Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 924: Abducting the All-Stars

Episode Date: July 13, 2016

Ben and Sam banter about box scores and the All-Star Game, then answer listener emails about alien abductions, odd career arcs, Clayton Kershaw, and being above or below .500.

For half an hour every day, I let the box scores, let the box scores have their way. I don't need a website recap, no highlights on ESPN. Baseball tonight is out of sight, but the box score is my best friend. Hello and welcome to episode 924 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus, presented by our Patreon supporters and the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I'm Ben Lindberg of FiveThirtyEight, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Prospectus. Hello. Hey, Ben. Anything you want to discuss? So when we were talking about

the best way to choose how somebody is a star and the balance between what they've done and all that, I was thinking that it's such a complicated question because like you said, it's all about weighting these three different factors and how much do you weight them. And I think that maybe you can simplify it to one question that is the line between people who believe the current year matters primarily versus people who believe that, well, to simplify, some people believe the current year matters most, some people believe your stature matters most, and then there's the, all of, most people are in the middle, and you have to figure out where you are in that continuum. And I think that you can find the dividing line nicely enough

on which side you tilt toward with one simple question, which is should Ichiro have been in it this year? Do I think Ichiro should make it? I suppose I do think Ichiro should make it. I wouldn't say that if he had been bad. If it was last year, then I wouldn't say that he should make it just because of say that if he had been bad if it was last year then i wouldn't say that he should make it just because of his stature in the game or because he just got a certain number of hits or something but the fact that he is playing as well as you know more or less he ever

has at age 42 and is also a superstar slash legend slash extremely fun player slash guy who delivered that awesome all-star speech to the all-stars, which was a great moment of famous people coming together in a fun interaction. So I would say that, yeah, I think so. I'd rather see Ichiro in the game probably than... Well, so if the point is that, well, the fact that, I mean, he's been very good, right? And he's still, you know, not really a deserving all-star because he has fewer than 200 play appearances, but he's played at what could be an all-star level for those play appearances. So isn't kind of Adam Duvall the the test case or someone like that just a complete well the duvall's his team rep right somebody's got to represent the reds

and jay bruce was an all-star too was he really and jay bruce hasn't been traded yet not yet all right well okay so but adam the thing about the thing about adam duvall Not yet. All right. Well, okay. The thing about Adam Duvall is that Duvall, it could just be you have a discrepancy about how you evaluate baseball players. I mean, Adam Duvall has tons of home runs. And if he had a 360 on base percentage, you wouldn't mind at all that he was there.

Some people still would. Some people would say that there's essentially nothing Adam Duvall could do in half a season to justify being on the All-Star team. that there's maybe half of people, well, no, I think that the yes group might be, you know, up to 70% of the population would say, yeah, sure, Ichiro, but how strongly you feel about that positions you on the spectrum. And so you say, I think so. So you are, you lean more toward the now, but you're fairly centrist. And I think that puts you more or less in the center of the spectrum and an even balance. I say no doubt about it. He's an obvious all-star this year.

It's a travesty he wasn't there. And that would put me kind of maybe at the 85th percentile. And somebody who says that he should have been a starter, for instance, might be at the 100th percentile, and somebody who says that he should have been a starter, for instance, might be at the 100th percentile. So maybe there's a way of phrasing the Duvall question as well, but I don't think that Duvall represents the nice even split, and I think there are other complicating factors with Duvall. But I was watching the All-Star game, the part that I did watch, and more than anything else, I was thinking, where's Itro?

More than, oh, look, it's Adam Duvall or, oh, look, it's David Ortiz. I just kept thinking, where's Itro? How come Itro's not here? Yeah, or where's the guy who hit 61 home runs yesterday and is a monster? But at least we got to see him as part of the all-star festivities but yeah i i agree i think you know joshian wrote something pretty persuasive about it in his most recent edition of the newsletter just that this time it counts has not actually changed the way that managers manage in the all-star game or the number of players who play

in the all-star game it's still basically players who play in the All-Star Game. It's still basically an exhibition, and the fact that we can't just treat it like an exhibition is unfortunate. And he kind of made the case that the 2002 All-Star tie sort of set it off on this branching path where the Futures game is fun and the Home Run Derby is now fun, but the All-Star game has to be less fun because it matters and it matters because that was a response to the tie and the way that those couple of games were played and so it could just be looser and less formal and more like a showcase for the bigger stars but it's not still for for various reasons so yeah i i think that's a pretty decent test the it was kind of semi-announced or or or it was reported before the game that stephen wright was was very

unlikely to pitch in the all-star game even though he made it uh and that made sense because nobody wants to catch a knuckleballer and certainly no all-star wants to catch a knuckleballer, and certainly no all-star wants to catch a knuckleballer, and also because Stephen Wright is not exactly Chris Sale or Jose Fernandez or like a name-brand MLB star. He's making his first all-star game, and, you know, at his age, who knows, maybe his last. But I'm curious how good for how long would Stephen Wright have to be for him to actually pitch in an all-star game?

Like if he makes the all-star game the next, so let's say he makes the all-star game each of the next nine years, pitching exactly like he does now for the Red Sox for the next nine years, in which year will he actually throw a pitch in the game? And assume for the sake of this exercise that neither Ryan Hannigan nor any other knuckleball catching expert is in the game to receive him. So R.A. Dickey did pitch in his lone all-star appearance, which was the year that he won the Cy Young and was maybe the best pitcher in the league or very close to it. So he did get an inning in there. it so he did get an inning in there and of course he'd been around the game longer than right but at a and he'd been pretty good for the two years before that so i don't know if that gave him enough status i mean that was an outlier year but he'd been a pretty decent pitcher for a couple

years did he start he did not start no he was the what the fifth pitcher in, it looks like. Okay. And is Dickey, it seems, my impression is that Dickey, while difficult to catch, is considerably easier to catch than a sort of more floaty knuckleballer. Do you know if I'm right about that? That sounds right, right? Because the thing that set his knuckleball apart was just how hard it was, right? And not so much the movement, but I think that's right. If Wright were having a Dickie season, and you know, he's having a really good season, but if he were having the season Dickie was having, then maybe he would have gotten a shot. But maybe that was just a reflection of Dickie's age and seniority. I mean, he was 37 at the time. And so the fact that he had turned into this superstar all of a sudden was kind of an even

more heartwarming story. And he'd been such a journeyman and he had no UCL and there was the whole backstory. And Stephen Wright hasn't really suffered for his craft the way that a knuckleballer is supposed to suffer for his craft. I mean, he's 31 and he's been up and down and, you know, I mean, he's gone through plenty of minor league bus trips and all of that, but you got to be older to be a genuine knuckleball success story. So I would say that he'd have to keep doing it for another, you know, year or two. All right. And I have one last piece of banter

that's not All-Star related, but the All-Star game last night did make me think of it. Do you have a preferred box score if there is a game that is in progress or just happened and you want to see how Marcelo Zuna did or how many pitches the starter has or something like that. Do you have a preferred box score? I think the ESPN box scores are pretty good.

I think they might be the best box scores, but I will often just default to the at-bat app because it's in my hand all the time. Ah, I see. Okay, so I was going way back to 2000, I don't know, one or so when I was when I first kind of got into the obsessive, refreshing way of being a fantasy manager where like it's not enough to have a draft and a team and you check the box scores in the morning, but you actually have to refresh every pitch for every game. Yeah, I was a total Yahoo partisan. I love everyone loved Yahoo partisan. I loved it. And I one time tried to calculate how many page views I had given Yahoo. And I don't remember how many it is. But I was truly literally clicking pretty much nonstop every 15 seconds or so for three or four hours a day at points in my life. And so I pretty, I mean,

I always would go to a Yahoo box score and I consumed a ton of baseball through Yahoo box scores. And then about, I don't know, three, four years ago, Yahoo redid their box score design and it was pretty much garbage. And I kept to it but less and then i think about a year ago they redid it again and now it's just complete garbage like totally worthless and at least on my browser and also relentless autoplay of you know videos and i never ever ever go to it And what I find so interesting about this Is that it is not that I switched to CBS or ESPN or MLB.com I do, I guess I basically do If I need a box score now I tend to go to probably MLB

But it's not that I took my business elsewhere It's that I just quit having business I never look at box scores anymore It's like just slightly more cumbersome for me to go to a unfamiliar box score than to go to old familiar comforting comfort food Yahoo that I have dropped from probably looking at, I don't know, 1500 box scores a day, including refreshing to maybe five a week. And partly that's a difference in the way i consume baseball and my complete lack of interest in uh the fantasy teams that i have um and being you

know busier with with other things and and so on but partly it really is just that i i don't like going to unfamiliar box scores and so i've just stopped and and so i i've been i i just started thinking about this yesterday, but I'm now starting to think about how that has affected my baseball fandom to experience it in the sport in a way that is much, much less about the box score, much less about seeing the description of the plays, and more about seeing scores on a ticker, or what I'm actually watching or listening to, but not having this semi-mediated experience for all the games.

Anyway, I've just been thinking about it, and I'll probably refer back to it at some point. And I was curious if you had a similar box score loyalty. I assume everybody has a box score loyalty. Yeah, I remember when that Yahoo changeover happened, and there was a great wailing and gnashing of teeth because it also seemed very unnecessary. Like the box score is such an old thing. Once you've perfected it or once you've developed a really good box score,

why would you ever change it? So it seemed pointless and cruel and unnecessary. And I agree that the box score is still, you know, despite the flaws of the box score and, you know, various people have tried to develop sabermetric box scores or more informative box scores. And you could look up, you know, win probability added at different places. And that's great. But I agree that there's still a value to the box score. It's still very informative. And from time to time, I always commit myself to, I'll look at every box score this season

and i will know everything because it really would help i know people who look at every box score i know there are people who somewhat famously used to i think tim kirkton was talking about this on jonah carey's most recent podcast that he used to paste all the box scores into a book for 20 years. And when I worked at Elias Sports Bureau for a summer and a couple of winters in high school or college or something, I was working with Seymour Sywaf, who had been there for decades. I believe he is still there and is the oldest member of the Baseball Writers Association. And at the time, he was 80-something, 90-something, definitely 90-something now. And he was still then coming into the office

every day. He still might be, as far as I know. And he would have these giant books on the shelf with just every box score pasted in there for I don't know how long and he would get them out every morning and he would stick all the box scores in there and it seemed like a crazy thing to do because you know all this stuff is online I mean this is Elias Sports Bureau you could look it up in the computer system you could look it up anywhere and this just seemed like a relic that he had done in the pre-internet era and had stuck to because it was comfortable. But I bet he had a better awareness of what was going on in baseball than I did. You're the first to know when some middle reliever gets called up and makes his major league debut. And otherwise you wouldn't hear about him until he's, you know, 30 innings into the season. You hear about him on day one and you see the name and say, who's that?

And you look him up and then you add him to your mental baseball player index. So it can be a very valuable thing. And you can get a sense of who's hot and who's not and which teams are doing well and how managers are using players so would be a great thing i should do it someday yeah the seeing how managers are using players seeing a guy who starts getting holds seeing a guy who moves up to third in the lineup is uh is such a you you don't even have to think about it. You just see it, and all of a sudden, your view of the player and his season has shifted. I do love a, I mean, baseball references box scores are great,

and if it's a post-game box score, there's no doubt at all I'd go to baseball references box scores, but of course, that's not live during the game. Right. Okay, well, this is supposed to be an email show, So we don't have that many emails picked out for today, but we've talked for a while anyway, so that works out. So I will start with a question from Mitch, who says, if aliens came to San Diego and abducted every MLB All-Star, which teams do you think would be the best in each league during the second half? And given the current standings, which two teams would actually make the World Series? So I do have a spreadsheet open here with the number of All-Stars per team and the All-Star. I think I do. It's hard to keep track of who actually was in San Diego or not.

And that's a complicating factor here because there are players on this list who, I assume that everyone who's on the MLB.com list of all-stars that seems to be updated live is actually in the game and was actually in San Diego. But apologies if not, it's hard to keep track of the musical chairs of all-stars. So wait, so do Sunday starters still go? I don't know about that. There must be, I mean, it seems like if you're going to skip the trip, you get replaced, right, for the most part. I guess you don't have to, but it does seem like that's kind of the convention. If you're not going to play and you're not available, then you let someone else have that spot. But I don't know. There could be exceptions to that. Well, I mean, you let someone else have that spot. But I don't know. There could be exceptions to that.

Well, I mean, you let someone have that spot on the roster, but is there a finite number of hotel rooms for ballplayers? No, but if you're not in the game and you're not even on the roster, are you still going to go? Do players care that much? No, they wouldn't. Some of them do. They wouldn't, but I don't know if they're expected to. might i mean there's still the fan fest and or whatever there is and there's still

you know you get your i mean like does bum garner get the padres colored all-star jersey even though he wasn't rostered i don't know because he made it says all-Star on his baseball reference page. He is on the list. Yeah, so he is officially an All-Star, I think. I wonder if he gets the, I forget what I reported. I reported. When I did my CBA thing and I talked about what players get for going to the All-Star game, it's like $1,000. I wonder if Bumgarner got his $1,000. It's like a $1,000 stipend or something.

I wonder if he gets that. And there's a swag bag. I wonder if he gets the schwag bag that's part of that's in the cba is that you actually get like gillette mock threes because they're like a sponsor of the also it's in the cba and i wonder if he got a mock three wow there were like 20 sponsors of the all-star game so it must have been a really great swag pack. All right. So the hardest hit teams, obviously, you know, the Cubs had seven all-stars. The Red Sox had six all-stars. I mean, it makes sense. The best teams in baseball tend to have the most all-stars. And so you've got the Nationals, the Blue Jays, the Orioles all had five as well.

So I'm looking for teams that are good but didn't have many all-stars and i guess the obvious candidates is the giants giants are the obvious candidate right but before you say the opposite four before you say the obvious candidates though it seems to me that you could take this philosophically one way or the other if you take out the cubs seven all-stars does that i mean yes you're taking away a lot of their talent, but the line of what is an all-star has not presumably changed. And if the Cubs have the, what is it, the law of power dynamics or something like that? I don't have any idea if it is the law of power dynamics.

I've been trying to remember what that law is called for a long time. But if they have a lot of superstars, it would make sense that they also have a lot of stars and just below star level players. So you could make the case that the more all-stars you have, the better off the rest of your roster probably is, that your non-all-star roster is. And so I don't know that I would look at how many players they lose first. I'm not sure that that actually tells you what you might think it tells you. It might not, although it seems like there's a tendency for certain teams to have more All-Stars than maybe they deserve, whether it was the Royals last year or the Cubs this

year. I mean, Addison Russell is an all-star starter, right? So I don't know if you've stripped away the seven Cubs on this team, they would still have some decent players, but not, I mean, not a lot, right? They'd still have Jason Hayward. They'd still have, I don't know, Kyle Hendricks. But I mean, most of their stars are really all-stars. So at least with the Cubs, it seems like there was a larger movement for voting in Cubs than even their success this season merited. I think you're right about the Cubs. I think that they are an exception to this because they had an unnaturally high number of

all-stars. Right, Addison Russell is there, and he should not have certainly been the starter, and he should not have even been an All-Star. On the other hand, it also works in reverse. If you're a team that has a lot of representatives already, you end up not getting your players picked. So for instance, Hector Rondon did not go, clearly better than some of the pitchers that were selected as all-star relievers, but didn't go because the Cubs had too many players and the other teams needed a representative. Brandon Crawford did not go. Brandon Crawford is, if not better than Corey Seager, otherwise clearly the best shortstop in the National League and the most obvious snub,

but he didn't go because he's a giant and they already had a bunch of players. the most obvious snub, but he didn't go because he's a giant and they already had a bunch of players. So while in cases like the Cubs, where there's sort of an artificial voting based reason, or perhaps, uh, it may be in the case of the Mets where there's an artificial manager making the selection based reason. I think in other cases, the more all-stars you have, the less likely your, your borderline candidates are to go yeah that could be so the cubs lose a lot and so yeah maybe the maybe the uh well so the good teams that didn't lose a lot of players the the astros lost two players jose altuve and will harris the pirates lost two players mark malanson and starling marte and the cardinals lost two players the Pirates lost two players, Mark Melanson and Starling Marte, and the Cardinals

lost two players, the Rangers lost two players. So maybe those teams leapfrog the ones at the top. The Indians lost three, the Dodgers lost three. So some of those teams, I mean, if you take away, say, like five of the best players from the—if you—well, the difference between the Cubs and the Astros or the Pirates is of those players are good players, then you would think that the team with fewer selections leapfrogs the team with more, right? So I don't know where the Cubs, without these seven All-Stars, would rank in the new post-All-Star game ranking of all teams, but probably not higher than the middle, maybe lower, right? In a world with no all-stars, I think the Cubs would still be above 500. I think they would be worse than the Pirates, however. You're answering the question of who would be best going forward, not who would win given the current standings, correct? Yes, that's right. Okay.

Yeah, I would guess that the Cubs would still be above 500 in a no all-star world. But yes, I agree with your assessment, generally speaking, that the gap between the Cubs and the Pirates is less than five all-stars. Okay. I'm trying to figure out who would be... Is it conceivable that the best team for the rest of the season would be a team that has not been very good so far just one of the teams that only lost the one token all-star like uh like the mariners lost one player robinson

cano are the mariners minus cano better than you know better teams minus several players yeah because the mariners minus cano are already they're like about a 500 team in a world with all-stars right and yes so yes so if you take out all the all-stars then you would your your mental adjustment would be that a 500 team in a world with all-stars would be pretty elite in a world without all-stars and so i think you could make a good case for the mariners is the difference between the i think the i personally believe the astros are clearly better than the mariners as a baseball team right now uh is the difference between them though greater or less than who was the astros second all-star al tutuve and, oh no, Harris. You said that. So I think the gap between

the Astros and the Mariners is clearly greater than one Will Harris. So, however, Altuve, the Astros lost more in Altuve than the Mariners lost in Cano, in my opinion. So maybe that. But I would think that if you're starting with the Mariners as a front runner, I would put the Astros above the Mariners. So I now think that the Astros of the teams we've named are the team to beat. Okay. Wait, that's it? Are we ending it? There are other teams.

Who are the other teams like the Mariners? No, who are the other teams like the Mariners that you were thinking of? Well, the Rangers only lost two. Well. The Rangers. Who'd the Rangers lose? Yeah, Rangers lose Cole Hamels and Ian Desmond. I would rather lose Cole Hamels and Ian Desmond than Altuve and Harris, I think.

And the Rangers, so then you have to ask, do you believe that the Rangers are really better than the Astros? They have way more wins, comparable run differential. So now the Rangers, I think the Rangers, the Rangers are now my team to beat. I mean, how do you look, they have a, they have a, the Rangers have a, the Rangers have a six, 10 winning percentage or something like that. And they only lose two all-stars. That's like pretty good. Yeah. The Indians lost three players, but pretty good players, Kluber, Salazar, and Lindor. But the Indians are in a division where the Royals lost even more players. How about one sleeper candidate here actually might be the Tigers.

The Tigers lost only one player, Miguel Cabrera. And they are a winning team, although not a great winning team. No, not a great winning team, but the Indians lose three players. The Royals lose four players. White Sox lose two players, Sale and Quintana. So they definitely profit from this the most. this the most? Yeah, I would say that the Tigers do not catch the Rangers, in my opinion, for the frontrunner in the league. I think the Indians are a lot farther ahead of the Tigers than two players. So I'm going to say the Indians still over the Tigers, but the Rangers over the Indians. Yeah, okay. So question from Zach. Love the show, and I'm hoping your knack for discussing

the most esoteric of esoteric debates might come in handy here. So my coworker and I got into it over how to perceive games under or over 500. I contested that if a team has played 30 games and are 10 and 20, they are five games under 500. My basis was that in a 30 game sample, a team needs 15 wins in order to achieve a winning percentage of 500. The team has won five games below that requirement and thus five games below 500. He rebutted that you can't go back and change results and that going forward, any manager would tell his club that they are

10 games under 500. Any fan would say their team is 10 games under 500 and any Baseball writer would say the team is 10 Games under 500 he thinks that my Perspective is reserved for nerds And that no manager would try and Sell this nerd stuff to their players Do I have my head in the clouds here Am I just complicating things

Hope you guys can help out I'm not gonna give an answer to this I think this Is an important well It's something that some people think is an important question and they have strong opinions about and they've put a lot of thought into it. I have put enough thought into it that I can sleep at night, but not enough thought that I'm yet confident in an answer. I guess what I'm saying is I don't want to put down my tent quite yet. So I will say that I use the term in the traditional way where 70 and 60 is 10 games over 500.

I use it in speech and I find that it is apt for communicating what you mean because the listener understands it. I am not going to say what I believe is correct at this point. not going to say what I believe is correct at this point. And I find that I enjoy the debate more without having a position. Okay. Well, it is really a semantic debate sort of because no one disagrees about the mechanics of this. It's just how you describe it. And when you say, you know, the common, the conventional way of saying 10 games under 500 really just means 10 wins under 500 more so than games, I guess is the way to put it. So it's just sort of using a different word. And I'm okay with the conventional way. It doesn't bother me that it's slightly inaccurate. I think most people understand what it means.

I think there are cases in which it's more helpful or more illuminating to be able to say that because what we're trying to, I think usually what we're trying to convey is just your record. You want to be able to tell, you know, how many games you could. I'm trying to think of how we actually use this phrase. Like we use it to basically explain that you have won more games than you have lost and give some idea of by how many more you have won than lost. So that's kind of the usage for this. you have won than lost. So that's kind of the usage for this. If we want to say how many games a team is back of the other team, then we have a way to say that too. We say that it's, you know, five games back or it's X games back in the loss column, or we can just look at the standings page and it presents things that way. So I find that these are completely different cases,

that way. So I find that these are completely different cases, completely different points and goals. And I'm okay with the slightly inaccurate phrasing of over 500 to mean what most people mean when they say that. Yeah, it's gonna sound sort of weird to say this. But the fact that they that that both usages that let your six games up in the standings or your six games over 500, the fact that they both have the word game in it doesn't necessarily mean they come from the same sort of root logic. They aren't necessarily siblings. They might,

they might simply be, you know, distant cousins at best. And so they don't have to follow the same rules of logic again, though. I think that the way you put it is exactly right at the beginning. This is a matter of opinion. I don't generally believe that one should express their opinions, particularly to me.

And I know that we will get a bunch of responses to this, that people will tweet us or email us, and they will tell us what they think about this and they will those messages will not bother me at all whereas if i had come out here today and said firm hard stop i believe it means one or the other those same people would have sent me those same opinions except they would have amended you idiot at the end of it and i would have hated them and i would have had a horrible day it would have ruined you idiot at the end of it. And I would have hated them. And I would have had a horrible day. It would have ruined my day. And I would have thought about quitting the podcast.

And it's, there's something to that, that I think is important to note that life is better sometimes when you, when you, when, I don't know i i sort of have lately been thinking about how uh... you know yes and the uh... the improv uh... technique uh... or the improv uh... philosophy of yes and uh... if everybody on twitter and everybody on the internet had a yes and philosophy toward each other it'd be so much better there is no yes and in twitter

and so therefore the only uh... the so therefore, the only really enjoyable way of engaging sometimes is to not be on, you responded to the questioner, Zach, with a tweet from McCarthy, who is in Zach's camp that games over 500 really refers not to wins, but actually to games. And if you look at the replies to that tweet, you'd have to keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling, because they go on for quite a while. So I understand the two perspectives, and I just haven't seen enough evidence, I suppose, that it would be worthwhile to overturn the convention and make everyone relearn what this means and have them refer to the typical way of saying over 500 with a different word instead. It seems like the system is working fine as it is. Okay, play index? Sure. This is a simple one. I was looking at Jason Hayward the other day at his stats,

and I was trying to remember how good Jason Hayward was as a hitter in his rookie year. And I was trying to remember how good Jason Hayward was as a hitter in his rookie year. Do you remember how good he was? Like, was he okay or was he good or was he really good or was he super good in your memory? In my memory, he was like the best he's ever been. Okay, well, there you go, Ben. That's exactly right. He was the best he's ever been.

I think he had a 131 OPS+, which is really good. Not quite, you know, it's not Mike Trout or anything like that, but it's really good. And he was 20 years old and he has never had a 131 OPS plus again. In fact, he's never even really come close, um, because of where I'm sitting right now, I can't look it up. Uh, but, uh, I think he's like 117 or something like that is his best since then and this year he's at like 80 something and 131 is you know by far the the best he he ever was and it was at age 20 so this got me thinking age 20 is most players do not have full seasons at age 20 and we've talked in the past about how simply existing in major league baseball at 19 or 20 is a tremendous forecaster of superstardom.

That, like, if you look at, you know, the players who have the most played appearances through age, say, 21 or so in their career, like half of them ended up making the Hall of Fame. But simply making the majors in a full-time role that early usually leads to stardom. And so Jason Hayward is one of 32 players since, how far back did I go? Since 19, well, Willie Mays is in here. So I think maybe I went since the integration. So since about 1947, Jason Hayward is one of only 32 players to qualify for the batting title with, you know, 502 played appearances or depending on the year in his age 20 season.

And he has never gotten. So he's never gotten better since then. And I wondered how rare that was. see of those players how many seasons on average they had in the following six years that were better offensively than at age 20. Now you and Randy and Joe talked about the changing aging curve. You sort of, you alluded to it, you referred to it a couple of times, but you didn't really get specific. So can you be, can you sort of go into a little more detail about what the current insight into the aging curve is, especially at young ages? Well, the idea is, as presented in some research by Jeff Zimmerman at Fangrass, that the old standard kind of bell curvy aging curve hasn't applied as well lately. And that whereas players used to come up and get better for a certain period and then tail off once they got to their late 20s or early 30s or whatever.

Now it's just a flat line and they get to the majors and they're about as good as they've ever been. And then eventually they tail off. and they're about as good as they've ever been, and then eventually they tail off. And the idea is that teams are getting smarter about when to promote their prospects. They don't promote them until they're ready, or players are just ready earlier because youth baseball has been so professionalized, and guys just get to the majors more prepared than they have ever been. Maybe coaching is better, et cetera. Now, I wouldn't bet my life on that.

I know that Rob Arthur has done some research into aging curves lately that hasn't been published yet, but kind of cast doubt on that. So I wouldn't necessarily take it to the bank. But that piece certainly has been cited a lot to explain why we've seen so many great young players in the, in the last few years. So that's the basic idea. So, um, Hayward is, uh, by, by offense alone, ignoring defense and base running. And that would be another factor I would, I would guess. And the more you look at the whole player in the aging curve, the more it's going to,

uh, maybe, maybe benefit or at least not penalize the young player because defense and speed do not go up. But maybe it'd be a little different with offense. Anyway, so Jason Hayward is the fifth best 20-year-old since, you know, since World War II by offense alone. And of course, he was a fine defender and base runner as well um and uh so if you look at the 32 if you look at the 32 uh only three other players have failed to improve on their age 20 season um besides jason hayward claudel washington did not have another year as good as his. Butch Weininger did not have another year as good as his. And Al Kaline, who was one of the four ahead of him, did not have another year as good as his. There's one other.

Ken Hubbs didn't, but Ken Hubbs died either the year after. Yeah, I think the year after. So I think his age 20 season was his his career tragically otherwise though everybody did improve and usually many times in fact only three other players managed to improve on their age 20 season only once and one of those was Tony Canigliaro, who famously had his career disrupted by outside factors. And in fact, far more improved on their age 20 season every year from age 20 on. There are Robin Yount, Edgar Renteria, Buddy Bell, Roberto Alomar, Cesar Cedeno, Hank Aaron, Eddie Matthews, all were better in each of the next six years than they were at age 20.

So that's seven players. And add to that list, if you want to, Willie Mays, who improved in every year that he played. He missed two years for war. Manny Machado, who has improved in every year that he has played, although he hasn't reached 26 as Hayward has. And Mike Trout, who's been better in all four of his seasons and is also not 26 yet, so incomplete. So it is very

rare what Jason Hayward is doing. It's not unprecedented, but it is very rare. The average player, let me see here, I will quickly give you the average. The average player, excepting Hubs and Hayward, but even with the incompletes, with partial credits for Mays, Trout, and Machado, the average player has better offense in four of his next six seasons after age 20. So, like I said, Hayward, very rare case, very unusual. And the weird thing is that selection bias here actually greatly favors lack of improvement because there's no force in the world that compels a team to put a 20-year-old in their lineup unless they believe that that 20-year-old is ready and quite possibly unless that 20-year-old is playing over his head because there's just so

many incentives to leave the 20-year-old down. Nobody's like, you know, usually saying, well, you got to bring him up. He's already 20. Like 20-year-olds really have to earn that spot. And so you could imagine that it would have gone the other way, where the group of 20-year-olds that we're looking at, the ones who managed to play a full season at 20, would all be regression candidates. They were all playing out of their minds in order to be in the majors for a full season. But instead of regressing, they all get much better, all of them except for Jason Hayward. Interesting. So yeah, I wonder if that has really colored the perception of Hayward

because even though we all kind of made the case that Hayward was worth all the money he got just purely based on how well he had hit over the last few years and his defense and the other contributions he makes, there was still kind of this sense that, well, but maybe the power will come at some point, or, you know, maybe the offensive talent he showed in that rookie year

will really come back in full force at some point. He's still not even, you know, into his late 20s. And so I wonder whether if Hayward hadn't had that one year, if he had come up at age 20 and just been the same as he was at age 21 or 22 or 23 or whatever, and there hadn't been that one year that was still sort of anchoring our perception of what Jason Hayward the hitter could be. I wonder how much money he would have gotten in that alternate scenario? Yeah, I mean, I wrote a piece shortly after I started at BP about Jason Hayward as a very good player and also as a disappointment for just that reason. And this was five years ago. And it is an interesting question because Hayward has been a, you know, frankly, a huge disappointment as a hitter. He's a fine hitter who, based on history, we would have expected nearly this defensive performance from him. If you were talking about Jason Hayward at age 20, you might have said, well, he's a great fielder, great tools, really plays the field well, but you would never have said, and he's going to be a plus 30 defender well into his 20s.

That just would not have been projected. So I am curious if anybody would have projected, even based on the 131 OPS plus or whatever he had in age 20 season, I wonder if anybody would have responsibly projected him to get projected for six wins usually. So in a sense, his career is not just one of having to look past the disappointing offense to see that he's still been a success. It's in fact having to look past the disappointing offense to see that he has been a greater success than anybody would have reasonably projected for him. Yeah, that's true. All right. So Playindex, use the coupon code BP. Get the discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription.

We have talked for quite a while, so I will just wrap up with one that will hopefully be very quick. Eric Hartman asks, is an average starting pitcher closer in skill to Clayton Kershaw or to a position player pitching? So if you just listed every pitcher who has appeared in the majors this year, including position players, would the average pitcher or the median pitcher be closer to Clayton Kershaw or to a position player pitching if you rank them in order of skill. Okay, let me ask you a question that I don't know if this needs to be asked, but let's replace all the nouns in this. Say you have three pitchers. One has an ERA of two, one has an ERA of four, one has an ERA of six. Is the one with the ERA of 4 closer in skill to the one with an ERA of 2 or the one with an ERA of 6?

If all of these ERAs reflect the actual skill of the pitcher, it's a true talent ERA. Yes. Well, you'd be closer to the, I mean, you'd be, if you listed all the pitchers In between them There would be fewer pitchers between 4 and 6 Than between 2 and 4 No, the other way around I think No, in the real world, there'd be way more pitchers in the real world

Between 4 and 6 than between 4 and 2 So, does that Is that an answer? In the majors, though, if you're including relievers I'm not including Relievers, for one thing, because they're relieving. And I'm not saying in the majors, because in the majors is a selected pool that doesn't want guys who have ERAs at six. There are a lot more people in the world. There are a lot more people currently pitching baseball.

That's what I'm saying. Yeah. Between four and six than between two and four. Basically, the two ERA pitcher is the best pitcher in the world. The four ERA pitcher is the 120th best pitcher in the world. And the six ERA pitcher is maybe the 1500th best pitcher in the world, or maybe the 800th. So in one one sense the four is much closer to two because of how many people are between them in another sense the four is much closer to the six because there's um it's almost impossible for a four to become a two like it is the amount of energy required. If we were talking about how many joules it is required to turn a four into a two,

it's much greater than the number of joules required to turn a six into a four. Yes. And so I don't... Now, Eric's question is actually much simpler, I think. Because I think that the average position player pitching in real world circumstances, not at the end of blowouts, but in real world circumstances, I believe the average position player pitching would have an ERA of maybe 11. And the average major league pitcher starter has an ERA of, what, 3.8.

And then Kershaw is, you know, something like a 2, true talent. So I think that in that sense, the math that I've been giving creates a false choice. I think the answer is that the average major league pitcher is much closer to Clayton Kershaw than Drew Butera. And Butera is, by the way, the best of the position players pitching, so he's not even the average. However, I think that the 2-4-6 question is also very interesting, and I don't know how to answer that one. Okay. Well, I think you're right about the answer to Eric's. Okay. Someone who's, I think that the 246 question though, I think that people in other fields know how to answer this. Like I

think that, I think a mathematician knows how to answer this. I think probably a scientist knows how to answer this. I think maybe an economist would know how to answer this. And I'm not sure they would have the same answers. But they actually, I think that there are tools in other disciplines and shorthands and formulas and such that probably answer just this question. So I am curious to know if you are in a field that can shine a light on the answer to this question. I am curious. So please don't hold back.

Okay. Well, it's not a standard distribution of skill If you're talking about everyone in the world There are a few people clustered to the very right end Where everyone's great, and that's the major league pitchers And then there's just a very, very, very long tale of people who are terrible So I see what you mean Okay so we will stop there

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