Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 946: Which WAR(P) is Just?

Episode Date: August 29, 2016

Ben and Sam banter about an In-N-Out Burger baseball promotion gone wrong and the MLB.TV Game Changer, then decide which win-value stat they side with when the available options don’t tell the same stories about certain stars.

Swing and a miss! Lay on the fastball, it's nothing to two. And the Stompers are a strike away from a championship. Everybody is up in the dugout. Stompers fans standing and clapping over on the first, on pardon me, on the third base side. And Jose Flores with the ball in hand trying to get his team a championship.

He sets. The 0-2. Outside, 1-2. 80 at third, pace at second. Mike Taylor at first. 1-2 to Brent Gillespie. Flores at the belt. A look to second.

The 1-two. Swing and a miss! The Stompers are champions of the Pacific Association! Nice ball game for the Stompers, five runs, six hits through errors. And the dog poll has begun on the pitcher's mound! Five hits, no errors, they leave 10 on the mound. Jose Flores

strikes out Jake Taylor, strikes out Brent Gillespie and Sonoma for the first time in their three-year history are champions. Vindication here in San Rafael. It's Sandor Fel! I'm gonna change the game for these. Play the game like we supposed.

Zigga zigga in the house. Sick. Get your wig pushed back by the wig push back. I'm gonna change the game for these. Play the game like we supposed. Big in the house. Still here, never left. Still bust, more left.

Good morning and welcome to episode 946 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from baseball perspectives. Brought to you by Playindex, a baseball reference, especially today. I will just note, lots of Playindexing today. And also by our Patreon supporters. I'm Sam Miller, along with Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. How are you? All right. Great.

I also, by the way, I just would note that i was uh just just wrapped up recording uh hang up and listen for today for monday and uh did some uh did some play indexing while they spoke while i while i was on the show oh didn't make a big drop the coupon code no i didn't make a big show of it and in fact this is this is probably the the toughest thing about baseball references play index is properly citing it, especially with fun facts. I try to cite it whenever I use it. And I always forget, like I will just sort of tuck some fact in. And then I don't cite it enough. And I always I feel bad about that. And I sometimes I go back retroactively and try to update things I wrote. But after people have quit reading them, but no, I didn't even

cite Play Index. So this is it. This is me doing it right now. The Play Index is what made Hang Up and Listen possible today. Coupon code BP. Yeah. I just went to mlb.com and I looked at the latest news column and most of the headlines are very straightforward. Jays owes fight for AL East lead on MLB TV. Young fan overjoyed by Trout autograph. Donaldson hits three homers. Blue Jays seal sweep. Nothing fancy, but one near the top says, L.A. Vins, in single apostrophes, by a toenail, semicolon,

Cubs W not meant to be the number two letter B. There's a real style difference in the headline format right now at MLB.com. Vins? Yes. Like Vin Scully? Vin Scully. He was calling the game, I guess. I don't know. I think Vince Scully described

the pivotal play at second base as a toe dance. Oh, okay. Around second base. L.A. Vins by a toenail, Cubs W, not meant, oh, 2B, 2B, yeah, second base. Oh, yeah, all right. No, that's, it's, okay. All right. No, that's okay. Okay. Yeah, so what's the story about this young fan with the trout autograph? Sounds like he got a trout autograph and he was happy about it.

I didn't click because that seemed to be most of the story. Moved to tears. Oh, yeah, yeah. That's it. That is it. You're right. They should have disguised it with some puns. Maybe I would have clicked to find out more. This kid got a Mike Trout autograph and you'll never guess what fluid came out of his eyeballs. All right. I saw an example out in the wild in the public yesterday of baseball portrayed poorly. So I'd like to

tell you about it. I sent you a picture, two pictures in fact, but this would be another example in our long running series, Why Didn't You Just Call Us? And so this was an In-N-Out, the hamburger restaurant. And the In-N-Out will give you stickers, particularly if you're a kid. And so one of the sticker games that they often have is you get a piece of paper with an In-N-Out, a drawing of an In-N-Out facade or whatever. And then on the back are these stickers of things at In- in and out like people eating in and out and people skateboarding. So then you take the stickers off and you put them on the in and out and now merge together. You have created a vibrant community of, uh, mixed use. All right.

So they've replaced that one though with a baseball picture. So this baseball picture is a baseball diamond, you know, baseball diamond. And then the stickers are baseball players and also maybe an umpire, although it's hard to tell. This is not what I'm getting into, but this umpire is wearing the uniform of the hitting team, which maybe she's the third base coach. Yeah. She's making a safe sign. That's the only indicator. So she, she might be a base coach. She might just be a player rooting from the sidelines. She might be, yeah, that's right. All right, so the thing about this baseball diamond is that there's a home plate, there's a third base, there's a second base,

but then the picture cuts off sort of just to the right of second base. So you can't see first base, and you cannot see the first base line. This is crucial for this story because one of the stickers is of a man running in a helmet on the offense, running as a base runner would, but because the orientation of this sticker, this man can only run from home to first. He can't run from first to second because we don't have that baseline. You would have to put your sticker on the table if you were to do that and that's not allowed. He can't run from first to second because we don't have that baseline. You would have to put your sticker on the table if you were to do that, and that's not allowed. He can't run from second to third because then he would be—that's not the way his body is. His body is facing from left to right.

And for the same reason, I don't believe he can run from third to home. So he can only run from home to first, but there is a batter hitting a baseball at just that moment. And so unless he's just really slow and they haven't finished the previous play, there's nowhere to put him. And this is not the worst thing in the world, but it's close. I mean, the whole point of this is that you've got kids who are learning the game. Maybe this is a way that they can learn the game where their mom or dad can say, well, this is what each member of the baseball team does. And it's so simple to do it, right? You just have the guy facing left instead of right,

and then he'd be running from second to third. But they chose not to. Well, there is a second base runner who is facing to the left. And who would most likely be sliding into third but if you were given if you were forced to use both of these base runners i think that she could reasonably be sliding into home i think that her body fits sliding into home if you need to but you're right there is a natural base runner going from second to third already anyway i don't i just don't understand what rob manfred is doing this clearly passed across his desk at some point he's been on the job for like two years almost now the in and out burger menu people go straight to the top when they're trying to decide their sticker orientation. And someone at the highest levels of baseball just made an easily avoidable gaffe here. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I'll include

the pictures in the Facebook group and in the usual places so you can see the horror. All right, got anything? Well, I just wanted to put in a quick plug. I mentioned it a couple weeks ago, I just wanted to put in a quick plug. I mentioned it a couple of weeks ago, Dan Hirsch's tool at the baseball gauge website, which is at the time it was called the MLB TV dashboard. Now he has rebranded it as the MLB TV game changer, which is a much better name. It works on multiple levels.

So I wrote about it for the ringer today, and I guess I'm setting myself up as the MLB TV game changer evangelist. But I really think everyone should try this thing. It's great. I used it for a few days last week just to sort of experiment with it, see if I wanted to write about it. And now I'm not sure I can go back. I think this might just be the way I watch baseball forever now. And the hook of it is that you can customize your MLB TV experience. So it's a browser window that you just open up and you leave it open while you're watching MLB TV on your computer. And it will automatically switch games for you based on what you tell it to do beforehand. So it will switch based on leverage index.

It will switch based on championship leverage index. So if you want to see contending teams play, you can set it that way. And if you just want to see the most exciting moments, you can set it that way too. So it will continually switch between games, finding whatever the most suspenseful game at that moment is. And you can also put in a bunch of other conditions. Like what? Like what? This is like a whole episode on what conditions you would put in there.

Well, yeah, I solicited some feedback from Twitter and Facebook group and asked people what they would do as I was setting up my own. So you can put in batters and pitchers and base runners. It will even switch to a certain base runner if he's on first or second with a base open ahead of him. So it'll switch to them. You can switch to teams. You can prioritize Vin Scully if you want Vin Scully games. You can prioritize no hitters through a certain inning, you know, extra innings.

There's just a ton of conditions that you can customize. So, yeah, we could talk briefly about the conditions I set. I went with a mostly hitter heavy lineup as I was experimenting because I really wanted to try out the switching functionality. And if I were to choose a starter, say Jose Fernandez or something or Rich Hill, then I'd be stuck watching most of their start, which wouldn't be the worst thing, but it would partially defeat the purpose of having a game switching tool. So I went with hitters and relievers, and I kind of went with the obvious picks, I think. I did put Gary Sanchez in there, even though I am blacked out of New York area games, so I couldn't see Gary Sanchez even if I wanted to, but I just

put him in there because I felt like he'd earned it. That's another thing. You can also mark which games you're blacked out of so that it will not switch to those games. So I went with Gary Sanchez. I went with Billy Hamilton as a runner. I went with no hitters through eight innings, which was great because I also had a Vince Scully condition set. So on last Thursday night, I got to switch to that game. I think I was watching it anyway, but if I hadn't been watching it, if I hadn't been aware that Matt Moore was throwing a no-hitter and it was a Dodgers game, I would have been switched to that game. I put in a position player pitching filter, so I would be switched to that. Didn't't happen, unfortunately But most of my picks were pretty obvious

Hamilton as a runner, Trout, Harper, Betts, Altuve Bryant, Seager, Alex Bregman Just because I hadn't seen all that much of him And he's been hitting very well lately I put in Edwin Diaz Who is unhittable And Andrew Miller, who's also unhittable And coming in at interesting times

Sometimes I put in David Ortiz And Itro, and V Vado and Javi Baez and Bartolo Colon as a batter and Jonathan Villar as a base runner too because he is stealing tons of bases but not a valuable base runner somehow. So it's kind of a fun combination of skills. So I put in all of that and otherwise I just let it go from one game to the next. And this is not a sponsor of the podcast or anything. It's just a thing I belatedly discovered and really like,

and I would think that a lot of people listening to this podcast would also enjoy it. That sounds phenomenal. It is. That sounds really great. And you could just put, if you wanted, you could just put 14 guys on your fantasy team, and then you'd never have to... Right. And MLB TV has, if you wanted, you could just put 14 guys on your fantasy team and then you'd never have to. Right. And MLB TV has a fantasy player tracker, so you can do the same thing, but it doesn't switch you to them. It just has a little unobtrusive pop-up that says, hey, this guy's coming up to the plate.

And then you can manually switch if you want to. But this is far superior. But this is far superior. And there are a few technical quirks that if MLB one day decided to incorporate this into MLB TV, which I think it should, I think it would behoove MLB to do that, then those would probably get ironed out. But even as it is, it's just a really valuable tool. It's kind of the antithesis of baseball just to have suspense all the time and not have any downtimes. And if you only watched baseball this way, and I get into this in my article, you'd miss out on a lot. Obviously, you'd lose your affiliation to any one team. You wouldn't get to see a starter go through the lineup multiple times and see how he adjusts. You wouldn't get to hear the Mets broadcast booth

banter about nothing during blowouts. So you'd miss out on a lot of the charms of baseball. But you also, using this tool, you miss out on blowouts. You miss out on mop-up men. You miss out on almost all commercials. So it's just this straight-to-the-jugular baseball, you know, with high leverage situations and never a dull moment, really. So people should try it out. Yeah, I will. All right. I'll link to that, too. All right. situations and never a dull moment really so people should try it out yeah i will all right

i'll link to that too all right so uh uh quick uh i don't know we'll see we'll see how long this takes but uh we're gonna play a little game today i can't remember if we've played this game before it's a game i like i wrote about this game one time this game is called which war are you uh in which players are identified who have significantly different values by baseball references model for war, fangrass model for war, and baseball prospectuses warp. And this is not necessarily a matter of litigating any of them or anything like that. It's a quick survey in which you, the viewer, the player, whatever, make your choices, and then it is revealed which model of war you like best,

which is, by the way, not actually a game to be taken seriously, and it has nothing to do with which model of war you like best. There's a disclaimer. But I thought it would be a way to get into a few players who have wildly different ratings or values put on them this year in ways that significantly, it's not just like, I mean, everybody knows that these models have different ways of measuring things. There's also probably a margin of error for each individual one. And so there's always going to be differences. That's fine. That's a feature, not a bug, as they say. And it's good. It's a strength of the system, in my opinion, not in a lot of people's opinion, but in my opinion, it's a strength of the system or a there on these players that we can't as humans necessarily identify, that the narrative around the player would be very different,

that it might be the difference between being an MVP candidate and an average player in the extremes. And so how we remember these players' seasons does depend to a large degree on which of these numbers we choose to remember and which one baseball as a whole will remember. So we'll go through a few of those. All right. All right. Sure. And I'm not going to necessarily tell you which is which until you've picked. However, you know, probably a lot of listeners know, but you know that the main differences between these systems are the defensive metrics. Each uses a different defensive metric, although fan graphs and baseball reference come from the same raw data,

more or less, right? UZR and DRS. So in my anecdotal experience, there tends to be more overlap between those. But anyway, different defensive metrics. And then the big one for pitchers is that fan graphs uses FIP, which is a way of looking at how the pitcher pitched, looking only at what we know that he most controls, strikeouts, walks, home runs. Baseball

reference uses basically a runs allowed war model adjusted for the defense of his teammates and other things. And baseball reference, baseball perspectives uses DRA, which is super advanced and in my opinion, the best. so i'm not going to necessarily tell you which ones these are but you might be able to guess and maybe i will tell you maybe it'll be easier for me to tell you but i won't by starting all right so i'm just going to pick the few that i bolded as ones that seemed most interesting to me there's no real system here for how i'm choosing but uh so the first one is uh going to Cole Hamels. Cole Hamels, who has been one of the best pitchers in baseball, certainly over the course of his career. And yet also, if you are into the ace or not ace discussion, Cole Hamels, I would say, has straddled the line his whole career.

He's been either the first guy on the number two starters list or the last guy on the aces list for much of his career. This year, he has arguably been the best pitcher in baseball. One metric has him at 5.8 wins above replacement. Another has him at 4.9. 5.8 is the best by that metric. Another has him at 4.9, which is I think fourth or fifth best. And then a third one has him at only 2.7 wins above replacement, which makes him a undistinguished all-star, more or less. So this is your first challenge. Cole Hamels, league leader in ERA and ERA+, 14-4 record, 170 innings for good team. Is he your Cy Young or is he off your ballot? Yeah, it's funny that you mentioned the debate about how to classify him. I remember seeing that

his former manager commented on that debate earlier this summer. The Phillies manager was asked if the Phillies had a solid number one among their young arms in July. And he said he's in the small hall group for what constitutes a number one starter. And he said there might not be 10 number one starters in baseball. And he said Clayton Kershaw is one. And then he was asked about Hamels. And he said, I don't know if I'd call him a number one. He might be a number two. Those guys are elite. and I love Cole Hamels. Don't get me wrong. It's debatable. So that confirms what you were saying. Even someone who has watched Hamels up

close for a long time. So this does always kind of come back to the retrospective, prospective debate and whether we care about how many runs someone gave up. That's something that happened. It's set in stone. It was valuable. And whether we care about whether his success is likely to continue. And baseball reference war is more of the former model. Fangrass is more of the latter model baseball prospectus probably typically closer to fan grass but somewhere in the middle i would think this year interestingly much closer to fan grass okay yeah so those are judging you based on your skills basically how your peripherals how sustainable what you did would be if you were to do the whole thing over again that kind of thing

and baseball reference is more retrospective and just looking at what actually happened, which is a valid way to evaluate players for awards or just to say who was better over that span. And it is kind of a cop-out to say that you are somewhere in the middle. You probably can't really be in the middle. Sometimes people will split the difference and say, well, here's the average of his fan graphs were in his baseball reference war. And I don't know. I know Joshian thinks that that's sort of disingenuous or intellectually dishonest to

do that because you are just averaging two things that are approaching the problem in completely different ways. And yet I kind of approach the problem in completely different ways. That's sort of how I think about it, too, because I do care if I'm saying who was the best over the span. I care about what actually happened. But when you talk about who was the best, then you're also talking about who showed the best skills and whose true talent level was the highest and maybe who had the least help from his defense and that kind of thing. So I probably, even looking backwards, I probably tend more toward the fit model than I do just the straight runs allowed model. And I'm not totally in one camp or another, especially because there are some guys who do seem to have the ability to consistently be better than the defense independent pitching stats. And Cole Hamels is not really one of those guys. I guess he's a little one of those guys, but only by a little bit over the course of his career.

So it's not as if he is some long-term Marco Estrada or something. So I would probably not have him on my Hall of Fame ballot or my Cy Young ballot or at least nowhere close to the top. It's a pretty weak class, so I'd have to see who else is in it. Your Freudian slip there is sort of telling, too, because I think that with Cole Hamels, if he wins the Cy Young Award this year, I think he makes the Hall of Fame. And if he doesn't, I think he doesn't. Oh, interesting. I think if he – It's Fame. And if he doesn't, I think he doesn't. Wow, interesting. I think if he – It's a big moment.

I really do. I think this – and I think this – Cole Hamels is sort of not as good a pitcher, but Cole Hamels has the Mike Messina problem, right? He's been very good and very durable for a very long time. And by war, he's a pitcher who is with any sort of reasonably positive decline phase. He's going to get there by war, I would say. But he's never won 20 games. He's never finished even in the top.

He's finished fifth only in Cy Young voting. He's never even won 18 games. wrote a great piece earlier this year about how his lack of wins colors even the sort of stat head impression of him by these secondary things of him not having bold ink of him not having as many all-star appearances or Cy Young finishes that over the course of a career we look at to very quickly demonstrate an ace and if he wins the Cy Young I think that that changes that narrative changes so that narrative changes. Yeah, that's probably true. It wouldn't really change it for me.

I'm very much in the Mike Messina deserves to be in camp. And I don't think you necessarily have to have been the best pitcher in baseball or in the league really for any period of time while you were pitching. If you were one of the top five or you were one of the top 10 for 15, 20 years or something, that's enough for me. So I might not vote for Cole Hamels this year, but based on the way he's going, I would end up possibly supporting him for the Hall of Fame. He's especially because things like, you know, FIP and ERA and that kind of thing tend to even out over the course of a career. So over the course of a career, I'm comfortable looking And saying how many runs did this guy give up

Because over thousands of innings That's usually going to correspond to your true talent level very closely So Hamill's FIP this year is the worst in a full season of his career Partly that's the ballpark in the league And so I'm not saying that he's been bad, but I am saying that he is, you know, by that measure, by, you know, your sort of standard measures, he's been the same pitcher he's always been.

And so I would, yeah, I mean, you're right. This comes, how you answer this ultimately might be a semantic thing, but I think that if I were to replay this season over and Cole Hamels throws every pitch exactly as he's thrown it all over again, I would say that I wouldn't expect him to be near the top of this leaderboard. I am choosing the low war on him. Yeah, I'm with you there.

Yeah, his tip minus, which adjusts for the league in the ballpark, is 89 and his career is 85. So he's basically been the same guy. Exactly. All right. So, uh, fan graphs gets one vote a piece.

All right. Yeah. He's, he has a 50 baseball reference war, almost 51 and over almost 57 baseball prospectus warp in his career. And he is not even 33 yet. So if he has any kind of gradual decline phase, he will have the numbers by the time he's done. All right. So reference was the high on him.

Prospectus was right in the middle, and Fangraffs was the low, for the record. All right. Next one, Nolan Arenado. By one measure, Nolan Arenado is at 6.3 wins above replacement, third in the National League. In this story, Nolan Arenado is one big September away from getting your MVP vote. Another has him at 4.7 wins above replacement, and a third has him at 3.9 wins above replacement, which would put him a big September away from your 10th place vote. So MVP or down ballot, maybe? I'd side with the latter, I think. So the outlier is Baseball Perspectives, right? So it has a different defensive system. It's not charted by Baseball Info Solutions solutions so i would guess that if it's based on a big defensive

difference and i assume it is then it's actually not a bit it's not prospectus has them at plus 17 for fielding runs above average and drs has them at plus 14 although i guess drs is uh also one of the no baseball baseball is the outlier in the positive. Okay. So I see what you're saying. All right. I was thinking that you were going the other way. But perspectives and reference are within two or three runs of each other.

And then UZR has them at plus eight. Uh-huh. Okay. So where does the big difference – I guess the difference is it's partially just the replacement level, right? Baseball Perspectus has a different replacement level than Fangraphs and Baseball Reference, so the numbers just tend to be... Yeah, but Perspectus tends to have lower... Perspectus has a higher replacement level.

Yeah. And so, in fact, Arenado's 6-point whatever is even more impressive by that measure. So how does he end up so high above? Good question. I said we're not litigating this. I'm asking you. This is how you feel, Ben. We're doing the feel phase.

Okay. All right. Well, it's not as if this is an out-of-nowhere season. He has been excellent for a couple seasons now. And he was really great last year. But I think of him more as probably a 5-ish win guy than a 7 or 8-ish win guy. And maybe I'm marking him down too much because of the Coors effect. Or maybe because I don't watch as many Rockies games as I watch some other teams.

Maybe I'm not appreciating him as much. I know that his defense is legitimately outstanding, but I'm going to side with, I guess, the baseball reference model in this case. I, this, almost the exact same proportion last year, by the way, between the three sites. And last year, Prospectus had him as a 7.5 win player. And again, there's a little bit of a difference on the defense, but not much, not nearly enough to explain the gap, which makes me wonder if this is a park factors thing. Yeah, maybe. And I totally feel like Arenado is a 7-ish win player right now.

I think Arenado is a top 5 or so player in the game. All right. So I'm going with the high. Are you going with the low or in the middle? Middle. Okay. I'm going with middle just because I know he's improved his OBP significantly this year. He's walking twice as often as he did last year. That was, I think,

kind of the criticism of him last year when people wondered why his war wasn't higher or whatever offensive stat wasn't higher. It was because he had a.323 on base and played in Coors Field. So this year he has his OBP up to.361 and he's kept the same slugging. So that's obviously more impressive. And maybe now the stats are in line with what people think his bat is, but it's not an overpowering offensive performance given where he plays. So I think probably if he had the same defense and he played shortstop or something, maybe I would think of him as best player in baseball material. Now I think of him as just slightly half a tier below. So I'm in the middle range. All right. Fair enough. Okay. Let's see. Next one is Buster Posey. And you'll figure out this one

pretty quickly. One has him at 3.6 wins per replacement, one has him at 3.9, and the third has him at 6.9. That is the difference between giving Chris Bryant a run for his money at the top of the MVP ballot and, you know, a down year, I guess you'd say, for Posey. Yeah, right, and the difference obviously comes from the fact that baseball prospectus is incorporating more aspects of his defense and hopefully providing a more accurate picture because of that. And it includes his framing runs. And he's got over two wins worth of framing value this year alone. And that is nothing new for him. That's basically where he's been every year for the past four years, more or less.

So I buy it. I mean, I believe in those stats. They're consistent from year to year. They're consistent in small samples. They're definitely consistent in big samples. He has been great at it for a while. He has the reputation for being great at it. So I think it has real value.

And that's where I land. Yeah, I do too. So I'm going to bring up another guy who's in this category and we won't make this a separate pick, but Yosemite Grundahl is another one who you could do this for. And Grundahl is 2.1, 2.5, and then at prospectus, 5.4. And Grundahl early in the season, Bill Shakin of the la times wrote a piece about how grundahl was projected by pakoda to be like the third or fourth best player in the national league and he asked grundahl like you know how do you feel about he asked me bill asked me to talk about it and explain it and explain why grundahl is so valuable and i talked about not just the framing but also

the fact that he is actually a good hitter a really good hitter for a catcher when you um you know adjust for his ballpark and and his position and everything like that and you get away from batting average but also that it's mostly the framing right and so then bill asks um grundahl about it like hey what do you think are you an mvp candidate and then grundahl's just like that's you know that guy stupid, which is such a weird experience. You're used to ballplayers not necessarily buying your snake oil, but when you're actually saying you're really good and he's like, no, I'm not, who would know better, me or anybody else?

I would know better than anybody else. I'm not that good. It was a very, very weird experience. But with Grundahl, it's a lot. I think a lot of people who, you know, by the basics of pitch framing metrics would go, yeah, no, that makes sense with Posey. He's a great hitter, great catcher. He's an MVP candidate every year. And we know, like you say, the framing is there all the time. Grundahl is also a guy who is a very good framer, but does not carry the same reputation. And contrary to Buster Posey, seems to not have nearly so much buy-in from the industry and perhaps even by his own team about how great he is.

Yeah, perhaps because as we heard from Jonathan on Friday's episode, he might not be that great a game caller or pitcher manager, which is a distinct skill from framing. Yeah. So do you have the same thought process? Do you go through the same thought process with Grundahl? If I had asked you Grundahl instead of Posey, would you have still taken 5.4? Or is he an MVP ballot guy for you? Yeah, I'd probably be closer to the war-inclusive model on him,

but maybe not fully buying it just because of what Jonathan told us last week and what pitchers seem to echo with their preference for other catchers. All right, let's go back to pitchers. Jose Fernandez, 3.4 on one, 5.2 on another, 5.7 on a third. So that's, again, you're probably talking about the Cy Young unless Clayton Kershaw comes back on two of those metrics And you're probably talking about 20th best pitcher in baseball Otherwise, do you see any reason that you can convince yourself That Jose Fernandez is a three-win pitcher this year? No, I was just going to say that pretty much any number you could put

On Jose Fernandez's value I would be willing to go that pretty much any number you could put on Jose Fernandez's value, I would be willing to go along with on the high end. So however good your stats say Jose Fernandez is, I'll go along with the highest number available. Yeah, he leads the league in FIP, and he has the highest strikeout rate from a starter since, I think, Randy Johnson. So he's been insane. You're going with the high, not just the sort of high, but the high? I think so. As am I.

That's the DRA-based model. That's BP's. But BP and Fangrass are right there. And I wonder what. So with reference, I guess it's just that he's given up some runs. Like the ERA is higher than the FIP. It still looks like a very good era but he's in a good ballpark and he doesn't have as many innings as anybody else i think if you

if you tacked on another 25 innings then it probably looks um more well they wouldn't be in line because they would both go up proportionately but if fernandez was a four plus win pitcher maybe we wouldn't even notice but it is interesting how much lower that is because it's not like he's it's not like he's rocking a 4.3 era that's all bad luck it's 2.9 2.9 is pretty good but yeah in florida it's so crazy that people are breaking strikeout rate records and and when they do we're still talking about like best since randy johnson or pedro martinez like no one from any prior era should have a strikeout rate record. It just strikeout rates are so much higher now than they were 15 years ago that for someone from

that time to still have that record is crazy. I agree. It's, it is really weird that the strikeout revolution or whatever has taken so long to reach the upper echelon of starters. And it seems like it's very possible. It feels like there might be, like, I could see in the next 10 years that record being broken eight times if pitchers decide they want to do it, especially as they get used to only starting, pitching six innings a game. But, yeah, I don't know. I guess what I'm saying is I don't know if it's because Randy Johnson

and Pedro Martinez were so, so good. It might just be that. It might just be that sometimes a record gets broken and it takes 30 years for Michael Johnson to come around and beat it. Michael Johnson, right? He's the long jumper. Yeah, I'm right about that. Bringing back the 96 Olympics references. Totally.

So sometimes it really does take 30 years for a record to get broken. I would guess though, that there's the possibility there for Fernandez and maybe a couple other pitchers in the next couple of years. All right. David Price is the opposite of Fernandez. He has a very, very, not the opposite, but he has a very high ERA and his wars are 2-8, 3-8, 5-2. uh and his wars are 283852 and uh one of course makes him a great signing uh and supports dave dombrowski's case for executive of the year and the other two suggest that he is overpaid thank goodness that he's not been a disaster but overpaid and troubling and you know not a sure thing going into a postseason series. Yeah, baseball prospectus has him basically, well, not quite as good as he was last year, but very close, close enough that no one would be saying he's even mildly disappointing, really. So that, I don't know, I think I'd probably be maybe the middleman or what the bottom two were

pretty close and then there was one higher. I'd probably be the the middleman or what the bottom two were pretty close. And then there was one higher. I'd probably be the middle or the low end on price at this point. Yeah, I think I would be the low, not even the middle. And I would quite possibly be wrong. I mean, he has, you know, basically has the same strikeout rate and the same walk rate that he had last year he has allowed more home runs he's allowed a lot more home runs and that's yeah that's the flukiest of the three in FIP uh and then beyond that you're dealing with all the other fluky stuff

so I could see a case for him being really good in snakebitten but my feel I have not felt good watching David Price at all this year. So I'm going with the low, which is reference is the low, fan graphs is the middle. And what was the difference between them? The difference between them was 2.8 for reference, 3.8 for fan graphs, 5.2 for prospectus. All right, I'll go with the middle. Okay, all right, and let me find, right. I'll go with the middle. Okay. All right.

And let me find, I guess I'll do one last one. Jacoby Ellsbury is a good one. Joey Votto is a good one. Dan Straley is a good one. But let's go with Andrelton Simmons. 2.6, 1.7, 0.9. So the question is, is it possible for Anderton Simmons to be below average? He's been more or less exactly this for his career, bad hitter, greatest defensive shortstop maybe in history. So is it possible for that guy to be below average? Yeah, I'd say probably not. I think

he hasn't really been a worst hitter. He's been about exactly the same hitter as he was, say, the last two years combined. So based on what I've seen, based on what many of the stats say, he's still a really great defensive shortstop. And I have no strong enough reason to doubt that. And I would say that a guy as good at defense as andrelton simmons at that position probably cannot be below average yeah and so the low on him is from prospectus and prospectus has always been more conservative about his defense generally speaking it has rated him as one of the most valuable defenders in baseball all along, but not gone to record-breaking levels like DRS has.

And then this year, it's even more so, a plus three by fielding runs above average. The others are like plus 10, plus 15. And I believe Anderton Simmons is still a better defender than that. So I'm going to go, I'll go with the middle on that one. Okay, I'll also go with the middle. Okay. So that would be fan graphs for both. So between us, we have five for fan graphs. We have two for reference and we have five for BP. So there you go. That's what we are. Okay. We are, I would say that we are mixed.

But I guess we're closer to the skills instead of retrospective accounting of what happened. I think so. Yeah, I think we are. All right. So we'll leave it there. All right. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Today's five Patreon supporters are William Sanderson, Kevin Clark, Brian Burke, Alexander L. Schultz, and Arthur. Thank you. Congrats to the Sonoma Stompers who won the 2016 Pacific Association title on Friday.

You heard broadcaster Tim Livingston's call at the beginning of this episode. You can read our book about the 2015 Stompers, The Only Rules It Has to Work, our wild experiment building a new kind of baseball team, check out the website at theonlyrulesithastowork.com for more information. And please leave us ratings and reviews on Amazon

and Goodreads if you like the book. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectivelywild, and you can rate and review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. As we mentioned, you can get the discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription to the Play Index by going to baseballreference.com and using the coupon code PP. I'll have an episode of the Ringer MLB show up tomorrow. Thanks to those of you who rated and reviewed the show

over the weekend. If you haven't yet and you're enjoying it, I hope you'll join in. You can email me and Sam at podcast at baseballperspectives.com or by messaging us through Patreon. And we'll be back with answers to some of your emails later this week. Hang on. You've got to not be playing the organ right now. Okay. Oh, if you put headphones on, yeah, sure. That'd be great. And the main thing with Anderlton Simmons is,

do you believe that it is possible for Anderlton... She's got her headphones on and she's playing When the Saints Go Marching in on the organ, and now she's singing it. She doesn't know we can hear her. That defeats the purpose. Hang on, let me go tap her shoulder. Hang on. You know, I'm just going to move. What am I doing? I'm just going to move.