Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 967: The Miraculous Mr. Lester

Episode Date: October 22, 2016

Ben and Sam banter about the origin of the pitcher’s mound, the impact of seeing a starter multiple times in the same series, and the Dodgers’ perplexing approach against Jon Lester, who continues to flourish without ever throwing to first.

When you say we've got time, I don't know if you're right. If it's true, I've known it. It's the game I'm throwing, throw it all away. Hello and welcome to episode 967 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives, presented by Playindex at BaseballReference.com and our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Sam Miller of ESPN. Hello. Yo, hey, hi.

Had a busy day, but we needed to talk about our old pal, John Lester. So we will get to John Lester in just a second. A couple things before we begin. First, do you know where the mound came from? I don't. That's a great question. Well, it turns out no one knows where the mound came from. I was just reading the most recent edition of Craig Wright's A Page from Baseball's Past newsletter, which I highly recommend. I always learn something. And today, what I learned was that no one knows where the mound started or who started it or when it started exactly. We know that it was kind of officially codified in 1903, although at that point it was just a maximum height. So there was no standardized height. It could be less than that height if people wanted it to. And often they did.

It could be less than that height if people wanted it to, and often they did. But the interesting thing was that there was never a point where people just said, hey, pitchers should be able to stand on something. It was just a thing that happened organically during that period where pitchers would go to the groundskeeper and say, hey, can you just sort of surreptitiously build this little pile of dirt for me here and angle it toward the plate. And so it just kept happening and it kept getting bigger and bigger until people noticed it and could see it from the press box and could see it from the stands. And then eventually they had to do something about it and actually put it in the rules. But it just happened like that. Basically, just everyone cheating was how the mound happened. That's bizarre. And you know what's especially bizarre about it is I remember Sean Boysen, our assistant GM, building the mound before the season started.

And it was like a multi-day process. You can't just like pile a bunch of dirt up there. Like it's not a pile of dirt. It is packed. You have to really like treat the mound you have to it's like it's like curing jerky it's not like you just go oh well i want jerky and you bite into an animal you have to do a thing you know and well at that time i'm sure it wasn't like that i'm sure it wasn't but it seems like it would be really hard to pitch from a loose

dirt mound like i'm not sure that would seem like an advantage to me at the time well i guess it must have been or people wouldn't have kept wanting to do it but yeah i had no idea if you had asked me i would have said that either the mound was always there or maybe i knew it wasn't always there but i would have thought that at some point people got together and said hey we should have a mound in the middle of the diamond. But nope, just happened sneakily. I have no idea. An inch here, an inch there.

Yeah, I have no idea what I would have thought the origin of the mound is. If you had really challenged me, I would not have been able to come up with an origin story. Well, no one has exactly, except for that sort of vague one. So anyway, that was really interesting. You should all subscribe to that newsletter Another thing, we got an email from Charlie yesterday And it prompted an article by me So he wanted to know Do pitchers suffer any sort of disadvantage

Even if they're fully rested When starting against the same lineup Multiple times in a short series For example, is there any reason to think That all else being equal Clayton Kershaw and Rich Hill would be likely to have a tougher time against the Cubs this weekend because Cubs hitters have now faced them for multiple at-bats in the past week, etc., etc. All of this also applies to the Dodgers versus Hendricks and Arrieta. By the way, before you reveal, I have a piece on Rizzo versus Kershaw that is going to be running on ESPN on Saturday.

And in writing about this, Rizzo was asked about Kershaw, and he says, quote, he feels the Cubs could have an advantage facing Kershaw for the second time this series. But with a qualifier, this is the postseason where nothing makes sense. So that is, I have just totally invalidated whatever you found. Yeah, I guess so. Well, I was going to say I wish I'd seen that quote before I wrote, but then he basically negated it. But if I had asked you this, what would you have said?

Because I didn't really have a theory. Both explanations were plausible to me That hitters would have some advantage Seeing a pitcher for the second time in a series Because obviously this isn't something that happens During the regular season You don't get to face the same starter twice in one series And we know that there are advantages in one game

That the more the batter sees the pitcher The better he gets So it's plausible that there would be an in-series advantage also. Would you have leaned one way or another? Well, I mean, there's a sort of foundational premise to that question, which we first must decide where we stand. I lean more toward pitchers fatiguing, pitchers tiring, more than batters getting an advantage from having seen them i think there's probably aspects of both but i lean more toward the tiring part of that

i think doesn't in some of the studies i've seen at least like the mitchell lichman one i think at bp i thought he controlled for that and looked at starters at different pitch counts facing the order and the advantage was the same anyway but yeah russell though did he found the found the opposite and so i sort of i think there's like i said i think there's aspects of both of it but both apply so even even if i thought that it was 50 50 then the next time you face them the it would not be like the fourth at bat it would be like 50 percent of the fourth at bat if it's 50 anyway i would bet that there is not a well i don't know you know what i was thinking before you give your answer i'll just

take this way off base actually before i even say this i now i'm going to go into a different direction if anybody really like if anybody is listening to this uh podcast for the very first time today and uh likes it and I'm going to go listen to the previous 960 episodes, do me a favor. I want a list of every time I said I have a hypothesis, because I would like to go back and test all those. I feel like I could get about two and a half years worth of writing out of that. And they just flow down the river and I never see them again. So if anybody is planning on, I don't know why you would, but if anybody is planning on going back and listening to all 960 episodes, do me a favor and just jot it down what my hypothesis is. I have now forgotten what my hypothesis is in this specific case.

My hypothesis is that, what were we talking about? Facing starters for the second time. And then. Times through the order. Times through the order. Times through the order. And then I don't think you told me where we were going. Oh, yes. I remember.

All right, good. You cannot edit out the silence ben just do me that one one time let me be your editor okay all right i have a hypothesis that when managers are making out their lineup and they go oh well this guy's four for 11 so i'm gonna have him play or this guy's two for 22, so I'm going to let him play. They actually should only pay attention to the second number, that whether you are one for 21 or 12 for 21 is irrelevant, but the 21 is relevant compared to a batter who is, say, 0 for 1 and has only seen the pitcher twice. Because I do think that every time you see a pitcher, the advantage, everybody thinks this, the advantage

goes to the hitter the more you've seen him. I don't know that that benefit builds forever. It might be that by the fourth time you've already maxed out the benefit. This is why it's only a hypothesis. But if it keeps accruing, then it would make perfect sense for a manager to go, oh, well, I'm going to play this left fielder instead of this left fielder because he's faced the guy 38 times. The other ones only faced him twice. And so in that sense, it wouldn't matter whether it was two starts a week apart. It wouldn't necessarily matter whether it was two starts a week apart or two starts a year apart. You'd still get some benefit. However, to answer your question, I would say that in this specific case, you will not find that pitchers starting a second time in a

series are severely disadvantaged compared to the first time they start in a series. You are correct. They're not disadvantaged at all. In fact, if they are starting on short rest, they are disadvantaged. But if they are starting on regular rest, then not at all. They have the same ERA. Their OPS actually went down a tiny bit, OPS allowed. So no evidence that there is any sort of second time in the series effect. And there is a study about what you're talking about kind of over the course of your career. Does it help a batter to see a pitcher? And I link to that in my article if anyone wants to go chase it down.

But it's not really conclusive. There's all these confounding variables when you're talking about batter versus pitcher over a number of years and just a whole lot of things that make that complicated. But anyway, that is the answer. If you're wondering whether you are going to see Clayton Kershaw or Jake Arrieta or any of these guys at some sort of disadvantage this weekend Because they have already pitched in the series The answer is, best as I can tell, with much help from Dan Hirsch of the Baseball Gauge Is no, so now we know that Alright

Okay, so, John Lester We haven't talked all that much about John Lester this year You can blame me, you can blame me for that Because you wanted to write about it at some point Yeah, in roughly April Yeah, roughly April I had a You can blame me. You can blame me for that. Because you wanted to write about it at some point and never did. Yeah, roughly April I started work on an article about – I felt like it was a different angle on John Lester. And so I forbade Ben from talking about it or answering any email questions about it. I still might do that article.

I might do it – like I do it It's probably among three things That I'm thinking about writing for two slots Next week so I still might but I feel like We can talk about it anyway Okay so even if you hadn't said that I don't know how much we would have talked about him Really because he wasn't as Big a story this year

Last year people ran on him much more It was a record setting amount Of running though not nearly enough Running to really hurt him all that much as a pitcher. And then this year, things went back in the other direction, which was fascinating in a way that people weren't emboldened by what happened last year. It seemed like things regressed, and they decided, okay, I guess that's all we can do, So we're not even going to do that anymore. And I think a lot of it was David Ross.

He gets a lot of credit for backpicking and throwing behind the runner and basically being John Lester's pickoff throw sort of surrogate. Which I find a little weird because, well, I'll say why it's weird. You keep going. Keep going with the intro. All right. So that's part of it. Part of it is that Lester is fairly quick to the plate and helps himself out in that way, but it's still been pretty mystifying to me. I think that he has continued not to be broken by this very easily identifiable flaw. So this is now a story again, because we saw the Dodgers do something semi-different against him in game five, but not have all that much success

doing it. They attempted and succeeded in stealing two bases, which, you know, would be a lot over the course of a season, but is not anything compared to 2014 al wild card game which was that's the thing when we saw that happen we figured okay well that's what will happen from now on because it worked so well and there was just no counter to it and it was such a high profile success that we figured all right well if he doesn't learn to throw over to first base then this will just break him now it will every game will be the al wild card game and sometimes it is the brewers the brewers stole five bases in four innings against him earlier this year uh and then they so the brewers for instance let's see the brewers faced him twice and stole seven bases.

And so that kind of is kind of breaking him. But then meanwhile, like the Dodgers, for instance, faced him twice this year in the regular season and stole none. And the Reds faced him four times and stole four bases. So like it really does seem like there's a little aspect. The Cardinals faced him three times and went 0 for 2. What is wrong with baseball? You were getting frustrated. I am so mad at this.

And I'm not mad. I'm not even mad that teams aren't doing anything about it. Like, I feel like they're trying. And I'm so mad that I just, that I can't understand how this isn't easier. Well, so we got an email from Chris Swick of Big League Stew, and he asked, are John Lester's yips actually good? And he says, I've now reached the point where John Lester's throwing issues are a good thing for the Cubs. We've seen both the Giants and Dodgers come out and try to get in his head during the postseason, but it hasn't worked thus far. I'm guessing that's because the Cubs have a strong defense and teams aren't used to bunting.

You pretty much have to drop down a bunt you know can only be fielded by Lester, and apparently that's a difficult thing to ask. So in a way, it's taking these teams out of their comfort zones. They are so focused on Lester's yips that they are doing weird and unusual things, and it's working against them. This reminds me of the section in your book When you guys shifted hitters knowing it would force Them to make adjustments to their approach What do you say are Lester's yips Actually good for the Cubs

It seems unquestionable that the Dodgers were doing Different things that were Intended to take advantage of this Yesterday they were Bunting they were dancing off First in really entertaining And also perplexing ways. Just taking incredibly lengthy leads. And bizarrely.

Yet still. Not even lengthy. Just lengthy but bizarre. Like Jock Peterson took a lead on his head. He actually had a headstand. Yeah it was like the ministry of silly walks or something. Yes exactly. It was like they were. and yet they were not going.

Even though they succeeded in taking these extraordinary leads, they didn't take advantage of it. And it seemed like either they thought the real advantage was not in stealing the base, but in being in his head about possibly stealing the base. Or they were just bold enough to take a really long Lead but not quite bold enough to Then try to steal the base like they were They were like the guy who says You know hold me back hold me back and is Like attacking someone but really

Wants to be held back my metaphor Watching them was the parent who Keeps threatening to punish the kid but never Actually punishes the kid yeah Howie Kendrick took a big lead and then strips naked uh yasmani grandal took a giant lead and then ate a sweet potato raw which seemed not likely to do anything that's all i got i needed you to talk longer i could have done the whole lineup yeah sorry chad from the bachelorette was a big eating sweet potatoes guy yeah i don't know i i can't explain it i mean it didn't did it seem to you that it was bothering lester yeah it's okay and yet it couldn't have been bothering him that much i think

it's great yeah i think that you can still be a good baseball player when you're mad at the opposing team i i mean i don't hate the other hating the other guy isn't necessarily a good like getting the other guy to hate you isn't always a good strategy and i think that if they had been more successful in what they were doing like there was that play where i think it was a bunt and lester fielded it and then threw to first and got the guy out. But, like, he bounced the throw, like, 15 feet in front of the bag. It was a horrible throw. And then afterward, Lester, like, glared at their dugout, like, how dare you try to take on me, the great 19-5 starting pitcher.

Well, that works if you get the out. And if you throw it into right field, it's kind of embarrassing. And I feel like there was – I mean, we'll never know. This is a reality that never happened. But I think it's plausible that had they been successful a bunch and made him start to feel like he had no defense against them, that it might have gotten in his head. But on the other hand, he went 19-5 and he had a 2.44 ERA this year, 2.53 ERA this year. And he probably feels pretty good when he's standing on a major league mound right now. And they did not do anything to knock him dizzy.

Wouldn't it get in his head more if you actually stole the base? Right. Well, that's the thing. more if you actually stole the base right well that's the thing the lead the the fact that they're not going was what was so irritating to me yeah because they would they would take this lead and then lester would move you know he'd lift his front leg and then they'd take two steps back and and i couldn't tell whether it was that they the lead was all fake and that they had to take two steps back because well if you stay out there then david ross is gonna pick you off or if what i think is that

they genuinely every single time every single time they thought oh he's throwing him he's throwing it here now which like is crazy for for one reason it's crazy because you are gone. You are 35 feet off the bag. Your only play here is to just go straight to second. If he makes an accurate throw, you're out anyway. If he makes an inaccurate throw, you should be on second anyway. So just go. But I really genuinely think that despite the fact that he would under no circumstances actually make that throw, even though you were You know totally vulnerable

And were going to be out He wouldn't do it I don't think they Ever believed now he's going home I don't know I don't know maybe they did That's basically what Jeff Sullivan wrote And I think that's how we've attempted To explain this in the past that

Batters are just so conditioned Particularly with a lefty You're just not going to get that to explain this in the past, that batters are just so conditioned, particularly with a lefty, you're just not going to get that far off the base. All your instincts are telling you, danger, danger, I got to go back. It's just a reflex that you take that step back, I suppose. Although, man, I mean, at this point, like if I were francona and i end up facing john lester in game one of the world series i would sit my team down and i would say if you get picked off here or if you get thrown out here it's on us it's on me i would pay him i would pay i would have a i would actually

have a a bounty if you get thrown out i am I have $5,000 here for you yeah Right it's our fault it's that's what The scouting report said you were just following Orders so don't hesitate if You get thrown out by an embarrassing Distance That won't no one will hold it against you Because that is what we told you

To do that's what I would say and It'll be really interesting to see if that Is what he says because obviously Francona seems like a very smart manager and has done a lot of other unorthodox things. And the Indians are a really, really good base running team and base stealing team. So now I am eagerly anticipating this potential game one matchup to see if they actually take advantage of this stuff, because, you know, the Indians now seem to be the team that is actually doing the thing that everyone says teams should do but don't do for various reasons with Andrew Miller

and the way they've handled their bullpen. So maybe they will also do the same with John Lester. It was just so perplexing because the Dodgers clearly had a plan here. They were clearly doing things that were intended to take advantage of this weakness, but then not doing the one thing that you could do to most take advantage of this weakness. So I don't get it. I believe that the Indians are going to just torch him. I agree. I think that they are going to go crazy. I think if Carlos Santana walks, he will go on the first pitch. I think that it is going to be every single time.

And I will, again, be incredibly frustrated when they don't do that. And also, I also, in their defense, will not be surprised if after Carlos Santana walks, Lester somehow throws a perfect pickoff throw and gets him out. And that's the last time this story is ever a thing. The other thing that is, again, in their defense, and that makes all of this so much more complicated, is that a third of base runners attempting to steal against Lester were thrown out this year. It's not just that they weren't going.

They went. They went 41 times. That's a lot of attempts. But it's by far his career high before 2014 wildcard game. And yet the league average caught stealing is 27%. Leicester's caught stealing was 32%. So it's not that they were afraid to go. They were somewhat.

But it's also that it's also somehow not easy to steal against them. I have a very hard time thinking that Jock Peterson, who is probably 19 feet off the bag compared to like a 12-foot average lead, off the bag compared to like a 12 foot average lead and who is literally lining up in starters blocks, like a sprinter would be, would even have to slide. I have a hard time believing that, but the evidence is the evidence that Lester is somehow also kind of good at getting these guys thrown out.

Yeah. And so it's, maybe it's harder than we think it is. Yeah. Well, August Fagerstrom had the stat cast stats on the collective time to second base with Lester and Ross, and they're both really quick. So Lester was like 1.1 to 1.2 seconds to the plate last night, and Ross's average pop time for the season was 1.95, which was sixth among 83 regular catchers. So, you know, combined, that's like 3.15 seconds. That's really good. And there are a lot of runners who just can't run that

fast to second base, maybe even if they take an above average lead. But still, part of that, the lack of success must be because runners aren't fully exploiting the advantage that they could be exploiting here, right? Because they're still too timid about taking really long leads against Leicester. I mean, I don't know. Maybe all you need is David Ross rifling one down there every now and then, and that works just as well as a pickoff throw. All right, so we're back there. We're back to the back pick. A back pick only works if you're not stealing.

So if you want to neutralize David Ross, go to second. Yeah, I just, I don't get it. There was that one game with the Stompers last summer where the catcher on the opposing team just- That was such a great game. It was great. The catcher on the opposing team was such a great game it was great the catcher on the opposing team was just bad at catching he was not their regular catcher and he could not get the ball down to second fast enough to throw out a even below average runner

probably and so we just stole every time we got someone on base i don't what was it seven steals eight i think nine i want to say it was nine and he never caught again against us. Yeah, right. So I mean, because it was just well, they're giving it to us. There's no way that they could get us out here. So that's not what is happening here. Obviously, Ross is good and Lester is good at getting the ball to the plate. But I mean, it's just still pretty unfathomable to me. And it is at once frustrating and incredibly satisfying, I think, that this just paradox persists. And everyone knows this weakness and everyone in theory should be able to just run wild. And no one does or very few teams do.

Really looking forward to thatians matchup if it happens because if it doesn't happen then then it's just never gonna happen we just might as well forget about this somebody uh we've talked about this before and somebody else um made a suggestion that uh that there is some aspect of this that is uh just being gentlemanly that it is somehow considered cruel or unsporting to uh pick on a guy for this or to humiliate him for this and we've uh agreed with the possibility of this in the past i think though that after last night we can at least say definitively that that that was not what the dodgers were doing like that if anything they were specifically trying to humiliate him without even taking

advantage of it like like the whole goal like the strategy was step one humiliation and then there was just no step two right and so i don't think that there's any reason to think that the dodgers felt inhibited by uh by by sort of by courtesy or anything like that right yeah right i agree okay i'm gonna see how many stolen bases there were in that game. I've got to find the file. So, anyway, every time we bring up John Lester, we just bang our heads against this same wall.

But it's, I don't know, when I talked to an advanced scout on the Ringer show a few weeks ago, he was saying, you know, you could pick up on some great tell or something, but if the players don't read it or they don't trust it for whatever reason or they just aren't that interested in applying it, then it just goes to waste.

And obviously you don't need an advanced scout anymore to tell you about John Lester not throwing a first, but if it is some combination of gentlemanliness with some teams and just ingrained fear that is really hard to get out of a player who's been playing a certain way for decades then i don't know i just think closed door team meeting just sit them down and say everyone steals and we keep stealing until it stops working nine is correct we sold nine in that game all right so if the sonoma stompers can do it then surely major league teams can do it all right any other lester angles i guess uh i guess not what what did you think about the bunting toward him as far as like do you think that so adrian g him? So Adrian Gonzalez, for instance, bunted,

and it took a spectacular play and a video review for him to be called out, and that was really a spectacular play. And Craig Goldstein tweeted that if you have Adrian Gonzalez bunting, you've already won, that you've taken a slugger, taken your three or four hitter and convinced him to hit the ball 60 feet. You've already won. Do you buy that? Do you think that it's even your best hitter? It makes sense.

Yeah. I mean, that is always the argument when we talk about bunting to beat the shift is that, oh, well, the guys who get shifted most often are these power hitters. So if you can get them bunting, then you win. But that is only true up until a certain point if and i don't know what the mathematical break-even point is off the top of my head but obviously there's a point where the expected on base percentage is high enough that even though you can only get one base or you're you're likely to only get one base. It still makes sense. And we've seen Carlos Santana bunting to beat the shift. We've seen Rizzo bunting to beat the shift just in these series.

So I think it makes sense. I don't know what the expected success rate would be against Leicester, but maybe it's harder than you think. I mean, he can bounce it over there, which is semi-effective, right? I mean, he only bounce it over there, which is semi-effective, right? I mean, he only had like one throwing. I heard a stat just like in the background today, I heard someone citing the stat against Lester and I don't remember the specifics, but it was like of his opportunities to field, like he had actually done pretty well. Like he, he hasn't had many throwing errors. He didn't have, he didn't have an air this year. Yeah. So he didn't have an air this year, Ben. That's pretty crazy too. The man

literally cannot throw a baseball. He can only throw a baseball in the hardest possible way to throw a baseball, but he can't throw it in the way that we can all throw it. Yeah. So he had 17 assists. Right. Yeah. So he's getting it over there one way or another it's just not pretty and maybe guys just aren't good enough at bunting but yeah i mean if that's the case then he was a plus one defender by uh defensive run saved yeah so i so maybe that play doesn't make sense. I don't know. I want more than anything in the world, Ben, I want John Lester to win the gold glove. And when they weren't bunting, they were showing bunt constantly.

Rob Arthur tweeted something. I didn't get that. I assume that that was a quote from the broadcast, that the Dodgers have shown bunt 10 times against Leicester. No, yeah, no, I mean, that's true. That's true. I don't get the strategy. Like, again, I don't think you're getting in his head unless you're getting on base. Right, yeah, and you're passing up pitches that you could potentially hit. I mean, I guess if you're showing bunt, you can always pull it back, but I assume you're at a disadvantage if you are showing bunt convincingly. but I assume you're at a disadvantage if you are showing bunt convincingly.

So, yeah, I mean, that was just kind of a piece with the dancing, cavorting leads. This is, I'm definitely going into this sort of speculative psychology here, but to me, if I'm Jon Lester and I'm watching a team that is trying to taunt me but too gutless to do the thing, I feel like the big winner. Yeah, right. So Chris is possibly right about the Yips actually benefiting him until he runs into a team that is willing to be ruthless. All right, are we finished? Until next time.

What game will he start in the world series if they make it first first one i believe oh god that means he might be in line to start twice he might be the well they have chapman so they wouldn't do a bum garner with him he won't pitch in relief in that series right it's not too bad all right well I'm glad we got the chance to talk about our old pal. So we will leave it there. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Today's five listeners who have already pledged their support. Andrew Johnston, Kyle Park, Ryan Quinney, Matt Legrone and Michelle Nail. You can buy our book, The Only Rules It Has to Work, our wild experiment building a new kind of baseball team. Go to the website at The Only Rules It Has to Work, our wild experiment building a new kind of baseball team. Go to the website at The Only Rules It Has to Work for more information.

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