Talkin' Baseball (MLB Podcast) - Deep Dive on the Injustice to Angels' Nolan Schanuel - Jimmy's Three Things

Episode Date: April 9, 2024

timestamps:0:00 Intro00:38 Scoring Injustice Deep Dive16:51 Quality At Bats24:19 Highest and Lowest Pitches Hit Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hello and welcome to Jimmy's three things on this fine Tuesday morning. My name's Jimmy. I got three things I want to talk about. One, a grave injustice has been done to the first baseman out in Anaheim. Two, quality at bats. Is your team doing well? Who's doing the best? Who's doing the worst?

Is the person doing the best related to the person doing the worst? Maybe. Number three, just a quick little baseball, Savon. I want to see the highest pitch that's been hit and the lowest pitch that's been hit on the season thus far. Quick sip in my coffee and then away we go. Okay. We are starting with Nolan Shanuel and the grave injustice that has been done to his hitting streak. Listen in to Angels announcer Wayne Randazzo.

Listen in to Angels announcer Randazzo going off on baseball and bringing up all of the dirty laundry because of what happened to the first base. Negative story after negative story. Scandal after scandal. A fiasco in Oakland. You have these ridiculous looking jerseys. You have the MLBPA challenging the league about the pitch clock today because of constant pitcher injuries. And yet, not to mention your global superstar is embroiled in a betting scandal. But on top of all of that, you have a young player trying to make a name for himself who has come up and reach base safely in every single game that he has played.

And the league allows this scoring change to go on to end his streak, kill this story, a positive story that's happening in Major League Baseball. It is an absurdity. Yeah, I mean, when you think about all the positivity from all over to social media world, how it impressed everybody to start your career. He was this in college last year. He was still playing college baseball at this point. And then they have that taken away on a base hit. It was a base hit.

It was a clear hit. It wasn't even really a borderline call. It was a clear base hit. Like I said in the pregame show, the NBA doesn't take an assist away from LeBron James. He's got a triple double and he's trying to add on that record. It just doesn't happen. Fired up about it. So first, if you're not familiar with Nolan Shanuel,

which I believe is how you pronounce it. I did a Jimmy's Three Things topic on him last year because he went up to the majors real quick. The angels were promoting everyone really quick. Sean O'well. Someone told me it pronounced, it rhymed with Manuel. I'm wrong. Sean O'well?

Sean O'well. That's what baseball reference says. That sounds. so weird to me. Sean O'ell? All right. I guess so. So anyway, he comes up last year in 2023 and let's look at his game log and you can see the hit column. He's got a one in the first 10 games that he played. Then he doesn't get a hit in the next two, but you go over to walk and he's got a walk and then he's got a walk, hit, hit, hit, hit, hit, no hit, but a walk. So anyway, on base streak going strong here all of last season. He starts this year with,

the same thing. Walk in the first game. The next game, he reached on an error? That doesn't count. Oh, that's the game? That's the game we're talking about. So after that, hit, hit, walk. This game, he came in at the end and got hit by a pitch.

That would extend it. Okay. And then no hits but a walk, walk. So I think April 7th, two days ago, as I record this, it would have actually ended. But what happened was they changed the scoring on a play. I'll let you see the play first, and then I'm going to deep dive into similar plays and the whole process of appealing a score and score changes. There's a Twitter account that does a great job explaining it.

This is the play in question. Hannah, longest on base streaks to begin a career. Right side. Oh, a diving play by Mountcastle. And then Bowman couldn't catch the ball. So a run scores. We'll see if that is ruled a hit or not. So they did rule it a hit initially.

The first baseman, for those that are just listening, had to dive to his right, and he makes the stop. It's not ordinary effort. It's a nice diving stop by the first baseman to corral the ball. After that, the play is pretty routine. The pitcher's got to cover, got to throw it at the pitcher. They didn't sink. up there and that's where he reached.

But the first initial stop is not normal. So there's an account called MLB scoring changes that does a really good job tracking all this. And he says that this is the second change on this play. This was originally a single and a dropped catch error on Bauman, which I didn't know you could really do that. that like it could be a single and then an error, which it makes total sense. I actually love that this is a possibility, but I thought because he didn't advance and he's safe,

it's either got to be a hit or an error. I didn't know you could say single on the hit because it was an extraordinary effort to make the play, not routine, to stop the ball, and then say, but once he did stop it, they should have made it. So then they give an error on Bauman, the pitcher who's covering.

I didn't know that was something you could do, but I like that. They hit, it was a great diving play that stopped a hit. So give the better credit for a single. And then the error is after that. They changed that to a single and then a throwing error on Mount Castle. So the same thing. Nolan still gets his single, but now the error instead of being on the pitcher who was running to field the ball

is on the first baseman for not hitting him in the chest. Kind of throws it as a tall pitcher, throws it down by his knees. Then the third change changed it to a straight missed catch error. So just Mountcastle just gets

an error on the play. No single. And that ends the on-base streak for Nolan. Shawnawell? Sean-A-well? And it retroactively ends the streak at 30 games.

He was two away from second all-time truck Hanna in 1918. this guy who's been tracking them forever, scoring changes. He says, this is a strange call at best. My year's doing this. I've only ever seen one other play with two changes on it. He says, I was fine with the hit call. It's a low throw after a dive to a moving target that is six foot five.

This is one, this one is interesting to say least, but the implication on a major record chase of historic portions makes that newsworthy. So yeah, this changed a lot of things. Then he did follow up a ton with the process of how this goes down, which I found really fascinating because it's just really in the cracks and crevices of scoring baseball games. So hand up if you're a nerd like me and into that. He said, you know, he's reacting.

I can't believe MLB did this to Shanual. How can this get changed six days later? And then he explains that this wasn't done by MLB. Scoring decisions get changed in a couple ways. The simplest is the official scorer, reviews a play after the game and ends and changes it. That's very common. Like, after watching replays or some other stuff, I change my mind.

And then there's a form they fill out and they submit it, gets sent in and changed it. Sometimes MLB or sports notices scoring rules being applied incorrectly. And when that happens, the game is over, they will alert. Kind of like, you know, hey guys, there's no way that that could be reached on error. He's like, that could be a wild pitch, should be a pass ball, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then the other way is via appeal, which can come from the player, Or the team, never an agent. That makes sense.

And the MLBPA, the players, collectively bargained for this. The rights to control their own stats in a way. And they bargained for a appeal committee on scoring changes. So the appeals committee is made up of former players, which was collectively bargained for. And those players or former players make, one of them will make the decision. Players teams have a 72 hour window to appeal anything. They generally do it right away, but it's up to 72 hours to allow for traveling things.

Once an appeal is lodged, the committee reviews it separately, but they can talk to each other. So, you know, they just, hey, did you see this, you dis? Or they just do it one at a time. In the past, appeals have taken anywhere from five to 14 days to get fully taken care of. I've noticed this year that window has closed about four to six days tops, where MLB would prefer it for fantasy purposes as well. But he's just saying this isn't an MLB did this. It's the MLBPA bargain for the ability to appeal to change scores. And then it goes to a group of former players.

So these are players making this call. So that's the process. So then if you, and then someone said that the three, oh, sorry, the three former major leaguers are Rajay Davis, Gregor Blanco, and Dan Otero. That's an outfielder, an outfielder, and a pitcher. No infielder. In my mind, you should have probably an infielder and an outfielder and a pitcher on this committee.

So you have, if you want players that can relate, but infielders where a lot of errors, most errors happen, I feel like, aren't represented on the appeals committee. That seems to be a miss. So then, if you think about this, okay, the first ruling was, which I liked, the first ruling was, hey, it's a single on the hit, but a throwing error on Mountain Castle. Or no, no, no. It was a catch error on Bauman. And then it went to the scores and they probably said, well, that's a pitcher,

tall pitcher covering the bag. That's extraordinary effort for him. It needs to be pretty easy. They're not fielders. Pitchers stink, basically. So let's switch it. Mountain Castle's got to hit him in the chest with that throw. And that was the official scores change.

Then it goes to appeals. And I'm guessing, Mount Castle or someone representing Mount Castle the team is like, hey, now, no. Like that's a crazy stop. He dove to stop it. Mount Castle should not get an error on that play. We appeal. We're going to appeal that.

Mount Castle's like, I don't want the fucking error. He should have caught it. I hit him in the glove. Yeah, it was low. Whatever. And then the committee of players say, okay, we'll look into this. And they go, yeah, it's just an error all around. You should have just made the play routinely, which is the craziest of the three rulings, in my opinion.

So what I did is I went and found in the past, in the years of video, so I'm limited, my search is limited here just to like 2016. Balls hit by lefty batters where the first baseman has to dive to their right to make the stop. Similar hit distances all around 10 feet. They hit the ground. So like similar projector on the ground ball, launch angle. Similar exit velos. And I tried to find similar ones to see how this has been scored in the past. I'll just play all of them for you now,

and then I compare to contrast and have some analysis on all of it. Off the glove of Teles and Marconno thinking too. He's headed there. He's going to be out. Tuka Pita Marcono. Tried to be. Alonzo can't knock it down. They will bring the tying run to the plate.

One ball, one strike on Albiz. After the Ozuna fly out. They're a rollover. And that's going to be off the leg of here. And all these is going to reach. Ground ball and grabbed there by LaMayu. But Rodon late covering. Has carpenter beats.

It just doesn't carry in this kind of weather. Ground ball. Wide at first. Cuthbert fields it. Throw it behind Duffy. But what a job. And Duffy missed the bag. Duffy did a great job to save Cuthbert of throwing here.

Okay. So of those five, the first three were ruled singles because the first basement doesn't even stop the ball. The next two were ruled throwing errors on the first basement. So right away, the original scoring to give the pitcher an error, it seems like there's not a lot of history of pitchers getting the error for not catching it unless they're standing there and it's right at their chest, I would gather. But this tells the exact story of why people say the error stat is overrated

because in the other, the two clips you have DJ LaMayhew diving and making the stop. And if he doesn't make this stop, it's going to be a single. But he makes the stop. Then the throw is a little behind Rodon. And now it's a throwing error on DJ. So he's better off just not getting to that ball the way errors are ruled, which everyone knows. Every follows baseball knows.

Same here. Cutbert makes that stop, a little less effort than DJ. So if he didn't get it, also the show. shift would have happened, but because the second basin is right behind them. But making the stop can hurt you if you don't complete the play. So I synced up all of them. And I have again, like I did last week, the red dot is when they put it in play. Right here is when all the balls got put in play. And you can see the white dots on the bottom of my screen here. That's when the fielder hit it. So this one is an outlier. That's a hot shot. He didn't get it. That's a single. Green is single.

Red is throwing error. The one in question is this. one, it's the second fastest ball to glove. So in theory, you know, second least reaction time of the bunch. The two with the longest reaction time are the ones that did get stopped by the first baseman. That adds up. And then they gave them errors. And then there's two here.

So then I compared, let's compare the singles. If you're looking at the screen here, the two on the wings, the left and right, were ruled a single. They're all hit right here, and then it's put in play, and the first baseman on the other two don't get to the ball, where Mount Castle's quick reactions makes a diving stop, gets to the ball. Now, that leads me to believe that if he had not stopped this ball,

it would have been a single for Nolan's annual, which means I think the original two rulings were correct, that it's a single on the hit, and then if you want to apply an error afterwards, you can. History gives those to the first baseman, usually, but not to the pitcher from my little deep dive here. And then, yeah, if you look at the other ones where it was ruled a throwing error, there they're all synced up hit, and the ball gets to Nolan, or not Nolan, I keep calling it, Mountcastle faster. He makes the play. These two guys make the play. D.Js is a really nice play,

and they throw it, and it just doesn't really get to the bag. Now, both of their throws, are worse than Mountcastle, who hit him in stride just low. So my conclusion, that's stupid. And I think the player committee, I don't know if they knew about the streak. Some people might say that you shouldn't take that or account. You got to grow the game, market it. It would have been awesome to promote an Angels player like this, a young player like this.

And I do think, without stretching it to like fabrication, you do have to take that in mind. And they need an infielder on this appeals committee. because that is a hit. That is a single across the board. And then the fact that you can go single and then an error on the throw, I'm fine with that.

Single error on the pitcher covering. Fine with that. But I guess Mount Castle, Mount Castle appealed. And it feels like he got spited. And they were like, well, we'll just give you an error on the whole fucking thing then.

And then that hurts Shannon on the process. I don't like it. You know, Sean Newell, I apologize. I just tried to go, Nolan, because I'm saying your name wrong this whole time. Apologize about it. But yeah, grave injustice done to the city of Anaheim of Los Angeles.

Next topic. What are we got? What did I queue up next? Oh, just quality at bats. I'm kind of really into quality at bats. I love because the Yankees stunk at it last year. And now they're getting better at it. So it's exciting me.

And making starting pitchers work is good. So quality at bats have, there's a lot of different formulas for this. a lot of college coaches come up with their own. The website that I'm using classifies this as a quality at bat. You get a hit. I think we can all agree. You work or walk.

I think we can all agree. You get hit by a pitch. Not your fault. You get credit. You didn't get out of the way. A sack hit, a sack fly. Move them runners over.

Let's do it. You know? A well hit out. So like a barrel. They probably use barrel rate launch angle. I somewhat disagree there. Only because I watched Gary Sanchez hit hard liners to left field over and over and over again,

rockets to left field over and over again, or hard line drives to the shortstop over and over. And they were like, oh, his bad bips says he's just getting unlucky. Oh, like he's hitting the ball hard. And it's like he's hitting the ball hard to the same exact place. And they just shift the guys right there. There's no unluckiness here. It's just routine. So sometimes I don't like that.

But I agree. If you smoke the ball, it's a good at bat. But I don't know. If you come up first pitch, smoke the ball right at the, you know, center of. fielder, deep fly, and he catches it easily. So I don't love that, but they include that here. And then seven plus pitches in a plate appearance. So you made the pitcher work, you fouled some off, you kept it alive.

I like that definition. So I have the quality at bat leaderboard for the season on a Google sheet. And I can maybe take this and share the link for you guys. Ty France is leading. Now he doesn't have a lot of plate appearance because he platoons, I guess, but 74% of his plate appearances have been quality at bats. The next highest is Freddie Freeman with 63

and Mookie Betts with 62. So 74 is pretty high. Again, I don't think he's qualified, but I just did all players because we're so early in the season. Adley Rushman comes in fourth place with 61%. and then you got Marcana, Detroit, and Logan O'Hoppy at 60% each. That's all the people in 60s. So six out of 10 times, seven out of 10 for tough friends.

They're giving you a quality at bat. I love it. Good stuff. If you want me to sort it by team, I can try and find the team with the most above 50. How would I do that? Let's see. Quality at bat percentage, filter by values. No filter by condition.

is greater than 49. That didn't work. Is it like 0.49? That didn't work. Nothing's working. I blew it. I blew it. How do you do that?

Filter by condition. Greater than 49%? It's not going to work. It didn't work. It didn't work. I give up. Someone who knows Google Sheets better than me. Let me know.

Anyway, Arizona, you got two players at 50%. I think average is 41 or something like that. Atlanta, I don't know. Who's got the least amount of quality bats? That'll be easier to do the way we have this set up. Christian Encarnacio Strand, 28.9 and Spencer Torkelson. They're both tied.

Oh, and Gavin Lux. Three-way tie for last place. at bat percentage. Nick Allen in Oakland, Castiano, Renfro, Brandon Lau, Victor Stott, also not doing great. Alonzo not doing great. Bummer, bummer, bummer. Trey Limbscomb, Rochester in Rochester. Okay, that's a weird one. So that's your quality at bat leaders. If I share that you can toggle it, but I mean, it's moot once we keep going. Then your pitches per plate appearance, which I also love, I found very interesting because bow nailer of the Cleveland Guardians has the best pitches per plate appearance percentage right now. He's averaging 5.1 pitches every played appearance. That's

really, really good. It's 143 pitches and 28 plate appearances. He is number one in all of baseball. And number last in all of baseball is his teammate and his brother, Josh Nailer, who averages 2.85. So the Nailer brothers are bookending the leaderboard, which I thought was cute. And I liked it, and I shared it with you. So there you go. I can definitely do this one, right? Let's see, what do we think? Average is. Get out of here.

Get out of here. Average is probably the top 100 is four. Four is pretty good, but I'm going to go, we're early in the season. It's going to be higher. I'm going to go 415. Let's filter this. Filter conditions is greater than 4.15.

I mean, this. doesn't work. It didn't work. I don't really understand why it's not working. Am I dumb? Am I dumb guy? We have changed this to like number? Got it.

How to change it to number. All right. So let's see which team has the most above 4.15 pitches. Arizona has three. Atlanta has three. Baltimore only has one. Boston only has one. The Chicago.

Is that all Cubs? Does that mean the White Sox have none? They have three. Cincinnati has two. Cleveland just has Bo Nailer. Colorado has Nolan Jones. The White Sox have Moncada. Detroit has three.

Good job. Houston only has one. Chas McCormick. Not good, Houston. Kansas City has two. L.A. has three. Muncie, Mookie, and Freddie. And then Anaheim is doing great right now.

O'Hoppy, Trout, Hicks, Rendon, and Shawnawell. Cushing it. Milwaukee only has one. Minnesota has three. The Mets have won. The Yankees have three. I thought that was higher. Oakland has two.

Pittsburgh has four. Way to go? St. Louis has four. San Francisco, one, Seattle. Tampa Bay. One, two, three, four. Five, are they our winners? Issaq, Palacios, Yandi,

Siri, and Randy. Is that our winner? Five might be our winner. Joey Gallo. Good work. So that's pitches per plate appearance, and that ends our second thing. A little interlude.

Tale from the dugout. Frank Lucchese, I'm reading from a book, Tales from the Dougout for those just listening as our interlude. Frank Lucchese managed a game via walkie-talkie. Lucchese, the classic Seapine Bluff Judges Manager from 1953 to 1954, was serving a suspension and was banned from the ballpark. So he sat in a van behind the outfield wall, peered into the field, and transmitted his orders from a walkie-talkie to someone in Pine Bluffs dugout.

Where to go, Frank Lucchette. That's from Tim Haggerty's book, Tales from the Dugout. All right, the last thing we're going to do is I want to find the highest and the lowest pitch that has been hit into play this short season. So we're going to go baseball savant. We're going to go by batter. The season, 2024, the played appearance result, a base. hit, pitch result in play. Those probably nullify each other.

And then we're going to change the included stats so that we can see plate Z, the Z access, and search. This should give us every hit so far this season. But I want to see, plate. So is this going to be the lowest or the highest? Christian Vasquez has one that was 1.42.

Or it's one of these two. Which one? No, it can't be that one. That one was two bases. 50 for the first time a couple years ago. Line to center field that'll land a base hit. Didn't seem that low. I guess that's pretty low.

He's down there. I thought it was going to be like on the ground. like ankle height. That's like the top of his shin guard height. So that's the lowest. Now we got to find the highest. So that was 1.4 feet off the ground. I don't think I'm doing that right because I think it's from the X axis. Volgelbach has the highest. I'm going to guess it's this one. Against Luke Weaver. That was pretty high. So there's the lowest right here and there's the highest. The highest is Luke Weaver pitching, Daniel Volgobach hitting. He hit it for a...

Was that a home run? Was that the homer he hit? Or is it a double? And the lowest was Christian Vasquez as the batter. Tim Heron, the pitcher. Two-two count as a curve ball. And it was a single. Right back over the pitcher's head in front of the center fielder,

where I believe the Vogelback won. He got on top of it. Oh, this is going back. The one where Soto kind of lost it, but it hit the wall and right. There you go. That's the highest pitch and the lowest pitch hit thus far this season. If people want to keep tabs on that, we can keep tabs on it. See if they get beat.

That was Jimmy's three things. Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoy these episodes and these little deep dives, suggest topics for me. I prep every Monday night, Tuesday morning on the train in. So that's when I'm going to be putting it all together. Hit me then. If you got a good one, you think you want me to deep dive into and subscribe to the channel. and leave a comment and share with your friends.

Thank you very much. And see you. Goodbye. Goodbye.