Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1014: The Astros-Royals Roster Reversal

Episode Date: February 2, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about how and why the Astros and Royals seem to have exchanged strategies and revisit champagne in the clubhouse and trampolines, then answer listener emails about what to hack if you were hacking, Statcast and baserunning, catcher framing, and Mike Trout. Audio intro: Death Cab for Cutie, "Champagne from a […]

Drinking champagne from a paper cup is never quite the same And every sip's moving through my eyes and up into my brain It had passed two, about time to leave Cause the DJ's playing rhythm and groove Said sorry, stay, start a step to the slammin' grooves As I'm waiting around for you Hello and welcome to episode 1014 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs Presented by our Patreon supporters

I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Jeff Sullivan of Fanagraphs. Hello. Hi, hello. So we're doing an email show. A couple things to get to before we do. One, I was curious, you wrote in the last couple days about the Astros and the Royals and how they no longer look like the Astros and the Royals, or at least the Astros and the Royals we have become accustomed to over the past few years. And the Royals, of course, were an extreme contact hitting team, and now

they're not. And the Astros were an extreme lack of contact hitting team, and now they're not. And it even looks like they might have the biggest contact improvement ever for a team in a single offseason. So I was wondering whether you ascribe intention to these things. Do you think that these are the result of people in the front office getting together and saying, we had that kind of team and now we want this kind of team because we, I don't know, discovered that this kind of team is better than that kind of team? Or do you think that these things just float around for no particular reason? And we write articles about how Team X is trying to do this thing or thinks this thing is an inefficiency or whatever. And

it's really just a result of largely random events that come together and produce extreme teams for one reason or another? Well, this is easy because the answer is both. So I think front offices definitely have their preferences. And we can say, I think for sure, we know what the Royals' preferences are. They love a team that's built like the best teams they have had. But you look at their circumstances, and no matter what the style of baseball is that you want to play, you can only keep that up with your best players for so long. And the Royals wound up in a situation where they were kind of up against it everyone was running out of contract time and so they needed to make some moves and so they just

wound up having to trade away gerard dyson and they wound up having to trade away wade davis and so they had wound up losing kindreds morales because they couldn't afford him and they found a cheaper version of kindreds morales who's also a whiter version of kendris morales who also happens to be a whiter version of chris carter in brandon moss who uh he hits fine he's a good hitter he's a good hitter like carter and he's a good hitter like morales but he happens to strike out a little more and in a way davis trade i'm sure the royals would have loved to pick up kind of a speedy uh defense and contact hitter but instead they got the complete opposite of that and jorge soler because that happened to be what the Cubs had available so I think from the Royals perspective it's been determined by circumstances I don't think that the Royals would want to move away from a team with

a lot of speed a lot of contact and a great bullpen but they are the Royals they have very limited resources they were running out of contract commitments and so they have had to adapt in the best way that they can, or maybe not the best way that they can. That kind of depends on your perspective. But I don't think the Royals want to have the kind of team that they have right now, where obviously they love having Lorenzo Cain, and they hope Alex Gordon bounces back, and Kelvin Herrera is quite good, and all that stuff. But I don't think this is what Dayton Moore wanted. quite good and all that stuff but i don't think this is what dayton moore wanted this is the roster right now i think is a compromise between what the royals want to be like and the best that they could do given the circumstances as for the astros they probably it's not a coincidence that the astros went out and got a bunch of i think veteran bats guys like brian mccann and carlos

beltran and other people i'm forgetting josh reddick, there you go. He's won. And they got these sort of, I hate saying this, professional hitters. This is so stupid. Where I think you watch Colby Rasmus for even like a month and you probably get tired of sort of wasted at-bats. And Jason Castro, I think also just frustrating to have in the lineup, especially when you've seen so much promise from him before at the plate. Astros, of course, not knowledgeable about his defensive skills, but in Brian McCann, they could find a more consistent hitter who doesn't give too much back behind the plate. So, again, I don't think the idea for the Astros was to wanted a better lineup and they succeeded because according to the projections we have right now the astros have pretty easily the best offense or at least

the best hitting offense in the american league better than the red sox better than everyone else and whether or not you believe the steamer projections they have an advantage right now of like 35 runs over second place which is enormous so i think the astros went out and they're like well we we want a better lineup because our pitching rotation has a lot of questions and the better lineup they put together has a little more age. With age, you get discipline. It's sort of self-selective as players stick around in the majors as they get older.

And a lot of the better hitters, not all the best hitters, tend to make more contact and have better eyes and bat the ball skills anyway. So I think it's not a total coincidence that the Astros are where they are. I think it's fascinating that they currently project to have like the biggest improvement in strikeout rate in recent history. Of course, we'll see if that plays out, but you've got guys like Alex Bregman who didn't strike out in the minors and we didn't really know what to make of Gurriel, but he made a lot of contact in his first cup of coffee. And it's just interesting to observe that. I don't know if you could have imagined two teams with more different outlooks than the Royals and Astros and whether by coincidence or

not, they've their lineups have kind of swapped places over the last few years, which is fun. And, uh, and the Astros also have one of, if not the deepest bullpen in the major leagues, which is also fun. So the Astros, I think maybe resemble the Royals more than the Royals do at this point. Yeah, it seems like if you're going to have the greatest contact improvement from one year to the next ever, it seems like that would have to be an intentional thing.

Like you must have sat down at some point and thought we want to be a better contact hitting team to outdo every other team in history in that respect. But maybe it's not. Maybe it just happens and you have some guys and then some of those guys leave. You know, you have Chris Carter and then you don't have Chris Carter

and you don't want Chris Carter anymore because Chris Carter's not that great. And then you go get the best available guys in that off season and they happen not to be contact hitters. And these things just happen, I guess. I think it's always fun when a team is like intentionally trying to stand out in some way. And as I recall, you got a couple posts out of the Astros striking out a lot. And the idea was that it didn't matter that much, that maybe there was some stigma still associated with striking out a lot because it's, I don't know, not fun to watch. Or it can be embarrassing at times when you just miss the ball and that's what you're trying to do is hit the ball.

And then there was talk of like, well, maybe it's an inefficient lineup. hit the ball. And then there was talk of like, well, maybe it's an inefficient lineup. Like even if, even if on the whole having a strikeout hitter, isn't so bad. If you have a whole lineup full of extreme strikeout hitters, then maybe they have trouble driving each other in and you have a harder time kind of scoring efficiently. I heard that theory. Anyway, it's fun when a team stands out in a certain way, especially if you think that that team is trying to stand out in that way and is somehow getting an advantage on every other team by standing out in that way. don't fit the mold of the type of player they like best if that means that they will be better at baseball or that they don't have to spend as much money on those players that sort of thing because it's like everyone credited the royal success to the contact hitting in the wake of their winning the world series and everything it was like a big theory oh if you're a contact

hitting team in a low contact era it's they're zigging where everyone's zagging and it's this huge advantage and i tried to look into that i don't remember maybe you tried to look into that we all we all tried to look everyone did right and so i found that like maybe there was a slight advantage to that like there was some evidence i found that extreme contact hitters do better against high velocity pitchers and there are more high velocity pitchers in the postseason in the World Series so that sort of follows but even so it was like I don't know you know a few points of whatever true average or WRC plus it wasn't like it would make you good if you were bad or vice versa so I think probably

we tend to fixate on these things more than they actually matter on the field. And so when you see a team go from one extreme style to the next without like a change in regime or anything, it maybe underscores that these things aren't all that important probably and that how you get the value is less important than whether you get the value. Yeah, I was thinking last night when I was driving home from a completely unrelated event, I was thinking about the Astros and their contact. And then I was reflecting on how much time that we put into trying to research the potential advantages or disadvantages of having a contact-oriented lineup. Because we spent so much time trying to figure out what are the Royals doing? How are they doing it? And the thought that occurred to me on the drive home was, what a waste of our time like there's no there's no you wouldn't think that it would make that much of a difference it's an odd thing to focus on at the end of the day a good plate appearance is a good plate appearance and we have a million measurements of that that aren't strikeout rate or contact but i guess if there's any small potential advantage to be gleaned then of course every team will go after that we

just saw the cardinals get penalized for one guy hacking into the astros trying to get a very small potential advantage for so teams are very much seeking out tiny little gains and you know if this is one then so be it i can't speak for what the astros are are doing or thinking i think that we do have a what five-year sample of lunau not caring about strikeouts have a what five-year sample of lunao not caring about strikeouts and now a one-year sample of him maybe caring about strikeouts and it's possible that it was sort of like a could be a reaction or an overreaction or to not making the playoffs last year maybe you also just get tired of strikeouts and you want to see different sorts of outs you

know at some point just any sort of change is better. And of course the lineup has improved and it's possible that strikeouts weren't the thing that he was seeking out on the market but they were just a factor that weighed a little more heavily. Maybe the contact is what separated Josh Reddick from Michael Saunders on the free agent market. Saunders would have been cheaper but he

strikes out more. So maybe they just liked Reddick more for that reason. And for the Astros to go out and spend actual money on nori aoki is a little weird it didn't it didn't seem like a thing that they needed but they have him and he's one of the best contact hitters in baseball he's extremely obnoxious to watch i think from both sides of for both teams he's very annoying to watch but as a fun fact i just i was looking this up, because you think one of the advantages of making a bunch of contact is that you put the pressure on the defense,

and then they have to make a play. So it's not just the pitcher and catcher who have to make a play. All the people behind them have to make a play. So last year, the average team reached on an error by the opposition 55 times. That's the average team. The Kansas City Royals, incidentally, 55 times reaching on error. The the uh the kansas city royals incidentally 55 times reaching on error the angels were a really good contact hitting lineup they reached 58 times on error of course they're disadvantaged they couldn't run at all they were one of the slowest

teams i've ever seen anyway tied for first place at 70 times reaching on air the houston astros from last year a uh a extreme not contact hitting team. Of course, this stat is pretty much a complete fluke. It doesn't mean very much. I'm sure it vacillates from year to year. But last year, the league leader, maybe a better way to put this, is the league second place finisher

in times reaching on error. It's a tie between Gene Segura and Steven Piscotty. They reached on error 11 times each, which is a lot, I think. That's like one every, I don't know, 12, 15 games. And in first place, so second place, 11. In first place, Carlos Correa, Houston Astros, 16 times reaching on air. So he had a lead of five. What that means? Almost certainly nothing. But there you go. Houston Astros, didn't hit for a lot of contact, still reached on airs.

All right. Quick follow follow-up something we talked about on the last episode this is from a listener named keenan he says i recently listened to your episode and a query arose whether teams in the low minors celebrate champagne flows i currently work for one mlb organization doing minor league video and i previously worked for the toronto blue jays in 2015 as their den eden complex video man that season their gcl team won the worked for the Toronto Blue Jays in 2015 as their Dunedin Complex video man. That season, their GCL team won the division for the first time since joining the league. And I can tell you with certainty, despite well over half the players being under 21, there was a celebration. However, the Complex clubby was sure to provide non-alcoholic Corbell for the bubbly party while saving the good stuff for the coaches and staff just thought i'd inform you from personal experience all right well thank you very much that is good to know yeah as i was saying that on that episode i was thinking that probably champagne or quasi champagne parties happen at far lower levels than than you'd think just because it's like a good way

to mimic being at a higher level. Like if you have a champagne party, that makes players feel big league, I guess, because that's what players do in the big league. So I don't know. You were saying that that probably doesn't happen in college, but I would bet that it has happened in college, just someone trying to impress the players or show the players a good time or whatever. Yeah, I guess it's the same way as if you have a player go out and he celebrates something that he does like a big leaguer like

you do a i don't know a twirl like barry bonds or you celebrate your save like francisco freaking rodriguez people want to mimic the baseball players that they've seen so yeah i guess it does make sense that players would want any to seize any opportunity to just spray stuff on their teammates in celebration that that sounds revolting, doesn't it? Say it out loud. But, you know, it doesn't always have to be champagne. You could have like Diet Coke and Mentos in the locker room or something. But yeah, I'm sure I haven't been in a baseball clubhouse since high school,

and my baseball clubhouse was small and terrible. So we didn't really celebrate anything. But as I think about it now, I bet that as you get into what you would say maybe a more serious competitive environment where the players aren't just doing it because they want something to do after school then yeah you probably do get a little more big league mimicry so yeah yeah i guess i rescind what i did before yeah you can do that and last follow- up on Friday, we talked about the possibility of a horrific trampoline related baseball injury. And somehow, neither of us thought to mention the horrific on a trampoline with his son and had a very gross injury. He had an ankle dislocation. It was in some places reported as an open ankle dislocation, which would mean that the

bone broke through the skin. And he lost a life-threatening amount of blood, according to some sources. I'm not sure if those initial reports were over-sensationalized or not. But at the time, at least people were talking about his career possibly being over, which I guess people are still talking about for non-trampoline-related reasons. But it was a scary injury, and it fully backs up everything you were saying about the destructive potential of trampolines so it already has people yeah okay emails eric hartman says i am listening to episode

1013 and jeff wondered what the real benefit of hacking a team is this made me wonder if you could get one thing from a team's database what would it be i think i'd like their internal prospect rankings of their own team do you have something if this was like uh what was that show where you can dash into a grocery store and you just or like a toy store and you just load up your cart with everything that that you can get in in allotted time and you try to go for the most valuable items first is that like supermarket sweeps or something maybe that was can get in an allotted time and you try to go for the most valuable items first. Is that like supermarket sweeps or something? Maybe that was a show in England.

Maybe that was here. I've seen something like that at my aunt's house in the UK, but there's probably an American version. So let's supermarket. Yeah, supermarket sweep. I think that was it. I think there may have been a toy store version of that also. So if that is how this is working,

if you get into a team's internal database and you have a certain amount of time and you want to go for the most valuable thing first, where do you go? I think he probably hit on the one that would come to my mind first as well, which was just trying to figure out how highly the team values its own prospects. Because you figure that there is so much information imbalance between organizations, between the players that they have and the players that everybody else has. We see this in the free agent market where players who re-sign with teams tend to do better than players who change teams in free agency

because their own teams seem to know something more about them. So unfortunately, I think Eric might have already touched on the best possible answer, but I'm going to think about this a little more because I think that you had suggested that you and Sam had talked about this maybe on a previous podcast. I think we did when this news initially came out

about the hacking. I think he and I talked about what we would do or what the most valuable hack you could pull off was. But that was a while ago. And conveniently, I don't remember what either of us said. So all of this is new to me. That undermines what I was hoping for because I think this is a fun conversation to have but I was curious to see if you remembered what you had suggested because I think there's

it's almost an overwhelming question because there's so much you could conceivably go for that yeah I was let's see what comes back to your mind. Hey Ben you're on the spot. Well I was just thinking that there's a lot of talk these days about how you know every team is smart and every team has cool proprietary stats and they all evaluate baseball players in roughly the same way and so the big difference between teams now is how they implement that information how they convey it to players and coaches and the manager and that whole front office field staff relationship. And if there's any truth to that, then I think you could make a case that the best thing

to do would be to look at the reports that the team assembles for the coaches. And when I was an intern several years ago, that was a big part of the intern's jobs was there were all of these reports on the Yankees internal system and you would go to them and you'd print them off one by one and you'd assemble them in a certain way and they would all go into Joe Girardi's famous binder, which helps the environment because those were very big books and also helps interns because those would take like a full day to prepare. And if you're not great at like organizational stuff and paperwork, they were just a nightmare because it was very easy to get things out of order and miss a section or whatever. Anyway, those sections, those reports that you printed out were kind of the team's best guess or best hope for how the coaches would utilize this information. So, you know, you'd have your heat maps and you'd have your outfield arm report, then you'd have your advanced report on each of the hitters and, you know know like situational stuff about the bullpen and matchups and projections for matchups and all that sort of thing so i don't know how much the coaches actually looked at those things and you know we would all kind of question at the time whether we

were doing this work for any reason whether anyone would actually look at or consult this stuff in a game. And that seems like an area where maybe you could get some insight into how teams are trying to get that information to translate and how to convey that information to coaches. And if you buy the argument that that's the big difference between teams now is not just being smart or having stat people, but being able to present the insights of those stat people in digestible ways. Then if you just kind of snuck into the reports section of the team's database and you, I don't know, stole all that stuff or printed it out or just looked at it or whatever, maybe that would give you some tips on how to best implement that stuff on your own side. Kind of like essentially trying to get a better understanding of the soft side of the game and trying to...

So going beyond the numbers. And I just remembered the thing when I first saw this email last night, I remember something that occurred to me that just came back to my mind. Thankfully, I didn't lobby for this question to be in the podcast and then forget what I was going to say in response to it. I was thinking, I've never looked at what a team's database actually looks like, so I don't know what they keep on there. My

assumption is everything. It's just kind of the organizational brain. And I think that what I would want to seek out, if not the minor league list, is some sort of, kind of like every player's permanent record, if you will, the stuff that goes beyond just the stats they've put up, because of course, every team can have access to those. But I would want to know sort of how the organization has evaluated the makeup and the receptiveness, I guess, to information of the players in the organization, minor and major league alike. It's not just thinking about which pitchers do or do not like pitching in front of shifts,

but I would also want to know which players or which minor leaguers seem to have work ethic concerns or the opposite of work ethic concerns in a way that I know we sort of laugh about this or at least don't fully understand it when it comes to scouting and how scouts

try to understand a high schooler's makeup, which I mean mean it's going to change you guys you're 17 years old yeah but you know when someone gets into a professional organization there they will have matured a little more they will be mostly whatever form of adult it is that plays major league baseball and you i think teams have a far superior understanding than other teams about how hard their own players are willing to work and i think i would love to know that because in so many cases that could make the difference between a cory kluber and a minor league equivalent of cory kluber that we've never heard of because he didn't do what cory kluber did yeah yeah i don't know how extensive this is or how much time you have to steal stuff. Like if you, if you can just download every scouting report or something, then that would be, that'd be very helpful, I'm sure. But I don't know on a certain page there was somewhere

where you could see just like everything you could access all the different reports and so if you had gone to that in 2009 for instance you would have seen like a catcher framing report and that maybe in 2009 would have been something that most teams didn't have and I don't know how common it is to have something these days that other teams don't have and i don't know how common it is to have something these days that other teams don't have like that i wouldn't think those advantages last very long now but you never know so if you go to a page like that where you can just see all the reports listed and even if you don't click on them if you just see what they are and there's something there that you wouldn't have expected or you don't have or you don't even know what it means, but maybe it gives you a clue, then that would be something. If there is any secret that this team

knows about players that you don't know or aren't currently applying, then the fact that there is a report for that listed on their internal database suggests that they value it and they've done the research and it matters. So that would be a good way to get a snapshot, I guess, of whether there is anything like that. Do you think, two-part question, do you think, one, the Marlins have a database? And two, do you think the Marlins database includes like personal information for Jeff Loria? As for the first question, I was just reading an article about the Marlins quantitative

analysis department, which is still fledgling. Dave Cameron was quoted in that article. Oh, yeah. Tim Healy, right? Yeah, I think so. Right. It was about Jason Perret, who came over from the Blue Jays and before that the Indians. And he's now running the Marlins department, which is growing slowly and or quickly, I guess, but still kind of lagging behind, at least

in terms of total employees. Anyway, they showed a picture of Jason Paray sitting at a computer, and I think it was just like a generic Marlins screensaver behind him. So they didn't show a picture of the database. I don't know how quickly a team can get this sort of thing off the ground. I think pretty quickly, especially if you have worked for a team before that had one of these systems and you have a general idea of the layout and what you're looking for, I bet you could get one up and running

over the course of an offseason. So I would guess that the Marlins do have some sort of system, and I'm sure it's not as fleshed out as other teams are. But yeah, I would guess they have something and I would guess that Jeffrey Loria's contact info is not inside I was hoping for like maybe maybe contact info slash also social security number because I think that if there's anyone that I would be willing to defraud in the major league baseball circles it would be Jeffrey Loria and if I'm able to hack into their database I probably have enough skills to mask my

behavior but it's every picture that's ever been taken of like a baseball front office analyst, of course, has to have him in front of at least one computer screen. And I've been on the other side of these. They're essentially stock photos is what these are. And I've been on the other side of these because I used to work at a biotech in San Diego. There's a flavor science company that's made the news because people think it uses fetuses, but it doesn't. But anyway, at one point, I worked at this biotech when I was like 23 years old. I was a lab tech, so I didn't know anything and I wasn't important. They were just paying me money and I basically blogged about baseball and watched Hulu from

my desk. But at one point, they had people come through and they wanted pictures for the company website and all the actual scientists were busy doing science. And I was just there, you know, writing about Miguel Olivo on the Mariners. They're like, hey, let's go. Let's take your department. Let's go take pictures for our website around the building. And so they're not like they don't want to take pictures of you doing what you actually do, because what I actually do is like, oh, here's some Excel spreadsheets.

And now I'm putting some powder into this HPLC they're like okay we want you to essentially stand around various instruments and look like you're doing science to them so we put on it was me and a co-worker we put on our lab coats which we never did and we stood around instruments and looked at them and tried to do our best interested poses. And the picture that wound up on the website that featured myself and my co-worker, Robert Martinick, we were photographed wearing our lab coats and goggles, which we never did, in the vicinity of a refrigerator. And I was apparently touching the refrigerator, but like the front of it. There wasn't a button. I was just touching the front of the refrigerator. And Robert was looking at me being like, yeah,

sciencey. And that is what they decided to put on the website. Unfortunately, it's no longer up there. I guess they've, they've done like a redevelopment of the site in the last seven years. But stock photos are weird, man. And you don't get paid a lot for them. I'm surprised you got paid at all for them. You were already being paid to work there, but this was on top of that. Oh, I consider that whatever money I got paid that year, it must have been for the stock photos because I sure as hell wasn't doing anything else. All right. Question from Bruce, who says, Guys, my sense is that 2016 Blue Jays led MLB in intentional toot blends, namely getting thrown out by 20 to 80 feet after a base

hit by forcing a cutoff throw from the outfield to ensure that a lead runner scores. The outee would get high fives all around in the dugout. The TV announcers would unqualifyingly praise the wisdom of said outee with the fan base, meanwhile, shaking its collective noggins as 99% of the time, the lead runner was obviously going to be safe anyway, and we just gave away another opportunity. Now that we have stat cast info, is it possible to measure the efficiency of this strategy? Seems to me that unless it's late innings in a close game, the intentional toot plan is not to be recommended, and perhaps not even then. and perhaps not even then. Better understanding of this strategy is important,

not only because it subjectively appears stupid, but it also appears to be contagious, at least among the Blue Jays species. Appreciate your insights. So yeah, I saw this one, and this is one of those baseball questions that it feels daunting to try to work your head around because there's a lot to try to consider. But what comes to my mind is, yeah, it's kind of dumb.

I get trying to draw throws we've all seen players who get hung up and then it allows like a runner to advance or to score in front of the play and and that's always great but in the same way that players get like basically a standing freaking ovation when they go back to the dugout after they lay down a sacrifice bunt it feels like something like this is one of those celebrated wastes where you're making like a show of like falling on your sword in a sense where yeah i think he's right first of all the lead runner can advance almost all of the time anyway we don't have like a specific play to go over i guess that we're both watching at the same time but i think it's also it seems like it should be

very possible to draw a throw and also get back to your own base, right? Because you can just kind of take off and go 20 feet and then the throw's in the air for a number of seconds. And you also see the guy preparing the throw and aiming his body to where the throw is going to go. So you have a few seconds to go and then turn around and then get back to your base. Which means that if you go and you get hung up, then it's not really worth much of anything. And if you get hung up and then a guy is able to score, okay, so you've gotten a run and you've thrown away an out. But how often is that run worth the out, especially if the out itself is unnecessary? So I'm inclined to say without any specific event that we're both looking at,

maybe 2% of the time it makes sense, but it is a waste. And the fact that something good happens while you waste your own existence on the base paths, I think that should not negate the negative value of you making an out in the first place. You only get so many of them and it seems stupid. And just generally, whenever someone asks, you know, now that we have StatCast, is it possible to measure X? Usually, yes, I would say the answer is yes. At least in theory, StatCast does or will at some point measure everything that baseball players do on the field, every movement they make, everywhere the ball is, etc. So knowing all that, in theory, you usually have the building blocks to come up with some better measure of whatever thing you're looking into. So I would think that, you know, it'll take some time for sample size and learning how to interpret these things and all that. base running metrics that we've ever had just because it will be able to track exactly where

the runner was instead of just saying that whatever he had a an open base ahead of him or that he was on first and he had an opportunity to go to third that sort of thing it will measure down to the foot exactly where he was and what his odds of making that advancement was and how fast he is and all these factors that play into that and the outfielder's arm and how fast he is and all of these factors that play into that and the outfielder's arm and how strong it is and where the outfielder was positioned. So in theory, at least you could get an extremely granular base running metric that would take all of these factors into account. And at some point down the road, I'm sure that that will exist. So at that point, you would be able to come up with a

numerical answer for these things that is probably better than stolen base runs or base running runs or whatever you're currently using. Man, imagine if we had stat cast for Alex Gordon's triple. Yeah, right. That'd be fun. That was like, I think that was literally the last baseball game before we had some sort of stat cast. Maybe they were rolling it out to some extent. I actually don't remember what it was like in fall of 2014. We'd only seen blips, right, of like Mets games or something. But yeah, that would have, I don't think it would have changed the end result.

I don't think Gordon should have gone. But yeah, that would have changed the way that we all did our analysis. And I'm glad that it didn't exist because that means the articles would have taken a lot longer to put together. Yeah, and also probably it would have been a less interesting question because we would have had an almost definite answer. And that was like the most popular post on Fangraphs that year, I think I remember reading,

was your Alex Gordon, would he have scored, should he have tried to score post? And yeah, if the answer was just, well, he had a X percent chance to score and we know that for sure because the fielder was this far away and his arm is that strong

and Alex Gordon runs this fast and takes this long to get from here to there, that maybe would have been less interesting. I don't know, more satisfying to some people perhaps, but less satisfying to others. I should go back and write an article about, I assume you read Sam's article yesterday about Victor Martinez and his base running. I'd like to write an article about Victor Martinez trying to score on a 140-foot sacrifice fly. Yeah, sure.

One of the dumber decisions I think I've seen on a baseball field. Yeah. All right. Do you have a stat of some sort? Oh, yeah. Okay. All right. Do you have a stat of some sort? Oh, yeah. Okay. So for this fan graph stat segment, I went to baseball prospectus,

which I think is maybe cheating, but it's also using some catcher framing numbers that I've been told, or at least that I've read, will have on fan graphs before too long anyway. So the other day, I think it was last week, I wrote about the Colorado Rockies, their pitch framing. I think their pitch framing this year stands to be good. the Colorado Rockies. Their pitch framing, I think their pitch framing this year stands to be good, and it stands to be, I think, the best pitch framing in the Rockies' team history. Their history goes back to 1993. There is pitch-by-pitch information of some sort going back to 1988 that is available on RetroSheet and Baseball Reference, etc. So the very smart people who have put together the framing numbers at baseball prospectus have of course used the pitch effects information going back to 2008 but for the 20 years before that

they have used the uh the pitch by pitch information to come up with pretty good estimates that i think have shown good correlations between whatever it's good it's all good it's the best that we have so the rockies project to have the best framing that they've had in team history. And the Rockies have had 24 major league seasons. And in two of those seasons have the Rockies had above average pitch framing, according to the numbers at Baseball Prospectus. Over the 24 years, the Rockies pitch framing has been worth negative 314 runs, which is the second worst in Major League Baseball over that span. So the Rockies, you could say two out of 24 in terms of positive pitch framing seasons. They're hoping now for three out of 25. So I was I was curious about the Rockies and then about other teams.

Who's been the best? Who's been the worst over the whole history of pitch framing going back to 1988 maybe it'll surprise you maybe it won't but in first place the uh the best team has been the Atlanta Braves they have a uh a pretty good history of pitch framing catchers you've got Brian McCann you've got Javier Lopez and you've got everyone in the 90s who allowed helped to allow Greg Maddox and Tom Gavin and all them to be so amazing so the Braves have like a 130 run lead on second place in terms of framing, but it's less interesting at the top and more interesting at the bottom. The Braves, they're 24 out of 29 in terms of positive pitch framing seasons. That's good.

That's a league leading 83% above average rate. The Rockies are second worst at 8%, 2 out of 24. For reference, the Detroit Tigers are third worst at 6 out of 29. That's 21%. So at the very bottom of this list, it goes the Pirates, 28%. Ryan Domet, shout out. You got the Tigers, 21%. Rockies at 8%. Do you have a guess which team has the lowest rate of above average pitch framing seasons since at least 1988? Did you say the Twins already or you didn't say the Twins? I did not say the Twins, but actually the Twins are above average. Wow.

They are 16 out of 29 pitch framing seasons. I don't really remember what the 90s were like. It's a blur to me. It doesn't really matter, but I guess guess the twins had some decent catches back then and also joe mara was a good pitch framing catcher for the time that he spent uh behind the plate it looks like the twins had a good long streak between 2002 and 2011 that's a whole decade the twins were above average every single season so kudos to them it's i guess yeah that's a recency bias because i figure they've been terrible all along yeah but the answer it's not a team that's existed since 1988.

It's a team that's existed since 1993. Our answer is the Florida and then Miami Marlins, who, like the Rockies, have played 24 seasons. And they have had above average pitch framing in precisely one of them, giving them a 4% success rate. They've had an average of negative 14 framing runs a year they've had a total value of negative 339.3 runs pitch framing wise that is like missing about 35 or 36 wins over the course of this many decades of baseball their one successful pitch framing season came in 2003 they were four runs above average so kudos to the marlins going over their entire catcher history uh the best framer i remember charles johnson is a framing

disaster right yes he is and he was you know he was a gold glover for let's see four years in a row during the years when he was with the marlins so yeah that reputation suffers somewhat now yeah i think that's back when the gold glove reputation was yeah, that reputation suffers somewhat now. Yeah. I think that's back when the gold glove reputation was cemented that it, you had to hit well enough to win one. Right. So Jeff Mathis has had the best, the two best framing seasons in a Marlins history. I don't have whole career numbers. I just have individual seasons and Jeff Mathis, when he was 33, he was seven and a half runs above average as a Marlin. When he was 33, he was 7.5 runs above average as a Marlin. When he was 30, he was 7.2 runs above average as a Marlin. Those are the two best framing seasons by a catcher in Marlins history.

They have had three individual catcher seasons worth at least five runs better than average. Three seasons. Jeff Mathis, Jeff Mathis, and Pudge Rodriguez, in case anyone forgot that he was a Marlin. He was. He was a good catcher, which is probably why they got rid of him so quickly. So they've had three above average seasons that were at least five runs better than average. I put that horribly, but you know what I mean. So three. Now consider what's the opposite of five runs above average. Well, that would be five runs worse than average. So instead of having three seasons,

at least five runs better than average, they've had 27 that were at least five runs better than average they've had 27 that were at least five runs worse than average and i mentioned that the best framing season was seven and a half runs better than average well they've had 19 framing seasons that were at least seven and a half runs worse than average topping out at jared saltalabakia who was somehow very recently 34 runs worse than average which is straight up ryan domit territory second worst you've got charles johnson who was better by a full 10 runs but still terrible you've got miguel olivo down there you've got charles johnson you've got john buck jt real mudo you've got charles johnson you've got matt trainer rob brantley you've got charles johnson you've got some mike redmond and you've got some charles john, Rob Brantley. You've got Charles Johnson. You've got some Mike Redmond. And you've got some Charles Johnson.

So Charles Johnson, very well represented in the worst of Marlins pitch framing history. He's gone. He hit well. I think he wound up at the Orioles at some point. It just kind of fits. The Orioles might actually still want Charles Johnson today because their own catching is bad. Charles Johnson, I guess, maybe sort of a like Wellington Castillo 1.0. Maybe. Yeah, if that works. Sure. Remember him very well, but no one's gonna fact check me

on this one. So this year, the Marlins, I believe, still project to be a bad pitch framing team. They have Real Muto, who's an interesting catcher, but a little more offense than defense. Not a not a disaster. the marlins are coming off their best pitch framing season since 2005 so at least that's something they're not going to be a disaster i think it's going to be real mudo and aj ellis this year behind the plate and so they'll be you know a little below average but assuming that they are a little below average then that will make them one out of 25, and the Rockies should put some further distance between themselves

and the Marlins. So as a final note, just to put this all together, since 1993, when the Marlins came into existence, their catchers also have the sixth worst combined OPS in the major leagues. The Rays, or the Devil Rays, are

worst. I think we can, we probably can't blame Jose Molina for that entirely, but I'm going to. So the Rays way down there, but of course they've had better defensive catchers than the Marlins have. The Marlins sixth worst hitters as catchers and also easily the worst pitch receivers, which means I think it's about time for the Marlins to find themselves a real catcher. All right. This next question you have already sort of answered via email, so this will be easy, I suppose. This is from Lendl, or possibly Lendell, who says,

Say Mike Trout was a free agent this offseason. How much would a team have to give Trout to make him a Ryan Howard or Albert Pujols level of overpaid contract? A friend and I were talking about it And we stopped at 10 years and 600 million as our high number We discussed this, assuming Trout follows a normal aging curve And keeps up his current production And it sounds like from your very quick and dirty research That they probably underestimated So yeah, we have sort of in the background on Fangraphs,

a contract estimation tool. That is apparently what it's called. I had no idea that thing existed. When you said that, there's like little reports tucked away into Fangraphs and Baseball Perspectives that a lot of people don't know exist. Yeah, I don't think this has ever been made public, the tool itself.

I think we've referred to it several times in posts. And all the contract estimation tool does is you can plug in a player's name or make up your own player. And it takes his projection and it takes his career performance. And then for any number of years, it spits out what it thinks a fair contract would be based on recent valuations of dollars per war on the free agent market and also based on a set rate of inflation because of course a win goes for more and more every single year. So usual estimates are that a win costs about eight million dollars on the market and there's roughly like a five percent rate of inflation. You can change these numbers if you want to, but those are the estimates. So I'm just going to go ahead and plug in Mike Trout into this tool. I will select him. He is projected based on Seamer for 8.4 wins above replacement this coming year, which would be,

I believe, the worst season of his career, which is insane, but whatever. Let's go with it. He's 25 years old. His tool also has a built-in aging curve, whether or not it's sufficiently aggressive. I don't know, but we're going to go with it. And I'm going to set the contract length here to 10 years. So this is a hypothetical fair 10-year Mike Trout contract, effective immediately, starting in 2017, using the same dollars per war estimate and the same rate of inflation. And with no opt-out clauses or anything, just a straight-up 10-year contract, the fair value spit out is $731.1 million over 10 years. So that is what this tool estimates would be fair. What this fellow would like us to say is how much would you have to pay him to make him a complete albatross? Now, I think it would be impossible

to make Mike Trout a Ryan Howard-level albatross because, of course, the problem there was that Ryan Howard was not worth playing at all. And they were paying him as if he were the best player on the team. So I think if you wanted to give that kind of contract to Mike Trout, you essentially have to give him this contract and then club him in the knees. So you have to physically wound your star player because otherwise you can't do anything other than giving Mike Trout your entire payroll and saying, well, now we can only field the one player. I guess we now are forfeiting every game or we finally get to live out the reality where Mike Trout is playing against a full baseball roster. So you can't give Trout the Howard contract. And if you wanted to give him, I guess, the Pujols contract, which is still terrible. I don't know. I don't know how high to take it, but what do you, double it? So do you give him

$1.5 billion over 10 years? Sure. At that point, so he's getting paid, I don't know, $150 million a year, which would put the Angels pretty quickly within range of the luxury tax,

or whatever team. They'll be close to the luxury tax. They'll have something like 50 or 60 million dollars left to work with to find 24 players. Of course, the average salary now in baseball is about four million dollars. So this team would be leaning heavily upon pre-arb or maybe early arbitration players. If it's the Angels, well, bad news. They don't have good players who are young and cheap. So, yeah, they would be screwed

and of course if you gave trout that amount of money and you already had the pool holes contract on the books then well you're you're kind of up a creek so yeah but even there even there the trap contract wouldn't be i don't think it would look as bad as the pool holes contract it would just he's so good is the problem yeah. And Pujols is not good anymore. And Howard wasn't good almost immediately when the contract took effect. So even then, you could say, well, within this framework where teams have spending constraints, this contract is killing you. But in terms of how much you're overpaying Mike Trout, like on a rate basis, you're still, the Pujols contract looks worse. But I mean, you would be overpaying Mike Trout by $750 million.

Yeah. But I don't know, you wouldn't, like fans wouldn't be reminded about that as regularly. Like every time Pujols comes up or Josh Hamilton when he was there or Ryan Howard, you got a reminder that, oh, we're paying this guy like the best player in the team and he's terrible. Not terrible in Pujols' case, but some of those players I mentioned. And every time Trout comes up, you think this is the best player in baseball, maybe the best player ever.

And so the money wouldn't bother you as much. It's not your money. It's ownership's money. And it only bothers you to the extent that it prevents the team from acquiring other good players so i don't know it wouldn't be perceived probably uh as quite as much of a bad deal i guess and i don't know if you're paying someone 150 million dollars which is what like almost five times the maximum anyone else has ever made then i guess that would get some attention but i i mean people thought the alex rodriguez contract with texas was terrible even five times the maximum anyone else has ever made, then I guess that would get some attention.

I mean, people thought the Alex Rodriguez contract with Texas was terrible, even though it was perfectly fine. The real problem was what they did around him. Now, that was the wrong team, I guess, to sign Rodriguez because they didn't have the flexibility. Just to change, because I don't want to pick on A-Rod,

or actually I was going to not pick on A-Rod, but in any case, you would say that Ian Desmond had a pretty good season last year, right? Mm-hmm. Okay. Ian Desmond, everyday player, season last year, right? Mm-hmm. Okay. Ian Desmond, everyday player, had a rougher second half than first half, but he wound up, according to Fangraphs, he was worth 3.3 wins above replacement.

Pretty good. Yeah. That's like a above-average, borderline star player. We'll go with above-average player. Good player for the Rangers. Okay. So this contract estimation tool I mentioned has a built-in aging curve. It's just a generic aging curve, but it's not

terrible. It's probably a little charitable, but it's not too bad. And so I plugged in Mike Trout just to see what we could project from him. The contract tool only goes up to a maximum contract length of 15 years. So I'm looking at a 15-year projection for Mike Trout. And in the year 2031, when Mike Trout would be 39, according to this tool, he would project to be worth 3.4 wins above replacement, which means that Mike Trout in 15 years could still have a better season than what Ian Desmond just had with the Rangers. Of course, every season previous to that would also be far better than what Ian Desmond just did with the Rangers. But Mike Trout over 15 years this tool, would project to be worth 103 wins above replacement. You could give him a 15-year, $962.1 million contract, and you could say, we did great.

Yeah. Well, that's relevant to the next, possibly the last question, which is from Charlie, who says, my buddy and I were discussing how the Angels have no players in the Hall of Fame, so naturally we ended up talking about Mike Trout. It's entirely possible that Vlad Guerrero goes in as an Angel, but if he doesn't, then Trout would be the next possible candidate.

My question is, if he leaves after 2020, will he still go into the Hall as an Angel? I think if he signs with another team and eventually retires with that team, then team two will be on his cap in Cooperstown, though if he plays for two or more teams, I'd assume the angels, and that seems like a safe assumption. So he's got four more seasons counting this upcoming one with the angels if he's not traded

at some point during that, and he's already at almost 50 wins above replacement. I think a conservative projection for the next four years would have him getting, what, another 30 or so. So if he ends up with close to 80 war as an angel by the time he hits free agency, I mean, that is a Hall of Fame career right there. That is, it will have been 10 years, which is the minimum that a player needs to be eligible. And he will be totally deserving, which is crazy because, you know, he'll be, what, 29 or something. So you could just put him in like that. And it's possible that he won't accrue as much value with any other one team as he did

with the angels so i guess really it just probably comes down to longevity as charlie was saying if he stays with another team from the time he's 29 to 39 you know if he signs a 10-year contract or something then he will have been with the second team as long as he was with the first team. And odds are his second 10 years will not be as good as his first the Angels, then that is, I guess, the route that he would take to going in as a different team. That's the only way that I can see it happening, really. Am I making it up or did the Hall of Fame take that decision away from the players and put it upon themselves? I think that's true, right? I think that's true.

I forget whether they went one way or the other and I don't remember which way it was now. And I'm not interested enough to look it up, so let's just assume that that's what they did. So I think it's up to the Hall of Fame, but in any case, they'll probably arrive at similar decisions anyway. Like you, I think it would be almost, maybe there's like a 5% or 10% chance that if Trout trout left in 2020 he would go into the hall of fame we know he'd go into the hall of fame first of all but i think there's a very small chance he'd go in with another team's cap like you said his second decade is almost certain i mean it's a virtual guarantee it has to be worse than his first it has to yeah because we've never seen this before so you know you never say never but I'm going to say never. His second decade, just based on performance, almost has to be worse than his first decade. So in order for him to really go over the top, he'd either need to have some like huge blow up with the angels where just all bridges are burned.

Maybe he finally gets fed up with like the team that they've built around him. I don't know. Maybe him and Mike. Maybe like Mike Susha threatens to kill. I don't know what's and mike maybe he like mike social threatens to kill i don't know what's gonna take place maybe he's like i want to bet you ninth and charles like that doesn't make sense and then social pulls rank so i don't know they'd have to have real bridges burned but even in that case ken griffey jr forced his way out of seattle said that he just wanted to be closer to his family and limited them to trading with one team. And then he's still so fricking beloved by the Mariners and the fans. It's like it never happened because he spent a whole decade being horrible in other places and underachieving.

I don't think Mike Trout, I don't think his second decade is going to look like Griffey's. And I don't mean to pick on this in a second podcast, but like Griffey's second half was terrible of his career. But he left the Mariners when he was 29 years old but everyone still thinks of Ken Griffey Jr. as that in his prime Seattle Mariners player he didn't win a world series he didn't have his signature playoff moment was scoring on somebody else's double yeah so like his his career maybe is maybe could be similar to Trout's I think Trout will have the better second half I don't think Griffout will have the better second half I don't think Griffey went into the hall of fame as a mariner because of the last season and change

that he spent with the mariners when he was a bad designated hitter who fell asleep in the clubhouse I think that was all because of what he did in in the 90s and in the 1989 and even if Griffey I think had like stayed a little healthier or won a world Series with the Reds, I don't think it would have made a difference. People know him as a mariner. Trout, he's not that cultural touchstone that Griffey was. But, you know, Trout had a Subway commercial, so maybe that's the same as being on the Fresh Prince and having a video game. It's almost impossible for me to imagine Trout in the Hall of Fame as anything else. All right.

So we can wrap it up there. Appropriate to end with a Trout question. Yeah, multiple. Next time we can begin with a Trout question. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. Five listeners who have already done so, Larry Miller, Mike Thompson, Kevin Arrow,

Dustin Palmatier, and Craig Campagno. Thank you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash Effectively Wild. And you can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes. Keep your questions coming via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or by messaging us through Patreon. We will talk to you tomorrow. friends after the show but you'll forget their names in 24 3 in 24