Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1035: The Catcher’s Crooked Finger

Episode Date: March 23, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan share responses submitted to a smattering of recent topics and banter about whether old scouting reports have value to teams, then answer listener emails about MVP-vote streaks, Brady Anderson and ex-player executives, predicting pitches perfectly, middle-infield offense, Aroldis Chapman copying Carter Capps, non-traditional starting rotations, and more. Audio intro: Ike & […]

I used to jump when you called and I would cry when you leave I had to plan every move just to keep you pleased Now I don't care no more about nothing you do So I'm going shopping, wait, no thing will pop it on you Hello and welcome to episode 1035 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast presented by our Patreon supporters. My name is Ben Lindberg, I'm a writer for The Ringer, and I'm joined by Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs. Hello. Hi.

We have a lot of emails to get to and a bunch of follow-ups because somehow it seems as if no matter what we talk about, there is someone who has a pertinent anecdote to relate to us. Do you have anything else you want to talk about before we get into that? No, let's just get into it. Okay. So we've got a Ryan Rayburn story. We've got a trampoline story. We've got a couple premature celebration follow-ups.

Let me start about Ryan Rayburn. You wrote a post about Ryan Rayburn being the most volatile hitter of all time with some Minimums and caveats But basically he's been terrible And great alternating Seasons for the past what five years or so And we got an email From Evan who says A while back Jeff talked about the volatility of Ryan

Rayburn's on field performance while I was Bat boy slash clubhouse assistant for the Toledo Mudhens while Mr. Rayburn Was a member of the team, I also have an example of Rayburn's ability to run so hot and cold. During a game, one of my jobs as Batboy would be to sit along the left field line and grab any foul balls. I also had to play catch with the left fielder.

Most left fielders threw at a nice crisp pace, fast enough to remind you they were a pro, but not too fast. When Rayburn played left, you always had to pay very close attention to the game because if he struck out or left a man on base, he would run out to left field and fire bullets at you. Obviously, I'm not a scout, and I don't know the scouting report on his arm, but he would throw so hard it was scary. Sometimes he even added a little crow hop. They make you wear a batting helmet on the field. I would always take it off between innings because it's so bulky and hot, but when I played catch with Rayburn, I kept the helmet on. Now, if Rayburn was playing well,

then his throws were at a nice, comfortable pace. Maybe this is another example of Rayburn's volatility, or maybe he should give relief pitching a shot. So beware left field catch person with the Cincinnati Reds this year if Rayburn is not hitting. He is apparently a different guy. My favorite thing about this is, you know, I don't know exactly how hard Rayburn throws via stat cast, but you know, the strongest armed outfielders throw like a hundred, right? Like

Aaron Hicks, Kevin Kiermaier, Ryan Rayburn, probably not quite that high. So he's probably in like the 90 to 95 range. That's like Ryan Rayburn throwing as hard as he can, which by the way is how hard the average pitcher throws, which what this says to me is that catchers are insane people. I don't know how anybody ever grows up and is like, I want to be a catcher. If I go like play catch with a friend and we go to the park every so often, you know, you start to get confident. You start to be throwing well, you decide I want to air it out. And we don't throw that hard. Maybe, maybe we scrape like 75 or out and we don't throw that hard maybe

maybe we scrape like 75 or 80 i don't know i haven't been measured in a while since it's probably embarrassing now but like 75 is frightening and there are like yadier melina i was watching the other day in the in the wbc he was catching edwin diaz edwin diaz is just out there throwing like a casual 99 miles per hour with insane movement. And Molina is just back there. Like I posted a screenshot, but he was just like as Diaz was in his motion, Molina had like his forearm resting on his knee and his glove just like down basically on the ground. He's just like, like nothing's even happening. Like Diaz is out there rubbing the ball, not on the rubber, taking his hat off, wiping his forehead. It's just,

I can't believe that there are any catchers. I can't believe that it's not something that you're forced to do if you're a criminal. Yeah, there are many reasons to appreciate catchers, but that semi-suicidal impulse is definitely one of them. All right. We also got a follow-up, a couple of follow-ups about the premature celebration banter we had recently. We were talking about Javi Baez's tag in the WBC And how he was celebrating the out Even before he applied the tag And we had a couple other examples that listeners submitted And now we've got a couple more

So Rocky mentioned My favorite premature celebration Is Al Albuquerque kissing the ball Before throwing to first base To complete the play in the playoffs A few years ago and this is great if you want to find it it's in the mlb.com videos section just search for albuquerque's big out and it's october 7th 2012 he was pitching against joanis cespedes and cespedes grounded

back to the mound albuquerque glumped it easily kissed kissed it, and then threw it to first. So I think that's a good one. That definitely qualifies. And David mentioned if you watch the Barry Bonds versus Troy Percival home run in the 2003 World Series, which is a great highlight for other reasons because it's just a flamethrower and Bonds at the peak of his powers, the replay shows the umpire actually tossing a new ball to the pitcher before the ball could have possibly left the stadium. It's pretty amazing. I don't know if this qualifies as an early celebration, but it's fun to watch, especially

in slow motion. This is actually the 2002 World Series. We're not in the 2003 World Series, but this is on YouTube. Just search for Bonds Hits a Monster Shot to Right Field and it's at the end of the clip, it shows a side view and Bonds has just unloaded. And you see the umpire take a new ball out of his pouch and toss it to the pitcher almost

immediately, which is a good one. Not a celebration, but good instant reaction. I'm surprised umpires didn't just flip balls to pitchers more often with Bonds at the plate, just like, you're going to need this. Right. And last follow-up, this is from Danny, and we've got a ton of trampoline feedback from people. Some people, their own personal trampoline injury stories, some baseball-related, some not. One guy just sent a picture of his kid in a cast and said, Sky as the subject line nothing in the body which is the

name of a trampoline place so we sympathize with that but danny has a baseball story he says growing up i had a trampoline in my backyard we fooled ourselves into thinking it was safer by digging a big hole so the bouncy part was right at ground level but obviously it was still a trampoline one day my younger brother had a friend over and we were all bouncing on it together. Me being the older and larger brother, I felt compelled to do the thing where you bounce the smaller people way higher up in the air by timing your jump to land just before theirs. I did this successfully, but my brother's friend, who was and still is very small, got absolutely launched much higher than I'd expected.

When he landed, he came down awkwardly, hands first, and ended up breaking or maybe dislocating a finger. A few years later, this friend of mine turned out to be a pretty good baseball player at my old high school. He was a bit small for a catcher, but he had a good arm and a great batting eye. I ran into him after a game one spring, and he showed me the finger from back in the day. I can't remember if it was his catching or throwing hand, but I believe it was one of his ring fingers. It was one of the most crooked fingers I'd ever seen in real life, basically taking and maybe 160 soaking wet he was a really good

D1 catcher and proceeded to win the Freaking Johnny Bench Award as the best Catcher in NCAA his junior year Two years later he got drafted by The Astros and now he's a legit MLB Prospect with a very crooked finger That I gave to him on a trampoline I'd like to think maybe this was

Some kind of rookie of the year incident where the finger Gives him some special advantage throwing or or catching but probably not it's probably just a weird finger and we tried to get the player on the show to talk about his trampoline trauma he declined for now we will try again in the future but he used the i'm just focusing on the season excuse which is really great. And I mentioned this to Dan in the email. That's probably the best excuse a player can use. This happens fairly often with me.

If I want to talk to someone for a story, they'll say, oh, I'm just focusing on the season right now. Oh, he's focusing on the season, so he can't talk right now. And it's a great excuse. It doesn't make any sense really because I'm going to talk to you for 10 minutes about A trampoline and it's going to distract you From the season you're focusing on the

Season 100% of the time no Time to talk to anyone doesn't really hold Up but it sounds perfectly Reasonable can't interfere with His livelihood he's a baseball player He has to focus on the season who am I To interrupt that person's mission? So that is a really great excuse. If you're a baseball player, I highly

recommend it. You can't even be annoyed about it. And I'm wondering if baseball writers can use that excuse to get out of doing things. Like if I have to do chores or something, just focusing on the season. Or like getting out of podcasts. I guess I think you and I would both agree that one of the things that's being emphasized in the modern baseball player is psychological health. Correct? Like the soft side of the game. Yeah. And I don't know the identity of this presumably still catching prospect. I could probably make a guess, but I'm not going to bother looking it up.

But it seems to me that whenever you are a prospect in a major league organization every season is critical you are just trying to prove your worth you are trying to stay positive and dedicated and healthy so that you can prove to your organization you are worth its investment of resources clearly the astros will need a catcher before too long because brian mccann is old wonder, I just wonder, if spending 10 or 15 minutes talking about a childhood trampoline incident might sort of bring back up some psychological trauma that might actually have a detrimental effect

on this player's preparation for the season. Possible, yeah. So I think that it would be a very legitimate excuse. And I feel like, honestly, with the amount of trampoline-related tweets and emails we're getting, we've really tapped into something here. I think this is a platform. This is Effectively Wild 2020. We're running on the anti-trampoline platform. And I think that we will run away. We will color the map. Yeah. People have been posting articles in the Facebook group

about studies about trampoline injuries exploding. So it definitely does seem like the zeitgeist. You know what we haven't gotten one of? We haven't gotten a single message that's like, hey, I really enjoy trampolines and that's it. That's true. That is true. No trampoline defenders. All right. So I guess we can continue. One quick thing. Neil Weinberg at Fangraphs wrote an article last week about things that he wants either baseball teams or broadcast crews or just people to do to collect data in this data-rich age we live in. There are still some things that aren't being tracked. He tracked backpicks last year when a catcher throws behind the runner, and that wasn't something that was being tracked, at least publicly. And most things either are tracked by StatCast or could be tracked by StatCast. So he was trying to come up with some alternatives that wouldn't be. And he suggested things like transcripts of baseball broadcasts, which would be great, but would also take a really long time. And I can understand why that wouldn't be worth the return on investment, but he mentioned that teams should just release their scouting report archives, essentially.

So if you are the Tigers and you have scouting grades for the 1995 draft in his example, he says that would be totally useless to any other team today, but it would be helpful in helping us outside the game evaluate players. And I'm wondering whether you think this is actually something that baseball teams could give up and not suffer any loss at all there is that hall of fame scouting database which is really great and it's a cool place where you can go to look up some old players and see what scouts thought of them in college or in the minors and it's really interesting and it'd be great if we had that for every player do you think that that would be a

sacrifice for teams is there a good reason for them not to give us all of that information could we i don't know the ins and outs of it but could we technically just try to get that data legally using like the freedom of information act can we just i don't i don't think that works with no private baseball team. No, but we could at least try and I might persuade them to just avoid the legal hassle and give it up anyway.

I would think... So, okay. I haven't thought about this real deeply, but we can... Let's see. Scouts are around for a long time, right?

So their names will be attached to their reports, presumably. Although I guess they wouldn't have to be. You could release the data. You don't need the scout's identity.

Right. Yeah, you could black it out like some sort of classified document. Right. I think that if you gave it, like, you know, there are government documents. I'm going to expose my lack of information here. But there are government documents that are, like, unsealed after some number of decades. Right. That's just the course of things.

Some stuff is still redacted right so if you just redacted like scout names but you said we'll give up everything that's older than 20 years or something then i mean i don't know how much that would do for us from the outside because scouting opinions change or they are extremely subjective. And sometimes there are only like three people interested in researching that information. But I don't know how well it's organized. I don't know if this information is like in an internal database. And if it is, that would make it super simple. It's probably not because teams probably didn't fold in scattering reports from 1993 into their like Carmine database, because why would you? So that might not be worth the trouble.

Yeah, I mean, one reason why you might, I would think that maybe it's something that could improve a projection system, right? If you have an archive of scouting reports and you can correlate the tools and the grades and the overall future potentials with what those players turned out to be, maybe it's the kind of thing

where you could fuse your stats-based projection system and your scouting reports on current players to come up with a more accurate long-term projection based on past scouting reports and projections. So I would think that would work, probably. I don't know because the scouts would be different scouts, and you'd have to try to calibrate what their ratings mean, and are they to have an amateur scouting report on a guy that says something. What does that mean for that guy 15 years down the road? So I would think there'd be some value there. And maybe if you give that up, you'd be surrendering that because other teams

could use your scouting reports to make their system smarter or someone in the public could. Like if you used all of those archives that were released and then you took Eric Langenhagen's scouting grades for current players and you plugged those in and saw what it had meant to past players in the database, then I think you could build something interesting with that. But there would be some benefit to it, just I think in terms of interesting content that we could mine for insights into past players and fun posts about how guys got players wrong or got them right really early. I'd love to have access to that, but I'm not sure there would be zero cost to the teams.

Yeah, it would, at the very least, it would be a hassle for them to maybe organize and release in a coherent way i don't know how you would convince them to put their resources toward this and i think like any new data source kind of like the catch probabilities it's fun to just play with new information just as its own reward i guess from our perspective i know you and i are basically just kind of fishing around looking for just topics full stop so we want anything to write about this would be interesting but as far as informing the projections goes i think one of the fun things that's also sort of discouraging i guess i have and we've mentioned before i keep a spreadsheet of like team projections that go back to 2005 yeah the sources have changed more recently it's been like fan graphs projections and some picota stuff but the further back i go i'm relying on like old diamond mind projections and like the sean projection system that a lot of

these older projections came from a replacement level yankees weblog that used to run like diamond mind projection blowouts every year which are great i used to really look forward to those posts in any case one of the interesting artifacts that i noticed is that over time over the i have 12 years of information, the team projections haven't really gotten any better, which is weird considering how much more I think we think we know about how baseball works now relative to 10 or 12 years ago. Like the most accurate, just based on correlation coefficients, the best single season projections were made in 2007. Now, granted, 2016 was second best. However, 2015 was the worst. You might remember that 2015 was like a backwards ass baseball season where

I'm pretty sure, at least at the halfway mark, I'm pretty sure that if you bet the opposite of all of the American League projections, you would have been more accurate. I mean, there's just no ways you can never control for, but the projections are not, they don't seem to be getting better, which is fascinating. I don't know how to go any deeper on that right now, but it's either humbling because we've made all these advances except that we haven't, or it's encouraging because even when we had so little information in 2005, we were doing okay. So I'm not sure, but I would hesitate to ever suggest that anything that we learn is actually going to make that meaningful of a difference in the projections because it turns out that the projections can be only so good

because humans are to a great extent, very unpredictable. Yeah, and I bet another way you could look at that is just to compare to Marcel, the most basic projection system, which doesn't even factor in most of the stuff that the other more complex systems include. I would think that probably relative to Marcel, the other systems haven't gotten much better, if at all, over that span. I know that the most recent projection review of 2016 projections at Beyond the Boxscore had Marcel very close and competitive and in some cases better than the other systems. And maybe that has to do with the fact that the projection

systems haven't quite kept pace with what we know. We have all of these new data sources, haven't quite kept pace with what we know. Like we have all of these new data sources, but in many cases, the projections don't make use of them for good reasons. One, it's hard to rebuild your projection system probably and plug in all this new data. But also we only have so much of a sample. You can't start using StatCast really to project players

after you have one or two seasons because you don't necessarily know how repeatable these things are from season to season and what it means for a player's aging. to project players after you have one or two seasons because you don't necessarily know how repeatable these things are from season to season and what it means for a player's aging if his spin rate declines or something like that. So you need a bigger sample and you also need all the data to be released in a way that you can use it with a projection system. So it might just be that a lot of the things we look at from day to day aren't actually baked into the projections yet. And maybe one of these years there will be a big leap forward in that area.

That's true. Like looking at Keon Broxson, he's projected on Fangraphs to be like a well below average hitter, even though like he's clearly the best hitter in the National League. So I don't know why. So, yeah, you could fold in some SACA's information. That projection would improve i have a theory also it's really difficult to examine so i haven't bothered yet but i have a theory that now more than ever we are seeing players making not quite overnight but more changes and maybe some more significant changes to their game it's a lot easier with a pitcher

to identify he just starts throwing a new pitch but of course there's the litany of swing changers and it's been battered into our heads for a decade by i guess i don't need to talk about the statistical people but that whenever we overreact any sort of small sample change that we should always we're making fools of ourselves we should always just lean on the the longer track record which is generally true and that's what the projections are always doing because they they're only as smart as the history but if you always just lean on the longer track record, which is generally true. And that's what the projections are always doing because they're only as smart as the history. But if you have a player who's suddenly doing something that seems to be very different, maybe now more than ever, that can be a very meaningful indicator of real change because there is that much more information. So I

don't know, we don't need to go into depth on this. Maybe this will be a podcast topic down the road, but it's good to think about. Yeah, I can't tell whether there don't need to go into depth on this. Maybe this will be a podcast topic part of it. But you'd also think that there would be more of those guys because there's so much data to use to make yourself better. So that is something that we're all tracking and writing about all the time. All right, we should answer some emails. So this one comes from Eric Hartman. He says, Hey, gang, while attempting to distract myself from the crushing horrors of reality, I ended up on Miguel Cabrera's baseball reference page. I noticed that he has received at least one MVP vote every year he's been in the league, sort of an anti-Nick Marquecas. Marquecas has never received an MVP vote. I was curious if there are any other players who can claim such a distinction. baseball reference data expert Hans van Sleuten, who is an invaluable research assistant to me at

times, to check this using their data. And the only one who has an MVP vote in every year of his career is Chris Bryant, which basically doesn't count. So there are a bunch of guys who come close who have, say, MVP votes in one less season than they have played in the majors such as mike trout for instance who had that first season where he wasn't good and so he didn't get an mvp vote in that season he didn't play much anyway the ones who have come closest over a long period of time joe dimaggio went 12 for 13 ted williams went 18 for 19 which is pretty awesome which year did ted williams miss out let's see 1952 oh yeah he was in korea i think for almost all of that year but not quite so he played six games and didn't get it but here's the incredible

thing look at the next year he played 37 games and he did get an mvp vote yes yeah so that's really close 18 for 19 and the only year he didn't get one was when he barely played because he was defending our nation so not bad there are some other guys who are very early in their careers and have come close like even even they haven't really like cory seager's one for two. Syndergaard's one for two. Lindor's one for two. Betts is two for three. Abreu's two for three. Addison Russell's one for two. But the only ones who go a really long time really are Damasio and Williams. And there's one interesting guy, the only non-active player who appears on this list is a player named Eddie Juhasz. I hope that's how you pronounce it, who played two seasons and got one year with an MVP vote. And that is kind of curious.

You'd think that anyone who got an MVP vote in his first season would get many more seasons to keep playing. And what happened to Eddie Juhasz is, first of all, he only got a 31st place MVP performance in 1952, the same year that Ted Williams did not get a vote. And he was 27. He was a 27-year-old rookie for the Cardinals that year, a reliever almost exclusively. And he pitched 99 innings with a 136 ERA plus. He was pretty good, and he got a 31st place MVP vote to show for it. And then the next spring, he hurt himself and had tendinitis in his shoulder and got into two games that following year, and that was it for Eddie Juhasz.

Never pitched again in the majors, at least, so that's his story. And nine years later, he was a Chicago district attorney. Yeah. So anyway, Miguel Cabrera's streak is very impressive. He is, of course, we haven't really seen his decline phase yet. He has played 14 years in the majors majors and he's gone 14 for 14. There will probably come a year when he doesn't do it. But if you had to come up with someone who could conceivably do it, Miguel Cabrera is a pretty good bet. He's a very Ted Williams-esque hitter,

I suppose. He hits for average. He hits for power, he does everything. He has thus far hardly declined at all into his early 30s, so maybe he'll actually be so well preserved and have such a reputation within the game that he can actually sustain this and go 18 for 18 or however many years he ends up playing. So something to watch. What's interesting in here is Cabrera, he's gotten that MVP vote every season, but he was not an all-star in 2003 when he was a rookie and he had a 27th place MVP vote. He was down there among some other extremely 2003 names like Mark Grudzelanek, Russ Ortiz, Dontrell Willis, Luis Gonzalez. In any case, Cabrera also, he was 13th place MVP finisher in 2008, fourth place in 2009, an all-star in neither season somehow. I don't know exactly how that

works, but Joe DiMaggio, aside from three years of military service, just like Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio did make the all-star game in all of his major league seasons. The one year he did not get an MVP vote was his final year when he was an all-star as a 36-year-old. But still, I don't think anything is weirder than that Ted Williams, 37 games, 110 played appearances, MVP vote. Although he did hit like 14 home runs that season. So good on Ted Williams. He made the most out of a little time. Yeah, maybe it was just a courtesy vote. Hey, you're back from war for the second time So here's an MVP vote Alright question from

Nick if a role this Chapman Suddenly showed up to camp and he used Carter Caps's ridiculous delivery But somehow maintained his control How unhittable would he be I think I've heard you guys say that Caps's Perceived velocity is about as fast Or faster than Chapman's fastball

But how ridiculous would that delivery be With a guy who can throw 103 as it is? Would anyone be able to score runs off of him? Only thing I know for sure is that that delivery would be getting outlawed even quicker. So I wrote about Carter Cowes, but I forget. What's the differential between his actual and perceived velocity? Do you remember? Yeah, I believe off the top of my head, if just look at fast balls it's 3.6 but over all of his pitches he gains 3.2 miles per hour or all this chapman gains 1.5 i've been i've been thinking about cardicaps a lot lately yeah tyler glasnow

interestingly was uh plus three without a weird cardicaps delivery but i think anyway we don't need to talk about tyler glasnow right now okay so Chapman with the Capps. So Capps gains 3.2 on all of his pitches on average. Chapman gains 1.5. So in this, are we just adding Capps onto Chapman or are we just adding 1.7? I don't know. I guess we should probably just give him Capps' gap, right? Because he'd be using Capps' delivery and maybe there's something about Chapman's current delivery that gives him that 1.5 that he'd be losing if he switched to Caps. So I guess let's just give him Caps. So over the last two years, Caps' average perceived velocity has been 101.5. Chapman has been 101.1. So now we're going to add 1.7 onto that i guess so that would take him up to 102.8 which

would mean that he would oh my god okay so he wouldn't be he wouldn't be literally unhittable but if you look at what caps did the last time he was healthy and oh by the way he's healthy again this is going to be a nightmare for other teams uh he was the most unhittable pitcher i think we've seen in baseball since at least that one year of like peak peak super brad lidge like if you sort contact rates for as long as we've had them i think lidge has the lead in this one season and then no one else is within like five percentage points of him i don't know exactly what he was doing but it was just slider machine like perfect slider machine and then albert pooh has happened in any case, so we're taking Chapman up to almost 103

miles per hour perceived velocity. Chapman has, of course, thrown balls that have had perceived velocities that high, and he hasn't avoided all contact. And I'm not convinced that Chapman's breaking ball is as good as Capps' is because, as I like to bring up from time to time, the last time we saw

Carter Capps healthy he batter swung at 84 of his breaking balls and they missed with 64 of those swings so I don't think Chapman has that kind of breaking ball his slider is fine but it's not Capps level his fastball is better he would strike out at the I would put the over under at what 55% strikeouts is that too too low? Is that too low? That does seem like a pretty good place to set it, and I might go higher. Yeah.

And that's giving him exactly Caps' gap and not giving him any extra credit for the fact that he's already pretty good perceived velocity-wise. Caps was 49% strikeouts his like 31 healthy innings and chapman lately he's uh let's see what his name is the last few years chapman has struck out 41 42 and 53 percent of his opponents so he's averaged like 44 45 percent the last three years which is consistent with his career marks so now we're giving him an extra almost two miles per hour i mean that's it's genuinely insane to think about. But yeah, okay. I would say maybe the over 100

point is 60% strikeouts and he would never give up a home run. Yeah. Someone asked you in your chat last week where the diminishing returns would be with fastball speed or where you get the most or least benefit from adding a tick. And you speculated what something like 105 106 like beyond that it probably wouldn't help that much to add one mile per hour depends on what you mean like when people ask about diminishing returns i think the the point where it makes the biggest difference is down around like probably 89 or 90 yeah so after that the returns would begin to diminish what i suspect was the intent of the question was where does it basically not matter anymore and that i think that is around somewhere between 105 and 110. Like if

you look at Chapman's fastballs that he's ever thrown, when you get up to 104, 105, it just doesn't matter anymore. As a batter, you're basically there as a tourist observing baseball. You're not actually supposed to do anything. Although granted, if you have Chapman out there throwing as hard as you possibly can, you would have guys choking up. But the last time we saw a batter really choke up on a Chapman pitch, he hit one of the most dramatic home runs in World Series history. So, you know, it can happen. But Chapman would average probably 0.5 home runs allowed per season. Comes from Connor who says It is being reported that Jared Weaver's Fastball velocity is sitting 79 to 83 during spring Training thus far what is going to Be a higher number this year the Lower end of his sitting velocity

Divided by 10 or his ERA so if he is sitting 79 his ERA Divided by 10 would be 7.9 And he is coming off A season where His velocity was what like 81 or something like that was he in that 83 it actually 83 it perked up if you will and he had a 5.06 era yeah you know you know what i don't i've gone i've gone completely around i think jared weaver is

fantastic i love that he's out there throwing crap and And last year he had an ERA of 5.06, but the year before it was 4.64. I mean, these aren't good numbers. His ERAs the last two years have been like 20% or 25% below average with the Angels, but he's going to the easier league. San Diego is still a relatively pitcher-friendly ballpark, even though there are more home runs. And he's proven, he's thrown crap for years. Like the last two years, he's had an 83 mile per hour fastball, but he's thrown his

fastball less than half of the time. And his changeup is still there. His other pitches are still there. He has the worst, I think objectively the worst fastball in baseball, but he knows it. And he is as close, we get the hypothetical ever so often about, could you be a good pitcher if you never throw a fastball? Well, Jared Weaver's trying. He's out there and he's doing his best. It's bad. But, you know, you have a hitter out there just gearing up for the heat.

And he still has that big loopy curveball that's always been a good pitch. He still has a changeup that works somehow because, you know, hitters are geared up for the heater so no i don't think that weaver is on the precipice of like a an eight era because he's just never actually been that bad yeah he's got the deception and the pop-ups and everything so yeah he gets by yeah i i like that he's out there i like that he still has a job he i mean he shouldn, he shouldn't, he shouldn't have a job, but this is this Padres situation. But just for, just for scientific reasons, this is going to be good data. And the fact that he's probably going to start another, I don't know, 50 games this season for the Padres is going to be really good for us to learn from just like how pitchers probably shouldn't hit, but I'm glad that they do.

All right. Do you want to do a stat segment sure i've got something that isn't so fun but is kind of interesting maybe uh for fan graphs should be published by now but we're doing an annual series that's called the positional power rankings and i was in charge of writing up short stops which is a privilege i think because short stops are so good right now and so this was I think, while we've been speaking during this podcast. And in that piece, I hypothesized something that why don't I just get into the information now. So you and many people are familiar with the statistic OPS plus on baseball reference. There is also a T OPS plus. I don't

know what the T stands for, but what this is essentially is OPS plus for a given split relative to the overall OPS plus. So it's a measure of how good a player or position is offensively relative to the league offense. Understand? Everybody understands? Only Ben is on the line, so that's fine. Let's just assume people understand.

So there's been a lot written about how we are entering or have entered a golden era of short stops. I think people can feel it. And it's difficult to measure overall in terms of overall value. However, in the known history of people playing shortstop, at least according to baseball reference, last season shortstops had their best ever offensive season. Last season, shortstops had their best ever offensive season. They had a TOPS plus of 96, meaning they were only 4% worse offensively than the average hitter. That's interesting.

And all of the top years are from after the turn of the millennium, except for, I don't know, whatever weird thing happened in 1960 when, hey, good for shortstops, they were able to hit. So that's interesting. But it's also interesting to shift over just a little bit and while less has been written second baseman are coming off easily their best offensive year ever they had a top s plus of 108 that's the best in second base history second place 100 so that's i mean as these numbers go that is a significant lead, where second baseman, eight percentage points better than their next best season overall. So the theory that I am

in the process of sort of superficially researching, and maybe there'll be a fan graphs post on this since I need something to write about, is I have a theory that with defenses shifting more than ever, I think maybe the importance of range has been reduced. And I think maybe the importance of agility in the middle infield has been reduced, or maybe teams are just more willing to put up with reduced agility. And that I think we all understand that a lot of major league baseball players have been shortstops before many were shortstops with their high school team. Some are drafted as shortstops. One of my favorite fun facts is that when he was in his first year in the minor leagues, Jim Tomey played shortstop. Somehow even more embarrassing than that, Michael Morse was a shortstop in the major leagues,

looking like Michael Morse does basically today. And then players move and the players move because teams decide, well, they're not just not capable of playing shortstop anymore. But I think that you are seeing fewer and fewer players moved from the middle infield because teams are more willing to put up with a little less athleticism in the middle infield again this is all speculative so i don't have any proof yet but i will say that let's see what is this search that i did so last year there were 27 middle infielders who played fairly regularly, has had a minimum of 400 played appearances.

There were 27 shortstops or second basemen who had an OPS plus of at least 100. That is very high. Although in 2007, there were 29 of them. Last year, there were 27. And then the list drops off to 23, 22, 22, 21, etc. I don't need to keep reading numbers in order. to 23, 22, 22, 21, etc. I don't need to keep reading numbers in order, but of some interest as well, last year, there were 35 middle infielders who were at least six feet tall, and that is the most ever by four. 2015, there were 31. 2013, there were 31, and so on down the

line. Of course, players in general have gotten taller over time. I have not conducted all of the necessary research for this because I did this in four minutes in advance of the podcast, realizing that I needed something to talk about. However, I suspect, I have not yet proven, but I suspect middle infielders are relatively taller than they have ever been, which would, I think, seem to support the belief that middle infielders are also just being moved less than they've ever been and so if you have the best players being moved off of middle infield positions less often then of course the numbers are going to reflect that those players are better and so that's interesting and so we're going to see where where this goes but I know there's been talk about Carlos Correa won't stick at shortstop or Corey Seager won't stick at shortstop or whoever else is good at shortstop there's always talk about Carlos Correa won't stick at shortstop or Corey Seager won't stick at shortstop or whoever else is good at shortstop. There's always talk that maybe he won't stick except for Francisco Lindor, who I think should be considered the inventor of the shortstop position, I guess. But, you know, Seager is still very young. Correa is still very young.

I don't know how long they're actually going to last at the position, but I don't think that there's any thought that they're going to be moved anytime soon. The Astros actually moved Alex Bregman to third to allow Correa to continue playing in the position. So I think this is this is kind of a thing and we're going to see how they age because they are still so young and short stops are also terrifyingly young as a group. as a group, but I think that this is one of the sort of unforeseen consequences of how defenses have been aligned in recent years, that if you shove everyone over to a hitter's strong side, then all of a sudden individual players don't need to cover so much ground. Yeah, plausible. Good theory. Look forward to seeing the numbers. All right. Let's take a question from Adam, who says, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on Ken Rosenthal's article from this week about Brady Anderson's role with the Orioles.

I've been on board with the recent trend of hiring former players like Dan Heron into strategist roles, but this represents an interesting view of what can happen when the player looms large in franchise history and they're hired by ownership, not by the front office. large in franchise history, and they're hired by ownership, not by the front office. Anderson is appointed as a VP, but carries out a much different role, I think, than most with that title. Despite the issues he appears to have caused with players and coaches, it has seemingly had limited impact on the on-field product so far, sample size of one, but are the concerns Rosenthal highlights reasonable ones to have about any of the former players taking on these strategist roles, or can I just dump all of the blame on Angelos for creating a particularly difficult situation? I don't know if you've read this article. It's novella length. It's like 10 times longer than any other Ken Rosenthal article, but basically it's about the fact that Brady Anderson doesn't really report to anyone and seems to have more leeway as a result of that.

Like he has a locker in the clubhouse where he gets changed and he is involved in acquisitions and negotiations, but also coaches anyone in the system whenever he wants. And just sort of, I don't know if loose cannon is accurate, but he can just kind of go where he wants and do what he wants. And he's only accountable to Angelos. And I don't know that any of the concerns in this sort of hybrid front office field staff role, because most of them are not hired by the owner. They are in many cases, not players who were even with the organization or were not with the organization for a long time. They're probably not quite as, I don't know if you can call Brady Anderson storied in Orioles history, but he was definitely there for a long time and he had some standout seasons.

So a lot of them are not that, you know, like, I don't know that Dan Heron has that kind of level of prominence with the Diamondbacks, for instance. But I think most of them are just hired by the GM and there isn't really any confusion about the hierarchy and how they fit in. And according to Rosenthal's article, it just sort of sounds like Anderson is kind of a strange guy. And there are lots of quotes in there about how he is atypical in a lot of ways. So I think probably we can't really generalize from his position, and I don't know that anyone has exactly his position, so it might just be a unique situation. I do wonder about the motivation level of former players turned analysts because essentially every player who had any kind of major league career is a many times multimillionaire at this point. And I don't know what they get paid for their front office roles, but I assume it's some fraction of what they would have made as a player. And if they've saved their money and invested wisely,

they probably don't need to work. And so I wonder, I'm sure most of them are very motivated and they like being around baseball and they like helping players and they're as invested in their job as any of us is, if not more. But I wonder, like, there's only some level of grunt work that you're willing to do, presumably, if you are already rich and you've already achieved a lot in this sport and you don't have to do work if you don't want to do work. Maybe some of them have aspirations to be a GM or get into ownership or who knows what, and then there's definitely a benefit to them working their way up. But I also wonder, maybe they just kind of keep them away from tasks that are boring and rote and unpleasant, and so it doesn't become an issue. But I wonder if it ever does.

I know that Dan Heron mentioned when I talked to him on an episode of Effectively Wild that it was important to him that he have the right role and he'd be able to spend a lot of time at home with his family and his kids and that sort of thing. So maybe if you're going after one of these players, you have to be willing to make some concessions that you couldn't make to the typical person. I would hope that when you are hiring one of these former players that they're sufficiently screened and vetted that you are only hiring someone who is at least reasonably motivated and not just looking for something to help the player stay occupied and save off post-career alcoholism. I think also moving to an earlier point, I don't know where

the lower threshold is for being storied, but Brady Anderson does have at least one story, I guess, of having been an Oriole, a pretty well-known story of dingers every other day. So that's something. I read most of the article. I didn't internalize it in a way where I read it and I thought this is very well sourced and detailed, but this doesn't seem like the sort of thing I'm going to write about. So I kind of just superficially read it. I understand that from a player standpoint, you are well within your right to question exactly what that individual's role is, because the clubhouse is considered something of a sacred room for the players. And it would be only natural to think that Anderson is sort of a mole, which, of course, you can't.

would be only natural to think that Anderson is sort of a mole, which of course you can't, you wouldn't be inclined to trust him right away, especially because players might not have that strong preexisting relationship with a player. But it sort of touches on something that I've also wondered about specifically earlier with the Mariners having Edgar Martinez as the hitting coach, where ordinarily you have coaches or advisors who are sort of more ephemeral, I guess. They don't have a whole lot of job security. We've seen teams cycle through pitching coaches and hitting coaches and managers. It's nothing. But if you are a Mariners player and you're getting instruction from Edgar Martinez, it could put you in the unusual position of realizing that you could be less secure in your job than he is in his. What would be the exit strategy if you're the

Mariners or in this case, the Orioles being like, like okay this person is not doing a good job however this person has been very important again ed you're more than brady anderson but whatever anderson still a somewhat beloved oriole so i don't know how you get out of that and this is one of the i think under discussed complications of hiring that former team icon. Like if Tony Gwynn had been a hitting coach for the Padres, which hopefully he wasn't because I don't remember that happening off the top of my head. I know he managed at SDSU. But it's one of the downsides of having like Barry Bonds around or just any sort of former

important player. It's great to have them around as sort of like a roving instructor or like maybe they can show up at spring training and maybe just maybe if you think that they're going to be great coaches or advisors that's important but i don't know if edgar martin is as good at his job but i sure as hell know that the mariners have to hope that he is and he's been around for long enough now that i mean i guess maybe that means he's good and the team has hit well. But like, I have no idea what the separation is going to look like. And the Mariners really have to hope that it's on Edgar's terms and he just decides I've had enough and then he's done because you can't, you can't fire him. Yeah. Good question.

Good point. All right. Let's take this one from Andrew. You are a lifelong baseball fan. You played in high school and although you were good, you were not offered any scholarships or drafted, so you stopped playing. Let's say you're watching a game one day in your early 20s, and you start noticing that you can predict not just every pitch, but the exact location and velocity for every pitch from every pitcher in every game. You can only foresee each pitch as the pitcher comes set. What are the odds of you

making the major leagues as a player and or how good would you be? Alternatively, how likely are you to get a job in some kind of consulting position with a club? So I sent back a quick email on this, but I think that your odds of getting a job are would be extremely high. Yeah. Provided you can in some way convey your knowledge right show people how to how to identify things now if it's just like this mental thing that clicks for you and you have no explanation for it well then you can't do anything you can't because yeah even if they give you a bench job you can't just yell slider lower it away like that's not you can't do that the the major with the ball there there have been times in the past when teams have tried to relay signals from the stands,

or at least it's been speculated that they've done that. And if you really did have someone with this almost supernatural power, I wonder whether they'd come up with some scheme. Now, you're not getting this knowledge until the pitcher comes set, so that doesn't leave a lot of time. But if there's some way that you could make a motion from the outfield or something, I mean, inevitably it would be noticed, I'm sure. And if it was always right, then something would have to be done about that. But you try to exploit that somehow, but yeah, I don't

know what you could do. You couldn't really just shout out from the bench. Right. And as far as being a player, I don't know quite how to answer that because I didn't hit for myself when I played because I was bad. I only knew how to pitch and hold a baseball bat, and I only kind of knew how to do that. So I don't know exactly how much benefit it would give a decent high school baseball player to know exactly what's coming and where it's going to be. But I do know that my school had a pretty good pitching machine 10 or 15 years ago. And it was one of those machines, you could program whatever pitch in whatever location at whatever velocity. And so the coaches would sometimes mess around

and show us like 85 mile per hour, perfect curveballs. And I don't I don't care how much, you know, you can't do anything with that, as certainly not when you're like a 16 year old idiot playing for like a division five San Diego high school. So you would need to be very talented. I guess it would be of great benefit to like a Jonathan scope where you're like, Hey, your approach problem, at least no longer matters. You have the natural talent, go hit the ball. But assuming that this undrafted high schooler does not have the raw ability of a Jonathan Scope or someone similarly undisciplined, then I don't think that you would have a job. This would be of the greatest significance for someone who was at least good enough to be drafted, I think.

Right. Yes, it wouldn't help us. So let's wrap up with a couple paired questions about rotations. let's wrap up with a couple paired questions about rotations. One from Matt, who says, if we assume pitchers have their best results the first two times through a lineup, would it be beneficial to a team to set up a rotation that has two pitchers only pitch two

times through the order in tandem? Basically have two starting pitchers take on every game split in half. So game one, you have pitcher A and B, game two, C and D, game three, E and F Game 4 G and H He says I think it could be done in a 4 game rotation

With fewer innings being pitched Also teams could win arbitration cases Based on the fact that teams in arbitration Still use innings pitch and wins to their advantage The arbitration process is a little bit Behind the times when it comes to advanced stats And stuck in the precedent system Teams could have smaller bullpens as well And and they would have to. So non-traditional tandem starter rotation,

the kind of thing that we've seen, maybe the Astros were doing that in the minor leagues a few years ago. Maybe they still are. Do you think that that could help a team? Will we see it? I was accepting a second paired question. So there's going to be one. Will we see it? I was accepting a second to parrot question. So there's going to be one. We sort of saw the Rockies mess around with something similar. What was it?

A 65 pitch minimum or maximum for their starters some years back. The problem there was that all of them were bad. So they just wanted to basically have them stop pitching on their own terms as opposed to being forced out. This is the kind of thing that I think is an inevitability like legal marijuana. But it's one of those things where it's not necessarily going to happen overnight. Running some numbers, last year we saw fewer pitchers throwing to hitters for the fourth time through the order than ever. That is not a surprise. This has been a recent trend.

Teams are paying more and more attention to the times through the order splits. I know the Rays have been particularly strict about limiting certain pitchers to like two trips through the order. So the Rays are already kind of getting there and you would expect a team like the Rays to get there. There are twin difficulties here. One, you would need eight pretty good pitchers. Like you're asking for something

beyond just good reliever capability because good relievers are good to like one time through the order or maybe for one or two innings at a time and here you're looking for eight not like top of the line started pitchers but eight pretty good pitchers who have at least three pitches so they can pitch to hitters on both sides and so that would be a challenge and of course the other challenge which is always the problem with something like this is player buy-in because as the question asker whose name I forgot noted you could in theory be messing with somebody's earning

capability because if arbitration held the this usage against them well we've seen players complain that they don't get a reward in arbitration because they're not getting saves we just had an issue with Dale and Batances and the yankees because arbitration didn't reward him fairly and so players would not be financially motivated to accept this but it is something that's going to happen because starts are getting shorter and shorter that is unlikely to end because it only makes sense and as starts get shorter and shorter then you're going to need more and more relievers the rosters are limited in scope so you're going to need more and more long relievers. And so it only makes sense that you would end up with short starters and longer, long relievers. And so I would think within five or 10 years, we're going to see something like this at least semi-temporarily show up in the major leagues. I don't know who's

going to do it, but probably a team like the Rays would be my pick now. Okay. And related non-traditional rotation question From Matt the Mets have seven Starting pitchers who have proven themselves To be at minimum competent and viable Options at the major league level they have zero Pitchers who seem to be capable in Current condition of throwing 200 innings

Are the Mets starting pitchers good candidates For the team to try the college Slash NPB model of assigning of Day of the week to their pitchers. They can name Thor the Friday night starter, with DeGrom throwing Saturday and Matts on Sunday. That allows Harvey, Gesselman, Lugo, and Wheeler to split up Monday to Thursday and offers built-in rest for recovering arms like Wheeler and Harvey. By dividing the season across seven pitchers, the team is only asking for 23 or so starts from each.

But because of off days, we can expect 25 to 27 starts from Thor de Grom and the Sunday starter while the other four carve the remainder. This could help limit their innings and keep them fresh for a stretch run, but it also means less of the top guys than normally possible. 160 innings of Cinderguard

is not as valuable as 200 innings of him, but he's never managed more than last year's 183, so it might not matter. Plus, having a standing Friday engagement sounds kind of awesome appointment viewing that would be kind of fun yeah it's it would be a nice idea because you would know exactly when cinder guard is pitching but yeah you know we've seen cinder guard he just made 30 starts and he had a only minor elbow problem to grom has thrown a bunch of innings in the past. I think that what I could see is more likely is sort of doing the six-man rotation deal, which the Blue Jays used for a time last year, because clearly there are Mets who need to be handled a little lighter than usual. And you do want to be careful with Syndergaard, who's trying

to throw the ball 107 miles per hour this season, which, oh, by the way, that's going to be awesome. I don't think that this would call for the seven-man rotation college style just because the Mets are in a competitive situation where they are maybe already a few games worse than the Nationals, and they're going to need to maximize what they get out of Syndergaard and DeGrom, who seem to be their best and most reliable pitchers. I don't think that you could really sell losing seven or eight starts from both of those pitchers because they are just too important that as much as gesellman is interesting or seth lugo is interesting realistically we know very little about how good they actually are lugo just has this curveball that spins a lot i don't

know what the hell we're supposed to do with that and gesellman has a very small sample success against bad teams after not being that good in the minor leagues so it's a it's a fun thought and i love the idea of being able to say like well it's friday night so we're going to go see noah cinderguard that's great but i think that would work against the mets more than it would work for them so i'm i'm sorry to say that but if they had pitchers who were worse than cinderguard and degrom hey well then that's interesting and that would that would be something to pursue. I just don't know if we know quite enough about what makes pitchers... I mean, we know that pitching more means a higher risk of getting hurt, but I don't know exactly if we have the greatest handle on, well, what if you throw 160 instead of 200? Does that help you a lot? Is it just that you're throwing fewer pitches or does

the rest between starts really help repair you and make you safer than you otherwise would be? I don't know how great a handle teams have on that. I definitely don't have a great handle on that. So I could see if there were good research behind it. And if you were sure that you could just waltz to your division title, like if it was the Indians, let's say, or some hypothetical team that had what seemed to be a really clear path to the division title

and you just wanted to make sure that your best starters were available when you got to the playoffs, then maybe if they were young and amenable and malleable and you could convince them to do it and they wouldn't be too upset about it. So there could be a situation where it would make sense. But yeah, I mean, they're going to need every win they can to win this division. And their top couple of guys are so good that without having really solid evidence that it would either make them better when they are pitching or keep them

safer in the longterm. Not sure I could commit to this kind of idea, although I do like the idea of just knowing who's pitching on any given day. It's a Cinderguard day. It's a DeGrom day. That sounds fun. Thor day. Sounds like it's actually a day of the week. Yeah. All right. So we will wrap it up there. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to

patreon.com slash effectively wild. Five listeners who have already done so include Alex Crisofuli, Brian Burke, Tyler Larson, Beth Davy Stofka, Thank you. or by messaging us through Patreon. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for editing assistance. We'll be back on Friday with previews for The Tigers and The Rays. Talk to you then.