Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 109: Eight Questions (and Answers) for the End of the Year

Episode Date: December 28, 2012

Ben and Sam ask and answer eight mostly unrelated questions about baseball and themselves.

Happy New Year! Good morning and welcome to episode 109 of Effectively Wild, the Baseball Prospectus Daily Podcast in New York, New York, I am Ben Lindberg. And in Long Beach, California, you are Sam Miller. We are one episode away from finishing the week on a multiple of five, but we didn't do it because we took

Boxing Day off. And now I don't know when we'll do it. Probably never. Well, what are we going to... Let's see. We're doing three next week. Is that right? Yes. So what episode is this? 109?

109. So then we'll be 112. And so then Martin Luther King Day will come along and we'll be 116, essentially. And then President's Day will get us to an even number. So mid-February, we should hit it. So I have something to look forward to. We don't celebrate two President's Days anymore, do we? It's just the one? I think so. Yeah. And then we're good, right? Because there's nothing in March and there's nothing in, well, there's nothing in April unless we take

a day off for Easter. And so we might actually make it until from mid-February till the end of May. This might be the best thing for you. Those will be the days. Alright, now I have something to live for. But it is the last of the year. Yes. We're not ending the year on a round number. No. I meant to ask you, you tweeted the other day a picture of your Christmas present and it was

a piglet. It was a piglet. You explain. I got a piglet. It was a piglet. You explain. I got a piglet. My parents have enough land up in Northern California that they have room to raise animals. And they raise sheep and they have geese and chickens and goats. And when I was a kid, we would occasionally raise a hog or a steer. We haven't for a real long time. I kind of feel bad about eating factory farmed meat, but I also feel good about eating meat. I wanted to eat meat more responsibly, so I asked them if they would raise a pig,

and we're going to share it. So at the end of the year, you're going to stomp it like you do the crickets? June, actually. June, okay. Yeah. Worry about what will happen when your daughter gets old enough to read and starts reading children's classics like Babe and A Cricket in Times Square. Or Charlotte's Web. Yeah. And his... Yeah, my wife and I were talking

about actually Charlotte's Web came up because we were making, you know, some pig jokes. And my wife mentions how absurd it is that that is a book about a pig and that everybody is so impressed by the pig as though like they cannot see the genius spider right in front of them yes i've heard that interpretation and so then we started thinking like when when you see the virgin mary on a tortilla everybody thinks it's an act of god but but i mean what about the tortilla that's a that's a that's a brilliant tortilla wow it's a fully sentient tortilla do you hear that bird i did hear that bird uh so this is like the cricket of the morning when we i guess when we record in the morning there's a squawking bird there yeah what kind of bird is

that um it's probably a crow well this is where i get my daily dose of nature i guess skyping with you otherwise should we move on yeah we probably should so we were going to talk about something else but then at the last minute we decided to do a different format for the last show of the year so what is that format so this format is just going to be a bunch of little things about baseball. Real quick things, some more personal things, and things that maybe we would never bore you guys all with an entire show about us or that are topics that we don't think we have enough nuance to sustain for an entire show, but that are things that I'd like to know about Ben.

That's basically what they are. They're things I would like to know about Ben. That's basically what they are. They're things I would like to know about Ben. And so I'm going to use this opportunity to ask him. And then he might ask me the exact same question back. I don't know. Am I allowed to answer these? I guess I'll answer them. Yeah, you answer them because I don't even know what the questions are.

And I don't have my own questions. That's true. So we're just going to knock them out. They'll be a minute or two apiece. And we'll be on our way into the new year. Okay. So, all right. So first question, you are the editor of Baseball Perspectus.

What is your favorite piece that Baseball Perspectus ran this year? So you gave me about five minutes of warning that you were going to ask this question and I didn't have an answer prepared and I still don't have an answer I'm really satisfied with because I feel like we have published many excellent articles this year. I'm somewhat biased, but I think there's been a lot of great work and I don't want to snub anyone. And by picking one, I am not even really saying that it's the favorite. It's just the one that occurred to me in the first few minutes. And if you asked me again next week, I would have a completely different answer probably. So one that came to my mind was an article by Jason Parks from mid-June

that was called Searching for a Prototype. And in that article, he took a quote from Kevin Goldstein, who had said something about a high school outfielder who was a monster athlete, but sashimi raw. And he also kind of applied it to Rangers prospect Jordan Akins. And he asked the question, can you name some other tool shed prospects that struggled early in the minors, but eventually developed into stars because he, and also Kevin, uh, are kind of infatuated with tools and they like prospects who have great physical gifts, but aren't necessarily refined yet.

And so he asked a bunch of people within the game, if they could think of a player like this, who had had those kinds of crazy tools and was an incredible athlete, but was just so raw that they just barely knew how to play baseball early in their career who turned into a star because that's kind of the the appeal of tools is that this player is eventually going to figure everything out and be a great player and it turned out that he couldn't come up with any examples of that player and neither could anyone else. There were a couple of guys like Matt Kemp or Jimmy Rollins, who sort of fit most of the criteria, but were just kind of too good at baseball to really

satisfy all the conditions. So they just couldn't come up with anyone who had just been this completely raw player who had incredible tools who then put it all together. And so he kind of reexamined his own approach to scouting and thought, well, maybe we should just rule these guys out instead of drooling over them. So I thought that was admirable of him to kind of question the way that he evaluates prospects. And it was just a well-written article and an entertaining article. And that is my choice of this particular moment. That was a great article. Yeah. My favorite article I'm not going to talk as long about. I just remember it and liked it a lot and it was um when adam sobsy wrote about the orioles and how many transactions dan duquette has made it was titled the post-modern orioles

and it was a great piece that came at a great time because everybody was writing this was early september everybody was writing their own take on what the orioles were doing and yes it was so hard to come up with a new angle on the Orioles. It really was. The differential is bad, and they have a great 1-1 record, and how many times can you point that out? It was so hard that Russell and I wrote almost the same article on almost the same day. Yes.

But, yeah, Adam noticed something that was basically just in plain sight and made me look at that team a lot differently. And so I just thought it was really good analysis. My favorite – this is not my favorite article, but my favorite actual discovery of baseball perspectives this year was so small. It was just such a tiny sliver of baseball information. And it just happened. It was when RJ wrote about Coco Crisp stealing bases. It was just such a tiny sliver of baseball information. And it just happened. It was when RJ wrote about Coco Crisp stealing bases. And I mean, he so he finds that Coco Crisp sometimes just leaves before the pitcher goes like he's got such a good read on the pitcher.

He leaves before the pitcher makes his move, which, you know, happens occasionally. You see it just periodically. I would guess that good base dealers, I would have guessed they do it two or three or four times a year. I think Coco Crisp did it like 13 or 14 times this year. He does it just relentlessly, and it's an amazing thing to watch. I would never have noticed that. I'm hoping that RJ will do the same with other good bass dealers. Yeah, he's working on a sequel for next week on kind of the next Coco Crisp type base runners.

Okay. Whenever a player gets popped for steroids or something like that, there will be snark on Twitter about how a guy who did steroids gets 50 games, a guy who gets a DUI gets no game suspension. Or sometimes it will be wrapped up to include a guy like Unal Escobar who had hate speech on his face or Delman Young who had his anti-Semitic thing going on and their suspensions are very small compared to steroids. And the statement, the societal statement which I think is legit is that steroids are probably not as grave a threat to our culture as bigotry and not as dangerous as drinking and driving.

My question is simply, do you actually think that the commissioner should get involved for DUIs? Should the commissioner have the power to suspend over a DUI? That's a difficult question. My initial inclination as you asked it was that it's something that the legal system handles adequately and that it would almost be redundant for the commissioner to get involved. I mean, I guess you could sort of say the same thing about steroids, which are illegal. So it's not really a double punishment any more than a steroid suspension would be. I guess the fact that we have a steroid suspension and not a DUI suspension has to do with the fact that steroids are maybe perceived

as a greater threat to the game itself than a DUI would be, even though societally a DUI is far worse. So I guess in that sense, it's sort of a self-serving thing for the game that some substance that is either actually or perceived to be kind of making the game less fair or less compelling or less legitimate would be punished by the game as opposed to some force outside the game i guess i mean it i guess you could could a team technically suspend a player on its own for that or would that i guess that would have to be a collectively bargained thing that a team couldn't just unilaterally do yeah i think that's right i think that they would uh they would run up against some really strong opposition if they tried and they probably would lose the arbitration. Right. And then I guess if you, I mean, if you include a DUI as a thing that the commissioner should suspend people over, then you have to do the same thing

for maybe some other offenses, like say Andrew Jones's battery the other day, which just came out. Obviously he is going to Japan and his, his team in Japan so far has not decided to retract the offer. But if something like that had happened when he was in the majors and obviously it has with other players, then maybe if you had the precedent for a DUI suspension, then you kind of do that for any crime which would be seen as equivalently bad. And I don't know. I guess that's not necessarily an argument against it, though it would certainly be a complication

because then you're almost having the baseball commissioner kind of decide the moral wrongness of crimes and what's wrong enough that a player shouldn't be allowed to play so i don't know i guess i'm okay with the way it is yeah i mean i think that they're not they're not a great analogy the reason that baseball uh regulates steroids is because it affects the competitive balance of the game and that's what the league is that's that is exactly the league's role to do and so you know you could argue about whether it's the right decision or whether they treat steroids the right way or not but clearly that it is their their purview i mean i do feel really odd when a player gets i mean you're right battery

or you know hitting your wife or hitting your girlfriend is maybe even more so. When they come back and I see them getting cheered a few days later for hitting behind the base runner or something like that, it seems weird and kind of gross and ugly, and I wish there was a free market way that we could avoid that, that these players' kind of worse offenses could be regulated. But I don't like the idea of giving it to the league office. I think that most people who make that comparison probably – it would surprise me to think that they wanted Bud Sealy to have more power because most people think Bud Sealy has too much power.

And I don't know. Most people think Batsui has too much power. And I don't know. I mean, I think that, like, with Josh Lukey, who, well, I don't even want to get into the specifics of what he did, but I sort of enjoyed the way that he was shamed this year. And I like the shaming of players. Like, unofficially, I don't know if it matters much. I don't know if it matters much to Lukey. I don't know if it matters much to the other players.

But I think I would rather keep it out of the commissioner's office. Yeah, Kevin's position, he was obviously extremely anti-Lukey, but his position on Lukey was that he didn't want any sort of rule or any kind of ban on his playing in the majors, but he just sort of hoped that each team individually would make the choice not to employ him? Yeah, I would support a team that made that choice for crimes like that. I would support a team that wouldn't sign a player that had a domestic violence charge

or perhaps, I don't know, perhaps I would say two DUIs. I mean, I don't like one. I think it's a wretched, wretched thing. But, I mean, I've known enough good people who have gotten behind a wheel that I don't know that it's, you know, it's horrible. It's awful. But I don't know that I would take away a person's livelihood over it. But, yeah, I mean, I don't know if all 30, obviously you never would get all 30 teams to do it. But I would probably cheer for a team that made a a stance out of that all right all right if you saw it's brian bruni right is brian bruni yeah if you saw brian bruni on the subway would you say anything uh

brian bruni in case you don't know has been his favorite player sort of um probably not i guess i don't know i i might just because i mean if it were someone who had people going up to them all the time and telling them that they're their favorite player i wouldn't but i kind of doubt that's ever happened to brian bruni so it might just be kind of a novel thing for him to be told that yeah but you don't have an intellectual reason for why it's not like no uh no I don't it might really seem it might actually seem condescending that he is a player yeah because it kind of is it's sort of just a joke in a way um so I probably wouldn't say anything, I guess, just because I am shy and I'm a New Yorker and New Yorkers are conditioned to be proud about not talking to celebrities because

we see them all the time. And just because I would probably have nothing to say to him at all. I don't know what I would say to him other than I used to watch you pitch and developed a strange fascination with you. And that would probably just make him uncomfortable. So I probably would tweet a picture of him. And that is all I would do. I think I would probably would give a head nod on the way out. Okay.

Only on the way out when the threat is completely removed from his area so that he would not feel uncomfortable. Right. Okay. And so actually my follow-up was going to be, what if it were Derek Jeter, a player who expects to be approached to the subway, but it sounds like you would say no to Derek Jeter as well. Derek Jeter I would definitely not talk to because he is boring. Yeah. At least his public persona is extremely boring uh so I can you have a player you would Jose Molina uh yeah

actually I might I might talk to Jose Molina because I feel like I'm almost a champion of Jose Molina um in a small way so yeah I might I might talk to Jose Molina in a small way. So yeah, I might, I might talk to Jose Molina cause I could actually talk about things that he did in a non ironic way and probably still creep him out. But maybe I would even be able to tell him something about himself that he didn't know or something. I don't know. Although I'm sure other people have told him

and he's probably tired of hearing it and wouldn't believe anything i said anyway which is probably smart on his part all right um it how long do you think it would take you to hit a pitch thrown by a major leaguer it let's say this is the this is the setup it's a major it's a legit major leaguer let's say it's uh let Let's say it's Brian Bruni in his prime. And he's only throwing fastballs. Definitely. Is that the same thing as a legit major leaguer? Let's say it's David Robertson.

Oh, okay. He's only throwing fastballs, all right? Okay. He isn't laying them down the middle, but he's just basically throwing fastballs in the strike zone. So they're not all going to be at the exact same place, at the exact same spot. But they're going to be fastballs around the strike zone.

Just throwing them as hard as you can. How many pitches until you make contact? Let's see. I'm a relatively coordinated person with some small amount of baseball experience and I suppose that would help. And if I know what pitch he's throwing, um, and I just have to just touch it, I can foul tip it. Does that count? It's good. The ball's got to go forward. Oh, that's tough.

I guess I would say I could make extremely weak contact knowing what the pitch was in 50 swings. 50, wow. Is that too low? No, I honestly don't know the answer when i my answer is usually lower than most people's i think i i my guess is um like somewhere between 18 and 26 yeah but but i don't really know i mean i honestly i don't know i've pitched going that speed i would think in just like from a batting practice machine or a pitching machine, in fewer than 50 swings.

So I guess it's just – and I guess the thing that makes Robertson so hard to hit is that he's like deceptive, but I don't know that that would make it any harder for me because I don't know what a normal guy throwing a really good fastball looks like. So there's no contrast. Yeah, the difference between the pitching machine is probably greater than I'm giving it credit for because there is going to be a lot more movement

just on a regular fastball. I mean, these guys don't throw it straight. And there's certainly going to be more of a terror factor um especially coming i mean partly because you know the unpredictability of man and also because of the arm angle is different than a batting practice or batting batting machine so i don't know maybe i'm a little low but i think i think i would be able to time it within 26 well we're both in the bbwa we would be able to time it within 26. Well, we're both in the BBWA. We should be able to arrange this somehow. Well, actually, this is the reason that I sort of...

There was a guy who did that, right? I think. I don't know. There was a guy who let himself get hit by a bat. He had been saying some batter should have let himself get hit. And so then the team said, do you want to try it? And so he went down to the cage and got hit by a 90-mile-an-hour fastball from the machine, which was a great idea.

But actually, I do intend, I mean, the listeners will get a sneak preview of an article that I intend to write someday, a researched article about how hard it is to hit and whether it's actually hard to hit or not. Because it seems to me the fact that pitchers are not selected for their ability to hit at all. Like there's not one degree of significance. And yet every single one of them gets a hit. And you look at Matt Garza.

There's never been a worse hitter alive than Matt Garza. He cannot hit. He's terrible. He's awful. And yet he got two hits this year. He didn't just put the bat on the ball two times. He put the bat on the ball, I think, nine times. And you figure major league pitchers are probably mostly excellent athletes and probably hit

in the minors or maybe... Well, not the minors, but they would have hit. They probably would have been... They were probably a good hitter in college or high school or something. Sure. They were almost all the best hitter growing up. I mean, I'm aware of that, okay? They're better hitters. They were all better hitters in Little League than everybody else in their league. However, there have to be a couple who want, who just can throw. There's got to be one guy who can snap off a breaking ball, throw 94, or maybe has a knuckleball, but can't hit at all And those two skills, they're not really related.

They're both athleticism, but so is polo. And yet you wouldn't expect them all to be great polo players. And yet there's never been a major leaguer who went 0 for 280 in his career. I mean, you go 0 for 40, you go 0 for 60. You see guys strike out 70% of time sometimes but they never go over yes so i suspect that it is secretly easy okay uh so the follow-up is how long would it take for you to get a base hit if he were throwing to you in a uh defended field uh okay and the infielders are playing in i assume uh let's they probably should they're playing in but they're not playing an extreme it's not a nine man infield or a seven man infield

it's just it's a normal alignment but they're playing in uh wow okay um probably the first hit i would get would just be placing it perfectly that it gets by the pitcher or even it doesn't get by him, but it's hard enough that it's ruled a hit because he can't feel that cleanly, but he had to move to get it. So if I said 50 swings just to hit the ball forward, that's only 17 at bats. Right.

forward that's only 17 at bats okay what is right um I'm gonna guess that in in a hundred at bats I could get lucky enough to get a hit maybe if I were I'm not extremely fast if I were if I were much faster I would probably say that I could do it faster. But yeah, I guess. Yeah. Because if it takes me 17 at-bats to touch the ball, then it would have to be a much higher number because major league defenders are good at getting out. Yeah, so 100 at-bats would be somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 swings, a little less than 300 swings.

It was about right to me. Yeah, so 100 at-bats would be somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 swings, a little less than 300 swings. It was about right to me. I would imagine that my BABIP is going to be extremely low. I would go, yeah, maybe 200 to 300 swings. Yeah. Well, okay, how about this? If you were pitching, how long would you ever get a swing and miss? Oh, right. No, I know that. See, that's actually the counter argument to my, to, to my, to the piece I want to write is that the counter argument is that Chris Davis struck out Adrian

Gonzalez swinging. And so in fact, it's that hitting is impossible. Right. Well, I mean, Chris, I don't know what his background is, but he was probably selected to be the position player who pitched because he had some sort of pitching experience. Yeah, I'm sure he was, but also Adrian Gonzalez. Right. And he struck out swinging. I think he whiffed twice. Yeah.

Would I ever get – no, I would never get a swinging strike. Never. I would – I'm confident that I could throw 5 000 pitches in a row and you'd probably get tired do you i mean have you ever have you ever clocked yourself uh not in years not since i was little it's really depressing how slowly you throw i mean i feel i have I play softball I play Sunday softball I have a good arm I throw guys out you know I'm a I'm a grown man you know and and I feel like I throw pretty hard but if you ever actually clock yourself I mean you you really you throw like maybe or something tops like yeah what did you say what was your number I was gonna say like 70 yeah I don't think i get

i'm i'm confident i couldn't hit 70 yeah i probably couldn't either if doug thorburn worked with me yeah but i mean i've been throwing my whole life i've thrown i've probably thrown i don't know i've probably thrown a hundred thousand baseballs and i i doubt i could do much better than 65. I could do better than 65. I bet I'm 62 to 65. And I have no movement at all. So yeah, I don't think I would ever get a swinging strike ever. Maybe just the element of surprise because your pitch is so slow and moves so slowly on the first pitch, if a guy is like keyed up to hit real pitches, except I guess even then they hit batting practice pitches and they don't ever miss a batting practice pitch, right? No one ever swings through a batting practice pitch.

And a guy who's throwing batting practice, I mean, that's going what? 60, 70, 70 something? 40. Oh, really? Oh, okay. Well, so no 60, 70, 70 something? 40. Oh, really? Oh, okay. Well, so no one ever misses those that I've seen. I don't know. I mean, they might foul them off, but.

Yeah, I vaguely recall seeing it once or twice, but yeah. I mean, if I got a swinging strike, the difference is that if I got a swinging strike, it would be totally unrelated to me. It would just simply be that the hitter developed a blindness, something bright, had a migraine. Whereas I honestly do believe that my ability to coordinate myself would give me a fighting chance to make contact with a fastball. Not a good chance. Not a fighting chance. Not a good chance. Not a fighting chance. Not

a fighter you'd want in your corner. By the way, we're not counting bunt hits, I assume. You can't bunt? No, I can't. Okay. I wouldn't bunt. Jeez, I'd lose a thumb. Yeah. All right. Let's see. If you were Pedro Florimon, would you do steroids? Now or pre-testing?

Yeah, that's a good question because my answer is also it's a difference. So would you do it now? Would you do it pre-testing? Yeah, go ahead. Now I would not, although I don't really know anything about steroids, and it's possible that there are designer steroids that most people know about that are undetectable and are completely safe for a player to use, safe in the sense that he's not going to get suspended. But assuming that you believe baseball and that the tests can catch things and the sport is clean and all that,

I would not do it now. Although there's still, I guess, an argument to be made that it still makes sense to do it if you are a really marginal player because you might not get caught. And if it does help you a lot, you might make more money than you would have made even if you are suspended. Ethics. Yeah, the ethics.

I don't know. The ethics. kill me. I don't know. Probably if everyone else was doing it and I was a marginal guy and I wasn't independently wealthy and had a family to support and all that. And it was the thing that I had devoted my life to. I don't know. I think maybe I would have done it. Or at least I don't want to say that I wouldn't have done it because I feel like that's almost presumptuous without ever having been in that situation and had the incentives to do it that you would. So either I would have done it or I'd like to think that I wouldn't have, but I'm not at all confident in the fact that I wouldn't have when actually presented with that situation.

Yeah, I'd like to think I would not have, but I think I probably would have. I mean, it seems to me that if, whether everybody was doing it or whether you merely thought that everybody was doing it, I think that it would be a pretty easy ethical rationalization to make. Yes. I mean, you're involved in a competitive thing, and if it doesn't disrupt the competitiveness of it because everybody's doing it, then it doesn't really seem that bad. I mean, it's all fake. Baseball is all fake.

And so, you fake. Why not? You're not really stealing from pensioners or anything like that. You're cheating. Cheating and stealing are the same, but they're also different. Despite my hopes for myself, I think that I probably there's a decent chance that I would have convinced myself. Especially if you're Pedro Flormont and you have such incredible financial incentives. It's not like coming from a gated community in Orange County and when your baseball career ends, you're going to be a stockbroker.

No, you're going to go back to the DR and be poor probably. Yeah. All right. Last question. If somebody in the world would pay you to write about anything you wanted to write about but not baseball, you were excluded from writing about baseball, what would you write about anything you wanted to write about, but not baseball? You were excluded from writing about baseball. What would you write about? I would probably write science fiction. Oh, interesting. Do you write science fiction? Not now, just because I'm constantly in a state of writing about baseball or worrying about what I'm going to write about baseball.

a state of writing about baseball or worrying about what I'm going to write about baseball. But if I had time or if it or if I had to change careers or something, I would probably do that, I think maybe because that was just kind of my favorite genre growing up and maybe still is. And probably I don't know that it influenced my writing style in that I am now writing about baseball and there's not a whole lot of carryover or crossover between the two, but I would probably do that. It's something I did just kind of for fun growing up and it gave me a lot of pleasure and it gives me a lot of pleasure to read and if i were able to do it well um i would take a lot of pride in that i think so i would definitely uh at least try to be a novelist and probably be a failed novelist and i would probably my first failed novel would be a science

fiction novel oh i hope you write one. Well, I hope I do too. I would write about... Because I lose my current job. I would, I'm not joking when I say that. I would actually write about, I think if, assuming that it were financially sustainable, that somebody would pay me to do it, I would write about household pests and bugs in general.

And exterminating them. I think that when you get a house, you realize how at the mercy of pestilence you are. You're always one bed bug away from your life being ruined or one cockroach away from living with cockroaches for the rest of your life. Ants are my favorite animal. Spiders are spectacular. The sheer mass of bugs in the world,

and so many of them, and so many trillions upon trillions upon trillions of them, it's one of my favorite topics. I like to read about it, and I would love to write about it and I never will. Well, maybe, so would you want to be, uh, an exterminator or just an entomologist and study them or, or wipe them out? Um, I don't know. I think study them in order to wipe them out more efficiently. Yeah, I think that. I would like to write about bugs from a perspective that would be useful to a normal person.

It would be kind of service journalism. Anyway, that's all. Entomologist slash exterminator. What's that? Entomologist slash exterminator. What's that? Entomologist slash exterminator. Slash popular science writer. Yes. Okay.

All right, so that's the last show of the year. All right, well, it's been a good half a year or less than half a year, however long we've been doing this. We'll be back on Wednesday then with episode 110, and that would theoretically be an email show if you send us emails. So do that, please, at podcast at baseballprospectus.com, and that will give us things to talk about next week.