Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 110: Players with Criminal Pasts/How Much Do Pitcher Hitting, Fielding, and Baserunning Matter?

Episode Date: January 2, 2013

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about how players with criminal pasts should be treated and how much pitchers’ non-pitching skills matter.

Good morning and welcome to episode 110 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectus. It is episode one of the year 2013. Ben Lindbergh is in New York, New York. I'm Sam Miller in Long Beach, California. Ben Lindbergh, how was your fiscal cliff? My end of the year was nice. I live a few avenues away from Times Square, but I was not in Times Square. And I watched Friday Night Lights for the last five days or so. Really? What do you think of that show? I think it's great. How far in are you?

I finished it. I didn't watch the entire thing in those five days. I had been watching it before. But it is excellent. When I started it, I wasn't so sure because I don't care about football of any sort, let alone high school football. But it became not really about the football pretty quickly. So I enjoyed it. When I started it, I was very sure.

But the further in I got, which would be probably around, I don't know, early season two, I suppose, I started to get a bit tired of some of the same storytelling tropes over and over and found it a little bit of a burden to get through, and I was skipping some episodes by the end. So it's not a show that I really generally recommend, although I enjoyed parts of it. I liked it more as it went on, although season two I know some people didn't like because of some of the strange storylines. Yeah, I mean, season two was sort of horrible, but yeah. I mean, I thought there were structural issues that I started to notice in season two, in addition to season two itself also being the worst season. Anyway. All right.

Friday Night Lights. There we go. itself also being the worst season. Anyway. All right. Friday Night Lights. There we go. Today we're going to talk about just a few or perhaps even a couple emails, including one about pitchers hitting.

So why don't you start reading? Okay. You want me to start with the pitchers hitting one or the one that we probably will answer more quickly? It doesn't matter to me. All right. that we probably will answer more quickly. It doesn't matter to me.

All right. Mark sent us a question about our last episode when we talked about Josh Luckey and how, I don't know, what we thought about whether teams should employ him or not employ him or whether there should be any ban against him or anything like that. Mark asks,

I wanted to ask about your comments about not hiring people with criminal pasts. I wondered about other jobs. Would you think that, say, a plumber should be stopped from making a living because of a criminal record? I get worried about stuff like this. Often when people in the public eye have made a mistake and come back from it, they can be a force for good. So that is Mark's question. It's a very good question. It is. I'm not sure that you or I, either one of us has an intellectually consistent answer to this. It's a tricky thing. And, you know, I think that when we're talking about baseball players, we can tend to get a bit more driven by

emotion than reason. I don't think that I would want a plumber to be blackballed just because of a criminal past. I would explicitly not like that, I believe. And so why is it that we're comfortable saying something along those lines for ballplayers, do you think? I don't know. I guess it's the nature of that particular crime, possibly. But I guess it also maybe has something to do with the role model aspect, which I'm not really at all comfortable with. So I don't know why that would sway me,

but just the idea that everyone would know about the crime and that there was no real consequence to it, I suppose. But I don't know. I guess it depends on what you do after the crime and whether there is kind of a change of heart or a pen, or some sort of atonement, I guess. And in his case, maybe there hasn't been at least publicly. But you wouldn't, you wouldn't expect a plumber to atone for anything. No, no, I wouldn't. So good job. So here's what I think. I think there are two factors at play here. One is that, and I don't know that either one of these is, like I said, I don't know that either one of these holds up to rigorous analysis, but I think this is probably where the thinking comes in,

and it's a starting point. So one is that we look at jobs as professional athletes as essentially like a lottery ticket that these guys get. I mean, it's a humongous reward. It's not like they're working hard doing plumbing or whatever to sort of provide for their family. They're making insane amounts of money. family. They're making insane amounts of money. And I think that generally we're uncomfortable giving those jobs to people who we don't like. It feels kind of unfair that somebody who doesn't deserve such a thing would get it. And I think there's always kind of a bit of an envy in cheering. You want guys that you like to get

those jobs you don't want guys that you don't like to get those jobs so once they've crossed a certain threshold for unlikeability it becomes kind of hard to accept that they have a a ideal dream life right so i think that's one issue i think the other issue is that with a plumber, it is a business transaction. They come. They fix your pipes. They get paid. They go home. They put food on their tables for their families.

But in baseball, we cheer for these people, and it feels a bit odd to cheer for a wife feeder or to cheer for a serial drunk driver. I mean certainly if – or to cheer for somebody who has expressed bigoted views. And it's really a job unlike any other where you are essentially kind of allying yourself with the person, um, in a completely fantastic way. It's not, there's nothing remotely real about it. And yet to, to, for three hours every day, put yourself in an emotional space with this player. Um, and knowing that this player is sort of rotten to the core, uh, is kind of troubling and unwelcome. And I don't know that that's fair to the player to hold him to that standard,

but I think that's where it comes from. Okay. I think I have cheered for a plumber at least once after several days without a hot shower at one point. But yes, I understand. And I guess that probably is it or both of those things are it.

And I guess emotionally that kind of makes sense and intellectually maybe not quite so much. So I don't know. Just out of curiosity, we talked about it sort of from the idea that it's not probably – I mean it's never probably going to be the case that all 30 teams would refuse to employ a person because of something like this. But – and so there's really in a way there's no stakes for the player. I mean it's not as though they're going to be unemployed rather than have a job. But would it change your mind if in fact it were the difference between them having a job and having no job whatsoever and being a plumber? I don't follow.

If it were – I don't know. I guess would you – well, okay. So I need to rephrase because I phrased it poorly. If it were realistic that every team would refuse to employ, say, Delman Young, instead of just like what we're talking about, which is kind of like – Because of his poor playing or his bat throwing or something? Because of his – let's say his anti-Semitic being. Right. submitting being. I mean, it's like we were sort of talking about one team not hiring him or maybe some teams not hiring him or our team not hiring him.

But, you know, Delman Young is still going to get a job somewhere. So what if, though, it were all teams? Would you find it an injustice if all teams refused to hire him? though it were all teams, would you find it an injustice if all teams refused to hire him? In his case, I'm not sure anyone should hire him just purely because of the playing. But I don't know. I guess I wouldn't consider it an injustice if each team kind of reached that decision independently and there wasn't some sort of edict from the commissioner's office. I don't know. I guess, I mean, there might be a situation where it actually wouldn't make sense

for a team to do it if a player had done something so heinous and yet somehow remained a free man who was able to play baseball. And that was just such common public knowledge. And it was kind of a marginal player like a reliever or a Delman Young who probably won't contribute all that much anyway. I guess at some point there could be some sort of PR backlash where it actually wouldn't make sense to employ the player just economically for that team because he wouldn't be good enough to overcome any loss of attendance or or public protests or anything of that sort um so i guess that could happen i doubt it would ever happen with a star

player but all right well i shouldn't have taken us down that road. We were doing so well. I don't know if we were. Okay, so we have another question. This one is from Sean in New Jersey. And Sean asked, was wondering about pitcher valuation. In the recent AL MVP debate, defense and base running were big factors for many voters. Does anyone ever consider a pitcher's hitting, base running, and defense in factoring their war or other stats? I would think that each NL team is probably giving about 400 at-bats to their pitchers,

and this is a full-time player that is sort of ignored. Thank you for your time. So Sean inspired you to look into this and write about it. Yeah, I did write about it. So you can read Sam's article, which is up at BP right now. But I guess you can kind of... We'll wait quietly. Yeah, right.

And you can, I guess, summarize your finding. Yeah, so just as far as I know, so our warp does include uh pitchers total value so our pitcher warp does include we have you can look at just i think it's called p warp pitching warp is just pitching alone if you want to look at that on our site but we do warp encompasses all of those things exactly and as as of of at least midway through this season, baseball reference, as far as I could tell, did not include any of that in their war, and I don't believe Fangraphs does in their basic pitcher war. Although if anybody wants to correct me, that's fine, but that's my

understanding. So what I looked at is essentially how much value pitchers can contribute to this. And the difference between the best and the worst pitchers is actually significant. The difference between the best last year, who was Mike Leak, and the worst last year, who was, I think, Tommy Hansen, is about two wins. And two wins is a significant difference a significant difference in value i mean it's the sort of thing that you would pay 10 million dollars for in a free agent um it's an average player it's a it's a big deal right it's uh if it were the difference between uh uh a pitcher's pitching war uh if it were two wins would be significant and everybody would be aware of it and yet most people i think don't really talk that much about Mike Leak's value with the bat or the glove or base running.

And so I think the question I was asking in the piece was whether we should pay much attention to it. And there are a couple of issues. But I think the biggest one is that just because there is a big spread, just because Mike Leak was significantly better than Tommy Hansen this year, doesn't mean that that's necessarily his true value because pitchers don't get that many fielding opportunities. They don't get that many hitting opportunities. They get almost no base running opportunities. And so a year of performance doesn't really necessarily convince you that that's a true talent that he has now.

Mike Leak, I think it's fair to say that Mike Leak is a better hitter than Tommy Hansen. That's a demonstrated skill at this point, but he is probably not two wins better as a hitter. And the spread that we saw this year is probably you know sort of a little bit of a statistical outlier um i would guess that at that at least you would have uh that just that difference cut that difference in half moving forward and probably go even further than that i might i might say a quarter of the difference and so, you're still talking about a half a win if you shaved it by three quarters. And I think that if I were a front office and there were some of these kind of extreme instances of pitchers showing value with their bat and their glove, I would be comfortable paying

for a portion of it. But I would regress it heavily. You know that you're probably, paying for a portion of it, but I would regress it heavily. You know that you're probably, if you're looking at a person on the extreme end of that distribution, it's probably a little bit of a fluke and you probably just want to regress heavily. Yeah, I mean, the most played appearances by any pitcher last year, it looks like, was 84 for Johnny Cueto and Matt Cain. So that's not a lot of play appearances. And in 2011, Mike Leak, who had a 749 OPS in 2012, in 2011 he had a 451 OPS and was bad. Yeah, if these were short stops, putting up these numbers in 80 at bats, you wouldn't even think twice.

That's less than April. And you'd be sort of a fool to put too much into it. So it's probably just like everything where you're really limited by sample sizes, but that doesn't mean that it's irrelevant either. sample sizes, but that doesn't mean that it's irrelevant either. My guess is that there are probably three or four pitchers whose fielding I would trust enough to pay a little bit extra for. Maybe three or four pitchers whose hitting I would trust to pay a little bit extra for. And base running is a total non-issue. There's just no base running to speak of.

Right, which is not surprising, I guess, because you figure pitchers are almost never on base, and when they are, they're wearing their warm-up jacket and trotting from place to place. Yeah, looking basically like fools. Yes. And I mean, I think I would probably... I don't know that it would always, like, okay, so Mark Burley is a player who's deep, might pay a little bit extra for, and a little extra, I might sort of pay for two or three extra runs a year, which is like a million extra dollars a year. like a million extra dollars a year.

But Mark Burley makes enough and gets a $50-some million contract that I don't know that that kind of little margin would even show up in his contract. Yeah, I would be curious to talk to someone who has given out contracts for pitchers and ask whether it's ever been a consideration. We should ask Dan Evans about that. I think we would always be interested in talking to somebody who has given out contracts. Yes. But I guess Sean was sort of asking in the context of the MVP debate. So in that context, I guess you would factor this in more heavily, right? I mean, you wouldn't necessarily pay that much for it projecting for the future, but if some pitcher had had some fluky Babbitt season for 60 at-bats and had hit 300 or something because he had a bunch of infield hits that happened to roll the right way, would you factor that in heavily for the the Cy Young debate at least or for the Cy Young debate

I don't know that that I don't know that I count hitting for Cy Young well that's interesting yeah um okay well let's say it's it's someone who's in consideration for MVP, and it's a pitcher who has never hit in any previous season, and his true talent, your confidence is not very high, but he just happened to luck into a bunch of base hits, and that made him actually contribute something offensively, even if it was mostly luck. That is, I guess, still something that you would factor in? I think I probably wouldn't really factor it in. I mean, maybe a tiny bit, but I think I would be a little bit skeptical of the numbers because there are two ways that statistics are unconvincing in small samples one is that the performance isn't necessarily the players true talent in small samples the other is that the metric might not have actually picked up the signal in a small

sample and so I think I would probably be I would probably not give the pitcher all that much credit if it seemed like an outlier his own career I think I would probably just give the pitcher all that much credit if it seemed like an outlier, his own career. I think I would probably just consider it a fluke. And whether the performance was there or not, I would sort of probably give a little bit of extra credence to the guys whose samples were big enough to weed out that flukiness. samples were big enough to weed out that flukiness. Okay. And then I guess that goes double or triple for fielding, since we know how much a non-pitcher's fielding stats can fluctuate from year to year, and obviously a pitcher has fewer opportunities and fluctuates even more.

So I guess would you just not even look at that until a pitcher has been around for, I don't know, a decade or something, and we know whether he's good at defense? Or, I mean, is that something that you would just kind of dismiss because it probably doesn't mean anything for several years? I don't know. I think that pitch, I don't know this for a fact, but just based on the glances that I looked at this weekend, I think the pitching defense might actually stabilize a bit more quickly because a huge portion of it is in pick-offs. All right, well, that's Dickie you mentioned is great at holding the runners and picking them up.

I would think that pick-offs would be a skill that would be pretty easily identified quickly. So I don't know. I might take it seriously. Yeah, I'd think about it. Yeah, I wouldn't blow it off. Okay. All right.

I guess we're done with our first show of 2013 then. Hopefully something will happen today that we can talk about tomorrow. Okay. All right.