Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1108: Always Look on the Bright Side of Baseball

Episode Date: September 9, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the end of their Hurricane Harvey relief raffle, the Indians’ and Diamondbacks’ winning streaks (and the Dodgers’ losing streak), an ambitious Hector Sanchez framing attempt, the dominance of softball star Monica Abbott, Giants’ fans perceptions of Brandon Belt, and why the prevailing tone of analytical baseball writing seems […]

Hello and welcome to episode 1108 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I am Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs, joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Hello, Ben. Hello. How are you? I'm okay. That's good. Okay.

Good small talk. Well, this is the last day of our raffle entry. I don't know when this specific podcast will be published so perhaps as you listen to this it's already passed but friday i guess officially at the end of morning will be the uh the cutoff for the raffle entry for hurricane harvey relief where you can get the uh the excellent swag of russell carlton's new book and effectively wild t-shirt ben and sam's book that i'm definitely not jealous of not being involved in, and a broken microphone, which I actually am not jealous of not being involved in. But firstly, I would like to say all credit should go to you, Ben, for this idea.

I think it came innocently enough out of making, I think it was a throwaway joke about raffling off the microphone. And then somebody just thought, actually, you should do that. But the donation angle, entirely Ben's idea. He's the one who puts thought into everything. And so credit to you. But I don't know what kind of expectations you had when this began. But the reality has certainly exceeded mine. I can say that much for sure.

I think we're up around right in the vicinity of $9,000. That's right. Which is incredible. And I guess the drawing, I don't know exactly how you plan to do the drawing, but I would assume it's going to be with a Microsoft Excel random number generator. Yeah, I could do that. I found something called randompicker.com that I think I can use to maybe make it public in some way.

So I will probably try using that. But yeah, the raffle format was suggested by listeners, I think, because I had initially thought of an auction. And I'm glad we didn't do an auction because I don't think anyone would have bid $9,000 on this package. So a raffle was definitely a better idea. But even so, yeah, I am very impressed by the degree to which our audience came through here. It's really nice to see. I don't know. One of the unfortunate angles here is, as mentioned, immediately prior to beginning to record the podcast, it already feels like we're a little behind because there are developing disasters seemingly everywhere.

But yes, I guess we can always try to break more things that we use and try to sell them off. Yeah. No, I don't have any other fun broken stuff lying around, I don't think, but maybe I'll get some over time. But yeah, it feels like it's a good time to wrap up this raffle because the world has already moved on to trying to help other people in maybe even more acute need. So anyway, it has been a pleasure to see all of these hundreds,

I guess, of emails rolling in over the past week or so, many of them with nice messages attached. So thanks to everyone. Yeah, you have definitely answered the call and been some. I'm sitting in an old, not very good anymore office chair.

This is an office chair that I've been sitting in for about six years of daily baseball writing. This is an office chair that has survived falling out of a moving truck in a busy intersection during rush hour. It's got the battle scars. So I guess let's start the betting at $10,000. Yeah, throw mine in there too. I've had mine since college, I think since maybe sophomore year of college or something, I've had this chair. So yeah, it's a bit beat up, but I have certainly sat in it a lot.

If that's something that makes you want to pay for a chair, I don't know why it would. I don't want to think about why it would. So let's continue. Yeah, I guess it might actually cost a fortune to try to ship an office chair as well. So okay, we're not going to we're not going to sell off the office chairs but uh yeah now we know that the community is out there in case we ever wanted to so i don't know as uh as far as banter goes i don't know what you might have but i feel like we are absolutely obligated to discuss the uh the cleveland

indians who last lost last season they are up to 15 15 consecutive wins which is the longest winning streak since the what was it the 2002 oakland athletic is that the right answer uh yeah there was a giants team in there wasn't there i was i was just reading a summary of this and let's see this is a bill bear news post about this at hardball talk he says the last team to win at least 15 in a row was the 2002 to 2003 Giants, who won 15 straight. Oh, okay. So that's a cross-season winning streak. So that's eh.

That doesn't really count the same way. So, yeah, within the same season, it is the Moneyball A's from 2002. And, yeah, it's, I mean, there are a bunch of streaks this long, but a lot of them are really archaic and there are not a lot of teams that have done this in recent years. So yeah, I think Joe Sheehan had the numbers in one of his recent newsletters. So I'm trying to dig that up, but it's more rare than I even thought it was. I think his, let's see, longest winning streaks. Obviously, there's like, you know, 26 games is the longest winning streak. That's the 1916 Giants. But in the post-war era or in the integration era, at then only five teams that have had more. And yeah, it's been since 2002 with the A's. And then before that, 1977 Royals had 16. But that's, yeah, for others, you have to go back even further. So this is a rare streak at this point.

Travis Sachik wrote on Fangraphs on September 1st about how the Indians quote look like AL favorites. And since then, they have won eight more consecutive games. There are two things. There are some angles here that make the streak more and less impressive. So if I wanted to throw some cold water on everyone, the Indians last eight consecutive wins have come against the White Sox, who are terrible, and the Tigers, who have rendered themselves terrible through subtraction.

So these are not major league teams they've been defeating. But then on the other hand, the streak began by sweeping the Yankees. Previous to that, they swept the Royals and took a game from the Red Sox. And importantly, the last 11 wins have all been on the road. The Indians swept an 11-game road trip, which is, well, I guess it's no longer unbelievable. I have to believe that this has happened but uh at least it shifts the odds the home field advantage is we always think of it as being like four percentage points right so it makes the the white socks and the tigers a

little more difficult to beat and the thing that has stood out well let me take that back okay the thing that stands out to be the most about the ind is the fact that they've won 11 or 15, 15 games in a row. The other thing that I can't help but notice is that in third place, according to Fangraphs, now this is going to use Fangraphs pitching war. Third place, we have the Dodgers, 21.4. Second place, Red Sox, 21.6. First place, Indians, 26.3. The Indians have separated themselves. First place Indians, 26.3.

The Indians have separated themselves. I ran a quick analysis yesterday that was not actually about the Indians, but I went back to, I think it was 1995. I was trying to analyze. I was actually trying to figure out if the Orioles have the worst pitching staff that might ever belong to a playoff team. The answer is, I don't know. I didn't complete the research. But based on that analysis, the Indians are on track to have

what would be the best full season pitching year in at least these two plus decades might have to write about this next week in fact almost certainly will if travis hasn't already beaten me to it without me noticing so indians on track to have maybe the greatest team pitching season in a while andrew miller has been injured cory kluber missed a month. Hasn't really mattered. This team is outstanding. Yep. Indians are good. That's what I got. Yeah. That's always kind of where I come down with winning streaks is I don't have a whole lot to say about them because they don't teach us that much about a team because ultimately it's a couple of weeks of performance really. And basically it just adjusts our opinion of the team slightly one direction or another.

We already thought this was a good team. Now we think maybe it's an even better team. But coming into the year, I thought this was, I think, probably the best team in the league or certainly, you know, top two. And it took a while for that to really show up and for them to distance themselves from the other AL Central teams. But that has finally happened now. They even had like back-to-back double headers, didn't they? They had on August 30th, they played two games against the Yankees. And then Friday, August 1st, they had back-to-back games on the same day.

I mean, against the Tigers in Detroit and then had to keep playing Detroit and then had to go to Chicago. Yeah, it's really impressive that they've done this. And we got an email actually from a listener named Charlie. And he says, I just saw a tweet listing all of the 15 game winning streaks since 1947 and ranking them by average margin of victory. The 2017 Indians led the group with an average margin of 5.4 runs. The 1951 Giants, however, had a streak with a margin of 1.9 runs. So my question is, which is more improbable?

My first thought is that what the Indians have done is more impressive. But the more I've stared at that 1.9, the more I've thought about how crazy lucky a team must be to string those wins together by a few runs. So that is a good question. other by a few runs. So that is a good question. This makes what the Indians are doing even more impressive because they are just dominating opponents and these games often haven't even been close. I don't know the answer to that question. I guess if you told me that a team was going to have a 1.9 run differential over a certain span, I would say it's less likely that they would have won all of those games than if you told me the Indians number. So in that sense, the Giants number is more improbable or streak is more improbable.

But on the other hand, maybe it is more improbable that a team could put together that kind of dominance over a span of 15 games. So the Indians streak is certainly more impressive. Maybe it's more unlikely, too. And not to be lost in all this is, oh, by the way, the Arizona Diamondbacks have won 13 consecutive games. And they've also, I think, within that streak, they've won six against the Dodgers. I think that's accurate. Yeah, the Dodgers have lost seven in a row and something of something as well.

So, yeah, that has also made this whole i mean there are three interesting streaks going on right now and the diamondbacks obviously have dramatically reduced the dodgers lead not to any worrisome degree because the lead was so huge when it started but they have really chopped it in half or something close to that just over this span and And yeah, and we haven't seen two coinciding streaks of this length ever, I think, has been established. So that has increased the intrigue around this. It's impressive stuff all around. And the opposite of that for the Dodgers, I just, we haven't learned all that much about the teams, really. We've learned that maybe the Dodgers are not the best team ever. And we've learned that the Diamondbacks and Indians are good.

But we knew those things before the streak started, and maybe we have just—we know them a bit more now than we did before that. But as you pointed out in a recent post, I think the Diamondbacks' success this season is very surprising if you kind of zoom out and look at it at a full season level relative to preseason expectations, because we thought they'd be decent, pretty good, but not this great. This is they're a really good team now. Yeah, that pitching staff is just greatly exceeded expectations. I'm sure that within the next few weeks, either on this podcast or your other one or in both and in posts, I don't know, but it's going to be time to put together posts that talk about what all this means for the playoffs. And the answer is nothing. The answer is pretty much always nothing that I don't want to burst any bubbles, I guess, but there's never really been any compelling evidence to demonstrate that how a team plays down the stretch has any real effect on how it plays in the playoffs. It all matters kind of no matter what. And of course, there is the additional

factor of how playoff rosters are different and a playoff player usage is different and you know what honestly the dodgers did not want to go into a slump like this that much is clear i don't think that they ever really cared about winning 116 games which by the way is now impossible for them to do in the regular season but as much as i don't think they ever wanted a slump they're not playing for anything like almost not anything and so while i don't want to sit here and argue that the dodgers aren't trying their best what's their what's their motivation to use some i don't know theater 101 kind of language i don't know what they really have aside from just trying to keep everyone healthy and so uh i was disappointed the other day to see that wilmer font got blown up because i was

kind of big on wilmer Font's AAA season. But Wilmer Font is not going to be pitching for the Dodgers in the playoffs. So that just doesn't really matter. So good for the Demobacks for building their own self-confidence, I guess. And bad for the Dodgers, I guess, for not winning the most games that any team has ever won. But my opinion of them has not really changed in any meaningful way. Indians, I feel better about them. But I was looking at some math going back, and just before the Indians' win streak began,

at Fangraphs, we had them projected to win 61% of their remaining games. Now that the win streak has, well, it's not over, but now that it's at 15 games, they're projected to win 62% of their remaining games. So the math math not really that convinced that anything much has changed of significance for the indians but what i do like one angle that i really like going back to with the indians is let me just make sure that i have this correct but i'm pretty sure that the indians two most valuable players this year have been

cory kluber and jose ramirez and that that is definitely true so at least according to fangraphs Corey Kluber 6.1 war second place on the team Jose Ramirez 5.2 war and what is great about this to me is that neither Corey Kluber nor Jose Ramirez were ever anything when they were younger they were just they were non-prospects I always like to analyze which good players were never really prospects I'll probably do it again in the offseason or next week depends on how desperate i get but i guess the indians get to come with kluber and ramirez who are two out of nowhere kind of uh star players and and the other or one of the other really good teams in the american league gets to come at you with jose altuve and dallas keitel who were never anything either altuve was always an interesting prospect but i don't think i need to go into detail about what made him so interesting and why he wasn't considered a premium prospect. But that stuff is fun. And

it doesn't teach us any new lessons because this is something that's been written about before. But it's always a helpful reminder to recall that sometimes players just become star players from nothing. Yeah. You got anything else? Yeah. One quick thing. I don't know whether you saw this tweet a couple nights ago, but there was a framing attempt in a Padres game that I think is notable. And I will send it to you now just so you can see like a highlight of a little league catcher who tries to frame some pitch that's like, you know, five feet out of the strike zone and just like yanks it back into the zone. And once in a while they even get a call because whatever, it's kids and it's little league umpires, but it just looks very silly that they even tried to do it. You don't usually see that at the big league level because umpires are pretty good catchers know that they're not going to get those calls they're not going to try to get those calls but on let's see i think it was september 6th yeah it was the what wednesday night in the padres game

with the cardinals there was a framing attempt and this is not Austin Hedges, the framing savant. This is Hector Sanchez, who was catching for the Padres that night, and he's about an average framer, maybe a little bit worse than that. But he made an attempt to frame a pitch by Denelson Lemaitre that bounced, and bounced far from the plate, even. bounced and bounced far from the plate even and uh it it bounced uh i would say i don't know outside by maybe six inches or so but in front of the plate and sanchez kind of short hops it gloves it and then pulls it back into the center of the strike zone like very obviously just moves it like a couple of feet and holds it there for a couple seconds as if he has a real shot at getting this call.

He did not get the call. Do you think, looking at this, do you think that this is something that Hector Sanchez knew he was doing? Or do you think that this is just a reflex that he has as a catcher? I mean, I would think that it's not a reflex to frame a ball that bounces in the dirt. I don't know. I mean, I could see if he actually caught the ball on the fly. That's usually a prerequisite for getting a strike call.

But this, to me, the way he holds it there, as if he might actually get the call on this one, there's just zero chance. there as if he might actually get the call on this one there's just zero chance and i would think that if anything this has to hurt you right because i mean an umpire is going to see this very obvious attempt to manipulate him it's almost an insult to say that you had any shot of getting this call so this seems like just a bad idea for catcher umpire relations period but it's very silly i will link to the gif so that everyone can enjoy it because i know i did and the hitter who's uh who's in the box watching the pitch watching the pitch doesn't seem to have any understanding of what uh what took place behind the play the umpire doesn't have any visible reaction the pitcher goes out of the frame the fans behind the screen are at a padres game so

they're clearly not paying attention so i don't know hetra sanchez is lucky that there was a tv camera focused on this and that somebody made a gif because otherwise this is going to be lost in the ether yeah yeah this is very silly very silly okay well i guess going through uh going through the emails there are a few other things i wanted to mention thaddeus wrote in with a funny looking box score from a game a minor league game between Florida and Dayton this was I believe the last game of the season and what made this game notable is that Dayton utility player I don't know if he was a utility player but he sure as hell is a utility player now Blake Butler Blake Butler was batting leadoff for the Dayton Tortugas going up against the Florida Fire Frogs I don't know what's going on in minor league baseball today but this is where we are and uh blake butler is a guy he is uh he was a 15th round

draft pick a few years ago he is uh 23 years old he's in a ball and this year he had a 559 ops following last year's 577 ops so you're a very good baseball player blake butler i've got some bad news about your career but nevertheless blake but Butler was leading off for Dayton. And the thing that he did, or at least the thing that the team allowed him to do, was play all nine positions. He went in order, first base, second base, shortstop, third base, left field, center field, right field, catcher, pitcher. He went 0 for 3 to play with a walk, struck out, and he batted 212. But I wanted to ask you, what to you is more impressive about Blake Butler's game which again granted I don't know how impressive it is but there were two things two things about his

game that get my attention and I don't know how to rank them one Blake Butler caught a shutout inning he was a catcher he has never caught before at least not as a professional not to my knowledge but he was able to catch it looks like he caught Aaron Quillen K I don't really know. Well you know what Aaron if you want me to pronounce your name then you should get really good at baseball then I'll have to figure it out but Blake Butler I think caught a shutout inning thrown by Aaron Q and then in the ninth he threw a shutout inning in which he allowed two hits no walks no strikeouts but no runs in the inning so what do you think is is more remarkable that he caught or pitched a shutout inning? That's a tough one.

Well, without knowing anything about how the innings went and without having seen him catch or pitch, I would say it's certainly got to be more rare for a position player who is not a catcher to catch than for a position player who is not a pitcher to pitch. We see that fairly regularly these days. And there are emergency catchers on every roster, but it's rare that those emergencies happen. And even the emergency catchers are probably the emergency catchers because they have some sort of catching experience at some level. And maybe he did too. So, you know, if he used to catch in high school or college, I don't know what his educational background is, if he did catch as an amateur, then it wouldn't be so impressive to me. But I guess just based on the sheer numbers of people who do this, probably it is more impressive that he caught than that he pitched.

Although, I don't know what the rate of scoreless innings is among position player pitchers. I know that you have detailed that position player pitchers, BABIP is not really bad, but on the whole, of course, they are pretty bad at pitching. So probably the rate of scoreless outings is fairly low. I can tell you this, this was actually Butler's seventh pitching appearance of the season. It's just been that kind of year for the Dayton Tortugas and Blake Butler. And in his six and two thirds innings of work, he's allowed one run with three strikeouts, two walks. So good for Blake Butler.

So now I'm going to go with the catching. Catching being more difficult. Yeah. Maybe he has a long career of doing everything ahead of him. I don't really know. Did you have anything to... I think that you did not. So Monica Abbott, have we ever discussed Monica Abbott before? Have you ever discussed Monica Abbott before? No, I really was. I don't know if I was aware of what she has done

before we got this email. I definitely was not. So we got an email from Elliot, a listener, Elliot, who sent in a copy of a genuine magazine page that a co-worker, right, a co-worker left on his desk. This appears to be from Sports Illustrated, the June, one of the June editions. I don't know how often Sports Illustrated goes out, but this article is dated at the bottom. June 26th, 2017, Sports Illustrated, page 22. This is an article written by one Kelsey McKinney. It's titled The Case for Monica Abbott. And Elliot's co-worker has written on top of the page the question in blue ink better than Kershaw

question mark. Monica Abbott is a softball pitcher who appears to be a god, a god, a goddess, I should say, of softball. And I was completely unaware of this. And we got another email this week that asked whether we think of softball as a form of baseball i don't have a very informed opinion about that i think that they're obviously very similar but i don't know if i would go so far as to say that softball is a form of baseball but i can say that i am softball ignorant or at least unaware there's just too much baseball to keep my attention on so So I definitely had not heard of Monica Abbott until this email. Had you ever heard the name? No, I don't think so. No. Well, Monica

Abbott is unbelievable. And among the reasons why, so the softball mound, many of you might be aware that the softball mound is 43 feet away from home plate. Baseball mound, of course, is 17 and a half feet further away. This is why you get baseball pitchers who throw in the 90s and softball pitchers who sometimes throw in the 70s and no one in softball can hit. Well, one of the reasons why is that those pitches, of course, look a lot faster because pitching is all a matter of how much time you have to react.

When the mound is nearly a third of the distance closer to home plate, it's hard to pick up the ball but i will i'll just uh read one line here the batter enters the box and abbott lowers her six foot three my god okay so the batter enters the box and abbott lowers her six foot three frame into a crouch somewhere between a skiers and a sprinters what she calls the quote power position from there with a precise combination of grace and strength she explodes upwards achieving triple extension the ankle the knee of the hip all in line, so that after she releases the softball, it screams across the plate at 77 miles per hour. That's the equivalent of a 108-mile-per-hour Major League Fastball.

So, Monica Abbott, hardest thrower in softball, to my knowledge, to the article's knowledge, it seems like. There's a reference here to pitchers who are, some pitchers are reference here to pitches who are some pitches are able to throw 70 some pitches are able to throw 73 abbott is out there throwing 77 which is the equivalent of 108 which means that her effective velocity exceeds the greatest effective velocity we've ever seen in baseball because aroldis chapman is topped out at 105 so there's that now madoka abbott has lost which flummoxed me when I was reading this article, because it began with the knowledge that she could throw basically 108 miles per hour. And then I scrolled down and realized that there are games where she's lost in allowed runs. But she, let's see, she just went 19 and three and nobody else won more than 10 games. She had an

ERA under one where the second best ERA was over two two one other pitcher had triple digit strikeouts with 100 abbott had 185 so there's just these unbelievable statistics that abbott has put up and she's put them up since college and she signed the the softball league's first ever million dollar contract which i don't know anything about the softball league economics but worth it it's worth it it's absolutely worth it six years but still yeah and there's a what it's saying here there's a an attendance clause to help sort of a attendance incentive i should say attendance bonus is a loophole that makes up the rest of the salary because teams do not have much of a budget but long story short here i could i mean might as well just read the entire article on the podcast

i'm not going to do that even though it's only one page. But for anyone who wants to know more, just do a Google search for Monica Abbott, who certainly appears to be at least the Mike Trout or Clayton Kershaw of her sport and is almost certainly a combination of the two. She is, I don't know, as valuable as what peak Shohei Otani would be, I guess, even though she doesn't really hit. She is so much better than every other pitcher and she's been doing it for like a decade. Yeah, she's 32. Yeah, the article just kind of makes the case that she is not only the greatest of all time softball player, but that she's just the greatest of all time athlete relative to her competition. I don't know enough to say whether that's the case or not, but the article does provide plenty of evidence that she is more of an outlier in a lot of respects than anyone in baseball probably is at this point. One last thing I will read from this quote.

By the time she graduated in 2007, Abbott was the all time NCAA leader in wins 189, strikeouts 2440 and shutouts 112 with 23 no hitters i don't know how many no hitters there are in college softball there are probably more than there are in baseball college minor league or major league but 23 no hitters is a lot of no hitters it's underlined here by elliot's co-worker it is a remarkable fact it is the final underline in the article. Monica Abbott, unbelievable. I don't have anything else to say except that she is unbelievable. I am looking at this. I've thought about this since when I read the email. I cannot believe somebody is this much better than everybody else. No, I'm very glad to know about her. Well, anything else you would like to banter about? Well, I did want to mention, I don't know whether you saw Brandon Belt had like a tweet storm the other day since deleted, I think very quickly deleted, in which he was responding to fans who were constantly criticizing him.

And I know that that has been a thing with Brandon Belt and Giants fans or some Giants fans for years now that they seem to be convinced that he is not a good baseball player. And evidently, the frustration boiled over for him on this night. And he's been out since August 4th because of a concussion. So that I'm sure has been frustrating too. And just the constant complaints appeared to get to him. So he said, this was like right before a giants rockies game he started tweeting he said if you can give a good enough reason as to why you think i suck so bad then i will try and convince the giants to dump me and so there is a long sequence of tweets and quote tweets and replies here where he was going back and forth with a person or people it's kind of hard to look now because these tweets are gone but he

was asking for hard evidence and data about why he is bad at baseball and no one was really giving him any at least these people were not they were citing batting average and he was telling them to look at OPS and that kind of thing and I mean I guess that is it. Like Brendan Belt is maybe the best example of just old school analysis that we don't really think of as being part of baseball anymore, coloring a player's reputation even still, because obviously he's a pretty good baseball player. He was worth four wins or so in each of the past two seasons, as well as two seasons before that. And he was playing at roughly that kind of pace this year, other than injuries that have kept him out for some time. He's not an amazing, he's not an MVP player or anything, but he is certainly the last part of a roster, at least on this Giants team, that you would think to complain about because he's been perfectly fine when he's been healthy and no one

else has on that team with very few exceptions so it is strange that he is still encountering this kind of feedback from fans and I guess it's entirely a result of just the most basic baseball things that it seems like we've all been aware of for a decade or two now just that batting average isn't everything he has never been a high batting average guy hit around 280 the last couple seasons he is hitting 240 something this year and hit 240 something a few years ago another injury plagued year so it's partly that it's partly that some fans are maybe just not paying attention to the fact that he walks and it's okay that he doesn't have the highest batting average and of course it is park factors and that is a very difficult park for him i think maybe i've heard grant make the case that

it's like the worst combination of player and park in baseball possibly because of his handedness and the way he hits and the layout of AT&T Park. So obviously that has hurt him too. And I guess it's just, you know, he's a first baseman and he's never hit more than 18 home runs in a season. And so if you're not adjusting for context and you're not taking into account the good things that he does do, then you would look at him and be underwhelmed at at least, maybe. So that seems to be part of it. And it's never great when a baseball player, you know, responds to fans' complaints publicly. It doesn't really seem like there's a whole lot of upside there, usually, unless you're

Tommy Pham and you're citing fan graph stats, which makes us like you more if you're doing that. But otherwise, just sinking to the level of the fan who thinks that batting average is everything and is not adjusting for park it's it doesn't really accomplish anything but i can understand why he would be frustrated because he has been a pretty productive player and has contributed to multiple world series teams and at least among some segment of the fan base, that has not led to the type of adulation that those things normally do.

It's weird. I don't know why Belt seems to get it so much more than any other player. It might be partially just because I like Grant. And so just as a consequence, I'm a little more aware of what's going on with the Giants. But it feels like Belt is one of the last holdouts of players who get blasted for antiquated ideas because it feels like everyone for the most part has come around on on everyone else it's not even like belt has bad numbers for his career he's he's hit 270 which is fine he's gotten on base 36 percent of the time which is good he's slugged 460 and the most

pitcher-friendly environment in the game he's basically hit as so if you if you compare belt to i don't know okay matt carpenter let's go with matt carpenter matt carpenter good player uh so we're just going to do career numbers here belt batted 268 carpenter 278 belt obp 358 carpenter 376 belt is slugged 461 carpenter has slugged 458 so when you adjust for park wrc plus belt is at 127 carpenter is at 130 same player same basic player not a huge massive thunderous power threat but just good you know like generally good and belt doesn't even have he doesn't even have like the history of being unclutch or anything that you might associate with someone just aggravating the fan base and it's not like belt was ever like a top five or top 10 mlb prospect that's what i was gonna say

like he's not like a number one overall pick or something he's like a fifth round pick. He topped out in the 20s in the top 100 prospect rankings in 2011, 2012. I guess those were years where the Giants didn't have a lot of prospects and he would have been their top one, I suppose. And maybe expectations were disproportionate because of that. But really, yeah, it's not like he's had some enormous contract, which increases expectations. What is his top salary that he has made in his career? Well, he's signed now to that $73 million deal. But outside of that, yeah, I don't think he's, well, I can tell you pretty quick. Belt so far has topped out at making this year's $8.8 million.

This would have been, I guess, his last year of team control. And he's about to go up to $17.2 million. So, you know, he'll get expensive. But that's like, it's just over league average starting pitcher money. So it's not like Belt is even all that expensive. It's flummoxing. It is. Yeah.

I don't know. Stop picking on Brandon Belt, people. I mean, now, granted, those people could say they just got to him. So which is maybe kind of the whole point. I't know and this dovetails neatly into the with the conversation we're going to use to end this podcast but i think this is going to sound stupid and i know that but i wonder how much of it so part of it there's this element of injury proneness which fans hate and even though belt is on what i think now is his fourth concussion i think that seems like an awfully silly reason to criticize a player because his brain hurts so if you're a giants

fan out there who's upset that brandon belt is injury prone you're stupid but other than that i think that yeah this this is gonna sound way too stupid but i think it's true anyway so i don't care i think it's a i think it's a body language issue. I think that belt is too shoulder slumpy and people don't respond well to that. So you probably saw the gif that was going around. I think it was this week. Maybe it was last week of Christopher Reeve turning from Clark Kent to Superman, right? Just by removing his glasses.

And so I don't really understand much about how to be an actor aside from believing that I could be an actor at a moment's notice. But in any case, I was watching that. And one of I think like the key is that Christopher Reeve

very subtly altered his posture as he removed his glasses so that he became more imposing as a figure, as he became, you know, Superman. So he seemed like a very different person, even though literally

the only thing he'd done is remove his eyeglasses. Well, I think that brandon belt if i had to guess i think this comes down to belt just not conveying the right impression with his body it's sort of i guess the baseball player equivalent of resting bitch face or something or he just doesn't look like you want him to look he doesn't look like he's big and ripped like he might want a first baseman to look and he's nicknamed baby giraffe instead of like the lion of the safari or ghost in the darkness or something so he doesn't have anything that's like particularly menacing about him so there's a there's that element so if yeah you know if print a belt just like stood up straight and squared his shoulders then i think that could or at least could have gone a long way toward changing his perception but at the end of the day you'd think you would

think that baseball fans would would end up at the numbers and the numbers would determine how they feel about the player we've seen this when when fans have come to the defense of just like horrible people in the past being like well i don't care as long as he helps my team win baseball games well brandon bell has helped your team win baseball games that's the only thing that matters here i don't care if he could have been one win more valuable at some point well he got a concussion that's not his fault yep let up yeah relax agreed it's fine better than eric cosmer i don't care yes okay well uh i i thought this would be a convenient opportunity i don't know why i said that i thought this would be an opportunity didn. I don't know why I said that.

I thought this would be an opportunity, didn't need an adjective in there, to pick up a conversation that we sort of touched on months ago. I think I navigated there almost unexpectedly, and I thought it would be worth talking a little bit more about how it seems like baseball writing has changed over the past 10 or 15 years. Now, that's going to be too broad of a topic, and when I say baseball writing has changed over the past 10 or 15 years. Now that's going to be too broad of a topic. And when I say baseball writing, I really mean analytical writing, or at least the writing that we encounter in analytical spheres. I went back and forth on whether or not we should have

some very historically experienced guests on for this segment, but ultimately procrastination won out over preparation. So that's where we are. maybe we'll have a guest for our third revisit of this subject down the road but with belt i guess that would be a nice little uh entry into how i think it's unusual especially now to have a player who seems to get criticized so much even though the numbers any number that's worth its salt demonstrates that brand of belt is a a very good baseball player and it is uh it is odd that he receives so much criticism because it's just not something that we're used to so i'm i guess just start things off it i it is clear without question that analytical writing is more widespread more people are doing it even john hayman is using war

in his articles for god's sake like the battle. He nearly said the war. Like the numbers are out there. They're widespread. People are using them. People are generally more aware of how to use them. And so I think that people have gotten smarter. At least baseball writing has gotten smarter. And we can see this when it comes to, I don't know, awards voting, where the voting pools are evolving over time.

And they're looking beyond like the triple crown statistics, the usual stuff, ERA, all those things. Baseball writing has gotten smarter. But one of the elements that I have become acutely aware of, and this is something that we talked about before, but I also think that baseball writing has grown more afraid to be critical. And I was wondering, I guess, firstly, if you agree with that sentiment. Certainly more reluctant to be critical. I don't know whether fear is part of it. I think, as we've discussed, there are just fewer opportunities to be critical in a sensible way, just because it seems like teams are smarter and are making fewer obvious mistakes. So yeah, I mean, maybe the fact that those opportunities to be critical are rarer than makes you even more reluctant toidation or there's some uncertainty because you are so in the habit of saying, well, this was a smart move for both sides and both teams got better or whatever. And when it seems like there is a case where there's a lopsided return in a transaction, for instance, then maybe you're going out of your way to look for how it makes sense and why it makes sense. And we're all just aware that there's more that we don't know now.

And so I think there is that, you know, fear, anxiety that maybe we're missing something that is important because we know that that has happened at times. There seems to be more of a tendency to grant the benefit of the doubt, which is, of course, a good thing because as the industry has gotten smarter, well, it's gotten smarter in ways beyond what I shouldn't say what we can comprehend, but at least what we're aware of on the outside. So there's there's the inclination to want to give teams the benefit of the doubt. And then there's also, I think, a difference between how players are written about and and how teams are written about, because I think that there is my perception. Again, this is all anecdotal. I don't have any numbers to back this up. But my

perception, at least, is that that writers are more willing to be critical of teams and front offices than they are specific players and i think that maybe that's uh maybe it's a shield by numbers kind of situation where with players in particular we will see a player get written about almost invariably when the player is on some form of upswing here's this player he's breaking out this player has been really good yassiel puig is back his uh article that i was just reading that was that was at the ringer was it not yeah well at least i guess one of one of the yassiel puig articles was was at the ringer and and i do it myself and i guess the one of the only counter examples i can come up with this season is what the hell happened with jonathan lucroy which we've all written about but like that one aside maybe maybe that's why Lucroy was partially upset by

the line of questioning because nobody else is getting critical questions about their performance this year, because otherwise you get you get things that are written about players who seem to be making improvements, getting better, becoming borderline stars or all stars. And I wonder because just as often when we write about a player who seems to be doing something better or is improving, the regression is coming. This is sort of the general form of the Jonah Carey curse, I guess. But we have positive publishing bias where we are more likely to write about someone who's doing well than doing poorly.

Well, then one, the player who's doing well stops doing so well. I guess there's less negative feedback than if someone were to write a critical article and then the player does becomes good afterward because then that seems to fall right in line with the uh with the contemporary gotcha culture you know where if you if you write that this guy's not very good and here's why and then he has a rips off a couple good games good weeks then you're gonna you're gonna hear it people are gonna make fun of you. But I don't know. I guess people are less likely to rip on the writer if he writes something. Yeah, I had an article about Aaron Judge come out and about his slump and decline in the second half yesterday. And of course, he homered on that day,

although I actually didn't get any tweets because I wasn't saying Aaron Judge sucks now or something like that. I was just pointing out that he has been considerably worse than he was when he was doing so well. And that, I think, is pretty inarguable. So no one could gotcha me about one homer when he had like 30 in the first half and hasn't done that. So I didn't fall prey to that there. But yeah, often that will happen if you say something negative about someone and then a good game or streak comes after that. Then you will get tweets for the rest of the season from people who are saying like, oh, I thought he was bad. Now you wrote about that months ago.

Yeah. So that's that's never fun. Yeah. I wrote an article last late last year that was trying to poke one single hole in chris bryant's mvp case chris bryant outstanding season so good but i i demonstrated that oh to this point in important situations high leverage situations if you will he has been unproductive and his numbers that were were plainly terrible in high leverage situations he was uh he was one of the best hitters in baseball when the stakes were not so high and even when the stakes were like i don't know thigh height i don't know what kind of stakes we're dealingters in baseball when the stakes were not so high. And even when the stakes were like, I don't know, thigh height.

I don't know what kind of stakes we're dealing with here. But when the stakes got up the neck level, his numbers were awful. And then almost immediately after I published that article, Bryant hit like two of the biggest home runs of the year for the Cubs. And so people had a great time with that on Twitter. And nothing against them, of course. But I guess maybe there was a lack of understanding of that. No, the numbers are I didn't make these up like this is what's happened. This is not my belief. This is not something that I think is true about him long term,

but he absolutely had been unclutched. So I don't know. I guess that's a that's a side tangent. But I don't know if you had to rack your brain, it's always easy to analyze the media in retrospect. And I think we it's it would not be hard for us to have sort of a 2020 hindsight situation if we were being critical of the news media at large for sort of a analysis, what sort of, if any, what sort of disservice do you think we might be doing if we believe that coverage is skewed positive, rather, out of fear of criticism? Or certainly there's the element of out of fear of a player actually reading what's being written, because of course now players are doing more reading and they're more aware of analytical writing now than they've ever been.

So certainly on some moderately prominent website, you could be writing a critical article that a player would read and then you end up feeling like, I don't know, a beat writer, which at home bloggers don't really want to do. But do you think that there's some sort of disservice being wr rot here? I don't know because the stakes of what we do in general are so low that I'm not sure it's not as if, you know, if we're not writing about some player who's playing poorly. And I mean, first of all, the fans of that player's team, I think, are always aware that he's playing poorly. Sometimes they're aware of that even when he's not playing poorly in the Brandon Belt case. But I think it doesn't go unnoticed if a player is slumping or something. And it almost feels like the default progression for a lot of players is to get worse because players, at least beyond a certain age, they tend to get worse. And so it's strange.

It's strange. It's like you just wrote posts about Doug Pfister and Justin Verlander and how they are kind of back to their old selves in Pfister's case or back to a slightly different but good self in Verlander's case. And that's notable because those guys got worse. And once you're a pitcher and you're in your 30s and you're declining, we don't expect you to bounce back to what you were before. And so if you continue to be bad, it's just not an interesting article. I mean, just to point out, you know, earlier this season, if you had written about Doug Pfister, it would have been, well, Pfister is still throwing slowly and he seems to have lost his stuff. And that was the case last year too. And it's still the case. And it's just not an interesting article. Whereas now you're pointing out, oh, somehow he has regained a lot of the velocity that he used to have. And that's atypical. We're always writing about at, when someone manages to turn back the clock in that way. And if a player is worse in some reason, I mean, you know, we wrote about like why Aaron Judge is not playing as well. Like if a player seems to be getting worse in a way that affects our long term expectations for him, if his plate discipline is falling apart or something like that, I think we would still write about that perhaps, and we still do sometimes. And you've written about, gosh, so many players. I don't know, Jake Arrieta, for instance,

not being as good and, you know, is it a mechanical problem and why is it happening? So I think it still happens, but I think it's just often that an unexpected slump is just a little less inherently interesting than an unexpected improvement. Yeah, and I guess maybe people are tired of reading that, oh, this guy's BAB up is too high or it's too low, and then that's just going to regress over time. So yeah, I certainly will also agree

with you on the issue of stakes, where if we were dealing with something that, you know, mattered, maybe they would require sort of a refocus. But it's an interesting evolution, given that this entire sort of field of writing used to make its name on on being snarky and critical and it's i guess it's sort of funny what happens when you get a little bit of import and access i will uh because we are out of time and because you had mentioned rightly that the every single player has an aging curve and every single player gets worse the natural trend is to get worse especially if you're good if for no other reason to get worse, especially if you're good. If for no other reason than regression to the mean.

If you're great, you're expected to be not so great down the road. This is, we're just going to come right back. You know it had to end with Mike Trout. Mike Trout, no regression. Will not regress. Does not regress. I don't know if anybody noticed, but he just had an unbelievable August. He's gotten off to a strong start in September that nobody cares over. Trout's passed, looks like about about two two and a half weeks he's got 19 walks and six strikeouts in his last one week he's got 10

walks and one strikeout nobody seems to care trout is just out there trying to win the mvp that will be a conversation that well at least that's going to be something that we will both i'm sure write about if for no other reason than the people who run our websites would like for us to write about that we'll try to avoid getting the criticism that ken rosenthal has gotten but it seems like you need to mention let's see how can you avoid the internet getting mad you have to include jose altuve i think you have to say altuve is the favorite because that seems to be the consensus position even though it's probably wrong then you have chris sale has to be in there. Corey Kluber, I guess, has to be in there. Trout and Jose Ramirez.

Seems like people are really all about you, including Jose Ramirez. Maximum, maximum player inclusion so as to avoid the fury of the internet. All right. Well, you have to go face that fury now. Friday chat's so furious. All right. You can support the podcast on Patreon By going to patreon.com slash effectively wild

Five listeners who have already pledged their support Include Spencer, Robert, Sarah Luthi, Hannah Miller, and Tom Lasko Thanks to all of you And I'm just going to do the random drawing for our raffle in real time Right now I will find out who won this raffle along with you So I've gone to the random name picker at miniwebtool.com. As instructed, I have entered all of the names in this field, each name on a separate line. Some people's names are there only once.

Others who donated more than $10 are there multiple times, in some cases many times. All is as it should be. All I have to do is click on this button. It says pick a random name, and this tool will pick a random name. So let's do it. Three, two, one, pick a random name. And the winner is Andy Englehart, who I believe was actually our biggest donor. So the probabilities paid off. Andy, thank you for your donation. Congratulations. I will be in touch. And again, thanks very much to everyone who donated, whether you wanted the microphone or not. You can join our Facebook group now at 6,500 members at facebook.com slash groups slash Effectively Wild.

You can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for editing assistance. If you're looking for something else to listen to, Michael Bauman and I talked to Tony Bungino on the most recent episode of the Ringer MLB show. Got his longtime baseball insider perspective on the Red Sox-Inky sign-stealing scandal. Keep your questions and comments for me and Jeff coming via email at podcast.pengrafts.com or via the Patreon messaging system. Have a wonderful weekend. We will be back next week. Cause Andy, you're a star In nobody's eyes but mine Andy, you're a star

In nobody's eyes but mine And the other side And nobody's eyes And nobody's eyes but mine