Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1129: The Darvish Dodgers Difference

Episode Date: October 27, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the all-time leaders in WAR for two teams, what Yu Darvish has done differently with the Dodgers, and whether Carlos Correa or Corey Seager will have the more valuable career, then answer listener emails about home-field advantage in the playoffs, projecting (and learning from) Charlie Morton’s breakout, why […]

And I say I'm not as bad as I seem But I used to be better, honey, can't you see? You of all people should know that this ain't really me And that's gonna change how you feel about me, baby But it won't change me And that's gonna change how you feel about me baby but it won't change me hello and welcome to episode 1129 of the effectively wild of fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our patreon supporters i am jeff sullivan of fangraphs joined as usual by ben lindbergh of the ringer if i ever were not joined by Ben Lindberg from The Ringer,

we would be in a world of hurt. I don't know what would be happening. Nothing would be recorded. How are you? I'm doing well. Someday that might happen. Maybe I'd take a day off. Don't say that. My Iron Man streak will end. I don't know. We'll see. Where is your streak? It's not 1,129. No, I think I've missed maybe three episodes in Effectively Wild's history or something like that, but it's been quite a while since the last one. Do you remember which episode it was that you last missed? Gosh, I do not. I don't know. It has been years, I think. Well, we'll see if you make it to Cal Ripken Jr. Yeah, I wonder if it's what people said about Ripken, how he would have been better if he had taken a day off now and then, because he was playing through injury and he was fatigued all the time. Maybe if I took an episode off now and then, I'd come back refreshed with great takes and jokes and banter.

Do you think that when Cal Ripken Jr. was also in the middle of a streak, he played a separate private baseball game specifically for people who sponsored his career. Probably not. No. Off the top of your head, tell me the all-time top five San Diego Padres in wins above replacement. Oh, all right. Gwyn. Yep. Winfield.

Yep. That's two. Top two. It gets worse. Yeah. I was just going to say, there's two. Top two. It gets worse. Yeah. I was just going to say, there's like a big drop-off here. Is it like... There's a drop-off of 37

War, by the way, between Gwyn and Winfield. Oh my goodness. Is it like Andy Ashby? Oh, he's number five. He was the one I didn't think you were going to get. Okay, yeah, no. I don't know who else I'm going to get, but I was feeling pretty good about Andy Ashby.

Like Ken Kameniti? Nope. No, he's... Oh, where is he? He looks like he's number 13. Okay. Oh, Phil Nevin? Nope. He's...

I don't know. He's somewhere else. Ryan Klesko is on this list, but he's not in the top five. Oh, okay. All right. Hmm. Will Myers?

I don't know. I can tell you that Will Venable is number 24. Oh, wow. We're looking at Trevor Hoffman. He's number four. That was obvious. And Jake Peavy. He's number three. Oh, Jake Peavy. Marlins.

That's how much I look down on closers in their career wars. I just ignored Trevor Hoffman. Probably the best known non-Gwyn Padre. Yeah, I haven't had the privilege of, or I guess no longer present tense, I never had the privilege of watching Mariano Rivera enter a game live, but Trevor Hoffman's entrance was the best that ever was. Rivera's entrance was a lot of fun too, particularly in a playoff game or something. That was a lot of fun too, particularly in a playoff game or something. That was a good one. I don't know if there are any closer entrances now that, I mean, I don't even know, like, granted, I'm not going to games in every stadium, but there aren't any closer entrances now that have that kind of resonance, are there? there like the intersend men hell's bells i mean everyone has their entrance song but i feel like none of them has quite reached that level of notoriety maybe just because no closer has

reached that level that reverend hoffman were at but yeah yeah right like jansen i don't jansen must have an entrance song i feel a little silly not knowing what it is but it clearly hasn't like pervaded the national consciousness and i don't know how befitting he... I mean, he's clearly the best one right now, but just his whole aura on the mound, it's not one of... As we were talking about during the game the other day, it's not like he isn't up there being intimidating. He's just up there looking past you as the hitter.

He's like, just go away. So I don't know what... Evidently, it's California Love by Tupac. Pretty good. Okay, top five Miami Marlins. Top five Miami Marlins. Okay, well, I was just reading a blog post about Mr. Marlin,

Jeff Conine. I don't know. Is he lower than one would think based on his Mr. Marlin name? Or is he actually up there? He does not appear to even be in the top 12. Wow. That was unexpected. Okay.

All right. Well, no wonder Jeter tried to cut his pay, and now he's gone. Let's see. I guess Miguel Cabrera? He is number six. Sorry. Dontrell? Yep, that's five.

All right. Stanton? Yep, he's one. Is Fernandez on there? He is's five. All right. Stanton? Yep, he's one. Is Fernandez on there? He is number 11. All right. Let's see. Man, there is so much turnover on those teams.

When I think of long-term Marlins, I think of Alex Gonzalez or something. What? Turnover with the Marlins? Yeah. Gosh, who would be? I'm going to guess. Oh, well, Hanlins? Yeah. Gosh, who would be? I'm going to guess. Oh, well, Hanley? Yep, he's two.

Okay. Now I'm looking for a starting pitcher and a second baseman. Luis Castillo. Yeah, there you go. That's number four. Just missing a starting pitcher. This starting pitcher was signed by the Padres

at the same time that they signed a Brandon Morrow. Oh, Josh Johnson. Josh Johnson. Josh Johnson. There you go. Number three, Josh Johnson. Worth Johnson. There you go. Number three, Josh Johnson, worth 25 war with the Marlins. He was a very good pitcher.

He was great. Yeah. The Rich Harden thing is what he did. All right. Is that the end of the quiz? That's all I got. Those are the only two good ones. Okay.

Well, you wrote about you, Darvish, so why don't we talk about that briefly because that will set up game three, Darvish McCullers. And you say that Darvish is like emblematic of the Dodgers approach, which they've had a lot of success, it seems like, with getting guys and then changing them and making them into better pitchers in certain ways. I'm thinking of some examples. into better pitchers in certain ways. I'm thinking of some examples. I mean, Grant Dayton was a good example,

although obviously he has been hurt and has not followed up on that success from last season. But that was the same sort of thing where he got to the Dodgers organization and they said, hey, you have a high spin rate fastball. Throw your fastball high in the zone. And it worked really, really well for him. And there are other examples. Tony Sangrani is another on the current roster you've written about but what was the change that Darvish

made when he went to the Dodgers it seems like from from articles written by Annie McCullough and Bill Plunkett and others that the Dodgers wanted him to change all kinds of things and most significantly they wanted him to change his arm slot because his uh his actual delivery had changed since he underwent Tommy John surgery came back with a higher arm slot because his uh his actual delivery had changed since he underwent tommy john surgery came back with a higher arm slot which is weird but they also wanted him to change some things about his pitch usage his pitch sequencing his locations just kind of everything i think the uh there's a quote i wasn't paying attention to this playoff press conference but a quote that darvish said through his interpreters that the Dodgers wanted him to change everything except for his beautiful face. So it's, yeah, I think what stuck out to me the most about it, I mean,

you don't get a whole lot higher profile than you, Darvish. He is a top of the line starting pitcher, not the best in the game, but he's an ace. He's now a number one starter. He's an impending free agent. He just joined at the end of July, joined the team. He would spend a maximum of like three months with in his career, assuming he's not resigned. But the Dodgers were able to gain his trust immediately anyway in making changes to his game. I don't know. I don't want to overstate how significant this is because it's not like we know that much about how teams and players interact across the league.

But it just really it stuck out to me that the dodgers not only have all these numbers and analytics and ideas of how to make a player better every team has ideas of how they can make a player better but the dodgers immediately were able to communicate their messages to darvish and they were well received and so if you figure that this is what there's been a lot of coverage of like the the pirates middlemen just like the the communicators i don't know what to call them but just the the intermediaries between like the the decision makers and the players and teams have been trying to hire those because everyone has numbers but they don't necessarily all know how to communicate them and the the dodgers have been

able to communicate their ideas to darvish and and he's implemented them and the the funny thing is if you look at what he's done as a dodger he's not even like clearly better now but he's on a hell of a hot streak he's only allowed four runs over his last five starts with two walks and 35 strikeouts and his arm slot has only gotten lower and lower and lower back to kind of where it used to be so maybe it's only now getting internalized but i don't know it seemed remarkable to me maybe Maybe I overstated things. I don't think that I did. But it's one of those things where you want to write about it with but you just can't have a full idea of what the league looks like. So maybe the Dodgers aren't really good at this. But it seems like they are in Darvish seems like a good example of like, you figure someone like Grant Dayton or Tony Singrani that those players changed when they

joined the Dodgers too. But those are also just lower profile players. Those are players you would think would be the most responsive to people who want them to get better. Darvish, I mean, he was already U Darvish when the Dodgers traded for him. So it's really kind of remarkable to me that they were able to get him to change. Yeah. And to change something significant mid season too. Like it's one thing if they had acquired him over the winter and then had spring training to work with him on that but to just change midstream like between starts your arm slot that you've used for years or anything else significant like that that's pretty impressive i don't know how you do that really i guess that would be a really interesting story because that is obviously a huge advantage if a team can just maximize a player's potential like that.

And I think that's where a lot of the smart teams are setting themselves apart and where a lot of the gains are coming in this era when every team is very into analytics, just being able to apply them. And whether it's with major leaguers or with minor leaguers in the player development process, that can be a big separator. But yeah, to do that in the middle of pennant race, I guess it wasn't really a pennant race for the Dodgers because they had things pretty locked up by that point. But in the middle of the season and with his free agency about to begin, which you'd think a player would be less likely to want to tinker with a possible big payday coming up. a player would be less likely to want to tinker with a possible big payday coming up. I guess he hadn't been off to a great start and his last start in Texas was a disaster, right? Was it his

last one? And so maybe that put him in a more tinkering friendly frame of mind, but it's still pretty impressive if you can do that in the middle of the summer. So speaking of maximizing potential, the other day you teased that you were writing an article, a Who You Got article between Carlos Correa and Corey Seeger. So I'm sure that pretty much everyone participating in or listening to this podcast has probably read your article. But in any case, who you got, Ben Lindberg? Well, I have Correa, I think,

and probably most people listening would have Correa, but it's closer than I thought. It's closer than you might think. And of the people I surveyed, I talked to some scouts about this. That was not the only way that I tried to answer this question, but I talked to a bunch of scouts about this. And I think of eight who got back to me, two of them took Seeger. And of the six who took Correa all of them said oh it's really close you're splitting hairs etc and even some of the ones who took Correa took him because they were either praising his off-field abilities like one scout said I like Seager more as a as a player as on-field value

but Correa is a special kind of clubhouse communicator, and he's bilingual, and he can bridge these gaps between clicks on the team. And so the off-field value, a few people mentioned that Correa just has kind of that special motivation or leadership ability, not that Seeker's not a good clubhouse guy or hard worker too. And then another one said, well, if you're wondering about career value, because that was the question, it wasn't who's better today, it was who'll have the better career. And another said, well, he's worried about Seeger's back issues potentially recurring. So it was close and it is close. Definitely look at stats to date. And frankly,

you could throw in Francisco Lindor right into this debate and it would be just as difficult to separate him from the other two but I was doing Seager versus Cray because their teams are playing each other right now and I mean lifetime weighted runs created plus 135 and 135 exactly the same and if you look at the war rates, they are very close. I think Seager has more fan graphs war despite less playing time. Correa has more baseball reference war. It really comes down to defense. And I got mixed reports and mixed opinions on their defense too. Even if you look at the stats, it's strange. If you look at UZR or DRS or BP's fielding runs above average, they don't all agree on whether the guys are great or good or not even good relative to the typical shortstop. But they all agree that Seager has been better than Correa.

down their fielding opportunities into buckets. So you have unlikely plays and remote plays and even plays that most people would make half the time or a range around half the time or likely plays, easy plays, routine plays, whatever. If you break that down, Correa has higher percentages of completed plays in every single category, despite having lower DRS, UZR, and all of that. So I don't know what to make of that. I think maybe the fact that Correa's on the Astros and they're shifting all the time maybe complicates that even more. And I got kind of mixed reports from the scouts on the defense too, where some of them praised Correa's arm and some of them praised Seager's instincts.

And positioning, of course, is a factor that might be a difference maker here, but isn't necessarily a result of the player's skills. So it's really tough. Although if you look at Zips, Dan Siborski's projection system, it does see Correa. Dan looked up Zips' rest of career war projections. So just he has for every player in baseball, he has here's what their projected rest of career war projections. So just he has, for every player in baseball, he has, here's what their projected rest of career value is. And Correa's is about a win a year on average higher than Seager's. So right now Correa's projected for like 72 rest of career war and Seager's at like 58 or 59, which would make both of them Hall of Famers probably,

which is impressive in its own right, but something of a gap there for Correa. By the way, Correa is the second highest ranking player on the rest of career war projection leaderboard. Want to guess who number one is? Is it good old Mike Trout? It sure is. Mike Trout.

It's not even close, which is crazy. Like Mike Trout is three years older than Carlos Correa and Carlos Correa is amazing. And yet Mike Trout has, I think it's 16 war more projected over the rest of his career than Correa, which is just, it's crazy. Like I was talking to Dan, like how old will Mike Trout have to be before he is not the player with the most projected rest of career value like he's gonna have to be what like at least a couple more years right until someone could potentially unseat him from that so he's gonna be like 28 or who knows how old and he's still gonna be projected as basically the most valuable career remaining

of any player even though there are you know 20 year olds and 21 year olds breaking in every year who have very bright futures ahead of them so that's incredible and top five by the way according to zips goes trout correa lindor and then manny machado and then Seager. So Seager's five. So these guys are both in the top five players in baseball and remaining war projected. And then Bryant is sixth, I believe. So anyway, that's a trout fun fact. I am curious now when someone will finally bump him off the top of that leaderboard. It's just obscene how old he's going to be before that happens. Where did Dan have key on Broxton? Don't know.

Not in the top six, surprisingly. Should we do 40 minutes of email? Yes, I think we should. So I have some lined up here. So let's start with Scott. And this is an email from before World Series Game 2. So I will have to adjust the numbers in here slightly. Scott says, this year, home teams are 23-8, which is a 7-42 winning percentage.

Obviously, now the Astros won one, so they are 23-9. And Scott says, this is well above the 54% I have seen cited as the average home field advantage. Is this just noise for a single postseason or is something real going on? The Yankees in particular are a far different team at home versus away as we have seen. They are a magnificent home team and a crappy road team in 2017. They were a perfect 6-0 at home and a miserable 1-6 away in the playoffs. And that's the question. And you, I think, looked up the numbers over a several year period do you have them in front of you because that would be great let me uh i can do a quick let

me i can just say this so yeah this year in the playoffs despite the dodgers loss in game two the home team has won a bunch good for the home team last year they sure didn't the year before that didn't happen either i do have your numbers that you looked up. Great. That's better. Okay. Tell me. So you wrote, this year home teams are 24 and 8. Again, it's 24 and 9 now. However, last year they were 17 and 18. And the year before, they were 19 and 17.

Since 2010, the home team has gone 155 and 125, which works out to a winning percentage of 55%. And now that would be 155 and 126. So this is exactly the home field advantage that one would expect. Yep. Yeah. So I don't know whether you'd expect like a slightly higher, I think Sam has written about either World Series home field advantage or post-season home field advantage and has found something curious. But I mean, there are some teams, I think, that have a higher true home field advantage than others. And maybe it's because their ballparks are more extreme or because they managed to construct their roster around that ballpark better. But there's some play. Like, I think Tampa Bay Tropicana has had a higher home field advantage on the whole than the typical ballpark, or maybe the artificial turf, that kind of thing. You could imagine that there might be a bigger home field advantage in that kind of scenario. And the Yankees could be that.

I mean, Travis Satchik wrote when they were still in the playoffs about their airball advantage at Yankee Stadium this year. It's one of the best places to hit balls in the air. They hit a lot of balls in the air and they got plenty of kind of wall scraper home runs in those short porches. So in theory, maybe teams that take better advantage of their ballpark would be more likely to make the playoffs. And therefore, maybe you would see on the whole a higher home field advantage in the playoffs but i don't know that's probably just looking too deep into this and theorizing too much because as you point out over a span of several years there is no difference from what you would expect i don't have all the numbers in front of me well let me put this a different way i do have all the numbers in front of me but they're not arranged in the way that i would like but ordinarily during the regular season you expect that when you're at home the

average team wins 54 of the time therefore when you're on the road, you win 46% of the time. And I've poked around, never really found anything worth writing about. But a team that stood out to me is having... So the team with the biggest seeming split, of course, is the Rockies. And looking over the last 10 years, Rockies have won 54% of the time at home. That's good, average. And they've won 40% of the time on the road. That's bad.

So the Rockies have the biggest gap. But for some reason, the Mets have the smallest one that I can find. And just looking over the last 10 years, they've won 50.5% of their home games and 47% of the road games. So they're still better at home, but they just don't have the pronounced split. I don't know if it means anything, but I mean, this is over 10 years of baseball. So that's like 800 some games in each category. So it's something teams do have different

splits and i don't know why the mets wouldn't have a pronounced home field advantage or maybe they're just unusually good on the road but mets it's weird it's always it's always challenging to talk about whether someone has a home field advantage or a road field disadvantage because you can't tell the difference right in the numbers. Like, I still have known about this rocky split forever, and I still just don't know how to talk about it. Mm-hmm. Yeah. All right, question from Nicholas. I have a Charlie Morton question. At the start of the year, or maybe even preseason, when talking about the Astros, I believe Jeff said positive things about Charlie Morton.

A lot of the Astros' preseason writing also was positive about Morton, the reason being a smallish sample of higher velocity. Was there anything else that made people think Morton would do well? He was projected for only.7 war and finished at 3.3. How can this sort of projection process be more generalized for any pitcher? What else can be taken into account to say the projections might be wrong? I think what made Morton so interesting is that it was March. But also what made Morton so interesting is that there are there are big sample statistics and there are small sample statistics. If you were really encouraged by, I don't know, Charlie Morton's rate of home runs allowed. Well, that is not really going to tell

you very much because it takes forever for that number to stabilize but what was so exciting about Morton is that he only played in like three and a half games last season before he uh what was it his Achilles I think he busted but before he got hurt he was throwing like two miles per hour faster than he had before as a starting pitcher and that's one of those like you don't fluke your way into throwing harder as a starter it just doesn't happen you can have maybe a recording instrument that like the gun can be too hot or something, but you can't like you can go out and you can have an Armando Galarra. You can almost throw a perfect game just by getting lucky, but you can't just throw hard by luck. Charlie Morton clearly had done something and then he suffered a season ending injury, which is never good news for a pitcher, but it wasn't an arm injury. So yeah, what do you care about Charlie Morton's legs as long as he's able to walk around?

So he was throwing harder. And in that tiny sample of data with the Phillies, I think he missed more bats than ever had. All of a sudden, he became this almost flamethrower who has a lot of movement on his fastball. So he became really interesting. And it seemed like it would be a smart gamble. What did the Astros get him for? Like years and 14 million or something like that yeah yeah good contract but clearly morton had this extended history of injuries and missing time but the astros saw a guy whose stuff played up rather dramatically over like three weeks before he

missed a whole year and you know again you never want a pitcher to be hurt for an entire season but if anything if a guy blows out his achilles and then doesn't pitch for the rest of the year it kind of preserves his arm a little bit that could have come back even more fresh so not saying that it always works out like this uh we mentioned josh johnson earlier and i think he's had tommy john surgery about 13 times but he uh he also just kept hurting his arm Morton's different and I was trying to think of obviously I think the bigger issue with this question is you can't really generalize the Morton case because there just aren't really pitchers like him very often which is what made him so interesting in the first place but I think

maybe maybe this offseason's equivalent or closest equivalent is going to be Brandon Morrow. He had a bigger sample of success this year, and he's a reliever. But he's going to be a free agent, and I have no idea what he's going to sign for. I feel like, though, given that he's throwing hard and he's throwing strikes and he seems healthy, it seems like he could get three years, which is insane. But maybe it's not, because if contracts are just about paying for what you think a player is going to do, who cares about the track record? Yeah. And I mean, the steamer projection system does factor in pitcher velocity. So I don't know how huge a factor it is. I don't know how much Morton's projection improved because he was throwing a bit harder in a small sample. But that's the kind of thing where I think maybe we

could make gains in projection systems. I don't know how great they would be. Projection systems have basically been the same, like, you know, more or less for decades now. I mean, maybe the methods have been refined slightly, but they basically all just work by looking at, you know, whatever a player's last three years or so of performance and weighting the more recent performance more heavily and then factoring in age and, you know, park effects and that sort of thing. And that's kind of it. And, you know, they each have their own little wrinkles and some of them have comparables and that kind of thing involved. But that's basically it, and it hasn't changed all that much even as we've gotten more detailed data. So I wonder how much room there is to improve those projections just based on StatCast info. And I would think that there will probably come a time

when projection systems, in fact, that time I'm sure has already arrived for many, if not most, major league teams, where you take into account a guy's speed and a guy's exit velocities and launch angles and spin rate and velocity, and all of that I'm sure can be factored in. As we've talked about on the podcast, it can also be misleading and deceptive

and guys can have little peaks or troughs in any of those stats and it might seem significant at the time but might turn out not to be and now that we have that data we keep digging into it and trying to come up with explanations for every slump or hot streak which it's easier to do now because we have that data. So I don't know, it might turn out to be that just still looking at the last three seasons or whatever is actually the best thing to do on a league-wide level, even though there is the occasional Morton or swing changer who does really transform himself. Because some guys, that will stick and they'll actually reach a new level of performance other guys They will go back to doing what they

Did before or they'll keep Doing the new thing but it just won't work as well So that's a tough thing For the projection system people to Answer and I would expect Some gains to be made there over the Next decade or so Alright question from Charles

Hey Ben and Jeff I was fooling Around with the leaderboards on Fangrass and I noticed something very interesting. Of the top 20 career BABIP leaders since 1920, 13 of them are active players. Why is this? Is it just a matter of relatively small sample size or is the more interesting answer. And I think the answer is that we're in a high BABIP era. And for the last two decades or so, BABIP has routinely been high. It hasn't really changed very much over that span, despite the advent of shifting and all of the swing changes and all the ways that baseball has changed. BABIP has been high. It's been around the 300 level, a bit below, a bit above for the last 20 years or so. And that is historically very high. If you look back into the 80s, 70s, 60s, 50s, BABIP was about as high or even a little higher than it is today. But that's basically it. So obviously, if we've been living in a high BABIP era for the last couple decades, the players from this era would be why is BABIP higher? And that is an interesting question. I would imagine it has a lot to do with just the speed and strength of today's players. Just, I don't know, base dealing is obviously not what it has been at other times, but speed maybe is, and you may just have some guys who are getting down the line faster than ever before and you also

have guys hitting the ball harder on average than ever before and those two things would lead to higher babips so that seems plausible yep and there's the uh the other related i think less important point but the important point that active players are still active and generally have not declined and so players get older and so then their numbers get worse. Yeah. Well, okay, let's do a related question then. This one is from Dennis and he says, I realize I've had this perception that baseball is in an era of defensive excellence.

Something has led me to believe that everyone generally agreed that fielders had been getting better every year over the past decade or so. I recently realized, however, that I might just be mistaking optimized defensive positioning with actually improved fielding. So my question is whether fielders today are actually increasingly sure-handed, throws are increasingly accurate, and defenders are increasingly situationally aware. Have errors actually gone down? Is Joe Third Baseman in 2017 really much better on defense than Joe Third Baseman in 2000? Or better on defense than Joe Third Baseman in 2000? Or are his handlers just better at telling him where to stand? Or are playing surfaces just more reliably maintained and bad hops curtailed? You know what's weird is that Joe Third Baseman is a catcher. Just a weird development course. So if you look at historical fielding percentage,

which is a number that I don't remember the last time i said that out loud but it's gone up so there are fewer errors that get charged these days than there used to be it's not i wouldn't call it dramatic but it's gone up fielding percentage is always a difficult stat to look at for a few reasons but it's always so high that like a tiny variation can be meaningful because like a difference between 0.97 and 0.98 is pretty huge but in any case fielding percentage has gone up that means there are fewer errors these days now that could just as easily be a change in scorekeeping as reflecting a change in defense i think that if you talk about just athletes overall league wide everyone is getting better at everything this is one of those kind of common points that we keep in the backs of our heads you think about what could babe ruth do today probably not a

hell of a lot he could swing sometimes and he'd be really tired pretty fast but i do think that there are two things going on that sort of counteract one another players i think are getting better just the training is better we don't need to go over i guess everything but athletes are getting more athletic they're getting more skilled but at the same time for a variety of reasons mostly having to do with defensive shifting and the rise in strikeouts and velocity meaning there are fewer balls in play i think that there is less prioritization of defensive ability especially among like infielders middle infielders now than there ever has been and so i think athletes are getting

better, but teams are also going to be asking less and less of like their best infield athletes to actually be really good at defense. Now that has less to do with sure handedness and more to do with range. I think you just need less range, but I don't know, maybe I seems like defensive abilities might be related to one another. So I think we could be approaching some sort of plateau if we're not there already. Yeah, it's it, I mean, I'm skeptical of the idea that players might not have gotten better at anything. I just think that given how much money is in the game, given how much better teams are at evaluating players, given the probably increasing size of the player pool just because of the domestic population and the

international markets that have gotten more into baseball. It's just hard for me to imagine that players are just not better than previous era's players in just about every respect. So on the one hand, I think it's hard to imagine that fielders are not better than they once were. On the other hand, as we just discussed, batters are having a higher batting average when they put the ball in play today than in most eras of baseball history. So it seems like those are conflicting ideas. I don't think they actually are. I think they can both be true, but it is kind of unintuitive that fielders would be getting better, but batting average on balls in play would be getting higher at the same time.

But I think there are just some confounding factors there that we have discussed. So it's weird, but yeah, I think fielders are better. All right. David. Oh, right. David mentioned he wanted to respond to our analysis of the MLB ad about the families who root for entire leagues, which we did hear from one listener who says he belongs to a family that kind of does that. I mean, I think it's not totally uncommon for if you are a fan of, say, a National League team and that team is eliminated, maybe you'd root for the National League representative in the World Series. That was probably more common in the past when the leagues had more established identities than they do now, where the only difference between them is the DH,

basically. But David says, I wholly agree that there are no fans of either entire baseball league. And maybe there he means like fans who buy every team in that league's merchandise, as the people in the ad did. But if such fans were to exist, now would totally be the time. We're living in a golden age of interleague baseball. Prior to 1997, a fan of the AL or NL only got to experience an interleague baseball game four to seven times a year during the World Series, plus exhibition games during spring training and the All-Star game. Then with interleague play, there were an additional three weeks or so of al versus nl action now a league fan gets an exciting game almost every night of the regular season in addition to the world series all-star game and spring training that's almost eight months of

cheering on your league i'm not saying such fans exist they don't but if they did now is when they should which is just true i was thinking of it as the opposite kind of just because, again, like the distinctions between the leagues have broken down and in terms of play style, in terms of player turnover, and in terms of the leagues playing each other constantly. or NL anymore other than the DH. That's basically the one thing that sets them apart. So in that sense, if you were a fan of a league for some reason, I would think that the rivalry would be less heated. But as David points out, and this is a good point, I guess the opposite might be true because you get constant contests between leagues now in a way that you once didn't. Yeah, you get them a lot, but how many interleague games are there a day? Let me look something up real quick.

So how many days are in a Major League Baseball season? It's like 182 or something? Isn't that right? Yeah, right around there. Okay. So this year, there were, well, I guess there's always, what, 300 interleague games a year? Does that sound right? Let me confirm that I'm not being an idiot.

Yeah, exactly 300. So you have an average of like one or two interleague games a day taking place. So on the one hand, hey, that's great. That's constant confrontation between the American League and the National League. But you don't have much of a choice. Now, granted, of course, if you're a fan of a regular team, just like a normal, normal fan that exists in reality, you also only get one, occasionally two games a day. So you don't really get a choice. If you like the Mets, you're day so you don't really get a choice if you like the Mets you're just watching the Mets every day but if you're the interleague family here's

one of the problems in the commercial you have like the family is represented sitting on either couch and like they're all decked out in different teams gear right like oh yeah we're all supporting these teams today well you wouldn't support like an American League team playing against an American League team that's just friendly fire so you have to be decked out in the clothes and the apparel of whichever team is playing the interleague game that day so like the family that had like i don't know didn't have anything having to do with the astros in the living room like i don't know maybe they should all be wearing their blue jays stuff in the commercial and then maybe tomorrow they're all going to change like there's so much money this is such an expensive thing to choose to do.

If you're a family, like I already know I don't have that much sports apparel. I don't wear it, but like it's not it's not cheap. The teams see to it that it's like $25 for a T-shirt or something.

And then you're throwing in pillows and framed art and hats. And like, what are you going to be wearing your stupid Indians hat when you're watching the Blue Jays play the Padres on a Wednesday afternoon? Like, no, you have to if you support the league. I don't it just maybe maybe it's a commercial shot in the offseason. I'm not entirely sure. I don't know why you would. I don't know. I don't wear a whole lot of sports apparel during the offseason of teams that I have the apparel. And it just it's still it doesn't hold up. But I guess I understand part of that perspective. But it doesn't hold up. It doesn't hold up. on four pitches with the bases loaded. And we mentioned that Jerry Blevins had tweeted something defending Edwards because he noted that that's a tough situation to be in when you know that the hitter's not swinging.

So Andrew said, I heard you guys talking about Jerry Blevins defending C.J. Edwards on the Thursday episode, possibly because he walked Pedro Baez with the bases loaded this year. This related to a video I'm making, and I wanted to point out that Blevins has done this more than once. In making the video, I found this clip of Blevins walking Barry Zito with the bases loaded in 2012. While this one is different than the Baez one because it was a full count, I do think it's interesting that a guy like Blevins, who doesn't have a reputation of losing the strike zone, can lose the strike zone at the most inexplicable time and it's true this is like the

closest pitching equivalent to lester not being able to make a pickoff throw to first basically not being able to throw a strike with the pitcher at the plate and uh jerry plevins multiple times has walked pitchers with the bases loaded i gotta i gotta pull something up let me let's look at some barry zito Career batting statistics So let's see what do we got So he batted 418 times And he batted 102 He slugged 102

But he only struck out 24% of the time So the thing Let me scroll down to get the actual numbers here So yeah Barry Zito For his career he made contact when he swung which he did 44 percent of the time that's pretty average he made contact 84 percent of the time barry zito was a contact hitter i think did we talk about this briefly during the

the game pod the other day because it seems i'm having a deja vu here yeah so barry zito when he would come up to the plate and he would hit you know look pitchers look stupid when they hit almost almost to a man of course there are exceptions i know who the exceptions are for the most part but like the average pitcher looks like an idiot he looks like he doesn't know what he's doing and barry zito had a had a way of very specifically looking like he knew what he was doing and all he wanted to do was hit the ball in play between 10 and 40 feet away from home plate and that was it that was the entirety of his game so he would go up there and i i swear it was like he was holding a tennis racket it would be like a swinging bunt

every time but he was good about actually getting the bat on the ball the ball just wouldn't go anywhere because he sucked but he was really good at just making sure that he didn't actually let the ball get by him now he did still strike out a quarter of the time because you know he's bad but in terms of contact hitting ability Barry Zeder was really kind of remarkable for a pitcher you just don't see pitchers do that and as Ben says the next thing he's going to say for 30 seconds I'm going to confirm this with new data yeah Yeah, well, to be fair to Jerry Blevins, I guess, in this respect, by insulting Jerry Blevins in another respect, he's not a great control pitcher for a reliever. He's a good pitcher. He's been an above average pitcher.

And over the last two years, he's been an excellent pitcher because Jerry Blevins, like everyone else in baseball now, strikes out everyone. Jerry Blevins, like everyone else in baseball now, strikes out everyone. Somehow from 2013 to 2014, his strikeout per nine went up from like eight to over 10, then to 11. This year, almost to 13. Yes, somehow 33-year-old Jerry Blevins struck out 69 hitters. I won't say anything about that because I know you don't like it. Over 49 innings. And that is not what he has done historically, but he is not a great control pitcher. He walked 24 in 49 innings this year, and through some small, minor, insignificant version of the yips, but through just not being great at throwing strikes to begin with.

Okay, so over the past 10 years, 176 pitchers have batted at least 100 times. Ivan Nova has struck out the most. He's got 59% strikeouts. That's a lot of strikeouts. Bad hitting pitcher, Ivan Nova. Noah Syndergaard, 50% strikeouts, but still a 70 WRC+. Good hitting pitcher? Anyway, lowest strikeout Nova. Noah Syndergaard, 50% strikeouts, but still a 70 WRC+. Good hitting pitcher? Anyway, lowest strikeout rates.

This one's fun. So like Jeff Supan is up there. Barry Zito is up there. Kenta Maeda actually has only struck out 17% of the time, which I never would have guessed. Zach Granke, 18% of the time. R.A. Dickey, 16% of the time. Javier Vasquez, second place, 15% strikeouts as a pitcher. But first place, famed Levon Hernandez, who struck out just 10% of the time over this decade that

he batted. Now, I don't remember how many years within this decade he was active, but I know better than to ever guess against Levon Hernandez and the duration of his career. He's probably still active now, and we just didn't realize it. He might have actually filled two of the Marlins rotation spots this season. And I mean, he could have, right? And we wouldn't have known, but he made contact with 86% of his swings. Jeff Supine, 88% of his swings. So Barry Zito, really high. He's fifth place on the list, but not first. Could have sworn he was going to be first, but not first. Jeff Supine, 88% contact for a pitcher. Huh. Wow. All right. Did you have a stat segment or did we cover it yesterday? Well, let's say that I just did it.

Okay. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Actually, we got a tweet. Two of us got a tweet about Kenta Maeda's strikeout rate, which I recalled now. It was in August, but it just came back to me because we were talking about that. Someone, Sam, a listener, tweeted at us that Maeda had not yet struck out at the plate, which was unusual. There have been, he wrote, 12 batting seasons by pitchers of at least 32 plate appearances and zero strikeouts. Maeda's

and 11 that came before 1948. How many strikeouts did he end up with this season? Did he eventually strike out? Three. Yeah. three strikeouts and 44 play appearances. Okay, but he made it deep into the season, into August without striking out at all. So we were briefly aware of this for a few seconds looking at a tweet and then forgetting it instantly as we do on Twitter. All right, couple more before you get to your chat.

Let's do this one. Olga says, there was a reference in the last episode to things that can happen in a short series, which is a common phrase in the postseason. But now that you guys are the unofficial language mavens of baseball, can you address that concept? A seven game series and even the five game division series will be the longest series any team has had all season. Who started calling playoff series a short series and why can we stop no i don't think so i think people say short series not in

comparison to a regular season series because i think for the most part people don't think of the regular season as actually being composed of series it's i always think of the regular season as well it's 162 games and maybe one day hopefully 154 but i agree that it's it's probably overused when people talk about the randomness of the playoffs because you'll you'll find things that happen in a short series in any article written to that effect but in reality i mean we've got best of five and best of seven game series these are short series i guess we suffer from a lack of synonyms. Yeah, we have to say something about that. I mean, we could just say small sample over and over and over again, which we do.

So this is, if anything, the cinnamon we're searching for for that. And I mean, it's right. These are long series by baseball standards. But yeah, we just don't really think of the regular season that way. We think of the regular season as a whole unit. And maybe we could be a bit more precise with that. But the alternative is really just to say small sample even more than we already do. So I think it's probably better to have this little bit of variety. Could I ask a question of you related to the playoffs? So when the second wildcard was introduced, I had it seemed to me and I think it seemed to some teams within the industry that all of a sudden you could get into the playoffs with like 86 or 87 wins.

And once you're in the playoffs, you know, anything could happen. You could squeak in and then you could make a whole lot of noise and then you can win it all. Now, I have moved away from that. And I think that baseball has moved away from that. We're seeing more impact trades and a little less parity as I think teams are trying to get really good and i can't tell if i'm falling prey to some sort of fallacy here but as i watch like they're all really good teams in this year's playoffs as soon as the series got started and even though there have been plenty of elements of randomness in the games alone we just had a pickoff throw hit an umpire and a ball hit ball hit Chris Taylor's hat in the same game. Incredible.

But as I watch these games, I don't... In my head, I think that there's basically zero way that the Twins were ever going to win the World Series. Right? They got throttled by the Yankees. But then if that didn't happen, then they were going to get throttled by the next team. And I guess guess are the playoffs maybe are they a more effective separator of talent than maybe we give them credit for from an analytical perspective or is this just being biased because we're just watching individual

games at a time and we want things to seem less random than they are yeah we we kind of touched on this recently when we said that maybe the playoffs are more telling just because every team is going all out and you're trying to win each individual game more than you do in the regular season. But then I think we followed up that by saying, but so is the other team. And so in theory, the same thing should apply on both sides. So I can't tell, like I'm open to the idea that the way that teams play in the playoffs now, and really just this year and last year, maybe certain types of teams would be favored. And so certain team constructions would be favored. And whether it's a top-heavy rotation, a good and deep bullpen, a home-run-oriented lineup, whatever it is, those things that seem to help a team in

the playoffs, maybe some teams are just getting better at constructing that kind of roster. And so maybe, and you know, if you're getting really aggressive in the playoffs and you're bringing in relievers earlier and you're managing those games differently, then I mean, certainly there's like less of a chance that you're going to come back, I would think, in a playoff game than in a regular season game if the other team presses its advantage and starts bringing in its best relievers early and pulls the starter early and all of that. On the other hand, the other team has better hitters than the typical regular season team would have, so that would even things out. So I really can't tell. I don't know. I get the same feeling you do, but maybe that's just because we saw the Dodgers dominate the Diamondbacks and then

dominate the Cubs. And yet on the other side, we saw the Indians lose, right? Despite being the better team. And the Astros came very close to losing despite probably being the better team. So I don't know. I think we might be talking ourselves into something that's not there. I think it's clearly like the Indians and the Yankees. I don't know which team is better built for the playoffs. You want to say the Indians? I assume it's the Indians, but like at least they were close, right? Like those were two very good baseball teams. I don't think it was a complete upset that the Yankees won. But like now imagine it.

Of course, being a Mariners fan, I think about, oh, the Mariners came kind of close to the wildcard. What if they had just squeaked in? Well, then they would have gotten the twins treatment because they're not good. You know, like there's there are in any given year, it seems like there are going to be a small number. This year is atypical, but there's going to be some small number of like really good baseball teams and then there's going to be the the teams that squeak in and i don't know maybe it's just been too long since

we had to deal with the reality of the kansas city freaking royals but i don't know even in like in in 2014 when the giants beat the royals and neither team actually won 90 games in the regular season like who were the dominant teams that year in baseball there wasn't I mean I know like the Angels won 98 games but does anyone think that that Angels team or like the Orioles won 96 games but like there's a pretty huge difference between those Angels and Orioles and like the good teams this year oh yeah well this yeah this year is definitely unusual in that respect, which is a very lopsided league and top-heavy league. So that's part of it probably. Yeah, I don't know if that applies.

I don't know if we're any more likely to see what we're seeing now than we used to be, maybe just because more teams are open to tanking or what. But yeah, this year, definitely unusual. So we've got a couple more minutes. I've got one more question. This is from Dylan. He says, so I was on Jamie Moyer's baseball reference page prompted by seeing a baseball card of him in a Colorado Rockies uniform. Yes, he made 10 starts for the Rockies five years ago and was reminded that he holds the record for most home runs allowed in a career, 522 home runs.

Granted, he pitched in the so-called PED era and also pitched for 48 years, but he didn't pitch during the flyball revolution. So do you think anyone will ever break that record? And if so, are there any likely candidates currently pitching? So I looked up the active leaderboard for home runs allowed, and the leader, as one would expect, is Bartol Cologne, but he's at 407, so he's 115 home runs away from Moyer. Cologne ranks 12th all-time or is tied with David Wells for 12 within 60 home runs of Colon. Bronson Arroyo, who is basically done, is 60 home runs behind Colon. Then you go to CeCe Sabathia at 336, James Shields, 327, John Lackey, 319, Irvin Santana, 307. Those are the only guys above 300.

So it doesn't seem as if anyone has a particularly good likelihood here. I mean, like, unless Sabathia's late career kind of renaissance here, unless he turns into the next Moyer and pitches for another decade at this level, which I guess is theoretically possible, but unlikely. I don't know that any active pitcher really has the inside track on this thing. And I mean, partly that's because we've only been in this most recent and most extreme home run rate era for a couple of years now, two and a half years, whatever it is. So it's not like anyone has had a chance to rack up huge numbers in this era. And there's also,

of course, the fact that pitcher workloads have changed and guys are not going as deep into games they're not making as many starts in a season and so even though the home run rate is higher the home run totals may not be yeah right like uh this year the league leader in home runs allowed was last year's cy young winner rick borcello he allowed 38 home runs that's a lot of home runs but i don't know in the year 2000 jose lima allowed 48 home runs in 2005 eric milton allowed 40 the year before eric milton allowed 43 tough break eric milton home runs are up we know that home runs on contact are up but because strikeouts are so far up like you said i guess i don't need to repeat your numbers it's not going to happen

not unless something really really dramatic happens to the game. Jimmy Moyer's record will not be topped anytime in the near or even medium term future. All right. So that will do it. We've got three World Series games coming up this weekend, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. For all we know, the World Series could be over by the next time we talk, but I'm guessing probably not. So we will discuss everything that happens next time we talk to you. And if you want to experience one of those World Series games with us,

Jeff and I will be doing another Patreon livestream during Saturday's game, Game 4 of the World Series. We will be talking throughout, just as we did during Game 2, for our Patreon supporters at the $10 level and above. So if you are one of those, you will be receiving a message with a link to that stream. There's still time to become one of those if you are not already. So if you sign up at the $10 level or above anytime before first pitch of game four, we will send you a link to that broadcast.

You can join us and chat with us and we'll get some guests in to talk to you too. So you can support the podcast on Patreon and potentially get in on that live stream this weekend by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. And five listeners who have already done that include Brian Riley, Daryl Purpose, Melissa Goodwin, Robert Livingston, and Marco Lepe. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectivelywild. And you can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes.

Thanks to Dylan Higgins for editing assistance. Please keep your questions and comments for me and Jeff coming via email at podcast.fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system. We will talk to some of you on Saturday, and we will talk to the rest of you next week. Enjoy the weekend. Somebody took my speed from me Somebody showed me just how free I could be On a sea of tranquility

Love really changed me love really changed me