Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 124: A World Without Easily Injured Pitchers/Hitter BABIP, and Whether Mike Trout Was Lucky/What We Think About Booing

Episode Date: January 23, 2013

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about pitcher injuries and pitching prospects, hitter BABIPs (specifically Mike Trout’s), and whether they boo baseball players.

Hi, and welcome to Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from BaseballPerspectives.com. It is episode 124, and I'm here with Ben Lindberg. I'm actually here in Long Beach, and Ben Lindberg is in New York. He is here with me on the internet. Someday we'll do a show in the same place at the same time and we'll just stare at each other across our microphones while we talk. Yeah, no, I doubt we will ever do a show. I mean, I don't think that's going to actually ever happen.

Maybe something will bring you to New York again sometime this season. Or both of us to Paris. Or both of us to Long Beach. At the same time. Something will bring me to Long Beach. It's Email Wednesday. We have too many emails.

We have great emails. Our inbox overfloweth. Yeah, you guys have stepped up the game, but you're going to have to step it up even more if you want to beat out the brutal competition, the brutal competition mainly being the last four that we got. That's not true. We read all your emails and select the most interesting.

Yeah, well, we do read all the emails, and they're all interesting. And in fact, one of these days, we'll stop doing the email Wednesday, and I'll just take all the ones we didn't answer, and those will be all of my article ideas for the next eight or nine months, because they're too good. In fact, most of them are so good that I don't want to talk unscripted about them for four minutes. I want to actually research and write about them and put tables together. I want tables with these questions. Yes, we like to do off-the-cuff answers to these things,

and some of them require much more than off-the-cuff. Some require GIFs. Some of these require GIFs to answer properly. Database requests and sorts of things. Yeah. Okay. Fancy fonts. Yeah.

I'll start with two questions that are sort of related. The first is from Matt Sinkowitz. I'm just going to say last names. I think I've listened to a lot of podcasts. It seems to be podcast convention to say last names if last names are provided. I don't know. That seems reasonable. If anyone doesn't want their last name mentioned, don't include it or say you don't want it mentioned, I guess.

A lot of people don't realize that their last name is included, though. If your email address is like acorn75, you don't think your name is in there. But then it shows up in my inbox as being from Matt Sankiewicz Matt Sankiewicz see well he's safe because I can't actually pronounce his last name

well hopefully none of you are on the run from the law or anything and using assumed identities and someone will hear this and ask us to trace your email. Matt asks, does the notion of tin step, there is no such thing as a pitching prospect, have anything to do with pitching prospects or does it simply point to the unpredictability of pitchers? In other words, are pitching prospects more unreliable relative to big league pitchers

than hitting prospects are relative to big league hitters? Sounds convoluted, but I think that this is a coherent question. Maybe it is. And then the sort of related question from Eric Hartman in Brooklyn. He asks, how would personnel evaluations be different if pitchers injury risk was equal to that of hitters? Would Zach Greinke have gotten more than six years would tin step ever have been popularized would i even know who dr james andrews is so these are kind of questions that require research but i selected them because you kind of did some of that research recently sort sort of, for an article.

Not any research that would actually apply to these questions, though. I mean, you compared the, well, I guess you didn't quite compare hitting prospects to pitching prospects. I compared pitching prospects to pitching prospects. Yeah, I compared pitching prospects to previous pitching prospects. Yes, and what did you find? Yeah, he compared pitching prospects to previous pitching prospects. Yes, and what did you find? That there seems to be some movement toward pitching prospects panning out more,

that they're flopping somewhat less frequently, that they're pitching more innings, and they're doing it at a higher level now than they were when the notion was popularized in the 1990s. And I don't remember exactly how specifically I got with that, but there does seem to be evidence that either Baseball America is doing a better job of identifying pitching prospects or I would say more likely a combination of probably of usage patterns and medical advancements probably seems to help young pitchers get through that dangerous period of their lives. And so they're just more likely to be alive in their mid to late 20s, which is sort of the most important thing. Would you care to speculate about Matt's question?

I guess I would. Which one is Matt's? Matt's was the first one. Yeah. Are pitching prospects any? I think, yeah. I mean, I don't think it's a yes or no question. I mean, I think that what it is is a spectrum.

And, I mean, I think that, that what it is, is a spectrum. Um, and I mean, you could, you could actually go further. You could just say that, uh, that there's no such thing as pitching prospect is, is actually just, it falls under the umbrella of you can't predict baseball. I mean, every, everything about baseball is, is sort of unfathomably unpredictable. Um, especially when you're talking about, uh, individual performances, individual players. especially when you're talking about individual performances, individual players. And so, I mean, everything is unpredictable. I mean, the Orioles beat the Red Sox this year in the AL East,

or whoever the good team is you want to say. So you could say there's no such thing as a team or whatever snappy thing. And so it's just a spectrum, though, where I think that you get the further you're trying to project out, which is what you're doing for know, the higher the error bars get and the less information you have about the player's history, the same thing. And when you're talking about pitching prospects whose arms are, you don't have, you don't really have a lot of information about their health characteristics. You often haven't, you know, they know, they've got such varying histories. They've got sort of young and immature tendons. And so there's all sorts of reasons that they're, I think that make that age particularly risky and that position particularly risky. But I mean, it's certainly the case that every player is incredibly unpredictable. I mean,

Adam Dunn seems to be the most predictable thing that you could conjure up. He was a player around 30 or 31 who had been just obscenely consistent, who had essentially one foolproof tool or maybe two if you want to count patience as that. And yet he went from being a 40 home run guy to being the worst hitter in baseball. So you just can't predict anything. But to tie it into Eric's question, I would suspect that if pitchers were injured at a similar rate to hitters that we would probably not have this saying, right? I mean, there's no such thing as a hitting prospect. Do you think that that's just attributable to the fact that pitching prospects and pitchers in general get injured so much more often, which adds another layer of unpredictability? Or do you think that

there is something else about them that makes them less predictable? Like, I don't know, maybe their repertoires develop late, or they lose their stuff that they have, or they gain stuff in some cases. I would guess that if pitchers didn't get hurt so often, we wouldn't have this saying and that that probably accounts for most of the greater variability we see with pitching prospects as opposed to hitting prospects. Yeah, probably. I mean, I think that you're talking about such different trajectories for skill development between the two. I mean, I think that you're talking about such different trajectories for skill development between the two. I mean, with pitchers, you basically have more velocity and more kind of life on your

pitches when you're young than you ever do. And it becomes basically a war of attrition where you're trying to develop new skills to cancel out the declining stuff that you have. And so you're really, I mean, when you look, I think in a lot of ways, when you look at pitchers who are successful in their late 20s or in their 30s, a lot of times they're almost unrecognizable from the guys who were scouted and drafted and developed in their late teens or their early 20s. I mean, like, well, I mean, just for an example,

if Blake Bevin ever turns into something, like, really good, the idea that, I mean, it's almost, there's no straight line that you can really draw or that you would ever think to draw between Blake Bevin, the prospect who got drafted, and Blake Bevin, the guy who might someday be successful. And so I think there is maybe a there is a reinvention to successful pitchers that I'm not sure you quite have with hitters. I mean, there's there's certainly you're predicting a lot of development for hitters as well. Nobody's actually good when they're drafted.

And so you're you're betting on who's going to develop physically and who's going to respond to seeing a lot of pitches and a lot of pitchers. And, I mean, there's certainly a – it's a little bit of wizardry doing that as well. But I don't know. I could see the case for why pitchers, even without the injuries um just because of the physical deterioration that they have i don't know if you're counting that as an injury but just because of that yeah um and i guess i guess as for the rest of eric's question i would say that yes zach granke would have gotten more than six years if he were not a pitcher. If you could somehow convert the essence of Zach Greinke, the pitcher, into a position player,

or just find a position player of a comparable age and comparable production, that he probably would have gotten more than six years, I would think. have gotten more than six years, I would think. If Prince Fielder can get nine years, then I would think a position player equivalent of Zach Greinke could also get more than six years. I guess Fielder was maybe a year younger, or maybe even more than a year younger. But Greinke just turned 29 recently, than a year younger but grinky just turned 29 recently and he was the best pitcher available and i would expect that he would have gotten a longer picture or a longer contract if not for the concerns about injuries that you have with pitchers i mean it depends on again what you're calling an injury um there's actually i mean if you if you, if you take, I mean, in a lot of ways, I mean, I don't know if it's an injury, if, if just the wear and tear of, of throwing so many

pitches leads to less elasticity in your tendons or something, and you don't throw the ball quite as hard. And it's, it's not as if there is something broken necessarily. It's just things not functioning as well as they once did. Um, so I don't know. It's not really an injury technically, but it is a physical, not even a defect, I guess, but just something that physically is not as good as it once was. And that is almost inevitable with a pitcher of a certain age. is almost inevitable with a pitcher of a certain age.

Yeah. Generally, I think that pitchers who don't get hurt, I think probably age better. This is just speculation, but probably age better than hitters that don't get hurt because a lot of the skills that you need to be a successful pitcher aren't really age-related. They're things that could even get better with time. I mean, you're basically fighting the inevitable loss of your fastball. And a lot of pitchers are able to adjust to that, develop new pitches, get better command. Whereas with hitters, the decline in speed, the decline in defensive range is almost impossible

to avoid. And so the sort of predictable decline of hitters, or I should say the decline of hitters is probably more predictable than the decline of pitchers. It's just that the decline of pitchers tends to be more extreme and traumatic and you're liable to get stuck with nothing. I do think that most, I think that Eric's question about what would be different if pitcher's injury risk was equal to hitters, I think actually we've been hearing for years that injuries and health are like the next frontier of baseball knowledge. And if you ever actually imagine a world where pitcher injuries drop substantially, like noticeably, like by half or something like that, it would be massive. the pitcher-hitter balance kind of going or benefits hitters is that pitchers just get

hurt so much that you're filling so many innings with guys who have no business really being in the majors. And if you just take those hundreds and hundreds of innings that are lost from really good pitchers and give them back to the really good pitchers, I mean, you would just have a huge effect on the run scoring environment in the league. And it wouldn't surprise me if there ever were those breakthroughs, if there would actually have to be substantial changes to the rules of baseball to even out that offensive environment again. And Eric's final question, would I even know who Dr. James Andrews is? I guess probably not. There doesn't seem to be all the celebrity sports doctors or the celebrity baseball doctors seem to be guys who treat pitcher specific injuries like the Dr. Andrews and the Dr. Jobes.

because I guess it's kind of hard to identify an equivalent injury for a position player that only position players get and that is related to their position playing in the way that an arm injury or a shoulder injury or an elbow injury is specifically tied to the things that a pitcher does and I guess something you need a specialist for. So there are certain doctors that you tend to hear about fairly often who treat non-pitcher specific injuries, but I guess no one who has attained the same level of prominence. If you Google James Andrews and RG3 right now, you get 369,000 results. I saw him on my television during a football game recently,

and I read many articles about what he said and what he allowed RG3 to do. So I think that you quite likely would know him through the football context, and probably the next celebrity doctor is going to be some head trauma doctor for the NFL or something like that. So, yeah, I think that you might know James Andrews right now. What was a football game doing on your TV?

I watched the playoffs. Oh, okay. Can I ask you another question? Do you have a dog? No, but I live... Does someone who lives near you have a dog? There's a dog near. Okay. Well, making a guest? There's a dog near. Okay.

Well, making a guest appearance is that person's dog. Next question from Paul with a Greek last name that I'm not sure I'm pronouncing right, but may possibly be Hembikitis. Paul says, Sam and Ben, I find Babbit to be a grossly overused statistical tool In comparing players to each other My logic comes from the obvious fact That typically the hitters with the highest BABIP

Are the best hitters That's obviously the case because the best hitters Hit the ball harder and would therefore Be more likely to get hits when they hit the ball And anybody who played baseball At almost any level would readily acknowledge that. Therefore, BABIP should be exclusively used to compare players to themselves from year to year. I'm just so tired of hearing that Mike Trout was lucky this year, BABIP of 383,

based on that stat, when anyone who watched him play would have noted he hits lasers all over the field and can also fly. Am I off base here with my logic? Looking forward to hearing your response. So no, I don't think he's off base. And certainly if we're talking about hitter Babbitt specifically, then I think it makes sense to compare players to themselves, since it's not the same as with pitchers, where everyone seems to cluster around a certain amount and you always expect someone who's above or below that to regress toward it.

Certainly some hitters have the ability to have high BAB-ups year after year or low BAB-ups year after year. And Trout specifically is a guy who you would absolutely expect to have a high BAB-up year after year in that he hits the ball very hard and runs very fast and can beat out infield hits. But I think it's still probably legitimate to say he might have been a bit lucky. I don't know that anyone's projecting a total, I mean, no one's expecting Mike Trapp to crater based on this Babbitt from last year. But the fact that it was 383, that's still extremely high.

I think in, I just looked before in 2011, no one had a BABIP that high. It's a level at which usually maybe just a handful of players or just a few players reach every year. And even someone like Austin Jackson, who's been kind of the king of high BABIPs lately and has topped that 383 mark, I think a couple times, has a career 370 mark. So 383 is just extremely, extremely high. And I don't know that anyone has actually sustained a BABIP that high year after year. So I would say that while he's as likely as anyone to have that high a BABIP next year,

he probably will not have that high a BABIP next year. Well, okay, so first off, the premise here is, quote, the obvious fact that typically the hitters with the highest BABIP are the best hitters isn't true. And that's kind of, you know, that's sort of, I mean, that's an important fact. Barry Bonds had a career 285 BABIP over the past three years, minimum 1,000 plate appearances. Here are the top 10 BABIPs in baseball. Austin Jackson, number one.

Joey Votto, number two. Wilson Betamete, number three. David Fries, number four, Dexter Fowler, number five, Carlos Gonzalez, number six, Emilio Bonifacio, number seven, Chris Johnson, number eight, Michael Bourne, number nine, John Jay, number 10. So it's absolutely not the case that the best hitters tend to have the best Babibs. And that doesn't really matter because BABIP is a tendency stat. It's not a quality stat. You don't point to a person's BABIP and say he's good because of his, and his BABIP is evidence of that. There would be, I guess, some correlation, probably, between being good at hitting and having a high BABIP,

if only because having a high BABIP helps you be a good hitter, and if you have a BABIP below a certain point, you probably will not be a successful hitter. But, I mean, yeah, I think the point that people make when they talk about BABIP, or they should make, I guess. And whether that is Mike Trout with his 383 BABIP this year or whether it's any player in any year, you should just regress it because it's a thing that misleads. It's a thing that is prone to mislead. And I mean, that's the only point about it, right? Well, yeah, I guess. to mislead uh and i i mean that's the only point about it right is that it well like yeah i guess but ideally you would probably want to regress towards some population of players resembling

mike trout right i guess you probably wouldn't want to just say he's just as likely to be league average as any other guy given his his speed right and that's somebody that's why that's why x babbitt was created to sort of take a look at all these factors in a player's offensive game and try to determine what a babbitt should be based on those things um but i don't know i mean i i i don't think that um i mean babbitt is probably overused because it's fairly simple, but it's also used a lot because it's a good thing to look at. I mean, in almost every case, if you're trying to assess a player who is doing something outside of his norms, Babip is not the final answer. But in almost every case, it is the first thing you should look at, I think. Okay. Along with maybe walk rate and isolated power might be the first things

you should look at. I don't have a problem with it as long as it's used, right? Yeah and I mean it is misused sometimes I think. Um, but it is, it is important to mention in, in many cases, would you agree that Trent was a little lucky or that it's likely that he was a little lucky? Um, I would agree that I don't know what he was. I, I don't, I don't, I would require another couple of years before I would say one way or the other. I, uh, if, if I wouldn't bet against him doing it again, and I wouldn't bet against him not doing it again. It's just a thing where we don't have enough information right now. I wouldn't bet against him doing it again at some point in his career.

I would probably bet against him doing it in any particular year, just because I don't know that anyone has had a... I mean, what's the highest career Babbitt? Maybe we can look it up while we're talking here. I think it might be Ty Cobb or someone who is of course playing in a totally different era but his career Babbitt was 378 at least for the years that we have

that stat for him. And I think that might be just about the highest i am i'm looking as we speak but okay uh so based on that i wouldn't expect mike trout's career babbitt or i wouldn't project his babbitt to be higher than the highest ever david freeze is the fifth highest okay well i guess that proves the the highest bad, but not always the best hitter point. Okay, last question for today comes from James. I'm just going to say James because he signed his email. James from Fayetteville, Arizona.

Oh, no, Arkansas. I'm bad at state abbreviations. So James from Arkansas says, now that you are both members of the BBWAA, you are no doubt immune to the knee-jerk reaction that causes an average fan to boo a player. I too, a BP subscriber and a self-titled enlightened fan, thought I was above doing it.

As a Rangers fan, when Josh Hamilton signed with the rival Angels, I was able to temper my friends with talk of, these are professionals who should seek out the most money for their services just like anyone else, and other arguments from a year of listening to the rational baseball talk of you and I and

Kevin Goldstein, whose company we probably don't deserve to be. Mark's going to get a mention. Yeah. However, after hearing that Hamilton didn't give John Daniels a chance to match the offer as they discussed, my ill will for Hamilton peaked. Of course, Hamilton didn't have to wait to see if Daniels would match the offer, which

he almost certainly wouldn't have. And of course, I should relish the home runs instead of the two strike whiffs he had as a ranger. And of course, he can sign with whatever team he'd like, even if it was his previous team's rival. None of these are appropriate reasons to boo a player. And yet when Hamilton comes to Arlington, I might do just that. Which brings me to my point. What do you think about fans booing players?

Considering that rivalries are vital to the sport's prosperity, is booing a necessary side effect of a popular sport or can a more tolerant sport be equally as prosperous and the final perhaps most interesting question when was the last time you booed a player reach back to childhood if you must and why uh did you know that ted williams and Jason Wirth have the same career, Babbit? I did not. I don't have a problem particularly with people booing. I mean, I think that I don't know the last time I booed anybody, but the situation where a player leaves for free agency and then comes back, it seems to me a perfectly legitimate time to boo

so long as you don't actually care. I don't actually think that... If you actually hate Josh Hamilton and actually think that you wish him unhappiness, that's a problem, I would say, because there's no real good reason to wish anybody in this world unhappiness but um certainly for the reasons that a player leaves one city to go to another um but booing is just part of the game i mean it's part of the game by by game i don't mean baseball but the game that

players play with fans and fans play with players it's part of the show and um it doesn't bother me when fans do it for that reason it i guess it bothers me it doesn't bother me when fans do it because a particular player is doing poorly on their team but i mean it also doesn't seem to have a reason and it doesn't seem to be helpful in any way so i guess in that sense i'm less uh kind of, kind of, uh, you know, whatever about it, it's, that seems kind of counterproductive. Um, but you know, I've felt the urge to, I mean, when I used to root for Pedro Feliz, I felt great anger at him when he would swing at the first pitch and ground into a double play. I usually usually I would be at home and I would be, you know, angry at him. So I was not booing him. But I could certainly appreciate the urge to boo even in that situation. But you know what, it's all it's all make believe. And so as long as you

treat it like it's make believe and have fun, that seems fine with me. Yeah, I don't I don't have a problem with it. I have never really had the impulse to boo. I might have booed as a kid at some point. I can't recall a particular player whom I booed, but it might have happened. It always seems like sort of a ridiculous sound to make with your mouth, I think. So I would feel sort of self-conscious booing, even in a stadium full of other people who are booing. And I'm not really inclined to cheer either. I guess making noise is not really part of my demeanor. So I tend to sit quietly at baseball games and will either seethe in anger or appreciate someone's play,

but I will do it quietly, typically. And yeah, I never really understood the motivation for booing one's own player. As someone who grew up as a Yankee fan, I saw many, many times people booing their own players, and it never really made much sense to me. Players know when they're playing poorly. They don't need you to boo them to inform them of that fact. And I always figured that it would make them, if anything, less likely to improve or to succeed going forward when they are downcast about the booing. Maybe they are the type of person who isn't affected by the

booing at all. But if they are affected, I think it's probably more likely that they would be dispirited by the booing than kind of goaded into action by the booing. And I don't know if it really, I don't know if it affects an opposing team much. I would think by the time you're a professional baseball player, you almost don't hear the crowd's reaction, I would think. But maybe it's something that an opposing player would feed off of just as much as he would be demoralized by it. So I don't know. I guess it can be kind of a fun thing and part of being a fan and identifying with the other people who root for the same team that you do.

And I don't begrudge anyone booing. It's just not something I have any desire to do. Tony Gwynn had the same career, Babbitt, as Matt Diaz and Homer Bush. All right. We're done. I guess you sent us so many good questions that maybe we will find time to answer some more of them later this week. You can continue to send them to us at podcast at baseball prospectus dot com. We will be back with 125 on Thursday.