Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1390: Baseball’s Biggest Mystery

Episode Date: June 17, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about the Yankees acquiring Edwin Encarnacion and some surprising names near the top of the MLB home-run leaderboard, Kenley Jansen’s intentional balk, and a fun fact starring Hyun-Jin Ryu, then reckon with some of the most perplexing player seasons of 2019, focusing on the enigma that is the boom-and-bust […]

Mystery, come smother us again Like a moon in the wet grass of night You'll fall like an airplane You do I know it's hard to believe Something you can't see. I know it's hard to believe something you can't see. Good morning and welcome to episode 1390 of Effectively Wild, the baseball podcast on Fangraphraphs.com brought to you by our patreon

supporters i'm sam miller of espn along with ben lindbergh of the ringer hey ben hello how are you not too bad what's got you what's got you so not too bad well on saturday i went to see friend of the show ben gibbard and jenny lewis play a concert in queens that was really fun enemy of the show jenny lewis sworn enemy yeah that's right won't go into that backstory but yeah that was fun so i am still kind of coming down from that fun concert experience oh fun see i well we don't need to get in i haven't been to a concert in a long time. Well, I don't go see that many new acts, I guess, but they were probably alike in that respect. I find that there's a big gap where you go to concerts for a large part of your life, and then later on you also go to a lot of concerts for a large part of your life,

and then in between you don't go to any. And that's because I'm too old to stand up for that long. I can't do standup shows and sit down shows are too expensive for me. And they're, you know, oftentimes not the kind of shows that I'm that into. And plus I don't really want to sit there that long either, but when you get older and all your favorite acts are playing at a concert halls at like a symphonic concert, and you can sit there and drink your wine at intermission and all that. Sure. Uh-huh. Well, even when I was younger, I listened to old people artists. And so whenever I've gone to concerts, it's generally been at places where

you can sit down most of the time. The other thing is that the last concert I've been to was Prince, and you're just not topping that. So I feel like I need to just- It could just be your last concert I've been to was Prince and you're just not topping that so yeah I feel like I need to just it could just be your last concert exactly flip the bat flip the bat and call it a day all right anything about baseball well the Mariners traded Edwin Carrasco to the Yankees this weekend that actually happened while I was at that concert and Ben Gibbard Mariners fan was on stage and I think he's sort of sworn off the Mariners this season because they haven't given him much reason to watch. And now there's even less reason to watch because Edwin Canarsioan, who is actually leading the American League in home runs. Well, so are the Mariners.

Yeah, right. The Mariners have mashed. They have not pitched or defended, but they have hit. or defended, but they have hit. So Encarnacion went to the Yankees for a young pitching prospect who actually went from the Mariners to the Yankees in a trade a couple of years ago. Jerry DiPoto sometimes reacquires people while he is doing trades. And this is probably not exciting for Mariners fans. It's somewhat exciting for Yankees fans because now they can construct a real imagined lineup with Stanton about to be back and judge on a rehab assignment. And the power potential of this lineup with Voigt and

everyone else in it when it's fully operational is something to behold. But I was looking at the home run leaderboard because of Encarnacion just to see who else was way up there that I might not have realized. And I think that's sort of a side effect of the home run rate and the ball and all the rest is that I'm constantly surprised by how many home runs certain people have. So wait. Yeah. Okay. Work. This is, I don't know. You could say treading on your topic. It's treading on our topic, but I go ahead go ahead say some things well hunter renfro yeah for instance has 23 home runs in the last week yeah in this four game series that the padres and iraqis just had where they scored all the runs a record number of runs in a four game

series so he hit two more homers i i think on sunday he's got 23 homers in 223 plate appearances yeah he has fewer plate appearances than most of the guys up there at the top of the leaderboard right so that's a lot of home runs and Pete Alonso has 23 but that's maybe not so surprising I see lots of Alonso bombs all the time are you can I just real quick are you building up to your your ace do you got not really okay no all right keep going I probably should have built up to Hunter ace? Not really. Okay. No. All right. Keep going. I probably should have built up to Hunter Renfro because who would have known?

And he's someone there have been trade rumors about recently. So you can go get yourself a 23 home run hitter if you'd like. And Cattell Marte. I thought you were building up to Cattell Marte. Yeah. Well, Cattell Marte has long been a Jeff Sullivan breakout pick, so he has been talked about positively on this podcast before, as perhaps you will soon hear as you work your way back. But he has broken out, I think we can say.

And, yeah, he's got 20 homers. 20 homers, can you believe it? 20 homers, Quetel Marte. I noted this. What's his previous season high? 14 last year. 14 last year. But before that, five.

He has the longest home run of the year that's not in Coors Field. Ian Desmond surpassed him, but it was a Coors Field home run. And so he has the longest home run. So I noted this in that very same ESPN Power Rankings, of which I've already repeated one of my fun facts. But Cattell Marte, 20 home run hitter bryce harper out slugger and longest home run of the year hitter is listed as the fourth lightest player in baseball at 165 pounds he is not that's a lie he's not 165 pounds he's not 165 pounds there's no way but uh that's

what he's listed at yeah same. Same as Terrence Gore. Bryce Harper only has 12 homers. Yeah. Bryce Harper, very unremarkable season so far. Yeah. We're going to mention Quetel Marte later in this show. Okay. Anything else?

No, I don't think so. What about Kenley Jansen? We're not going to talk about Kenley Jansen. The intentional balk. The intentional balk. All right. That's one of the things I'd like to talk about. Okay.

First of all, as it was repeated to me, I think I watched it. I mean, I definitely watched it, but I think I might have watched it with no volume. But as it was repeated just a few minutes ago, somebody told the story of it on TV and mentioned that it was maybe to avoid having signs stolen, which seems very reasonable. Probably it was. It seems ironic that it would be Kenley Jansen who would be worried about signs being stolen. Good point, yeah. It's a cutter.

It's like the batting practice coach worrying that you're sending signs. I mean, yeah, it's a cutter. That's what it's going to be. It's a cutter. They have signs. I didn't know that they had signs when Kenley Jansen pitched. Yeah. Do you remember when Lance McCullers was doing his 35 straight curveballs?

I just remember Brian McCann at one point just nodding. He wasn't putting down numbers anymore. He was just nodding. So that's one thing about that. But the other thing is that this was an interesting... This a in some ways of the same genre as skunk in the outfield right the the idea of skunk in the outfield is that a base runner would deem himself more valuable on first than on second because as long as he's on first he can go to second thereby causing turmoil for the defense once you're on second you can't do anything you're stuck there you can't do anything. You're stuck there.

You can't make any more noise about going, well, you could go to third, but there might be someone there. But when you're on first, you can get them to try to get you out. And so the skunk in this case had second base freely available to him once he had taken off, but he didn't want to go there. He wanted to go back to first so he could keep on doing this. And in the same way, Kenley Jansen decided that a runner on third was less valuable to the offense than a runner on second, same kind of idea. And so then this makes you think, well, then should logically speaking, should Jason Hayward have stolen second

back? And so I don't know, some people will know the answer to that question is he's not allowed to. But that's an interesting rule as well. And so I did a little background research on this because I knew that you weren't allowed to run the bases backwards, that you couldn't steal second. But I also knew Gene Segura did that thing a few years ago. Remember that one? Yeah.

So to set the scene, well, actually to really set the scene, in the early 1900s, there were a couple of players who would occasionally steal first from second. Germany Schaefer was most famous for this. Yes. And this was a classic skunk in the outfield type move. He wanted to steal first, hoping that they would get greedy, well, not not greedy maybe rational

but try to throw him out and then if they tried to throw him out the runner on third could then score so it was like your basic little league first and third play but run slightly differently uh trying to induce a throw so the runner on third could advance and anyway they outlawed that rule uh that that um that gambit there is a rule a rule that you cannot run the bases backwards. So then to then come back and set the new scene, Gene Segura in 2013 was on second base. There was a runner on first. He got in a rundown between second and third.

When he got back to second safely, the runner on first had already advanced to second. They were both standing at second on the same time. The Cubs tagged both of them out while they were standing on the bases and umpire signaled out gene segura thinking he had done something wrong trotted back to the dugout while ryan braun stood on second base thinking he had done something right but the rule is that the

trail runner is the one who is out so braun was out while segura was safe the whole time jogged back toward his home dugout which thankfully or maybe it was visitors but thankfully was in the path of first base although maybe it wouldn't have mattered. Maybe it would have been better if it had been on the way to third base now that I think about it. But his first base coach said, stand on this bag, you're safe. And sure enough, Braun was out. Segura had successfully gone from second base to first base and there was much discussion and it was determined that he was safe. And so first of all, I don't know if you knew this, but I just watched the play and he had clearly been tagged out when he started to leave. Fielder tagged him when he was on the base and then tagged him again as he was coming off the

base. But the umpire did not call him out. If this were one year later, this all would have been moot because he would have been out on replay. They would have asked for a replay and he would have been out. But this was 2013, the year before before so i'm reading an article in the new york times that explains that after germany schaefer did this thing and they outlawed it the rule decreed that quote after a runner reaches base he is out if he runs the bases in reverse order for the purpose of confusing the defense or making a travesty of the game. And so it was, I guess, determined by the umpires that because Segura was the one who was confused, that he was not attempting this as an act of confusion, as an act of introducing confusion,

this didn't apply. So he was allowed to accidentally go back to first. But there are other rules that probably should have come into play that would have made Segura out. One of which is that a runner is deemed to be out or is out if he is deemed to be abandoning his efforts to run the bases, which Segura was, he was trotting back to his dugout. So he probably should have been out there. And then also a comment on a rule 701 says if a runner legally acquires title to a base and the pitcher assumes his pitching position, the runner may not return to previously occupied base.

So there's no motive is irrelevant there. It is very clear, according to that rule, Segura should have been out. So in fact, Segura is no precedent at all, for uh you know precedent for wanting replay because this call should have been changed it shouldn't have been allowed so anyway jason hayward cannot steal third base the other thing that did occur to me is that cannot steal second you mean cannot steal second base yeah i'm sorry you can't steal first either can you decline a block i don't think you could i don't know why how what probably not but i mean yeah i don't know could you i don't think you could. I don't know. How, what? Probably not. I mean, yeah, I don't know. Could you?

I don't know. Well, boy, I don't know. So like if a pitcher throws a pitch and the batter hits it after the balk has been called, then he can decline the balk. You're allowed to. So if you hit the pitch for a home run and the umpire is called balk, the home run can still stand. You can say, I don't want the balk. I want the pitch.

And so I guess you can decline a bach in that situation so maybe you could decline a bach why not i think you should be able to decline a bach yeah i think you should be able to also although if he were to decline it in this situation i guess he'd be tacitly just admitting that he's stealing signs or i guess just that he's in jensen's head and jensen wants him at third and therefore he wants to do the thing that jensen doesn't want him to do so yeah but it is a strange situation to be worried about signs doing i mean i guess i don't know if uh if jensen is throwing a cutter i don't know what percentage of the time he throws a cutter but probably like 90 something yeah yeah but i but i guess if of the time he throws a cutter, but probably like 90-something. But I guess if you're someone who throws a cutter 90-something percent of the time, then it's really valuable to know when it's not coming.

That's exactly right. Yeah, you know, that's true. You're right. I have just failed logic. You're right, because as long as you throw two pitches, it really doesn't matter what percentage of time you throw each of them. There is still uncertainty. And the uncertainty is proportionately larger the more you throw one of them. It's proportionally larger when you throw the other.

And so you're right. The advantage of throwing a 3% pitch is much greater than the advantage of throwing a 30% pitch. And so, yeah, you'd want to keep it secret. So, yeah. Good point. Only 82% cutters this year. And so, yeah, you'd want to keep it secret. So, yeah. Yeah. Good point. Only 82% cutters this year. And it's actually been going down. He was at 93 early in the season, or 90-ish. And he's been at like 70-something for the last couple months. So, he's mixing it up. Okay.

So, yeah. And I guess there's a history of sign stealing or suspected sign stealing between the Dodgers and the Cubs that goes back a bit. So that's why. And obviously that run didn't really matter. It was 5-3, two outs, and Hayward was the only runner on base. So who cares if he's at third or second? I think Hayward should have said, if you don't want me to steal your signs, why don't you go get them out of the ocean? Yeah. Put that on a t-shirt. I do want the t-shirt. It's such, the t-shirt's a good t-shirt. Someone sent me the t-shirt and it's just fantastically designed.

And like you say, as long as we ignore the stumbling that got us to those final five words, go get it out of the ocean. Seven words, then it's great. Yeah. All right. I want to tell you about my favorite, probably my favorite fun fact of baseball this year right now, right now, this specific moment, which is that after his start on Sunday night, Hyunjin Ryu has now walked five batters in whatever innings this whole year,

which is impressive. But I looked and I saw that he only had a 67% strike rate, which is pretty good. It's, you know, it's good, but it's not, it's not like leader, like Kershaw will be 69, 70% some years. And Cliff Lee, I think was at 70% when he was doing kind of comparable control stuff. And Ryu's only throwing 67%. And so I thought, well, where are all the walks then?

And so I looked and it turns out that when he gets to three balls, he doesn't throw four balls. He doesn't throw four balls. He doesn't throw a fourth one. He's very good at avoiding the fourth one. So he has five walks this year. He has 50 three ball counts. So his walk rate in three ball counts is 10%. The Blue Jays and White Sox as teams have walk rates of 10%.

Yeah. So you can put Ryu in a three ball count and he walks batters the same as the Blue Jays and the White Sox do overall from scratch. And so then that though is still like, well, how's he doing that?

And so I'm going to tell you how he's doing that. His three ball, his strike rate on three balls is 94%, which is like nuts. Nobody throws anything in any count anytime ever anything under any circumstances 94 percent of the time the number two in baseball pitcher is 85 percent so he's 94

with a three ball strike count a strike rate number two is 85 the gap between him and number two i know i don't i generally don't like this framing of effect, but in this case, there are 80 qualified pitchers, Ben, okay? 80. The gap between him, number one, and the number two is the same as the gap between number two and number 50. Number 50, below average. Yeah, that's a big gap.

His chase rate, Ben, on three balls is 72%. Wow. 72% on three balls, which again, nobody chases anything 72% of the time ever. But to do it on three balls when you have no obligation to swing unless you think it's your pitch is nuts. 72%. That must be a very small sample size because he's not even throwing many pitches outside of the zone on three balls. Well, no, he is. I mean, he's not throwing a lot, sure.

Yeah, I just looked at his rate of pitches in the strike zone on three ball counts. This is before Sunday, I guess, if you sunday was uh 74.1 percent yeah it says he had he'd thrown 81 pitches in three ball counts and 60 of them were in the strike zone so we're talking about 20 ish 20 ish 20 ish pitches out of the zone on three balls and he got chases on 14 of them. Yeah. That's impressive. Yeah. That's nuts. Come on. Yeah. No, that's pretty good. Only three other pitchers out of the 80 are over 50%. Nobody is of course near 72. And, um, for what it's worth, there are three Dodgers starters who are among these 80 qualified pitchers and all three are in the top eight in strike percentage on three balls. So they have, um, they've all been very good at avoiding walks.

Yeah, I noticed that when I was writing about Kershaw last week, and Rick and I talked a little bit about that article, but when I looked at, well, I was looking with Kershaw at first pitch strikes and then going outside the zone on later pitches and the ratio of pitches in the strike zone on first pitches to pitches in the strike zone on later pitches and like the ratio of pitches in the strike zone on first pitches to pitches in the strike zone on later pitches and Kershaw's is very high because he tends to throw a lot of pitches in the zone at first and then he just expands and expands and I saw that like Rich

Hill and Ross Stripling were also very high on that list but you're talking about strike throwing and getting strikes which could be swings or it could have been called strikes yeah i don't remember what i'm actually that last thing i might have been talking about zone percentage which is different i can't remember all right all right marco estrada by the way has a launch angle of 31.3 degrees that's his average launch angle that seems too high uh all right gary sanchez has 20 homers by the way i forgot to list him in my my little leaderboard i can't believe that i honestly cannot believe that you're listing gary sanchez pete alonso and cattell martin like those are all the same fact

i mean yeah well gary sanchez only played 51 games and he's still got 20 homers. That lineup. Cattell Marte only weighs 51 pounds. Yeah, that's true. Encarnacion, Voight, Stanton, Judge, Sanchez, Gregorius is back, Glaber Torres, DJ LeMayhew, Aaron Hicks, all in one lineup? Let's break up the Yankees. Could be the third best team in baseball too. I mean, could be the best. I'm not saying that they're not the best, but they could be the third. Those are the Astros and the Dodgers are so good.

Yeah. Well, they have starting pitching. The Yankees just have a ridiculous lineup and bullpen. Not so much starting pitching, but it seems to be working okay for them. Anyway. All right, Ben. I want to talk about some things. I want to talk about unexpected things this year.

One in particular that will work our way too. But, you know, you can't predict it. You can't predict baseball. Yeah, that's what they say. It feels to me like this year is wilder than usual. And maybe it's because... On the individual level. On the individual level.

Right, yeah. The team stuff is extremely predictable. There's basically like one team out of place at this point. But on an individual level there it feels like there are a lot of crazy things going on and a lot of them are home run related and a lot of them are youth precociousness related but yeah yeah just off the top of your head what's the what's the i mean what's the least predictable thing this year like tommy listella tommy listella you think yeah he's up there, so that's kind of because I was looking at the like the leaders in all-star voting.

Tommy La Stella had 10 career home runs. He's 30 years old. He had 10 career home runs at this point through this point. And now he has 15 this year. Yep. That's a pretty good one. Pretty unpredictable. And so that is a pretty good one.

a pretty good one. And one thing though, that your book is really good at showing is that unpredictable is not the same as, as weird necessarily, like players can develop, they can change things, they can get better. And so one thing that your book makes clear, but also a lot of really smart baseball writing over the last five or 10 years has shown is that we can't necessarily say what's going to happen. Baseball is unpredictable, but there's a logic to it. It's not like, it's not like this is just complete anarchy out there. Like Tommy LaStella, maybe, maybe, maybe he just act, you know, somehow bunched together all of his good games into a two month period. That happens sometimes the Randy Wynn principle or whatever, But also guys get better and they can learn tangible things.

They can change things. They can work with coaches. They can use what's around them to become different ballplayers. They can get stronger. All these things make sense. So when a player like Tommy LaStella breaks out, we're shocked. But it kind of makes sense that that would happen sometimes. And so that's a good one, though.

Tommy LaStella is a good one. Ryu, Ryu's season's a good one though ton of the still is a good one ryu ryu's season is a good one i feel like the way that the chris archer trade has played out where chris archer now has an era of six and austin meadows and tyler glass now if you were starting the season from scratch and they were both healthy like Glass now might be one of your top three Cy Young picks, and Meadows you might say would be one of your top 10 or 15 MVP picks. Yep. And that's like you expect some trades to get lopsided, but that happened fast and a lot. Yeah.

And also the minor leaguer who was traded in that trade, right? Shane Paz. Yeah. He's got a 1.44 ERA in 25 innings in A ball, but he's doing really well. He is doing really well. He's got 32 strikeouts and seven walks and he's 19. I guess he's 20. All right. So yes, the way that that trade has worked out is unexpected. Chris Davis's hit list streak, I think just mathematically speaking, seems really unexpected.

But on the other hand, if you do the math, if you assume he's a 150 hitter, which by the way, he's back down to 167 with a 550 on OPS. So that little boomlet, unfortunately, was not lasting. But if you consider him a 150 true talent hitter, then the odds of 54 straight plate appearances without a hit are only like one in 10 000 which isn't that crazy you consider there's a lot of baseball players playing a lot of games so fairly unexpected jordan alvarez you know comes up and he hits four homers in five games austin riley comes up and hits like 11 homers in his first month unexpected partly it's home run environment partly it's home run environment. Partly it's this trend that we've talked about a lot where young players are no longer young when they come up.

They're actually kind of in their peak when they come up. And so unexpected, but like not a real big shock. I think that Chris Sale, in a way, his first month is a contender for the weirdest thing because Chris Sale last year was the best pitcher in baseball when he pitched. And he, since then, since the first month, has also been the best pitcher in baseball when he's pitched. And then for some reason, for a month, he was terrible. Everything was bad about him.

He was throwing much less hard and he was getting hit. And everything was really bad. And you thought, oh my gosh, Chris Sale. Like I remember I actually asked somebody on Gchat, like what's the over under on career wins for Chris Sale because future wins. Because at that point it looked like almost certain that he was going to probably have surgery before things got fixed. You just didn't look at him in April and think, ah, he'll get out of it. Like you thought, oh, he's hurt. And then he'll have surgery and then he'll come back in a year and who knows. And at that point he had, so at that point he had 103 career wins. And I thought, is it more likely than not that he will finish

his career with fewer than 150 wins if you assume he's going to have surgery? And then now that looks nuts. He's the best pitcher in baseball again. And it's not the best pitcher in baseball thing that is unexpected. It's the month that he was really bad with all the greatness. So that's a weird one. Yeah, that was maybe related to his spring training or lack of training. Exactly. Unexpected.

You can't predict it, but also fairly easy to explain. And we know that you know pitchers they are at some risk of having their mechanics get off and usually that gets sorted out pretty quickly but it can have major effects on you and he got it sorted out and it was a temporary thing so unexpected but not hard to explain exactly so here though i think is the most unpredictable unexplainable weirdest thing in baseball this year mitch garver jose ramirez oh yeah except that you predicted it you with again with mitt we are used to now realizing that players can do things to make themselves much better that they all have they are all essentially superhuman athletes and at this point it is about

whether they can unlock that way of playing that makes them jump from 500th best to 50th best which is a very small margin and they're all trying to do it and when they find it sometimes it clicks that's easy to explain they're trying to do that that's the whole point that's why they exist they're trying to find that next level when When a player goes from that to Jose Ramirez, though, I just cannot figure it out. And so we're going to, I think we need to talk a little bit about Jose Ramirez. If all baseball players X'd or if the baseball gods did Y, what would it mean? And I feel like with Jose Ramirez, we need to think if an MVP candidate for two years in a row suddenly is this, what does that mean? What does it mean that a baseball player, that this can happen with a baseball player who is as good as he was? So I'm going to give you a few things about not Kenley Jansen. He's on the list of things to talk about in this show,

but we already did that, about Jose Ramirez. So last July when Fangraphs did their trade value, what do they call that, trade value series? Yeah, trade value rankings. They rank all the players in baseball based on how much trade value they have given their future projections and their current contract status. Jose Ramirez, number one, number one in all of baseball ahead of Francisco Lindor and ahead of everybody else.

But Lindor was number two. And Kylie wrote, I'd like to say the top spot was a tough call and break down a 33 point recap of how I landed on this one. But it seemed like this would be the guy from pretty early in the process. The mean projection for Ramirez calls for him to produce 9.4 war and 41 home runs while also recording more walks than strikeouts plus defense and league leading base running metrics. A month later, Dan Zimborski wrote that Jose Ramirez projection in zips put him at 9.7 war which would have been the greatest season in history by a third baseman uh he had a 53 chance at that point of having the greatest season ever by a third

baseman and a 20 chance of being the first third baseman ever to hit 10 war he was also going to be uh he was at that point 0.1 war behind mike trout and uh i think at that point only one player in history had ever finished ahead of a healthy Mike Trout playing a full season in war. And Jose Ramirez had a chance to be the second. And since roughly then, not quite then, but since August 15th, he's played 400 and he's had 486 played appearances. If you include the post-season, he's hit 184, 296, 289 this year. He's, I think, at 0.0 war and a 599 OPS. And I checked with Dan Simborski and his 10th percentile projection was not that. His 10th percentile projection was a 99 OPS plus.

So the 10th percentile projection still had him basically being a league average hitter. And his OPS plus right now is 59. He is one of the very worst players in baseball. He went from being arguably the second or third best player in baseball, an MVP candidate two years in a row. And as I recall, basically tied with Mookie Betts for the second best projection in baseball coming into the season this year. He went from that to now a replacement level player. And that's just, that's shocking. That's shocking. It makes you think like that your range of things that you think can happen is actually way too narrow. That even recognizing as we do that you can't predict baseball, you just could not possibly have drawn this up.

And the fragility of everything you think you know about baseball is so much greater than we give credit for. If you were the Twins, for instance, then your offseason would have probably, you would have considered everything a lot different if you thought, well, it is possible that the guy we project for eight war is actually going to be zero. And if you were Cleveland, then your offseason would have obviously been probably a lot different. Eight to zero, or maybe seven to zero, depending on your projection. So I have a little, I mean, I want to play a little game, but I don't know if you just want to talk.

Well, so I think first of all, he is someone who surprised us when he went in the other direction because we didn't realize how good Jose Ramirez was. He wasn't very good for his first few years in the majors. Now, those were not full seasons, but we kind of got used to the idea of Jose Ramirez when he came up and he played 15 games and then he played 68 games and he played 97 games. And when he played 97 games in 2015, he had a 72 WRC plus. He batted 219. He was not very good. And by that time he'd been hanging around for a while and he hadn't been a super duper prospect or anything. So I think it shocked us just as much in the other direction when he

went from unremarkable guy who you didn't even know him from the other Jose Ramirez to suddenly one of the best players at baseball. And it kind of happened sort of slowly too. Like in 2016, he was much better, but he wasn't a superstar that year. He was good when you factor in the defense and everything, but the offense was fine. He didn't hit for an enormous amount of power. And even that year, he went from like a 150 isolated power that year to like 265 the next year, 282 last year. And sure, that that's partly the ball but mostly not the ball and so i didn't see that coming and it took me some time to adjust to that so now i've really got whiplash with jose amiris because i've totally had to change what i think about him twice now and it's this like flowers for algernon type trajectory where he was bad and then amazing and then now he's suddenly bad again. So I don't know how much you're going to break down his season and how he's ended up this way. I just searched a few things while you were talking.

Well, yeah, not that much because I haven't seen a lot of explanation for it. I mean, I've looked at his profile. I've looked at his batted ball stuff and all that. And, you know, it's not glaringly obvious. I haven't read a lot of writing on it, maybe because it's not glaringly obvious. There doesn't seem to be an injury. He's not actually hitting the ball less hard. He's hitting the ball much higher,

which is often a good thing, but maybe it's not for him. Maybe it's not the way he's hitting it. Maybe he's, you know, like obviously if you're hitting the ball at a certain trajectory, then getting it higher is good. But if you're hitting the ball at a different trajectory, then hitting it higher is bad. Now you have a pop-up. And I feel like I have watched, I mean,

I feel like I've watched 40 Jose Ramirez plate appearances this year and 36 of them ended in pop-ups. But then I looked and his pop-up rate isn't outlandish. It's actually not really that much higher. Although his launch angle overall is much, much higher, much higher. Right. So just looking at some numbers, I haven't done a full deep dive here, but it seems like he's been a little unlucky and maybe he had been a little lucky before.

So there's some kind of narrowing of the range of actual performance here. Like looking at, let's see, there have been 189 hitters going into Sunday who had at least 200 plate appearances this year. He has the fourth biggest gap between his weighted on base average and his expected weighted on base average in the direction you don't want. expected weighted on base average in the direction you don't want. He had a 266 WOBA and a 321 expected WOBA. So only Kendris Morales, Justin Smoak, and Jason Kipnis had bigger gaps between basically how well you'd think they would be doing based on their batted ball stuff and how well they've actually done. And in the last couple of years, he was in the other direction on that leaderboard. Not dramatically, but like last year, he had a 392 WOBA and a 366'd expect him to be doing it's not as big uh like i mean if if he had a 321 weighted on base average right now which is his expected mark that'd be bad but we probably wouldn't be talking about him on this podcast right that's basically

league average right yeah so it's not it's not good and you know like his hard hit rates down from like 35 to 30 and his like other stuff like his strikeouts are up a tiny bit, but he's still walking a lot. And he doesn't strike out much. Yeah, he doesn't strike out that much even now. It's not like his plate discipline is completely cratered. I guess he's chasing some more pitches than he was last year, but not more than he had the year before.

He's still swinging at lots of pitches in the strike zone. So it doesn't look like he has completely fallen apart until you see the stats and maybe until you watch him. I don't know. I think I've watched him less than you have, but when was it that you brought up the possibility that Jose Ramirez was just bad now? It was like the first week of the season. It was our lessons from opening weekend. Right. Yeah. And you just sort of joked yes jose ramirez is bad now right and so i um i'm now now we're gonna play the game first ben i just want you to just somewhere around your computer just write down uh two numbers okay

okay i want you to write down don't tell me don't tell me what it is i want you to write down uh what you think jose ramirez war will be for the rest of this season okay and what you think is war will be next season or or if you want yeah next season or or for the rest of this season and next season all right all right so now uh this is a little bit of a of a game a game that we played very very very early with re dickie you remember this game yeah right so i'm gonna just say a player and you're gonna tell me whether you would rather have jose ramirez or that player okay for do you want to do it for this year or do you want to do it for the for the next year and a half we could do it for this year i guess okay so all of these players

are you know they're basically they're basically inf infielders like Jose Ramirez and they're all basically youngish like Jose Ramirez, but they also all have very different trajectories over the last year, two years, three years, four years. Every player's got his own trajectory and these players, you, you all, you all, you'll have a different sort of sense of emotion, of momentum for each of them. Okay? Okay. All right. So Jose Ramirez or Paul de Jong. Paul de Jong, I think, is of all the players that I'm going to tell you, I think he has the highest war over the last year and a half. He is the closest to Jose Ramirez in total war in the last year and a half. Yeah. I've underrated Paul de Jong repeatedly, as probably a lot of people have, but I'm wary of doing it again. He's been worth like three war already this year, and I feel bad for discounting him before the season because I just kind of thought, whatever, Paul DeYoung, he's an okay.

He's just a defensive shortstop who's not a terrible hitter and now he's been a really good hitter for the second time in three years so i might take paul to young over jose ramirez right now okay did you say for just this year or for for this year okay just this year we're doing from from tomorrow going forward all right right next one is jorge Polanco. Polanco was I don't know, in some ways, Polanco, it might be if you said who's who's who's the next Jose Ramirez or who's got the closest thing to Jose Ramirez track right now? Not who's the next, but the closest thing to that early Ramirez arc. It might be him. He was like a guy who seemed like he was just going to be a major league infielder, maybe average or so. Guy who seemed like he was just going to be a major league infielder, maybe average or so. And then in his mid-20s, he suddenly became a superstar. And right now, Polanco is second in the American League in war behind Mike Trout. But before that, he was basically a league average guy for a couple seasons and a prospect,

but not like an elite one when he was coming up. Right. I think I'll take Ramirez. All right. How about Ramirez or Yohan Mankata? So Mankata is, over the last year and a half, has basically half the war that Ramirez does. But this year he's already set a career high. He, of course, is a former elite prospect.

And he's hitting 295, 348, 506 right now. Yeah. Yeah, I jumped the gun a little bit on my Mankata breakout. I think I had him as a breakout guy when I was forced to pick breakout guys. I don't know whether it was a year ago, probably a year ago. So now that's sort of happening, but he's not like a great plate discipline guy. That's the thing with Ramirez that makes me kind of want to keep him up there is that, A, he's like, he can field and run and that coupled with good plate discipline kind of like makes the floor seem like it should be pretty high, even though it's been extremely low this year. So I think I will take Ramirez over Moncada.

Okay. How about Ramirez or Quetel Marte? Quetel Marte, 25 years old, just hit his 20th home run of the season. He had three and a half war last year. He's up around three already this year. But, you know. Yeah, I think I'll take Marte. I'm probably swayed by Jeff being so high on Marte for years

and my respect for Jeff's player evaluation skills. And also Marte's doing really well this year. So yeah, I'll go with him. Okay. What about Ramirez or Xander Bogarts? Bogarts. Okay. What about Ramirez or Brandon Lau? Ramirez. Okay. What about Ramirez or brandon lau ramirez okay what about ramirez or scott kingery yeah scott kingery's having quite a year but i will say ramirez uh brandon lau is also having quite a year yeah okay all right what about uh ramirez or rafael devers ram. And what about Ramirez or Hunter Dozier? Ramirez. And what about Ramirez or, remember just this year, we're not doing like, okay. What about Ramirez or Fernando Tatis? Tatis. Okay. And what about Ramirez or, I don't even need to ask this, Dansby Swanson? Yeah, Ramirez. Okay. One last one, Glaber Torres torres uh ramirez okay so you're much higher on

ramirez than i i might have guessed that you would be i'm not saying you're higher than i am or than you should be but you know those are 11 or 12 names and you definitely have ramirez near the top of them only four players that you picked over him and of course i could have just asked you what you think ramirez will do over the next half season and year and a half. So since all of this, you know, if Ramirez is a minus two war player, then he's going to be below everybody. And if he's a superstar, he's going to be above everybody. So it's not his actual. So why don't you just tell me, what do you think he will be? Yeah, I don't know if my answers are consistent here because looking at the numbers I put down and then comparing to the people I said that Ramirez is better than or that I'd prefer to have, I'm not sure if these are all consistent. But I said two and a half wins the rest of this season and three and a half next year. Okay, so we're pretty close on that. I was 1.7 this year.

Very, very specific for some reason. And then I also had 3.5 next year okay so strangely this guy who has had one of the most historically unprecedented breakouts become an absolute superstar and then has also had one of the all-time disappointing collapses at age 25 yeah 26 right is he 26 now well he was 25 last year with no known injury cause right i'm aware of and with no other known cause despite that you and i looked at him and said yeah we pretty much know what he is like we're we're about the same on that. We're literally the exact, we had the exact same thing for next year. We think he is so typical that we can predict him like that. So that's interesting to me. I will just say that if I have him as a 1.7

for the rest of this year, I will take probably everybody on that list over him except for Swanson, Dozier, and that's probably it. Uh-huh. Okay. Yeah, I don't know. I kind of don't really believe in Kingery for absolutely no reason whatsoever. None. I have no logic for that. I think it's because he pitched and threw 55 last year,

and I've never seen him as an athlete since then but um so but here's my here's the final question ben so i'm gonna read i'm gonna give you two things first i'm gonna read the bp annual comment which you already kind of said the same thing but the annual comment for ramirez last uh this winter you know the old story do everything utility player becomes a fan favorite thanks to his short stature scrappy pay play and The annual comment for Ramirez this winter. majors. You're left with your memories and little else. But what if that story turns out differently? What if your scrappy utility player morphs into a middle-of-the-order masher, a bona fide superstar and MVP candidate, terrorizing opposing pitching staffs with elite power to go along with one of the best eyes in the game? What if that power spike doesn't affect his strikeout rate at all? What if he becomes an elite base runner, too? What if he proves he can hold his own at the

hot corner or second base? What if he does all can hold his own at the hot corner or second base? What if he does all that in his age 24 season, does even better in his age 25 season and is under team control for another five years after that? These questions are all rhetorical, of course, because things like that just never happen. And the second thing I want to read is,

or note is before 2014, according to Dan Zimborski's piece about Jose Ramirez from last summer, before 2014, so when Ramirez had like 12 major league games and was basically just a prospect, Zips projected him to have 22.9 career war for the rest of his career, which at the time made him like something like the 70th best player in the world going forward. He is currently at 21.8 career war. So he was at 22.9 projection five years ago before we'd ever heard his name. He's at 21.8 and has been stuck basically at 21.8 for almost a year now.

So that's interesting. It would be interesting if he ended his career with 22.9 career war, and we could say, see, you can predict baseball. But here's my question is, would it be more? Well, what is my question? All right, let me ask you this. Would it be more surprising for Jose Ramirez to be done? Surprising like today, like not going back, but today, if I ask you, what's more likely that Jose Ramirez is essentially done

and maybe he's got five more career war in him or that Jose Ramirez finishes in the top three in MVP voting next year? I'd say done. Done would still surprise me more. Me too. Yeah. And I don't know why.

How many plate appearances of this would it need to be before you? Because I still think, yeah, he's going to be good. How many plate appearances would it take for you to think that he's flipped over? I don't know. Maybe if he shows no signs of life the rest of this season and we go into next year. I don't know. It's just so strange. It's like if he had the same background

as francisco lindor let's say then we would think of this slump differently right because and i don't know if that's fair or not because over the past two seasons jose ramirez was more valuable than francisco lindor at least according to fangraphs war he had a slightly higher war in each of the past two seasons and well was you know basically the same the year before that too. So like over three years even if you want to go that far he's been as valuable if not more so and that's like what projection systems look at. They look at the past three years generally and so that's what we have telling us entering this season that Ramirez was every bit

as good as Francisco Lindor but Francisco Lindor was a top prospect he was a you know total total stud just eighth overall pick in the draft like top prospect we all expected stardom for him and Jose Ramirez we did not and that was years and years ago and really probably shouldn't even be in our mental projection systems or data banks at this point, but it is. And the fact that Jose Ramirez surprised us when he was good still factors into my projection for him and my level of surprise if he were to be done at this point or to go back to stardom so yeah i don't know how long it should now that we're in this era where you can make changes in the middle of your career and you can be a completely different guy and you can sustain that and guys have and we have numbers that can tell

you with a greater degree of specificity exactly how you're performing right now so we don't always need the huge sample size to say, this is what you are. We can look at the pitches you throw or the batted balls you hit, and we can tell what you are. And yet still something about Jose Ramirez from years ago is having a heavy impact on my projection here where I'd be less surprised if he is done than if I had expected him to be good before his breakout. That's a really good point. And it's, I think, worth noting that both of us had him, you know, when we off the top

of our head picked the number 3.5 war for next year, I doubt there's 30 players in the game that we would project for more than that next year. Like that's a lot. That's a lot. That's a lot for a projection. more than that next year yeah like that's a lot that's a lot that's a lot for a projection and so we do you and i both still do basically believe that he's one of the best players in baseball yeah more or less more or less because we don't have an explanation if you'd think we actually got an email the other day asking about jose ramirez and i think the question was like if it's

a psychological thing or a physical thing which would you prefer which would yeah which would I don't know be the best sign for for Jose Ramirez like uh this question was from Carlos I have it right here he's talking about the slump and how bad he's been we've heard quite a bit that he isn't performing to the same level but what is the reason for this going through his his fancast page, blah, blah, blah. And he says, you know, basically the same thing that we were saying. It's not that obvious. And he says, is there something I'm missing? Or is my other theory that this might all be a mental issue? Is that the cause of his prolonged slide? As a follow-up, if it is indeed a mental issue, would that in your mind be less preferable to a physical issue

in terms of a comeback scenario? My thought is that an injury wouldn't be as bad since there are steps and timetables to coming back from one, but a mental issue, not so much. And you could look at that in a couple of ways. On the other hand, if it's a physical issue, if it's just an injury, if he's got some nagging injury that somehow has persisted since last summer and that hasn't been cured yet, I guess that could be bad because maybe it just won't go away. Or it could be good because it will go away. I don't know which is – it's hard to say which is more persistent or which is more fixable or solvable. Like if there were something in his life off the field that weren't going great in his personal life, well,

maybe that could look up. Maybe his life could improve and he'd be in a better mood and he'd be better at baseball. So it's hard to say. But if we were to suddenly find out, oh, he was going through a tough time personally and he just wasn't able to focus as much on the field or something, then I would mentally bump up my projection for him, I think. Whereas now it's just hard to say because, again, it doesn't seem like a lot of his skills have slipped all that much. That's the thing. If it were a 50, whatever it is, 58 WRC plus, and he also weren't hitting the ball hard and he were really slow I haven't looked to see if he's slower he's not slow he's not slower and not less powerful he's not striking out that much that's the that seems to me a big thing if you a guy in a slump strikes out right a guy a guy who is just hitting into outs that feels like that's just that's just a that's a

something you have to wait out. You wait through it. But, I mean, on the other hand, his home runs per fly ball rate have dropped by 75%. And so those are a big deal. Career low contact rate, but not by that much. And, of course, the contact rate's going down across the league, and it's still good. So, yeah, it's a very confounding situation. And I don't know that we're good at projecting this.

Essentially, we're doing what a projection system does. When we're giving him 3.5 war for next season, we're just basically saying, well, he had eight last year, and he's at, like, zero now or less than zero. And so we're weighting the more recent a little more heavily than the further away. And so we're ending up with a number that's kind of in the middle, but a little bit closer to where he is right now. That's basically the math that we're doing in our heads. And that's probably the right math on the whole, right? That's why projection systems do that because it works out on a league-wide basis, but you tend to miss the breakouts and you tend to miss the total collapses. And so if this is either one of those, then we're just doing the wishy-washy, well, somewhere

in the middle, and then we won't get it. But most of the time, somewhere in the middle is where they end up. All right. You know, we could absolutely do an entire episode on the Chris Ar archer trade oh yeah definitely but let's not do it right now okay all right so is that it that's it all right that will do it for today thanks for listening you can go get my book the one sam referenced earlier it's called the mvp machine how baseball's new non-conformists are using data to build better players maybe some of you got it or gave it for Father's Day. If not, go get it now. And if you like it, please leave a review for me and Travis at Amazon and Goodreads.

You can support this podcast by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Sign up. You pledge some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going, as have these following five listeners, Ross N., Spencer Goldrich, Mike Lemaire, Open Flywheel Project, and Cody Robertson. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild, and you can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. and Megan Sam coming via email at podcastoffangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you're a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. I think we actually did an episode in under an hour. It's been a while since we pulled that off. So we will be back to talk to you a little later this week. It's happening again. Tell me your secrets.

Don't try to hide them. Give it to me straight now. Don't touch me. I feel this way. I need a little help now. Don't get by the key. Gotta find the key now. There's still a mystery. Tell me your secrets.

Don't try to hide them. Give it to me your secrets.