Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1431: Curtains for Trout

Episode Date: September 17, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about the Twins’ missed opportunity for a mid-plate-appearance pitching change, more mind-boggling home run facts about the year of the dinger, fun facts about the Diamondbacks and Jarrod Dyson, Guy Fieri endorsing Spencer Torkelson and which celebrity character references might make them draft a player higher, and how to […]

I filled out the application to be a human being She put it on a stack with all the others I walked out onto this tree And dialed my telephone and answering my cigarette Started to weep, cause I'm a junkie Good morning and welcome to episode 1431 of Effectively Wild, the baseball podcast from Fangraphs.com Brought to you by our Patreon supporters, I'm Sam Miller, ESPN, along with Ben Lindberg of The Ringer Hey Ben Hi Brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Sam Miller, ESPN, along with Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Hey, Ben.

Hi. The other day I was watching a game in which, so do you know who Devin Smeltzer is? I know the name. All right. Devin Smeltzer is a rookie 23-year-old pitcher with Minnesota Twins. He is a lefty who throws, in the game that I was watching, he threw, you know, like high 80s, low 90s. Minnesota was doing a bullpen game, more or less.

It was the first game of a doubleheader against Cleveland. And Smeltzer had kind of gotten through two and a half innings. And then he ran into some trouble. And so the bases were loaded. The Twins were up two to nothing. And Carlos Santana was up. And so the previous batter, Smeltelter had gotten ahead 0-2 on Oscar Mercado, but he doesn't really, at least in the game that I was watching, he didn't really

have a strikeout pitch. He was just, you know, like he's the kind of guy who works around the zone and mixes pitches and, you know, gets batters off balance. But like, you know, he was throwing 90 miles an hour and he would try to get the, he to get Mercado to to to chase and Mercado wouldn't chase. And he ended up walking him. So the bases were loaded to two run game bases loaded. Cleveland's best hitter coming up, arguably Carlos Santana, Santana better from the right side. I mean, a very scary situation. And so Smeltzer gets ahead of him, one, two on a couple of called strikes. And then again, you know, he just can, he doesn't have a put away pitch. So Santana, obviously very patient hitter, takes a ball, fouls one off, takes a ball, fouls one off. And so now it's a 3-2 count, bases loaded in a bullpen game. And I was just screaming strategy, strategy. This this is the moment yeah like and and in fact i think that no matter what happened i can't remember i i didn't see if anybody was was

warming yet but smeltzer did not face another batter after santana i don't think he would have faced another batter after santana um missed opportunity right the next batter was puig who's a righty and so if you're gonna replace him they were, he didn't face another batter as it was. And I don't think anything that would have happened would have caused him to throw more than one more pitch in that situation. And they could have brought in a righty. I don't know if it would have been even doubly effective to now force Santana to also turn around in the wanted bat. So he's facing a pitcher he's never seen. And he also yeah has to now change from from batting from the right side to batting from the left side but they didn't do it they left and it was so terrifying i did not think he had any chance of getting santana out on this pitch and uh he threw a you know he threw a pitch basically right down the middle and santana hit 105 mile an hour line drive that the shortstop made a diving catch for and ended the inning I did not feel like that justified the decision uh but they uh they did get out of it and they they did win the game two to nothing well good for them I guess although I'm sorry that they were rewarded for taking the coward's way out and not going with the strategy

I didn't know that this happened but yeah now, now I'm upset retroactively. That's the perfect spot. I really do keep expecting someone to do it. One of these days, it's only a matter of time until someone does the real mid-plate appearance pitching change. Maybe they're saving it for the playoffs. Maybe that was the twins thinking, we don't want to give away our strategy in the regular season. We'll wait for when it really counts. Could be. By the way, speaking of Cleveland, somebody pointed out that another good answer to the guy you can't believe has as many home runs as he does is Roberto Perez. Oh, yeah, that's right.

Now has 23 home runs. He is 30 years old. He had 21 career home runs coming into this as a 30 year old coming into the season. He was, in fact 30 before opening day so he was already 30 had 21 career home runs has 23 this year had two last year yep and eugenio suarez is up to 47 now yeah and jorge soler is up to 44 i know suarez might just lead the major leagues in home runs this year. That could happen. Yeah, yeah. I don't, I don't, I don't, I'm not as hot on Eugenio Suarez being a strange home run guy.

It's pretty strange. I mean, he had 34 last year, so it's not quite. Do you remember that before the season began, we talked about the prop bets in Vegas, and one of them was that Eugenio Suarez was more likely to win the MVP award or as likely to win it as Christian Jelic. Yeah, that's right. Is it conceivable that he will finish ahead of Christian Jelic? Well, he's definitely hit more homers.

He has hit more homers, yep. So, yeah. Anyway, Roberto Perez, keep him coming. No, don't keep him coming. Brett Gardner, I think, is now up to 25. Anyway, Jorge Soler is about to pass Mike Trout, which we'll talk about later. As you know, I've been, I don't know, for some reason, I've been really hung up on six Homer games.

There's something I've been trying to decode about how fun facts work in a home run era. Because like, Eugenio Suarez hitting 47 is interesting. It's surprising because it's Eugenio Suarez, but it's also only 47 homers. But then the way that individual home run achievements cluster to create home run fun facts has been something that has been kind of, I've had trouble wrapping my head around it.

And so I just, every time someone, a team hits six homers, I find it very interesting. And so I looked, every time someone, a team hits six homers, I find it very interesting. And so I looked, and so just to put into perspective, I don't even know if this puts it into perspective, but I looked at how many, so, okay. So home runs are up since 2014, which is when they kind of reached their, their low point. Home runs this year are up like about 50%. So about 50% home runs are up. So games with one home run in them, one or more, so one, two, three, four, five, those are up, of course, because we know home runs are up. So those are up 30%, right? Games with two or more are up 80%.

Games with three or more are up 180%. So you see how this is like the yeah like the cluster is is like the thing right so three or more is from from in 2014 there were 292 this year there are going to be about 820 so almost triple games with four or more are up 300 percent a little more than 300 percent so they're going to end up quadrupling from 79 to 320. And then games with five or more are up from 25 to 107, so up 366%. Games with six or more are up sevenfold.

So they have gone up more than 600%, and games with seven or more, there were zero. There have been 11 this year, and there have been five with eight or more this year. Now, to put the seven or more in perspective, as of 1975, there had been 11 such games in Major League history, and there have been 11 this year. And they're on pace to be 12.

Anyway, I looked that up. now you've heard me read it well you've been tweeting about the losing games with six homers right right uh yeah four of those yeah four games where a team has hit six homers and lost which is uh like many many decades have passed where where that did not happen that many times yeah is that that's the record, right? Is that the most homers allowed? Yeah, the previous record had been two. So it wasn't totally unheard of, but that was the record, yeah. And has a team ever allowed seven homers in one or is six the max?

Seven homers in one, let me see. That's a good question. Home runs. It turns out there are three games in which a team has allowed seven home runs and won. Ah, okay. Once in 2016, once in 2004, and once in 1999. It has not happened this year because this year is not exceptional, I guess, as it turns out. All right, cool.

So we've been talking about some purported fun facts that we agreed probably weren't actually as fun as advertised lately. So I wanted to pass along one that I actually did enjoy. This was, as you probably saw, the Diamondbacks won a game in which they had only one base runner, which was the first time that this had ever happened, at least in a game on record. And I think that's pretty cool. This was what I think it was Saturday's game. And the Diamondbacks had come into it having lost six in a row. They've really been struggling. Their offense has disappeared. Over the last 30 days, they have the third worst offense in baseball ahead of only the Giants and the Rangers, so they're not scoring a lot these days, and they certainly didn't score

a lot on that day, but they scored just enough. They scored one run while Merrill Cully pitched very well for them. It was not a home run, surprisingly, you would think, especially in this era. If you were going to win a game with one base runner, it would be a solo shot. But it was not. It was a triple by Nick Ahmed, and he scored, and that was that. The game took two hours and 15 minutes. And one thing that stood out to me in this game, this was a win against the Reds, by the way, but Gerard Dyson had only two plate appearances in this game, and he started the game. He started in right field. He played the entire game, and he made only two plate appearances. The even more surprising part of that is that he was batting eighth Which makes it even more unlikely compared to, say, a ninth place hitter

Especially in another league where you don't have the pitcher pitching the whole game and batting the whole game So I looked this up, this is not unprecedented, not like the team winning with one baserunner But it is very unusual It's happened 38 times in the modern era. It's happened only three times with an eighth place hitter. Dyson is the third eighth place hitter to do it. Mark Lemke was the first in 1992. Jordan Schaefer did it also in 2012. And both of those games were also, of course, one nothing wins in which those teams had one hit apiece, although they did have other base runners. And both of them were also games where the one hit was a solo homer, as you would expect.

So Dyson did it, and you may have noticed I said 38 guys have done it in the modern era. Three guys had done it batting eighth. That means there is someone unaccounted for. There is actually a sixth-place hitter who did it, but under strange circumstances. So Rich Adet, who is best known, I think, for his famous bat flip in a AAA game in 1994. In 1993, he had two plate appearances in a full game batting sixth, but he batted out of order one time. And so that plate appearance did not count. He was removed from the bases after singling. So that's how that happened. But what Dyson did is almost as unusual as what the Diamondbacks did as a team. So that was a weird

one. What a fool. Rich Haday. Yeah. Yeah. Very foolish. Yeah. Great fun fact already. Great fun fact previously. I don't know if you remember this, but about a month ago, the Giants and the Cubs played a game that was only 26 batters. So you've described a 25 batter game, which is the theoretical minimum that you can send up in a full nine inning game. And so the 25 man threshold, as you noted, has only been done honestly uh in honest ways three times in the past century so this is notable but even the 26 man game which i i was surprised somebody

emailed us as soon as it happened just to head off the fun fact querying i had expected it to be somewhat more common than it was and i did not realize how rare it was there have been only 47 games in the past century of 26 batters and i don't know i would have guessed i had seen one before but i went and my dad and i started talking about this and wondered if we'd seen it because we both i think thought that we must have seen it it doesn't feel like something you wouldn't have seen and yeah you you know, there were a couple games in my peak childhood viewing of a specific team

that might have happened, but it is very rare. I was surprised how rare every couple years. That's right. Great, great fun fact, though. Yes. All right.

25. Whew. Yeah. Boy, how did the run score? What happened? Nick Ahmed tripled and actually Gerard Dyson drove him home with a sack fly. So although Dyson came to the plate twice, he actually only had one official at bat.

Hmm. Hmm. I wonder, I bet if we looked through these 57 games, I guess 61 games, I bet there's at least one interesting story in here, but yeah, I'm not going to do that. All right. Let's see. Anything else? Well, I don't know i'm kind of waiting for games that are in progress as we are speaking right now to possibly say

something about pennant races so maybe by the end of this episode i will be able to say that so let's talk about what we came to talk about well not yet not yet i got one more to go. So I don't know if you saw this, but this was a question that was going around of a question. Well, it's a question from a job posting Philadelphia Phillies posted for a quantitative analyst. And one of the questions is this interested applicants. In fact, maybe the only question, I don't know, maybe the only question. Interested applicants should submit both their resume and an answer to the following question. So I don't know, have you opened it? Don't open it yet. Have you opened it? No. All right. Just curious, if I only give you one question to ask prospective candidates, and this is like, you know you're probably going to get a thousand

applicants, and so this is not going to be the one question you would ask somebody that you bring in for an interview, or even that you would maybe ask the follow-up to this, say like the 15 that you shortlist or anything like that. You got one question to filter out 900 or so. What question do you think you'd ask? And would it actually be the question that I just asked you? Would that be your question? What would you ask if you were applying for an analytical job in the Phillies front office? If baseball were different, how different would it be? Yeah. That's a tough one. I'm thinking of questions you hear tech companies ask,

like how many McDonald's are there in the world or how many things would fit inside another thing or something like that. But for a baseball specific job, I don't even, would you ask a baseball specific question? I don't know whether you would. I guess that would make some sense just to kind of narrow things down a little bit. But if you want to know how someone thinks about things, then there's a whole world of possibilities out there. You don't necessarily have to ask them a baseball question. All right, let's pause this real quick and do an email that we got a week ago, which is somewhat on the same topic. All right, this is from Nathan,

who writes, today Guy Fieri tweeted his support for 2020 draftee Spencer Torkelson from ASU. And that tweet specifically reads reads congrats to my buddy spencer keep an eye on this guy he's gonna go big okay my question is simple if you were to draft a player in the first round based on the opinion of someone not employed or working for a baseball team or for any other sport for that matter a a non-sport person, who would you pick? And Nathan followed up because he was very nervous that we were going to cheat. And so he said, you can't pick like a baseball writer or anything like that. So I intend that to include sports writers as well.

So I think Nathan really wants somebody who is specifically non-sports. So who would you, whose opinion might actually conceivably make you choose somebody in the first round who isn't a non-sports person? What would you look for for that recommendation? So someone who's not involved in baseball at all, I probably don't care about their evaluation of the player's performance or his on-field talent or skill, right? Because I probably have baseball people who are better qualified to answer that question and data that can answer that question. So this would be more of a makeup

thing, right? Like someone basically having a professional recommendation for someone, a character reference or something, right? Which I don't know that that would even sway me all that much, but that's the only thing I can think of that would actually like if if someone said, yeah, this potential draftee, he saved my whole family's life and he jumped into freezing water. He saved my life. He braved some extraordinary circumstance, and the pressure was extraordinary, and he rose to the occasion, and he was selfless, and he acted courageously. That would probably be the thing that could— Yeah, that's not a person, though. That's an endorsement. You're asking for a specific—in this case, you're asking for a specific piece of data about the person. I feel like that's cheating.

You're supposed to ask, you're supposed to say who as a source would be the most convincing to you, not what they would tell you. So I'm just saying the person whose life was saved by the person. But I can't think of like a celebrity endorsement that would actually make me more likely to like, what would that celebrity be able to tell me about this person? Are you more interested in Spencer Torkelson? Because Guy Fieri said, like if Guy Fieri said he's a good cook, that probably would be the opposite. You'd probably then be less likely to have him be your chef. But like, I just, I can't think of like someone in a non-baseball field telling me something about a baseball player other than just how that kid got to that point and how hard he worked and just what a good guy he is, which I don't know that that would actually make me take him in the first round unless I liked him for other reasons too. Yeah, I don't think there is anybody in the first round. I think that Nathan set the bar too high. But who might bump somebody up a draft list?

I think you need to think – well, there's two different scenarios where I could imagine a non-baseball person being brought into this. And so in one case – I'll just skip. My answer is Michelle Obama. And the reason that I picked Michelle Obama is because she is, she is not a frivolous person. She is not like a lot of us just like to say stuff, you know, like a lot of us, like if you're playing poker too, this happens where you know that like the odds are not very good that you're gonna get the spade that you need and yet you just like you you can't really you you can't contain yourself

and you just go for it you just keep on calling and then when you don't get the card you feel like a sort of a dummy but like your impulses are stronger than your your like your rational side sometimes and i feel like that is what happens a lot when people speak. They just want to say the thing. It seems fun to say the thing. This comes up all the time in this podcast. And sometimes we edit it out because you say the thing and you go, well, that wasn't actually that fun to say.

And now everybody's going to hate me. But you want to say it. It sounds provocative. It sounds like you just blurt it out. You know, you just blurt out the thing that you want to say out loud. And so Guy Fieri to me, and this is probably not fair. There's a probably to some degree of managed persona that he has created, but that persona is, is like the epitome of the just blurted out guy, right? Like he is blurting things out. Like sometimes he just blurts out food. And so when Guy Fieri tells you something, you don't think that there's anything

behind that. You just think he's just saying stuff. And of course, you wouldn't take his opinion on baseball for anything because he's not a baseball person. And given that anybody who answers this is not going to be a baseball person, the data that they give you is basically nothing. The only data that might be something is the data point that they are speaking up on behalf. Like they have chosen to say something out loud. And for the overwhelming majority of people, that is no data at all. The overwhelming majority of people will say anything out loud at any time. They just want to speak or they just want to be heard.

But then you take somebody who is not frivolous, who makes their words matter, who makes the things that they speak matter. And the very fact that they are choosing to tell you something seems like a significant data point. So if Michelle Obama came to me and said that Spencer Torkelson, trust me on this, I would i would think wow you got up today yeah and you whatever you you put aside all the other things you could be doing with your important life

and you shared your opinion about a baseball player there is something there like that is that is like you know if somebody comes back from the future and tells you something is going to happen and you should really like not get on the train today, you'd be like, all right, I don't know. I don't know what this person knows about the train schedule. But the fact that he came all this way to tell me not to get on the train is pretty convincing. And so in that case, I would say that that's my pick. in that case, I would say that that's my pick. Now, there's another scenario here, which is that you maybe you actually have somebody who is not a sports person, but for some reason has been tasked with finding a draft pick for you. And you have to rely on somebody who is not a sports person to do this, in which case, then you want to figure out, okay, well, whose opinion could I trust,

despite no expertise. And so for that, I'm going to say my my friend, well, whose opinion could I trust despite no expertise? And so for that, I'm going to say my friend Jim, who is the best newspaper reporter that I've ever seen, I've ever been around, and who had a total ability to become an expert on something very quickly because he knew exactly, like he, there was nothing, he had no nervousness about calling exactly the right people about calling exactly the right people and asking exactly the right questions and if you gave jim i i swear to you if you gave jim a 40 minute deadline and said i need a draft pick he would say in what sport and you'd say baseball and he'd say how do you how do they play and you'd explain baseball and then he'd be like but you

gotta hurry you only have 37 minutes left and he would in in 37 minutes he would give you a first round draft pick with no internet access and somehow he would just do it and so the ability to get information in any field to process it to uh have a sort of a Mike Peska would be another good one except that he's a baseball guy already but like if for instance I had to know like what like if i had if i were if i had been in a boat crash and i had three antibiotics and i didn't know which one to take i feel like and i couldn't ask a doctor i feel like i'd ask mike pesca and i'd be like mike go get help and two minutes later he'd come back and he'd tell me which bottle to use. And so in the same way, my friend Jim. Yeah. I almost said Barack Obama, but now that I think about it, he puts out an annual list of

things that he recommends, songs he likes and TV shows and books and movies. And I'm sure that he actually likes them all and he's considered his choices extensively, but he's not someone who only makes a very rare recommendation. He will recommend things. So maybe it doesn't carry quite as much weight. That's right. We can all think of things that he blurted out. Yeah. So you want someone who is just known for not endorsing things, not taking things lightly. Maybe even someone who is difficult to please, like maybe like Robert Mueller. Maybe you'd want Robert Mueller because he won't express an opinion on anything unless he has written a full report on it.

And even then he will not usually. So if Robert Mueller came out and said that someone should be a first round draft pick, I'd assume that he had thoroughly vetted him and that he is making an exception to express an opinion about something. All right. So interested applicants should submit both their resume and an answer to the following question. Do you have a question or should I tell you what theirs was? I mean, probably I'd just ask something like, what's the market inefficiency or whatever, which is like a very basic question.

But A, you can filter out a lot of people who say something extremely obvious that shows that they either haven't kept up with the research or they don't know what's going on in baseball, or they're just not thinking very originally, didn't put much time into this. And also, I guess to think of this somewhat cynically, you get a lot of free ideas. You can probably only hire one person, but you get everyone's best idea for how baseball teams should win, arguably the most important thing that they are bringing to your team. So you get a lot of ideas that way, and most of them would be useless. But someone might say, hey, make mid-plate appearance pitching changes, and you'd say, we should hire that guy. Or not.

Or not. What's your second best idea would be your second question, and if his second best idea is no good, then you just take the idea. How does Guy Fieri know Spencer Torkelson, by the way? I can't figure that out. I've been Googling, and all the articles that aggregated this tweet were like, we don't really know why he's recommending Spencer Torkelson. It's not like they went to the same school or something. I guess they're from the same area. Evidently, Guy Fieri is in Santa Rosa

and Spencer Torkelson's from Petaluma. So maybe he's like a family friend or something. Who knows? But very strange. That's, I mean, that is really, that's a small community up there. Like those towns are all- Everyone knows Guy Fieri.

Everyone knows everyone yeah it is crazy how many every i have never met a person from santa rosa or petaluma who doesn't know joey gomes for instance johnny gomes brother it's just a they all know i don't know they all know everybody up there okay so what's the phillies question the phillies question is suppose you could trade your top pitching prospect currently in a lower minor league level. By the way, my question would have been, what is one mistake that we have made and what mistake did we make in making it?

Okay. Suppose you could trade your top pitching prospect currently in a lower minor league level for a young all-star position player currently in the major leagues. How would you decide whether to make the trade and then you have a 250 word limit and they do give you a tip there's no right or wrong answer well they actually put tip isn't it i mean that seems obvious right how could there be a it's a pretty involved question there can't just be one answer in 250 words. Anyway, huh. Okay, so now I'm looking. It says responses are used to get some insight into how you approach problem solving and baseball in

general. So 250 words, you could write a giant essay on this with all kinds of analysis and data. So I guess it's nice that they limited it to 250 words because they're not paying these people to answer this question for them. That seems like a good question. You could probably find out a lot about a person based on how they answer that. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of information about the situation, about the context that's left out. And so you probably learn a lot about the person just by what sort of details they fill in, what sort of details they fabricate in order to make this more.

Because otherwise, it's totally unanswerable, right? You could not possibly answer this question unless you knew more about the teams involved. So you just essentially are forced to make some assumptions about, well, are they the Phillies, for instance? So how would you answer this question? Well, I guess I would need to know. I mean, it is kind of difficult to answer without the specifics because it's like, well, who's the pitching prospect and who's the young all-star position player? But I guess if I had more than 250 words and I really wanted

to get in depth, I would do a study, right? And I would look at like the average young all-star position player. So I'd look at, I don't know, 25 and under position players who made the all-star team over the past 20 years or whatever. And then I'd collect every team's top pitching prospect during that time too and I'd look at how many war or whatever those pitching prospects went on to generate and how many war the position players went on to generate and maybe some salary considerations in there too and then you could come up with an actual answer based on data, based on past players who had done that. So I suppose with 250 words,

I would just essentially say that that's what I would do more or less. So you're really counting on your resume to set you apart. Not a good answer, huh? Well, it's just, it's the obvious answer. It's the answer't wouldn't 400 people answer it basically that way yeah i guess so all right i mean i've had two seconds to think of this so maybe i would come up with something better but that's like basically the the standard approach that you would take and yes of course you would want to say something to differentiate yourself from everyone else who's going to say that but you also don't want to say something that differentiates you in a bad way because your idea is worse than the obvious idea. There's a

reason why the obvious idea is obvious. It might be a good one. So I don't know. Do you have a better off-the-cuff answer? I mean, I would probably create a panel with maybe myself. I'd ask Guy Fieri, honestly. I was going to say my friend Jim and Michelle Obama. I would probably create a panel with, you know, maybe myself. I'd ask Guy Fieri, honestly. I was going to say my friend Jim and Michelle Obama. Yeah. All right. What would I do?

I don't know. I don't think that I would say what you said. I think that the two most important questions to answer for a team in this situation are, one, what is our, how are we going to define happiness for the organization right now? And if you think that, you know, if you're in a situation where it really makes sense to go for it, for instance, then I don't even think it's that hard of a question. If you think that you're, I mean, a pretty important question is how long do I think I am likely to be employed with the franchise? Am I about to be fired? Well, I don't know. If I was about to be fired, then I might go ahead and make the trade. I probably won't say that in the

interview answer, although I don't know, maybe it's honesty would be appealing. I just think that you have to define what success is going to be for you in that moment. And I think that it's hard to, I mean, like, I don't really, how am I going to put this? It's hard to, you're right, it's very hard to say off the top of your head. Because my answer is generic, but I feel like it's sort of cheating to ask for specifics or say that because, yes, obviously, if the team is trying to contend right now or the team is rebuilding and contending years in the future, sure, that has an impact. Or if the young all-star position player actually isn't good. I mean, maybe he shouldn't have made the all-star team. player actually isn't good. I mean, maybe he shouldn't have made the all-star team. Maybe he only made it because he was the only all-star on that team and he's not actually good and he's having a weird BABIP year and he's got off the field issues and the top pitching prospect is

Steven Strasburg or something. He's like the best pitching prospect to come along in decades. So of course those things would affect your answer, but without knowing the specifics. And we could just say, well, it depends on the specifics, but that's not a great answer either, probably. Yeah, you're right, Ben. This is tough. You're right. It's very tough. My first start at this was very weak.

I would have deleted it all entirely. I don't even know. I don't know what I said, and I don't know where it was going. All right, here's another one. Here's my other thing you should be thinking of is you should be trying to figure out whether you like the player that you're acquiring more than the other team likes them and whether you like the player that you would be trading away less than the other team likes them. I think there should be enough room. I think there should be enough disagreement in terms of player evaluation, but particularly these days where you're potentially

going to be doing a lot of work of player development. You're forecasting, I mean, for each of these players, you're forecasting, you know, somewhere between five and nine years of future development, of aging, of growth. And the margins around what each player could become or the bars around what each player could become are so massive that there ought to be a lot of, there's probably a lot of space between what you think each player is going to do or that you could do with them and what the other team thinks they're going to do. And if there is a trade to be made, then it is probably going to be the case that the best trades are going to be made between a team that is acquiring a player that they like more than the other team likes, and that is giving up a player that the other team likes more than they like.

Otherwise, there's some sort of inefficiency happening here. Now, I mean, obviously, there's the competitive windows, and some teams will trade anything future for something today and vice versa. And a lot of times it's about contracts, but when you're talking about eight, nine year projections, eight, nine year windows for development and for full actualization of these players, it seems to me that there, you should somehow be able to figure out like, is this player better to me than he is to them because otherwise you're just moving around like you're just moving things around you you really ought to like when i like when you're trading cards as a kid with your friend it's

really nice when you collect all of a player and then the other, your other friend collects all of a different player because then it just, it makes it so clear. Like you want that player more than the other person does. You already have 200 Will Clarks and you want to get 400 and he already has 200 Nolan Rhines and he wants to get 400. You just know for a fact that everybody's going to be happier with the other person's card. And so I don't, it's tough because you, I don't know how you figure out what the other

29 teams think, but in a perfect world, like that would be a great thing to figure, you know, if you could somehow figure out how much does every team like our players and how much does every team like their players? And then you could just go and look and say, oh, well, I like this player more than they do. I want to get him. And they like this player more than I do. And you can get him. And they like this player more than I do. And you could go get him.

So you're suggesting that you hack the other team's database. I am maybe. I did. Yes, I thought about that. I did think about that as I was saying it. That's right. Yeah, I might steer clear of you just to be safe. I didn't think about doing it.

I thought about the implication of what I was saying. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, do you and Jesse, how do you and Jesse decide where to, like say, I guess you just go to the diner. Never mind. How do you decide when you disagree about what to do or where to go or what to eat or what to whatever? How do you decide? Well, we don't disagree very often, which is nice. I think that's why we make a good couple. But when we do, I guess maybe you kind of add up like a relationship scorecard about like who's gotten their way more often lately. Oh, wow. That's a very their way more often lately. Oh, wow. That's a very interesting way to do it.

I mean, I'm not saying that we like make a list and check off, okay, I'm doing this for you, so you owe me the next time we do this. But I will keep that in my own mind. I might not even say that, but if it's like Jesse wants to do something and she did something with me that she wasn't so keen on recently, then I'll feel perhaps more obligated than usual to reciprocate. So I guess that's kind of a mental calculus that I do. I don't know if she does it. So what we do, what my wife and I do is the thing where you each think of a number between one and 10 of how much you want like each alternative so if it's between a and b then you

figure well i really want a i'm a nine like i care about this one and for for b i wouldn't be that unhappy but like it's maybe a five or six and then the other person does theirs and then you add it up and whatever gets the higher score and as long as you're doing this in good faith right you have to trust each other right but the it's a pretty i mean it's a pretty simple concept that you know we all we all think about all the time when we're trying to decide like what's the best thing for the world it's like what creates the most cumulative happiness and it's hard because if you don't have that good faith which you know teams are competitive and they're in zero-sum pursuits and they're the GMs are trying to rip off the other one if they can, although they say the best trade is one that makes both teams happy, and that's true.

But really, they would like to have a trade that makes them twice as happy and you not happy at all. So I don't know how you do that, but I guess what I'm saying is you can't know what the other team thinks about any other player, but you do have a sort of a general sense of like what the conventional wisdom is about a player. What is his war and what do I think a typical projection system is likely to produce and how much do I know that other teams, you know, sort of adhere to those kind of projection systems and and then you just sort of figure out, well, do I vary from those? Do I am I different about them? And if you think that you're, you know, that you're off the conventional wisdom on a player one way or the other that's probably the time that you should move and there also are times where you should probably make the move even if you're not especially high or low on someone in the deal right you like you just need that player you need to fill a hole and you'll pay the market rate for that guy what if the right answer is just do i have anybody good at the position of the all-star player that I'm acquiring? That's a consideration too. I might be overthinking this. I found a Phillies job listing from last year for another position where they ask a similar question.

Same tip about there not being a right or wrong answer. Same 250 word limit. This one is, how would you decide whether a minor league position player prospect is ready to be promoted to the major leagues? Maybe it's the same young position player. This was a year ago. No, this was last year. Now he's an all-star.

Now he's an all-star. He was ready. They're actually asking about specific players, and they're just trying to figure out whether they should make a trade or not. This question seems a little bit easier less nebulous there's maybe fewer considerations here because you're talking about one guy and whether he's ready or not and it doesn't depend on some other player in your evaluation of him as well yeah and this one too you can really lean on the expertise of other people you You're not, you know, you're, I mean, unless you're applying for director of player development,

in which case, even then, you're going to like rely on a lot of expert people who work for you. You're going to ask his manager. You're going to ask the people around him. You're going to ask the other people in your department. Probably, again, not the answer that's probably going to get you the job though.

And so maybe being a little too literal. Wisdom of crowds. I just surveyed the whole front office and we do the most popular thing. Yeah. I don't know. I feel like I've done a bad job with this question. All right. Well, you're no Guy Fieri.

No. It's also a quantitative analyst position. That's true. analyst position. And so it might be that the answer needs to have some quantitative analyst keywords in there, some jargon. Maybe this is not the quantitative philosopher position. Just because you're limited to a 250-word answer doesn't mean you can't do a whole lot of research and analysis and dial it down to 250 words. You can just say, I studied the entire history of this and that, and here's the average expected war for these guys. And you can just summarize your findings in 250 words,

but actually do an unlimited amount of work. So that's an option. That's probably the right way to do it. Yeah. All right. So anyway, we're here to talk about Mike Trout. Mike Trout's season is over. Sadly.

Very sadly. He will probably not lead the league in home runs. That is probably some bolding that he will still have unchecked off. Although, you know, he probably won't. But Jorge Soler is one behind him. He probably won't, but Jorge Soler is one behind him. And strangely, behind Soler, nobody is within seven home runs of Soler. And so, you know, they have 11 games left.

But if he were to hit one, Travis would still get the black ink. Yeah, so that's conceivable. He already lost his bold ink for hit by pitches. He was leading yesterday, but he is no longer. That was on the bingo card. And he will probably not lead the league in war this year, which will be the third year in a row. In his first, obviously, he's been just as good. Part of the reason that he has not led the league in war the past three years

is one, that Mookie Betts had the best season by anybody since Bonds and this year he might only be behind Cody Bellinger so I guess he would lead the league the American League but he's behind Cody Bellinger who's having an extraordinary year at baseball reference at baseball reference yeah at fan graphs he's like almost a win and a half ahead of Bellinger still. Is he ahead of everybody else by just as much? Yes. But yeah, I don't know. It's just this is now the third year in a row that he has missed some time. This is again a situation, I think in all but maybe one of those cases, it's a situation where the fact that the Angels are not in it is a big part of the reason that the Angels being not great is not only costing us Mike Trout postseason games, but it's probably costing us regular Mike Trout games. Because I think Mike Trout, he said he would have played if they were in a race. They're 14 games under.500 now, by the way.

You had just written the article about how they were the.500-est team of all time. We should look up what day it is that you ran that article they haven't won since then they're they were since they were at 62 and 64 they have now gone 6 and 18 so anyway so uh that's costing us real mike trout games uh i don't know i think the plan was we were going to just briefly talk about Mike Trout's season, that it was going to be a Mike Trout season in review or something like that. And so the kind of it's it is the same sort of story. He is an absolute joy to watch play. He does things in individual accomplishments that are unprecedented and unmatched throughout baseball. and unmatched throughout baseball.

And yet it feels a little bit kind of gross that we only have individual accomplishments to talk about, that we're so focused on his individual accomplishments and what this means for his war and what this means for his MVP case and what this means for his bold ink, because that is still sadly just, that's all there is. That's all there is right now. And so you end up feeling a bit ambivalent

at the end of each season. Yeah, I mean, I'd probably still feel pretty positive about it if it weren't ending this way. is right now. And so you end up feeling a bit ambivalent at the end of each season. Yeah. I mean, I'd probably still feel pretty positive about it if it weren't ending this way. And unfortunately, it's not just Trout as we talked about last week. We've got a bunch of season ending or regular season ending injuries for Stars and a lot of other players in pennant races. Now you've got Anthony Rizzo, whose regular season seems to be done. So that's unfortunate. And with Trout, because all you have with him these days is the war, essentially, and the league leading stats, it's sad to be deprived of that. It's sad that that's the best possible outcome is that he has good stats because the Angels have not been good enough to get him to October. But now, because all we're hanging on is the war and the accumulation of

milestones, it's disappointing to be deprived of that. And over these past three seasons, he's played 388 games from 2017 to 2019. That means he has missed just a little bit more than 20% of the Angels games over that period. And of course, almost no one plays 162 games and no one does that every year. But it is disappointing that the best player perhaps ever at what seems to be the peak of his powers thus far, has had about a fifth of his playing time lopped off by various injuries and maybe exacerbated by the Angels not contending, and so his not playing through those injuries, although who knows if he would be able to play at the same level if he tried to. I mean, the way that this most recent injury was

described, it sounded very painful, and I know he was playing through it for a while, and then it got to the point where he just had to have this cryo-ablution to correct his Morton's neuroma, two terms that I definitely knew a week ago. But this is a very painful nerve that just kept flaring up, and it would go away and come back but then it stopped going away and it was just bothering him all the time to the point where when he was just walking around it hurt when he takes himself out of the lineup then you know that it's probably pretty bad so i don't know that he would have kept up his pace if he had played through this but i would like of, to see this player maximize his

potential stat amassing. And he's hardly like the first player. I mean, we've seen so many players who you look at their peaks and you think, oh, if only he hadn't missed that season or if he had been a little more durable or, of course, people who've missed time to go to war. I mean, you look at Ted Williams's career and the blank lines on his baseball reference page, and you wonder what his stats would have looked like. So there are a lot of guys in that camp. But, of course, Trout and his success brings me great joy. It's my favorite ongoing story in baseball. And the more he plays, the funner the facts get so i really wish that he would play full seasons even if it wouldn't lead to a playoff berth at least it would lead to 10 war years and that's something to delight in at least yeah he was on pace for 10 before he started missing time and this was by the way this was the first year of his career where he had an ops over a thousand every month which is a pretty incredible thing when

you think about it. It's not unprecedented. There are, I mean, you know, there were years where Babe Ruth and Barry Bonds had OPS is over 1300 over 1400 for the year. And so they, they did the same thing, but still over a thousand every month. It is incredible, but yeah, he, you know, he stole three bases in the final three months of the season. I don't exactly know how much of this to attribute to the foot, but his defensive war dropped by about five runs over the past month. And so it seemed clear that he was not at 100%. And I think we've talked about, but I have speculated, I mean, this is an unusual case,

but I have speculated that he is often not at 100% by the end of the year. If you look at his month-by-month stats, August and September are definitely his worst months in his career. September is worse than August. And if you look at his, traditionally, his stolen base totals in those months, although, yeah, I think if you do it by game his stolen base rate to go down in the second half his caught stealing rate goes up and so it sort of suggests that the way that he plays the uh intensity that the physical intensity that he has

when he plays and the amount of mass that he carries around it might take something out of him and that is no impediment in any way to him being the best player in baseball. But as these things start to add up and as you start to sort of wonder about his durability a little bit and, you know, note his age and you start to worry about it, it just makes it very easy to, well, like I was just talking to a friend the other day about how when you're like when you're 20 something hurts and it just it hurts and then you forget about it and then it heals but when you're 40 or you know in your 30s then when something hurts you think oh is this forever

like you get really scared because you have this twinge of pain in your hip and you think oh no am i now am i is it 50 years now of this hip pain and you like you're really obsessed with that hip pain for the you know couple days that you have it until it goes away and then you breathe this huge sigh of relief because it is no longer you can no longer take for granted that it's just going to heal that it's just going to go away you like some people live with hip pain for 50 years and like there's uh this is not a big deal this foot thing none of these things with mike trout have been big deals these have been majestic seasons they've been incredible the last three years have been as good as anything he's ever done i'm greedy i want more i'm i'm not greedy so much as i'm i'm frightened i'm just a easily i'm easily scarable and i guess it's greedy too i'm worried about yeah i don't know i'm worried

about it but not not too worried but a little bit worried yeah when i first read about this injury i thought oh this sounds like something that could linger and bother him in the future. But it seems that's not the case because he's having surgery to just remove this troublesome nerve. And so it won't be able to trouble him anymore. But, yeah, you do kind of worry because he's had this succession of injuries. So he had, what was it, the wrist was one year. The thumb. Then the thumb, which he had to have surgery on. And that was just a sliding

into a base injury and this i don't know if there was anything in particular that prompted this or if it's just something that happened i forget whether the wrist was just what was that just one swing that something went wrong or was that a sliding injury i don't know but none of these is really connected in any way. And it's that conversation we always have about players who have a bunch of injuries. And you wonder, well, is this person just injury prone? Or if it's not the same body part getting hurt again and again, then does that actually mean anything? Does it tell us anything holistic about this player's ability to heal or to resist injuries?

holistic about this player's ability to heal or to resist injuries. And I don't think we're at that point with Trout where we have to start talking about him as an injury prone player, really. But it's three years when I wanted him to play every single game. Just a selfish reason, like I'm going to the Yankees Angels game on Tuesday, just as a fan with some friends. And one of the reasons why we picked this particular game is because the Angels are in town. And we thought, oh, well, we'll see Mike Trout. We'll see Shohei Otani. And now we're not going to see either of those. We're just going to see the Trout-less and Otani-less Angels. I can't wait. But that is personally disappointing for me. But obviously, as someone who obsesses over his stats, that's the really disappointing thing.

And of course, as we discussed with Jelic last week, there is some possibility that this costs Trout some hardware and an MVP award. I think he is in a better position than Jelic is when it comes to maintaining that lead. But depending on the war you look at, Bregman's only about a win behind, right? Maybe less at baseball reference now and a little more at fan graphs. And so it's possible that he could close that gap. And even if he doesn't completely close that gap, he is on a playoff team. So it is... And plays every day, you know? Yeah, right. He's going to end up with 158 games or something. case late in the year, Trout maybe solidified himself as an MVP candidate this year early, just because he was slapping everyone and no one was close to him for like half the season.

It just seemed like a fait accompli that Trout would be the MVP this year, no matter how the Angels did. But at this point, that is very much in question. and i don't care that much anymore about trout and mvp awards because he's already lost some that he should have won he's won a couple so he's on the board and it's not like it's gonna cost him a hall of fame berth or something like that so really all that matters is you look back at the baseball reference page, and I think it will speak for itself regardless of how many MVP awards he has there. If he has fewer than he should, that just reflects on the voters. But I think we've passed the point where we would actually knock down Trout, or certainly I would knock down Trout because he didn't win as many MVP awards as other guys have. So I want him to win when he deserves to win. But if he doesn't this year and Bregman ends up with the same war and people pick the playoff guy, then I won't be able to raise a huge objection to that

because Bregman's been great too. I think Bregman's, I don't know, I kind of think Bregman's going to win. I think that voters like to vote. If they can, they prefer to vote for somebody who they didn't vote for last year. I think there's a little bit of a bump you get for not having won the previous year. And Trout didn't win the previous year, but Trout has won and you're always voting for Trout. And that's not a reason not to vote for him. But i think that there is a little bit of that but so when i i don't follow other sports that closely and but i'm i'm i always have this almost childlike fascination with knowing how good certain stars are and so like i will often text a friend of mine who knows all the sports and say you know so and so is the you know how where does he rank all all time and i'm i really want it to be like eighth.

And then I get a little bummed when he's like 35th or something like that. And I'll go to their basketball reference page or their football reference page. And I'll look for the sure signs of greatness. And I'll look at like the MVP results or I'll like look at somebody's per. And then I'll go to Michael Jordan jordan's purr and be like oh and i don't really know i don't know if there's a era adjustment to purr and so i don't even know if i'm doing the right thing but you know i i like to feel like when i'm watching somebody who's great that i'm watching somebody who's the greatest or who's really great and so i i have uh in this

it's again it's very childlike but, I really love looking at a player's page and being just like, Ooh. And so I imagine that there are a lot of people who do that with Mike Trout. They know that Mike Trout's great. They hear all about it. They hear that he's the best player in baseball. It's gotten through to them that he's the best player in baseball. They've, you know, they read one out of the 20 articles that each of us write a year, and they get it. They get it. Mike Trout's the best player in baseball,

and they want to know how great he is. And so they go and they look at things like his MVP finishes, and they see that he's won two, and that's pretty good, and that he finishes second every other year, which really drives home that he's maybe the best player in baseball. But you're not necessarily, you could come away thinking that he's the greatest of all time, but you could also come away not thinking that thinking, you know, that you need to text your friend and ask like, where is he? Where does he rank? Do you care about that? Does it, does it matter to you that sort of non-baseball fans that you're just sort of your general sports

fan who doesn't really love baseball, but is aware of it in the same way that i'm aware of you know the warriors is putting mike trout in some sort of historical context and might get it wrong or does it just not matter to you as long as the the true the true baseball fans get it i think it matters to me a little bit it's a little like what you say sometimes about how part of the reason why we care about things is because everyone else cares about them. I care about Mike Trout regardless, I think, of whether the casual mainstream American knows or cares about Mike Trout. But I would like his greatness to be recognized. I'd like people to acknowledge that he's off to the best start of a

career anyone's ever had. And we've all written that countless times. And so I care a little bit, but I'm kind of past the point of stressing over it too much if someone discounts his accomplishments. And I would just like to say one more time that we talk about how the Angels are wasting Mike Trout because they can't get to playoffs they're trying obviously they're trying their best it's not like they're punting seasons or anything like that it's not like they're run by the will ponds they're doing their best and it just hasn't worked out for for various you know various reasons over the years but when we say that they're wasting Mike Trout I think what we kind of mean is oh it's a bummer

that we don't get to see Mike Trout in this specific context that is so exciting of October. And we don't get to see him reach. We have not yet gotten to see him reach that final, you know, that final accomplishment in his career. But as a person who, you know, goes to Angels games and lives in Southern California, there is nothing wasted about Mike Trout in Southern California. There is nothing wasted about Mike Trout in Southern California. If you think of baseball as a or 60 and 90 team didn't have Mike Trout. The difference is like it is entire. It is like on one end, you have a nonproduct. You have a season that is not worth tuning into at all. In another, you have one that you can just bank it.

Like you can go to any game during the season. And as long as Mike Trout is playing, it is going to be a pretty good time. You are going to get to see a decent enough team with a great player and who is a great franchise player and an icon in Southern California. And so I don't want to say that his career is wasted in any way by him being in Southern California, by him being on the Angels. It's a very narrow way of using that term. Yeah, it does concern me, though, that I look forward and can't even really project him getting to the playoffs. Not that the Angels have been so terrible, but they just have so little

pitching, and it seems like so little pitching on the way that I just don't know how next year is going to be any different unless they have some wild offseason where they're signing Garrett Cole and Steven Strasburg or something. I just don't know how it happens for him next year. And, well, once you look forward into the future, no one knows anything. Yeah, they have. I mean, there's not that much left on their payroll though, right? They're getting to pretty clear. I don't know if they're, I don't know if the idea is that they've cleared all these terrible contracts.

Now they're going to go give six year deals to big free agents. Maybe they decide that they won't do that, but it is not nearly the hamstrung organization that it was two or three years ago. And they have, I don't exactly know specifically how good their system is right now. Like, is it, are we talking, is it number one or is it like number six? I think it's, I looked this up when I was writing. I think it was like 11th or something, according to Fangraphs, not too long ago. But not a lot of pitchers who are at high levels and highly touted

who are on the way, say, next year. So I don't know. Help's going to have to come from outside the organization, which it can, I think. But yeah, that kind of concerns me because once you go a few more years, then maybe Trout isn't an incredible force that he's been at some point in there. And then you have to make up that deficit too. And then we don't get to see Trout in his prime in the playoffs, which I would like to see. When we talked about depressing seasons from stars a couple of weeks ago, Matt Trueblood pointed out that Justin Upton is a very good answer to that question too and one of the things that's been so frustrating for the Angels over the past few years I mean it's never been one

contract or two contracts like they haven't been all that close for the last four years or so but it just feels like every time a big contract expires it seems like another they they have another player sort of age into the decline years and their payroll is is definitely every year like three more of these things go away um and you think oh now they have a lot of money but then you know they've just had a series of players in their 30s kind of quickly get old and i did not expect that from justin upton justin upton was doing very well for them he was uh he He seemed to be a great trade and then a great re-signing. And then this year was just kind of a lost year for him. And

their outlook obviously looks a lot different when you think of Justin Upton as a one-win player instead of a four or five-win player. And so that's kind of partly what just keeps making it hard to project forward. Although, like you say, it's also been about pitching for the last six years. They've had just a series of pitchers who seem like if five of them got healthy at one time, they'd have a pretty good gang. And instead, one of them is always healthy at one time. Cole Calhoun, by the way, is a pretty good, can you-believe-he-has-31-home-runs guy. Oh, yeah, that's a good one. Albert Pujols will have played more games for the Angels over the past three years than Mike Trout.

Wow. Pujols is up to, I think, 386 games now since 2017, and Trout is stuck at 388. So Pujols will pass him soon. Wouldn't have guessed that. Wow. Wow. Yeah. Huh.

Huh. Fun fact, I guess. Made you say, wow. Not really that fun, but all right. All right. Well, we paid tribute to Mike Trout's season. We laid it to rest, and we hope that we will get a full, healthy one from him next year. Yep.

All right. That will do it for today. In a way, I wonder whether it's better for Mike Trout's MVP case if the Angels just lose out without him, because occasionally you get people making the case that, well, how good can Mike Trout be if the Angels aren't that good with him? That's sort of a misunderstanding of how baseball works and how much difference any one player can make, but if the Angels just go winless without Mike Trout for the rest of the season, maybe that makes the case for how good he was to just prop them up to a 500-ish team. On the other hand, the worse they get and the further they are out of the

race, maybe the more that makes people want to vote for Bregman just to go with a winner. Though really, if you want to pick the player who was most pivotal and put his team in the playoffs, that might end up being Marcus Semyon. We'll see. I should also note that after we recorded this episode, Jorge Soler did hit his 45th homer of the season. So he is now tied with Mike Trout for the league lead with 11 games to go. So it's entirely possible that this year's home run titles will go to Jorge Soler and Eugenio Suarez, just as we all foresaw. The Yelich-less Brewers, by the way, keep winning every game. Our guest on Friday's episode, Will Leach, Cardinals fan, of course. He described his state of mind as cautiously terrified when we talked to him at the end of last week. And at that time,

the Cardinals had a four-game lead in the Central. Now that's down to two games, and they still have seven games to go against the Cubs. So I bet if we were to ask Will right now, he would omit that cautiously and just say he was terrified. But that's a pretty fun race right now. The Cardinals, the Nationals, the Cubs, and the Brewers jockeying for three playoff spots, essentially. And yes, some other teams on the periphery of that race. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up to pledge some small monthly amount, help keep the podcast going, and help themselves by getting access to some perks. Patrick Gibbs, Daryl Mulder, John Ford, Matthew Gardner, and Mark Montgomery.

Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments for me and Meg and 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. You can buy my book, The MVP Machine, How Baseball's New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players. Your reviews and ratings for the book are appreciated too. I'll be back next time with Meg. I think Meg and Sam are switching episodes the rest of this week.

So we will talk to you then. This means it's curtain for you This means curtain for you This means curtain for you