Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1473: The Stories We Missed in 2019 (Part 3)

Episode Date: December 20, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about whether this year’s good free agents have actually gone to an unusual selection of teams and whether they believe in Wade Miley’s supposed pitch-tipping, and then, in the third and final installment of a three-part series, discuss stories that they overlooked about 10 more teams in 2019, touching […]

So save your money for a rainy day And learn to lie before they take it away But haven't you paid enough of your dues? It's good enough for them It's never good for you Was never good for you And if it is the end I'll be there with you too Hello and welcome to episode 1473 of Effectively Wild,

a baseball podcast from Dan Graffs presented by our Patreon supporters. I'm Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Sam Miller of ESPN. Hello, Sam. Hey. Meg is not here today because we are finishing our series where we talk about the story that we missed about each team in 2019. And so Sam started it. We figured Sam would finish it. But all three of us will be on the first episode next week.

So Meg will be back soon. So a couple bits of banter before we finish what we're doing. First, wanted to mention an article that Ben Clemens wrote for Fangraphs on Thursday because he sort of debunked something that I had kind of believed to be true of this offseason so far, kind of believed to be true of this offseason so far, which is that the teams that are signing the free agents or the good free agents and driving a lot of this activity are worse teams than usual, like more non-playoff teams or bad teams. And so I thought this was a positive sign. Okay, maybe the imbalance of the standings last season is correcting itself because these also ran teams are now suddenly more active. And I thought, well, maybe that explains why the free agent market has bounced back to the extent

that it has. Maybe it's just that a bunch of teams were rebuilding, and then suddenly they decided that they were rebuilt and they needed to sign some free agents to put the finishing touches on their rosters. Anyway, Ben thought this was the case too. He had that intuition, Ben thought this was the case too He had that intuition But he decided to examine it And turned out not really to Hold up to his scrutiny at all So he looked at this in a few different

Ways he just Scanned all the free agent signings from Previous off seasons going back to 2002 And he looked to see if More of them were coming from Non-playoff teams or Teams below a certain winning percentage or even teams that were kind of like on the cusp of contention like 75 to 85 win teams

showed nothing showed no increase in in the percentage of free agents going to those teams this year and then he also looked not just all free agents but good free agents to see if well maybe it's the high profile players are going to those teams. And no, that's really not true either. So I think that I was just kind of extrapolating from Rendon going to the Angels and Bumgarner going to the Diamondbacks and Grundahl going to the White Sox and trying to convince myself that, OK, maybe this is something new and positive, but it's not actually unusual, at least so far from the typical off-season pattern. Because pretty much every off-season, there are free agents who go to bad teams and non-playoff teams. That's kind of how free agency is often supposed to work, that if you were not a great team, then you try to make

yourself better by spending, and that happens every year so thanks to ben for correcting that record huh yeah it doesn't feel like it though i still don't believe it yeah it does uh but i mean i don't know like last year uh the padres signed manny machado right the year before that they signed eric cosmer that was weird just for the padres to sign anyone notable but but i think if we went back we could find examples of this every offseason so so kudos to Ben for for doing the legwork and examining that good to know we would have said we how many times would we have said that between now and and like May at least like 13 I was tentatively planning to write about it at some point and so

maybe if I had written about it I would have have come to the same conclusion that Ben had, and then I would have stopped saying it. But before that point, yeah, I probably would have said it like five or six more times. So thanks to Ben. But that makes this offseason more of a mystery even. So I still don't know exactly what it is that has caused the market to recover to this extent.

But anyway, the other article I wanted to shout out quickly is Ken Rosenthal wrote for The Athletic about Wade Miley. So Wade Miley just signed with the Reds a two-year $50 million deal. And Wade Miley just kind of collapsed at the end of last season. September, he was just terrible. He was not left off of the first postseason roster, but didn't really have a prominent role and then was left off subsequent postseason rosters and he pitched his way off of those rosters because he was really terrible. an inversion of the usual Astros story. This is not Astros picking up on another team's pitchers pitch tipping. It is an Astros pitcher tipping his pitches. And as always, I am left with as many

questions as answers when I read about pitch tipping. The interesting thing about this is that Miley says he was looking for whether he was tipping and the Astros were trying to see whether he was tipping. And you would think that the Astros, if they're supposedly so adept at picking up on pitch tipping. And that's not just a residue of some sign stealing that they're doing. That they would be able to detect this. Like maybe they're using the cameras and machine learning or whatever to pick up on pitch tipping. But evidently the Astros couldn't figure out what he was doing. And then, so he says, I couldn And then so he says I couldn't get

It out I couldn't get anybody to swing and miss At anything he watched video he consulted With Astros officials but he Had no idea what was wrong until a Former teammate sent him a text message After his final regular season start Check your glove And that's it that's the tip

That uh that cleared All this up check Check your glove. Oh, well, he left a note in his glove saying he's tipping your pitches. I don't know. Maybe there is more to the text message and that's just how it started. But check your glove. Did he not check his glove before? Isn't that like one of the first things? Yeah, that's what he said that he looked. Of course he'd check your glove. So anyway, I guess this somehow broke it wide open. And it says, Miley thought he had checked everything.

Except the glove. Except the glove. So anyway, so here's the thing. So this article quotes Brent Strom, the Astros pitching coach. And Strom acknowledges that maybe Miley was pitch tipping. And he says, you know, it had an impact, even a huge impact. But Strom also noted two other reasons for Miley's decline in September. Strom said Miley started pushing his changeup, losing effectiveness with the pitch by focusing more on location than arm speed. Miley also became too reliant on his cutter the pitch that Helped revitalize his career right-handed Hitters started taking the cutter to the Opposite field and employing that approach Helped them stay on Miley's changeup and

Negate that pitch Strom wanted Miley to throw more four-seam fastballs up In the zone etc etc so Strom isn't saying it wasn't pitch tipping but he's also Saying it's this other stuff maybe So here's the thing and I'll send You this article because there's a screenshot of miley supposedly tipping his pitches with his glove and this is not the first time that i've read an article about pitch tipping where like we're supposed to see the the

smoking gun image that reveals the pitch tipping and i still can't really see it. So it's like this big graphic tipping pitches side by side. It shows Miley in the same position. One side is before he throws the curve and the change. The other side is before he throws the fastball cutter. And like at first glance, it looks identical to me. Now, there are red lines added to the image between his glove and his shoulder to show the distance at which he's holding the glove. And I guess the red line is bigger on the cutter, like he's holding the glove farther away.

But it's like it's minuscule. It's like, what is that, an inch, two inches? And that's in one frame. That's like the frame that they chose to represent. Right. And so if you're sort of rocking at all, like even just an inch. And I mean, it genuinely does look like, like if you did this as a highlight and said there like two pictures side by side, find the differences.

Like the wrinkle in the jersey is the same. Check the glove. Check the glove. The little groove in the forearm muscle is the same the angle of him his head looking at the runner is exactly the same the the line that goes down his pants is at the exact same angle it's all identical. And then there's an inch of space. Yeah. This is incredible. And everybody, like, this is, just to be clear what we're talking about with Wade Miley, two starts, one third of an inning, 12 runs.

Yeah. From the club an inch farther away. I know major league hitters are really good at picking up on patterns and they have sharp eyes and all of that, but you cannot tell me that this is why Wade Miley went from above average starting pitcher to can't get an out, can't get a swing miss. line on the fastball cutter side actually goes into his shoulder a little more, which makes it look longer, but it's not actually that the glove is farther away. It's just that the line extends deeper into his shoulder. So it's overlapping his shoulder, not actually marking the distance from the edge of it. I can't believe this. First of all, like you'd think the Astros wouldn't want this to be the narrative about Wade Miley because this is essentially saying that if you know what pitch is coming you are dominant you you will never swing and miss so that's probably not the story the Astros want out there these days granted maybe like pitch tipping natural

pitch tipping could be less distracting to a hitter I guess than than a garbage can but still like if if he's selling the story here that uh he was so terrible because hitters knew what pitch was coming that's uh you know that doesn't reflect well on the 2017 astros not that miley was on that team anyway so yeah i i have a hard time believing this was that huge a contributor and the thing is here i kind of wonder whether this is just something that he sort of cooked up with his agent. To sell the Reds. Yes, exactly. Much of this article is about how pitch tipping became part of the selling point for Miley's free agency to explain why he was bad in September.

And so Miley says he gave his agent the go-ahead to be like, yep, just tell them. Tell them I was pitch tipping. You can tell them I'm not embarrassed. And I kind of wonder, like, is it actually that this was really happening or did he want that to be the story of the season? Because then another team might think, oh, well, this was not the real Wade Miley. This was Wade Miley with his glove One inch farther away so Miley is not one for

Excuses it says he allowed His agent Tom O'Connell to inform clubs During free agency that he had been tipping But he had not been willing to publicly discuss It before this he Relucted to pin all of his struggles On the problem okay but this Image I think was one that O'Connell prepared for teams.

This was part of the selling point. So O'Connell, so it says, Once he reached free agency, he knew he had to come clean. Revealed to clubs he had been tipping, explained why he performed so poorly in September. He told his agent, O'Connell, to do what you have to do. O'Connell found photographs and video that clearly demonstrated Miley's problem. This does not seem to be one of them, but O'Connell says, Led to the tough month we looked At all the trackman data all the stuff a lot of clubs Look at everything was good consistent the entire Season we were able to give that certain

Level of comfort to the clubs we were dealing With that the Wade Miley they saw from April to August was going to be the guy They get the next couple of years so This was maybe if Anything a brilliant marketing strategy By Miley and O'Connell To say oh no that wasn't

The real Wade Miley this was'Connell to say, oh, no, that wasn't the real Wade Miley. This was pitch tipping all the way. Wow. Yeah. So many. Everyone. I would listen to a well-done podcast on pitch tipping. Yeah.

It was just nothing but pitch tipping. Every story, pitch tipping story. Yep. It'd be like the first episode of the first season of Serial, too, because you would come away with no answers. Yep. All right. Let's resume our exercise from the previous two episodes. We've

been counting down all 30 teams one story we missed about each team's season in 2019. We've done the first 20 teams in our last two episodes and today we're going to do the last 10. So we left off last time With Cleveland

And that means that it's time To talk about the Mariners So didn't talk about the Mariners a ton This year at least not after their Surprisingly hot start I think maybe the most salient thing About the Mariners this year was how many Mariners there were

So that was the suggestion that some people had The Mariners used were, so that was the suggestion that some people had. The Mariners used 67 players this season, and that blew by the Major League record, which was 64 before the season. That was set by the 2014 Rangers, who they had a ton of injuries that year, and they used a lot of players. The Mariners didn't have a historic injury here, but they still used a ton of players. And in baseball, it's generally not a good thing to use a ton of players. It's not the team that uses the most players wins. Generally, the team that uses the most players loses a lot, as the Mariners did.

So this has kind of happened before. Didn't the Mariners set a record for most pitchers used in 2018? Maybe it was. I think they used like 40 pitchers or something. So this time they used a lot of players on both sides of the ball. to shuffle bullpen guys on and off the roster. At least they have. Maybe that will change a little with some of the rule changes for minor league options coming in 2020. But Mariners really exemplified that trend, which is probably not a great one for spectators because Mariners fans didn't have a lot of reasons to watch the team this year. But when they did watch the team, they probably had to keep reminding themselves who all of these people were.

You don't think it was fun? I, okay. I feel like we've been having a slightly different version of this conversation every so often for the last few months. I agree that you want your starting lineup and you want your top couple pitchers in your closer to be people you recognize. You need to have a base of players you recognize in the lineup. you don't want every game to be the seventh inning of the spring training of spring training games but if you're talking about the very bottom of the roster the 25th 24th 23rd do you think that there's not some benefit to having novelty and having after a certain amount of time you kind of know that mac Mack Williamson is not that exciting.

Like you've learned Mack Williamson. And now if it's Donnie Walton instead, then isn't that kind of like, oh, well, maybe Donnie Walton's the guy. I mean, I remember growing up and thinking that like any number of very, very short lived major leaguers were exciting because sometime in their first like eight games on my team, they had a big hit. And I remember Steve Scarsoni very well for basically like one big hit and one good weekend. And so Steve Scarsoni, career as a giant, I guess he ended up hanging on four years as a giant.

Wow. I don't know steve never a good idea to bring steve scarsonian into the conversation you're not even sure what point you're you're gonna end up landing on but i don't know i i could see a case for novelty being to making it a little more interesting i mean certainly if you're this is not the perspective that the average fan has but if you're the beat writer and the 25th spot is constantly someone new that's great because you always have your your b story for that day like you can go interview that player and ask like what would you buy with your signing bonus and and all you know those sorts of questions yeah so that's always good and i don't know it seems like maybe that would somewhat be the experience that fans would have too.

They also want to know what the players spent their signing bonus on. It's tricky with the Mariners though, because I don't know if you had enough of a core of players there that you were interested in even seeing the 3-4-5s. I always have in mind, I want to do an article on maybe the least exciting do-up batters. Like, you know how they show the do-up batters at the end of one half inning? So I want to do an article on the least exciting do-ups over the course of a season. And I feel like with the Mariners, it could be like two-thirds of their innings had an exciting do-up. Right. I mean, I guess you could say that if your team is going to be bad anyway,

you might as well meet some new people. That's what I'm saying. That's exactly what I'm saying. It's not a great stat to lead the league in, but it's maybe better than being third. Yeah, that's probably true. I find it kind of alienating as a follower of the sport, I think, the fact that if I look at box scores now, there are so many names I don't know, which maybe my attention is slightly divided, I guess, because I'm covering other things at the ringer. But it's not just that. It's that there are just many more names in baseball in a major league season in a given year. And there's kind of a comforting familiarity when you look at box scores, you look at news,

and you know every name. It's like, okay, I'm following this TV show and I know the whole cast and I can maybe even picture them or tell you a fact about them. And now I just, whenever I look at a box score, there are names I don't know to the point that I don't even think like, oh, I better go look that guy up so I can know something about him. It's past that point.

I've given up on knowing anything. So it used to be even at BP when I was at BP and trying to pay as close attention to every roster as I possibly could, there would always be like the back of the bullpen in an NL West team that was bad that the games were on late and I didn't watch all that much of them. There would always be some players I didn't know. But now it's every team. There are players I don't know. And you just kind of have to accept that, which maybe is not so great as a follower of the sport. If you're a follower of a specific team, yes, at least you're getting fresh faces and new stories and anecdotes about players that you haven't heard on a dozen other broadcasts that year.

I'm very sympathetic to this. So I don't want to argue against it if you're right, and I'm not sure that you're not right. A couple of counterpoints, though. One is that you're comparing your experience to when you were editing BP, and you are never in better shape than when you're editing BP. I mean, you know, you're having to edit prospect stuff every day. You're having to edit every transaction analysis. You're editing so much that you get to know, you really know every player in a way that you don't when you're just writing about it, let alone just a fan of it. about it let alone just a fan of it and it's like there are i don't know how many names the average baseball fan can hold in their head at once my guess is it's not more than say 400 or so and the top 400 players in the world are still all there uh they're surrounded by instead of 500

other names now 600 other names but i don't know how many of those other 500 you were really learning anyway a bigger it seems that a bigger challenge is that in the 30 team era then there's a lot more names obviously so in the sense that there's more teams uh you're not seeing the same teams as much and also there are now a lot more than 400 players in the league. In the olden days, there were actually only 400 players in the league when there were 16 teams. And so I, like I say, I'm sympathetic to the human need that you're describing. I'm not, and I'm just not convinced that the problem is quite so, I don't know, recent as we're treating it, nor that it's in any way desirable to solve it,

given the league that we have. However, and I will also make this last counter argument, which is that if I'm doing the query correctly, I believe that the Giants in 2019 set the National League record for players appearing with 64. At least that's close to an accurate statement. And in the last episode, or maybe the one before when we talked about the Giants season, you rattled off a bunch of the Giants who were new to the team this year, who were part of Farhan Zaidi's roster churn as he tried to find good

players. And if you were to ask a Giants fan about what made this season good and memorable, I think that Giants fan would say that Donovan Solano and Alex Dickerson and Steven Vogt and Mike Yastrzemski were big parts of that, the players that you named when you named the surprising successes. And those are all the result of Farhan Zaidi playing with not just a 40-man roster, but like a 64-man roster across the season and bringing new players in and giving new players a chance to both be learned and also to thrive. So don't know what exactly my point is here. The Mariners season was exactly as you described it.

And I guess along those lines, one of the best stories of the Mariners season was one of the last players to arrive, Kyle Lewis, who is not in that same class as the free talent pickups that you just named. overall pick in the 2016 draft and he had a serious knee injury I believe and then he had a couple years where he underperformed and then he came back and sort of re-established himself as a viable player this year and then he showed up on September 10th and he went on a great run which I think Meg and I mentioned at that point because he had one of those debuts where he was hitting a home run every other day and it was very exciting and he finished with 18 games 75 plate appearances six homers and a 132 ops plus so that was a nice bright spot granted he walked three times and struck out 29 times and there were worrisome things about that too but it was nice just that he got to the big leagues and contributed at all and was sort of a breath of fresh air in the clubhouse and exciting energy and all of that.

And that was the product of a player who showed up at the last minute. So, yes, sometimes depending on the player, a new addition can certainly be exciting. But I think there is sort of an anonymity that sets in when it's just a rotating cast all year long. Two other things about the Mariners this year. One is that we didn't talk about, I don't think. One is that Marco Gonzalez is the pitcher with war disagreements this year. If you look at some sites, Marco Gonzalez was average. And if you look at some, he was very, very good.

And so he's an interesting pitcher going forward, very low strikeout rate, and yet by some measures very effective, by others not. The other is that Tom Murphy wasn't quite Mitch Garver, but he was a lot like Mitch Garver in terms of catcher who came out of nowhere, who was not seen as an offensive force and who had a, um, incredible season in somewhat part-time play. So Tom Murphy had 10 career home runs at that point, uh, at the beginning of, of this season. He, uh, he was a career 219, 271, 439 hitter in Coors Field as a Colorado Rocky, so playing half his games in Coors Field. Joined the Mariners, hit 18 homers in 75 games as a catcher,

which is not Mitch Garver pace, but is very good. Pro-rate that over a full season, and that's like 40 homers. And in August, he hit.333 and slugged.804. So Tom Murphy was a story that we might have taught if tom murphy had been an atlanta brave we would have talked about it yeah all right orioles not a ton of great stories to talk about with the orioles this year but hanser alberto we never really talked about him and he's kind of the the reverse of the Mike Yastrzemski, because we talked about how the Giants just sort of plucked Mike Yastrzemski off the Orioles without giving up much. That was a March trade.

And the same thing happened the other way. The Orioles took Hanser Alberto off of waivers from the Giants in March, and then he had himself a good season too, and a strange one. So he was in contention for the AL batting race until pretty late in the year, and he was kind of Tim Anderson-lite. He had the same 2.9% walk rate, which is not great, but he managed to bat 305, playing a full season, qualifying for the batting title. That's not easy to do. And he was in the first percentile in exit velocity, the first percentile in hard hit percentage, the 18th percentile in expected weighted on base average, 20th percentile in expected slugging, but 88th percentile in expected batting average, which I don't know what to make

of that exactly. Does that mean that he was just consistently putting balls in the stat cast donut hole where you're hitting it hard enough to get it over the infield, but not hard enough to be caught by outfielders essentially? And he kind of found that semi-sweet spot and kept putting balls there. It seems like if you never hit the ball hard at all, it should still be hard to have an expected batting average that's that high, which I guess, I mean, what was his BABIP must have been high? It wasn't even that high. It was a 318, 318 BABIP. So that's just a strange season.

Struck out 50 times. Yeah, right right he put the ball in play a lot but yeah so he put the ball in play and i guess you could do it by hitting if you almost never pop up and you almost never chop out like if all of your launch angles are between like two percent and seventeen percent you can probably do it if you don't hit the ball hard it's just if you could if you could do that you're like superhuman right that's that's the hard thing about baseball it's harder to do that than to be strong yeah i guess so so yeah he had a six percent infield fly ball rate so that's low and yeah just weird like 8.3 percent infield hit percentage That's not extraordinarily high I don't think

So that's just a weird season So he was coming off Three straight sub-replacement level seasons In little playing time With the Rangers And then he I don't know He was 26 for most of the season

I guess And that was that So So strange season, probably tough to repeat. Oh, actually, so wow. All right. So his transaction history is actually pretty interesting. So in November, November 2018, he was selected by the Yankees off waivers from the Rangers. Then in January 2019, he was selected off waivers by the Orioles from the Yankees off waivers from the Rangers. Then in January 2019, he was selected off waivers by the Orioles from the Yankees. Then the Giants took him off waivers from the Orioles in February, and then the Orioles took him back off waivers from the Giants in March. So he went through like a little mini Oliver Drake saga there just in the few months before spring training, or I guess he

must have already reported to Giants spring training probably by the time the Orioles took him but he didn't know where he was going to be playing there when we talk about the Oliver Drake sagas of the sport there's I think there's always an assumption that there's a lot of effort for not much reward there that like part of what it makes it feel a little bit absurd and funny and also a little bit cruel is that these are players that we expect, even if they do finally latch on,

to just be holding on by their fingertips, even in that situation, and maybe be like two runs better than replacement level. And yet we have here two stories, Alberto and Drake, of players who were both very good for their teams at the end of these sagas and making the teams that let them go look kind of dumb more than the whole process. So, yeah, like Alberto, you know, like basically all-star level player this year. Pretty close. He was like a two-win player but well he was

three uh three at baseball okay and uh and then you know drake if uh drake was in if if drake were a closer he would have had 39 saves so and as it was he was pitching in leverage in the postseason and was a very good pitcher so those were two valuable players those are median players on uh on a championship team. Yeah, that's right. And Oliver Drake got to spend the whole season with the Rays. Good for him. Hopefully, Hanser Alberto will find some stability too.

I guess he did this year. Can we just appreciate that a player that you described as Tim Anderson Light hit 12 home runs this year? Oh, that's true. Yeah yes the player who had the first percentile exit velocity yeah hit 12 home runs this year that's true huh I wonder if he like he hit his peak velocities I wonder if his peak velocities were good and he just like hit a lot of balls poorly but when he did get a hold of one he hit it pretty hard or maybe it's just the ball and you can do that this year i have an update on the marco gonzalez okay conversation uh so gonzalez at fan graphs 3.7 war at reference 3.2 war and at prospectus 0.0 war

and what's kind of interesting about that and maybe i'll write about marco gonzalez now is that i had a whole thing going for a few years where I would look at the player whose wars most diverged across the three sites and then write about why and what made them interesting and what it tells us about, you know, the modern age. And, uh, and usually what you find it because references runs based and the other two are more peripherals based with different levels of sophistication. Usually you just get a very simple thing where a player has, you know, a high war on reference and a low war on the other two or a high low war on reference and a high war on the other two.

The other two kind of move in a lot of tandem. And so it's hard to write that story the next year about a different pitcher who's basically the same story. But with Gonzalez, the diversion is between prospectus and fan graphs. It's between all of them to some degree, but the extremes are fan graphs and prospectus. And I'm not sure how many pitchers there are where there is say more than a war, a war and a half separating them. And the extremes are those two with reference in the middle. It's very rare that reference is in the middle. Okay. All right. Rangers are up next. We did not get a lot of Rangers suggestions,

and the ones we did were mostly from people who want us to talk about Danny Santana, who I think we have mentioned at some point this season, but I don't really remember specifics. He was one of the most surprising home run totals When we were naming those for a while Okay, well it was a surprising season on the whole Because Danny Santana was quite good for the Rangers He started the season better than he finished it, I think

Because I remember his numbers looking considerably better Than they do at the end of the year But still, pretty good. He hit 283, 324, 534, and yes, 28 home runs. And that was after just a few really pretty terrible seasons. Like he had a good rookie year with the Twins in 2014. He got votes for Rookie of the Year that year. He got votes for Rookie of the Year that year.

And then after that, it was just 2015 with the Twins, 46 OPS+. 2016 with the Twins, 64 OPS+. 2017 with the Twins and the Braves, 55 OPS+. 2018 with the Braves, 54 OPS+. And some of these are small sample. Others are not that small. So I'm going to guess that if you set a playing time minimum of, oh, I don't know, 600 plate appearances or something from 2015 to 2018, Danny Santana must have been one of the worst hitters in baseball and certainly one of the worst non-catcher hitters in baseball and then he came

back and he put together a really strong season for the Rangers and it probably went under the radar a little bit just because Rangers had a few of those seasons like they had the Mike Miner season they had the Lance Lynn season they had the Hunter Pence season And those all probably got more attention Than Danny Santana did But given his previous Four seasons or so For him to do what he did After signing as a free agent And he got a minor league invite

I think as did Hunter Pence And so to do what he did After that was a really good story And as you mentioned the other day The Rangers did not have a good offense in 2019, but Danny Santana was a good part of it. Yeah. 13 homers in 360 games before this season and 28 in 130 this year. So in basically a third of his prior combined playing time, he hit double the home runs. And Santana was was a fast player he was a slap hitting fast player

before that and I wasn't paying that close of attention to Danny Santana or his his fantasy value but if you'd asked me I would have guessed at the end of this year that he had probably bulked up that he was older he you know probably was a slightly reimagined player, and that that's where the power came from, and that he was no longer fast. He also played primarily first base this year. He played everywhere, but he played more first base than anything else after being a center field shortstop with the Twins. And so I would have imagined, well, Danny Santana is now strong and slow, but he also stole 21 bags and had six triples.

He was one of the faster players in the game again, too. Yeah, my suspicion was right. So I just looked 2015 to 2018, 600 plate appearances. Danny Santana was the third worst hitter in baseball, slightly worse than Jeff Mathis over that period of time. So Omar Infante had a 47 WRC+, Alexi Amorista had a 48, and Danny Santana had a 49. So that was not a terribly small sample, and he was a sub-replacement level player

and one of the worst hitters in baseball, and then he came back to be a slugger. So I'm reading a story about him at MLB.com from June, and people are talking about just what kind of an amazing person he is. And he says he's crediting confidence, which is always one of those explanations that, like, you want something more concrete than that. But it is understandable that confidence would help a player be better. Of course, you wonder then, well, why are you confident? But it says, I guess in terms of like a mechanical change,

he says Santana credits adjusting the movement of his hands on his swing for some of his success. So I don't know exactly what that means, but he did some kind of mechanical tweak and also just felt good about himself. And the Rangers liked him, so they trusted him, and that made him believe in himself. And there we go, Danny Santana.

I will note two things about his utility. I don't know the easiest way to query positional flexibility, but Danny Santanaana started not just appeared in but started at least six games at every position uh on the diamond except for catcher is catcher on the diamond or is it just off the diamond i was i phrased it as on the diamond because i was trying to figure out a way to include the other seven positions uh-huh yeah that's a tough one okay well anyway he started at least six games at the other seven positions uh-huh yeah that's a tough one okay well anyway he started at least six games at the other seven positions which i would not be surprised if that's

unprecedented okay i mean it may it's it's like there are obviously players who could do that but you usually if you have a certain usually you end up at a position a little bit more than that even if you're utility. You get sort of your normal one. He played everywhere. So there's that. Also, baseball reference lists the positions you play as almost like a line score.

And so at the end of the season, it says position. And so for Danny Santana, it says 3, 8, 4, 7, 9, 6, 5 because he played the most first base, 3, and the second most center field, that's 8, and the third most second base. and that feels like a very odd combination of a very odd sequence of those numbers and it would not surprise me also if danny santana is the first ever three eight four seven nine six five in history okay like you play the most first base and then the second most center field that's weird yeah true and then the third most second base that seems weird too this is a john this is a

random number generator this order i guess so yeah the well the rangers had isaiah kiner falafel so he's he's the even stranger positional combination. But yeah, that's odd. All right. Next up is the Rays. And we got a few Rays suggestions, and most of them were talk about G-Man Choi. And G-Man Choi, I think it's a case of like you had to be there, I think, to fully appreciate what G-Man Choioy means to race fans because it's like it's the spectator experience of G. Monchoy, I think, more so than the stats.

Because if you look at the stats, you'd think, well, he's just, you know, a moderately above average hitter this year for a first baseman and not a, you know, incredible defensive premium position guy. He's like kind of an average player, statistically speaking. But people love Ji Man Choi, and I think some people were introduced to him in the postseason and started watching him regularly then and appreciated what he brings to a game because Ben Clemens, for instance, at Fangraphs on October 9th wrote a post called The Joy of Ji Man Choi.

And he was writing a bit about the unusual postseason batting line that Choi had, which was good but weird, but what Ben said here is, quote, what's great to me about Choi is his wonderful combination of giddiness and sheepishness combined with the instinctual, hey, I could do that feeling I get for an instant every time he does Something good that feeling is certainly Misplaced Choi might not look like A prototypical elite athlete But looks can be deceiving And then he continues

Lower in the post You don't have to care about the aesthetics to think that Choi is good the trop would suggest that Rays aren't in the business of caring about Aesthetics and they traded for Choi and made him an everyday starter on a 96-win team. He has good counting stats, good context neutral stats, good stat cast stats.

He's just good. But if you do care about how baseball looks, that's an extra mark in Choi's favor. He's an absolute delight to watch, regardless of what he's doing on the field. Would it be good for baseball if every player was Ji-Mon Choi? Certainly not, but it works in small Doses and there's no better proof of that

Than Choi and He mentions also you can't Watch him celebrate a win shirt untucked And partially unbuttoned in stark Contrast to his teammates and not get A sense of hey that's what I'd look like Out there Interesting good

I'll enjoy him more next year i don't uh i i hate to compare raise players only to other raise players but something about him has always reminded me slightly of dan johnson okay in the the way that uh hair it's not the hair but it's but it's a combination of uh well first of all raise raise first baseman, you know, that's part of it. It's the nomadicness of the career. It's the productivity, the general productivity. But like you're never going to be a star at your position with those numbers. But you're also like always going to be someone that like if you're in the do up next inning, that feels like an okay inning. And then the general sort of, yeah, like you just notice that they're in the screen,

that they feel like somebody who is on the team that you like. And I can't get more specific than that. I didn't even have this thought going really uh but that's kind of a little bit what he reminds me of and you know dan johnson famous famous clutch ray right yeah and choy when he came over the the race traded brad miller for him in june 2018 and i think it always helps when a player comes over joins joins your team, and you're not expecting a ton from him. And then he goes on a great hot streak to sort of introduce himself to the team. So in 2018, before the trade with the Brewers, he had a 104 OPS plus in 12 games or something.

Then with the Rays after the trade in 49 games, he had a 141 OPS plus. So he really announced himself. And then this year year he didn't hit quite that Well but he still hit Fairly well and was kind of A constant all season and Brad Miller by the way had a quite a good Year too he he played 79 Games and only got 170 plate

Appearances so he was sort of a Part-timer but when he did Play and this was for Cleveland And then the Phillies, he had a 125 OPS plus. So both sides of that trade have sort of made good. So here's why I think that I link, I think now this is why I link Choi and Johnson. Well, maybe it's not why. I had a theory, but maybe it's not right. In 2010, he was a Ray and he was good. And he had been just picked up off the scrap heap with little investment. And then for most of the decade, the Rays were very kind of like they always had these

first basemen who you were underwhelmed by. And it always felt like an easy position to upgrade, but they invested so little in it because it was such an easy position to upgrade and it always ended up pretty bad that like they weren't they weren't actually getting a lot of good production out of those players and so so they had casey kotchman i guess i don't remember maybe he was good with the rays but i don't remember it and they had james looney for a while and they had uh i don't know i don't know if this theory is holding up at all but it feels like there was a period in the middle of the decade where we thought of the rays

always needing a first baseman but not really having one yeah and uh and then choi is ends that choi is good now this theory is uh is is actually ruined because uh they also had logan morrison in 2017 who really ended that streak when they went and got Logan Morrison and he hit 38 home runs. And then the next year they had CJ Krohn who hit 30 home runs. And so I don't know. Choice is not the franchise. Both of those guys left or the Rays got rid of them. I'm trying to create an organized theory and it's not working.

Wasn't it like DHs too? Maybe it was even more DHs than first baseman? I think it might have even been more DHs. Maybe I can retry this theory in seven minutes with DHs. Alright. Okay. Red Sox. Also pretty light on Red Sox suggestions

but one consistent one was just recognizing the season that Eduardo Rodriguez had and it was a very the season that Eduardo Rodriguez had. And it was a very fine season because he actually made every start this year. He got to the 200 inning mark, which he had never really approached before. He wasn't necessarily better on an inning per inning basis than he had been, say, the previous two years. He'd always been kind of good, but you kept waiting for him to have a full healthy season.

And he was on the IL each of those years. I think each of the previous three years, he had spent time on the injured list with lower body injuries, I think usually knee, but also hamstring and maybe ankle in there. So kept hurting himself and had never made more than 24 starts in a season before this one. But this one, he was totally healthy. And he made all 34 starts. And he actually went 19-6, which, like, I pay no attention to win-loss record anymore. So I didn't even know that until just the second. But for him to go 19-6 on a, what, 84-win team, that's pretty impressive. and six on a what 84 win team that's pretty impressive i mean eduardo rodriguez was sort of the staff ace i guess because price was disappointing and chris sale was hurt and

semi-disappointing although in some ways he was good when he was healthy but eduardo rodriguez was like one of the bright spots if not the bright spot on that staff. And it feels like we've been waiting a while for that. So that was his age 26 season. And he made good on what everyone hoped for from him. Yeah, finished sixth in Cy Young voting. And my recollection is that he had pretty lousy numbers through the first month or two, good peripherals and lousy numbers.

And now I'm looking at his game log. And yeah, it looks like that's basically true. So I'll just go from his first start through May 21st. He had a 5.43 ERA, but he had 10 strikeouts per nine and a little bit more than three strikeouts per walk. And then he got it going. And so he had, now, even then he had, I think he had crazy run support.

I think he was a crazy run support guy all year. But from that point on, basically had the same peripherals, but had a 3.2 ERA. And so that might be part of why we didn't talk about him. His numbers did sort of sneak up through the summer. And I remember when he finished sixth in Cy Young voting, around that time, I was talking about him with RJ. And RJ was more in tune with how good Eduardo Rodriguez had been than I was. I was kind of demeaning him a little bit because I had in my head a pitcher who was slightly disappointing on a team that was very disappointing and just had run support. And RJ

pointed out that no, in fact, Sam, he was a good pitcher. Yeah. And I guess in that same kind of category, Christian Vasquez had a really nice year too. And he's a player I've been rooting for for a while, just because he was a framing specialist and he had some injuries and then he also just didn't hit at all sometimes. And this year he was like a league average hitter, not just for a catcher, just for anyone. And he played 138 games and the great defense. And that's a really strong season. So I was happy to see him really blossom. Yeah.

All right. Royals. So got a few things for the Royals. We did talk about Bubba Starling making the majors. A few people suggested that. Talked about that when he came up because that crossed off another box on the 2011 draft bingo card. So got that out of the way, but that was a cool story. Another one people suggested was Ian Kennedy turning into a relief ace, which was also fun.

It's always nice when you get another data point to see What happens when a pitcher Who has almost exclusively Been a starter goes to the bullpen And transforms himself And in Kennedy's case it was Quite a stark transformation So he I think he

Gained what a mile and a half Two miles per hour on his average fastball Something like that. And his numbers just improved by a ton. So he had a sub-3 FIP just barely. He struck out like 10.4 guys per nine, whereas he had struck out 7.9 guys per nine as a starter the previous year. His walk rate went down. His ground ball rate went way up

he didn't allow many homers and you know he had a 343 babbip so if anything his his era which was a solid 3.41 did not reflect how good he was he was uh really good and it doesn't happen that way for everyone that's this is better than the typical transition from the rotation to the bullpen. But I'm always fascinated to see what will happen, whether the pitcher will actually look like a new pitcher and why that is. I don't know particularly in Kennedy's case why a bigger than average velocity boost. Doesn't really seem like it. Or whether it's more of a mentality thing. He just liked being in the bullpen. Or maybe it was a pitch usage thing. I don't know how his pitch selection changed. Maybe he was able to use a better pitch much more often.

But always like that sort of science experiment. And in Kennedy's case, it worked out very well. Sort of surprising that he wasn't traded at the trade deadline. And that we didn't hear more rumors about him. So I'm just looking. So Kennedy is signed for one more year right now. He signed for one more year right now. His average annual salary is $14 million, which is a little high for a closer of Kennedy's level, but not high for a closer. And when you compare, say, what he was owed and what he was doing compared to what, say, Mark Melanson was owed and what he was doing, it looks fairly comparable. And Melanson was successfully traded last fall. So there was no rumor on MLB

trade rumors for Kennedy in the four days leading up to the trade deadline. So not only was he not traded, but there wasn't even talk about him being traded. And there has been one rumor credited to or around Ian Kennedy in all the time since. And it was just a couple of days ago. And it was kind of in a roundup of what the Royals might do this offseason. And this, I'm going to read this. This is kind of paraphrasing something from the kansas city star the royals continue to present the idea that they are happy with their core an impression bolstered by the moon sun and stars type packages the royals are demanding for players like whit merrifield danny duffy and ian kennedy and you could have convinced me that the reason that Ian Kennedy wasn't traded

was that he was seen as having no value with his contract. And you could convince me that he wasn't traded because the Royals are demanding two top 30 prospects for him. I'm not sure which one it is. Yeah. Well, you mentioned Danny Duffy and I wanted to mention Danny Duffy too, because probably not a lot of people were following the Royals in September, in late September. But there was a great story about Danny Duffy in the Kansas City Star on September 20th, and Duffy just opened up about his history with anxiety and depression and panic disorder. And he told all of these stories about how hard it was for him to kind of live within a major league clubhouse and was very frank and vulnerable about it, which you don't often hear from professional athletes. Obviously, you know, Zach Greinke is a Royals precedent for some of this, but the stories that Duffy tells in this article, like he was just bullied

throughout his career, really, not even just his professional career, but like in high school, even earlier than that. And when he got to his first Royals spring training, so he's in his early 20s, and he was talking about how exciting he was to be there in big league camp for the first time. And there was this group of five pitchers. He doesn't specify who they were, but they just picked on him mercilessly. It sounds like worse and more mean-spirited than even the typical traditional rookie hazing, which is bad enough. But Duffy, given his history, probably reacted more strongly even to that. And it's just, it sounds cruel what they did to him. And he was so miserable that he quit baseball

for a while. He just went away. He told the Royals he was done, as Granke did, of course. And he didn't say why, at least publicly, and he didn't even tell the Royals at that time. He kind of kept it private and said it was something to do with his family maybe. But it was because of this, because he was having panic attacks just because he was so miserable to be in that environment. You know, he says within three days of his showing up at spring training, he felt mentally broken. Teammates needled his every move, his every word. Each night during hours-long phone conversations with his mother, Duffy told her he wasn't cut out for this. He wanted to come home.

He started showing up at the park really early, hoping that he could just avoid these pitchers who were picking on them. But that didn't work. And so eventually he had to to leave and you know he went into therapy and he's gotten treatment for this and now he copes with it to some extent by taking very long walks i know you take long walks but these are i think even longer walks than than you take so he says uh the first i think spring training when he went back to the Royals after this ordeal, he just left at like four o'clock. He left his hotel and started walking and he walked for 14 hours and he didn't go back until like 630 the next morning having walked a marathon, essentially. And he still takes very long walks as sort of a stress reliever.

he still takes very long walks as sort of a stress reliever. So anyway, it's a really good article, and I applaud him for being so open about it because he says that having this out there and feeling vulnerable because people know this about him might be an even greater source of anxiety for him, but he said that he kind of wanted to put it out there for other players who might be experiencing the same thing and don't know that other players have because so few professional athletes will talk about it.

So really nice story. Yeah, yeah. He talked about the walking in 2018, and it was really dispiriting because just that caused a bunch of—a lot of like kind of public reaction about him being odd. And rather than him having a perfectly healthy hobby. Yeah. And it's just it's tough. It's tough to be in public.

I mean, you just cannot count on the generosity of the public. And so, yeah, keep keep keep that in mind with players. Yep. All right. Tigers. We had to dig here to get a good Tiger story, but this is something that I wasn't really aware of. I knew that Spencer Turnbull had had a pretty good season, at least by Tigers standards. Tigers were terrible, obviously, this year.

Got themselves the first pick, I guess, in next year's draft because of it. But they were more terrible on the offensive side. The pitching staff was not quite so terrible. But because the offense was so horrendous, worst offense in baseball, pitchers didn't get a lot of run support. And Spencer Turnbull had a 3-17 win-loss record. He led the major leagues in losses, and yet he was a pretty good pitcher. He had a sub-4 FIP. He had a 104 ERA+. This was in 30 starts. He was good.

He struck out almost a batter per inning. Pretty good season for Spencer Turnbull, but this is such a terrible win-loss record, which, again, just reminds us all why we don't really pay attention to win-loss record anymore. But I was kind of curious about where Spencer Turnbull's season ranks among seasons with a winning percentage this bad. And the answer is at the top. The best season ever For someone who had a winning percentage This terrible and spent time in the Starting rotation because obviously You're in the bullpen you can have a 0-4 season or whatever and it doesn't mean

Anything but Spencer Turnbull had a 2.9 fan graphs War this year which is quite good So the best Season by any other pitcher Who had any number Of starts was just S slightly worse at 2.8. That was another Tigers pitcher, Art Hoodeman, in 1948.

But Art, he pitched in 43 games and started 20 of them. So he was in the bullpen a lot of the time. So to find another pitcher who had a winning percentage as low as spencer turnbulls and spent the entire season in the starting rotation you've gotta you gotta look well well down the list but not very far from spencer turnbull because it was jordan zimmerman of the 2019 tigers yeah who went 1 and 13 and had himself a 1.3 war season And that was in 23 games and 23 starts So to find the non-2019 Tigers pitcher Who spent the whole season in the rotation

Or started exclusively And had a winning percentage that's terrible It is Ross Ohlendorf for the 2010 Pirates Who went 1-11 that year With a 1.1 fangraphs war season. So this was a historically great season with a historically terrible record for Spencer Turnbull. Yeah, and it wasn't just the, I don't think it was just the run support either. A part of it was the defense. So if you just look at their top four starters, you have Zimmerman, who was the opening day starter,

and then you have Daniel Norris, Spencer Turnbull, and Matthew Boyd, who were all quite good. All of them had ERA pluses that were over 100, but also they had FIPS. I guess Norris' FIP and ERA were about the same, but the other two had FIPS that were better than their ERAs. Zimmerman had a terrible ERA, but a league average FIP. And so if you group them all together, I'm just eyeballing this. I don't know if this is right, but I think it's pretty close. I think that you would have like a FIP minus that's probably in

like the low nineties or so for those four collectively, which is better than average, which is pretty good. So there's that, there's the defense behind them. But then even if you just look at their runs allowed, which are worse because they allowed more runs than their fit would have suggested, and Zimmerman in particular was a disaster, those four had a combined ERA of five, which doesn't seem very good. But this era in the american league uh it's pretty close to league average i would guess that it's an era plus of of like 98 or so so let's just assume it's 98 or so basically league average and those four starters who were basically league average went 16 and 55 55. Yeah, that's not good. The Tigers did also have another player who was with them, I guess, pretty much all year. He threw 79 innings and 46 games out of the bullpen,

Nick Ramirez, who is a left-handed pitcher. And he was a former hitter, former Tigers prospect as a first baseman, I believe, or initially, I guess he was a Brewers prospect, really. He was drafted by the Brewers in the fourth round of the 2011 draft, and he just didn't hit very well. And then he converted to pitching, I guess, in 2017 was when he started pitching, and he made it to the big leagues with the tigers in 2019 and he was pretty good and spent all season with them so nice positional conversion story is always is always good too i did not realize that trevor rosenthal was a tiger after the nationals let him go the tigers picked him up and of course the tigers when they picked him up were probably 45 games under

500 already and rosenthal is a free agent this year. He would have been no matter what, because this was his sixth year of Major League service time. And so at the very best, the Tigers were picking him up for two and a half months. But it was 16 days before the trade deadline. And I wonder, do you think they picked him up because they thought, ah, what the heck, we need arms. Maybe he'll, you know, pitch 17 innings for us and then the season will be over and we can go on our boat. Or do you think that they picked him up with 16 days until the trade deadline thinking that there is a genuine chance that if they turned him around, that his velocity and name recognition and history would actually make him tradable with 16 good days.

And keep in mind, the Nationals had released him with an ERA of 22.74 and 15 walks in six innings against five strikeouts. So he had gone through one of the worst stretches that a pitcher could possibly fear. But do you think that Trevor Rosenthal, 16 days of Trevor Rosenthal would make him a tradable? I think potentially, yeah. And it didn't seem like the Tigers made a lot of

moves that were like, let's pick up this guy because it might make us a tiny bit better. Like, let's pick up this veteran player. They didn't do that, really. They pretty much tanked and they got the number one pick. So I would think just based on that, based on the fact that they didn't try to bring in recognizable players just to be a little bit more respectable, maybe they did think that that was a speculative thing. Might as well give it a shot, I guess. What else were they doing at the time? All right, twins. So you mentioned Mitch Garver already in this episode and many of the suggestions we got were to talk about Mitch Garver. We did at some point this year. We probably didn't talk enough about Mitch Garver because he really had an incredible season. He just remade himself and he went to Alex Bregman's personal hitting coach and he just changed his swing. And he also had a framing coach, catching coach with the Twins who helped him become a good framer.

And he was just unbelievable. It was one of the best stories of the Twins season and one of the best player turnarounds, just how good he got and how much better and how quickly. That's it's it's a cool story, but we did touch on that at least. So I think most of these suggestions that we got were to talk about Luis Arise. And I think we gave short shrift to Luis Arise probably because we gave such long shrift to the other non-strikeout Venezuelan multi-position

player on the Twins roster. Williams-Estadio just didn't leave a lot of room in our hearts for another player like that, I suppose. But Luis Reyes is frankly a better version of Williams-Estadio. He's maybe not quite so extreme when it comes to the strikeouts and the walks. Certainly he does walk, but he is similar in the sense that he played a ton of positions and he is really good at getting the bat on the ball. He was a fun player with a very sort of mature offensive approach. People are just very impressed by Luis Reyes. And he hurt himself.

He sprained his ankle just in late September. Like, was it the last game of the season or just about? And I know that was kind of a blow to the Twins. He did make the playoff roster and sort of taped up his ankle and tried to play on it, but he didn't look like he should be playing, really. Didn't look like he was at full strength. If you look at the Fangraph's depth charts projections for 2020, and you sort by the lowest strikeout rate, the Twins have two of the three, the top three or bottom three, depending 2020 And you sort by the lowest Strikeout rate the twins have

Two of the three the top three Or bottom three depending on how you sort So Williams Estadio Projected for a 6.5% strikeout Rate Luis Arise for an 8.5% strikeout rate and Nick Madrigal whom Meg and I Spoke about recently he is projected

For the lowest strikeout rate In baseball with the twins 5.7 lowest strikeout rate in baseball with the Twins 5.7%. So everyone fall in love with Nick Magical. But point is, Twins have two of these guys except that Arise is really good. And he had a 123 OPS plus in 92 games. He was sixth in Rookie of the Year voting. Everyone loved him. Everyone was impressed by him. And he is only 22 years old. So he is actually probably a promising player who will be the Twins utility player of the present and future.

Wow. Yeah. And this was passed along with a link to a plate appearance that I think we probably both wish that we had known about in real time. Maybe you did, but we might have raced to write about it. At the time, it was a situation where Arise was brought into a game in an 0-2 count because what, the batter had been injured or ejected? Yeah, this was in July and it was Jonathan Scope, heard his oblique swinging. And so,

yeah, there was an 0-2 pitch against Edwin Diaz and Arise came in as a pinch hitter. So 0-2 against Edwin Diaz, who granted did not have a good season, but he certainly struck out a lot of guys. And when you're down 0-2 and you have the pinch hit penalty and you're coming in cold off the bench against a guy who throws 100, and cold off the bench against a guy who throws 100. That is a pretty tough assignment. And yes, so according to this article, TwinCities.com, Arias fouled off three straight pitches. Then he took two straight balls.

Then he fouled off a high fastball. Then he took an inside slider for a ball to get a full count. And then he fouled off another slider and then took a fastball outside to draw a walk. He pirouetted toward the Twins dugout and shouted toward his teammates who responded with a massive roar of their own, which you probably wouldn't hear a massive roar greeting a walk in just a July game all that often. But this was really impressive, and everyone was raving about it so Rocco Baldelli said I don't know how many people in the entire world could have the at-bat he had last night I'm not trying to be overly dramatic here there are only few people out there that have the skill and the general feel in the batter's box and the ability to do that so that is uh very high praise yeah

and he doesn't strike out as you noted but but he does walk, which is a rare combination. And it's particularly, it's an extremely rare combination if you don't have a ton of power. Some batters, when they reach their kind of their peak, they have a combination of plate discipline and pitchers fearing them that allows them to draw a lot of walks. And Arise doesn't have that.

He hit four home runs this year in a year where hans roberto hit 12 for goodness sake uh and yet he struck out 29 times and walked 36 that's a 10 walk rate and that is that's a very rare it's a very rare ratio hardly ever see that that if a pitcher comes in and he has one start where he strikes out 10 and doesn't walk anyone or something, maybe that one start is enough to tell you something about his career, which I don't know if that's actually true or certainly not universally true, but you hear that about pitcher outings. And obviously if a pitcher throws one pitch and it's a hundred miles per hour or something, then he's proved that the future could be bright at least. So to have one plate appearance that ends in a walk prove that your future is bright,

I wonder if that's actually true or how often that is true. Because if you end your plate appearance with a ball that you hit 115 miles per hour and it goes 450 feet or something, then maybe you've proved that your future is bright. I think Rob Arthur has written before about how just one really hard hit ball can tell you a lot about a player, but one walk. I wonder if that's true. It's probably true that there are certain types of players who never have a plate appearance like this one plate appearance that he had but even like a free swinger who doesn't make contact all that often could have a single plate appearance

where he did something like this so maybe it's not really just this one plate appearance because as baldelli also said he's had that at bat against many other pitchers and either gotten a hit or a walk or hit a ball in the barrel or done something else positive it's not surprising because he's done it before so they they should put him into every game when someone falls behind oh two yeah that's right yeah i uh yeah it's a sort of no fun to say it but i agree with you that there's nothing that significant about i mean he fouled off some pitches when like every batter fouls off like 30 of the pitches that they swing at and he took some pitches and almost every batter takes roughly half at least of the balls or much more of the balls that are

out of the strike zone against him so if you just do the math he saw what did he see seven pitches after the two that he was he was granted the o2 he saw seven more six more so he had like uh yeah i mean part of the big part of the reason that this uh plate appearance lasted as long as it did was that he did not hit a ball fair for a double yeah so that said it is a great a grad bat. He was not one of the twins top 10 prospects going into the season. He did not play for the twins for almost half the season. And he ended up tying Vladimir Guerrero Jr. in rookie of the year voting with a higher war per per game.

And so that was a tremendous turnaround. Yeah. Can I do a quick Mitchitch garver sure all right i'm gonna read you a list of names those names are sammy sosa roger maris babe ruth mark mcguire barry bonds javi lopez jd martinez matt williams hank aaron Those are the only players in history who have ever had a season with a higher home run rate than Mitch Garber. Wow. All right. Good one. In at least 300.

I'll say in at least 250 played appearances. I could have said 350, but I went lower to make it sound slightly better, and then I explained the process To undercut my integrity Alright, White Sox So this suggestion comes from A listener Facebook group member named Jerome Who says I think this was widely underappreciated

Loy Jimenez, who was traded from the Cubs Hit a pinch hit home run In his first at bat against the Cubs In spring training And said he was waiting for that moment to get revenge ever since the trade. Then in his first game at Wrigley, he hits the game-winning home run. It's just about the most exciting thing that can happen for a 72-win team. Star Prospect hits game-winning homer on the road in his first game against his former team,

the Crosstown rival. When he came up to bat late in the game, everyone was either anticipating or dreading smacking one out. He did it on a broken bat to Wes Kuhl in 2019, but whatever. And that's nice. That's the kind of story that you know about a team if you follow it every day

and you're a fan of it and you live in that city and you might not know as a national person when you certainly know about Eloy Jimenez, but you might not know about his vow to get vengeance against the Cubs. I don't know if you can get vengeance in a spring training game. I'm not sure you can get revenge for a trade. I'm not sure you can really make much of an impact at all in a spring training game,

but then he did it in his first game against them in the regular season. So yeah, that's a pretty cool crosstown story. Yeah, it was something that I just knew for a fact when I was a kid that players who got traded by a team were better against that team because they were so mad. It was just known. You knew that certainly. Yeah, sure sure i've never seen a study on it but i haven't either i i remember i my recollection is that kevin mitchell was the the prototype for this theory because he hit so well against the padres and maybe also the mets checking now let's see i mean the problem is that kevin mitchell played for so long after that and then had so many former teams that this is not going to be that revealing. But for what it's worth, against the Padres,

89 games, 1,001 OPS. Against the Mets, 70 games, 927 OPS. Again, I don't know. But he had a career OPS of 880, so he did much better against the Padres. It's a dumb tangent to have gone on. He was traded from the Cubs in the Jose Quintana trade. So that wasn't like a we don't believe in you.

It wasn't a challenge trade. It was like, hey, this is a great prospect, and we've got to give up a great prospect to get a really good pitcher because we need a really good pitcher. So if I were Jimenez, I don't think I would hold a grudge and say they didn't believe in me they just uh you know they they had to get this other guy which but i mean this is how players motivate themselves so it's fine yeah i i think it would be different if he had been in like say triple a at the time and he could have said well why go get a new pitcher when you could

call me up right now I can make the team better right now but he was in high A it was clearly just one of those trades and they had traded Claibor Torres and they like not that far before that and they were trading Dylan Cease in the very same trade and so this was a team that was trading all its top prospects by the way i wanted to say one last thing about arise i just forgot i wrote an article last offseason about the most impressive plate appearance of the 2018 season and it was when starlin castro fell behind o2 against josh hater and then homered on i think the 14th pitch of the at bat or something like that and starlin castro like is definitely not on the one hand

starling castro is definitely not the one player that you'd say has that skill set like he he is there's nothing notable about starling castro he's like an average hitter in every respect and so it was extremely special at bat and it didn't say anything particularly special about him on the other hand if uh luis arise came up and it was like his 20th game in the majors as a 22-year-old and you said this plate appearance shows that he's going to be as good as Starling Castro, I think everybody would go, awesome. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, I'm looking forward to Luis Jimenez's 2020 because he kind of turned it on as the season went on. I do these top 10 things. I go on the MLB network to do these top 10 positional rankings every offseason with Mike Petriello and Vince Gennaro. We're recording in just a few weeks, the 2020 ones. And I think both Mike and I had Eloy Jimenez and Vlad Guerrero

Jr. on top 10 lists heading into the 2019 season. I don't remember which positions they were eligible at, but we were so confident in them. And it's pretty rare to, before a player even makes his major league debut, to say, this is right now, this season, one of the 10 best players at that position. You have to have a lot of faith in a player to think that he will just walk into the big leagues and from day one one be one of the 10 best players at his position. And we both thought highly enough of Vlad and Eloy Jimenez to put them on our lists. And incorrectly, I guess, as it turned out, because they had some growing pains and they did not have great seasons. And Jimenez hurt himself, I think, also when he was really

heating up. But even so, he had a first half WRC plus of 105, second half of 128. And Vlad, of course, hit better as the season went on too. He got up to a 112 in the second half after a 97 in the first half. So looking forward to seeing full seasons of those guys. And maybe they will have the seasons in 2020 that we hoped and thought They would have in 2019 Alright and the last team Is the Yankees how could there be anything We didn't talk about with the Yankees this year We talked about them a ton there wasn't Much that people suggested but Gabe pointed out and I think

Maybe Martin did also that The Yankees lost each of their First three home series. And those series were against the Orioles, Tigers, and White Sox. And then they never lost another home series the rest of the season. I guess until their final playoff series, which they did lose. But still, it's pretty impressive, A, that they didn't lose one all season long after April, and that the three they did were all the first three and against three of the worst teams in the league, Orioles, Tigers, and White Sox. It's some start to the season.

Good one. to mention that on Star Wars Day, May 4th, someone else suggested that we link to C.C. Sabathia, who dressed up as Yoda, and it's he really went for it. He had the ears and the skin paint and the gloves with the three fingers and the Jedi robes

and it's like, before Baby Yoda, there was Sabathia Yoda, and it's like the opposite. It's like a 6'8 guy or whatever he is with a Yoda costume. It's endearing, I guess, but also sort of disturbing. But he was greeting people going into Yankee Stadium as Yoda and signing autographs and kissing babies or whatever. Really went for it. He got the whole mask, the bald head, the wrinkled green face paint.

It's quite a sight. So I'll link to that for people who missed it. That follows a – I guess maybe that establishes a tradition because 20 years ago, about 20 years ago, 20 years ago? Yeah, 20 years ago. I think it was 20 years ago. Hang on. I'm checking the date. years ago yeah 20 years ago i think it was 20 years ago hang on i'm checking the date 17 18 19 21 years ago pedro martinez wore a full yoda uh mask in the dugout of a red socks game

that's right okay for some reason i don't know why and it wasn't for may the fourth uh i guess i don't know why okay all right uh it was it was uh no i don't know why i don't know why i don't know why i don't know why he did it in fact i'm reading now we may never know why he did it okay i don't want to know yeah i'm happy not knowing all right so that is the end of this exercise it was fun i like doing these things thanks for all the suggestions of stories we should you know we should really do this mid-season yeah there's yeah's, yeah, probably. Like one in July, maybe one at the break. Yeah, good idea. All right. That will do it for today and for this week. Thanks for listening. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged

some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks jay jesse dubas matthew hansies luis torres and nate gilman 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 coming from me and meg and sam via email at podcastwithfangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. We hope you have a wonderful weekend, and all three of us will be back to talk to you early next week. Outro Music