Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 157: SABR Analytics Conference Recap

Episode Date: March 12, 2013

Ben and Sam discuss Ben’s trip to Phoenix for the SABR Analytics Conference, covering the sabermetrics of marketing, clubhouse chemistry, knuckleballers, bullpen usage, the WBC, Kyle Lohse, and other topics along the way.

You know, they say Mickey Mantle threw an incredible knuckleball, right? Nobody would even play catch with him on the sideline, on the side. Wade Boggs, too, right? Why didn't they do that? Mickey Mantle, I mean, I'm retiring, but now I'm a knuckleball pitcher. How awesome would that be? Extremely awesome is the answer, yes. Good morning, and welcome to episode 157 of Effectively Wild, the BP Daily Podcast.

In New York, New York, I am Ben Lindberg in Long Beach. Joining me as always, Sam Miller. Hello, Sam. Hi. How are you? I'm okay. I think that's the first time in the show's history that you've referred to it as the BP Daily Podcast. Yeah, I guess so.

Well, we've been off for a while and I've rethought things. So we've come back with a new format where I say – Time to bring some abbreviations into this thing. So for the first time since January, we do not have a team to preview. And we do not have a guest to preview, and we do not have a guest to talk to, and I barely remember what to do now. Yeah, and yet Kyle Loesch is still on site. Seriously, I don't have anything to say about the Kyle Loesch thing. Maybe I will if we decide to talk about it later this week, but what in the world? This season starts in 19 days from when you're listening to this,

and he's not signed. It's crazy. This is insane that he finished seventh in Cy Young voting last year. Matt Cain finished sixth, and he finished seventh. And 19 days, Ben. I'd love to know what his demands have fallen to now. I would too. Yeah.

I would too. This is going to – ultimately this is going to make for probably an interesting story. Do you think that he will just wait until after the draft now? No. All right. Well, I hope he is working out somewhere or throwing off a mound or something. I'm sure he is. It'd be interesting to know how much it meant. I mean, if he signed tomorrow, would he be ready for, I mean, is there any chance that he'd be ready? I'm sure Scott Boris has a full spring training facility for his clients.

He does, but you know, they always say that it doesn't, you know, it's not not the same and why isn't he in the wbc it seems like if anybody's yeah that's a good for free maybe maybe they didn't want him either yeah they don't like that fit yeah you need a he costs a draft pick if he plays for the team uh so can we just preview some other team? Like, like, I don't know, the Lansing Lugnuts. Are they looking for this year? Start over on the Yankees. Just keep doing this. Uh, okay. I guess we'll, we'll talk about something else.

Uh, we are going to revive the listener email shows. Some of you have, there have been some emails trickling in even though we weren't answering them, but we will revive them and I guess we will do one Wednesday and probably we will just keep doing them indefinitely. Maybe probably after the season starts also because we like them and you seem to like them.

So send us emails at that address that we have for emails which was podcast at baseball prospectus.com yep please yes so should i just start talking now so you uh so you went to the saber convention this weekend yeah yes. And you had previously went, you previously had gone to the winter meetings this winter, and we talked on the show about how it was maybe, I don't know, a little awkward or something, because there wasn't really a whole lot of reason, it turns out, for you to be there, that all the action takes place in hotel rooms. Sabre is totally different, because all the action takes place on stages yes uh in front of you and you're

invited to to watch so what did you what did you think what did you learn uh well i i did sort of enjoy the experience more uh than i did the winter meetings the weather was nicer and the area was nicer and the format was nicer and it it wasn't uh at dawn dawn till dusk sitting in a big media room with hundreds of other people waiting for something to happen. It was listening to interesting people talk all day and then going to a baseball game or going out to dinner or something. Things that were not really possible at Nashville. So it was good, I think. So it was good, I think. I mean, I went there kind of hoping to learn things and be exposed to new research and techniques and things. And I guess, I don't know, there wasn't a ton of new revelations. Um, a lot of the, the panels were just kind of, um, I mean, do you feel that you ever learn anything when you listen to a general manager talk now? Uh, there's usually, you know, I think that there's, um, uh, there's a sort of, uh, there's

information in the particular way and tone that they obfuscate. I don't think that it's, I don't think it's ever totally worthless, to be honest. I think that there's always, there's always information. Sometimes it's sort of in the Kremlinological sense that you're kind of maybe really having to squeeze hard to get the information. But I don't find it useless. I also don't find it particularly useful, though. And I think a lot of times the more information you think you're getting, the less you actually are.

And so it can be a bit numbing and dulling. Mm hmm. Yeah. So there was there was a GM panel and Rick Hahn was there and John Daniels and Jed Hoyer and Jerry DiPoto at a separate event. So they spoke and

it was interesting and they didn't give anything away as you wouldn't expect them to. There was a player development panel with people from the Pirates and the Indians and the Giants and they mostly didn't give anything away and you wouldn't expect them to. There was a player panel which turned out to be just Brandon McCarthy and Javier Lopez, which was interesting, but... The Giants, Javier Lopez? giants the giants javier lopez yes um and i don't know i mean they didn't say a whole lot that you

probably haven't heard brandon mccarthy say and in other interviews or on twitter or something um so it was just kind of a lot of listening to interesting people talk uh but i guess the research and the new ideas were kind of concentrated uh in a really i guess a few um presentations and and bill james uh was like and and brian kenney were like the workhorses of this thing they were on three different panels or gave keynote addresses. And Joe Posnanski did double duty also. And those are all very interesting, personable people. And that was wonderful. And there were lots of writers and team employees around who were great to talk to. The most memorable thing that I wrote about for BP today,

that I wrote about for BP Today, so you can go read it at length, was actually a business of baseball presentation, which was not something that I had really been anticipating and was not something I would have expected to come away from the conference finding particularly memorable, but it was. It was really, really interesting. And it was about the, the Indians marketing department, which is sort of applying sabermetric principles to marketing. And there was a lot of guesswork with marketing as far as, uh, how to advertise, how, you know, what media to use to advertise and how far in advance of series to advertise and how to decide which promotions to use and which ones worked best. And there was really no way to tell. And it was a lot of sort of tradition and kind of the way that player

evaluation worked maybe a decade ago or more. And with the help of this consulting company called ThinkBine, the Indians basically put all of their data from five seasons into a fancy model. And it now spits out forecasts that tells them exactly how many fans they project to draw to each game and kind of isolates all the different factors that could affect attendance and allows them to see how effective everything is. And they are projecting that that will really affect their bottom line quite a bit. They were barely breaking even, it seemed before. For every dollar they spent on media, they were getting a dollar back. Or for every dollar they spent on promotions, they were getting a dollar five back. Now it's like a 75% booster or more.

And it was interesting because, you know, there were so many team stat guys just in the audience and team employees giving talks. But they weren't giving anything away. And no one really expected them to give anything away. And you never weren't giving anything away. And no one really expected them to give anything away. And you never hear them give anything away. But this was a team employee from the Indians just talking very openly about the innovative things that his department was doing. And it was surprising and refreshing. And I enjoyed that quite a bit. Yeah, I read that piece before we recorded um and there were a bunch of interesting things in it i think one of the interesting things about it to me was

when you talked about why he was willing to say all this in public when baseball ops will never give away uh anything and you you sort of noted that their competition is not with uh from the business side their competition is not with the white socks business side, their competition is not with the White Sox or the Royals. It's with a Cleveland multiplex or whatever entertainment options there are in Cleveland. And that was interesting and is that you sort of talk about how there's a real kind of wall between business and baseball ops. They're really almost two separate companies in a way with different priorities and different incentives.

And when we think about where baseball ops was 15 years ago and we sort of mock how archaic and group-thinky and unadvanced it was, I think that in a lot of ways that was presented as a character flaw of the traditional baseball man, that it was really specific to the idea of these kind of like old school baseball type, man's man looking at the good face and all that, as though that were the root of the problem. But business, the business side is, these are businessmen. They don't have, I mean, they're a completely different type of personality, right? I mean, they are, business has been numbers driven or attempted to be numbers driven for the, you know, for as long as business has been around. And yet they had, it seems to me that they have some of these same blind spots. And so it just, it seems as though what was maybe attributed to the baseball man is actually not really a baseball man problem, never was. It's really just more the fact that organizations in general, especially once they've been around for a long time, can get into some bad habits and that it's always a bit hard to push yourself in a more modern direction when you have an established organization. It takes work. It takes initiative. It takes somebody willing to kind of push a little

bit. And so it surprised me that the business sides weren't already doing all this. But now that I think about it, it doesn't surprise me. Yeah. I mean, when I interned for the Yankees at the new stadium, baseball ops and everything else are completely separate, different offices, different entrances and exits, different key cards that you need to use to get in. I mean, there's just almost no, I mean, there are certain places where employees mingle, but you could go for a week without seeing an employee of the Yankees in another organization. That wasn't really the case at the old stadium and isn't really the case in every organization. But there is certainly a divide. And Bill James mentioned in his address that he doesn't

really even know what those people do. And it seems like there are opportunities to, I don't know, to use a business speak term to kind of come up with some synergy between those two. And it seems like this decision that the Indians made was kind of driven by Mark Shapiro, who used to be the Indians GM and is now their president. And I've always wondered when a GM gets promoted, what that means exactly. I think we talked about it with Rick Hahn and Kenny Williams a little bit. Is it just sort of, I don't know, are they tired of having him run the baseball side? Because it seems like there's almost no way you could make a bigger impact on the team

than just being the general manager but if this is kind of the template and that promoting Mark Shapiro allowed him to kind of dabble on both sides the baseball side and the business side and apply techniques from one to the other and and have a bigger impact on the organization as a whole then I can see how that would make sense. Would you say that you knew a week ago that his last name was pronounced Shapiro and not Shapiro? Yes. I don't know why, but I did. The other thing was I went to a WBC game.

And that was the first time I had done that. And that was the first time I had done that. I went Friday night to the USA versus Mexico game that Mexico won. And I enjoyed it. It was last week at BP, I reran an old Joe Sheehan article from 2006. and Joe had been very critical of the WBC when it was first proposed or when it was first starting. I think before the first game he had written kind of this long article about why it didn't make sense and he didn't like it or he didn't care about it or both and he used all the usual arguments that people use for that and then he went to a game a couple weeks after that and then he wrote this column about how suddenly he cared about the WBC and he really enjoyed it and thought it was a good thing. So I re-ran that column last Friday and then sort of had the same experience myself on Friday night.

I'm in favor of the WBC just because I think it's probably good for the game. And clearly there's a lot of international interest and people want to watch it and I'm happy that they want to watch it. I didn't so much want to watch it myself though and to be honest I still don't but I think in person it was kind of a cool experience and there was definitely a lot more enthusiasm in the stands and and kind of in an infectious way that you don't get at at your typical baseball game so i enjoyed that quite a bit and uh who were you rooting for uh i went in not really i mean i don't know i I guess I have a little bit of patriotism, but I don't care so much about the baseball manifestation of that. So I went in not particularly caring about the outcome, and I was kind of won over by the Mexican fans.

They wanted it more, to use a cliche. They had all kinds of interesting things in the stadium that i don't know how they got into the stadium there were these big spinning metal things with flashing electric lights all over them that they would spin after every remotely positive thing happened for the mexican team and giant drums and giant guitars and sombreros and face paint. Uh, and it was, it was kind of exciting. And I got to see Kareem Garcia up close. Uh, he is not in the best shape of his life. Uh, uh, wow. Wasn't expecting to talk about Kareem Garcia. Did not do, sorry, did not do any research on Kareem Garcia before the show.

So I do not have any. I don't even have a one-liner ready to go. I'm sorry. Can I just real quick ask something about one of the panels? I'm not that interested in what their answers would have been, but I am curious to know what Brandon McCarthy and Javier Lopez were asked. I'm curious what stat heads want to ask a player when they're near one. Do you remember what the sort of interest was there? The panel was moderated by Steve Berthiaume. And so he did a lot of the questioning, although I guess there was some Q&A at the end. It was mostly, you know, how have analytics affected you or improved you as a player?

And it wasn't really clear that they had in Javier Lopez's case. So, I mean, he was a good speaker, but he didn't seem to have a whole lot of familiarity with it. He mentioned that when he was with the Red Sox, they kind of introduced him to it without pushing it on him. But, I mean, a lot of the stuff that they talked about was just sort of the fact that they can be easily overwhelmed by stats and that even if they appreciate the value of stats, they don't necessarily want to know them because it could just kind of screw them up. They don't want to be thinking about their stats, which I imagine if I had any athletic talent and were a professional

baseball player and also had the interest that I have, that would be probably crippling. I would think that would be a crippling weakness. If I were a pitcher or something, I would be just constantly calculating my stats and it would be really distracting and I'd be terrible. But I don't know. People ask them kind of their opinion of pitcher wins and saves and RBI and the sort of typical malign statistics. Brandon McCarthy was very adamant about pitcher wins being useless, and he preferred that they would be gone. setup guy um he kind of emphasized that it didn't really make any any impact on his his earnings so he he couldn't get too worked up about it uh but it was it was you know kind of your typical questions about how analytics have helped you and what is it like talking to teammates about them

and is there any interest in that and what stats do you look at and and not look at the the most interesting i guess quote from the panel was something i tweeted where brandon mccarthy said that uh someone asked him about clubhouse chemistry um that without john Gomes and Brandon Inge, the 2012 A's may have been a 70-win team. Yeah. And it's strange because I feel like the fact that clubhouse chemistry causes this big rift between baseball men and stat heads is just kind of because each side exaggerates a little too much, I think. Yeah, that seems accurate. That seems like a very good way

of stating it. I mean, yeah, I think saying it's meaningless is probably ridiculous, and saying that it's a 24-win swing based on one and a half players, since what Inge was added midseason, right, is also probably ridiculous. Although, I mean, you know, well, you know, whatever. I mean, the issue is just that we don't really know. And so anytime you say anything, you're speaking from position without any evidence. And that tends to get people angry.

Right. Yeah. I mean, I feel like if we both kind of said it probably matters to some degree, but it probably doesn't make or break most seasons. And yet it's also not meaningless. And I feel like we could all probably agree on that. and yet it's also not seamless. And I feel like we could all probably agree on that, but it seems that we kind of tend to dig in and say that it's either nothing or everything.

Yeah, I think I've mentioned before that I think the great value in defensive metrics is not necessarily that they tell you whether one player is two runs better than another player, but that they tell you that one player is you know two runs better than another player but that they tell you that basically the boundaries between the the value of good defense versus bad defense we now know pretty well that a good defender you know is worth i don't know that the best defender is worth maybe 30 more runs at his position than the worst and that's valuable and so then you just have to figure out however you want to whether it's good good or bad. And so like in this case, McCarthy is able to tell me whether their clubhouse chemistry is good or bad.

He knows better than I do. I trust him. What we don't know is how much good chemistry can possibly matter. And I would say that 24 wins is probably a bit higher than I would ever imagine. The most divisive, I think, were knuckleballs and reliever. Kenny brought up both of those in his inaugural address that kind of got things started, and then it seemed like every subsequent speaker had some take on it or someone would ask about it at the end of every session. some take on it or someone would ask about it at the end of every session. And Kenny's position was that he thinks knuckleballs are just so effective that he doesn't understand why

you cultivate knuckleball pitchers more. He thinks that it's possible that at some point in the future knuckleballs will be outlawed because some team will start some sort of knuckleball academy and just churn out knuckleballers. And it'll be a bunch of 40-year-olds who are unhittable and eventually outlawed. And then Bill James responded to that point. And he brought up an interesting thing, I thought, was that there are a lot of institutional obstacles between a knuckleballer making it to the majors and not, which was not something I had really thought of before. I always think of the knuckleball being rare just because it's a difficult pitch to throw, which is probably true. There's probably some truth to that. probably true. There's probably some truth to that. But he mentioned the fact that if you're a minor league knuckleballer, no one can catch you and no one knows how to coach you. And so that really makes it a lot harder for you to make it to the major leagues because teams are just

less willing to put you on their roster. And if you are on their roster, it's really hard to just kind of go through the basic, I mean, enjoy the basic advantages that any player enjoys, like personalized coaching from someone who knows what he's talking about or a catcher who can catch your pitches. So presumably that's something that a knuckleball academy would solve if someone were to do that. would solve if someone were to do that uh the other thing brian kenney he told this story uh about a boxing match i think it was oscar de la jolla and bernard hopkins maybe i don't know anything about boxing uh and he was watching this kellerman and one of the guys uh punched the other guy in the liver by accident, I guess, and the other guy was down for the count. And his daughter was in the room watching, and she said,

what happened? And they explained it was a liver shot. And she said, why don't every boxer just aim for the liver? And Max just kind of hemmed and hawed and and said oh well you don't do that and and eventually came to realize that there's no real reason that that people don't just do that that maybe they should just do that so he was saying that bullpen usage could be that kind of liver shot in baseball that he doesn't understand why we still use starting pitchers at all, that he thinks that the first team that just kind of goes all in on relievers and starts with relievers and relieves with relievers and closes with relievers will have a huge

advantage and will win. And then it will be adopted by everyone. Whereas Bill James, in his talk, said that he thinks the typical bullpen usage now is counterproductive, that it doesn't make sense for teams to go matchups, to play matchups and make 200 pitching changes a year to get a lefty on lefty matchup. He thinks that's worth five runs a year. He said not more than five runs a year although he said it could be something like eight he didn't want to be tied to to that particular number but he thinks that uh it's counterproductive and that it is a much bigger advantage to have a better

bench uh able to replace players defensively and pitch it for them and and do other things uh and that he hasn't really proved it and he's open to being disproved but he believes it i could have had this show over 13 minutes ago if i hadn't asked that question yeah you shouldn't have asked me that that way i just i thought these other things and started talking. Yeah, not even really answering the question now that I think about it. Sorry. It's okay. It was interesting stuff. Those were great anecdotes.

Those are great stories, Ben. Good stuff there. All right. Okay, so we're done. We will be back tomorrow. Send us emails at podcast at baseballperspectives.com, and perhaps we will answer them.