Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 18: Popcorn Popping

Episode Date: August 10, 2012

Ben and Sam discuss two players exceeding all expectations in 2012: R.A. Dickey and Eric Chavez.

Good evening and good morning to our friends and first-time listeners. This is Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives for Friday, August 6th. That's the wrong date. August, I don't know, 10th probably. This is our 18th episode, which means we have now matched the entire series run of the television show Freaks and Geeks. I don't think it is inaccurate to draw some conclusions about our show's cultural importance from that factoid. I'm joined today by Ben Lindberg. Ben, how are you? I'm good.

Now I'm going to be thinking about Freaks and Geeks for the rest of this episode. Should we spend the rest of this episode talking about Freaks and Geeks? I think we should. I just completed my, I think, fourth watching of Freaks and Geeks, so I could talk about that. I unfortunately lent my DVD set out when I was raving about it to a friend, and it's seven years later and he has not returned it. Anyway, what are we talking about for real? I figured we should probably do an R.A. Dickey show.

Oh, okay. And I would like to talk about Eric Chavez. Okay. Go for it. All right. So Ari Dickey pitched tonight or last night, if you're listening in the morning, and he pitched very well. He threw a complete game shutout against the Marlins. He had been a little less effective lately, or he had a couple starts where he looked less like 2012 Ari Dickey. And so now he is perhaps back on track.

And he looks like he maybe is the favorite for the NL Cy Young Award winner at this point, or assuming Strasburg does get shut down at some point. Um, and, and Terry Collins now is talking about pitching him on short rest in order to get him more wins, uh, which seems like a kind of a strange reason to do that. Um, if he can do that, you'd think that just the fact that he can do that would be a good enough reason to have him do that. But I just want to kind of gauge your confidence in future R.A. Dickey and sort of play something akin to the playoff starter game that we played last week and just ask you, would you rather this starting pitcher or Ari Dickey for 2013? I love this game. Yeah.

So because Ari Dickey is old, and so that's a reason why you wouldn't want him, but he's a knuckleballer, so in that sense he's not really old, and he's really good, but he hasn't really been this good before, so it's kind of an interesting game to play. So I thought we could just... Ari Dickey right now is... Let's see, he's seventh on the FIP leaderboard, Fielding Independent Pitching,

among pitchers who've thrown 100 innings this season. So I thought we could go through the top 20 and see how many of those guys you would prefer to Ari Dickey for next season alone. Okay. Not counting contract concerns or anything like that. Sure. Okay. So just to sort of establish a baseline, like when you take a lie detector test and the person asks you your name. Steven Strasberg.

I would rather have Steven Strasberg. Okay. And Wade Miley. I would rather have Ari Dickey. All right. So we're one and one now. Okay. Gio Gonzalez.

Oh, I would rather have Gio Gonzalez. All right. Zach Granke. Oh, I would rather have Gio Gonzalez. All right. Zach Granke. I would rather have Zach Granke. All right. Felix. Felix.

Okay. Chris Sale. Sale. All right. Verlander. Verlander. Kershaw. Kershaw.

Josh Johnson. Dickey. Verlander. Kershaw. Kershaw. Josh Johnson. Dickey. Johnny Cueto. Cueto. All right. Wainwright. Dickey. David Price.

Price. Okay. Jason Hamill. Dickey. All right. Good to think about that one. No, I didn't. I had to remember who Jason Hamill was.

Jared Weaver. Weaver. CeCe Sabathia. Sabathia. Jake Peavy. Dickey. Chad Billingsley. Dickeyie Jared Parker Dickie

Jordan Zimmerman Zimmerman Okay So the results I have lost track of the results Hopefully somebody will You picked Dickie over Wade Miley and Adam Wainwright and Jason Hamill and Jake Peavy and Chad Billingsley and Jared Parker. And Josh Johnson.

Josh Johnson. What did I write about Wainwright? You picked Dickie over Wainwright? That's right. So that's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. That's right. guys over him for next season. And I would agree. I think if anything, I would probably take more of them. There's just something about Dickey where he, when he makes one start where he doesn't look like incredible RA Dickey, I sort of think, well, that was fun. And that's, it's just not going to continue. Yeah.

continue. Yeah. Yeah. Somebody asked me in a chat around late May, whether I was a believer in his breakout yet. And at the time his breakout was basically like five starts that had been really amazing. And I wasn't ready to try any conclusions. And a full year is obviously a lot more than that. Um, and a full year is obviously a lot more than that. Um, I, I don't know. It's, it's hard to, I mean, it's really hard to say because, um, I mean, not just because he's a breakout guy and it's always hard to know what to do with breakout guys, but because it's, it's really hard to know how batters are going to react to this pitch, um, into the future. I mean, it's such a, it seems like it's such a disorienting pitch, and it makes his other pitch, his fastball, also so disorienting. And I don't know, you just wonder whether it's the sort of thing

where these guys haven't faced a pitch like this coming up through 25 years of baseball experience, and that's why they're at a disadvantage right now and whether it's you know just a sort of an adjustment thing just like a tricky delivery that's I guess the the argument for not really believing in him even though he's having this great year yeah I guess I'm almost just as worried that he will suddenly stop throwing that pitch as I am that batters will adjust to it. It just seems, I don't know, I just get kind of an ephemeral feeling for it, like he could suddenly lose his feel for it and it will just be gone forever. And all we have

are the highlights from 2012. Yeah, it's true. That's also a thing. I don't know. I mean, so you're saying not that he's going to stop throwing it by choice, but that he'll lose the field. Yeah, and I don't think it's purely like he's getting by on deception, or it's just a thing where if he kept doing the things that he's doing, he wouldn't be as effective. I think it's real, and he would, but I guess I'm more worried that he won't keep doing those things. Yeah. It's awfully hard to predict even the most predictable pitchers. And so when we start predicting the unpredictable guys, we're just having fun.

Right. All right. On to your topic. Eric Chavez. Chavez. Eric Chavez. Eric Chavez. Eric Chavez never really did quite get that down. He's having a good year. He homered today. And I was just thinking that when he homered today, I thought a couple of months ago, an Eric Chavez homer would have been the sort of thing that you

would have tweeted and made fun of on the internet. You would have mocked on the internet. And now he's having a very good year. He is having almost an identical year, I mean, with obviously a ton of caveats, but he's having essentially the same offensive year that he had from 2002 to 2005, which are the four years that he got MVP votes. Those four years, he had a 354 on base percentage, a 498 slugging percentage, and a 123 OPS plus. This year, it's 344, 511, and a 124 OPS plus. That's before the home run today. And so there are two things that I find interesting about this. One is that he has managed to face almost no left-handed batters this year. And,

you know, that's obviously platoons have a long history in baseball. But even if you are a pure platoon player, it is still hard to actually protect you entirely from the same side. And the Yankees have done a really good job with him and also with Abanez. Chavez has faced 212 pitchers this year, and only 22 of them have been lefties wow he has the third highest percentage in baseball um behind niger morgan and roger bernadina and abania is his seventh and i just think that um the the platoon is a strategy i like but it's also a strategy that uh requires diligence and good management. And I think the Yankees have done a great job with those two guys, getting good performances out of guys that I don't think really anybody had expectations for.

I mean, Chavez especially was, I think, probably two or three years ago, you could have made the point the case was the worst player on a big league roster. He basically did nothing uh well and he couldn't stay healthy and um he didn't you know at that point well yeah there was nothing he contributed nothing and here he is uh hitting like vintage eric chavez for a team that has found it quite useful um the other thing that's i I think, interesting about this is that, I think, remind me, Pakoda goes back five years? Yeah. And I always wonder whether that's enough because, I mean, I assume it is.

I assume it's enough in the sense that for most players, for almost all players, it's enough. And there are always going to be variables that Pocota can't include because if you include every variable, then the ones that are really stronger get diluted a bit. But I thought about this with Mathis earlier this year too. He's hitting a bit better. He's not hitting great, but he's hitting a bit better. And he, of course, was a very good hitter when he was 20 and 21,

and he was in the California League. And I always did wonder. I mean, the Angels, the weird thing about the Angels was not just that they believed that Mathis was the greatest defensive catcher who had ever been born, but they always actually seemed to really believe that he was going to be better as a hitter. They always thought he was on the brink of breaking out, that he had a good spring training, he was going to have a good year, or he was hot for two weeks, he was going to have a hitter. They always thought he was on the brink of breaking out. He had a good spring training. He was going to have a good year. Or he was hot for two weeks. He was going to have a good year. And I always wondered whether that talent that he had showed as a 20-year-old really was

in there and could someday come out. So when a guy like him or Chavez kind of flashes that talent again, I don't know. I wonder whether that level of play was always in him and it was just lying dormant and there were all these things suppressing it. Or whether it's just one of those fluke things where bad hitter has a good appearances in it and it doesn't mean a doggone thing. Yeah. I think there's one projection system that's, uh, that's always in, in Tom Tango's forecasters challenge. I think it's just a guy named John Eric Hansen who runs it. Um, and it's based on the idea of demonstrated skills. Like once you've demonstrated that you can do something, he kind of gives you credit for being able to do that thing. So that even if you have a bad year or two, it sort of, it believes that you can do that thing again, more so than another projection

system would. I don't know that it really makes the system more accurate on the whole than the others, but it does catch some guys like that who have been good before, haven't been good lately. And so the other projection systems forget about the good guy while that one doesn't so much. But, yeah, I was very wrong about Chavez. so much. But yeah, I was very wrong about Chavez. Whatever I wrote in transaction analysis when the Yankees signed him for this latest time, I just sort of, you know, it wasn't a big financial commitment or anything. But it just seemed like a questionable choice for a backup in that A-Rod has been much less durable in the last few years.

And so it seemed like they would actually need someone whom they could count on to be available. And Chavez has not ever been that guy for the last several years. It just seemed like sort of a strange choice to make a backup, a guy who almost always needs a backup himself. And on top of that, even when he's been healthy for the last few years, he really hasn't shown anything like the Eric Chavez he used to be. So it seemed as if the injuries had kind of sapped him of those skills

as well as his ability to stay on the field. So I didn't see this coming at all. And back injuries are scary. I was actually going to, I was considering a topic the other day where I would just ask you what the injury that you least like to hear a player has is other than like amputation or something, something that actually afflicts baseball players regularly. And I think up there with like elbow soreness is stiff back.

I never want to hear stiff back. Like in the last few days, Travis Hafner has had his usual stiff back and Furcal has had his usual stiff back. It just seems to be – or Russell Martin. It's just kind of a thing that comes back over and over and over again. And yeah, I really didn't see it coming, and it's sort of nice to see. Well, speaking of things that just come back over and over again, we will be back. You like that?

On Monday, we will be back on Monday with episode 19 of Effectively Wild. And we hope that you have a great weekend.