Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 20: Elephant

Episode Date: August 14, 2012

Ben and Sam discuss the significance of a potential big-league promotion for Jurickson Profar and investigate the link between Johan Santana’s no-hitter and his subsequent struggles.

Good evening, good morning. It is episode 20 of Effectively Wild, a baseball prospectus daily podcast. I am Sam Miller. I have just watched every pitch of a Brad Penny outing in which the man who started the 2007 All-Star Game pitched two innings of relief and allowed six runs on nine base runners. So the mood of this day's podcast may be a bit foul. I am joined, as always, by Ben Lindberg, my boss. And in a general sense, I would just say a boss-ness human being. Ben, are you doing well? I am. I watched four innings of Derek Lowe, which went a lot better than the penny innings.

He struck out four guys, which is, I think, as many guys as he'd struck out all season before today. Career high. Yeah. Season high. Well, yeah, I know. I was just making a joke. I was trying to, also. You were making a joke by scaling back. All right. Ben, we're off to a great start as always. Do you have anything baseball related that you're informed enough about to talk about tonight? I have something baseball related I would like to talk about. I'm semi-informed about it.

I would like to talk about Jerickson Profar. Okay. I would like to talk about Johan Santana, the pitcher for the Mets. That's a good one. So let's start with you. Let's start with you. Okay. So this is sort of top prospect pennant race call-up season. And the next guy, it looks like, who might be coming up on the heels of Machado, is another top-rated shortstop, Jerickson Profar, who is a Rangers player in AA, and he was rated the best prospect in baseball by both Jason Parks and Kevin Goldstein at Baseball Prospectus recently. So that is news.

And it was reported by T.R. Sullivan, who is the MLB.com beat writer for the Rangers. And basically they're thinking of calling him up as soon as next Monday, possibly because they are currently carrying three bench players, which means that Michael Young is the backup middle infielder, which is not a situation that they would like to continue. Uh, and Mike Alt has been taking balls at shortstop, and it's just sort of a dangerous situation and a desperate situation. And so the Rangers are carrying an extra pitcher right now through the road trip that they're on.

But when they come home to face the Orioles on Monday, they're thinking of calling up Profar. So Profar is, I guess to compare him to Machado, whom we talked about recently, he's even younger, about seven months younger. He is playing in the Texas League, which is pretty close to the offensive environment of the Eastern League, as we just determined through extensive research. And his numbers are a bit better than Machado's, 825 OPS compared to 789 OPS.

And he is just, he's supposed to be a very polished, good all-around player. Not really the fielder that Elvis Andrus is, but he is expected to be able to stay at shortstop and be fine there and just sort of have a decent power and be able to hit for average and just kind of do everything well. So, uh, I am wondering what you think about a top prospect like Profar being called up in the Rangers situation, which is a bit different than the Orioles, in that the Orioles are kind of pulling out all the stops in a desperate attempt to make the playoffs despite not being a very good team,

whereas the Rangers have a pretty comfortable lead. They are six games up, I think, on the A's in the AL West. They have a 99.9% chance to make the playoffs and around 97% chance to win the division. So they don't seem to be in much jeopardy of missing the playoffs. And they are not going to just hand Profar a starting job like the Orioles did, going to just hand Profar a starting job like the Orioles did, which has so far worked out very well for them. So Profar, if he weren't called up, his team plays their last regular season game on September 3rd, so he would have a few more weeks of minor league action. They will not be a playoff team, so he might be a September expanded roster call-up anyway.

But I just wonder what you think about this decision, if the Rangers do decide to do it in their situation. Yeah, well, I want to pull back a little bit instead of just talking about the Rangers specifically, because I think that maybe to answer that, I want to, like I say, pull back a little bit. From 2000 until 2010, there were only three players, three players in their age 19 or younger season who played in the majors, both Uptins and Wilson Bedemete. who played in the majors, both Uptins and Wilson-Bettameat. And the Angels called up Trout in a similar situation last year, as we talked about. And, of course, Bryce Harper is a teenager this year, and Machado and Profar.

So we've already in two years produced more teenagers than the entire previous decade. uh produced more teenagers than the entire previous decade and i wonder whether this ties into the um sort of proliferation of extensions that players are signing younger and for longer where teams are no longer really as worried about burning um service time uh or anything along those issues because they know that they're likely going to be able to lock up the player at some point well into the future. And while bringing a player like Profar up probably costs them a few million dollars,

a few million dollars is not a significant situation or a significant issue as long as they're not burning years. And knowing that they're likely, probably, most of these guys now signed some extension during their pre-arb or arbitration years, knowing that they're going to keep them for a few years beyond free agency, they at least know that they're not costing themselves years of the play performance. Do you think that that is an issue at all? Yeah, I think it could be.

It seemed like the early extension idea was something that smart teams used to do or teams that the internet think is smart used to do. And every time it would happen, we would follow all over ourselves to praise them for doing that. And it does seem as if it's happening more and more often and that if you extrapolate out a few years, there will just be one free agent every offseason and it will be Jason Marquis and he'll make $30 million because he's the only free agent because every player is locked up to a long-term deal. That definitely does seem to be the way things are going.

I guess, I mean, the guys that you mention are not guys who are assigned to that sort of extension, at least yet. And Harper doesn't seem like a particularly good candidate to be one of those guys. like a particularly good candidate to be one of those guys. So in his case, I don't know, across the league as a whole, yeah, I could see that. As far as the Rangers specifically, I mean, I think that you summed it up pretty well. There's almost no chance that they're not going to, well, I guess there's some chance they're probably, you noted that they're 99% likely to make the playoffs, but if you just look at their division odds,

I think there's something like 92 or something like that. 97, so it's gone up in the last few days. So yeah, I mean, they're very unlikely to miss the playoffs. They're very unlikely to not win the division. They could pretty much do whatever they want for the last month and a half. So you wouldn't think that they would make this move unless they thought that it was a no-loss proposition. Yeah, it seems like if he is just going to be kind of the backup middle infielder, alternative to Michael Young,

I mean, usually that seems sort of like maybe it would be a September call-up more so than a middle of August call-up, in that he does still have a couple more weeks in which he could be presumably learning things and then come up in September after his minor league schedule is over and still get whatever boost you get from being introduced to the majors and seeing how players prepare and that sort of thing. Well, there's also the possibility that they are leaving open the possibility

that Mike McBeung is not a starter in the postseason and they want to get Profar up a little bit earlier so is not a starter in the postseason. And they want to get Profar up a little bit earlier so that he's eligible for the postseason, so that they have a better look at him to decide whether he's an upgrade. And perhaps they have a little bit more time to ease the transition, because Michael Young really has been wretched. And I don't think that they're probably likely to sit him on the bench in favor of a 19-year-old. But you can't really be worse than he is. The question is if they call up another 19-year-old shortstop to replace him, will he demand a trade again before September?

I could see that. And then get accolades for how well he handled not being traded. Yes. Team leader. That could definitely happen before the waiver deadline. Okay, so Johan Santana. Johan Santana pitched very poorly on Sunday. He recorded, I believe, four outs,

and he had the third worst game score of his career. And he's been, I'm going to say something that sounds like I'm implying cause and effect, but really it's just two facts, but since his no-hitter, he has been very poor. And what interests me a little bit about Johan Santana is just that it's this wonderful case of confirmation bias, I think, where after the no-hitter, after he threw 134 pitches, there was all sorts of discussion about whether 134 pitches is too many in this day and age and whether it would affect him and now that he has pitched very poorly since then um although really very poorly in the last four starts um but pretty poorly in the nine starts since then um it is uh coming up again where people are talking about whether that start was his doom he uh spent some time on the deal but with an ankle injury and um I don't know. I mean, I think that if Santana had started the season

with the nine-start stretch that he has had, people probably wouldn't have been all that surprised because Santana was such an unknown coming back after missing all of 2011 and at this age in his career and with this much lost velocity. And he pitched extremely well through the no-hitter. He had a 2.38 ERA. He had struck out a batter per inning. His peripherals were generally good enough to support something close to that ERA. But I don't know. I think that maybe lost in this no-hitter kerfuffle is the fact that Santana is merely a shell of the pitcher that he used to be.

He doesn't get the swinging strikes that he used to get. He is extremely reliant on one off-speed pitch, and it wouldn't surprise me, it wouldn't shock me to find out that he is merely in a steep decline. Yeah, I was all ready to write about this, I think, the start after his no-hitter. When he went five innings and he gave up six runs and four home runs, and I was going to write a little bit about whether his stuff was down at all or whether there was

any possibility of tying that out into the pitch count, which was a career high. And I didn't because Jeff Sullivan beat me to it, as he often does. And his conclusion was basically that we couldn't draw a conclusion either way. And in that start, he struck out five guys and walked one guy. The start after that, he went five and gave up four runs. So that wasn't good either. But then the three starts after that, he went six, gave up none, went six, gave up two, went eight, gave up none. So if he was in some way broken by that career high pitch count outing, it kind of had a delayed onset um which i don't know maybe maybe that could be a thing but it wasn't necessarily reflected right away uh and in that immediate start after that at least his stuff wasn't down i guess his control was off but he

wasn't throwing any less hard or anything like that. I don't know whether that has been the case. He's not now. Yeah, he's not now either. I mean, he's throwing a lot less hard than he used to, but his velocity has been steady this year up to and including his most recent outing. And I think Terry Collins' comments after that no-hitter maybe encouraged people to draw that cause-and-effect relationship. And maybe Terry Collins is just a very frank guy, given the Burdock comments that we discussed last week.

But I remember him saying something about how agonizing a decision it was to leave him in for that many pitches. And then he said something to the effect of, like, now we'll just wait and hope that he's okay you know just like let's let's hope i didn't make a mistake there um and so maybe that kind of leaves him open to that criticism uh so i don't know when you when you look at his stats since that start he he does have an 80 ERA or something in nine starts, and it looks very, very damning. But I think he's got like a 17 ERA in his last four, though, and that's where the damage is. Yeah, so when you drill down a little deeper, I think it's harder to draw that connection.

You know what his BABIP in the last four starts is 536. So that also might be a factor. But it might not be. He's given up six home runs in 14 innings. And, you know, I mean, there's all sorts of ways that pitchers can go bad. And I don't know that we need to narrow our view to the most high profile moment of his season to find ways for Johan Santana to be at risk. Like RJ pointed out, he might just be gassed. He didn't pitch at all last year. And he's kind of an older guy. So maybe he's just fatigued.

While I was looking at Johan Santana, I happened to come across a totally unrelated point that I want to bring up, which is that Denny McClain, who is a pitcher, a baseball player from the 60s. You know Denny McClain. He won 114 games through his age 25 season, which is incredible. That's really something, 114 wins through age 25 how old was he when he came up uh he made his debut at 19 he had his basically his first full year at 21 and he went 16 20 17 31 24 and then uh he won 17 more games the rest of his life so he probably had a high pitch count in one of those games and that was that was it for him and then he won 17 more games the rest of his life. So he probably had a high pitch count in one of those games,

and that was it for him. Exactly. It was probably the pursuit of 30 wins that did it. So anyway, baseball players are screwy, and Johan Santana is a baseball player. So now that we have concluded Johan Santana's status as a baseball player, let's wrap it up. We'll be back with episode 21 tomorrow, and we thank you all for listening.