Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 21: Typewriter

Episode Date: August 15, 2012

Ben and Sam reach a milestone (the 20-minute mark) as they tackle the topics of clubhouse chemistry and whether there’s more to Jeff Mathis than meets the eye.

Good morning, and welcome to Effectively Wild, the daily baseball prospectus podcast. The date is Wednesday, August 15th. The show is episode number 21. In New York, as usual, I am Ben Lindberg. In Long Beach, as always, he has literally never left Long Beach, California. It is my co-host, Sam Miller. Sam, I occasionally listen to other podcasts, and I've noted that other podcast hosts, almost without fail, tell their listeners how great the show is going to be. Interesting. We never proclaim our greatness at the beginning of the show.

I think we should start saying that we're going to be great. I don't think that we could pull it off without – You don't think we could sound convincing? No. I mean I think if you want to ironically proclaim greatness it might work but i mean you and i are two of the most door uh unself assured people i've ever met well maybe we'll try to work it into an intro one of these days uh yeah i did uh well at one and i think in our second i think in our second episode I made a comment about how we had quickly become the number one sports podcast on iTunes.

And I did get an email from a relative of mine congratulating me and sincerely congratulating me. Yes, my girlfriend fell for that as well. And she was very disappointed to find out that she was not dating the co-host of the number one sports podcast. Well, just imagine how disappointed she'll be if we proclaim that this is going to be a great show and it turns out to not be a great show. Okay, so it's going to be a show. It will probably be a lot like our previous shows, and if you think those were great, then this will also be great. I like them in retrospect yeah for the most part i mean as long as we're being honest here and uh self-evaluating i i think i do like the show i've enjoyed the shows i listen to them i'm a regular listener

um i just never think that the next one's going to be worth anything and i don't feel like making false promises. Have you rated and reviewed us? I have not. I have not officially reviewed you or myself. I have not officially registered my opinions on the internet. Well, we do encourage our listeners to do that if they have nice things to say. I do believe that's actually a real thing, right?

I mean that benefits us somehow? Yes. Like having lots of reviews will help us make the money or something? Yeah, that's what they tell me. Okay. All right. So what's your topic today? Jeff Mathis. Okay. And my topic is something Rani wrote on the Royals and team chemistry. Oh, okay. Great. So you must have a lot to say about Jeff Mathis. Well, I'm writing about it, and I don't want to give away everything in my entirely unpredictable transaction analysis of this move. But yeah, as probably most people have heard uh if they have access to punch lines uh jeff mathis was signed to an extension today by the blue jays who have

committed to him as a catcher on their roster for two more years and um i think that the most interesting part of this for me from a kind of bigger picture thing is whether you believe or whether you're comfortable admitting or whether it is true that a general manager's decision to sign or extend a player is a data point in itself about the player's abilities. Jeff Mathis obviously had a powerful patron in Anaheim for all those years, but he was still fairly comfortable mocking him and his playing time, even while Mike Socha continually stood behind him and exhibited a great deal of confidence in him. And I think that maybe some of that softened a little bit, at least from my perspective. Over the years, I became a little bit more willing to allow for the possibility that Jeff Mathis might have skills that I wasn't seeing. And I would say that that is because Mike Socha continued to show confidence in him.

But I was still skeptical and didn't really believe it. But the Blue Jays are a different team with a completely different, it seems to me, philosophy that, as far as we can judge them from the outside, seem to be a smart team and have similarly voiced confidence in Jeff Mathis. So do you consider that a data point? I do, yeah. I think I've come to value that much more highly in In the last year or two, one of our former authors, Matt Swartz, wrote, he did some really good research about what happens when a team brings back its own player as opposed to letting that player go to another team. And he found that the players that go to other teams that for whatever reason their old teams don't

resign don't offer nearly as much value over the course of the contract as the guys who do stay in one place, which suggests that teams know their players better than other teams do, which makes sense, and that they can make a better judgment about how those players will play in the future based on that knowledge. I think he found that the effect was strongest for pitchers, which probably makes sense, and not quite as strong for hitters. But I do. is strong for hitters, but I do.

I definitely value the knowledge that a team re-signed a player or extended a player because I do think that they probably know that player better than the market as a whole does. Obviously, there are exceptions. And I wrote a couple weeks ago about Mathis and about the fact that over the winter, Greg Zahn had sort of foretold a future for Mathis in which he would hit for the first time ever.

Now that he is separated from Mike Socha, who, in Zahn's theory, emphasizes defense kind of to the detriment of offense. And that possibly now that Mathis was free of that sort of single-minded focus, he would be able to kind of concentrate more on his bat and that he had some hidden power that hadn't really shown up in games or or that he hadn't really cultivated as well as he could and at the time i wrote that uh mathis was having his best offensive season and i guess he still is but just glancing at his player

card it appears that he has gone oh for however many plate appearances he has had since I wrote that, more or less. Yeah, at the time you wrote that, he had a 286 on base percentage, and it's now down to 252. He had a 460-something slugging percentage or something along those lines, and it's now down to 415. He still has an extremely uncharacteristically high isolated power, but his numbers overall are virtually the same other than a few extra base hits are basically the same as they were with the Angels. Angels. And yes, and in particular, he has hit most of his extra base hits at home, which,

if I'm not mistaken, is a has been a very cozy place for right handed pole hitters over the last few years, especially compared to where he used to play. Yes, especially that. But, yeah, I mean, Mathis is... Is he known as a clubhouse guy, or is it just sort of his defensive value that teams like? Is he known as a leader type? Yeah, so far as I can tell, no. I mean, I don't want to give the implication that I'm Mr. Beat Reporter over here, but I did stand awkwardly at one end of a clubhouse many nights when Mathis was there. Talking to pitchers on their game days.

I, uh, Ben is, uh, cruelly bringing up my unfortunate decision to try to interview CJ Wilson a couple of weeks ago, um, without realizing that it was his day to pitch. And, uh, now we're reliving that. So thanks. Uh, but no, uh, Mathis was quiet. I never got the sense that he was a leader in the clubhouse, really a leader of a pitching staff. The pitchers all really liked him. I don't think that the position players in general

had quite the same esteem for him, and I do know that there was, and I've heard directly from some players, and I've also heard from other writers who've heard from players, that they wondered why Mathis played over some of the alternatives that they had. So I don't think that he's a... he's very quiet. He's not a loud guy, not a lot of bombast, but pitchers loved him. Because that is typically a reason why a guy who looks to the typical stat guy,

like someone who probably shouldn't be playing so much, ends up playing so much. Sort of like the Marc Cotze effect of a guy who's a mentor to younger players or perceived as a positive influence and can get an extension, as he just did from the Padres, without necessarily looking like someone you would want to play all that much. And I don't know, Mathis hasn't rated particularly well in all the catcher defense stuff that Mike Fast has done and Max Marchi have done.

He's sort of been above average, but not in Jose Molina territory or anywhere close to that where you would want to play him even when he doesn't hit. So I guess either they're still not capturing something that he's doing back there, or I don't know, he just makes teams confident for some reason that uh that isn't justified but well that's the question i mean that's that is the entire question of segment is that if we have been completely unable to capture jeff mathis value um so uh is this compelling

evidence though that there is value there that that we need to keep looking at catchers because we're clearly not seeing the value that a player like Jeff Mathis has brought yeah it definitely makes me less inclined to to do the Jeff Mathis joke with punchline that has been done many times before sort of of reflexively, and wonder whether there is a reason. I mean, yeah, it does make me more inclined to believe that there is a reason why Jeff Mathis should be playing, even if I can't necessarily... Well, Ben, let's...

Yes, let's not extend this conversation for two years. Okay. People can read all about Jeff Mathis on the website soon. On the internet. Yeah. So Rani Jazzerli, one of the founders of BP, who now writes for various other places, wrote something about the Royals on his site, Rani on the Royals. wrote something about the Royals on his site, Ranny on the Royals. And as usual, it's many thousands of words long and encompasses many topics and provokes many thoughts.

But the subject is chemistry, team chemistry, which has sort of been a sticking point between the stat guys and the guys who tend to believe more in intangibles or ascribe more value to them. And he takes issue with chemistry not so much in the sense that he thinks it doesn't exist. He has an open mind about that, or at least he did before he wrote this. But he has a problem with the fact that people who believe in team chemistry don't demonstrate it in the right way. They don't, like he thinks you can put chemistry to the test, or you should be able to if it exists.

And you should be able to predict which teams have good chemistry and what the effect of that will be before the season as opposed to during or after. So his paragraph here is referring to people who credit chemistry for teams that surprise. The problem with these explanations are that they are always, almost literally always, ex post facto. They are explanations after the fact.

The people who make these arguments have the luxury of knowing which teams have played better or worse than expected before they bestow capital C chemistry on them, which is disingenuous at best and fraudulent at worst. If chemistry matters, then you should be able to tell me before the season which teams will surprise us because of the mix of personalities in their clubhouses. So as usual, he didn't really hold back there. And his point was that the Royals, to him and to many other observers,

seemed like an excellent chemistry clubhouse before this season. He basically went through everyone on the roster. And just about all the starters were guys who had good reputations for being clubhouse presences, really no negatives against them. really no negatives against them. And so he kind of, he didn't write about this before the season, but he almost did, that he thought that if chemistry is real, then the Royals would be sort of a prime candidate to surprise us in that they are a very young team and supposed to be an up-and-coming team,

and that theoretically that chemistry would maybe enable them to gel more quickly and surprise people. And the opposite has been the case. They've sort of gone backwards in many ways and really haven't had that great chemistry. It seems they've fired a member of the coaching staff and let a couple of players go under sort of murky circumstances. And so that hasn't come together. And so he wraps up this exploration of chemistry by saying, if the 2012 Royals were an experiment in chemistry, consider the experiment a failure. That won't stop former major leaguers sitting behind a desk

on television from crediting the C word for every good team in baseball. There's no cure for that, unfortunately. But next time, at least you'll know better than to believe them. I know I will. than to believe them. I know I will. So where do you stand on that? I guess, do you think this is something that could ever be predicted or that would have to be predicted in order for this? I mean, really the burden of proof falls on the chemistry crowd and that they should have to demonstrate this before the fact? Well, I think that it's – first, I think there are probably about like four guys in baseball who are demonstrated chemistry above replacement. I mean like if you were actually going to start naming guys who are good chemistry guys, I think you would have a hard time coming up with even one player per team.

And similarly for bad chemistry types, I don't know. I mean, I don't even know what we would be looking for. And the sliver of a player's role on a team that actually makes it out into the public sphere is tiny. I mean, these guys, as far as the media gets to see, they see the clubhouse. The clubhouse is actually, to some degree, like a facade. They all hang out in the training room and behind the clubhouse. I mean, there's this whole underground world where the team hangs out that you don't even get to see them.

So I don't even know what the media would be looking for, how much they would get to see. So just as far as the idea that this is in any way calculable, I would say it's certainly not by the public. And as far as chemistry goes, I would say that he's basically probably right, that it is very rarely prescriptive and it is a convenient narrative that I tend to believe is real but not identified in anything close to a high enough level of accuracy to be useful. Yeah. And he says, I'm trying to still keep an open mind about the importance of chemistry. Maybe it's true that while good chemistry doesn't guarantee winning, that bad chemistry is enough to derail it. And then, of course, he gives some examples of teams that

famously had bad chemistry and won anyway. What about the Red Sox, though? I mean, this seems to be the first example of a team who is... To tie this into a team that matters more than the Royals at the moment. I mean, I don't know. I guess the Red Sox sort of seemed to me a little more like the ex post facto. I mean, in that, I mean, the chemistry has been a problem there for a while, and clearly it was before the season. So I guess if you had predicted that chemistry would affect them one way or another this spring, you would have said it

would hurt them. Yeah. I mean, I'm not saying that the Red Sox problem is necessarily chemistry. I'm just pointing out that as far as, I mean it might be the first case in our lifetime of chemistry being identified before the losing season. Yes, that's true. But I guess even in that case, you still can't conclude anything. Oh, no, certainly not. Any other explanations for the Red Sox season that have something to do with that. So, okay. So we came to no conclusion about team chemistry and maybe no one ever will.

The chemistry of the show, I would say, though, is strong. Yes. And I would have predicted that before the show. All right. So this has been episode 21. We have two more shows coming to you the next couple of days. They're going to be great. Yes. I believe that they will be great. And we will be back on Thursday with another one.