Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 217: Umpires, Catchers, and Home Field Advantage/Forming a Wall/The Anti-DH Movement/Lengthening Games

Episode Date: June 5, 2013

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about umpires, catchers, and home field advantage, a wall in front of home plate, game length, and the anti-DH movement.

Typically, in a four-man wall, we're going to get our midfielders involved in the wall. We want our defenders to be free. We want the defenders to be marking men up. They're playing defense because they're our best defenders. And we don't want to put them in a position where they're pretty much just like cones. We want them to be active. We want them to be actively defending. And that's one of the main reasons we use our midfielders in the wall. Good morning, and welcome to episode 217 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives. I am Ben Lindberg, joined by Sam Miller. It is Wednesday,

which is Email Wednesday, so you sent us a bunch of questions. We're going to answer some of them now. And we only received one angry email about our Yasiel Puig episode. And actually, if I remember right, when we talked about Puig in spring training, we received one angry email about not being critical enough of Puig at the time. We had bought too much into his spring training stats. So we have one for and one against. I guess that says partial. It's like that old saying, you can't please anybody ever of the time.

Yes, I think that's how it goes. We did get a bunch of ratings and reviews over the weekend after I asked people to do that over the weekend. So I appreciate that. Thank you for those. And if you haven't done one yet, please consider doing one on iTunes as it helps us reach more listeners and stroke our egos. So you have picked out some questions. I sure have. So let's see. I think we're going to try to get to a bunch with quick answers if possible because there are so many good questions. And I think I'm also going to just start answering some of these on unfiltered because there are like a dozen or more questions a week that actually entertain me or make me curious about the answer. And I want to answer more of them. So I think I'll probably start doing that. But I shouldn't be making promises.

If I were a person, I would probably rather hear us, I would rather read us write an answer to a question than hear us talk about it. Yeah, especially given how bad we are. Right. That's what I was getting at. Yeah. So the first question is the one, though, that might be more in-depth, and it'll only be in-depth if you have an answer, and I'm not sure if you will, but it's up your alley. It's from Aaron, and it's a long question, so I'll read for a while.

He says, blah, blah, blah. Okay. You asked recently, would a move by going to robot umpires affect batters or pitchers more because of the lack of skill of pitch framing? I would argue that robot umpires would negatively affect the home team by decreasing their home field advantage. And then he goes out. He goes on to explain the theory that is in the book Scorecasting. Did you ever read Scorecasting? No.

I read things that people wrote about it, but I did not read the book. Yeah, I believe you edited a thing that people wrote about it. So I'm hoping that you'll remember that to some degree. But the theory of scorecasting on home field advantage is likely due substantially to, if not entirely to, the umpire effect, that umpires are more generous to the home team. basically if you take away the umpire effect uh which is shows up mostly in balls and strikes you would take away the home field effect he says it becomes even more evident there is a bias at different points in the game they use the leverage index to examine called ball strikes in non-crucial situations the home and away teams get the same strike ball calls but as the game situation becomes more crucial the home team receives far fewer called strikes and more called balls than the away team. The strike shrinks for the home team and expands for the visitors. And the higher the importance of the game situation, the more that is evident.

So do you have thoughts about, I guess first I should ask, looked at all at framing in home field advantage or framing in any sort of factor that would affect the umpire's calls besides ball count leverage? I don't think so. No, I haven't looked to see. Yeah, I've wondered whether the score of the game has an an impact whether i don't know whether there's kind of a a parallel to the the compassionate umpire effect on a count where a batter who's behind in the count is is less likely to have a called to have a strike called on him whether there's kind of a a parallel for for the team's score um and whether a a team that is trailing by a lot or something would be less likely to have a strike called in. I have not looked at that, and I don't recall anyone else having looked at that.

Okay, so then the second question is, do you think if we removed umpires we would remove the home field advantage? I don't think so i home field advantage is such a complicated topic and there's been so much research done on it and it never really seems definitive it's kind of hard to to isolate what exactly it is um i mean, there's the theory that it has to do with just players having the support of their crowd and, you know, being pumped up by being cheered or the benefit of not being on the road and sleeping in your own bed and having your own food and whatever else comes with being home. And of course, I mean, you know, knowing your stadium and taking advantage of it in that

way and that an outfielder knows the fence and he'll know how the ball will bounce off the fence and be able to play a ball better, that sort of thing. So I feel like a lot of the potential explanations for home field advantage would still apply if there were no umpire, I think? One of the things that I remember finding once when I looked at it, and I wouldn't purport to say that I looked at it in any sort of comprehensive way, so I wouldn't stand by my conclusions or anything, but I remember being surprised that the home field advantage in baseball didn't seem to show up. Oh, in fact, yeah, I looked at this again recently as it relates to the postseason. I found that the size of the home field didn't seem to increase home field advantage

and that the fervency of the home field, which shows up, you would think, in the playoffs, you would see a much more fervent home crowd, also doesn't affect the home field advantage. Basically, the home field advantage in the postseason is identical to the regular season. And if it were the size of the crowd, if it were the umpire being swayed by the loudness and size of the crowd, then certainly a playoff team in a playoff situation would get a bigger bump than the Marlins in June. And yet that's not true. And so my suspicion, while the umpire effect makes sense, and I would probably, without having looked at it in great deal, I would probably accept that it's part of the mix. My guess is that the home field advantage is persistent in ways that remain mysterious,

and if you took away this factor, you would still see a fairly consistent home field edge. I mean, the home field edge is interesting partly because it's so consistent across era, across level, and even to, if I'm remembering right, even largely across sports. And so it makes you think that it can't be anything so simple as Brian Runge and what he's thinking about the guy sitting in section 103. Is Brian Runge? Yeah, I think so. If you heard me typing, it's because I was trying to look up some stuff that Phil Birnbaum has written about that book. Phil Birnbaum is a really

smart sabermetric writer. He writes at his own blog and does kind of critiques of sabermetric stuff. And he wrote a guest review for Baseball Perspectives of scorecasting and kind of looked into some of the claims that the authors made. And so he goes over some of the stuff they do early in the book, and then he says some of the author's other findings, though, seem considerably less certain, especially their biggest topic, home field advantage, which is the only topic that covers two chapters. He goes into what he thinks causes home field advantage. He said it's one of the biggest unsolved problems in sports analysis. People have looked at various factors. And he says he doesn't think we have a great handle on where home field advantage comes from. So he addresses this referee bias, umpire bias argument, and he says,

Second, I tried to verify the baseball claim that the home field advantage is actually backwards in low leverage situations. low leverage situations. To check, I looked at all MLB games from 1954 to 2007 and figured out the home slash road run differential in each inning. If the scorecasting argument is correct, you'd expect more home field advantage in the late innings, where clutch situations tend to cluster than in early innings, but the actual figures show the opposite trend. The biggest home field advantage came in the first inning when the home team outscored the visitors by 18%, and then the home field advantage is smaller later in the game. So he concludes that that's kind of iffy,

that that is something that's happening. I'm looking because he also wrote something. This is why I should probably look at what questions you picked up before the show so I can do all my Googling before. Maybe you should go to the next question and i will i will uh yeah i'm gonna talk the next one is uh is a quick one kyle asks uh he says i have a question concerning the average length of mlb games except rather than length being stated in hours and minutes i want to know how many outs the average baseball game has the simplest answer is probably

usually 51 or 54, but I'd appreciate an answer with at least one decimal. I think the answer depends on the run environment, as fewer runs per game would increase the likelihood that the ninth inning would end with both teams having scored the same number of runs, thus increasing the average outs for extra inning games. Do you, just real quick before I give the results,

do you have a hypothesis about whether outs per game are going to be significantly affected by run scoring environment and in which direction? I guess no. All right. Well, it's actually as as he suggests, and it's fairly significant. I looked at 1,000 games this year, 1,000 games in 2000, which is the highest offensive environment since World War II, and I looked at average outs in 1,000 games since 1968.

And in fact, there are 53.5, sorry, excluding rain outs, by the way. I'm excluding rain outs because they don't really skew things very much, but they seem to be cheating. So excluding rain outs in 2013, there are 53.64 outs per game. In 2000, there were 53.34, so a third of an out fewer. 3-4, so a third of an out fewer. And in 1968, actually, there were an average of 54.25 outs per game. So that means that the average game, now obviously it doesn't work this way,

but the average game went extra innings, if that makes sense. I mean, there were so many extra innings being played because nobody could score a run that there was actually more than nine innings being played because nobody could score a run, that there was actually more than nine innings being played on average, which I guess is interesting because if you think about how many half innings, I mean, more than 54% of games basically, since we're talking about the home field edge, don't complete nine innings, right? Don't complete 54 outs. And so there's going to be a real bias for being lower than that.

But in fact, if you get the run scoring environment low enough, the games will just go on forever. Of course, that does not mean that games take longer because more batters are batting in those games. So in case, whatever this guy's name was, I've forgotten. Kyle. In case Kyle wants to know, uh, there were, uh, one and a half more batters per game in 2000 than there were in 1968. And you figure more of those batters are going to come with other runners on base, which means that

they're working out of the stretch and that there will also be more pitching changes, uh, because pitchers can't get out since there are more changes. even though there are fewer outs per game when runs are scored more there is a longer game when runs are scored more and so I don't know why you would want to state the length of games and outs I do wonder what Kyle is going to use this information for I wonder if he's got some sort of sinister plan because i could not i could not necessarily come up with the motivation for wanting to know this um but i trust kyle i trust kyle with this information all right do you have an answer or should i go on to the next uh i'm i'm falling into a rabbit hole here so go on to the next one all right uh this one is from uh matt and matt says i've been thinking

about this idea since listening to your discussion on fielder positioning what if mlb teams oh goodness i'm i can't believe i'm reading this what if mlb teams packed five to six players as close as possible to the batter forming a kind of wall that you often see in soccer free kicks. The goal of the wall would be to knock down hits as they left the hitter's bat. The wall would make pitch recognition very difficult, especially if the wall is hopping up and down and you have a pitcher like Jared Weaver throwing from an extreme angle. The pitcher would have to adjust to throw through a narrow gap in the wall. B, is there a rule that forbids fielders from wearing special equipment? All rude wore helmet on the field, so why not full catcher's gear for wall members?

Do fly balls leave the bat at such an angle that the wall would have no hope in blocking them? And hitters would probably be unnerved, breaking their concentration at the plate. And, you know, I think that when Ben and I read this, we did some soul searching because we realized that this is the podcast that we're doing. This is not a baseball question so much as it's a kickball question. Ben worries that if we go down this route for long, eventually we will be a football podcast, which is not what either one of us wants. I'm just going to say that this is ludicrous. It's clearly going to say that this is uh it's ludicrous it's it's it's clearly unsafe to get close enough i think you would you would it would you would quickly be hit with bats if you got close enough to block the ball and uh i mean it's just it's a baseball it's not it's a baseball it would kill

you uh now here's the the response that i have that is semi semi serious. What if just one guy stood between the pitcher and the hitter in the direct path of the pitcher's release point and the plate? And what if he just dodged? You've got to figure, in that case, it would be extremely difficult for the batter to pick up the ball. If he dove on the ground, I mean, sure would he would certainly get hit by some balls that were hit at him and he would probably die as well um but let's say he figured out a way to avoid the dying um do you think that there's anything illegal about standing 30 feet from the pitcher's mound

between the pitcher and the batter and just doing something distracting yeah obscuring the batter and then just as the pitch comes you dodge i mean obviously it's hard to dodge a pitch if you don't know that it's coming but if you know exactly when it's coming and it's going to be coming right at you if you could just sort of time your your dodge in such a way you could you might even be able to work on this with the pitcher so that you'd be very good at dodging you could time it just right and then you just sort of dive head you know dive head first away from the batter. So if you get hit with a ball, you'd probably get hit on the push. It seems like that could really disrupt the batter. Now, I assume this is the sort of thing that if you had this brilliant idea, it would be outlawed

by the second pitch. And if it weren't outlawed, then you'd be outlawed by the second pitch and if it weren't outlawed then you'd be hit in the face by the next pitch that you saw in the plate i don't think that anybody would go for this except for you know maybe the dodger but uh legal do you think and and uh effective do you think uh i i can't think of a reason why it wouldn't be legal i haven't i haven't dug into the rule book to see but it sounds legal i mean you can you can put fielders are you allowed to play are you is a fielder there's no line behind which the fielder has to play that you know not that i know of um i mean yeah if it were perfectly timed i i guess that would certainly be effective. It would be like the ultimate deceptive delivery because you wouldn't see the delivery. Right.

I mean, it would be devastating. It seems like it would just be absolutely devastating. Nobody could hit a pitch that they didn't see until it was 40 feet from them. Yeah, that would be. And I mean, if you did it right, you might even be able to, like the pitcher might be able to play with different arm angles and the batter would never be able to see it. You know, it's, it would be, it would be something. Yeah. Yeah, I was thinking, I mean, with the wall idea that if you actually set up a wall, how does the pitch get to home plate?

Well, the pitcher would have to throw between the wall. In this case, the wall would, in the situation offered by Matt, was it? Matt. The wall's primary purpose would be to block hits. It would be very much like the kickball strategy where you just, you charge and then you throw your body at the ball basically. And I think he says that the – I think he's pointing out the side benefit of unnerving the batter and maybe disrupting his line of vision. But basically the wall would be in order to block balls going out. I'm talking about doing something specifically. And what if, like, also, what about this? What if you were, what if you had the shortstop just stand directly behind the pitcher's release point

and just, like, jump up and down and sort of block the batter's eye with a white uniform? That probably wouldn't be allowed either. And I don't feel like that would be as useful and you would have a player out of position. That's the other thing. Right, well, you could, I mean, I guess you'd take the left fielder or something. You'd have to take the left. Even in my theory too, in my idea, you'd lose a fielder. So if the batter could hit anything, you'd be toast. Yes, which would probably be worth it for that.

I mean with the wall idea, I was thinking what if the pitcher just kind of throws a pop-up that comes down directly over home plate? It just, it just throws it sky high. It, it drops vertically on home plate in front of the wall. Right. Yeah. So I just don't think that you can have a wall for blocking baseballs because baseballs are going to kill you. Yes. I don't understand. I mean, like why not have the fielder stand on the plate and so the batter can't swing because your body is blocking the plate? Yeah, that would be interference.

I don't know. There's a rule against catcher's interference. There's no rule against shortstop's interference. So far as I can tell, the rule book is silent on whether the shortstop can interfere with the batter's swing by putting his body in between it so i'm not i'm not so sure about that now so i think the big flaw with the the the block with these with the dodgeball guy is that the catcher would be at the same disadvantage and therefore the umpire would be hit by pitches and the umpire you just can't you can't be hitting the umpire with pitches

or you'll get nothing from him yeah i'm pretty sure that the umpires would would make it their personal mission to destroy you if you if you let pitches go straight into their face mask yes so probably not a starter of an idea matt's from germany by the, and I'll leave it to all of you to be thoroughly unsurprised. All right, shall we do another one? Yeah, okay. This might be the last one, we'll see. Timothy writes, in a May 22nd article, Russell Carlton writes that the DH is the most highly paid position. Hasn't Effectively Wild Research already uncovered that there are no more than three players in the AL who play exclusively DH? My point is that the DH isn't truly the highest paid position because there are not enough people playing the position to adequately judge.

I feel like there are no mainstream voices in baseball who are vehemently opposed to what the DH represents. On the other hand, there are a multitude of baseball people who like the DH or feel a general apathy towards including the DH in the NL, my goal is to end the DH from Tim. That email took a sharp turn midway through. And I'm just going to say right off the bat. Can you really explain why he doesn't like the DH? No, I think he wants us to not like it. I think he's hoping that we'll make his case for him or something like that. But I do just want to say, first of all, that I don't appreciate you trying to start a fight between us and Russell.

Russell is, I would say, the intellectual, if not the spiritual godfather of this podcast, and we're not going to be drawn into this. So I will note in Russell's defense, because Russell can do no wrong, that the DH is actually probably more expensive in great fact, even though you're arguing, Tim, because DHs tend to be older. They tend not to be pre-arb players. They tend to be guys that have been acquired after their sixth year, and therefore they're making real salaries. So I believe that the amount of money spent in the DH spot,

whether it's by exclusively DH players or whether it's by guys who are platooning at DH or whatever the case may be, is more expensive. But I don't actually want to defend the DH or not defend the DH. I hate talking about the DH as Tim, even in his subject line, says, beware DH discussion ahead. Nobody likes to talk about the DH at this point. I do just want to note, though, that it is interesting because anytime that there is some sort of controversial hot topic like, well, anything, it seems that the controversy goes one of two directions.

One is it simmers for a long time. that the controversy goes one of two directions. One is it simmers for a long time. Some sort of 50-50 parity develops on either side of the issue. It becomes extremely partisan, and it doesn't change, and that controversy lasts for a long time. And I would say an example of that would be Roe versus Wade, where we're generally not much less divided, if any less divided now than in 1973. And that's not an issue that's going away anytime soon. Meanwhile, there are other political issues where the fighting goes for a little bit and gradually one side starts to get more power. And then the issue becomes how far will it go? it's clear that that issue has taken hold, that it has gotten a majority, and that it then becomes simply a matter for

the minority position of stopping it from going further than they want it to go. I'm sure you can think of political issues that would fit that description. DH, I would say that for a long time, I didn't think that there was going to be this, the movement. I thought it would stay pretty divided for a long time. When I was growing up, it never occurred to me that DH would go to the NL and it didn't really occur to me that DH would ever be abolished, although maybe that was what I hoped for as a child for no good reason.

It's clear that that's not going to happen anymore. When was the last time you heard anybody talk about abolishing the DH? Never. Yeah, not really. It just doesn't happen. I'm not any serious professional writer. Yeah, it's just completely been accepted, I think, that the floor, the DH floor is one league and the ceiling is two leagues. And now it's like the fight is really, if anything, it's more about like how long can anti-DH people hold off

and how many more years of the NL-AL divide will there be. But I mean it's clearly going to happen and the momentum is sort of unstoppable. And I'm not sure what caused that. It feels to me like a fairly recent shift that maybe in the last seven or eight years, um, the momentum just sort of picked up just enough steam that you kind of quit thinking about it as a, as a, as a 50, 50 divide. Uh, okay. So if I can sort of synthesize the reading that I've tried to do while recording this podcast, there has been research into the home and road umpire effect. John Walsh in the 2011 Hardball Times Annual found that

home plate umpires favor home teams in their pitch calling by 0.8 pitches per game, which is significant. There have been a couple studies at Beyond the Box score by Brian Mills and Dan Turkenkoff that looked at similar things. And I think maybe found smaller effects, but still significant effects. So Phil Birnbaum, the guy I was talking about, kind of went looking for something that would be unaffected by the umpire to see whether the home field advantage can be entirely explained by the umpire calling pitches differently. And just to note, that's been an approach that people have done in other sports too where it's a little easier to find those things. and they've usually found the effect even in in events that like that are completely independent of the uh-huh yeah uh right like go ahead like i think uh yeah there's something in in basketball that yeah like like errant passes or something like that or uh yeah um or foul foul shooting or

free throw shooting or something. So Phil looked at wild pitches, which he felt would be sort of independent of umpire. He controlled for count in case it's more likely to throw a wild pitch in certain count and you're more likely to be in a certain count because the umpire is calling a less favorable zone for you. So he found that there is a home field advantage in wild pitches, that visiting pitchers throw more of them. So he felt like that was not really something that would be that affected by umpires. So there's this long comment thread that I've been trying to skim on that post,

which I guess I'll link in the podcast post at BP. He was going back and forth with Mike Fast, and Mike had some interesting thoughts on that. He said, I wonder if what we are counting as umpire bias, and this is kind of what you're saying, if what we're counting as umpire bias here doesn't also include catcher and pitcher skill in targeting and framing the pitch. We have good reason to believe that umpires call the strike zone relative to the catcher's target. If catchers do better at taking advantage of this at home and pitchers do better at hitting that target just off the corner when they are at home, we could see a home road change in the strike zone even if umpires were entirely consistent in how they called the zone. Not consistent in terms of a fixed size spatial

boundary, but consistent in their methodology of judging the player performance, where the change in player performance is what drives the changing size of the zone. And so Phil is kind of skeptical then about why framing would be better or why pitchers would be more able to hit their spots. He says, my unscientific opinion is that framing the pitch is something that wouldn't vary between home and road since it's more a decision than a physical attempt. That is, he wouldn't expect a catcher to try to be framing a certain way but fail to do so just because he isn't good enough today. And then Mike, and this is the last thing I will read, says, I will be the first to say I don't have a good feel for differences between home and road. However, on the topic of strike zone, maybe I can add something.

I see three basic components to be executed by the players. Catcher sets the target. Pitcher delivers the pitch at some location relative to the target. And catcher receives the pitch into his glove. Here's how I speculate that home field advantage could affect each of those three pieces. Number one, the catcher is probably relatively unaffected by home field advantage in his ability to place the glove where he wants, but he might very well be affected in his decision making about what the right place is to put the target in the first place. Whether it's being

more rested by sleeping in his own bed, or feeling more confident because the fans are cheering his pitcher, or he's more likely to be working with a lead, he may make more correct decisions about how to gain a few extra strikes for his pitcher. I'm not sure how one would measure that. Two, pitchers may have better mechanics at home, such that they'd have better control over where the pitches go. This is probably measurable. And three, the catcher's mechanics for receiving the pitch may be sharper at home. He may be more confident about how the ball will bounce off the dirt if he has to block the pitch or other factors that help him to be more relaxed as he receives the pitch.

Anecdotally, umpires react poorly on giving strikes when the catcher is reacting to his pitcher rather than seeming to be in control. It's possible to observe from video the catcher's mechanics in receiving pitches, but doing that on a large scale is probably impossible. Short of that, I don't know how to measure this. So those are good thoughts by Phil Birnbaum and Mike Fast from a couple years ago on the topic. I will link to that post and some of the other research, but I guess the consensus is it's really tough to say. Yeah, well, it usually is. So thank you, Aaron and Timothy and Matt and Kyle for your questions, and thank you for everybody else, and hopefully we'll get to some of them in writing, and certainly we'll get to the next batch of questions in a week.

So send them to podcast at email dot podcast at baseball prospectus dot com. And we'll be back tomorrow.