Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 220: Sick Starters, The Value of Hitting Coaches, and The Most Disappointing Team of 2013

Episode Date: June 10, 2013

Ben and Sam discuss how impressive it is when players play sick, whether hitting coaches are more important than they’d previously thought, and the season’s most disappointing teams.

Right now this is this is really hard for me because I'm feeling really sick But I want to say thank you to all my fans for making me feel so comfortable It's not it's not really a great feeling when you're you know, you're throwing up in front of a bunch of people but I Know that you guys you guys don't judge me, do you? You love me just the same. Even though I'm throwing up all over the stage. Good morning and welcome to episode 220 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball

Prospectus. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg and it's a new week. Ben, how are you? Very well. I had an excellent weekend. When we're chatting before we click start, if I just started talking and doing the intro to the show, you'd play off it, right? I mean, you'd be fine.

Yeah, I'd probably adjust. If you didn't do the countdown? I think so. I do too. You be fine. Yeah, I'd probably adjust. If you didn't do the countdown? I think so. I do too. You're going to try it next time probably. What do you want to talk about? I have a couple things I want to mention, but I guess my main topic would be on the most disappointing team of the season.

The most disappointing team of the season. Okay. Can you rephrase that? Are you going to be talking about a team? We are going to discuss which team is most disappointing. All right. And I'm going to talk about hitting instructors. Okay.

Why don't I start? Before we start, can I mention one thing? Yeah, you can do your mentions first. Yes, I can mention. I'm always amazed when a pitcher pitches while he's sick. I don't know whether this amazes you. Like Chad Godin? Yeah, Chad Godin.

You did a piece on men vomiting. Yes, I wrote an article on pitchers who pitched while throwing up or in between throwing up. Because it fascinates me that this happens. So Chad Godin pitched six innings for the Giants against the Diamondbacks. He allowed two runs, five hits, one walk, struck out seven. And Andrew Baggerly tweeted, Godin had a stomach issue all game, said he threw up in the third and sixth innings.

And this just, I guess, I don't know. This is what, I guess, reminds me that major leaguers are not like us, maybe. I mean, the fact that pitchers throw really hard and have pinpoint control and all those things is, is amazing. But I can't really identify with it or it's just, it's, it's not something I've ever experienced. So it, it's completely divorced from me. It sort of means nothing. I just, I intellectually, I understand that, that they have these amazing abilities, but it doesn't mean anything to me really. It's just they're amazing.

But stomach issues I have had and I have thrown up. And I can't imagine pitching in a major league baseball game and pitching well while that's happening because I mean I I feel like I'm I'm I'm fairly good about illness and being stoic and doing whatever I was going to do anyway and getting through it but what I have to do usually doesn't include pitching in the major leagues so uh it it is shocking to me that this happens I guess I mean I guess if you're Chad Godin and you're kind of fighting for a rotation spot or something, then I understand how you limp out there. I don't know how you pitch well after limping out there. Yeah, but okay.

So I don't want this to be misinterpreted as me not being absolutely in awe of everything these people do. They're incredible. They're amazing. And, you know, I'm in awe of everything these people do. They're incredible. They're amazing. And, you know, I'm in awe. Okay. So I'm not, I'm not, I'm not trying to dismiss anything that they do. But I don't know that this is a, I don't know that this is where I focus my attention for a few reasons. One, I just don't know that, I don't know that you and I have ever cared about anything as much as we would probably care if there were, you know, if, if we were going to be humiliated in front of people. And, and if I also knowing that there's

like, like literal hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line, um, like, like I, I, for instance, um, I don't think that I could run, I mean, I could barely run a mile like right now, but I certainly couldn't run a mile you know with a terrible flu and yet for thirty thousand dollars i could like guarantee and and also i mean if you if there was a lion behind me i could and it wouldn't matter if i had the flu if there was a lion behind so like partly it's just about incentives and i i trust that the incentives that a major leaguer has, particularly probably if he's Chad Godin, I would guess that those incentives carry the day. I would bet that you could, let me put it this way.

You're a terrible pitcher, but I bet that for enough money, you are just as good a pitcher with the flu as you are right now without the flu. Second of all, the fact that Chad Goodann threw so well today and that, as I recall, you found a lot of pitchers throwing up who were actually pitching well. To me, that tells me that it's not as big an obstacle as you think it is. I mean, like you would think it would make it a lot harder and yet they do it. And so it obviously doesn't, if it made it a lot harder, they'd be worse. We would see an effect if it made it a lot harder. And so apparently it doesn't, it's hard to explain, but apparently it doesn't, the proof is there. Yeah, I guess so. I mean, I don't know. It's amazing to me, I guess. I mean, I can put up with a fever or chills or whatever the usual flu symptoms are and be pretty okay and function as I normally would.

But stomach stuff and nausea pretty much puts me out of commission and I just lie there waiting for it to be over. me out of commission and I just lie there waiting for it to be over. I mean, I guess I might go to work now because I work from home and just kind of have to sit in a chair so I could manage that. But yeah, I don't know. I guess. And I mean, I get it with Godin, I guess. But sometimes you see it with an established starter who's in no danger of losing his role. And probably, I mean, if he said, hey, I just threw up and I can't start today, probably no one is going to pay him less. No one is going to think that he's not a competitor. There's other incentives, though. Yeah.

I mean, the thing is, look, this guy's – whoever that hypothetical guy that you're naming, I mean, the thing is, look, this guy's whoever that that hypothetical guy that you're naming, he throws 30, you know, 32 times a year. And, you know, he's got a muscle through two hours. He's got a muscle through two hours of pain. And I just I think you could do it. And I think that you could go through two hours of pain if, you know, if you knew that that's that's all you had to do all year was go out on that mound and like go through incredible pain. I mean, I'm sure it hurts a lot even when they're healthy. It's probably super uncomfortable every time they walk on that mound. Maybe that's part of the thing too. I mean, if you think about it, Chad Godin is probably in some degree of either immense chronic pain or acute pain or simply fatigue or simply like crushing anxiety every time he goes out there and so then you throw a fever on there and uh you know who like who even notices you know

like you just you just brush that off with a with a you know with bend over vomit and it that's it. That's a small thing. I guess what I'm saying is that these guys are probably accustomed to pitching through a certain amount of physical pain that you also would have a hard time imagining. Yeah, I guess that makes sense. I mean, they certainly I don't know exactly how many

sick days per season a major leaguer averages, but certainly a lot fewer than your typical office worker, I would think, averages over the same six-month span with a much less physically demanding job. So, yeah, I guess it's about the incentives, and I guess it's also about the determination that made them major leaguers in the first place.

You know, when you have a topic, Ben, feel free to just make it a topic. Is this a topic? We've been going for eight minutes. Yeah, I guess so. I don't know. If I were listening, I wouldn't be satisfied with this as a topic. All right. Fair enough.

You talk about your topic. All right, fair enough. You talk about your topic. All right, so we talked a few weeks ago about whether it's ever appropriate to call for a manager to get fired. And as we know, the only thing that fans like to call for more than a manager to be fired is a hitting coach to be fired. They love it. They all love it. love it and i feel like they're the common sentiment um uh these days among among writers etc is to a uh you know to some degree dismiss those fans or mock those fans uh as you know like not really um you know not really understanding what a hitting coach does be to simultaneously disparage what a hitting coach does, um, in a lot of cases and see when a hitting coach or hitting instructor

does get fired to, you know, just sort of say, ah, it's just, uh, you know, finding a, finding a scapegoat. Sometimes you criticize the team for choosing the wrong scapegoat. Uh, sometimes you brush it off as being inconsequential. And so the question that I had, and I'll talk for a little bit more after I ask the question, but the question I had is, do you think it's ever appropriate to call for a hitting coach to be fired? And so Russell Carlton, spiritual slash intellectual godfather of this podcast, wrote a piece that will be up on Monday morning, so a lot of you can go read it right now. Some of you can't. And he looked at whether teams that fire their hitting coach get better. I would guess that the obvious hypothesis that we would all come up with is that they probably do,

because there's probably some sort of reverse cover curse going on where teams that fire their hitting coaches are probably underperforming and perhaps artificially underperforming and are due for regression anyway. So that noted, and I don't want to spoil the ending or anything, but Russell does find something significant. And it kind of makes you think that if your team is struggling and they fire the hitting coach, you should kind of be excited by that. And so, do you think that we're not calling for enough hitting coaches to be fired? Well, as Russell wrote, what he found, and I guess I won't spoil it either, but his significant finding doesn't necessarily suggest that we should just hope for our team's hitting coach to be fired because it's a selective sample of hitting coaches who were fired. I mean, not every hitting coach for every bad team or

every team that's not hitting as it was expected is fired. So you figure that the ones who are fired were especially bad. They were doing something that really made their team think that they could improve significantly just by firing him and hiring someone else, which is not always the case. I mean, I'm sure that there are times when a team fires a hitting coach just kind of to change things up or to shake things up or not necessarily because they felt he was terrible at his job, but maybe just that they needed someone who could connect with their players better or whatever it is. But it's a selective group of people whose teams decided that they had to go. So I don't know that we can just say, well, if you fire the guy, then they'll get better.

Right. He does not say fire your hitting coach every two months. You're guaranteed to be the 27 Yankees by September. However, if you're watching a team that sucks and they fire their hitting coach, then maybe they've identified the problem. You could be optimistic, I guess, about it. The thinking should be that, yeah, these guys know what they're doing and they've clearly found the cancer and removed it.

Yeah, and it's funny. There was a story that I saw. Wait, are you just agreeing? You're just agreeing with that and then moving on? I mean, I think it's justified to feel optimistic that there will be some improvement if your team fires a guy, I think. I mean, I don't think that we could call for a guy to be fired. I mean,

you and I are uncomfortable with calling for a manager to be fired. And we see much more of what a manager does from day to day than we do of what a hitting coach does. So I don't think that I would ever feel comfortable saying that that guy's going to go because I don't know anything about what he does other than how his hitters are hitting, which may or may not be a reflection on the job that he's doing. So I wouldn't call for it to happen. I wouldn't say it has to happen, but if it does happen, I guess there is some reason to be optimistic that it might help a little bit. Two hours ago, I think I would have said that it would have no impact on my confidence level for a team and perhaps even negative impact because I would think that it's a – maybe if anything, it points to a team in disarray. And Russell has convinced me that I will now feel some bump in confidence level.

I don't know, a huge bump, but some bump. Yeah, it's not huge because I'm still not sure how much of that is accounted for just by the regression. You would think a big part of it. Yeah, it's got to be. So now, is this an okay time, though, to talk about Russell's piece from a month ago, which we never did talk about,

but which is similarly fascinating, in which he looked at the value of a good hitting coach yeah sure they kind of go in and in they do and so this one was was even more shocking I mean this one I would never have bet on but he somewhat fairly convincingly demonstrates that you know a top hitting coach and this was a from I would say from a fairly conservative uh place that he drew this conclusion he wasn't like he wasn't out there looking for the most radical example he could find but he finds that the best is something like probably four four wins above replacement um and just as valuable as a Leo Mazzoni type, as a pitching coach would be, which blew me away for, I would say, two primary reasons. One of which is that the highest paid hitting

coaches, so far as I can tell by the internet, get paid something just under $1 million. There are two premises to Russell's finding. One is that a good hitting coach is worth a lot more than a replacement level one. And two is that there is such a thing as replacement level. I've always felt like there are like 5,000 hitting coaches that were, you know, essentially all qualified. That, yeah, that Kevin Seitzer, for instance, is a good hitting coach, but so are literally 5,000 other people. And that's why he doesn't get paid more, because he's just so easily replaceable. And so both of those things seem to not be true.

And so I wonder, how is there not a team paying more for a hitting coach? I mean, four wins, we know what that's worth. And even if you're not giving them $20 million, Four wins, we know what that's worth. And even if you're not giving him $20 million, doesn't it seem like $2 million for a hitting coach could be like this big market inefficiency? I guess so. I mean, if you pay your hitting coach that,

then you probably also have to pay your pitching coach that to keep him happy. And then you may have to give your manager a raise also so that he doesn't feel like he's being out-earned by his coaches or something or threatened by that. So it would probably cost you more than just that raise to the hitting coach. But yeah, still pretty insignificant compared to what you'd pay for a win from a free agent. So yeah, I guess so. So, yeah, I guess so. Maybe teams, I guess it could be that Russell was looking retrospectively at what has actually happened,

whereas maybe teams aren't able to identify which hitting coaches are the best in advance or aren't confident in their ability to do that. And so you wouldn't necessarily pay a guy to be that effective if you're not sure that he can be. I guess if a guy's been around long enough and he gets fired or he's available for some reason and he has a long track record of improving his hitters, then I guess at that point you could be confident in it. Very good.

Whenever somebody has told me that so-and-so needs to fire their hitting coach, my response has always been that if hitting coaches meant as much as fans think that they mean, they would get paid a lot more than they do. Basically, the teams are telling you exactly what they think a hitting coach is worth by what they're being paid. And yeah, so Russell has shaken me to my core in these two pieces. Do you know much about Rick Eckstein? Nope.

So Rick Eckstein is the Washington Nationals hitting coach. He's also the brother of David Eckstein. And, you know, I always see him on the bench, and I'm always like, oh, look, that's Rick Eckstein. What does he do again? Is he like the the the clubhouse attendant what is it and then i look it up and he's the hitting coach and i'm always surprised and now i'm gonna burn it into my memory by talking about this but

david eckstein you know of course is has got this you know reputation for being the the the sultan of grit and and in fact his brother brother is, I would say that in life terms, is actually considerably grittier. And so I'm just going to real quickly tell you how Rick Eckstein became the Washington Nationals hitting coach. First off, very important, Rick Eckstein never played a professional game of baseball, which I have to imagine is exceptionally rare for a hitting coach,

if not entirely unprecedented in the sport itself. And like, of course, we'll get an email tomorrow listing 17 of the other 29 hitting coaches who have all, you know, learned to play baseball by watching Bases Loaded 2, and I'm going to feel like an idiot. But so this is Eckstein's career. He played college ball, got injured, okay? So coach at the University of Florida. Not even, it doesn't say manager, just coach.

Bullpen catcher for the Rays in 1999 when they were terrible. Batting practice pitcher for the Rays. Coaching staff for Seminole Community College. Minnesota Twins bullpen catcher. Minnesota Twins batting practice pitcher, University of Georgia coach for two years, member of the Harrisburg Senators coaching staff for a month, coach for the Vermont Expos, coach for the New Orleans Zephyrs, Memphis Redbirds, Columbus Clippers, coached Team USA in the Baseball World Cup, and finally joined the Nationals in September 2008. So that's grit.

He's got a legit job. He's one of only 30 people in the world who has this job and had to do all that. So bless his heart. Not listed, but he is not a big man. Yeah, that's very gritty that's a very strange trajectory to become a hitter's hitting coach uh i just before we started recording i saw an article on the royals website and of course the headline is yost says royals are responding to brett and the royals are seven and three in3 in George Brett's first 10 games as hitting coach. And

Ned Yost says, they're listening to what George has to say. They love his approach. Up until George came on board, everything was a mechanical fix, and George hasn't been thrusting mechanics down their throat. It's been more about slowing the game down, slowing their mechanics down, freeing up their swing, getting them to

understand the difference between what it feels like for a good swing or what it feels for a bad swing so you can make adjustments and to get back to that good swing. And I really, I wish that the Royals pitching staff had been worse over those 10 games and the hitters had been exactly the same, but they had gone three and seven instead of seven and three. And I would love to know if Yost would still say that the Royals are responding to Brett or be complimenting his performance or whether this is driven by the fact that they've won some games.

But I guess, again, having read Russell's article, I'm a little less inclined to laugh this off than I would have been otherwise. They're 5-0 with the spreadsheet lineup. Yes, that's right. That actually means that they're 2-3 with Brett, but without the spreadsheet lineup. Yeah. Okay, then this will be...

In the last, by the way, in the last, in the eight games that I can see here, 14, 18, 22, 23, 27, 28, 29, in the eight games I can see here, they've averaged 3.6 runs a game. Okay. Well, that's not any better. I think they had averaged 3.4 or something over the previous six weeks.

And actually, in the previous two games, so going back 10, that's 35 runs in 10 games. Not impressive. Okay, so then this will be really quick. Nick Caffardo wrote an article for the Boston Globe. The headline was, Four of MLB's preseason favorites are duds. He went through those four teams, the Blue Jays, the Angels, the Dodgers, and the Nationals,

and just kind of went through everything that's gone wrong for each of them and why they're disappointing and doom and gloom. And there wasn't really any conclusion. It was just sort of these teams have been disappointing. So I wondered which you think has been the most disappointing out of those four teams. We've talked about the Angels a little bit. We've talked about the Blue Jays and the Dodgers, I guess. Haven't really gotten into the Nationals yet. But just relative to preseason expectations,

relative to what you expected them to do and what they've actually done, which one so far is the most surprising or most disappointing to you uh off the top of my head i'm i'm i i uh if i get too detailed i'm going to start saying things that aren't true like i'm going to start quoting stats that aren't true or something like that so uh off the top of my head i would say that the Angels feel like the most disappointing team, partly because, well, the Blue Jays are interesting because because Pakoda alone didn't really like them. And I mean, they obviously Pakoda liked them more than 27 and 35, but didn't really like them. And so you and I had been kind of fighting with whether we bought that or not and whether we believed it.

And we did actually for the Nationals too. The Dakota's Nationals projection was I think like 87 wins, something like that, which I thought was one of the most conservative projections. So they're 500 so far. conservative projections so they're 500 so far yeah I I guess I guess probably I guess like sort of emotionally the Blue Jays is the most disappointing just because it's you know it's hard not to it's not it's hard not to feel bad for the Blue Jays you know you you sort of they, they slogged through the last decade of the ALEs to get here, and you wanted it to go well for them. You didn't want to see them basically sink into disrepair this quickly.

And you kind of wonder, like, what it's going to mean for their long-term future and what it's going to mean. I mean, you figure Alex Anthopoulos is probably going to get fired, and that's sort of sad and depressing because this economy is so bad. Although maybe it's better in Canada. I don't know. That's one of the most interesting aspects of it to me, whether he's going to be blamed for it. In Caffardo, in his article, he says Anthopoulos stuck his neck out and dealt for, and he lists all the players, Ari Dickey and Jose Reyes and Josh Johnson and Mark Burley.

And then he says, what did Anthopolis do wrong? Nothing, really. He gave up top young talent for all-stars. So I'm curious about whether that will be the interpretation at the end of the season, if the Blue Jays kind of finish where they are now. interpretation at the end of the season, if the Blue Jays kind of finish where they are now, whether people will start picking apart those moves in a way that they didn't at the time they were made and start saying, well, Ari Dickey, his success kind of came out of nowhere and he's almost 40 and you could have seen that coming and his picota wasn't good. And then Jose Reyes and Josh Johnson, those guys are hurt all the time and he should have seen that coming.

And Mark Burley is an older guy and gives up a lot of fly balls. And, you know, we could have figured he'd get hit hard in the AL East and whether, whether people will start to sort of retroactively blame him for this collapse or kind of absolve him because at the time people liked it and thought he was going for it and and thought it was good which generally i did um so it's interesting to me i wonder whether he will be fired or whether he'll be scapegoated for this generally uh yeah when you say whether people will yeah well i guess give him the benefit of the doubt i guess guess the important people are the owners of the Blue Jays, I guess. But yeah, I don't know.

Just the court of public baseball opinion, Blue Jays fans, pundits. Yeah, I mean, I haven't looked super closely at them, but the impression I get of the Blue Jays is that their problem is that they have a rotation that should be good and is terrible. And that's just one of those things about building a team, that you're at the mercy of your rotation. And, you know, what are you going to do? I mean, we talked about this with the Angels,

where the problem with the Angels last year is that Dan Heron was garbage. He was terrible. And what's Jerry DiPoto supposed to do about that? Heron was like a Cy Young contender the year before. He'd just thrown a career high in innings. He'd been a stud for eight years. I mean, what's he going to do, drop him? So, you know, you just sort of, you know, if that guy ends up giving up 30 more runs than you expected, you're toast. Well, you need a bunch of those guys, and the Blue Jays have had a bunch of those guys spend their entire rotation. I mean, it's toast. Well, you need a bunch of those guys, and the Blue Jays have had a bunch of

those guys, been their entire rotation. I mean, when I was writing that piece for ESPN about the Angels and the Dodgers, originally, it was going to also include the Blue Jays. And I ended up taking the Blue Jays out because I didn't feel like they fit the trend that well, but there's some element of that where, you know, they, they wanted to, they wanted to get really good in a hurry. Um, and the players that are available these days, um, you know, they all come with flaws and I don't know that that's, that was ever not true in baseball. I mean, it's not like you could ever just go shopping and get like four superstars or anything like that who have no flaws. But, you know, every player on there had some, you know, some pretty big question mark.

I think probably Dickey least of all. But, I mean, certainly Johnson, certainly Burley, and, you know, maybe Reyes. Reyes, it's hard to fault him for Reyes. I mean, I would have loved to have Reyes. And, you know, that was kind of a fluky injury, right? So I don't know. I mean, if they played out this season again, it wouldn't shock me if the Blue Jays were a lot better. And I probably wouldn't blame Anthopolis

if I was writing a history of the league, but if I were the owner of the team, I probably would fire him. Yeah, okay. Well, I would say Blue Jays too, probably. Blue Jays emotionally, but I would say that of those three teams, I probably had the lowest expectations for the Blue Jays. Not by a lot, but somewhat. And I probably had the highest expectations for the Angels. And the Angels to me feel like the team that is maybe the least likely to turn it around. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.

Yeah, I think I probably feel that way about them right now. Yeah, that makes sense. All right. All right. Did you? Yeah, we both answered. Yes. Is there anybody else?

Do we have any other guests? No, we don't have any other hosts today. All right. We you? Yeah, we both answered. Yes. Is there anybody else? Do we have any other guests? No, we don't have any other hosts today. All right. We can end it then. Send us email questions at podcast at baseballperspectives.com.