Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 223: Should College Pitchers Shut it Down After Being Drafted?/The Red Sox and Advance Scouting

Episode Date: June 13, 2013

Ben and Sam discuss whether college pitchers should stop pitching for their college teams after being drafted, then talk about the Red Sox and advance scouting.

There is no altering this offer. Then shut it down. Good morning and welcome to episode 223 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus. I am Ben Lindberg in New York, where you can probably hear construction sounds in the apartment above me. And in Long Beach, California, where you can hear birds chirping, is Sam Miller. Hello, Sam. Howdy. What's your topic today?

Advanced scouting. Okay. And mine is whether college pitchers should keep pitching after they are drafted. Great topic. I like yours. Yes, me too. Let's do yours. Okay, so this topic was inspired by a listener email that we agreed to defer from the listener email show because we wanted to spend some more time talking about it.

And the email was from Wes, who emails us often. And I will read his email. He said, what's the incentive for college pitchers to continue pitching after they've been drafted? While many, Mark Appel, for example, are done by the time the draft rolls around, others, Jonathan Gray, are pitching in regionals, super regionals, and Omaha. It seems extremely risky to continue pitching for one's college team, risking injury or poor performance, two factors that could hurt contract negotiations.

Sure, it would be a pretty lame way to end your college career, but when hundreds of thousands, or in some case millions of dollars, are in play, I'd think it's totally logical to just leave your team. The list of college pitchers abused during Omaha runs is long and legendary. Texas's Austin Wood, a closer, threw 169 pitches in 13 shutout innings of relief on one day's rest. While that performance took place in the weeks before the draft, a player's value is basically established at this point. Just the suggestion or fear of an injury after a performance like that is enough to considerably reduce a prospect's leverage i'm sure we won't see it happen and if it ever did

the player's makeup would be questioned endlessly that said even a throwaway risk reward analysis seems to point to the fact that this isn't a totally unreasonable suggestion your thoughts. So I... And it's also, not only could you ask why the player does it, but you also might ask why teams aren't more proactive in signing their players quickly and not allowing them to do it. Yeah. Because they also have great incentive. Yeah. So I sent this question, I sent Wes's email to a few scouting executive types with teams

because I was curious about what people who might actually be making these decisions might think. And I got a few responses. Two of them were sort of similar. One was kind of different and kind of interesting. So I will read them. The first two are kind of short. So first one is, I think it's a lot like the WBC. You risk injury and other stuff because of a sense of pride and obligation. You feel you owe it to the college, and if you are on scholarship, you have to fulfill the commitment you made. There is a lot of risk, but if you think about the few starts in the spectrum of a career, the probability

that something would happen at that time is very small. So that's one response. And I hadn't really thought of the scholarship angle. Yeah. I wonder if that's legally binding or if he just means that in a sense of living up to your obligations, you have an obligation. Yeah, I'm not sure how that works, not having gotten an athletic scholarship to college. Yeah, I don't know if you commit to pitch until you – well, I don't know. I mean, can you quit the team if you feel – I really don't know. I mean, can you quit the team if you feel good? I really don't know. If you didn't want to pitch, could you give them a prorated portion of your scholarship? Yeah, I mean, maybe.

I doubt it. I don't know. And I guess this is something you can really only do as – I mean, if you don't do it as a senior, then you're kind of killing your leverage, I guess, because you can't, I mean, you can't really go back to school after doing this. That's true. So you kind of either have to be a senior or you have to basically guarantee that you're

going to sign. I mean, it would kind of clue in the team that you're not going back to school. I don't know. How certain are we that you couldn't go back to your team if you did this in college? You don't think that a college would basically understand that you have this incredible financial incentive to have done this. They still would benefit. If you're the third best college pitcher in the country, they can probably take a lot of abuse from you if you promise to come back the next year or if you choose to come back the next year.

You'd still be a good pitcher for them the next year. I'm sure you wouldn't be popular with your teammates after having done this. But I guess your coach in your college might have an incentive. Yeah. If you were the fourth pitcher on the staff, that might matter. But if you were the superstar ace, I don't know how much it would matter. People tend to respect skill a lot. I don't know.

I just remember when I was a kid and you'd look around and you'd see – you would do something and you'd get made fun of for it and people would laugh. And then four days later, the most popular kid in school would do the exact same thing and everybody would be like, yeah, that was pretty cool. I mean, the best pitcher in college is kind of a cool guy. He's a real cool dude. Trendsetter. Yeah, exactly.

So he can probably get away with wearing his backpack on one shoulder instead of two. Okay, second response. It's easy to judge this in a vacuum and just say the kid should sign. These kids are kids. They're invested in the school, and they're pitching for an NCAA championship. You can't pull them off the field, and I'm not sure I'd want a kid who wanted to walk away from his team right now.

For the overwhelming majority of these kids, Omaha is by far their greatest baseball moment. Nothing you can do about the usage. It's frustrating to watch for sure." So that's interesting. I mean, so that's the makeup angle. And I kind of go back and forth on the makeup angle because yes, I would want a guy who wants to win whatever is at stake and wants to be a good teammate and

wants to finish what he started and all of those things. But I mean, I guess I'd also want a guy who is so dedicated to his pro career that he would sacrifice this college career. I mean, maybe it's sort of selfish, but a selfishness that would help the team that drafted him, maybe. I mean, that instinct for self-preservation or putting his pro career before anything else would, in a way, kind of speak well of him. Or you could look at it like that.

And then there's also that angle of these could be the most exciting couple weeks of the player's career. I mean, most players it doesn't work out in the minors, and if you're in the College World Series, that's something that's really exciting and probably the most exciting thing that you've done up to that point. So that, I guess, is a lot to walk away from. I think that the way it is now, where this is not a common thing that people do,

I think the answer for why players don't do it is probably fairly simple. It's that players don't do it. You would really be stepping out if you were the one guy who did it, and it'd be risky. It would look lousy. It would be the first time almost any baseball fan had heard of you, and it would be in a pretty lousy context. You'd have national columnists writing about how you represent everything that's wrong with the game, and

you don't want to be that guy. There's always going to be some young guy who represents have national columnists writing about how you represent everything that's wrong with the game. And you don't want to be that guy. I mean, there's always going to be some young guy who represents everything that's wrong with the game. And it's probably better if that's not the first impression that you make on people. And, you know, if for the same reason, it might actually backfire and it might look bad to your club, to the drafting club who, you know, probably have who probably have, they're baseball fans, a lot of them are probably played, some of them probably played in the College World Series, and they might not take so kindly to it because it's such a, sort of, you'd be an isolated case. Now, I think maybe the larger question is why haven't the interests involved in this, who all have incentives,

why haven't they worked out a solution yet? Why hasn't a solution happened organically? Why isn't the schedule slightly different maybe? Or I guess that's probably a weather thing. You can't start the baseball season that much earlier, so there's really no way to move the college season up. But, you know, maybe clubs and I guess I don't really know what the solution is, but I'm surprised that there hasn't developed one where maybe clubs and colleges talk before the draft

or just after the draft and set some pretty clear parameters. I mean, if this were a sort of threat that college players might do this, then the pro clubs, the pro organizations would have a lot more leverage to go to the college and say, hey, we want to see your guys stay with you. We want to see you make a long run, but we need some assurances from you. As it is, the fact that this doesn't happen gives them no leverage. So a pro team can't really go to the college and ask for this because what do they really have to bargain with?

So I don't know. I mean these guys are having conversations with the players they're going to draft in advance they're talking about numbers you know they're getting a sense of whether they're going to be signed you know maybe the answer is that in this due diligence you also talk to the coach of the college team and say hey you know what are your expectations? What limits would you put on this guy? What's your philosophy? Maybe that's all part of the scouting. I'm not really sure, but my guess is that, well, I was going to say my guess is that

within maybe a decade, there will be a solution, maybe one that we can't anticipate. But it's been a decade since the Rice draft of Neiman, Townsend, and Umber. And so it's not like this is either a new concern or, more importantly, a new public concern. I mean, that was talked about in fairly mainstream places. And so if a solution were going to be coming quickly, you would have thought that it would have happened since then. So I don't really know what is going to change. Okay, let me read this last response because it kind of touches on some of the things that you're saying. This one is a little longer. Okay, this one says, glad you asked. I have often felt like I'm taking crazy pills on this. I think it's 100% insane that these guys don't get shut down once they're

drafted. I think Wes hit on the key point that ups the insanity into impossible, greater than 100% insanity territory. The games taking place after the draft are the most important games of the college season, when literally the entire year is on the line. But it also explains why a pitcher won't shut himself down. The bonds developed over a season, or four seasons in some cases, are extremely strong, and no one wants to feel as if they are abandoning their teammates. That said, I'm very surprised, verging on shock, that neither an agent nor a club has effectively shut a player down yet. Admittedly, there is often a lag between when a player is drafted and when a player is signed.

The fear of not being signed or being signed for less because of refusal to play is certainly reasonable enough for a player to not shut himself down. The quintessential refrain among amateur scouts during in-home visits is, son, if you go play college ball, your coach will only care about your development for the four years at school, whereas if you sign with us, we will develop you to be a major league baseball player. This rings true for me, as evidenced by insane pitch counts and usage patterns that would never fly for even the most reckless pitch count-neglecting player development systems. Nolan Ryan's thoughts on pitch counts would be middle of the pack among college coaches, if not outright conservative.

I don't blame the coaches. They've got hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars on the line, and they don't reap any benefits once a player graduates beyond flaunting their record of developing players to high school recruits. So it's in their best interest to get every ounce they can out of their players in the limited time they have them. It's just insane that an agent or a club hasn't stepped in yet. So that's a little different.

Yeah. No, that all rings really true. I don't know that any... Again, because of the way that the customs are, I don't know that it's true that it's insane for any individual player, individual agent, or individual club not to act, but it's very

surprising that this remains the culture. It feels like the 30 teams with this great interest and all the power in the world in the sport would have taken some action by now. Yeah, so I guess people are split on this, and maybe there are some teams that would not count it as a strike against you and would be more eager to do it. So maybe we will see some pioneer college player shut it down after being drafted and be reviled, but set a trend that will become popular. I wonder what the reaction would be or will be if there's any sort of strict pitch count limitations on college baseball players. I wonder if, well, there of course is in the Little League World Series, and I just wonder how kind of offensive to our tastes it would be if those sorts of limits were put on college players. If it would really, I don't know, discredit the college game in some way if you treated these guys like children, and whether people would kind of find it tacky or what.

I mean, you could certainly see the case for why players who are not allowed to throw that many pitches at any level except for this one during a phase where their arm is arguably the most fragile shouldn't be allowed to be compelled, I guess, to throw that many pitches. But on the other hand, it seems like you wish the coaches would behave this way on their own. You wish that it didn't need to be policed because it's a group of players who are old enough that you would think that everybody would have some agency in the matter and be able to be responsible in the matter. I'm trying to think.

You don't have this issue in any significant way with college basketball, but maybe that's the nature of the game. It doesn't seem like, I guess it doesn't seem like you have the same thing with football, but I guess for different reasons. It seems like maybe the reason that this isn't an issue with football is because the pro game is so incredibly violent, and the pro is is the one that's um always under scrutiny for not protecting its players caring about its players treating their players like people rather than short-term commodities and also because the the game is is actually literally a lot less dangerous at the college level because the the size is so different maybe. So yeah, we're getting too close to four.

I would think that if you're a highly recruited high school player, you can almost kind of interview college coaches, right? I mean you could kind of exercise some agency before you make your decision about where you want to go. You can look at their usage histories and whether they've been in programs or guys who've pushed people too far in the past. And, and I guess you could, you could almost just make these people, uh, you know, compete to, to sign you by, or get a commitment from you by kind of getting a guarantee that you're going to be used in a

responsible way or setting some sort of ground rules, um, on how you're going to be used in a responsible way or setting some sort of ground rules on how you're going to be used. But I guess I don't know how many players are in that position or have that kind of leverage, and I'm sure some of them are just happy to be able to go anywhere and get a spot anywhere. Yeah, it'd be interesting to see if any of the coaches who have used their pitchers in the most kind of extreme ways or or who maybe the ones who have reputations for it at the college level uh if there's any uh recruiting back uh back backlash downside to them

if there's a if there's any kind of sort of free market solution to this my guess is not my guess is that most players aren't paying that much attention to it um but i mean certainly uh well i don't know maybe the answer is that well uh geez i don't know i mean i guess some players who are recruited uh and are also are drafted have uh advisors have a sort of an agent slash advisor at that point. So maybe it would come up in that context. I don't know. That might be the next round of emails to send out to the agents. Okay.

All right. First things first. I said that I was going to talk about advanced scouting. Yes. And I don't know if you knew this, but it's actually just advanced scouting. Yes, I did know that. And so that's your fun fact for the day. I wonder why.

That doesn't seem to be – It's in advance of the series that you're going to play with that team. Advanced scouting. Advanced – okay. So Tim Britton wrote a three-part series for the Providence Journal about the Red Sox advance scouting department. And I just wanted to mention it mainly because I really enjoyed it and I think that everybody should go read it. It's a good look at a part of the game that we don't talk about much. I think that when we talk about scouting, 90% of the time, probably more,

we're talking about the guys who are out looking in the cornfields for the next great player or are in minor leagues looking at projecting young players. And you don't really hear as much about the pro scouts who are in major league stadiums every night, behind home plate, on your camera. They're on your camera.

You are looking at a scout every single night, just about. You are looking at a scout doing his job, and you don't even know it. And it's a very interesting time for advanced scouting because there is probably, I don't know, maybe a billion times more data available to you and I right now than there would have been to any major league advanced scout even 15 years ago. And I'm not trying to exaggerate. I might be unintentionally exaggerating, but I'm not trying to exaggerate.

I mean, I think that's probably literally pretty close to true. And you wonder what the role of the advanced scout is in that culture. I always wonder why is that guy sitting there? What could he possibly hope to pick up that wouldn't be captured by the data? So it's interesting. It's an interesting piece. And so if I could just, I guess there's a lot of things that you could pull out of these pieces and say that that's the most important paragraph. But I think the most important paragraph from my perspective is that, well, I guess it's the idea that it's no longer about collecting data. So it's the idea that it's no longer about collecting data because the data is collected. As he writes, each team essentially starts at the same information baseline.

So it changes the nature of it to where it is not about collecting. It is much, much more about how concisely you can filter and narrow that down into one sentence because that's what a player can essentially handle. Ben Charrington says, we don't want to weigh the players down with more information than necessary. That was easy 30 years ago because there just wasn't much information. Now you can provide breakdowns of everything imaginable and it wouldn't be all that helpful to playing a game. So Tim notes that you're not really going to tell the guy this is how a pitcher changes from 0-2 to 1-2, even though you and I very likely might when we write a piece that is completely a topic that we might write about. maybe unless you're a savant at the plate, not helpful because partly it's overwhelming and probably partly because you're narrow slicing a bit too much. So Tim describes how the data has been accumulated, discussed, and distilled, gets passed down to the players in its most significant form. Enormous scouting reports can be whittled down to a single page

for a player's benefit. For a pitcher, it can be a single idea about each hitter. Quote, hits change-ups well. And that's fascinating to me, the idea that the data is growing so fast that it is becoming more and more useful. And yet, in a way, the role of the scout or the role of a coach is going back. In a weird way, it almost becomes more simplified. It turns him into a storyteller. He just goes back to the most primitive skill that a man could have, which is the idea to narrativize something, to make it significant, to teach somebody in a clear and concise and clearly communicated way, and basically just take the story of

what's happening in baseball and figure out a way to share that story with a player in a way that will resonate with him and to stay in his brain when he's up there and then basically to not screw him up. So I really liked this piece. I just want to recommend this piece. Yeah, I saw it and intended to read it and have not had a chance to yet. I definitely will and Tim is great. yet. I definitely will. And Tim is great. Where do the Red Sox fall on that spectrum of teams that do exclusively video advanced scouting and stat advanced scouting now and people who still send

guys out on the road? I guess they're not one of the video and stat scouting teams. Well, they do videos. They do video, they do data, and they have scouts on the road. I didn't know that anybody had quit sending scouts on the road. Yeah. I think it's several teams. I'm pretty sure the Rays are one of them. I vaguely feel like we might have actually talked about this. Yeah, I think we did talk about it.

So, yeah, there are some teams that have just done away with their advanced scouts. Well, the Red Sox, they do have an advanced scout who goes out for every— he's a week ahead of the Red Sox schedule. He attends games based on the starting pitcher, according to Tim, I'm quoting now, but he's looking for much more than that. He's examining holes in team defense, relievers who are slow to the plate catchers with bad pop times who's stealing bases and when and any weakness in an opponent the red sox can take advantage of when he finishes with the team he compiles an in-depth scouting report with notes on every player for hitters the report lists strengths

and weaknesses as well as suggestions for how to exploit the latter. The pitcher reports are more general with information such as a go-to out pitch and how he pitches ahead versus how he pitches behind. Yeah. When I was an intern, one of the jobs I did was taking handwritten advanced scouting notes that came in and just typing them into the system so that it would turn into these neat sheets that would be included in the binders that go into the dugouts so that people could go and look at them before a series or whatever. So I used to get these notes for every hitter in the upcoming series, and it would be the same sort of thing, strengths and weaknesses

and how you could get them out. And they were very, very detailed. And I always wondered, I didn't really have time to check on them, but I always wondered whether the stats would back up or contradict all these things that the advanced scouting notes said, because they would be very specific about how you could get a guy out. And he'll expand the zone, he'll chase a, you know, try a back foot slider when you're ahead in the count or whatever it would be like really specific about what pitch types he was vulnerable to or whether he would chase or not or you know

what the best way to get these guys out was and these were coming from people who had probably sat on this team for i don't know one series or two series or, you know, hadn't been following them all year and probably wasn't looking at a lot of stats before making these judgments. And I always wondered whether it was, I mean, I don't know whether there was a kind of a tendency to stretch or read too much into what they would see over the course of one game or two. Like if you saw a guy susceptible to something one time in one plate appearance, would you then say, well, that's how you get him out? Or I always wondered whether it would be more reliable to have a guy just kind of watching and jotting these things down than it would be to look at stats for, you know, a full season or multiple

seasons when you could really kind of, you could generate all of these same insights, really, and maybe they would be even more reliable. I guess the benefit of having someone in the stadium as opposed to just doing it on video is that, I mean, it's probably easier to read defense and positioning and that sort of thing that's not captured in the data and, or at least hasn't been up till now, but maybe it would be with field effects. But yeah, so I mean, the sort of things that you can't see on TV really where a guy is standing before the play and whether he gets a good break on the ball and takes a good route and and you can't really see those things and also you have a guy in the

ballpark maybe he's talking to people and sharing information and and i would get some kind of information about makeup or something i mean when you when you're approaching the trading deadline, you start sending out special assignment people to kind of gauge those makeup qualities and things that you can't tell from the stats. If you're thinking about trading for a guy, I don't know whether an advanced scout would do that sort of thing, too. I always wondered whether you could just kind of, I mean, it would be time intensive to have someone looking at the stats, but I guess it's also time intensive to have someone at the ballpark. And maybe you could write some sort of script or something like a more advanced version of the scout thing on game day that would tell you what a guy's vulnerabilities were. So I wonder if it's moving in that direction. It seems like some teams have moved in that direction, and I wonder whether that will continue. Yep. All right.

All right. So we'll be back with one more show tomorrow. Send us emails for next week at podcast at baseballperspectives.com.