Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 228: Matt Harvey and Clubhouse Hazing/Albert Pujols at Present/Underrated Slash Line Stars

Episode Date: June 20, 2013

Ben and Sam discuss Matt Harvey’s response to hazing, Albert Pujols’ recent resurgence, and players we’re underrating because of the run environment.

Love stars, road stars, all stars, road stars. Good morning and welcome to episode 228 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectus. I am Ben Lindberg, joined by Sam Miller. by Sam Miller. We spoke in one of our meta commentaries on the podcast at some point recently about how we've spoken about so many topics that everything reminds us of a topic. And I had one of those moments when I read the story about Matt Harvey and John Roche. Did you read that story? No. It was in a Jeff Passon column the other day. I'll read it. It's Harvey bounded up and challenged. Oh, okay. This is not, I shouldn't have started there. Basically, Roche tried to. This is Roche, the six foot 11 reliever.

Roche tried to... This is Roche, the 6'11 reliever? So I never pronounced that Roche. I think it's Roche. And I always would have pronounced it Roush. And yet I'm looking at baseball reference, and it seems to suggest it might be Roche. No way. Huh. Yeah, it does sort of suggest that.

Okay, I'm going to just avoid saying his name anymore um so that tall really his middle name is no his middle name actually incidentally is not any easier it's eric eric with an h is it so do you think it's eric or eric or erish or er er er erish erish i think it's eric and the h is silent but that that is one of the syllables. But he's got a CH. He's got a CH. I mean, he's already established the CH as shh in his family history. That's true. Okay, so he tried to haze Harvey in the Mets clubhouse.

This was last season, by throwing a bucket of ice water onto Harvey. And then Passon writes, Harvey bounded up and challenged Roche to a fight. Right there, right then. He gave up seven inches, about 75 pounds, and a gallon or so of bad ink. It didn't matter that he was a rookie. Harvey would not be a joke. He would not be a punchline in Roche's retelling. He would not let some mediocre clown play him. Roche backed away. And I wondered whether you think this would be interpreted differently if it were some other player? Is it that Matt Harvey is a top prospect and a big part of the Mets' future and a good pitcher as a rookie even. Is that why we interpret this as him standing up for himself and a positive thing about him?

Or if he were a worse player or a less promising player, would we put him in the jordani valespin category of someone who can't get along in the clubhouse or doesn't accept the hazing that he should accept or was this hazing just kind of over the line for hazing uh well i don't think the fact that he's a star is what would give him the leeway on this. I think that, in fact, these sort of hazing rituals are more targeted toward the star. I think that's primarily what veterans respond to is players who think they're good too young. too young and uh i i would imagine that to be honest uh players don't care that much about what the non-star young players think of themselves because they're you know not they're not they don't take up a big part of uh anybody's attention uh so i don't know why i don't know star young player i think that you know what i'll i think that, well, yeah, no, Valdespan is clearly not liked.

I mean, it just... So they care. Well, I mean, my suspicion is that Valdespan is just not a guy that they like. They're around him a lot and they don't like him. And Harvey, for some reason, probably is a more likable guy. I don't know either of these people. I don't know what either one of them is like. But my suspicion is that well before Val Despin did any pimping, home run pimping, he was not liked.

And well before Matt Harvey challenged John Rausch to a fight, he had some admirers in the clubhouse. I also, I don't know, this might be addressed in the story, but I wouldn't be surprised if we, not we, you and I, but we, the greater public, responded differently to this story if we had known about it that day, if it felt fresh, if it felt like there was a little bit of oxygen left for that fire. It might have been a little bit of a controversy for three days and Harvey might have had to live it down a bit in public. But since it's old news and he has

obviously managed to succeed since then, we don't really have to worry too much about it. The next paragraph is, From that day forth, everyone who witnessed the incident or heard about it understood a new Met's commandment, Thou shalt not trifle with Matt Harvey. And they gleaned something that they may not have understood at the time, but certainly will going forward. If he can stand up against the big, bad Leviathan

and turn into the Alpha Dog just like that, so can the team that for the last five years has been nothing but joke after punchline after clown b it's also possible that roush is not liked in the clubhouse yes that is possible uh and it's also possible that i don't find this particularly admirable behavior by harvey so uh if if it matters to him which i sure hope it doesn't my opinion of him dropped by like a percentage and a half. Yeah, it's hard to say where the line between where you lose respect for someone for not standing up for himself or you lose respect for standing up for himself too much and not just going along with the teasing.

Well, yeah, I'm fine with him standing up for himself. I don't know why I'm talking. I mean, nobody cares what I think, but to me, adults fighting is weird, and challenging people to fights is super-duper weird. I think if you're in a fight that happens without a challenge, maybe you can be like, whoa, wow, emotions really got a hold of us.

But the challenge itself is just like, feels very, very eighth grade to me. Okay, my topic is a cop-out. I'm basically just going to ask you about Albert Pujols. Okay, and I'm going to talk about the current offensive environment, I guess. Okay. So my thing, I read a quote from Pujols who said,

I feel right now like my old me, like when I was in St. Louis. He admitted that he never felt that good last season. He said there were some streaks here and there that I hit, but I was battling. I never got to a point where I could say, holy cow, that's my bat speed. And he has hit better very recently. Just in June, he has hit 313, 385, 567 with four home runs. And I guess even better than that even more recently um and i guess he had

months that were as good or better than that last season certainly uh but he seems to feel like this is different and he looks different and feels different and you were doing a series earlier this year where you were writing about Albert Pujols playing through pain and running painfully and slowly to first base, which you then suspended once it seemed like he wasn't running as slowly and painfully anymore. So I wonder how that's evolved and what you've noticed, if anything, as someone who was at the Angels game yesterday?

Well, it's interesting because for a while I was not focusing on a connection between his leg and his hitting because the Angels didn't seem to be drawing that connection. And I sort of, I didn't want to force a narrative on something that wasn't there and then there was a pretty clear shift sometime in in may where i think it was may where they acknowledged that uh it was it was absolutely affecting his swing that he puts a lot of weight on his front leg he really spins on that front leg especially on inside pitches and uh that uh because of that he wasn't getting any drive and um so he i would say that he is uh clearly and so anyway so after that i i started to wonder you know how strong the correlation was between the

the days that he felt good running and that you could identify him running well and his offense. And I never did put the two variables together and see if there was anything there. I mean, he's still slow, but he doesn't make you cringe quite so much. There are occasional days where he doesn't seem to be able to run like normal, but basically now he's a big, slow guy, not quite the crippled guy that he was. I don't know. To be honest, I mean, he has hit better in the last month, but I don't sense a, you know, I don't sense, you know, I don't sense, I personally don't sense that

he's a guy you can't get out. He still seems, you know, he still seems to be certainly less threatening than he was in his prime. And I think in particular, it seems to me that on low pitches, he has a little bit of trouble getting down after them and hitting them with authority. So I don't know if I had to guess. I would probably say that he is a top 20 hitter, certainly. Well, maybe not certainly, but I would say he's a top 20 hitter, and he might be a top 10 hitter.

But I would take, if you offered me a bet, that if you wanted to bet that he's going to be a top 10 hitter from this point forward the rest of the season, I think Pakoda would back you, and I think I would oppose you. I would take that bet. Yeah, it's interesting, because he had three months last season where he had a higher OPS than he does this month. June, July, and August, he hit better than he has this June.

But I guess it means something that he thinks this is different somehow. Well, it would mean maybe. It might mean something if he thinks it's different. It probably means nothing if he says it's different. Yes. I would guess that it's not that hard to find. I mean, there's quotes of Josh Hamilton talking about how he's coming out of it. There's quotes from Josh Hamilton's teammates talking about how he's coming out of it. There's quotes from Josh Hamilton's teammates talking about how he's coming out of it,

scattered throughout the last six weeks. I mean, put two good swings together and people will talk about it. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've heard Angels announcers talk about how he's coming out of it, how you can really see. You should see his batting practice. Oh, he's hitting hard outs. He'll put a good swing on a ball, and oh, well, when you see him doing that, Oh, he's hitting hard outs. Right. When you see, you know, he'll put, he'll put a good swing on a ball and oh, well, when you see him doing that, you know,

he's out of it. I wish we could, I wish we could track those just league wide somehow. You, you could, it's really super duper easy to track them if you identify one player and focus on it. I remember, um, I remember doing this with Scott Casimir where over the course of 13 months, Scott Casimir had 35 starts and 24 of them were bad. And yet I found 19 instances, separate instances of Mike Socha saying he's just one adjustment away, and it was always a different adjustment. So, I mean, I don't think that they're lying in this case. I think that there's a strong incentive to believe the best about yourself and to believe

the best about the players you're around. So I think that they, I mean, this is the reason they're better than us, is that they skew toward the optimistic, while you and I, pathetic sacks of sadness, skew toward the tragic. So, I mean, this is why you, you know, even if you and I had the skill to hit, we would completely melt in four seconds. Although if we had that skill, maybe we would be more positive people. Oh, I don't think we would. You do have that skill in other avenues of life. And yet, you constantly doubt yourself in all facets. I'm not Albert Pujols in anything. Well, you're the Albert albert pools of being you yes okay all right your topic all right so uh bill barnwell um spectacular uh grantland writer um of football

and occasionally baseball uh once in a while, asked me a question last night, which fits the parameters of this show, although I'm not going to dwell too much on it. It's a jumping off point. But he asked me what would be the most boring slash line for a 2013 player. He was thinking 253, 317, 422. Do you have a number in mind by the way a slash line the most boring slash line

did he have a rationale for that or just I mean well I think that having I mean when you're talking about the most boring of something the rationale is to exclude other things you would just want someone who's probably below

average in everything but not so far below average that it's interesting that he's that bad? Exactly. Right. That's exactly right. So this is where this is going. The thing about 253, 317, 422 is that it looks below average. It looks like a bad line and for most of our lifetimes it would have been a below average line. But essentially it's average right now. I think it's actually slightly better than average. It looks like a bad line. And for most of our lifetimes, it would have been a below average line, but it's essentially it's average right now. I think it's actually slightly better than

average. Um, and this is something that I'm not sure that everybody has completely adjusted to, even though we know offense is down, we still have certain slash lines that we're used to being good and that are, we're used to being bad. I remember about a year ago, RJ telling me that Jason Kipnis had secretly become a superstar, but nobody noticed because he had a 315 OBP. And we had not gotten used to the fact that 315 is the league average OBP. We're still used to 335. And so I recommended, for various reasons, I recommended a slightly lower line. But you can't get too low because the problem is that once you get below 700, then it starts to look terrible.

So I suggest a little higher batting average, a little lower on base, and less slugging. But I wanted to know if there are any players that you think are uh secret superstars or maybe that's that probably oversells it but secretly playing like stars but nobody notices because we're not used to uh you know we're not used to we're still not quite mentally adjusted to this um i just sent you a list by the way a play index list of list sorted by OPS Plus, if that helps. So you might want to scan that while I keep talking. But I wonder specifically whether because slash lines are something that most of us have only used as a way of kind of a shorthand evaluating a player for a few years, like since about 2000 or so.

That's basically when I remember the slash line coming up. And so for the first eight to 10 years of slash lines, 300, 400, 500 was basically your standard. That was the equivalent of a 330, 100 hitter. And we don't have 25 or 30 years of slash line experience where we sort of are used to the swings um so um i'm not sure we've all mentally adjusted so uh you can look at that list but i have a couple of players uh and i don't want to suggest necessarily that that these guys are superstars but that they are playing that they are hitting better than um uh sorry what was i saying uh that they are hitting better than yes they're hitting better than people

all right so first one is kyle seager yeah okay that's a good one so kyle seager i just don't like i i feel like kyle seager is a guy who might not get drafted in a 12-team league right now. He has the same OPS plus that Andrew Jones had the year that Andrew Jones hit 41 homers and finished 11th in MVP voting. He has the same OPS plus as Andres Galarraga, the year that Galarraga led the league in home runs, RBIs, and finished sixth in MVP voting. And he's a third baseman who has the same OPS plus as basically Aramis Ramirez's peak years, when Ramirez had an OPS in the 900s. And when you think of him as like a mid-ballot MVP guy, that's what Kyle Seager has hit like this year. what Kyle Seager has hit like this year. So I think this is made, Kyle Seager might be,

Jason Kipnis is, uh, is a, is a good example that I'm glad RJ planted that in my head, but Kipnis was a top prospect and I feel like, uh, yeah, that's, that's part of it with Seager, right? Is that he, he wasn't expected to be that great and he's a young player still, and word is still getting out and he's a mariner um so it's it's all that stuff in addition to the the run environment yeah in addition to the running yes so then uh brandon crawford same ops plus as ryan howard the year that howard finished second in mvp voting uh and of course i don't think anybody's thinking of Brandon Crawford as being a great hitter this year, although probably you shouldn't have thought of Ryan Howard as being a great hitter that year. But still, it's a nice juxtaposition.

Marco Scudero has the same OPS plus as Paul Molitor, the year Molitor finished second in MVP voting as a DH, as Craig Biggio during the three seasons that are going to get him into the Hall of Fame, basically 95, 97, 98, I think, when he was a top-10 MVP candidate every year. Same OPS plus as Scudero. And Sean Green, the year Sean Green won the Silver Slugger as a right fielder. And I think everybody sort of is aware that Marco Scudero has hit well. He's been on fire and all that. uh he's hit like crazy well he's it's just you don't notice because it's like an 8 10 ops or whatever uh and uh matt joyce is basically having juan gonzalez mvp season

right now uh howie kendrick is has a better ops plus than justin morneau's mvp season or runner-up season and probably uh and i i might i might have used all the ones that you could possibly name so sorry but the i think the most the the probably the standout example in the genre is everett cabrera so everett cabrera has an ops plus of 130 so since 95 1995 33 players have had that exact ops plus and the medium the median player who had that ops plus hit 27 homers drove in exactly 100 batted 292 370 on base 510 slugging. So almost the perfect 30, 100, 300 hitter, and almost the perfect 300, 400, 500 hitter. And so Cabrera, you know, quietly,

I mean, everybody's probably aware that he's stealing the bases and all that, but quietly is basically playing at that level, and he's doing it with, you know, a-10 slugging percentage and four home runs. So, yeah, it's a different world, and we have to adjust accordingly. Yeah, and my conception of Cabrera is still that he is an awful hitter. I guess because of my first real awareness of him, or I guess that one season where he just didn't hit at all. real awareness of him or I guess that one season where he just didn't hit at all um looking yeah he hit 208 279 278 uh and 241 plate appearances and I guess I just kind of uh I don't know I

wrote him off at that point and so I've probably been underrating him since because he was pretty good last year. Not really in the same way, but as a good defensive shortstop who steals a lot of bases and kind of got on base, he was fairly valuable, I guess, even though he didn't really have any power. I haven't looked to see. Is he just a high-bad at guy this year or something? Let's see. His isolated power is up 30 points. His walk rate is up a little bit.

So there's a lot of BABIP in there, but not all BABIP. Let me see. His career BABIP is 328. This year it's 365. Well, I guess, I don't know. I don't know if these are as good, but I guess my own bias is probably against low OBP guys who have good power, probably.

I guess I look at the OBP first and then kind of revise my opinion downward even before I look at the slugging or the extra base hits and stuff. So I guess maybe Colby Rasmus might fit that group for me, in that he has a 319 on base percentage and kind of coming off being a disappointing player, and I kind of had grown to accept the idea that he was going to be a disappointing player, and he's slugging 474 with a 250 batting average and 13 home runs, which is good.

And then I guess I had a conversation with Jason Wojcicki the other day about Ioannis Cespedes because I wrote something in an article about how he wasn't having a sophomore slump and Jason thought I was being too generous saying that. But then kind of in the course of the, came around to the idea that even though he has not a very aesthetically pleasing slash line, 232 average, 296 OBP, the 465 slugging in this run environment and also in Oakland is pretty impressive to the point that he wouldn't really describe it as a slump although i mean it is it is a slump compared to what he did last year but but it's not not as bad as you would think looking at the average in obp yeah i think cesspit is a is a great example of a guy who uh who feels like a huge disappointment because when you look at that slash line and then you look at it adjusted for context,

and he's actually been just some disappointment, but still a very good hitter. I mean, a guy that would fit in every lineup. Yeah, it is hard to shake those baselines. I guess I kind of grew up in the high offense era and I feel like 330 OBP is just like, okay, it's average. It will always be average. And so I'm used – I'm aware that there are – I sort of have internalized the idea that, like, for instance, Will Clark was a superstar when he was hitting 29 home runs because that led the league. So even though I know that 3,100, 300 was the classic great line, I was aware that there were years where that was much lower would be very good. Like I remember that the Cardinals had a season where 13 homers led the league

or led their team in home runs. And so I can adjust for that. My brain very easily adjusts for that. But I never had a slash line era this low. Yeah. All right. One more show tomorrow. Send us emails at podcast at baseball prospectus.com.