Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 23: Benching Bryce Harper/Why We Were Wrong About the White Sox

Episode Date: August 17, 2012

Ben and Sam discuss the possibility that the Nationals might enter the playoffs without either Bryce Harper or Stephen Strasburg, then talk about how the White Sox have defied injuries yet again and proved the pre-season predictions wrong.

Good morning, and welcome to episode 23 of Effectively Wild, the Baseball Perspectives Daily Podcast in New York, New York. I am Ben Lindberg in Long Beach in his Honda Fit. It is Sam Miller. How are you, Sam? I'm good, Ben. How are you? I'm very well.

How are you, Sam? I'm good, Ben. How are you? I'm very well. And a lot of you listened to us yesterday, and not too many of you were mad that we didn't talk more about Felix, or at least not so mad that you told us about it. So tonight we have new topics, as we do every morning, except that sentence didn't make any sense temporarily.

What's your topic, Sam? We really probably should address between ourselves the issue of the night-day thing, whether we're going to stay consistent. You have the good morning, good evening, good evening. Well, I mean, when you post it, when you put it online, a lot of times it's nighttime for me because it's before midnight. It's only like 9.15 sometimes. So it's hard for me to get out of the uncomfortable fact that we are listened to at night. Yeah, I just switch between days freely within sentences sometimes. And we also have to decide whether we're going to say this is the Baseball Prospectus Daily Podcast or the Daily Baseball Prospectus Podcast.

That is a pressing issue that we've got to comment about today. Well, we'll schedule a meeting. My topic is Bryce Harper. All right. And I want to talk about the White Sox. The White Sox. Okay. I'll start. Okay. So everybody is, of course, quite agitated about the state of Steven Strasburg and whether he's going to reach his innings limit.

Well, he is clearly going to reach his inning limit, but whether the Nationals will hold firm to their plan and all of that. And it occurs to me that there, I mean, I don't know if there is, but I wonder if there might actually be a chance that Bryce Harper also is not playing in the postseason for Washington because he's just been so bad. And I wonder whether he needs to turn it around in order to assure himself a spot on the postseason roster. I mean they have outfielders and it could get to the point where Harper is like their fifth outfielder going into the postseason

to give you an idea of how bad he has been since the All-Star break as near as I can tell he has hit two baseballs past an outfielder and he is slugging to 44 that is bad.

He is still contributing in other ways, I suppose, in that he is good in the field, or at least our stats tell us that he is, and he is very good on the base paths for a team that is very bad base running-wise, as I wrote about yesterday. So that helps a bit. Yeah, so he's good in the field, and I'm not arguing.

This is just a question, but he's good in the field when he's in a corner, I assume? Yeah. I don't know how he is in center. I don't know how the metrics like him in center, but when he's in a corner, usually that means that Worth is in center or vice versa. And if he were to not be starting, then Bernardino would be in center. Right. I don't actually know this.

For all I know, Worth is always in the corner. Nowadays, I'm not sure. It would be Bernardino, though, who's getting the majority of the time if Harper were benched or left off the roster. Yeah, and then you've got Tyler Moore just chilling. That would be very surprising, I think, if the Nationals were a playoff team and neither one of those players was on the roster. That would be very strange in that they are sort of the faces of the franchise in a way.

Yes, it would be. So let me get this straight. You are saying it would be strange and we would comment on it. Are you also saying that you think that it is unlikely to be the case? Yeah, I guess I would say it's unlikely that both of them will be left off. Yeah, I think so too. I think probably Harper will be on the roster. I kind of think Strasburg will be, but I don't really know.

Yeah, there still seems to be a sense that until it actually happens and we see him shut down, that it can't possibly happen. Are people talking about him moving to the bullpen for the last 15 innings? Because that would extend him over two months. Yeah, I actually haven't heard that in his case at all. Man, Strasburg in the bullpen, I guess that would be what we talked about in one of our, I guess our first episode when we talked about Verlander in the bullpen and what that would look like. I guess

Strasburg in the bullpen would be the equivalent of that. It'd be tremendously fun. And that's the bullpen that could use, obviously any bullpen could use Strasburg in the bullpen, but they could. I read some stories yesterday that made it sound like Mike Rizzo is sort of the lone person in support of this plan. Wow. And that everyone has been sort of questioning him about it and that even like the story was about Strasburg's father asking Rizzo why he's doing this.

And according to Rizzo, he persuaded the father that it makes sense and they're both happy about it now. But according to the things I read, no one else in the organization really will admit to being behind the plan and Rizzo has said it's all his plan and all his decision. said it's all his plan and all his decision. And it seems almost sort of dogmatic in that he said something about how this decision was made five months ago and it's not going to change because it was made and they're not going to reevaluate it now.

Whereas things are much different than they were five months ago. Five months ago, the Nationals were not a first-place team. So... Look what we've done. We've taken Harper and we've talked about Strasburg anyway. Yeah. I'm fine with that. Yeah.

I really just... I don't actually... I don't think it's all that likely that Harper... I mean, I'm not suggesting that the Nationals are going to demote him. They could, and 19-year-olds are terrible at baseball as a rule. I just wanted to point out that they have options. Okay. So the White Sox won again last night.

last night. They hit five more home runs and they've hit some crazy number of home runs in the last bunch of games. They've hit something like 28 in their last, yeah, 28 in their last 13 games. And they have won 15 of their last 22 games. And they're now two and a half games ahead of the Tigers and the AL Central and they just seem to me to be almost year in and year out the most unpredictable team. We never seem to have a handle on what they're going to do. This March the BP staff predicted them to finish third behind the Indians and not far ahead of the Royals. And I think I probably didn't look at what I picked, but I think I probably said the same thing. And just the way that they've done it is, I mean, the Adam Dunn rebound from being awful, the Alex Rios rebound from being awful. Both of those guys were just as bad as you can be. And we didn't know whether to expect anything from them.

And they have both been about as good as they can be this year. And AJ Pruszynski is the best hitter on the team. And that is one of the strangest parts in that he is a 35-year-old catcher and it's very rare for a 35-year-old at any position to have a career year, let alone a catcher. And it's also very weird for even if he was a start as a catcher in his mid-20s, late-20s, early-30s,

nobody would have bet on him holding up to mid-30s. Catchers don't hold up. Yeah. He has 23 home runs for a guy whose previous career high was 18, seven years ago. He's slugging 550. Yeah. Every time I see that on a leaderboard or a website, I just do a double take. But I guess one of the big factors yet again is that they don't get hurt. of expect this run to come to an end. But almost every year they are either the lowest or one of the very lowest in terms of disabled list days or disabled list stints or percentage of payroll loss to injuries, however you want to account for that. When Jay Jaffe wrote about this, Per Sports Illustrated last week looking at the Red Sox injuries. The White Sox were, he didn't focus on it, but they were at the very bottom. So, I mean, the Red Sox have lost 40% of their payroll to injury. The White Sox have lost 5.5%, which is less than any team but the Marlins.

And it's just, I mean, at this point, I guess it should be predictable that they keep doing this. It's surprising to me that whatever it is that they're doing, I mean, it seems to me, I assume you agree that this is a real thing, that they can do this. They know how to keep players healthy or they know how to acquire players

who are likely to stay healthy. I guess I trust you. I mean, it seems to have been going on too long for this not to be a real thing. I mean, I think I wrote about it two years ago when it was already a long thing and now it's still happening. And their trainer, of course, is Herm Schneider,

who's been around for a very long time and came into the season in the best shape of his life, actually. And he is having yet another good season, if you can credit him for that. I mean, I guess I wonder whether it is that they can prevent injuries or whether they know how to acquire players who won't get hurt or regardless of which it is, how the secret hasn't gotten out somehow. This has been going on for several years at least and teams are, of course, very, very interested in being able to keep their players on the field. It seems strange to me that – I mean normally when you see some sort of competitive advantage, someone writes a bestseller about it.

It becomes a movie. Well, yeah, and I would think that with medicine and sports medicine, it would be even more so a difficult thing to keep secret because it's not the sort of thing it makes sense for fielding metric advancement to happen in the sport of baseball. But medicine and sports medicine and anything having to do with medicine is done by guys at Harvard and Carnegie Mellon and stuff. And so it seems particularly hard to believe that they have cracked some incredible code about human health and managed to keep it to themselves. Yeah. But I think if you looked at it, the odds that this is happening by chance over and over and over are very, very, very slim. It does surprise me. And I mean, the narrative surrounding the White Sox was so negative over the winter. I remember Brad Doolittle wrote a really nice article for BP, sort of contrasting the, I guess, the front offices and the futures and the directions of the White Sox and Cubs. He went to both teams' fan fest events over the winter, and the White Sox event was

just sort of depressing the way he described it. They had really no minor league system, and Kenny Williams, people asked him what his plan was and he was just kind of like, well, we'll just hope things go well. Or he said something very, something that didn't inspire a lot of confidence and didn't sound like he really had a plan other than hoping things would, would break right, which they have. And of course, contrasted with the Cubs who just remade remade their front office and said all the right things this winter. And I guess not that things have gone any worse for them than expected.

They were expected to be bad. But I guess I just wanted to atone for my doubting the White Sox yet again and resolve not to do that in the future. Well, we've got you on record. Okay, so that is our show. We are done for the week

and we will be back on Monday with episode 24. Have a nice weekend.