Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 230: Deceptive Strikeout-to-Walk Ratios/Picking the Perfect Run Environment

Episode Date: June 24, 2013

Ben and Sam talk about pitchers who are struggling despite lofty strikeout-to-walk ratios, then pick the perfect run environment.

I don't know. To me, the flip's not that hard. I think flips are overrated. I mean, you know, when you were cleaning your room when you were a kid and you had to throw socks into the laundry basket, you could do some pretty incredible things. Good morning and welcome to episode 230 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus. I am Ben Lindberg, joined by Sam Miller. How was your weekend? I am Ben Lindberg, joined by Sam Miller. How was your weekend? It was okay, except for that Victor Martinez flip, which bumped me out.

We just had a 10-minute conversation about whether Victor Martinez's flip from Sunday night was impressive or not. I maintain that it was fairly impressive. Sam's not impressed. Oh, I have a couple quick updates before we get to our topics. One is that Munanori Kawasaki had a home run on Friday night, as many people notified

me on Twitter. That was very exciting. Wasn't barely over the wall either. Got over by a little bit. So that was good. Now we know for sure that he can do that. And I guess I'm... That makes you not want to see him in the derby anymore.

I would still want to see him, but I'm less eager to see him, yeah. So now who takes... Ben Revere? Yeah, Ben Revere was a candidate for my original. So I guess he'll just start with Juan Pierre or something. No JB Shuck for you? Maybe. I didn't convince you with my stirring piece about JB Shuck and Reggie Willits.

I liked it. Maybe. Maybe. He's a candidate. And then the other update is, did you see the Diamondbacks' new post-game celebration for walk-offs? Oh, no. It's not liquid based it is uh it's a bucket of bubble gum that they oh interesting not just just uh wrapped up yeah wrapped up just one of those like you see sitting in the dugout just a huge double bubble container with many pieces of double bubble in it and oh ben i've just thought of the best i've thought of the best one okay uh two two 50

gallon bins of grass shavings of like of like lawnmower clippings you know like when they mow the lawn before the game save it save. Save it. So good, Ben. They would get rashes. Those people would get rashes from all that grass on them. I like the cut grass smell. It's one of my favorites. The gum one, I'm not that into. I like the idea of having a thing that mimics liquid.

Visually, it's not very impressive. I guess the cleanup is... The buckets are small. The cleanup is easier. The buckets aren't big. It's a very brief shower of pieces of gum, and then it's over. How about a sack of chicken feet? Yeah, I guess I like the idea of moving to a solid. But I don't know about the bubble gum.

Yeah, like a solid that has some of the pourability of a bubble gum. Yeah, it's kind of amorphous solid. Thank you to everyone who rated and reviewed us over the weekend. Quite a few of you actually did after my plea on Friday. So thanks for that. I think my favorite... Sprinklers, Ben. Sprinklers. Get the grounds crew to turn on the sprinklers. And there's no escape

yeah that's true my favorite review said that the podcast is better than a pink starburst high praise wow that is a very solid compliment I thank that person

that's great okay what is your topic? Strikeouts to walks. Okay. Mine is, I guess, a philosophical question about run environment. Okay. Why don't I go first? So as we are discussing this, oh, Nick Tepes has just lost his no-hitter against the Cardinals. And I was watching the 0-0 game and actually find the interesting line to be on the other side. Adam Wainwright has five strikeouts and no walks. And Adam Wainwright currently, for the season, has 105 strikeouts and nine walks. And Adam Wainwright currently, for the season, has 105 strikeouts and nine walks,

which is absurd. It is on pace to be the best season ever for a starter, but that's not where I want to go with this. We've talked about the increase in strikeouts on this show. I don't think we've talked about, though, that this seems to be the era of the strikeout-to-walk ratio. And this year in particular has absolutely gone completely off the deep end.

And I'm going to regale you with fun facts now if you have a minute. Okay, so Joe Blanton's last nine starts, 60 strikeouts, four unintentional walks. So 15 to 1 ratio. Aaron Horang, who is terrible, 59 strikeouts, 11 walks. Dan Heron, five strikeouts per walk, ERA of 6.1. Yes.

He is almost two runs higher. His ERA is almost two runs higher than the next worst ERA ever by a pitcher with a 5 to 1 ratio. Edward Mujica, 27-to-1. Michael Roth of the Angels, 14 strikeouts, 3 walks, ERA of 9. The top, let's see, well, okay, so those are all, okay, so one more from this year. Of the top 150 strikeout-to-walk ratio seasons of all time, 23 of them are this year. One in six is this year. 46 of them from the past four seasons, so a third.

And going back a few more years for a little bit more context, the highest career rate of anybody who retired before 2007 is Rick Reed at 3.41. Again, that's the record through 2007. That's the all-time record. Lower than the Tigers this year as a team. The top seven career rates in history are all currently active. And the only, well, and, yes, okay, so I'm going to basically, that's where I'm going to stop. Tom Lane, I'll do one more because Tom Lane, as you know, is a favorite of mine. Tom Lane, 29 strikeouts, three walks in his career.

Tom Lane, most notable for being 28, a rookie, and having virtually nothing to speak to him except for his strikeout-to-walk ratio. He did not even start the season in the Padres' bullpen, despite last year having some... I forget what I wrote. He had the second-best FIP in baseball. Yeah, and he was mediocre again in the minors this year, right? Before he was called up?

I think so. I didn't even notice that. Not so great so but yeah so there's two stories here one is that the the best strike out to walk ratio guys like adam wainwright are doing things that have never been done the other is that uh that there are are uh this extraordinary number of players who are able to do strikeout to walk ratios like never before while still being terrible uh blanton harangue and heron being the best examples um and uh it's it's interesting and so i i just i bring it up because there's uh when when when people start

talking about the strikeout rates in baseball, it often becomes a sort of an aesthetic debate between people who like it and people who just say it's natural and it's where it's going and people who think that it makes the game boring and that it's a threat to the game and that it might be too extreme. Even people who are kind of in the middle are saying it might be too extreme. It might be kind of a threat to the enjoyability of the game. Nobody's really talking about this part, which is, I guess we would call it the FIP era. And yet, it's arguably as extreme. It's a combination where we have by far the highest strikeout rates in history, and right now we're seeing the lowest walk rate in the majors since

1968 and only four years in history since the dead ball era have a lower walk rate than this and they were all in the sort of 60s dead ball era 63 64 66 68 so essentially eliminating the high mound era, there's never been a walk rate this low or a strikeout rate this low. And unlike the strikeout revolution or whatever you want to call it, there isn't really an aesthetic argument against walks. I mean, nobody likes walks for the most part. Nobody likes walks for the most part. Stat heads like players who walk, and they like taking advantage of the walk and not undervaluing it. But walks aren't interesting.

They're virtually always kind of boring. They take a long time, and they're a slow way to watch offense develop. I get some enjoyment out of watching a really disciplined hitter who just won't swing at a pitch outside the strike zone and takes a walk maybe after. Yeah, that's different, though. You like to see the skill of a player who controls the strike zone.

But, I mean, if a team's offense comes primarily from walks, don't you? I don't enjoy actually seeing him walk down to first base. I enjoy the lead up to that. I guess. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I don't know. I don't really know how to answer that. We're getting into strangely subjective territory.

But I don't think anybody is really arguing that the lack of walks is a threat to baseball or baseball's entertainment value. Is that fair? Is that a fair thing to say? So I guess my question for you is, why do you think it is that all of a sudden bad pitchers are able to do this in such an extreme way without actually getting better. And do you think that it needs to – I mean, are we getting to a point where we have to seriously reconsider the predictive value of FIP if it's sort of so easily manipulated by guys who are just completely intent. I mean, I guess it's weird to me that Blanton can both strike out more batters, walk fewer batters, and still get worse.

I mean, you would think that there would be a correlation between your ability to get guys out and your ability to strike guys out and your ability to avoid walks. And yet those two things seem to almost exist. And if you want them to they seem to exist in this completely separate part of the field and you can like go you know pick those off without actually you know being any better at the other parts of pitching it it's very odd it's feeling very odd these guys that we're talking about are struggling primarily because they're giving up a

ton of home runs right or at least i mean heron is blanton is uh they're giving up a ton of home runs, right? Or at least, I mean, Heron is, Blanton is. They're giving up two home runs for nine innings or something. Home runs and hits, yeah. Wainwright just struck out another. So I don't know whether, I don't know, I mean, I haven't looked at the stats to see if pitchers are actually throwing more pitches inside the strike zone than they were a few years ago. I assume that they are, I guess, because there's, I don't know.

I mean, there's certainly a perception that there's less power and guys can kind of pound the zone more and not be as afraid of the consequences. Guys can kind of pound the zone more and not be as afraid of the consequences. And if you do that, then you'll maybe end up with more, I mean, certainly fewer walks and maybe more strikeouts. Because I think the rise is in called strikeouts, isn't it? I think primarily. At least the last time I checked, I think that made up a big part of the game Was called strikeouts So you'd expect to see I mean if pitchers are throwing more pitches

Inside the strike zone You'd expect to see all of those things I guess more strikeouts and fewer walks And more home runs And more hits presumably So is the The i mean the league babbitt is not higher though no well it's higher than i think it's higher than it was at certain points in history but it has not gone it's it's gone it's held basically steady for the last

you know few years um i mean scoring is is. So it's whatever they're doing is working to some extent. Right. I mean, it's not completely not translating to, to better run prevention. Um, so I mean the, the higher strikeout toto-walk ratios are in some way still correlated or still associated with preventing runs, right? It's not completely divorced from it. No, no, you're right. I mean, it's definitely – I think it still remains, generally speaking, the key to pitching, right? That ratio, I would say that that ratio still tells you more than any other single factor. I mean, you could put more data and be better, but if you basically had one number that you could choose from the back of a baseball card, those

are the first things you'd look at. Strikeouts, walks, innings. And you would sense, you would intuit from that whether they were good or not. And I think you would mostly do a good job. But I don't know. I mean, it seems like, and this might be like what we were talking about with the slash lines, where this is basically a stat that I did not look at until 12 years ago these are these are numbers i didn't look at i mean i knew if a guy struck out a lot of batters um but and i knew if a guy walked a lot of batters but i didn't really use and then and then you know 2003 comes along and for like six years that was the primary thing i would look at the first thing

i would look at for a pitcher's performance and so so it might just be that it's like scale shock where I don't quite know how to adjust for a different scale. I was thinking about this with Zach Granke though, because Granke is a guy who's, you know, he signed this huge contract and Tim Marshman put it very well. I believe when the Dodgers signed the contract, he said something like the Dodgers just gave $150 million to a guy based on a theory. And that theory is that FIP is more predictive than ERA, and that Zach Greinke's excellent FIPs of the previous few years. I'm probably badly misstating what Tim Marchman said, so I apologize. Whatever he said was smart. Whereas Granke had been an extremely average pitcher for the previous three years by runs.

And so that was kind of the gist of the transaction analysis. And so Zach Granke's ERA at the moment is exactly what it was for the previous three years. And obviously that doesn't mean anything. That could be confirmation bias. It's still early in the season. But it makes you wonder whether there's this, I don't know whether there's kind of a correction coming in the way we evaluate pitchers, but that some of the more stat-friendly teams that have embraced FIP wisely are going to be exposed on some of these guys. And FIP is a big deal for, well, strikeout and walk ratios are a big deal for Jerry DiPoto. And he got stuck with Tommy Hansen and Joe

Blanton this year. So it's way too early to say that's true, but you wonder whether it's going to be... I guess I kind of wonder if maybe in three years, there's going to be so many exceptions to FIP evaluation, like maybe 15% or 20% of pitchers we're just going to consider unevaluable by FIP, that it basically becomes really hard to use FIP without getting all these false positives. Yeah, I would have to think about that more. I mean, there's a league constant to it, right,

that changes from season to season with that? Yeah, there is. I don't have any idea what the constant represents. Yeah, I don't know. I'd have to think about that. But you're right about definitely having to adjust my gauge of what is good. That seems to definitely have changed. I guess my topic is sort of related to yours. It was inspired by a couple recent stories about the run environment in non-major league leagues,

Japanese professional baseball and NCAA college baseball. And in both of those games, there's been a major adjustment in the run environment just in the last couple years. And in the run environment just in the last couple of years. And it kind of has, has completely yo-yoed where it was believed to be too far to one end of the spectrum a few years ago. And then there was an adjustment made and now it's, have we gone too far and have we adjusted it too much? Um, so the, the Japanese story, uh, that was this kind of weird scandal where they changed to a livelier ball, but the commissioner didn't admit it and said he wasn't aware of it. And it's just kind of a weird story. But so I'll just read from this time story. from this time story.

Okay, so the league secretly made its official ball livelier during the offseason essentially because the previous version introduced in 2011 led to an alarming drop in home runs. The new ball worked only too well. Check swing hits have flown out of parks, and formerly light-hitting batters are having career seasons. Through mid-June, home runs had jumped more than 40%. And so the increase didn't go unnoticed. The players' union argued that pitchers could be hurt

because they signed contracts based on their previous year's stats, et cetera, et cetera. And the story in college baseball is sort of similar, And the story in college baseball is sort of similar, where now offense is way down. So I guess it's kind of the opposite story. But it's so since the height of the so-called Gorilla Ball era in 1998, when Louisiana State crushed eight home runs in its College World Series opener, and Southern California and Arizona State combined for eight in the final, the NCAA placed multiple restrictions on aluminum bats. It reduced barrel size, banned composite bats,

and adopted a new standard to address concerns about pitcher safety, out-of-control scoring, and lengthy game times. College teams averaged 6.98 runs and 0.94 home runs a game in 2010 before the new standard was adopted and as of march 31st of this season that had dropped to five and a quarter runs and 0.37 homers uh so that's like a third as many home runs being hit 0.37 homers per team or per game uh per it says it says a game college college teams average 6.98 so i think it's per team per game yeah uh yeah and teams are averaging twice as many sacrifices as home runs team batting fell to 270 which if it stands will be the lowest since 1973 the last year collegian swung wooden bats uh and apparently this this year's college world series has been a bunting extravaganza uh 12 games through friday night with 21 sacrifices

and three home runs so uh i am wondering whether whether it has to be this way where we over correct to one run environment and swing all the way back to the other end of the spectrum and then decide that that's too extreme and go back too much do you think that um i guess i have like three questions is there in major league baseball is there an era that you would pick that you would want? If baseball were always going to be the same run environment, is there a particular one that you would want? And is there a particular one that you think would appeal to the most people, not just you, but all fans? And then I guess the final question is, would you even want to pick one?

And then I guess the final question is, would you even want to pick one? Or do you think we need the variety and the kind of just going from one extreme to another to keep things interesting? Those are good questions. I really like the run environment that we have right now. Yeah, I was going to say that too. It feels like a good middle ground right now. Yeah, and I feel like it's producing really interesting stat lines on both sides. Yeah, it's fun. I mean, we've mentioned, and I expected we might mention it during my topic, but we didn't,

that my fear whenever pitching, you know, whenever people talk about strikeouts is just, does it get to the point where a two-run lead in the third inning feels insurmountable? Does it become soccer? And we're not near that. And I feel like, personally, fewer runs per game is generally better as long as you don't get to that point. And it's not anywhere near that point. I mean, I watched a team come back from 6-3 in the ninth today and then score four in the tenth and then give up three in the bottom of the tenth. And so there's clearly a lot of in-game fluctuation. And I personally really like the aesthetic of the game right now.

I'm a huge fan of strikeouts. And I think that right now we're in a place where I personally think that defense is better than it's ever been. And you don't quite see that because batters are hitting the ball harder than they ever have. And so the BABIP has kind of nicely stayed just about where it always is. And yet you see more, I think you see more good plays and more great plays than you ever did before. And I personally am not a huge fan of the home run. And so I don't miss some of the home runs that were happening,

but you know, there still are plenty of home runs. And you do still feel like any player in the lineup could homer at any given point. If a guy is the tying run, he still represents something. Because every player in the league, Ben Revere excluded, can hit a home run. So it's hard for me to talk where we are right now. So do you think that that's a widely held opinion? It's kind of hard for me to tell because whenever there is some sort of shift,

there are a million articles written about how things have changed. And they're not necessarily saying that it's better or worse, but how many articles have been written about the year of the pitcher a couple years ago and now scoring is down even more and strikeouts are up. And it seems like every week there's some new feature somewhere on how strikeouts are up. I can't really tell whether that's something that just interests baseball writers or whether that's something that, you know, your average fan is really even aware of or or cares much about i can't i can't tell whether whether a wide cross-section of fans are are content with the way things are now or whether you know whether all the kind of attention that's been drawn to it is just a reaction to the fact that it's different but not necessarily worse what do you yeah i think that i think like

98 of this stuff is just column columnists in need of a column i mean certainly it's a huge a huge number of the pieces that i write uh are of no of no interest to the common fan and i just have to pray that i can write it in an interesting enough way that it will be of interest to them by the end um so i i think that until things get extreme that they're not that big a deal now did things get extreme uh well certainly i think colorado was extreme in a way that made it unenjoyable. I think that there were at least 15 National League teams whose fans hated Colorado in baseball, and maybe 16. I don't know how Coloradans felt about it,

but that park was out of control. It was horrible. And I think that if you had a league that resembled that, it would be a problem. Probably, it's hard to know if the offense of 2000 was a problem before all the moral grandstanding began. I honestly, I think I recall, I think I was probably more, you know, I think I was a bit more sympathetic to the idea that baseball was too offensive at that point. And as I recall, I think that that was a fairly well-held opinion. And I think part of the reason is that you have, I mean, baseball is nicely divided between pitchers and hitters.

I mean, half the roster is pitchers. You think about these two guys who don't really overlap much, and it felt unfair for pitchers. And I think it probably, you know, you have more base runners, you have more innings being pitched, you have more base runners, you have more innings being pitched, you have more injuries happening, you see a lower grade of pitcher, and it's really annoying to have this kind of endless stream of anonymous relievers coming in and just pouring gas on every lead.

I think that probably there was a point where it was too much. I think that probably there was a point where it was too much. So if I had to pick a year, I think that 93 was a really nice year for offensive context, run scoring environment. It was kind of the year that things started to blow up. And so a lot of the stat lines were really novel. lot of the stat lines were really novel and um you know other than maybe that blip of 87 you've never really in our lifetimes you'd never really seen some of these guys put up numbers like piazza's rookie year and things like that but it was not a big home run year yet in fact home runs were quite a bit less than they are this year it was a big stolen base here uh and it was just i think it was a year where a lot of balls were put in play.

I'm not seeing it right now, but my guess is that Babibs were fairly high. And you saw a fairly exciting way of runs being scored in most innings. 4.6 runs a game, which is compared to 4.2 this year, but compared to 5.1 in 2001. So it splits the difference nicely. It's where it was in 2009 per game. So 93, I think, was a solid year. That might be the year that the public would most be drawn to. And no, I don't think that consistency is a virtue. I like the fluctuations. I agree. And I think that baseball's fluctuations have, with probably the exception of the 60s, always been within range of generally of what I'm happy with.

I think that fluctuations in college, particularly I'm a bit more familiar with, are arguably too artificial and too great. I wouldn't say that I would like to see... I would not like to see the fluctuations be quite so obviously engineered, if possible. Yeah, I wouldn't want major equipment changes from year to year. Yeah, that would kind of...

I don't know, that would break the fourth wall almost for me of baseball. Yes, well put. Yeah, well put. So yeah, I like the variety, and I hope we live through multiple pitchers' eras and hitters' eras, even though I like the current era and I'm happy with the way it is for now. I'd like to see the full range of baseball run environments. Um, okay.

So send us email addresses at, or emails at podcast at baseball perspectives.com. We will get to some of them on Wednesday and we'll be back with another show tomorrow.