Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 243: No-Hitters, Tim Lincecum, and Pitch Counts/Joe Blanton and ERA Estimators

Episode Date: July 15, 2013

Ben and Sam discuss whether we should care about pitch counts in no-hitters, then talk about the gap between Joe Blanton’s actual and estimated ERA.

They call it Stormy Monday But Tuesday's just as bad They call it Stormy Monday The truth is just as bad Good morning and welcome to episode 243 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives. I am Ben Lindberg, joined as always by Sam Miller. Hi, Ben. Hello. How was your weekend?

How are you? Good. How was your weekend? It was eventful. The FanFest stuff was going on, and I was doing some of that. And then I was at the Futures game yesterday, and there was a BP event after the Futures game, so it was a busy weekend. You went to actual events. Yes, I did. And it's nice to go to the Futures game as a person who doesn't know much about prospects just because you can't be completely wrong when you think that someone looks good

because everyone there is a prospect. So you can't have that feeling when you go to some other minor league game and you become convinced that someone you're watching is a future star and then you find out that he's like a 28-year-old repeating the level for the fourth time with no stuff. So you can't have that feeling. So that's nice. It was a good day. Great.

What do you want to talk about uh xfip okay and i want to talk about uh pitch counts in no hitters great start why don't you start okay it's a good one uh yeah so we've talked a bit about how we're not that impressed by no-hitters, that we don't think it's maybe as impressive an achievement, just all else being equal, as maybe a more dominant start that did include hits. I mean, when you say we're not that impressed with no-hitters, I think that the key is just to say relative. Right, right. Relative to the sort of position that no-hitters hold. I don't think that we're strictly anti-fun or anything like that. Sure.

So, right, yeah, the Lincecum game was great. I was watching the Lincecum great. I enjoyed it. So it seems like the no-hitter now or the perfect game attempt is now sort of the one time when pitchers are allowed to throw a ton of pitches. And so I thought we could talk about whether that makes sense or whether we approve of that know a time when it's seen as acceptable to do that lincecum of course through 148 pitches uh a career high and uh the most anyone has thrown since edwin jackson's no hitter which was 149 and that was in 2010 and what's it the most since in the non-no-hitter context? I don't know. I'll look it up.

Yeah, but there are very few starts now really over even 130. So it was kind of an outlier. And I didn't see a ton of complaints about this. And I feel like in the past we've maybe seen some, if not that was a bad idea, just kind of uneasiness, like maybe this was a bad idea. It feels like we saw less of this with Lincecum than we did with Jackson maybe or with Johan Santana, although that was kind of a retroactive thing. After he struggled later that year, people sort of said it maybe was because of a retroactive thing after he after he struggled later that year people sort of said it maybe was because of the no hitter um but i i guess the the two things i'm interested in is uh are whether it whether it makes sense on any level for you know if you believe that that a

start this long and with this high a pitch count is not a good thing, does it make sense to make an exception for a no-hitter? And secondly, I guess maybe why there wasn't much of a backlash to Lincecum's being allowed to exceed his usual or anyone's usual. To answer your inability to answer your to answer yeah uh i guess your bounty i guess your inability to answer my question uh the longest non-no-hitter or i guess the last the last pitcher to throw 148 pitches in a non-no-hitter was levon hernandez in 2005 and he and hernandez was kind of he doesn't really count yeah no not at all So if you just look for pitches, if you just look for games with more than 140,

besides Linscombe and Jackson's no-hitters, the next four are all LeVon Hernandez. There's a Jason Schmidt start in 2004 that was 144 pitches, a Kerry Wood start in 2003 that was 141, and then you have to go back 11 years to Randy Johnson in 2002 to get a non-no-hitter that topped Tim Lincecum's pitch count.

Well, nothing bad ever happened to Kerry Wood or Jason Schmidt. Or Randy Johnson. No. I mean, he's retired now, for goodness sake. Yeah, he's still... Terrible outcome. Yes.

Would not surprise me at all if when uh tim lincecum is 44 he now also has to be retired yes that could very well happen even well earlier than that um so to me the backlash there's a there's a second backlash that you didn't mention but that i'm a little surprised it seems to be one of, maybe not, maybe you'll think of others, but one of the few places, maybe the only place in baseball, where blatant stat chasing is allowed. Saves would be an example that a lot of people bring up, in which the save kind of dictates pitcher usage, but I think managers would say that more than that, the save is a parameter by which pitchers expect to be used, and since the goal of using a lot of relievers is to have their usage be predictable, to have them have clear roles, I think they would say that they might argue, I'm not sure convincingly, that it's not as much about the stat as it

is about the predictability. But, I mean, like when Craig Biggio was out there chasing 3,000, there was some backlash. Can you think of anything else where a batter is allowed or a player is allowed to do things that are considered strategically not desirable in order simply to chase a personal achievement? Yeah, someone tweeted at me the other day and asked whether I thought that managers' lineup construction is dictated by wanting to get certain hitters more RBIs or something, and I said I didn't think it worked like that.

I guess, I mean, maybe a manager might leave a guy in try to get him through five innings oh yeah get the win i don't know how often that happens but it it happens that's i think that's probably true you're right yeah uh yeah yeah that's true but there's a maybe a couple of instances a year where you you sort of know blatantly that they're trying to get him through five yeah and if it were the sixth inning, he'd be gone. And if it were the fourth inning, he'd be gone. But because it's the fifth, he gets to keep going. So I don't know.

I wonder how long, maybe if there will come a point when there will be some sort of backlash to the individual achievement aspect of it. But maybe not. Maybe it'll be forever. What was your question? Oh, pitch count um yeah the weird thing is that does it make sense had a nine run lead right uh does it make sense so to make an exception to yeah i think that if it it might make sense but if it makes sense then

then what i would say is that it we're actually not making enough exceptions. Like I could see a manager saying, look, one game pitch counts are probably not going to be the thing that usually leads to an injury. It's more about probably, more about a pattern of usage. You know, who knows, but it's as good a hypothesis as any. And so when you have your starting pitcher and you really want to send a message to him that he is an ace, that he is a man, he is a god among other peers, and that you want him to really feel like he's capable of accomplishing great things, that you might leave him out there for what might

seem like an irresponsible number of pitches, knowing that it's probably not too irresponsible and there might be secondary benefits down the road. The question is whether no hitter is where that line should be, or whether one hit shutout with 17 strikeouts is one of those, or whether one nothing game against a division rival is one of those. If this were a one were a one-run game against the Diamondbacks or the Dodgers or whoever's in first place in September and the Giants needed the win, they wouldn't have left Linscombe out there to throw 149 pitches. They probably would have pulled him after, you know, I certainly don't think they would have let him start an inning

with 130. They probably would have pulled him around 130 at the most. So if you want your aces to feel like aces and you think that that's the best thing to do, even at the expense of pitches, you should probably broaden the range of times that you're willing to do that. To me, no-hitter is a probably not particularly convincing place to draw that line, but that's because I don't think no-hit are quite the historic accomplishment that uh baseball thinks they are i mean there's so many of them that uh you know maybe they're just not quite valuable enough or rare enough i think you'd see i think that you

wouldn't have seen well it's hard to throw 150 pitches in a perfect game right because that would be like five and a half pitches for batter. But it seems like they do still have the capacity to seem special to most people. I mean, if you're, especially if your team is not having the greatest season, the Giants are kind of having a disappointing season. They've been sort of lousy lately. And having a Tim Lincecum no-hitter all of a sudden, it sort of changes the feeling of the season in a way, at least for a little while. Or when people think back on this season, they will think back fondly on this one start,

and maybe the team will sell a lot of souvenir Tim Lincecum no-hitter, I don't know, t-shirts, and make a lot of money that way. And, you know, they'll be able to replay Tim Lincecum's no-hitter on TV for the next 20 years and it'll kind of be one of these great franchise moments, I suppose, to some extent. Maybe it's less special than it used to be, but still sort of has that feeling for most people, I think. And I don't know whether a manager should consider that sort of thing. But there is a benefit to the

team. You know, certainly with Santana's no-hitter, there was probably more of that than usual just because the Mets had never had one. So I feel like there are all those sort of secondary benefits that someone with the team is probably pretty pleased about. I don't know whether the manager is considering that or should consider that. And I guess there's also the fact that players really want to do this. So you always hear the manager say, well, he would have killed me if I'd taken him out or something, which kind of seems like, well, it's your job to do the unpopular thing if it's the better thing, if you think it's the better thing.

But you also have to worry about your players liking you and being happy and being allowed to pursue those goals that they really want to pursue. I guess that's a consideration. Lincecum is an interesting case, too, because he's not necessarily going to be back in three months. So even if you do think this is bad for his arm, maybe the Giants' exposure is very limited. And this is a really, I mean, you can't ask for a more high-profile showcase start if you're thinking about moving him at the trade deadline. So there's a little bit of extra intrigue there, I would say, from the Giants' perspective. Yeah, so that's what I was wondering about, why there hasn't been much of a backlash in this instance. And I guess, like, you know, has there

been is it that we can't, we can't tell whether it's really bad or not? Because, you know, Edwin Jackson was the last one. And I think Tom Tango did a comparison of Jackson's 15 starts before and after the no hitter. And it was like was like you know exactly the same or a little better after um and so we don't really have any strong evidence that i've seen that one you know lone start with a high pitch count can be really harmful so i wonder whether we you know we're just so sick of seeing pitch counts rule every decision and get smaller and smaller, that in a way we're sort of happy to see kind of a throwback start like this,

or whether it does have more to do with Lincecum in particular in that it feels like he's kind of on the downside already. For the last year, year and a half, he's been mediocre, if that. So I don't know whether we're kind of excusing it because it feels like sort of this less hurrah thing where, you know, it's not really endangering a pitcher who's in his prime, but sort of seeing, you know, one more great start from a guy who's already on the downside. Or, yeah, whether it's, you know the the Giants aren't well they're contending

certainly but you know they're they're behind and they're struggling and so it's a good moment or or the things that you mentioned that he might not be with them for long and and you know it's not like a young starter who's going to be with your team for the next half decade and you want to protect him. So I'm looking at Randy Johnson threw more 141 plus pitch games than anybody of the pitch count era. And he threw 37 of them. I have no point here. I'm just looking at it. It's enjoyable.

So he threw 37 of them. I see a 160 in here. I see a couple 160s point here. I'm just looking at it. It's enjoyable. So he threw 37 of them. I see a 160 in here. I see a couple 160s in here, as late as 1995, in fact. Although, yeah, even with Randy Johnson, they fall off quickly after the early 90s. But my favorite of these starts, the most probably early Randy Johnson start you could possibly imagine, is 1992 against the Yankees, seven innings, one earned run. So that's, that's pretty good. Yeah. Uh, and you might wonder how he threw 146 pitches in seven innings with one earned run. Well, he, he struck out three,

so that doesn't get him there. He walked, he walked nine, uh, and he allowed six unearned runs so it was the the classic 757193 pitching line yes i i would guess that's the only one of those willing to bet yeah yeah uh he walked six per nine that year that wasn't even his highest. Okay, so yeah, I guess, do you have one theory on why we don't care about the pitch count? Probably one theory about why we don't care about the pitch count. I don't know, because he's a veteran and it's one start. I don't think one start is probably the thing to worry too much about. Probably not. As though I have any idea.

Like we have any idea whether one or more is matter. Which is kind of the thing. Like I guess we know we don't have any idea, so we can't get that worked up about it. Well, the thing is that I don't, you know, I mean one of the reasons that I don't get too excited when I'm watching a no-hitter is because like I've seen it. It's not all that new. It doesn't feel all that that rare and special but 148 pitches is kind of rare and

special and so I actually enjoyed that start a great deal for that reason yes yeah because there was sort of some uncertainty about whether he'd be allowed to do it or whether he would just collapse all of a sudden or what right yeah who knows what happens i mean maybe there's like a kill screen and if you just keep keep making the guy throw pitches eventually like he starts to get glitchy yes and you know batters can't see him anymore and who knows what happens right all right okay so uh i uh joe blanton this year uh well i don't know what yeah i i imagine i know what you think about xfip uh but do you have any, just before we start, do you have any opinions about XFIP, the utility of XFIP?

I think it can be helpful sometimes. You know, as long as you kind of, it's the same sort of thing as FIP, where it doesn't work for some guys and and you kind of have to look at whether a guy is pitching in a certain ballpark where we should probably explain what it is first because someone emailed us and you know said that when we bring up some new advanced that we've never talked about before we should yeah give some background do you want to do that so X yeah XFIP is basically just a way of creating an ERA like stat that only looks at the things that a pitcher is thought to be the most in control of which are his strikeout walk and ground ball rates so it

assigns him a league average babbitt and it assigns him a league average uh home run per fly ball rate so if a pitcher has a lot of strikeouts not a lot of walks and a good ground ball rate he'll have a low xfip uh that might not up with his ERA if he's been giving up a ton of home runs on, on fly balls, but then, you know, kind of look beyond that to see whether it it's because of his ballpark or whether he's a guy who always gives up a lot of home runs on fly balls or whether he's just kind of, you know, leaving a lot of balls over the middle and getting crushed and maybe that will continue. So it's, you know, I look at it from time to time and then think about whether it's missing something.

So yesterday I tweeted that Blanton this year has a lower XFIP than at least three all-star starters. And Joe Blanton, you have to understand, you probably are aware that Joe Blanton is bad. And Joe Blanton, you have to understand, you probably are aware that Joe Blanton is bad. But out here, it is like all the energy that Puig Mania gets is all sucked out of Joe Blanton's life force. It's a total mirror. They're the unbreakable team. And, I mean, Blanton is at as low a point as I've seen an Angel starter as far as the public perception of him in all my time here. So he's been really, really, really bad.

And he's got a better ex-fip than Bartolo Colon, who's like a Cy Young candidate. And I think he actually, with the replacement starters named, he's better than at least one of them by ex-fip, and maybe more. And I might have missed guys, too. So I tweeted this out out and as I often do, I then spent 40 minutes pondering it because I was worried it was going to get misunderstood. Yeah. And so I needed to have like an answer in case somebody said like, what's your point?

Like, cause you know, I think you can read that a few different ways. You can read it as me saying XFIP is, is nonsense. You could read it as me saying Joe Blanton is very good when you don't think he is. And what I actually tweeted it out as is like, look how weird all this stuff is. You can think about those two angles of thought and wonder which way you fall. To me, it was just a way of putting your beliefs to the test, right? If you believe that XFIP is more predictive than a lot of other things, then this puts it to the test, right? If you believe that XFIP is more predictive than a lot of other things, then this puts it to the test. And if you believe Joe Blanton is absolute garbage,

then this puts that to the test. And I don't actually, my opinion of Blanton is that he's probably not doing very well. But after I, and then he's probably terrible. But probably not, also probably not quite as terrible as one would think. So then like a few minutes later, I was listening to the Angels game on the radio, and they were talking about Blanton.

And they were theorizing about why he's so bad. And so Terry Smith, the Angels radio guy, says, well, a lot of people around baseball think that he lost too much weight. You know, he came to camp this year having lost a lot of weight, and they think that's the problem, that he's not used to pitching at this weight. He needs to be heavier. And so then he asked, like, his partner Mark Langston whether he thinks that's the reason

that Blanton sucks. And I was thinking, well, but we don't necessarily know that Blanton sucks. Like, we're now narrativizing before we've even necessarily determined whether Blanton is doing worse than he always does or whether maybe he's even doing better than he usually does. And so then Langston said, no, no, I don't buy that at all. He thinks that it's because Joe Blanton doesn't shake off his catcher enough that he goes up there and he just throws what it's called for. So he's not always throwing a pitch that he's confident in. He's not adjusting. That game-calling really benefits from having two different minds

kind of pushing each other and going back and forth and finding really the right pitch. And again, I thought, well, that's interesting. And yet I don't know that we've like, what if Joe Blanton corrected and pitched to his ex-fit for the rest of the year? We would be finding solutions for what had changed. And yet, we don't necessarily know what's real. And so I just wanted to bring this up because the thing about all these ERA predictors is that in a way, unless you really dig in on a pitcher and like you described, go deeper and look at a level of detail that most of us can't do for most players

all the time, it in a way has actually created a lot more uncertainty. And so while you know a lot more about each player you don't necessarily know who's good anymore you have a lot of situations where you're like well these are three different numbers that that attempt to capture three different things and uh they say three different things and it reminds me of that that old saying that a man with one watch always knows the time and a man with two can never be sure. In a way, having these ERA predictors that are all different has, I don't know, chipped away. I mean it's chipped away at our certainty, which is very good. But it's also chipped away at – until you decide whether Joe Blanton is bad, you can't decide why Joe Blanton is bad, if that makes sense, right?

Yeah. You can't, you have to first decide what you're seeking to explain before you can explain it. And we can't necessarily pin down, like for a lot of players, I feel like this is the case, especially over the course of a year. I mean, this is why you always talk about how hard it is to write during this time of the season season because you don't trust anything. So, yeah, that's my point. That's my whole point. Yeah, and I guess I don't know whether watching a player regularly maybe that probably dispenses some of the uncertainty, I guess.

Like if you know absolutely nothing about a pitcher and you've never seen him and you haven't watched a single start and you see that he's given up a lot of home runs on fly balls and so he has a much lower XFIP than his ERA, there's almost no way that you could tell whether that was bad luck or bad pitching, really. I mean, you could look and see whether in the past he's had a tendency to do this or whether he plays in a hitter's park or something.

But you couldn't really say with any certainty whether he had just done something to make it more likely that he would give up these home runs or not. you would give up these home runs or not. You know, when you watch every start or when you watch every game with a guy, I guess that maybe makes you more confident either one way or another. Or, you know, you could look at his pitch FX data or something and see what he's doing.

But, yeah, if you're, you know, it's sort of the thing with Dan Heron that I guess we've talked about. It's similar to Blanton with the high strikeout-to-walk ratio and just a ton of home runs that makes his line look really ugly. And so you wonder whether that's, you know, it seems like something that's been happening for a little while now so probably something that has to do with the way he's pitching or reduced stuff and he's throwing a little less hard and and all those things kind of can make you more confident one way or another if you know them yeah yeah and i mean i don't with blanton i think to me it's pretty clear that with blanton this isn't controversial Blanton got me thinking about it. But he seems fairly uncontroversial.

Although I will, as an amusing, maybe closing point, from 2006 to 2009, these are his ex-fip ERA gap. So the difference between them, 0.01, 0.02, 0.05, 0.04. So virtually, maybe the most, probably I would guess if you looked at all the pitchers in baseball, nobody's ERA was predicted as well as his XFIT. So then these are the last four years. 0.95, 1.84, so that's hysterical. 1.32 and 1.76. Yeah, that's a big difference.

Yeah, I don't know. Do you have a theory? I know the point is not really Blanton in particular, but maybe it's just a guy who's always around the plate and he loses a little stuff and suddenly you can hit a home run every now and then that you couldn't hit before. Is that basically the idea? That's basically the idea. Yeah. He doesn't have anything that can blow batters away, but he wants to strike out guys and not walk them.

All right. So that's one show of the week down. Send us emails at podcast at baseballperspectives.com, and we will get to them on Wednesday. Can I just – what if Joe Blanton is actually like a super, super stat head, and he only looks at one stat? And every July he's like, another year I got snubbed by the LSU team. Like, what is wrong with you guys? He just walks around like such a big shot in the clubhouse. Yeah, that doesn't happen, though.

No. All right. See you tomorrow. All right, bye.