Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 247: Derek Lowe’s Rare Career Path/Matt Garza and the Rangers

Episode Date: July 19, 2013

Ben and Sam try to figure out why more pitchers’ careers don’t look like Derek Lowe’s, then talk about the latest Matt Garza trade rumors.

Kind of needed to come up with something to separate yourself from the next guy. And our pitching coach, Jeff Andrews, really understood the sinker. I kid people all the time, without it, you'd see me working on a McDonald's supersized with a value man. That's the only reason why I made it this far. Good morning and welcome to episode 247 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives. I am Ben Lindberg, joined as always by Sam Miller and his chirping birds. Good morning, Sam.

Good morning, Ben. Did you see that Johnny Giamatella was sent down? I was going to bring that up myself. I had his tab open. yeah so the the third third shot is also a failure or was it more than three i guess maybe he had multiple chances in those other two seasons i don't know they are getting they are getting progressively shorter shots yes this one was only 10 games so the let's say last year the he had about a month and a half at the end of the year and about a month and a half in the middle of the year. And in 2011 he had about two months, two full months. So, yeah, and then this one was a half a month.

So next shot he gets will be he'll get 45 minutes in the manager's office to show that he's got what it's worth. I don't get it. You don't get it? He doesn't play that well. I mean I don't know that I would treat him the same way, but I mean at least I get it. I get why he's – I mean not that I expect huge things from him at this point, but the alternative is still Chris Getz, right? And they called Chris Getz back up, and they sent Chris Getz down and said,

we need more offense, so we're going to call up Javitella, and then we're going to give him 10 games, like under 40 plate appearances to hit, and then bring Chris Goetz back up, because he's not going to hit like Chris Goetz anymore. I don't know. Goetz has an interesting minor league line. Yeah, I see that.

Well, it's interesting because he hit 313, and he had a 313 on base percentage, so you would just assume that he didn't have any walks, but he actually did have a walk. Yeah. He also had two sacrifice flies. So if you can have twice as many sacrifice flies as walks, then your OBP will stay about the same. He's a run producer. Drove in nine runs, 14 games.

All right. So that's not what you wanted to talk about, right? What do you want to talk about? Derek Lowe oh ok and I thought we could just do a could do a hot take on the Matt Garza maybe trade

ok alright well I'll start which will give me time to heat up my take yes ok I so Derek Lowe officially announced yesterday Well, I'll start, which will give me time to heat up my take. Yes, okay. So Derek Lowe officially announced yesterday. I guess he didn't officially announce his retirement.

I mean, the whole point of the official retirement is that you file paperwork, and I don't believe he filed paperwork. But he did tell somebody that he's not going to pitch again. He had not had much interest. And so now he says he's not going to pitch again. He had not had much interest. And so now he says he's not going to pitch again. Anyway, I don't care that much about Derek, though. Although there are interesting things. There's a helicopter above me. Hang on.

Let's let this pass. He said, I'm officially no longer going to play the game. Yes, he did. That's a strange way to put it. That's actually how you do it. You just say that. You have to find a reporter to say that to. That's the paperwork.

When you look in his file at the MLB League offices, it's just a clipping from USA Today. Like Steve Carlton, you open it up, and there's a clipping from USA Today saying... Steve like Steve Carlton. You'd open it up and there's a clipping from USA Today saying. Well, Steve Carlton wouldn't even talk to the media, so I don't know how he did it. He had to. Yeah, maybe just that one time.

Derek Lowe, there are interesting things, I would say, about his career. One interesting thing about his career was the time that you wrote a long piece about how he was pitching like it was 1906 and he found a way to make it work and then like four days later his ERA was 8,000. That's my least favorite article that I've ever written. That's like my go-to article when someone asks me for an example of something I was wrong about or wrote about too soon or read too much into something. That's the one. or read too much into something, that's the one.

There's also his role in, I would say, I would say an underrated worst trade of all time, the Heathcliff-Slocum deal. I think it gets mentioned some, but I don't think it gets mentioned enough, not because Lowe and Veritech should have turned into such great players, that the Mariners should have seen that coming. But because they traded for Heathcliff Slocum in the middle of a pennant race, Slocum at the time, to appreciate this, he was a reliever.

And at the time they traded for him, he had a 5.79 ERA. He had 36 strikeouts and 34 walks in 46 innings. And it's just hard to imagine that somebody saw him as the missing piece in a pennant push worth trading two prospects for. I mean, really, the Mariners' mindset in that trade should probably be reexamined a couple times a year by somebody. And I think Lowe is also somewhat interesting for, I don't know, I think that Lowe is kind of a player who has been viewed differently through different people throughout the sabermetric era, both good and bad. I remember when Paul DePodesta signed him, it was widely considered a big overpay for him.

He hadn't been very good the previous year, probably even the previous two years. And I think even, as I recall at the time, stat heads thought that he was fairly overrated from his good BABF year. And I remember Rob Nye writing a piece about how Dodger Stadium was actually perfect for him because he allowed – well, Dodger Stadium was – what was it? Dodger Stadium was good at suppressing – no, good at allowing home runs. It allowed a lot of home runs, but it suppressed everything else. And Derek Lowe didn't allow home runs, but he allowed everything else. And so there was like a nice match.

And I don't know if that's exactly why Lowe was good with the Dodgers, but he ended up having four really good years with the Dodgers. So anyway, interesting career, but not what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is that Lowe faded out as a reliever his last two seasons. He was trying to hang on as a reliever. And so I was thinking about this like as a sort of comparable situation to a veteran star who goes out as a DH. And this is kind of, certainly when I was growing up, there was a lot of talk about how players today had this big advantage because they could keep on playing for an extra four or five years as a DH the way that Babe Ruth

could never do that. So there was this thought that a lot of records were going to get broken. There were going to be a lot more 3,000 hitters. Maybe there are. I'm not sure. And you do see that. You see a great, great many veterans who are DHs at the end of their career. Even guys like Johnny Damon, who you don't necessarily think of as a DH,

hangs on for a couple extra years as a DH. Some of them make this transition at 29, some of them make it at 39, but it does seem like almost all the really good hitters at some point have a DH season. And so you would think that there would be a similar situation with pitchers where great starters would be great starters until they got old and then they would have a couple years where they would go into their relief phase. Right? That makes sense. Doesn't that make sense? I sorted pitchers since 1985 among starters by war and looked to see how many of them had done this,

had had this career path that gave them a year or two or 10 years or whatever as a reliever. And you actually don't see it. It doesn't happen. You have to go all the way down to the 26th best pitcher and I'm skipping John Smoltz because uh uh John Smoltz uh relieved as like an ace reliever and then he started again and I think it was a little bit of a low low kind of did too I mean he wasn't uh not to the level that Smoltz did but but he yeah did sort of I mean he was a closer for a while. Right, at the beginning. I'm not saying that Smoltz is disqualified because he had... I'm saying that I am not counting Smoltz as a late career reliever, if that makes sense. Smoltz, as I understand it, was deployed as a reliever because the Braves had the need.

For a period of time, I believe there was some question about his arm. And so he was a dominant reliever, but then he went back to starting, and he did not fade out as a reliever. His last few years, his last five years, he only started. He did not relieve at all. So that's why I'm excluding him. You can include him if you want, but he would be number ninth on the list. But otherwise, you have to go down to number 26 to get to Mark Langston, who had one relief outing at the end of his career. You could also go to 34 and get Dennis Martinez. And you could probably, you could include, I would say, number 37, Carlos Zambrano.

And then you have to go all the way down to Lowe, who's number 49. So of the top basically 50 pitchers of the last 30 years, Lowe is one of only like four who did this. And that really surprises me. You would think, I mean, I think we tend to think about pitching starters and relievers. You think about them as basically being on a spectrum where the, you know, the best ones are starters, the worst ones are mop-up men, and then in between there's this, you know, spectrum of guys, some of them who can,

who can be swingmen, some of them who can be closers, some of them who can be, you know, specialists, and it's not, the spectrum is not purely good-bad, right? I mean, I sort of think of it as good-bad, where the good are the starters and the bad are the mop-up men. But there might be other reasons for why these pitchers aren't relievers. But one reason seems to be that maybe that there's – well, I don't know. I don't know. Why do you think we don't see this? Is it just that, like, it's annoying to be that maybe that there's, well, I don't know. I don't know. Why do you think we don't see this?

Is it just that it's annoying to be a reliever? No one who's put in 15 years as an ace wants to go back to being a reliever? Is it humiliating? Yeah, I think there might be some of that. I mean, you've certainly seen a lot of pitchers who resist going to the bullpen even if they can't stay healthy as a starter, and it seems like it's the only way that they're going to continue their career. Like, like Rich Harden or Dantra Willis have been people that,

that have always been said like, oh, well, they'd probably be a great setup, man. Maybe they could stay healthy that way and get their issues under control, but they haven't really done it because they didn't want to do it, it seemed like. So maybe there's more of a stigma attached to it if you're an accomplished starter than there is if you've been someone who plays in the field and has to move to DH, because I don't know, if you're a DH, you're still in the starting lineup. You're still getting just as many plate appearances. So it doesn't feel quite as much like a demotion, maybe. Right, you still get to sit in the cool kids table. Yeah, you would think it would happen more often, though, still.

I mean, particularly Randy Johnson. would think it would happen more often though still you i mean it's particularly randy johnson it's hard for me to to to see why randy johnson didn't have like four years as a dominant reliever in his in his 40s i wish he had i wish you'd seen it uh i mean he might still be pitching right now yeah i mean he was he was still a pretty effective starter in his last season. So of the pitchers who are, like, do you, well, I guess, do you think that this is something that is going to happen more? Like, are we in an, are we getting more and more in an era where just, like, everybody's a reliever anyway? Yeah.

There's a lot more fluidity of going back and forth. I mean, I guess the question is, who do you think, like, do you think that Felix Hernandez will be a reliever at any point in his career? I guess probably not. I wonder. I mean, there's so many more bullpen spots now that you have more to fill, and maybe that would make it more likely that you would try this or that a starter would go along with it.

I don't know. It seems so easy to find relievers now. We see so many of them come up every season and just sort of dominate with one really great pitch or a couple of really good pitches. I don't know. Maybe it's, maybe it's just,

it's people are, are grooming pitchers to be relievers from the start and drafting pitchers who are already relievers. And maybe they're just too many of those guys around to really, I don't know, to really make it more likely that starters will go out this way. Yeah, and it's possible that the skill set required to be a starter involves, I don't know if I'm going to be able to make this sentence come together at all, but to be a good starter, you need to be able to throw the ball well, obviously, and you also need to have some pitch ability, and you need to have some stamina,

and you need to have a multi-pitch mix, and you have these other things that are not necessarily super common. And so you might have a situation where, let's say Felix is 38, and he's losing his stuff. Um, but he's still maybe more valuable as a starter than a lot of other relievers are because he's got these skills. And by the time he gets to be so bad that even those other things can't carry him or make him valuable as like an average or below average starter, by the time he gets that bad that those

resources are wasted he might be too bad to be a reliever yeah like he wouldn't he wouldn't have one or two really great out pitches anymore that you'd need he'd his fastball would be uh i mean it would maybe play up a little more in short bursts but relievers generally throw harder than starters so maybe it still wouldn't really measure up to the competition. Yeah, I could see that. Well, anyway, Derek Lowe. Officially not going to pitch anymore. Yeah, I like Derek Lowe.

He's an interesting guy. Weird career path and crazy high ground ball rate and one of those guys who got a lot of extra strikes because I guess he was really good at throwing pitches on the corner. So he was one of those like Tom Glavin, Mariano Rivera types who would always expand the zone by putting balls just off the plate. So, interesting guy. One of the handsomer mugshots. Yeah, right. Pretty good one.

Mugshot kind of looks like Saul from Breaking Bad. Okay, so Garza, are you heated up? I'm on fire, man. All right. Cool me down. Cool me down. So usually I feel like we probably overanalyze, uh, deadline trades or we focus too much on them.

And usually even if it's a big trade, it won't be worth more than a win or two over the two months of the season that are left by the time you get to the deadline and how many races are actually decided by that win or two. Not most of them. So most deadline trades aren't really difference makers, probably, when you look at them in retrospect. But this season feels a little bit different in that with kind of almost unprecedented parity. I mean, there's I think one team maybe on pace for 100 wins. I think the Cardinals maybe, just barely. Is that unprecedented?

I don't know if that is, but it feels like things are more compressed, that there's less of a spread. I could just be making this up, but it feels, you know, there aren't any teams right now with more than a six-game lead in the division, and there's only one with a lead over three games or over two and a half games. So the races are all very compressed right now and made even more so by the fact that there's a second wildcard now,

so many more teams are in it. I mean, if we counted how many teams are officially out of it right now, it would not be a big number. So I guess potentially then trades are maybe more likely to be difference makers this year than they are usually, which is why there's been some talk about how sellers are really holding out for high prices and trying to get great prospects in return. And as we're recording right now, we don't know. We don't even know if Garza has officially been traded to the Rangers,

and we don't know what the Cubs got back, if they did get something back. But this seems like a situation where it could be a fairly major move in that the Rangers are two games back of the A's right now. I'm looking up their playoff odds. Their playoff odds, they're about 10% playoff odds behind, yeah, about 10 percentage points behind Oakland right now. And right now they kind of have like three starters, sort of. Like I looked up their depth chart on Baseball Perspectives and they have three starters listed right now because they have five on the DL.

Yu Darvish is hurt and Colby Lewis is hurt, although he's rehabbing and pitching poorly. Ogondo is hurt and Tepesh is hurt and Harrison is hurt. And these guys will be back or some of them will be back. But right now the Rangers are kind of without arms. Who is not hurt? Holland is not hurt. Who else is not hurt? Holland is not hurt, and then they have Martin Perez is pitching, and I guess Ross Wolfe. So right now they kind of have not even half a rotation.

Derek Lowe's available. Yes, yes, he is. So this seems like a time when they could get a pretty big benefit from adding a solid starter and that they don't really have any. And they are locked in a close race. And it's kind of been the, I guess, the concern all season, even when their starters weren't all hurt. The concern was that maybe they have an ace in Darvish, but then after that there's a bit of a drop-off, and Haaland is pitching very well, but I guess doesn't really have the track record of a sort of number two-ish starter like Garza does.

So there's not that much we can say about it, I guess, without even knowing that it's happened and what the Rangers had to give up, if it has. But this seems like a trade that is worth paying attention to, more so than most midseason trades. so i don't know if this is true but there was a report or a rumor that um i mean theo well not theo i guess the cubs asking price for garza especially initially was like sky high yeah and one of the rumors was that um when the diamondbacks called he asked for skags and Archie Bradley for Garza which is you know obviously it's a it's a you know that's a Heathcliff Slocum for Derek Lowe Jason Veritech kind of mismatch and obviously there's you know no no harm in asking right except like can you imagine though in like your everyday life actually trying to negotiate like that?

I mean, maybe it feels somewhat unrealistic to me because when we bought a house, the realtor's like, yeah, I mean, you can give them a lower offer, but you don't want to insult them because then they'll feel insulted and then who knows what will happen. I feel like that happens. You never want to go too low. You have to show that you're acting in good faith and you don't want to have a lot of no responses. I don't know. In my life, I'm always very averse to being told no. If I play Monopoly, I'm a terrible Monopoly player because when it's time to trade properties, I don't like set a bargaining price.

I set the price that like – I basically give my best offer because I really, really am scared that they're going to say no and I'm going to have my feelings hurt. So I could like – I could never ask for Bradley and Skaggs because I would know that they were going to say no and that would break my heart. So I would ask for exactly what I thought they would give me and then they'd be like, no, but we'll give you less and I'd be like, I did it again. Anyway, we hear a lot of these rumors of trade offers that seem unrealistic or I guess trade demands that seem unrealistic or particularly deals deals that like a couple of years later, we look at them and go, wow, that's hysterically mismatched. I wonder if these are real. Do you really think that he asked for Bradley and Skaggs or do you think

it was like just some guy in the front office told some reporter like, oh, we can move them but it'd have to be for a lot. We'd be talking about... Because you would think these guys are all very fairly chummy. They also have each other's respect. They have to have working relationships with them in a lot of different capacities over the course of many years. You would think if you go around asking, like you know this guy in the fantasy league loses respect, loses his league's respect if he starts making these horrible trade proposals, you would think that they would want to be taken seriously.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm not sure whether it's something that officially was proposed or those names were exchanged or whether it was just sort of floated through a reporter kind of or just put out there to establish that they want to get something big back. I don't know. I think probably certain GMs have a reputation for being difficult to deal with, maybe because they are less realistic about trades or they

take a harder line when negotiating. And maybe that does make people less likely to deal with them in the future. I've heard either privately or publicly stories like that about certain GMs being kind of unpopular for, for reasons like that, or being hard to reach or just being tough to deal with. Um, that sort of thing. I don't, I don't know whether, whether the Cubs people have that kind of reputation at all. Uh, but I, but I do think it's a, it's a good seller's market and maybe there's less harm than usual in kind of leading with the pie-in-the-sky proposal. Yeah, I think it might also be helpful if – even if it's embarrassing to tell the Diamondbacks that and have them say no, it might actually be good for the Cubs to have that rumor out there for other teams to hear. You might not even be planning on trading them to the Diamondbacks. You might not think that's realistic. But for other teams to just mentally

adjust their expectations of what it's going to take might be a good thing. In general, it's good for people to have a higher frame of reference when they're thinking about it. What is that called? Remind me. Anchoring. Anchoring. Anchoring, yeah, anchoring. So yeah, it might be a good thing. Anyway, so the Rangers might get Garza. Yeah.

By the time you're listening to this, you'll probably know more about this than we do right now. Do you think that there's anything, I mean, they're giving up a player probably who was recently a very good prospect but is having a down season. Mike Holt, you mean? Mike Holt, yeah. Presumably. Now, let's say they don't.

But do you think that you would judge this trade any differently if it were a team that we didn't like as a front office you know uh i guess so i yeah i have those kind of inclinations where i'll you know i won't i won't just completely take a pass and say that that if they've made smart moves in the past then this must be a smart move but i am of the opinion that if we've seen a team be smart, then there's probably a higher chance that they're being smart again, right? I mean, if there's some precedent for that, I would kind of give it a higher probability of succeeding. But I guess this is one. I mean, these are two teams that are generally regarded to be smart and well-run.

So maybe that kind of cancels that out. Yeah, I'm certainly not suggesting that this is the case. But when we did the decline and fall of the Rangers last year, and we were looking at what historical precedents there are for a team as good as them collapsing, one of the, I believe, one of the theories was that they would have, they would basically get sucked into, well, I don't know how to put this, but once they started having less success

that they would kind of go on tilt and start chasing success at ever greater prices. And so you could maybe make the case that their current trajectory is maybe slightly downward. They were two pitches away or whatever from a World Series championship not that long ago. And then last year they lost the wild card game. And this year they don't have any. I mean, they're losing their division to the A's at the moment. And you could maybe make the case that even rational people are only rational under a certain set of circumstances and that as things maybe become less

favorable to them, they might not be quite so skilled, if that makes sense. I don't think the Angels front office ever had quite the same prestige in the internet as the Rangers did, but you sort of have seen that happening with them where it feels like every year that they lose, they get more desperate for the next year not to see the same thing, and then it reversely makes them worse. So, you know, it's possible that they are now at a point where they are in danger of

overpaying for this sort of long sought after white whale that they have at their own expense. Yeah, well, they traded for Ryan Dempster at last year's deadline, so maybe this is just kind of an annual tradition where they trade for a Cub starter when they need one. All right, do we have a— I would guess that that's probably not in there. No, you don't think? They probably don't have that, like tacked up on the wall, like to do.

Yeah, maybe not. Okay. Do we have anything more to say about this non-official trade? Nope. Okay. Then we are done for the week. Send us questions for next week at podcast at baseball prospectus dot com. Rate and review us if you have a minute on iTunes and have a wonderful weekend.