Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 265: Answers to Your Burning Baseball Questions

Episode Date: August 14, 2013

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about baseball with clockwise bases, whether in-game managerial moves help or hurt, who pays players who get released, and more.

What is that sound? Can you turn the fan off? We've replaced crickets and birds with squeaky fans. That one particular fan is squeaky. That was a motorcycle. That was a motorcycle. Good morning and welcome to episode 265 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus. I am Ben Lindberg, joined as always by Sam Miller. I believe he's in his kitchen today.

It's Wednesday, so this is the listener email show we received quite a few emails and mostly Sam has picked out some for us to answer so we're going to do that now before we start I had one quick question that I meant to ask yesterday because we were talking about the Tigers and I had just watched the Jose Iglesias play about 12 times. Where does that rank on your, I guess, web gem scale? Because we've disagreed before about the impressiveness of defensive plays. I remember we argued about the Victor Martinez flip earlier this year and whether that was an impressive play. Yeah, I think generally if there's a dividing line between us, it's usually I'm less impressed by unusual throws. I find that humans have a great capacity to project objects in a given direction,

even under a crazy circumstance. So that's why I wondered about this particular play exactly there was a crazy throw when you're i think when you're a kid and you're you have limited space but you do have like a lot of socks and a hamper you get very or you know a nerf basketball hoop or whatever you you know you get creative and you get very used to throwing from all sorts of angles and uh with all sorts of different motions and uh you know like like i think i said at the time with victor martinez it's not that he makes that that play every time it's not an easy play but i think that you know that that a lot of guys would make it you know maybe one out of ten times or one out of six times now i didn't have time to

to necessarily like really study the physics of a glacius play, but it seemed to me very legitimate. To me, that was particularly impressive. I would say that I would agree with that. To me, to be able to throw from that angle that quickly and to make the ball do

what it did seems very impressive, especially because that's not any sort of a thing that you would ever, well, I guess not especially, but in addition, uh, that's not a play you, a type of throw you would ever throw. So it kind of reminds me of like, when, when I was a teenager and I golfed a lot and you, uh, you try to do sort of like Phil Mickelson shots in practice. But then the thing about Phil Mickelson is that he would make these kind of incredible shots that he would make these kind of incredible shots that he had never practiced just because he had to.

And it sort of felt like that. It was just this wonderful creativity that he just had in him. So I liked it. Agreed. Okay. Uh, what have you picked out for us today? So a couple of weeks ago,

maybe somebody accused our listeners of trolling us with some of these questions that's exactly what i thought of when when i read the email that you're about to read well i'm gonna read four of them in fact oh wow okay because now i'm on guard for this now i don't i don't think he was i don't think that he was right i don't think we've ever been trolled however but but this there we have an interesting slate of of questions this week and so i want to just go over the four kind of ones that this guy would claim are trolling and we'll just decide which of the four merit discussion and we can we can answer none of them or all four of them it's up to us yeah um we're in control of this show after all and if it doesn't basically

it doesn't really matter if it's trolling if we like it so uh so all right so the four questions one is um all right so so one is uh from eric hartman and he writes simply, so I woke up and had this written in a note, what if baseballs were half the size? So that's one. One is from Steven, who suggests that my thought is this, in center field, there should be a little house in which each team hires an elderly man or woman to inhabit for the game.

Should there be a ground rule double the outfielder has to go to the house knock on the door and ask a said occupant for the ball for the ball back i call this sandlot rules uh one is from emma who uh wants us to shoot down her boyfriend's question this is my favorite because of which is how she framed the email uh which i imagine that we'll probably we'll probably do this so i don't read the whole email to shoot down her boyfriend's question. This is my favorite because of how she framed the email. Which I imagine that we'll probably do this. So I won't read the whole email, but her email is basically baseball on ice.

Her boyfriend's great idea for baseball, I should say, is baseball on ice. And the last one is from podcast legend Carmen C, who asks about what it would be like if baseball were counterclockwise rather than or uh pardon me clockwise rather than counterclockwise with third base being first and first base being third and so i wanted to know um of the four do you think that uh which ones do you think uh deserve to taken seriously? And I will start by saying that I think Carmen C's is obviously a good question that does bring up some interesting questions about baseball in general. So I'm going to just immediately throw my support behind that one.

What do you think of the other three? I think we can probably dispense with the Sandlot rules question as much as I enjoyed it. Probably dispense with the Sandlot rules question as much as I enjoyed it. I might say the same about baseball and ice, except I enjoyed the email so much that I kind of want us to read it. And as for Eric's question, well, we know Eric is not a troll. I have met Eric. He is a very pleasant person. I'm not sure that we

would have that much to say about it, right? Except it would be much harder to play. Yeah, there'd be a lot more you'd think there'd be a lot more strikeouts depending on the composition of the ball you would expect it to travel a lot further. Yeah.

You could throw it faster, right? You could to travel a lot further. And the real question is... You could throw it faster, right? You could throw it a lot faster. That coupled with the fact that it's half the size. But you would lose the spin, right? I mean, if it's half the size, I think that every pitch would basically be... You'd have too much...

I don't know. I think unless you were throwing knuckleballs, I think it would be too hard to really manipulate. It feels to me like a baseball is the perfect size for spin manipulation, but it might be, the reason I don't want to answer that one is because I think that I would want to ask a pitcher who actually really has intimate knowledge of where spin comes from and how you impart it and is sort of in touch with the ball and one with the ball to answer that. I don't think we could answer it because that's the interesting question about that to me is the spin factor and I'm not qualified. So let's skip that

one for now. Okay. Uh, all right. So Emma's question is, um, uh, he has a dumb idea. My boyfriend has a dumb idea for extreme baseball that he won't shut up about. I'm covertly writing you on the chance that you might tell him how dumb it is. Like, this is risky. But baseball on ice, everything is played normally, but the players wear big spikes so as to not lose their footing. After a few innings, the rink would be so roughed up from the spikes, the ball would be taking crazy hops all over the place.

I guess at the very least the slides would be funny. Still, this is the dumbest of dumb ideas and I'm tired of hearing about it. I don't think that the ball would be taking crazy hops. I don't think that you would have anything resembling the normal hops that the ball takes. And so for the most part, I think that you would see – I don't think that the bad hops would be the problem personally. No. I mean you could get some gouges in the ice. I mean I think a Zamboni would be an excellent addition to baseball. I would fully support that as a longtime fan of Zambonis.

But I don't see this one having having legs well but so uh tennis is played on radically different surfaces yes right and golf is played on radically different surfaces to some degree uh you know if you look at i mean not not to a great degree but you know like the british links are radically different than, you know, Augusta. And, of course, you have different textures within a golf course that are radically different. So I guess it's not totally implausible that you would have a different surface type of field and that some guys might thrive on that. I mean, it seems implausible. on that. I mean, it seems implausible. Certainly, it's not scalable in the way that grass is scalable or fake grass. But I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand. I don't know that I – I

don't know. I don't know. You wouldn't have the – I don't think you could – I don't think you could – if you're wearing big spikes, I don't think you could have the speed necessary to field balls. And so I think it would just basically be too offensive driven. That's what I would say. Yeah. Well, I don't know. Could you get leverage at the plate if you're on skates or spikes? Maybe, I guess.

Yeah, I think you could if you have your back foot planted. That's probably the easiest place to get leverage. Okay. Well, yeah. Do we agree with Emma, though? Is this her boyfriend should feel ashamed of himself? Do you feel that way? Yeah, I guess so.

Have you ever seen an example of extreme baseball because there is an example of extreme baseball that dustin parks once brought to my attention i don't think so extreme baseball it's actually i think it's called like the extreme baseball league and it you have as i recall you have a both a left-handed batter and a right-handed batter batting at the same time, and then they run in opposite directions. There's two pitches. The two pitches come at the same time, and that's the extreme part of it. There's two balls. At any given point, there's two balls live at the same time.

There was this news story about it, and people talking about how awesome it was, And there was this news story about it and people talking about how awesome it was and they were like kind of sort of like semi game, and what the analog would be in baseball. And you wrote about how Petco has a slow infield, right? I didn't conclude it was slow, but they have an infield that suppresses ground balls to a great degree consistently from year to year. Okay, possibly because of the way the grass is groomed or something of that nature. And we've heard stories about, I don't know,

like teams that are, well, you know, watering down the base pass if they don't have a lot of speed to slow down the opposing team or letting the grass grow high if they have a bunch of ground ballers or doing something with the foul lines to affect bunts and that sort of thing. And of course, there's AstroTurf and things that can make the ball bounce higher and faster and all those things.

But I guess would not have quite as much of an impact as in a sport like tennis where the ball bounces on every interaction. That's the whole game is the ball bouncing all the time, which is maybe not something that happens as regularly in baseball. All right, so this one's quick. This one is from Brian. If a player is Dfa'd refuses assignment and signs as a free agent with another club who pays the player what mark reynolds was just released

by the indians if another club signs him is he still owed the entire six million the indians sign him for or does he get a prorated amount from cleveland and then whatever he agrees to sign for from his new club uh i i've always known this answer but you can correct me if what i've known is is incorrect but um my understanding is that a player who then who's released and then signs with a new team gets the minimum from his new team and his club is responsible for everything but the minimum uh of the previously owed salary um in perpetuity so um you kind of would prefer that your guys released get re-signed because you save a few bucks, but there's no hope that like Reynolds is going to go sign for $3 million with Pittsburgh and then Cleveland only has to pay half of the $6 million or whatever.

You're stuck with everything but the minimum. Yeah. Guaranteed contracts can be kind of a pain sometimes. All right, let's see. Tim asks, this season there is a good chance that every team in the NL with a winning record will make the playoffs. This has never happened before in the wildcard era.

The closest was in 1997 in the American League, and it's highly unlikely that it ever occurred in previous eras american league and it's highly unlikely that it ever occurred in previous eras well it's virtually impossible that it ever occurred in previous eras when fewer teams made the playoffs obviously this is a direct result of having an extra wild card in each league it's also a direct result i would guess of having one fewer team in the national league but uh anyway however do you think having more teams with a shot at the playoffs is suppressing the overall win-loss records for all teams, thus leading to fewer teams with winning records? This is interesting, and I'm going to let you go for a while because I want to look something up real quick. parity would have the reverse effect where you'd have more teams winning 85 games and fewer teams

winning 105 because you don't need to win 105. Basically, once you get past 90 or whatever, it's sort of diminishing returns. So if this were the reason, what Tim suggests, it would be counterintuitive to my mind. What do you think? It would be counterintuitive to my mind. What do you think? Yeah, I guess I would have probably agreed with the way you were thinking about it. So how does this tie into what we've talked about with parity and wealthy teams not winning more at all, do you think? Well, it's not parity, though.

I mean, what he's describing is the opposite of parity. I mean, what he's describing is that there's kind of a small upper class of teams in the National League that are significantly better than everyone else. Right now, the way that it would work is the Diamondbacks are like a couple of games over 500. So they need to get below 500. And then the Nationals are currently three games under 500. They need to stay below 500 in order for this to happen. And if that were the case, you'd have basically the Braves are on pace to win about 97. The Pirates are on pace to win 96. The Dodgers are on pace to win 94 or so, and will probably end up winning 115. The Cardinals are on pace to win, it looks like, I don't

know, 90 some. And, oh, actually, yeah, and then you have the Reds, who would be the worst playoff team, and they would be on pace to win 91 so you basically would have no teams winning between 81 and 90 games and so that's the that's the opposite of parity right I mean that's what what you're describing is no teams that are average or slightly above average right so it's yeah so it's there's well so Russell Carlton was was pointing this out to me the other day with the American League. So Tim is talking about the NL. Russell was talking about the AL and how there are just about no 500 teams. There's no one really in the middle, which is, I guess, similar to what Tim is saying, right? There are the Yankees who are 61 and 57,

and then pretty much everyone else is like five. I mean, there's a big gap between kind of the have wins and the not have wins. Yeah, it's the exact opposite. The best under 500 team is the mariners and they're on a 75 win pace so it's almost the exact reverse yeah uh where you yeah that's interesting you have the the same thing happening although i guess you don't see quite the underclass there as you you don't see the the equivalent underclass in the al as the uh overclass or the upper class or whatever in the in the nl there's only really one one one god awful team the white socks are getting there

they're getting there that's true um so do you have a theory i don't have a theory i mean clearly so i i guess as a as like a as a fun factor as an anomaly, the White Sox are already there. As an anomaly, it's a quirk. The sort of trivia part of it, the fact that all 500 teams might make the playoffs, is just a quirk. Because the 1997 season that he describes, if there was an extra wild card, that year it would have happened. And, you know, I don't think there was any particular trend that we see having developed since then. I mean, the American League since then has gotten much better and there are always more 500 plus teams than in the NL since then. So putting aside the trivia, the gaps, I don't know. I don't know how to explain it.

I don't know that I – I don't think that the theory that more teams have a shot at the playoffs is – would make sense in the NL. Now, it might make sense in the AL if that's all we were talking about, but we're not. Yeah, could just be a one-year blip. I mean, it does make sense in the AL. What we're seeing in the AL does make sense because you saw the Indians and the Royals in particular, and maybe basically those two teams in particular are classic teams that were going to be probably just around 500

or a little bit below 500, decided that they had a real shot, and so they went kind of a little bit crazy this offseason in a way that I'm not sure they would have in a different year. So that's partly because of the wild card, and it's partly just because we've seen so many teams come out of nowhere. So that kind of does it. I mean, you've maybe lost two teams there that you would have expected to be around 77, 78, 79 wins.

But on the other hand, those teams could have outperformed or underperformed and not been in that range anyway. It is, it's a weird thing. It's a weird thing. I'm glad that they both noticed it. Russell and Tim noticed it. I'd like to come up with a better answer than we have. Yeah, me too.

Maybe one of us will write about it after thinking about it more. Okay. All right, so now we're going to go to Carmen C's question. And his question came out of a – do you know how – what is it? Kotaku? That's like the video game blog, the gaming site. Yes, Gawker's gaming site. Is that part of Gawker Media?

Yeah, yeah. Good site. So they did, what's that? Good site. Oh, okay. So they had a post that you might have seen a while ago in which they attempted to see what would happen if you put a left-handed throwing player at a right-handed position, second base, third base, shortstop, or catcher.

And as I recall, the game wouldn't let you? Yeah, or at least the more realistic game wouldn't let you, because there was just no animation made for a player throwing from that handedness at that position or whatever. It just hadn't been modeled by the developers because those players don't exist. So Carmen writes, it got me thinking, what if the game of baseball operated under the same rules, except that the bases were laid out clockwise instead of counterclockwise? Would it be as simple as just that one rule change, or would the natural abundance of righties in our culture lead to a slightly different game? I don't just mean for the flipping

of the defensive positions or throwing, since that seems like something anyone could easily learn with enough reps. Would the game be slightly boosted offensively, with all the right-handed batters already a step closer to first base? Would there be less base stealing because of all the right-handed pitchers facing first base and more box called would we actually see left-handed throwing catchers would we see any fundamental change to pitching as a whole thanks for reading my question um and this uh did kind of make me realize maybe for the first time that is baseball the only sport that's not symmetrical uh where you have players of a certain handedness who can't play certain positions or at

a big disadvantage at the no just just just that in general the play doesn't move back and forth symmetrically it's i'm i can't think of a sport where the – well, besides golf, which is like nonlinear or whatever. It's kind of weird. It's multidimensional. But I can't think of a sport that is played on a contained field that isn't symmetrical, that doesn't go back and forth. That's kind of odd. Okay. So I noticed that.

Now everybody has noticed that. Yeah. So what do you think? obviously the positions where you have prohibitions against players of certain handedness playing would just be switched, I guess. They'd just be reversed. No, I don't think you could have prohibitions. There's not enough lefties in the world. So I think that you would have, I think you'd have righties at every position. And you'd just have to deal with that.

Lefties would have the advantage. It's interesting because you've seen in a couple of different ways where baseball has probably organically developed advantages for certain handedness, the positions obviously advantage right-handers because as a right-hander, you can play any position. Pitching advantages left-handers probably because batters don't get to see enough reps against you growing up. You're rare.

And hitting advantages left-handers, because you're five feet closer to the first base, and your momentum is taking you there. So that all would be switched, but it's not just a matter of i mean you could not you could never fill i don't think you could ever fill a field with left handers at five positions so yeah yeah right i mean you'd you'd have uh i mean you'd you'd maybe select more of them because there are fewer or there are more possibilities for each of them to but there are just fewer of them to go around uh so so you'd have uh so since lefties would have the defensive advantage at all those positions i think that you would see a lot more lefties held there which means that you would have a lot fewer left-handed

pitchers. Because, I mean, one reason that you, one reason that, Bill James' theory, as I recall, that there's no left-handed catchers is that it's because anybody, any lefty with an arm gets turned into a pitcher right away. You wouldn't have that. You would have lefties playing, you know, second base and first base and all those shortstop. And so with fewer lefties pitching, right-handers would now have a huge advantage, right? Because they'd have the platoon advantage.

Well, no, they wouldn't have the platoon advantage. Right-handed hitters would almost never get the platoon advantage because virtually all the pitchers i would guess would be right-handed so you'd have almost all right-handed batters against right-handed or sorry almost all right-handed pitchers and so then lefty left-handed batters would now have not only the positional edge because they would have the defensive edge at uh you know the defensive flexibility to play any position, but they would also have the platoon advantage a significant portion of the time. But they wouldn't have the running to first base advantage.

But they wouldn't have the running to first base advantage. Which is true. I don't know how much of an advantage that is. It's big. Don't you think that's big? It's pretty big. I mean, it's just an infield hit advantage i guess right it doesn't lead to to extra bases or well it might i guess uh right

sure it does yeah okay so five feet closer yeah um okay yeah that seems like a pretty sizable advantage but i would guess that it wouldn't outweigh the platoon advantage yeah no it would pale in comparison to the platoon advantage so basically all of your your uh lefties would be your best defenders and your best hitters it would be a it would be a lefty ruled world it would be like how lefty pitchers are completely overvalued now, except they would be properly overly valued. So then the question is how many lefties can you add before you then water down the pool of lefty talent, right? Because there are fewer lefties to be had out there. But if your righties are kind of sort of slightly worthless then all the righties would be trained to be pitchers uh-huh and then you'd have you'd have well you'd have better pitchers then

that would counter the platoon advantage it would or the few lefties who actually did go into pitching would be uh would would be like dominant because you'd almost never at that point you'd almost never see a left-handed pitcher so you would have a huge kind of quirk advantage and um you'd have a you'd have lefty dominated lineups most of the time although maybe just maybe maybe everybody would switch hit maybe you just see a much higher percentage of switch hitters. Yeah, I don't know how many people have that innate. Or maybe you would have never.

Maybe you would almost never because there'd be so few left-handed pitchers it wouldn't be worthwhile. Maybe everybody would just grow up batting left-handed. I don't know. So these would be pretty sweeping changes over time. I guess not immediately, but over a decade or so, I guess you'd see a pretty dramatic demographic change. We've had multiple questions related to this.

I think this is the best, the most sort of tightly condensed one, and I like it because it lays out a lot of the issues that would come up. But this is something that a lot of people apparently think about or simply want to trick us into answering. Yeah. Do you think that any thought went into this when the rules of baseball were formed, or was it just a natural, we do things clockwise, so we'll run clockwise? They don't run clockwise.

It doesn't run clockwise. It runs counterclockwise. So why would it? Every game moves clockwise, too. If you're playing bridge or whatever, you move clockwise. So I wonder why. Do you think there was consideration

given to these factors that we're talking about? Because the game was so different then. I mean, pitchers weren't even trying to get hitters out, really. That's right. There was no thought whatsoever of platoon advantage. Do you think it was just simply that almost everybody was right-handed and it made the throw to first easier? That it seemed natural to throw in that direction? Seems plausible. we should ask

john thorner or someone who would know yeah yeah we should uh all right do you have any more uh no i i think i'm good oh wait let me check let me double check uh uh well i would yeah no i don't think i can answer that one. I don't know. You want to answer? I wanted to hear just James's question about managers. He said, it seems to me that a lot of tactical decisions that a manager makes during a game are generally considered to be low or even negative value moves. I'm speaking of things like giving out intentional walks, ordering sacrifice bunts,

hit and run plays, and other such calls from the dugout. My question to you is this. Do managers add any in-game value through the plays that they call, or would baseball teams perform better if the manager limited himself to simply deciding who takes the field and just let the players play? So this reminded me of a recent thing. So this reminded me of a recent thing. I think it was in a Bill James mailbag on Bill James Online where he talked about whether pinch running makes sense. And his conclusion is that I think it almost never does because the increased odds of that runner scoring, he thinks, are are minimal like single digit percentage now there could be exceptions to that but he seems to think that's the general rule and that in a close game the the risk that uh that hitter spot will come up again and you will lose the better bat in the lineup almost always clearly outweighs the the advantage that you get by pinch running yeah i when i when i did that that kind of experiment with Billy Hamilton last year, I was shocked by

how little Billy Hamilton could add as a pinch runner, even assuming that he ran every single time at a very high rate of success. Still very, very small. Yeah, so I mean, a lot of these things do seem counterproductive intentional walks uh i guess bunts have been rehabilitated to some extent with with the focus on game theory and uh how sometimes bunts make sense even if even if the run expectancy table tells you that they don't um but even so probably still overused. And the manager maybe is responsible for the way that bullpens are structured and the way that rosters are broken down between batters and pitchers.

And that's another Bill James thing that we've talked about, I think, that the lefty situational guy is way overused and doesn't help a team as much as a bench player would. And then I think maybe managers don't always consider the pinch hit penalty enough when they're deciding how much of an advantage pinch hitting imparts. So there are a lot of these things that I think you could maybe make an argument that, and pitch outs, right? We talked about pitch outs when we were when we were completely desperate for topics we did an entire podcast on pitch outs wait i wrote an entire article about it what are you saying about my article uh well the podcast was uh partially extraneous because you had written

that article is is what makes it uh i think less less forgivable that we did that but um so pitch outs you you found on the whole don't make a whole lot of sense either. So I think there are a lot of these things that you, that you could make that argument that maybe just not doing them ever would be better than the amount that they are currently done. Um, so you, I mean, you do need a manager to make certain moves, right? I mean, you'd need a manager to make certain moves, right? I mean, you'd need a manager to make bullpen moves, or you'd just get the biggest and fastest reliever

would just sprint in before all the other relievers because he wants the ball and everyone wants the ball. But arguably, the pitching coach could do that as well. Well, okay. Yeah, sure. I mean, arguably, the pitching coach already does a lot of the time, you know, that at least provides counsel and might provide better counsel than the manager, you know, manager's ultimate decision. We don't really know that, but it's possible. Yeah, right. Although that's, yeah, I mean, that's kind of giving a task that's traditionally assigned to the manager just to someone else who's doing the same thing, maybe better.

Yeah, that's the point. Well, I think the point is just no one making any moves. It's not delegating it. It's just letting the players play. Although, to some extent, you just have to make certain moves just to have players in the game. So there's an unavoidable amount of strategy and tactics that have to be deployed. But on the whole, I mean, I did a story on front offices and coaching staffs, and I polled some front office people to ask them how many wins a year they think the manager costs their team through suboptimal tactics.

And I forget what the average was, something like three wins, I think, maybe. But the consensus does seem to be that a bad manager can cost his team more tactically than a good manager can help his team, right? So it sort of suggests that maybe if managers limited themselves, it might be better on the whole. Do you think that that's a defensible statement? If they limited themselves to the bare minimum of of player substitutions when a guy is is tired or or you know i mean matchups are important and i don't know any way to get away from someone someone dictating that but but otherwise well we all we all have to write a couple of manager comments a year for the annual,

and it does feel to me like the default in all of these is to say, this manager, you know, it's hard to say what he does, but at least he doesn't do a lot of this. At least he doesn't do a lot of that. I mean, we tend to judge almost all these managers kindly when they don't act. When I did the pitch-outs piece, and I found that every manager but one had cost his team runs by pitching out last year,

the two managers at the very, very, very bottom who had called the fewest pitch-outs, I think one had called two and one had called four, all year were Joe Maddon and Davey Johnson, who might be the two kind of consensus, stat-heady best managers going. So yeah, I think generally speaking, there's a danger when you give somebody a three-hour job that only takes 10 minutes that he'll find more things to do. Yeah, sure.

Because you always want to look like you're working hard. Time to lean lean time to clean that's what that's what mike socia always says right so yeah so there's something to that i think um okay so i guess we're finished for today uh as always you can send us more questions at podcast at baseballives.com people to the site. And you can join our Facebook group through the blog post at BP and rate and review us on iTunes. And we will be back tomorrow with regular topics.