Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 28: Austin Jackson and Debating Defense/What Does the Mariners’ Winning Streak Mean?

Episode Date: August 24, 2012

Ben and Sam discuss Austin Jackson’s excellent catch, whether he’s the best defensive center fielder in baseball, and whether it’s even possible to decide one way or another, then dissect Seattle’s eight-game winning streak to see if it’s the start of something good or a fluke that will soon be forgotten.

Good evening and good morning to everybody and welcome to episode 28 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast of Baseball Prospectus. We are on the cusp of a weekend, which I know means all of our listeners have one thing on their mind. Ben Lindberg, will you once again be lounging topless beside a pool in upstate New York this weekend? I will not. I will be in Manhattan, not next to a pool this weekend. Well, now that we have that question answered, let's go on to baseball. Do you have a topic you'd like to talk about today?

I do. Before we get to that, maybe, I don't know if it's really an omission, not really, since we did mention him very briefly, but I got a tweet asking for us to talk a little bit more about Pat Corbin, who was also involved in the Dan Heron, Joe Saunders, Tyler Skaggs trade we discussed yesterday. Do you want to very quickly cover why you're not a big fan of Pat Corbin? Oh, well, Corbin was drafted in the same draft class as Skaggs, I believe, but is a much more low upside guy. He is also left-handed. He, at the time of the trade, had very good numbers in A ball, but was widely seen as a kind of pitchability guy who maybe would struggle as he moved up. He has not

struggled as he has moved up, and he is now in the majors and has actually had a pretty good, I believe, third stint in the majors. But this might just be a case of it being hard to change one's mind after one has made his mind. I'm sure Patrick Corbin has a much brighter future in this game than I do. He just has never really jumped out at me as a guy who was going to make a huge impact but would make some second division team moderately happy with his fourth starter level performance at low cost. Moderately happy with his fourth starter level performance at low cost. And I guess even if he's not a high upside guy, if you're judging by results, which we said we probably shouldn't do, he does swing the trade a little more in Arizona's favor. Yeah, I always thought that his upside was being the second Joe Saunders in the deal.

Anyway. Okay. By the way, Saunders in the deal. Anyway. Okay. By the way, I have omitted my name. I'm Sam Miller, just in case anybody has just found us by accident, and you're Ben Lindberg. Yes. So let's go. My topic is the red-hot Seattle Mariners. And my topic is something like Austin Jackson, probably. Okay. You want to start? Sure. Well, back in the day, I'm told men used to gather in bars to drink alcohol and argue about

baseball. And this isn't a huge part of our life anymore i i don't think i think back then in our grandfather's era the average human spent two full years of his life uh just on the question of maze or mantle or the duke um but back then they only really knew each player's batting average and what they heard on the radio. And so there was always kind of a probably rich, fertile ground for arguing about things that could be argued forever without coming to any conclusion. Today we have far more information, and I guess there's some room to debate which hitter is better between Albert Pujols and Miguel Cabrera or whatever. I don't sense that many people really care, and to argue that question would really be

arguing about the merits of true average or WOBA or something along those lines, because we have numbers that we adhere to or that we put our faith into. But then there's defense, and defense is sort of a different situation. Today, Austin Jackson saved a baseball game and improved the Tigers to 13-7 in August by chasing down a line drive and making a tremendous catch on that line drive. And I think everybody knows that Jackson is an excellent defender and also that Peter Borges is an excellent defender and that Franklin Gutierrez is and probably that Carlos Gomez and Chris Young and Drew Stubbs are. But I don't really hear people arguing about this, which maybe they just don't care about center fielders. But I wonder if it's because there are lots of statistics out there, so we can't just say anything we want anymore in a bar out of ignorance.

But they aren't really great statistics, so we can't really conclude a point and feel like we won the argument. So I guess my question is twofold for you. Is Austin Jackson better than Peter Borges, and have we lost the capacity to argue passionately without evidence like our drunken grandfathers did? which I guess kind of has something to do with the second question in that I, I mean, I guess we have lost the capacity to do that. Speaking of you and I, I don't know whether you and I ever had the capacity to do that. I think in the past, as you've said,

we had different statistics available and probably less accurate and less comprehensive statistics available. And that didn't stop people from discussing things as if those statistics gave us just as much information or just as much ability to make those decisions, I think. And I mean, there are many people, most people, in fact, who have no awareness of the statistics that you and I would use to discuss players now, and would still be arguing using the statistics that people would have argued Mays, Mantle, and Snyder 60 years ago. I think defensive stats are not to the point where I would feel too comfortable arguing about it, certainly from season to season, because there's so much, I mean, in addition to just the variability and the fact that you need three seasons or so to give you anywhere close to as much confidence in a defensive stat as you would in maybe in the equivalent offensive stat. Offensive stat, there's positioning and all those sort of intangible things that at the moment are intangible and don't necessarily have to be intangible, but maybe think ultimately you have to fall back on the eye test often, and the eye test is something that people very rarely agree on, it seems.

I can agree that Austin Jackson is a very good hitter, better hitter than we thought he would be, and better hitter than he has been before. And I would certainly much rather have him than Peter Borges. But defense to defense, I don't know. They both look really good to me. That's about all I can say about that. Well, I am going to just say that I think Peter Borges is a better defender and the entire pool of evidence that I can marshal is that I've seen Peter Borges more

and somehow in my mind that is evidence that he is better I've seen him and he looks really good right and that's the worst argument ever um i mean you can be more confident that he's good i guess if you just see an occasional austin jackson highlight of him making an incredible catch like he did last night uh maybe you don't know if he always looks that good whereas you know how gorgeous looks always yeah i i actually probably would say that i don't know if he always looks that good whereas you know how gorgeous looks always yeah i i actually probably would say that i don't have any idea which one is better i

kind of i i think that probably what i want is for peter borders to be better because i've seen him so much and it's been so enjoyable that i kind of um would like to think that the numbers would back me up if the numbers were reliable and so that I would feel like I had seen something special that it wouldn't have been taken away from me, if that makes sense. And he's a good example because Peter Borges' fielding runs above average for 2011 were negative 7.1 and for 2012, positive 6.2. So overall, for his career, he is above average.

And certainly if you just watch him or believe any scouting report, you would conclude that he is well above average. But you can't really use our defensive stat to argue that very well for a guy who only has 286 career games and has had some fluctuation from year to year. Austin Jackson is really good. He's moving quickly into that. Well, actually, to sort of shift this a little bit, there are a few arguments that seem to come up every year. And one of them is the sort of variation of who would you want starting one game if you had to win it kind of a thing. And those kind of arguments are great because they are sufficiently

vague that you're not simply saying who had the most wins above replacement player this year or, you know, that sort of thing. And another one is who's the most exciting above replacement player this year or, you know, that sort of thing. And another one is who's the most exciting player in baseball. And Austin Jackson is not the most exciting player in baseball, but as far as that kind of category goes, he is really frigging exciting. Yeah, he is. He's just a high-babbitt guy. And I think we've reached the point where in his rookie year, he was a really, really, really high BABIP guy, and everyone expected him to regress, and he did.

But now his BABIP again is as high as it was in his rookie year. And he was always that kind of guy in the minor leagues too. Clearly he is just a guy who has some ability to get a lot of hits when he puts balls in play because he's really fast for one thing. And people who put the ball in play and are fast and get a lot of hits on balls in play and play really good defense are, are very exciting. Let's talk about your thing. Okay.

Uh, so the Mariners were off last night, but they are currently on an eight-game winning streak. They had another long winning streak shortly before that. So they've won something like 14 out of their last 15 home games and 10 out of 11. They are one of the hottest teams in baseball, certainly. They are one of the hottest teams in baseball, certainly. And so, I mean, this wasn't really something I expected to see this season, certainly. And I'm wondering how real it is or how much more optimistic you are about the Mariners now than you would have been two weeks or so ago. They have played very well since the All-Star break overall.

And as Dave Cameron and Jeff Sullivan have pointed out, a lot of this recent winning has come against the AL Central. They are something like 13-1 against AL Central teams and more or less 500 against everyone else they've played since the All-Star break, which is a bunch of good teams and the Blue Jays who are all right. But that is not really, it doesn't totally explain it. Obviously, no teams go 13-1 against any division consistently, so they have played well. And to be more or less 500 against everybody else is...

Yes, that's good. have played well. And to be more or less 500 against everybody else is, that's good. Yeah. And so I don't know, Jeff wrote a piece about how he doesn't know whether to believe it. He's seen hot streaks and stretches like this before.

And the Mariners have gone right back to being the Mariners, but that this team is a little different in that it seems to have more youth and more promising young players. But looking at who's actually played well during this eight-game winning streak, or during August at least, the people whom you'd want to see playing well and who are really a big part of the Mariners' future have not been a huge part of the winning necessarily. Their hottest hitter has been John Jaso, who could certainly be around for a while. But the guys who you really want to see do well, Justin Smoak and Jesus Montero and Michael Saunders and Dustin Ackley,

have really not hit in August at all. And on the pitching side, of course, Felix has been incredible. And there are many promising young pitching prospects on the way or recently arrived. And I don't know, do you see this as more of a fluky interruption in the losing that ultimately will pass? Or do you see it as the start of something or at least a reason to be more excited about the Mariners? Well, it's a little bit of a complicated answer. I think that I was on up and in just before the season started to preview the AL West and Goldstein asked me for a bold prediction. And I said that the Mariners would be over 500 or something like that. And so I did actually think that they were going to be a surprisingly average team. average team um and yet i actually can't take any credit because they're i mean everything that i thought was going to contribute to that has not really happened and the most of the the reason

i was kind of bullish on them is that um i thought that they had done a really good job of um of drafting and trading for guys who were um if not super high upside, close to the majors. And so they were able to really turn the team around, turn the roster over very quickly. Like within a year, they turned over almost the entire roster. And there weren't really any stars that were apparent other than maybe Montero and Ackley. were apparent other than maybe Montero and Ackley, but it seemed like they no longer had any four or five spots where they were going to have terrible players, and yet they have terrible players all over.

So they are winning in a way that surprises me. I could be wrong about this, but my sense has been over the last few weeks that their bullpen has been like it just out of this world insanely good I could be wrong I like I haven't done a ton of research on that but there are it seems like their bullpen has again with almost all players who were either not there at the start of 2011 season or weren't a big part of it at the start of the 2011 season, has become one of the most effective bullpens in the game.

And I don't know that that's a thing that I would really want to be basing my team's future on because those are always bullpens that are all over the place. They fluctuate like crazy, as we talked about, or as I talked about somewhere with the are all over the place. They fluctuate like crazy as we talked about, or as I talked about somewhere with the Giants and the Rangers from the beginning of the year to now. So I do think though that the Mariners have, and the other thing is that I thought they were going to promote maybe some of their pitching prospects a little bit more aggressively.

And I was envisioning a rotation that was Felix and four 23-year-olds. And, of course, they really haven't promoted aggressively this year because this year hasn't really mattered. And I think because Holtson has been a little bit uninspiring after his last promotion, again, if I'm not mistaken. uninspiring after his last promotion, again, if I'm not mistaken. So anyway, the point is that I think the Mariners have a nice little future. It's not a super high upside future.

It's hard to imagine this team getting to 95 wins anytime soon without a bunch of things breaking. And I think you could probably argue that, as you were alluding to, And I think you could probably argue that, as you were alluding to, this season has actually been sort of a step back for those fantasies. Because Montero and Ackley are certainly a big part of any fantasy for the future. And neither one of them has taken a huge step forward. Or really any step forward or any step parallel or any small step back. Yes. Well, it's nice to see people parallel or any small step back. Yes. Well, it's nice to see people excited about the Mariners for a change and not just for one great Felix start, but for actually a stretch of playing well.

And people have actually started talking about the Mariners' playoff odds, which is amusing. Because it's like 0.2, right? It is. But it is like 0.2 right? it is but it is something it is not non-existent it was 0 for a while it's always fun when something comes back from the dead

and people are comparing them to the 1995 team that had similar odds or at least were a similar position in the division at this time that year, but we're not behind nearly as many teams, and we're just a better team to begin with,

so it's probably sort of a silly comparison. But it's fun, and it's nice that Mariners fans are getting to see the Mariners do some good things. I think everybody roots for the Mariners at this point, right? There's sort of, I think, a blogger backlash. There's some people who like the Mariners blogs and root for the Mariners. And then there's some people who kind of are oversaturated with Mariners content and I think root against them for that reason. Well, let's wrap it up, Ben. them for that reason. Well, let's wrap it up, Ben. We have 72 hours to ourselves. So I'll see you back here late Sunday night and hope everybody has a great weekend.