Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 302: The Diminished Miguel Cabrera/Clayton Kershaw and the Days-of-Rest Debate

Episode Date: October 8, 2013

Ben and Sam discuss the current true talent of Miguel Cabrera, then talk about pitchers starting on short rest in October.

Good morning and welcome to episode 302 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives. I am Ben Lindberg, joined by Sam Miller. How are you, Sam? Good, Ben. How are you? Okay. What's the stopwatch situation out there? I have one. Did they give it to you, or did you have to buy one? I had one already. We had to provide our own. Can't just be.

You had to provide your own? Can't just be. Did they recommend? There's no such thing as a free stopwatch did they recommend a particular model no they didn't but i think when i bought mine which was a while ago because i've used it for various articles i think i asked kevin and jason if there was a particular brand to get and i think i got the one yeah so you you got the uh you got the accu split uh the axe pro no i don't know really mine mine says sportline i don't know maybe i didn't ask them i don't really remember i feel like i i would have asked them there's one in particular that um

that they've i've seen them recommend they recommended, that Goldstein recommended. And when I went to buy it, it said customers who bought this also bought and it had all Baseball Perspectives books. Yeah, I don't know. It's a stopwatch. I mean, how different are they? There are some differences. You want one that won't break if you drop it, and you want one. Some people here have ones where you have to, like, hold a button down to clear it or reset it,

and mine just has a different button that you press to reset it. But, you know, it's a stopwatch. Goldstein said that it was pretty much the unofficial official stopwatch of scouting because of the scout proof feature and i have not yet figured out what the scout proof feature is i've been using it for a couple months and so far as i can tell it starts and stops yeah mine mine works that way it's it's i have no complaints all right uh what do you did you bring a topic you probably didn't bring a topic really and i apologize to everyone because I wish that I could get in depth on some playoff series and talk about the games. But I'm sitting here now watching Braves-Dodgers, and this is really the first baseball I've seen of any length today.

So next week I'll be home, and I'll be watching every inning of some series, and I'll be able to talk about it. some series and I'll be able to talk about it. Before you start, can you run quickly through the little math you did at the beginning of your ALDS game three recap? Because I thought that was interesting. Did you? I did. Okay. Yeah. Well, happily. Can you run through it? Yeah, well, happily. Why don't you, I don't know, can you run through it? I can, well, I can pull it up here. I mean, basically you tried to figure out what percentage of the regular Miguel Cabrera Miguel Cabrera is right now. And I guess you pulled Twitter.

And the answers, so the answers for him ranged from one to four wins. He's a one to four warp player right now with a mean of two. Yeah, with a mean of two. And the four was, I don't think anybody, I'm not sure anybody said three. Like it was almost all clustered around two. I got a lot of 1.5s. That's interesting. And a lot of twos. And, you know and a couple that were high enough that, yeah, the average was two. And the thing that I liked about this, the thing

that was fitting about this is that a reader named Neil Kendrick decided to actually try to find a good comp for Cabrera historically using the play index on baseball reference. And he actually found a a season that sort of feels like almost exactly like what Miguel Cabrera is right now and it was Toby Hera in 1979 and Toby Hera he had a 389 on base percentage and I believe in Miguel Cabrera's September when he was so you know he was terrible in September as well. And I'm looking it up right now. But he had something like, well, I'll just figure it out real quick, if you can wait.

But, I mean, he's basically a guy who can still get on base because he has some threat to him. And he still has some batting average, but virtually no power. And so in September he hit hit 278 395 333 and so if you give him a little bit more credit than that and assume that you know all those will kind of regress to be a little bit more like each other then toby harrah's line in 1979 which was 279 389 444 feels pretty good that feels like a decent a decent guess for what cabrera would hit right now if he had this body permanently and uh harrah that year was a third baseman

rated minus 30 by by our metrics and minus 23 by total zone and so uh like a legitimately like mouth-droppingly awful a defensive third baseman which i would say i anticipate cabrera to be until he gets healed uh so so anyway the point being that toby harrah was worth 2.3 warp that year and so we actually got a pretty good answer assuming that we all think that's more or less what his production would be if he had to play physically like this forever. We actually got a good proxy and it told us exactly how much that's worth. So you said that, so you started with the premise that these are both 96 win true talent teams, which the third order standings say that the Tigers are better than that. Their actual record says they're worse than than that so you're just looking for some sort of uh common premise there uh so so if you assume that they have the same true talent and they would win 500 games each if they played a

thousand times if you bump cabrera down from the seven and a half win player he was to toby harrah then you're saying that that turns this into a matchup between one 96-win team, the A's, and the Tigers, which then become a 91-ish win team. And so that is equivalent to giving Oakland home field advantage in every game, roughly, which means that that they would win 53 54 percent of the time instead of 50 percent of the time is that yeah roughly summarize that right yeah you did and uh yeah you summarized it i would say quite well so um and that's interesting and then you also noted that that the a's are pitching cabrera like he's to Hara, or worse, like he's a pitcher or something. They're just pumping fastballs in there all of a sudden. win team um uh it basically gives the a's chances of winning one of the next two two games it bumps them up from you know something like like 75 well basically exactly 75 to like 78 or 79 and

does that seem like a big difference or a little difference to you uh i mean i because in a sense it kind of makes miguel cabrera i mean it puts in perspective what even one player can do over two games right and it should also yeah yeah but uh yeah and also i mean the fact is that the a's even with cabrera playing are you know overwhelmingly likely to win at this point they only need to win one out of two games. So if it were three games in an even series, then the A's would probably... the gap would be bigger, right?

Yeah, obviously. That makes sense, because you're not even completely taking him away, you're just making him worse, and it's one player out of many players. Anyway, worse and it's one player out of many players oh anyway yeah it's uh i guess it it feels a lot like watching albert pools earlier this year although not not as bad um not nearly as bad actually watching albert pools was was hard to watch um remember when we

had zachary levine on and we talked about Miguel Cabrera's storylines? And one of the ones he asked us was, I guess, whether it would become a controversy late in the season if he played to try to chase the Triple Crown instead of resting to get ready for the playoffs? Has anyone, I mean, he missed some time, obviously. Have you seen anyone suggest that he should have rested more or anything? um i haven't but he wasn't chasing a triple crown yeah and and he did rest he sat i think he sat maybe maybe six games in september or maybe four uh completely so he did rest i haven't heard that i do know that i was asked uh by a radio a radio crew, a radio show, just before the series started, how worried the Tigers should be about Miguel Cabrera. And I said, not at all. So there's that. Okay. So what were you going to talk about?

So, yeah, every year there's a three-day rest controversy when a team in need of a win goes to their best pitcher but does it on three days rest. And it seems to me that there are – it's a complicated math problem. There are a lot of scenarios that you need to figure out. But it seems to me that it's a universal truth that we don't give enough credit to how much worse guys are on three days rest than they are on four. Which makes me think that if these are hard decisions, even underestimating that gap, then they are probably almost all wrong decisions because we're probably not including that enough in our own internal math. But regardless, I mean there are some cases where it probably makes sense. And I can be very easily persuaded that it made sense to start Kershaw on three days rest, given the Dodgers roster and their schedule going forward and a bunch of other things.

But I can also, I think I slightly feel like it was the wrong decision. In fact, I think I do feel like it was the wrong decision. But that doesn't really matter, and he pitched great. So whatever. And if you do want to go into the math, you can go look at MGL's blog. Again, when we were talking about how he wrote about Madden's decision, he has also written about the Kershaw decision. His site, by the way, is baseballsolutions.wordpress.com, and he went through all the math, and he concluded that it was basically a toss-up, at least if Granke would start game five instead of Nolasco, then there's essentially no difference,

according to his math, which is better than my math. Yeah, but was he just looking at these two games? is better than my math so yeah but he yeah was he just looking at these two games yeah uh so then there's also you'd have to start the nlcs with nalasco i guess and then and then go with kershaw and gricky no no no you start it with ryu and then you go okay so uh it basically doesn't it doesn't seem like it changes the rotation for the nlcs it changes the order but not how many starts everybody makes but then it could change the world series if you go seven because now you've got kershaw starting a game seven in the nlcs um and in the world series it actually might have an impact because even if you still get kershaw his two starts he's not available in the bullpen for

game seven as is sort of customary for your for your ace who's who's already made his two starts so it's a complicated series of events that would need to happen but eventually it could catch up to them but you know brandon mccarthy also talked about uh how he worries about uh the fatigue of the long season catching up to kershaw sooner it not in this game but but later on and i mean there's a lot of factors to me this felt like that i i also i ran the pakoda odds for it but pakoda doesn't know what doing it starting on three three days rest does do a pitcher so it wasn't all that helpful but i got the sense that yeah the two over the two days it's essentially a push um and so then you have to go to all the complicated stuff and if ever there was a a I would like this decision, it would probably be

with Kershaw this time. So that, you know, that maybe makes me feel like it's totally defensible and maybe the right move. Anyway, the point is not that, though. My point is that this comes up every year. And every single year, we go through the same numbers about how guys on three days rest cumulatively over the last you know 20 years have an era of some high number or over the last 10 years have an era of some high number and we point out that that's a that's a select group of pitchers who would be asked to do that they're usually the guys that you know obviously you want to move up and they're usually guys who started game one or game two so they're at the top of the rotation and um yeah jeff sullivan looked up the numbers right and and yeah and so did cameron and so did uh so did rosenthal and so i mean you know that's so it's it was like six

seven tenths of a run higher era for the short rest group even though those are better pitchers yeah and and it's a the numbers have been consistent. I mean, I, I know this because I've been seeing the same numbers every year for five years, because this comes up every single post-season. There are about five short rest starts per year in, in every post-season going back to 2000. Um, and so I guess my question is if, if this is an inevitability, and if we're never, if people are just, if managers are, maybe they are, maybe they're pricing this in, but if they're just never going to acknowledge the fact that the name pitcher isn't necessarily better when you change his rhythm, should teams that are, particularly teams that have playoff aspirations, do you think that they should start figuring out ways to get their pitchers, maybe three or four starts a year on three days rest so that it is not a foreign concept? And you would have them do it.

Maybe they're winning a blowout and you take them out after five innings, 70 pitches, and then you bring them back three days later and maybe you have them throw 70 or 80. I mean, you don't just abuse them. You don't just create more pitches for them to throw. But you get them used to, A, this sort of short rest idea and the recovery time in it, and, B, just being a little bit more less rigid in what you think. Because you also will hear that pitchers, you know,

maybe have taken too much time off. And that was actually something I wondered with Kershaw. If he didn't pitch tonight and the Dodgers had won, then he wouldn't have pitched. He would have had eight days rest. And you'll hear in cases like that, you'll hear somebody beforehand wonder whether he's you know had too much time off whether he lost sharpness or whatever so um i wonder if it

might actually be better for teams knowing that the postseason is is different and that you're going to ask pitchers to do different things and knowing that that's particularly for teams that feel confident they're going to make the playoffs that's the bulk of the value out of your season is going to be in that month, whether they should just start mixing guys up a little bit more so that it's not quite so rigid. But particularly getting them some experience every year with three days rest. Because maybe it's a mental thing, uh, no, knowing that you're, you're going on three days rest and maybe having them do it a few times, um, we'll get them over

the mental block. Um, you know what I'm saying? Yeah. There, there could be something to that. And, and rotations used to be a little less rigid than they are now. I mean, every now and then teams will, will skip a fifth starter or something if they have an off day and it makes sense. But for the most part, it's just one, two, three, four, five, one, two, three, four, five throughout the whole season. Whereas it once was the case that teams would kind of rearrange their rotations on the fly a little bit. And if they thought that they matched up really well with a particular team, some sort of platoon thing, then they might hold a starter back for that series or in a certain ballpark or just kind of play around with those things throughout the season. And maybe that would accustom a starter to being used a little bit irregularly, I guess.

I don't know. You could say that it wouldn't really mimic the playoff experience if you only guy who's going to be starting on short rest in the playoffs would be coming off a full start also in the playoffs. But although with Kershaw, Kershaw threw 124 pitches in his last outing, but like the last 50 were totally unnecessary. And so, I mean's a that's an isolated example but you wonder if mattingly would have uh if mattingly had kind of thought that this is this was a thing he was going to do and something that kershaw was more used to whether he would have pulled kershaw after you know 75 maybe but that's that's not the standard situation you're right and then there's also the possibility that you would just be increasing risk by doing that like maybe i see what you're saying that that maybe it's mostly or partially a mental block and that if you got pitchers used to the idea of doing

it during the regular season it wouldn't be so unfamiliar during the playoffs um but maybe because pitchers aren't trained to do that and they're not used to doing that and it does increase stress on your arm, I would think, just to do something unfamiliar and change your routine, that if you did do that three to four times in a season, it's not enough times for the pitcher's arm to adjust to that kind of schedule but it's more times than he would normally do it and maybe each time you do it you're increasing the risk of an injury or increasing the risk of fatigue or a dead arm period or something and so maybe you wouldn't want to mess around with it unless you really had a comfortable lead um and even if you did

have a comfortable lead you wouldn't want to do anything that would jeopardize that guy's availability in the postseason. So I can see the benefits of it, but I guess it's not completely without some potential drawbacks. Yeah. Yeah, fair enough. Yeah. It just feels like there's two solutions to this problem. One is to quit throwing guys on short rest and expecting them to be great. And the other is to prepare for it better.

And I don't know how to do the second one, but at least it seems like something that is possible because we tried the first one and it didn't work. Yeah, and there doesn't seem to really be a consensus among teams about whether it – there's no blanket policy about whether it makes sense. I guess I would say that – would you say that most times a team has the opportunity to do this with an established ace, it does this? Say it again.

ace it does this is that say it again would you say would you say that most times a team uh with an established ace or something close to it has the opportunity to do this to start him on short rest in the playoffs they do it no you would not yeah so i i would not i would say that it is a usually it is a combination of uh well in this case, it was it was the Ricky Nolasco factor. You know, most teams that make the playoffs don't have a pitcher as bad as Ricky Nolasco making starting games for them. So it's either that or more more commonly, it's the it's the down, you know, the back against the wall. I would I would argue maybe fallacy that, you know, they they have to win this game and they can't put their hands in their fourth starter, and so they bump the guy up. And so it's usually, I would say it's usually the ace, but I'm not sure that, yeah, it's

not the default, though. And then there are cases where the pitcher has never like cliffley right the phillies would never start cliffley on short rest because he'd never done it and they just didn't want to just didn't want to have him do it and which maybe that would have been a case where it would have made sense to do it with him at some point just so you could say it he has done it at some point and he didn't collapse. Yeah, well, Kershaw had never done it, I believe. I think that's why I was thinking about this. Okay, well, it's sort of surprising that there's no consensus about it,

but I guess teams have to think about it on an individual basis if they think that their starter is is built to handle it or not last year it's interesting some of the pitchers who have done it uh lance lynn did it last year uh rick porcello did it the year before uh let's see uh aj burnett did it and ofJ. Burnett is a great pitcher or, you know, a good pitcher, but one who in the postseason has this reputation. Jay Happ did it. Wow.

In 2007, Chin Ming Wong did it, which probably actually was not laughable at the time. Yeah. 2005, Paul Bird did it. 2005, Brendan Backey did it. I feel like there's a story there that I should probably look into. Yeah, probably. Okay, last thing I wanted to mention, just because I think we talked about it on the podcast,

and sometimes I forget whether we talked about something or I just wrote about something, and I know I wrote about this, but when Maniacta was fired the last time, did we talk about it? I think Bakke was coming back on from relief. It looks like Bakke had actually just pitched in relief, and that might be the case for one or more of the pitchers who I just mocked. Yeah, Bakke had only thrown seven pitches in an inning of relief. So much more. All right. I wonder how much that's – it's conceivable that the numbers that people are citing are somewhat skewed by that.

Because if you look on play index on baseball reference, it lets you pick what the guy's role was in the game that he did second, but not what he did in the game he did first. So it might be that there's guys like Backy who have done it who are the opposite of the self-selected ace group. They are guys who are pitching on quote-unquote short rest because they're relievers and suck. That sounds worth looking into. Maybe. All right. What were you asking? So did we discuss Manny Acta the last time he was let go? I wrote about it. I know. Yeah, we did.

So I think we talked about, I don't know, whether we thought that if he were on a good team, whether we thought that if he were on a good team, he would succeed or, you know, whether whether his firing was a result of his performance or just kind of being on bad teams and taking terrible records and then got fired and then caught on with, with a good team and established their reputation as a good manager. And I like Casey Stengel was one I brought up who was the manager of, of some mediocre Brooklyn Dodgers teams and some pretty bad Boston bees and Boston Braves teams. And, a decade or so almost into his managerial career, he was just a, I mean, he had a very, very poor lifetime record. And then the Yankees hired him and he went on to win a bunch of World Series and become a Hall of Famer. So

not that that's necessarily what's going to happen to Akta, but I'm kind of pulling for him, you know, partially because of the sabermetric thing and just the fact that he's been very open about embracing analysis and statistics. And I would like to see him get a chance to succeed with a good team. And he is now interviewing reportedly with the Cubs. And I hope he gets another chance just because I'd like to see him catch on with an up-and-coming team. And then we'll really know whether he's a good manager or just someone who kind of talks a good game

or talks a game that's appealing to internet people. So I'm looking forward to his next chance and hope that it will come next season. So Backy and Happ and Porcello all were coming back from relief appearances. So they should be excluded from the sample. I don't know if they are in the numbers that you see cited, but they should be. But for what it's worth, those three guys who, as noted, were all in the bullpen to start the series because they weren't very good, combined for a 6.43 ERA in their short rest starts, their so-called short rest starts. Well, you should ask Jeff or someone if he counted those

guys. And if not, maybe you can do a new group. Shame him? Shame him? Yes. Maybe I could shame him? Yes. All right. All right. Okay, so tomorrow is the email show. Yeah, so we've gotten some, but we could use some more at podcast at baseballprospectus.com,

and we will be back tomorrow with that.