Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 423: Analyzing Early April Trends

Episode Date: April 8, 2014

Ben and Sam discuss whether they’re buying several statistical developments from the season’s first week.

Let me stretch upon your carpet, let me hear the rain tap on your street, knowing I am safe on the inside, like trapped and drifting off to sleep. Good morning and welcome to episode 423 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives, presented, as always, by Play Index Tool at BaseballReference.com. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg. And, Ben, before we get going, I want to thank loyal listener James Smith, who pointed out that Ryan Webb finished a game today. He did not get the save in that game.

He looked very good. He looked like a closer. He struck out a pair, didn't allow a base runner, but he was not getting a save in that game, and they were losing. So he now has 75 completed games in his career without a save making up the the ground that Matt Albers had had put between him and and Webb with a finished game a week ago so that's a thing we're updating now he has 75 and Matt Albers has 83 and uh if if you're not reading the site you might not know that we wrote about matt albers and how closer like he looked uh in in a game a

couple days ago in which he's sort of like kind of made history he got eight swinging strikes in an inning in which he threw only 14 pitches which is the the the high basically the highest ratio of the last year plus um and dwarfs what you know really any other pitcher and particularly what any other matt albers has ever done and um and he was so fired up by this uh performance that we got to see an almost closer celebration out of him like after the final swinging strike he he stomped off the mound and lifted his fist and pumped it down as though he had just saved a game and uh it was as though we saw what he will do when he finally gets it saved very i would say very broxton like to me it looked like a jonathan broxton uh save um so that's what he's got in him. He's ready. He'll be ready when the day comes.

Matt Albers is on paternity leave. He's just always finishing. Edit that out. Please edit that out. I don't know. We'll see. Please, please edit that out. All right.

So a podcast. Let's do a podcast. Okay. I meant to mention something yesterday. I guess I was so distraught over the Undertaker's loss at WrestleMania that it just slipped my mind. But people should take part in the Hacking Mass competition that we are running at BP. This is a longtime thing that BP used to do. We took a few years off and now we have brought it back. It is basically a stripped down fantasy game where you

try to draft or, you know, you try to select the worst players at every position. And there are prizes. The person who selects the worst team wins a lifetime premium subscription to BP and $100. And the rest of the top 10 or bottom 10 finishers also win one-year subscriptions to BP. So you can go to the site right now. It's free for anyone to play. You don't have to have a BP premium subscription. You can just have a basic free one. Just go to the site. You'll see a post on the top right about Hacking Mass, or you can go to

baseballprospectus.com slash H-M to register. And the deadline is this Friday at midnight Pacific time, I think. So both Sam and I are playing, and a bunch of other people have already signed up, and it's fun. It's like the reliever league. It's another thing to pay attention to. It's super fun. I'm thrilled that it's back. To me, now it feels like J.J. Abrams getting to direct Star Wars and Star Trek.

Hacking mass is a thing now that we get to bring it back and kind of almost in a way oversee it. So that's really super cool. I mean, we have nothing to do with it. You said the words that made it happen. Yes. Anyway, yeah, so do that. It's fun. Who's your pick? Who's your hacking mask pick?

I haven't made my team yet. I'm actually sort of sifting through the options because we have until Friday, and I figure might as well use that time. Maybe someone will get hurt or something. But you don't have like one name, one goer? I like Ryan Goins. He was kind of my pick off the top of my head. I don't know whether he'll get enough playing time because that's the thing. It's based on like a proprietary stat that's basically –

it's like.8 minus OPS times plate appearances. So you want the guy with the lowest OPS and the most plate appearances. And for pitchers, it's something similar with ERA and innings pitch. So you want someone who's bad on a rate basis, but somehow not so bad that he loses his job. You just want the replacement level types who manage to stay in there all season. I guess I think BJ Upton has been a popular pick so far. Very.

In fact, 134 out of 440 teams have him right now. He is, at least as far as the players that I've picked, he is the most popular player. Uh-huh. Yeah. Just continuing my mystification about mechanical flaws and people who fix them. Oh, yeah. It's just i i never know what to think we did it we talked about this on the braves preview podcast i guess it was how he revamped his mechanics after his struggles last season and everyone sounded really optimistic and he sounded confident and oh he's hitting the way he did during his successful seasons again and so far

he has what 11 11 strikeouts and no walks and 25 plate appearances meanwhile josh hamilton is hitting really well and he credits a mechanical adjustment um he is he is now bouncing around behind before he starts his load which apparently he didn't do last year and didn't do in the second half of 2012. And somehow he just forgot to do it all of a sudden, and now he's doing it again. And so now he's the old Josh Hamilton again. So continuing to confuse me about whether I should ever believe these things will have an effect. You'll crack it someday. Someday.

All right. So I wanted to talk about a few things that are new this year. That's not the right way to say it. Things about 2014 that are different than all the years that have come before in terms of league performance. And, of course, we're only five to eight games into the season. And so most of these things, at this point, it's way too soon to say whether it's a fluke or whether it's something specific to the early, you know, to the season's

first eight games. You know, there are certain statistical trends in the first eight games that you might not see in September just because, you know, pitchers, for instance, are, you know, limited in pitch counts kind of a thing, or if there are actual changes in the game. So I'm going to tell you a few of the things that are happening this year that are different than all the other years, and you're going to talk about them and tell me whether they're real, I guess. Okay.

And you haven't been prepared, so I don't want anybody to think that you've done any sort of statistical work to determine whether they are significant, whether this is a significant change or anything like that. You're just going to talk. Yes, I think they will know from the quality of my answers that I have not thought about this before. I might also talk. Please do. All right, so here's one.

Home runs are way down. They're way down from last year. Last year, there was almost one home run per game. And this year, 0.96, I should say. And this year, it's 0.85. It's the lowest rate since 1993. And obviously, offense has been going down or it went down, I guess we can say. It went down. But home runs didn't really go down. It's such a home run friendly era in a lot of ways strategically that home runs still stayed quite high. And now they've dipped. So 0.85 home runs, lowest in 20 years,

and significantly lower than last year and the previous year. And so perhaps, yeah, do you want to talk now? Are we talking about season-to-season comparison, or are we talking about April-to-April, or first week-to-first week? We're talking season-to-season. And so your answer could very easily be, well, it's April. Maybe home runs are always down in April. Yes, that is my answer.

Well, yeah, I wonder whether we can check that quickly. I mean, I know that they are lower in April. I don't know whether that accounts for the entire difference. But yeah, that's, I mean, offense in general goes up as the year goes on as the weather gets warmer balls start flying farther when they are hit so i wouldn't be surprised if that accounted for all of that or or a high percentage of it at least i wouldn't be shocked if home runs were down either, but that doesn't convince me. Well, Ben, this isn't conclusive, and this is only one year that I'm looking at, but I will say that actually last year in April, home runs were up over the rest of the year.

In April, there were 1.02 homers hit per game in April, and the season average was.96, so presumably on average.93 0.93 or 0.94 for the rest of the year after that so in fact that's only one year maybe last year was a freakish April but home runs were not were not down that surprises me um huh okay well yeah uh i would like to to know more years but if i mean it's you'd think that i mean if pitchers are getting harder to hit it seems i mean strikeouts rise every year and maybe that's partially because of a change on the batter's part where they are swinging for home runs they're trying to hit home runs and therefore they still hit home runs but they also miss the ball and they strike out more often um but i mean it sort

of stands to reason that if pitchers are throwing harder and getting it harder to hit that there would be fewer home runs sure yeah but uh in 2012 home runs were down in April by about the same margin as they were up last year. And of course, we know that this is not, I mean, we know that home runs are down in April. That's an established thing, right? So I would guess that that accounts for most of that. Okay, now let me bring this up, though, because they were down slightly in 2011. So nonetheless, home runs in the previous three Aprils were all higher than they are now.

Although maybe it's that we haven't seen all of April. Maybe they'll move up progressively as April happens. Yeah. Um, yeah, I'm going to say, I'm going to say small sample on that and not just small sample, but early April sample.

Yes. Yeah. Like a misleading, yeah. A confounding variable. Yes. We'll say. Uh, and so presumably that would have something to do as well with total bases being down and, uh, runs being down and OPS being down, all of which are down.

All right. Next one. Strikeouts. Our favorite way, way up. Strikeouts, our favorite. Way, way up. Way up. Yeah, like a huge, a huge jump. You know, there have been, it's been going up steadily for many years. But last year was 7.5 per game. Previous year, 7.5 per game. This year, per game uh previous year 7.5 per game this year eight per game oh yeah big big jump and uh and walks actually have gone up too uh over the last uh three years compared to compared to the previous three years so that is a big jump so there is a big jump from 2011 to 12 when it went

up from 7.1 to 7.6 and then it was right and then it was flat for a couple years huh so that's interesting um i wonder if i had to guess about a time of the year effect i would guess that strikeout rate would be lower in april just because velocity tends to be lower um pitchers pitchers tend to gain velocity as the year goes on, both because of the temperature and because they are broken in and warmed up and all that. And that's been pretty well documented too. So I would guess that strikeout rate would rise also throughout the year, but I'm not sure about that.

I'm looking at, I've just looked at the previous five seasons, and it's ever, ever, ever so slightly less in April, it looks like. But not reliably, and not a big difference. Huh, okay. Well, I'm inclined to... Okay, well, I'm inclined to... April looks to be a very good gauge or predictor of what the year's strikeouts are going to be. Yeah, so I'm inclined to believe that one. I mean, just based on the fact that it's happened more or less every year.

Yeah, I mean,'s that's interesting because we've talked many times on the show about when one strikeout rate is too high and of course you know people like rob nyer think it's already too high and we were kind of okay with it where it was last year and i think we said maybe we'd be okay with it up to like a strikeout per inning or something like that uh we're we're getting almost there what do you mean people like rob nyer uh rob nyer and other people uh yeah it's so you know i'm as as as you know i'm i'm looking this year at uh every day i wake up and i look at the previous day's pitching lines and i'm i'm collecting all the pitching lines that have never occurred before

and then I'm writing about them periodically. And so, you know, the pitching line, innings, hits, runs, earn runs, walks, strikeouts. And it's usually, it's like one or two a day on average have never happened. And I'm fascinated by how we could be this far and have lines that have never happened. And you're surprised by how many there are.

And in fact, I don't know, maybe you should be surprised by how few there aren't because there's like infinite pitching lines. But anyway, the real consistent thing I've seen with the new lines is that usually what sets them apart is the strikeouts and or the walks. There are so many outings now that are like five innings, seven strikeouts from the starter. And that doesn't seem like, that doesn't shock you. That seems fairly normal. Like, you know, batters and pitchers do that pretty regularly now. But those lines just didn't exist previously.

Partly because pitchers would go longer than five innings, partly because they wouldn't strike out seven in five innings. But those two things are kind of related, too. I mean, the pitch counts are getting higher because pitchers are striking out seven and, you know, walking three in five innings. So that's a non-scientific way of looking at this. But I mean, it really does seem like and i this is not compared to last year necessarily but uh you know clearly we're in a place where starting pitchers are are pitching for strikeouts in a way that is unprecedented and uh it i'm not i'm just noting that it has jumped out at me in doing this thing that i'm doing i mean there's also there's also

a lot more and this does not show up in the stats so far this year because walks'm doing. There's also a lot more, and this does not show up in the stats so far this year because walks are up, but there's a lot more eight strikeout, one walk outings where the pitcher goes six innings and gives up five runs and you wouldn't think he pitched that well, but he struck out eight and walked one or he struck out six and walked nobody.

There's a lot more fit games. A lot of these new games are are fit star you know fit superstar games right well you we we talked about that or you wrote about it last year right with the the high strikeout to walk ratios not necessarily leading to good results or to the degree that we would have would have expected did i i think so joe Blinton, right? Yeah, Joe Blinton. Yeah, so I'm looking at a – there was a Max Markey article about a year ago, last February, where he tried to figure out whether pitchers are ahead of hitters or whether hitters are ahead of pitchers, that once you remove the effect of temperature, scoring is actually higher early in the season and then declines throughout the year. Which to him suggested that pitchers are not really in mid-season form to the extent that hitters are. And he looked to see if it was a defense effect, possibly, and it wasn't. Defensive efficiency was just as high or even higher early in the year. So it seemed to be that pitchers were behind hitters once you accounted for the effect of

temperatures. So if that's the case, and if pitchers are really striking people out at that rate and again we're just talking about one week but strikeout rate is a thing that stabilizes pretty quickly so yeah i mean i'm inclined to to think there's some signal there all right um it's also it's also possible that that uh this would be different three days from now it's possible that this would be different three days from now. It's possible that this is somewhat the effect of being midway through the second turn through the rotation. That's possible, yeah. So that the aces have pitched twice, and so they've pitched a disproportionate percentage of time. But we'll see in a couple days.

All right, caught stealings, way down. Like, way down. And, you know, I wrote last year and we talked last year about how stolen base attempts are down. And stolen base attempts this year are equal to stolen base attempts last year, which is, like, I think the lowest since, like, the 70s or something. And that came out of nowhere and was already hard to explain. But nonetheless, that's established. But this year, nobody's getting caught. So this year, last year, 55%—sorry, there were 55 stolen bases per game and not—there's not 55. 0.55 stolen bases per game and 0.21 caught stealings.

This year, the sum is going to be the same, but it's now 0.61 successful and 0.15 unsuccessful. So better than 80% rate better than 80 ben or as the guy in can't hardly wait would say 93 yo um and it's not billy hamilton because he doesn't have one yet he's bringing it down he He's been caught once by my man Anthony Recker. So that's interesting. Lowest caught stealing rate since 1950, which I assume is actually an artifact of the record-keeping. My guess is that they weren't keeping caught stealings reliably in 1950.

My guess. Anyway. Okay, so what did you say about the attempt rate? It's exactly the same as last year, which is much lower than in 2012 and 2011 and 2010, but nonetheless, exactly the same as last year. Hmm. Well, I guess it could be, all right,

so if it is real, then it could be a few things, right? It could be that teams are not prioritizing catcher arms to the degree that they once were. Maybe they're more interested in receiving skills or game-calling skills or something. It could be that pitchers are neglecting the running game, that they're focusing on the batter, which maybe makes sense. It could be that runners are faster. Maybe that thing that people always say about how 90 feet between bases is just perfect and it worked really well a century ago and it works just as well now and it's immaculately determined. Maybe that's not true maybe people have

gotten faster to the degree that that that's not quite as as long a distance anymore um maybe i don't know could it be probably wouldn't have anything to do with replay right i mean i doubt that that umpires got their calls wrong one way or another in the past in a way that would affect stolen base rate? I wouldn't think it would affect it enough to show up. I actually, though, to go off on a small tangent, I was thinking the other day that one thing that we never talked about with replay is that there's always been, I feel like, a bias toward calling a runner out

if the ball beats him. And so now, you know, now theoretically with replay, that will, you know, sort of have to go away. And you wonder whether, the only reason I thought it was interesting is you wonder whether it will change base running, whether you will see a shift in how often runners go for it. If they, and kind of, I wonder how long it would take for runners and teams to change their calculus and their mind. Like if it's an entire generation that has to be brought up in this slightly, slightly, slightly different calculation so that it becomes second nature. Anyway, that's not relevant to this conversation. Anyway, that's not relevant to this conversation.

Or I guess it could be that the overall attempt rate hasn't declined from last year, but, I don't know, better runners are going more often or something. The distribution of attempts is skewed more toward runners who are more likely to be successful. So it could be any of these things, or I guess it could be nothing. I'll say there's something to it. To talk about what you just said, at the Sabre Analytics conference, there was a presentation by BIS, and they just did a whole thing on charting everything having to do with base running and timing pitchers and timing pop times. everything having to do with base running and timing pitchers and timing pop times. And I think they're timing the time it takes to apply tags starting this season.

And they found that even to get it to a 50% caught stealing rate, the ball has to get to the glove of the player who's covering second between 0.2 and 0.25 seconds before the runner arrives. And that if the ball and the runner get there at the same time the runner is safe 88 of the time that would support the idea that maybe maybe replay could could help or or would have an effect there but yeah i'll say i'll say there's something to it i'll say it'll regress a little bit back toward whatever the established number was before, but maybe there's something.

I'm going to guess that it's all fluke, that it won't regress all the way. Or maybe that last year's might have been a little low and this year's might be a little high and maybe last year's never quite regressed all the way. But I mean, we're talking about like a dozen caught stealings that are missing and so i don't know that when you put it that way it doesn't seem like it has to be significant so i'm going to guess not significant did you see the martin maldonado play no if he were if he were behind

the plate uh cut stealing rate would be higher it was like he he backhanded a ball in the dirt and threw from his knees and got the guy uh i will send it in a second it was it was very impressive i think even you would be impressed and i have failed to impress you with defensive plays many times you sent me that delman young one a couple weeks ago there was just like nothing it was the most routine play they basically made delman young one a couple weeks ago that was just like nothing it was the most routine play they basically made delman young look slow and clumsy and you were you were like doing that none of that sound like you were all like hyped up all right this one you're gonna like i probably will like it uh and while i watch it uh because i no longer have ad blocker oh good

it's here we go i'm gonna watch it i'm gonna watch it here we go okay okay that's ridiculous yeah i'll put a link to the facebook on the facebook page to this play in case you haven't seen it it is it's very impressive that's really great yeah i like that there's this great way that the two, he does two amazing things, right? He picks the ball and then he throws the ball and he does both of them extremely well. But there is this wonderful way that the two things help each other, you know? Like the way that he has to catch it leads into his throwing motion. Yeah, right. It sort of creates a load for his throw.

Yes, I thought that too. Yeah, so it's slightly convenient for him, but it's pretty and I like it. All right, next one. Ground ball double plays. Way down. Way down, Ben. Like shockingly down. Like down by 20%-ish.

And lower than any year since recorded history. There's never been a year. We're talking about per opportunity? Double play per? We're talking about per game. Okay. So how much is it down from, say, last year? And just to be clear, if you look at singles plus walks plus hit by pitch,

there's no difference this year. So just as many people are reaching first base per game. Basically, is that right? Yeah, because the walks are up. Yeah, it's just about exact. And so last year was 0.77 double plays per game and that's about the average for the last five years and then before that it was in the low eights low point eights um but basically over the course of the last 20

years it's been between like 0.74 and 0.81 and very little fluctuation this year it's at point six three i don't know what to make of that i don't think that could i mean what could have changed so much in one one winter to make it go down that much i mean um i was gonna say it had something to do with offense going down but if that's not the case, then it could be, you know, is ground ball rate down, do you know? Is like, are hitters hitting more fly balls? Because fly balls are good. Maybe you can check that out.

Yeah, that was my first thought. I don't know. If it's not that, then I don't know. What else could it be? Is it possible that shifting somehow makes it more difficult to turn double plays because you've got your second baseman in right field or something? Yeah, like today Adrian Beltre, for instance, was playing shortstop, and there was a ground ball double play hit to second base and they fed him

and he had no idea what to do and he's very awkwardly sort of tried to do a jump throw over Pedroia and never got the ball out of his glove and almost stepped on Pedroia who's small and so I mean it's hard to imagine imagine that there are like 30 of those, but... Yeah, or that shifting could be up so much from last year, which was already up, that it could produce that sort of effect. Anything on the batted ball stuff? I'm looking it up. I don't know.

I would guess not that much to that, probably. Yeah. I don't really want to look up the ground ball thing, to be honest. I don't want to have to do math again. So I'll look sometime, but not right now. All right, last one. Last one is wild pitches are way up uh a let's see it's right now currently the wild pitches are the highest rate in recorded history as well uh it's 0.39 per game uh and the average over the last five years has been about 0.33 or 0.34. Are well pitches up historically?

I mean, I have no idea what the trend is. Yeah, so in the 70s, it was about 0.3. In the 60s, it was about 0.25. In the 80s, it was about 0.28 to 0.3. In the 90s, it was about 0.33. And in the 2000s, there was a tick downward from 2000 to 2008, in which it was about 0.31. And then in the last five years, it's been about 0.34.

And then this year, it's 0.39. So we're talking about nine extra wild pitches. just so that it's clear what we're talking about maybe 10 could be 10 i wonder if this is an april phenomenon because you'd think you know cold weather maybe more precipitation or you know snow and rain and less of a grip on the ball maybe catchers and catchers who don't know their pitchers as well yet. There's a fine line between a catcher and a catcher. Catchers are at least a large portion of the blame here.

If they don't know their pitchers as well. That's what I would guess. Velocity going up probably would lead to more wild pitches, right? Because you'd, I mean, it's harder to get yourself in front of a ball in such a way that maybe it would be called a pass ball instead of a wild pitch, just because you can't get over to it in time because it's going faster, maybe. Yeah. But yeah, I'll guess April on that. You're going to guess April, and I'm going to guess small sample.

Just general small sample. I do have one correction to report. Okay. It's 92% yo is the quote for a special K in Cowardly Wake. 92% yo is the quote from Special K in Cowardly Wake. 92% yo. Okay. So I apologize for that. As soon as I said it, it felt wrong.

Yeah, we would have gotten an email about that. Yeah. Okay. Is that it? That's it. All right. So go register for Hacking Mass before Friday. Just do it right now.

It doesn't take that long. At baseballprospectus.com slash HM. Send us emails for tomorrow's email show at podcast at baseballperspectives.com. And please support our sponsor, Baseball Reference. Go to baseballreference.com. Subscribe to the Play Index. Use the coupon code BP to get the discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription. And we'll be back tomorrow.