Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 442: The Second Annual 25-and-Under Starters Draft

Episode Date: May 5, 2014

Ben and Sam banter about position player pitchers and headfirst slides, then draft starting pitchers under the age of 26.

I couldn't keep myself from shouting, look at that. Look at that. Look at that. Look at that. Younger. Younger. Tell me why you did it. Younger.

I can't get you out of my head. Good morning and welcome to episode 442 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from BaseballPerspectives.com Presented by The Play Index at BaseballReference.com I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg. It's a new week. Ben, how are you doing? Very well, thank you. I understand you've brought banter just a quick one uh we talked last week about sliding head first and whether it's advisable when we were talking about the the different levels of hustle and which ones we would advise players not to do so i i came down came out against sliding

head first not just not just as a form of hustle, but just as a form of technique, because it seems like it's a way that you can hurt yourself. And so there was an item that I came across after that about the Astros telling their players not to slide headfirst anymore. So apparently Bo Porter, he is against it, and George Springer is a headfirst slider. He has slid headfirst throughout his entire minor league career, and he has slid headfirst a few times early on in his major league career. And Porter said, I don't like headfirst slides. It just exposes too much of your body, and you can get fingers and hands hurt. I really don't like headfirst slides. Players, for whatever reason guys get like to slide headfirst it's more of a knee jerk thing

as far as their sliding technique something that i really don't like and he so he he told springer to stop doing it or to try to stop doing it and springer had a very ambivalent statement about it i guess or he was ambivalent. The statement was ambiguous. He said, it's an instinct to slide headfirst. I have to respect Bo and assert myself as a player and try to do everything I can to not get hurt. Obviously, sliding headfirst has its risks. I'm not going to be conscious of it when I'm playing. I'm just going to play, and if the situation says I have to slide headfirst,

I will, but I'm going to try not to do it. situation says I have to slide headfirst, I will, but I'm going to try not to do it. Assert myself as a player is an interesting baseball phrase. So he's going to try, but if he does it, he does it, and he'll think about it, and he'll give it a shot, but he's not going to try that hard. I will say this, that every year during the off-season, I do the year in slides. And I watch every slide that gets, well, any slide that makes it into MLB highlights, which is, you know, it's usually around 1,000. uh one of the interesting things about these slides is that there it is a an under under uh appreciated skill the ability to avoid a tag while you're sliding there are certain players and i'm not talking about you know the kind of classic hook slide i mean like the guys who simply move their hand at the last second and dodge the tag you know the the glove is down and you can't

really do that feet first. So there are probably, like, I could see, I want to say Jose Reyes is good at this. I might be wrong about that. But probably the speed that you gain going head first is maybe not worth it. But thinking about it, the ability to dodge a tag might come in handy. Like in a high enough leverage situation, I could see, I'm sympathetic to George Springer, I guess is what I'm saying. Because it does give you more flexibility. Yeah. And we talked about how maybe it's an instinctive thing and maybe you can't just stop doing it all of a sudden. And his statement seems to suggest that. Although I'm sure if, you know, if Bo Porter said, you slide headfirst again and you'll be back in the minor leagues the next day, which would not be a good idea for him to do.

But if he did do that, I bet that would work. If I learned anything from 1980s baseball, if they they should just sew front pockets on their pants and put vials of cocaine in the front, and then everybody would slide. Right. There is also a play today, Sunday. We talked about diving or running into the wall also as a form of hustle. So there was a play on Sunday where Puig went into the wall, but it wasn't your garden variety wall collision. It was the highest leverage wall collision that you can have in a game on May 4th.

It was 4-4 in the bottom of the ninth, and the Marlins had a runner on first, and there was a ball that was hit to the wall in right field, and Puig crashed into the wall, and he's now day-to-day, and he tested negative for a concussion, but he was pointing to various parts of his body that were hurting him. But it was a case where either he was going to catch the ball or the game was going to be over, which it was because he didn't catch the ball. But in that case, generally I'm against running into walls if you can possibly help it.

And if there were a player who habitually ran into walls, I would be less likely to acquire him than I would be otherwise. But that seems like a case where, you know, bottom of the ninth. And if you don't catch the ball, it's the end of the game. Even if it's May, I can't fault a player for doing that. Did you see the Ken Rosenthal thing a few days ago? He interviewed Jeff Luno, the Astros GM, about a few topics, and one of the things that came up was the shift. Yeah, about whether they're doing it just to gain information.

Yeah, that was fascinating. That was an interesting kind of accusation, that the Astros are essentially playing this season like a think tank, basically. They don't actually care about... They're just collecting information so that they can make better decisions some year in the future, which is, if true, would just be taking the idea of marginal wins or whatever to this total extreme.

The level of competition really would mean nothing at all uh this year but they denied it um but that leads into a quick piece of banter i have um which is uh martin maldonado pitched uh for the brewers martin maldonado the backup catcher pitched for the brewers late last week. I want to say Wednesday. And it was a 9-3 game. And so I was fairly shocked. I mean, I wanted to tweet something about it, but I couldn't really believe my eyes.

And even though the announcers kept saying it and the box score said it, I was like, 9-3? I must be misunderstood. He must just be warming in the bullpen or something, right? Because that's only a six-run game. And that's, you know, Dan Rosenson wrote in his scouting report after the fact of Martin Maldonado as a pitcher that of the 55 position player plate appearances since 2005 that weren't in extra innings.

So basically the team wasn't forced to use a position player as a pitcher by a lack of lack of pitchers um only two were uh were six run leads and uh none in at least the last decade uh has been fewer than six innings that there's one example that was but but that was an extenuating circumstance, so it doesn't work out. So basically I just wanted to know, I'm fine with, you know, I'm fine with the Brewers. They were short on pitchers and they saved a pitcher.

Six runs is, you know, it's a pretty safe deficit to concede. But do you have any issue? I guess I'm going to start winding down the numbers. Where would you have an issue with a manager doing this? Because if, I mean, baseball does seem to have accepted the idea that you should save your resources for when the wins matter. As in the Astros case, that can be for an entire four-season stretch. But in some cases, you pull your players in a blowout. It's not uncommon to pull your regulars in a blowout.

So what if it were four runs? What if managers just basically decided four runs were not worth trying? Like if it were the sixth inning and they were down five and they just conceded, they just pulled all their regulars as a matter of course, would that bother you? I mean, is there a point where it would bother you? And is that point necessarily the same as the win expectancy would, you know, the kind of risk management of win expectancy would lead you to? Or do you think that managers have some obligation to at least, you know,

keep up appearances more so than logic might tell them to? I'm okay with the six runs down at the end of the game because it doesn't sound great. It doesn't look great. Although Maldonado looked pretty good. He did. It wasn't really necessarily. Although Maldonado looked pretty good. It wasn't really necessarily your typical position player pitcher. He was above average for a position player pitcher

and Dan raved about his slider, right? And so that's kind of okay because if you actually look at the numbers and the percentage the probability that a team will come back from a six-run deficit at whatever point of the game that was it's extremely rare but i was not okay with the the one we saw earlier this year when uh who was it lairs uh garcia with the white socks pitched in extra innings in a tie game. And that one to me was, and again, there were circumstances. Obviously, it got to that point because Ventura had used his entire bullpen and he'd used Daniel Webb for three innings, I think, at that point already. So it came down to either push Webb to a fourth inning

or start using your starters. I think I would have used a starter at that point because looking at the history of position players pitching in extra innings in close games, in tie games, it's pretty much like just conceding the game. It's almost, it's close to a forfeit. Teams that do that almost always lose. And, you know, that to me is a little bit too

far if you get to that point and of course you can't really look back and say well he should have known that they could have a 14 inning game he shouldn't have used he used i think four relievers in the eighth inning just you know faced one batter two batters each and so i guess in general i'm against that sort of extreme matchup stuff, especially if there's any chance that it's going to lead to a utility infielder pitching in a tie game and not even that deep into a tie game. 14th inning was earlier than most of the previous cases in which that had happened. So that is too much for me i guess in a in a regular regulation game i wouldn't want to see it probably probably like five runs is the least is the that i'd be okay with with that probably

yeah i mean when you in the garcia example it sounds like what you're saying is that that you think that ventura made the wrong decision strategically. He basically gave up more or less a 50% chance of winning a game so that he could save his starter the next day, which probably doesn't gain you as much. Logically, he probably made the wrong call, and you're saying that logically you would have made the right call, which I understand. But I'm saying, like, if Tango had a post tomorrow saying that from the eighth inning on, mathematically, statistically, you should not use a major league pitcher down by three. Like, if he showed that mathematically it's a waste of a pitcher

when you're down by three and that you should just always bring in your backup catcher at that point or you should just never go with a pitcher that you conceivably care about. Wouldn't that still kind of, I don't know, I guess I'm saying is there, if hypothetically that were true, would it be acceptable for managers to just punt games that regularly do you have a problem with punting games that uh to the people who you know paid and who are watching might still be drawing some entertainment from because if if they're drawing some entertainment from it do

do you have any obligation to that guy who who is deluded enough to think that that his team might come back of course the position player pitching is always more entertaining the most entertaining thing but it wouldn't be for long but right but yeah it's a different kind of entertainment um i mean it's just like the last guy in the bullpen is always so replaceable it seems like you could you could i mean on how many teams do you think the the last guy the seventh guy or whatever it is in a bullpen at any one time is measurably better than your best reliever at triple a or yeah but but the last guy in the bullpen pitched in the fifth that's why we got to this point in the game i'd rather see i'd rather see the position player pitch than

ask a starter to do something that he doesn't typically do when the game is already out of hand you know well it wasn't that though i mean it they they only used three relievers in this game and one of them was maldonado yeah so they used wong for three so that's the last guy in the bullpen and then they used duke and then they just basically wanted to reset their bullpen. They'd used their bullpen a lot recently, and they wanted to reset. But, I mean, they could have gotten, if they'd wanted to, they could have gotten an inning out of Kinsler or something, right? Yeah.

Yeah, I don't hate it. I don't mind it. Maybe I'd mind it if I were a Brewers fan, but I don't mind it. I don't mind it at six. I'm more wondering if five would do it or four would do it or i don't know say i kind of mind it at six i guess i guess i brought it up because i kind of anyway uh onto the topic onto the topic of the day um uh just about a year ago uh this week that we did our uh was it our first draft i think it might have been we did a a draft of under 25 pitchers. Ben found the 24 pitchers at the time who were under 25 had worked exclusively as starters that year and qualified

for the ERA title up to that point. And he and I alternated picks and decided that at the end of five years, whoever had more warp from his team, I guess what got the rights to Effectively Wild for the nationwide tour with a band of replacements. As always, there were no stakes except our pride. And John Chenier has been keeping track of it at at the moment it it actually is tightened up you were running away with it for a while but uh thanks to kershaw's injury this year and matt moore's injury this year um it's uh it's now 20 warp to 18 warp so that's actually pretty close we and i've got four years to to pick up some ground on the other hand

looking at the rosters it looks to me clearly like you have the better team. Jose Fernandez is basically my one great pick, and you've got a couple that I think were pretty great, like Chris Sale, ninth overall, I believe, is a great pick, and Willie Peralta, second from the bottom, just before I got stuck with Vance Worley and Alex Anabia, is a great pick. So anyway, it's a year later,

and there's actually, believe it or not, a whole new group of under-25 players. There are, once again, 24 of them who are under-25, have only started this year, qualified for the ERA title, and were not picked last year. And so Ben and I are going to do round two. And I guess the question is are we tacking these on or is this a whole

new tab on John's spreadsheet? Double or nothing. I'm not sure what it is. Double or not. I don't know what that means really. Yeah, I don't know. Separate thing I think. Separate thing. All right. And just in case anybody's wondering, I don't know. Separate, separate thing, I think. Separate thing. All right. Yeah. And just, uh, in case anybody's wondering, um, I have here the standings for all of our bets, uh, all of our drafts and various challenges, uh, that John's been keeping track of, um, the minor league free agents one. Did you look at this?

Do we have anyone who's playing right now? We don't. We each drafted 10 minor league free agents and it was going to be uh what plate appearances person with most plate appearances that's it it didn't matter how good or bad the plate appearances were most plate appearances wins and we have yet to get a plate appearance uh we have you have uh three free agents four triple a k Korea, Japan, retired. And I have one free agent,

seven AAA, Mexico, Korea. I hope one of us just wins with one plate appearance and the other one just has zero. Might happen. Under 25, I said we did the under 90 mile per hour rotations last year and harry pavlidis drafted with us and i'm getting crushed

i'm below replacement level you're slightly above two warp from your five pitchers uh and harry is at at about a half a win but he's he might be zero after tyler skgs. Let's start today. We have how many home runs over the next five years will Jacoby Elsbury hit? You said 50. I took the over. He's got one. Since September 5th, so two full months of play. And you can find all of the various drafts and which teams we picked on the files section of the Effectively Wild Facebook group.

I should link to the Google Doc where this stuff is being updated also. Yeah, you should. Who will win Comeback Player of the Year award in 2014? My first pick was Albert Pujols. Nice. Mine was Matt Kemp, right? Yours was Matt Kemp. player of the year award in 2014 my my first pick was albert pools nice mine was matt kemp right yours was matt kemp and then you also picked to shara and sabathia and i picked jeter and beckett so so far it looks like there's only one one useful name out of those six probably uh how many of the next five post seasons will include the pirates uh i said zero you said two of course it's way too early to start drawing any conclusions.

And I won the all no bang for your buck team of last year. That was a massacre, right? We tried to draft the worst possible teams with a minimum of a $200 million payroll. And yeah, I won by 17 wins. All right. All right. All right. So, so here we go.

We're going to draft and because you picked first last year, I get to pick first this year. And I'm, and tell me if I pick your pick and I'll tell you if you picked my pick. But I'll take Michael Walker. Huh? Really? Okay.

You did not take my pick. No, I will take your Donovan tour oh wow that's not that would not have been my pick either interesting i mean i like him he might have been in top four but uh i'll take uh uh i'll take uh tanaka okay. And I will take Garrett Cole. That would have been my next pick. And I hesitated primarily because I thought about taking him. Yeah, I had Cole and Tanaka basically even. All right.

I will take Zach Wheeler. Yeah, that would be mine. I will take Sonny Gray., that would be mine. I will take Sonny Gray. That would have been mine. Alright. I'm going to take Gosh.

I think I'll take Tony Singrani. I don't really like anybody at this point. That was just a tear. We just fell off a tear. I felt like I liked everyone on this list. I like everybody enough, but to me it's a big drop off after Gray. Yeah.

I probably would have had Singrani around here, except that he's hurt right now and and not necessarily anything serious but i bumped him down a bit for that i will take danny salazar it's off to not such a great start but i like him very yeah very poor start um i'll take uh chris archer who pakoda hates, but I like. Yeah. All right. I'll take... Martin Perez. Interesting. Good enough.

I like Martin Perez. I know. As you know. Mm-hmm. All right. I will take Julio Tehran. Okay. All right.

I'm going to take, I think, Nathan Evaldi. Okay. And I think because I have a little something planned at the end, I think we'll be able to talk about some of these picks at the end. I'll take Alex Wood.

Alright. I will take Rick Porcello. Uh-huh. Who was only undrafted last year on a technicality, he had somehow managed one relief appearance early in the year when they didn't need a fifth starter or something like that

so people asked last year why we didn't alright, so I could see a bunch of different ways to go here I guess I'll go with this is why drafts are so popular a bunch of different ways to go here. I guess I'll go with... This is the part that... This is why drafts are so popular.

This is the part where I start doing this for a lot. I'm going to draft... Gosh, I guess I'll take... I guess I'll take Tyler Skaggs. Yeah, he was mine. Next one.

Uh, okay. Where's my list? There it is. I'll take Henderson Alvarez. That would have been my next. That's who I was hemming over just then. Um, okay. I'll take, um, I guess, I guess I'll take Dan Straley

And I think I think I'll take Henry Mejia Okay I'll take Drew Hutchison Alright this one I'll take Drew Hutchison.

All right. This one, I think I'm going to take a guy that I wasn't that high on coming into the year, Jordan Lyles. Ah, okay. Was he yours? I was kind of thinking about it I talked myself into him Over the off season Jared Cozart I will take Robbie Ross

And I will take Gosh I will take You know you left this guy Because you don't know how to pronounce his name Gosh. I will take... You know, you left this guy because you don't know how to pronounce his name. I figured out how to pronounce half of it. Rowanis Elias? Elias.

Elias? Mm-hmm. Elias? Elias. Elias. And that makes me the proud owner of Brett Oberholzer. All right. So I don't know if you So I don't know if you,

I don't know if you look, did you look, did you look at Pocota at all for this? No, I would have, I would have liked to spend hours preparing for this, but I didn't have time. So no, I didn't, I didn't really consult a whole lot of anything. Yeah. So I, I got the five year uh pakoda projections for each of them um and there's some interesting contradictions between our picks and pakodas um this is pakoda's ranking of them uh waka tanaka singrani sk, Wood, Straley, Ventura, way down there, Sonny Gray, way down there, Danny Salazar, Hutchison, Archer, which struck me as very low, Tehran, which struck me as low, Cozart, Elias, Elias?

Elias. Elias. Yes. Lyles, Alvarez, Porcelo. Back to that. I thought we'd conquered that one It's been a while since I've had to Oberholzer, Ross, Ivaldi, Perez Second from the bottom, and Mejia

So there's some surprises there By Pocota's standards I mean, Perez particularly low evaldy is avaldi i actually i thought i'd get him in this avaldi i mean i don't know how to not like avaldi like i don't i don't know i can't i i don't know what angle i'm supposed to be looking at him that i don't like him out of these 24 pitchers he's got the highest strike rate of any of them this year he's got the highest strike rate of any of them this year he's got the lowest FIP of any of them this year and he probably has the high the highest

average fastball I would think so yeah he's probably him or Cole well no Ventura would he's got bro right yeah but he's he's about at the top of the list of everyone not just under 25 starters yeah exactly so I I genuinely don't understand, A, why he's not better, but I guess given that he hasn't been good this year, but given that he hasn't been better, I guess I can see why Pakoda doesn't love him. But I don't know. It seems like everybody should love him.

Alvarez is a guy that I can talk myself into or out of on any given day. It seems like there's this whole group of pitchers right now who have great fastballs and no strikeouts. I guess they're not great fastballs, but a lot of velocity. A lot of times they just throw these 94, 95-mile-an-hour sinkers. If you knew only one thing about a pitcher and it was that, you'd be all over him. Weren't you planning to write about those guys?

I was. I was. Carlos Martinez is another one of those guys. I always think he, I look at his strikeout rate and it'll be like 14 or something. And it's like, yeah, it's like seven. Danny Salazar, probably the guy who has fallen the most since opening day for me on this list yeah and i don't know how much a guy should fall or gain uh at this point after a month but i guess if you're under 25 more than more than most and uh

yeah i mean i i think if we'd done this opening week, he might have been top four or five, five-five. And Pakoda is crazy bullish on Skaggs, and I don't really see it, but I think he'll probably throw 900 innings over the next five years, which is better than a lot of the guys on here. So Tanaka, we didn't have a lot of the guys on here. Tanaka, we didn't have. Actually, I'm sorry. I said Tanaka number two.

Tanaka, we actually don't have a projection, a five-year projection for Tanaka, so I just made something up. So forget that. And Ross, who's near the bottom and was pitching very well until this weekend, his bullpen projection. So it doesn't really count. All right. Well, I liked almost all of those pitchers.

I seem to recall at the end of last year's draft, I was kind of holding my nose and like, all right, I'll take Jeff Locke. I'll take Vance Worley if I need to. But this time, really, until we got to Brett Oberholzer, I was pretty happy about everything. I like almost everybody. I don't like Elias.

I don't like Elias. I watched the start of his earlier this year, and he did fine. He survived it, but it was one of the least impressive pitching performances I've seen. I mean, he looked horrible to me. And so because of that, I haven't really paid much more attention to him since, and I don't find myself caring to him. But otherwise, you're right. I mean, there's something to talk about with everybody on here. I i guess at this point i don't really like straley as much i i was

high on straley a year ago and i'm low on him now um but otherwise yeah that's an interesting group it's more it's a more fun group than it was last year but um not nearly the upside as last year i would draft these guys elbow surgeons over any one of them individually. They're collective surgeons. Uh-huh, yeah, because they're going to have surgery. Yes, sadly. Mm-hmm. All right.

All right, well, so now we have something else to pay attention to. Mm-hmm. So maybe someone will write this down for us. That'd be great if you can and add it to the files section of the Facebook group. Or maybe one of us will do it. All right. So send us emails for Wednesday at podcast at baseball prospectus dot com. And please support our sponsor, Baseball Reference.

Go to baseball reference dot com. Use the coupon code BP to get the discounted price of $30. The bargain price of $30 on a one-year subscription to the Play Index. Three, two, one. Ben, were we or were we not recording? We were. We are.

Okay, so if we were recording, and I mean, I know it's silly that I require you to count me down even though we're recording, like I know that that's odd, but, but since given that it's a completely pointless countdown that you're doing, why do you still put in the false drama of three, two, one? I'm usually preparing in some way and I'm trying to get the last second that I can get without making you mad