Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 483: Made Possible By Listeners Like You

Episode Date: July 2, 2014

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about meaningless splits, data leaks, exploiting unwritten rules, and more.

But now my world's dead, drowning in the amber again. It's like explaining cricket to Americans. Just trying to get the whole, the whole damn thing all out. All out. Good morning, and welcome to episode 483 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives presented by the Baseball Reference Play Index. I am Ben Lindberg, joined by Sam Miller.

Hello. Hi. Anything before we begin? Emails? Koji Ohara's outing on Tuesday included a run allowed and no home runs. So that dream is over. And you jinxed Sean Doolittle too. That time, you know, what kind of?

He had one bad outing or something? Which is notable for him. Yeah, I guess. He walked. I guess he did walk. He did walk, yeah. That probably more specifically. But, I mean, everybody jinxed Sean Doolittle.

Right. Every single person who has written about baseball. Tied. Tied for the jinx. Yep. You share a small portion of the blame. Okay. Is that it?

Mm-hmm. All right. So, listener emails. We got some good ones. I have them all in a Word document here. Let me pick out a couple. This one was fun. It's always good when we can answer a cricket-related question. This one comes from Owen in Wellington, New Zealand, who says, Hi, Ben and Sam. I always think of it that way, but I have no idea why. I've been thinking about asking a question for about 350 episodes and decided now is the time. My question this week is related to that

oft-mentioned sport on the podcast, cricket. Over the last few months, there has been a pretty large scandal involving some former international cricket players involving match fixing in various leagues around the league. However, strangely, in most of these cases, only two out of the 11 players have been accused of any wrongdoing. I think that in cricket, one player can often have a bigger impact than in baseball as a general rule, and I would not be comfortable betting on a game in which I had only gotten two players in the bag. What if someone else on the team had a crazy game

and you lost the entirety of your Swiss bank account? Therefore, my question is, how many baseball players on a team, perhaps hypothetically equal teams assumed, or I think more interestingly, a massively favored team, I think you'd have to exclude the starting pitcher, would you need to have bought before you would say that you'd be 90% confident that your team would lose? So I don't want to exclude the starting pitcher, though.

Okay, you don't have to. That seems unfair. We can tamper with the parameters here. Because if you didn't have to exclude the starting pitcher, how often do you think a starting pitcher could? Let's just say, for instance, Justin Masterson were on the take this year. He's done a pretty exceptional job of pitching much worse than expected. And his team has done, I'm checking to see.

They won today, despite his best intentions. Wow! Wow. They're 10-7. When he pitches? When he pitches. He's been so bad. I was going to make this point that nobody suspects Justin Masterson of taking money from gamblers.

But in fact, he's been extremely ineffective. So maybe harder than I thought. I mean, like today he only pitched three innings and they won. Ten base runners in three innings. You can't really do that much worse than that. So what, I don't know. I mean, Nate Silver did a piece on umpires, I would say around, I would say summer of 2006 is my guess,

I would say summer of 2006 is my guess, about umpires and whether they could be crooked and affect the outcome in some meaningful way. And I don't remember exactly what his conclusion was. And I was just trying to look it up when you turned to me and made me start speaking. turned to me and made me start speaking. But I think, as I recall, it was, I think at the time that he said that there's just not that many questionable calls. And of course, this was pre-framing math, and so maybe now we would look at it differently. But I think at the time it was,

even for a home plate umpire, the problem is just that most calls are still kind of clear. You don't have that big an opportunity to sway the outcome of a pitch in a meaningful situation. I might be totally misremembering what Nate said, but because of that, it would be a little bit tricky even for a catcher probably. Let's see. Oh, yeah. Well, so this is not the same thing, but like when Manny Machado threw the bat at the third baseman,

it was sort of striking how obviously intentional it was. So it might also be hard. I mean, that's not how you would throw a game. You would not throw a game by flinging your bat at the third baseman. However, many acts that you would try to do poorly would probably be kind of uncomfortable to watch, and they wouldn't look natural enough. So it might be a challenge.

I'm just rambling on a little bit here, but I guess I'm getting to the point that if you had the starting pitcher, it would be pretty easy, I still think, even with Justin Masterson exception. And if you had anybody else, it'd be kind of tricky. So I guess here's the question. You're betting $10 against my $10, two evenly matched teams. And so you're 10 against my 10 uh you find out that uh one player in the game is is taking money from a bookie to to throw the game you don't know which player you don't know if it's the best player or the worst i don't know that it matters i guess you i guess you would say the best it's easier for miguel cabrera to 0 for 4 without raising eyebrows than for Jeff Mathis to go 0 for 17 with three errors

or whatever would be the equivalent drop-off in his expected performance. So I guess you'd want it to be the star if you could, but you don't know that. All you know is that one of the non-starting pitchers is in the back. How much of a discount would you take to still make that bet? So I don't even know if it's, can we say that it's someone in

the starting lineup? It's not a bullpen guy. It's not the utility infielder. It's not. It's one of the nine. Yeah, it's one of the nine, although I'd be curious if it were the closer, whether you would rather have it be the closer or the best hitter. If it was the closer, I don't know how reliably a closer could blow a close game,

but basically you know you're going to win half your bets because the team's going to lose anyway. And then of those remaining half, something like half of those will involve the closer. If there's a 1-9 or 1-10 or whatever chance that it's the starting pitcher, then... It's not. It's not the starting pitcher. It's not. Okay. So I think I'd only need a small discount, I think. If it's $10 and we're talking about one member of a starting lineup, I'll say, well, on the

one hand, as we know from the sort of terrible stat that you hate when people cite, when one guy has a good game, the team's record in that game tends to be very good, right? So maybe if you can guarantee that one guy will have a terrible game, then maybe the opposite is true? Maybe the team would have a bad record. Well, part of the reason, it's not exactly because the default in baseball is that he'll have a bad game. The default offensive line is not very good. However, the point is that even one good event significantly, like if you know that one guy hit a home run,

for instance, that's, I don't know, like a 12 or 13% win probability added or something like that on average. So just one good event can sway something. So even if you could only guarantee one extra hit for the opponent, that'd still be pretty significant. So I don't know.

I guess I'd only need, maybe I'd just say a dollar a guy or something. Uh-huh. A dollar a guy. So you would then bet, if I would only bet 11 to 10, you put up 11 and I put up 10. You would take that bet if you had one guy. I think so. And then if you had two guys, you would do 12 to 10. Yeah, I wonder, maybe there's a multiplicative effect. If there are multiple guys in the bag then maybe you have uh maybe you have a an increased increased

chance of winning because uh or losing as the case may be because there are some cases where the players are both involved in a play and maybe not maybe it doesn't doesn't even maybe it doesn't even matter maybe there's no maybe it's linear that your chances go, go up the, just sort of in a line with the number of opposing players who are trying to lose. So, so yeah, I guess, uh, about that. Sure. So I'm reading Nate's piece right now and he doesn't just look at balls and strikes. He looks at close plays at home, the ejection of the pitcher, and box called, as well as balls and strikes. And he concludes that, quote, a corrupt home plate umpire could engineer a victory an extra 8.2% of the time for an overall winning percentage of 58.2%. The vast majority of the difference is

in the way he calls balls and strikes. This assumes the umpire has some concern about anomalous calls that might trigger attention from league officials. Over time, as the level of heat on the umpire increases, he would need to be more and more careful, and his ability to manipulate the outcome of the contest would decrease. If, for example, the umpire decided to call a tight strike zone when the home plate was at bat, but a normal strike zone when the visiting team is at bat, the home team's winning percentage would be reduced to 54.3%. So anyway, 8% for an umpire, more or less for Troy Tulewitzki. More. Okay. All right, settled.

But maybe not for a left fielder or something. Troy Tulewitzki is a star player at a position that gets a lot of defensive chances. Yeah, hence the choosing of Troy Tulewiczki. Uh-huh, there was a method behind that. Okay, all right, so this question comes from Sean. Let's say there's a team in the midst of the wildcard chase and they have a team on base percentage that is the league-wide mean, currently the Orioles at 318 let's say this hypothetical team decided as a means of scoring more runs than they were going to as blatantly or yeah as scoring more runs than they were going to

to as blatantly as possible flaunt every unwritten rule bat flips on inf flips on infield fly outs, pimping warning track shots, tagging as hard as possible every time. And all 24 members were 100% committed to this strategy. How much of an increase in on base percentage do you think they could achieve? Thanks to all the necessary hit by pitches. And do you think at any point the league would wisen up to their efforts? And do you think at any point the league would wisen up to their efforts? One thing that's significant is that you have to assume that most retribution, retaliation, hit by pitches come in the situation that is least likely to hurt the pitching team. And so you might get a lot of low leverage batters on base, but that doesn't necessarily help you.

I mean, the problem with this strategy is that there's nothing that compels the opposing team to do this, and particularly it doesn't compel them to do it on your timetable. So you might very likely get hit in the cheek with a pitch in spring training, for instance, the next year, or in the eighth inning of a game that's already 6-1 three days down the road. So I don't know that it's a – I don't know that – it's certainly not a sound strategy for winning. I don't know that it would move the needle whatsoever, though, for winning. I mean, it was whatsoever, slightly, slightly, slightly. for winning. I mean, it was whatsoever.

Slightly, slightly, slightly. But I think it would be almost impossible to get the opposing team to systematically shoot themselves in the foot out of rage. Whether it would take, how long it would take the league to wisen up to their efforts,

I don't know. What do you think? It would be in a Jeff Passon column, and it would be, what, like two and a half weeks if they did this really reliably? Yeah, probably. I'd say even sooner if they were taking it to this degree. Yeah, I guess.

But Passon only writes a couple columns a week, and he's probably already got a couple of them that he's working on. Well, there are other writers. Nunworth, Passans. Well, what if there were an unbalanced schedule and you get to play the Diamondbacks every day? Well, don't you think a lot of the attention would be on the diamondbacks in that scenario like i i feel like that would almost obscure what you were doing because people would just

focus more and more on the diamondbacks but the diamondbacks would still be unable to resist retaliation so you're you're now you're talking about the value of it and not the notice of it okay yeah so uh yeah i don't know if the Diamondbacks would be able to lose this. Has anybody looked at the Diamondbacks? Have the Diamondbacks been retaliating in particularly self-defeating ways? I am just thinking of the one notable example from about two weeks ago when Kyle Loesch hit Chris Owings in the helmet, and then the Diamondbacks pitcher, I think it was Evan Marshall, threw at Ryan Braun,

and it was in a really tight situation. It was a 4-3 game in the seventh with runners on second and third and one out, and he hit Braun, and then Luke Roy hit a grand slam that gave the Brewers a 7-4 lead. Yeah, but they might have intentionally walked Braun in that scenario. Maybe. It'd be interesting. I trust that you will write this almost immediately after we hang up now that I've mentioned this.

But it would be interesting to look at the win probability added of all the Diamondbacks, I don't know, vigilante justice over the last couple of years. Yeah. I wonder how many examples I could come up with. But yeah, that would be fun. Okay. All right. This one comes from Mike to Knight, and this was June 26th.

The Cubs, who admittedly do not have a logical leadoff hitter batted Ryan Sweeney first against Doug Pfister Sweeney is hitting 200 slash 247 slash 244 this season but the Cubs one of Ben Lindbergh's favorite players ever though yeah I like Sweeney

he's why do I like Sweeney because he's big and he has no power exactly he is the all time he has no power? Exactly. He has the all-time big guy, no power ratio. Yes, that's right. But the Cubs were facing Doug Pfister. Sweeney is hitting.400,.538,.600 against Pfister in his career. My question is, which is more ridiculous? Putting stock in a below-average hitter who has been great against a particular pitcher over a number of years,

or putting stock in a below-average pitcher who has done well against a particular team in his career, obviously against different players, over a number of years? Sorry, I might not have listened to this closely enough, but the against-a against a team stat is uh i i i i once tweeted this but uh the amount of uh the amount of scolding that we give teams for paying too close too much attention to the um to the against a pitcher statistics should be multiplied by 10,000 if they ever sincerely do the against the team statistics.

The against the team statistics are the greatest example, I would say, in the entire sport of random numbers being compiled to form a narrative. There is the occasional case where I might buy the Kyle Farnsworth revenge scenario. When I was growing up, for instance, there was a Kevin Mitchell San Diego revenge hypothesis that was pretty well accepted. and there's the occasional scenario where I might accept the ballpark suits a player, or even I might accept, for instance, Will Clark used to do great in the Astrodome. His dad would be in the crowd. Fine, I'll give you one of those every 10 years or so, but otherwise there's nothing about a team that is unifying. What if there's a team that's really good at advanced scouting

and somehow picked up on this guy's tell or something, he's tipping his pitches, or they're better than every other team at assessing what pitch and what location would get him out? This guy specifically. So it's not that they're better at advanced scouting. They are just better at advanced scouting this one person? Yes.

They had a scout who, for some reason, picked up on this guy's kryptonite and no one else noticed. Yeah, I'm not mocking the premise. I just wanted to make sure I'm understanding you correctly. Because if they were just better at advanced scouting overall, we would not notice the anomalies. They would just be the best team. So if they were,

that wouldn't... The thing is that nobody stays with a team for very long anymore. Whatever book is on a player gets quickly spread around the league. Guys change teams all the time. Coaches change teams.

Scouts change teams. Everybody's changing teams. So for the sort of numbers that you would even start paying attention to, we'd be talking about probably four, five, six seasons minimum. And by that point, the information would be well dispersed throughout the league. Okay, so that's Mike's answer. Not only is the versus team split worse, it is 10,000 times worse. 10,000 times worse than a stat that is already usually meaningless, if not always.

So don't like, yeah. That is already usually meaningless, if not always. I also don't like that. I actually, I would buy the in a ballpark split before I would buy the in a team split. And I am not in the habit of buying the in a ballpark split. The in a ballpark split, at least there is some intuitive sense to why it might matter. But of course the problem is then you have half the sample when you're talking about this. Great. Okay, let's do one more before play index.

This one comes from, I'll say Jonathan's question. Jonathan says part of the Brewers' success this year has been having a rotation of two to three win guys, average plus to use Joshian's term, eat innings and keep them basically in every game. It seems like many teams take more of a stars and scrubs approach with one or two terrific pitchers and a few back end guys whom they hope will not fall off a cliff when it is their turn. None of the Brewers' pitchers is great, but they also rank high in both quality starts and game score average, which day in, day out is something most ball clubs would seem to find very valuable,

even if the skills basis for those accomplishments is debatable. I recognize that success in the postseason is another matter, but if you were constructing a rotation to get to the postseason and you had a choice to make, would you prefer a rotation whose talent is distributed fairly equally across the board or with the more common one and two than four and five sort of approach?

I suspect you've considered a question like this before, probably in the abstract, but here we have what looks to be a successful example of a distributed approach. Would appreciate your thoughts. I'm not going to answer this quite yet. I'm not going to answer this probably ever. I'm going to wait for you to answer it.

But two quick things, though, in response. One is that the success in the postseason being another matter is something that we've talked about on the show. It doesn't seem to be another matter. While it seems like it should be and we can't figure out why it wouldn't be. This is one of our, probably our first recurring themes in the Effectively Wild history. It seems to me that in the first hundred or so episodes we talked about this a lot and never did come to an agreement on why. But success in the postseason being another matter doesn't seem to actually be the case. The other thing is, in answering this,

the Brewers being a successful example of a distributed approach, well, not exactly. We've seen the Brewers pitchers perform as though they are an evenly distributed talent group, but that's how they've performed. That's not necessarily what their true talent is. And when you're talking about, you know, you might have a stars and scrubs approach, That's how they've performed. That's not necessarily what their true talent is. And when you're talking about, you know, you might have a stars and scrubs approach,

but the scrubs slightly overperform and the stars underperform, and then you have what appears to be an evenly distributed approach at the end of the year. But, of course, that's not what it is. So you really have to think about a team that would have entered the season being identifiable as this phenomenon rather than looks like this phenomenon in July. What's the answer, Ben? I don't know if there really is a huge difference. I don't know. I'm thinking of the article that Jonah Carey and Neil Payne did recently at 538,

and that was for a whole roster where they looked at whether it's better to be stars and scrubs or to have talent evenly distributed throughout your roster. And they found that essentially it can work either way. There's no clear edge to either approach. Maybe that also would apply to the rotation as a microcosm of the roster. I'm trying to think of maybe is the Stars and Scrubs rotation more vulnerable? Is it more risky? Because it's not quite as balanced. So if the Star gets hurt, then you're taking a bigger hit.

You have a bigger gap to make up with your replacement player than you would if you lose any of your evenly distributed starters. Is there anything to that idea? Well, yeah. I mean, if you have seven war wrapped up in one spot on the roster, then that's potentially seven war that you could lose on one unlucky line drive or unlucky play covering first base. But that seems to me, intuitively I would suggest that that would be the sort of roster

construction that would be more likely to lead to a surprising last place finish. that would be more likely to lead to a surprising last place finish. But once you get past second, nobody seems to care where you finish. So I don't know that it matters so much for postseason. One thing that feels like it should be true, and I think I'm on pro team balance in general, but I don't exactly know why, so I'm not going to defend it.

But one reason that pro stars and scrubs seems like the better way is just that you have this entire infrastructure of baseball players who are available to you to fill in for the guys who are failing. If your 25th guy sucks, it's not like you have to go to the 26th guy. You have 26 to 200 to choose from. In theory, when you're building a team and you're optimistic, you really only need one of those 175 guys to take a big leap forward this year. 75 guys to take a big leap forward this year. And so then you're replacing number 25 with, you know, the breakout, you know, whatever breakout minor league you have or whatever breakout quad A veteran you've signed or whatever,

you know, breakout starter turned reliever that you've got striking out 17 batters per nine in double A. that you've got striking out 17 batters per nine in double A. And when you have a balanced team, well, I mean, just think. If you've got a guy who suddenly develops into a three-win player and you replace a one-win player, like on the balanced team, you're only picking up two wins. But if you replace a minus-one-win player on the Stars and Scrubs team, then that's a bigger upgrade, right? So that's why it seems like the Stars and Scrubs is so tempting. And I think for fantasy purposes, we've all done the Stars and Scrubs

where you sort of feel like you have this team where the league is shallow enough that there's always good players on the waiver wire, and you're smart enough to pick them up and to identify them in May. The real premium is on the stars. So that's probably true in fantasy, but I don't know. This idea that you're going to have more breakout players than you need, I guess, is probably an illusion in real life. breakout players than you need, I guess, is probably an illusion in real life. I was just trying to think of the best examples of each of these approaches in the rotation in recent years. And I would say the best example of a successful, evenly distributed rotation is

probably the 2005 White Sox, who I guess their best starter was probably Mark Burley that year, who is certainly not overpowering, not dominant. He was Mark Burley. But they had four different guys make 32 starts or more. And Burley and Garcia and John Garland and Jose Contreras all had three-something ERAs at a time when having a three-something ERA for a starter meant something. And I guess their worst guy was El Duque. So that was the, I guess, the classic example that I think of as that kind of rotation. And then the stars and Scrubs rotation,

I would go with the 2001 Diamondbacks, who, of course, had the overpowering Randy Johnson, Curt Schilling, 1-2, who also finished 1-2 in the NL Cy Young voting that year. And then their third best starter that year was essentially no one. They really didn't have a good third starter. They had Brian Anderson made the third most starts.

He made 22 starts with a 5.2 ERA. And then Robert Ellis made 17 starts with a 5.77 ERA. And then Albie Lopez made 13 starts with a 4.00 ERA. And that was, I guess they also had Miguel Batista, who was going back and forth between the bullpen and the rotation. So that was kind of the classic example of the unbalanced top heavy rotation. Of course, both of those teams won the World Series, so it can work either way. Okay, would you care to do the Play Index segment? Yeah, sure, and I'm going to do a first ever in Effectively Wild history. I'm going to do a live Play Index.

I will be performing the Play Index while you wait, and we'll see how fast I can do this. So this was a question that was asked by Michael, who, I hadn't noticed this happening, but it's an interesting thing to have observed. Michael writes, John Gibbons has used pitchers to pinch run a half dozen times or so this season.

Some of this has been because DeAndre Navarro and Adam Lind have been hurt and only available for pinch hitting duty while interleague has rolled around. DeAndre Navarro and Adam Lind have been hurt and only available for pinch hitting duty while interleague has rolled around some of it's because Navarro and Lind are slow even when they're healthy and playing in the American League not to mention that the Jays have rightfully carried three catchers for much of the year and not so rightfully eight relievers for other portions sometimes at the same time exclamation point I guess my question is what team in history has used the most pitchers as pinch

runners? Which teams and players have had the most success, if that's even possible to measure in such a small sample? I don't intend to measure it. That is not the sort of thing that I would answer in a live play index. That sounds too difficult to do. However, I will try to answer the first one. So I'm going to go to the game finder in the play index tool. I'm going to search for teams with player games matching criteria. So the teams in each season who have had the most players match the criteria. I'm going to uncheck all pitchers. No, I won't.

Yes, I am. I'm going to uncheck all batters' defensive positions. I'm going to then click only pinch runner. I'm going to then click the box recently added, a tremendous feature that Baseball Reference has recently added, for typically a pitcher, which is a great thing to have. And I believe now in the pitcher play index, you can click a box that says typically a position player, if you want to see how position players have pitched. And I'm going to go back to, what year should I go back to, 88? Sure.

It's one of your magic years. You're there? Yeah. All right. Yeah. All right. So I'm going to search for teams with the most of these happening in a year since 1988. And I'm in a place with really bad Wi-Fi,

and yet that didn't take that long. So the record since 1988 is 17 times. The 2011 Cincinnati Reds pinch ran with a pitcher 17 times. Do you know? Can you think? I know the answer. I know immediately the answer because I wrote about it. Not this specifically, but do you know who the pitcher is who was doing all this? Which year?

2011. Was it Owings? It was not, no. I don't know. It was Mike Leak. Okay. Sorry, it was Mike Leak. That's true.

The answer is Mike Leak. However, I don't want to imply that it was only Mike Leak. In fact, even if you exclude Mike Leak from this, they would still be one of the highest ones. Leak pinch ran nine times, and so then they had eight otherwise. And eight would be good enough for 14th since 1988, the 14th highest. The number two team since 1988 is the Montreal Expos with 16, and that was the 1988 Expos. And then number five is the 1988 Braves. Both of those teams, 1988, earliest season,

which leads me to believe that if I went back further, I would see a trend downward. And so I'm going to now expand the search while we wait, but it does seem almost inevitable that we're going to find more pitchers pinch running in the past, right? Well, I guess it does. Well, you know, on the one hand, you used to have a lot – you had more position players on your active roster. And so the – I guess the value of a roster spot wasn't quite as high.

So you would have more guys on your bench capable of pinch running. So I guess that would be the argument for it not being more rare. The argument for it being more rare is that pitchers have become kind of more specialized, more fragile. They've become much worse hitters, for instance, since the 1960s. So you have to imagine if they've become much worse hitters for instance uh since 19 since the 1960s so you have to imagine if they've become much worse hitters they've probably also become worse pitcher uh worse runners and if they've become worse runners uh their then teams would probably be more wary of letting them run uh and potentially getting hurt and of course they've gotten more expensive i

think the idea of pitcher um scarcity has gone up since then i get the feeling that pitchers are treated much more cautiously now than they used to be i don't remember for instance pitchers being told not to swing the bat when they would bat in the 1980s as occasionally a pitcher will be told not to even bother swinging for fear of getting hurt these days uh anyway so i look and yes indeed the record since 1960 is 36 more than double the anything that showed up since 88 the 1963 cleveland indians then there's 33 for 1960 cardinals 31 for 1966 white sox so yeah it used to be pretty common so the Indians in 1963 every basically fourth game

they would have a pitcher pinch running so yeah pretty dog on common and so I'm going to look in a second and see who, well I don't even care I was going to say we can look and see who it was that was pinch running but could you possibly care? Could you possibly care?

Could you possibly care which 1963 Cleveland Indian pitcher was pimp running the most? Probably not. What if I told you his name was Mudcat Grant? Would you care a little bit more then? Yeah, sure. That's mildly interesting. Mudcat Grant. And I guess just to round this off, just see who the modern uh leader in this regard is who the team that's that does this the most if there's a manager who likes this style of play uh i guess i mean the reds were kind of a fluke maybe they were kind of a fluke but i mean leak

was such a good athlete that uh you have to think that was a big part of it. The reason I knew that Leak would be the guy is because I wrote about how Leak added more value in non-pitching ways than anybody else in any other pitcher in baseball that year. He was like two and a half wins more valuable than Matt Garza when you just strip away all the pitches he threw. Garza was a more valuable pitcher and Leak was like two and a half wins more valuable in every other aspect of the game. So Leak sort of skewed that. I guess the Rockies show up a lot.

The Rockies, the 2011 Rockies are seventh. The 2010 Rockies are third. The 2012 Rockies are second. So I guess this would have been a pre-Walt Weiss Rockies trend. I guess that would have been, I guess, the 2009 Rockies are 17th. So I guess if you had to say, you'd say that this is Jim Tracy's jam. This is pretty much a Jim Tracy thing. And so I guess we can now say that Jim Tracy is the manager most likely to pinch run with a pitcher in the modern era.

Well, everyone was wondering. Just imagine if he had Mudcat Grant on him. Do you know if Leake has, I mean, obviously he has not continued to do that to the same extent? that to the same extent? The 2013 Reds, which this was the 2011 Reds, the 2012 and two times this year and I guess probably one time in 2013, if that. Maybe none. Yeah, one time in 2013. So, yeah, so leak has quit doing that. That's interesting.

Mm-hmm. Okay. Well, please. Interesting-ish. Yes. I like this. I like that whole segment. Please support our sponsor, Baseball Reference. Go to baseballreference.com and subscribe to the Play Index using the coupon code BP

to get the discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription. Gain the ability to run interesting queries about players' pitchers' pinch running. And so quickly. Don't you feel like I demonstrated how simple and how quick it is? Yes, you did. We have already been disconnected once because of your internet connection, but Playindex was perfectly able to handle whatever weak connection you've got going there. 55 years of baseball history on a 56-bit modem. Is that a thing? Is that what you – 56-bit modem?

Is that – 56K, right? K, 56K. Yeah, there you go. It's the same sort of thing. Yeah, same thing. Okay. Well, good.

Thank you for doing that. Let's wrap up with maybe one or two more here. Kyle, no, Kevin, no, Brett. Brett asks, are the Astros the most interesting team that could have had a data leak? Which team would you be most interested in hearing about? And as Brett points out, probably most people's vote would be for whatever their favorite team happens to be, whatever team they root for would automatically be the most interesting. But which team would be the most interesting to the largest group of people? If it's the same data, we're just getting the same thing we got from the Astros, the trade talk notes. I don't know. I guess maybe I'd like to see, say, I'd like to see the Cardinals trade talk, say, maybe from this winter, you know, say, maybe from this winter, you know, when they had all of that depth and lots of good players and people were talking about whether they might deal

from that depth and they ended up not doing that. I'd like to see whether they got close on anything, what sort of offers they entertained for some of their young players. Trying to think if there's any other team that might. Well, the Rays would be interesting Just because we don't ever get anything out of the Rays front office And you do wonder what sort of mad geniuses What kind of mad geniuses coming out of that front office

Or whether it's not Whether it's just the illusion of it Because we don't hear anything But the Rays would be interesting just for the insight The Dodgers would probably be interesting for activity It would be the flip side of the Astros, where they probably have a conversation about acquiring every player in the game at some point or another, and it'd be interesting to see how they value each of those players and uh what they sort of view as their uh their their greatest um asset as a trade partner if it's just uh if every trade is just like uh you know john called said

they'd be willing to give us dan ugla we could afford it you know like that's the entire like every single it's just row after row of like uh ed wade called still has carlos lee hanging around we could afford it yeah yeah that's a good good choice i'd like to see dodgers okay uh let's take uh this one from kevin who says with the ern Ernesto Freire, Jason Grilly trade this past week, I was thinking about the difference between NL and AL pitcher stats. I know that NL pitchers usually have better rate stats because they get to pitch to the opposing team's pitcher rather than a DH. But is it different for relief pitchers?

By the time relief pitchers come in, the opposing starter has usually been or soon will be swapped out for a position player is the dh effect less pronounced for al and nl relief pitchers than it is for starters also i went with ben and sam with this email purely out of alphabetical order this time so don't get too down on yourself sam um so this one all right so i i looked up the as reliever and as starter splits at baseball reference just for for each league in 2014 so the average era for starters in the al this year is 4.02 in the nl it's 3.77 so nl starters era league ERA is about 94% of what it is in the American League this year. But for relievers, the AL average for relievers is 3.79. The NL average for relievers is 3.37, which is about 89% of the AL number. So actually, there is a bigger gap, at least percentage-wise,

between AL and NL relievers than there is between AL and NL starters. Does that surprise you? Yeah. What a finding. Yeah, that was up there with the record for pitchers pinch running. I don't think I would have had a hypothesis on this issue, so I'm not sure I would have necessarily been surprised.

It surprises you, though, clearly. A little bit, right? I mean, it seems like that's not the whole reason why NL pitchers have lower ERAs. People have fairly convincingly shown that the actual talent level of the – well, yeah, I don't know how much that plays into it because you'd think that the pitchers are better in the American League also. Maybe there's an imbalance between pitching talent and hitting talent in the leagues relative to each other.

I don't know. So the hypothesis was that because the AL starters face DHs and AL relievers also face DHs, whereas NL starters don't face DHs and NL relievers in a sense do. The gap should be bigger between NL starters and NL relievers. That's the hypothesis? I don't know. The hypothesis as I understood it was that the gap between the starters would be greater than the gap between the relievers because if you're a reliever in, say, the NL, you are not facing all that many pitchers

because the pitcher has been pulled or a pinch hitter comes in for late-inning relievers. for late inning relievers. So you're not seeing, you wouldn't expect them to see the same percentage of pitchers, right? Because in the late, right. So you would expect that there would be a same idea, yet maybe expressed a different way. So yeah, would you have expected there to be a bigger gap between the starter ERAs in the two leagues than the reliever ERAs?

I just said I didn't have a high about this. So how would the... Do you think that NL relievers get the platoon advantage more or the platoon disadvantage more, I guess, because there's more pinch hitting. Like just the fact that you have this one spot in the lineup that gets pinch hit for every time, they're more likely to have a pinch hitter brought in who is against their side of the plate. Or does that just lead to more pitching change?

No, that wouldn't probably. So, yeah, I don't know. Yeah, so that sounds plausible. That could. It sounds plausible, but I'm not sure that that might strengthen the original hypothesis. I'm not sure which way anything works right now. I am completely upside down. I am Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Inception fighting in a room without gravity. Okay, so maybe we should move on. Let me close with some thoughts from Matt Trueblood on the discussion about the Astros that we had yesterday. We talked about how the Astros seem to be shooting for the moon

in all of their trade talks, starting off the trade talks with a request for whoever the opposing team's best prospect was. And we acknowledge that that might be what every team does and that there are reasons to do that. But elsewhere on the internet, certainly there was some mocking going on about that. So Matt points out, it surprises me to see that so many people were surprised by the way the Astros trade talks unfold. I think most front offices probably make it a point to begin negotiations with the preposterous feeler proposals we saw on Monday for several reasons. One, anchoring bias. We've

discussed that in different contexts on the show. Most GMs are smart enough to work around it, but any cognitive bias you can put to work for you is worthwhile. Get a guy digging in his heels on Prospect 1, and maybe he'll be relieved just to hear Prospect 2's name cross your lips. Two, as Sam notes, the bulk of the variance in prospect evaluation is among non-elite guys. Therefore, why tip your hand if you're really hot on Josh Hader or Kyle Smith or whomever? on Josh Hader or Kyle Smith or whomever. The smart thing is to get a trade partner on the hook, hope they propose realistic names first,

and redirect to your guy at the last second. If they don't know who you're really after, they can't hold your feet to the fire on him, and they can't go looking for whatever it is you think they've missed. Three 1980s negotiation handbooks used to instruct you to avoid making an offer that drives the other guy away from the table. In 2014, though, and especially in baseball, that's not a major concern. If you make a silly demand for Lucas Harrell and get no response, you probably had a bargain shopper on your hands all along.

You want to trade a guy to the team who likes him enough not to walk away over a bizarre opening offer. And finally, for while the answers executives gave to these offers all boiled down to no, there was subtext. It's of some use to Houston to know that the Pirates aren't holding a hard line on any of their three best healthy pitching prospects, and to know that Clayton Blackburn is definitely a potential target the next time the Giants call. Subtext does matter. A hard no and a soft no have very different meanings. So those are some thoughts, because as we speculated, it can be annoying when your trade partner automatically answers

or automatically asks for the best player you have. So those are some potential reasons why it might not be so silly. Yeah, I like those. I like the second one, especially about not wanting to tip your hand about how you assess the other players. I mean, basically like what? There's that idea that shows up in movies about how whoever says the first thing in a negotiation loses. And so you kind of just want to stall for as long as you can without saying anything of import. By asking for Lucas Giolito, you're basically sending the ball back to them and making them say something first. I don't know. Sure.

I like that. I like all those. I especially like the second one. All right. Thank you, Matt. Final thought, I just say the Red Sox and the Angels made a very minor move that I love this kind of move. This is like my favorite kind of move, I think. The Red Sox traded Rich Hill to the Angels in exchange for cash, just cash.

And Rich Hill has been pitching in Pawtucket, AAA, the Red Sox affiliate, all year. He has not been up to the majors. He was pitching pretty well. He pitched like 39 innings and with a low three ZRA and over 10 strikeouts per nine and was good against lefties. He struck out 30% of lefties and held them to a 196 average with no extra base hits. But he could not get a call-up to the Red Sox because the Red Sox have three lefties in their bullpen.

They have Andrew Miller, who's just been dominant this year. They have Craig Breslow, who has not, though he has been good in the past, and now they have Felix Dubrant in the pen for now also. So he could not get a shot there, and the Angels, by contrast, had no left-handed relievers at all. All righty bullpen. And so this is just a minor move, but it's a clear example of sort of a redistribution of resources in a way that just kind of makes the the whole game more efficient right rich hill potentially useful commodity just languishing in triple a another team needs him more than the red

socks do and and he got moved to the team that needs him more it's kind of nice because we always we always talk about the replacement player and how you should be able to go get someone at whatever position just go get the the best available guy in the minor leagues to fill whatever terrible position you have. And it's not always that easy to go get someone. But this is a good example of how you can just kind of fill a hole by finding a team that has something that would potentially be useful to you, but was not really potentially useful to that team.

So I'm, I'm really glad that today was a Wednesday and that you didn't have to bring a topic because I'm afraid that would have been your topic and we would have had 25 minutes. Yeah. I'm not sure how, how long I could have gone on Rich Hill. Although I will say that Rich Hill's 2013 season is one of my favorite seasons because I love players who have an ability to stay on a roster despite never playing for whatever reason. Maybe they're a loogie who barely faces any opposing batters or maybe they're a utility guy or a third string catcher who just never really gets a start, never really faces anyone, but somehow manages to stay on the roster

the whole year. I did an article on this recently for Fox Sports and Hill is one of my favorite examples of this because he was on the Indians last year from opening day till the end of the season without any interruption, despite pitching fewer than 40 innings and having a 6.28 ERA and having a having like an 8.2 ERA into June, which you'd you'd think peripherals aside would have gotten him demoted at some point, but it never did. He did strike out a lot of guys. He also walked a lot of guys.

And somehow he clung to life in the majors for that entire year. So that's all I have to say about Rich Hill. And that's all we have to say today. So thanks for listening.