Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 496: The Q&A Episode

Episode Date: July 21, 2014

Ben and Sam banter about unwritten rules, then discuss the Angels-Padres trade, Oakland’s ingeniousness, and a few other subjects.

Good morning and welcome to episode 496 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from BaseballPerspectives.com presented by The Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I'm Sam Miller with Baseball Perspectives and he is Ben Lindberg who, what do you, do you have to wear a suit and tie tomorrow to go to your first day at work? No, we're recording this on Sunday. At Greenland? Yeah. your first day at work uh no we're recording this on sunday yeah uh no i i will wear my normal attire and work from home as usual wait oh okay so you will not you will you ever do you guys

have an office do you this is one of the most common questions i um but i of course work for you know a smaller a smaller shop so I have answered that question. Yeah, I've answered that question about baseball perspectives many times. There is no office. There is an office that I could make use of if I would like to at some point. Maybe I will. What's that like? I don't know.

I haven't been there. Huh. Interesting. You've never even been in there, huh? It's in New Yorkork though yeah it's like uh you know espn abc offices grantland people are there 538 people are there sometimes huh i think there's a cafeteria probably yeah probably you you seem like a guy who eats a lot of cafeteria type food based on i do a lot of cafeteria-type food based on my experience with you. I do. A lot of diner food.

Yeah, exactly. Yep. So one thing, first off, it seems like there's a clear consensus, including among the Angel family, that Roger Angel's last name is pronounced Angel. Yes. Yes, that's right. I did include the sound clip of the robot voice pronouncing Angel at the end of the last episode. Although that was not an authoritative sound clip. That was just a sound clip that we found.

There were hundreds of names pronounced by that robot, and that robot could have been wrong. However, Roger Angel's like college roommate's son or something like that wade in on the Facebook page and let us know, or maybe on Twitter, and let us know that Angel himself pronounces it as Angel. And there are a few things I'm willing to tell people. I'm unwilling to tell people they are wrong about, but the pronunciation of their own name is one of those.

So the takeaway here is that you should never trust Carson Sestouli. Yeah, if that's how you pronounce his name. Right, who would even know? Yeah. All right. Ben, we should probably talk about Brady Aiken, but I'm not ready to talk about Brady Aiken. Nick Filaris is going to be filing a barn burner when I know that I'm having such great content delivered to me shortly. So I think that we should wait a day

to talk about Brady Aiken. I mean, we've waited until now. We can certainly wait until tomorrow. Nothing's going to likely change. Is that okay with you? That is okay with me. Plus, we had a podcast about Aiken on Thursday. That was before the news actually happened.

But yes. Yeah, but the news happened. Do you have a knee-jerk reaction? Do you have any sort of feeling about it? I mean, I've been disconnected from the internet completely this weekend so I haven't really given it much thought

but I would think that if they were willing to give him five, was it? That was reportedly the offer that they upped it to toward the end of the negotiating window. If they were willing to give him five, you'd think maybe it would have been worth it just to give him the 6.5 and not shoot down your whole draft. Yeah. This whole Astros thing has turned dark. It has, yeah. You know, it was, I mean, there were cracks in the consensus about them, I guess, over the last year.

And it's been growing. But even, you know, a month ago there was that, the Sports Illustrated cover about them. And, you know, i'm sure that it still felt pretty okay to be an astros employee i don't know what it's like to be an astros employee right now but there's just something really dark about like having back-to-back number one overall picks and having it turn into um you know mark appell and nothing else at this point. And there's, I don't know. It feels weird. It feels, this sort of feels like,

and it's not analogous, analogous to the situation entirely, but it sort of feels like we're watching a large scale version of the Red Sox full pen by committee experiment of like 10 years ago happen in, it's like in inception, right? time is you know slowed down because we're in a different situation so like we're watching something that's going at a much slower bigger speed we're in like the second layer right now i think uh compared to what the the um red sox bullpen by committee thing was. But there's just like you get this feeling that, I don't know,

this will be shaping up to be something that people might run from for many years. I don't know. We'll see. Still lots of time to see how it goes. You've made a lot of Inception references lately. Did you recently watch Inception? inception i didn't but i would imagine that one led to the other yeah probably the first one but i watched a lot of snowpiercer lately though good very good yeah yeah good stuff much better than inception i would say hmm yeah i found it to be more memorable i I don't make any Inception references because I don't remember it well enough.

I really only remember the one thing about it. I remember the one scene of Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the room fighting. But it really made an impression. There was also some Unwritten Rules news over the weekend. Did you have any thoughts about that one we talked about the unwritten rules with the the bunting bunting to beat the shift earlier this year right that was another astros story uh astros versus a's jed lowry bunting am i getting that right uh to to uh with like a what up seven runs early in the game, first inning. And that was a big controversy. This time it was Colby Rasmus bunting on Colby Lewis, and it was close. Colby Rasmus was up 2-0 with two outs in the bottom of the fifth. And Colby Lewis was not happy about this. He said,

I told Rasmus I didn't appreciate it. You're up by two runs with two outs and you lay down a bunt. I don't think that's the way the game should be played. He said, I felt like if you have a situation where there is two outs, you're up two runs, you have gotten a hit earlier in the game off me. We are playing the shift and he laid down a bunt basically simply for average. So he's accusing Colby Rasmus of hitting for average, which is not something that Colby Rasmus has done this season. But this seems like a particularly egregious over-invoking of an unwritten rule. Yeah, well, you know my philosophy of the unwritten rules. If you take these guys in good faith that they actually believe that they are aggrieved and that this is somehow a classless move, then yeah, he looks like an idiot.

Colby Lewis looks like an idiot. He makes no sense whatsoever. You want to hate him with all your heart and you wonder why they let these people out in public. why they let these people out in public. If you think that this is basically a subtle form of influencing the way the other team behaves in a way that will benefit you and that it is therefore up to the other team,

Colby Rasmus' team or the opposition, to have the sort of emotional strength of character to ignore it and therefore regain the competitive advantage, then this is all just part of the game. And it's a thing that you sort of can convince yourself that you actually love. So Colby Lewis, yes, is pushing it to the point where it strains credibility.

But I sort of have that second philosophy where unwritten rules are essentially just a competitive move, and I enjoy it. So the more egregious they get, the lessons Wilson said at the time, if you don't throw them a strike, they're just going to take the walk. And he was saying that dismissively, as though that was cheating. right? I mean, it's like saying that even in a competitive situation, even in a competitive game, there are certain styles of trying to win that are normal and don't look funny at all and don't show anybody up and yet are somehow inappropriate because they help the offense for no reason other than that they help the offense and that they annoy the pitching staff and the defense. That's the only crime is that it is sort of tedious for the opposing team. And so sort of similar, I don't know if it's a staff thing, if this is a Rangers staff thing, if they spend a lot of time complaining about the other team playing the game the

wrong way or if it's a coincidence. But, you know, who knows? It's hard to imagine how Colby Lewis will reap the benefits of this. But if he keeps just one 2-10 hitter from dropping down a bunt against him in the future, it probably will be worth $500,000 for a tenth of a win, Ben. That's right. So what are we discussing? So we had a BP

ballpark event yesterday in Oakland. It was great fun. I think we all had great fun. It was a good time. And you weren't there to answer the questions. Not being BP. And not living over here. And I was sitting up there answering all these questions and thinking just how unfair it was that you didn't have to answer them.

So I'm going to make you answer them. Oh, no. I'm going to make you answer every question that we were asked. Sounds awful. This is why I left. So I wouldn't have to do this. All right. But, I mean, in all seriousness, I mean, if they were good questions of anybody, you know, Sounds awful. This is why I left so I wouldn't have to do this. All right.

But I mean, in all seriousness, they were good questions if anybody... Many more people couldn't be there than could be there. If one person wants to know, maybe everybody wants to know. I'm just going to ask them. I think there's only like five that I remember. Okay. All right. So here we go. Number one, do you think that there is actually an advantage to the A's being poor? Is it actually to their advantage that they're poor because they can't sign C.C. Sabathia and get stuck with C.C. Sabathia? Does it actually force them to be a better team and do we have the narrative all wrong? I don't know whether it does anymore.

Like if you suddenly gave the current A's front office a lot of money, I would think they'd still spend it as intelligently as anyone else would, and they'd be able to survive their mistakes better and buy better players, I'm sure, you know, it could be, I guess, that they're really good at finding these ways to win without spending. And they're not necessarily that much better than everyone else at just paying for free agents. And so if you gave them all the money in the world, they would just sign the best available free agent. And like most free agents, he wouldn't be as good anymore. Whereas now you're depriving them of those resources. So they are forced to go above and beyond and make waiver claims and minor league free agent

signings and acquisitions for cash considerations that turn out to be brilliant. But you'd think that if they have some statistical or scouting insight that allows them to find guys like Jesse Chavez and Dan Otero and Brandon Moss that they could apply that same evaluation skill to free agents, right? And maybe get the ones who would age better or whatever. So I would think that it has helped them and that they had to embrace these out-of-the-box ideas and were an early adopter

because they couldn't just sit back on their laurels and spend tons of money. But I'm sure if you gave Billy Bean tons of money, he'd be pretty good at spending that too. But it does seem like, I mean, having a small payroll and financial constraints does seem to lead to, I don't know, more innovative teams or more analytically rigorous teams, at least in the past now maybe everyone is at that point but but the early adopters seem to be yeah well i don't know i guess there's an exception to to that too though right i mean the red sox are not a a tiny market team and they were as advanced as everyone and and the yankees are and the cubs are so So I don't know, maybe it's maybe the, the idea that the A's and the Rays just had to, had to be more creative than everyone else because they couldn't spend as much as anyone else. You could, you can, I guess you could say that, that the A's were the first

going into it that heavily or that the Indians were. But at this point, I don't know that there's any real small market, big market distinction in terms of being smart about building a baseball team. So you think that the A's are – the current A's, the arguably best team in baseball A's are simply much, much smarter than everybody else or much, much luckier than everybody else and that there's not some sort of systematic systemic i should say advantage there that they're able to capture because the the to to go back to moss moss had a quote i think uh i think talking to maybe ken rosenthal recently or somebody where he said that there was a big difference between all of his other stops and oakland oakland was the first place where he was allowed to fail that it wasn't like oh he had 15 batted bats and then he was back in the minors, never to be heard from again. But it's not like necessarily, we can't say for sure

that the A's let him have more chances because they are smarter or that's their policy so much as they had no choice. They needed somebody. Moss got a chance there because they needed somebody and they didn't have a player they'd spent nine million dollars on at every position and josh donaldson i mean goodness gracious the amount of time that they that he got to fail in their system uh and still even when he was i mean he was getting chances i mean he he was hitting

he was so bad that they went and got Brandon Inge. Okay? That's an incredible thing to say about a person. They had a guy who was so bad that they got a 200 hitter because he was five points better than what they could get out of Josh Donaldson. And yet they stuck with him. He was also worth like 10 wins in chemistry, though. Brandon Inge, yeah. But they had to stick with him, and they did stick with him.

When their third baseman went down, they said, well, who's played the most third base? And it was Donaldson. They didn't go out and get another third baseman. They just said, oh, that guy played in the Dominican. What the heck? And so when you look at their team right now it's you know a huge part of why they're successful is that um they've found guys who had failed elsewhere that are now stars with them and i don't think that they would argue that they saw that coming from donaldson or moss they probably

saw you know something acceptable coming out of them um so i don't know how many i don't know if you give them credit for all 10 wins that those two guys are going to produce for him this year. Um, but, uh, but both of those guys had failed even, I don't know if this is true about Moss, but, uh, I mean, certainly Donaldson failed even in their system. He wasn't just a guy that they found failing somewhere else and gave him a change of scenery. He was basically failing in their system for a couple of years. Uh, that might not be true with Moss. But, I mean, Moss, they sent him to AAA.

You know, they... Anyway, I don't know. So, I don't know what my point is. My point is, I guess, just that... I don't know that Moss and Donaldson would have... Even if the Red Sox had discovered Moss and Donaldson, I don't know that you can say that Moss and Donaldson would be producing even if the Red Sox had discovered Moss and Donaldson, I don't know that you can say that Moss and Donaldson would be producing for the Red Sox right now. They might be producing for the A's right now if they'd signed them.

They might have released them three weeks later or three months or three years later and ended up with the A's anyway. Maybe you could say that having smart people matters more to a small market team or small market teams enable smart people to make more of a difference? Something like, I mean, like if, I don't, I mean, the Red Sox have smart people and money and they've won a couple World Series, so that works too, but. I think what I'm saying is, I think what I'm saying is that if baseball is inherently bananas unpredictable, and you're a team that can sign free agents, you're basically going to try one thing per year

at each position. And that's the thing that you're trying. You spent $12 million on them. You're not trying something else. You're trying the $12 million guy. And it might be that you're trying that guy for five years, because you might have signed him for a five-year contract. Whereas if you're the A's or a team like the A's that doesn't have anything particularly invested in each position, you might try four things. And none of those four things seem likely to work out, but baseball is ridiculous. And so you're basically getting four shots at having the ridiculous thing happen for free instead of having the one shot at having the thing happen and then really no creativity beyond that.

Yeah, I think having a high payroll is some incentive not to be creative maybe or maybe it's a recipe for ownership intervention in a way that gets in the way of what your baseball operations department is doing because you're, I don't know, you're in a big market and there's a lot of pressure. And maybe you have a more meddlesome owner who's less willing to try experimental things because he can just buy the best player. So, yeah, I think it's been an advantage in certain ways. All right. Second question. What do you think about the fact that the Angels traded half their farm for Houston Street? I thought that the Padres got a very good return for Houston Street. Again, I've been on a boat all weekend and haven't really studied it. But I mean, the Angels farm system, of course, was, you know, rated as one of the lowest or the lowest.

And so trading half of their farm system is not the same as trading some other team's half of farm system. But it seemed to me like they got a lot back from him. That was a very well done deal by whoever was doing it for San Diego, I thought. And are you, what about the, from the Angels' perspective, trading what they had, the few pieces that they had to trade, on bullpen help instead of starting pitching when it seems as though their bullpen is just fine and their starting pitcher is not. Starting pitching is not necessarily. Yeah, that seems kind of curious.

Haven't we talked about Jerry DiPoto's bullpen philosophy before and how he has said things about how... Don't spend anything on it. Right, don't spend anything on it and these guys are interchangeable or whatever. anything on it and, and these guys are interchangeable or whatever. And so, yeah, I don't, I don't know why they would want to, to blow their few remaining prospects on Houston street who has been, who's been good, but, but yeah, ultimately, I don't know how much better that makes them unless you think there's some kind of, I don't know whether they think there's some kind of like mental block or something

that develops when a team is not confident that it has a capital C closer who always save the lead or something. But it seems, seems curious if you don't have a lot to work with that, that would have been the biggest need they identified. Uh, yeah. One, one thing we should note is that uh just for the record it's always hard to know with the angels whether the move reflects the gm's philosophy or the owners because they're a high payroll team women's that's what we were just i don't necessarily

even mean whim whim is it whim is a cheap word to use there but uh the owner's desires or the owner's uh wishes wishes is the better word um but yeah my answer was similar to yours in that you can't say half the farm. Half the farm is not a consistent measure of quality. Half the farm is very different from team to team. I didn't think the Angels gave up anything they'll regret giving up.

To me, those guys are all fairly overrated by the fact that they've been on a list, but they wouldn't be on a list if they were in most organizations, and I won't miss any of them particularly. But yeah, I think from the Padres' perspective, it's a fine haul. They got some role players. And RJ and I were talking about the starter-reliever thing. You have to presume that they spent

the last month really doing a good job of figuring out what the market is and what they're able to acquire with the pieces that they had. I would imagine that they spent the month shopping around with their $2.75 trying to get a car that they could take to work, and they realized there were no cars for $2.75. So rather than end the month with $2.75 in their pocket, they got a meal, and that's not bad. You got to eat too. You got to go to work, but you got to eat too.

Maybe you can also make the case that because they're in the position they're in, where they are quite likely to end up in a one-game playoff to make the division series, maybe in that case, when you have so much riding on a single game, and maybe you go with a bullpen-heavy approach, maybe they're thinking about that one game and thinking that it'd be nice to be able to turn an inning over to Houston Street instead of someone else in that one game, which if they win it, they would raise their chances of winning the World Series significantly. So maybe that has something to do with it. Yeah, good point.

All right. Number three, somebody asked whether we have measures of the spin and velocity and location of a... Well, basically he was asking if we have HitFX and TrackMan. And I explained that we don't. It's an easy one to answer. We don't. And then he wanted to know what you would do with it if you had it or something along those lines. I forget the specific question, but basically wanted to know whether

there would be measures about I don't know. Really what I wanted to just talk about again. We talked about this a couple hundred episodes ago, but he was sort of suggesting this idea that we've talked about where you would measure uh hitting not based on what happened uh not on the results but on the probability of having those good results yeah and um the reason that i i'm bringing it up again with you because um so imagine that say 10 years from now we did have all this data and imagine that that when, you know,

Robinson Cano hits a line drive to left field, and it goes down in the record books as a hit or an out, but it also goes down as, say, 0.72 hits, because that's the expectation of a ball hit at that trajectory, that hard, into that part of the field, is, say, it's 0.72 hits. And so then at the end of the year, you have, you know, Robinson Cano has a 340 batting average, but then he also has, say, some other number that's like 132. And that 132 is, you know, what I'm talking about. It has no reflection on what actually happened, but on what should have happened based on all the balls he hit. Which would you which would you look at if given the choice and if your answer is the the um wacky one that i just described uh do you think

that there would be backlash to that yeah i think so that well depends why why you're looking at i mean it kind of comes down to the like, fan graphs war versus baseball reference war for pitchers argument, kind of, you know, like, do you care about how many runs the guy gave up? Are you trying to say how valuable he was? Or are you interested in how valuable he probably would be if he were to play that season again, play the next season. It would be talking about what a guy actually did versus what he should have done. And there are different times when you would want to talk about each of those things, right?

I think I'd probably want to see the 132 number, but I would need to see both numbers. And teams have those numbers already. And from what I understand, they're pretty useful because it's really imprecise what we have right now, saying that something is a line drive or a fly ball instead of saying that it had a vertical angle of such and such a number and a horizontal angle of this or whatever.

So, yeah, I think there would probably be some resistance to that. You'd get the, you'd get the usual thing where people say that you're just making things up or it's an opinion. It's not actual performance. Um, and that seems to bother some people now with the stats that we currently kind of do this with. Maybe it would be a little bit better because it would be so precise and kind of intuitive, I guess, if you explain how it works and how you're looking at actual batted balls and seeing what usually happens to them.

But yeah, there'd be some resistance to that. I think I'd still want to see the cool new number. Why would you want to see the old number? What would you get out of it? I mean, assuming that this isn't a situation where the number is diverging, I mean, because you always have to sort of check like, okay, well, is there a certain player whose number diverges from actual results significantly that makes you wonder whether there's something that the system isn't picking up or if there's a bias or something like that? Assuming that it's not that, what would you

ever look at, say, a slash line for again? Well, I was thinking that you'd use it for determining value in retrospect, but I guess you could say that that's not even a more accurate representation of value in retrospect. Or, I don't know, it's that old debate about if a guy has a fluky bad dip and he has a high average that year, he actually got all those singles. So he sort of contributed that value. And yet maybe it was also due to luck. And so maybe he's not really the pot fly and the value is coming from somewhere nebulous out there in the universe that allowed his batted ball to drop. So I could see where you'd want to maybe look at the slash line just to see what actually happened, right? There are times when you want to talk about what happened, just describing, just in a descriptive sense rather than an analytical sense.

But for analysis, you wouldn't? Probably not. I guess not. Yeah. All right. And the last one that I'll ask is about you. Oh, no. What is your process for continuing to find inspiration for things to write about, for continuing to push yourself to think creatively, and for staying kind of up to date on the state of the science?

I assume someone asked you what your process is, right? Not what mine was. Somebody asked. Somebody asked. I wish Ben Lundberg stayed so motivated. Somebody asked all of us. Uh-huh. Hmm.

That's tough. There are weeks when I have more topics I want to write about than there are days or hours. And there are weeks when I have nothing I want to write about and I feel like I'll never have something I want to write about, then there are days or hours and there are weeks when I have nothing I want to write about. And I feel like I'll never have something I want to write about again. But I'm always interested in reading other people's work. And I do try to keep up with that at the various sites. And often it will inspire me to do something different or something similar and I'll get ideas from that or I'll watch highlights and something weird will happen and I'll wonder how weird it was and I'll want to look it up.

Or I don't know, there are just certain subjects that appeal to me and I go back to them time after time and try to put a slightly new spin on them each time. But it is sort of endlessly fascinating to me, or at least it has been so far. So do you have an article for your first day at Grantland? Can we read your first day at Grantland article on Monday? I will have something tomorrow on Tuesday and probably on trades or the trade deadline, something related to that,

and a couple of things later this week. Do you have a schedule? Do you have a schedule? Are you like Tuesdays and Thursdays? Yeah, I'll probably be Tuesdays and Thursdays, and then the third thing I write will be kind of on a flex schedule where maybe it'll be Wednesday or maybe it'll be Friday or depending on news. And is it – I can't remember. Is it all baseball or you're going to do like – are you going to keep your body count thing going? Are you going to do that again? Right. You're referring to my post about Longmire, the AMC TV show where I counted up the number of murders there were.

And tried to extrapolate what that would mean to a community. Yes. Yeah, I'd like to do that again. But that requires a lot of time. And I don't know how many shows I watch work that well with that idea. I might have to watch new shows and then it would be a, an extraordinary investment of time for one post. But yeah, I'll be doing some, some non-baseball stuff like last week when I wrote about Snow Piercer. Um, but on no set schedule, whenever something occurs to me.

And so can I ask you one last thing or do you have to go? Uh, You can. Okay, so this will be a spoiler. So if anybody has not seen Snowpiercer yet, don't listen to the next, say, three minutes. But, okay, so they're gone. Okay, so in the scene in the classroom where the shooting happens, all the shooting happens, we don't see any child shot.

Nope. We don't see any child flee. It seems to me that we know that they couldn't have gone to the front of the train, and we know that they probably didn't go to the back of the train because there was more shooting going on there. going on there. And we also know that there is a real, that it is a serious violation of rules to shoot a front of the train passenger casually. We know that because a couple seconds later when he shoots one in the spa, he's scolded for it, right? Yep.

So what happened to those kids in that scene? So what happened to those kids in that scene? My recollection is that they did just sort of disappear all of a sudden, right? They were clustered somewhere in that car and then they were no longer anywhere. So I don't know. One of the reasons I liked that movie was that a lot of it didn't make sense and there were weird surreal things just thrown in from time to time uh that maybe would not have been included in a you know big budget summer blockbuster if it were made by a western director um and so i think i think they just showing kids

getting shot maybe was was too much for the movie. Talking about babies being eaten was not. But actually showing them being shot maybe was more than audiences would stomach. And so they just kind of disappeared then. And it was probably not the weirdest thing about that movie. It was not completely logically consistent at all times, I don't think. And that was one of the reasons I liked it. So then you think shot and just not shown, basically.

Well, we... As far, I mean, it's the closest thing we have to an answer. Yeah. The closest thing we have to a resolution is the idea that shot but not shown for taste reasons. I would think so, yes. And if they weren't shot, then they were killed when the train derailed, if that's any more comforting. Okay, and why do you think they left the teacher alone in the room to shoot all the tail enders?

Why didn't the Eggman stay there? Why didn't the Eggman stay and shoot with her? I don't know why after a certain point in the movie, none of the front section people seemed to be put out at all by the fact that there was like an armed gang of rear compartment people proceeding through the drain. I guess because they were all taking chrono or whatever it was. But yes, there was a marked disparity in how certain people on the train reacted to other people on the train. And that was another aspect of the movie that didn't completely seem to be consistent to me, but didn't really detract from my enjoyment all that much either. All right, Ben. We'll have a nice flight. Okay. Yeah, I've got to catch a plane now.

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