Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 499: Yesterday, All Your Emails Were So Far Away

Episode Date: July 24, 2014

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about front-loaded contracts, qualifying offers, scouting umpires, pitcher command, and more.

Good morning and welcome to episode 490 of the Glorious and tenderness will lay into my mind, that's all you know Good morning and welcome to episode 499 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectus presented by the BaseballReference.com Play Index. I am Ben Lindberg, a writer for Grantland.com, joined by Sam Miller, Editor-in-Chief of Baseball Perspectus. Hello. Hi, how are you? Okay. So, it's another day, of course.

And that means that the Diamondbacks played, Ben. They did. And when the Diamondbacks play, we need headlines. Yeah, that's right. There needs to be a story. I'm going to read you 10 headlines that we've got 10 were selected as top submissions 10 that's twice as many as usual so you know they're good you know that they're 10 gold headlines i'm gonna i'm gonna uh read you

these 10 i'm gonna ask you to pick a winner but then i'm also just gonna ask how much you've learned about the game i mean if i were given 10 headlines uh to convey the game to you i think i'd i'd like to think that i could pretty much tell you everything you'd get from a game story uh cumulatively so we'll see if we can so 10 submissions all right hill keys victory in effort to get out of town that's how headlines are right isn't that how most headlines go um well there's some useful information in there i know who won i know who had something to do with the victory yes and i guess i know where the diamondbacks are gonna play next also going on the road you next. Also, going on the road.

You would think that they were on the road already, right? To get out of town, I would think, normally would imply that they're in an inhospitable environment. So I think that's slightly misleading, that they're actually at home. I think any time you have in effort to in the headline, you've gotten a little too verbose. Brevity is the key to a headline. Alright. Gut check. Passed. Nope. I don't get anything

from that. I have no idea what that means at all. But I mean at least it's strong. It's got strong noises. Strong fricatives and stuff um so i actually don't hate that one if i'm assuming that there's going to be like a picture and a story that goes with it and maybe a decade all right oh god man late walks in a hill of a win hill of a like hell

of a one except the e in hell of a has been changed to an i late walks in a hill of a like hell of a one except the e in hell of a has been changed to an i late walks in a hill of a win no okay but you now know that there were late walks presumably this was a yeah was that was it a walk off walk what was i'm intrigued yeah as am i by the way i just realized i'm I'm intrigued yeah as am I by the way I just realized hang on just a darn second I am looking at the box score

from today's game and none of this adds up so I'm guessing that this has to be from yesterday's game but if it's yesterday's game they did not get out of town they played another game in the same city yes they wait um i'm still a day off hang on hang on maybe they didn't actually no they didn't yesterday

wait today is today is wednesday yeah wednesday night yesterday was tuesday and uh they and they did not get out of town. Same location. So I think that one is especially not allowed. All right. All right. Next one is D-backs beat Titans. Must be like the idiom, right? Get out of town.

Get out of town. It's got to be that. D-backs. I love that these all have their own capitalization conventions, and whoever puts them into the website doesn't bother to fix them. So some of them are just like, they look like E.E. Cummings poetry, basically. All right. D-backs beat Tigers, quote, Miggy style.

I don't know what a Miggy style is. What is a Miggy style, Ben? I don't know. Someone on the Dying Backs must have hit well. On the Triple Crown. Yeah. Somebody won the Triple Crown last night yeah uh yeah all right uh next one is um oh gosh i swear to you i'm gonna just read this exactly how it appears okay okay one by one is three dot dot dot so far anderson anderson chased but d-backs get relief

gosh uh need a special section for this paper to accommodate this headline one by one is three dot dot dot so far anderson, but D-backs get relieved. One by one is three. I don't know. All right. A walk in the park in D-backs win. That's what happened. I will note, though, that this will make you think that,

whoa, you would think walk off, walk. Yeah, or go ahead, run, walk. Yeah, exactly. Did not happen. The go ahead run scored on a single. There were two walks earlier in the inning, and Aaron Hill didn't have any of them. But he homered in the second.

He might have done more. Oh, okay, okay. any of them uh but he homered in the second uh he might have done more uh the uh oh i get okay okay the other miggy comes through in the clutch so okay so that's what the miggy style is they they beat the tigers with their own miggy uh miguel montero i. The other Miggy comes through in the clutch. All right. D-backs grab tigers by the tail. Well, tells me who won. That's all it tells me. Tells you who was playing. Yeah. And tells you that tigers are an animal with a tail. In case you're like, what's a tiger? D-backs take a bite out of the tigers. That's kind of the opposite, I guess. Yeah.

Or maybe it's saying that tigers bite or diamondbacks bite. D-backs bite. I think D-backs, yeah. So this actually D-backs bite, I'm assuming that this means that the D-backs bite. I think D-backs, yeah. So this actually D-backs bite. I'm assuming that this means that the D-backs took a bite because they're a snake that bites. This is actually the same guy who proposed venomous snakes a previous day. So he's mainly in this for the snake. His main interest in baseball are snake attributes.

He roots for the right team. And last one, Diamondbacks climb hill to victory. I mean, I wouldn't be shocked if that were a headline at MLB.com. Yeah, I wouldn't either. He went one for three with a home run in the second inning. He drove in a run with a ground out, and he drove in a sack fly, so fine. He was significant to the effort. But I guess I just don't think he rises to headline status.

But that's the cleanest one, and that's the one that won. Okay. All right. Before you start asking questions, a few weeks ago we got one from eric uh hartman that we didn't answer and it's quick okay he wanted to know what is our what is our favorite score yeah hmm what's yours uh i like a i like a three nothing and i like a seven one i like a nine nothing too as far as a 7-1. I like a 9-0 too. As far as blowouts go, 9-0 is my favorite blowout.

Do you like blowouts? I do, yeah. I do if it's got something that keeps... Like 9-0, you know you're seeing a good pitching performance. Otherwise, I only like blowouts otherwise if the scoring continues. I don't like a blowout like the Red Sox game the other day where it was 14-1 in the fifth and it ended 14-1. I hate a game like that. But, you know, a good 23-2 game where the scoring just keeps going on and on.

Yeah, I enjoy that. But 9-0 is about as far as I go without thinking this game's lost it. So 3-0 is probably my favorite. I like 5-4. It's a good one. Yeah, there's about an average amount of scoring, but it's close. All right. By the way, Ben, I think I am going to, at someone's suggestion, I think I am going to perhaps try to organize an Effectively Wild Crashes the Arizona Republic headline competition.

Yeah, I was going to say there was some suggestion of that in the Facebook group. So it's possible that some of those were our people, but probably not. Probably not. But I think that I'm not ready to start yet. I think I'll announce the rules or the guidelines maybe Monday. Okay. That would be fun, maybe. All right.

This question comes from Aaron. He asks, there's been talk, at least among Cardinals fans, that the way Johnny Peralta's contract is structured is beneficial to the team if he starts to decline. Not to complain, he's been great this year. His salaries for 2014 to 2017 are $15.5 million, $15 million, $12.5 million, $10 million. Unlike most contracts, his salary goes down instead of up as he ages. This means he could be easier to trade or move to a different position if he can't cut it

at shortstop anymore. So the question is, why don't more teams give players front-loaded contracts, or at least older players? Probably wouldn't make sense to pay Trout less for his age 27 season than 26. That way the team pays more for the years the player's likely to be more valuable in, and the player gets the same amount of money either way. Are players and agents refusing to accept those types of contracts in order to make it more difficult for the team to trade or bench-slash-platoon them, or is that just not the normal way to structure a contract so it's just generally not done? I have a friend who's been arguing this to me for years and I've never got it. I've never understood the point.

So the premise of this is essentially that the people in the front office, pretty much anybody who's involved in the decision-making, has just as much stake in the team five years from now as they do today. Because that's why they would, quote-unquote, I guess, sacrifice this year for five years down the road. Clearly they think that five years down the road is just as important. And that's true. I mean, that's how baseball teams are. They, you know, they exist for 100 years and they want to win as many of those years as possible. And five years from now is roughly as important as this year is.

So, but once you accept that, then you think, well, wait, why can't, I mean, why aren't they capable of just like sort of adjusting in their head. If they know that they're going to... I don't know how to put this, Ben. Are you still there, Ben? I'm here. Yeah. But are you still there, Ben? If you're capable of thinking

in that long-term, five-year plan kind of way, you'd think you'd be capable of balancing your books as well in a long-term, five-year plan kind of way. So other than having cash availability, you obviously need to have enough cash to make payroll. And if you put five years' worth of expenses on day one, then you wouldn't have enough cash. So you can't have enough cash. So you can't do that. But other than that limitation, there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to basically balance your books with all of this in mind. And so it shouldn't actually matter. So long as you're making payroll, it shouldn't actually matter. So that's why I don't quite get the benefit of it. And in fact, the reverse is true. Five years from now is actually probably not quite as valuable as right now is because

you don't know where you're going to be in five years. You don't know what your team's needs are going to be, etc. And so generally speaking, I think teams prefer to play for today at the expense of tomorrow to some degree, not so much that it cripples them or handicaps them in a great way. But I think most teams would take a dollar today if they had to basically lose a dollar and a penny in a year and a dollar and two pennies in two years and so on. What you get today is just sort of seen as more valuable than what you get in five years. And plus, if you're pushing the money back,

if you're deferring it, then you're saving yourself some money in the long term if you're still around, just because a million dollars in five years will not have the buying power that it does today. So if you were a player, maybe you would want this. You would push for this, right? Is it surprising that players don't push for this? It does seem to be the convention that teams can backload a lot of the time, but there aren't a lot of front-loaded deals, and you would think it would be better for the player just to get more money while that money is still worth what it is when he signs.

Well, I think that when they agree to these deals, the math is done. I mean, the players' union, for instance, puts a true value on each contract that reflects the amount of money that has to be depreciated or adjusted for inflation some years down the road. And so they're aware that $100 million now is worth more than $100 million in seven years that's accounted for. But when you think about it just from an individual perspective, the player doesn't actually need to have access to that money right now. It's guaranteed, so he knows he's going to have it for his great-grandkids, but he doesn't actually need to have access to that money right now. Whereas the team, arguably having to make payroll and having to make these $100 million decisions, does need access to that money right now.

I assume that it reflects more or less the true value of the contract. And if a player demanded that he would get slightly less because he would be getting paid essentially slightly more. The other thing is that, I don't know, to make the point hopefully a little bit better, if you have a guy who's getting paid $20 million for the first four years and then $2 million in the last year, well, yeah, he's not making as much in the last year, and theoretically there's teams that would love to have a guy

and only have to pay $2 million for him. But you've already paid him all the money. So if you flip it around and only have $2 million in the first year and then $20 million in the last four years, and in the last year nobody wants to pay him more than $2 million, you still have the option of paying him that $18 million and then letting somebody else just pay him too. You just swallow the money, right? And so by front-loading it, you're essentially taking the choice out of your hands. You've already paid him.

You have no choice left anymore. You money is gone. It gives you actually more flexibility to have the money back loaded because then you have the choice of whether you want to pay him or whether you want to eat the contract. Yeah. If you're a GM, you're probably in a perpetual fight or dialogue with your owner to try to get a little bit more money. And it's just the more payroll room available to you, the more possibilities you have, the more ways to put together your roster. So I guess there's just always a natural inclination to kick the can down the road and put off the payment until ... I mean, this is why people carry credit card debt, right? Because you want to pay sometime in the future.

And if you're a GM, then there's always a not inconsiderable chance that you won't be around anymore when that bill comes due. So why not stick it to the next guy? One last thing is that a guy who's getting paid $25 million right now is getting, that looks like a lot more money now than it will at the end of the contract, because salaries go up. And so while the player is declining in value, the cost of a win is going up. And those don't necessarily cancel each other out, but it's part of it. So in a way, having the salaries go up just reflects that the costs are also going up. I don't know if that matters to anybody, but at least there's a sort of logical consistency there or something. Aesthetic consistency.

Yeah. All right, so I'm going to read the next one. It's from Vinit. Let's say a team offered a qualifying offer to a player, and the player countered with two years, $20 million. Qualifying offer, of course, last year was one year and, what, 14.3 or 14.1 million. So the player counters with two years and $20 million. If the team refuses, then they probably just want the draft pick and don't really care for the player.

Would the player then have a case to file a grievance? It's my understanding that the spirit of the qualifying offer system is such. We're a small market team. Here's the best we can offer you. If you get poached by a team with a bigger wallet, we'll get some compensation. But if the team is unwilling to negotiate past the bare minimum, the player would certainly have a case to make. I guess that's the spirit of the qualifying offer system, I guess, but it's not, you know, contract law is not necessarily governed by the spirit of such things, for one thing, and the way that the qualifying offer system is actually um put in

play is not really keeping with the spirit either so no i think the answer is that there would be no case whatsoever that's not really how these things work all right so i'm going to read the next question it's from mike uh sam and ben do teams scout umpires and how far in advance do they find out who is behind the plate? If they do scout the umpires, what adjustments, if any, do the teams employ? I've actually had, I've been to two ballpark events recently. And in both ballpark events, this was a question that somebody asked me while I was watching the game. And both times it led to a lengthy conversation do you you pay more attention to umpire bias of course than most people do you have an opinion about the merits of scouting an umpire

um well i think teams do it to some extent i don't i don't know that there's really that much potential to leverage it. I mean, you can, there have been umpire reports on the internet in the past, and teams have their own umpire reports that I think are pre-built. But how much can you really do with that? You can, you know, give a player a printout of a heat map of that umpire zone or something, and maybe he calls pitches a little more on the outside corner, off the outside corner than the typical umpire. Maybe he gives you the high strike a little bit more.

I guess that's something that a catcher would want to keep in mind and maybe would change location a little bit. But I would think that for the most part you still want to throw to the same areas, I think. I don't know that – I guess you might be willing to expand the zone a little more in certain cases. Yeah. So yeah, that's more or less what my answer was both times it came up. I mean, I think that I've mentioned this once before, but so somebody told me once that when you're deciding what pitch to throw and where to throw it, the first, like if you're a catcher calling a game and trying to decide what pitch to call, or if you're a pitcher pitching a game and trying to decide what pitch to throw, the first thing that you think is, what's my strength as a pitcher?

Am I a sinker baller or am I a high heat guy? Because you're going to play to your strengths. Number two thing that you think about is the situation. Is this a situation where I need to throw a strike, where I sort of need to throw a strike, where I'm going to waste a pitch, where I'm worried about the guy on deck or the guy on deck behind him. Is it a close game? Is it a home run ballpark? Do I need to get a double play? All those things. So the situation is the number two thing. And then the third thing, which is sort of as it was conveyed to me, in which I think that a couple of pieces that I've written,

I've kind of felt the same way when I've looked at the idea. The third thing is the batter himself. What's the batter's strength? And so if he's a, you know, you know what I'm talking about. And that's low down the list. I mean, that's already kind of a not that pressing issue and it doesn't influence all that much. In some extreme cases it does, but, you know, you're talking about a couple pitches out of 100, really, where you see pitchers change in approach from Sean Figgins to Mike Trout. It's not that big a thing. And so then for the umpire thing, it would be a clear number four thing. Even if you thought that, okay, one umpire was likely

to call eight more low pitches a strike out of 100 than another umpire, likely to call, you know, eight more low pitches a strike out of 100 than another umpire. Even if you thought that was the case, you wouldn't capture anywhere near all eight of those because most pitches you're just ignoring that. That's not even a factor. You're totally focused on factor number one, then two, and then a little bit three, and then like way down is the umpire thing. So it's very, very rare that that would be enough to sway you off of your first three decision tree routes. And then, of course, you have to actually hit the spot that you're trying to hit if you're trying to get the umpire to do something. So I just think that it's very hard to capture any sort of benefit.

I mean, I think that teams are totally aware of the umpire. very hard to capture any sort of benefit. I mean, I think that teams are totally aware of the umpire. Like, I think that probably just by being in the game and by having one guy in the dugout who pays attention to it more than other people or, you know, having the bench coach who pays attention or, you know, just seeing these guys a bunch of times a year, I think they all know before they even step on the field, like, oh, it's this umpire, he usually calls this or this. But i doubt that it changes their approach like really hardly at all they might even like i could see them thinking that it might but then once they get out there it doesn't yeah that's my guess uh yeah i asked someone about this someone in the front

office about this when we got this question and he said that their team had like a pre-built umpire report but that his impression was that no one really used it all that much and it wasn't really of all that much use and uh he actually he actually was under the impression that technically teams are barred from using PitchFX to evaluate umpires, which is interesting. Like there's an umpires union rule against it or something. I know that because the data is made available for free on the Internet, it's kind of discouraged for people on the Internet to use it in that application. But I did not know that that also extended to teams of course there's really

there's nothing that that anyone could do about it really but but yeah i think that's uh that's that's right uh teams i mean i don't know you're you're already loading up players with uh opposing hitter tendencies and it's probably probably more important to focus on that rather than have the umpire thing in the back of your head also. You want to do play index? Sure. Cool. Play index, baseballreference.com.

Offer code BP. So the A's, of course, had that really great run differential earlier this year. They still do. They've had a great run differential. The A's have a very good run differential. And the other day, you and I were talking about how to find run differentials over the course of X game stretches for a team. And we, of course, found this on Baseball Reference. So I was looking at the best, what Baseball Reference play index list as best end game streaks. You can find the teams with the best stretches of runs scored or runs allowed or run differential or record over the course of however many games you want to do it.

And you can do that forever, and you can do it from the start of the season, or at any point in the season, so on and so forth. So I was looking at the A's, and I wondered what their best stretch has been this year by run differential, and how that compares to the rest of the league. And so I looked at it for just 2014, and I set a 20-game limit, so the best 20-game stretch. And Oakland's best stretch was a plus 62 run differential from

May 11th to June 1st. What's kind of incredible is that the A's have, and this isn't totally incredible, obviously it will kind of make some intuitive sense, but the A's have, and this isn't totally incredible, obviously it will kind of make some intuitive sense, but the A's have, like, all the best stretches.

Like, they have the best, like, nine stretches, which makes sense because they're just, you know, each game kind of leads into a new stretch, right? So you have a 20-game stretch, and then the next day is just the end of a new 20-game stretch, and the next day is the end of a new 20-game stretch. So anyway, Oakland is way above anybody else there, plus 62. The Rockies had a stretch where they were plus 56. The Tigers had a stretch where they were plus 53.

Anyway, so how good is plus 62? So I went and I looked at every year since 1988 to see who has the best and the worst run differential stretches over 20 game periods. The worst is the 1996 Tigers, who managed to be minus 92 over a 20 game stretch, which is really bad. But the best is even more impressive. The best is the 2002 Angels, who over 20 games were plus 96 over 20 games. No other team was even plus 90 in any 20 game stretch so

they are way ahead of everybody um and um uh so i have a little bit of a little bit of history about these angels so there's a few there's a few things that are really interesting about this stretch one is that it started with a loss the first of those 20 games they lost and so uh while of course any end game stretch is going to be kind of by almost definition cherry picking this one does at least start with a loss it's like the most honest way that you can do this um they lost one to nothing and the thing about that loss is that it came in april it came on april uh 17th of 2002 and it dropped them to 6 and 14 um which is the worst start in franchise history 6 and 14 so this is a team that was at its like basically lowest possible point like one of their lowest points in franchise history uh and with that loss, that loss itself, the very loss itself kicked off

like the greatest stretch in franchise history. And of course, as we know, would ultimately lead to their one World Series title. So in that 20-game stretch, they scored 151 runs. They allowed 55. So that's an average game score of 7 and a half to two and three quarters. For a 20 game stretch, they won the average game by almost five runs. In that stretch, they had a 19 to nothing win. They had a 21 to two win. They had a 10 to one win and nine to two win and a whole bunch of five game wins. They went 17 and three in that stretch as a group they their offense hit 317 378 497 which is a 875 ish ops uh benji melina had a 600 ops in that stretch every other player was basically bananas uh their batting averages the rest actually all their batting averages in that stretch are i think it's like uh 262 347 341 322 318 348 318 288 333 um they uh

their uh pitching staff meanwhile allowed an ops of 222, 351, which actually sort of surprised me to have the most dominant stretch in basically modern baseball history. And the difference is only like the difference between an all-star hitter and below average hitter, well below average hitter. But it's not like they weren't holding everybody to Brandon Wood levels and they weren't all Barry Bonds. It was just sort of basically good baseball being played against bad baseball being played. Anyway, so they were dominant. They were awesome. And so I wondered, given that this was a team that wasn't supposed to be very good coming into the season,

that started out six and 14, that wasn't a team that this was expected of, I wondered if everybody was all excited during this stretch, whether this historic dominance captured America's attention. So I went back and I read Baseball Prospectus. The two months that surround this, basically from the beginning of April to the end of May, this stretch went from the middle of April to the end of May, this stretch went from the middle of April to the middle of May. And I went to see what people were saying and nobody was particularly excited about this stretch. Nobody was talking about what

a great team they were. Here's basically a summary of articles referencing the Angels during this stretch. Okay. An article arguing that they should sign Jose Canseco to play first base instead of Brad Fulmer. Brad Fulmer, meanwhile, was hitting three 48, three 94, six Oh six over this 20 game stretch.

Um, uh, a piece grudgingly admitting that Garrett Anderson is in fact an above average left fielder, uh, an article on how Tim Salmon had fallen off a cliff, performance-wise. Not a real cliff. Salmon hit 318, 440, 652 during this stretch.

The piece came out two weeks into the stretch. Two and a half. A piece talking about their bad bench and saying, quote, if that was the bench of a team with a great lineup it would be acceptable but this is the bench that is guaranteed to keep an already bad offensive team on the field um and finally a piece noting that the pitching was outperforming their peripherals uh didn't say this but the implication being that they got lucky or we're getting lucky and. And these are all responsible things that were being said. I don't mean to imply that any of these things shouldn't have been written. The Angels had this fantastic year, this miracle year, this magical year,

and then the next year they dropped to like 70-some wins. So it isn't actually as though necessarily the team was fundamentally necessarily a great team. They probably were that year, but fundamentally they weren't necessarily a great team. And it was, I think, fair to say that it was way too early to get excited. But yeah, anyway, this is just the point being that the great, being that really the truly great things happen. Some of them happen over the course of two decades and we get to watch them and then wonder why they're on steroids. And some of them happen before we've noticed that they're happening and don't find out about it until 12 years later. Good. Good one.

BP. Coupon code BP. $30 for the annual subscription to Playindex. Get it. Use it. Do it. Okay. All right, so I'll read one last one. This is from Ranger in Seattle. Ben and Sam, one of my favorite regular topics is, can pitchers throw strikes even when they really want to?

However, I've always been a little uneasy with the stat you generally cite. That stat being what? That on 3-0 counts to pitchers when the man on the mound has no incentive to throw anything except the fattest fastball ever right down the middle, they manage to hit the strike zone two-thirds of the time. That's the stat. Because, as you've mentioned every time, there may be a selection bias. When you're looking at pitchers who have gone to 3-0 with the opposing pitcher in the box, perhaps they have poor control to begin with. I was thinking of some other situations where the pitcher is just trying to

throw a strike. Maybe we can look up the stats in those and triangulate. How about a 2-0 on the pitcher? That's when I'd start aiming down the middle. You know he's probably taking anyway. How about 2-0 and 3-0 to all batters with an 8-plus run lead? Or 3-0 to the number 9 hitter in the AL? Thanks, says Ranger. I think that you'd have some of the same issues in all those cases. It would be a sliding scale. You'd be, in some cases, more certain that the pitcher is ready to throw a strike, but then that would mean that there's more incentive for him to have not gotten there in the first place, and therefore he might just be wild. Or you can be less certain that he's going to groove one down the middle,

such as a 3-0 count to the number 9 hitter in the AL, maybe. Less certain that he's going to groove on right down the middle, but more confident that he's not naturally wild. Anyway, we're not going to be able to answer that right now, but Ben, you're going to answer it with other words. Yeah, so we have been interested in this question, both of us, and we've been trying to approach it in this kind of oblique way by looking for these scenarios where we could be pretty confident that a pitcher was trying to throw a strike and then seeing how often they were able to follow through on that goal. And hopefully I have a better answer now or a more direct answer. So I wrote an article about Tim Lincecum for Grantland that is

up this morning, if you're listening on Thursday morning when this podcast went up. And I was talking about how Lincecum has kind of bounced back a bit, or at least has been in terms of, you know, runs allowed. He's been anaverage starting pitcher for most of this season, since the end of April, certainly. And it was kind of a tricky problem to find out why that is. And so just improved command was something that was often suggested by people who had watched him, or people with the the team or maybe even Lincecum himself that he was able to put the ball where he wants it and that this has been a key to his partial comeback and that he is continuing to throw less and less hard every year. He got in a lot of trouble when he was pitching, you know, in 2012 and to a lesser extent last year when he was pitching more or less the way that he had been before when he had been something like a power pitcher.

He was not getting away with the pitches that he had once gotten away with when he was throwing much harder. So I wanted to try to find a way to quantify his command. his command and I was thinking about doing a time-consuming exercise where I watched all of his pitches and I you know recorded the pixel of my screen where the catcher's glove was before he threw and then through the and then recorded the pixel of the screen where the ball crossed the plate and and figured out the distance between those pixels and what that equated to in inches. And I could have done that and it would have taken a long time. But there are companies and services that do this already. So the usual data collection companies, BIS and Inside Edge, they do this at least to some extent in some way, they record the catcher's target before the pitch is thrown and, of course, have the location of the pitch. But that information is sort of hard to

obtain. They have to get permissions from teams to share it or they're not willing to share it if you don't pay a certain amount to get access to that information. But the other and maybe better alternative is CommandFX, which is like the least mentioned, the least known of the FX products from Sport Vision and Major League Baseball Advanced Media. It uses the same system of cameras that pitch effects and hit effects use, but it is targeted toward command. It records the position of the catcher's glove at the moment when the pitcher releases the ball, and then it records the position of the ball when it is in the same plane as the glove. So, you know, a couple of feet behind home plate, whatever it is. And they, they extrapolate that trajectory if, if the ball is contacted and does not actually make it that far behind the plate. But, uh, so they can more or

less answer this question. They, they know where the catcher's target was. They know where the pitch crossed home plate and can figure out the distance between those two points. And so I asked if they would be willing to share some information about Lincecum. They were. And we're also able to provide the league average. So the league average distance between the catcher's target and the ball in the same position in space. And this is fastballs only because breaking ball's a little more complicated. The pitcher is not always necessarily aiming for the catcher's glove

when he throws a breaking ball. Maybe he's aiming below the strike zone in the approximate horizontal location of where the glove is, but it's not quite the same. So they limit it to fastballs only. And the average distance between the target and the location of a fastball in the majors this year and for the past few years,

they've been recording this data since 2010, is 13.8 inches. So that is presumably, I mean, now maybe there are exceptions. Maybe certain pitchers are not always aiming for the glove. I know some pitching coaches will tell a pitcher to aim for something else or maybe he's not necessarily aiming at all. So it's probably not perfect, but as a proxy for how good pitchers are at putting the ball where they want it to be this seems like about as as good an answer as we can come up with so

13.8 inches so uh a little over a foot is how close pitchers can come yeah and linticum you can well you can go read about about where Lincecum ranks and what his change over the past few years is. But this seems like... A lot. Yeah, although when I asked you to guess, you guessed higher, right, I think? I'm eating a peach, by the way. I guessed higher when you asked me for Lincecum.

I didn't guess higher when you asked me the average. That's true. I would when you asked me the average. That's true. I would have guessed lower on the average. And I think that probably the average is slightly lower because of the things you noted. I mean, those would be exceptions in those cases, but the exceptions would skew the numbers slightly and would make it so that true the true average is probably a little bit lower i mean certainly with it seems like there are a lot of pitchers who throw two seamers with movement where the catcher

is deliberately setting up at not the target right it's basically saying start it here we know there's going to be movement yes Yes. At least that's the legend. So I would guess that it's a little lower. But yeah, I mean, that's a lot. Most people wouldn't believe you when you told them that. I think most people would not believe you. Yeah. 14 inches.

14 inches. Goodness gracious. So what do you think is the best? You don't know the answer to this. No, I'd love to. This is the first thing I wonder. I don't even care who the pitcher is. I just want to know what do you think is the best that any pitcher has.

Like let's say it's Cliff Lee. What do you think Cliff Lee's is if you had to guess? I'll say nine. I was going to say seven and three quarters and and then let me ask you this um do you think that pitchers uh on 3-0 to pitchers would be better i mean when they ease off do you think that they're able to hit their target better or uh do you think that it's just impossible to make a ball go 60 feet exactly where you want it to and whether you ease off or not they're especially considering that they're not used to easing off at all whether you ease off or not you basically have the same margin of error

or the same error bars i guess it's a little bit easier. Yeah. So I thought about, I actually thought about, I didn't, because I can't even watch the Home Run Derby as it turns out, I found out when it came on, on my computer. But I thought about doing something like this on the pitchers, the Home Run Derby pitchers, to see how much they missed by and who was best and whether there's a big difference between the good

ones and the bad ones or what I would have found to be the good ones or the bad ones. And I didn't do that because I couldn't watch the game of the derby. But I wonder how much they missed by because they're really just grooving it in there, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah. So is this consistent with the rate of 3-0 strikes that we found? Like if the average pitcher misses by close to 14 inches on a fastball and we found that the 3-0 strike rate was what 67 percent or something um does that does that make sense i mean if you're if you're if you're aiming for the center of the

strike zone and you uh i don't know what the the average standard deviation or what the typical standard deviation is for for this stat but if you're aiming for the center of the strike zone you've got you've got room to work with and yet you presumably the ball could be anywhere within a 14 inch range of where you're throwing so yeah it's it's hard to do that math for a few reasons one because the 3-0 auto strike makes the strike zone very large. Although, that's not what we were looking at. We were looking at in the rulebook strike zone. However, 14 inches due west is a ball, but 14 inches southwest is not a ball.

It catches the lower corner. Also, it's conceivable that pitchers know their tendencies to miss in certain directions and wouldn't aim right in the center. They might be missing by 14 inches, but usually they pull left or whatever, and so they might aim for the middle in part and allow themselves that 14 inches. So I don't know if it's consistent. Not ready to answer that. Okay. But at least... You should ask your new powerful friends. Well, at least we got an answer.

We're slowly getting answers to our... It's a good answer. It's a good answer. I learned a lot from that answer. 14 inches is a lot. I don't think people would believe that. Well, they might believe it for Lincecum, but I think if you told them that Burley or Lee was 9 or whatever they are, I don't think they'd believe that. If you told him Maddox is seven and a quarter,

I think it would hit you in the face. Right, because people say that certain pitchers can put the ball in a teacup. What's the saying? Teacup. That's a saying, I think. So yeah, I doubt anyone can consistently do that. Anyway, that's something we learned about baseball. So that's... Maddox's command was so good, he could hit the diamond on the back of a venomous snake.

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And please rate and review the podcast and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. We will be back with another show tomorrow. So 3-0 is probably my favorite. I don't know. What scores do I like huh um I like five four