Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 54: Jeff Luhnow’s Season-Ending Interview Idea/Why Players and Executives Disagree About the AL MVP

Episode Date: October 2, 2012

Ben and Sam discuss Jeff Luhnow’s plan to interview his players at the end of each season, then talk about why players and front-office executives are backing different candidates for AL MVP.

Good morning and welcome to episode 54 of Effectively Wild, the Baseball Prospectus Daily Podcast in New York, New York. A little later than usual, just around 1.30 in the morning Eastern time. I am Ben Lindberg and in Long Beach, California, where as always, it is three hours earlier, is Sam Miller. How are you, Sam? Good. I heard a story on NPR today about an epidemic of crickets in Texas. This is relevant because yesterday we talked about crickets at the Rangers ballpark. And one of the people they interviewed talked about crickets at uh the rangers ballpark and uh one of the people they interviewed talked about how when the first cars drive into his parking lot at his business every day it sounds like a car running over bubble wrap oh oh uh the crickets

listening to this in your garage right now not are appalled and there were crickets in your house yesterday i am given to understand there were there was crickets in your house yesterday, I am given to understand. There was a cricket in our house and another one in our attic and then another one that we found today. So they are moving in and actually, well, let's limit cricket conversation. Because I could talk for a long time about crickets. Okay. well, we'll just continue to spread it out among our many episodes. It's going to be a fun off-season, Ben. Yes.

Homer Bailey has a beef with us. He ranted, and that was not my word. It was the word of a column I read on Cincinnati.com. He ranted a bit about the overlooked Reds a couple days ago. He thinks the Reds haven't gotten enough attention. He says no one's even paid attention. You don't even hear about that on ESPN. We keep hearing about the Reds in the 70s.

Nobody's talking about this team, this rotation, the things we've done, the amount of quality starts, the innings, etc. He did not call us out by name, but you have to imagine that this was in some way inspired by our not talking about the Reds and then being chastised about it by a commenter and then half-heartedly talking about the Reds in a subsequent episode and then apologizing for that and not having talked about them since. This podcast now has two inside jokes, and everybody who's listening has now heard them both. It's funny because on the 21st,

John Prado's On the Beat column included a scout's view about Homer Bailey that said, he's pitching better than I've ever seen him, he's commanding his fastball to both sides of the plate, and he's getting ahead in the count. No one has ever questioned his raw talent, but he's finally learning how to channel it. And I had a debate with Bradley Ancrum that day about whether that meant anything and how Bailey's peripherals at the time were almost identical to his peripherals last year and whether the scout was actually seeing something meaningful or it just happened to catch a good start or two. And then the start after that, he gave up five

runs in six and two thirds and I felt very smart. And then the start after that, he pitched a no hitter with 10 strikeouts and I felt less smart. So maybe that was on to something who's better homer bailey or phil hughes uh i don't know i guess you kind of give hughes the al east boost um and maybe that pushes him over the top possibly yeah i don't know i'd have to look closer but uh they are kind of linked as hard throwing or formerly hard throwing right handers top prospects who have not really developed from the same year yes okay so okay we have actual topics uh what's yours um i think i think we're we're maybe going to have the same one mine is the buster only gms players thing uh i don't know if that's the same thing i mine is about an idea jeff luno had okay we're okay. We're different then. Okay. I guess I'll talk about mine first because it'll probably be pretty short.

I just read about this earlier tonight. Jeff Luno had a good idea, which is maybe not an unusual thing. He has had the good idea to hire two of our finest employees over the past year. And his latest good idea, I think, is to conduct year-end interviews with players. So yesterday, Monday that is, he met with 12 players, both at the team's hotel and in the dugout prior to the Astros game against the Cubs, for the first of three days of season-ending interviews. And he said, it's an exhausting process, but it's very worthwhile. the Cubs for the first of three days of season-ending interviews.

And he said, it's an exhausting process, but it's very worthwhile. It's a good opportunity for them to kind of recap the year and for me to give them my perspective and hear what their goals are for the season going forward. It's been good. It was a chance for the players to talk about their performance this season and where they stand in the organization heading into next year. And he added that he learned something from every single one of them and learned about what's going on in the clubhouse and how everyone's feeling and planning to prepare for the off season.

So that was just something that struck me as a very good idea. And I asked you before we started recording, without telling you why, I asked you whether you could think of any general managers doing something like this, and you could not, and I cannot either. And it seems like something that in the past happened just because with the reserve clause, players would go year to year with their contracts and they would have to negotiate

every off season um for their contract for the upcoming year and so that would be i guess a time for them to talk with the general manager or the owner whoever was running the team at the time about how their year went or what the expectations were for the coming year. And, of course, players do not miss the reserve clause, but maybe they miss the opportunity to talk with the guy who decides what they make or whether they'll be back and give him their perspective. And it seems like the sort of thing that would be very useful for Lunau or any other GM.

And I wonder whether this is something that we'll catch on. I'm always surprised to learn how few formal conversations actually happen between players and the front office, or players and even the manager. There are a lot of informal conversations. There is a lot of chit-chat. There is a lot of discussion about the you just had or whatever. But, you know, I mean, there are formal discussions, but it surprises me whenever I ask about this, how rare they are and how much less

common I think they are than, for instance, formal conversations that I have with my bosses about what I'm working on and what I'm doing. So not current bosses, but, you know, in the past. The podcast. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I talk to my boss every day formally. Yeah. Well, it seems like a very clever idea. And I assume no agents were involved or anything as they would be in any kind of contract talk over the winter and that this was just more of a one-on-one thing. And it seems like a good idea. I don't know

exactly what you would learn. He said he learned something from every one of them. And I don't know what the most useful piece of information would be, but maybe even more useful than the actual information is just the impression that he wants to talk to you, that you are able to talk to him. So kudos. Yeah, sounds good. I support it. Okay. My topic is actually not totally unrelated, although it will not use any of the same words. although it will not use any of the same words, only wrote on his blog Saturday, I think,

about the difference between players' opinions on the AL MVP and front office people's opinions on the AL MVP. And I know we're all very sick of the MVP stuff, but this was actually one of maybe the most interesting thing I think I read this year. I what was interesting is that he estimated that he had sort of asked 50 people or so about this. And of all the uniformed personnel, managers, coaches and players, all but two picked Cabrera and of all the front office types all but one picked Trout and he quotes a veteran player who said that he would be really really disappointed if Cabrera didn't win and he quotes a front office official who says, why is there even a conversation? And this is Bill Parker, beloved Bill Parker of Baseball Perspectives fame, wrote about this

elsewhere. And he kind of, he came to the conclusion that, well, of course players are idiots. And so it's really like you're asking a person whose job it is to evaluate the value of players which player is valuable. And then you're asking a guy whose job is absolutely totally unrelated to measuring the value of players, whose job is simply to go up and have fast twitch muscles and be an amazing athlete. And so it's not really a fair fight. And there's a, I don't know, there's an interesting angle there that I don't know that I totally 100% disagree with. But it's, I mean, it's fascinating to see just how big the gap is and to think that while we talk, I think, quite frequently about how the scouts versus stats divide is

essentially a retired issue and has been for maybe six years or so, there are still two worlds in baseball. And there is a fairly peaceful detente right now. But you do wonder, and we talked about this a while back when we talked about the idea of general managers more forcefully imparting their decisions or their preferences on the field. You do wonder at what point this divide is reckoned with, if it ever needs to be reckoned with, if it's the sort of thing that will melt away, like over the course of years as more of the kind of players, ex-players and kind of academic types coexist in front offices and realize that they have the same goals,

or whether there's eventually going to be a clash where a GM, like maybe in Colorado, decides that he wants to have an office in the locker room and make some of these decisions. So I had lots of reactions to this Olney piece, but that's probably the most obvious one. So what's your interpretation of the, of the reason for the divide then? It sounds like you're not convinced by the, by Bill's argument, which would probably be my snap judgment argument, at least that we're talking about people with different skill sets, and it maybe makes sense that the front office guys who are in charge of evaluating players would have a better sense of what is valuable than the players who are doing and providing the value. There's probably some truth to that, but also it's probably part of the basic principles of baseball prospectus and its existence that players are bad at analyzing the sport. And I've read it stated exactly that way.

And I think that probably underestimates what players have to tell us. There was a time where scouts were considered by a lot of stat heads to be bordering on worthless, and I'm probably creating a little bit of a straw man there, but not totally. And, I mean, there was a point where as a 24 year old, I probably thought I knew more about baseball than scouts. And now that I am a 32 year old and I sit next to scouts at games, sometimes I realize how just absolutely insane that is and was and, uh, and, and always was. Um, I think that there's probably a communication divide that really gets in the way of appreciating

how much players have to offer as far as wisdom in the game. They're not generally great communicators. They also have different communication goals in any situation. Their audience is, in a lot of ways, their peers, and their audience is, in a lot of ways, simply, or their goal is, in a lot of ways their peers and their audience is in a lot of ways simply, or their goal is in a lot of times simply to avoid saying anything that can be misinterpreted. So you're unlikely to necessarily hear a very wise thought from a player or an ex-player, but I think that they actually do know an awful lot about the game, and I think that over the next few years, especially as more and more players are from our generation and were raised with a lot of these ideas as sort of accepted wisdom, I think we're going to be surprised to find out how much more player opinions are part of the way that we assess the sport. are a part of the way that we assess the sport?

I think they know an awful lot and maybe more than front office people in certain areas. I'm reading a book from the early 90s by Keith Hernandez called Pure Baseball, where he basically goes over two games in the middle of a summer, just pitch by pitch, play by play, and gives you some sense of what everyone is thinking and what everyone's looking for at the plate and what the pitcher's approach is and what the hitter's approach is. And I mean, it's clear that he knows an awful lot and he knows more than you or I know. And he knows probably more than a general manager knows, at least as far as how to read a picture, certainly.

I guess it's just maybe when it comes to translating statistics into runs or wins above average or reducing them to pure value, maybe that's just a completely different area and one in which they haven't really had to specialize or they haven't been selected for their ability to evaluate people on that level. Yeah, but unless you also know the details that Keith Hernandez knows about, it's hard to know what to measure and i think a perfect example of that is catcher framing um it's probably um it's fairly well accepted now that for um for decades there was a blind spot in stat head analysis for catcher framing and i don't think there was a blind spot as far as players' perspective.

I think that they knew exactly, or at least they knew generally, how important it was and what a significant factor it was. And knowing that helps you know what to measure. And so, I don't know. I think that there's a way that being involved in the game and being able to play the game does give you a certain wisdom in what's important and what makes different situations different and what helps you measure things correctly with more nuance. it comes down almost entirely to age and that this is simply, I would imagine that if it, if it were instead of Trout and Cabrera with these numbers, if it were say Bryce Harper, who had Cabrera's numbers and it were, geez, I don't even know who the NL equivalent would be, but maybe McCutcheon, maybe McCutcheon's not old enough, but somebody who was putting up Trout's numbers.

My suspicion is that the players would overwhelmingly pick the veteran again. I just think that there's a sense that you can't be a team leader as a 20-year-old. As much as the Angels rave about him in the clubhouse, I think there's probably a bias against young players as team leaders and that there is a bias toward picking a team leader in discussions of value. Yeah, that could be. And maybe also a bias toward picking someone from a playoff team since that is what they're all trying to be.

Yeah, only though I didn't ask all these players on Friday night. He asked them over the course of the last few weeks, I believe, and the Angels and Tigers have been in essentially the same position during that stretch. All right. But yes, I think that as well. Okay. Well, that's it for today. We'll be back with Episode 55 on Wednesday.