Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 544: Cole, Altuve, and Other Season-Ending Excitement

Episode Date: September 29, 2014

Ben and Sam discuss the Pirates’ decision to start Gerrit Cole, the Astros’ decision to sit (and then start) Jose Altuve, and other news from the weekend.

Well, you and I collapsed in love And it looks like we might have made it Yes, it looks like we've made it to the end Good morning and welcome to episode 544 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives. Presented by the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg. Ben, how are you? Very well, thank you. Do you want to hear a quick Play Index story?

Of course, always. Want to hear a quick Playindex story? Of course, always. So a friend of mine named Ryan Kaltenbach, who is on the Twitter, he gave me sort of a push in the direction of a potential fun fact, and I looked it up, and it was fun. And so then I started to, I thought I'd talk about it here, and then I thought I'll write it up as an unfiltered. And then I just kept writing, and now it's a full post.

So it'll be up, but I'll give you the fun fact here, which is this. There are 49 major leaguers who this year would have been the Padres' triple crown winner. Oh, man. Oh, that's sad. Oh, man. Oh, that's sad. And, of course, the Padres' actual, the leaders of the actual, of the Triple Crown stats are actually three different people.

So they don't even have, it's not, I mean, it would be bad enough if the best hitter on their team could only manage to hit.268 with 15 homers and 51 RBIs. But, in fact, the best hitter on their team couldn't manage to do that. The best hitter on their team could manage to only do one third of that. I wonder if you were able to park adjust every component of the Triple Crown, how many would still be better than the best Padre? Yeah, well, of course, fun facts, as I wrote in my piece about this fun fact,

all fun facts tell lies, every single one. One does, too. So, you know, there is a lie in there, but it is also mostly true. The lie is just to make it more attractive. Anyway, so there's a good one. And while I guess I'll throw this in, I would like some people to go to the website sometimes and read the articles. this in, I would like some people to go to the website sometimes and read the articles. So I'm hesitant to give away too much, but there's another fun fact within that I also got from Playindex.

And that fun fact is that the Padres only had one qualifying hitter this year, only one hitter qualified for the batting title. And barely, just barely. So they were just trying to avoid having anyone hit, really. But meanwhile, the Royals came two plate appearances away from having nine. Mike Moustakas had 400 and, I guess, 500. It looks like, through today, it looks like exactly 500. So if he had gotten two more,

they would have had all nine hitters in their lineup qualify. The exact opposite of the Padres' experience was the Royals' experience, which is kind of interesting because the Padres and the Royals' experiences have not been dissimilar for a very long time. Or they are currently dissimilar, but for a long time they were not dissimilar even this year the royals are not exactly the offensive opposites of the padres they are that's a good point also not so great at at the hitting it's a good point where do they let's see i'm gonna just check i'm writing about them so i know they're they rank uh, I was looking at, I think by true average, they're like fourth from the bottom or something.

I was looking at WRC Plus and they were 21st among, if you just compare their non-pitchers to every other team's non-pitchers. This is interesting because the Royals, yeah, by runs scored, they're average. But by OPS+, they're very close to the bottom. By true average, they're very close to the bottom. Is this saying that Coffman Stadium is actually a strongly hitter-friendly park, which I've always thought of it as roughly average. But Dayton Moore has made such a show of talking about how it's impossible to hit there. And in his telling of it, it's the most pitcher-friendly park in the game. But do the numbers actually support it being strongly hitter-friendly?

I don't think so. It definitely depresses home runs significantly. Looking at just ESPN's park factors, it's 10th slightly inflated runs, but not to that extent that you would think that that would be the

case. So maybe they were just clutch. Oh, right. Their runs scored don't reflect their offense performance. Yeah, that could be it. That's probably it. All right. today being Sunday. And I figure we can talk about this because this is the first, it seems to me possibly, depending on your perspective, but possibly it's the first huge managerial blunder

of the postseason. Because the Pirates, the background is that the Pirates were a game behind the Cardinals. If they won Sunday and the Cardinals lost, they would force a one-game playoff to determine who would be the division champ. And if they won that, then they wouldn't have to play the wildcard game. So they would essentially win a... It would basically be turning a 1-1 game playoff into two 1-game playoffs where they only had to win one, which

would certainly help their odds. But they didn't win. Garrett Cole pitched. They lost. Or did they lose? I don't even know. It didn't matter. Yeah, they did. They did. They lost to Johnny Cueto. And now they have to play the wildcard game. And because of that, Garrett Cole can't pitch in the wildcard game against the Giants. They already knew that Liriano would be either unable to pitch because he pitched Saturday or would be on short rest and therefore probably shouldn't pitch. And so the drop-off is what fantasy league people call a tier.

It's a tier from Garrett Cole and Francisco Liriano to the next tier down, which is Edison Volquez. So now probably Volquez will start. And unless you can talk me out of it, there doesn't seem to be any logic to this. They basically needed to... If they had won this game, like let's say that Jeff Locke,

I don't know who it would have been, but let's say Jeff Locke would have been the pitcher today otherwise instead of Garrett Cole. They would have, in this situation, they would have needed to win a start that Garrett Cole made and then a start that Jeff Locke made. And instead, they could have opted to hold Garrett Cole and then they would have needed to win a start that Jeff Locke made and a start that Garrett Cole made.

Garrett Cole made. So the exact same thing, just in a different order. But the same thing. They would have, in order to reach this magical division title, they would have needed to win a Jeff Locke start and a Garrett Cole start. But by not pushing Garrett Cole back to the Monday game, to the potential one-game playoff against the Cardinals, they now lose Garrett Cole for the wild card game which was you know most likely anyway and um they do it at seemingly

no gain does this all make sense do you see what I'm saying yes um and so they had the benefit of being able to just wait with Cole for a day. If they needed him, fine. They could have used him on Monday. If they didn't need him, they would have been happy they didn't use him because now he could have pitched against the Giants on Wednesday. So can you think, first of all, can you think of any reason that a team would care which order their pitchers pitched? I mean, like, is there any... Can you even think of a kind of a weird baseball momentum confidence reason for it?

Like, if they had pushed the Cardinals to that 160... Like, you could... Like, I want to say there's some narrative there where if they push the Cardinals to game 163, it's a moral victory, and they get to claim that they pushed the Cardinals to game 163, it's a moral victory and they get to claim that they pushed the Cardinals to the brink. But I mean, in this telling of it, they would have lost it anyway. And then they would have lost momentum before the postseason.

So you can't even say that they would have had that. So what would they be thinking, Ben? Well, did you read Hurdle's comments about this decision? I know that you read everything. I don't have to. You have this insane reading schedule. This is why I come on this show, because it takes me less time to hear you sum up the day's reading than to read it myself.

So now what did Hurdle say? Hurdle said that it basically did come down to soft factors like that and so his okay good so i believe him i totally believe him i'm fine with soft factors so what are the soft factors because i can't envision them okay so he says at the end of the day with every conversation i've had with a player i've had with neil huntington that i've had with bob nutting that i've had with frank coonley and that i've had with a player, I've had with Neil Huntington, that I've had with Bob Nutting, that I've had with Frank Coonally, and that I've had with my coaching staff. There is no way we're going to walk away from the opportunity to win the division. To walk away and pitch Pimentel or Sadler or Gomez after 161 games of grit and fight and battle. We're trying to make history here. There is no guaranteed way to cut this thing up and do what you want to do. So we're going to do what we believe in. And he said that they feel good about Edinson Volquez in the wildcard game. And he said that human analytics outweighed theoretical questions when it came to arriving at the decision.

So he said, we've been second guessed all throughout this season about how we do things. This is not about theory. This is not about theory. This is not about analytics. The only analytics that played into this decision was human analytics. You play this long, and you get the opportunity to win the division, and to go theoretical is not in a lot of your players' DNA. And so he talked to his players. He talked to the Pirates Leadership Council, which I love, which is made of five

players. And they were asked for their input and showed unequivocal support for starting Cole and going for the division title. Hurdle said that the ultimate decision was his, I am reading from bucks.gap.com, and that he retained the right to veto. But this was his decision. This was what everyone on the team seemed to want to do. And he said that when your business is other people's pleasure, other people get pleasure telling you how to do your business, which is what we're doing now, I suppose. Well, no. I mean, we're not. We're trying to figure out what the soft factors are. So I don't hear, I just don't hear what the soft factor is there. I want to believe in the

soft factors, but I get that it comes down to game 162, and in the last game of the season, you want to put your best foot forward. But in this universe, it is not the final game of the season. 163 is a certainty in the outcome that you desire. And so if the importance of putting your best foot forward in 162 is so big, then 163 would be equally as important. Unless you believe that losing game 162 is more dispiriting than losing game 163, and maybe that's true, I don't know. It's hard for me to imagine that it would be. And besides the dispiritingness of it, there are the real tangible factors. I mean, game six three also takes

something out of you so uh... so even if you even if there were some moral pick up there might be a physical but it sounds to me though and this is what i don't think i was appreciating so jeff lock would have started on monday but what her all said is to walk away and pitch him intel

or sadler or Gomez. So Locke presumably is unavailable on Sunday? Because if that's the story, then it becomes an analytics question. It becomes much simpler. Is Jeff Locke considerably better than Pimentel? And if that's the case, then you can start to say, oh, well, you're not talking about Cole and Locke versus Locke and Cole. You're talking about Cole and Locke versus Pimentel and Cole.

And they probably think that Jeff Locke is a lot better, considerably better. And so that changes things. And so now I'm going to back off. I don't think that Pimentel hasn't started a game this year. Sadler hasn't started a game this year. Gomez hasn't started a game this year. So were they going to do a bullpen 24, 25, 26, 27? He'd have been a day short.

Okay, so they would have had to go with a bullpen game. They would have had to throw their three junkie relievers out there to get through the fifth, at least by standard practice, before they could go to their a bullpen game. They would have had to throw their three junkie relievers out there to get through the fifth, at least by standard practice, before they could go to their real bullpen. So, yeah, okay. I'm fine with it then. I guess. That's reasonable. Yeah, I suppose. I don't know. Why didn't Clint Hurdle say that? Why didn't he say it was analytics? I don't know, why didn't Clint Hurdle say that? Why didn't he say it was analytics?

Why didn't he just go, well, you know, we looked at the analytics of it, and we just didn't have faith in using a bunch of garbage middle relief in the matter, and we figured by shuffling our rotation or by keeping it on the same rotation, it would cost us coal in the wild card game. But boy, the benefits of it were potentially large if we had a chance to to avoid the wildcard game altogether frankly what it came down to media that we looked at the analytics and uh you guys want to you guys all want us to buy into some crazy narrative concoction that you've got about momentum and leadership but you know frankly it all comes down to logic and you if you have a job

like mine, you've got to look at these things dispassionately, objectively. You have to look at all the information and make the decision that even if your leadership counsel is against it, you've got to go with it. And I did. Yeah. And we wouldn't have talked about it at all. All right. So here's the second thing I wanted to get to with this, though. The same day that this happened, José Altuve happened. And so this morning, the Astros announced, and we're going based on reports. I don't know. There might be other details here that didn't get reported.

But based on kind of what's reported, this is the sort of conventional wisdom of what happened this morning. Jose Altuve went into the final game with a three-point lead in the batting race. The Astros, according to Altuve, met with him, told him he would be sitting down the final game of the season. This would probably preserve his batting title because Victor Martinez would have had a very strong day to overtake him. According to Altuve, it was a meeting with the manager, the general manager, and three people he didn't know. He wanted to play. He fought. He didn't like this decision. And it was announced probably

three hours before the game, two hours before the game, all this came out. Two and a half, I guess, is when the clubhouse closed. So in that three-hour period before the game, two hours before the game, all this came out. Two and a half, I guess, is when the clubhouse closed. So in that three-hour period before the game, this went on Twitter. Twitter freaked out. Everybody was ripping the Astros, including, you know, like big-time people like Ken Rosenthal and such were ripping the Astros for this decision. And then about an hour or so before the game, it was announced that the Astros had reversed the decision,

and Altuve did start. So it's hard to know. I saw this sometimes framed as Altuve talked his way into the lineup. Yes, I saw that too. And I also saw it framed as the Astros got managed by Twitter for the day, that basically the public got an early look at the lineup, declared it a poor idea, and made sufficient noise that the Astros changed their mind.

So I don't know which one it is, but let's just assume for a second that it was the latter. Now, let's then further assume that a similar freakout happened in a situation like the Garrett Cole thing. Is it dangerous, do you think, that the public has a three- or four-hour, sometimes longer, head start to really amplify a kind of public response to a team's decision like this?

Do you think that, for instance, it's conceivable and or preferable that if Pirates fans had been furious enough and unanimous enough, they might have been able to similarly uh change hurdles mind before the game started is that possible are we going to that era at all that's sort of what we talked about a couple weeks ago right with the idea of whether public relations or whether the public and the fans should control what leagues do what decisions leagues make and so now we're talking about whether the same thing should apply to teams i i mean the the altube situation was unique or unusual in that this was it was not a decision that caused an uproar because we thought that someone else would be better to play

it wasn't it wasn't a case of why isn't this guy playing because this guy is better than that guy i don't think a team would allow twitter to change its mind for that reason i would i would think i can't remember an instance of that happening to our knowledge. It seems pretty far-fetched that a team would weigh all its options for who the best player to play in a game was and then change their mind in an hour or two, particularly if you're talking about a starting pitcher who ideally is being told that he is starting a couple hours before the game. So it's not as easy to change that decision as it is to change someone who's been removed or inserted into the lineup. But because it was this case where it was a team that was out of contention

and a player who was being benched solely to preserve a batting title against his will, which was the real problem that people had with it. Because if Altuve had decided to sit himself to preserve his batting title, some people might have been a little disappointed in him, but I think there wouldn't have been nearly the sort of response. The response came from this perception or Altuve's own perception that he was being benched against his will by Jeff Luno and these other front office executives who were meddling in this area that the front office is not traditionally involved in. And so I think it's different enough from the Cole decision

or another decision based on just sit and start because this guy's better than that guy that it doesn't concern me that such a thing could happen for a different reason. Yeah, I think you're right. And the other thing, I mean, you might have touched on this, but Altuve was a willing participant of the switcheroo. I mean, it was, you could imagine that if the scenario were the opposite, if Altuve had been in the lineup and Astro's Twitter had been so petrified and somehow put pressure on the Astros to bench him, that you could imagine that that's a way that you lose your clubhouse, right?

If you're listening to Twitter, that would be brutal. That would be awful. That would just not go over well. But in this case, Altuve got what he wanted. There will be no complaints from his end. And you could, for all we know, it was him that talked himself into it. But even if it wasn't, you could sell it to him as, congratulations, Jose, you really made a great argument. Yeah. It's sort of hard to see what the end game there was or what the, I mean, yeah, maybe we don't know all the details. The fact that he failed to talk his way into the lineup the first time before the Twitter outcry and then succeeded after the Twitter outcry seems to suggest some sort of cause and effect relationship there.

It's possible that there wasn't one. Who knows which ally he might have turned to? Who knows if his agent or who knows if he went to the hitting coach or who knows if he has a, you know, his friend, you know, he's friends with the club president or the owner or whatever. Well, which one is more concerning to you or disturbing or seems like a worse decision to make that initial decision or to change it once it became clear that everyone hated it um because the initial decision i mean it it seems it seems like a strange one right i

mean how much does a batting title matter to an organization? I mean, it matters somewhat, but it's an individual achievement in an otherwise not lost season. They've made significant progress, but a season when the team was out of contention, how much does one batting title really change the perception of the season? And obviously Altuve is signed for a while. It's not like he's about to become a free agent and leave because of this or anything, but it seems like a weird one to go against the players' wishes in this case for what seems like not a whole lot of gain. And you had to figure that it would get out, right? Because if Altuve wasn't on board with the decision,

then when the first reporter came up and asked him why he wasn't in the lineup, you had to assume that he was going to tell the truth and say why he wasn't in the lineup and that that probably wouldn't go over very well. Yeah, and it's a controversial thing a slightly controversial thing when players choose to do it so he would have been he's not gonna take he's not gonna take the bullet for the club on that so uh i felt like it was it must be a trick question ben because the answer is obviously the first one is is more disconcerting the second

one kind of i don't know if you're if you you're predisposed to find flaws in the way people act, then you can say, oh, well, it's weak or it's whatever. But that seems like they probably corrected themselves for either noble or un-noble reasons. They corrected a pretty, it seems like a pretty bad first decision or if nothing else, one that wasn't going to play well. And if you're the Astros, at this point, you probably have to be more concerned with whether

things are going to play well than the typical team, I would think. Well, I mean, that's what this is about. The whole point is that the batting title plays well. And so if you're undoing the play well-ness of the batting title, then why bother? True. Yes, right. I mean, it's all PR at this point. So, all right, I'm going to give you a couple softballs

about the Garrett Cole thing. These are based on your Grantland piece from four days ago, postseason myths. Grantland piece from four days ago. Postseason myths. So we now know that the Pirates will go into the wildcard game as the wildcard

and with a sort of sense of disappointment because they had a chance at the end and failed to make the most of that chance. The Giants, on the other hand, don't have that same sense of disappointment. They lost the division weeks and weeks ago,

and for them it was a nice little victory at the end that clinched it. So a few of your myths that are relevant, or I just gave it away by saying they're myths. Beliefs. Ideas. All right, one of them momentum matters tell me why it doesn't matter that the Pirates go in with a slightly less

a slight bit less lift in their step than the Giants might well I wrote about Russell Carlton's research which he published at BP last playoffs after a big David Ortiz home run. And he didn't look at this exact situation necessarily, but he looked at times when a team came back to win. And really, there are a couple bits of research that are maybe relevant here. that are maybe relevant here but one is that he looked at all the situations where a team was was losing like in the eighth inning and came back to win and then look to see what happened

in the game after that victory which one would think would have been demoralizing to the opponent and difficult to come back from and he found that there was no difference in the follow-up game from what you would have expected after any game between those two teams. And then maybe related to that is just the idea that momentum coming into the playoffs doesn't matter a whole lot, that whether you look at how a team played the previous week or two weeks or three weeks or month or even the whole second half of the season, there doesn't seem to be much difference in how you actually perform in the playoffs over and above your regular season record based on how

you finish okay uh next one garrett cole pitched uh twice in the postseason last year and he was very good uh in his starts edison volquez has started once in his career in the postseason and he did not make it out of the second inning he has in his career in the postseason, and he did not make it out of the second inning. He has a career ERA in the postseason of 21. So how significant has this been? Well, there's the matter of playoff experience, which, okay, so Cole has very slightly more playoff experience. It's not a big factor in their case, but based on all of the studies that have been done on that by Russell and by Jensen Borski and others, there doesn't seem to be any benefit to playoff experience

either on the individual player level or on the team level. The teams and the players with more playoff experience don't seem to do better than you would expect them to do, and the ones with no playoff experience, even literally none if you look at their first plate appearance in the postseason, don't seem to do any worse. And then as for, you know, playoff experience being indicative of some clutchness, obviously going on a couple starts is not enough to tell. Mm-hmm.

All right. And last one. let's see. Pakoda projects Garrett Cole at this moment in time to be a 3.50 ERA pitcher, and Edison Volk has to be a 4.17 ERA pitcher. So basically, 0.6 runs every nine innings. So if you consider that they're going to pitch probably six innings, we're talking about 0.3,3 0.4 runs which is significant but really it's much much more than that right

ben because you can't win a game like this with a lousy pitcher and you can't if you have the horse like cole is then you're gonna win right well well if we look at series, maybe it's a little different than an individual game. I assume if you have the better picture in an individual game, then that probably does favor you. I would guess that the real difference between them might be smaller than what Pocota thinks it is. If we buy into the mechanical changes and everything that Ray Searidge made, then again, right, Edinson Volquez, which we didn't mention earlier,

has the best ERA, I guess, of any Pirate starter or maybe just behind Vance Worley. But Fipwise has the worst, I think, or second worst behind Jeff Locke. So I don't know whether to buy into that or not. Are you going to write about it before it happens? Nope. Okay.

Jonah Carey is going to write about that. Okay. All right. Okay. By the way, I should just say that we underrated the final weekend. Did we not? It was a good weekend. It was a good weekend.

We said whenever it was on Thursday when it looked like there wasn't going to be much at stake, that the playoff spots were going to be decided. And then very suddenly that became not the case. And we came down to a final day of the season when there were three playoff spots undecided. Or, you know, division winner wildcard or wildcard no playoffs. And so that was exciting, and we got some really good starting pitching performances to clinch a couple of those games.

And we got the Jordan Zimmerman no-hitter, which was fun. And we got some nice farewell games from Jeter and Canurco and Abreu. And it was a feel-good day. It was a good weekend. Good job, baseball. It was no 2011 last day of the regular season, but it was better than we expected as recently as a few days ago. Okay, so that's it for today.

Please support our sponsor, Baseball Reference, by going to baseballreference.com, subscribing to the Play Index using the coupon code BP to get the discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription. And please send us some emails at podcast at baseballprospectus.com, and we will get to those Wednesday. We'll probably talk some playoff series tomorrow, so come back for that.