Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 554: Observations from Another Wild Weekend

Episode Date: October 13, 2014

Ben and Sam discuss the Cardinals’ injuries, the value of outfield arms, Statcast, and more.

I'm genuinely sorry, but I missed your party. You should try holding all the guilt I still carry. Good morning and welcome to episode 554 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives, presented by the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg of Grantland, and I am simultaneously doing a thing for this show while reading or reciting, I guess, that intro. So forgive me for a couple of odd pauses. Ben, how are you?

No one could have told. I am well, thank you. All right, so what I am doing right now, in case you were wondering, is I am changing the Cardinals game one lineup from Yadier Molina to Tony Cruz to see what that does to their chances of winning that game. And so let's see. To see what that does to their chances of winning that game. Uh-huh.

And so let's see. As it was, St. Louis, San Francisco, game one, the Cardinals were 58% likely. Game two? No, game one, game one. Oh, okay. Just because I'm thinking about going forward. Okay. And this is only stage one of this.

So Cardinals were 58% likely to win, according to Bocota. Any guess what that'll be now? With Cruz instead of Molina? Well, because it's not taking into account Molina's full defensive value, I will say 56.5. It's actually 55.2.

Okay. So from 58.0 to 55.2. So about a 3% knock on that. And so I'm actually going to do it again with no Molina, with Cruz instead of Molina. But I'm also going to replace Adam Wainwright. Who should I replace Wainwright with? Who's the equivalent?

I guess, who will they go with? If Wainwright can't start again, who will they go with? Marco Gonzalez? Maybe. Is Waka an option? I don't know. Is Justin Masterson, I i guess it probably would be justin masterson right if wayne wright couldn't so here's the thing we don't know if we i mean that presumably wayne wright will pitch um but the

premise is that wayne wright either might not pitch or waynewright, I don't know, man. I have to say, I just, I find it, I'm always loathe to say things are going to or not going to happen. But I would just be really surprised if Wainwright starts and makes it through four innings. I just don't think that he's, I don't think he's healthy. I think that he's like three weeks overdue for Tommy John probably. And we just don't know it i mean they were gonna maybe skip him in a game five of a division series so how are we supposed to believe that this is not and we'll talk more about wayne wright but for the purposes of of this part of the show i just have to uh you know i just have to sound

exasperated uh to get the point across uh So let's say Justin Masterson is either the replacement or that a Hurt Wainwright is, in fact, Justin Masterson quality. Okay? Okay. All right, so I'm going to run that, and it's going to take about 40 seconds. So we'll kill some time. But let me ask you, Ben. Okay.

First off, Wainwright, healthy, not healthy, somewhere on that spectrum or somewhere way off the spectrum on the Tommy John side? I will guess he is progressing closer to the Tommy John end of the spectrum. It's hard to tell just from looking at his stats exactly. progressing closer to the Tommy John end of the spectrum. It's hard to tell just from looking at his stats exactly. I know you wrote something for the Jabo broadcast about whether he's actually throwing a new pitch or whether his old pitch just looks like a new pitch because he's not throwing it as well or he's throwing it differently. He is throwing about as well or he's throwing it differently he is throwing about

as hard as he was before but clearly there seems to be something going on and the comments that he has made and Matheny has made have been contradictory or very confusing misleading one day there's there's nothing wrong with him one day there's something wrong with him it sounds very much like the sort of thing where they're just trying to get through the postseason somehow and we will find out the full story or something approaching the full story either once the Cardinals are eliminated or once they win it all. And Jeff Zimmerman wrote something about how Wainwright is now approaching the point where most pitchers have their second Tommy John surgery.

Like a certain number of innings usually elapses between number one and number two, and he has thrown a ton of innings over the last couple of years because he has thrown a lot in the regular season and because the Cardinals have been on these deep postseason runs and he's pitched a lot during nose so he's really racked up the innings and it seems like something is not right yeah i uh i wanted to talk a little bit about that wayne wright slider thing because i found that whole thing to be very interesting very mysterious and perhaps very significant so you sort of summarized it. But basically what happened is that according to Brooks Baseball,

according to the pitch identification tags on Brooks Baseball, which are generated by Harry Pavlidis, who explained on this show once how he does it, or part of how he does it, it said that he had thrown 13 sliders in his division series start against the Dodgers. And all year, Wainwright had thrown, according to Brooks Baseball, 12 sliders combined. And in fact, if you go back to 2008, he had thrown 12 sliders combined. Those are the only 12 he had ever thrown that Brooks Base baseball had tagged as sliders.

And so then here comes 13 in a start. And that seems like either super interesting and weird or super uncredible and weird. And so I talked to Harry about it and I talked to Dan about it and I looked at it to see if I could figure it out. And Harry, as Harry explained it, the pitches, he is very, very hesitant to assign a new pitch to a pitcher, especially one like Wainwright, who's generally not, you know, tinkering a lot and probably especially at a period like this where it's, you know, he's late in the

season and all that. But Wainwright has thrown a slider in the past. He said so. And Harry said that he had heard or he was aware or he knew that Wainwright also had a slider somewhere in that arsenal of his, just that he didn't really throw it. And he said that it looked like a different pitch. It looked like it had different depth. And he went with slider.

He went with slider on those 13. That was his decision. And the slider, there was sort of a slightly different release point cluster, a little lower than his cutter. Oh, by the way, I should point out that you would wonder, well, I mean, why is this hard to decide? The slider was the basically the exact velocity that his cutter usually is and a slider and a cutter are on the

same spectrum um and so if he's throwing a pitch that is like a cutter at the same velocity as a cutter and you know that he throws a cutter you would call it a cutter unless you had a very convincing reason not to um and so the evidence that it was a different pitch was that, well, the evidence that I came up with is, A, while it was the same velocity as his cutter usually is, he was also throwing his cutter harder than usual and throwing his curveball harder than usual. And if you kind of adjust his normal slider

or what we think of as his normal slider velocity by the same amount that his curveball and his cutter were fast, you get basically what the slider was. So the velocity chart kind of suggests that that might be that he was overthrowing his breaking balls that day. Two is that it had different movement than his cutter usually does. It had more drop. It had about four inches more drop than his cutter usually does it was it had more drop it had about like four inches more drop

than his cutter does usually um and uh three is that he threw it from a slightly different location release point a little lower so he was you know either well yeah so he was basically throwing it throwing from a little bit lower release point and getting a different kind of movement and four is that he seemed to be throwing it this is speculative but he seemed to be throwing it with intent based on who he was throwing it to he threw um it to mostly right handers and if this was just the matter of some of his cutters acting weird against his will and there was no intent at all you would think it would be randomly distributed between right-handed and left-handed batters. The fact that it really wasn't and was heavily tilted made you think there might be some intent.

And so I don't know whether it was a cutter or a slider. He was clearly throwing a pitch that had slider action. And the question of intent seemed to me to be everything. Because if he's intending to throw a slider it just means that he's kind of bringing this new weapon into the game it's a pitch that we know that he's probably thrown it in bullpens and worked on it over the course of his career and probably slipped in any games from here and here and there and maybe he just had a feel for it and and that would just be like oh oh interesting he's got a new pitch that he's he out. But if it's not intentional, if this is actually what he thinks is a cutter and his arm is, for some reason, unable to throw it like he normally does, and it's creating weirdness that looks like a totally different pitch that fools Harry and

fools everybody, that would be a very, very troubling sign for a guy whose elbow we know has something wrong with it. And so intent seemed to be everything here. I think Harry tagged seven sliders in yesterday's game and Saturday's game. And I still don't think we know the answer, but I think that all the signs are pointing to Wainwright being worse than he's letting on. Just knowing that, I think that I would lean toward bastard cutter. That is a bad sign for Wainwright's elbow a little bit more than I would lean to the idea that he's intentionally throwing it. So what does Pakoda say about diminished Masterson or diminished Wainwright or Masterson? 51%. That's of course with home field advantage. Home field would

usually be like 53.5, 54%. So they consider the Cardinals the worst team in that game, and a half, 54%. So they consider the Cardinals the worst team in that game. Of course, without Wainwright and without Molina and going up against Madison Bumgarner, that's to be expected. Now, let me ask you the third part of this

trifecta of a topic. Let's assume that Molina's not coming back. And as a subset of that assumption, let's acknowledge that Pakoda's projections for this game do not include Molina's pitch framing, which, as we saw tonight, I feel like in the ninth inning,

could be significant. Although those pitches that Cruz was struggling with were, often they were 100 miles an hour and missing badly. So the fact that he's stabbing at pitches that are coming 100 miles an hour nowhere near where they're supposed to be, maybe everybody would do that. Molina's also a better blocker, which might have come into play. Not in that one, though. In the first one, in the first pitch that Lynn threw

after Molina left the game, the wild pitch? Yeah, the wild pitch. Not the first pitch. Who threw that? Carlos Martinez threw after melina left the game the wild pitch yeah the wild pitch not the first pitch who what who threw that carlos martinez threw that right yeah the first pitch carlos martinez threw anyway that one i think is but the one that rosenthal threw it was 98 miles an hour and hit 25 feet in front of the plate yeah it was jeff sullivan's worst pitch of the week it was Jeff Sullivan's worst pitch of the week it was ridiculous well he stumbled or something yeah he stumbled and then he weirdly ran past

that was the weirdest play why did he run past the plate to attack I don't know it was like he was backing up someone who wasn't there it was as though he's like oh I better go get that ball like he was chasing it down anyway uh but yes better blocker um better

pitch framer and as you wrote 50 million words on in an article earlier this year. Perhaps a better pitch caller, staff leader. So anyway, Molina's not coming back, let's assume. Wainwright's not Wainwright and might not pitch, let's assume. And Michael Waka, who's probably the second best pitcher on that staff in true talent level, is lost you know, lost in some ninth dimension with 2013 Shelby Miller. Yeah. So you're basically taking a team that won 90 games. You're taking away their ace, who is a Cy Young caliber pitcher. You're taking away their number two starter. And you're taking away their best player,

or maybe their second best player and a perennial MVP candidate. What are the Cardinals right now? What is their talent level? Are they a sub-500 team at this point? Well, maybe just because it's such a big gap. It's always been a huge gap between Molina and the backup, or I guess in this case they're carrying multiple catchers, which worked out well for them.

But neither one is anywhere close to Molina. Not that any backup catcher usually is. But they've always had one of the best catchers in the league with Molina and probably one of the worst backup catchers. So it's a big, big gap from Molina to Prusinski or to Cruz and right we don't really know who would be replacing Wainwright but whoever it is would not be anything close to an ace so it's a pretty big step down in both cases I don't know whether that's enough to make a 90-win team into an 80-win team. But maybe considering the fact that they were like an 83-win Pythag record team and maybe weren't really a true talent 90-win team,

then yeah, maybe without Wainwright and without Molina, maybe they are a 500 team or worse. Of course, they've won the world series as a basically 500 team within recent memory so yeah just to preempt the uh the accusations that we are somehow predicting something that could be proven wrong uh we acknowledge that a sub 500 team can certainly beat the giants three out of five. Uh, so we're not burying the Cardinals.

Nope. I'm not burying the Cardinals. Um, but, uh, it is sort of, uh, I don't know.

It's slightly troubling how, how bad they look at this point. Not, not bad on the field, although, uh, but bad, like they just, this is not what bad on the field although uh but bad like they just this is not what they want this is not this is not how they drew up their october attack nope and september went so well for them all of the all the issues that they seem to have during this year while

they were sort of a 500 team for much of the year and and we're fighting with the brewers and the other nl central teams for a playoff spot everything seemed to get straightened out and they got melina back and they got waka back and they were pretty healthy and and seemed to be all set up for a good run and this is not helping no so um runner on third i think it's mich Michael Morse. Fly ball to right field, shallow to Randall Gritchuk. One out. And obviously Morse would like to tag if he can, but he can't run. He's slow.

He can't run just in general. He can't run. If we were speaking in Spanish, we would use both the verb for is that reflects permanent characteristics as well as the verb for is that reflects only the temporary state of the noun. Right, yes. The Michael Morse s-slow and also s-dot. Right. right anyway so the catch is made Morse ain't going anywhere Gritchick throws the ball in to the plate and the audience claps the audience the crowd cheers they ovate they're happy that

the right fielder has thrown a strong ball to home plate and and prevented the runner from scoring and i'm just calling for a moratorium on this on this this entire play this entire phenomenon of audiences of crowds cheering when the right fielder throws the ball into the plate that runner is not ever going like that's when he doesn't go he intended to not go they are not reading the throw like they're never reading the throw they're sometimes reading the reputation though oh yes certainly the rep i mean we saw in the the royals game too that that happened you wrote about it alex gordon preventing a run by just having a strong arm right and in that case you can cheer him anytime you want you can cheer him when he's jogging out to the field after after his team bats you get because it's the same thing like he is

still the guy with the arm who is preventing some but if you want to fine but like if gritchick had thrown the ball into second and morse hadn't gone and it was because of the reputation of gritchick's arm which is a good arm he does have a reputation. I would imagine that, I don't know if he would have gone on any right fielder in the world in that place, but you could imagine that Gritchick's arm might have prevented Morse from going on certain fly balls. And I'm fine with being happy about that and calling out to Gritchick, nice job. You've been good at baseball, and it paid off there. But the throw he made could have been 50 feet up the line. It could have been anywhere.

He could have thrown it to third. Morris wouldn't have gone. So I hate that. Let's stop it. I don't know. I don't mind it. Oh, I hate it. All right.

Let's see. Ben. Yeah. This is about a radio ad. Okay. We've talked about one kind of baseball radio ad that I love, the strange industry or union or whatever that doesn't ever advertise anywhere else. We've talked about another ad I love, which is the Microsoft advertising advertising uh in like uh

independent league uh bulletins uh where 17 people are seeing them uh but there's another ad that i hate and this is the ad that incorporates baseball into its ad into its message and so in the most in the most basic way it's hit a home run at Valley Ford, right? Hey, you guys like baseball. Do you like home runs? Well, you can hit one, metaphorically, at our car company. More complicated, sometimes they weave in storylines. And there's an ad that's been playing on Giants Radio all year for a law firm.

And the premise of the ad is that the man is talking to his daughter, and his daughter says, Daddy, what does it mean to hit 300? And the lawyer says, It means that you get a hit every third time up. And then he says, But at our law firm, we win all the time and and the daughter says something like they get paid for that like idiots which which is already a terrible like we like baseball players do not set yourself in opposition to baseball players like the the product that you are supporting is a product of people hitting 300. So already you've lost me. But the point is, you know, he says we get a hit every time.

And so this ad has killed me all year because, of course, hitting 300 doesn't mean you get a hit every third time up. You get a hit three times out of ten. Every third time up would be three times out of nine. And so I listen to this ad. I hear it constantly. I hate it constantly. It's a terrible ad. And I am told that very recently this man, this lawyer, has come out with a second ad saying yes i got it i understand that hitting 300 is not the same as

one out of three times math is not my strong point i got your emails like literally he says i got all your emails or like you can stop emailing me or something uh so this to me is the terrible baseball ad equivalent of getting j Altuve in the lineup on the last day of the season and I commend it so if maybe next year instead of a relievers league fantasy a relievers only fantasy league maybe we can put our collective power to cleaning up some of the baseball radio commercials yeah sure good idea all right uh fourth thing i forgot to mention this when the angels were playing and it's no longer relevant but uh remember how we talked about how uh the scout that found mike trout getting fired and what that meant and whether that's fair uh i should have mentioned that uh they fired the

guy who invented the rally monkey too in 2007 yeah in 2007 they did and um uh that's that after mike trout that might be the second biggest thing that uh what was that person's position uh he was like a uh program director something like that huh just like an in stadium entertainment ballpark stadium ops guy or something like that so he uh and then it got brought up again a few years later because he he was financially destitute he got fired in 2007 couldn't find work and so he sold his uh World Series ring or was trying to sell his World Series ring on some memorabilia site for $20,000. and you invent the rally monkey, that is the equivalent of finding Mike Trout, except that there's not as much downside.

Once you do that, you have solidified your position, I would think. Right. We talked about how the scout has filed literally tens of thousands of scouting reports, so it's easy to find a pattern in his behavior, pro or con, apart from just the one-mike-trout thing. But the stadium guy, he invents the rally monkey, and then he just keeps putting the rally monkey up. So what do you do that changes your reputation from that point on? It's like, do the rally monkey today? Yes, I did. I don't know. There's not much to it.

I guess you need to top it every year. All right, last thing that I have to mention is you alluded to the Alex Gordon play. And so this was runners on first and second, tie game, seventh inning, base hit to left field. Nick Markakis does not score, does not even attempt to score as Alex Gordon charges the ball. And it is my estimation that that is based entirely on both a combination of Alex Gordon's reputation, mostly his reputation, and maybe how aggressively he was able to charge that ball

um and you know i found a an example of a similar base hit going through the infield with a different left fielder and basically it's like exactly the same archaic is basically the same place when the ball gets past the infield the outfielder is in basically the same place when the ball leaves the infield it takes basically the same amount of time for the ball to get to the outfielder, about 3.75 seconds. And in the first one, Marquecas scores without a throw. And in the second one, he doesn't even try it. And so Alex Gordon's arm reputation saved the game, saved the tie.

The run never did score. And of course, the Royals would end up winning it in the ninth and their final at bat and so i'm you know somewhat somewhat splashily tweeted something like how alex gordon saved the game without doing squat or something like that and it occurred to me this morning when i woke up and stat cats stat cast had released you know a half dozen videos or whatever a dozen videos with stat cast uh stat casting uh superimposed on those videos it just reminded me how this is the last year that we get to do this next year we just can't like it like it'll be so different we won't be able to just say well marquez is basically at the same place when the ball leaves the infield and the outfielder is basically in the same place.

It will all be exact. We will all look crazy. Not crazy. We won't look crazy. But, like, we will have to. It's like what we talked about in Episode 500 with Jeff and Grant where, like, something changed seven years ago where you could no longer say this guy can't hit fastballs.

You had to show seven graphs with three disclaimers about how he can't hit fastballs you had to show seven graphs uh with three disclaimers about how he can't hit fastballs uh it's going to be the same thing next year is going to be completely different we are we are a i don't know if we're a dying breed but this is this is uh you know the development of talkies and some of us are going to be revealed to have funny voices and some of us won't some of us will make this transition quite smoothly and be bigger stars than ever but this is it for some of us ben it's a little bit scary yeah right and it it also occurs to me uh that the rob nyer jabo alternate broadcast of game one of the LCS, which it seems went really well. I couldn't see it, but somebody did TiVo it.

I'm planning to watch it. People seem to like it. I heard almost all good things about it other than sort of things that are easily fixed, like the split screen thing. Everybody said the split screen sucks, which is an easy thing to fix. It's not like the premise has failed. You just adjust. It was the first time. So anyway, the point is that as enjoyable as people seem to find that this year,

that idea is really made for a post-StatCast world and I could imagine like I think that personally if I had had the option to watch it on cable this year I probably would have watched it out of curiosity just to see if it was going well

if it was kind of cool or kind of embarrassing because these things can go either way but I would have chosen to watch the game. But in a stat cast world, I don't know that that's true. You'd be less likely to watch it, even if there were... No, I'd be more likely. Oh, okay, yeah, right.

In a stat cast world, I would feel like the value added becomes mammoth. Yeah, probably. Yeah, I watched it, and I enjoyed it. And as you mentioned, there was a lot of split screen in the first few innings. And that was kind of distracting because you don't, I mean, the commentary was good throughout. Given the people involved, that was not surprising. how hard it is to follow a game or to really be into it from pitch to pitch when you've got the game on part of the screen, like a third of the screen, and you're not hearing the sounds from the ballpark and no one's really narrating the action, it's kind of hard to pay attention. So that was a problem for the first few innings when it was almost all split screen and they were kind of laying the

groundwork I guess for later in the broadcast by introducing all these concepts and kind of trying to find ways to shoehorn them into the game but it ended up being you know talking about the nature of defensive stats for a while instead of really talking about the game itself and and working the game into the discussion so that changed after a few innings. I don't know whether because they felt that they had gotten the introductory stuff in there or because they were responding to the Twitter feedback or what. But later in the game, it was really good. It was less split screen, less just watching people sit in suits and talk,

and more the game on the screen and those people focusing on pitch to pitch and at bat to at bat. And at that point it was, I think, really good and pretty much exactly what people had hoped it would be. But you're right, I think it will be a lot different. Maybe. It depends. Depends how much we get, how much information we get, and how much we can access.

Because if it's just like it has been this year where videos get released periodically and we get to see what someone's top speed is or how long it takes them to react to a ball on a particular play, but we don't get full season stats or anything. I don't think that would really change anything unless there were videos like that of every single play where you could just calculate the stuff yourself. But yes, if that stuff is released in some sort of database format or it's collected by MLB Advanced Media and put online somehow, then yes, then we will have to start citing numbers

whenever we say anything, which is more work maybe, but also a good thing. All right. Well, I'm glad you got to talk a little bit. Yeah, thanks. It was fun. And do you think, I mean, at what point do we have to start talking about this as the best postseason we have seen? Has it gotten to that point already? Like in our lifetimes? Oh my gosh. People hate this postseason, Ben.

What? People are complaining. On my timeline, people hate it. Who hates it? That's crazy. You don't actually have to name names. Okay. Yeah.

But mostly I've seen excitement. Yeah, it is. You already wrote about it, so you can give away whatever you innings and that had been decided by one run or had been decided late. And that's the sort of thing where as soon as you point it out, usually it will stop because I pointed it out because it was so unusual. And usually the unusual thing doesn't continue to happen. But it has even more so maybe since then we've gotten one-run games and extra inning games and upsets and the team that wasn't favored to win going into the series winning and winning in the way that the Royals win, which is exciting. And so it's been fun.

I don't know if I recall having had this much fun through this point in a postseason. I completely agree. Every game has been ridiculous. And what, well, yeah. Good point. Okay. All right.

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