Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 592: Listener Emails (The Holiday Edition)

Episode Date: December 24, 2014

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about the Hall of Fame, the best baseball gifts, GM track records, and more.

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Prospectus. Hello. Hello. Good morning. Yeah, sure. It's not actually morning as we speak, but this is a fiction that we maintain. Yep. So, listener emails, anything to say before we begin? No. Merry Christmas. Okay, sure. Yeah, same to you. Alright, so then let's just begin. Should I take a Christmas-themed question? This is coming from Kyle, the Bitter Phillies fan,

who asks, this isn't very technically or even terribly baseball-y, but it could be kind of fun. Who are your favorite or least favorite players that have your name in their name? Oh. Mine is Kyle Farnsworth because he reminds me of Farnsworth Bentley,

the guy with the umbrella who used to dance in music videos in the early 2000s. Least favorite has to be Kyle Kendrick because I'm a bitter Phillies fan. Keep in mind that they don't have to have exactly the same name as you. Bill Miller. Bill Miller.

Bill Miller. Bill Miller. Bill Miller. Bill Miller. It's Bill Miller. It's Bill Miller. Okay. Bill Miller is a top five player in the history of my life. Not spelled the same. He said it doesn't have to be exactly the same. That's why I found that.

His conditions are seemingly that their name has to be, your name has to be part of their name or vice versa. He cited Armando Benitez, for instance, or Odrisamer Despagne. I don't know how to say that name, but Sam is in it. So those would be allowed. I don't know whether spelling changes count. Maybe. Why do you like Bill Miller?

I don't know. He's just always my favorite player. My favorite players were always, they were almost always rookies or young players, and they were almost always not great. So my favorite players were J.R. Phillips, Steve Decker, William Van Landingham, Bill Miller. That was my top four. Okay. Well, mine is Jose Molina, whose middle name is Benjamin. Is that true?

Yeah. You're kidding me. No, it's true. Mine could almost be Jose Molina because Sem is in his name. Jose Molina. Jose Molina. See, Jose Molina. His name is Jose his name. Hosea Molina. Hosea Molina. See, Hosea Molina. His name is Hosea Molina.

Yeah, that's a stretch. That's probably a bigger stretch than Bill Miller. Oh, Benji is his brother. Yeah, I don't like him as much, though. Of course. But maybe they are named after the same Benjamin. I name, yeah. I'm going to see if Yadier's brother... Actually, Yadier is also

I think a Ben. Benjamin. Yeah. Yadier. Yeah, right. His middle name is Benjamin also. I could have used any Molina. But Jose's my man. Benji's middle name is also

Benjamin. Really? It seems redundant It's not, it's Jose So one is named Benjamin Jose Molina And the other is named Jose Benjamin Molina Those Molinas Endless fun Yeah

I don't have a better answer But Bill Miller's as good as it's going to get Okay You can search baseball reference for the rest of the podcast if you'd like and give me another answer at the end. Okay. This question, something that we wrestle with often, I think, comes from Andrew, who says, my question is about GMs and the benefit of the doubt.

The recent moves of the Oakland A's, I feel, have people who don't understand the moves In one or two camps There's Billy Bean is a wizard so he must know something we don't Or if Kevin Towers Made these moves we'd all be ridiculing them Actually we I think we've been in both camps

Over the course of recent podcasts You have espoused both of those positions His examples were Billy Bean and Kevin Towers His example, yeah. I assume that he's using that based on your comparison that you made. Probably. But you've also said that Billy Bean probably has a plan and knows something we don't. So you can belong to both of those camps.

So my question is this. Can a GM ever reach a point where he has earned the benefit of the doubt? Or is the past successive moves irrelevant when evaluating a front office decision? Is this a question of what makes good writing, i.e. giving a GM the benefit of doubt, makes for a boring, uninteresting column? It's a tough question. No, I mean, so here's my thinking on serial. I'm going to talk about serial for a minute. Great.

I don't believe that there is a plausible answer to serial. Like there is no, when people say, oh, well, what do you think happened? Who do you think did it? Yeah, right. Well, I don't think anybody did it. None of the people, none of the possibilities that they have offered seem to me 50% or greater. And therefore, all of them are unlikely. None of the possibilities that they have offered seem to me 50% or greater. And therefore, all of them are unlikely.

And therefore, none of them could be, I cannot put my weight behind either of them. Right. So I'm stuck having to go after a plurality that I don't believe in. So then I start using the Bill James model, more or less, of solving crime, where I assign guilt values to various things. Of all the things that we know about this case, it seems to me that the most convincing evidence that we have is that a guy was convicted. That is not 100%. That's not even 50%.

However, it is more evidence than we have for anything else because you figure 12 people who had way more access to him than we did and who looked at this dude for a month and stared at him and tried to look into his soul, which is all serial really was, was looking into a guy's soul. They all decided unanimously, dude did it, and that counts for something. I don't know what that counts for, but I'm giving it roughly 30% guilt. And so to me, just knowing that a jury of his peers convicted him is 30% likely that he did the crime. Now I can't find anything else about Adnan to add to that. So I'm pretty much stuck on 30 with him. Maybe I can go up to like 38, because J doesn't make sense otherwise. However, at most we're like 38, 40%, but most of that is that he was convicted. And so it's the same way with a GM. You're not necessarily going to say, oh well, Billy Bean did this, so I'm 100% behind it. But you're just adding

up probabilities when you're talking about how to assess these things. It's all uncertain. Everything we look at here is uncertain. It's predicting an uncertain future about a sport that we can't predict. I would say that just the fact that AGM wanted to do it, particularly if it's a case where he's not under duress, it's not obviously a financial dump of some reason, there's no reason to think that he's been under duress. It's not obviously a financial dump of some reason. There's no reason to think that he's been snookered. It's not even necessarily a zero-something

where, well, two GMs had completely opposite opinions about some player, and so therefore that's a wash. If a GM decides player is worth this, that to me is evidence. And each GM has his own evidence level, I would say. And so to get to the answer of this question, every GM has some value. Ruben Amaro wanting to do something is worth% for the bottom. And so that's, I guess, a way of answering the question. Yeah, I think that there's a huge swing in how I assess or how I start looking at moves just based on who did them. And I know that's a weakness, and it's

mockable, and I've mocked other people for it, but I think it's also logical. So it's not necessarily a weakness, or it can be. Oh, it definitely can be a weakness because my assessments of GMs are garbage too. That's the weakness. The weakness is I have no idea what the GMs are, and so I'm regressing based on this weird sort of non-exact thing to begin with. Yeah, right. Yeah, it's a Bayesian thing.

It is a completely Bayesian thing. We start with our prior, which is Billy Bean is a good GM or whatever. It could be that. He's been a GM for a long time. Dispena May or whatever his name is, is the only player in baseball with Sam in his name whose name is not Sam. Really? The only one. Active or all-time? Active, 2014. And the only one, in fact,

even... Wait, wait, wait, wait. That can't be true. I mean, I've got right here in front of me a list of 1,187 baseball players who were active last year. And I just did a search and... And there's no Sam? There's no Sam. There are actual players named Sam. I said his name is not Sam. Oh, what about? Sam Dyson, Sam Freeman, Sam LeCure, Sam Tuvalala. What about Jeff Sam Arja?

Huh. Why didn't that show up? Huh. Yeah, you're right. Why didn't that show up? Huh. Yeah, you're right. Why didn't that show up? That's a good question, Ben. Hmm. I don't know why it didn't

show up, Jeff. Huh. Next time on Effectively Wild. I don't know. I don't know how to answer this. Oh't know. I don't know how to answer this. Oh, no, I don't know how to answer this. All right. Well, you keep investigating.

So, yeah. So how do you approach that as a writer or a person who is called upon to give opinions about baseball transactions, then do you baldly acknowledge whatever your prior is and then try to... Well, you've heard me. You've heard how I do it. Yeah, I mean, a lot of times I will refer to the person making the move and express some deference to it. But more than anything, I just don't rule things to be black or white. I generally am loath to say a move was good or was bad. I just say whether it makes sense from my perspective. And then if the GM in question is a significant factor, I'll mention that as well. But it's

usually, I very rarely will have a strongly negative opinion about a move in general, partly because this is start with the presumption that the guy's not an idiot, then you get a different sort of transaction analysis. I assume that most of these guys are not idiots. I remember Goldstein one time saying that he thought that there was only one idiot among the 30 GMs. He wouldn't say which one, but he said he thought that 29 of them were smart and there was one who, maybe one, he said who he wasn't sure about. This is why we didn't do the podcast about cereal that everyone asked us to do. Cause we would have just, we would have just deferred to the justice system. Not deferred. I i placed i placed a certain amount of faith in the jury not not a ton of right 30 only i mean if you look if you're if you think that a jury is only uh 30 percent

reliable in sending a innocent man or guilty man to prison for life that's not a lot of faith no well there was a segment on the gist this week about that about the lack of power of eyewitness testimony or the power of eyewitness testimony but the lack of accuracy um right yeah people asked me to join serial discussion groups and i never i felt like i had nothing to contribute to that because I was receiving all the information from a host who's reporting I I trusted for the most part but I I wasn't gonna do any digging of my own I wasn't gonna uncover any new information that that she hadn't covered and I I would have had a hard time coming to any conclusion and I knew that well in advance.

The other thing about a discussion group is, okay, so there were 12 episodes and the first six were chasing leads and laying out the story. And then the last six were a discussion group. That's all the last six were. We were all in a serial discussion group for the last six episodes. So you didn't need to have a separate one. No. All right, next question comes from Mike in Philly.

With an increase in teams employing shifts, I have noticed players trying to beat the shift by bunting down the third baseline. If the bunting tread continues, could you see teams employing a super shift where the left fielder would come down to cover third in case of a bunt? Or would teams be too afraid to leave such a gaping hole in left field that they would rather the player get on via the bunt? Yeah, I think that, I don't think they would. It's hard for me to see it unless it would have to be extremely extreme.

The thing that makes the shift, I guess, tempting. You're sort of tempting the hitter but not tempting him quite enough is that it's only a single. If it started becoming a triple, that would be a problem. But the other thing is that it's hard to hit a grounder the other way, but it's easy to hit a fly the other way. If you try to go the other way, the natural swing, the natural spin coming off the bat is likely to be a fly ball spin. And so it's actually, it seems to me

that it's much easier to hit a fly ball the other way than it would be to hit a ground ball the other way. Somebody who has any idea what baseball is can correct me because I might be wrong. But in my experience. That's true. Most ground balls are pulled and most fly balls are hit the other way. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. Okay. Brandon from Chicago wants to know what's the best baseball related holiday present you've ever received? Could also expand this to include all present occasions if you'd like. You have any? A baseball present that I received? Yeah.

Oh, man. I don't remember what presents I've received. One time I played baseball, as most did, and I was an all-star once. One year I was an all-star. And that year… Better than Nick Markakis. and that year better than Nick Marcakis

there was the our city had our city's league had kind of like an all-star jacket that you'd get if you were an all-star

and I got the all-star jacket for my birthday that year and it was it was expensive I mean it wasn't like they didn't just give you the all-star jacket

this was like a fundraising thing it was like you know 110 bucks for some cheap jacket but I got that and that was probably the greatest present I ever got I wore it everywhere I never made the all-star jacket this was like a fundraising thing it was like you know 110 bucks for some cheap jacket but i got that and that was probably the greatest present i ever got i wore it everywhere i never made the all-star game again but and eventually you traded it in for a black hoodie that you never removed thereafter yeah that was a pretty good present that was a pretty good present i have gotten very few baseball-related presents. Just no one in my family knows or cares about baseball particularly.

So I don't think any of them really felt confident giving me a baseball gift. If you're going to give a baseball writer a baseball gift, you have to know something about baseball or else you won't be confident. I got baseball prospectus. My first baseball prospectus was a present. I won't be confident. I got baseball prospectus. My first baseball prospectus was a present. I wouldn't have spent the money myself at the time as a 22, 23-year-old kid who wasn't used to paying for anything. So I don't – yeah, I got this.

I got a subscription to the site for Christmas one year and then the next year I got the annual. So that was pretty great. I had to pay my own way, my baseball prospectus experience. I did get a – my girlfriend gave me a poster print of outlines of all the stadiums superimposed on each other so that you can see where the shallow fences and deep fences and oddly shaped fences are. And there are like little cutouts at the bottom, outlines of what each field is shaped like. I have that hanging in this room right now. So that's something.

I got dollar sign on the muscle a couple years ago. That was a good one. We didn't get that for free. I got it later for free. I got the original first, and then we later got the reprint for free. All right. Playindex, do you have another impossible quiz for me? Wait, wait, wait. Ask the one about the Jeff Sullivan tweet. I have an answer. This is from Eric Hartman and he wants to know what is Jeff Sullivan's greatest

tweet? I don't have an answer for that. It's impossible. However, I will say that there was a day in October where I had to look something up from the previous year's postseason. And so I stumbled onto an old, I stumbled, I had to look for something Jeff Sullivan had tweeted. And so I had a month of his tweets in front of me and I was looking through them. You retweeted like eight of his tweets in front of me and I was looking through them. You retweeted like eight of them in a row in the middle of the night. Like 40 of them. And it was all within a month and it was an incredible display

of tweeting. But there were three in particular that I loved and have I think retweeted more than once in my life. And so I will just say these are my top three in order. Number three, you've reached the age where you've learned a thing or two, and this is the sensory motor stage and you are an infant. Like the Viagra ad, you know, Cialis ad. Reached the age where you've learned a thing or two. All right, number two, this one you have to have seen the picture of Dave Dombrowski's son in the postseason because he wears... Very fancy dresser.

Dombrowski's son is wearing a jacket of dead chameleons that in their last living moments were standing before the world's ugliest jacket. Number one. Number one. world's ugliest jacket number one number one gm and the gm hear that hear that buzzing gm gm reaches under desk gm pulls out bow tie shaped microphone gm i know who did this ken rosenthal jokes ken rosenthal jokes bowtie shaped microphone i like that one partly because the bowtie shaped microphone but partly because of the implication that it's buzzing that ken rosenthal has a spy microphone that buzzes yeah i like that he plants a spy microphone but does it in an easily identifiable way. It's his signature spy microphone. If you find it, you know immediately who it is.

Okay, Playindex, do you have another impossible quiz for me about who's 18th on a team's sacrifice list? No, it's not impossible, but I guess it's a little bit of a quiz. It's barely a quiz. I just want to ask you a question. What percentage of players who play one year in the majors

do you think play two years in the majors? You know, two or more. How many players who make a debut play in a second season i'll say 83 percent uh that's high it's 74 percent and so uh what i did i went to play index i had a question about this i wanted to see basically how many make it to 20 years. So I did this year by year, and I looked to see how many players played their first season in every given year and added it up, and then how many played in their second season in any given year

and added all of them up. So 16,000, basically 16,000 players have played in the majors. 74% made it to a second year. And so then would you, so knowing 74%, how many of players who made it to two years would you guess made it to three? Slightly higher, 80%. Okay. And so what do you think the curve would look like

if you were to chart the attrition rate. I would guess that it would be gradually increasing up to, let's say, five or something. And then steadily decreasing after that in an exponential kind of curving way. Pretty close. Pretty close. So you said 80% for year three, it is exactly 80%. You said it would rise until year five and then start declining. It actually rises until year eight and then starts declining. And it doesn't decline very quickly though. So year 8 is 86%. 86% of players who play 7 years make an 8. And then it's 85, 83, 82, 80, 77, 78. So if you've made it 13 years, you are 78% likely to make it 14 years, which is roughly the same as year three. So it's a very, very slow decline. So it's the first year at which you are less than 50% likely to come back.

Well, it is at earliest year 22 because I didn't go past year 21. Year 21 is 66%. Year 20 though is very low. Year 20 is 62%. So if you played 19 years, you were still only 62% likely to play 20. And that surprised me. I would have maybe hypothesized that it would never go down. Obviously, at some point it has never go down. Obviously, at some point it has to go down because at some point it's going to reach zero. But I thought that maybe being around longer would just consistently guarantee that you are more likely to be around for even still longer.

And I see why it's not. I mean, I understand why it's not that way. And it makes sense, the mechanics of the decline make sense. But I still kind of thought that it wouldn't be. I'm a big, you know, like one of the analogies in the world I use most or one of the pieces of junk pop science that I use most is the, I've mentioned it, I'm sure on here before, the idea that a house that is 50 years old is more likely to be standing in 50 years than a house that is 10 years old or five years old or one year old, that basically being old correlates to living longer, even going forward. And if you're a thing, not if you're a human necessarily,

but a thing. And so I would have thought, but anyway, it's not. It's the curve that you were expecting. It's exactly what you were expecting. One interesting thing that I discovered while doing this is that since I did this by year, what I did in Playindex is I basically looked to see how many players met a criteria in each year. And so the filter would be, you know, second year in the league, for instance, and plate appearances zero or greater. So basically just appeared in a game in any capacity would count you. And so then I would see how many there were for each year. So for instance, for 10th year players in 1951, there were 17 players who were active and were in their 10th year, whereas in 2008 there were 46. And that makes sense because the league is much bigger, you have a lot bigger player pool, so of course you're

going to have more players making it to year 10, right? But as you get higher, as you get to year 10, year 11, year 12, year 15, year 17, you start to see a lot, you start to see a dip in the 2012, 2013, 2014 years, which is in keeping with research that has shown recently that the aging curve has changed dramatically since steroids were tested, right? You referred to this in your annual essay. I did. And so it makes sense that there would be fewer old players, I guess, more or less, in 2014. And so I thought, oh, well, this is another piece of evidence.

And yet, then I looked more closely, and the year-to-year noise in this is so extreme. So I'm going to give you an example of the noise. The most, for year 10 players, 10 years exactly, 2004 is the most common year for 10-year players, which is right in the middle of the steroid era. 66 players who played in their 10th year, which is 20 more than played this year, for instance. And, you know, it's a big spike. It's a big difference. But then I was like, oh, so what's 2003?

And what's 2005? And 2003 was 34, so half as many. So in 2003, there were 34. And in 2004, there were 66, which is kind of crazy that there was just this huge bubble of players who debuted basically in 1995 who were aging along. And there was simultaneously a big trough in players who debuted in 1994. Although I guess that maybe makes a little, maybe that's because there was no September. That's why, isn't it? Because there was no September of 1994. Yeah, that's true.

So there were no call-ups. That's right. And so nobody made their debut in 1994. So that's it. We answered it. It's rare that we actually answer a question that we are wondering about. It's nice. Good feeling. Yeah, so that's kind of weird.

I'm going to see how many people debuted in 1993, 1994, and 1995. And I'm going to do first year of career. and I'm going to do first year of career. So in 1993, 203 players debuted. In 1994, 114. And then in 1995, all that pent-up debut anxiety came out, 247 players. So there actually was a huge bubble, and it had a logical explanation. That's interesting.

I've been thinking for a while as I was writing that essay, one of the things I referenced in that essay was just the amount of league-wide wins above replacement that are produced by over 30 players and under 30 players. And basically that era was the only time in baseball history when there was more value produced by over 30 players than under 30 players. So I've been thinking back to that time. And at the time it was, you know, before either of us was writing really, but the,

the standard sort of internet sabermetric position was kind of, or even in the aftermath of that time was kind of minimizing the PED thing or, you know, not, not drawing a direct line from PEDs to the offensive environment and coming up with lots of alternative explanations. Maybe the ball was different or the ballparks were smaller or conditioning or whatever. Whereas the kind of hot take columnist standard responses, you know, look at what all these steroids are doing to the game. And I'm wondering, do you think it's safe to say that the hot take was closer to the truth than the more reasoned take? That when you look at that dramatic change to the aging curve, even if not every guy who

hit 40 home runs was taking something, maybe that's still too simplistic to say, but the fact that there was that dramatic change to the pattern of aging sort of suggests that, that there was something that was really affecting everything that, that minimizing that was perhaps an over response i'm not i'm not ready to say that so i'm going to pass on answering this right now i don't i'm not i don't want to be wrong twice if i was wrong once i don't want to be wrong twice and i'm not going to take every possible position in the hopes that one of them eventually is in a seat when the music stops. So I'm just going to go ahead and pass. Okay. All right. Well,

something I've been thinking about. So that is it for the Playindex segment. So we remind you, as always, to subscribe using the coupon code BP to get the discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription. All right. A couple more. Let's take one from Mike D in St. Louis. I always enjoy Mike D questions. He wants to know, would the Hall of Fame be improved if there was a cap on the number

of players? There are currently 246, so maybe go up to 250. Would older and lesser known players start being eliminated first? Then each year there could be an additional debate on who should go as current players are voted in. So that would double the amount of intrigue or discussion, which some people enjoy and some people find tiresome. But this would be not only electing people, but then having to find people to kick out. It would be the ultimate Hall of Fame reality show, voting people off the island. I think that the danger is that people wouldn't want to elect people if it was going to come at the expense of somebody else.

And I don't think that there's a... I think it's an arbitrary decision. To me, that's a restriction that has no particular logic behind it. The league has been played for more years. It's like saying that you can only have 50 World Series champions, and so every time a team wins one, you have to go steal some other team's rings because you can only make 50. And you can't have more than 50.

So it doesn't seem to necessarily make a lot of sense. ESPN, by the way, has a capped Hall of Fame for baseball. They did a list about two years ago of the 100 greatest players ever. And they revisit it every year. And if somebody goes in, somebody else gets kicked out. Yeah, I don't know. The danger there, as Mike suggested, is that, I mean, at first, it would probably be a good thing.

I mean, at least in terms of the quality of the player pool. Well, it would constantly make the quality of the player pool higher. But at first, you would have low-hanging fruit, the people, you know, the Veterans Committee selections that people always cite as the worst Hall of Famers. So you could go quite a while just getting rid of those guys before anyone would mind that anyone was kicked out. But eventually, you would have to start removing people who meet the current standards.

And maybe there would be a temptation to just kick out the old people that no one living saw play. Yeah. And that's the problem because the whole point of this is to remember people. It's a museum. So if you're kicking out people because you don't remember them anymore. I barely remember that guy. Why do we need a museum for him? I barely remember him.

Put in a guy I know who I see on the pregame show every Saturday. I know. Why do they have so many fossils in the Natural History Museum? We don't need those anymore. They're not even around. All right. We got another philosophical trade question from Eric Hartman, who asked one last week about whether we prefer veteran for veteran trades or veteran For prospect trades this week he wants To know which kind We prefer trades where one Where both teams seem to benefit The win win trade or Where one gets swindled

The win lose trade Definitely that the win lose Definitely no doubt about it Yeah love a good swindle Yeah me too Gives me something to root for Although yeah the more It seems like a swindle. Yeah, me too. Gives me something to root for. Although, yeah, the more it seems like a swindle, the harder we look for an explanation that makes it not a swindle.

But it is more interesting because the win-win, all you can really say is that one team needed this thing more than that other team needed it. And they both helped out each other and that's great, I guess. I don't know, maybe nicer people prefer win-win trades. Maybe this makes us bitter.

We want to see someone lose. Alright, you're done. That's it for this week. If you are celebrating Christmas, we hope you have a nice Christmas. If you're celebrating having Christmas off because other people are celebrating Christmas, we hope you have a nice Christmas. If you're celebrating having Christmas off because other people are celebrating Christmas, then we hope you also have a nice week. We will be back next week for, I guess, a couple more episodes before the year is over.

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recommend to some family members the Fine Baseball podcast without which you would be lost. We will be back next week. I wonder, uh, yeah, no. Edit that out. Okay. Two minutes, 30 seconds into this thing

and we are editing already. I wasn't listening. You have to do a lot of editing on this episode.