Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 61: Division Series Round-Up/Giving Darren O’Day His Due

Episode Date: October 12, 2012

Ben and Sam catch up with the latest action developments in each of the just-completed or still-in-progress playoff series, then discuss Darren O’Day in greater depth.

Good morning and welcome to Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectus. It is Friday, October 12th, and we are on episode 61. I'm here with Ben Lindberg, who is in New York, New York. Ben, did you take any detours to Brooklyn last night? No, I slept for a few hours after we recorded yesterday, and that has been enough to keep me going. I felt like I was about to take a trip to Brooklyn, so I listened to the last episode of Up and In, which I had been saving for a special occasion, and so that got me through the train ride conscious.

So the state of baseball at the moment is that there are two game fives to go today, the Nationals and the Cardinals and the Orioles and the Yankees. Meanwhile, the Giants have beaten the Reds in their game five, and the Tigers have beaten the A's in their Game 5. They will be advancing. Real quick, when everybody talks about the bad scheduling of the 2-3 this year, if I'm reading this correctly, and I feel like I must not be, but everywhere I go says the same thing, the ALCS begins tomorrow? Yes, it does. That seems to me far crazier. Yeah, I mean, the fact that the Orioles and Yankees have to play tonight, and possibly both managers said it would be sort of an all-hands-on-deck situation where it would be sort of a all hands on deck situation where anyone would be

available and everyone would be used if necessary um i don't know what time the game is tomorrow but i assume it's prime time uh yeah that is a very very quick turnaround it is a very quick turnaround i feel i mean i guess you don't expect every game to go five games and so you don't want to leave too much um too much soft space in there and they baseball really loves to start these things on saturdays um but i would be complaining like crazy if i were the yankees and the orioles and i did not get even a single day off between my series whatever though um so uh the tigers won and i think that i have no choice but to say one more time that i cannot believe that the strength of a team's ace does not correlate to postseason success this was entirely justin verlander's series the a's you get the sense had no chance

of winning unless they swept the three medal games because Justin Verlander is simply too good. And he was extremely good in this series. He pitched a complete game shutout yesterday. He was maybe even better in the first game total. He threw 16 innings, struck out 22, allowed one run. So I don't know why. Yeah, I didn't see any of yesterday's game because I was at the Yankees game and then coming home from that and I looked at the box score on my way back

and saw that Justin Verlander had gone nine innings and struck out 11 and I wondered if I had somehow looked at the game one box score because it looked very much like that one um so you say he was not quite as dominant or I guess it's hard to even say no I mean he was as dominant as you could be yesterday it's just that he was also as dominant as you could be in game one and uh so it's conceivable that if you've figured out a way to measure dominance that you might somehow come up with Kaplan being more dominant. I'm not saying that he was less dominant yesterday.

He was dominant. Dominant. Yes. Yeah. I'm still confused about why we found what we did. I guess it is an optical illusion when you watch the ace pitch so well and confirm your expectations. I think you probably heard this going into the series. You will hear about it going into the next series.

You will hear about it next year when Verlander's team makes the playoffs. There is always an assumption going in that the ace is going to win their games and that he cannot be beaten. And we take it far too much for granted. And so when you see Verlander actually looking unbeatable, it just feels like it was fate and that that's just the only way you can do it. In truth, Verlander's Tigers won something like 60. Well, I'll do the math. Sixty three point six percent of the games Verlander started this year. So it really isn't that overwhelming an advantage to have the superior pitcher. It feels like it is when you're watching it. But of course, these guys do lose.

when you're watching it, but of course these guys do lose, and the A's could have won one of these games if they had, you know, I mean Verlander lost a lot of games. Well, maybe CeCe Sabathia will be terrible tonight, and then it will make more sense. Yeah, that's true, although, yeah, I don't know if there's any pitcher in baseball who we treat, I guess, well, no, probably not. I don't think there's any pitcher in baseball that we treat as such an automatic win as verlander and that makes sense because he's the best pitcher in baseball but uh it seems like the the gap that um that we uh have left between verlander and the next best pitcher is probably the biggest gap i guess maybe the pedro years were the biggest gap that um of our our lifetime between Pedro and the next best starter. Maybe, although Randy Johnson was at quite a high level himself.

He was at quite a high level himself. And then I think certainly in the 90s you didn't have that sort of gap between one and two. And I don't even know who the best starter was during the 80s. I couldn't tell you in a million years who the best starter was. I mean, it would have been Jack Morris probably by conventional wisdom. And as we know. He did win the most games. He did win the most games.

I mean, Dave Steeb was probably his equal roughly. So, yeah. So right now Verlander might be the clearest ace. I don't know. I still think Pedro over Randy Johnson probably for those three or four years was it was was I mean Pedro it was better than anybody in history over those three and four years right uh yeah or yes I think so I guess there are people who are close and you could maybe if you don't totally believe in park factors and league factors and that sort of thing you can make a case for someone else but yes i would not disagree with that maybe clemens from like 88 to 91 maybe maybe although i don't

know you have that dwight gooden overlap and and greg maddox coming in anyway so the uh the a's started this year well i guess the a's right now have, I think, seven players who were on their active roster last year. It was a remarkable turnaround. I don't even really get the sense that this is going to the maybe the petty sniping comes out after the uh the exciting uh and and inspirational glow of victory fades but um as i noted last night um via twitter.com um the a's have now in billy bean's career uh played six division series they've lost five of them you might conclude that they are terrible losers, but they are 13 and 15 in the actual games. So they are essentially his Billy Bean, Billy Bean's Billy Bean-ness does seem to work pretty well in the postseason. And it is just kind of the fluke of distribution. Yeah. I mean, they went five games, and no one is going to blame Moneyball for losing to Justin Verlander.

So they made it respectable, at least. Except they would never have drafted Justin Verlander, because Justin Verlander was a high school starter, and we have not, you know, obviously they would have, but the conventional wisdom that Billy Bean does not change might have led some people to make some. Anyway, whatever. Of course, they would have drafted Justin Verlander. Let's see. What else?

There was a Nationals game. Uh-huh. Yeah. There was a Reds game. There was a Reds game and a Giants game, and the Giants put that one away. The Giants will move forward. I wrote the recap for that game. You did?

You haven't read it, I'm sure. I've read parts of it, and I read Jason's diary of it, so I have some idea what went on. It's really striking to me how probably poorly both teams played. And you feel bad because it seems like the margin in the series was small enough that you can pretty closely tie it to the Reds losing their ace after one batter. And the Giants, I would say, didn't get a good start this series. I mean, Vogelsang pitched five innings and gave up one run, but he didn't look all that great, and he did only pitch five innings. And their closer also looked pretty terrible as the series went on, Sergio Romo.

And so it's one of those things where they move on, and as a Giants fan you're excited, and as a Giant, you're excited. But there's a lot of, I would say, a lot of concern about the state of their entire pitching staff right now. And, you know, I don't know that I would conclude that they're in a great position to move forward to the World Series. But, of course, they're in as good a position as anyone right now. But, of course, they're in as good a position as anyone right now. But, yeah, Kane had his second outing in a row where he sort of had to fight to get into the fifth. And now they're going to probably move Lincecum back into the rotation.

So they lose their bullpen stopper as well. Although I'm sure that they'll be just fine not having to watch Barry Zito throw pitches. Yes, and the Nationals won their Detweiler game, which maybe takes some of the Strasburg pressure off, at least temporarily, unless they lose tonight. Yeah, because they may have replaced Gio Gonzalez in the rotation with Strasburg, is how people will remember this 40 years from now. But yeah, Detweiler did just fine.

I mean, all these sort of like what would have happened things are weird. Because if, I mean, given the fragile balance of our universe, if Strasburg had thrown even one more pitch as a national, everything that you and I know as reality would have turned out differently. So it's not so much a matter of simply slotting a guy into another spot. But yes, the Nationals could quiet the whole Strasburg meme with one more victory tonight. And a bunch more victories after that. Probably. Yeah, yeah, yeah, probably. Nine more victories.

Nine more victories. And they can quiet everything about Strasburg. Do you know where Strasburg is right now? Like, what is he doing? Is he in the dugout? Are they showing him? Because I would think if you were a TV producer, wouldn't you show Strasburg about

four or five times an inning? Yeah, I would just kind of have a picture and picture set up of him just in the bottom right corner constantly. There should be more Strasburg on our TV than Courtney Cox and Jimmy Fallon. Yes, I'd support that. But I haven't seen him. Have you seen him? Does anybody know? I don't know. He must be with the team. I'm Googling, where is Steven Strasburg? Nationals, no, that's not going to work. No, they don't seem to say. Bummer. He must be with them unless it would be too painful for the Nationals to see him up close and not have him pitch.

And so they decided to separate them, but that doesn't seem likely. Well, the closest thing I'm going to get to an answer is a question that was asked on Yahoo Answers one year and four months ago, so that probably won't help. Well, someone will tweet at us and tell us the answer and berate us for not knowing it. Brian Wilson and Freddy Sanchez were in the Giants dugout, so there's some precedent, obviously, for injured players

or whatever you want to be there. But it just feels to me like you'd see them a lot more. Mariano Rivera is in the Yankees dugout. Yeah, so he's probably in there. That'll give me something to watch. And you went to the Yankees game last night how was that uh it was another very long game it was about four and a half hours of baseball and there was very little scoring during those four and a half hours so it was uh i guess it was a well-played game and it was an entertaining game and there was pressure and high stakes and all those nice things. There were also many, many, many pitching changes.

Basically every reliever on either team, on both teams was used. The Yankees used eight pitchers. The Yankees used eight pitchers. The Orioles also used eight pitchers, pretty much everyone except Chris Tillman. And that was kind of unprecedented for a game that was as low scoring. There has never been a game, at least in the regular season,

where so many pitchers were used with so few runs scored, except for one game two years ago that lasted 20 innings. And so that was unusual. It was just a whole lot of matchups. And normally when you see that many pitchers in a game, it's because some of those pitchers aren't pitching well and have to be replaced. And in this case, it was just the combination of an extra inning game and a lot of matchups because managers were playing for every little edge that they could get. I suppose that we'll probably use this as a more formal topic later, but Darren O'Day, is he perhaps the breakout star of this October?

Yes, I interrupted myself writing about him to record this podcast. He was great last night. He was probably, if you want to pick an MVP for the Orioles of that game, I would probably give it to him, although Nate McLeod was also good. He pitched two and two thirds innings, which was the most he had pitched in any appearance since 2008. He struck out A-Rod for the third time in this series in a very high leverage spot where A-Rod really just had to get a ball to the outfield for the Yankees to take a lead. Yeah, he was great. He came in in the eighth. He got two

outs. He pitched the ninth and the tenth. And it's interesting because he's a side armor or a submariner. And normally you expect someone like that to have a giant platoon split and be more of a situational pitcher, whereas he was quite comfortable going two and two thirds and pitched two innings five times this season and doesn't have a big platoon split, which is unusual, I think. And I asked him about that after the game, and he had a giant bandage wrapping his entire shoulder and arm and talked about how tired he was. But he said that the platoon split thing is something that he's worked on a lot and that he thinks he's gotten much better at over the years dealing with opposite-handed hitters. up in the zone more so than you'll see typical people who throw from his arm angle do that,

and that he changes eye levels more than you would see other people doing that, which I haven't had really a chance to look into, because a lot of times players will say something like that, and it will sort of sound reasonable, and then you'll look up the numbers, and you won't really see anything that backs up what they were saying. Yeah, that sort of describes Justin Masterson too, and he's got maybe the biggest split in the game. Yeah, so I don't know what it is really. That was sort of his explanation. And I asked him if he prepared any differently for this series than he did during the regular season, knowing that he would be facing guys like Jeter and A-Rod probably three or four times in important spots.

And he said not really. do everything and that Matt Wieders has perfect recall of every pitch he has ever thrown and knows what they did last time and what worked and what they should do this time. And so he watches some video, but mainly he just trusts Matt Wieders. But yeah, I think Darren O'Day's profile has certainly been raised by this. And he has an interesting story in that he was undrafted out of college and he was uh allowed to be rule fived by a team and he was claimed on waivers twice um so he's been a guy who teams have not wanted or or not really gone out of their way to keep in the past but um he has been excellent this year and not just this

year but in recent years yeah it's interesting we talk about sometimes how bullpens come together in weird ways and you can find these sort of gems off the scrap heap but the the counter to that is of course that some team is always letting a good reliever go that as hard as it is to i mean as easy as it sometimes seems to find a great reliever, it's also, uh, just as easy to give up a great one. And the Rangers, the Rangers had this awesome Darren O'Day for two years. And from 2009 to 2010, he had an ERA below two. Um, he had a great strike out to walk ratio. Um, and he basically had 16 bad innings for him in 2011, and they let him go on waivers to Baltimore.

Relievers are so volatile that you're just as liable to give up too early on a guy. O'Day, I don't know, maybe Stroop, but O'Day might be the best part of that bullpen. Yeah, Stroop was good too last night. He went two innings. But I guess as soon as we say that someone is a breakout bullpen star, he will be bad. Yeah, the Orioles, when I wrote about the Orioles bullpen maybe two months ago or a month and a half ago, they had Stroop and O'Day and Johnson were all in the top three in win probability added among relievers, and it was a good bullpen. But what you saw last night, as you pointed out, has become an extremely deep bullpen with Hunter and Mattis,

where now I think the reason that you can go eight pitchers in and only allow one run is that all eight of the, all seven of those relievers are really good. I mean, their bullpen is crazy deep. And if there's a, you, you could totally see them winning a game, uh, where, um, you know, that they get eight or nine innings out of their bullpen. If they, you if they don't trust their starting pitcher. I mean, that's a real possibility for them going forward. Yeah, I talked to Hunter, too, because he struck out A-Rod also, which is kind of a theme in this series. He struck out A-Rod yesterday on a 97-mile-per-hour fastball,

and it's still strange to see Tommy Hunter throwing 97 mile per hour fastballs. So I kind of asked him about the velocity boost and whether he knew he had that in him in short bursts before he made this transition or whether it surprised even him and whether there are certain guys who gain more when they go to the bullpen than others and a bunch of other questions in that vein. And basically he said, no, I always threw hard. So that was the answer there. Very helpful. Very helpful answer.

The lesson is that interviewing players is often disappointing. Yeah, for them too. Yeah, it's definitely for them, but they don't have any expectations that it will be rewarding. So for them, it's exactly as underwhelming as they expect it to be. Well, I linked to a Matt Latos pregame interview in my recap, and next time you, anytime you go to the park and are going to interview players i would recommend you just watch that matt lato's interview to really set your expectations at a realistic level right uh all right let's end it and we'll be back tomorrow to talk about the winners of the

orioles yankees game and the washington national st louis card. Wait, isn't tomorrow a weekend? Oh, thank goodness. We will be back on Monday morning to talk about games one and two of the ALCS and game one of the NLCS. You got everyone's hopes up for a weekend show. We'll never live this down. Yeah, we'll be back Monday. Sorry, folks.