Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 671: Avenging Umpires, Adjustable Innings, and Other Emails

Episode Date: May 6, 2015

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about umpires and framing, a different home-field advantage, bad baseball terms, and more.

Frame by frame, myth by drama, in your own analysis. Step by step Down by numbers In your own, in your own Analysis Good morning and welcome to episode 671 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectus, presented by the Play Index, baseballreference.com. I am Ben Lindberg of Grantland, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Perspectus. Hello. Howdy. So we shamed Tanner Roark into striking someone out.

Striking a bunch of people out. into striking someone out. Striking a bunch of people out. Yeah, so we did a play index last Friday, was it? About Tanner Roark and how he hadn't struck anyone out. And in his first outing after that, he struck a guy out. And then he had another outing and he struck two guys out. I guess all weird things have to come to an end.

Yeah, I didn't think that was going to last all year. No, me too. Would have been fun to follow for a little while, though. We didn't get to was going to last all year. No, me too. Would have been fun to follow for a little while, though. We didn't get to enjoy it for even one outing. Yeah, what was that guy's name? Ted Wingman? Ted Wingfield? Wingfield.

Yeah, one strikeout all year. Love that one. Yeah. Love that play index. One strikeout, man. He had 30 the year before. 30 the year before that. And it's just like, it feels like somebody just didn't count strikeouts that year. Because sometimes in old-timey baseball reference years,

they don't count intentional walks. And so you're like, wow, that guy had no intentional walks for like seven straight. Oh, and then you realize, oh, yeah, they didn't count them back then. And you think that it's like that with strikeouts. That's what I thought. and then it wasn't. And Wigfield beat over here. All right, go ahead. Handsome guy, too.

Wigfield? Yeah, much better old-timey baseball reference photo than the other guys that we've talked about in the past. Including the invisible guy who didn't have a picture at the time. Colleen Kane, the White Sox writer for the Chicago Tribune, just reported before we started recording that Matt Albers has a more serious finger injury than expected. He has to have surgery now. He's going to be out six to eight weeks.

So do we have to reassess Royals points again? Is this like when you try someone for attempted murder and then they die and you can try them for murder? Like in Good Wife last week, can we now try the Royals for forcing Albers to have finger surgery? No, I don't believe in that. I don't believe in any of that. I don't believe in attempted murder.

I don't believe in the concept of it. Well, I do, but I don't think that it should be distinguished from murder. I don't believe in the concept of it. Well, I do, but I don't think that it should be distinguished from murder. So no, I wrote about- You're all about process, not results. I am. I think I wrote about this during the Zach Granke, Carlos Quentin thing. I think it's silly that they base suspensions on what happens after the pitch instead of the pitch. To me, the crime's the crime. Carlos Quentin retired, by the way.

Yeah. All right. Anything else? Not at the moment. Are you surprised that Jared Saltolamacchia is being released? That's something, by the way. I blame his six straight games with a negative win probability. That's right.

We forgot to update that. We wondered whether that portended a terrible season, and it did. He has nine games. Did he ever have a positive one? Yeah, he did. The first day after we did. Oh, again. Yeah.

Yeah, of course I am. I mean, I don't see how you couldn't be. It seems weird. I mean, he started the season as their starting catcher. Now, if they had decided that there was just something so bad about him last year that they couldn't have that anymore, and they made the decision in the offseason, that would make sense. But if he started it as their starting catcher,

then you have to assume that they saw something in 33 plate appearances that made them want to waive their second highest paid player. And that feels weird to me. It does. Maybe they saw 12 strikeouts and one double and one home run. I don't know what they saw, but he was bad, obviously. double and one home run i don't know what they saw but he was bad obviously but he's been he's been like kind of a league average-ish player for the past four years or so except for that one year with the red socks where he was really good i don't know if it's a reaction to his defense which

is not good according to the you know framing and blocking metrics that we have now, that he was one of the worst guys last year, but also not bad before that for a few years. So I don't know. Maybe there's something else to it, but they could not find a taker, so now he's going to be league minimum for someone. I'm sure someone will take him for that price. Okay, so emails.

Speaking of framing, we got a bunch of framing and catcher catching questions got a question from stewart who asks as more and more emphasis is placed on pitch framing how likely is it that umpires will respond and adapt every strike that's called a ball and every ball that's called a strike because of the actions of the catcher acts as an implied criticism of the umpire's availability to call the actual or ability to call the actual strike zone isn't it so what are the odds that umpires act to counteract this either by taking into account the framing reputation of individual catchers or working to look past the framing or some other method and we got other emails that were specific to certain catchers comrad emailed us about rob arthur's article at 538 about the decline in yadier melina's framing stats this year and

jonathan lucroix's as well and he's wondering if they're suffering from a backlash from being labeled excellent pitch framers very publicly. Do you buy that explanation? I don't, and I've always found it odd that when, I'm going to pivot from those two, from catchers to hitters for a minute, I've always found it odd that you'll hear it sometimes said that, you know, a guy like Barry Bonds or Bobby Abreu or Frank Thomas or whoever has such an amazing high that uh... that the umpires will give them that call because you know it like

i think it was in their and all my about ted williams if it was a strike and swung at it uh... or something like that or you know it's a ball because i took it whatever but those guys are generally seen as having great eyes only because they do have great eyes, but also partly, largely, because they're very patient. They take a lot of pitches, and they don't swing at pitches that are right on the corner of the strike zone.

So to me, the opposite should be true. If Vlad Guerrero takes a pitch, then I would automatically call it a ball. Like, if I were an umpire, I would call, if he took a pitch, but he didn't swing, I'd call a ball, and then I'd check his pulse And I'd go back to my position

And it always seemed weird to me that the hackers Aren't perceived as getting the calls And the Ricky Hendersons are But Ricky's He's trying to game the umpire He's the guy you want to Contradict It's much more likely if he takes a pitch to strike

Than a hacker. So anyway, along those lines, I have always wondered why that's not the case, but it doesn't seem to be the case. Conventional wisdom is that that's not how umpires work, that umpires are subtly affected, perhaps by the esteem in which the player is held and whether he has kind of earned the strike zone.

And so I would expect that if there was any, like I'm guessing that most umpires are wholly unaware of the blockbuster interview you did with Jonathan LeCroy a couple years ago. But to the extent that they are aware, I would think that it would probably help rather than hurt lucroy's framing uh reputation and slash ability interesting it's yeah i don't know i mean molina's been a gold glove catcher for seven straight seasons i guess he's always had a reputation for this and and now there are numbers attached to it and maybe if you're an

umpire you're more sensitive when there are numbers attached to it and there's a actual column that says the number of strikes that he got that he shouldn't have gotten or something and i could i mean i can imagine it you know if we if we assume that the league has something to do with how the strike zone is called and how umpires are graded, as we seem to know based on when pitch effects started to be used for umpire evaluation and what happened to the strike zone after that, then I don't know. It's not out of the question that someone could have brought it to their attention. I don't know whether umpires are Googling themselves or have a Google alert set up for framing or anything, but it's gotten enough publicity over the last year or two that maybe an umpire supervisor sent a memo around.

Who knows? I don't know. Yeah, I'm saying specifically Lucroix and Molina. Now, as to the larger question, does the awareness of framing cause umpires to tighten up their strike zone, I guess is how this would work, that seems very plausible to me. Now, maybe less plausible than you would think because there's generally a pretty big overlap between what we notice as framing and what every other human being notices as the strike zone on the TV screen.

Those two things are in concert with each other. They both come from basically the same advances in technology and were preceded by the same technology when it was Quest Tech. And so clearly there is more awareness by everybody from the extremely casual fan all the way up to the guy working in the Rays front office about pitch calling accuracy than there was a decade ago, right? And more so even this year than there was last year, because now you have this K-zone on some games that's always there and creating a weird portal on your screen that looks slightly off or whatever it was you described it as. And there was more last year

than the year before and more the year before than the year before that. And yeah, you could definitely see the fact that there's so much energy being spent on this conversation that umpires would be more aware of it on their own and also probably it would be more likely to be something that was addressed in the way they did their job. So I can see it now. The issue with that interpretation is that when Quest Tech came around, the opposite thing happened. The more umpires were aware of the job that they were doing and aware that they were being assessed on the job they were doing, the more the value of good framing catchers started to separate itself.

And Harry and Jonathan Judge hypothesized in their piece on the new catcher framing metric that we have at BP last month that it was because of Quest Tech that basically by bringing the strike zone out of the Wild West and making it was because of Quest Tech that basically by bringing the strike zone out of the Wild West and making it less kind of unpredictable and, I don't know, fluky from pitch to pitch, it created a standard that good catchers were maybe able to manipulate better. And so if the umpire strike zone were becoming more predictable, you would think that the better framing catchers would

be better able to exploit it. And the premise of this question is that the opposite has happened, right? And that the spread is sort of shrinking or that the great catchers are being considered less great, right? Yeah, or that even specific guys are being targeted, profiled as good framers and being penalized because of it i mean it's you know it's it's curious i guess that those two guys have seemed to decline so fast and that this is a stat that i read the read the comments on rob's article which was probably not the best decision

on my part um because of the way it was timed. The Cardinals are playing really well right now and they've got a good ERA and everything. And so when you point out that Yadier Molina is struggling at a certain aspect of catching at that time, it's very easy for people to dismiss that because of the team's overall results. And there was a lot of questioning of whether the sample size is big enough and everything. And, you know, he is at 1290 framing chances right now, which is kind of a lot in framing. It seems like something that stabilizes very quickly because you get so many opportunities. And it seems like something that's consistent from year to year generally. And those two guys are i guess among the more high profile known framers and uh

suddenly they have negative numbers which we've never ever seen before so it's it's worth having the conversation it's worth asking the question i guess i don't really i don't really know how to if i could figure out the answer i would probably have tried to write about that already. I'm not sure how to figure out whether, I mean, you can look at video and see whether someone looks different. I haven't looked at Molina to see if he's actually doing something different. He lost a lot of weight and he's 30 something, 32, almost 33 now. And it is a skill that declines based on the Harry and Jonathan Judge research you mentioned. So maybe it's that stuff just catching up with him or injuries catching up with him or I don't know what.

But it's hard to establish for sure, I guess, whether it's a reputation thing coming back to bite him. Sure is. Okay, question from noah when me and my friend play super mega baseball we always argue over how many innings to play in a game my friend likes to play five or more since he usually puts together one big inning when my pitcher gets tired and doesn't score much otherwise to counteract this i like to play three innings. We've come to a mutual agreement that the home team gets to pick the amount of innings. This got me thinking, what if it was a rule in real baseball that the home team had to pick the length of the game before each game?

They could choose any length they wanted from, say, one to 18 innings. Would teams stick with the traditional nine innings or try to utilize this device strategically? What would be the most important factors the home team would consider when choosing a length of game to maximize their chances of winning? Would rosters be constructed differently and or custom built for a specific game length? In general, would the home team gain much of an advantage? And what do you think the average length of game would be under this new rule? And maybe, I don't know if they can choose 18 innings. That seems like something that they wouldn't be able to do.

They could choose shorter, maybe. I don't know. No. They can choose any number of innings. So there's three big factors at play here. One is that you want to give your fans a product that they'll pay a lot of money for. I would imagine that the first pitch is the most expensive one to produce. Once you get all your concession workers in there and have all your parking attendants and have all your rich super millionaires put on their pajamas,

that's a lot of money you've spent for one pitch. So you might as well keep throwing as many pitches as you can to maximize the amount that a person will pay. And I don't know when people would stop paying more for more. Clearly you wouldn't be able to charge me very much for a one-inning game. I probably would not ever go to a one inning game, although it would be a fun game. It's just too much of a production. You might have three hours of travel for one inning. It's a mess. I would think that you could probably cut off games at seven innings

and people would pay as much as they pay now. I mean, they pay as much as they do for basketball games and those are roughly in time commitment, the same as a seven-inning game. And that's when they cut the beer off anyway. Well, you'd have to cut the beer off at five, though, isn't it? That could be a problem. They don't cut the beer off because it's a seven. They cut it to n minus two, or x minus two, or whatever variable letter you want.

All right, so one factor is you want to be able to charge your family as much as you can. A second factor, though, so that's one angle is the business angle. All right, I'm bored of the business angle. I already hate it. Now, the competitive angle is much more interesting. You are assuming that, on average, the home team is going to be the better team because they have the home field advantage. So they're roughly a 54 to 46 or 53 to 47 favorite. Now

of course sometimes that won't be the case. Sometimes the Reds will be hosting the Dodgers and the Dodgers will be favored. But in many more games than not, the home team will be favored. And because baseball is absurd, it takes a huge number of trials before true talent really emerges. And so in that sense, you want the longest game you can possibly have. This is the equivalent of the Ken Jennings opponent's strategy in Jeopardy, where some opponents very cleverly would take as long as they could to, say, choose a question or to answer a daily double or whatever. They would stall because they figured the fewer questions there were in that match, the better chance that they could flukily topple the

better player. And of course, Jennings would benefit from a greater number of trials. There's also this cynical way that some people think that basketball teams do this when they're underdogs. All right, so we've got the—that's the case for 18 innings. And if it was one game, I think you would see the home team choose 18 innings. Now, here's the most significant thing, though, and this is why the answer is not 18 innings. You're only playing your opponent that day and maybe two other days. The next day, you're going to be facing a new opponent. And if you're playing 18 inning games and your new opponent is playing two inning games,

they're going to come up and beat the tar out of you because your guys are all going to be injured from having to play twice as long a season. The relievers are going to be exhausted. having to play twice as many twice on a season that they've believers are gonna be exhausted you had use every picture uh... they meanwhile uh... were able to just you know read you know they played two innings or whatever and they're ready to go and so that to me is a much bigger disadvantage uh... that you would have

other than the advantage you gain from lengthening the number of trials uh... against your inferior opponent in this one game. So all that said, I think that you would want the game to be as short as possible without basically killing your business model. So I would guess six or seven innings would be the norm, and it would be almost universally used. Yeah, I was going to say seven innings also, but do you think there'd be some variation, right? Like what if you had a team that had a, it would depend maybe on the starter that day. Like what if you have Clayton Kershaw going that day, then maybe you want the

game to end as soon as Clayton Kershaw's out. So you want it to be a six inning game or a five inning game because you get good Kershaw the whole time. Whereas if you have a bad starter, if your fifth starter is going, then maybe you want it to be a bullpen game if you have a good bullpen or you don't want it to be about the starter so much. I'm not sure I necessarily agree with that. I mean, the fact that Kershaw is going to be able to pitch much deeper into the game get you to the bullpen bridge as opposed to say that opponent who you might only expect to go five and a third and then it's gonna have to

find some fifth reliever to get to that open bridge but to get to that bullpen and shouldn't you know that the lady has to it's sort of like how when tiger woods used to be a lot of hit the ball so much farther than everybody else. It's not that he then wanted the holes to be shorter so that he could hit a lot of holes in one. He wanted long holes where the advantage that he gained from his length would kind of multiply as the hole was played out.

And so I could see the team, I mean, you wouldn't want to, if you went 18 innings, it would basically neutralize that because now two-thirds of the game is going to be non-Kershawed and you guys are equal. But I could see a nine-inning game maybe being even more beneficial for the Kershaw starter than the seven-inning game. I'm not sure. Possibly. So if you think that it would be a universal six or seven innings, then do you think home field advantage would be the same as it is now? There'd just be no difference because everyone would just basically do the same thing?

No, it would shrink a little bit just because the true talent of the home team over the road team would have less time to manifest. So it would kind of get slightly shrunken. I wonder if you'd have an easier or a harder time attracting free agents if you were known as a team that played shorter games, could you get guys to come because you can promise them that the game is five innings and they can go home and they have to work less or do baseball players actually want to play baseball? Would they not want that?

Or would they be worried about how it would impact their market if they hit free agency and they don't have the counting stats because they played five-inning games all season. Hmm. Yeah. I think baseball players would rather just play less. I think that they would give up the count. I mean, this would be a world where counting stats would be,

would sort of cease to have any value because they're playing different numbers of innings in games. Right, or you'd have to adjust. Yeah, I think the prestige of the counting stat would go way down, and it would be much more about the prestige of the rate stat. And baseball players, I think it's pretty universally true that they hate playing baseball. Not so much because the game is bad, but because they're exhausted all the time. Okay, Playindex, what fun, interesting streak are we spoiling today?

All right, so you know that Alex Rodriguez hit that pinch hit home run the other day. And it was the first time he'd ever hit a pinch hit home run. And so I thought, oh, that's interesting, because I bet he's probably pinch hit a couple or a few dozen times in his career. To have never hit one is maybe interesting. And so I looked to see how Alex Rodriguez had done as a pinch hitter in his career. And do you have any idea how he has done? I do not. There's a pinch hit penalty of some sort, right?

So I don't know. His number's minus 10% or something. Okay, so good guess. So he, bad guess, but good guess. So he, bad guess, but good guess. So he is currently hitting 118, 250, 294 in his career as a pinch hitter. And that's with the home run. Before the home run, he was hitting 063, 211, 063 for a 273 slugging OPS, which is 29% of his overall OPS.

How many plate appearances is that? That was his 20th. Oh, okay. And so I first wondered, oh, I wonder if this is like how it is when you're a superstar or when you're anybody. If you're not used to pinch hitting,

I wonder if that's just, you're terrible at it. So I very quickly looked at some other players and they're all over the board. Ken Griffey Jr. was almost exactly the same pinch hitting as he was. Otherwise, Jeff Bagwell was a superstar pinch hitting. He had an 1,100 OPS. Most of these guys have somewhere between 30 and 80 plate appearances.

A-Rod's a little low. And then some other guys are worse. Ortiz was about 80% of his OPS. Bonds was very good and yet about 80% of his OPS. Bonds was very good and yet also 75% of his OPS. Frank Thomas, 65% of his OPS. And then Manny Ramirez was horrible, 116, 278, 256, 54% of his overall OPS. So he's even worse than A-Rod now is, although much better than A-Rod was. And so then I wanted to see whether this was a superstar thing or what, if there's anything at all about these superstars. So I took every player who got at least 25 plate appearances as a pinch hitter since 1988, and I did this by going

to the splits finder, and the split I chose was as pinch hitter. I set a minimum plate appearances of 25, and I clicked on that little thing that lets you compare to their overall stats in the column next to it. And I got, I don't know, I have 1,500 players who have 25 or more pinch hit plate appearances since then. And first off, one interesting thing you should know. First off is that we are currently living, we are observing perhaps the greatest pinch hitter of all time right now. Really? Yeah. You probably didn't even know this.

I didn't. But if you want something to follow, the best OPS of any hitter as a pinch hitter since 1988 in 25 or more plate appearances is the Astros' Evan Gattis. Huh. Yeah, he's hit 360, 450, 900 more or less. So is that relative to his regular numbers or not? No, this is raw, okay? Okay.

He is the best pinch hitter just period four home runs in 29 plate appearances and uh 1368 ops which by the way we set a split a split minimum here of 15 of 25 plate appearances and i still couldn't find anybody in this group of 1500 people who could produce an OPS as good as Barry Bonds in 2004. That's pretty... I mean, there's like hundreds of people here who have 30 plate appearances roughly in this split and not one of them in those 30 plate appearances could do what Barry Bonds did. In fact, only two people, Evan Gaddis and bizarrely Kurt Suzuki, even did manage 1,300 OPS, which now that I notice it, which Bonds did over a four-year period. But Bonds' OPS in that four-year period was 1,368, which is exactly what Evan Gaddis is in his 29th late appearance.

Fun fact. Fun fact. Fun Barry Bonds fact. All right, so Evan Gaddis is the best. Mark McGuire is the fourth best. is in his 29th late appearance. Fun fact. Fun fact. Fun, very fun fact. All right, so Evan Gattis is the best. Mark McGuire is the fourth best. Ryan Howard is the seventh best. And a whole bunch of scrubs are in here, too, like Kurt Suzuki is the second best. Nelson Centovigna. Anyway, so, and the worst, in case you're wondering, the worst, even worse than A-Rod was,

is Jose Lopez, the Mariners' Jose Lopez, who had a career line as a pinch hitter in 39 plate appearances, which is not nothing, of 0-77, 0-77, 0-77. In those 39 plate appearances, not one extra base hit, not one walk, and only three hits. All right, Carlos Zambrano better, by the way, and also made it onto this list, which means he got at least 25 plate appearances as a pinch hitter.

So anyway, I took their OPS as a pinch hitter and then their OPS overall, and I rephrased it as a ratio, more or less. And so now I have the best pinch hitters relative to how they were as hitters. And I'll give you those, and then I'll give you one last little thing. I'm surprised that Jose Lopez had 39 pinch hit plate appearances. He only played for nine years, and he was an AL player for almost all of that, and he was not a particularly good hitter. So 39 times in those years, the Mariners, I guess, mostly had a worse hitter than Jose Lopez with the pinch hit penalty or so they thought.

That's surprising. Yeah, fair point, fair observation. 39 is not that many, though. I mean, there's guys on here with 200 and 300, but it's still a lot. All right, so the best pinch hitters as pinch hitters. So we are going to say that this is different than the first one. These are the best pinch hitters relative to how good they actually were in history are number one, Kurt Suzuki, number two, Nelson Santovigna, and number three, Evan Gattis.

We talked about them. So number four, Calvin Murray, who was a horrible ball player. Number five, Lou Merloni, who was also a very poor ball player. And he got 39 plate appearances. How did he get 39 pinch hit plate appearances? Corey DeHaan, who I never even heard of, is on here. Brandon Wood is on here. Brandon Wood, good ball player, is a pinch hitter.

In 25 plate appearances, the very minimum, he slugged 545. He had two home runs in those 25, and that carried him, although there was an awful lot wrong with him in those 25, too. He had a very low batting average, and he only drew one walk. Tom Barrett, Jeff Manto, Josh Rutledge. And, of course, you do have a, if you're a worse player of worst player it's going to be easier to get high on this list because you know very bad opiates to start with and we're doing you know comparisons here

uh... so the probably the best pinch hitter among good baseball players uh... is depending on how you find good baseball players would either be alex rios who is eleven thought our list uh... with uh... twelve hundred opiates as a pinch hitter in 28 player pinches, or Eddie Murray, who is 16th on here. So probably one of those guys.

Bo Jackson is 21st, so maybe Bo Jackson would be the case. And then down to the other side, the worst pinch hitters ever besides Jose Lopez would be Andy Van Slyke, who is the second worst just above Lopez by ratio. Carlos Gonzalez, who is 077, 172, 077. Kent Caminiti, who got 70 tries as a pinch hitter and had a 238 OPS. Carlos Zambrano, who even though he starts with a pitcher's OPS, still manages to get it. Carlos Zambrano was a 686 OPS in his career as a hitter, but 207 as a pitcher.

As a pinch hitter. As a pinch hitter, yeah. So that didn't work. Torrey Hunter does very, very poorly here. He's very near the bottom. Jose Canseco does very poorly. And, you know, i very briefly thought oh well maybe this is like a thing um like certain guys are better at it and certain guys are worse at it for some reason or another and maybe you could find it but basically

all the guys at the extreme ends uh just have fewer plate appearances and therefore much wilder swings in these sorts of splits. So I sorted them by plate appearance instead of by quality. And then I averaged the absolute differences in the OPSs and I averaged them in 25 player blocks. And so like the 25 players who have the most played appearances as pinch hitters, they only have an average absolute difference of about 5% from their OPS. And then when you get all the way down to the bottom and you have these trenches of players with only 25 or 30, the average absolute difference is like 35 or 40 points.

So it's clear that these, this is just noise. This is all like, I don't think that you can say anything about Alex Rodriguez preparation or ability to, to, you know, focus or anything like that. I would love to vilify some people and turn others into heroes, but I think this is just a interesting, uh, interesting way of grouping dice rolls for each player. Yeah, I was going to ask if maybe there is a correlation between how often you pinch hit and your ratio between pinch hitting and non-pinch hitting appearances, either because you get used to pinch hitting and you get better at it, or the guys who happen to have more luck when they're pinch hitting get

to pinch hit more often because managers concluded that they have some pinch hitting ability or something? I eyeballed it looking at that, and it doesn't seem to be the case that there is. It's basically, like you said, there's a very small pinch hitting penalty of you know like two percent or something like that that seems to be fairly consistent all the way down and and uh the guys who are at the top are about there they all have a percentage of you know 98 99 100 101 um and then the guys at the bottom are all over the place but as groups they're sort of the same let me real quick the penalty you can go read the research if you're wondering but it's partly because you're always facing the pitcher in your first plate appearance

against him in in the pinch hit plate appearance it's the first time you've seen him in that game whereas your regular numbers include lots of plate appearances where you're seeing the pitcher for the second or the third time in a game and therefore you have a bit of a leg up so that's part of it and part of it is that maybe if you weren't starting it's because you were injured or old or otherwise impaired for some reason and therefore you would expect the person who didn't start to be worse for some reason, or it's just being cold and not having played the field or warmed up the way you normally would or whatever, some combination of those factors. Yeah, there's essentially no correlation between number of played appearances

and your OPS to pinch-hitting OPS ratio. All right. That answers my question. So what, Evan Gattis will now go 0 for his next 10 as a pinch hitter? Probably. I doubt it. I think he'll probably do the opposite. I think he'll go 10 for his next 10.

I think he'll go his usual thing, minus 5%. Okay, support the Play Index. Use the coupon code BP when you go to Baseball Reference and subscribe to the Play Indexex using that coupon code, get the $30 discount on a one-year subscription. We highly recommend it as always. Okay, question from Jeff. Baseball has a lot of terminology that is necessary to describe the game, but there are also some non-technical terms in the baseball vernacular that range from less useful to downright annoying. I personally don't like

referring to a no-hitter and no-hit bid as a no-no. It just sounds childish and not the fun sort of childish. I've also found that the term slump has lost usefulness as we've gained better data. I thought of this during the Betts-Bogarts discussion, where Betts seemed to have a better stretch of poor results despite hard contact, bogart struggles last year were related to issues handling sliders or general inconsistency in the approach both would be called slumps when the causes couldn't have been more different the word slump implies fault on the player but only describes a small sample of results and generally ignores walks are there any other not so technical baseball terms that you wish would just go away. Are there any you particularly like for no good reason or dislike? Do you think that, I agree about slump.

Do you think that cold streak has the same issue? I don't think it does. I think cold streak implies that your luck is running cold, or at least it includes that possibility. I don't know. I don't see the distinction really. Well, what would you use to describe a player who's not getting base hits? Yeah, you need a word.

Even if it could be misconstrued or misleading, you need something. You could say that you're cold at the blackjack tables or you're cold at playing craps or whatever. True. It's a hot hand in craps, right? So to me, hot and and cold there's a luck element baked in or or agreed upon yeah maybe there's something to that running old you know trying to think of others i i don't care for ace i feel like the ace used to be a a less fraught term or

a less complicated term it seems like in the last several years, Ace has been, I don't know, I've been more conscious of it being restricted to a certain class of pitcher. Like the, I googled baseball vernacular just to kind of look for some ones that I don't like. And there's an MLB.com page with baseball terms and phrases. And the very first one on that list is ace. And it just says a team's best starting pitcher, which is a very uncomplicated way. It's a convenient thing to say that he's that team's ace. There's no issue with that. That's a useful term.

But there is so much pressure, it seems, to restrict ace to an elite starting pitcher. Like, it's not just the team's best starting pitcher. It is a starting pitcher who's one of the best starting pitchers every year, and he has been for a long time, and he's got ace stuff. And certain guys who are their team's best pitcher are not actually aces, and there's this whole debate about what constitutes an ace, and I find it to be a very unproductive discussion most of the time it's it's unproductive partly because we spend half

of that discussion arguing over the terms of the word instead of right like if we agreed over the terms of terms of the word if it just meant one or the other and we didn't have to have that discussion that would be fun right yeah right it's like most valuable player you have to kind of parse what valuable means which is awful it could mean just the best player it could be context sensitive everyone interprets it a different way so it's this whole problem that you don't get when you just say who's the best player most valuable player is a totally different thing for some people. So that's a term I wish that award would just be renamed

unless you actually want it to be totally context sensitive like a win probability added best player. That would be fine, but that's a different thing. I don't mind the word ace. And while I agree that I prefer not to argue over what it means, to me there is a right one, and it is a good term. And I would like to continue to call pitchers aces for the rest of my life. And hopefully I won't have to get in arguments every time.

But if I do have to, that's part of the rule. Which is it for you? It's a great pitcher. It's a great level pitcher. It has nothing to do with the other guys on your staff. Yeah, okay. And that is, as I understand it, it is A, the history of the word. The word was used to describe a dominant pitcher. It comes from an early, well, I'm going to read. Getting at your baseball dictionary. Yes, I am. In 1869, pitcher Asa Brainerd won 56 out of 57 games for baseball's first professional team. From then on, any pitcher with a dazzling string of wins was called an Asa, which later became Ace. Some have questioned this as folk etymology.

Recent work by Peter Morris finds references to Braenard as acey in game accounts. And so not only that, but even though nobody knows that that's the origin, I think we probably think when we hear the word ace for a pitcher,

we think of ace in a deck of cards, and it probably helps that, it probably has helped that term survive that an ace in a deck of cards is the best card you can play. And you don't call your king an ace

just because it's the best card in your hand. You don't say, I'm playing my ace, and then lay down your nine. It's an ace or it's not an ace. And so it seems totally legitimate to me to use the word ace to describe a great pitcher. Now, I also have in my life used it the other way, and I don't really mind if people do that, but I would hate to lose the term just because we have this debate too often. Yeah. Well, you need something because you can't just

say number one pitcher over and over. That's always an awkward thing to write. Mine would be, I think that magic numbers sadly have to disappear. We can't have magic numbers in this world anymore. They don't make sense because of the the playoff format or what yeah yeah that's a shame i like magic numbers yeah i uh i i know i liked counting magic numbers when i was a kid i liked it a great deal now i don't even look at standings i look at playoff odds yeah all right last one from ben he says let's say in an effort to shorten games, MLB outlawed pickoff throws to any of the bases. This would eliminate the drawn out sequences we sometimes see where one at bat can take five minutes because there's a pickoff attempt between

each pitch, sometimes more than one per pitch. To even the playing field, baseball also outlaws lead offs, but stealing is still allowed. Base runners would just have to stay on the base until the pitcher begins their motion to home. Base runners would always know that the pitcher is going to home because pick-offs aren't allowed, but wouldn't be allowed to go until the pitcher begins their motions after coming set. Pitch outs are still allowed. What effect would this have on the game? Would we see an increase in stolen bases because the base runners know the pitcher is going home or would they decrease because they now must run the full 90 feet between bases? I think they would decrease. I wanted to say they'd increase because I've always

fantasized about having a sprinter who like started at first base on like, like out of the sprinters block and just exploded towards second base. But I feel like you could do that right now and have the first base coach just yell, go when it's time to go. And for right-handed pitchers, first movement is to the plate. As soon as the guy moves right now, you could go, right? Unless he's doing the knee pop, which some of them do. So I don't see there being enough of an advantage to make up for the extra 12 feet.

Probably not. I guess not. I mean, you're increasing the length that you have to run by a significant amount. I mean, I don't know what, 12% or something in that range. So you can add 12% onto the time that it takes and maybe even more than that, right? Because if you have a lead, you can kind of get a running start a little bit whereas i don't know i guess you're if you're if you have to stay on the base the whole time you could just be like a sprinter at the block and be poised to go like that so maybe you wouldn't actually get a worse jump but you would have to run quite a bit

farther and i don't know that the predictability would outweigh that. So yeah, probably fewer stolen bases. Okay, so that's it for today. We welcome your emails for next week at podcast at baseballperspectives.com, Facebook group, facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild. We will be back tomorrow.