Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 682: How Bryce Harper Broke Out

Episode Date: May 22, 2015

Ben and Sam banter about earthquakes, Tim Lincecum, and baseball nightmares, then talk to Dan Rozenson about Bryce Harper.

We're gonna shake, we're gonna quake, cause we got the baddest crew that we could make. We only two of y'all, the drummer's gonna tap, we're gonna sing it, and we'll rock this mother to the max. And that's a fact. House quite, come on, say it. Oh, come on. You can't follow it. We got the baddest jam, never lie. Everybody shut up, listen to the band So I'm in Sonoma now, and I've already experienced my first earthquake.

It's a little on the nose. It's like if you had some character in something come to California and you wanted to establish that he is in California, you would have an earthquake right after he gets off the plane, and that is basically what happened to me. I haven't even heard of it. Well, it wasn't a big one. It probably wasn't felt where you were. it wasn't a big one probably wasn't wasn't felt where you were it was like a it was like a four point something i've probably felt i don't know

five earthquakes in the last 15 years it's uh and none of them has been remotely scary it's been uh you know i was in 1989 one and uh it was big, it was scary, it changed everything. But after that, I expected a lot more earthquakes. I thought that a corner had been turned earthquake-wise. And I remember I would, you know, there's this sort of, if you have the earthquake phobia, as some people do, mainly non-Californians do, then it's kind of a constant tension in your life thinking, oh, at any moment, an earthquake. And so I would, to get control of this, I would, when I would be lying in bed where there was nothing that could fall on me, I would just sit

there and ponder an earthquake happening right then. And it felt so relaxing because I was half asleep. I was in a warm bed. And I knew that the whole earth could shake. The whole earth could shake and nothing could hurt me from it. And I felt in control of the earth at that moment. There's a roof. A roof could fall on you. I guess that's a remote possibility. A, very, very remote.

I mean, you're not really worried about roofs. B, if an earthquake hit, obviously I would put a pillow over my head. And, you know, probably if a roof fell on me would put a pillow over my head and you know a roof probably if a roof fell on me if a normal household roof fell on you uh as long as it didn't hit you in the head i mean a roof isn't that heavy is it um i think you'd be okay no it depends on the roof but that's anyway that's the standard earthquake procedure that's what they tell you to do put a pillow over your head i felt like i had uh i like I had conquered the earth. I was bigger than it shaking. Anyway, so that became a very relaxing and a very soothing thing to think about, to lay in bed and just think about,

oh, maybe an earthquake will happen in the next 10 seconds and I'll be fine. I would just think about that until I fell asleep. Because of that, I do feel ripped off over the lack of earthquakes. It does bother me that there hasn't been an earthquake while I've been lying in bed, to my knowledge, since then. Never. Sometimes there are earthquakes but I'm at a desk or I'm walking or whatever. I keep waiting for that bad earthquake to come and it doesn't happen. It's frustrating. Well, it actually did happen to me. I was in bed at the time. I was just lying there. I wasn't sleeping, going to sleep, but I was lying

on a bed for a moment. All right. Yeah. So we're going to have Dan Rosenson from Baseball Perspectives on in a few minutes to talk about Bryce Harper. He wrote an article called How Bryce Harper Beat the Book on Bryce Harper. and he's going to say that article to us. And before we get there, just a couple things from the last few days. We're not really tracking post-game celebrations anymore, so the Nationals squirting chocolate syrup on each other, I guess, is something that I don't even need to say, but I just said it anyway. It sounds very messy. It's evidently a huge ordeal for clubhouse attendance. The Mariners signed Kevin Gregg.

So my little farewell to Kevin Gregg from a couple weeks ago proved premature, which I should have expected because Kevin Gregg keeps finding jobs somehow. Kevin Gregg is so forgettable in my life that I forgot that we talked about. I was like, oh, the Reds cut him? I had no idea. We talked about it, though. I now remember what I said.

I talked about how he was in 2005. He was underrated. So Tim Lincecum, remember how we talked about Tim Lincecum before this season? It was his dad, yeah. He was working with his dad, and did we believe that that would do anything for him? Would he be any better because of his dad? We both said no, essentially. And here's Tim Lincecum through eight starts with a 2.08 ERA. Yeah, there were two questions. One was, do you think that his dad,

being reunited with his dad will help him? The other was if he pitches really well, how likely will you think it is then? Which are two very different questions, right? You could have... So imagine that you have a scenario where only people who wear sweatshirt get raptured, okay? Now, if I say, oh, that guy's wearing a sweatshirt, what do you think are the chances he's gonna get raptured. Now, if I say, oh, that guy's wearing a sweatshirt, what do you think are the chances he's going to get raptured? Well, the chances are basically nil. They're almost completely nil. There are millions of people wearing sweatshirts. None of them has ever been raptured. And so the chances are nil. But if he is raptured and you said, oh, do you think it was

the sweatshirt? You'd go, yes. You say like with almost 100% certainty that the sweatshirt came into play. Right? Yeah. So now that you have a thing that has happened, Lincecum has pitched much better. And there weren't many things that were going to make Lincecum pitch better. There was basically he was either going to start throwing harder, he was going to figure out some sort of plan, he was going to random fluctuation his way into a series of good dice rolls, or he was going to get Babbitt lucky, more or less, right? Those are the four ways that people get better. And if he was, I'm going

to just jump ahead to the question. If he was throwing harder, I told my dad this, we had this conversation. I don't think I mentioned the rapture analogy. But if he was throwing harder, I would give that to his dad. Yeah. If he had tremendous command, I guess that's the fifth thing, is suddenly he had command, maybe a mechanical change or just repeating his delivery better. If he had tremendous command, just repeating his delivery betters me. If he had tremendous command, I would say maybe his dad. If he had the random fluctuation, we wouldn't know that.

That doesn't become apparent until it regresses. If he had the Babbitt block, I'd say no. And if he had a better plan, like if he was, you know, suddenly he was like throwing change-ups on 2-0 or something, something that he hadn't been doing, then I would maybe think about it being his dad. And so far as I can tell, he hasn't added velocity. That was the one thing that I definitely would have given to his dad.

He's lost velocity again. Yeah, so it's not velocity. It's not clear that he's pitching better is the thing. And it does seem like this is probably the Babbitt explanation, although not Babbitt, more fly ball. Yeah, right. Run for fly ball rate. Yeah, he's allowed, what, one home run in 47.2 winnings,

47.2 thirds, yeah, and lower BabbIP too. And that could be a command thing. That is probably the thing that is most connected to command and least easy to spot. So it could be command. I'm not ruling out that it's command. I'm not ruling out, although I haven't noticed it, that it could be a new plan. But it does seem kind of like he's not

actually pitching better and he's kind of getting a little a little luck a lot lucky yeah i mean his his first pitch strike rate is not it's down he's not throwing more strikes he's he's walked a few more guys and he's not striking out more guys and he's not getting a ton more grounders, really. He's getting a few more grounders, I guess. But yeah, if you look at whatever his defense independent stuff is, it's depending on the one you look at, it's not really much different from his last few years. But his last few years, he's had the big gap between his ERA and those things. And this year, well, he still still does but in the other direction so yeah

i don't i don't know i haven't looked to see if he's like throwing in a different location or something and there is no great way to look and see if he's if he's has better command you could look and see if he's like grooving more pitches or fewer pitches so maybe maybe there's something to it. Well, so how willing are we to give his dad any credit for this, which we don't even know what this is really? I'm not, having not looked at the command question in sufficient detail, I feel it would be disrespectful for me, of all people, uneducated as I am, to dismiss the dad factor. So I will say that I'm open to it.

If forced at threat of non-rapture to make a pick, I would say not dad. Okay. All right. And lastly, you saw the story. Did you see the story about Matt Joyce? He missed an Angels game. He was scratched from the lineup because he thought a day game was a night game and he showed up late this seems like I just what

do you think the most common baseball player baseball related nightmare is like I might maybe I'll ask some baseball players what their baseball nightmare is like literally what nightmares they have that are related to baseball because this seems like every nightmare i have which is just like i i'm supposed to write something and i didn't know or i had a test and i somehow didn't know and now i'm just showing up and and it's starting and i didn't realize which is weird because like that i don't that never really happens it's not like that happens to me all the time but that is what i dream about sometimes i don't have like the dream where i'm naked and doing something in front of everyone i don't i don't know why i'm a never nude in my nightmares but do you have do you think that this is a common baseball player fear that

you i don't know how it happens because it seems like a pretty pretty simple thing to check and see what time your game is the next day that's like the thing that your life revolves around but well a few things now whether you have it as a nightmare a lot is different than whether it ever happens i think it does i think this is a common nightmare and the reason i think it's a common nightmare is that baseball players i assume sleep weird hours and sleep in in in snips a lot of times like probably they're sleeping on planes and it the time is is weird and you probably do lose track of time you're changing time zones a lot and so probably you are thinking subconsciously not so much is it a day game or a night game as what time is it? You probably lose track of whether it's actually night when you're asleep,

and you probably worry about sleeping through a game for that reason. I would think that the most common baseball player nightmare would be pitch coming at your face. I don't know if they have that. I don't know if that's a long enough narrative to sustain a dream. Because my nightmare, my recurring nightmare is also

one that plays out over the course of an entire semester. In this six minute dream I grow a beard and everything. It's a very long dream and it takes a long time. Time is slowed down or compressed to one or the other in dreams. And so I don't know that you could have a dream about an eighth-tenths of a second event.

That would be like the thing that wakes you up at the end of whatever the nightmare is. So if not that, other than missing a game, let's see. Not having a glove, I bet, would be one. Just like just weirdly being bad. Just like missing fly balls and striking out at everything. So do you know a dream that I used to have a lot? I'm sorry, everybody. I'm so sorry.

Ben made me do it. I used to dream just before fantasy baseball draft season would start. I would dream that I, it was like the ninth round, and I'd be like, who should I get? Who should I get? Who should I get? Oh, Mike Trout's available. And then I would take Mike Trout,

and then it would come around to the 10th. I'd be like, who should I get? Who should I get? Oh, Clayton Kershaw's available. And then I'd wake up, and I didn't have that roster. You just combine talking about your dreams and talking about your fantasy team in the same anecdote. The two deadly conversational sins. What happens at the end of your months-long dream?

I just wake up. This one is a school thing. And it's like I failed to do the journaling. I have years of journaling to do. And I can't graduate unless I to do the journaling. I have years of journaling to do, and I can't graduate unless I've done the journaling, which I'm supposed to do every day, which is my life. That is exactly why my life is not better, is that I don't do the day-in-day-outbeat management

of writing and journalism that I should do, and then when it's too late, I have to do everything on deadline. Anyway, secondly, getting away from the dream aspect of it. If I'm understanding this correctly, I think Joyce has a serious beef with the discipline. They play Sunday in Baltimore, travel to Toronto for a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday series. And it's a day game on Monday? It makes absolutely no sense. It's such an outlier event that, to me, it is definitely on the club

to have 17 public service announcements, to pay for an advertisement on local TV that they're going to be watching when they go to bed that night, to have wake-up service, to have somebody knocking on doors, to be texting them. I would have this thing so pounded into their heads because this is a freak show schedule. A Monday into your first day in a city and it's a day game? That's weird. All right.

Good. Okay. You're going to blame Joyce, the professional baseball player, for not having time. I mean, especially given the fact that his whole life is someone goes, stand in this line, get on this bus, get on this airplane, drink this thing. You have to be here at this time. Like, just have like a Google calendar telling him about the one day game in Toronto. Feels like a little ambitious, in my opinion. There hasn't really been a part of Matt Joyce's season that hasn't been nightmarish.

The whole thing is kind of. The most common nightmare for ballplayers is it's May 21st and you're hitting 155, 203, 236 as a DH. That's the dream. He had a funny tweet about this. Did you see his funny tweet about this? No. I'll send you his funny tweet about this. He tweeted... You are really optimistic if you think I'm going to find this funny.

You know that I'm not going to find this funny. It's a ball player tweet, so lower your standards for humor. No being late is no joke but I take my joke very seriously I apologize to the fans at Angels in League And then he has a picture of Six alarms being set Alright Alright as promised

We are going to talk about Bryce Harper now And to do that we're bringing in Dan Rosenson who writes For Baseball Prospectus and Helps out behind the scenes at Brooks Baseball. You can find him on Twitter at 6ToolPlayer. Hello, Dan. Hey, very good to be with you.

All right, so we have talked a bunch about Bryce Harper in the last couple weeks, and we haven't done it all that analytically. We talked about how he's walking more, and we talked about how he's turned a corner we did some serious corner turning analysis we haven't really looked at how he's better or why he's better or what he's hitting better than he was and you wrote an article for bp this week about exactly that topic so what did you find about the new bryce harper yeah well obviously there's so much you can talk about him without even going into things like how he's approaching pitches. I mean, I was actually at the game where he got tossed for being out of the box. So what I found was that he has really made a big improvement this year

in how he handles off-speed pitches and breaking balls. I remember when the Yankees came to Washington in 2012, Andy Pettit just took him to town. He just kept pounding low and outside with cutters, and Harper was out in front consistently, swung wildly, looked like he didn't belong in the major leagues. And, you know, if a guy left a fastball out over the plate, he would crush it. But he kept struggling, especially with lefties, getting these softer pitches away.

And this is something that continued actually 2013, 2014. And it's not until this year that he's actually hitting breaking balls harder than any other pitch type. He's slugging over 800 against them this year. that he's actually hitting breaking balls harder than any other pitch type. He's slugging over 800 against them this year. And if you saw a few days ago, there was that Nate Evaldi slider that was like two inches above the ground that he somehow hit for a home run. And he's got much better plate coverage. So it's really part of that maturation process we've been waiting for, I think. And that's a big deal if Bryce Harper couldn't hit breaking balls

because that's all he saw the last couple of years, right? I remember looking. There was a big difference between how Trout and Harper were pitched when they came up and I guess throughout their careers so far in that Harper never sees fastballs right I mean he sees one of the the lowest fastball percentages of anyone yes actually I noticed that as soon as he came up he was getting breaking balls in fastball counts and he actually he had the sixth lowest percentage of fastballs of any type in his rookie year. I mean, the guys, the guys, the only guys ahead of him were like Josh Hamilton, Pedro

Alvarez, guys who would swing at almost anything. Yeah. So is that a sign of instant respect or is it a sign that people knew he couldn't hit breaking balls? Because it can be both. I mean, in general, if a guy has really really good power pitchers will stay away from him maybe they won't throw him as many fastballs but as you say it could just be a guy who will chase or just had the book on him is that he doesn't do as well on those pitches you know i i wish i knew a little

bit more about how guys were throwing at him in the minor leagues yeah i would guess it is a i would guess it is a bit of both. Obviously, he was so well known, the power tool was what he was leading with. And so I would imagine guys were curious to see, you know, they almost probably assumed he could hit their fastball. So they wanted to see what they could get away with. So is it all outside pitches that he is now? Is it just the fact that it's breaking balls, or is it the location more? Is it pitch type or location? Because I don't know whether he struggled against all outside pitches before, or whether it's just the fact that breaking balls tend to be thrown outside more, and he was bad against those. Which of those is it?

He was especially weak on breaking balls in 2013 2014 his slugging percentage anywhere in the strike zone against breaking balls was i think 332 and outside overall he wasn't bad but it wasn't as good as he was over the middle of the plate is uh from 2012 to 2014 his slugging percentage on the outer third for the plate in the strike zone the six thirty one so that's not that at all this year it's two-and-a-half times that i mean just a world of difference he's hitting as good off the plate outside as he was on the other for the past few years and uh... just uh... for the you know sake of of honesty uh... i'm imagining we're still going to fairly

small numbers of of both pitches seen of each type and uh... that you know if you regressed this you might not have uh... quite a bulletproof explanation so how big are the samples are talking about music purchasing yeah well obviously yes still relatively early in the year and actually ryan parker who i asked uh... asked for his take just to see if Harper was doing anything differently. I mean, Harper's constantly tweaking how he swings, how he tries to get his timing. There were only 18 pitches in the off-the-plate outside group.

If anyone's curious about all this, they can go on Brooks Baseball on Harper's hitter card, They can go on Brooks Baseball, on Harper's hitter card, and it'll have a strike zone map where it shows each sort of area, how many pitches he's seen. They can see the slugging percentage. So we're talking like a couple dozen pitches in each sort of ninth of the strike zone, if you imagine it as a three-by-three grid. And so this is, as we often hear, a game of adjustments, and so this is uh... as we often hear game of adjustments and then adjusting to the adjustments is there any sign yet of how pictures are

responding to this what is the new way to pitch harper well he's actually seeing more fat balls now than he ever has and that's actually what first got me interested in exploring the topic is that so they were throwing him or fastballs and i thought wait a minute minute, he's never been seeing fastballs. What could be behind that? I mean, it's very small sample sizes on the inner half of the plate right now. I would be interested to see if guys would, you know, it's going to take some courage, but I think throwing fastballs inside to keep him honest might actually be important now because if he starts being able to sit on

the outer half of the plate where he's clearly getting comfortable then you know obviously he will regress somewhat but they're going to have to learn something new and and is it more that i mean is it that the fastball inside is the pitch that uh is going to get him out or is it more just that they'd gotten so predictable that he was able to basically zero in on one one portion of the plate and so it's more than anything about being able to show him every pitch in every location it at least at least sometimes well what comes to mind is uh... remember a few years ago perchilling said it how he approached robinson canal

you can always a guy who is just so terrible to plan against because he can hit almost anything in any count. He's just so balanced. And what Schilling said was no repeats, no patterns. You don't double up on any pitches. You don't have any consistent pattern of approaching a guy like that. Because if you do do they'll figure out a way to beat you now harper clearly is not quite in that category yet of someone who has that much balance and control but if he continues to move in that direction i think that's kind of what pitchers will have to do is is really try to make him guess they're probably if i had to hypothesize

my hypothesis would be that a year from now the book on him will still be throw him breaking pitches away and there's probably a reason why that pitch has has baffled him from the beginning even you know going back to the andy pettit game which was sort of pre a lot of the tweaking i remember that game too because that game was a corner turnt as it was. He was so good at that point. He had a 922 OPS for his career going into that game and even excluding that game, so not holding that against him, over his next 50 starts, he hit 210, 284, 298. I remember that game being really held up as like the, the moment that he got like sort of broken. Didn't Ben, what did you say, Ben? Didn't you write like an unfiltered

about that game? I have no idea. I don't know. Yeah, you did. It was like how to get the headline was like how to get Bryce Harper out every time. Oh yeah. What did I say? I don't know. I wouldn't be surprised because, yeah, he went 0 for 7 that game with five strikeouts. It was an extra inning game, and he just had nothing. Yeah, and then so, like, from that point on, he was, like, pretty horrible for a couple of months. Anyway, the point is, I mean, like, if you had to guess, wouldn't you still guess that that's going to be the pitch that pitchers are going to always try to get him out with? It's just that you have to sort of treat him like an adult. He deserves a little respect. You have to at least show him the other things at some point,

or he's going to get to it, right? It's like wanting John Lester to just throw once over to first kind of a thing. Right. Well, one thing we have to remember is this is Bryce Harper healthy. And Bryce Harper healthy is probably a different animal than if he's got a nagging injury in his wrist or something. And, you know, if that happens, it might be easier to take advantage of him some way, either to try to get him to go back on the adjustments he's been making that almost slow his bat down, which is, you know, it's unusual advice for a hitter, but with someone with as much bat speed as him, that's sometimes how you have to go.

So things like that, I think, could definitely expose him a little more. Yeah, I just looked up that post. He saw 19 pitches that day, and 16 of them were sliders, and he struck out four times, and then he got one fastball and got a hit on it. So that was how to get him out at the time. I didn't know that that was the way to get him out. I always thought the way to get him out was fastballs up,

because to me it seems like whenever I watch him, it seems like he's always chasing a fastball up. And every once in a while, he catches up to him better than anybody I've ever seen, but that's a really hard pitch to catch up on. So sometimes he lashes one the other way off the wall, but a lot of times he strikes out. Dan, did Ryan Parker or Chris Crawford or any of the scouting people at BP that you talked to

have a hypothesis? Did they pinpoint some specific change that they think is allowing Harper to hit these pitches better than he has in the past? Yeah, Ryan, if anyone's able to look at the article, I recommend it because Ryan made a little video that shows, compares Harper like very early in the season versus the last few weeks. And what you see is he's added just a little hitch at the beginning of the swing, not like a dropping the hands kind of hitch, but a little bump of the bat head out towards the pitcher that just keeps his hands in motion.

And, you know, I know guys like Jose Altuve a couple of years ago dropped the hitch in his swing because it was kind of lengthening his swing out and he wasn't really getting the balance that he wanted. But you think of someone like Gary Sheffield, who was literally, he was moving the bat when the ball was leaving the pitcher's hand. He was still waggling the bat. For guys with bat speed like that, it can actually help their timing some. And so that's something that Ryan noticed.

And I'd definitely be curious to see if other people who know how to scout hitters, if they've noticed something too. So in your opinion, having looked at this in detail, has a corner been turnt? Oh, this is such a dangerous game. I'm going to buy into it. I've always thought it was just a matter of time before he found a couple little things that were going to help him reach that level we all expected him to. In a couple weeks, he'll have run into an outfield wall and will be out for the year and I'll look like an idiot. But yeah, I mean, I remember actually in his rookie year, he was

really good at making adjustments the second time he faced a pitcher. He's good at learning from mistakes in the box. So yeah, I'm confident. If he runs into an outfield wall, I think you're okay. I think that's separate from this prediction. It's only if he stops hitting breaking balls that you'll look bad. Then I'll be exposed, yeah. All right. Well, thank you, Dan. Everyone should check out the article. Follow Dan on Twitter, at 6ToolPlayer. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, thank you guys so much. Alright, so that is it for us

today and this week. You can send us emails at podcast at baseballperspectives.com Our Facebook group is at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild. Rate, review, subscribe to the podcast on iTunes and support our sponsor, the Play Index, by going to

baseballreference.com and using the coupon code BP to get the discounted price of $30 on one year subscription. Have a wonderful weekend. We will be back on Monday. Oh my gosh. Every time I try to explain this now, it's like going to a therapist and talking about the time my tragic thing happened that I'm not going to say.

Parents took your baseball cards away. Yes, like that.