Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 693: Dugout Etiquette, Warm-Up WAR, and Other Thrilling Emails

Episode Date: June 12, 2015

Ben and Sam banter about Pat Venditte and Zack Cozart, then answer emails about batter-pitcher matchups, when to congratulate players, double Delino DeShieldses, and more.

You're asking me, don't take my advice Because I've been there before, doesn't come to pass But I have all the answers to the questions that you ask I'm telling you, because you're asking me Good morning and welcome to episode 693 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives presented by the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I am Ben Lindberg of Grantland, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Perspectus. Hello. Hello.

How are you? Pretty good. All right. Want to talk about anything? Baseball? Some things about baseball? I guess we could do that today. There was something about Pat Vendetti, who has pitched three and a third scoreless since we talked about him earlier this week.

You mocked me mercilessly for asking whether he was considered one pitcher or two pitchers. Oakland A's pitching coach, Kurt Young, considers him two pitchers. Okay. I think that I don't remember the exact conversation, if it even happened. But I think that I was mocking your semantics more than anything. I do know that I get the point. Although at one point we did talk a long time ago about whether he could pitch. If he were a starter, could he pitch Monday?

Could he be the first and second starter? Yeah, we actually got another question about that this week. Basically the same question. Could a switch pitcher who is a starter go twice in the rotation? Right, and we answered no, and I still think it's no. I mean, I think he could throw somewhat more just because, you know, the elbow and the shoulder wouldn't have so much strain on them and so they wouldn't get injured quite so quickly. But I think that maybe a huge part, maybe most of the fatigue for pitchers

comes from the fact that they're using their entire bodies to great effort and their you know their lower body gets exhausted and um uh so i think he would still run into fatigue yeah i think that he could probably pitch like basically i guess what i'm saying is i bet he could pitch a lot more innings without getting hurt but a not twice as many and b i don't think he could pitch really almost any extra innings while maintaining the effectiveness like i think he would lose effectiveness almost as quickly as a one-armed pitcher not a one-armed pitcher but a pitcher who only pitches with one arm i i'm not speaking to jim abbott in this yeah if you had like a starter's body starters repertoire type guy who was like he

threw 90 something from both sides or whatever i bet he would be better than the alternative yeah but i i agree you couldn't you couldn't go twice in the five man rotation and you probably would be affected by it and wouldn't be as good from either side. Hey, Ben. Yeah. Last night I dreamed that we were on the Snowpiercer train. Oh, yeah? And Phelan, our manager, was at the front of the train. And this was not a very hostile train. It was the train, but it wasn't an apocalyptic nightmare.

Uh-huh. But he was near the front of the train, and he called a bunch of us up to his office in the front of the train for a meeting. A bunch of people like Carranza was there, and a bunch of random people who I don't know were there. But while we were there, he scolded me for not wearing a suit jacket. That's a weird one. And that's the end of the dream. It's true, though. You don't wear suit jackets no he's got a point yeah another interesting thing about vendetti that we didn't really talk about it's kind of intriguing how what side he chooses to pitch to switch hitters right because

there's a lot that goes into this and kurt young was talking about it with david lorella on a fangraphs audio episode and they were talking about i think uh the decision to pitch to blake swihart in ben daddy's first game and they were taking all these things into account like they were in fenway and like you didn't want him hitting from the right side I guess because you don't want him to be able to hit the monster or I don't remember which it was but theoretically there's a lot of math you could do to decide what the optimal side for Vendetti to pitch to a batter is like there's a ton that goes into what seems like a simple decision it's what side is the batter better from and is the better is the better better against certain pitches or angles or anything that would

change that decision and then it's which side is vendetti better from against that batter in particular or against all batters and then there's the ballpark is does it favor righties or lefties and maybe part of it is just what side vendetti feels more comfortable pitching from that day but there is like you can do a full article on every single decision that vendetti makes to pitch to a switch hitter yeah which uh which side does he use his top hand better yeah does he wear suit jackets yeah okay the other thing i just wanted to mention zach kozart is out for the season that's not that huge news zach kozart but zach kozart was having one of my favorite seasons of anyone i don't know whether you're

paying attention to zach kozart this year yeah unfortunately i am because he's my hacking mass team oh i'm sorry in that case no it's the worst so that's why his season was so interesting is that he was a very good hacking mass pick he was not a good hitter the last couple years last year in particular he was terrible he's been a bad hitter for most of his career, all of his career, really. And this year, he has been an above-average hitter, above-league-average hitter as a good defensive shortstop, which made him quite a valuable player. And he had one of those great change stories, the mechanic stories or mindset stories that I always like hearing

and never know whether to trust. But when I, early this year, did an article on guys who were being pitched more carefully, like the Rob Arthur idea that better hitters would get pitched further, farther away from the centers of their strike zone, that sort of thing. And he's found that it can help predict breakouts or guys who are going to be better than they're projected to be and Cozart was very close to the top of the list pitchers were being more careful pitching to Zach Cozart and I didn't know why at the time I mean Cozart was on a hot start to the season but he's still Zach Cozart but he had a story that went with it, and it's one of my favorite one of these kinds of stories.

So his story was it involved Barry Larkin, and it was this spring training, and Cozart was hitting. And I'm quoting from C. Trent's story about this at Cincinnati.com. This spring training, Reds Hall of Fame shortstop Barry Larkin had a simple question for the team's current shortstop, Zach Cozart. Quote, hey, you ever thought about telling yourself to just crush the inside part of the ball? Not guide it, but whatever that ball is, wherever that ball is, just crush the inside part of it. And that's it. And that's the end of the quote. And then Cozart says, I was like, oh, it was kind of eye-opening. The simpler you can make everything, and if that one thought keeps me clean or clear, it's definitely going to help.

And that was it. Just think about hitting the ball hard, basically. Think about crushing the inside of the ball. That was the whole origin story of Zach Cozart hitting. And he was hitting, and he was still hitting pretty decently when he got hurt but he tore knee ligaments and the biceps tendon in his knee i didn't know there was such a thing but he tore those things and he's out for the year so now we don't get to see if he's going to continue it but he wasn't like a crazy high babbit guy his babbit was the same or lower than it had been the

last few years and he was just hitting. Because Barry Larkin told him to think about crushing the inside part of the ball. All right, Ben, I don't know if this is going to work. Okay. We're going to play a little Mad Libs, okay? Okay. All right. So give me an adjective.

Careful. No, careful. Careful. That was amazing and strangely meta all right noun suit jacket all right adjective quiet okay verb crushing crush okay uh and adjective supercilious okay all right so i'm going to rewrite a john fay column this column is reds will miss more than zach cozart's glove and bat okay and i know that everybody's wondering well what else what else? What else will they miss? I don't know. About him. I can't even possibly envision what else they would miss besides his glove and his bat. His base running, maybe?

Maybe. Maybe it's his base running. Maybe it's his being an emergency catcher. I don't know. We'll find out. All right. Everyone's part of the team, Reds manager Brian Price said. But he has a role not just as a great defensive

player and someone who's off to a great start offensively but he's one of those careful suit jackets he's a guy that's quiet he can crush at times unless you're around him every day like we are he's just such a super silliest guy haughtily disdainful or contemptuous. Yeah. There you go. Well, I can't figure out what the original words could have been. No. I can't think.

We'll never know. Okay. Anything else? No. Okay. I told you about the suit jacket dream. You told me. Yeah.

Okay. Wanted to make sure. Okay. All right. So we're about the suit jacket dream. You told me. Okay. Wanted to make sure. Okay. All right. So we're doing some listener emails today. So I'm going to start out with an email from John. The Blue Jays have called up reliever Phil Koch in time for their series against Boston. Some have noted David Ortiz is going 2 for 19, a 105 average against Koch as something of a justification. Except that Ortiz is benched against lefties now, right? I guess you can still use a lefty reliever against him.

They don't take him out. John says, how many play appearances would it take for you to think that a certain pitcher was a lock against a certain hitter? Would it be more or fewer play appearances for a hitter to be a lock against a certain pitcher for reference napoli and pedroia are both three for seven while deaza is three for nine against coke thank you for that so is there any number is the number different for a hitter or a pitcher you've looked we've talked about the ultimate ownership matchups right guys who've owned certain batters or pitchers. Yeah, I'm absolutely certain that my answer is on the record somewhere, and so now I'm very hesitant to give another answer. I think that, as I recall, if it were something extreme,

like this sort of thing, like we talked about Sergio Romo and Ricky Weeks at one point, right? Yeah, that was the one. Oh, was that your ultimate lock? I thought your ultimate lock was going to be Mariano Rivera against Ray Durham. sort of thing like like we talked about Sergio Romo and and Ricky Weeks at one point right oh was that your ultimate lie I thought your ultimate lock was going to be Mariano Rivera against Ray Durham oh right yeah but we talked about yeah we talked about both of those so if it's something that's so extreme like that like Ricky Weeks to people who are not familiar with the Ricky Weeks Sergio Romo story I might as well just pull it up. So Ricky Weeks, I believe at the time that we talked about it, I think he was maybe 0 for 6 with 6 strikeouts against him. He's now 7 for 8.

Sorry, he's now 1 for, he actually got a hit. He's now 1 for 7. Wait, that's wrong. He's not. He's absolutely not 1 for 7. He's now 0 for 8 with 7 strikeouts against him. And the reason that, like 0 for 6 with 6 strikeouts is definitely ownership And the reason that like over six with six strikeouts is, is definitely ownership, uh, already. But if you just saw the visual of it, it was like, he'd thrown him like 18 strikeouts out of the zone and weeks had like swung and missed at 16. Those numbers are all made up. They're not accurate. They're just completely made up. Not true, completely not true. But the, uh, extreme of the approach and the extreme of the results was such that I was willing to concede right then and there that Sergio Romo had ownership over Ricky Weeks. Now, I was willing to – my conviction on this matter was so slim that if I saw Ricky Weeks take literally one good swing, then I'd be like, oh, no ownership anymore.

So this isn't something that you can carry with you for years and years, like a travel pack. But for that day, I felt like it was a good bet. It certainly tilted the odds in Romo's favor more than their career stats alone would have. Now, which is just to say that if a guy is generally speaking if a guy is got maybe 15 or more at bats and is striking out say 75 or more of the time i would consider that to be telling and would be also prepared to be proven wrong a lot now without

something so extreme like your run of the mill hitting 210 against a guy, I would say like 195 at bats, of which they would almost all be hopelessly outdated and therefore not really useful information anyway. Like if I had 195 at bats between a pitcher and a hitter in one season, that would enough for me uh but otherwise no and when i say run of the mill 210 i'm saying like even if you're hitting 060 but you know it's mostly babbitt or whatever or you just haven't hit a home run against him or whatever i wouldn't consider that to be telling for any realistic sample that you're gonna get yeah that sounds right. I think one of the things at slash lines or some number that says just how productive the hitter was. And that might not show something because it might be that the

guy hit a bunch of balls hard or whatever and just didn't get hits in that sample. But if you look at strikeouts or something like that that becomes meaningful more quickly, like Dan Rosenheck of The Economist did this year with spring training stats. And if you look at spring training OPS and regular season OPS or something like that, it doesn't really show much of a connection. But if you look at more sensitive stats like strikeout rate or whiff rate or that kind of thing, then it does help you predict how the player is going to do in the regular season. So maybe that's the case with batter-pitcher matchups too.

Maybe if you looked at whiff rates or strikeout rates, maybe it would tell you something at the extremes. So I would entertain that idea, yeah. If you have 20 blade appearances and 15 of them are strikeouts or something, then yes. But if it's not that, if it's not out of the normal rates, it's just results that are slightly different, then I don't think there's never a point where I would call up a reliever to face a certain hitter or even call him in from the bullpen necessarily,

unless just the overall matchups supported it i might bring in romo to face weeks no matter what but um i i do think this falls under the category of things that are so intuitively like they it just makes perfect sense that some hitters wouldn't see some pitchers very well and that some repertoire some pitchers for whatever reason their repertoire is suited or their look they give is suited facing a hitter or the opposite and it should be very telling um we like this seems like something that if it weren't so noisy like if if we could be God, we would definitely see different true talent levels between hitters and pitchers. And we used to have very, very, very noisy data. And so we, it seems like, mostly gave up on the idea.

And probably the idea is not at fault. I mean, the idea is a good one. It's just whether the data is ever going to be unnoisy enough and like you say we're it quite possibly already is in some cases uh but you're going to get a lot of false positives yeah in the book i think they divided pitchers up into families based on handedness and maybe on strikeout rates and walk rates or something like that. But now you could do that better. You could do velocity and pitch types. And you'd have to think that certain pitchers or certain hitters are more vulnerable to certain velocities or certain pitch types.

And if you could classify a bunch of pitchers as a certain group of guys who resemble each other, then you'd think you could tell something about whether that hitter would be good against a pitcher like that let's do wes justin maxwell just grounded into a double play wait okay can i tell you about justin maxwell real quick so they have uh they have ads for like there's this promotion at macy's for father's day that if you spend 35 at macy's you can get a an autographed baseball signed by justin maxwell and and so the thing is though that

macy's has justin maxwell but they don't have the giants like they don't have the rights to say the giants oh so it's like those ads where you see a guy who's just in a blank white jersey? Well, I've been hearing radio ads constantly, like three a inning, it seems like, for the last couple weeks, where they refer to the Bay Area star outfielder, Justin Maxwell. And it's the the that really gets me.

It's like, y'all know him. He's the Bay Area star outfielder, Justin Maxwell. What a strange promotion. Yeah, it is, right? And you can't get anything else signed, only a baseball. I wonder how that came about. Did someone say we got to get Maxwell? Did someone just say we'll take anyone and he's the only guy we can get?

How many people are taking them up on this promotion? I'd love to know. Yeah. Well, and you have to figure, like, a lot of people just go to Macy's and spend $35 without the Justin Maxwell incentive. It's like a pair of socks. Yeah. So do you think that all those people are going to go get their baseball? Like, it's like the first hundred people or whatever. Do you think that all those people are going to go get their baseball?

It's like the first 100 people or whatever, but what if the first 88 people are just there to shop? I wonder how many Justin Maxwell signed baseballs they have. You just sit them down for a day and get hundreds? I guess so. All right. So Wes wants to know, maxwell just grounded into a double play but a byproduct of said double play was an rbi as joe panic scored from third does justin maxwell deserve congratulations high fives butt pats etc on his return to the dugout while he

unintentionally drove in a run he did so by effectively killing an inning, which saw the Giants having the bases loaded with no outs. This is, I think this is addressed by a somewhat related topic that I once wrote about, the walk-off error. Uh-huh, yeah, right, and guys do get congratulated for walk-off errors. Yeah, I basically went back and looked at all the walk-off errors for the year and saw where the scrum went. Did the scrum congratulate the hitter or the guy who scored? And this came up because I think I watched Desmond Jennings come up with like, it was like the bases loaded, one out, and the winning run was on third and he grounded back to the pitcher who like threw to second for the out and then the throw to first was going to beat Jennings in plenty of

time but it was inexcusably wild and so like they won and and it was like Desmond Jennings did the worst possible thing you could do like the the worst the thing you could possibly do in that situation and so i want to see like who well who are they going to celebrate and they all at first that well they all jump out of the dugout and like three guys run to home plate and everybody else goes to desmond jennings and then the three realize their mistake and like they like very quickly congratulate the runner and then just desert him because they got to go congratulate desmond jennings and this is generally the norm there are there i found a couple of semi exceptions to this but generally speaking if you do if you fail in baseball but the result helps your team anyway then they congratulate you and this is not quite

the same because the Giants run expectancy probably dropped. So you could say that Justin Maxwell hurt the team, maybe. But it's basically the same premise. He got the run in. And so my conclusion from the walk-off error celebration study was that hitting a baseball is pretty hard. And that once you hit a baseball, there is a general acceptance of the fact that anything can happen to that baseball. Like I compared it to a felony murder, uh, where if you commit a felony, like if you rob a liquor store, well, that's like a year in prison. But if you rob a liquor store and on the way out you cause somebody to have a heart attack and that person dies, they can charge you with felony murder. Like if anybody dies in the act of committing a felony, then it becomes a murder case, even if there's no, you know, what is that, premeditation, right?

Normally if you accidentally kill someone, it's just manslaughter. But if you accidentally kill someone while committing a felony, it's felony murder, right? And the idea behind felony murder is, well, once you commit a felony, once you start, once you go down the path of committing a crime, it, everything gets unpredictable. You don't know what's going to happen. It could go in any direction and you made the wrong decision to set that unpredictable series of events in motion. And so even though you had no intention of giving that guy a heart attack, we're still holding you responsible. We're still saying you should have known felonies can lead to

death. And it's the same with, with this, you put the ball in play and anything can happen. And if what the thing that happens ends up being good even though you were bad at it like your role in it was bad we're still giving you credit we're still saying well you did you you set the course of events the unpredictable course of events in motion um and so then they they celebrate so uh again max was a little different because it's it's not that there was an air on the play he hit into a double play the the damaging play was done. But I still think that people would say, well, you did what you did. You put the ball in play,

which is what we were asking you to do, and it could have gone in any direction. And the direction that it went, well, it wasn't optimal, but you still did your job. Yeah. It's strange when a guy hits into a double play, which is just about the worst thing

that you can do with a plate appearance, and he gets congratulated. But it's like a good thing happened for the team. It wasn't the best thing that could happen for the team, but the team still scored, so someone has to get congratulated, and you could congratulate the runner who scores, and you do, but you feel like you were leaving out the batter, but you'd feel like you were leaving out the batter, probably. At least he made that run happen. Indirectly, I mean, unintentionally, he did a good thing.

So I think the impetus is just to congratulate a guy for helping you score a run, which is a good thing, and they don't overanalyze it beyond that. Play index? Sure, let me do one. Yeah. All right, play index. I have one in mind, and I'm going to do it right now. So what I'm doing, this is a live Play Index,

but this is a live Play Index in the way that talk show interviews on late-night talk shows are also live. This conversation has currently happened. I've practiced it, but then I forgot to write it down, so now I'm going to redo it. You hate how rehearsed late-night interviews are hate it so much just absolutely kills me all right so this came up because somebody recently told me that really that closers have to close because if they don't close when they're not closing that if you use a closer in a non-safe situation they fall apart.

And we've all heard this. We've all heard this many times. Have we not? We have. And there are various hypotheses for it, some of which feel like maybe a little rubbishy, and some of which maybe make a little sense, like they don't have the intensity. Trevor Hoffman's explanation for it was that the hitters don't have as much pressure on them, and so you're not getting the benefit. Basically, if you're a closer, you come in and you're trained for that situation. You've got ice in your veins, but the hitter has a lot of pressure on him because the game's on the line, so you get a little bit of a benefit of the choking factor. In a non-safe

situation, there's not that pressure, and so the guy does better. So those are all various explanations for why this phenomenon occurs. But of course, we need to know if the phenomenon occurs. So what I've done is I've taken 2012 to 2014 individual seasons, so not over the course of all three, but individual seasons. I'm setting the minimum of 20 saves in the season so that I only have closers who were generally closers. And I'm looking at, that's the minimum, so everybody who had 20 saves in the season. And I'm going to do, I'm going to split between saved situations and non-saved situations. So I'm going to look at OPS in saved situations.

And then I'm going to set the minimum by, compare this split to players' season totals. So I'm going to have two OPSs for every pitcher, the one they allowed in safe situations and the one that they allowed overall. So if the one they allowed overall is higher, then we can deduce that they were worse in non-safe situations. If it was lower, we can deduce that they were better in non-safe situations. If it was lower, we can deduce that they were better in non-safe situations. That would never happen because they couldn't possibly be better. We know, we have heard way too many times that they are worse. Do I do OPS or ERA?

Which do you prefer, Ben? OPS. All right, OPS. All right, so I have my results. And the results give me 80 pitchers who meet this qualification. I'm taking those 80 lines. I'm putting them into another spreadsheet. I'm creating a new column that says difference.

I'm subtracting the split OPS from the total OPS, and I'm going to see whether there are more people with positive or negative differentials. All right. Simple enough? All right the results are are coming i'm i'm sorting this is exciting if the split ops is lower than the total that supports the hypothesis it's higher than it doesn't all right so we had 80 pitchers and of these 80 pitchers, 48 were better in safe situations. All right. And so that means that 32 were worse in safe situations, which is actually somewhat surprising because when I did it by ERA,

it was a perfect 50-50 split. So you should have said ERA. You're joking. Now, okay, but all the same. So 48 were better in safe situations than non-safe situations that's not a huge effect and uh as a total as a group these guys the difference is extremely extremely small like spread out over the 80 it's one point of ops better okay nope sorry that that's wrong it's not it's like seven points eight points eight and a half

points of ops as a group it's an average of eight and a half points of ops which is small but a thing so now there are a couple of disclaimers here one is that you could argue that a guy might have 20 saves in a season but he might not actually be the closer the entire season and so it's conceivable that a guy pitched his way out of the closer role, and therefore we might be getting his better performance in non-save situations, or the reverse, he might have pitched his way into a role. It's hard to know exactly whether this is a perfect representation of how good each of these guys were in save versus non-situations.

It would be useful if we had, like, in RetroSheet, you just had, like, a designation for every day who was the closer that day. Who was the closer? It would be, yeah. That would be good. So color me a little bit surprised with some disclaimers, but I'm a little surprised. However, if you're trying to decide whether your closer, who you think is your best option for a situation, can't pitch in a non-save situation because he would fall apart,

the answer seems to be that he would not fall apart. Your closer is probably nine points of OPS better, or he should be nine points of OPS better than most other relievers. And so all the same, even with this small tax, if it is a a small tax you would still have him being theoretically a very good pitcher and you think that i don't know whether you said this at the beginning but the distribution of the hitters that you would face in non-save and save because save situations ninth inning tends to be weaker batters right like eighth inning i think tends to be the best batters or better batters than the ninth inning so maybe in non-safe situations if you're coming in in the eighth or something then you're facing better batters than you would in the ninth of course closers often

come in in the ninth regardless of whether it's safe or non-saave. Yeah, I don't think the eighth, ninth situation would probably be enough. Explain this. I mean, you could, one way of thinking about it possibly is that, and this probably wouldn't be enough either, but if you come into a save situation, oftentimes that's a one-run game. At most it's a three-run game, but often it's a one-run game. If you don't have it that day, if you just don't, flat out don't have it, well, the amount of time that you're going to spend on that mound not having it is limited.

There's a restriction, an artificially imposed restriction on how long you're going to be allowed to pitch. You're going to be allowed to pitch until you lose that game and everybody goes home. Or frequently, if you blow the save and it's not a walk-off, often the closer gets pulled from the game so that he doesn't get worn out or whatever. Whereas if you come into a non-save situation, like say a six-run lead and you're just trying to get some work and you don't have it that day, well, if you pitch yourself, if you suck, well, suddenly it becomes a save situation and now you've got to keep the closer in there. I mean, it's not a save situation. You can't pitch yourself into it.

But now the manager is probably going to leave you in. And so you've got a long time to suck up there. And so those outings might weigh on your line more than the other ones, if that makes sense. It does. Or maybe save situations, you're more likely to come in with runners in scoring position or runners on base, and batters hit better with runners in scoring position or runners on base and batters hit better with runners in scoring position you know so that could be part of it too there's a bunch of little adjustments you could make and maybe they would account for that difference but the larger point seems to be that if you have a closer who's your best pitcher in the bullpen then even in a non-save

situation he's probably still going to be your best pitcher in the bullpen, then even in a non-save situation, he's probably still going to be your best pitcher in the bullpen. Feel free to use him, is what we're saying. That guy's going to be cool with it. Okay, play index. Use the coupon code BP. Get the discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription. Okay,

Mike in Waterloo, Ontario wants to know, at what point do we think that Delano DeShields Jr. surpassed Delano DeShields Sr. as a ballplayer? And you could apply this generally to all father-son player combination. So the relevant information here, Delano DeShields Sr. is 46 years old. Delano DeShields Jr. is 22 years old. When DeShields played his final season, which was 2002, he was 33. DeShields was 10 at that time.

When Delano DeShields Jr. was drafted with the eighth pick of the 2010 amateur draft, Delano DeShields Sr. was 40, 41, I think. So at what point did Jr. surpass Sr.? And Delano DeShields Sr. was not a great player in his latter years. But by the time DeShields Jr. was drafted eighth overall as a college, or well, he was a a high school guy but when he was drafted eighth overall would you take him over Delano DeShields senior at 40 41 eight years removed from being in the big leagues I think I did this one time with Bryce Harper and Xavier yes you did because Bryce Harper is Xavier Nady's son uh So DeShields was an eighth overall pick. Yes, as a high schooler.

As a high schooler. So he was 18 probably. And his dad was how old? 41. And eight years removed from his last big league season. The eight years probably does it. If he kept on playing and stayed in shape, I'd take 41-year-old DeShields. Over 18-year-old DeShields over 18-year-old DeShields.

But he didn't. So do we have to answer it assuming that he didn't? Yeah, we answer it with the real Delinos. So 39-year-old DeShields who was six years removed from baseball or 16-year-old DeShields who was playing for some elite travel team. Yeah, I think I'd take older DeShields in that case. I saw Eric Burns play. Yes, you did. Which kicked off this whole Stumpers thing.

And he hadn't played for a couple years. He was only, I think, 38 at the time. And he played two games. And he's in good shape because now he's a triathlete so he was in like extremely good athlete shape but not good baseball shape he was 38 and he hadn't played in three years and he had the slowest bat by far in that game i mean he he was hopeless it was like strikeouts or sad little grounders to second base as a right-handed hitter. And I remember thinking before I went out there that Eric Burns would be good in that game, and he just wasn't good. He was very poor in the games he played. And so I think that

the inactivity of six years would probably be too much. I think that at 38 and 15, I'm definitely, I'm most likely taking the 38-year-old, five years inactive, because 15-year-olds are nothing. 15-year-olds are horrible at baseball. We'd have to know when young DeShields hit puberty, and we'd have to know what old DeShields did after retiring. Did he let it all go? Did he stay in shape? Did he ever

play ever? Those things might change your answer, but not knowing any of those details, I think I would, I'd say 17. I'd say when young DeShields was a year before being drafted eighth overall, that's when he passed elder DeShields and you'd say maybe 60 i think 60 i think i'm taking 16 year old to shield okay all right now if does she if old the shields had kept playing and had never stopped i might go i might go as far as 43 and 20 before i switch yeah yeah you definitely go later okay patrick says you've talked a fair amount about hidden perfect games, and I was wondering about other hidden accomplishments. Are there any that you would find interesting?

Are there any that are notably common or uncommon? Hidden 400 batting averages over consecutive Team 162s, hidden 21-plus strikeout games, hidden cycles, hidden 62-plus home run games, hidden cycles, hidden 62-plus home run seasons, hidden 68 double seasons. I don't know if any of those things happened. There was a Tony Gwynn hidden 400 season, which is kind of cool.

Oh, right. So that would be like the equivalent of like the Grand Slam that you win where you win the four majors in a row but not in the same year kind of a thing? Yeah. Gwyn hit 400 over a calendar year. Over 162 games he hit 400. Uh-huh. I don't think there are any that interest me, not because they're not interesting,

but because there's just too many players playing too many games in too many end points. There's always a hot streak that interests me. I'm frequently interested by what a hitter has done over some period of time and so that yeah like i i would definitely be interested if a guy hit 400 over the course of the season but i would also be you know 396 and i wouldn't be you know and i would be even more interested if he hit 415. Like, it's the roundness of the number ceases to matter to me. Achievement of being that good for that long is very interesting. But the roundness of the number is not the kind of milestone qualities of 400 lose relevance.

What about homers and consecutive play appearances? Well, I mean, wait, what? How's that the same? Oh, you mean like if he homered in four straight plate appearances over two games? Yeah, or five would be, because we always talk about five in one game, so what if he hits five, but he starts in

the second plate appearance of the first game? Yeah. I don't have a good reason for not being into it, and yet I wouldn't go that far out of my way to watch it. Yeah. I don't know. There's something about the spectator experience of seeing it all in one game, which is really cool,

and it's the same pitcher for a lot of it, and it's the same team. You can still be the same pitcher in the same team for a lot of it and it's the same team. You can still be the same pitcher in the same team for a lot of that over two games, but it's not quite the same. I once very, very, very, like one of the first weeks that I was a baseball writer, I was trying to do something on hidden hitting streaks. Like I wanted to see whether hitting streaks happened more or less often than they should or something like that i forget exactly what it was but my work involved basically going through a bunch of hitters and alternating their

games so like pretending that every other game didn't happen and seeing what kind of hitting streaks they got just by random dice rolls and whether it compared to, and I forget, but yeah, it was like each row's longest hitting streak was like 24 games or something. I don't remember. This is a horrible story. Stupid.

So I never wrote it. I had, I had like stacks of paper that I had done by hand and I never wrote about it because it was stupid. That's what happens when you, that's like the, I remember doing a it because it was stupid. That's what happens when you... That's like the... I remember doing a lot of things like that. Like when I was first starting,

I would come up with some question that just wasn't interesting, and I would just do so much work to confirm or refute it, and then maybe I'd write about it, and no one would read it. You got to get that out of your system. I wonder if I have those notes. Okay, Mike asked something. What? We're still going?

No more. Mike asked an interesting question about Sabermetric's role in coaching and training. It's a good question. It's something we've thought about a lot with the stompers and we don't necessarily have an answer yet but he asked a corollary to that question which i like and he says in its current form how much wins above replacement does practice or training add and then he gives us some hypotheticals let's say we have a team with a true talent level of 100 wins how many wins do you deduct for the following scenarios?

One, they skip spring training altogether. They start practicing on opening day. This is a great question. They start practicing on opening day. B, they have two additional weeks of spring training than every other team. Three, they show up at the park five minutes before the game, and they play without warm-ups every game beyond every beyond a pitcher warm-up session wait wait but they could like they

could if they wanted they could scooter to the park like they could have their blood pumping a little bit right they don't have to roll out of bed and literally hit 400 or whatever they used to say about tony yeah right and and d they practice two additional hours every game compared to your average team. So skipping spring training, they start practicing on opening day. First of all, I mean, there's the health issue. You might lose guys for health. Yes. But let's get past the health issue for a minute and just talk about performance. How long into the season before they are caught up?

I would say it takes all of April. All of April before they are caught up? I would say it takes all of April. All of April before they're caught up. So from May 1st on, we're saying no, again, ignoring health. From May 1st on, we're saying no residual effects. The last five months of the season are exactly the same. I think so. Okay, so the average teen goes 500 in April. They go 14 and 14 or whatever.

And so at most, the very most you could lose is 14 games. And of course, a double A team would win five games. And so we're really talking about somewhere between zero and nine games lost. At the extreme would be nine i would say that for performance alone i think that you'd be mostly up to speed within two weeks and so really you're mostly talking about you know 12 or 13 games yeah of which half you're going to lose anyway and of which half of those you're going to win anyway by dint of baseball being stupid. And so you'd lose two or three wins. That sounds low.

I don't know. I know it does, but I gave you logic. You did. You hear that a lot, that spring training could be much shorter, that it could be a couple weeks. Of course, we're talking about doing spring training while also traveling to games and playing games and talking to the media and all the other things that take up the team's time. So they wouldn't have all day to spring train. And the pitcher's problem would be pretty big, right? Because you'd have to have guys on pitch counts for much of that month.

Well, I think if you do factor in injuries then you would get a bigger you'd get a bigger effect i think that i think that would hurt yeah i think injuries might hurt too but i mean you're these guys are professionals they work out all year they they're if they knew there was no spring training that's the thing it depends if you spring this on them right they i i assume that all these pitchers would come prepared much better than they have to right now and that yeah that it would still be it'd be a loss you wouldn't be able to have them throw 110 pitches in their first start or anything like that but i think that you could probably have them come to shape come to come to the season mostly in shape so how much does it change if this

is a surprise if they show up on spring training and it's opening day i mean like another like i'd knock off another win like i'd go from like two or three to maybe three or four uh-huh maybe now yeah if you lose i don't know how many pitchers you'd lose for health i'm not really comfortable estimating i do assume i do assume some people would get hurt. On the other hand, a lot of guys get hurt in spring training because that's a month that they have to spend playing baseball, and you get hurt playing baseball. So it's conceivable that simply having less baseball in one's life would make you more healthy. That's true, too. you more healthy that's true too and i guess you'd lose you might lose some some clubhouse chemistry right if that's a thing and if it's built in spring training when the team is getting to know

each other you'd have pitchers who had never thrown to catchers and catchers who had never caught pitchers and no one would be familiar with each other except the returning players so maybe there's something extra there yeah so if in that case we're we're getting we're we're going to ignore the may 1st on everything is normal yeah and i yeah i could see that i could see that both for chemistry and for like coaching assessment of players in spring training that you could lose throughout the season so maybe i'll add another two ish three two to three wins on there'd be no spring training instructor so bar Barry Larkin never would have told Zach Cozart to crush the inside of the ball.

He never would have been good for the first couple months. Yeah, good point. So, yeah, I'm going to say if it's a 100-win team with no spring training, man, like the last couple of years, no spring training was kind of the rationale for why Kendris Morales and Stephen Drew were spring training was kind of the rationale for why kendris morales and steven drew were awful for entire halves of the year right and i don't know

if that was legitimate steven drew's been pretty bad anyway but i don't know players seem to think it would screw them up so i i would i would accept that i'm on the low side of the estimates. Yeah, I'm going to say they win 93. They win 93? Oh, we're talking about a 100-win team? Okay. The other thing is that every time there'd be like a ground ball hit the first base, the pitcher would be running like in circles.

They probably would be going to back up third. They would just get down. Like they'd just go down on the ground and just curl up. Yeah, that'd be bad. Okay, and then... So I'm going to say that the second scenario, two additional weeks of spring training, I'm going to say that's nothing.

That's half a win. In either direction. I don't know that I would even want that. Yeah. I guess... So the guys would report. Are they allowed to? Is there anything that stops a team from starting spring training?

Because it does seem like having pitchers that were ready to go 115 pitches from day one. But I think that the grind is already so strong in baseball. The grind is, like as Russell Carlton has been writing about, the grind is like the villain in baseball the grind is like as russell carlton has been writing about the grind is like the the villain in baseball it's what you're ultimately fighting about as much as you're fighting against as much as you're fighting your opponents and so i it does seem like adding two weeks to the season could hurt uh could lead to more injuries i'm gonna say that's the case for mike's fourth scenario also, which is two additional

hours of practice every day. Absolutely. That would just mean less sleep. That would mean, I mean, more blisters. You'd just, you'd be tired and frustrated and everyone would hate it. So I would say that wouldn't help at all. But the third scenario, they show up at the park five minutes before the game and play without warm-ups except the pitcher can warm up. So that would mean no BP, basically. Which I don't think would hurt at all. I think you could do away with BP. I think the only reason to show up early is you want to have people getting in a good mental space.

You do have some benefit to the clubhouse stuff, and you want to basically get everybody there so they can get their physical therapy. They can get their – they can watch tape. Just working out. Right. They can go and – well, they can go and – yeah, they can work out, but they'd work out anyway. These guys love working out.

They can go in the video room and watch tape. They can have the catchers and pitchers meetings at the start of the series. They get a meal that isn't whatever some of them would probably eat. Get to talk to reporters. So I think there's a bunch of benefits that have nothing to do with BP. I think if you took out BP and infield, you would lose zero. Zero runs. Zero runs over the course of the year.

And it might actually help because I don't think it's good for the pitchers to be standing out there stiffening up and sometimes getting hit in the face with baseballs. Yeah. Okay. So how much? Zero. I mean from everything that you named? Still zero?

Are we to deduce that they're not watching any tape in this scenario that they can't watch it at home on their ipad they can i guess there's no there's no rule against that all right so like a win and a half maybe i'm gonna say more than that i'm higher i don't know i'd you just you'd feel rushed you wouldn't feel comfortable you wouldn't uh i don't know whether bp actually makes hitters better but i think it makes them feel better feel like they're getting better right guys always say when they're slumping they take extra bp they work on stuff in bp they convince themselves that that they're not going to slump anymore so if you're not having that opportunity to work problems out then you're

just feeling depressed all the time because you only have four swings four plate appearances a day to work your troubles away i i'm gonna say 90 100 win team wins 95 i mean you're basically saying we're assuming that players are going to do their homework on their own right they don't have to come to a meeting but they're gonna pour over the advanced scouting reports and they're going to watch video just on their own because they're conscientious i don't know if that would be the case for a lot of guys so i think you'd miss out on a lot of that information so i'm going to say you'll lose at least five all right right. Okay. Fair enough. All right. That's it for today.

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