Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 769: Rich Hill, Jerry Dipoto, and David Ortiz

Episode Date: November 18, 2015

Ben and Sam discuss the Rich Hill signing and more Mike Trout punctuation, then answer listener emails about Jerry Dipoto and David Ortiz and do a double Play Index.

Sha la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la, sha la la la la, sha la la la, sha la la la, sha la la la, sha la la la, sha la la la, sha la la la, sha la la la, sha la la la, sha la la la, sha la la la, sha la la la, sha la la la, sha la la la, sha la la la, sha la la la, sha la la la, sha la la la, sha la la la, sha la la la, sha la la la, sha la la la, sha la la la, sha la la la, sha la la la, sha la la la, sha la la la, sha la la la, sha la la la, Good morning and welcome to episode 769 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus. I am Ben Lindberg of ESPN, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Prospectus. Hello. Hello. I can actually specify now where within ESPN. I am Ben Lindberg of FiveThirtyEight. Oh, I didn't know that. As of now. Okay. Does that mean you're going to have to start producing things? Yeah, probably. Ugh.

Not on a regular schedule until the book is finished, but I'll be doing some writing and some editing and some baseball and some non-baseball. Congratulations. Nice to have a home again. A good home. Yeah. Fun home.

Fun home with a good father. Reunited with Nate Silver, reunited with our friend Rob Arthur, reunited with Kirk Goldsberry from Grantland. Obviously, lots of other excellent writers whose work i read and admire maybe i'll do some podcast stuff over there we'll see how many more jobs this podcast follows me to what is this the this is the fourth introduction of myself that i've had now while still doing this podcast what was the well if you count espn as a as a temporary one i don't did you

do a single thing no well i i couldn't i didn't have a place to do a thing uh-huh so don't we're not counting that okay it was a transitional stage holding holding pattern uh-huh all right so rich hill signed what did you think of the one-year $6 million deal for Rich Hill? Bigger, smaller than you expected or dreamed? A couple few years shorter and probably two zeros fewer than I would have been willing to go to. I probably would have given him seven and 120. I don't know. 6 million.

I mean, I have to give Major League Baseball teams a lot of credit for being disciplined. Because I just feel like if I had a chance to get a guy who looked as good as he did over the last month, I wouldn't be able to think rationally. And I would just do it. I would just be so, like, I would feel, like, I would talk myself into this as, like, the great opportunity that I'll never get again to get, like, a super ace for, you know, $6 million, right? Like, he's probably not, I i mean you know it's there's thankfully there's probably 50 people in the front office who can restrain you yeah when you sail past that island but i would uh i would absolutely have gotten crazy

and uh so i'm actually a little disappointed that out of 30 teams this seems to me to be a pretty good proof that the winner's curse is flawed because 30 teams and not one of them did anything nuts. Not one. You're right. It seems awfully – I mean, look. What is the fear with Rich Hill in your mind? Is it the injury risk or the he's not going to be good risk

or is it a combination of the two? Well, with any pitcher, it, or is it a combination of the two? Well, with any pitcher, it's to some extent a combination of the two, but with him specifically, I think it's probably more the latter, right? I mean, his problems were less injury-related than just being bad, right? I mean, were there many injuries along the way, or was he just pitching poorly? I think there were a lot of injuries. I think it was, hang on, I'm going to go to Corey Dawkins' site and see what his injury history is. But yeah, I mean, he was doing, like, he was pitching in, in, like, complex league games at certain points, so those would certainly be injuries.

All right, Rich Hill, 6'5", 220. First place, Boston, Massachusetts. All right, 2014, no injury. 2015, no injury. 2013, no injury. 2012, injury. So yeah, he missed a lot of time in 2012, 2011. What was the injury in 2012?

Elbow. Forearm strain. Missed 84 days. And that came right after coming back from, I think, TJ in 2011, I think. And then he had labrum surgery in 2009. So the original blow to his career was all injuries. Like he was, everything was going pretty well. And then his whole body collapsed on him. He had back problems.

He had shoulder problems. he had elbow problems, all of those things. Now, I think the last three years, you're right, that he has, it hasn't been injuries, it's been the, you know, the ERA of six that he had as a reliever, left-handed specialist in 2013, for instance, is pretty bad. Yeah. Like, that's pretty bad. Pretty bad. You don't want your loogie to have any ra over six no you don't uh and then 2014 uh he was you know trucking along in the

minors doing pretty well good strikeout rates always as a reliever i never did read i don't since i don't but i never did read the the why rich hill is great now story did some some beat writer must have like figured you asked him like if someone taught him a cutter or something right yeah i don't i saw more analytical versions of that i didn't really read the backstory uh so you're more worried about him being bad than being unhealthy i'm not worried about him being bad okay i'm more worried about him being bad than being unhealthy. I'm not worried about him being bad. Okay. I'm not worried about him being bad. I don't know. I can't remember. It's been a while since this all happened, but surely at the time we knew how unusual it is to have a

four-start stretch this good and whether it's telling whether it's signature yeah the whole idea of signature i don't know how much there is to that at least with young pitchers but when you yeah i mean there weren't there wasn't much precedent for guys just being that good period so it was definitely not fluky i mean it seemed fluky but the actual performance was not fluky so ben let me ask you a question say it's not rich hill say you didn't know his name you didn't know any of his backstory and uh a guy shows up in the majors and you don't like he's just a guy you've never heard his name right but someone signed him for some reason and threw him out on a mound. So best guess, what is his ERA going to be in your mind? Do I know anything?

You don't know anything. You just know that he just got signed. So he wasn't on a team a month earlier. And that he is on a mound. That someone thought that it was worth putting him on a mound. So what kind of ERA would you expect from that guy? You know, whatever replacement level is. Yeah, so like 5'4", 5'5", something like that.

Okay, so then first start he goes... I'll get the exact. So his first start he goes 7 innings, strikes out 10, throws a one-hitter, walks one. Now what is your adjusted expected ERA for this guy? It was 5-3. Yeah. Now what do you expect now? Now he's probably like league average.

Okay. So now he's like 4.1. Yeah. Okay. okay so now he's like four four point one yeah okay so then the next start against the blue jays in toronto he goes seven strikes out ten walks nobody and gives up three runs on seven hits yeah uh so now what is you've got two starts 14 innings a guy you've never heard of 20 strikeouts one walk in 14 innings against good teams uh what's your expected era now 3.5 3.5 all right so now the next start he throws a two hit shutout strikes out 10 walks one so now he you only know

all you know about this guy is that he wasn't pitching a month ago and three starts 30 strikeouts two walks in 25 innings 20 23 innings and And have I seen him? Or have I just seen the box scores? Doesn't matter. You could see. You think it'll matter? Well, if he's throwing 99 or something, I might change my answer. Say I just see the box scores.

Yeah, just the box scores. Okay. So this third start? Two hit shutout, 10 strikeouts, one walk. Three. Three. All right. So now he's a three era guy and then the last start against the yankees in new york six innings six strikeouts two runs three walks and uh a game score of 59 yeah well that is a three era right so i'll just stick with my three i think that strangely that would actually maybe make

the era go slightly up uh-huh uh but all right so then what you're saying uh is that it is worse to know that it is rich hill than to not know that it is rich hill in this situation that it would be better for him to be a stranger with no history in the game than to be Rich Hill. Because then I could at least imagine he was some sort of like Toe Nash story. Yeah, exactly. Which worked out great, by the way, for everybody. Right. The famous Hall of Fame career of Toe Nash.

Yep. Nobody ever was wrong about Toe Nash. All right. So I think that the point that you can adjust upwards or downwards based on it actually being Rich Hill in Not a Stranger is fair. And I'm not sure whether Rich Hill's past is in his favor or not. Like we talked about at the time time his strikeout rates have always been ridiculous uh he has uh it's a very long time ago but he does have some success in the majors although not this level of success even when he was really good with the cubs he wasn't really

that good right yeah i think that it is fair to dock him for being rich hill uh as opposed to a stranger i would guess uh should we should we just do a bet right now let's let's do it right now okay how many i'm gonna write down i'm gonna write down two numbers and i want you to write down the two numbers in your head uh you don't have to write now because i'm writing them down the numbers are going to be how many innings he pitches next year and what his ERA will be. And I'm going to say that and okay. Okay. All right. I have mine. You can go ahead and do yours.

All right. How many innings and what will his ERA be? I'll say 130 innings and a 3.8. Okay. I have 84 innings and a 3.39. All right. So there we go. Would you give, how much would you pay for a guy who you projected to throw 130 innings at a 3.80?

Probably more than $6 million. And would you be happy to, if he were willing to take $6 million, would you be happy to give it to him for a second year as well? Yeah, I think so. So should have gotten him for $2 and $12. Yeah. All right. There we go. All right.

The Rich Hill transaction analysis. Rich Hill is my new Ray Durham, actually. actually you know how i've tried tried and failed to contact ray durham when mariana rivera was retiring because i wanted to do a story on what it was like to face mariana rivera 26 times and have a zero on base percentage and i got as far as getting ray durham's number and leaving him voicemails and that was as far as i got so i wanted to do a story on Rich Hill's free agency because what could be more fascinating than like a TikTok of what offers he got and what his strategy was

and how he valued himself and how other teams valued him and what the range was and the offers he got and what his agent's strategy was. Would have been fascinating. So I left messages for his agency no response i managed to get rich hill's number i texted him no response i texted rich hill yesterday to see if he wanted to come on the podcast no response so i think i might just text rich Hill every few years. You want to cold call him right now?

See if it picks up? No. Why not? Oh, man. That would be very awkward. Well, you're not going to get anything from him now. Well, no. No, I was thinking I might just text him every few years to just let him know how things are going with me.

Look, he has no power over you, Ben. His approval or rejection of you and your way of life mean nothing this would be like if i had texted ned garver and he had not answered and then we called him i'm 99.9 sure that if we had texted ned garver he would have not answered rich hill you know rich hill maybe he's just i mean he is old maybe he just doesn't know how to text that could be he's he's a caller he's a phone guy yeah landline yeah are you sure it's a cell phone maybe it is a landline and he doesn't even get the texts i was told it's a cell phone so anyway anyway my book will come out at some point unanswered text to rich hill i'll collect them all all right okay so we just a brief thing on the mike trout punctuation matter because we've

gotten lots of theories and responses and he hasn't really done anything to move the needle he hasn't really tweeted much lately. He did his most recent tweet with punctuation. There was no space before the exclamation point, although it was the last word of the tweet. So I don't know if that changes anything. So I think the most interesting response, maybe most enlightening response we got was from Jared, who pointed out that his cousin, he told us about his cousin Chet, who is a retiree, an older gentleman, good guy, baseball fan. And he types like Mike Trout. And he sent us some samples. And they're very Mike Trout-esque.

He seems to leave spaces in front of almost every form of punctuation. So if there's a comma, there's a space before the comma. If there's a parentheses, there's a space before the parentheses. And obviously he's not taking a cue from Mike Trout. And he types this way on email and Facebook and his wife does not type this way and it basically he types like mike trout but he's an older guy so jared emailed chet to ask him why he does this and he sent us the response and chet didn't really uh it wasn't really a complex answer he said i like separating from the last word. When he handwrote things, he says he doesn't do much handwriting these days, but in the past, and space comma, I was conventional in anything handwritten, space exclamation point. So when he actually wrote things on paper, normal writer, but now that he types things, he has just switched to the Mike Trout style. And it seems to have just been a decision that he came to himself.

And so I think that the most likely explanation is that Mike Trout just has a punctuation quirk. It's what we thought all along, that this is just a thing that Mike Trout does. And maybe we all have these punctuation quirk. It's what we thought all along, that this is just a thing that my chat does. And maybe we all have these punctuation quirks. In fact, I asked you about one of yours last week, which has puzzled me for a while, which is when you end an email to someone you are familiar with, you'll say, thanks, comma, and then there's nothing after the comma. The sentence never ends, and you don't sign the email. And I was very perplexed by why. I always look down to see if you signed it, Sam, and you didn't, and then I wonder why you didn't end it with a period.

And you explained to me that you used to sign it, and you still do sign it if it's someone you don't know well but now you just sort of assume i mean that the signature is is assumed and you just save the second that it takes to hit enter and type sam yeah so we all have our quirks yeah i'm sort of pointing to the idea of a signature while feeling uh while not feeling the need to actually go through with the labor of it. Right. Okay. It's remnant, sort of. It's a little shadow of an earlier time in our relationship. Uh-huh. Okay. So let's answer a few emails. This one is from our friend Mark Simon at ESPN,

and he wants to know, what did you guys make of hearing Jerry DiPoto reference Leonis Martin's war when talking about him on the conference call announcing the trade? On one hand, you could make a case that it was a great step for war, since it might be the first time it was referenced publicly by a GM to validate a trade. On the other, it might leave you wondering, as it left one of my colleagues, why your GM was referencing baseball references war when teams supposedly have their proprietary wars that we hear about that are supposed to be better than what is publicly available. Personally, I thought it was great, but I suppose some might be wondering, as my colleague

was. And I'll read the DePoto quote. He said, this is a guy that has put up about nine and a half war the past three years, which is not an insignificant number. And that came after he was kind of pointing out that he was a low BABIP guy and seems like a bounce back candidate. Well, I wouldn't say that him citing, first of all, he doesn't necessarily cite a public war. He might be citing his own, the team's own or his own model. One of the things – Yeah, it's probably the public one. Well, no, I know.

But one of the things – I mean look, every team – not – probably every team. Yeah, I think almost every team. Somebody has told me they think every team has a war model, their own war model, whatever. But most war models are essentially the same thing, and you're just plugging in different ways of measuring certain aspects of it or perhaps adding in a variable here or there that you're able to measure that somebody else chooses or is unable to measure. And so the fact that he's using war is not to say that he's not using his war. Secondly, the fact that he is, if he is using, say, a public war instead of his own internal model, that might just be, well, we're not going to give away ours. We're not going to, I mean, we're trying to, I'm trying to convey a point to the public

that is also looking up their war and is familiar with this. And I'm kind of reminding them of this fact. So it's just sort of generally communicating to people using the available information that you share with them that everybody shares access to. Or the slightly more sinister explanation is that, in fact, he has a private model for war that says that Martine was worth five and a half wins over the last three years, and he is war shopping, which I think a lot of people do. I think either to prove your point or to enhance your point or to win an argument, I do think people, probably even people in the public, do a little bit of war shopping, a little bit of stat shopping generally. And it's conceivable

that he's doing what they do in press releases or what Scott Boris does, which is you look at all the things you could say about a guy and say, which one looks best? And maybe that was the one that made Martine look best. Yeah, and I guess it at least sends the message that war has become embraced to the point where he would want to use it as support for a move. You could say that a guy was worth nine and a half war, but if no one knows or cares what war is, then it doesn't really help you.

It might even get you disparaged or something. So the fact that he cited it says at least that war has reached the point where you can just kind of casually drop it into a press conference or a conference call and have people understand what it is and have people actually care what it says so that's probably it i mean it's also uh like we talk about sometimes it's important to think about who he's talking to and in this case he's probably talking to us, but sometimes, a lot of times, the audience for a GM is really either his owners or the people who he's leading his team, for instance, his players, his manager. to his owner that this is actually something that is kind of geared toward the people in the organization to say, you know, to sort of reinforce the way that they make these decisions is a little bit nerdier. Or maybe he's trying to convey that to us. Maybe it's not about the individual of the war itself,

but rather just the simple fact is itself a self-serving kind of way of reinforcing the notion that he is a smart guy think he maybe did warshop here because Fangraph's War has him at under seven and B-Ref has him over nine. And I think, I think, as I recall correctly, in a chat that he did somewhere at MLB.com or maybe ESPN or maybe something. Oh, it was on, I think it was a Twitter. I think it was a hashtag sort of a thing where you could ask Jerry.

And I think, I'll correct myself if I turned out to be wrong, that he said that he leans Fangraph's War. Uh-huh. I think. And so if he has opted, now it's also possible, like I said, that his internals are what he's referring to. I don't put that past him. And it's also possible, like, you can be a fan graphs war for hitters or for pitchers or a B ref war for batters. Or you could prefer one to the other based on position. You

might think that one system is better on first base defense and another is better on outfield defense or another is better in handling the shift. Or if you're very smart, if you have any sense whatsoever, you're using warp because it includes incredibly advanced catcher framing metrics as well as the extremely detailed and broad thinking DRA metric to get pitcher value. So that might also be what he is doing. We just don't know. Yeah, it reminds me a little bit about something I've always remembered. There was a Q&A at MLB.com when Neil Huntington was hired as GM of the Pirates in 2007. was hired as GM of the Pirates in 2007, and it was the very first question in this Q&A. Some guy named Eric said,

the Pirates' upper management has widely ignored OBP in the past. How important will OBP be in player evaluation under your leadership? And Neil Huntington says, we are going to utilize several objective measures of player performance to evaluate and develop players. We'll rely on the more traditional objective evaluations, OPS, WIP, runs created, ERC, component ERA, ground ball to fly ball ratio, strikeouts per nine, strikeouts per walk, walk percentage, et cetera. Those are the more traditional objective evaluations that he'll be looking at.

But we'll also look to rely on some of the more recent variations vorp relative performance i don't even know what that is but both both words are capitalized equivalent average equivalent on base percentage equivalent slugging percentage ball and play percentage wobah range factor probabilistic model of range and zone rating probabilistic model of range, and zone rating. So he just listed every single sabermetric stat that existed in the first Q&A he did as a GM. So it definitely was like a purpose pitch kind of answer where he was like, I know sabermetrics.

So not that DePoto needs to do that because it's eight years later and I think he already has a reputation as a more sabermetric sort of guy but it sort of sends the message that he's looking at the things that we're looking at honestly I just think that like he's like Leonis Martin's pretty good and then he looked up his baseball reference page and he saw a lot of war. And he's like, this is one way I can tell people that. And I don't think there's much beyond that. I think, you know, he's a cool dude who just said a thing. Pretty casual and chill.

Yeah. Reference and chill. Yep. Okay. Scott says, Ken Rosenthal announcing that the Marlins may trade Jose Fernandez on the same day that David Ortiz announces 2016 will be his final year leads me to this hypothetical. Would the Red Sox trade David Ortiz straight up for Jose Fernandez? From a projected war standpoint only, of course, Fernandez is projected to outperform Ortiz.

But what would it take for Boston's front office to deal this potential Hall of Famer after he announced a retirement tour? First of all, what level of retirement tour do you think David Ortiz will get? Will he get the full Jeter, Chipper Jones treatment? Has he earned that? He'll get the full Chipper. The full Chipper. Uh-huh. Yeah.

He won't get the full Jeter. I guess they were different but just because the the yankees make a huge deal of everything but yeah god gifts like everywhere he went no no that's what i'm saying he got the that's the full chipper but jeter got a nike commercial right no a gatorade what was it gatorade commercial i think it was both they re they re-spelled a word in the english language to put his uniform number in it. That's right. And everyone in the world tipped their cap to him.

The dude got a pipe shot in the All-Star game. Yeah. All right? Right. The full Jeter is never coming back. Uh-huh. Okay. It almost is impossible to make it through a career with people wanting to honor you like they do Jeter.

Like even Rivera, who is unimpeachable and probably a better person and probably everything better, doesn't get it. And Trout is not beloved in the same way and he won't get it. And most guys eventually become villains uh anyway so yeah i mean the the jeter is like a once in 40 years sort of thing like i'm not sure i don't know how many guys you could transport to now and they would even get a jeter like like assuming that the sort of racism of the era doesn't follow forward with them like jackie rob would. He'd get a full Jeter if he could somehow play his retirement year this year. I think that if you somehow knew that Koufax

was pitching through brain-destroying pain every start his last year and that he was going to hang it up at the height of his talents and it would be sort of sad and depressing and that he would retire as he did. He might get close to a full Jeter and I don't know. I don't know how many other full Jeters are even conceivable.

Like Ted Williams was like the whole point of that John Updike thing is that like Ted Williams was retiring and with sort of general ambivalence by people who somehow managed to be dissatisfied with his career. And Ted Williams is the greatest hitter of all time. He never did anything except win wars.

Yeah. That was his deal, winning wars for America. Nah, doesn't try to beat the shift. Yeah. And there was a, Joe Posansky wrote something the other day about how no one ever gets elected unanimously to the Hall of Fame. And he looked back at other classes

and what people were writing at the time about certain players. And he looked at a sporting news preview of the Hall of Fame class of like the early 60s or something and jackie robinson was eligible that year and it and i think phil risuto and someone else and it just said like and jackie robinson who played second base for the dodgers that's that's the only thing it considered notable about his career so things have changed in that sense so yeah i think david ortiz will will get some sort of tour so what would it take or will would the red sox be willing to forego the tour really almost kind of cancel the tour and take jose fernandez trade the

the hero the possible hall of famer So the tour itself doesn't really mean much. No. Right? I mean, the tour is worth probably close to $0 for them. It's more, what would they... Yeah, I mean, the Red Sox sell out all the time anyway, so they don't necessarily need to milk the David Ortiz retirement tour. There's two reasons they wouldn't do it, and I'm trying to figure out the cost of each of those One is that everybody would hate them

And I don't know how much everybody would hate them I mean, teams seem to be Like basically a lot of what quote unquote sabermetrics is Is the willingness to do something unpopular Or that people find somewhat distasteful and just do it because it's good for winning. And so I don't know where this would rank on an outrage machine if they did it. I mean, I think everybody would probably...

What would your take be? Let's say you had to write the transaction analysis of this. What would your take be today? I mean, I think everyone does this trade. I think even David Ortiz would be like, yeah, you should do this trade, I think. I think he would give them a special dispensation or something because it's Jose Fernandez.

If it were trading him for prospects or something or someone less exciting and awesome and young, I think there would be a big backlash. But if you traded David Ortiz for Jose Fernandez, who's not going to be okay with that? for Jose Fernandez, who's not going to be okay with that? Even sentimental Red Sox fans who love David Ortiz and were looking forward to seeing David Ortiz in 2016, got to think even they would. It's a pretty good consolation prize, Jose Fernandez. I mean, guys, there's a long history of guys playing for other teams in the last year or year or years of their

career but that we didn't used to have the retirement tour which in a way feels like Ortiz is locking it in and be Ortiz unlike a lot of those guys is still really good it's not it's not in any way painful to watch him play it's not as though the club is saying you should really hang it up. And he's like, well, if you don't want me, I'll go somewhere else. I mean, he's still really good. He's still a big part of their team.

And so I don't know that it would go down quite that easily. And by the way, the second factor is whether the people who made the trade themselves would just rather have Ortiz, like whether it'd be more fun to have David Ortiz in their lives than Jose Fernandez. And I don't, I mean, it would certainly, they would rather trade someone other than Ortiz, but I don't know if that's, so you think it's an automatic, like an immediate yes, yes, sign here. We don't even have to talk about it with ownership kind of thing. You probably have to talk about it with ownership Kind of thing You probably have to talk about it with ownership

But it happens Like it happens a hundred times Out of a hundred that they say yes I think so yeah I mean you know maybe it's a new front office And we were talking about how they do things differently Maybe they would place more value On the loyalty or something than we expect

But yeah I think it happens So Matt Trueblood the other day Was making the case that more value on the loyalty or something than we expect. But yeah, I think it happens. So Matt Trueblood the other day was making the case that Carlos Carrasco has more trade value than Jose Fernandez right now because, you know, the contract Carrasco's got basically five extremely friendly years. Fernandez has three and really the third one will be pretty close to market value anyway. And he's also got a fairly short history of being healthy. Like you don't quite know how his body will react to the full year. Anyway, let's say, I don't know, that's not the point I'm trying to make, but let's just say that they're equal value in a vacuum. And let's say the Red Sox internal metrics agreed with this. And they also thought that Carrasco was better than Fernandez in a vacuum. And let's say the Red Sox internal metrics agreed with this, and they also thought

that Carrasco was better than Fernandez in a vacuum, maybe even more valuable. They don't trade Ortiz for Carrasco though, right? No, no. It needs to be someone who has an aura. So there is an acknowledgement that the aura is a big factor here. And we're just, like the question is how much the aura weighs. And in this case, you're saying the Fernandez aura outweighs the Ortiz aura. But if this question were rephrased for any number of similarly valuable, great players, you think the answer would be that they would still opt for inferior David Ortiz for the retirement tour? Yes. Significantly inferior, by the way.

Like you're saying Jose Fernandez is essentially a no-brainer and Carlos Carrasco is probably a no. And so if Carlos Carrasco, you know, that's a big turndown if they turn down five years of Carrasco at like $6 million a year for one last year of their big DH. Right. Yeah. I think they would definitely take some sort of performance hit in order to keep David Ortiz. Would they trade David Ortiz for Sonny Gray? Yes.

Okay. Not that Sonny Gray has a huge aura, but I think he's good enough. Yeah, there's a certain level at which the sentimentality is probably outweighed by the fact that everyone will forget that you traded david ortiz when you get to watch the new guy being awesome for several years would they trade david ortiz for brandon crawford no all right okay it's the last one on all right we actually both have play indexes i suppose or do you have a play index i have a plan yeah i have two but they're both real quick okay go ahead should i do all right they're real real quick okay the first one is that david schoenfield at espn

uh uh did a little rundown of things that he learned from the Bill James book this year. One of them was that there were six starts in which a pitcher threw 125 pitches or more in all of baseball. Six. Which, of course, is lower than it used to be. Yep. Lowest ever, I think. Now, my question for you is, Now, my question for you is what year would be the last year in which an individual starter threw as many 125-plus games as the entire league did this year?

How far back do you have to go for that classic model of fun fact to be true? Okay, so one starter throwing at least six games with 125 pitches i will say 2000 uh that i might have said that too because it's normally you have to go that far back to make a fun fact like this happen you gotta you gotta you know it doesn't just happen but in fact uh in fact the answer is 2011 wow Four years ago, you had one pitcher throwing 125 pitches, six starts. Halliday? Verlander? Verlander. He did it in 2009 and 2011, actually. So only four years ago.

In only four years, we've gone from it being rare, but it happened, to essentially completely never. Yeah. Of the six, by the way, at least two and maybe three were no hitters. So those are forced. You only have to go back to 2000 to find a pitcher who, well, let's see. I guess you have to go back to 1998 to find a pitcher with 16 of these starts leave levo who was uh by the way really young levo had 16 in 2000 in 1998 and randy johnson also had 16 in 1998 the most since 1988

is do you want to guess how many was the 16 was levon 16 was how many levo and randy johnson had in 1998 uh-huh so the most since 88 um i'll say uh 20 yeah it's 19 nolan ryan had 19 in 89 and roger clemens at 18 in the same year and mark langston at 17 in the same year. So those are your leaders. All right, second one, Angleton Simmons is negative offensive war and positive defensive war, of course. And I wanted to figure out who is the all-time leader in war through age 25 with negative batting war. Simmons is sixth on this list. He's actually quite a bit ahead of Ozzie Smith because partly Ozzie Smith's defense didn't show up on,

I guess, on play-by-play data that was used to measure defense back then and also because his offense was worse than Simmons. But anyway, Simmons has 17 more so far in his career, despite negative 31 batting runs. That sixth, number one, is Robin Yount, who was a 27-war player despite being a below, a negative-war batter to that point. Elvis Andrews is actually ahead of Andrelton Simmons,

which kind of blew my mind. That's partly because he has two extra years uh but uh elvis andrews through age 25 uh had and that was only that's through 2014 so it's not the distant past but through age 25 had more war than andrelton simmons simmons though is way way way way way ahead of everybody else in defensive war uh on that leaderboard he's at 113 runs ozzy guillen number two at 93 uh and to put anderson last one to put anderson simmons defensive value in perspective. I just looked at all major leaguers from 2012 to 2015, and Anderton Simmons, of course, leads in defensive war. Defensive war includes both the runs that you save as well as the positional adjustments, so a shortstop gets more value than a left fielder. All right, so the difference between number one and number two is the same difference as between number two and number 96.

Wow. Yeah. So that's why we were saying yesterday that he seems like an exception or should be an exception to people not trusting defensive ratings. Yes. Okay. All right. Well, my play index is a response to a listener email, and it's from Matt in Maryland. And he says, I'm a diehard Orioles fan, and I'm tired of the Orioles never getting credit for one of the most amazing performances in the history of baseball, or at least since the start of the 20th century.

the 20th century specifically on august 23rd 2002 the orioles came from behind to beat the blue jays 11-7 to improve their season record to 63 and 63 i was at the game it was great we had battled back to 500 and we were going to compete for the playoffs what happened over the rest of the season was historical dot dot dot lee bad exclamation point he's really excited for the oils for a second the o's went 4 and 32 the rest of the way to finish at 67 and 95 amazing i mean it has to be one of the greatest accomplishments in baseball history right i did some digging a while back and couldn't find any bad team that went 4-32 during any 36-game stretch, let alone 4-32 starting from a 500 record to close out a season. I looked at some likely culprits, such as the 1962 Mets, the 1941 Phillies, or 42 Phillies,

and I didn't see a 4-32 stretch for any of them. Even the 1988 Orioles, who started out 0-21, were 5-31 after 36 games. My questions are, is my hunch correct that no AL or NL team other than the 2002 Orioles has ever gone 4-32 or worse in a 36-game stretch or played to a lower winning percentage over a longer stretch? If I am correct, is this not a stretch of baseball incompetence that deserves a great deal of recognition? Could it be that the 1988 Orioles with their 5-31 start to the season are the closest to 4-32 that any team has ever come to reaching it? So you can look this up with the play index. You can go to the streak finder and you can put in any number of games. So

you can put in 36 games and you can't sort all years and all teams, but you can search for any one team and all years, and you can look for the most losses in any stretch of 36 games. So I did this for every franchise, and I think that Matt's suspicion is correct, that this is pretty unprecedented. Now, I will say that there have been worse stretches. The thing is that the teams that did worse than this are basically from baseball prehistory, like the Pittsburgh Allegsburgh alleghenies

of 1890 went 2 and 34 over a 36 game stretch but you know that was 1890 things were crazy the 1916 a's 2 and 34 also and so did the 1897 st louis browns and the point is you have to go way far back to find these things but in the modern era the tigers matched it with 4 and 32 in 1996 but of course the 1996 tigers were a really atrocious atrocious team they were terrible they did it the 2012 astros did it 4 and 32 and obviously 2012 astros were horrendous the 1982 twins did it but they were also horrendous so basically that's it like either you have to go back to baseball prehistory and some really terrible teams did it in the 1890s or the first decade of the 20th century or you have to go to essentially the worst teams that we've seen

in recent memory the 1996 tigers the 2012 astros basically replacement level teams so he's right. The 2002 Orioles going 4-32 were just about as bad as any team has been. And the fact that they were 500 before they started that stretch really sets them apart from the teams that were awful all season. So I think that we can say that the 2002 Orioles had an unprecedented stretch of awfulness. So he was quite correct that he was watching a historic performance. Cool. Yeah. The best, worst stretch over any 36-game stretch is 8-28. I mean, that's the best that any team's worst performance over that stretch has been.

And he's right. I mean, you can like the rays the 19 the 2003 rays were one of those teams so terrible rays teams were not this bad terrible royals teams were not this bad expansion mets teams were not that bad most of the really historically terrible teams did not have stretches obviously it's a it's an arbitrary number of games, but this was something special. So I can think of maybe six, in my lifetime, six all-time achievements in being awful. You know, like, and kind of all at different scales. So, like, the Mets in, what, 2000, whatever, seven or eight or whatever, had the greatest collapse ever, right?

Uh-huh. Or at least since the Phillies and the Sixers. So the Mets are an all-time bad. The Mets collapsing is an all-time bad example of a team being horrible. The Astros having essentially the worst run, multi-year run in history and having the zero TV rating and all that is an all-time example of being bad at a team level the 119 lost tigers is an underrated baseball reference spiral uh opportunity

you can almost go as deep in that season's club as you can go on bonds or pedro yeah so that's that's a good one and then the last three are all Orioles. The one that you just said, which we've determined is the worst run basically in history from a team that was good, pretty good before that. The 20, what did they start? 0-21 or something in 1988. And the time that they won me a bet that I had completely given up hope on ever winning by allowing 30 runs to the Rangers in a game. So, you know, like I had bet that there would be a 30-run game at some point by like 2009 or something like that. And it was becoming extremely clear that that was not going to happen. Like nobody comes close anymore ever.

becoming extremely clear that that was not going to happen. Like nobody comes close anymore ever. And then all of a sudden there's this game where it's like 15 to 3 in the seventh. And I just start willing it. And it gets completely out of hand and they end up losing 30 to 3, I think. And so that's three of the six horrible team examples of my lifetime are the Orioles, which they don't feel like the worst franchise. I guess you could throw the Pirates in there too.

Yeah. For the extended stretch that they had. Right. And for the 1890 Alleghenies. Yeah. All right. Ben, quick little update on a thing that we were talking about. There's a tweet here about david ortiz indication that in lieu of gifts ortiz will ask clubs honoring him to donate to his

children's fund i would like to think that they will nonetheless donate the gifts they were going to give him and the children's fund will be rich with Stetson hats, Weber grills, surfboards, bottles of wine, and highlight videos of David Ortiz. Portraits of David Ortiz. Portraits of David Ortiz. Yeah, it'd be great. The kids need them.

Yeah. Okay. Some of these kids have never worn a Stetson from Houston. That's true. All right. I guess we've talked enough. You can send us more emails for next week at podcast at baseballperspectives.com. As always, I will roll over some of the good ones that we didn't have time to.

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