Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 770: Shooting the Baseball Breeze

Episode Date: November 19, 2015

Ben and Sam banter about award apathy, Hall of Fame voting, and Francisco Rodriguez, then answer a couple listener emails.

I'm so pleased I never gave up on him Oh, why you wouldn't believe some of the things that he did And everyone said you have to give him some time And I'm glad that I gave it to him Cause now everything's fine Good morning and welcome to episode 770 of Effectively Wild God, God gave it to him, and now everything's fine Hello. Yo. My award apathy has risen or sunk to the point where I didn't even look at the results yesterday. I was getting ready to go to bed and I remembered that there had been award results and I thought of checking and I thought, nah, I'll look in the morning. And I looked. You did. And I said,

yeah, okay. I'm glad you brought this up because I actually have reconsidered my position on awards apathy. I feel like what I expressed a week ago does not actually fairly reflect what I believe. I thought it did, but it doesn't. In fact, I think that it's not so much that I think that the awards matter any less than I used to, but rather that, and it's not that I even mind seeing lots of discussion about the awards, even though I'm not all that interested. I think what it is is I dread having to comment myself on them. I think this is a defense posture where I don't want to comment on them. Like I'm content with them existing. And I'm worried that if I pay too much attention to it, I am going,

it will be insisted by whatever, by either my own sense of obligation or by external forces that I comment on them. And so really, I fear. I fear the awards voting. I fear it, Ben. But I actually don't think I have any negativity toward it other than as it affects my schedule. Yeah. Yeah, I don't have much negativity toward it because the results are far better than they used to be. But I would actually look forward to having a vote, which I have not had because I'm in the New York chapter of the BBWA and every other writer is also in the New York chapter. And so it rotates randomly or in some fashion and it hasn't come to me yet. But if I had a vote or I had a Hall of Fame vote, I would enjoy that.

I think. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that'd be fun. I'd give it lots of thought. I guess I'd write something about it. I don't know. The world doesn't need another explanation of why someone voted for someone, but I would have fun.

How much thought would it take you? Like, realistically, how long would you spend on this? And I guess, how long would it take you to reach your final three or your final five or your final 10? And beyond that, would you simply be talking yourself out of the position and changing it to be wrong? It depends on the year. Obviously, there are some years where it's really obvious. And then there are some years where it's this year's NL Cy Young or this year's AL MVP, where there are really good

arguments for both sides. So if it were one of the tight years where there were multiple deserving candidates, then I think I would spend two hours on it. Two hours on it. Yes. I think that's the extent to which I could dissect the numbers and potentially come up with something new. Would you write your column about it before or after you submit? Because I feel like the best process would probably, well, best or worst, boy, I was going to say the best process might be writing your column so that you actually do force yourself to think through it in ways that, like a lot of times you don't really know how to think through it until you start trying to say the words. On the other hand, then you might find yourself choosing whichever is most narratively satisfying and whichever gets you the next paragraph and gets you to the end.

Yeah. And whichever supports the best one-liners. So I'm not sure which would be worse, which would be better. Yeah. It probably would be better to do a Socratic method style column and interrogate yourself As you write it and come to a conclusion Yeah Maybe it would be just good to Document your thoughts

Just do a stream of consciousness Column on how you Came to your vote Yeah there's that old thing though Where you make a decision and then you Whatever decision that you make You will then find reasons to support it. And that in a way, once you're wrong, the more you think about it, the more certain

you become of the wrong thing. Yeah. You will become like, you know, very firm in your position the more you talk about it. It's almost better not to talk about it, maybe. Right. It's also, what is it? There's another thing where if you ask people to think about how they're enjoying the movie while they're watching the movie, like to be thinking, is this a good movie?

They will generally like the movie less. Oh, uh-huh. So they'll like the word less. Oh, uh-huh. So they'll like award voting less? No, I'm suggesting that if you are too in your own head while you're making this decision, you might end up skewing your own actual... Like, you can maybe make a case. Look, I still think that there's a pretty good case

that I can't beat a war, uh, war sword. I don't want to, I don't want to admit that. I don't think it's any fun. I don't know that I would ever be able to do that, but probably realistically I would try at least of, of many of the voters, I would probably trust a war search more than their own. A thoughtful, but I guess I want the thoughtfulness. I guess it doesn't matter if it's right or not. I would rather it be thoughtful. The point is to get perspectives.

Yeah. Yeah. I do find, though, that when I look at the ballots, I immediately say, I kind of congratulate the ones who got it right. But the ones who got it right, but the ones who got it right, it's like the ones that most line up to a war sort. So why not just sort by war? I don't want anybody sorting by war. That's my real problem with awards

is I don't think you can do better than that horrible, boring method of taking a leaderboard and clicking at the top of it so that it'll sort. Of course, pitching war leaderboards can look very different. Yeah, but then you just have to pick one, right? Right. Like there's not really a better method. I mean, you could average them, I guess.

I don't know if that's been shown to be any better. But really, you still sort of have to just pick one. Picking none of them is probably like, I don't know. So who would you have gone, Arietta, Kershaw, or Grinke? Well, I didn't devote my two hours to it because I didn't need to. But I probably would have said Arietta, but you kind of swayed me toward Kershaw when we talked about it on the show. And I might have ended up going that way i think it was joe sheehan who said that you can go the what happened route and pick cranky or you can go the vip what should have

happened route and go kershaw uh-huh but there's not really a case for arietta above both of them there's a case for arietta over either of them. There's a case that Arrieta should be second in both. Yeah. But not first in either. And yet, Arrieta won, which is an interesting thing. Yeah. If Arrieta had had his second half first and his first half second, he doesn't win the Cy Young, correct?

Right, yeah. Unless you just want to recognize the guy who had the most incredible run, which is probably not a great thing to do for a full season award. No, but I think I said this. Maybe I didn't, but I think I said this, in which case I would have had a reason to believe this. I think Kershaw's run was better than Arrieta's run, although only in the fit model, not the ERA model. Right. Okay. Also in voting news uh wait wait hang on hang on one one last thing how many years in the last

just off the top of your head you don't know this but how many years in the last 25 do you think uh each of these guys would have won the nl cy young like if you transport arietta to another year uh-huh how many years does this performance win the cy young it's like 24 right in the nl it's got to be like i'm trying to think like other than maybe like kershaw 2014 yeah probably beats all three of them maybe i mean some randy johnson maddox years uh yeah maybe maddox in 94 95 would be tough and yeah there's a at least a johnson year or two most years though all three of them win they're three of the 10 best seasons, you know, the Hall of Fame has called its voting role this year, and people who haven't covered baseball in a while or had their legacy or honorary votes

no longer get votes. Not clear to me whether you could actually request to vote if you were one of those people. Anyway, some people who lost their vote are upset about it and are making the case that they have more perspective or a different perspective because they covered these players or they saw more of these players. And I've been thinking about whether there's anything to that, whether having seen a player at this level matters or makes you a more informed voter, or whether it just makes you potentially biased in some way because of some personal interaction. Is there any way in which you think that someone who covered a player is more qualified to judge that player's performance? Or is Major League Baseball just, I mean, everyone can watch the games on TV.

Everyone can look up the stats. They're very detailed stats, and you don't have to have seen the guy to see where he ranks on a leaderboard or know what his reputation is or have read about him. know what his reputation is or have read about him is there any way in which you think someone who saw a player or covered a player is better qualified i'm not sure that having covered a player it makes you more qualified yeah i i think having lived through his career probably does uh like for instance mart mcguire okay this okay? This is not a great example because everybody knows Mark McGuire hit 70 home runs and did the thing. But if Mark McGuire hadn't, like, you know, he hit 70 home runs one year and then he hit 56 the next or whatever. And one of those years broke the all-time home run record and was very exciting. Now, if instead of hitting 70 and 56, he had hit, well, he still would have broke the record.

But let's say he hadn't broken. Like he had the same number of home runs, but they were distributed in such a way that he never topped 61. That would make him exactly as good ballplayer, but a worse Hall of Fame candidate, right? Yeah. I do think that there is some value to having created moments that nobody else created and that nobody else could claim to have done. amplified moments, those exclamatory moments from getting lost in the river of tens of thousands of events in a guy's career. And so I think that David Ortiz, for instance, fares better if you've lived through David Ortiz than it ever will 20, 30, 40 years from now. And I think it's a good thing. I think David Ortiz is more qualified because we know exactly what the Red Sox winning in 2004 meant. We know exactly the feeling that we had when he came up. We also know that he performed extremely well. And you can get some

of that by looking at his postseason performances. But I don't know that you quite really get it. So that helps. On the other hand, those can be sources of extreme bias and you can put way too much weight on those very same things and so probably living through a guy's career uh leads to more correct assessments of him and also more incorrect assessments of him than not having but uh unless i mean it's sort of like the the five-year waiting period or whatever waiting period you put in is for historical perspective it's so that you don't make rash judgments based on having just seen something and not having time to think about it and you could say that having not seen a player in a sense is like a waiting period it's someone comes along and sees how the numbers stack up and it's dispassionate and you get a you can judge that player in

comparison to other players that you haven't seen who are also in the hall of fame and see whether he measures up just based on objective things rather than what you actually saw. You could if you want it to be dispassionate. Right. I think you want to have some passion. You don't want too much passion, but you want some passion. Yeah. Right?

Yeah, sure. I guess you want the right kind of passion. You want the passion that is placed well, not misplaced passion. Yeah. Let me ask you a hypothetical. Let's say that there was a guy who was hitting 400 into mid-September. And we had this 400 chase all year long. And then at the end, he failed to hit 400 and he hit 391.

Okay? Yeah. Now, another guy hit 370 all year long and we weren't even paying attention. He failed to hit 400 and he hit 391. Okay? Yeah. Now, another guy hit 370 all year long and we weren't even paying attention. And then he went 16 for his last 18 and he ended up at 391. But there was never a 400 chase. Does the first guy get more Hall of Fame consideration to you than the second guy? For giving us five and a half months of our first legitimate 400 know our first legitimate 400 chase in 40 years yeah i think he probably does okay and he probably shouldn't

right i mean well beyond beyond the fact that he had 390 and the other guy had 370 do you think he should oh i think he should not i think that I'm okay with it. Uh-huh. Not like I'm not putting him in the Hall of Fame for that alone, but I think I would. Okay. I don't know. Look, they're all wrong.

All of these, the Hall of Fame is just, it's all wrong unless you change your mind and think there cannot be wrong, that this is a document from the people who watched 30 years of baseball choosing what mattered in those 30 years, choosing as a big group in a way that should theoretically lead to a real consensus, a real sort of sense of public opinion. And if that's what it is, then I'm fine. I think that that works. Now, it's partly I say that's what it

is because the legacy that these previous generations have passed along is of a very flawed Hall of Fame that cannot possibly be the other thing. Now, if it were the other thing, if it truly were the best collection of the best players decided through the best and most objective means, I would want to keep it that way. Like that might be my ideal for what the Hall of Fame would be. But at this point, we're 80 years into this experiment, like you're not going to get all the smudges off it. And so then the I don't know, I sort of feel like the best way to say to think about it is, oh, well, this is a smudged document. The smudges are what it aspired to.

The smudges are part of what made it such a lasting institution. And that, you know, it just, it is always going to be that. And so once those are the parameters, then you treat it a little bit differently. going to be that and so once those are the parameters then you treat it a little bit differently i still would you know i still think yes vote for the best players but not as nervous about passion being part of what people use to decide what best meant yeah i mean we both agreed about the mcguire thing right like you don't think that's a problem the The McGuire hypothetical? Probably not. No, I don't know. I think that I think exciting things should have a place in a baseball museum in some way. Like there should be an exhibit about the guy's 400 chase and how exciting that was.

I don't know. I would like people to be able to go and relive and have some place preserve these exciting moments. But I guess the I'm just not sure whether that should translate to the room with the plaques. I don't know. It doesn't matter that much to me. Yeah. Okay. It matters so little that we've had this conversation about 30 times on this podcast. Well, you have to talk about something when you do a daily podcast i like talking about it yeah i like talking about it too

all right it just uh yeah i like talking about it but i i stopped thinking about it the moment that we stopped talking about it yeah all right um so you your show is early in the week, got the interesting trades, and I'm stuck with the leavings. But do you think that we underrate Francisco Rodriguez? We were talking about Craig Kimbrell the other day, and you were saying he's the closest thing to Mariano Rivera in that he is not a fungible reliever. He's really good every year, and his peak was better than Rivera's even. And Francisco Rodriguez, whom the Tigers just traded for, has been good for a very long time. I mean, first of all, I think the fact that he's only 33 surprised me.

I mean, he's very close to 34, and 34 sounds very different to me than 33. But he obviously started very young, so that is why he's not that old. But he's been pitching since 2002 was the year when he came up and made the playoffs and was exciting. And he's still good. He's still good enough for a team to want to trade for him to be a closer. And that's a long time to be a guy who gets saves. And I guess his best self only lasted for a few years, maybe. Maybe that's why I don't think of him quite on the kimbrough rivera pantheon as a young

pitcher he was really exciting and really good and now he's sort of settled into this good enough to close but not good enough to have fun facts made about him territory but still to have been in that territory for this long is impressive and rare there was i think that we probably uh underrate him now because there were two or three years where he wasn't very good yeah and where it seemed like his career was pretty well over and there is a there is he sort of fits an archetype of the former closer who gets to hang on to his prestige to some degree and often his closer role, even though he has declined and there are a lot of often better relievers even on his own team.

And so when you see, generally I think when a guy is 30 plus and has a mountain of saves behind him and is still getting saves even though he's not nearly as good, then we probably maybe make it a point to think less of him, to think that he's not good, to put him in the sort of Val Verde, Rafael Soriano sort of kind of camps, kind of camp. And so I think that probably we were appropriate in assessing him then. And then I would guess that, yes, most of us, many of us, me, I don't know about anybody else, maybe just me, considers his last two years to have been stealth great and stealth to the point that I didn't notice them. So, yeah, probably if a team trades for Francisco Rodriguez, as a team does, my first reaction is, okay. And he's probably as good as a number of pitchers who, when they get traded, I think, oh.

Right. Hmm. Yeah, like, I mean, is he any worse than Houston Street right now? Yeah, probably not. I don't know. I'm going to look. But, you know, when Houston Street gets traded, it feels like a bigger deal. Like, Francisco Rodriguez getting traded does to, yes, it does kind of feel like the sort

of thing you tuck into another transaction analysis rather than giving its own file. Do you consider Francisco Rodriguez to be a convincing fit breaker at this stage of his career? I hadn't thought of him that way. He hasn't been that way throughout his career. But every year since 2007 and usually by a lot and for his career it's about a half a run difference yeah that's that's interesting i guess that's maybe long enough to start to think it means something i don't know it's hard because with relievers they pitch 60 innings a year and they do something for five years and it seems really impressive.

But then you realize it's only 300 innings and that's like a season and a half of a starter and it's not that weird. But sure, maybe. It does look like those are pretty big gaps. So I'm going to do the comparison game. So if you think of him as an ERA guy, then he is of active relievers, and partly this hurts him because it includes his decline, but of active relievers with more than 300 innings, he is 12th right there in between Mark Melanson and Sergio Romo, which is actually less impressive than i was

expecting that back to be uh if you go by fit and use all the same parameters then he is now uh no not actually much worse i guess a lot of relievers are at that level are kind of fit breakers maybe but he's like uh because they tend to have a lot of them have at that level are kind of fit breakers, maybe. But he's like, because they tend to have, a lot of them have good Babbitts. He is like 16th between Drew Storn and Houston Street. So probably if I told you he's between Drew Storn and Houston Street in one and Sergio Romo and whoever on the other, you probably would not know which one was better. Yeah.

So never mind. Okay. Same fun fact. All right. He might have more, let's see, of active pitchers, he's only 33, as you noted. And of active pitchers who have at least 80% relief, he is, are we counting Joee nathan is active yeah okay he is fourth in innings pitched is la troy hawkins did he retire i think so okay so he is he's behind only among actives pitchers who pitched in 2015 and that are still on a roster he's behind Joaquin Benoit, Carlos Villanueva, and Joe Nathan.

And all of them have starts. So he is the most innings for any pitcher, active pitcher, without a start. All right. I could have said all the things that I said about Rodriguez, about Benoit, probably. Oh, I think Benoit is a stud't He hasn't gotten the saves but I think of Benoit as an elite reliever I don't feel like Benoit is underrated Benoit's I mean maybe he is

But he's awesome like I don't have any Negative feelings about Benoit And I have lots of negative feelings There are many reasons to have negative feelings about Rodriguez Alright I wanted to answer A couple emails that we didn't get to yesterday. One of them somewhat topical. Ethan asks or states hypothesis.

By the way, Benoit, big fit breaker too. Oh, yeah. Yeah, at least lately. Last five years. Last five years, he has a ERA of 235 and a fit of 315 uh-huh all right good okay hypothesis seeking to offset his reputation as a great tradesman and thereby soften the ground for future trades dombrowski deliberately overpaid for kimbrough no no no no. Okay. He didn't. No, he didn't. No, he didn't. False. No.

However, his question is, how much explanatory power do you think this hypothesis offers or more broadly, to what extent, if any, do GMs make trades with an eye toward knowing how such trades will affect their public reputation And therefore other GM's expectations about subsequent Trades You only get So many shots in this world And I Like if you

First of all I don't think that people Are paying that much attention To what kind of trades You make and Like whether you're not to be traded with. I think they look at the players and they say, I know that there are sort of stories about teams not wanting to trade with Billy Bean

after Moneyball came out. But if this is your strategy, I just don't think it's going to work. I just don't think some team is going to. Now in fantasy, it definitely happens that you'll see someone make a trade and then immediately you're like, wow, that was a dumb trade. I'm going to trade with that guy. But then you're not offering that guy a very good trade.

You're trying to rip him off. And that's not what Dave Dombrowski wants. I don't know what to say about this theory except no. Yeah, the whole thing is you can always leak a trade rumor if you really wanted to. And I think we've talked about this on a previous episode. I don't know whether teams pay attention to the public reaction to their trades or whether they might leak a rumor just to kind of crowdsource it and see what the public thinks. And I don't know whether they do that, but they could do that. The point is, it wouldn't be difficult to do that, really. And so you would always rather do that than actually

make a trade that you believe to be bad, just to like be a ringer just i mean or you know just like confuse people and lull them into a false sense of security or something so i don't know whether anyone leaks trade rumors to see what the world thinks it seems like it might be a useful piece of information to know but i guess you also jeopardize the trade talks because if you leak an ongoing negotiation then teams might not want to trade with you or that might kill the deal somehow so it's risky and it probably doesn't really happen and teams probably trust their own trading abilities maybe even too much okay mark asks would baseball be better if the season was 12 months long? What would be the perfect season length?

Three months. Yeah, Stomper's length. I do think the, I don't know. I mean, if you like baseball and you miss baseball when it's gone, then having baseball is probably better than not having it. Yeah, life would be better if the baseball season was 12 months long. then having baseball is probably better than not having it. Yeah, life would be better if the baseball season was 12 months long. Baseball would be considerably worse.

Yeah, the individual games would be worse, but it would still be better than not having any games for six months, I suppose. I mean, I don't mind the break. I think the offseason is okay. I do other things and don't miss baseball that much. I mean, I look forward to it when it comes back. But when it's over, I think, okay, that was a good length that went on for a while. It's interesting. Isn't it sort of interesting that we need baseball? We require our baseball to be real, but we don't require our novels or our television shows to be real. We're perfectly happy rooting for fictional things.

And so it's sort of interesting that we don't have fictional sports that we root for that we get. I mean, we do. It's WWE, right? And people like that. A lot of people really enjoy that. And a lot of people can't possibly get their head around it.

But you could imagine a world where, somewhere in the future, where we just embrace that none of us has any real power in any of this and that the stakes are not actually that real. We wouldn't really embrace that but uh you could imagine maybe uh somewhere down the line there being some version of sports that doesn't require real people and that that you could cheer it anyway and that could

then go on forever that you could always that you could basically have a non-stop baseball drama in your life but it would be somewhere between maybe scripted or maybe randomized i so like holographic baseball players or you like that book right i know exactly what book you're thinking of which book am i thinking of the universal baseball association there were some edited parts out of that people I know exactly what book you're thinking of. Which book am I thinking of? The Universal Baseball Association. There were some edited parts out of that, people. Yeah, the Universal Baseball Association, Inc. J. Henry Waugh, proprietor, which is about a guy who basically has a fictional baseball league on his kitchen table that he's quite passionate about.

And what I guess, I don't know. I'm not sure what I'm saying. People play Strat. Yes, they do. Although that's not quite so much a shared experience. Neither is the book, by the way. But it's not a shared experience that we all watch together. Whereas we do all watch

The Wire together. It's a bad example because nobody actually watched The Wire when it was on. But we do all watch The Sopranos, and we know that's fake. We know that's fiction, and yet the stakes seem really huge, and we all like to talk about it. I don't know. That's a long way of saying that it would be nice if there was some version of the drama that we get from baseball

that could be in our lives all 12 months of the year. But it's unrealistic from a physical standpoint. And the stakes, the longer the season goes, the stakes of each individual game get less. And so you're actually, like, it's a kind of inefficient way of packing joy into your life. What if, though, like, this can't happen because you need to have your minor leaguers available for as depth and reserves and all that. But do you think it would be enjoyable if the major league season went from April to September and the minor league season went from November to February?

Would would you do you think we would be super, super into minor league baseball? Yeah, definitely. Do you think that it's, uh, that in, I don't know, 10 years or so the, um, the Dominican winter league and the Caribbean leagues, which are extremely, have extremely passionate followings and are played with extreme competitive levels, uh, but you know, far away from us will be regularly broadcast in good enough quality that baseball fans will turn them on and watch them the same way that they watch non-major golf tournaments and non-major tennis tournaments.

Yeah, I would think so. I mean, a lot of people do that already. Not a lot. Not a lot do, and the quality do that already. Not a lot. Yeah, not a lot. Not a lot do, and the quality is pretty awful. Right, yeah. I mean, the production of it. So if it were more available, yeah, I think more people would watch it.

I don't know if it would. It would still probably be a minority. It wouldn't be like every baseball fan would suddenly switch over to watching that or the Arizona Fall League or whatever, but I think it would become more popular. Do you know whether Winter League participation is trending up or down? I would think down for prominent players. You would think down for prominent players, but I don't know if you know that. I don't know the numbers.

Yeah, part of the problem is that you need enough prominent players that you can get the fan who's not into it just for prospect watching. Yeah, I mean, more and more fans are into it for prospect watching, but still not the majority. So we will be back tomorrow. You can send us emails at podcast at baseballperspectives.com. Join our Facebook group at

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