Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 863: The 0-9-Off: A Battle for Baseball’s Most Soul-Crushing Start

Episode Date: April 15, 2016

With help from Twins fan Aaron Gleeman and Braves fan Alex Remington, Ben and Sam attempt to determine which of MLB’s two winless teams has had the more demoralizing start to the season.

If there's one thing I have said, is that the dreams I once had now lay in bed. As the four winds blow my wits through the door, it's been the worst day since yesterday Good morning and welcome to episode 863 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectus presented by our Patreon supporters and the Play Index at BaseballReference.com I am Ben Lindberg of FiveThirtyEight, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Prospectus. Hello, Sam. You get me so excited, Ben. Yeah, you're probably the second happiest person on this podcast. And the next two people that you're going to hear from are less happy than we are.

And we're gathered here today for a very important purpose, and that is to determine which team has had the most depressing, demoralizing start to the 2016 season. I think there are only two possible answers to this question, and they are both teams that have not won a game yet. We are talking about the 0-9 Minnesota Twins and the 0-9 Atlanta Braves. And we have convened a representative from each team here today. And speaking on behalf of the Braves, we have Alex Remington, who works for the Washington Post and is a writer for the Hardball Times and an editor at Braves Journal. Hello, Alex, and our condolences.

Thank you for having me. And thank you for those wonderful condolences. And speaking on behalf of the twins, we have the Dean of Twins Bloggers, longtime writer at AaronGleeman.com and co-host of the Gleeman and the Geek podcast, Aaron Gleeman. Hello, Aaron, and our condolences to you. Hello. Thank you for the condolences. Didn't we just do the last team against team roundtable that we did was whether the twins or the who was the other team should feel happier? Well, we did. We did an episode with Aaron only, I think, where we talked about the twins and whether

whether they were actually as good as they appeared to be at the time. OK, but that was long ago. That was when the twins were winning games, which is something they have not done. Actually, Aaron, you know exactly how many days it has been since the Twins won a game. Add a day to your total since this is Friday now. Yeah, it has been 198 days now since the Minnesota Twins won a game, which I realize is cheating a little bit using the offseason, but I feel it drives the point home. I think it does. Yeah. So I both of you on Twitter. And it's been a relentless, just an unceasing string of sad tweets from both of you. You are clearly not very happy. So I think that you are excellent representatives of your

respective fan bases. So what we're going to do is we're essentially going to have you each make a case that the start to your team is more depressing. And to be clear, we're essentially going to have you each make a case that the start to your team is more depressing. And to be clear, we're not saying that the Braves or the Twins are the most depressing franchise. I think they both have a lot going for them. They both have young talent. They've got some hope on the horizon, but they have no hope in the present. And that is what we are talking about. So let's start. I don't know. We could do a coin toss, but I feel like you'd probably both lose it somehow, given how things have gone. So why don't we just start with Aaron?

You can make your opening statement for why the Twins have had the most depressing start to the season. Okay. Well, I think first and foremost, there were actual expectations for the Twins. Not that anyone thought they were going to run away with the division or even be the favorites for the division. But I mean, I'm often accused of being one of the more pessimistic Twins writers around for the past 10 years. And even I thought this was clearly a 500 or better team. They won 83 games last year with a pretty young

team, had a lot more prospects coming up this year. And I think I remember about two days before the season started, I did a Twitter poll, which, as everyone knows, is the most scientific way to determine anything. 78.5 wins, which was their Las Vegas total. And so there were definitely a feeling like this is a team that made a big stride last year and was ready to be, at worst, similar this year and potentially make another jump, and obviously that hasn't happened. And then the other two other sad things are, one, Joe Maurer, who has been ripped constantly locally for all kinds of reasons, some of them fair and some of them not, is hitting like 400 with a 1,200 OPS and no one cares because the team is so terrible. And then the other thing is, fans are already starting to kind of turn on Miguel Sano and Byron Buxton and Eddie Rosario

and some of the other young players who the whole idea was that these are the guys that are going to be the building blocks for the next five, 10 years. And there's already people who are, you know, they think Sano's not working hard enough in right field because he's 275 pounds and he shouldn't be in right field. And he's also not hitting. A lot of people want to send Buxton down. And then it's just sad to see people are already soured on the guys who, you know, eventually are going to be the fan favorites. So I think all those three things, and particularly just the fact that people expected this to be at worst a 500 team,

I think makes this by far more depressing than the Atlanta Braves. Yeah, it was just about two weeks ago that you wrote a season preview post and you titled it, Are the Twins Ready to Be a Playoff Team? And even if the answer was the odds are against it, you were at least willing to entertain the possibility.

It seemed like a plausible outcome to this season, and it seems significantly less plausible now. Okay, so Alex, make the Braves fans case for this being the more depressing start to the season. All right, well, first of all, Aaron, my heart goes out to you. to the season. All right. Well, first of all, Aaron, my heart goes out to you with all of the magnanimity of mutual condolence. I do believe that misery loves company. That being said, it sounds a little bit like you're asking for credit for the fact that the twins are a better team. You think you get to be more miserable just because not everyone thought that you would suck going into the year.

Being a Braves fan in 2016 is a little bit like watching your dog slowly die of a disease, hearing a doctor tell you that your dog is going to die next week, and then having him die tomorrow. I have to quibble a little bit with your statement that the Twins haven't won in 191 days, was it? 198, I believe. 198. Well, the Twins went 1911 in spring training, which means that until today, the Twins were still 500 for 2016. The Braves went 6-20 in spring training. 2016. The Braves went 6-20 in spring training. That was not only the worst in baseball, that means that the Braves are now 6-29 this year. It's digging a grave through to China and then out into space. While you've got Joe Maurer batting 400, our only good hitter, Freddie Freeman, is batting 0-80 and was benched today because he's pressing

and can't hit. Our starting lineup, and remember, this is a rebuild, so we're supposed to be tearing down the team and fielding a team of youngsters. Our position players have an average age over 30. I mean, let's just go through the lineup. Our infield consists of catcher A.J. Pruszynski, the aforementioned benched Freddie Freeman, shortstop Eric Ibar, third baseman Adonis Garcia, whom no one had heard of before last year.

Our left fielder was arrested for domestic abuse yesterday. Our center fielder is Malik Smith because Ender and Ciarte, our starting center fielder already tweaked as Hammy. And our right fielder is hometown boy, Nick Marcakis, who at a sprightly 32 is the best player on the team right now. We've got a young starting rotation, Julio Teran, the putative ace, in his most recent start, the most recent game played by the Braves, our best pitcher gave up a grand slam to Bryce Harper, removing all doubt as to the outcome of the game. The rest of our starting rotation is Bud Norris, Julius Chassin, and Williams Perez, whom no one had heard of before last year. And of course, Matt Whistler, who may turn into a decent fourth starter, but that's like,

that's what the scouts see in him. So he's not a future ace. This is who the hopes are hanging on. Yeah, right now, just reading the Braves roster out loud is a pretty strong argument that they're the more soul-destroying team. The Braves have already had a pitcher fracture his elbow in the act of throwing a pitch, which seems symbolic. Yeah, we had the Joe Saunders injury from a right-hander. Our best-case scenario is that the 2016 Braves are the 2015 Phillies. 16 Braves are the 2015 Phillies. And our young guys who are in single A actually have a good year and go into double A next year and don't fall off the cliff. But not only is 2016 awful, but the 0-9 start. So again, I feel for you. You've got Byron Buxton, Miguel Sano on the same team, even if Buxton is hurt again. You've actually got something to dream on in the second half in 2017. We were told two years ago that our rebuild would yield a good team in 2017. Then 2015 happened and we were so bad that we started to be told that, well, maybe it'll be 2018. We're seeing years of life be shaved off our hopes and dreams so that the net present value of ever seeing a good team again has gone almost to zero. And we haven't played our 10th game.

I think we're more miserable. Alex, can I ask, if I may, I'd like to ask a point of clarification for each of you. Alex, do you think that additional losses at this stage slow down or speed up the rebuilding process? In other words, does the fact that they're losing mean, well, that's good. They're going to get the pick and they're going to get the international bonus and they have more incentive than ever to trade everything that's not nailed down? Or does it just tell you that they're going to look at this team and go, wow, we're not even as close as we thought and we need to push it back another year to set our expectations more realistic? Very much the latter. I've never been a proponent of the idea that catastrophe leads to positive change. In general, I think that in the face of catastrophe,

the natural response of most people is to make horrible short-term decisions that they think will temporary stanch losses and cause a temporary reversal of public relations nightmares, essentially robbing Peter to pay Paul for many years to come. In fact, I think that that is what happened in 2014, when an unexpectedly disappointing team caused the front office to utterly clean house. And I frankly, based on everything we've seen for the last year and a half, have no confidence that that was the right call. So I certainly don't think that even worse results will lead them to start suddenly making good decisions. And Aaron, this is somewhat of a more narrow question, but I assume that the typical fan

is going to use whatever weapon he has at his disposal to hate the slumping ballplayer. And so just having his weight listed in the newspaper is going to be plenty to have many people be on Sano's bad side when he's not hitting. But I'm curious, as somebody who has watched him a lot last year, as well as this year, how does he wear his weight? Well, it's funny. I mean, he is a extremely large human being. He has been since they signed him when he was 16. I think he's probably right now like 6'5", 270. But he doesn't look like Jose Maharez or David Ortiz or Rich Gutt. I mean, his gut is not hanging over his belt. He just isn't capable of running 100 feet to track down fly balls into the gap

and all that stuff. And he also just doesn't know what he's really doing in right field. But, yeah, I actually think it's a little overblown in that I went to the Twins home opener, which by the way, it was 35 degrees and overcast for the Twins home opener. I could have thrown that in. It's slightly more depressing. And people around me, we were sitting sort of near right field watching him. A lot of people actually commented that they were surprised after reading all the, there were a couple prominent newspaper columns during spring training, kind of taking him to task for not losing more weight to get ready to play right field. And a couple of people around me actually commented, he's not even that fat. Like he's not

fat at all. He's just a huge guy. And so, I mean, I don't know how he's going to look at 33, but at 23, he looks like an incredibly strong 40 homer, cleanup hitter type of guy who should probably be at first base or DH. But yeah, I actually think the whole thing about Sano being out of shape, let's say, is probably overblown. So I don't know if there's such a thing as a good 0-9, but there are less demoralizing ways to lose a ballgame than others. You have your managerial incompetence. You have the way of losing where you never even have a lead and you're never in it. And then there's the other way of losing where you do have a lead and then you blow the lead. And that's depressing, too.

So how have these teams lost their games? I guess which one has lost in the most depressing fashion? I mean, they've both been bad at everything, I guess would be a quick way to summarize their performance thus far. But Aaron, how have the Twins lost? And why has the way that they've lost been particularly depressing? Well, the Twins pitching has been terrible for about five years now. I think the worst in the American League. And the odd thing this year is that their starting pitching has actually been sort of decent. They've generally gotten six or seven innings,

allowing, let's say, two or three, four runs from their starters. But their offense has been, I believe they have 14 runs through nine games, which is by far the worst in team history. They're five out of 66 with runners in scoring positions. And so it's one of those situations where if you had said through nine games, whatever the current team ERA is, everyone in Minnesota would have jumped at the opportunity to have the pitching staff perform like that. But the offense has just been, they've yet to score more than three runs. They're averaging a run and a half a game. And so I think I would argue that it's more depressing or more demoralizing to lose like this because you're just constantly one key hit away from tying or taking the lead. And they've really yet to get that through nine

games at all. And all this unexpectedly decent pitching has completely been wasted. I think there's only two guys in the entire regular lineup, which is Maurer and the shortstop, Eduardo Escobar, who are hitting above 190 at this point. So it has been incredible futility from the lineup. And Alex, I know that there was at least one game where Freddy Gonzalez intervened and Braves fans were not happy with his actions, which suggests at least that there was a chance that the Braves were going to win that game. So have their losses been as uncompetitive as the Twins? I think, if anything more so, you know, if this means anything after only nine games, the Braves do have the worst run differential in baseball.

We've given up the second most runs, and we've scored the third fewest. That specific game that Freddie was pilloried for removing Julius Chassin after only six innings, despite the fact that he appeared to be cruising. I find it a little hard to fault him too much. If anything, Freddie has often gotten into trouble pushing, in my opinion, I haven't really looked at this. This is just the sense that I have. He's often gotten into trouble when he's tried to push a starting pitcher to start maybe one inning too many. And he's certainly done that time and again with Julio Teran, it seems, though not today exactly. The Grand Slams sort of took care of that. Chassin was just throwing

sliders and junk all game. And that's exactly the kind of thing that third time through a lineup can really just kill you. So I didn't mind that. The bigger problem was that it looked like if you gave the offense 18 innings, they wouldn't have been able to score. More broadly, when you see a, not just offense and pitching, if anything, the truest weak spot of these Braves has been defense. They're kicking the ball all over the field. There have been a decent number of not just pass balls and wild pitches, but failures to catch would-be outfield assists on plays at the plate. It's been an incredibly lackluster effort from the gloves, and this from what ought to be a veteran team. I find it hard to lay that at the

feet of the manager, other than the fact that it strikes me that watching this team play, they seem to be going through the motions. They seem to be depressed, downhearted, every bit as miserable as it is to watch them. And after a horrible year last year, where the final two months just looked like the team basically giving up, I think that they really need to part ways with the manager. He's presiding over a clubhouse of miserables where no one appears to be able to get his best effort. You guys are both very smart and calm people. You're calm human beings. Neither one of you do I think of as a reactionary or short-sighted or anything like that. But has this first week and a half changed either of your minds about what the front office's plan was coming into this year?

Obviously very different plans, but one plan was to punt and the other was to kind of move forward. And so has your idea about how they planned and how they executed change has, and maybe even in a larger sense, has your opinion of the front offices overall as the stewards of the team's future changed based on these nine games? I was very down on the team's approach going into the year, particularly the Andrelton-Simmons trade, I thought was horrendously short-sighted. Almost regardless of the return, trading the best defensive shortstop in baseball

seemed like exactly the wrong thing to do in a rebuild around young pitching. The one thing that you should do when rebuilding around young pitching, it seemed to me, is retain a strong defensive team. They did the opposite. But I think it's evidence of even more incompetence than we feared, or at the very least, even worse strategy and even more indifferent execution. I think that there should be a wholesale cleaning house in the front office rather than just shifting a few deck chairs, as they did after canning Frank Wren.

And as a microcosm, I think that the Hector Oliveira affair reveals something. For some reason, they really liked this guy, going back to when they tried to sign him. The Dodgers paid way more than they traded a fairly significant prospect haul to obtain him. And not only could he not hit, but he appears to have off-field issues as well, to the point where he's administratively suspended by the league pending an investigation. And there's a very real chance that he will never accomplish anything of note in an Atlanta uniform. That's a bad use of resources, if nothing else, even if they had no idea about any of the other character issues. Aaron?

Well, when the Twins were playing well, it's painted as a positive, but it's also of late been a point of frustration, which is that Terry Ryan and most of the front office has essentially been in place for 18 years or 20 years. He stepped down briefly in the middle there, but came back to the same position. And they've been, I think, one of the more conservative teams over that time. They've, of late, when they've kind of reached for a larger either signing or trade, they've failed more often than not. And this offseason, they did very little. But I think the hope was, or at least the plan that people assumed, was that they just viewed

the farm system as ready to pay off. We saw Sano was fantastic for the second half last year, but they saw Buxton and Max Kepler and Jose Barrios and some other top prospects as being so close to being ready as impact players that they just kind of felt it's not worth pursuing slightly better short-term options in trades and free agency. And I thought that was a mistake. I certainly didn't think it was going to turn into a 0-9 start and being all but out of contention in mid-April. But I think it's certainly people are frustrated in that even when they were playing well, going back six or seven years, they would win the division title and they would never

do absolutely anything in the postseason. But there is a sense here that it's essentially Terry Ryan's job until he no longer wants it. And even then, if he were to step down, it will just go to Rob Anthony or somebody who's his assistant. And there's a lot to be said for having people in place and consistency and all that when it's going well. But it's almost a helpless feeling where it's like, yeah, what do you expect? A lot of the same mistakes are made over and over when it comes to free agent pitching and just the lack of overall aggression. But at some point, fans kind of throw up their hands and go, well, we've seen this same story play out through multiple rebuilds and multiple contending teams with different building block parts.

And it's almost like fans don't have the energy, I guess, to put up a fight at this point because they know all the Twitter complaints about Terry Ryan and all the letters to the editor and calls to talk radio. It's not going to mean anything. I mean, he's been the GM without any real pressure through four consecutive 90 loss seasons. And so I think there's a lot to be criticized in terms of what they did or didn't do this offseason, but it falls mostly on deaf ears unless Terry Ryan himself just kind of says, yeah, I'm done with this, which there's no sense yet that that's the case. And maybe lastly, can each of you pick a player who has maybe been most emblematic of this start

to the season, whether it's someone who you expected to be really good and has looked much worse than you hoped, or someone who has just, you know, really embodied the futility of the team as a whole, or even an injury? I mean, is there one person on each team who stands out as sort of the microcosm of the 0-9 start? I guess we can start with you, Alex. Jeff Frank Kerr. Jeff Frank Kerr was our starting opening day right fielder. 11 years after he debuted in a Braves uniform as maybe the brightest of the baby Braves in 2005, and then had a career that we really don't need to go into as an occasion. Excuse me. I guess he only started and left field on Tuesday the 12th,

according to B-Ref. He was going to be in the opening day lineup. He's gotten five games in, but he was on the opening day 20-man. His shortcomings are Legion. He was a really bad player for us for a really long time, but he got endorsement deals with Delta and they couldn't get rid of him. Finally, they traded him for a post-concussion Ryan Church, and we thought we'd seen the back of him. He sort of reinvented his career in the American League, remained a fan favorite, had a truly wonderful viral video with the Padres in the minor leagues. But for a 32-year-old Jeff Franker to make the team out of spring training, as the team is in the middle of a self-described rebuild, it demonstrates the utter paucity of talent in the high minors, in the organization in general, the scattershot nature that they've taken to even approaching the major league team.

If you were trying to lose on purpose to move the team to Miami, like in major league, you could hardly do better than to bring Jeff Frank Curran to fill out your 25-man roster. Oh, and by the way, he's batting a buck 25. All right, Aaron. Okay. Well, I realize this is a bit of a cop-out, but I would say it's a tie in my mind between Byung-ho Park and Miguel Sano Park because he was really the only significant move they made all offseason. They signed him for a total investment of $25 million after he was a superstar in Korea for many years. And he's shown a little bit of power, but he's hitting 150. I think he has struck out in literally half of his plate appearances so far.

And so that was the one move they pointed to during the offseason and kind of said, well, we're making an effort to transform the lineup a little bit and add more right-handed power and all that. And he has more often than not looked kind of lost at the plate. I don't think it's way too early to write him off, but he has just struggled to make any sort of consistent contact. And then Sano, I think because the expectations for him based on his rookie performance were incredibly high. And it got to the point where I was trying to tell people like, you know, the power is for real, but he may end up only being a 250 or 260 hitter. And people were getting upset at that just because they immediately viewed him as an MVP candidate. And now fast forward, we talked a little bit about the stuff about his weight and the stuff about his work ethic, which I think is a little overblown and the stuff about

his defense and right field, but he's also hitting about 135 and he has struck out in I think 45% of his plate appearances without really showing any power at all. So you have Park, who was supposed to be your one big offseason move, who's whiffing half the time. And then you have Sano, who was supposed to be the second-year guy around which the lineup is going to be built for a decade, your MVP caliber RBI guy and all that. And he has just seemed lost at the plate too.

And I think you combine those two and that has really painted the picture of the Twins offense as a whole. So Sam, as an impartial party to these proceedings, does either team's case seem more persuasive to you? Does your sympathy go out to one fan base more than the other? I think that it is going to vary from person to person just based on their priorities. It's really a philosophical question. I think that the Braves, the case that the Twins don't have it worse is that the Twins are probably going to win some games this year and their young players are probably going to do some exciting things. And from this point forward, there's still a decent bet to be a fun team to watch. And many of the things that you expected from this year as a sort of a consolidation

year are still probably going to happen, even though they won't happen with the thrill of a pennant race. I didn't really expect that pennant race for them anyway. And, you know, I could sort of see this year from this point on going how you'd want it to and not being too bad for Aaron. The case for the Braves having it better is that this is the plan. This was like kind of the point. The point of the season was to be this bad. And, you know, to some degree, you had no expectations, so you can't possibly be too disappointed.

You had no expectations, so you can't possibly be too disappointed. And every loss does potentially, you know, in a sad way, does benefit them in what they're doing. I would say that I choose the Braves as the sor more likely Alex is to find himself one day rooting against them in a game for long-term benefit. And I think that you lose a little bit of your soul when you root for your favorite team to lose the game that you're watching. I was hoping you would say the Twins because I was leaning Braves also, and I thought it would be appropriate if no one won this competition. Braves also, and I thought it would be appropriate if no one won this competition. But I think you're right. Although I'm sympathetic to Aaron's argument, I think the Twins have the higher chance to make their fans feel like there was an opportunity wasted, which is an uncomfortable feeling. If they do put things together and play as well or better than

they were expected to play. They could get to a point in the season where this 0-9 start will be looked at as the thing that separated them from a really interesting season and what it might just be sort of a placeholder stopgap season. And if that's the case, then this would be a truly depressing start. But I think I'm also leaning Atlanta. Just the utter hopelessness. I mean, if you were to have polled people on which team in each league was most likely to have an 0-9 start to the season, I think the Braves probably would have been the most popular or second most popular answer in the American League. But even so, no fan base deserves to have its hopes dashed so quickly and so convincingly after the optimism of opening day.

The good news, I guess, is that these teams do play each other on July 26th. So if you can just get through the first half, one of you is guaranteed to be on the board. So that's something to look forward to. All right. Well, I guess we've about covered it. We've given people a very dark end to their week and beginning to their weekend. So you can find Aaron on Twitter at Aaron Gleeman. You can find Alex on Twitter at Alex Remington. You can follow their public breakdowns in real time.

Guys, thank you for joining us and for discussing a painful subject with us today. Thank you. Thank you very much for the therapy. Yeah, and we wish you wins or at least a win in the future. All right, so that is it for today. Thank you to Aaron and Alex for joining us and helping us pick a winner or a loser in this battle to the bottom. The Twins are the team whose logo is getting photoshopped to remove the win from the middle of Twins. But as my Grantland buddy, Rembrandt Brown, tweeted yesterday, I don't see

how the Braves win a game this season. By the way, Alex wanted me to mention that he misspoke. Jeff Francor is not actually batting a buck 25. He pinch hit on Thursday and struck out. So he is now batting and slugging 111. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild five listeners who have become patrons, Matt Gillette, Matthew Lum, Ian Leidner, Brian Hayworth, and Mark Griffiths. Thank you. You can also buy our book. The only rule is it has to work, which comes out on May 3rd. You can preorder it now in various Thank you. innovative in-game tactics and spoiler had a much better start to the season than either the twins or the Braves. You can also join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild rate review and subscribe to the show on iTunes and get the discounted price of $30 on a

one-year subscription to the play index by using the coupon code BP. You can email us at podcast at baseball perspectives.com or by messaging us through Patreon. That's it for this week. We have the twins and the Braves. Don't have a winless weekend. We hope you have a wonderful weekend and we will be back on Monday. No need to feel sad Cause times are pretty thin And you can't win You can't win You can't win