Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 899: The Padres’ Points for Trying

Episode Date: June 7, 2016

Ben and Sam banter about a Clayton Kershaw mystery and discuss where the depressing Padres should go from here.

What happened to the wonderful adventures? The places I had planned for us to go? Well, some of that we did, but most we didn't. And why, I just don't know. Sneaking through my fingers all the time Good morning and welcome to episode 899 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus, brought to you by The Play Index, Baseball Reference,

and our supporters on Patreon. I'm Sam Miller, along with Ben Lindberg of FiveThirtyEight. Hey, Ben. Hello. How are you? All right. Great. You wrote an article about Clayton Kershaw that has, if I counted correctly, 45 still images and 10 GIFs.

Yeah. That must have been fun to upload all of those. The uploading was fine. I mean, those come from six different games and from 40 you know roughly 40 different plate appearances so i had to go i had to go get them all yeah and my um the program that i use to capture video on my old computer was great you just you'd click capture and it would capture and then you'd stop and it would stop. But this one it's about a two and a half second delay before it starts.

So then you have to time it and it's really hard to get the timing right. Anyway, it was a lot of work. But you know, with practically no point. Yeah, if you're not

discussing that article as your topic today can you tell the people what you discovered about clayton kershaw well it's a process of discovery uh but clayton kershaw we've talked about how he uh he's not as obvious as you know like say noah sindergaard uh or jose fernandez or or r.a dickie where you, where you go, oh, no, I get it. Yeah, it's that pitch. Or, oh, it's he throws 101. Kershaw doesn't throw that hard. He throws hard, but, like, you know, I think he's, like, 70th percentile

or something for starters, or maybe a little higher than that. But, you know, there's a lot of really mediocre pitchers who throw as hard as him or even harder. He doesn't have a change up which is still i think maybe the funnest fact in baseball that the the greatest left-handed pitcher um you know of the last 50 years never bothered with the change up which we're led to believe is like the most input like for a left-handed pitcher that's like the most important thing on his prospect sheet other than velocity i think and uh clayton Kershaw just never bothered to prospect sheet, by the way.

That's not a thing. Scouting report. Vin Scully still hasn't come to terms with that. No, well, we'll get to that. And he has this amazing curve ball, but he actually very rarely throws it. And I think one year he won the Cy Young award throwing it like four or 5% of the time. So while it is an amazing pitch, uh, it is hard to say that it is the reason he's great. And then the slider is really nice, but, um, you know, the slider is not, I mean, you know, it's, it's a perfect pitch that, that doesn't jump out at you as perfect. It just, you know, you don't quite see it the way that we see some other sliders, even though it's perfect. And so I always assume that what made Kershaw great was that he has impeccable command and never throws mistakes, never makes mistakes. He just, that must be it. He doesn't make mistakes. And in fact, he throws it right down the middle of the

plate, right down the middle of the strike zone, just as often as every other pitcher. Like basically, most pitchers throw about 5% to 6% of their pitches down the middle, and so does Clayton Kershaw. Just as much as any number of horrible pitchers that I can name who are right there with him. But he gets a tremendously higher number of whiffs on those pitches than most pitchers, He gets a tremendously higher number of whiffs on those pitches than most pitchers. And he gives up a tremendously lower number of hits and extra base hits than other pitchers. And so I just decided that I'm going to watch every one of those pitches this year. And so this was the second month in that pursuit.

Yeah. So have you figured it out? No, I have. I have confirmed the phenomenon though. I mean, there really are a ton of pitches that are just right. I mean, I don't know. I read it, but there are a ton of pitches that are just right down the middle that, um, hitters are either off balanced or it looks like he's, it almost looks like he's jamming them a lot of times, even though it's right down the middle. And there's other things. I mean, you know.

I wonder if he's a deception. People don't generally talk about him being especially deceptive, do they? Like hiding the ball or something like that. You don't hear that much about Kershaw. No, you don't. I mean, I think some people like the little hitch, but I think the hitch is – I would guess the hitch is probably overrated, if anything. And he doesn't usually do the hitch from the stretch anyway.

I don't know. It's a good question. I mean, I think they're, I'll get there by the end of the year. Okay. All right. Well, it's one of baseball's great mysteries. Yeah. Yeah.

Man, there's a lot of gifts and photos in here. All right. I like, too, that it's a lot of pictures and gifts, and then I just give up, and it's just a wall of 40 pictures. There's no text anymore. Yeah. Anyway. I wanted to update something that we talked about yesterday. We talked about the Dodgers and the wars per dollars on the Adrian Gonzalez-Karl Crawford at all trade.

And I think that in retrospect, I think we undersold the badness of it because I thought of something that puts it in perspective, I think. So as we talked about, if Adrian Gonzalez produces five more wins in this, which is no guarantee, but if he produces five more wins, they'll get 22 wins for like 250, 260 million around there. And Albert Pujols currently in his deal has produced 14 wins. So he's got one, two, three, he's got, well, he's got five and a half years, obviously decline years. I wouldn't expect much, but he's got five and a half years to get eight more wins, which is not much. I mean, considering he was three last year and four the year before, uh, it seems perfectly reasonable to assume something like eight wins for Albert Bowles. And he was 240 million and,

uh, inflation helps him more than it helps the other guys and he only took up one roster spot instead of three so everybody pretty much agrees that the albert pujols deal is a huge disaster huge boondoggle uh one of the worst deals in baseball and the dodgers got worse than that on on a dollars per war basis so i'm i'm i'm saying that we were too kind. But they sent such a message. Well, I'm still, yeah, I mean, I'm not saying that it was a worthless deal. I'm just talking about the specific part where we said, well, maybe the Dodgers can get away with spending $12 million a win or whatever. Maybe they can.

And maybe the deal, for the reasons that we concluded it was salvageable, maybe it was. You know, I'm not saying that the franchise would necessarily be worse off if they hadn't made the move. But I do think that we were briefly too kind to them on the dollars per win basis. I mean, that's a lot. You've got to figure they could have spent that money Better now yeah maybe they couldn't Maybe it was gonna be hard to spend that much money And maybe the timing of it made it

Especially important that they spend it right then So you know you can't say For sure but I Feel like what I so I gave it a Three on the Dodgers winning the trade Yesterday and I don't want to knock it to Two I still want to keep it at three but I think that we talked about it like it was a four. So I'm, I'm, I'm retconning my three to a four. Okay. And, uh, and then now I'm dropping it to three.

Okay. That's all. All right. All right. So let's talk about the Padres. Oh, okay. The Padres. So let's talk about the Padres. Oh, okay. The Padres, well, okay. About a year ago or a little less than a year ago, I wrote about how the Padres' great offseason of 2014-2015 had gone so badly. And I kind of concluded that, among other things, that a bunch of moves that could have worked out really didn't work out at all. They turned out terrible for the Padres.

And that for that reason, they had gotten in a position where they were hopeless. They were worse. They were actually worse than they had been before they acquired all these great players. They had less farm system. They had more money committed and they were all around a disaster and they were going to have to figure out a way to unwind this. We've sort of seen the unwinding happening, first with the Craig Kimbrell move, which I think everybody really liked, and then with the James Shields move, which might have been necessary but which basically gives them nothing but a little bit of salary relief. They didn't get a lot of talent back, and they didn't even get as much salary relief as you might have hoped,

and nobody's really that keen on that deal. But two of the seven moves of that offseason have been undone. And so as they continue to do this, and as they might be the worst team in baseball right now, or one of them, I wanted to know what we learned from that offseason. All right. Well, I guess one thing we learned is that it's hard to put together a winning team in one offseason. Well, that was something we learned last season. Yeah, you can talk last year and this year.

What have we learned? Yeah, I mean, you know, just I think we were very impressed at the time. We did a podcast or multiple podcasts about how it was that A.J. Preller had managed to pry away so much talent in one offseason. Had he just been more aggressive than everyone else? Was it just that he kept calling? 300 phone calls. 300 phone calls, Ben. Yeah.

And so we wondered about that and we commended him for his aggressiveness, I think. wondered about that and we commended him for his aggressiveness, I think. And he did make the team more interesting on opening day. And he acquired a lot of famous players and players who even had some expectations for them that season. And the problem, I guess, was that, as many people pointed out at the time, it wasn't that well designed a team. And, you know, maybe in a different simulation of the world, it could have worked out anyway. But, you know, they had that terrible defensive outfield and they had kind of a stars and scrubs lineup. They just didn't really have anyone who could hit in the infield. So they acquired a bunch of talent, so much talent that everyone was shocked that they had managed to do it so quickly. And even so, they had very obvious holes that everyone could see and that

came back to bite them. And, you know, a lot of things went wrong in weird ways too. And suddenly they were giving up tons of home runs in Petco Park and James Shields wasn't good anymore. And all of these catastrophes occurred. But the predictable things went wrong also. So it's hard to go from non-contender to contender in a single offseason. It's hard to do that without having some holes and cutting some corners. a single offseason. It's hard to do that without having some holes and cutting some corners because we've seen lots of teams go from Padres 2014 to good in two years

or three years or four years, but in a single offseason, it is difficult to do. Do you think that more predictable things went wrong or more unpredictable things went wrong? Well, what were the unpredictable things? Okay, well, I'll give you – Ian Kennedy and James Shields and Kashner and – went wrong or more unpredictable things went wrong? Huh? Well, what were the unpredictable things? Okay. Well, I'll give you Kennedy and James Shields and Kashner.

And I mean, I, I, yeah, I think you could sort of make the case that, especially for, for this team, that the unpredictable things had nothing to do with their off season.

I mean, Kashner and Ross and Tyson Ross were like, you know, the foundations of the, the foundation of the team before they started making all these moves. They were the two guys who were good enough to build around. And they were good enough that you could say, all right, at least we've got some stuff.

If you didn't have them, you'd say, well, we've got to tear it down all the way. And they've both been, well, Kashmir's been just absolutely horrible since then and no longer even has trade value and probably cost them a chance at really restarting this last summer. And then Ross is not pitching. So those would be the leading unpredictable things, and they have nothing to do with any of these moves. So other unpredictable things would be that, well, let's see. I mean, I guess nobody thought that Derek Norris was bad. And Derek Norris wasn't bad last year.

He was really bad for, I think, half a season or so. And then he was pretty good after that. But this year he is very bad. And the Derek Norris move was, I think, probably the one that was the most unanimously applauded. Like, I think you made the case for billy bean making that move and i think i think if i recall and i think you were the only one like otherwise that was just seen as a as a wallop and derrick norris is really really bad right now uh will myers being injured last year i guess would be unpredictableable James Shields being bad as we talked about

Yesterday unpredictable Matt Kemp being Replacement level instead Of average or slightly above Is unpredictable Yeah everyone hated the Matt Kemp move But no one thought Matt Kemp would be That bad although he was The best hitter in baseball in the second half of the season

But he had been so bad to that point And then The flip side, I guess Brandon Moore being bad, but that was a small move. And going the other way, Seth Smith being this good is surprising. Trey Turner and Joe Ross both being really good is to different degrees somewhat surprising. And then on the other hand, you could argue that some really surprising things have gone well for them. Drew Pomeranz falling into their lap and being awesome was surprising, and that was a good thing. Brett Wallace having a career and being good is surprising. And probably the most surprising thing is that the Craig Kimbrell deal,

which was by far, I think, the most hated. Well, maybe not because of the Kemp deal, but one of the most hated. Pretty much like the moment when some people went from thinking that A.J. Preller was the mastermind of this incredible offseason to thinking that maybe A.J. Preller was just a dude throwing everything down on black over and over again until he ran out of money. That turned out to be, like, the probably the best move he made. I mean, Craig Kimbrell brought back more than they gave up. I think he did that even though he like wasn't nearly as good as with the Padres as he had been with the Braves. And he had one less year of team control.

Braves and he had one less year of team control. And Melvin Upton, who was the whole point of getting Craig Kimbrell was that they were taking on all the Melvin Upton money. Melvin Upton has been better than half the names, more than half the names that we've said so far. He's basically had, you know, close to a full season and around two and a half, three war as a player who's kind of revived his career. So that would be another surprise. Yeah. Okay. So surprises, good and bad, but mainly, I guess if you, from the transactions they made, the big surprises are Kemp and Shields being terrible and maybe Norris being bad.

And then from a non-trade, the surprises would be Kaschner and Ross not actually being helpful. So they had more surprises with the moves that they made, you think? I feel like neither. Look, if you undo the surprises on either side, you're still not talking about a good team. Like if Kashner and Ross were Kashner were healthy and playing like they did in 2014, then you're talking about a team right now that is instead of 24 and 35, they're, you know, 28 and 31. They're still bad. And if Kemp were good and shields had been good, same thing you're talking about.

So I don't know that this might get to the point that some people made before the 2015 season, which is that even with all this, even with all the excitement, the Padres still projected to be a low 80s win team. They didn't seem to have gotten all the way there. And it was hard to think of how much more a team could possibly need to do. I mean, they had won, what did they won? They had won like 75 games the year before, 77 games the year before. So it didn't seem like they needed to do that much. But there was some regression baked into that. And, and, you know, there were, there were some, you know, trading Grundahl for Kemp, for instance, got a lot of headlines and even then didn't look like it made them necessarily better.

And now we know that Grundahl is definitely a more valuable player than Kemp, money and everything else aside. Yeah. By the way, Seth Smith, you mentioned briefly, he has had a very strange career arc. Yeah. He has been such a good hitter for the last few years. And you could tie it to LASIK. He had LASIK in August of 2013. And he came back and he said, you know, I didn't even realize I hadn't been seeing the ball.

And there's stories with quotes from all his teammates about how he's a new man now. And since that day when he came back, I think it's August 23rd, 2013, he has in almost 1,200 plate appearances, he has a 127 WRC+, and in 2,200 plate appearances prior to that, he had a 106. And the 127 comes in his age 31 to 33 seasons, essentially. So he has become a far, far above average hitter at a time when most guys get worse.

And the complicating factor is that that was his second LASIK surgery. So I don't really know whether that works. He had LASIK at some point earlier in his career, and that didn't turn him into a superstar. But I guess the second LASIK touch-up really did the trick. But it is kind of incredible. You can really trace it's not i don't i don't think it's usually a big perceptible boost but in his case it really seems to have been he is a new man i apparently don't know how lasik works why would you why would you need why would you need a second one sometimes you need a touch-up my girlfriend needed a touch-up on hers. You just, I don't know, it just doesn't work quite as well on one eye or something the first time, and they go back in and do it again. And so then do they put a tendon from your wrist in your eye, right?

Yeah, that's how it works, yeah. Okay. So bottom line then, should A. should AJ Preller have done this? Should we have, uh, should he have known all along that this was impulsive and was he doomed by his impatience? Cause he made, you know, as I've said, he made seven moves. That's actually a lie. He also got Will Middlebrooks.

I don't know why Grant left it out. Uh, cause that one's as bad as anything, except they didn't give up. Yeah. They didn't give up much. All right, so eight moves that got transaction analyses that offseason. If he'd spread those eight into two offseasons instead of one, do you think that they would have been notably better, notably more efficient? Would he have potentially built a... Given the resources he had, given the mandate he had, given the patience for calling 300 people that he had, and given his –

I don't know if that is patience. Whatever it is. That might be the opposite of patience. players pretty well in his career. Would you bet if you could go back in a time machine and have him redo it, except for the goal is to be good this year instead of last year, would you bet that it would have worked? Or was this just making bad moves and thinking they were good? Yeah, you'd have to think that deciding to do it all at once really increases your chances of making bad moves because you're that impatient. Maybe you're doing some things that you wouldn't if you were waiting and assessing the market and,

you know, not having this urgency associated with everything you were doing. So that and the fact that, you know, there are only so many players available at any one time. There are only so many teams willing to deal at any one time. So if you set this arbitrary goal of competing immediately, then you are sort of at the mercy of everyone who could theoretically make you pay a premium for players. I don't know whether he really did pay a premium because he was willing to call everyone 20 times. And so maybe no one really got the sense that they could exploit him But yeah if you're only If you say I want to build a contender

Out of what is available to me At this very moment Then you have to be at a much greater disadvantage Than if you say I want to Make X number of moves or I want to make This team this good but I'm going to Take my time and I'm going to wait for the right Opportunities to come along So I would think so, even given all the things we covered that

went wrong and went worse than in theory they should have. You'd think that if he had tried to pull off the same goal over the course of even a year, it would have worked out better. Yeah, it makes sense. That makes sense. That logically holds up. But again, we're really talking about one move that we didn't like that didn't turn out well. And we liked the other moves, right? We basically liked them when they were happening.

And so those would be moves that if he'd made them the next offseason, we would have liked them too. I mean, the Kemp deal was horrible and it was horrible the day it was done. And you could say that, I mean, maybe this is a guy who a bunch of his deals didn't work out. And then he had one really bad blind spot or one really bad idea. or one really bad idea. And I don't know if that's an impatience thing or a rush thing at all. What you say about the stars and scrubs and about the really like sort of glaringly, like almost like unnaturally weak spots on the field, that probably is something that if you did it over the course of two years wouldn't happen. Because you'd be, for one thing, you just would be so sickened by it that you would have to act. And when you're doing this all in the off season and you're not, you don't, you're not, you're sort

of, you're not tasting the sauce as you make it. Right. And so probably there were, I would guess that there were some pretty basic, better common sense ideas that they could have done to strengthen the weakest parts of the team. But they don't jump out at you quite as much when you're, you know, when you're looking at a depth chart as opposed to when you're watching a team lose every night. On the other hand, Brett Wallace, you know, and Yonder Alonzo. Yonder Alonzo was supposed to be the problem and he was not the problem. He was pretty good. And if they'd been smarter, they would have replaced Yonder Alonzo was supposed to be the problem and he was not the problem. He was pretty good. And if they'd been smarter,

they would have replaced Yonder Alonso before he was pretty good. And then before they could trade him for their ace. So the way these things work is very unpredictable. I mean, right. They would have, there's no way they, that if they had done it right,

Yonder Alonso is playing is probably even maybe even on the roster going into last year and the only thing like the best thing about the padres this year is what they got out of that yeah it's weird right so yeah and there's man there's just not a lot left on this roster right now there's uh i mean even if you wanted to do a teardown, I know Dave Cameron wrote a post earlier this week about how the Padres should go the Braves' route. There isn't that much left that teams would want. There's Myers, there's Drew Pomeranz,

who's turned into a really good pitcher all of a sudden, and I'm sure teams would still take a chance on Kashner and Ross, but Ross is hurt. So there's just not much there. There's just a lot of old guys. There's a lot of uninteresting guys. It's not a very attractive team. Honestly, I'm not sure.

I mean, you say teams would take a chance on Kashner. He's a free agent at the end of this year. And I would be surprised if you could get a team, one of a team's top 10 prospects for him. Yeah. At this point. Yeah. Doesn't have much control. I'm not sure that he's in the rotation on half of the postseason contenders right now.

Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, they've managed to rebuild the farm system a little bit but at the major league level it's bleak it is bleak so yeah um i i don't i mean at the time i while acknowledging the the holes in the roster that preller put together i was happy he had done that which was maybe easy for me to say i I'm not a Padres fan. I had no rooting interest in it. I was just intrigued by how quickly he had tried to rebuild the roster and how interesting the Padres were after years of winning 70-something games and being pretty

boring and being under the radar. I was sort of excited that the Padres were now an interesting team and they were doing interesting things. And Padres fans must have been somewhat excited about that, maybe more apprehensive than I was also. But man, it really backfired terribly and they're in a tough spot. The saving grace, I guess, is that if he hadn't done that, they would still be bad right now. They would probably still be bad for the next year or so. I mean, he might have, if he had just embarked on a Braves teardown from day one, they'd be ahead of the timeline where they are now, of course,

but they would probably be just as bad right now, if not worse, I would think. Well, I don't know. Maybe. I mean, having Turner and Ross would sure go a long way. Yes, that's true. And, well, probably having Grandal would go a ways, although Grandal's not. Yeah, unless they did. Grandal's not been a real impact guy this year um right and

yeah i don't know it's once you get into the undoing every move and trying to figure out who's left and all that it's it's hard to say i mean yeah the kimball deal ended up making them stronger yeah they weren't a it wasn't like a there wasn't a great option available to him at the time, I don't think. There wasn't like if he had just taken it a little bit slowly, then he would have built a winner by now. Yeah, I think you're right. I mean, there was a lot of mockery at the time of him saying that they were even close before he started making all those moves.

When he said that he thought that they were going to get good. And there was mockery because it seemed like they were really far away. They had a farm system, but the farm system had kind of dropped off a little bit at the time from its peak. And they had won 77, 76, 76 in the previous three years. 76 76 in the previous three years 71 the year before that They just had seemed to Gotten stuck in the 70s after that

2010 year when a lot of Things went right and They hadn't shown any ability to Spend so no one really Thought they were going to go out and get Great free agents or anything and They had had highly ranked Farm systems at times but

the the talent hadn't really translated so so yeah he was in a tough spot and the reason that he did what he did i think was just that he he didn't want to take over the team and tear it down right away and i think there was even some reporting or speculation that he got the job because he was the one interviewee who didn't say, we have to tear down and be terrible for a few years. I can actually make this team win quickly. And that's an attractive pitch if you're an owner. And so everyone else probably took the prudent course and said, this team is going to be bad for a while and there's no way around it.

So that was probably the alternative to what he did. Yeah. If you look at the roster that he had before that, all the pieces that you would think would be worth building around would still be just as bad. You know, Ross and Kashner would still be doing nothing for him. Jesse Hahn has collapsed this year. And, you know, so probably right now we're still talking about a terrible team. This goes a little bit back to what we talked about yesterday or what I mention all the time that our miss rate on evaluating these moves are not our miss rate, but our miss margins are just like so vast that it

kind of turns the whole thing into farce. And I think what I'm getting at with that is that instead of really trying to really specifically like, oh, is the dollar value exactly right? Is number of years exactly right? It's probably more honest and kind of more accurate in the long term to think about orientation. Does this move orient the team in the direction that they should be going? Is this a team, they sign a shortstop. Instead of thinking about the money and the years first and foremost, you can look at that. It's important. If you overpay, you overpay. But is this a team that needs a shortstop? And is this a shortstop that will make them better? And so for

the Padres, I still think that I would say that AJ Preller went into that offseason oriented in the right direction. I still think that he deserves a lot of credit for accomplishing a lot, even though what he accomplished didn't end up making the team good. I think there are some clear mistakes. There were some mistakes that we knew and mistakes that we know about now. And it wasn't necessarily executed as well as it could have been. And the Padres are worse off because of it. However, I think you're right that they were a team that was going nowhere. And AJ Preller performed a little bit of a miracle,

something of a miracle in creating a new team. The new team sucked too, it turns out. But he took a bad team and managed in an offseason to create a whole new team that we believed in a lot more than we believed in the old one. So I don't think that he gets to, you know, I don't think he gets to manufacture any trophies for himself or anything like that. He gets to manufacture any trophies For himself or anything like that I do think that Just remembering where we were A year and a half ago with the Padres

It is still worth Applauding the effort And I still do think that It could have worked out well Maybe he should just get LASIK for everyone Who's left Maybe a couple of them will turn into Seth Smiths Might be the quickest way back

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Standing on the effort, crossroads, low, decide to run. There's no hurry anymore when all is said and done Thank you.