Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 941: Pitcher Value and the Zach Britton Debate

Episode Date: August 17, 2016

Ben and Sam discuss their definitions of “value” and whether they think Orioles closer Zach Britton will be a deserving candidate for end-of-season awards.

It's all up to what you value down to where you are Be the sweet of the pain you come through getting where you are It's all up to what you value in your motor car Good morning and welcome to episode 941 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives brought to you by The Play Index, BaseballReference.com, and our Patreon supporters. I'm Sam Miller along with Ben Lindberg of TheR Index, BaseballReference.com, and our Patreon supporters. I'm Sam Miller, along with Ben Lindberg of TheRinger.com. Hi, Ben. Hello.

How are you? I'm all right. Sounds like you may have picked up a little bit of a cold at Saber Seminar. I did, and I've been trying to figure out who is most likely to have given it to me, and I believe... I was probably closest to you, or maybe it was John Chenier. Well, yeah, you were closest to me, but you have excellent general health and personal hygiene. Thank you. So yeah, I don't know. I would probably blame it on, well, Ryan Watt is the first person whose hand I shook. And there

was something in his eyes that spoke to subterfuge. i guess i'll blame it on him no i actually feel very guilty because there are dozens of people who are going to get sick now probably because of me because i was probably carrying it around an incubator for those few days probably weren't patient zero so it's probably not your fault well that sort of goes to the question of zach of Zach Britton's MVP case, does Patient Zero get more credit or less credit in a sequence of events that leads to a single outcome? Good point. Yeah, it is a good point. We should talk about that. So I wanted to quickly give you a fun fact that I heard yesterday on the Giants game. And if you were watching the Giants game, you would have seen this, but it was interesting to me. It's more trivia, I guess, or it's a trivial fun fact. There are two active players playing in the majors who played at Candlestick Park. Do you think you can think of them?

So it's not just the obvious, like Bartolo, just the oldest players? Bartolo was in the AL at the time. Right, sure. Bartolo was in the AL at the time So he's out And A-Rod was in the AL at the time I mean they could have interleagued it But neither did Is there some old reliever who's still hanging around? There is one

There had to be an old reliever An old reliever who was on the Giants though I don't know Joe Nathan Oh right, I forget that Joe Nathan is still a baseball player. Yeah. So he's one, and the other one is Adrian Beltre. Oh, okay.

So it's fun trivia. Yeah, good one. For me. All right. Did you have anything you wanted to talk about? No, I don't think so. I'm just glad that I've put a continent between us, given how you sound right now. But we can proceed.

Yeah. given how you sound right now, but we can proceed. Yeah. Every time I get sick, I think it's, even years later, I think it's probably Colin Wire's fault for coming on our podcast that one time. That one episode when he came on with a virulent disease of some sort. It was incredible. The audio on that podcast is amazing. Yeah.

If you want to feel sick, just find the Colin Myers episode of Effectively Wild. Yeah. And you'll be taking some sort of cough medication in no time. All right. So then we're going to talk about, because I want to talk about the piece that you wrote yesterday at the Ringer headline, Baltimore closer Zach Britton isn't just the surprise Cy Young contender. He's the AL MVP. And there's lots of places to- That's exactly how I feel about it. There are a lot of places to go with this, but I will start with you tweeted something like, here I am with a hot take or something like that. Why did you identify this as a hot take?

What do you think made it hot? Yeah, well, I put that in the Facebook group. It's a hot take, I think, coming from someone like me, a baseball prospectus, you know, statistical, sabermetric, leaning sort of person who historically has downplayed the role and value of relievers and closers and would never have supported the idea that a closer could be an MVP or even a Cy Young. So I think that's kind of what it came down to. Of course, I was kidding a little bit because if you actually click on the article, I don't think the take is that hot.

But someone tweeted at me this morning to say that we need a new term for something that is a hot take, but is based on research and stats and facts and stuff, which doesn't really fit with the hot take, which is purely opinion and instinctive. My case for it being a hot take is that it was an argument. I think this is what defines a hot take actually in most cases. We all have opinions and I have opinions that might surprise people. I don't know what they are, but for instance, Rounders, the movie, not a great movie, but it is probably my favorite movie to watch. And I've watched it, I don't know, 25 times. And I don't know that there are three other movies that I've seen more than five. Yeah, it's really rewatchable. And that's a pretty good way to define a great movie. So, yeah, so is the fact, like, if someone was, like, if someone was telling me that their favorite movie was The Godfather, and I was like, yeah, I like watching Rounders more, though.

Like, that would be a weird take, but it would be personal. It would be true. And, you know, from my perspective, defensible. To me, what a hot take is, really, is not an outlier opinion or an outlier position, but an argument that one makes despite not believing it. or an outlier position, but an argument that one makes despite not believing it. And I'm going to right now challenge you to tell me that you are voting for Zach Britton for AL MVP. Well, I will never get to vote as a member of the New York BBWA chapter that has half the baseball writers in the country in it. It'll never be my turn. But no, I would probably not vote for Zach Britton.

Probably not? I'm going to challenge you right now to stick to that probably. It's definitely not. You would not vote for Zach Britton, would you? Like realistically? the best player, the player who's performed the best, then it should obviously be Mike Trout, who is the best player in baseball for the fifth consecutive year, according to every value metric we have. So if you are toward that side of the spectrum that picks a context neutral award winner, and I am, then you'd go for Mike Trout. And this Britain argument was kind of taking the opposing view to the extreme. So the idea that you should consider context, you should consider when a player had his hits or recorded his outs, and did his teammates set him up in such a way that what he did actually mattered. And this is kind of taking the argument that basically you have to play for a playoff team to be an MVP and for your contributions to really matter in a way. This is taking that to the extreme and saying, well, if that's the case, if we are interested in the actual value you accrued, and we're not just talking about how good you are at baseball, but how much of a difference you made in your team season, then we should also take into account things like how your team did and what the standings were and whether the wins you contributed actually made the difference between making the playoffs and

not making the playoffs or improving your World Series odds or hurting your World Series odds. I think the way that I looked at it is kind of carrying that to its logical or possibly illogical conclusion. So maybe a less hot way of framing it, it could have been, or for our purposes, we could think of it as providing a framework, a better framework for the people who have established this as their first priority. It is basically saying, okay, that's cool. You've got your way of framing value. And now Ben Lindbergh is going to help you think that through in the best way, the most detailed way, the most accurate way, and perhaps the most

logical way. Is that fair? Yeah, I think that's pretty fair. Because I used to be very firmly on the context neutral side of the debate. And I still lean that way. But I am more open to the idea that that doesn't have to be the way that we pick award winners. That as long as the thing says value and value isn't defined, we're all pretty much free to define that in any way we want. And so if value to you is dependent on a team's position and on the timing of your contributions, then I think that's a reasonable stance. Yeah. And as I think, you know, I feel the definition of the most valuable player is the one who wins the vote among 30 people chosen to vote for it. Because it is explicitly a award that is designed to measure the temperature of 30 writers

and to assign some esteem to that title. And so I am perfectly fine with everybody using whatever definition one way or the other, and I can disagree heartedly with the individual votes. But I think that, like as we, I think, also talked about, But I think that Like as we I think also talked about The wording of the award Seems to intend For people to take that

As they will Yes very ingeniously I don't know if it was ingenious Maybe it's just an accident But the fact that we have these debates About the award every single year That we probably wouldn't have Or they wouldn't be as vociferous if it just said

the best player or the player with the best stats or something like that. Now all that settled, I do have beefs with your methodology. And so I want to get to those beefs. But before I do, let's just clear the table on a few other lingering questions about your vote, the vote, and generally the idea of the vote. Say you got a vote. I'm just going to give you some names. You pick Britain or that guy, okay? Okay. Well, I mean, I can tell you who it would be, I think, basically. I think I'd probably be picking between Trout and Donaldson at this point. I mean, maybe Mookie gets into the discussion. Well, I don't care if he's in the discussion. Is Mookie ahead of Britton?

I guess so, because just philosophically, I like the award being an award for the best player, because I like having an award for the best player, because I like being able to come to some kind of consensus about what we value in players, what we think makes players good and valuable. And, you know, I think that it's good if we can all agree that, hey, Mike Trout's the best player in baseball, and we all recognize that. Now, someone who doesn't vote for Mike Trout this year probably would still agree with that, I think. That's about as uncontroversial an opinion as you can hold at this point that Mike Trout is the best player in baseball. We've seen it demonstrated year after year. So I think there are probably people who think that Mookie or Altuve is having a better year than Trout. Yeah.

And it's within, they're close enough. It's within the margins. Yeah. You can, you can reasonably argue that. So I think, you know, if you're really trying to decide who the best player is and who has the highest true talent, then you should take into account the previous few seasons. And those certainly point toward Mike Trout being the best player in baseball. But yes, you could argue that someone else has had a more valuable season just purely based on 2016 stats. a more valuable season just purely based on 2016 stats. So it really would just come down to those few guys for me and what happens over the next six weeks or so, more so with those players' individual performances

rather than what happens to their team would probably decide it for me. If forced to choose between Francisco Lindor and Zach Britton, who would you pick? Lindor hitting 311, 360, 456 with gold glove defense on a division leading team, five wins to date on the baseball reference. Hmm. I guess I'd go with Lindor. Okay. All right.

Yeah. Am I correct that this topic partly came up because people were talking about Britain for Cy Young? do an article about britain just because it fit into this championship wpa framework that i developed last year with the help of dan hirsch and by the way i want to mention dan because he basically provided all of the the backbone of this article so i am indebted to him and also you should all check out his site because it's really really cool and it doesn't get mentioned as much as fan graphs and baseball reference and baseball prospectus but it offers some things that no his site because it's really, really cool. And it doesn't get mentioned as much as Fangraphs and Baseball Reference and Baseball Perspectives, but it offers some things that no other site does. So you should all go to seamheads.com slash baseball gauge. His site is called the Baseball

Gauge and it has this stat championship win probability added for post-season players, which is really cool. No other site offers anything like that. Mariano Rivera is, not surprisingly, the all-time leader in postseason championship when probability added. And it also has some cool stuff like it has this page where you can go and set all these parameters you want when you're watching MLB TV and it will just automatically switch from one game to the next

based on all of these settings that you can control. So if you want to see the highest leverage game of the moment, if you want to see a certain batter, see a certain pitcher, you can set all of these conditions and then start up MLB TV and it will just auto switch from one to the next, which is incredibly cool. So that's Dan Hirsch. You can find him on Twitter, at Dan Hirsch. So what were

you saying? I was going to ask if you think there is also a plausible case for a closer being the Cy Young in, I guess, a sort of sub question is if you think there's a plausible case for Zach Britton being Cy Young. Well, there's about as possible a case for Zach Britton as there could be for really any reliever at this point. He's been amazing. He is not only challenging the all-time record for lowest ERA, he hasn't blown a save if you care about saves. He has the highest ground ball rate ever right now, which would break his own record. He is impressive in a lot of ways. And of course, he does it throwing one pitch primarily, which makes it all the more amazing. So I think you can make that case. And often people will

make that case with win probability added, which he leads the league in among pitchers, at least, I think Trout leads all players. And that's kind of a tough argument to make because WPA is sort of skewed toward late innings. So if you are used in that role, that's really what this whole debate comes down to is do you give Britton or any other closer credit for being used as a closer, basically. If you think that, well, I could slot in any other good reliever in that spot, and Buck Shawalter would use this guy instead of Britton, and maybe he wouldn't be quite as good as Britton, but he'd be pretty good too, and he would show up pretty high on this leaderboard too because he is playing for the Orioles. By the way, I guess I should step back and summarize for people who haven't read the article. The reason that Britton shows up as the most valuable player in baseball by this methodology is that it's taking into account the team's place in the standings. And

the Orioles have been in a dogfight for first place for weeks, for more than a month now. They just haven't been separated from the next closest team by more than a couple of games. So every game for them to this point has had playoff implications and so if you compare britain to someone whose team is out of the race or even to a team who is out of the race in a different way because they have all but locked up the division then you know britain's contributions look more momentous by this methodology than another player's would, putting up the same performance on a different team. So that's what it comes down to. Yeah, to take it to sort of an, I guess this would be probably a counter argument to the idea is, if Chris Davis were, if Chris

Davis had 38 home runs right now in a 1200 OPS, then Zach Britton would not be atop of this leaderboard, because the games wouldn't have as much meaning. So in a sense, Britton would not be atop of this leaderboard because the games wouldn't have as much meaning. So in a sense, Britton is, well, I guess in a sense, Britton is benefiting from all sorts of factors, but one is that his teammates are good, but not quite good enough. And that the Blue Jays and Red Sox have been good as well. If the Red Sox were doing worse and the Blue Jays were doing worse, then Britton also wouldn't be.

And so there's a lot of factors that obviously have nothing to do with Zach Britton. But the philosophical premise is that you get dealt your circumstances. And Zach Britton has been put in a situation to have an enormous impact on his team. And because of that, he is adding value. And if you are, you know, like you could make the case that, you know, if Steve Jobs had been born 100 years earlier or 100 years later, then he wouldn't have invented Apple. And that doesn't mean that we go, you know, just got lucky. Right. Yes. That's basically what it boils down to. It doesn't say that Britton is the most talented player in baseball.

If the Orioles could have had Mike Trout instead of Zach Britton this whole year, they would have been happy to do that. It's just the specific set of circumstances. If you are evaluating the MVP as the person who made the most difference in this one way, makes you more likely to make the playoffs, makes you more likely to win the World Series than because Britain happens to have been put in this spot. And because he has performed so well in that spot, he dwarfs everyone else contribution by this metric. Yeah. So I want to make the case, I have three cases against this idea. One is that I believe that what you have identified is an illusion. I have tried to explain this to, well, I've had this conversation with people in G chats and such, but it's still

hard for me to kind of explain it. By the way, before you launch into this, I just say that I wrote basically the same article last year. Yeah. It didn't bother anyone. Maybe that was partially because the headline was a little less inflammatory than this one was. Who were you supporting last year? That one, it came down to Anthony Rizzo over Bryce Harper. And that was both because Rizzo's Cubs won the second wildcard by, I think, maybe five games, but they were in the division race the whole year. So Rizzo's contributions mattered in that sense, and Harper's Nats missed the playoffs,

but also because Rizzo just had a really extraordinarily clutch year, and he did most of his damage when games were close and when runners were on, and just every kind of clutch stat you could possibly imagine Rizzo really excelled at. So that overshadowed Harper's superior surface stats by this method. And no one really minded that all that much. Yeah. All right. Well, there have been plenty of hotter takes on MVP voting, making cases. There have been plenty of hotter takes on MVP voting, on making cases. So, all right, so the point about it being an illusion is that the closer you get to the end of a race,

the more tense it seems. But, in fact, a race is an accumulation of discrete events, each one of which, in retrospect at the end, has equal value or has equal contribution to the final result. And the reason that closers pitch the ninth inning or that Delon Batances only pitches in high leverage situations when he's brought in in the seventh or eighth or did is not because those situations are actually more valuable than the first inning of the same game. It's that we have scarce resources when it comes to pitchers throwing baseballs, and you want to avoid having them expend their energy in games that end up being not close at all. You don't want to have them pitching in blowouts.

That's why you don't have Zach Britton pitching in the first inning. However, if you knew that this game was going to be 6-5 at the end of it, Zach Britton could pitch the first or he could pitch the ninth and it would be exactly the same. And in fact, for that reason, when we talk about how we would manage a one game playoff, which one time you and I did more or less manage a one game playoff, you don't hold your best pitcher until the ninth inning. You no longer have limited resources except for within that one game. So you have your best pitcher pitch, and then you work your way down from there so that you have as much as possible only your best pitchers pitching. And so in this scenario where I said that you know in advance that it's a 6-5 game and Britain can pitch the first, the third, the fifth, the seventh, or the ninth, it would not matter at all to the outcome of the game, more or less. I mean, obviously, butterflies and all that. But it would not matter at all to the outcome of the game, whether he's pitching the first and the next guy is pitching the next eight or vice versa. And yet,

for his win probability added, it would make all the difference in the world. I mean, it would make literally all the difference in the world. And I think it would make literally all the difference in the world. And I think that this is, I mean, I really do believe that this is just wildly distorts our view of pitchers' win probability added and also for championship probability added. And to give the sort of end point of that, the logic that you used, whoever what was it sal perez grounded out with alex gordon on third and two outs in seventh game in the world series sal perez has probably the lowest championship probability added in major league history he he i mean it was 50 well it wasn't it was 25 more or less because if he'd singled then it would have been a tie and the royals would have had about a 50 yeah close enough but, close enough. But it's six and a half times Zach Britton's

entire contribution this whole year. And technically that's true. But more realistically, Sal Perez just was a guy who had wanted back, that was in a situation that was wildly exaggerated by its closeness to the end point. And so another way of putting this is if you want to build the highest building in the world, and maybe the highest building in the world is 100 stories, and so you build a 101-story building, the 101st story is not actually doing any more work than the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh. It looks like it is, but it's not. They're all part of one long series of events leading to an outcome or not an outcome. And Bill James, I think, has another great way of thinking about this or putting it, which is that if you draw a straight in poker, which of those five cards is the valuable one? Well, none of them is valuable

without the others. The order doesn't matter. It's a seven card game. And yet, if you were trying to assign value based on shift in your chances of winning that hand, it wouldn't be until the fifth card in the straight game that your odds would go way up. And so you would assign a lot of value to it. But in fact, it's not actually doing any more work or carrying any more of the load than the first four cards you got to that straight. Yeah, that's a fair critique and one that people often raise against WPA. And I think it was Dave Studeman of the Hardball Times always describes WPA as a story stat. It kind of captures how we feel when we're watching the game. If there's a moment that feels tense, feels important, feels like the game could swing one

way or another at any instant, then that's going to be a high leverage moment. It's going to be a high win probability added moment. But that doesn't necessarily mean that something you did in the first inning was not just as important in retrospect, even though at the time it didn't feel like it was or you didn't know it would end up being that way. And, you know, if we're feeling that at home, then maybe the players are feeling that on the field. I wouldn't put that much emphasis on that. But, of course, you know, people who think that a safe situation is actually different from a non-safe situation or pitching at these important moments of the game is something that certain people can't do or can't do as well. Then, in theory, WPA would capture that kind of thing. in theory WPA would capture that kind of thing. But I think that's probably a bit overblown just because players have already survived such incredible pressure at every level to get where they are. So I don't put too much stock in that. So yeah, it's definitely a fair critique and a shortcoming of WPA in general, or at least, I don't know if it's a shortcoming because it was just designed this way, but it's a shortcoming of certain applications of it, at least.

All right. Objection number two. WPA is, from the pitcher's perspective, assigned entirely to one person on the field, the pitcher. Yeah. And that's crazy. We would never do that for any other stat. And Zach Britton is, I imagine, I haven't checked, but Zach Britton is a extreme ground ball pitcher who plays in front of an excellent infield defense, right? The Orioles have had an excellent infield defense.

I don't know if they do this year. But for the premise of this, let's assume that he does, which is a great thing. It is a great system. It is a great system. He is a good pitcher for that system. They are a good infield for him. And everybody involved with the Orioles organization should be very happy. But WPA is just simply not good at assigning credit on a play for everybody who is involved

in it. It only does it for two players. It does it for the pitcher. It does it for the hitter. And you don't have to strain your imagination too hard to realize that the ways that other people affect that play, you know, from the catcher to the defense behind him. And so for this reason, it seems like the wrong way to assess player value. Yeah, I think, of course, you could go too far in the other direction and maybe give too much credit to fielders at times. I know that Michael in his Britain piece pointed out that Britain at least has been given credit for allowing extremely soft contact this year, and that guys just might not be hitting the ball hard off of him, which would lead in theory to easier fielding opportunities. And so that's something that should be credited to him that might not show up in other methods. the only one on the field. He could get all the ground balls he wanted, and most of them would

be hits. So there is clearly some value to the defense that is not being captured in WPA. And so you could just say that WPA overvalues pitchers, period. Yeah, no, exactly. I would say that it does. Although, yeah, I would say it overvalues pitchers, period. Would there be some pitchers who it undervalues, though? Probably. I don't know. Do you, yeah, the question is whether you should try to limit it to just the pitcher's contribution.

Like, if you should look at every play as being two-thirds the pitchers or 80% the pitchers work and then the rest distributed among the defense or whether it is fair to give the pitchers all the quote-unquote credit, but whether you should attempt to control for the defense behind him in some way. I'm not sure which of those, or whether you should do neither. I don't think I like the don't do anything aspect of it. I'm not sure if I like either of the other two. I'm not sure which. Yeah, well, that's the age age old separating pitching and defense debate, which we've

made some strides on certainly, but haven't come to a complete solution for yet. All right. And then the last thing, and you've kind of alluded to this, and this is sort of implicit in the case, but so Zach Britton is being rewarded here because he's a great, implicit in the case. So Zach Britton is being rewarded here because he's been pitching really, really well. No doubt about it. But he's being rewarded here by your methodology specifically. He's being rewarded because of his role. And it feels weird to reward a guy for a role that we know is explicitly an acknowledgement that he is not as good as other people and that if he were better if he were 10 better zach britain might still be a starter and the orioles would have determined that he is more valuable as a starter i mean i guess what i'm saying is that as you know as you taught as you

told fay uh nobody moves their best starter to the bullpen. They all know that you have more value as a starter than as a reliever. So if the very definition of the role is less valuable, then how can he be the most valuable? And I think that we talked about in the last play index, I think, that there is certainly more of an acknowledgement that, well, there are a lot more good pitchers relieving now than there used to be. Yes. And, you know, Andrew Miller and Aroldis Chapman and Delon Batances 30, 40 years ago would have all been starters. They might have been good.

They might have been bad. But they would have been starters. And teams are more and more willing to have pitchers, good pitchers or potentially good pitchers, go to the bullpen where we know that they can have a great deal of value. And there's no doubt about it. Zach Britton has a great deal of value. And probably Zach Britton, as he's pitching right now, I have no problem saying is more valuable than if he were a third starter, the way he's pitching right now. I wouldn't

necessarily say that about most closers, but the way Zach Britton is pitching, more valuable than if he could be a third starter. I can buy that. Even though the war would be higher, I can buy that. But we're talking about comparing him to a starter, the best starter in the league, and that guy's equivalent at eight other positions. And it just feels to me like we have a sort of,, just a logic crash there where it, you cannot be more valuable than a player who is doing the thing that you were deemed not good enough to do valuably. Right? Well, I think there might be some exceptions to that rule, which I would agree that generally is a rule. I think, well, you know, first of all, we know that no one could have been better at Zach Britton's job than Zach Britton. No, no, no, no, no.

No one could have, even if you had taken- Totally disagree. Well, I think I don't. I mean, if you had taken Clayton Kershaw, a healthy Clayton Kershaw, and stuck him into the Orioles closer role, I don't think he would have allowed fewer runs than... He's allowed six runs, Ben. He's allowed six runs in 50 innings. You're telling me that Clayton Kershaw... I mean, as a closer, you don't think it's plausible that Clayton... If you took three aces and put them in the closer role, if you took Kershaw, Syndergaard, and Jose Fernandez and made them all closers,

you don't think one would have allowed fewer than six runs in 50 innings? I don't. Oh, my goodness. I completely do. And again, this goes back to our first episode. We were frustrated in the very first episode of this podcast that nobody has done this for us because we want to see what Clayton Kershaw would do,

and we wanted to see what Aroldis Chapman would do as a starter so that we would have some baseline of what the best relievers actually would do as starters and vice versa. And at the very, very, very, very top end of the talent level, we don't get to see enough cases of them switching back and forth to really know. And it might be that, yes, in fact, you're right, that there is a certain ceiling of what a pitcher can do on the mound, that there's just too much luck and variance and various other things involved, that no pitcher could plausibly ever go below a.54 ERA

or a 1.08 runs per nine allowed, which is what Britton has. But having not seen that, I still believe that there is a huge difference between Kershaw and Britton in talent and that Kershaw's true talent as a reliever would be a sub one ERA. Yes, I believe that. Sub one I could buy better than 0.5. I don't think so. Well, you're not docking him for his unearned runs, which you would if you were making a different argument. But also, this sort of gets to a problem that I have with not your argument, but with the whole argument.

This all depends on Zach Britton having not allowed one more run. If he'd allowed one more run and he didn't have a record and he didn't have a scoreless inning streak, then we probably aren't having this conversation. And that's the reason that we're having this conversation is because he hasn't and it's really fun and scoreless inning streaks are fun and record eras are very fun but the margin between one extra run and not one extra run seems like a very small margin on which to hinge a award where you have perfectly qualified superstar talents out there waiting to be voted on well

like mike trout is not an mvp candidate had, you know, he had one extra home run or he struck out one fewer time. It is like this incredible accumulation. And I don't know. I mean, with Britain, like really, if one run comes in three and a half weeks ago, we're not having this conversation. We might not be having this conversation. He would still blow away everyone in baseball, I think, by championship win probability added. We're not having this conversation. which admittedly is a flawed framework. But I think I can't imagine that there is any pitcher whose true talent as a closer

is better than Britton's observed performance this year. And to be clear, I don't think Britton's true talent is equal to his observed performance this year by any defense independent or, you know, deserve run average or whatever metric you use He should probably have An ERA closer to the 2s Low 2s somewhere around 2 Unless you think there's something he's doing That that's not capturing

He should probably have more runs allowed This year so if you were to Replay the season from the start And you know start with a blank slate Zach Britton would not have a.54 ERA. So I will stipulate that. But I think that there could be guys who certainly are way, way worse as a starter

than an elite starter is. And Zach Britton, definitely one of those guys, but might not be that much worse as a one-inning reliever than a starter converted to one-inning relief. And if you were going to come up with a profile for a pitcher who would fit that description, it would probably be Zach Britton, who has this sinker that no one can hit, and he throws it 92% of the time. And that doesn't work in the starting rotation, but it does work when you're facing three or four hitters at a time. So I can buy that if you are a Britton or a Rivera and you have this one unbeatable pitch,

that you might be close to an elite starter pitching in relief, even though you couldn't actually be a successful starter. Yeah, I think that's fair. A lot of my unwillingness to go all the way on this argument really does come down to the fact that I have an unproven hypothesis about how Kershaw, Fernandez, Syndergaard would do as starters, and baseball has never given me the chance to test that hypothesis. Except for what, all-star games and occasional postseason appearances? Yeah, and even even then they're not they're not prepared for that they haven't you know it's their first time in the role so if uh

if somehow i was given the keys and could run a sim where i got to make the top 10 starters all all relievers and if they had let's say they had well not even the top 10 give me the top three or four and let's say they had a cumulative ERA of, you know, 185, and that nobody or maybe only one of them had an ERA under one, and nobody, you know, nobody had an ERA of like 0.13, then I would have a different opinion about this. I have no way of knowing, but it is my belief that the gap between Jose Fernandez and Zach Britton or the gap between Noah Syndergaard and Delon Batances even is large as a reliever. And I might be totally wrong about that. Yeah, 100% wrong.

I mean, it can't be that large when you're allowing like – if you're Wade Davis allowing a one ERA every year, how large could it be? Okay, so let me give you a hypothetical, Ben. Let's say that I got to play Little League this year, and I was the pitcher, and I had an ERA of zero. Then you would say the gap between me and Clayton Kershaw couldn't be that large, because what's Kershaw going to do against Little Leaguers? True.

He would still be just as much better than me as I am, as he is now. Right. It just wouldn't show up in one specific stat. And you're right. If you're trying to determine the MVP of that little league, it doesn't really matter. Oh, so if you're trying, yeah. So you're saying that the gap in value can't be that much larger. Yeah, no, it's true that the gap in value can't be that much larger. But if there is, this all hinges on whether Zach Britton is special, right? And so whether the gap is large or small, my hypothesis is that among closers, Zach Britton is a miracle.

And among humans, Zach Britton is a miracle. And the Zach Britton is great, awesome, phenomenal. And that even if you took all the starters in baseball, there probably wouldn't, and made them closers, there probably wouldn't be more than 85 who are better than him. But I do think that there are a lot who would be better than him and that there would be some who would be better than him. There would be two or three

who would be even better than he is this year, every year. Just, again, totally unproven. But if that is true, if any of that is true, then he's not that special. All we need is for some team to make a dumb player development decision, stick their prospect in the bullpen for no reason. Well, the thing has been that we wouldn't know if they did. Maybe the Reds did that. Maybe Aroldis Chapman is entirely that. And so that's why the first episode of this show, we called for Rolands Chapman to be a starter. It wouldn't be quite as good as turning Syndergaard into a closer

today, but it would be the next best thing to turn Chapman into a starter tomorrow. Maybe the innings, maybe you can't handle the innings and it would end up being a flawed test. And we need more than one test too. Also, we need like 30 of these at least. But yes, I don't even think that if a team did this, it would be enough for us to tell. Yeah, that's true. Anyway, yeah, I don't know. Hey, quick question.

Yeah. Britton has thrown 50 innings, and that is the entirety of his case for him not being the Cy Young because obviously he's you know has a better ERA than anybody else so you could make the case he's the best pitcher but he's only thrown 50 innings Michael Fulmer leads the American League in ERA ERA plus and baseball references model for war and the case for him will be that he's only thrown 120 innings because he got called up late and he'll probably be shut down. So he might not even qualify for the ERA title when it all comes down to it.

Do you have a preference for which one of those guys has a better Cy Young case? Not MVP, but Cy Young. I feel like Britain, by the way, just not to sway you, but I feel like Britain will finish about fourth this year and Fulmer will get a single fifth place vote. Just not to sway you, but I feel like Britain will finish about fourth this year, and Fulmer will get a single fifth place vote. Yeah, and of course that's probably because the Tigers will finish out of the playoffs. Well, Cy Young, I'm not talking MVP.

I'm talking Cy Young now. You don't think that has an impact on Cy Young? Not as much. I would say if there is, it's probably minimal, I would think. Just because of that word, value, it's not there? Yeah, no, I really... Because I approach the two awards essentially in the same way, like best pitcher, best player. I don't think most people do.

I think that you will be able to find a lot of columnists this year that explicitly say that there's a difference. I remember Mark Wicker when he voted for Frankie Rodriguez to be the MVP of the AL. I think that he would not have had him on his Cy Young ballot, that it was explicitly the value component of it that he felt turned him into the most valuable player. I would bet that if you looked at a correlation, you would find some, but that they would be largely the residue of pitchers on good teams getting more wins and therefore having better Cy Young stats. Yeah, I wouldn't mind a Britain over Fulmer vote. That wouldn't bother me. Would you mind a Fulmer over Britain vote?

I don't actually mind any vote for anyone, but no, I wouldn't. I don't believe that Fulmer actually has been the best pitcher. I mean, yeah. But for the same reasons that Britain probably shouldn't have a 0.5 ERA, Fulmer probably shouldn't have a 2.25 ERA. But if Fulmer led the league in DRA, as a starter, even in fewer than 31 starts, I would vote for him. I think that, you know, you're largely answering the question of how well this guy did in the way that his team chose to use him. Uh, and you know, it seems hard to penalize a guy for, uh, his team wanting to, uh, keep his service time. Well, yeah, it seems wrong. All right. So I think we've covered this from all the angles angles Hopefully people enjoyed the

Thought experiment on some level So we will end it there You can support the podcast on Patreon By going to patreon.com Effectively wild. Five listeners who have Done so already. JC Olivares Chris Wicke, Chris Krohn, Brandon And Mike Taylor. Thank you. You can

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