Episode 1997: This Time it Pitch Counts

Summary[]

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the podcast's semi-official new nickname for Yandy Díaz, what Mookie Betts playing shortstop says about the Dodgers, and Andrew McCutchen's hot start, then (15:29) answer emails about the Reds' many mascots, why we stop at "Quadruple-A," how good today's 26th men would be if they traveled back in time, sticky stuff on a tacky ball, and whether MLB would ever privatize publicly accessible Statcast data, followed (47:48) by a Stat Blast about Ross Stripling and the ultimate swingmen, the longest identical sequences of team wins and losses, and whether working the count to get pitchers out of games is still all it's cracked up to be, plus a recap (1:23:03) of the first time the A's played MLB games in Las Vegas and a Past Blast (1:30:27) from 1997.

Topics[]

The Reds' four mascots
How would major leaguers rank if we extended "Quadruple-A" to even higher "A" levels?
How far back in time would today's 26th man be an All-Star-quality player?
Why not make the ball tacky so pitchers won't need sticky stuff?
Would MLB ever remove Statcast data from public view?
Ross Stripling's career as a swingman, and the finding most swingman-iest pitcher
Longest identical sequences of team wins and losses at the start of the season or at corresponding points in the season
Does forcing starters to throw more pitches and leave the game help your team's chances of winning?
1996 belated Past Blast: Oakland A's play MLB games in Las Vegas
Past Blast: Radical realignment proposal to split the leagues east/west by geography
Final notes
- Liam Hendriks announces that he is cancer-free
- Episode 1996 follow-up: Exit velocity shown in ballparks
- Effectively Wild bingo game

Banter[]

Finding a new nickname for Yandy Díaz
What Mookie Betts playing shortstop says about the Dodgers
Andrew McCutchen's hot start

Email Questions[]

Tyler Mahle (not the Twins pitcher): Your mascot talk has had me laughing over the last few episodes but it did bring up a question. I am a reds fan (I know this may be too much reds talk on the pod) and they actually have 4 mascots. They have Mr. Redlegs, Mr. Red, Rosie Red and Gapper. The first three are all baseball head people and the last one is a "monster". I was wondering if this is just a Reds thing of having multiple mascots or if other teams have multiple mascots, and how many mascots are too many?

Tyler (Patreon): I'm sure you're probably getting lots of sticky stuff questions again after the Max Scherzer ordeal. I've been seeing lots of post exclaiming that MLB needs to "fix the ball" and "make a tackier ball" and by creating a tackier ball, pitchers won't use sticky stuff because it effectively wouldn't be needed. Am I in the wrong here believing that a new, tackier ball won't fix anything with the sticky stuff issue? Why would pitchers just stop all together? Would a tackier ball not just be enhanced with sticky stuff? To me it's like the argument that MLB owners would lower ticket prices if they didn't have to pay big contracts when in reality they are going to charge as much as they think people are willing to pay because why wouldn't they? Wouldn't (or at least couldn't) a tackier ball just lead to pitchers combining the new ball's tacky surface with sweat, rosin, pine tar, sun screen, etc? I'm not looking for a ball that is MORE slippery, but am I crazy for thinking a tackier ball might just make the problem worse?

Kirk: Was listening to a recent episode where Jarred Kelenic and the concept of a AAAA player were discussed which got me thinking. Why do we stop at AAA when classifying skill levels?

Seeing the Tatís Jr. numbers from his minor league stint this week has me wondering how many more As his level would be. Is he a AAAAA player or an AAAAAAAAA player?

Not entirely sure how you would go about making these classifications, given we don’t really know how an A or AA-level minor leaguer would fare in regular season major league competition to use as a basis for an extrapolation. But if there is a way to sort this out, how many As would a league featuring only Mike Trouts and Shohei Ohtanis need to be classed at for them to be replacement-level players?

Monte (Patreon): I was watching the Cardinals pregame show today, and a former player made the statement that [Brendan Donovan and Tommy Edman are "so good they could've played in my era." My first thought was "anyone playing today could've played in the 80's," simply because of improvements in training, not having to work off-season jobs, etc., as you all have discussed. But maybe a more interesting question is "how far back do you have to go before a replacement level player in 2023 could be an all-star?" Mike Trout is an all-star in any era, but if we assume baseball is currently the best it's ever been, how far back in history do you have to go before the 26th guy on a roster today would be so far ahead of everyone else just because they regularly eat protein and lift weights that they would be an all-star caliber player?

Andrew: Do you think MLB would ever privatize the types of data it provides via Statcast (or pitchfx or any statistic you can’t observe or calculate through game action)?

It seems silly to think in horror of public baseball analysis in 2014, but what would be the consequences of such an action? Could MLB ever perceive a benefit (justified or not) in making statcast data private? Or the inverse, making more data public? I remember hearing of team-side data about things like swing path that aren’t public, but I don’t know if that is distinct from types of league data that would be beneficial or of interest.

Joseph (Patreon): I saw this post, which I can't currently find, remarking that both the 2023 and 2008 Phillies were 0-1 after the first game of the season. And it got me wondering about potential duplicate complete seasons. Have two teams ever had identical seasons in these terms? I mean 0-1 after 1, 1-1 after 2, 1-2 after 3, ..., 35-43 after 78, etc., identical after each and every game for the entire season. Maybe this is super common, but maybe it's super rare, I really have no idea. Has the same franchise ever had identical seasons? How many possible seasons are there? How many have happened? Maybe this could be considered separately with 162-game seasons and 154-game seasons. Actually, now that I think about it a little more, it seems basically impossible that any two teams would have had identical seasons. I believe there are 2 to the power of 162 possible team seasons. And given that there have only been a few thousand team seasons played, the odds are minuscule. So maybe a better question is how long into the season two teams have ever had identical seasons. Or how long, on average, does it take to get to a never-before-played season? Like a version of the "usually after x moves in a chess game, you're playing a game that's never been played before." And what about identical windows that don't start the season, like perhaps two teams had identical records between their 26th and 73rd games of the year?

Stat Blast[]

The swingiest swingman pitcher[]

Former podcast guest Ross Stripling joined the starting rotation briefly, but was sent back to the bullpen, solidifying his reputation as a swingman (pitcher who can both start and relieve).
Ben looked for the "swingiest" swingman pitcher, with ratio of starts and relief appearances closest to 1.0, setting a minimum 100 games in each role.
The winner is Wade LeBlanc, who started 129 games and relieved 129 games. However, there were years he didn't start any games, and others where he didn't pitch in relief.
If you require both starting and relief appearances in every season, then the leader is Bill Champion, who started 102 games and relieved 100 games. He barely met the minimums, but Ben points out that this is not surprising when you're looking for outliers. Champion had a 78 ERA+ and a -0.9 bWAR, and his mediocre performance helps explain why he kept swinging back and forth.

Longest stretch of matched win/loss records[]

Based on Joseph's question, Ryan Nelson looked for teams who had the longest stretch of matched win/loss records.
The longest season-opening match is 25 games: The 1895 Louisville Colonels and 1928 Phillies both started their seasons with W, 2L, W, L, W, 3L, W, 4L, W, 10L.
The longest match starting at corresponding points in the season is 29 games: 1899 Cleveland Spiders and 2016 Tampa Bay Rays, starting at game 64: 11L, W, L, W, 4L, W, 8L, W, L.
Ryan Nelson says it would be too computationally expensive to find matches between non-corresponding points in the season but invites listeners to suggest optimizations.

Is there an advantage to driving up the starter's pitch count?[]

Justin Turner talked about teaching batters who fight back from an 0-2 count to 3-2 not to let their guard down. Tom Tango's analysis confirms that batters should focus on the two-strike part of a 3-2 count rather than the three-balls part and defend the strike zone more closely.
Turner also talked about trying to get the starting pitcher out of the game by the fifth inning, "so we can get into those 11th, 12th, 13th guys on the roster coming into pitch innings in the sixth or seventh. I think that's how you win a lot of baseball games."
Ben predicts that stronger bullpens reduce the value of driving up the starter's pitch count to get him out of the game sooner.
Lucas Apostoleris from Baseball Prospectus helped Ben assess this theory.
From 1954 to 2017, if a starter fails to complete five innings, the team wins between 19% to 28% of the time, around a quarter of the time. In 2018 (which is when the Rays pioneered the opener), the winning percentage was 29.5%, and climbed each year thereafter, reaching 36.1% in 2020.
Robert Au from Baseball Prospectus pitched in to calculate winning percentage after controlling for runs allowed. The revised numbers show a weak benefit to driving up the pitch count.
They broke the numbers down into groups (low, middle, high pitch counts), and found that forcing high pitch counts increases win rate by .028 (worth 5 wins over 162 games), and since 2015 it gave you a boost of .032. This runs counter to Ben's prediction that the effect would be weaker in more recent years. He encourages listeners to offer their explanations.

Notes[]

Ben: "Our long national non-nightmare that absolutely no one has been worried about is over."
Listener-submitted nicknames for Yandy Díaz include "Exit Veal-o", "Air Cud", "Prime Cut", "Beef Up", "Beef Bouyant", "Beef Ka-Bomb".
Listener Lee submitted "Meat-Loft". Meg: "Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Ben? Wow."
Listener Lee was joined by listener Ross in submitting "Launch Meat". Ben and Meg agree that this is the winner.
Another listener pointed out that we already have a nickname for Yandy Díaz: "Beef Boy". He got the other nickname only because he didn't qualify as a Beef Boy, but now he does. Nevertheless, Ben and Meg decide to stick with "Launch Meat". (Ben: "Until we get a better submission or change our minds.")
A positive interpretation of Mookie Betts at shortstop is that the Dodgers are so strong, they can lose both Trea Turner and Gavin Lux and still have an MVP at shortstop. Another is that the Dodgers are in big trouble because they're using someone who hasn't played shortstop since the minor leagues.
Meg: "I could write a whole book in defense of puttering. Puttering is the best."
When Meg finished her household chores, she checked in on the MLB web site and saw a photo of Yan Gomes leaping onto Drew Smyly's back and thought they were celebrating a perfect game. The caption "What a way to lose a perfect game" was below the fold, thanks to a very large advertisement for a new movie.
Ben semi-seriously expresses suspicion that the listener named "Tyler Mahle (not the Twins pitcher)" might really be the Twins pitcher, because isn't that what the real Tyler Mahle would say?
Ben, on the Reds' four mascots: "This is very clearly 'too many mascots'."
Meg is horrified at the mascot biographies on the MLB Reds mascots page, particularly the sexualization of Rosie Red, whose weight is given as "101 pounds of fun". Meg: "A meeting was had, just to be like 'Look, how sexy do we make them? [...] We can't make it obvious that we know that some people, excuse my swear, wanna f*** the mascot.'"
After Ben notes the Blue Jays former mascot "BJ Birdy" and they had a player B. J. Ryan, Meg jokes, "It would be funny if BJ Ryan was named after the mascot." Ryan was born four years before the introduction of the mascot.
Ben presumes that an officially-tacky ball would simplify sticky-stuff enforcement because the rule would simply be "No sticky stuff at all", since the ball provides enough stickiness on its own. Other leagues do this with the ball, but Ben doesn't know if it has been effective.
According to some research, AAA is about 80% as good as MLB. Ben thinks that the gap between AAA and replacement-level is comparable to the gap from replacement-level to starter, and again from starter to superstar.
Ben thinks that for the replacement-level player to be an All-Star caliber player, he'd have to go back a few decades, but to be the best player ever, he'd have to go back to the 19th century.
Meg: "When we invent time travel, the very first thing that we are going to do: Answer this question." Ben confirms that questions comparing today's players and players of the past are quite common.
Ben notes that Pitch/FX data was inadvertently made public by MLB, but they realized that allowing outsiders to crunch the numbers added value to the sport overall. "I think MLB understands that there is some value to putting it out there in the public."
In 1996, the A's opened the season at Cashman Field in Las Vegas because renovations on the Oakland Coliseum were behind schedule. There were concerns that the park was not up to MLB standards and that playing in Las Vegas would invite unwanted gambling associations. In the six games, offense was significantly higher than average.
Ben provided this episode's Past Blast. In 1997, Bud Selig promoted a radical realignment that would divide the leagues geographically, with Eastern time zone teams in the AL and the rest in the NL. The plan was blocked by many NL teams who refused to move to the AL. Mariners DH Edgar Martinez said that he'd retire if the Mariners ended up in the DH-less NL.
Listeners pointed out that some ballparks show exit velocity information on in-park scoreboards.
Listener Eric G suggests the creation of an Effectively Wild bingo game, with boxes for things like "Ohtani at-bat", "Mentioning how baseball is different from other sports."