A (121:19)
All right, well, do you think I have some updates for you. Yes, I have some updates for you. First, on the Pitcher Warp draft, I have some facts, I have some figures. One little thing. The WARP totals that Chris cited at the start of the episode were for those pitchers we drafted in 2015 Ian through 2025 as he subsequently realized that 10 year period should have ended in 2024. That's 10 seasons, including 2015. However, that does not change the results. Sam still won according to the current model of warp, 63.7 wins above replacement player to 60.9. Pretty close. And because I had to know, I looked up how we would have done if we had gone by Fan Graphs WAR instead of Baseball Prospectus warp. Of course, we were a Baseball Prospectus podcast at the the time. Now we're a Fan Graphs podcast. If we were doing this today, we'd probably use Fangraphs War. Well, by fan graphs, war, my 2015 draftees won 73.1 war to 71.6. So by old warp, I would have been the winner. By FanGraphs war, I would have been the winner. But by Present warp, Sam won. Now we wondered aloud which pitchers we should have drafted back in 2015 and how well we could have done if we had had an ideal draft. So Chris and I figured that out. If we had both drafted perfectly, each taking the best person, I would have won 109.5 to 97.2. And if one of us had picked the best 10 candidates available, anyone who was 24 or younger and active in the majors when we drafted in early May 2015, they would have earned 162.1 warp. And actually we did a little bit better than I thought. Because if we had drafted ideally, I said we would have had 109.5 and 97.2 warp. So with 63.7 and 60.9, we were more than halfway there. The pitchers we overlooked and should have drafted kept Kevin Gosman, Marcus Stroman, Robbie Ray, Carlos Rodan, Andrew Heaney, Mike Fulton, Evic, Felipe Vasquez, Jose Urania, Ken Giles, and Corey Canable. Sorry we snubbed you guys, but according to the Effectively Wild Wiki page for that episode quote, Ben and Sam agree that the crop of under 25 starters is not very deep this year and many of them have injury concerns. So maybe we didn't do that badly, it was just a weak class. Also, in case you're wondering, I did find out what happened to Tim Cooney and what he's up to today. He made six starts for St. Louis in the majors 2015. That's the entirety of his big league career. He then went to Cleveland. He retired as a player after the 2017 season. And what did he do next? He went to business school. Unlike John Yandel, he earned his NBA from Wharton no less, class of 2020. He went to work for McKinsey for almost four years and now he is a corporate strategy senior specialist at Vanguard. I guess he landed on his feet. I also have a follow up to something John said. He said he'd like to know what Barry Bonds batting average was when he five or more pitches. And John said he figured that Barry's batting average would be higher in those plate appearances than it was overall. Well, you know, I had to check on that with some help from Michael Mountain. We have pitch by pitch data going back to 1988, almost all of Bonds's career, but not quite. Michael found 4,053 plate appearances from 1988 through Bonds's last season, 2007 in which he saw five or more pitches. The slash line was was 253. 501. 539. Obviously five plus pitch plate appearances were going to get a lot of walks, even more so than usual for Bonds. So we're mostly interested in the batting average and slugging percentage.253.539. And Bonds's career batting average and slugging percentage were.298 and.607. So considerably worse in the five plus pitch plate appearances than overall. But then I wondered okay, well what about the rest of the league? Did the average batter get much worse in those situations? Well, from 1988 through 202007 National League, the median average was 260 on the dot with a.411 slugging percentage, five plus pitch plate appearances,217 batting average and.344 slug. So again, Bonds was.298 versus 253 and 607 versus 539. The league was.260 versus 217 and 411 versus 344. So Bonds's drop offs in those plate appearances, 15.1% for his batting average and 11.2% for his slugging performance percentage. The league as a whole, 16.5% for the batting average versus 15.1 for Bonds and 16.3% for the slugging percentage versus 11.2 for Bonds. So he declined less than average. Of course he did. He was Barry Bonds. And he declined notably less than average in his extra base hit ability. So this does turn out to be another way to show that Barry Bonds was a good hitter, but the results might surprise Jon I think the reason why the batting average average and slugging percentage are lower in those plate appearances is that seeing five plus pitches means a lot of two strike counts and that's going to drag down your numbers. Michael looked just at bats ending with a three ball count and the numbers were still a little bit below Bonds's average and the league's average. So kind of counterintuitive. But now we know Bonds didn't have a huge times through the order effect for what it's worth. 10.58 OPS his first time facing a starter in a game, then 1103 the second time, 1069 the third time. 977 the fourth. Fourth time he was just a great hitter. However you slice it, there have been a bunch of small transactions since the last time we potted. Maybe we'll do a roundup next week depending on how much major news there is coming out of the winter meetings. A smattering of free agents signed Cedric Mullins, Miguel Rojas, Emilio Pagan, Anthony K, and we had a Red Sox Pirates trade with password going to the Pirates and Johan Oviedo going to Boston. Kudos to that unnamed exec in the Jesse Rogers ESPN survey we discussed the other day who said that the top trade candidate of the winter was a Pirate starter. Nailed it. A Pirate starter has been traded. To me, maybe the most interesting signing was the Rockies hiring Josh Burns as their new gm serving under Paul D. Podesta. In a way, it's another blast from the past. Not as distant a past as Depot, but Burns was the GM of the Diamondbacks from 2005 to 2010 and the Padres from 2011 to 2014. However, unlike deep Podesta, Burns has not been out of baseball. In fact, he's been with the Dodgers since 2014 as their senior vice president of baseball operations. He's overseen their scouting, their farm system. Seems like a good guy to have around if you're trying to catch up on what has happened in baseball in the past decade and you're trying to learn from the best. Get your scouting and your player development and your prospects up to speed. Plus you get to poach a front office talent from a division rival. Seems like a suitable right hand man and perhaps encouraging that the Rockies were able to persuade someone from the Dodgers to work for them. He also was previously the Rockies AGM 25 years ago or so just needs to work for the Giants to complete the NL west circuit. Lastly Tis the season for year end podcast listening stats, Spotify wrapped and others. Thanks to all of you who have sent us your stats, who have posted them and tagged us. It's always gratifying to see how much time people have spent listening to the podcast. Though I gotta say some of you are sickos, which I appreciate, but based on what I've seen, it seems like listening to every episode we publish this year gets you only into the top 3 or 4% of listeners, which means that a considerable number of you have not only listened to every day new episode as it's come out, but also listen to some old ones or listen to some multiple times. We always do well in these things because we put out a lot of episodes. I don't know if you've noticed and also they tend to be fairly lengthy like this one, but some of you have listened to Effectively Wild for a significant percentage of the year. I think the top number I've seen so far Listener Jack Alexander posted in the Facebook group 44823min, which makes him a top 1% fan considering it's still early December. That's that's what, 8, 9% of the year something like that spent listening to Effectively Wild. However, in the comments he did disclose that he sometimes listens when he sleeps. Can you actually listen when you sleep? You can put the podcast on as you're falling asleep. We have no problem with people using Effectively Wild as a sleep aid, but we might have to discount that minutes total just slightly. Those are garbage time minutes. That's some low leverage listening minutes. Consciously listened. That's probably the metric we would want. Listener Dan enden is a top 1% listener. 15,224 minutes. If those were all minutes while he was awake, maybe that's a more legitimate total look. Asleep awake, old episodes, new episodes, one time speed, three times speed. We'll take it. We're happy to have the support and we're especially happy to have the support on Patreon, which you can confer on us by going to patreon.com effectively wild and signing up to pledge some monthly or year yearly amount to help keep the podcast going. Help us stay ad free and get yourself access to some perks as have the following five listeners. Patrick Britton, Rowley Richards, Matthew Fury, Chris Dyer and Christine Goo. Thanks to all of you, Patreon perks include access to the Effectively Wild Discord group for patrons only, monthly bonus episodes, playoff live streams, prioritized email answers, personalized messages, discounts on merch and ad free fan grass memberships and sponsors much more. Check out all the offerings@patreon.com effectivelywild if you are a Patreon supporter, you can message us through the Patreon site. If not, you can contact us via email. Send your questions, comments, intro and outro themes to podcastangraphs.com youm can rate, review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music and other podcast platforms. You can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at R Effectively Wild. You can join our Facebook group at@facebook.com group effectivelywild. You can check the show page in the podcast post at Fan Graphs or the episode description in your podcast app for links to the stories and stats we cited today. One link is to sign up for Effectively Wild Secret Santa, which you can do until December 10th. Thanks to Shane McKeon for his editing and production assistance that will do it for today and for this week. We hope you have a wonderful weekend and we will be back to talk to you early next week.
