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Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast
Effectively Wild Episode 2461: If You Build it, They Will Checksum
00:27:38
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- [00:00]
A
Vroom, vroom. Here's your primer on beef, boys. Baseball's end. Roger angel and super pretzels Williams Astadillo and Mike Trout. Hypotheticals waiting for the perfect bat from a volcanic eruption. Ladies and gentlemen, the Effectively Wild introduction. Hello and welcome to episode 2461 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from fan Grafts presented by and today 2 and 4 our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindbergh of the Ringer joined by Meg Riley of fangraphs. Hello Meg.
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B
Hello.
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A
So we have talked a lot about rookies having superlative performances this season. I wanted to look at what this looks like league wide and rookies are raking. Rookies be raking this season. Rookies as classified by fan graphs. If I check the little rookies designation on the leaderboards, rookies have collectively hit.283.54, 5 23. That is a 147 WRC plus. Wow. Yeah. So rookies collectively have been one of the best hitters in baseball over the course of a full season. So that means non rookies have been a little bit below average thus far because rookies have brought up the league average themselves. And obviously we're super early in the season here. Small sample applies. Except that when you put all the rookies together it's actually not that that small sample. It's 346 plate appearances. Yeah. You know that's it's like more than half a season of full time play for one player. So yeah, obviously it's a small sample for all the players put together, but it's not an insignificant number of plate appearances in which rookies. And not all of these are debut guys. These are guys who debuted in previous seasons but still have rookie classification. But even so they're making it look easy.
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B
Yeah. And. And look like it'll fall apart tomorrow for any of them. There is the notion of adjustments on both sides. You do glean some comfort from guys who either have very limited big league time previously or no big league time at all. Coming up and showing. Hey, I. I can do this right. You, you are demonstrating a viability that I think is. Is useful and good.
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A
Yeah. And they're not gonna end up with numbers like this. Obviously. No. And I'll be tracking this. It's. It's such a hot start that I will be paying attention to see whether this ends up being some sort of historic rookie performance. But the best rookies have ever been if we search all the way back to the beginning. Well, I think 1871 doesn't count because that's the first year of Major League Baseball, if you count the National Association. So that year everyone was a rookie. So when everyone's a rookie, no one's a rookie. Maybe. So even that year though, rookies had a 98 WRC plus, a little bit below average. So the best real rookie performance over a full season is 2015 when rookies, rookie hitters had a 94 WRC plus. And that was a notable year when a lot of people were talking and writing about how good the rookies were and this young generation of MLB players and so that's the best they've ever been. 94, just a bit below league average. So that's the number to beat. We'll see if this year's rookies can do it. I might share some other other rookie research at the end of the episode, but as good as the hitters have been, and the latest was Diamondbacks rookie Jose Fernandez.
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B
That's right.
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A
Had himself a two homer game in his debut on Tuesday. So yeah, that's already historic because there has never been a season before in which more than one player in his first career regular season game hit two or more home runs. And Fernandez and Chase Delater have already done that this year. Unprecedented. It's just been major performance after major performance and major league performance. However, the pitchers, the rookie pitchers are not quite holding up their end of the bargain despite some impressive individual performances. Andrew Painter looked quite great. He was painting in his debut on Wednesday and Parker Messick was good and you know, Connolly early was good. So guys have had good starts. But on the whole, the rookie pitchers have been subpar. They have a negative 0.6 wins above replacement according to fan graphs with a near five ERA and five plus FIP. So rookie pitchers, you're slacking. Maybe it's because they're facing so many rookie hitters. It's like rookie on rookie crime. Maybe that's what's happening here.
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B
I, I, I do wanna linger ever so slightly on, on Painter because boy, did that go well. You know, that was, that was good.
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A
That looked, we've been waiting quite a while for him.
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B
Pretty good.
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A
Yeah, it did. And the idea was, well, he's finally arriving. But is he the same pitcher that everyone was so excited about when he was on the verge of making his debut for the Phillies years ago and then he got hurt and he's been absent and is the stuff going to be the same? And I don't know if it's exactly the same, but it looked pretty darn good on Wednesday.
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B
Yeah. And, you know, it was nice to see him utilize his curveball to such great effect. You know, worked ahead a lot. Fastball looked good. Like, you know, it. It's different. It is a little different than it was from a shape perspective, but a fastball look good. I enjoyed. There's a lot of engagement with his family on that broadcast. You know, again, it's been a. It's been kind of a long time coming, which is a funny thing to say about a guy who's still so young. I. But, you know, we were, we were teased with the possibility of painter, and then he lost basically two whole seasons to the elbow injury. And so, like, you know, it has been a long time coming. Even though he's 22, soon to be 23. And his family was so stressed, you know, his mom is so stressed. His, I think, fiance, I think they're engaged. Fiance. So stressed. And then the first inning goes very well.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And then the next time they cut to the family in the stands, his fiance had a beer in hand and I was like, yeah, you get a girl. Like, he did it. He's. It's going to be okay. You get to unwind now and enjoy a butt heavy. If you want one, you get was nice. I was like, this feels very human to me.
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A
Yeah, it's true.
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B
It was nice.
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A
Yeah. Yeah. And I think the way that you end up with a 147 WRC plus among the rookie bats is that almost all of them have been good. If any of them had not been good, then you wouldn't have that high a number. But yeah, if you set the minimum at 20 plate appearances through Tuesday's games, that gives you eight guys and only one has not been above average and significantly above average, and that's Carson Williams of the rays with that lowly 18 WRC plus dragging down that lofty average. And if you set it a little lower, the cutoff, then there's some other guys who are off to slower starts, but on the whole, just everyone firing on all cylinders. And I think that is very exciting for baseball. Also very exciting, I hope, for our Patreon supporters and effectively Wild listeners. We have a trio of guests today. So this is sort of a themed episode, what we're doing here. There are three listeners of effectively Wild who have put out new apps or websites, handy tools and widgets that have already improved my experience of the baseball season. And they posted about these in our Discord group or on our Facebook group. And they caught my eye and I thought, well, my be Fun to talk to them about how they made these things. So we're doing what qualifies as a lightning round for effectively Wild. So, you know, 15 to 20 minute interviews with each of these listeners about their new tools. It's sort of a show and tell. It's almost a Shark Tank kind of exercise, except a lot lower stress and lower pressure. And they're not asking for funding and we're not providing funding, and we're not a lot nicer. We're nicer. I think that we're certainly going to intend to be nicer. But we will be talking to listener Tristan Rodman, who has created a website called Baseball Scores that turns games in real time into ambient music that you can listen to while you're doing other stuff. And Tristan buried the lead. He didn't actually mention this during our conversation, but he is a musician himself, as he gets into. And he is one half of the Gagnees, the synth pop duo that created some of our themes for the podcast that we play. Famously, the effective Mon Sauvage theme that a lot of people like. Tristan had a hand in creating that. And we'll be using music from his site as the interstitials to split up our segments today. So we'll talk to Tristan about baseball scores, and then we'll talk to Zach Gines about his creation First Pitch, which is a way to score how compelling each game on each given day is. If you're trying to decide, what do I watch today? Then you go to First Pitch and it'll tell you how interesting each game is based on various criteria. And then I will talk to Ezra Thompson, who created a website called Playograph, which is a live scoreboard that includes not only mlb, but also international leagues and the minors and college ball. Just all the baseball scores you want in real time on one website presented very cleanly. And you can actually use all of these tools in concert, really. So you could use First Pitch to figure out, which games am I going to watch today? And then when the games begin, you can pull up Playograph and you can follow them on there. And then you can have Baseball Scores open to listen to the games that you are watching. So it's a perfect little synchronicity here. So this will be fun. And before we get to those guys, for our free previewers, before we hit our Patreon cutoff on this episode, I thought we could front load a little stat blasting here. Just lead with some stat blasting. And then they'll tease out something interesting tidbit discuss it at length and analyze it for us in a Mason way Is today. These stat bless are prompted by listeners who have submitted some questions and one of them that came from our Patreon supporter Michael Hoffman is As of Monday, March 30, every team in MLB has lost a game. Seems early for that. Is it a record? And Michael puts in parentheses I wanted to add that every team has also won a game, but alas, the A's. The A's had not won a game when Michael sent us that message. They have now. Yes. So everyone's on the board. So that's exciting. And this was also asked by another listener and Patreon supporter in our Discord group who noticed that the A's had finally won. This was Wandering Winder who posted now that the A's won last night, every team at least one win and at least one loss within their first five games. Two questions when is the last time that happened and what's the earliest that's ever happened in a season by game number. So Michael Mountain, somewhat frequent Stat Blast correspondent, has crunched the numbers and come up with a spreadsheet and has summarized some of this data for me. And I guess the high level takeaway here is that this is kind of quick for wins and losses to have happened for every team, but it is not historic. There have been a lot of seasons and strange stuff happened in some of them. So see, you have to distinguish between calendar date and how deep we are into the season.
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B
Correct?
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A
Because obviously the former method is going to privilege this season because this was the earliest opening day, or at least the earliest real opening day. And so we got started early. Of course you're probably going to have wins and losses for everyone a little earlier, or at least that's more likely. So this was a record for the early earliest calendar date for all MLB teams to have recorded a loss, but it was the earliest calendar date for all MLB teams to play also. So that's a little less special. The latest by calendar date modern quote unquote record excluding shortened seasons that started late May 5, 1904. So Michael really ran this three ways. The calendar date, the number of days into the season, just how many days had elapsed since the first game played. And then I think the most telling way is through a certain number of games for every team. So how many games did it take before each team had played that number of games and there were no winless teams left? And that's a good way to do it just because it keeps things Consistent as Monday was, I think day six of the season. Tuesday was day seven of the season. But of course day one of the season was opening night. There was one game. And that's often the case if a team opens internationally before everyone else, for instance. So I'm going to focus on through a certain game number. And then Michael ran that for no winless teams left. And also no undefeated teams left. And also no undefeated or winless teams left. And if you want it the other two ways, calendar, date and day of the season. You can see that on the spreadsheet as well, which I will link to. It usually takes about nine days into the season before no teams are undefeated. But 6, not uncommon. Between 6 and 11 is about 2/3 of season since 1901. So if we go by how many games did each team have to play before there were no winless teams left? This year it was five. Now it's taken as many as 22 games. That's the record on the high end, Courtesy of the 1988 Baltimore Orioles, who lost their first 21 games of the season. A very long season, opening winning streak or losing streak will delay the day when every team has filled up both the win and loss columns. But the fastest time is three games. And that's happened in 10 seasons, most recently in 2020. 2020 was weird in so many ways. And this was more common earlier in MLB history when there were fewer teams. So 2020 was actually the first time that had happened since 1953, but it has happened 10 times. In total, four games has happened 26 times and five games has happened 40 times. That's actually the mode, the most common value. So if you add up all the possibilities, this was on the low end. This was faster than average. But 5 is actually the most frequent total. Last year it took eight games, 2024 took 10 games. The year before that it took five. So 2023 and 2026 were equival over the last 10 years. The average is 5.5. So not that anomalous. If we look at no undefeated teams instead of no winless teams. This year it took four games for everyone. And that's pretty quick, but again, not extraordinary. Five or six games is pretty typical for how many each team needs to play before no undefeated teams are left. Four, which is what it took. This year is less common, but not that rare. This is the eighth occurrence since 1989. Last year it took nine games. The year before it took six. The year before that it took 14. That was when the Rays started the Season season with a 13 game winning streak. And then 2022 it took four, same as this year. So the low again is three. That has happened nine times, most recently in 2020 and the high is 28. Because in 1875 the Boston team started the season with a 2601 record, one tie. So they didn't lose a game until their 28th game of the season. That was still the national association, not the national league. The ALNL record is 21. That was 1884. And then finally, if we put it all together, no undefeated or teams left. This year it took five games. Last year nine. The year before that 10. The year before that 14. The year before that four. So it's the quickest since 2022, 2020 was three again and that is the quickest. It has happened six times. 28 or 22 is the longest it has taken, depending on whether you want national association or National League. So yeah, it's just not that strange. 1975-2000-2013-2022. All teams remove the goose eggs within their first four games. So seven games is actually the median number before every team has the win and loss column populated, but anything between 5 and 9 is pretty common. And then here's another little question that we got via email from a Patreon supporter named Sam, but also independently because great listeners think alike in the Discord group in the Stat Blast channel, which is also a a fun place to submit these and sometimes get very quick answers. But got a question from listener whose username is Panic Emoji, who said the Dodgers just won 4 to 1 to earn a 4 and 1 record. I wonder what's the highest number of total runs scored in a game where the score of the game matched the resulting record for the winning or losing team like it did for the Dodgers tonight. And as listener Avery said, personally I'll always remember the 1998 Yankees winning their final game of the season. 1 and 20 hundred, 114 to 48. Really poetic when they scored 114 runs in their 114th win. That didn't actually happen. But what is the highest number that has happened? Michael Mountain chiming in again. 1894, the Boston National League club beat the Cincinnati Reds 20 to 11 in the second game of a doubleheader on May 30th to improve their record to 2011. So that's the record 2011 record 2011 score for a losing a game. It's the 1911 Boston club losing to the Cincinnati Reds. Interesting. Different season, same pair of teams and that Boston team lost 18 to 8 on May 12 to fall to 8 and 18. The more modern records for winning a game, it's 23 total runs. 1996, the Yankees beat the Orioles 13 to 10, losing a game 25 total runs. In 2000, it was 11 to 14 was the Rockies versus the Mets, and then also 12 to 13 the Marlins and the Dodgers. The highest scoring game where both teams had their record matching the final score afterward is 17 runs accomplished by the 1993 Padres and the Mets on April 25th. But they were both eight and nine. So if you want to enforce that one team has a winning record and the other team has a losing record, it is 13 runs accomplished three times, most recently the 1986 Angels beating the Twins 8 to 5 on April 20th. So yeah, those 2000 Marlins lost a 13 to 12 game to drop their record to 13 to 12. So that's some nice little symmetry. And finally, our last little step. Last question here comes from Wilson Hamilton, who is also a Patreon supporter and Sundays, I have two related questions. The first question is what year in major league history featured the most active hall of Famers? My assumption would be it has to be some of the olden days of the early modern era, given the rate at which borderline or sub borderline players trickle in through the various committees. I'm also curious about what year in major league history saw the most active players who were in one of the peak years used to calculate their jaws. So their JAWS scores. That draws on the top seven seasons for the player and what year saw the highest total WAR accumulated by players whose WAR totals would feature in their jaws? If that makes sense. I might be butchering that phrasing, but what I'm driving at is what year could be considered the apex hall of Fame year featuring the highest concentration of the best players playing at the peaks of their powers. So Michael dove into this one today too. He is our st last MVP for this episode and he says I'm assuming that for the JAWS part of this question, he's asking how many active hall of Famers were in a JAWS peak year, not how many total active players. That's the way I read it as well. If so, by raw player count, the most active players in a single season who went on to be hall of Famers is 69. Nice. Which happened three times in the late 1920s with three slightly different sets of players, 1925, 1926 and 1929. Michael notes that this is pretty easily stat headable since the Answer predates the DH era. So all active hall of Fame pitchers were also batting. The most active AL NL players in a single season who went on to be hall of famers is 15, which happened three years in a row, 1928 to 1930. So that same sort of time range, 1928, is also the peak hall of Fame year. When you look at percentage of league wide plate appearances, plus batters faced that were taken by eventual hall of fame inductees, 18% of all playing time that season was by hall of Fame players. That sounds, sounds too high. It sounds like you've set the bar too low. Maybe for what constitutes a Hall of Famer, if nearly one out of five played appearances or batter's face is a Hall of Famer timer, maybe that is the influence of the veterans committee and kind of cooking the books, you know, sort of stacking the deck to get friends of friends in there. The Frankie Frisch years. Michael says by comparison, hall of Fame playing time rates Post World War II fluctuated between about 10% and 12% every season until the early 70s. And by the mid-90s, we're down to about 7%. In 1928, there were 37 future inductees, 26 batters and 11 pitchers who had enough playing time for a qualified season. Almost 2.5 hall of Famers per team.
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B
Oh, wow.
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A
Yeah, that's, that's a lot.
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B
Yeah.
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A
The Yankees and Cardinals had five each. Jim Bottomley, Frankie Frisch, whom I just mentioned, Chick Hay, Grover Cleveland Alexander and Jesse Haynes for the Cardinals. Earl Coombs, Lou Gehrig, Babe Ruth, Wade Hoyt and Her Penick for the Yankees. So yeah, there are definitely some deserve hall of Famers in there. Sure. I think you know, Babe Ruth, he clears the bar for me. Yeah, you know, even if you're sort of a small hall guy, I feel comfortable with that. Yeah, I think probably everyone can find room for Babe Ruth in their personal hall of Fame, but there was a lot of cronyism going on in these days and so some debatable selections and inductions there. And Michael has attached a chart of hall of Fame playing time rate by season in the retro sheet era, which I will share onto jaws. Michael used fan graphs were instead of the baseball reference data that's part of the site's JAWS calculations because the fan graphs data was easier to collate. But the broad stokes should be similar. For the peak question. In what year were the most future hall of Famers having one of their seven best seasons? Which is what the JAWS metric uses to Define peak value. You might be starting to sense a pattern here. The answer is 1930 with 28 future hall of Fame inductees having one of their seven best seasons by Fangraph Sweden. This is including all active players, so Satchel Paige is included in the tally that year also leads in total fan graphs were accumulated by hall of Famers who were having a peak season with 159F war gained an average of 5.7 per player. Just a little more perspective on how many more hall of Famers there were in this era. Imagine A team in 2026 with four active players whom you would describe as future hall of Famers and they're all in the prime of their career year. Now imagine that team finishing 16 games behind the division leader. Seems impossible, right? Well, that's exactly what happened to the 1930 New York Yankees. Not only did they have four players each having a peak Jaws season that doesn't even include the 1930American League fan. Gosh. War leader. Literally Babe Ruth who had a 10 to 10.5 war season but doesn't get counted on this list because it was only his ninth best season. So.
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B
Oh, that's so funny.
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Imagine ten and a half WAR season just doesn't. Doesn't even make the cut. It's barely top 10. Yeah, embarrassing really like down year for the Babe. Yeah, as I just.
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B
Is that one of the heavy VD's?
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As I just mentioned, he was pretty good. And yet they finished in third place 16 games behind the Philadelphia Athletics whom we have mentioned recently. Just a incredible collection of stars in that era. Hall of Famer simply didn't mean as much back in that era as it does now. I mean for one thing, the hall of Fame literally didn't exist yet at that point. Point or to the extent that people would refer to hall of Famers, it would be sort of a generic term or people would use it kind of cavalierly, willy nilly to say that oh, someone threw a no hitter, he's now in baseball's hall of Fame. But there wasn't actually a baseball hall of Fame, not a national one by then.
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B
No standards.
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Yes, Michael says there was some luck involved, but even by Pythagorean record, those Yankees were still a third place team, albeit only six games back instead of 16. Of course the divisions were, were a little different back then. I mean there, there weren't divisions, it wasn't the divisional era, so it was just leagues. And in case you're wondering, these are the 28 hall of Fame peak players and their war totals for 1930. I'll just read the names Gar Joe Cronin, Lefty Grove, Bill Terry, Hack Wilson, Al Simmons, Kai Kai Kyler, Freddie Lindstrom, Melot Chuck Klein, Charlie Garringer, Dazzy Vance, Gabby Hartnett, Frankie Frisch, Travis Jackson, Mickey Cochran, Goose Gon, Earl Coombs, Sam Rice, Carl Hubble, Ted Lyons, Chick Hafe, Pie trainer, Heiny Minouche, Red Ruffing, Tony Lazzari, Satchel Page and Jesse Haynes. In more recent history, there were 18 future hall of Famers so far having a peak season in 1996 Griffey, Smoltz, Maddox, Bagwell, Tomei, Larkin, Piazza, Chipper, Frank Thomas, Edgar Pudge, Messina, Glavin, Alomar, Bio, Rivera, Hoffman and Harold Baines. And there's a spreadsheet showing the player count and WAR hall of Famers who were having a peak year with another tab for individual player season sorted by year and fang graphs war. So yeah, a lot of this was that was the ultimate era of cronyism in the Veterans Committee. A lot of it also was the further back you go, the more time there has been for players to get inducted. So this obviously changes. The hall of Fame membership is a living document and in recent years there are guys who have not yet gotten in in who will get in. And so yeah, this will change over time.
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B
Totally.
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A
Okay, well, thank you very much to Michael and to all of our questioners. And now we will take a quick break and we'll hear a little ambient music courtesy of Tristan. And then we will talk to Tristan about baseball scores, followed by a couple other excellent creative listeners about their creations. First Pitch and Playograph. That'll do it for the free preview of today's Effectively Wild. Thank you for listening. If you'd like to listen on and hear whatever wisdom and wit await, we would love to have you. You can visit patreon.com effectivelywild to access the rest of this episode and plenty of other exclusive content. Weekly subscriber only episodes, monthly bonus shows, our Discord Group, our livestreams. Either way, we will be back with another episode soon which will appear in full on this feed. Until then, we wish you well and thank you for your support of Effectively Wild. Whatever form it takes.