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BP Daily Podcast: Effectively Wild Episode 444: Questions of Science and Progress

and
May 7, 2014

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about replay and umpires, home field advantage, picking a front office to follow, and more.

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rawagman
5/07
One reason why LHSP have seen their winning percentage decline lately - teams are familiar with the historical numbers and get suckered into confirmation bias, thereby lowering the selection selection standards for using lefties under the assumption that, by simple virtue of using lefties, they will be better.
One way to test this theory is to eliminate the guys who have only short trials as starters in the show. Focus only on - say - lefties who started at least 10 games in a given season.
Reply to rawagman
lyricalkiller
5/07
Lefty winning percentage was higher in the 2000s than it had been for many decades. You're saying this supposed bias *just* started four years ago? Further, lefty winning percentage was highest in the decades when teams gave the most starts to lefties, so the opposite of this hypothesis.
Reply to lyricalkiller
onearmedecon
5/08
Not exactly the same situation of the QO to an injured pitcher, but the Dodgers gave a $19M commitment to Brian Wilson in July ($10M for 2013 plus a $9M player option for 2014). Given that he only gave them 13.2IP in 2013, basically they committed a majority of the $19M on the promise of what he could provide in 2014. He missed basically all of 2012 and coming back from his second Tommy John, yet made the commitment without even seeing him pitch competitively.

Presumably, had he signed a one season contract with the Dodgers in the preseason for some amount quite a bit less than $10M and then pitched like he did in the final six weeks of the 2013 season, then the Dodgers would likely have extended him a QO (since they made the $19M commitment without seeing his 2013 performance). If so, then 13.2 IP with a 3.25 K:BB and a 2.02 FIP would likely be sufficient for extending a ~$14M offer to a middle reliever. If you were to map Wilson's dominance to a starting pitcher, then the prediction of a starter in 10 starts demonstrating Scherzer-like dominance sounds about right. At least for a large market team like the Dodgers, for whom $14M is a relatively inconsequential to their overall payroll structure.
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