Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1007: Baseball News is Back

Episode Date: January 17, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Lenny Harris and Jerry Dipoto, then celebrate the end of a long baseball news drought by discussing a few recent and imminent transactions, including the Jose Bautista signing and the Danny Duffy and Wil Myers extensions. Audio intro: Josh Ritter, "Harrisburg" Audio outro: Supergrass, "Lenny"  iTunes Feed (Please rate and review […]

Hey everyone, just so you know, Jeff and I held out as long as we could, hoping that someone would sign Jose Bautista before we recorded. Eventually we couldn't delay any longer, so we talked about it as if he was going to go to Toronto on a one-year deal, which, just after we hung up, is exactly what happened. So, as you undoubtedly know, Bautista signed with Toronto for a guaranteed one-year, $18 million deal, with various mutual options, investing options, and buyouts. This doesn't change anything we said about batista or the blue jays but you can feel slightly superior while you listen to us and know more than we did and now that you know that we can continue it's a long way to heaven

it's closer to harrisburg and that's still, the podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I'm Ben Lindberg of Ringer, joined by Jeff Sullivan from Fangraphs. Hey Jeff. Hello. Now that you're back in the country, there's all sorts of baseball news. It's nice for you. You have to write about things. You've got things to write about. So we're going to get into the news that has happened or that has almost happened. I feel like nearing has been a big theme of this week so far in terms of MLB trade rumors headlines. Lots of people are nearing extensions or nearing deals, and some people actually have some. So we'll get into all of

that stuff, but I believe you've brought some sort of banter before we do. Yeah, yeah. I'm not familiar with the established protocols, but I did want to bring something up. In the last podcast, and I guess my first as the official co-host here, we talked a little bit about Lenny Harris. Maybe I talked a little bit about Lenny Harris. Things were discussed in less than flattering terms. Just to remind everybody, Lenny Harris, you know who Lenny Harris is or was if you're a baseball fan. I think he's been around enough that even if you don't know much about his career, you have a familiarity with the fact that he was the pinch hitter. He was sort of like Wes Helms before Wes Helms, I guess, and also sort of at the same time as Wes Helms. But Lenny Harris batted more than 4,000 times in his career,

81 career WRC+, which is not good. He had a career 1.8 war, which glancing at the leaderboards is the same as what Steven Vog vote just did last season uh there is a player named greg garcia apparently this could be a fangraphs leaderboard bug but there is at least a bug asserting that there was a greg garcia who played last year on the cardinals who was worth 1.9 war so a player i've never heard of uh not only posted an obp of 393, which is classic Cardinals, but also had a more valuable season than Lenny Harris had as a career. So I don't know Lenny Harris. I got nothing against Lenny Harris, but I do observe that statistically he was not very good, which brings me to a Jerry Krasnick article from last week. And the title of this article, and Krasnick actually just linked it again on Twitter this morning, And it's titled Does Character Count in Cooperstown? Hall of Famers Way In. So in this

article, Krasnick was talking to people like Bert Bleileven and Tom Glavin about different questions about the Hall of Fame. And toward the end, there is a question that Krasnick asked the group of players, former players. And the question read, is there a player who isn't in the Hall of Fame now that you would like to see in Cooperstown? And Bert Blylevin, he answered Jim Cat, Tommy John, obviously Tony Oliva, etc. Ted Simmons, very good argument for Ted Simmons. We don't need to talk about Bert Blylevin's players. They're good arguments for them all. Craig Biggio, Fred McGriff.

You want to see Fred McGriff in there, which totally makes sense. We get to Barry Larkin. Barry Larkin says, Fred McGriff, he remembers at is totally makes sense. We get the Barry Larkin. Barry Larkin says Fred McGriff. He remembers at the height of his career, how dominated the game and how much we had the game plan against him. All right, that's fine. Lee Smith, Alan Trammell, you can believe it. The to a certain extent, Lou Whitaker is in there. Second of two paragraphs. I look at a guy like Lenny Harris, my former teammate, Barry Larkin. I look at a guy like Lenny Harris, my former teammate. He has the most. I look at a guy like Lenny Harris, my former teammate, he has the most pinch hits in the history of baseball. I'm sorry, Barry Larkin, Barry Larkin,

quote, I look at a guy like Lenny Harris, my former, not just a out of sequence name drop. I look at a guy like Lenny Harris, my former teammate, he has the most pinch hits in the history of baseball. Maybe, my emphasis, maybe he's not a Hall of Fame player, but I scratch my head and say, why isn't there some at least acknowledgement in the Hall of Fame for that? So in Barry Larkin's answer, he didn't say, hands down, Lenny Harris belongs in the Hall of Fame. But what he did say is, well, you know, maybe he does belong in the Hall of Fame. I wish that he would at least have like a plaque or an exhibit in the Hall of Fame. I don't

know which of his hits you would put in the Hall of Fame because Lenny Harris also statistically was not a clutch hitter, which makes things even worse. So I get if Jerry Krasnick had been like, hey, Barry Larkin, what do you think about Lenny Harris? I totally get you don't want to piss off like an ex-teammate. But there was no reason for Barry Larkin to bring Lenny Harris up in this conversation at all. He was not going to be name-dropped in a conversation about the Hall of Fame from start to finish. Lenny Harris' feelings were not going to be hurt if Barry Larkin didn't talk about him in the same breath as Alan Trammell, Lou Whitaker, Fred McGriff, and Lee Smith. But he went out of his way to say that this, I'm sorry, not good,

but very long-lasting player deserves to be in Cooperstown. And that just that struck me as more extraordinary than anything else in the article. It was a very good article and Krasnick and Tom Glavin had some very insightful answers, but I'm just going to come away thinking that Barry Larkin is a crazy person. most listeners complaint about this podcast which was not enough Lenny Harris content I don't think Lenny Harris came up in the first thousand five episodes of this show but you have changed that in your first couple we've gone back to back with Lenny Harris there is I mean it does seem like if you're gonna have a hall of fame that is sort of a baseball museum, it would be nice if there were some acknowledgement of kind of curiosities, like players who just had strange careers or did something unusual that maybe wasn't all that valuable in the end,

but set them apart from everyone else. And he definitely, he did that. So if you were telling the history of baseball, Lenny Harris was part of almost 20 years of it and in kind of a weird way. So he deserves some sort of footnote, if maybe not a mention along with those other players in the article. Maybe he belongs. You could like have a Lenny Harris quote from Lenny Harris about Barry Larkin on Barry Larkin's plaque. Maybe. Yeah. Like I used to watch Barry from the bench a lot,

and this is how good he used to be. That's a good solution. Everyone would be happy. You also did a post about Jerry DePoto, which is very topical. And this was one of those posts that I don't know if we necessarily learned anything, which this is heading toward a compliment, although it didn't start that way.

But it's like one of those ones where it's satisfying just to see the numbers and to have your intuition confirmed and maybe even to bolster the case. Like everyone knows that Jerry DiPoto has made tons of trades, and my co-host on the other baseball podcast literally just wrote a song about how many trades Jerry DePoto makes. So it's not a surprise that as you found, Jerry DePoto has actually led the major leagues in trades made since he became GM. But I think the margin by which he has done so, it was maybe somewhat surprising to me, or at least when you actually see it in a graph, it really drives it home. Do you have the numbers in front of you or in your memory? In my memory, yeah.

And I agree with you. It was definitely a post where it's like we kind of already know what the truth is here. But when you write two posts a day, you can't be providing new information all the time, especially when it's your first baseball post in nearly a month, which is a hell of a break. But yeah, I went into it. And we all know Jared voted trades a lot. There was actually a tweet I came across from some ESPN source, I don't know, I guess probably a week ago, that said that since DePoto took over as a Mariners GM, he had made 35 trades, which is the same number I found, and that the Braves were in second place with 26. Now, I only found 23, which was coming from baseball reference. I don't know

what trades might be missing. Maybe they were like international signing pool trades that didn't show up in the baseball reference logs. But in any case, there are probably a few trades that didn't show up on baseball reference, but they would be insignificant and greatly outnumbered by the trades of consequence. And Jerry DeBoda led the way with 35 such trades. I had the Braves at 23 in second place. I can actually pull up my spreadsheet here because for some reason they actually kept this one. And in third place, the Padres at 19 trades, and then you have the Yankees in fourth place at 16. So it's a huge lead by the Mariners. It's a lead of a dozen for the sake of reference to that lead of a dozen. If a team had made 12 trades, so that's Toronto, Pittsburgh, and Texas tied with 12 trades each

since October 1st of 2015. And those teams are tied for ninth place. So the difference between the Mariners and the second most active trading team would be in the top 10 most active trading teams. So you know, that's extraordinary. And they're not all blockbusters. Almost none of them actually have been blockbusters. Maybe only the Gene Segura taiwan walker trade would qualify as such but if there's anything that i think i really learned i wanted to establish the context just so you could have a fuller understanding of how busy depoto has been but it's also helpful because then you get to look at some of the other teams like the average team

has made about 10 trades in the uh 15 16 months since And I didn't really pick up on it, although I guess indirectly I did. But like the Reds and Rockies have done almost nothing. Like the Reds, who are a rebuilding team, have made just three trades in roughly a year and a half, which seems like a funny way to rebuild. And the Rockies have made three trades, despite, I think, constantly being in rumors about trying to trade or very much not trying to trade Carlos Gonzalez, or maybe they're going to finally move Charlie Blackman or any of their other outfielders. So I don't know what this means about like the Reds and the Rockies. I can sort of understand it with the Reds because they have nothing left to trade. They're not a very good team.

The Indians are near the very bottom with four. The Cardinals also near the very bottom with four. If you actually add up the seven least frequent trading teams, they have combined to make fewer trades than Jerry DePoto has in the past 16 months, which is absurd. So again, I don't know what we learned from this in terms of who actually likes to trade versus who has had trade. We talked about DePoto in the previous podcast, but clearly he has at least some sort of completionist tendency where maybe Jeff British, Brightich, Brightich. I'm not actually. I don't know. Brightich, Brightich. You know, he hasn't earned the pronunciation. He needs to be a little more active.

Jeff in Colorado maybe is a little more difficult to reach an agreement with. That's what the numbers bear out. A little more difficult to reach an agreement with. That's where the numbers bear out. Yeah. So if you knew nothing else and all you knew about a GM was that he made a ton of trades and he led the league in trades, would you assume that that meant that he was the the old gm who traded very compulsively was i think terrible at trades and he just always felt like he had to be making trades and that was counterproductive on the other hand you'd think that a gm wouldn't want to keep doing things that he was bad at that were making his team worse but every team is so smart that it

seems like if you're making all those trades it would be hard to win all that many of them because like every team has scouts and stats and evaluates players in an intelligent way and so like you could imagine that if you were picking your spots like maybe you could kind of find places where someone was undervalued or just blocked and you could profit from that. But if you're just making trades constantly, it seems like it would be hard to kind of have the same margin of victory in each one. Yeah, I would think this is going to be a bit of a weasel answer. I think you know, as a matter of fact, that the GM in question would be good at making trades, right?

Yes. It's not necessarily good at the trades themselves. With DePoto, it feels like maybe two-thirds of his trades have somehow involved Joe Wieland. So it's like the stakes are so low anyway. But I don't think it would tell you much about whether or not he's making good trades or bad trades. I think that just given the volume, you'd say you've achieved a sufficient sample to say that there are probably several good trades and bad trades in here at the same time, or trades that are like when he gave away Mark Trumbo because nobody wanted you trade Mark Trumbo and more for a racist backup catcher who doesn't play. I don't really know what you're supposed to do with that. And in the end, I don't know how much of that you hold against the photo. I think that if there's anything you can really learn from that, it's that this guy clearly is easy, easy to talk to. And he probably

is not one of those guys who talks about trade guys who talks about a trade with another GM for two or three months over the course of a winter. I think he probably has about two or three conversations before he just reaches a conclusion, which should make him pleasant to work with if you're another executive. Jack Zarensik infamous in the days before Jerry DePoto was that he was almost impossible to negotiate with he would make extraordinary demands and sometimes he would put these offers on the table that he would sort of like float and then if the other team came back with a really enthusiastic response then he would say oh no that wasn't really on the table I was that was just a hypothetical he I remember hearing that he made such a move with the Nationals once where he overbid for a player and the Nationals were like, yeah, great. And then Zarensik was like, just kidding. I'm not going to give you as much as I'd offered, which was frustrating. And some of the discussion about AJ Preller ever since his suspension and general bad behavior

was that teams would be less willing to deal with him, except given that he's one of just 29 other general managers in the sport, you can't really just cross him off the list. You have to put up with him. And teams had to put up with Jack Srencic and other bad general managers. But Jerry DiPoto clearly is a conversation and agreement facilitator, which I don't think of it as either a good thing or a bad thing, but it's been a unique thing, which is enough, I think, for both of us as writers. Yeah. David Lorella has a thing up at Fangraphs today where he talked to John Cappellella about Jerry DePoto sort of and about the trades they've made. So it's the second most active trader talking to the most active trader. And Cappellella says, it's worth noting that Jerry is extremely professional about returning calls

and texts, open to ideas, not afraid to make moves, particularly in terms of trading prospects. It's amazing how many conversations get shot down almost immediately, but Jerry will listen and engage. So I guess that sort of explains it. I think one of the qualities I prize most highly in people is just answering emails. If I send you an email and you answer it in a somewhat timely fashion, that's like all you have to do to earn my affection. Just because I spend a lot of time like waiting to hear from an editor or waiting to hear from a source for a story or someone who's sending me stats or something. So a lot of my job is just sort of waiting and hoping to hear back from people. And I try to always answer if I can, if I have an answer, or if I don't, I'll even answer to say I don't have an answer.

So that's something that I find is useful in all walks of life. So I guess that is also true in baseball. So we've talked for 20 minutes and we haven't really gotten to the topic yet, but I guess we should do that now. And the topic, I guess, is maybe the most forgettable kind of topic that we have on this podcast. I was emailing with you when you were away because this podcast just changed hosts and changed homes. And so a lot of people were sharing their favorite memories from the history of the show. And almost none of those memories involved something that we said about baseball or a baseball team or a baseball player. It was all like weird hypothetical tangents or musings about life or

surprising jokes or something like that. It was never like, Oh, they did a great job forecasting the season or they picked a breakout player or, you know, like they identified that this guy was overpaid or something. I don't know if anyone remembers any of that. So the things that we're about to talk about will probably just sink into the sea of transactions and no one will remember what we said a month from now. But we have to provide the backdrop of baseball to keep people coming

so that they can hear the weird hypothetical tangents that will actually stick in their minds. So we don't have hard news about Jose Bautista as we are speaking right now. He's been rumored to be about to sign somewhere for a couple of days now, but hasn't actually done so. It sounds like he'll be going back done so. It sounds like he'll be going back to Toronto. It sounds like it'll be a one or two year deal. None of those things is definite. And maybe by the time you're listening to this, you will know more than we do.

But I think we can discuss this in broad terms that will probably apply wherever he goes and whatever the exact terms are. And I think the thing that stands out to me most about Jose Bautista and really his whole free agency and his whole career is just how much sequencing matters in a player's career earnings, which is not something that I've thought about that much before. Like we talk about sequencing in terms of player seasons or team seasons even like if you string a bunch of hits together in the same inning you'll score more runs than if you parceled out the same hits over nine innings and players and teams can't seem to consistently control that from season to season but it can have a big impact on your ERA or where you are in the standings or what

your reputation is. If you're clutch or unclutch, it all comes down to timing to a certain extent. And so does your salary. And so do your lifetime earnings. Because I was just looking at a list of cherry-picked players whose career earnings, if you adjust for inflation, will be higher than Jose Bautista's after however much he makes in 2017. And that list includes players like Andre Ethier, Rafael Fercal, Victor Martinez, Mike Hampton,

Carl Crawford, Vernon Wells, A.J. Burnett, Carlos Lee. And those are all pretty good players. Like, you know, you don't make $100 million or more in current day dollars without at some point having done something to convince a team that you were worth that money. And some of them have produced less value over their whole careers than Batista has in his last seven years as a superstar. And probably none of them was really as prominent or as well-known as Batista is. And he's basically been half of a Hall of Famer over his seven seasons since he broke out in 2002. And, you know, he's led all players in home runs over that time. broke out in 2002 and you know he's led all players in home runs over that time he's been fourth in offensive value eighth among position players in overall value and it's not like any of his value is subtle or hard to see like he hits dingers he drives and runs everyone knows

these things are good he's made lots of all-star teams he's been in the top eight of al mvp voting four times and you know he's like a sort of an outspoken player too he's been in some very memorable moments so nothing about batista flies under the radar at all but he has probably not made as much money as one would think that a player of his caliber would have made or he'll probably retire with less than he easily could have if his career had just been sort of shaped in a different way. Like, obviously, he didn't become a superstar until he was 29 or whatever. But then, even if he had done that, he could have easily made more money than he's made to this point. He, after that first breakout season, he took the extension for whatever it was, five years and 65 million. Yeah. So, you know, which was fine. It's a lot of money, but by baseball

superstar standards, it's not so much. And he didn't really have that huge a track record at that point of being good. So it was an understandable deal to offer and to take. But then the very next season he goes out and has an even better year. And he was worth like eight wins. And he was third in MVP voting. And that was his age, what, 30 season, something like that. And that was the winter that Albert Pujols, who was even older and coming off his worst year ever and a much worse year than Batista got 10 years and 240 something million dollars. So if Batista had been a free agent then coming off an amazing age 30 season,

he probably would have gotten hundreds of millions, more than 100 million certainly. And instead he had like, you know, five years and 70 million after that. And then if he had been a free agent say a year ago if he had signed an extension that was one year shorter then he would have cashed in too because he would have been coming off a good year and instead he's coming off a lousy year relative to his

recent years although still pretty good and so he's going to end up getting one year or two years and not making all that much money and maybe he'll rebound and maybe he'll get a decent deal after that, but he'll be 37 or 38. And so he's not going to get that much. And so, you know, no one has to like have sympathy for Jose Bautista for making only $100 million or whatever it ends up being, but it does kind of drive home for me just how much it matters whether you come along in an era when your skills are appreciated and you hit the market in a year

when there are lots of big bidders who want you and you have a big walk year, which doesn't seem to be a skill that players can really control. But if you break down or you break out at just the right time, you can make so much more money than you would have otherwise, even though you've produced the same value overall as someone else. Yeah, it's obviously Batista's track record has been somewhat particular to him. He's one of the most famous examples of a late breakout ever. And if you look at his fan graphs page, you scroll all the way down, you can see that he's been worth something like $250 million over the course of

his career based on pre-agent dollars and valuation and whatnot. And if you glance over at baseball reference, he's made about $85 million for his career. Now, obviously, every player or most players will end up making less than their worth because of the arbitration and pre-arbitration years. But you know, Batista's weren't necessarily so great, which is one of the reasons he's such an unusual case in the first place. But he is, because of his late breakout, he's one of those players where you kind of get one shot, sort of at a payday, at least if you're going to sign one of those long term extensions. And he got his and, you know, to his credit, he did go from being nothing and sort of a waiver claim to 65 million dollars plus an option but he like you're talking about the sequencing is important to him but it's really okay so he signed

an extension of which was great for him gave him security but it was a little under market still left him with the opportunity to make one more big splash which of course he talked about in advance of this offseason he's not going to get it because maybe he set his sights or maybe his agent set his sights too high but the sequencing problem for batista is really just this one year in a sense where no matter what he had already been locked into that extension and he just needed to have one more four or five, even six win season this past year to get that, I don't know, $90 million, $100 million. I don't know what Batista was going to get. The market has been shifted somewhat against the older, but good, but older player. And this winter, Batista, of course, is not really contributing

that much anywhere else on the field anymore. But one of the other interesting things about him is that if you look at the sort of the stat cast readouts, there's no question that Batista was banged up last year. He clearly didn't put up numbers like he's used to. But Tango Tiger had a tweet just the other day that was... I actually prompted that tweet because I emailed him to ask because I was wondering if Batista was one of those guys who maybe got a little unlucky in some sense. And so he dug up the numbers and tweeted them for everyone instead of just for me, which I was hoping to have be a Ben Lindbergh exclusive. But that's okay. The whole internet can see it now. And now the internet knows that it was supposed to be a Ben Lindbergh exclusive.

Yes, I get partial credit anyway. to be a ben lindbergh exclusive so yes i get partial credit anyway the the long story short of that tweet is that based on some of the stack as information batista was indeed uh somewhat unlucky last year and he's all he's long run like lower than average batting averages on balls of play because everything is either a home run or a pop-up but he's uh his power was a little below where it should have been last year uh His general contact wasn't as much worse as the the overall numbers make it look. So based on the like, we refer to the line score numbers as like results based information. And in a sense, stat cast information is also results based data, except it's just based on like transitional results. I don't know, it just feels like a

funny term. But based on Batista's other more immediate, and seemingly more meaningful results, he really wasn't that much worse last year, aside from the injuries that he had been in the past. And yet he's still going to get so much less than he could have on the market, which is a little weird, because you'd figure the teams should know enough to know that, okay, how he hit the ball is more important than what those balls actually did. But the information is still so new and teams are unlikely to take those kinds of risks when Sackass is still only two years in. And at the end of the day, he is going into his later 30s. So Batista is being made to pay for the one season out of sequence in which he wasn't

even that much out of sequence necessarily which uh which is tough uh he's still gonna have a chance to make a lot of money probably in uh in two years maybe the the talk i've seen i have no one's information here but there's been talk about like one year and a mutual option which means one year essentially uh so he could go right back to the market and if he has like another 140 or 150 wrc plus and he's really good, then he can get a multi-year contract. We saw what Victor Martinez got when he was roughly this age. And there wouldn't be a qualifying offer because players can only have one qualifying offer now under the new CBA. So that would help a little bit.

Yeah, yeah. So it could and would be better for Batista. But still, it would give a certain sense of urgency that Batista might say that he doesn't deserve to have. But, you know, in a certain sense, it can be tough to feel bad for Jose Batista for the way that I think we understand him to work as a human being. And maybe him undershooting his market expectation by this much will be one of those potent motivators that it seems like he thrives upon. I don't know the inner workings of Jose Batista, but I do have a sense that they're a little different from most. And I am

delighted personally that he's staying in Toronto. They've been such didn't really want, they've been such a fun product that, and so much of it has come down to Batista and Encarnacion that I didn't really want them to be gutted on a personal level. I, when I think of Batista, I think of the Blue Jays and the other way around. So I'm thrilled he's going to be sticking around

for at least one more year. I would like some team to make the AL East interesting this year. And so the Blue Jays have a chance to do that. And so I'm excited to see what a more motivated, perhaps, than healthy Batista can do. But, you know, he's 36 years old and things go awry. So at least he's getting some sort of guarantee when he's 36, which is more than I might be able to say for myself in five years.

Yeah, he seems to think that every questionable ball or strike call is a conspiracy against him. So I can only imagine that he will look at this contract as collusion or something similarly nefarious. But yeah, I think it makes sense because for all the positive interpretations you can make about his 2016 and you just had a couple of them, which is that is that yes his stat cast stats say that he should have been a little better based on where and how hard he hit the ball and even though his strikeout rate rose his contact rate didn't decline i think they're pessimistic spins you could put on each of those things i think maybe you could argue that he seems to have underperformed what his batted balls say he should have done because he's so painfully slow, which maybe was always the case to a certain extent. But now that he's older and he had

lower body injuries last year, I actually asked Mike Petriello yesterday about Batista's home to first times because I was curious to see if they had declined from 2015 to 2016. And Mike would not tell me because they were so slow that he wasn't sure they were right. So he said that he had to check with the StatCast engineers to make sure there wasn't some sort of problem because Batista looked so slow. Which he said there wasn't that big a difference between 2015 and 2016, that he'd just been slow the whole time. But that could be part of it, because if you are slower than the typical player, then that means you'll beat out fewer singles and you won't stretch as many singles into doubles and triples. And so maybe that's one reason why you could look like you had underperformed to a certain extent. And as for the contact, I guess it's probably a positive that

when he actually swung, he didn't miss more often than he used to. But maybe it's a negative that he swung at fewer strikes. Maybe that's an indicator that he just wasn't as confident in his abilities, that he didn't believe he could drive those pitches as well as he had in the past. And, you know, his power was significantly down and maybe because of the injuries, maybe because of the age, he subconsciously felt that he had slipped to a certain extent. Like that's something that I think you see sometimes with older players. They try to compensate for declining bat speed or whatever it is with just patience and working the strike zone and then that serves them well for a time but then pitchers kind of catch on and they see that that's

what the guy is doing and they don't have to be so afraid of throwing him strikes and then that stops working so well so maybe Batista is kind of poised on that precipice but yeah I mean I agree that there's no reason to think that he won't be a good player and a good hitter this year. And if he goes back to Toronto, he should be a pretty significant upgrade if the alternative is Ezekiel Carrera or whatever. So, you know, if they were kind of on the periphery of the wildcard race without him, then with him, maybe they would be a little closer to the center of the wild card race, although maybe still not quite the favorite. As far as the swinging at fewer

strikes point goes, counter argument, can you imagine a version of Jose Batista who might have lost confidence in his own abilities? I personally cannot. I was looking at something just yesterday, it didn't materialize in terms of any post so I'm just going to put it here instead but I was thinking that with with Batista he kind of came first he's clearly been like a pull heavy power hitter guy he's been swinging at pitches over the inner half kind of laying off everything he can away low and away outer part of the plate and there's so many offensive parallels and approach, but he's being more selective. But between him and a guy like Brian Dozier, who is also just kind of I swing at one pitch, and then if it's not that pitch, I'm not going to swing at it.

And it seems like it's so exploitable, except for the fact that they've been doing it combined for like a decade now. And it's it's been fine. And these are the only players who do it. But there are two players. And I'm reminded of this old mariner, Jose Lopez, who it used to be something of a joke, but like every single home run that Jose Lopez hit was identical because it was about 370 feet down the left field line, and that was it. But it kind of worked for him for a while.

And then it stopped working because he was a terrible baseball player. But with Brian Dozer and Jose Batista, they're clearly good enough and disciplined enough to make it work, even though there's like no mystery at all to what they're trying to do up in the box, you throw them something over the inner half, they're going to try to pull it in the air. And if you don't throw that pitch, then they won't. And they just, they probably won't swing at all. And so it's a, it's one of those things where if you're an analyst, and you're writing about them, you can be like, look, I found the key to getting out Brian Dozer.

Well, that's great because you did in theory. But in reality, no, you didn't. Because every pitcher, every single pitcher in the world knows how to get Jose Batista and Brian Dozer out. And yet there's still two of the better hitters in baseball, which is kind of one of those important reminders. Like when you've looked at that kind of bad but still interesting command FX data where it's like every pitch misses or the average pitch misses by a foot it's like yeah you know what a foot is it's like the width of the strike zone yeah like there is it's it's also it's similar to trying to throw those high fastballs to mike trout it's like yeah you can every single almost every single non-miguel cabrera hitter has a weakness, but just knowing

that is really only inadequately useful because you really need to be able to execute. And it's fun to have a guy like Batista who's in this way sort of the opposite of Cabrera, where Cabrera can hit everything, Batista can hit one thing, but he sees enough of that one thing to thrive and be one of the best hitters in baseball for like the last seven or eight or six. I don't know what it is years. So it's it's fun to think about how pitchers are flawed like that. Yeah. And last thing on Batista, I don't know how recently you've studied the Blue Jays depth chart, but is there any potential for him not to play right field or to play right field less? for him not to play right field or to play right field less, do you think? Because that seems to be the biggest liability for him now is running and fielding. And obviously they have Kendris

Morales sort of locked into the DH slot and Michael Saunders went to the Phillies. So they do need an outfielder of some sort. Justin Smoke is the first baseman, doesn't really hit like a first baseman, but I don't know. Do you think there's any way that they can kind of minimize the things that Batista is bad at, or do they just have to live with it and hope he hits enough that it doesn't matter so much? Yeah. I mean, with the Morales signing, I don't really know what they're supposed to do because Morales isn't really much of a first baseman. Now, if they want, they can try to play Morales at first and bench Smoke because he's not good and then you can put Batista at DH or at least more often

put him at DH but it does seem like they're sort of locked in and you know helping to counter that is that Kevin Pillar is amazing and then uh Melvin Upton is probably going to play fairly often in the other corner and he's fine Dalton Pompey is also around. He's fine. Ezekiel Carrera, he can field. Most of them can field. It's just the one who, you know, can't. And the hope is that maybe Batista will have a healthier year because he was banged up. But this is sort of one of those things you say about a lot of players going into their late 30s where you say, well, if they're healthy, they're still really good. But as you get into your late 30s, you are not. Maybe you at least redefine what healthy means, which is maybe where Batista is going. So I think maybe the best case circumstance

here is he hits so well that he establishes early Blue Jay leads, and then they can pull him in the eighth and ninth innings when they need better defense. Okay, we can go more quickly with these other moves. So the Royals signed Danny Duffy to the Jose Bautista extension, basically five years, 65. And I think of Danny Duffy as one of your guys, kind of. You've written about him before you seem to be interested in him and you wrote about him again. So what do people need to know about Danny Duffy and his new deal? Yeah, I love Danny Duffy. I didn't quite realize that he had sort of the rough September that he did last year. It was a it was a bad September by almost any metric. But

he did end up throwing something like 160 170 innings as a starting pitcher last year, even though he didn't begin the year as a starter. And if you're a guy who didn't begin last year as a starter with the Royals, that didn't reflect well on you, because the Royals rotation was and and continues to be fairly bad. But Duffy has now had six consecutive partial years of being a starter in the major leagues. And last year was the first one where he was good. His strikeout minus walk rate, which is, I wish that we had a better name for that measure because I love it as a standalone. But it always used to be in the single digits.

And then last year, it went up to 19%. He had a career best strikeout rate as a starter, a career low walk rate. He throws super hard. He has two other good secondary pitches. And Duffy had a really good stretch of like two or three months of being a pretty dominant strike throwing hard to hit starting pitcher. And one of one of the things I love about him is one of, I think, the hallmarks of a potential ace is a guy who has ace-like performances. Like you can think of when Vince Velasquez had that start we all wrote about against the Padres on April 14th, where he struck out all of, I think it was all of the Padres that he faced. And Velasquez got worse from there, and he's still got his his questions but I think that one

start kind of demonstrated okay this guy could be like a really electric dominant starting pitcher uh only three starting pitchers last year in baseball had more starts with no walks and at least eight strikeouts than Danny Duffy he had four of those starts that's a weird stat which I understand but it still shows that he had some really dominant games but he also had this one game against Tampa Bay and he went eight innings. He allowed one hit. He had one walk. He had 16 strikeouts.

And in that start, Danny Duffy got 35 swinging strikes. And looking at baseball savant here, that is tied for the greatest swinging strike game since 2008. It is a tie with Clayton Kershaw, who had 35 and a start last September, two Septembers ago, I guess. And so the top of the list reads Duffy, Kershaw, Scherzer, Strasburg, then there's a bunch more Kershaws and Scherzers. There's nothing too surprising in there. But for Danny Duffy to have a start like that, where he nearly threw a no hitter, and I know that the Rays had sort of charitably a tries hard lineup last year that was to a certain extent quite strikeout prone. So of course, there was some opponent effect. But Duffy looked like a very, very good starting pitcher last year, so often that I do not find it too hard to imagine him being a very, very good

starting pitcher more consistently. And so for the Royals to be able to extend him at the cost of essentially four free agent years and about 55 or 60 million dollars, that's not cheap. But compared to like what they gave to Ian Kennedy just one year ago, it seems like this is a deal that has a lot of potential for the Royals to emerge feeling great. He's had Tommy John surgery before, which means he could have it again in a few years. Clearly, there's some injury risk here, but I thought Duffy was mostly a goner and the Royals didn't only keep him, but they kept him for, I think, a considerable amount less than they would have had to pay for him a year from now. So I love this move for the Royals. I kind of like the offseason they've had so far, even though they've, you could say they just wound up

with Danny Duffy, Nate Carnes, and Jorge Soler. But given the difficult state in which the Royals have found themselves, I like what they've done. They've found and kept some long-term pieces. Yeah, that was a good point that you made, that everyone's been talking about how the Royals' window is closing. And so they traded some guys who were part of that closing window for some guys who sort of propped it open. Maybe they're not as good, but they're under team control for a while. So instead of one year of Wade Davis, they have four years of Jorge Soler. And instead of one year of Dyson, they have four years of Carnes. And now they have Duffy for a while too, which it looks like it might still be hard for

them to, you know, be the best team in the division Once people leave I mean they're not that now obviously But if they have those guys around Performing capably for Not that much money That makes it easier to At least sustain decency

And not fall back into the pit They climbed out of a few years ago So that's a wise strategy. I guess that's a good hedge if you can't afford to spend or aren't willing to spend enough to keep all of your guys. This is kind of a good way to compensate for their inevitable departures. At the winter meetings are right around there. I don't know if I'm free to discuss this information by name, so I'm just going to leave out the names. But I was having an indirect conversation talking about, there's a system out there that it rates every single organization in baseball by essentially like

its total value that it possesses in players. I think I know what you mean. Yeah, you probably know where I'm going with this. But it looks at not only all the players that the team has, but also what their contracts are, how long they're under control, etc, etc. And I was curious. So I asked, like, which team has the lowest value rating of every team at baseball? And I was thinking, like, okay, I'm sorry to bring this up. But I was thinking, well, maybe it's the Marlins, they have this like Stanton Albatross. And of course, they just lost one of the most valuable resources in baseball to death. And so I thought, well, you know, it could be the Padres, there's any number of teams

who are just in these awful situations. And the answer actually came back to be the Royals, which took me a little by surprise. And you could say maybe this is just another case of analysts undervaluing what the Royals have, but it essentially captured that they had a lot of not good farm players and a lot of their good major league players were in their contract years. And anybody with one year left on the contract is not going to be that valuable of a player. So I was somewhat surprised when I heard that. And it prompted a post that I wound up writing about how the Royals were essentially entering their last year of being anything. And since then, the Royals were essentially entering their last year of being anything. And, uh, and since then I'm, I'm still not convinced that they've done that much to make themselves good in 2018 or 2019,

but they have now locked up or acquired three pieces that should be able to help, uh, to a certain extent down the road. So an underratedly difficult situation for Dayton Moore to figure out. And, uh, I think so far he's, he's done a pretty good job. The farm system still is not good, but you can only do so much in a few months. Yeah. You had previously written a post, I think possibly citing the same source about the Rangers being in a similarly precarious position, which is maybe even more surprising since a lot of people think of them as a playoff team, maybe even a favorite. And yet, if you look at all the assets they have under control, the farm system is thinned out, and some of the young players on the roster are kind of question marks,

and they don't really have a lot of, you know, no-doubt superstars locked up long-term for affordable rates. And so they kind of fall into that camp too. But they just re-signed josh hamilton while we were speaking so they're set now okay well i don't know exactly what his position is i'd heard those those rumors that the rangers were likely to try to bring him back but i don't this this seems like it's one of those like good gestures that might not be all that well thought through, you know, or it's like, we want to do right by Josh Hamilton, but do they really want

to end up being a team that in spring training is like, we're going to give you a roster spot again. Right. Yeah. It's a, it's a minor league deal, but it's one of those ones where you could easily imagine it becoming uncomfortable actually to have him be in the minors. And so, yeah, there's some danger there. Well, before we finish, is there anything you want to say about either Michael Saunders signing with the Phillies or Will Myers possibly getting a six year extension with the Padres that is reported to be in the range of $83 million? No, and good, I guess. I certainly can't imagine even beginning the post-writing process or thought generating process about Michael Saunders in Philadelphia. As much as I quite like Michael Saunders as a player and as a person based on limited interactions talking about NHL 94. But with Will Myers, the Padres are in sort of that sad sack position, but also they're, as a listener recently emailed in,

he was asking about what the Chargers relocation means for the Padres in San Diego. And it's probably actually a complicated answer because in the one sense, they are the only show in town accepting the AHL San Diego goals. But at the same time, because they're the only show in town accepting the ahl san diego goals and uh but at the same time because they're the only show in town the incentives might actually be reduced on them to try really hard to make themselves great uh not that i think it's really that easy for the pot

race to make themselves great but it is just generally encouraging to see them make some sort of commitment to a player to build around. Myers is like feverishly, I think, beloved by the baseball fans in San Diego who just needed something to cling on to. He had a much worse second half and first half. He is not, I don't think he's like a blossoming Hall of Famer or anything, but he's at least something for Padres fans to cling to, which every single team needs. I know that we get pretty wrapped up in our delight talking about good players on bad teams and how they should be moved. But I know how upset I was as a Mariners fan thinking about trading Felix Hernandez when the team was bad and he was good. I think that every team needs

someone like this and Myers is kind of like literally the only option. I think I know they kept Jan Hervis Solarte, who's maybe a curious Robin to Will Myers Batman, but I'm just I'm glad to see some sort of commitment just as I was glad to see them have Adrian Gonzalez for as long as they did. San Diego has a certain soft spot in my heart because it's where I used to live. And though Myers is not the most desirable building block in the game, I'm glad that they have one. All right. Okay. So I think we've covered all the important stuff. It seems like if there's a theme to these moves, it's that they're all reasonable. And if anything, the teams probably have the edge in these deals if we're pronouncing winners or losers.

You like the Duffy extension. I think Dan Zaborski tweeted that Zips had him valued at something like $30 million more than the Royals got him for. So that seems like a clear victory for them. And we talked about Batista possibly being undervalued or at least being worth what he's getting so anyway no weird ones to talk about here but some interesting stuff theme of the baseball era nothing too weird everyone reasonable yeah and uh we'll be back most likely tomorrow with an email show so keep your questions questions coming. All right. See ya. Okay.

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