Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 107: Edwin Jackson, the Cubs, and Qualifying Offers

Episode Date: December 21, 2012

Ben and Sam discuss Edwin Jackson and the rest of the Cubs’ offseason signings and talk about how the specter of draft-pick compensation is affecting some free agents.

my encounter which predicts the end of time to occur on the 21st of December of this year this year this year good morning and welcome to episode 107 of effectively wild the baseball prospectus daily Baseball Prospectus Daily Podcast. And she keeps me satisfied! Thank you. In New York, New York, where it is December 21st in my time zone and the world is not over and we have recorded a podcast, or we are recording one, I'm Ben Lindbergh and in Long Beach, California, where we hope his wireless signal strength will cooperate, Sam Miller. Hello, Sam.

Yeah, I mean, I understand that there were problems yesterday, but I don't know that we can blame it on me. I think we can. I'm comfortable doing that. I think it's just as likely that it was your fault as mine. I would argue with that. I mean, it's just as likely that it was your fault as mine. I would argue with that. I mean, I wouldn't. I wouldn't blame it on you directly. It's more of an institutional problem.

But I'm very near my wireless signal. I'm no longer in the car. I mean, I'm in the cold. I can be close. So you were not in the car last night? I was not in the car last night. I was just probably 12 feet from my wireless radio. Well, we'll see how it goes today.

And if you start cutting out, I will stop this. So this is James Hetfield, Downboard yeah you stopped in probably yes all right this is our last show before christmas um we have brought sort of two topics i don't know if they're two full topics but they're close to full talk to full topics uh you want to talk about what? Well, why don't you just say what you want to talk about, and then we'll decide whether we have to. What do you want to talk about? I wanted to talk about kind of the impact of qualifying offers

at this point in the offseason. Okay. And I think we should probably talk about what you want to talk about also. Okay. Well, I mean, I was suggesting that we might talk about the Cubs rotation and the signings that they made this week of Edwin Jackson and Carlos Villanueva. Makes sense to me. But maybe those will just flow off of each other. I think they will.

So why don't you tell me what's interesting about qualifying offers and their impact this year? So I was just looking at the top free agents remaining. And the top free agents remaining are Michael Bourne, whom we ranked third, or RJ Anderson ranked third at the beginning of the offseason. Nick Swisher, who was fifth. Kyle Loesch, who is ninth, Adam LaRoche, who is 13th, and Rafael Soriano, who is 20th. And all five of those guys have something in common. They received qualifying offers from their teams. And I wonder whether you think that it's a coincidence

that they are the five top free agents remaining. We saw nine people get qualifying offers. David Ortiz and Hiroki Kuroda re-signed with their teams. And Josh Hamilton and BJ Upton got qualifying offers and then signed with new teams. But so far, they are the only two who have. And I wonder whether the five remaining guys who all have qualifying offers and therefore cost a draft pick, I wonder how much of a disincentive that has been to teams. It seems like the fact that those are the five guys remaining has something to do with

that, unless it's just a coincidence. Yeah, I don't think it is a coincidence. I think what's interesting is the Red Sox have a protected pick, so if they sign a free agent, it would only be their second round pick. And so when I was doing the transaction analysis for Mike Napoli, I talked briefly about qualifying offers and whether the Rangers had erred in not giving Napoli a qualifying offer, since he had essentially signed for... The qualifying offer, to recap, would have been one year and $13.3 million, and Napoli signed for three years and $39.

So you would think that if he's worth three years and 39, he would be worth one year and 13.3 and that he probably would have rejected that offer if he had had a good sense of his market. But. Sorry? But. But what? Was there a but coming? I was going to add a but. Yeah.

Okay. There is a but coming. so i uh so i i noted that um it didn't seem to be a factor uh or it probably wouldn't have been a factor for napoli because the red sox signed him and and they would have had a protected pick anyway and it probably wouldn't have mattered and i actually got a note from one of the uh red sox beat writers and i'm sorry i don't remember which one it was um telling me that that actually he thought that it was a factor and that the Red Sox might not have signed him even at the expense of a second round pick. That even that would have been enough to discourage them from signing Napoli and maybe going in

another direction for their DH. And I think specifically it was that basically coming down to the decision of whether to sign Napoli or La Roche, probably it was the second round pick. And so if the Red Sox would make that decision with the second round pick on the line, then imagine teams that have a mid or even late first round pick. teams that have a mid or even late first round pick. Yeah. Well, I mean, I don't know that it's a problem.

It seems like this is, I guess, the way the system was designed. I know Buster only wrote something the other day about this, and he said the new rules were designed to ensure that only elite free agents who received $13.3 million qualifying offers from their former teams were attached to draft pick compensation. The hope was that the compensation wouldn't hinder the players at all this winter, but that's not how it's playing out in the eyes of some general managers and agents. And someone said about Rafael Soriano, he's a good pitcher, said one GM, but I don't think teams are wild about giving up a draft pick for a reliever.

And so Buster said, especially in light of other rule changes, the draft and international signing spending caps would prevent teams that sign top free agents from making up for lost picks by splurging on picks in later rounds because teams have constrained opportunity to improve their organizations through the draft, they are more reluctant to surrender picks. So that makes sense. And so I guess it didn't affect Josh Hamilton very much,

or I guess maybe he would have gotten a bigger deal otherwise. Who knows? I'm kind of surprised that it didn't seem to affect Upton very much. But I guess it is affecting the remaining guys. And I mean, it was kind of a problem under the old system when a reliever would be a type A free agent and no one would want to sign him, like Juan Cruz is the example that everyone uses. But I don't know. I mean, is this a problem?

Is this not working the way it's designed? Or is it a good thing that, I mean, for competitive balance, that teams are thinking twice about signing these guys? I mean, what do you think a draft pick is worth? What do you think the surplus value of a draft pick is? I mean, like, imagine, let's say that the Angels really did. I doubt they did, but let's say that they really did say, okay, we're going to lose a draft pick, so we're going to lower our offer to Hamilton by a corresponding amount. What would that corresponding amount be? I mean, what do you think the 20-second pick has?

I mean, especially, I guess it's hard to say because anybody who's looked at this question in the past would have looked at it from the old CBA framework. And now with the new CBA, the value of a draft pick is different. But, I mean, let's say it was the 22nd pick in the first round and you give it up. I mean, what is that? Maybe two to four million in surplus value?

Yeah, I'm looking at some old research. Victor Wong at Hardball Times did a valuing the draft article. This is from 2009, and he said that the surplus value of a pick from 16 to 30 he said was six and a half million but then that it falls to like two million or so from picks 31 to 45 um so i guess it's sort of significant i don't know that those numbers are still completely accurate. Maybe they're worth more now. I don't know. But that's pretty significant. That certainly makes you think twice about signing someone like Soriano. And we talked about Soriano and his opt-out, I think, even before the end of the season. And I remember, I think probably both of us thought it made sense for him to opt out.

Now it's not so clear that it did. Not at all. Well, there are three players who have, I guess, if you include Angel and Gon, but we probably shouldn't for the purposes of this. So there are three players who didn't receive qualifying offers who you might have been surprised if you had known what they were going to end up signing for. And those three are Torrey Hunter, who signed for two years and 26. So essentially a qualifying offer, but times two years.

And then Napoli, who essentially got $13 million for three years. And Jackson, who got $13 million for three years, and Jackson, who got $13 million for four years. And the mystery is whether their teams made a mistake. I thought that teams were too cautious in offering qualifying offers. All three of those plus Pagan seemed unlikely to me to accept it, given that it's only a one-year deal. But it's really hard to know. I mean, without knowing how much this pick is really affecting teams' interest in a dollar value, and I guess the players wouldn't really know that.

They would be guessing, and the agents would be guessing at this point. Yeah, they would have been at the beginning of the offseason. They would have been, yeah. So it's hard to know. I mean, there's a sort of a math that's going to take a few years to develop. I mean, only refer to it as an unintended consequence and I think that that's accurate. I don't know for sure that it's a permanent consequence because the more teams start... I mean, right now, like you mentioned that Upton was an anomaly, but really, I mean,

we shouldn't expect all 30 teams to have the same opinion about this, right? So maybe the Braves just don't feel this way. And maybe the Red Sox are on the extreme end the other way. And, you know, every team is going to have a slightly different math that they do. And after a few years, the math is going to sort of congeal into a conventional wisdom and at that point it'll be interesting to see uh how teams handle it yeah and it'll be interesting to see what soriano ultimately signs for um because people have kind of looked team to team for a fit for him and there just doesn't seem to be one at least for someone who would give him the kind of money that he was making before that he and Scott Boris seemed confident in making at the

start of the winter um but I guess it's still fairly early in the offseason by Scott Boris standards yeah I mean at this time last year everyone was thinking Prince Fielder was not going to get the deal that Scott Boris wanted him to get. And he did at the end of January. He found a taker and an owner who would give him tons of money. So people are kind of expecting that to maybe happen again. Everybody thought that, like, for instance, Edwin Jackson wasn't going to get the deal. Yeah. So, all right. So I guess we can just talk about Edwin Jackson wasn't going to get the deal. Yeah. So, all right.

So I guess we can just talk about Edwin Jackson now. I actually don't want to. I keep missing these obvious segues. But real quick, though, Soriano and LaRoche seem to be the two players who are most on the bubble who they could end up regretting not accepting their qualifying offer. I don't know what kind of deal either is going to get, and certainly with Soriano, you don't doubt Boris. But do you think that they're likely to get deals big enough that they won't regret turning down $13.3 million in one year?

I wouldn't give LaRoche a deal big enough i wouldn't give either of them a big deal a deal big enough but i think probably yeah they will i don't think they'll be i don't think they'll regret it too much i don't know um it's possible yeah i bet la roche i kind of think la roche will end up signing with washington yeah i mean he. I mean, I think he's had a two-year offer for a while from them that he's just kind of sitting on. Yeah. So I think that he'll end up being fine, and Washington obviously doesn't have to worry about giving up a pick.

I could see Soriano. I don't know. It's hard to find a great fit for him anyway. I guess he's regretting it. But, you know, he took his chance. I don anyway. I guess he's regretting it. But he took his chance. I don't know that I would feel bad about it. It just might not work out.

All right, so Edwin Jackson has capped off the Cubs' offseason rebuilding of their rotation. They signed four pitchers, and all four pitchers are sort of interesting. None of them is exactly an ace. And yet, you know, as a whole, taken as a whole, Scott Baker, Carlos Villanueva, Scott Feldman, and Jackson, combined with Matt Garza and Jeff Marja to give the Cubs all of a sudden a deep and potentially kind of good rotation.

Like, I sort of like that rotation, although it could go terribly wrong. So I'm just actually, what interests me about this is that it's, we've sort of talked about how it's supposed to be hard to get players now because nobody hits free agency and there's so much money in the game, and yet the Cubs, who are a terrible team, I think they had the 29th best record last year in baseball. And before this run, didn't even seem to be aiming for competition for a year. They were able to rebuild a rotation with competent guys and for cheap.

I mean, I don't think they spent more than like $10,000 and I actually see them as until it goes more than $10,000. You're fading a little bit again. You're fading. One of us is. All right. So if I keep fading and just pause it or something, okay. Okay.

So, um, so I just wondered, do you think, um, the Royals of course also went to work on their rotation and they, they went about it in a very different way. Um,

they kind of, they, they took on, yeah, Edwin, Irvin Santana's contract. They re-signed Guthrie. And they added fields.

So you could say that they invested a lot in guys who maybe, I don't know, there are different kinds of pitchers, but they also rebuilt. The Blue Jays, of course, also rebuilt their rotation at the expense of a full farm system's worth of talent and the cubs did it on the cheap and i'm not saying that the cubs rotation is anywhere near as good as the blue jays for instance but like do you think that there's reason to think that the royals couldn't have signed these same four players for roughly the same price and done it that way. Yeah, I mean, that was one of the big criticisms of that trade, I think, was not just so much that,

I mean, that the talent they got back was imbalanced compared to Myers, but that they could have done it in a similar way without giving up Myers. I mean, there was, I think Jeff Passan wrote that David Glass wouldn't pay for Anibal Sanchez, and maybe that's the case. But, yeah, I mean, you'd think they could have kind of stocked these rotation spots with free agents who wouldn't have cost any draft picks without giving up Myers. I mean, I guess Edwin Jackson was too rich for them, probably. In fact, after they traded for Santana and re-signed Guthrie. they traded for Santana and resigned Guthrie. But those three that they have are going to make about as much as,

I think more than the four that the Cubs have. I mean, I'm not, I don't know. I'm not necessarily knocking the Royals. I'm not saying that their rotation is necessarily worse. I haven't really looked at it. I'm not saying that the way they did it is necessarily worse. But, I mean, I don't know. On the surface, the Cubs way looks like pretty good bargain shopping, and I think we've kind of gotten used to this idea

that bad teams can't sign free agents. Yeah. The Cubs count as a bad team because they are still the Cubs. Yes, definitely. They're going to have the money to spend. The Cubs count as a bad team because they are still the Cubs. Yes, definitely. They're going to have the money to spend. So maybe it is different. Maybe they've gotten decent work.

I mean, Zach Levine wrote an article for BP on Thursday about how the Astros are not really spending any money this offseason except they did sign Jose Veras and Carlos Pena. And so he was wondering kind of how to evaluate those two signings because it's not like those two signings make the Astros competitive or anywhere near competitive, and they could have fielded league minimum players at those positions and maybe one or two fewer games or something and really what's one or two wins to the Astros.

And I guess the Cubs could have done something similar in that I'm sure they're not expecting to win in 2013 or to compete in 2013 any more than the Astros are. So why are they going out and signing Edwin Jackson and Scott Feldman and Carlos Villanueva and Fujikawa and all the free agents that they've signed when they could have saved their money? And I guess the difference maybe is that they're the Cubs, so they're a bigger budget team and they can afford to do things like that. Or maybe they're just kind of signing Edwin Jackson with the idea of trading him before long. I think there's no trade in the deal. Who would trade Edwin Jackson?

Right. There's no precedent for trading Edwin Jackson, but come on, you can't put the Cubs in the, especially after this off season, you can't put the Cubs and the Astros on the same. I mean, the Cubs are at least as good a team right now as the Orioles and A's look to be last year.

I mean, at least as good a team, maybe as good as the nationals look to be last year. And they're a swisher away from being a 500 team that things could break right and put them better. So, come on, the Cubs are way better

than the Astros. They certainly are now. Would they be way better if they had signed no one? Yeah. I mean, they'd be better probably, but not. I would think they would be significantly better. They might have been the – I mean, they're on the cusp of not being –

they're on the cusp of the hopeless line. And I might have put them at like the 26th or 27th best team in baseball before. But they did this – I mean, they did this all pretty cheap and pretty quick and i mean right now i think they're i would probably i don't know maybe 18th or 19th best in baseball well it's interesting to see them sign so many free agent starters because that's something that andrew friedman has not done once in the entire time he's been in Tampa Bay, unless Roberto Hernandez slash Vasto Carmona ends up starting, then he would be the first. But some teams kind of have a policy against doing this,

or at least the Rays do, because they feel that it's not likely to work out. But, of course, they are on a much more shoestring budget than the Cubs are, and I guess that gives them the freedom to sign someone like Jackson. And as RJ pointed out in the transaction analysis today, it kind of gives them a guy who can be expected to pitch some innings and gives them some freedom to experiment with younger starters, I guess, and see how they work out.

And I don't know. I mean, I don't dislike the deal. I wonder when we, I think we talked about whether Edwin Jackson would get this deal either right before the end of the season or right after, because this is the deal that he was looking for last offseason. I have a vague sense that he was looking for something with these exact terms or very close to it, and he didn't get it that season. And then he went on to have a very Edwin Jackson-like season for the Nationals. He went on to have a very Edwin Jackson-like season for the Nationals.

He didn't really raise his stock in any way, I wouldn't say, from last offseason. So I wonder why he could only land a one-year deal for less per year last winter, and now he can get a four-year deal. Yeah, I guess the first thing you would think is that boris botched it last year although i mean you know you might not put it all on boris it might just be that the way that the timing worked out you sort of gamble a little bit once you get deeper into this in the offseason and maybe it just got too deep so you would sort of think that though that you would blame it on you know they failed to execute last offseason. But maybe the point is the opposite.

Maybe it got to the point where teams were offering him two years and maybe even three years, and maybe it was actually incredibly savvy for Boris to say, no, we'll just take our one year. We think the money will be there next December. And sure enough, it was. Obviously, there was some risk involved in that, but Edwin Jackson has been so steady that there's not a ton of risk as far as pitchers go. He's probably a lot less risky, or he was risking a lot less than a lot of pitchers. Yeah, it was the proverbial pillow contract.

In favorite terms. Yeah. Go ahead. I was just going to say, I think my favorite part of this podcast was when I referred to the Cubs as the 18th or 19th best team in baseball. As though I have nothing to do with this. And I just can't decide whether they're 18th or 19th. But the work I've done has been really specific right it's just i can't quite say 18th or 19th as though i have

yeah i've thought at all about this effectively wild power rankings we'll have the full the full list out soon um so rj made the point sorry Sorry, you're cutting in and out again. Okay, go ahead. We're going to be angry. So RJ said that Jackson has not spent more than 363 consecutive days. He actually counted the days with a team since the 2008 trade when he went from Tampa Bay to Detroit. And since then he went to Arizona and then the other Chicago team and then St. Louis and Washington and now back to Chicago. How many years of this four year deal do you think he will spend with the Cubs? I'll say four. Really? I think that,, I don't... If you can settle down.

I think that if you... I actually thought this about the Sanchez deal when it looked like it was going to happen, but I'm just going to transfer my opinion over to Edwin Jackson. If you look at next offseason's pitchers, there's a lot of old guys and a lot of guys who might not be that attractive a year from now. I think that it actually might be the safe thing to do now is to sign Jackson or Sanchez who are both relatively young, both relatively reliable. It might actually be more conservative to sign them for the years 2014 to 2016 than to try to sign somebody on next year's free agent market for the years 2014 to 2016.

So I think that Jackson fits into the Cubs' long-term plans. I think that they will be competitive before this deal is over and I don't think they'll be anxious to move him when they're competitive. So I'm going to say that Edwin Jackson either finishes the contract with the Cubs or is traded by a non-competitive Cubs team in summer of 2016. All right. So Edwin Jackson can start looking at houses or apartments in the Chicago area. Yeah. I mean, he's got so much money money he should probably be investing in real estate anyway. Yeah. Okay. I guess we're done for

several days now. So the plan for Baseball Prospectus is to be back the day after Christmas. Presumably we will try to be back then too. Maybe we'll do a Wednesday morning show. We'll see how that goes.

And if we do do three shows next week, you know what that means. We will end the week on a multiple of five. And then we will instantly ruin it the next week when we're off for New Year's. So if you are someone who celebrates Christmas, enjoy celebrating Christmas. And I guess by the time we get back, it will be time for another email show if we do one Wednesday. So send us emails at podcast at baseballperspectives.com. And we will answer them when we return. So have a nice break from us and we will have a nice break from you.