Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 112: The Kyle Lohse Quandary

Episode Date: January 4, 2013

Ben and Sam reflect on one of the slowest days of the offseason and then discuss the lack of movement in the market for Kyle Lohse.

You keep pretending that everything's fine So you make small talk to help pass the time But all the words that you spit from your face Add up to nothing, you got nothing to say Good morning and welcome to episode 111 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast at BaseballProspectus.com. I'm Sam Miller in Long Beach, California. Ben Lindberg is in New York, New York. Ben, how are you doing? I'm okay, but I think this felt to me like the most boring day of the offseason, possibly. like the most boring day of the offseason possibly um it seems like we're at about that point where nothing is happening uh yeah i i found today to be not too boring but nothing that um happened meant anything you know it was like uh like like so sergio romo had some sort of confrontation in the airport. And Sergio Romo might be my favorite player in as much as I have a favorite player, which I don't.

And so I was interested in that. And I was interested to read when Scott Miller... Yeah, I was just going to ask you if you'd seen that too. Yeah, so Scott Miller of CBS kind of had a backhanded, well, not backhanded, he kind of insulted Romo. He sort of said something like, you know, he,

I don't, let me see if I can find it. But basically, he says- He said he'd been belligerent and he kind of blew him off when he tried to interview him during the postseason or gave some sort of rude answer. Exactly. And Scott Miller is not the kind of reporter who normally goes out of his way to needle

players or to needle anybody. And so this sort of has kind of emerged on his Twitter feed over the last couple of hours where he's been kind of explaining it in bits and pieces to people in replies. And so finally it seems to have been revealed that Romo sort of was kind of freaking out in the clubhouse during the postseason. And so Miller wrote about this belligerence and rudeness. And somebody named Marcos Breton said, yeah, he got weird at the end. It was bizarre. And then Brian Murphy of KNBR says, this is all disheartening to hear. He did a weekly show with us and couldn't have been better. And Marcos said, you could start to see it after game two. He had become a story and was engulfed in his locker by press,

freaked him out. And then Scott says, that's probably the best explanation. He suddenly became center of attention and freaked. And that's fascinating to me so that doesn't have any importance in the baseball season right um but you know that was interesting and um the thing that John Pirato wrote it's kind of fascinating because if he was freaking out in the clubhouse you'd expect that maybe that would have carried over to the field when the spotlight was on him, but it didn't seem to at all. So that's kind of interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's hard to say for sure whether it did. I mean, he certainly, there were, I don't know when, I guess if this freakout happened in the World Series, it probably didn't affect him. And I actually wouldn't expect it to affect him but um like he he had some of the worst games i've ever seen him throw in the in the nlds

and nlcs uh where he just really couldn't couldn't break off a slider at all um anyway and so then the rafael palmeiro thing was interesting where John Parado, I think, talked to somebody who is convinced that Palmeiro was actually clean and had been tricked into doing steroids but can't admit it because I guess maybe he would be like incriminating himself in a perjury charge or something like that. So that's interesting. It doesn't mean anything at all, but it was interesting to me. Yeah. So, but anyway, as far as things that matter, nothing happened. And that's why today we're going to talk about Kyle Loesch, to whom nothing has happened. Yes. The story about Kyle Loesch is that nothing has happened. So he's appropriate. Did you know that Scott Boris's nickname is Mr. January? Until I read that it was in Jeff Passon's article at Yahoo a couple days ago, no.

I had never heard that. I was aware of his reputation for getting big deals late in the offseason, but I had never heard him called that. Me neither. So then I Googled to try to find it, and trust me, that is not a Google you want to spend a lot of time with. Well, now you make me want to. Well, there's not a lot of Scott Boris references, I guess, when you search for Mr. January. Okay. So anyway, Kyle Loesch is unsigned. We actually talked a little bit, I guess a little

bit about this when we talked about qualifying offers and whether they're holding back the sort of the four highest remaining profile free agents of whom Loesch is one. And he was on a radio show today with a gentleman named Tim McKernan and talked fairly candidly and at length about sort of what his market has been. And his market has been, I mean, I think all of us kind of sense it's been sort of strangely quiet because when's the last time you heard of Kyle Lowe's rumor? You haven't heard him linked to teams the way that you heard uh all these other guys linked to teams and he says that he hasn't spoken to the cardinals in like which is probably true of the other qualifying offer guys who are left or i mean you haven't really heard

much about rafael soriano and i guess you've heard things about michael bourne but mostly the fact that he doesn't seem to fit anywhere um so sort of true for those guys too. Bourne is the exception, I think. I've seen Bourne linked, not necessarily like super closely, but linked to a number of teams. And Laroche, I think, like there was a Red Sox rumor recently and all that. But yeah, so Laroche says he hasn't spoken to the Cardinals in months, and so he doesn't expect really to be signing there. He says he's had to scale back his expectations. John Heyman wrote in September that the aim for Loesch could be to beat C.J. Wilson's $75 million deal. Jim Bowden predicted three years and $39 million. And now it's sort of starting to sound like even Loesch is kind of realistic about what he's going to get.

And so, yeah, I don't know. What do we want to say about Kyle Loesch? I guess at the beginning of the offseason or even towards the end of the season, I think there was kind of this Kyle Loesch backlash. And I think maybe we even may have talked about Kyle Loesch's impending free agency at some point. And there was just this overwhelming sense that he was going to make much more money than he should make or that the team that paid him was going to regret whatever it signed him for. Just because Kyle Osh career-wise has not been anything particularly special. And he's coming off a career year and he's in his early 30s or whatever he is, 33, 34. And I should note a superficial career year.

Yeah, right. It was like a fluky Babbitt sort of year and all that. It was a baseball card career year, but it was – I mean he had a 200 Babbitt with runners in scoring position. And you – I mean it was a – he had a fine fit, but he wasn't really a fundamentally different pitcher. I think we had him at 1.1 warped, and Okoda projects him for.5 next year, which is lower than I would be comfortable saying, but Okoda's smarter than me.

Yeah, I mean, he, I guess, has done some things better over the last couple years. He has certainly walked fewer batters than he ever has before, or at least he did in 2012. And I guess his slider has been more effective and has supposedly just become a better pitch. And so he struck out more guys than he usually does, although certainly not an impressive amount of batters. So maybe he's gotten better, but there is still a sense that teams were going to look at the ERA and the 16-3 record and give him some giant contract. And then he would just kind of turn back into innings eater Kyle Ossh and not even really that great an innings eater. And so now it seems like things have swung back completely in the other direction where in the last couple days people have just in conversation said things to me

like it's kind of a shame that Kyle Osh is not getting any offers and is not going to get a contract because he's not a bad pitcher um i don't know that i mean when we were talking about his free agency at the beginning of the offseason i don't think we said kylosh is terrible it's just we thought kylosh was not as good as as the contract he would get but now it looks like possibly he's better than the contract that he will get yeah it it almost i i don't know if this is true but it almost feels like it if instead of going 16 and 3 with a what do they have like 270 ra or something like that 286 286 if instead of that he had had like all the same peripherals, but had gone 14-9 with a 3.21 ERA, I wonder if he would actually be signed by now for the same contract he's ultimately going to get. surface stats and like you once you sort of get it in your head that the guy is worse than

he looks then i don't know i wonder if that starts to um to to uh if that's if that starts to slide into just a negative impression of him overall i mean i doubt i doubt that front offices are dumb like me um but that i i think that probably happened with me a little bit yeah probably me too David Schoenfeld did an article at ESPN at his blog the the sweet spot where he kind of looked to he tried to gauge the value of first round picks because that has become such a story with these remaining free agents not being signed, presumably because of the draft pick compensation, or at least that's been a factor. So he looked to see what these draft picks have been worth. And we've talked on the podcast before about similar efforts. And he concluded that it does depend to some extent on where in the first round you're picking.

If you're a good team, then you probably have a late first round pick, which is not the same expectations wise as an early first round pick. So he said that if he's the Rangers and he has a late pick and they're interested at all in someone like Michael Bourne and the money itself is not prohibitive, then he just wouldn't worry about losing that first round pick because the odds are that that player isn't going to turn into anything special anyway. He was looking at the last 20 years or so, and he said basically 1 in 10 met whatever criteria he was using for a star player. So I don't know. Maybe that's been too big a factor, or maybe we've just been kind of overrating the role of the draft pick compensation in this. And maybe it's not so much the pick as it is, as you said,

the kind of the expectations contract wise for Loesch and for Soriano. Well, Loesch sort of almost explicitly said that it is what has limited him. He specifically said it, for instance, when he was asked whether the Rangers and the Yankees would make sense. He said, you know, yeah, but it seemed that he had knowledge that the draft pick is what's holding him back from those two teams. And he compared himself to Anibal Sanchez and Zach Granke, who are better pitchers, but they probably aren't

when you're reading the Scott Boris binder on Kyle Loesch, and said that it's sort of not a fair market. It's not a free market in that they have no draft pick compensation tied to them. So, right, and maybe he's right about that, and he certainly knows more about the market for himself than we know about his market. But I wonder whether it's possible that he is using that as a scapegoat and possibly Boris is using that as a scapegoat when talking to Loesch about why he hasn't gotten that big offer yet

because presumably Boris told Loesch he was going to cash in at some point. He hasn't, so your agent kind of has to justify to you why he hasn't gotten you that giant contract, and maybe he's blaming the draft pick thing when that's not the main reason. I don't know. Maybe it is. It's weird, because teams do give up draft picks to sign free agents they do it every year they do it all the time i mean they don't they prefer not to

but when i mean the reason that they redid all this draft pick compensation is not because uh it was getting in the way of guys like kyle loche signing it was because it was getting in the way of guys like Juan Cruz signing. Yeah, I mean, I guess, I don't know, is it, no one really designed the, I mean, if the CBA is designed to promote competitive balance, or if the draft pick compensation system is designed to promote that, then, I mean, it's kind of the point that a good free agent comes with that cost. I suppose, I don't know if Kyle Loesch kind of meets the threshold for a good free agent where that was intended to make teams think twice about signing him.

But, I mean, the people who have had the qualifying offers who have signed uh like hamilton or like swisher i guess the the draft pick was a factor in their markets too but they were just better i guess or teams had fewer concerns about them, or there was just more of a market for them than there is for a reliever or a back-of-the-rotation guy, which maybe is what Loesch kind of is. So where's Loesch going to end up? I have no idea. I haven't been following the Kyle Loesch rumors to the extent that they've existed, and I haven't really looked to see who really needs a starter.

It sounds like the Cardinals will not be the team that brings him back, based on his comments that he hasn't talked to them in three or four months. Which is kind of impossible, right? Right, which means he wasn't talking to them while he was pitching for them, which would be strange. But I don't know. I really have no guess off the top of my head. Do you?

You know, when the Angels signed Joe Blanton, it seemed sort of odd, and Colin Wires defended it based on the idea that what the Angels really needed was stability. They needed somebody who could pitch innings, even if they were garbage innings. They did need to have a human being who could stand on a mound for 200 innings or so, and I think that's still true of them.

I think that there's still a team that needs something they can rely on because I don't think that they can rely on Hansen. And honestly, I'm not sure they can rely on Blanton to have an ERA lower than 5.5. And even if those guys do kind of work out and make it through the year, I don't think they have a game three starter for the postseason. And, you know, the Angels have a really good defense to put behind a guy who pitches to sort of contact. They have a good park for a guy who has a, actually, who's not a ground ball pitcher at all anymore.

And they've already given up their first round pick. So at this point, they're talking about a late second round pick. I mean, I'm sure that it would sort of suck to have to wait until, you know, the 105th or whatever pick to draft like they did last year, but they will sacrifice less than any other team to sign him. So to me, that makes sense. It would also maybe make sense if they're worried about all of the long-term contracts piling up, if Loge sees it as a potential pillow contract or maybe as a kind of modified, maybe like a two-year deal where they each get a little something out of it.

So that would make sense to me. The Yankees would still make sense to me if Loesch wants to hit the market again in a year. I don't think he will. I don't think this is like Edwin Jackson where he can really be confident that he's going to hit the market with the same value that he did last year. So maybe that's not appealing. But I don't know.

I could see the Giants, I think, by my math, should have a little bit of money to spend. And right now, Barry Zito's in their rotation. And I think that they would be smarter to not have that be true. And you know what? If the Royals are willing to give up Will Myers, maybe Dayton Moore is able to, I mean, to get a pitcher, then maybe Dayton Moore can convince his owner to free up a little money and get Kyle Osh because they're not there yet.

Huh. Yeah. That would maybe retrospectively make me like that trade even less, probably, if they signed another free agent pitcher. It would, I think it would probably make me like it a little more, but I would not like it. Well, we talked about the Joel Pinero precedent with the Angels at some point. Yeah, they're very similar. And signing a Cardinals pitcher who just recently became better, and that didn't work out so well for them. It didn't, although the first year was pretty good. And then the second year was disastrous. I don't know.

The second year went horribly, but I don't know that you'd necessarily say, oh, well, that's definitely going to happen to Loesch or anything like that. But yeah, the Pinheiro precedent isn't great. No, it's not that the Pinheiro precedent isn't great. It's that every precedent in baseball history is not great for Kyle Loesch. He doesn't have the track record. He doesn't have the peripherals. There's nothing particularly compelling about his case as a pitcher.

But if you're only paying for a two-win guy, why not? All right. Well, we've talked for the traditional amount of time, despite having very little to talk about. So good job by us, I guess. We'll be back next week. And I guess next week we could maybe talk about the Hall of Fame stuff, if either of us has any appetite for that.

I feel like if I see one more person's Hall of Fame ballot at this point, I will just fall asleep instantly. But maybe we can talk about our Hall of Fame choices or something. And, of course, we will answer your questions on Wednesday if you send them to us at podcast at baseball prospectus dot com. So we'll be back next week.