Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1133: Lessons to Learn (and Unlearn) from October

Episode Date: November 7, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Shohei Otani, the Players Association, and a trio of opt-ins, then discuss whether tanking is bad for baseball and which conclusions can and can’t be drawn from the rebuilds, roster constructions, and in-game tactics of this season’s successful playoff teams. Audio intro: Neuseiland, "When You Get Back from the […]

I never noticed, just who did me in love I only know they played to win When you get back from the war door. We start tomorrow before we find out who you are. Hello and welcome to episode 1133 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from FanGraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I'm Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs. Hello, Jeff. Hi.

Did you finish Narcos? Yes, although not in one day. I was thinking maybe I could do the one-day marathon, but it took me a second. But it was rewarding. Very good, very good. I did not, but I played a lot of video games. And I thought a little bit about baseball

in the few minutes before we started recording this podcast. And based on that thinking, we've got some news that we could talk about. I think we should just quickly follow up on our Shoyotani discussion from the most recent episode, because I think we left out an element of that that was also in Joel Sherman's New York Post report that I think is worth mentioning. We talked about how the posting agreement, the system expired this year, the system whereby a team in Japan that wants to post a player gets $20 million from interested MLB teams who can then negotiate with the player. That is in fact expired and those parties have to work out a new agreement. But it sounds as if MLB is willing to grandfather Otani in under that deal and give Nippon Ham the $20 million.

But apparently the Players Association is putting up some resistance here because they're worried about the precedent of a player like Otani, who is clearly worth many, many millions of dollars, not making many millions of dollars, which I don't understand because they just agreed to this system and allowed themselves to be negotiated into this system by MLB. And there was immediate backlash to that when we heard after the CBA news became public that there was going to be a hard cap on international spending for young players. I think we were all somewhat taken aback by that, that even though these players are not members of the Players Association until they actually reach the majors, still it seems surprising that MLB would agree to any kind of hard cap on anything, since historically that's

something that they've been resistant to. Anyway, it sounds as if now that the system is actually in place, they don't like it, which I think anyone could have predicted. So I don't know whether there will be a workaround here. I would think that there's enough impetus, at least on the part of the majors and the teams that want Otani to try to find a workaround here. But I mean, there's no resolution here where Otani ends up making anything close to what he should be making, which is something that the Players Association probably should have thought of a year ago if they were that concerned about it. Yeah, you think so? This is not like Otani is a guy who emerged out of nowhere to

become available to the major leagues. We've known about this. He was like the guy who was used as the example when we were talking about the implications of the new CBA and all the foreign spending arrangements before. It was always, well, what's going to be the deal with Otani? And early last year, there were a bunch of articles written about, well, what are the ways around the system for a team to sign Otani? Well, you know, there's no way around the system. It was designed to be almost

airtight. So I don't know what they're going to do to find some sort of negotiating advantage here to get Otani more money. But this was the problem all along. And I don't think that in good conscience, you can decide that Otani is just too good. And therefore, we have to make an exception because what kind of precedent does that set then you're drawing lines of who's good or not good enough to be an exception to the rules so when sherman's article came out it seemed like okay there is a posting agreement that has to be renewed or redesigned and it's like well that seems like some sort of hiccup and then there's a middle step and we don't know what the middle step is and then the conclusion is otani makes more money. And it just seemed unclear.

And now it still seems unclear because I still don't see what the avenue is to get a major league baseball team to give Otani more than basically the league minimum, plus the five or six million whatever dollars it is signing bonus. There just isn't a route that I can see. And it's as if the players union only just realized that, oh, this guy's really good, and he's going to be affected. But like, this has been apparent for years. We've known about Otani for years. And this was always going to happen. So I don't want to assume that the union is just that, I don't know, that blind or short sighted, but I don't know what the alternative

interpretation is. That's the word. It seemed short sighted at the time, but I didn't know what the alternative interpretation is. That's the word. It seemed short-sighted at the time, but I didn't think they would, I guess, realize how short-sighted it was in this short a time. I mean, I don't know. You'd think that this would have been something they had thought of at some point during the negotiations. So hopefully this has worked out in a way that makes everyone happy, but I don't know what that way would be. Obviously, American baseball fans want

Otani to come over so that we can watch him and follow him more easily and see how he'll be used. It's the most fascinating story of the offseason. On the other hand, Otani, I mean, it may be in his own best interest not to come over, except that he seems to want to prove himself in the majors, so he has to balance the money against wanting to do that, which is an unfortunate situation. So it's complicated, and I don't know if there's a way that everyone will be satisfied at the end of this. And I really don't understand what it's doing when it seems to be objecting to its own agreement at this point. So perplexing. Anyway, there are a few actual transactions we could potentially talk about. I don't know whether you feel moved to do that. I think we have some larger ideas to explore in this episode, but it's been a winter of opting in thus far. We're not so much used to

players opting in. I don't know what the breakdown has been traditionally when it comes to players exercising their opt-outs or not. I think in most cases they probably have, right? There's some exceptions, you know, like a Vernon Wells sort of situation where the guy obviously wants to keep the contract he agreed to. But I think we agree that opt outs are player friendly because it gives them the option to do what they want. And in the past, at least, it seems that most of the time players have improved their stock enough or have found that the market has moved enough since they signed their deal that it made sense to opt out. But this winter, we've seen Justin

Upton get that one year tacked onto his deal rather than opt out. And we've also seen now Masiara Tanaka, Johnny Cueto, and Ian Kennedy all decide to opt in to say, yeah, I'll stick with that contract and I'll stick with this team, which is somewhat surprising in a macro sense, but maybe not all that surprising if you think about the individual players involved and the seasons they all just had yeah i uh when the news started to break i had to laugh when i saw ian kennedy opt in sometimes sometimes this this isn't a breaking story but in in every case it's uh it's explicable johnny cueto of course just had the worst year of his career aside from i guess a season or two when he was hurt in Kennedy. Pretty obvious. Tanaka. Tanaka

was maybe the one where it seemed a little more likely that he would go to the market. But even there, you'd think that maybe he would just go to the market and try to get one more year tacked onto his deal. But if you're Tanaka, you're probably never going to shed the specter of that ligament situation. So teams are going to be justifiably nervous about giving you a contract and so if you're Tanaka even if you think maybe on the market you could have gotten that fourth year guarantee well you can just stay with the Yankees for now play out the three years you're still going to make something in your fourth year and if you're pitching well you'll you'll make your money so if he's happy then it kind of I don't know what the Yankees intend to do but in

a sense I expect them or have been expecting them to bring back CeCe Sabathia on some sort of one or two year term just for familiarity and then if they do that kind of kind of fall the rotation's kind of done I know and of course they they got Gray at the trade deadline which was kind of their offseason move in advance so they they might just not have to do all that much in that area yeah right I don't know how much they love Gray, but that's the investment that they've made. And, you know, if you have that five, I think I'm including Montgomery.

I'm not actually looking at the rotation picture right now, but if you do that, then either they make a consolidation move or I don't know, maybe they just end up going to get an outfielder or they stay completely silent. I guess this isn't the Yankees podcast right now, but yeah, among the other opt-ins, I think this was also a weekend. And I think we're still maybe today's the deadline for when teams are

going to offer qualifying offers. And so there have been a few like, well, yeah, of course, Andrew Kashner is not going to get a qualifying offer. Why would he? Zach Cozart is maybe the somewhat interesting one to me because he's coming off a really good season. He's sort of having a rejuvenation in his career, but he's also a 32 year old shortstop in a market where pretty much no good team needs a shortstop so i don't know exactly what the reds plan is with kozar but i'm pretty sure that they want to bring him back and i don't know how many times this winter we're going to have to you and i will have to guess, kind of privately review everything that changed with a qualifying offer because they made it so much more damn complicated last year. So I still

don't have it all down cold, but all I can say for now is that the QO system has been devalued in some way, but please don't ask me to go into specifics. Right. Yeah. All right. Is there anything else that piques your interest here? What do you think of Cueto? What are his bounce back odds? I mean, this is a guy who was on the very short list of best pitchers in baseball like a year ago. So how far gone is he? Yeah, right. I don't think he's I don't think he's that far gone. And I look at Cueto and I kind of see the Giants writ small, if you will, where the Giants are coming off just a miserable season. They had, I can confirm, the worst record tied to the worst record in baseball tigers also down there but i look at the giants and i think yeah that's a team that i could very easily see winning like

20 more games next season and it wouldn't even require anything in the way of a surprise now they could probably use an outfielder their outfield combined to be below replacement level last season uh i think by both fan graphs and baseball reference so that's one of the worst things you could possibly do but outside of that i look at cueto i figure well yeah he had what blisters and i think a forearm thing and forearm things are never encouraging and even blisters are never encouraging of course it's still something that's preventing one from pitching to his highest capability but i'm not too concerned about cueto i'm not concerned about him in any way i'm not concerned about every other pitcher in the major leagues i think that as far

as i can recall his stuff was basically fine he just was a little bit off i would expect that quito will be good again next year i would expect that samarja will be good next year bum garner is going to be in there for the full season i don't know i think I think there's weirdly a good amount to like about the Giants who this year were completely terrible. Right. Yeah. All right. Well, there will be much bigger news that we'll have to discuss at some point soon. So we'll probably just leave that and return to it. We're still doing three episodes a week with a lot less actual baseball content to discuss here. So we have to be a little smarter about how we parcel this out. So I do want to do, before we transition fully into off-season mode and free agent and trade market modes, I want to talk a little bit about larger

lessons from the post-season, both from the teams that won and also how they won. And I mentioned on the most recent episode that there is a tendency, as Theo Epstein has pointed out, for the thing that a team does to win in any given year to become the hot new thing. And teams will look at that team and say, this is how you win the World Series. And often you get copycats that are trying to learn lessons from that. you were actually asked in your chat on friday what the lessons or the wrong lessons that people would draw from this october were so i want to talk about that a little bit and maybe we can start just with the big picture view which is that a team that tanked essentially and obviously we can you know quibble

about the terminology and i haven't really come across a better single word that encapsulates what it is. I think some people don't like the negative connotation of tanking because it implies that the teams aren't trying to win where they actually are trying to win, just not in the present. They're trying to win in the future by not trying to win in the present. So whatever you call it, the Cubs and the Astros both were part of this movement toward tanking that really has spread to all sports now. And I think there's always concern when a team does this and it works, is this going to create too many copycats or too many teams going to tank? Because you can't dispute after back-to-back teams won the World Series with this strategy that it works, at least when you do it well and you get lucky and lots of things work out in your favor. It works. So are you concerned? Is there any reason to be concerned that now that tanking is proven, at least for certain teams at certain times, that we'll see too much of it, that this is bad for baseball in any way? No.

Okay. Neither am I, really. But why do you think no? I think, so first of all, tanking is kind of like a more contemporary word for rebuild, and maybe it's just a more extreme version. But rebuilding has gone on forever. And I think that certainly in baseball, if you have too many teams trying to tank at the same time, then they're just going to work against one another. The tanks, the tankings, tanks, tankings? I don't know. What's the noun? The tanking attempts will be presumably less successful because there will just be more teams trying to get the same assets, whether those be high draft picks or young talent from other organizations. The market would be flooded with

these available young players with a bunch of surplus value, et cetera. So you can't have too many teams doing it at once in the first place. Teams are always pretty strongly incentivized to try to be competitive in any given year. I think that it's really difficult for any ownership group in front office to say, OK, we're going to be bad and we're going to be bad for a long time with really no guarantee. The Braves are a tanking team that people keep talking up their farm system but they still suck they haven't been good for a while

since they tore down a half decent baseball team we have the White Sox who who knows where they're going to go and the Padres are in their own tank at the moment I guess I don't know maybe it's a sensory deprivation tank is it just tanks in other words how many teams would you say are currently tanking because that's okay let's do this together how many teams are currently bad okay so there's no one in the ale east no ale central we have the tigers have started i think i mean have they have they they're they're bad and they're going to be bad but have they really i don't know if they're doing what the astros and the Cubs did. I mean, they they've made some moves, right? They've traded some veterans and they're not spending in a way that they used to. And then maybe partially that's because Mike Illich isn't their owner anymore. But I don't know. I mean, I wouldn't say it's a complete teardown in the way that the Esters and the Cubs did, although maybe they're heading toward that. Maybe they will do that fully this winter. like outside of that what you're not going to move jordan zimmerman has no value miguel cabrera has no value to another team and victor martinez has no value to another team like the tigers are okay so the tigers are in a weird situation obviously the white socks are tanking yes in the

in the al west i don't know what we say about the a's see there's these in-between situations where like where's the line between a like prioritizing the future over the present and tanking so the the clear tanking teams would be i guess the white socks we know they're they're in a tank i think we can say the padres have tanked yeah i think so when you use three rule five players on your opening day roster i think that qualifies yeah there's there's your hard line yeah uh and the braves and the phillies haveed. I'd say that's fair, yeah. Something like that. So those four. And then there's some questions maybe about what the A's have done

and where exactly the Tigers are. I don't know if there's a word for how bad the Tigers' situation is, but I guess it's kind of like where the Astros were five or six years ago. It's kind of like the Royals. I don't know which one is worse, I guess. Yeah, I don't know. But, worse, I guess. Yeah, I don't know. But yeah, neither of those teams is tanking, but they're in very unenviable situations right now.

So, all right. So what do we have, like five or something, roughly? Yeah, four or five or potentially six teams who are in that process. And then, I mean, like what are the Reds even? Like what is that that where are the brewers are the brewers still in there i mean the brewers never tanked but they were rebuilding but are they are they out of it what do we say about a team that was just competitive

yeah there are gradations here and and sort of nuances to this term obviously i i think not every team that tanks will get to the 51 win or whatever it was depths that the Astros did not even the Cubs did that so I think you don't have to bottom out quite that hard to qualify but I think okay so that's a significant percentage of teams I mean we're talking about a sixth or so of all of the teams are currently in some sort of tank we think but I mean the thing is that there are always teams that are bad. There have always been teams that are bad. There will always be teams that are bad because they're, I mean, that's how competition works.

There are not enough great major leaguers for every team to be great and every team that go 81 and 81 or whatever. So there are always going to be teams that are up and teams that are down. And in the past, at least, I think maybe it was just a little less common for the teams that were down to be down kind of knowingly and intentionally and with a clear purpose and an eye toward being up a few years down the road. So I think in that sense, this is, if anything, an improvement because yes yes you have teams that are bad but they're also offering some hope to their fans that they won't be bad in a few years that being bad has purpose

you could look at the white socks and imagine them being good gosh i mean as soon as next year or the year after right and so i think that there's hope here that's the the positive aspect of tanking is that you're not taking a team that would have been great and saying let's lose for no reason. You're taking a team that would have been at best mediocre and probably wouldn't have made the playoffs anyway and just would have kind of hung along and, you know, maybe put a more entertaining product on the field on a day to day basis, but not really for any purpose, not for any payoff. but not really for any purpose, not for any payoff. And now I think it's more common for fans to know what is going on organizationally, what's happening in the minors, who the team's prospects are. And if you're a team like the White Sox, sure, they were awful in the second half this year, but they had the best farm system in baseball,

and a lot of those guys were coming up to the majors and fans were getting their first look at them. And I'm not going to say that is as fun and as entertaining as being good at baseball, but it's a nice consolation if you know that you're going to be bad for a while. Whereas the White Sox for quite a while there were pretty boring and not good. I was thinking about this over the weekend. The one thing I did think about with regard to baseball over the weekend is, is there a team better positioned? Like if we were looking for another White Sox, the advantage that the White Sox had over other teams who have tried the rebuild process

is that they had players with big time value to move. They had players who were really good signed to a low cost long-term contracts. And that is rare for a team that needs to rebuild because of course those are valuable players and teams with more valuable players tend not to be so bad that you need to restart anyway is there a team better situated to do that than the marlins who even aside from you know the stanton sweepstakes which god knows what he's

going to end up costing another team they've got both christian yelich and marcelo zuna signed to long-term contracts and i don't know exactly dan straley's situation and dan straley is no ace but i guess he well let me take the back by Straley is no ace. But I guess he... Well, let me take that back. By definition, he is an ace. He's an ace of that team. But you could, in theory... I know that the rumors have said

the Marlins want to move guys like Stanton and Dee Gordon and Martin Prado. But the thing about Gordon and Prado is they're not good. Whereas Jelic and Ozuna and, to a lesser extent, Straley are good. And they're cost-controlled for a while. So if the Marlins really figured, you know, if you're going to trade Stanton, you're going to put off fans anyway. And

if it seems like they are determined to trade Stanton, maybe they should just go all the way and just move everyone, just control the offseason. I know Dave Cameron put up a post just a little while ago on Fangraph saying that the Marlins will be one of the teams that controls the offseason. And if they really want to go crazy, this is their opportunity to move some big time talent because guys like Jelic and Ozuna, no reason they couldn't get Adam Eaton like packages at the least. Yeah. And I think the other question is, well, if you have several teams tanking, then will there inevitably be diminishing returns when you had just the Astros and just the Cubs doing it, then they can take advantage of that because they're selling from a position where no other

team is trying to do what it's doing, or maybe one other team is trying to do what it's doing. And so in that sense, it's easier to get that number one draft pick. It's easier to sell your veterans and get good prospects because there just aren't as many available. And so if five teams are trying to do the same thing simultaneously, inevitably you're going to get one where it just doesn't work out nearly as well as it has for the Astros and the Cubs. And I think we have to keep in mind that even though it has worked out as well as it possibly could have for the Astros and the Cubs, that was not a predetermined outcome. We knew that they were going to get better. We didn't know and couldn't know that they were going to win the World Series despite the Sports Illustrated cover.

So I think that that's something to keep in mind as you kind of adjust your expectations here. If your team goes into a down cycle on purpose, it doesn't mean you can just pencil in the victory parade a few years down the road. That's the best outcome, but it's not the inevitable outcome. And that's just going to get harder to do when more teams are trying to do it. So I don't know of the teams that are tanking currently. I don't know what we would say is the one that maybe is the furthest from having it work out in this way. I guess you'd have to

say the Braves probably just because of their front office turmoil, if nothing else at this point. But we would have said that. We were starting to say that about the Phillies at the beginning of the season, and now they look like they've gotten on track again. Right. When you were talking about teams who were just as bad as possible and then picking well, you can look at the case of the Washington Nationals, given that they got Bryce Harper and Steven Strasburg in consecutive drafts, which seemed like that was going to give them a shot in the arm. And of course it has. But the difference between the Nationals and the Astros and the Cubs is that the Nationals haven't won the World Series.

They haven't actually won a round, which, you know, that's their own cross to bear. But even when you get all of this talent, we are in a position, and we talked about this the last week, where we're going to be biased in favor of the teams who tanked and won it all as opposed to the teams who rebuilt and we're just pretty good it would take a lot i think to go through a rebuild and not emerge competitive and better for it you'd have to really screw up yes again we have the situation of like where the reds are but then they're i don't know if they're a unique circumstance in that they don't seem to be all of that functional but i don't know we could be looking unique circumstance in that they don't seem to be all of that functional. But I don't know. We could be looking at a situation where the Orioles could be down for a while.

The Royals, thankfully for them, they did win the World Series, but they could be down for a very long time. There are some situations that are not enviable right now, to the Braves' credit at least. I don't know how they're going to be disciplined for all of their various, I guess I shouldn't say crimes, but the things they shouldn't have done. And I don't know what kind of players are going to lose and they have to rebuild the front office. But at least they do have like Ronald Acuna and they have talent in there. Whereas if you're the Royals now or the Tigers or the Reds, I just don't know what you do. Or I guess forget the Reds, even the Orioles. I don't know what you do if you're

the Orioles. Yeah. Anyway, I think the larger point is, I mean, I just don't see it as making a less compelling product than we've ever had. There've always been bad teams. I don't know that there are more bad teams now. I mean, certainly this season was strange, just in the stratification that there was in the league where you had these handful of really great teams and then a lot of bad teams and then not much in the middle. I don't know whether we can call that a trend. It was really just a one season thing so far. So maybe you're more likely to get a situation like that, but I'm not totally sure that that was worse in any significant way either. And I just, I don't see this as destabilizing the sport or anything like that. I mean, it's not fun for specific fan bases for that period when they're not very good,

but it doesn't seem as if there are really lasting long-term effects here. I mean, I don't know that everyone was worried about that when the Astros had 0.0 TV ratings and lousy attendance, and you couldn't blame the fans for not supporting the product at that time. But it seems like they've come back as soon as the Astros got good and the World Series parade was quite well attended. I just, I don't know that there is any long-term franchise killing effect here. I mean, maybe in certain markets there would be, and in Houston there isn't, but it just doesn't seem to be as if this is an existential problem.

It sucks at certain times for certain teams, but on the whole, I don't know that this makes baseball worse in any way. Do you have any sort of general moral opposition to the idea of getting really bad in the first place? I don't really. As long as it's with an eye toward winning. I mean, if it's like a major league, the movie sort of situation where you're trying to get your team contracted essentially, then sure. But if you're just doing it, I mean, I see the argument that I guess if you're getting revenue sharing, you should be obligated to spend some of that money. And certainly if teams don't, the players union will be all over them for that. But I don't really see a problem with it. If you decide that this is what makes sense for you competitively, then it's not non-competitive in my mind. It's just differently competitive. So no, I don't have a problem with that. Yeah, I agree with you. And I think that it's important to give fans the benefit of the doubt. Of course, if you're going to have a bad team, then that's not going to be very appealing to the area casual fans who just want to show up and maybe see a home team win.

But I think that with fans, fans consume sports, well, first of all, a lot now. And I think that fans have a better understanding than ever of what organizations are trying to do fans all love well not all but many fans love to play sort of the the amateur front office thing and and fans get excited about young players that are brought in this isn't unique to baseball tanking takes place in other sports and fans get really excited about being like the best farm system in baseball or having this young guy come up and and being able to anticipate a rookie i mean i remember in seattle the ovation that dustin ackley got when he was first promoted to the major leagues chris taylor never got that reception whoops a doodle but i think that obviously there are going to be people that

you turn off if you win 51 games for like three years in a row that's not going to be good for your brand but i think that if you are an organization with a strong footprint in a community you can get people excited for a rebuild provided that it starts to bear fruit and if you have faith in your own i guess roster and navigation you can bring in that kind of young talent or i think that if you're a white socks fan you just went through a pretty miserable season it was no good and the and the years before they decided the tank were not that great either because they were just kind of treading water but there would have been very little time between last year when the white socks it was last year right the white socks started

really strong and then they faded from view yeah something like that so you know you get a 2016 where you you think well this team is overachieving maybe it's going to hang in the race and then it doesn't and then they embrace the rebuild and they just trade everyone they go into 2017 and now if you're a white socks fan you can look at the major league and the minor league rosters and think well we're coming we could be even 500 next year the brewers are an exciting case study where you could say we could be as good as that team as soon as next season who knows and so there's just so little downtime as a fan so little time where you would just want to completely check out you're not going to watch all 162 games in the regular

season of a team that's tanking but there's a lot to look forward to I think that's really quite appealing the only purpose of sports is not to have the team win as many games as possible right away. All right. So that's maybe the larger lesson you could draw from this postseason or last postseason is that tanking works in some cases. And if you're in a situation similar to the ones that the Astros and the Cubs were in, then it may make sense for you. And we think that is a fair lesson to draw, but not a harmful one for baseball. And I guess on a more micro level, we can talk about the specific roster construction or in-game tactics that these teams used to get where they were. So last year, for instance, the big lesson, of course, was pitcher usage, relievers, Andrew Miller, firemen, et cetera, et cetera. We all talked a ton about that over the winter and, you know, didn't see a whole lot of difference really in the regular season. There

were maybe some slight signs of erosion in the save mystique, but not so much that you'd really notice unless you were looking hard for it. And this off season or this post season, we've seen, I guess, a slight variation on that. I mean, I think that was a big part of the conversation for the first few rounds of the playoffs. And then the Astros sort of changed that conversation a bit, both because their relievers really struggled and because they had some success using starters out of the bullpen. So now that's something you could look at. And for instance, Jerry DiPoto, actually at the beginning of October,

said something about how the Mariners want like a Wolfpack model of pitching, which is like a euphemism for our pitchers are bad, I guess, except for James Paxton. So we're just going to get out however we can, basically. But maybe that is a lesson that you could draw from the Astros who of course had the tandem starter system in the minors and maybe that came back to to bear dividends here the idea that basically pitcher roles are eroding and you don't have to be a

closer to close the game even if it's game seven of the world series even if you have zero career saves you can do it because Lance McCullers did it and Charlie Morton did it. And it just blurs the line a little bit more between starter and reliever. So do you think there's anything we can learn or that we shouldn't learn from that? I would think that we are in we know that we're in an era where starters are pitching less often per start. I think we know we're in an era where teams understand better than ever that they need more than five starters to make it through a season. It seems like there is the opportunity here for teams to load up on having six or seven starters on a team, and then you could just kind of rotate them, except for maybe the top one or two,

in such a way that you don't have pitchers who are having to make 30 or 32 starts in a season you can kind of help keep the workload down you can skip some starts here and there and make some guys into the bullpen the astros were unusual in that i guess they went into the playoffs with six or seven legitimately good starting pitchers it was already going to be weird with the diamondbacks making it and i know that they didn't last very long but they went in with like five good starters and it seemed like maybe the maybe the playoffs put them at a disadvantage because you don't get to use your full rotation in the playoffs the way you do in the season but as the astros just demonstrated well actually you can use your rotation to cover for the fact that you don't trust a single one of

your relievers in the postseason where i mean you go into go into game seven and the astros i think what i think liriano pitched but he got like one guy out. Yeah. I think he got Bellinger out. Relatedly, yeah. Yeah, very brief. There was a lot. There was the long.

He pitched twice, right? But short outings, yeah. Yeah, like McCullers had the long save. Peacock had some long outings. Morton had the long relief outings. So the Astros clearly decided, well, we might not have a bullpen, but we do have basically two starting rotations. So we're going to use the second starting rotation as the bullpen, which worked out really well.

I don't know how many teams can plan on having like seven good starting pitchers at a time come October, but certainly one of the lessons that you could draw from the Astros, we thought this might be a playoffs where we look at the Yankees and say, wow, look at that team. They stocked up on relievers and they were great. And the Astros didn't. But it turns out you don't need a bullpen necessarily to win the World Series as long as you have a whole bunch of starting pitchers who can work out of the bullpen. Yeah. So how do you take something from that that you can actually use?

Is it that you adopt the tandem starter system that the Astros used in the minors? Or do you try to work that in at the major league level and I don't know use guys on their throw days in actual games or try to move them back and forth I mean the Astros did move guys back and forth during the season guys like Peacock and McHugh and you know they were doing a little this and a little of that depending on injury needs and whether you have Justin Verlander yet or not and other factors. So I don't know. I mean, there are only so many guys, I guess, that fit that description. You have some guys who are just not qualified to start ever.

You have some guys who are too good not to use as starters. And then you have people in the middle. and then you have people in the middle. So I guess, do you think that this is something that we will see teams start to do with an eye toward October, or is this purely a thing that you implement with young players at the minor league level and then hope that they're kind of accustomed to it

by the time they get to the majors? I think with the Astros in part, it was just a function of circumstance where Keichel had a DL stint and McCullers was, he missed a bunch of time and Colin McHugh missed a bunch of time. they only got verlander late in the season and so they they were having to give these extended opportunities to like morton made 25 starts peacock made 21 starts he threw in 24 games and even mike fires if you remember him he pitched a

bunch he was on the astros not in the playoffs but i think that they they were just in a situation where they had to find out what they had i don't know what kind of opportunity someone like brad peacock would have had on this team if not for the the other circumstances in their rotation so in part it's a little bit of chance which isn't to give the astros no credit for what they found in a guy like peacock but i think that they didn't go into the season with this kind of plan but certainly with all of these teams focusing on okay we we don't want our mediocre like our third through fifth starters we don't want them seeing a batting order a third time through yeah and we we know that priority is there well if you're not going to have your

starters work deep then you just need to have more long relievers it's just a necessity because you can't go inning by inning with your bullpen through a regular season if you're going to limit your rotation that much so i think that you're going to end up i don't think teams are going to refer to it as a tandem starter thing because i think players will still try to think of themselves as starters or relievers but you're going to have more of these like hybrid i guess reliever really they're just swing men is what they are but they're like better they're better than swimming because i think when you think of swing man or at least when i think of swingman when i was younger i would think oh like a sixth starter who's in the bullpen because he's not good right well i think that these are going to be more like

guys who you know are good once or twice through the order kind of like the the brad peacock thing where he's not a guy you want working that deep but he's such a a useful tool he's you know kind of like a chad green where you look at him and you think well what's the difference between him as a starter and a reliever and there's not a big one because as a starter they wouldn't work that deep in the first place so i think this is going to be an interesting period of teams trying to figure out what they have on the farm where you know chad green wasn't special necessarily as a prospect but then he found a role and he pitched a lot of innings with the yankees and he was awfully good. Classically, you would look at a pitcher in the minors and you think, well, he's either going to be a starter or he's going to be a loogie or he's going to be a

closer, but there are more options than that. And if you have a starter who's good, but I don't know, maybe he doesn't have a third pitch or he just doesn't have the durability, but that doesn't mean that you have to limit him to being a specialist or a closer because you can do more than that. And I think that we could be entering a sort of era where it's difficult to evaluate sort of the middle tier of pitching prospects because we know who's great. Someone like, I don't have a better example than Julio Urias, which is dumb because he's injured, but someone like that, you look at him, you think, okay, we're going to let him start. But if you have someone like the, I don't know, an organization's eighth or tenth best prospect, you think, well, maybe he's not going to maybe a ceiling isn't really that high as a starter. Well, what is it as a hundred inning kind of multi-inning reliever? It could be really high.

Yeah, that's a question that we've gotten from listeners in the past. Like, who is the person who is maybe most suited to that role as the 100 inning reliever. Maybe that's something we could think about and answer on an email show. I don't know if I have an answer off the top of my head, but certain guys might have a skill set that lends itself to that more than others. And yeah, I mean, I don't want to sell this as like the new sabermetric innovation or anything. I mean, this is old, really. Almost nothing in baseball is new, but this is kind of one of those everything old becomes new again at some point sort of things. I mean, it was not at all unusual for rotations and bullpens to be more flexible and interchangeable in the past before they got really rigid and segregated in the last few decades. So I think that this is kind of taking a nod from the past,

even if people aren't really thinking of it that way. But yeah, I'm curious to see whether we actually notice any difference in the way pitchers are developed because of this. I guess the lesson that you wouldn't want to draw from the Astros run is that relievers who've been good all year and are bad for a week are then bad relievers. I mean,

I think that is a lesson that they may have drawn with certain guys and it didn't hold them back. Obviously, they were able to try this unorthodox for this era tactic and just kind of adjust on the fly with sort of a risky strategy in retrospect. i like you got a chat question last week something about you know will ken giles be the astros closer next year and yeah i mean he should be you know like unless they reach the conclusion somehow that this exposed some inherent weakness in ken giles i mean whatever it was didn't affect him for six months of the year. And yeah, he had one bad playoff run here, but it happens. And he was one of the most dominant relief pitchers in baseball all year long. So I think, you know, not reading too much into the small sample and the

recent performance is still pretty important here. So if that's the lesson you draw that, hey, if our players struggle for a round or two, we should abandon them for the rest of the playoffs. That's probably not going to be a winning strategy in the long run. Yeah, no, I didn't love the way that AJ Hinge handled this bullpen. I understand someone like Chris Tavensky seemed to wear down. And look, if you want to be one of the slick ball conspiracy theorists in the World Series, which I can get behind, I understand. There's evidence. Maybe you figure, well, if ken giles is susceptible to this if he can't throw

his his breaking ball in the way that he needs to then he's just a fastball pitcher and you know just a fastball pitcher isn't really special because it's the breaking ball that makes giles what he is so maybe you just avoid him granted giles was struggling even before the world series so who knows what the story would have been there. But yeah, wrong, wrong lesson, I think, as opposed to, you know, had the Dodgers won, Dave Roberts did not operate in that way. If anything, you could have said he had too much faith in the guys that he had.

Now, granted, he was using the same guys over and over and over again. Great. So he had his own kind of problems that he ran into as the postseason got deeper. But, you know, Brandon Morrow really only seemed to have the one down game and Kenley Jansen bounced back and Kentamaeda bounced back. So whatever.

I certainly don't think that a good takeaway should be that a week in the playoffs means everything. You don't want to you shouldn't want to manage like that. But to the Astros credit, I guess they had so many talented pitchers that they could avoid their best relief pitcher pretty much throughout the World Series and still win the damn thing. So kudos to them. It's a weird reward for learning the wrong lesson, but they paid no consequence. All right.

I don't know if any other narratives suggest themselves to you here, either with the team that won or teams that were eliminated. either with the team that won or teams that were eliminated. I saw some Facebook thread somewhere about people, Dodgers fans, saying, oh, we need to get away from this stat-driven numbers nerd stuff, which is obviously crazy because, A, the team that won does the same stuff. Every team does the same stuff. And also, they just got to Game 7 of the World Series. But that's not a mainstream viewpoint that you will hear anyone reputable does the same stuff. And also they just got to game seven of the world series, but you know, that's, that's not a mainstream viewpoint that you will hear anyone reputable espouse at this point, I would hope. So I don't know. I think just something that I think teams know already is that

all of these teams that are making the playoffs this year seem to have an eye toward the future as well as toward the present. And these teams that, you know, in some cases are rich and free spending have also tried to be responsible with saving up their prospects and not acting like big market teams have often in the past, whether it's the Yankees or the Dodgers. You know, they've hoarded these guys when they've had opportunities to trade them for kind of the veteran quick fix and they haven't done that and so they are in this situation i mean all these

teams have these young cores whether it's the astros quartet or the dodgers with bellinger and seager and barnes etc or yankees with judge and sanchez and severino or the red sox with you know bradley and bets and, you know, it just goes on and on. I mean, all these teams have some kind of core here, Bogarts, you know, where there's like a trio or a quartet on every team that they've kept around when they had opportunities to trade them. And now that's the foundation of a winning team that is not just a winning team for one

year, but winning team for many years. And that's not a new thing in baseball, obviously. That has always been a factor behind team success. But it's something that maybe the big market teams, the teams that can afford not to do that and to be a little less responsible and pay more per win, maybe they're kind of paying more mind to that just because it's been proven to be so successful by teams that did not have the money and were able to compete anyway agreed as a as a quick little i guess somewhat subject change i'm sending you a link right now through skype all right should go through so this has to do less with uh postseason trends possible postseason trends and more with just general baseball trends so if you have the page opens a link to

a baseball reference page showing miscellaneous stats if you look at the uh one of the last columns it's uh denoted pitchers slash s this is the the average number of pitchers used per team in a season yeah so for example 20 years ago would have been 1997 the average team used 21.2 pitchers over the course of a year and this year it was all the way up to 28 and 28 of course being the high and it's uh it's been a steady progression northward i think this would surprise few people it's gone batters per season almost exactly the same it's just kind of interesting 24.5 in 97 24.2 this year nothing happening at all with batters but pitchers have been rising more and

more which again not a complete surprise as teams have been leaning on their starting pitchers less and less you just need more backup more kind of flotsam jetsam you pick the word i guess so two questions one how much higher can this trend go what are we looking at here and second sort of follow-up specific question, something happened between 2014 and 2015. Maybe my memory is too short. Yeah. But in 2014, the average team in baseball is 24.8 pitchers. The next year, it jumped all the way to 27, which is just eyeballing it. That seems to be the biggest such jump in at least recent history. Although I guess something, well, I was going to say something happened between 1994 and 1995, but we know what that was. So that's's an exceptional season so pitchers jumped to 27 per

team in 2015 and then since there it's gone up to 27.5 to 28 so do you remember something happening between those years was that just like the tommy john year yeah maybe it was that i don't know the royals of course had succeeded in 2014 with that bullpen-centric roster, which made some waves, but I don't know whether teams dramatically changed things. And that was pre, you know, 10-day DL for pitchers, which is probably part of it this year. Certainly was for the Dodgers. That's another lesson maybe that teams could use, use the 10-day DL like the Dodgers did. But no, I don't know. I can't think of any reason why this would have jumped that much. But obviously, the long-term

trend is just a constant rise in this number, really. Ever since, looks like about the mid-50s or post-World War II, it's just been steadily increasing. Right. So I guess I don't know. I don't know what the real question is here, but this is a trend. This is a very clear trend that's been taking place over decades. And I guess I just don't know how high it can go. But already teams are trending in the direction of, I guess, just having a bunch of players that they can shuffle between the majors and AAA. That's certainly something the Dodgers have taken advantage of.

And they've also taken advantage of the disabled list in ways that have only become easier. So something else to keep your eye on. Teams clearly no longer just need like five or ten good pitchers. You want to have, it looks like, about 20 major league capable pitchers in any one given season. And ideally, maybe you could even have 25. major league capable pitchers in any one given season. And ideally, maybe you could even have 25. Yeah, we've maybe reached the point where we've bottomed out when it comes to like the typical length of a relief outing, which has been falling for years. And, you know, I think got down to just about an inning. And my sense is that maybe it either ticked up slightly this year or at least held steady instead of continuing its precipitous decline.

So I think maybe we've found the bottom there and perhaps we will even see something of a rise if teams do kind of, you know, use relievers and starters a little bit more interchangeably. a little bit more interchangeably. But yeah, I think it's most of the difference that is driving this rise now is kind of at the fringes of the roster, like the 24th, 25th guys on the team where you're just sort of cycling relievers in and out. So I'm not sure we're seeing that much of a dramatic difference from year to year

with your actual core relievers that are on your roster all year. Yeah, right. Looking at the all-time record as best as i think i have this looking at a baseball reference again this year the mariners tied the all-time record for total number of pitchers used right yeah they used 40 now granted one of those was mike freeman not a pitcher but yes he pitched it happens and they tied the 2014 six strangers at 40 second place not 39 not 38 actually 37 but theins are up there, this year's Twins.

They used 36 pitchers. They made the playoffs. The Blue Jays this year used 33 pitchers. So again, yeah, I think you're right. These are generally teams that have bad pitching. The more bad pitching they have, the more pitching you need to bring up or try to use. So certainly if you're a team

that is using a bunch of pitchers, probably more things have gone wrong than have gone right. But still interesting. Just accumulate as many good pitchers as you can. model of sort of the progressive-minded manager who has maybe coached or managed somewhere before. The guys who've been hired this winter, Martinez and Cora and Kapler and Callaway, have not managed before except for Kapler's one year in the minors. But I think that model certainly of former players, guys who haven't been out of the game all that long, for instance, in Roberts' case, and of course Hinch had managed before, but you want that. You want somewhat young, somewhat experienced, not set in their ways, receptive to all input, etc. the tigers are kind of hiring that model of manager right now so i don't know if there are any other large lessons that we should draw or that should be drawn but if we've omitted any feel free to write us and we'll talk about them next time i feel like we're going to have a like

a whole month of articles written trying to find the next charlie morton what a time to be alive what a weird it's i mean i and i totally get it too, because Morton was an original, or not original, but he was an unusual case as a free agent in terms of his blend of upside and all of the obvious downside. But just what a strange consequence of the playoff run in the World Series,

trying to find the next Charlie Morton. Right. All right. Yeah, there just aren't a lot of Charlie Mortons out there, so the Astros were wise to strike when they found one. And I saw a report, I think it may have been in a Ken Rosenthal column, I saw it at MLB Trade Rumors, that Morton initially thought that their offer to him was $7 million total. It was actually two years at $7 million per, but he was thrilled,

he was blown away that he got a $7 million offer and was like, yeah, let's take it. And then he found out it was a $14 million offer. So that was actually a lot to offer Charlie Morton at that time and with his market. But on the other hand, it was not at all a lot to offer Charlie Morton if you believed in the stuff that he had recently shown. So the Astros were smart. That was just a smart move. But there's not necessarily always a Charlie Morton out there that teams can have that information on. I know we have this. There's a common opinion of any professional high level athlete is just being the most confident person in the world about his own

abilities, just being like the alpha in any room that he finds himself in. But Charlie Morton undersold himself as a free agent, blown away by the idea of an offer that was half of the offer that he actually got. Charlie Morton, a little pessimistic. And then it all worked out for him. So look, no reason to be pessimistic about the world. Everything's going to work out for you, unless you're not Charlie Morton. All right.

We'll end on that note. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. Five listeners who have already pledged their support include Ben Saffron, Ken, Nick Roscoe, Mike Vanderpeer, and Chris Jarrett. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectivelywild. And you can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for editing assistance. If you're looking for something else to listen to,

Michael Bauman and I have a new episode of the Ringer MLB show up. Not too much overlap this time. We talked a lot about the new off-season transactions and managerial hirings and opt-ins and extensions and declined options. Covered a lot of ground. And by the way, since I mentioned video games at the top of this episode, I do have a video game podcast.

I don't mention it on Effectively Wild all that often, but if you're into that, I do it every week at The Ringer. It's called Achievement Oriented, co-hosted with Jason Concepcion. Keep your questions and comments for me and Jeff coming via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system. I believe there are still Effectively Wild t-shirts available, although it can't be many left at this point. I plugged those on the last episode, the Mike Trout heat map design of Effectively Wild memes. You can get that at Fangraphs. Just Google Effectively Wild t-shirts or look for the links in previous podcast posts or in the Facebook group. And we will talk to you later this week. there is in my prayer keep telling me let your loss

be your lesson