Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1138: No Loopholes Here

Episode Date: November 17, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Gabe Kapler’s prospects as Phillies manager, Aaron Judge’s hard hitting, various end-of-season awards results, MLB’s baseball-studying committee, and Shohei Ohtani’s value to AL and NL teams and the difficulty of gaming the CBA to sign him, then answer listener emails about an Ohtani sign-and-trade, homegrown value vs. free-agent […]

Hello and welcome to episode 1138 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast being recorded mere hours after episode 1137 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. So is 1137. So is 1138. I am Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs, joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer and in the background, his dog. We are recording this on Wednesday because I will be out of town. And so our breaking super outdated news is that cory kluber just won the cy young that's his uh that's his second one

this will no longer be that relevant to you listening if this is published on friday or saturday yeah apologies if there have been any big baseball developments that we're not able to talk about yet today but fortunately most of the award votes this year were not really in question i guess you don't have our our hot nl mvp takes yet so you'll have to wait for those because we don't know who nl mvp is yet but why don't you explain to the people why we're recording a little bit earlier today where where are you where in the world is jeff sullivan now uh right now as i'm recording this i'm in portland oregon at home but where i will be is not here uh just taking an anniversary trip down to the american southwest flying to phoenix and immediately leaving phoenix

to go into northern arizona which is quite beautiful there is a particular restaurant that we are apparently uh dave cameron has almost mandated i think i might get fired if we don't eat at this place called elote and order apparently at least five appetizers of Elote, Latin preparation of corn that they apparently removed from the cob. Anyway, some beautiful desert landscapes and whatnot to be found. Going to swing by the Grand Canyon because you can't not. And then there's a bunch of other stuff. Some moonscapes. So we'll see a lot of sunrises and sunsets.

One of the only times a year that you will find me willingly going to a desert. Yeah. And indoor destination. I'm surprised that you mentioned a restaurant. Usually it's much more outdoorsy destination than that, but you'll see some of that too. The idea is to see the outdoors, but we have to eat at some point. That's true. We could bring food with you, but yeah. All right. We'll have a nice trip. Hope you're having a nice trip currently as people are listening to this. Happy anniversary, et cetera. Thank you. All right. So here's the problem. What are you going to be doing for all of your anniversaries in the middle of October? It's not just the wedding that's the problem. I know. That's true. I'm kind of for the rest of my life, let's hope. I am locked into the October anniversary. So I don't

know. I don't know. I can't really do anything. I guess it gets me out of certain things that people might have to do on their anniversaries, but it also precludes some fun things that people might have to do. So yeah, it's, well, she knows what she signed up for. What was the Joe Girardi plan? Like two months on, one month off kind of baseball season so that it's a year round? Maybe they'll shift the playoffs and then your anniversary will be better timed by coincidence. That would solve my problem. Yeah, so we are going to talk about the things that have happened most recently in our timeline. And then we're going to get to some additional listener emails because we didn't have a chance to talk about that many of them.

Last one, I want to talk about some Shohei Otani stuff, maybe ask you about some Aaron Judge stuff, but you want to bring up anything before we get to the other banter? So I don't know how much people still care about this, if they care about it at all, but there's an article written by Matt Gelb. I hope that it is pronounced Gelb. I know that I get these things wrong. It's probably not Gelb. That would be dumb. Matt Gelb. I know that I get these things wrong. It's probably not Gelb. That would be dumb.

Matt Gelb writing an article. I can see you seeing Gelb though given your other pronunciation tendencies with RG words. There is a reason and I will stand by the reason. So he wrote an article about Gabe Kapler who I had already forgotten

is going to be the new manager of the Phillies. Gabe Kapler has managed one year in 2007. I guess you could say that he's managed every year of his life. He's managed his own affairs. We are all managing every day that we breathe. But he has managed a baseball team and he managed a team in what? Single A? Something thereabouts.

Yeah. Red Sox single A team 10 years ago. Yeah. So I don't know if people are still talking about this article on Friday or whenever you're listening to this. And it's an article that goes into Kapler's intensity. And there's an anecdote in here about how Kapler would not only work out with the players that he managed, but kind of put them in their place by working the hell out of them. I don't know how to put that, but there's an anecdote of him holding a 50 pound weight between his legs and then doing 50 pull-ups i couldn't do one pull-up in high school so you know there are some just out of high school aged players on this team and and uh there's there's another player in here talking about how he thought he was pretty strong but then he looked over and capler was curling 20

extra pounds with each arm but i think probably the most memorable part of this was uh i just have to do a little search so yes i think i know yeah which of course you're gonna of course right here that uh there's a section that ends talking about how capler would uh would bring food he's he's been a health fanatic when he briefly wrote at jabbo jabbo jabbo uh rob nair's fox site he wrote some he had an internet presence he would write about yes how much he has his own avocados lifestyle site his own cap lifestyle.com right lots of health advice fitness advice yeah right so it talks here about how he wouldn't trust like the the options at rest stops and budget hotels where he would bring his own organic eggs and organic

peanut butter and then the section ends of the paragraph quote he was so into health still said he's addicted to ice cream so he would just sit there and lick ice cream but have a cup and spit it into it he would just lick it for the taste but he didn't want to eat it i told him dude that's like unabomber type stuff that's a thing he did yeah yeah there are gonna be a lot of anecdotes about gabe Kapler's managerial tenure that sound unlike any other manager. I think that much is clear. I think the question is whether this is going to resonate with the creator of GIFs has weighed in to say that it is, in fact, Matt Gelb. That's how you say it. Hard G. He's inconsistent on that point. But I think that he makes the point that is probably a good one, a valid one, that Kapler will be handling managing older players now and more established players, actual adults for the most part, and wealthy people and people who are, you know, closer, well, maybe not necessarily closer in age to him because he's now 10 years older than he was at that time.

But people who have already proven that they are very good at baseball as opposed to people in single A who maybe are not quite as full of themselves and self-assured. single a who maybe are not quite as full of themselves and self-assured so it's possible that that sort of motivational tactic and there's this one anecdote about how i guess guys were not giving their full effort defensively so he went out to shortstop with a glove and was running around and diving and and kind of reaming them out and from matt's article it sounds like this worked for the most part he at least among the players he talked to, there's no one who was really going on the record saying, oh, I hated this. This was terrible. Most of them are saying, oh, this was like the best manager I ever had. He motivated me.

He cared about me. He would talk to the players and meet with them off the field and talk about non-baseball interests with them. So it really sounds like either he's not going to last long at all or he's going to be like, you know, a legendary manager who is an institution and wins lots of World Series. It's hard to imagine the middle ground there. So I don't know. This kind of intensity probably will rub some players the wrong way and others will be complete Kepler converts. Yeah. Guess what? It's almost impossible for any one personality to appeal to 25, 35, 45 guys over the course of a season.

There's going to be a lot of players filing through the, especially the Phillies clubhouse. A lot of different pitchers are going to be getting some major league playing time. And maybe it works to Kapler's benefit that while these are major league players, they're also generally younger, less established major league players players maybe he'll be running into fewer strong veteran egos i don't know maybe reese hoskins has a massive ego maybe he's a real jerk and we just don't know it but i like again because i'm not involved at all in the decision making i didn't hire gabe capillar i like that the phillies went for someone so volatile, so unpredictable, because it's a manager. Manager hires are just so boring. I don't care that the Tigers hired Ron Gardenhier. It's good that he's a great guy, but I just I don't I don't care. I could be completely wrong. I just don't see the fun in examining how the Tigers do now that they have Ron Gardenhier at the helm but the phillies with gabe capler who knows because i never even heard the expression that this guy i want to run through a wall for this guy until i was talking to someone about gabe capler like six or seven years ago that expression just never crossed my radar but i forgot i think i was talking to someone who a few people who were working for

fox at the time or something they just said like you talk to him and you can't help but like be energized immediately like you just have this adrenaline in your body that you didn't even know was there as you sit in like your office on a rainy Thursday afternoon but I don't know how that's going to hold up over like six months plus the six weeks of spring training and etc but ah I like it I like it yeah I mean it's it's definitely going to be more fun for us to follow how this works. And, you know, I hope it works well, but I have no special insight into the situation, really. But, of course, we should say, you know, he's 10 years older now.

He has done things. He has learned things. He has probably changed in some ways. So the intensity that he had 10 years ago, maybe he will moderate, modulate somehow with his major league job. So I don't know that he'll be exactly the same guy that he was then, but he's definitely going to be different than most managers. So, you know, it's a risky strategy just in the sense that probably you run a greater risk of alienating players than you would if you could find some laid back guy, you know, like Terry Francona is probably not gonna

really drive anyone away I mean maybe people will be more likely to love Kapler than anyone else but you're probably gonna get some guys who would not go for this sort of motivation tactics I know it wouldn't have worked for me like when I was on sports teams as a kid I kind of hated the like intensity and the rah-rah stuff I I guess, you know, that's why I didn't continue playing sports or that's one of the reasons. So I don't think that matters because there probably aren't a lot of people in major league clubhouses who have my temperament. I don't know that you would get to the majors with my temperament. So I think that probably I'm not that great a guide for that, but there will be some people who don't really like that

and don't kind of want someone you know looking at everything they do and pushing them to go harder and lift more and that kind of player might not like it but i think it's probably going to inspire a lot of devotion in some players so it's going to be fascinating to see given that we can't actually know what players true personalities are who do you uh Who do you think at Major League Baseball that you can think of is the closest to your temperament? Maybe like John Jaso. I don't know, such is life. I guess he's not actually in the majors anymore, right? Because he's sailing away on his boat or something. So I don't know. You don't see that many guys who are known for being laid back and

just kind of even tempered at all times. Or if you do, then it's like they're intense all the time instead of non-intense all the time. So I'm not really sure. I don't have that same kind of competitive drive, at least in the athletic arena, kind of pitting myself against someone in a contest of will. But I think that it will probably work better for Kapler than it would be if he had a bunch of Ben Lindberghs on his team. But which, you know, I like Gabe to the extent that I know him too. We've worked together in some capacity. I've edited him and I was not alienated by his intensity as I edited him. So maybe I'm wrong. But anyway, yeah, it's a high variance strategy, I guess, that the Phillies are going for here. But it could really pay off

remarkably well. I wonder how this is going to go. Like, I think the Phillies have had some trouble getting through on a daily basis with Oduble Herrera. I wonder how Gabe Kapler is going to interact with Oduble Herrera. But I don't know i i don't know how we're gonna know the answer and i just realized that i think uh i probably share my temperament with most with daniel norris so that one's mine i don't know if uh do you think do you think that there's in any universe any universe is there any part of any ben lindbergh that would have grown dreads like john jay so can't can't imagine that no probably not but uh you know i respect the choice so i don't know we'll see it's like a lot of sitcom potential here i could see the kind of type a manager with a

bunch of major league players they're they're gonna be stories and some of them will be oh gabe capler does this odd dietary thing or fitness thing but i think ultimately all of that won't really matter so much as how he is actually getting along with the players so it's gonna be fun to watch so I had a couple things I wanted to talk about one by the time people are hearing this I'm sure Aaron Judge will have either won an MVP award or finished a fairly close second not really going out on a limb there you wrote about Aaron Judge the most recent thing that you published as we speak and basically you wrote about how Aaron Judge hits the ball hard which is

not a surprise to anyone but man he hits the ball really really really hard and I've seen some speculation will this have been the best year of Aaron Judge's career will pitchers adjust to him we've seen them seemingly adjust kind of in august early september before he rebroke out again it seemed like either the league had adjusted to him or maybe he was dealing with some injury issues at the time and then of course he went through a little rough patch in the postseason seems at least that he is more prone to kind of ugly slumps than the typical player just because he will go through some periods where he's striking out a lot and it's more notable that he's not doing anything good.

But as you pointed out in this article, there's a lot of room for Aaron Judge not to make contact and still be a really good hitter. So based on what you found, which I'll ask you to describe in a second, I don't know that I think there's really any potential for Judge to be solved by the league and not be a star anymore. I mean, who knows? He might have an excellent career and this will still turn out to be the best season of his career because it was a really fantastic season. But it's just hard for me to imagine him kind of flaming out as opposed to maybe taking a step back or being a 5 or 6 win player instead of a 7 or 8 win player. So what do you think based on the research that you most recently did?

I don't think that we have quite seen something like Aaron Judge. And I know that Giancarlo Stanton is close. And maybe we only really know Judge as a function of the stat cast era having this exit velocity information that we haven't had for very long so we only have the three years and and john carlos tannin in 2015 i guess comes closest to what aaron judge just was in terms of how hard he hits the ball but aaron judge is impressive because of what he does when he makes perfect contact but he's no less impressive because of what he does when he doesn't make a perfect contact he can just he can hit balls that he turns into hits or extra base hits that other players just can't do because he just has this extra i don't know depending on who

you're talking about five or ten miles per hour off the bat that he's just i keep in the post i go back to this double i i keep reflecting upon from the alds where trevor bauer was in some trouble and he was facing judge and i think it was game four and he threw like a 96 mile per hour fastball up and in it was probably too high to be called a strike and Judge just shortened up a swing and lined it into left field for like a crucial double and I know that Judge was having a nightmare of a time actually hitting the ball at all in that series but I just keep coming going back to that and thinking man somehow I feel like judge's quality of contact is underappreciated even though it's like literally the only thing we've been talking about related to him like since april i guess it's yeah like the quality of the contact and then how often he's making contact but i don't

think that he's someone who's going to strike out more. His play discipline isn't bad. He just swings and misses a lot. Well, so does Giancarlo Stanton. So do lots of power hitters. But if anything, I think Judge is likely to strike out less often going forward. And I was playing around just out of curiosity where Judge really stood out. I looked at weighted on base average on contact. So just eliminating walks and hit batters and strikeouts. And I also looked at via baseball

savant expected weighted on base average on contact so doing the same thing and i looked at individual player seasons from 2015 through 2017 etc judge just had the best wobba on contact and he had the best expected wobba on contact and he was so good he was four standard deviations better than the average in the first one and 4.7 standard deviations better than the average in the first one and 4.7 standard deviations better than the average in the second one that's not even like a real amount of standard deviations it went in my schooling it's like no they basically just end like a little above three or maybe maybe they get to four but you just don't see this and so i was running some numbers just out of curiosity judge struck out a little over 30 of the time last year and i thought

well what if i kept everything the same and he struck out a little over 30% of the time last year. And I thought, well, what if I kept everything the same? And he struck out, I don't know, 40% of the time. You'd never make the major leagues striking out 40% of the time. That's catastrophic. Well, he would have hit as well as Edwin Encarnacion just did. That's just amazing to me. So I don't know how he's going to age. Giancarlo Stanton had his big year in 2015. And then his numbers kind of dropped a little bit, at least the exit velocity stuff and in the year ahead and maybe that means something i don't know but you look at judge and nothing about that nothing about how hard he swings or how hard the ball leaves his bat seems like a fluke so it seems like unless he sustains some kind of major injury or he's adjusted to in a way that i don't know what that would be he's's incredible. He's really good. Yeah. Yeah, right. So that, I mean,

that suggests that he's probably not going to disappear or something. I mean, I don't know, maybe he's more vulnerable to certain exploits just because he's so big and he has to worry about how umpires are going to call his zone, which maybe they will figure out or he will figure out how they're going to do it better as he ages. So maybe there's some potential for improvement there. But when you are that much of an outlier in how hard you hit the ball, which is a big part of how good you are as a hitter, it's just really hard to imagine you not continuing to be really good. So I guess that's, you know, I don't know if anyone was worried about Aaron Judge just kind of being a one-year wonder, but it's just really hard to imagine that right now.

Yeah. I mean, what's like, what, is Nelson Cruz like a downside for Aaron Judge? That's, yeah, that is, right, that is out there. Yeah. And Aaron Judge, probably a better defensive player and runner than Nelson Cruz ever was. So yeah, it's a fairly bright future. So as far as the other award votes, we haven't heard them as we speak. I don't know if you have any opinions. I would say that Max Scherzer is probably the deserving NL Cy Young Award winner. And as for the NL MVP, we both wrote articles, I believe on the same day, like half an hour apart or something,

same day, like half an hour apart or something about just how historically log jammed the top of the NL player field is. So I almost have no opinion. It's not important that I have an opinion on this because I'm not voting on it. But really, I mean, there are several players you could tell me he won and I would say, yep, fine. That's good because they're all deserving. And statistically, at least, there's really no significant difference between a handful of guys. I would probably, without having done the extensive research that I would do if I were voting, I'd probably vote for Stanton, I guess. But again, almost anyone else who could conceivably win this thing is fine with me. So I just whatever the outcome is was i am rubber stamping it in advance essentially yeah these things just cause divisiveness where it doesn't need to exist sometimes there is no single most valuable player that we can identify sometimes it's a whole group of them congratulations to like a third of the players on the nationals for being the best players in the national league as well as stanton and vato and there are a couple rockies who didn't even make it as finalists because they only named three

finalists for this thing a week ahead of the time so yeah it puts people in a really difficult position and if you are a a voter and if you're a voter therefore you're a writer if you're a voter for this year's national league mvp you are almost you're basically obligated to write an article explaining why you did what you did and and that basically obligated to write an article explaining why you did what you did and and that's just going to make a lot of people upset because i don't know you can't sell it because i don't think that there is a legitimate method that separates one player from another i don't know like six eight really good players in the national league and so it kind of puts you in a no-win situation which i i get it awards exist and

and the voters are selected so that they can make these difficult decisions but sometimes it's not divined by god that there was a most valuable player in the national league and it's up to human beings to identify that player i don't i don't I don't think that we can do it. Okay. One other quick news item, news to us at least, is that there was an item here that surfaced on Wednesday that the league is evidently looking into the baseball in some sort of rigorous way. John Marossi tweeted something from an MLB spokesman who said that the league is in the middle of a thorough review of data relating to composition of baseballs. And John Rico, the Mets assistant GM, said something about it this week too. A committee that is in the midst of studying the ball, a high-level panel of physicists and

scientists to study the ball. And Rico said that early returns were that not much has changed, but they haven't reached any kind of conclusion or produced any report yet. So we don't know what they'll say. We don't know what they're looking at, but at least we know that they're looking. And so presumably we'll hear something about the results of this at some point, and hopefully they will set this thing to rest one way or another, or at least make it look like MLB has, you know, considered this stuff. Because the frustrating thing to me, to the extent that any of this is actually frustrating, is just that MLB keeps saying there's nothing different about the ball, but just hasn't really put any information out there, hasn't really responded directly to any articles that seem to make a case

that there's something different about the baseball, whether by me and Mitchell Lichtman or by Rob Arthur or anyone else. So hopefully this committee is actually considering those things and other things and will present full findings that are convincing to everyone at some point this offseason. Do you have any guesses? Do you have any guesses on exactly what they're going to say when they're done? Well, I'm going to guess that they're not going to contradict Rob Manfred. I mean, it's kind of an awkward situation to put people in. Again, I don't know who's on the panel, and I'm just assuming that this is a good faith effort, that this is not just, you know, trying to dress up something or arrive at an answer that MLB wants it to arrive at. It's kind of a strange situation because Rob Manfred has been insisting for a year or more that there's nothing different about the ball, that there's no evidence that there's something different about the ball. I guess he could conceivably walk that back now that there is this new study that is considering different data and can say, well,

this came to light and now we know. And, you know, I don't know that it would even look that bad like if an MLB committee that was organized by Rob Manfred or with his knowledge does a deeper dive into this and find something that hadn't been considered before and MLB says well we made this study because we wanted to know and they came up with this new info and now we know that whatever the seams are lower or the ball is a little bouncier or whatever it is. I don't know that there would be a lot of blowback to that, really, if it's something that is coming from an MLB-created committee. And they could say, we've taken this under advisement. We've talked to Rawlings.

They're going to tweak their standards in such and such a way. And, you know, I don't know that there would be any big backlash to that, really. I don't know that there would be any big backlash to that really. So I think if they wanted to just acknowledge that something is i also i don't want to sit here and accuse in advance rob manfred's committee of like doctoring or deliberately misinterpreting or misstating the data that they find but you know you you and i and and our wonderful listeners can sit here and say that you know what if they would just tell us that the ball was changed that's fine because this has done good things it has brought offense back into the game at a time when it it badly needed it and what if they would just tell us that the ball was changed that's fine because this has done good things it has brought offense back into the game at a time when it it badly needed it and so if they were just up front about yep ball's different aren't you glad yeah i i would

be fine with it but i would imagine that that would be met with a uh a a great deal of of controversy because people would automatically say well you juiced the ball you juiced the ball and you didn't tell us and it even yep i don't know how you convince people if this was some sort of coincidence i mean it doesn't it doesn't the timing doesn't line up for it to be just a just like a coincidence so doesn't mean the door is closed on it haven't been coincidental but boy what a stroke of good luck for major league baseball if that's the case yeah so anyway i hope that whichever conclusion this committee reaches i just hope that they put their report out there and the data out there so that all of us out here can

come to our own conclusions just if they just say well nothing is different or something is different and don't offer the evidence that led to that conclusion that would be somewhat frustrating i think so as long as they show their work i'm happy it's happening i hope that they just come out after months and they're just like yep something's different that's the press release has all the signatures yep we found it yeah yeah it's just still so perplexing to me again i mean we don't need to rehash all the things but the difference between the mlb and minor league home run rate to me is one of the the more hard to ignore things I mean when guys are coming up from the minors and hitting more home runs with tougher pitching and everything that to me is

it's just hard to square with the idea that there's nothing different anyway we've gone over all of this and hopefully we'll find out more sometime soon so I want to get to emails but as a lead-in to emails because we have some emails soon. So I want to get to emails, but as a lead-in to emails, because we have some emails related to this, I want to talk about Shohei Otani. And there are two topics here. I'm going to assume that by the time people are listening to this, he has not signed yet because the most recent thing that we read is that even the posting agreement could still be weeks away.

So it's going to be a while. We're all going to be talking about Shohei Otani for quite a while while but I don't know that I will personally ever get sick of it so I think one recent question that has surfaced and Travis Sotrick wrote an article about it I believe prompted by a chat question submitted by one of our listeners Mike and Patreon supporters was which league is he better suited for and I've kind of been proceeding under the assumption that it's more likely that he'll go to an AL team, that he could maybe help an AL team more or at least be happier with an AL team if he wants to be a true two-way player. And Travis examined that assumption and found that it's very possible that he will not actually be more valuable to an AL team. Because even if we assume that Otani would DH regularly for an AL team,

he'd have to be really good to be significantly better than the DH average for offense, which is already pretty high. So Travis took the translation of Otani's 2016 stats when he had a full offensive season and was incredibly good. And, you know, he'd be an above average hitter, but by DH standards, not otherworldly. So he'd probably be worth a couple extra wins as a DH, DHing on the days that he doesn't pitch. But if he were in the NL and he essentially only hit when he was starting, plus a couple other instances that we can discuss. But he'd be obviously getting fewer plate appearances,

but the plate appearances that he would get would be as a pitcher, and the offensive baseline for pitchers is extremely low. So he would be much, much, much, much, much better than the typical pitcher as a hitter than he would be the typical DH. So he might still rack up the same value war-wise, hitting a lot less in the National League. And that's before you factor in, A, if he is a good hitter for a pitcher, he's probably not going to be batting ninth when he pitches, right? So he would get more plate appearances than the typical starting pitcher does. Plus he could

pinch hit sometimes, and maybe you could even save a roster spot there because you know that you might not need a dedicated pinch hitter or a guy whose primary job is pinch hitting as much because you have Otani on the days when he's not starting, so that might help an NL team more. And then maybe he could get some DHing in during interleague games also. So I think it's a fairly strong case that he could be as valuable to an NL team, but that doesn't necessarily mean that he's more likely or just as likely to go to an NL team

because he might still prefer to play for an AL team. If he really likes to hit, he would get to hit more often for an AL team. So I don't know that that changes where he's more likely to go, although it does change where he would be more valuable. A small factor, I guess, but additionally, if you assume that he's a good hitter for a pitcher and he's a good pitcher for a pitcher, then if he's in the National League, then he might last a little longer. He might throw more innings because you have less reason to pull him from a game if his spot comes up in the order. So that's just one of those little incidental things. Now, granted, if he was in the American League, that wouldn't be a consideration at all.

And I don't know if Otani and his representation are going to be in there talking to the league about like how long until you might implement universal designated editor. And then who knows where that might lead things. I wonder, I wonder right now, do you think Shohei Otani knows where he wants to go? Do you think he even has like a like a pref list? Or do you think he's just kind of waiting to have someone make the case? Because we have so little information. Like if I don't know if you're not, I already asked you the question.

Do you think he do you think he knows? I mean, he must have narrowed it down slightly, right? I would think he must have some vague preferences because he's been thinking about this for a while so i doubt he would have any sort of final answer now i'm sure he wants to keep an open mind and actually talk to the teams but yeah you would think that he maybe has contenders at least that are above others i would think so probably at least initial inclinations but i'm sure he hasn't come to any kind of conclusion i was uh incidentally talking about otani and less about where he's going to go and more about how that team will handle him i decided i wanted to talk to to dave

cameron this afternoon uh he's more plugged in than i am he knows more about how teams behave and and how they might behave with uh with the otani situation and i i wanted to ask him so what do you think about the odds that otani actually gets put in the minor leagues at the start of next year so that a team can game the service time and do that whole usual thing and he said uh no he said uh he said that his answer was that no that will not happen he figured that otani's representation will probably ask that first that will be one of the very first things that they say to the teams that they're negotiating with and now granted if you are a team you can promise whatever you want just to get otani to sign the dotted line and then as soon as that's done much of the incentive is gone for you to

behave in a i don't know what to call it but appropriate player first manner but you do have to remember that whatever team signs otani is going to want to get him signed to an extension almost immediately, even if it's sort of unofficial terms. And if you put Otani in the minors, I don't know. Look, we've had this conversation before. We didn't know what the situation would be with Chris Bryant when the Cubs sent him down. Or we've talked about the Angels underpaying Mike Trout in his second year or whatever it was where they just gave him the league minimum. And we've said, is this going to damage the team and player relationship and so these things can be recovered from but I don't I he Dave was so confident about this that I no longer believe

with much of my heart that Otani will start next year in the minors unless he has a very bad spring training which remains a possibility yeah that's a good point. I guess that is something you could at least get a verbal agreement on and could potentially separate some suitors from others. And you probably wouldn't want to go back on your word in that obvious a way, you know, two months or whatever, after you tell a player who you want to be in your organization for several years. That would be a pretty bad

way to start that relationship and would be pretty terrible PR if the player went public with it. So yeah, I think that probably makes some sense. But the other reason I wanted to bring up Otani in this transitions into emails is that we've gotten a lot of emails about can a team do this, can a team do that to try to find workaround, some way to essentially give Otani some value that is not covered by the CBA, is not prevented. And I think the answer to almost all of those questions is no, or at least no unless you are really secretive and good at getting away with stuff that you're not supposed to be able to do. So at least legally, and by legally I mean according to baseball's laws, you really can't do any kind of shenanigans. And J.J. Cooper wrote about this recently in Baseball America, and the CBA really tries hard to eliminate any loopholes here. So I can read from the Cooper article here. And, you know, we know that obviously Otani is going to not be getting

more than about three and a half million as a bonus for signing. That's about the most that he could get. It's possible that he'll get less to sign than he would have gotten to stay in play for the fighters next season so that's why his free agency is so fascinating any team can sign him i was actually just having a conversation with a friend who knew about otani but did not know about the signing bonus restriction so i dropped that bomb on him that you know any team and every team could afford otani and should and will try to sign Otani. And he was flabbergasted that this was a thing as I can't blame him

because it is kind of an unprecedented sort of situation. So we know that teams would love to have some way to distinguish themselves other than geographic location or teammates or competitiveness or what you're saying about not starting him in the minors or teammates or competitiveness or, you know, what you're saying about not starting him in the minors or letting him hit more or whatever. Teams would love to just find some way to pay him more, but I just don't see how it can happen. So I'm quoting from Cooper now. Right now, some very smart lawyers in every organization are assuredly looking to

see if there are any loopholes that would aid their case and what they can offer Otani. But the current CBA is explicit that other than a bonus and a minor league contract, any other financial offers are a violation of the CBA and could lead to fines, suspensions for players and or front office officials, voided contracts or other penalties. Teams can't offer Otani an opt out. They can't sign Otani's parents to a massive personal services contract. They can't even promise him a spot on their opening day roster. That's what we were just talking about. And the last sentence of the introductory paragraph about

circumvention makes it clear that the list of possible violations is non-exclusive. So even if a team gets creative and offers something not explicitly banned by the list of violations, the commissioner's office could still come back and declare that such an offer is a violation of the cba and he does include the portion of the cba here that relates to this and you know the the things that it precludes here it's providing paying or promising a player his advisor his foreign league or federation his trainer or his family members anything of value anything of value other than the compensation and benefits contained in the minor league contract, making any payments to or providing anything of value to an individual advising or training or representing a player, agreeing to enter into any business transaction with a player's advisor or trainer, including signing other players represented by the advisor or trainer, promising, representing or committing that a player will be placed on the club's major league roster by a particular date? Uh-huh. Okay.

Well, that is evidently prohibited, although it seems like that would be hard to enforce maybe. But what we were just talking about, at least teams are not supposed to do. Releasing a player as part of a scheme to exclude a player to another minor league contract or major league contract in the future or to provide additional compensation or benefits under the extant contract, such as a higher salary in future years of the minor league contract. And then there's the kind of blanket clause that's like anything else we decide is not kosher here. So basically, no, you can't do the thing that you're wondering if the team can do to sign Otani, or at least you can't do it if there's any chance to get caught, I guess, if you're wondering if the team can do to sayonara or at least you can't do it if there's any chance to get caught i guess if you're just willing to completely you know not leave a paper trail and make like offshore bank deposits or something and keep it just totally secret i

guess you know potentially there's some way you could hoodwink everyone but realistically speaking no there is no way around this the only thing you can do i guess and tim dirks had a post about this on mlb trade rumors this week you could extend him but not for a lot of money not for like a really player friendly term i mean you can't just say okay we'll extend you now for some massive contract that is prohibited but what tim was saying is you could essentially offer an extension that would be in line with other previous extensions that have been offered to or agreed to by other players in the same sort of situation. So, you know, there's some precedent for players

signing extensions with fewer than 30 days of big league service time. There's Evan Longoria, there's Matt Moore, there's Jonathan Singleton so there's that sort of deal if you wanted to maybe you could get away with that but that is really not much of an incentive because you know that's like a team-friendly contract in most cases so that wouldn't be much of an incentive for Otani that would basically be saying not only can you not make a lot of money now you can never make a lot of money so I don't know that he would even be interested in that sort of thing yeah it's funny when you reflect on those early distinctions just how player unfriendly they end up being but i i don't remember who was tweeting about this the other day but i liked the i like the argument and it's true that as soon as this sweepstakes is

complete and otani has signed with some team every other team is going to be like they did something they everyone is going to view this deal with suspicion which makes all the sense in the world because the the probability is extremely high something shady will have been done because now that doesn't mean that it's necessary if every single team acted in good faith and followed the cpa to a letter then otani would still sign with some team and it would be fair and it would be done and it would it would be almost just luck luck in location and i guess circumstances at that point so it doesn't mean that anything nefarious or or sort of uh screwing the rules will have been done but i think that we we understand the baseball industry well enough to figure that teams will find something and the team that lands or

tony will be the team most likely to have found or done something it will still be based on some luck and location and circumstances but basically as soon as otani has signed they are going to be i don't know maybe 20 teams were like yeah we knew he wasn't going to come to us anyway that's fine but then there were they're going to be like eight or nine other teams who figured hold on we need to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate. What do they have that we don't have? It must be something nefarious. Right. And then as soon as he signs some sort of extension,

it probably doesn't benefit Otani to play for a month and then sign away like two free agent years. If anything, he needs to just get to free agency as quickly as he can. Because, I mean, look, it's not like this guy isn't at all motivated by money these are just peculiar circumstances that he is in so he uh he certainly doesn't need to he's coming over for such a team-friendly term he doesn't need to make the problem worse so to speak he's already made some millions of dollars in in japan but if he signs any sort of massive extension then there's going to be just another wave of of speculation, hold on, they had this worked out months ago.

Obviously they had this worked out months ago, and there won't be any way to disprove it, because hopefully these teams are smarter than to have these things down in writing. Right, yeah, so it'll be hard to get away with, because you'll have a lot of people wanting to snitch on you, essentially, if there's any hint that you might have done something. All right. By the way, while we were talking,

it was announced that Max Scherzer did, in fact, win the NL Cy Young Award. I guess the only semi-surprising thing about the Cy Young Award results is that they were roughly equally close. In the AL, Kluber got 28 first place votes and won overall 204 to 126 and in the nl scherzer got 27 first place votes and won 201 to 126 so i'm semi-surprised i guess that the al race wasn't a little bit closer just because you know there's a legitimate case for chris sale there and he looked like the favorite at some times this year but that's not the case everyone was pretty set and decided on it being kluber and scherzer as i think they probably should have been. Through the first two months of the season, Chris Sale had, I think it was like 75 innings and an ERA in the twos. Kluber had like 35 innings and an ERA in the fives. He had a DL stint and then Kluber came back.

Almost to the last few weeks, I thought this momentum argument is dumb. Momentum shouldn't matter for the Cy Young. It should be all the entire regular season. It be your your whole body of work that you should be evaluated on and then kluber just kept on going he didn't get he made up almost the entirety of the innings gap with chris sale and even though i know that chris sale finished above kluber in fan graphs wins above replacement it was small kluber allowed a lower on base percentage and a lower slugging percentage. He had a much better ERA. They faced roughly similar opponents. I can't really argue

with that pick, and I certainly can't argue with Scherzer over Kershaw or Strasburg in the National League. So way to go, panel of voters. Right. So we did get one question about Otani that is probably worth answering. This is from Jordan, who wanted to ask us about Otani arbitrage. So he said, are there any league rules that prevent a team from signing Otani only to immediately trade him for a huge prospect haul? How about the same situation, but the trade is for cash? Are there any teams that you guys think should do this if they win the Otani lottery? So as for the cash situation, you wouldn't get away with that. You can't just sell a player for many millions of dollars. The commissioner has to approve any transaction that includes more than like a million dollars

or something like that. So you can't just sell Otani for like hundreds of millions of dollars or something that would obviously be voided. But the first scenario, signing him and then trading him for lots of prospects, seems like technically it could be done. I guess the question is, would it be done? Is there any incentive for it to be done? Can you think of any reason why a certain team would be in a situation where it would be able to sign Otani but then would want prospects more? Like, it's hard to imagine. I guess maybe if somehow a tanking or rebuilding team managed to sign Otani,

and that probably would be difficult because you'd think that Otani has his pick of teams. He'd want to go somewhere he can win, but who knows? We don't know what's important to him. Maybe that's not important to him. If he went to a team that is just embarking on a rebuild or something like if he went to the tigers or something i again don't know why he would do that but if he did then maybe they'd rather have someone who would be good you know three four or five years down the road which otani might but his immediate success might be worth more to another team and you know you could get a pretty

big prospect hall if you were to do this somehow so i guess it's possible it's not very realistic but there are some teams that maybe if they manage to land him this would make sense yeah you would i don't know i don't know exactly what this would require because our tony would have to sign with a team and then completely misread that team's direction because otani would have to sign with a team and then completely misread that team's direction or and the team would have to just outright lie to him now i don't know i'm maybe maybe otani just really wants to go as low as he can and just sign with like the worst team in base maybe he wants to go to the tigers i don't know what he what he wants nobody knows what he wants but assuming that he's's not motivated by that, then he would have to make the decision to go to a team

and then have that team essentially remove his freedom of choice, strip it from him, and just trade him immediately to some team that he can't choose. So he would be immediately put off. And then from the other team's perspective, it would make sense for a bad team to trade Otani because of his massive surplus value. But then if you are another team that wanted him, you would have to give up pretty much his equivalent cost in young players to get him. At which point, then you're not even trading prospects for a proven major leaguer. You're trading prospects for just a different sort of unknown.

So I don't really see that a team would be sufficiently motivated to do that so fun hypothetical i i don't think that it's against the rules i i guess there is there's still that rule about how free agents can't be traded until like june 15th without their consent does that apply to right for anything like this i don't know a minor league deal i'm not sure there's i mean this is such a a singular deal? I don't know. A minor league deal? I'm not sure. I mean, this is such a singular deal that I don't know exactly what applies to it and what doesn't.

So I was thinking about that, but at worst, I guess you'd have to hang on to him for a little while. It wouldn't really change his value all that much. So it's, I don't know, it's worth considering, I suppose, but it seems like an unlikely sequence of events that you'd have a team just outright mislead him about its intentions and also that a team that would be in a position to have a reason to do this would actually be able to sign him so it's unlikely

probably there's one team that I think could conceivably do something like this and there's one team that could conceivably be willing to put Otani in the minor leagues to start the year. And it's AJ Preller. It's AJ Preller, San Diego Padres. I think he's the only one who might figure, look, my reputation is already so far gone. I don't care. If I can build a winner, I'm going to build a winner. And I'm going to do whatever I can do it. All right. Question from Dalston, who says, I was discussing with one of my friends today how our favorite team, the Cardinals, could improve this offseason.

In general, both of us think that there isn't a lot of value to be found in free agency recently. In investigating this, I noticed that according to Fangraphs, only three of the top 20 position players by war in 2017 play for a team other than the one that drafted them. That would be Justin Turner and Justin Upton and Andrelton Simmons. This got me to thinking, is this unusual or typical? How often is it the case that most of the best positioned players in baseball play for the team that drafted them? Should we infer that the draft is the best place for MLB teams to get top level talent? Is this maybe a consequence of players reaching their peaks at a younger age? Yes.

The first thing that comes to my mind is definitely the latter one where you figure players are peaking somewhere in their 20s. And if you have, I don't know, what's an average WUH? Good young player. Let's say he comes up at 22 even. But he maybe gets his first full year of service at 23 or 24. Then he's going to be under team control through 28 or 29. If he's good, he's unlikely to be traded as a major leaguer. 29 if he's good he's unlikely to be traded as a major leaguer oftentimes if he's good there's been a trend toward signing these players to extensions that buy out a year or two or three of their future free agency which is why you so seldom see free agents hitting the market as good

players before they're 30 it's what makes eric cosmer unusual now it's what made jason hayward unusual the other year so i think that i don't have numbers for how consistent or inconsistent this has been i don't have a 3 out of 20 or 4 out of 20 numbers for the last several seasons i think that it is probably treading toward players staying with the teams that drafted them because i think teams just in general don't want to trade the players who are pretty clearly good and young so not too surprising to me yeah i wrote I wrote something for Baseball Prospectus. I don't know. I'm trying to find it. It was like, I think the headline was farewell to free agency or something and, you know, somewhat overblown. But definitely we have

seen less value in free agent classes recently because, and I wrote that, I don't know, it was maybe four or five years ago or something. there was one particularly terrible free agent class, but we've seen trends toward early career extensions, which lock players up until they're past their peaks. We've seen greater recognition of when players' peaks actually are and the fact that they decline earlier than people used to think they decline. And we've seen players seemingly, whether because of better drafting, better development, all of the above, get to the majors and produce more quickly. So for all of those reasons, we're just seeing a shift away from free agency being really important in how you construct a roster. It still matters, of course,

but the impact players on this year's market just aren't really that great for the most part. With the exception of maybe Otani, you have Darvish, who's a good pitcher, but no longer, I would say, one of the very best pitchers in baseball. And then you've got like JD Martinez and Eric Hosmer and good players, but not the best players.

So it's not like you can build a team out of free agency anymore. It's just receded somewhat in importance. So I don't have the exact numbers, but it definitely has become more common, I think, for the best players to be homegrown probably and for teams to count on that avenue for talent more. So next one, let's see, where should we go? I guess we can take this one from Lane. And I believe we answered an email from Lane early in the year or right before the season. It was about intentional walks and whether we would see more. And Lane thought there would be more intentional walks. He estimated a 30% increase in intentional walks because he was

thinking that part of the reason that managers didn't call for more is that they were worried that, you know, throwing intentional balls would screw up pitchers either psychologically or mechanically. And with intentional walks going to the automatic model where you just have to signal, that wouldn't be a concern anymore. And I don't think either of us expected a notable change. And as it turns out, there wasn't one. So Lane followed up and he wrote, Intentional walks were up by 4% this year compared to 2016 with the new no throw rule. But 2017 was still a historically low season for intentional walks due to the larger trend away from this tactic. However, there did seem to be a couple changes in how the tactic was deployed this year. One, intentionally walking the number eight hitter increased by 19%, reaching the highest total since 2010, and the highest percentage of intentional walks since the start of the DH era in 1973.

This was related to big spikes in second and fourth inning intentional walks when the number eight hitter is likely to come up and then number two intentional walks with the pitching team losing by four or more runs increased by 37 percent reaching the highest total since 2008 and the second highest percentage of intentional walks since 1973 with the strike year being number one and he wants to know why either of those things happened or both of those things happened do we have any theories or is it just small sample and you know splitting the data i mean i don't know well let's see let's uh let's what was what was the last one like uh intentional walks were up when you're the pitching team losing by four or more runs losing by four or more runs okay so let's see losing by four or more but an intentional walk implies that you are still you still think you're kind of in the game.

Who knows what this... Comebacks, I think, were a little more common this year. There was a recent Rob Maines article about that. I don't know if it's related to the home run rate or not, but maybe that's something that comes into play here. Yeah, right, right. So it was up, what, 37%? But maybe I'm already blanking. Was there any other historical reference for that rate that he said? Up by 37%, highest total since 2008,

second highest percentage of intentional walks since the DH era began. Yeah, okay. So maybe because offense has been up and there's been so many home runs, four runs as a margin just doesn't mean as much as it used to, so games feel more competitive, so therefore you're less inclined to give up i don't know small a small part of it might be that when you're when you're sort of fringe still in the game as a manager you might uh you might feel more comfortable just signaling for the intentional walk as opposed to just drawing out an intentional walk for like the minute or minute and a half that it used to take i don't know that that one's probably dumb

so i'm going to go with a big margin no longer feels like so big a margin. Yeah. Or it could be, I mean, how many intentional walks with the pitching team losing by four or more runs are there? I wonder. It's got to be a small number, right? Most intentional walks. Yeah. So maybe it's one of those cases where it's just a big percentage increase, but a very small increase in actual intentional walks the answer is that i'm testing you here there were so many intentional there we go 76 that's it oh i don't care yeah doesn't matter to me yeah so it's probably just it might just be that it's just you know a small number and a little fluctuation might seem like a lot but isn't actually all that meaningful and as for the first one more intentional walks to the number eight hitter and a high percentage of intentional walks going to the number eight hitter i don't know i guess

maybe just the fact that pitchers continue to get worse at hitting and teams recognize that maybe that could be something or again maybe it's just not all that important i don't know but uh i guess the larger takeaway is just it didn't really have much of a change just going from actually having to throw four intentional balls to just signaling didn't matter so much i wonder if any pitcher this year was intentionally walked no the answer is no okay makes plenty of sense. All right. Let's see. Maybe one or two more here. All right. Let's do this one. On a recent Ringer podcast, there was some banter about how you'd need to be able to travel to the future to make the right predictions about whom to start and when to pull pictures, et cetera. This reminded me of a book, Every Anxious Wave by, let's see, Mo Daviau. Maybe I'm pronouncing that right. I don't know.

Where the main character finds he can travel back that right, I don't know, where the main character finds he can travel back in time but can't affect anything, only observe, so he uses it to go back and watch old rock concerts, sometimes bringing guests back with him, bringing it back to baseball, given the same type of time travel opportunity, which game would you most like to go back and attend? Would it change greatly if you could record it and collect full stat cast data? Would you want a Woodstock type of situation like a World Series or All-Star game? Or would you go for one historical moment like Jackie Mitchell striking out Ruth and Gehrig? Or is there one you'd do more for personal reasons like seeing your favorite player at

his peak? Well, I would want to go back and see Randy Johnson hit that bird. I think that would be an incredible experience. And especially if I could know that it was going to happen, then i would be able to get some sort of a i'd bring a lot of camera equipment yes you could document it i would i would probably make myself a multimillionaire almost immediately and i don't know i would i would like to go back to as early a baseball game as i possibly could provided that i am somehow able to make myself immune from suffering the various ills of existing in the world at that time and place i am somehow able to make myself immune from suffering the various ills of existing

in the world at that time and place i don't want to come away with a horrible case of the influenza or the vapors so i would i would like to go and and watch some super old-timey old-timey baseball as far back as i can go i'm not really interested in trying to apply stat cast or pitch fx technology to old baseball i think that we have information overload and i kind of like that there's just old mythology that exists i don't know how hard bob feller threw and i never will that's great i know how hard noah cindergarten throws with two strikes and a left-handed batter at the plate so i have more than enough information what about you yeah i mean there's so many options you know legendary, moments of great historical import. You could go back and watch Jackie Robinson's debut. I mean, there are so many options. I think I'd probably go

watch Merkel's Boner. I think that's what I would do. Go back and see the Boner because I think Merkel's Boner is still a household play. I think it is known to, well, I don't know if it's known to most baseball fans, but certainly most serious baseball fans. And we're talking about well over a century now, and yet it is still very well known. I don't know if that's because it's called Merkel's Boner, and that is very funny in this day and age or not. But again, this is 1908. It's still one of the most famous plays in baseball history. It has the advantage of being old-timey baseball, so we get to see a very different baseball from the one we know. And I think the real draw is that no one knows to this day exactly what happened, and it's still controversial, and there's no way for us to resolve that controversy other than to time travel. So I think I would go back and see

that, especially if I could document it. I guess you could say there's some appeal to just having it be a mystery forever, but I would also be interested in being able to solve the mystery. So if I could go back and record it somehow and settle this question once and for all, did Merkel actually make a boner? What was his boner? What did the boner look like? Et cetera. I think I would do that. I don't know. I guess, I mean, the thing is that in order to document it, I mean, you'd have to, in order to convince anyone that you were right, that this was legitimate and authentic, you'd have to tell them about the time travel. Everyone would have to know about the time travel. Otherwise, you'd just sound like a crazy person who was claiming this and it wouldn't actually settle anything. And if everyone knows about time travel and you can freely time travel, there are probably many more important things and questions you could go back and answer than the Merkel's boner question. But I think that's

what I would do. Settle it once and for all, what exactly happened that day and bring back some evidence. So that would be my pick probably. If you go to Fred Merkel's Wikipedia page, then you have within the table of contents, subhead number two, the boner. If you go to Fred Merkel's Wikipedia page, then you have within the table of contents, subhead number two, the boner. If you go to the page for Merkel's boner, table of contents, subhead number three, boner. Just, I got, I'm not ever, I'm not, I hope that I never grow so old that this doesn't delight me. Yeah. All right. I'm going to close with this.

This is from William. He says, there's a lot to talk about all the time. But if you want to discuss something that happened 17 years ago, I have recently found myself fascinated by the March 17th, 2000 three-way trade between the Expos, Blue Jays, and Rangers. Here it is. Expos acquire Lee Stevens, first baseman. Blue Jays acquire Brad Fulmer, first baseman. Rangers acquire David Segui, first baseman, and cash. At the time, the Blue Jays were hoping to shed some payroll and move Segui so Carlos Delgado could play first base full-time. Fulmer, a comically inept fielder, was going to DH. I don't necessarily understand the trade from Montreal's perspective beyond team control. Segui made $4.3 million in 2000. That was partially paid down by the Blue Jays, but Lee Stevens made $3.5 million. Segui was set to be a free agent while Stevens did have remaining control. Two years later, Stevens was packaged with Grady Sizemore, Brendan Phillips, and Cliff Lee for

Bartolo Colon. Oops. Then the Rangers, who had Rafael Palmeiro coming off a gold glove 1999 season, that's the notorious gold glove when he barely played first base did downgrade defensively by giving up stevens saggy dh most of the year and palmero played first saggy signed a free agent deal with baltimore after the season all of this is well and good but the most important aspect of my intrigue is this how many other times has a three-way trade featured just three players at the same position and uh i don't really have an answer for that but in retrospect that is a very strange trade yeah three first basemen traded for each other with like fairly similar talent levels and salary situations very odd maybe instead of going back and seeing merkel's boner i'd go back to the

conference call that arranged this three-way trade yeah you know it would be uh it would be fun to go to back to some old uh some old winter meetings before it was sort of the media draw that it is now and you could just kind of hang out with famous team executives just kind of hanging out in the lobby doing work making trades swinging deals drinking at the bar can't really do that so much anymore unless you just want to get really loaded with bruce bocce and jim leland that's my experience at the winter meetings but yeah when uh when we got this email i looked at it i thought that is a really weird trade but it's so hard to go back in and analyze these things in the past because we're so used to uh when we analyze moves now we have contract information that is present today and it gets a lot more difficult to look up what the

contract situations were obviously it's it's still possible but it's it's very tricky i don't know what kind of information teams were going with back then but it sure as hell wasn't wins above replacement for all these players so it just seems like it was a there's a weird nothing trade i shouldn't say nothing trade but just a weird almost inexplicable trade i sent an email response this was this email rolled in a few weeks ago and i sent a link to a i think it was an article from like canoe.ca or something that was giving i think the canadian perspective on the trade and it was talking about how jeffrey loria was trying to what was it like build up load up some expensive players and try to make the expos competitive what little the author knew

the quote loria continues to follow through on his promise to try to make the expos a more competitive team also acquired in the offseason we're starting pitcher hideki rabu relief pitcher graham lloyd and second baseman mickey morandini what a sentence that didn't quite put them over the top yeah so that's a weird one i don't know if anyone has any good precedents in mind for a three-way trade with three first basemen and nothing else please let us know because uh it's a weird one it was in the works for three days apparently before it happened it feels like i know it's not going to happen because they're all free agents but you know you've got like yonder alonzo logan morrison lucas duda all out there probably other ones too and it feels like they could all just kind of like trade places with one another just taking

signing one year contracts over and over i don't know there's a lot a lot of interchangeable first basement but yeah weird to see them traded for one another. All right, so that will do it. A couple quick notes here from future Ben or closer to your present Ben. I now know that Jose Altuve is the AL MVP and Giancarlo Stanton is the NL MVP. Stanton's victory was extremely narrow, which is probably appropriate. I think there were, what, six guys who got multiple first-place MVP votes in the NL this year. Very weird year. Altuve beat Judge by a much wider margin than was expected, but I probably would have voted for Stanton and Altuve, so can't quibble with either result. And a few follow-ups from listeners about our bathroom break by baseball players

conversation yesterday. Tom writes in to remind us that when the Red Sox were all sick with flu-like symptoms early in the 2017 season, Andrew Benintendi threw up in the outfield during a game reportedly. That was in April. I don't know if that was televised. And Maxwell reminded us of an all-time weird baseball tweet as he puts it, game three of the 2016 World Series between the Cubs and Cleveland was delayed briefly because Mike Napoli could not be located, after which he tweeted a gif describing his quote-unquote situation, and the gif is of Elmo sitting on a toy toilet. And as Maxwell points out, Napoli also homered in that game. And lastly, at least for now, atleez34 on Twitter reminds us that friend

of the pod Dan Heron tweeted last year that he took Imodium on most days he pitched to plug himself up so he wouldn't have to think about this. So thanks as always to the collective wisdom of our listeners. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Five listeners who have already pledged their support include Troy Carter, James Walker, Michael Mountain, Anthony Sheff, and Ian Swirka. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash Effectively Wild. And of course, you can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes or the podcatcher of your choice.

Thanks to Dylan Higgins for editing assistance. Please replenish our mailbags. We need your questions to give us content for the long, cold winter. You can email me and Jeff at podcast at fangraphs.com or by messaging us through Patreon. So have a wonderful weekend. We will talk to you all soon. And there's no future in the past. So take it slow

You're getting nowhere fast You could be saving the situation now You better run