Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1139: The WAR We Want

Episode Date: November 21, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about a Shohei Otani “deadline” and Braves prospect Ronald Acuna, then bring on FanGraphs managing editor Dave Cameron to discuss a dispute about WAR and valuing players between Bill James and sabermetric stat sites, the evolution of awards (and Hall of Fame) voting, why Dave expects certain teams to […]

Hello and welcome to episode 1139 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. Hopefully a rested and restored and well-traveled Jeff Sullivan. How was your trip? It was pretty good. Arizona is hot, but it's also very cold. Yeah, hot during the day, cold at night, something for everyone. Yeah, for anyone who doesn't really understand, Arizona gets down close to sea level. I don't know exactly where Phoenix is. It's a little above sea level. But as you drive north, you can get to about 7,000 feet. And that's not even in

a mountain. So Arizona, a much more diverse array than it's given credit for. Excellent. So what we're doing today is talking to your boss and pal, Dave Cameron, managing editor of Fangraphs. We're going to bring him on in a few minutes to talk about a kind of kerfuffle that happened over the weekend about war and how wins above replacement is calculated and whether the main sites that host that now are doing it wrong. There was a Bill James critique that caused something of a stir. So we're going to talk to Dave about that and maybe also a little bit about awards voting and free agency. But we want to talk about just a couple things briefly before we bring him on. The first thing is Shohei Otani. And today is a

Shohei Otani news day, as is every day this offseason, really. But there is a deadline that was set today by the Players Association. So it's Monday, 8 p.m. Eastern, and it's the Players Association's self-imposed, I suppose, deadline to either agree to a new posting deal or agree to an extension on the deadline if the progress is made. So that's not really much of a deadline. If we don't make the deadline, we're just going to have an extension to talk more about the deadline if the progress is made so that's not really much of a deadline if we don't make the deadline we're just gonna have an extension to talk more about the deadline so if there's news about that later we may reconvene for a few minutes at the end of the

podcast to discuss whatever that news was but basically the players association has a say here and and has a potential issue here as ken Ken Rosenthal reported, there are a few reasons why this is so. According to Ken, it's not necessarily related to Otani. The union is okay with extending the current agreement for one year, but there are several aspects of that that the union evidently is not okay with. So I'm reading from an LMB Trade Rumors summary of Ken Rosenthal's article here, it says, The system as currently constructed would allow NPB teams to post players throughout the majority of the offseason. The union, not wanting domestic free agency to be held up by the uncertainty of whether Japanese players will be posted, wants NPB teams to make that call by November 15th.

So I guess that makes sense. So I guess that makes sense. I remember a few years ago, it seemed like the Daisuke Matsuzaka posting question kind of held up the pitching market for quite a while. So, you know, I guess that makes sense. Maybe it's not fair to impose that deadline on NPB teams that is not imposed on MLB teams, but it's a different system. So that's part of it. And then another thing, the new proposal also awards the NPP team a sum that is equal to 20% of the contract the player signs with an MLB team, not 20% of his actual contract though, and allows the NPP club to rescind its posting of a player if it is unsatisfied with the contract to which he agrees. Rosenthal notes that MLB allowed the pullback provision due to NPP concerns that a player could sign a small deal and then sign a much larger extension within a year or two. So I guess the MLBPA doesn't want all the negotiations to happen and then have the NPP team say, no, we changed our minds, which I guess is also understandable from their perspective although again also kind of unfair to the the NPP teams I guess because they you know should be able to to make a decision about their player you would think based on how much money they're going to be getting for that player especially in this market

where the CBA has already artificially restricted what they can earn and what a player coming from Japan who is not 25 years old with a certain amount of service time can earn. And then, you know, I guess you don't necessarily want the whole negotiations to play out and everything and then find out that it was all for naught because the MPB team is pulling the player back. So I get it, I guess. And, you know, again, a lot of this seems to come back to the CBA and its very strict limits on spending, which a lot of people criticized the Players Association for allowing to happen at the time. I don't have a perfect understanding of how these things work. But once again, it seems like this is something that they could have seen coming ahead of time.

So it seems a little strange to have this be such a stumbling block. strange to have this be such a stumbling block now i am much like yourself much like a i think ken rosenthal i'm not too concerned about this alleged monday deadline because it seems like a very soft deadline and if they don't do anything on monday then well now maybe tuesday's the deadline and etc it will kind of creep forward i think we both in this specific circumstance i think we both expect that there will be some kind of humdrum boring ordinary agreement that will sort out a few details and then otani will come along i think that there is just too much momentum for otani to come over for something like this to get in the way i was unclear when ken rosenthal was presenting the union's disagreements he had a third bullet point there was a the range of dates when players could be posted and there was a there was the second bullet point that I already forgot

what that was. But it was the third one that was tripping me up because there was some concern about Japanese teams getting more money if players signed when they weren't yet 25. And I just wasn't really clear on what that point was. And it hasn't been very clearly expressed i don't think so unfortunately that means that i can't really talk about it but there is some lack of clarity there but i think that just sort of in general the concerns here aren't enormous i understand have we ever seen a player pull back i know that when hisashi wakuma was posted and then the a's won the bidding they didn't seem i don't i don't want to say they didn't negotiate in good faith but they did not offer him very much money i don't know if

that's because they saw something in his shoulder that maybe the dodgers saw several years later or if the a's were just trying to block another team like say the seattle mariners from getting iwakuma that offseason but i know that he didn't end up signing that was not a case i don't think where the team just pulled him back i think the team wanted the posting fee in any case but i guess when you have a situation where a player signs a small contract as per the requirements of the cba and then he signs a much larger contract a few years down the road well that's that's what's going that's is what happens with young players all the time and the only thing that would really stand out here would be a case like specifically shohei otani's case and i just don't know what you're supposed to do about that but and the only thing that would really stand out here would be a case like specifically shohay

otani's case and i just don't know what you're supposed to do about that but once again we have seen otani coming for at least i don't know two years and it seems like the something that could have been negotiated well ahead of time right because otherwise if you have a player signed for a small amount of money who isn't shohay otani but someone who maybe deservedly signs for a small amount of money when he's posted and And then a year or two later, he looks much better than expected. Then he signs a big extension. Well, I don't think the NPB teams have any right to demand more money there. Yeah. John Heyman reported last week that this did have something to do with Otani's potential earnings and that they were concerned, the union was concerned that the fighters would be getting 20 million while Otani would be getting a maximum of 3.5 million. And yeah, I mean, if that is part of this, then

that seems very silly to be concerned and to be making us think about that now when they just agreed to the conditions that we all knew was going to make that the case just a year or so ago. So if that's part of this, I have zero sympathy for them for not foreseeing this problem and the way that it depresses foreign players' salaries. So anyway, we'll see. And like you, I expect there to be some sort of agreement, whether it's today or sometime soon, just because the player wants to come over his team is okay with him coming over MLB certainly wants him to come over because he's going to be a big story fans want him to come over so that they can watch him and see what happens so everyone wants this and I think there is considerable pressure on all of the parties involved not to hold this up here so

it would be a very unpopular move if the MLBPA were to somehow stand in the way here. So anyway, we'll either have an update later or there will not be an update yet later. And one more quick thing that I just want to mention before we bring Dave on, we don't talk about prospects all that much on the show. Occasionally we'll do a prospect centric episode with someone who really knows about prospects, but it's not our specialty. And so we are often not the best qualified people to talk about prospects. But I do want to mention perhaps the best prospect in baseball, Ronald Acuna,

because he just ended an incredible season in an incredible way. And I mean, he just, if people aren't familiar with what Acuna did this year, he is, of course, the Braves outfielder. He's 19 years old. I think he turns 20 next month. And he had an amazing season. He entered 2017 as, you know, a top 100 guy, but not a very top of the top 100 guy. I think Baseball Perspectives had him 31, Baseball America had him 67. And between some other guys getting promoted to the majors and Acuna just having a flawless season,

I think he's now probably the consensus top pick heading into next year. And if he wasn't at the end of the regular season, I think he is now because he was just named the MVP of the Arizona Fall League, as if his season wasn't impressive enough. So he was the AFL MVP. He hit 325, 414, 639, led the league with seven home runs, had the second best OPS in the league. Of course, this is a league full of the best prospects in baseball, and he excelled in that competition. And according to one report I read, he is the youngest prospect to receive that AFL MVP award. And this is coming on the heels of a season where he started at high A

and then graduated to AA and then graduated to triple a and got better at every level which is also amazing so he had an 814 ops in high a an 895 ops in double a and a 940 ops in triple a and like really solid numbers at every level solid power and these are not particularly small samples either he had you know 28 games in high a and then 57 and 54 at the higher levels. And I don't know where this leaves him other than consensus top prospect in baseball. I don't know if he would have a chance of breaking camp with the Braves next spring, but it'll be talked about, of course, all spring training just because you don't often see a 19 year old player make that large a leap in one season and show just zero holes in his game really and get better the better the competition he faces so this is you know i don't know if it's the best minor league season the best minor league season is probably one where you get called up to the majors and you're good and obviously we've seen 19 year olds do that so it's not the most

impressive age 19 season ever but it's pretty darn impressive yeah and i mean clearly this is a guy who came into the year as a legitimate prospect as i think you mentioned he was number 67 by baseball america before this year but it's also i love i love the idea that he improved from high a to double a to triple a and then if you want to say that the afl is harder than triple a i don't know but all the players there are for the most part good sounded like he had an even higher ops From high A to double A to triple A. And then if you want to say that the AFL is harder than triple A, I don't know. But all the players there are, for the most part, good. Sounded like he had an even higher OPS in the AFL. And then you kind of go back, I guess.

And he ruins the streak because in regular A ball last year, he had an OPS that was five points higher than what he did in high A. So he didn't get better at every single level. And then there are adjustments to make. But it's also easy to lose that this year over three levels, not counting thel he stole 44 bases so he also has a lot of speed not one of those big like heavy walkers he has maybe a few contact problems look i don't know the guy's 19 years old or yeah still 19 years old he doesn't turn 20 until the week before christmas so he is absolutely outstanding based on his minor league profile there's nothing not to like here he seems like maybe he's is i don't know do you think he's basically equivalent with yohan moncada status

a year ago or was moncada even a little older back i don't know exactly i think he might have been right i'll tell you what i'll tell you what right now yeah so last offseason, Mankata was 21. So Acuna is like a year and a half younger than Yuan Mankata was last year, which is just way out there in terms of what Acuna has done. So maybe this is like the next Mike Trout, Ken Griffey Jr., other examples of young players who came up and were good. I don't know. Bryce Harper would be another current example. We clearly can't say what Acuna is going to do, but you think about the Braves rebuild and they're going through the uh i don't know where they are in the disciplinary

process here with the sanctions they're going to have imposed on them but they're going to lose prospects and probably some prospects you've heard of but not akunya obviously and no one as good as akunya because there is no one as good as akunya this is a rebuild that when people talk about the braves rebuild i think the focus is on this is a team rebuilding with pitching and they're just trying to, you know, invoke those classic Braves teams from 20 years ago and they just want to build around a strong starting rotation. And you know what? Maybe one day they will. Right now they have no good pitchers, but they do have Ronald Acuna, the prospect who clearly didn't come out of nowhere, but oh, holy hell, did he kind of emerge and way overachieve

this is the kind of player that you can in theory we'll see how he develops this is this looks like the kind of young player that you could just kind of build a franchise around we could very easily be like a year or two away from akuni being one of the top five like who's a player you would start a franchise around one of the guys you know yeah, no, and he's one of those guys, I don't think there's any disagreement between stats and scouts in his case. There was a mid-season update to Kato, the Chris Mitchell Fangraphs

stats-based prospect projection system. And in late July, Chris put out a top 100 according to that system which is you know based on what level you're at and park adjusted performance and comps and you know what stats in the minors have proven predictive of major league success all of that and at the time this was in late July Acuna was number seven on the Cato top 100. And that was presumably either before he got promoted to AAA and then got even better or before most of that performance. So I'm guessing that now he's either at the top of that list or really close. And I think the scouting based list, if there were a solely

scouting based list, he would be right up there too. So this is definitely not a case where you have any kind of disparity between what the numbers say and what the you know eye test would say he he passes both with flying colors i did not realize that in 2016 one of the reasons that acuna sort of emerged so quickly is that in 2016 he played only i think 42 games because of some sort of injury i am going to admit my lack of knowledge here on exactly what the injury was but i did not realize that for the winter acuna assigned to play in australia that is an uncommon maneuver but that's what he did he put pen to paper according to the author zach mcginnis of this author on web.theabl.com.au etc so australian baseball and highly rated atlanta

braves prospect ron Ronald Acuna has put pen to paper and is set to join the Melbourne Aces for the upcoming Australian Baseball League season. This was a year ago. So interesting move. And this is no longer relevant, but I bet he was good there too. Yeah. I mean, it's amazing that he was this good in the AFL because you would wonder about fatigue with a player like this just because of his youth and because he really hasn't had a full professional season before. I mean, he played, what, 40 games last year or 42 games combined last year, which I guess is maybe why he went to Australia to get more time in. But, you know, 42 games last year, 55 games in 2015. And this year he got up to 139 regular season games and you'd wonder you'd

worry about whether he would be tired at the end of that and if he was it didn't prevent him from being the best player in the league in November too so yeah just a just an amazing irreproachable season so I am looking forward to seeing what he does next year acuna in melbourne batted 375 with a 1.001 ops and according to a according to that same article acuna was joined by catcher wigbeto nevares wigbeto nevares a teammate of his from the rome braves and nevares acted as acuna's translator for the season in Australia. So I don't know exactly how much he played, but that's interesting that Melbourne decided that because it had Acuna on the team, they needed to sign a player to also facilitate communication.

Also, Wigbeto. I have not seen Wigbeto as a first name before. No, neither have I. For clarification purposes, the article made a typo. It is not Wigbeto, it is Wigberto. Wigberto Navarez is the name of the catcher who was signed by melbourne he appears to be not a good hitter uh-huh well that explains it wigbertos are a dime a dozen you come across come across the wigberto every day can't swing a dead cat without hitting a wigberto a buttwig. Beto, that one was going to be a diamond. All right. Well, Dave is ready, so let's take a quick break,

and we'll be back with Dave Cameron. I belong to the race to robots round and round and round. All right, so we are joined now by Dave Cameron, managing editor of Fangrass, making his regular, I don't know, six-monthly appearance on this podcast, something like that. Hello, Dave. Hi, Ben. How are you doing? I'm doing well. So we're going to talk about something that you wrote about today, although I approached you without even knowing that you were going to write about it. That's how simpatico our senses of what the people want to hear or read are right now. I don't know if we're right about that because this is sort of an inside baseball, even more so than usual conversation. This is about how Winslow replacement is calculated,

but I think it is not totally arcane. There's a philosophical difference here and Bill James is involved. So it started a lot of discussion over the weekend. Bill James posted an article on his site, Bill James Online. He called it Judge and Altuve. And the upshot, if I can summarize this here, and Bill James, I think, is upfront about the fact that he hasn't really been that integral a component of the online baseball analysis community for the past couple of decades, maybe partly because he's been working for the Red Sox and who partly because he's been working for the Red Sox and who knows what he's been doing for them, but also because I think once he helped get that community to a certain point, really helped create that community, other people kind

of took it and ran with it and had more programming skills and were able to do things that he hadn't done, but he got the ball rolling. So when he says something, I think about baseball, at least we all pay attention. There are occasional things he says not about baseball on Twitter that we probably shouldn't pay that much attention to, but he also wrote a really good crime book recently that I talked to him about. So his critique here, he says that basically he wasn't that familiar with how war worked because when it started, he says he didn't really want to punch down. He was the famous Bill James. He didn't want to condemn any efforts of the little people who were trying to do baseball analysis at the time. But he has now dug into this stat and has found things that disturb him. So he's using Judge and Altuve as an example of what he sees as a major flaw or even just an error in war, which is that it's not tied directly to team wins.

So what war does basically is it looks at what a player does, kind of the linear weights contribution of what a player does, does, kind of the linear weights contribution of what a player does. And then it sort of just divides the runs that we say he produces by 10 or some number close to 10, depending on the run environment. So it's just kind of a rule of thumb. It's not necessarily looking at how many wins his team actually had. And Bill is saying that's wrong. That's the wrong way to do it. You can't do that. You have to have it you can't do that you have to have it tied to wins and so he's using Judge and Altuve as the comparison here because they had similar wars and Bill says that can't be right because for one thing Altuve's team won a lot more

games and were essentially giving the Yankees credit for scoring runs that didn't lead to wins in their case for for reason. They lost a lot of one-run games, but they didn't have as many wins. And so we should be penalizing Judge for that relative to Altuve. And also just the clutch performance, which is something that we've talked about with Judge before. He was not particularly clutch this year. He had a lot of his production in low leverage moments and kind of had worse production the higher the leverage was. So he's saying that we have to account for those things if we're talking about what a player's value was. And so this prompted a lot of discussion.

Joe Posnetsky wrote about it. Tom Tango wrote about it. There were many Twitter threads. Bill has since posted a follow-up on his site. You wrote about it. What is your reaction to the Bill James critique, if I have summarized it reasonably accurately? You have. I think you summed it up quite well. I think the interesting thing here is I don't actually take his critique of war as a critique

of war because he's essentially arguing against any context-neutral metric as a determiner of a player's value in retrospect, right? So you could write the exact same essay he wrote about batting average or home runs or stolen bases or any number you want to count that is generally used to assess player value. They're generally just aggregated, and the situations that they occurred in are not accounted for. And a home run, like John Carlos Stanton hit 59 home runs this year. How many of them were solo home runs? I don't know. of them are three run home runs i don't know those aren't the

same things in terms of value to the marlins but when we just talk about john carlos stanton's home runs we just count them all as one and so i think in general baseball the baseball community especially the online analytical baseball community has decided that context neutral statistics are generally more preferable than context dependent stats at fangraphs we have a lot of context dependent statistics like win probability added and then some even more esoteric numbers like re24 that go to like part of the way of measuring context but don't include everything that's including context those have been available for a long time and they've never really caught on like we've we've pitched an idea tom Tango's written a series for us

where he basically walked through war and said, you have to make assumptions along the way about how much context you want to include. And he put polls to our readers and said, do you want to include this level of context? And they generally said no. The general baseball fan community has decided, and I think, in my opinion, correctly,

that a context-neutral metric, which is what most baseball statistics are, is more interesting and answers more questions in a way that we kind of want to ask them than if you built some very context specific number that told you that like Aaron Judge wasn't actually any good last year. Yeah, you'd think that stats named RE24 and WPA slash LI would have caught on better than that. It's amazing that with our marketing and branding, we have caught on better than that. It's amazing with our marketing and branding. We have not taken over the world. Yeah. I think a few years ago, actually, I tried to get RE24 to be renamed as context batting runs. And then someone said, if we called it context batting runs above average, we can call it Cobra. And that would be like the coolest baseball stat ever, right? Like Dave Parker had a Cobra of 27.

Who doesn't want to say that yeah jeff what were your thoughts when you read the the bill james piece it seemed like it was it wasn't a new argument necessarily this is something that we've talked about for a long time and it's that i i don't know if it's that we have just put less i shouldn't say we i was late to this whole movement but that the community has put less focus on identifying value in retrospect because it seems like just when we're using these numbers and when we're talking about baseball we're generally forward thinking we're trying to think of what as soon as something is over we're thinking what's going to happen next month or next year how how do things project and if it weren't for the mvp award if it

weren't for that award existing how often would we need to be addressing this in the first place how how much would we care about what someone was worth if it's not what we think they're going to be worth and so i think every year around this time we have a conversation kind of like this and then it just becomes a matter of well people are using war in a way that it's not designed to be used. But like Dave has written about, like he's said today and on several other occasions, if it weren't for that one question, what other questions are we looking to answer if we haven't taken the context into account at times. There was a post on Fangraphs about how Aaron Judge was like the least clutch player of all time or something this season. I mean, that's not saying that he is inherently unclutch or that he will be unclutch in the future. But I think people have long at least acknowledged that or taken it into account as a tiebreaker or something, even if

you don't think that it really reflects any true ability of the player. If you're trying to decide between Altuve and Judge, who by war were very close, then the fact that Judge was very unclutch this year, that factors into the conversation. I think most people even who think war is just fine as it is would acknowledge that it's perfectly fine to consider that when you're talking about retrospective value and the MVP race, right? Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, the kind of metaphor for baseball statistics has always been like a tool belt. Like it's kind of overused, but people are always like, when you need to drive a nail into a wall, use a hammer. When you need to, you know, put a screw into a piece of wood,

use a screwdriver. Like there's a lot of baseball statistics out there that serve very different purposes. And I think in some regards, like this difference between James and perhaps a lot of the online baseball community is just our interest level. Like Bill James wrote several books ranking all of the players in baseball history. Like he's very interested in looking backwards and rating players from different eras and how their performances in the past measure up against each other that's the thing that he is maybe more than most people or more than anyone uh particularly interested in he's not as interested in projections uh like he does some projections but they're not they're not great and you know i think like the forward-looking

stuff as jeff mentioned has never necessarily been a strength of bills you know he does, he does some really wonderful things. He's a great writer. He obviously did a lot for the online baseball community or the baseball community in general. And we're all kind of building off of work he did 30 or 40 years ago. But I think his interest level in the kinds of analysis or the kinds of questions that war is generally used for aren't the kinds of questions that Bill is as interested in asking as other people. And that's okay. Like, you know, I'm not as interested in guys who played in 1910 as he is. That's totally fine. I think the availability of metrics to answer questions is out there. Like, we don't really have a shortage of numbers. Like on bankruptcy, we have a lot of data. Baseball reference has a lot of data. Like if you're in a position where you say, I want to know the answer to the most contextualized value retrospective analysis I can

find, you could build that. You could build a version of war based on win probability added, and you could make all these adjustments. I don't particularly find that interesting, but if you want to, knock yourself out. Yeah. I mean, there's so much, if you want to knock yourself out yeah there's i mean there's so much if you decide that you either want to go to one extreme or the other you could adjust more than than we do currently or make it even more context free or more of a true talent reflection like if you if you wanted to you could use you know expected batting stats based on stat cast and say well we don't want to give him credit for hitting what he actually hit because whatever he got lucky a few times or a fielder messed up or something and now we have stat cast and it tells us how hard he

hit the ball and at what angle and and what that usually results in so we could just say that that's what he did and you can have a version of war that was just even more context independent and so you could have a war that does what he is wanting it to do or or even the most extreme adjustments i mean it's you could have something like i don't know some kind of interactive tool that just says well what do what do you care about? What do you want war to be? Here, you can toggle this box if you want it to be what Bill James wants it to be, or if you want it to be like what his true talent is, as best as we can estimate it, then you can toggle this other thing. And I guess the only downside there really is that, you know, it'll be hard to have kind of a consensus conversation if we're all constructing it differently and people who are still anti-war will use that as ammunition.

You know, they can't even decide on what the number is. It's all different numbers. And, you know, if you're making that argument, you're probably just kind of entering the conversation with a bias here and looking for reasons to support it, I think. But, you know, you could do that. It's just a framework, as Tom Tango always says, and you can decide what you want the inputs to be and how you weight them. Yeah. I think the tricky thing is if you actually go down the path of trying to do

kind of what James says he wants to do, where context is completely included, it's actually really hard. So I brought this up in the post that I wrote. But we always talk about context in terms of the number of runners on base or the situation that the batter hit in, but no one ever talks about what happens after the batter hit, which matters just as much, right? Like if we're going to say that Aaron Judge hitting a three-run home run is more valuable than Aaron Judge hitting a solo home run, then Aaron Judge hitting a single that is followed by a home run is more valuable than Aaron Judge hitting a single that is followed by a double play, right? Like one directly led to a run scoring, one directly led to it out. It wasn't his fault. He didn't have anything to do with it, just like he didn't have anything to do

with the guys getting on base in front of him. But if we're just doing double entry accounting, and we're trying to figure out, did this play lead to X number of runs, then we have to go not just with what happened up through the players' plate appearances, but what happened after after those plate appearances and if you really wanted to take it all the way to its logical conclusion you could say that like any performance and a loss has no value like if you hit four home runs and your team loses 16 to 15 at the end of the day there's zero win values to distribute to any of the players who played in that game so the guy who hit four home runs or the guy who struck out four times they would have the same amount of win values to share because their team won zero games.

But I don't think anyone actually wants to judge baseball players that way. And with all due respect to James, this is why win shares was mostly rejected when it came out. Last summer, the Staten Island Yankees had an event that we were invited to. And what was it?

Saber Metrics? I don't even remember the name of the event. But anyway, Saber Nerds descended. Yeah, Nerd Day. Nerds descended upon a baseball stadium and were out in the bright sun. And you were given the unique challenge of during an inning break, I believe you were given a microphone and you had to try to explain wins above replacement to the crowd.

Am I remembering that correctly? In like 30 seconds. 30 seconds, right. Okay, so we're going to give you 20 seconds. If you had to actually explain what you want, if war is not, we know it's not necessarily forward looking because it considers the things that have happened in the past, but it's not also backward looking because for what we're talking about here it's not it doesn't include other context how would you explain in let's give you two sentences don't overuse semicolons how would you explain how you see war as a tool run on

sentences here i come that's one so i would say a war would represent the expected or estimated number of wins that a team would lose if that player were on opening day to be injured for the rest of the season he blows out his acl or tears his elbow in pieces and had to be replaced with some generic triple a guy who you know wasn't a major prospect just some guy hanging out in triple, was called up, played every single game, and got every at-bath that the star player or this regular player was going to receive during the season. Over time, we would estimate that that difference between those players would be something along his war value. And that's how many fewer wins a team would expect to receive from the replacement level player versus the non-replacement level player. But then context could change all of those calculations. I wasn't actually running

a timer there, but I'm pretty sure you failed all of Jeff's conditions. Well, he works for me, not the other way around. Yeah. I mean, part of this just seems like maybe James is more concerned about things like clutchness and luck than we are now. And I mean, he kind of initially led the charge on, well, clutchness is not necessarily predictive and maybe there's no such thing as clutch back in the 70s or 80s. And he has since kind of come off that stance. And I think probably the community as a whole has. No one is saying that no player is clutch, that no such thing exists. I think what most people say now is that it's really hard to detect if it is a thing just because there is so much randomness associated with it that you just need enormous samples to make any kind of firm conclusion about whether someone is clutch or not. And so it's not even really that useful to say because we can never really say with any

certainty until a guy's career is over, if even then. And then also the fact that if it is real, it's probably pretty minor. You probably don't have someone who is just consistently choking horribly because that kind of guy doesn't make the majors in the first place. And so I think most of us are comfortable kind of, you know, if not disregarding it, just putting it on the back burner, at least for purposes of war discussion, except as maybe a tiebreaker. And James has kind of come out in recent years and recanted almost and said, you know, I no longer believe it's not a thing and it's not right of us to say it's not a thing and we have to account for that. Or, you know, whether it's Judge a thing and it's not right of us to say it's not a thing and we have to account for that or you know whether it's judge not hitting well in high leverage situations this year or the yankees

underplaying their pythagorean record or their base runs record or whatever estimated record you want to me i'm kind of okay mostly disregarding that stuff because we just we know based on history that there's very little consistency from year to year and that those numbers a player's clutchness will jump around from year to year a team's underplaying or overplaying its base runs record or whatever will jump around from year to year and it's just you know the safest assumption usually is that it's pretty much randomness or mostly randomness so for me other than as a tiebreaker with very huge disparities between two players it just doesn't enter my thought process

all that much and i guess james now is waiting that more than probably we would so i guess that brings up an interesting question is when stat cast gets to the point where we can categorize every play and there aren't you know too many data errors and we're pretty confident that the data set is stabilized would you generally move towards a version of war that was built on expected records because like do we want to give a guy credit for a double when a left fielder fell down because that's randomness too like this is not something that i necessarily have an answer to but i'm interested in your answer of like if we can just say that you hit the ball this hard at this angle, you know, off this pitch in this location, and we want to give you this much credit for, you know, then we have to adjust our pitcher, right?

Like if you hit a Craig Kimbrell slider, you should probably get more credit than if you hit someone else's slider. Like if we adjust for all those things, do you care about the result? I think projection systems are certainly going to incorporate all of that, right? Which is different from war, certainly. But when we have all that data in a usable form and we're getting there and this could happen any day now, a system will substitute expected WOBA or whatever for actual WOBA. And after validating that, that actually tells you something and makes the projection system more accurate, which, you know, is probably the case, I suppose. But I think more and more we'll be talking about that stuff when we're looking forward.

And so maybe just to bring the forward looking conversation and the backward looking conversation into alignment a little more inevitably. You'll have to have some version of war that does that, and I'd be curious about a version of war that does that. I would definitely take that into account. We already have it to a certain extent, like comparing Fangraph's Pitching War to Baseball Reference Pitching War, and Fangraph's obviously has the RA9, the actual runs-aloud version of Pitching War, so you can use that if you know, Fangraphs obviously has the RA9, the actual runs allowed version of Pitching War. So you can use that if you want.

But Fangraphs has the, you know, it's not based on actual runs allowed, but your peripherals, how many runs you probably should have allowed, whereas Baseball Reference has more of actual. So we kind of already have that conversation. And I probably tend to find myself looking more at Fangraphs War than Baseball Reference War for pitchers. So I guess. You can say the other thing when you have Sean Foreman on for Pitching War. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. find myself looking more at fangraphs war than baseball reference war for pitchers so i guess right you can say the other thing when you have sean foreman on for yeah that's right yeah so i i wouldn't want that to be the only version of war that exists but i would want it to be a version of war that exists and i would probably look at it and and take it into account at least in in certain conversations i do think like um as we get into more drilled down,

context-free, results-free metrics, which are coming, certainly when we're heading in that direction, it'll be interesting to see if we just need to start renaming some of this stuff. I think Bill's actual problem with the stat is that it has the word wins in it. If it was just called production above replacement, I don't think he would care. He would never look at it. It wouldn't interest him. He would never have written this article. And the reality is like war is a run space metric that we then convert into wins by just dividing, but it's built up from runs. So we can really call it like runs above replacement divided by wins, but war doesn't roll off the tongue quite as well. So I think, you know, as we go forward and as we build new models,

we might have to think about like, do we want to put wins in the title of this? Do we want to like, what are we communicating to people by the naming of the metrics? I think we can probably do better than RE24 with the next one. Hopefully we can use the word context

or something in there that kind of communicates to people what it is. But I think this is at the end of the day day mostly an argument about the name of the metric i would like to uh i'd like to point out real quick while we're uh before we completely leave the names uh aaron judges wrc plus with men in scoring position went down 37 points from what it was with the bases empty jose altuvez went down 35 points so it's not even necessarily clear that this is a conversation worth having about these two players all right and yeah i mean i think the reality is that we just have to become comfortable with stats kind of being abstract or or more removed from actual events

on the field or events that we can easily count than we would have in the past and i think that's a good thing for the most, it makes us know more, but it's also kind of confusing. I mean, every time you add a layer of adjustment, whether it's park factors or era adjustments or just what a player should have done rather than what he actually did, I mean, there's always this sort of assumption

is kind of baked in. If you say that a guy had a double, well, maybe it shouldn't have been a double. Maybe it should have been a triple. So there's always certain assumptions you have to make or not make. And if you grew up in an era when baseball stats were very simple,

a single was a single because the guy got to first base and it was a hit and it was recorded that way by the official score and it was in the box score and that was that. There was no really arguing that that did happen. And now we just keep getting or or the mixed modeling that baseball prospectus has done with a lot of its stats like dra where it's even harder to say why a guy's number is what it is it's just kind of this advanced algorithm that is taking into account

things that our puny minds cannot and we just have to trust it to a certain extent once it's been tested and validated. So not everyone's going to be comfortable with that, I think. And I think on the whole, it's probably like baseball science is going the way of all sciences. Where in the past, you could be like a casual inquirer. And you could make a major discovery in science and notice that gravity exists or you know light works a certain way and now you have to be a super genius or have like decades of training to discover anything new basically and you know baseball is sort of a science too it's a less important science but it's trending in that direction also so this is a conversation

we're going to be having probably more and more often. And I think as you look under the hood of a lot of like even the most advanced metrics, the reality is you have to make assumptions or guesses or estimates all along the way. Like no matter what model you're using, whether it's war or wins above replacement player or DRA or UZR win shares, it doesn't matter.

Any calculation that's trying to attempt to isolate an individual player's value at a team game has to make a lot of estimates. And, you know, there's no magic number tying back to Pythagorean record isn't a magic number. There's no true handed down from on high and a starting place where it's like, this is the number that we know to be true. We're estimating all along the way. And so I think, you know, our estimates might get better. Our estimates are certainly going to get more

complicated in 20 years. The robots will just be doing the estimates and telling us what they are. But I think as long as we keep in mind that we're estimating and we don't actually know the answer, that's a healthy place to be. You've, you talked about marketing a little bit and for example, removing wins from the name name but when you were proposing proposing your hypothetical about like uh expected war essentially like what what you would have expected would happen we can assume that when those numbers come out and when they're reliable that is how teams are going to be making their decisions because for sure yeah i mean and i'm sure some of them are kind of already there yeah so're already there, yeah. Yeah. So if you look at, we'll just talk to speak for Fangraphs at this point, but I think a

lot of what we write is presenting things from what we at least perceive to be the team perspective or sort of how, why a decision was made based on the numbers here. And as we do that more and more, then we're going to be separating more and more from the fans who were just watching game for the results. And they can see that this guy hit a home run this guy hit a single and that's what happens so i guess it becomes more and more of a marketing question and what do you want to try to present to an audience and how much do you think an audience would be willing to read about and put a lot of faith in a statistic that becomes more and more divorced from what they've actually seen because there's a clear benefit to those expected war metrics that are coming but how

effectively do you think you we the site would be able to sell a stat that is based on what didn't necessarily happen based on my uh experience trying to get people to buy into the fit version of pitcher wins uh Not very good. I mean, like people have a, it's a 15 year pushback against FIP, right? Like the, since Forrest McCracken rolled out his idea of dips in 2001. So it was 16 years later. People are still thinking that like FIP is, you know, heresy. Like, right. Like, yeah.

How dare you not match up with ERA? Even though ERA has like multitudes of its own problems, it's still seen as kind of the gospel pitching stat, at least after it replaced pitcher wins as the gospel pitching stats. We've moved a little bit, but I think there is certainly, this comes back to the different tools for different jobs, right? Like if you were just looking at it and being like, how well does this metric line up with what I saw happen, then these expected or, you know, stat cast based numbers are not going to match up with that at all. Like, it's very possible that, you know, a pitcher could end up with like a

60 RA and stat cast be like, no, he was totally fine. And people will be like, this number is garbage, which is what we've done with FIP for years. And we've tried to say, hey, look, you know, he was just unlucky, he's gonna be fine. And people are like, I watched him give up 13 runs. He wasn't unlucky, he was throwing fastballs down the middle. I'm like, well, he won't throw fastballs down the middle every time he's eventually going to adjust. I do think there's a pretty significant disconnect between people who just want to say, how good did that player perform last week or last month or last year or whatever it is? And how good is this player? And at Fangraphs, you know, a lot of what we do is player valuation in terms of contract signing trade value um you know how good is this player uh going forward and and i think you know it's

going to be a challenge as these metrics diverge they don't you can't have one number answer both questions effectively and it might be you know people who are interested in retrospective analysis more like bill come up with their own version of war that takes all these things into account. And that's kind of becomes the historical war. And then going forward, perhaps the stat cast war becomes the one that is used for contract analysis and trade value. All right. So to sum up, I guess we're all okay with war as it is now. We don't think there needs to be a major overhaul in kind of the standard version of the stat. We'd be fine with a version of the stat that does what Bill wants it to do, and that would be informative in a different way. But we don't see this as any kind of crisis as we use the stat and as we think probably most people who use the stat use the stat, I guess.

So, yeah. Okay. It's designed for mass consumption consumption and it works most of the time. Yeah. All right. So while we have you, just a couple of quick things that you've written about recently. We didn't talk that much about the award voting last week, partly because Jeff was away when some of the awards were announced, but mostly because either the awards were very obvious who the winner should be, or it was so unobvious that you couldn't really get upset about any outcome because there were many deserving candidates and you wrote a post

about how the award voting was perfectly fine and there was really nothing to complain about i know that some people were upset that joey vato barely lost out to jean-carl stanton but i probably would have voted for stanton it's perfectly fine that Stanton won. You know, you could be mad about the fact that like Anthony Rendon didn't get any first place MVP votes, whereas six other guys did, I think. And, you know, he's just perpetually underrated, but you really have to look hard to find any problem here. And it's, it's funny. I was just, I just saw the news that the NPB, the Pacific League of Japan, announced that its MVP is Denis Sarfati, who many people might remember, probably most people will not remember. He is a very undistinguished pitcher for the Brewers and Astros and Orioles

about a decade ago, and he has since gone to Japan and become a lights-out closer there. So that is how the NPV voters are voting for the MVP, right? They're sort of, it seems like, stuck in the mood where MLB and BBWA voters were a while ago, where closers were legitimate contenders. It seems like we've kind of moved away from that recently. I mean, Sarfate was great. He had a 1.09 ERA with 54 saves for the Hawks, the team that won the Japan series and I think had the best record in the regular season.

So he was excellent. But going by war, going by Delta Graff's war for Japanese baseball, he was something like 18th in the Pacific League. war for Japanese baseball. He was something like 18th in the Pacific League. And I think that more and more, the voting over here has fallen in line with war and, you know, with how we evaluate players today. And it's been a while. I mean, not really since, I guess, Trout and Cabrera have we had a huge argument about the results. There have been little arguments here and there, but it's been a while. And I think that's probably a good thing. It feels almost strange, like we're always still spoiling for a fight, kind of, but we just haven't had one. And if you just look at how far the

voting has come, just in the last several years, let alone going back to the 80s when the results were just wildly out of line with what actually happened on the field things are fine there is pretty much no problem with how the bbwa does its award voting now i will say from like a sanity perspective and like just being able to enjoy the release of the awards this is way better like it used to give me like aneurysms when the awards i hated that because like the worst week of the year now that's the hall of fame i still have that month it's terrible but uh but generally the awards you know become much less uh stressful for me on the negative the traffic is significantly worse at fangraphs we used to like do so many articles on like stop voting for miguel gabrera

you idiots and we get 20 million receipts it was like it was great yeah so i think in terms of our business model this has actually been very bad for fangraphs we need something else to get mad about you idiots and we get 20 million it was like it was great yeah so i think in terms of our business model this has actually been very bad for fangraphs we need something else to get mad about uh maybe we'll just become super indignant about the hall of fame although jay jaffe kind of has that beat already yeah i always have trouble when it comes to award season clearly there's a lot of attention there but it seems like such a weird and silly thing for people to be passionate about certainly in a case like this year the nl mvp now maybe this is unusually crowded and in fact i now recall that ben and i wrote about this being

unusually crowded on the same day but in any case there were you know six eight ten fifteen players who were almost equivalently valuable in the national league it seemed like by any reasonable metric and okay so somebody won but what do you even do with that like how do you how do you tell yourself how do you convince yourself as a voter i'm also a voter but you've been a voter for longer how do you convince yourself of the importance i guess of the awards given that people come into this rooting for a team is it just something else to try to celebrate or i don't know maybe you have a better explanation than i've been able to come up with i mean i think when i've gotten a ballot the way i've looked at it in order to kind of take it seriously and put real effort into it is that the players dedicate their lives to this.

And we are, to some degree, for whatever reason, tasked with kind of passing judgment on how they did in that season. And it's only fair to those players, to Giancarlo Stanton and Anthony Rendon and joey vato and all those guys to put in not as much work as they put in but uh at least a a capable amount of work to try and seriously answer the question in as objective a way as we can in order to to acknowledge that you know these are some of the best players in the world competing against each other and they look to us whether for better or worse to be the arbiters of how well they did this season. And I think overall the writers do a pretty good job. Like the silver slugger awards,

which are still going on by the managers are still terrible. If you want to be like, just really mad about something, go look at the silver slugger awards and be like, you know what, who put it on these? So I think the writers generally do a pretty good job and they take it pretty seriously. And I know when I'm given a ballot, you know, when voted on these so i think the writers generally do a pretty good job and they take it pretty seriously and i know when i'm giving a ballot you know when i looked at it

so obviously i was voting for tony bellinger in first place i had a national league rookie of the year vote that was super easy but to i wasn't just gonna be like well second third who cares i like reese hoskins i'm voting reese hoskins i actually looked at it and kind of went through it and said you know what luis castillo kind of under the radar had a really great half season of pitching for cincinnati i know no one thinks cincinnati has any pitchers but they have one and we should Luis Castillo kind of under the radar had a really great half season of pitching for Cincinnati. I know no one thinks Cincinnati has any pitchers, but they have one. And we should probably recognize that this guy was really good. And so I voted for Luis Castillo, third place on my NL Rookie of the Year ballot.

And I kind of took it seriously. And I thought Castillo pitched well enough and put the work in to get major league hitters out that he deserves recognition for. And I kind of wanted to honor that by putting enough work in to justify that on my own. Yeah, you mentioned how the Hall of Fame voting is still sometimes infuriating in the way that the regular season voting used to be. And I mean, that's going to change too, right? It seems to me that that's trailing the BBWA regular season award voting renaissance sort of, you know, maybe because it takes 10 years to become eligible for a Hall of Fame vote. So we, for instance, are not Hall of Fame voters yet, even though we are all eligible to be regular season award voters. And so it seems like, you know, not that the sole reason that the regular season award voting has improved is

because, you know, fan graphs and BP and online writers have been allowed in. That's part of it, but it's probably just a larger change that, you know, people who already were in the group have evolved in their thinking too. But I think it's inevitable that it's going to change, right? Because we've seen this pattern where Hall of Fame voters just haven't really recognized that the player pool has changed, that pitcher usage has changed. They're still kind of holding candidates to 1960s or 70s standards of what Hall of Famers are. And that just doesn't make sense, as you've pointed out, as others have pointed out. going to change, right? I think, you know, we just need to wait a few years, essentially, and there will be new voters added to the rolls and some removed from the rolls and just the general change of thinking. And I have to think that by the time you start getting today's leading Hall

of Fame candidates on the ballot, probably the thinking will have shifted significantly. Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think like you talked about the getting voters on the rolls and off the rolls. I think getting the guys off the rolls is actually gonna be the bigger change. It's like, I think, was it last year or the year before the rules were changed to say that you had to cover baseball

within the last five years to retain your Hall of Fame vote. Right. And I remember like, this will probably be a grain in my memory for the rest of my life. Like when I first got admitted into the BBWA, the site has its own like member specific message board.

And this was probably four or five years ago. A Hall of Fame voter went on the message board and said, I haven't covered any of these players in 40 years. I don't know who these people are. Can someone send me a packet of information in the mail with data and statistics on all these guys so I can learn about them? Yeah. And Keith Law just typed out baseballreference reference.com that was like his entire answer and the guy was

like i don't like the internet i want someone to mail me a packet of printed data sheets yeah so that i could vote for the hall of fame and we're like i was i couldn't believe my eyes this guy he no longer has a hall of fame so like removing those people i think is gonna change the game a little bit more than you know adding a bethlenburg or a dave cameron like you know we might make some influence with our one vote in six or seven years or whenever we get in but i think more more importantly is getting guys who just cover the game today so the guys who are voting are going to be the ones who watch these players play and know who they are yeah and i do think you know like we certainly have the backlog problem right now or whatever those 25

hall of fame worthy players on a ballot that only has 10 spots like that issue is going to take a while to resolve itself but eventually we're not going to have this big backlog we're gonna we're not gonna leave guys like craig vizio off the first time like as hall of famers become eligible they're gonna go in and i think like obviously it was terrible that Roy Halladay passed away a few weeks ago, but he was going to get in the Hall of Fame, I think, regardless. And that kind of pitcher, I think getting in there will cause people to go back and be like, well, if Roy Halladay's in, because we all agree, he was awesome. He was a Hall of Famer.

Everyone who watched him pitched, I think generally sees like this was an elite pitcher. Then why isn't Mike Messina in? You know, like we have to put Mike Messina in if we're putting Roy Halladay in. We have to put mike messina in if we're putting roy halliday in we have to put kurt schilling in if we're putting roy halliday in and as some of these more modern players get in we'll go back and re-evaluate the guys who got left off and say oh we're gonna put david ortiz in let's put edgar martinez in too yeah the bbwa message board by the way is not really a hopping place i i go in there every now and then. There's like two threads a year. I don't think I've checked in since the guy asked for his mail data packet. Yeah.

All right. So last thing I wanted to ask you about, obviously the Marlins and the Cardinals are very much in the news as we speak right now because the Cardinals have reportedly submitted an actual trade proposal for Giancarlo Stanton. These were two of the three teams you pinpointed in an early offseason post as teams that are running the offseason or that will be running the offseason.

You had the Marlins, the Cardinals, and the Red Sox. Why did you pick those three teams? I mean, I guess we know why the Marlins, just because it seems like they want to get rid of their players and save money it's not entirely clear why they need to do that I guess it's not like they were spending all that much I mean they they were what 20th in payroll and now they just have to get back to when they were 29th or 30th all the time it's kind of depressing that they feel that they need to do that but anyway that is why they are on this list But why are the Cardinals and the Red Sox teams that are positioned to be dominating discussions this winter?

So the Cardinals, I think they just have too many players. I mean, you could like legitimately make it a case for like 23 St. Louis Cardinals position players to be everyday guys next year. And like, you know, they don't have 23 roster spots or 23 lineup spots with guys. So they're really the position're more than anyone else they need to do a consolidation trade and say okay we've got all these like one to two win or you know one to three win players we need like a six win player like i don't actually know who the st louis cardinals best player is i guess it's still matt carpenter maybe but he's like he's not a superstar anymore like he had some really great years but i

think at this point matt carpenter is probably more like a good player on his decline phase if he's your best player that's a problem and so like i think they're looking at it and saying we have all these guys who could fill holes for other teams steven scotty or randall gritchick or luke voight and we don't know what to do with them so let's combine them into one better player and i think that's why they're going after stanton if they don't get stanton they'll probably call the blue jays and try and get josh dollinson on the table and if the blue jays won't answer the calls maybe they'll call him manny machado like i think they're gonna make a run at one of these household names and guys that they could have as the cardinals best player for

the next decade or at least try to keep him it's donaldson or machado so i think they're gonna be involved in high level interesting conversations for superstar players which is gonna make them kind of a hotbed of interest and then with the red Red Sox, you've got Dave Dombrowski, right? Like not a guy who's known for looking for value. He's not a bargain hunter. He's not going to be like, who's this year's Charlie Morton. Like Dave Dombrowski's plan is who do I like and how do I get them? And this year there's a lot of interesting guys to like, and a lot of interesting guys to get. And I think, you know, with Eric Hosmer sitting out there as the most obvious free agent landmine in the last 20 years, a lot of people have pointed to Dombrowski as like, this is the guy who's

going to give Eric Hosmer $150 million. And he does have a history of signing Scott Boris clients to really large contracts. And he has a history of spending a lot of money on corner infielders. And so I think Dombrowski, in a a lot of ways is probably going to determine the market for guys like cosmo or jd martinez and if he gets it on stanton then what's that going to do for the other high-priced hitters out there and i still wouldn't be surprised if he made some trade too or if he looked at it and said i don't really need jackie bradley jr and mookie bets i could put one of those in center field and get a real slugging corner outfielder who hits 40 home runs because my team lacks power.

And that's how I build my team is power, power, power. You mentioned the Red Sox and the Cardinals, and we already kind of know why you selected the Marlins as a team who could run the offseason. But if you were coming at this from the Marlins perspective to give something to our massive Miami Marlins listening audience, give something to our massive miami marlin listening audience if you are in the position of trading john carlos stanton and it sounds like potentially d gordon and you know the other the other players martin prado who get listed up there is there any reason at that point you're already making the marketing maneuver of we are trading our mvp the mvp as it turns out is there any reason then to not just go what's the expression whole hog basically and just trade Yelich Ozuna Strayley like why keep players when if you are giving up your presumably best player then you can sort of

go pseudo White Sox and just you know Yelich could be Adam Eaton Ozuna could be I don't know another White Sox they don't have a sale to move because that's Stan but he's overpaid or he's he's paid what he's worth but why why shouldn't the Marlins just go the distance if they are going to trade Stanton and maybe Gordon and beyond? So I think there is an argument to be made that you can saturate the market and hurt yourself. And I think this is one of the things that the White Sox figured out last year where, you know, if we're trading Chris Sale and we're trading Adam Eaton, and then we try and trade Jose Abreu, like at some point we we're gonna like the buyers for win now players has gonna be picked through and we're gonna have already gotten all of the Nationals prospects and we're gonna have already

gotten all of the Red Sox prospects and now who do we trade Jose Abreu to so I do think there is something to be said for like staggering and saying okay I'm gonna make my big stand trade this winner and try and get as much as I can and get as much of that contract off the books as I can and then in three months I'm gonna to try and trade ozuna to whoever their team blows out and you know their outfielder blows out a knee and they need a big right-handed power guy if you're trading like three outfielders at the same time you might run into an issue where you're oversupplying for the demand and now you're gonna have to take a worse deal on one of these things because the team that really wanted to overpay for an outfielder you'd already given

them one and so now you had to go to the team that's a little bit more rational for number two and then by the time you trade your third outfielder it's like a gm who's sitting there doing dollar to win conversions he's like i'll give you my worst prospect all right well as we all know jerry depoto really runs every offseason so it's true yes i would really like it if you would take thanks off this year That was really annoying last year Not likely You mentioned Hosmer as a potential landmine And you did your 2018

Top 50 free agents last week Jeff and I did a draft of players We thought would earn more or less than MLB Trade Rumors thought they would earn So is there anyone else Other than Hosmer? Because the fun thing that you do Is you do contract crowdsourcing. So you have the Fangraphs readers estimate what people will make, and then you make your own estimates.

So I guess it's really two different questions. Who are the people that you differed on most from the crowd? And maybe who do you think is kind of either the biggest value or the biggest non-Hosmer don't sign this guy for what he's going to get kind of candidate? Yeah, those posts are coming. So I've got a free agent bargains and free agent on my posts that will be up before Thanksgiving, but I can preview them. I will say like, I think Carlos Santana and Lorenzo Cain are the two guys in this market that I would really target. I think both of those are... That's good because i picked both of those guys as guys i took the over on in our draft last week so that's yeah i think the fangrass crowd estimated that carlos santana was going at 45 million dollars yeah that's what

mlb trade rumors said 45 million dollars for carlos santana this has a legitimate consistent non-injury prone three-win player every year yeah yeah i mean like if you want the safest three wins you could possibly have like yeah he's not the sexiest guy he's not going to be a seven win player but like you can't get much more steady than carlos santana like to me he's gonna get 70 million and i might give him 80 or 90 so i i think carlos santana could legitimately double what the crowd thinks all right that would win me that draft probably right there that's's great. Yeah. I keep reading that Lancelin is trying to get a hundred million something and that sounds very scary. What? I haven't seen that one.

You took the under on Lancelin at what, 56 or something? Yeah, because that's absurd. Derek Gould is saying that he's going for triple digits or, you know, many more than triple digits really, but more than than 100 is what he is seeking and thinks he's worth. I think the most famous one was when Urban Santana floated that he wanted $100 million or something, and after four months of no phone calls, he fired his agent and took him in one-year deal. Lance Lynn, if he sticks with this $100 billion thing,

in March he's going to be like, what do I do now? Do I want to take up hunting? I've got nothing to do for the next six months. So, Wald, we have you before you go i i know you've identified hosmer as this massive landmine i don't want to take too much of the i don't know zip out of your future post but i think the even more than hosmer which i didn't think was possible the free agent who intrigues me the most is jake arietta because i'm not sure if there is a bigger gap between I guess sort of public maybe even industry perception and what I think of the guy's future I can't tell how much of it is is a gut feeling but this is a guy whose peripherals have gotten worse this year it's not

even clear he generated soft contact and his velocity has gone down but still this is a guy that Scott Boris is going to pitch as a nine-figure pitcher and he's what rumors have gone around of four years a hundred million maybe Boris is going to want to get him up to 125 like at what level there's what we think the industry is going to give Jake Arrieta because it's easy to say some owner is just going to give in and give him nine figures because look at that track record but at what level would you if you were an executive stop feeling comfortable paying Jake Arrieta yeah but it's a good question i i think i like marietta more than you do i remember our infamous tweet storm from the postseason when

i was like look at that pitch and you're like you mean that one that he threw like in a terrible location with like bad movement and uh you know so i think like we i probably am a little more optimistic about arietta than you are but i do agree that like if you're pricing him in at ace levels like if you think you know he should get something but what's that great he got a couple years ago that's a really bad idea i think as long as it's a short-term deal i would be okay pushing over 25 million a year so like if it's three at 27 or something like that that's probably fine with me because there's enough like whatever if he turns into just an innings eater who's like a league average or slightly above average pitcher that's still worth 20 million or something, right?

Like you can't, you know, Mike Leak signed for 18 million a year, not that long ago. Like there's a decent amount of room for Arietta to fall and still be worth not zero. And so I think with a fairly high floor as like a somewhat durable guy who still misses some bats and generate some amount of weak contact and still throw some strikes occasionally, like worst case scenario,

besides getting hurt, which is every pitcher, like you just blanket. If you sign a pitcher, he could be worth nothing because his arm goes to, you know, whatever the word is. I'm probably not allowed to say,

then I think I would, I would be fine with Arietta on a three or maybe a four year deal. I certainly wouldn't want to go five unless he's willing to take, you know, 15 or 20 million a year or something. Like once you start getting to the long term, I think it's a little scarier. And that's probably one of the problems for Arrieta is like the luxury tax incentivizes now lower annual average values because that's how the tax is calculated.

So if you're a guy like Arrieta and you're looking for a short-term high annual salary deal, that's actually harder for one of these teams, like the Dodgers, the Yankees, the Red Sox to take on because they're going to get taxed on that higher average salary. So I wouldn't be shocked if Arrieta was on the market for quite a long time and he turned out to be one of those guys who, you know, in February he's still a free agent.

Someone shows up to camp for their pre-spring training medical. It's like, oh, my UCL is shredded. And then that team decides, well, Jake Arrieta is available. Let's go get ourselves a pitcher. All right all right well we will let you go now people should stay tuned for dave's posts this week which we have only partially spoiled during this podcast and dave if jeff's posts are up late today you have no one to blame but me for inviting you and you yourself for accepting my invitation. Jeff is blameless. And for all I know, he's been working on his post the whole time we've been talking.

I don't know. I wouldn't be surprised. But thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. And don't worry, I blame you every Monday. And Wednesday. True, yeah. Okay, Ben here chiming in a little later with an update on the negotiations between the NPB and the Players

Association about Shohei Otani that we mentioned at the beginning of the episode. The update is that there isn't much of an update. The parties involved just voted to push back the deadline from Monday at 8 p.m. Eastern to Tuesday at 8 p.m. Eastern. I wish that all of my deadlines were like that. Every time I have an article due, I'll just vote to extend the deadline for my article another day. Make life a lot easier. So we'll know more about that story sometime soon. In the meantime, you can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. And five listeners have already done that include Adam Brock, Robert Tetman, Dylan Turner, Isaac Stevenson, and Kyle Lewis. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild.

And you can rate and review and subscribe to effectively wild on iTunes. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for editing assistance. Please keep your questions and comments coming for me and Jeff via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system. We will answer some of those emails next time.