Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1143: Giancarlohtani

Episode Date: November 30, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter, as always, about Shohei Ohtani and Giancarlo Stanton, as well as the slow start to the offseason and baseball takeaways from news about basketball and football. Then they look for players who performed better in team losses, talk about two twins, and answer listener emails about the most valuable […]

Can I take your victory? Well, Virginia, this is how it's done. You take the money and the joy is mine I'm going to try to do a podcast about a sport that is completely dormant these days, as we did on Monday. So we're doing emails, of course, relying on the listeners to get us through this very, very slow spot in the calendar. But we have a bunch of banter to get to. I think you have maybe more banter than I do. So you want to start with yours? Let's see how much overlap there is.

So I think I have three or four things. Let's see. So, I mean, what are the two things people are talking about right now it's xiaoyi otani and john carlos stanton so let's talk about some stanton and otani one we have uh we have the marlins who apparently told john carlos stanton that if he doesn't accept a trade they will trade everyone else those are uh those are not exactly their words but those are basically their words i think that was something they expressed in a meeting. What was it back in October or something? It makes plenty of sense because, of course, the Marlins are in a position where they're trying to cut payroll by something like $50 million.

I think the figures are like they want to get down from $140 to $90. So, of course, it should go without saying that they need to clear money and there's only so many ways to do that. But it's seldom you don't get this so explicit in uh you could say a threatening manner where stanton has already said he doesn't want to be on a rebuilding team which is funny because that's how he spent his entire career but i guess if the idea is to pressure him into accepting a trade but he kind of still has most of the leverage the marlins don't like they presumably don't want to trade someone like christian yelich i think they've already said as much they don't want to trade someone like

dan straley who granted isn't really making much money anyway martin prado doesn't have trade value d gordon has limited trade value they kind of need to move stanton but the only point here is that the team relationship with stanton is is not so good and that is that is the extent of the banter that i wanted to have on yeah that subject it seemed like it hasn't been good for quite a while, right? I mean, Stanton has wanted that team to be good and has wanted out or has tweeted things or made comments about his unhappiness with previous winters when the Marlins didn't do anything. Or the thing that they did do was get rid of everyone they had recently signed. So that's nothing new, I guess, although this sounds almost like an ultimatum. I'm sure it wasn't phrased that way, but in effect it is.

If you want to be a winner, if you don't want to waste your entire prime on a team that's not going to be competitive, then gotta go. But yeah, you know, I mean, I think he'll probably have enough suitors, one would think, that he wouldn't have to be desperate and, you know, I mean, I think he'll probably have enough suitors, one would think, that he wouldn't have to be desperate and, you know, waive his no trade clause for a team that he doesn't want to go to. Or there's a question we'll answer later in this podcast about his opt out and whether he might exercise it for someone. So I don't know. I think probably this is kind of what we all thought the Marlins situation was going to be, whether they actually told Stanton about it or not. Didn't Jeter say recently that he hadn't talked to Stanton? There was a report, or he actually said that, I think. I guess maybe. Yeah, so, I don't know. Maybe he wasn't the one actually giving him this message. Maybe that's a technicality, but it does sound as if there has been some kind of communication even in the hypothetical where stanton holds out and he only wants to go to the dodgers who might not want stanton in the first place that would in theory put the marlins

in a position of having very little leverage at all but then that is basically just gives me an excuse to reflect on the ken griffey jr trade in 2000 when he gave the mariners zero leverage essentially forced them to trade him to the he gave the Mariners zero leverage, essentially forced them to trade him to the Reds. Mariners picked up Jake Meyer, Antonio Perez, Brett Tomko, and most importantly, Mike Cameron. Perez, I think, was supposed to be the big get there, but Mike Cameron, so good, immediately better than Ken Griffey Jr. Great trade for the Mariners. Absolutely fantastic trade. Got rid of Griffey just in time. I don't think the Dodgers would make the same mistake, but leverage not always making for lopsided transactions.

Right. Yeah. If they actually want to get down to 90, which by the way is pretty sad to begin with, but there were what? There are only four teams that looks like below 90 this past year and a couple of them were pretty decent. The Brewers, the Rays. But yeah, I mean, if the marlins go back down to that that is

just very sad and without stanton too so you're basically guaranteeing that they're not going to be good for i don't know how many years that's just whatever fans they have left would be pretty justified in just taking the next few years off at that point yep all. All right, next item. Okay, we've got Scott Boris blasting the Shohei Otani posting system, which makes sense. I will try to read part of Boris's quote. I don't really know what it means. But in any case, just going to quote him. This is Scott Boris talking to Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic and also of Twitter and also of everything that is reported in the industry. Scott Boris talking about Shooei Ohtani, quote, Now the unsuspecting, referring to Ohtani,

no longer has the protection of his Japanese team or the MLB posting rules. He is precocious, greatness cast adrift, forced into the MLB lifeboat. And his admission is handcuffs that prevent him from getting at least what his older, lesser valued peers received, in Tanaka's case, more than $150 million. Scott Boris very upset. I think the weirdest part to me of Boris's grievance here is throwing Otani's Japanese team under the bus, claiming that they're sort of being greedy. But outside of that, he's basically right.

Otani's getting screwed. Yeah. I don't know if the analogy works perfectly. I don't know. He wasn't really cast adrift. They would have been happy to have him. So I don't really see this as a lifeboat situation. It's like he's trying to go to a bigger boat, basically.

But yeah, I'm with him, obviously. And yeah, Boris is always an advocate of the players. And of course, the players are his clients. So one would expect him to be regardless of how he actually felt but he does seem genuine as far as you can ever tell about that one thing of course he is not necessarily genuine about how good any given player is or what he's worth or what a team should pay for him but in his advocacy of players versus owners as a former player himself and as someone who works with players, he is obviously sympathetic to their plight. And so he's come out with many statements

about this sort of salary restriction. And yeah, we're with him on this. We're not always with him. We don't always understand exactly what he's saying or how he's saying it. But yeah, can't disagree on the posting system, specifically in otani's case being really unfair to the player yeah i i think the boris is kind of obnoxious i wouldn't want to spend a whole lot of time with him but at the same time he's very charismatic he's very persuasive and he's excellent at doing what he does players i would assume love having him as an agent because he just does seem to get them the most money and as as much as it's odd to me, and this is nothing, not an original point, but it's always odd to me when fans complain about Boris just because

if the money doesn't go to the players, then it stays with the old rich white people. So it's really not in anyone's best interest there. But I wish that Boris wouldn't get directly quoted because it just shouldn't. He's just, he is generally propaganda. So I don't want to see his direct quotes in print. But I still support his cause. And if his cause isn't possible without getting those direct quotes in print, then so be it. But, you know, this is not a time in the media to just quote someone uncritically.

So it's just a thought there. We can move on to Jeff Passon's latest article where Jeff Passon was talking about the dead industry, the dead hot stove. It's a very cold stove at the moment. Nobody has turned the stove on. And Passon was writing about what is holding it up because the consensus opinion is that it is all the Stanton and Otani negotiations. But Passon came up with four bullet points, four alternative explanations that are either

very well sourced or he just lied about all the sources and made quotes out of thin air but i think that's unlikely and so i wanted to get your opinion on what you think of passin's four bullet points we will go in order the first one passin calls four corners free agency i need to read a paragraph to remind myself what he means by that because that expression doesn't make any sense to me but it appears to be that it's a matter of clubs waiting out the market figuring that the longer that teams wait the more desperate players become to get jobs and so therefore as long as teams are very patient then prices will go down if i have conveyed that accurately what do you think of that opinion on the market right now? Well, I would say this applies maybe to multiple bullet points that Jeff has here.

I'm not totally convinced just because this seems like such a dramatic change from the typical November or, you know, last November, for instance. And I'm not sure that I buy that every front office has come to the same conclusion at the same time about how to approach the free agent market. And to me, well, I'll take this just one at a time here. I mean, I don't know that waiting out the market actually helps teams particularly if every team is doing it, right? I mean, unless this is like a collusion-like scenario, then I don't know. The same number of openings are available. The same number of players are available. Whether it's November or December, I guess in theory, players could get nervous and not have jobs and compromise in some way.

But maybe teams will get nervous and say, hey, we don't have a second baseman or whatever. We better get one of those. So I don't know that I find that all that compelling. And I know that this is mainly addressing the big players in free agency, someone like JD Martinez, but like Doug Pfister just signed with the Rangers and he got a pittance. He got a very small contract. I think that Rangers got a great deal out of Doug Pfister. So there's some advantage in acting quickly in the market because it helps you settle your own roster and some players will be happy to avoid the uncertainty and i also am not sure why this would be kind of unique to this market if you figure that teams waiting at free agency is something that can drive

prices down they would seemingly do that every offseason that doesn't seem to me that doesn't seem to explain why things are going so slowly right now right i will say there was a an article by brian mcPherson in the Providence Journal. This was now five years ago, actually, where he did a little study to look at the rate of return that teams get on free agents when they sign them early in the offseason or late in the offseason. I'm trying to just skim it quickly and see where he set that cutoff. But he found that the deals are more efficient from the team's perspective later in the offseason. So there's some truth to that. Now, this was only based on five offseasons, but he writes that based on numbers called from MLB

trade rumors and fan graphs, free agents signed in January not only have been a better value than those before, but have been more productive. So there was some evidence there. So he says, before January 1st, teams have paid an average of $5.5 million to obtain one war's worth of production from the free agents they've signed. After January 1st, teams have paid an average of $ 3.6 million per one war of production they've received. So there is evidence that waiting makes sense. And I keep thinking someone should probably update that study or do it with a larger sample just to make sure that's a real effect. But again, that to me seems like maybe there's some sort of selection bias there where guys who are waiting are having to wait for a reason or you know i just don't know if the entire market is waiting at once

i don't know that you would see the same sort of benefit there right and i i have not read that study or i don't remember that study but does it ignore players signed a minor league contract to show up for who gets spring training invites uh i don't know i'll try to skim it but i'm i'm not sure i would guess that it probably does yeah so you kind of wonder that i agree with you there's probably at least one form of selection bias in the study but i also agree with you that someone should take another look at it because that would be good research that i am not going to do myself point number two in passen's article he he titles Manfred University. The point here being that a lot of executives have come through the Major League Baseball offices, and they're just very similar executives in terms of their approaches. Passon cites a case from last

winter where multiple teams offered Tommy Hunter pretty much the exact same contract, and it's used as evidence that executives are just more alike than ever. And Passon also says that they know better than ever how to manipulate the CBA or use it to their advantage. And the evidence here is teams, for example, saying, well, you know, we were trying to stay below the luxury tax. And if we go over, that would be stupid. He quotes one GM saying, of course, that's what we're saying, referring to the luxury tax. We'd be stupid not to. How much do you buy this bullet point? Well, I do buy the idea that front offices and GMs have become more homogenous as a group.

I don't know that there's been a dramatic difference in that since last offseason or the offseason before. That's been the case for a while now, I would think. So I don't know that that accounts for a dramatic difference. I could see the luxury tax concern, whether genuine or not, having some impact here. So I kind of buy that. But the homogeneity, I don't even know, I mean, would that make the market slower starting or the opposite? I could see it going the other way, where if players know that they're getting the same offer from everyone, they might as well just take one of the early offers that they get, right? So I don't know that I find that particularly compelling, but I could see the CBA and the luxury

tax concerns or the presumption of luxury tax concerns having some impact on the market. Yeah, I agree with you. And if the luxury tax isn't rising fast enough, then more and more teams are just going to bump up against it. And the luxury tax threshold, I guess it's what, the competitive balance tax now, not the luxury taxes, that effectively functions as a soft cap. And so if teams are getting more money, but if they're all getting closer to that limit, every team is resistant to go over because, of course, there is that taxation. And that would just be a problem more with the CBA than with the teams themselves because teams don't want to pay those overages.

And so maybe they just need to raise the threshold faster in the next CBA because otherwise this is going to be an unavoidable problem. There might be more players out there, but teams are going to be an unavoidable problem there might be more players out there but teams are going to have less wiggle room to sign them and so that's going to be bad news for free agents yep bullet point number three the job shuffle since the end of the season a full third of teams have changed pitching coaches six have sought new managers and that doesn't begin to address the behind the scenes organizational churn that four general managers said has taken up a significant amount of time that normally would have been devoted to trades

and free agents. Says one GM, I feel like an HR director. It has been so much crazier this offseason than I've ever seen. What do you think about this one? Well, I'm curious about it. If that's the case, I want a whole separate article on why that's happening. I'm not really aware of the behind-the-scenes shuffle so much, although certainly we've seen the coaching and the managerial turnover. But again, I mean, maybe there's something to it if it's true that this is really an unusual amount of turnover. But I don't know. The pitching coaches, for instance, I don't know that that makes that much of a difference. I mean, even managers, at this point, rosters tend to be constructed more by the front office

than by the coaches or managers. And in some cases, sure, you might sign a guy or not sign a guy based on a recommendation from a coach or manager or based on the front office knowledge of what the coaches or manager's strengths are. So I could see that potentially having an impact. Like, you know, if you're the Yankees and you don't even know who your manager is yet, A, you might want that manager's input before you make any major moves. And B, players might want to know who their manager would be before they sign with you. So potentially, but I don't know, we haven't seen

GM turnover, which to me would seem like the thing that would hold up the market the most. So if it's true that there's been a ton of front office turnover, I guess that could potentially have something to do with it. I don't know. This alone wouldn't seem like a sufficient explanation to me, but when you have a month that's been as slow and as strange as this one, there's probably some degree of all of the above involved here so i would guess that this has played some role but it's hard to say how big a role yeah right and i think that if you have like clearly a team like the braves they were in no position to start doing a bunch of stuff they couldn't be very active they need to figure out who is going to

have any jobs in the organization now that seems like it's mostly settled and they can proceed but yeah i agree with you we can move quicker on to the fourth bullet point that pass entitles the dull of free agency the idea here being that free agency is stupid and teams don't like it and younger players are there's a trend towards signing more long-term extensions earlier in their careers that buy out some free agent years and so they don't hit the market until they're older which is helping reduce some of the star power available in free agency. Not always the case, and of course people have talked about next winter's market as being fantastic, which currently it looks like it will be.

But as one official says in here, quote, you can't be a genius if you spend on free agents. That's the world we've evolved to. You can't be a genius unless you're winning a few more games on a low payroll, and they're all looking to be geniuses. I will immediately disagree with this because the Dodgers have a very high payroll, and I think that the Dodgers are run by geniuses.

But in any case, what do you think about this section? Well, we talked about the evolution or devolution of free agency pretty recently, and that does seem like a real thing, where teams are just more dependent. They kind of sink or swim based on the war that they're getting seem like a real thing where teams are just more dependent. You know, they kind of sink or swim based on the war that they're getting from their early in their career players, you know, guys who are still under team control, who are in their pre-arb or arbyers. So there's something to that.

Like this market just isn't all that exciting if you remove Stanton and Otani from it. There's just not a lot to get that excited about. So I could see free agency maybe being less of a priority for teams just in that most teams, you know, either they're going to make the playoffs or not next year based on what they already have in-house. There aren't that many players who are going to make the difference probably on this year's market. And maybe free agent war just accounts for a lower percentage of a team's total output than it had at some points in the past. So, yes, but all these guys are going to get signed. It's not like teams are just totally turning up their noses and say we don't even have a need or a want for any of these players.

Like your top 50 free agents or whatever are going to have jobs come March. So I don't know. Like I could see maybe teams dragging their feet a little bit more because it's not like any of the guys available this year. You know, I mean, there's JD Martinez, there's Arrieta, there's Darvish, but there's not kind of the one no doubt superstar who's going to put you over the top necessarily. So yeah, maybe you get to it a little more slowly, but it's not like these guys are going to be just on the unemployment line once the season starts. So all this activity is going to happen at some point. So I don't know that that alone explains why it hasn't happened yet and there

are two markets anyway even if even in a hypothetical where teams hate the free agent market then they just turn to the trade market if they want to get get better and so i mean there we know that there are trade talks taking place jerry depoto has already made a couple trades right it's a couple i don't yeah trying to do probably several more as we speak so it there are two areas to go we know less about what's happening in trades than we do about what's happening in free agency maybe a little bit but in any case i think that there is some of that all of the above going on i'm also not convinced that i don't know the market has been slow and that we haven't seen many of the smaller fish sign.

We have Doug Pfister who's signed. And there's probably going to be some opening at the floodgates of middle relievers signing soon. Maybe in the second half of this week. But I don't know who would have expected none of the big fish really signed so quick in any offseason. J.D. Martinez was never going to sign in November. Eric Hosmer might not sign until February. Jake Arrieta might not sign until January or February. We know Otani's timeline now. We know Darvish probably isn't going to sign. The expensive players generally don't sign until the middle of December or after that anyway. And the big trades

usually don't happen until around the winter meetings. And so if this is all just complaining about like the third tier free agents not signing with teams, who cares? Yeah, no, I agree. And I think, I mean, Jeff is great and he is well connected. So I trust what he says and what his sources say. And I would guess that all these things are having some sort of effect, but I don't know that I find any of these individual reasons more compelling than just Stanton and Otani are holding things up to me those seem like perfectly valid reasons like on the one hand sure why would Otani hold up your whole winter because every team can afford him and so it's not like you have to earmark a ton of money to sign Otani so you could proceed proceed with other plans. But on the other hand, every team has at least a theoretical shot of signing him. And if you're able to get Otani, obviously that affects everything else you're going to do. You're not going to decide, you know, if you think you have a legitimate shot at getting Otani, you're not going to necessarily be firming things up with Darvish, with Arrieta, with the other options out there at the top of the starting pitching market, because maybe you won't need them. So

I could totally see Otani holding things up. Like if this is a historically slow month, then I think the obvious culprit is the historically unique free agency that's playing out with Otani. And maybe that's too simplistic to say that that's why, and I'm sure there's much more to it. But, you know, it's not just that these players are available, but that there have been questions about whether they'd be available and how they'd be available. And we didn't know for sure that Otani would be. I mean, he still hasn't officially been posted. And then with Stanton, there's been all this back and forth about will he be available and what would a deal look like because of all the contract complications. So to me, the fact that the best hitter theoretically available and the best pitcher theoretically available and the best

pitcher slash hitter theoretically available are, you know, delayed in some form and are not really unrestricted free agents in the way that most unrestricted free agents are, I think it's reasonable that that would hold things up a bit. So I find that explanation, as simplistic as it is, pretty compelling too. I think it comes up every year that people will point out the baseball free agency market operates nothing like the NFL free agency or NBA, NHL. And the difference is that those other leagues have fixed salary caps. And so teams just need to spend money up to the cap. And everyone is just in a damn hurry to get there. And I was fielding this question in a chat the other week.

And after the chat was over, I got a text from some baseball person who said, yeah, it's all about the salary cap. That is the difference. And baseball teams just don't have to abide by these same regulations now the thing about that is that in a sense they kind of do because they do have the competitive balance acts that teams usually treat as a soft salary cap but still that is the difference teams aren't just i mean i don't know how to i don't know how best to put it into words i know that that is the difference and if you gave me an hour i could come up with a coherent expression of why that makes such a difference.

But I don't know. Do you think that you could do it more concisely? No, well, there's I mean, I don't know any more about other sports than you do. If anything, I know less. So I think there's just a pressure, right? Because you you know what you have to spend. Every team knows that. You know what you have to spend. Every team knows that. And so there's this big rush on day one to sign the guys you know you can afford and who will help you and who will still get you under the cap. And so there's just this feeding frenzy as soon as teams are able to do that.

Whereas in baseball, there isn't such a hard limit. And I don't know. I think that's basically what it comes down to. I don't know if that's a perfect explanation either, but we're not all that well qualified to talk about basketball and football, as it turns out. I do know that at least in basketball, don't they have like a maximum contract that players can sign? So that would make a hell of a difference in baseball. Football has the franchise contract right they all have franchise deals that are for a certain max amount so yeah so uh the last bit of banter that i wanted to put out and i tweeted a little bit about it but the more i've thought about it so okay we're talking shohei otani and shohei otani in one sense has no leverage at all because he's going to sign

for a pittance he's going to sign for a comically undervalued contract and etc all this stuff there's a reason why teams are falling all over themselves to try to sign shohei otani in another sense teams are falling all over themselves to try to sign shohei otani which gives him a lot of leverage in that he could in theory get away with a lot you could if you were a team negotiating with Shohei Ohtani and Ohtani just wanted to make a show of it, like, look, we know that we can't get around the CBA. We know you can't just offer me more money, but you can do things for me. Like, would a team dig up a body for Shohei Ohtani?

Would it bury a body for Shohei Ohtani? Would it put a person in the ground for Shohei Ohtani? Like, if you figure Otani is worth a surplus value of like 100 to 150 million dollars over the life of his deal what is the cost of like maybe one of your team executives gets arrested for murder? Like what is that really how far would a team go to sign Shohei Otani? he could ask a team, not for his contract, but just to, you know, get his attention. He could ask them to

steal him the Mona Lisa. He could ask for any, he could just make any kind of, like, look, we all know about, like, celebrity riders and stuff and like, oh, I like the Red Skittles. What if he only liked Red Skittles made out of human blood? Like, he could get away with so much.

And what team would be like, no, you know what? Wiping my hands here. Just not worth it. It's not going to get to that point unless he's like murder a city. Then a team probably wouldn't go that far. But he has so much power because he has so little power. This is effectively like a really, I don't know, if LeBron James were a free agent in basketball and you have that maximum contract, then every single team would offer him

that maximum contract. And so the teams would have to stand out. This is just like that, except it's not even a maximum contract. It's a minimum. It's literally a minimum contract that he's signing for and no team would just give up on signing otani because there is no alternative there's nothing in the world that comes close to offering this kind of immediate value shohei otani could ask for blood and i think some teams would give it it's possible they'd certainly give their own blood i don't know if they would draw someone else's but yeah i mean it's i the only problem with the scenario or i guess the the saving grace here maybe is that each individual team employee might not have all that much incentive to sign

shoryutani if they would incur the cost here because it's not like i mean sure he would be whatever 200 million dollars of surplus value or. But it's not like your director of baseball operations is reaping that reward directly. That is, I guess, going to ownership, essentially. So maybe the owner would kill someone. I don't know. There might be owners who've killed people already. Who knows? But yeah, I mean, you could certainly afford to hire a hitman if you didn't have moral qualms about that, someone who'd be doing it already. But even then, you're subjecting yourself to legal trouble down the road there. And I don't know if any team would be willing to do that just because of the incentives. But you're right. I mean, he could certainly demand that they dance or bark like a

dog or debase themselves in some way. And I would think they'd be willing to do that. So I encourage him to wield his power responsibly. All negotiations conducted in German. Everybody in the room who doesn't work for Otani has to be naked. He could get away with these things. Everything has to rhyme. It just it doesn't it doesn't matter.

He could he could do it and i would assume look there are probably people who own baseball teams have probably already murdered i'm just going to assume that they're like you you get rich sure and you yeah statistically rich and you kill people and you do it for sport and he could just ask them there's been the rumor that maybe otani wants to go where darvish goes because he looks up to Darvish and maybe they're great friends. What if it's the complete opposite? What if he hates you, Darvish? What if he wants absolutely nothing to do with you, Darvish?

What if he wants you, Darvish, to be blackballed from baseball? Or worse, what if he wants you, Darvish, to no longer take a breath on this planet? What team? Look, I'm not going to say that I'm putting a bounty on you, Darvish head i'm not shohei otani i don't have the kind of power this is not a threat don't arrest me i'm just saying shohei otani there's no limit there's some limit there's 150 million dollar surplus value limit to what shohei otani could demand and that frees up a lot of opportunities this sounds like a lot of the emails we've been getting over the last week or so. We've been getting a lot of, even after we went through why teams can't do almost anything nefarious, at least openly, because of the way the CBA is written.

I think that has only encouraged people. That has inspired our listeners to try to find loopholes. And so far, I have not been convinced that anyone has found one, which is not a reflection on their lack of imagination, but just reflection of the way that the CPA was written to prevent this kind of thing. But no one has actually brought up the blood money scenario that you have just advanced. So thank you for that. Yeah, it's murder. All right. Well, I was going to just quickly bring up, I accidentally saw a football news story. I don't remember how that happened. It just came across the transom somehow. So this was a rumor, evidently, that the quarterback of USC, Sam Darnold, who I guess is a sophomore and maybe the first pick, presumptive first pick in the 2018 NFL draft it was reported that I guess by someone with Monday morning quarterback that Darnold would wait to see whether the Cleveland Browns had the number

one pick before deciding whether to enter the draft as if he would just choose to go back to USC for his junior year just to avoid the Browns and Darnarnold has denied this, so I have no idea whether there's any truth to this. But do you think that this could ever be a discussion in baseball? Do you think there could ever be a story? Like, is any franchise in baseball at the abject level that the Browns have reached that a potential number one pick would consider sitting out the draft? Is that a scenario that in baseball anyone would actually ever talk about? I mean, wouldn't the downside be that in the next draft, the Browns are probably picking first again?

Right, that's the thing. I mean, it's not like this is new. The reason why he would be avoiding the Browns is because the Browns are always terrible, in which case you'd think that they'd probably have the top pick again. So, yes, that is a problem with this scenario. But, yeah, I mean, there's that. they'd probably have the top pick again so yes that is a problem with the scenario but yeah i mean there's that and then i guess part of it is just that in baseball there's such a long delay between being drafted and actually getting to the majors so it's not like you know with darnold it's

like you get drafted and then you're the starting quarterback for a team in the next season whereas in baseball you're talking you know with baseball, you're talking, you know, with rare exceptions, you're talking about three years or something in the minor leagues, at least even for a talented guy. And by that point, who knows? We're not really able to predict all that well what teams will be doing in three years. So, like, unless there were a really toxic ownership or management situation, I mean, you know, or if it's like you're a pitcher

and you're afraid of going to Coors Field or something, because for so long the Rockies had trouble developing pitchers. So if it's something like that, or it's like the Mets injury situation slash ownership situation, maybe, but the lead time is just so long that probably this wouldn't even be a consideration. Yeah, I agree with you. But wasn't there something? This was a little before my day, so I don't remember all the details. But wasn't there something about JD Drew and not wanting to play for a team? Am I remembering this correctly?

Oh, well, was it with the Phillies and the Phillies fans hating him and everything and not wanting to go back there. It sounds just about right. Let's see if the Wikipedia page has anything to say here. Okay. So we're going to 1997 drafted by the Philadelphia Phillies. The, I don't know what this paragraph is going to say. We're all going to learn something here.

The Philadelphia Phillies made JD drew the second overall pick after pitcher Matt Anderson in the 1997 major league baseball draft draft. Draft is a crapshoot. Drew and his agent Scott Boris chose not to sign with the Phillies, insisting Drew would not sign for less than $10 million. Okay, this is different. The Phillies had no plan to pay an unproven player this amount of money, and despite Boris's warnings, drafted Drew nonetheless. They offered him $2.6 million. Consequently, Drew ended up playing for the St. Paul Saints of the Independent Northern League. Boris had Drew sign with the Northern League because of a loophole in the rules of the

MLB amateur draft. Yes, that was an actual loophole that he exploited, but harder to do that today. So yeah, that's why he was unpopular there, but it's not the same scenario we're talking about. Yeah, right. That was a... So never mind. But because you...

I forgot to bring something up on Monday because you have now already invoked another sport. I wanted to very briefly invoke another sport only because I think something happened a few days ago that I think might be the most amazing thing that I've heard of in recent sports. And that is that you probably saw this tweeted. This is college basketball. Alabama was playing Minnesota to, I believe,

ranked schools to top 25 programs. And with about 11 minutes left, for a variety of reasons, Alabama wound up having to play three on five. This is something I'd never have. I know this happens in hockey sometimes. It is a great disadvantage. But not only did Alabama play about 11 minutes of three on five basketball against Minnesota, they outscored minnesota over that duration 30 to 22 unbelievable i didn't watch the game i didn't watch any highlights but i cannot

imagine anything happening in baseball that would be that amazing i know that didn't like a college team beat the phillies or something in spring training a few years ago and everyone was making fun. Not even close. Three on five basketball. They had two, they had 67% more players and they got outscored. Unbelievable. That will never make sense to me. Yeah, that is, it's a really amazing story. I heard about that on Hang Up and Listen. It sounded as if it's just that the team that was shorthanded, A, had a really good player who was almost killing himself running everywhere just with the exertion of being one of three players on the court. It was partly that and partly just that the other team seemed psyched out by having to play. There was some discussion of whether the team with three would even continue to play.

There were injuries. The whole bench was ejected I think for starting a fight which was weird enough and so there was just no one to come in and there was talk of forfeiting and they didn't do that and evidently the team that was still at full strength just was so put off by having to play against three that they were just unnerved and and their game kind of fell apart so yeah that is a really amazing story i don't know what the baseball equivalent would be i mean i guess it would be taking away players also but you'd have to like you'd have to take away how many fielders would you have to take away in baseball for it to be the equivalent of three on five in basketball i mean i mean i think you would need to eject the whole bullpen so you

have just have one pitcher just a starter who has to go the distance and then i don't know do you remove the whole outfield is that too much too little like if because then you're still at least preserving entire infield or at least like five other players so the proportion wise it's not the same but i mean do you do you just have like a pitcher a catcher a first baseman a third baseman and then like the shortstop in the middle with that? Maybe is that too harsh? I don't know. Three on five basketball. It's crazy.

It really is. Yeah. All right. Well, we've talked a whole episode's length already and we're just getting to emails. Now, do you have a stat segment you want to use? People have mentioned that we need a more entertaining name than stat segment. It used to be play index segment.

I don't know. We need something like the Sam Miller Memorial stat extravaganza or something. I don't know. We'll solicit submissions, but do you have one? Number blast! Okay. I have a number blast. And it's leading on the

good old everyone's favorite T-O-P-s plus look shut up i'm tired please i'm not gonna do that so i'm just gonna go right past it so i just got curious i wanted to know who this past season was better in losses than they were in wins it's one of my favorite little splits that means nothing in baseball reference you can search it on the on the play index so i'm gonna do the bulk of my numbers just have to do with hitters but for example what was it i have kyle hendricks this season kyle hendricks he lost uh what was it i think five games i'm just going to keep talking because i'm loading the splits page as

we speak i did not have it prepared but kyle hendricks this season went seven and five so he had seven wins five losses and a whole bunch of no decisions and kyle hendrix this season went seven and five so he had seven wins five losses and a whole bunch of no decisions and kyle hendrix this season allowed a 670 ops pretty good 670 ops in games that kyle hendrix lost which was uh five games he allowed a 649 ops kyle hendrix actually allowed a lower ops in games he lost than in games he didn't lose. That is weird. So therefore, for Kyle Hendricks, that means his TOPS plus for losses was under 100. That means he was more effective. Now, granted, his ERA was higher. His situational pitching, you could argue, was worse.

But just in terms of how he prevented hits, Kyle Hendricks, good in losses. Weird stat. Nowhere close to the all-time individual season leader and i picked up a season in 1952 pitcher by the name of dick littlefield uh he was pitching with the well he actually pitched with two teams that season so we don't need to talk about which teams they were dick littlefield overall in 1952 allowed a 658 OPS. However, in games he lost, he lost six games, he allowed a 490 OPS. Way better.

So Dick Littlefield has the all-time best season for performance in losses relative to performance in non-losses. Just kind of a weird stat. But anyway, it's a little less fun with pitchers more fun with hitters so this past season i said a minimum minimum of 100 plate appearances in losses and the leader i'll even go third place tony walters had a 115 tops plus in losses that means he was 15 i think better in losses than he was in wins as a hitter daniel nava 124 and first place Troy Tulewitzki 126 Troy Tulewitzki far better in games the Blue Jays lost than in games the Blue Jays won again doesn't mean anything but how does that 126 stack up all time well I looked it up and it's there and Tulewitzki actually ranks in 44th place all time and this stat whatever but first place we have a tie a tie between someone named pinky pittinger from 1922 a name that only existed in 1922 and no other season did that name

exist 160 tops plus and more recently 2000 jose nieves also a 160 tops OPS plus in losses. So let me just pull up the actual numbers that year, Jose Nieves, this is number blast again, remember number blast, Jose Nieves in the year 2000 had a 782 OPS in games that his team lost and a 315 OPS in games that his team won. Jose Nieves, basically helping I think it was the Angels. I don't remember who he played for. It doesn't matter to me anymore. But that team seems to have lost more than it won. And Jose Nieves basically helping I think it was the Angels I don't remember who he played for it doesn't matter to me anymore but that team seems to have lost more than it won and Jose Nieves did a lot to help his team avoid losses which ultimately he did not do finally I looked up career splits I wanted to know who's done this over the bulk of their entire career and of course this is not often you'll frequently see like a if you have I don't know jean carlos stanton you'll

have this stat that says here's what the marlins record is in games where he hits a home run and here's what the marlins record is in games where he doesn't hit a home run the records are always lopsided well of course they are that's because home runs are valuable and the marlins will be better so no player has like a massive sample of being better in losses than wins it just wouldn't make sense that being said rick wise has the all-time lead in tops plus in losses at 119 for his career he was 19 better in games his team lost but he only batted 298 times in losses and so the actual leader with a better minimum i set a minimum of 500 plate appearances and johnny o O'Brien just eclipsed that with 509 plate appearances and losses. And Johnny O'Brien had a TOPS plus in losses of 107.

He was 7% better in losses. There are only two players in baseball history who have batted at least 500 times in losses and been better in losses than they were in wins and that is uh what did i just say johnny o'brien and andy allenson those are the only two guys andy allenson at 101 but johnny o'brien at 107 i don't know what to make of it but that is johnny o'brien's i don't know one claim to fame i don't know anything about johnny o'brien no neither do i maybe you can research him while we speak but fun fact moderately fun fact i'm just gonna say johnny o'brien according to baseball

reference not yet dead oh okay that's a wait a second call brother why were you better hold on a second johnny okay hold on johnny o'brien according to baseballball Reference, is the brother of Eddie O'Brien. Johnny O'Brien. Okay, no, this is impossible. Johnny O'Brien. No. Johnny O'Brien, 107, career, TOPS plus, in losses. Eddie O'Brien, career, 107, TOPS plus, in losses.

Wait a second. What is going on here? Mind blown. There's no way okay no hold on is this wait no they both played for pittsburgh what is going on here at the same time are they the same person no this hold on no no no no johnny o'brien different johnny o'brien debuted in 1953 definitely a resemblance eddie o'bBrien debuted in 1953. Definitely a resemblance. Eddie O'Brien debuted in 1953, both for the Pittsburgh Pirates. Eddie O'Brien spent his career with the Pittsburgh Pirates. Johnny O'Brien spent almost his entire career with the Pittsburgh Pirates.

No, no, no, no, no. This doesn't make any sense. How did this, what is going on? He was the double play partner and twin brother of Johnny O'Brien. Johnny O'Brien, 597 OPS in wins, 649 OPS in losses. Eddie O'Brien, brother Eddie O'Brien, 529 OPS in wins, 576 OPS in losses. My hands are shaking. Right now, my hands are actually shaking. This is unbelievable.

Forget Alabama versus Minnesota. This is the most unbelievable thing in the history of sports. They have a dual baseball card where they're both crouching at the same stance with each other side by side. His brother Johnny also pitched at the major league level at times. That's interesting. Oh my god. Oh my god. I need to sit down. I am sitting down. I need to lay down. Yeah, and they're Pacific Northwesterners like you, Seattle area. Unfortunately, Eddie is no longer with us, but Johnny is still around. Someone preserve Johnny. Get him on the phone. Yeah. In the past, us getting them on the phone has not been great for their preservation, but

I think we may have to look into this. So this is quite a story. I'm sure it's not new to some of our listeners, but it's new to us, I think. They both missed 1954 for military service, too. They had a whole lot in common here, let's see. So Johnny was 5'9", 170. Eddie was 5'9", 165. Yep, checks out. They are twins. This is, huh, what a story. Unreal. Maybe more to come on this topic. We'll see. All right. So some questions. There are some good questions. Let's see how quickly we can get to some of these. So Ezra says, imagine a world in which one person is far and away the best come play

here memo writer on earth and will only sell his or her services to one team. How much do you think he or she would be paid to write the Otani memo? Would the memo writer be worth more than a comparably dominant translator? I would guess that the memo writer would worth more than a comparably dominant translator? I would guess that the memo writer would be more valuable than the translator just because there are probably more good translators out there than there are good writers of the Otani memo, unless we're talking about someone who is just drafting the Otani memo based on what the front office wants to say, so basically like a ghostwriter, essentially.

I don't know how hard it would be to find someone to do that. But if you could find someone, I mean, it all comes down to how important you think the memo is. And we really have no way to tell. It could be completely unimportant. They could just be trashing these things. I don't know. Or they could be basing everything. They could be moving teams up the list based on these memos ruling teams out based on these memos so if you

actually found someone who is a dominant memo writer and i don't know how you would because they would need to know so much about your organization that it would be tough to do as an outsider but yeah if you had that skill set for some reason, that would be pretty valuable. Just take some percentage of the Otani surplus value, whatever you think the odds of the memo actually mattering are. Just take that sliver, assign some portion of it to the memo writer, and you have it. You could have some guy hiding in a back room for 60 years working for a baseball team, and he does absolutely nothing. And you pay him a million dollars a year to do nothing if anything to stay away from all of the co-workers but if that individual man woman or something else is such a good writer such a compelling persuasive writer that he writes he or she or they write the memo that convinces shiwa yutani to sign with the

baseball team that employee is worth it and then some. You just, I mean, baseball teams have been hiring writers for so long. Now it's your time to shine. Exactly right. Yeah, no, this is the time to be a memo writer in baseball. I don't know that there's ever been another time or that there will ever be another time, but this is it. All right, David, Patreon supporter, says,

I'm not sure if you play Yahoo Fantasy Football. David, Patreon supporter, says, I'm not sure if you play Yahoo Fantasy Football. Let me tell you, David, I do not. But they send out an automated report on how you did in the matchup. There are jokes and insults and lots of stats and analysis, but the whole thing is done via computer software. The other day I was talking to Amazon Help and I started wondering if I was even talking to a human. It would be easy for a computer to answer my questions. Then today I read 2018 Red Zips projection reports on fan graphs. Honestly, it could have been written by that Yahoo Fantasy software for all I can tell. Is that a Carson Sestouli insult?

I think it is. I don't think a computer could replicate Carson. Nor would you want one to. No, a barely competent person could replicate Carson. But I don't know about a computer. I also know that there have been some experiments with computer software baseball game reports at the minor league level. My question is this. How soon until computer software writes the majority of what we read, both baseball and other subjects, and how will the baseball writers of America deal with this?

I would love to hear the two of you discuss this online, although it might be an uncomfortable topic for the two of you. P.S. I teach high school writing, so I'm more than a little interested in the future of writing. Well, this is a big subject. Let's do it in three minutes. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I mean, all the minor league game reports I've seen, you can tell that they are pretty personality-less. I mean, I'm not concerned about this personally, like the kind of work that we do. I think that there is certain work, obviously, that humans have done that can be replicated pretty well by computers. And I mean, computers still aren't at the point where they can like check the box on my screen that says check this box if you're not a computer. So I'm not that worried about computers taking my jobs yet. I think that there's just so much involved in, you know, even just writing a basic analytical baseball article. I mean, one thing computers can do is come up with fun facts. They can do that very well. There's a program, Inside Edge has this site called Remarkable that basically just

mines for fun facts. And you can look by team and by player and set various parameters, and it will come up with all of these statistical outliers, essentially. And that's good if you're generating game notes or something. A computer can do something like that. But if you're talking about translating that into an interesting article, I think we're still quite a ways from that. I mean, there's just so much to the writing and the analysis and the reporting and talking to people that, you know, personally, I'm not that concerned. But historically, one of the ways that you break into the business is by doing kind of, you know, wrote game stories about whatever high school sports or something.

And if that's something that gets outsourced to computers, I mean, some, you know, papers to the extent that papers even exist anymore, aren't doing that kind of coverage anymore because they figure it can be replicated by just looking at the score or the box score or whatever, and people don't necessarily need the game story. And so maybe there are fewer entry-level positions, the kind of stories that, you know, a young aspiring reporter might have started out with. Maybe those are going away, and that would probably be bad. But once you get to a certain level and you're doing a certain sort of piece, I wouldn't be that concerned about this. Right. It's no different from a lot of other industries. We can look at automobiles and

you've got, of course, machines that are doing a lot of the rote work, but machines aren't in charge of the automobile manufacturers. They're not designing new cars. They're not creating innovations in car design. And they're just doing the hammering and the scoring and whatever it is that cars actually have done to them. But even on Brooks Baseball, you mentioned the remarkable thing by Inside Edge, but Brooks Baseball has a little automated paragraph that it writes about pitchers. And I'm not going to read the whole thing, but for an example, this is still listed as a beta feature. I assume Dan Brooks coded this, but this is about Hugh Darvish. So if you go to Brooks Baseball and search for Hugh Darvish, you get this landing page, and on it there's a box that says pitch repertoire at a glance, and here's a basic description of 2017 pitches compared to other righties for Hugh Darvish. His four-seam fastball generates a high number of swings and misses compared to other pitchers' four-seamers, has less arm side movement than typical, and has slightly above average velocity velocity his slider sweeps across the zone has exceptional depth and results in somewhat more fly balls compared to other pitcher sliders and it goes

on from there talking about all of darvish's 17 different pitches and so you can have this descriptive paragraph that has a number of different adjectives and descriptions and it's useful but it's not a story and no one would want to read this as an article. So it's there, but yeah, much like Ben, I personally don't feel threatened, which is part of our privilege, but there's a lot that goes into writing. Yeah, I read a James Surowiecki article for Wired recently that was called The Great Tech Panic. recently that was called The Great Tech Panic. Robots won't take all of our jobs. And he made the case that concerns about automation taking jobs are probably overblown, that there aren't that many careers that have been rendered obsolete by robots and automation yet, which isn't to say that that will never happen. But the pace of that happening has been slower than some people

expected or feared. So maybe that's influencing me here. But yeah, I think writing is still going to be a valuable skill, even after the robots take over and even after no more memos to write about Shohei Otani. All right, Jeremy says, this is the Stanton question I alluded to earlier, I want to ask you about a potential John Carlos Stanton trade scenario. Derek Gould noted that a team that reaches an agreement with the Marlins could ask for a window of time to dock directly to Stanton and try to convince him to waive his no trade clause. For the sake of argument, let's say the

Dodgers, rumored to be Stanton's preferred destination, put together an acceptable package of prospects for the Marlins. Even for a team that prints money like LA, Stanton's contract would likely still be a stumbling block. Could Andrew Freeman and company use the negotiating window to try to convince Stanton to exercise his opt-out clause immediately, effectively making it a three-year, $77 million contract? As Gould laid out in his column, players typically use these negotiating windows to try to sweeten their contracts, but this type of move wouldn't be without something of a precedent. Alex Rodriguez was reported to be willing to restructure his then-record contract in 2003 in the trade that wasn't to the Red Sox. The Dodgers could pitch this to Stanton as giving them cost certainty so they could continue adding pieces to build a championship team.

I'm sure the union and the commissioner's office would weigh in on this scenario, but it would make the trade more palatable for the Dodgers or any other team, and for the Marlins, who would likely be on the hook for a good chunk of the financial obligations. Otherwise, for Stanton, the obvious downside is he'd be giving up a guarantee of $218 million, but it would get him out of what looks like a lengthy rebuild in Miami and give him a real shot at a World Series. So what do you think? Is this a real possibility to make a Stanton trade happen or a complete non-starter? Tough questions today. Jesus. Yeah. This would be effective. Certainly on the scale, this would be effective certainly on the scale this would be unprecedented right and we've we know that there have been players who have renegotiated contracts before but certainly nothing to this level and this this would be talking about money that's still a few years down the road so i don't know how much the dodgers are concerned about those luxury tax

excesses competitive balance tax excesses i'm sorry i'll get it right one of these days i have not considered this i don't know if there is a stipulation that you can only make a decision on your opt-out clause between the seasons but that doesn't mean that you couldn't just get stan to have it in writing somewhere like have a little side contract that says i will use my opt-out clause so i can't think of a reason why this wouldn't be allowed but at the same time i can't see a player renegotiating to give up that much of a guarantee for a stand and that is such a guaranteed windfall in the event that something goes wrong that I just don't think that he would care about specifically Los Angeles that much. There

would be a lot of people upset if he did that. I agree. Yes. I don't think this could happen. And I think, you know, just, I mean, if you waive your no trade clause, you're supposed to be getting something for that, not giving something up for that. So he'd have to be really, really desperate to get out of Miami and to go to LA specifically to want to do this. And we talked about the leverage earlier in the podcast, and it just seems like the Marlins essentially have to trade him if they want to get their payroll where they say it needs to be or where they want it to be. So I just, I don't think he's in the position where he would or should have to do this. And I think there'd be enormous pressure on him not to do it. I don't even know if it would be allowed or whether that would be

voided or something if he did do it just because of the precedent it sets, but I don't see him being in such dire straits. There are enough teams that would be interested in taking Stanton and would not make this demand. I think that I don't see it happening and I would not advise him to do this. All right, question from Mike. Enjoying reading all the Otani scenarios and articles lately, but I was just thinking of one involving the Mariners. If the Mariners sign Otani, they will have to DH him the days that he's not pitching, probably. In order to make DH room, they will have to put Nelson Cruzz in the outfield how much war will atani have to put up as a hitter to counter cruz's negative value as an outfielder i'm sure this can be done with other teams with horrible dhs but cruz works just as well well i don't know how to directly answer the question in terms of making it worth

it but you figure so cruz currently a dh and if you are using war, then there is a, the positional adjustment between DH and corner outfield is 10 runs. So Cruz, if you put him in the outfield, his positional adjustment over the rough equivalent of about a full season would be 10 runs more favorable. Now, of course, to offset that, Cruz is probably worse than a negative 10 run corner outfielder. There's a reason why he dhs he also would stay less healthy so if you figure he's probably like a negative 15 or negative 20 run defensive outfielder then that's why he would be worse out there so if he were forced to play the

corner outfield I don't know over a third of a season or so then that would be costing the Mariners that would be costing Cruz's value. I don't know. Let's even call it five runs. Maybe he gets more tired. Maybe he's just less good of a hitter. Maybe he's more likely to get injured. So let's say that it would make Cruz about five runs worse than you are. I mean, what's the alternative?

I don't know. Is counterfactual the right word here? It's Otani at DH and Cruz in the outfield as opposed to Cruz at DH and, I don't know, is counterfactual the right word here? It's Otani at DH and Cruz in the outfield, as opposed to Cruz at DH and, I don't know, Guillermo Heredia or something in the outfield. And Cruz might even still be better than Heredia. So maybe it's not so bad. But you would have Otani at DH for roughly a third of the game. So I don't know the final equation here to figure out exactly what Otani would have to do to be worth it.

You would want him to be, you know, something like an average hitter just to make him worth playing as a DH in the uh in the first place but from the Mariners perspective they would probably just look at this as well this is just the cost of doing business Otani is so good that we're going to accept this relatively minor drawback as a short-term consequence of having him on the team so the Mariners probably wouldn't fret too much and they would take care to limit Cruz's outfield exposure. So I realize I have not directly gotten to an answer to the question, but I've said a lot of words. Yeah, they were good words. I agree with the words. I don't know exactly, but I mean, we're basically saying that it's still worth it, right? It's still

adding value to have Otani as a DH, even if you have to have Cruz as an outfielder, probably for the days that he would be DH. It's I mean, you know, it cuts into the benefit, but probably not all the way. All right. Joe V in Houston says, suppose Mike Trout were required to have a spot in the batting order that matched the numerical value of his defensive position. For example, if he played center field, he would have to bat eighth. If he played first base, he'd bat third. If he played pitcher, he would be leading off. What would the optimal spot for him to play be? So are we assuming that this is something that would have been true his whole career or he has to make the move now? Let's say he has to make the move now. I think that's probably the most interesting. So, I mean, mean you know obviously you want mike trout hitting as high in the order as possible either leading off or maybe batting second because that's where you want your best overall hitter but you're not going

to have him pitch and you're not going to have him catch so i think that immediately the conversation really i guess just becomes about whether it's better for him to stay in center. He would lose at bats and play appearances, but he's at a more valuable defensive position. Right. So that's the question, right? Should he move to first base and bat third? Or I guess, do you think he could handle like a middle infield spot? That's, you know, what do do you think trout's defensive capabilities are like you assume he could move to first but could he play like second or short or something like that yeah so yeah i i think back on darren erstad was like an amazing defensive

center fielder and then in 2004 i'm gonna i think this is because of concussion concerns erstad moved to first base now there's a difference because erstad had previously played a lot of first base he had an interesting career i think the easiest thing to do if you wanted to move trout up and the angels would be incentivized to do so i think you could say okay we can make trout a first baseman he would probably be able to make that adjustment if he starts now you're just doing off-season routines get to spring training he would probably be fine he would be a pretty good first baseman better than cj cron or whatever overall but then you get into the conversation of well kind of don't you want

your best hitter batting or i guess you don't want your best hitter batting second right isn't that where statistics have ended up but second or fourth that's where you want your best hitters and so you obviously aren't going to have a second he's not going to play catcher but you could make a pretty convincing argument that i think mike trout could probably learn second base second baseman don't need to have strong arms and that's probably trout's biggest drawback right now there are intricacies that you just wouldn't be able to get familiar with in a short amount of time but the difference between batting fourth and trout batting like seventh, eighth, or ninth is pretty substantial in terms of plate appearances and overall leverage. And I think that he'd be

able to do it. And just from the Angels' perspective, you know what they need is a second baseman. So maybe they have one playing center right now. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, Trout's defensive skills as a center fielder probably have slipped a bit. He's not a brilliant center fielder at this point in his career, so he's someone who potentially might move to a corner a couple few years down the road anyway. So hey, just get ahead of it, move him up in the order, and fill that second baseman. And I mean, you know, lineup spot doesn't matter all that much, usually in the grand scheme of things, but going from eighth to fourth would be pretty big. And when you're talking about a guy who's maybe the best hitter in baseball, that's pretty significant, getting him more point appearances.

So, all right. Yeah, let's have Mike Trout field some grounders, see how that goes. All right. Question from Dylan. I've been thinking a lot about all the starters who have benefited by switching to reliever, the Archery Bradleys, the Andrew Millers, the Chad Greens of the world. I'm curious if you two believe it would work with Steven Matz. In the case of Green, Bradley, Miller, and many more, it seems the bigger issue for them as starters would not having a third pitch worth throwing, or the fact that as a starter it's more important to control the fastball well. With Matz, though, it has been his health, far and away, that has held him back.

Do you believe that health problems for starters can be mitigated by a switch to the pen? I'll also note that he could benefit with his pitches, too. As a starter in 2016, his best year by far, he threw five pitches regularly, two of which, the sinker and the changeup, were both average to below average in the WRC+. They yielded to batters, numbers, numbers. Assuming he picks two or three pitches to stick with as a reliever, he could throw the four-seamer, curveball, and slider that yielded good numbers, respectively. All of his pitches would probably get an uptick in velocity as well, since that happens with most starters who move to the pen, and he already throws around 95 to begin with. Can we dream of another Andrew Miller, or at least a Brad Hand?

he throws around 95 to begin with can we dream of another andrew miller or at least a brad hand mats was so fun to watch when he was on and healthy so i'm just looking for something to salvage him and i'm not even a mets fan one thing we know is that on average it is easier to relieve than to start we know this for a fact this is why relievers are better than starters it's why failed starters end up as relievers one thing i think teams probably don't know is who's going to make the best transitions to the bullpen and who's not like the diamondbacks jorge de la rosa just gained like three or four miles per hour which i don't think anyone expected but archie bradley kind of did the same thing which maybe more people expected but i don't i don't think teams have solved who can make the best transition to relief and who can't i don't necessarily buy that relieving is that much better for health than starting of course the innings are

lower but you're making a lot more appearances you're certainly warming up pretty often and those pitches are generally thrown with higher leverage at least if you if the reliever is any good so they're more stressful situations and you get a lot of the up and down less of the between appearance recovery so there's a lot relievers arms can be taxed pretty heavily especially if you end up being someone who's slider heavy which is something that relievers do pretty often or you rely more on i don't know if you have a splitter you threw a lot of splitters so it can be taxing but if the mets have arrived at the conclusion first of all let's not trust the mets conclusions in any case but if the mets or a smarter team were to arrive at the conclusion that steven matz just can't withstand the rigors of starting every five or six days,

then sure, you can try him in the bullpen, give him a shot, make him one of those multi-inning swingmen and just see what he can do. See if he can get that slider back now that he has the surgery behind him because the slider was good. It was one of those Worthen sliders and it made him even better than I think he looked as a prospect. So the real answer is it's kind of a mystery because I don't think even the Yankees knew Chad Green would turn into Chad Green. And he basically just did that by throwing his fastball, which all of a sudden was touching the upper 90s. So you don't really know. But certainly if you are the Mets and you're concerned that he can't start, there's no reason not to try him in the bullpen first. Yeah, right. I mean, probably throwing fewer pitches means less risk of getting hurt. I

mean, maybe it's not really a proportional relationship there because as you mentioned, maybe there's more risk in pitching more frequently or having to get up and get down again or, you know, the high leverage, all of that. But, you know, if you have difficulty staying healthy, it's not unreasonable maybe to at least try it and say, well, this didn't work. Maybe this will work. And you might have some guys who would respond really well to this and other guys might not. So again, it's really hard to predict, but you know, just because the potential impact of a reliever is probably lower than a starter or at least a good starter. And you know, maybe the gap is kind of converging here just because of the way

that starters and leavers are used today but there's still a difference so it's the kind of thing that you try when starting just doesn't work and you know maybe matz is getting to that point but probably not quite yet all right uh let's see if we can just go very quickly here eric hartman let's say that nosferatu threatened aaron judge that if Judge did not put up a strikeout rate that was better than league average, he would damn him to a life of one of popular culture's less glamorous vampires. I would assume that Judge can do this if it were his only concern each time he stepped to the plate. I'm curious as to your thoughts as to how low he could get his K rate. I hope you enjoyed your respective Thanksgivings. I did. Thank you, Eric. So aaron judge's only concern

is making contact how much contact could aaron judge make i think he can make a lot of contact and i think back on the uh the the barry zito half swing that i've referred to in the past just pulling up some uh some pitcher strikeout rates what's the lowest one i can find here levon hernandez in the last decade struck out just 10 of the time javier vasquez 15 of the time r.a dickie r.a dickie 16 of the time kenta maeda 17 zach cranky 18 aaron judge far better hitter than all these guys if he was motivated by not striking out he would not strike out a whole lot or very look you know what i mean so he would get the strikeout rate very low and i think what would probably happen he would bank a lot of contact earlier in the season because you know who wants to become a non-glamorous vampire and so he would he would make a lot of

contact earlier on and then as soon as it's banked then he would just go on these runs of just being erin judge and and yeah having his usual approach and so he would have crazy month-to-month splits but i think that he would be able to make a lot of contact, and he would do it by swinging weaker and swinging a lot earlier in the count. You'd see a lot of first pitch swings from Aaron Judge. Yeah, I mean, if you really wanted to make contact, you could bunt, you could do a butcher boy kind of thing. You'd obviously be a lot worse as a hitter, but if that were your only goal, I think, you know, probably every hitter, every regular position player in baseball could get into like a single digit strikeout rate, right? Is that too ambitious to say that?

I think that's probably true. You'd be bad. You would be unplayable in some cases, but you could do it, I think. And then not Eric Hartman, but Eric Halterman says, imagine three teams equal in every way, except that each has a team building superpower. Imagine three teams equal in every way, except that each has a team-building superpower. Team A is by far the best in the league at identifying which top 100 prospects will end up being all-star caliber players. Team B is by far the best in the league at identifying which non-prospects will end up as average regulars. And Team C is by far the best in the league at identifying when established stars will fall off and become replacement-level players.

Imagine these teams being three or four times as good as the next best team in their respective areas. Not literally perfect, but feel free to answer whichever way is more fun. Which team ends up winning the most World Series? I think it's the first one. I think stars are more important than anything else, especially when they are young and cheap. And there is such a miss rate with the top prospects that when you have some and you know that they're not going to pan out, then you can trade them for a lot of value. You can probably trade them for up and coming top 100 prospects. However, I already know, well, I just made my case very, very briefly, but do you have a difference of opinion? Well, I'd rule out C, I think, just being able to identify when established stars will fall off. That doesn't really help

you that much unless you have the established stars already and can trade them at the right time. So I would say not that. By the way, there was a good Russell Carlton piece at BP this week about how teams don't seem to be able to do that and don't seem to be able to predict breakouts. So, you know, it would be valuable,

but not the most valuable. So it's really between A and B. And your position is persuasive. I think the best case for B is that there are just a lot more non-prospects than there are top 100 prospects. And every team needs average regulars. And you've written a bunch about the value of just avoiding terrible players and avoiding sub-replacement players. And this team would never have that. You'd have an average regular at really every position, right? I mean, you would never have a below-average regular because there are always non-prospects available. So this would not give you the superstars, but it would give you no holes on your team anywhere.

And to me, that might actually be more valuable because if Team A is just which top 100 prospects will end up being all-star caliber players but it's not necessarily just which players period will end up being all-star caliber players then you're only working with 100 prospects and you know they're under other teams control and sure you can go get them but there's some difficulty to to doing that and maybe teams catch on eventually and stop trading their prospects to you because they realize that you're really good at this whereas there's no way really for teams to defend

against the ability to identify non-prospects who are maybe just freely available talent you could sign so i think i'm gonna go with b but it's close yeah okay you i think now you've probably persuaded me team b would still need stars because the the downside is that you end up basically is like the rays where you just have a bunch of average players everywhere and you're just not good enough you need every team needs star players but i think you're right well you could trade for star players right because you can you basically have an unlimited supply of average players so yeah you know okay you can parlay that into stars i've come around because you can you can trade for stars you can even overpay for know okay you can parlay that into stars i've come around because you can you

can trade for stars you can even overpay for stars or you can pay for stars in in free agency and the reason that it's dangerous to do that is because they take up so much of your money but if you figure that you can probably have a bunch of really really cheap average players that's always the challenge teams don't they can't fill out their rosters because you still need average players because if you have stars and scrubs you're probably not going to be very good you need that support system but if you can have that support system reliably for cheap then yeah you can probably identify the above average players that you want and and yep i've come around it's b ben's right okay last one this will be quick i think aiden patreon supporter says jeff made an aside on a recent podcast what

if otani pitched for the yankees and hit for the Mets? That was almost certainly not meant to be taken seriously. But what is this podcast if not an excuse to entertain the ridiculous? It got me thinking about the case of Alfredo Di Stefano, legendary soccer player of the 50s and 60s. In 1953, the rival Spanish clubs Barcelona and Real Madrid both believed they had signed the player. To resolve the dispute, the two clubs entered mediation with the league,

who decided that they should share the player for the next four years. The teams agreed. Di Stefano would play for Real Madrid in the first year of the contract, Barcelona for the second, Madrid for the third, and Barcelona again for the fourth and final year. The deal never played out that way. Barcelona renounced their claim on the player shortly afterward, and Di Stefano went on to have an illustrious career with Madrid. My question is, would a major league team ever consider entering this kind of deal with

a free agent player and another ball club? Smaller market teams might be more able to go in for big free agents, knowing they'd only be on the hook for half of the contract while still getting some of the player's productive years, or would the hassle of trying to find a replacement player for when your free agent signing disappears every other year make this idea a non-starter? Okay, it's bad, but it's better for the team that goes first. I think that if you have like years 1, 3, 5 of a six-year deal, it's going to be better than years 2, 4, 6, especially in year 5 when you can just run the guy literally into the ground. You can just have him throw 350 innings if you wanted to because you know what?

It doesn't matter to you. Screw you, Team B. So I think that it's not a good arrangement. I can't believe that there is actually a precedent in major sports for something like this happening. Didn't come to pass, as mentioned in the email, but bad, even worse for the second team. Sloppy seconds. Yeah, I don't see it happening. I mean, the player wouldn't want to do it.

He's going to have to move and move his family around from year to year, just not see them. And then there's the hassle of trying to fill the hole that is left when he goes to the other team. And I can't imagine this player would be very popular with his teammates because he's a mercenary who is basically jumping to, you know, I don't know if it's a direct rival, but it's at least an indirect rival every year. So I don't know that that would work very well with the clubhouse. So yeah, I don't think this would ever be in the best interest of a player or a team probably. All right. Could you tell I was monitoring the real-time Bitcoin price this entire podcast with avid interest? I'm in the Bitcoin market these days. My cousin gave me about a 20th of a Bitcoin for my birthday four years ago,

which was worth $35 at the time and is now worth like $1,000. And Bitcoin just like skyrocketed this year and over the last month or so. So I'm trying to figure out when I should get out and wait because it's crashed repeatedly over the last several years, but it bounces back. So it's going to crash at some point, but I don't want to get out too early like my cousin did so i don't know what to do here how how deep look i don't know anything about markets how deep has it crashed when it's crashed like all the way back down to like 30 or 40 dollars or just partial i think so i haven't been tracking it that closely because it was 35 so whatever but i i think it's lost you know most of its value like five times or something.

So I expect that that will happen again. So I'm just trying to find the right time here. But I have this window open on my computer. I'm like a guy with a Bloomberg terminal or something with a graph and like real time updates on the Bitcoin price trying to maximize my return here. It's now like a tenth of a Bitcoin. At some point it doubled. But yeah, it's worth like a thousand bucks here. How long should I ride this thing? I knew nothing about the market or forecasting the Bitcoin market. And when I got it, I didn't think all that highly of that birthday present. But it has turned out to be probably the best birthday present I got that year. Yeah, right. Shame for everybody else. You should probably write them all emails. I know. I've almost sold it like three times in the last couple of days.

I don't know. If anyone listening is a Bitcoin expert and wants to give me some investment advice here, let me know. This hasn't cratered completely by the time you hear this podcast. All right. So that will do it. This was a long one, but you sent excellent questions. We will be back later this week.

And if you write in emails about Bitcoin, please leave me off. Even with my possible Bitcoin windfall, we still need your support to sustain this podcast. You can do so on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Five listeners who have done so include Dan Friedman, Alex Legg, David Goetz, Tom Dever, and Tom Lloyd. 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 the podcast on iTunes. Your ratings and reviews help us out.

Give us a self-esteem boost. Help us attract new listeners. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for editing assistance. Please replenish our mailbag. Send your questions and comments to me and Jeff via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system. The powers that be at Fangraphs have ordered a new supply of Effectively Wild t-shirts. Those should be in stock in December, hopefully in time for Christmas. We'll see, but I'll make

an announcement when they're back. And Jeff and I will be back to talk to you later this week. I'm going for high coin, baby For I am going nowhere at all I'm going for high coin, baby To keep me high and in and up and down and all And all the cats try to lick you And tear down all the words you're able to recall That's all before the fall