Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1146: Unmaking Multiple Myths

Episode Date: December 7, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about a baseball earthquake in Cleveland and the Miles Mikolas and Mike Minor signings, debunk myths about NPB pitchers and Pud Galvin, and answer listener emails about Shohei Ohtani and Chief Wahoo, Ohtani loopholes, Jerry Dipoto trading his way to Ohtani, the DH and Ohtani, free-agent players prioritizing factors […]

Can't keep hanging on to what is dead and gone If you built yourself a name And don't just want to give Interior lies Oh, let the ashes fly Help me today, babe Help me today, babe Hello and welcome to episode 1146 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters.

My name is Ben Lindberg, I write for The Ringer. I'm joined, as always, by Jeff Sullivan of FedGraphs. Hello. How are you? Good. How are you? Still waiting for those transactions that we've all expected and awaited for weeks. Haven't happened yet. So we're going to do an email show today. And we've got a bit of banter that we want to get to before that, I think. And one thing we want to mention is an email from Colin who mentioned in regard to our previous episode with Eric Clemente about earthquakes

and other natural disasters. Colin says, with regard to your Geological Baseball podcast, on August 23rd, 2011, there was an earthquake during the Indians game. I was sitting on a bench at Cleveland State eating lunch and listening to the game and can anecdotally confirm it was minorly distressing. Two of my friends were in the upper deck and reported disconcerting shaking. Tom Hamilton, the Indians radio guy, was amusingly terrified. Then it ended in life and the game went on without serious disruptions. And you say that you remember watching this. I did not watching this.

I did not remember this. In fact, let me confirm. I can go to an entry. Okay, August 23rd, 2011, lookout landing. Headline, Indians rally past Mariners, prove they're still pricks. Let's see. Bullet point, control F. This game was interrupted by an earthquake.

Wait, no, the broadcast was interrupted by an earthquake. The game was not interrupted by an earthquake because nobody on the field had any idea there was an earthquake. Some earthquake. There was a lot of expressed amazement at the fact that the earthquake was felt some hundreds of miles from its epicenter. Now consider that the 1883 eruption of Krakatau was heard nearly 3,000 miles away from the source. Volcanoes are greater than earthquakes.

There is not even an argument. So even in 2011, apparently that was me. Yes, you are very consistent. Boy, the press box here is really shaky. What in the world is going on? Now the 2-2 pitch. Swung on, hit a ton, deep right center field. This is in the gap. This will go all the way to the wall for extra bases. Chews in the second with a two-out double as this broadcast booth continues to shake back and forth. I have no idea what's going on, but it's not the most comforting time to be in this ballpark.

I wanted to ask you about at least one recent signing since we just talk about NPB pitchers constantly on this ballpark. I wanted to ask you about at least one recent signing since we just talk about NPB pitchers constantly on this podcast now. There was one who signed with the Cardinals, Myles Mikolas. And the important thing to know here is that he signed for two years and I don't know, 15 million or between 14 million and 16 million. And he was one of my picks in our free agent contracts draft. I took the over on MLB Trade Rumor's prediction of two years and 10 million. So I'm feeling good about that. That is the important thing about this transaction. But there are also some other

things to know. So who is Myles Miklas? He's a man. Yeah, I forgot about the contract to pick him. So congratulations on your $5.5 million to play with. Buy yourself something nice. Maybe some more fractions of a Bitcoin. Yeah. Usually we get feedback on that draft more quickly than this. But this was maybe the first person either of us drafted who was actually signed. So it's always a nice little boost when you remember you picked one of these guys and actually got it right.

Yeah, I like analyzing, especially now that I have some access to Delta graphs. It's fun to analyze the NPB. And I think that not enough credit is given to players who go over there and become successful. I think that there is more of an interest in players who are born Japanese and are successful. Because then you think, oh, we've never seen these players. They could be anything. Shohei Otani could be the next Babe Ruth. He won't be, but he could be the next Babe Ruth.

But if you have someone like Rick Vandenherk go to Japan and pitch well, people are like, well, we've seen Rick Vandenherk. We don't need to see more Rick Vandenherk. Well, Myles Mikolas is a pitcher who pitched with the padres and the rangers he was a starter for the rangers in 2014 and he wasn't very good and so just like many players who go to japan he pursued better job security he pursued a little more money went to japan and for three years and especially this most recent year he was one of the best pitchers in neither league which is a good thing to be he's not overpowering he doesn't throw 103 miles per hour like Otani does. He's more of a strike thrower. He had the second lowest walk rate among all starters.

I was going to say Japanese starters, but that's not true. He had second lowest walk rate in the NPB among starters last season. He had a good strikeout rate, good ground ball rate. He has a good fastball in the low 90s, good slider, good curveball, good pitches, throws a lot of strikes. And now he's going to the cardinals who are kind of i think they're still considered like the classic team to sign a strike thrower who gets grounders that's kind of their it's been their mo for decades i don't know how good he's

going to be no one can know how good he's going to be but he has nearly an identical track record in japan now as colby lewis had when he had his little two-year stint and when colby lewis came back he was worth nine war over his first three years with the rangers so lewis was a great investment on texas as spartan he wasn't a very good pitcher before he went to japan either mikolas has gone over seems to have refined his repertoire throws a million strikes and i like it i like the signing here his uh if i'm remembering this correctly apparently apparently his wife has become even more of a name and celebrity in Japan than Mikolas. Which, again, I'll remind you that Mikolas has been one of the best starters in the league. So he's been great.

His wife has been even more popular. She has some sort of lifestyle brand. I don't know. I don't traffic in those circles. But that's something I learned when I was reading and learning about Mikolas. And I wrote about him on Monday because I didn't have anything else to write about. And just by pure coincidence, he signed on Tuesday, which was great timing. So I'm thankful for that.

Yeah. So between that and what Mike Miner signed, that just about brings us to the end of the activity. You wrote about that too, I guess. Had to. Yeah. I guess the notable thing there in the Rangers signing Mike Miner is that it was reported that they're considering or leaning toward trying to make him a starter again, which, of course, he used to be a starter. He had some success as a starter. Then he got hurt.

He missed two full seasons, right? And then he came back as a reliever last year and was very good. And so i think generally the reaction has been why mess with success why tempt fate but apparently they are although we're months away from them actually having to set their rotation so this could definitely be one of those things that gets abandoned before or during spring training yeah just uh two seasons ago the pirates are trying to make one nicosio a starter again and there's a lot of attention paid to him in spring training and people are talking about the progress of his change-up because if nicasio could learn a change-up oh the sky's the limit he started 12

times and he went back to the bullpen so he relieved perfectly well and it worked out for the pirates and there are plenty of examples of this not working out but then if you're the rangers they tried to convert neftali felice to starter and that bombed they tried to convert Alexi Ogondo to a starter and that succeeded for a little while and then it bombed and they tried to convert CJ Wilson to a starter and that was great even though CJ Wilson is annoying so there's a there's a mixed record here but I mean the no matter what this is going to be decided by the results-based analysis where you think oh why mess with success but then the counter-argument, well, if he's good, why not get more innings out of him? And then this will just be determined by, you know, the usual n equals one sample size. And people will

say either it was a great decision or a bad decision because it did or did not work out. You wrote an article. You also wrote a baseball article recently about Japanese pitchers and how they age when they come over to the major leagues. Talk about that. Yeah, I wanted to do a couple debunkings here. Everyone enjoys a good debunking. So this was one of them. I recently became aware of what seems to be a fairly common belief about former NPB pitchers,

which is that they come over here and they essentially have a two-year window where they're good and then things fall apart. And Joe Sheehan wrote about this last week, and then I went back and Jill Sherman has written about this. Tom Verducci wrote about this. Various other writers have also kind of bandied this about. And when Verducci wrote about this back when Hugh Darvish was the guy everyone was trying to sign, he quoted a bunch of major league executives who seemed to acknowledge that this was the case, that there was like a wall that these pitchers hit where in their third year and beyond, they just fall off a cliff basically. And it seems like it's kind of just a widespread

belief in baseball, or at least it was at the time. And I was somewhat suspicious of this just because none of these articles provided any kind of control group or any comparison to non-NPB pitchers. And so when I read it, I thought, well, yes, certainly Japanese pitchers decline over time, but who doesn't? Certainly Japanese pitchers decline over time, but who doesn't? We know from research that pitchers generally just decline from almost the moment they make the majors. And by the time you get to the age that most NPB pitchers have been. So there have been 11 pitchers who were sort of established in NPB in Japan and then came over to the U.S. and made at least 40 starts in the majors. And those guys averaged almost 29 years old when they made their MLB debuts. So you wouldn't really expect them to

last that long. It would be weird if they didn't decline after a couple of years. And really, if you take any group of pitchers, you would also expect them to decline after a couple of years. So that was my thought. So came up with comparisons with with comparable players for every one of these japanese pitchers and i basically just looked for guys who had similar ages in adjacent seasons you know so like if i think what darvish came over in 2012 was his rookie year and he was 25 or something and he was worth 3.9 war and he threw 191 innings something like that so I looked at guys who had seasons in the majors within one year of that on either side within one war of that on either side within 20 innings pitched of that on either

side and within one year of age on either side so I did that for each Japanese pitcher, came up with composite averages of each of their comps, and then compared those averages to the averages of the Japanese pitchers. And basically, I found no evidence that this is true. And if in fact, it appears that the NPP pitchers decline more gracefully than the typical non-NPB pitcher who has a similar season. And I went and looked six seasons out from that season, and it turns out the NPP pitchers have been much better bets. And so it's somewhat perplexing that there is this widespread belief that Japanese pitchers are not durable or decline more quickly than average, because it seems like the opposite is the case, if anything. And I had a couple of theories for why people think this in my piece. I don't know whether

you agreed with any of those or had your own thoughts on why this is a thing. Well, why don't you just continue talking? Okay. Well, the theories I had basically, I mean, you know, you can certainly think of high profile examples of Japanese pitchers who were at their best early on in their MLB careers and then quickly declined from there. Like Hideo Nomo lasted a long time, but his first two seasons, he was fourth place finish in Cy Young in both of those first two years. And then after that, he was a below average pitcher for the rest of his career. both of those first two years and then after that he was a below average pitcher for the rest of his career certainly Daisuke Matsuzaka had two good years and then got hurt and was not very valuable after that and you can you know talk about Tanaka Darvish guys who hurt their arms hurt their elbows have still been useful certainly but maybe not at their best anyway my thought is that there are only

like 11 of these guys that fit this description that I was using and that Joshian was using. And so when you have a small group like that, it's very easy to think of specific players and think, oh, yeah, Matsuzaka, he was so hyped. And all of these guys get hyped. And not all of them. I mean, you know, this group included like Kenshin Kawakami and Masato Yoshi and guys like that who weren't really at the Tanaka, Otani, Daisuke, Darvish level. But still, there's sort of extra hype that comes along with these pitchers who we haven't really seen. And maybe their numbers are really impressive because they've been pitching in NPB and you get a little overexcited about them. But when you have 11 names, you can kind of call up specific examples. And it's very easy to recall those examples. Whereas when you're thinking of just everyone else, all the other pitchers, it's hard to single out names. And when you look at like the Matsuzaka comp group, for example, I'm just trying to pull up my article here just to remember the actual specific names that I use. But you, but you do have guys who were good

bets and aged very well. In his comp group, you get, for example, CeCe Sabathia or Dan Heron. Those guys held up pretty well, but then you also get guys who just kind of had Matsuzaka-like seasons, but then really declined very quickly. Eric Bedard, Jeff Francis, Chiming Wong, Carl Sembrano, John Garland, Rich Hill, who of course had a renaissance later, but not until a lot later. Just a lot of guys like that. And so I think people are probably just focusing on the high-profile examples of NPP pitchers who have declined and not really thinking of the fact that every free agent pitcher is expected to decline fairly quickly. The value is always up front, no matter

what the backstory of the pitcher is. Right. I think that it also, because the sample is so small and you are essentially leaning on anecdotal evidence, Japanese pitchers suffer from not really having the one like freak show workhorse, like their Randy Johnson, where you could just think like, oh, that guy lasted forever. Now, as I look at the numbers, Hideo Nomo, well, yeah, there is Corota, but unfortunately for him, he came over so late that he didn't get to say that he was durable for like a decade and a half or whatever it was. Although, as I look at the numbers, I guess it's been so long long and maybe this is the reason a lot of people suffer from this but i had forgotten that hideo nomo was such a workhorse for as long as he was between 1995 and 2003 he was like top i think he was seventh in baseball in starts he was like top 10 or top 11 in innings he was worth 28 wins above replacement according to fan graphs which put him in the top 20 so nomo actually was a workhorse there for nearly a decade and then of course he started to break down but that's what happens to

starting pitchers so that's not nomo's fault it's just that i would uh i would think that as you brought up when you have pitchers who are coming over already at older ages then that means that their sort of prime pitching shape is if it's not behind them then they are rapidly getting to the end of it and they really i would think you only need i don't know one more corota maybe if he came over a little earlier you just have one one of those come over i think that would do a lot to change the impression but maybe maybe one of the major takeaways here is that people vastly continue to overrate the reliability of domestic starting pitchers. Every pitcher is an enormous risk. Every single one of them. Don't give them money unless they're Clayton Kershaw.

Right. Or unless they don't cost anything anyway, like Shohei Otani. I don't think any teams are really that worried about his durability because he could pitch one year and be worth what they're paying for him. But just, you know, when we're looking long term at what you expect from his career, there is zero reason to think that he will age any worse than a pitcher who was not pitching in NPB. And, you know, there are reasons why you could think that maybe an NPB pitcher would age worse. And in the articles arguing that they do, you see things like, And in the articles arguing that they do, you see things like, well, the leagues are different and a lot of Japanese pitchers are worked very hard at a young age. And, you know, they have really potentially harmful pitch counts in high school and that sort of thing.

And then also they're on a different schedule. So they're pitching, you know, once a week maybe. And so maybe they would decline more quickly in MLB where they're going from that to pitching every five days or something and you know differences in the ball and the schedule of the length of the season all this stuff or maybe even like advanced scouting you could say that maybe these guys coming over from Japan hitters aren't familiar with them a lot of them have had sort of distinctive or potentially deceptive deliveries. Maybe the league just takes a while to catch on. And then when they do catch on, they kind of head downhill faster than the typical pitcher. But anyway, all those things, if the data supported this theory,

then you could trot out those arguments to explain why, but it doesn't, so we don't need to. So Otani's 23, obviously obviously which sets him apart from previous japanese pitchers who've been older when they've come over for the most part so even if there were a trend here you might think that he was the exception just because he's so much younger but there isn't a trend so this is not something anyone needs to worry about and hopefully we can put this narrative to rest hopefully otani will put this narrative to rest. Hopefully Otani will put this narrative to rest by pitching well for a long time. I hope that in all seven individual team meetings this week,

Otani goes in and his agent asks for a $200 million contract and then he just expresses surprise when they can't offer it and then he just walks out. So the other thing that I wanted to kind of briefly debunk here, this is the time of year when people start recirculating the Pud Galvin story. The idea that the Hall of Famer Pud Galvin, you hear the details differ, but I heard our friend Jonah Carey alluding to this on his podcast the other day, not to single him out because I hear this all the time. And in fact, I have probably mentioned this at points in the past before I was aware of the actual story. But the legend, and it is a legend seemingly, goes that Pud Galvin back in like 1889 was taking monkey testicles or

something, very 19th century, some sort of snake oil, but you know, some kind of testosterone supplement that was intended to improve his performance. And it's a handy story to trot out at this time of year, because this is when we get into Hall of Fame and steroids arguments. And so it's nice to have a Hall of Famer from the 19th century that you can cite and say, see, people were cheating back then, or if it wasn't cheating, they were just doing whatever they could or taking whatever they could to be better at baseball. Even way back then, this has always been the case. There's no reason to make a big fuss about recent users. And generally, I'm in agreement with the philosophy there. But the actual facts of the case are pretty dubious in Pod Galvin's case. And here I am citing pages from baseball's past,

which I've plugged before. This is the newsletter that Craig Wright, the great historian and sabermetrician, writes a couple times a week. And it's a subscription-based newsletter. I subscribed to it. I enjoyed it a lot. So he's written a couple things about Pod Galvin.

The first is that no one called him Pod Galvin until long after he died, apparently. This is a nickname that was almost never used during his lifetime, during his career. But then, like, in the 50s, back when his candidacy for the Hall of Fame was being revived, someone used Pud Galvin, and that just caught on, and it sounded very quaint and 19th century, and so everyone liked it, and now it's just standard Pud Galvin and that just caught on and it sounded very quaint and 19th century. And so everyone liked it. And now it's just standard Pud Galvin. But really, he was just, you know, his actual name was James and he was called James or Jim

or he had other nicknames like the little steam engine or gentle James because he had an accent. I wanted to ask you about, so first of all, so Pud Galvin, the Pud supposedly originates because he made hitters quote look like pudding. But then it wouldn't be Pud. It would be Pud. It'd be Pud Galvin, which is ridiculous. But then so I didn't know about the accent because I wanted to ask. Gentle James is listed as his nickname and his name is James. So that would be two mispronunciations for one player from more than 100 years ago.

But he's Irish? Irish-ish? Yes, I think so. Yeah, right. And there's another theory that maybe he was called Pud because he got kind of pudgy late in his career. But that would be a correct pronunciation, I suppose. But anyway, that's not the important thing.

The important thing is with this PED scandal that was sort of, I think this was discovered, someone wrote a book about him maybe or an article about him about 10 years ago. And since then, this story has really caught on and it's been in NPR and ESPN and all sorts of prominent places. And so Craig Wright wrote about this a couple of years ago, and he did the research and he tried to corroborate this. And it is pretty dubious. There was a mention in the Washington Post, I think it was August 14th of, let's see, 1889, I suppose, is when this happened. And that did allude to the fact that he had been like a test subject at a place that was testing this elixir. And this elixir was kind of a famous popular thing at the time a lot of people realized that it was stupid it was snake oil it was nothing but it kind

of caught on for a while there and let's see Craig describes it here it's a powerful energizing elixir that involved using slices of testicles of a guinea pig and a dog, which this doctor then mixed with glycerin, stored for 24 hours, washed in boiling water, passed through a paper filter, and sterilized at 104 degrees. And as Craig writes, at this point, a modern first-year medical student could assure you that the brown saccade elixir, that's what it's called, was no more a steroid-like substance than the Rocky Mountain oysters you can order at Rocky's Game. So anyway, Craig says here that this reference in the Washington Post brief reference is the only reference ever found relating Galvin to the elixir.

So that's one thing. Often you hear that this was like common knowledge and everyone was talking about it. This is the only reference ever found to it. And in that story, it is a single occurrence with Galvin cooperating as a test subject in a medical experiment. Galvin had already won over 300 Major League Games before. This doctor had even come up with his crazy concoction.

Clearly, no one had any impression that it was responsible for Galvin having been a great pitcher. But here's the really interesting thing that came out of my research into this legend. That brief claim in the Washington Post on which the whole controversy is based is, more likely than not, bogus. I tried very hard to uncover anything that would substantiate the article's claim and came up empty. It has all the appearance of being a phony story intended to further the sensationalizing of the elixir, a practice that was particularly strong in Washington, D.C., which was the hometown of this doctor and his champion,

another doctor. So this is probably not something that ever happened. Galvin had a game on the day that he was supposed to have been at this test thing, and no one ever mentioned it otherwise, and it was certainly not common knowledge or anything like that, which is not to say that no player took this. And Craig Wright also mentioned that the September 4th, 1889 issue of Sporting Life has Pop Smith, the shortstop of the Boston Bean Eaters, saying that he tried this elixir the other day and that he felt like a cult, which I guess is a good thing to feel like a cult. So this was something that, you know, athletes would be called upon to essentially be sponsors of this sort of substance, which, you know, we get the same thing today, right? Frank Thomas hawking testosterone or whatever on TV. So it was not

unheard of. And there may be players who tried this, but doesn't seem to really be any evidence that Putt Galvin actually did this or that if he ever did, that it was something he did regularly or was known for doing. So spare a thought for poor Pudgalvin, who has had his name sort of retroactively trashed here for taking this elixir that in all likelihood he probably didn't take. That is another podcast debunking. And I will add, because I didn't know this, Pudgalvin, I guess, he happens to be, probably a lot of people don't know this, happens to hold the all-time single season record for wins above replacement for a pitcher.

In 1884, Pudgalvin was worth 20.5 wins above replacement. And that's because that season he started 75 games and threw 656.1 innings for the Buffalo whatever they were. They were the Bisons. Well, that makes sense. Yeah. Well, he must have felt like a cult that season, I guess. But that was pre-Elixir.

You couldn't even get the Elixir in those days. So, Pud Galvin, no asterisk needed. All right. So, let's do some emails, I suppose. And about half of our emails are shohei otani related there's just no avoiding this i don't think but we'll we'll try to get to some other things too here but let's start with uh well this is a maybe a missed opportunity this is from ben in san francisco and he sent this before we got the list of seven teams that are finalists

for otani but let's talk about what might have been. So Ben says, suppose Shohei Otani is more woke than any of us realizes and is simultaneously a huge fan of the Cleveland Indians approach to analytics and player development. After dutifully reading all 30 memos, he communicates to Chris Antonetti, I really want your team to be my top choice. However, to make me feel most comfortable, you'd need to abandon the Chief Wahoo logo and optionally change your team name to something I find more acceptable.

The Wahoo logo would have to go immediately, but you'd have up to two years to transition your team name to something else. I don't want to get into a negotiation about this. Let me know tomorrow what you decide to do. And if it's not enough, I'm prepared to go to the Yankees. So as we know now,

not going to either of those teams, but Ben continues, what do you think the Indians would do? Or what would they have done in this situation? to go to the Yankees. So as we know now, not going to either of those teams, but Ben continues, what do you think the Indians would do or what would they have done in this situation? Would they get rid of the logo? Would they do both? How would it affect their decision if Otani went public with the request? Well, okay. So let's see. I believe this off season, Commissioner Manfred is meeting with, who's the Indians owner? Dolan. I believe he's meeting with Dolan and they're going to have a conversation about the Chief Wahoo situation. I don't think there's any momentum for the Indians to change their actual name. I think it's kind of a one thing at a time deal.

And we know Manfred wants the Chief Wahoo logo to go away and Dolan is, well, I'm not going to make this political. But I would think there's already momentum for the Indians phasing the logo out, even though I think they've taken a few steps backward in that regard in the past year or two. But I think that if Ohtani confronted them with this and if he said, I will sign with you if you get rid of this logo, I do not think that logo is worth $100 million or $150 million to the Indians anymore. I would think that the Indians would say, great, on one condition, please don't't go public we will say that this was our decision and this is a coincidence of timing i think that the indians would like to be regarded as the team that did away with the logo because you know i guess teams deserve credit when they undo racism or something several decades i now if if Otani was like, I want you to not be the Indians anymore,

that would be very difficult from a branding perspective. Of course, teams have changed their names before. The Marlins aren't a great example because they changed their location and the Angels have changed their location a million times. But like the Astros used to be the Colt 45s.

That's a second colt reference in this podcast and they felt like colts every day there are several other examples that i'm not recalling off the top of my head that maybe ben could come up with the we know teams have changed their names but i can't think of a team that's changed its name in the modern revenue and hashtag brand era so it would be difficult for the indians to. But I don't know. Do you think that there would be a value loss in changing your franchise name just because you do have to rebuild some of your brand? But if the Indians became the Cleveland, I don't know, volcanoes, then I still don't think that the penalty to them would be worth the Shohei Otani surplus value, which is,

of course, what we always have to come back to because Otani projects would be worth the Shohei Otani surplus value, which is, of course, what we always have to come back to, because Otani projects to be worth something like one or two hundred million dollars more than what he's going to be paid. And so do you think that Otani would be worth more to the Indians than the penalty of changing their franchise name? And I know that these are very complicated decisions, but I'm inclined to think the answer is yes. I know that these are very complicated decisions, but I'm inclined to think the answer is yes. Yeah, I bet if you could just reduce it all to dollars, I bet probably. But I don't know if a team would do something like that, change its name.

I mean, that is even more central to its identity. And in Cleveland's case, you know, there's not quite as much of a movement to change the team name as there is to change the logo. I mean, there are arguments in favor of doing both, certainly, but I think the logo is something that seems very obvious to me and to a lot of people and has clearly been on the way out, and you can't really say the same about the team name. So that, I don't know, I think a team would probably balk at that just because it's changing such an essential thing to your identity for a player who has not played for you, has not played in the majors. Even I think probably most people would not be sympathetic to that request, whereas they probably would to the logo request. I think either way, whether he goes public or not with the logo request, I think the team would acquiesce to that because it's clearly on the way anyway. It's going to happen one of these years, hopefully soon, but with or without Otani and this request pressure on the Indians to do it, but also gives them kind of a defense for fans like the holdouts who have been Cleveland fans their whole life and are attached to the logo and don't think there's anything wrong with the logo or think that their tradition trumps whatever is wrong with the logo. Even they will really want Shohei Otani, so they might kind of just be okay with it. Like, hey, we like the logo. We don't want wrong with the logo even they will really want shohy otani so they might kind of

just be okay with it like hey we like the logo we don't want to lose the logo but if that's what it takes to get shohy otani all right so i think if he made that demand it would happen if he tried to get the team name changed i don't think it would happen yeah i don't a team presumably would not change its actual name that if nothing else sets a terrible precedent for future free agents but now you can imagine let's say otani comes over and he says okay get rid of chief wahoo keep the name but get rid of chief wahoo and and we're a coacher here now you can imagine there would be those holdouts the people who would just be really offended by otani's request and you know like you said it's all about the team winning at first and

those fans would be excited because the team would be getting a potential superstar and so the fans would tentatively embrace otani's presence but you know if he started to bomb or if he looked like he was going to bust or in any way rubbed people the wrong way you can imagine fans would start showing up to the ballpark for his starts wearing chief wahoo logos and it would be this whole like counter protest in the stands with the fans turning on otani and i'm not saying that there would be a large number of these fans but basically the deadspin articles write themselves all right sifting through every other otani here i'm trying to go with some variety here but it's hard all right yeah let me i'll try to answer like an otani question and then a

non-otani question just alternate basically here so cameron says i don't understand how jose altuve consistently has such a high batting average i realize it's a wonky stat but his batting average on balls in play has been high every year he is fast but all those infield hits can't explain this he doesn't hit the ball that hard and although he sprays the ball pretty well, other guys do it much better. Tell me why he consistently has very high averages. Is it that perfect launch angle right above the infielders? Well, Jose Altuve, since the start of his career, has not had a very high pop-up rate. And as you can imagine, batting average on balls in play is tightly correlated to pop-up rate because pop-ups are essentially automatic outs. So if you don't pop up, like Joey Votto, you are going to reach on balls in play is tightly correlated to pop-up rate because pop-ups are essentially automatic outs so if you don't pop up like joey vato you are going to reach on balls and play more often

not popping up is also suggestive of a pretty good line drive rate pretty good bat control and we know altuve has that he has a high rate of infield hits which means he turns a lot of grounders into hits in part because he's fast and also he just does have that spraying the ball tendency and so he is virtually impossible to shift there's no point in trying to shift jose altuvi so when you altuvi what what the hell was that altuve so when you put it all together altuve's batting average on balls in play is good but it's not like it's extreme or some sort of outlier i think what is it like 339 since he debuted which is really good that's one of the better batting averages on balls in play but I think Votto is I should just look this up so I

can confirm but Votto for his career is at 354 Joey Votto is a lefty and he is not fast but still he's got 15 or whatever points on Altuve over his career so even though Altuve's batting average on balls in play is good his batting average is so extreme because in addition to all of those other facts, he also just doesn't really strike out. And so that allows him to bat like 330 every single season. All right. And let's see, Joseph very courteously sent us an Otani question and a non-Otani question. So we'll just take both of those. So starting with the Ohtani question, the DH rule clearly states that a hitter may be designated. While every American League team does designate a DH, it doesn't have to. What would happen if Ohtani demanded the team that signed

him, assuming it's an AL team, did not use a DH when he was pitching? How much would this impact his value? How much of a drop-off in offensive performance would this create what if he demanded that his team completely stop using the dh i imagine this is caused by his introduction to the song centerfield giving him an increased desire to play in the outfield how much of otani's value would be lost in this scenario wait a second he's saying don't use a dh even when i'm not so just on other days yeah i don't know the pitcher has to hit yeah that would be dreadful he would not be worth it under those circumstances you do not want your pitchers to hit when they don't have to no you don't so yeah the latter case would be dreadful in the former case i would imagine that's one of the possibilities being discussed with the al teams

is that he will hit for himself when he pitches and because you know that's kind of the possibilities being discussed with the al teams is that he will hit for himself when he pitches and because you know that's kind of the whole point of shohei otani so in theory that wouldn't cost the team anything now what we don't know is whether he's actually going to be that good of a hitter we got a glowing scouting report the other day from dennis sarfate also from literally everyone else on the planet but this will be I'll talk about Otani a little bit in this podcast's stat segment, which I know that I've called it number blast once, but I realized why stop there? Why not just go with stat blast?

Stat blast rhymes with stat cast. Makes sense. Stat blast coming up. There will be a little Otani, but also a teammate of Otani's. Oh, intriguing. Is it Takuya Nakashima? No, a different teammate.

Wow, even more intriguing. All right. And Joseph's other question, the non-Otani one, he says, the released 2018 playoff odds give the Detroit Tigers a 300 to 1 odds of winning the World Series. Outline the scenario that occurs 0.33333% of the time where the Detroit Tigers win the World Series. Does Vegas think it's relatively likely that the Tigers have been stashing a team of identical twins to Mike Trout? And this is kind of a Sam Miller specialty, the scenario in which something weird happens. He has

used the Pocota odds multiple times in the past to come up with the, you know, the simulation, the one simulation out of millions where something extremely improbable happens and that's always a fun type of article so how do the detroit tigers win the 2018 world series okay um okay okay well point number one miguel cabrera is healthy and good okay that, that's easy. MVP level Cabrera again. Yeah, absolutely easy. They still have Victor Martinez, right? Yeah, sure.

Make him a good hitter too. So you've got, it's not hard to see how you could have a lineup that is anchored by Miguel Cabrera, Ian Kinsler, Victor Martinez, and Nick Castellanos. That could be a pretty good lineup. Leonis Martin, they just picked up Martin the other day for no money. And he could be a decent center fielonis martin they just picked up martin the other day for no money and he could be a decent center fielder jose iglesias is whatever mikey matuk was apparently good last year i don't know if anyone noticed that so you can you can kind of see a decent offense here if some aging players rebound and the the defense looks like it's improved and this team still can't run the bases but the Tigers have

never been able to run the bases dating all the way back to the days with I don't know Cecil Fielder so you move to the pitching staff Michael Fulmer I don't need to sell you on Michael Fulmer he's pretty good I've been a Daniel Norris fan since he was a prospect it's not hard to see how Daniel Norris could emerge Buck Farr Jordan Zimmerman Jordan Zimmerman could turn it around I guess Zimmerman was signed to a big contract. And, you know, stuff-wise, it doesn't seem like there's that much of a difference between what Zimmerman is now and what he was when he was like a three-win pitcher for the Nationals. And so I don't know what the problem is with Zimmerman.

But, you know, there's some sort of bounce-back potential there. And Matt Boyd throws strikes. So you can have a you could you can kind of have a decent rotation here if you really buy michael fulmer's upside i mean he's he's demonstrated that he's pretty good and in the bullpen it doesn't take a lot to believe in shane green and as for the rest of them holy hell this is a bad unit okay the tigers have a terrible bullpen they have someone named spencer turnbull that's awesome wow the Tigers have a terrible bullpen. You don't say.

Man. Yeah. But, I mean, the upside here is, what do we really know about bullpens? The Angels had a good bullpen last year, not because of Gambit Rojan, but because of Yusmer Apati and Blake Parker and the other one that they had who was good. I forgot who it was, but it doesn't matter. You can have these good relievers can come out of nowhere. Anthony Swarczak was nothing, and then he was great. Tommy Canley was nothing, and who it was but it doesn't matter you can have these good relievers can come out of nowhere anthony swarczak was nothing and then he was great tommy canley was nothing and then he was great that's just how this works and so you can look at the tigers bullpen alex wilson he could be good drew verdhagen he could be good warwick salpold yeah i bet he's the best pitcher in his

family daniel stump he might still have steroids in his system bruce rondone still throws hard you could whatever you could get a bullpen out of this who knows now a tigers fan might say we know we know the bullpen won't be good why would the bullpen be good but yeah you know if you have old players play like they're 10 years younger if you have young pitchers pitch like they're five years more mature and if you have relievers pitch like they're completely different relievers then the tigers could win 88 games, make the wild card, and then fluke their way to a World Series championship. Right. And the calm, steadying presence of Ron Gardenhier at the helm. Yeah. Just more generally, like everything goes right. You have the best one run game record ever and you dramatically outperform your run differential. And meanwhile,

every other team in the division just has horrible injuries and, you know, has their own terrible, terrible luck all year that just lasts and lasts. So that would have to happen too, not just, you know, individual Tigers having bounced back or career years, but also every other team in the division having the opposite of that. And that is extremely unlikely, which is why the odds are extremely unlikely. But it's baseball. So there's usually a possibility, at least a theoretical possibility of almost anything happening.

Yeah. And also the other Angels reliever I was trying to cite was Bud Norris, whose first half ERA was 2-2-3. He was a closer. The second half ERA was something over seven. So Bud Norris, that's why ERA was 2-2-3. He was a closer. The second half ERA was something over 7. So Bud Norris, that's why I forgot him. He got bad. But for a few months, Bud Norris was good out of nowhere.

That was neat for the Angels. Statblast! Statblast! Okay, okay. So I was going over to Delta Graphs, and I was just looking at some numbers about Shohei Otani's hitting last season. Mike Petriello just wrote about some Trackman information that they got on otani from last year which was pretty cool otani apparently topped out at like 112 miles per hour exit velocity which i actually kind of

preferred not knowing that now that i know the number because that's good it's not outstanding it's not like aaron judge territory but anyway, I was going over to Delta Graphs and just going through their nearly Fangraphs identical leaderboards, which is an awesome feature. Yes. And vaguely illegal, but it's fine. I don't think, I think you said that David Appelman doesn't care because why would he? Okay. So Delta Graphs has a lot of numbers that are similar to Fangraphs numbers. And so I set a playing time minimum among hitters in the MPB last year

to 200 plate appearances. Shohei Otani had a 168 WRC+, which is great. That ranked fourth in the league out of 125 players. Okay, great. He's sandwiched by Yuki Yanagita and Shogo Akiyama, other well-known Japanese superstars, I guess, Shohei Otani. Now the risk here, and this is something that shouldn't be understated, I don't think, Otani did have the fifth highest strikeout rate in the NPB last year at 27.3%, and he also had the fourth lowest contact rate in the NPB at 66.7%. was uh right around some very familiar names here because the the five lowest contact rates in the npb last year brad eldred william opinion jimmy paredes shohei otani and vladimir ballantine so i think that the hope is that otani is kind of like a

left-handed ballantine as a hitter but while i was doing some research here shoya otani very good hitter we know that to be true he is uh he's teammates or he was a teammate with brandon laird who is an american player went over and had some success he was teammates with takuya nakashima who we talked about the other day and who ben has written about he's incredible for the fact that he's so annoying to play against but there's another teammate i don't think we've ever talked about someone named kintsuke kondo have you ever seen the name kintsuke kondo i don't think so okay so some things about him last year i told you that there were 125 hitters who batted at least 100 200 times in the mpb otani was fourth in wrc plus kintsuki kondo was first he was first in the mpb in wrc

plus at 232 second place at 198 kondo was far and away the most productive hitter in the mpb he struck out just 11.7 percent of the time which is a very good low strikeout rate that actually ranked 12th lowest but the thing that really sets kondo apart is that he walked 26 percent of the time second place was 16 percent of the time he had a 10 percentage point lead on second place in walk rate kanzuki kondo his isolated power was basically average he had only three home runs his batting average on balls in play was 475 which is is just something absurd. And if you look at the plate discipline stats, which Delta Graphs also tracks, Kondo had the second lowest rate of swings at pitches out of the zone. He had the second lowest rate of swings at pitches in the zone. He had the lowest swing rate overall in Japan by about four percentage points.

He also made contact with 90% of his swings, but it sounds like he didn't want to swing at all. So Kensuke Kondo was actually the most productive hitter in Japan. He was more productive than Shohei Otani. And what's weird is that this is new. See, Kondo has been a good hitter before. Maybe I'm mispronouncing his last name, but he had a 160 WRC+. A few years ago in 2015. Last year, I guess 2016, he was not good at all he had a wrc plus of 84 but then he decided to change something he walked 10 of the time two seasons ago i will remind you that he just walked 26 of the time and so he uh we have four years of data for condo who incidentally to make things even more intriguing is a catcher a third baseman and an outfielder so he's really cool but here are his swing rates for his uh his limited career that we have a record of 2014 45 2015 45 2016 45 2017 30 condo decided nah swinging what is it good for

so he just kind of stopped doing it. And it seems like pitchers didn't know what to do with him. He still hit. He wasn't like Nakashima because he was still a good hitter. He had a tremendously high batting average on balls in play, but he just walked all the time. I don't know how or why this happened. I don't know if this could happen domestically, but he was, he's only 24 years old he stands five foot seven he's not uh he's not a physical threat but he's coming off a four digit ops so kintsuke kondo another fascinating teammate of shohei otani man npb is just a bottomless well of fascinating players just keeps giving and giving i love it all right let's take a question let's see i guess

it's time for another otani question right it's been a couple minutes now so okay let's say this is uh only slightly otani related this is inspired by the fact that otani does not seem to be prioritizing money in anything he's doing this winter. So Nick says, With MLB revenues and salaries rising immensely, do we ever foresee a time where it becomes relatively common for players, especially elite players, to select teams without much regard for money? The difference between, for example, making $50 million a year and making $40 million a year is objectively huge,

but when you've got a career worth hundreds of millions already, would it be more likely to see players prioritize factors such as the ones Otani seems to be emphasizing? I'm certainly not a millionaire, but I don't see an extra $100 million on top of the $500 million you already have really changing your life too much, while committing to spend six months a year in a place you don't want to play for 10 plus years seems like it would be far more impactful on your overall happiness so do you think that otani and his apparent willingness to pass up a ton of money will be something that we will see other players channel well i feel like i just talked a bunch for stat blast so i don't know do you have an answer for this one i doubt it i i don't think this is generally something that we see wealthy people do, stop wanting to accrue more wealth. I mean, when you get to the level of Bill Gates or something,

then maybe you start thinking about giving away money, as Bill Gates does, but he still makes a lot of money. So I don't know that a player would ever get to the point where money would not be the single most important factor. Now, maybe the difference between the number one factor and the number two factor would be a little smaller than it would have been. I mean, certainly if you go back to like, you know, before the free agent era, even or early in the free agent era when players were making good money but you know at points in baseball's past they were not making that much more money than a fairly well-paid person just in in general american life and still had to work multiple jobs and work in the off

season and all of that so obviously back then money was a huge factor because you were not mega rich. And now players are, even as they maybe get a smaller piece of the pie revenue-wise, they're still getting a larger piece of pie relative to, I guess, the typical American citizen. So I would say that money will never stop being the number one driver of where a player goes. the number one driver of where a player goes but maybe we will see more cases where you know the difference between many million and slightly more million just won't be as important as it might have been in the past yeah it clearly is the money gets higher and higher than each additional dollar means less and less but i think there are two things about this well i guess three money is always what matters most it's just kind of human nature when money gets involved and two a lot of players not all of them but a lot of players look

at their financial terms as sort of a sign of respect they are reflective of who the player is as a professional and they there's a reason that players sometimes go into free agency and say i want to get paid i want the highest average annual salary for my position or i want to i want to beat this other contract by one million dollars players want their contracts to make a statement which is kind of weird and self-important but you can also sort of see it because it's just a it's one means of conveying what your worth is to the industry to the public but also it's worth remembering a lot of players have foundations or they do charity work and and even though you could say this player holding out for 10 more million dollars is really greedy, does he need 10 more million dollars? Depending on the player, if it's someone like, I don't know, Nelson Cruz, who does a lot of community work, that is not really necessarily 10 million dollars for Nelson Cruz's family.

That could be 10 million dollars where he thinks he could do more with that money than like a baseball team owner which if we're going to be honest yeah under almost all circumstances some owners are very charitable but some other owners are owners because they've hoarded their money so you can have like one of the reasons where why i don't think albert pujols would necessarily want to walk away from the rest of his contract now first of all that's more than a hundred million dollars no one can walk away from that money but like albert pools could look at that as for every week that he spends still on the angels active roster making that money that's a lot of money he could put toward the causes that he believes in right is like hugely hugely important now if there are players and of course there are players who just get the money and do irresponsible things with it

which is entirely their right. They earn the money. They can do whatever they want with it. Those players do exist, and, you know, they can be greedy. They can be self-serving pricks. But when you have players who are doing so much for the community, you should want them to have more and more money because that money gets redistributed. Yeah, that's a good point. All right.

money because that money gets redistributed yeah no that's a good point all right and marcus asks if a batsman is struck by the ball he has been hit by the pitch or is he awarded a hit by pitch if the former yasiel puig collected two hit by pitches this year if the latter puig had two hits by pitch this year hits by pitch or hit by pitches say you? We don't say run batted ins. We say runs batted in. Yeah. Okay. So I don't have a, I know how I handle this, but I don't have a good, like clear, concise answer.

I have never said hits by pitch. I will never say hits by pitch. I think that sounds ridiculous. It's hit by pitches, but I also hate typing it out. I think it's really clunky. So I just, under almost all circumstances, try to find another way of saying it entirely what do you do yeah i've probably written hit by pitches at some point if i were to write one of these it would be that but i agree with you i would try to write around it this is almost like talking about a single white socks or

red socks player god not knowing whether to say that they're a white sock or a white socks and i i hate the the plural of that to talk about a single player it sounds very strange to me but it also sounds very strange to call a player a sock so generally i will just say a white socks player a player for the white socks something like that we need to do something about we have two teams that are socks related haven't we been over this yes we have it's at least more than that yeah but we have at least two teams with socks with x's in their names we we should i hope shohyotani i guess he didn't have either the red socks or the white socks on his list but in addition to doing away with chief wahoo he could have done away with us needing to write a player is a white socks or whatever so anyway it's the same sort of thing i'm not signing with the red socks because your name is ridiculous right all right jeff says if

jerry depoto decided he was going to use his trading abilities to secure otani i know you one of your many excellent otani tweets this week was about Jerry DePoto signing Otani and then trading him immediately, which is actually another Otani scenario that we have discussed in a previous email show. But Jeff says, if Jerry DePoto decided he was going to use his trading abilities to secure Otani and do so by trading assets to the six other finalists remaining in exchange for dropping out of the race how much value would he need to trade away how bad or good of an idea would this be for him well that would be a terrible idea because the team would have nothing left first of all i'm not even sure the mariners have six assets to move that are like worth anything you move james paxton okay that'll knock someone out you don't want to do that no this, this is too much of a nightmare circumstance because this ends up with the Mariners

being the worst team in baseball with Shohei Otani. And then how is that? No, no. You definitely hire hitmen and you murder other teams' executives. Yeah, probably before you do the trading thing. I just, I don't think that would work. I mean, you'd have to make sure

that you had like all six on board with this and if those teams thought they had legitimate chances to sign otani i mean like if a team thinks it's like a 50 50 shot to get otani or something then it's not gonna just give away that shot for anything on the mariners so right i don't think you look at this every team roughly has a one in seven shot to sign joey otani we i'm sure there are actual favorites and long shots but we can think one out of seven but i don't think that each of the seven teams has a realistic perspective if you asked all seven teams what do you think your odds are of signing otani i bet that if you added up all of their individual odds you'd get something like 200 or even 300 percent like every team probably thinks it has a way better shot at otani than it does because

that's just how you think of these things you never really think like if you're a if you're a team's fan you probably don't go into a season thinking oh we have a 1 out of 30 chance at winning the championship or if you go into a series you don't think oh it's a 50 50 shot you think oh if my team just plays well we got this under control but you're fate you're within it's so easy to forget about the context when you were actually in a race like this so i i bet every team i'm i bet the pagers think they're like oh we got a 40 chance at this no you don't you're probably the worst of the candidates but you know uh the teams i don't think the teams would trade for what one seventh or one7th or 1-6th, whatever it is, of Otani's value to drop out of the running because they just think that they have a better chance than that. Yeah. Okay. All right. Let's pivot from Otani questions to a little discussed subject on the show, Mike Trout.

The question about Mike Trout is, and you actually had an interesting answer to this via email, which is why I want to answer this one. Adam says, Mike Trout's agent has found a loophole in the CBA and is currently selling Trout futures. You have the option to offer Trout a binding contract today that will kick in in 2027, the season in which he is 35 turning 36. What is your max offer for Trout at this age. No matter what, Mike Trout would become the property of your team on January 1st, 2027, keeping in mind injury risk, projected production as he ages, and everything that goes with it, but ignoring the fact that as a GM, you probably won't be with your current team in 2027. How much money? How many years? Oh, man. What did I respond? So I think, what did I do? I looked up the 10. Yeah. So what? I do i looked up a little stat plus 10 yeah so what i think i looked

up the all-time 10 best players between the ages of 23 and 25 that sound right yeah so i looked at least the the 10 best players between the ages of 23 and 25 in terms of fangraphs wins above replacement selecting those players who have actually played later in their careers and i then figured out what those players did when they were what was it 35 36 35 35 age 35 season yeah so i think of the 10 they averaged 4.1 wins above replacement in their age 35 seasons two of those players who were ron santo and grady sizemore didn't play at all very sad but still that i think that like the leader was probably willie mays who played until he was 74 and might still be the best center field option for the giants and uh so you take that that rough average that's 4.1 wins above replacement at 35 then you age it so maybe you're looking at

like three and a half or three and a quarter wins at 36 and then something like two and a half wins or something at 37 so you figure you're getting, what is that? Roughly nine or 10 wins above replacement between the ages of 35 and 37. I don't know exactly what a dollar is going to be worth in 10 years in baseball, but it's going to be devalued. There's going to be a lot of inflation. And so I don't know what terms that I throw out there, like three years and 90 million, three years and a hundred million, something around there. And I would, I would be pretty comfortable making that offer. Yeah, i would too i mean it seems amazing to think that you would commit that much to a player 10 years in the future but that is the kind of class that mike trout belongs

and there's no reason to think that he wouldn't still be an excellent player at that age so sure yeah might as well all right one last otani question this is from nick he says so with good reason we've all been talking about the otani sweepstakes in terms of what out of bounds things teams would have to get away with offering otani in order to lure him but doesn't it take two to tango here obviously otani is not some poor 16 year old dominican kid who doesn't know better and is being taken advantage of by Busconis and a billion-dollar oligopoly He's being advised by top agents, has been a professional already, and entirely understands, or at least pays people to understand, the system he is entering So, a couple questions

Are we taking for granted that Otani wants to be offered some against-the-rules incentive to sign. He could have just waited an extra couple years and took the big payday, assuming nothing catastrophic happened in the meantime, if maximizing value mattered most to him. I mean, obviously humans will intrinsically want to maximize their returns, but he's already not doing that. Could he just tell teams he wants offers to be made by the book and make his choices based on other perceived intrinsic factors about clubs rather than shady backroom deals or hidden payments?

And then, second, should some against-the- the rules dealings come to light after he signs, we know the team will get slammed with penalties. But what about Otani? Would he get punished? He's surely more of an equal partner in any impropriety than any of the kids the Braves just lost were. Assuming he's actually as good as we think he is and just voiding his contract would only allow him to somehow get a bigger deal.

What sort of penalty do you think he could and should get if any okay well let's do the first one first i think that one of the tricky things in in writing about otani right now is that this is for all intents and purposes this is unprecedented you don't have players in baseball who were seemingly so unmotivated by money and so i think that writers just don't have a good way to talk about a player like that and so they they and i'm in there as well i'm included figure no no somewhere underneath there has to be a money element you can't not care about money but based on what evidence we have which granted is still somewhat limited money just really doesn't seem like it's that important it's not not like otani selected the teams with the most international bonus money

to offer as the finalists he's already turned down some teams that had more money to spend so i would imagine that otani's strong preference would be to do this completely by the books if he was interested in chasing money he would have gone new york and gotten those endorsements or something and and that would have been totally New York and gotten those endorsements or something. And that would have been totally within the rules because you can get whatever endorsements you like. This isn't the NCAA. So I think that Otani does want it by the book. And I think that it's probably about time that all of us come together and agree, well, maybe this just isn't a situation that calls for shady practices and loopholes because it's not what the player is interested in as for the second part which then goes against the first part if we

figure that he does want a team to take advantage of some sort of loophole yeah you still kind of hold the representation more responsible because ultimately it is the agents who are deciding these things but have we ever seen a case where a player was... I mean, you can't do nothing to Otani if you can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he was aware that he was agreeing to something that was against the rules. But what... Have we seen a player disciplined for... I don't know. What would that be?

A CBA violation? Nothing comes to mind immediately. Almost everything in baseball that could happen has happened at some point. So I wouldn't be surprised, but I can't come up with anything immediately. It is an interesting case because, yeah, I mean, obviously it's different from the Braves situation where you have these impoverished players who are, you know, minors still legally in the U.S. at least and not even be aware of these rules. They're not represented by big shot agents in most cases. So, you know, this would be

different. And those players obviously weren't penalized for the Braves transgressions. They got to keep their bonuses and sign again. But I would have to think that things would be a little bit different in otani's case if he had full knowledge of it if he was fully aware that it was against the rules and really he should be or at least his agent should be then it does seem like it would be hard for him to get off completely scot-free there but i'm not sure exactly what the penalty would be i guess it would just depend on the size and the details of whatever he got that he was not supposed to get. Yeah, you could in theory see him re-entered to the market subject to those same international spending rules.

And even if, so you could say Otani might be incentivized to sign something that's against rules and then leak it in two years so that he's made a free agent when he's 25. But I would assume that if MLB found out and was able to connect Otani to that, then they would just say, okay, you're a free agent when he's 25 but i would assume that if mlb found out and was able to connect otani to that then they would just say okay you're a free agent now but even though you're 25 you're subject to those same old restrictions maybe teams can't offer him a bonus in excess of like three hundred thousand dollars or something that seems to be their signing bonus minimum and uh so i don't know maybe that would be the most appropriate discipline if you could prove that otani was part of some sort of fairly significant violation of the rules. But yeah, I don't want to see it, but I guess for the

sake of precedent, it would be interesting. Yep. All right. And to end on a non-Otani note, Andrew Patrick, a Patreon supporter, points us to a Reddit thread, which in turn points us to an MLB Network radio tweet, which in turn points us to a snippet of an MLB Network radio interview with Adam Jones from within the last week or so. And this is Jones is talking in this clip about how he's been fined a lot for delaying games or for not comporting with the pace rules. Could you quickly see where Adam Jones ranks in pace, batter pace? Is he one of the more egregious offenders? He claims that he has been fined a lot, that he's been fined like $50,000. I don't know how many separate fines that would be, but this is interesting because we haven't heard a whole lot about players getting fined since really that first year when MLB was making a concerted effort to do that. And I just wasn't really aware of this happening. I wasn't sure whether it wasn't being enforced anymore or what. Maybe it's just that it is happening, but players are not being as vocal about it because it's not new. Do you see

where is Jones particularly slow? 24th slowest pace out of 144 qualified hitters and still four seconds faster than Marwin Gonzalez andalez and adubo herrera right okay so apparently he is getting fined and he provides a defense of his relative slowness here i'll play a quick clip but the upshot of this he says i think that when certain hitters are in the box it's a movie and you just have to sit shut up and enjoy the movie so i'm gonna play this clip now i say that i get in the box and i say it's like a movie i'm feeling like i'm in a movie every time i'm in a batter's box i'm in a movie you know and it's like a show it's a tv show and i'm entertaining so i want to make sure that i'm entertained i'm entertaining the people around me i talk to the

umpire i talk to the catcher i might look at the kitchen the picture blow him a kiss it just depends but i think that that when certain hitters are in the box it's a movie and like you got up you have to just sit shut up and enjoy the movie and that's how i see once you get into the box and as even when i'm in center field i look at uh certain hitters when they get in the box their presence it's just like it's like a movie so sometimes you have to sit back and just enjoy it so what do you think of that he's essentially saying that it's part of the show that it's part and their presence. It's like a movie. Sometimes you have to sit back and just enjoy it. So what do you think of that? He's essentially saying that it's part of the show, that it's part of the drama of baseball. When you have some notable hitter up there, he is providing a form of entertainment by sort of slowing things down and, I guess, increasing the drama and the suspense. No, that's stupid.

This is not an appealing part of the show. It is part of the show. This is as appealing as intermission. Yeah, right. I can't agree here. Even if you have some entertaining like between pitches ritual or something, some distinctive tick, even then, you know, it's something that people might imitate, but it's not really something that adds entertainment value.

So, you know, good defense, I guess, but not buying it. And Adam Jones probably at this point wouldn't even fall into the class of hitter who I would want to see do this. Like, you know, if Shohei Otani is up or something, then I want to maybe prolong the Shohei Otani play appearance just because the whole thing is so fascinating. But Adam Jones is not, I don't think, in that class offensively anymore. And, you know, like maybe if it's Game 7 of the World Series or something, if it's the playoffs, and that's one of the tradeoffs that we make with the playoffs because everything slows down dramatically in the playoffs. make with the playoffs because everything slows down dramatically in the playoffs but we don't mind as much because every pitch is heightened the stakes are are so dramatic that we put up with it and it's okay at some points the suspense is fun and it's all right if it's dragged out for a few

more seconds but it's not all right if it's you know may 4th and it's the orioles playing someone no one is having their enjoyment of the game heightened by adam jones taking a long time between pitches so yeah nice try but no all right so let's end there i guess we could talk about rafael palmeiro's comeback attempt but i think neither of us has all that much to say about that that's got to be like the most improbable comeback. I'm trying to think of any other comeback attempt that we've ever had a player make or talk about making. I mean, every now and then you hear about like a player who's been out of the game for a while and it's sort of a sad thing. It's like, you know, he can't really let go of that part of his life and his career.

He hasn't moved on. He is maybe deluding himself that he thinks he can still do that. And maybe that's a necessary quality that you have to have as a professional athlete. You have to think you're better and more capable than you are. But Rafael Palmeiro thinking that he is capable of playing Major League Baseball at age 53 is what? He's been out of the game for 2005 was the last time he played and he wasn't even particularly useful in the last couple years of his career and between that and the pd stigma this is like one of the more outlandish ones i've ever heard let's see uh jerry krasnick

july 17th 2009 r Ricky gives stubborn nod to retirement. Ricky Henderson, all but conceded his playing days are history Friday. Me and one of my best friends was talking about that. Are you thinking about coming back? Henderson told reporters. In my heart, loving the game, I would love to come back and play. That's Ricky Henderson at 50. Now that I think about it, I kept trying to come back and to come back.

You have to wait five years to go into the Hall of Fame. If I would have thought about it and just got those five years out of the way early i would have been a little younger and i could have come back after i went into the hall of fame but i waited too long he would not have been the first player to try to come back after already being in the hall of fame fun thing to try to do uh former oil star jim palmer briefly attempted to come back with baltimore in 1991 after being elected to the Hall of Fame, but he retired after pitching two innings in a spring training game. That sounds like about what Rafael Palmeiro will do. Yeah. How old was Jim Palmer at that point?

Jim Palmer, 1992. Okay. Guesses? 1991, I should say. I'd say late 40s. 1991, born. Yeah, he was only 45 uh-huh yeah this is yeah no rafael pomer is not even gonna get two spring training innings this is this is not happening i don't know let's see what is going on in his life right now but it's not probably nothing good yeah fernando valenzuela pitched in mexico when he was 46 that's not close julio franco played in the majors

when he was 48 that's pretty good yeah anything after that okay julio franco in 2014 he's been playing like indie ball in japan i think i will believe you the most recent thing on baseball reference is that at the age of 55 he batted 30 times with fort worth in the UNLB, United League Baseball. Yeah. And he went six for 27. That's probably the most hits ever for a 55-year-old. Yeah. Well, I mean, in his case, since he played forever,

it's not quite as improbable that he could play in his 50s because he was actually playing very close to his 50s, but Rafael Palmeiro was not. So, yeah, I don't know. This is a weird one We'll end on that note You can support the podcast on Patreon By going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild

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