Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1147: Ohtani Time at Last

Episode Date: December 9, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan discuss all the implications of the Angels’ Shohei Ohtani signing, including its impact on the franchise’s short- and long-term outlook, the Ohtani-Trout tag team, the Albert Pujols conundrum at DH, and where Ohtani’s trade value ranks. Then they assess the suffering of the finalists that lost out on Ohtani and […]

I love you, I adore you, I laid my life before you, I'll have you want me more and more. And finally it seems my lonely days are through. I've been waiting for you. I've been waiting for you. I've been waiting for you. Hello and welcome to episode 1147 of Effectively Wild, the Fangraphs Baseball Podcast, brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I am Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs, joined, as always, by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. I was supposed to be joined by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer four hours and 40 minutes ago, but as he sent me the link to the recording window, Shohei Otani made his decision. How are you this Friday? hand the moment that we have been anticipating for months years and certainly days and weeks in a very concerted way is finally here we can stop speculating about where shohyotani is going

and we can start speculating about other things related to shohyotani and you reflect on all of the speculating that we did and we were wrong everybody was yeah it was wrong because i don't remember reading a single i know like every single mlb.com website ran its own this team could sign oton except for probably the marlins.mlb.com website but aside from those i don't think i ever saw anyone be like yep it's the angels i don't even think i saw the angels like given a chance even as a finalist yeah i mean i didn't express any strong opinion about where he was going because I didn't think I had any knowledge of where he was going. But certainly it seemed like the Angels were an underdog, if not the underdog.

Just everything we had heard made it seem like it was going to be potentially one of the teams that wasn't even a finalist. And then once we got to the finalist stage, it seemed like the Mariners were the leading contender. And Jerry DiPoto was certainly acting as if he thought he had a chance and evidently not so the angels yeah did not see that coming it's fun and also it means otani made his decision two weeks before the deadline which i mean since when do these things ever not go to the deadline or at least close to them i kind of had it in the back of my head maybe he would like make his announcement at the winter meetings in a press conference or i thought maybe he would travel to go see like i don't know three cities three finalist cities although i guess he didn't

have to travel far to see what anaheim's like and even though there are currently five active significant fires in the southern california area my understanding is none of them are significantly impacting the Anaheim area, I think. So what a time for him to be there. But yeah, it's the Angels. This was already a Mike Trout podcast. Recently, this has been a Shohei Otani podcast. Might as well have the Mike Trout Shohei Otani podcast. We podcast about the Angels now.

I don't know if you knew that. They might as well go get Giancarlo Stanton to just really put a cap around things and make him play second base. Yep. We have already received our first listener email with a Mike Trout, Shohei Otani hypothetical. How much worse would Otani be if while he was pitching, Mike Trout would have to be in center field in a handstand and would run with his hands and catch and throw with his feet? We'll save that for next week's listener email show. we'll save that for next week's with their email show.

But yeah, I mean, it's efficient for us because these are probably the two players we will talk about the most next season and have been talking about the most lately. And now they'll be playing on the same team. So I really look forward to finding out if we do find out why Otani made this decision because we don't know any details about that yet.

Was it the market? It's hard to imagine that it was the market. Does he know that they're not actually in Los Angeles? Does he care? Does he prefer not to be in Los Angeles? Who knows? And I don't know. The thing is that it was hard to forecast that the Angels would be the team because they don't really stand out in any one area that you would think would contribute to his decision here. Like, you know, they don't have the best facilities or ballpark of the finalists. They don't have the best talent or payroll of the finalists. They didn't have the highest international bonus pool money available of the finalists. I don't know what it is that made him decide, yeah, the Angels.

But hopefully we'll find out. Maybe they just wrote a really good memo. I mean, they don't even have any sort of reasonable record at all of keeping pitchers healthy. Every single pitcher in their projected rotation has had a significant injury in the last calendar year. Yes, counting. Yeah, right. Also, him. He had surgery two months ago, granted for his ankle, not on his arm. But yeah, that's basically why

i i admit it i kind of wrote the angels off i never considered that i thought even the padres maybe had a better chance they just have a newer facility they have a i think a closer relationship with otani and his people if that makes any sense aj preller has been in there for years and i understand based on some tweets that have come out after the announcement that billy epler has also been all over otani for a couple of years, but every executive has been all over Otani for the last couple of years. And I, I am floored. I didn't expect an announcement today. And I certainly didn't expect the announcement of the angels, but it, I don't know, maybe calling themselves the Los Angeles angels finally worked. Maybe it tricked them. Yeah. I'm glad it happened

now. Cause I was going to talk about how we were probably heading for just a perfect storm of transactions next week. Because if Otani and Stanton hadn't made any sort of decision before next week, on top of the usual winter meetings load, that could have been a recipe for just a really, really action-packed week. could have been a recipe for just a really, really action-packed week. And as it is, we have Otani out of the way now, which maybe means that'll open the floodgates for some other moves, but Stanton, still unresolved, has now rejected the trade to the Cardinals, and it seems like that situation will linger a little longer, but now the first domino has fallen. So we both wrote about this move, obviously. I assume we took somewhat similar angles, but probably different in certain ways. I haven't had time to read your post and you haven't had time to read mine. So we don't know what each of us wrote, but just judging by the headline of yours that he changes the whole outlook for the Angels, that is something I touched on that too. And this is obviously not news to anyone that adding the, I don't know, highest surplus value player in the sport changes any team's outlook. But I think you're right that with the Angels, there is a particularly big gain here.

Yeah, it's most interesting, I think, to see Otani end up with. The Angels aren't the only sort of fringe team in there. You could throw the Marin on there you could put the giants there the the rangers would belong there there are a few teams are just sort of right around that like 80 win mark and they have questionable medium and long term futures where you think otani would like make a huge difference like imagine if clearly this is never going to happen but imagine if you went to the orioles like how much does that change the the franchise calculus yeah i don't know if the orioles were ever even involved but with the angels of course they haven't had a good farm system since trout left it i think and even when trout was in it yeah i think the consensus opinion was well they have a good farm system because of this one guy and he's right here at his name is mike trout so they've

had nothing really in there they've had all this pitching talent in the rotation but it's constantly gotten hurt or underperformed but you look at this team now and you've got trout you've got otani you've got justin upton you've got andrelton simmons cole calhoun is like a pretty good fifth or sixth player and who knows what garrett richards is there's still this team still needs plenty of help but obviously the headline could have applied to any team just about like when you get to just pick up out of nowhere one of the, I don't know, 10 or 15 most valuable players by performance and cost in baseball, that's just, it's just a free, it's just a free, I don't even know the word. I want to say lottery ticket, but it's not, it's like a free winning lottery ticket, I guess is the real expression. Yeah. A free lottery ticket is almost worthless. When Epler took over this team in whenever it was, October 2015, I think, it seemed like he needed some sort of baseball miracle to win during the Mike Trout tenure with this team.

Because they had already shown that just having Mike Trout was not enough to win as you'd think it would be and should be. But it hadn't been reliably to that point. And like last year, Epler did a lot of things right. And he built a bullpen basically out of nothing. And one of his first acquisitions, Andrelton Simmons, turned into like an MVP caliber player to pair with Trout, which is what they won 80 games. And that just, I think, drove home how hard it was for them to go from where he found them to where they want to be. And I just don't know whether they really had an easy path to winning with Trout if they hadn't done it already, because Trout can't be any better than he's already been. And Epler inherited this weak, barren farm system, so he couldn't really trade for anyone. So he was really reliant on just, you know,

stealing guys from other teams, essentially, which is hard to do on a consistent basis, or drafting incredibly well and having those guys get to the majors before Trout reached free agency, or, I guess, having Shohei Otani volunteer a lap, which was not even really an outcome that anyone was thinking about. But it's like, I don't know how the Angels—we were talking about them as a rebuilding team not long ago, and just kind of throwing up our hands and saying, how do they get from this to something better?

And I guess one way to do that is to have a once-in-a-lifetime type of player become available on a once-in-a-lifetime type of contract and then choose your team out of the 30 that would have been very happy to have him. So it wasn't really a high probability path to success, but they somehow found it, and now suddenly they're in really good position. And their pitching has been injury-wracked. Their whole rotation has been. They don't really have anyone in that rotation you can count on to give you innings or good innings. And Otani, for what it's worth, falls into that group because he's been hurt too.

But adding a potentially top-of-the-rotation pitcher to that rotation addresses their greatest uncertainty. And because they were in that range in the wind curve, I think I was looking at Fangraph's depth charts projections, and I don't know, maybe that's just one of the projection systems that's playing into that now. But they had the 10th best projected record in baseball, I think, and the 5th best in the AL, which was actually a little better than I thought. But basically, they were on that playoff bubble where they'd be contending for a wild card. And now they've just picked up, I don't know know the error bars are pretty big in trying to assess what otani is but something in the range of four to six wins seems not unreasonable so i mean at the place where they

are competitively speaking adding those wins is just completely franchise altering yeah i mean there's not even like a lesson to learn from this because we're not going to see this happen again it's just like a free i don't know it's like he's just a it's just a bonus like the clouds parted and look it's been a long time since i saw the movie but mary poppins just like arrived descended from the clouds and now you have a really clean house i don't remember the details very well but the angels got mary poppins essentially and he's uh he she's got complicated it's got a pitch there's already been rumors that the angels might think about a six-man rotation which is the same thing the rangers had talked about doing if they got otani well nuts to them they didn't they have

mike minor instead and doug fister no miles micolás either but the angels i think with a six-man rotation it helps to keep potani in a role that he is accustomed to and of course it would also reduce the burden on people like garrett richards tyler skaggs nick tropiano andrew haney uh the other one jc ramirez which is his name i think there's still more parker bridwell is in there i should always remember to mention him but if you are able to have that six-man rotation going, of course, the other thing about the Angels, and I'm sure we'll talk about this later, but you could say statistically they're wide open at DH. Practically, they're not so wide open at DH. Yeah, this was actually the main thrust of my article because we had three people simultaneously writing Shohyotani transaction reactions. So we needed different approaches to that problem. So I wrote about

the Pujols problem largely. So yeah, I don't know if you want to talk about any other aspects of this before we get to that, but that is suddenly the most fascinating aspect of all of this to me. So one of the things about the angels that was complicating their short and medium term future is that they have this albatross of a designated hitter who last season was arguably the worst or at least least valuable player in baseball. Now, I understand. I haven't seen it published yet on Twitter. But my understanding, Ben, is that you just wrote an article for TheRinger.com about Albert

Pujols and how Shohei Otani might fit around him. What do you how do you think Shohei Otani.com about Albert Pujols and how Shohei Otani might fit around him. How do you think Shohei Otani might fit around Albert Pujols? Thanks for setting that up so smoothly. Yeah, I think, I mean, this is suddenly like, we thought that maybe figuring out where Otani was going to sign was going to resolve a lot of the intrigue. And I think signing where he did suddenly creates some where I didn't know we were going to have any because now I think more than any other team he could have gone to potentially,

the situation is somewhat murkier than it would have been, at least as it pertains to his two-way player potential. We know he's going to be a starting pitcher, but is he going to play in the field at DH? I think because it's the Angels, we can immediately rule out the idea that he's going to get any regular outfield innings, which was far-fetched to begin with, but the Angels' two best pre-existing players, other than Trout and Simmons, were their corner outfielders, Justin Upton and Cole Calhoun.

So obviously, Otani, you know, there might be the occasional Waxahachie swap sort of scenario, but he's not going to displace either of those guys. So if he's going to hit, it has to be at DH. And as you're alluding to, like the Angels have the most eminently replaceable DH and yet also the most difficult to displace DH because Pujols, we don't even have to specify which war he was worst in. He was worst in all of the wars. All of the wars said he was the least valuable player or at least least valuable batter in baseball last year. And so on the one hand, they could very much use an upgrade at DH. On the other hand, it's Albert Pujols and you can't just jettison Albert Pujols the way you would with a normal player. And we actually talked about this just a couple weeks ago. And we, I think, both estimated that probably Pujols would last until maybe early to mid-2019.

That seemed like the likeliest outcome to us. us and obviously he's signed through 2021 for big money but it's really hard to envision him getting to the end of that contract the way his performance and his health have been declining but we thought okay he'll get one more year to bounce back or show that he can bounce back and probably he won't bounce back all that far and so maybe he comes back in 2019 it's clear that nothing has changed and the angels either just decide well we can't carry this guy anymore or maybe Pujols makes it easy on them and either gets hurt or just decides that he doesn't want to play out the string and play through pain and so maybe they could have come to some graceful resolution where Pujols would retire but still get to keep part of the remaining

balance on his salary now there's a lot more scrutiny on Pujols. That whole timeline is potentially accelerated because the Angels now have to win, and they're in a better position to win. And so every successful start that Otani has on the mound is going to increase the team's need for Otani to hit, potentially. Unless, of course, Pujols does bounce back, and that's not out of the question well I guess if you were going to try to work through how this is probably going to go we know

that the Angels have kind of bounced Krohn around between the majors and AAA I don't know what his option situation is but he's not so valuable that the Angels would I think miss him if something were to happen that sounds ominous if he were to go somewhere else. But clearly, it's not like they're about to dump Pujols now. And the way that it would be fairly easy to see this go, I think this probably applies every offseason, but I think Pujols recently had a surgery that's supposed to alleviate something-something foot pain.

So it wouldn't be too surprising to see Pujols and Krohn kind of exchange playing time at first base. This is operating under the assumption that Shohei Ot kind of exchange playing time at first base. This is operating under the assumption that Shohei Otani does not try to learn first base. I don't think the Angels would do that to him as he's trying to get acclimated to the league. So I don't know how often, let's say the Angels go with a six-man rotation. Let's just say that. And so that means that there would be five games in between Otani starts. And if you say he probably won't bat, he won't be in the starting lineup for the day before and the day after his starts, and that would still leave him, what is that, three?

So 81 starts or something like that, he could conceivably make at DH. And that would leave something like that many. I forget interleague complications. So around 81 games still available to Pujols and then there's still a first base with Krohn so I would imagine that Krohn's a pretty good hitter and he's young and he's powerful and you know he's useful as long as the Angels have him he certainly looks more useful than Pujols it would be pretty easy to see the Angels say that they are going to just allow Pujols to take a step back in his playing time just in an effort

to try to keep him healthy which of course we all know is baseball team for we can't cut him right he's going to make the hall of fame but we'd really like to yeah but I I would think that you know especially if you have him played first base a couple times and then he's going to tweak something because that's how it always goes when you're old and broken then you can say well he needs to he needs to sit he needs some rest and i would imagine that this makes it a little bit i don't want to say it makes it easier but it means that the phasing out of albert pujols will begin with more haste yes i guess you said about three minutes ago but yeah his playing time is going to it's going to dwindle and bless otani just really can't hit

or unless pujols right really really can all of a sudden. And that makes it easier. Yeah. I don't know if Pujols has had surgery this offseason. He seems to have a streak of several offseasons where he has, and I know last offseason he had this time. I know that Epler said something in October about how he's going to, you know, have a new training routine and nutrition and conditioning and all of that, and Pujols said he's going to, you know, have a new training routine and nutrition and conditioning and all of that. And Pujols said he's going to work harder on conditioning.

And Socha said, oh, he's going to come back with a vengeance and all of that. But I don't think, other than the usual sort of he's going to be in the best shape of his life sort of rhetoric, I don't think that he's had a surgery as far as I'm aware. And he only played 50 innings in the field last year. as far as I'm aware. And he only played 50 innings in the field last year. So I just don't know if he can go back to regular time at first base. It seems like something of a stretch. I mean, unless they're throwing him out there thinking like, well, if we put him at first base, he'll hurt himself and then we won't have a problem anymore. But I just, I don't know if it's something, if they actually want him to play play I don't know that he could handle that at this stage but we know he's the slowest player in baseball we know that it

seemed like with increasing frequency infielders were playing back on him at an embarrassing distance so why whatever do you mean so his babbit fell below, and I wouldn't be surprised if it continues to fall as infielders get even more daring at just like playing in short outfield just because they can. So I just don't know. And his power eroded last year too. Of course, his plate discipline has long since kind of mysteriously left him. So I think that, I mean, look, if you look at the projections, he is projected to be basically a league average hitter, and there's no guarantee that Otani can top that. I think he certainly has the potential to, but there's a lot of uncertainty there too. Obviously a lot of uncertainty about Pujols also, because he's coming off a season when he was way, way worse than a league average hitter. So I don't see it playing out dramatically differently from how you've laid it out here. They're not going to just cut him, but I think that they'll bring him back.

They'll evaluate both of these guys in spring training, maybe the first few weeks of the season. They'll get a sense of whether Pujols can bounce back to that sort of good enough 2013 to 2016 level where he was, you know, not a great hitter, but comfortably above average and could hit 30 homers. And if Pujols could get back to that, I think he'll play. If not, like if he's struggling, if Otani's not struggling, then you'll probably just see his playing time shrink and shrink, right? I mean, that's probably what's going to happen. And

at first you can sell it as, well, we're just giving albert extra rest but at some point it crosses into that well this guy's the starter and that guy's the backup and i i just i don't know how long that will take it could take all of next season and more it could take weeks it's really hard to forecast it kind of depends how both of them look at the beginning of the season. And I think the Angels could pitch this as, well, Otani has a lot to deal with here. He's making this move across continents and cultures and pitching in different circumstances. So we'll just let him, you know, ease himself into the big leagues and he'll do one job at a time. And maybe it'll stay that way as long as there's no acute need to change. I guess my only fear is that maybe that is what happens. Maybe Pujols returns to decency and he actually holds on to that job. skills sort of atrophy, or at least he kind of becomes locked in as a one-way player. It's going to be harder and harder, I think, for him to break out of that mold once a team has sort of established

the precedent of how he'll be used. So that's my fear, that essentially Pujols, his status in the game, his past achievements, his tenure with the team, all of that might potentially impede Otani's ability to do the two-way thing which we all want him to do on the other hand we don't want to see albert pujols just cast off prematurely because he's certainly done a lot in the game and deserves at least to show that maybe he can recapture something it is funny that if albert pujols were to bounce back which is something i think he and the angels would love to see then it does kind of i don't want to say screws otani but it does really limit what he can do i mean maybe maybe after otani gets established in the major leagues then he can start to try to pick up

first base but that seems like a hell of a responsibility because then you have a guy trying to do three new things yeah in a league instead of the two which is already twice as many as people try to do usually so i think now if i don't know where to put the odds that pujols bounces back and looks like legitimately good because you know if he's a league average dh and he offers nothing on the bases and nothing in the field is he's not that valuable and this does i think make it a little easier for the angels to have that conversation with pujols and i'm sure they've already sort of beaten around the bush like look pujols knows what his numbers were last year the angels know what his numbers were last year and even if they haven't openly communicated because

the angels have defended him in the press and they've pointed to his rbi and they've said the angels have said a few times in the media that they they strongly disagree with the public estimates that say pujols was the worst player in baseball last year. And the way that I interpret that is that if you put in like the timing numbers, you know, and give him credit for his better hitting with men on base, then the Angels, what they're really saying or what they're omitting is that, no, we strongly disagree with the idea that Albert Pujols was the worst player in baseball last year. We think he was actually the ninth worst player in baseball last year. I think that's what's there because there's really no way to make him look good but if you're the angels and you're going into 2018 you know that you want a

better DH but you have Albert Pujols you can't just say like hey we're gonna go we signed we signed Logan Morrison so you're gonna lose playing time that's not that's not gonna go over because it's Logan like look yeah it's look you're not going to be able to sell that to albert pools but shohei otani short of like david ortiz or barry bonds unretiring and taking steroids like this is shohei otani this is an international sensation and it makes it i think a lot easier for them to sell to pools being like look we this guy has been one of the best hitters in a really good league. We got this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to use him. He wants a hit.

I'm sorry, but this is like the only spot that we can make it happen. We still want to play you as often as possible. And you're still going to get to play, I don't know, 80, 90 games, even more if things go well for you and if Otani has a difficult transition. But this does, I think, give the Angels

a little bit of cover to help back off of Pujols' playing time in one of the few ways that wouldn't piss him off. Yeah, it's hard to project that because, of course, Otani is a rookie, and even though he is a singular rookie and he's already a sensation, Albert Pujols has been a sensation in his own career, and I don't know, he might look at Otani and say, well, he was good in Japan, but I was the best player in Major League Baseball for a decade or something. And this guy hasn't proven anything here. So it all depends. I mean, you could see Pujols being very gracious about it and paving the path and making this easy on the Angels. And you could see him doing the opposite. And I guess, I mean, Mike Socha is entering his walk year,

his contract year for the first time in decades. Like what his 10 year extension he signed in 2009, he's finally entering the last year of that contract. And I don't know if he'll be back, but he's going to have a tough task ahead of him. He's going to have to manage these egos and do this sort of delicate dance to make sure that both of these guys are getting playing time. And also with Otani,

this isn't purely a competitive concern. I mean, it's primarily that, of course, the Angels want to win. But just from a spectator standpoint and from a business and publicity standpoint, you wonder whether there will be any pressure from above to say, we need to get this guy in the lineup because we're wasting him if we're only using him every five or six games or something. I mean, there's going to be so much appetite among Angels fans to see this guy hit. I mean, among all fans, obviously, but people are going to buy tickets to see him DH. And if he's not DH-ing regularly, if he's not in the lineup, then there's going to be the big Otani boost on the days that he does start. But you're really leaving a lot of

potential profit unclaimed there. So I wonder at what point, I mean, that probably doesn't become an overriding concern if Otani isn't hitting or if Pujols is. But the second that reverses itself, the second Pujols is slumping, you have to wonder whether there will be some sort of directive, maybe from the business side of the franchise, that puts some pressure, at least, on the baseball operations people to say, we need to get this guy in there. And obviously they want him in there, too, if they can do it without having this turn into a debacle. What's that? A conflict between Mike Socha and the Angels baseball operations department? Never been heard of. If there's one manager in baseball renowned for his open-mindedness and pliability,

it is Mike Socha of the Los Angeles Angels. It's going to be hard. I'm thrilled this is too strong, but I am happy to see, of course, given my own biases, it would have been wonderful if Otani wound up in Seattle.

We'll talk about that one in a little while. But just from a baseball perspective, this is good to help the Angels try to establish themselves. Now, granted, they've been where they are for decades. It's not like they're some sort of new organization looking for a foothold. But this is going to be something that's good for them. It's going to improve their exposure. And it's going to improve Mike Trout's exposure, which is something that's important for the brand the hashtag brand otani is going to get angels games televised very often which means trout will be televised very often there's nothing he can do

about playing on the west coast but still trout will be more in the spotlight because otani will be more in the spotlight i don't know who else i guess that means justin upton will also be more in the spotlight sure the angels will just simmons always always fun yeah yeah i mean they're gonna be like the the all mlb tv team of 2018 like this is gonna be the team that if your team your primary rooting interest is not currently playing you're gonna turn on the angels like if you have an option of 14 other games or whatever and you don't have a rooting interest i'm gonna put on the angels every opportunity because trout because simmons because otani because pujols who is intriguing in his own way so i expect to be watching a lot more angels baseball next season than i would have expected a week ago i wonder now that they signed otani i wonder how much of a draw he is for other players.

Because the Angels could use another infielder. They could use some help in the bullpen. I think their current second baseman is either whoever Nolan Fontana is or Caleb Cowart. Yeah, they could use Dee Gordon. They could use Dee Gordon, although they already have a center fielder. I know Mike Moustakis, I think, played ball when he was younger near Anaheim. So he's an option out there if i wonder basically if otani makes the angels meaningfully more appealing to players who are

available to come and join because you give them i don't know two relievers and a second baseman and all of a sudden that team is quite good still not as good as the astros this is an important point even with otani the angels are not the best team in that division and still by a pretty good margin but yeah, they're good. And this is not like signing the typical free agent where you're hoping they'll stay at their past level for a year or two. This is signing a 23-year-old who, in theory, at least for the entire several seasons that he's under team control, should be at or near whatever his peak level is.

And at least for the next few seasons you're talking about overlapping Trout and Otani which is just I mean if you can't win with those two guys then give up okay exercise I have a exercise I'm going to quiz you I'm pulling up Dave Cameron's trade value list from last whenever it was last July 14th great okay so i am i know that you're gonna be doing this off the top of your head but you already know a lot off the top of your head so i'm gonna read off some baseball player names and i want you to stop me when i say a name for which you would trade shohei otani today okay all right okay carlos correa oh wait did i do this right yeah i would probably trade him for carlos correa Yeah, okay. Okay, yeah.

So we'll still get, okay, I understand. Chris Bryant. I would not trade Chris Bryant to get Shohei Otani. So I would rather have Bryant, I guess. Right, okay. Aaron Judge. Oh, man, that one's hard. That is a hard one.

Man, I guess I would trade Judge just because he is a couple years older and because he only has the one year track record of being amazing. So I guess I would. I don't know. That's like a coin flip for me right i mean it is it is worth remembering that shohei otani did not pitch much in 2017 and when he did he was not that good he walked a lot of guys didn't really throw his splitter or forkball whatever it is so you know we're still kind of relying on 2016 i think it's fair to do so because he had an ankle problem not an arm problem and he'll probably be fine but you know otani was a good hitter in 2017 not a good uh not a good pitcher anyway gary sanchez otani i'd take otani over sanchez okay cory kluber otani oh man okay trey turner that's boring mookie bets hmm man that's a tough one because they're essentially the same age right uh yeah i'll take mookie i guess over otani okay so you uh based on this trade value list you are having Otani right around like the ninth or tenth most valuable player in baseball, which I think is, I think that's suitable.

And when I ran some numbers about a month ago, and I compared Otani and some sort of like estimate of what he would get as a free agent, I think that he wound up having a little more estimated surplus value than Corey Kluber, who is, according to this trade value list, the most valuable pitcher in baseball. So therefore, Shohei Otani, the most valuable pitcher slash hitter in baseball. Yeah, so I don't know. I mean, our appetite for Otani content is not quenched here by the fact that he is signed. So for the next few months, there's going to be speculation about how good he's going to be and how he's going to be deployed. And all of that will be roughly as fascinating for me as the last month or so has been. So I can't wait. I'm happy. I guess I'm happy that he ended up here. I have no rooting interest, but just in terms of storyline, I would say that his being on the Angels with Trout, with the Pujols, Logjam, with all of that. Probably one of the more interesting destinations that he could have arrived at.

Now imagine, I think it was Buster Only who tweeted earlier Friday that MLB is going to closely investigate whatever team signs Otani, and now we know it's the Angels. So they'll be looking at this and just imagine two months from now, blows up, turns out the Angels did something they weren't supposed to do. Joey Otani through his agent was saying about talking all about the the strong connection the bond he felt with the angels in their like probably two hour conversation and you know maybe i don't know maybe they gassed the room maybe they uh maybe they did something maybe otani wasn't in his right mind maybe he agreed to something that he wasn't supposed to agree to just imagine if this blows up you know when the when the rest of the winter has played out and teams have already

plugged their holes assuming that otani was going to be with the angels what if he weren't just saying it's possible yeah no then we can all tear up our takes and write new ones so we can assume that the team with the emptiest feeling is probably the mariners right yes i hope someone has checked on jerry depoto i hope he's okay i mean there were six other finalists and i don't know how this looks from the other perspectives i think the giants were also considered a sort of a co-favorite but it was hard not to read into depoto picking up the two million dollars of international slot money within 24 hours i really enjoyed that like jockeying for bonus pool money. It was like the angels trading for a million dollars of bonus money. And then yeah, that was that was fun. I liked reading the tea

leaves there, even if we mostly read them wrong. And now what to do with that money? I know that there are some players available, but I think it has a bunch of Braves prospects. Yeah, pretty much. But I think the best ones have already been snapped up incidentally too by the angels yes that's right they're just really making a really making a killing really fortunate off season for the los angeles angels of anaheim if you think about it they get my tan they get otani they get uh they got another one of the braves prospects whose name i've forgotten but he was one of the more expensive ones when he initially signed his bonus so the giants wanted to get otani they had buster posey meet him otani was in awe of posey's aura but based on at least what i was reading about the mariners and just based on

the fact that the mariners went out and got the two million dollars of international slot money it seemed like too much to be a coincidence that they just barely edged out the rangers to have the most money available and i thought we were all just trying to speculate but i thought oh that's it that is what did it all this time we thought otani didn't care about money but he cared about money and the mariners are going to give him the most yeah no no they're not they tried but they're not and so now for all of the executives but probably especially jerryPoto, who traded some somewhat interesting young players to get that international slot money, you have to look for help.

And I just can't imagine how despairing it is to have the next conversation with an agent without like anyone else. Yeah. I mean, maybe DePoto's so used to this, he's probably pursued every player in the majors at some point over the last two years. So maybe he bounces back quickly. Maybe he had 10 different contingency plans all drawn up and ready to go, and he's already trying to put those in motion. I wouldn't be shocked. But yeah, I mean, it has to be demoralizing for Mariners fans and has to be demoralizing for the Mariners. fans and has to be demoralizing for the Mariners. By the way, I just read Buster Only tweeted that Mike Trout, who is getting married this weekend on Saturday, so congratulations, Mike Trout, he was not available for an in-person meeting with Otani, but he evidently FaceTimed with Otani

as part of the Angels recruiting efforts. So now should we, is it possible that Mike Trout is, in addition to being the best player in every way, is also the best recruiter? Maybe he has incredible recruiting talents, too. Maybe that's worth extra war on top of all his other wars. And what's wild about that is that Otani was basically in Anaheim. And I know that's not where Trout lives during the winter because he goes home. But he was there in the city where Mike Trout plays. Trout wasn't even there.

Didn't matter. He could just look at him over a phone, and Otani just had to look at his eyes. Yeah, I'd love to know what they talked about to each other. Was it weather or the Eagles or Subway sandwiches? What else does Mike Trout like? I don't know. Anyway. Please help.

Yeah, right, exactly. So yeah, as for the Mariners, I mean, I guess they were in sort of a similar situation in the sense that they, too, have had a barren farm system. They, too, have kind of tried to put together winners and have gotten close but just haven't been able to break through, and it hasn't been clear how they could possibly get to the next level with the talent that they had under team control. And for a team

like the mariners getting otani i mean maybe that makes the difference between deciding to rebuild in the next year or two and not it definitely would have been just as much of a springboard for them as it is for the angels so i i'd have to think that yeah that has to be dispiriting yep it's uh it's a very very similar situation that they're in, except that they don't have a Mike Trout. They have lesser players, but, you know, take Trout aside and the teams are not all that dissimilar. But yep, that was,

Otani was going to be the move that would sort of retroactively validate everything else. All those moves that Jerry would do where he would ship minor league talent for like close to the majors ready talent all the the tyler o'neill's for marco gonzalez's or even the god forbid zach lee's for chris taylor's and all those all the moves where he would just subtract something something seemingly moderate from the farm in exchange for someone who could help right away where maybe it's sort of like death by a thousand paper cuts where you're maybe mortgaging the future just one bit at a time,

but then you'd land one Otani and it makes up for everything. And if you don't land that Otani, your farm system really sucks and your major league roster is only okay. And now it's worse than the Angels roster, which gets to have Shohei Otani on it. That's just the final blow. A deficient rival to just add insult to injury. Yeah, this is rough rough a rough day for

mariners fans in a long line of rough years for mariners fans and for the rangers too because they're they're a team again like like the mariners and the angels turns out these teams are very similar coming into the day yeah all finalists for otani all just right on that bubble between do we want to be good or do we want to be bad and then good and this just like it could lead the mariners down the inexorable path toward a rebuild the rangers could be headed in that direction too and uh yeah in that sense i know billy epler deserves a lot of credit for the presentation that he put together i know i saw some people tweeting as such that epler clearly did a great

job of selling his team which by the way that is incredible because i don't know how he would sell that team otherwise but it's some presentation and some luck but you wonder how what kind of difference otani would have made for for john daniels or jerry depoto's job security because now if you're depoto clearly you're desperate you don't want to have this longest active playoff drought anymore but there's not help coming so i don't know how many more playoff list seasons the mariners can take before he's gone and maybe john daniels has earned the benefit of the doubt in texas he's built some pretty good teams but the future there doesn't look so bright either well jerry has a po i was gonna say podcast which uh i guess maybe what he should have called it but he does have a podcast so he'll land on his feet if that were to happen but uh i hope not

because he certainly supplied endless content for people like us over the last couple of years. Anyway, yeah, I had maybe even underestimated just how much Otani going to any one of these teams. I mean, if he had gone to, say, the Dodgers or the Cubs, he makes a really good team, an even better team. It doesn't necessarily change their long-term outlook or even short-term outlook in that dramatic way but a handful of these teams that were among the seven finalists are just almost made or broken by this decision and the angels have been made and mariners have been broken yep i think that's been the general response i i would have been i would have been pretty annoyed if you end up with the Dodgers or Cubs.

It would have made all the sense in the world. Of course, he would want to play for a really good baseball team in a really big market where he could be really super popular. But that would have bothered me from just a baseball observer standpoint. I'm glad it didn't happen. But I think that I don't feel glad in my actual heart. It's my brain that feels glad. And I'm going to let my heart and brain communicate with one another when I'm actually done with

work this evening. Yeah. So Giancarlo Stanton said no to two teams. Yes, he did. Yeah. I know many neutral parties were not upset by the fact that the Giants and Cardinals didn't get what they wanted. I guess maybe not the most two popular teams among fans who don't root for them just because of all the success they've had lately that leads to some bitterness and people not wanting to see them succeed and so yeah now we kind of go back to the drawing board here I guess and we know that Stanton does want to be traded this is sort of what we were speculating all along is that if Stanton didn't want to go to certain teams he had a lot of leverage because the Marlins really, really, really seem to want to get that money off the books. And if they want to do that, Stanton has to agree to it so he can kind of

dictate his destination, at least to some degree. What are the current rumors? We know, at least we think we know, Stanton would like to go. He would love to go to the Dodgers, but there were rumors on Thursday that also said that he'd be interested in the Yankees, Astros, and Cubs, I believe. I can see the Astros maybe kind of getting involved I had them as a dark horse in the back of my head for Stanton but really feels like the Dodgers and I don't quite because we have such an unclear understanding of the Marlins financials I don't quite understand the desperate urgency to get rid of Giancarlo Stanton's contract but it sure seems as if the Marlins are operating like that's the one thing they need to do in which case well they're going to end up with a very bad offer from the Dodgers or or the Yankees and I don't know what choice they'll have but to take it

maybe maybe you understand it better than I do but I guess the Marlins are they're a bus and there's a bomb on it and if they don't shed money at a faster rate every 30 seconds, then the bomb explodes, and then the bus is no more. So they just have to shed the maximum amount of money, and they just can't do it. But you can't move Wei Ying Chen. He's unmovable. You can't really move Martin Prado. He's easier to move than Chen, but that doesn't make him easy. They don't really have a whole lot of other highly paid players. Azuna's good, and Yelich is good. I'm sure they would like to keep at least one of

them, but Stanton is the one, and they have to get rid of him, and I don't know where they go from here. You basically have to wait for one of the three or four selected teams to provide you with an offer that you hate, and you hold your nose, and you take it. Yeah, so maybe this will linger a little longer. I don't know. I'm sure Stanton wants to know where he'll be playing and whatever team has a chance of acquiring him wants to know that they'll have him, but it's going to take a little longer to work out terms with a few more teams here.

So we may not see an immediate resolution, but it certainly seems likely that he'll end up going to one of those three or four teams and maybe we'll find out more about that next week well you got anything else well chris ionetta sign yeah i mean we could talk about the move that the mariners did make it's not quite oh right atani level but it it's a move it's an interesting move they did trade for d gordon and then immediately moved him to centerfield evidently without his prior consent.

But Dee Gordon, center fielder for 2018. What do you think? Well, so I know that in Gordon's or his agent's statement, they said that the Mariners didn't ask him about this beforehand, but could they have done that? Like through what means can you find out if a player is willing to change positions if he's on another team? Isn't that tampering? Yeah, it probably is technically tampering.

But I would think i mean once you have the terms of the deal worked out for example i i would think that you could say well we don't want him if he won't consent to this move i would think that you could either reach out through some back channels or maybe you could just openly like get permission to talk to him from the team you're trading with i would think that would be an option. And I don't know. I mean, I could see that his agent put out this sort of passive aggressive statement about how Dee Gordon already moved once from shortstop to second. Didn't mention that he did that because he was bad at shortstop.

It wasn't just out of the goodness of his heart, but he has made himself into a good second baseman, maybe not the best second baseman, as that statement said. I think probably DJ LeMayhew might have an argument with that, but I think he is entitled not to be happy about this, but in any other line of work, it would be weird if you just acquired someone and then made them do something different from what they'd been doing. But in any other way, you may like become president. Yes, that is one thing. But in any other line of work, it would be weird if you acquired someone.

Period. Baseball is weird. You can trade for people and uproot them and they don't have to give their consent to that. And so I would think that there are two ways you could look at this. I guess you could say, well, this is the wrong way to go about it you should make sure the player is on board before you trade for him because you don't want him to be upset you don't want to start on a bad note but you might also say well what if we ask him if he wants to do it and he says no then he'll be even less willing to do it whereas if we just trade him and tell him he has to do it then he'll probably get on board so i could see how maybe this diplomatically might not be a comfortable move but effectively might be

okay so let's forget about the mariners roster for a second we know they need it as a centerfielder we know that gordon is maybe reluctantly but he is gordon has expressed a willingness to make the move the mariners are asking him to make. I would imagine if the Mariners were like, hey, we want you to be a shortstop again. Gordon would be like, okay, that's weird, but I'll do it. How strange of a position assignment do you think the Mariners could give, could like basically make Dee Gordon do? What is the weirdest thing they could make him do

before Gordon would actually express a strong desire to not leave the marlins like if the mariners are like we are trading for you d gordon because we want you to close like would z gordon still be like i'm gonna do it i'm gonna do it you guys i'm just i'm happy to show up and do anything for the team. I mean, I would think anything other than pitching and catching would be preferable to playing your preferred position for the Marlins. That's what I would think. There are echoes here of when the Mariners signed Sean Figgins back in 2010. At that time, Figgins was coming off a season that, according to Fangraphs,

was worth six and a half wins. That's great. Season before that, 3.2 wins. Season before that, four. Sean Figgins looked like a really good player. Now, granted, he was going into his age 32 season, but you know, Sean Figgins, little dude, speedy guy, lots of value coming from his legs, his actual positional versatility, but Figgins, not large, very fast, and the Mariners signed him, and when Figg signed him and the when figgins was with the angels in 2009 he had worked to become a very good defensive third baseman and the mariners were like great you're an awesome third baseman you're going to play second base and jose lopez our second baseman is going to play third base i don't know why that is but we're doing

it and we're going to do it from day one of spring training and it's going to go great and both players fell on their faces so there are echoes of that now some of that is just the existential mariners pessimism and i mean i don't know how many players have a more similar profile to sean figgins and mariners history than now d gordon just in terms of physical build and skill set yeah so you know who knows to what extent the positional switch mattered for figgins and lopez we know now that it doesn't seem like there's that much of a difference between second base and third base but the timing was interesting and to have gordon do this now it's just like it's i think it's a ready-made excuse for if gordon is very bad then we can point to this is why right but you know there's a sound grounding, I guess,

for why you think it might work. He has played center, what, in winter ball at some point, and he is one of the fastest players in baseball. And that's not everything. Instincts are a lot of it too, but speed is a really great start. And if he could be a competent center fielder, then he'd be a pretty valuable player because he's certainly a decent hitter for a center fielder. So you can see why they would want to do it. And I would guess that he'll end up making the effort. And all of this was slightly more exciting when we thought that this had something to do with Shohei Otani. And now it does not.

So it loses a little luster. and now it does not so it loses a little luster everything the mariners have done leading up to this has uh lost a little intrigue now because it's not going to be shohei otani related but still it is uh it's a it's a weird one but you can see why they made this move yeah there is more to playing centerfield than being fast but i think that probably everyone would agree that the most important thing you can be as a centerfielder is fast if you look at the stat cast sprint speed leaderboards the d gordon was the fourth fastest sprinter in baseball last year the three players ahead of him were byron buxton billy hamilton and bradley zimmer all centerfielders probably not a coincidence and even though d gordon is older than hamilton was it is worth remembering that in 2012 or 2013 billy hamilton was an infielder

and then the reds made him a centerfielder, and he was instantly one of the best defensive center fielders in the game. I would imagine that the Mariners think that Dee Gordon could do something similar. I don't know why he couldn't. You know, especially with infields moving around the way they do now, I don't know how much of a difference it makes to be a fast second baseman anymore. You just don't have that much ground to cover. So I like it. I like the idea. On the off chance that Gordon doesn't take to centerfield then i mean they kind of screwed themselves because i don't know what you do then yeah can't really put him at second base and don't have a center fielder on the roster but you know if uh if d gordon isn't working out in

centerfield then uh i'm sure the mariners have bigger problems and and maybe that will help spur the rebuild yeah i mean the fact that it's robinson cano blocking gordon as opposed to some less accomplished player maybe makes it easier to sell i mean maybe it doesn't make gordon any happier but he can't really protest because hey it's robinson cano probably a hall of famer so if you're blocked by a hall of famer then if you're d gordon there's only so much you can say to to elicit any sympathy agreed all right well we've covered almost everything sounds like you are a a tyler chatwood doubter should we end on that quick note uh okay okay so the cubs signed tyler chatwood

for three years and 38 million dollars one of the interesting things about tyler chatwood recently is that he has been bad uh he has been bad and he has been injured which are two things that you don't want a pitcher to be and i i absolutely understand that tyler chatwood has interesting stuff and he does he does have what like a high curveball spin rate and a high fastball spin rate whatever the movement on his fastball does not wow me and i think movement is more important than spin rate but anyway it's a weird time to be alive because people came into the offices being like who is the next charlie morton which is not a headline i would have expected like at any point in my life but after what charlie morton was able to do and the little contract he signed last winter it only makes sense you

you think morton was one of the best bargains from the free agent market who can be the next charlie morton i get it it's a it's a valid pursuit and it's always a fun exercise and I think a lot of people settled on Tyler Chatwood he gained some velocity he somewhat improved his contact rate this past season and his numbers were made worse because he pitched in Colorado but I know he has like low road ERAs but he the biggest problem I had with Tyler Chatwood is it's kind of a fundamental problem he doesn't throw strikes you need to throw strikes to be able to be a good pitcher and he doesn't throw strikes at home and he didn't throw strikes on the road and so it feels to me like this is an investment on stuff which is valid because the cubs can make stuff work they made it work with jake arietta i'm sure that arietta is right there

in the front of their minds when they look at chatwood and think of what he could be but tyler chatwood is a 28 i think year old major league starting pitcher who has twice had tommy john surgery and he's never thrown strikes he has thrown just enough strikes to be okay but i think the upside isn't being overstated because he could be really good but i think his chances of achieving that upside are slimmer than they are being given credit for and i would imagine that there is some element of well the cubs did it so it, so it's really smart. And I just don't see it. All right. Well, you have much more fully formed opinions of Tyler Chatwood than I do in either direction. So I'm content to have you take the official podcast position on that matter. All right. So I guess we've covered all the major stuff. Brian Cashman got a five-year extension. He's just going to be the permanent general manager of the New York

Yankees, evidently. How is he the longest? Him or Sabian? Well, Sabian isn't even the general manager anymore. Right. But yeah, Cashman. Did Bean start right before Cashman, maybe? I think he may have. But I just, I mean, it's incredible that longevity in this market and that ownership family to have made it this far. But it appears that his position has not at all been eroded. I don't know how many years Aaron Boone got on his deal. I don't remember reading. Perhaps it was announced, but I'm going to guess that this takes cashman past however long the yankees are committed to aaron boone so clearly cashman is the power

player here he is seemingly the one who wanted that change and i'm gonna guess that he will outlive aaron boone's tenure with the yankees one way or another or at least if boone does not work out as well as they hope i don't know that uh cashman is in any sort of vulnerable position here credit to cashman for his weird ass pursuits of shohei otani i didn't i there what there was like a video on a roof yes took place i don't know what that was about cashman does this charity thing every year i think where he he climbs the side of a building basically and he chose to make his pitch to otani while he or one of his pitches to otani while he was in the midst of that okay and there was another video that came

out after otani had declined the yankees and i i haven't watched it recently because that happened like a week or two ago but he was i don't know he was just he was not dressed as you were accustomed to seeing a general manager dress it looks like maybe he didn't anticipate having to meet with the media or something that day he was in like a i don't know like a fringy jacket or something it was like a brown look i don't need to it's not important it's just brian cashman clearly is like the most at home with being a baseball executive of anyone who's a baseball executive and yeah he's gonna he's gonna die in this role not soon because he's gonna outlive all of us but he when he dies he will still be working for the Yankees.

Yeah. Aaron Boone, by the way, got a three-year deal. So I think it's clear who is running the show here. Chances that you would give to Boone of seeing the end of the third year of that? There is a club option for a fourth year, by the way. Hmm. I don't know. I wonder what the typical managerial turnover rate is. It's high, obviously. So I would guess fairly high, actually, just because the Yankees are probably going to be good, and it's

less likely that a manager is going to be fired if the team is good. Although you could have said that about Girardi, too, and they let him go. So no guarantees of anything. But I would say he has better than even odds of making it through that contract Okay, 64%, that's your estimate Okay Alright, so we covered all the major stuff We've got winter meetings coming up next week We will still be podcasting

But we'll be doing so around Maybe many other transactions and obligations So we'll see what the schedule Works out to be But we will get you your podcasts at some point. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. Five listeners who have already pledged their support

include Dustin Toon, Denis Theriault, Will Crosby, Elliot Carter, and Dan Gabrielli. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectivelywild. And you can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes. Please keep your questions and comments coming via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system. And thank you as always to Dylan Higgins for his invaluable editing assistance. We will talk to you presumably about many more transactions very soon. Bye.