Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1151: Performance-Enhancing Antlers

Episode Date: December 19, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter (and bantler?) about more Marlins trade requests, the Yankees’ outlook for 2018, antler-rubbing bats vs. bone-rubbing bats, and a scout quote about Shohei Ohtani, then discuss the financial implications of the weekend’s big Braves-Dodgers trade, the effects of the luxury tax, and the latest Manny Machado trade rumors. Audio intro: […]

You're always chasing after dear, oh my dear, oh my dear. And through the meadow I can hear my fears, oh my fears Hello. Hello. Just before we started recording, I saw a rumor or maybe it's news reported by Craig Misch, the host for Sirius XM. And it made me think of our buddy Laz from last week. Evidently, according to a source, JT Ryle Mudo has requested a trade from the Marlins. And wasn't he one of the ones that Laz is particularly attached to and was hoping would not go anywhere. And yeah, he wants to go somewhere. All of the good ones do. Why wouldn't they? I mean, if you're Christian Jelic, he's under the most control, right? He's got, what, five more years, four more years? I don't know.

But Real Mudo's got three, and the Marlins aren't going to be good in the next three years. It's almost impossible. They're bad. They're bad now, and they don't have a farm system so the the thing here i guess is that real mudo is still like a an arbitration eligible player you don't often see players like this demanding or i don't know if it's demanding or requesting there's a some sort of thin line between them i guess but there were the reports last week that the Marlins were going to talk to Christian Jelic and get his opinion. And we can assume what his opinion would be on sticking around. But at least there, Jelic has signed a long-term contract.

He's made a commitment to an organization that has now deviated from the plan that I assume they told Jelic would be in place. So Jelic would be given some amount of rights i guess i don't know he has a stake in the franchise so to speak but real mudo is just a team control player and if even he is like please please cut me loose then like where does it end yeah dan straley be like put me on waivers could adam conley be like just lock my just like remove my locker from the clubhouse and just let me go like i'll just live on the streets like what if jt real mudo can ask his way out where who couldn't ask their way out i mean marlins in theory the longer you're under team control the more eager you should be to get out. Because in this case, the team is the Marlins. So

the longer your future with the Marlins stretches out in front of you, the more incentive you should have to get out of there. If you're a year away from free agency or something, you might also want to leave, but at least you could stick it out and be gone one way or another. But if you're Real Mudo, you've got to say something or you'll be stuck there for three years. So evidently he wants out Yellich wants out Ken Rosenthal confirms that a source confirms that Real Mudo wants out so Laz it is not too late buddy you can get out too you don't even have to request a trade to another fan base you can just start following another team but I guess he can't he is too loyal that is that's the problem less yeah you can't

ask out of a loyalty and for the players this is not a loyalty this is a business partnership you have to feel for don mattingly who signed with the team and what he assumed was in a very different position but instead don mattingly is going to go into next season and who's going to be the best who do you think will be the best player on the Marlins next on opening day? Oh, man. That's a really good question. Justin Boer, if he's even there. Yeah, right?

Because why wouldn't he ask out? Okay, let's look at this. The current best Marlin, which unsurprisingly, is Christian Jelic. He's projected at four wins above replacement. Second place, JT RealMuto, 2.8. Third place, oh no, Justin Boer, 1.9. Will Justin Boer, because what's Justin Boer's service time situation is

such that he is a free agent in three years. So he's like RealMuto. He's already arbitration eligible. You could ask out. He's a big, powerful first baseman who's underrated because of where he's playing. So then the best player would be Dan Straley or Dylan Peters.

Oh, that's an unusual... I wasn't expecting to look at that projection. But in any case, will the Marlins on opening day, will the Marlins have a player projected at two wins above replacement? So even Boer is not? Not according to Steamer.

So Jelic and Real Mudo are the only ones who are. Yeah, and maybe you think when the Zips projection folds in or whatever that things will change. But I mean, the answer is almost certainly got to be no, right? If it's just Jelic and Real Mudo? I guess so, yeah. Oh, no.udo i guess so yeah oh no get out of there les get out of there oh man i know we've talked about the marlins a lot this winter but it's just one of these slow burning fires that keeps getting harder and harder to look away from so we keep having to return to it anyway in other perhaps more exciting and happy news...

Nope, you can't move on yet. We're not done here. More Marlins? No, more Marlins. Right now, as built, the Marlins are projected... You're trying to move on from the Marlins, please. Marlins are projected at 72 wins right now. They won 77 games last year. That was with, you know, Giancarlo Stanton, Marcelo

Zuna, good players. So they're projected at 72. How many games do you think the Marlins win next season? Not as built, but as you think they'll be built. Right. 62. All right, 61. Okay. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to project a team to be a lot worse than that

unless it's like a replacement level 2003 Tigers type team, and there are not a lot of those so yeah i i'm gonna say low 60s i guess that is that said laz again go go all right so what i wanted to bring up to you i'm gonna send you a link this is something that i discovered last week i think it was tweeted to the Effectively Wild Twitter account at EWPod. And we've got a new development in the bat boning space. There is a new innovation. No longer will bats be boned. They will be antler rubbed. This is new. Did you get my link? Yaya Baseball?

Yes. So apparently there's a bat manufacturer named Yaya Baseball. This is, I think, the only bat manufacturer in Europe. So, you know, if you're playing in Europe, there are a lot of teams and people who play baseball in Europe and you don't want to have to import your bat. You go to Yaya Baseball, which I believe was started by an American, but it is a Slovakian bat manufacturer and not a whole lot of baseball in Slovakia. I found an interview with the maker of these bats at Batflips and Nerds and not a lot of baseball in Slovakia, but there is a lot obviously elsewhere in Europe and there wasn't really a bat manufacturer. So Yaya Baseball, it's a custom made bat company and you can customize your model and size and handle and all of that.

But another thing that differentiates Yaya from everyone else, antler rubbed baseball bats. So I am now reading from their Instagram where they announced this. Introducing our newest feature added to each player's bat, antler rubbing. The process of rubbing a bat compresses the wood on the barrel in order to make it more dense. The denser wood will ensure that the bat will not splinter or flake as quickly, providing more durability to the bat, and the ball will come off the bat at a higher speed. For the rubbing, we pass the bat through a lathe equipped with deer antlers. This makes for a high-quality and efficient process.

And there are pictures of a bat being antler rubbed. It's just an antler stuck onto like a black metal and plastic thing and a bat right under it being rubbed, being caressed by this antler. So what do you think? Would you rather have a bat that is boned or antler rubbed? Well, I guess we do. Does it work? Does it not? We should consult with the divine secrets of the ya-ya antler rubbingbed well i guess we does it work does it not we should consult with the divine secrets

of the ya-ya antler rubbing process yeah bone and antler are made of similar material is this just calcium right calc so you're essentially rubbing do you you kill a deer when you get the antlers right that's what i was just wondering i don't know why you would have to okay let's let's solve this now so that we don't get a bunch of emails from hunter listeners okay because that would change my answer about about whether i recommend antler rubbing or not i don't know i don't know what to google so i'm going to try deer antlers kill okay i don't know why you'd have to kill it to get the antler it doesn't seem like any vital organs would be located up there i guess it would

be embarrassing to not have antlers if you're a deer and maybe if you're the kind of creature that has to butt heads and antlers with other creatures maybe it would put you at something of a disadvantage not to have them but uh can't say i know from personal experience there's a there's a question here why do deer antlers fall off that's promising if they just fall off yeah that sounds good maybe i'm already doing this wrong because i searched for deer antlers instead of buck antlers look okay forget it i'm not gonna try to do this on the podcast i don't know if you have to kill the animal to get at the antlers if you don't that'd be super because you know bones come from the dead yeah bones you kind of just remember the cow i don't know you just like leave a cow with three legs that'd be even worse right well i can

tell you that the deer antler rubbing is more instagrammable it has has a more, I don't know, authentic feel to it. The color of the antler is more striking than an ordinary bleached bone. So it makes for a better image, but the process is still silly and questionable. But I don't know. It's been going on for so long. The lathe is clever.

The antler has a natural bend to it that just allows the bone to fit right in there in the little crook. Right. And look, they even have a logo up here with antlers

and two different fonts, which is weird, that just says antler rubbed right up there in the corner of the image. So this is clearly going to be a big part if not the core part of their marketing process they're just going to slap antler rub this is

probably going to be a brand that you're going to see on the bats i'm going to guess because it looks like something you just like singe into the bat right yeah i don't know some player let's call him dd gregorius we'll pick up a bat next year and he'll be like see these are antler rub right i'm gonna hit 30 dingers so good news i'm on deerfarmer.com seems like the authority on this issue and i found a post entitled antlers to cut or not to cut which implies that there is an option to cut and an option not to cut. So when raising white tails, the decision to cut the antlers off your bucks every year should be strictly one of management and economics. So you can cut your antlers off your white tails. It's evidently a pretty complex decision here. It is easier said than done, according to DeerFarmer.com. It doesn't

sound like it would be easily done, so I'm not surprised about that. But let's see. We've got some more info on here. Why cut antlers? And the reason is because these animals carry weapons on their heads that are triggered by testosterone. We all know how explosive and unpredictable that can be. Mother Nature has made it that way to preserve the strength in the genetic pool. There is no way man will ever or should ever attempt to breed these instincts out of these animals.

However, you can remove the antlers. Disarming these critters of their deadly weapons is the only safe way. And so the cutting procedure allows you to be able to match the antlers to the buck without having to go and search them in the pastures and then use DNA. This is important when keeping antler growth records for management and marketing purposes. So lots of good reasons to de-antler your deer apparently here. And evidently it worked out for the author of this post. The first year we had no losses. And then the next year I lost four bucks out of 32 to puncture wounds. Well, anyway, it's not perfect, I guess, but when you have puncture wounds in your deer, you want to cut the antlers. So you can cut the antlers.

I don't know exactly what the process is here, but it is possible. So maybe you can get the antlers without having to kill the deer, and you can't get bones without having to kill whatever had the bones. So that's one reason to go with antler rubbed over bone rubbed. That's all I got. I mean, presumably you would have to tranquilize a deer a buck yeah whatever in order to remove but can you imagine you're just walking around your deer you're just walking around you get shot by a dart you're like what's going on and then you you wake up and all of a sudden you're like oh my head feels a little lighter

but you can't you can't know that you're at you can't as a as a buck i imagine you can't see them i don't know maybe they have good vision above their heads but yeah you know that you're antlers. As a buck, I imagine you can't see them. I don't know. Maybe they have good vision above their heads. But, you know. Maybe it's peripheral vision if they're big enough. It's possible. Or maybe you, I don't know.

Do they recognize a reflection if they look in like a window or a pond? I don't know. I know when I had a bird, I don't think that he knew that that bird in the mirror was him. I think that he thought, I have a friend, and my friend seems to do things that are very similar to me. But if you're a deer and you don't have antlers, but then another deer wants to fight you and he does have antlers, do you think that you can fight the deer with antlers when your antlers have been removed? Right. That's a good question. Yeah. I don't know. Okay. We're still going to open up ourselves to a lot of deer-related emails here. But you know what? It turns out we need it.

Every time we've talked about some obscure profession on this podcast, we get like 10 emails from listeners who do that thing. So like when we talked about professional organists and what they make, we got lots of emails from organists. So I can only imagine that there is a deer farmer listening to this right now, possibly removing antlers. If so, please give us a call, drop us a line, let us know about this process. But anyway, I think that we have found out about as much as we can on this subject live. And all you need to know is that Antler Rubbed is an option if you want it.

So we've got a few baseball moves to talk about. I suppose we've got a C.C. Sabathia signing, which maybe we don't have a whole lot to say about. It's one year, it's 10 million, which is a pretty good deal for C.C. Sabathia, right? That seems to be something of a hometown discount, I would say. C.C. Sabathia, pretty effective pitcher in his new incarnation. So presumably he wanted to stay. Yankees wanted him to stay. Where do you think the Yankees are as a team right now? Because I was listening to the podcast the other day, which is great, one of my favorite podcasts, and it was their reaction to the Giancarlo Stanton trade. And they were treating the Yankees as if they were just this unstoppable juggernaut now that can't be beaten and can

hardly be competed with. And our only hope is that the Astros and the Indians might take them out in October. And that's part of the bit. They're both self-professed Yankee haters and enjoy sort of wallowing in Yankee hatred and resignation to the Yankees being great. But I don't really think of the Yankees as that sort of unstoppable force yet. In fact, I was kind of expecting that if anything, they might take a slight step back this year. Now, maybe not now because they have Jean-Carlo Stanton and because, you know, they also underperformed what seemed to be their true talent last year, or if not their true talent, at least their run scored and runs allowed. of some guys who had huge years kind of out of nowhere they might also get a bit of a boost by just not having bad sequencing so i could see them being good certainly even before the stanton trade and the stanton trade helps but i don't think of them as like a shoe-in the way that i think of the astros and the indians right now am i am i underestimating them no i think that they're

they're good they're clearly a strong team they're one, I don't know, five or six best teams in baseball, but you'd look at this team and they're still starting Brett Gardner, Aaron Hicks I like, but you know, he's not a force. Their current second base and third base situation seems to be Miguel Andujar and Ronald Torres, and eventually Gleyber Torres will show up, but he's not probably going to be great right away. Greg Bird certainly hasn't proven himself at first base. There are reasons to be skeptical of Didi Gregorius as a power hitter. So it goes on and on. But if you look at this team, I think this could be a 100 win team. If you look at it and you think Aaron Judge is for real, he really is something like last year's version of Aaron Judge. Giancarlo Stanton really is healthy and better now that he strikes out less often. And if you

buy completely into Luisis severino as being like one of the 10 best pitchers in the game then you could look at this team and think that team has star power like nobody else that's just a really incredible ball club but it doesn't really work like that stanton could get hurt judge could take a big step back judge probably will take a big step back and greg bird hasn't proved i'm just going over the same points over and over again but this this is a good team and right now according to steamer the yankees project at 91 wins and steamer is a pretty conservative projection system at least i think it tends to regress players fairly heavily and i think that zips does the opposite for anyone who doesn't know the eventual fan graphs projections

are a 50 50 blend of the steamer and zips projection systems right now it is only steamer that you'll find on the website so right now the yankees are projected to be as good as the nationals and the red socks they are all basically tied for being the fifth best teams in baseball they are a few wins in front of the cardinals and a few wins in front of the angels the angels do not yet have a shohei otani projection in there but i would just think that we're going to have about eight or nine good baseball teams this coming season and then one or two more will make the playoffs and you should pity them but the yankees are good but i don't think that they're better than the cubs indians dodgers or astros yeah that's how i was

thinking of it too and of course there's still time for them to improve and add pitching and they're certainly going to hit a ton of home runs but I don't think they've reached that juggernaut level yet. I mean, they are a juggernaut in a larger sense, and they might make the playoffs for the next decade, but I don't think of them as unstoppable in 2018, at least. So speaking of the Otani projection, I was just reading an article by Jim Allen in the Kyoto News. He is an excellent writer about Japanese baseball and buried at the end of this article, which is about how the Angels persuaded Otani to sign with them. And by the way, I still don't exactly know. I still don't understand. Clearly, Billy Epler seemed to convey the Angels' experience well and really sold it from like a player's perspective in the Angels organization and made it very easy to envision for Otani what it would look like to be on the Angels.

And clearly he just felt some kind of connection with the Angels or with the people on the Angels he spoke to. But it's still not entirely clear exactly what he was thinking when he picked the Angels. Anyway, that's fine. It's nice to have it be a mystery and to have someone go to the non-obvious destination. Anyway, at the end of this article about Otani, there's a quote from an anonymous scout. It is a former Major League scout. And so the paragraph setting up says, because Otani is so young and will be seeing Major League pitching and throwing off Major League mounds for the first time, expectations need to be tempered, a former Major League scout said Monday. Quote, a season in which Otani bats 230 with eight home runs and has an ERA over four should be considered a success, the scout said, citing figures similar to those Otani achieved as a rookie with Nippon Ham in 2013. I'm going to break this to you.

Anonymous Scout, no one would consider that a success. Whether they should or not, there is zero chance that anyone in the world, including Otani, I'm going to guess, would consider that a success. And I mean, sure, he's a rookie again in a sense, but he was an 18-year-old rookie when he was 2013 with Nippon Ham, and he is a 23-year-old rookie in 2018, so it's not quite the same. And sure, he'll have some growing pains and adjustments to make, but I mean, especially the ERA over four part, I think, would be considered widely disappointing just because we've seen Japanese pitchers come over and do better than that. And he seems to have stuff that matches up well with any of them. So

I think if that happened and he also sort of struggled offensively, I think that would be looked at as, you know, not like a bust exactly. He'd have many more years to prove himself, but a disappointment for sure. Yeah, it would depend on how he got to the era over for the following are some pitchers last season who finished with the arrays beginning with four chris archer jose quintana jeff samarja michael walker trevor bauer garrett cole and patrick corbin so not those are all good pitchers all of them three wins above replacement or better according to fan graphs i think there is one way that well okay there are two ways that shohei otani could end up with an era over four and still be considered a success one the era just doesn't match up with his peripherals and he has a

bunch of strikeouts and he right you know gets a little unlucky and two the home run spike continues it flourishes and the league era is like five and a half. And then all of a sudden, the Cy Young winners are at like three nine or three eight. And, you know, I don't know if it's going to go like that. It probably won't go like that. But we don't know. We don't know what's going to happen. The home runs next season worth are just like 600 more home runs hit than before.

So the league, let's just let's just take a little gander right here the league average era in baseball last season was 4.36 the season before that 4.19 season before that 3.96 season before that 3.74 you would always assume that this is going to stabilize i don't know if it actually will and if i look just at starting pitchers it's gone up from 3.82 to 4.49 and that's just over the span of 2014 to 2017 so you know if you project this forward if the runs keep appearing because the home runs keep flying over the fence you could see a starting pitcher at average era next season of like 4.6 or 4.7 and all of a sudden an era of about four it doesn't really look that bad it actually looks pretty good all things considered that could still be i mean what if we're going to do if we're

going to set the average the era at 4.65 so that would mean that otani if he had an era of four would still be 14 better than average which is pretty strong that's like a legitimate number two starting pitcher so uh in that sense former major league scout you're not completely incorrect but one should also wonder why he is a former major league scout right because he he just had too low expectations for everyone he just gave everyone great grades when they had really lousy seasons. Don't draft this guy. Don't draft this guy. Don't draft this guy. Who do you want to draft in the first round?

No one. You know what? Nobody's good. Or draft everyone because they hit 230 and hey, that's pretty good. Or that one. This guy's an eight home run ceiling. Pick him first. All right.

Let's talk about the big trade. The small trade. Depends how you look at it. It was either very consequential or totally inconsequential. Trade that happened this Saturday. We both wrote about it over the weekend. And it's definitely an intriguing trade. So this was, of course, the double salary dump. And it was one where everyone in the trade well almost everyone in the trade was

famous was a former all-star had mvp votes at some point in their career etc but has fallen on much harder times so this was dodgers and braves and of course the braves new gm alex anthopolis was himself very recently a dodger, which helped facilitate this swap. But Dodgers get their old buddy Matt Kemp back. The Braves get Adrian Gonzalez, who has already been designated for assignment, Brandon McCarthy, Scott Casimir, Charlie Culberson, and $4.5 million. So between the people in this trade, there are a lot of career accolades and accomplishments. But between the people in this trade, there is 0.7 fan crafts war in 2017. That is what they produced collectively.

Almost all of it from Brandon McCarthy. And in 2011, these guys produced 26 times that. So they were very good six years ago or so but not so much anymore they were all shadows of their former selves and this is sad and it made me think morbid thoughts and about how disposable we all are and inevitably are headed downhill and six years from now we'll all just be salary dump candidates but anyway anyway, that's what happens in sports. And this one's fascinating because it's cash neutral, essentially, or close to it, because Kemp is making a lot of money over the next two years.

And so the Dodgers are taking on, you know, over $40 million to have Kemp, but it's split down the middle, 2018 and 2019. Whereas everyone that the Dodgers sent to the Braves, except Culberson, who's making the league minimum essentially and will be under team control for a while, everyone else is also expensive, is making like 50 million combined this year or 2018, but is a free agent after that. So it's cash neutral, but it's a swap of 2018 salary commitments for 2018 and 19 salary commitments that are not as steep in either one of those years. So I know we both wrote about the luxury tax implications here and probably had to refresh our memories on percentages and taxes and it gets

very complicated at a certain point but do you want to run through the broad strokes motivations for this deal the dodgers want to get under the competitive balance tax or more familiar luxury tax threshold for the season ahead they want to do so so that they can reset their penalties they have paid a luxury tax penalty for five consecutive seasons. And that means that whenever... It's like $30 million this year or something. A little more than that, maybe.

Yeah, they have paid substantially a luxury tax for five consecutive seasons. And that means that as soon as you go over the limit for three years in a row, which again, the Dodgers have already done, you are paying a minimum of 50 tax on all of your overage over the limit so if the dodgers were able to get under the limit for one season you

just need to reset for one season then that 50 minimum penalty turns into a 20 minimum penalty which is less that is what the dodgers are looking at. So the threshold for the season ahead is $197 million for payroll plus benefits. I never know exactly how much the benefits are. I think it's like $14 million or something total. So it's something that people tend to leave out of their payroll calculations when you just use like Spotrack or Kotz contracts. But in any case, the Dodgers just want to get under the limit for one season so that when they move forward and they look at 2019, I think the tax threshold moves up to $206 million for next season. And importantly, as you've probably heard, next season's free agent market is going to be wild. And one of the players who might become a part of it is Clayton Kershaw, who has an opt-out clause.

So the Dodgers will be thinking about signing Clayton Kershaw to a new and large contract and they could sign Bryce Harper or they could try to sign Bryce Harper I should say Harper has some agency in this but Manny Machado looks like he'll be a free agent Josh Donaldson looks like he'll be a free agent lots of really good players are going to be out there on the free agent market one of the possibilities that has been floated before is that the Yankees will still sign Bryce Harper and maybe trade Giancarlo Stanton to the Dodgers, which would maybe make all parties involved quite pleased. So the Dodgers are thinking they're going to spend a lot in 2019 and beyond. And as a way to reduce their tax burden, they figured, well, this will be an opportunity for us to reset the penalty. Long story short, we can't run the specific numbers

on exactly how much the dodgers will be saving but they will be saving several millions of dollars in tax penalties probably into the eight figures and this isn't just a a one-time benefit because it will take some years right for the tax penalty to go back up to 50 assuming the dodgers continue to outspend the tax and so they will save money in 2018 they will save money in 2019 they'll save money in 2020 etc there's one one delightful little thing that i'm not sure if this is true or not but when the dodgers traded matt kemp to the padres in 2014 the dodgers agreed to pay 32 million dollars of kemp's remaining 107 million dollar commitment so the dodgers paid 18

million of kemp's 2015 salary that's already done and then they agreed to pay 3.5 million dollars in 2016 2017 2018 and 2019 what i don't know is how those arrangements are spelled out in the actual trades because i don't know if that means the dodgers are paying the padres specifically to pay down matt camp or if the dodgers are just paying the padres this amount of money under the assumption the padres will have camp on the books so i don't know if the dodgers are now still going to pay the padres 3.5 million dollars in each of the next two years for matt camp even though the dodgers now have kemp which would mean they're in a sense kind of double paying for matt kemp because then that 3.5 million dollars would be on top of the 21.5 million dollars camp is already under contract for so

kotz contracts has removed that kemp three and a half million dollars from its spreadsheet i don't know i trust them more than i trust myself So I would assume the way that this works. Is that the Dodgers no longer have to pay that money. But I really don't know. It's possible. Yeah of course Kemp will probably not be on the Dodgers. When next season starts. We'll see.

But odds are they'll either designate him for assignment. Just like the Braves did with Gonzalez. Or they will try to package him with a prospect and get some of his salary off the books. Maybe just he doesn't really fit on their team, doesn't really fit on any team for that matter, but he'd fit a bit better on an AL team just because he is the worst outfielder in baseball literally at this point, and also seems to be one of the worst base runners in baseball maybe too, and was a league average hitter last season exactly so if that's what he is that's not really anything that anyone would want but maybe he could hit a bit better than that and if you

dh him he doesn't cost you quite as much elsewhere so yeah so the interesting thing is here that we know that the dodgers are determined to get under this limit. And I think it's still $197 million for next year. And then it goes up to $206 in 2019 and $208, $210. But this is since the 2002 CBA. So I think starting in 2003, there's been an annual limit, a luxury tax limit that functions as sort of a soft cap, but that cap has gotten harder and harder over the years. And so teams were routinely exceeding that luxury tax limit.

And so that's when they made the 50% penalty, the new maximum that you could get. But next year, as part of the CBA that was agreed to last winter, but this part of it has not gone into effect until next year, when it will, there's going to be an additional tax on top of that 50% if you're above a certain threshold. So if you spend more than $217 million on payroll and benefits next year, then you pay an additional 12% on any amount over that limit in addition to the 50 percent or whatever you're paying on anything over 197 and then if you spend more than 237 million which the dodgers have done for three consecutive seasons they were at like 241 this past year any team over 237 pays an additional 45 percent on any amount beyond that so if you are a three-time offender like the Dodgers are and you're over 237, then you're paying like a 95% tax, I think, on any dollar over that. So clearly

there are reasons why you would want to get under this thing. And it's not only that, but it's also a draft pick penalty that comes into effect next year and it's not that severe but it's just any team over that 237 number if you have a whatever your first pick in the amateur draft is falls 10 spots so like the dodgers have the 30th pick in next year's draft so presumably they would just lose their first round pick essentially would just like fall down to 40th pick early in the second round something like that so you know that's probably only worth like a couple million dollars of difference or something but still that's something so there are all these harsher measures that have been put in place either to try to ensure competitive balance if you want to kind of take mlb's word for it or

to suppress player salaries which is certainly also part of it. The thing that I can't quite figure out is how much of it is that? How much of it is these new stricter taxes and penalties that are going into effect that is contributing to the Dodgers and the Yankees really making a concerted effort to getting under these limits as opposed to past years when they've tried to or said they would try to, but not really tried that hard. Now they both seem to be pretty committed to that. Is that because of these stricter limits or is it because of the 2018-2019 free agent class, which as you mentioned, could include Kershaw and will almost certainly include Harper and Machado and other guys too, like Josh Donaldson is in that class. That class isn't quite as impressive as it looked

a while ago because some guys have either signed extensions or just dropped off a bit, but you know, it's still those big three and Donaldson and Charlie Blackman, et cetera. So is it that these teams are preparing to spend a lot then, or is it that they are actually deterred by these penalties that MLB has put in place? i would assume it is that they're planning to spend a lot and so i don't know i don't know exactly what the savings would come out to because we can't just project what a payroll would be but i guess you could i think jeff passon was running through some math on twitter yesterday that if you if you figured the dodges were going to run a payroll of i I don't know, $250 million in two seasons. And I think the way that it worked out for him is that they would save something like $10 or $12 million

if they were able to reset the penalty, which is pretty substantial. But, I mean, look, I don't know exactly what the motivation is. The correct answer is probably that it's a little bit of both. But we know that the Yankees and Dodgers can both afford to pay overage. They have been doing it for a while they are two of the richest franchises in north america but this is also an opportunity for both of them they have a lot of cost-controlled talent on the rosters that it's not like they have to lose a whole lot right in order to drop below i mean do you look at what the yankees have done

they're a very good team right now the dodgers just lost a bunch of minimally valuable players in order to drop below the threshold so it's it's relatively it's a painless way it's a relatively painless way to save money and i guess we haven't talked about the braves motivation here which is fairly straightforward the braves this season are bad so they're going to pay more in exchange for clearing the books for 2019 so now matt kemp and all his money is off the books for 2019 the braves are going to end up in a situation somewhat similar to the phillies although less so now i guess that the phillies are spending but the braves have very few future commitments which just means that they're going to have a lot of money to spend next season and for their sake

hopefully next season they look better hopefully some of their pitchers finally develop and hopefully ozzie albies and ronald acuna and and dance b swanson look good and establish themselves in the major leagues so for the braves this is really quite simple for them to do i'm sure that part of the reason this happened is because anthopolis was just in the dodgers front office so he kind of knew what the dodgers wanted to do and there was a there was a a fangraphs chatter a few weeks ago i should have mentioned this who proposed uh on the fly on december 8th in my fangraphs chat there was a a user named tom who floated the idea of a kemp for casimir and gonzalez trade

and i looked at it and i thought i wish that i didn't put this in the chat i wish i didn't accept this from the queue because this is complicated this is going to take me a few minutes to think through and the more i thought about it the more reasonable it sounded and then i i included that in my write-up on the trade this weekend and tom uh left the first comment in the thread and said he's actually been thinking about this trade for a couple of months and he linked to a post he wrote on some message board from i think it was october that was floating the idea of a kemp for a casimir and gonzalez trade so there are a few teams who would be willing to offer the dodgers this kind of relief and few teams who would have that kind of exchange contract available but

the braves and dodgers lined up made great sense there's absolutely i i don't i guess the only thing you could say is maybe the braves didn't get enough for kind of letting the Dodgers off the hook, but I don't think that there's any loser in this trade. Pretty much every single party gets what they want, except for Matt Kemp, who doesn't know where he'll be playing. Right, yeah, and I mean, the Braves, you know, they could use a couple starters or possible starters more than the Dodgers could probably at this point. The Dodgers could probably at this point. They went into last year with some veteran guys, Colon and Jaime Garcia and R.A. Dickey, and Colon and Garcia are gone, and Dickey's a free agent.

So, you know, they have a bunch of 20-something guys, some of whom seem to be good, some of whom unclear. So they could use Brandon McCarthy and Kazmir if he pitches. So, yeah, I see why it makes sense. sense and and right it's not like the dodgers are hurting themselves here to get under this limit it's not like they're really making any sort of sacrifice in the short or long term they just didn't really need anything this winter and they might need something next winter they might need clayton kershaw so you can see why they would do this and i guess that's the thing like i've seen a lot of sort of hand-wringing about moves like this or like the luxury tax keeping Dodgers or Yankees spending down. I guess

the concern is that, well, if teams are really adhering to this limit, then players are not going to get paid and their share of the revenue in Major League Baseball is going to keep falling as it has, especially if you count things like, you know, MLBAM and revenue that is not maybe directly related to the sport. So that's a concern, I guess, except that if teams are so rich and they're making so much money, then even as these penalties get a little stricter, they still shouldn't care that much, right? Like if the Dodgers, I think Jeff Passan tweeted something about how like the Yankees bring in half a billion dollars in revenue every year and the Dodgers are close to that. So I mean, how much of a difference does whatever it is, 20 million, 30 million, less, more, it seems like

those teams would still be very profitable, even if they were incurring the maximum penalties here. And if incurring the maximum penalties meant building a playoff team, a World Series team, then that probably pays for itself. So I don't know that you can make the argument that on the one hand, teams are super profitable and these limits are keeping players from sharing in that profit, but then also make the argument that these limits are actually incentivizing teams not to spend because if they're so rich, then they should just continue to blow by the limits. Well, I guess what business has ever not cared about saving as much money as possible, even when it's a very successful business? cared about saving as much money as possible even when it's a very successful business i mean if you were given the option of being the dodgers on friday and being the dodgers now well the dodgers now are in a better position tax wise and they didn't lose anything really in terms of on the

field talent maybe a little bit of rotation depth is missing but other than that what what business would think well who cares about saving five or ten million dollars that's five or ten million dollars you can do a lot with five or ten million dollars if you're a billionaire so yeah the the dodgers and the yankees could i don't know where the uh the theoretical limit is for them to maintain profitability or at least breaking even and still have a payroll maybe it's 300 million dollar payroll maybe it's 400 million dollar payroll i really don't know it would be hysterical if they tried i wouldn't mind if it happened for one season and then we could go back to normal i wouldn't mind it if it were an experiment just see what would happen this is not the market to be trying to do that because there's just not that

many good players out there but you know next year the team could sign machado for shortstop donaldson for third base kershaw for pitcher harper for right field and you could just keep going and figure well we're just going to build this whole team through free agency but yeah i i would imagine that the ownership groups also feel maybe a i don't know how tangible it is but a certain amount of pressure to try to be reasonable i'm sure manfred commissioner manfred doesn't want teams just blowing past the cap over and over and over again now maybe that does work to keep down wages, which is not ultimately a great thing for the sport. But I don't think that baseball wants to have teams that are running payrolls that look as outlandish as the Yankees payroll did 15 or 20 years ago. So there's some

amount of psychological pressure, I'm sure, for these teams to keep payrolls reasonable. But I think ultimately it just comes down to businesses are greedy and they like to save money when they can. Yeah. So I'm not sure how much this is a blip and how much this is a sign of things to come. It could just be a confluence of factors like the Yankees and Dodgers not really feeling like they need to spend a ton this offseason and they're not being a ton to spend on. And then next winter there will be. And so teams are trying to save their money for that. So I don't know how much of it is just kind of a temporary thing where they're going to try to get under this limit, reset their tax rates and then come back with a vengeance after that. Or whether we really will see this function as sort of a salary cap going forward. I'm not sure.

I'm reserving judgment, but I'm sure it has something to do with the fact that penalties are actually getting stricter. And so this is working as intended to some extent, I suppose. How did Scott Casimir... Scott Casimir did not win the 2013 Comeback Player of the Year award, which is surprising to me, I guess, because in 2011, Scott Casimir threw 1.2 major league innings, and in 2012, he threw not any at all. Then he came back, and he made 29 starts, and he was good. So Scott Casimir, so this defeats the purpose of my subsequent question, because I thought that Casimir was going to win that award in 2013. I guess he didn't. I think it was actually Mariano Rivera. So anyway, the point I was going to ask was let's just pretend that casimir had one and i guess it doesn't matter because he showed up on the award voting scott

casimir finished third for the american league comeback player of the year award in 2013 that was after not pitching in 2012 scott casimir didn't pitch in 2017 he had hip and arm problems but he's a flyer for the braves i mean there's not a whole lot of bodies that are in his way for the rotation could scott casimir conceivably show up in the voting for another comeback player of the year award? And has that ever happened before? I mean, sure. He's eligible. He missed the entire season with a hip injury. So if he comes back and is good again, he'd be a good... I mean, who won it this year? This is... I don't even know this is uh let me find out do you have any guesses i well i read it and then i forgot it instantly so uh okay two former royals

former and this is by the way this is something that we have drafted on this podcast before i believe we've drafted comeback player of the year candidates like heading into a season so maybe we'll do that again uh oh well it was uh Greg Holland was one of them right yeah okay and the other one I don't know Mike Moustakis and now that I look at this okay so it'll be a royal you never know that's true okay so especially now that he won't be an angel so it turns out maybe this isn't so uncommon in 2010 Franciscoisco lariano won the american league comeback player of the year award for the twins and in 2013 he won it as a member of the pirates so francisco lariano has won it twice rick sutcliffe has won it twice chris carpenter andres galarraga brett saberhagen boog powell

and norm cash have also won the award multiple times so it turns out these players have had multiple comebacks and in that sense i guess scott casimir would not be unique but still something to watch casimir it's still unusual yeah i guess that sort of makes sense like if you're an injury prone player you have more opportunities to be the comeback player of the year otherwise if you're just uh playing every year it's tough to be eligible for that award. All right. Well, do we want to say anything about many Machado rumors, which seem to have intensified a lot of buzz as we speak here on Monday about something potentially happening this week, if it's going to happen? Nothing nothing concrete but it sounds as if maybe offers improved over

the weekend teams got a little more serious about this the orioles got a little more serious about this okay well hold on let me let me just take a step back here i don't understand something here okay okay okay 1981 yeah richie zisk won the comeback player of the year award that season he played in 94 games he was worth 1.7 wins above replacement. Okay. The season previous, he played in 135 games. He was worth 0.6 wins above replacement, but he went from a 123 OPS plus to 140,

and he played less? What did he come back from? He was fine. So wait, this is 1981 is when he won? Yeah. Now I know the 1981 season was shortened but he still played nearly a full season in 1980 yeah did he come back from something off the field that is not reflected in this didn't come back from anything um randy jones hold on randy jones won the comeback player of the year award In 1975

When he had a 2-2-4 ERA He was 25 years old And the season before that he had a 4-4-5 ERA But the season before he threw 208 innings He didn't come back from anything either Yeah his Richie Zisk's baseball reference bullpen Page says he was named Comeback player of the year 1981, even though he had hit well the previous year and his rise in batting average was largely a function of his having moved to a better hitting park.

So, I mean, his rise in batting average wasn't even all that impressive. He went from 290 to 311. Huh. All right. I don't know. This is a stupid award. That's, yeah yeah someone must have gotten robbed in 1981 with the comeback player of the year award anyway okay manny machado so we have

what the white socks are a weird team who have been reported to have checked in and the diamond backs have also checked in i don't know if there have been any developments over the course of us recording this now but the white socks are a weird fit because they are bad and machado has one more year of control and the white socks i think the idea is that the white socks would trade for machado under the condition that they could have a window to talk contract extension with which manny machado would never grant them because he would i'm sure love to hit free agency so i don't know how many players who are as good as machado get to this point one year away from free free agency, and decide, now I'm going to sign a long-term contract? Machado wants to hit the market.

I would be floored if some team were able to extend him now. So I can't imagine the White Sox would make any sense unless they traded for Machado, and then they traded Machado almost immediately to the Yankees, which wouldn't make sense to me. And there are some recent reports now that says that maybe it is more likely that the Orioles would greenlight a trade to the Yankees because before it had been reported that they would never do such a thing and they wouldn't even trade him to a team that they thought would trade him to the Yankees. Anyway, now there's a couple of sourced reports here that seems to say the opposite. So it is possible that Machado will end up with the Yankees. And in that case, we can revisit our Yankees discussion from

earlier in this podcast, because I think they would be more of a juggernaut if they added Machado to a team that currently has no third baseman, basically. So yeah. As far as the Diamondbacks go, they make some sense. I think the Diamondbacks front office looks at them as still a short-term organization. The way that the front office has spoken in some press reports over the past few months has conveyed that they are concerned about the future of the organization. Now, I don't know how replacing Jake Lamb with Manny Machado makes that better, but I don't know. Maybe they see Machado as a shortstop, and then that frees them to do whatever they want with Cattell Marte etc etc still doesn't feel like

the Diamondbacks or the White Sox make a whole lot of sense as Machado's destination I would never pick them first or second on my list Yankees of course making all the sense in the world but it is I don't want to say it's good to see the Orioles now favoring a rebuild because I don't think that baseball wants teams to drop out of competitiveness but it's i guess it's good to see the orioles acknowledging their position uh that position being that they are bad and other teams are very good and they are extremely unlikely to be good in 2018 i saw the recent zips depth charts projections of the orioles on fan graphs and this is dan zimborski's project and the posts are run by carson sistuli but anyway the orioles starting rotation

in that depth charts was uh kevin gosman three wins above replacement dylan bundy three wins above replacement and the other three rotation slots were zeros so the orioles need a whole lot of help and they're not going to get it they are a bad baseball team that is not in a position to get better so it makes sense for them to move machado you could say that it would have made sense for them to move machado a year ago it's very easy to say that now but this will be as we discussed i think last week this will be really interesting if he does get traded and it looks like he could get traded this week this will be very interesting because it's so uncommon to see a player this good get moved with one final year of team control and so we will he will help us establish some sort of precedent for when this happens in the

future because machado is a very good i guess i would call him a second tier player maybe he belongs in the first year i really don't know last year kind of threw a wrench in the works but for a player this good i think people will be surprised by the somewhat limited return that the orioles get in exchange for them just because there is only so much value you can provide in in one season but i mean when you sell machado then where do you go from there i saw a report on mlb trade rumors that like the orioles untouchables where i forgot the first one but then there was trey mancini and michaelbons. It's like, what are you doing? That's the saddest list of Untouchables.

Let me, I got to figure out the first one. Orioles Untouchables, MLB trade rumors. Let's just give this a gander. Oh, man. Okay, so Jonathan's scope I can kind of understand, I guess. But yeah, so this is the first bullet point from an entry from sunday this is a post written by connor burn linking to a pair of articles from rock kabatko of mass and sports.com it's unclear how many untouchable players the orioles have but second baseman

jonathan scope howard filter trey mancini and reliever michael givens are among them an executive from outside the organization told to kabatko at the winter meetings come on so scope has two arb years remaining maybe they try to extend him so whatever he's young he's talented that's fine treyman cini is like he's just he's not that why why beat around the bush he's not he's not very good and michael gibbons is a reliever who's not like whoa he's like kenley jen no he's he's a michael gibbons level reliever i like, whoa, he's like Kenley Jantz. No, he's a Michael Givens level reliever. I like him. I think he's interesting.

No such thing as an untouchable relief pitcher for a team that is rebuilding. That is just stupid. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, we'll return to this soon, I'm sure. But I wanted to mention it.

It is currently the probably biggest story in baseball because there are no other stories in baseball. So we will end there and we'll be back with emails next time. The Orioles are reportedly trying to acquire Danny Duffy. What are you doing? What is this process? Their problem. All right. Future past Ben here. I realized after we recorded that there's another deer antler tie-in to baseball. It was just six years ago, August 2011, Tom Verducci reported at Sports Illustrated that baseball sent a warning to its major and minor league players to

stop ingesting deer antler spray. Deer antler spray was evidently an alternative to steroids. The velvet from immature deer antlers includes insulin-like growth factor, or IGF-1, which mediates the level of human growth hormone in the body and is banned by MLB and the World Anti-Doping Agency, among others, for its muscle building and fat-cutting effects. Cannot be detected in urine tests. One manufacturer touts its benefits, anabolic or growth stimulation, athletic performance, and muscular strength and endurance. Didn't say anything about rubbing bats, though. That's the real performance enhancer, and it's still legal.

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