Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1155: Hoffman Kluber Meets the MarlinTigers

Episode Date: December 28, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Steven Goldman answer listener emails about the best and worst times to write about baseball (and the most and least rewarding ways to do it), Nolan Ryan’s Cy Young Award goose egg, Trevor Hoffman vs. Corey Kluber and Hall of Fame standards for relievers, Brandon Belt vs. Eric Hosmer, gaming the luxury-tax […]

See my friends, see my friends, playing across the river. See my friends, see my friends, playing across the river. Hello and welcome to episode 1155 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I'm the member of The Ringer, joined not today by Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs, my regular co-host who is on vacation, but by my friend Stephen Goldman, formerly of Baseball Prospectus and SB Nation and elsewhere, and currently the proprietor of the Infinite Inning podcast. Hello, Steve. Hi, Ben. How are you? I feel as if I am in the Infinite Inning myself right now because we are in the deadest of all dead periods on the baseball calendar, certainly, and really in any kind of calendar. This is

not the week to be podcasting about baseball. This is the week to be taking vacations, like Jeff was wise enough to do. I hope you went somewhere warm. I think he did, yes. But I'm still doing podcasts, and so I'm very grateful to have you and also the listeners sending in emails so that we have something to talk about. That's what we're going to talk about today, because if you're not into the Hall of Fame, and I know neither of us is really that into the Hall of Fame at this point in our lives and careers, or at least as much as we once were, and I kind of got it out of my system on yesterday's episode too. So if not that, then it's very, very slim pickings. So we are just going to rely on listener submissions today and just work through emails.

And for those who haven't listened to Infinite Inning, you all should. It is sort of a history slanted podcast about baseball. There's often a historical element to it. It starts off with a couple anecdotes, tales from baseball's past. And then there's a guest who comes on to discuss more current events usually. And it's great. I'm glad that you started it, that you're still doing it, even during the off-season, during the long winter. It's been a lot of fun to listen to. So I know a lot of my listeners have already discovered it, but for those who haven't, please do discover it. I am telling you to.

Thank you. Somebody reviewing it on iTunes called it something like there may have been more than three thirds here, but it was something like one third history, one third therapy, one third baseball or something like that. There might have been another one in there, one third politics. I don't know. It reflects kind of the jumbled inside of my head. And hopefully I organize it in a way that it makes more sense than it does from inside that place. But I'm very grateful both for your support and you encouraged me to get it started in the first place after I danced around this idea for, God, more than a year at least. And it's caught on very nicely and it doesn't have the following that this mighty edifice, which is now, I believe, this is episode 1.5 million, I believe. I'm glad to be on for this great anniversary show, the 1.5 millionth show. to be able to talk to people and reach them directly and not have to be working through the medium of words that always have to be topical and focused on something that's happening at the minute and I can just kind of level with people. Right. And that's what we're doing today because

nothing is happening at the minute. And we will, I guess, start off with a question about that, more or less. And this is from a listener named Gianni, who says, It seems that most baseball writers, and perhaps all writers and journalists, have a chronic problem when trying to produce content. What to write about? This was evidenced again in a recent podcast. This is a while ago now when Jeff mentioned writing about Clayton Kershaw's arm slot in the middle of the year because there was nothing else to write about. Clayton Kershaw's arm slot in the middle of the year because there was nothing else to write about. Particular to baseball, they and you appear to be stuck in an endless 12-month cycle,

which goes something like this. Spring training, not real baseball yet, so nothing really matters unless there's an injury. Early season games, small sample size, so hard to write anything with concrete conclusions or it doesn't end with we'll see. Trade deadline, interesting things to write about. Some years, and most moves help teams only a tiny bit. Mid-season, it's the dog days. The baseball season is endless. Every game looks the same. Hey look, Kershaw did something with his arm slot. September, interesting, but only if their playoff race is on, and that wears thin fast. Playoffs should be interesting, but as

Carson Sistoli asked on the Fangraphs Audio podcast, what utility do we add at this time of year aside from describing in words a game that just happened? And then there's the postseason when there's no baseball to write about aside from the odd trade and winter meetings. So Gianni says, my question is, when is it good, fun or enjoyable to be a baseball writer? Maybe when writing a deep dive piece or in that week in July when lots is going on or the week in winter when you're on holiday or not in our case right now. Sometimes he says, I daydream about having your jobs and how great it would be rummaging through the internet and data sets and videos. But then I contemplate the reality of it and it seems like it would be super taxing. I'd still love to do it. Seems like

a lot of fun as well and very rewarding, but not all peaches and cream. So here at the depths of the offseason, what would you say are the most and least rewarding times to do this? It's harder now. It's true. When baseball has gone into the refrigerator, basically most of the teams have, especially this particular winner. And just October came and then slam, and they just went into deep storage. And there are so many teams that are pretty much where they left off. So if you're going to restrict yourself to exclusively commenting on moves that somebody made in the last number of days since your last deadline, then yeah, it's going to be difficult and you're going to have to write speculative

things. Like I saw someone had written, you know, the top 10 needs that most teams have or whatever. And you can always do filler like that. But my trick has always been to treat baseball as an avenue to go other places if necessary. And I do this on the infinite inning a lot, possibly too much. It's almost the raison d'etre for the infinite inning. But to look at something that has happened in baseball, whether now at some other time, and show how it's analogous to something else that has happened in the wider world, because this is a cliche, but baseball is a microcosm of our world at large. And it's usually not in stasis quite like this. So you have various avenues where you can talk about culture or history or politics or just emotional

stuff because ballplayers go through the same stuff that we do marriages and divorces and births and deaths and occasionally they get really depressed and slaughter their whole families which is a story that i intentionally haven't told because it just seems exploitative so i just saving that for sweeps week yeah may i don't think I'm ever going to tell it because I don't. There's no real insight there, except that, again, all groups of people sometimes get a little bit sad and take the wrong exit from that. And that's I don't have anything uplifting to say about it except that. So it's better not to. But the cool thing is that and the downside of the job, I think, is that all writers struggle with the blank piece of paper or the blank screen. And at the same time, there's so

much possibility in that. And I look forward to that part. And the neat thing about it is, it's more or less of a struggle for different people. And you start to understand why so many writers have famously been drunks, because you want to lubricate the skids of your creativity. But I'm curious if this happens for you too. And, you know, your pieces are often more about video and deep dives into stats where mine have done that sometimes, but not at the level that you do. And I'm more about doing deep dives into old newspaper archives and libraries. But it's, I guess, the same process. But what's neat for me is that sometimes I will sit down to write a piece and I will have that blank screen and I will not really know what I'm doing. And I will just start kind of throwing out words and sentences and ideas that

don't necessarily connect to anything. And pretty soon they will start connecting to each other. And then somewhere in there, I will think, yeah, you know, Aaron Judge's season was a little bit like what I'm saying here, the state that I'm describing or the anecdote that I'm describing. And then I start to have linkage. And the next thing I know, three hours have gone by and there are 1500 words on the screen in front of me and I'm pretty much done. And I didn't really experience it. It's like it came through me. And I don't mean to make it sound highfalutin or mysterious or mystical, but if there's any bragging that we can do for having chosen this field of life, I think it's that, that that happens.

Yeah, I mean, it totally depends on what your writing schedule is supposed to be, what kind of pieces you do. Jeff, for instance, writes great things year-round, but because he is obligated, encouraged to post twice a day most days during the week, he, I think, enjoys the season when there's just constantly stuff happening and leaderboards to sort and players who are doing things differently that he can point out before anyone else notices. point out before anyone else notices. And we, at least in recent years, haven't really been on quite as frantic a pace, I think. And so there's a little more time to respond to things or do things that aren't as tied to the news cycle. And I like that. So I know that you felt in your latter years at SB Nation and Baseball Prospectives maybe that it's kind of become a commodity, the reaction to news, the transaction analysis. There was a time when there weren't that many people with a certain perspective on baseball transactions. And so you would go and read

Christina Carl because she would be, I mean, she still would be unique, I think, in the way that she approaches things. She doesn't write quite as often now because she has a big editing load at ESPN. But there was a time when there weren't that many people analyzing trades and signings in the way that so many write, well, here's what this guy is worth and here's what that guy is worth and here's why team A wanted to do this and here's why team B wanted to do it. And maybe you can find some angle that no one else will have, but it's really hard and it's tough to stand out in that way. So I think we both feel that those kinds of posts, they might do well and sites are still sort of built on a foundation of that kind of thing that people click on because they want to know what just happened. But for the writer, it's not necessarily as satisfying as something that is not quite as quick a hit. And so for me, at least, as I've

tried to branch out a bit from baseball, I actually appreciate the offseason because it gives me a chance to do other things and also to take a longer, slower approach to certain baseball pieces. I have a series coming up in February that I won't spoil now, but it's something that we're doing because it's February and because there's no baseball and nothing is happening and football is over and it's kind of an evergreen thing. And so we figure, well, that's when it makes the most sense to do it. And I'm looking forward to that, even though that is one of the worst times to write about baseball in general. So I think it really varies depending on what you're looking for. Obviously, at the trade deadline or during the playoffs, you never really wonder what you should write about or you never really

have a shortage of topics. And that can be a relief in a certain way because often the hardest thing is coming up with something to write about, not the actual writing itself. But the things that you're doing all tend to feel like things that no one will read in 24 hours, let alone 24 months. And I try as much as I can to write things that people will want to return to some years down the road. So I think my thinking on this has changed over time. And now it might be some of the slowest spots on the schedule that I actually enjoy the most. Not to dwell on this over extensively, but since you brought up Christina, she, and no disrespect to any of the other BP founders, was really my personal gateway drug to BP. And it wasn't just because she was analyzing transactions in a way that was so unique,

because, I mean, let's face it, the actual transactions themselves are either fairly meaningless. I would say 90% of them are fairly meaningless. And if you go through the whole history of trades, you just get a lot of Joe Slobotnik for a player to be named later, and neither of them emerge from the minors, or one of them pitches three innings for the acquiring team and then disappears, and the other never emerges from the minors. And so there's a certain level that's intuitive. And over time, the sabermetric tools that were rarer in mainstream publications are now all too commonplace. And the readers come equipped with them, too.

So that aspect of it is not as special as it used to be. But what she did, and this was in part because she was always deeply involved with the creation of the BP Annual, both before and after I got there, was that as the winter went on and all the off-season transactions that we're not having this year were happening, she would be off doing the book and would develop a backlog. And she would go dark at exactly the time that you really wanted her to be there. But there was just no way short of cloning her that you could do both. And so she would eventually publish these huge catch up pieces.

And they might be 3,000 or 4,000 or 4000 or 5000 words. And I would even print them out. And the thing that she did is the thing that I was talking about me doing, too. And I think this is why we became such great friends, is that she employed analogies and metaphors to other things and other places and would evoke all these details that came out of her background in military history. That's what her degree is in. She has an advanced degree in military history and just knows a lot about a lot of things, just like you do and hopefully I do. And so she would drag in so much. You would learn so much more than what the value of the trade was. You might also learn about the Peace of Westphalia. that your mileage may vary, as we used to say. But that, I think, is is the value.

And you're right that I mean, I hope people still read those because they would probably still be really entertaining. But you're right in terms of the quick hits. But you're right in terms of the quick hits. You have to do it for the churn if that's the business that the site is into, into like the traffic that you get when you do like a quick burst on a trade. And then, you know, Google News picks it up or one of the other bigger sites picks it up. And suddenly you have all these hits coming in on something that's going to have no legs. And, you know, legs are a luxury. You know, people are a luxury. You know,

people are just trying to make a living right now. And it's a it's a tough time in in our industry. And so I kind of get that. And from an editor's point of view, I get the necessity of having them. But it's a it is a drag to just have to belt out that stuff. And when you can sit back and spread out. And for most of my career, I've had the luxury of doing it, I think it's also why I'm a niche item. And, you know, to be creative and to tell a bigger story in baseball or out. And I've said this to you before, whatever it is you're about to do, and I'll bug you off the air. One of the things that I most enjoyed is the should Ben learn to drive story that you did. Was it a year ago now? Yeah, in this past year.

Just this past year. Time telescopes for me here in my old age. But that was such a great piece. And it was like reported and you were reporting on yourself, which was weird. But it was, you know, it was, you know, Ben Lindbergh, 60 minutes on Ben Lindbergh. the ability to do that through baseball, but now you're getting to show that you can do other things. And just to close it off, we're far afield now from the question that the reader asked. But the thing is that if it's going to be hard for you, you're probably not meant to do it. You always have to be able to just sit down and do it on demand. Even if the news is not cooperating with you, you've got to find a way to find some, and Jeff is so good at this with his stat stuff too, that just looking at little aspects, small aspects of the game, Meg Raleigh, who was just on my show also is brilliant at this. And I think Jeff was a huge,

I don't think I'm talking out of turn to say that Jeff was a huge influence on her that way, that to find these little small corners that you can tell stories with and you make the news cycle irrelevant, you make the time of year irrelevant because you always have that ability to pick that stuff out. And it may take Jeff six hours to figure that out, but that he does and it's so entertaining is how you negotiate with that aspect of things. And we've talked about ours. Yeah, I think if you are a full-time baseball writer and you're at an exclusively baseball site, maybe the best time would be, I don't know, two months into the season or a little more than a month at the point where you can start saying that things are significant and meaningful.

And it's not all small sample, but it also doesn't feel like you've just gotten to the grind and it's baseball day after day. It all feels somewhat new and fresh. And that's the time of year when you can pinpoint, okay, this player is doing something different and here's why it's working or not working. And now we can break it down. And there's just a whole lot of that or teams that are exceeding expectations or falling short of them. I think that's probably a good time of year for that sort of thing. But I like being at a site that's not exclusively baseball now, both because I can do other things. If I don't have a pressing baseball idea and I have a pressing non-baseball idea, I can do that instead. But also because there's not quite as much pressure to chase every little baseball story. I mean, we still want to cover the big news, obviously, and the teams and the players that people want to read about. But if there is, I guess there's a benefit and a drawback.

If you're at a baseball-only site, you can write a whole article about a very obscure player because you know that your whole audience is there for baseball content and they're all hardcore baseball people. Whereas at Grantland or at the Ringer, you knew that you kind of had to hook people. There would be some people who are there just for baseball, but the majority of people would not. So you had to try to sell them on why they should read this article about baseball. So there are upsides and downsides to that. But I really like being in a place where I can just take off in the

middle of the season when the trade deadline is happening and write a long feature about the Salinas stockade an independent league team that no one has ever heard of and they let me do that because they thought it was a fun story and I did too so I'm lucky to be where I am I think and even if you are cut out to do it I think it can still be difficult and challenging, but hopefully in a way that you welcome so that it still feels like work, but it feels like work that is rewarding and that you're capable of doing and that you want to do at least most of the time. So yeah, I'm not saying I'm not saying that even if you are cut out to do it, that it's ever easy. Just that people talk about writer's block. People talk about not being able to find something to write about. Those are the

people that I'm suspicious of. And Gore Vidal, who was one of the most snarky writers, and I've quoted this many times, but he said, you have writer's block? Okay, then you're not meant to do this. There are many more like you. And that sounds horrible, but it's true. Another favorite of mine, Harlan Ellison, said that he had writer's block once and it was the worst 10 minutes of his life. And I'm not comparing myself to those guys because they had skills that I can only dream of, but I do try to adhere to that ethos, or I should say it's not hard to adhere to that ethos because I think it's true for me too. If I go on vacation, I miss it. And it's not necessarily writing about baseball, it's just writing about something. This is something I have to do every day. And I start

to go into withdrawal if I don't. And if it's a struggle for you, it's a stupid way to make a living to begin with. So why do something that's hard for you if you can do anything else? Because there are other lines of work that are more reliable and more lucrative. And yeah, it's fun to be writing about baseball. This is a whole other line of discussion. But there are so many people who love baseball so much that they want to write about it, not because they're writers and they have stories about baseball to tell, but because they just want to be in anything that's adjacent to this thing that they love.

And that's not a good way to go through life because you are forcing yourself into a situation which may not be a natural fit for you. It would be better to just be a fan at that point and not try to be part of this very competitive, incredibly shrinking, hard to get established, hard to get to a point where you're not getting $10 per story or something. And, you know, just everybody has a dream. I'm not trying to crush anybody's dream. But if you're not really called to do it, don't do it. Well, now that we've done the navel-gazing portion of the podcast, I guess we can mean, maybe the best answer is just that he never deserved to win one. I guess he is probably one of the most accomplished pitchers never to have won one, but there was never a year when I think he was the best pitcher in baseball, right? And

which is not to say that he couldn't have easily won one because during his career, it was probably less common for the most deserving player to win than for some other guy to win, but it never happened for him. And obviously he was an incredible strikeout artist, but he also walked a ton of guys.

And so his rate stats aside from the the strikeouts, were never the most impressive in the league. Well, you have to keep in mind, first of all, that the Cy Young Award was really tantamount to the most wins award a lot of the time. And he only won 20 games twice. And those weren't years that synced up with big seasons for the Angels, who he spent the first chunk of his career playing for after he was traded infamously for Jim Fregosi over from the Mets. And so I think that's part of it, that there were always guys who had kind of neater records where even where he was very good, you had Jim Palmer winning 20 games and posting low ERAs. And yeah, he wasn't striking out 380

guys a year, but he also wasn't walking 380 guys a year. He had great exquisite control, and those teams were going to the World Series or at least winning divisions. So when you put together the narrative part of it, Palmer had it on his side there. You have the stats part of it. Palmer, again, wasn't as gaudy, but had that on his side. I'm just picking Palmer as an example of a guy who won a bunch of Cy Young Awards at a time where he was contemporary with Nolan Ryan. And I think also there's an aspect of Nolan Ryan, especially in that period, before he developed the circle change and tamed the control a little bit, where people looked at him and they were just like, you know, he's kind of a freak.

He's not he wasn't going to be mentioned in the same breath as Sandy Koufax, who was an artist. mentioned in the same breath as Sandy Koufax, who was an artist. And Nolan Ryan was just a guy who had an unbelievable fastball and could throw it by people, but wasn't a pitcher. And so again, I think all these kind of soft factors affected him. And then the other thing is that, again, the cult of the winds, look at 1987. That season has bugged me now for 30. This is the 30th anniversary season of his 1987 bugging me. And we're going to have a reunion tour. It's going to be great. It's going to be me, Alan Trammell, who should have won the American League MVP, and Ozzie Smith, who should have won the NL MVP.

And we're just going to make fun of George Bell and Andre Dawson. But he led the National League with a 2.76 ERA, led the league in strikeouts with 270, led in adjusted ERA. He was a ridiculous pitcher. He lost 6.5 hits per nine. And because the Astros could not hit their way out of a paper bag that year, it's not just the ballpark. The ballpark, the Astrodome at that time was just ridiculously anti-offense, but he was legitimately great. And he went eight and 16 and he just had no run support. There's no other way. And it would be really interesting to see how that season would play today because, I mean, we've seen now, I mean, the 20 game season is not extinct, but it's certainly in much lesser supply with the rise of, you know, 90 man bullpens and pitchers being pulled

after five or six than it used to be. And we've seen guys like Felix Hernandez win it with whatever, 15 wins and not even a great winning percentage. But would they give it to a guy who was 8-16 just on the basis of this incredible one-loss record and strikeout totals and all that? I don't know. But I always thought he was the best pitcher in the National League that year.

They couldn't decide who to give it to. always thought he was the best pitcher in the National League that year. They couldn't decide who to give it to. So they gave it to a Phillies reliever, Steve freaking Bedrosian. Instead of Nolan, he finished fifth. He got 12 votes. Bedrosian got 57. And I just think that's a massive miscarriage. Yeah. Even that year, if you sort by war, not that that's the only way to determine who should have won, but even among, I guess, the guys who did get Cy Young Award votes that year in that league, Ryan was fifth behind Bob Welch, Oral Hershiser, Rick Sutcliffe, Mike Scott, and then Nolan Ryan. don't think there was ever a year where he led his league in pitching war or I mean he must have come close a couple times but he had plenty of top five finishes he had some top three finishes and in 1973 that was the closest he came he had a second place finish but even that year you can't really make a case that he should have won it because I I mean, that year, who won it? Jim Palmer won it that year, and Ryan was probably better than Jim Palmer that year, but there were other guys who were better

than both of them. I think Burt Bleileven was probably clearly the best pitcher in the league that year. He had a 10-win season, according to Baseball Reference, and he got one Cy Young vote, baseball reference and he got one Cy Young vote and not even a first place vote. So I think that was the thing with Ryan. Obviously, the longevity is incredible and made his career a famous one and a very valuable one, but he was never really inning for inning the best guy around in any given year or at least didn't have a clear case as one. Yeah, exactly. The strikeout totals are amazing, and that's what speaks highest for him. But the overall package, as good as it was, and remember, we're talking about the 70s too, which was a period in which offense was kind of low. It wasn't necessarily 1968 anymore, but it still

was very constrained compared to later years and certainly compared to now. So when you see him posting a 2.87 ERA in 73 or a 2.89 in 1974, it's good. It's not great. When he posts a 3.45 in 1975, he's actually just league average. And so, again, very durable, as you said, was never or very rarely a war leader. He never led the league in war. The highest was third in 1977. This is via baseball reference war, by the way. And they gave it to Sparky Lyle that year. So, I mean, that also worked against him is if you didn't have the, again, the obvious stats,

and there wasn't a guy who had the obvious stat, they just defaulted to like, well, if we can't give it to the wins leader, well, maybe we'll give it to the saves leader. All right. Colin has a question that is sort of Hall of Fame related. He points out that on the 2018 ballot tracker, Trevor Hoffman is on 81% of ballots and updated. Now he is on 78.4% of the ballots that have been revealed through about 28% of the electorate. So he's going to be very close. He might get in this year, might have to wait another year. But Colin says he tossed just 1,089 and a third innings, while another former Padre, Corey Kluber, has hurled 1,091 innings in his career, almost the same. While these two

pitcher stats are similar, Kluber has an undeniable edge. I feel I do not engage in hyperbole by saying Kluber would not be a first ballot Hall of Famer if he retired tomorrow. Tom Tango has recently been posting polls on a number of other bubble starters, including Brett Saberhagen, David Cohn, and El Presidente Dennis Martinez, all of whom are in the 50 wins above replacement bubble zone, while Hoffman is set to waltz in with just 26 wins above replacement via fan graphs. My question is essentially, do you care to comment on the Kluber-Hoffman comparison or on the candidacies of any of those bubble starters. And of course, this comes back to the age-old debate about starters versus relievers, and I think the Kluber-Hoffman comparison is instructive if you are someone who is anti-reliever

when it comes to relievers in the Hall of Fame or thinks that it should be reserved for a very, very, very elite few, you can always just point out that, yeah, starters pitch a lot more innings. And in some cases, those innings are almost as effective and they have the additional handicap of having to face guys multiple times in a game and having to go deeper into games, whereas relievers are just pitching an inning at a time, or at least Hoffman was more of that breed of reliever so where do you stand on this do you think it's a useful comparison to point out that these guys innings totals are so close or you know obviously most people are not really thinking of it this way they're thinking of Trevor Hoffman as the best

of his kind of player and Corey Kluber as a different kind of player. But that is sort of an artificial way to think about them in that a guy who ends up as a closer in most cases just couldn't hack it as a starter in the first place. I'm really mesmerized by the idea of Kluber Hoffman and that if I write my World War II historical novel in which the American OSS agent has to kill a particularly infamous SS captain. I think the SS captain is going to be named Kluber Hoffman. Beware of Kluber Hoffman. He's brutal. The other thing, this is kind of a cheating way to answer the question, is that if Corey Kluber retired tomorrow, he would not be eligible for the Hall of Fame

because he has logged a mere seven seasons in the major leagues. You have to get to 10. And the only Hall of Famer who really has scraped by on that consideration is Ross Youngs, the Giants outfielder, who died in the midst of his career of Bright's disease. I believe it's a kidney disease. They go south on you. And at least then that was the end. Maybe today dialysis can do something about that. I'm not positive.

I'm not a doctor. I do not play one on TV. However, he had nine full seasons more or less, or kind of like eight and a half. And then in his rookie year, or prior to his rookie year, he had like a seven-game cup of coffee, and that is what they counted as the 10th year. So it's a bit of a cheat, but they felt sentimental about Ross and he was a very good player. And so they they kind of said, well, if you squint, it's kind of 10 years. So it's cheating in terms in terms of of the question. Colin, it was right. Colin is is now my my favorite Colin next to wires and Colin the beagle from that episode of black adder who is voted to parliament. Anyway, he, he points out something that has bugged me for a long time. Look on the 162 game schedule teams pitch a total of something like 430, 440 innings a year, 60 to 70 innings, no matter how freaking important you think they are is a drop in the bucket. It's a very small amount. And one of the things that has

bedeviled me is the idea that in a season where, and this is often the narrative, the closer gets hurt somewhere. And then while he's out for 50 games or whatever, the team goes 20 and 30 or 25, 25. And they say, well, if only so-and-so had been around. Goose Gossage broke his thumb wrestling with Cliff Johnson in the clubhouse in 1979. And the Yankees went into a horrible tailspin that year. I mean, there were other things going on, like Thurman Munson died. Like it was not a good year overall. But yet the narrative was that the absence of Goose Gossage really doomed that team even

before Munson crashes airplane relatively late in the season. And I don't I don't think that's accurate. I mean, yes, every once in a while, we've seen this over and over again, a team will try to build a bullpen and just fail utterly. And they will try reliever after reliever and just not be able to hold a lead. There's probably like one team like that every year. But for the most part, I think if we really looked at this systemically, we would find that teams are able to plug another guy in there and that the difference between the Mariano Rivera level closer and the average closer is like a couple of blown saves a year and that the value that we accord to these incredibly mysterious, mystical closers who are not on that Rivera level.

And I don't think anybody would argue that Hoffman was as good as he was, as entertaining as he was for a long time. It's just overstated. And so I think what we're really talking about now is do we value that many innings? Are we saying that Kluber and Hoffman's innings are kind of parallel to each other, but Hoffman gets an extra break because of the sexy, sexy ninth inning? I guess so. But I mean, that as a game, as again, the narrative of it, like that's something that we've decided to do, whether it's accurate or not. It's not accurate, but you're going to have to persuade people that that's the case. And right now it's okay. We're putting people in a very specialized role in the Hall of Fame. And no, it's not as legitimate, in my opinion, as what Kluber don't know if that's the best way to measure a closer's contributions, but we don't have a perfect way.

If you use that as your rubric, Rivera is literally twice as valuable as Trevor Hoffman, although you wouldn't know it from their save totals, which are separated only by about 50 or so. But Rivera was just a much, much better closer than Trevor Hoffman was. a much, much better closer than Trevor Hoffman was. And so I think you pretty much have to be Rivera to satisfy my standards for a Hall of Fame reliever, at least in the post-Gossage sort of fireman era. If you're pitching mostly an inning at a time, those innings better be extraordinary, and you better do it for two decades, and you better do it in the postseason too. And that was partially a product of opportunity in Rivera's case, but he obviously capitalized on those opportunities. So for me, I would draw a line somewhere between Hoffman and Rivera, and I don't know if most of the voters will, but I think it's a valid comparison to make just to sort of remind

people you can be the best at this specialized role, but it's still just, you wouldn't ever have been in that specialized role if you had been capable of this other role. And I think you tend to see people who can't hack it in the rotation, shunted into the bullpen. And that was true even for Rivera. And I think because of his incredible cutter, which he developed after his move to the bullpen, he benefited from that move more than the typical pitcher would, or he was better suited to that role than the typical pitcher was. So I think you can give him some extra credit for that. But in most cases, you end up doing that job because you can't do the other job. And so if you're going

to overcome that to end up in the Hall of Fame over people who could do that first job and maybe weren't as superlative at that thing as you ended up being at this lesser thing, but still were able to do that more challenging thing in the first place, I think they have a stronger case. So that's how I think about it. You're really having to braid and twist that argument to justify it. And I think it's right. And I think you're almost saying if you're going to talk about collusion in the Hall of Fame, you're almost saying things like war don't count. And again, I'm not necessarily endorsing that point of view. But Rivera even, as great as Rivera was, he had what, 50 war according to baseball ref?

Yeah, 56. Yeah. So, I mean, there are a lot of position players who are in that vicinity who are not in the hall of fame and are not going to get in and are not considered guys that that we are pining to have in but what we're saying is that they have a value that's not captured by strictly by the amount of playing time that they have we're saying that these were guys that were so excellent in a strictured amount of playing time that the normal compilation of stats doesn't apply to them. Billy Wagner was a great, great pitcher for a number of years, just got amazing velocity out of a relatively small body for a pitcher and was a guy you really didn't want to see in the ninth inning. He had less than

30 war. Again, I keep clarifying baseball reference. You may use another flavor grape reference perhaps, or this year, fan graphs reference. It's whatever you prefer. But again, he's not going to go, at least not on the basis of war. But if you want to say, look, he had this small career relative to everybody else who plays, then I guess you're creating a separate set of rules. It's okay. I mean, look, one of the reasons that you alluded to this, that, that hall of fame debates don't do that much for me is to invoke what Bill James said.

It's a self-defining institution. You can make it whatever you want. And if you feel like there should be a bunch of plaques for guys who threw a relatively small amount of innings and and just happened to do it late in the game it's okay with me it's whatever makes you happy really it's it's it's it's a museum you know the the plaque part is a popularity contest and and it doesn't matter that much to me all right let's do one quick current events ish question this is from jim he says i have seen brandon belt and eric h Hosmer compared frequently, some saying Belt is

underrated and better than Hosmer as Hosmer is overrated. How would Belt's market compare to Hosmer's if Belt were a free agent this offseason and Hosmer were not? And so far, it seems as if Hosmer's market is not very robust as it is. But we've talked about Belt before on this podcast, and I think we're generally in agreement with the line of thinking that says he is underrated and maybe the ballpark hurts him. And for the reasons that players typically tend to be underrated, he's not a big power guy, and that's what you expect at that position. But he does get on base, and he is a well above average hitter, and he does other things well.

And the big drawback for him has been health and he's had concussions and it's unclear whether that will affect him going forward. He hasn't demonstrated the durability that Hosmer has. That's maybe Hosmer's greatest selling point is he never misses a game. So I would say that Belts market would be weaker than Hosmer's, and you could certainly argue that it shouldn't be if you just look at the projections. Belt's projections are slightly better than Hosmer's, and Belt's best seasons are better than Hosmer's, but I think the fact that Hosmer's coming off a career year, whereas Belt is coming off an injury-riddled one, and concussions, of course,

are concerning. I think that, combined with the lack of durability and just the fact that his skills maybe aren't quite as obvious to everyone or as flashy as Hosmer's are or seem to be, probably would lead to a weaker market than Hosmer's, which itself seems to be pretty weak. Hosmer is also about two years younger. And I think that would be a key factor, because when you add in the health issues that Belt has had, which I won't recapitulate. You did a fine job on that. You start to worry about a guy who has kind of old player skills who might decline quickly. And yes, if you got him out of that ballpark,

it's very tempting to think his power numbers would jump up. I mean, overall, he's been, I guess, a better overall hitter at home. It just kills his power so that he's hit, I think, 34 home runs at home career and 64 on the road, which is a pretty dramatic difference, especially for this day and age when everybody homers everywhere. Yeah. But I think Hosmer, again, the youth of it is more tempting. And there's always been a mystique that Hosmer has had that Belt has not. And it may go back. It goes back as far as the draft. I mean, Hosmer was a first round pick and Belt was a later round pick.

He was in the fifth round. And I can remember talking to Kevin Goldstein at BP at different times about Hosmer. And this is before, obviously, Kevin went to the Astros and he can't disclose his professional opinions about players now, which is a drag. But he would say, oh, that swing. Have you seen the way he looks? And I might have said this to you on one of our online on-air meetings before, but one of my favorite things that Kevin ever said to me about scouts and about the way that they look at players is I was talking about some player who you

would call a tools goof. Like the performance was not great. He might've been a Phillies draft pick, but people kept clinging to him and Baseball America kept ranking him very high. And I don't think he ever made the majors, actually. But everything was about his speed, his muscles, his stature. And I said, why do you guys like this guy so much? And he said, I'm just going to make up a name, you know, John Smith. And he said, have you ever seen John Smith naked?

And no, I hadn't. I've seen some, unfortunately, putting my eyes in the wrong place in clubhouses lives. It's more about what they look like than who they are. And it's only later you find out that bad things can sometimes come in very attractive packages. And Hosmer is not a bad thing, but he's also not Lou Gehrig. And I think that's important when we talk about the market and expectations. There's no justification for the Padres, who have been hot and heavy on him all winter, supposedly, to sign him. He doesn't move the needle that much for a team that lost 91 games. And by the time that they get to where they're not going to lose 91 games, he might not be as much fun anymore. Whereas Belt, at his age, with lower salary expectations and the health issues that we talked about, might not have the same, wouldn't have the same salary expectations. He still might

cost you a pretty penny, but he'd be a nice finishing touch at a level that doesn't demand a superstar pay. Imagine if the Red Sox had acquired him instead of re-signing Mitch Morland for two years. We'd be over the moon with that move. And the whole reason that I think they did that is that they didn't want to pay the freight for Hosmer. Yeah. And Hosmer has a reputation as more of an inspirational team leader type and Belt doesn't have that same reputation. I can't vouch for whether either reputation is earned or not, but if there's anything to that, I think there is something about that that teams value. Maybe they should, and so that probably contributes to this also. But we should pause now for our stat blast. So as the theme song says, usually Jeff will dive deep into some extremely wonky data set

and will use the Fangraph's leaderboards or Baseball Reference Play Index to come up with some obscure statistical nugget. And occasionally that leads to a larger story or Johnny O'Brien interview, but usually it does not. or Johnny O'Brien interview, but usually it does not. But for this one, I hoped that Steve could do more of an infinite inning type stat blast where something numerical would serve as a jumping off point to the type of story that he typically tells. So I don't know what you came up with, but I'm looking forward to it. I feel like you came very close to saying sometimes stat blast is good, but often it's anticlimactic and leads us to a kind of dead end, which possibly describes the infinite ending. I don't know. One thing that I've been obsessed with this winter, and I came close to, I alluded to it

in one of my recent shows, but didn't quite get there for some reason, in part because this idea chokes baseball reference. In honor of the Marlins teardown and the fact that JT Real Muto, excuse me, and Kristen Yellich are still on that island, the Gilligans too, I was curious what player was marooned for the longest on teams that just lost continually. And thanks to the baseball reference game finder, you can actually search on this. You can put in the only qualification is that the team lost. Nothing else has to happen. And then in theory, it will spit back a list at you of players who endured the most losses in their career. Now, it's hard to do this universally because that is asking their database apparently to just look at every game ever in which there was a loss, which is half of all games all year, and it chokes on it. So it turns out, though, that that's a good thing. I did eventually kind of tease it out. But when you look at the entire history of baseball that they have, which goes back to 1913,

you get guys who participated in a lot of losses just because they were around for forever. So Pete Rose, for example, participated in a lot of losses just because they were around for forever. So Pete Rose, for example, participated in a ton of losses. Carl Yastrzemski participated in a ton of losses. And it wasn't necessarily that they were suffering with Marlins-like franchises. It's just that they played every day for approximately 100 years. And so that's not that informative. However, if you split it up by decade, then you start catching teams that were having down periods and you start to see who suffered the most. And sometimes the answers are actually very surprising.

And then other times they're predictable. But the one thing I think that's fascinating is that a lot of these guys are very good. And I guess you would have to, in the same sense that Pete Rose played forever or Yastrzemski did, they were just good enough to do that. Even guys on bad teams have to be good enough to play or they'll try to change you out. What's more surprising is that for the most part, teams did not try to make a Giancarlo Stanton trade or a prospects for a veteran trade and restart their franchise in large part because these teams had given up or very often again, or were just so lost that they wouldn't have known where to begin.

So the list. Yes. All right. So again, they don't have the whole decade of the teens, but the period ending in 1920, the losingest player, he sat through 601 losses, was second baseman Del Pratt. And Pratt is kind of obscure today, but he was, I don't know, a Chuck Nelblock or Dustin Pedroia kind of player. He had really good punch for a middle infielder of the period. He hit.292 career. He slugged.403, and for a career that had a lot of dead ball in it, it was really, really good. And he was over 100 runs batted in three times, which gives you a sense of how robust a player he was. The problem was that he was with the St. Louis Browns and then the Yankees, and the Browns, before they were, they never got good. So basically, the Browns. And then the Yankees, he was in and out

before they started to go to the World Series. And in fact, he went up to the Red Sox as they were dying. He was in one of the many Harry Friese trades that dismantled that great Red Sox team. But the weird part of it is that the way he got out, the way that he momentarily had hope when he went to the Yankees, is that in 1917, the owner of the Browns, who's a guy named Philip Decates B. Ball, he was kind of a prickly guy.

He was presently in the process of chasing Branch Rickey from there to the Cardinals, where Rickey would start the farm system and everything else that Rickey did. It could have been done for the St. Louis Browns. And there's a whole alternate universe where the Cardinals left and the Browns stayed. But he made a statement, a sort of George Steinbrenner-like statement, that everybody on his team but three players were dogging it, that they were not giving their full effort. And Pratt was not among the three players listed. And so he and another player sued the owner for slander for $50,000, whatever that was, in the 1917 period. And as soon as he could, he flipped him to the Yankees. And it was this big, ugly trade for both teams, actually, because the throw-in with Del Pratt was a future Hall of Famer, Gettysburg Eddie Plank.

But Eddie Plank was like 40 at that point and retired rather than go to New York. He didn't want to do that. So the trade had to be sort of rejiggered and evened up, and the Yankees sent Urban Shocker, who was basically their best pitcher, to the Browns for Pratt. Miller Huggins, who had just taken over the Yankees, had been told that Urban was a bad guy somehow, or maybe just that he had a bad heart, which he did and ultimately killed him at a very young age. But later they had to undo that. Urban Shocker had to be reacquired by the Yankees and was the best pitcher on the 2017. And parenthetically, the guy who's in second

place behind Del Pratt, and this is something of a surprise, is the first baseman, Stuffy McInnes, who is not that well-remembered today, but he was part of the $100,000 infield with the Philadelphia A's. And he played in five World Series. So you'd think, well, this guy, he was a winning ballplayers with winning franchises. But the thing was that he piled up all his losses in a hurry because Connie Mack dismantled that $100,000 infield and sold off everything and for a few years was literally playing sandlot players. Like, hey, kid, you look pretty good over there. Can you put on a a uniform and some of those guys turn into legit major leaguers one was a guy named whitey witt who like he they picked him up off of a a sandlot and he

made like 60 errors at shortstop his first year but he later also wound up with the yankees they moved him to center field very typical story right guy? Guy has the speed to play short, but not the glove to play short. You move him to the outfield. Anyway- The D. Gordon move, maybe. Yeah. And so McInnes stayed too long. And those teams had winning percentages under 300. So he was on the 1914 team that went 43 and 109. And the 1916 team, which was really special, and went 36 and 117. So after that, after his being traded out of town finally, he wound up with the Braves and caught another couple of 100 game losers there. So he just managed to pack them in. But in between, he was going to the World Series all the time. So he didn't suffer much. But one guy who I do think suffered was an outfielder named Cy

Williams, who's a really fascinating guy. And he's the leader for 1920 to 1929. The Philadelphia Phillies just quit between basically from about 1918 to 1948. They just lost 95 to 110 games every single year. And they were functioning as a farm system for everybody else. This is the team that infamously played in the Baker Bowl. And the owner was so cheap that rather than hire somebody to mow the lawn, he bought sheep. And so it was a small part. And Cy Williams was a guy who had come up during the dead ball era. He led the National League in home runs four times, once with the Cubs. And then he moved over to the Phillies and the lively ball came in and he went from leading with totals like 15 to leading with totals like 40. But he sat through, and this is one of the highest totals all time, 807 losses from 1920

to 1929. And they never tried to move him. His heir in 1930 to 1939 was another Philly, Chuck Klein, future Hall of Famer, MVP winner because the Phillies went 78-76 in 1932. And for the Phillies in that period, that was like being the 1954 Indians. Fourth place was first place, 78 wins equal to 112 wins. And they gave it to Chuck in a period where you really had to be on a pennant winner to win it. And again, really great player, but part of that bad Phillies period, 776 losses. Yeah. Wow. Well, that segues nicely, I think,

into the next question I was going to answer, which is about terrible teams. And this one is from Dan and he says, if the Tigers and Marlins were combined into one team with 50 roster spots, would it make the playoffs? And I don't know how the 50 roster spots thing would work, but if you could just smush those two teams together and take the best from each roster, would it be a playoff team? And there's one way you could look at this, I guess, with any bad team. I mean, you'd never really project any team to be worse than 60 wins or somewhere in the 60s. And so you could say, well, if you take one 60-something team and one 60-something team, then you end up with the best team ever. You just put their win totals together.

I don't think it works that way. But I would think that it should give you a playoff team or a playoff contender, at least in most cases, unless you end up just by bad luck with two teams whose best players are at exactly the same positions and there's no flexibility, so you can't really combine them in a way that makes them both better but I would think in most cases because so often the thing that makes teams terrible is that they'll just have black holes up and down the lineup or the back of the rotation or the back of the bullpen they'll just have guys who are actively hurting them and if you can take even competent guys from another roster and insert them into those holes, then often I think that gets you up to competence. So that's what I was thinking at

least. And then I actually opened up the depth charts for the Tigers and Marlins and I started imagining what this team would look like. And it's still, it's not very impressive. So maybe I'm wrong about that,. I think you might be. Yeah, you take the Marlins whole rotation. There's almost no one you want in that rotation. So it's tough to construct a winner out of those two teams in particular. One thing to remember with these two teams is that their pitching staffs were about historically bad.

Like I haven't ranked them all time, but when you look at them relative to the league, and to just use the shorthand of adjusted ERA, which Baseball Reference has, the Tigers were 85, and I think the Marlins were roughly in that vicinity. Usually teams are not that low relative to the league. And so, I mean, the Tigers did have some guys, particularly before Verlander was traded, Michael Fulmer before Brad Ausmus wrote his arm off. I kind of laugh bitterly when teams talk about trading for Michael Fulmer this winter because I have a feeling that, unfortunately, that might be a really bad idea. But they have some stuff. It's not great, and there weren't a

lot of great performances. but the Marlins, like you said, who are you taking off of their pitching staff? Yeah, I mean, you'd take a few relievers, but as for the starters, I guess you'd stick Dan Straley in the back of the Tigers rotation, probably, and maybe Wei and Chen if he's healthy, which he hasn't been lately. And gosh, other than that, the top five right now is what, Jose Urena, Dylan Peters, Justin Nicolino. It's not an impressive group. So yeah, I mean, I'd like to think if you could, you know, you have Victor Martinez, you have Miguel Cabrera, you have Castellanos, you have some respectable players, certainly in each lineup, and you put those two together. If Real Mudo is still around, then he replaces, I don't know, James McCann on the Tigers, and that makes you a bunch better.

And then Christian Jelic, if he's still on the Marlins, you stick him in Detroit. That's a huge upgrade over Leonis Martin maybe in center. And so there are places where you're going from replacement level to very good player, but the pitching in both of these teams' cases is still going to be a handicap. I think you could do it. I think you could come close to constructing a playoff roster out of the best of these two teams, but it would be difficult. Note, by the way, when you look at the Tigers rotation, difficult. No, by the way, when you look at the Tigers rotation, at least the depth chart as it's stacked up now, it's kind of old and it shouldn't be old on a rebuilding team. Fulmer's only 25 or so, but again, I have my doubts and this is not any inside information, just the way that Awesomest used him in some of his struggles late in the season. So Fulmer's 25, Matthew Boyd is 27,

Jordan Zimmerman is 32, Mike Fiers is 33, and then I guess Daniel Norris has the last spot. He's 25. So you have three guys in their 20s, but maybe two more veteran stabilizing theoretical innings eaters than you should have, especially when it's going to be a rebuilding year. Yeah. All right. A couple related questions here. This one is from Henry, who says, We are going to see teams employ to try to get around the cap. Most obvious maneuver would seem to be an uneven distribution of money over years. Do you think a team will pay Harper $50 million in the first year, $50 in the second, and $1 million in the third year to reset the luxury tax? And then he goes through some math and he says, Manipulating one contract like this would probably be enough to get a team under the tax threshold. But if a team signed two big-ticket free agents and synchronized the contracts, the fluctuation would certainly be enough to reset the luxury tax every three years. Will we see this or other creative accounting? And I can say that we will not see this exact solution because the money that's counted against the luxury tax is the average annual value of the contract. So you can't game it this way. You can't have a guy

make 50, 50, and then one. It would just be the average of those three annual salaries over the life of the contract. So you can't get around it that way. But one way you could potentially get around it, I think, is just by tacking on extra years to the end of the contract. So if you were going to sign a guy for seven years, well, what if you signed him for 14 years instead? And you don't actually intend to employ him for 14 years, but that money then is distributed over 14 years instead of seven years, and it's half the luxury tax hit. And I don't know that we've seen a team try that really, but I don't know that there's a rule against it. I think maybe if you did it, the union would be angry and would protest. And maybe

MLB would say that, well, you can't do that anymore. I don't know exactly how they would do that, how they would determine what a realistic length for a contract is and say, well, this is too long. You're not allowed to sign a guy for that many years. But that seems like one potential way that teams could exploit this. I think that's already happening, Ben. Has it? Is it? Yeah. Yeah. Because I think that teams understand when they sign, maybe the Stanton contract is not a great example because it ends, taper off is the wrong word since it keeps getting bigger. But guys that sign contracts that take them up to like age 40, I think they understand that they're not going to be necessarily using that guy at age 40.

I don't think there's anybody in any major league front office who is sitting there and saying like, well, if we get lucky, so-and-so will completely defy the aging curve. Miguel Cabrera's contract may go that long if I remember that correctly. And we already see that he's declining. I think it's a way you extend the contract into the distance. Alex Rodriguez's contract is another one where this is how it resolved, really, that they just said, look, you know, we're going to pay you off, but we don't want you on the roster anymore. And all players are interested in deferred money because of, I realize we just abolished taxes in this country or something, but, or at least for people in their tax bracket, but that they don't want to take the hit up front. They want the money coming in reliably for years after the fact. And so you do let these contracts

stretch on longer and you put as much money in the back end of it as you can. And I think if you don't call attention to it, it's completely legitimate. Now, maybe if they said they're going to sign a player until he's 60, maybe the commissioner would jump up. But what would stop you from saying the ballplayer part of this contract is going to run through whatever age 38? And then we are going to append a separate personal services contract onto the end of this that picks up at that point. And we expect that this player will be in the front office or greeting people in luxury suites or doing charity appearances, whatever. I think there are ways to game it that probably do happen. We just don't really think about it.

Yeah, Pujols actually has one of those. Probably do happen. We just don't really think about it. Right. So the related question then is from Jacob, a Patreon supporter, who says, there have been so many threads in the Facebook group concerning the feasibility of the Yankees signing Harper and Machado next season, even after acquiring Stanton. Is this remotely possible? There seems to be lots of disagreement as to whether this scenario is pure fantasy. And, you know, it seems realistic at least that they or the Dodgers could get under that luxury tax limit and reset their tax, which would make it more feasible. It's almost maybe a matter of where would you play them as much as it is could you afford them? I think at least in the Yankees' case, when they have Stanton, they have Judge, they have all of these outfielders and DHs, and those spots are somewhat filled, although I guess you can always make room for Bryce Harper. I guess Brett Gardner's contract is finally going to come to an end.

I think he's going into his free agent year, and he's been a fun and useful player for a long time, particularly in left field where his defense and center, which was not good but not necessarily great, really has played up in left field. And offensively, he's been solid. He's not been an MVP type guy, but I guess that's where you'd put him. Do you want to be locked into that? I don't really know. And I don't know that it would be good for baseball if they did just start buying everybody you could possibly buy, especially that they've had, as you said, they have this farm system that has a lot of interesting guys coming up. They deserve a chance to play and the team deserves a chance to make a profit for that matter. So, I mean, I don't have the luxury tax numbers in front of me, but I mean, it's not impossible that somebody gets delusions of grandeur, one of the Steinbrenner sons, a case

of megalomania they want to satisfy, but I don't know that it's optimal yeah all right maybe we can squeeze in a couple more here so let's take one from owen who says if and when home plate umpires cease to call balls and strikes in favor of an automatic system how quickly do catchers that derive much of their value from pitch framing get phased out does jeff mathis immediately get cut or does he stick around because the team thinks that he provides some intangible value to the pitching staff? If a team, let's say the Dodgers, believes that this change will be made in the next year or two, is there any extra incentive to trade Yasmany Grandal knowing that his value could drastically change due to the potential rule change? In this case, how offensive-minded does the catcher position become? Does a prospect

like Alex Jackson of the Braves, who has a more promising bat than glove behind the plate, gain any significant value? And I've probably touched on this at some point in the past on the podcast, and I've sort of switched over from wanting robot umps to not really caring if we get robot umps to not even really wanting them anymore at this point, to not even really wanting them anymore at this point, just because I kind of enjoy these defensive aspects of catching that would be gone. And it would give us all less to talk about, certainly, if we couldn't complain and analyze calls. So I think in terms of the defensive value, yeah, I think you would see someone like Jeff Mathis have a very short leash. I mean, you know, maybe you'd keep him around just to see if this system actually sticks and works and see it play out in practice. But not that you could just stick anyone behind there, because of course you still need someone who can block balls in the dirt, who can throw out runners, at least at some minimum level

of competence. at least at some minimum level of competence. But I think, yes, a lot of the finesse of the position does come back to how you receive pitches. And in theory, at least that wouldn't matter anymore. And so much of it is working with pitchers and that pitcher-catcher relationship, and that would still matter. So, you know, I think there would still be elements

to the catching position. It wouldn't just be pure Jorge Posada on every team. It would be people who still have these defensive skills. But that one defensive skill that seems to be maybe the most valuable of all would suddenly not be valuable at all. So I think that would drastically change things. Yeah, I think you've pretty much summed it up. I think you've pretty much summed it up. Maybe the guys who are on the extreme fringe like Mathis who contribute almost nothing with the bat would go fairly quickly. But the other defensive aspects of catching would still be necessary to be serviced.

So I don't think you just see all those guys excised completely. But maybe when putting together a team and you might put more of an emphasis on bat first catchers than hereto week or be a Mike Napoli kind of guy where you might be able to rotate him around. And there have been guys like Jim Leyritz or John Walkenfuss or guys like that, Joe Ferguson with the Dodgers in the 70s, who caught a little but weren't really catchers and spotted at other positions. It was kind of Mickey Tettleton late in his career, although he had been a catcher before that, more of a full-time catcher.

And you could do that because the tolerance would be a lot less. You know, one question that occurs to me, though, is wouldn't framing still be a thing for pitchers in terms of their confidence and consistency? You don't really want to have a pitcher on the mound and have catchers who are more boxing the pitches around. And, you know, sure, the robot is calling them strikes, but the pitcher doesn't really have a great or consistent target. And this is one of the things that I think the pitch framing guys are valuable for, not just the fact that they do get extra strikes, but they have such fine control with the glove and with receiving pitches that there's a benefit, I think, to the pitcher and his mechanics and consistency that may not be captured just in the ball strike calls.

Yeah. And as I mentioned, you definitely have to have the confidence that the guy's not just going to whiff and just to let the ball go to the backstop if you're throwing a breaking ball two strikes that kind of thing and yeah i mean maybe there is just a psychological element to it that would be difficult to overcome at first at least if your whole life has been having to get calls from umpires maybe it's not just a switch you can flip in your mind instantly and say well it no longer matters if he's jerking his glove all over the place. It's just not important anymore. That might take some time to adjust to. So I think there could be something to that.

All right. Let's do one more before we go. This is from Rob. He says, with the Cubs and Astros proving that, yes, the teardown model can be successful, with the Cubs and Astros proving that, yes, the teardown model can be successful. There are growing calls for a number of teams to throw in the towel, sell off assets, and eat losses for a few years in order to restock the farm. If it all goes according to plan, such teams will rebuild around cores of controllable and hopefully talented young players.

Off the top of my head, the Marlins, obviously, Rays, Orioles, Blue Jays, Royals, Mariners, Athletics, Giants, and Rangers have all been named recently as teams that might want to consider a teardown. This is on top of the several teams that are currently in the middle of a rebuild or otherwise on the wrong side of the wind curve. So my question is, how many rebuilding teams can MLB sustain at any one time before it becomes an inefficient strategy? If draft picks are a significant part of the strategy, only a few teams can finish with bad enough records to reap the benefits of this aspect of the process. If you're a team that sells off everything and still comes away with the seventh or eighth worst record in baseball,

you're suddenly a bad team with no clear path back to contention within a four to five year window. You want to take that one first? It's a really good question. I know that it would be terrible baseball. And I wonder if we kind of got there this year just because the races were so imbalanced in so many places. We had so many teams just not showing up that we really didn't have divisional races this year, particularly down the stretch. We had some wildcard races, but we had the Dodgers winning by 11 and the Nationals winning by 20. And the AL Central and AL West were also decided by double figure

totals. The Red Sox-Yankees thing was kind of close with only two games, but that was it really. And even the Cubs, who dragged all year, eventually won by six games. So one thing that would be interesting would be if that happened, would that finally galvanize the owners in the union to put in some kind of floor? And I understand that there are all kinds union to put in some kind of floor. And I understand that there are all kinds of arguments against having some kind of payroll floor, particularly that teams like the dear departed Jeff Loria's version of the Marlins or the current version would seek

it out, would gravitate towards it and just say, hey, we're going to do the minimum and pocket the money. But, you know, it wouldn't be a good thing for the game. It's not a good thing for the game when you have teams in markets that are not being serviced by clubs that have a chance or at least are making a game effort. And I know that's not answering the question squarely. Yes, it would be a weird competition. In effect, what I think the listener is saying is you would now have teams scrambling for the number one draft pick as hard as they scramble for a postseason berth. And baseball would be turned on its head.

I really think that it breaks down at that point. Yeah, I wonder whether some of the inactivity we've seen this winter has to do with that stratification and just that there are these teams that are very good and these teams that are very bad and maybe the very good teams feel less pressure than usual to add just because their path to the postseason seems pretty clear as it is like if you're the Indians coming into this offseason or the Nationals or some other teams that are in similar situations you might not necessarily feel the urge to do something over the winter. You might figure, well, I'm going to be in the playoffs one way or another, and I'll just wait till the deadline when I know exactly what I need, and then I'll add those final pieces. So that could have

something to do with it, but I actually think that the draft pick compensation is maybe not the greatest reward for the tanking teams. I think that if you happen to be lucky, if you're the Nationals and you have the number one pick in back-to-back years when Steven Strasburg and Bryce Harper are available, then yes, that's a big benefit. But that's not normally the case. I think that often the biggest benefit to tearing the team down is that you are just profiting from teams who are trying to win at a time when you're not trying to win. And so you're acquiring future wins while another team is acquiring present wins. And you can just sell off all of your players who are good right now and trade them in for players who, in theory, will be good a few years down the road. And I think probably the typical rebuilding team gets more value from that process than from a draft pick being number one or number two instead of number eight or number nine or something like that. So I think that is important to keep in mind. But at the same time, if seven teams are selling at the same time,

then obviously you're not going to have as strong a position if you're trying to sell because the market will be flooded. So it's still a problem if too many teams are trying to do this at once. And I don't know. I mean, back before the Astros and the Cubs, it wasn't like teams were never bad. Of course they were. And in earlier eras of baseball, there were teams that were always bad. You mentioned the Browns earlier in this podcast, and those teams never even tried to rebuild. They just never tried, really. And so I think we're better off with this system where teams are losing with a purpose than in an earlier era of baseball when there were a lot of teams that were losing just by necessity because they couldn't compete. And that's a little bit rarer today, Marlins aside. I think, you know, again, we both mentioned the Browns. And this is something that I actually just by coincidence brought up on the most recent episode of my own show. But there was a period where the rest of the American League

complained about the Browns. And I do think that this complaint that they had is still relevant. Maybe it's a smaller aspect of things than it was. But they actually said the Browns are so bad and draw so poorly that we can't cover our expenses on road trips because you know that the teams do get a share of the gate when they're on the road. They get a portion of the ticket sales. They do put their players up in hotels and fly them on airplanes and feed them food and all those things cost money. And so the American League arranged to transfer some better players over to the Browns in kind of an under the table expansion draft where they made a few one-sided or were encouraged and allowed to make a few one-sided trades of surplus players on other teams so they can at least be

representative and other clubs can make some money. And you would think that that would not only affect the road gate, but also the home gate. Because, you know, if I'm going to decide which ball game to go to this year in the New York area, I'm going to go to the team that's playing the Cubs or the Astros, not the team that's playing the Marlins or the Padres, just because I want to see the best players. And if it isn't entertainment and if they're not putting a product on the field, then I mean, sure, I'll you know, any baseball game is better than no baseball game. But if I have a choice, I'm going to pick the better matchup. And I think most people are like that. And you see that in what's available in terms of ticket sales when you do try to go.

So it's not good for the game to just have these markets vacated. And you're right that the draft picks are only a small part of the reward that they're getting. But let's emphasize just how dangerous a strategy it is. Again, on my last show, we were talking about the Mariners. The Mariners have not been there since 2001. It took the Royals, and I realized the Royals weren't exactly trying the whole time,

but it took them 30 years from the 1985 World Series to their return to the postseason. There's no guarantee that you're going to hit on the picks. Yes, the Cubs hit on Chris Bryant. Yes, the Astros actually made a mistake with Mark Appel, and they were able to repair that. Also, when they were allowed to pick Alex Bergman, when they didn't sign their first round pick the previous year.

There's no guarantee that the guy that you pick, his arm's not going to fall off, or you've not scouted him correctly, or any of a number of things. You can develop a drug and alcohol problem. I mean, don't forget the Astros are also paying John Singleton to sit in the minor leagues because they thought he was the next great thing. And they decided to tie him up for forever and they were just plum wrong. And so there's no guarantee that once you tear it down, you're going to build it back up again anytime soon. Like these teams make it look easy, but it wasn't easy. And I know from talking to people at the Astros, they will tell you, we made a million mistakes. They just barely got there. Yeah, right. And we've said that on this

podcast before too. If you're tearing down thinking that inevitably you'll be the Astros or the Cubs in a few years, that's probably you should lower your expectations somewhat because, I mean, they had smart plans and they executed them really well, but things still just worked out in their favor that I think they never would have anticipated. You have to have a lot of things break right. And sooner or later, there's going to be one of these teams, there has to be, that is going to do this kind of intentional rebuild and just won't really come out the other side and won't turn into a perennial division winner and won't win a World Series. And that doesn't mean it wasn't still the smart strategy for them to pursue, but it doesn't always have that happy ending. So it's going to be coming one of these

years. So I think that we have come to the end of this. This has been an infinite inning length episode. I tend to have that effect on people. I still have more losers to talk about. Look up Willy Montanez when you get a chance. Explain why Willy Montanez got to play 15 years as a first baseman without ever hitting. Yeah, that was, I think, more common in that era than it is today, probably, to have the guy whose page you look at and you just wonder what was going on there. You can usually at least come up with some reason why a guy is playing now. And back then, you would just be people who, even at their best, were barely playable, but they lingered on and on. They lingered on and on.

So thank you very much for coming on, for getting me through an episode without Jeff and without any baseball news. I needed the assist and always happy to have you on. And again, people go listen to the Infinite Inning. You can find Steve on Twitter at GoStevenGoldman. And he has a new Infinite Inning up every week, usually toward the end of the week. And probably we'll have a new one going up right around, usually toward the end of the week, and probably we'll have a new one going up right around the time this episode goes up. So I'm looking forward to it. Let us hope. I have the same lack of news to deal with that you do, but I just gave a big speech about how that's the easiest thing to deal with if you're a professional writer and podcaster. So I

will have to put my money where my mouth is. All right. Thank you very much, Steve. Thank you. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Five listeners have already pledged their support include Joel Cox, Arthur, Zach Wendkos, Jeff Snyder, and Patrick Eschenfeld. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild, and you can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes. Thanks to Dylan

Higgins for editing assistance. Please keep your questions and comments coming via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system. I have some reason to believe that a certain former co-host named Sam Miller might be joining me for next week's email show. So please make sure you send lots and lots of questions for that one. If you're channel surfing, does anyone still channel surf? Tomorrow, Friday afternoon, I'll be on MLB Network's MLB Now with Brian Kenney and Joe McGrain and Tom Berducci. The show is from 2 to 3 Eastern, so you can catch me on that.

And we have Effectively Wild t-shirts back in stock here in the market. Last time I checked, they were available in all sizes. And you can find the link to those shirts through the podcast post at Fangraphs. And I and someone else will be back with another show this week. So talk to you soon. Clean Steve, they don't come any dirtier than me. Better watch out all you space cats. Clean Steve is a mineral mine.