Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1163: Engaged in Trade Talks

Episode Date: January 17, 2018

Ben Lindbergh and a newly engaged Jeff Sullivan banter about Jeff’s absence and return, Willson Contreras and Jon Lester, and the Astros’ and Giants’ ends of the Gerrit Cole and Andrew McCutchen trades, respectively. Then they bring on FanGraphs writer Travis Sawchik to break down the Pirates’ past, present, and future, including their returns in […]

Look who's back in town again Drag us down to memory lane Can't accept that things have changed Hello and welcome to episode 1163 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangrass presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer and I'm joined by, and it gives me great pleasure to say this for the first time in a while, Jeff Sullivan of Fangrass who has returned from his latest world travels and none too soon. Hello Jeff, welcome back. Hello. Thank you. Welcome back. Hello.

Thank you for coming back. It was so nice of Baseball to do nothing while I was gone for three weeks. It was nice for you. Yeah. I remember when you took your vacation last year, right after taking over as co-host and then leaving the country immediately, we talked about that feeling of disorientation when you get back from a trip and you have to catch up on everything. And you were probably largely spared that this time. You were, of the few weeks that you were away, what was the biggest baseball thing that happened? Like J-Boost? Oh, Scott Alexander trade, I got to tell you. It was going to be Garrett Cole,

but then last week it didn't happen until right about when I landed. So it was really great timing, I think, for me personally and the problem for you. Yeah, you don't know what it was like. I resorted to talking to Dave Cameron about his jobs and your co-workers past and present because there was no actual baseball transaction. Fangrass was making most of the moves for those few weeks that you were away. So, yeah, things worked out well for you. You get back and immediately there are topics to talk about and write about. We've got two big Pirates trades to talk about.

And we're bringing on Travis Sochik to talk about the Pirates present and past and future. But give us a quick recap of while you were away anything notable happen on this trip that you took he asked knowingly well i i guess the it's i don't know how to do this that's kind of self-important but whatever now i get to stop saying girlfriend then i get to start saying fiance and then soon yes before i don't know how long but then i'll get to stop saying fiance which is also kind of a clunky word and then i get to start saying, and that's going to be fun because that's a shorter word, and it makes me sound the most adult. And it makes for great excuses. So I can be like, well, I can't really go out.

My wife is feeling under the weather, which just sounds so much more serious and legitimate than, oh, my girlfriend has the sniffles. You know? So I'm looking forward to that. I always felt self-conscious saying fiancé. I said it as little as possible. So it was an awkward transitional phase. nipples you know right i'm looking for that i always felt self-conscious saying fiance i i said it as little as possible so it was an awkward transitional face i'm happy to be out of so we'll set the scene how did you do it well first of all i'm i'm glad to finally have a reason to know the difference between fiance with one e and two yeah or at least i i think i know the

difference i'm not going to recite it on the podcast just on the 25 chance i have it backwards again but we were uh we were down in in pat Patagonia for the third time we've been down there because we can't stop going back. We love mountains and ice and it's just really beautiful to us. Even though it takes about three and a half days to get there, it's terrible. But anyway, we were doing some hikes at the start of the trip and one of our favorite areas in the world is around the base of Mount Fitzroy, which for anyone who doesn't know what Fitzroy is, think of the Patagonia corporate logo, the outerwear company Patagonia.

The corporate logo is a series of sharp squiggles, and that is the silhouette of the Fitzroy range. So prominent mountain, popular among climbers and photographers and general world seers. Pretty picturesque. Extremely picturesqueque so we were up there on a bluebird sky day it's beautiful weather down there is unpredictable and so you can never really know what you're in for but we got up there hiked up the slope to the base it was beautiful and i thought okay this is where i'm gonna do it i think she had a good sense i was going to do it

somewhere on the trip but the longer i waited maybe the more stressful it would become so we were up there there's a lot of people around didn't want to do it around some people thought i was going to do it in one area around the mountain just as i was summoning up the courage two germans approached to just be in our way so then i thought ah i'm not going to do it here so anyway we went to a different part of the area and uh i had been in this uh this mood i had discovered hyperlapse video feature on my phone just like fast forward time lapse video so i've been taking i was taking a bunch of hyperlapse videos of the clouds over the mountains and i i put my phone on a rock and i was like i'm just

gonna take one more hyperlapse video of of the setting uh because i just you know before we turn around and go back to the camp then i will take a video and i was able to use some weird words that you know you get kind of nervous in the moment and you say weird things but i was able to get her in the image and i have a hyperlapse video of me getting down the knee and proposing on the shore of lago de los tres below mount fitzroy and it was beautiful and i thought i was going to have this whole speech when i was doing it but then when i was doing it i was really nervous i thought we're going to fall into the water so i just went right to the point and she said uh are you serious and then eventually i was able to confirm that i was serious and it was all set and we thought it was really great and then not five

minutes later as we're descending we spotted a couple young couple and the the male was wearing a rip city t-shirt that's a one of the nicknames for portland and i was like well a couple a young couple and the the male was wearing a rip city t-shirt that's a one of the nicknames for portland and i was like well a couple from portland so we talked to them and we explained our story and they said oh that's great a couple days ago we got engaged in patagonia and we realized in that instant we are not original in any way yeah so basic everyone's getting engaged that way these days at the uh at the of the video, I need to find a way to edit the video because for the first half of it, and this is a short video. It's 18 seconds because it's in fast forward. But the first half of it is me digging in the water for a collectible rock because I collect rocks.

And I need to edit that part out because it makes me look a little autistic. That rock is just as special to you as your future wife, I'm sure. It turns out she thought I was actually giving her the rock that I found instead of a ring. Yes, taking diamonds and rocks, literally. Well, congratulations. That's great. I'm happy for you. You make a great couple based on the couple days that I spent in your company. So that's nice, and I look forward to snubbing a wedding invitation the way you snubbed mine well i look forward to getting married in october just to just continue the theme of you

and dave cameron doing such yeah well since you got back there's been a lot of volcanic activity too not just trade activity it seems like there's lava erupting out of holes every which way oh my god we were flying when we were coming back in the air, we have several flights to return home. But we were in Chile, and I looked out the window of an airline. I saw this volcano a little south into the east of Santiago, Chile. And I did some research and figured out it was Nevados de Chilan. I think I'm pronouncing that right. It doesn't matter.

But it was a volcano that is known to be active. And we flew over it. And it turns out that not like five hours later, the erupted which is just i mean look i'm glad the volcano didn't erupt while you're flying near it because you know we could die but oh that would have been a spectacular death i've missed you saying am i pronouncing this right it doesn't matter that's kind of your catchphrase all right right. I guess we should talk about trades. There's one brief thing that you may have missed, a small news item while you were away, and it relates to John Lester, a favorite story of ours, his former inability to throw to first and his ability to throw to first finally this year when the Ringer staff had to do a group post

on our favorite sports moments of 2017, mine was Jon Lester throwing to first and picking off Tommy Pham in May or June or whenever that was. So we got the backstory on this just a few days ago. Wilson Contreras at Cubs Fest or Cubs Convention or whatever they call it was talking about this moment. or whatever they call it, was talking about this moment. And I'll just play the clip of him saying what he said to Jon Lester during a mound visit. If you're trying to protect your children from ever hearing profanity, guess what? It's not going to work.

You may want to cover their ears for the next few moments here. This past year was Jon Lester picking off Tommy Pham from the Cogs. I love that that a lot. And I told him to throw the other first. I went out there and said, Hey, motherfucker, throw the fucking other first. Earmuffs. Earmuffs. I'm being honest. I'm being honest.

And then he threw the first and he didn't get it out. He also signed a bat, I saw in a subsequent tweet. He autographed a bat with this phrase that he said to John Lester. So this was funny, obviously, to get the backstory. And I think if you go back and look at the video you can kind of capture the moment where this happened on the one hand I don't necessarily endorse this as a treatment of psychological problems if someone has a hang-up about doing something I don't know that the most effective therapy is going out and yelling at them to do it, but it seemed to work in this case.

So well done, Wilson Contreras. Partially redeemed himself for his incessant mound visits, most of which do not have an amusing story associated with them. As far as we know. I mean, he could just be going out there and saying, well, look, you already played the clip.

I don't know if I'm supposed to use the language, so I'm just going to skip over the language. But he could just be going over there and being like look mfford throw the curveball blowing away look mfford cutter inside get this right yeah he just he could be an extremely impolite catcher but he seems to have a good relationship with his teammates who i don't really know but yeah it uh maybe when rob manfred officially cuts down on the number of allows right sounds like that's happening yeah maybe wil Maybe Wilson Contreras is just going to be yelling it from behind the plate.

All right. So let's talk about trades. We've got the Garrett Cole trade from the Pirates to the Astros and the Andrew McCutcheon trade from the Pirates to the Giants. And I'm going to talk to Travis about the Pirates ends of these deals. So let me just lay them out here. A lot of names involved in these trades. So the Garrett Cole trade, which looks like a trade I would have proposed back when I played fantasy baseball and thought you could just offer five for one or whatever deals to get good players without giving up any good players. This was the Astros get Garrett Cole. The Pirates get Joe Musgrove, Michael Feliz, Colin Moran, and Jason Martin, who are all either prospects or people who have fairly recently arrived in the majors. And then the Andrew McCutcheon trade to the Giants. Of course, the Pirates get back Brian Reynolds, Kyle Crick, and half a million dollars of international bonus pool space. They also send two and a half million dollars of McCutcheon's nearly $15 million salary for 2018

to San Francisco. So now we know all the names, we know all the terms, let's talk about the trade. So Garrett Cole, obviously the less surprising, neither of these is extremely surprising. These have been among the most rumored trade targets for months, if not years in both cases, but Cole had been linked to the Astros days earlier. Then that trade was not consummated at that time. But then it went through. And now the Astros are even better at baseball. Yep. Sure are. Yeah. So I was able to read when this was originally supposed to happen last week. I had a little bit of Wi-Fi down in South America and I was able to read about it and

sort of consume what was happening. And so when the trade actually did manifest, it came as little surprise at all. I know much of the surprise is about the return package. But you look at the Astros, and it's always hard for me to understand quite the motivation of the reigning champs. I know that's silly. Teams want to win every year. But it's like, just relax, you know? Like, you just did it.

In my head, I figured, like, just take a year off you know yeah well often they do worry about it i've written about this and i think sam may have written about this too that there's often a tendency for a world series winner not to do very much in the off season after they win the world series so kudos to the astros i guess for not resting on their laurels yeah and and now look i think there's a perception of Garrett Cole that I don't think matches the reality. He's got more stuff in pedigree than I think he has actual projectable talent right now. I shouldn't say talent, but I don't think of him as an ace,

even though he's been the ace of the Pirates. That doesn't really mean anything to me. I think he's just a pretty good, not great starting pitcher. But, you know, the Astros rotation is so good that now Brad Peacock is going to work out of the bullpen, which just an absurdity which again a year ago would also have been an absurdity that we're talking about brad peacock but you know that's just what happens but now where the astros are they were already obviously incredibly good they won 100 odd games they won the world series but now as they're building their team going into 2018 this could

this could end up being i'll be excited when we have the zips projections folded into fan graphs and the offseason is is completely done but the astros could end up being the best pre-season projected team of the projection era i've referred to having a spreadsheet that goes back to 2005 and i know the people at neffy co tweeted out when the astros got garrett cole that they have now the highest pre-season team projection of in the history of neffy's preseason team projections i don't know if that covers two years or 30 or what but it's like when people talk about the stat cast era right well that doesn't mean anything but the astros have just they're super good there's really nothing else to say and and we'll talk to travis sachik about this a little later but one of the things the astros managed to do

in in getting garrett cole is in trading musgrove moran feliz and what was the last piece martin i mean martin's uh being the prospect but they were able to trade three players who just really didn't mean much to them in the short or even medium term i think they're still good players pirates i think will be happy to have most of them but the pirate the astros didn't even lose much to get garrett cole they just landed two years of a number two or number three starting pitcher which is i mean what what is there to say the astros are great and they made a move to be more great and they're going to win that division and they're going to be the odds on favorites to win the world series again yep the mariners and the angels obviously had been much busier even the a's had been busier this offseason and maybe had closed the gap slightly.

But now the Astros wipe a lot of that away with one move. And yeah, I guess everyone has just gotten the Astros fixed Garrett Cole post that normally you would save for midseason or earlier in the season. Everyone has already pre-written that post on the assumption that Garrett Cole will be better with the Astros. Everyone has seemingly pointed out that the Astros as a team, their pitching staff and their pitching philosophies seem to be perhaps better aligned with Garrett Cole's skills than the Pirates were. And in fact, Brian Bannister tweeted this. Brian Bannister is the vice president of pitching development for the Red Sox, a potential Astros competitor.

And even he has tweeted, when Cole replaces all of his 5% whiff rate two-seamers with 17% whiff rate sliders, his FIP will drop back toward 2015 levels again. Thanks for the tip, Brian. I don't know why he's giving's giving tips away but maybe it's just because everyone knows this and eno wrote that post and everyone wrote that post and i mean you'd think if it were so obvious the pirates just would have done it right are they so dogmatic about throwing sinkers that it's just a one-size-fits-all policy and they wouldn't adjust when a guy has a repertoire that might be better suited to something else but it does seem i mean he's got a good slider he doesn't use it very much the astros throw lots of sliders so it seems like an obvious case of well he's going to throw more

sliders and therefore he's going to be good or better yeah i think it's always been a little like this but i think we're in an era now where trades aren't just necessarily being made on getting getting the player for what he's done but i think there's a lot more consideration of what can we do with this player uh it's less about the astros being like we want garrett cole and maybe more about them being like we want garrett cole and we want to do these specific things to him i think teams have always made adjustments to players as they as they see fit but i think maybe as a benefit of having so much granular data now teams feel more confident in their ability to make data driven changes to players we heard about this with the dodgers a bunch last season with you darvish

and tony sangrani and tony watson and etc and the dodgers are not the first team to do it and even and on the pirate side you can say well they can make changes to joe musgrove they can make changes to michael fleas they've been making changes to pitchers for years with the whole traceeerage and previously jim benedict era of of just tweaking their pitchers you look at colin moran who's going from the astros to the pirates and colin moran made some massive data-driven changes to his own profile last year and he was in the minors so he was kind of hidden but there it seems like players are changing now more than ever and i think teams are maybe it's almost it's like a perfect blend of stats and scouts where teams are thinking in sort of a traditional perspective when

they look at players but using more progressive technology to get there if that makes sense where i it seems like teams are maybe seeing players less as projected numbers of wins above replacement and more as here is your talent level and we are going we think we know how to get the most out of your talent level which is interesting yeah all right well i guess we can i mean this is uh not a complicated trade to to analyze really at least in terms of its effects on the astros i mean mean, even if Cole is not the ace that some people think of him as because he kind of was one a few years ago, he's kind of what the Astros need because they have guys like Keichel and McCullers and, you know, high skill talent performance guys

who cannot necessarily be counted on to throw innings. And that's something that Cole is maybe at least a slightly better bet to do. What level he'll do it at, we're not sure exactly. But if he even just gives them some bulk, that's really what they need. They don't even need that. They don't need anything. They're the Astros. They're really good. But now they're even better and they'll have him for a couple years. So congratulations, Astros fans. Your lives are getting better by the day. So let's talk about the Giants. I guess I had Grant Brisby on one episode too early

to talk about this team-altering move here, but everyone has made the jokes about the Giants acquiring the faces of other franchises, which they did with Evan Longoria earlier this winter, and now have done with McCutcheon. And maybe the upshot there is that they are old, because if you're acquiring multiple other faces of franchises, you don't really get to be a face of a franchise generally, unless you're a veteran. And the Giants had a lot of veterans, and now they've got a couple more veterans.

And so looking at their projected opening day lineup now, the only player in it who is not turning 30 at some point this year. Well, I guess technically Jarrett Parker will turn 30 on New Year's Day of next year. But other than him, Joe Panik is 27 and everyone else is about to turn 30, recently turned 30, or well past 30. And it's not even really just their lineup. It's kind of their whole team. But that's not to say that this move doesn't make them better because obviously Andrew McCutcheon is still a pretty good player. Yeah, it's easy to look at the Giants and you see the almost inevitable Tigers or Phillies-ification of the ball club because there's so much. One of the consequences of having such an old team is that old players are in their free agent years or close to them and then they're more expensive.

And so you have a higher budget. You don't have the cheap, flexible. I don't need to explain how this works. You get it. But it seems like from the Giants perspective, they probably recognize, okay, this is going to get bad before too long. There's not a whole lot of easy ways to avoid it, especially if you assume they're not going to trade Buster Posey or anything to make room. It's probably going to get difficult. They don't have much of a farm system.

And it's like they're trying to force a good year in 2018. Now, that's noble. It's better to try to have a good year than a bad year if you figure you're going to go to a dark place down the road anyway. But it's hard then to rationally evaluate the sense of the moves because you figure, well, look, the future's shot, so you might as well just lean into it. No, but of course there are ways to mitigate how shot the future might be. But regardless, I think from the Giants' perspective,

2017 clearly was a disaster. The way 2016 ended was a disaster. They've been, I think, the worst team in perspective, 2017 clearly was a disaster. The way 2016 ended was a disaster. They've been, I think, the worst team in baseball for the past year and a half by wins and losses. But this is still a team that I think was poised to advance back. And with McCutcheon and LaGoria and whatever the next piece is that they add, they're going to look like a pretty solid baseball team that's still in a heap of trouble down the line. But I don't know. Maybe from their perspective, they figured that if they have a strong year in 2018 maybe that means there's more revenue or just

something gets better that makes their position look a little less bad down the road but i don't know i guess you could argue that focusing too much on the giants future does too much to ignore their present which is not bad and there is value in being good in the short term but boy i gotta tell you that division is looking awfully tough now because you've got three playoff teams and now a bad team that should be a good team. The Padres ought to be better. This could be the best division in years and years, but those days are gone. Yeah, so McCutcheon has been kind of difficult to evaluate just because he had that positioning story where he was positioning himself poorly, and that seemed to hurt his defensive metrics and also his defense. And then he had the knee issue and seemed to recover. I mean, he was, I think he tailed off a bit last September, but certainly in the second half of last year was good, was good overall offensively last year.

So you mentioned another move, and it does seem like there must be another move because the Giants corner outfielders right now are Hunter Pence and Jarrett Parker, which is not optimal. So obviously they've been linked to Lorenzo Cain, but I think they're very close to the luxury tax limit right now. So if they care about that, it would be pretty tough to add Lorenzo Cain at this point. Maybe they add Judd Dyson or someone like that, go for defense. They've been rumored at least to be interested in both of those guys or been linked to both of those guys speculatively. So maybe that happens and maybe that's enough. I don't know. But in that division, you're just kind of hoping for a wild card contention and division is probably out of reach for everyone not named Dodgers. Yeah, I've seen the argument that this could be the Dodgers quote unquote down year.

You know, this could be the weakest the Dodgers are for the next while. I don't necessarily believe that's true. Things change in a hurry. Look at, I don't necessarily believe that's true things change in a hurry look at i don't know the giants but i can understand the perspective of just try to seize this moment and the way things are lined up it's not like the giants could work to make themselves look good in 2020 anyway it's just almost out of the cards unless you assume that the giants are unique now and figuring out a way to make players in their 30s stay good or get better now there is a way

to do that but it's not in accordance with the rules so i don't know or at least a giant has done that before that's that's true and you know people leave a mark i'm not going to accuse the giants of systematically injecting their players with steroids but you know there's a lot of technology in the area a lot of good brains and anyway from the giant perspective, pretty easy to understand. From the Pirates' perspective, for which we will have Travis on, this is an emotional one-two punch. It's a body blow and then, I don't know, a head blow. It's blows. Pirates are getting blown. It's basically the idea here.

It's sort of a crystallization of modern sports fandom and that you just don't get to keep your favorite players forever it's not the way it works and there's the argument of being rational versus being emotional and and it's probably to the pirates benefit that they're not going to have the rest of andrew mccushion's career but boy it's just it's just never easy to get over it i think that there are probably mariners fans who still aren't through the team traded ken griffey jr even though that trade worked out great for them it's just so difficult to lose someone who is so good has meant so much is so symbolic and has been so involved in the community and is just one of the i don't have better words than to say andrew mccushion just seems like one of the

best dudes around through and through he seems like he is a tremendous ambassador he was everything that you want a player from your system to be he became he basically reached his ceiling across the board and you figure that happens to maybe one percent of one percent of all players that you have on a team even that you draft high mccushion worked out perfectly and now he's gone that sucks there's just no other way around it yeah that's how i felt when we lost you to patagonia, but you're back. So I'm happy, at least. I hope the fact that we're both off the market now hasn't lessened this podcast's appeal. We're just breaking a lot of hearts here in the last few months, but I hope you'll listen to us anyway, even though we're no longer eligible bachelors. So let's take a quick break,

and we will be back with Travisvis sachik wait our wedding is permanent that's the idea doesn't always or even often work out that way but just gonna negotiate a five-year deal we'll see All right, so we are back and we are joined now by current Fangraphs writer, former Pirates writer, still occasionally current Pirates writer, Travis Sachik, author of Big Data Baseball. Hello, Travis. How are you? I'm doing well. Pirates fans, probably, but we'll talk about how well Pirates fans should be doing in just a second and what exactly this Pirates process is and what it should say about how long the Pirates will be bad before they're good again, if they will be bad at all. But I want to start with how things have changed since your book, because it's been not even three years since

Big Data Baseball came out, although obviously that was covering an earlier season. But it seems to me that so much has changed, not just about the Pirates, but also about baseball in that time, so that a lot of the things that you wrote about that the Pirates were doing at that time, they're either not doing anymore, or they haven't been able to do as effectively anymore, or they're just not working anymore. So if we can just recap, not that any of this invalidates the book, because that was excellent, and it clearly serves the pirates well at the time. But Mike Fitzgerald, right, was the traveling analyst you featured at the time, and I wrote about too. He is now the director of R&D for the Diamondbacks. So he's gone.

Pirates lost him, victim of their own success with him. And then a lot of the trends you pinpointed. So catcher framing, right? That was one thing that they were early on. They are now below average at that, or at least they were this past season. And the league as a whole, as Jeff has shown, there's just less variation between the good and the bad teams now when it comes to ground ball rate, right? The pitchers were extreme ground ball getters. Not really the case anymore. They are still extreme sinker throwers, but that whole strategy seems to be kind of passe in baseball now and teams have abandoned the sinker.

And now when Garrett Cole gets traded away from the Pirates, we're all writing posts about how he's going to be better because he's getting away from the Pirates system, which is the opposite of all of the posts that we wrote about the Pirates shifted less last year than they did in 2016. They are not one of the shift leaders anymore, whether in number of shifts or shift runs saved. Anyway, I'm talking a lot. The point is that these are very different Pirates teams than the ones you wrote about and the ones that took them to success. Right. You covered a lot of the major points, I believe. And when you write a book about trends, I guess you always run the risk of 10 years later, these trends will be either irrelevant, absorbed elsewhere, or they'll be disproven. But we try to make some timeless elements when we're putting that together. But yeah, the ground ball and shift combination has produced less value. And I think even the Pirates have started to try to target some more high spin four seam guys as they felt the market for ground ball pitchers had become overpriced. That was even a couple of off seasons ago. The framing has been, of course, absorbed. Everyone,

that's no longer a secret. There's no competitive advantage there. A lot of these things, the analytics groups and decision science departments have expanded. I think more teams have better communication. I think the Pirates had a communication edge in 13 and 14. And I think a lot of teams have tried to copy, improve, adopt in that area. And that's one reason I think that shareable is so attractive to the Diamondbacks. Just the speed, you know, stack cast didn't exist in 2013, which is the season the book documented. And I think that has changed the way teams have evaluated hitters, thought about different aspects of the game, quantified different things. And even the book came out in 2015. And even that season in 2016, the Pirates were looking at teams like the Royals and

Giants, which has had a lot of postseason success with low strikeout guys, line drive hitters, not the most powerful lineups. And I think they tried to build themselves to be a more low strikeout, high on base team. And then all of a sudden, the home run, juice ball, launch angle, a storm came together. And they were kind of left behind in that too so i think some of the things they did well were either absorbed copied no longer relevant and then they missed some of the next trends that came along and it's just the speed of change i think is so quick in today's game with all the information available to everyone it's harder to keep secrets and you have to be i think the pirates you have to if you're a small

market with limited resources you have to be pretty nimble and agile and i don't know that they have done that as well as they they would have liked to or could have done last few years but yeah it's that book wasn't published that long ago but a lot has changed and they're much they're much different looking team in a much different situation today i think you should write a much worse selling sequel the The pirates went from good to not so good again. It could be, it could be instructive. Maybe it'd be more instructive. It's the money ball trajectory, right? Right. So Buster only had an article that was published just this morning that was highlighting some parallels between the royals and the pirates.

And just to kind of get to the point of it what would what would you say to the idea that the only real marked difference between the royals and the pirates over the last five or ten years is that the royals won the world series and the pirates ran into some wild card buzz saws you look at where the royals are going to probably lose some of their core players this offseason i guess they're still in there on eric osmer and whatnot but the pirates of course have said goodbye to Garrett Cole and Andrew McCutcheon. And it's already, they've been losing players, they're going to lose more players. But what would you say to the idea that this would all feel so much more different if only

the Pirates hadn't, say, gotten a little unlucky in the playoffs? The perception would be much different, right? If you have a flag flying above your ballpark, people notice that and they remember that and it's perceived to be the ultimate achievement, which I guess it is, although post-season we all know about the randomness, small sample size, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, I think there are some similarities. The Pirates won the second most games in the majors between 13 and 15, but they ran into Bumgarner and Arrieta at the peak of their powers and two wildcard games. And they were very short-lived postseason experiences. So I think they did have

some poor fortune. I think a lot of people in Pittsburgh would also believe that they didn't do everything they could to bolster those teams or even try to extend the window. And I think our friend Brian Kenney pointed out on Twitter that even the Royals had, I guess, a top 10 or maybe it was even greater payroll. I think maybe even top seven at some point. I don't know if that's true. But I think he said that was a threshold and the Pirates never really got out of that bottom quartile in payroll size.

So there's this other perception that even though they had a nice three-year run, ownership really didn't allow the front office to extend I don't know, extend that window, maximize the core they had built. I think the largest free agent signing in that period was re-signing Francisco Liriano. And that didn't really work out well. It's two years later, he was part of a salary dump. So I do think there are some similarities. And if they'd had more post-season success, the optics are different. But I think there's also a feeling that maybe the Royals' ownership and decision makers did a little more to supplement the group they had. I wanted to ask you because it's been a little while since I've run some sort of crowdsource

ownership poll on Fangraphs. Probably overdue to do that. And maybe it's time to do it today after this call. But so I think fans of most teams hate the owners. And I don't know, maybe we're in a particularly socialist moment in baseball fanhood where everyone is starting to just get angry at rich people everywhere. But long story short, I think a lot of fans are unhappy with ownership. But you talk about the Pirates. If you mentioned the Pirates in any context, it really doesn't matter what you're talking about at all. If you're just like,

Gregory Polanco has been a disappointment. People talk about Bob Nutting and people hate Bob Nutting. Can you provide any insight? If you could explain the Bob Nutting hate phenomenon that has swept Pittsburgh and has crept out of Pittsburgh. You could just explain if you figure the average listener of this is not a Pirates fan, what's the deal and where do you stand on the public opinion of Bob Nutting's ownership relative to the rest of the owners in Major League Baseball? Yeah, he is not a popular person at Pittsburgh. I guess to put it as mildly and gently as I can. And he's perceived to be a really rich guy who could spend more, who has made what people believe are promises to spend more, and who hasn't spent more and hasn't lived up to those promises. So yeah, I think a lot of ownership groups are unpopular. But I think the Nutting Group is particularly unpopular just because of where payroll is ranked, despite the Pirates record from 13 to 15. And they were one of the last teams to creep over 100 million for the first time in team payroll. Not that they should have thought about

entertaining McCutcheon extension, but just there hasn't been that nine-figure contract given out to a star player. The perception is he is not as invested in the product as the fans are, of course, and that even as other owners are. And it's that he's more looking at the Pirates as an investment in his portfolio. So I think that is the root of the issue. And it's hard for me to say what his relative popularity is amongst other owners and fan bases, but I believe it's like the Pirates payroll. It's in a lower quartile. And there's a strong correlation there. People, they become emotional and invested in their teams, and they want to see owners spend

and commit the same way to match their emotions. And that hasn't really happened in Pittsburgh. Now, there's a lot of other problems that have gone on. The core pieces haven't performed as well the last few years. But yeah, they look at the man at the top at the end of the day. And, you know, season ticket sales have declined three straight years. It'll be interesting to see. I would love to hear what if you're in charge of selling season tickets and you're making your calls around the Pirates box office or ticket office. What is your message today? So, yeah, it's interesting.

Yeah. Yeah, well, there was a tweet I wanted to bring up or a couple tweets, actually, because we can talk about whether these pirates trades made sense, given those payroll constraints. But first, we should talk about whether they need to have those payroll constraints, I guess. tweeted a day or so ago that he had asked Bob Nutting what it will take for the Pirates to break the cycle of develop then sell when it gets too costly. And Nutting's answer was, I think you'd have a fundamental redesign of the economics of baseball. That's not what we're going to have. But then there was another tweet from Bill Brink, who covers the Pirates for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. And he pointed out the Pirates projected payroll after the McCutcheon move is now at roughly 77 or 78 million. And so I can understand why a Pirates fan might say, okay, well, these moves make sense from a certain perspective if you accept that we can't go over a certain payroll number. But I mean, Nutting saying that you'd have to have a fundamental redesign of the economics of baseball, that's what we've had, right? That's what revenue sharing is. That's what

the BAMTEC investment is. And that still hasn't changed his willingness to spend. Yeah, I wish. I used to cover Clemson University. And you could, as a public institution, you could send a Freedom of Information Act request and get all the finances and the expenses and the incoming revenue. You can't do that with a baseball team, unfortunately. But I'd love to know what the bottom line is. But you have to think that the Nutting family is doing very well. And even a couple of years ago, I think in 15, I'd asked Nutting's available a few times every year to reporters. And I asked him about, I'm trying to remember who, maybe it was Russell Martin extension or something. I can't remember who the player's subject was, but it was along those lines of what he said to Mr. Graves that they're just not capable of keeping up with most teams and most market sizes.

And really, the 13 through 15 had proven that their draft development approach had worked. And with the idea being that we're going to target years of control and pre-arbitration talent. And when they get too expensive, the fans will have to just be conditioned as they have been to watch the faces of the franchise walk away. So I think that's always been the idea there. And I think we've seen that across baseball, that ownership groups for offices are more leery about spending in free agency. They're prizing, of course, younger talent, cheaper talent. And the Pirates are, I think, on the extreme end of that spectrum. But yeah, there's this belief that they don't need to spend to be competitive. And maybe for the Pirate fan base, one of the downfalls of the 13 to 15 run is that ownership felt that their position was

validated, that they didn't really have a huge payroll and they succeeded and they can repeat that again. So I don't think we're going to see a sea change in spending in Pittsburgh anytime soon. It seems like with the Pirates, there's a little bit of a reluctance to just give in and do the whole rebuild, complete teardown thing. Even now with the Cole and McCutcheon trades, you've got the front office talking about how these trades don't meaningfully impact their projected odds of winning the World Series and how the team won't take a huge step back. And when I look at where the Pirates are and what they've been doing, I'm sort of reminded of the Rays or the A's where you've had these teams that are, it's like every year they're fighting to project as a 500 team. And this is maybe one of the conditions that comes with being a smaller

market operation is that the best you can do, you can't build a sustainable winner. You just don't have the funds. And so you just try to build someone who can sneak into a wildcard position. But first of all, I guess, do you agree with the premise that the Pirates won't fully rebuild? And secondly, do you think that in this era, this potential era of super teams, is there value in just trying to be average every year? should the pirates kind of go whole hog and and just start over from scratch i know it's a great question and we're seeing so many super teams develop and then so many teams just doing dramatic rebuilds so there's a smaller group of teams that are trying to be mediocre the pirates are one of those teams and maybe the yeah you're going to i

guess if you have a projected league average team, you're going to surprise every once in a while, like the Twins did a year ago. And I do think the Pirates have their eye on 2019 and 2020 and getting Mitch Keller up, and a lot of the guys on the 25 man will still be around and having a chance to build upon that. But yeah, it is a little surprising that these weren't traditional... Usually when a small market team is retooling and selling off face of the franchise level talent, you usually expect a, I think you noted Jeff in your piece the other day, you usually expect some sort of traditional headline and return a top 50 overall prospect in the

game or something of that. We haven't seen that. We've seen the Pirates take on, I think, half the assets they got back in these two deals where our players who've already arrived at the major leagues and were perceived to have higher floors, maybe lower ceilings. And there aren't top 100 prospects involved. It's almost like they're trying to perpetuate mediocrity, just good enough to try to sneak into a second wildcard, that kind of approach. And maybe with so many teams uninterested in contending, maybe there's logic to that. Maybe they believe in this

quantity of return. There'll be quality produced. Maybe they see something with brands swing change last year or Musgrove in the rotation. I don't know. But it is a little curious that they are not really taking a traditional bottom out. Let's retool to the ground and get a high upside, younger assets in return. It does seem like they're trying to maintain some level of competitiveness while also rebuilding or retooling to a degree. The criticisms of this trade are many and varied. Both of these trades really, there's the critique that they traded these guys at the wrong time. There's the critique that they didn't get enough back. these guys at the wrong time.

There's the critique that they didn't get enough back. There's the critique that they are underselling what these players, particularly McCutcheon, mean to the fan base. And then the counterpoint is maybe not. Maybe not on all of those things. And we just talked about the Royals-Pirates parallels, and you could draw another one here in that we've all kind of criticized the Royals, or some have at least for holding on to all of their guys who were approaching for agency, just taking one last run at it. and maybe one of the more hopeless positions in the short term of any team in baseball. And Pirates are not doing that, right? They could have held on to McCutcheon for his last year under team control, could have held on to Cole for his remaining two years

and taken another run or two at it with them. Instead, they are getting what they could get for those guys. And Kylie McDaniel just wrote a long defense slash explanation of what the Pirates did and which she, I think, made a decent case that maybe they did about as well as they could have. Where do you stand on that? I think I wrote earlier. Well, I know I wrote. I know I wrote this, that they should trade Cole. There's no need to hedge there. I did write this. My name's attached to it. Yeah, that they should move Cole this offseason. And with

his two years of club control remaining, this was, look, if Cole had been better the last two years, he would have fetched a far greater return, I'm sure. But if you took his name away and his draft position and his pedigree, and you just showed his statistical performance over the last two years, it's not something a lot of teams are going to over... It's not going to overwhelm you. And I don't think a lot of teams would look at that as a top of the rotation arm who's going to put you over the top. So they're really, I think, traded away a number three caliber starter. I do think the Astros can get more out of Cole. I do think there's more in there. I think Cole can be the kind of pitcher he was in 2015 again. But it's probably hard to sell that if you're trading someone that,

look, he's going to be better for you. I think that's a hard sales pitch. So maybe the debate is, should they have done more of a White Sox style trade and traded for more risk and upside versus they appear to have traded for a higher floor and lower risk, which the pirates I, often do. I think there's a debate there, but there's a lot of risk in holding on to Cole, too. He's had DL trips. He might, what if he has a more significant injury if you hold on to him? What if no market has really developed for him at the deadline with clear gap between the haves and the have-nots and the standings?

So once the season begins, each day that evaporates is another one less day a team has control over them. So I think it made sense to trade Cole, and I think the return is okay, given what he's done. Maybe I would have preferred perhaps a higher upside play in the return. But yeah, I don't think it's illogical trading him. And McCutcheon is another guy where if they would have traded him at the end of 2015, he would have been a superstar caliber player and the return would have been far, far greater, but it would have been hard to trade the face of the franchise after 98 win season. And then he, of course, he had his stunning age 29 seasons in 2016, where he's just awful and a lot of his trade value evaporated. So he's rebounded to a degree and he has one year

of control left. So I don't think anyone in baseball thought there was a huge return out there for him. So I do, well, these aren't overwhelming returns. I think it's just the reality of baseball today and how teams value players. And a lot of teams have the same mindedness to free agency and probably the trade markets. So I do think the Pirates were probably methodical, investigated and saw a landscape where they're in a whole lot of teams who believe one move is going to really move the needle and push them into the postseason field and i'm sure they felt this was the best they could do and with the mccushion trade i think emotions aside it it makes sense it's not too controversial certainly after the the coal trade i think few people were surprised

that mccushion went away and that he got the return that he did but with the coal trade an angle i've seen a lot of is that the pirates didn't get enough for a variety of reasons but you look at what the astros lost and joe musgrove has moved to the bullpen because they have a million starters and michael fleas was buried in the bullpen because they have better relievers and colin moran of course was behind alex bregman who he was never going to supplant so you look at this from the Astros side and you say well the Astros didn't really lose anything too important to them what a great trade for them but from the Pirates side do you think that maybe some of the criticism is present because the Astros are so deep that these

are better players than they're being given credit for but they had the misfortune of playing for a team that was too good? Because you look at, even leaving the fourth piece aside, when I look at Musgrove, Moran, and Fleas, I see some really intriguing talent, but it seems like maybe the Pirates are getting critiqued because those players were playing for a team that was simply too good to use them very much. The Pirates have all sorts of perception problems, right? We talked about that they're similar to the Royals in many ways, except they don't have a World Series title to show for their efforts. And now it appears they're taking another team's spare parts for the last player they selected number one overall in the draft. So yeah, that's a great point. And it's another perception issue where I think the pirates did okay. I don't even think this... The pirates have said the coal trade doesn't even change their

internal projections for what they're capable of in 2018. And as I updated the Fangraph step charts, it didn't change their standings either. Although I guess steamer still needs to change muskrow from a reliever to a starting pitcher. But there's a lot of truth to that, where this trade gives the Pirates years of control, and they don't really lose much in the short term, unless Cole somehow becomes his 2015 self again. So yeah, I think you hit on something there. And it's another perception issue for franchise from ownership to what they have to show from their 2013 to 15 run that has all sorts of perception problems. Maybe they need a good PR firm to come in there and do some crisis management because this could probably be spun in a different way and crafted perhaps more deftly.

But yeah, it's a tough sell. That's what MLB.com is for, right? That's right. It is a tough sell if you're a Pirates fan. They had the number one overall pick in 2011, the number two overall pick in 2010, That's right. It is a tough sell if you're a Pirates fan, though, when you look at, you know, they had the number one overall pick in 2011, the number two overall pick in 2010. And all you have to show for it now is, well, you had a lot of top five picks, really even day back to Pedro Alvarez, Tony Sanchez. And out of that whole group, now only Jamison Tyone has left. And that's tough to accept, I think, when you,

when if you're living in Western Pennsylvania, you probably had a much grander vision of the upside of all those draft selections and all the money spent on the overslot bonuses. And it's tough when you trade your number one overall pick for Musgrove and Moran. It's a hard sell. Jeff prefaced his last question with emotions aside,

which would probably be a pretty good alternative title for this podcast. But if for one moment we can all engage our emotions as uncomfortable and unnatural as that may be and talk about Andrew McCutcheon from that perspective, I think we all have some sense of what he means to Pirates fans. I mean, everyone likes Andrew McCutcheon. You don't have to be a Pirates fan to like him. But the prominence that he had for that franchise, when he came along, how good he was, what kind of person he was, et cetera,

you saw it firsthand. I don't know if there is anyone they could have gotten back in this trade that the typical Pirates fan would be happy about if it cost them Andrew McCutcheon. So having seen that up close, can you talk about the off the field significance that he had and has for Pirates fans? Yeah, he's, when we think about faces of franchises, he's a really important one,

because for 21 seasons, the Pirates failed to record a winning campaign, 20 seasons, and you know, they lost a generation of fans or risk of losing a generation of fans. And McCutcheon is the face of that revival of baseball in Pittsburgh. In addition to all the work he does off the field and the quality player he was, he was sort of the symbol of a resurgence. And it's tough. There's an emotional, it's an emotional blow. And kids who grew up knowing the Pirates, not always as losers when, or fans who had been through the 90s and the 2000s to enjoy that run again, to lose the face of that, I'm sure there's, that's emotionally, that is difficult for some people. I don't know

how you quantify that loss. I know we're speaking emotionally here, but yeah, it's, if you're going to lose the face of a franchise, I think it's emotionally, this would probably be one of the more difficult ones to replace. And it's sort of a symbolic cutting of ties now is the pirates need a new face. They need someone else to be developed and ascend to that role and to push this club forward. It's going to be a tough position to fill. It's hard to find a face. It's hard to find a face. We need an emotions plus or emotions minus maybe would help us discuss these matters the way we're accustomed to. And we might see that at the tickets. I'm very curious to see what the bottom, the final ticket sales total is this year. I think some people will be sitting

out this season in protest. Maybe that is one way to quantify the emotional appeal of Andrew McCutcheon. Must quantify the emotions. How do you think, the Pirates are not the first team to have to deal with this. They won't be the last team to have to deal with this. But when you look at this bigger picture, I think a front office like Neil Huntington's would tell you that ultimately winning is the most important thing. Winning is the easiest thing to sell the fans but how do you think you can build a product where you are trying to sell yourself to fans and fans will rally around faces of teams i wish i had a better way of labeling those players but whatever we're going with faces but when you have a pirate team that is publicly

acknowledged that they just can't sign these these great players for long-term contracts in their 30s and that those players are going to go away. And that's just the market dynamics as they are. How do you think that you can sustainably sell a brand where, as a fan, you know that the best players just aren't going to stick around for the rest of their careers? I know that it's uncommon for any player to do that anywhere aside from, guess san francisco but you look at the nfl and you have franchise quarterbacks who just stick around for it seems like 15 20 years and that's the core of the team and if you were the pirates you can you have mccutcheon he's great then you trade him you have cole he's great you trade him the next great pirates player is going to be traded when he's 29 or 31 or whatever how do you sell that to fans in a way that just prevents is it

possible to sell that in a way that prevents them from just living in this constant state of cyclical dejection and anger and unrest it's a tough sell and i think you hit on it at the the beginning of of your question and that is you just have to win basically. And I'm from Cleveland, Ohio, and I've seen the great Indians teams of the nineties be dismantled. And now today you have new stars and you have Francisco Lindor running around with a smile and his 30 home runs and his gold glove defense. And that makes people forget about losing the Manny Ramirez's and the Jim Tomey's of the world. So it's about developing the next stars and it's about winning ultimately. And I think it's really tough to sell that this

is good for the overall health of the franchise. Now, maybe the more analytical sabermetric fan of the Pirates gets that, but I think the Pirates have tried to condition fans to accept this is the reality of modern day baseball. And you're not going to see your stars retire here and they're going to go away to bigger, more lucrative deals. And our job is to replace them. And even after the Melanson and Neil Walker trades just over a year ago, Neil Huntington had said, we're going to continue to make challenging and potentially unpopular decisions. And that's been being retweeted this week on my Twitter. So even then, that was from November 30th of 2016. I think the Pirates front

office has tried to condition fans to understand that this is how they're going to be operating so that they're not shocked when Cole was traded, when McCutcheon was traded, that they're somewhat prepared and maybe they've reached the acceptance stage of their grief. And maybe they have. I don't think anyone is surprised that these guys were moved over the last week. But yeah, it's a tough sell. And I think ultimately the solution is to create goodwill is to win. And for the Pirates, it's about the draft, international signings, and player development.

They're going to have to do well there. national signings and player development. They're going to have to do well there. So about 19 hours ago, Ken Rosenthal broke the news that the Pirates would be extending excellent closer Felipe Rivero to a four-year contract, buys out his Arbiers, potentially a couple of free agent years. About 20 hours ago, so one hour before that, Felipe Rivero tweeted a facepalm emoji and then followed that up with a Jim Halpert gif of Jim saying, what is going on? So his most recent three tweets now are facepalm emoji, gif of what is going on, and then him slapping forearms with McCutcheon and saying, won't be doing this anymore. forearms with McCutcheon and saying, won't be doing this anymore. So that's your new Pittsburgh Pirate. Evidently already experiencing some signers remorse here, potentially. But for

the sake of Felipe Rivera, maybe we can end on this. How long do you think it will be if you had to give us a mean projection before the Pirates will again be back in a position to be eliminated in a wild card game. I do think one element working in their favor is not many teams seem to be that interested in competing. So a lot of this depends on what is Mitch Keller? Does Tyler Glass now become anything? Can Jamison Tyone stay in the field? So there's this Josh Bell, can he produce better than a 108 weighted run screened plus? So there's a lot of uncertainty. What is Starling Marte?

What is Gregory Polanco? This is a tough question with a lot of range of outcomes. But I think we have them at Fangraphs as an 81-81 team today. I could see 2020, if enough goes right, that they're in the mix for that wildcard spot again and to be heartbroken again in the Clint Hurdle Invitational that we call the wildcard game. So yeah, if enough goes right, it's possible that the dip is not as dramatic as it will be in Kansas City or Baltimore or Miami. So I think if you're looking for some silver lining in the clouds in Western PA, I think it is that, that maybe the dip will be shallower if there are

enough correct decisions and enough things happen in a positive manner in the player development side of things. So we'll see. I wouldn't consider them a favorite for a wildcard spot in the next foreseeable future, but I think it's possible that they're within that range in the not too distant future, I guess. Very political answer, but I feel it is an accurate, honest response. All right. Well, now that we have completely cannibalized the pirate season preview podcast that we'll probably have to be doing a few weeks from now, we can let you go. And I'm sure that you have posts to write. You can find Travis writing regularly at Fangraphs. You can read his obsolete book, Big Data Baseball. Yes.

I'm kidding. It's a history. It's a great book. Go get it if you haven't read it. It is and will always be a document of that time in baseball and for the Pirates. Travis, thank you very much for coming on thank you for having me and for dealing with i'm dealing with a head cold so i'm sure the the sound quality of my voice was less than optimum today but uh but thanks for having

me on and dealing with me i appreciate it i think you sound exactly the same so do i but i wasn't That's that bad wow Alright Thanks guys Okay that will do it for today You can support this podcast and help pay for Jeff's wedding On Patreon by going to Patreon.com slash effectively wild I have listeners who have already unwittingly Pledged their support for Jeff's wedding

Include Martin Paul Gibson Thomas Crockett, Beau Sorrell, Ben Hickson, and Will Crosby. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash Effectively Wild. There was a brief sensation this past weekend when our 6,969th member joined, but we are up to 6,970 now, so the crisis has passed. You can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes. Thank you to Dylan Higgins for his editing and production assistance. You can

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Until then, let's stay engaged.