Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1165: Jeff Passan Diagnoses Baseball’s Broken Market

Episode Date: January 19, 2018

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about a few recent trade demands (or non-demands), then bring on Yahoo Sports MLB columnist Jeff Passan to talk about what’s behind baseball’s slow-moving labor market, who and/or what is to blame for the sport’s present economic stalemate, and what can be done to avert disaster. Lastly, Ben provides […]

In about an hour or so I'll be in bed, don't you know my eyes and ears, well they won't make a sound. In a dream Jack Bell appeared and told me he was happy with the way a drink could make a man black out. Hello and welcome to episode 1165 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I am Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs.com, joined as, I guess, recently, always, again, joined as mostly always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Hello, Ben. Hello. How are you? I'm doing all right. Great.

Okay, so moving on from that, with the pleasantries out of the way, we will have on this podcast, for almost all of this podcast, we have an, I think, delightful conversation with Yahoo's Jeff Passan about what is going on in baseball's market right now and about the economics of the game. And if you just rolled your eyes or fell asleep at the mention of the word economics, I promise it's better than that. Jeff swears it's great, And we talked for about an hour. But for that, I don't know if you have anything

you wanted to talk about that isn't about baseball's marketplace and the economics. I think that's the only thing being discussed. But just as long as we're talking about baseball and not that we have a couple sort of trade demands, pseudo trade demands. I don't know if they're quite demands, but you know, trade demand is a general term.

We have Josh Harrison. He posted a statement to the athletic uh which is i guess i don't know the new players tribune i'm not sure but josh harrison uh i'm looking at this from the roto world so i'm not going from the original sourcing but this is josh harrison saying quote if indeed the team does not expect to contend this year or next, perhaps it would be better for all involved that I also am traded, Harrison said, talking about Garrett Cole and Andrew McCutcheon leaving the Pirates. So Josh Harrison more or less saying, hey, I wouldn't mind. I wouldn't mind if you traded me. That would be great, maybe for all parties involved. And separate from that, going to Miami, Christian Yelich didn't personally say that he hates life but his agent did yes in the words of kristin yelich's agent yelich's relationship with the marlins is quote

irretrievably broken and uh it's soured he's part of the old ownership regime the new ownership regime needs to get new parts into this plan and to move forward and he referring to kristin yelich needs to get on with his career where he's got a chance to win the big issue is him winning and winning now this is from a jerry krasnick article at espn so josh harrison direct but i don't know polite and christian yelich's representatives being like this sucks move. So do trade demands matter? Well, I mean, the Marlins relationship with baseball is probably irretrievably broken or has been for some time. I mean, the contrast to this trade demand approach, I guess, would be what Marlins pitcher Brad Ziegler did, which was sort of an anti-trade demand. He said, I think in the Miami Herald just a day or

two ago, I think he was asked, or maybe it was on SiriusXM, he was asked if he had requested a trade or if he would be. And he said, no, I have not. I understand the frustration. I made sure my agent would not do that. I don't think he would do that anyways. He knows I'm happy where I'm at. Whatever team wants to have me the most, that's the team I want to play for because I want to be wanted wherever I'm at. So he signed a two-year contract with the Marlins last offseason. So he has a year left to go. And his attitude seems to be that he will just want to be with whichever team wants him, even if that is the Marlins. And I don't know, I guess these are both healthy attitudes depending on what you want. If you don't want to play for a team that is entering a rebuilding phase or is perpetually

in one, I understand that and maybe the best way to get out of that situation. I mean, I don't know. I don't know whether making a public statement is the best way to do it, putting pressure on the team that way, but also putting pressure on the team that way, but also sort of embarrassing the team in a sense. I don't know, having never been a player or a team executive, I don't know whether it's more effective to do it that way and potentially burn a bridge in the front office or just to go behind the scenes and say, hey, I'd like to be gone. I don't want to put you on blast publicly, but if you could trade me, that'd be great. I don't know which is the most effective way, but if you really want out,

I don't blame you for wanting out. Although obviously you could say, well, you shouldn't have signed with Team X in the first place. But if you're Christian Jelic, well, I guess he did sign an extension, right? But there are certain players, the thing we've seen with the Marlins is that pre-free agency, our beer guys are demanding trades, which is unusual. But in a sense, like, you know, they're the ones who didn't choose to be there in the first place. So they almost have a better argument to ask out than someone who signed a deal with that team. Right. And of course, it's difficult to contrast Jelich and Brad Ziegler because one of those players is good and one of those players is Brad Ziegler. So even if Ziegler were to demand a trade he has only so much leverage and in this

case Jelic also has only so much leverage again he is signed for four or up to five more years and he is where he is it doesn't really matter that he signed understanding the Marlins to be different than what they have become because that's just kind of the commitment you make so Jelic doesn't have a whole lot of ground here he can't do anything I mean he can tank his own performance I guess but that's not going to help anything at all although I guess he does have his money but you know if you're the Marlins and if the Marlins are dead set on keeping Yelich at least for a little while then they can move forward with the understanding that Christian Yelich has to perform because he's a major league baseball player and there's he'll put too much pressure on himself to really get down but on the other hand he's the

best player on the team and you don't want to have an unhappy best player and to be completely honest he should be traded anyway i know he's a long-term asset but the marlins suck it's for the same reason that they've traded the other players they should move yelich and they should move jt real mudu and they should just go down to the studs so you know i think that it would hardly surprise me at all if within a month or so yelich were moved. I'm going to be writing about this in a post that will be published before this podcast is published. So I'm talking to you from the past about the future or some sort of weird timeline. But I think that at the end of the day, Yelich's agent statement will not have a direct effect on what happens to Yelich. But I

think it is pretty clear that this relationship should end anyway. The Marlins really should just kind of start completely over. And I think that that's what they're going to end up doing. Yeah, we were talking about this in the email show with a fan's perspective, essentially. This is kind of the equivalent, like can a fan demand a trade essentially to another fan base because we had a listener who's a pirates fan wanting to know if he could switch to the giants for a season that is easier for a fan to do than for a player to do obviously but we said whatever makes you happy for the most part so i think the same applies to players i wouldn't blame any marlin

for trying to get away from the marlins so you can see why this would be happening now if only i know the marlins weren't involved but it would have been the most fascinating outcome would have been if shohei otani was like i want to go there and i want to be the guy who's there from the very beginning i know the marlins have already had a beginning but like the new beginning yeah that would have changed things then you would have had people wanting to play with shohei otani in the marlins i don't know i wonder it could have this is dumb but i don't care if if it had all been a gambit and if if the marlins expressing zero interest was in fact the best expression of interest you know tony and if he was like i'm interested in him that's so confident yeah yeah yeah right it's a neg it's

a neg that like what was it two three teams that essentially negged the questionnaire? Yes. Yeah, that would have been something. We already followed a weird timeline that we didn't expect, but it could have been weird. Yes. That's my one regret. Playing hard to get approach for signing Shohei Otani. Didn't work.

So all these discussions we've been having about trade talks are set up in some way by baseball's economic system, which it seems may not be working so well anymore. So in just a moment, we will be back to talk about that with Yahoo Sports columnist and author of The Arm, Jeff Passan. Come gather round, children, it's high time ye learned About a hero named Homer and a devil named Burns. We'll march till we drop the girls and the fellas. We'll fight till the death or else fold like umbrellas. So we'll march day and night by the big cooling tower. They have the plans, but we have the power so the subject that i think is being

discussed the most right now because it's not transactions it's the lack of transactions and maybe the uh the biggest most impactful article written on the subject recently has come from yahoo's jeff passon and uh we have him on right now to discuss his article. And so we can just begin by saying, Jeff, collusion, yay or nay? Is that a binary or can I say like maybe? Probably not, but I wouldn't ever. Like my favorite realization that I've come to in recent years is the unending hunger of really rich people to get richer.

Like, just think about it this way. Think about what it takes to become a billionaire. If someone gave me $50 million, I would say, wow, that is amazing. And I would quit my job and I would be on an island with an umbrella drink the next day and for the rest of my life. You sound like the MLB Players Association. Billionaires get $50 million and say, no, that is not enough. And then they get a hundred million and they say, nah, that's not good either. And they keep going. And the way, generally speaking, that billionaires get money is by climbing on the backs of the people underneath them.

And that is sort of what has happened in baseball to this point, when you go and look at the Forbes numbers. And I know that Forbes is not by any means 100% accurate with its valuations every year. But when you look at the operating income that they've had over the last 17, 18 years, they've gone from the red for a couple of years there to MLB in the 2016 season, making a combined $981 million in profit. That is a lot of money. And you see teams making $50, $60 million in any particular year. And you know if the teams are making this much

and it's going into their pockets, where is it not going? To the players. Yeah, and there was an article on Thursday at Baseball Perspectives about how you actually define collusion, what has to be present in order for it to be collusion. And there's a legal term that they mentioned there, conscious parallelism, which is not sufficient in baseball. That's at least an excuse, an explanation that people have offered. It's also that you have to have a concerted effort. You have to have some direction from above, some communication. And that seems like it would be a really risky thing for teams to try in this day and age. For one thing, everyone's

on the lookout for it because it has happened before. For another, there's just a paper trail or a digital trail to every communication now. And it just seems like that would be a hard thing to hide. And for third, there's treble damages, which I think is a forgotten part of collusion from 1985 to 1987. The ultimate agreement that paid players $280 million for the collusive behavior, then part of it was that in every bargaining agreement past that, the league had to agree to pay three times as much in whatever damages they are assessed if they ever do collude in the future. So if they were found to have engaged in collusive behavior that was thought to cost $100 million, the league would actually have to pay $300 million.

And the incentives, as you said, are enormously in place for them not to do something. At the top of every story I write, I try to put either a thesis or question that I want answered or a couple of questions. And one of the questions I had at the top for the entirety of writing this piece was, can you collude without agreeing? And the idea there is, can you have collusion if teams just happen to think the same as opposed to work in concert with one another? And that I think is going to be ultimately for a major league baseball players association lawyer to try and answer and to try to make the case. 85 to 87, they were morons and they slipped up and they, I mean, they had an information bank. They literally in the 1987

season had an information bank where if you made an offer, you put it into like a Google doc essentially. And every team knew how much other teams were offering. Like you couldn't be more obvious with your collusion there. Today though, man, you know, one of the things I heard from someone at MLB is these teams despise each other. Why would they actually collude with one another? And there is something to be said for that. I mean, you have a league where one team is literally spying on

another's proprietary database. You have a league where the pettiness of teams toward one another leads to them putting organizations they don't like scouts in bad seats at games. I mean, putting organizations they don't like scouts in bad seats at games. I mean, there's things like that. But when it comes down to it, I think they probably have a more adversarial relationship with the players than they do with one another. And that's what's really at the heart of this, especially with the fact that the players feel like they are being mistreated and not given their fair share of what's due to them, since like it or not they

are the game it's not the uniform it's not the ownership it's not the team name it's not the brand the players are the game and if the players aren't there nobody's going to watch baseball yeah well we we've all become experts at defining collusion over the past year or so. So this is familiar territory. I think there are a lot of baseball fans who are simultaneously of two minds. One, we get all the salary information now, so we know exactly what players are getting paid. We know exactly which players are getting paid. What we might say is too much. But at the same time, if you asked any baseball fan, they would all, I think, to a person, say for the billionaires, say that they would rather have the money going to the players than going to the billionaire owners. I actually wholeheartedly disagree with you on that.

Really? I do. And I think, Jeff, that's the problem. There's a large segment of our society that believes that owners and people who run businesses should be the ones who get the spoils because either of the idea that there's an inherent risk in running a business in that there's a particular difficulty in running a business. And I think this I think you see this throughout. Why do you think there is this grant? There was this grand reverence for the idea that our president was some sort of a incredible businessman. grand reverence for the idea that our president was some sort of a incredible businessman. I think the deification of the businessman is a big part of this. And it goes back to the, it goes back to the idea of the greedy player, like the greedy player, I almost feel like

should be shown in a cartoon in, in a completely ridiculous over the topthe-top way, same way it was done, propagandized with Sambo or with the hook-nosed Jew. The greedy player is in that same category in that for one reason or another, it gets played up that there is this problem and that these people do not deserve what they are given or what they are getting. And it's really unfortunate to me because the players are the heart of baseball. And for them to be characterized as being greedy, no, they're not greedy. They're trying to get what they deserve and what they believe they have earned. The problem is teams now are seeing the relative folly of free agency. And I think it was inevitable that we were going to get here to this place that anybody

who has even a cursory understanding of sabermetrics has known for a long time. Free agency is ridiculous and free agency is kind of stupid and free agency more than anything is incredibly inefficient. Yeah. Well, that's kind of something that I've been thinking about is that why now, why this one winter, as you mentioned, this kind of mindset has been pretty prevalent in front offices for a while now, and maybe more so every year, but not dramatically more so today compared to a year ago. So why do you think this is all

coming to a head right now? I don't think it is. I think that we've missed collectively the signs that this was coming. And let me try and make my argument here. I think that we're going to look back and see a timeline as to how this happened. And I don't think it started in 2012 per se. I think this has been happening for quite a while now. but really I'd say within the last three years, we've more or less gotten rid of quote unquote dumb front offices. So you have this uniformity throughout the game. Well, going back to 2012, the CBA that year that was signed instituted the draft pools. And the draft pools to me were the first step of this. I don't know if they were the Pandora's box necessarily, but they were the first step

in establishing that there are certain limits on where you can spend. So draft pools come into place. You're going to lose multiple first round picks and the dollars that come with them if you go any more than 5% over your pool number. Ergo, you do not go over your pool number. Flash forward to 2016. At that point, I think the winnowing of the back end of the free agent market had started where you simply were not seeing guys in their

mid to late 30s, someone like Ben Zobris perhaps accepted, getting those long-term deals that they may have in the past. So the shrinking of the free agent market is happening there while simultaneously earlier on, it's happening with the buying out of guys' arbitration years and free agent years using the pre-market contracts that so many of these guys are taking right now. In addition, what that did was it shrunk the ability for arbitration salaries to grow. And so you don't see many record-setting victories in arbitration. Certainly, the amount made in arbitration has not gone up anywhere close to the amount of increase in revenue or franchise values. So you've got that,

and then you add in the international aspect. Major League Baseball was threatening the international draft. And I've spoken with people there, and they swear to me that they want the international draft, that they believe the international draft is a good thing. Implementing the international draft would be such a logistical clusterfuck that I don't know why MLB really truly does want to do it. I don't feel like there's enough to be gained there in order to do that. What it did though, was it gave him a cudgel against a group of players from Latin America that it knew felt indebted to the people

down there who helped them become major league baseball players. And the way that the system works there is you've got your buscones and you've got your trainers who have kids who are 12 and 13 and 14 in their academies who they have contracts for already. And those people stood to lose a significant amount of money, perhaps possibly imperiling their businesses. Well, those trainers are calling up the players who they helped make major league players and saying, you cannot allow the international draft to happen. And when that happened, the players went and argued for it.

Tony Clark saw this as his almost duty to back up the Latin players who for so many years haven't had a voice in the union. And in doing so, they ended up hard capping the international money. What that did was you have a shrinking of the market among 36 year olds. You have a shrinking of the market with the younger guys who aren't hitting free agency. You can't spend money internationally on amateurs. You cannot spend money domestically on amateurs. The only place left to spend money is in free agency. So what is the obvious move? You're going to shrink that small pool that's left starting at the top by going after guys like Martinez, guys like Hosmer, guys like Arrieta. And I think this was just an inevitable outcome for what over time

has been barreling toward this. We have accepted, or I think a lot of people have accepted that this offseason in particular particular you have the two biggest spenders the yankees and the dodgers who are saying that they want to dip under the uh the competitive balance tax threshold or the the luxury tax threshold currently set at 197 million dollars and and the teams say that they want to dip under that threshold and every other team says they want to stay under that threshold because of of course there are savings there are penalties for going over the threshold and they're compounding etc we don't need to go into the specifics of those penalties. But as I just eyeball like the MLB.com glossary, and the headline here is what is a competitive balance tax? I'm not going to read the whole

thing. Anyone can read it if you want to. It's easy to Google. But as I look at it, I think that the truth of the matter, it's really easy to spend some billionaires millions of dollars. I understand that. But the penalties really don't seem particularly steep unless you exceed the competitive balance tax by a lot. And you don't have to do that. I mean, you look at a case like the Giants right now who are within, I don't know, maybe three dollars of the tax threshold. And they say that they really badly want to stay under the threshold. But if they go over by like three million to sign Gerard Dyson or something, it doesn't seem like that's really quite painful at all. And I don't think I'm getting this wrong. So why is it that I guess ownership has been so successful, at least what I perceive to be successful in selling this maneuver

as being, I guess, I don't know, in good faith might not be the right word, but as legitimate. I think partially because you have a class of fans out there who will buy into this notion of austerity being something that is laudable. And I think that was almost the quote in the story, I think, that got the most traction, the notion that Brian Cashman suddenly became a great general manager when he stopped spending money as if spending money is some sort of a sin, as if using an inherent advantage that you have because of the marketplace you're in makes you any less of an executive. And you're so dead on right about this.

And listen, I'm guilty of this too. Like when the Dodgers made the trade of Matt Kemp, getting Matt Kemp back and shipping Gonzalez and Casimir and McCarthy off, my first reaction was Dodgers just got below the tax. That's going to let them go after Bryce next year. As if getting under the tax was something that was necessary for this. But after that, I started doing the math. And I had to cut this from the story because there was concern that people were just going to fall asleep when they were reading it. But I hypothesize a scenario in which the Dodgers have a $246 million payroll next year.

Now, the luxury tax threshold, the first threshold next year is $ 206 million. After that, the first surtax, as it's called, is at 226 million. And the second one is at 246 million. So you can essentially go 40 million over the lowest threshold without getting the full-fledged penalties. Once you exceed the threshold, the penalties, by the way, are almost all the same. And I'm going to digress here because I think it's important to point out that these penalties really aren't that penalizing. So let's just say that the Dodgers go over the threshold this year and they lose Clayton Kershaw to free agency next year. I don't think this is going to happen, but it's a guy who has a qualifying offer.

They would get a pick after the fourth round. That's $379,000 in bonus value. If they're not over the threshold, they get a pick after the comp balance B round, which is $750,000. So we're talking $370,000 in draft dollars. That's not a lot of money. Now let's say they go and sign a player who has a QO assigned, attached to him like Bryce Harper. They would lose their second and fifth highest picks plus a million dollars in international money if they're over the tax. If not, they would lose their second highest pick in 500,000 in international money. So a fifth rounder for a decent team is about $300,000. That's 5% of a draft budget. $500,000 on the $4.75 million that they get is 10.5%. We're not

talking egregious sums of money here that teams are going to be losing for their amateur budgets by going over. So let's take it back to the actual money, money. If the Dodgers spend $246 million next year and they dipped back under this year, they've saved a grand total of $12 million next year in luxury tax penalties. Now, if they go out and spend $290 million, it's a little bit different because it's almost a dollar for dollar tax over that $246 million threshold. But I don't know a scenario looking at the Dodgers payroll now in which they could spend $290 million unless they buy every big name free agent out there on the market. So the idea that this is some sort of somebody who has more value than what they would project themselves to lose by staying under the CBT threshold, they are going to go out and sign that guy.

If Darvish's market dips, if Arrieta's market dips, if J.D. Martinez's market dips, whoever it is, if any of these guys get down and the Dodgers think that they are going to be revenue positive because of signing him, they will. We are not worried about anyone falling asleep while we talk about math on this podcast. We just assume that will happen. I was just going to say, you know what? You got to know your audience, man. Like the Yahoo audience, not having it.

This audience, totally down for it. Any future sections that your editor cuts because it's too boring, feel free to just come on here and read them to us so normally if there were some outlier winter outlier market it would be like if a player had an outlier season like a 230 hitter suddenly hits 320 or something you figure well next year they're not going to hit 320 again they're going to be closer to what they were before and of course next year we have Bryce Harper and all these big name free agents. And so maybe at least for one winter, that will make things look temporarily, at least as if things are back to normal a little bit. But since you're saying that this is not a one-year blip, this is just something that we've

been missing that's been building all this time. You're not that worried about this being the outlier and saying, well, things will regress, things will go back to normal, more or less. And you think that, you know, maybe after next winter, this will just be the norm. And of course, if it is the norm, then we're going to have to start talking about changes. And at that point, the CBA is going to be expiring again, and then we're going to be in trouble. point the cpa is going to be expiring again and then we're going to be in trouble i don't know if it's going to take until next winter to be honest uh-huh there's a lot there's a lot of anger festering out there right now and i think that i think the players are i think they're pretty fed up and i don't know if something's going to happen before spring training necessarily, but I know that there's

talk right now about what's going on and about what they can do to counter it. And I, you know, I do think in terms of Bryce Harper and Manny Machado and Clayton Kershaw, things will look the same next winter in terms of their, their ability to get paid because things won't look the same with them. And this is another thing that I ended up cutting from the story. Are you telling me teams are going to look at 33-year-old Josh Donaldson and say, let's give this guy 10 years, even if his production warrants it? Are they going to make the Cano contract?

Are they going to make the Pujols contract? No chance. There's no chance he gets it. You're telling me that teams aren't going to look the Cano contract? Are they going to make the Pujols contract? No chance. There's no chance he gets it. You're telling me that teams aren't going to look at Charlie Blackman and say, in Colorado, 32, not going to be a center fielder for very long, arguably isn't a very good center fielder right now. We don't want to pay him. And that they're not going to be saying that Daniel Murphy, despite being one of the best

hitters in baseball, 34 years old. Why would we give that? The same arguments that they're making right now, guys, they're not going to stop making next year. And so it's why the argument that I made that baseball is on the verge of turning into an NBA or even NHL type environment where the tippity top best of the best guys who come and hit free agency at the right age, get paid exorbitant amounts and everybody else just merely becomes like common person rich. I'm not feeling bad for anyone making a million or $2 million a year, but compared to what it was, I don't know if it's ever going to be like stars and scrubs quite like that, but there's a lot of momentum in the direction of that at this point. And I think a lot of sentiment among front offices that echo that. You know, what could probably help older tree agents get more money is career

lengthening steroids. So maybe we just need to go back about 15 years. How much do you blame the Players Association for this? And how much do you think it's just a product of trends that Marvin Miller in his prime would have had a tough time counteracting? Are you talking the Players Association as an executive group or the Players Association as a consortium of players? Because I think they're two different things. because I think they're two different things. I think the union's strength as a group of players over the last probably 10 to 15 years has waned. And part of that, I think, is a function of there being incredible money in the game

and people feeling like they're satisfied and not pushing, you know, not wanting to disrupt the labor piece that's gone on for upward of a quarter century at this point and has seen everybody grow rich together. That's been the beauty of baseball, that the players, the owners, everybody has been involved in this together. But at the same time, if the players are not recognizing the importance of their unanimity and strength, it's incumbent on the leadership to stress that to them and to make that their number one priority. And I don't know that the MLB PA has done as good of a job as it needs to in doing that either. Engaging the modern athlete is a really difficult thing to do. And I think Tony Clark gets a lot of shit and I think some of it is deserved

and some of it absolutely is not. Could he have seen the gambit that MLB was running with the international dollars coming? Or should he have seen that coming? Yeah, probably. But at the same time, I think the reason that he was brought in was to be someone who brought together players. And that's what he was endeavoring to do there. It was just strategically the wrong move at the wrong time i think right now though he needs to get the players together and get them on board or there will start being questions of whether he's the right person for the job there are clearly a lot of factors at play here and we're going to talk about more of them in the coming several minutes but one of the points that is i've thought about in the last couple days is that now more than ever this is

of course the the information age and teams have all the stat cast information to themselves. But it seems like there is more than ever an information imbalance between the teams who were responsible for giving out the money and the players representatives who are responsible for getting the money. And so to what extent is this? I mean, like the Boris Corporation, that business is doing fine. They have their numbers, people. That's probably not representative of the, I don't know, smaller agency group, maybe the boutique agencies. But with the growing information gap, how prepared is the player side and their representatives

to even be able to fight back because this isn't a level playing field right now? I think there's something to that. fight back because this isn't a level playing field right now. I think there's something to that, but I also think part of it is that quite a few of the things that have historically not been valued in free agency still are not. I mean, you can argue that Jason Hayward's contract was the thing that said defensive metrics are, you know, we will pay for defense. But the truth of the matter is, if Jason Hayward were a 29-year-old who had come out there with the same sort of defensive metrics and the same sort of ability to play right field, I don't think he would have gotten half of what he did.

Jason Hayward got signed for what he did because he was 26, and the age is what mattered in free agency. So I think the ability to use those things, it's tough if you're an agent, I think, to go to a team and say what a team does to a player. Let's say Charlie, let's say Charlie Morton, for example. If Charlie Morton's agent had gone around to teams saying, we feel like Charlie, if given the right pitch mix, is going to succeed in these places. Do you think teams would respond and react to that as if the agent telling them what they don't know is a good thing? And I'm asking this hypothetically, but I think that there is a certain arrogance among teams that they just feel like they know what's best and they know what's right. And yeah, it allows them to go out and get bargains in free agency like Morton, for example. And I don't even know that Morton was a bargain per se, because I think the Astros were willing to pay more for him

than anybody else out there would have been. So you can argue that both Charlie Morton and the Astros maximize that contract because the market is what it is. It says what it says, and it says it will pay you X amount. At the same time, though, I just don't know that having that information would give a great advantage to the players. And I might be dead wrong about that. teams look at anybody outside of that team and cast aspersions on their ideas or thoughts or data and they trust themselves above anyone else. This might be too blanket a statement to make, but do you think it's a bad idea to have a player in charge of the players association? I mean, I can see the appeal in certain ways, but then on the other hand, we've all seen players vote for awards. It's not, it's not, you know, when players weigh in on what their team should do, it often doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And so from the player's perspective, I can see how it would be rational to say we want a chef in the clubhouse because once you get to a certain level of wealth,

which most of the players have attained at this point, it's not MLB owner wealth, but relative to most of us, it is very wealthy. Maybe at that point, your working conditions become your most important concern, how much space you have, how opulent your lifestyle is for the seven months or so that you are with your baseball team every day, I could see how that would be your most pressing concern and that you might not be looking at the larger picture and saying, well, this is going to affect future generations of players in this way. And I can't just act out of my own self-interest. I have to act as a group and what's best for all of us. And maybe someone who is coming from the background of being a player and having the same concerns

that players have and maybe not having the different training that you need to go toe-to-toe with Rob Manfred, for instance, maybe that is just a flawed idea from the start. I don't think that having a player lead the union is a bad idea. What I think is a bad idea is having anybody who does not have A a incredible leadership capabilities. And by leadership, I mean the ability to bring people together. This is literally called the union. And it's called that because all of the people are supposed to be buying into the ideas and be invested in it. I think you need incredible leadership and leadership is something that it's an intangible. And I also believe it is, it is so undervalued and good leaders. All look, all of us have had good bosses and bad bosses. Our lives are better when our bosses are good. We work harder. We appreciate things more. I think leadership is a real thing. So I think you need a good leader. I think you need a good negotiator. You know, just because you're a player doesn't mean you can or can't negotiate.

But if you are going to be a player, I think you need to be a really good negotiator. I think you need to be open-minded. I think you need to be logical. I think you need to be any number of things that generally speaking are represented better through people like lawyers who literally go to school for three years and are taught to think critically. And look, you can have a brilliant person who is a better critical thinker than anyone who's a better negotiator than anyone who happens to be a player. I'm not saying that players initially should be locked out of this idea that they can run the union because I think the history and the experience that they bring is a valuable thing. I also don't think it should outweigh all of those other elements, which to me are far

more important because they allow you to stay on the path of what's important and never to let the little things get in the way of the big ones. And I think that's what happened to the MLBPA in the recent negotiations. And this isn't just Tony Clark. I think it happened in 2012 with Mike Weiner as well. They took their eye off the ball. And is it possible that the owners will end up being too successful for their own good here? I mean, everyone had it pretty good for a couple decades there, right?

Owners were making lots of money. Team values were appreciating. Player salaries were skyrocketing. Everyone was making money. And maybe there was value to everyone in the equilibrium where neither side would really get a huge advantage over the other and each one would make some concessions, but nothing that would just change the paradigm of the market.

And if the owners are just stealing so many marches on the players that they're going to have the upper hand and the players are going to be bitter about it and for the first time in decades we're going to be talking seriously about a work stoppage that will relatively impoverish everyone, then maybe it would have been better not to win the short-term battle and in the end to just keep making money hand over fist. Yeah. This gets back to our first, you know, the first part of this conversation though. And these guys, once they got a taste of the cake, they wanted the whole damn thing. And look,

I don't get it because if I have something good going for me and it's going well for my partners too, I'm going to do everything within my power not to ruin it. But when you have 30 people who have divergent opinions, who have divergent backgrounds, who have divergent goals, you're going to get into a political game too. And that political game has a chance to get very dangerous because there are people who voted for Rob Manfred for commissioner and supported him. And then there are people who didn't. And inside the game, they know who Rob's friends are, and they know who's got his ear and who he's going to listen to. And I think the push from that faction to have Rob, and I think the implementation of

the pitch clock is going to be a perfect example of this. Major League Baseball doesn't need to do that. Historically, even though it's had the right to unilaterally implement rules a year after it has proposed them to the union, it hasn't done that on something as drastically different as a pitch clock. But here we are. There's going to be a pitch clock in 2018. Whether the union likes it or not, there is going to be one. And terms that have been proposed to the union are, you know, they've been given a choice. Either you do it our way, or we can have a negotiated way that's pretty similar to our way. And, you know, that's not sitting well with the players.

To go back a little bit to the quote that you had about Brian Cashman and suddenly being a good general manager. Look, I don't want to sit here and toot our own horns as people who are in the public sphere writing about baseball, but at the same time, it would be naive to suggest that the public analysis and writing has no impact on the game itself. So to what extent, I think it's fun. If you just look at this in isolation, I think it's more fun to look at teams and their more limited budgets and see it as a puzzle, right? And the lower the payroll, the more difficult the puzzle it is to solve.

And so it becomes more fun to think about how can the Rays make this work? How can the Pirates make this work? Trading the star players and bringing in cheap team control, all this stuff. It's fun to write about. And it's more fun to write about than rich team throws a lot of money at good player. You know, that's just, I don't know what you do with that article. You write it and then it's over. But I don't think any of that is done with sinister or anti-labor intentions. I would think that the overwhelming majority of baseball writers and public analysts lean pretty far to the left. So anyway, skipping the politics of it, to what

extent do you think that even if unintentionally the public analysis has far to the left. So anyway, skipping the politics of it, to what extent do you think that even if unintentionally, the public analysis has contributed to the market that we're seeing today? Well, have you ever asked yourself, am I asking the right question here? The question you're asking is, what can we do to put the pirates puzzle together, right? But what if that's the wrong question? What if the question is, why is the pirates puzzle what they tell us it's going to be? Why do the pirates have to have a particular sized budget in a particular year? And I asked this, I'm going to throw some numbers out here. I'm just going back to 2010. And I'm using the Forbes valuations here, because they're the best publicly available. I don't think that they're 100% accurate. I would say though that

some rounding errors here and there, I'd say they're probably about within 20% either way accurate. The Pirates in 2010, their franchise valuation was $289 million. Last year, Forbes had the Pirates for their overall franchise value as $1.25 billion. And this to me is going to be just as damning here. The Pirates since 2010 have had operating incomes, in other words, EBITDA, profit, whatever you want to call it, of upward $250 million. That means over the last eight seasons, they've made an average of $30 million a year just opening the gates. So when you're talking about a billion dollars gained in franchise value over those eight years, and another $250 million or so in cash flow on top

of that, shouldn't the question we're asking be, why do the pirates have to conduct themselves as the little sisters of the poor, rather than the pirates are stuck inside of this puzzle? How do we fill it out best? Yeah, we were talking to Travis Sotchick about that earlier this week. And, you know, Bob Nutting was saying that he was crying poor again, basically. And someone else, I think Bill Brink was pointing out how much money the pirates are getting from revenue sharing and from the mlb the the bam tech payments and that seems to almost pay for their payroll right now so i guess the problem is that the team's books are not out there in the way that the players books are we know the players contracts are announced as a matter of

course wasn't always the case, but has been the case for a while now. Whereas with teams, we're sort of back calculating and trying to figure these things out unless something leaks to Deadspin. We don't know for sure. And maybe our journalistic impulses to kind of couch things when we don't know the facts for sure and to say, well, they have to be making money, but we don't have the exact number. I guess that could be one reason. But then if you do take teams to task and owners to task for not spending, then you'll get people who will defend them and say, well, that's capitalism. In what other industry do we expect people to not operate at

a profit? Why shouldn't they? Sure. Why are you spending someone else's money? I get it. And then there's the comeback that teams are different from the typical business, that you're the steward of a community institution and you shouldn't be worried about making every last dollar if you're going to own a team. And that's sort of a persuasive argument too. So it goes back and forth. And that gets us back, I think, to one of the central points here and something that I did not realize. Because for a long time, I was pro-tanking. If this is the best way and the most efficient way to rebuild your franchise, then why wouldn't you do it?

I couldn't understand. Maybe the scope of my thinking was just too small and thinking, why wouldn't you do that? What I didn't realize was the larger implication that it has though. Because in a vacuum, one team, any team going out and doing it that way is I think still a smart thing. But when you have as many teams as you do that are out there and not spending and not trying to win, that becomes a problem for the entire sport. And that's what I think is as much as anything manifesting this free agent market the way that it is right now. You've got a third of baseball out there that just has no intention of spending or really trying to win this year. And that might be on the low side. I mean, you know, I don't include the Mets in there. They

went out and they, they got Jay Bruce. They, you know, they paid for Anthony Swarczak, but aside from that, they haven't done a whole lot. You've got the Yankees and the Dodgers. Yankees spent on Stanton. So it's tough to put them in there, but the Dodgers haven't added any salary this year. And, and you've got all these teams whose priorities, it seems like, has to do more financially than winning. It's like I said in the story, winning is not an imperative, it's an option. I think as far as tanking goes, certainly the whole stripping to the lowest possible payroll idea, I don't know if I'd say it's fallen out of favor, but that I think would get a harsher reaction now if you kind of went the whole Astros and got down

to about $25 million, because there's still plenty of room. I don't think anyone would argue with the idea of trading veterans for young players if you just don't have a competitive window. That makes all kinds of sense, but it would be a lot more difficult, I think, now to sell. I mean, you look at the Phillies and you could say, well, Carlos Santana is a weird fit there. But on the other hand, if he didn't have a market otherwise, what's the harm? You know, probably a few draft spots isn't going to change the Phillies outlook too meaningfully much. And now they have a good player to slot in. But anyway, that's kind of peripheral to the point I was going to ask you about. But if you're saying with the pirates or with cases like the pirates, it's a matter of asking the right question. And I agree with you. And I think that the undercurrent with all of the pirates talk right now is, well, this they didn't necessarily

have to be in this situation. But what would be as a public facing writer, what would be your solution to that? If anything other than every single article you write about almost any team, the question is, why aren't they spending more? Because to a team, they can all afford to do it. I think the question to ask any team is, how are you trying to win? And the argument that has been made is that we're trying to put ourselves in the best position to win in the future. I'm curious, though, how many teams are looking toward the future and how many teams are looking at right now and whether major league baseball is altogether concerned about that balance in any particular year. And I, you know, I hate to be someone who gets caught up

in prisoner of the moment and thinking that right now is the only time that matters. But if you're looking at these different teams' windows, I don't think that suddenly it has all come together coincidentally in one year where a number of teams happen to be at the same place at the same time. Because the notion that the New York Yankees are going to be anything but what they are right now going forward when they have Judge and Sanchez and as many young players as they do under control, that's not changing. And even though the Giants find themselves in a pretty precarious position contractually and the Red Sox may not be able to go out or may not be willing rather to go out, I need to get that out of my lexicon, by the way. I find myself saying may not be able to. No, they're all able to. It's a matter of

willingness. And that's what this gets back to. What is the desire to win and just how accountable are fans willing to hold teams to winning? Is it a reasonable thing for a ball club to say there are going to be multiple years where we do not try to win? I think that's where we are right now. And the answer has become yes. Is that right though? Is that right for the sport? Is that right for the fans? Is that right for the cities? Is that right for the teams? So what is the blueprint to avoid all of this the cities? Is that kind of concession? Is it having free agency start earlier in players' careers, for instance? Can I come back on the show in like three months?

because I'm literally trying, like that to me is, there are going to be a bunch of secondary and tertiary stories that come off of this first one that I wrote. But that right there, you know, outlining a feasible, rational, reasonable economic system in baseball is something that I've been wanting to do for a long time. And I say it to agents and I say it to executives. And up until this point, I didn't think there was really any reason for it. But for years now, I've been saying to them, why the hell does baseball operate in a system in which guys pass their best years, generally speaking, are getting paid the most money. And how can that be fixed? And I didn't think it was going to come to a head like it has, but here we are. And it's time for that story. And already, I've gotten... I will throw this out there and I will give credit to Len Casper. And part of me

loves this idea and part of me despises this idea. But we were texting yesterday and Len, for those who aren't familiar, is for my money, one of the two or three best play-by-play guys in baseball. He's a Chicago Cubs play-by-play announcer. And Len said, my idea is to incentivize teams to win through the draft. The first team out of the playoffs, the team with the best record that does not make the playoffs, he said, gets the number one pick in the draft. And the next best record gets number two, and it goes all the way down with the playoff teams drafting in the bottom 10 or 12 or whatever it's going to be. But teams are not going to tank if that's the case. Teams are going to do everything they can to win at that point.

And maybe that kills the trade deadline. So it's not worth it at that point. But I love the idea of putting incentives in place that encourage teams to win. Because I think the more teams are encouraged to win, the more they're going to go out and spend. And I think once they go out and spend money, labor relations are going to be great. spend. And I think once they go out and spend money, labor relations are going to be great. Yeah, it's tough because every measure you propose, you could come up with a way in which it would hurt. If you're talking about, say, earlier free agency, for instance, then you

start to worry about competitive balance implications. And is that going to favor the rich teams? And I mean, this is where we were in baseball 20, 25 years ago. And they changed things to address that problem, or at least that was one of the goals that they had. And it worked, I think. I think you could say that that worked, that competitive balance hasn't been such a big problem, that there has been more parity, but there... Yeah, but do you think that competitive balance is a function of revenue sharing? Or do you think competitive balance is a function of the fact that baseball is just a really weird sport? Yeah.

I'd argue more of the latter, to be honest. And I think as teams have gotten quote unquote smarter and they've started to minimize the inefficiencies that were inherent in the game i mean look at look at who made the playoffs last year outside of cleveland they were all the big market teams i mean the final four teams were you know chicago los angeles houston and in new york the four biggest cities in the country yeah this. This is a sticky, sticky situation. It is. And I'm, and you know what, I'm so like, honestly, I'm so glad we're talking about this because it's heavy stuff. Like I, I've been working on this for a month right now. And, and my, my poor wife will tell you, I was, I was up, you know, a bunch of nights in a row until

three o'clock in the morning, trying to pour over every sentence in this story because I felt like it was important and I didn't want to screw it up and I didn't want there to be logical gaps in there. And I didn't want someone to be able to look at this and say, well, you got this wrong. Does that mean everything else is wrong? Because putting this puzzle together and trying to figure out how everything ties into one another, it's not an easy thing to do, but it's a vitally important thing to do and to talk about it, to understand, because it's like the last line of the story said, all that's at stake is the future of baseball. And I think it's true. I think baseball, for all the things we talk about during the season and all of the wondrous

quirks that Jeff Sullivan is better than anyone at pointing out and that I love seeing all the time. None of that exists if the economics aren't amenable to both sides, because the game's not being played then. Yeah, it's important that you get every single detail right in the story, because otherwise you're fake news, right? But I guess even, I don't want to just sit here and talk about like the Len Casper proposal, which I like. And I've heard it in a few places before. And I know that this is still what, three months early before you feel sufficiently informed to talk about all this. But even in that particular system, what that would do is seemingly incentivize teams to maybe spend more in free agency. But that does nothing to shift money toward the players who are most valuable right the young pre-arb or arbitration players and how do you how do you manage to get more money in the hands of the players who are most valuable because like look right now jake arietta is a free agent and i don't think i'm being dishonest when i say that jake arietta scares the crap out of me as a free agent i think there are a lot of warning signs i wouldn't want to make a big

investment it's true it's absolutely true arieta was dramatically underpaid during his peak, and he wants to be compensated for that now. But of course, why no team is incentivized to pay him for that. So how do you do something to get more money? This completely overlooks the fact that it's the minor leaguers who need to make money anyway in the first place. That's a separate conversation. But how do you get more money in the hands of the players who are earning it?

Because teams are never going to want to spend more the players who are earning it because teams are never going to want to spend more on players who are in decline. I mean, I've heard a couple of proposals from people the last couple days. And one of them is that you have a percentage pool for pre-arbitration and arbitration eligible players, just pre-free agency players, essentially, based on the number of players and the service time that they have and that they get paid according to their performance. So literally, you have performance standards in place. And I don't know if you would use percentiles to rank them or whatever it may be. I don't know if you would have a ceiling in terms of what those

players are capable of making, but they make how they produce. That's one way. Another way that I thought interesting to sort of juice free agency a little bit and get players out there younger is the idea that you have a standard offer to arbitration eligible players based on the number of the qualifying offer. If you're a super two, you either get offered 20% of the qualifying offer or you're a free agent. If you're a three plus 40%, if you're a four plus 60%, if you're a five plus 80%, the problem is this harms the best players because their salaries are limited and there's a ceiling on that.

Whereas guys like relief pitchers are going to be free agents after probably two or three seasons, depending on their value, unless we're talking to Kenley Jansen or Craig Kimbrell. And you might have a flooding of relief pitchers into the market that way. I didn't like that idea all that much, frankly, but I think there are so many novel ideas out there, which is why I want to canvas the game as much as I can, hear all of them, figure out what I think are the best ones, run those by other people, get feedback on there, and then hopefully come up with a way that baseball can function that would have all sides invested in it and all sides happy because that ultimately is the goal.

All right. Well, I guess we'll let you go get started on that then. By the way, don't hold me to three months because i'm gonna be in korea i'm gonna be in korea for a month for the olympics and then spring training and then i gotta prepare for my fantasy drafts like you're gonna i have kids like you know these are busy times man so maybe three months is optimistic you get you get three and a half months whenever you figured out how to fix baseball we will will talk to you again. We'll read the article at Yahoo Sports. We'll see you tweet it at Jeff Passan. Everyone else can do that too.

Jeff, thank you. Always a pleasure to have you on. Pleasure is always my voice. Thanks for letting me nerd out for a little while. Okay, two quick things before we go. First is that Jeff Passan, who is always reporting something, reported not long after we talked about the details of the negotiations for a pitch clock and a restriction on mound visits, which he says have been hampered by the tensions between the league and the union that we discussed today. Evidently, the pitch clock that MLB plans to implement unilaterally after the players

have rejected a compromise proposal will have a 20-second pitch clock with the bases empty and runners on. There will be one warning per game if the pitcher takes too long. Then there will be an automatic ball after that. The restrictions on mound visits, pretty strict. Anytime a coach, manager, or player visits a pitcher on the mound or a pitcher leaves the mound to confer with a player, it counts as a visit. Upon the second visit to the pitcher in the same inning, he must exit the game. I like it. Get your meetings out of the way between innings, people. There's also a between batters timer, 30 seconds. The league is hoping to shave 10 minutes off the average game time. We will see,

but Jeff Sullivan and I are certainly in favor of these measures. The other thing I wanted to mention here on yesterday's email show, we did a stat blast segment on the best baseball names, the names in baseball history that have produced the most combined war. We mentioned that the most common name in baseball history is Bill, that the name that has produced the most war in baseball history is Mike. I wanted to add a couple things here that I didn't mention yesterday. First is that I think we undersold Willie as a baseball name. It is not one of the more common baseball names. There have been only 51 Willys at 78th most all time. However, if you limit it to names that have had at least 10 players,

and then look at the war produced per name, I mentioned this on the show yesterday, it goes Babe, Barry, Willie. The thing is, the top 10 are all pretty close to that minimum if you set the minimum at 10 names, as you'd expect. The most valuable ones have all had pretty close to 10 names. But Willie is the outlier there. 51 Willies, and yet Willies have produced 14.6 war per Willie. Obviously, you've got Mays, McCovey, Stargell, Keeler, Randolph, McGee, Davis, Wilson, goes on and on.

Bloomquist, not one of the best Willies, bringing this average down. But I've got gotta say, the name Willy really punching above its weight. And the other purpose for this update is to give you the worst baseball names, which someone on Twitter asked me about today. Again, if you set this to at least 10 players with this name, the good news is that there is no sub-replacement level name. However, some have come pretty close. There are 10 names with at least 10 players that have produced less than one war per name. All right, starting with the 10th worst, we've got Angel or Angel, then Stephen, Archie, Carl with a K, William, those Williams should have switched to Willie, Robert, Brent,

Mark with a C, Patty, number two, and then the worst baseball name, Jesus or Jesus. 0.1 war per Jesus, with 16 Jesuses all time. They have combined for just 1.8 war cumulatively in more than 14,000 played appearances or batters faced. And again, this spreadsheet is online in the show page at Fangraphs for episode 1164, or in the Facebook group. You can support this podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Five listeners have already done so include Mark, uh-oh, Mark with a C, bad baseball name, good Patreon supporter name, Mark Gunther, James Akoya-Corin, Joseph Blumenthal, Will Hickman, and Mariana Sanders. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild we're almost at 7 000 members

maybe you will be number 7 000 you can also rate and review and subscribe to effectively wild on itunes thanks to dylan higgins for editing assistance please keep your questions and comments for me and jeff coming via podcast at fangraphs.com or the patreon messaging system i am actually taking a little trip of my own, so I will not be home on Monday. We don't know if we'll have a working government on Monday, but we will have an episode of Effectively Wild that will be pre-recording. So have a wonderful weekend, and we will talk to you early next week. I think I give a lot of problems my consideration But not for me, it always seemed to fit for someone else Why do people always seem to just be on vacation? What do I get from it? I don't get anything at all I'm like a trash can hauling all the information

And every single time I need me feel like to be told It's a larger solution, it's a larger solution