Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1168: Winning is for Losers

Episode Date: January 27, 2018

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan talk about the Brewers’ trade for Christian Yelich and signing of Lorenzo Cain, how the Brewers stack up in the NL Central, whether they’re the new model for a rebuilding team, how Yelich and Cain could perform in their new park, what the Cain contract says about the slow-moving market, […]

🎵 To make the world famous, let's make a loser out of it. Hello. Hello. And welcome to episode 1168, or 1168, of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our many Patreon supporters who are wonderful, each and every one of them. They are all different. They are all the same. I am Geoff Sullivan, a Fangraphs, joined as always by ben lindbergh of the ringer i guess hello again yes

hello i'm still here how are you i'm doing well we have actual baseball to talk about yeah we do and uh we we booked a guest before we do that was gonna happen so uh in the uh the latter bit of this podcast we will talk to baseball prospectuses patrick dubuque about how caring about winning sucks but at the first half of this podcast we'll talk about a team that's trying to win which is exciting so let's talk about the milwaukee brewers who all of a sudden on thursday decided i'm not going to say let's go for it but let's at least begin the process of going forward the brewers of course traded a lot of prospects four of them specifically for christian yellich and then almost immediately thereafter news broke that they were signing lorenzo kane which means i was looking at the

last three years of uh wins above replacement on fangraphs among outfielders lorenzo kane ranks fourth christian yelich ranks 11th these are two top 10 top 15 outfielders probably the two best players on the brewers now and they got them on the same day. That's pretty cool. Yeah, it is. Yeah. I've been doing these top 10 rankings for each position for MLB Network over the last couple of weeks and over the next couple of weeks. And I had, let's see, Jelic and Kane were both eligible at center field. So I had Jelic at fourth and Kane at sixth, I think, maybe going from memory among all centerfielders in baseball. So obviously they're not both going to be playing centerfield regularly now, but that is maybe part of the appeal here. But yeah, these are really good players.

And as you had pointed out in a recent post about the Brewers, they didn't really have any star players. Like one of the reasons why they were successful last year Was they didn't have a whole lot of bad players Or bad positions They had a lot of guys who were providing Some sort of minimum level of competence So that they were avoiding just purely sub-replacement play And they had a bunch of guys kind of come out of nowhere

And be productive despite not having big names And so now they have pretty big names These are legitimately good players And you've got Domingo Santana in the mix too so this is immediately at the top of the list of best outfields in baseball or very close to the top of that list and it's just exciting a to see a team do something period but b to see the Brewers be that team because we're so conditioned to seeing a fairly small number of teams make the major moves and to see the brewers be the one to do this to go for it is really refreshing and of course they're not probably finished so they could still use some

help in the rotation they have about 13 different major league outfielders on the roster at present so there's there are moves to be made they've been linked linked to Jake Arrieta and Hugh Darvish at this point. They probably won't sign either one, but I think it seems pretty obvious that they're lined up to trade outfield depth for starting pitching. Maybe a second basarns in the front office and the Brewers rebuild not bottoming out. And look, at risk of saying, hey, the Brewers have won the offseason, let's skip that stuff. But I don't know how good the Brewers are going to be in 2018 and henceforth. But they were 82 and 80 in 2014. If I recall, that was the year they were kind of in the hunt to win the division for a while. Then they bottomed out later on. And then 2015 and 2016, they took deliberate steps back they began the rebuild and then last year they won 86 games and and this

year clearly they think they're good enough to finish above 500 and when this is all said and done the brewers might have handled their rebuild in a far less painful way than even the astros and the cubs who granted they'd won their world series so they got the cherry on top but right we could have a new example of a model rebuild right here in the Milwaukee Brewers who are not they're not a team like the Cubs that has that amount of resources now granted the Astros don't have that many resources compared to other teams so you know Astros are right there as maybe a model rebuild as well but the Brewers did it in an even less painful way which is remarkable yeah definitely I don brewers did it in an even less painful way which is remarkable yeah definitely i i don't know whether it will pay off in the way that the cubs

and astros rebuilds did but there's definitely something to be said for never having to go through the 50 and 60 win seasons and i don't know how many teams i mean if the brewers don't win a world series with this team that they've constructed, then I guess most fans and most future front offices would rather have the Astros and Cubs rebuild in its entirety than the Brewers won. But certainly up to the point of getting good again, you'd much rather have the Brewers' path than the Astros' or Cubs' path. It's maybe even harder to replicate, I think. That's one of the reasons why I wrote about it last year is that it was so impressive that the Brewers seemed to be going from bad to good again without really having a stage of being very bad. So that's tough to do. And I think they

should be recognized for that if, in fact, they don't take a step back. And they may have been in line to take a step back, but now with Jelic and with Kane and maybe with some pitcher or pitchers that they add, it's pretty easy to see them kind of holding course there. And obviously, they had to give up a lot here. And David Lorela had a post on Fangraphs just a couple days ago. He attended some Harvard panel of some sort with various Harvard alums in front offices. There are a lot of those. So there were a bunch of GMs on this panel. And I think John Marossi, a Harvard alum himself, was hosting and made some joke about they could maybe make a Christian Yellich trade right there on the stage. And I think the Rockies GM, Jeff Breidich, was there too.

right there on the stage and i think the rockies gm jeff bridich was there too so he asked michael hill who was also there what it would take for yellich to go to the rockies essentially and hill said you know back up the truck or something like that and that's basically what the brewers did here they traded what their first third sixth and 21st best prospects according to fangraphs for yelich and you know for good reason yelich is really good has some room to get better is under control for several years at a very team friendly contract so a lot of surplus value here probably more than any of the other players that the marlins have already traded this winter so this is what you have to give up. And this is a trade that you can't really criticize the Marlins for, at least in the same way that we criticize some of their other trades. I mean, yes, the major league product is going to be terrible and unwatchable. Oh my God. It's really going to be bad, but at least they got back what

I think they should have gotten back here for a player of Christian Jelic's caliber. And as we talked about recently, they essentially had to trade him after slashing and burning everything else because that relationship seemed to be pretty irreparable. And so I like the outfielders, the Marlins got back in this trade might be their best outfielders now. Like I, Lewis Brinson, you know, is a center fielder. Monty Harrison is a center fielder. The Marlins' current depth chart on their site, which has not been updated yet,

maybe because probably the person who updates their depth chart has been traded to some other team's website maintenance, but their depth chart right now, left field, Derek Dietrich, center field, Braxton Lee, right field, Magneris, Magneris, Sierra. I don't even know how to say it for sure, which is a reflection of what he has accomplished in the majors thus far in his 64 career plate appearances. So they just don't really have any outfielders on their roster right now. So they got outfielders back, which seems like a good thing.

Feeling good about that Rafael Ortega minor league. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, because I mean, the Marlins had one of the best outfields in baseball, if not the best. And now they have gone from best to worst, basically. And Brewers have maybe gone to close to best or best. So I mean, yeah, I think there's a lot to like about this from the Brewers' perspective, and they still don't project to be the best

or even second best team in this division. And I have a sense that the projections are lowballing them, and I think you have that same sense. Do you have an explanation for why you think that's so? Well, I think their better would be the explanation. I know. When Fangraphs projections are are complete they will also fold in the zips projection system i don't want to go

into too much detail about this but there are two projection systems that get featured on fangraphs first what you see all year long is steamer and then by a point late in the off season then zips gets folded in and so it's like a 50 50 blend and i think that steamer is generally more conservative than zips is long story short the zips is higher on the brewers than steamer is so when that gets folded in the brewers projection will improve and i i just i think the projections are way low on someone like domingo santana i think that they're low on on yelich and kane a little bit i think that they're low on the pitching staff i like josh hater a lot i like cory kniebel a lot the steamer doesn't think the brewers are terrible but i do think it is conservative about some of the players that i think have made market improvements now at the same time it's important to caution maybe i'm biased maybe i mean i kind of bandwagon the

brewers a little bit last year clearly i have some sort of extra affection for them just because they hire august fagerstrom and i like august fagerstrom and so i think the brewers are exciting plus they're just like a potential antidote to the Cubs and the Cardinals, which is exciting because it's like a fresh new team. So, yeah, it's very possible that a year from now I will be looking back and kicking myself or thinking that the Brewers are better than they were because, hey, Steamer said they were bad the whole time. Why would you have supported this? So maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. By the way, this is not the best move for his career, but I guess the move was made in part because of his career. He could be the next one out the door.

I don't know what he's going to do, but he could be a starting center fielder. One thing that I do quite like about the Brewers rebuild, again, this is presuming that the Brewers rebuild is entering its final stage, which is getting good. And again, we don't know how good the Brewers are going to be. But when you look back at the Astros' rebuild, they took Carlos Correa first overall. They took Marco Pell first overall. They took Brady Aitken. Well, they tried to take Brady Aitken first overall. Kyle Tucker was a fifth pick.

Alex Bregman was a second overall pick. Astros were there at the top of the draft list. Of course, the Cubs took Chris Bryant right after the Astros took Mark Appel Kyle Schwarber was drafted fourth you had the Astros and the Cubs sort of bottoming out and taking advantage of their high draft picks but when you look at the Brewers they have not as I scroll here they have not had a draft pick from the last three years make the majors yet now granted that's only three years of drafting so that's not completely unheard of but in 2015 the brewers first pick was 15th in 2016 they did pick fifth and then 46th and then in 2017 they picked ninth so of course the brewers have had two top

10 draft picks the last two years because they were not very good but the brewers did not go all out to try to draft first or second or third and they didn't unless i'm missing something they didn't go hog wild on the international market and throw money at a bunch of players and go over the threshold which i know you can't do anymore but the brewers again as you wrote about at the ringer they didn't tank they rebuilt which is different they traded their their veterans, which makes sense. You trade your short-term valuable veterans when you are not ready to win. I don't think that that is arguable.

The difference between rebuilding and tanking is that with tanking, you just strip all the way beyond the studs. You just tear the entire structure down, and then you rebuild from the ground. Whereas I think the Brewers kind of held it together a little bit, and they kept the rebuild from the ground whereas i think the brewers kind of held it together a little bit and they kept the product from being awful and that seems like at least from the overall baseball plus fan perspective seems like it's a more appealing model than going all the way because again brewers only had one top five draft pick. And to this point, Corey Ray has not been all that great in the minor leagues. So credit again to the Brewers, a modest budget, small market franchise that didn't tank and is now aiming at least to contend with the Cubs for the three or four or five seasons ahead. Yeah. And the Brewers still probably have room to spend.

I don't know that they will spend it on a top free agent starter, although they've been linked to some, but they have had, you know, $100 million payrolls in the past and they don't now and they won't for a while because they, I mean, they must, if not lead the league, be very close to the league just in total team control years because they're young and they've got guys locked up for a long time now, including Jelic and Kane, and most of them pretty affordable at this point. So they do have the ability to spend. And so if you're worried about, say, Lorenzo Kane and his age and a five-year contract, well, first of all, I think Kane is really good and hasn't really shown much sign of decline. He's still very fast. His plate discipline has improved in some ways.

He's still very capable of playing center field. And, you know, I think his skills just haven't eroded really yet. And obviously they will, but that's okay. I mean, we usually talk about teams like the Yankees and the Dodgers being able to absorb that contract, which is why you don't see the Brewers signing a lot of guys to that type of deal. But because of the way that the rest of their roster is constructed, it's okay if the back half of this contract for Kane is not all that rewarding for them. They can handle that. about Kane, but both of these guys, not only have they been excellent in their surroundings for the last several years, but they have maybe been hurt by their surroundings, certainly in just the surface stats. But even if you look at the park-adjusted stats, as you pointed out, Jelic has been far better on the road, which obviously is unusual because he's hurt by playing in Miami and Kane was better on the road last year I think not for his career but pretty close these are parks that really haven't helped those guys

either in the surface stats or even after you apply the park adjustments just because maybe you know using a generic park adjustment doesn't reflect the fact that say Marlins Park is is really tough on a hitter like yelich especially yeah the marlins altered the dimensions in right center and center field some years ago i forgot how many years ago it was in their ballpark but nevertheless you look at christian yelich for his career at home he has had a 113 wrc plus pretty good on the road 128 very good he is uh he's ranked a if i recall what it was on the road yelich has ranked in the 94th percentile among all hitters and so it's easy to look at yelich i see a lot

of parallels between his offensive game and eric cosmer which is i don't know if that's damning with faint praise or praising with faint damn or something but he's he hits a lot of grand balls he's got the exit velocity thing we've been over this a million times. StatKast and Christian Jelic just make for a wonderful, albeit argumentative pair. I don't know. So you could say Jelic has all this upside. But the point is that at least when he hasn't been in this home run and often suppressing ballpark, he's already been a really good hitter. So it's not even clear that he has to get better. I don't want to make too much of home road splits because you can't just ignore the home numbers.

But he is going to a far friendlier ballpark. He hits the ball hard. He does hit the ball in the air. He's made progress in that regard over the past couple seasons. He's a really good hitter. He's not like a Hall of Fame level hitter necessarily. He's not the world's greatest base runner. He's not the world's greatest defensive center fielder he seems like a player who could conceivably end up underrated just because he doesn't stand out at anything but on the other hand he does stand out in terms of like his batting averages which casual fans are still gonna eat up and of course playing milwaukee that's going to be good for him so well maybe not for his recognition league wide but it will at least be good for his statistics and so you get guys like yelich and kane who are sort of quiet star level players and the trouble with kane is just that he is going to be 32 years old and as good as he's been for almost his entire major league career certainly for the last several seasons i remember feeling really confident about alex gordon when he was around this time i remember feeling confident

about sean figgins around this time of course you remember the bad ones more than you remember the good ones but you know players just become less predictable when they get to this point and i don't know what kane is going to be clearly the brewers offered him the biggest contract and that's not what you expect ever in any market period yeah but yeah he's good now yeah i would expect kane will be good for at least i don't know the next three seasons and yell it should be good for all five you throw in the rest of the roster and they could really use Jimmy Nelson making a full return. But if they get something like that, boy, this team is fine. Yep. The important thing is that Kane got 10 million more than MLB Trade Rumors projected him to get. And I drafted him in our offseason free agent

contracts draft. So racking up 10 more million for me. And that is interesting in a larger sense, just because at this point, it seems like every free agent move is treated as a referendum on this market and collusion. And, you know, I think Kane got, if not, at least as much as he was projected to get, if not more, even before we knew how slow this market was going to get. So, you know, not that I was taking the collusion talk all that seriously, but at least here's an example. You know, at least some of the moves that have been made, the signings that we have seen, the dollars haven't been way out of whack from what we expected necessarily.

It's like guys aren't signing, but when they do sign, the dollars aren't so out of line with expectations that it adds to your suspicion that something nefarious is going on. So anyway, it's probably not wise to treat any one move as an indicator of the market as a whole. You have a chat to get to. Well, actually, I'll stop you right there. I don't. I'm actually taking that. I'm going to Seattle for a non-job related baseball meeting with the mayor. So I have a few extra minutes here anyway here anyway and yeah it's interesting you bring up the uh i don't know if you do but we're still talking anyway yes it is interesting you bring up kane and and the free agent money and all this talk there's just so

much constant focus on the market which is good it's something that should be examined and it generally doesn't get enough attention i don't think in the public sphere but yeah with kane signing for more money than he was expected jd martinez we we pretty much know he has a five-year 125 million dollar offer out there you darvish is probably going to end up around 130 or 150 million dollars as a guy who's had tommy john surgery seven year big yeah yeah big contract out there it's it wouldn't surprise me if the money is still there but you realize in an office like this teams they don't have that same incentive to hurry up and you wonder if teams are just realizing like wait this affects the players more than it affects us now granted that's not great for the players it's not

overall optimal treatment of other human beings players want to know where their home is going to be but from the team's perspective there's really not that much of a rush especially when you have these players who you know are going to be holding out for the most money. If you are in a hurry to sign Yu Darvish or JD Martinez at the start of the offseason, you're probably going to be paying more than you need to. So there's just another difference of incentives here where I still convince that at the end of the day, this free agent market is going to look numerically like a normal free agent market clearly it's the timing that's weird but why have teams needed to hurry in the past and i i just don't think that

there is that convincing of a reason but more to the point jeff passon has written about the idea of a free agent spring training training camp uh which is something that existed what was it 1995 for players who were unsigned and and that was a camp that I think featured something like 70 players that eventually dwindled to about 20 or 15 before it was a complete but this is not something that we've seen in the I would say modern day not something a lot of people would recall but fun idea because you frequently will have like hold out free agents under Scott Boris working out at the Boris facility or whatever but you frequently will have like holdout free agents under scott boris working out at the boris facility or whatever but you don't have all of these free agents working out together so it's going to be interesting to see if this actually materializes or if teams just kind of

hurry up and sign a bunch of guys the next three weeks because who knows maybe kane really will bust the dam so to speak that's not an expression i don't care we've probably talked enough the brewer is trying to be good yeah we we can talk about the free agent camp idea maybe more next time because I'm actually writing about that. But last thought about the Brewers, maybe what do you think will happen? How do you think their outfield will shake out? We've already received a listener email about Ryan Braun and whether this means he will finally be traded and whether he can be traded. Of course he can. Everyone can be traded. Of course he can. Everyone can be traded if the terms are right. But the odds of that happening, you also

have Brett Phillips, you have Broxton. Can they move multiple guys from that group? Should they? Can they get the caliber of pitcher that they seem to want to get from a trade like that? Or do you think, I mean, I don't want to say that like these moves will be wasted, certainly if they don't now sign Darvish or Arrieta or someone like, the temptation is certainly there, especially because the Cubs have been linked to those guys too. So if the Brewers could get one of those guys, deprive the Cubs of one of those guys at the same time,

then that roster starts to look pretty imposing even just for 2018. But these moves were not purely 2018 moves and the Brewers have pitching prospects on the way and lots of good young talented players and should just get better through the passage of time. So maybe they will just wait and if things happen to fall into place this season, great. And if not, they'll have better chances down the road. But do you think that they will shell out for one of these guys now or do you think they'll be able to get someone good back for the surplus outfield talent that they have now yeah it's really difficult to forecast exactly what the next move is going to be clearly the brewers now have a whole bunch of options and it's difficult you talk about the difficulty of trading ryan braun who

has his contract and he's also very close with the Brewers owner. And then you have Domingo Santana, who is just a good player, I would say a better player than Ryan Braun today. Brewers are aware of that. I know at least before he joined the Brewers organization and went silent, August Fagerstrom was quite a fan of Domingo Santana. He wrote him up a few times at Fangraphs comparing him to George Springer. George Springer, good player, World Series champion. So on the one hand, you have a Brewers team that would probably be optimal with an outfield of Jelic, Kane, and Santana, with Braun sort of out of the mix, assuming he's not the new first baseman. But I wonder if this could be a situation where the Brewers acknowledge Santana is quite good and he's controlled for a while but maybe you can make a parallel move where you you

trade him to a team with a a young similarly talented and controlled starting pitcher maybe some team that has a lot of pitchers doesn't have enough outfield power now i don't know who that team is you know like i don't know if it's worth trading domingo santana for like julio tehran or something but i would not be surprised if the Brewers made a very interesting trade of Santana for a similar starting pitcher but honestly I don't know I don't know how Brett Phillips is valued league-wide I don't know how Key and Brockson are valued league-wide and I don't know their willingness to move Ryan Braun and his money so very interested and hoping because I'll be out of town that nothing happens this weekend all right, we will reconvene next week.

But first, we have guests because we don't bump guests when the brewers make moves. We are too loyal to do that. So we'll be back in just a moment with Patrick Dubuque of Baseball Prospectus. And though I knew I'd have to choose To welcome you back

Or push you away But Wayne, we're not there yet And though I'm losing the bet And so shifting gears from talking about a team that is trying to win seemingly very much to a conversation about teams that might not be trying to win or at least what's going on in Pittsburgh, I wanted to talk to Patrick Dubuuque author at baseball prospectus lovely person and he recently wrote an article titled a no win situation talking about i don't know really the proper phrasing but fans being sort of stuck on the concept of winning and how winning can sort

of corrupt the fan experience so patrick hello hello. Hi, thanks for having me on, guys. How are you? I'm okay. That's great. How do you feel about winning? When I talk to Patrick, or at least read Patrick in any circumstance, you tend to make me think about things in a way that nobody else does. And in this case and before, you've expressed on several occasions, maybe this is just a consequence of being a Mariners fan, but you have explained that winning can sort of ruin the experience of baseball. It very much is, Jeff.

It is entirely because of that. Well, then, please explain. If you had to offer sort of a, I don't know, like a 11th grade speech, you know, you have a little oration on the problems inherent of following a team to experience their winning. What would be your thesis? I did a really terrible job on my 11th grade speeches. All right. So I would say, first of all, as I understand that if you care about baseball only because of winning and only because of chasing championships, then you will be miserable all the time, except for one fleeting

moment where you'll be happy before you decide you need to win another one and you will be miserable all the time, except for one fleeting moment where you'll be happy before you decide you need to win another one. And you'll be miserable again. And it's not a way to live. And if you're a Marist fan, you won't even get that moment. And you really have to question why you're devoting your time and energy to such a thing. There are many things to like about baseball. And there are many things to enjoy. Many of them are not part of some grand narrative, but are just simple moments of baseball hitting the tops of people's heads and bouncing over walls. I mean, there's all sorts of things that you can like baseball for that aren't about your team doing the best it possibly can in a very rigid set of circumstances. And I think one of the big problems with winning today, and I think it was we've searched for all the billions of things that have gone wrong this

offseason that have led us to this dark path to where we are now. Collusion, sabermetrics, you know, all the things that combine. I think one of the problems that we don't talk about enough is the effect of sabermetrics on fans. And usually we have that conversation and that conversation is RBI is law. And that's pretty much the extent of it. And you have the good fans and the bad fans or the Luddites and the modern ones. But I think there's also a bigger problem with the idea of waiting till next year. And that's one of the charms of baseball is that we can no matter what happens,

no matter how bad things are, there's always a reason you can always pick a guy or two guys or maybe a trend and say, that's why next year is going to be better. We're going to we're going to figure it out. Things are going to it's is going to be better. We're going to we're going to figure it out. Things that we're going to it's all going to come together. We're going to have a magical run. And I think that when the modern world of projections, both teams and fans are realizing that that's just simply not true and that there's a lot of time that hope that we had is just gone.

And so now we're expected. It's not next year. It's it's next window. And in the meantime, you know, sit and wait and don't complain. Yeah's not next year. It's next window. And in the meantime, sit and wait and don't complain. Yeah, that's interesting that Joshian made a point in his newsletter yesterday about the Hall of Fame, actually. Sorry, Jeff, I told you we wouldn't talk about the Hall of Fame for another 10 months. And here we are again. That's all right. I'm not paying attention. But his point was, basically, he was wondering whether it's more enjoyable to follow Hall of Fame season now that we essentially know who's going to get in before the actual day comes because of the work of Ryan Thibodeau and before him, others who have tracked the public ballots.

And I mean, we want to know and I enjoy seeing all that data. I enjoy following it in real time. And yet there's next to no suspense. I mean, you could have wondered maybe if Trevor Hoffman was going to sneak in or not, but we had a really good, clear idea of what the levels of support informed. But definitely when it comes to the actual moment, I just something that's thrown down on us the day of the voting, we feel like we can kind of talk more directly to the people who are involved. And it feels like fans are more involved, at least in an indirect, angry, buzzing kind of way in what happens. Whereas with off-seasons feels in teams and how teams are running right now, it actually feels like fans have less effect on how things are being run

than ever before. Yeah. Well, it's difficult to get out of the mindset that you're talking about, because I think everyone starts out caring about winning primarily, right? And some people, some percentage of the fans gain this perhaps deeper level of appreciation for the game, for the sport as a whole, for these little moments, for it being about the journey instead of the destination, et cetera. I don't know that I would have gotten to that next level of appreciation, if you want to call it that, if not for working on baseball-related things. I started out as a fan like anyone else. I lived and died with one team. I paid attention to other teams, but still ultimately what dictated my mood at the end of a game was whether that team won or lost. And that seems like a long time ago to me now, but I think that the majority of fans probably that is their primary allegiance and it can be tough, I guess, especially if you don't have the time to appreciate baseball that maybe we do since it's part of our professional lives. So if you can

only devote so much time to baseball every day, you're watching your team and there are a lot of fans who never branch out beyond that. And for a lot of them, that is probably satisfying and it works. And I mean, people keep coming back to baseball and being baseball fans, even though most teams do not win the World Series in a given year. So I guess they are deriving some satisfaction from that. So Ben, do you have sports that you don't write about? Do you still have that sense that you haven't lost? But I don't pay any attention to them at all. So no, like Jeff has his hockey fandom and I have pretty peripheral awareness of other sports and don't really have any serious bonds with teams.

Overwatch League. Yeah. I mean, I'm interested, but even that, I don't have what I used to have for a baseball team. So I miss that. I mean, I'm sort of sorry that that's not part of my life anymore. And I know that Jeff, you endeavor to preserve that feeling. You don't want to be too educated a hockey fan, right? Because you want to be appreciating the sport on almost that elemental level. Well, it's great because the team that I like was one goal away from making the championship last year. And now they're all of a sudden one of the worst teams in the sport, seemingly inexplicably.

And it's frustrating but also liberating to just not know why because you just want to keep uh you just want to keep the whole core together you know you don't want to trade players but then that comes right down to sort of what patrick is talking about the pirates with with the pirates and the rays these are teams in similar situations and the pirates have traded away not just garrett cole but clearly face of the franchise andrew mccutcheon and of course shortly before that the rays traded away face of the franchise evan longoria and from the contemporary perspective of baseball analysis you can understand perfectly why mccutcheon of course one year left and the pirates not very good and the rays just can't really buy their own budget argue that if you'd like to but they didn't they didn't think that they could

afford Longoria anymore so it makes sense that those players were traded and and the team's got fairly reasonable returns so from the fan graphs my perspective the analytical perspective makes sense good trades fine trades whatever understandable trades but yeah from the fan perspective it sucks it sucks to trade Evan Longoria. It sucks to trade Andrew McCushion. These are the players who you're most likely to own their jerseys or jerseys. You have autographs, you have posters, you have whatever it is that fans collect. I don't know. I'm 32 years old. But I mean, I guess from the Mariners perspective, it would be like watching Felix Hernandez in some other uniform. Well, Felix isn't very good anymore. And he's just

seemingly his arm isn't even attached. I'm not convinced there's anything in that sleeve. But I guess I don't know how you're supposed to reconcile what would be the right thing to do in terms of trying to build a successful long term franchise versus the right thing to do in terms of not upsetting the people who care about your product the most. And I don't know, it feels like maybe things are pushed too much at present toward trying to make the right long term decision. Because of course, winning is everything. But what if winning isn't everything? And I don't know, how is a team supposed to operate optimally? Yeah, I mean, 35 years ago, if we had the current culture today, Karly Ostromsky would have been his career in the Milwaukee Brewers uniform, it would have happened,

the Red Sox window would have closed, the Red Sox have this aging first baseman. The Brewers are making a run. That's weird. It's weird to think about that that's the right way. And yet it is the right way. But it's the right way because those are the incentives that have been created. And baseball is an artificial construct. And it's because it's an artificial construct. Everything about baseball is stuff we decided is baseball. And it can be changed. We can make all sorts of changes to make the game more valuable to the fan or more valuable to the owner, more valuable player. It happens all the time.

Things, most of them happen accidentally or mistakenly. And then we find out later that those decisions were or non-decisions were wrong. But you could create elements if you wanted to. And that means all three parties, the owners, the players and fans all wanting to make the game better, a better viewing experience. I mean, we're looking at that with the juice ball right now, right? Some of the players, the pitchers union within the players union has started to notice that maybe they didn't complain early enough about this thing, but the owners don't mind the players. The fans do mind, I think

more than either of the other parties, but what are they going to do about it? So it is difficult. It is always difficult in any political situation to get everybody to agree to make a change, but we can't just look at the system that's in there right now and say, well, this is it. There's no way to modify behavior. We could always modify behavior. What would be your prescription for a fan who is in the winning first, winning only mindset other than say, reading short relief at baseball prospectus, gaining appreciation for the other sides of the game. But if you were talking to someone who, you know, and I know people like this and there's nothing wrong with it necessarily that you just, you grew up following one team. You care only

about whether that team wins you don't really watch games that that team isn't involved in that team is eliminated you stop watching baseball etc i mean what would your path to nirvana look like for that type of fan well you got a couple options uh first of all you should be a writer because that makes everything better it makes you can it gives you agency over everything because you can just make it about yourself and your own experiences. And you can create something out of it, which is the most important part. That you're using the baseball to make something meaningful yourself. That's the way to go.

Everyone should write. But if not that, then the other alternatives. Fantasy baseball exists. You can use it to have fun. Fantasy baseball is fun. And then you're not beholden to any owner because you're just trying to track your own players. You become the owner. Other options.

When we tend to think about our nostalgic experiences with baseball as children or from the old days, and we think about going to the ballpark and we think about that time. It's not like when you went to as a kid with your dad to the ballpark to your first game. And it's not like the ones whose team lost. They just don't care for that memory at all. You can still enjoy the experience of fandom outside. And I think a lot of teams like the Seattle Mariners certainly have put a high amount of effort into making the ballpark experience almost elevating it to be more

important than the actual on field product in some ways. And that's fine, too, if that's what you want to do. If you want to think of someone if going to the ballpark and taking in a game is your way of being a fan, then that's also perfectly acceptable. I would personally probably just ignore teams and take a single player and become a fan of that player. And then you're no longer beholden to winning because all you really care about is whether your player is doing well. And even if he's not doing well, whether he's trying and whether he's, you know, his own narrative of his attempts at success and his attempt to do well. Baseball doesn't make that very easy. It's not like you can just go on the Eatro channel and just watch Eatro at bats,

because unfortunately, if you... Well, that actually might very well exist. It should, because otherwise you'd have to watch Jose Urena pitches, and you should be able to sift those out. But, you know, if you decide it, and Eatro is a perfect example of this, and it's a perfect example of Mariners fandom, because we had the most interesting baseball player in the league for a while, despite having largely the most uninteresting teams.

And you can just devote yourself toward watching that one person play and be a fan of theirs and taking in just the details, the minutia of that player. That's probably going to be more rewarding than sitting through year two of a four-year rebuild. And then what do you do when you find out that that player got arrested for a DUI? Yeah, don't have heroes, I guess, or friends, or depend on anyone. Go back to being a writer. That's probably the better way. It does seem like, though, that there is a virtue to the losing seasons now that maybe there wasn't typically in the past and that's one of the reasons that I don't really worry about tanking all that much as a destabilizing force in baseball I tend to think that we're going to have losing teams in every year that has always been the case in baseball that will always be the case but maybe

there's there's an advantage to losing in the way that teams are losing now where when you lose it's kind of a clear demarcation where okay we're entering losing mode now and when you do that you can then look forward to the year when you will transition back into winning mode and so if you're the white socks for instance who i think still have the worst projection in baseball according to fan graphs currently there's still a lot to be excited about as a White Sox fan and not even in too distant a future. And you can look at guys who are already on the major league roster who are going to be part of the next good White Sox team. And so there's that aspect of intentionality to it now. And it's so much easier to follow prospects and to evaluate prospects. And

there's so much more coverage of them. And you can even watch them on MILB TV and various other means. So it seems like there are ways to appreciate a team's future that maybe don't have that much to do with its current win total or projected win total. Although that's still a mindset that is putting winning first. It's just future winning as opposed to current winning. I don't think that's wrong. And certainly prospect fandom is a perfectly legitimate way as well. I think it's a better strategy during the season when there is actual minor league baseball to watch and less so. I think it's made the off seasons worse compared to the regular seasons because it's literally just the lack of an activity, the activity that

we're seeing right now. Baseball is a 12 month sport now, and we've come to expect a certain amount of trying to win. And it's not that there aren't teams trying to win. I mean, there's always been teams that are losing and that are on the wrong side of the path, even if they don't quite recognize it. But I think it's that they're giving up earlier. The Pirates and the Rays would have in an ordinary time tried one more shot and figured out it wasn't going to work and then at the trade deadline they would have gotten they would have made these trades now because they didn't even do it at the beginning of the season it's you know three months before the season and then that's three months to have to wade through before you

even get to start to see the the fruits of whatever you got back for your for your sins so if you there are a lot of different ways to look at baseball to be a fan and to to consume a team but if you if you were to maybe pick some one of the teams in baseball i think a team that stands out to me would be the the san francisco. And you can tell me whether you agree or disagree. But they they at least presently they seem like a team that is maybe not doing things, let's say, optimally. Maybe they're not in an ideal situation, but they seem to have placed a priority at least more than most other teams on keeping players together, elevating the experience and just not, I don't know, dashing connections that fans might have developed toward players. Of course, we saw them keep Matt Cain. I think they're expressing interest in Tim Linscombe again. I think fans enjoyed Barry Zito even until the end, even though we don't need to talk about that one. But the Giants seem to have kept a core together. They

even reunited with Pablo Sandoval, for God's sake. and this is not a model sabermetric franchise but it seems like maybe from the fan perspective there is there's a balance where you could follow the 100% model sabermetric franchise or there would be an example of a team that maybe preserves other loyalties preserves other connections and I don't, where do you feel like the Giants might be close to the perfect rooting franchise? Or is there another example? Or is there any example? Yeah, I think that there is a virtue in the 82 win season that particularly now, I mean,

we talk about zigging when everyone else is zagging. And right now, the way to not act like everyone else is to be medium. I mean, there's as Jerry DePoto said yesterday, there are more people trying to get the number one pick than there are winning the championship. But there's more teams trying to do either of those than just try to be decent. The Mariners themselves will probably end up in that same position, although not necessarily by choice. San Francisco seems to at least be more mindful about how they're going about it. I think that with 82 win seasons, yes, you're not going to decay the fan

base, although they do tend to come back. I mean, Houston seems to be fine. I think that it's generally more of a benefit in hindsight. When you look back at this era of Giants teams after the World Series and they're decent, I think that that's going to feel more rewarding 10 years from now than going through a Brave style rebuild where you spend the whole time wondering, well, actually, is this going to work? Did these pieces come together? And some of them won't, like every other Mariners rebuild. And you mentioned the sabermetrics point earlier, just how that might affect someone's enjoyment of the game. And I think that's probably something that we can be a bit myopic about,

maybe, just because of the way that we think about the game and probably a lot of our listeners think about the game. It's kind of a self-selecting audience. If you're listening to this podcast, you probably enjoy that dimension too. still be paying close attention to baseball, let alone working on it to the degree that I do, if not for that added statistical layer to the game that I've come to appreciate over the years. But I'm sympathetic to people who don't like that, who aren't wired that way, who don't want to view the game through that lens. And I think Jeff and I have talked about maybe how projections, which are a tool that we rely on constantly, like for a lot of people, they're just a wet blanket. And there's no real advantage to dimming someone's enthusiasm for the upcoming season by linking them to the Fangraph's death chart page or Pocota or whatever and saying, you probably don't have a chance here. It's better to think that you do have a chance.

saying you probably don't have a chance here. It's better to think that you do have a chance. Although if we are trying to wean people off of win totals as something that their happiness should be dependent on, then maybe it's best to just rip the bandaid off and show them their team is terrible and they have to move on anyway. Yeah, I think what it's done is it's reduced our ability to be surprised. I mean, you're still going to have Aaron judges. There's always going to be players that just destroy all the projection systems, destroy all and same with prospect rankings, but less so than there used to be. But what that does, what why I feel the same way as you do about statistics and about this stuff is that it gives you in exchange for that lack of surprise, it gives you a better ability to appreciate the talent and the skills that are

actually taking place. Without sabermetrics, Randy Milligan would be nobody. And he still is. But you can look at his stats and say that this weird first baseman that every team hated was basically a three-win player per 600 plate appearances throughout his career. And you can go back and look at Randy Milligan and say, oh, that guy was actually really good. And it's valuable to be able to say that. And it's interesting to be able to go back and look at these situations with these extra tools. And it would be a shame for the things we would lose if we didn't have that, the things that we wouldn't be able to appreciate. It's just that the one trade off is that we don't get to expect every team to have a chance at 95 wins. So I think we could at least agree that the,

the majority of fans go into a season and they want their team to be good. They want their team to win and whatever, to whatever sentence appealing to follow the example of say, following one specific player that, that you, that you love fans everywhere have demonstrated that what they care about is the winning. They want their team to be good, or at least they want to feel like their team has a chance to be good soon.

That's the whole idea of tanking and accumulating young talent. We're going to be good in three years. You just watch. We're going to be good and stay good. I remember Jack Sorensen saying those words. He was correct. What do you think about the potential disconnect between wanting to win, being so interested in winning right now, as defining your fan experience versus you would uh you had said earlier Giants fans might look back on this

year more fondly 10 years from now and there is a there's a whole lot of retrospect in every fan's future there's a whole lot of looking back and you can experience say the 2018 baseball season once but you're going to look back on the 20 you could conceivably look back on the 2018 baseball season for the rest of your life, no matter what the outcome was. And my sense is that over time, the amount you care about how much a team won in a single season is greatly reduced. And you just have these individual players or moments or stories that emerge out of the year. But would you agree with that? Would you disagree with that? Or do you feel like perhaps that, But would you agree with that? Would you disagree with that? Or do you feel like perhaps that that future experience of hindsight is underrated for all of the reasons that we as humans struggle to consider the future today?

Well, I mean, yeah, since 97 percent of fans or these teams aren't going to succeed, it seems like a really terrible way to decide what's worthwhile. I mean, I can't remember the exact tweet, but Brandon McCarthy, after he lost the World Series, made some sort of comment. I don't know if you remember it, but he made some sort of comment about how it didn't mean anything because it wasn't the whole thing. And I thought that was tragic. I mean, this is a guy who endures so much pain and does so much work to try and win something and almost does exactly what he needs to do. And to say that none of that mattered and it was all entirely meaningless is the worst possible thing to me. The problem with winning is that it basically tells you that nothing else matters. And this whole idea that winning is the only thing is so philosophically

repulsive to me that you can throw out any experience except those are the winners. There has to be other things that you can care about. And there has to be other things that you can take away from an experience. And when you watch kids play wiffle ball, they want to win, but they still had fun, regardless of whether they won or not. In fact, to the point where you can just kind of lie when they ask what the score is, because they're not really keeping track.

And if you do keep track, then half of the kids will be miserable because they're not winning. And it just takes over. And you've got to, it's a reality of sports are going to have winning in them, but you have to kind of actively force yourself to find something else as well. Well, I'm with you. I wonder if this whole conversation is just a conversation that losers have so that we can tell ourselves that it's okay that we don't win more often. Our experiences are legitimate, guys. All of them. Yeah. All right. Well, I agree with your sentiments here. It's probably a tough sell for certain fans, but they should all read Short Relief.

I was serious about that. You do a really excellent job with that series at Baseball Perspectives. In fact, you want to do a quick pitch for it for people who may not be aware? Oh, sure. So Short Relief is a short form collection of eccentric baseball writing. It's got all sorts of things, fiction, nonfiction, essays, mostly not about analysis, not about journalism, but just about the fun things about baseball. And it's up every single day at Baseball Perspectives. It takes two minutes to read. So, you know, it doesn't cost you much. And yeah, it's a I think

it's a good thing that we've got going. Well, you have experience at both places. Would you say that it's better or a lot better than Notgrass? I try very hard not to compare it to Notgrass because it does not have carson it does not have dane and it does have me who was a very i was a very polarizing end of the of the not grass spectrum so patrick everyone was a very polarizing spectrum it's true it is different it is it's a little uh it's a little less um crazy perhaps, than Knockgrass was. Some episodes of this podcast are probably polarizing in the same way because we do so many of them that there are some that have nothing to do with baseball in the traditional sense of pennant races and who's winning or not winning and why.

We do a lot of that too. But some of the other stuff tends to be my favorite at least, just living up to the title of the podcast and ranging far afield. So I like when you do that in that series as well. So anyway, thanks for coming on. It's been fun. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it. Title of the episode, Winning is for Losers.

Excellent. That's good. You know, the irony of your article, Patrick, Is that in a sense it kind of gives people A reason to try to keep caring about the Pittsburgh Pirates Kind of I actually literally tell Like basically it started with that That guy who wanted to know

If he could move to San Francisco And I'm all on it You should do it You own Pittsburgh nothing You happen to live near them Okay that takes us to the end of this episode by the way after we finished recording jiff pass and reported that the mlb players association is investigating the marlins and the pirates two teams we talked about

today for possibly violating revenue sharing rules and not investing back into their team maybe they should use the patrick dubuque. We just don't think baseball should be all about winning. Not sure that would go over well. You can support this podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. Five listeners who have already pledged their support and thus are all winners in my book include Rebecca Chauval, Matt Piscitella,

Matthew Court, Tom Mulley, and Linus Marco. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectivelywild. And you can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for editing assistance. Please keep your questions and comments coming for me and Jeff via podcast at fancrafts.com or the Patreon messaging system. Have a wonderful weekend.

And we will talk to you all again early next week. I'm losing you I'm losing you