Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1193: Unicorn on the Cobb

Episode Date: March 22, 2018

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Alex Cobb’s surprising windfall with the Orioles and the ever-present overlap between baseball and social issues, follow up on non-throwing outfielders, and answer listener emails about challengers to Mike Trout’s email-episode throne (and Trout’s spring training strikeout-less streak), whether tanking is actually bad for baseball or becoming more […]

I wanna live a life like that, I wanna be just like a king Take my picture by the pool, cause I'm the next big thing Beverly Hills, that's where I want to be Living in Beverly Hills, Beverly Hills Rolling like the celebrity Livin' in Beverly Hills Hello and welcome to episode 1193 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs and from our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs.

Hello. Hello. We've got an email show on the docket. We will get to your questions very shortly. But I think my main takeaway from this week so far is that if I'm ever in the market for representation, if I'm ever a free agent again, I would like to be represented by the Beverly Hills Sports Council. Because that is the agency that represents Alex Cobb. And Alex Cobb just signed a four-year, $57 million contract with the Baltimore Orioles. I did not really expect any parts of the sentence I just said to be true a few days ago.

So this is, A, a good deal for him because it's more than was projected for him by MLB trade rumors at the start of the offseason. It is essentially exactly what was predicted for him by the median fan graphs crowdsourcing project. And this is Alex Cobb just before opening day coming after all these deals where guys have had to settle for very small or short-term contracts, we've probably talked about the fact that he's quite comparable to Lance Lynn in a number of ways, age, performance, having had Tommy John surgery, etc., and Lance Lynn just had to settle for a one-year $12 million deal. Alex Cobb gets $4.57, So good for him. Good for his agents. Good for the Orioles.

I don't know. But that happened. Yeah. So on the one hand, if it were November or December, you would look at this and think, yeah, that's about what we thought Alex Cobb would go for, more or less. But obviously, given the circumstances of the market, this is unusual. It's hard to say, hey, look, the Orioles overpaid for someone because, first of all, the Orioles usually don't do that.

Well, let me take that back. They kind of do. But also, you know, you don't want to make fun of a team necessarily for spending about what you would have expected them to, but I guess I don't understand how the Beverly Hills Sports Council, that's what it was, right? Yes. Those are the first time I've ever said all those words in a row and also probably the last or maybe

every team's gonna hire them now but uh yeah i don't understand how cobb and his agency had the leverage here yeah right so kudos to them and there's a there's my favorite little part of this you know this is a contract it's a $57 million contract that has deferrals. I think Peter Angelos loves deferrals. I'm not a financial anything, but I can at least say that, you know, pushing money to the future makes it less likely that Peter Angelos will be the one paying it. But anyway, looking at Rakabako's Twitter, the total value of the contract is $57 million. Got $20 million deferred, so the net total value of the contract is $57 million. Got $20 million deferred, so the net present value of the contract is $47 million.

Well, something would happen if the Orioles didn't defer money, and if the Orioles just paid Alex Cobb $47 million guaranteed, the Tampa Bay Rays would have gotten a worse pick as compensation. So the way that this is going to work, there is a cutoff, pulling from MLB trade rumors back when the new CBA was introduced. There was a condition here that says if the team losing a player who declined a qualifying offer, if the team received revenue sharing in the previous season and the free agent signed a deal at least $50 million in guaranteed money, then the team will receive a compensatory pick after the first round of the draft.

So now the Rays are going to get a pick for this that's somewhere around 31 to 35. So just after the first round. However, had the Orioles just given Cobb the $47 million and not deferred anything, then the Rays would have wound up with a compensatory pick after competitive balance round B. And currently, those picks are around 76 to 79. So it's not that big a deal. It's just like a higher pick for a rival. But I don't know if the Orioles thought this through. I mean, it's a weird quirk. And ultimately, it's not that important. It's just a higher pick. And of course, the draft is kind of a crapshoot. But still, you figure what's the

difference between a pick around around let's call it 32 and a pick around 77 that's probably five million dollars maybe a little more than that in value that the orioles have basically just given to the raise for what i would say is not a compelling reason well maybe it's payback for giving them tim beckham i don't know but it's yeah it's an interesting contract i hadn't even realized that aspect of it. But as you said, the leverage angle, opening day was about to begin and comparable guys had signed for a lot less. And I mean, it's odd that the Orioles were the one to give him this deal, obviously, just because they don't seem to benefit all that much in 2018.

Certainly they needed starting pitching, but even with Alex Cobb, I don't know that that makes a demonstrable difference for them. But they had said they weren't interested in pursuing guys for four years. They hadn't been interested in other top pitchers on the market, ostensibly for that reason, and then they ended up signing alex cobb so i don't know why they did it specifically as opposed to some other team but yeah i mean he even passed the physical which is hard to do with the orioles as we know so just a win all around by alex cobb and his representation well let's see uh dylan bundy has a spring training ERA of nine. Kevin Gosman, he's been fine.

But Andrew Kashner has been Andrew Kashner. Chris Tillman has six walks and one strikeout in spring training. So, yeah, maybe the Orioles just looked at Chris Tillman and thought, eh, we don't really want to have to rely on that. I don't know. This is a team that came into the offseason with literally two starters worth anything so some credit to them i guess for for plugging those holes but chris tillman andrew cashner and alex cobb this is still a last place team to me yeah yeah there's been this sort of new strain of analysis or maybe it's almost a throwback strain of analysis this offseason

because there's been so much concern and discussion about the player share of revenue and the free agent market falling off that I think we've all kind of realized that if a team saves money, probably that money is not really going to the fans' pockets or to the players or to anyone we really care about. It's probably ultimately just going to the owners. There may be exceptions to that. There are owners who maybe are investing in ways that are not reflected in the major league payroll. But on the whole, if a team saves money, no one's really

benefiting from that except someone who is already rich enough to own a baseball team or operate a baseball team. So I think there has been this response that if a team signs a player to a deal that maybe we once might have criticized, then there's a tendency to say, well, you know, if they hadn't spent this money, they just would have had in the past, I think we all would have just pounced on that long-term deal for a player who is maybe a little overrated for a team that doesn't particularly seem to need him, at least right away. And as it was, I think there was more of a tendency to say, well, you know, the Padres will be a little bit better than they would have been anyway, so that's okay. That's a good thing. And on the one hand, that doesn't make for very interesting analysis. You don't really need to read an article or listen to a podcast to hear someone say, team that adds to win player X will now be two wins better if he's replacing a

replacement player or something. But I guess if there's no opportunity cost, in some cases, maybe there isn't. I think we all are in this mindset of saying, well, if you sign a player to this contract, that's not efficient. You could have used that money more efficiently. You could have spent it on this other guy instead and your money would have gone farther. And that's more interesting analysis. And maybe it also sort of serves the reader and the fan and the consumer because that person wants to know whether this was a good decision for the team or not but the way that baseball's economics have sort of shaken out these days I think it's easier to just sort of throw up your hands and say well it's good for Cobb it's good for players it's good for Orioles fans to some extent so who cares I mean why even look into it any deeper than that? If the Orioles maybe could have applied their money here to something else in a more efficient way, great. But if the alternative was them not spending any of this money, then maybe everyone's better off except potentially Peter Angeles. Yeah, two years ago, orioles had an opening day

payroll of 148 million dollars last season there was 164 million dollars this is coming from kotz contracts and with cob now their projected opening day payroll is going to be somewhere around i don't know 140 to 145 sort of that range so the orioles are a team whose payroll is slightly down this year and I think that this can't be emphasized enough they're about to be bad I think after this season because as we've talked about Manny Machado is a free agent he will almost certainly go Edmund Jones is a free agent I don't know if he's going to go but he's not what he used to be Zach Britton is a free agent doubt he sticks around Brad Brock is a free agent doubt he sticks around Brad Brock it's a free agent doubt he sticks around Chris Tillman could stick around but I don't know if anyone wants that to happen so this is a team that is just not likely to be super competitive a year and more down the road

anyway so given that let's say that the Orioles take a step back it's hard to imagine them not doing that they don't have that much coming through the system it's basically austin hayes and chant cisco and so they're likely to shed payroll when they're no longer competitive and they're not going to have a whole lot of commitments on the books the only long-term contract that the orioles have right now is the regrettable deal given to chris davis well negotiated by scott boris so it's going to be davis and now it's going to be alex cobb but you know if the team's not great i guess what's the harm i don't know like you like you said it's at the end of the now it's going to be alex cobb but you know if the team's not great i guess what's the harm i don't know like you like you said it's at the end of the day it's not our money and the reason to care a lot about efficiency is because you're trying to make a team as good as as possible

and if the team is not going to be good and i would imagine that the team knows it's not going to be good then well either you spend and kind of throw money away because the players don't mean anything much to you anymore or you just pay a bunch of players league minimum and well we know the Orioles aren't going to be doing that right yeah and this also keeps coming up because for instance if a team has decided that it either needs to or wants to operate under a certain spending constraint. This came up when you were writing about the raise moves not long ago. And people would say, well, they could afford more. Every team is getting this $50 million payment from the Disney

deal for MLB Advanced Media streaming technology, and they could apply that to the payroll. And you could go on and on and say, well, every franchise is worth a billion dollars, multiple billions of dollars at this point. So these owners could afford to spend more. And so in a sense, if we sort of take them at their word that they can only spend so much, if we're writing about the pirates and Bob Nutting says, I can't spend, and we just accept what he's saying, then in a way we're almost complicit in that decision not to spend. On the other hand, it would be pretty boring to write over and over and over again that Team X could have signed this player because every owner is rich and therefore he could have signed, you know, he could have signed another free agent. You could point that out, I guess, in every article, in every analysis say, well, they're going to operate like this, whether they should or not. This is the way they do operate. This is the way they've always

operated. This is the way they will continue to operate. And so if you're a fan of that team, you want them to operate as well as possible within those constraints. And so then we end up breaking down moves to say, well, given this payroll limit, which they have said that they have for whatever reason, here's why this makes sense or doesn't make sense, or here's something better they could have done. And so I know there's been a lot of criticism of sort of just even accepting the premise that there are spending limits. So it's kind of a tough decision to wrestle with as a writer. Do you sort of turn every transaction analysis into a critique of baseball owners and point out that, yeah, in theory, they could all be spending more? Or do you just sort of accept the system the way it's always been and probably will continue to be and then write your analysis within that sort of framework?

So I think that's something that a lot of writers have really wrestled with lately. Yeah, and I don't think that anyone has settled upon an easy answer so far. You know, you could say that every single business in America could afford to spend more than it does, at least every successful business, I should say. And though I've kind of come down to certain cases,

it'll require a passing mention, but it's not so much that I guess we're powerless to adjust the behavior of like the Rays or the Pirates or choose a team. But I mean, they've had 20 odd years of established spending patterns. And I would think that from our perspective, I'm not in this to affect social change.

You know, that's not what my position is. My position is to analyze the game of baseball and how the game of baseball is working and likely to work and the reality is that the Rays are likely to not spend a whole lot of money in the foreseeable future so therefore I might as well write about how the Rays are making moves given the constraints that they have now this has turned into a Rays segment instead of the Orioles but the Orioles are and the Rays don't have that much in common in terms of you know what, what's the word? Anything. So just to change the subject, I sent you a little link.

But I noticed that tied for the Orioles' lowest spring training ERA, covering one shutout inning, a 22-year-old right-handed pitcher named Michael Bauman. And he is the first and only Michael Bauman in affiliated baseball history, according to Baseball Reference. Yeah, the other Michael Bauman and I actually interviewed him on the Ringer MLB show last year. I must have missed that. Yeah, just so we could have multiple Michael Baumans on the show at one point. He goes by Big Mike, so that was how we told them apart. But he actually had a really good season last year after he was drafted. So an Orioles pitching prospect, they do exist. Yeah, so anyway, we don't have to dwell on this. But as you're saying, I mean, there are, I think, cases where mention that there is some wrong there that should probably be corrected or some fairer way that things could be done. And we've done podcast episodes about both of those topics in the past. and when you just want to break down a trade because that's what your audience is clicking on an article for,

or most of your audience. So I think it's sort of an ongoing negotiation that every writer is handling in his or her way. I would think that if you are of the opinion that certain owners need to invest more in their product, and many of them probably could or should, at the very least, maybe that should be a standalone article as opposed to maybe the the transaction analysis article now this is getting kind of writery and in the weeds so maybe people don't need to listen to it so anyway to deviate from

that but to also maybe talk about something that's a little more justice oriented did you catch the article that was written the other day by former cardinals upper level pitcher trey nielsen i did not trey niel is, well, I could just read this editor's note at the beginning of his article. It was special to stlsportspage.com. Editor's note, when the Cardinals pitchers and catchers go through their first official workout of spring training on Wednesday, Trey Nielsen will be at home in Utah.

A non-roster invitee to the camp the last two years, Nielsen has made the decision to retire from baseball primarily because of the economic realities of being a minor leaguer. A 30th round selection in the 2013 draft out of the University of Utah, Nielsen, the son of former major league pitcher Scott Nielsen, split last season between AAA Memphis and AA Springfield, but now at 26 has decided to walk away from the game he loves. In his own words, here are the reasons why. I think it is worth reading, but it talks about the economics of being sort of a non-prospect. But still, this is a guy who played in the upper levels of the minor leagues last season.

And I believe, if I remember in the article, he says that last season he made about $8,000 total. And this is a guy who had an upper level ERA last year in the mid threes the year before. He was a starter in AA and AAA, and he had an ERA. Again, in the threes, he has a career minor league ERA of 3.14. I'm not saying Trey Nilsson was ever much of a prospect. I'm not saying that he was going to develop into that much of anything, but he is retiring in large part because it's impossible to make ends meet. And this is, as we've talked about this is probably

where more of the focus should be because it really does feel like there is a opportunity here to improve your player development by allowing players a little bit of comfort a little bit of flexibility so that they don't have to panic all of the time i know it doesn't apply to the players who who get a big bonus out of the draft or international signings who get a big bonus, but you know, maybe the teams would justify it by saying that they care mostly about the players who get the bonuses anyway, and then there's just not much return on investment for the later round draft picks and the minor league filler or whatnot, but I'm not so convinced of that.

Yeah, this is not totally dissimilar to the conversation that is surfacing about Ronald Acuna, of course. And he's someone who can expect to make a lot of money in the future. But the making of that money will be slightly delayed by the fact that he's starting the season in the minors. We talked about this last time in reference to Shohei Otani, who is, of course, his own kind of case. But it's the same sort of debate with Acuna. Do you blame the Braves for taking advantage of a system that allows them to push back his years of control and get that extra full season of control

if they just leave him in the minors for 12 days this year? So do you blame them? Do you blame the Players Association for not making more of an effort to prevent this sort of thing? It's kind of a tough conversation. I think a lot of teams have done what the Braves are doing here. And it's hard to say that if I were running a baseball team and trying to run it as well and efficiently as I could, that I wouldn't make the same decision. So it's a lot to ask, I think, of any business to just sort of act out of the goodness of its heart or a sense of fairness or justice when there's a substantial profit to be made. So I don't think the Braves are doing anything we haven't seen before and probably something that we'll see again unless

the next CBA finally addresses this thing so there's just been a wide range of reactions to that move whether it's just yeah the system is unfortunate but the braves are operating within that system and so it's hard to blame them from that to you know this is just a disgrace and they should be the ones to change this in some way as opposed to, say, the Players Association changing it in a more formalized way. So anyway, this has been a frequent refrain. This offseason will continue to be, but we should probably get to emails. Could you quickly summarize what you found in your annual projected strengths of schedule post because i think that's always kind of interesting if only just to give people a sense of the range the impact that

strength of schedule can make on a team because i think probably some people underrate it some people overrate it but there is kind of an actual range is that some teams can benefit by x amount and some teams are hurt by x amount well the three worst teams in the american league at least projected at fan graphs all play in the same division they are the three worst teams by a decent amount especially now that the orioles have signed alex cobb for a lot of money so the white socks tigers and royals all play in the american league central the american league central has two teams that made the playoffs last season and the long and short of it i think the American League Central. The American League Central has two teams that made the playoffs last season.

And the long and short of it, I think the most interesting thing that I found doing this analysis was that maybe unsurprisingly, the Twins, it's the Indians who have the easiest schedule in the American League. But, you know, we kind of assume the Indians are going to make the playoffs anyway. They're very good. So this is usually most interesting with the wildcard teams and contenders. And among them, it's great news for the Twins. And this is nothing that the Twins couldn't have guessed, I imagine. They came into the offseason knowing the Royals were going to take a step back and the White Sox aren't very good.

And the Tigers definitely aren't very good. And so if you were the Twins, it's not just a matter of trying to get into the top five teams in the American League in terms of how good you are, because they get a boost. And if you look at the difference between the Twins schedule and,'t know like the rangers schedule or the oriole schedule there's a difference here of like four or five projected wins just based on their opponents alone because there is no bad team in the oriole's division except maybe the oriole's and there is no bad team in the rangers division but the twins have a lot of bad teams and if you look at the twins are going to play the indians who are great but then the White Sox, Tigers and Royals combined, they play their

divisional rival 76 times this season, which is nearly half of the entire regular season. And so if there's anyone out there who wants to dismiss the idea that a schedule can make a big difference, that's a lot of games and a small difference can add up over time. That's one of the things that happens over the course of a baseball regular season schedule. It's 162 games. There's a lot that's going on. So long story short, the Twins are going to have an edge. I think we knew the Twins were going to have an edge, but it's a definite leg up.

And it's worse news for literally everyone else in the American League. All right. Emails. We got a follow-up from regular listener Kazuto Yamazaki, who sent a follow-up about our hypothetical about Trout, if he can't throw, would he still be playable? Would he still be valuable? And I mentioned a couple other cases where an outfielder wasn't able to throw, like Randall Gritchick or Albert Pujols briefly played outfield because they were good hitters but weren't able to throw because of an injury. So Kazuto says, in the final years of his career, the Hanshin Tigers' Tomoaki Kanemoto was notorious for being in the lineup and playing left field despite his complete inability to make a throw. Having sustained a severe shoulder injury in a preseason game in 2010, Kanemoto was unable to toss a baseball even 90 feet when the season started.

However, since he hadn't missed an inning of a regular season game in the previous 10 years, the manager kept having him patrol left field. Hanschen is in the non-DH Central League. To keep the streak going before eventually snapping it at 1,492 games two weeks into the season, the streak was later recognized as a Guinness World Record. In those two weeks and the times where he did play in the field in the following three seasons, watching him try to make a throw was painful.

And Cazuto sent a couple YouTube clips of him attempting to throw and just not really being able to. There's one where there's a somewhat portly base runner who manages to motor around from one where there's a somewhat portly base runner who manages to motor around from first to third on a grounder that just barely gets through the infield. So Kanemoto gets to it in shallow left field, and somehow this pretty slow runner still manages to go from first to third, even though he's right in front of Kanemoto, and he just really can't throw the ball. He just kind of lobs it very lightly, and it doesn't even make it all the way in.

So that's another real-world example. So it has happened for either offensive reasons or, in this case, I guess just reputation reasons and a guy who had a streak going, but it doesn't work out very well. I'm reminded of a game it was june 29th i didn't know this off the top of my head i looked it up june 29th 2011 the mariners were playing the braves and the mariners had two catchers on their roster they were miguel olivo and chris jimenez and miguel olivo started batted twice and then he had to leave the game because of cramps and then uh chris jimenez came in and chris jimenez very quickly strained his oblique which is one of those injuries that knocks

you out for like a month and a half so over the course of the game chris jimenez could no longer throw or really tag or certainly swing and so there was a the braves were winning five four in the bottom of the seventh i think this is what I remember the most. It was 5-3 Braves going into the bottom of the seventh, and then Itaro singled, Brennan Ryan made an out. That's what he did. Adam Kennedy singled. This is an old game.

Justin Smoak walked, although Adam Kennedy was caught stealing. Anyway, Dustin actually hit a single. So Chris Jimenez came up with two outs and runners on first and second in the bottom of the seventh, and Chris Jimenez tried to bunt, and we were all watching on television thinking why is the mariners catcher trying to bunt with two outs and the tying run in scoring position and it's it turns out it's because chris jimenez is playing through blinding agony in his side he ultimately struck out looking on a pitch that was right down the middle he did work a full

count so he he nearly willed himself on base despite not being able to do anything and this reminds me of robert selman not being able to swing last year or maybe it was two years ago which sam wrote a bet at espn but just another case of a player on the field who would have been incapable of doing his job but credit to chris Chris Jimenez in the top of the eighth. Alex Gonzalez of the Braves came up against David Pauly. This is just six years ago, but these names are so unfamiliar now. And Gonzalez hit a ball somewhere. There was an out at home, basically.

Chris Jimenez was able to apply a tag at home in the game, which he said later caused him to nearly faint, I believe, because everything hurt so bad. But Jimenez, thankfully for him, did not come up again in the game because I believe in the bottom of the ninth, he was in the hole when the Mariners were attempting a rally. But thankfully, it didn't come down to Chris Jimenez standing there trying to draw a walk. Yeah, that is merciful. All right. So that was sort of a Trout-related email. Kazuto's email did mention Trout. The next email from Damien says, when will Mike Trout be overtaken as the most emailed about player, and how old or at what level is the player currently? But where are Otani's numbers this winter, this spring, this offseason?

I don't know. I suspect Trout is still number one. But Otani, at least for a few months, was like all the emails we got were either Mike Trout, Shohei Otani, or Baseball Economics. Yeah, right. I mean, we've probably gotten more emails about Ronald Acuna than we have about Trout in the last week or so. I don't know whether that will continue, but if Acuna debuted this year and was amazing immediately in the majors, then I could see getting more Acuna emails in 2018 than Trout just because Acuna is the new exciting thing and Trout is just the boring old best player in baseball yet again.

So in that sense, maybe it's not so far off. I think if we wanted to talk about when will Trout not be the best player in baseball anymore, I mean, that could be a decade off. Who knows? I cited the long-term career projections from Zips at some point on a podcast, I think over the off-season, or maybe it was late last season because I was writing about Corey Seeger versus Francisco Lindor and Carlos Correa and Dan Zamporski sent me some long-term projections. And Trout, even though he is, what, 26 now, still had by far the best projected remaining career,

now still had by far the best projected remaining career not just cumulative career but just what's still ahead of him so in that sense i think it might be a while but if otani is great or if acuna is great those guys might displace him temporarily just because they're new yeah but if you're going to look at this over the course of like an entire year i i get that if Ronald Cooney is great or someone else is great this year, then like the media coverage will probably exceed Mike Trout because the media gets, I think, is just kind of over Mike Trout being so great. But I have more faith in us and our audience to keep the spotlight on Mike Trout unless he falls apart or gets worse. Because, you know, it's not like Trout was overtaken by Aaron Judge judge emails even though judge technically did finish with a higher wins above replacement true so i think this will remain a a trout centric like plurality of coverage will be about trout for three more years yeah that sounds about right i might even go further than that i mean at this point there's a history of trout emails in this podcast so yes it's like a self-sust mean, at this point, there's a history of Kraut emails in this podcast. So

it's like a self-sustaining thing at this point, regardless of how he does. If he suddenly declined, I'm sure we'd get tons of emails about that too. So it kind of reminds me, Sam and I answered a question years ago about when the most common fan jersey in a Yankee Stadium crowd would be someone other than Jeter. And I forget what we said, but at the time we didn't anticipate Aaron Judge, for instance. We didn't anticipate that Jeter would own or be one of the owners and the public face of another franchise. So maybe it will be even sooner than we thought i don't know but i'm sure that he's still in the lead despite all the other famous yankees and you know there's a yankees youth movement with lots of good players who are young and good potential jersey buying

candidates and now the nl mvp is on the yankees too and so lots of challengers to that throne i did notice on mlb.com slash orioles that there's a little headline over on the Yankees too. And so lots of challengers to that throne. I did notice on mlb.com slash Orioles that there's a little headline over on the right because nothing is happening besides Alex Cobb that says, Gosman scouts the AL East's weather. I wonder if Kevin Gosman and Mike Trout have ever had a conversation. Today, that weather is very poor. I will say that much. It's spring now, technically, but it's a blizzard out my window. Speaking of Trout, there was an article on Tuesday by Jeff Fletcher in the OC Register about the fact that Trout hasn't struck out yet this spring. What? whether he did on Tuesday night or anything. I don't know whether this is still current, but as of when Jeff wrote this article,

Trout had 44 plate appearances without a strikeout, which was easily the most in the major leagues this spring. His longest career strikeout-less streak in the regular season, according to the article, is 28 plate appearances. So he has far surpassed that. Now, he has unsurprisingly always been better in spring training, I guess, than he has been even in the regular season. His career spring training OPS is, let's see, higher than, I guess, his regular one. His career spring training OPS is 11.08, almost Ronald Acuna-esque, and that's, you know, a good 150 or so points higher almost than his career regular season OPS.

But yeah, no strikeouts, at least to that point, which is kind of interesting. The article goes on to say that it's not really something that he's been specifically trying to do, cut down on strikeouts. It quotes him, a very typically boring Mike Trout quote, has a hitting coach quote, and that one just basically says he hasn't tapped his full potential. He's getting older. He's getting smarter. He's getting better at recognizing the pitches he can and can't handle. We just talked about the value of Mike Trout experience, right, and seeing a lot of pitches. So maybe it's that he's evolving and his strikeout rate has fallen in each of the past three seasons in the majors, even as the overall league rate has increased. So that's just part of his evolution is that as he's continued to get better, he has struck out less at least than he did in his highest strikeout rate seasons. The following players have not struck out in spring training but have batted at least 10 times.

Mike Trout, Humberto Arteaga, Tony Cruz, Jacob Stallings, Oscar Hernandez, Christian Kelly, Sean Miller. I have heard of one of those players besides Mike Trout, and the one I've heard of is bad. Not like the others, yeah. So I don't know if this means anything. On the other hand, as we said recently, spring training stats do matter.

Recent research has shown if you look at the right stats and if they're extreme enough, and strikeout rate is the sort of thing that tends to become meaningful in fairly small samples. So maybe it prefigures some continued cut down in his strikeout rate. That could be a good thing, I guess. Shout out to Domingo Santana, who's batted 43 times and has 21 strikeouts. Oh, my goodness.

Oh, wow. Okay. Let's take a question from Doug. Doug says, there is a recent quote from Jerry DiPoto that went something like, you could argue there's more competition to get the number one pick in the draft than to win the World Series. Based on this comment, I wanted to do a little research to see how many teams were closer to getting the first pick in the draft than they were to making the playoffs. I found that nine teams were closer to getting the overall number

one pick than they were to getting to the second wildcard spot in their league. There was obviously a bit of hyperbole in his statement, but there were almost as many teams last year closer to that first pick as there were teams that make the playoffs. Will Jerry DiPoto be right? And will we have a season with more teams closer to the number one pick than they are to getting wildcard spot? How boring or how good would that season be? And any ideas on how to make sure Jerry DiPoto's prophecy isn't fulfilled? So I almost bantered about this topic because I wrote about it. I have a new article up on this subject at The Ringer, and it's just basically about tanking, about the contention that some people have lobbied this spring that tanking is hurting baseball, that it's making it less competitive, less compelling. A lot of people have been sort of

recycling the Bud Selig quote from back in 2000, where he talked about how every fan has to have hope and faith. And if every fan doesn't have hope and faith, then it destroys the fabric of baseball. And his goal was to restore hope and faith. And so there the fabric of baseball, and his goal was to restore hope and faith. And so there are a couple ways, I think, in which we are in sort of an anomalous period when it comes to competitiveness in baseball. My colleague at the Ringer, Zach Cram, wrote last week that the turnover among last year's playoff teams is very unusual in that not since the 1980s have we seen one season's playoff field bring back as great a percentage of the positive war that it produced in the previous season. So, you know, like the Astros, I mean, they barely had to do anything

this winter. They were really good. They didn't have any team that was really pushing them to make huge upgrades. I mean, they still did. They still went out and got Garrett Cole, but they brought back most of the players who were responsible for how good they were last year. And that's true for a lot of teams, the Indians, the Dodgers, et cetera. So we are in this, I think, era, at least temporarily, where there just are some really good teams. Some people have called it like the super team era or, you know, have labeled these teams like the seven super teams or whatever it is. So I think in that sense, there is a little bit of a difference. And I actually used a spreadsheet that you have that has preseason projections going back to 2005 that you've collected.

have that has preseason projections going back to 2005 that you've collected and it does look like the projected win totals this year are a little differently distributed than they have been during that period so the standard deviation of the projected win totals this spring is higher than it's been in any other season in that sample which suggests that suggests that maybe there are a bunch of good teams and a bunch of bad teams right now in sort of an unusual way. But I don't think it's that big a deal. I mean, first of all, I think the idea that tanking is new or is threatening is sort of overblown. There have always been bad teams.

There have been bad teams that were doing what people call tanking today. I think people have sort of lumped in every rebuilding team at this point in tanking, and I don't think that's really even true. As I wrote in the article, you could draw distinctions even between what the Astros and the Cubs did. I think what the Astros did was much more extreme in a lot of ways than what the Cubs did. So not every team that is bad is tanking or is doing something new or innovative or potentially risky. And if you look at the actual results of wins

in the regular season or winning percentage, you see that there just isn't really that much difference, that the distribution of wins, even like last season, was basically average, even going back to like 1960 or something. It just hasn't changed all that much. And there actually is a stat called the Hope and Faith Index that Fangraphs and Hardball Times writer Gerald Schiffman debuted in one of the Hardball Times annuals a couple of years ago. And it basically measures the average distance from

the closest playoff spot. So the lower the number, the lower the hope and faith index, the closer the typical non-playoff team is to a playoff spot. And in theory, the more hope and faith that team's fans would have. And that hope and faith number has just fallen and fallen and fallen over the past decades, largely because of the change in the playoff format. So when the wildcard was added, there was a dip in this number. When the second wildcard was added, there was a dip in this number. But even looking at like the beginning of the second wildcard era to the current one, there's no difference. There doesn't seem to be any less hope and faith or any fewer teams that are within a reasonable

distance of a playoff spot. So I just don't think there's a whole lot of evidence so far that there actually has been a less entertaining brand of baseball because of tanking or rebuilding or whatever you want to call it. Let's okay, who right now is tanking? Right? That's the question looking at looking at the list. Because I'll just look at the projected standings right now and go from the bottom on up. The Marlins, okay, look, I don't know where the line is between tanking and rebuilding, but they're clearly doing something that's not trying to compete now. Marlins, obvious. White Sox, sort of a tank rebuild. I don't know which one it was.

They gave away most of their great players, but at least now they're coming out of it. That's not new. White Sox, we already knew that. So the Tigers are down there, and they're just bad i don't really know what the word is for them they didn't add a lot this offseason they did add like leonis martin and mike fires if those count as additions but tigers aren't tanking maybe they'd like to tank but they have unmovable money so the tigers don't they haven't slashed payroll they just suck yeah the reds are down there which is you know they were good for a long time, and now they're not.

Yeah. Which is, you know, that's the Royals you could put in that camp too. I mean, that has always happened. There's sort of a natural life cycle to most teams. And if you win for a long time, it kind of depletes your talent level, and then you end up not being good for a while. That's just, you know, it's always worked that way. Yeah, absolutely. The Reds aboves above them rebuilding coming out of it the royals have signed a bunch of free agents lately the padres signed eric hosmer the braves are just rebuilding

they're not in a tanking situation they didn't sign a major league free agent i think last i checked but that's not really the qualifier here the orioles just signed alex cobb and andrew cashner and chris tillman the rays haven't gotten better but they haven't gotten i don't think meaningfully worse the phillies have given a lot of money away the pirates are the same as the rays the rangers signed a lot of players the a's are on the upswing tanking is not out of control there are teams that are uh this this look this is we've had this conversation a million times this offseason and i agree with you just because we have the word tanking that's new does not mean that the action of rebuilding is new.

There have always been teams that have tried to rebuild, and there are not too many of them right now. I would expect that at any given point, roughly five or six teams in baseball are in a rebuilding stage. And that makes sense because probably on average every five years or so, a team needs to kind of strip down and try to get better. five years or so, a team needs to kind of strip down and try to get better. Yeah. As I've said, I think what has changed more than anything else is just the language teams use to discuss this. Teams won't necessarily anymore pretend that they're making every effort to contend every season the way that once they might have. And maybe the Astros and the Cubs' success has kind of made it more acceptable to say, well, we're looking forward to 2020 or whatever, whereas in the past you just had to pretend or make some sort of

effort to show that you were still contending. And, you know, I think maybe there are different incentives today where there's revenue sharing, there's all this extra money that comes in from non, you know, wins and loss related reasons. So maybe it's easier for teams to do this. Like if attendance falls, you're not going to go bankrupt in a way that maybe you might have in earlier eras. But there have always been fire sales. There have always been teams that were kind of in the down cycle, having youth movements. And it works, for one thing. I think, you know, not even like extreme tanking examples like the Astros, but Dan Zimborski did a study last year where he showed that if you compare teams that are very bad, you know, just get bad for a while or teams that just kind of hang around in that 70 to low 80 win range and sort of come close to contention every year but are never really good like there's less of a gap there's less time elapsed before your next great team if you actually do get bad

for a while you you end up stuck in that down period for less time than you would otherwise and so he even showed that attendance bounces back more quickly if you get bad and then get good again than if you just kind of hang around. And we saw teams that hung around for decades at a time, whether it was the Royals or the Pirates. Those teams were just cheap or incompetent or small market or a combination of all of those things. And they were just bad for a really long time, and that happens. And frankly, I don't think it's any less entertaining to be bad if you're being bad in sort of a planned way. If you're the White Sox of today, I think that's better for fans and maybe better for baseball than being the White Sox of five years ago who were just never really good enough but would never really rebuild. Now you have a

great farm system to follow. You have great young players who are up and maybe you're having some growing pains, but are still exciting to watch. You can daydream about how good the team's going to be in a few years. So I just don't see it as inferior, really, as an entertainment product. And maybe they're more than the usual amount

of rebuilding teams right now, but I just don't think that's going to continue to be the case. I mean, the more teams that do this at any one time, the less incentive there is to try to go for the number one pick, which isn't that big a deal in baseball compared to some other sports anyway. And, you know, now even the CBA kind of made that less valuable by reducing the drop-off in the pool money from the first pick to other picks. So again, I think it's just, you know, there was a period where there weren't any great teams or any like super teams and Fire Joe Morgan always used to make fun of Joe Morgan complaining that there are no great teams anymore. And now there are great teams and people are worried that there are too many great teams or too many terrible teams. And I don't know.

I just think it's kind of much ado about almost nothing. Yeah. I don't know what is a great era to go back to, but I'm comparing the last five years against just 2003 to 2007. Just two different five-year spans that are separated from one another by 10 years just to see if how things are now compares to what we sort of remember maybe before things were broken or whatnot and i don't have great numbers this is going to be arbitrary but for the first five-year period which was 15 to 10 years ago there were four teams that averaged 90 or more wins per year over those five years and in the most recent five years there were again four teams so what's the what's the good lower threshold 70 wins 75 call it 75 there were nine teams that

averaged 75 wins or fewer over those five years and over the past five years there have been seven such teams rockies marlins podgers reds twins white socks and phillies so even there it doesn't imply that there's a worse or wider distribution now than there used to be. There were just sad sack teams back then. And now I don't think that you have that perennial sad sack organization anymore. It kind of fluctuates between certain ones. And, you know, right now the Marlins are kind of sad sack. Maybe they won't be in three or four years.

We don't know. But we don't have the Devil Rays. we don't know but we don't have the devil rays we don't have the old royals or the old pirates or the old orioles that were just the old tigers were just miserable all of the time that isn't the case anymore and i wonder if not only has the language changed in the way that we talk about these teams but also just the fact that we have these numbers all the time so maybe it's entirely possible teams have known forever that hey we're not going to be good but the fans don't know that so we can sell optimism even if you know we're the pirates we signed some moderate free agent but we know we suck yeah now maybe the pirates didn't

know that because you know they were the old pirates but now fans are just smarter than they've ever been people are smarter than they've ever been but especially baseball fans and the numbers are there that say look this team probably won't be very good so maybe 10 or 15 years ago this royals front office could have said well hey we're reloading and we think we'll be pretty good in 2018 now fans know they probably won't but that just it shifts what the royals front office can talk about and they can say well i think we'll be competitive but we're also recycling and we're going to be pretty strong again we believe in our young players and we're aiming for three years from now and i think fans can get behind that yep good point all right belated stat blast yeah sure it's

not very good i don't care they'll take a data set sorted by something like e r a minus or o b s plus and then they'll tease I was, I searched around for a bunch of different things to pursue but I keep coming back to the fact that the Astros right now are not only projected to be uh super good but they're projected to be like really really super good yeah so according to our current projected standings on fangraphs the Astros are at 101 wins projected that is schedule adjusted that ties them for the best pre-season projection for a team since at least 2005 that's very good the team that was projected for 101 wins in 2005 i believe went on to win 100 games so credit to them team in second place to the cubs they're projected at 96.2 wins but what i also like is that at fangraphs we have projected wins above replacement and the

astros are projected at 55 wins above replacement so basically i was just looking at the history of baseball to see where teams have actually come out so right now we have uh i went all the way back to 1900 which covers you know a lot of baseball teams i don't know how many thousands of baseball teams and the astros are projected at 55 wins above replacement over 162 games so i calculated every team's wins above replacement on a per 162 game basis and the astros would be tied for 42nd place which does not sound great until you remember that this is a projection and projections again are by their nature conservative and so i was uh i was curious how many teams in a sort of modern baseball wound up this good or better. And so since, what do you want to call it, the 30-team era, I guess, that began in 1998,

over the past 20 seasons, there have been only six teams that have finished as good as the Astros project right now in wins above replacement. And interestingly, there was no one from between 2003 and 2015. There was no team that was quite this good. But in 2016, the Cubs wound up at 58.6 wins above replacement. They won 103 games. And last year, the Indians wound up at 59 wins above replacement. They won 102 games.

What do you think about, you Ben, what do you think about the Astros' projection right now? Is it outlandishly positive to you or do you look at this team and think actually i think they're even better than this i don't think it's outlandish in either direction i mean i'm accustomed to see smaller numbers with projections so in that sense when i see triple digits and if you look at the fangraphs depth charts projections, which are not schedule adjusted, then there are three teams on there with triple digit win total predictions, which is in line with what we were saying earlier about super teams, I suppose. But

I don't think it's really that far off. I don't think it's unreasonable. I wouldn't say, I mean, maybe I'm just conditioned not to project any team to be better than that because that is really, really good. So I don't think I would say it's underrating them so much, but I don't look at it and say that is irrational in any way. I don't know why it would be. It's a projection system. It's not like it's getting caught up in post-World Series hype or something like that. But the Astros are great. They were great last year. It's the same team with Garrett Cole and other guys who might be even better in some cases than they just were.

So there's another fun fact. This is less about the projected Astros and more about where the Astros have come from, because I have this entire leaderboard of teams and their wins above replacement per 162 games. So last year, the Astros were incredibly good. But what's fun is that, of course, in 2013, the Astros were incredibly bad. The Astros in 2013 finished with three. That is the number three and no other numbers.

And that team, out of all of the thousands of teams that I have projected, is the sixth worst team in baseball history since 1900, wins above replacement per 162 games. is the sixth worst team in baseball history since 1900, wins above replacement per 162 games. So the Astros in 2013 had three wins above replacement, and the Astros in 2017 had 53.8 wins above replacement. And so I was curious where that ranks among the greatest five-year transitions, I guess, for a team. So over the five years, the Astros added

50.8 wins above replacement, which is maybe unsurprisingly the biggest five-year jump in baseball history. The team in second place, I guess, should say the teams of the 1901 to 1905 Giants, who added 47.4 wins above replacement over five years. And then, again, unsurprisingly, we have the 2012 and 2016 Chicago Cubs, who added 42.3. But still, the Astros beat that by eight and a half wins. So big jump for the Astros. And now, because I'm curious, to look at the other end, we have the 1975 to 1979 Athletics. Good Lord. They lost 52.5 wins above replacement.

They went from 50.8 to negative 1.7. The team in second place, the 1932 to 1936 Athletics, and the team in third place, the 1911 to 1915 Athletics. Been some big swings in athletics baseball history. Yes, there were some athletics fire sales back in the Connie Mack days. All right, let's take one from Eric. We've discussed, well, you've discussed, I've just listened, what would have to happen for Jason Hayward or David Price to opt out of their contracts? On the flip side, how bad would Clayton Kershaw have to be this year not to opt out of his contract? Okay, so first of all, I think I might, I'm still thinking about writing about the Jason Hayward opt-out situation. And so I reached out to some people I know in baseball

because I was just kind of trying to get an educated consensus of what people think Jason Hayward would have to do. And I think my favorite response that I've received so far was, good God. And that was it. That was all that I ever got from this individual about Jason Hayward opting out. I did ask a few people, like, what if Jason Hayward just had one of his peak seasons,

like we talked about? I kind of thought, getting ahead of myself, that if Hayward just bounced back ahead to one of his really good years, then he would be in position to opt out. And the consensus opinion was, no, that is not true. So now I'm starting to believe that maybe the jason hayward opt out odds are maybe not a million to one but maybe more like the ten thousand to one that has been talked about he would need to have a mic drought season but anyway this isn't about jason hayward this is about clayton kershaw and i think he needs a back injury yes kind of it

maybe that's maybe that's a cop-out because it's not about performance right but we could blend this question with the question we got before like a a year ago, about what if Clayton Kershaw always allowed hits? Remember what it was? And like every single batter he faced got a hit and how long he would last? Yeah. So, you know, if you put those together, then you give Clayton Kershaw a month of allowing to hit to 100, 125 opponents. And then Clayton Kershaw would not opt out. He would, maybe he would retire.

Yeah. But I think that this really requires a back injury. Well, so he's had back injuries in each of the previous two seasons. So he's also been excellent in those seasons and on an inning per inning basis, still among the best pitchers in baseball, maybe the best pitcher in baseball. But he did, well, not quite end each of those seasons with a back injury, but had one late in the season and came back to pitch in the postseason, obviously. But if he had the same season he had last year, for instance, let's say, where he threw 175 innings, or the year before he threw 149 innings, but the stats were still very good

when he was pitching. Would he opt out? I mean, the thing is that would be a third consecutive year with some sort of back problem, which I think would make people even more wary than they would be right now. On the other hand, if he were to just continue being as valuable as he's been in each of the past two seasons that wouldn't be so bad either yeah right and i think that not only does he need a back injury but i think that the season needs to end with the back injury in 2016 kershaw came back he pitched in the playoffs he appeared in five games 2017 kershaw came back in the playoffs he appeared in six games struck out a batter per inning i think that if kershaw has a similar

back problem but then he comes back and he looks like clayton kershaw then that's not going to be enough and he will opt out but if he gets hurt and it looks like he has a chronic back injury and it ends the season then i think that's that's the line otherwise because it's it's virtually impossible to imagine him performing so poorly that he uh wouldn't opt out but i guess that would be a fun subject for a post as well what if clayton kershaw pitched as the worst what if clayton kershaw pitched like alfredo simone what do you do all right sean says with teams emphasizing optimal defensive shifting perhaps more now than in any other period of time i was wondering what you think the threshold is for how many times a player could beat his shift and still have opposing teams try to use it for example if anthony rizzo started the season 30 for 30 hitting the ball

against the shift, do you think you would immediately see teams abandon the shift against him? Do you think it would happen in waves as more forward-thinking teams came to this realization? At what point would teams start to see the player's success as more than a fluke, but rather as an intentional strategy? This is a Ben Lindbergh question, as the previous author of This Week in Bunting Against the Shift. Yeah, that's true. I guess we've probably both written about this subject over the years. But, I mean, yeah, Sean mentions Anthony Rizzo. He's a guy who's been more willing than the typical player to drop the occasional bunt down to take advantage of the shift.

But, yeah, Chris Mosch, who used to write for Baseball Perspectives and now works for the Angels, he tracked this very closely, too, to see, like, even within a series, if someone tried to beat the shift, did the team react to that? And I think in many cases, yes, but I think also in many cases, players just don't seem to stick to this for whatever reason. I mean, there are certain guys who have really changed their approach for a full season or more. And Mike Moustakas had that season where he went the other way a lot more, for instance. But a lot of the time, guys will drop a bunt down occasionally, but they'll never do it in really a concerted way like, OK, I'm just going to do this nonstop until they stop shifting me this way. We just haven't seen that all that much. So I think that, yeah, if you do it every day for a few games, I mean, even if you do it in like the first couple games in a series, in the third game in that series, that team will probably play you a little bit differently based on Chris's investigations into that subject. Might take a little longer on

a league-wide level unless teams are really very carefully scouting you and advanced scouting you but i think you really have to stick with it for longer than most players tend to to have a meaningful change because it's hard to change your batted ball traits especially something like whether you pull the ball or not on the ground most guys do and most guys have very discernible patterns in those areas yeah and you know you bring up anthony rizzo was a guy who's been willing to bunt against the shift and only one player was shifted more last season than anthony rizzo was at least in terms of how fangraps keeps track of it and mike mistakis was in third place for player

most shifted and he's a guy who the last time he was good, went the other way a lot, as you wrote about. That was his big adjustment. So, you know, teams went right back to shifting. And I suspect that if you had a guy who could clearly kind of spray the ball around or bunt down the line or whatever, he would just end up with a shift with a third baseman or shortstop, whoever's over there, plays closer to third base. But that's about it. Because like you said, nearly every player in baseball pulls the majority of his ground balls. And if you don't pull the majority of your ground balls, you're generally kind of a slap hitter,

a Itro or Juan Pierre type, where it's just not really a threat. Unless you're Corey Dickerson, who's been like the weirdest player in this respect that I've looked up. Dickerson is, I think, the only power hitter I've found who actually doesn't pull the majority of his grounders i don't know how to explain that but otherwise teams are going to expect you to pull

it and so they're going to keep on shifting so i would think that at this point teams would be pretty stubborn about that because it's just not proven to be a real skill on the hitter's part it's hard you you hit the ball where you hit the ball, and that's you. Yeah. All right. Different Sean, different spelling of Sean, says, in the quanti fangraphs world, posts on players use highly quantifiable numbers like team control years, exit velocity, XFIP, and a host of other stats that are not used by most traditional outlets, so player profiles vary. Let's do some introspection. Strictly within the sabermetric circle, who do you guys think is the most overrated player in the game today? Overrated by analysts?

Yeah. Overrated by non-analysts? Yeah, I think overrated by analysts or people who focus on the latest and greatest stats. Well, not Mike Trout. It's never been Mike Trout. It never will be Mike Trout. No. I don't know.

I'm tempted to pick some, maybe like a big strikeout pitcher who just still isn't very good, kind of the old Javier Vasquez approach, which would point me to like Jeff Samardzija. But I don't know. Do you have an idea? Well, you actually answered this email. I have no recollection of that. What did I say? You said Yosemite Grandal as one candidate.

Oh, great. Yes. What a great decision that I made. So I think with Yosemite Grandal, he's gone so far, he's gotten like a little bit of MVP support. And I like Grandal. I think he's pretty good. He's been a fine above average hitter.

And of course, the pitch framing numbers have loved him. I think that what we're still missing is sort of the pitcher comfort, the game calling stuff. There was, I forgot who ran the analysis. Was it Harry Pavlidis and co? Yeah. Who attempted to run a game calling analysis that identified Grandal as not being great at it.

Anyway, the long and short of it is that I think we still don't have a great idea, not only of what we're doing with the framing numbers or how sticky they are, but what else catchers do. And so I think that Grandal has become a guy that many analysts kind of love a little too much because it's hard to overlook the framing numbers. But of course, on the other hand, maybe it's accurate. Maybe Grandal is super great.

I just feel like we should be a little more certain before we give him that much credit. Yeah, not a bad pick. seem to have breakout potential or they have like good stuff or they do something well that should augur more success in the future but just hasn't really translated yet like you know maybe someone like tyler chatwood who's uh signing you have i don't know if you've criticized the signing itself or just kind of his shortcomings as a player this offseason he just you know he has good spin rates and everything and that looks good and teams are interested in that and sabermetric writers are interested in that but the actual results not that great doesn't throw that many strikes so someone like that

someone like i don't know who's like a the exit velocity equivalent of that i guess you could say byron buxton last year but But, you know, maybe like Nick Castellanos or someone like that, who's... Oh, yeah, that's a good one. He's a good player. But I think people look at his exit speed and stat cast stats and say he could be a much, much better player. And maybe, maybe they're right. But, you know, he's been in the big leagues for a while now, and we just haven't really seen stardom from him so you know that's uh that's a decent pick i guess yeah i can see that or maybe maybe some especially pitching prospect comes up from the minors has a big strikeout numbers down in the minors and so you just kind of it's easy to look

at that and assume oh he's going to do that in the majors but there's a lot more to it so yeah i like uh castellanos is good and i think it's also it's really easy to look at a good young player who just succeeded in his major league debut and conclude oh he proved himself kind of like Dansby Swanson two years ago so an early candidate even though I like him could very well be Reese Hoskins we might be going overboard on

Reese Hoskins yeah yeah Sean actually mentioned Hoskins as a candidate in his email or you know maybe like I don't know if anyone is still on the Seth Lugo bandwagon, but when he came up and he started throwing that curveball that had such an extremely high spin rate, I think everyone said, oh, this is a great pitch and he's going to be good. And it's not even clear that the pitch is good, let alone Seth Lugo. It does have a high spin rate, but there is more to pitching than that. So yeah.

All right. Yeah. Important point. It's fun to find statistical outliers, but it's important to know if that outlier means anything before you celebrate it. Right. Okay. All right. I'm going to end with two questions here that I have answers to already. So this one is about A-Rod. So this question comes from Joel. He wants to know, could A-Rod hit good pitching? Joel says, today on the Braves Astros broadcast, one of the commentators used Alex Rodriguez, an example of a player who didn't hit top pitchers well, saying he's an example of a guy that's going to feast on your 3-4-5 guys going 10 for 13, then occasionally show out against your aces. Is there evidence that this is true, or was he talking out of his ass? Who is an example of someone who really did this?

So the idea is, the contention is that A-Rod beat up on bad pitching, essentially. So I took a quick look at this, and I used your favorite stat, TOPS+. All right. This time I'm the guy who gets to say TOPS+, which, again, is just a way to compare a player to himself, essentially. So a 100 TOPS+, is just your baseline. If you have a higher number than that, it means you were better in a certain split than you were overall. So I looked into A-Rod's career splits using baseball references, power and finesse pitcher splits, which is just a – it's kind of a proxy for good and bad. There are bad power pitchers and good finesse pitchers. But this is – it's not going by stuff so much as results and like strikeout rates. So the power pitchers, as they define them, tend to be good and the finesse pitchers

tend to be bad or at least below average. So A-Rod's career TOPS plus against power pitchers is 87. So he was, you know, a little bit worse than he is usually. His TOPS plus against finesse pitchers was 113, so better than he usually was. So that's in the way that we would expect, but you have to know whether that's unusual. Is that a big split? Is the typical person, you know, a smaller split or a bigger split than that? So I looked last year, the league marks for all hitters last year the splits were 84 and 112 that's again against power and finesse the year before that 86 and 114 the year before that 84 and 115 so you know exactly the same range really as a rod a rod again 87 and 113 so you know it's basically the same there's really no evidence from that that a rod was any better or worse than expected against the best and worst pitchers it's just

pretty typical which uh not a shocker you know he was one of the best players of all time statistically so it would be weird if he couldn't hit good pitching. Minor. I'll butt in here because I was just looking at something as well. So Alex Rodriguez over his career batted 6,209 times against teams who played 500 baseball or better. You probably looked at this as well. I didn't. It's not a pitcher competition proxy, but, you know, it's close. Baseball reference has splits of against teams 500 or better or teams under 500. So you can assume over a player's

career teams that are 500 or better will have better pitchers than the others so anyway just in baseball history there have been only 95 hitters who have batted at least 5 000 times against teams that finished 500 or better i'd want it as big a sample as possible to uh well you understand why so alex rodriguez had a 9 OPS against good teams and a 929 OPS against worse teams, which is actually a slight advantage. So his TOPS plus against 500 or better teams was 100. That actually ranks him 10th out of the 95 players. Carlos Beltran actually in first place with a TOPS plus of 103. But Alex Rodriguez, by this measure, slightly overperformed against good teams as opposed to bad teams.

Interestingly, the guy who's down in 83rd place out of 95, Derek Jeter, T.O.P.S. Plus of 91. All right. Well, further confirmation, we have defended A-Rod's honor. So, yeah, that's one of those cases where either the person probably just didn't realize how much worse the typical hitter is against good pitching or was just kind of smearing A-Rod because he's A-Rod. All right. And last question comes from Dylan. This is another sort of official score related question. We've been getting a lot of those lately. So Dylan saw this on the baseball subreddit. He thought we might be able to help. Here's the scenario. It's May. Team A is playing Team B. The game starts and Jimmy Smith comes out of the bullpen in the fifth inning. He blows the lead for the team that eventually loses, Team A. What happens in this game, however, is that it starts to pour immediately after he gives up the lead. The game is postponed to a later date in August.

On July 31st, Jimmy Smith is traded to Team B, where he is promoted to the closer position. When the game resumes in August, is Jimmy Smith allowed to pitch for Team B and close the game, thereby giving himself the loss and the save for that game? So can you get the loss and the save in a single game in this scenario? Sent this question to our official score listener, Darren, who says, usually by definition,

you can't get the win in the save, but switching teams, yeah, I think this could happen. I love this scenario and would love to see it. And that was kind of my guess too. I don't see any reason why you couldn't do this because I don't think there's any rule against a team like in a makeup game or in a continuation game that was suspended for weather. I don't think you're, you know, you don't have to bring back exactly the same roster that

you had when you were playing that game. So yeah, you could use a new player. And if he was a player who was on that previous team, I don't see why this couldn't happen. It would be weird. It might break all the stat sites. I don't know, but it could happen. I like the idea of you needing to use the same roster for that game that's been postponed. It's like a little reunion tour if you have a team that blew itself up. Yeah. All right.

Well, we will end this here. So that will do it for today. You are presently hearing some music that may be familiar to you if you're a Ringer MLB show listener. The Ringer MLB show is back. There's a new episode up this week. The show has a new format this season. It's more of a roundtable type thing that's worked well for our other sports podcasts at the Ringer. So I'll still be on it, but most weeks it'll probably be a greater variety of voices. I think the first show is pretty fun. As part of that new format though, there's a new theme song. The old Ringer MLB Show theme song is what you're hearing right now. For those who listened to that podcast from the start, you may remember that song was written for me by

Effectively Wild listener Ben Gibbard. That's how he's usually introduced at concerts. Effectively Wild listener Ben Gibbard is just kind of what he's known for. But Ben was nice enough to write this baseball-themed music for me as a favor, and I would hate for a Ben Gibbard baseball original not to be in use, so I'm going to use it on Effectively Wild for now. Just play it under this time when there's usually no music, and hopefully Ben will be pleased that he gets to hear his song more often. So you can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild, five listeners who have recently done so and signed up to pledge a small monthly amount to keep the podcast on a sound financial footing include

will gentry chuck ruther joel morrison evan ellenberger and eugene chong thanks to all of you you can also join our facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild and you can rate and review and subscribe to effectively wild on on iTunes. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. Please replenish our mailbag. Keep your questions and comments coming for me and Jeff via email at podcast.fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system. We have two more team preview podcasts to go. Next time, we will tackle the Seattle Mariners and the Colorado Rockies.

We'll be back with that very soon.