Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 120: Quantifying PED Effects/Best Farm Systems in Baseball/Roleplaying Trade Talks

Episode Date: January 16, 2013

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about how much steroids help, the best farm systems in baseball, and how they’d try to negotiate a hypothetical trade.

Hi. Hi, Ben. Hi. Welcome, Ben, to episode one... Twenty. Twenty of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives. You are Ben Lindbergh in New York, New York. I am, still. Yes, I'm Sam Miller in Long Beach, California.

We are here with Email Wednesday we have some good emails and some good ones that we probably won't even get to so thank you to the people who asked questions that we won't have time to get to but we have some things to talk about um so are you ready for me to read an email to you yes please all right so this one is um i i i well this one okay so this is from a a gentleman named aaron who uh says i'd like ben to play gm of the diamondbacks and sam to play gm of the white socks i'd like you to act as the gm not try to emulate the actual gm now negotiate and finalize a trade centered around justinpton for Chris Sale. And I just want to note that I think that this is a great idea for an exercise.

And I think that I would be willing to take on such challenges in the future. I think we will be horrible at this tonight because we've never done it. horrible at this yeah tonight because right never done it we would need uh a more comprehensive knowledge of both the diamondbacks and white sock systems than we have without uh preparing at length but yeah i think it's a it's a good idea and also yeah go ahead i was just gonna say we also have never done it before i think if we did it more times we would probably would get better at it um i don't know it might be a thing that would work better in text, or it might not. But I'm willing to give it a go because I like the idea behind it. Me too.

So the other thing, though, is that in looking at your roster, Ben, it seems that there are a few things that you need less than my pitching. that there are few things that you need less than my pitching. You have something like seven credible starters at this point in time. Some of them are more credible than others. I traded a pretty good young one already this winter. That's exactly right. The team that trades Trevor Bauer is not usually going to be the team that trades for Chris Sale. Currently, MLB.com lists Daniel Hudson as the seventh starter in your rotation. And so that sort of gives you an idea about what kind of a rotation we're talking about. You sound a little jealous.

I would be happy to have that. In fact uh can we undo the daniel hudson trade no backsies on that one because that one didn't work uh i think what did i get ultimately out of that i i got Edwin Jackson traded for Jason Fizer, something like that. Let's see. Just checking my records. I think I... Daniel Hudson was traded with David Holmberg to the Diamondbacks for Edwin Jackson. And then Edwin Jackson was traded to Toronto, or rather to St. Louis via Toronto, for like, I'm trying to remember, like Santa? He was traded with Mark Tien, or we're talking, traded by the Diamondbacks to the White Sox,

and then traded by the White Sox with Mark Tien to the Blue Jays for Jason Frazier and Zach Stewart. Yeah, so I think this is actually how most trade conversations go. A rehashing of trade. Very little memory of those trades. Yes, it was all a blur. The thing is, though, that while Chris Sale might not be your preferred return, I think in this case, I think we both know that you don't have any choice but to trade Justin Upton. At this point,

Chris Sale is an extremely desirable commodity. And so you'll make room, right? Well, I can't argue with that. I've been trying desperately to trade Justin Upton for the past three years. All right. So we'll just throw Miguel Montero and Tyler Skaggs, and then I think that works. Let's do it. I don't really understand many of the moves I've made this winter. I think that in general, though, to be totally sincere, these aren't probably two teams that match up

real great they have it seems that they have some of the same strengths and weaknesses um upton to be honest doesn't really fully fit into my team either i um would much rather have a third baseman for instance and maybe a second baseman and maybe a catcher than another outfielder um although vc8o is not uh you, my favorite player in the world, but he's 23 and he's coming off of, uh, you know, a decent year, a pretty good year. He can kind of hit. Um, I, uh, I think that I'm surprised that the White Sox, uh, looking at the White Sox roster, I would think that, um, Eric Chavez would fit very well on this team, especially in a platoon with Jeff Kepinger. But I think that if I were interested, I think from the White Sox perspective, if I wanted to trade Sale for Upton, I would expect to get the extras in the deal.

I think that Sale is a more valuable commodity right now than uptick. And so I guess that's the question. Do you agree? Do you think that that's true? I guess I would say, yeah, I agree with that. At least after factoring in the contract, if we were talking about only the players, I don't know that I would say that. I might take the dependability of the position player who doesn't look like he's a member of an alien race when he's pitching. But yeah, but with the contract and the fact that Sale is so young and cheap, yes, I would say he's probably more valuable. Yeah. Well, it's only, I mean, it's basically one more year of control. But yeah, that's a big year.

So I would think that, yeah, so we're in agreement on that. So I would think, though, that it's close enough that I wouldn't expect a big return besides Upton. A big return besides Upton. Holmberg, who you named, part of the Edwin Jackson deal, is actually the sort of player that I might think would come back in that deal. He is a double-A pitcher with good strike-out-to-walk ratio, pitchability. And so basically he's a guy who is low upside but low ceiling and fairly close to the majors right now as a starting pitcher. So I could see that being the kind of thing that would appeal to the White Sox.

The Diamondbacks have a catcher locked up for four years, so I could see scouring their minor league catching depth. Unfortunately, the only two catchers worth a darn in their system are both like in rookie ball or below. But, you know, I think an upside 20-year-old catcher might be something that would fill out the trade. They don't really have a bad contract that I would think that they would want to move. Yeah, I don't know. I guess, yeah, not particularly particularly I guess Kubel kind of but you're not going to take up Danan Kubel so yeah

oh well I was going the other way oh White Sox I mean Rios is a bit overpaid and I guess Dunn is kind of a bad contract now yeah you're not going to probably have much luck trading him to the NL no I guess Dunn is kind of a bad contract now. Yeah, you're not going to probably have much luck trading him to the NL.

No. You're probably not going to be a lot of money going one way or the other. So anyway, Upton and Holmberg and some 22-year-old catcher who nobody's ever going to hear of again for Chris Sale. Is that a deal? Let me talk to my people. Uh-huh. I think if Rick Hahn and Kevin Towers are listening to this, they probably can just take this as a sign that they shouldn't even talk about this

trade. It probably won't go that much better. They probably haven't, actually. No. All right. All right. Just say it's a deal. Yeah, sure. I like making deals because I'm Kevin Towers. because I'm Kevin Towers. All right. So next is, this is a very quick one. It's a gentleman named Sean who says, piggybacking off your who has the farm system to get Justin Upton segment yesterday,

segment, I think that adds an officialness to the show. Yeah, it's really just one segment every day. We went on a tangent. But who do you feel have the top three to five or so farm systems in baseball? I'm only answering this because, well, I don't know. I certainly don't have the expertise to add value to this conversation. So I would just note that Jim Callis actually answered this at Baseball America. And if you want our opinion instead of Jim Callis, it really doesn't matter what we tell you because you are an idiot. Sean is simply getting as many good opinions as he can. But Jim Callis' opinion is the best in this current discussion right now between me and Ben and Jim Callis.

And so Jim ranked them a couple weeks ago or a week ago or so, and it was the Cardinals number one, the Mariners number two, the Marlins number three, the Rangers number four, the Red Sox number five, and then the Rays number six. And so I don't have any quibbles with that. I mean, I guess there are things that surprise me. I'm surprised that the Red Sox are quite that high. But, I mean, I know they have a good system.

It's just a little higher than I would have expected. And I'm slightly surprised that the Marlins are that high. I got the sense that they were a little lower than that. But it's a good system as well. Yeah. Well, if you want to hear what someone at BP who actually writes about prospects for a living thinks, we will have our own rankings somewhere towards the end of the offseason once Jason Parks and the rest of the prospect crew finishes running through all the top tens. Otherwise, I guess, I mean, he, Jason did mention that he thought the Padres were

a top five system when he did the Padres list recently. That's interesting. You're right. He did. And I, that was, I would have expected to see the Padres very high, top maybe two, based on kind of what I hear, and also where they were last year, and when you look at the promotions that didn't get made. And the Padres actually aren't on Kalos' top ten, which shows that this is not something that there's always a ton of groupthink on. Yeah, actually, I'm very surprised by that yeah when when the um

when we talked about the tick tock of the marlins blue jays trade and the marlins had identified the three best systems in baseball do you remember who they were one was the blue j. I think one. What was the second one you cut out? Rangers? Yeah, that sounds familiar. I thought the Padres were the third one. Maybe you can find that. But yeah, when we're talking about an entire system or a snapshot of a whole system, I sort of feel like to an extent I'm just parroting other people because, well, I might have a more informed perspective about certain prospects, especially notable prospects.

It's kind of tough to have a great sense of an entire system from top to bottom without putting a lot of time into that. Without putting a lot of time into that and to rank every system, you have to have a good sense of all 30 systems from top to bottom, which takes a lot of time and expertise or reading of what other people who have that expertise say and repeating it back. The third team that was identified by the Marlins as the top three systems in baseball was the Royals. And the Royals also are not on Callis' top ten, but of course a lot has happened to the Royals' system since that was made. And they traded their best prospect and probably their best pitching prospect as well as a couple of other pretty good prospects away. So that.

as well as a couple of other pretty good prospects away. So that. So then we have a question from Doug. And I don't know that we'll go that deep into this question, but it's an interesting point that I wanted to make earlier. And I'm just going to skip ahead. Could we quantify the effect of PEDs? Well, okay, I'm trying to figure out how much of this I need to answer. But basically, this question is about the Hall of Fame.

It's about Bonds. I'm initially inclined to think any player testing positive should be ineligible for the Hall, but I do think we can start to have an intelligent debate about the effect. The whole PEDs didn't teach Bonds to hit a baseball argument seems to be rather banal to me. If they didn't help him significantly, why would he risk his own personal health, etc.? And yes, while MLB did not have an effective testing program, PEDs were always against league rules. They were just not effectively policed. So, if we quantify the effect of PEDs, it appears from the investigations that he likely began using in 1998. We can take his

Pocota projections based on aging and historical performance levels and use that as a baseline, compare what his actual performance was to those projections. So I just want to use this actually to talk about a somewhat related topic, which is that I feel like maybe the biggest thing right now in the Hall of Fame voting, the difference between people who would vote for no PED users and the ones who are willing to basically overlook it and vote based on performance, is a disagreement about how much the effects of the PEDs were. There is some science out there that is limited, I think, considerably by the fact that we don't know the precise day

that every player starts using and stops using, and we don't know the precise steroids that they are using, and we also have the sample size issues. But the whole thing basically is there's a lot of interference to the information. But there's some science that seems to suggest that it hasn't helped baseball players, that it hasn't shown a considerable effect in steroids users' performance. And many people, and I think that I would consider myself currently, at least momentarily to be of this viewpoint, that think that it is essentially a non-issue for performance and that these players

did in fact use them because they thought that it would make them better, but that it did not make them better. So you believe that on the whole, or even in the case of someone like Bonds, who at an age when it's extremely unusual for a player to improve, let alone improve by as much as he did, started doing things that no player has ever done before? Yeah, well, that's the thing, is that it defies belief to think that that's true. Yes. It's silly to believe that that's true. Silly to believe that that's true. But probably I think that that's mostly true. I don't feel confident in my opinion. I could be very easily swayed by a well-written report tomorrow.

But currently, based upon the well-written reports that I've read, I think that as unlikely as it is, that that's probably the best information that we have. reports that I've read, I think that as unlikely as it is, that that's probably the best information that we have. So I asked recently on the Twitter whether, I asked people two questions. One is how many home runs they think Bonds would have hit in 2001 had he not used any performance enhancing drugs. And then secondly, I asked them whether they currently support Barry Bonds for the Hall of Fame. And the idea was to see whether there was a big gap between the people who do support and don't support as to how much effect steroids had, in their opinion.

And the problem is that out of those, I don't know, maybe 60 or so responses I got, I think there were three that said they wouldn't support Bonds for the Hall of Fame. Everybody else who follows me did support him, which is sort of surprising, but that's probably the kind of standard internet-y baseball fans view. But the average home runs that they thought he would have hit was 59. And I don't quite know what that number says. On the one hand, 59 is considerably lower than 73. On the other hand, it is considerably

higher than anything he had ever done before. And so it is accepting the theory, the thesis, that Barry Bonds at age 37 or whatever did something that he had never done before and by a considerable amount. So it seems that there's a bit of ambivalence between people who do give steroids some effect but also kind of limit the effect that they think it gives. So anyway, this – I've been talking a really long time. Well, I mean with Bonds, it's almost – if you're going to vote against Bonds, I mean if you don't put someone like Palmeiro or Maguire or Sosa on your ballot, it could be because you think that the steroids made them better enough that they are Hall of Famers statistically and wouldn't have been had they not taken anything. And I think, I mean, maybe that's defensible given that they're kind of borderline statistical candidates or certainly not shoe-ins just purely based on stats.

But Bonds, of course, is purely based on stats and probably was before he is supposed to have done anything, right? So, I mean, if you are not putting Bonds on your ballot, then it seems to be more of a moralistic stance, I think, maybe. Yeah, I guess it is. So imagine though that instead of steroids, imagine that Barry Bonds had actually come out with a baseball bat that would hit a home run every time, or it would hit a home run every time, you know, or it would hit a home run every sixth time. No matter what he did, all he had to do is just put this bat out there and it would automatically hit a home run every sixth time. And that Barry Bonds at this point in his career was actually the worst player in baseball, but he had this bat that did all of the work for

him. I don't think we would consider it moralizing for voters to penalize a player who used that bat. And I think that there are people who are voting against Bonds or against Palmeiro. I mean, maybe Bonds muddies the water a bit because like you say, he has this performance before and same with Clemens. But I think there are people who are voting against those guys who really think that steroids is essentially that magic bat. And that is, like, that's not an opinion that I hold, but at least it's a reasonable one. It's an understandable one. And it's a sort of, to some degree, it's a logically consistent one. And so I think that there's a bit of vilifying of voters who won't

vote for steroids users based on the idea that they're all just moralizing, judgmental stone throwers. And I'm not sure that that's true. I mean, it really is. It seems to me that the question that we just were asked by Doug, which is how much do steroids help, is not a question that has been answered. And even if it has been answered, to some degree it has been answered conclusively. And there's room for an extremely wide range of opinions about that question. wide range of opinions about that question. And if you happen to think that, that they turn, um, uh, utility second baseman into 45 home run MVP candidates, um, and that they're basically just a magic, um, you know, a magic trick that players can use, then, um, it seems like it's reasonable to vote against those guys. It's not how I would vote, but I don't actively hate people who feel that way. Well, we know for sure that it's not a magic potion in every case,

as people often cite the examples of Alex Sanchez or some marginal player who's known to have used steroids and didn't immediately become Barry Bonds. So we know, I guess, with some certainty that it is not something that will in every case produce a gigantic improvement. I guess I'm willing to entertain the possibility that it could in particular instances, and possibly even in Bonds' case, whether because of what he took and how he took it or what specific cocktail he was using, or just because of his physiology. And maybe there was something about his body

and the way Barry Bonds worked physically that made him able to take advantage of it in a way that most players wouldn't. I guess in general, I'm sort of in the agnostic, we don't know what the effect is, we can't quantify the effect camp. But I certainly wouldn't dismiss anyone who concludes that steroids helped Barry Bonds, just purely based on his aging curve and his trajectory. I think it's at least a reasonable position. Yeah. And just quickly with Sanchez, you know that Sanchez got swept up in the Mitchell report. Maybe he was using 10 times the steroids Bonds was, or maybe he did it, you know, maybe he got one shipment of HGH and he did it and you know, it made him sick to his stomach and he never did

it again. I mean, you don't, you don't really know even what Alex Sanchez did with you. I'm on, I'm on the same side as you. So I agree, but I'm just, I think that for a person, you know, there is room for people to disagree reasonably about this. So how many home runs would Bonds have hit in 2001 if he had never touched an illegal substance? Man, that's such a difficult question. I guess, I mean, what was his previous high before then was 49? 49? I think. His previous high before then was 49. 49?

I think. So he had 49, and that's in 2000 when I guess that's after he is supposed to have started doing things. So before that, I guess it would have been 46 when he was a 28-year-old in 1993. Man, I mean, it's just such an outlier. He never hit 50 in any other season, and he hit 73 in that season. And I guess you could say if he was taking the same sort of steroids for that whole several-year period, why would he have hit 40-something every year except that one? I don't know. I guess it's just so hard for me to expect that a 36-year-old player

would improve that dramatically on a previous career high. I guess I could see it being 50-something, I guess. And, I mean, maybe it's possible that he just became so selective at that age. Players typically improve in that sense, or their walk rate goes up and they become more selective. And maybe with him, he was selective enough already that it kind of pushed him past the point where he was just able to let every bad pitch go by and hit only the good pitches.

And it all just came together in a perfect storm of home run hitting. I'm avoiding the question. I guess, I don't know, 55. All right. So now we know what you think. You think that home runs produced, in that case, a 33% improvement in performance? Yeah, I guess. I don't know. Not confident at all in that number. Have no evidence to prove that that's the case, but I guess that's the gut feeling. All right. Well, I'm glad you didn't ask me because I have no idea. So we'll be back tomorrow with our own topic, maybe.