Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 123: How Far Away Are the Astros?/The MLBPA is Mad at the Marlins/Is A-Rod’s Surgery Suspicious?/The Future of Baseball on the Radio

Episode Date: January 22, 2013

Ben and Sam discuss an assortment of topics, including the Astros’ outlook for 2013 and beyond, Alex Rodriguez’s long-awaited surgery, the Marlins and the MLBPA, and whether baseball broadcasts on the radio will survive.

A gallimaufry is actually a collection or an assortment of things. We know that gallimauphries can be anywhere. They can be in car trunks, they can be in classrooms, they can be all over the place. Well, the gallimaufry is not the junk itself. It is the collection or the assortment. Good morning and welcome to episode 123 of Effectively Wild, the Baseball Prospectus Daily Podcast. In New York, I am Ben Lindberg, and in Long

Beach, California, joining me is Sam Miller. How was your long weekend, Sam? It was short. Yeah, it wasn't actually a long weekend. It was a long weekend in the sense that we did not do a podcast yesterday. But we did work. You did write an article and edit articles. Yeah, and read articles. And read articles. Although that's fun.

It's not work. It's fun until it is your job. And then it's not unpleasant, but it is also, it strangely becomes a thing that you procrastinate on. Yeah. So it used to be that when I would work, when I was covering news beats, I would waste my whole day reading about baseball in order to avoid doing work. And now that it's my job to keep up on baseball, I find myself procrastinating from reading. But there's nowhere to go. It's like I'm trapped. There's nothing to escape to once you're trying to escape from baseball writing. And so I just stare at a screen.

I just sort of stare at nothing. You could spend time with your daughter. Yeah, that's true. That hasn't occurred to you. That is another thing that I procrastinate because it is also a responsibility. Yeah, there is a certain pressure to feeling like you need to read what everyone else is doing, even at least so you don't do the same thing or so you get good ideas.

Anyway, we have a bunch of topics today, but we don't like any of them. So please listen. Great show ahead. Yeah. So we're not going to do a full show on any one of these topics, but we are going to do a full show on a bunch of these topics in the Fire Joe Morgan tradition of the Gallimaufry, where they would not have enough material for a full post on one thing,

but they would have a bunch of things that they'd been tipped off to so they would just do them together in a jumble and not spend a ton of time on any of them and just get to all of them so that's what we are going to do we're just and and in five and just like fire joe morgan in in five years the classical is going to do an oral history about this segment do you need to do an oral history of a podcast it's already it's already one tricky okay uh so all right first thing on our list here on my list here the astros signed eric bedard someone suggested that we talk about how far away they are From, I guess, being a good team They now have, I suppose, a full rotation Or projected rotation of Bud Norris, Lucas Harrell, Jordan Lyles, Phil Humber

And Bedard, who is on a minor league deal But will probably make the team And they have some other players on their team uh can you name can you name them i i was actually in a press brought in a press box um around probably august and there there actually was a game being played of of name the astros and how many could you name and there was one, I forget who, but one credentialed member of the press corps topped out at three. Wow. I have thought in previous years that the Astros' bullpen was like a dead zone in my

knowledge of baseball and that any time I would look at who was in their bullpen, there would be multiple players I had never heard of uh we just got a a tweet by the way from someone who asked no more effectively wild uh yeah he's well but yeah it was over how everybody is going to feel in about an hour um whenever i look at the astros bullpen i, I'm shocked to see that Frankie Rodriguez is in their bullpen. And then I, of course, realize that that's actually Fernando Rodriguez. And we actually got a question from a listener, I don't know, a month or so ago, who wanted to know what the effect of the Astros moving to the AL West was. Would it make them worse? Would it make everyone else better?

And we liked the question, but we just weren't sure how to answer it. It was a very long, detailed question about quantifying exactly what the effect was, and we weren't sure what the effect was. Presumably it's something. So the Astros moved to what is now a very competitive division, it seems like. And they've signed some players, but not any particularly good players. So how far away are the Astros? Well, you mean how far away, like how many years until they're good, or how far away from being good? I guess, okay, so they won 55 games last year in the NL Central, so now they're moving to the AL West.

Will they win more games? And that, well, geez. And that was, I guess you could say that was with Carlos Lee and Wandi Rodriguez and the pitcher that you like, the reliever that you always love, Wilton Lopez. And also with Brett Myers and I guess with like Jay Happ. So they, I mean, none of those guys are like super awesome, but they did shed a lot of players as the season went on.

So you could maybe argue that they were actually worse in September than they were in April. And then Carlos Pena and Jose Veras and Eric Bedard and Phil Humber and that's about it. Yeah, the H is silent actually. What? Oh, Humber. Yeah, I never knew that. It's also not Phil. Well, you are the expert on Phil. I am currently the expert on Philip Umber, for what it's worth. Yeah, no, I think that it's, I wouldn't put him at 107 losses.

I mean, Jeff Sullivan wrote a piece, which we might have mentioned on this show before last year, about how they were arguably the worst team ever projected which is to say that they projections are usually fairly conservative and there's some element of regression to the mean in all projections so you'll rarely see a team projected to lose you know 102 games or or whatever but the Astros were in and so far as Sullivan could find going back he couldn't find a team that had been projected preseason to lose fewer games. And they actually started to lose more games, and the Astros actually did lose more games in their projections.

I would guess, though, that, I mean, I don't know. I think that that rotation's not so bad to me. I mean, I think that you could put that rotation on, you know, I think if you put that rotation on a team that wasn't the Astros, nobody would notice it as being particularly bad. You know, if that was the, you know, if that was the Marlins rotation, I don't know, Marlins aren't a good example, but I mean, it's not, it's a competent rotation. It's a major league rotation, I think.

I don't know. Do think. I don't know. Do you? I don't know. Am I way too optimistic about that? It's a major league rotation because it's a major league team. I don't know that it's a rotation that any major league team would want. I mean, it's not good. It's very bad.

It's, I mean, I don't know. I guess I would expect them to win more than 55 games just because it doesn't happen often that teams win 55 games. And maybe they'll get a little luckier or something. They were 56 the year before. What? They went 56 the year before what they went 56 the year before is that right uh yeah pence and roy oswalt for right but not oswalt wait was that oswalt no not oswalt no that was before yeah um i don't know they underplayed their their run differential the last couple of years by at least a few games uh and i don't know i i guess moving to the aos makes them worse probably

record wise i guess we didn't have a good way to quantify that but that's probably the direction of the effect i would say yeah well especially that the AL West right now is really good. I mean, I guess the NL Central last year wasn't as bad as it has occasionally been, with two really good teams at the top. But, I mean, the AL West right now is, I think, three teams that won at least 88 last year and then a Mariners team that I think is going to challenge 500. So it's not going to be, I mean, it's certainly not going to be pretty. And, I mean, I think that they, I mean, we've talked about when the point is that a team should punt

and quit trying to get better in an individual season. And the Astros are undoubtedly in a position where they can feel very good giving up. I would guess that it would take, I don't know, 600 to 1 odds for me to bet on them to win the World Series? Yeah, and they have acted in a way that suggests that they would probably not give themselves better odds. Yeah, I think 600 to 1 to make the World Series. Uh-huh, okay. Our playoff projections will have them at 0% on opening day.

They will probably be the only team, I think. Well, I guess I'll take the over on 55 games. I don't feel good about it, but I'll take the over on that. And I will say 2016 for a playoff contending Astros team. I will say I will take the over on 55. I will say, well, what is contending? I don't know. Entering a season with, I don't know, what's contending?

It's what the A's and the Angels and the Rangers are. Yeah, well, I would say that the Astros are going to have 0% playoff odds on opening day this year. I will say that they will not have 0% playoff odds on opening day in 2014. And I will further say that their rotation this year will finish no lower than 13th in the American League in whatever reliable metric you want to use. Okay. All right.

So Astros in 2014 will not have a 0% chance. That is encouraging. Okay. Next question or next topic. The Marlins are in some hot water with the MLB Players Association, which is something that we thought might happen once they started selling everyone, trading everyone. So this comes from Barry Jackson's column on Sunday, I think, in the Miami Herald. He said, the 2013 payroll projects to be $32.5 million, but it's $45 million counting money they owe other teams. Two and a half million, but it's 45 million counting money they owe other teams.

An MLB Players Association source said if owner Jeffrey Luria doesn't increase their payroll in the coming months, they plan to pursue the issue with Commissioner Bud Selig. We don't have to wait until next October to pursue it, the source said. If the Marlins don't raise payroll in 2013, former Commissioner Faye Vincent expects the commissioner and union will strongly encourage Luria to spend some money. They can make it very uncomfortable if he doesn't. And in 2010, there was a similar thing when the MLBPA kind of forced an agreement that required the Marlins to spend more for a few years, which they did. And then those few years were over and now they're not spending again. So also in that column is the news that the Marlins are hearing from free agents who would love to play for them, including Freddy Garcia and Bobby Abreu. So they could sign those two guys to huge contracts

and get on the Players Association good side, I guess. But maybe this is why we haven't seen them trade in Alaska, which seemed almost inevitable at one point. And maybe it's why they held on to Stanton. Not that he's making money, but I don't know. Do you have anything else to say about the Marlins spending? Yeah, I mean, it's weird because they did spend money. I mean, they spent more money than almost any team in baseball

over the last few years, or I guess rather they... I don't even know what the verb is because they didn't technically spend that money, but they committed that money. They infused that money into the game. And so if you're the player, I mean, really, the Players Association's got to be kind of thrilled with what the Marlins have done recently, especially if you don't include exclusively the near-re recent history. But I guess the question is, do you think that the Marlins' actions this offseason

suppressed the player market, the free agent market, by putting all these veterans, by making all these veterans available? I mean, they basically, you could argue, they increased the supply of free agents without increasing the demand and therefore kept everybody else's costs lower. Yeah, I guess I'd say so. It's hard to say by how much and certainly not by so much that salaries weren't quite robust anyway. But, yeah, I don't see why not.

If someone like Josh Johnson hadn't been available, then, I mean. Kyle Osh might have been signed. Yeah, perhaps. Or Mark Burley. Yeah, that's possible. Perhaps. Or Mark Burley. Yeah, that's possible. The article does mention that the Marlins expect to collect much less in revenue sharing this year, between $10 to $15 million. They reportedly averaged $33 million last season and won't make much, if anything, this season

because they expect attendance and ballpark revenue to plummet. And it seems strange that they would lie about that in that MLB and the Players Union can see their books. So it's not quite the same as telling the media that. You'd think that the Marlins who got such a sweet deal on their stadium would be able to break even at least, especially in the first year of that stadium where they drew decently, at least certainly by Marlins standards. So I don't know, that's kind of hard to, to buy, I guess. But, uh, the people they are saying that to will be able to tell whether they were telling the

truth unless there's some sort of creative accounting going on. And this is just, you think this is just coming up because this is already, it had already come up with the Marlins previously, right? I mean, if the, uh, the Twins had traded Joe Maurer and Justin Morneau and Josh Willingham this offseason, I can't imagine that there would be the same official action. Or do you think that the union has a little bit of an itchy trigger finger with this issue? Yeah, I guess the fact that there's some precedent

might have made them look a little more closely. But I guess if there were another team that were projected to spend low 30s on payroll next season, that's probably something that would have attracted their attention too, I would think. think. I wonder if Bud Selig's quasi-intervention into the trade where he reviewed it and tacitly approved it, even if he didn't... I don't know how officially he approved it, but he basically looked into it and publicly affirmed it. I wonder if that affects this one way or the other, because in one sense, you could say, well, the Marlins have cover, because Bud Selig has already blessed the trade and declared it an okay baseball trade. But on the other hand, it could be that the union

complaining gives Selig cover to kind of take action against the Marlins without it being him you know like this maybe gives him an opportunity to uh let somebody else be the bad cop on the Marlins yeah right okay uh let's switch topics again next topic is uh why did Alex Rodriguez wait so long to have his surgery? He had his surgery, I think it was last week, and he had the diagnosis months before that. We were told about his diagnosis at the winter meetings, and the Yankees knew even before that. So why, when he had months of rehab ahead of him,

would the Yankees have waited a couple months to kind of start the clock. So I am taking this from a Bill James mailbag. I was going to take that from a Bill James mailbag, which I read specifically because I had no obligation to read it. And so I procrastinated reading other things by reading the Bill James mailbag. Right. So that's why I'm bringing this up. Someone asked Bill James, as a Yankee fan, sorry, apologies up front,

I'd like to give the organization and A-Rod the benefit of the doubt on waiting until January to have surgery that I seem to remember we all knew he was going to have back in November. I'm assuming that there might have been medical reasons for having to wait.

Otherwise, WTF? And Bill James said, I'll tell you this, it's a big WTF inside baseball. Obviously, there is something in all caps going on there that we don't know about. And then someone else kind of posts the party line about this, which is what the Yankees or A-Rod's doctors have said, that it took a while to prepare for the surgery, that he was doing this sort of prehabilitation to strengthen the area and reduce inflammation,

which theoretically would reduce the recovery time and that it would be worth it for him to wait. And Bill James responded, sure, which seems rather dismissive. So... I didn't. I'm sorry. I didn't hear that. I wasn't listening. So if I repeat what you just said,

I was looking something up, but if I repeat what you said, I apologize. So I'm looking at the Daily News, and they said the surgery was done now instead of when the injury was originally discovered because Rodriguez needed a period of prehab to strengthen the muscles in the joint. Am I literally repeating word for word what you just said?

Yes, you are. Should I keep going? I don't know. What are you going to say next? Well, I'm just going to say real quick that in this New York Daily News story, there is a photo of Alex Rodriguez in the hospital, which is weird. How did they get that picture? Why did he – why did they – oh, so there's a picture of – oh, I guess it's via Facebook.

Alex Rodriguez released photos of himself. He does have a lot of strange photos of himself on there. There's one of him actually in the hospital bed with like a breathing tube in his nose and he looks like he's asking Derek Jeter to hit a home run for him because he's got cancer. Looks like he's asking Derek Jeter to hit a home run for him because he's got cancer. And then there's another one where he's like walking in the hallways of the hospital, which is very, very weird. And I feel like he's dressed in street clothes. He's wearing like a black jacket and like gray tennis shoes and a beanie and i feel like there's perhaps some meme

potential to this photo uh so david pinto who who linked this bill james thing that i saw looked up whether this is actually a standard recommendation with hip surgery on some hip surgery site and found that it was or at at least it was, it was mentioned as something that could be done if deemed necessary. Uh, so I don't know that either of us has any inside knowledge about this. I don't. Um, well I do of course, but I can't share it on a podcast. I know all of the score. But I guess, I mean, when A-Rod was being benched during the playoffs, we all wondered whether there was something the team wasn't telling us. At the time, he was ostensibly healthy, and it was just a performance-based thing.

And then much later, we found out that there was an injury injury and it wasn't exactly clear when the team knew about that injury or whether it seemed that Joe Girardi made the decision to bench him the first time without knowing about the injury, at least according to Brian Cashman. But after that, there was the injury. So there was something going on then that we didn't know about and at least conceivably there is something going on now uh that we don't know about but do you find the official explanation convincing would you have thought there was some conspiracy going on if if you hadn't seen this bill james thing the conspiracy would be like i

don't know i guess i mean it will only be a matter of time until there is actually legitimately conspiracy theories about how this is a rod being suspended for uh steroids or something like that and this is the way that they're secretly doing it right david pitto said maybe alex was planning a big location a big vacation and didn't want the surgery until after that. Uh-huh. I mean, there's no, what's the, I mean, okay, so there's always about a million explanations for any odd behavior that you're not thinking of that, you know, you could never imagine. But in this case, what is the counter theory that, I mean, there's no reason for them not to do this, is there? I mean, what do they gain?

Who would possibly gain from putting off this surgery for two months? And what would be the mechanism of that gain? Kevin Euclid? You think Kevin Euclid? He just kept calling the hospital in his A-Rod voice and going, yeah, I need to reschedule. Yeah, I don't know. You'd think it would be in the Yankees' best interest to get him back sooner and also to ensure that he would be more healthy in the long run,

given that he signed forever. Obviously, it's in his best interest to come back sooner. Presumably, he wants to play baseball. I don't know. I mean, yeah, I guess unless there was some sort of testing thing or a thing where he wasn't allowed to play, but even then, I mean, a suspension wouldn't kick in anyway, would it? I mean, I guess he could.

Can you serve a suspension while you're recovering from surgery? I mean, I don't know. Well, you used to be able to. Although, I mean, what are we talking about? There's no reason to think he's suspended, right? No. Yes. Maybe baseball just, maybe baseball has enforced,

maybe baseball doesn't want him to break Barry Bonds' home run record because A-Rod isn't clean like Bonds was. Yeah, that's such a sacred record. Yeah, it's such a hallowed, yeah. Just think of how upset people will be when. Yeah. Do you think people would be happier with A-Rod as the all-time home run king or Bond? Well, there's that old expression about how politicians, buildings, and whores all get respectable with age.

And I guess it's possible. I mean, clearly everybody hates Bonds more than A-Rod, I think, in general, in the world. But when you add another 15 years of life, if Bonds has it for, I don't know how long he's had it, he's had it since 2006 or 2007 maybe. So I think after a decade, people might just be more used to Bonds having it and it might seem more egregious that a rod would get it so i could see i could see people being happier with bonds having it than a rod yeah all right uh well i don't know it seems it seems kind of weird that you would wait

a couple months to start the the rehab the recovery clock on someone who's going to be out several months as it is. Although I guess they found the damage wasn't quite as severe as they had suspected or feared. But I don't really have a better explanation. I guess it's, I accept the possibility that there's something I don't know about going on here, as I always do. But I don't have a great conspiracy theory or don't have a great motive for either A-Rod or the Yankees waiting here. Me neither. All right. All right.

Last thing. Last thing, really? Have we talked long enough? I don't know. We've talked for 24 and a half minutes i think that's a long time yeah do you want to just quickly discuss the the dave raymond article about the future of of broadcasting specifically broadcasting on the radio that we ran at bp today i'll just say my i just want to recommend that people read it if you

listen to baseball on the radio i'm a big baseball on the radio guy. One of the reasons is because you can do things while you listen on the radio, and you can't really do things when you watch on the radio. I think that at a certain point in your life, you have to reckon with how much time you spend following baseball. If you're doing it on TV, you're basically just giving up a third of your life for baseball. If you're doing it on TV, you're basically just giving up a third of your

life for baseball. If you're doing it on the radio, you're weaving it into your life. It becomes just a companion, like a dog. It's like having a dog around. I love baseball on the radio. I thought Dave Raymond was great. He did a great job as the Astros guy. I really liked listening to him. Dave Raymond was great. He did a great job as the Astros guy. I really liked listening to him. And he was removed from their booth after the season, and so I don't know where he'll go next. But it's a nice little love letter to baseball on the radio that he wrote,

and so I'd encourage everybody to read it. And it's really incredible when you think about it, how there's almost nothing different between the radio broadcast today and the radio broadcast of say 30 years ago when when you might have started listening and whereas if you're flipping through MLB network and you see you know you know Jose Rio pitching in 1990s World Series or something you're just immediately struck by how different the TV broadcasts are they're like night and day it's like switching from you know the NFL to darts or something.

The level of production is incredible. And with radio, it's not really like that. There really aren't any bells or whistles, and that's kind of nice. Yeah, and so he says that he's not really afraid of technology, that every new technology has just brought baseball fans closer to the game. And he seems to expect that will continue to be the case, I guess. I mean, is a webcast the same as radio? I mean, is that because presumably that could be the future, right?

that could be the future, right? I guess if everyone has an internet-enabled device and has it with them at all times, then that would possibly be more popular than radio is. Not everyone carries around a radio. So maybe radio will just kind of be replaced by streaming or webcasting, which I guess is, I mean, it's a different medium, but essentially the same product, I suppose. It's just a person talking into a microphone and describing what's going on in the game, however you consume that. It is. I think it's hard for people who have the option to watch to not watch you know if

when i'm at home i still like my tendency is to put the game you know a video a tv game on my computer instead of the radio game on my computer and um i think that the, maybe the biggest threat to radio, baseball on the radio is just that a baseball on TV is so ubiquitous. You can get it in your office, you can get it anywhere. You can get it in the backseat of your car. Um, if you're, you know, hooked up to the internet, you can watch a game from anywhere now. And so it just, you know, you have to sort of more deliberately choose radio now, whereas

it used to be that that was going to be your only option a lot of time. There would only be one screen in your life where you could watch, and it wasn't a portable screen. I always think when people say that they dislike a certain broadcasting team so much that they will just mute the TV and just watch with no sound. I never do that, even though I do find certain broadcasters annoying. If I muted it, I'd have to just be paying constant attention to it. And I generally am doing something else while watching a game, not always, but usually I'm looking at a computer or something, and even an annoying broadcaster gives me some idea of when to look up and pay attention, which I find useful.

Yeah, I gotta go. My daughter's crying. Okay, we're done. We'll be back with listener emails tomorrow, so send us some at podcast at baseballperspectives.com.