Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1362: An Inelegant Blooper for a More Civilized Age

Episode Date: April 13, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the Mariners’ fun, surprising, and unsustainable start (and how it might affect the franchise), Austin Hedges’ chest protector, the extraordinary nature of Ozzie Albies’ extension, why he might have signed it, what it says about baseball’s economic market, and why we should care, the frustrating MLB/MiLB crackdown on […]

Just give me one more day, that's a nice extension Round and round and long and straight Loop the bed and make it blend Oh, I, I, I, I love yellow Oh, I, I, I, I love yellow Nice extension Hello, and welcome to episode 1362 of Effectively Wild, I've got all your things to show recorded ephemera to banter about. But before we do, well, this might be ephemera, I don't know, but the Mariners are good. And that's, well, winning. Yeah, the Mariners are successful.

Yeah. Let's put it that way. So Mariners are 13 and two right now, which is kind of incredible. I feel like we just watched this play because we kind of did this last year too, where the Mariners started off really hot and everyone knew it wasn't sustainable. I guess the difference this year is that they're actually kind of crushing people. Whereas like last year, it was always like, how are they doing this? They're getting outscored. They're not actually good. And so far, they're playing well, which doesn't mean they could keep playing well, but it's been really fun to watch. Yeah, it was funny. Last year, you did a little bit of digging on how the Mariners were winning

when we knew that they should not at least be winning the way they were. And a big part of that answer was they were playing a lot of close games and had an Edwin Diaz on their roster. And so they were able to sustain those leads and win. And this year, they are winning in a different unsustainable way, but one that is, I think, for Mariners fans much more fun. I talked about this with Michael Bauman on the Ringer MLB show, but the Mariners are leading baseball in Team WRC Plus right now. Yep. They are out WRC Plus-ing the Dodgers by 20 points.

Yeah. It's like not a small margin. It's a lot. It's a lot of points. Yeah. They're leading the league in a lot of – they're leading the league in WRC plus. They're leading the league in home runs. They're also leading the league in stolen bases, which WRC plus doesn't even factor in.

So they're just like – they're the ultimate power speed combination right now. They're also leading the league in being the worst at defense by a lot. By a lot. And like granted, we all understand the very small sample size defensive metric caveats. Those are important to remember. But sometimes you watch a baseball game and you're like, wow, this team's pretty bad at defense. The fielding is quite poor and the Mariners certainly qualify. And yet they're just winning a lot. Now, I don't imagine that they will continue

to score almost eight runs a game. I do imagine that they will continue to give up almost five runs a game. That part of their profile seems quite sustainable. But they're only outperforming their Pythag by like two wins. So that's something. They're only outperforming their base runs record by two wins also. We are all getting to enjoy the version of Daniel Vogelbach that we thought we were going to get to enjoy. So I am sorry that Kyle Seeger broke his hand and then necessitated Ryan Healy at third base, which, you know, when you're talking about that bad fielding, that's part of that bad fielding.

But this has been just delightful to watch our large adult son thrive. You know, he took his prospect status and lit it on fire and this is what has emerged from the ashes it's great yeah he had a really impressive home run this past week there have been a bunch of really impressive home runs because there have been so many home runs and the ball seems to be carrying better and also exit velocity is up for one reason or another so lots of guys are just crushing the ball but local back particularly and right now the mariners don't have a single hitter really who's below average like their only guy below average is dylan moore and he has 25 plate appearances and he's at 93 wrc plus anyway so he's pretty close and he's the only guy with more than like six plate appearances who hasn't been above average.

And most everyone is way above average. And like some of them, it makes sense, obviously. Like Edwin Encarnacion is a good hitter. Not this good maybe, but good. And Mitch Henniger is a good hitter. You'd expect him to be doing what he's done. Some of them are kind of weird though i guess like uh i mean d gordon probably not quite this good uh no i mean like domingo santana maybe good but

has been good obviously not this good but like could have been a bounce back candidate right tim beckham not this good and uh dan Vogelbach, I don't know. I mean, we've been waiting for him to get a shot for a while, and he can hit. Clearly, that's not really his problem. Right. So, yeah, Ryan Healy, probably not this good. Jay Bruce, you're— I can guarantee that that is likely true.

Sorry, Ryan. Yeah, your age mate, Jay Bruce, who is younger than you, much to your dismay. He's got seven dingers. You know, he's hitting like a much younger man, so God bless him. I think my favorite thing about Jay Bruce right now is that, and this is not surprising given the percentage of his plate appearances that are going for dingers, but his BABIP right now is 115, and he is slugging 673. I love this Mariners team. They are so silly. It is so fun.

Watching Omar Narvaez catch is as bad as I thought it would be. So that is, I think, anchoring me to a realistic expectation of what this team will do. And then, of course, the pitching remains very shaky at times, but yeah, I don't know. It's very, it's very odd. And I guess the question that I posed to you in G chat, which I guess we should contemplate just very briefly, because this will certainly come back to earth for them once they start playing teams that are better than say the Royals and the White Sox, but the Mariners playoff odds as of today are 16%. So they have ticked up. They have ticked down from their previous season high, but they are now right in line with the Angels in terms of their competition in the West. The A's are still

ahead of them by a little bit. And then obviously Houston is basically a luck, whatever their slow start has been. How many wins would the Mariners need to bank before you would start to think, not feel certain that they would make the postseason because they are the Mariners and we are realists. But how many wins would they have to have in the bank before you would start to say, I wonder what the wild card picture is going to look like? Yeah, many more than they currently have. Yes. I think, I mean, I actually thought they might make the playoffs last year. I wrote an article about how it was fluky and weird. But like, whenever I wrote that at some point, maybe the middle of the summer or something, their playoff odds were actually good just because they had fluked their way to a solid lead, and it looked like of fun and wacky but yeah this team I mean unfortunately Jeff is no longer writing but he did leave behind like several posts about this very topic about when you should trust in-season performance and as he found repeatedly you should

not trust it for a long time because we have pre-season projections and we have updated projections that take into account the current season performance. And like even into the second half of the season, you still trust the projections over the in-season record. Teams just tend to come back to earth if they get out to starts like this. So, I mean, I won't really buy this unless it's still happening at trade deadline time or something. It depends how it happens. I would never have believed that last year's Mariners were good, even if they had kept that up all season long, because they were just not outscoring people. This team is outscoring people. If they continue to do that, then you would believe more quickly that they were real.

to do that then you would believe more quickly that they were real but it would also be really hard to believe that tim beckham was slugging 694 and that that was real so i don't know daniel vogelbeck it's 39 plate appearances daniel vogelbeck has a 315 wrc plus yep yep slugging over a thousand yeah i mean even if this isn't real like jerry has to be just itching to do something right because like yeah he can't resist he can't help himself i mean even though they intentionally took a step back and were focused on 2021 or whatever it was that he said now that they're off to the start he has to be thinking oh man i'm i'm jonesing to make a move i need a reliever in here he he signed neftali feliz right but but that's just the start so yeah he's got to be contemplating reinforcements already he he does although i imagine you know he will be reined in by the you know the rest of the league is not going to think, oh, and now the Mariners are good.

And what will put my roster over the edge is a Tim Beckham. I think cooler heads will prevail. Man, that bullpen is really not very good at all. It's pretty bad. Yeah. It was bad when they had Hunter Strickland. And now it is arguably much worse because they don't even have Hunter Strickland. Although they do have a Connor Sadzak, which, man, a Mariners player was sad in the name.

I keep asking people, friends and family, like, how long do I have to wait to get a Sadzak jersey? And they assure me it is much longer, but I don't know how long my resolve is going to hold because it just seems too perfect. No, I think you should go for it. Why wait? Mariners have been sad for so long. You've waited already. They are my way of feeling sad in a low stakes way.

It's true. I'm part of my therapy. It's fine. Some of these hitters are guys who you figure Jerry would have been trying to trade trade like Encarnacion and Bruce. So I wonder even if he's not able to add in a satisfying way, whether this would make him hold off on subtracting and whether that would be good or bad in the long run, given that this will eventually stop, one would expect. Yeah, I think that I'll be very curious to see kind of what he does there. I don't imagine that this factors into the calculus too terribly much for them. And I don't think I'm arguing that it necessarily should even because you would like to construct a Mariners roster

that actually can contend in the postseason. I mean, even if this team were to luck its way into a wild card, uh, which again, no, no one on this podcast, including me is saying is likely to happen. We, we, we do not think that that is what will result from this season, but you know, last year when they were good winning rather, you could kind of see how, you know, they weren't likely to have a sustained run in the postseason, but you could at least architect your way to them making it out of the wild card round, right? Because you'd have James Paxton start and you'd have Diaz to finish and you only needed one run.

And, you know, you could kind of magic your way to that in a way that wasn't completely nutty. That path does not exist for this Mariners team. So you're like, you know, you want that 2020 window of contention to be meaningful. And so I don't think that they will think about it this way, but I expected this Mariners team to not only be pretty middling to bad, but also just terrifically boring. Like I was like, this is going to be a really boring season in Mariners baseball. I will not watch it much unless they are the late game that is on or

Kikuchi is starting or, you know, Hanager is doing something cool and weird. And they are quite fun, which is really strange. And I think that, you know, as rebuilds or step backs go, I get the logic behind doing something more drastic and really tanking hard. I understand why that's appealing, but I do think it is, you know, it's nice to give your fans something through the lean times as long as people understand that like this is not likely to result in a playoff roster. Like, I don't know, what are you really going to get in trade for Edwin Encarnacion? I mean, probably not a whole lot, but something maybe. So I don't know. I'd be curious to see how long they hold on to players like him. Or I would imagine Jay Bruce would be one that they might be keen to kind of move.

Some of these younger-ish guys, they're not super young, but they're younger-ish. They, I would imagine, be inclined to maybe hold on to a little bit longer unless they can really get something interesting, which I doubt they will for Tim Beckham. But I don't know. We're going to see. Well, I'm glad that they're doing this. I think it's been a lot of fun. Yeah.

And a lot of the other divisions look more like we thought they would in kind of a fun way. I mean, Cleveland's in first place right now, not by a lot. I mean, look, all the divisions are pretty close because it just hasn't been that long. So the last place teams that are furthest back are only six games back right now. And there are some weird things like the Red Sox being four and nine as we speak

and just having narrowly escaped a loss on Thursday night with a walk-off and a comeback. And that's weird, but otherwise not so weird. The Mariners have been good, but so have the Astros, and they'll be fine. And the NL East has shaped up exactly like we thought and hoped it would. All those teams other than the Marlins are within a game and a half of each other. That's really fun. The top of the NL Central is very tight, even though the cubs are not currently in that group and then the dodgers have been good but the padres are in first place which again may not last but

has also been fun these are a couple of your fun team draftees i know i feel i feel very very sassy right now yeah no wonder you uh you cleaned our clocks in the listener poll because you got some fun teams yeah you did well yeah so uh should we talk about something less fun i guess i guess we have to i can i can transition us to the less fun with just something um that is strange and weird that i noticed that we don't have to discuss for very long if you'd prefer yeah so i was watching that very fun padres team play last night because they're very fun. And so I was watching them play. I did note to a friend that I think I have watched more Padres baseball in the first two weeks of the season than I did in maybe the entire first half last year.

Yeah. I thought you were going to go like the last five years or ten years. I wouldn't blame you, but yeah. Well, you know, they have that thing of being one of the West Coast teams that's on. And so then you end up seeing them more than you would otherwise expect. But I wanted to see if you'll pitch this, you know, first one. So anyway, I was watching last night. Austin Hedges was catching.

And I noticed on, you know how, you know, first one. So anyway, I was watching last night. Austin Hedges was catching, and I noticed on – you know how catchers wear chest protectors because they have a very dangerous silly job? And they will often have their names, some version of their name embroidered on the – like right at the collar because there's more than one catcher, and I assume some of their chest protectors look the same, and you want to wear the one that's yours. And so they have their names on there, right?

And Austin Hedges' name embroidered is Hedgy, like his nickname. And I was wondering how often people get creative with that because I have almost always only seen like actual last names. Like Mike Zanino's was Zanino. almost always only seen like actual last names like mike zanino's was zanino uh some some guys like uh melina does yadi and that makes sense because you do have some space constraints i suppose and i suppose it doesn't actually matter because it's really just as long as everyone knows whose gear that is you've accomplished your goals but i just noticed that and i thought it was strange so i'm bringing it up here so that we can delay talking about Ozzy LB's contract extension a little

bit longer. Yeah, that sounds unusual. I mean, I guess that falls in line with Sam's rules of NLP nicknames. And a lot of cases, you just add a Y to the end. It's not very creative. So it makes sense that that would be his nickname a little more personality than usual to actually have it on the gear i mean if it were me i don't know i i still have articles of clothing or like uh ratty stuff that i'll wear around the house that has like my initials because i wore it to summer camp it was like a really long time ago and uh put initials on everything, or my mom did, so that other people wouldn't take my clothes at the time.

So that's something that a player could do, just put your initials on there, but maybe they don't want to look like their mom put their initials on their gear so that they wouldn't lose it. So that's, I don't know, maybe his nickname is more widely used than the typical nickname, or maybe he's more fond of it than the typical player. Could be true. And I suppose, you know, if it was if it were you catching, you couldn't put your last name on there because it would not fit.

No. Yeah, that'd be a problem. I wonder what Saltilinaccia did with his. Okay, so I'm not going to look that up now, but I am going to look that up because I'm very... He probably did salty, right? Yeah, I'm sure he did salty. Yeah, it's the obvious thing. Was the E in there or was it just a catchy with a Y after the G?

I think he had the E in there. So it doesn't even... That wouldn't even save space. Yeah. You could just put the S in there instead. I'm going to have to... Now I'm going to have to look back through my text to see because I did bring this up to someone because I watch baseball in a weird way.

Yeah, I think the E was in there as I recall. Hedgie. Strange. If you just Google salty catching, it's about fishing. So that's not going to work. I'm going to actually have to remember how to spell his name. we talk about ozzy albies i suppose we should all right so the braves who recently signed ronald acuna jr to a long extension that was much maligned for its size signed ozzy albies to an extension this week that was much more maligned. And this one was, what,

five years and $35 million technically, although there are other considerations there and bonuses and things that performance can trigger. But regardless, even if it's the maximum, it is a somewhat shockingly below-market deal from all appearances. And so the baseball world has been abuzz for the last day or so trying to figure out what happened here and why he signed this and why his agents would have wanted him or let him sign this and what it means about baseball as a whole. And Fangraphs has published a couple analyses of this extension, which you have read and edited. So do you want to give people the summary of why this stinks? Yeah. So just so that we are all on the sort of same page about what exactly is at play here. So yeah, the deal is a very, it's just light in a hilarious way. I mean, it could sort of max out at nine years

and $45 million. And Ozzy Alves was almost a four-win player last year. And so this, I think, has naturally brought some sort of comparisons to Evan Longoria's sort of infamous long-term contract extension. But this is a significantly different set of circumstances. I mean, Longoria was very early into his rookie year when he signed that deal, which was for six years and just a little over $17.5 million with additional team options on the back end. And even the team options in his deal were more generous than this is. You know, Albie's options come in at 7 million a year. And when Dan went through and sort of forecasted out Albie's zips through 2028, you know, he is leaving potentially assuming that he sort of performs in line with expectation. If he were going say year by year, just based on his performance, he would probably be in line

to make something on the order of $282 million. And so Zips is essentially estimating that he is leaving at most probably $200 million on the table. And even if we project his performance down slightly and take a more conservative view to what he is likely to do, and I think when Dan did that, it knocked off something like 18 wins from his projections, he was still leaving about $100 million on the table. sort of trying to put this deal in context with other extensions signed by players who were within who had you know accrued between one and two years of service time and so were similarly situated in terms of their free agency you know albies had already accrued the second most career war in that population of players uh we'll link to the piece in the post for this, but behind only Christian Jelic and is making significantly less in terms of the money he is guaranteed and is giving up more free agent years over the course of this deal. I mean, he's essentially situating

himself in a place where given how old he will be when this extension expires, that he will probably never be in line for a major payday unless he performs in such a way that he sort of forces that question. But I would imagine, given what we know about how front offices have approached players into their 30s, that that seems quite unlikely. So it is, I think Craig put it best when he said, even within the context of team-friendly contract extensions to young players, of which we have seen best when he said, like, even within the context of team-friendly contract extensions to young players, of which we have seen many, not just this year, but over the years, this one stands out as particularly team-friendly and putting the player in a position to make potentially significantly less than he would have had he waited for free agency. So it just feels really bad. And as you

said, I think we're all trying to figure out exactly what happened here. I mean, I had some text exchanges with people I know who work for teams, and they were quite confused by this. So it does seem to be quite aberrant based on what even folks on the team side who theoretically want to lock up really good young players at bargain prices, even within that universe, people were looking at this one askance. So that's not good. Yeah. Yeah. Jeff Passan tweeted shortly after this was signed. It's typical that agents criticize competitors' deals, but I've now heard from executives, players, analytics people, development side, and scouts who are saying the same thing. The Ozzy Alpes extension might be the worst contract ever for a player.

And this is not hyperbole. I think it's probably hyperbole if we're actually talking about ever when players didn't used to make any money. But since players started making good money, this is really bad. And it stands out for all the reasons that you mentioned. And I really like Alpes as a player, but potentially too much. I don't know. When I had to do my own positional power rankings or my top 10 for MLB Network early this year, I had Albies as the second baseman on my list after Altuve, which maybe that was too aggressive. I don't know. He did end the season in kind of a slumpy, lousy way last year. But even so, he was like a four-win player last year, and he was like a two-win player in about a third of the season the year before that. He's just really good. He's good at defense. He's good at base running. He has power. He's extremely young.

He's good at defense. He's good at base running. He has power. He's extremely young. He is just really, really good. And so to get this player for this long to buy out this many free agent years for this few dollars is extraordinary and not in a good way. because even though there has been this spree of extensions that has been, if not unprecedented, at least much heavier, much more extensive than any of the previous several years, I think a lot of those extensions were fairly reasonable, or at least more so than in the past. They weren't getting Evan Longoria comps. They weren't in that class of extension. And then these Braves deals have come along. Acuna first and then Albies even more so. And these very much do seem like a return to, oh, agents are clueless or players are getting taken advantage of or there's no easy explanation for how this happens. So, I mean, the obvious explanation, like, A, there's just, it applies to every extension that baseball players don't get paid until deep into their careers. These days, they're not even getting paid at the, you know,

free agent point as much as they used to. And so players are maybe more eager to sign extensions. as much as they used to. And so players are maybe more eager to sign extensions. And there's risk, obviously, even though Albies is not a pitcher, he could hurt himself tomorrow and he hasn't made big money yet. And so that's why players sign these extensions. They're very young adults and teams come to them and say, here's $35 million. And a 22-year-old says, that sounds pretty good to me. And you would hope that they're getting good advice from someone who's telling them, yeah, that's a lot of money, but it's not enough money because you're really good at your profession. So I don't know. I think that in Acuna's case and Albie's case, and you can kind of lump them together in some ways. There were some other factors here that may have made it easier for the Braves to convince them to sign these things.

Yeah, I think that, you know, people are going to be taking kind of a long look at the agent situation that both of these guys find themselves in to see if, because it just seems like there has to have been, there has to have been something that motivated this above and beyond the usual risk aversion that we talk about because i you know there's a lot of discussion about this on twitter yesterday not that we need to like cede more time to the twitter discourse but sort of speculating about um whether players have obligations in moments like this to eschew deals that are this light, even though they are getting set up in a way that is clearly meaningful to them. I mean, Albie's talked about this after the deal

was signed about wanting to take care of his family. So there's always going to be that pressure in the system for players to do what they need to, to secure their futures and secure their family's futures. And that's where, like you said, you want them to have good advice from someone saying, I appreciate that pressure, but we should not cut off our noses to spite our face, right? And take a sort of longer view. It's the sort of thing where you just, even if you were to line this up to other extensions recently, it just seems like you would look at it and say oh well that's that's nuts like it's very strange that you are in the part absent the team options like he's only guaranteed like what 10 million dollars more than scott kingrey yeah and scott

kingrey had never played a major league game before right and like his team options are richer yeah than aussie albies like kind of seems like albies could have made this much money like through arbitration alone right or at least very close to it without even factoring in the free agent years that he's rendering here right i mean so i just i think that um it is probably an indication of how dicey some players, and I don't think that we should generalize, right? I think there are a lot of different motivations at play when players sign extensions, and some of those are going to be about the state of the market or their own personal preference for security versus appetite for risk. So to say like this indicates that players are afraid of free agency is, I think, perhaps too strong. But you understand why some players might look at this market and

be keen to not have to participate in that. But even within the context of that potential reality, this seems so strange just because he's 22, right? He's just so young compared to the guys who you would look at and say, yeah, there's reason to be nervous. Like you're, you know, approaching 30 or looking at other players who are young, but not as young as him and realizing that they are going to be hitting the market when they are approaching 30. It's such a bummer. And the only thing that would potentially make it seem less of a bummer is if, and it would still be a bummer to be clear, but if the Braves were then to turn around and spend a bunch of money elsewhere in free agency, you might say like, oh, this is part of a broader sort of strategy of roster construction. But even the

guys that they would want to spend a bunch of money on aren't in free agency anymore. I know, right? Like, they can't go sign Mike Trout. Mike Trout's taken, right? He's made his choices. So the number of ways that you can look at this and say, oh, there is an interpretation of this situation that would suggest that actually the state of the market or the state of relations between players and teams is healthier than this would initially suggest. Many of those justifications are quickly falling away, and all we're left with is the fact that Ozzy Albies is going to potentially make $200 million less over the course of his

career than his play is likely to merit. So it's just a bummer. Yeah. It's getting to the point where you're really going to have to look at the free agent market and there's just not going to be anyone on it. I mean, that might work out well for a few guys who don't sign extensions and kind of have the market all to themselves. But for the most part, you're really going to see fewer good players available because of this wave of extensions. And I guess that makes the winter a little more boring, for one thing, aside from all the economic stuff. But there's that.

There's the fact that all of these really good young players will not be going through the arbitration process and will not be potentially setting new records and precedents that will help other players get paid in the future. So MLB is probably pleased about that. We were thinking about talking to Kylie McDaniel about this, but it turned out he was driving all day because he's a scouting type person and scouting type people have to go outside and see the sun and breathe the fresh air for their jobs, unlike us. And he was tweeting about this.

Of course, he was employed by the Braves a few years ago, a different regime entirely. But he tweeted, the new Braves regime walked into a dream situation with Acuna and Albies. Two phenoms that got low amateur bonuses came up and wanted to stay together, got there fast, and both were repped by small agencies. Heavy rumors, the agents were nervous they would lose the kids before they got paid. So that's another thing that you have to consider. You'd like to think that agents are giving their players the best advice, but agents are in it for the commission too, and some of them may use that to give advice that actually hurts the player in the long run because you have guys like Acuna and Albies who didn't come from

privileged backgrounds didn't sign enormous bonuses as amateurs so they haven't gotten their big first payment and there is maybe some urgency in their cases to support their families. I mean, I think Albee is not actually getting much more money like in 2019 than he would have previously. So it's not like he got some giant lump sum. But who knows what the pressures were there, economic pressures. And there's also the agency, which is not big. I think it's the same agency that reps like Craig Kimbrell, for instance. Who knows? Maybe the agency needs some money maybe they're just not good at this and just misread the market or something. Either way, it is not ideal. Yeah. It's the sort of thing where the disconnect between what you would expect

an agent to understand, and I've obviously never worked in that field. I am speculating wildly here, but like the degree to which there is a seeming disconnect between what you would think an agent understands they have in a client versus the contracts these guys sign, like that's a huge gap. I mean, Acuna is in every MLB commercial, right? He's in Let the Kids Play. He's on the new era like Subway cap ad, which is very strange, but he is in it, you know? And so these guys are, Acuna especially, Albies I think to a slightly lesser degree, but he's still a phenomenal player who's going to be a core piece of this competitive Braves team. You know, it's like Acuna could be, Braves team. You know, it's like, Kunya could be, he could be the next face of baseball. He is charming and energetic and, you know, has, has personality and attitude on the field when he plays. Like it is not hard to think of him quickly becoming part of the same conversation we have around guys who define the sport and its outward, you know, presentation to the world. And he's signed to this like rinky dink little deal. And so it's just a very, either it suggests to me that either

they're like quite bad at their jobs or that there might be, as Kylie suggested, some other motivations at play that really aren't about what's in the best interest of these players, but is rather about, you know, a desire to sort of get while the getting's good before they were to move on to, you know, an agent who might be inclined to tell them to wait to sign something like this. So that's a bummer too. Yeah. I mean, you almost think, well, if they had been ripped by Scott Boris, for instance, they would not have signed this deal. And I mean, you know, maybe Boris can be like overly pushy at times and go too far with the brinksmanship, There's no chance. And maybe that's because when you're with a big agency, they don't need to push you necessarily to get an immediate payment or worry about losing you because big agencies don't lose that many guys. guys they're the ones picking up players and so they can diversify their player portfolio and you know they don't need obbies to sign an extension because they've got 20 other clients who are signing deals this year so that is uh something at least in scott boris's favor for

instance so i don't know it's how can we convey the significance, the larger implications of this one contract or two contracts? Because I think there's some percentage of people who will just automatically say, this guy got $35 million to play baseball. Baseball players are overpaid. It's a kid's game and they should be happy and grateful that they get to play it and all that. There's always some part of the chorus that says that, and I don't know if we can reach or persuade those people or if they're still listening and we haven't changed their minds yet. I don't know that we can now. But there is also another segment of the audience that says,

okay, this is a below-market deal. He shouldn't have signed it, but he did. And so I'm not going to waste much of my mental bandwidth fretting about a deal that a professional athlete signs that is going to make him wealthy, not nearly as wealthy as he probably could or should have been, but, hey, a lot more wealthy than most of us ever will be. He's doing okay.

He doesn't need our pity and concern. And he wasn't forced to sign this deal. He agreed to it. He wanted to sign it. So if he's going to want to do it, then why should we get outraged on his behalf if he is not personally outraged? I think it's a reasonable position to say

there are bigger problems in the world than major league baseball players making $35 million instead of $100 million or $100 million instead of $150 million or whatever it is. There are even bigger problems in professional baseball, probably. We could just talk about minor league players making teensy-weensy amounts of money instead of these guys getting paid a lot more. So what's the case? How would you try to break through to those people and say, understanding that this is not the greatest evil in the world facing our planet at this point in time, we should still care about it? I think I would try a couple of different things.

I think the first thing I would say is that, you know, the general state of pay for baseball players is, you know, it's all connected as part of a system. So the reason that I think we should be concerned about downward pressure on player salaries is not that, you know, saving that that saving, that money does not then guarantee that minor leaguers are going to make a living wage, right? It doesn't guarantee. In fact, it has nothing to do with the price that a fan will pay at the ballpark for a ticket or a hot dog. And so there is, I think that, you know, we tend to, there tends to be this empathy gap between fans and players because, as you said, like they make so much more money than the average fan will ever see in their lifetime, assuming that they get to the major leagues and make it through, you know, making half a million dollars a year to be a reliever sounds pretty great. But they face sort of downward pressure on wages in the same way that a lot of workers do who make significantly less. And when that money doesn't make its way to

players, it's not as if it makes your hot dog cheaper, your ticket cheaper, or make sure that minor leaguers get paid. It just sits with ownership. And so I don't know how persuasive the millionaire versus billionaire argument is, but I think that for normal working folks who do normal working jobs, there is an element of the dynamic that they have with their employers that is potentially quite similar to baseball players, albeit on a much smaller scale. So there's that part. But I think that the bigger thing is that when I watch Acuna play baseball, it makes me feel a way, right? It's exciting. It's thrilling. It's why I want to tune in and watch a Braves game is to watch him play, to watch Albies play, to watch

these guys do their jobs because they do it as you've written about, like better than anyone has ever done it before. We are watching the best baseball there has ever been. And we get to watch it right now. And no owner has ever made you feel that way. Right? You have never like gotten that shot of the owner's suite and been like, oh my gosh, John Stanton, he just makes me feel a way. That doesn't happen. That has never happened for anyone ever. And so I think that when I hope that an argument that might be persuasive to fans who rightly say, these guys make a lot of money to do a really cool job. They should just, you know, aren't they just so grateful? It's like, well, sure, I'm sure they are, but it is still a job. They go to work every day. They spend time away from their families. And they are why you like

this. They're the reason you like this. They're the reason that you spend 162 games and all of the playoffs engaged with this sport in a way that is really fun and exciting and makes you feel stuff and think things. And like, they are the story. And so, you know, when we're thinking about where we want to lend sympathy versus not, I think that that should be a mark in players' favor because they are why we like this. And it's so great right now. I mean, it is a profound bummer that we are having conversations about this young person feeling pressure to accept a below market deal so that he can take care of his family because he hasn't been paid that big payday yet on a career that is term limited, right?

Rather than getting to focus on all of the great baseball and weird baseball and home runs that are being hit right now. But we have to engage that part because long-term, you know, there will come a point where like baseball will not be the preferred sport for some people as a result of the money they can make doing this relative to other things. Like there are very talented athletes who are going to make those choices and are going to look around and see what the environment is, even though baseball, you know, has guaranteed contracts, which makes it appealing, I think, in a way that some sports aren't. Like there does come a point where, you know, young people are going to make choices about what they want to spend their time doing. And we probably won't see the effects of that in the game for a while, but they'll come

eventually and then it'll be less good. Yeah, I think those are all really good points. Like baseball is kind of this mirror that we use in many ways to figure rules and all that stuff has implications for non-baseball walks of life. But also economically, even though it is billionaires versus millionaires in many cases, we're always, it's an ongoing conversation about how should wealth be distributed in society. And so baseball is part of society. It's a part of society that a lot of people pay attention to. And so baseball is part of society. It's a part of society that a lot of people pay attention to. And so these principles are at work there also. And deciding what is fair in baseball, I think, sort of shapes what we think is fair in larger life. So that's worth

paying attention to or just on a purely self-interested level. Obviously, these deals are incredibly good for the Braves, but they're not good for baseball, most likely, in that they're happening in an already charged environment where people are really paying close attention to contracts that are signed or not signed. And if you just want baseball to be healthy and to continue and not for there to be a work stoppage at some point, then you want deals like this not to happen that will get everyone up in arms, understandably, because it's just going to push baseball closer to the brink. And you can't really blame the players for getting upset about deals like this, obviously, other than the players who are signing them themselves. I saw that Tommy Pham left an Instagram comment about this deal that was just like three poop emojis.

So that's how he feels about this. And it's probably how a lot of players feel about this. And maybe that makes them more up in arms, more willing to go to battle. Maybe it should. But if you're a fan, obviously you don't want sources of friction like that. You want everyone to be happy and everything to be good. And this, I think, takes us a little bit further away from that. Those are all reasons to care.

Not saying that you should care more than some other existential threat that is facing our planet or many millions of other people somewhere else in the world but to some extent like we're we pay attention to baseball so baseball itself may be unimportant and frivolous but we've all given it importance by deciding that we like it and want to devote a lot of our lives to paying attention to it and so this this is like the little manifestation of possible injustice that is going on in our

little fiefdom here. And so this is what we will pay attention to and try to shed a little light on. So I think that's part of it too. Yeah. I think that I wrote about this way back in the day at Baseball Perspectives, but I do think that that is, I understand why people don't always want to engage with the sport in this way, but I do think that that is – I understand why people don't always want to engage with the sport in this way. But I do think that that is part of what is really powerful about baseball as an enterprise because I think that, you know, we do encounter so many really weighty questions that have other effects on human beings that exist in other aspects of our lives as, you know, as people, as citizens, as, you know, members of communities. And baseball lets us engage with those questions in a way that's, I think, a little bit easier for us to maybe wrap our minds around and easier for us to engage with because they don't often have the same sort of existential tragic tinge that they can in the rest of

the real world. And you engage with that question and you hold it close to you and you think about stuff and sometimes feel uncomfortable or challenged or made to think about something a different way. And then you get to watch a home run, right? You get to release a little bit and still engage with this fun thing. And I think that constant negotiation between the really serious aspects of the sport and the stuff that is just like amazing and makes you feel stuff and makes you excited to watch

it, I think is really valuable for people to be able to understand those questions better. So I think that we all agree that the balance of those things is off from what we would like it to be right now, but I still think it makes it pretty important that we dig in on this stuff, even as I come up with weird catcher ephemera to try to buffer us away from it. Yeah.

Yeah. In other weird and kind of frustrating baseball news this week, MLB seems to have cracked down on video sharing this year, which is really weird. There's a history of this, obviously, with MLB occasionally cracking down on GIF usage. And they had seemed to be more open about that sort of thing and had placed fewer restrictions on sharing video clips. And they did recently make all of 2018 pitch video available via Baseball Savant, which is nice and helpful. But at the same time, it's really hard to find clips and highlights through at bat or through the MLB.com site and to share those clips now and every clip has a

pre-roll ad which is maybe why they don't want people sharing gifs because they don't have ads and at the same time they seem to be banning people from sharing minor league video baseball america got a cease and desist about its minor league video and had to take down all of its in-game video, if not their batting practice and practice stuff. So it's odd. I don't know why this is happening, why there's an increased emphasis on this when things seem to be opening up. And MLB gets a lot of criticism for how it markets or fails to market the game. And I think a lot of that is kind of unjustified. And Lindsay Adler and I did an episode last year where we talked to Jeff Heckelman about this and how a lot of the stuff that MLB gets criticized

for, I'm not sure that it's like MLB failing to market its stars so much as just institutional disadvantages and different ways that baseball is consumed compared to other sports. But it is really striking when the league adopts this sort of stance compared to other leagues like the NBA that are just, yes, please share our stuff because it's the best advertisement for the game. And right now I'm rereading Lords of the Realm, the classic book for the game. And right now I'm rereading Lords of the Realm, the classic book from the early 90s about baseball's owners, and just rereading some of the stuff about how when TV came along, and even radio before that, owners were very suspicious of this and thought, if we allow our games to be broadcast, no one will actually come to the

ballpark. And that was very backward looking. And the teams that embraced TV and radio got huge benefits from it, not just from the revenue that came from those contracts, but also it was a good advertisement for their teams. And if you can consume baseball that way, then you would like baseball more and make more fans. And those fans would then eventually come to the ballpark and buy tickets and it seems like the same sort of short-sighted thing like unless this is a really temporary measure because they're about to roll out of an even better video platform or something like that and but it's weird that this started like as soon as the season started because that's when you would want clips to be shared. I don't get it.

Yeah, I don't, I don't get it either. Cause you would think that, uh, when, when the thing you're selling is a visual experience that you'd want people to be able to look at it. Yeah. Cause it's about being able to look at it. Uh, yeah, I. Yeah, I don't especially get it. I think that particularly, you know, it seems particularly short-sighted given some of the challenges that baseball faces, which I agree with you are as much structural as they are like marketing failures. that the game has for getting fans invested in particular players across fan bases. You would think that you'd want folks to start seeing those players and appreciating those players as early as possible, even if the typical baseball fan isn't going to be looking at prospect footage in the same way that readers at Fangraphs might or that Baseball America might, but you would still think if you have a minor leaguer who hits a long home run and bat flips that you want that to go everywhere rather than people being

sort of nervous and walking on eggshells that they're going to get a takedown notice. So I don't quite get it. I assume that they must think that they can monetize that sort of content in a way that they aren't able to now and that that would offset whatever, you know, disinterest it might cause in the game. But I would be curious to hear what the rationale is because it seems like those things would not be quite in line with one another. Yeah, it seems like a short-sighted thing that is maybe mirrored by the big broadcast contracts, like baseball's making lots of money on those contracts now, but those contracts could go away at some point. And so I think it makes sense to think about ways that you can increase your fan base and attract new people to the game instead of just making the most money that you possibly can in the short term,

even if you're shooting yourself in the foot in the long run. Anyway, I hope that that changes and that we can go back at least to the way things were before, if not better than that. So there are a couple other things that we wanted to banter about before we wrap up, or at least, yeah, a couple other things, right? Marcelo Zuna, you want to talk about Marcelollo zuna what a weird week marcello zuna had what a strange week i mean his um his misplay in the outfield we'll call it that uh obviously went viral i felt terrible for him i jay wrote about this uh briefly for us at Fangraphs, and I loved And I don't know Kenley Jansen,

so this is, as it often is for me, speculation on the inner monologue in life of a stranger. But I'd like to think that Jay got it right, which is that Kenley thought, you know, this is objectively hilarious, and I am going to let it be funny. But I also know, you know, I know how asking for it works.

And this is, well, I don't know what the pitcher equivalent of this is, but it definitely had a vibe of like there, but for the grace of God, go I. So I appreciated that he tried to restrain himself somewhat so as not to invite karma to intervene on a future outing of his and ozuna also had a he to planned i think the next day and the the broadcast just tore him apart he had another close play at the wall which thankfully he he handled much better although he did look a little hesitant trying to go up and rob a home run but like he had a fine you know he had a fine week is the weird thing like uh from from the 8th to the 10th he you know he like he hit two home runs he had a 284 wrc plus

like he just had a very strange work week what a weird what a weird week at work that was for him yeah he should be on the mariners why is he not not on the Mariners? He had a very Mariners week. Oh, yeah. Oh, my gosh. Can you imagine if that play had happened in the same game that Daniel Vogelbeck had hit a home run? Everyone would be a Mariners fan. Yeah, Ozuna homered on Saturday and Monday and Wednesday,

so he is contributing in some ways, and he'd take it away in other ways. And, yeah yeah speaking of shareable video clips that play was an all timer that was despite my sympathy and like embarrassment for him

I watched that many times it's just it was it was the perfect combination and it's just fun to see actual really amazing baseball players do something that looks like what we would do if we were on a baseball field just from time to time. It just reminds us of how rare that is and how good they are when you do see a lapse like that. That was ugly. Yeah.

And, you know, there was a great shot of him, you know, in the outfield with Harrison Bader and Dexter Fowler just like goofing about it after. So he seems to have taken the whole thing in stride. I think if it were me, you know, he laid on the ground for a little while. And I think I would have been down for a much longer count if it had been me just to be like, how hurt can I pretend to be to shift the balance of sympathy yeah it feels like we're not in the golden age of bloopers no i don't know i mean maybe there just aren't as many bloopers anymore because players are really good or maybe it's i mean you used to have like vhs's that were just like all bloopers and you could buy them and then you could see bloopers i mean i guess you still see bloopers in ballparks like blooper reels between innings but

there's so much else that you see on video boards at ballparks these days and you see like little other games and themed things and like players talking about other stuff and playing little game shows and quiz shows and stuff so it seems like bloopers have been crowded out a little bit at least i i mean there's more video than ever and nothing escapes the cameras so in theory there should be as many bloopers as ever i don't know if we're just jaded and bloopers don't have the same effect on us anymore or whether i'm just not going to games and paying attention to the between innings highlights packages as much as I did when I was a kid. But it seems like we've moved on a bit from bloopers, but this was a classic one.

I think that part of it, what I have noticed, because the, so at, oh, wow, I'm going to get the name right, right from the jump, at T-Mobile Park, Oh, wow, I'm going to get the name right, right from the jump, at T-Mobile Park. They do bloopers between innings sometimes in addition to all the other stuff and nonsense that goes up on the video board. And I have noticed over the years that the tone of those bloopers has shifted. I think that when we were kids, like 50% at least of those bloopers were actually guys getting horribly injured. Yeah, maybe that's it. And now I feel like there are still a couple where I'm like, why are you showing that catcher getting hit in that spot?

Or like, why are you showing, you know, whatever guy colliding with the wall and then clearly like having torn his ACL or something like that. And so I wonder if maybe it's just that we've recognized that a lot of what was on the blooper reels was really just us laughing at people being horribly hurt. And so we've decided we shouldn't do that anymore. I don't know. It's like, do people watch America's Funniest Home Videos? Because it's the same impulse, right? It's the same instinct where you're like, well, I don't know know how many times can we watch a dad get kicked in the nuts before we're like that's just kind of mean yeah so maybe it's a sign of a more

enlightened society i don't know we're just nicer now all right there's uh one last thing that we want to talk about right one last weird game what was oh yeah oh we should perhaps save this i don't know it'll be long past but the twins had one heck of a weird inning of pitching yes they they had a bad day they had a real bad day on wednesday the twins we'll just i'm just gonna read the play by play the twins playing the mets had jake odorizzi pitching and this is how the bottom of the fifth went for the twins. Wilson Ramos grounded out, fine. Jeff McNeil singles. Ahmed Rosario walks.

J.D. Davis walks. Then, let's see, Noah Syndergaard came to the plate and there was a base running out, it seems. Yes, McNeil out at home. Okay, fine. But Noah Syndergaard ended up walking. So now bases are very loaded, it would seem. Then they bring in Vasquez to pitch because Jake Odorizzi is clearly done.

You're done. And then Andrew Vasquez promptly plunks Brandon Nimmo, and then he promptly walks Peter Alonso, and then he promptly walks Robinson Cano, and then they were like this Vasquez character get him out of here they're terrible and then uh Trevor Hildenberger came in and then he promptly walked Michael Conforto and then Wilson Ramos hit a single and then Jeff McNeil struck out swinging for uh six runs two zero errors, two left on base.

And that is when the game officially got away from the Twins. I haven't seen a half inning like that in quite a while. The last game that I could think of that was somewhat similar is the Mariners played the Padres a couple of years ago and had an inning where they scored like 100,000 runs, which is very scientific. But that was all like hits. This was one, two, three, four, five, six walks, one hit by pitch. Yep. The hit by pitch was on 2-0 also, I think. So it probably just would have been a walk anyway.

Right. We actually got a listener email about this from Damien who said, I assume the experience of walking the third of three straight batters was pretty bad for Odorizzi, but still not as bad as what Vasquez or Hildenberger experienced. Of those remaining base runners allowed, which experience would you least wish on any pitcher coming in and allowing the bases loaded run by hitting nimmo the second straight walk and third run allowed that got vasquez yanked or hildenberger coming in after all of that and still walking in a run in terms of like psychic pain which do you think is is worse uh man i think probably the hit by pitch is the worst yeah i agree i think i would feel the worst about that because you know you're right to say it might

have well resulted in a in a walk and so then the the effect of the thing is the same in terms of the score. But, you know, there are so many things that a pitcher does that are not hitting a batter. They don't hit a batter very often, right? As a percentage of their, you know, pitches thrown. It's a very low percentage. And it's just such, like walks are charity, but hit by pitch is really charity, right? There's no work being done by the batter in a case like that. When a batter walks, like, yeah, some of it's the pitcher and they're maybe not throwing great pitches or maybe the, but maybe the umpire's like being a jerk and maybe the hitter is just like really good and patient and is, you know, is taking good pitches that

they should. So they're still doing something, right? There's a little bit of work as opposed to hit by pitch where it's just like, oh, this is very painful charity. So I think that would feel the worst. It really amplifies the failure. Like Odorizzi, I mean, it's the fifth inning and maybe he was just getting tired. And up to that point, he'd been pitching well. And so maybe you just kind of give him a pass and figure he was running out of gas there. But then when Vasquez comes in fresh arm, then I think there's extra blame on him. People really get mad at relievers who can't get out of jams because that's what you're supposed to do if you're a middle inning guy. You're supposed to come in and strand base runners.

And he did the opposite of that. He not only let them all score, but he left the twins in just as bad a situation as they'd been in when he entered the game. And then obviously Hildenberger came in and was terrible too. But by that point, I feel like it's almost like, okay, this is just one of these wacky innings. Everyone's bad. Odorizzi's been bad. Vasquez has been bad. Now he's just joining the party. It's almost like, you know, everyone else has already kind of spoiled things. And so I think there's less focus on the third guy who comes in and sucks than the first two guys. Well, and I think, yeah, by the time you've made the second pitching change in the inning,

you've had a commercial break to start to reconcile yourself to the fact that your team is probably going to lose now. And so you've started healing. Whereas when Vasquez comes in, you're like, oh, well, this is still pretty close. They could get out of this scrape if they worked at it. And then you immediately start to unravel that expectation. So I think it's really bad. And I think it would be different if the hit by pitch had come at the end of his little bit of work there. I think it reads differently also. Like walking a runner in, that's not great.

But again, it's a different thing than the painful charity of a hit by pitch. So I think that if you build up to that, that little stretch reads a little differently. You're still mad at Vasquez, but it reads a little differently. But starting off with a hit by pitch, you're like, oh boy, we're in for it now. Because then your expectations that he's going to have any kind of commander also just shot right yes so you're gearing up you're like oh i bet he's gonna walk the next two guys right and that is exactly what happened that's exactly what happened yep forgettable inning all right so i guess we have covered everything we wanted to cover. And I probably have to go watch a Star Wars trailer.

So we can wrap up there. Thank you. Thank you. Everyone enjoy Game of Thrones. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up to pledge some small monthly amount and help keep the podcast going. Thank you. and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments for me and Meg and Sam coming via email at podcastfangraphs.com

or via the Patreon messaging system if you're a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance this week. Dylan is actually the guest on the new episode of Fangraphs Audio, so you can go check that out, listen to Meg and Dylan talk together. You can pre-order my book, The MVP Machine. It comes out later this spring, and pre-orders are much appreciated. Thanks for listening this week. We hope you have a wonderful weekend,

and we will be back to talk to you early next week. To Groovy Day. Marcel, Marcel. Cost is worth the giving. A pound a man you're living. Oh, let's go down to Marcel's on the Thames. Let's go down to Marcel's on the Thames. Let's go down to Marcel's on the Thames. Let's go down to Marcel's on the Thames. Let's go down to Marcel's on the Thames.