Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1384: Welcome to The MVP Machine

Episode Date: June 4, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about whether it would make sense for one team to “blow up the draft” by ignoring the bonus slotting system for one year, paying a premium for the top amateur talent, and incurring the maximum financial penalty. Then they discuss Ben’s new book about baseball’s player-development revolution, The MVP […]

I, I'm a real machine, that follows. I, you're a real machine, that on the shadow. I, I'm a real machine, that follows. I, you're a real machine, that on the shadow. Good morning and welcome to episode 1384 of Effectively Wild, the baseball podcast from Fangraphs.com brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Sam Miller of ESPN, along with Ben Lindberg of The Ringer and the co-author of The MVP Machine, out today? Yeah, by the time people are hearing this, probably just about today. Congratulations. This is the end of about a three-year process for you or so? Well, I mean- Two-year process? Depends where you start it, I guess. But actually, I talked to my co-author, Travis Sachik, for the first time ever about this last March. So in that sense, it's only been, I don't know, 14 months or something. And we got

our book deal last May, and I think we signed it last June. So this had been germinating in my mind for a while and also in Travis's mind. But in terms of the actual project itself, it's been about a year. It was quite a busy year. Too fast, Ben. Yes. Well, we're going to talk about the book a little later in the show, but first we're going to talk about all the other assorted nonsense that comes up. Do you have any assorted nonsense? I don't know if I have any assorted nonsense. You go first. All right. Well, I only really want to talk about one thing semi-quickly. Maybe not. I thought this could conceivably be a whole episode, but I don't think we'll talk we'll talk that long did you read uh jeff passan's piece about

uh how a team could blow up the draft i have not all right so basically not blow up like end it or anything like that but how a team could take on all the sanctions that come with overpaying or spending spending beyond your bonus pool. And so the plan would basically just be that you would commit, you know, you'd kind of spend a year or so identifying all the top high schoolers who are going to go. And you basically convince them, well, we will pay you twice what anybody else will pay you. All you have to do is tell everybody that you're not

signing for anything less than a prohibitively high dollar amount. Basically, most teams can't give them more than their bonus pool or the penalties are stiff enough that they won't give them more than their bonus pool. So if, you know, theoretically, every high schooler said, I'm not signing for less than $9 million dollars you'd have teams would have well they'd have a choice they could draft that player and hope that they talk him down or they could pass and say well i can't we can't risk the number you know three overall pick on a player who's telling us that he's not going to sign and then if you're say the 29th team to pick you draft all of those guys you draft one in the first round and one in

the second round and one in the third round and one in the fourth round and you pay every single one of them you know whatever 10 million dollars they're all worth it and you take the penalties that come with that and the penalties uh are let's see if you go between 5% and 10% above your bonus pool, then you lose next year's first round pick. And if you go more than go between 10% and 15% over, you lose a first and second round pick. And if you go over 15%, then you lose your next two first round picks. And so the plan doesn't work if you're just going to like sign one guy and lose two picks

for it. But if you sign like seven guys, then you're trading two first round picks for seven first round picks, which the math works. You're of course in this plan, you have pledged to pay more to these players than you would normally be paying for draft picks. So the sort of marginal value of that underpriced asset or

whatever you call them draft pick is is less but as pass and relays most most front office people think that draft picks are so underpaid that you can overpay them quote unquote overpay them by a lot and still be literally underpaying them and so then you take like the top seven high school players in the draft and you're the big winner. And so this raises a few maybe things that you could ponder. And so Jeff, just who knows if anyone's going to do this. This is how Jeff characterizes it. The plan to blow up the MLB draft to use the power of cold hard cash and land the most talent rich class in draft history with a half dozen or more players with first round grades going to the same team has been discussed in multiple front offices around baseball, bandied about for years over beers and on cocktail napkins. So the fact that it's been, so this kind of tells you where this plan is.

Lots of teams have talked about it, considered it, thought about how to game the bonus pool restrictions, but they've done it for years without acting on it. And the discussion has been over beers and on cocktail napkins. Presumably, if you were to do it seriously, it would also have been bandied about in spreadsheets and Slack and conversations that would not be quite so publicly known about. But this is something that teams think about. And so the main question I have been about this concept, and we can talk about how Jeff explains it, it would work or might not work but the main thing is what do you think is the purpose of the sanctions on teams that go over their bonus pool because it feels really weird to me that there are penalties that are stiff enough to discourage it but that are not stiff enough

to take it out of the realm of gameplay. That basically they have created this weird system where the penalties are low enough that you can think, is it worth it to strategically go past them? If the goal of the penalties is to keep teams from doing this, to preserve the monopolistic power of teams to way underpay draft picks by depriving them of any sort of competitive negotiation,

then you, it seems like you would just say, well, if you go over your bonus pool by more than 5%, you get a $500 million tax. And if you go over by more than 10%, you're out of the league. And so why do you think they calibrated these penalties just so so that there's like this intrigue of can we beat it it's a weird it feels ben like it was designed someone to do it it was designed for someone to do it it is like then it is like an option in a board game to shoot the moon like like what why would you create a shoot the moon option in the game of hearts well because you want people to do it if you didn't want people to get all the hearts sometimes strategically you would say that that's losing that getting all the hearts would be losing

and instead they made it so that that would be winning so is this secretly the goal of all of this is to get some team to do this i don't think so i think a we've seen this sort of thing on the international market too right teams have already blown up their budgets for a year on the international market, spent so much that they essentially lost their privilege to spend a large amount on any player in subsequent seasons. So same sort of system there, probably even less harsh penalties that it was even easier for a team to talk itself into doing this. So that is also sort of strange. I think, I mean, the primary purpose of having these slots, I think MLB

Would certainly say it's to preserve Competitive balance and make sure that The Yankees and the Dodgers can't go out And spend whatever they want on Amateur players while other teams can't Do that and then you'd get an imbalanced League but of course it is Largely designed to suppress salaries

And to make sure that teams don't Have to play these players much because they're not free agents they're bound by the draft and drafting teams are bound more or less by these slots and so that is the effect of it and i mean given what we've seen since these slots were made mandatory or close to mandatory with the penalties. No team has defied them really in any significant way. So it has worked to this point. They've coerced teams to behave the way I think they want teams to behave. So as for why they don't just make it completely inconceivable that they could do this, maybe

it's from a PR perspective. You want to make it look like there's some freedom here that teams could spend a little more if they wanted to. You don't want to make your hand look quite as heavy. You're clearly putting your thumb on the scales to some degree here if you're MLB, but there's at least a theoretical possibility that someone could do this. So maybe that's part of it or maybe they just think that well and they're right thus far that pressure fear of mlb will will keep the systems in line that they won't have to do it because teams will fear some reprisal from the league in some future date if they do defy their wishes or you know there'll be some censure from other owners who are upset about a team doing

this and and maybe that will just kind of keep people from doing it, which to this point it has. Do you know about this phenomenon? So if, you know, pickup is at five and you're not allowed to pick your kid up before five and most parents pick up their kid at five and a lot of daycares will or preschools or schools or whatever will have a thing where like every minute that you're late, you have to pay like five bucks, like something fairly absorbent. So if you're like, you know, maybe it's not five bucks, let's, let's say it's $1.25. And so if you're 18 minutes late, you have to pay $24. And what they find is that that actually causes more parents to be late, because now they think, oh, well, I'm allowed, I'm allowed to be late, as long as I'm willing to pay, it's just the charge

of being late. And so then you're at work or whatever, and now you're making a rational decision about whether it is worth it for you to pay the tax. And so if what they want is for you to simply fear the commissioner's office or to fear the cultural reprisal of the other 29 owners, then you wouldn't want to have any tax. You would want it to be a hard behavioral norm that nobody dares challenge but if you put that it is a very precise penalty for doing a thing then you go oh well is it worth it for me to do that thing because i'm allowed it's encouraged in a way it is now just simply a math problem to be solved just like any other rule in baseball that causes

you to choose whether or not to do something is in your best interest. Kind of reminds me of like library fines. For instance, my mom is so eager to avoid library fines that she will cross any amount of distance. She will go to any lengths to avoid being a day late returning something to the library. And if we're talking about a book, it's like 25 cents a day. So I try to return things on time, but occasionally I'll have a busy day and something is due and I'll think, well, it's a quarter. It'll cost me a quarter to not do this right now. Maybe I'm going by there tomorrow or something. I'll just wait because if someone were to offer me work at a rate of, you know, 25 cents for the half an hour or something, it'll take me to go to the library.

Would I accept that? No. So I will accept the penalty. And it's probably an example of loss aversion, the cognitive bias where people are much less willing to give up money that they already have than they are to do something to get the same amount of money. So my mom will walk to the ends of the earth not to incur a library fine, but she wouldn't do the same if someone offered her that same amount of money as an incentive. And in that case also, it's not just the financial disincentive, but there's kind of like a golden rule aspect to it, where if you're a library user, you want people to return their books on time so that you can get them, and so you feel bad maybe making people wait to check out the thing that you are

hogging all this time but financially speaking it's not that much of a disincentive but i guess if they said it will cost you eight hundred thousand dollars if your library book is one day overdue then no one would use the library anymore because they'd be so afraid of the fines yeah it is a little like that i feel like the what the league actually did here to make this to i don't know to keep this from happening is rather than setting sort of uh the the sort of penalties that you couldn't possibly handle is that they have created okay i'm going to try to reset so one of the reasons that jeff explains that this might fall apart if you tried it is that teams would figure out by like the second or third round what you

were doing right and they would then start drafting some of the high school players that you were going to pick knowing that once they have drafted that high school player well whatever 10 million dollars that that high school player thought they were going to get from you, the draft blower upper is no longer an option. And now the high schoolers just simply forced to make a rational decision for their own life and for their own career. And so maybe they would stick to the plan. Maybe they would say, well, I was going to, I was hoping to get 10 million and I'm still not going to sign with the team that is going to try to pay me $2 million. I'll go to college instead. And so I think that the reason that teams might do that, even though they would lose the players potentially, is that

there's not really much of a penalty for not signing the player you draft. So if you draft a guy eighth overall this year, and doesn't sign it's not like you don't get the eighth pick you just get next year's eighth pick or i guess you get next year's ninth pick which has created a a lot of leverage for teams this leverage did not it doesn't seem like teams used to have this much leverage but now that it is the way it is where you get the same pick next year like all you're really doing is pushing that pick back a year. You're not costing your franchise that pick. And so teams could then counter the draft blower upper by simply taking all those players,

being willing to push that pick back a year if they lost it. Does that, am I explaining that? Yeah, I think so. I mean, that's to me if i'm i think i'm getting these right but like so the astros the whole brady aiken thing at the time seemed like this massive debacle from the astros perspective i mean there was the fact that like we were debating the ethics of it as well but it just seemed like ah wow the astros they they still were they still hadn't come out of their losing ways.

And here they are. They've got the number one overall pick, and they don't even sign the guy. And it seemed like, ha-ha, jokes on them. And then they just get Alex Bregman the next year. Right. And the guy they said was hurt was hurt, it seems like. Yeah. And so you have this incredible amount of leverage as a team where the player has always been able to say, well, I'm going to go to college instead.

But the team can say, well, we don't really care about you. You're easily replaced by the equivalent of you next year. And so, yeah. Putting aside all the stuff about whether drafts themselves are ethical. Oh, my gosh, Ben. I can't get over what the draft is every minute. Right. This is so weird when you think about just what it is.

We should stop once a day and think about the fact that the draft exists at all. Yes. And then, I mean, if you think the draft is crazy, saying that you're going to import the same system to international players who are under, like, A, who are under a totally different set of laws than we have in America? Like, how does Congress's whatever, like, you know, monopoly exemption for professional sports, like, can you imagine telling a kid in Venezuela that he has to abide by some, like, 1921 Supreme Court decision in the United States, and that's why he isn't allowed to negotiate with teams. It's weird. Yeah. So, I mean, acknowledging all of that, you'd have to be even more careful if you wanted to do this system because, I mean, you better not tell kids we're going to give you $9 million, so don't sign with anyone,

and then you don't sign them, and then they're just left with no team or you know maybe maybe you tell them that and it costs them money because some other team decides that well we're going to take him even though he said he won't sign for anything less than nine million or whatever we think he will if we draft him and he doesn't have a choice so we'll just take him and you know maybe he'll sign in the fifth round instead of the first round and the team that promised him nine million won't give him that and the team that signs him in the fifth round or drafts him in the fifth round will pay him fifth round money and he'll just settle for it and yeah cost him so even if not even if not quite fifth round money like the the team that

takes him in the fifth round in the this sort of uh yeah the team that takes him in the fifth round has already now taken a first round pick. And so even if they really do value the guy and really want to sign him, they've already given a large part of their bonus pool money. Right, exactly. So there's that. There's the potential to really hurt players

if you don't follow through or if things that aren't under your control really interfere. And then there's what you mentioned and what Jeff mentioned about once you factor in the penalties. Wait, did you just read this article while I was talking? No, just going by what you said, Jeff. The penalties, which make the returns a little less. And especially if you're talking about high school players, there's a lot of uncertainty with high school players and how many in one draft because you're doing this in one draft so it better be a draft with a lot of good players and you better be good at picking those players

because if you're not you're just out of the amateur market for years and you know it's hard to pick players and it's hard to pick great players in one draft because i don't know what the numbers say but i mean you know there's only what, one Hall of Famer or something in the average draft? I mean, it's not that much talent, or at least it's not as much as you'd think. So it's not like automatically you do this and you're reaping the rewards for years and years. There's a risk.

I mean, it sounds like Jeff has thought this through much more than I have. And if he has concluded that it makes sense, then maybe it still makes sense. Well, I don't know if he concludes that it makes sense he's he's saying that teams have been having this conversation internally and trying to figure out whether it makes sense but he lists a a lot of daunting obstacles to this including well a lot of daunting obstacles to this but like he quotes one gm who says the worst case scenario is you get caught in the middle ground which is a very likely scenario guys don't get to your picks you think you've got

these guys lined up they get picked then you're scrambling that middle ground is a terrible outcome and it's too likely to chance yes jeff adds it's pretty ugly yeah so there are reasons that this hasn't happened and probably won't happen, but it is a fun thought experiment. I'm not surprised that teams have thought about it because thinking doesn't really cost you anything. We've thought about a lot of very silly stuff on this podcast, and some of it actually has happened, but most of it has not. So what do you think? Let's say a team pulled it off. I mean, let's say not only they attempted it, but they did it.

They got the top seven high school players. They spent a hundred million dollars in bonuses for the top seven high school players who otherwise only would have probably gotten, let's say collectively 30 or 35 million. And they've got, they go from the number, you know, they were picking 28th and they had the 24th best farm system in baseball. They still end up with the greatest draft in history. And now they've the 24th best farm system in baseball. They still end up with the greatest draft in history. And now they've got the number two farm system in baseball. And all it cost was money going to players who deserve that money.

And we'd all be kind of happy if draftees were getting more money. So what do you think the general reaction, though, would be to this? Would we be talking about, not we, you and I, but would the larger world be talking about this team as heroes or as cheaters or something else? I don't know if they'd be heroes because obviously they wouldn't be doing it out of the goodness of their own hearts. They'd be doing it because they think it will benefit them in the long run.

And these players, they're signing for $9 million, will be worth 100 million. So I wouldn't give them that much credit just for being big hearted. So I don't think that's the case, but I am curious to see what would happen in subsequent years, because this kind of only works if one team is doing it at a time, right? Because if multiple teams are doing it in the same draft, then you have an even greater chance of ending up in that middle ground that the GM is talking about, right? Because you're only going to get certain players and you're going to want others. So if it happens once and it seems

to work, of course you can't really tell whether it worked for a while, but if it's acclaimed and if those prospects seem to have raised their profiles in the year since the draft then having you know broken the seal maybe other teams then would be inclined to do it but would you coordinate it would you say like this is my year to blow up the draft and you can blow up your draft next year when we're not able to spend anything because, right, it's even less likely if you're not pretty sure that you're going to be the only one doing this in a given year. We'll forget about future years because I'm assuming that after this happens that they would change the draft rules. I mean, yeah, the international, the equivalent in the

international market was able to work for what, three or so maybe-ish cycles. Yeah. So they'd be vilified by some people, like Rob Manfred, for instance, would be upset and would say things about how they were killing competitive balance. And then other people would say they're nuts to give players this much money and players make too much money. And other people would say, great, down with the draft. This is exposing the structure of the draft that deprives these players of money that they're worth.

And so in that sense, it would be a good thing. Maybe it destabilizes the draft in some way. I don't know. But I don't think they would be heroes and I don't think they would be villains. I think they'd be like every other team except maybe a bit bolder i feel like the fact that the penalties are very clearly stated gives them a fairly i mean i don't think you could say that they did anything moral or unethical if what they did was specifically i don don't know, foreseen and the league took the steps that they wanted to mitigate against it and left open the possibility that you could make the rational

choice to do this anyway. I do think though that the way that you described it potentially blowing up where midway through all these high schoolers who thought that they had a deal with you and you can't deliver on your promise because all the other teams swooped in drafted them in the fifth round and signed them to second round money instead of like the guy what was his name who didn't get his astros deal because aiken didn't sign yeah someone the one who you know thought he had a deal and his deal fell apart because of some other player and so he was left in the lurch so yeah so maybe it could be that that even if you're pro player in all this you could see it and even if this is designed to get

more money to players and to break the anti-negotiation system that we have you are putting a lot of the risk on those players and you can't promise them anything. But I don't know, maybe, I don't know, maybe everybody goes into this knowing that that's the case and it's a risk that you want to take. I'm not sure. I, I think it'd be, I think that at least in the conversations that, that we tend to be around, I think there would generally be applause for this, that in the same way that feel like, as a person who knows almost nothing, I might say that, but like John Calipari, as the guy who has embraced the one-and-done player and said,

this is a system that's not fair for players who are NBA ready, and so I'm going to do the most fair thing and help you get NBA ready in your one year instead of going through the farce of acting like, you know, you should be, you know, a college student first or whatever. That seems like it's generally applauded among the conversations that I tend to overhear

about college basketball. Maybe it's not, but it seems like it is. And that feels somewhat similar to this. Not that I know. Jeff writes also, MLB is going to be livid at a team for making a mockery of its system. Definitely true. Other teams would be apoplectic too. Probably true.

I think maybe less true. The draft is great for all of them. True. The talent acquisition cost is minuscule. True. Compared to the production players provide. The draft is baseball's golden goose. True. And whatever team would do this runs the risk of killing it and i wonder if you think that that

last part is true would this kill the draft would would i mean break the wheel yeah would it break the wheel wheel or don't isn't the case that as long as mlb has you know close to absolute power over what it wants to do with amateur players they would just tweak the rules so that this was no longer an option and keep on going the way that they're going i mean the the way that like teams that blew up the international market uh it's not like at the end of that well everybody was free all the international free agents are now totally free and they tightened the rules and now it's much worse for international players than it was during this period and even before it. Yeah, right.

It was Jacob Nix, by the way, was the player we were trying to think of who was in that Brady Aitken draft and had to go back into the draft. Ended up with the Padres and made the majors last year, but is now dealing with elbow injuries. So yeah, I mean, I think it exposes the fiction that maybe some people have bought into that what the players get paid in the draft is what they're worth, and that this is not the open market, that teams are restricted, that the players are restricted in choosing their employer, and so they have to settle for what teams will give them according to these draft slots. So if one team suddenly pays all its players $9 million in that year, then I think it just highlights that these players are actually worth a lot of money to teams, and there's a lot of surplus value here. I don't know whether

just exposing that is enough to bring down the whole system. I mean, I think a lot of people are already aware of that reality. A lot of people aren't, and maybe they will have their eyes opened by this, but maybe they'll just think this team is nuts and these players don't deserve all this money and I don't know what they're doing. Because it's like the occasional Boris loophole when Boris opens up a loophole and someone who would have been subject to the draft then becomes a free agent and signs for much more than he would have signed for if he had been in the draft. Then, you know, it shows that these players are actually worth more, but then that loophole gets closed. And then after that, everything's the same again. So this would bring a lot of attention to people who advocate for the abolishment of the draft, and it would give them some ammunition.

advocate for the abolishment of the draft and it would give them some ammunition. But I think MLB would move pretty quickly to portray this in a negative light. And some people would probably be persuaded by that and others just don't care that much. And these players are not in a union. And ultimately, I think probably things would go back to the way they were unless some larger legal challenge is mounted, which is successful. Maybe this would help. I don't know. But short term, I guess everything goes back to the way it was the next year with the penalties even stiffer. All right. Well, you got nothing else. So you want to talk about your book? Sure. All right. What's your book called? It's called The MVP Machine, How Baseball's New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players.

I have told you this, but I prefer the name The MVP Machine, where the stress is on the sheen. I feel like it's a— You heard Josh Levine say it that way. I heard Josh Levine say it that way, and I heard it in a totally different way, and I thought it was a much stronger title, The MVP Machine. All right, The MVP Machine. Maybe I should start saying that. Yeah. All right. So why this book? Well, I think Rich Hill started it for me. We certainly talked about Rich Hill a ton on this podcast, and that really kind of blew my mind. I think it blew both

of our minds when Rich Hill came out of nowhere at the end of 2015 as a 35-year-old player who had been bouncing around the majors and the minors and indie ball and then suddenly comes back and looks like the best pitcher in baseball at the end of that year and then sustains that success. And that made me wonder whether we were just wrong about players because I had always assumed that to get to the majors and to stay there, you had to have been maxing out your talent for the most part because it's so competitive and everyone wants that roster spot. So if you've made it, then you must have used every last iota of your ability to get to that point. And what Rich Hill suggested and what Justin Turner and JD Martinez and these other guys have suggested is that that's not the case, at least for a lot of players. You can be a big leaguer, you can reach the pinnacle of your profession and still have a lot of room to grow. And if that's the case for those guys who have been in the big leagues already, it must be even more the case, you would think, for minor leaguers and for amateur players who have not gotten to that point. And that was really kind of an intoxicating idea to me. And then over the past few years, it seems like every day I see a story about someone who

changes swing or added a new pitch or started throwing a good pitch more because of some data or technology. And it just seemed like that was the story in baseball these days. That was, if you had to pick one trend that kind of defined the game in the post-Moneyball era, that would be it. So I don't have a whole lot of ideas for books about baseball, but this seemed like one, and it seemed like one that might have some kind of crossover appeal or parallels to other non-baseball fields. And Travis was sort of thinking along the same lines. So that's how it came together. And and not all but most of the book is about major leaguers it's about either people working with major leaguers or the

major leaguers themselves or the major leaguers that are working with other major leaguers and i would imagine that this is i mean it makes sense to me that you would write a book about the famous people right it's called the mvp machine uh MVP machine. It's not called the going from number 14 in your organization's prospect rankings to the number three ranking in your organization's prospect rankings machine. But is this like, is the story of Rich Hill or the story of Justin Turner, is that, are there 20 of those? I mean, there's like, you know, we can, it seems like there are two or three or five of them on every major league team. Are there 24 of them in every minor league team?

Is this just the story of player development right now? I think so. Not to that dramatic degree with everyone, obviously, but just small changes. I think there are many players who are using these things. There are some systems where the second you get into a minor league system, you're exposed to this stuff and you're using it almost from day one. So it might not even look to us on the outside like one of these transformations happened because it happens so early in the player's pro career. about a bit in the book and have also written about for The Ringer, all this stuff to some extent is happening in college and even Trackman's in a couple high schools now. So you might not get as many Rich Hill type stories where a 35-year-old is having this makeover because it will have happened when that 35-year-old was 25 or 18 or whatever. So I think it's harder to see in some cases, but yeah, I think it's happening, which is not to say that every player does this or

that every player needs to do this. But I think being able to do that with players is the thing that is really setting some teams apart. So we've talked about how this is a very young person's league right now, that 25 and under players are better than they've ever been, that they're are better than they've ever been that they're more common than they've ever been they're taking up more of the playing time than they ever have and with that still being um you know collectively out producing older players for and even late 20s players i think for one of the very very rare times in baseball history and i've kind of

always thought that the story that was the story story of travel ball and all the sorts of things that teenagers do, not just in the United States, but throughout the baseball world to get really good young, the sort of professionalization of teenage baseball. And so they're more refined by the time they reach the minors and that it makes sense that they would be more precocious and more developed and that they would have better eyes and have seen a lot more high velocity and so on. And so your book made me wonder whether what I'm actually seeing is the fact that there are so many that, that minor leaguers all have to be as receptive as Rich Hill was, or all have to be as receptive as Justin Turner was because they're working with player development staffs. They have to earn their way up and they're not they don't like they're not millionaires yet. They don't have the rigidity of having made it in the majors. And so they're all essentially every player who comes to the majors these days has gone through the Rich Hill program or gone through the Justin Turner program. or gone through the Justin Turner program. And so in that sense, it would be as though, like there really is kind of a dividing line between players who were in the minors through, you know, 2014 or whatever, and then players who have been in the minors since then, that there's a real generational shift in terms of player development. Do you think that that is

true? Is that what we're really seeing when we see 23-year-olds who are reaching their peak? I think it's a bit of both. And I think that this movement that we're documenting in the book is still, I don't want to say in its early stages, but we wanted to write this now because we felt like this was the time when maybe a lot of fans and readers are not that aware of it. It's not universal. It's not common knowledge. And so a lot of this started outside organized baseball with these independent coaches and facilities and instructors and players who were kind of on the outs and they organized baseball. And so we have the Astros as kind of the case study of how one major league team adopts all of these ideas and this technology.

And so with the Astros, it's definitely like day one, you get into the system and they have high-speed cameras on you and they have RepSoto devices tracking your spin and all of this stuff. So if you're in the Astros system, then for sure, by the time you get to the big leagues, you've already done all this stuff. And not just for the top pick, but the last pick in the draft gets this same sort of shot at things. all of the youth movement that we're seeing in baseball these days. Even with the Astros, we're talking about three, four years, maybe five years since they really started doing this stuff and really in earnest at their current level, just a couple of years.

So I don't think that's enough to account for this incredible youth movement we've seen. I think it's probably partly just what you're talking about, travel teams and players who have just kind of been getting better old you know, travel teams and players who have just kind of been getting better old school instruction, just, you know, better traditional coaching. And also just like the typical money ball, you know, they're just drafting better. So they're doing a better job of identifying talent in the draft and getting promising players, which is not really what this book is about. This book is about enhancing or creating talent more so than discovering undervalued preexisting talent. So I think it's a bit of both of those things, but I think in the future, it will be more and more the thing that this book is about because that's what we talk about in the Astros got heavily into this stuff because they realized that their draft models weren't really working as well anymore because they had worked when Sig and Jeff Luno and those guys were with the Cardinals. But then around 2013, 2014, they realized that other teams were doing the same thing. And so the guys that they were getting in the fifth round were now going in the third round or whatever. So they had to pivot to player development to maintain the advantage that

they had had before. So I think that is where things have shifted, but not everyone who is up in the big leagues and is young today is necessarily a product of these new methods. The thing that I really liked about this book is, well, so I liked the contrast between it and Moneyball and the many books that were written and the philosophy that I think was common in writing for the decade or so after Moneyball, which was Moneyball was basically like, how can a team use data to get better players for less money. And that was an interesting concept. And it was fun to watch teams try to do that and beat the system and beat the game. And this is a very different thing. It's really about how players have taken that data and used it to make themselves better. It's much more person focused instead of organization focused. It's much more thinking about baseball players as you know, the protector of their own own career rather than as a cog in an organization. And the way that they have not only used this data, but that they have become in a lot of

ways the trailblazers. They're pushing it further. They're creating their own things. I did not realize that without Trevor Bauer, for instance, there would not be edgertronic cameras probably in baseball, that in a way his introduction of edgertronic cameras to baseball has been sort of historically significant. And that was not something that a front office person came up with or that a writer came up with, but that the player himself came up with. And it felt very different. It felt like a completely new way of thinking

about what data is doing and how we relate to it as success. Yeah. And I think it's changed things also in the way that we write about baseball. There was always the stereotype of the old school player who dismissed all of the new ideas and the stats and didn't care what people with non-baseball backgrounds had to say because they'd never played the game. Going back to the old Fire Joe Morgan all of the new ideas and the stats and didn't care what people with non-baseball backgrounds had to say because they'd never played the game. Going back to the old Fire Joe Morgan and the Joe Morgan versus Moneyball and all of that. And I think that is now outmoded. And it's not that you never hear that sort of thing anymore, but I think particularly with young players, you don't really hear that sort of thing anymore because there's a whole new generation of players that is now grown up and is steeped in moneyball and has been developed with all this technology and all these techniques in mind.

And they've also seen some players go from not great to great and make themselves a lot of money by doing that and by being open-minded. And so I think word of mouth has kind of passed from player to player, even in clubhouses. If you see someone, it's like when we would be in school and you would come back after summer vacation and one kid was a foot taller than he had been the last time you saw him. And there was nothing you could do about that. It was just puberty. And it happened for some people and it didn't happen for others. But now in baseball, you come back from winter vacation and this guy's got a new pitch or his old pitch works way better or he's revamped his swing or whatever. And it's like, hey, what did you do? How did you get this good? I went to see this coach or this instructor or I got myself a Rapsodo device or a Trackman

or something and I made myself better. So I think this stuff is passing from player to player in kind of an organic way, and players are driving it. And of course, the role of the conduit, as we call it in the book, which initially I thought the whole book was going to be about that. And you and I had even kind of worked on something, you know, what would a book look like that would just be about conduits like Brian Bannister and Sam Fold and these former players who are now the go-betweens between the front office and the field. And they're translating all of this stuff from one sphere to another, and they're comfortable in both worlds. That role is really fascinating to me. And now, I don't know, half the teams have someone like that, maybe more than half, and others have multiple guys in that role, and that's been a really big part of it.

So these days, now that it's kind of been co-opted by at least some organizations, I guess it's kind of like the old top-down, just, you know, you get into the system and the team tells you what to do. But even so, there's a player participation aspect to it where the player actually has to be open to these things and has to practice in a way that will make himself better where whereas in the moneyball days it was just all about let's go get guys who are already good and we can't actually teach our guys to be better if they're not good already so in the years after moneyball we had sort of ways of identifying which teams were moneyball teams. There were sort of certain things you'd look for of a team that would suggest that they were progressive or that they were pushing the game forward in a new way or something like that. If you're trying to identify a player who is doing the same thing other than like, you know, by quotes that he might be giving to Eno or whatever? Like, what would one look for to find a player who is embracing data? What does a pro data player look like besides his quotes?

Yeah, I don't think it's quite as obvious as, say, a team that stops bunting or stops giving out intentional walks or something like the classic moneyball mold of a team. Because you could see that, whereas with player development, you can't really see the process that got a player to a certain point which i think is why there haven't really been many or any books about player development to this point and that's why this topic was so appealing to me because it felt like somewhat fertile and untrod ground because so much of how a player gets from point A to point B is like behind the scenes and it's far from the big leagues and it's happening on the backfields and bullpens and batting cages and we couldn't even watch minor league games without going to them until the past

few years so all these adjustments and maybe it's not quite as sexy in some cases as seeing the finished product and talking about how this team is winning all its games. But a lot of it is kind of opaque to the typical fan, and hopefully we pull back the curtain a little bit in the book. But as far as how you can tell, I mean, you can look throws tons of sliders all of a sudden out of nowhere or he just developed a new pitch that he never threw before and it's really effective. Or if he made some dramatic change and you see that his fly balls are way up or his launch angle is way up or something. It doesn't necessarily mean that he absolutely made some data-driven change, but it's a hint at least. I think in a lot of cases, though, it does come from quotes and from talking to players who were really good sources for us as we were reporting this book. Players were the ones who were the most helpful because they like to talk about changes that they've made. If they did something that makes them better, then of course they want to tell you this is not just a fluke. This is not random.

I actually did this. So I want to brag about it, even though you're potentially giving other players ideas for what they could do. Yeah, I just realized that that was something I really liked about your book. I didn't realize it when I was reading it. But all the stuff from a team-wide perspective that books have been being written about for years, it's been like, well, teams want to keep it secret. Teams don't tell you anything. Team teams won't even let you talk to their players about this thing sometimes. I mean, didn't you try to talk to Jose Molina one time in the Rays? Just wouldn't even let you talk to Jose Molina.

Yeah. And like there was a real sense of like proprietariness that they were going to hoard. Like they were going to try to find a way to make baseball better and then they were going to hoard it and keep it from you, keep it from everyone. And with players, it's just, it seems to me it's exactly the opposite. There's no sort of territorialness about these advances that they're making. Like they're, they're coaching each other. They're sharing their, their unorthodox swing coaches or, or whatever. They're, they're evangelists almost for it.

And it feels like there's a much more sharing, open, like sense that good baseball is something that we should be supporting. And I hadn't really noticed it directly when I was reading it, but it really comes through in the way that these guys are open with you, but also very open with each other. Yeah. When we were doing our book proposal and we were trying to say, well, we're going to talk to this person and that person. And of course, in our own book proposal for The Only Rule, we kind of just had to invent what we would be doing and hope that it actually happened because who knows.

And that was a little different from this book. But even so, we didn't know where the story would take us and we weren't sure who would talk to us. And in many cases, teams weren't willing to talk to us, and I understand why. But there's a whole long chapter about the Astros, and Jeff Luno wouldn't talk to us, and we kind of lucked out in that some people left the Astros at the perfect time for us and were willing to open up. But that's one thing that gave us some confidence is that players are generally willing to talk about these things. Not always, sometimes they'll be cagey, but we really relied on players who they like. I mean, if you improved in something in your own life, you probably like to talk about it. It makes you feel good about yourself and also demonstrates how you did it and why maybe you're worth more money than you used to be. worth more money than you used to be. And there's some competitiveness there. Baseball is a zero-sum game. And if you get better, it's going to come at someone else's expense. So I don't know that this will last forever. Maybe it's just like the early adopters feel like I can talk about these

things and it's not so pervasive. I can maintain my edge for a while, maybe. But that was a big help for us. And also some people like Brian Bannister, who works for a team, but just feels really strongly about improving players and getting this knowledge to players to the point that seemingly he would say things to us that most team employees wouldn't say because their primary allegiance is to their team and to maintaining their own job instead of helping out other players. And also probably it's that some of this stuff is visible so that we have all this tracking technology now and we don't know everything that teams know. I think there's a bigger disparity in the public private knowledge

than there was five years ago. But you can tell if someone changed the swing because you've got GIFs and you've got video of every plate appearance and you've got launch angle and you can see if someone's throwing a new pitch and if he's throwing a certain pitch more often or if he's throwing it in a different location like it's all out there and you can't hide it even if you wanted to to a certain extent so there's a little less incentive i think for players to hide what they're doing when we can all kind of tell what they're doing. What's the best thing that you learned? Like, what's your favorite thing that you learned? Like, not like a big, like, oh, I learned about, I want to know, like, what's the best nugget that you got? Oh, boy, there are so many things. I don't know. I was surprised by how

much I learned just in general as I was working on this because I kind of felt like, you know, I know the topic and I want to write a book about it. So clearly I've been paying some attention to this stuff and I'm generally aware of it, more aware than the public at large. And yet I felt like I was learning things every day about this stuff. I don't know what my favorite thing is. I guess, I don't know. I mean, to me, the Brian Bannister stuff about how his photography background now applies to baseball, I found very compelling because he's this guy who was really interested

in like, you know, SimCity and building things as a kid and then became a professional photographer. And his whole baseball philosophy of making players better is something he got from Ansel Adams, the famous photographer who had a system for making photos better. And Brian goes about developing pictures the way that Ansel Adams went about developing pictures, which is really fascinating to me and was not something I knew. So I think that was one of my favorite kind of anecdotes or just convergences.

But I just, I came across so many quotes in this book, like, you know, Billy Martin in the 80s saying you can't make mules into racehorses. That was just the prevailing philosophy in baseball. Or even more recently, like in Extra Innings, the baseball prospectus book from I think seven years ago, which I contributed to, there's a chapter in there by Jason Parks, who of course is great and has gone on to work in baseball. And it's about how do teams scout and develop players. And it's like a 19-page chapter and 17 pages is about scouting and two pages is about development and it basically just says like

player development is reducible to talent and then it's basically like you you got to go draft the best amateurs and then they'll turn into the best major league players and that was kind of like baseball until the past few years and it's just changed so dramatically where sure talent is still really important and you want to go get the guys with the best natural talent. But I don't think any team thinks it's just reducible to talent anymore. There's just a lot of leeway there. Or, you know, even like a player like Trey Harris, who is probably like the least famous player we mentioned in the book. He's this kid who, you know, was drafted by the Braves last year, and he was at the University of Missouri, and he was going nowhere at all. And he changed his swing in college and adopted Trackman, and Trackman's like his favorite thing in the world.

And now he's got like a thousand plus OPS in A-ball, which he's 23, and it might not mean anything, but it's pretty cool that he even got that chance. he's 23 and it might not mean anything, but it's pretty cool that he even got that chance. So I think it's, it's sort of an inspirational story in that sense, in that these guys actually are making themselves better, even though they were really, really good at things already. So if you're not good at something, but you want to be, then there's a lot of room to improve there. All right. Well, let me ask you one last last question which is this that i'm going to ask awkwardest awkwardest build up to a not even interesting question if one of the great themes of the first 40 years of like the the post bill james era was that it was outsiders breaking into the sport. There was a real feeling that the players were not necessarily being served by the traditional ways of doing things,

by the people who were running front offices. And gradually, people like Bill James, but then people like many hundreds of others, including coaches and conditioners and writers and scouts from nontraditional backgrounds, all kind of broke into the game and made it in a lot of ways an outsider's sport. And that is in one one thing that's kind of been great to see in in the sport over the last few years is the way that, that the, uh, you never played the game charge is, it just doesn't really have the same power anymore. It's, uh, it's, uh, opened up all sorts of places in the sport where people who never played the game have been able to contribute. And it's, it's been great. It's been one of the, the, the real, I would say positive outcomes of

the last 40 years. And I'm not saying this next thing is is bad or anything like that but uh now that players have um in a lot of ways taken over taken taken taken the data back and used it in uh ever more advanced ways to benefit each other and to benefit themselves it seems to some degree that it's back to where they have this naturally huge information advantage over those of us who didn't play the game. And outsiders maybe have less to contribute because the players themselves have taken all the tools that outsiders once used to have a little bit of a monopoly on. So again, not saying this is bad or anything like that, but do you think that the outsider

era is kind of coming to an end? Are we going to see now where front offices are mostly run by ex-players again are we going to see where most of the progressive teams are still being taken in progressive directions by players and by ex-players and by coaches who were ex-players and all these things who are simply now more open-minded and yeah kind of more and all these things who are simply now more open-minded and kind of more innovative with what they've got. I think the outsider era is in full swing right now. I don't think we've ever had a more outsider-centric era than we do today. That was something that we dealt with while we worked on the book because, I mean, really in the year or less than a year that we were writing it,

you could see this change happening almost like a a stop motion photography or something. It was happening so quickly that when we were doing our last updates for the book this past March, half the work was like keeping track of where all the people we had talked to had gone because we talked to all these college coaches early in the process or people at driveline or other independent facilities. And by the time we were done with the book, they were like all working for teams. It was just incredible. It was like eight driveline people or something were hired this past off season. Almost literally every college coach I talked to who was into this data-driven development stuff then got hired by a team this season. And so all that's happening really quickly. And like the

Angels hired a bunch of like Twitter hitting gurus this past winter. So all that is happening, I mean, full force right now. If you haven't played the game, that is not really an impediment to your getting a coaching job. Whereas before it was, where did you play? And your own career was a big, that was the top part of your resume. And maybe it still would be, but it doesn't have to be the whole resume. It's all about who can you fix or who have you fixed or not what do you know, but what do you want to know and are you seeking this sort of knowledge? So all that is the case right now. But I do mention in the book that I kind of wonder whether things will come back all the way around, like you're saying. And we're in this era now where, what, there are two former player GMs, just Depoto and Bean and retire and work their way up through the front office, then yeah, there isn't really a reason why those guys can't ascend back to the management roles that they occupied before.

So I don't know that that will exclude non-baseball people because it's a pretty big tent these days and there are just a lot of people working in these areas like part of this whole movement is that the player development staffs have just increased by like 50 percent and obviously we've seen front offices and the quantitative departments increased by even more than that so i think maybe there's room for both but i don't think players will be barred from it the way that they seemingly are right now. And former Effectively Wild guest Nate Fryman, for instance, he's someone who, you know, like maybe the first player to write for fan graphs and learn SQL and R and all of these tools. And then he got hired by Cleveland and he's in Cleveland's front office right now.

So I think that will happen more and more. Yeah. All right. Well, how many, do you have to do that thing where you go on 65 radio shows in an afternoon? Maybe at some point. Yeah. That was like the worst day of your life. Yeah. Cause you weren't. I couldn't do it. Where was I? I don't know, but you weren't available for whatever reason. And so I did like 30 radio interviews in one day and just like lost my voice completely. So yeah, that might happen. We'll be doing a lot of talking this week. I should also mention, because you asked me about the coolest thing I learned, and probably some of the coolest things I learned were things that happened a really long time ago that I never knew about, like the history chapter in the book about all the precursors to this modern player development where you had some people here and there espousing some of these ideas, but baseball men and tradition kind of conquered them and it never ended up going anywhere. today and they had this whole program that just got junked and forgotten about or you know the royals academy and i got to talk to 92 year old royal scout art stewart about the royals academy which was really cool or all the branch ricky stuff so that was very eye-opening for me because i didn't want to be like oh this is all new and nothing none of this has ever happened before because in baseball there's almost always some precedent for something it's

just that the game wasn't ready yet the technology wasn't ready yet for it to be adopted on on such a large scale but i do sort of see this as you know like a spiritual sequel to the only rule in some sense like it's a different kind of book it's not my story or travis's story in the way that that book was to some extent our story, but player development was something we really wanted to do that summer with the Stompers. We wanted to figure out how do we make these guys better and how do we give them a better shot to get out of indie ball. And we basically didn't do anything in that area because we didn't have time

and we didn't have competence and we had our hands full just doing the basics. But that process, like figuring out that we had to talk people into listening to us and how that book became all about communication and interpersonal dynamics and politics and all of that, that kind of gave me a greater appreciation for how you really needed people to bridge this divide between the front office and the field. And whether that's with conduits or whatever, people had to come along to do for big league teams what we couldn't do for the Stompers.

So kind of glad I got to explore that more with this one. I'm reading the email, Jane, about the satellite radio tour or radio, sorry, radio satellite tour, which I was moving and so i couldn't do it okay i did offer they said could you do the 12th of the 13th and i said i can't do the 12th i can do the 13th but i'm moving on the 12th and then they said with we can only do it on the 12th and i let out a great whoop wherever i was and every email of you in here is just like, it is audibly groaning somehow. And yeah, you hated this. Yeah. Well, I hated it less than you would have, but I'm happy anyone wants to

talk to me about the book, but that was not the ideal venue for talking about it. It's like 20 consecutive. You've never talked to before for 10 minutes at a time in a different market every time. And they definitely hadn't read the book. I mean, there was no chance that they had read this book. No way. And they were all in a row. Yep. Saying exactly the same thing every time. And people who were not really that receptive to it in many cases. Yeah, that was rough. But fortunately, a lot of people have wanted to have very engaging and rewarding conversations about the book like this one. So that's been a pleasure because

it's been months of not being able to talk about it. And it is a joy to be able to talk about it now. You express skepticism of whether radio hits sell books because, quote, no one ever tells me they heard me on the radio or that they bought the book because of it. So if anybody hears Ben on the radio, tell me. Tell Ben. Yeah. Especially if you bought a book because of it. Yeah. I don't know. Cause it's like, you're usually in your car when you're listening to it. And when are you going to buy the book right there in the car? Probably not. So then once you get to your office or something, you probably just forget and you're probably half listening anyway. And yeah, when I go on a podcast, it's like, oh, I enjoyed your conversation and glad I found out about the book. And when I go on the radio, it's just a void and I never hear any evidence that anyone was listening except the host and

the producer. So I hope it works, but I don't know. All right. Well, the book is called The MVP Machine and I hope it does bonkers numbers. Thanks. Me too. All right. All right. That will do it for today. I really hope you'll pick up The MVP Machine.

It is available now, or it's just about to be. Tuesday, June 4th, official release date. It was sort of a grueling process to write. It was not easy for us to get publishers to see the potential in the idea. I hope that you all will, and if it sells well, that will be great vindication. But I think we're already feeling good about the book. It's something we wanted to write

and I hope it'll be something that you want to read. Again, it is called The MVP Machine. Go get your hands on it and please share your thoughts. We are eager to hear them. And if you're in the New York City area and you're hearing this on Tuesday,

please come out and meet me and Travis at Foley's on West 33rd Street, starting at 630 Eastern. We will sign your books and chat. It will be fun. You can and meet me and Travis at Foley's on West 33rd Street, starting at 630 Eastern. We will sign your books and chat. It will be fun. You can also catch me and Travis on MLB Now on MLB Network on Tuesday today. And thanks to all of you who pre-ordered. We really appreciate that show of support. You can also support this podcast by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some small monthly amount to keep the podcast going. Luke, Josh Eichach, Darren Cohen, E. May, and Phil McRae. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com

slash group slash Effectively Wild, and you can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Please keep your questions and comments for me and Sam and Meg coming via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you're a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. And we will be back to talk to you a little later this week. Happy reading, everyone. Thank you. De vontade De vontade De vontade