Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1464: The New Hot Stove Survey

Episode Date: December 2, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter anew about José Abreu’s perplexing RBI total, then predict and discuss the answers in the sequel to “the Crasnicks,” a survey of front-office executives on hot-button offseason questions conducted by ESPN’s Jesse Rogers. Along the way, they touch on the four-player Padres-Brewers trade involving Luis Urías and Trent Grisham, […]

Let's start an anonymous club. I'll make us name badges with question marks. Come round to mine. We can't walk close and drink wine all night. Good morning and welcome to episode 1464 of Effectively Wild, the baseball podcast on Fangraphs.com, brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I am Sam Miller of ESPN, along with Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Hello, Ben. Hi. I just noticed something on baseball reference i think this is new uh this is a uh on a player's game logs they have uh something called rbi it's sort of like an rbi stats box and it has who the player drove in the most and then who who the player was most driven in by and then it also has how many runners were on base, what the average major

leaguer with that many plate appearances, how many RBIs I guess the average player would have with that many plate appearances, and how many they drove in. And so it's interesting. I'm like just now seeing it. So I don't know if I could make anything interesting of any of this. But the reason that the well, I thought that there might be something interesting about Jose Abreu's RBI thing because he led the league in RBIs, as we talked about, and we found that very odd. And he drove in Larry Garcia 34 times, which I don't know if that's a lot. I haven't had time to figure out if that's a lot. He didn't drive in any other Chicago White Sox more than 15 times.

That seems like a lot. I don't know. What I'm saying is that I haven't figured out whether this is something I can make use of. But just glancing at it, it seems like Jose Abreu and Larry Garcia had something special going on last year. Yeah, sounds like it. Like Garcia was driven in by Abreu 34 times. And then number two was Moncada only 15 times, and then nobody else drove him in 10 times, including himself.

So I don't know. Jose Abreu did have the second most runners on base during his plate appearances of anyone in the majors. So that is a baseball prospectus stat. Juan Soto led the majors Actually with 473 Runners on base during the regular season And Jose Abreu was just behind him At 465

I just don't get it why It is weird that he would have the Because it's the White Sox And they didn't have great On base guys on ahead of him Or they shouldn't have in theory Because even though we talked about this but anderson was up there obviously and because he had such a high batting average he had a decent

on base percentage but not an incredible one yeah and then who else was typically batting ahead of abreu it must have been garcia moncada yomer sanchez who just got non-tendered yeah and uh let's see was uh adam angle the white socks the white socks had the fifth worst on base percentage overall in the american league i mean moncada had a good year but he's not a great on base guy either so all right i don't know yes it is interesting though to see like so he had 465 runners on base and it breaks down how many were on first how many were on second how many were on third and then they have the average major leaguer how many they had in that many plate appearances first second and third so this is actually something that i would find quite useful if i were writing a

baseball prospectus uh player capsule for instance i'm sure that this would come quite useful if I were writing a baseball prospectus player capsule, for instance. I'm sure that this would come up at least once in my blurbing. And so anyway, new thing. Yeah, Brea was also, let's see, he was also second in runners on third. I thought maybe he'd have a disproportionate numbers of runners on third, but he was behind Soto in that category too and ahead of everyone else. It's very odd it must have been that like I was the the bottom of the White Sox order must have been just a a real OBP abyss it must have just been no one getting on base at all because

the all the on base must have been concentrated in front of Abreu for him to get that many runners on yeah and it's not I I mean, you could think, well, maybe there were decent on-base percentages, but nobody was hitting home runs in front of him, that if you got on base any time in the inning before Abreu, you were still going to be there by the time Abreu got there. So maybe that's a theory, but it's not like Anderson and Moncada didn't have any power at all,

and the things that would cause you to get on base for Abreu would also cause you to clear the base runners that are on ahead of you and also Abreu. It's a hard equation to figure out. Yeah, it is. Yeah. I mean, they had Eloy Jimenez on after he was usually batting behind Debreu or batting fifth, and he did not have a good on base year. And then Daniel Palka was somewhere out there. Meg and I talked about his futility during the season. And who else was there back there? I mean, James McCann, he had a good first half at least. And then mentioned yomer sanchez so huh i guess and yonder alonso

was batting behind debreu a lot and yonder alonso had a very lousy season i so yeah that is that's getting very i mean that yonder the strength of yonder alonso is probably not a factor well just in the in the team wide low base percentage, that was part of it. But yeah, I guess it was just a pretty good top of the order. Or was it like a good number nine hitter? No. It wasn't. It was Engel, and he was usually hitting ninth.

There are other people who didn't have great seasons. So very odd. Very odd. I mean, Garcia was their most common leadoff hitter, and he had a 310 on base percentage as a leadoff hitter and and yet as we i mean the people who have missed three episodes ago probably wonder why we're talking about jose abreu's rbis but this came up because garcia himself had the highest rate of runs scored basically per time reaching base

and uh so it seemed like that was something about Abreu, but I don't know. Abreu wasn't that great. And it's all odd. All right. Okay. So anyway, today we're going to talk about something other than that. We're going to talk about, well, long-time listeners of the show

know that one of my favorite, maybe my favorite recurring piece of baseball journalism is what we used to call the Krasniks. And the Krasniks were when Jerry Krasnik in the offseason, each offseason, would survey a bunch of GMs. I think he would get like 30 GMs or other front office types to answer questions that were very topical and also were, you know, difficult to answer.

Like who's going to be better, player A or player B? And you'd have to think about it. Well, who is going to be better? Or where is so-and-so going to sign? Or who's going to be a better signing? And, you know, I don't exactly know. I'm not a rumors reporter, but my sense is that, like, you know, if you're a rumors reporter and you get a GM to tell you that he thinks that, you know, JD Martinez is going to get traded to the Royals, then you go, oh, wow, that's good. And then you tweet that or, you know, you put it in your roundup. Like one GM telling you that is news enough that it's reportable. And this is like an incredible opportunity to get 30 different people

to give you their opinion about what's going to happen or who's going to be good. It seems like it should be. I mean, it is. It's a very fascinating. I love reading it. I loved I always loved reading it. It's a fascinating thing. But then what really kicked it into the thing that I love more than anything else is when I looked one year to see, well, how well do GMs and other front office types do at predicting these things? How accurate are they? How much intelligence are they bringing to this exercise? And I found that they were essentially no better than random chance that they were ever, ever, ever so slightly better than 50% right when you look back over the decade that the Krasnicks had been going on. And so it is a fun article on its own. And then it is also

just a great something. It's a great something about how, I don't know, how unpredictable baseball is, how difficult it is to actually know anything before that's unknown, or maybe it's about how GMs themselves fall into the pundit fallacy and end up giving wrong answers when they should know better. I don't exactly know, but there's something about their inability to actually get the answers right in retrospect that is especially enjoyable. So anyway, long lead in, Jerry Krasnick no longer works as a journalist, and so the Krasnicks seemed to have died. But then,

then this year, Jesse Rogers, ESPN staff writer Jesse Rogers, has saved them and saved us and done. I have not read this yet. Ben and I agreed that one of us would read and the other would not, and so Ben has read. I don't know how closely these hew to the Krasnick's formula.

Are these the Krasnick's that has Jesse taken it entirely or are they different? It's pretty similar. It doesn't explicitly mention the Krasnick's. It doesn't say that we are picking up the torch that Jerry dropped when he went to work for the Players Association, but it seems very clearly to be the spiritual sequel to the Krasnicks. And some of the questions are similar, similar sort of format. It's a smaller sample, I will say. So I went back and looked at the last Krasnicks and he would talk to 40 people or more. And the Rogerses, the sequels to the Krasnicks. This is 15. This is 15 team executives and baseball

insiders, which I don't know exactly what qualifies as a baseball insider, but presumably— Do you think you—do you qualify? Well, I don't know. I mean, I know that you—Jesse, I presumably did not call you, but do you think that you would qualify as an insider? This is sort of a separate question. Are you an insider, Ben? I don't think I'm an insider, no. But I have heard media people described as insiders, like people who are plugged in and do rumor reporting and are talking to MLB executives all the time. They will sometimes be described as an MLB insider when they appear on some show or another. So it's possible, I guess, that this includes media members,

but I'm going to guess that it probably doesn't. I don't know. The spirit of the Krasniks. Krasnik, how did he describe who he was talking to? Like just executives, managers sometimes I think he mentioned? General, yeah. So like the year that I first did the survey of his past results, of their past results, is the the wording 22

general managers assistant gms advisors scouting directors and talent evaluators in the field uh-huh yeah so that would be that would be front office people and scouts that are currently employed all right so this is a smaller sample and it's a bit more vague about who is being surveyed but it's the best we've got we've got no krasnicks anymore and this is a good first attempt at replacing the krasnicks maybe it will become its own tradition and the sample will grow so we've got nine questions here and am i just gonna read them and get your take on either what you think or what you think the responses will say? The way that we have done this in the past is that, yes, one of us reads the question,

and then the other guesses what the GM, we'll just call them GMs for the sake, we've acknowledged that they're not all GMs, but we'll call them the GMs. So the other will predict what the GMs said. And then the reader, the person who has read it will then say what the gm's actually said so we'll see whether we can predict predictions first and then once that is settled i believe if we have anything to say maybe we will each say how we would have answered that or uh or or so on okay all right so let's start first question which team will make the biggest splash of the offseason this is not multiple choice it's just name a team that will make the biggest splash of the offseason? This is not multiple choice.

It's just name a team that will make a big splash. Oh, I'm already excited, Ben. I'm excited because I know that in like 12 seconds, you're going to tell me how many said, I don't know. I can't wait. I love the I don't knows. Okay, so which team will make the biggest splash this offseason out of 15 picks? All right, I'm going to say that I really feel like the answer is going to be the Angels, and I think that it's going to be, if not a majority, it will be a strong plurality.

I could see like six or seven picks for the angels you are right survey says angels seven and they are ahead of everyone else you've got padres two rangers two white socks two and then cubs and yankees with one a piece so everyone did answer this question uh so okay so uh ray padres two rangers two white socks two cubs one yankees one and that's this is a crucial thing because i don't know maybe it is actually the case that if you asked who is most likely to sign i mean the biggest splash is is pretty much limited to who will sign garrett cole who will sign anthony rendon maybe who will sign strasburg and also like another top five but even strasburg's a little low for us for the biggest splash and

then who will here someone defines the biggest splash okay one of the respondents says if any team signs two of the bigger names then that's the biggest splash or gets mookie bets or francisco lindor and that's basically what it can so maybe if you Betts or Francisco Lindor. Yeah, I guess so. That's basically what it can. So maybe if you ask the GMs, if you rephrase this and said, which team will sign Garrett Cole, maybe they would indeed say seven of them would say the Angels. But just looking at the answers,

it feels to me like they're answering a question about the definition of splash, which is a little deeper than who will sign one of the top three free agents. But in fact, who will sign one of these free agents after not being good? That for it to be a splash requires it to be somewhat shocking, somewhat unexpected. Like, I don't know, maybe none of the GMs think the Phillies are going to sign anybody, but I kind of feel like in the GM's opinion, the Phillies are already exempt from splashes because they've been sloshing around in the pool so long that there's already splashing everywhere.

And so the idea of it being the Angels, the Padres, the Rangers, or the White Sox, those four teams are really teams that have not— well, I guess the Padres did last year. All right yeah there goes my theory the angels kind of made the biggest splash the winter before because yeah they had otani and that wasn't a splash so much though that was but it wasn't just that it was uh what they signed zach kosar they signed they made some other signings that winter too because we had billy epler on the podcast and the name of

the podcast was billy epler on winning the winter which uh obviously winning the winter does not always predict winning the regular season but no the angels were all right busy they did other stuff that winter i forget what else okay they made multiple moves i take it back then all right so they have they have answered this question who will that who will be the biggest splash and they simply mean who will sign those big okay so angels seven and everybody else eight and so that means that nobody thinks that like for instance the the nationals have a splash in them or the who else would be splashing well it seems like if the nationals are going to make the dodgers they're probably going to bring back their own free agents and that can't be a splash.

Right. Exactly. The Dodgers, no one named the Dodgers for a splash. No one named— The Dodgers, like if they signed Rendon or something, I mean, that would be by far the biggest signing of the Friedman era, the biggest signing Friedman's ever made. I don't think he's ever made a bigger free agent signing of a player who wasn't already a Dodger than A.J. Pollock. I think A.J. Pollock is the biggest free agent signing that Friedman has made, accepting, I guess, what, Justin Turner? Was that an extension? Or Kenley Jansen? Or Clayton Kershaw? Those were either extensions or bringing back someone. So the Dodgers haven't really gone out

and made the big splash, and they haven't really had to. They keep winning the division and making the World Series because they keep developing great players, but they have not done that. So they seem like they would qualify as a team that could make the biggest splash because they haven't really been playing in that pool. idea of a splash takes on its own value when i was covering the angels tony regan's i think shortly i want to say this was shortly before the vernon wells move had said that they wanted to make a big splash and so then for years big splash became kind of a term of mockery for tony regan's move and like you could just go and like you said zach cozart nobody thinks that cozart is a splash. Well, at the time, he was coming off a good year. No, no, he's not a splash. No, not on his own.

He's not a splash. You don't splash with the 25th free agent. Although, actually, Zach Cozart was, you're right, he was good. He was a five-win player. He was a five-win. All right, but a splash is something else. A splash is a statement. A splash is not just acquiring you know players

it's it's making a statement it's a it is a reassertion of your team's direction and uh or in the case of the dodgers the unwillingness to make the splash has been a sign of their timidity they have obviously acquired many great players they have they they've won 100 games multiple times they have they you know they have one of the all-time great teams this past year but it is specifically the lack of the splash that has been uh held against them that they have not been willing to make the splash move and so um so i'm still going back to the the gms were answering a question that was slightly more nuanced than who is going to add the most talent this year. It is specifically who is going to make the splash.

So anyway, the Angels seem poised to make the splash. Who would you pick? Yeah. The Angels also, they got Ian Kinsler that winter, right? And then they re-signed Justin Upton. Yes, that's right. Yeah. I mean, yeah.

Okay. So who would I say? So some of these teams have already started splashing. They haven't made the biggest splash yet. The White Sox. There are ripples. So yeah, this survey was sent out before the Grand Isle signing. So this came out, I think, the day before Thanksgiving.

But it was sent out before the Grand Isle signing. So the White Sox have already signed a big free agent the rangers got your guy kyle gibson who uh you you took in the off-season free agent oh my gosh i didn't know this how much yeah i was kicking myself for not taking him because i thought that was a great pick and then it was indeed a good pick ben tell me what happened i what did i didn't follow this. I was at Thanksgiving. What happened? He signed for three years and $30 million, and the prediction was two years and 18. So you were on the right side of that one. And then maybe you also, did you miss the big Padres Brewers trade while you were at Thanksgiving? I saw that. I did see that one. So maybe we should talk about that for a minute. So that was sort of a splash. And then the Padres also signed Drew Pomerantz after making that trade.

So, so far, the executives have done a decent job of pinpointing the teams that will be active because Padres, Rangers, White Sox, they each had two votes and each of them has made at least a moderately big move so far. So I think the angels make sense like it's hard for me to say what i would have said 10 minutes ago but i think i probably would have picked the angels just because they have been connected to cole so much and because it's so hard to envision them competing next season without making a splash i mean they they need a starting rotation. They need free agent pitchers. They don't have a ton to trade or that they'd probably be willing to trade. So they really need to make a splash. It seems like the only route for the Angels to be competitive next season is by splashing. And because they went out and got Joe Maddon, maybe that means they're more likely to splash. Already a splash. Is that a splash? A little bit.

I don't know if joe mann's it was one that comes got him yeah but uh yeah i think they're probably the best pick i that padres brewers trade was kind of a fun trade by the way i don't have a ton to say about it but the padres got trent grisham and zach davies the brewers got Eric Lauer and Luis Rias and it's kind of a fun like challenge trade of young guys and clearly the Padres kind of gave up on Rias and he struggled when he was playing for them last season and they didn't really give him an extended second chance to prove himself and he'd obviously been a pretty highly regarded prospect, but he sort of slotted in as their second baseman of the future. And apparently they didn't even think that he could be that, whereas now the Brewers seem to be slotting him in as their shortstop of the future. then you'd think this might work out in their favor then again i guess trent christian's a pretty good player too but it's a interesting trade because of it's just two teams that really

seem to have different evaluations of a player who until recently was a pretty highly regarded prospect and just had some struggles in his first taste of the majors but clearly the brewers still believe in him and now the padres have a million outfielders which is also kind of interesting so i don't know how they figure out what their outfield of the future is but it's like now you've got if will meyer's still there you've got francie cordero you've got hunter renfro you've got grisham you've got many marco you've got francisco mejia who's kind of out there sometimes. Josh Naylor. It's like seven outfielders.

And I don't know that any of them are sure things, but that's an interesting situation. I don't know how that shakes out. All right. I'm going to pick the Braves. I'm going off the board. I want to give an answer that nobody else has given. And so I'm going to say the Braves will make the biggest splash. All right. to give an answer that nobody else has given okay and so i'm gonna say the braves will make the biggest splash all right and they've obviously been one of the more active teams so far but nothing splash worthy they've been bringing back their own players mostly yeah their bullpen yeah

okay all right bullpens other relievers yeah next will smith will smith has a little bit of a he would contribute to interest splash yeah yeah okay all right number two which of these three players is most likely to start next season with a new team okay mookie bets okay francisco and or got it or chris bryant chris oh we've talked about this yep most likely most likely yes oh and i'm not picking the answer. I'm picking their answer. Okay. Right. So this is where the GMs should really have so much to offer us collectively.

Because you're not going to trade Mookie bets by keeping it a secret. Like, you're going to talk to a lot of people and say, like, you know, I'm just throwing this out there. you know, I'm just throwing this out there. And so they ought to really have a sense of how much those conversations are happening and where, uh, you know, where the Red Sox are starting with this process. And if, and they would have probably reached out. So maybe they are even read the article or the tweet or whatever it was that said, Chris Bryant could be available. And then they called Chris Bryant and the Cubs said, that was a bad article. Chris Bryant's not available. And so then they, they should really be able to tell us something. And so this is, this is the, they, they'll, they'll end up getting it wrong, but they should get it right. Yeah. I'm going to say that the answer is that a 15 of 15.

Okay. So I'm going to say, oh, and somebody's going to say neither. All right. I'm going to say that Mookie Betts is the most answered answer with like eight. That is probably what I would have said too. And that is absolutely not what they said. In fact, no one said Mookie. No way. Zero Mookie responses. Great to know.

Yeah. So Lindor led with eight and Bryant had seven. Wow. No abstaining. So yeah, that's Interesting because there's certainly been The most discussion About trading bets because The Red Sox basically came out

And said that they're interested in trading bets But either these executives And insiders don't believe Them or just don't think That they'll be able to do it or don't think That they'll be able to find a deal worth Doing which is sort of what we were saying when we talked about this before. So Lindor, I get it. I get why Lindor would kind of be the easiest to move. He's the most attractive of the three we

discussed, right? Because he is signed for longer than Mookie and he's close to as good as Mookie let's say and Bryant is closer to free agency there's some uncertainty about his grievance that could bring him even closer to free agency and he's just coming off a couple of down years relative to these other guys so I get why they are thinking Lindor like if you're and maybe it's because Cleveland just seems the most motivated not to spend. That could be a big part of it too. They've been talking about trading their good players now since last off season, they traded Bauer in season. So they don't draw and they don't spend a whole lot. And I guess that must be why they picked him. And I guess that must be why they picked him.

I feel like this is a pretty big scoop from Jesse. Because again, like if you get one GM saying that they think that Mookie Betts is going to get traded this offseason, you can get away with tweeting that. Like that is a tweetable statement. GM says Mookie Betts is going to get traded. And here Jesse has 15. 15. He's collected 15 who do not think he's going to get traded or that he's unlikely to relative to the others. And I have now completely changed my expectations for this offseason. I don't think Mookie Best will get traded. Just based on this, which you acknowledge is probably not accurate because it hasn't been in the past i know it's weird because they really should be able to nail the transactions ones they don't do they don't historically when i've looked at this they not only don't do that

well when it talks about predicting player performance but they also don't do that well when it talks about who will get traded but i still it feels like they should do well and in this case i mean this is a pretty lopsided result zero zero i didn't i wasn't even thinking about chris i thought that chris bryant was only in the this conversation for like the rule of threes i did i had not really been thinking of him as being truly trade bait uh at all yeah huh all right well i mean i certainly would have answered the way that you did i think just based on how much smoke has surrounded bets but it never made sense to me that they

would want to trade bets, which is what we said before, or that it would really benefit them to trade bets. And maybe that's the case. Maybe all the executives just looked at it the way that we looked at it and said, why would they do this? It wouldn't make sense. So I guess I get it. It's also interesting because the Red Sox are, I don't know if this matters for somebody like Mookie Betts,

but you tend to think that a GM is a little bit more likely to trade a player that he didn't develop or that he doesn't have a long time relationship with. And I mean, again, it's not like, it's not like Heimloom doesn't know who Mookie Betts, or have like an emotional relationship to Mookie Betts as we all do, but he didn't develop him. He hasn't been there, you know, through the years, through the, through the parades and also the struggles early, you know, early in the, the, the everything, like it's not

all, it's not all background for him. And it would be very easy for him to come in and say, well, I see a player who's not likely to sign an extension and trading him could really kickstart my era of Boston Red Sox baseball. Whereas with Lindor and Brian, you, you don't have that same dynamic. And so you might just think that in the abstract that Betts would be a lot more likely to be traded for that reason, but apparently not.

Yeah. All right. Number three. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Who do we think is most likely to start next season with a new team? Hmm. Well, I guess I probably would have said muki before this so am i going to change my answer based on this response from anonymous people i i probably shouldn't right i don't know i don't trust this that much again like i think probably if you had given the choice of none of them that probably would have been the leading response, right?

That would be, I think, my leading response, that it's more likely that none of them will be traded than that any one of them will. So they are essentially all less than, you know, one in six to be traded or so. Yeah. Okay. So you would say none of them if you could. I would also say, no, I think I would say one of them is more likely than none of them. None of them is more likely than any of them, any individual of them. Okay. So, all right. So then in that case, right, none of them is the right pick, but I do think that one of them will probably be traded. And I will say that of the

three that is likely to be traded, I will say Lindor yeah i mean it makes the most sense in in some ways like he is he's tradable i guess like he's on a team that seems like it might be inclined to trade a good player because they've made noises about that before and actually done it before and who wouldn't want him. And the thing we were saying about Bryant and Betts, also even more so Betts, is that they are going to be fairly expensive. Like they'll be worth every penny. Certainly Mookie will be worth more than he will be earning in salary, you would think.

But there's still a limited number of teams that can afford what Mookie Betts, or at least that has decided that they can afford what Mookie Betts will be making in 2020. And so I think Lindor will be the least expensive of the three, right? And that probably means more potential suitors. So I think it makes sense. Okay. All right.

Number three, this is a two-parter. Anthony Rendon is the clear top hitter on this market where will he land and for how much all right well they're gonna say in washington because for one thing he probably is more likely to land in washington i think it does feel like rendon is is more likely to stay than he is to leave it kind of feels like that to me but also i think every free agent, unless it's like an extreme circumstance where his team just doesn't have any interest in him or something, is almost always more likely

to re-sign with his team than to go to the team that you pick out of a hat. Like, it's very hard to name. Out of the five other suitors, it's very hard to get that one right. And it's just easier to say, well, we already know he has a relationship with this team.

Unless he appears after his last postseason game wearing a exact horse cap that's exactly right exactly so i will say that um that uh that they'll pick the nationals but then i'll say that the number and most will say like i could see it being like 11 say the nationals and then he has a highest response a lowest response and an average response i don't know if you want to answer all of those but oh for four dollars well dollars first i'm gonna though pick the number the runner-up team for if he doesn't sign with the nationals and i will say that the runner-up team is oh boy this is hard i I don't know. The Giants. No, it can't be them.

The Braves. Can't I say the Braves? You can. Big splash. Yeah, big splash. All right. Okay. So highest response, lowest response, and average response.

I'm going to say the average response is going to be seven years, $199 million. Okay. All right. So only three teams named because almost everyone thought it was the Nationals. So 13 said Nationals. And then Rangers and Cardinals got one apiece. And the money, highest response, eight years and $280 million. That was the one person who picked the Rangers.

Lowest response, six years, $200 million oh i was lower than the lowest i tried to do math in my head that is the national someone who picked the national said that average response was seven years 227 million seven years 227 million okay yeah i think theays should sign him. Sure. Yeah. Why not? Yeah. I mean, obviously I would have said Nationals too. I think it makes sense to say Nationals. It's interesting really that anyone didn't say Nationals because the two people who said non-Nationals teams must think that it is more likely that they go to those teams than the nationals so you wonder what they know or think they know about that that's that's kind of surprising i guess so and as for the money well it's more fun to give a more fun answer is what yeah true that too yeah yeah no one abstains so far that's uh yeah jesse i like this jesse pushed them. I guess it's also because he only talked to 15 people. Krasnick talked to 40-something. Well, no. So you're more likely to get a non-answer, right?

That's not fair. Like I said, when I did the first survey of this, Krasnick only talked to 22. And so that's not that much difference. No. Yeah, that was early on. I think the 40 was the freakishly expansive. Well, maybe as the Krasnicks grew in stature and everyone knew, there'd be an Effectively Wild episode about it. Everyone wanted to get in on it. Hey, by the way, Jerry, if you need to survey anyone anonymously, hit me up. Every time your phone rings in mid-November, you're a GM and you're thinking, is he calling me this year?

Yeah. Yeah, and as for the buddy, I mean, that's right on what MLB Trade Rumors had. They had seven years in 235, and neither of us drafted that in our contracts draft because we felt like that was pretty much right around where it would be, I think. So that sounds about right. All right. Number four. Who is more likely to return to the Nats, Steven Strasburg or Rendon?

Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. So it's interesting because, you know, Strasburg is already mentally in his head was already going to be playing with the Nationals. Yeah. You know, he didn't know if he was going to opt out.

And I think quite possibly until fairly late in the season, I wouldn't say the postseason, but fairly late in the season, I'm not sure that he would have thought he would opt out. And so probably in his mind, he was planning a future as a national for another, what was it, like four years? Yeah. Well, he was signed, yes, four years, right? And Boris had said, and I don't know if this is true, but Boris maintains that he doesn't talk to his clients about their offseason plans until it's the offseason. And if that's the case, then Strasburg must have been at least thinking of himself as a national in some way right up until the end of the World Series. So if you had asked me this question prior to the end of the postseason, I would have said Strasburg just because it wasn't a cinch that he would become a free agent at all. It seemed quite possible that he would do the Clayton Kershaw thing of using the opt-out as

leverage to get an extra year or two tacked on at a higher rate or something and that he wouldn't actually hit the open market. And once he did, then it became more likely, I think, that he would leave just because he'd be able to hear the other team's offers. But still, yes, there could be something to the fact that he had already committed to the Nationals for the next few years. Yeah, so it would be rather jarring for him to all of a sudden uproot. Yeah, he bought a house there i think yeah but uh on the other hand uh every team uh needs pitching could use

pitching could use more pitching uh not that many teams need third baseman so because of that i think it's been a lot easier for narratives to develop about strasburg going elsewhere particularly geographically there's a sense that he is somehow drawn to the West because he is from the West, which is a thing that happens sometimes with players. We believe that they can only... They've just been gritting their teeth until they can go back to where their mom lives.

Right. Garrett Cole, too. Garrett Cole as well. So I do think that more picks will be for Rendon than for strasburg i'll say to return to return to washington yeah that it is more like that gms will say it is more likely rendon will stay in washington than that strasburg will and i think it'll be like uh 12 to 3 that is exactly right 12 to 3 for rendon to return to the Nationals. No, okay, all right. I really do, I want to commend this survey.

No both, no neither. No, not yet. It was really aggravating how many GMs would answer with basically some equivalent of, well, what do you think? And this has not been that way. Everyone gets the answer. The whole point is to serve it. We all know. We all know that there are other choices that you could make.

That's not the question Jesse asked you. Yes. Just answer it. Yep. All right. So do we disagree with this? I wouldn't have any idea. Yeah.

I mean, neither do I really. But so I don't know. I would have said Strasburg if you'd asked me in October. Now, I don't really know. Pretty much a toss up for me. Yeah. So who in the past has done the because because the opt out and then resign thing. When I think of the opt out and resign, the first name that comes to mind is Sabathia. And didn't Kershaw opt-out and re-sign? Did he technically opt-out or did he just, was the opt-out like converted into an extension? It happened so fast. Did A-Rod opt-out and re-sign? A-Rod did, right?

Yes, he did. Okay, well, never mind. I was going to say I think about it as pitchers doing it. He was a porous guy, right? All right, never mind. I don't know. I'll say Rendo. Okay.

I don't know i'll say rendon okay i don't know i have the this is not probably true to either one's character but you have i have the feeling i also believe that story that strasburg wants to surf or whatever in california and i also have this feeling about rendon that he's kind of fairly no drama and just wants to play until he's you know until he can retire right yes yeah there was a story it was kind of a joking quote i think that he gave to ken rosenthal who asked him something about like what does he see himself doing when he's howie kendrick's age 36 and renton said that he just wants to be home with his kids or something like he doesn't even want to be playing anymore at that point i think it was kind of kidding, but that is his reputation, I guess,

that like he plays hard, obviously, and he applies himself, but he is maybe a little less like tear the uniform off me type than others are. All right. Number five, will Garrett Cole get a $300 million deal? And the options are definitely no chance or it'll be close but under okay well i liked the start of this question because i have garrett cole i have the over on garrett cole's contract in the free agent game and that was 256 and i've been nervous about it and if 300 is seen as the uh as the you know the the rough estimate then I would feel great. Now, the fact that two of the options are under and only one of the options is over

makes me feel that 300 is not the line. And so that question got progressively less encouraging for me. Yeah, I would have liked to see one more option there because it goes from definitely and no chance. Those are the two poles. And then it'll be close but under. And there's no intermediate yes. There's no like, yes, but barely or something. Like it'll be close, but over. Yeah. Yeah. I wonder that. Okay. So that makes me think,

and I don't know this, I don't have any inside knowledge, but I have talked to people on the phone before as well and interviewed and had the premise of a question kind of change as you ask various people that. It makes me wonder whether this started as will he get a $300 million deal? And the first two or three people said, it'll be close, but under. And so then Jesse added the third option. Again, I don't know if that's true, but sometimes you adjust on the fly. Well, definitely, and no chance. I wouldn't want to say either of those things, right? But you need some kind of hedging, some kind of probability thing, right? I mean, you could just ask, is it, well, you could ask, is it more likely that he does or doesn't? That would be if you

think that like 300 is where you'd set the over-under, like that's the median that he does or doesn't, that would be if you think that like 300 is where you'd set the over under, like that's the median that he might get or something. So it's kind of stacking things toward it's less likely that he will get it. But well, I'm going to say that the answer that they give is not going to be definitely. I think that, you know, I'm afraid I'm, I hate to say it,

Ben. Okay. I think the answer is know, I'm afraid, I hate to say it, Ben. Okay. I think the answer is going to be no chance. I think it's going to be like 7, 4, 3. No, like 7, 5, 2. So 7, no chances, 5, close but under. And I don't even think there will be two definitelys. I don't even think that, but I'm going to say two definitelys.

Well, zero definitelys. Yeah don't even think that, but I'm going to say two definitelys. Well, zero definitelys. Yeah, that's what I really thought. Yeah, which again, like definitely, maybe it's just people not wanting to commit to definitely because most of these questions, it's like, which is more likely, which is I'd have no problem answering that. But if you give me definitely, I'm not going to say definitely for almost anything. So maybe that's just my wishy-washiness. I don't know. But the most common answer was close but under, which I guess is good news for you in the free agent contracts draft. So nine of the 15 picked close but under, and the other six took no chance.

So it makes sense that no chance would be more likely than definitely i think just you know i mean it's it would be an unprecedented deal so i understand why people wouldn't want to say definitely no chance is you know that's a little strong i guess for me too i guess i just like to leave myself some chance of being wrong because I expect myself to be wrong often. But if anything, I would have thought more close but unders because he doesn't specify how close. So, you know, how close is close? Is close 10 million? Is close 40 million?

When you're talking about 300 million, those are probably both close. So that's a big area there. Here's what we do know. We know that there are 15 baseball insiders representing i don't know maybe a dozen teams and this tells me that those dozen teams are not offering him 300 million dollars because if they were they would say definitely i'm going out there with 300 million dollars and either i'm signing him or someone who's offering him more is signing him. So we have 40% of the league surveyed here, accounted for, and there are no $300 million offers.

Unless they want to try to depress his price. They want to send a message to Scott Boris through this survey, hey, you're not getting $300, so don't try. So there could be ulterior motives here, I suppose. I'd like to know, more than like number of respondents, I'd like to know how many teams are represented. That would be an interesting thing here. Because if you have 15 people, but five of them are from the same team or something, that doesn't tell you much because they might have a similar model that's telling them things or they might have some groupthink going on. So you just kind of have to trust that rogers is spreading out his sources here i do i do too all right so i mean i would say close but under also as long as you're not pinning me down on the close because he can still get the biggest deal ever for a pitcher and not be that close to 300 because David Price is the biggest pitcher deal, right? 217, that's not even that close. And then the annual salary, like he could get there without a 300

million deal. So, I mean, it's possible that Boris will set that as the target initially, that he'll want that big round number, but often it seems like he just kind of wants the record and this would be the record for a pitcher without getting to 300. So I don't think he'll hold the line there necessarily. Yeah, I would guess that if you were to follow up with the six people who said definitely not, that they would estimate something like $225 million for him. And the nine that said close but not quite i would guess it would be 275 yeah okay all right question six of the second tier guys which of these free agent starting

pitchers would you most want your team to sign this winter madison bumgarner zach wheeler or dallas keitel oh huh interesting all of them have very different yeah they would offer very Zach Wheeler or Dallas Keuchel? Hmm. Huh, interesting. All of them have very different... Yeah. They would offer very different things. I'm going to say I'm somewhat swayed. I'm largely swayed by the various free agent rankings that we read a few weeks ago

in preparation for our contract draft because I did not think that Zach Wheeler was going – I did not personally think of Zach Wheeler as as hot as he has been treated by many of these prospect rankings. Neither did I. I took the under on his contract in our draft, and it was a $100 million estimate, and I think you agreed with me on that pick.

But he has been showing up high, and I get it. You're talking about Bumgarner and Keichel who are sort of similar. They're kind of in similar boats. Keichel last year was sort of similar to the free agency of Bumgarner. This year, people have drawn parallels there. They are older and like handedness and same sort of stuff so i could see why wheeler would kind of be a contrast to those two so the it seems like the answer that i should give is is wheeler i'm going to hmm hmm hmm it's weird because i in a way bum garner would

seems like he would be the bigger splash just like you would get more coverage in your local newspaper bigger name exactly and he brings with him a sort of a character a personality you've just added veteran you know tough guyness yep clutch playoff clutch playoff performance i'm going to i've talked myself into it i'm going to say it's very close i'm going to say eight say bum garner seven say wheeler all right it is wheeler eight bum garner four keitelichel, two. And then three-way tie. Three-way tie. Three-way tie. Yes.

So someone says you'd get – Three-way tie, by the way. So which of these three would you most want your team to sign? Yeah, so can't even – it's not even two-way. It's like, oh, Baumgartner, Wheeler, Keichel. We have exactly the same valuation of all three of those pitchers. What are the odds? I love that GM.

Just imagine that GM in the winter meetings. He would literally not be able to decide between. Flip a coin. Flip a three-sided coin somehow. Doesn't matter. The agent comes back to you. You're like, I'll give you $120 million. And the agent's like, $130 million.

And you're like, it is a tie. I cannot decide whether to do that or not. Yep. And you just stare at him for a very long time. Three-way tie. So two-set Keichel. Two-set Keichel. Two-set Keichel.

Yeah, that is interesting. This is a player who literally every team let sit unemployed for three months. Yes. Last year. The Keichel, one of the Keichel voters is quoted as saying, don't sleep on him. They slept on him. Yeah, they did. But he's saying, don't do it again.

He bet on himself by sitting out half a year and was a big help in Atlanta with solid numbers. Plus, the guy has a lot of heart. Has a lot of heart it almost sounds As if Keichel Improved his reputation in this person's Estimation by sitting out Half a year just because of the Courage of his convictions betting on himself So yeah

Not not surprising To me that people would pick Wheeler Most often and yeah I think I probably would too Again I'm not quite on Board with the Wheeler love, I don't think necessarily. But I get why, because we're paying for future performance here, you would maybe want Wheeler over the other guys. Yeah, I think so too.

I mean, it's really been three years since Bumgarner was even Bumgarner as it was. Did any of them make the case for Bumgarner was even Bumgarner as it was. Yeah. Did any of them make the case for Bumgarner? Nope. Not quoted. No. Okay. All right.

Question seven. How much does the 2019 baseball and what the ball will be like going forward impact your offseason decision making? A lot, some, or not at all? Good question for us all. Yeah. How much does the baseball affect your decision-making? So, so this could be the question of how much you think that it skews everything, or it could be how much you think that it is volatile. And so whatever you are thinking is happening now might change again, or it could be simply, you might assume that in both, you might actually have a pretty good handle on things and assume that it's going to stay the same, but how much does your, your,

your, how much do your baseball strategy truisms change in a radically different environment? How much do you think you need to rebuild your team because this baseball is here to stay? There's a lot of different ways that you could answer this question. So how much – it gives you – that's open-ended. Yep. So how much does it change your thinking? Well, there are three options. Oh, the three options.

A lot, some, or not at all. Oh, okay. So identical tie. A lot – And I should tell you here, or not at all. Oh, okay. So identical tie. A lot. And I should tell you here, three declined to answer. I don't know why. I don't know why this would be the question that three would decline to answer when up to this point, everyone has answered. Except there was one person who once said three-way tie, but they all answered until we get to the ball question

which i don't know what that means is that like are they it's a hard question maybe i mean you can't offend anybody you're you're not gonna offend anybody and you're not gonna get brought up on charges of tampering so that that's the reason that you would answer it now but but it's a hard i could imagine you just saying that's really hard i honestly can't answer with any conviction how much does it impact your off-season decision making i don't know i don't know i can't even answer this yeah how much does it impact you it is such a big question i do not know how to answer it and i do not know how other people would answer it i will say answer i will say that it is i will say most people will say a lot or not at all that uh very few will say some

and i think it would be mostly a lot i'll say a lot all right well that is not right so of the 12 who answered nine said some and zero said a lot so three said not at all, which, I mean, I guess that makes sense to me. Because if you're, and it's easy for me to say because I see the answers, but if it's a hard question to answer, then that must mean that you think it might impact your decision making. Because if it were so clear that it wouldn't affect your deficient making, then no one would decline to answer. You'd just say, oh, no, I'm not even thinking about that. But the fact that three were agonized over it, that they couldn't even come up with an answer, that means it must be waiting on their minds a little bit. And so you'd probably say some just like as a way of answering without actually thinking about it or having to come up with a definitive answer. Just say, yeah, it'll probably affect some.

I don't know how or how much, but some. That is a great point. Do you believe that, I think that it's fair to assume that some players benefit more from one type of ball than another type of ball. But do you believe that it is clear enough that you, given the information that is available to you in a team do you think that you could make accurate decisions about which players those are i think especially after only one year because we've only had this ball for one

year and so many of the things that so many of the things that you would look at are they're just so fluky they're they're the sorts of like home run per fly ball rates basically are one of the flukiest things as it is right and they have more precise tools maybe they have i mean obviously they have the entire trajectory of the ball and even better than the public stat cast stuff they have the whole trajectory and so they can probably estimate like with some precision, like Rob Arthur and others have done some estimates of who has gained the most or how many home runs would not have been hit with the old ball this year, let's say. So I think you could make a decent estimate. Of course, you can't tell what the ball will be like. We don't even know. You

can't even say, well, will it be the 2019 ball? Because there were multiple 2019 balls. So is it the regular season ball or the postseason ball? Does the fact that the postseason ball seemed to have been deader, does that mean we're more likely to get deader next year because that was the most recent ball we've seen? Or can we just not even say because the panel of people who've been studying the ball, they haven't even released their findings yet. And based on that, I think you would have to say that it's more likely that the ball will be deader than it was this year, than that it will be the same or less lively would be more likely than more lively because we're already at like liveliest ever highest home run rate ever so you wouldn't bet on it to go up even though it did go up this year yeah we said that two years ago right and then it went up again but just because there's so much scrutiny and because if there is an intentional change made

you'd think it would be to suppress the flight of the ball a little bit. And we have the postseason, which may indicate that some change was already made intentionally or otherwise. So I think you'd have to probably bet on lower home run rate, just like regression. So how much would that affect? Probably I would be in the some category too, because I think there are certain players who you could say have probably benefited. But again, everyone's playing with the same ball, but like you did that stat blast that one time, right? About the quartiles of home run hitters

and that seemed to support the idea that if you're like in that category where maybe you were hitting a bunch of warning track flies, then you would be in the cohort that would gain the most from a ball that adds 10 feet of flight or whatever on a hard hit ball. So I could see why you might be less likely to bring back one of those guys. Like, you know, Meg and I were talking last week about Jonathan VR and how he hit the record setting home run ball. He hit the one that set the regular season record. And then we were marveling at the fact that Jonathan VR had 24 homers and was quite a valuable player because of that. And then we saw the Orioles

place Jonathan VR on waivers just over this little Thanksgiving break, which I think a lot of people were sort of surprised to see because he was coming off a good year. But again, like he was projected to make more via arbitration, like 10 million or something, I think was the estimate. And he hasn't been that good before. And it's the Orioles. So maybe this is just a tanking thing. You know, they don't have any real reason to pay Jonathan VR. He's probably not going to increase attendance, probably not a lot of people coming out to see Jonathan VR, even though he was technically, I guess, the Orioles' best player or most valuable player this year. But with a big raise coming, with the Orioles not projected to contend, you could see why the Orioles would make this decision. It's not that surprising. And maybe part of it is that, well, we don't think Jonathan Villar is going to hit 24 homers again because A, he hasn't done that before

and B, maybe the ball will be different and maybe he's the kind of player who would have benefited disproportionately from the ball. So if I were in the market for players, like it's certainly something that if I were a GM, I would say, hey, give me a study on this, like run the numbers, tell me if this is something that I should be considering. I would have my analytics people working on this and telling me, does this affect your evaluation of anyone? So it would at least affect my thinking. Would it affect my decision-making? I guess that depends on what they conclude, but I would guess that it would change your evaluation of certain players to some extent if not hugely okay all right question number eight who is the one player most likely to be overpaid on a big contract this winter

and this is a double prediction this is like you're saying who you think will get paid you're trying to predict both how much they'll get paid and how good they'll be which are two things that gms have a hard time predicting in yes in these exercises and this is a tough one for you because it's open-ended and uh no no options here so give me the give me the number of the most how many votes did the most named player get four okay and okay well it's gonna be one of the top five free agents so no no i'm not gonna confirm i'm not gonna deny or confirm that it seems like it almost has to be because after that it's just too dispersed and people aren't like nobody's sitting around thinking about Chris Martin on their off day. True.

If you have to come up with one off the top of your head, it's probably going to be someone famous. Yeah. I'll say, I can't remember. Okay. I can't remember. Okay. I'm going to just say that it'll be Zach Wheeler. Oh, that's right.

Yeah, no, I said it. Oh, I should have let you change your answer, but yes, you got it. Zach Wheeler, which is interesting because, again, the executives thought that Wheeler would be a better value than Bumgarner or Keichler, that they would rather their team sign him. And yet he is also the most likely answer for overpaid. Now, I will say seven declined to answer here. Seven with almost half of the people. If I were, I mean, I don't know. I don't want to put myself in the place of Jesse or Krasnick here.

But if you were doing this, like, I feel like if I were doing this, I would just say, like, you have to answer the whole point of this. If you're willing to, I guess you can't, before you ask the questions, demand that someone answer because they probably won't agree to that because you never know what the questions would be but like i don't know i would want to prod them a bit because why would you not answer what what's the harm i guess uh anyway wheeler for grandal too which is interesting because this was before the grandal signing but we were talking last week about like is there something that we're missing out here in the public about Grandal? Because it seems like he's worth more than he always makes. And yet, two people here thought that he would be most likely to be overpaid. Then we got Nick Castellanos had one.

And Daniel Hudson has one. And that's it. Because seven people declined to answer. Daniel Hudson? Yeah, I mean, I get that. Oh that oh yeah because he just got the yeah yeah he's coming off the last heroic series closer on the world series team big gap between his era and fip all that but do you think that do you think that the uh i think that there is uh i mean obviously this is not uh uh it is very clear to anybody on baseball twitter that there is much more reluctance

on baseball twitter to call a player overpaid now than there would have been 10 years ago 10 years ago we were we just couldn't wait to call people overpaid we loved it it was our favorite thing to call a person was overpaid and now i think that it's a very different conversation about player value and whether like that's a a good dynamic to even like really engage with and all of that do you think that there's any of the same reluctance in front offices? Do you think that that kind of culture of de-emphasizing player contracts and worth, quote unquote worth, is also at all in front offices? Do you think that they are? Well, I doubt their thinking has changed, but maybe the language that they use has changed just because you're heading into CBA negotiations.

And like, for instance, Mark Carrigg reported, I think it was last winter, that MLB has this championship belt that they pass around to Mark, that they have discontinued that practice. Obviously not because they are not going to be trying to win every dollar they can in arbitration or that they won't be doing some back-slapping among themselves for winning, but just because you don't want to have that public-facing championship belt that just looks bad. You don't want to sway the average fan's sympathies toward the player by being that obviously ostentatiously money-grubbing so i could see how teams would modulate their language but would that contribute to their not answering this question probably not i mean they could have just said well do you mean team friendly or player friendly that would be a way to to phrase this too naming

grandal is an interesting one because yeah because last year i think he was probably the consensus most underpaid player that the market didn't develop for him and he ended up with a shockingly you know low total total value deal so i think i took took the under on the predictions for him, in fact, because I thought, I wonder if he will still be underpaid, if he will still not get what the market should be for him. So it's interesting that two people looked at Yosemite Grandal, who went in the last offseason as one of the war leaders in baseball and one of the top free agents and ended up with a one-year deal, would then say, that's the guy who's going to get overpaid this year it's interesting yeah i mean i guess what this is so it specifies on a big contract which is most likely to be overpaid on a big contract and so

you're probably going to take a pitcher like it makes sense that you take a pitcher just because there's the injury risk there and if you have a pitcher who hurts himself and, you know, even if you just miss a year and a half with Tommy John or something, then that makes it more likely that the scales will swing towards the player. So I think, and there's also an insider quoted here who just says about Wheeler, what's on his resume, which I guess is kind of what we think about Wheeler when we look at him. So obviously resume is not relevant here because this is future performance, except to the extent that you think his past performance predicts his future performance,

as it often does. And with Wheeler, he does have a track record of injury and missing time. And who else are you going to pick? Like if you're talking about big free agent pitcher contracts, there's Cole, there's Strasburg, and there's Wheeler basically. Those are the only guys I think who were predicted to get like $100 million or over deals. So you're probably not going to take cold just because he's so great then again he's gonna be paid like he's so great so i guess he could hurt himself too but he's been durable and strasburg has obviously had a lot of injury problems himself he's at least

coming off his most durable year and maybe it's just because they think well we've only got like three big pitcher contracts to choose from here and we trust wheeler the least he's had less of a track record he's had injuries and fewer accomplishments so i i can see why you would pick wheeler and i suppose i might too yeah it's fair it is also worth pointing out that Wheeler has been very good the last two years and was incredible in the second half of 2018. So this is not, I don't even remember if this was fair about Darren Dreifurt, but Darren Dreifurt is the player that you think about as the no track record, youngish arm. And this is not what I think of as Darren Dreifurt-esque, right?

I mean, Wheeler over the past two years has been the pitcher that many, many, many teams would love to have. And that's there. This is not all projection. All right. Last question. Which of these hitters will produce more over the length of their next contract? And that's always a tricky one.

Does produce more mean that they'll just be better? Does that take into account the contract? Is that relative to what they'll be paid? And if one signs for five years and the other signs for two years, does he only have to be as good over those five years, as many wars over those five years as the other in two years? Yeah, right. So anyway, the three options are Didi Gregorius, Marcelo Ozuna, or Nick Castellanos. All right. I'm going to cross Marcelo Ozuna off because I think that anybody who picks Marcelo Ozuna over Didi Gregorius would pick Castellanos over Marcelo Ozuna.

So I think that it comes down to whether you're going to pick the shortstop or the slugger. And I think that – I think it'll be castanos i think it'll be um like uh well i can't say unanimous because somebody said that castanos was going to be the most overpaid or whatever in the previous question so there's at least one front office guy who hates castanos but i think it'll be um convincing like 11 for Castellanos. It is 7 for Castellanos and 6 for Ozuna. Oh. 2 for Gregorius. Interesting.

So, wow. I mean, that's no real difference. Like Castellanos and Ozuna were basically tied. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Yeah. There was actually interesting something that I didn't mention here because we were talking about how would the ball affect your decision making.

So one executive referred to Anthony Rendon as juiced ball proof because of his ability to lay off borderline pitches while driving the ball into the gaps when he does swing. So presumably if he thinks that Rendon is juiced ball proof, then he must think other people are not juiced ball proof. And so he must have been one of the executives that chose some or a lot instead of not at all for how much will the ball affect your decision making. That assumes that if you're saying somebody is juiced ball proof, you're saying that he will be good even though the ball is not going to be juiced anymore. But the mystery is whether the ball is going to be juiced anymore. You're essentially saying, how much does it affect your planning if you know that it is either going to be totally different than it was this year or exactly like this year and you don't get to know. Like if you knew one way or the other, if you knew that the ball was what the 2020 ball was

going to play like, then it could make some changes. But here you don't know whether it's going to play that way or not. And so you're having to decide how much does the uncertainty of it affect your decisions. And yes, like Rendon might be a player, I might, I don't know if I would agree with that, but he might be a player who does better in a, with a 2018 ball relative to 2019 than other players but that would suggest that he does worse with the 2019 ball relative to 2018 than other players and so what do your projections say the ball is going to be it's tough yeah one of the executives says that castellanos is a gap doubles machine that should play in any ballpark of, that is easy to say coming off the year when he was indeed a doubles machine. But I guess that makes sense.

All right. So that is the first annual, let's hope, annual Rogers. Yes. Okay. Can I say one more thing? I meant to say this at the beginning. I just got back from seeing Knives Out, the Rian Johnson movie. Good movie.

Everyone should see it. But it's a baseball movie, and I'm not giving anything away here. There is just literally a baseball in the movie. Some people in the Facebook group were joking that The Irishman is a baseball movie because it mentions the monster Joe Gallo. Yes, who is also a baseball player. But no, this is a real baseball movie. There's a baseball. It's just a thing that one of the characters just likes

to hold in his hand and this is something that we see in more than just knives out like there are other characters in non-baseball shows that just like to have a baseball in their hand or they like to have a baseball on their desk or something this character also displays the baseball on their desk or something. This character also displays the baseball on his desk and just has it there, which is like on The Good Wife, Josh Charles just has a baseball on his desk. It's something that people have on their desks. And I think it's a nice thing about baseballs. They're like among the more satisfying, if not the most satisfying pieces of sports equipment just to have in your hand, just to carry around with you. You can't really say that about most of the other types of sports balls, right?

Because, like, there's not much you can do with a football on your own. Fun to toss around a football, sure, and you could even toss it up and down, but you need two hands really to do that. And for a basketball, same thing thing unless you're a real basketball player who can palm a ball or something you can shoot it in a basket by yourself basketball is more fun to play by yourself and more possible to play by yourself than baseball but the ball itself i think you could spin it on the tip of your finger which is a fun thing to do with a basketball but still baseball it fits right in your hand even if you don't have an oversized hand, you can just cradle it. It's got stitches, so it has an interesting texture.

You can roll it around. You can grip it. Even like a soccer ball, I mean, you're not even supposed to touch a soccer ball with your hand. You can do the keep-it-up-kicking thing with a soccer ball, which is fun. But I think a baseball, maybe I'm just biased here, but I think it's probably the best piece of sports equipment if you're just idly holding something by yourself or tossing it up and down or something. I think a baseball has most other types of balls beat. Yeah, I would

agree about everything you said. I do think a tennis ball is very satisfying because you can bounce it, you can throw it against the wall. You can throw it against the wall. You can really let it go. And I mean, that's the premise of the, what was it? A Spalding in West Wing. What's his name? Toby. Toby.

What was his name? Toby? Yeah, Toby. So those are good. I used to have a bowling pin on my desk, which is obviously not as satisfying. But a bowling pin has a different weight distribution than you expect the first time you pick up a bowling pin. And it is satisfying to just kind of hold a bowling pin like, you know, while you're talking on the phone, but not as good as baseball, not as good

as tennis ball, not as good as a Spalding. And at the moment right now, I'm actually holding a baseball bat. I sometimes hold a baseball bat while I'm recording this podcast. This is a game-used bat from Jesus Sanchez, former Miami Marlin, I believe, or something that Stefan Reichert, one-time part owner of Baseball Perspectives, gave to me as a gift, and I love it. Right. Yes, I knew that somehow. Did we talk about that? Maybe. Yeah. Huh. Okay. Well, yeah, those can be fun to balance. And you kind of need two hands for that though, right? I mean,

just, you can do your fake swings or something. If you're on the phone, you can cradle the phone on your shoulder and you can swing a bat and I guess you can kind of balance it with one hand or. No, baseball's better than a bat. I also, I also have a ball at my desk. Okay. All right. Yeah. Baseball's good. Oh, and last thing, No, baseball's better than a sandlot level game against a team of high school pitchers would you like to guess how well he did so he he pitched and he hit and so he was playing with just some local people that i guess he plays uh baseball with his team of local acquaintances and they played the teachers from a high school baseball powerhouse and suzuki pitched and hit would you like to speculate what's his his line on this game oh i would rather

speculate on what 15 baseball insiders would have predicted his line on this game yeah i will guess that he went um like seven for seven and also through like a one hitter but the one hit was a home run okay well he he didn't do quite that well so he he did pitch a complete game 131 pitches and uh he walked none he struck out 16 and he allowed zero runs however he did allow Six hits and at the Plate he went three for four with a walk His team beat the high School teachers 14 to nothing So clearly the MVP

And the star of the game but he did Allow six hits so he was Not untouched and someone got him out once Hmm all right good to Know we need more of that yes Yes we do all right that'll Do it all right wanted to know we need more of that Yes yes we do all right That'll do it all right wanted to Mention the death of former White Sox player

Val Heim who was the oldest Living major leaguer his death of course Makes our guest on episode 1454 Eddie Robinson The new oldest living major leaguer And long may he reign if You missed our episode with Eddie go back And check it out a couple of other well-known nonagenarians with ties to baseball passed on just in the

past couple weeks. Dorothy Seymour Mills, the well-known baseball author and historian and researcher. She, of course, has an award named after her, Sabre's Dorothy Seymour Mills Lifetime Achievement Award, which goes to any person with a sustained involvement in women's baseball or any woman with a long-time involvement in baseball in any fashion. Dorothy Seymour Mills was 91, and Seymour Seaworth, the long-time head of the Elias Sports Bureau, died last week at 99. And I met Seymour, I had a little bit of a connection to him, because one of my first

jobs while I was still in school, and the first job that had anything to do with sports, was at the Elias Sports Bureau. I worked there, I think, for a summer and two winters. And when I worked there, Seymour was, I believe, in his late 80s. And he was still in the office every day. And he would come in wearing a full suit and jacket and tie. And he would paste the previous day's box scores into giant scrapbooks that he kept. And there were years and years of them arrayed around the shelves in the room where I sat and I would be there doing very boring data entry. I was just reading microfilm and printing out microfilm game logs from the Hall of Fame and then entering it day by day player performances into Elias's system so that that data could then be combed for fun facts and statistics.

And while I was doing that, sitting and typing away at those numbers, Seymour would be behind me or somewhere else in the room pasting box scores into these scrapbooks for no real reason at that point. Obviously, everything had been digitized, but it was just habit. Or maybe he just didn't completely trust the computers and he wanted to have a backup just in case. But Seawolf, of course, was at Elias for, gosh, 80 years because he started working there when he was 19. And he eventually bought it and he expanded it and he had grand ambitions and, of course, built it up into what it is today, what it has been for decades now, the apart from his baseball stats and other sports stats records, he was a World War II veteran, he was injured in Italy, so there are plenty of reasons to celebrate him. He does have a somewhat checkered past when it comes to sabermetrics, though. He and Bill James were something close to mortal enemies in the 80s, because Elias, and you can understand why this would be. Seymour helped build up this vast infrastructure and tracked all these stats, and then he was very protective of them after that point. He was kind of the gatekeeper, and Elias was definitely not open source. They were just not putting these

things out there, and Bill James was very frustrated when he was working on his abstracts every year because he could not get data from Elias. They would provide stats to teams, but they would not make it public. They would not provide it to researchers. And Seymour, I think, felt somewhat scornful of early sabermetrics and also, I think, threatened by it because it wasn't really what Elias did. Elias provided the stats but didn't really do research or sabermetric analysis with it, although it later claimed, I think, to have sort of inspired the sabermetric analysis with it, although it later claimed, I think, to have sort of inspired the sabermetric movement with its player analyst publications. It didn't really. It just provided stats. It didn't manipulate them in interesting ways like James did. There's a lot about the

Seawolf-James feud in the excellent book by Alan Schwartz, The Numbers Game, Baseball's Lifelong Fascination with Statistics. I'd recommend that you all go read that if you're at all interested in the subject. So in one way, Elias and Seymour sort of held sabermetrics back because he wouldn't put that data out there, wouldn't give it to researchers who wanted it, and then also sort of flooded the market with inconsequential stats, mostly meaningless, just factoids. So I'm reading here from the numbers game about the Elias baseball analysts books. Quote, the Elias books did Analysts books. Quote, who didn't know how to use them, like handing a chainsaw to a hyperactive teenager, with similarly grisly results. Announcers would cite Benny DiStefano's slugging percentage with the bases empty in late innings as if it were meaningful. Writers would herald how Mickey Hatcher had gotten

hits in 17 of his last 25 games, a statistic roughly as significant as the number of hairs on his chinny-chin-chin. Elias did not educate its readers nearly as well as James did. It failed to reinforce the fact that The Analyst was at its heart a reference book. Only one in a hundred numbers held any real significance. Whereas people knew things through Elias's charts, they understood them through James's writings and wit. The old saying, give a man a fish he'll eat for a day, teach him to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime, is applicable here. Elias delivered fish. James taught fans how to catch them. And as a

result of Elias's obstructionism when it came to sabermetrics, James started his own movement. He started Project Scoresheet, or at least co-started it. That was the crowdsourced effort to just collect stats on baseball and do an end-round Elias and Seawolf by getting all that data, and that led to a lot of the early sabermetric breakthroughs. So in a way, by standing in the way of those early sabermetricians, Seawolf only inspired them to greater heights, perhaps. He was no fan of saber, and he would stand in the way when saber researchers would turn up a statistical inconsistency in Hack-Wilson's RBI record. He actually had one more RBI than the official record says.

Elias sort of dragged its feet And didn't change those things unless it Absolutely had to and I thought this passage Was interesting this is also from the numbers Game and it concerns the founder Of RetroSheet David Smith Who we had on an episode of Effectively Wild Episode 1318 another good one

So quoting here one of Smith's best Friends was dumbfounded at this You're spending 50 hours a week on this stuff and then giving it all away? This was a guy who knew a thing or two about the baseball stat business too. It was none other than Seymour Seawolf. Believe it or not, Smith, whose goal was to make every

statistic free, is buddies with the one lambasted for keeping them proprietary. The two crossed paths in the mid-1990s they were bound to, and Smith was so friendly, his passion for baseball statistics so pure, that Seawolf immediately took a liking to him, particularly when Smith was smart enough never to ask for any data. In early 1999, the two got together up at Elias' New York offices one Saturday and shared an afternoon just talking baseball and family. When conversation turned to RetroSheet and Smith charging nothing for his data, Seawolf was still befuddled. They'll take advantage of you, he warned.

I can't be taken advantage of, Seymour, Smith said. I want to give it all away to everyone. Seawolf shook his head. Then he confided something that explains so much about the old man, about all the years he shut himself off from the growing statistics community. I'm terrified of you, he said. So you can understand it. Seawolf built this flourishing business by collecting all these stats and digitizing them and providing

them to the leagues. And once you build something like that, naturally, you're going to be inclined to protect what you've built and your business and your income source. So I think, in a way, Elias did a service to the statistical community by helping make these stats at least available to the league and to teams and then eventually to the public in some form, but also stood in the way of sabermetrics and yet, by opposing it, may have encouraged those early researchers to go out and collect this data themselves. So kind of a complicated legacy, but he had a long life and accomplished a lot in the

industry and certainly loved baseball. And I kind of hope that someone is still pasting those box scores into Seymour's big books, even if there's no real reason to, just for old times sake. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners have already signed up to pledge some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks. James Walker, Ken, Christoph Atkins, Connor Strangler, and Greg Dowd. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms.

Keep your questions and comments for me and Sam and Meg coming via email at podcast and fangraphs.com or via the patreon messaging system if you are a supporter thanks to dylan higgins for his editing assistance and we will be back with another episode a little later this week talk to you then I sign, I sign, I sign on, on, on These words are all I have These words are all I have