Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1465: Free Agency’s Second Wind

Episode Date: December 5, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller discuss a crowdsourced effort to help baseball writer Jen Ramos, then banter about hot stove terminology and why free-agent activity seems to be picking up, analyzing the implications of a busy non-tender deadline day and the expectations-exceeding signings of Drew Pomeranz, Mike Moustakas, Cole Hamels, Zack Wheeler, José Abreu, and […]

🎵 I hope I still know you when this is all over Good morning and welcome to episode 1465 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast on vangraphs.com brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Sam Miller of ESPN along with Ben Lindberg. Hello Ben. Hi. We're gonna be doing an email episode. Before that though, there was a terrible and tragic event involving a baseball writer, many of you know, named Jen Ramos this month. Jen is alive, but in very serious condition. I'm going to read from a GoFundMe page that has been set up by Jen's family. On the morning of December 1st, 2019, Josh and Jennifer, husband and wife, were driving from Jen's parents' home in San Luis Obispo, leaving at around 11 p.m. to get to Merced in time to take care of their four cats. Unfortunately, they never made it.

At around 1.30 a.m. December 1st, a drunk driver hit them on Highway 99 in Fresno, California. Joshua Eisen, 28 years old, married on January 2nd, 2019, was not to see his first year anniversary as he was killed on the spot by the drunk driver. His wife, Jennifer, was severely and critically injured. Jennifer sustained fractures on both lower limbs and pelvis. An aortic tear, had hemothorax, and other injuries. That afternoon, they were wheeled to the operating room to repair the aorta, insert a chest tube for the hemothorax, and debridement of the fractures. On December 2nd,

Jen was wheeled back to the OR for the reduction of the left and right limb fractures. The left limb was not reduced due to some pulmonary oxygen saturation problem, and another surgery was scheduled for Wednesday, which is when we are recording this right now. This is just plainly awful news made more personal by how much their caring and persuasive voice has been part of the baseball world for the past few years. Jen was once introduced on a podcast as Jen MacRamos of pretty much everywhere. And that's about right. They've written at Baseball Prospectus and the Hardball Times, co-hosted Hardball Times Audio, and came on this podcast at least twice. and came on this podcast at least twice.

And my recollection is that Jen was a commenter at McCovey Chronicles way back when I was too, way back before most of us were even writing at all. They were also the assistant general manager of the Sonoma Stompers the summer after Ben and I were there. So hired by Theo. So as noted, there is a GoFundMe page. We'll post a link to it on Facebook. It's going to be a very expensive recovery.

And I will retweet something right now so that it will be easy for anybody to find. And also, I mean, most of you don't need to hear this, but some of you do. And so I'm going to say it. Really just don't drink and drive ever. Not even a little. Not if you think you're okay.

I promise you any scenario you can imagine where you do not drive will be forgiven. You will be forgiven by anybody. If you miss work, if you, you know, if your car gets towed, if you have to wake somebody up, if you have to be a bother, you will be forgiven. I've never driven in my life. You can get away with that. Yeah. Well, you and can, can yes you will be able to forgive yourself and if you don't do that if you drive drunk then something can happen that you just won't be forgiven for and you won't forgive yourself for it's just such a consequential decision and you should know better so just just don't do it don't ever do it don't even cheat

don't even convince yourself just this once. Don't think, well, it's hardly ever. It is just a terrible, terrible, terrible decision. Don't ever, ever do it. So that's that. Yeah, I was very sad to see that. Jen has been on this podcast a couple times, a couple Rockies preview episodes, I believe,

and used to host the Hardball Times audio podcast or co-hosts it, at least. And I hope that Jen will be okay eventually. It's gratifying, I guess, to see that the community has kind of come forward and supported this GoFundMe, but I'm sure much more support would be welcome. So again, check out the show page or Facebook group. We'll have the link to that page there. All right. Okay. Well, I guess let's talk about baseball.

Sure. So the stove is sort of hot. Can I, you guys think like last winter, I think you did an episode where you talked about how the stove was getting hot. And I sort of paused on that because I'm not sure in the metaphor that the stove is the activity. I don't think that the activity is the stove. I don't think it's the fuel necessarily. True.

It's the people gathering around the stove. So the origin of the hot stove, as I understand it, is what is the origin of the hot stove? My recollection is that the hot stove predates free agency and all that stuff. That the hot stove was like people sitting around in the winter. Talking baseball. Talking baseball. Exactly. And so the stove pre-existed transactions.

Yes, I think that's true. Well, there were always transactions, but fewer. So yeah, I think that's true. They're clustered around the stove trying to keep warm while they have their baseball conversation during the long, cold winter months. And yeah, maybe we've kind of conflated the activity with the temperature of the stove. I think it sort of works, though, because if nothing's happening, then there's not much to talk about and there's not much warmth there.

I mean, I guess the stove is a stove. It's a literal stove. So it's warm, presumably regardless of what's happening in baseball. But it doesn't really warm us if there's not much happening in baseball or at least not positive happening in baseball or at least not positive happening in baseball so for me it kind of works to okay to tie the stove to the activity yeah i'm glad we talked it through you've you've talked me into it okay so stuff is happening we've had a few signings since we last recorded and all of them met or exceeded i I would say, expectations contract-wise.

First, we had Mike Moustakis, who when we talked about him in our contracts draft episode, we were kind of joking. You joked about how maybe he would get the multi-year contract that he's been seeking these past couple off seasons. Maybe he'd get it all at once and he'd land a six-year deal or something. But he kind of came close to that he got a four-year 64 million dollar deal from the reds and then we saw on wednesday a couple nl east pitcher signings so cole hamels signed with the braves who have been one of the more active teams so far and then the phillies responded with an even bigger signing and they landed Zach Wheeler for five years and 118 million. And not even the biggest offer that he got. Yes, the White Sox apparently had an even bigger offer out there that he spurned because his wife is from New Jersey reportedly and this would bring him closer to that. So obviously, bad news for me on my offseason contracts pick of

under on Zach Wheeler on whatever the MLB trade rumors prediction was. It ended up well over that. And all of these really have come in over. And so for the past couple winters, I believe the Fangraph's crowdsourced free agent contract predictions Have been over-exuberant They've been over-optimistic as far as what players would make And the market has been depressed and slow-moving And yet this year it seems like As often as not Hitters and pitchers are exceeding what they were expected to earn

So Moustakis had an average crowdsourced salary expectation of $32.6 million, which was right in line with what Kylie McDaniel, who was doing the write-up, saw. And then Wheeler, and Wheeler was number nine on Kylie's free agent list, so it wasn't like he was low on him really. But Kylie had him at $ million and the crowd had him at 77 million and then hamels i guess is right in line because he was in line it looked like for a two-year 30 million dollar deal instead he got one year and 18 million so a little higher aav for a shorter term contract but so far this is what we're seeing and you know, we saw Will Smith make basically what he was projected to make. And granted, the reliever market has been more robust than the market for other position players and types of pitchers in the past couple of years. But still, there was that. And then, of course, there was Yasmany Grandal, who got the deal that he seemed to be seeking last offseason and ended up settling for a lot less. So when you put it all together, we could paint a picture of a free agent market that seems to be thawing out a

bit or at least moving more quickly than it has of late. Yeah, when we did our contract prediction game, I mean, we got to pick the contract. We got to pick only the players that we felt most certain that we were right about. And thus far, yeah, you had Wheeler, you took the under and he's over. And Jose Abreu, you took the under and you will get credit for the under because he accepted the qualifying offer. But that was at $28 million. And Abreu immediately signed a, what was it, three years and $50 million. Yeah, 50-51. And so he took the qualifying offer, but he ended up signing for, you know, double what it was predicted that he would get as a free agent.

And then I took the under on Yasmany Grandal and he's over. And then I took the over on Mistox and Gibson and they're both over. And so Odorizzi taking the qualifying offer is the only exception there so far. Now, what do you make of the non-tenders though the non-tender yeah because a lot of a few of those a large handful of them some number of them really surprised me and that would seem in to be an indication that teams are are spending and that they consider dollars spent on players to be a bad idea instead of fair market value for some of these players who were pretty good last year. So that would seem to go in the opposite direction. Yes.

Probably less so, but still it was kind of shocking to see some of the players who have been non-tendered or released because Jonathan VR wasn't even non-tendered or released because like jonathan vr wasn't even non-tendered right he was just he's put on waivers and traded to the marlins oh okay so he was traded yes like i said a lot of things happened while i was away yes so that was sort of surprising i think there were 55 players non-tendered and for those who don't know what that means basically arbitration eligible players players who have enough service time to qualify for arbitration teams have to decide to say yes

we will offer you a contract and then we'll go to arbitration to figure out how much that contract will be or we'll exchange offers and we'll settle on some amount and if you just decide well this player is going to make more in arbitration than we think he will be worth to us, then you don't have to tender a contract. You can say we release you, we non-tendered at a non-tender deadline. It's not that convincing or that clear. Like there was one year, like 2010, was only a few fewer players than this. So it's not wildly out of line with at least one past year. And the quality of the players, because I also looked at the preceding year wins above replacement player total.

And there were some years where if you add up all the warp totals of the non-tendered players, they were actually better on the whole than this year's crop of non-tendered players. But last year was a fairly high number and a fairly good crop of players. And this year was an even higher number and an even better crop of players. And so as a two-year trend, it sort of looks like teams are deciding, yeah, we're not going to go to arbitration. We are going to replace these arbitration-eligible players with some youngsters, someone we developed and think can be just as good as this more veteran player and can make the league minimum. I will say maybe there are more arbitration eligible players than there were several years ago.

I don't know whether that's true, but it could be true, right? Because there have been a bunch of young players coming up and getting a lot of playing time. And then there are also just more players, period, in the majors just because bullpens are so much bigger. Granted, a lot of those guys are sort of cycling on and off rosters and so they're not necessarily getting a full season of playing time or service time but maybe there are more players arbitration eligible and so maybe as a percentage of our eligible players it's not as unusual i don't know that's just that's just speculation but yes it it did seem like a lot, and it is a lot.

So that would suggest that teams are okay going with youth and inexpensive and inexperienced players as opposed to paying for them. But then we have these other deals. So I don't know what to make of it because if this were a few years ago and we saw these contracts, If this were a few years ago and player i think most people probably don't think of him as having been that good if you go by baseball reference war he's been more of a three to four win player but even if you say he's a three or three and a half win player as he's been the last couple years and you just do the division, then it seems like, well, yeah, sure. He is the sort of player who should be making 23 or $24 million a year.

And yet now that's just so hazy. I don't really know what a win goes for anymore. We don't really bandy those numbers about so much because it's almost like we were all talking about what a win goes for on the free agent market. And then teams decided, well, we're not playing on that market anymore. We're just going to count what a win goes for on the pre-arbitration players market, which is almost nothing. That's the type of player we're going to get. And so it's almost irrelevant what you have to pay for in the free agent market. So I don't know. Is it that we have just all accepted what this

market is now? We all just kind of lowered our expectations. And so these contracts are exceeding our lowered expectations. And maybe players are accepting these deals when they wouldn't have in the past couple offseasons because they've seen how those offseasons went and they've thought, okay, well, the offers that we thought would be out there aren't out there anymore. So we're not going to sit around and be the next Dallas Keuchel or Craig Kimbrell. We're going to take the offer when it's out there in November or December. So I don't know how much of this is the market is back to what it was, or this is a response to what the market has been. Yeah, I think that it helps to think about these deals less from the dollars and more from the years, though, because, you know, years are the more when they're in there doing

their discussions. It's usually more about years than dollars. They figure out the dollars as they go. But years are kind of what they're fighting for. they go, but years are kind of what they're fighting for. And years are like in the collusion case in 1987, part of it was that nobody was giving anybody years. It was like they would just give them one year, one year offers. And I don't know, last year, I don't know. I haven't looked at this, so I don't know. Maybe there were a normal number of multi-year contracts, but I don't know. I don't sense that there were and this year what we've

kind of been surprised by is that everybody's getting their years you know yasmani grandal is a catcher in his 30s and he's getting four years and mike mistakis is a 31 year old third baseman who's going to be a second baseman now and he got four years and zach wheeler is a pitcher with a long injury history and he got five years and so those are those are i think significant and we getting too i mean it's important as well it's important to the union it's important to the players and important to everybody that the dollars are there as well but it probably is i don't know it's probably not that important whether it's like 23 or 22 or 24 if you're looking if you're trying to like gauge the temperature of the industry it's more whether

teams are willing to commit to players for you for the amount of time that players of that caliber are used to being committed to. Yeah. And it's odd because, again, if you do that old dollars per war math that we don't seem to do that much anymore, then it makes sense that Mike Moustakis would be making $16 million a year because he's been at least a two-win player, a two to two and a half to three-ish win player in each of the past three years. So that is what someone like that should be making, or at least that's what we would have said a few years ago. But what did he do differently this year to land this kind of contract that he couldn't land the last couple of years? I mean, granted, I guess what, the first of those years he couldn't land the last couple of years. I mean, granted, I guess what, the first of those years he had the qualifying offer attached, right? But that wasn't the case last year. And it wasn't like he hit better than he's ever hit before

this year. It wasn't like he played more games than he's ever played before. I mean mean what was it about mike moustakas's 2019 that convinced the team and one would think more than one team right unless you think that the reds just were so in love with mike moustakas that they blew the rest of the teams out of the water like they must have thought that there would be some offer in that region in order to bid that much. So, so what was it? Have teams behaviors changed? Cause it's like, I mean, the Reds were trying to win last off season. They were one of the most active teams last year. They were making a lot of trades, bringing in players. And so I, I don't know exactly what it means that it worked for Moustakis this year, unless it's like, well, that it worked for Moustakis this year,

unless it's like, well, he showed that he could play second base and he played, what, 300, 400 innings at second base and did okay, like didn't look like he couldn't play that position. And maybe these days teams think, well, with the shift and with the new rules that lead to fewer collisions on double plays turned at second base, maybe more players can play second base than we used to think and so used to be that second base was like a premium up the middle position and maybe now it's just not you can just stick mike moustakas there the way that the brewers did and it'll work out fine so you know he demonstrated that he could do that is that

the thing that was missing from his resume that team said oh mike mistakis could play second base all right here's four years i think uh you should put a little calendar reminder in for like seven or eight years from now and then we'll call and we'll ask the reds okay because i would like to know the answer to that and i don't know that i trust that i could get the answer right now maybe someone will leak me their scouting reports again in 10 years. Yeah. And I can look back at what they thought of Moustakis at the time. But that is the perplexing part.

Like, it's not necessarily that you can't imagine why a team would think he's worth that much. It's just why now when he's a year or two older and not really noticeably better than he was before. So what does it mean? Does that mean the market is completely different or is it just that there was one team that was really in the market for Mike Moustakas right now and thought there was an opportunity in the NL Central and that Mike Moustakas was their guy? I don't know. It's hard to generalize from a single signing, of course, but it's hard not to when it's Moustakas who their guy. I don't know. It's hard to generalize from a single signing, of course, but it's hard not to when it's Moustakas, who has been one of the focal points of the frozen free agent market of the last couple of winters, and suddenly he's cashing in. Yeah. I mean, if you're just thinking about the Reds specifically, the Reds specifically last year,

they had, in 2018, they had Joey Votto at first, Scooter Jeanette at second, and Eugenio Suarez at third. So even if you could convince yourself that he could play second, which there wasn't really much track record there, you didn't have a place for him at second, you didn't have a place for him at third, and you didn't have a place for him at first. And now if you're the Reds one year later, wellose parraza hit 239 285 346 for you and scooter jeanette gone got traded or yeah he did get traded i didn't even know if he got traded but yeah he did get traded and then joey vato got got old and so you're not going to replace joey

vato but now you have a place where you probably you're thinking in two years you're going to need a first baseman and so you're now you're not now you're not just looking at Mike Moustakas and saying, well, he's a he's a pretty good player. We can find room for him. You're saying, well, the worst spot in our lineup was second base. So we're not just replacing replacement level at this point. We're probably replacing less than replacement level. And we've got a place to put him in the last half of the deal. It makes a lot more sense.

we've got a place to put him in the last half of the deal. It makes a lot more sense. Now, it's probably not right to focus specifically on the Reds because there were 29 other teams last year that could have done some calculus and maybe they would have found someplace for Moustakas. But to answer that specific question, that might be why the Reds would be excited to give him four years this year

and maybe a little tentative last year. Okay, yeah. And as for Wheeler, we've talked a bit about how maybe teams are over-optimistic about Wheeler or expecting too much or projecting too much when it comes to Wheeler. I don't know that I see another Garrett Cole here waiting to be unlocked, but I understand why people think he can be better than he's been. And he's been pretty good over the last couple of years. And he's been pretty good over the last couple of years. He hasn't pitched 200 innings. He hasn't had super low ERAs, but he's been good.

He's been valuable. And his most severe injury problems seem to be behind him somewhat. So I get it. And Ben Clemens wrote for Fangraphs recently about how you can envision making some changes to Wheeler and making him better. So he's like a strikeout per inning guy. And just based on how hard he throws and how much movement he gets in his spin rates and all that, you could think, well, maybe he could be a 10 in strikeouts per nine innings, 11 strikeouts per nine innings guy. And Ben pinpointed, well, when he gets ahead

of the count, maybe he throws too many fastballs or he doesn't elevate his fastball enough. And that's the sort of tweak we've been talking about with so many pitchers over the past few years. I don't know that it's as obvious as it was when Cole was with the Pirates and he was throwing his sinker all the time and everyone just said, we'll have him throw his better pitches more and have him pitch up in the zone more and he'll be better. And he was. I don't know that there's that kind of transformation coming, but you can certainly envision if he stays healthy and keeps pitching why he could be better than he's been. And again, he's been pretty good. So the Phillies need pitching help and they need a lot of other things too. So I don't know to what extent whatever budget limitations they have imposed upon themselves. I don't know whether Wheeler precludes that. It seems like they should still have a decent amount of payroll room before they start even getting into competitive bounce tax territory. But I think they did need to make at least one pitcher move, and now they have.

So I don't know that this cements their status as a favorite or anything like that. Obviously, the Braves have been very busy too. And the Nationals are sort of in limbo right now as they wait to see what happens with Strasburg and Rendon, but they seem to have a lot of payroll room to work with. But nice to see that the Phillies offseason spending spree last year was not just a one-time thing because they had a lot of money to work with. I missed this also while I was gone. Drew Pomeranz signed a four-year deal? Yeah, that's another one. Another four years, four years for Drew Pomeranz. And Abreu also ended up with three. So multiple years for a 32-year-old or whatever he is, I forget, probably close to 32 32 year old uh first baseman is also out of character for the last couple years so yeah pomeran's fangraphs crowdsourcing had him at 11.6 million and kylie had him at 16 oh goodness so i'm writing about this uh for espn for probably uh early next week so i'm not going to get too specific about what i think but i'm just curious if you could pick one pitcher for you know know, like your, your fantasy team or whatever. And

that pitcher is either Zach Wheeler re-signing with the Mets or Zach Wheeler signing with the Phillies. And we're only going to focus on like, you know, like FIP. So we're not talking about run support or defense behind him or anything like that. Just who, who is the better pitcher in your mind? Who's the better bet? Zach Wheeler staying in New York or Zach Wheeler going to a new team? I think probably going to a new team. Yeah, I do too.

I feel like everybody's going to get kind of excited thinking about, you know, like Ben was saying, like the changes that a new team might make to his repertoire or that, you know, his exposure to a new mindset or new data or new tools or whatever. Not that the Mets might not have had that, but now he doubles his exposure because he's already seen what the Mets have. Yes, right. I think that's true. And that's something that we talked about at some point on the Ringer MLB show this past offseason. You and I did as well.

Maybe, yeah, this podcast too, about whether it's flipped so that you now have more faith in someone You and I did as well. to new voices and new approaches, then he's more receptive to that. Don't talk anymore. Okay. All right. We'll read about it early next week, I'm sure. But I think that Wheeler and also Pomerantz kind of maybe fit into this paradigm of teams paying for future performance, paying for potential more so than paying for past performance, right? I mean, again, you can justify Wheeler's deal just based on what he's already done, I think.

But the fact that there seemed to be so much interest in him seems to be a product of teams thinking that they could get more out of him. And Pomeranz is someone who really made himself into this appealing free agent in like 25 innings or something with the Brewers this year, right? Because I mean, again, no one was talking about Drew Pomerantz as a big free agent or a promising player at all,

particularly. I mean, I know he's signed deals before, but like, you know, when he was with the Giants this season, he had a 5.7 ERA or something. Then he goes to the Brewers and they move him to the bullpen. And, you know, he's been back and forth a bit between the bullpen and the rotation, but the Brewers move him to the pen and he is dominant. I mean, he struck out 15 guys per nine innings in his 25 innings. And so it seems like the Padres believed in that version of Pomeranz. They thought we're signing that Pomeranz, not the previous Pomerantz, not the previous Pomerantz. And so the question becomes like, well, how much of a sample do you need to believe that this is the guy? And now you have this new data that can show you essentially the

quality of a pitcher's repertoire in an outing or two. So you don't necessarily need a big sample, but can you get yourself into trouble there where you extrapolate from a part of a season and say, well, he's got good stuff and he did it for 25 games. So that means he'll do it for the next four years. Or does it mean that he could do it for 25 games, but he can't actually sustain it for four years? There's still something to be said for a track record and a resume, I think. So I think those things are kind of coming into conflict now. All right. So we're going to do some emails, I suppose.

So I guess this one is very much on topic, and maybe this is too much overlap with what we were just talking about. A question that may be a bit too conspiracy theory related with the rash of free agent signings. Are the owners purposefully spending more to quash the rumored collusion or is this just like any other offseason? So the idea that owners are spending so that people will not accuse the owners of not spending or, you know, you could to make this less nefarious i guess you could just say well there's all this tension between labor and management and now that all that is ramping up as the cba negotiations approach and so maybe uh teams are saying well we should spend so that we appease the players and so they won't be mad at us and won't strike i guess that's a hypothesis you could have so it's like they're just playing like they're just playing possum for the by the way okay can we talk about possums okay my dad's dog caught a possum and uh my dad's dog apparently catches possums sometimes and so

my dad's dog caught a possum and as sometimes happens bit a little too hard and so this possum was dead and so my dad you know like made sure it was dead and then threw it in the trash and then in the morning the trash can lid was open and the possum had had gone away this thing was all the way like no no i did not realize they actually did this i thought that playing possum was just like kind of an like i thought they just sort of pretended like they just went yeah they just closed their eyes I did not realize they actually did this. I thought that playing possum was just like kind of an... Like I thought they just sort of pretended. Like they just went... They just closed their eyes and went limp.

But their entire body shuts down for hours. Wow. Yeah, like they actually go catatonic for hours. And so this dog... I mean like... By the way, I left out an important detail. My dog does not like to catch a possum to give it up. My dog likes to catch a possum and then have it for a while and play with it.

And so my dad, to get an animal out of his dog's mouth, I keep saying my dog when it's my dad's dog. And sometimes I'm saying my dad when I mean my dad's dog. So just be clear who everybody is in this story. Your dad did not catch a possum my dad's dog holds the animal very tight in its teeth and then my dad has to pull and tear for like sometimes 20 minutes to get the animal out of the dog's teeth and so this possum was playing dead, playing dead while its body was being tugged back and forth. And it's it was in the iron grip of a dog's jaw.

And it just kept not doing anything. It just kept chilling and waiting for its moment to escape. It's an incredible thing. Wow. Huh. That's interesting because, yeah, I think I've read that sometimes this can come back to bite them, so to speak. I guess not literally because they might play dead on the road, like when a car is coming,

and that's not a good place to play dead because you might actually end up dead if you get run over by a car. But I guess if it's a dog bite then this this works this is an adaptive behavior so congrats to the possum for getting away but i've been really struggling to figure out what the evolutionary benefit of this is because it seems to me that most you'd get eaten you get eaten right most of your enemies they want to eat you they don't care they're not in it for your feelings yeah and so it seems like playing dead is the worst possible defense to almost everything and if if if if just hypothetically

imagine that it's actually really good possum's the only animal that figured this out if it's good how come no other animals do it well we do it right humans have done it i guess but wait we we don't wait we don't go catatonic, though. It's not a biological response. You might play dead if you get shot or something. You might pretend to be dead so that someone doesn't shoot you again. But humans generally are not eating other humans, so it makes sense. It's a weird thing to me.

Context, yeah. All right. So you think the question is, are the owners just sort of faking so that they get through the crucial period? It's almost like it's like election year politics where like all your this too far and there's a work stoppage, then we're all going to lose money. And so we might as well give an extra year or two to Zach Wheeler or Drew Pomerantz or whoever right now. And if that helps assuage the situation and then we avoid a work stoppage and we can keep making money hand over fist, then it will benefit us in the long run. to work stoppage and we can keep making money hand over fist then it will benefit us in the long run see them the simpler conspiracy theory that i've wondered about is do you just sign a bunch of players now because you're expecting a work stoppage and so you know you're basically going to get a year discount right yeah i mean that's possible too you sign a four-year deal now and

it's like well we're we're not going to be paying that fourth year. Yeah, we're not even going to. We're going to shut down the league in two years. So we might as well just enjoy it while we can. So I don't even want to engage with this conspiracy theory. But it seems to me that part of the problem here is that a lot of the numbers that we see, they only mean something to us relative to our expectations. we see, they only mean something to us relative to our expectations. And so if you pay, so for instance, like we were just talking about, I don't know what Zach Wheeler is actually worth, except that I've seen hundreds of other contracts signed. And so I can put it up against those hundreds of other contracts and say, is this normal or is this not normal? If you just like, if you just pulled somebody who had never heard about baseball before and been like, Zach, we only got $160 million. What do you think of that? They'd be like, I don't know what's a baseball player worth. And so if you're the owners, and your plan is to save money by raising salaries, and then cut them again, later on, it's going to look a lot worse when you're cutting them

because then everybody's like, hey, weren't we getting more like four months ago? That's kind of the situation they're in. Right. Like, I mean, in a weird way, I don't know. The economics of all this is very complicated. But one of the narratives of like baseball salaries is that like 80% of baseball players are totally underpaid

because of this arbitrary system of rules that they've set up to suppress salaries for everybody except for those few people who make it to their 30s while still being pretty good. And at that point, those players cash out. And the reason they cash out, the reason owners have paid them is because, I don't know, it's like one of the stories is that it was just sort of like everybody was going along to get along. This was the system that everybody was happy with. So owners would pay a lot of money for it. Or maybe the scenario is that they can't spend it on anywhere else because they've set up this system where they can't really actually acquire the players they want to. It's all very weird and convoluted. But what you had is a situation where

these veterans were being paid like 50 times what their younger peers were being paid. And they were being paid that because that's what the market said. But the market was so artificial. It was so weird and limited and restrictive to everybody else that it wasn't really an accurate market and so you could have gone through that period of like the last 20 years and been saying well like 80 of players are underpaid and these 20 that hit free agency you still don't really know what they're worth you only know that owners are paying them that because they can't spend it anywhere else and because maybe this is like how you keep labor piece but you don't really know is like, is Jason Marquis really worth that? I don't know. You don't know.

And it all only makes sense in as much as you have a pattern of behavior. You know what other teams have been willing to pay in the past and it gives you a sense as much as possible of what the market bears for each of these players. And so if you were the owners, I mean, if you were really cynical and you were the owners, you would just not want to give an inch

because you would want to reestablish the norms as being lower. And so by reestablishing the norms as higher, you're just setting yourself up for the collusion conversation again in two years. But also, it also sounds very collusive. And it seems to me that they shouldn't be colluding. They have way too much money to collude. If they want to, I don't know, do whatever they want to do with their money, that's fine. But it feels like when you get really rich, you shouldn't take unnecessarily illegal risks. Yeah. Well, to me, right, I guess from a negotiating perspective, you'd probably, on the one hand, you make the players maybe more determined and you rally the union and you increase their unity and their willingness to strike. And so if you're the owners

and you think that a work stoppage actually costs you money maybe, then maybe that's bad. Maybe you should be the hardest liners you possibly can be because it will give you more leverage in the negotiations because players will be so desperate to get anything that they're starting from such a disadvantaged position, then they will ask for less in theory maybe. But I think that first of all in the history of baseball, I don't know that owners have ever really acted except in sort of short-sighted ways, a lot of them for the most part. Like, I don't know that they're looking years down the road. And I don't know that individual teams, unless they were colluding to spend more money, unless they were all saying, hey, let's make it look good for an offseason or two here.

I don't know that individual teams, owners, front offices would come to that conclusion themselves because they might think, well, will my signing Drew Pomeranz for four years right now, is that actually going to forestall a work stoppage or am I just going to cost myself some money while the getting's good here? I might as well just make as much money as I can might as well squeeze these players for all that they're

worth while this system is in place because who knows the CBA will change in a few years and then maybe we'll have a different system so I don't know that you could get that many owners and front office people to think that way where where they're putting the collective group of them in the future forward rather than just, hey, let's get the best deal we can get right now. I don't know that the history of baseball shows that they're actually good at acting in that way against their own short-term interests and individual interests. So I don't know that I buy that really. Yeah. My semi-optimistic take on all this is that owners want to spend, I think that owners do want to buy things. They want to spend their money. Like it's not really that much fun to be a billionaire if there's nothing good for sale. And so they have these

teams and they like to sign famous players and then have press conferences. They like that process. And something got in their ear over the last couple of years that said like, this is not smart. You're just playing the suckers or whatever. And so they all like kind of, they all said for a couple of years, oh, the cool thing to do now is to be cheap and wise and to not sign these players. And I think they found it really unsatisfying. I think it was annoying to some owners that they didn't get to have their

press conferences and that other teams won when they thought, ah, if I'd signed more players, then my team would have won. I think it's probably really annoying when you don't win the World Series and this winter before you sat around, you know, telling everybody how smart you are for not getting better players. And so my somewhat optimistic take on all this totally speculative, no evidence whatsoever, is that they just didn't they tried it and they didn't like it. And now they're going to go back to being owners. That's my that's my hope. Could be. Yeah. I mean, it's early and all of this could swing back the other way.

Who knows? But I think it could be like a lot of this is cyclical. And maybe if there were a bunch of teams, like if it were the case that a bunch of teams had just decided that we're rebuilding right now, we're not trying to win this year, we're not in the market for the top free agents, then maybe those teams that were in that bucket two off seasons ago, well, maybe now they're ready. They're ready to spend, like the White Sox, for instance. The White Sox were a rebuilding team, and now they are rebuilt to the extent that they're really trying to sign people. And yeah, I know they made an offer for Machado last year, but it wasn't really a competitive offer. Now they're making competitive offers. So that's an example of a team that maybe is just in that position right now where they want to win enough to invest in free agents. So it could be that it's just a cyclical thing and that was a down cycle. And now there are more teams that are in that sweet spot. I don't know whether that's true. I don't like, you know,

are there the Braves, for instance, are they in any greater position to spend now than they were last year? Probably not right there in about the same position they were last year. We could go team by team. I just don't know if there are more teams in that group now than there were in each of the past two off seasons, but it's at least possible because you wouldn't expect there to be the same number of aggressive buyers every single winter yeah i mean you since you said the braves the what the braves did do is they made a lot more money last year than they made the previous year because they made the playoffs and they drew fans and they're going to draw fans again because they made the playoffs the other thing is if there were a conspiracy and teams were trying to lull players into a false sense of security

when it comes to free agency, why would so many teams still be talking about fiscal responsibility and fretting about the competitive balance tax? Why would you have the Red Sox saying they need to trade Mookie Betts or lower their payroll? Why would you have all of these front offices saying that they don't have flexibility, they don't have payroll room, they're looking to get under certain targets?

We're hearing that still, I think, more than we used to. That's kind of confounding because we're hearing those things even as some signings are actually happening now. So again, there are some encouraging signs here, but some of the underlying issues and the reasons why teams would not be devoting as much money to free agency as they used to are still there. The improved player development, the concentration of production in the younger members of the league, the lack of a direct connection between off-season spending and revenue. It's all somewhat difficult to square with the behavior we've seen so far, but that behavior is also kind of encouraging.

All right, step last? Yeah, sure. This is a quick one. square with the behavior we've seen so far. But that behavior is also kind of encouraging. All right. Step last? Yeah, sure. This is a quick one. I was looking up, I don't remember why, the worst innings that any team has had. So the worst performance by inning, I should say that any team has had over the last 20 years. And so I looked at, you know, a T OPS plus, which is your OPS in the split relative to your total OPS. I was looking at this for pitchers. And so I just looked for by inning sorted by T OPS+, all innings showing up. So as you would probably not be surprised to learn, you know, like the worst inning that any team has had was extra innings. Extra innings is its own category in this split.

And extra innings, you usually have a much, much, much, much, you always have a much smaller sample across the year. It might only be a few innings. And so, you know, as I'm going down this list, it's all some team in extra innings, some team in extra innings, and I'm scrolling. And then after like 30 or 40 of these, you get to a few first innings, which isn't that surprising because we've talked about how first innings really are a difficult inning for some pitchers that it does there, that there really are pitchers that you've got to get early and that can be gotten early. That was a stat blast from about 700 episodes ago. And so you get your first

innings and then you've got your random like Toronto's third inning in 2007 and Cleveland's sixth inning in 2006. Just a couple of those. And then about number 70 on this list is the Mets ninth inning this year. So the Mets this year, their ninth inning was a OPS, T-OPS plus of 142. So relative to their overall, they were 42% worse. And so I wondered about this. So I went and I looked and over the past century, because this was only the past 20 years. So over the past century, the Mets ninth inning performance relative to the team's overall performance is the worst in the century,

in a century. So the, they were at 142. The next worst was the 1927 Detroit Tigers at 141. The Tigers, this was 1927. So of their 78 ninth innings that they had, 48 of them were pitched by starters. It was a very different time. And then you have the 1928 Boston Braves at 138, and no one else is really even close. So the Mets, very bad. Now, of course, we know that the Mets' ninth inning was quite bad because Edwin Diaz was their closer, and that was a huge story. But of course, Edwin Diaz only pitches in safe situations, which means that it wasn't just Edwin Diaz. Everybody in that team who had a chance to pitch in the ninth inning

pitched very, very badly. So yes, there is Diaz, but you also have Urias Familia was quite bad, and Robert Gesellman was quite bad, and someone named Tyler Batchelor familia was quite bad and robert gazellman was quite bad and someone named tyler bashler was uh was also quite bad someone named drew gagnon faced 19 batters and allowed five home runs in the ninth inning that was very bad paul sawald was bad jacob raim was bad steven nagosek was bad jason vargas made it there a couple times. He was bad. And Jacob deGrom, he made it to the ninth inning one time. Can you believe that? Jacob deGrom only made it. It's a different era.

We said this last year, too. I think that last year was the same thing. Maybe he didn't have a complete game and he had like a 1.70 RA. And I think we said this exact same thing. It's a different era and it still is that era. He faced three batters in the ninth inning, two of them homered. That's a 985 T-OPS+. And I was going through. I didn't get a chance to finish the search, but I was going through. And I couldn't find anybody yet with any T-OPS+, in any split this year,

at any level of plate appearances, worse than Jacob deGrom's, unless they had an infinite OPS, like a one batter and allowed a home run. Everybody else was better or worse or whatever than Jacob deGrom in the ninth inning. So it was a team-wide failure. And I feel genuine sympathy and sorrow for the mets because so much of the season no matter how you look at the mets you just keep coming back to the

ninth inning and you go oh that was a pretty good team and oh he did good and oh and that was a surprise and and wow they're run differential and oh and they could have in their third order and then you get to the ninth inning and it all falls apart which which you know that that you normally you would say well that's their that's their dumb fault for not doing anything but they went out and got the best closer in the american league i just don't see how you can do this game. So mean. Yeah, that is, that's pretty frustrating. Yeah. I mean, in a lot of ways, like the Mets had one of the most predictable seasons, like their record, they ended up with what, 86 wins.

And that's very close to what they were projected to win. And they had this roller coaster season. It was like a disaster. And then they were one of the hottest teams and then they were cold again and they ended up almost exactly where they were supposed to end up but i think it was so frustrating because it was an up and down team and because of those ninth inning failures and because that edwin diaz trade was like that was the highlight of the offseason that was like the big move where they pushed their chips in and they said we're going for it and it backfired pretty spectacularly and there were a lot of people who didn't like

that trade at the time but none of them thought edwin diaz is going to be an absolute disaster so that's pretty frustrating and if he had just been decent and everything else had been the same probably a playoff team or you you know, potentially wildcard team. If he'd slipped on a banana peel on the first day of the season. Maybe, yeah. I mean, he would have, they would have made, I mean, probably you throw, you know, generic. I mean, look what Mark Melanson did for the Braves. They just picked up anybody who was available at the trade deadline, made him the closer.

He pitched like a league average pitcher and that would have probably been enough. And then they'd spend the whole winter bemoaning how they got knocked out of the playoffs in the division series. And if only they'd had Edwin Diaz, because what they really needed was a lockdown closer. And they would have gotten to live with the satisfaction of realizing that they had been successful and that their failures were only the fault of a banana peel. Yep. All right. Seth Lugo, by the way, dominant in the ninth inning.

The one exception. Super good in the ninth. Yeah, they tried to throw him as often as they could. All right. Alex says, this question might be too hypothetical to even think about. I doubt it. Alex, if you've heard this podcast before, that's a tall order. But I hope that I can get some semblance of an answer. Imagine there's a supreme international law that makes everyone play baseball and everyone starts with equal access to the sport. In this hypothetical, how good would Mike Tra trap be relative to the whole world would he still be among the best 10 best 100 players statistically he probably wouldn't keep his number one spot i'm also assuming that mlb is the only professional league i know it is unanswerable but i hope to gain some insight into what it means to be the best in the world at a sport yeah so it feels like the answer is is gonna is that it's gonna be

unsatisfyingly high how many players would be better than mike trout yeah probably like even if even if you take out the world and you just say there's only one sport and now it's baseball in the united states yeah then i don't know that's not looking good no because it's right now it's Yeah. There's no cultural value placed on it. There's no real route to becoming a professional. There's just no history of that area of the world producing major leaguers. I mean, the world's population is coming up on 8 billion now. And what percentage of those people ever even contemplate a career in baseball? Like, I mean, the population of North America, Wikipedia is telling me, and this is lumping in a lot of other regions. I mean, this is Mexico, U.S., Canada, but also the Caribbean and other baseball hotbeds, Venezuela, Dominican Republic, Cuba, Panama, et cetera, is like 600 million people, something like that. And then maybe there's another 130-ish million people in Japan.

So you're talking like less than a billion people in the world are even from places that placed any emphasis on baseball that kids would ever grow up thinking, I want to play baseball. What is it, like an eighth of the world's population, something like that? I mean, I know that some people play baseball in other places. There are baseball programs in Europe and even China and other places, but it's so, so far down the list of even sports that a kid would consider playing, let alone professions, period. So you're talking one in every eight people in the world, maybe seven, eight people in the world even thinks about baseball. Baseball is even on their radar.

So if you just had baseball everywhere the way it is in the U.S. right now, presumably you'd have eight times as many people, right? You'd have a player pool that is vastly larger than it is now. And if you said baseball is the only sport and every athlete can only play baseball, then I mean, yeah. Right. Well, the, I mean, the proof that that last part is big is, so the Dominican Republic has 11 million people and yet produces very nearly as much baseball talent as the United States does. Yeah. Because that's the sport that they all was. So the way I think about it sometimes is that you can trust that there is not. So I think we've been asked before whether there are like Mike Trout level athletes who

just never pick up a ball, like never play at all, like never. And I mean, that's kind of what this question is, but I'm meaning more like domestically. So who just never play a sport and they just don't know that they have this magic ability. And I always think, well, no, there's not really because all the incentives are pushing you. If you are that good at baseball, all the incentives are pushing you to play, to become a great baseball player, because there is no other job that you get that's going to pay you as much. Like I was when I would do the research for the players that Mike Trout passed in the career war over this year. You'd run across stories where like Frankie Frisch was trying to like he almost quit baseball when he was 24 to become a doctor. And because it just at the time being a doctor was arguably as good and his dad would have preferred he was a doctor and it probably would have made more.

Prestigious. Right, prestigious. Money was equivalent or better, yeah. Yeah, and for longer. And so at that point, you could imagine that there'd be a lot of people who were great at baseball but decided not really worth it. But then we changed things and now you get paid $30 million if you're a great baseball player. And so you're not going to like quit baseball if you can make $30 million. You're going to do it.

All the incentives are pushing you to that, except that we also have football and we also have basketball and we also have other sports that you can make similar amounts of money in. And so all of those various athletes, you know, go get bled off to other sports and the Dominican Republic, they don't. And so like, that's what, that's what the incentive is. It's to get as good at baseball.

It's not to get good at football. It's not to get good at basketball. It's to get good at baseball. And they, by having that, you know, incentive structure, they produce like a third of the league. And so you have to imagine that if the United States, with a population of 35 times Dominican Republic, and if you took out all the other sports, then we would have hundreds of more players that could play in the majors, thousands, maybe more players that could play in the majors, better than any number of players that are currently in the majors, right? Yeah, I think so. And even, I mean, under this current system, like if you're in the US and you go to school, like you're exposed to some sort of sport or athletic activity. So there probably

aren't a lot of people in the US who just have no idea that they're athletic because they never picked up a ball or something. You probably have a pretty good idea. I think there are still plenty of people who just don't pursue that. They might be athletic. They might even be extremely gifted athletically, but their inclinations don't lie that way or they do have some sort of parental pressure or whatever the family business, they have to take over whatever the family business is. And so it's just not really something that they consider. Granted, like if you're a freakishly great athlete, then A, you probably enjoy that because

you're really good at it. And maybe it's a path to status and popularity. And so I think probably most people who are very gifted athletically at least make some effort to to be athletes but not necessarily as a career i think there are probably a lot of people who have the potential to be professional athletes but decide they don't want to be because they like something else better i don't i don't no i don't think so i don't think so i don't think if i don't think if you're talking about players who could realistically become you know 10 10 figure salaries 10 figures 7 8 8 figure salaries i don't think there are many of them now i think there are late bloomers i think you got your you might have your your you know your cory kluber's who their inflection points along the way where they could very easily have

uh have have have quit and yeah never they can't afford to join the travel ball team or whatever, and they just can't keep up with the more advantaged kids. Right, and there's the developmental benefits. I don't think there's quitting quite so much as the developmental benefits that various privileges afford. So yeah, there's that too. But I want to ask an aside. If there was no football and no basketball, the average height in the majors right now is six foot two. If there was no basketball and no football, what do you think the average height of a major leaguer would be right now?

but not enormously taller, like maybe 6'4 or something. I think there's probably a point at which it becomes counterproductive, I think. I mean, I don't know. That's what they always say at least about pitchers, let's say, and pitchers are tall as a group. But when you get really tall pitchers, because you could say that, well, pitchers should be as tall as possible, right? Because the taller they are, the closer they release the pitch to home plate and maybe the more force they can generate. And yet you don't see basketball-sized pitchers for the most part. And maybe that's a cultural thing.

Maybe it's financial incentives. It's hard to be a baseball player. You have to pay your dues and ride the bus in the minors and all of that. And most players don't make it. But well, they go to they go play basketball, though, right? If you're an athletic six foot nine person, you play basketball. Yeah, but you'd think that some six foot nine people would.

And granted, there have been some pitchers who are six foot nine, but not a lot. I don't know. I mean, they always say that, like Randy Johnson was a late bloomer because he had to get his mechanics under control and he was so tall that it was hard and all those moving parts and everything and i don't know whether that's true or not but you know i mean

i guess the the farther your appendages are away from your brain the longer it takes to send those signals but obviously very tall people are very coordinated and able to excel in basketball. So I don't know that it would preclude being a pitcher. So I feel like I'm a little more extreme on every part of this topic. You think all the baseball players would be giants? I do. I think that there'd be a lot more. I think, in fact, the game itself might even be more tailored to tall people in some ways.

I don't know how how it would be but it wouldn't surprise me if various tweaks in the game or in the coaching methods or or whatever actually became more beneficial to tall people if there were more tall people we haven't even gotten into the seven eights into trying to figure out a mathematical adjustment for the now seven eighths of the world that is baseball obsessed but do you feel like you want to give an answer yet boy i mean we'll just look at how much better the talent level in baseball has gotten even though and granted like the player pool has expanded international markets have gotten into baseball more than they used to be and they've been allowed

into baseball and of course baseball used to just be a white people only activity at the highest level. And now it's not. And now there are many more people and just the population has grown in general. And so baseball has gotten better. The caliber of play has gotten a lot better and pitchers throw harder and people hit the ball harder and everyone runs faster. So that's just kind of doing away with the segregation that used to exist and just the natural growth of the population. So if you were to suddenly fling the doors open to the entire population of the world and also get rid of all of their other options, I mean, look, I think Mike Trout would still be a major leaguer i think he is so much better

than all the current major leaguers that i have a hard time imagining that the caliber of play would would grow so much that mike trout would now not even be able to crack a roster but i don't think he would be the best player anymore he certainly wouldn't be historically great anymore one more thing about the height thing, because baseball, another thing people say about baseball is, oh, well, it's so great because it's the one sport, at least compared to basketball and football, let's say, where you can be a small person. You don't have to be big, and you can be Jose Altuve.

And, of course, that's true to a certain extent, but also kind of not true because baseball players are pretty huge compared to the typical person. Maybe not to the typical basketball or football player, but to the average person in the population, they're enormous and they've gotten a lot bigger over time. And it's also, if you were to try to do like a correlation between height and performance or something in major league baseball you might find some correlation but it would be probably weaker than you think but that's just because the the short people who make it the small people who make it they compensate in some way so jose

altuve is just you know otherworldly great in other ways and also banging on a trash can. I don't know, but whatever. He's an outlier. He's really great. And so he is able to be great, but that doesn't mean that you take a lot of other 5'5 players and they'll all be good. It's just that he's the one who made it. So the short players, the small players who are in Major League Baseball, it's like looking at soft tossing pitchers or something

well the fact that they're even there is probably because they have great command and control or deception or whatever it is they've already compensated in some way that makes them different from all the other 88 mile per hour throwers out there who never make it yeah and also they've uh the they've come out of a much larger pool of people their same height. And so the three players that are 5'7 are being pulled out of a pool of like a billion humans. And the 800 players that are 6'3 or 6'4 are coming out of a pool of, I don't know, 100 million people. All right. I think that the answer is that Mike Trout would be the 19th best player in the world right now. Okay.

I feel like that might be a little low. I would not be surprised if you told me that he was like number four or something like that. But, you know, I'm just, I'm thinking about like U.S. soccer too, where like there's nothing like, there's nothing special about Americans. It's just like we have a combination of resources and interests. And where we put those resources and interests, we do well. And where we don't, it's like watching downhill skiing in the Olympics and there's no Americans. It's not because we're losers. It's just because that's not where we put resources and interest. Like you were saying about the Dominican Republic and its tiny population producing so many major leaguers, it's the same thing with Olympic sports.

And you have small countries population-wise that always excel in certain sports because they emphasize it. And they have whole programs set up to scout potential players and develop them from a young age, which is another thing, by the way, like the caliber of play would be so much higher, not just because you'd get all the best potential athletes, but they'd all be, instead of focusing on other sports and playing baseball during certain seasons, they'd all be playing baseball from five years old, and they'd be incredible. 750 roster spots or you know now we're going up to 26 roster spots per team but if you had a worldwide sport and it's the only sport then you would not have only 30 teams and so you could imagine that the league would expand in size so much that the the talent level would well the talent level would still i guess would be diluted by the expansion, but also that wouldn't necessarily affect how good Mike Trout would be relative to the very best players. Mm-hmm. Yeah. All right.

So you said he'd be the 19th best player. Hmm. And just to be clear, I mean, that would actually be an upgrade because he would be the 19th greatest athlete in the world since this is the only sport. And as it is now, it will never know where he ranks among all athletes well just have no there's no way of knowing you can't compare but what we do know is that he is not the 19th most famous nor is he the night nor is he the 19th richest um although baseball salaries are higher than other sports but the marketing just isn't there. And so if he were interested in relative prestige to other athletes, this would actually be a much better scenario for

him, I think. Yeah. I mean, I'm going to say he's still a major leaguer. He's still an above average major leaguer, but I don't think he's even that good. I mean, just think of like every football player. I'm going to take that to mean not that. I know that you meant he's even that good. I mean, just think of like every football player. I'm going to take that to mean not that I know that you meant he's not that good. He's not 19th, but I'm going to I'm hearing that is he's not even that good. No, he's still pretty good. But just think of like everyone in the NFL, everyone in the NBA, just all these people who just seem more skilled in a lot of ways in ways that don't

necessarily i guess help always in baseball like again in baseball you don't necessarily have to i mean you don't have to block people like the amount of physical force you can inflict on someone else that doesn't necessarily matter and like foot speeds still matters very much but you don't it's not as reliant on running really as football is for instance so there are certain skill sets that maybe mike trout is just so great at the things that he does and even if you took you know your average running back or someone who can run faster than Mike Trout and lift more than Mike Trout and you you take the entire rest of the population of the world and everyone who's playing soccer and a million other sports i don't know that he cracks the top like 100 i don't know that he does because i don't know that he does either i i i went with

19 but i don't know for sure i mean football players are outrageous. Yeah. Like, their bodies are nuts. Right. And there's not a single baseball player who looks like a lot of football players just, like, physically. Yeah. Yeah. It's incredible. It is really incredible. Wow. need to look like i don't know that you need to be in that kind of shape or that it would be as beneficial to be in that kind of shape as a baseball player than it is as a football player where you have to run far more you need that sprint speed far more you need to bash other people's bodies and withstand being bashed by other people's bodies like i don't know that you need to be an absolute monster in baseball but maybe I'm just saying that because to this point, baseball players haven't looked like that.

But if you put every person in the world into the baseball pool and said it's the only thing that they could do, then maybe they all would look like that and it would be helpful even so. You know, it's too bad because I feel like if you took our modern era of recording everything and having pretty good data about everything and having rankings and lists and, you know, basketball in the winter and baseball in the summer or in the spring. And then I feel like you could use those two things, put them together and actually design a study to figure it out, to figure out somehow how much overlap there is between, you know, like great football play. Like if you took all the great football players, are they, were they actually all also the great baseball players and they had to choose? Or is there actually a lot of distinction in what skills each of these elite athletes have? that they choose these sports, but that actually the difference

between being the best in the world and being like the 10,000th is fairly small in an athletic sense, but actually fairly clear in a performance sense. And that these players actually get sorted in a rational way. And so in fact, while Mike Trout would also be a great football player, you know, relative to the population at large they could they actually can't do that

you know one important thing which is recognizing a pitch or repeating a delivery those two skill sets that define everything in baseball yeah and i know people probably bring up like every now and then you'll see like a basketball player will swing a bat or throw a ball or something and it'll just look so awkward. They look like they've never done it before because they probably never have done it before. And that's not what we're talking about. In this world, they would all be doing it from an early age. So it's not like you take the current world and you just say, okay, everyone stop playing the sport you're playing. I'll switch over to baseball. It would just be deeply ingrained.

It would be the culture of everywhere the way it is in the U.S., but even more so. And people might bring up like Bo Jackson, too. Like Bo Jackson is just athletically speaking such an outlier in baseball. And I guess he was in football, too. Like even in football, he was a great athlete. in football too. Even in football, he was a great athlete, but you'd get a lot more players built like Bo Jackson in baseball in this world than you do now, where it's basically just Bo Jackson and he's kind of on his own. And the fact that Bo Jackson was as good as he was is impressive because of his lack of experience and how he was splitting time between sports. And he wasn't a great baseball player, but he was a very good one for a while there. So I think you'd get a lot of players

like that. And because they would be just training in baseball from an early age, like I was just saying, well, maybe it's not that advantageous in baseball to be incredibly fit and muscular, but it probably is, right? Like, if you compare today's baseball players to the baseball players of 50 years ago who didn't lift weights and smoked and didn't care about nutrition and everything, I mean, these baseball players look like a different species almost compared to those baseball players when you look at old games, they're just so much smaller and lighter and thinner and much more so even than I think the population as a whole, the baseball playing population, has grown and gotten stronger. And it would just explode if this were to happen. So Mike Trout is very impressive in how big he is and how fast he moves at his size for a baseball player.

But just I don't know that he would stand out in a crowd if you had all the potential athletes in the world in baseball uniforms. Yeah, such a good eye though. Yeah, great eye. He's got a great eye. I feel like that's such a huge part of his game. It is. Yes, it is. He sees pitches.

He sees them slow. He's getting better and better at that. But, well, that's in large part because he has seen so many pitches, and everyone would see a lot of pitches in this reality. But many baseball players have seen many pitches, and he is better at recognizing it than almost all of them. Mm-hmm. All right. All right. so we got through

two questions but they were good ones all right we had so much free agency talk to get to today that we didn't even get to the dylan bundy and jerks and profar trades although those two guys definitely among the league leaders in being younger than you think they must be by now dylan bundy just turned 27 jerksson Profar still hasn't turned 27. He's 26. Seems like they must both be in their 30s by now, right? But I think that's probably because they've been in our lives for a long time now. They both came up in 2012, which was the age 19 season for both of them.

And obviously things have not gone quite as planned since then. Bundy, of course, didn't get back to the big leagues until 2016. And he's been up and down since then. Profarm is 2014 and 2015, and he's been up and down. Kind of parallel careers in some ways, but definitely similar in that I still sort of do a double take when I see how old they are, which gives you some hope that maybe in Anaheim and San Diego, respectively, they might blossom or blossom again. You can support this podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners have already signed up, pledged some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going

and get themselves access to some perks. Suji Park, Jonah Bernhardt, Zachary Morgenstern, Kathy Harden, and Philip D. Cowan. 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. Please keep your questions and comments

for me and Sam and Meg coming via email at podcast.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 Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. And we will be back with another episode a little later this week. Talk to you then.

When the voices came quietly I shut them down When a tricky young southerly wind Came at me with its high whistling sound I turned around to face it With real arrogance burning inside And I drank in the whole wide world