Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1512: Let’s Predict This Decade

Episode Date: March 11, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about Padres outfield un-fun facts, then discuss MLB’s $1 million “The Vault” competition to predict several statistical leaders of the 2020s, producing their picks in each category, reviewing how hard it would have been to pick the winners of the 2010s, and ruminating on the nature of baseball predictions […]

This friend, so near, we stopped existing I feel fine, baby I couldn't cry What a time, to be there with your life I saw you in a crystal ball, you're upside down When the irony is round, you need it better than you find When the irony is round Good morning and welcome to episode 1512 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. Hello. I was just looking at the RBI totals of the 2014 Padres. As one does. Particularly the outfield. I mean, we don't talk much about RBIs, but we still do know the basics of like, what is a good number of RBIs for a season?

We don't talk much about the 2014 Padres. 2014 Padres either. And so these are the four Padres who had the most played appearances as outfielders for the team that year. Will Venable played 146 games and he drove in 33 runs. That's very low, right? 33 runs for a right fielder who played 146 games. Was he a defensive replacement at times? Is that why he had so many games or no? Was he actually starting all the time? I mean, okay, a little bit. It's less fun to point out that he only had 448 plate appearances, but he did have 448 plate appearances but he did have 448 plate appearances and he still only drove in

33 runs he had a 224 288 325 slash line so he was he was quite poor as a right fielder and then cameron maybin played half a season he drove in 15 and then you have chris denorfia he played half a season he drove in 16 and then the fourth player in fourth player who played outfield for them the most was Seth Smith. And Seth Smith was very good. He had a 134 OPS plus. And he played, he actually qualified for the batting title. He had 521 plate appearances with a 134 OPS plus. Like if you did that for your whole career, you'd be a Hall of Famer.

And he drove in 48. and he drove in 48 and so i bring this up just because the san diego padres in 2014 got a combined 141 rbis from all of their outfielders everybody who was playing in the outfield and that is the lowest in a full season in the dh era but here is the fun fact that is lower than any team's outfield in the strike-shortened 1994 season. That season ended on August 8th, and every single team beat the 2014 Padres outfield for runs batted in. I guess I should say that every team that year outscored the Padres also. They scored 535 runs as a team.

Oh, my goodness. So no wonder no one was driving in runs because no one was scoring any. So I guess that was a combination of not a great offensive team plus Pete Petko at that point. So that was probably, I don't know if that was a historically low run total. It sounds like it. It's very low. Yeah.

That's like, that's like, that's Mariners bad. The RBI leader for the team had, I don't know why the Mariners, I'm referring specifically to the 2000, I think 13 Mariners. I don't know why that's a reference anybody would immediately get the 2013 Mariners being the worst offense I can think of. But the team leader for RBIs that year for the Padres had 51. And yeah, and he had a 78 OPS plus. That's not great.

Yeah, the 2014 Padres are the third lowest scoring team of the wildcard era behind. The 2013 Marlins, actually the lowest scoring team. And then the 2010 Mariners. Oh, 2010, okay. And then the 2011 Mariners after the Padres. And I'm sure you wouldn't have to look too far down the list to find more Mariners teams there. But yeah, as you say, all fun facts lie. And I guess this is a case of this one lying because if a whole team doesn't score runs, then it's not quite as impressive if

individual players don't drive in runs, but it's still odd. What led you to be looking at the RBI totals of the 2014 Padres today? I truly do not know. Yeah, that just happens sometimes. Yeah, I don't know. It's a great question. Yeah. All right. So we're going to talk about how to win a million dollars. Yeah. On this episode. So MLB.com has something called the $1 million Vault Challenge. I have not, I've been looking at this for a few days and I've not yet figured out why it's called the Vault Challenge. I don't understand the name of it. But it is a fun project in which you can pick who in Major League Baseball is going to lead the majors in home runs over the next decade, in hits over the next decades, and seven other categories. And whoever is the closest after 10 years will win a million dollars

if they are, well, you have to have a certain minimum, basically. The minimum, we'll get to that. But this is a fantastic, fun thing to think about for, you know, partly because it gives us a chance to look at who won, you know won the last decade, who would have won the last decade if you had done this, and then to try to imagine picking all those people. And I mean, baseball is obviously extremely unpredictable. And so if you look back at the last decade, you go, oh, wow, there's a lot there that's unpredictable, and I never would have predicted it. But I think we then sometimes forget to apply that to our own predictions. And we do still think that certain things are obvious and self-evident. And so when you ask me to pick the next decade, I think, oh, well, that's easy.

Like, I could definitely do this. Like, it's not hard to say that Mike Trout is going to be good over the next decade. But then you just go back and look at the last decade and you realize how many things were self-evident then that did not come remotely true and how many things were totally out of left field that did end up coming true so we're gonna what are we gonna we're gonna each pick we're gonna each reveal our ballot our pick i mean the first the first spoiling our chances of winning a million dollars by letting everyone know what we're picking are you actually we're throwing people off the scent are you actually going to i have not actually entered and i probably will not i was tempted to just because it'd give me something to follow for

the next decade and kind of root for but a all of my picks and things when i am forced to make predictions tend to be just so chalky that it's not like I'm going to go way off the board, probably, and be the only person who picks the guy who ends up having the most hits or whatever. So I'm not going to win anything anyway. I am curious about how many people will win, period, in addition to just who will win these categories. But I don't know how many people will enter. just who will win these categories. But I don't know how many people will enter. When you think about it, as you said, it sounds sort of easy to do in that it's easy to make the predictions. Like it's easy to probably pick the most likely candidate, I think. But you also have to be aware that the most likely candidate is still an underdog compared to the field. And so even if

you make the smart pick, the right pick, the highest probability pick, you'll probably still be wrong about most of this stuff. Yeah. Yeah, it's true. I've just, if I'm reading the actuarial tables correctly, I have a 3% chance of dying before this is even revealed. And so I do have to think like, do I want to commit to giving my email address to another, you know, to another, another source and remembering a password and, and all those things for something that there's a decent chance that I also believe that I was using an email address in 2010, that I no longer have access to that I no longer know the password for and that the retrieval password goes to a previous email address that I also no longer have access to.

And so there's a real possibility that you would win. I mean, it's small, but a real possibility that you would win and then not even be able to claim this prize. So that would be very frustrating. So I looked back at the last decade and tried to imagine how likely it would be that you would pick these things. So I don't know if you also did something similar to this. Well, MLB did do the work for us and tell us who would have won. Right. They tell who would have won. I tried to put myself in the mind space of a baseball podcaster on the eve of the 2010 season who was doing this. And so. I did try to do this because a Patreon listener of ours, James wrote in to call our attention to this and ask us to do our picks. And he had a couple highlights in there of how weird it would have been to pick the winners in this the ones that look normal now would have been less likely.

I think then like for instance, Clayton Kershaw, you know, would actually Clayton Kershaw, Clayton Kershaw would have won for most Cy Young awards and most all-star selections. And you could easily go, oh yeah,

well he was 22. He was coming off of a, of a Sterling first full season and he had been an elite prospect. Those are very natural picks for those awards. And yet Tommy Hanson was essentially the same as Clayton Kershaw at that point. Tommy Hanson was also an elite prospect. In fact, at his peak was ranked fourth, whereas Kershaw at his prospect peak ranked fifth. I believe they were the same age and Tommy Hanson had just come off a sterling rookie season. And if you look at the Pocota fourth, whereas Kershaw at his prospect peak ranked fifth. I believe they were the same age. And Tommy Hanson had just come off a sterling rookie season. And if you look at the Pocota

projections for the 2010 season, in fact, Tommy Hanson projected to be slightly better than Clayton Kershaw that year. And so it's not like Kershaw was the only smart option. Tommy Hanson also would have seemed like a smart option. And of course, Tommy Hanson, well, now Tommy Hanson tragically passed away a few years ago. But but you know, his career also had been cut very, very short by shoulder injuries before that. And so it's, you know, like, this is hard. This is hard to predict. So Alright, so I have we have the the winners from the previous decade. And so I'm just going to go down those and talk about, first of all, where that person was at the time before 2010. And secondly, who you would have picked if you had been in this headspace exactly 10 years ago. So one of the categories is most home runs. The winner was Nelson Cruz. So Nelson Cruz before 2010 had just played his first full

season. He was 28 years old. Actually, he was going to be 29 years old and he had just played his first full season he was 28 years old actually he was going to be 29 years old and he had just played his first full season he wasn't that good he had a 117 ops plus as a right fielder and so you would have thought oh okay he's a he you know like he's a fine player he's going to have a six-year career three or four of them are going to be pretty good yes never in a million years would have picked very safely say i would not have picked nelson cruz to win that category you actually almost certainly would have picked prince fielder so prince fielder at the time was young he was very young i think he was like 24 he had the second most home runs in baseball over the previous three seasons and he was projected to lead the majors in home runs that year in 2010. So you have the youngest credible home run leader of the group and also projected to

already be the best home run hitter of all the available players. You would have picked Prince Fielder. Yeah. And as it turns out, Prince Fielder finished 62nd in home runs and he would have gotten you zero points for this award. I wonder actually how late into the decade I would have continued not to pick Nelson Cruz because probably like half the decade, right? Because in the last couple of years, he had a sizable lead. I suppose that I would have said, yeah,

okay, he has it now. But even when he signed with Seattle, everyone thought, oh, bad contract, right? He's 34, he's a DH, he's going to age poorly And they'll regret this deal And instead, he did not decline at all And of course, in 2019 for the Twins He somehow had a career year, which is incredible But yes, I mean, when he signed with Seattle Everyone discounted him, then he was great with Seattle And each year, it just became harder and harder to believe that he would not decline at all,

which he is not to this point. And so I guess I'd have to look at the running totals of the decade to know exactly when he crossed the line. After 2017, so eight years into the decade, he was still trailing Jose Bautista and the same age as Jose Bautista. He was trailing Edwin Encarnacion and two years older than Edwin Encarnacion. And he was one home run and nine years of age ahead of Giancarlo Stanton. So at that point, if you had to pick this in 2017, there is no doubt at all. After 2017, you would have picked Stanton. He was so obviously the right answer.

He was coming off of a 59 home run season. After 2018, Cruz was tied with Stanton. So going into last year, you would not have picked Nelson Cruz, I don't believe. No, I don't think so. By the way, Edwin Encarnacion finishes second. Let's see where Edwin Encarnacion was going into the 2010 season he was he had just been picked up on waivers by the blue jays and had had a 91 ops plus as a 26 year old in 2009 can't predict baseball he had been actually well was he actually, no, he was sorry.

He had been traded to the Blue Jays. It was a year later that he was picked up by the Blue Jays on waivers. Okay. So in 2010, somehow he ended up on the A's. No, the A's picked him up off waivers from the Blue Jays after 2010, and then they released him 20 days later, he signed with the blue jays so that was a year into anyway you would have picked prince fielder it would have been wrong you uh stanton by the way at that point was a good prospect he was like a prospect in the 20s or 30s

but i don't think you would have tabbed him at that point so there you go all right so that's cruise you're saying we wouldn't have picked Cruz until a year ago, basically, to win this? That's correct. Okay. That's right. Yeah. All right.

So hits, you probably, well, the winner was Robinson Cano. And Cano would have been a very credible pick. Yeah, that's a pretty predictable one. He was about to play his age 27 season, so he was not old. He had just had a 204 hit season and he projected to be tied for the second most hits in baseball in 2010, right behind each row. And so you very likely might have picked Cano, but I think you would have actually picked Dustin Pedroia, who was a little younger, who was projected to have the same number

of hits in 2010, and who I just think you would have picked over Cano. I think it would have been razor thin and you could have picked either one. So maybe you would have gotten that one right, but I think probably you would have picked Pedroia, and Pedroia finished 46th in the decade and would get you no points. And the numbers two, three, and four in the decade were Nick Markakis, Adam Jones, and Starlin Castro. So they all would have gotten you points. So a so that's a pretty predictable one we can call that one gettable okay so we have one gettable one mvp awards you would have picked let's see you would have picked either albert pujols or ryan braun albert pujols would have been the pick for he

is currently the best player in baseball he was winning all the awards at that point. No sign whatsoever of decline going into 2010. And in 2010, he finished. Yeah, actually, he had won the previous two. He finished second in 2010. You would have picked him, perhaps, quite possibly, thinking that you'd get a couple in the early 30s. He was 30 by that point. He was 30 and zero sign of decline.

You might have thought, okay, I can squeeze two or so out of his early half of his decade. Maybe I get lucky and get three. Because he had already won three and he'd finished second three times. He was Mike Trout, but a little older than Mike. What, two years older than Mike Trout is now? Yes. And arguably not as age-proof a skill set i guess you could say but arguably not but also first baseman doesn't have to do much you know he's not

he's not as likely to lose a step you know if his bat holds he's not asked to run around like he's not going to get knocked down a position on the defensive spectrum like mike trout might be and so on but uh all right pool holes lost a few steps he did he did at one point he lost about 30 steps yeah he got a few of them back yeah that was a i did a series that was a running thing for you yeah it was literally a running thing for me albert pool holes running to first base i'm sort of surprised in retrospect that you did that that you didn't feel it was uh cruel or just made you feel bad or something but i enjoyed it at the time yeah he was obviously hurt and so i think that's why it didn't feel quite cruel he was running in a lot of pain and it was a tracking i was i went through a period where i was really into visible pain

like i i wrote a bunch of pieces about pain manifesting on TV screens. So I was into the idea of watching players, you know, being in agony. And he was. Ryan Braun would have probably been the young player option here. He had played three years in the majors, finished in MVP voting three times, three years in a row, and projected extremely well that year. So you might have picked him, although you might have also picked Grady Sizemore. You might have picked David Wright was there at the time and still quite good. Joe Maurer was there and still quite good. Hanley Ramirez was there and still quite good. You might have really been ahead of

things and picked Bryce Harperper who was a year away from the draft i believe but i'm thinking ryan braun or albert bulls neither of them would have gotten you points ryan braun did win one and finished second once and like i said albert bulls finished second the actual answer was mike trout who at the time was the number 53 prospect in baseball so you never would have picked him out of that group. He was what, 17? He had just turned 18. And in his entire career,

he had played five games in front of people. Like he had a high school career and he had a complex league stint that summer, the previous summer in the Arizona League. And then he had five games in A-ball for Cedar Rapids. So basically he had played five games in front of a crowd and had 207 minor league plate appearances. And he was not yet, I think two or three months, maybe even less than that into the 2010 season. It was clear that he was maybe one of the two or three best

prospects in baseball, but it was not quite yet. So you would not have picked Mike Trout, who of course won this category. Most all-star games, I think there you probably also would have picked Albert Pujols, just knowing that he's very famous. He's going to start a whole bunch in a row before his decline even starts. And that would have been the wrong pick. The actuals, Trout, who we just talked about, Clayton Kershaw, and Yadier Molina, who had just made his first all-star game in 2009. And he had gotten MVP votes for the first time. So he was established as a very good player. That was his first year as an average hitter, though I don't think you saw, probably would

have seen him aging as well as he did or growing into a well above average hitter. But you know, he was there. Conceivable. World Series titles. You would have picked the Yankees. They did not win. They had just won the World Series. And of course, they were the Yankees. So you would have had to pick the Yankees. They did not win any in the previous decade. The correct answer was the Giants, of course. And to put the Giants in perspective, they in the next five years when they won three World Series, they only finished seventh in the majors in total wins. So even over the stretch where they won this, this category, they were not one of the six best teams in baseball. So it would have been quite a pick if you had picked them somehow. Total team wins, you would have picked the Yankees and

you would have gotten that one right. So you are now up to probably, if we give you Cano, you're up to 20 points and you need to have a minimum of 36 to win. You have to beat everybody in the world, but you have to clear a minimum of 36 points win. You have to beat everybody in the world, but you have to clear a minimum of 36 points. You get 10 points for getting the right answers. I should have said this. 10 points for the right answer, seven points if your pick finishes second, four if your pick finishes third, and one if your pick finishes first. So you have to beat everybody else who has entered the vault as well as meet a minimum of 36 points. You so far have, if we give you Cano, you have 20. Your picks otherwise would have gotten you 0, 0, 0, 0. And that takes

us to the pitchers, three pitching stats, Cy Young's, Wynn's, and Kay's. And I don't know, I don't know how you even would distinguish between, you could pick one pitcher for all three, probably would make a lot of sense, or you could pick one pitcher for all three probably would make a lot of sense or you could pick three pitchers for those three i think that either way tim lincecum is definitely getting at least one of these for you lincecum had just won back-to-back cy young's he was only 26 he projected way better than any other pitcher on pakoda for 2010 like he was like a winner concerns about his durability and long-term health just because of his size and the wind up and all of that so maybe you maybe given some credence to that maybe you could have but yeah i think you would have

picked tim winscombe for at least one don't you think yeah not only had he just won back-to-back young awards in his first two seasons, he had led the league in strikeouts both years. How do you not pick that? Yep. And he was still young. Youngish, but not like injury Nexus Young. So you pick Lincecum for one.

I think you probably pick Strasburg for one. Strasburg was in the minors at that point. It had been drafted the previous season. So you might pick Strasburg for one. And then, you know, you might end up with a vote for Kershaw. You might end up with a vote for Tommy Hansen. You might end up, I think you probably end up with a vote for Felix, who, of course, was, had been, you know, the most hyped prospect for years.

And then he had really put it all together as a big leader in 2009. He finished second in Cy Young voting. We all thought he has arrived. And I think probably would have been probably the consensus pick for the 2010 Cy Young, you know, the next year. And he actually won it. And so you probably would have picked Felix. So my guess, I'm going to give you Strasburg for Cy Young.

I'm going to give you Felix for for wins and i'm going to give you lincecum for k's and doesn't matter because you get no points um for any of them uh the actual answer like i said was uh kershaw tied for cy young and the other three were all won by max scherzer and scherzer was a credible i i mean sort of like he would have been a name you would have gone past and thought about briefly. But at that point, he had just finished his first full season. He wasn't quite the prospect that Kershaw and Hanson had been. He had 15th best pitcher in baseball in 2010 whereas the others were all projected to be a little better than him right away he was a little older and i think you would have been you know right that he was not a he was not on the cusp of greatness at that point he did not get a single cy young mention until the fourth year of the decade so it took a long time before he scherzer won all these categories uh late in the decade in the second

half of the decade much more than in the first half of the decade so I don't think you would have named Scherzer and so that's where we are you you basically had no not only are you not going to beat a million other people who are going to be in this but even the cheapo minimum that they set of like well we have to have somebody who gets something right somewhere along the line. You wouldn't even have that. You wouldn't even get 36 points, I don't think. If you'd looked at the prospects and said, I'm going prospects, besides Strasburg, the

top prospects at the time, Jason Hayward, Pedro Alvarez, Desmond Jennings, Chris Carter. So those were all top 10 prospects. I guess Carter was number 11 that year. So those were all top 10 prospects. I guess Carter was number 11 that year. So those were the top 10 hitting prospects. So even the sure thing hitters were not going to get you there. It's tough to pick prospects for this. You might be right, picking a prospect that might turn out to be the right answer. It would have been in Trout's case, but of course, as you said, Trout would not have been the prospect that you would have picked at that point. And when you're picking a prospect, you're usually spotting them a season or two or you're spotting their competitors a season or two because unless they're ready to make their major league debut, then they're not going to get started for a while. And they're going to start out from behind and have to come back.

have to come back. And there's just so much uncertainty surrounding most prospects that it's a little more likely that it's probably going to be a big leaguer, someone who has already made it to the majors and passed that gauntlet. So I may pick a prospect in this one. We shall see. But it would not typically be the pick. But in other words, all of what you just said, to sum it up, we're going to be wrong about most of what we're about to say but that said i didn't find as i was going through these picks that i was wrestling with that many options because again like there will be a nelson cruz and there will be a trout and there will be people that we never saw coming but we can't see them coming so we're not going to pick them.

Yeah, exactly. There's nothing to wrestle with. We know the answers right now. We're like very confident that we know what's going to happen over the next 10 years. We are constantly surprised that baseball is as unpredictable as it is. And we say all the time how unpredictable it is. But then when you ask us, well, what's going to happen? Like there's so many things that we think that we can take for granted, that we just believe that we know them to be true. And it's not just that there's a lot of things that are hard to predict in baseball. It's that the things that are easy to predict are generally hard to predict. You know? You know what I mean?

Like it lulls you into a sense of believing that you know something yes and to be clear i don't think i'm going to be right about anything but i i think i'm right about the picks that i'm going to make well i just still think i'm going to be wrong i don't think i yeah i agree i don't think i'm going to be right about anything, but I also, I don't think that, I mean, I still look at the answer and I think, well, that's the right answer. Yes. You know, like I don't, there's something in my brain that is not like, there's no flashing red light there that says the obvious answer is wrong.

And I don't know what you do. I mean, if you think that the obvious answer is probably going to be wrong then like you say it's not like okay well then I'm just going to go pick the one unobvious answer out of you know hundreds of unobvious possibilities like Nelson Cruz there were other Nelson Cruzes there were very well kind of there were various Nelson Cruzes floating around though there are always 28 year 28-year-olds in AAA or 28-year-olds having kind of good breakout seasons. And you have to pick the right one out of all of them. But that said, I'm going to get all these right. Okay.

I guess it's called the vault because the money is in the vault, right? Do you think? They're keeping the million dollars in the vault. Well, the graphic design for this has the Major League Baseball logo, and then it says the vault. And the A has a vault door, you know, a twisty knob on it. And then it has the categories below it, and each of those is a vault. So they're suggesting that the stats are in a vault. Yes.

This is like, are they saying, like, maybe they're keeping our ballots in a vault? That could be. By the way. This is a million dollars for everyone? Everyone who. Well, it's just the top scoring person. And if there's a tie, I assume they would split it, right? I've been reading the rules, and I don't know what the tiebreaker is but

there are there are various tiebreakers okay uh but only one person get there's only one grand prize winner and the grand prize winner gets a million dollars all right i wonder if this is a million dollars in present day dollars probably not so in the event of a tie for the grand prize the first tiebreaker is points scored for challenge number one. And then the second is points scored for challenge number two and so on. So if you're going to go get one right, you want to get the first one right. Okay. So they actually have every decade's past winners on this page, which I didn't even

notice. I just looked at the most recent decade. I would like to point out one thing about this. So they have every decade's past winners. And some of these, you can break these into three categories. There's the ones that are individual stats. There's the ones that are individual achievements like MVP awards, Cy Young awards, and all-star selections. And then there's the team ones. And so if you just look at the individual stats, you know, home runs and wins and all that. Virtually every player on this page is a Hall of Famer, almost every single one. Now, there's a couple of exceptions here.

One exception is Mark Grace was the hits leader in the 90s. Mark McGuire was the homers leader in the 90s. But I think there's a, I think if Mark McGuire had never been tainted by the steroids, I think he probably would have made it, although he's not a slam dunk. But virtually every other one is in here. And of course, we know that with like the Jack Morris, so much of his case was that he led the majors in wins in the 1980s, and it's mentioned that it came up in his arbitration hearing in 1987, or maybe it was his free agency in 1987. He was already talking about how he had been the winningest pitcher of the decade in 1987, through 1987. So this is like a constant thing. And yet, I just want to point out that Andy Pettit is the wins leader for the 2000s. So that should be talked about more if people want him in the Hall of Fame. Okay.

It got Jack Morris in. I don't know why we're not talking about Andy Pettit having more wins than anybody else in the 1990s. Did we do a whole episode on why Andy Pettit should be a Hall of Famer and you didn't mention that? I didn't even know it. That's probably your best case. Didn't even know it was a thing. Exactly. Okay.

All right. Word to the Realm is amazing, by the way. It is. Anyone who's uh hearing this and has not read it i reread it a year ago and talked to the author and wrote about it and it's just so good you know now's now's not now's not time to bring it up but i'm gonna bring it up next off season with cba talk will be going crazy and so on so next off season we should do a book club on this show of that book with Andy McCullough, who has named it the best baseball book of all time, and maybe others. Yeah, okay. I revisited it last year because of all of the free agency stuff and the labor tensions and all of that, but that will continue to be relevant. So, yeah.

All right. All right. So, should we do this? Let's do it. Okay, so home runs. Who's your pick for home runs? Ronald Acuna. Ronald Acuna.

Okay. I'm going with Cody Bellinger. Yep. That was my second pick. Oh, that's good to know. So nothing fancy there. I'm going with the 23-year-old who set the all-time rookie home run record three years ago and who then hit and didn't lead but was nearly led the league

in home runs last year seems pretty easy yep it's a good pick that was my gut pick initially was Cody Bellinger and then I thought well Acuna hit what one less homer than Bellinger did or something this past year I forget what he ended up at but I know that he is uh he thinks he's going for 50-50, so he thinks he has more power in him. And he's two and a half years younger than Bellinger, which may not make a difference. Maybe Bellinger is young enough at this point that he'll still be productive throughout the decade. But by the end of the decade, he'll be, what, 34 or something, and Acuna will be 32, and maybe that makes something of a difference and I don't

know that their power potential or their raw power or whatever is really all that different so it was close for me Bellinger hit six more home runs than Acuna this year okay way ahead okay well those don't count all right I don't have anything to say about that. Okay. Was there anyone else who you even considered? I only wrote one name for each of these categories. Okay. Except for, I guess, with one exception. All right. And then I guess there's one that I haven't decided yet.

I'll decide in a minute. All right. Hits. Well, this is maybe my riskiest pick, but I received my Baseball America prospect handbook in the mail today. And so sitting on my desk, staring at me is cover boy Wander Franco. And I'm going to take him, which I just said that you probably shouldn't take prospects all that often, but he seems to be an unparalleled prospect

at this point. He's just the consensus top prospect in baseball, no matter where you look or who you ask. And it seems like he has the skill set to be a great pick in this category because he puts the ball in play a ton. He doesn't strike out. He hits for high averages. He walks, but he doesn't walk like Juan Soto, so it won't necessarily be a huge impediment. He has some power and may eventually develop more power, but probably not so much that he would be hitting lower in the lineup. So he'll probably still be a top of the lineup guy who'd be getting a lot of play appearances. And he's obviously extremely young. He'll be basically in his peak prime production for the entire decade. He just turned

19. And the risk, other than the fact that he has not played above A-ball, is that he's not going to be in the big leagues this season. I guess it's not inconceivable that he could get there at the end of the year, but most likely he's a 2021 guy. And so all the other people I considered picking will have a head start on him. So that gave me pause, but I don't know. It's fun to pick a prospect. So I'm going with Wander Franco. Yeah. I mean, I, I feel like, uh, I'm going to pick a prospect. Uh, maybe I've considered a prospect for another one, but it's really, I think, hard to make up a lost year on these stat ones, you know, where like, if you're going to,

if you're picking a prospect for Cy Young's or MVPs, then you don't necessarily need to have all 10 years on your resume. As like, for instance, Mike Trout didn't because you're only you only need three of those years to really do it for you. You could theoretically debut in 2027 and still win the MVPs category, but hits. It's really tough. So all of the stat categories were won by people who were going concerns every year of the decade, who were regulars and who were at least full timers for the entire decade. But I guess the argument that you can punt a year is that Robinson Cano missed half a year with PD suspension and missed almost half of last year. And so he did give away almost a full year and he

still won. And my guess is he actually probably- How much did he win by? I was going to say he probably won by a fair amount. I'm checking right now. If he didn't win by a fair amount, he definitely placed by a fair amount because I imagine he has a lot more hits than Starlin Castro, who finished fourth. He won by 44 hits over Nick Marcakis, and he was 100 hits ahead of fifth place. So that's a pretty good amount. So, okay, Juan DeFranco, I would not have picked a prospect. This was the one that was hardest for me,

and I had maybe like three other guys who were neck and neck for me so okay well i picked vladimir guerrero jr who is young and who you know jeff one of one of the later pieces that jeff wrote i think at fangraphs was about how vladimir guerrero jr was going to get more at bats than like how he was what he was like the best bet to to break a hit streak record or to have an extra long hit streak because he a projects to have really high batting averages he you know had incredibly high batting averages as a minor leaguer and he puts the ball in play and he does not walk hardly ever and so he's going to have a lot of at bats and a lot of at bats are going to lead to a lot of hits. And he's only 21.

And so so I picked him now. I mean, there are ways that that the names that I named just now for the actual hits record or the hits leaders in the 90 in the 2010s are Cano who was a good hitter and for part of the decade was a very scary power hitter but Cano and then Marquecas, Adam Jones, Starlin Castro and Elvis Andrews was fifth and for the most part you're not talking about super fearsome hitters so there might be something about like you want to pick a player who's not too good because you don't want them to get walked and you also don't want them to be trying to hit a lot of home runs because they can. And so maybe Guerrero is too good. Maybe Franco is too good. Or maybe the trend that I just noted with those top five means nothing. Yeah, Guerrero, I'd be worried that

eventually like if he blossoms into a 50 homer guy or something then he's gonna get pitched around and maybe that hurts you but i considered francisco lindor 26 was a little too old for me to do it but i i thought about it seriously and then i strongly considered ozzy albies who i like a lot and also raf Devers, who both of those guys are extremely young. Devers is 23. Albies is still 22, I believe. Well, no, Albies is 23 now also, but both those guys young enough. Devers has only been really very good for a year in the big leagues, but was expected to be good for long before that. So I think any of them would be smart picks. Yeah. I looked at the projected hits leaders for this year and it's

mostly either Rockies or players who are 27 or older, who I wanted to sort of stay away from or David Fletcher. And so I thought about Lindor too. And I thought about Tim Anderson as well. And I just decided I wanted younger. So Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is projected to have the 15th most hits in baseball this year. And he's much, much, much younger than everybody ahead of him. So that was my thinking. Yep. Okay. All right. Wins, pitcher wins. Yeah. So there are three pitcher categories, wins, Ks, and Cy Young Awards. And I think I'm going to be pretty boring here because I might just pick the same person for all of them. Or I was kind of going back and forth between really two pitchers, the same two pitchers for each of these categories, which is sort of a bummer.

I guess it'd be nice if I could differentiate these, but I don't really know how to do it. I guess if you had someone who was really good but on a terrible team, maybe you wouldn't pick him to be the wins leader. And maybe if there was someone who you thought was really good but was not a strikeout monster, you might pick him to win Cy Young Awards or wins or something but not strikeouts. might pick him to win Cy Young Awards or wins or something, but not strikeouts. But then again, like best pitchers are the ones that you would predict to be the best over a decade. They're going to be getting a lot of strikeouts in just about every case. And so I really could not talk myself into taking anyone other than one guy for all of these. I wonder if it's the same guy. My thinking, I also picked one guy and primarily because i'm not interested in finishing in the 85th percentile i'm not trying to spread my risk out i want to win which means i've got

to go all in on on some things and have them turn out right so i'm going all three picks with one player i thought about not picking this player for strikeouts. And I thought about picking like, say, maybe Garrett Cole for strikeouts. But knowing that the strikeout rate is probably going to keep going up, I thought that there's a pretty good chance that the winner is going to be the person who is still throwing a lot of innings at the end of the decade when strikeout rates are higher. And so I thought, I don't want to go with a 29 year old and maybe risk that he's you know not as good or not pitching as much or maybe not pitching at all at the end of the decade and so I went youth I went good team I went awesome and I I don't love them for strikeouts but I'm just

going with the same name for all three so who's your name Walkerer bueller yeah my that's my name too yeah all right yeah so yeah pretty boring it's like dodgers are really good and he's really good and he's young and yeah he's not a elite strikeout guy in this era but he's a very good strikeout guy and i don't know the dodgers are are smart i know they do a lot of work with injury prevention and obviously player development. So I trust them about as much as anyone else to keep him healthy and get the most out of his talent. And he hasn't been horribly overworked or anything, hasn't had an injury history. So yeah, I didn't really see a reason not to go with him. The only other person I strongly considered was Flaherty. Did you think about him? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. That's about it. So, and ultimately I just figured, well, Dodgers probably better than Cardinals and I don't know, maybe more strikeouts with Bueller. I guess there's not a big difference there, but yeah, that was the whole thought process for me. Yeah. 10 years ago, we did not know the opener was coming at all. It wasn't even, I mean, we didn't even know that the shift was going, like at the time the shift was just barely starting to spread widely. And so I thought, what are the odds that in 10 years starting pitchers on some teams aren't getting wins? Am I potentially risking? But I thought that was too complicated, too complicated to handle. Who even knows what team any of these players are going to be on in five years. So yeah, Justin Verlander wants to pitch till he's 45, right? So maybe it'll be Justin Verlander. Yeah, I mean, maybe it will be Justin Verlander. Justin Verlander was second in wins for this decade.

And coming into the decade, he was already fairly old, right? I mean, older than Buehler is now, I guess, right? In what, 2010? He was 27. So I guess not that much older, but I don't know that I would have picked him. Did you even mention him as a potential candidate? Because he was coming off a third place Cy Young award win in 2009. He had not yet won his Cy Young or either of his Cy Young awards so he was not super young and had not been the best pitcher in baseball to that point but he did end up finishing one win behind Max Scherzer for the most wins in that decade and where did he come in when the strikeouts he he was uh well Significantly behind Scherzer there

Yeah I didn't mention him and I could have I also didn't mention And I should have Zach Granke Who projected quite well And was fairly young And I knew that he had had that one Amazing year and I did not realize That the one amazing year

Had come in 2009 so there would have been A good case for picking Zach Granke as well Over Clayton Kershaw and certainly Max Scherzer. Yeah. Okay. All right. So we did wins. We did K's MVP awards. Yeah.

For this one, I'm going with Trout for the sort of same rationale that you said probably we would have taken Pujols 10 years ago, except that Trout is younger than Pujols and maybe even better than Pujols or at least perhaps more future-proof than Pujols. And he's young enough, obviously, that he should still be good. I mean, he may be very good for the entire decade. In fact, I sort of expect him to be. But by the end of it, he'll be in his late thirties. And so would not expect him to be winning MVP awards at that point, but he is

probably the favorite to win the MVP award for the next, say, three years or so. And so that alone, I think, especially because he does have the fame going for him. And maybe there's a certain point where you've won so many MVP awards that, I don't know, people want to give it to someone else. But he has established himself as a perennial MVP award winner. And in fact, I think it's generally or widely believed that he should have more MVP awards than he does. And so maybe people will not begrudge him additional MVP awards because they feel like

it's a makeup call for the ones he should have won. Yeah, he's not just the favorite this year. He is actually favored over the field. He I was just looking at the odds today. And you you have to bet more than you would win on Mike Trout to win the MVP award this year. Obviously, the answer would be Mike Trout. If your only goal was to pick who was going to win the MVP award this year. Obviously, the answer would be Mike Trout if your only goal was to pick who was going to win the most MVP awards.

I'm trying to win a million dollars. And so this was a category where I thought I was going to go write-in candidate. I figure if I hit with a write-in candidate, then almost literally no other person will have that. And I get 10 points that no one else will have, which you have to do if you're in a big field kind of pool like this. You have to have some wins that nobody else has. Otherwise, the path is just too difficult. So I had to go with a write-in.

So my write-in candidates came down to Cattell Marte, Byron Buxton, Joe Adele, and I forget who my fourth, Adley Rutschman, I think. And so I am going to, after much thought all day today, I'm going with Byron Buxton. And I know that he's a long shot, but you know, the story of this thing is that even Trout is in fact a long shot. They're all long shots. And I'm going to go with the long shot that's going to win me a million dollars. All right. Should we mention Dan Szymborski's article from this past week yeah so we wanted to bring this up at some point on some

episode so dan i guess uh shortly after mike trout and his wife announced that they are expecting their first child dan turned his attention to mike trout's demise and decline. So the circle of life here, the next Trout is coming, and this Trout will get old and decrepit at some point. So Dan, who of course creates and maintains and operates the Zips projection system, turned the Zips long-term lens to Trout's future and also to just how great he has been already, which we never tire of talking about.

And he came up with sort of a simple, Zips kind of like a Marcel method of projecting who would have been the best player entering every season or who would have had the highest war projection entering every season. And Trout is now on his eighth consecutive year so every season since 2013 he has been according to this method or would have been projected to be the best player in baseball and as Dan notes that ties the longest streak anyone has ever had as the reigning top war guy going into The spring so Barry Bonds From 1992 to 1999 was always The top war projector And if Trout gets one

More year he'll have the longest uninterrupted Run which is really kind of incredible And Babe Ruth had 10 seasons and Bonds had 11 Seasons at the top just not All consecutive and you know Why right in Bonds' case But you know why right in bonds's case but i know why in babe ruth's case too well yeah there were other performance enhancing oh i was just gonna

say he didn't yeah and he didn't have to play against a lot of the world's best players exactly yes so what trout has done obviously uh i don't think anyone listening to this necessarily needs us to put it into perspective but that is another way to put it into perspective. He's basically just on the best run as the best player in baseball that anyone has ever had already. And there's no end in immediate sight. So Dan looked at the long-term projections too, and he kind of like projected the projections. So he tried to figure out who would be the most likely war getter going into 2021 and 2022 and 2023 and many years after that. And for the next three years, Mike Trout projects to be the best player going into each of those seasons.

to be the best player going into each of those seasons. And then for the next couple of years after that, he's like behind only a couple of guys, I think Lindor and Acuna. And then he falls down off the list. At that point, he'd be in his mid thirties already. So it's a good article and a good look at how great he's been and how great he'll continue to be. And we will link to it and everyone should go check it out.

Not that we want to contemplate Mike Trout's inevitable decline, but maybe it is better to contemplate it now so that when it does happen, we have emotionally prepared ourselves for it. And also appreciated the great Unparalleled run that he will have already had by that point. Yeah. Yeah. the great unparalleled run that he will have already had by that point yeah yeah is it better to contemplate it now or is it better not to i don't know i can't help contemplating it we've talked about this on the podcast before right didn't we guess didn't we do this once we guessed which year yeah he would not be he'd no longer be the best player in baseball according to the consensus or something and i don't actually remember which year we said but we've well yeah we we definitely did we have talked about his decline in various forms uh we when he was quite young we talked about how someday

he wouldn't i remember saying at some point long ago maybe five years ago how bleak it was to think that we were i think i said something like we're only six or seven years from it being painful to watch mike trout run or maybe i said like nine or ten years or something like that and so that idea has been there i think we're we were aware of it but it was different when he was 23 and it was like can you believe that in nine years mike trout's gonna get worse now he's 28 and it could happen this year. Like it could start. We don't know.

We no longer know that we're not at the top of the parabola. And this is probably is probably the first year that you might start thinking that it's more likely that he'll be worse over the next three years than he was over the previous three years or something something. Like this is when you would start thinking. It is that it is more likely that his best season. Maybe a better way of putting it. Is it's more likely his best season is behind him. Than ahead of him.

And this might be the first year that you would say that. And so now I don't want to condom late his decline. Which we have to be clear. Not seen a single gram of evidence for. Like there's no. There's nothing. Like he had his best year just now offensively. Right.

And before that, he had his best year in the season before. And before that, he had his best year in the season before that. Unless you take his lack of durability as a reflection of age and infirmity, because he has not had the playing time that he did earlier in some seasons. Yeah, you could. You could. You could find ways to be negative about Mike Trout if you want to be. because he has not had the playing time that he did earlier in some seasons. Yeah, you could. You could. You could find ways to be negative about Mike Trout if you want to be. But you could also find ways to not be negative about him.

You could be living in total blissful ignorance about anything. And so I have less appetite now to contemplate the future of his decline than I did when it was way off in the distance. Yeah, Dan did note in his post that there was one milestone that has already happened, which is the best rest of career projections. Trout has been passed in those. So for years, like even just a couple years ago, Trout was already, you know, 26 or something at that point, but he was still projected to be better over the rest of his career than any other still projected to be better over the rest of his career than any other player was projected to be over the rest of his career. And now that's no longer true.

So Dan noted that in the 2019 projections, Acuna and Soto passed Trout for rest of career expectation. And now he is sixth behind Acuna, Soto, Lindor, Bellinger, and Gleyber Torres, actually. And then there are a bunch of players, just a few wins behind him. So, yeah, there's that. And anyone who's in the middle of writing us an email right now about what Mike Trout Jr. will be worth or how good he'll be, Mike Trout's expected son who is on the way, we have already contemplated that kind of question in, I believe, episode 983 when we talked about Clayton Kershaw's newborn son, Charlie, and his long-term future. So probably applicable. I think we even did an episode on that in like the 300s.

Uh-huh. Maybe. The 300s or 400s. Okay. In like the 300s? Uh-huh, maybe. The three or 400s? Okay, I unfortunately switched from one vault page to a different vault page.

And so now I'm worried I'm out of order. All right, we did home runs, hits, wins, strikeouts, team wins. Somehow these have gotten, maybe they've gotten out of order. I think we're up to all-star selections. Okay, all right, all-star selections. Oh, so anyway, MVP, I picked Byron. By the way, I picked Byron Buxton. And if you look at previous decades as well, again, like Trout, they look normal. It was Barry Bonds in the 2000s and it was Barry Bonds in the 90s.

But I don't think you would have picked Barry Bonds in either one of those cases. So before the 90s, Barry Bonds had never gotten an MVP vote. He was very good and he was youngish. He was 26, I think, in 1990, but he had never gotten an MVP vote. And then in 2000, you wouldn't have probably picked him. He was very old. He was like 36 years old at that point. You weren't going to pick Barry Bonds. And 2001 was when he had his big, crazy, you know why resurgence.

And so there was no way that you would have picked Barry Bones for either of those, either. Off by a year. He was 25 in 1990, and he was 35 in 2000. All right. All-stars. This one I picked. All-stars, you said? This one I picked, Trout.

I did, too. Yeah. I just feel like he will be so revered for the rest of this decade. A, he'll be great, for most of it, but then he'll attain a Cal Ripken-like status, I think, where fans will just vote him in because I think at that point, everyone will love Mike Trout. I think everyone who knows him already loves him, but I feel like he is just kind of gaining in, I don't know, admiration and affection just because I think, at least in my case, I've sort of stopped wanting him to be anything other than what he is. It doesn't frustrate me

or disappoint me that he is not the most quotable guy, typically. I actually like him more now for it. That's his character. It's not that he doesn't have a character or a personality. It's just, that's what he is. He is just the, I don't know, the apple pie and guy that you would want your kids to emulate or whatever. He is that guy. And he just never does anything to make anyone dislike him for any reason, really. And so I think he will continue to have a very high approval rating perhaps even after he is no longer deserving all-star he will continue to make the team yeah I mean what would it take

to have him not make the next eight all-star games I mean it would be it would be severe so yeah that's that one I was I was not going to get creative on yep all right so we're up to the two team ones world series titles and team wins all right so these should be the same yeah but i'm not mine are not going to be the same mine are not the same either yeah so world series titles i'm going with the dodgers okay not because they're due but just because A, they seem to get there every year, and they are currently the team with probably the best chance to win the World Series, certainly in their league, if not all of baseball, and really, there's no end in sight for them, which differentiates them slightly from other teams that I might have picked here, which is just that they have this young core. So not only are they great right now, but they just brought up a whole bunch

of really good young guys. And it just sort of seems like they can keep this going. And the division that they're in, it's hard to project. I mean, once you go beyond like three years, it's basically flipping a coin. So I don't know what the Rockies will be or the Padres will be or the Diamondbacks will be. But with the Rockies, it does seem like we have enough of a history to say that it's just hard for the Rockies to be good, maybe harder than other teams. And so there's one team that's sort of starting with a handicap there in their division. And I think the fact that they're so well run seemingly that they have the budget and and the payroll and all of that i just i don't know why i wouldn't pick them and now i'm kind of

questioning why i wouldn't pick them for both of these categories actually well i'm picking them for wins okay for i feel like the flukishness of world Series titles is high enough. And the fact that everything, like you say, gets almost unforeseeable, other than some basic franchise fundamentals after two, three, four years, means that if you're going to pick a category randomly, or nearly randomly, this is the one. And yet I'm pretty sure that most people are going to pick the Dodgers or the Yankees or maybe one or two other teams. And those would also be the picks that I would have if I were thinking logically. And I just don't want to pick the same thing everybody else does, because again, when you need to have some answers that nobody else has or few people have. So I got I'm trying to think of the least picked answer that I can comfortably go with. And so I think I will go with the, I'm thinking White Sox or Tigers. I'll go with the White Sox. No one's picking the White Sox, right? Probably not. So I'm picking the White Sox. Okay. I mean, it only takes two, it most decades, it only takes two. And well, this decade, it took three. The previous decade, two.

Previous decade was the Yankees. That was three. And then the previous decade was two. And then three. And then two. So you're looking at, you know, you need two or three. And I feel like pick at random, you might get two. So White Sox.

Yeah. White Sox are just emerging and getting good now so you're getting them on the upswing and maybe you could say they're in a division with Cleveland that just doesn't at least currently seem all that motivated to put the best team together that they can and well you almost did take the Tigers so so the two teams that you almost picked were in the same division. I was picking a central team with the assumption that the central generally has been and probably will continue to be a little less than the other divisions. Now, obviously, lesser divisions still have good teams. It took 101 wins last year to win the central. Well, it didn't, but that's how many the winning team did

win and so they're obviously like they're tough divisions and they could be a tough division but historically it's been easier to win the central than any other division yeah all right and the last one is team wins and i don't know maybe i should just stick with the dodgers but i think i'm gonna take the yankees here and I will try to justify it. I mean, obviously, historically speaking, they have been the safe pick here, but they've also been the safe pick in World Series titles. But even when they don't win the World Series, they win this category. So in this just past decade, they had the most wins without winning World Series. And they did the same thing in the 80s. So they have a track record of that. And the way I'm talking myself into this is that I just think the Yankees

are probably the least likely team to be bad at any point. Even the Dodgers, I could imagine the Dodgers deciding, okay, we're going to take a step back or something. It's hard to say how long even Andrew Friedman will be running the Dodgers, but as long as he is, I could imagine them getting to the point, let's say in four years or something where they do kind of like a tactical, you know, bridge year or whatever. And they say, oh, well, we want to get under the luxury tax and we want to trade some of our guys and, you know, set our sights on the future or something. I could imagine them doing that in kind of a calculated way, whereas with the Yankees, well, they've reset their tax and all of that too,

but there just seems like such a resistance to being bad in New York and being bad if you're the Yankees, and they have such a long streak of not being bad that they sort of have the most at stake, I guess, in terms of keeping keeping that run Going like even the Dodgers were Bad or not good Within fairly recent memory Whereas with the Yankees you're talking about like a quarter

Century of being good at this point So it's almost inconceivable That they could not be and so Between the payroll and the institutional Advantages that they have and just the Tradition of you know Steinbrenners And always wanting to put a winner on the field I can't imagine them ever institutional advantages that they have and just the tradition of Steinbrenners and always wanting to put a winner on the field.

I can't imagine them ever bottoming out or even really having a valley that I could conceive of the Dodgers having. The other nice thing about either of those picks is that because they're just so dominant and such formidable teams at the top of the division they force other teams to state to take steps back so they're just constantly in divisions with two teams that are gonna lose you know a lot of games just because you don't you like i think there's a tendency for a lot of teams to go well no point trying to get to 86 in this division and so uh it probably over the course of a decade they probably get a few extra tankers

on their schedule than a team in the central or team in you know the al west or the nl east might yep all right all right we did it don't take any of our picks to the bank but uh take them to the vault i guess if you feel like it like don't take my picks i'm trying to differentiate from the crowd yeah okay well i'm sure uh john chenier our official stat keeper will add our picks record them for posterity on the spreadsheet where we track all of our drafts and competitions and hopefully we will be able to check back in 10 years to see how we did you know shane by the way shane bieber is younger than walker bueller and yeah projects to basically be just as good this year and and yet i didn't i didn't even really consider

i mean he he met the he met the criteria that i went through for the last decade or for you know for bueller why didn't i consider him instead i mean yeah you're a lot more likely to win if you pick shane bieber for all of these and he ends up winning than if you pick Walker Bueller for all these and he ends up winning. I'm switching. I'm going to Bieber. There's an anti-stuff bias with Bieber, which I think is probably unfair. But the fact that he throws like 93 or whatever right now when he's young makes you question what he will throw in seven years. It does seem like there's no way he can be leading the decade in strikeouts, right?

I mean, I know he had more strikeouts than Buehler last year. Yeah, I love Bieber, but yeah, I'm not picking Bieber. I'm picking Bieber. You're picking Bieber. I'm filling it out right now. For everything, all the pitcher categories. All the pitcher categories, yeah. Wow.

Okay. All right. I'm pretty happy with my Walker Buehler pick, at least for wins. I think I'm going to take wins over Bieber. All right. I appreciate, by the way, that this is just old school categories. Yeah. I'm glad they did that.

You can't do war. You can't do war. No. Because who the heck knows what war will be in 10 years or or one year for that matter and uh yeah i mean you that's the thing like you can't really pick any advanced stat because it could be changed or surpassed by something else 10 years from now so you have to go with wins even though who's going to be talking about wins in 2029? No one. We're hardly talking about wins now, but it's kind of a standby. Should have done outfield RBIs.

about today. Seth Smith, whom Sam mentioned because he had a great year in that 2014 season, he's my go-to example of someone who maybe got better because of LASIK surgery. He had LASIK in late 2013, I think. And if you find the day that he came back from that and then look at the rest of his career, he was significantly better after that than he had been earlier in his career, even though he was younger, even though he was more in his prime age, he was much better post-LASIK. So when people ask, well, does that actually make players better? And I know there have been a few studies about it. I say, Seth Smith, he got better. Except even that one doesn't work so well because I think he had his first LASIK surgery

in 2006. So I don't know. Maybe the second one just worked better. Or maybe he made some other changes. Who knows? And speaking of Padres outfielders with surprisingly low totals Many of you probably saw the fun fact that was tweeted last month by Adam Dorowski Who wrote, just noticed that last season Will Myers played in 155 games with 490 plate appearances

Nobody in history has played in more games with fewer plate appearances That is pretty impressive, or unimpressive to have 490 play appearances in almost every game played. But of course, he did not start a lot of those games because he was benched and he pinch hit a lot. And that's how you do that. But that just goes to show what a weird role he has had with the Padres and how he is not really fit in that outfield. So there you go. Hope that was enough Padres outfield content for you today. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to

patreon.com slash effectively wild. And hey, if you enter the MLB vault competition because you heard about it on this podcast and you end up winning a million dollars, maybe kick a cut back to us. I don't know if you're feeling generous, but in the meantime, go to patreon.com slash effectively wild as have the following five listeners who have signed up to pledge some small monthly amount and help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks. Parashar Bisset, Ryan Dorsett, Alexander Brown, Chad John, and David Lizerbrom. Thanks to all of you. You can also 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. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. You can contact me and Sam and Meg via email at podcast.fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. And we will be back with another episode a little later this week. Talk to you then. It's coming around. It's going to carry off all that isn't bound. When it happens, when it happens. So let it happen.

Let it happen.