Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1550: Make Me Your Worst Offer

Episode Date: June 12, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the continued standstill over starting the season, MLB’s series of superficially different, substantively identical, and equally unproductive proposals, public perceptions of the owners’ and players’ positions, the difference between a 50-game season and an 80-game season, and how the “negotiations” seem destined to end, plus a Stat Blast […]

My friends, they all agree. My friends, they all agree. Give in to our defeat. Give in to our defeat. In secret, we believe. In secret, we believe. We're nothing, nothing, nothing that we need. Oh, oh, oh, it's my only offer.

Stifle coffees on myself. Oh, oh, oh Or someone else Hello and welcome to episode 1550 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs, and I am joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? I'm doing alright. We have not talked in a couple weeks. Yeah, it's been a minute. Nice to hear your voice, dude.

Yes, yours too. And in just a moment, we will hear Eric Longenhagen's voice. He will be joining us to talk about the very abbreviated MLB draft that took place this week. Before we get to Eric, I don't know, there's almost nothing new to say about the prospect for a season. I don't know, there's almost nothing new to say about the prospect for a season. When we talked two weeks ago, there was no deal to start the season, and now that we're talking, there's no deal to start the season. Just before we started recording, the latest offer was put forth by MLB to the Players Association. And like the previous offers, it sounds like it's essentially the same offer, but with different numbers and words. I've kind of lost track of how many offers and counter offers there have been, but basically MLB keeps making the same offer, just like with slightly different terms that make it sound like they're moving toward the player's position,

but they actually aren't because they seem to have just decided, okay, this is how much we are willing to pay for a season to happen. And then they either have fewer games with a higher percentage of the prorated salary or more games with a lower percentage of the prorated salary. And it works out to the same amount of money somehow, one way or another. And so it's not really any more acceptable to the players than the previous offers were. I wonder if they are engaged in a bit of very high concept performance art, or perhaps, do you remember the phenomena, the cultural phenomena of icing, Ben? Yes. Where people would hide a Smirnoff ice in in a pringles can or a bag of groceries or behind their backs and they'd present it and you if you fell for it you had to drink it

i feel like it's like that like they're trying to hide the same sugary bit of bad nonsense in a bunch of different forms and you open it and you're like, oh, this is the same crap as before. Yep. It's very frustrating. I imagine that part of the calculus here is that if they end up just mandating a 50-game season, it seems inevitable that the players will file a grievance claiming that the league did not do their best

to play as many games as possible. And so I wonder if this back and forth, claiming that the league did not do their best to play as many games as possible. And so I wonder if this back and forth, which does not seem to be motivated by trying to get a deal done so much as delay until a 48 to 50 game season is sort of the only option that we have left, is meant to be evidence that, oh, no, they really did try in the event of an eventual grievance. But I am unconvinced.

Yes. Maybe an arbitrator would be convinced, someone who doesn't cover baseball that closely and would just say, hey, they made four offers or whatever. That's a lot of offers. They really wanted to play a season. But it turns out they all boiled down to essentially the same offer. It's basically like uh when i used to play fantasy many years ago and i wanted a player on someone else's team and i would just construct

like seven different trade scenarios for that player but they were all basically the same offer it's like hey give me this good player and i'll give you a bunch of less good players who you don't really want or need and oh you turned, you turned down my first one? Okay, how about if I change it and it's this player you don't want instead of that player you didn't want? And they would just all get rejected because none of them was actually an appealing offer. It's sort of the same thing here. And so this latest one is owners save 72 games

and the pay is, again, roughly equivalent to what they are offering in a 50-game season at full prorated pay. And this version of the season would start on July 14th. It just seems like, I don't know, maybe part of it is what you just said, that they're trying to make it look to someone like they are really actually trying to start a season here. just trying to run out the clock so that the only possibility of a season is the 50-game season that they seem to want. If you just keep going back and forth here and they keep putting forth these unacceptable proposals, because it seems pretty clear the players think that they have already been promised and have already agreed to full prorated salaries and anything short of that, which is what the owners keep offering is not going to be acceptable to them but the owners haven't caved on that particular point so any

offer they put forth is pretty much going to be an immediate no i mean they've put i think a expiration date on this one they say sunday it expires but i mean they could say it expires five minutes from now they could say it expires five minutes from now. They could say it expires five years from now. It just doesn't really seem to matter. The players are not going to take this offer. So maybe it really just is trying to convince people who don't know any better or just trying to play this out long enough that the players will have to accept a shorter season because

it'll be August by that point. Yeah, I think what we were really missing in all of this was more of a, you know, bank robber takes hostages vibe because that'll really help to open things up. It's just very disappointing. I was very frustrated on Tuesday night when all of, you know, when the latest bit of nonsense was coming down when the players moved, right? They made a meaningful move to try to meet the owners in the middle on the number of games played. And it was just rejected out of hand.

And one of the management sources said that they're not trying. And, you know, the draft was Wednesday, right? Like we are in the process of welcoming new players into the professional ranks of baseball, and we're doing this nonsense. It's just very frustrating. A lot of people's livelihoods sort of hang in the balance here. And, you know, as I said tuesday when i was tweeting about this

because referencing one's tweets is always a wildly popular choice you know like the players are going to be risking their health and a lot of other people are going to risk their health to come together to broadcast those games and put them on and it doesn't seem like the people who bear the most risk should be the ones who are the most enthusiastic about getting a season staged but that's where we are and it's just it's very disappointing it felt very it felt really good to watch the draft i mean i i view the draft as sort of like an inherently anti-labor exercise but it felt really good to watch it and to have all of my baseball pals tweeting about a baseball thing and i don't say that like there isn't other more important stuff going on but

it was nice to have an evening where we were we were sort of positively engaged with the sport and it felt like you know wouldn't that have been such a nice opportunity to be able to come out and say you know we had all this nonsense but we've come to an agreement and we're happy to announce that opening day is going to be. And instead, we're going to have another week of this stuff. So I feel strange saying this because it's just such a cynical and exhausted and sort of disappointed and unenthusiastic view but if they're gonna do the 50 game season i wish they'd just get it over with so that i can like plan when people need to file positional power rankings yeah you know just like do it because you're gonna uh if you're not gonna negotiate in good faith then just stop pretending because this is exhausting. Yeah, it is. And even the draft, weird as it was,

was a reminder of how strange this whole season is and how the owners are just trying to employ fewer players, have fewer games, less of everything. But you're right. It was at least a live event that was taking place in Major League Baseball. I do think that it's pretty clear from this negotiation process which side really wants baseball back more. I mean, I'm sure that some people perceive it the other way when Rob Manfred comes out and says he guarantees that there will be a season and there will 100% be a season. If this does end up with Manfred saying,

okay, I'm unilaterally exercising my right if he has a right to set the schedule and I say that we're doing a 50 game season and it starts then and we'll see how the players association responds to that but some people who haven't been following this whole saga will say oh good for Rob Manfred good for the owners they just said okay we're done with this delay we're're going to get the season started. And then if the Players Association is in the position of having to file a grievance because of the way that that happened, again, some people who are kind of low information followers of this whole story will say, oh, wow, look, MLB wants to start the season, and the players are filing a grievance about starting the season. But it's really the opposite, right? Every player proposal has been, let's play more games. And

every MLB proposal has been, let's play fewer games. And I really do think it makes a difference. I know I've seen a lot of people say 50 games, 80 games, what does it matter? It's a weird, ahistorical season and there will be much more flukiness and randomness than there's ever been before. And that's certainly true. But I at least personally think there's a meaningful difference between 50 games and 80 games. I mean, on a very simple level, that's 60% more games. So that's a lot more games. But also, it seems like there is an inflection point, and Eno Saris and others have written about this, where if you look at how many games it takes to predict a team's full season record and how many games do you need for a team's performance to really be representative of their full season performance, there is a point

where you start learning less and less beyond a certain number of games. And that point really does seem to come between 50 and 80, where at 50, you're still learning a lot about how good a team actually is. And at 80, you're still learning something, but the pace at which you're learning has kind of decreased. So for me, I'm not saying I'm going to look at an 80 game season the same as I would a 162 game season, but I think there still is a difference between 50 and 80. Like at 80, I'm saying, yeah, let's play a season, and it'll be weird, and I'll think of it differently, but it'll still be sort of like a real season. At 50, I'm just sort of saying, eh, why not just

have a tournament, or why not just make it all playoffs or something? Like this doesn't feel like a season to me. Right. And I think that in terms of our there's sort of that intellectual understanding of baseball and when things start to be meaningful and significant and when we can when we can look at performance and think think and feel that it says something right that it is indicative of a guy's actual contribution on the field that isn't fluky or weird or because he was having a bad day. I think the emotional part of that is that, you know, an 80 game season in a year where there is still literally a global pandemic. Yeah, which seems to be plateauing, by the way, like it's not going away. And forget about the second wave, like the first wave has not ended. So yeah. Yeah. You know, it's very concerning that several of the states that are home to major league franchises are seeing spikes in their case rates. But there's something about being able to get like a half season's worth of play in a year where you have a global pandemic and all this uncertainty and so much to sort through in terms of the logistics of actually staging games

that feels reasonable, right? And so you can look at that season and say, the reason this season took on this sort of character that it did was the pandemic. But now we know that the reason for a 50-game season isn't really the pandemic at this point. It's about money. And that's going to

always feel terrible and always feel like a missed opportunity. I mean, I don't need to rehash all the things I said the last time we talked about this stuff, but I just continue to be completely flabbergasted, completely bum-fuzzled by the league's opportunity to re-center baseball in American sport, and they're absolutely unwilling to do that. Yeah. I've seen people say, under these circumstances and with everything going on, it's even more unacceptable that baseball can't come back and provide some solace or something. And I don't really subscribe to that because these circumstances are why we're in this position. It's not just a regular year and they decided, well, we're just not going to play right now. They're not playing because of the pandemic and that's a real concern. And that's something that was always going to significantly shorten

the season. And there's just no way around that. Like MLB's timing, I think, was not great or really the pandemic's timing was not great for MLB or for anyone really. It's a pandemic. There's never a good time for one. But in terms of sports, like hockey and basketball got most of their seasons in and they can come back and just kind of do the playoffs. And I think most people will consider that a pretty legitimate season. And most of the revenue stuff there is already decided, like the players were already paid. So the issues were more, I think, about safety in those sports than finances or about whether the seasons would be considered legitimate. And then the NFL, of course, you know, it's possible that they may just be able to start as scheduled and play their full season.

We'll see. But it seems like the timing for them was pretty fortunate in that their season had not started and was months away from starting when all of this happened. just about to start and it delayed that start so significantly that now the season is going to be really shortened and maybe considered not fully legitimate and you had to figure out all these economic issues which has proved pretty difficult so yes i think it's more understandable that this has happened because of the circumstances and yet even more distasteful that this latest delay is happening because of the circumstances, because we're all worried about life and death issues right now. And meanwhile, baseball is sort of squabbling over dollars, and the owners are trying to save as many dollars as they possibly can. And if this were just about safety or logistics, fine, that's one thing. But if it's just about haggling and really not even haggling, but just looking for an opportunity to

cut players, cut the minor leagues, cut everything you possibly can and save money, combined with the messaging, which Bill DeWitt and other owners coming out and trying to pretend that they can't and don't make any money owning baseball teams, which come on guys, like there's been a lot written about this, of course, and we've talked about it to no end, but just the behavior of baseball owners, I think puts the lie to their own claims about not making any money owning those baseball teams. So please don't try to sell us that line. Yeah, it just makes me very tired because I keep having to tell Craig,

you got to write it again. It's the same deal. You got to write it again. Like seven different versions of this article and they're all great and informative. Oh, yeah. They're really essential commentary. But yes, every time a new offer comes in that's not really actually a new offer, he has to write that article again. Yeah. It's just, you know, you can dress it up as a tuba or a hat or a pizza.

It's all the same. Yeah. Anyway, I hope we're getting close to the end of whatever this is, that they will either just put the season out of its misery or more likely say it's going to be 50 games, it's going to be 48 games, it's going to start then and the players can file their grievance. I think the season would still proceed while that grievance is going on. Yeah. That's my understanding. So I assume that that will happen, and maybe it'll happen as soon as next week, and then we will have to reckon with whether we're even fully excited about baseball coming back under those circumstances. I certainly want baseball, but it seems like whatever format the season takes is not one where we're going to be watching without any reservations about how that season started. But please just end the agony of the offers and counter offers and the owners not actually

adjusting their offer at all. Just you're wasting our time. I know it's maybe posturing to try to make yourself look better to an arbitrator when that time eventually comes, but it's no fun for us. Yeah, agreed. All right. One quick thing before we bring on Eric. I want to do a stat blast. We haven't had a stat blast in a couple weeks, and I have a draft-related one. So I'm going to play a stat blast song cover here from listener Angus Kellett, who did a great piano cover. Gjørens Okay, so this question comes from Patreon supporter Alex Harrison, who says, June 9th marked the 12-year anniversary of Ken Griffey Jr.'s 600th home run, and June 10th was the beginning of the modified MLB draft. After seeing highlights

of the Griffey homer, I went to Baseball Reference to look at Mark Hendrickson, the pitcher who allowed the home run. I saw that he was drafted in six MLB drafts. My question has two parts. I'm assuming six is the most times someone has been drafted. Is this the case? Also, Hendrickson was never drafted higher than the 13th round. What is the lowest round a player that has been drafted four or five or six times has gone overall in his selections? Is the 13th round the mark? No pun intended, I assume. Jacklin, who does data stuff for Baseball Reference, and he sent me a list of every player who has been drafted six or more times. And it turns out that there have been, I think, seven players who have been drafted seven times, but those players were drafted in the years when there were two drafts a year. There was the main regular draft, and then there was a secondary draft. So that kind of doesn't count.

There are a few guys, though, who did end up making the majors and were drafted seven times. Dwayne Kuyper, Luis Medina, and Pete Varney all drafted seven times. But again, some of those were drafted twice in one year. So among the players who were drafted in distinct years, so only once per year, Mark Hendrickson stands alone with six drafts. He was drafted each year from 1992 to 1997. And during that time, he was also drafted in the NBA. So he was just getting drafted all the time. And that's why he was drafted so many times in baseball is that he was a basketball player.

And it is kind of interesting, like the difference between the two sports. He was drafted in the 1996 NBA draft, and then he was playing for the Sixers in the 1996 to 97 season. It's just you get drafted, you play in the highest level league. Whereas when he was drafted and finally signed in baseball, the Blue Jays took him in the 1997 draft and he didn't make the majors until 2002. So when you're a baseball player, it's going to take a while for you to actually make the majors, which is why in some cases, it may be more appealing to play some other sport where you can just sort of skip that whole minor league process and go right to it. So Mark Hendrickson was drafted by the Braves, the Padres, the Braves again, the Tigers, the Rangers, and the Blue Jays. And I do still think that one of the best things about baseball is that we don't have to have hyphenated seasons with multiple years. We can just say 2002 season. We don't have to say 2002 to 2003. That is a nice thing for us writers and editors, I think.

Yeah, it is truly the best thing. That's not true. That's not even remotely true. It's one of the nicer little editorial things, certainly. Yeah, I mean, there have been many players throughout history who've been drafted by multiple leagues, and this is obviously a quite extreme example uh i wondered very much when the a's uh announced that they

would not be paying their minor leaguers their stipends which they have since backtracked on the what facial expression kyler murray had in that moment yes be like, oh, hey, I made some really good choices with my life. But gosh, would you have a draft party each time? I was wondering that. Yeah. How do you mark the occasion? As an aside, we did not talk about this in our conversation with Eric, but I was very

nervous about the lack of social distancing on the draft broadcast. Ben made me, that's not the point of this, but it made me very nervous. There's a lot of people very squished. didn't care that much, but still, it must be nice, right? It's nice to be wanted. It's nice to feel like someone wants you. And especially if you're playing one sport and you're still appealing to people in another sport, it's nice to have the options. If you're at a job and you like your job, but someone comes along and offers you another job, you might not want that other job, but it's still good, good right it's still nice to have the offer yeah but you like start what did you start with like a big cake like a sheet cake and then and then you and then you go to a smaller maybe you go to cupcakes after that and then you're

like uh it's too many sweets so you go to scones i mean scones are kind of sweet too but they're less sweet than cupcakes and then after a while are you just like oh this again yeah i don't even think it's cake worthy after like three drafts probably and we have to celebrate the little things ben it's important the highest he was drafted was the 13th round and that was the first time he was drafted so after that it was just 21 32 16 19 20 which is interesting like the closer he got it's like when he was an nba player he was drafted higher than he was in some earlier years when he was not yet an nba player so teams were really holding out hope for him but it's probably a little bit different to get drafted in the 32nd round as opposed to say the first or second round. That's probably always worth a cake, but otherwise I'm not so sure.

But there were players who were drafted five times in the era when you were only drafted once per year. There were quite a few of those guys. And there were some guys because part of Alex's question was like guys who had been drafted repeatedly but were never drafted in a high round. And like Curtis White, for instance, who was drafted every year from 1999 to 2003, that's five drafts, but he was never drafted earlier than the 31st round. And Kenny answered this question too. So Alex wanted to know for anyone who's been drafted at least four times who were guys who never were drafted earlier than Mark Hendrickson was drafted in the

13th round. And I guess the king of this is Todd Abbott, who was drafted four times, 91, 92, 94, and 95. And the earliest he was ever drafted in that time was the 38th round. And then Anthony Snow, four drafts, 37th round. Kyle Peter, four drafts, 34 rounds. Bart Braun, four drafts, 33rd round. And Mike Davis, four drafts, 32nd round. So not uncommon. And there are different stories there. They might be signability guys.

There might be injury guys. There might be multi-sport guys. But it is interesting that teams just kind of keep going for those guys, even if they don't think there's a real chance, even if they're not going to waste a high pick on them. They just indicate interest. And what's the worst that can happen? You don't get a 38th round pick that year. Yeah. Remember when there were 38th round picks?

Oh, yeah. Those were the days. All right. So we will take a quick break and we will be back with Eric Longenhagen to talk about the draft and what will happen to players who went undrafted in this odd five round draft and what scouting was like in general this year. And also what will happen to prospects and minor leaguers if there is no minor league season. If we had Eric, then the closer the sun would rise. There'd be no shadows in his eyes. But you're never, ever, ever, ever gonna be satisfied With somebody else No, you're never, ever, ever, ever gonna be satisfied

With somebody else And now we are joined by Fangraph's lead prospect analyst, Eric Langenhagen, who has emerged from a very busy week of draft coverage to share his thoughts on this latest draft exercise with us. Eric, how are you? You know how I am. You saw the time signature in WordPress this week. It feels good to be done. But the listeners don't know

how you are yeah who cares about uh you know i'm glad to look i don't i'm glad to be done with a long stretch of a lot of stuff that stretches back to writing the book like it's just been a sprint since the book and so now i'm kind of glad like for the next little bit that there's not baseball. Sorry, folks, like I need it. So yeah, I'm good. I feel good about, I'm glad there was a draft. I loved it to just have something to talk about that relates semi-directly to baseball. But yeah, I'm ready for a break

and then I'm ready for there to be something happening on a field somewhere. Yeah, silver lining. There's no baseball, but on the other hand, Eric gets to sleep. Yeah, I'm all in favor of that. The break that so many people experienced starting three months ago has, for some folks I know, like, not really been a reality. And the dichotomy of being at home for three consecutive months, but also being, like, kind of wrung out is, it's weird. It's a weird feeling not to be exhausted from, like, traveling to the

SEC tournament or to Super Regional and just literally contain all of that in your home. Like it has been strange. You know, Bomani Jones has his like weekly YouTube show that I try to catch when I can. And he mentioned something about this recently too, where like he can't, in that Texas, like the little Texas season draw of his, like he just cannot find a day off for some reason. And it is now today tomorrow is my first one so i'm stoked about that obviously this was a highly unusual draft we had just five rounds undrafted free agents signing bonuses are capped at twenty thousand dollars all of the draftees signing bonuses are going to be heavily deferred there were rumors before the draft of a team that was planning to

just punt on the exercise entirely. And I'm curious, did teams have noticeably less information on top picks this year than they usually do? How did the draft preparation process change in light of the pandemic? And did you see guys not go in the last two days that you might have expected to with a more usual and sort of normal season? Yeah. So the rumors about the team punting in the industry, like I'll just say it now, like I wrote it in two or three mock drafts ago, was that it was the process, like at the onset of the pandemic, when baseball was trying to figure out what the hell to do, Artie Moreno is one of the owners who, I have this from multiple sources, who was just like, yeah, let's not have a draft, right? And so based on when they furloughed their scouts, that was more smoke around, hey, the Angels are operating as if they're a team that's

not going to have a draft. And had they taken the name attached to them in the event that they were going to do this and punt was Drew Bowser, a high schooler from California, whose price tag was like north of 4 million, like close to 5 million. Stanford commit a big third baseman with power. Good prospect, but 5 million's mucho, right? So now the Angels didn't do that. Thank thank goodness it would have been like a permanent stain not only on moreno but just on like the it would just have been so craven but yeah like as far as the the shortened draft there was definitely an asymmetry of information right there were some players who benefited no doubt and there were some players who were harmed by it the players who were overwhelmingly harmed by the five-round process

were the types of high schoolers who it takes that extra day and those extra 35 rounds to assess their signability. While the draft is going on, the area scouts, the director, the GM, they're communicating with the players' advisors about signability. And so you have, not only do you have more time to assess this information in real time, but you've got 40 rounds worth of bonus pool space that you can kind of shift around and play with and try to fit as much talent into as you can. And because the draft was only five rounds, teams were not as able to be creative. There was just less nuance, which is just a trend that's occurring in any aspect of scouting and

player acquisition. Like MLB is just sort of sucking nuance out of the process because nuance is expensive because those little corners that you can gain advantages, it costs money. It takes more manpower and MLB doesn't like that. So, you know, the, the types of players who were hurt by it are generally the cold weather high schoolers who did not get off to, they didn't play at all this year. Some of those guys went anyway, right? Mick Abel, the Phillies first round pick, Ed Howard, the Cubs first round pick. They are, in my opinion, two of the most talented players in the class, bar none. But unless you were, you know, some teams just weren't confident taking either of them because they didn't throw or play this spring at all. Ed Howard had two practices,

I think. And I don't think anybody saw Mick Abel do anything. We've all seen Mick Abel do stuff for the last couple of years, which is why I'm sort of perplexed by how a couple of the college players who really popped over the first four weeks of this season, if they were seen by enough teams, and some of them were because, you know, some of these big college tournaments early in the year, February, they're in Florida, they're in Texas, they're in Arizona. Everyone is there to see those guys because you can efficiently see, you know, a half dozen big college programs over the course of a weekend. So these players were widely seen over the span of four weeks and teams felt more confident in four weeks worth of performance sometimes than they had two plus years of with their

history with these high schoolers. Even though like this gap of three months between when the college season ended and when last high school showcase season ended, which was about eight months ago, was somehow meaningful to teams. So I think there was some recency bias that was at play in this draft too.

You know, Jared Schuster, who the Braves took in the first round, sounds like he might be underslot by a little bit. Go look at his freshman and sophomore year stats at Wake Forest. They are not good. Then on the Cape last summer, he starts to get it together.

Then he had a huge velo spike over four starts this spring through strikes during that time, which he had previously struggled with. And if what he was this spring is what he is going forward, then at 25, the Braves got a steal. But four weeks worth of a pitcher being good, four starts worth of a pitcher being good, it's kind of scary to me as someone who has seen Yadier Alvarez on the backfields and almost passed out. So then you have the financial stuff, right? There were just fewer high school players taken. It's going to have repercussions for what happens with college programs going forward and junior colleges.

And I think the impact of the pandemic and what it means for this draft, I think the ripple effects of it, we are still just beginning to understand. But as far as what players are currently on teams in teams farm systems right now, assuming that they sign. Yeah, it was, we're college heavy. And a lot of the mid six figure high schoolers who typically go on day three as teams have a better chance to assess their signability and play with their bonus pools. Very few of those guys were drafted this year. And some of the public mock drafts started falling apart pretty quickly, especially with the second overall selection when the Orioles took Heston Kerstad, whose dog was extremely excited that Heston was drafted so soon. So what were some of the oddities that stood out to you

about this year's draft? Was it more difficult for you and the other public draft experts to predict what was going to happen because of the strange circumstances, because you didn't get to see scouts and executives showing up in the stands at college games leading up to the draft? And were there any teams that took interesting approaches or tried to game this weird draft in some way? I got eight right on my mock. Keith got nine. I think Keith and Jim Callis were tied for the most with nine. That's about as many as is typical to get right in a given year. So even though things got nutty at the top, we all performed pretty close to, well, not all of us, but at the high end of which of us were the most correct, which was in that eight or nine range. That's about what is typically who wins, you know, if you want to call it that at guessing the most picks, right?

It definitely was, you had to go through the agents more this year for sure. The different avenues for information for the mocks are yes, like seeing scouts and executives of import at games late in the year, right? You see a GM at a game in mid-May, it's a signal. That guy's not wasting his time going to a college game in North Carolina unless that team is on that player. And there are definitely mock draft picks the last couple of years that Kylie and I have gotten right because we were in the right place at the right time

or somebody else who we know and feels inclined to text us about something is in the right place at the right time to tell us that you know Matt Klintak saw Alec Boehm or that you know the Mets had a bunch of players in to see Jared Kelnick in late May and so that stuff went away but going through the agents and and talking with the teams who picked behind teams about what they anticipate going what is going to happen in front of them, proved sufficient this year. Then as far as, yeah, the Heston Kersaud thing at two, here's what I've been told. Baltimore last year took Adley Rutschman without calling him. Spencer Torkelson admitted as much on TV after he was drafted.

The Tigers never called him, right? The day of the draft, as teams picking, let's say like three through 11, were communicating with each other and with me and other writers, Baltimore was holding up the process of them understanding what was going to happen in front of them, right? So Baltimore is just secretive and plays this stuff pretty close to the vest. Baltimore is just secretive and plays this stuff pretty close to the vest. There's been a lot of smoke around Mike Elias getting creative. He did it in Houston.

People who have worked with him have told me, yeah, this guy is going to seek to maximize what they do over the course of the entire draft. He's going to explore all avenues. Heston Kerstad specifically, I think, made the most sense for them to cut with, to cut an underslot deal at two. I have him in my 50 future value tier. He's going to be on the overall top 100 prospect list when I updated here in the coming days with the drafted players. I had Torkelson in a tier of his own above Kerstad and the other 50 future value prospects. I had Kerstad ranked behind a couple of the other 50s, who I do prefer to him,

but they all are in the same tier. Kerstad of that tier was likely to go maybe starting at 7, but more likely 9, 10, and then his floor seemed like 12 to Cincinnati. So if you get him to sign a deal for 5 million at pick two, which's good for the player because that's more than he gets at slot at the picks I just mentioned. And it's good for you because in the Orioles case, you're saving, I think it's close to $3 million. Okay. So, and again, I don't know that those numbers are true. That just makes sense based on where Kerstad was likely to go with a slot amount was like at those picks. And so his incentive is to take more than that if he can, even if he's cutting an underslot deal

at two, it's still more than he would have gotten between seven and 12. And so then, yeah, I didn't think it was surprising. It was logical. It was not a thing that had leaked, which good on the Orioles for keeping that in-house. That's a good job. But then what that enabled them to do with the rest of their class, I thought, made their entire group really, really strong. So I had Kerstad, I think, eighth on the board, but he was in the same tier as all but one player ahead of him. So relatively similar evaluations. And so I thought that what Baltimore did made an awful lot of sense. The most bizarre draft was Texas, not only because it was so stylistically odd for them, for the most part, for the most part, Texas's system for the last several years, since I've lived in Arizona and

been on the backfields has been a lot of big projectable athletes, huge tools without stable bat to ball skills a lot of the time. And this draft, you know, with Texas, they kind of went off the board a little bit. Their second rounder, Evan Carter, a bunch of us knew nothing about, right? So in the last 18 hours, I don't know how long it's been, but last like you know day we've all been trying to run down as much information about Evan Carter as we can and he is an interesting prospect I you know I'm still trying to get a get a grip on what Texas did they took a bunch of guys who are those mid six figure high school types in a typical year with like basically their whole draft after their first rounder which in the first rounder was a very vanilla,

up the middle college player who the model spit out really strong. Justin Foskey from Mississippi State, young for the college class at like 21.2 or 21.3, really performed over three years at Mississippi State. I really like Foskey. I think he's going to be a solid big leaguer. I had him, I think 24th. He went 14th, but again,

basically the same future value tier there. Foskew had Holmes all throughout the teens. Not a reach at all for Texas to take him at 14. And then all these weird, interesting, but not really strong, so far as I know it right now, high schoolers throughout the rest of the draft. And it was a thing that even late last night people were texting me about. Like what do you think about this we think this is kind of weird but it seems like there's a changing of the guard maybe going on at Texas as is the case for a lot of the teams that picked from seven through the teens like just all those teams had either new scouting directors or new GM or there were rumors that they're they're changing something

philosophically because things in the recent past have not worked out, which is the case with Texas, which has taken a lot of high school pitching over the last few years, most of which has succumbed to Tommy John. Texas has just had rotten luck as it pertains to pitchers that they've drafted. So those were some of the things that, yeah, I think struck the public differently than me as it pertained to Baltimore, because everyone had just heard, you know, Austin Martin and Asa Lacy and all these guys.

And then really the industry was shocked most by what Texas had done. So you've anticipated a couple of my questions. So I'm going to moosh a couple together, which is, let's start with something you just said. Were there any other teams that are operating under a new regime that you saw starting to really carve out a distinct identity for their amateur departments or indicate to you tendencies that might be useful as you're thinking about guys they might target in future drafts?

Yeah, so the White Sox are one. The White Sox have been very college-heavy, college performer-heavy for the last many years under Nick Hostetler. And some of those guys have worked out, right? Like there's a reason that they have one of the better farm systems in baseball. And some of those guys have had very little margin for error and are kind of clogged together

at the upper levels of that system now. It's a lot of corner only, like really first base type guys. And this year they took Garrett Crochet, the lefty from Tennessee, who people in baseball think that there's like a 10, you know, shot in the dark that he's Chris Sale. Like it is like that, where the delivery is kind of weird. So you don't love it because, you know, it's scary because it's weird, right? But it's not necessarily a bad weird. He only pitched once this spring.

He was, I mean, Tennessee said he was hurt, but everyone just thinks the kid wasn't in shape and wasn't ready to start the season, which is better than his shoulder being hurt, by the way. But yeah, Crochet's like upper 90s with a seven breaking ball. He threw three innings all spring. If you saw those three innings, you left there going,

yeah, I'll take that guy wherever. But if you didn't, I don't know how confident you feel in taking him at all. Maybe he's just like the puns. The crochet puns? Yeah, he's really in on the puns. Yes.

Baseball scouts famously, not only into puns, but cross-stitching in various crafts, famously. But yeah, so the White Sox stylistically different, high upside arm in the first, and then another one in the second in Jared Kelly, who coming out of last summer was the most dominant of the high school pitchers,

was Jared Kelly, a big 6'4", 230, Texas right-handed high schooler with 94 to 96, touch a 7 or an 8, plus changeup. But breaking ball is questionable. It's pretty fringy. And teams just would rather have the guy who's got that natural proclivity for spinning a good breaking ball than the guy who doesn't. And then teams were also concerned about Kelly's physical maturity. He's a really big guy. Now, I will say that when Chris Paddock

was coming out, there were similar concerns. It was fastball changeup only, right? He wasn't as physically maxed out as Jared Kelly was this year, but Paddock was 19. And so the reason he slipped is also the reason that Kelly fell below where we would have all expected he would coming off his performance last summer. So I understand why teams were hesitant to move in on him. And I can't speak to Jared Kelly's fastball carry through the zone. Like Paddocks is, is almost elite. We'll have to there. I'm sure there's pitch data somewhere on

Kelly that I just haven't seen yet that might indicate whether or not his heater plays like Paddocks for real, even though it's, it's just as hard. But yeah, so the White Sox stylistically different Philly as well. Philly, two big upside guys in Mick Abel, the best high school pitcher in the draft, in my opinion, in the first round. And then Casey Martin out of Arkansas, way back in the third round. Martin's got monster tools. He's like an eight runner.

He's got crazy power. He just swings at absolutely everything. And it was especially bad this spring, like totally undiscerning approach. And that has to get way, way better for him to be anything at all. But if it does, he could be a multi-positional player with power. Like even Ian Happ, who strikes out a bunch, Casey Martin could be that type of player who plays better defense at all the positions that Ian Happ tries to play. So I think that's pretty interesting.

You know, we're still trying to get a feel for San Francisco, although I think that we're starting to, that they're on a model type of approach where it's up-to-middle college performers early, and then they start to mix in upside high schoolers towards the middle, which I think they did with Kyle Harrison, the California high school lefty,

who's like a lower slot, two-seam change-up guy. And then some of the other teams, like the opposite of that is the Diamondbacks, who I mentioned in my analysis is just like, it's so clear what type of pitchers the Diamondbacks like now that they've just acquired them on the pro and amateur side pretty consistently over the last two years. So yeah, definitely a changing of the guard in those teams. Mostly, like I said, from seven through the teens, anyone who's got like a new scouting director or a new GM is sort of up in the air. And there are some trends starting to emerge. We haven't talked about the top pick, Spencer Torkelson to the Tigers, which maybe is because it wasn't so surprising.

And we've been talking about the surprises. But for people who don't follow the draft that closely or don't follow amateur baseball that closely. Tell us a little bit about Torkelson. How does he compare to the typical first overall pick in terms of ceiling or safety? And what does he do for Detroit? And typically, I guess the Tigers have been looked on as a pitching strong system. And so this maybe corrects things a little bit. Yeah, I've been lucky enough to watch Tork every other weekend on average for the last three years. He's really remarkable. He's like Andrew Vaughn from last year where even though it is that scary right, right first base profile, he's just been so consistently dominant that everyone scouting and well, maybe not everyone. I actually have spoken to some people

who are kind of scared of the profile and how much swing and miss there was in the zone from tork especially this year he was working at about like it was like close to 60 percent in zone uh contact rate which is a little bit below average but the approach is elite and the power is you know i've got a future seven on the raw it's not like crazy eight raw in my opinion that's i reserve that for gallo and judge but it plays in games because his approach is so good and i think that there are some things with the swing you can do to prevent him from swinging and missing as much as he did the little bit I saw him this season, which was, you know, it was a little bit more stark how, how much he was swinging over the top of some stuff towards the bottom of the strike zone this

year. But he's going to move, he's going to move quickly. I don't think, you know, the Tigers announcement third base, I don't think that's possible. I went back and looked at my high school notes on Tork, right? Because Kylie texted me and said that Tork was going to be announced at third base. And so I went through my old notes from Tork way back in high school when he was just more likely to have, you know, he didn't play third base at ASU. I have notes on him in high school as an outfielder. I've got a three on his arm at that time. I don't think he's going to be able to play third base. It doesn't really matter.

He's just going to rake and get to the big leagues quickly. I think he's going to hit in the middle of the Tigers order and hit like 35 bombs a year and be like an all-star caliber first baseman. So, uh, yeah, he's, he's as stable, uh, uh, a prospect in this draft as any, in my opinion, there are some analysts I've spoken to who are, who are a little put off by how much he's swung and missed in the zone, but I really don't, you know, I don't think it's, I don't think it's anything to be too concerned about. And yeah, the, the, as far as the pitching stuff with Detroit goes, I don't think it's anything to be too concerned about. And yeah, as far as the pitching stuff with Detroit goes,

I don't know if that's an organizational trend. They certainly like a certain type of pitcher. And I do think that they are sneaky good at developing pitchers. I think that because the Tigers have been so bad for the last couple of years that they're easy to take an ideological dump on. But I think that they are really good at developing pitchers. Some of the stuff that the high-speed camera has illuminated for me is the way they've changed some of the guys that they've acquired in recent years for the better, in my opinion. Like Alex Lang,

they got from the Cubs last year. He arrived at the fall league with a much better pitch mix, much better defined breaking stuff than he had while he was with the Cubs. The Tigers are just better developing pitchers than the Cubs have been. So yeah, I think that some of the reason that the Tigers are talked about as an org that prefers pitching has to do with who they've made better, not who they've sought to acquire. I'm curious, are there other teams that might be looking to either shifts in their player development focus or recent successes that are integrating that into their draft strategy? Can this help us to account for, for example, the Cubs taking Jordan Wogo out of Michigan?

I think that if teams didn't have conversations about involving their dev group in this process before this year, that the 20K undrafted free agent phenomena, you know, like the scenario that teams have to deal with almost mandates that you have to include them in the discussion because you have to know who you might be able to sign for 20K is actually an upgrade over what you have in the system. There are certainly teams who are more inclined to involve the dev group in the process than others. And I think having a certain level of confidence in your developmental group enables more freedom in the draft room. I think the Cubs are probably one of those teams. Jordan Nwogu, who they took on day two, the outfielder from Michigan,

him from a swing perspective, it is unorth is unorthodox and they've made relevant swing changes to Nico Horner and to Brennan Davis and a lot of guys who are stock up since draft day, especially in the power output department. And so, yes, I think that you nailed it, that the Cubs are one of those teams who certainly, it seems like they were more, they would be one of the teams who I'd be more inclined to give Jordan and Wogo to based on what they've been able to do with players' swings lately. I think the Reds, with their new dev group, based on who they took, I don't know how involved the new dev group is.

Maybe on the hitting side, because that's been different for a little while now, that it's more integrated, but maybe not on the pitching side. The Dodgers, for sure, it seems almost a lock that their dev group is pretty heavily involved in what they do in the draft. Same for the Yankees. I think that a lot of the higher up dev folks are in the room,

and I just don't know exactly, other than through some of the players that are drafted who clearly need to be changed, that it's hard to find true evidence that that's going on. But yeah, I think that you nailed one with the Cubs for sure. Oh, I would say the Angels probably too. The Angels' strength and conditioning program is really excellent. They draft a lot of the younger players in the drafts.

They took David Calabrese, who's a Canadian outfielder, who's one of the younger guys in the draft and Werner Blakely, who's a big, like six, three, you've seen this type of guy, six, three, one 60, one 70 arms and legs infielder who could put on like 30 pounds of muscle on his frame without like losing a whole lot of athleticism because it is just that type of of build uh and the angels are excellent at making sure that those guys add that weight that they do get stronger and they do start generating power in games they've been um really good about that with the international kids too and that's something that i'm just like lucky enough to see because their complex is five miles from my house right like i can see these

kids developing physically day to day which is a little bit harder for some of the Florida clubs. I also wonder, I have to believe that based on the stuff that's been written about and just talked about throughout the industry about Gary Denbo with the Marlins, that he is heavily involved in their player acquisition and dev process as well. So I want to ask about undrafted guys. First of all, how many of them do you expect to sign in the coming days, given the limited amounts that they can sign for? And if they don't sign, what will they do? I mean, it depends on how old they are and how much school they've had and how much they've played and where, but will some sign internationally?

Will others hope to go back to school, reenter the draft, hold out for IndieBall? When and if there's IndieBall again, what do you think will happen with all of them? And were there any big surprises among players whose names were not called? Yeah, I'm not totally sure what's going to happen with the undrafted free agent pool. I know every team is interested in exploring it very heavily and that a lot of scouts think it's going to be a chaotic free for all, that it's a thing a lot of orgs look at as a huge opportunity. I think the individual financial circumstances of the players involved and their families, given the state of our teetering economy

and how individual families might be feeling it more than others, might impact some players' desire to sign more than others. And there are NPB teams who are interested in bringing some of the harder-throwing college pitchers who went undrafted over to Japan at a price of $200,000, $300,000 per player, bringing some of the harder throwing college pitchers who went undrafted over to Japan at like a price of 200, 300K per player, which is, you know, obviously way more than what any of the MLB teams can offer at this point. Way to go MLB. Then as you mentioned, yeah, you've got the players who, you know, minor league contraction is a variable here too. Farm system quality and

whether or not you can not you're actually upgrading what you already have in the system is a team to team variable. Then you've got, as you mentioned, the colleges who have a finite amount of scholarship money to offer to baseball players, which by the way, is totally insufficient. It's a joke how few scholarships big D1 programs actually have. And so you're going to have some groups who are going back to school or are going to matriculate to college that cause a surplus, a spillover at certain schools where they are going to have to make decisions about scholarships. And a bunch of kids are going to transfer. A bunch of them are going to go to junior colleges. A bunch of

them are going to trickle down to mid-major type schools. Some of them in major schools, especially if athletic departments continue to flounder financially in the fall without football bringing in as much money as it does, they're going to be the ones who are like baseball is a threat to just be cut from their athletic program. So all of these things might occur. The two players who were, I can't believe didn't get drafted, were Tommy Mace, especially Mace, and Jack Lefwich,

the two pitchers at Florida who are a big part of their weekend rotation. I've got a 40-plus on Mace, which is essentially like a second-round grade. And Florida's coach has been pretty good about, maybe not good about it. There's a lot of buzz about him trying to convince kids to stay back at school a lot of years. Promising players, you know, this and that to try to get them to stay at school.

And so, yeah, here in this situation with the Florida guys, they're gonna go back. I think it'd be really interesting for Tommy Mace, especially to bet on himself, take 300K, maybe even more. He's pretty talented from an NPB team and try to go over there and pitch well for about a half a decade and come back here as an unrestricted free agent. I think that's something that he and his advisor should consider. But then again, if he goes back to Florida and is just as good as he was this year

and basically has been for most of his career, although he did have a stretch where he wasn't very good. He came to Florida with quite a bit of profile and for a little while wasn't doing very well. But if he's as good as he was for the first four weeks of this year, next year, then he probably just goes somewhere in the first or second round and gets a bigger payday up front than he would if he were to go to Japan right now. So yeah, the Florida program in general is kind of stacked based on who did not go. And I do think we're going to see some of the harder

throwing college arms who didn't go be courted by Japanese teams, maybe Korean teams too. I mean, why not? I think it would be smart for the teams in Asia to adjust their restrictions on foreign born players that are rosterable. This is just a huge opportunity for them too

to make baseball a little bit more global and kind of even the playing field a little bit. Why not try to take a chunk out of this whale carcass that MLB is if you're the great white shark that MPB wants to be, right? Why not adjust your rules on the fly now to try to gash at MLB. Given the instability of MLB, if you're NPB or KBO and you have an opportunity with how global media works now, why not try to take a chunk out of MLB and see if you can assert yourself on a global scale a little bit more, especially as MLB kind of teeters on the brink of disaster, seemingly, for the next couple of years. So that's what's most fascinating about this undrafted free agent process for me is what it opens up globally.

So you mentioned earlier Texas and Baltimore, and this question is obviously wildly premature and hard to answer literally the day after the draft concluded. But are there other teams whose classes either really impressed or disappointed you at first blush? Do you want to inflate some egos or break some hearts among our listeners? So I think that it is useful to evaluate the draft classes right now.

Certainly the players' careers need to pan out, right? But I do think it's useful to consider them good or bad based on the information that we have right now, right? That's going to change. But I think that there's some merit to saying like, hey, here's who I did like. Cleveland, there was a stretch where Cleveland's first four picks were all ranked within like five spots on my rankings on the board. They took Carson

Tucker, the high school shortstop from here in Arizona, Cole Tucker's brother, in the first round. That was under slot, about 2 million there. So they cut about a million on that slot. And then that enabled them to spread that money around over their next three picks. And so they got a 40 plus future value prospect in Tucker and then another one in Petey Halpin and then another one in Tanner Burns. And then, so they collected a pretty robust group of guys based on what they did in the first round, cutting in a high priority way. So I like what Cleveland did. Milwaukee, Milwaukee didn't do anything fancy. They had five picks. They didn't have a comp round pick anywhere

and they just went college value in the first round with Garrett Mitchell Who's has huge tools i'm skeptical about how he's one of these like explosive power straight line speed types But i'm not sure how athletic he really is like he is kind of a stiff guy But he has performed at ucla aside from his freshman year, which was kind of rough. He really performed at UCLA. He does have clear physical gifts. So they got him in the first round.

And then they just took college value guy after college value guy for the next five rounds. They announced Xavier Warren, who's like a switch hitting Midwest college guy who had a big sophomore year. They announced him as a catcher. He caught in high school. He played the left side of the infield in college. So that's an interesting thing. Freddie Zamora, their second round pick, I had ranked in the 30s.

He tore his ACL at the onset of the spring, didn't play this spring. It's probably why he fell, but I thought he absolutely belonged in the back of the first round comp area based on talent. So they scooped him up. And yes, I really thought Milwaukee's class was interesting too. Obviously, I just loved the Cubs getting Ed Howard at 16.

I had him ranked 11th. As I mentioned earlier, Baltimore's class was good. Zach Veen falling to Colorado at 9. Also pretty great for Colorado. I had Veen ranked fifth. The rest of their class was fine, but getting Veen at nine I thought was fantastic. And then the Dodgers, all three of the pitchers who the Dodgers were reportedly considering drafting at 29, Landon Knack, a fifth-year senior from East Tennessee State who, Ben, have you seen anything about Landon Knack?

This dude is 51 strikeouts versus like one walk over 25 innings this spring. They considered him at 29, ended up getting him later. And then Clayton Beater, who I had at 19, they were able to draft 66th. This is another guy who, when you see his pitch data, you guys are going to like barf with excitement. Like it's so ridiculous. But he's almost 22. He's had a TJ.

He's got a relatively short track record of performance because he was in the bullpen earlier in his career. But I really liked the three arms that the Dodgers got. And then, yeah, Kansas City had a great draft. They just were in position with a bunch of picks that their draft was really good. And then San Diego. San Diego is the other one where Robert Hassel

was the first high schooler taken. He Diego is the other one where Robert Hassel was the first high schooler taken. He's arguably the safest one in the draft because the hit tool is so advanced. Then they got two premium athletic frame-based projection guys in Justin Lang, a high school Texas righty, who was 88 to 93 for me last summer and then spiked way into the mid to upper 90s this spring. Owen Casey, a big 6'4", lefty hitting Canadian outfielder. They were their next two picks. And then they ended up getting Cole Wilcox, who was a top 20 player in the draft for just about everybody.

He fell because of signability stuff. I assume that they're going to get a deal done with him in the third round. So that's great value there. They probably had to do some other creative stuff financially to get that done. And then their fifth rounder, Jagger Haynes, is just an interesting athletic high school lefty pitcher. I thought San Diego's class was great as well. What about the Astros, who were shorter on picks than the other teams because they were

deprived for their cheating? So they had just four picks in the draft. One of those was a comp pick, and they will miss their first and second rounder next season. So when those penalties were assessed, a lot of people thought they were too light. But what do you think the effect will be of missing a couple drafts on a team's farm system and the outlook for that franchise? I think it's pretty severe. I had someone text me last night about how their perspective on the punishment had changed just by kind of seeing what Houston was left with.

Not that the players that they took are bad, because they're not. They take some interesting players. They got Alex Santos, who's your, you know, a typical tier two high school projection arm like upper 80s low 90s but has that 6-3-1-70 frame and a good breaking ball and then they took a couple interesting college performers with their their next with their last few picks but it's it's not just how few picks that they have but what it does to the amount of flexibility that they have throughout the draft, which essentially is zero. And so yeah, without the comp pick next year,

they took Santos with the comp pick that they got for Garrett Cole. Without that next year, I think it's a pretty severe punishment, actually, that if you look back at other franchises, when they have a failed draft, not when they don't have a whole lot of picks, although sometimes when they don't have a whole lot of picks, especially early, but when they just don't do well, if that happens for even just two consecutive years,

as is almost assuredly going to happen here with Houston, it makes the farm system down the line really strapped, like really, really strapped. So I think that the repercussions of this are pretty severe and certainly worse than people and like their gut reaction was upon initially hearing the punishment. I don't think people have properly gauged how bad this is going to be. I think this is something that's going to rear its head for Houston two, three years down the line. And at that time, I think that maybe we'll all wake up and say, this hamstrung the organization pretty severely.

So you obviously talk to scouts a lot, both to help to source our org lists and to source information about the draft. Do you have a sense of how scouts who helped to prepare this draft and worked for years in some cases to scout these players and then have been furloughed because of the pandemic are feeling right now? How are they sort of planning to approach baseball going forward? Do they have optimism that they will be able to find additional scouting work? Or do you think that we'll see some attrition in the ranks? Yeah, it's weird that the stuff that Kylie and I wrote about in Future Value, which was kind of

not pessimistic, but definitely concerned for the future of scouting and sort of pointed at reasons for scouting to want to change, try to fit into something that teams find more viable. All that stuff is happening at an accelerated pace because of the pandemic. Some of it has to do with travel, right? The PG National, the first big event for the 2021 draft, is next week. And I want to go, but I don't want to fly. You know what I mean? And teams aren't even, I'm not even sure if teams are going to be allowed to go. And so what we have right now in the short term is a situation where teams out of necessity have to use video.

Teams out of their owner's mandate are trying to cut costs. Some of them have furloughed scouts. The baseball season, especially on the minor league side, is not necessarily guaranteed to happen. And if it does, probably not something until later in the summer into the fall. And so all of the things that seem to be working over the long term against the scouting industry, they're now just all here. And yeah, the morale across the industry is not great right now. It sucks when you've got a staff of like two dozen people who, yeah, have been working for over a year on this class. You start collecting information on guys as their underclassmen.

And you have 20, 24, 30 people working on a thing and you draft three players, you draft five players. It sucks and people are scared. And I think the solution is to try to understand how as tech and video move into the space trying to to get a grip on what you can do to i hate using this phrase but add value like what is the space that you can operate to help evaluate these players that the technology and the video cannot and yeah the travel part too like the it's there's just there are all sorts of convenient reasons for these hatchet men types

at the top of some of these orgs these corporate like you guys know what i'm talking about there are all sorts of convenient reasons for them now to to start to cut their scouting staffs down. And it was a thing that a lot of them wanted to do anyway. But now you have reasons to do it, to point to and go, hey, you know, like, you know, I'm just waiting at some point for some of these consultant types to be like, yeah, for scouts traveling is bad for the environment, right? So we're getting rid of some of them. They're just going to start to point toward socially acceptable reasons to doing it rather than just say like, yeah, we're going to fire all these people. So I don't know what's going to happen, but I do think that I do know that my friends are scared. So presumably some of these top picks are going to start signing and teams are going to try to start developing them somehow. But as you noted,

seems sort of unlikely that there's going to be a real minor league season of any kind at this point. So what do you think we will get instead? What will teams attempt to do so that these prospects of theirs are not missing an entire year of development time? Will there just be an expanded Arizona Fall League or will teams just train guys kind of on their own with drills and scrimmages? What do you think will happen? So this is just the industry banter. It is conclusions that people are drawing from logic and some rumors. The minor league season certainly hasn't been officially canceled. It would be journalistically irresponsible to report something like that as fact, even though it is a widely held belief in the industry. belief in the industry. But yeah, it does sound like there will be something. Obviously, we have the taxi squad situation, right? So you'll have your active roster and then we have the taxi squad. That taxi squad is going to be there in the event of injury or illness. And that in addition to the players on teams, 40 man rosters, that there will be other high-end probably more advanced

types of prospects who occupy roster spots on the taxi squad and so some of the players will develop during that period of play and then yes it does sound like there will be an increased length to some type of fall league or leagues whether whether that's in Arizona, which seems highly likely, also maybe expanding into Florida to some degree. We have the Puerto Rican Winter League, we have the Dominican Winter League. It's possible that players who are on rosters in those places will be given more reps than they ordinarily would at the behest of the player or their representative or their MLB team just to try to get some of these guys more reps. I think a couple of the players who were drafted this week might go right onto the taxi squad. There's a non-zero chance

that we see Reed Detmers, the lefty from Louisville who the Angels drafted 10th overall. That guy's really polished and the Angels need pitching, right? Like the Angels have just dealt with injuries at the top, at the very top of the minors and on their big league staff for the last several years. And so this is exactly the type of guy who his skills and the situation of the team that drafted him might enable him to just pitch in the big leagues this year

without ever seeing time in the minor leagues beyond what he does tuning up on the taxi squad. And that's going to be really interesting. And I think Garrett Crochet, who the White Sox took, is another possibility for that. They ideally, especially in a shortened season, that makes things a little bit more variable as far as who might win these divisions or whatever we have. Having a guy like that in your bullpen is a big deal. Same with Clayton Beater with the Dodgers. That guy's 94 to 97 with a plus plus breaking ball. That plays in the bullpen right now. So we'll see a couple guys who, if the teams have incentive and the player is the right skill-based fit, maybe we'll see them in the

big leagues right now. I worry about COVID, period. I especially worry about a bunch of scouts, most of whom are middle-aged and above men, packing together in the scout section. It seems like a recipe for disaster no matter when it's occurring. So I don't know what's gonna happen as far as how it gets scouted, but I do think that

we will have some form of minor leaguers playing baseball but i don't think it's likely to occur anywhere other than a controlled developmental environment probably one for which there aren't even really stats kept all right well with that we will will let Eric go so that he can take a nap and have a well-deserved snack. Eric, thank you for joining us. You can find Eric on Twitter at Longenhagen, and you can find his book with erstwhile Fangraphs writer Kylie McDaniel, Future Value, The Battle for Baseball's Soul, and How Teams Will Find the Next Superstar from Triumph Books. Eric, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me, guys. Okay, just want to let you all know that ESPN will be airing a documentary called Long Gone

Summer on Sunday. It's a 30 for 30 about the 1998 home run race. Sam and I will be discussing that and doing an interview about it in our next episode, which will be up after the documentary airs. You don't have to watch it to listen to that forthcoming episode, but you may enjoy it more. So check it out on Sunday if you're interested. In the meantime, you can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some small money amount to help keep the podcast going. Chad Jobin, Philip Tapley, Sean P. Montana, Keep the podcast going. Chad Jobin, Philip Tapley, Sean P. Montana, Jake Silverman, and Matt Gillette.

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Ain't a deed for our last to be made Saviors, nothing left to save