Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 159: The Carlos Gomez Extension and the 2013-14 Free Agent Class

Episode Date: March 14, 2013

Ben and Sam discuss the Brewers’ Carlos Gomez extension and the increasing scarcity of impact free agents.

All right, fine. I'll be a dwarf. But my name is Carlos. Carlos, a dwarf? Good morning, and welcome to episode 159 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus in New York, New York. I am Ben Lindberg in Long Beach, California. You are Sam Miller. Taylor, before we start on today's topic, we have, I guess, I don't know if it's an errors and omissions segment, but it's a follow-up to something we talked about yesterday. Yeah, I think it's an error, or certainly it's a clarification. Yeah, okay. So yesterday we talked about why position players don't... People who didn't hear yesterday are going to wonder how we

possibly talked about position players blocking home plate yesterday, but we did. And I said that something about physics and how the fielder who tried to block the plate would have the worst of it if a runner ran into him because of physics. And a gentleman named Paul wanted to clarify that Newton has actually taken care of this for us and that the runner has no advantage over the catcher because he is, quote, running. The force exerted on the catcher by the runner in a collision is exactly the same force that is exerted on the runner by the catcher to stop the runner. So yeah. So I just want to, yeah we we should note that

seems to be correct which i think both of us had heard at some point in our lives but didn't internalize i think that the um without trying to defend myself because i have absolutely no what i no idea what i'm talking about but i think think that the point holds, which is that the runner gets to decide. The runner who kind of creates the collision, who instigates the collision, gets to decide where the contact point is. And so the runner can focus all the energy into something strong like his shoulder and put it into something weak on the defender or something defenseless. So as an analogy, when we were talking about boxers and liver shots, the boxer's hand absorbs the same amount of energy as the opponent's liver and yet clearly the guy who gets hit in the liver is the worse off for it

because he didn't get to choose where he was hit and with what. Does that seem fair? Does that seem right? Yeah, I think so. And then the example that I was thinking of to make this clear in my own mind was a car that is driving fast slamming into a stationary car, which is bad for both cars. into a stationary car, which is bad for both cars. But that's not really analogous because there's no, I guess, targeting of a weak point going on. But I guess...

Great stuff. This is great stuff. Newton's laws of motion have only been around for 325 years or so, so we're still kind of wrapping our heads around those. Okay, today's topic? Today's topic is Carlos Gomez, the Brewers center fielder. So Gomez signed an extension with the Brewers that will keep him in Milwaukee through 2016. He was signed for $4.3 million for this year.

He would have been a free agent next winter. He will not any longer be a free agent next winter. He will be a free agent after 2016 when he will be, I believe, 30 years old, turning 31 that winter. And so I sure like it. What do you think? I like it too. I mean, I guess we both like Gomez.

When we did the Brewers preview podcast, it was Ken Funk, right? Was not a big Carlos Gomez fan? Yeah, I don't know why it is. I think I have found myself feeling really emotionally attached to him. And I think that the reason might be you know that I love Peter Borges more than anybody in baseball. And I've often compared Borges to Gomez. And I think that that has actually made me like Gomez more. I think they're, in a lot of ways, very similar players.

Well, yeah. I mean, I guess maybe there's some lingering bias against Gomez because for a while there, he was not a good player or not a particularly good player. I guess his defense was maybe so good that he was at least kind of breaking even and worth playing even when he wasn't getting on base and wasn't hitting for power. And I don't know if you are a sabermetric sort of person who likes walks, then maybe you don't like Gomez because he really doesn't walk. Um, but you just kind of have to look beyond that at all the things that he does do well. Um, and there, there are some, I was just looking at his, uh, he was ranked the 34th

best prospect in baseball by Kevin Goldstein in 2007. I was just looking at his blurb from the top 101 that year. Kevin wrote, To rank this high with a good-not-great 281-slash-359-slash-423 line at AA means tool city and plenty to dream on, as the scouting lingo goes. This isn't just any old dream. This is a Technicolor masterpiece with cupcakes and puppy dogs and some other things we probably shouldn't talk about in a family publication.

There are those in the Mets organization who think he's the team's best prospect, envisioning another Jose Reyes but in center field. Plenty to dream on indeed. Wow, he had a.359 on base percentage. Yeah. That sounds pretty uh i guess it's i mean it's kind of unusual i i feel like it's not unusual for a player to develop power as he gets older that's kind of the the typical progression but it seems sort of unusual to do that without really any corresponding improvement in plate discipline or walk rate

or anything. I mean, Gomez's walk rate last year was the second worst in a full season of his career. He swung at everything. He struck out a whole lot more than he walked. And yet he still hit for really good power, not just for a center fielder, great power for a center fielder, but, but good compared to anyone really. Uh,

yeah, I wouldn't think that plate discipline and, and power spikes would actually, uh, correlate that strongly, to be honest. I don't know. I mean,

I mean, I would think on, I would think on base percentage and, uh, plate discipline would, um, I mean, I would think on base percentage and plate discipline would, I mean, obviously. But I would think that with, I mean, I don't know, to be honest, at a certain point, I wouldn't really necessarily want a guy trying to do something that he has been thus far unable to do.

I mean, it seems to me that his power came, well, he's gotten stronger. I mean, he's working his way into his physical prime. He pulled more balls last year than he had before. And he hits more fly balls than speedsters probably would have been taught to hit 20 years ago. And so, you know, he's a guy who has increased his isolated power every year since his rookie season. And he has not done anything for plate discipline there hasn't been any uh related growth but you know even last year um he did cut his strikeout rate some he did have a career best barely i mean his strike every last year was previous two years like

right on his his career rate yeah it was lower when he came up and then went up in 2010 and 2011 and then he cut it right last year um but you know i mean i don't know he's not he's not i think the thing that's really nice about um a stat like warp is that um it keeps you from fixating on the flaw because you see the whole picture and you uh it it embeds the flaw in it so it's not ignoring it but you don't have to obsess over it and make it seem like that's the only thing that defines him and um you know he's basically he's a two to four win player depending on your uh on your computer on your website on your ur your URL. And he does that even though he does things that are, I think, probably infuriating to some Brewers fans

and that maybe 10 years ago we would have had a hard time looking past. I guess I'm maybe more worried that the defense won't hold up and I don't really have a great sense. I've always thought of him as one of the probably five best center fielders in baseball. But his numbers took a little bit of a dip last year. He went from finishing fourth in fielding Bible voting in 2011 in basically half a season to ninth in 2012. So those guys don't think he's an elite fielder. It adds a huge element of risk if you can't count on 5-10 extra runs of defense from him over the next four years. Because if he's a guy who's going to be a plus 5 or a plus 10 center fielder until he's 30,

then there's virtually no way this deal goes wrong. That alone is worth $8 million a year. He's coming off his best base running year, too. He is. He's a good base runner. He's 86% stolen base rate over the last three years. He's, what, 37 out of 43 last year. And how many runs do we have him worth? 4.4. So here's the question, though. He would have been 27 when he hit the free agent market. And I think that's what BJ Upton was. And BJ Upton got a huge contract from Atlanta as a 27-year-old, even though BJ Upton has been

significantly worse than Michael Bourne over the last three, four years. And Bourne is, I think, 31, which is what Gomez will be in four years when he hits free agency. So it's kind of surprising, to be honest, that he would sign this extension. He's a Boris guy, and sometimes Boris guys will sign extensions, but a lot of times they're timed sort of well so that the player still hits free agency in his peak. And Gomez might be the kind of player who the market doesn't want to see after the age of 30, no matter what. And he might have actually turned down or missed an opportunity to really cash in, because over the last two years, I think you could argue that he's been as good as BJ Upton,

and maybe better and very similar to BJ Upton. So if he had hit free agency as a 27-year-old, I mean, that's a pretty good market comparison to take into meetings with teams. Yeah. And I feel like given the state of free agent classes these days, almost any good player who's a free agent is kind of in a good position. I was just looking at the free agents or the guys who are going to be free agents next winter if they don't sign an extension or something between now and then. And it's really a very, very thin crop just because of all the extensions for young players and guys like Gomez, who probably would have been free agents at one

point in the past, but will not now. It's kind of, I mean, it's headlined by Jose Molina, of course. But after Molina, it's kind of a big drop off to Robinson Cano, assuming that he doesn't sign an extension. And there are some center fielders who are decent who are on the market. Like who? Well, there's Ellsbury. There's Chris Young, who I think has an option that might not be picked up. There's Granderson, if you consider him a center fielder at this point. So there's that. I mean, there are very few star-level players.

There's Brian McCann, kind kinda, who's got question marks. There's older guys like Beltran or Chu. There are some decent starters, I guess. Josh Johnson, Matt Garza, Corota. A couple guys, Lincecum and Halliday, who would have looked like really marquee free agents until recently, but now maybe not so much. So I wonder, I mean, clearly this is a trend towards fewer free agents and teams locking up players early. And I wonder whether it will ever swing back in the other direction and whether we'll see the kind of free agent classes we used to see or not. I mean, I guess it's certainly not a bad thing for baseball, I guess, for teams to lock up players

early, which maybe allows them to compete if these are team-friendly extensions without huge payrolls and people like to see players stay put and spend large parts of their careers with a single team that's probably not a bad thing either i guess i sort of miss the ability to remake your team in one off season i wonder whether there will be less uh fluctuation from year to year in team records if if free agency is not really an option or not an option to remake a roster in a single offseason? I don't know. We've had three teams really drastically remake themselves in the last two offseasons, right?

The Blue Jays this year, the Marlins last year, and if you include kind of the calendar year, the Dodgers, since June. So I don't know. Maybe – I don't know that I'm worried about being unable to remake yourself. Well, I guess if we see more trades, that's not a bad thing either. Trades are fun. Trades are fun. I could see looking at that free agent crop, and even though it seems overall fairly weak, especially for pitchers, I could see looking at it and saying that from Gomez' perspective, if Ellsbury has a bounce-back year and Young is on the market and maybe Chu sticks at center field all season long, and so then he goes on the market as a potential center fielder,

and I think Granderson will definitely try to position himself as a center fielder. That could actually have buried him a little bit. Possibly. I could see that being part of the calculus. It's funny, in Gomez's player comment in the current annual, there's a sentence that says, Gomez remains as hacktastic as they come, offering it more pitches than any NL regular,

posting walk-to-strikeout ratios near the league bottom and constantly swinging for the fences, essentially doing everything he can to avoid taking advantage of his speed. It's sort of funny that there's still a perception that maybe what he's doing is counterproductive because his speed is sort of his most salient skill and he's not just hitting the ball on the ground and running fast. Whereas it seems like power is maybe his greatest skill at this point, even though speed is still something he has. Yeah. I mean, he had 200 isolated power last year,

which is corner outfield kind of quality. I like this from 2007. He has great speed, but is more suited to right field. Huh, is right. So one last thing. I wrote a couple weeks ago about the Brewers' farm system from 10 years ago, which was ranked the number one system in baseball, and the exercise was to sort of see how long the effects of having a top farm system last through, you know, by keeping your guys and by spinning them off for new pieces and whether

10 years from now that farm system still has echoes. And Gomez will, the Brewers have two first round draft picks that they got as compensation for Prince Fielder. So those guys will keep that farm systems production going if either one of them pans out. But Gomez will definitely do so. extensions are team friendly and that most players who are re-signed by their teams do somewhat better than free agents that aren't signed by their teams, then you could say that