Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1657: The Stars Were Bright, Fernando

Episode Date: February 19, 2021

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the Baltimore Orioles trending on Twitter because of their 0.0 percent FanGraphs playoff odds, what that figure really signifies, and how teams tend to respond to pessimistic projections, then break down why the record-breaking 14-year extension signed by superstar shortstop Fernando Tatis Jr. is a windfall for him, […]

You just don't step inside to the 14 years It's so hard to keep my own head That's what I say, you know Wrapping the dealer Hanging on your street I was a dog That I tried to mate But it's been 14 years of silence

It's been 14 years of pain It's been 14 years and I've gone forever And I'll never have again Well Hello and welcome to episode 1657 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs We will! And I thought to myself, why in the world would the lowly Baltimore Orioles be trending today? And it turns out it was your fault. I mean, not you personally, but you, the editorial second person plural. It was Fangraph's fault because MLB, the MLB Twitter account, tweeted out the Fangraph's playoff odds.

And as everyone immediately noticed, the Orioles were the lone team at 0.0 percent and people were displeased and also making fun of the poor Orioles did you feel bad I was just mostly surprised that the thing that people decided to latch on to when they looked at our playoff odds was us saying that the Orioles had no shots. Because, well, granted, it is unusual, slightly, for a literal 0% odd to show itself. It's like, you know, that's not a thing that you always see. It's odd. I think that people would agree that the chances of the Orioles

making the postseason are minute, very small, très petite, one might say. So, yes, I was a bit amused by that but but look baltimore it's not personal it's it's it's not personal you you gotta you gotta prospect in the top five of the top 100 so it's not that we dislike you it's just that we are taking a realistic view of your chances of winning this year and and i will say i don't think all that inconsistent with the messaging of the orioles themselves Yeah. It's not as if they're out there offering much hope and faith. So yeah. And the playoff odds don't hate your team. I mean, in this specific case, they do, but not because of any personal bias, just because of the objective

methodology. It's what the projections and the stats say. Sorry, Orioles fans. It's not Fangraph's fault. Blame Mike Elias and Orioles ownership or Orioles players even if you want to, but not Fangraph's. They're just reporting the facts here and dashing your dreams of the miracle O's. And I should note that the 0.0, I mean, I get why people picked up on it because it's like, hey, spring training is starting. Pitchers and catchers are reporting. It's a new season. Optimism reigns supreme.

And then Fangraphs comes out like the wet blanket and says, hey, you, you have no chance, zero chance at all. So I understand why that would be demoralizing. But I should note that that's rounded down, right? So it's not literally saying that it's inconceivable. I mean, it's pretty inconceivable. I can't quite conceive of the Orioles making the playoffs in a full 162-game season. But statistically speaking, it's not saying it's impossible. It's just that, and I was talking to david appleman and sean

dolan are about this there are 20 000 daily runs of the playoff odds yes and so according to them they said that the orioles would have to make the playoffs in 10 of the 20 000 to be displayed at 0.1 on that day and so 10 out of 20 000 that's a tall order for the orioles but they have had individual runs i mean they've had like one or two of the 20 000 on any given day the orioles will make the playoffs so i am saying there's a chance yeah it is a it is a very minute chance it is it is very small but it is not a thing that has failed to materialize in every single one of the multiverses, just in the vast, vast majority of them. It's like, what's that Shakespeare quote? The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.

Sure, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's like the Doctor Strange odds. What is it? The 1 in 14,605. It's a little bit better than that, actually, the Orioles' chance of making the playoffs better than 7 one-millionths of 1%. Yeah, and in none of our scenarios is someone snapping their fingers and making half the

league just disappear. Just a bunch of the minors. Yeah, I think when the Fangrass playoff odds were at ESPN, Appelman was saying they insisted on displaying that as like less than 0.1% or greater than 99.9% just to make clear that it's not literally zero or 100 to head off those kinds of complaints. So I guess you could consider that. But on the other hand, you got people talking, you were trending on Twitter. So that's something and for not a terrible reason, unless you're an Orioles fan. Although it did elicit the standard round of beat writers talk to the players and say,

hey, what do you think about these nerds who said you have no chance, even though your season hasn't started yet? And I get it. If I were a beat writer, I'm sure I would be doing that too. But you had the usual round of responses and Brandon Hyde saying it's the least of my concerns. I'm not worried about an article. Granted because he tends to be sort of a statistically inclined sort. He made some comments about it too and said, I think the last two years we've been projected to finish last and I don't think we've done it yet. I think they actually did do it two years ago. They were last, but not last year. It's true.

The pandemic shortened schedule, bailed them out. He said, I think we've outplayed projections every year that I've been up there and the plan is to outplay the projections again i think we have a better chance than 0.0 percent for sure but we're just going to try to play so low bar better than 0.0 percent but uh if i were john means that's probably the attitude i would have about this too yeah i don't i don't listen i don't begrudge any player looking at that and sort of taking umbrage and deciding that they're going to say, no, we're better than that. I mean, you are correct.

And Lee Rutschman was the number one overall pick. So, you know, the Orioles did finish in last place at least that one time. But I always find this particular news cycle to be kind of strange because it is an impersonal calculation on the part of our projections. There is no ghost in the machine that says, I hate Old Bay seasoning, so the Orioles shall be last. So on the one hand, I feel like getting overly wound around the axle around that stuff is a little bit a little bit goofy. But I also don't understand why, you know, we have to like spend time being like defensive of our projections either. It's like, honestly, who cares? Like this is not a good team. And they know that. And that's OK.

They have a plan that hopefully will work and then they will be a good team and they'll look at their odds and they'll be like, our odds are good. We shall make the post season or their odds will be middling because they're in a hard division. And then, and then I think they can say, no, we are a good team. We shall overcome the Yankees and everyone will clap and we will be happy

for them. And then it'll be, then that'll make sense too. But I, I just, I wonder, and again, I am not going to fault beat writers for asking these questions because this is a question to ask.

And it's early in spring training. And you can only ask how long that guy's going to take to get back on the mound and how long that guy's hamstring is going to take to feel better so many times before you run out of stuff to say. So I understand them asking the question. them asking the question but i do wonder what threshold you would have to clear before this becomes a non-obvious question for a beat writer which again i don't mean as a slight on them i think that they have a hard job and this is a perfectly reasonable thing to ask about but i also wonder like if it was at 10 would the baltimore beat have been like less interesting yeah right and sometimes the projections turn out to be right to the extent that you can ever say projections were right.

You know, teams play in accordance with the projections. Of course, if the Orioles do not make the playoffs this year, Van Graaffs can't declare victory. And see, it was impossible. It literally was 0.0 and not 0.1. We'll never know. But I get it. Like, you know, the Pittsburgh Pirates weren't trending for

their playoff odds being point whatever percent they were. I guess it's just the impossibility of the Orioles making the playoffs. People instinctively resent being told that their season is over before it begins. So I get that. And that's not literally what the projections are saying if you really look under the hood. And yes, if I were Brandon Hyde or John Means, I would certainly not say, yep, you know what? They're right. Let's pack it in. Let's head home.

They just got there. So of course, they're going to use that for motivation in some cases. And it's bulletin board material in the clubhouse. You look for motivation any way you can find it if you have a chip on your shoulder and if you want to treat the fangrass playoff odds as the antagonist that you are trying to prove wrong then more power to you it certainly makes the break room less awkward than really taking it to the you know front office folks who are deciding to embark on a teardown strategy. So I'm happy for us to play the minor villain for a day.

And if that helps John Means to motivate himself on any given morning, then go forth and do, young man. That sounds great. Band together against the common antagonist of the dispassionate playoff odds have it out for the orioles isn't dan simborski like from baltimore i mean yes you know perhaps anything you'd think he would be uh putting his thumb on the scale in favor of the orioles so well see this is this is why we do a 50 5050 mix of Zips and Steamer to keep Dan in check because otherwise that guy, he'd just go hog wild. Exactly.

Yeah, it is funny, though, that the Rockies and Pirates with their 0.2 and 0.4 playoff odds respectively were like, eh, no, it's fine. We don't have to talk about this. No, it's fine. We don't have to talk about this. If it's any consolation, and I'm sure it's not, Fangraphs actually believes that the Orioles are not the worst team in baseball, that it is actually the Pirates who, if you were sort of schedule agnostic, if every team were playing in the same division against the same opponent, somehow the true talent of the Orioles is projected to be better than the Pirates. The Pirates are the worst, but the Pirates are in the NL Central

and the Orioles are in the AL East, and that accounts for the even lower playoff odds for Baltimore. I don't think that anyone would have noticed if they did not have the delightfully amusing and discordant visual of the happy, smiling Oriole looking at 0.0% odds, which just felt like a very

we-are-still-in-the-midst are still in the midst of a pandemic kind of a vibe. So yeah, I was joking with Craig Goldstein of Baseball Perspectives who, you know, whenever your odds come out, there are going to be fans who are mad about it. And, you know, people were mad at the way that they were projecting the central and people thought they were underrating the, you know, I think they thought they were underrating the Cardinals and that they thought that the brave stuff was sort of silly and then our turn was about the oriole so you never know what twitter is gonna get excited

about on any given day i suppose yeah on ringer slack we actually have a customized emoji that's called Oriol's Grimace. Oh, no. It's just the Oriol's bird face grimacing as if he just smelled something bad or detects danger behind him. And mostly we use it to make Mallory Rubin sad when the Oriol's come up and we all chime in with the Oriol's Grimace emoji. But, yeah, the smiling face can be discordant when it comes to the orioles these days however here's my segue i know someone who has a smiling face it's fernando tatis and it's every san diego padres fan so we're gonna get to the the top 100 list that came out at fancrafts

this week shortly we will bring on eric longenh, who wrote the list to talk about this year's crop of top prospects and the pandemic and the past prospect eligibility of Fernando Tatis. But now there's the news that we were expecting. It was clear that this was coming, that there had been some talks, but perhaps we were not prepared for the length of this contract because Fernando Tatis Jr. is now committed to the San Diego Padres for longer than I care to think about, frankly. And I think everyone has had to reckon with their own mortality in the wake of this contract and projecting forward to see how old they will be when Fernando Tatis is next eligible for free agency.

It's like when Bryce Harper signed his 13-year deal a couple of years ago and everyone was like, I'm going to be how old when that's done? And now it's a couple years later, and it's 14 years. So this is the longest contract in baseball history, 14 years, $340 million, so longest contract and third largest contract. longest contract and third largest contract. So the thought of the just turned 22 year old Tatis signing a contract that will take him through his age 35 season in 2034 made me feel some feelings. I stared into the abyss and the Tatis extension stared back. But even as a non Padres fan, it's hard not to like the idea of one of the most exciting and charismatic players in the sport staying put and cashing in. I am just thrilled, Ben. I think that saying that this is exciting for him and San Diego folks is underselling it.

I think this is exciting for baseball. This has been a good baseball story. Absolutely. Yeah. Unequivocally a good baseball story. Now, maybe you think that Tatis could do slightly better in arbitration and slightly better in free agency. And so you look at this and say, well, he left a little bit of money on the table. But this is just a good story. Fernando Tatis Jr. is wildly talented. If you look at the Zips projections for the next 14 years, which is a wild statement to say out loud. for the next 14 years, which is a wild statement to say out loud. That's a goofy one, but that's the thing that we have said that Ben Clemens included in his assessment of this deal for us at Fangraphs. He is just going to be, if everything goes right

and we have good reason to think it will and he stays healthy, he is going to be a mainstay at the top of the leaderboards for a long, long time. I love the top of the leaderboards for a long long time i love the idea of and we have talked about this before of san diego as a baseball town right like the main professional sport in san diego and i think they're getting a soccer team and if they are i'm very sorry and i don't mean to knock soccer soccer's great too if you like it if you don't fine i'm anticipating replies to reply guys in my life now which is a sign that i need to log off but anyway i love the idea of san diego as a baseball town

right this is the main attraction when it comes to professional sports in san diego they have a beautiful ballpark and the team is responding to the core that they have and a rich farm system and a winning record and saying we're gonna keep this guy in town for as long as possible he is going to be a mainstay of professional sports here and i just love it it's good for baseball when fans get to grow and and develop with their young stars and when teams look around and say yeah we're we're in a division with the dodgers who are the best team in baseball but we will will not be intimidated. We will not be cowed by their excellence. We will commit to excellence of our own. It's just very, very exciting that you get this mashup of a good team, a really good player who is vibrant and charismatic and going to be arguably one of the, if not the face of baseball for a long time and say this is our guy and we want him to stay here until his contract can almost drive and we're

gonna give him the money to incentivize him to do that and we're not gonna lowball him like the Braves look like they lowballed Ronald Acuna Jr. and definitely low-balled Ozzie Alves. We're going to pay him what he will likely be worth. And if the back end of this deal looks a little shifty, who cares? Because in the meantime, we get Fernando Tatis Jr. in his prime in a beautiful ballpark near Good Tacos. Everything about this is good, Ben. I'm so excited to be just like unreservedly happy about a baseball thing. What a delight. I know.

Me too. And there was a tweet that got some traction, generated some interaction. This was by ESPN's Paul Hambachidis. And I could not disagree with this more as I know that you could not either. But he said, Fernando Tatis Jr. playing the next 14 years in the country's number 27 media market on the West Coast

is an objectively bad thing for baseball. And I know what he means in the country's number 27 media market on the West Coast is an objectively bad thing for baseball. And I know what he means in the sense that perhaps Fernando Tatis will be seen by fewer eyeballs than he would have if he had left to sign with the Yankees in four years or something. But this is just a wildly good thing for baseball from my perspective. And it sounds like your perspective because it would not be a good thing for baseball from my perspective. And it sounds like your perspective, because it would not be a good thing for baseball if every talented young player concentrated on three or four different teams. And this is so refreshing. I mean, it's after seeing a bunch of still competitive and contending teams trading good

players like Blake Snell or Hugh Darvish, and then seeing potential face of the franchise types like Francisco Lindor and Nolan Arnauto get dealt this offseason. And here's San Diego, who has been so incredibly aggressive and just constantly trying to make their team better in every possible way, right up until this week when you know they're signing Keone Kella and Mark Melanson which was you know the thunder was stolen slightly from those moves by this permanent almost extension infinite extension for Fernando Tatis but really to see one team that is not a huge market team and you know not the Yankees or the dodgers or someone in that category commit to a superstar for a long time and a good amount of money it just kind of you know exposes

the hypocrisy or the artifice of other owners in you know other similar markets saying that they can't afford to keep players. Every franchise is slightly different circumstances in every ownership group. But still, the fact that the Padres could do this on the heels of every other major move that they have made to make long-term commitments and add payroll, I mean, it shows that it can be done if you care to do it. And I'm thrilled for Tatis, who obviously likes it there and wanted to stay, and for Padres fans who just can look forward to having a whole Hall of Fame career, basically.

And maybe you'd think that I'm getting ahead of myself with that because Tatis has played two seasons, and if you add him up, it's a little more than 140 games. But when you look at just how fast his start has been and you try to look for comparables, it really is. I mean, it's a small sample, but almost everyone else who has had that sort of start to a career has ended up as a Hall of Famer or will one day end up as a Hall of Famer or is, you know, Joe Jackson or something.

So he's off to that kind of start. And he's answered every question you could have about his performance coming off his rookie year when he was great. But there were various warts to his game. And you could say, oh, well, he's making a lot of errors or he has a high BABIP and he strikes out a lot. And no, then he came back in 2020 and he addressed every one of those possible concerns and he really just ironed out every hole in his game and was suddenly defensively dependable was making more contact and yet was hitting the ball harder than ever was more patient and selective like he's just you know close to the perfect player at this point and so why would you not want to be in business with bernetta tatis for

the next decade plus and the wildest thing about his 2020 was that yes as you noted like we we looked at his rookie season and we're like he's really good but some of this is bad fueled and the errors are a problem and last year by his expected stats he he underperformed slightly yeah like that's the part of this that is that is really looney tunes you look at his again 14 years we just had to ask dan for that we're like hey dan we need zips for 14 years in one ballpark can you do that and he's like yeah sure if you look at that he has nine consecutive years with a projection for five wins or better. And that assumes that he is not able to log more than like 500 at bats in any of those years.

Because, yeah, like Zips knows that he had some injury stuff and it's baking some of that in, too. So it's just he's just really spectacular. And, you know, and they got rid of the boring uniforms. Now he's going to be in those just like really choice ones but i think that fans don't really need to worry all that much about whether it's a big media market or a small media market they have to worry about whether a player is good and a team is fun to watch and i think that eyeballs will find those teams, right? And there's a lot. He's going to be in October for a while by all appearances. Yeah, like he is going to be, if everything goes to plan here,

like a mainstay in the postseason. And I think it's, like you said, it's really good for there to be a counter narrative to the idea that teams can't spend. And I think that it's encouraging when a team like the Padres, which like, look, we all have a good laugh making fun of that Eric Hosmer deal. We all think that that's just a hoot of a time.

There is a timeline where a team like San Diego says, look, we have a lot of prospect depth. We're, you know, we're really good at drafting. We're really good at player development. We get some of these guys in trade like Tatis when other people don't. And we we've spent our big money and that's not working out great. And we're done now. We're going to rely on a homegrown

core and we're not going to spend big money. And not only did they say, no, we're going to go get Manny Machado before our window is really open. They then do something like this to keep that homegrown well i guess tetis isn't technically totally homegrown but like quasi mostly homegrown like uh you know he he uh he spent some time in boarding school i don't know i i didn't think through this analogy but you know we're gonna keep that guy here because we think he's great and we want this team to win and give our fans something so i don't think that it's a thing that fans need to worry about whether the the ratings are good because for one thing i think the ratings will come and that's not your concern that's like a

tv exec's concern no one cares about that you don't have to care about that care about this because this is great yeah and i feel just good for the padres fans because like the padres have not been a distinguished franchise historically i think that's fair to say they've never won a world series they've had a lot of years of mediocrity or worse a lot of years when they just didn't have much star power and they're making up for it now if you can make up for a half century or so of futility in one go, they are doing it now because there's no more fun team. There's no more encouraging team from a business of baseball standpoint. It seems like they are set up to be good and to keep this core in place for years to

come. And as you mentioned, it is the only major league city right now where MLB has the city to itself in the big four sports, aside from, I guess, Oakland technically. But Oakland is in the Bay Area where there are multiple teams. So it just seems like the Padres are positioned to own this town for quite a while. And as you noted, Padres fans have supported this team, and they have come out to the park. And that was when the Chargers were still in town. And now that the Padres have the stage to themselves, more or less, it just seems like it will be a baseball hot be because it's so unusual. It's a unique contract. And you're talking about a player who was not even arbitration eligible yet. So to figure out what he deserves or should command, you have to try to project, okay, what is he going to make in his first year of ARB eligibility? And then what kind of raises will he get over the next couple of

years? And then what can he expect as a free agent? So you have to do a lot of mental math or just plain math math to figure out what it should be worth. And yeah, if he plays like superstar Tatis, the way that we've seen him play for the duration of that contract, he will perhaps have cost himself some money relative to what he would have made if he had hit the open market. But really, there's plenty of risk and uncertainty here, as good as he is. He's still years away from free agency or the point where the Padres would have lost him. So they're accepting some of that risk. And you just you never entirely know with anyone. And again, like he'd have to hit, you know, the upper ranges to really make it look like he left a lot of money on the table.

And frankly, it's $340 million. So at a certain point, you're splitting hairs. I mean, yeah, maximize your earning potential. But if you're talking about a 22-year-old who is now set for multiple lives and generations of his family for centuries to come. I think he is probably not stressing about whether it should have been 360 or 380 or whatever. I think he did quite well for himself. Yes, I agree. When Ben looked at this, he tried to use some comps like Cody Bellinger and Mookie Betts and Francisco Lindor and Nolan Arenado, who did go through the arbitration process and set, you know, records at times when they were going

through that. But as you noted, Tatis would need to sort of hit the upper end of all of those. Some of those big awards came on the back of MVP seasons, which aren't a given even for a player as talented as Tatis. And so, you know, when he kind of did some of the math around this, he figured that Tatis would probably get somewhere in like the $50 million range over the next four years. I think Kylie McDaniel arrived at something of a similar conclusion when he thought about what a Tatis extension might look like about a month ago. And so if you're thinking about this as a deal that's 10 years beyond what his team control would have been and $290 million, then yeah, the Padres are getting something of a discount, right? The dollars per war there comes out to about $6.6 million. We're going to have, you know, another CBA negotiation. Who knows what the economics of the game are going to look like in the future, although

we don't really have a reason to think they won't be good. And so, yeah, this is, there's a little bit of room to quibble, but this doesn't strike you as a deal that's unfair. It's a lot of money that he is guaranteed when he has only played 143 major league games. And, you know, I don't think that we want to factor this into contract negotiations too too much because i don't want to sort of diffuse the responsibility of paying players what they're worth away from the team but i think that we've already seen that the the money he makes playing baseball is not going to be the only means of income that someone like tatis jr has right like

he's got a gatorade deal and he's, you know, he's young and charismatic. And now he gets to say that he's like the face of a franchise and potentially the face of the game. So I think he will be fine, which I don't say as a way to excuse away deals that are unfair. Like guys should be able to make what they're worth at work and not have to rely on endorsements. But I don't think that this is one that we need to fret too much about. And people know I am prone to fretting about this question. So

they can rest easy because I'm not concerned. One last point about this. This was a windfall for one other party. On episode 1272, this was September 2018, Jeff and I talked to Michael Schwimmer, the former Phillies pitcher who is the founder and CEO of a company called Big League Advance. some financial safety in the short term because minor leaguers don't make much money and sometimes they're willing to trade short-term certainty for future earnings. And big league advance, which it's kind of controversial and we talked a little bit about that at the time, but they're betting basically that they can do a good job of predicting which players will be good, and then in the long run, make money off those players' career earnings. And one of the players that Big League Advance invested in very heavily early on was Fernando Tatis Jr. So they now stand to make an undisclosed, unspecified, but probably considerable amount of money because they get a cut of this contract. So the way that it works is they use whatever algorithm they have to try to project how productive a player will be, how much money he'll end up making. And then they offer him, you know, I'm making up numbers, but they might say here you can have $100,000 if we get a 1% cut of your future earnings.

And then I think the player can choose, well, maybe I want $200,000 in exchange for 2% or $300,000 in exchange for 3%, et cetera. So they did that with Tatis. They had an initial round five years ago when Tatis was in single A, and they spent $26 million across 77 players, and Tatis was in single A. And they spent $26 million across 77 players. And Tatis was the biggest investment. I'm reading from an interview that Schwimmer did with Sportico just today in the wake of the Tatis deal. And he did not specify how much the fund provided to Tatis or how big its stake is.

It's somewhere between 1% and 10%, but it was more money than they had offered any player before him. So if, for instance, it's 5%, then they would stand to make like $17 million off this contract, which would work out pretty well for them, I think, although it would obviously be over a long period. So that's kind of interesting because I guess it's a proof of concept for that model, which

perhaps will become less essential as minor leaguers make a little bit more money than they used to make. Players might not have to make that bargain. But in this case, at least it worked out for big league advance. And so far, according to the story, they've invested $156 million into players. There was a second series of $130 million. And so Schwimmer says in this piece, we've been living in theoretical land in the five years since we started this because it takes a while after signing a bunch of A-ball players for them to get to big deals to see it come to life. It's a really cool day.

So Tatis, not the only person celebrating his big deal here just making dreams come true for everyone yes uh we can be happy for the hedge fund people who invested in big league advance too maybe not quite as much of a feel-good story as tatis and padres fans but hey everyone's happy is our point here. So everybody gets what they want. No, I think that there's a longer conversation to have about why this shouldn't be necessary because if minor leaguers were paid a living wage, they probably wouldn't have to leverage their potential future earnings to be able to buy salad and have good nutrition and a decent place to live and not have to hold jobs

in the offseason that aren't doing baseball stuff but we will not let that dampen our mood today although we will continue to hope that the wage situation in the minor leagues gets better not only because it's the right thing to do but also because it seems very short-sighted to put the guys who might one day be worthy of a Fernando Tatis Jr. contract in a weird spot at a point in their lives when they could really use the help of their teams and when teams could do it for just a shockingly low amount of money. But all that to say, we are very happy about Fernando Tatis Jr. So got that going for us. Yeah. And as I recall, Jeff and I speculated at the time about why Tatis was interested in this

deal because of course he's the son of a big leaguer who made a decent amount of money himself about as much money in his whole career as Tatis may have just made for big league advance and I'm sure he had his reasons he said that he was going to hire a personal trainer and eat better food and get better lodging again things that you would think a team would just provide to a prospect in order to improve their own investment in that player in person. So he upgraded his training regimen and his offseason practice field in the DR. And in 2018, Tatis told The Athletic that he was not afraid his deal with Big League Advance would cost him a chunk of his future earnings. He said, if I'm a successful

player and make big money, I'm not going to care about giving that money away. That will be nothing if I make all that big money. And hey, he is a successful player and now he has made big money. So, you know, a lot of people to be pleased for. The big league advance investors don't have to rank high on that list. Yeah, I don't really care about that as much, but I am very happy. We get to be happy, Ben. We get to be happy. Yes, we do. All right. Well, on that high note, let's take a quick break and we'll be back

with Eric Langenhagen, who has just given birth to the 2021 Top 100 Prospects list after what I can only imagine was an extremely lengthy and probably painful labor. And because it's Eric, it's nominally a top 100 list. But in truth, it is a 133 prospect list because you just cannot be bound by top 10s or top 100s. The base 10 system, you defy it at every turn. Yeah, it's true. And the intensity of the sex that led to the conception of this top 100 list is part of why it's 133 guys. It was just like when you watch Heriberto Hernandez rake on the backfields for like weeks at a time, it's just a very sexual experience so so that is part of it yeah but yeah look like the hundred the concept of it being a hundred and us we just want to talk about it that way

it's because that's just what's marketable it's a quick shorthand term for what people know it as but yeah it's just anyone who's a 50 future value or above just gets ranked and it's typically in that 125-ish range. And this year it was just a little bit more than that. Yeah. I applaud it. I say go where the talent is, not where an arbitrary number is. So how did this year's process differ from previous years because of these strange circumstances? And was the difference mostly in the production of the list or is it also reflected in the production of the list or is it also reflected in the makeup of the players on the list? There are definitely a few variables that shifted.

Most of them were obviously pandemic related, right? So no minor league season meant that all of the summer intel was just sequestered at the alt sites. Some teams opted in to video and or data sharing from the alt sites. Some teams did not. Some teams didn't even have the capability of doing it. There was no Padres alternate site data. So all of the Mackenzie Gore inferences that we all made, and I think they're logical when Ryan Weathers comes up in the playoffs instead of Gore to pitch out of the Padres bullpen,

there was just no way of actually knowing. There is no way of me asking someone with another team, hey, what did Mackenzie Gore's pitch data look like at their alternate site? Because there just wasn't any. So that made things challenging. And certainly the context for what was going on developmentally at the alternate site, whether you were looking at video or you were looking at data, is basically that it's an intra-squad. The hitters are seeing the same handful of pitchers over and over and

over again. They're not great pitchers. They're upper-level, minor league depth guys for the most part. And if we're all aware of the third time through the order penalty, right? And so what's the 18th time through the order penalty when you faced Christopher Sanchez at the Phillies alternate site for the 25th time this summer? Like what are we really learning about anyone from the alternate site? I really had a light touch with data that was gleaned from the alternate site unless there was a huge change evident in the pitch data, like someone's change up action had totally changed in a way that was indicative of

a new grip or something like that. That was the sort of information I leaned more heavily on. And then we had Fall Instructional League and Winter Ball. And the information that I gleaned from that, I just weighed more heavily. It was an actual competitive environment. Certainly the context of that was also different. You're at instructional league. You're not going five plus innings as a starter every five or six days. Minor league development is tailored to development rather than the on-field competition. So the context for that is just automatically different in any calendar year, let alone this one. But I just felt a little bit better if someone looked markedly different during the fall instructional league or in winter ball to use that information to

adjust where I had guys. And so I did less in-person scouting in the year 2020 than I have since I was 18 years old. So I lean more heavily on the scouting sources that I trust. That's front office folks, that's in-office analysts, that's scouts who had their boots on the ground at the field here in Arizona for Instructional League and in Florida. And then some of the pro scouts and then some of the amateur scouts too, just because there was nothing else to do during the course of the summer during the alternate site camps, they were often the ones who the teams had parsing the video and the data and auditing org lists top to bottom almost in the same exact way I do. And so I was talking to a lot of those folks as well. So even though scouts weren't allowed at the alternate site, there was some scouting opinion generated from there. And all of that information is what got baked into the list. And then the one philosophical change that I think is worth noting is just that I think

pitching usage is going to continue to be augmented, especially this year, coming off of a shortened pandemic year when pitcher workloads are going to have to take a gigantic leap if we assume that they're just going to go back to business as usual over the course of 162 game season, which I don't think they will. So I think that the pitching, the innings are going to be more spread out throughout more pitchers. We'll see more long relief type usage. I've started classifying prospects as multi-inning, single inning relief pitchers and starting pitchers. That's a philosophical difference. And so I think some of those dynamite middle-inning, like Ryan Yarbrough role,

but with nasty or stuff type guys are going to start trickling. They've started to bubble up to the back of the hundred now. So given some of those limitations in terms of scouts having really been closer to home and not having seen as guys outside of their orgs as broadly as they might in a typical year were there still players who were particularly controversial as you were sourcing information for the list like were there guys where you were surprised that there was as wide a disparity in the opinion of them as there was given how limited the looks might have been in a year like 2020. Yeah, because you still have, you have teams who don't think you should

care about what happened in 2020 very much. Some of the trades that the Yankees have made this off season tie on, they sent Frank German to, it's German, not Hermann, I'm pretty sure, to the Red Sox. Both of those players, the Red Sox and the Pirates acquired without any new 2020 information because the Yankees didn't have instructional league and there was only room with their alternate site for so many guys. And so some teams are just dismissive of whatever 2020 occurred in general. So there are some guys towards the back of the list, especially who I thought really blew up in the fall and who just deserve to be on here guys like Blake Hunt Reggie Preciado some of the guys the Padres traded away basically who we talked about last time you had me on and some of the teams are just

not as willing to to buy into that and don't think that some of those guys belonged then you have the individual players who depending on who you talk to, some of their individual traits, those people just don't like. So if I'm talking to an in-office analyst type or a scouting director from an analytically inclined team, I find that those folks maybe don't like Vidal Brujan as much because his high-end exit VLOs, which they care about quite a bit, just aren't high enough for them to think that he belongs as a 60 on the list. Xavier Edwards, another guy in the race system, generates some of those opinions as well. And he's pretty divisive, despite the fact that he's basically performed since he was a high school underclassman. And typically, that's been the trait of a guy who

the analytically inclined folks like. But now that their focus has shifted to some of this performance stat cast-y data, they don't like that guy as much anymore. So that's been kind of interesting to see a sort of reversal that scouts like Xavier Edwards because he plays his ass off and he's an 80 runner and he can really, really hit. But the analysts have started to not like that guy as much because of what his high-end exit videos look like. And then you have the whole group of players

who are towards the back of my 55 future value tier. These are the more traditionally divisive players, right? It's Jazz Chisholm. It's Jose Garcia and Drew Waters. It's really toolsy up-the-mid middle guys who have rare talent, but some, like the Jenga Tower might fall because their approach is so bad. And those guys are just typically divisive every year, no matter what. And the same held true for this year's list. So people can probably guess without having looked which teams are best represented on your list, but can you talk a

little bit about which organizations did the best and sent the most people to the top 133? And I guess if you're higher on any other organization or lower than the consensus, that would be of interest too. Yeah, certainly the raise. When you have the top guy, especially the way, thanks to Craig Edwards' research, the way that the farm system rankings get doled out here, which will start to populate on the site soon and will be done when I'm done with all the team lists, but it favors top heavy systems. And so, you know, like the Rays and the White Sox of recent years, the Tigers, they're all pretty strongly represented on here.

Then the organizations with more depth, those are the clubs that I tend to like, but that Craig's research show like pushes further towards when, you know, the bottom of the rankings. Not that having a deep org is bad, but if you could pick either a couple of stars and a shallow rest of your org or not very many, or like none at all, more like average type guys at the top, but the org is really deep, those types of farm systems get punished in the rankings that are done through historical empirical valuations of the prospects. Whereas my instincts are to prefer the systems with more depth. And I think some of the organizations like Pittsburgh, especially this offseason, the way they've approached their rebuild, Texas has started to do this too, where they're

taking a high volume risk mitigation, get two or three guys back in every trade rather than one big guy approach to rebuilding their farm system. There's some push and pull going on there. There's some discordance between what Craig's research has found and the way some of these teams have begun to behave, where even though Craig's research shows top heavy systems tend to be more valuable, that teams are trying to build insane depth. So I would say that the Yankees are both where there's a bunch of high-end talent in the system and they're deep and they're very good at developing pitching. The Mariners have a bunch of high-end talent in the system,

not quite as much depth, but have gotten better over the last couple of years at developing pitching. The Padres traded a bunch of guys away, but Mack gotten better over the last couple of years at developing pitching. You know, the Padres traded a bunch of guys away, but Mackenzie Gore and CJ Abrams are still towards the very, very top of this list. And they're also good at developing young position players. And so it's hard to do farm rankings in a way that accurately describes what's going on with whether the organizations are full of young talent or not. Like the Oakland A's, no more Lizardo on the prospect list, no more Sean Murphy on the prospect list because they graduated. They're not rookie eligible anymore. They're still young guys who are going to be A's for quite a while here,

but they're not part of what's driving the farm system rankings anymore. And that's not perfect, right? Like we should think about Jesus Lizardo when we think about the short and long-term future of the Oakland A's, just as we are thinking about Robert Poisson and Brian Buelvas and guys like that. So yeah, it's a flawed, the context, he can't provide sufficient context really for it. But I think people know it's the Rays and the Tigers and the Yankees and the names that people tend to know about. I think that one of the orgs to watch, Baltimore, has also taken an interesting depth approach to their rebuild rather than some high ceiling guys. Those are the teams to watch really, I think,

over the next year. Teams who have shown they can develop pitching and have acquired it en masse over the last couple of years, which was of course made harder because the 2020 draft was so short. If we step back from the org rankings themselves and start thinking about some of the positional trends that you've noticed as you've not only assembled the top 100, but have been in the process of doing lists more generally, I think the way that you have thought about how fastballs play in the zone has changed some of the way that you think about some of the prospects on this list. I'm curious if there are other positions where you are starting to notice any particular trends, either in the kind of athlete that that position is making room for now, or that you notice teams prioritizing in terms of the kinds of players or profiles that might be ascendant within prospectum sort of more generally?

Sure. So you have the teams who are functionally platooning players at two different positions. The Dodgers are a great example of this where Chris Taylor's versatility in effect enabled Kike Hernandez and Jock Peterson to platoon with one another, even though they don't play the same position. So teams are taking a broader approach to what they consider a viable defensive infielder because of defensive positioning improvements, because they know that that player can come off the field late in games when they're head in favor of a better defensive player. Like you can move someone around to improve your defense when what you want to do based on the game state is prevent runs. And so I think that teams are starting to think about prospects with that in mind. It's a little bit closer to

the way NBA teams, I think, are starting to define roles. Like, what can you do on the field at an elite level? Let's put these players in position to do that. And I think that that applies to the Dodgers. It applies to the Rays. It applies to the Cardinals. Teams who you see moving Tommy Edmund around. He's facilitating stuff that puts the other players

in position to succeed better than they would if they were just thrown out there in a neutral environment. So there's some of that. I think that I started to do this last year, but anticipating what defines the catching position will change soon. It's definitely part of how I thought about rankings. At some point, framing is just not going to be a thing anyone cares about anymore. You can go down a

real rabbit hole just sitting and trying to think about all of the little repercussions of that and what it might mean for not just catchers, but base running and everything else. So I'm leaning more on offensive-minded catchers throughout the rankings. But again, I think that's been the case for the last couple of years. I mentioned the pitching thing a little bit earlier. I do think that has changed. And then the thing that will be interesting to see in 2021 is how does this new dead-end baseball impact

how good you need your center fielder to be? Or if you want, like, I don't know. I don't know. This is where I don't know. It's what will the dead in baseball do to power? Does it make it so that being a fly ball prone pitcher is less detrimental? I don't know.

But that's what I'm considering for the next year is how does the fact that the baseball now seems like it's going to be different, does that have an impact on whether you need to have a guy like Kevin Kiermaier on your roster or you place real value on trading for Manny Margot? I just don't know that yet, but that's where my thought for this upcoming year will be. Kevin Goldstein wrote a post on Thursday that was about which types of prospects he thinks are most affected and presumably in most cases hampered by the year off. So I'm curious what your take on that is, you know, either specific players or just more broadly types of players who might stand to suffer more than others. Yeah.

First, I got to say that this new prospect intern we hired, Goldstein guy, is great. Really impressed by how he's done so far. So yeah, Kevin's piece was interesting. I think the prospects who were least impacted are just the rehabbing pitchers who were basically doing everything that they would have done anyway. everything that they would have done anyway. Then I think you have the, on the other side of the spectrum, it's the players whose 40-man timelines are like, were such that they had to be put on the 40-man last, the end of last November, right? Those are the guys who had the opportunity to play well in the minor leagues throughout 2020 and earn themselves a 40-man roster spot. They never got that chance. And so

I think it was interesting to watch the Rule 5. There were a bunch of injured rehabbing from Tommy John pitchers who were selected, I think specifically for this reason, because those are the guys who were just doing what they were doing anyway. So there's that. Then I do think that you have like the 2019 college hitters who are now 23 for the most part. And yet most of them, I think actually all of them have just never played above single A. They haven't played above A ball yet. They're 23. And so how to certainly that is the group of player who I think our public estimation and I think teams pro model estimation will be the most warped I don't know if JJ Bledet and Hunter Bishop and those guys are going to go right to double a it seemed kind of

it seemed kind of nuts to me to to some of these guys just played like in the Appy League or the or the New York Penn League or something like that and and they're going to make a that big of a leap like that's kind of scary so i think some of those guys might have had their development severely impacted by the year off and then you have the the pitchers who this is the one with kevin where i agreed uh very very much is the pitchers whose workload needed to tick up like all these guys have multi-year schedule for what the team's plan to do with their innings load is. And it's typically about 20 or so innings a year where you'll take a high school pitcher and he'll throw 80 to 100 innings. And then the next year he'll throw 100

to 120 innings, depending on where the workload was when he was first drafted and signed. where the workload was when he was first drafted and signed. And, you know, that progresses over a couple of years in the minors until they're big league ready and they're coming up and throwing 140 to 160 innings, ideally. And this just applies to every pitcher on the planet, basically. But the pitchers who, there's a certain subset of pitchers who needed that 20 inning increase this year, or last year, rather, in anticipation of them being like on the big league club in 2021 and they didn't get it either so it certainly is a lot of

players who were impacted by the lack of minor league season it's different player to player in some circumstances because of the facilities that they had access to or not if they have friends who live nearby who they can go throw live BP to, or whatever, like there are groups of minor league players, and a lot of them just posted a video of it on YouTube, of Cody Ponce, and Matthew Liberatore, and Nolan Gorman, and a bunch of the Arizona-based prospects just got together and just developed themselves with one another for all from different orgs. And then there are some guys who just didn't do anything. So it's just going to vary player to player as well. That might be a lead into a question that, and the answer to this

might actually be that people should just read the picks to click article that you and Kevin put together. But for those who haven't had a chance to, I'm curious, you know, if there was a population of player who before the shutdown sort of looked poised to you to take a step forward and maybe advance into the top 100 this year that didn't and not because, you know, they failed to meet expectations or take a developmental leap, but simply because they weren't seen or developed traditionally the way they would have been if there had been a minor league season. So who are some of the guys who you think listeners should be keeping an eye on as they start to see minor leaguers report for spring training after big league camp closes and get into a minor league season this year? I think people want to watch Reed Detmers, who the Angels took out of Louisville in the first round in 2020,

Detmers, who the Angels took out of Louisville in the first round in 2020, just because of how advanced he is and how badly the Angels just need pitching. It seems like one of the guys heuristically who would move quickly through the minor leagues, but we don't know. He throws like 88 to 92. And so while he absolutely carved the ACC and statistically was one of the best pitchers in college baseball over the last couple of years. There just aren't many good big league starters who sit 90. So it'll be interesting to watch him. He's either going to rocket through the system or there are going to be signs that his stuff just doesn't play very, very quickly, I think. So he's someone who could have big league repercussions already in this coming year. And there are a couple other guys from that draft class who I think could do that. Obviously, we saw Garrett

Crochet already. Clayton Beater with Texas Tech, maybe not a top 100 type guy just because he is relief only. Again, I think that there's an argument to be made for some of those guys being on the back of the 100 and some of them are on there right now. But Clayton Beater from Texas Tech. Texas Tech's really interesting because they always have a bunch of guys who throw hard and none of them throw strikes and they all really fall in the draft and then a bunch of them explode in pro ball. And I don't know if it's because there's just so much talent in Texas that this group

is underscouted, or if there's something suboptimal going on with Dev at Texas Tech that gets corrected in pro ball. But if you like the way James Karinchak's fastball and curveball work together, you're going to like Clayton Beater. And so that guy might move really, really fast through the Dodgers system, but obviously they don't need him as badly, as quickly as the Angels need somebody like Reed Detmers. So that's another one. And then some of the guys who Kevin and I agree are likely to be on next year's top 100 include Gunnar Henderson, who was a high school

third base shortstop from who the Orioles drafted, was one of those high school performance bats who was seen a bunch because he's from the Southeast. You see these hitters from the Southeast and from Southern California who are just facing the best varsity pitching in the country during their normal high school spring seasons. And so there's a trust in their data and performance that other high school hitters around the country don't have. And so it's not always the star level draft prospects, but it's a lot of like sneaky six figure back of the draft type signees who end up coming from those locations because they just hit

a lot in high school and teams trust it more. And so Gunnar Henderson with Baltimore is one of those guys. He's a little bit more tooled up than the typical version of that. But Kevin and I both like him quite a bit. And then the other like really young, there's so many of these, yeah, the picks to click article is what you want to look for. But Jairo Solis, like there's this whole group of players who were on my picks to click article last year, who I just couldn't justify putting on the 100 because they didn't do anything in 2020. And so Jairo Solis with Houston is one of these guys where the reports of his stuff, and it's been this way for the last couple of years, was interrupted by a Tommy John.

It's incredible. So he just needs to go out and show for the course of a season that that's real, that the things that we've heard about his stuff are in fact true. And so he's another one where you'll look up and be like, hey, look, the Astros have another really good pitcher that they've developed. And I think he's likely to be that in a year. I've been saving this question from a Patreon supporter until we talked to someone who could

answer it. And you are that lucky someone, I think. So we were just talking about the diminishing returns of players at the alternate site and seeing the same opponents every day. But I wonder whether it could work in the other direction for anyone. And this is a question we got from Joshua Patterson, who said, I was reading this article today, and there's a very brief reference to a benefit of the alternate training site for Kansas City prospect Lynch.

So I'm looking at the article. This is Ann Rogers wrote this for Royals.com last month. It's about Royals left-hander Daniel Lynch, and she writes, despite no minors games last year, Lynch improved his arsenal by focusing on his changeup with the Royals development team throughout the summer and fall. He became more comfortable throwing it against hitters on both sides of the plate, and he faced a multitude of left-handed hitters given the way the player pool was lined up. The 6'6 lefty also improved his delivery, which in turn helped with command and control while maintaining the power he has shown since Kansas City made him the number 34 overall pick in the 2018 draft. So Joshua considers, they mentioned that he got to throw

against many more left-handers along these lines. I was wondering what aspects, if any, of the alternate site remote spring training structure might survive or be a hidden benefit. In my own work environment, we found certain adaptations to the pandemic were actually okay and might stick around after. And I wonder if there might be some of those relating to player development. Yeah, I think the specific Lynch example is interesting. And I think it's hard to replicate something that feels pretty random, like it was a random unexpected benefit. I do think that, especially in concert with the restructuring of the minor league season, that there will be more development occurring that mimics what we saw at the alternate site, where it's a lot of intra-squad, live BP, exhibition type of settings.

I don't think we can fully comprehend what the long-term repercussions of altering all of that will be. repercussions of altering all of that will be. There is something about, certainly there are, you know, in terms of the pandemic and like all of us going to an office or not, there are positive environmental repercussions, but probably long-term individual mental health stuff that we haven't really grappled with, like about the demarcation between our work and our home and what the line between those two things blurring kind of does to us. As someone who has worked from home as the Fangraphs prospect writer for five years, I can tell you that for some of us, that's kind of weird. That like just being at like rolling out of bed and writing 100 scouting reports for 13 hours is weird.

And so I don't know how that's going to apply to player development. There's something about the security and the warmth of the complex level in Florida and Arizona that suits some players in a way that is very different from the environment of affiliated ball and the grind of getting on a plane and going somewhere else tomorrow after you've played like a 12 inning slog in Arlington right like you just baked in St. Louis in July for four hours because your pitcher couldn't throw strikes now you got to get on a plane and go somewhere else. The gap between what development might be like as it's more alt-site-y and what actual Major League Baseball is like might be a problem for some individuals. So I certainly think that as teams generally over the last couple of years have moved away from developing players in games and in games and in games, and that's sort of it. And there are more classroom environments. There's more video work. There's more school

type of activity that certainly there are different types of learners playing baseball. And that's a reason to vary how you instruct players as well. But I worry that there might be a prerequisite that we are not selecting for anymore. Major League Baseball, which is just sort of a thing that naturally gets cooked into the development over the course of the last 15 years, the way it's been done for the most part. If that goes away, then there are going to be some rude awakenings for players who arrive in the big leagues having never really been tested in that regard and then suddenly are. Do you think that the pandemic absence of games will accelerate certain trends

in technology use or training, you know, players who had to rely on those things even more because they weren't in games or because they were trying to stay in shape and it was the only way to do that or because they were subjected to it constantly at an alternate site? Like all of that was happening anyway, of course, but do you think that moved the timeline up on players' use of those tools or particular techniques? Yeah, I think that a lot of changes that were coming to the game in general, both on the dev side and the scouting side, were just accelerated by the pandemic. I think some of it, again, it's a mixed bag. Scouts don't like to travel necessarily. I mean, certainly it's wonderful to see as much of the country as you can and spending weekends

in college towns before the draft can be a lot of fun, but it's also a grind. And so there's a benefit to throttling down your travel schedule, or there might be a long-term health benefit to pitchers if they're not subject to the grind of a minor league season. And then at the same time, when scouts can do more of their jobs remotely, while it saves them travel, it also shifts then what you're looking for in someone who can scout altogether. Like if I'm a person who's been scouting for 20 years and I show up to scout, you know, Georgia Tech and Mississippi State, and I know Mississippi State's pitching coach for the last 15 years, seeing him and talking to him for 15 minutes before the game might be very, very

valuable for reasons of, you know, collecting intel about players. And you don't get that through a Zoom meeting. You don't get it through watching film. Although again, like there are just other things that doing it that way is bent.. I understand why teams want to shift toward that, especially as scouting is expensive. For me to get on a plane and go to Chicago for two days to see the Under Armour high school All-American game, it's pretty expensive. So I get that it's going to be on MLB Network

and I can just watch the broadcast. I'll have all of the velocities. I'll probably have a better idea of how the player's stuff is working from the centerfield camera angle than I would from an askew scout seat because so many scouts are there. I'm not going to be center cut at the All-American game in Chicago. It's just not likely. So I get it. But we're also going to lose some

stuff. And I think people in baseball should be mindful of that and consider what those things may be because I think there's a lot of value in that stuff. The guys who are currently pros are not the sort of extent of the scope of prospect week. Earlier in the week, you updated your draft rankings for the next couple of draft eligible classes. I know that you and Kevin are going to have a piece that comes out the day that most of our listeners are listening to this about how teams are approaching the draft. But I'm curious as we start to look ahead

to opening day for the NCAA season, what some of the early trends are that you have noticed in the way that teams are approaching scouting for the upcoming 2021 draft? So, man, it's going to be a mess. Already this weekend, this weekend, folks are listening to this on Friday. Today, there's college baseball on right now. Go put on the ESPN app and watch some college ball while you're listening to the rest of this pod. A bunch of series have already been canceled because of COVID. If you're a scouting director or just an area scout,

and you had planned on going to see North Carolina and Kentucky this weekend, and you booked your travel and your hotel, and then it gets canceled, where do you go? Like you have to have an option B. And so the way scheduling gets done for the upcoming year is going to be very complex. The way players are and aren't seen because of cancellations is going to make things very complex as well. We're working with a gap year with basically no data. All of the junior eligible college players for this upcoming draft just don't have a sophomore year of data, really, or performance or looks, truly, right? We had about a month of college

baseball last year. So if you were lucky enough, if you're a scouting director or a cross checker or whatever, to have been in the right place at the right time, to have a feel for a player who would have exploded as a sophomore and clearly been on the radar in 2021 as a junior. Now that guy, we don't know about him yet. And so how confident you are in that player coming out and performing as a junior is going to, it's going to vary depending on how much your org has seen him, how much the individual decision makers in each org have seen that player or not. And so I think we're, again, going to see a lot of work on video. All of Division I baseball can be viewed through this app called Synergy Sports, which all these teams subscribe to and can watch a lot of college baseball through those means, then you also have the repercussions of the NCAA transfer rules and eligibility rules being changed

to deal with COVID. So if my division one school, all my players from last year now have an extra year of eligibility. If they want to stick around for a year, I might not have the scholarships to go around. I might not have the roster spots to go around to accommodate everyone who now has an extra year of eligibility, which was exacerbated by the shortened draft, right? Fewer talent could diffuse to pro ball. I don't have enough roster spots to accommodate those players plus my incoming class. And so what has happened is there's a huge talent spillover to the junior colleges. So now the junior colleges are flush with talent. And obviously fewer junior colleges have track man units than the division one schools

do. And so it becomes much more important for in-person scouting to be done at all of these junior colleges, which are concentrated in Florida, here in the Southwest, Arizona, and Nevada. There are several. Texas and Oklahoma have a lot of big junior colleges. There are some Midwest. There's like a Midwest suite of junior colleges that are typically pretty strong talent-wise. And so those are the places where I've been the last couple of weekends where I've seen like assistant GMs at games for junior college players, which is, you know, sometimes it happens because every once in a while you've got to a junior college, right? But to go to a junior college and see a couple of guys sitting 93, touching a six, watching a 6'3 guy with a really projectable frame who is running 4'3 flat to first base and has some power, that's different. So I think that that is the area where my eyes have been open to use like a scout, a public

prospect writing cliche that I like despise. Like, wow, the junior college guys are opening my eyes. Like my eyes are open at the field all the time. Right. And I'm watching the field. They're not, no one's turning my head. No players turning heads anywhere. We're all just watching the field.

Our heads aren't turning. What are we writing about? But anyway, but yeah, the junior colleges, I think, are the place where, wow, this is definitely very, very different. We're going to be talking about 2020 in both baseball and non-baseball contexts for the rest of our lives, I'm sure, and certainly in a prospect and player development context. And I wonder whether you think that there will be certain players you point to down the road and say, oh, he was just a guy who got

derailed by 2020. His college season was canceled. His minor league season was canceled. He suffered some setback. He missed out on reps. I mean, I guess we'll never know. We'll never be able to say for sure that that was why, but I wonder whether you think that we will have certain players we point to and say, oh, he just didn't develop the way we thought he would. And maybe it was because he didn't have a normal development trajectory because life got in the way. Yeah. I certainly plan on just pointing at everyone I'm wrong about and saying, yeah, exactly. This is what happened. Easy out. No, I don't know. I think, um, I think probably there are some players for whom it was beneficial in a weird way, but yeah, this is just one. I just don't know.

I remember when there was a two-way player at rice named Joe savory, who the Phillies drafted in the first round and they took him like in the middle of the first round as a pitcher. He had a bunch of injury problems, which a bunch of the pitchers coming out of Rice have had. And then it was so bad that even though he reached the upper levels of the minor leagues, his stuff just clearly wasn't good enough. He was sitting like 86 to 90 or something like that at AAA. And they decided we're going to make you a first baseman. 96 to 90 or something like that at AAA. And they decided we're going to make you a first baseman. And so he gets sent back down to like high A as a first baseman. And he's not really a prospect as a first baseman, but he hits okay and does well enough to stay in the org for like a year,

year and a half as a first baseman. And he doesn't pitch anymore during that time. as a first baseman. And he doesn't pitch anymore during that time. And then at one point, there was like an extra inning game or a double header, and he needs to pitch. They just need somebody else to pitch that day. And they go, Joe, can you pitch today?

And he was throwing like several miles per hour harder than he had before they converted him to first base just because he had before they converted him to first base just because he had rested. Like he just had taken a year plus off from pitching and all of a sudden he was throwing much harder. So I don't know. This is weird. Our world is weird right now still, even though we've been in it for like a year and I feel like I've adjusted to it personally. It's still weird for me too. And so I don't know what it's going to be like.

I think that for me personally, having spent 2020 watching more Major League Baseball than I have in a long time might have weird ancillary benefits for me. And so I don't know if there's some perspective about like life or baseball or working at it that has shifted for some individuals as a result of this pandemic and maybe some people have just had their you know realize that like we're just subject to this chaos all the time and don't care about baseball anymore

either like who knows so it's just weird and i really don't know what to do about it. For sure, there will be some players who, you know, like, look, I've put on like 15 pounds over the last year. And I bet that there are players for which the case is the same. And so who knows? Yeah, I don't know. The answer to this might just be Jason Dominguez, but I guess to ask an optimistic counter to that question, who are the guys who you're most excited to see this year? And they can be top 100 guys or they can just be dudes on your pick to click, but who you didn't get to get eyes on. Not that they turned heads, but who you didn't get to get eyes on last year

just because of the nature of the lack of a minor league season who you'll hopefully get to see this year. Hmm. Well, I really want to see Quinn Priester. Quinn Priester was the first high school pitcher drafted in 2019, Pittsburgh, and then was unbelievable during 2020 Instructs. And again, the context for it's weird,

but he's the only guy who I've got an 80 future breaking ball grade on. So seeing if he retains that is a big deal. I want to see another one who blew up in the fall in Florida is Hunter Brown with Houston. Again, Houston really good at developing pitching, but he went to a division two school in Michigan and then Houston got a hold of him. He was arm strength, slider, a lot of relief risk. It's that, again, like that backspinning fastball that has carry at the top of the zone. Misses a lot of bats there at the letters.

Houston gets a hold of him and says, you're going to throw a curveball again, curveball that he had scrapped in college. And now that's his best pitch. And so hearing about, hearing him described is a lot like what I remember Walker Buehler looking like on the backfields. I was at Walker Buehler's first pro outing in the AZL after he had rehabbed from Tommy John. And, you know, Buehler was at his best at Vanderbilt. Buehler was like, you know,

into the mid nineties, but sometimes lower nineties. And again, like some of this is because he was hurt and the Dodgers knew that when they took him and knew he'd need TJ. And then they took advantage of his rehab and he got stronger. He was throwing harder. And he came out that first day. I just remember rushing to the field that he was like 97, 99 with that hard cutter slider thing that he has and a nasty curveball. And he was not a two breaking ball guy primarily in college at Vanderbilt. They tried, you know, fastball breaking ball changeup at the time. That's what you wanted the three pitch mix to be. You felt that someone needed a changeup.

And now that thinking has changed where you can just have two good breaking balls as long as you have three pitches and you can locate them. As long as you have a weapon that can get opposite sided hitters out doesn't matter if it's a change up or not that's fine and so that's what hunter brown sounds like it's now there's two breaking balls they're both really good the curveball is absolutely incredible it's his best pitch now and the change in his body is a little bit similar to Bueller's in that, except it didn't occur during like a TJ rehab or anything like that. It's because he went from a division two program to a major league baseball strength and conditioning program. And so now his body's

different too. And so players for, for which there were changes in stuff, if there was also a mechanical change or a noticeable physical change in their body for this year's list, those are the ones who I just bet on more rather than thinking it might just be the context that is causing their stuff to look better. Here, there's been a real physical change as well as a tweak to his repertoire. And so, man, I'm just excited to see players, period, coming up here this year. I think, I hope that I'll get to go to the backfields, which are just barren of people. Like it's just me, a couple of scouts and the teams and that's

it. So hopefully I'm allowed to go see that stuff this year for my own sake but uh but yeah like gosh who else am i i want to see hasan kim play for the padres and see how that translates to the big league level yeah uh i want to see alejandro kirk catch good big league stuff uh and see if he can actually do it he looked okay i think doing it towards the end of of last year i want to watch uh michael bush with the dodgers play second base and see if he can actually do that because he might be a real dude if he can stay there at second base but he might not be able to i want to see leoti taveras hit like he's so fast and such an amazing defensive center fielder like please go hit uh it's just everybody the whole diamondback system i think is exciting they have all these young pitchers who I think are going to make, like, comprise one of the better

pitching staffs in baseball here over the next two or three years. Luis Frias and Blake Walston and Levi Kelly and Matt Tabor. Like, all these guys have real stuff. And they're coming. And there's going to be attrition. But I want to watch those guys see if the d-backs can have the horses to compete with the padres and and the dodgers in that division like i don't know it's just everybody basically is the answer but yeah i'd love to see jason dominguez too because it's hard now for there to be real legendary type of athletes yeah you just can't the the the folktale athlete is gone because we all just have a camera in our pocket and so we all know what it's like to watch Jason Dominguez swing a bat and it's pretty ridiculous 18 year old swings like this that like has this kind of

power but there's just been so little actual in-game looks at him there are more now than there were just like five months ago because of the Yankees activity on their backfields, but not in a place that scouts from other orgs have really been able to watch. And so he's someone who could, he's like Kevin Maiton, right? Kevin Maiton was also this. He was switch hitting, uncommon ability to play shortstop uncommon power and body projection for somebody his age and then he was given five million dollars and i don't know what he did but he's terrible now he's awful he just struck fear into countless yankees fans' hearts with that comment. It'll be fine, Ben. But here's the thing.

It's at one point, all we knew about, what we know about Jason Dominguez right now, switch hitter, ridiculous power. Good nickname. Right, good nickname. The Martian. We knew about Kevin Maiton and we also knew about Wander Franco. Like at some point, all we knew about Wander Franco is,

hey, this is the best guy his age. He's a switch hitting middle infielder. And that was it. And so that's what we know about Dominguez right now. It's what we knew about Maiton. And so I don't know how things are going to break, right? I can watch this guy swing and be like, wow, this is a different cat, okay? It really is different. And it's different putting him on a prospect list than if the Yankees called me, if I were the Padres or if I were the Cubs or whoever. And the Yankees were like, hey, we want you, Darvish, or we want whoever. And we'll give you Dominguez. And my job is actually on the line if, you know, whether or not Dominguez is good.

It would scare me to death. And so I would much rather, I think, take like, you know, Nolan Jones plus a handful of other guys than bet on Jason Dominguez if my job actually depends on it. But when you're lining up what his upside might be compared to the other guys toward the back of the hundred, yeah, like for prospect list, for sure. Like I'll put him, I'll put him way, way up there. So it's ridiculous. Who knows what will happen? I mean, we know about some of the next couple signing classes, four plus million dollar players at this point. This is the way this works internationally right now. And so yeah, Dominguez, if I get vaxxed and get to go on a plane, the Yankees backfields are high on the list of priorities.

I guess it's an indication of how obvious the selection for Wander Franco was at one that we are 50 minutes into this pod and I'm just now asking about him, but would you like a moment to sort of wax philosophical and rhapsodic about Wander Franco right now? Are those the words I want? I don't know. Tell us about Wander Franco. So yeah, in addition to the statistical case, right? If you look at what Vlad Jr. did in the Appy League, and then look at what Wander Franco has done at basically the same levels as Vlad Jr. at the same age, Wander Franco's performance is better and he plays shortstop. So that's different. And then just the visual

evaluation of him is, it just reinforces it. Whichever of the two you use as the foundation for your thought, whether it's the statistical track record or the visual one, they both support one another and they're both elite in my mind. And to watch someone like him have as good a feel to hit as he does, there's something about how short his levers are and how quick his bat is that enables him to just wait an extra beat on every pitch and diagnose balls and strikes that, I don't know, it's just been a huge, huge benefit to him to this point. And he's just so hard to beat with velocity because, again, the levers are short and the

bat speed is so special. He's the only 80-hit tool guy who I've put on the list. It's the bat speed is so special. He's the only 80 hit tool guy who I've put on the list. It's the most important thing. And I think he might be the only 80 hit tool guy. Maybe I 80'd Luis Arias with the twins and probably should have 80'd David Fletcher maybe. I don't know. The list of guys who I've considered 80ing their bat is really, really short. I think Williams Astrodio, maybe the raw hit tool I 80ed, but the pitch selection aspect of it, I took way down

because he just swings at everything. This is just all the things. This is, you watch this guy take BP at the Futures game with a bunch of players who are much bigger than he is and they don't have a whole lot more power than he does.

And you watch him take infield next to all the other fantastic shortstops that the minor leagues has to offer, and he's as good or better than any of those guys too. And then you look at him, his swing and miss, or rather not swing and miss like ever, and you combine that with the physical ability, and now we start talking about someone who has elite ceiling

and a weird combination of certainty. Even Fernando Tatis, when he's in double A, you look at him and you go, you know, look how big this guy is. He's making a lot of throwing errors over the first base. There's a chance he's a third baseman. Or look at how much he's striking out. There's a chance that he's like a four bat, right? You don't think so, because you end up sticking him two or three on your list and putting a 70 on or whatever we did. And you love him nonetheless. But there's a little bit of a, not a red flag,

but like a yellow flag. Or a thing that you could see dialing down how good he is a little bit. It's a blemish. It's not perfect. And then when you look at Franco, he doesn't have the body that Tatis does or like A-Rod has or that type of player traditionally has. He's built more like Jose Ramirez.

And when you're looking at a guy when he's 16, 17, and he's built like Tatis is built, that sticks out to you. But with Wander Franco, it doesn't as much. And we've classically sort of underrated these types of guys. That's like how Jose Ramirez slips through the cracks is because he's built like he is. But with Franco, because he's had profile for so long, that's not a bias that we are really worrying about. So there's just this weird combination of ceiling and certainty with Franco, specifically around his hit tool that has me, yeah, we've never 80'd another player in the history of this process. Acuna, Otani, Tatis, Vlad, you know, these guys have all been 70s or 65s on the list in some cases.

And this dude's just weird. It's bizarre and special in a way that I'm abnormally confident in. Even if his launch angle's not like exactly 14 degrees right now, this dude has freaky feel for contact. And so, yeah, like I'm not going to do some attention grabby thing where I'm like, you know, he's number two. No, everyone thinks he's the best guy. Everybody thinks he's the best guy. That hasn't happened before. So we've been talking about the future. Just before we end here, I wanted to rewind a little bit and talk about a past prospect. It's always fun to look back and see what was missed and why it was missed.

And you just mentioned Fernando Tatis, and we're all celebrating Tatis this week as are Tatis' agent and accountant and everyone in his world. So I wanted to ask about what people missed about him, what the White Sox missed about him for that matter, but also prospect analysts. And you were actually higher on him than others were at the time. I was just looking back at your 2017 top 100 list, which actually was 100 players. And he was 78th on that list. And at that point, he was not even on the top 100 at BP or at Baseball America.

And of course, this was less than a year after the White Sox traded him for James Shields. So you saw something there and others didn't even have him in their top 100s. And then he just went from not on the list to top 10 in 2018. So did he take an enormous leap? Was there something unforeseeable there? Or was it just he was so young

and it was a toolsy player and no one knew if they would come together it's just from a lot of it was just for me being here a lot of it's just for me being in arizona and seeing enough of these guys to have an unusual degree of confidence in some of the younger ones but yeah if you look at this year's 100 and look in that same general area of the 100, that like 80 through 90 area, and there's just a bunch of guys who might hit in that type of way, like who might really blow up in that similar type of way, short stops with huge power potential. So some of it was heuristics and maybe me applying them in a way that is

better than other outlets. I don't know. Like it's just this type of player I think belongs in that general area. I was too low on him at that time already. He was putting balls into literally into the parking lot. Like just a teenage kid, absolutely eviscerating balls. Like, you know, like Acuna basicallyuna basically it's just it's been pretty rare and at the same time like I saw Juan Soto in person on the backfields too and didn't was late

to move him up right like so some I really think that it just has a lot to do with me seeing players myself down here and thinking like Jesus this guy this guy's unreal. And being willing to stick my neck out a little bit on someone like that. And yeah, I think the same thing, some of it was because of Kylie, but we were also ahead on Acuna too. And then there are some players we've been quote unquote ahead on for a span of months. And it turned out to be wrong. Like Miguel Andujar for like six months, it looked like, Hey, we were right about this guy and nobody else was. And now it doesn't feel that way anymore. Right. So some of this can just come undone at any time. But with Tatis, it was just,

I remember there's a pro director who saw where I had Tatis. And I think he saw the power, the present and future raw power grades I had on him at that time uh when he was already on the hundred and was just making fun of me for how low he was on the list still and how he's like haven't you seen this guy like take bp you have like a 55 on his present raw power like it's no it's much more than that now dude and uh and yeah so this is a really hard job. It's hard to do it with the scope I take, which is my fault. But yeah, some, there's something about being at the field and watching these guys and having watched enough bad baseball and bad baseball players that makes guys like that jump in a way that feels obvious to me now, but I understand if it's harder for other people who haven't been doing it as long to see that guy. And I also think there's something about it just being me that makes it easier for me to go, you know what? I'm stuffing this guy. I don't have, like, it's not a staff model here at Fangraphs where it's like, you know, at BP and BA

where everyone's in a room talking about this, and therefore opinions get diluted. You want to try to satisfy everybody. You want to try to weigh everyone's opinions, and that makes sense to me. But when it's just me, I get to go, you know what? I think Vidal Brujan is a stud. And everyone says this kid busts his ass, and he's an elite level athlete. And I'm just like, I see his musculature through his jersey. And I just think that eventually this guy's gonna hit the ball much harder than he does right now. I just get to do that. And so I might be right.

And I might be wrong. And with Tatis, yeah, I guess I was slightly less wrong than everybody else. A year earlier than everybody else. Yeah. I mean, being slightly less wrong is kind of what the the prospect yeah if we were drafting if we're using the hundreds at that time to like draft the dynasty league then yeah i'd whoop everybody's ass speaking of seeing someone's musculature under their jersey how much of a wrench did it throw into your top 100 prep that tim tebow retired the day before he published he must have

had to rearrange everything you know know, certainly like, look, some of the Tebow stuff is weird to me. I don't think it's great that the Mets, in effect, used a minor league roster spot on a guy to sell high A tickets that the ownership group was benefiting from at the time. Like that was frowned upon. I do think it's kind of amazing that he wasn't,

I mean, he was not good, but I never watched him and thought, man, you know, this guy's got a chance. But the fact that he kind of did, he didn't embarrass himself. He had some embarrassing moments, but the fact that he didn't embarrass himself, I think is pretty impressive. Yeah. And I respect the hustle. I mean, you know, it may have been semi publicity stunt from the Mets perspective, but from his perspective, I mean, he stuck it out for four seasons, right? I mean, you know, it may have been semi-publicity stunt from the Mets perspective, but from his perspective, I mean, he stuck it out for four seasons, right? I mean, he was living that minor league life, not getting like special celebrity treatment. He was riding the buses and everything. So I kind of admire that. I mean, he clearly wanted to do it and didn't have the ability to or started too late, but he put in the time and the work

and yeah, he was bad, but not terribly embarrassing. And yeah, the whole concern about, you know, was he taking a roster spot from a legitimate prospect? I mean, I guess I sort of see it, but like this was pre-contraction of the minors, you know, he played like legitimately in double A, like he could hold his own there, which most people in a minor league system can't, you know, and like, I mean, most minor league players are not going to make it. So yeah, maybe he had no chance or almost no chance where someone else would have had slightly more chance, but the vast majority of players are not true prospects.

So one roster spot in a whole organization doesn't seem like a great abusive privilege to me. Can we use the Tebow thing to talk about organized religion for the next half hour? Oh, look at that. We're coming up on time. Hold on, hold on, hold on. No, okay. up on time. Hold on, hold on, hold on. No, okay. I want to talk about the line between positive thinking and magical thinking and how

it may have an impact on our broader cultural goings on right now. No, all right. Anyway, RIP Tim Tebow's baseball career. It was memorable. Maybe it'll resurrect. That's a good one to end on all right thank you you can find eric on twitter at long and hagen you can check out the top 100 which we'll link

to and you can find a handy dandy sean dolan our widget to all the prospect week content on the homepage at fangraphs you can hear eric often on fangraphs audio as well thanks as always eric thanks for having me guys okay that will do as well. Thanks as always, Eric. Thanks for having me, guys. Okay, that will do it for today. Thanks as always for listening. Congrats to our guest from last week, Shannon Towie and her colleagues at NASA JPL on landing the Perseverance rover on Mars, safe and sound. As expected, I got a little misty-eyed watching the celebration in Mission Control.

It never fails. Also, kudos to the Pinstripe Prospects Twitter account, which tweeted a picture of Jason Dominguez showing up in the first fisheye image from the Perseverance camera on the surface of Mars. Because he's the Martian, get it? And while we're extending congratulations, congratulations as well to another former guest

and former big leaguer, Fernando Perez, who was hired by the Giants as a video analyst. If you haven't heard it, go back and listen to episode 1093, live at the Bell House with Fernando Perez. Jeff and I did a live event in Brooklyn, and Fernando was our guest, and it was great. I will link to that on the show page. 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 monthly amount to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks. Paul Hendrickson, Ken Berger, Paul Pfeiffer, Greg Sells, and Fletcher. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to effectively wild on iTunesunes and spotify and other podcast platforms keep your questions and comments for me and meg coming via

email at podcastfangrass.com or via the patreon messaging system if you are a supporter thanks to dylan higgins for his editing assistance we'll be back to our season preview podcast series next time in addition to our banter we'll be talking about st louis and Cleveland. So we'll be back with that episode before the end of the week. Talk to you then. Hold back, I'll be coming soon, I'm coming soon. It's time I got to see you, it's time I got to see you, it's time I got to see you now.