Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 166: Is the Internet Too Optimistic About the Astros?

Episode Date: March 25, 2013

Ben and Sam discuss whether the supposed split between scouts and statheads about the outlook for the Astros actually exists.

Crickets. Huh. How about that? No. I don't even hear it. You don't hear it. I hear it. Yeah, I mean, I sort of hear it. It's extremely faint. I wouldn't have noticed it. Now I hear it. That's loud. Good morning and welcome to episode 166 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from BaseballPerspectives.com.

I'm Sam Miller in Long Beach, California, and in a place that he does not want named is Ben Lindberg. Hello. Ben, how are you? I'm very well, thank you. I had a restful weekend. Great. You noticed as soon as you came on the line that there's a cricket in the background yes although it seems to have gone quiet now that we have drawn attention to it but i was excited to hear it because i haven't heard a cricket for months since you exterminated all of last season's surviving crickets uh well it's like i said at the time it's they're seasonal yeah so it's the

start of a new season see how it works renewal sort of spring baseball yeah yeah um so you and i today are going to talk about a piece on cbssports.com by baseball insider danny knobler and danny has written about the Astros and I think it's a good place to talk about this article because a lot of times on the internet you don't want to bring too much attention to a

kind of story you don't like because then you just give it traffic but we're not going to have a link to it or anything we're just going to be talking about it I don't think anybody I mean I'd be happy to tell you where to find it but how many people are not going to have a link to it or anything. We're just going to be talking about it. We won't tell you where to find it. I don't think anybody – I mean I'd be happy to tell you where to find it but how many people are really going to go seek it out, like six? So I feel like we can talk about this without giving it any extra traffic or love or whatever. So this piece is about the Astros and it sort of frames the Astros,

the current Astros as an extension of frames the Astros, the current Astros, as an extension of the, I guess, culture war that none of us really feel exists all that much between stats and scouts and says that the bloggers all think that the Astros are really good and that the scouts think the Astros aren't very good. So, congratulations, Ben, you're a scout. Okay. All right. Well, then, in that case, according to the article,

I think that the over-under for the Astros this season is 40 wins, which I recently raised from 35. Yeah. Now, there are quotes, a scout who says that, apparently. Yeah. Nalbert quotes a scout who says that apparently. And scouts are saying that there are very few, if any, players on this roster who are part of the next Astros winner or part of the Astros core. And it's got a chance to be pretty ugly, quote unquote. Yeah. So I think everybody agrees on that. The straw man is

clearly the idea that blogger types, as they're repeatedly called, are high on this team. I think blogger types are kind of gloriously low on them, but see that as a strategy, as a sort of full measure approach to building for the future that is perhaps admirable, certainly kind of maybe debatable. But I think that there's a sense that people like what the Astros have done for the long term and that they like some of the people the Astros have hired, but nobody is picking the Astros for anything other than last place. I think I just saw Dave Cameron the other day. He was the first person I saw that suggested that the Astros might be better than last place. I think I just saw Dave Cameron the other day.

He was the first person I saw that suggested that the Astros might be better than the Marlins and only be the 29th best team in baseball. And that's a pretty, I mean, even that is going out on a limb and Dave didn't say it definitively. He just sort of said, wow, the Marlins are really horribly bad too. There's also a section in this article where uh kevin goldstein turns out to be pro scout that is that's my favorite part we should just read that goldstein came to the astros from baseball prospectus and there were certainly eyebrows raised when he was named the team's pro scouting coordinator coordinator but in his first seven months on the job goldstein has proven to be a lot more scout friendly than some in baseball, parentheses, and in the blogger world would have expected.

So that's weird. Yes, that is very weird. I don't necessarily want to totally rip the piece. that also sort of quoted anonymous people who, in their anonymity, were taking shots at the idea and thought that Kevin was a writer, not a true baseball man or whatever the case may be. But not that he was a stat guy who hated scouts. Exactly. Not that he was a stat guy who hated scouts. And I don't think anybody in the blogger world is unclear where Kevin stood.

I mean, Kevin was the guy who turned Baseball Perspectives into a scouting-heavy publication, right? I think, I mean, there probably are some people who maybe are a little too optimistic about the Astros in the long term, I guess. I mean, even... Yeah, so let's talk about it. Let's move beyond the straw man and let's actually talk about what we think about, whether we think the Astros deserve plaudits yet and when we think the Astros could realistically be looking at success. So at Sabre, Bill James said some really, really nice things about the Astros.

He said, no question, and I'm quoting from a Jonah Carey tweet, which is quoting him, no question in five years they'll be winning 95 games a year. And that struck me as a little too rosy an outlook. I guess if it's 95 games a year if as in they will be a contending team they'll be a good team then i can i can go that far i guess but 95 games a year is not a threshold that many teams succeed in reaching and and that even that i would predict many teams next year to reach or this year to reach so looking five years out at a team that is terrible now and saying that they'll be winning 95 games a year,

I guess they're going about it in such a way and they have a philosophy that is consistent and smart people running it, and that certainly gives you confidence and they have added a lot of talent to the organization. And still, that is a long way away to project with any kind of certainty. Yeah, I would not say that about any team in baseball, even if the number were lowered to 90 and even if the timeline were lowered to three years. I mean, we don't have any team projected to win 95 this year with Pocota,

and I'm not sure anybody's projected to win more than 92, and the season starts in six and a half days. Yep. Right. So, yeah. So that's clearly an exaggeration at best, right? But what Bill James is saying is that they have a great plan and that he likes their setup for the next five years or for five years from now as much as any other teams. Do you agree with that?

I guess probably not. I think they're probably teams that are already somewhat respectable and are set up just as well, I would think, maybe. I mean, the Astros have just burned it to the ground and traded everyone and brought in a lot of talent, but it is true that there aren't, I mean, there aren't total blue-chip guys. I mean, I guess it's one of the best systems in baseball, but there aren't really sure thing prospects or young guys on the roster who are already stars and are locked up for the next several years.

So, yeah, the, I think that it's certainly not a system like the Royals had two years ago. And it's a guarantee, obviously, of immediate success. Yeah. The highest prospect that we have in their system right now is 25th. We only have four in the top 101, three in the top 100, which is probably like, well, I mean, it's basically the median, right? Because there's 101.

And so 25 is pretty low to have your highest one. And yeah, I mean, I wrote a piece that may not be up yet by the time people are listening to this, but it's sort of a gimmicky look at their season next year, position by position. And it's sort of true that there's not really really um a guy with a lot of upside in that um lineup as it is i mean they're young and they're cheap um but it isn't as though you look around and you say hey there's there's seven or eight guys here with all-star potential there's

like i don't know i mean there's all two vey and even Altuve, he's never going to be Chase Utley. He might be, I don't know, Jose Vidro. What might he be? What is Altuve's upside? I mean, I guess he's already Jose Vidro, maybe. No, Jose Vidro was a dog of all time. I'm remembering his Mariners DH years. Yeah, so I think it's fair to sort of look at this team and say they're not that close, and they're not that certain either.

I think it's also fair, though, to look at where they started, which is that a couple years ago, they had the worst farm system in baseball. They had the worst farm system in baseball, essentially, for about a six or seven year period i wrote about uh i wrote about their 2004 crop the other day because they were the worst system in baseball at the time and i looked at the 10-year lifespan of a prospect class and since 2004 when they were they were they were actually 29th ahead of the Expos. They've been 22nd, 20th, then 28th, 29th, 30th, 28th, 28th, 26th. And this is the first year they've had any sort of a farm system at all. So they went from 26th to probably like top, depending on where you're looking, top five or top seven pretty quickly, which is great.

But, I mean, when you think about that, 2011, they were the worst team in baseball and they were also the third worst farm system. 2009, they were a pretty terrible team and they were also the worst farm system in baseball. So they weren't a team that had one or the other or even mediocrity in one or the other. They were in the worst possible place you can be. And in that piece that I wrote about the 2004 class, you can actually see ways that having a farm system that bad has penalties that last for a really long time. You end up having to trade to fill a lot more spots.

When you trade, you give up more of those prospects and you end up signing free agents. And when you sign those free agents, you end up giving up draft picks. And so it's not like they're, I mean, you have to accept the context here, which is that they were a completely lost franchise. And now I think that it might be easy to exaggerate a little bit how much their future looks bright. I'm not sure that I think their future, to be honest, I will say I don't think their future looks as bright if you remove what we know about their front office. I think a lot of what we're responding to. Yeah, that's a lot of it. And this is fair to Danny Knobler and his piece. I mean, I think this is this is fair to danny knobbler and his piece i mean i think this is

part of what they're saying is this idea that that the that the internet crowd is sort of willing to carry the water for the astros because we like those guys and i i think that there's an element to that um i don't i don't think that's unfair either though i mean we know the work that some of these guys have done we know what jeff Luna has done. We know what Kevin and we know what... Yeah, Luna has a track record. Yeah, I mean, yeah, Luna has a track record, exactly. That's not irrelevant data though. The fact that that might be the single... Probably if you wanted to know who was going to be good in five years. I might actually look at farm system as the number three determinant,

and I might look at organizational, the front office, and simply what you know their payroll is going to be as one and two. I wouldn't look at record right now. I wouldn't look at farm system until I've looked at front office and payroll. And I think that one thing that the Astros are doing that is extremely good and easy to celebrate and that I don't think anybody has really done before is that they're really taking the don't spend money when you're not going to win theory to an extreme that nobody's ever done before. I mean, the Marlins said it because they're that cheap. But to carry a $20 million

payroll right now, if you assume that their true payroll level is something like, I don't know, $80 million based on the size of their metro area, that's basically $60 million that they have just ready to spend. $60 million is 10 to 12 wins on the free agent market when they're ready to spend it. Theoretically, you think they have that money in a no-load mutual fund or something like that and they can pull it out. I don't know if that's how it works. I don't know if that's how budgets work. It might just be that that money somehow disappears and they don't reinvest it or what. But if they do, and I would think they do, and I would think that's part of the plan, that's pretty significant too. So you're talking about a team that's going to have a lot of financial flexibility that has a pretty good farm system, that has a front office that we like, and even if they don't have a lot of real elite Moustakas, Hosmer types,

they do have a lot of depth. I think that their lineup as is, which is terrible, I think that there's a lot of potential starters in that lineup. And when you develop even average or even slightly below average types, those are positions that you don't have to go overpay for later, that you don't have to trade anything to fill out the trade deadline. And just starting with five or six or seven major league regulars is a pretty good way to start. I mean, you'd rather have the superstars. But I think Chris Carter will be a major leaguer in five years.

I think Jason Castro will be a major leaguer in five years. I think those are guys who are going to be filling roles. It wouldn't surprise me if Justin Maxwell was. And it wouldn't totally surprise me if Fernando Martinez was and Matt Dominguez was. I mean, those are all guys who I think could develop into average players that make it easier to build. Well, the scouts disagree, apparently, are the ones that Knobler talked to.

Yeah, they do. Or the ones that he quoted. That's relevant information, too. Yeah. Although you could find, I mean, to be fair, we don't know how many scouts. You could talk to 100 scouts and the first 95 love the estrus there is a scout who will say anything i mean some of the that's actually a good idea for a piece going back and finding the one scout who said everything because scouts do amazing work

but you get one guy to say anything at any time right and the one scout in the story is always and we always we just set a strong and we We always give it the same amount of weight. Maybe it's a terrible scout. Maybe it's the worst scout in baseball who's being quoted all the time. We don't know, but he's a scout. Some team pays him to evaluate players, so we kind of take his word as something worth paying attention to. But maybe he's bad at his job.

I don't know. It could be. Yeah, at Sabre, Dave Cameron brought up the whole not spending thing, and he basically said that we don't know what the effects of this will be. We've never really seen a team go to these lengths before. Maybe the fans will just desert the team

and not come back, and if team and not come back and if they don't come back or if they are very slow to come back then then the astros won't draw and it will be tough for them to spend money once they start getting a little better uh and then it would be difficult for them to kind of complete this rebuild i guess that is possible something to take into account i think it's I think the fact that the Astros seem to be doing it in good faith makes that less likely to me, but it is possible

Dave's right I just had a curiosity are you interested in watching the Astros this year? I could see either way of looking at it to me they're probably the number three team I want to watch every day. I would imagine I'm going to watch 50 Astros games this year.

I'm really stoked to watch the Astros. I heard Luno, I think it was Keith Law maybe asked him for his projection about the team. And of course, he didn't say any specific win total, but the way that he kind of gets around naming a win total is by saying that it's such a young team, and there are so many rookies and so few people with experience that there's a lot of uncertainty about how good the team will be. And that our projections for the team are less certain than they would be for a

team that's made out of a bunch of veterans with long track records, which I suppose is true. So maybe there are more possible outcomes or a wider range of outcomes for this team than for most teams. And that is a reason to watch them. And just the fact that we haven't watched them before and we don't know what these players look like and can do is a reason to watch them and just the fact that we haven't watched them before and we don't know what these players look like and can do is a reason to watch them plus there could always be one of those plays like they had last year where they all crash into each other and we make gifts of it that is not why i'm gonna be watching but i i like their starters i'm actually like i i still keep saying that i actually they're pitchers yeah they, they're starting pitchers.

They're not bad. I mean, presumably they'll trade Norris at some point. They're guys I'm interested in. And I'm going to- You like Umber? I'm a huge Phil Umber fan now. Philip, sorry, he does not go by Phil. I'm a huge Philip Umber fan, and I'm probably going to watch a lot of his starts.

So maybe that's why. Maybe I'm just swayed by Philip Umber. But yeah, anyway anyway fun club uh bless their hearts but we're also going to we i mean like we're running a piece that the piece that i alluded to that may run tomorrow or may not is kind of mean right i mean it's sort of like it's it tries to be nice and i don't think the conclusion is mean and and all that but you can read the premise as being kind of a mean spirited and i don't think we want to do that but yeah i mean we're going to criticize the heck out of the team or or if not criticize at least we're very realistic about what they are yes so i i think that's where like this

last the last part of the story is that he quotes a guy saying it's got a chance to be pretty ugly and then danny says the astros say it won't be the pro astros crowd says that even if it's ugly now it won't be ugly soon someone's going to be wrong and i just don't think that's true i think that he's set up a fight that's not there define soon i don't yeah no one's really saying sooner than i don't know four years or something which is not very soon in baseball terms so yeah yeah okay all right so long bye