Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 168: Projections for the Yankees and Blue Jays/If the Amateur Draft Were an Auction/Lifetime Contracts for Generational Talents

Episode Date: March 27, 2013

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about PECOTA’s projections for the Yankees and Blue Jays, how the amateur draft and free agency would work in an auction format, and whether teams should offer players like Bryce Harper and Stephen Strasburg $100 million lifetime contracts after drafting them.

time to get it good morning and welcome to episode 168 of effectively wild the daily podcast from baseball prospectus.com i'm sam miller with ben lindbergh ben have you noticed that um maybe i don't know 50 or 100 episodes ago i quit fighting the good morning thing that you do uh you mean you stopped saying good morning simultaneously? No, I stopped saying good evening. Oh, right. You stopped the good morning, good evening. Yeah.

No, I didn't. I didn't either. I just noticed it like this moment. Interesting. We can change. Things do change. All right. So it's Email Wednesday. Yeah. Before we start, I have a very quick story. I've mentioned on the podcast before, I think, the 24-hour diner that is a block from my apartment, without which I probably would not survive because I have very little initiative when it comes to food preparation. So tonight my girlfriend and I went to eat at the 24-hour diner.

I have never known the 24-hour diner not to be open except for a few days during Hurricane Sandy. But tonight it was closed. Passover. No, because they were filming an episode of Elementary. Oh, how about that? Yeah. And they changed the whole place.

It's usually, you and I ate there when you were in New York last summer. It's named the Market Diner, but they put a new store sign on the side of it with a big neon sign that said Parthenon with pictures of the Parthenon. So you watch elementary, so you should let me know when there is a diner scene at a place called Parthenon. You don't watch it after your wonderful experience with the show and its producers? No, you and I pretty much put that show on the map

between your tweet about how it's as good or better than Sherlock and then my article about how it's bad at depicting baseball scenes accurately. Between us, we really gave that show a boost, I think. But no, I haven't watched it since I wrote that article because I was so exhausted from watching that one scene like 40 times that I couldn't bear to go back. But I know you've continued to watch it, so I hope you will let me know when the Parthenon makes an appearance. Yeah, I will let you know and maybe we'll deconstruct the meal and how many, I don't know, how many different cows died in the making of the burger or something like that. Right. I got an email from Jason Parks after we recorded our Puig show yesterday. And by the way, Puig was optioned to AA yesterday after we recorded.

So he will not be pushing anyone to start on opening day. Jason said, and I'm quoting now, I've spoken to a few front office sources out here about Puig, and I've seen him several times in camp. He's jumping fastballs like crazy, and most arms are just firing away without much of a plan. The book isn't out on him yet, and Arizona is a poor environment, especially this early in the season, to spin quality curveballs.

And in order to build arm strength for the season, most pitchers are very fastball heavy right now. Puig is a dead red fastball hitter so he is crushing the ball I think this inflates his performance a great deal he's legit at but not much advanced scouting on him right now and some readers sent us some things that Keith Law has said in a similar vein in the past few weeks so that seems to be I guess, the consensus among scouting types or some scouting types at least that his spring training stats are not really maybe an accurate representation of how he would do in major leagues, which of course is true for just about everyone.

And somebody else emailed to criticize us, I guess, for buying into his spring or something like that, which I didn't feel like we did. I mean, honestly, I have no idea what I say during these 20 minutes. I will say almost anything to avoid silence. But I don't recall that being the point of the show. I certainly don't think that I don't know what to think of him right now, but I think probably my view of him hasn't changed

more than a couple percent this spring. Okay. Email Wednesday. Email Wednesday. This is from James, who points out, and I want to read this one partly because you and I had this conversation a little bit when we were planning pieces for this week. But he points out that Dakota has the Yankees finishing seven games ahead of the Blue Jays.

It basically has the Blue Jays as a 500 team and the Yankees as the AL East favorites. And this is counterintuitive, and I think it goes against conventional wisdom. 84-78 team. The Blue Jays? Yeah. Okay, so I think that's actually new. That's the latest run. I think that a few days ago they were at 82.

I mean, it has the Yankees as a 91-win team, so it thinks the Yankees are very good. Yeah, and a lot of people think the Yankees are very bad. Tim Marchman, for instance, wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal that may have been slightly tongue-in-cheek, I'm not sure, about how Yankees fans get to root for a bad team for the first time in 20 years, and here's how to do it. And so James asked some specific questions that I want to go through in order.

But in a general sense, Bill James has said something in the past about how a statistic that never surprises you isn't much good. And this, I think, surprised both of us, this projection for the Yankees and this projection for the Blue Jays. And I have to admit that even though I believe wholeheartedly in what Bill James said and when people criticize or sort of cherry-pick examples of stats

that are counterintuitive and use them as evidence that stats are evil, I've often used that Billuitive and use them as evidence that stats are evil. I've often used that Bill James kind of maxim as evidence. But I also find it very hard to actually tell myself that and accept it. So when I see the Yankees projected better than I think and the Blue Jays projected worse than I think, I very rarely think, well, I'm the problem and Pakoda has cracked the code. Do you ever feel that way or do you also continually just have to get proven wrong because you can't get past your own confidence? way if it's if it's something that that doesn't really align at all with my expectations of things then then yes it's sort of a very forcible uh process i have to i have to tell myself that

maybe i'm missing something and i have looked at and and to be fair i mean the the projections for teams are heavily dependent on our playing time projections, which is not a Pocota thing. It's a thing that Jason Martinez has gone through and kind of projected playing time for everyone with input from the staff. So if we are being maybe over-optimistic about the Yankees' ability to stay healthy or something, it's more a reflection of our collective wisdom than Pocoda's algorithms. But I don't know, when I look at the individual projections for players, I find it a little

easier to believe, I guess, or at least I disagree with fewer of them. But as you said, James had some specific ones. so james goes on there are a few counterintuitive statements that pakoda seems to be making to reach this overall conclusion which of these seem most slash least plausible he lists seven so i just want to go through quickly and see whether whether you on the whole would give it a thumbs up or a thumbs down so the yankees catchers taken as a whole are not below replacement level. I probably don't buy that. I might buy it kind of because I think Chris Stewart is a very good defensive catcher and framing wise, but that's not something that Pocota really incorporates.

So I would think that if that weren't incorporated, I would expect him to be below replacement level, yeah. Replacement level is really low, and if you can just stay on the field as a catcher, you can get pretty much there. And I like Chris Stewart's defense, not just the framing, but the sort of traditional stuff too. So I will give that a thumbs up. I don't like much the the backups behind chris stewart though no it's not a good group it's just i could see them being combined 0.02 warp right yeah it's not it's not shocking all right milky cabrera is not for real yeah and i i looked up what that meant uh this context, because I do sort of think

Melke is a decline candidate and would have been even aside from the positive test and everything. So he's projected for 1.4 wins above replacement in 551 plate appearances. So sort of, I guess, and that's in left field. And so he's sort of a maybe average-ish, slightly below average left fielder, which, I don't know, doesn't sound crazy to me. I would expect him to be more of a 2011 upside offensively than a 2012 upside. And I don't think much is – That was 2.1 warp.

Right. So I don't know. Well, yeah. I mean he was worth a 5.1 warp last year in two-thirds of a season before he got popped. And obviously there's regression from that. But I'll take the over on 1.4 warp i'll take the over on two warp okay um you know i think that 2011 is perfectly realistic probably a pretty good projection and considering that 2012 is slightly more recent i'll even even

with the bad flip and all that luck and all that, I'll still take the over. He's playing center in 2011, though, isn't he? He was, but badly. Not that he was good at center, right? Yeah, it probably shouldn't make that much of a difference. For 2013, Kevin Uglis is almost as good as Brett Lowry. Lowry? Lowry?

I don't know how to pronounce his name. Yeah, that one I don't buy so much. Lowry. It's Lowry, isn't it? I say Lowry? Lawry? I don't know how to pronounce his name. Yeah, that one I don't buy so much. Lowry. It's Lowry, isn't it? I say Lowry. I don't buy that one either. That one's awful. Being better on a per-plate appearance basis and Lowry just having about 150 or so more plate appearances.

So I buy the Low Laurie having more playing time, but not the rest of it. I like Laurie. Yeah, I have a hard time with that one. Colby Rasmus is not about to break out. I'm okay with that. Yeah, I'm completely okay with that. I would say if you asked me to make a true statement,

I would say Colby Rasmus is not about to break out. Yeah. And just leave it at that. Reduce playing time at all. Mark Teixeira is almost as valuable as Edwin Encarnacion. I'm a believer in Encarnacion. He's exactly the sort of player that a projection system is not. I mean, you're not going to have a projection for Encarnacion

that's based purely on stats that is as positive as Mark Teixeira. So I guess in this case, I would disagree, probably. I would disagree, but if it weren't for the reduced playing time, I would take Teixeira, I think. Okay. CeCe Sabathia is the best pitcher in the division and about three warp better than R.A. Dickey. I'm okay with the first part i think um yeah i mean you could i mean you could make the case that david price

is better or something but that's sort of off topic yeah um so i certainly buy him being the best projected starter on on these two teams we're talking about. And, of course, Dickey is just a notorious breaker of projection systems, and that probably is, I guess, the number one thing that you could point to, although he's not projected to be bad or anything, but certainly not Cy Young level. So, yeah, I would take the over on the Dickey projection. So yeah, I would take the over on the Dickey projection. Yeah, I think I would say that it's probably responsible to have Sabathia 3-warped better than Dickey.

But if I were betting, I would bet that Dickey closes that gap. And finally, more than half of the Yankees' perceived advantage comes from the bullpen. 3.6 wins of it, which I will say is... That all bullpens should have equal expectations. I believe that, yes, I believe all. Except in extreme, extreme circumstances, all bullpens should have equal expectations. So I will say that if that's where Pocota's getting it from, then I would bet the over on the Blue Jays and probably bet the under on the Yankees. Yeah, I'd agree.

So I hope that answers your question, James. We're going to go to another question. Actually, I think the next two, probably the final two, are somewhat related. They're both about ways of kind of looking at draft, the draft. But Xander from Brooklyn started thinking about auction drafts in fantasy baseball, and he says that auction drafts made me wonder what the impact would be if MLB were to adopt this type of format for the Rule 4 draft.

How would you feel about such a change? I think this would be the fairest possible manner in which to portion out talent among Major League teams. A team scouts a player, they put a dollar value on him, and then they have the opportunity to bid on his services, regardless of where they placed in the standings the previous year. If MLB wanted to continue to advantage inferior teams, they could allocate each team's money on a sliding scale inversely to their record, but no team would be prevented from going out and taking any individual talent if they think he's worth the investment.

And I would say, I would just note that this is essentially a more open version of what baseball was like up until 1965, and scouts, it seems like, still long for the good old days when it was like that but i actually want to expand it a little bit and talk about what it would be like if major league baseball owners made all free agents basically if they auctioned off all free agents and i guess the problem is that well i guess the problem is that the player gets to choose too. They don't have to go to the highest bidder. But it seems to me that right now players have this huge advantage in the free agent market because they can essentially

They can essentially collude with each other because they can leak all this information to reporters and have all the information be on MLB trade rumors and such. And so it becomes this market where they know how much teams are offering, but teams don't necessarily have the ability to do that without risking collusion. offering, but teams don't necessarily have the ability to do that without risking collusion. And it seems that the teams would have this wonderful advantage that might be legal and wouldn't violate collusion if they all just agreed that they would bid against each other in an open room and that all their offers would be public. And so I don't, this is probably – it probably wouldn't be legal. It probably would count as collusion somehow because – I don't know. But I think that that would be a fun day. Yeah.

They did that. This would be a very fun draft day as well. It would be a fun draft day. People might actually watch the baseball draft. Yeah. people might actually watch the baseball draft. Yeah. I mean, certainly there would be a lot more,

it would be a much more kind of dynamic picking environment where there would be a lot more strategy, there would be a lot more nuance, and you wouldn't have to wait 29 picks to see who your team was going to be involved with because your team could theoretically be involved in every player um so i think it's a great idea so what's the downside besides it not being possible for collective bargaining reasons yeah i don't know um i mean as long as you do as he says as long as you you do allocate each team's money based on its record

so that the worst teams would have more of an opportunity to spend, it doesn't seem off the bat to be something that would hurt competitive balance to me. And it would certainly allow teams to beef up their scouting staffs and make more of an impact in that area. They could really set themselves apart, possibly, not having to wait for a certain pick to draft or to select, I would think. Yeah, I wonder if you had this system where teams were bidding. I wonder what percentage of the time you would see the player go to the highest bidder and how often you would see the player kind of reject the highest bid because of the circumstance.

If you had to guess, would you guess that it would be closer to 95% of the time or closer to like 20% of the time or somewhere in the middle? For both major leaguers and for draftees. For draftees, I think it would be pretty rare. Just that they would go to a lower bid. Yeah, because you're years away from making the majors anyway, so a team that is not competitive at the time that you're drafted is not necessarily still going to be a losing team by the time you actually get to the majors. So I don't know.

We might just see every prospect avoid the Marlins or something. to go not only to the place that was willing to give you the most money, but also just liked you best as a prospect and had the biggest stake in your development and would possibly be more committed. I guess for free agents, for major league free agents, it would probably be more common. it would probably be more common. But I would say probably not more common than 20% of the time. Yeah, you hear teams, there are certain teams that complain about not being able to get free agents as easily,

either because of their geographic location or their ballpark or the fact that they are terrible. And it's hard to actually know how much of that complaining is true and how much of it is a convenient excuse to put in front of the public. But if we auctioned players off in public so that everybody could see every team's bid, we would know. We would also, it would be incredible, I think, for evaluating front offices because you would just get so much more data. It doesn't really help to try to evaluate front offices just on the players they sign. You really need to know what they thought of every player they didn't sign to really get enough data.

You need them to put the dollar sign on the muscle, basically. And you need to evaluate all that data. And so it would be a lot of fun for us, I think, to really see how much they value every single player who is available to them. Be a delight. And that's probably why they should do it. Yeah. We need more material. And so finally, Eric also asks about draft picks. He says, let's pretend the draft bonus restrictions don't exist. Should generational talents like Harper or Strasburg accept a lifetime contract offer of $100 million as their draft bonus?

Would it have been wise for Washington to have offered it at the time? It seems that right now both contracts would have been big wins for the team, but of course it was no guarantee. Does your answer depend on whether it's a pitcher or a hitter? And I kind of answered this about a year ago, right? You did. Yeah. So I wrote about whether a team should or will ever offer a player like Mike Trout or Bryce Harper a 20-year deal, and if they do, how much they should pay. And I think that this is actually a situation where that deal actually benefits both sides pretty clearly and pretty obviously. sides pretty clearly and pretty obviously, the player is still in a situation of kind of tremendous personal risk where they're either going to be a hundred millionaire or if something bad happens, they're going to be like a two millionaire. And that's a huge

difference. I mean, you're literally talking about four or five or six generations down the line. And I think that many people, if not all people, but many, many people would gladly give up the second hundred million to lock in the first hundred million. Yeah, I think just about any player would do this. Yeah, well, so there's a reason. reason. We'll get to it. From a team's perspective, teams are essentially just running insurance companies. For them, it's just about risk management and figuring out the actuarial tables. I think almost every team would be able to profit based on this. That's why you see these long-term deals being signed earlier and earlier for pre-ARB players. So the reason a player wouldn't do it, though, I think, is that you can get, basically, you can't get your first $100 million, probably, but you could get your first $20 million pretty easily if you're this kind of talent or $30 million or $40 million or $50 million or $60 million and still hit free agency in your late 20s.

So you don't basically have to give up all of your future earning potential in order to lock in guaranteed security. You only have to give up some of it, if that makes sense. So like when I was talking about Trout signing a 20-year deal before last year started, and I was talking about how he would love to get $120 million now and not have any risk, except if he wanted to really get safety and security from the Angels, he probably could have gone to them and signed a seven year extension for $30 million at the time with a couple of maybe team options. The difference between $2 million and $100 million is huge, but the difference between

$30 million and $100 million isn't really all that huge and I'm not sure that it's enough of an incentive to give up your your sort of maximum potential because what you're giving up is the difference between you know 100 and maybe 350 if everything breaks right I mean Trout might make 350 or might make 500 million dollars in his career and so you really need to basically figure out a way to put the leverage screws to the player when that's really poor and doesn't have a lot of leverage. And a player like Harper or Strasburg, the type of player that Eric is asking about, is probably in a position to get enough security that you can't really put the screws to him. And does your answer depend on whether it's a pitcher or a hitter? No. I mean, I might offer a hitter more, but I would run the actuarial tables for either one and make a slightly less than fair offer to either.

All right. Yeah. All right. So let's stop there. All right. Yeah. All right. So let's stop there. That was fun, fun times. We have more questions that we wish we could have gotten to, and maybe we will in a future show. Get to them next week, but send us more at podcast at baseball perspectives dot com.

Very good questions this week. All right.