Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 171: Extensions for Everyone!

Episode Date: April 1, 2013

Ben and Sam discuss the recent news about extensions for Justin Verlander, Buster Posey, and Elvis Andrus.

Then it can wait. It can? For how long? Forever and ever. Good morning, and welcome to episode 171 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectus. I am Ben Lindberg. I am joined by Sam Miller. Hi, Ben. Hello.

Did you watch baseball yesterday? I did not by Sam Miller. Hi, Ben. Hello. Did you watch baseball yesterday? I did not watch baseball yesterday. I really wanted to watch baseball yesterday, but I was at an Easter family gathering, and my family is not a baseball-watching family, so I would have had to be extremely antisocial and go sit in a room by myself and watch TV, which is usually my goal at family gatherings. But someone always comes and brings me back and tells me I should be talking to people. So well, the Astros sure proved Danny Knobler and all his scouts wrong. Did you watch baseball? I did. Yeah, actually, I did watch it. It was a really fun game. And I'm going to love watching the Astros this year, even if, uh, even if it's a painful March to 56 or 57. Um, but, uh, one thing that was interesting

about the broadcast that actually I kind of was thinking about when I read Danny Knobler's piece, which we talked about is Buster Olney, um, was interviewing Jeff Luno, um, on the air. was interviewing Jeff Luno on the air and he said something along the lines of you guys have insiders have told me that you guys are the purest form of implementation of statistical analyses or something like that.

It's just interesting how it seems like every bad team that does anything moneyball becomes like the standard bearer of moneyball stuff. And any good team that wins at all becomes the standard bearer for scout stuff, which is weird because, I mean, like obviously there's not really a ton of difference between I think the philosophies on each side. It's just odd how these narratives always seem to attach. The winners are always like the Giants.

You read these pieces about how the Giants win without all these fancy computers. And the Phillies. And the Phillies. Oh, man. I remember actually when I started writing about baseball, the Phillies had just won the World Series, and there was a guy at the paper who hated anything statty and hated everything I was writing.

And he would just go into the comments and insult me anytime I wrote a piece. And he kept on bringing up the Phillies and how the Phillies had proven all this stuff wrong. Anyway, so I guess all I'm saying is to watch out for people who are anointing the Astros the king of the stat heads because I assume that they're probably actually fairly close to the mainstream and they probably just actually in a way get this attention because they're bad. You can be good and get the same rap.

they're bad. You can be good and get the same rap. I mean, you can be the Red Sox under Theo Epstein or, I mean, the Rays are good and do that. They're also a small market team. And I feel like maybe small market teams are more likely to become known for that. Or maybe they're just more likely to be that way because they have to be. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know either, I guess. It was just something off the top of my head, but we're off topic. Yes. And we kind of have a lot of different topics that we're not going to talk about for a long time each. But there were quite a few things that happened this weekend. quite a few things that happened this weekend all of them were extensions

or almost all of them were extensions there was one that wasn't an extension that I wanted to just get a quick yes or no on is Johan Santana a Hall of Fame pitcher for you if he doesn't pitch again

no I don't think he is he doesn't need to? No, I don't think he is. He doesn't need to do much more, but he does need to pitch again. Yeah. If he could come back and maybe just limp along as a league average guy for a few years, maybe? Yeah. The peak was basically there. Oh, yeah, definitely the peak was there. Okay. So extensions, we've talked about the trend toward extensions before. Everyone is signing them. No one is going to be a free agent anymore.

Teams have decided that it makes sense to lock up their young players before they hit the open market. And players evidently are okay with going along with that. So we had a few big extensions signed. I guess the biggest of all was the Justin Verlander extension, which I wrote about at BP. And I don't know, I wrote a lot of words about it. And at the end, I guess I didn't feel too different about it than I did when I started. I guess I kind of started with the kind of the boilerplate default long-term pitcher contract opinion. It's too risky. It doesn't make sense, etc. But I tried to get a little more nuanced than that because it gets boring to say that every time one of these deals is signed. It's hard to, yeah. It is the interesting thing about these contracts is how difficult it is to say anything all

that interesting about them. They all seem to fit a fairly similar template. Yes. And it's hard to, I mean, anything that goes this far into the future is really hard to judge. There's so many variables. And almost all of these are kind of by definition going to be club friendly if you sort of just do the basic math. I mean, that's why that's why

this clubs were so eager to do these. Yeah. I mean, this deal doesn't strike me as extremely club friendly. It doesn't strike me as terribly club unfriendly either i basically just looked at pitchers who were like justin verlander at the same age and that's a very very small group uh because from age 26 to 29 which is his his four last years his very dominant years dominant and durable years uh there's really almost no one who's been better than he was over the same age range it's like it's four guys it's johan santana one of them uh no um it's pedro and clemens and kofax and cc sabathia that's that's since 1950 or stats don't go back beyond that or these stats don't so uh that's basically three of the pitchers who are kind of in the typical conversation

as the best pitchers of all time. And CeCe Sabathia, who is an excellent pitcher in his own right. Wait, wait, I'm looking at it. I see Johan Santana's name on here, but you subtracted him from the sample because he's still active. Oh, well, right. Okay. So I lowered the minimum to let more people into the group. Because I was just looking at guys who had 20 wins over that period or whatever, which was what Verlander had. So I lowered the bar a bit and to 15 wins or something. And then Santana was in there and there were about 20 low 20s guys, not counting Verlander.

And I mean, there were some disasters in that group. There were people who basically didn't pitch beyond that point or didn't contribute at all. Koufax, of course, was done after age 30. There were other guys, Jose Riho and Sam McDowell, basically done after 30 or so. But a lot of guys who aged well. And if you kind of compare all of them to Verlander and how well he has done compared to them

and just some other factors, all of them to Verlander and how well he has done compared to them. And just some other factors, just the fact that there's no, there really are no warning signs about him. There's no health concern. There's no performance concern. He's been durable. He's been dominant. And it's always a good sign. I think when a team is willing to commit to a player for that long. That always

makes me more optimistic about his future than I would be if that player were traded or allowed to leave. So I'm kind of okay with it. It seemed basically about right. It didn't seem like they got much of a discount for signing him a couple years in advance. And I guess Clayton Kershaw will probably sign any day now and will probably make more money than Justin Verlander. And maybe that will set a precedent that will send the market rate climbing even higher. But I don't know how much he would have profited from that because he's so much older than Kershaw. It seems like it would be hard for him to use that as an argument to make more money. But I don't know. It seems like sort of a fair deal.

And if you're a Tigers fan, then you should be happy that Justin Verlander is there forever. And it's risky like any risk or like any contract of this nature, but it doesn't seem like a crazy, disastrous risk to me. So when Verlander had two more years under the Tigers' control, and when Ryan Howard signed his big five-year, $125 million extension, one of the things that was so criticized about it was that it wasn't even going to kick in for two years, the the Phillies essentially didn't get much of a discount like you're saying with Verlander and they didn't have to sign him so early they didn't have to to you know jump two years into the future to make this move and and I think some of the same criticism if I'm remembering correctly was lodged about Travis Hafner's deal with the Indians where it was like

you know that one of the nice things about having a player under club control is that you don't you get to wait and see whether he makes it to free agency before you commit to him because every pitch could be his last so is the only difference between this move and the Howard move that that we just didn't like Howard and we do like Verlander or was, I mean, is that really a bad, I mean, it seemed like at the time that was considered bad management and now it's considered great management. I guess it was just, I don't know. I mean, even at the time, I guess it seemed like there was no way that Howard was going to justify that contract. Yeah. So it was the contract was bad, not the

timing. Yeah. Well, yeah, I think that was, I mean, if, if they had signed him two years early and gotten a great deal because they signed him two years early, then, then people probably wouldn't have hated it. Uh, so I think it was more about the, the size than it was the timing. I mean, if you are going to sign a player then, then you should not be paying more than he's worth, probably. Yeah, I think the timing was used a lot to criticize it, maybe unfairly. The deal was maybe bad enough on its own terms. Although, yeah, I mean, it's probably fair to say that Justin Verlander will not be as good over the next two seasons as he has been

over the last four seasons so there's an argument to be made that maybe he would have commanded a lower price I think that it's also possible that that you do get a discount here it's just hard to see it because um you figure if Verlander makes it to free agency like he is now, guys at that level who have hit free agency, I don't know if that's necessarily true in the last couple of years because Halliday and Cliff Lee took kind of weird deals. But before that, you were seeing guys like him getting six- and seven-year deals. So Sabathia, I think, was a six with a player opt-out. And Santana, I think, was a seven year deal and so if you're thinking that you're going to basically have to sign this guy for seven years what this does is

it moves the seven years up to now when he's younger uh rather than having to give him seven years when he hits free agency if that makes sense do you get what I'm saying yeah you're actually you're in a way you're actually ending your commitment sooner. You're gambling that he's going to be healthy for the next two years and that this isn't going to turn into a disaster because you're planning on giving him what he wants in two years anyway. And so I don't, I'm not expressing this well. Yeah, I understand what you mean. That's a good point. Okay, so we wanted to get to a couple of other extensions. You had something to say about the Giants deal for Buster Posey. I don't have much to say about it, but a lot of the talk has been about his position,

he's a catcher. How will he age? How will his bat play at first base? I don't know if this is an original thought. I haven't been online in the last couple of days. It just seems to me that thinking of Buster Posey as a future first baseman is actually probably wrong. I think he seems very likely to me to be a future third baseman, perhaps a future second baseman. He's got the body type. He's got the arm.

He's got the history as an infielder, as a shortstop. And it just seems to me that you could almost make the case. In fact, I was talking to a friend about it this winter. You could almost sort of make the case for moving him to third base like really any time if you wanted to, especially it might have even been easier to make the case when you didn't know how he was going to come back from his injury. But I mean, if you sort of fiddle with the positional adjustments and stuff and you credit

him with being a good third baseman, and you give him a little bonus for his bat if he's not having to catch every day. I mean, right now he's already giving some of his value away by playing first base on his sort of rest days because the Giants don't like to have him catch too often. So, yeah, I mean, I think that if you look at him as a guy who's likely to transition to another, uh, valuable position and not first base, it becomes a lot different than evaluating like, like, like what, you know, what Joe Malin is. So that's what I wanted to say. Yeah.

I wanted to tell somebody that. You just told many people that. Uh, okay. You just told many people that. Okay. The extension that is the latest one of these to happen and so recent that I don't think we even officially know what the terms are, or at least there were conflicting reports the last time I refreshed my browser, is the Rangers extending Elvis Andrus. And this is not official. Is the Rangers extending Elvis Andrus?

And this is not official. Ken Rosenthal is saying it's an eight-year deal that could be worth $120 million. I think there was a different report from John Heyman, maybe. By the time you're listening to this, it will probably all have become clear. But I guess the initial reaction is, why are the Rangers locking up Andrews forever when they have Jerickson Profar ready to go? Why would you want to block the top prospect in baseball or make him move to a less important position? That's a good question, Ben.

No answer. I don't know. I mean, you deal with that when you need to. It kind of is when you need to, though, right? Isn't it? Well, it isn't, in fact. It's not because you knew that Andrews was going to be on this team for the next two years. You knew that Kinsler, unless you're going to move Kinsler, was going to be on the team for the next two years.

So if it's an issue now, then this extension has no bearing on it. What you're talking about is what you're going to do from 2015 on. what you're talking about is what you're going to do from 2015 on and maybe the answer is that elvis andrews moves to second base or maybe it's the profile moves to second base or maybe it's the profile i would think well i'm saying after two years from now i'm saying later in the future maybe it's that somebody goes to center field maybe it's that somebody gets uh maybe maybe it's that somebody flames out and doesn't become the hot shot that you thought it was going to be. Maybe someone goes to third base. I don't know. How long has Beltre signed for? Three more years. Okay, so it's not

going to happen. But you get my point. It's not any more of an issue. Yeah, this doesn't... I don't really feel like the extension has that much bearing on that issue, to be honest. It does in the long term, but you have two years to figure that out.

So by the time Kinsler is a free agent, I guess Andrus will be, he's 24 now, so he'll be, I mean, still basically in his prime, but maybe not as good a shortstop as Profar is at that point. Oh my gosh, Ian Kzler signed through 2017. Yeah. That's a long time. That's a long time. All right, well, that gets...

Right, so he moves to DH or first base. Yes, he does. That seems likely. One of those things seems likely. Or left field. Mm-hmm. Anyway, the point is simply that what you're doing with Elvis Andrews from 2015 on is not related to the issue that you and I have with their roster glut right now in this moment.

So I think that's a false complaint. I will say that what I think is interesting about this move, about this extension, let's say it's 8 and 120. interesting about this move about this extension let's say it's eight and 120 um what's interesting to me is that elvis andrews is he's a great player uh he's a very good player he's gonna i think he's gonna be worth that money um on like a standard wins per million metric kind of thing but if you look at what he's done it's not the sort of stuff that gets paid he he is a well below average hitter um he has hit eight home runs in the last three years he's no longer really a premium stolen base guy he's not going to put up 40 or 50 steals um and i'm just trying to think of a guy like that for a short stop i wouldn't say he's a well below average hitter no no not for a short

stop but he's even for a for a hitter for a hitter he's a below average he's never had an op he's never had an ops plus higher than 91 he's i'm just saying that he doesn't have i'm trying to think of a short stop who got a mega deal like a you know like a mega this is a basically like you what when you sign ellen andrews to this kind of deal you're basically saying we think he's going to hit free agency and he's going to get six years in 150 and so we're trying to get you know a deal now or six years in you know what five and a hundred whatever and i'm just trying to think of a shortstop who, um, who got that without any gold gloves without, I mean, all these things that aren't meaningful in the way that you

and I analyze players, but seem to nonetheless have been meaningful to the market. And so I wonder if what's interesting about this deal is that the Rangers think that the market is going to be sort of smart about a player like Andrews and sign him even though he doesn't have any of the traditional money stats. I guess it's interesting in the same way that he has been an all-star twice already. That's interesting too. Although, yeah, you're right. He slugged 301.

Right, he slugged 301. And last year, I mean, if you adjust for everything, I mean, his last two years, true average-wise, were 258 and 255, so pretty close to league average, and that's as a 22- 23 year old so you figure in his prime maybe he will be an above average hitter who's a good defender and and a really good base runner um but yeah but there's no when you look at what the diamondbacks were willing to give up to get gregorius and when you look at, if I'm remembering this right,

and if the reports were true, the Braves refusing to trade Andrelton Simmons for Justin Upton, it might be that the market does now value these guys. And we just haven't seen a player like Andrews hit the market, but the Rangers were confident that he would get paid as though he were a 25 home run shortstop in his prime. Yeah. I guess if you're, if you're going to block a prospect or temporarily block a prospect, it would make the most sense to have it be, uh, have him blocked by a really good

shortstop who could move pretty much anywhere on the field or be really attractive to any other team because it's it's just always a an area of scarcity and also an area that that you can be flexible with since those players can do a lot of different things it's not like it's not like sticking a bat only first first baseman behind another bat-only first baseman. Right. Exactly. Right. Although, yes, I agree.

I think I agree with that, and we should end there. Okay. Sorry, Paul Goldschmidt. Not going to talk about your extension. Okay. We will be back tomorrow, and maybe we will even talk about real baseball that happened and that we both watched there is a bp staff round table that will be going on from 1 p.m eastern today monday uh probably through the end of of the games if people are interested in talking to us for that long so

stop by bp everything is still free on the site today and we will be back tomorrow