Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1724: Changing of the Guardians

Episode Date: July 24, 2021

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the new name and look of Cleveland’s MLB team, the Guardians, then react to the Rays trading for Nelson Cruz and dealing away Rich Hill, analyze a new electronic system for sending signs from catchers to pitchers that’s about to be tested in A ball, and salute Juan […]

I had a guardian angel, that's what this is all about I have a guardian angel, I keep him in my head When I'm alone and become afraid, he saved my life instead When I'm alone and become afraid, he saved my life instead Hello and welcome to episode 1724 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs and I'm joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? Doing all right. How are you? I'm good. I'm noting copy editing errors in team announcements, so I'm just rolling along, being true to myself. Yeah, well, we have to talk about that team announcement. So we have a couple

guests coming up later in this episode. We will be talking to Ben Clemens and Kevin Goldstein of Fangraphs about their just completed Trade value series, which has been running throughout the week at Fangraphs, ranking the best players in baseball in terms of the most value they have on the trade market in theory. And we'll also get into the upcoming trade deadline and whether Ben and Kevin think this will be a busy one or not. It has already been a bit busy. So we have some news to discuss. We have two Rays trades. The Rays have traded four and traded away a 41-year-old apiece. And I also want to ask you about some news about a new system for relaying signs from catcher to pitcher.

But first, we have that team announcement that you alluded to. her to pitcher but first we have that team announcement that you alluded to the cleveland mlb team has a new name and a new logo and a new word mark the works the cleveland guardians what is your review i think the name is fine i think i think the guardians themselves having seen them in person in Cleveland, are very cool. Like they hearken back to a time when we did big public art in a more like conscious and sort of concentrated and purposeful way that the state would direct. And so the Guardians themselves, super rad. And so I am fine with the name.

I think that when we talked about this process at length a while ago, that we were both sort of of the opinion that like, we're not from Cleveland. And we are not Cleveland baseball team fans. And so I'm very happy to defer to whatever the good people of Cleveland think of this because it's their team. And it is it is invoking sort of local iconography in a way that I hope is pleasing to them but if they're like those guardians suck then i is then it's a bad name but that is not my my impression yeah of it and i think that the logo is neat but i i will to the surprise of absolutely no one who listens to this podcast uh i have a couple of notes. Mostly, I think that we all agreed that moving away from their existing name and iconography was important to them building a franchise that really felt

welcoming to all people and did not diminish or exclude anyone. And so while I can appreciate wanting to evoke Cleveland as a place and sort of link to the traditions of the community and the iconography of the community, I do find it disappointing how similar the typeface looks to what they had before. It does feel a bit like they are trying to have their cake and eat it too in that respect. And when you are trying to distance yourself from an offensive part of your franchise's history, it seems odd to not take advantage of the opportunity to distance oneself further than they seem to have with that part. So that part I find wanting. I, like everyone else, with that part so that part i find wanting i like everyone else uh wish that they had moved away from their color scheme just because i think we we don't have we we don't take as good of advantage

as we ought to of how many there's so many colors bad like there's just a lot of colors so we should use more of them and do stuff that is more obviously distinct from from the other franchises but if they were going to stick with one thing to be like, this is about our heritage, then sticking with the color scheme but embracing a more obviously different typeface would have been my preference. So those are the things I think about it.

But the Guardians, super cool. And I think the logo is neat. I know some people have been unenthused, but I think it's cool. Yeah, I really like the logo. That part's good. If people haven't seen it, it's sort of like a winged G. Yeah. The Gs are guarding the baseball kind of.

Anyway, I like it. It's unusual, and that's good. It's a relief to have any new name, first of all, just to get that done and to not have it drag on any longer than it had already dragged on. bridge outside the stadium. They're not as nationally associated with Cleveland as, say, the Rockies are with Colorado or the Brewers are with Milwaukee. I think a lot of people from outside of Cleveland saw this and thought, is this an MCU reference? What are they going for here? And it had to be explained to them that, no, you have these statues that are called the Guardians, and that's kind of cool. But it does have some significance to people in Cleveland who are the target audience here.

So as you said, I think if they're on board, then everyone else will get on board. And for those who haven't seen the statues, they are kind of cool. They kind of look like the Argonath, the pillars of the kings that are the gates into Gondor in Lord of the Rings. They sure do. I don't know if that clarifies anything for anyone, but that's

what came to my mind when I saw them. And I think as for the name itself, there were a lot of people who wanted spiders or blues or rocks, and I had issues with all of those names. I never loved spiders. Again, I do kind of defer to the people who are going to be rooting for this team and i don't feel that strongly about team names just like i don't feel that strongly about team uniforms for instance and i thought spiders was sort of semi-ironic in a way it's like associated mostly with one of the worst teams ever and it's out of the box in that it's not the usual creature that you name a team after although i know there are some teams named after spiders. But, you know, there are differing opinions about spiders and the aesthetic appeal of spiders, which I guess is good in that it would have been distinctive.

On the other hand, some people are scared of spiders. But anyway, it just seems strange to me to name it after a team that is known to be terrible, although I know the Spiders weren't always terrible. Maybe it would kind of be like reclaiming the name in some way, but I didn't love that. And Blues is boring, you know, enough color names in team names. And Cleveland Rocks would be kind of confusing to me because rocks as a noun means something different from rocks as a verb. So I like Guardians, I think. The standards for team names in baseball or most sports are not really that high. I mean, it's usually just named after socks or like- Or sporting, the athletics.

Right. Yeah. Or fish or birds or some other kind of creature or something generic like giants or pirates. I mean, the team in Philadelphia is named the Phillies. Like the bar for creativity is pretty low here. So if anything, I think Guardians sort of stands out. And like any name change, I mean, any website redesign, everyone initially hates it just because it's different and you don't know where things are and you don't know how to find things and it looks weird and we're sort of scared for a minute but then it grows on you and my initial reaction to guardians was this is fine and then gradually it morphed into actually

this is maybe better than fine i kind of like this so even people who had a negative reaction at first i think it will grow on them And by the time this team starts playing under the name Guardians, I think it'll just sound like, yeah, that's always been a team name and we'll just be used to it. And some people aren't going to like it because they don't think the old name was racist or they don't care that it was racist or they think the team got too woke or whatever, or even they're just attached to the tradition of the name of the team they grew up rooting for. I don't know what you can do for people like that other than say, too bad, we're changing it because it should be changed. And it's not as if this franchise was

in any great hurry to change the name clearly. And they did kind of drag their feet and eventually went along with it. But I think it is way past time for it to be done. And I am personally relieved that we will actually have a name to call this team now. Yeah, I am too. And I mean, I think that a couple of people on Twitter pointed out that the announcement of it perhaps could have grappled, not just more seriously, but like at all with why they were changing the name. Like, I do think that there's still an important conversation for the team to have with the community that roots for it about why it took so long and why they were so resistant for so long and sort of what finally moved them to acknowledge the racism that was pretty obvious to everyone or to a lot of people. the racism that was pretty obvious to everyone or to a lot of people so i think that you know we can we should continue to like prioritize those conversations and and say hey you're not having

one of the ones you need to have when we see that but guardians is good more red and blue is new typeface would be i mean they're so cool on art decoco. Like do a cool Art Deco typeface. It would be both like relevant to the art, the public art that inspired the name and also really different than what you already have. So I think that like there were still missed opportunities here. But also we know that, you know, it's not as if teams only do the one thing, right?

I'm sure there will be multiple alternate versions of this. And so maybe others will emerge that will sort of naturally become more resonant for people and that the team will naturally gravitate toward. That process of fan feedback where it's like, no, this is the thing that really speaks to us as fans about our franchise can be really neat and organic. And so I hope that that happens, too, because, you know, you want you want you've set the precedent that you will, even if very begrudgingly and far too late, accept the feedback of your fans. And so maybe they'll continue that tradition and do it more. Yeah, I was kind of torn on the continuity of the team name and the look of the lettering, because on the one hand, as you said, yeah, maybe it would be better if you said we just

totally reject that past name and we want to distance ourselves from it as much as possible. And so we have a totally new look. On the other hand, I'm sort of sympathetic to the idea that maybe it's better to ease people into the new name as long as you got rid of the offensive part. Like, there were a lot of people making jokes about the fact that both names end in D-Ns, as if, you know, it was just kind of like lazy design on their part. All they had to do was change a few letters at the front. But the fact that these names ended in D-Ns, that's not the offensive part of the old name. So I could sort of see how it's the same team and there's a lot of tradition there. And so maybe you don't want it to be super jarring. You could say maybe it's better if it is jarring. Jar everyone out of their complacency with the old name and show that you totally disagree with it but i could kind of see that maybe just you know keeping it close-ish so that it's clear that like hey this is the same franchise you can continue to root for this team it's just that we changed the bad part you know as long as there's no new chief wahoo replacement where chief wahoo is replaced by the Guardian face

or something like that, as long as it's just that the name ends in the same letter and has the same lettering. Like you, I agree that it is a missed opportunity not to capitalize on the Art Deco design of the Guardians and just have the logo look like that. Or I guess the logo kind of looks like that, but the lettering of Guardians does not. So purely for that reason, I think that they could have done better with that. But yeah, I'm kind of conflicted about just having some continuity, maybe not the worst thing from some perspectives. Well, I think we can leave it on.

Keep talking to your fans, Cleveland. And you can continue to to i'm going to use like a gross tech term like you can continue to iterate on this ideate while you're at it that's man i i missed the the era of ideate in my finance consulting life and boy am i glad because i don't think i would have ever been able to sit in a meeting with a straight face and hear someone say, ideate, ideate. That is one of the worst, yeah. Ideate.

Quite a coup for this franchise to get Tom Hanks to do the voiceover for your announcement video. Like, who can be mad at Tom Hanks? If he says he likes Guardians, fine, I'm on board. I was surprised by that, mostly because didn't Tom Hanks grow up in California like famously an A's fan? I think he has like some history in Cleveland. Like he started out as a young actor, I believe there. That's true.

So he had like his first professional job. He was like an intern at the great lakes shakespeare festival or something so i i think he rooted for cleveland during that time although yeah like when you think of cleveland you don't immediately think of tom hanks that's yeah he's he's not the guy who jumps to the top of the list for me no not at all but anyway can we call them the guardians right now yeah i know that they will not officially be named the guardians until next season but we've been calling them cleveland for quite a while now and it is very awkward to call only one team by the

name of its city and now that we know what that name is yeah let's just go with guardians starting today oh yeah i mean this is like at the at the very bottom of the list of the reasons why a name both a name change and then an actual name announcement is good like we will we certainly appreciate the relative stakes here but as a person who edits baseball writers being able to give them a new thing to say yeah just a what a little gift so that is a tiny gift to us on a friday clearly not the most important thing but um yes i i you you remind me that i need to slack the fangraph slack and say guardians fair game because we you know we moved away from it uh this season because we didn't have to we didn't have to go through a design process.

Although if we had, I imagine that when we explained it, we would have known to put past time, one word, one T. Not past time, Cleveland. That's your quibble, your copy editing feedback. I can't turn it off and it makes me less fun as a person. I know that about myself. You're all sitting there being like, Meg, you seem like you suck at parties and I do. All right. So we're good with guardians and we're glad that there's a new name. In other news, we have the Rays making trades. Drew Stopman going back to Minnesota. And those are real pitchers, real prospects, as we will discuss briefly in our second segment. They were 17th and 18th on Eric Langenhagen's preseason raised prospect list, and they're

now fifth and eighth on the Twins' updated list. So they got a real return here, although Cruz is, of course, the headliner going to Tampa Bay. And then on Friday, Tampa traded away podcast favorite Rich Hill for Tommy Hunter and the New York Mets fourth round pick from last year, an A-ball hitter named Matt Dyer. So the Mets pick up Rich Hill and I'm sort of disappointed that Hill and Cruz overlapped for only like a day because the Rays very briefly employed the oldest hitter and the oldest pitcher in the American League so that was fun but I guess they reached their quota of 41 year olds so Hill was

on the move so what do you make of Nelson Cruz Tampa Bay Ray I love it I like it more I don't really have a super strong feeling about the Rich Hill deal, not to get ahead of us. But I like Cruz to the Rays very, very much. That team's going to strike out just a billion percent, and it won't matter because they're going to hit so many home runs. Nelson Cruz, you've noted, is 41, but I think he's ageless in his heart and at the plate, importantly, as we have discussed many, many times. I like it a lot. I think they've gotten decent production out of some of the guys who they have cycled through

the DH spot, but this, I think, really changes the potential of their offense in a meaningful way. And as Kevin will note in our later segment, like Nelson Cruz just seems like one of the all-time clubhouse guys. And that's always a good thing to have no matter what your position is in the standings and is certainly, I think, useful as you try to progress through October.

So I like it for them very much. Jay Jaffe has been doing his annual replacement level killers series for us at Fangraphs this week where he looks at the teams that are at every position that are sort of underwater and might look to improve at the deadline. And the Rays, they were going to feature prominently in the DH section. And then they traded for Nelson Cruz and solved their problems before Jay could go to press. So I think this is just like an obvious win for them. And we'll preview this in greater detail next week.

Eric Longenhagen always does a 40-man crunch piece that talks about how the guys who teams have to add to their 40-man to protect them from the Rule 5 draft can sort of dictate the kinds of prospects that both are likely to move and that teams can accept in trade around this time of year and it is a dynamic that i think still is a bit underappreciated by casual fans in terms of who actually switches teams come come july 30th but um you know the the rays have a lot of those guys and so they are in some ways you know i think i don't want to use the word capitalizing or maximizing the value because that's kind of an achy way to think about it.

But some portion of the dudes who they will move and have moved in are likely to move next week would not necessarily remain raised after the rule five. And so to be able to shift guys around and get players back who can help you now and get more for them than just losing them to another team come the offseason seems like good roster management to me. So I give it thumbs up. The Rays just have too many good players. Too many guys. On one team. So they keep having to trade pretty good players just to make room for other pretty good players. players just to make room for other pretty good players so they had to trade willie adames to make room for like three better shortstop prospects basically who've all come up since and part of the rich hill deal like initially i wondered well is this a salary thing like they

acquired cruise and so they're dumping hill but i don't think it's that because they picked up tommy hunter who has like basically the same salary as Hill. I don't know if there's any money in that trade or not, but it's not that. It's not like Hill was on some huge salary. I think it's that, well, partly it's that he hasn't been great lately. He hasn't pitched very well since mid-June or so, and his spin rates have been down. Maybe he's been a bit affected by that. He's been throwing a change up more often than he had been before perhaps as a response to a lack of sticky stuff and with him you never know if he is going to break down or have some blister issues or something so i suppose they're selling high but

like also they just have too many pitchers and they have like luis patino who they have to make room for so you get rid of hill and you have someone just as good behind him basically so that's a position of strength and a luxury that they have but one thing they have not had a whole lot of is like real great players like elite players they have a lot of good players and maybe very good players but not a ton of stars and so their offense is decent. But I think their best hitter by WRC Plus so far has been Mike Zanino, who is very dear to your heart and is an all-star. But, you know, you don't think of him as an elite offensive talent. So it's a lot of guys who are, like, pretty good. And it can be tough to upgrade a team that has a lot of pretty good guys.

But DH, as you said said that's one spot that they could upgrade at and they've just been one of these teams that sort of cycles guys in and out of that spot as they try to deal with their positional log jam and give some players days off so i don't know how this affects other players playing time who might be blocked by cruz now but that's a problem that you're happy to have because Nelson Cruz is the best hitter on this team now. And even though they have a barely above average offense overall, they're only 24th in non-pitcher WRC plus against lefties. So now they're adding another lefty as we've discussed many times, he has been ageless. His offensive stats are down a bit

from last year, but his expected WOBA is essentially the same as last year's, just a bit better, in fact. So maybe he overperformed a bit last year, and maybe he's underperformed a bit this year. The upshot is he has a 142 WRC+, and he fully deserves that, and it's one of the best age 40 seasons of all time and he's 41 so it's really pretty impressive and you can go back and listen to episode 1588 from last year where we just devoted a whole episode to nelson cruz's unique career path but i believe if i did the addition right he had 216 home runs before turning 35 and he now has 220 home runs after turning 35, which is just unbelievable to out-homer your pre-35-year-old self after 35. I mean, that just does not happen.

So he's great, and he's beloved, and everyone likes him. And maybe it's tougher to be a great clubhouse guy when you're joining a team midstream as opposed to a team that you've been with for a while. And clearly, Minnesota loved having him. He loved being there. He even said he could potentially resign there when he is a free agent. But quite a coup, I think, for the race to land him because I'm sure a lot of teams would have been happy to have him and the al east race is so tight that that could be a difference maker there like there were even rumored to be some national league teams that were interested in nelson cruz and just would have put him out in the field and hope for the best because his bat is that good so yeah the old sam tweet about love this trade for the raise who they get who they give up i think we can trot that out again because it's hard not to like getting nelson cruz especially when you have so many prospects that you have to trade some of them right yeah i think that that's right and i don't know like he's just he's just a good bat all the

time you don't have to voltron together a bunch of other dudes. And I continue, I just, I like moves like that where you get to replace the work of having to cobble something together with just putting a dude's name in there every day and it going well. Yeah, because so many teams have transitioned to using that DH spot as kind of a catch-all where you just rotate players through and that's fine.

It's just that very few teams have the david ortiz nelson cruz type dedicated dh and well now the rays do and i love that he went to the rays because when i think of the rays i think of their old dhs like they have a history i guess it's because they never spend very much and they're always looking to pick up some pop like they usually are more of a pitching and defense team probably because you can get more bang for your buck when it comes to pitching and defense than you can in offense and so they're always trying to cobble together a lineup and often because they're not bidding at the top of the market they're going after

old guys who are kind of past their prime and Cruz his prime basically like is his 40s I guess but for most guys they've picked up in that role like I'm thinking of Jose Canseco and Greg Vaughn and Johnny Damon and Cliff Floyd and Paul Sorrento Luke Scott Pat Burrell was a free Al Martin DeJesus, Fred McGriff, of course. Like some of these guys were good. Some of these guys were not good. But that is just a hallmark of the Rays, that they will pick up these accomplished players like in the last lap of their career, basically. And maybe this isn't the last lap for Cruz.

Who knows how long he has left? And he is more productive than probably any of those prior DHs were at the time the Rays signed them. But that is such a Ray's move to me. Like the A's have done some of that too, probably for similar reasons. But this fits right into that lineage of ancient DHs. a year many a moon and when you do think of Pat Burrell you probably don't think of Pat Burrell as a ray I super do not the other thing and maybe we won't remember Nelson Cruz as a ray either but who knows maybe he'll have some signature moment in October and we will and from the Mets perspective picking up Hill obviously happy to have Rich Hill come into my hometown of New York maybe I'll get to see Rich Hill pitch in person but But the Mets just need an arm. They need a starter now, like this weekend. Their rotation is just really hard hit by injuries. Like on the injured list right now,

they have Jacob deGrom, David Peterson, Robert Stock, Jordan Yamamoto, and of course, Carlos Carrasco and Noah Syndergaard still on the comeback trail Joey Lucchese had Tommy John surgery Jared Eikhoff was DFA'd so they just like don't have healthy starters right now so

kind of odd that you're bringing in Rich Hill to be the innings eater and the durable guy but that is what he is by the standards of this Mets rotation and really as hard hit as so many teams have been by injuries this year, I don't think anyone has the Mets beat. Like, I'm looking at the baseball prospectus, injured list ledger, and right now the Yankees have 17 players on the injured list and the Mets have 16. So something is happening here in New York.

And the Mets have 16. So something is happening here in New York. But looking at it on a seasonal level, they also show the projected wins above replacement player lost over the course of the season. And the Mets are way out ahead of the pack with like nine warp lost just to players who were on the injured list. So they are easily in first by that metric and by percentage of warp missed to injury so the fact that they are in first place just as decimated as they have been all season is pretty impressive and hopefully down the stretch they will get healthy and hopefully Rich Hill will right the ship and that he can be a stopgap for the Mets because on the whole he's been probably about as durable and effective as you could have realistically expected himgap for the Mets because on the whole, he's been probably about as durable and effective

as you could have realistically expected him to be. So the Mets need someone, anyone right now, and Rich Hill is still a serviceable option. Yeah, for sure. I want to express a tiny, tiny, tiny bit of trepidation. I know you said, I think you are correct, that the Rays have all this pitching depth. They haveino glasnow will come back presumably i am a little nervous teeny tiny bit about them having sent hill away just because you know patino is good i think he's

going to be a really good big leader he hasn't exactly like forced the issue right of like pitching so well in the minors they're like we got to get this guy up on a permanent basis and they do have some injury stuff that they still have to deal with and so i i i'm expressing a teeny bit of trepidation but i also it's only a teeny bit because you know it's not as if like richville hasn't been a Cy Young candidate this year or anything like that so you know from an actual production perspective it probably doesn't mean that much. But I am expressing a teeny, teeny bit of trepidation. But only a tiny bit.

Yeah, definitely a little less depth at the big league level this year after letting Morton leave and trading Snell. Yeah. But they also have Shane Baz coming up behind these guys. And yeah, Patino hasn't necessarily forced the issue. But Shane Baz has. Yes. And he has like a 2.48 ERA in AA and then got promoted to AAA and has a sub 2 ERA there in five starts. So any day now, he's going to get called up. He could easily step into most teams' rotations right now.

This is true. There's just no shortage of arms behind those guys and and who knows like maybe the righty they picked up in the straight will suddenly be throwing 102 the next time we see him because it's the race and you never know this is why it's only a teeny bit yes so before we go or before we move on there was another little bit of news that was reported by espn's alden Gonzalez on Friday. And this is something that we've sort of seen coming for a while, but now we have some hard news. It appears that the days of catchers flashing signs may be numbered now, and we may have a higher tech solution to the problem of having to tell pitchers what you want them to throw. So MLB starting on August 3rd,

which I think is also the day that the Atlantic League will move its mound back afoot. So I'm looking forward to that too. But in the Cal League Class A, MLB is going to be testing new technology, reading from Alden's report here, that allows catchers to electronically communicate signs to pitchers. And the system that they are using is manufactured by a company called Pitchcom. And it basically involves a transmitter that is worn on the catcher's wristband, and it has multiple receivers. So the catcher has a receiver in the

padding of his helmet, and then the pitcher has a receiver within the sweatband of his cap, and the transmitter that is on the catcher's wrist has nine buttons. You can signal what pitch and location you want, and it has English and Spanish sound bites, so you can also record your own audio clips there, and then the information is passed from the transmitter to both receivers using an encrypted communication channel and played with bone conduction technology through your head essentially so it doesn't emit an audible sound and this has been tested in various places for safety and also effectiveness they kind of tested it out in the Cactus League this spring, I think at least in bullpen sessions, and apparently it was pretty well received. Alden's report says that using the device, which will arrive to teams beginning on Monday, is optional but strongly encouraged, according to the memo.

So you don't have to use it, but probably most teams will. So there's a small part of me that sort of laments the loss of the ancient tradition of putting fingers down to signal what pitch, but from both an anti-sign-stealing perspective and a pace-of-play perspective, this seems like a pretty reasonable solution. And I've thought for a while that there had to be a better and more easily encrypted solution to this that could prevent future banging schemes. And sounds to me like this would work fine. Yeah, it seems like it should be pretty reasonable. I wonder if they will continue to add new languages to it as the need arises. But yeah, it seems like this is a good solution to a problem that always felt like it was sort of weirdly lagging what tech we expect to be available. Yeah. Right. It seems like it seemed like the sort of weirdly lagging what tech we expect to be available. Yeah.

Right. It seems like it seemed like the sort of thing that should come along more quickly than it had. I use it as an opportunity to once again advocate for Lab League, which I think is going to be the platform I run for office on. But it seems like a good way to address this problem. Now, though, we do have to worry about sophisticated audio surveillance techniques yes so it isn't as if the there is no opportunity for

for shenanigans they just require more sophisticated tech potentially yeah i'm reading from the report here so hacking the, the company says is virtually impossible. Famous last words. Sounds like a challenge. Pitchcom uses an industrial grade encryption algorithm and transmits minimal data digitally, making it mathematically impossible for someone to decrypt intercepted

transmissions, according to the company. So we will see. They said the Titanic couldn't sink, so we'll see if anyone can crack the Pitchcom system. But it seems like it should be a lot safer than the current system of putting your finger down. So if that's the standard, it's kind of like when people talk about robo-umps and it's like, well, maybe it's not 100% perfect. But if the standard is humans, then maybe it doesn't necessarily have to be so

i know not that i'm advocating for that i'm just saying very the lead the rules here also players found to be wearing a receiver while batting will be ejected sure i guess that's one way you could hack this if you somehow had an extra receiver and you just had the batter getting the signals transmitted to his skull, then that would be easy. But I guess that would be tough. Only the active catcher and no other players or coaches are allowed to use the transmitter. A backup transmitter is provided, but must remain in the carrying case during games. And if players and coaches need to confer because of an issue with the device, they can notify the umpires and not be charged a man visit.

So the Cow League, I think, is also where they've been testing the 15 second pitch clock so this goes hand in hand with that should speed up games you in theory would have less miscommunication and fewer cross-ups and thus also fewer mound visits which would be nice so it seems like a win-win all around. Apparently they were testing some system that had like a four button pad in front of the catcher and he would choose the signs. And then there was like a combination of lights that only the pitcher could see. And they actually built prototypes for that, but it was technologically more complicated. And I don't know, maybe it's easier to see the lights than it is to intercept these signals. So anyway, I am all for it. And we've talked before about like, you could have some kind of audio transmission system, like headsets, you know, they've used things like that in college, but then you have to have the catcher say something out loud, which in theory could be overheard. So this just seems better. And even if you have speakers of more than just those two languages like there is some universal baseball language when it comes to like you know what's a

fastball so i think it would probably be intelligible to everyone anyway yeah i think that that's probably right all right so hopefully that will go smoothly and we will see that in action in majors sometime soon and just wanted to mention also since the All-Star break, do you know who the hottest hitter in baseball has been? Who? Juan Soto. Yeah. Juan Soto. Yeah.

Entering Friday, he has a 364 WRC plus over that past week, which is like 100 points higher than anyone else. And that is of interest to me for for one thing, because Soto was sort of underperforming in the first half, although he was still quite good. But everyone knew he was going to break out and be full Juan Soto again sometime soon. And it's interesting because he mentioned coming into the home run derby that he hoped it would fix his swing, which is the opposite of the usual narrative about the home run derby disrupting hitter swings, which seems to be bunk for the most part based on the many studies that have been done on the home run derby curse or hangover effect doesn't seem to be real.

If anything, it's just regression to the mean because you get into the home run derby if you hit a ton of homers in the first half and so you're bound to hit fewer in the second half. Doesn't mean it couldn't hurt some individual hitter swing but doesn't seem to make a difference on the whole but Soto one of his problems in the first half was that he had been hitting too many ground balls and so he said he thought that preparing for the derby might actually help him because it would get him in the swing of things when it comes to hitting the ball in the air and I don't know if that is why this has happened but correlation causation but it has happened and he has hit five homers since the derby since his uh showdown with shohei

so i think that's nice i think that he could actually reverse the home run derby narrative that it might not just be that no the derby doesn't break your swing but actually the derby can fix your swing in some cases that'd be fun yeah we need to incentiv the derby doesn't break your swing, but actually the derby can fix your swing in some cases. That'd be fun. Yeah, we need to incentivize derby participation because if we don't get all the very best guys in there, who will ever stop Pete Alonso? Yes, exactly.

All right, so we will take a quick break now and we'll be back with Ben Clements and Kevin Goldstein to talk about trade value and the upcoming trade deadline. We remember something that no one can hear. We trade in silence, but no one needs fear. Well, the trade deadline is a week away, which means it's time to talk about a bunch of players who almost certainly will not be traded. The Trade Value Series, in which writers rank the 50 players who would theoretically bring back the greatest return in trade, is a Fangraphs tradition that dates back more than a decade. In the past, the series has been handled by Dave Cameron and Kylie McDaniel and Craig Edwards, but this year it took two writers to rankle, and we are joined by both of them today.

First, a freshly caffeinated Ben Clemens, staff writer for Fangraphs, is here. Hello, Ben. Oh, hey, Ben. How's it going? We have national writer and chin music host Kevin Goldstein, who went several years between Effectively Wild appearances and now has gone one week between Effectively Wild appearances. So hello, Kevin. Welcome back already. Hello. It's good to be back. It's been a long time. So, Ben, I guess we could start with you. Could you sort of lay out the purpose of this series? What exactly are you trying to measure? Yeah, Ben, can you tell us what that is? Because I'm still confused. Yeah, hopefully you guys know by now, but not everyone

listening might know. So tell us what this is supposed to be. And then I guess, Kevin, maybe you could sort of describe how you two teamed up on this and made it a two-person exercise for the first time, stats and scouts. Yeah. The theoretical purpose of this is to come up with a list of if every player were available on the trade market, who teams covet the most and if for whatever reason you know someone called up the blue jays and said hey we'll give you ronald lacuna for vlad guerrero what would happen i think it's just a very hypothetically interesting thing to talk about that said will teams make these trades probably not but it is fun and we've been doing it for a long time and so we just like to keep doing it, keeping the conversation going, as it were. Yeah, maybe, you know, maybe there's a better way to do it or other ways to do it.

But it is a fun way to think about things and just say, would you trade this guy for this guy? And I've always talked about, like, just the concept of untouchables. And there's no such thing as an untouchable, you know. And I always say, like, you know, whoever you think is untouchable, if the angels called them tomorrow and said, hey, we'll trade you Mike Trout and pick up all the money, they'd trade him. There's no such thing as this. And so it's more about kind of like figuring out those kind of things while also acknowledging kind of the ugly side of contracts and some that are exceptionally to be kind, team friendly and how that can make a player a more desirable trade acquisition but you know Ben and I got together and we lined everybody up and we spent some time arguing over it and trying to figure out where to place guys we threw the list you know we kind of finalized the list just between the two of us we threw it back

to a good section of the Fangraph staff and we threw it out to a good cross-section within the industry itself everyone from you know sc scouts to to hire up executives to people who are just in the analyst world i got to throw it to someone who's kind of the you know for lack of a better term kind of the money guy for a team as far as kind of measuring value of a player and contract and that kind of stuff and and we were able to get a lot of feedback and you know move the needle on some more guys and and and try to place guys at exactly the right spot that would inspire the angriest of comments and then so i feel like we've achieved that this year it's it's funny like you can't do a list i don't care what it is like you get to a prospect list

uh you know our you know the preseason stuff we do by position a trade they think that without making people mad but i also you know ben and i were talking about this privately no one's gonna comment hey johnson's really right at 24 that That's great. No one does that. The comments are there for your disagreements. It's been kind of fun to watch the discussion. I think one of the challenging things around this exercise every year is that you're trying to gauge trade value among 30 teams who are not in the same place in their competitive cycle, right? So what a team that is trying to win now is willing to versus one that's rebuilding are going to be really different. And I wonder if you, maybe we can start with Kevin this time, can talk a little bit about

how you thought about that within the confines of this exercise. Because clearly, when you're out talking to team folks, where they are is going to inform their impression of how valuable a guy is. So I imagine that you had to weigh that not only in the beginning, but then as you were sort of vetting the list externally as well. guys like Garrett Cole, Fernando Tatis, Mookie Betts, guys with very long, very expensive contracts. You can't put those guys at the top. How can you do that? Because there's so many teams that just couldn't take it on. I would say, well, not couldn't, but won't. But there's a subtle difference there.

And we decided to kind of mitigate all of that by just thinking about kind of maximum return. So if the Padres said, hey, we're willing to trade Fernando Tatis tomorrow, obviously, you know, teams like the Rays or the Pirates would say, yeah, we just can't take on that deal. But there would be teams interested, like the Yankees would open up the vault for Fernando Tatis. They would give you everything they have for Fernando Tatis. He would completely change the franchise. And so, you know, we tried to kind of

focus on maximum return as opposed to an average return or not thinking about how many teams were interested because that complicates things greatly. And I think it would produce something that was a far less accurate list. Yeah. I was going to ask how you handled the guys with the giant contracts, like Mike Trout, for instance, who's been a staple of this list since the start and used to be at the top of the list. Now he's at number terms of like surplus value like looking at projections and comparing that to salary and what would he be worth above the salary or was it more of a feel thing than a quantitative exercise oh yeah the first input we used was just a like discounted and using both win and cost of a win inflation like a model of surplus value in present value for every player, just to give us like kind of a,

here's a framework. Hey, like probably don't put Nolan Arnot on there, you know? But that's basically just a framework starting point. And we spent a lot of time adjusting around that. If you wanted a list of just Zips projected surplus value, you could make that, but it's a lot of just zips projected surplus value, you could make that, but it's a lot less interesting than leavening in both industry sources and the fact

that surplus value is not really a linear thing or particularly useful at all times. And one thing that we took note of is that when you look at players who are really basically stars, they don't really get traded at fair linear surplus value when when Mookie Betts got traded in the last year of his contract if you just counted the beans you'd say oh the Red Sox got more beans but that's not really how trades of players like that go and so we definitely started with that as a as a starting point but it doesn't really reflect industry behavior and it doesn't really reflect value of basically guys who provide just really disproportionate amount of wins.

And I know Ben in the past, you've kind of looked into whether players like that get valued by teams at various times. And I don't really know if we've perfectly captured the industry there. And we definitely got mixed feedback as Kevin could surely attest from teams where some of them said, Oh, like that guy absolutely can't be there. And we definitely got mixed feedback, as Kevin could surely attest, from teams where some of them said, oh, like, that guy absolutely can't be there. And some said, oh, okay. But we endeavored to take both sides into account. But I just don't think that a pure count up the assets and count the liabilities and the value of the player provides on the field

in war, count up their costs, divide by some factor and go from there, really captures how teams value players and their contracts and what they'd actually trade for them. controversy and back and forth and differing opinions from the industry folks we talked to, what were some of the groups of players where there appeared to be a pretty firm consensus in terms of how the industry is thinking about them as a category? It was really kind of the guys in the middle. It was the extremes where you got the very differencing opinions. And those extremes are the guys we talked about, these guys with huge contracts, these amazing players with huge contracts. And then the other one is the good players with ridiculous amounts of control with five, six years left. Those kind of guys we got consistent input or we got the varying input on.

There are people who thought a good player with five or six years left of control, all those guys should be at the top. That's the things you want. It was those guys in the middle. It was good players who are in their first year of arbitration. Like Ben and I kept calling them the 2.5, 3.5 guys as far as how many years they had before free agency. Those are the players that we got the most consistent feedback on. And I think because those are the guys who are easiest to know about.

You know, they've already, they're past this point where they're past the rookie scale, if you will. So they're no longer making pittance and pittance on the Major League Baseball salary scale and doing great things. And so they're doing good things. They're getting paid well below their free agency amount. But well, into the millions is a salary that's going to escalate at a scale. Everyone kind of understands how Arb works. As far as what you make year one, year two, year three, you can kind of project what a guy will do as long as he remains that kind of player. And so those are the things we got kind of the most consistent feedback on

where kind of these two and a half, three and a half guys are, but you know, pitchers are always a little different because it's a less stable thing. But those are the guys who I think we had the fewest needle moves as far as, you know, throwing this list back to the industry. had the fewest needle moves as far as throwing this list back to the industry. Yeah. Do you know offhand what the pitcher batter breakdown was roughly in year 50? Because I went through that exercise recently when we were ranking the top 25 players under 25 for the Ringer Baseball Podcast, and we all ended up with like five pitchers on the list or something. And it was just really hard to argue for pitchers being at least close to the top of that list, given the variability and also given the way pitchers are

used these days and just the declining innings totals over time. So I wonder how many you ended up with. I guess among the really top elite guys, it's mostly position players, because how could it not be? Yeah, by quick count, it looks like we had 15 pitchers, and that might be off one or two. But it is very heavily skewed towards batters, like Kevin said, and either in their last year of pre-arb or their first year of arb, where teams have that combination sweet spot of certainty, but cost certainty also. And I talked about this in the comments, you know, like for Giolito, but especially for Garrett Cole. You know, Cole ranked high up there

and obviously he's a huge contract, but Garrett Cole, the industry sees incredible comfort in having a pitcher who you can, is just dependable and can take the bump every five days. You know, I've talked about this a little bit with Walker Bueller too,

who's been, you know, the pitcher of health since getting a TJ right after signing out of the draft. Like those guys, even just, obviously those are great pitchers even just a good pitcher but you feel good really good and there's so few pitchers who can do this that you're going to get 32 starts and 180 innings out of like the industry values those guys like gold and you know we we saw an hour ago it's friday afternoon the the mets trade for rich hill just because they need someone to to do something like they're. They're in first place.

They're throwing Robert Stock and Jared Eikhoff out there right now. And so just the ability to have this guy where you just know he's going to go for you is something that I think the industry, when you look at numbers, like just back at baseball card numbers, the industry itself does value innings a lot more than I think the public does. Of course, those guys who take them out every five days are those guys until they're not. And that happens eventually. But I guess you got to bet on the track record. So the flip side of the players we were just talking about, the guys who are ultra elite talents, but maybe with big salaries, are the guys who are good, but not

great, but have very team friendly contracts. so we're some of the guys that came up in that discussion because as i was just scrolling through the list one name that sort of surprised me for instance was ramon loriano who's at number 40 and i guess he shouldn't have surprised me because he was number 36 on last year's list and it would also be bad if there were zero surprises as i was reading this thing but But, you know, just among all of the other great players. And then in your blurb, Kevin, you say, you know, he's good, not great, but he's also cheap and a pretty good player. So he deserves a spot on the list. But if you're just reading this without totally understanding exactly how you're defining these things, you might say, oh, why was this guy who is probably a better player than Ramon Laureano not on the list? And it might just be because he's also making more money than Ramon Laureano.

Exactly. And Laureano is an interesting case. And he's a guy who I think people within baseball would say adds more than maybe what you see in terms of the stats in a war, in terms of what he can do with his arm, but also kind of what he brings to a clubhouse in terms of just good vibes. You know, this is an 80 makeup guy and and and teams do value that kind of thing and what he brings to you know energy wise to to what he does it's it's why you know to talk about a guy who just got dealt why nelson cruz i think is a great ad for the raise because i beyond the fact that he is a fantastic hitter he does bring something to a clubhouse and i do think those are measurable, valuable things that maybe

we can't, you know, put a specific number on, but the industry certainly believes it. And frankly, I do too. Yeah. And I think the real poster boy for this kind of player is Nick Madrigal. Yeah. High floor, low ceiling. He's going to be under contract or under team control, not contract for five more years. And we got mixed feedback, I'd say on whether teams like want that because different teams want magical differently, but everyone kind of agreed this guy will be there for a long time and he'll be a player that you can put into your starting lineup every day. And he probably won't win an MVP and that, but for five years of that at unknowable costs that will be discounted to you, that's pretty valuable in a way that just sets him apart from players around him.

Xander Bogarts is lower than him, and Xander Bogarts is a better player. So apart from the big contract guys, who moved the most for you on this list after you talked to team folks, either up or down? Maybe both. Who moved up the most and who moved down the most but remained in the top 50 or perhaps found found their way out of the top 50 entire i mean one of the guys who i think the commoners were the most worked up about was brian reynolds who plenty of people thought should be

in the top 50 and there were just enough who didn't he's such a strange player and i think there's there's still people who don't necessarily believe in it and maybe they should and maybe they shouldn't like if there was one guy that we were going to sneak into the 50 it probably would have been brian reynolds and you know he moved the most i would say as far as what we were doing and at the end of the day like the guys some of the guys we moved you know into the top 50 that maybe weren't there before were some of the the the impressive young arms and luis garcia with the astros comes to mind and you know there's some to argue luis garcia with the astros comes to mind and you know there are some to argue luis garcia should be in the top 20 it's just this thing where we just don't

have enough of a track record he's really good if he's really this good we have him way too low you know that's the thing we just don't know yet you talk about obviously the variability with arms that we already did but you know some of these young good pitchers who still have a truckload of control left. You know, the Luis Garcia, the Trevor Rogers of the world, where if they really are what they've looked like in half a year of starts, then they're too low. Yeah, Fran Bervaldez fits that as well, where it seems like the consensus of him is just a lot higher than I expected.

And I guess Dylan Carlson fits into that as well. He didn't start out in our top 50. And a lot of people thought, well, why not? He's 22 and has five years of team control remaining and is already playing an above average outfield, basically. Not really an above average center field, but he's an above average outfielder. And I think that that was kind of contrasted with, I guess, Randy Rosarena is the name who I think dropped the most on our list. And partially because we were getting more data and it wasn't great, but partially also because he fits more into the average player with certainty than the super elite player

bucket. And that kind of gravitated into our 30 to 50 range, which is where he ended up. And we had him in the mid 20s to start with, I'd say. I was curious about Max Kepler who ended up at 45 on your list and has been a really perplexing player for me I just can't figure out if he's good I mean clearly he's he's good but is he better than good like for his career now more than 2,500 plate appearances he has a 102 WRC plus over the past three years it's 115 but it seems like it should be better than that because he hits the ball hard.

It's just that his BABIP is just unbelievably low. And I guess it's because he's a lefty and he's a pull hitter and he gets shifted and he hits a lot of fly balls, but it's still so ridiculously low and it gets lower and lower every single year. When you keep expecting some sort of bounce back it's like nope it can go lower it's 233 as we speak now and i've looked this up many times because it's just a fun fact not fun for him but going back to 1993 which is when babbitt kind of jumped up into the range it's been more or less ever since among players who've had that many

plate appearances the only guy with a lower career babbIP than Max Kepler is Rod Barajas, which is like the kind of player you would expect to have a low BABIP, not Kepler, who is not slow. So I can't figure him out because if he just had a more normal BABIP, he'd basically be a star. But it's not a small sample fluke at this point. Yeah, he's very like you said he's very strange and and i'm hoping that his babbitt slips up just a tiny tiny bit just you know three years out of the last four being at 236 he's kind of the chris davis of babbitt he's a very strange player i think it's it's interesting to see him on the list ending up right next to nick madrigal because i think it's it's it's a similar guy where you feel safe about what you're going to get and there's also upside for more and Max Kepler is a guy who like you said it always feels

like he should be better and you can't figure out why he's not and I don't have a good explanation for the Babbit I just don't and I spent some time trying to figure it out it's something weird's going on there but like you said after four years of this like his career high bad that's 270 something it's it's you got to think there's something strangely intrinsic to the player that maybe we can't figure out but i think he and magic all are good back to back as guys where you like you feel safe about what you're getting as a floor there's room for more like nick magic all you feel good he's at 290 he might have 330 one year you know and you feel like you're that's what you're gonna get and i think with a guy like kepler like you feel good that you're gonna get you know, and you feel like that's what you're going to get. And I think with a guy like Kepler, like you feel good that you're going to get, you know, a guy who's going to slug 450 and

maybe give you like a 325 OBP, but there's all sorts of reasons to think that you might get more. And so you feel safe about your floor and like the ceiling. I think one of the benefits of circulating this list to both analyst types and scout types is that you can see all the places where those two skills are starting to dovetail with one another. But I also wonder if there were any guys who were sort of had consensus in one group as belonging on the list or belonging at a particular place on the list or and then did and then were deemed either too high or too low by the other group was there anyone who the the analyst loves loved but the scouts hated or vice versa Zach Gallen comes to mind and I I don't want to say love and hate but like analysts love Zach

Gallen scouts are okay on Zach Gallen like I think if we if we only if we just did a scout version of this Zach Gallen would be in the 30s or 40s if we did just an analyst version of this, Zach Gallen would be in the 30s or 40s. If we did just an analyst version of this, Zach Gallen would probably be in the top 10. Was there anyone that you guys disagreed over, you know, whether because of different ways you approach player evaluation or just because of your feelings about a particular player? I think I was a lot higher on Mike Yastrzemski than everyone we talked to. I probably started him at like 25 and handed up off the 50. Just because he's been good, even though he's old and a late bloomer and all of that. Yeah, I think there was a lot of it. Like you said, he's 30. He's 30 at this point,

the batting average has come down and people we talked to in the industry think something, you know, he's got real power. He's got a good approach to the play, but people do think like the advanced people have figured him out a little bit in terms of how to get him out yeah he's an extreme version of the scouts for stats when we did the the zips based surplus value ratings he was in the top 12 or 13 because he just he cost nothing forever and there's just not that much projected decline to make up for the fact that he's you know still a pre-arb player who is putting up a lot of warp or 600, I mean, five-ish or so. And I think that was probably the main point of disagreement we had, is that a lot of people just look at it and they're like, no, this won't continue, and he

can be pitched too, he has holes. And I was a little bit more willing to believe the track record as opposed to what people think will happen going forward. I think that was probably the player we disagreed on the most. You ended up with Shohei Otani at number 17. How did you figure out where he went? Drift dart. I mean, obviously, he's the strangest player in baseball, the most unique player in baseball. And Shohei Otani, there's arguments from the top 10. He just doesn't have that much control left. He's under control for have that much control left you know he's he's under control for 2022 at a ridiculously low salary it's five and a half i think and then he is what will absolutely be the most unique and strangest arbitration hearing in the history

of baseball for 2023 which is kind of what i focused on like what that what is that going to look like in the sense that there is no kind of rule set in arbitration for two-way players there's no two-way player designation in the arbitration system. And I talked to one person with a team who just said, if I was his agent, I would show up at the arbitration hearing with comps for him as a DH and comps for him as a pitcher. And I would add those two numbers together and say,

this is what he deserves, which would be a lot of fun to see. Yeah. Yeah. That might be the rating we've had the least confidence in at the end of the process, because I just don't know. You have so many things that make it confusing. There's the little control versus the fact that he's a star. There's the fact that he's a two-way player.

There's the fact that his yearly production has gone up so much this year that you have to fade, but that he looks the part. If you ask me to put confidence bands on each in each rating that we did that would have the widest error bands for sure yeah and then it's important and there's also questions about sustainability here and look i hope shoya tani is a two-way guy forever and and as long as he wants to do i hope he can do it and i hope it lasts forever but same time like this guy's in his fourth year and he just crossed 100 innings career and so we can't just assume he's going to be able to do this forever either. So there are plenty of guys in the honorable mentions who had been in prior iterations of

this list and because of either their proximity to free agency or injury had found their way out. But there were also guys who were sort of new to the honorable mentions section this year. So who are your picks to click among the honorable mentions to make next year's trade value series? I realize this is an unkind question because we just wrapped this year's iteration and now I'm making you think about next year's. How about John Means for me? I think John Means is great and he won't be a free agent until the 2025 season. So there's plenty of room for him to still be a controllable and good pitcher. And if he gets a longer track record of being kind of a Zach Gallen-esque, like, oh, he throws pretty hard and oh, he has really

good control and really good secondaries that I think he could, you could see him climb into that, that range of pitchers that people trust. He's definitely not there yet. I think if Yohan Mankata continues his hot streak that he's off to a crazy start in the second half, we could end up feeling more comfortable with what he is. He's a strange player to wrap your head around. And then there's kind of some of the prospect guys. I think Logan Gilbert's a guy who'll probably be on the list next year as one of those young pitchers with tons of control. And I think, you know, Adley Rushman ranked really high this year, despite having, you know, obviously zero major league service time. I wouldn't be surprised if

we, you know, get a guy like Spencer Torkelson or Bobby Witt or someone like that on the list next year as well. And is there anyone, because it sounds like you read the comments, at least to some extent, for better or worse. And Kevin, I saw a comment of yours that said, yeah, maybe we should have had Eloy Jimenez on the honorable mention list, for instance. And you guys mentioned Brian Reynolds earlier. So is there anyone you've been swayed on based on reader feedback this week? Or are you feeling pretty good about how you had everyone? And if it's the latter, then I wonder who generated the most angry commenters or tweeters or people who said, why not this guy?

Or why wasn't this guy there? Even if you continue to think that you put them in the right place. Oh yeah, that's definitely Brian Reynolds. No question. It's just not even close. And I think that he was, you know, we ended up with him at 51st

and we were talking to Meg a few days before the list came out. Pablo Lopez, one of the IL. We said, oh, should ended up with him at 51st and we were talking to Meg a few days before the list came out. Pablo Lopez won the IL. We said, oh, should we just bump him off and we'll move Reynolds up into the 50? And I think people would have felt very different about this. And there's not much difference between, you know, 45 and 70 in these lists. A lot of these players are of extremely similar value to teams. You know, if he ended up 45th on this list, I would have no issue with that.

And so I think that may be one where we could bump them up a few if we had the list to do again. Aside from that, I think the big contract guys were the ones that generated the most controversy. And I don't know. I mean, I think our ratings of them kind of consider both their upside and downside. But I know that a lot of people would rather just kind of add up the numbers and do the math and it's just never going to make sense to them. And I guess there's no way to know whether you did this right because- Oh, we did it right. Except for Reynolds, which you should blame on your editor. If they just say, and Meg said, no, you keep Pablo Lopez there or you're both fired. You should go back through

all the comments and say that. I would still take Lopez over Reynolds. It's for the best, I guess, that we don't get any form of feedback here, really, because it would be bad if all the best players in baseball were just traded immediately from their current teams. That's the other thing. If we put in

everybody who people think we should put in, we'd have to take these 50 players out. There's no way to satisfy everyone. Reynolds was the one who's the most and and various white socks players there's a i don't know there's a strange thing out there where people think fancraft hates the white socks we love the white socks and because there is no real world test of this immediately what do you think is the biggest benefit to this? Or what do you learn personally from going through this exercise? Like Ben, I saw something you tweeted about how you learned about sort of synthesizing different inputs and smart people who are telling you maybe

varying things, which I guess is something that a GM has to deal with all the time. So you've got to be a GM of this this exercise essentially so no upside but most of the downside um i found that part really interesting kevin and i don't think the same way about baseball and it'd be really boring if we did because like that would that's not really how you add information and add value by just taking the same opinion twice you get nothing and then you know we reached out to a lot of of writers within Fangraphs who we respect and a lot of people in the industry. And I think the process of going through all that and trying to figure out, oh, well, this guy thinks Jack Flaherty should be 18. And this guy thinks he should be 40. What's going on here? And we

think he should be 30. What do we do with that? I think that kind of iterative process of, oh, we've revised the list. Oh, we've revised it again. Does this look better? Does this look worse? Do we still like it? Was really interesting and not something that you'd normally get in what's often a solitary job. Yeah. And some of the more interesting stuff also revolves around when people see the player on just a pure talent, his value on the baseball field as exactly the same, yet they would rank him incredibly different based on what's left in

terms of control, what his contract looks like, where it's no longer, it's not the evaluation is agreed upon, it's the valuation where there's the big separation sometimes. So I'm curious if this exercise highlighted for either of you, and Kevin, obviously your perspective on this is going to be a little bit different having recently been on the team side, but were there any sort of shifts in what you thought teams would value relative to what you set out thinking that they were going to find important as you embarked on the exercise? Not really. I think maybe it was more of the, Really, I think maybe it was more of the, again, kind of the extremes, like when you bounce this off of a team that is cheap, for lack of a better word, a team that doesn't spend money, a team with a low payroll, a team, however you want to put it, how much the money part really matters to them and how they're going to just simply value cheap and controlled over talent at times. And I think, you know, frankly, to their own detriment. And then how the teams that really don't look at it that way and spend a lot of money don't really care about the money nearly as much.

And I think the level of those, I expected that, but I didn't expect it to be at the level it was in terms of feedback. Mine's a little more micro, and I guess I should have anticipated it from the disagreements that Kevin and I had when we were first setting up the list. But teams were a lot higher on guys they saw as potential ace pitchers that had, call it three years of control left or two years of control left. I didn't really understand. And it goes back to what he was saying about innings earlier, that there was a pretty much unanimous chorus of team people who thought those guys weren't high enough on the rankings compared to where I would have had them. I thought that was interesting as a class of player that

I just, I guess I just didn't realize how much that skill set was valued. Yeah. Talk about balancing the different salaries as we were earlier. You have MookieBats at number seven and WanderFranco at number six and just back to back can't get a much bigger spread in salary than than those two so last thing I wanted to ask before we let you go just about the trade deadline which is coming up and will not involve many or any of the players that you were considering here but we've already seen some activity Jock Peterson, Rich Hill, Nelson Cruz I wonder whether you think, to the extent that we can actually predict these things, what the activity level will look like at this year's

trade deadline. And Ben, I know you've looked in the past at what kind of factors control competitiveness and how willing teams are to upgrade, like when you've evaluated what would happen if we had a 16-team playoff format, would you get more buyers or would you get more incentive to add or would you get less? So I don't know how you even evaluate exactly like what circumstances create an active trade deadline, but whether you've looked at that or thought about that at all, I wonder what you think those things are and whether we're satisfying them this year. Yeah, I think there are enough factors that I would really struggle to just look really quickly and tell you yes, no. I am not expecting this to be a tremendously busy deadline just because the NL feels a lot more locked up than it has in recent years. And that takes out a lot of the intrigue. The AL has a lot of settling to do still. And I think that there will be quite a lot of the intrigue. The AL has a lot of settling to do still.

And I think that there will be quite a bit of trade activity, particularly in the AL East. But the combination of the fact that there aren't as many competitive divisions in terms of just the number of teams with, call it, 20% chances to make the playoffs, as there have been in the two wildcard era. And the fact that there's a very compressed trade season will keep it less busy than in recent years i can't believe you're doing this ben i can't believe you're putting that jinx into the world we'll see if it happens uh it's win-win either we get to prove that jinxes aren't real or we get a lot of stuff to write about yeah that's a good point. The National League is kind of locked up. And last I looked and just doing some quick math with our own playoff odds, it was like 85% that the National League West is going to produce three playoff teams. And so the East and the Central, it's very much win or go home.

And I think that could create a little bit more action where you can't kind of lean on the chance of sneaking into the wildcard game. And then I think a lot of teams have changed their behavior in some ways where, you know, even if they do feel good, like take Milwaukee, for example, I think Milwaukee and the White Sox, both central leaders have to feel pretty good about their spot right now and their chances of winning that division. But I think teams like that have really changed their behavior over the last three years. And a lot of this comes from the way they operate in terms of analysts and models where they no longer are measuring players about how they can

help them get to the playoff they're measuring players who can help their playoff odds and so I think you'll see a little bit more more action there and I think there are a lot of teams in the east who think they have a chance and in both east really the national league and american league east who think they have a chance to do something and so I think you'll see a lot of action there. So I think you're going to see quite a few player moves. I just don't think it's going to be, I don't think Max Scherzer is going to get dealt. I don't think it's going to be,

you're not going to get a big Zach Greinke surprise. I just think it's going to be a lot of moves, but they're not going to be super exciting. Did you find during your time with a team and being involved in trade talks that it was predictable whether the deadline would be busy or not, just based on, I don't know, how many techs were flying back and forth or were you often surprised on

deadline day there was always a surprise i say this and there was always a surprise at some point there was always a surprise and i can i can think of them like what almost every year like you know it was like oh holy shit we might get zach cranky like that was you know i talked about that on the podcast that this week like zach cranky's name didn didn't even come up until July 28th you know and and so that was a surprise I remember a year and he ended up getting traded it was like hey they'll trade Tommy Pham and everyone kind of went oh we all went back to our quarters and looked at Tommy Pham and we had no idea he was available there was the year that you know and this this story came out months after it happened like half a year Ken Rosenthal got it.

And he talked about that on the podcast where the Astros made a trade for Bryce Harper. And literally, I went to bed that night thinking Bryce Harper was an Astro. And in the morning, it all kind of fell apart because owners can be owners. And there's always a surprise. There's always something weird every year. Do you think there have been any interesting trends in the types of deadline deals that get made or don't get made or how teams value players at the deadline? Like, I think Joshian has made the case that we just kind of have to recalibrate our expectations when it comes to what you can get for an impending free agent, someone who's just under team control for a couple more months. You're not going to get a big name prospect for that guy anymore the way that you once would have. So even during your time in Houston, did you see that like

there was more of a trend toward teams valuing prospects more? And so having to kind of lower your sights a little when you're trading someone like that? For sure. Teams have definitely, I think over the last five years become, I call them prospect huggers and they hug their prospects a lot more than they used to and get very weird about it. And I mean, even I was surprised to see, and it's a good trade for both teams, but last night's trade of Nelson Cruz to the Rays,

just getting a couple of pitchers who rank in the teens on the list for the Rays, it surprised me they got that much for a rental player. And so I do think Chris Bryant's probably going to get moved. I think that's probably the guy who will demand and at the end get the best return in terms of prospects. But yeah, for the most part, teams have gone from saying, hey, these three guys are untouchable to stay out of our top 10.

Yeah. Well, regardless of how many moves are made or whether they're big or they're small, you can read about them all at Fangraphs next week. I'm sure Ben and Kevin will be contributing to that coverage and Meg will be editing a whole lot of it. I'm sure she can't wait. So in the meantime, you can find Ben on Twitter

at underscore Ben underscore Clemens. Always go with multiple underscores in your Twitter handle if you can. And you can find Kevin on Twitter at Kevin underscore Goldstein. Only one underscore for him, but you can hear him on Shin Music every Friday. And you can catch both Ben and Kevin

pretty often on Fangraphs Audio as well. And I will, of course, link to the Trade Value series so that you can check out and argue about where everyone ranked. Thanks, guys. Thank you. Thanks for having us. All right.

That will do it for today and for this week. Thanks, as always, for listening. Sometimes I regret that we've stopped rolling when someone says something funny right after the interview. This time, Ben and Kevin teased Meg by saying that they were going to use trade deadline week to rank the top 500 players in baseball, and that they were planning to submit numbers 500 to 401 on Sunday night. And then Ben said he was planning to rank Brian Reynolds 500 first. It got a big laugh. And unfortunately, it wasn't preserved for posterity. Fortunately, someone describing a joke to you that they heard is just as good as hearing it yourself.

So a few notes for you. If you are a listener of my other baseball podcast, The Ringer MLB Show, you know that we often do a weekend preview segment where we talk about some of the best series that are scheduled for that weekend. That podcast always comes out on Friday afternoons, so it makes sense. We don't do that here typically, and by the time you hear this, it may already be too late.

But just in case you are listening to this right when it's posted, check out the weekend matchup between the Brewers and the White Sox, which is wonderful. On Friday, you've got Freddy Peralta against Lucas Giolito. On Saturday, you've got Corbin Burns going up against Carlos Radon. And on Sunday, you have Brandon Woodruff against Lance Lynn. That is a matchup of maybe the two best top threes of any starting rotation, certainly among the best. And not only do you have those two teams going head to head, but you have the rotations perfectly lined up certainly among the best. And not only do you have those two teams going head-to-head, but you have the rotations perfectly lined up so that the best three starters on each team

are going up against each other. There are a lot of good series this weekend. Yankees, Red Sox, Reds, Cardinals, Phillies, Braves, Mariners, A's, but you can't beat the caliber of pitchers going head-to-head here. Of course, will we get pitcher's duels or will we end up with blowouts in high-scoring games anyway? Who knows? But on paper, this should be fun. And I saw a tweet by

Jeremy Frank at MLB Random Stats who noted that this will be the first time that two teams faced each other on consecutive days, with all four starters having a sub-2.25 ERA and 15 or more games started since September 8-9, 1917, 1917, Cleveland versus Chicago. 104 years is a long time. I know that's a lot of qualifiers, but if anything, that fun fact underrates how great these matchups are because Burns, Rodon, Woodruff, Lynn, those are only two of the three games and Peralta-Giolito is not too shabby either. And I saw another fun fact on Friday from Stats LLC. This is also the first three-game series in MLB history to feature five all-star starting pitchers from the current season.

And of course, the sixth guy, Chialito, is a former all-star who's gotten Cy Young votes the past two years. So that should be a treat. Before I leave you, just a few straggler suggestions for alternate cycles, which we discussed last time. Eric from Minneapolis suggests the simple out cycle. He says one way to describe the hitting cycle is safe at every base. So it seems the simple sauce version of

the first cycle variation has to be out at every base. Probably it's pretty rare for someone to be retired at first, second, third, and home. If a strikeout put out by the catcher is taken as satisfying out at home, though, there would be more cases. Similarly, a strikeout and a catcher to first baseman put out might be good for retired at first. What about forced out at every base? Not bad. Alex says, I call this the why am I even here cycle because the identity of the batter base runner is not that important to the events or they have nothing to do with the result. Intentional walk, reached on fielder's choice, advanced by balk, and placed on second in extra innings. And Charles says, And one more follow-up from last time. third strike and foul bunt third strike. That to me would be a pure failure and is in the realm

of achievability. And one more follow-up from last time, we discussed the idea of the Miggy cycle, the idea that the only way that Miguel Cabrera could get a cycle is if he hits two home runs and stops at third in the second one. And we discussed what would happen if a player actually did stop at third after hitting a ball over the fence and how that would be scored. We noted that there is a rule on the books that says that the umpire is not supposed to replace the ball until the runner crosses home plate, but it wasn't clear exactly what would happen if the runner refused to cross home plate and just stayed there. We talked about the precedent of the Harvey Haddix game and the Robin Ventura Grand Slam single,

so if you were prevented from reaching home plate, then maybe you would just be credited with the triple, but what if you left voluntarily? Well, listener Michael in our Facebook group pointed out another rule. Rule 5.09b, parentheses 2. If after touching first base, the runner leaves the base path, obviously abandoning his effort to touch the next base, then he's out. says, any runner after reaching first base who leaves the base path heading for his dugout or his position believing that there is no further play may be declared out if the umpire judges the act of the runner to be considered abandoning his efforts to run the bases. Even though an out is called, the ball remains in play in regard to any other runner. This rule also covers the

following and similar plays. Less than two out, score tied, last of ninth inning, runner on first, batter hits a ball out of park for winning run. The runner on first passes second and thinking the home run automatically wins the game. Cuts across diamond toward his bench as batter runner circles bases. In this case, the base runner would be called out for abandoning his effort to touch the next base. And batter runner permitted to continue round bases to make his home run valid. If there are two outs, home run would not count. It goes on from there, but presumably,

if you were to abandon your effort to cross home plate, you might be called out but credited with the triple. Or maybe you could just miss home plate entirely, and then you could also get called out but get the triple. So there are probably ways to do it. 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. Ben Llewellyn, Nathan DiIorio-Koth,

Jesse Kraler, Tom Harmon, and Matt Shirley. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectivelywild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments for me and Meg coming via email at podcast.fangraphs.com You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments for me and Meg coming via email at podcast.fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter.

Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. We hope you have a wonderful weekend, and we will be back early next week. Talk to you then. And I think they all were true Trust, that's my trust in you It's what I value And it's what I refuse to lose You've got a thing for me And I've got a thing for you too