Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 173: Should Contract Size Influence Our Projections for Players?/Revisiting Our Pre-Offseason Predictions/What Started the Sabermetric Revolution?

Episode Date: April 3, 2013

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about whether we should let where and for how much a player signs influence how we expect him to play, then revisit their team predictions from the end of last season and discuss what started the sabermetric revolution.

Hi, this is Bob Costas, and a huge part of my baseball upbringing had to do with Stratomatic. All the best, all you Stratomatic seam heads. Good morning, and welcome to episode 173 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus. I am Ben Lindberg. Joining me, as always, is Sam Miller. Hello, Sam. Hi. It is a listener email show. Some of you have sent us emails. We're going to read and answer them. Sam is going to read them. So why don't you start? All right. I will. So first, I want to read one from Eric, who asked, following Jay Happ's extension, well, he says, I don't think it's a bad deal by any means,

but Happ is nobody's savior or sexy extension candidate. On the other hand, I find Alex Anthopoulos and his front office to be very smart. Would it be reasonable to assume he may be better than a fifth starter or swing man based solely on the fact that the Blue Jays are willing to give him such an extension? Financial situations aside, would you ever change your view on a player based on how they're valued by a front office? Did people try and find reasons to think James Loney may be better than we all think because he signed with the Rays than if he had signed with the Royals or the Marlins?

Best wishes, friends. Eric. Good question. And best wishes, friends, Eric. Good question. And best wishes to you. And Eric also asked if we are going to be doing morning podcasts regularly from now on. That is not the plan. This is just something that happened a couple days in a row and will happen from time to time. So as for the question, that is something I've thought about, and I think it came up either in one of

your articles or on a comment on one of your articles not too long ago someone asked whether we should take contract into account when we are making oh it was a chat that's right yeah um whether we should take contract into account when making projections for players. And you said you thought it was an interesting idea, and I thought it was an interesting idea also. It's kind of hard to untangle the contract and the performance, and obviously a team can give a player a bad contract and give him more money than he deserves, but in the same way that I am more optimistic about the player who

re-signs with a team than a player who signs with a different team, because I assume that the team that had him before knows him better than anyone else, and if that team wants to keep him, then it's a good sign. So in the same way that I think about that, I guess I would think the same thing about a contract. If a team is willing to give someone an extension or, well, that's sort of the same thing. But if someone pays someone a lot of money, then I assume that they know something or think they know something about how good that player is. And I guess I would factor it in. I don't know exactly how to do that in any sort of statistical sense, but just mentally sure. Yeah. Uh, I remember there being a period of my life where, uh, I

tended to draft a lot of Oakland A's based on the idea that Billy Bean was, uh, in my mind at the time, some sort of super god. And so Rubio Durazo became like a fourth round pick. And Joey Divine I remember having a lot of in my life, a lot of Joey Divine in my life. And so, yeah, it's – I don't know. You and I have talked about this, but we've never figured out any practical way of executing it. And I don't know what the practical way of executing it is because so much of a decision that a team makes to sign a player involves factors that are either not quite relevant to the player's actual ability or that involve kind of hidden information. So like the role that the player serves for the team is going to be a lot different for

different teams. It wouldn't have told us, like for instance, if the Rays had a first baseman in their system who was really good, they wouldn't have signed James Loney. And so that wouldn't have told us anything about James Loney that them signing him didn't tell us. It just so happened that they needed a first baseman and they chose him over Casey Kochman. And of course, the negotiations that take place are not known to us. The amount of bidders are often not known to us. The amount of bidders are often not known to us.

And so it's awfully hard to necessarily make this practical. But the fundamental idea behind it, which is that we know less than the guys who are really, really, really, really good at this. And who have a lot more at stake than we do. And who have a lot more at stake than we do and a lot more information than we do. It would be kind of strangely arrogant for us to think that we know more than they do. And so in a lot of ways, I'm very open to this idea. And it's sort of hard to square that idea with a job that requires you to write and judge what people do. Nobody wants a world where writers simply say, James Loney is good now because the Rays signed him and we have nothing else to say.

But I guess maybe Eric is also asking specifically about certain office the word certain appears in his email and we we did not make this um we did not make this judgment when the philly signed uh uni best and pedigree i was just gonna bring that up yeah um which of the phillies were you gonna bring up though i had three okay yeah i i got i started that sentence without knowing where it was gonna end and then i got midway through and i thought, there's too many names to choose from. But yeah, I don't know if this idea would be as popular if you applied it to every GM so much as if you applied it to somebody's pet GM. And I think that's fair. I think, I mean, there are a lot of people, I think, accuse sort of the sabermetric community of groupthink. And when the Rays do something or the A's do something at various times, we try a lot harder to justify it or find some way that it makes sense, which we wouldn't do if it

had been done by another team. And you can certainly take that too far, but I think to some extent you have to give a team like the Rays some benefit of the doubt if they've shown over a period of several years that they're able to compete with teams that spend a lot more money and they make a lot of smart moves and they seem to see things about players that that we didn't see before they signed them then i think you do have to factor that into your expectations for the the players they sign i think that's fair to do to an extent you do but i think there's a possibility that um that you're just going to end up with a lot of a lot of false positives i'm not i mean the philly the rays are better at winning than a lot of teams are at winning,

but it's not like it's a reliable thing that if they sign a player, he's going to be good. There's lots of guys they've signed that have been bad. I remember thinking after the Casimir deal that it was shocking that not only did they get rid of Scott Casimir on the Angels, but that they got so many awesome players from the Angels, and none of those guys turned into anything. Whereas a team like the Giants, you would have missed completely by this principle, because when Brian Sabian was putting together his two World Series teams and signing Andres Torres and Aubrey Huff and such, nobody liked Brian Sabian. And so we would have just completely missed every.

If you adjusted downward on the same principle, you would have missed almost all the very good players he signed on the cheap. And I don't know that GM quality is all that predictive. I think that maybe GM ability overall, like all 30 GMs as a group, you would probably find that all GMs as a group make better decisions than we do. The wisdom of that crowd is bigger than the wisdom of our crowd. But I would think that the margins between all of them are so small that if you tried to start picking out some GMs as being better than others, you would find very little practical application in the short term.

Mad Fientist I agree. Mad Fientist Okay. So did Ruben Obrador Jr. signing Uni Bettencourt, Michael, uh, while Delman Young and trading for Michael Young change your opinion about those three at all? Uh, no, probably not. Yeah, me neither. Um, kind of, maybe a tiny little bit about Michael Young, although I don't know if it changed my opinion of him so much as it made me remember things about Michael Young.

That he's not quite as bad as he was last season. Yeah, and that it was only a year earlier that he was really quite good. So I guess I wouldn't credit that to Ruben Amaro, junior or senior. No Amaros. All right. Shall I move on to another question? Yes. All right.

This is from Spencer from a place called ON. Is ON Ontario probably? Yeah. Not a state I know of. Mm-hmm. All right. Spencer asks, on the October 30th episode, you guys predicted the first and last place teams of 2013.

In that episode, you committed to revisiting the predictions when the season starts. Sam said it would happen, quote, on the eve of the 2013 season. That didn't happen yesterday, so I wanted to make sure it still happened, since I think comparing pre- and post-offseason predictions would be a lot of fun. So, yeah, we forgot about this,

and I'm glad that Spencer reminded us. I don't know that I have any memory of doing this. Yeah, you will. You'll remember it in a minute when I tell you. There was sort of a defining moment in these predictions that you will remember. A pretty important moment in the history of our show, I would say. So, yeah, we wanted to revisit them. At the time, we wanted to revisit them in the future

because we wanted to see how much an off-season changes our outlook. As it was, we were relying almost totally on the 2012 season standings to make our predictions, and we didn't know whether an off-season would upend that or whether we would still be mentally prone to just follow last year's results. So I'm going to say what we each picked in each division, and then you tell me whether you have changed your mind. I can read you our predictions from the staff predictions article. That's fine with me. Unless you changed your mind

in the last day or two. Okay, go ahead. All right. All right. So in the AL East, you had the Yankees and I had the Rays. I have changed my mind. I have continued to predict the Rays, but I don't consider there to be any particular science behind it. I would be happy to change my mind to the Blue Jays at this point. Yeah, I would feel the same way. I officially predicted the Blue Jays with the Rays as a wildcard team. All right. Central, we both had the Tigers.

Still have the Tigers. You had the Angels. I had the Rangers. And you have the Angels now, and I had the Angels. We both had the Angels. Uh-huh. So you changed from Rangers to Angels? I did change from Rangers to Angels, yes.

And partly because of the offseason, and partly because I did change from Rangers to Angels, yes. And partly because of the offseason, and partly because I thought they were pretty close to begin with. In the AL East, you had the Nats, I had the Braves. NL East. NL East, I have the Nats still. And I have the Nats. So I changed mine from the Braves to the Nats.

And partly, I don't think the Braves got better this offseason, even though the conventional wisdom is that they did. And partly I think that the Nationals did get better. But also partly I'm not sure why I didn't pick the Nats at this time last year. The Nats are really good. Or I guess at the end of the season. In the Central, you had the Reds. I had the Cardinals. And I think we still both do.

Okay. And we both had the Giants. And now you have the Giants and I have the Dodgers. I'm surprised I picked the Giants because somewhere else I predicted the Dodgers. So I predicted half Giants at this point. And that's obviously an off-season development. Last place, you had the Blue Jays and I had the Orioles. Okay.

Well, now we both have the Orioles. And we both had the Indians in the Central. And I had the Twins. We both had the Twins. Where do we had the Indians in the Central. And I had the Twins. We both had the Twins. Where do we have the Indians? I have the Indians third. You have the Indians second. And winning the wild card.

Yes. In the West, we both have the Astros. We have not changed our minds about that. Didn't we? That's correct. We didn't predict the Astros. We have not changed our minds about that. Didn't we? Did we not? We didn't predict the Astros because we forgot that they were switching to the AL. Yes, we picked the AL.

I think that was the show where corrections, clarifications, and errors was birthed. First time we ever made a mistake. Based on that error. Okay, Marlins in the West. In the East. Yes, still. Actually, I didn't.lins in the West, in the East. Yes, still.

Actually, I didn't. I had the Mets in the East. And now I think the Mets are kind of good. Like, I think I probably have upgraded the Mets at least one place. Yeah, I've upgraded the Mets. Yes, you had them in fourth. Okay. The Central, you changed yours to the Cubs

I left mine as the Astros As an active aggression Right now you have Pirates And I have Cubs Yeah, okay And the Rockies Yes

So It is kind of crazy that We In one off season The Blue Jays went from last place to a first place contender. That's not saying anything new. People have noted that. However, right now with all the extensions going on, people are talking about how difficult it is going to be to get free agents in the future because of this.

And in fact, the blue Jays did this almost entirely without free agents. And there's probably something relevant there. I think that the long extensions arguably make it a little easier to make trades because you're taking on a lot of, I mean, people move on from the players that they signed to long-term extensions and then they want to move them. And so a team like the Blue Jays that has a lot of flexibility and some prospects can still upgrade in a flash based on this growing trade market.

Yeah, I agree. Okay. All right, Spencer, thank you for keeping us honest. Yes, good memory. Okay. All right, Spencer, thank you for keeping us honest. Yes, good memory. And so then last question is from Mike, who asks, what event marks the beginning? He put quotation marks around beginning. I'm not sure why.

But I guess because he wants to make it clear that the beginning is a vague term. So we're going to say beginning, but of course there could be many beginnings. Okay, what event marks the beginning of the sabermetric revolution? The advent of the internet? The publishing of Moneyball? The increasing popularity of fantasy baseball? I know it's a confluence of these things, but what do you think had the most impact? Well, I mean, there are all sorts of sabermetric pioneers you could say we're we're the first and and trace a straight line from there to today but i guess in terms of uh

popularization i mean if you want to say it's one guy and i mean i don't know that that you can pin it on one person or one event so much as maybe we're just sort of moving as a society towards quantifying things and having big data and and baseball being a big business and so therefore uh decisions mattering more and and needing to be based on data so So maybe it would have happened without any particular event or person, but I don't know. Can you pick a better one than just the baseball abstracts? It seems at least certainly in terms of writers and popularizing the sabermetric revolution. It seems like just about every writer who writes about sabermetrics of a certain age

grew up reading the abstracts and was exposed to the abstracts at some early age and marked by it. I mean, it seems to be the case with everyone who founded Baseball Perspectives, certainly, and everyone of the same generation who writes about this sort of stuff and has brought it to a bigger audience. Well, there's, yeah, I think first off there's probably two different ways of answering this. One is the moment when the thing gets massively huge and popular and mainstream, when the thing gets massively huge and popular and mainstream. And the other is the kind of Velvet Underground moment where the seed is planted for a million other bands

and the impact isn't really known until many years later. And so I think that the publication of Moneyball, as far as I'm concerned, is what made it mainstream among fans. I don't know if, and it was almost instantaneous, and I mean almost everybody I know, there's a clear line between kind of what they knew before Moneyball and what they were reading before Moneyball and what they were reading after. I don't know how much that is true on the team side. I don't know if Moneyball simply rode the wave that was already pretty well established in front offices. There's some of that, but I don't know if it was going to be in 30 front offices this quickly,

if not for the book, and I suspect it wouldn't have been. I think it probably still would have been a little bit of a niche thing for, I don't know, another half decade or so. Um, and so yeah, a combination of the money ball is, but in the money ball book, but really the book I would say was, uh, can't be overestimated. Um, but for the seed of things, um, I am, uh, you have to forgive me. i can't think of the name of the that game that people play stratomatic stratomatic yes it's very early in the morning sorry uh i wonder whether stratomatic might be the the seed moment um because it kind of took baseball from being a an abstract thing that you could enjoy on your own terms

to being a thing where knowledge benefited individuals. And I think that you hear in any area of the game, it's sort of amazing how many people trace their baseball knowledge back to that is a really formative experience. I was just reading John Miller's book, and John Miller also is a guy who wouldn't be a broadcaster except for Stratomatic. He would play entire seasons on his own in his room

and would announce them as a 13-year-old. And he actually would set up sound effects. He would get reel-to-reels and record them. He would have multiple recorders so that some were playing different noises while he was giving the broadcast for 162 game seasons for all 10 NL teams. And I think that that's pretty significant. That comes up a lot. And I don't know if that's the answer, but I would go with it.

Yeah, that's a good one. Do you know what year that was? That John Miller was doing his thing? That Stratomatic was first developed. I don't. In my head, I place it in mid to late 60s. Yeah, it seems to be it was founded in 61 and then, yeah, I guess got popular later that decade. And that coincides with Earnshaw Cook getting a Sports Illustrated cover story written about him.

Although he had no Bill James-like ability to entertain people with his writing and thoughts, I don't think. I mean, maybe the thoughts were provocative, but the prose was not persuasive or compelling. Right. And you do hear occasionally about how his book found its way into front offices, but his ideas also weren't all that good. But it doesn't seem like it matters. I mean, it seems like he captured a part of people's imaginations, that he sort of introduced an idea. His ideas didn't have to be right. It was just thinking that way appealed to certain people. Yeah, all right, so that'll do it. We're done with this episode. It's just thinking that way appealed to certain people. Yeah.

All right. So that'll do it. We're done with this episode. Email us for next week. It's never too early. It's never too early. If you want, you can even backdate some of your questions and we can answer that. You can require us to answer them in three weeks.

We'll answer them whenever you want us to answer them. Podcast at baseballperspectives.com. That's right. All right. We'll be back tomorrow.