Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 185: Trading International Bonus Pool Space/Shortening the Time Between Pitches

Episode Date: April 19, 2013

Ben and Sam discuss the implications of teams’ ability to trade international bonus pool space, and whether it makes sense to enforce the rule about time between pitches.

Good morning and welcome to episode 185 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus. I am Ben Lindberg and joining me is Sam Miller. Sam, you did some further thought or research into pitchers and hand warmers. Is that so? Yeah. Isn't it? is that so yeah uh not really uh i know what you're talking about yeah so carmen c um who if you listen to hang up and listen is a podcast celebrity um and is also a listener of this podcast um is uh he suggested that uh one of the reasons that hand warmers might be a non-starter in baseball is because there's not nearly the downtime that a football quarterback has. A football quarterback,

of course, can keep his hands in his muffler for, I don't know, 90% of the time, whereas a baseball pitcher during downtime is responsible for holding onto the baseball. Whereas a baseball pitcher during downtime is responsible for holding onto the baseball. And I think that's a reasonable objection. And so then I just sort of watched a pitcher for about, I don't know, eight minutes or something like that to see how much downtime there is. And if we're assuming that there's some sort of heating device in there, that it's not simply insulation, but that there's actually a heat generating device in there, I think there actually would be plenty of time for a pitcher to get some benefit out of it. There's plenty of action that the pitcher's not involved in.

Catcher comes out to the mound and batter strolls to the plate and so on and so forth. Infielders throw the ball around. All that time, I think the pitcher could get some benefit of it. I mean, they're blowing on their hands, so they obviously think there's some benefit to warming their hands up even a little bit, so this would do more than that. Plot pickings. We will have a regular hand warmer segment on every episode from now on. Okay. I wanted to

mention something that is not a topic but we have talked about Clubhouse Chemistry a few times and I have had this tab open in my browser for a few days now meaning to mention it and I haven't yet and I don't think we really

have to talk about it necessarily but I just wanted to read it. It's something that James Shields said, his sort of definition of team chemistry, in a Jeff Passan article from earlier this week. And he said, chemistry is something that has to happen naturally. We worked really hard in spring training to create that. It's important to get our arms and bats in shape, but you have to know each other before the season starts or you can't be on the same page. When you have good chemistry, it brings out the best out of every individual. Let's say I have a man on second,

and I want Chris Getz to move over two steps to the right. I can look at him and give him a head nod, and he knows exactly what I'm talking about. If he doesn't understand where I'm coming from, next thing you know, I give up a hit in the four hole. Chemistry is thinking similarly, being one unit, really knowing each other. So I thought that was an interesting way to define it and maybe makes it more believable to me that it has a real effect or a significant effect than the typical definition. I guess the way that we usually talk about it is that it's just sort of everyone's happy and they like going to work

and they're hitting well because they're feeling satisfied with themselves or, I don't know, because they had a nice time in the clubhouse before the game. So this kind of makes it more of a, I don't know, more of a real on-field, in-game thing. And I like that definition. Yeah, it does, but it also makes it, I mean, we watch baseball games and we sort of know how rarely the actual, I mean, it seems to me that we know by watching how rarely the interaction between the players has a material effect on the play's outcome. And so it makes it realer but it also seems to really limit it to a couple of, a few plays a year, maybe if you're generous a few plays a month. But very uncommon.

I think that what, it might show up actually as a hybrid of the two things where it's somewhat real and it's somewhat attitude-based. For instance, I remember last year Mike Trout talked a lot about how much communication there was between the Angels hitters on the bench when they were facing a pitcher. Angels hitters on the bench when they were facing a pitcher. Every hitter was coming back and sharing notes. And the impression I get is that it wasn't that way at the beginning of the year. And I think after they changed batting coaches and maybe after Trout got there, there was a lot more of it. And a lot of players actually talked about that on the Angels, talked about how significant it was to come back and basically get a scouting report every time. And if you don't like the guy, or even if you're just not close to the guy, you either might not get that scouting report or you might get a less enthused scouting report. And so I think that's a case where communication, I could see making, you know,

being a big part of adjusting throughout the game and learning the picture and finding weaknesses. And that would come from chemistry, right? Yeah. Okay. And the last thing I wanted to mention, a couple weeks ago, I talked about how I had kind of, after Sean Markham's latest injury, I had mended my ways and learned not to expect anything out of always injured players coming back from injury. Well, apparently he threw four no-hit innings with five strikeouts today in an extended spring training game. And I'm back in.

I'm a believer in Sean Markham again. Noted. Noted. Okay. All right. What's your topic? Trading international pool, slot, pool, whatever. Yeah. Okay.

And I'm going to talk about time between pitches. Okie doke. Who goes first? You. All right, so this year, as people are probably somewhat aware but have trouble with the details, teams are now limited in how much they're allowed to spend on international free agents, just as they're limited in how much they're allowed to spend on drafted players unless they want to be penalized and lose future abilities to sign such players. And so you're basically given a pool of money to sign international free agents. And that pool is

based on various slots that you're given. So something like one team gets the first slot, a bad team gets the first slot, and that first slot is worth, I'm going to throw out a fake number, say $2 million. And then you keep going, and then your second slot might be for $800,000, and your third slot might be for $400,000, and your fourth slot might be for $200,000. And then you add all that money up, and you have that much money to spend. As I understand it, you can spend all that money on one player if you want, or you can divide it up all over the place, but that's the money that you get. One of the quirks of this though is that teams are actually allowed to trade their slot money. Ben Badler wrote about this for Baseball America. It's the first I had heard of it. And so I'm guessing

it's going to be the first a lot of people have heard of it. And it's fascinating for a lot of reasons. So I'm just going to go through real quick some of the basics of it. It seems pretty clear that Major League Baseball doesn't actually really like this idea, that they would prefer there isn't a lot of trading going on, because they don't like anything that benefits the amateur player. And this benefits the amateur player by moving money to teams that want to spend it. And, of course, we've never had, in my lifetime at least, the teams have never had the ability to trade draft picks, for instance. Most of the rules that

baseball has regarding contracts and money are kind of designed to protect the team until the player is a pro, and then once the player is a pro, to protect the player. So you're allowed to trade pool money, pool allotments, but with limitations. So if your total slot money is, say, $2 million, you're only allowed to add 50% of that. So you could add $1 million. You have to trade the entire slot. If you have a $500,000 slot, you can't trade half of it and keep half for yourself. It's somewhat restrictive in that sense. You can't sign a player for more than you have and then go looking for the additional

slot money after that. You have to have the slot money first. You can't trade slot money for future years, you can only do it for the current year. And you can't buy slot money. You can't give the Rangers $100,000 cash for their $600,000 slot and then just take that. You can't basically just give cash for it. You have to give players for it. So these are all restrictions designed to – it seems designed to make it somewhat harder to do it. But Ben Badler goes down some teams that don't have the freedom to sign high-talent players like the Rays this year because they're being penalized for last year, and teams that simply have too much money.

Like the Astros have a $5 million pool, and Ben says it's basically impossible to spend a $5 million pool efficiently, so they basically are on surplus. They have surplus pool money and then the buyers are kind of mostly mid to high market teams that have been aggressive in buying players in the past uh so this is fascinating for a couple of reasons one of which is um that it's going to be really interesting to see what kind of trades this turns out uh it's going to be really interesting to see what kind of trades this turns out. It's going to be interesting to see how teams value the flexibility to do this. I mean, theoretically, in the sort of mass illusion that is the amateur free agent market,

theoretically, if you have a $500,000 slot and you can sign a $500,000 player for $500,000, that player, theoretically, is worth $500,000. What this essentially admits is that that's completely a lie and that all these players are underpaid. They're all assets and the freedom to sign them at even so-called market rates is a lie, that that ability is an asset, is a surplus asset. So it's kind of like baseball has essentially dropped the facade and just admitted like, yep, totally screwing the amateurs and if you have more money than you can screw amateurs out of, you can trade it to other teams that want to screw amateurs, which is interesting.

Doesn't that seem interesting to you? Yeah. And the reason I think it's going to be interesting to see just how much teams value this and what sort of price teams put on this flexibility is that it usually takes a long time for markets to get efficient in these sorts of situations. For a long time, for instance, in the NFL draft, teams were terribly undervaluing lower picks and terribly overvaluing higher picks. And that happened for like decades. That was the case until, you know, somebody put together a chart and figured out

how much value each pick is basically worth in surplus value and kind of took the inefficiency out of it. But it took a long time. So it'll be interesting to see whether that's, that was just the case that sports weren't that analytical and that it was just an inefficiency because there were all sorts of inefficiencies in pro sports, or if it, in which case,

we might expect baseball to figure this out really super quick because all the teams are going to be studying this, or if it takes many years before we actually know how much an extra $500,000 slot is worth in players. I mean, it would be interesting to see if these guys, these slots get traded at the trade deadline, what kind of prospect they're the equivalent of. Is a $500,000 slot equivalent to getting the player that costs $500,000? I mean, it wouldn't probably be, but it might be equivalent to, say, a $250,000 bonus player or something like that.

So, yeah, you know what I'm saying? Yeah. So I guess what would you get back for $250,000 of value in the international draft? What is that in terms of, I don't know, minor leaguer who already is in a system? Is that just kind of a depth guy, an org guy? Is that like a real prospect in terms of value? I don't know. Yeah, it's a really good question. I have not thought this through all that well, but if I had to guess, I would guess that it's maybe like 30%, so like a 70% discount

or I guess put it this way, if you traded a million dollar slot, you would expect $300,000 worth of surplus value in return which is like basically like a C prospect, something like that. Like kind of a guy who's on the depth chart, not totally organizational fodder, but also not going to be a top 100 guy at all. Just a guess, though. I don't really know. We'll see. That is interesting. I wonder if that kind of opens the door for trading of picks or slot stuff

in the amateur draft eventually. Yeah, it kind of feels like a test program, doesn't it? Yes. I mean, it basically is a test program. I mean, this is exactly what this is. I mean, it's not quite the case because just because you have the money to sign a player doesn't mean you get to go out and pick your player and make him sign. You still have to talk that guy into signing with your organization instead of another

organization. But it's essentially the same thing. It's basically giving you the freedom to pick an amateur player. So, yeah, it will be interesting to see whether this is just a test to see how much big market teams prey on small market teams, which is what baseball kind of has always claimed as the point of not trading draft picks. Okay, interesting. Okay, my topic is a rule change that was made in tennis recently in the ATP tour. That's probably redundant. I don't know what ATP stands for off the top of my head.

But I guess tennis is kind of analogous to baseball in that there is time between discrete events and it's kind of one person versus another. And so the equivalent of time between pitches in baseball is time between points or time between serves in tennis. And I wasn't really aware that the length of tennis matches was a problem or something that people complained about, but apparently it was. Apparently it was. So there was a rule on the books in the ATP that players could take no more than 25 seconds between serves. But enforcement of it, I think, was about as spotty as as enforcement of time between pitches is in baseball. So I was reading an article in The Wall Street Journal by Carl Bialik today, and apparently they have changed the rule in tennis. So they have done two things.

I mean, under the old rule, if you took longer than 25 seconds between serves, you would get a warning, and then after that you would lose a point whenever it happened. So now they have reduced the penalty after the warning. So you get a warning and then you just lose the first serve. You don't lose the point. You just lose a serve. But they, at the same time as they kind of made the penalty less strict, they also said that they would enforce it more strictly. Uh, and they have, uh, they have, I guess, actually timed it and, and I don't know how, how often they've punished players, but, but it has been a real thing. It has been a real, uh, incentive or disincentive not to take a long time. And apparently tennis matches are now 7% shorter. There is a real reduction in the time that it takes to play tennis because of this rule. So baseball changed the rule,

I think it was in 2007, before the 2007 season, changed the time between pitches permitted with no runners on base from 20 seconds to 12 seconds. So the rule right now says when the bases are unoccupied, the pitcher shall deliver the ball to the batter within 12 seconds after he receives the ball. Each time the pitcher delays the game by violating this rule, the umpire shall call ball. The 12 second timing starts when the pitcher is in possession of the ball and the batter is in the box alert to the pitcher. The timing stops when the pitcher releases the ball. The intent of this rule is to avoid unnecessary delays. The umpire shall insist that the catcher return the ball promptly to the pitcher and that the pitcher take his position on the rubber promptly. Obvious delay by the pitcher should instantly be penalized by the umpire. So I don't know how often pitchers take longer than 12 seconds between pitches with no runners on base.

We could check that with the timestamps on PitchFX pitches and see how often it happens. But presumably it happens pretty often, I would think. but presumably it happens pretty often, I would think. And you very, very rarely, if ever, see a pitcher called on this and have to give up a ball. I mean, that almost never happens. So I wonder whether this ATP model suggests that it could work. Apparently, according to the Wall Street Journal article, there has been a lot of grumbling by players.

They've kind of complained about it, but it hasn't become a serious issue, and it's just been effective. So I wonder whether, I don't know in baseball, whether there's any equivalent to changing it from losing a point to just losing a serve. I don't know what you could do that is less severe than a ball. Because, I mean, it's not as if under the current rule the runner is automatically put on base or something.

It seems like losing a ball is kind of the equivalent to losing a first serve. So I wonder, I mean, it seems to have been implemented fine and gone smoothly and had the intended effect in tennis now that it's actually being enforced. And, of course, the length of baseball games is a problem or at least considered by many people to be a problem. And I wonder why we can't just observe the rule in the same way and just let everyone know, okay, we're serious about this now. And umpires can just have a stopwatch with them or something and they can press it at the appropriate times and pitchers can

be aware that this is happening and and there's a real threat to it uh and i wonder whether whether we would see any any kind of more serious side effects other than some players kind of grumbling uh and the game's actually getting shorter it suggests to me me that maybe the solution to making games quicker other than cutting into advertising time or something, which would be effective but will never happen, is just observing this rule that's already on the books. It would kill me. It would actually drive me to drink knowing that there was a 12-second clock that was always about to go off. I mean, really, I would not be able to watch a baseball game. I would be counting to 12 on every pitch.

It would drive me insane. I mean, eventually, you know, there'd be a clock on the screen counting down, play clock up there with the score. Oh, it would kill me, Ben. It would kill me. I could not do it. I can't. If I know that there's a buzzer about to go off in 12 seconds i can't not count down yeah i don't the 12 seconds and it's not an issue i mean baseball is slow i i mean it's there's no doubt baseball is slow uh but the the uh the speed with which pitchers throw the ball with runners on base

i would pause it is not a problem. You're talking about maybe in extreme cases, three or four minutes in some games. But pitchers spend way, way, way more time in between pitches when runners are on because it's a tactic to delay the game, I guess to freeze the base runner and because they have the freedom to there you know there's no there's no rule on that's the other thing you could make a rule about that too you could but then what so then it gets to 18 seconds and

the guy has to go to the mound yep i mean he has to go to the plate so then when it gets to 17 and a half the guy can just take off Mm-hmm. So then when it gets to 17 and a half, the guy can just take off? I mean... No, no, because then you would say, okay, well, so then he could throw to first, and so the guy can't take off. But now the pitchers are going to just keep throwing to first in order to keep their time. I mean, you're basically going to add a lot more throws to first

so that pitchers don't take two extra seconds to freeze the runner. And, you know, the advertising time is significant. As far as I know, I think if a ball is fouled off, I imagine the 12-second rule doesn't kick in. If a catcher comes out to talk to the pitcher, which is allowed, I assume 12 seconds doesn't kick in. And you watch pitchers when there's nobody on base pitchers basically get the ball and throw the ball they're pretty good at it um so i just don't think that this is the problem my my guess is that if you sat down with a stopwatch and you figured out how much time uh this is costing you in your life it would very rarely top two or three minutes in a game. Well, maybe I'll try that and see what we find out. I don't know.

I mean, the length of baseball games doesn't bother me so much, but I am a person who cares about baseball and likes baseball more than most people. So I can certainly accept that there are certain people who just have given up on baseball maybe or don't watch baseball because it takes three hours instead of two-something hours. If you look at it, it's actually kind of crazy. I was looking the other day at how many pitches per plate appearance

there are now compared to 1992. And the highest pitch per plate appearance team in 1992 would be the lowest now. And so when you start looking for reasons that games are slower now, you're adding probably 40 pitches a game just in terms of, I don't know, that's extreme. Maybe it's not 40, but maybe it's 20. Just in terms of kind of a different, basically hitters trying to win adds 20 pitches a game. What are you going to do about that? You can't do anything about that.

That's just trying to win. So, I don't know. Yeah. Sorry, I just went off on a new rank when you were just being conciliatory. Yeah. Well, I don't know. I mean, there are a lot of things that you can't do anything about. I wouldn't want to change the competitiveness.

I wouldn't want to skew things towards the pitcher or the batter in any way and upset that balance just in the interest of making games shorter. So this is just kind of... Something you could do something about. Right, and maybe it is two minutes a game, but it's something. You would do this for two... And I'm not even saying two minutes a game. I'm saying two minutes in some games.

In occasional games, it might be two minutes. I bet it's not two minutes a game regularly but if it were what would it have to be what would it have to save on average for this to be worthwhile to you uh i don't know i hadn't i hadn't considered the anxiety aspect man it'd be so you would just be so anxious all the time. I don't like clocks ticking down which is maybe one of the reasons that I watch baseball and almost no other sport is that there is no clock

and even when I play a video game and there's like a timed level, I no longer enjoy the video game because I'm just worrying about the clock ticking down. If you take 13 seconds between pitches, Carlos Quentin charges the mound. There's always Carlos Quentin just standing there. And

as soon as that buzzer rings, he's coming. He's coming right at you. Okay, I like that. Alright, well, I don't know. I think it's definitely an analogous situation. And I think if it worked this smoothly in tennis, it might work this smoothly in baseball. But maybe the return wouldn't be a 7% reduction in the time of game. Maybe there would be a 2% reduction in the time of game or something. Even that might be a lot.

But I don't know. It reminded me of baseball when I read it. And there is a similar rule. And it is not enforced currently. And maybe things would be a little different if it were enforced but you make good points about maybe why it's not worth the effort all right we're done for the week uh you can email us at podcast at baseball perspectives.com we will answer your emails in an email show next wednesday have a nice weekend and we will be back

on monday