Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 189: Should Chad Billingsley Have Had Surgery Sooner?/Brendan Ryan, Robert Andino, and the Mariners

Episode Date: April 25, 2013

Ben and Paul talk to Corey Dawkins about Chad Billingsley’s elbow, then discuss the Mariners’ decision to start Robert Andino over Brendan Ryan and the state of Seattle’s organization.

Oh! The people's elbow! Good morning and welcome to episode 189 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus. I am Ben Lindberg. Sam Miller is on vacation for the rest of the week. He is at Yosemite Park and I feel like he was reluctant to tell me where he was going because he didn't want me to make a Yosemite Sam joke

which I refrained from doing when he did tell me so he will be back on Monday and we will have a couple guest hosts over the next couple days so today's is Paul Sporer be back on Monday and we will have a couple guest hosts over the next couple days. So today's is Paul Sporer, whom you may remember from being on basically every team preview podcast. I don't remember what the final count was, but when we previewed every team before the season, Paul was definitely our most frequent guest because he wrote like half of the annual this year. So welcome back, Paul.

Thanks. Thanks for having me back. I hope people like the annual because now I've got half of it put on my shoulders there. But yeah, I enjoyed those pods and I'm ready for another. All right. So what is your topic that we are going to talk about second? All right, so what is your topic that we are going to talk about second? We're going to talk about this interesting decision, and you wouldn't think it's interesting because of the two people involved, but the decision for the Seattle Mariners to bench Brendan Ryan in favor of Robert Andino for some reason. Yes, so we will get to that a little later.

So the first thing that I want to talk about, my topic, is Chad Billingsley's Tommy John surgery. So we have another guest. I've asked Corey Dawkins to come on. Corey writes about injuries for Baseball Perspectives. He is the man who maintains our injury database, and he knows a lot of things about injuries. So I wanted to ask him some questions about this Billingsley, Tommy John announcement. So hello, Corey, thank you for coming on. Hello, thanks for having me on. So this is one of those cases. And I was in the press box yesterday at Citizens Bank Park when this news was announced and someone kind of read it off his computer

to the rest of the press box that Chad Billingsley was going to have Tommy John surgery. And I would not describe the mood in that press box as shocked. There were no gasps or intakes of breath. This was not a huge surprise to me or anyone there. I guess given what we've seen Chad Billingsley go through, what he went through at the end of last season, it almost would have been more surprising to me if this hadn't happened. But I don't actually know anything about injuries. So I wanted to bring you on because this is one of those cases where his his his elbow issues cropped up last august so we're talking about about i mean eight months ago right is when is when this first surfaced and he elected to go the the rest and rehab and and platelet rich injection route instead of surgery and now he's

going to have the surgery anyway, because that that route ultimately didn't work. So I wonder, I mean, looking back, and of course, you're not looking at his medical records, there's there's a lot of stuff that we don't know. Is there is there any reason to question the decision that was made? And I guess it was Billingsley's decision to not have the surgery immediately because I mean with the benefit of hindsight you look at it and you think man if he'd had the surgery when this issue first popped up he would have been mostly you know most of the way back by now whereas now he's going to be out into next season. So what are your thoughts on the way that they went with it? Even with the timing, I think it's always best to try every possible

non-surgical option that there is. And actually his first time his elbow started following him last year was actually all the way back in July when he was on the DL for what was just termed inflammation for the flexor tendon, which basically overrides the ligament. It was only later on in the year, towards the end of August, when he was officially diagnosed with that partial ligament tear. And having to go through with the surgery would obviously put him out pretty much the

entirety of the 2013 season. And so it would be wise to try and do those PRP injections first to see if there's any chance of it healing. injections first to see if there's any chance of it healing. The small tears actually can heal on their own even without any PRP, at least about 20% to 25% of the time. So, you know, even without the PRP, there stood a chance that it could heal on its own because it was a partial tear.

Again, hindsight's 20-20, but given how much is invested in him and the elbow, it's probably best to always try the non-surgical route first. Is there a degree of tear of the ligament beyond which it doesn't make sense to try that therapy? I mean, is there an extent to which it can be torn that it just isn't going to come back without, it isn't going to heal on its own? Well, the hard thing is that every case is different. You know, some people can have, say, 20% of it torn, but it'll be problematic in giving them symptoms, while others can have, you know, over 50% of it torn, and it doesn't really give them any symptoms. Generally, you know, the higher you go up to, you know, around 40 to 50% is when most people start having symptoms. In fact, a lot of people say that even lower percentage, you'll start having symptoms. In fact, a lot of people say that even a lower percentage, you'll start

having symptoms a lot earlier. You know, they'll think it's a case of just normal soreness after a workout when, you know, it's probably the very, very first sign of it. Every time someone's going to go and, you know, have soreness after their workout or their bullpen session, you know, they're not going to automatically lead to a ligament injury. But generally, you know, once you get around probably 30%, 40%, 50%, you know, people have symptoms consistently. The main thing is that how much the elbow kind of is unstable. Nowadays, a lot of times what they'll do is under a specific type of ultrasound, they will apply pressure to the elbow, kind of mimicking how the elbow will open up during the throwing motion. and then they can see how much of a difference it is

or how much it kind of gaps open at that joint space. And that can tell you the degree of the instability. So was he pretty much pitching with this tear up to this point? I mean, he pitched in spring and he threw all winter and there was no real sign of anything wrong. Things seemed to be going well. And he made a couple starts, which were decent starts. And he was throwing 92 something miles per hour, pretty much as hard as he threw, say, a couple seasons ago. So do you think this is a case where he re-injured it, or was he just kind of pitching through it and with it, and is that possible to do if you can take the pain for a while? Yes, it's possible to do, but I think more likely he re-injured it, at least over the last several weeks or so.

With the PRP injections, sometimes it just doesn't work. Even though we're getting better science out there and some of the reports are encouraging, it just doesn't always work. And usually in those cases, if the symptoms resolve, it will usually be because the inflammation in the area has gone away from rest, from therapy. Also, the area of the ligament will fill in with a sort of scar tissue. So it behaves as a little more stable, even though it doesn't have the true ligament tissue that was originally there.

And so a feeling we likely had was that the scar tissue was allowing him to go through his normal workouts, going through even his starts earlier in the year, and then just it got stretched out too much, and it got to the point where it was ineffective again. Can you think of, I guess, any notable success? I mean, can you think of cases similar to Billingsley's, at least in terms of what we know publicly, where we're going the rest and rehab and maybe PRP route worked and the pitcher was fine after that. And maybe he

missed a little time, but he didn't have to miss a whole year. And he came back and stayed healthy for a long time. Because it's easy to, when something like this happens, it's easy to when something like this happens it's easy to just remember the cases like this where in retrospect it looks like you just sort of wasted time when you could have been recovering from the surgery but it's maybe harder to remember all the cases where where this route did work and and the surgery was avoided and and time was saved. Can you kind of remember any success stories of the Billingsley rehab route? Yeah, the first one that actually popped in my head when I heard about the PRP injections was that of Takashi Saito back in 2008.

You know, he had his ligament injury pretty much mid-year, right around the end of July, mid to late July. And he had a partial tear of the ligament as well. And given that at that time he was going on 38 or so, going under the knife for surgery was, you know, clearly going to knock him out potentially for the rest of his career, at least at the major league level here.

So he certainly wanted to try the non-surgical route, and he ended up coming back in mid-September, really about eight or nine weeks after first injuring it. So that was certainly one of the best stories that I can think of off the top of my head. And then the next couple of years, he was actually quite successful in 2009 and 2010 before finally kind of nearing the end of his career. And have you kind of,

you've done some studies and and research on on tommy john stuff what is your what is your feeling on on the success rate right now for for the surgery and then how pitchers hold up after the surgery when they come back successfully is there's kind of an expiration date on on their new ligament or are they pretty much, I don't know, as safe a bed as anyone else at that point? The success rate for returning is, for a first-time surgery, is quite high. They may not always reach the same productivity level, but usually for first-time surgical patients, the success rate is pretty well at returning to the major league level. It looks like lately there tends to be around a five- or six-year kind of window

to where before any problems really start to come back up. Some fail within the first two years when they first get back to pitching at the major league level, while others last 10 years or more. The average that we looked at, it seemed to be around the five- or six-year mark with several needing another surgery within the first two years of getting back to pitching at the major league level and then some towards the end of their careers, eight, nine, ten years later when they had other injuries at the same time such as tearing of the tendons that are in that

area as well as the ligaments and and is the typical return time about a year now or is that the best case return time it's it's pretty much it's close to around a year. A lot of it depends on really how he feels around the 8 to 9 month mark, when they really start ramping up the throwing and ramping up the progress. And that's when we can get a good general idea of how he would progress, whether he'd be back at around that 12 to 14 month mark or if it's going to be closer to the 18 month mark that was consistent in the late 90s and early 2000s.

Okay, I think that's all I got. Paul, you have anything? Ben, you've handled this with aplomb, and you've taken all the good questions. Okay, well, thanks, Corey. I find it hard to kind of resist the feeling once you start hearing about elbow inflammation and soreness and all those things, I just kind of get that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that this isn't going to go away and maybe just get the surgery over with. That's kind of my just gut feeling that this is going to linger, but I don't know anything. So I'm glad that you came on and talked to about this. And there's really, there's no reason to think that Billingsley's, the way he was handled or the way that he decided

to go was was not the right decision knowing what everyone knew about at the time I guess right agree I think you know how it was handled and and how he progressed through each stage uh was certainly appropriate and that's the way to handle it given the data and everything that they had at that time and you know obviously anything that they the way to handle it given the data and everything that they had at that time. And, you know, obviously anything that they can do to avoid surgery, which would certainly knock them out for, you know, a year, would be, you know, the best thing to do. So I think it was handled appropriately and all the right decisions were made. Okay, great. Thanks, Corey. Thank you very much. All right. We will let you go. So that was enlightening. I learned a lot.

Yeah, I completely agree. I'm with you. When I start hearing anything about the elbow, whether it's just kind of a one-off shot of news about soreness, I instantly start to worry. And as a fantasy guy, if I've got them on my team or it's somebody I want to target and Billingsley has been a favorite of mine for years, that makes me, you know, doubly nervous, obviously, because if I've already got them, obviously I've already made the investment. But if I kind of want to get them, then am I going to get a discount? It's, it's just too much of a mess. And, uh, you know, I think everyone kind of thinks the same path is going to be happening with Jason Mott sooner than later, too.

How long does a guy like that need to not break before you sort of feel confident in drafting him or starting him? Or are you just kind of until it happens or a long time goes by, are you just kind of waiting for the news? I took a shot on Billingsley in a couple leagues this year because he was pitching in spring. I saw some decent things. I wasn't in love with the two starts that I saw. But, you know, I also don't consider myself some elite level scout, you know, not even close. I didn't see anything that said, oh, you know, not even, not even close. Um, it, it, I didn't see anything that said, Oh my God, run. He continued to go out there and kind of do the innings that they

allotted for him. So I said, okay. Uh, but some of these guys that are getting stopped short of their innings or just, you know, kind of continuing to have this soreness all the time, I'll leave them alone altogether. Um, Matt was a guy I had in one league as a keeper. And then as much as I liked him, I had him number two back in, I would say, December when I first started making rankings. I had him two behind Kimbrough. Once the news started coming out, I backed off him completely. I only kept him in that one league. Scary stuff. Absolutely.

OK. Mariners. Talk about what happened there. there yeah let's talk about this situation because it's kind of interesting i mean right now they're a train wreck i think there's there's a lot of uh maybe more colorful words we could use it doesn't really matter whether we go pg g or x to describe it it's all bad right now what's going on in seattle and uh so they're kind of grasping at straws and i think this is is one of the weakest straws they've grasped at. I first saw it on my timeline from Jeff Baker announcing that Brendan Ryan has lost his starting job to Robert Andino.

And it doesn't make too much sense. Now listen, you don't have to be a stat guy or even a hardcore fan to understand that Brendan Ryan is not good with the bat. Conversely, those same groups, whether you're a power user as a fan who goes to every stat site and studies all of it, or just a casual fan, you know that Brendan Ryan is amazing with the glove. studies all of it or if just a casual fan you know that brendan ryan's amazing with the glove uh now robert andino is just as bad with the bat and not nearly as good with the glove so why in god's name would they do this i mean if he was even you know slightly below average with the bat i I could understand it. You're trading some of the defense just because the offense has been anemic for what your entire life. Um, I, I don't know how much of the Griffey A-Rod era that you had,

but that's about it. You know, since the, or then the one right after the team that won a whole ton of games, but you know, in the two thousands, uh, late two thousands, rather, they've just been so terrible. But what does Andino offer that Brendan Ryan doesn't? Can you think of anything? I mean he's a different human being. And I guess after you have watched Brendan Ryan hit for a while and your team is not hitting and Brendan Ryanan ryan is not hitting even by the standards of

brendan ryan brendan i mean it's comical yeah i mean well okay so brendan ryan has been bad if you're if you're if you're going by by wins of a replacement player he has been the worst player in baseball this year he is he has negative one warp, which is the worst of anyone. So, I mean, he has hit very poorly even by Brendan Ryan standards, which are very low to begin with. But, yeah, I mean, his preseason projection for true average was 231. And Dino's was 232. So they are basically the same guy offensively, except that Ryan is a few years older.

And I mean, I guess it's kind of incredible that Ryan was as good as he was at shortstop, I feel like, as a 30-year-old, I mean, if you see most defensive studies, it seems like defense just kind of goes straight down after a guy goes to the majors, that the aging curve is not kind. So it was kind of surprising that Brendan Ryan could be the best shortstop in baseball probably at his age. And I guess, I mean, if maybe they think that he has lost a step or two suddenly um to the point that that the bat I mean the glove cannot make up for the bat I guess I could kind of see it maybe but

it almost seems like they're just looking at at uh baseball card numbers at this point and and one one in particular homers you know and dino's got five and seven the last two years and uh brendan ryan has a pair of threes you know and he's never oh he hit four his first year and then zero three two three three and then zero so far this year i mean i mean, I get you want to try to shake things up. This is not the move to make. Figuring out a way to keep Casper Wells is the move to make before he ends up leaving their team earlier this year. It's strange because, I mean,

clearly the Mariners appreciate Brendan Ryan's defense. I mean, the fact that they started him basically all of last season, despite how poorly he hit then, I mean, he, you know, he added 194. I know it's batting average, but there aren't that many teams I think that would put up with that for a full season. Uh, so it tells the story. Yeah. This is a case where batting average tells the clear story. You can go deeper if you want, but this is one where you a case where batting average tells the clear story you can go deeper if you want but this is one where you just say the batting average and you're not missing anything right it's not like he has a ton of secondary offensive skills that are making up for that but

but the fact that he started all of last season despite that sort of suggests that that they know exactly how good Brendan Ryan is on defense or how good he was. So it's sort of strange that, I don't know, I mean that seemed like a pretty enlightened thing of them to do, to start him all season despite that batting average when the numbers were saying that he was worth it because of the gloves. So unless their evaluation of his defense has changed uh it's not that they don't appreciate that aspect of what he brings to the team so i i don't know i it's kind of hard to to figure i guess it's just sort of a rearranging the deck chairs move but not one that

well and that that leads to the next question though uh when do the chips start falling with management whether uh in the front office or or do they get some firings in before they're fired because uh i think that's completely apt they are simply tidying up the titanic here because i just don't see how this front office team can last. Yeah, it's kind of hard to see that happening right now. I mean, just looking at some of the names on the roster, it's not pretty. I don't know. I mean, there's still Raul Abanez starting most of the time and Jason A on the roster.

He has to play now because Gutierrez is out and Andy Chavez. I don't think Bates is starting, but if he's not, then Chavez will be and then Ibanez. Most folks didn't really like the Moore steal. Folks didn't really like the Moore steal, and I understand why. Jay So was one of their best hitters last year, maybe their best. And I guess – so that leads kind of to another thing. A lot of these guys were getting passes, the Dustin Ackleys, the Justin Smokes. Right. Those are the guys – I mean Montero, Smoke, Ackley are just not hitting at all they're failing though like not not just this year you're talking yes overall and there needs to be some accountability for that

at some point doesn't there i think so i mean i i sort of defended jack z kind of over the winter about those guys not panning out so far because it just, I mean, certainly the moves for them seemed defensible at the time. No one really was criticizing them when they happened. Especially Smoke. I mean, he was Teixeira Jr. And you can find lots of folks that said that. I think, I mean, if there was a consensus on the Montero trade,

I would think most people figured the side that got the position player probably got the best of that. Agreed. And people agreed that Dustin Ackley was worth a high pick when they used it on him. Oh, God. I've been his biggest fanboy, so I still hold some hope for him, even though it's just not working. So conceivably those were all smart moves at the time they were made that just haven't panned out. But I don't know. I guess what standard do you hold a team to? guess what what standard do you hold a team to i mean you would you would want the the gm of the team that's acquiring these guys to to know their future or have a better sense of their future than than the internet does sure um and yet it probably would have been pretty hard to find people even inside the game who were big critics of those moves at the time. So I don't know whether it's just, I mean,

think about how different this team would look if all three of those players had panned out and were playing like you would expect prospects of their caliber to be playing at this point. I mean, it would be a completely different situation if all three of those guys were young stars instead of pretty much busts so far could you imagine that division at this point then yeah that wouldn't

even that wouldn't even be fair you know and then kyle seager has shown some great things on the road he seems to actually be a casualty of the park uh speaking of you know that a lot was made and i think personally i think way too much was made of the fences moving in at both parks that did it both safeco and petco uh because the moves were pretty small they were a bunch of i think between 8 and 13 feet moves when you're when you're looking at both stadiums and all these different spots where they made the little moves uh how quickly can you start to make any sort of assessment off of that? Obviously, probably not right now on April 24th. Can we look at the Safeco data and say,

well, that didn't do anything? Or look at the Petco data and say that it did because Petco's got the sixth highest OPS, and Safeco has the seventh lowest. What threshold for you are you comfortable at saying that any of that matters? Do you need a full year, two years? I mean, at least a full year. I don't know. I remember when the new Yankee Stadium opened, and it seemed for a time to be just total band box

and just home run crazy, and everything was being hit out. And since then, I don't know, it's basically been more or less like the old Yankee Stadium. I think it's not any kind of crazy exaggerated environment. It's just sort of a standard hitter's park. So I don't know. I feel like you have to wait a while, I guess. I mean, there was a post by Jeff Sullivan, right, where he looked at

one particular home run that was hit. I think it was at, I don't remember which of the parks it was at, but he looked at the hit tracker data and basically found that one of the home runs that was hit this season early on was just sort of unlike any home run that had ever been hit at that park it was just it was hit at a different angle or something it just it clearly wouldn't have been out uh before so you can kind of i guess look at isolated batted balls and say that this would have been different um and i guess you can extrapolate from that to some extent but i don't know i wouldn't be very very comfortable in it until at least a full season and maybe more yeah i think we need at least a season i'm with you there one other question uh spinning off kind of back to

something that we were talking about earlier with the failure of the prospects um do you equate this or do you see any similarities between this front office and kansas city's then as uh you know hasmer is off to another slow start mustakis seems to be kind of a swing from the heels and that's really it even though he's not even off the power snide yet he doesn't have a homer you know gordon eventually came around but um you know those two primarily hasmer and mustakis are kind of like their uh smoke and ackley you know a couple of high guys that i feel like they should be better but at the same time i look at them and they're 23 and 24 and I say, well, maybe we can't freak out yet.

Do you see any parallels between the two front offices? I don't know that there are parallels from, I don't know, like a process approach, I guess results-wise sort of. But Smoke is 26, so I mean hasmer's considerably younger and i guess he's been sure he's already had a better season than smoke has ever had um so there's that i i'm still i'm still sort of optimistic about the royals guys and less so about the mariners guys because of because of their age and because of yeah they're both college guys too and so you would have expected them to actually be uh progressed a bit further when they came in I don't I don't know I just I you I'm not trying to I'm not bringing it up to to crack on them but everyone kind of remembers when you know Fangraphs did the organizational rankings and they

had Seattle as the sixth organization and uh you, whether you think it was high or not, there was a case to have them pretty high. Again, we looked at everything that they had and you're like, wow, that's that's you know, that's a bright future there. And I guess to take it one step further and even veer out further to another team, doesn't the fact that both these two teams I've mentioned, Seattle and KC, and if I'm going too far, let me know, but the fact that they've had all this potential and it hasn't panned out, isn't that just one little more checkmark in favor of not doing what the Nationals did with Strasburg last year and going for it while you have the chance?

I guess so. I mean, yeah. I don't know that the You have a chance to really take it further and you kind of put one hand behind your back with that. That's all. I'm not comparing the organizations. I don't want emails saying, did Paul say that Ned Yost and Davy Johnson are the same? I'm not making too strong a comparison,

just asking about the potential question. Yeah, I mean i i guess it's it's certainly worth remembering uh that a team or an organization that looks really well set up short or certainly long term at any particular time is is far from a guarantee and that yeah i guess if you if you get to the point where you are making a run. And I mean, cause the, that was kind of the narrative with the nationals that, that they were just set up to compete for so many years that even if, even if the Strasburg thing cost them the world series in 2012, they would be back sort of almost inevitably because they were just so strong and built so well and so young and

and yeah i mean i guess i guess it is it is worth pointing out that that a lot of teams that look like that do not end up like that okay last question here because i think i'm gonna make this the longest uh effectively wild possible sam will come up on me about 10 minutes ago i know he gets to a point where he is like ben i don't want to speak with you anymore as effectively wild possible. Yes, Sam Wolf hung up on me about 10 minutes ago. I know, he gets to a point where he is like, Ben, I don't want to speak with you anymore. We are friends, but God, I hate you right now. The point is about 10 minutes in, yes.

So would the better move have been here to just call up Nick Franklin and stick his feet in the fire after 75 AAA games? I don't know. Let's see. He's been hitting very well. He was modest at AAA last year. Actually, modest might be overstating it. He wasn't very good with a 725, which in the PCL is pretty bad. But this year he's raking.

Obviously, only 50 plate appearances. I don't know. I think what you're going for is some offensive boost and you might think that Andino has that for some reason. Um, I don't know. I don't just go ahead and put all your cards on the table, bring up Franklin, bring up Holton for Saunders, you know, just is, is Brad Miller kind of the guy who's maybe next in line or I've, I've heard that. Yes. Uh, but then from some of the, some of the, uh, bigger Franklin fan boys, obviously they think Who's maybe next in line? I've heard that, yes. But then from some of the bigger Franklin fanboys, obviously they think he's going to go.

So I just – I don't know. I would have rather done something like that. Yeah. I don't know. Unless they're – I guess at this point there aren't so much service time concerns. Because they're not going to be – I mean if we are right and that they are rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic here and if they're kind of feeling that pressure, then in some instance, what do you guys care about the service time issues yeah well that's yeah that's that's true i mean i would think that unless something changes unless unless those those guys who haven't hit so far that we've talked about start hitting for the rest of the season unless the mariners start winning more i would i would think that probably there will be changes in the front office uh whether or not those decisions were bad at the time someone is going

to take the fall eventually so who's the batting coach because uh he's probably putting his house on the market yeah i think i think i uh i think i said something the the batting coach is dave hansen and i feel like when he was hired i I might have said something about how that was like the best hitting coach job you could get. Because just from like the dead cat bounce, the Mariners would be better and he would be kind of credited as a hitting savant who turned the Mariners around. And so, yeah, not so much so far. Now it's going to be the opposite. You couldn't improve this team for crying out loud? You're gone.

Right. So, yeah, I don't know. Perplexing decision by the Mariners, I suppose. Sorry, Ems fans. At least you got a great park and maybe a bright future with the pitching. At least Hasashi Iwakuma is doing very well, and I'm a bright future with the pitching at least hasashi iwakuma uh is doing very well and i'm a huge fan of his no that's maybe he can start hitting maybe he can start batting for them i don't know i'm just trying to come up with some ideas i'm thinking outside the

box ben yeah uh i wonder how maybe they should have had casper wells play shortstop or something i don't know i mean what what what was the move that facilitated him leaving? I can't remember. Was it Bay? Oh, God, I think so. I think it was Bay. Not helping your case, front office. Yeah, because he was just waived.

Okay, we don't need to get into Casper Wells, but it's not a good situation. I don't think this is a good move on any level. It doesn't make any sense to me. Any incremental gain that you might even get in the short term from batting I think is going to be lost with defense because even though you're definitely right about the defensive curve, I think this is a generational guy who kind of bucks the curve. Yeah, that's possible. And Andino's – I mean he's more of a second baseman. Correct. I mean, how many games has he even played at shortstop on baseball reference typing?

He has played, he's played. Buck 41. uh uh uh he's played buck 41 yeah he's he's played well i guess he's played about a thousand innings at shortstop and and about 1800 at second base um but but but as you can see that came in nine seasons short yeah and then the 1800 came in six seasons right oh jose valverde is getting a standing ovation that's how bad my favorite team's bullpen situation was ladies and gentlemen yeah the last time that that andino played shortstop more than more than second base was 2009 it looks like um well at least it's not an important position right okay that's enough I suppose

so thank you thank you for filling in for Sam anytime bringing it as always happy to be on alright and there's one more show this week send your emails to podcast at baseball prospectus dot com if you want me

and Sam to answer them next week we will be back tomorrow