Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1951: The Pod Heard ’Round the World

Episode Date: January 6, 2023

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley discuss the Red Sox signing Rafael Devers to a lengthy extension, the state of the Sox, the next two free-agent classes, and Carlos Baerga the newsbreaker, then banter about bad news for Charles Leblanc, a Congressional baseball analogy, the Sears/Willis Tower, a painful slide by a broadcaster, the Dodgers’ offseason, […]

Hello and welcome to episode 1951 of Effectively Wild, a FanGraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Riley of FanGraphs and I'm joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? Pretty well, how are you? Pretty well. Good. Well, although Carlos Correa's status is still unresolved we're twisting in the wind very much so i expect we'll have an update on that one of these days one of these weeks but for now nothing new to report or nothing new that has been reported so we're otherwise well into the wade miley zach davies eric cosmer evan Longoria portion of the offseason. So I think it's

safe to say that we're entering the pre-spring training doldrums, the low ebb of the baseball offseason news-wise, which is fine. We've had it good thus far. But there is one exception in that we got another $300 million man. I thought we might have been done with those for this winter. But no, Rafael Devers, welcome to the club. Yeah. You know, his name is Rafael Devers, and he is a $300 man. And I think importantly- $300 million man.

$300 million man. Yeah, that's what I meant. You knew. Not that cheap. No. Yeah. I did know. Sorry, I did not want to impugn the incredibly strange Red Sox.

Yeah. I am so confused by this baseball team, Ben, you know? And I guess, like, let's say this up front, because we have been critical in the past. I think we are going to be, or at least I'm going to be, perplexed in this conversation. But, you know, one thing that we have done has been like, hey, Red Sox, why are you not with your guys and the money, you know?

And we've said it more articulately than that in the past and with a great many more words. But the general thrust has been, hey, Red Sox, what you doing, you know? And so I want to give credit where it's due, you know, to say that they did not let divers leave that they met him with a contract that he and his representation clearly felt was commensurate with his talent such that he wanted to sit out a free agent market where he would have been one of the top guys you know oh? Oh, yeah. Much thinner next year.

You know, we're going to be like really amped for Otani. And then, you know, particularly if some of the guys who have opt-outs don't opt out, might be kind of a Wade Miley-esque year, you know? Yeah, very much so. Just to pick a guy who we just talked about. So I imagine he could have done, in addition to being a very good hitter, quite well for himself just on a relative basis. But, you know, was extended an offer that he felt was, you know, appropriate and took it. And so I want to give the Red Sox credit for that,

because I don't want to be ungenerous I have been on generous before. But I also, I'm still going to ask with a slightly different tone now, Red Sox, what you doing? Yeah. I don't, Ben. It's curious. I don't understand this baseball team. You know, I don't understand some of the choices that they have made. Because typically we can kind of slot teams into a couple of different archetypes right and there's variation within each roster and all the comps aren't

necessarily perfect and you know there there are teams that are trying to simultaneously come and go but generally like you have teams that from a broad architecture perspective are like trying or not trying right and then within the architecture of trying or not trying right and then within the architecture of trying or not trying you know the way that they try or not try can take a couple of different forms you know they can be like shedding payroll they can be tanking they can be trying to win but on the cheap they can be you know they're a couple different i don't understand i don't understand this team a little bit because i don't I still don't think that this team is very good. Yeah.

I think that they might be last in the AL East. I'm not trying to be sassy, but I are spending, but they're spending in weird ways. They're spending on Kenley Jansen. They're giving $16 million to Kenley Jansen, and they're going out and they're getting Corey Kluber. They're bringing in a post-peak Justin Turner. And they're giving Masatake Yoshida like a lot of money in a way that we were like, he seems intriguing, but that seems like an overmarket deal for what he was expected to sign for. So I mostly feel like their offseason has some sequencing errors, you know?

Like they didn't, I don't know if they didn't have confidence that they were going to be able to get Devers done. I don't know if the urgency with which they tried to get Devers done right now changed because of the way that the free agent market shook out, because of the criticism they were taking as a team. I can't, you know, I'm always skeptical that that kind of thing really matters to teams, right? That like people are mad online. I think that they tend to not care that we're mad online, really. Although they've been mad offline as well, because earlier this week, John Henry was at Fenway. He got yelled at. Yeah, he got heckled.

There was a winter classic NHL matchup at Fenway where Henry's Pittsburgh Penguins were playing the Boston Bruins, which I guess already might have made some people mad at him because, hey, what are you doing owning the Red Sox and then also owning this hockey team that's playing against our Bruins? But beyond that, they were booing, they were heckling, they were holding up signs about Devers and having signs confiscated about Devers. So I'm not saying that that had any connection to this necessarily. Like when the billionaire gets booed in real life, like Elon Musk recently did at an event. And it's like, oh, wait, maybe everyone doesn't love me or maybe it's not just people on Twitter who don't love me. So I don't know if it's that, because if you're owning a team, one of the privileges you would think of that is that you get to walk around town with your head held high and, hey, I'm a big shot, right? I'm the big man on campus here. Chest puffed out. Yeah. I'm the owner of the Red Sox and they broke the curse when I was owning them. And then they won a few more World Series and you should all love me and be grateful to me. But wait, hold on. Maybe not. It sounds like people don't like me anymore. And maybe it's because I don't spend to keep these franchised cornerstones around. So not saying there's a connection or a correlation there necessarily between John Henry getting booed

for not handing out a big contract and then a few days later handing out a big contract. But it's amusing. It's coincidental. If nothing else, I'm happy it happened that way. But yeah, you're right. It's mixed signals. It's sort of a strange roster. Our pal Patrick Dubuque at Baseball Prospectus has dubbed this kind of difficult to classify team a spackling team because it's not clear what window they're in or if they have a window, they have some holes, but they're trying to spackle over the holes, sort of, but the holes are still there and maybe not all that well camouflaged. So he kind of grouped the Red Sox, the Giants, the Cubs, the Rangers in this class. Some other teams are, you know, they have holes. Almost

everyone has some sort of hole, but he put this in a different category where it's like, what are they doing? Where are they going exactly? They're trying to some degree, but also there are issues here. And yeah, looking at the Fangraph's depth charts, war projections, they have the 11th least war projected for 2023 which puts them right between the marlins and the orioles they are neck and neck with the orioles in projected war so that's what you're saying that they're not clearly not the worst team in that division right and you know i think that you could make the argument particularly in baltimore's case that like the red sox system isn't like terrible but in terms of like guys who might come up and be impact talent like i think

baltimore has them like yeah they're uh at least for the 2023 season so you know there's there's that piece of it and yeah like i wish that we could get like a candid assessment on the part of the front office of like, what do they think their real ceiling is here? Because it's like, you know, you have, I don't know, man, like Chris Sale is their number one starter. And like, yeah, Corey Kluber in there. And like, you're expecting a lot from James Paxton, which is like, feels like a real choice. And then, you know, what are we going to really see out of Trevor's story this year? And, you know, you're starting to catch Rory McQuire, like, that's fine, but it's not great. It's like, you look at this team, you're like, okay, let's imagine that, you know, you have a full sense of the, you know, the full

distribution of outcomes that could be present for each of these individual players, not even the team, right? Each of these individual players. Okay, cool. Even if they all hit their like 90th percentile outcome, is this team obviously better than like the Rays? Is it obviously better than like the Rays? Is it nearly as good as the Blue Jays or the Yankees? I just don't think, I still don't know that it's necessarily obviously better than the Orioles. You know?

All of that is true. And yet. And yet. And so it's like, okay, so you have that piece of it. And then you think, okay, well, some of these guys might end up being useful, like, complimentary pieces, complimentary veteran pieces to an actual contender.

So it's like the idea here that they will see where they are come the deadline, and then they will ship some of these guys and see what they can get and contend in 2024 i still think they have problems you know so i just i'm really i'm i'm really very confused and you know this is i'm about to say something that's unfair are you ready i'm acknowledging up front that it's unfair okay and i don't mean to knock devers although i'm about to knock Devers. I think Devers is a fantastic hitter. He's coming off a great season at the plate. I think that he will, and he is a young 26, right? So it's not like he's going to move off third tomorrow, hopefully. But I do think that you can say without caring about the idea of an overpay, like here is a guy

who seems at some point in the course of this contract ticketed to first base. Now he will probably still be a very productive bat when that happens, right? He can meet the challenge of the offensive bar at first base, but like a first baseman, less valuable than a third baseman, even when they're hitting like we can expect divers to. And so you go back in time and you think to yourself, if they had a $300 million deal to give out, right? If they looked at their young core and they said to themselves, you know, we really want to put our money eventually where our mouth is. We have $300 million plus to spend. You don't just try to retain Mookie bets.

Right. Yeah. And that's unfair. I'm admitting it's unfair because part of what you have to deal with in any given year is like, what does the broader market have to bear? And as Bauman pointed out when he wrote this up for us, this isn't what it used to be in terms of the free agent markets we've seen in the recent past, like this within the context of this year and certainly within what we might anticipate to be the growth of payrolls over the next over the course of this CBA and then into the next one.

Like, we're going to look back toward the end of this and be like, oh, $300 million money, you know, like whatever. But and that wasn't the context necessarily for that deal when they were potentially trying to retain bets but i just i don't know man it's a weird it's a weird little it's a weird little club those red socks except they're not a little club they're literally the boston red socks right yeah well at least they acted like the red socks with this specific move which is what they had been failing to do so this was as much a narrative changer as anything, really, because it doesn't make them better for this season because they had Devers under contract for the season anyway.

It doesn't change the calculus. Well, I guess the way that it could change the calculus is next offseason. Yeah. If this is taken not as a, and we have spent our money, but more as a we are willing to spend money. And then maybe the conversation is different in 2020 at the end of 2023. True. Yeah. But they have at least changed the story of the Red Sox from let's boo John Henry. I'm not saying you can't still boo him if you want to, but boo him because he let Betts leave and they traded him and then they didn't get that much back. And then also Bogarts left and they seemed to undershoot him with their contract offers.

So they had to do this in a way because Devers is almost like the last man standing from the 2018 team. I mean, there are just a few members of that team left, and he's really the prominent one. He's like the sole, I think as Bauman put it, tentpole, but just like the franchise player, the cornerstone, he's the only one who's still standing. And you have to wonder whether he would want to still stand there after everyone else left, and clearly he did, and he likes it there, and he got a good deal and good for him. left and clearly he did and he likes it there and he got a good deal and good for him but they at least changed it from we're the red sox and we can't keep our great players to well finally we kept one and yeah we can second guess and wonder why they didn't keep the other ones was it that

they cheaped out did they actually like devvers better as a long-term bet or that could be true could be true. Being tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail, basically. It's almost like the Yankees really needed to keep Judge for sort of similar reasons. Like the Yankees are better, obviously, and they are more likely to make the playoffs and be real contenders in 2023. And so they needed Aaron Judge for that reason. you know, like they had not made other moves and not brought in other superstars. And it was like, well, we're going to spend on Judge. And if they had not spent on Judge, then people would have been very upset. And also they would have had a huge hole on their roster that would have been difficult to fill. And all those things, even though Devers is not the player that Judge is currently and wasn't in 2022, a lot of those things still apply. So they just, they had to, they had to do it. I mean, I'm not saying that they shouldn't have done it, but also they had to do it. They had to do it.

And they did. And you could have said that they had to keep Mookie Betts or they had to keep Xander Berger. So they didn't do those things. So they did do this thing. So that in itself is an improvement. And there's still a whole lot of question marks surrounding this roster and this team. And why didn't they do this? And why now?

of question marks surrounding this roster and this team and why didn't they do this and why now but better to do this now than to continue not to do the things that a team like the red socks should be doing so it's it's progress in that respect but you're right it is just kind of a confusing team and a confusing few years for that team john henry was played by the same actor in moneyball as the guy who was john Hammond's son in The Lost World Jurassic Park and he got chomped on. So maybe John Hammond's like, oh boy, I don't want to get eaten by a dinosaur. Gotta be. Could be too. You know, have to be the non-chomped on version of Arliss Howard. You know, don't want to get chomped. That was just as much a cautionary tale

warning as the Red Sox fans booing him, just a shot across the bow there. But we haven't even mentioned the terms. It's an 11-year extension, $331 million, although some sources have reported it as a 10-year extension because they had the day before agreed on a 2023 contract avoiding Devers' final year of arbitration. So that was going to be a one-year $17.5 million deal. And I guess that just kind of got incorporated into this.

So you tear up the one-year deal and add 10 years onto it. And now it's an 11-year deal for $331 million. So it's a big contract. It's a big contract. It's like the sixth largest ever, I think, in unadjusted dollars. And there are no opt-outs and there's no trade clause. Yes. We should say pending physical.

Yeah, geez. That one, Correa ruined it for everyone because usually we forget about the pending physical because it's just a formality. Everything technically is always pending physical. But now there's a little voice in the back of my head. Do I have to say pending physical every time? I think probably still not, because almost always it goes through and maybe it's just assumed that it's pending physical. And Crayo was just such an outlier, a deal of that magnitude, having not gone through not once, but twice so far. So we can probably get away without saying pending physical every time.

But pending physical. So the thing about Devers is that he's obviously a really good player. And I think in some ways he's underrated because it's like the Bill James thing about how generalists get underrated compared to specialists and people who are good at one particular category and they

really excel and are extremely good at that and lead the league, they get more attention or a disproportionate amount of attention. We like loud tools. Yeah, right. And Devers, he's good at a lot of things, especially offensively. He's basically good at almost everything. And, you know, he gets on base and he makes pretty good contact, especially for a guy who hits for good power. And he's pretty selective and he's consistent and he's fairly durable. And, you know, like he does a lot of things well, everything except, I guess, run. Like he doesn't steal a lot of bases. He's not a great asset on the base pass or anything. But in the batter's box, like he's just selective and he's kind of the same year in, year out, but coming off his best offensive season probably. And because he doesn't lead the league in anything, except for that one year when he hit a ton of doubles, which of course Fenway helps with that, but he hit 54 doubles in 2019, which led the AL, and he also led the AL in total bases that year. But other than that, no black ink, no bold ink on his baseball reference page, and he hasn't even had a top 10 MVP finish. Maybe he should have at some point, but he hasn't. He's not really perceived to be a superstar, I guess, or we've probably talked less about him through his age 37 season, whereas all the other guys we've seen signing 10-year deals or longer, they're going up through their age 39 or age 40 season. So even at the end of this deal, he's still projected to be a better-than-average hitter. But as you said, he's probably going to have to move to first at some point and even as a third baseman he has not graded out well his defensive metrics have not

been good and so that sort of saps his his value his ceiling where he's maybe like a four to five win type player than a six to seven to eight type player. I guess he has had a year maybe where fan graphs were would have given him something in that range. But as it is, it seems like he's settled in as like just an all-star level player, which he is. He's been an all-star for each of the past two seasons and he still has some prime or close to prime seasons ahead of him.

So of course you would want him. And a deal like this magnitude, I think, as Bauman pointed out, you could argue that the players who have gotten deals this big before Devers were better than Devers, were maybe more elite than Devers. But you have to factor in this market and the kind of contracts that have been handed out and his youth and it doesn't look wildly out of line or anything. So it's not like the Red Sox got some sort of steal here. It doesn't seem like, nor would you expect them to because he was entering his final year of arbitration. He was about to be a free agent. And as you said, he was positioned to really cash in in the free agent market next

winter. So they weren't going to get a great discount here, a hometown sweetheart deal, but they got to keep their guy and it's someone to build around. And they do have a lot of building around to do, but at least a lot less than they would have if Devers had left as well. Right. Yeah. I think that in addition to alleviating the problem of having to find similar quality production from someone who isn't already in their organization, it gives them something to build around and stability saying like, the diverse piece is done. We have this guy. He's going to be here for the next decade. We know what he's going to make that entire time. We can kind of game out payroll around that. And assuming that they are willing to

spend at some point and maybe spend in a way that sort of tracks more obviously toward trying to win, having payroll certainty, even if it comes with a big contract, I think is an underrated value. Like part of what a big, a big part, the biggest part, I want to make clear, the biggest part of what makes the Braves young cost control core valuable to Atlanta is the cost control element to it, right? Like that, that's really valuable. And having that amount of certainty in your roster is also super valuable to a team because I think it allows you to game out off seasons and trade deadlines with a good deal more confidence and certainty than you would otherwise this is obviously that on a both much smaller and much larger scale right in terms of how much money is concentrated in one guy and how few guys sort

of meet that criteria when you look at boston's roster but i think that that that's a valuable piece and you're right that to some extent this allows them to say when people are like well you guys aren't doing this they're like well we have paid we have done the thing you have asked we have paid don't eat us like a dinosaur you know it's like the little baby t-rex that eats that guy you know don't eat the rich not this particular rich person right yeah yeah i feel like i really stumbled into a nice little analogy here and also underrated flick you know like our best julianne moore is in that one you know of all the of all the jurassic parks in hindsight that one reads really well

i'm gonna tell you about some of the recent ones. They've been stinkers. Yeah. I can't confirm, not because I disagree, but because I just have not seen it. I've really lost touch with the Jurassic franchise over the last several years, which I don't know how much I've missed. You know, not a lot. Yeah. So did you get faked out the day before like I did, like a lot of people did when they reported the terms of the the arbitration avoiding arbitration did that on purpose like i don't know i haven't talked to him about it but

jeff we're on to you we know we know what's what you were trying to get a little rise out of twitter as if that's hard to do yeah a lot of people were posting the you know like red socks and rafael debbers are in agreement on you think, oh, my gosh, here it is, the extension. And then it's like a one year, 17.5 million. Oh, OK. Yeah. I was trying to think of like how you should have phrased that just to let everyone know this is not the deal that you're hoping. And this is not the deal.

It is a deal. This is just another deal. Like it should come with some sort of warning or like content warning. Like this is not that exciting i mean it's just like don't get too excited folks but you know that should have been the preface but anyway if you did get prematurely excited you only had a day or so to be disappointed because then you did get the extension that you were hoping for right you know you were not left twisting in the wind unlike unlike Carlos Correa, who twists in Ben. Yeah. Speaking of Carlos is making news, we buried the lead here because who had it first?

Carlos Baerga had the Rafael Devers extension first. Just like we all expected. Just so amusing to have to watch Ken Rosenthal and all the acknowledged news-breaking authorities credit Carlos Baerga for being first. Of course, Baerga is just a chaos agent of the offseason. He comes off the top rope sometimes and is completely wrong and other times really does know what he's talking about. It amuses me to no end to see Carlos Baerga breaking news because it's just like it's a remember some guys guy basically who's also making major news or breaking major news here. It's like there aren't that many players like that who are former players and also newsbreakers.

I mean, I guess connected to the Red Sox, there's Lou Merloni, who was a contemporary of Carlos Baerga's a 90s, 2000s infielder. But he's been a member of the media. He had a radio show and everything. Whereas Carlos Baerga, as far as I can tell, he's outside the mainstream news. He's just out there on his Instagram account breaking news every now and then. And if MLB trade rumors crashed for some reason, you could follow the offseason's happenings through Carlos Baerga's Instagram account. Because he basically puts a post out about almost every move that happens, like every signing, every trade. He's not breaking all of these, but he will just, just in case you're monitoring baseball news via Carlos Bayerga's Instagram, he will clue you in to even like Wade Miley signing, right? And he's like, he's been a manager in Puerto Rico since his career. He's been a coach in the World Baseball Classic.

He's in and around the game, but it doesn't seem like he's been a member of the media exactly. And yet he just he tosses bombs into the public square here because he reported the Justin Verlander deal and he got those terms pretty accurate. And he was first on that. And he also reported Marcus Simeon to the Blue Jays in 2021. But then he's also been extremely wrong sometimes. He said that Freddie Freeman would sign with the Blue Jays and that didn't happen. And then he also suggested that the Giants were going to sign Aaron Judge and Carlos Correa. I think he phrased it. A San Francisco source who is at the meetings in San Diego, letting us know that with the signing of Aaron Judge between today and tomorrow, the team could be signing El Nuestro, the SS Carlos Correa too. So he was reporting that they might get both of those. So obviously the team did have interest in both of them, but that coming on the heels of him correctly calling the Verlander deal, it was like, whoa, wait, do we need to take Klaus Beyerga seriously here?

Are the giants getting Correa and judged? And then, of course, they didn't get either of those. Yeah, it turned out not. He's not the only person to be fooled by that. And he did spell Aaron correctly, unlike some others. No arsons here. Yeah. So he's been kind of a credible source sometimes and then completely off at other times.

And I just I enjoy if you look at his Instagram, like he has a format. There's like a template. He has like a motto, like he has a catchphrase. It's like the top of all of his Instagram posts are like, me gustan los deportes. Like, we like sports, like junto a Bayeran los deportes. Like, we like sports. Like, junto a Bayerga y sus amigos. Like, we like sports. Like, Bayerga and his friends, like, together.

Like, it's just like a, it's a branding thing. And at the bottom, it's like sponsored, too. He has like a whole row of sponsors at the bottom of his Instagram posts. Incredible. So some of them are like local restaurants or some of them, there's like Pudge's Coffee, like Yvonne Rodriguez has a coffee brand, I learned from his sponsorship of Cars by Area. That's great. But then there's also like Goya is sponsoring him and like a Ford dealership. There's like 10 different sponsors at the bottom of all of his- Goya like the food company?

Yeah. Huh. I have so many questions. I need to know more. Is he making a lot of money out of this? Does he have ambitions to be a big newsbreaker, a media figure? Yeah. How does including Wade Miley signs for one year and $45 million with the Brewers like right next to, you know, Eric Cosmer. He has it branded as like some of them are signing, some of them are trades and some of them are rumors. Rumores.

So that was Raphael Devers as he was reporting a rumor and it was basically spot on. So I just really appreciate just the aesthetics of his Instagram feed and how diligent he is and how accurate he has been sometimes and how way off he has been at other times. It's just great. And I have enjoyed this, I think, more than anything, any kind of chaos in baseball news breaking since teenagers who no one had ever heard of were suddenly breaking every transaction. This is, I think, either better or the next best thing, just having some player you remember from 20 years ago resurface as an occasionally accurate newsbreaker. Yeah, it's a funny thing. And you wonder, is there a particular... I always wonder about the longevity of the constellation of people who are presumably helping him to get some of these right right like sometimes you'll have we'll have total randos and you know he's not a total rando but like we'll have total randos break news and it's because they happen to know a person who works in

an org and they get a they get a good tip and then they're done katie perry's booty hole wet 23 right that booty hole had like one good run in it. I don't know. I have regrets. But you know what I mean? Like they have a person. They have a guy. And then, you know, that person changes orgs or they just don't get any more good dope.

Or like sometimes it becomes really obvious who their source is. And so then they don't get information after that because the org is like, hey, stop talking to that guy. So, you know, sometimes they're like, they shine brightly. And then they don't get information after that because the org is like hey stop talking to that guy so you know sometimes they're like they shine brightly and then they yeah and then they don't anymore like which is it in astronomy like which are the ones that they they burn really bright the stars and then they're done sure right you know like those so it's like that and then sometimes you know we start to see a network of sources cultivated. And those folks go from being like high volume shooters, basically. And they're like, some of these are going to be right and some of them are going to be wrong. And then they really lock in and they become a reliable source of intel, a weirdly good source of intel.

So I wonder what we will get. Yeah. You know? He must have a team of graphic designers. Right. Graphic design is their passion. I was going to say maybe graphic design is his passion. Could be.

He might be doing it himself. We don't know. Yeah. It's Bayerica sus amigos. It's Bayerica and his friends. I mean, what a motto. What a phrase. I like sports.

Quote. Yeah. Me gustan los deportes. That's my motto, my slogan. I like sports. Yeah. It's pretty good deportes. That's my motto, my slogan. I like sports. It's pretty good. Yeah. We know where he stands, I guess.

All right. Well, as you said, the upcoming free agent class is very weak, particularly on the position player side. So Devers was due to be a free agent next winter. It's just going to be the Otani show next winter. I mean, that was going to be true anyway. Of course. Yeah. But it's really going to be the Otani show next winter. I mean, that was going to be true anyway, but it's really going to be true. Yeah. And he's a position player technically, I guess. He's really an ace level pitcher and a DH.

Right. But he's really like the only elite guy kind of on the offensive side because extensions and other signings and just the variability of free agent classes it's going to be a lot thinner for the next two off seasons really there are plenty of starting pitchers who are going to be available but other than otani like machado can opt out of his contract next winter yeah and assuming he's healthy and good this season, he should opt out. He should do that. He will get a lot of money if he does that. Right. But he'll be past 30. He is past 30 now. So that will somewhat limit his long-term earnings. So what we've seen this offseason

with everyone signing 10, 11, 12, 13-year deals. I don't know that that will continue beyond Otani next winter because even though we talked about how all of these conditions were conducive for that, I think it also did depend on having this crop of really elite and young-ish free agents and also Aaron Judge coming off one of the best seasons of all time. So that will ebb and flow from winter to winter. And I don't think we will see quite that happening next winter, regardless of what the economy is doing or interest rates are doing at that time. But really, it's Otani, and then it's maybe Machado, and then I don't know who the next best free, like Matt Chapman, maybe, is the next best available

free. There's a big decline. And then the offseason after that, again, it looks like there are plenty of starting pitchers available and all of this. These guys could sign extensions before then, who knows. But Juan Soto, if he doesn't sign an maybe, but then it's other guys who are kind of getting on in years. Maybe Alex Bregman, if he doesn't sign an extension. So there are some guys, but it's not like this winter. No, it's not like this winter. Maybe the winter after that, you're going to get Guerrero and Bichette and Tucker. I mean, this is all so far in the future that who knows that any of these guys will be available. Half of those guys are going to get locked up by long-term extensions, I would hazard.

Yeah. And of course, there could be players who have a huge 2023 or 2024, and that massive walkier platform year makes them more appealing as a free agent than we would think of them being now. But if you were one of the teams that tried and failed to sign one of the marquee hitters this winter, or you were one of the teams, you know, you were the Mariners or the Orioles or the Marlins or insert some other team that wasn't really even in the running, that might make that more disappointing from a fan's perspective because you can't necessarily count on another player of that caliber coming along next year or the year after.

player of that caliber coming along next year or the year after only one team can get otani next winter yeah it it doesn't even like as assuming he's healthy and and good again in 2023 if he has another mvp caliber campaign he's he's gonna break every record because he will be what entering his his age 29 season this was uh this was his age 27 season although he's he's one of those guys unlike Devers who's like old for his baseball age because uh he's born July 5th right and baseball age is your age as of June 30th and so he turns the next age like shortly shortly after his Machado's kind of like that too right where yeah machado's like that he's an early july birthday right yeah and so otani will be entering you know he just finished his age 27 season but he turned 28 in early july like halfway through the season basically so he will be entering technically his age 29 season but you know

closer to age 30 sort of but because he's Otani, he will smash every record. Some people speculated that the Dodgers, who, as we speak on Thursday afternoon, still have Trevor Bauer under contract and on their roster. He has still not been released, which is just- What percentage of you is nervous now? The fact that it's taken this long, even if they do ultimately release him before the Friday deadline, it's a less resounding statement than it would have been, I think. Even if they ultimately do release him, if they had to take up until the last second to decide to cut ties, it's sending a little bit less of a clear message than it would have if like the day the decision came down, they're like, okay, he's reinstated, but not on the Dodgers. We're done with him, even though we have to pay him.

So they're just, they're really dragging it out. Like it produces the impression that they're having to have a lot of conversations about whether they want to do this. Like, I don't know what other, yeah, if there's red tape, if they're procedural things, I don't know what's going on behind the scenes, but it has been reported for a while now that It does create that impression. They're not acting fast to do that. Anyway, what I was going to say is that it's been speculated that the Dodgers, because they are just a teeny, teeny, tiny bit below the competitive balance tax threshold right now, even having to pay Bauer most of his salary for 2023, people are speculating that they're trying to reset their taxes. They would have been, if they had gone over again, they would have triggered the highest

penalty. they would have been if they had gone over again they would have triggered the highest penalty and so if they're trying to reset now so they can completely blow everyone out of the water and just break the bank for otani whoever gets him is going to have to do that and should be happy to do that to get shohei otani and all of the on and off the field value he brings but it's gonna be like the sweepstakes to end all sweepstakes what is the optimal time for him to sign not for us but what is the best time for otani to sign for you and me you mean in terms of like making the offseason interesting or yeah because like i think we can say with great confidence he's just gonna he's gonna break every record it's gonna be a number heretofore unseen

in professional sports not just in baseball but generally like all of that stuff i think we can take as a given i don't think there's like a ton of strategic advantage to waiting versus going early because it's just like that i don't think that's gonna move the needle in any kind of meaningful way when it comes to what the ultimate contract is so like in terms of like maximum fun what's the most fun it could be well i think it would be fun if he were traded this this coming season and i i mean look it would be fun if the angels were good and they didn't have to trade him because the moves that they've made this offseason paid off and he got to go to the

playoffs with Mike Trout together for maybe the last season. But if that doesn't happen again, I know it's hard to imagine, but if the Angels disappointed somehow, as improbable as that seems. Never happened before. Yeah. But there's a first time for everything so if that happened then if they were to trade him then we would get the intrigue of of multiple rounds of who's going to get otani right and we could see him make the stretch run with someone and and see some giant prospect package even though he'd only be under team control for half a season. It's still Shohei

Otani. So that would be intriguing. But as for his free agency, it could be one of those situations where if he doesn't sign, he kind of holds up the market because if you're in the running for Otani, you basically have to apportion some huge percentage of your payroll to him and you have to earmark many, many millions of dollars. And so even if other players are not like great Otani alternatives, you know, it's not like there's a plan B exactly. It's like, if we don't get Otani, we'll just, we'll get the next best two-way player. There isn't really anyone else out there. So he might not hold up off seasons in that sense where it's like, he's just, he's the unicorn. So it's not like everyone else who is like a lesser unicorn needs to wait to see where Otani signs, but teams will need to wait to see like, are we spending $50 million or whatever it is on Shohei Otani next year or not? So they might not be willing to proceed with the rest of their off seasons until there is some resolution there. So on the one hand, it would be intriguing, I guess,

to have that linger and be an ongoing storyline about who's going to get him. But it might slow down everything else to the extent that it would be better for it to happen early and then for everyone to be able to get excited about where's Otani going to be and maybe he's on a contending team now. And if you signed him, then you get the maximum amount of time to market off of that

and sell season tickets based on the fact that you get to see Shohei Otani next year. Yeah, I think I'm into that. I'm into that. But also, it's going to be so boring afterward. Yeah, well, nothing can compare to that it's true yeah right maybe carlos correa will be maybe he'll opt out again maybe he still won't be signed who knows it seems likely to me that

they will get this done and soon but what form it takes i wouldn't dare speculate ben wouldn't dare to speculate yeah Yeah. Others have dared. Yeah. When it was reported that Steve Cohen's like searching, seeking some special provisions, probably they're just like protection in the event that whatever body part has been flagged, ankle or leg or whatever it is, if that does break down, then you get some sort of recourse there. But people were speculating about all sorts of strange contract provisions that could be built into this thing to get it done. I'm sure we'll find out sometime soon.

All right. A few follow-ups and lesser news items here. I saw this tweet to stray into somewhat political territory for a second. As we are recording, I think Kevin McCarthy is on, what, his eighth attempt to become Speaker of the House, something like that. I think the seventh failed not long before we started recording. I bring this up only to note, I saw a tweet a couple of days ago, earlier in his failed attempts. This was from Matt Fuller, Washington Bureau Chief for the Daily Beast. And Matt tweeted, Representative Blake Moore, Republican from Utah,

just made the argument for Kevin McCarthy continuing to lead Republicans by saying, quote, you don't take out a pitcher in the middle of a no-hitter, which that caught my eye. Baseball analogies, Brian Curtis wrote about this years ago, that politics uses baseball analogies all the time. I mean, baseball analogies have seeped into many other fields, but politics in particular. But this one fails for me on multiple levels. You don't take out a pitcher in the middle of a no-hitter. I mean, first of all, that presupposes that Kevin McCarthy is pitching a no-hitter in some way. But beyond that, also, it is kind of a tell me you haven't paid attention to baseball lately without telling me that, right? Because you don't take out a pitcher in the middle of a no-hitter. Actually, everyone does that these days. That usually happens now. It's commonplace. We've talked about that. You hardly bat an eye anymore when a pitcher is removed in the middle of a no-hitter. It's expected. When a pitcher is removed in the middle of a no hitter, it's just it's expected.

And it's maybe beneficial even in your attempts to win, even though it's kind of a bummer sometimes. But you absolutely do do that, Representative Blakemore. So you got to update your understanding of the way pitching usage works now. now also wouldn't it be better to understand oh gosh i'm trying to think of a podcast friendly way to describe that group of republicans isn't kevin mccarthy the hitter in this analogy right you could definitely make that case yeah matt matt said that in his tweet as well. Yeah. Like, he's the hitter. He's the hitter being no hit. That's the whole problem for him. You know? Like, what do they call themselves?

We're really letting them get away with the Freedom Caucus? We're, like, seeding that ground? Really? Anyway. But, like, aren't they the ones pitching the no hitter at this point? Yeah, I guess so. Kind of? Maybe. It just doesn't really work on any level i don't think they are then the party as a whole has issued a lot of walks like if we're counting the votes as anyway i don't even know man i don't even know what a

what a mess that i haven't had any delay in at all you know. Why would you accuse me of that? Why would you even suggest that I've found it funny? What else? We also had the Marlins designated Charles LeBlanc for assignment. Charles LeBlanc, we hardly knew you. Literally, we hardly knew you. We didn't know you until last week.

And now you're gone. No sooner did we discover your existence and your pretty productive 2022 season than the Marlins have cut bait. They have let loose. The LeBlanc is loose. I guess this is a result of their signing Gene Segura and needing a spot on the 40 man. And Charles LeBlanc was the one to go so i'm sad it's it's almost like you reminded them that he existed maybe they forgot that they had charles leblanc did i cross charles yeah they listened to effectively wild and they were like oh right charles leblanc we have him yeah but we forgot he existed and now that we know we we can get rid of him i I guess. So sort of sad. I mean, I'm sure he'll catch on somewhere. Maybe the Tigers, who reportedly pursued and failed to sign Segura, can have Charles LeBlanc. They could have Gene Segura at home, can be Charles LeBlanc.

But I'm sure he'll end up somewhere. But man, we just got up to speed on Charles LeBlanc, and he's gone already. Here's the way that the narrative needs to unfold. So we mentioned before, I mentioned before, I was concerned that we had perhaps done the minor league free agent draft too soon, right? That there were all of these guys who, had we waited a week, might have found their way onto one of our draft boards if we had waited. And here's what needs to happen. I need Charles leblanc to sign a minor league deal somewhere and then i need him to just destroy all of us and the control group right make us feel

small for having not known him and then having been so casual as to as to be like yeah yeah they've been waiting to get rid of that guy so yeah charles we wish you well make us feel badly about our choices i think yeah well he was uh he was not available to be drafted right he was not a minor league free agent even if oh yeah i guess that's true yeah we won't have to feel bad about not drafting him but we could feel bad about not knowing him yeah you're right i don't know i don't know if that entire little jaunt I just took is worth keeping in then. He could still sign a minor league contract and outperform many minor league free agent draftees.

But really, also, it's sort of surprising not only because he just recently entered our radar and came to our attention, but because the Marlins, even after signing Segura, they don't have a wealth of position playing talent. And so I looked and Charles LeBlanc, he made his major league debut last year on July 30th. And from July 30th on, Charles LeBlanc was the second most productive Marlins position player by Fangraft's war. There's only one better, Brian De La Cruz, who some people have high hopes for during this year. He had 1.0 war from July 30th on and Charles LeBlanc had

0.9 and no one else had more than half a win above replacement. I mean, it was bleak. So I guess either they don't believe in Charles LeBlanc to maintain that performance because he did have a 374 BABIP and he did strike out 31.4% of the time.

And there were indicators there that maybe suggested that he was playing a little bit over his head, which makes me feel a little bit less bad about not knowing that he existed until very recently. But still, the Marlins, they can't be choosers, you know, when it comes to good position players. So I guess they felt like he just,

he either wouldn't repeat that performance or they wouldn't have a spot for him. But it is sort of striking that they just desiccated like their second best position player, basically, in the second half of last season. It just says more about their group of position players than it does about Charles LeBlanc, but still. But still. Yeah. Anyway, happy trails. Glad to have known you. Hope we get to know you again somewhere else now that we've invested all of that time and effort and done the research to figure out that

he existed and also some salient facts about him. I hope we can put that knowledge to use next season. I hesitated over saying next season because as you tweeted, the nice thing about being in a new year and happy new year, everyone, if we didn't officially formally say so last time. Oh, yeah. Happy new year. formally say so last time. But the nice thing about that for baseball writers and editors is that you can finally say last year when you're talking about last season, or you can say last season, and it's very clear that you're talking about 2022 and not 2021. And that's always a great relief to be able to do that because I think one of the underrated aspects of baseball

is that it is contained within a single calendar year. So even though it takes up a lot of that calendar year, you can just say the 2022 season and you don't have to do the nonsense that you have to do in all the other major sports where you have to do the 2022 to 2023 season. You might have to do that for a baseball off season, but much more rarely. So it's just, it's really great. Even though baseball continues for most of the year, it lasts so long. It's all within the same calendar year. So we don't have to couch that or be confused or anything, but it does get a little confusing late in the year after the season is over when you have to say this year, this season, last year, last season. So once we flip over to the following January, everyone is on the same calendar page and on the same page when

we talk about these things. So it's a great relief. Yeah. It is a weight that is lifted and it just really cuts down on the amount of slacking i have to do right because i i was always having to be like which year do we mean what do you mean and now i don't have to do that so i just get to talk about baseball instead it's delightful yep and also last time we we talked about that emily in paris uh baseball scene yeah and and you mentioned the sears Tower, right? And that came up. You noted that the Sears Tower is in Chicago.

You asked me to confirm that it was in Chicago, and I did. But what neither of us noted is that the Sears Tower is no longer known as the Sears Tower. And so as many helpful listeners wrote it or tweeted it or commented in somewhere or another, it's now the Willis Tower. The Sears Tower is the Willis Tower. Not a big issue because everyone knows what we meant when we said Sears Tower. But I think this is kind of a case in point. This is what we're attempting to illustrate when we talk about how people should consult us, a subject matter expert, when they're doing their baseball scene. And so if their actor says incorrectly or the script says incorrectly, two outs left in the bottom of the ninth, right,

when actually there weren't two outs left, but also no one would say two outs left and there are other anomalies and things that just for a baseball fan make you perk up and say, that's not quite right. That's not quite how it would be said. That's not authentic. If we were making a show about Chicago or the Chicago skyline or architecture, we would consult someone also, right? We would not trust ourselves. I mean, at least probably Google, and then we could have known that the Sears Tower is the Willis Tower now, and maybe we did know that. But if we were to make a special show about that, we would probably bring on someone who is from Chicago or knows about Chicago architecture. So we, in a sense, illustrated by making that minor mistake, we illustrated the minor mistake

that the producers of Emily in Paris were making by not consulting someone on their baseball scene or not heeding their advice and thus making us, the baseball people, say, oh, something's off there in a similar way to when we were talking about the Sears Tower. Chicago residents probably said, oh, something's not quite right there. It's the Willis Tower now. I bet a lot of people from chicago still call it the sears tower though i wouldn't want to speculate but i would probably yes i would posit that it's possible and part of my thinking is that i'm just gonna call it safeco field right it's the we've had that discussion right about how the corporate sponsor changes yeah

right and it's not like sears was named after like an architect named you know jane sears and then they called it the sears tower no it was because like sears the retailer was headquartered there i think there was a literal sears in the sears tower at least at some point and now it's like some insurance company that has the naming rights but you don't you know you don't remember these things and so if you're from a place you just call it the thing it was initially called kind of like how you know it's a century link fields but now it's lumen fields i think and it was originally quest fields and every now and again i will be like it's quest field and i was like that's wrong i don't even

know if quest yeah the telecom company still exists. I mean, I don't know that Sears still exists. But I bet there are a lot of people from Chicago and the greater Chicagoland area who call it the Sears Tower still. Because what is the Willis Group? Who are they? What is their business about? It's about insurance and reinsurance, I'm learning from the Wikipedia. But you didn't know that.

Yeah, the Willis Tower Wikipedia page says local area residents still refer to the building by its old name see see but but to your point i would never i would never dream of consulting on chicago right uh for something because i'm not from chicago i've never lived there i don't know the ins and outs i'd be reticent to be an advisor on a series about seattle at this point because the city's changing so quickly that you know my my referent is is rapidly going out of date although i would bring a long time residence perspective on it you know yeah right anyway it was the sears tower a lot longer than it has been the Willis Tower since anyway. Get off my back. Other people also pointed us to an SNL skit where Peyton Manning espoused the virtues of Emily in Paris. So not just Jim Palmer, another prominent athlete,

or at least the character that Peyton Manning was playing in that skit, very high on Emily in Paris. Wait, Peyton Manning was on SNL recently enough that Emily in Paris was like out in the world? Yeah. You know, I'm not always up to date on SNL. So I'm surprised. That entire sentence surprised me.

Yep. All right. And also I talked for the umpteenth time about ways that baseball is unique or if not unique, unusual. I just I keep following up on that as I think of other ways in which it is. It is very unusual. And one obvious way. So last time I talked, prompted by reading Russell Carlton's upcoming book, and he noted that the fields are asymmetrical, not just different dimensions,

but also asymmetrical dimensions. And he noted that it has one-way substitution. And as I said, these things are not unique, but they are unusual. There are some other sports that have similar things. But someone in one of our various fora and places where people can post things about the podcast, and I forget which one it was now. I apologize to whoever made this comment, but just made the obvious observation that baseball is, if not unique, very unusual in that there are just so many games, right? So the initial thing that prompted this discussion was that the baseball itself is replaced so many times.

And then we got into the other things that would be on a Mount Rushmore or a top five of ways that baseball is weird, whether it's the dimensions or the defense initiating the action or the stats or the managers wearing the same uniforms as the players or no clock, et cetera, et cetera. But there are just so many games. I mean, that's one very obvious way. And you could say it's a bug or a feature, a plus or a minus. But there are just way more games than there are. Yeah, so many games.

I don't want to say every sport, but almost all of them, right? Almost all the major ones in North America, at least. And there are multiple reasons for that. I mean, one reason is I guess it's not as strenuous and high contact as some other sports, which is not to say that it's not somewhat strenuous and that there are no injuries and contact injuries, but less so. And so there's a little less recovery time required between baseball games generally. So there's that. And then there's the fact that you just need a lot of games to find out who the good players and the good teams are, right? Just because there's so fact that you just need a lot of games to find out who the good players and the good teams are.

Yeah. Just because there's so much randomness just in the way the sport works. And I guess the number of trials per contest, you know, and the number of points scored and all of that. Like you get a better read on a true talent of, let's say, a tennis player in one match or a basketball team in one game of basketball than you do a baseball player in one game of baseball. So there's that and there are other historical factors. And maybe there's also a benefit to just playing every day with some of the finesse skills and the techniques that are involved in baseball and you would get rusty more quickly, potentially, if you were to sit out a certain amount of time. There are a lot of reasons for it, but that is one thing that probably should have come to my mind sooner. I don't think I mentioned it. Maybe I did, but that would probably be on the top five. It's just like 162 games. That's just a ridiculous number of games in addition to spring training games and post-season games. So tack on a couple more months basically of games there.

So just a lot of games. It's a lot of games. There may not always be that many games. There may be fewer games at some point, but there have been a lot of games for a long time. So I think that is definitely one of the defining characteristics of the sport. Yeah, it's just so many games. And then there are other sports where

i have this experience of both the nhl playoffs and the nba playoffs where i'm like this is going on forever the playoffs last like as long as the regular season seemingly and i know that's not quite true but they they do go on for for quite a time and it's not like the you know mlb playoffs are so short i'm not saying the mlb i'm like the MLB playoffs are so short. I'm not saying the MLB. I'm saying the MLB playoffs. And in that case, using those. Just so everyone knows.

But anyway, it's not like they don't go on for a while. They do. But relative to the season, it's like, oh, gone in the blink of an eye. Yep. Yeah. And it probably goes on longer than it needs to. In the NBA's case, you could definitely dispense with some of that and still get a pretty good read on the best teams. But in baseball, it would need to go on much longer, as we have noted, in order to get a good read on the best teams. All right.

And also, I guess one story that could have been in our series on stories we didn't talk about from the past season. This was submitted belatedly by Nick, and it was Brewers-Dodgers related because it was about Dodgers TV broadcaster David Vassie. I may be mispronouncing his last name. It's V-A-S-S-E-G-H. Vassie. I don't know. I'm sorry. I like how you were like, let me end by making it fancy. Yeah, but he broke his arm and six ribs going down the slide at, I guess, what we're calling American Family Field these days, right? And so the famous Brewer slide, the slide that Bernie Brewer has slid down who knows how many times without incident. This poor Dodgers TV broadcaster, which I was aware of at the time and we didn't talk about it.

And I didn't want to like laugh at the guy too much, although his colleagues on the broadcast did. But once it was clear that he was OK, I mean, kind of okay, like he broke a lot of bones and ribs and stuff. But like they kind of, you know, they gave him some crap for that once he was back on the air. Yeah. And there's a video which they broadcasted to kind of make fun of him. And I guess he was good natured about it. But he was really looking forward to going down this slide for a long time. And then he finally got to go down the slide.

He was really looking forward to going down this slide for a long time. And then he finally got to go down the slide and the video of him going down, he says, Holy crap, all the way down. He's like, Holy crap, Holy crap, Holy crap.

He's been talking for three days about going down the slide here in Milwaukee. I've never heard somebody so excited about doing anything. And David did do it today. Watch. All right, here we go. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap. day watch here we go holy crap holy crap holy crap

holy crap strike on Muncie oh no okay first I want to report that he's OK. He's OK. Dave. Dave. Hi, guys. Hey, I do my own stunts. grape stomp video, which I think turns 25 this year, the great viral grape stomp video where the lady is stomping grapes to make wine and then falls out of the grape stomping thing and makes

moans of pain. And you get the live real-time reaction from the broadcasters back in the studio. That was just a huge hit with me when it came out or when I became aware of it as a kid, one of the early viral videos. And it's kind of like that because this guy's just, he's having the time of his life and he's sliding down on his jacket, which I don't know if that was his mistake. Like, was that the tactical error that he was sliding down on his jacket? So he like minimized the friction too much. I guess he was sliding down on his jacket so he minimized the friction too much? I guess he was trying to preserve his pants possibly. Maybe he went too fast.

He flew too close to the sun on the slide. And he just slammed into this wall at the bottom of the slide. Ben, the technical term that you're looking for here, and I'm going to do a swear, he ate shit at the bottom of the slide. That is that is the technical term i'm watching this again we know that he's okay and so when i i'm gonna put it on and you're gonna keep talking and then we i think people will be able to tell when he crashes because i probably left so you go you continue you know he's eating yeah technical term yeah no and and really like the problem was with his technique uh like i i hate to add insult to injury i'm sorry he was okay oh no he's so he's

okay like pain yeah he broke lots of stuff and like had a cast so he's okay in the sense that it wasn't like life-threatening but he wasn't really okay. Like he hurt himself pretty significantly, but you know, he was able to laugh about it or at least take his lumps. But really like, I don't know, I've been through down a lot of slides in my life and I guess I've had some sort of slide related injuries. And I did break a collarbone when I was like five or six on a seesaw because there was just like a miscommunication with my grandma, I guess, about who was getting on and who was getting off. And I got off in an unplanned way and broke a collarbone. So I have some experience with this, I guess. But like, man, the technique because he just like he he slid into now i guess you could fault the construction

for not adequately padding the place but it is like it's padded it's padded yeah so it's not like he's sliding into a brick wall or something now maybe there should be a longer slowdown period there before you run into anything but also also, he ran into it, like going into it in the side of his body with his arm like awkwardly tucked behind him. You know, this was not great sliding technique. It's his first time, I guess. So I suppose it's forgivable. But yeah, it was not how you draw it up. It was not textbook mechanics for going down any sort of slide. I would like to say three things the first is i really like how joe davis consummate professional he's trying so hard

not to laugh as he introduces this clip to the point that he has to like kind of do a little like and then he laughs the decision to go down on the jacket i think was the the sort of fundamental mistake here because i'm here to yeah he does hit his arm so awkwardly i'm here to tell you this i think that that slide is designed with a mascotted human in mind yes yes that's a lot of padding every this is not the first eating on the brewer slide brewer's side that I have heard of I just will say that I have heard tell of team employees being like I'm gonna go down the slide and then they just wipe out

thankfully I think not to the extent that this guy did where it you know resulted in an injury and the need of a cast but you know it's a hazard it is a hazard and I think that it is architected with a great deal more padding in mind i can't believe the brewers let him go down on a jacket or like a

burlap sack or whatever that was that was gonna cause him to go faster i can't believe that they weren't like no no don't do it and then here's the here's the last thing i'll say the lack of intervention by the other people on the platform at the bottom oh that's like chilling you know because he he wins it he's in pain he is clearly wounded and there is not an immediate rushing in to be like oh god are you okay man i don't know why i find this one so funny because like i hate america's funniest home video i hate those like they just feel mean i feel like i'm being mean spirited but you know he seems like he's kind of game to to poke fun yeah at himself but you know he's also clearly doing this pre-game and then i think was just like cast it up and what and ready to go right

yeah so like on the one hand it's like an admirable, like I got to bear down and do my job. But also I think if you break your arm and a couple of ribs at work, you're okay to take the day off if you need. Yeah. Like I think you could, and I'm not saying they made him work, but it's like, hey guy, you know what?

It's okay. You don't have to, you can take the day off. It's fine. Man, he really eats shit into that wall though. Holy crap. Yeah. He just seems so excited to go down.

Yeah. Just feel bad for him the emotions just what a swing what a roller coaster or a slide i guess yeah they shouldn't have uh they shouldn't have let him go down on the the jacket or whatever because yeah i don't think you need to like decrease the friction it's a steep slide right yeah someone put that in in like a mcdonald's play place they'd be no, we can't let the kids go down there. Right. Yeah. So was it to protect his pants, but then wouldn't you want to protect your jacket also?

So maybe it was just because he thought he needed it to slide. But no, if you can slide down that thing in a Bernie Brewer outfit, you can probably go down in suit pants in business casual. So apparently it is vasay, according to another video that I've surreptitiously watched while we were talking. Quite fancy. Yeah. Yeah. All right.

And one other thing. Oh, Ben Clemens, he wrote about the weird Dodgers offseason. Indeed. Which we've talked about and just alluded to earlier, the fact that they have not spent a lot and they've lost some stars. But he had a chart in there of net war lost in free agency this offseason. This was as of Wednesday, I guess. And he found that the Dodgers have lost a lot of war and have not gained a lot of war. So they lost 21.3 2022 war. So this is just this is last year war this is not projected war for 2023

but still they lost more than 20 wins in in 2022 wins from free agents and then have gained about seven so they have a net loss of 14.3 and no one else is is close to that really like the white socks are the only other team in double digits just just barely. And then most of the other teams, it's like even other teams that have lost a lot of war, like the Dodgers did, they have also gained or brought back a lot of war, like the Yankees, like the Mets lost a lot of war, but they have gained net war, or at least if they keep Carlos Correa, then they will. But what stood out to me here is that on the other end of the spectrum, you have the Cubs with a net gain of 8.7. You have the Mets with a gain of 8.0. And then you have the Angels, those Angels whom we mentioned also, a net gain of 7.3 were from free agents. So they're third there between the Mets and the Rangers, two teams that have made headlines and made huge acquisitions and thrown a lot of money around. The Angels have not done so in such a notable way, but they've achieved the same effects, at least when it comes to free agents.

So obviously the Dodgers had a lot to lose and still be really good. They won 111 games. So even if they lost 14 war worth of free agents, that would take them down to like high nineties win total. It's not that simple because free agents, that's only one type of transaction. And this is retrospective war, not looking forward, not future war. But even if they've lost a lot of wins, they had a lot of wins to lose and still be a good competitive team. But as Ben notes and as we've noted, they're not clearly ahead of the Padres in that division anymore. So the LA area team that has had by far the better offseason when it comes to free agents coming and going, at least.

It's the Angels, not the Dodgers. Yeah. At least so far. How about that? Spooky. All right. And I will also just note that Russell Carlton wrote about wins this week at Baseball Perspectives. And he wrote about this previously, and we've stat blasted about this previously, just the fact that starters aren't really getting wins as often anymore. They're getting decisions a lot less often, period, but especially wins. And so Russell wrote about maybe we should redefine the win. We

should just change what has to happen for you to get credit for a win. And we talked about this briefly. I think we may have answered a listener email about this not long ago, but he had a few different proposals for how we could tweak the pitcher win. And one is that you could just eliminate the rule about starters needing to pitch five innings to qualify for the win. So if you're a starter, you leave with the lead, the lead holds up, then at least you're eligible for the win, even if you didn't go the full five. Because so many things about the win are weird. And one of the things about it is that it's very dependent on your teammates, obviously, like your bullpen support and your offensive support.

But also, they're just weird sequencing things where if you're a starter, you have to pitch five innings. But if you're a reliever, you don't. You sure don't. No, you just have to be the pitcher of record, the pitcher who's there when the team takes the lead, essentially, and you could barely pitch at all and you could still get the win. So why? Why that? So just like the order in which you come in and what your offense happens to be doing

at that time, It's a very significant factor. So that was one proposal, just remove the five inning requirement for starters. Another possibility he listed was to eliminate the five inning rule altogether and allow the starter to win the game as long as they leave with the lead and it was not surrendered afterward. Proposal three, all pitching win decisions are at the discretion of the official scorer, presumably with some guidance to give it to the most effective pitcher. So one pitcher from the winning team gets it. It doesn't matter when the winning run scored. It can just be a case-by-case decision. Or proposal four, he had normalized a shadow category listing how many times a pitcher left the game having satisfied the criteria for a win

and then lost it to a bullpen meltdown. And Russell, I think, mentions in this piece that even if it wasn't one of his proposals, that he would prefer that it just be the pitcher who added the most in terms of WPA or whatever win probability variants you wanted to use, or linear weights, or whatever it was. You just used something like that. And yeah, I kind of feel like, A, we should keep the win the way it is just for historical consistency, just to kind of track how things have changed. Because I think the idea of having the win be an individual award is weird, and we don't necessarily need to preserve that. It's just kind of wrongheaded, more so than it used to be when a pitcher would at least be in the entire game and still wouldn't be solely responsible for the win, but at least would be on the pitching side more often than not. Now that that's not the case, why even bother having the confusion of you know a team

win and a win above replacement and a player and a pitcher win why you didn't have the same nomenclature for all of those things right but if you wanted to hand out like a star of the game or like yeah most impactful pitcher of the game or whatever it is then i think probably you could go with some sort of wpa thing so you could have like a revamped pitcher win, I guess, like the way that there's a Bill James game score and then there's a Tom Tango game score and it's like a different formulation of the idea of a game score. So I would want to keep tracking wins the traditional way just to have consistency. Because if you were to change the definition of a win, would you then apply that retroactively or would you just have two different ones? And that would be weird. And it's handy just as a barometer just to be able to say like, hey, pitchers get a lot fewer wins these days. And that is a way to illustrate how much pitcher usage has changed. even if the stat is pretty flawed. Yeah. So I wouldn't necessarily preserve,

I wouldn't want to sustain the concept of having a pitcher win, but I would support reclassifying that somehow so that you could have basically the most impactful player or pitcher in a game. I think that would be a useful thing to have just to be able to say, this guy had the highest number of games in the league where he was the most important player or something, right? Which it would probably just end up being the best players by other metrics, but there'd be some clutchness built in there and some timing and all of that. So I think that would be kind of useful. So I'd go for something like that. And if I were to reclassify the win i would just call it something different it would be like

not even win it would just be some some other type of metric or you could just say this is a new win and we're keeping the old wins but we'll have these new wins too which i would probably still ignore so but there are a lot of different ways you could go with it the cool guy hanging out award sure you could call it that we'll workshop. We'll workshop it. We'll workshop it. Okay. We'll end with the Pass Blast. So this is 1951, the episode, and this Pass Blast comes from 1951 and from Sabre's Director of Editorial Content, Jacob Pomeranke, who is also the chair of the Black Sox Scandal Research Committee. And he writes, 1951 as day follows the night. The 1951 National League pennant race is usually remembered for how it started, the New York Giants stealing signs at the polo grounds to overtake the Brooklyn Dodgers 13.5 game lead,

and for how it ended with Bobby Thompson's famous shot heard around the world home run to end a playoff tiebreaker. But in between those two events, the Giants were part of an unusual doubleheader involving three teams on September 13th in St. Louis, the first and only three-team doubleheader in the 20th century. Bob Braga of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch explains what happened that day and night at Sportsman's Park. Quote, playing two ball clubs in one day never will become a major league policy or practice, nor will the king size stunt replace the automobile now any faster than it did old Dobbin when grandpa was a gay blade. Okay. I totally followed.

Yeah, I tracked that whole sentence. I knew what every part of it meant. Yes. Every part of it meant. Yes. I'm going to miss when we get up to just more modern times in the past, and we don't get the at all old-timey baseball language, because that's been one of the best parts of this series. Yeah, for sure.

To straighten out a weather-snarled schedule, the Cardinals tried yesterday to beat two ball clubs, the present-day Metropolitans, Giants, and Beantowners, Braves. But they were successful only in proving that enough is enough, and that to face two 20-game pitchers in one 24-hour period is too much. Knocking out Sal the Barber Magley in the afternoon, the Redbirds scored all their runs in one inning and beat the New York Giants 6-4, handing Leo DeRocher's Dandies a swift kick in their pennant aspirations.

A little more than three hours later, however, after eating a hurried dinner and passing up batting practice, the Redbirds tried to beat the Boston Braves and warrant the great spawn. But against the stylish southpaw who pulled abreast Magley in the 20-victory column, the Cardinals couldn't qualify with even a loud foul. And Jacob concludes the three-team doubleheader was caused by a rainout the day before, which forced the Giants to stick around for one more afternoon before the Braves came in for a previously scheduled makeup game. While it was believed at the time that no one had played two teams in one day since 1883, Tom Ruane of RetroSheet reports that it happened several times in the 19th century, most recently by the Cubs in 1899. The Giants' win pulled them to within five and a half games of the first place

Dodgers with two weeks left to play. It didn't mean much to the Cardinals or Braves, who were both well out of contention by then. So three-team doubleheader. One day, you got to face Warren Spahn and Sal Magli in the same day, two different teams. That's tough. I can't see why we don't do that as a matter of course. Yeah, I can't imagine that it would go particularly well for you, you know? Yeah. All right, you can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up

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but any old listener can contact us via email at podcast at Fangraphs.com. You can also all join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. You can follow Effectively Wild on Twitter at EWPod. At the very least, it's a good way to get notified quickly when an episode comes out. You can also find the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash effectively wild. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing and production assistance. We will be back with one more episode before the end of the week.

Talk to you soon. My fame is sure, thanks to your Sunday pitch. Up high or low, I don't know Which is which But come Next spring Keep throwing me that thing And I will swing

Because Of you Because of you.