Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2084: The Sexiest Free Agents Alive

Episode Date: November 10, 2023

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about norovirus derailing the GM meetings, leftover Boras quotes, and the baseball players deemed sexiest by People magazine, Stat Blast (18:47) about a possible bunting comeback and whether age is correlated with pitch-clock violations, and then (43:39) talk to FanGraphs writer Ben Clemens about the free-agent market and his […]

More than 2,000 episodes retrospectively filed, and at each new one we still collectively smile. That's Effectively Wild. That's Effectively Wild. Hello and welcome to episode 2084 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Raleigh of Fangraphs and I am joined by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? I'm doing all right, but how are you? Did you escape? No, I'm pretty sure I'm fine. Look, look, look. I want you to know that the odds that I have whatever stomach bug was going around GM meetings very low. I wasn't there for very long.

Several of our industry colleagues were there all day. They were in the media workroom. They weren't just in scrums. They were coming and going. They were talking to executives. They were doing their interviews. They're reporters, Ben. I'm an interloper. You know, I'm nobody. But here's the thing. You ever feel really tired because you've had a really big project and you've been working on it a lot and it's taken a lot of hours and maybe your website went down for a little bit the night before and so you had to get up at 5 in the morning to finish the top 50 free agent posts.

Because, look, generally you rely on your writers to do a good job of fact-checking their articles, and they do. They do a great job, Ben, an excellent job. But you know that this is one of the posts that gets read the most of anything you publish the whole year. And so you want to bring an extra level of rigor and diligence to it to, like, you know, honor the thing and all the work that everybody's done. And so you've slept not as much as you usually do. And you're a person who needs sleep because you're not like your co-host. Like you're like, seven hours is not enough. I need to consolidate every night. And so you get up at five and your body feels weird because probably, probably because you got up at five. But then you're also an anxious person. And so some part of your brain that you can't turn off is thinking, is it that I got up at five and I have been busy and I didn't sleep a lot or do I have norovirus? So I don't think I do.

I can't identify with that specific scenario that you just laid out. That's not like a universal one. It's not like, you know, common to the human experience. Not quite. Your use of the second person there reminded me of the narration in How To with John Wilson, where he will describe things that happened to him as if maybe it's something that happened to you to you but but no i was not at the gm meetings that ended prematurely because of the gm meeting massacre the gm's revenge whatever we're calling it i think stephanie apstein said that the gm meetings became the gi meetings right there's a norovirus going around. Steph scooped you on that story. Because you're on the Archie Bradley beat everyone would have assumed. Well,

if Meg's on the scene at the GM meetings- It would be me. Yeah. People are uncontrollably crapping, apparently, that Meg would be the one to break that news. But- I mean, I'm here to say a couple of things. The first of which is that, you know, I would never dream of comparing myself to Steph Epstein in terms of reporting chops. She is my superior in that regard. And I feel fine saying that because it's true. So there's that piece of it.

The second piece is that Ben, naively, I thought, thought you know i got a new beat now i got an i got a new thing that people associate with me with and it's it's them kissing you know it's the baseball men if they want to giving each other little tender kisses you know and throughout the postseason when the phillies were expressing their tender affection for one another, I'd look at Twitter and my mentions would be full of these brothers, these dudes, these friends, giving each other little kisses. And then this story broke. And I realized that no one ever really changes.

And once you get associated with something like this, it follows I'd have a, you know, I'd have a well of other material for people to draw on and associate with me. But instead, they're like, you know, some GMs, they had a hard time in a particular way. And you know, who needs to know about that? Meg does. Meg needs to know. Not since Chen Ho Park owned up matter of factly to having a lot of diarrhea, Meg does. Meg needs to know. typo where he said that ron washington was getting another shit with the angels which might describe how that job's gonna go good luck ron you're gonna need it if it's i don't think you're wrong but also you know if anyone can can get the last bit of you know juice out of whoever ends up being an angel i i have confidence that ron's uh

ron washington's on the list you know he's at the top of it yeah let's hope it's it's incredibly hard unlike those gms and popo's battle movements so god you're okay that is so bad it's so much worse i hope they're all feeling great and that things have settled down, intestinally speaking, so that they can get down to another kind of business and get down to making baseball transactions, which I'm sure we're all more interested in.

So, I have a couple other updates. The first is that I think there were a couple Scott Boris quotes that we overlooked. I hope Scott Boris quotes that we overlooked. I hope Scott Boris is unaffected. There was certainly some verbal diarrhea that was emanating from Scott Boris, hopefully not the other kind.

But he had another couple confusing quotes because you shared the one where he talked about the FAA and how you want to have two engines, not just one engine on a plane, and the FAA and how you want to have two engines, not just one engine on a plane. And the FAA mandates that. And we need an FAA for the market. It's free agency something or other. I don't know. It was one of his convoluted vehicular turns of phrase.

Yeah. He was asked about Steve Cohen suggesting that he might not be spending as much. about Steve Cohen suggesting that he might not be spending as much. And Boris's response was, when you have the bigger jet and you say you're going slower, you're still going faster. What? Yeah, I don't know.

It sounds like Yogi Berra's Aflac ad level of coherence to me because I guess what he means is that when you spend a lot, as much as Steve Cohen did, then if you cut back a bit you're still spending a lot than than most okay okay that that makes more sense I guess so yeah and then the other one I saw I guess people were really riffing on the plane language because Boris introduced that himself. So Rob Bradford, who writes about the Red Sox, he asked Scott Boris about whether the Red Sox would be spending more, whether they'd be more active. So he said, would the Red Sox engines be firing hotter this offseason? That's how Rob phrased it. And he tweeted,

Boris dug in his notes and found an unused line, quote, the Red Sox are free to move around the free agent cabin. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Look, I don't want to cast aspersions on another reporter, but I'm just saying, you can't't don't tee him up you know like let let the man if the man's gonna cook you know he needs to he needs to turn the stove on on his own you know you can't i don't know do a stove thing for him um so there there's that you like

we no don't do that don't's not, this isn't about us. This is his show. Yeah. And we need him to, if he's going to do it, he's, you know, so. Yeah, well. I'm so worried I'm going to end up having crummy tummy, Ben. I'm really stressed about it. I know, me too.

I hope not. I'm very nervous. Yeah. Well, that allowed Boris to use a line that otherwise might have been wasted. I love just the visual of him digging around. I know I had a line about this, just in case someone asked me. You got winter meetings in like five weeks. You don't have to shoot your whole shot. For now. Yeah. But he'll be back next month and we will chronicle what he says at that time. But I have one other update and it's related to Shohei Otani.

Now, we're going to talk about Shohei Otani later in this episode because we're going to spend the most of this episode talking to other Ben, Ben Clemens of Fangraphs, about the top three agents of this offseason because Ben just published his ranking of the top 50. Shohei Otani prominently featured on that list, as one would imagine. But a bit of other Otani news. So one of the preseason prediction pod predictions that we had this season, Bauman predicted that People magazine would name an active MLB player sexiest man alive. And as we discussed at the time, it seemed like there was really only one candidate for that honor. If someone was going to be named sexiest man alive, it would have to be Otani just because Otani is just about the only crossover mainstream baseball

figure to some extent these days. So if you wanted to sell magazines, it would have to be him. Well, he was not named people's 2023 sexiest man alive. It was Patrick Dempsey. What? Yeah, McDreamy. Still dreamy after all these years, apparently. So Grey's Anatomy, still running. And Patrick Dempsey.

How is that true? Still sexy. How is that true? Yeah. So he topped the list. However, Otani was mentioned at least because they had a separate list of the sexiest men in sports specifically. And there's a list of 21 athletes here. They're numbered, but I assume they're not really ranked because if they were ranked, it would be weird that they're all grouped by sports.

So they start with the NFL guys. Oh, I see. Then they move to soccer players and tennis players as they're all grouped together. But they are numbered. And so the list starts with the Kelseys, Travis and Jason, number one and two. They have the football guys up there. But Otani does lead the baseball representatives. There are three baseball representatives on this list.

So Otani appears first. Then you have Mookie Betts. Okay. And then you have Cody Bellinger. Cody Bellinger. Yeah. I don't know that I would have guessed that Cody Bellinger was, let's say, the third sexiest man in baseball. But people have spoken. that's apparently the case.

Wait, but, okay, so, like, look, this is dangerous territory for me, Meg, you know, as a lady who is also a media member. Yeah. Because you start talking about who's you know sexy and that gets awkward very fast um this is part of why you're able to indulge your love for otani it just reads differently to people yes but um look if i were making a personal ranking that i would not share with uh the public uh perhaps that is the subject of patreon Patreon pod. I don't know. But I don't know that Cody Bellinger, he's not like a bad looking guy. And like there is something to, I'm not saying this knowing what sorts of substances Cody Bellinger might enjoy or not enjoy.

I don't know. We're not friends. But like, you know, the stoner type is a type and it does have its appeal. But if I were picking amongst, there's some good looking dudes in baseball. I don't know if it would have been, you know, my. And, huh. Wow. Who did this?

Who is, I want to know now. I want to know who are the people of people, you know? Yeah, yeah. Who's on the masthead here? Are there any names on the byline? Probably not, right? No. Obviously, sexiness goes beyond just purely who is handsome, right? Oh, sure, yeah. There are other qualities that make up for that. And so the blurbs that they have for these players don't really explain it for Otani.

They just said he earned his flashy nickname Showtime. They talked about how he can pitch and hit. And he set some records and stuff for Mookie. They talk about how he's a multi-sport athlete. They talk about how he bowled a perfect game at the World Series of Bowling in 2017. Wait. Because when I think of sexy, Ben, you know the first thing I think of? Bowling. Yeah. No dedicated bowlers on this list, but Mookie is there.

I don't have Mookie. For Bellinger, it said Chicago Cubs player Bellinger proved he's a total catch in 2021 when he spoke to People about his then girlfriend and now fiance Chase Carter's pregnancy with their daughter, Caden, detailing how he supported his pregnant partner. Bellinger said, I want to make sure she's comfortable in bed. Just the little things to like getting her coffee. She's pretty active. She works out every day. She's a strong girl. She can get through most of it, but just doing the small things for her.

She can get through most of it, but just doing the small things for her. So I don't know if it's saying that he is one of the sexiest men in baseball because he brought coffee to his pregnant partner. But I guess that's part of it. I don't know. Anyway, they were the three representatives. However, there is another page where it has like a crowd sourced just like the reader's choice poll results. So this is not the editorial judgment of people, but the readers of people.

And there it has a separate breakout for athletes. And it says sexiest athlete, Travis Kelsey. And it says the race for sexiest athlete was tight, parentheses, end, with Lewis Hamilton, Joe Burrow, and Shohei Otani all competing at the highest level. But the Kansas City Chiefs star got a last minute boost in votes. Thanks, perhaps, to Taylor Swift, right? that it was really a race between Kelsey, Lewis Hamilton, the racer Joe Burrow, and Shohei Otani among the readers at least. Joe Burrow? Joe Burrow, yeah.

So much. Football players, they have a leg up because the NFL is so supremely popular. And obviously Kelseysey because of his connection to taylor has become a massive celebrity have you seen what joe burrow looks like i mean he's looking at a headshot here i mean isn't that bad it's not that it's i'm just like of all the i don't know look there's no accounting for taste, apparently. But I'm glad that Otani was represented. And it's not just that he's great and also he's handsome, but what a mensch, too. I mean, Otani, he just donated 60,000 baseball gloves to 20,000 Japanese elementary schools.

He donated baseball gloves to every single elementary school in Japan, which came to a total of 60,000. And he said, I'll be looking forward to sharing the field one day with someone that grew up using this glove. I mean, how heartwarming is that? So that would be sexy, even aside from all of his other philanthropy. What could be sexier than giving baseball gloves away oh yeah look i guess like the thing the thing that we should all acknowledge is that like all kinds of different ways to be sexy there's a face for every taste i think yes and and a taste for every face it just as importantly my own tastes are my own you know and again like cody belner Cody Bellinger's not a bad looking guy. I just, like, if you're going to pick amongst all of the guys, you know, there's a lot of guys. And some of them don't look like they ordered Domino's at two in the morning, you know, because of substances they might be imbibing. And again, I don't know that Cody Bellinger does that. I'm not saying that he does that.'m saying that that's or that those would

be his snacks he might have resting high face yeah yeah okay wait might sorry yeah i mean it might not because not because he's high he just he wears that expression yeah i'm not saying that i'm not saying that again i don't know i don't know him. I don't know what he likes or doesn't like because we are not acquainted. I do know that, you know, he is from the Valley and that if he were inclined to those particular substances, they are now legal in the state of Arizona for recreational use. So, Clint is doing fine. Like, whatever he likes or doesn't like, he's doing fine. Yeah. But also, I am just conscious of the fact that, like, anyway. Anyway.

Anyway, Ben. Anyway. Just wanted to point out, A, that Bauman's prediction did not quite come true, but it wasn't a total whiff. People did not ignore Shohei Otani. He was represented in the pages of the Sexiest Man Alive issue. And Cody Bellinger, whether or not you think he deserves to be the third sexiest man in baseball, he is the third highest ranked free agent, according to Ben Clemens. So that's something. And we'll get to Ben in just a moment to talk about Ohtani and Bellinger and much more.

However, I do have a quick stat blast for you. Stat blast. Discuss it at length and analyze it for us in amazing ways. Here's to day still past. Okay, so there's been some conversation going around about small ball. So there's been some conversation going around about small ball. And there have been some dunks on the quotes and there's been some consternation why it suddenly seems like small ball is back. Baseball Twitter has been discussing that this week. And it was prompted initially by Hal Steinbrenner's comment. Hal Steinbrenner's comment.

So Hal talked to the media, and one of the things he said was, I think Aaron Boone, Yankees manager, thinks that we're not teaching young players to bunt enough. A few years ago in player development, we cut back on the bunting skills, but Aaron Boone feels it's becoming a bigger part of the game again. He feels it's important. So we're going to start right up again. And naturally, there was a lot of gnashing of teeth and rending of garments and tearing out of hair, right, by people who said, oh, we're going to bunt more. Okay, great. That's what we're going to do differently coming off of this unsuccessful

Yankee season. And then there have been some other quotes that have been sort of in the same genre. So Marcus Timms, who is the newly hired White Sox hitting coach, was I think most recently with the Marlins, who went to a more contact-oriented approach in 2022. And Marcus Timms said the vision that Chris Goetz and Josh Barfield and Pedro Grafal, what they're trying to do moving forward, I love the vision they're trying to do. They're trying to reshape the team. I heard Goetz's interview, and he's trying to make some moves to make the team a little more athletic and get some guys to put the ball in play a little bit more. And I like that vision. I think the game has come to a point where situational hitting has been a lost art until the postseason. And then you see teams trying to bunt and hit and run and stuff like that during the postseason. We're going to start hitting that in spring training and we're going to change our identity a little bit. I like that vision of what they're trying to get done. And then Jerry DePoto also said that he wants the Mariners to go in a little bit more of a contact direction, right? Which, I mean, they could probably stand to hit for a little more contact, I guess. They struck

out a lot, and they had the second highest strikeout rate in the game. And I guess. They struck out a lot, and they had the second highest strikeout rate in the game. And I guess the problem with the Mariners is that they didn't really have a lot of power to go with the strikeouts, is the thing. So, I mean, if you're going to strike out a lot,

fine. You gotta bop a little bit more than they did, though, yeah. Right, yeah. yeah like the the twins struck out even more than the mariners did but they had some slug in them too they had some isolated power the mariners not so much so if you're gonna have the low contact low batting average approach then right it better go with some pop or else yeah you gotta do something a little bit different and and the marlins you know they resolved to strike out less and have a higher batting average and everything. And then they made the playoffs, although they were not really a great team or a great offense. So people have been

talking about what is behind this. Why are people suddenly saying that we need to have more small bar? We need to bunt more. And I've been trying to figure that out. And I think partly it's because of the Diamondbacks. I think partly we probably have to blame the Diamondbacks because we talk about that Theo Epstein quote, right? About how whenever a team wins, everyone's like, oh, that's the way to win. And so we got to model ourselves on that team. And the Diamondbacks won the pennant and they were bunters.

And so I think there have been some people who have looked at that and said, oh, OK, well, that's the way to win now, which is a pretty simplistic, facile way to look at things. And so Mike Petriello and Robert Orr and others have questioned online why people would be thinking that. And if you look at the teams that bunted the most and the least during the regular season this year, I don't think you would want to be on the side of the teams that bunted the most. bunted the least. Atlanta Braves, they had a pretty good offense, as I recall. A pretty good team. Yeah, they made a quick exit from the postseason, but one of the best offenses ever and very little bunting. The Mariners, not much bunting. The Dodgers, very little bunting. Another excellent offense. The Rangers, very little bunting. They just won the World Series. The Brewers, very little bunting. Playoff team. The Tigers, eh, okay. The Cubs almost made the playoffs.

The Rays, good team. Okay, so mostly the teams that didn't bunt a lot were good. Here are the teams that bunted the most. The A's. Does anyone want to emulate the A's? Probably not, right? The Diamondbacks were second. And then you had the Pirates, the Giants, the Padres, the Reds, the ball clinic, that teams were bunting a ton or that the teams that were playing small ball were much more successful. That's not what I got out of it.

I mean, I think people have been fairly clear about the fact that in the postseason, what seems to win is home runs, the short sequence offense. And when you hit more homers, you usually win. And other than the Diamondbacks, there weren't teams bunting a ton in the postseason. I don't think the Rangers bunted. So again, it was like people were so hungry, so eager for a small ball. That's the way to win. I get it. It's fun when it's working, when a team like the Diamondbacks, if a team is not striking out a lot or is speedy and scrappy and slapping the ball around. I like that. I wish that it were a more foolproof way to win.

But on the whole, it's just not really. However, I wanted to give Boone or Boone via Steinbrenner the benefit of the doubt here and figure out why would he be saying that the bunt is coming back? Why would the Yankees be doubling down on bunting or deciding we need to go back to bunting? And I think there is some support for the idea that bunts have become a better play recently. And I'll use Fangraphs mostly for this, the splits leaderboard with some help from Lucas Pasteleros of Baseball Perspectives. So obviously bunting is not back or anything like bunts are less common by a long shot than they've been in past years. So like this year, according to Fangraphs, there were 1,105 bunts in the regular season. Well, in 2002, which is the first season of the Splits leaderboard, there were 3,301. So basically there were three times more bunts back then than

there are now. A lot of that, of course, is the fact that pitchers don't hit anymore. So we'll get to that. If you just look at WRC Plus on bunts, and now this is just bunts put in play. So like bunts where you attempt the bunt and you actually get it down. And one thing that makes bunting tough is that very often when you attempt it, you don't get it down. You bunt it foul or you just whiff entirely. On episode 2051 on a stat blast, I talked about bunting success rates. But if you just look at bunts that were in play,

here are the WRC plus marks by season since 2002, league-wide, where 100 is average and lower is worse, higher is better. Okay. So starting in 2002, 72, 69, 64, 68, 53, 62, 66, 68, 75, 76, 77, 75, 89, 80, 77, 61, 81, 76, 71-76, 135, that's 2020, 61, 2021, and then 170 and 162 in the past two seasons. So there are three seasons there that are not like the others. Okay, all the others are well below average. And then you have 2020, 2022, and 2023. What do those seasons have in common?

They're universal DH seasons. They're seasons where pitchers didn't hit and thus didn't bunt. Because when pitchers bunt, most of the time, they're sacrifice bunting. And also, they're probably not good at it. They're not fast. They're not sprinting. They're not going to beat it out most of the time. So in the universal DH years, the non-pitcher hitting years, bunting has been above average as opposed to below average in all other years. Okay, that makes sense. That's just a product of stripping out pitcher hitting. However, if we just limit it to position players and we go back to 2002. Now, every year is above average, above 100. So when position players get bunts down, typically, that's good. It's a better than average outcome. However,

nowhere close to these past two years, 170 and 162. So most years, it's like in the low 100s range, low to mid, whereas 2022, 170 WRC plus and 2023, 162. So in this sample, these past two seasons have actually been wildly successful bunting seasons. The results on bunts have been really good. And that is, I think, interesting. We could puzzle out why that is. Because again, we're just talking about position players here. So this is not including pitchers. Why would position players have better results now on bunts than they used to?

And I think part of it is that bunting has still gotten less common. So even if you strip out the pitchers, there used to be more than 2,000 position player bunts a year. This year, just over 1,000. And that means that probably you have better bunters bunting, right? right? So these days, the only guys who are bunting are guys who have some aptitude for it, and they've practiced it, and they're speedy, right? But we've had better results even in the last two seasons when the number of bunts by position players haven't really gone down a whole lot. So it would suggest that bunting has been a better play in the last couple years. And I've been trying to figure out why that is. I think it could partly be, again, that as the bunt just gets de-emphasized more and more, it's just a better class of bunters are the ones doing the bunting. Partly, the fact that the bunt total by position players hasn't declined more is because people are sacrificing more in extras because of the

zombie runner. So the zombie runner has brought the bunt back a little bit. Yeah, you start extra innings with a runner on second, no outs. Sometimes you're going to bunt the guy over. And so if you include extra innings in here, then the results have been 172 WRC plus and 167, a little bit better. So bunting in extra innings has actually been a little bit better, but there just aren't that many extra innings and not that many extra innings bunts. So that's not really accounting for why bunting has been more successful. Part of it, I think, is that the distribution of bunts by position players has gravitated more toward non-sacrifice bunts. So it's bunting for a hit more so than sacrificing. So like in the early 2000s, most bunts by position players were

sacrifice bunts. It was like 45%, you know, were non-sacrifice. And now it's like 60% or more are non-sacrifice, are bunting for a hit. And it was actually even more pre-Zombie Runner. It got up to almost 70%. So yeah, for a while there, it was kill the bunt and bunting is bad, but that was really always limited to sacrifice bunting. Yeah. Bunting for a hit, that can be good. Yeah, thrilling in fact. Yeah, thrilling, exciting, and also rewarding. And lately, a greater percentage of the bunts by position players have been bunting for a hit. So that's part of it. But I think the last piece of the puzzle is probably that I would guess that defenses are not defending against the bunt as much as they used to, or they're not practicing defending against the bunt as much as they used to because it's reached this tipping point where bunting is very uncommon.

There's sort of the element of surprise because you're not expecting it. So I would guess that with pitchers not batting anymore and position players bunting less, probably fielders are playing back more, right? So they're not in bunting position. I don't think it has anything to do with the shift rules because this was the case even in 2022 that bunts were working out well. But at a certain point, you don't expect it. So you're not going to play in because there's going to be a cost to playing it so you're not going to play in because there's going to be a cost to playing in you're not going to have as much lateral range and you're going to get eaten up by hard hit balls so i would think that sort of makes sense that the less you bunt

the better the bunters and probably the less prepared fielders are so yeah so it's it's kind of a cat and mouse thing. I think that that's, I think that you're right. I think that that's a good explanation. Yeah. So I don't know if I would, if I were Aaron Boone, if I'd say, well, we got to bring back bunting now. I mean, I guess if teams reacted to this by bunting more, then fielders would just start

playing in more and then bunting would not be as successful and it would just be back and forth and back and forth. But it is true when position players get a bunt down, especially a bunt for a hit and a non-sacrifice these days, it does really tend to pay off. So I think Aaron Boone is not entirely imagining things. Again, like you'd still probably just rather be the Braves and have an overpowering offense that's good at everything and on the whole it's not like teams that bunted a ton were way better this year the opposite if anything but but there's something to it

I always with these quotes that make you scratch your head and think yeah they thinking like the often there's some little kernel of truth there maybe. Maybe. And, you know, maybe the Yankees analytics people, if they still even have an analytics department. Right. I mean, like, you know, a meager ghost town of a set of cubicles, as we've heard. Then they might be running these numbers and saying, hey, if we could teach our guys

to bunt, defenses are not prepared for that, so maybe we could take advantage of it. And maybe some of this is just pandering, too, because there's certainly a section of the fanbase that likes small ball and likes the lip service at least of like, yeah, we're gonna

advance runners and situational hitting and all that stuff. Especially the old school fans, they like to hear that. So even if you don't follow through on it, maybe from a PR perspective, maybe it could mollify some people potentially. I think that the issue is that the folks who are really into that style. And I think we're right to point out that it's like, hey, just have a really good offense. And often that is not going to be one that bunts a ton. And certainly not as much as, say, the Diamondbacks did. But I also think that there's this vision

that everyone is going to be an 80-speed guy, right? That you're just going to have a team full of Corbin guy right that like you're just gonna have a team full of corbin carrolls and it's like but you're not though and you know um when his shoulder is doing okay like that guy's for power so you know he's fast and he steals bases but i think that the thing that old school fans are envisioning isn't even bunting for a hit they're imagining sacrifice bunting and then they're imagining really fast guys doing it and it's like you know you're the yankees you aaron judge what did you just like hit a bunch of dingers and you played a little league ballpark so like that's

dismissive but it's not wrong you know how it can be both things it can be rude but still a little true yeah um so just like you know hit some dingers probably and i think that saying we want a team that is going to be better at making contact and is able to utilize that to power an offense like that's defensible but that's not what old school fans mean either you know they're not like anyway i think it's um i think it's a little silly so it doesn't mean that there's nothing to it but it is not i think the best way that you can put an offense together both in terms of like your actual propensity to score and like how fun it is to watch.

So there's that. All right. Well, bunts, rarer than ever and maybe better than ever in a way. Yeah. The Diamondbacks had two bunt hits this postseason, a grand total of two, and they led all teams. The Astros had one, the Brewers had one, and that was it. So, yeah. And I mean,

there were, the Diamondbacks sacrificed nine times. Yeah. They had nine sacrifice bunts. No other team

sacrificed more than once. The Rangers did not sacrifice once. They didn't have a single bunt hit. They won the World Series. So, I don't know that we need

to look at the Diamondbacks and say, oh, that's the formula. That's the way to win. Yeah. Anyway. Bunts and bunts and bunts and bunts and bunts and bunts and bunts. And StatBlast still sponsored by Tops Now. Now, the season is over.

It's over. However, there are still some cards available via Tops Now. Yeah. The usual business model for Tops Now is that there are baseball games, and then the very next day, Tops pumps out some cards just based on what happened in those baseball games. Even though there are no baseball games currently going on, no Major League, no MLB games going on right now,

there are still some Tops Now cards, and they do not expire immediately. So you can go get them. So they have a 10-card set right now of Players' Choice Award winners. So the Players' Choice Awards, you know, they've got Outstanding Player and Outstanding Pitcher and Outstanding Rookie and Comeback Player and Player of the Year. These are players choosing their own award winners. And so there's a 10-card set of Tops Now Players' Choice award winners, Acuna, Gunnar Henderson, Corbin Carroll, etc. And there is also a 15-card set for the Rangers. So your 2023 World Series champions who did not bunt even once in the postseason. Not even one time. Yeah, you can get those Player's Choice cards until November 15th.

You can get the Rangers Tops Now 15 card set until December 1st. So act now or act soon. And you can check out those sets at tops.com. We will link to them, of course. And also, just to close the loop on something, thank you to Andrew, Patreon supporter, for asking about the bunting question. We also, in our Facebook group, listener Isaac was listening to an old episode and he requested a follow-up.

So on episode 1991, this was in early April, we answered a question from Jay about which teams we thought would have the most or least pitch clock violations this season. And I don't know exactly which teams we picked, but my hypothesis was that, or my basis for picking teams was that age would be the thing that would matter most for multiple reasons. One, because if you're young, then you certainly played with the pitch clock in the minors or elsewhere. And so you'd be used to it. And also because maybe if you're younger, you're less likely to need the recovery time or get winded. In past seasons, there've been studies that show that older players benefited more from taking more time between pitches, right? So my theory was team age would be the best predictor of violations.

And I was just trying to do a little after-the-fact analysis to see if that held true. And I think it did, actually. Yeah, there was nothing I saw that predicted violations really well. I looked at a number of factors and the correlations were low, whatever I looked at. But looking at team age and comparing to batter violations and pitcher violations compared to pitcher age and team age. There were correlations at least directionally right. They were weak. They were like 0.16. So, you know, the higher it is, if it's one, it's a perfect correlation where one thing moves up and the other thing moves up.

This is a weak correlation, but it at least was in the right direction where the older the team was, the more violations it had. And I looked at it on a player level too. And there the correlation was slightly stronger, even like 0.19. So that was the only thing I found that really seemed to have any kind of correlation because the other stuff I looked at just didn't really pan out. Like I looked at average velocity of all pitches because I thought maybe if you throw harder more often, then you would need more time to recover. But that turned out not to be the case at all. In fact, it was just the opposite. The softer you threw, the more violations there were.

Like the softer you threw, the more violations there were. If I looked just at fastball, four-seamer velocity, it was in that direction. Higher velocity, more violations, but extremely weak correlation, even lower than the age one. And I looked at pace. I thought, well, pace must predict violations. Like if you're taking more time, then maybe that just makes you more likely to take too much time. But it didn't really seem to actually. Even I looked at it on a team level and on a player level.

I looked at 2022 pace. I looked at 2023 pace and either there was no connection or an extremely weak connection. So taking longer overall didn't mean that you took too long often. So yeah, the only factor I could really find that seemed to have a correlation, albeit a weak one, was team age. So I guess some slight vindication there potentially. But I'm sure if you

did a fancy regression, you could come up with some other factors that maybe were significant. And even that one was weak. So other things definitely determined that age was not destiny when it came to violations. Bunce and bunce and bunce and bunce and bunce and bunce and bunce. We'll take a quick break and we'll be back with Ben Clemens to talk about free agents. The problem we're trying to solve is that there are rich teams and there are poor teams. Then there's 50 feet of crap. And then there's us. Hey, kids, this is the stomach flu.

He is an angry virus that likes to cause stomach pain and diarrhea. Scientists have been looking for a way to keep that awful stomach bug away. Our experts agree. By washing your hands after you poop and pee tells that stomach bug, let me be. Wash those hands after you wipe and send those germs down the pipe. Well, Craig Council and Jason Benetti are both off the board, but there are still some free agents left. Not quite as exciting as Council and Benetti, of course, who have both traded teams within the centrals. But Ben Clemens has ranked the remaining free agents for Fangraphs, and he is here to talk to us about them today.

Hello, other Ben. Hey, Ben. How's it going? Okay. Did you have any trouble finding 50? I'm going to say that if Jason Panetti was allowed to be in these rankings, he would have done pretty well. This was not a great year for

free agent depth. Yes, I saw someone asked you in your chat where Craig Kounsela would have ranked if he had qualified for the top 50 free agents list, which I guess is a larger, deeper question that is asking you how you value managers or maybe the best manager in baseball. But he would have been on the list and probably not super low on it, even though I don't know how you value Craig Council, but even so, he would have been an impact player. Yeah, I wonder about that question too,

and probably not in a rigorous enough way that I could write about it. That's a tough question. I'm not the first person to have wondered that. But come on, you're saying you wouldn't want Craig Council on your team more than, I don't know, the 47th ranked free agent or whatever? I think probably any fan who says that is not telling the truth. Yeah. Let's see who is number 47 on your list. Alex Wood. Would you rather have Craig Council than Alex Wood? Yeah, probably. I don't even think that's that close. Sorry, Alex. Although you did project Alex Wood for an average annual value of $8 million, which is roughly what

Craig Council is. Yeah. I mean, that makes roughly what Craig Council's going to get. Councilian. Yeah. I mean, that makes me especially want Council more. I guess Council got more years than you're projecting Alex Wood to get. Anyway, if there's a misconception about this free agent class, I think maybe it's that the entire class is weak, whereas you really have to separate between pitchers and position players. I don't know if it's a great pitching class, but there's a huge difference, right? So if people are saying, oh, it's a week for aging class, there's no pitching. There's actually plenty of pitching. The problem really is that Cody Bellinger is the top ranked position player, unless you count Otani, who will not be playing an actual position this year other than DH. you count Otani, who will not be playing an actual position this year other than DH. Yeah, I actually think the pitching is good this year.

Yeah. Particularly in its depth. There's just a lot of solid number two starters available, which is not always or even frequently the case. But yeah, the hitting is just like last year was a hitting bonanza. And this year is just not that in so many different ways. Bonanza. And this year is just not that in so many different ways. It seemed as if when we were kind of compiling this, that there were, you know, there were a couple of guys who were sitting toward the bottom of that 50 range. And some of them made their way onto the main section of the list as option decisions and opt outs and whatnot got clarified. But if you had ranked a 51st guy,

who might that have been, do you think, Ben? This one I'm certain of. It would be Hyunjin Ryu. Like, he definitely would have been next up. We have a blurb written for him, which I threw in my chat today, because, you know, like, might as well get all the content out there.

I'm a little bit upset with myself for not having him on the list higher, not because I think he's going to get a deal that outstrips kind of the bottom of this list. And that's always one of the questions that I find myself faced with when I'm compiling these is, should I just project the 50 biggest contracts? Or should I project the 50 free agents who I like the most? And I think that someone should take a shot on Ryu, like more so than I think a lot of the guys at the back of this list are interesting,

particularly like some relievers. I just, it's hard for me to want to spend a lot of money on relievers that aren't like Josh Hader. Yeah. Whereas Ryu, if Ryu is good, he's really good. He's like a, you know, an easy top three in your rotation starter, despite just not having good stuff because he's really precise and maybe he won't be that guy again. But like, I guess that's another reason to say the pitching is pretty deep. You can get off the list, off the top 50 in an inarguably weak class, and still be maybe signing Hyunjin Ryu. That's pretty good. Yeah. And you did actually quantify how this class compared to last year's class, which was seen as a really big one and had record spending,

although some of the results probably left something to be desired. But that was seen as a really strong class and tons of years and dollars for the top guys. And you compared the Zips projections. So can you share what the magnitude of the difference is here? Yeah. So I compared it two ways. One is just the top 10. And this year's top 10 is less good overall. So last year's top 10 added up to 46 and change war, 46.2 to be specific. This year's add up to 32. And this is for projected 2024 statistics. That sells Otani short, right?

Like you're not just signing Otani for his 2024 war. Or I mean, you're not signing any of these guys for one year. But his 2024 is obviously less than mean, not saying any of these guys for one year, but his 2024 is obviously less than his 2025 will be because of pitching. But even if you give him, I said three war of credit for pitching, that seems like a fine estimate for once he's back. We're still way short. And then if you look at the whole top 50, it's an even bigger deficit. So 121.3 war was the projection for the top 50 guys in 2023. This year is about 90.

So, you know, meaningfully less. Yeah. And if you could separate out pitchers and position players, it'd probably be even more drastic because last year had a lot of really strong position players. I thought about doing that, but it just looks like too lopsided and made it hard to compare. And so I just said, ah, we'll do the overall numbers. And that still kind of gets the point across that, like, there will be less money spent in free agency this year than last year.

And there will be less, like, 2024 money spent, like the average annual value of each contract. That'll be way less. And it won't be because free agency is dying or because baseball is going into a recession or because of Bally. Although it could partially be that. It's largely because the players just aren't as good in the aggregate. I feel like when you have a weak class like this, you know, sometimes the the list publication to publication can almost vary more because, you know, you're you're being forced to

choose between a bunch of guys who when you look at their projections or anticipate what their contracts might be, they're sort of landing in a similar spot, right? And so I wonder if, and I don't say this to knock anybody else's list, but just as you were thinking through like where you stand versus any industry consensus, were there particular demographics of players who you were higher or lower on? Were there guys who you felt like, I don't understand why everyone likes this guy or why other people don't like this guy as well as I do? I can give you a bunch of different ones of these. I'll start with my broad preferences, let's call them. I ranked fewer relievers and put them lower than everyone else did. I think that's just the main difference. And the reasons for that are that I don't buy that,

like, you should be really excited to go spend a ton of money to put Jordan Hicks on your team. I like Jordan Hicks a lot. He was one of the first players I ever wrote about as an author, and I find him very interesting. But he's the second best reliever on the market. And he's been bad, like actively bad into the last three seasons. And he's all like, he's gonna get paid because when he's on like he was this year, he's great. But that seems like a weird use of free agency resources, which tend to be scarce, like for better or worse, teams don't have infinite money to spend on free agents or don't choose to. And I think too much of that goes to kind of one-inning relievers. I mean, Meg, you were talking about Rafael Montero yesterday. And it's like, man, he was actually one of the top 50

contracts signed last year for sure. And I don't know, like there's a lot of guys who are like that. I would prefer to be in the spend at the top of the market or spend in bulk and like sign five different guys to smaller deals kind of camp with relievers. And so systematically, I'm just lower on relievers across the board in these lists than everyone else's. And yeah, everyone is doing these. So I'm sure that like mine is not the definitive ranking, but that's one place where I think I feel confident that I'm doing the right thing in just generally devaluing relievers. In terms of specific players, look, I think Whit Merrifield is very fun. I like his style of baseball from my viewing experience.

I do not understand why he ranks fairly highly in some people's top 50 lists. Like, this is what everyone's clamoring for? I understand it's a weak hitting class, but Whitmer Field is not that good anymore. That's a, maybe a harsh way to say it, but he doesn't quite get to league average hitting. He doesn't quite get to league average, like overall. He's 35 next year. I don't, like Zips projects him to be worth less than a win as a 35 year old with kind of not good defense anywhere um not bad defense obviously like he can play several positions but he kind of shuttled between second and left for the Jays and that doesn't like that doesn't

give me a lot of confidence that he's a great defender at either place yeah and he's aging he's not I get that it's a weak class And I get that he's a good baseball player. But these guys are people with similar skills. At least 90% of his skill set tend to be available pretty freely during the season. And I just don't see him as a top 50 free agent. I hope, I don't hope I'm wrong, but I'm definitely open to being wrong. And like I said, I really like watching him play. But I'm definitely open to being wrong. And like I said, I really like watching him play. It's one where it hurts because the way that I like baseball played does have 26 stolen bases and, you know, like plenty of balls in play and stuff. But I just don, like, Charlie Morton wasn't going to be available or we learned about Clayton Kershaw's surgery.

I was always asking, like, is this one where Merrill gets on the top 50? And you really did hold the line. You were a firm no on wit. Well, let's talk about the guy who leads the list, Shohei Otani. Not even elbow surgery could prevent him from being the top free agent. Now, the crowdsourced estimates by FanCraft's readers for his contract, roughly 10 years and $450 million. And when I was writing about him not long ago and I was trying to get a feel from front office folks about what they thought he would get, front office folks about what they thought he would get. I generally was hearing somewhere between 400 and 500 post-entry, although no one really seemed to have any high degree of confidence

about those estimates. You went higher. You went with 13 years and $527 million. Is that meaningfully different from what you would have projected for a fully healthy Tuwe Otani? Did it just not make any difference because of everything else he brings and because of the weakness of the class? I think I would have projected a similar amount of money with fewer years, which is maybe silly and maybe kind of, maybe tells me that my first projection would have been wrong. But no, I don't think it matters a lot in terms of

he's just going to get a really large check. I do think it matters in terms of, like, maybe teams will say we want to put a few extra years on it. Because even at the end of your career, we think you'll be a good hitter. And we value having Shohei Otani on our team. So, like, in exchange for the fact that you're not pitching this year, let's give you the same amount of money, but tack on a few years at the end. This is the one that I struggled the most with though. And I wasn't even sure what I'd project before he injured himself.

Obviously, I knew that I was going to be doing this exercise and I knew that Otani would be number one. And so I've been thinking about this question for quite a while. Yeah. This has got to be like most unprecedented is one of those annoying phrases that is almost never true.

And it's kind of like most unique. Yeah, it is like most unique, Ben. You know what that is? It's a bad expression. Yeah. It's either unique or it's not. You know, it can't be more unique. Look, we've hashed this out before.

We've had this fight. I don't say most unique if I can avoid it. But I'm just saying my mind was sort of changed on this by someone somewhere, I forget who or where, when making the argument that there are different ways in which you can be unique, right? And so you can be unique in more than one way. And so if you're the most unique, that might mean that you're just unique in a bunch of different categories, right? Like everyone's unique in some way, but maybe some people are more unique. They're unique across a broad spectrum of categories.

No, it does not submit to degrees. I disagree. Fundamentally, if I were your editor, I would change this every time. I wouldn't even write it, to be clear. I guess I'll just say that the difficulty with projecting an Otani contract is that basically Otani picks what he wants his contract to be. If he tells teams that I'm looking for eight year deals, and so like, it's going to be eight years, tell me what your average annual value will be, then that's what it'll be. If he tells teams, I want to deal with an off out after three years, and I won't

sign with you unless you give me one. Well, okay, he's got one. This isn't the case where like, there's six shortstops available, and they kind of filter out to the right team based on what the team's looking for and what the player's looking for. There's one Otani, and there's a lot of guys who want him, and he'll figure out what he wants. Like, maybe he wants an incentive-laden deal. Maybe he wants a Julio Rodriguez-style, I don't even know what you call that thing,

like a transformer kind of contract where we don't know what it is for three years. But whatever he wants, he's going to get. Like, it's just not going to come down to money. I can't see him being like, well, I'd actually like 527. And some team is like, well, we're holding the line at 515, Shohei. That's just not, he's going to end up where he wants to end up. And that makes this really hard because I understand that lots of teams will just throw a checkbook at him. But I don't think he's going to be getting 60 or 70 million dollars a year. I just don't think baseball teams are going to pay that.

And it's kind of one of these like teams have chosen not to super compete on contract size. There's kind of an understood top end of the contract market. And that's good for them because there's less money in the game, but also like it's enough money that he won't care about money. He already probably doesn't care about money for the rest of his life, but now he really won't. And so, yeah,

he should, he'll just go where he wants to go. And that makes it hard to predict. Yeah. Yeah. I can buy the injury, not making that big a difference to the bottom line for one thing. It sounds like he didn't even have full Tommy John.

He had sort of a partial reconstruction kind of anchoring the ligament that was intact, but just detached perhaps, which might make his outcomes better. But the fallback plan for him, even if he weren't able to be a two-way player, which I expect that he still will be and still intends to be and still can be, but he could be presumably roughly as valuable as he has been to this point if he were just a plus defensive everyday right fielder or whatever, right? I don't know that that would sap his on-field value that much. I could see it maybe sapping some of his sensation value if he's just a really good everyday position player,

then, well, those are not a dime a dozen, but they're not the most unique, right? And so for him to be the two-way player, I mean, I guess even if he's only as unique as anyone else's unique, every player is unique, but he's unique in the most interesting, impressive, fascinating way. But I think that's the only thing. If he were not a two-way player, would he be as big a draw? I don't know that he would be ultimately if he just moved. You know, the way that Bryce Harper is now a first baseman, and I'm sure he'll still be very valuable as a first baseman, and it'll keep him healthy and everything. is a first baseman and it'll keep him healthy and everything. But if you said, okay, Shohei,

you're a first baseman now, or you're a right fielder or whatever, then am I going to be tuning in for every single one of his games and plate appearances anymore? I don't know, maybe, but it won't be quite as arresting as it has been to this point. Yeah, I think that's true. I really like Sam Miller's article about, you know, basically about Shohei and Babe Ruth, where he imagined how Shohei could be better. And it was essentially 1927 Babe Ruth. It's like, what if he focused a little more on hitting and played the outfield and played good defense as a result of focusing on it? Yeah. Yeah. Like, I could imagine him being a better overall player as a hitter only, but less interesting for sure.

Yeah. Well, I won't ask you to predict where he's going to go because no one knows. No one knows anything about how he's even making that decision other than it seems like he wants to win some games for a change. But in line with the Ben Clemens philosophy of predicting things about baseball, which is that you're not necessarily predicting the thing you think is most likely, but the thing you think is maybe more likelier than the consensus or more likely than the consensus? Because everyone's sort of saying, well, the favorites are the Dodgers, and I don't have a reason to suspect that that's not the case. But is there a team you think is not getting enough mention as an Otani suitor? I first want to say that I'm extremely disappointed in all of the Major League GMs who answered MLB.com's survey about? I first want to say that I'm extremely disappointed in all of the Major League GMs who answered MLB.com's survey about this. I want to get that out there specifically on the record.

I don't know if you saw this, but at the GM meetings before they were so rudely ended, they got 14 GMs to anonymously pick where they thought Otani would land. Ten picked the Dodgers and four refused to pick. Just don't go, don't bother participating in this. Like literally they said, okay, you can count my vote, but my vote is for I don't know. And I refuse to pick anonymously. Are you kidding me?

Like just don't answer. That makes me really annoyed. And also, what are the other 16 GMs doing? Like, this is free. It's probably relationship building with this reporter. It's off the record. Like, it's anonymous. Just pick something.

And the 10 who picked the Dodgers were all like, but I don't know. You could end up anywhere else, too. Yeah, that's implied, guy. Like, it hasn't happened yet. It just makes me furious. Like, you don't have to hedge that way. Just pick something. So that said, I think that a team that is not getting enough love in the Itani sweepstakes in the recent coverage is the Mariners.

Oh, boy. Ben. Pandering to Meg here. Wow. Not the case. No, this is so stressful. He knows that. Like, now I'm going to have here. Wow. Not the case. No, this is so stressful. He knows that. Like, now I'm going to have expectations. But I just

think that we had this old idea of what Otani wanted a few years ago, maybe last year, which was, like, play on the West Coast and win. And, okay, like, then we decided, I don't know, he's just going to go to the Dodgers and, ooh, maybe the Cubs, the Rangers. Like, those are exciting. And just started putting more names out there and like the Maritors stay winning. Like they're good. And nothing has made me think

that he's less likely to sign there than he was a year ago when they were considered closer to the top of the heap. So that gets my vote as the one that is being under considered. But I mean, who knows? Like I do think it's reasonable that the Dodgers are the have the plurality of the percentages and all the both

like betting markets and prediction markets that I've seen. That makes sense. Like, they got a lot of money, they they structured their contract around it. Obviously, if you want to win, the Dodgers are not a bad place to go. Unless you're, unless you're like really focused on postseason results, but presumably you'd want to change that if you're Otani. But yeah, I think that it's truly unknown and that it would be crazy to think one team is 50% likely to sign him. That said, yeah, Mariners, Giants, Rangers, I think are all pretty interesting landing spots for him.

I have no clue if he wants to play in Chicago or New York or Boston, but I mean, maybe, like why not? So this was not the first year that we, in your tenure with this exercise, that we have had international players, international pros on this list. Although I don't think that we've at any point while you've been sort of running things had this many players from NPB and the KBO. And I wonder if you could help our listeners understand just how you think about ranking those guys and determining contract values for them because obviously it's not like we don't know anything about Yamamoto. We have data on him, you know, we're able to watch some video,

we have some context for him, but obviously these are the guys on the entire list who you're arguably the least familiar with from not having watched them for the last six years in the major. So how do you think about sort of placing those guys? And do you I am going to ask you where you think Yamamoto is going to go? Because I am curious about this question and I don't have a definitive answer myself. So this is the year I think actually ever in these ratings with the most foreign professionals in the top 50. I might be missing some very old years, but I don't remember any years with that many foreign players being posted or, you know, coming freely depending on what the case may be for their

specific situations. And certainly in my tenure and like Craig's and Kylie's tenure, I haven't gone all the way back. But yeah, there are a lot of good foreign professional players this year. In terms of how to deal with them, Yamamoto, I think, is categorically different than the rest. And that's because he just has a lot of tape. He's been dominant, dominant in NPB for years and years. Three times in a row, he's won the Sawamura Award. He's won the pitching triple crown three times in a row. Like, i think he's pitched no hitters in two consecutive seasons his era hasn't been over two since like i don't even know since before anybody knew what covet was it's really outrageous like and i don't think there's a lot of question and a lot of oh we'll give them a discount because

of the way things work in the posting system like he's just really great and he's just going to slot in as a great pitcher right away there's a lot less adjustment for pitchers coming over, right? You just, you throw the pitches. It's a lot less reactive of a thing for everyone behind him. It's trickier. If they're pitchers, they don't have stuff that translates quite so cleanly or they're relievers where you kind of wonder about the level of competition translating because there you have a little bit less room. If a guy is a three and a half ERA true talent reliever instead of three, your returns start to diminish pretty quickly. And I think there's less question about that with Yamamoto,

also since he's 25. There's a lot of room for growth left. There's just a lot of ways this can go well. Hitting is always the hardest. And I only have one foreign professional hitter, Lee Jung-hoo, who is like really hard to assess. And I'll give you an example of this process at work. I rely pretty heavily on Eric Langenhagen and Dan Zaborski for these because Eric does a lot of in-person or video scouting, rather. And Dan does a lot of translation work and projection work.

And Dan thinks that he's going to be a much worse defender than Eric does. And it's really hard. And teams are going to be facing that same decision, right? They need to rely on their scouts and their models guys to kind of split the difference on this. those guys to kind of split the difference on this. And particularly for a guy with a profile like Lee's, his range of outcomes offensively is huge. Like, he's not a power threat kind of guy. He's going to be a single digit home run hitter, almost certainly on average in the majors. But he's not also like a, like he is a zero strikeout guy. But it's hard to imagine that continuing against like major league pitchers. They're justout guy, but it's hard to imagine that continuing against like

major league pitchers. They're just really good and it takes a while to adjust. So I think that his market is going to be all over the place. I do a lot of past comparison, like marking my things to market and then adjusting for inflation when I'm projecting contracts. And I don't think that Lee projects all that different than Hassan Kim did when he came over. Yeah. But he signed a very low deal that I think even at the time, everyone thought was under market. I think it was four years at $7 million a year. So $4.28 in total. And that just felt low even at the time. And it has proven to be low. It turns out that we all knew what we were talking about.

Yeah. But I do think that teams won't go as high as market for these guys, because there's a lot of risk inherent. And it would really hurt to sign somebody to say, like, four years at 20 million a year and have them deliver a 10 million a year performance when you were signing a guy you didn't know a lot about because the range of outcomes is just really uncertain. And so I think everyone will kind of take a, like most foreign players take a bit of a discount to fair value when they come over.

That's just kind of how it works because risk aversion is a real thing. It's not fake and it, like you shouldn't discount it. So I have been projected for four years at $15 million a year. So more than double what Kim got when he came over. I still think that undervalues his skill, but as Eric pointed out in his write-up of Lee, it's kind of a multi-year deal if you sign him. Even if you think he's going to be great, you can't expect him to be great right away. Prospects who come up from the equivalent of AA, I think you can cuff KBO somewhere in the AA, AAA range. They don't always hit right away. There's no reason to think this is going to work perfectly in year one his defense is not like bad but i estimations of it certainly vary and he was injured at the end of this year and so you don't know how much that

injury will linger and how much of it made his defense look worse recently or like how how it will translate these are tough things to do okay the last thing that i need to address here then is where i think yamamoto will go yeah this is boring, but I'm just gonna say the Mets. I think that this is a unique chance for the Mets. Like they have all the money in the world. Yeah, we get it. And maybe they tricked Max Scherzer into saying they wouldn't compete in 2024 to get him off the team. And they will and who knows. And there's all this kind of stuff. And how much is David Stearns just already telling us that he's actually going to go back to shopping at a thrift store? I don't know. But you know what you can't get with money? Young aces. Like that's just not, that's not how money works. Like aces hit the

market at 29 or 30, and then you can pay them a ton of money and sign them. Or you can trade a bunch of players for one when they're young, or you can draft one. That's how you get them. So getting a 25 year old guy who could win a Cy Young award for young, or you can draft one. That's how you get them. So getting a 25-year-old guy who could win a Cy Young award for money, you just can't do. It basically never happens. And so here you can. And so if the Mets are serious about basically becoming Dodgers East, that's like an overused thing. But basically, if they're serious about being a very good long-term team, one of the biggest deficiencies in that model is that it's hard to convert money into young, very good players. That's like the biggest shortcoming of

the whole just transmute money into wins model. And this is a chance to skip that. Like you can actually do it for once. So if there's ever a time to just take out the checkbook and blow everybody away, like I'm not even the highest among the industry in predicting a contract for Yamamoto, and yet much higher than the crowd. Yeah. Well, Senko worked out quite well for them. So, yeah, and of the other international guys you talked about Yamamoto, you talked about Lee,

Shota Imanaga, Yuki Matsui, and Yariel Rodriguez. Rodriguez, of course, is Cuban, but has been playing in NPB. Can you give a capsule summary of those guys? Just because there are probably listeners who haven't heard of them or know nothing about them, which is not the case for some similarly skilled or productive domestic free agents. Yeah. So we'll start with Imanaga because he's the next on my list after Yalamoto. If you are just thinking Kodai Senga level results with different strengths and weaknesses, that's going to get you close. Last year when Senga was coming over, I asked Dan for NPB translation projections,

and he sent me Imanaga's numbers instead of Senga's on accident at first. Then he sent me Senga's instead, and they're the same. That's kind of what you're getting. They had similar results in Japan. They're both very good pitchers. They're both not on Yamamoto's level. But if you're looking for a guy who's probably in the two to three starter realm in the US, I think he mostly fits that.

His issue is more homers than walks. You know, Senga, I think, is always going to walk some guys. But like that general level of performance, if you're expecting that from Yamanaga, and he's coming over at 30, pretty similar. That's kind of what I'd have in my head for him. Yuki Matsui is a much harder player to figure out. And I'm glad that I didn't have to write a capsule for him because he just missed the top 25. But he's had great results for a long time.

And he's also going to be free-ish, as it were. He does not require a posting fee. He's an international free agent rather than a posted international free agent. He's small and he has a high arm slot. Like, he's really small. I think he's listed at 5'8". I don't know if that's actually true or if he's meaningfully shorter. He looks small when he's pitching.

He's a lefty. He's fastball dominant. And it seems to work really well. It's worked really well in NPB for quite a while. He throws a nice splitter, a hard splitter, which works pretty well with fastballs, I think, in general, particularly from an over-the-top arm slot. You know, over-the-top and kind of aiming down means that when a splitter disappears, it really disappears. And that just works really well for him. I guess we'll go to Yariel Rodriguez next. He is a Cuban defector.

He did not pitch in Japan this year. He pitched in the World Baseball Classic as a starter, but he's a reliever. I don't think any team is considering signing him as a starter. Basically, he was a not particularly great starter in Japan. And then he converted to the bullpen, picked up some velocity and just became like awesome. If you're roughly thinking Jordan Hicks in terms of effectiveness, but also, man, he could be all over the place. I think that's that's a pretty good picture in your mind.

If he's the second best reliever on your good playoff team, that's fine. You should feel happy about that. Similarly, I'm only worried about the range of his outcomes in as much as he's a reliever, because relievers are always uncertain. Like this stuff just plays. You look at him pitch and you're like, oh yeah, like that'll work. He's got, I don't think it's quite drop and drive. I'm not great at categorizing these things, but he's got a delivery where he gets good plane on his fastball, despite being over the top-ish, because he kind of drops and then fires it. And it just looks like hitters can't hit it. I'm very impressed by him in as much as you can be impressed by a reliever who you haven't seen pitch against the very best opposition. But man, he looks unhittable when he's on. And I think that teams will be pretty happy just plugging that into the bullpen. What is your sense of the speed

with which the market will move? And I guess one way that we can think about this is maybe specifically, do you think that Otani is going to prove to be a gating factor for the rest of the premier free agents such as they are in this class? Or do you think he's in a group that's, you know, if he's in a tier on his own, does he just exist sort of outside of whatever anyone else is sort of looking to do with, you know, this bevy of

starters and the limited position players that are available? I don't think that he's going to affect the pitching market too much. And basically, my reasoning for that is that teams that are signing Otani are trying to compete in 2024. And I don't think there's anybody who's signing Otani and they're like, part of my six-year rebuilding plan. By 2026, he'll be fully engaged. He just wouldn't go there, for one thing. But also, why? So those teams are not going to be counting on him for 2024 starting pitching innings. And teams think on a long enough scale that it's reasonable to sign Otani and sign a starter, or sign Otani and not sign a starter, but you have that plan already. And so whether or not

you get Otani, I don't think a lot of teams are gonna be like, oh, we failed to get Otani, let's go break the bank on three number two starters. Right. So I don't think that's going to be a huge hold up to the starting pitching market. I actually think that'll go fairly fast because there's a lot of guys, which means that teams will be trying to figure out which one their guy is, you know, early on. And I think pitching will move reasonably fast regardless of what Otani does. I think that the hitting market is going to be somewhat beholden to Otani, particularly if you're a DH-y type. Yeah. Like if you're the Dodgers, maybe you want a J.D. Martinez reunion. I don't know. Like I haven't talked to the Dodgers about this, and I don't think they'd tell me, even if they had an idea. But they're not going to sign J.D. Martinez until

they find out if they're getting Otani. Right. And I think the same goes for a lot of the guys in the 15 to 20 range, like Lourdes Gurriel, Teoscar Hernandez, Reese Hoskins. A lot of these guys would be at home at DH. Soler, probably, right? Yeah, Soler, Mitch Garver. There are a lot of teams who will be signing power DHs this offseason, who can maybe moonlight somewhere else, but mostly are DHs. And a lot of those teams overlap with the teams who think they might get Otani. Like, the Mariners need a DH bat, I think, particularly right-handed power, but any handed power, like, and if it's Otani, awesome. But they're not, like, they don't have the unlimited resources to go sign Jorge Soler and Otani, because, like, they will have used all those resources to sign Otani.

So they're going to wait, like, they're going to see, presumably Otani will tell which teams tell the teams who have a real chance at him, that they have a real chance at him and the other ones will, will go out and kind of move on. But there will be a bit of a freeze at the, like certainly the DHE market. And I could also imagine some of the suitors for Cody Bellinger saying, well, like, let's just wait. Cause if we get Otani, I don't know. And we'll just like keep in touch with Bellinger. So I could see his market waiting till Otani goes. But for the most part, he's, he's so distinct that having a place to play your DH is a reason to hold up a market around Otani, but I don't think the rest really is. Speaking of Bellinger, he is your third ranked free agent, second among

position players, if we're counting Otani as a position player. And yet you said in your chat that basically you wouldn't sign him. Now, that doesn't mean you wouldn't want him at any price. That just means that you wouldn't want him at the price it will presumably take to sign him. But why wouldn't you? I mean, I guess it's not that hard to understand because he was non-tendered literally a year ago, right? So he had this bounce back season. But what about the bounce back season, if anything, makes you wary? Kind of the nature and finiteness of time makes me a little bit wary in that he had one bounce back season and more than that worth of not good seasons. so yeah just like the cumulativeness of it all like he had as

many played appearances in 2023 as he did in 2022 and he was twice as much above average in 2023 as he was below average in 2022 so like right i don't know that makes it really hard to figure out yeah you could say well he just wasn't healthy. He wasn't fully recovered yet. And now he is. I think that's basically what Boris has said. So if you buy that, then I guess you could just kind of toss out the diminished Bellinger seasons. But that's not how projection systems work, obviously.

Right. But then also, he didn't get back to his peak Bellinger form power. And he's relying kind of a lot more on not striking out very much in his most recent form and hitting for a good BABIP. It's unclear to me if that's going to stay. And outperforming X stats is kind of a lazy way of looking at it, because he does have a skill that I think will lead to him consistently outperforming his stat cast metrics, which is that he pulls a lot of his fly balls. And that's a good thing to do if you're a guy with Cody

Belanger-esque power, which is to say, not extreme. Like he's always hit for more power than his raw power because of the nature of his swing and everything like that. So I do think he's going to continue to outperform his expected statistics. I have a lot of just worries about how sustainable this is because it's all over the place and that's to be expected. I mean, this is a guy who's had a 47 WRC plus for half a season, but also 160 for a whole season. Like, he's going to have some variable ups and downs.

Yeah. Basically, I just think that I'd prefer to go get Kevin Kiermaier for, you know, just fractions of the price and try to bet elsewhere on a stable bet. I'm not averse to signing top free agents or whatever. I'm not a GM, so I'm not signing any free agents. I don't think any of them are going to work for fan graphs either. But if I were a GM, this is a place where I'd try to try to get 90% of the production for 50% of the price. There are places where you can't do that.

I think Yamamoto is a guy who doesn't have an easy kind of comparison in free agent markets. And so if you're trying to get him, yeah, go try to get him. But I think Kevin Kiermaier is great. And I don't think he's that much worse than what you should expect from Cody Bellinger next year. And I also think that generally it's not too hard to get good defensive center fielders in free agency. I don't think that should be the case. I think that they're undervalued for sure, but that makes me not want to spend a bunch

on a guy who is a good defensive center fielder, but where I'm paying for a lot of other stuff that might not come through. So that's why, even though I think he's a good player, I don't think I'd be willing to meet the market expectations. Gosh, now I'm thinking about what Cody Bellinger's copy would be like. Hmm. I don't know.

It might be most unique. You had Snell, Nola, and Jordan Montgomery all clustered pretty close from a contract perspective. In fact, they might have all had the same projected contract. How do you think that teams are going to sort of prioritize and think about differentiating those guys from one another when they're trying to make their decision on, we need a number two, and here are some really good ones. I think that this is a case where the overall resumes are close enough that individual teams' views of pitches or fit or we could improve this or we could improve that are going to trump everything else. Obviously, the

easy difference kind of like statistically is that Snell is better, but for fewer innings. That's like the soundbite. Snell will be better when he pitches, but he won't pitch as many innings. Teams care about that, but I think they care about the overall amount of performance. You get a lot more. This isn't like a huge difference in innings either. I mean, Nola is very solid, and he will give you the most innings, I think kind of unquestionably. But Snell against Montgomery, like, I don't know. I would not be too concerned with a giant difference there. The biggest difference to me is what kind of team you want to put him around. Snell feels a little more team immune.

He strikes more batters out, walks more batters. More of his results are on him. And Nolan Montgomery allow far more balls in play. Like, that's just their style. You could imagine, I mean, I guess the Phillies' defense isn't bad anymore. But who's, like, a terrible defense? I mean, like, the White Sox? I don't know. That's kind of, they're not signing these guys. They can't afford Jason Benetti. They're not signing any of these dudes. Sad, sad times. But yeah, like you can imagine putting Aaron Nola or particularly putting Montgomery, who has emphasized his sinker even more so of late in front of a bad defense. I mean, Montgomery looked hurt by the Cardinals defense regressing this year.

Like that kind of thing you could imagine happening. If you're a team with a bad defense, you'd say, I don't know. Should we really go sign Aaron Nola, who we know will show up and give our defense a bunch of balls that they can't field? Right. Or should we just sign Blake Snell and pay for a reliever to kind of cover the innings he's not going to get? Personally, I like Nola the most. That's why I put him first. I think there's an argument that he will get the biggest contract. I think that I projected them

all for the same contract because it was just close enough to be within a margin of error. And my model suggested giving them all the same contract. I think I mentioned this in my chat, suggested giving them all the same contract. I think I mentioned this in my chat, but I kind of like first principles, macroeconomic principles, and project the whole market, and then kind of apply those by war, and then actually make adjustments based on, you know, scouting and my own views and all that kind of stuff. And the model said they should all get the same kind of contract. And I didn't feel confident bumping them off that as much as I looked at it. And I made a ton of adjustments to these throughout the process. I ended up with those guys all the same. But yeah, I would prefer Nola if they all cost the same. So maybe he'll get more. But that'd be my view. Is there a particular team you think

has good timing or bad timing when it comes to this market, Like a team that needs to be players in the free agent market, but that is coinciding with the thinness of the position player side of the market, at least? Or is there a team that you think kind of needs to really take advantage here other than the usual big spenders being big spenders? This is maybe kind of unfair. I'll start with teams who had things break poorly for them. I don't know if the Guardians or Marlins are ever going to spend. That assumes a lot. They made a trade that somehow was both of them shedding payroll this year. And the Josh Bell for a Gene Cigarot trade. And those are the kinds of guys they go after in free agency. But it's a

tough year to be going after the Gene Cigaras and Josh Bells of the world because there aren't any. Both of those guys would have done probably OK in this market. Bell did so well in last year's market that he opted back in and didn't test it again. But he would have been a top 50 free agent this year. He was. It's tough if you're looking to add bats. If you really feel like you need to improve your offense, this is not the year for it.

And so I think those teams that never participate at the top of the market, but would do well with kind of a robust middle class and need hitting, they're in a little bit of trouble. In terms of a team that doesn't always make a big splash in free agency, in fact, almost never makes a big splash in free agency, but could this year, I'll just point out the Cardinals. The Cardinals have said that they're going to sign two or three starting pitchers. And like, man, they really need to. Their rotation is not good. It was one of the worst rotations in baseball last year. And like, it didn't get better. You know, they traded away Jordan Montgomery and Jack Flaherty, who are both in our top 25 free agents. Flaherty more on, you know, maybe he'll get back to when he was good than what he did in 2023. But Montgomery,

especially for what he did in 2023. So Montgomery, especially for what he did in 2023. So the Cardinals really need a kind of rotation talent infusion. We have Zach Thompson and Dakota Hudson and Matthew Libertor projected in there. And man, they don't want to be starting with those guys as options in the rotation. They want those to be the 6-7-8 types. So they need to spend on pitching. And man, what a year for it, right? Like they could probably do to sign two of the top six or seven starters.

They won't. Like as a longtime Cardinals fan, that's not how they operate. And it wouldn't even shock me if they don't get any of the top six starters. It'd make me very sad. But they are set up pretty well. I would have said the Oriioles except they've as much as said they're not going to sign any of the good pitchers so that makes it a little tougher there are plenty of them out there if they if they wanted to which they should it seems like

that is exactly what they need to do so it's not that they missed the boat like with some teams you could say like if teams wanted to follow in the footsteps of the Rangers and go get good position players and then get good pitchers, like this is not the year to get good position players. And so maybe it's good that the Rangers went and got their guys when they did. You don't always have top super shortstops available. But this offseason, you know, you can't really put the Orioles in that class. Like the pitchers are out there for them if Orioles in that class like the the pitchers are out there for them if they decided to go get them the pitchers are there it it just sounds like they're not interested in spending basically in competing not not competing like to win baseball

games but competing with other teams for sought after free agents if you look at Michael Isis quotes about it he basically said that oh's going to be a lot of teams paying ace money, and so we'll probably go a few tiers down. Well, yeah, that's because there's a lot of these good pitchers. Teams want them on their team. I do think that the Orioles haven't been a player in free agency for a long time.

Maybe that's because they're getting ready to sign a bunch of extensions to guys, but it does strike me as strange. This is the perfect team to be participating at the top of the pitching market because they have the hitting, right? And this is the year for the pitching. It just doesn't seem like they're going to. All right. Well, I think we can end there unless there's anyone else you want to shout out some hidden gems in this market that you feel better about than the consensus. Is there anyone you feel like you would end up signing that we haven't discussed that you feel better about than the consensus? Is there anyone you feel like you would

end up signing that we haven't discussed that you would welcome the winner's curse on because you would want to win? Yeah, I'll just generally say, like, I mentioned this in passing when I was talking about Bellinger, but defense versus centerfielders. So Michael A. Taylor, Harrison Bader, Kevin Kiermaier. If Eric is right, Jung-Hoo Lee, these guys, I think, are undervalued by the market every year. And if you look at playoff teams that do well, they have these guys, right? Like, they've got Liotty Tavares out there, or Alec Thomas, or Johan Rojas. It's a place where you can punt offense a little bit. But the crowd did not project a lot for Harrison Bader. Like the crowd projected him to get two years at 9 million per.

If I could do that deal, I definitely would. Like he's a, he is the best defensive center fielder in baseball per stat cast since he debuted. He still looks like a great defender. He's not a great hitter, but that's okay. You know, we're projecting him for basically two wins and getting a two-win player who plays great centerfield defense and kind of makes the rest of your team's defense much easier. Doesn't, you know, nobody needs to be out of position. I think that's the kind of

player I'd end up with. As I mentioned, I like to kind of be at the very top or work in bulk when possible. And I think in bulk, it's a good year for centerfielders. So I would hope that if I were a team who had hitting needs in free agency this year, it was of the good outfield defender type, because I think this is a great market for them. I want him to return to the Blue Jays so that I can hear Buck Martinez say, Ken Kiermaier, in the way that he says that. All right. Well, we'll see where all these guys go and whether your estimates prove accurate or not. But thank you, Ben, for endeavoring to rank 50 free agents, even when there weren't as many appealing ones as there usually are. Yeah, anytime. Oh, I did it entirely to increase my Effectively Wild guest number. Well, success. All right. That will do it for us for today and this week. Thanks,

as always, for listening. We will have more free agent action ahead. We've got to do our annual free agent contract over-unders draft based on the MLB trade rumors predictions. So you can look forward to that and some other fun off-season episodes. For now, I will leave you with an email from listener David, who responded to our banter a couple episodes ago about whether we would watch the winning team celebrate if we were on the losing team in the World Series. David says, I enjoyed the banter about players on losing teams

watching World Series celebrations from the dugout. I was wondering, though, if you're more likely to sit there if you've had a good series yourself. Personally, I'd be more likely to hang around on camera watching the winners

if I had had Corbin Carroll's series than if I had had Christian Walker's. Just a thought. And you know what? I think I agree with that thought. Even if you're a true team player, gotta think you'd feel a little bit better about yourself if you had had a good series personally. Wouldn't be a shame to show my face. But hey, maybe I'm just selfish. I would selfishly suggest that if you enjoy this podcast,

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