Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2098: A Team Deferred

Episode Date: December 14, 2023

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley call for a listener referendum on how to treat Shohei Ohtani’s unprecedented contract in the EW free-agent-contract over/under draft, then (20:43) banter about the Royals’ recent pitching additions and a wizardly Will Smith. After that (33:32), they talk to FanGraphs lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen about the players from Asian […]

Autorni, le stat place, les beef boys sont chouettes Les avis pétantes, et super, une fête Je pense que c'est effectivement cool Je pense que c'est effectivement wild Effectivement sauvage Effectivemental Sauvage. Effective Moral Sauvage. Hello and welcome to episode 2098 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? Well, part of me is excited because we've got some fun stuff to talk about. We've got some interesting news. The San Francisco Giants have finally landed a flashy free agent. They have signed Jung-Hoo Lee after being spurned by Shohei Otani, whom they claim to have offered roughly the same deal that the Dodgers did. But they've got Lee and we're going to talk about Lee. We're going to bring on Eric Langenhagen, who's going to give us the full scouting report

on Lee, but not only Lee, all of the fantastic Asian players who are really enlivening this off season's free agent market. Because as we've talked about, not that great a market if you subtract the Asian players and not just Shohei Otani, but also the players who are coming over from Asian leagues now. Yamamoto, we will talk about at length. We'll talk about Imanaga. We'll talk about some of the relievers and we'll talk about the challenges inherent in evaluating and scouting players who are moving from one league to another and some of the stylistic differences. It's going to be great. However, I am conflicted.

I feel like we can't move forward until we get something straight. And that is, how are we going to handle Shohei Otani's contract in the free agent over understraft? That is the defining question facing Effectively Wild. Now, so much has been written, so much has been said about Otani's deal and is it favorable to him? Is it favorable to the Dodgers? Should people be upset about this? We've talked about it. I've written about it. No one else seems to have really considered what this means for us, the implications for the Effectively Wild over-unders draft. And we've got to tangle with that. We've got to really reckon with this

because how we count that deal will swing this draft, right? Or it could, it certainly could one way. So I think we each have to maybe make a case here. I solicited responses from listeners on the last episode. I asked for amicus briefs as we go to trial over this thing, and people have written in with great perspectives. And this basically boils down to, for those who haven't followed it, we've done an annual Effectively Wild over-unders draft for many years now, where we take the MLB trade rumors predictions for what free agents will make, and then we select some we think will get more or less, and we take the over or the under. And if we pick in the right direction, then we get credit for the amount of money that they got that

was different from what MLB trade rumors predicted. So, you took the under on Shohei Ohtani, who had been predicted to make $528 million by MLB Trade Rumors. And I should say, you also took the over on Lee, and you did quite well for yourself there, as he did. Because they predicted $50 million for him over five years, and he ended up getting quite a good deal more than that. He got a six-year deal, 113. So that would be a windfall, not only for him, but for you in the draft, except that your draft is basically over, as we discussed last week, if you don't get credit for the under on Otani. If you blew that one, if we count the 700 million, then that's it for you. You picked the under, it was the over by

hundreds of millions of dollars, and that sinks your draft. Whereas, if we use the $460 million figure, if we use the net present value, if we use what it is appraised as for competitive balance tax purposes, then in fact, you would have chosen wisely and correctly and you would get credit for that. So you are lodging a formal petition here to do that, I believe. I mean, I guess I am because here we are. I don't know that I expect to prevail because look, we have never, we have never cared about this before. Right. And I can't recall, Ben, I can't remember. I can't remember what we talked about on the podcast the last time, particularly since we had to record part of the segment twice. So

who knows what people heard? I don't know. I don't know what anyone heard. I don't know what anyone heard about it. But, you know, we have never accounted for deferrals previously, right? And the concept of a deferral isn't unprecedented. It's just the magnitude and particular structure of this deferral that is without precedent. So, on some level, I expect to lose because why would we care now, you know, just because I am so profoundly inconvenienced, you know, so there's that part of it. But I do think there is something about this being unprecedented from a deferrals perspective that at least invites us to ask the question of how we ought to consider these things, both in my specific case and generally, because

our understanding of this deal in terms of its real value, right, is that it is, depending on whether you want the CBT number or like the actual sort of net present value number, which are slightly different, right? But, you know, it's somewhere between $460 and $470 million in terms of how we understand the real value of this deal. And that seems meaningful to me, both because I'd like to win and also because, you know, architected this particular strategy so that he could minimize the real present impact of his signing. And he did that for a couple of reasons, many of which we talked about last time. We probably didn't talk about the tax implications for him enough because that seems like it is a an important factor for him, right? And probably maybe as important as the ability to have the Dodgers have payroll flexibility.

But this isn't really a $700 million deal in terms of its value right now. And I think that if we as a podcast are going to dedicate a segment to saying, well, the top line number isn't really what this deal is. This is what this deal really is. And then we're going to talk about it for 30 minutes twice that perhaps I should emerge victorious, um, and get to count, you know, and I'll let you, um, I'll let you pick the higher of the two numbers so that my, um, victory is a little on this particular contract. There's a lot of, there's a lot of off-season left, right? And so me emerging triumphant on this particular question doesn't assure me a win in the draft. It does mean that I haven't lost already. So that's kind of nice. But we felt deflated as a podcast when we heard

the terms of this deal, even understanding when it was initially announced that it would include significant deferrals. We didn't dare imagine, Ben, that it would be this meaningful, that it would knock him down to $2 million a year in real salary and a competitive balance tax hit of a mere $46 million rather than, you know, rather than the 70 that we had originally contemplated as possible. So that's kind of where I'm at. Yeah. Yeah. That's, I understand. It's a valid point of view. I'm somewhat sympathetic if only because if we use the 700, are we perpetuating the sort of fiction that this was a $700 million deal in the sense that a lot of reported free agent terms

are whatever the value they are, right? This is different for all the reasons that we've outlined. The counterpoint would be, well, A, we've never done it that way, right? And yes, this is different in degree, but not quite in kind. And we didn't establish that anything would be different about this when we conducted our draft, right? And no one really could have anticipated exactly the way that this would work out, but we knew that there might be something sort of wonky about the way that this contract works. I mentioned at the time that it might actually have been a great pick for you because maybe he would sign a short-term deal and maybe then you would get credit for that. So there was always a possibility of some unusual structure, right?

And that could have been factored into your decision-making for the pick. There's also just the complication of if we do this, are we opening Pandora's box here? It's very simple to just use that top line number of guaranteed dollars. Once you start bringing in opt-outs and deferrals and whatever else, then it becomes difficult to calculate, or at least we have to agree on a way to calculate it. Because I've seen people come up with all sorts of values for the actual present day value of this contract. According to the AP, for instance, there are three different evaluations of what the contract is worth in present day dollars.

For competitive balance tax purposes, you use a 4.43% discount rate. That's the October 2023 federal midterm rate. And that gives you a value of $460,767,685. But the Players Association hundred sixty seven thousand six hundred eighty five dollars but the players association evaluates it at four hundred thirty seven million eight hundred thirty thousand five hundred sixty three dollars and then for purposes of mlb regular payrolls a 10 discount rate is used and the value is 282 million dollars 107 876 that's the jp morgan chase prime rate plus one percent rounded to the nearest full percentage point. I'm learning a lot more about interest rates than I ever cared to know, but I've seen so many figures using different interest rates and what could Ohtani get if he invested that money.

Just for consistency and simplicity's sake, I think it makes sense to stick with that top line number. It's not a complete fiction. He will receive $700 million. Those dollars just won't be worth as much when he gets them as they are now. So I'll read a few responses from listeners. We had people write in to support both sides. Vicky said, definitely think that Meg's free agent draft should be counted as present day value. Aaron said, I'm not a corporate attorney, but in my humble opinion, Shohei's contract should be considered like it is considered for luxury tax purposes.

10 and 460. Huge momentum swing for Meg. Coolbee said in our Patreon Discord group, I want to weigh in on the side that's in favor of ruling the Otani contract as 460 for the sake of the free agent draft. That's not the letter of the law, according to past precedent. But in this case, it's clearly closer to the spirit of the underlying exercise. I agree. Yeah. Then taking the 700 at face value. And if you can't make ad hoc decisions to accord with the generally accepted spirit of a zero stakes wager, where or where can we ever find justice in this world? All right. That's a sensible point there. Now, we did get people writing in on the other side,

some of whom did extensive research, really, which is quite impressive. They really took the spirit of the amicus brief to heart. For instance, here's some useful information from JJ. By my count, through 2022, there were 95 contracts selected in the over-under draft, of which 10 were reported to have deferrals, or approximately 11%. On average, there are two contracts each draft which contain deferrals. 2022 is the only draft for which no selected contract contained deferred money. Through the 2022 draft, the contract with the largest raw dollar amount of deferred money is Freddie Freeman's contract, selected in the 2021 draft with 57 million deferred. The contract with the

largest percentage is Brad Hand's contract selected in the 2020 draft, of which 6.5 million of 10.5 million was deferred, or approximately 62%. How about that, Meg? 62% of Brad Hand's contract was deferred. Three contracts selected have had at least one third of the total money deferred. Freeman's, Didi Gregorius' contract selected in the 2020 draft and Steven Strasberg's contract selected in the 2019 draft. And another three contracts have been between 18 and 24 percent of their total money deserved. Incredible research here. The lowest total value of a contract with deferrals is Andrew Kashner's 16 million

selected in the inaugural draft. The largest total value of a contract with deferrals is Andrew Kashner's $16 million selected in the inaugural draft. The largest total value of a to pick correct directionality with the reward comprising the gulf between the line and the pick. To paraphrase Meg on 2097, Otani could have signed at 10-460, the CBT value of the contract, but desired a contract with a much higher price tag. The accounting trick of deferrals may lower the present-day value of Otani's contract, but it does not lower the raw dollars deposited into his coffers. Deferrals serve multiple purposes. For some players, it offers the security of an annuity. For some teams, it offers the ability to pay for the contract with cheaper money.

For Otani and the Dodgers, the purpose is at least partly to increase the payroll spending power of the team during the term of Otani's contract. Given the reporting that Otani's philosophy is this with his suitors, logic suggests that if he valued his talents at 460 over 10 years, he would still offer to defer a supermajority of his salary. But those are not the final terms. Shohei Ohtani is a $700 million man, and his contract for the over-under draft should be valued at $700 million.

All right. Thanks for the data. Bring in the data to the discussion. Rita says, as a finance adjacent professional, I do property tax research. Present value is the most well actually of any number in econ, a field chock full of well actually numbers. Imagine how funny that first 68 million is going to be real dollar value only in my house. Sorry, Meg. Now, Tyler says, don't do it unless you change the metric for every other contract as well.

All contracts signed, except for when your contracts have a lower present value than top line value. The net present value of Jamer Candelario's deal with the Reds is not $45 million. In other words, what Shohei did creates a difference in degree, but not in kind. That's what I said earlier. Rob Means just wrote about this at BP. I'm guessing you do not want to run NPP calculations on all of the contracts that you drafted, plus all of the estimates, so I think you should stick with the headline value. I suppose the alternative would be

to use the luxury tax AAV as the metric. But that's also complicated and gives too much legitimacy to the anti-competitive, anti-labor luxury tax." Okay. And a final perspective here from Michael, who sort of says something similar, but also splits the difference. The obvious answer to this question is that you've been doing it wrong all along. The correct way to evaluate contracts is not total dollars, but net present value. You've already discussed this with respect to Otani. The discourse seems to be suggesting that his contract is worth 460 or 470, which is evenly paid out 10-year contract that produces the same NPV as his annual contract. But the critical number here is $395 million, which is the actual NPV of his contract at a 4% discount rate. This is below the NPV of $425 that the MLB trade rumors projection of $528 would have produced. So for Otani, I think the under should win, but there's no reason to just do this for

Otani. The only intellectually honest thing is to do this for all contracts. There's a real can of worms here. We might have to invalidate all previous results and retrospectively recalculate all of the over-under drafts. And you know, I didn't win any of those. So I think that's the right thing to do. You know, I think that that's just the most rigorous, really. That brings the spirit of pedantry to the exercise in a way that it was maybe lacking before and we are nothing if not pedantic. So I don't know, I find that pretty persuasive. Now, lastly, I did solicit a ruling from John Chenier, who is effectively Wilde's scorekeeper and statistician.

He enters all the results of our drafts and competitions into the drafts and competitions spreadsheet. And he deliberated over this for some time. He slept on it. He didn't want to issue a snap judgment or ruling here, but he did conclude, while I can acknowledge the extremity of this case, in the end, Otani is still getting $700 million from the Dodgers, just not $700 million in today's dollars. So I say it does count against Meg. Now, I'm not saying his word is binding or that his ruling is final or anything. I'm just,

you know, that's another little data point there. So I don't know how to decide this. I guess one point in favor of saying that the undercounts is that, well, the competition isn't over, right? Because if it's over, then it's over. But that, I guess, is not the most intellectually honest way to decide how to handle this. What would make it most interesting for the rest of the offseason? Right. Yeah. Probably not.

I feel like if I wanted to be a stickler, I could just insist on, hey, you know, we drafted total guaranteed dollars and that's what we've always done. And we can't retroactively make an exception here. We can't retroactively make an exception here, but I'm willing to open it up to the audience. If you want to do a poll, if you want to do wisdom of crowds and crowdsource this thing, I will abide by the Effectively Wild audience's input here. I will, too. I feel like you should decide if you want them to decide. Because I'm obviously a hopelessly conflicted party in this. I mean, we both are. Yeah, we should both somehow recuse ourselves here and let a neutral party, which I guess is John, potentially, or the crowd. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I'd hate to make John solely responsible for what happens. I know, right? Yeah, we both like him. He's friendly with both of us. He might not want that weight hanging on him. Yeah. It's like you don't want to be the person whose rookie of the year vote determines service time stuff. That sounds stressful and terrible. So maybe the crowd is the right way to do it. I want to stress again that I don't expect to prevail in this, regardless of the ultimate authority deciding what's going on. This doesn't feel like a thing

that I will emerge triumphant in, but like maybe we put it to the crowd. You know, the question is like, do we put it to the Discord? Do we put it to the Facebook group? A lot of people in the Facebook group are going to be confused and be like, what is this even about? Because they don't listen to the podcast, which remains bizarre. Remains strange. I can create a poll. I can do a Google form sort of thing, and I'll link to it on the podcast description on our show page here. If

you're looking at your podcast app, you can find a link there right now and you can go and cast your vote. And I would just say, vote your conscience. Just, you know, not necessarily what you think would be most entertaining for podcast purposes, but who do you think deserves it here, which is closer to the way that we have conducted this draft historically? And I'll leave it up to people, I guess. All right. Well, I agree to abide by the results and we will report them next time. You know, the audience is a big part of Effectively Wild, so I like letting them weigh in here. I will submit to whatever the election results prove themselves

to be. We will have a peaceful transfer of over under draft power. We will both make that pledge to abide by this democratic process in advance. Okay, great. Last because we're sad. All right. Last thing before we bring on Eric here in some slightly less notable news, the Royals signed a bunch of pitchers. Yeah, they sure did. It's kind of interesting, right? The Royals have signed Seth Lugo. They've signed Chris Stratton.

They've signed Will Smith. So I guess that's, you know, maybe not super exciting unless you're a Royals fan. And even then, I don't know if it is. But I guess you could certainly say that the Royals needed pitching help. That much was clear because they were, I think, 28th in Fangraph's war in Reliever War last season and 26th in Starter War, which comes out to 27th overall. I guess the bad news is that even after making these additions, they are still projected to be 27th in reliever war and 23rd in starter war. But I guess you got to start, so to speak, somewhere.

So what do you make of these moves? Seth Lugo being the bigger, the higher dollar one that was three years, 45 million, I think, which was something like the third biggest contract in Royals franchise history, I think, with unadjusted dollars. I don't have a strong view of this really one way or the other. You know, I don't think it moves the needle for them significantly. They're not going to like suddenly rocket up my leaderboards in the central, even in a weak division. But to your point, like they got to start somewhere. I think that if I'm Kansas City, I am skeptical of my ability to develop pitching internally.

And so free agency is attractive to me if I have confidence in the guys I'm signing as a means of bringing in sort of reliable production. So that's kind of what I think about it. I don't really have much more. I mean, like it's Seth Lugo. He's he's good. You know, like he did, I think, a little bit. He was pretty right in line with Ben Clemens's estimates in terms of what he would do. And Ben was a little high on him relative to consensus.

I think, I think Ben, I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about Seth Lugo since we published that post. Not because he's bad, but because, you know, there are just other guys who are like really good. Yeah. I like Lugo, but it's not really a step change for the Royals. It's not like it pushes them from one category to another. By the way, I think it's actually their fourth biggest free agent contract, not their third after after Alex Gordon, Ian Kennedy, and Gil Mesh, which worked out wonderfully. So Seth Lugo. Yeah, I like Lugo, but yeah, you know, it's just, it really isn't going to, their fortunes I don't think are going to swing one way or another on their free agent pitching additions, Probably you have to supplement.

But the hope for them was that they had this great wave of young pitching coming up and coming along. And then that wave, I don't know that we can even say it, crested. It never really did. And it hasn't. Some guys have turned out to be OK. Others have gone backward. And that seemed to be a big impetus for their changes last winter, coaching and front office, et cetera. And then the results just

weren't so great. So yeah, Cole Reagan's sort of exciting based on what he did down the stretch for them and Brady Singer. But after that, it's just like, I mean, you know, I tip my cap to Jordan Lyles and his below average inning eating. It is something. There's some value to that. But it's just not a great staff unless some guys that they already have take steps forward. They have to prove that they can do that, that they can develop and, you know, develop and promote internally and have a high caliber core there outside of Bobby Witt.

They have to figure out what they're doing with all those guys. They've had a lot of young players getting lots of playing time, but it's just not entirely clear. Like, are they good? Are they good enough to be the core of a contending Royals team?

And which ones and at which positions? They just, they got to sort that stuff out. There's a lot to be done here and it's across the board. And I think that they are in a position that this is like a, I'm going to, I'm going to make a tortured comp. Okay. Are you ready for torture comp? In some ways they remind me of the Marlins of a few years ago where we, and in a very particular way, Torture Comp, very particular way, where when the Marlins sale went through and, and they were starting to hire guys and bring like a bunch of, at the time, Yankees, um, player dev and sort of front office folks into the organization. Like the way that we thought about them or that I thought about them in terms of

their potential timeline for competition was like, there's like a lot of backend infrastructure approach, hiring work that needs to go on before we even think about like, what are the players look like? Right. And I think that Kansas city is in sort of a similar situation, even though I don't really tie it to the sale, they were sold, right? A couple years ago, where it's like, they are, they're behind in a lot of important ways as an organization. And so I think that you can bring in guys, like you can have someone like Witt, who did manage to take a really meaningful step forward this year and was wasn't is like a foundational piece for them. And they have other players who range from like good to interesting. Right. But the way that they need to be oriented as an organization needs to change, I think, pretty fundamentally. There needs to be a revamping of the approach to

putting a baseball team on the field before any of that really matters. Now, if they have a surprise good season, that would be really cool, in part because we could say, look at these players. It's got to be the players because they've changed from an approach perspective as a front office. So I think that's kind of where I sit with Casey, where it's like, I feel for Kansas City fans. Like part of me is like, just trade all your good guys. But it's like, what would they get for them? You know, and like, it wouldn't be good. Yeah.

The individual moves and the terms seem fine here. Fine. They seem fine. Yeah. There's more work to be done. But yeah, there's an interesting like Texas, Kansas City pitching pipeline going on here with Will Smith and Stratton coming from the Rangers and Aroldis Chapman going to the Rangers, right?

Sure. And that, I wonder, is the motivation maybe for the Smith signing? He's not like Aroldis Chapman, but maybe, you know, they flipped Chapman. They got Reagan's that worked out great for them. Right. Maybe they're hoping to do something similar if Smith sort of reestablishes himself and the Royals aren't in it, then perhaps they could trade. Not that he's projecting to be a great trade ship or something. something. But that does remind me of a question that we got from listener Wandering Winder, who said, if the Royals win the World Series this year, will you believe that Will Smith is one of the people from an Effectively Wild hypothetical who has magic powers? Will you

at least start to wonder? Because I will wonder. Smith famously has won the World Series three years in a row with three different teams, Atlanta, Houston, and Texas. If he extends the streak now, of course he could extend the streak like Chapman did by going from the Royals to some other team at mid season. But, but if the Royals win a world series with Will Smith in 2024, will you think he is a witch or a wizard or whatever? Yeah, I think I, I will start to wonder a little bit. I don't believe in any of that as being actually real. But it would be so weird.

I mean, among the teams that are the least likely to win the World Series next year, Kansas City has to be. I mean, they're not maybe at the tippy top of that list. Because I think that the A's have longer odds. I think that the Rock's have longer odds i think that the the rockies have longer odds you know the royals get this like advantage in the improbable world series sweepstakes because they play in the central uh and so like in terms of having a pass to the postseason even though i still consider it to be to be very clear quite remote it exists you know like it's narrow it's like one of those terrifying little caves you have to like squeeze through you know that no one should

do that because like even thinking about it makes me anxious but you know it's like one of those where it's like oh you're gonna get scraped your back's gonna be all weird like you're probably gonna have like dirt on you but like it should happen it's not impossible it's highly improbable but not impossible whereas like you know the the al west is like a good division then the nls is like a good division i think that like even the like even the nationals are much further along in their process than i think um like the the royals and a's and and rockies are but like the royals is like because the Nationals famously play in the NL East, not an easy division. So, you know, it's there, but I would think that, you know, for it to happen, both the getting to the postseason via an AL Central crown and then navigating a robust playoff field, I would have to assume that

magic was involved, you know, that would require it almost. Right. Yeah. The Royals, I think, are better than they played last season. Sure. Their season was really a setback because they were expecting to take a step forward. It was almost like the Tigers when everyone was like, oh, Tigers, they turn in the corner, you know, dark horses and then things fell flat. I think the Royals were sort of similar this past season and they were very unlucky. No one really noticed because they weren't bad because of their bad luck. They were just even worse. But according to base runs at Fangrass, the Padres were nine wins worse than they should have been.

And everyone noticed because that made a big difference in the Padres case. But the Royals were 10 wins worse. It's just that that's the difference between like 56 and 66, which still sucks. Right. But that might suggest that there's some regression coming their way, which might boost them, but not to winning a World Series levels. So, yeah, if this were to happen, I would seriously have to question. regression come in their way, which might boost them, but not to winning a World Series levels. So yeah, if this were to happen, I would seriously have to question because Will Smith was with very good teams the past three years. It's not that surprising that Atlanta won or that Houston won, or even that Texas won. Somewhat surprising, but not-

But not Royals winning surprising. Right. Exactly. So he's the first player ever to do it with three different teams in three different years. I remember Eric Hinsky made three consecutive World Series with three different teams. And people were talking about Hinsky as kind of a Ghani Jones style talisman. Good luck charm. Right. So, yes, if the Royals win a World Series with Will Smith, we may have to throw him into water to see if he sinks. Just set aside the AL teams that they would have to defeat in order to win the pennant, right?

Just set that aside for a second. the World Series would mean that the Braves didn't win or the Phillies didn't win or the Dodgers didn't win or even the Diamondbacks didn't win. That seems very unlikely. The Mets didn't win. I'm saying the Mets, so everyone relax. Everyone should do a wellness check on their Mets fan friends because that part of Twitter seems very upset. Yes.

And I don't want to contribute to their further agitation because it's already a scary time for them over there because they might not be the very best team in baseball. So it seems like it would have to involve wizardry. What's the difference between a wizard and a warlock, Ben? This feels like nerd s*** you would know. Excuse my swear. What's the difference?

I don't know. Is there a difference? Are those synonymous terms? We're going to get emails. They might be somewhat synonymous, right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

All right. Well, we will take a quick break and we'll be back with Eric to talk about Lee and Yamamoto and other excellent Asian players. All right, we are joined now by Eric Langenhagen, Fangraph's lead prospect analyst and all-time leading Effectively Wild guest here to extend his record. Hello, Eric.

Hey, Ben, what's up? We have talked to you about players everywhere, all levels and qualities of competition. You handle it all because you write about the draft and you write about MLB players and you write about international players. And today we're focusing on that last group. So how does your scouting process for players in NPB or Korea or Taiwan, how does that work for you? What sources of data or video do you have at your disposal and what are some of the challenges? It is two or three pronged, the approach. The proliferation of video, specifically for me using Synergy Sports, has changed the way I do a lot of this really since the pandemic.

Through Synergy, I do have access to video from all of the Asian professional leagues. They've actually done a better job just in the last 12 months of converting kilometers per hour to miles per hour, like in the user interface and stuff like that, even just the last year or so that has become like a much, much better tool. So I can watch like every young Hooli ball in play. I can, you know, watch every Hassan Kim swing against fastballs, like 95 miles per hour and above and kind of get a sense of what's going on there. As far as like data resources go, Delta graphs, which is like the NPB fan graphs, where if you Google essence of baseball, I pay for like a souped up subscription to that site. And it is just like having NPB fan graphs. And they have a lot of data, including pitch velocities and stuff like that for minor league baseball over there.

So that's also very useful. And then I do have a handful of sources. It's not the same deep well of folks who I do domestically with MLB teams. But I know scouts for Korean teams. I know scouts for MPB teams. I know former executives who traffic in this space for one reason or another, and they are wonderful sources of information when it comes to anticipating who might be coming back over, especially when it's relatively innocuous names. Guys like Jake Waguspec,

like relatively innocuous names, guys like Jake Wagus back. Kyle Keller was this year, Adam Plutko, guys who might like come over or, you know, kick back who were once here. And yeah, Eric Fetty. Yeah. Eric Fetty is obviously like the big one from this offseason. And then there have been so many consequential guys between, you know, from Merrill Kelly to Robert Suarez and a host of others, Nick Martinez, many, many guys go over there, develop in a way that they couldn't over here and then come back. So, you know, sometimes like with Fetty, there was a Washington Post article about like the changes Fetty made from from months ago that turned out to be, you know, a useful resource for that too. So it is, once you start getting down to like the Taiwanese league, or like you start going through the KBO draft, like the first round of the KBO and MPB draft,

which takes place like in the fall, you can do a lot of video work on those guys too, because they were on like the U18 Japanese national team. You can like dig on that and just like the video highlight culture uh in korea and in japan especially if you search for a player's name in like korean or japanese characters on youtube the video that comes up and like the data that you can see just like on youtube it's it really dwarfs like what we're doing over here in the u.S. with like minor league and amateur baseball. So you mentioned this just a second ago, and we'll probably talk

about it with Lee, but to try to account for the difference in the quality of competition, you might focus on pitches that are of a particular velocity or against certain guys who have certain experience, which people will do with amateur prospects too. Like how did they do against different kinds of competition or other guys who got drafted? I assume that that is useful and valuable and predictive, but do you know how predictive it is? For instance, if someone beats up on soft stuff that they're probably not going to see in MLB, is that just meaningless or does that still have some signal, but just less so? How do you weigh that?

Yeah, it's incredibly difficult. I don't think there's a great way to do it. The sample is very small, especially when we're talking about how hitters are going to translate. And in Lee's case, Korean hitters, you know, they just are so few and far between in terms of coming over here after they've played KBO baseball for a while.

You do have your fair share of them over the course of the last 15 or 20 years, but the fact that we've had two or three guys come over the last five years is not really enough to to know how they're going to translate i think if you're going to compare it to anything it's like hitters making a leap from the acc to major league baseball like just the the sheer velocity that you're facing in a large college conference is more comparable to what's going on in the KBO

than any upper minor league level. Even double and triple A pitching is just going to have more guys who throw hard. In Lee's case, at least on tape in a way that Synergy has tracked, across the last two seasons, which is really like a season and a half

of plate appearances because he was hurt this past season. He's only seen like 150, 93 plus mile per hour fastballs in a season and a half. And that's like two weeks of plate appearances in major league baseball. So it is, you know, very difficult.

Sometimes it is, you know, very difficult. Sometimes it is, you're limiting your sample to like the world baseball classic at bats. This guy took, because there he's facing a couple of guys back to back to back who have real stuff and you're scouting him across, you know, seven, 10 total games in international competition or against, you or against guys in Korea who throw hard.

Although the best pitcher in Korea, other than Eric Fetty last year, was just on Young-Hoo Lee's team. That's Woo-Jin Ahn, who we probably won't see over on our shores for a long, long while. That's like a whole other can of worms to talk about on the podcast. But yeah, it is super difficult. The same is guys coming up from AAA, although to a more extreme degree. You just don't know. There's such a huge gap between the quality of major league stuff and any other league on the planet that you truly just don't know how guys are going to do, I think, until you see them face big league stuff for a couple of months. Well, I guess that should maybe transition us into talking about Lee and what he might do for the Giants. We can talk about some of the other guys who have been posted and

are likely to come to MLB this offseason. But Lee is the first sort of big signing, apart from, you know, Fetty. I don't want to disrespect Eric Fetty. But Lee is the big signing. The Giants have finally managed to spend some big money to net a free agent. So what should Giants fans expect from Lee as they look forward to next season? Well, I think the thing that helps him have a high floor is what he's capable of doing defensively. a high floor is what he's capable of doing defensively. As I was working on writing up Lee with Ben Clemens for like our top 50 free agents,

we watched a bunch of him playing defense together towards the end of the year and it was fine. On my own, I went back and watched like, you know, a few dozen more balls in play and it was better than fine. He's got a plus arm. I think he's going to be an above average to plus defensive center fielder. That's not a thing the Giants had on their roster. They've tried to shoehorn

guys like Mikey Stremski into center field for the last couple of years. Luis Matos came up last year. I think they felt his defense was substandard. He was playing the corners deference to some of the other guys, a whole bunch, even after came up so that's that's number one offensively i think there's going to probably be an adjustment period for the reasons that we just talked about big league stuff is so good you know you saw hassan kim have a year and a half plus really before he started to he made like meaningful improvements after that amount of time still so i think you know you're looking at like the back half of this deal before the opt out where there might be a leap in his offensive production and what the Giants do with his

swing. Obviously, there's no Gabe Kapler anymore. So we'll see how some of like the player development at the big league level stuff shakes out for this team. They were like very apt to want to grab guys and change them at the big league level under the previous coaching staff. So we'll see how some of that stuff goes now that that group is no longer in place as far as the big league field staff is concerned. Is there going to be more power here? There's not power right now. Lee's only 25, maybe with a major league strength and conditioning

program and who knows what, like his dietary changes might be coming over here. Like there might be more strength. There might be a swing change. This guy had a 60% ground ball rate, uh, last year. He's not going to hit for power as his swing is currently constituted, but he's going to make a lot of contact. You can really make a ton of contact again. Probably there will be an adjustment period,

but he's a very talented contact hitter. I think just between that over time and what he's doing defensively in center field, that the Zips projections for him are about what I'd expect. Two, two-and-a-half war contact and defense in center field. Is he a monster star player? No, not unless that power arrives during the back half of the contract. If it does arrive during year three,

during year four of his deal, then he's going to opt out, right? Just because at that point, he'll be 29. Now we're talking about a power hitting center fielder, like a do-everything guy, and he'll cash in in a pretty big way in free agency again. Is this a monster leap

in terms of what the Giants had production wise before? Not in a big, big way. It creates kind of a log jam. In addition to Lee, you have Conforto, Michael Conforto and Mitch Hanager, who are on expensive deals for the next year or two, depending on the guy. They have both been either hurt or not awesome for the last couple of years. Conforto slugged under 400 the last two seasons he's played. Those are expensive platoon guys for the next year or two, depending again on their deal.

And then you have Austin Slater, who's Arb3, crushes lefties again. Voltroning these guys together has been what the Giants have liked to do. But between Yastrzemski and uh conforto from the left side austin slater and luis matos and mitch hanegar from the right side now you add lee in the middle of that group plus they have like blake sable laying around now who can be optioned after he met the rule five requirements from having played a whole season last year like there's this is a crowded group i would think there's got to be another shoe that drops here i think given what we know about the giants and how they've wanted

to spend money way more than the 113 mil that they just gave lee across you know during the last couple of off seasons that there's room for them to do something still. And now they have a surplus of outfielders, some of which are attractive, I think, on the open market, or on the trade market, rather, that they could do a cease deal. They could do a glass now deal. They could play in the free agent market because they have money to spend, presumably. And also, they have outfield surplus from which they could trade.

So I would expect there's still more action to come here. I think that, you know, I don't know how you guys feel about it, but I think this team is still clearly a level behind what San Diego should be if they can continue to just build a suitable pitching staff. And where Arizona is right now and definitely where the Dodgers are right now so I think there's still a lot of work to be done here but this is a nice like fun exciting it adds an element to the team that they didn't have before in terms of speed athleticism like good up the middle defense you know this is this is an org

that was trying to get Casey Schmidt to play short and, you know, like had old Brandon Crawford doing stuff like, yeah, they need athletic up the middle guys. And so at least, you know, Kim got four years and 25 as at the time the best player in the KBO and then Lee gets six years and 113 with an opt out at least of the potential for top KBO players to come over and excel in MLB now that Kim has, especially lately. Because I'm curious just about the evolution of how MLB teams see players who come over. Obviously, like decades ago, you know, Ichiro comes over and people are like, I don't know if this is going to work here, right? But I mean, even more recently, since we've seen just so many top Japanese players and Korean players excel, is there less skepticism now or does it depend on the type of player and the type of production? I think it's a mix of all that stuff. I don't know that there is a universal

acceptance that if you are an elite performer in even MPB, which is like, I think the quality of play in MPB is better than triple a baseball over here. Uh, that it's like sandwich between that level and major league baseball. I think it's so, so high, but I think we're sort of,

you know, it's that it's the nineties SNL premise where it's just like, I can't remember a bad Chris Farley sketch. I just remember the ones I liked, right? Like Yoshi Setsugo exists and Byungho Park exists and like Kaz Matsui and all kinds of guys who came over and it didn't really work out quite in the way you wanted it to. There are still plenty of examples of that happening. So it is going to be hit and miss, I think. In this case, I do think that Ha Sung did help alleviate concerns in general just because that gap is so much bigger between KBO and MLB

that the guy could come over and perform. In terms of the players we're talking about there, yeah, they are different. Hasan Kim had nasty pull power in KBO. He was an incredibly dangerous pull-for-power hitter in Korea, and he has had to make pretty substantial adjustments to the way he's approaching hitting on our shores, and that has worked. Lee is just so contact- worked. Lee is so contact oriented. It is incredibly special.

Like what he's able to do as far as moving the barrel around the zone. There are mechanical things happening there that make me a little bit worried that, you know, the skills won't translate. But I do think there are some teams, there's some teams who punt in this realm because of what they see as risk. And it's like immediately apparent when you whiff on a guy like this, that it's not going well, like with Tsutsugo and stuff. I know people like high-ranking executives who are not at all interested in having players on their roster from this space directly. They would much rather them come over and succeed like a Kenta Maeda for a while on our shores before bringing them into the fold. So I think that it's way different team to team. I think you can see some of the teams who have taken advantage of it more than others over the last five to eight years. I think San Diego is at the very, very top of that list. Pierce Johnson and the guys I mentioned before, it's just so many guys.

then yeah, you can have difference-making players like a Robert Suarez. This offseason, that's the Cuban guys who played in Japan and then defect from Cuban citizenship and then come over here. That's Oscar Colas too, right? It's kind of a mixed bag for him. But I think that, yeah, you can really make headway if you get a Merrill Kelly right or if you get a Robert Suarez right. And so, yeah, we'll see what happens here with Lee. I'm curious, like if we were going to, that perhaps the best way to think about this is to present the range of outcomes. So like from your perspective, what is,

what is the range of potential outcomes for Lee here in terms of what we might see from him? Like what's the bottom to the top end, do you think? The bottom is he ends up being like the way Johan Rojas looked in the playoffs where, holy cow, look at that guy go get the ball in center field. It may be not quite Rojas' level of defense. You know, Leody Tavares has way more raw power than Lee does right now, but some of the way he has performed would be comparable to what you think the bottom is for Lee.

And then the top is, I don't know, like the Ben and Tendi peak years, but with good center field defense is not a terrible way of comping it, I suppose. You really have to squint to see it. Miles Straw is the bottom

of the range of potential outcomes. I think, like, that's an interesting way of looking at it. And, like, maybe Leody is, like, more the middle to the top. Like, what Leody did this season. Do I think that this guy's going to be like Michael Harris? Probably not. TJ Friedel's not a terrible one either.

Again, like, Friedel had 18 bombs this year. That's, you know, I would have taken the under as far as whatever his peak career season would have been in terms of like power output. TJ Friedel slugged almost 470 this year. You know, like that's like the high end outcome that we'd be looking at here where there are some like years of three, four war probably. Yeah. It's kind of confusing if you look at scouting reports on Lee. As you said, you know, you kind of had differing thoughts looking at him at different times. There's a Sports Info Solution scouting report about him online, which I will link to, and they have a defensive run saved metric for Asian leagues. And they had him at negative 13 in centerfield in 2022

and then plus nine in his shortened 2023. So make of that what you will. They kind of concluded somewhere in the middle, maybe. Since you have brought it up a couple times, that phenomenon of pitchers, especially going to foreign leagues and unlocking something, learning a new pitch, whatever it is, I guess it's not exclusive to pitchers. Some hitters have remade themselves over there too. But what is that? Is that those teams being better at player development than those players teams in the US were? Or is it a mindset thing? Maybe when players lose their spot in the majors and go over to another league, they're more open-minded about what do I have to do to get back to where I was, that kind of thing? It can be all over the map. I do think that a guy's ability to hit free agency

of some kind or for teams to be done with them such that they can explore opportunities abroad, it can take so long that if you're a guy stuck in an org that isn't very good at developing pitchers, then you can have a real late breakout. I mean, we see it happen over here too. We see guys get hurt and leave teams that aren't good at developing pitching especially, and they end up on the Yankees or the Dodgers or end up with Cleveland or whatever it is,

and they take a substantial late career leap or just make a change at all. Like Sean Minaya, Sean Minaya is great. And, you know, was a Royal, an A and a Padre until his like late 20s, early 30s. And none of those teams is especially good at optimizing their pitchers. And so once he got with San Francisco, it's not like he had an unbelievable season or anything like that, but he was like throwing harder and they made noticeable changes to his delivery. And you wouldn't think that a guy who was that established is likely to do a thing like

that, but he did. And this type of thing happens all the time. Evan Phillips was just around, you know, Evan Phillips had a sexy looking breaking ball his whole life. But it took him until he was like almost whatever. I don't even know how old Evan Phillips is, but like he was one of the first guys when I came to Fall League for the first time as a college kid who was here like in the brave system. Yeah, he's 29. It took him forever to be a good team's late inning reliever. a good team's ladening reliever. And so I do think, you know, in Fedde's case, he did it at a third-party facility in the U.S.

He went to, like, you know, one of these gas camp indoor facilities in Scottsdale. And, like, driveline is like this, and tread athletics is like this. Like, Cole Reagan's, the Royals didn't make him better. Tread athletics did. And so, you know, I do think you're seeing more of that is like this, like Cole Reagan's, the Royals didn't make him better. Trent Athletics did. And so, you know, I do think you're seeing more of that where some of the developmental processes outsourced. I think that you're going to see more and more of that.

I don't think we've reached like an equilibrium where we have enough of these third-party independent places that can do this. As we continue to lose minor league affiliates, I think that that's going to be a big deal, having scouts in those facilities or those facilities sending data to teams to show them who isn't on a contract

but could maybe be because of how their data looks at these indoor facilities that are developing guys. There are all kinds of avenues for it. But yeah, I think just given what we know about, what one can glean from watching the japanese baseball late at night at like what's on their broadcasts the things that are are have permeated their culture as it relates to pitching development with technology uh and like quantifiable stuff it seems obvious that there's stuff going over there that is on par with some of what's happening here.

It varies team to team. One of my KBO scouting contacts has a team that is only recently beginning to invest in this and really understand and use it and make it part of their player development infrastructure, stuff like high-speed video pitching labs so you know there are some teams who are further ahead of others in that space in asia but yeah i think for sure there are other barriers when you're talking about doing that over there that have to do with like language some of the players who end up going over there are not they're not the best expats. They don't go over to Korea with an open mind necessarily, and they feel kind of isolated and alienated. There was a pitcher who melted down in Korea two seasons ago.

An American pitcher, I think it was Mike Montgomery, who just had an absolute meltdown. He just wasn't handling the transition well. All of that stuff becomes a variable too. But yeah, I think for some of these guys, you get to go over there, you get to cut it loose. It's its own challenge. There's a position player who signed with the Korean team a couple years ago

who was deathly afraid of flying. And a hurdle for him being on a big league team was like he had to fly and I mean obviously he had to fly over to Korea and stuff but like these countries are small enough that you don't it's not as intense a cross-country flight from San Diego to New York if you're you know Jose Perela or whatever so uh there's all kinds of stuff that reasons that guys end up going over there and I do do think there's also a, Hey, I'm the best one over here now. And that gives them a certain measure of confidence. So it's a fascinating thing to be able to follow.

And either through the leaderboards on our site, which we just have for the KBO, uh, you can see like who's over there and who's succeeding or not. Like, look at Anthony Alford and you know, all these guys who, you know, remember some guys from the minors, like from just a couple of years ago, a lot of the time. Well, if Lee was something of a needy appetizer, I think that the main course in this group of international players is likely to be Yamamoto.

There's reporting today that the Dodgers have sort of given him a full court press. This is from Fabian Ardaya that his meeting with the Dodgers yesterday included star power like Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, and Otani. Wow. What a group to be able to bring in the room, right? I know. Otani was getting wooed by the Dodgers two weeks ago, and now he's like out there doing recruiting for them.

Yeah, doing the wooing himself. And it seems like every time I see a rumored contract estimate for Yamamoto, the number has gone up relative to the prior one. So what is it about him that is so exciting to teams? What do you expect from him? I mean, he'll be great presumably no matter who he signs with, but what do you expect from him next year? Yeah, it was interesting at the GM meetings

because there was so much Japanese media there. You could see them congregating around the organizations who were rumored to be in on these guys, right? Whether it was Otani or Yamamoto. And so it was like Cashman, it was Farhan, it was Brandon Gomes. There's just so many cameras and media people there. And some of the questions for Farhan were like, hey, short righties, what's your take? And Yamamoto, that's the one quote unquote knock. And it may just be teams putting it out there into the media zeitgeist as a way of creating some sort of doubt in the discourse. But like, look, Yamamoto to me is peak granky that's what this guy looks like he looks

like him bodily he's just the way the uniform is just sort of draped over him and and loose and kind of flowing because he's like a smaller skinnier guy his delivery is very similar to granky's his command is every bit as good as peak granky's and that's the thing here that is like exceptional there's a lot of you know pitch data talk out there about how this guy's stuff is like above average to plus but not elite and i think some of that is true but his command is elite and that's like a less quantifiable thing if you put on two of just put on this guy's last two starts in the MPB World Series. Just go find the stream of him somewhere.

It exists somewhere, I promise you. And watch how good this guy's command of mid to upper 90s, reaching back for upper 90s when he wants it, kitchen sink, monster splitter. His command of everything is surgical. This is a rookie of the year and Cy Young threat rolled into one. I don't know what some of the ballpark contract stuff is. It would not surprise me if this guy got $350 million. He's 25. He's absolutely unbelievable. I'm all in on Yoshinobu Yamamoto. Yeah, he's just that good. So, yeah, he's just that good. How many pitchers in the world would you take before him?

I mean, forget about best international prospect or pitcher. In MLB, how many pitchers do you think are better than he is? Or would you kind of give better chances to Winnesai Young? Cole, Wheeler, Strider. Now we can start to quibble. I think there's a clear gap between Yamamoto and Snell. I love Frambois Valdez a lot, but I'm pretty sure I would take Yamamoto. I would take Yamamoto over Gallin.

I would take him over Gossman. If you told me I'm getting fully operational burns, it's close. Sandy. It's close. Sandy, it's close. I don't know. That's kind of it. Right. You were just going to say something about the height and the builds, right?

Like, is that overblown? Does that matter? I think he's proven that you should ignore it. I think there are actual logical reasons that we as the scouting apparatus should cool it with the tall guy thing. Some of it is just mechanical repeatability. Some of it is fastball approach angle. It's just likely to be shallower and more effective

for missing bats in the zone when the pitcher's shorter. You can be tall and have a low release height and your fastball can still play that way. But when you're shorter, like all things equal, it's just going to be better for that purpose. And then as far as stress on the elbow is concerned, you know, and this is like from an old driveline article, that's probably 10 years old at this point, but it's an interesting thought. Like the formula for torque, part of it is just like the length of the lever, you know? So theoretically, the stress on your elbow is going to be directly correlated with like the length of your arms, like the distance from the fulcrum to the end of the lever is like part of the formula. So stress on your joints might be worse if you're like longer. And that's like theoretical, right?

But it makes sense. So especially when a guy is this athletic and his body is just so beautifully connected from the ground and his lower body all the way through his fingertips, and he's reaching back for 99 with pinpoint control. Just forget it. It doesn't matter. It turns out it's mattered for some guys, right? Davey Garcia was just like, is this guy going to sustain this velocity? And it turns out, no, he wasn't. Luis Patino, is this guy going to be able to do it? Like, no. But Yamamoto has been doing this for a while now.

Like, this guy's just been a capital D dude for long enough that he gets to be exempt from the stupid bonus pool stuff. So it's fine. Like, I would have every confidence that this guy is just going to be a top of the rotation starter for the next half decade. And he's not the only pitcher that is in this free agent class. So walk us through some of the other guys who you're excited about who are coming over from NPB and might entice some teams on the free agent pitching side. Yeah, it's a pretty deep, good group. I expect next year's really for the next couple of years, it probably will have at least one really big deal guy coming over each of the next couple of years. So yeah, you do have Yamamoto.

You have Roki Sasaki, who there is a report out there that he has requested to be posted this offseason. I think it's very unlikely that that would happen. Both Yamamoto and Sasaki would be top five universal prospects. I think you could make an argument that you would take Yamamoto ahead of Jackson Holiday. You definitely would take Roki Sasaki ahead of Paul Skeens. Both those guys are dudes. And then the other guys for this year, Shota Imanaga is 30 years old, lefty with the Oklahoma Bay Stars. This is the sneaky, fastball, invisible guy. Japanese athletes are just shorter on average than a lot of our baseball athletes. When you look at the annual Japanese NPB draft results,

When you look at the annual Japanese like NPB draft results, it's a lot of lefties who have that short vertical arm stroke. They look like they're trying to do a Kershaw type thing with their delivery and their first and second round college pitcher, high school pitcher. They're 5'11", 6'0", and they sit 88-91 with stuff that kind of plays in the same way that Kershaw's does. Imanaga is one of those guys who, over time, has developed pinpoint command of his own of stuff that plays that way. So he's only sitting like 92 but he doesn't walk anybody he's super durable he threw 143 innings and you know this is one of those guys with like

that upshot angle fastball that plays even though it's it's only 92 and you know whether there are some questions here too like his curveball is really slow so how is that going to play over here uh his change up on it from a pure stuff perspective is only okay. It's way more reliant on his command than on pure stuff. But he's going to come over here and be a No. 4 or 5 starter on a good team. Obviously, he's 30 years old, and so the shelf life on that might be shorter than some of these other guys we're talking about. Yario Rodriguez is a Cuban reliever who I think could be a setup man. It's your pretty standard like 94 to 97, touch 100 in relief,

converted from starting to the bullpen, had like a huge velo spike within the last couple of years. Because of the way like cuban citizenship works the players who get quote-unquote loaned to the npb teams from cuba they do have to a lot of the time defect in some way and that can involve them like being awol from their NPB team during the last year of their contract there. That was the case with Yariel, who opted out. He defected after the WBC and didn't pitch during the 2023 NPB season. He's just worked out for teams during the fall and looked basically the same.

He's in that late-inning relief market. There's a guy named Raydel Martinez and a lefty named Levon Moinello, who are both in this boat for next year. Moinello maybe would have come over this offseason, but got hurt and wants to be a starter. So look for that next year. He pitched for Fukuoka, Soft Bank Hawks. Levon Moinello is a name to watch for a year from now. And Raydel Martinez, also with the Dragons. Another Cuban righty who, like, a year from now,

that's a name you're going to want to know. Other dudes for this offseason, you've got Yuki Matsui, 28-year-old lefty reliever, three pitches, plus command. He doesn't throw especially hard. It's just like three slightly above average pitches that he commands the heck out of. He's platoon neutral. Is it going to be, you know, he's like the third or fourth best guy

to come out of any given bullpen. So a nice middle relief contributor there, Yuki Matsui. best guy to come out of any given bullpen. So a nice middle relief contributor there, Yuki Matsui. And then you've got a Taiwanese guy, Yun Yu Sang. He's only 22. He's 5'8", like 165. He's got like huge glutes and thighs and just like super powerful arm strength only type guy. He's been up to 99.

He sits 93, 96. Again, it's got a flat angle because he's five foot eight. He is like unconventionally strong for a guy that size. You have to really develop the rest of what's happening here. But considering he's coming from Taiwan and is so young, maybe there's room for growth as far as secondary stuff is concerned. So he's a really interesting name to watch this offseason. And then, yeah, after that, it's like Taster's Choice.

There's a guy named Naoyuki Uesawa, who pitched for the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters in Japan. That's Otani's old team. He's like a data-oriented sleeper, starter. That's Otani's old team. He's like a data oriented sleeper starter. He's 30 commands, not really there for me for him to start, but it's, you know, it's interesting. And then you have the kickback guys like Kyle Keller and Jacob Wagyu SPAC and Adam Plutko, who are like, okay, up, down reliever types in a vacuum. But if they sign anywhere, you know, assume someone thinks that they can just be like a perfectly fine, you know, middle reliever.

But yeah, folks should go to the international player tab over on the board over, you know, on fan graphs and just sort the ETAs by the 2024s. And you've got, you know, scouting reports for all these guys. Yeah, that was what I was going to ask you about next, because you just did a redo. You updated the board and a couple of the guys we've been talking about here are very close to the top. And of the guys that we haven't really talked about because they're not coming over immediately, who would you put in that class? Maybe we've talked about Murakami before. You mentioned Sasaki. There's Yamashita, right? Like these are in some cases players who could be coming over soon. Some could be years away.

But when we're talking about the absolute best baseball players in the world who are not in MLB, who else should we be talking about? Yeah, Munataka Murakami is the big one and the most interesting one to watch over the course of the next two seasons. the big one and the most interesting one to watch over the course of the next two seasons. So he's on pace to come over after the 2025 season. This was the MPB MVP two seasons ago as a 22-year-old. He had like 56 homers. He had a pretty rough for him 2023. He has not really developed defensively. He's still a bad third baseman

the swing and miss stuff has ticked up there's a lot of swing and miss against fastballs up and away from him which is kind of a problem because like every right-handed pitcher just has a fastball that finishes up and away from left-handed hitters if they wanted to. And so how that shakes out over the next two seasons is going to be pretty interesting. Last year, this guy was just at the top of this list, Murakami. I had him ahead of Yamamoto. I had him ahead of Sasaki. He would have just been a top three global prospect for me

right there with Gunnar Henderson and Corbin Carroll. We're talking about a guy who was 21-22, hit 56 bombs in the second best league in the world. He has ridiculous measurable power and has been nothing but incredible since debuting as a teenager in the second best league in the world. But then this year was concerning

where it felt like the book on him got out in a different way. And just across the board, all of his swing and miss and chase stuff got a little bit worse, not like crazy worse, but just a little bit worse across the board in a way that, yeah, manifested in a lot more strikeouts and like 20 fewer homers. And then, yeah, Sean Patey Yamashita, he was the biggest riser over there during the 2023 calendar year. He had a five tick fastball bump. So now,

you know, he's 21 and a half. He's built like Trevor Lawrence and, you know, had a sub sub two seriously. Like he's got an NFL quarterbacks build at like a strapping six, four, he had a sub two ERA across just shy of a hundred innings.

Uh, you know, during his, mostly like his rookie year, I guess I'd consider it. City 96, peaks at 98, 99 pretty routinely, and just has a monster upper 70s breaking ball. It's your traditional power 12-6 breaking ball.

If that guy were—he's 21, right? So if he were in our draft, he just would have been the top college pitcher not named Paul Skeens picked in this past year's draft. He's better than Chase Dolander and all those guys. He's a top 10 pick in just any given baseball draft and plays for the Oryx Buffaloes, which is the same org that Yamamoto is coming from. So that's a name to know for way, way, way in the future. But those are the two big deal young guys other than Roki Sasaki who are over in Japan right now.

I guess just goes to show that you can't rely on the average, right? In terms of build and physicality, they're going to be outliers, even if on average, they're a little bit shorter when you look at the draft results, right? Yeah. And it's fascinating. Like they're growing over there too. Like the rate at which people in Korea and Japan are growing is like on average is outpacing the U S which for the longest time, obviously like we were just getting much bigger than the rest of the world. That kind of leads into my last question, which is just about the stylistic differences among players in these various leagues. And even, of course, comparing one Asian league to another, there are different traits and tendencies and higher power, higher strikeout, etc.

But there are certain windups or stances, delivery differences, right? Aesthetically speaking across these leagues, which is great because I like baseball players just looking different in terms of how they play the game at a really high level. And that's something that you sometimes see people lament about MLB these days. Oh, it looks like everyone has sort of the same stance or the same delivery. There's a little less idiosyncrasy there. So do you think that those differences indicate that one way is better or worse, or is it purely just like each could learn from the other or each one works in its specific environment? You know, like should players in the U.S. be taught to set up the way that Japanese players often are or should, you know, would they be better if they did it the

way that people do it here? Like, I don't want everyone to just be bland and the same, but if there are different approaches, then maybe one might be better than the other or maybe not. So I guess that's my question. It's tough to like make inferences about a cultural approach to anything just from like watching TV basically. But yeah, like the style of baseball over there is more balletic. The ability to just rip fast balls past people doesn't quite exist over there. And so the way that they go about trying to do anything is going to be slightly different. Like just the sheer physicality and power on both sides of the ball really is different. I do like watching Japanese baseball.

It is a lot of fun. I think the best illustration of, I guess, some of the differences in the style of play is like the league-wide swinging strike rate in NPB was 8%, I think. And it's like 12% in MLB. And it feels like four percentage points isn't a lot, but it's like a 50% increase from 8% up to 12%. It is just a much more contact and defense-oriented game. And I think a large part of that is because it is easier to find athletes who are exceptional at doing that over there than it is to find guys who are exceptionally strong and powerful. And so the game just looks that way.

I do think that in terms of bodily movement, especially for pitchers, that Japan has had a better idea of how to optimize the way guys move their bodies for longer. So I couldn't even tell you the name of this book, and I've showed it to magazine, this book, and a bunch of the other fan the name of this book and I've showed it to magazine, this book and like a bunch of the other fan graphs writers. Cause I brought a copy of it to winter meetings to show everybody it's, it's a manga, like a pitching manga from 1998 called, uh, I don't know what, but it's, but it's by a guy named Kazushi Tezuka, K-A-Z-U-S-H-I, Tezuka. And some of the draw, like I can't read any of this book, but some of what this guy drew in the book is like unbelievable. It is exactly the way you'd

want to teach like a drop and drive delivery today to create some of the traits on, you know, pitches that we've talked about already in this podcast. It really is like ahead of its time and the, and the drawings are amazing. And yeah, if you were to put on an MPB game or just like go find video of Yoshinobu Yamamoto throwing a baseball,

it looks like the drawings in this book. And so I think that they've had a better idea of how to like get the most out of one's body on the mound, which is out of necessity for much longer than we did. Like it took a tech bro startup to show through like hardcore science that like, this is how we should do things before we really bought into any of this stuff on our shores. And we still have a lot of these like multi-billion dollar franchises who

have guys pretending to throw while holding a towel, you know, in the bullpen, like that still goes on a lot. So I think that, yes, just some of their approach to getting the most out of their bodies over there is like heightened their awareness of some of this stuff a good 15 years before it was a thing that was pervasive in United States baseball development culture. So folks should check out that book

online if you can. Don't buy, don't all go buy copies of it because I'm like hoarding them. So I'm still waiting for one that might be lost in the mail. But yeah, like folks go look at, that's actually what my avatar and various, you know, my Gmail or my Twitter or whatever,

like comes from that book. And it took me forever to actually find a copy of it. Now I have two and I'm waiting on a third. So, uh, don't let everyone go buy one at once, but, um, but yeah, check that out. All right. Well, podcast appearance number 29 went great. We will celebrate number 30 with you at some point in the future. Thanks as always. Thank you guys again for, for having me. And, um, it's been a nice, it's been a nice little stretch here. Like it was great to see the whole website at winter meetings, but yeah, it's been a beautiful little stretch here. Like getting to see everybody again and, uh, like turn 35 and like reflect on a bunch of things. And

so I'm thankful that this is part of my baseball writing life is coming on here with you guys. All right. That will just about do it for today. By the way, my book about player development in baseball, the MVP machine has been translated into Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. And from what I understand, some of the ideas in there have been embraced in baseball circles. So there's definitely a lot of interest in data driven player development. Not surprising that it's paying off for players there. Also, I will remind you to vote if you haven't already in the audience referendum on how to handle Shohei Ohtani's contract in the free agent contracts over underdraft. After we recorded our intro today, the AP reported that Ohtani has what's sometimes called a key man clause in his contract. He has no opt

outs. But if Dodgers controlling owner Mark Walter or Pobo Andrew Friedman leave the team, seemingly for any reason of their own volition or not, then Otani could opt out at the end of the season and keep whatever deferred funds he has earned to that point, which is quite unusual. The only other time I can recall hearing about this in baseball is Joe Maddon's deal with the Rays. He had a similar provision also for Friedman. And when Friedman left the Rays, Maddon opted out, went to the Cubs, won a World Series. Quite a flex for Friedman that prominent people around him think he's so important to the team that they might not even want to be there anymore without him. Anyway, I'm sure Otani doesn't want to trigger that clause and it's not likely that Friedman will leave, but 10 years is a long time for a baseball executive to stay in one place.

It gives them both some leverage, even if Otani didn't want to exercise that clause. Maybe he could ask for something more not to. Plus, sure gives Friedman a lot of leverage. If he has a contract negotiation coming up, better pay me or I'll leave and you'll lose Otani, though I doubt he wants to leave, and it's not like his job was in any danger, I don't imagine. Still, how would you value something like that if we're considering factors other than just the total guaranteed dollars? Total guaranteed dollars are pretty important to us and to this podcast. So if you want to send some our way, you can do that by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up

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