Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 215: Does Money Still Make Teams Better?/Taking our Temperatures on Tim Lincecum and Chris Davis

Episode Date: June 3, 2013

Ben and Sam discuss whether the ability to spend big helps teams as much as it once did, then talk about their expectations for Tim Lincecum and Chris Davis.

I hate these moments. I'm hearing the dual voices now, you know. What about the money? What's money? Good morning and welcome to episode 215 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus. I am Ben Lindberg, joined by Sam Miller. I hope you had as good a weekend as the Astros and the Marlins, who both swept.

The Astros have won five in a row. No, yeah. I mean, I didn't because they're playing in the major leagues. Yes. And I'm not. I mean, it's just that the starting point is ridiculous. In fact, I also had a much worse weekend than the Angels, who were – they actually weren't swept, by the way. It's a four-game

wraparound series. So, it's wrong to say that the Angels got swept, it is correct to say that the Angels world burned to hell. Which I guess you kind of want to talk about today. Somewhat, what do you want to talk about? I wanted to ask you about two players. somewhat. What do you want to talk about? I wanted to ask you about two players. We don't have to do a podcast for that, Ben. You could have just emailed me.

No one else would have gotten to hear it. And I want to talk about the so-called resource curse. So why don't I start? All right. So I wrote a piece for ESPN, the magazine, uh, the premise of which was if the angels are a smart team and they're a rich team, uh, why aren't they a winning team? And, uh, incorporates the Dodgers as well. And looks at the question of whether it is, uh, well, I guess whether it's harder to win, uh, with money now than it used to be. But the pitch, or I guess the nut graph, is that there is an emergent resource curse in baseball whereby there seems to be very little advantage to having money. And this showed up last year really primarily when the correlation between money and wins was the lowest it had been in any post-expansion year in history, and really a lot lower than

the average. The average, I think, the correlation was somewhere between 0.4 and 0.5. Last year, I think it was 0.19. Last year, I think it was 0.19. The average team over the last 20 years that has been in the top half of payroll has won 85 games. And so then the average team in the bottom half has won 77, which is a good and real difference. Last year, the average team in the top half won 81.4. So almost no difference. The correlation this year is stronger thanks to the Marlins and the Astros, who have played exactly as badly as you

would think with a $23 million payroll or whatever. But for the 28 teams that are kind of above the bare standard of Major League Baseball teams that those 28 teams when i looked about maybe eight days ago had no correlation the correlation was 0.1 for between payroll and wins for the top 28 teams and so um you know it's certainly possible that this is a glitch because this is what baseball does to us they give us us glitches and blips and those sorts of things. But I just wanted to know how full of it you think I am for this idea of a resource curse. And should I explain what a resource curse is? Yeah, I think so. So a resource curse refers to this phenomenon where countries that are poor discover, say,

oil or some natural resource that gives them tons and tons and tons of money, and it actually should save their economy. In fact, it seems to have the opposite effect. It makes their economy worse, it makes their economy grow slower, and generally leads to all sorts of negative things like civil war or dictatorship or graft or whatever. In fact, they also call it the paradox of plenty. So basically, discovering such money in your land can actually be a bad thing. So that's sort of the idea is that the Angels and Dodgers announced these huge TV contracts.

And it seems like all should be right with the world. But yet, we're seeing them both in last place right now, or I guess the angels aren't in last place, but they're doing terrible. Uh, yeah, I enjoyed the article and I mean, my, my mind sort of rebels at the notion that money doesn't matter or doesn't matter much. Um, it just seems like such a, such an ingrained thing that the teams that spend more should on the whole be, be significantly better than the teams that don't. Uh, I mean, I guess it's, it's consistent with what baseball has tried to do. Um, I mean, baseball has tried to promote parody and we've talked about some of the

ways in which it has tried to promote parody and, and that seems to have worked really well. And you've written about extensions before in the future of extensions, and you talk about extensions a lot in this article. I guess, has always been that the rich teams could still preserve an advantage maybe by locking their players up younger or to longer deals. And that it was kind of a small market strategy that was now co-opted by big market teams. And then you'd see the small market teams advantage sort of disappear in that area but and and then there's always been the idea that uh if the free agent market shrinks just because so many players sign extensions that they're not available every winter then the rich teams would just sort of shift their spending to other areas and they would build up their organization in some other way that

small market teams couldn't afford. And so maybe you wouldn't see such a huge difference in payroll anymore, but you would see it in their organization somehow, in their farm system, in their international presence. But as we talked about last week, and there won't be an international draft next season, which kind of came out after we did our last podcast about it. But if that is the way that things are moving, and of course, there's already a ceiling on how much you can spend on those players, then I guess it's getting harder and harder to find out where you could put that money so as to confer some sort of advantage. I mean, how much can you theoretically spend on a scouting staff or a front office department? It doesn't seem like you could

have a huge spending disparity there so that you could hire much, much smarter people. And maybe hiring the smartest scouts is not quite as important as it once was when you could spend as much money as you wanted on the international market or had more money to spend in the amateur draft. So I guess I kind of buy it. I want to say that it won't necessarily continue, that this sort of thing is cyclical and that, I don't know, at some point the rules will change and big market teams will again kind of have their way. I guess, I don't know, I'm having a hard time seeing where they could differentiate themselves as much as they might have been able to before. And then there's also the concern that the broadcast deals are some sort of bubble and that these things won't last. And I guess you could say maybe that's the way that it will happen, where the small market teams that signed a bunch of big money extensions if they're if everyone's

tv deals kind of go belly up then maybe the big market teams will be able to absorb those losses better uh and remain competitive i guess that's one way in which that could happen well or yeah or the small market teams that don't have those, if they didn't make them in the first place. Yeah. First off, I talk to people who work in big market front offices. I talk to people who work in small market front offices. Nobody says, oh yes, give me less money. You need to put me on strict limits.

I can't be trusted. Everybody wants more money. Everybody thinks that more money is better and I think more money is better. There still is a correlation there. It's just it's small. The point is that it's getting smaller or seems to be getting smaller. And I think that it's I think that the way that it would the way that it seems to work is that big market teams can still buy an extra win. It just costs so much more than it used to that they can't buy nearly as many extra wins. And it almost always comes with a somewhat

steeper price tag if not in money, because the real value of money is so relative to the organization, in lost opportunities. And so you see the Angels, for instance. I mean, this is something that gets talked about constantly with the Angels out here because fans are not just upset that they're seeing the Angels lose, but they're upset that Gene Segura is going to be an all-star for the Brewers and that Pat Corbin is 9-0 for the Diamondbacks and that Tyler Skaggs is a top prospect. And they look at the Angels' farm farm system and it's ranked 30th. And so you get in this cycle where you have to get a win.

You're a big market team and you feel like your window is there and your fans expect you to win every year and pursuing a win today costs more than it ever did. That's basically the premise is that pursuing a win today cost more for three years down the road than it ever did, and that's the disparity that small market teams have some benefit from. Partly it's the extensions, and partly it's that if you sign... If you have the 100th pick in the draft now, you can't really do anything but get the 100th best player, where a big market team used to be able to throw around their money on tough sign guys.

Mark Trumbo, for instance, was I think an 18th round pick. You can never get Mark Trumbo now for $1.5 million in the 18th round. You're basically stuck getting lousy, low- low ceiling talent and with your hundredth pick. So, and the third thing, I forgot what the third thing was. There's a third, there's a third. Oh, yeah. The other thing is, and this one is probably the least convincing to me. But everybody I talked to, or I guess a lot of people I talked to kind of believe it that old players just aren't as good. Oh, yeah, I was going to bring that up because, yeah, I was on the radio yesterday or last week at some point, and the host asked me whether I thought there were lessons that could be drawn from the Angels and the Dodgers disappointing.

And his theory was that we kind of got used to a historically anomalous aging curve, kind of in the PED era, and that we expected free agents to remain productive into their mid to late 30s, and now teams haven't adjusted to the fact that players aren't aging like that anymore. And so they're signing Josh Hamilton or Pujols or whatever and thinking that they'll be decent through their late 30s or early 40s or whatever it is. And that's just not the case

anymore. And yeah, I don't know. I guess that could be a lesson from this. I am a little less convinced by it, but then... Yeah, I yeah i'd want to i think i'd want to see somebody with a bit more creativity than me figure out a way to to study that and see whether there was an article i guess it was a couple of months ago at bp remember zach levine did an article on on the amount of well and i guess you kind of wrote about just the amount of wins that came from players of certain age groups. And he wrote about how there were many fewer wins from older players, and you wrote about how there were many more wins from younger players.

Yeah, 27 and unders account for more than half of the wins in baseball this year and were 40% 10 years ago. And, you know, that's a big difference. It's a very big difference. The question is whether that's just the Manny Machado, Bryce Harper, Mike Trout effect. If guys are developing sooner... Combined with the Barry Bonds effect, I guess. Combined with

the Barry Bonds effect, combined still further with, which is an explanation I heard, that teams are simply going to young players more because they're cheap, because they have more faith in them, because they need them, because circumstances have led to it. And so it might just be that we're seeing them more, if that makes sense. So, yeah, so I don't know. I don't know.

Like, I guess the question is, let's say there was a 0.2 correlation last year. Let's say there was a 0.2 correlation last year, so maybe something like closer to a 0.3 correlation this year, which both of those would be at the far, far low end of what we've seen over the last 27 years. If you had to guess from 2014 to 2016, is that number going to go lower or higher? The free agent market is... To be honest, the extensions effect on the free agent market is really mean the extension to be honest the extensions effect on the free agent market is really just barely kicking in now I mean you

can sort of point to and I do point to the guys who would have been available to the angels if there hadn't been all these early extensions being signed but like in three or four years it's going to be absurd so if that's actually what's driving this, then you would think – Then you'd expect it to go down.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I guess I would expect that. That is – I don't know. It'll be interesting to watch. I mean if the – There's also of course course, the fact that the Angels and the Dodgers,

even if you accept this premise that the Angels have gotten to this somewhat destructive cycle whereby they're having to overpay for wins, it doesn't explain Josh Hamilton being this bad. Even if you thought that Josh Hamilton was a bad signing

or was overpaid, you expected it was going to hurt them in the fourth year and that maybe he would only be a three-win player this year instead of a five-win player. But it's not like anybody said, oh yeah, those Angels, they're going to get a sub-replacement performance out of Josh Hamilton or out of Albert Poole. With Albert Pooleols too. They were supposed to get an MVP performance out of him this year, and it's not like I was predicting this two years ago. You have to sort of accept that a lot of this might actually be totally unrelated to the resource curse. It might just be bad luck.

It's crazy. Baseball is nuts, man. Okay, so the two players I wanted to ask you about are Tim Lincecum and Chris Davis. We talked before the season, I guess, about our expectations for Lincecum or what we thought he would make as a free agent after this season. And as usual, I don't really remember what we said. I remember that I had some very low number, I think, for him because I wasn't at all confident. So now we've seen a third of the season. We're a third of the way to his free agency.

And there's an interview the other day with Andrew Baggerly from CSN Bay Area, where he talked to Lincecum about kind of starting a second career as a reliever and whether he would consider that. He says that the Giants would turn Lincecum into a late-inning reliever in a heartbeat if they had another starting pitcher to replace him with. And he talks to Lincecum, and of course Lincecum doesn't come out and say, I am dying to be a reliever, but he sounds, well, he says, I'm open to it. And he said, I'm sure if my career takes that turn, I'm definitely open to changes,

if it's beneficial to the team I'm playing for, et cetera, et cetera. So some players who are starters and who've been successful starters kind of have to be dragged kicking and screaming to the bullpen. It doesn't sound like Lincecum will be one of those people. And there are just lots of quotes from like Jeremy Affelt, who was kind of a struggling starter until he became an effective reliever and Buster Posey and people talking about how great Lincecum would be as a reliever. And they seemed to think that he would just kind of become a dominant closer right away. Affelt compared him to Smoltz and said that he was just he just kind of transitioned to a second successful career and become a dominant late inning reliever. to a second successful career and become a dominant late inning reliever.

So I guess I want to revisit what we think about what he will make this winter. Will a team still take a chance on him as a starter? Will a team just kind of take a flyer on him? Is he at that point? Or will someone just think that he can be an effective closer without necessarily having seen him do that and give him closer kind of money to be a closer without having proven that he has the closer mentality or whatever it is? having proven that he has the closer mentality or whatever it is.

Of all things, I'm Googling Joe Pinero right now. Well, you know, I don't know. I think it's a bit of a leap to say he's going to be a dominant closer off the bat. I mean, he had like nine pretty good innings in the preseason. The idea is, I mean, there's a quote from him where he says, out of the bullpen your focus is different. You're not thinking about lasting. It's go until they tell you to stop. When you're starting, when you see your pitch count go up in a bad inning,

that can be at the forefront of your brain. You know, it's going to limit how deep you can go. So I guess you could say it's a lack of pressing when you're relieving. So I guess you could say it's a lack of pressing when you're relieving. And then there was stuff about how dominant he looked and how Baggerly says he could dominate with his fastball and split slash change alone or go two seamer and curve. And, you know, all these people saying that he'd be well suited for it. I mean, it does... Wait, they're saying if he's a reliever,

he can go strictly to two-seamer and curve? Baggerly says he could dominate with his fastball and split change alone, or go two-seamer and curve. Uh-huh. That would be an interesting choice to go to two-seamer and curve, because his split is like... It seems to me is the only pitch that works i don't know yeah i don't know either um andrew baggerling is a whole lot more than me

so uh it's weird that i would say something to dispute him actually that's what's weird um uh yeah so uh i don't know i mean i i certainly wouldn't take that chance on him. But the other thing is that, well, I mean, say you give him something like closer money, like $9 million for a year. Well, he's probably worth that as a starter too or at least has the potential to be worth it. I imagine that he might get that as a starter. I guess what I'm saying is I don't know that his price would be different depending on the role. Do you? I don't know. I guess I'm wondering whether there's, I mean, if he finishes the season where he is now, he will have gone two full seasons with a five plus ERA in San Francisco.

with a 5-plus ERA in San Francisco. So I don't know. I mean, he'll still be only 29 years old, but I kind of have a hard time imagining a team handing him much money to start at that point. But, yeah, I guess. Who else is going to get signed on the free agent market? He still looks more attractive than Halliday, and he probably still looks more attractive than Josh Johnson.

Yeah, so I guess this is a resource curse candidate. I would guess that if he were a starter, gosh, I don't know. I wish we had asked Jim Bowden this beforehand. I guess, I mean, he still strikes guys out. Yeah, that's the weird thing. He still strikes out over a better perning. I would guess that he would get, I would guess that he would get, I would think that he could get more than Jeremy Guthrie got,

so 3-35. I don't know. I don't think so. Assuming he finishes the season as well or as poorly as he's pitched so far, I don't know. I think the Guthrie deal was kind of a combination of him just coming off a really awesome run. Not a long one, but a combination of that and the Royals just really wanting a starter. I don't know. I don't think you could come off two consecutive seasons, even as a former two-time Cy Young winner coming off two consecutive seasons like this.

I don't know. I guess I have a hard time imagining that happening. So two years, $10 million? Well, I mean, at least that. Okay, so we're not that low. I guess. Okay. Yeah, I guess i would i mean i guess he could go for a one-year deal and try to either either show that he can be a dominant closer at which point he

could really get closer money or or try to rehabilitate himself as a starter again uh i mean if he settled for a one-year deal i i guess i could see him getting like i guess i could see 10 million for one year from some some desperate rich team without a lot of free agents out there i guess i could see that and maybe he would be i don't know maybe they would just try him as a starter and if it doesn't, then maybe they would try him as a closer. So maybe it would be a team without a stable rotation or bullpen where they could kind of slot him in either way and it would work. Yeah, I guess I could see that.

I don't know. I don't see Guthrie. All right. Yeah, I don't have any sense whatsoever. Well, we knew it would be interesting before the season, and it has remained interesting. The other player I wanted to ask you about is Chris Davis. I wrote about the Orioles recently, and I just kind of tossed in some line in there about how he was an unlikely leader for their offense. Not something I really

thought about. And some commenter kind of called me out and said, why do you consider him an unlikely leader? He was good last year. He was a promising prospect not long ago. And I said, you know, that is true. He was also kind of considered a quadruple A player not too long ago. So I guess I'm wondering, because I've been thinking about how much I buy the Chris Davis breakout for a while now. I guess he's kind of the closest to Jose Bautista that we've had since Jose Bautista. Jose Batista that we've had since Jose Batista. I mean, his breakout sort of started last September, which was the case with Batista,

where when he did it for a full season, we all looked back and said, oh, it started last season, or maybe it was just a hot September or whatever. But so if you, I mean, it's basically half a season if you include that September that Davis has just destroyed the league. He has been the best hitter in the American League. I mean, as good as Miguel Cabrera has been, Davis, according to our stats at least, has been better.

I mean, he's slugging 754 this year. And you can kind of see differences. 54 this year and you can kind of see differences i mean he's one of those guys where i don't know maybe we're we're looking too hard for ways to justify the performance but he's a guy who kind of revamped his swing and he's he's less of an uppercut guy now more of a level swing uh and he he talked about those changes before this year so we we know it's not really just justifying it uh and he's become more selective and he's he's chasing pitches outside the strike zone much less than he did last year and uh so i mean everything about his performance seems like it's kind of real except except he's got a crazy high babbitt I mean, you expect his average to come down somewhat.

But he now has 20 home runs and has been the best hitter in baseball, I guess. So, I don't know. Are you – and it's funny because, I mean, he was traded for Koji Uehara a couple years ago. Not even straight up. He was part of a package for him. And we like Uehara a lot. And. Not even straight up. He was part of a package for him. And we like Uehara a lot. And Uehara is awesome.

I love that trade. Yeah, when Texas pulled that trade off, I was like, God, nobody's ever going to beat Texas. They're too good at this. And Uehara, he wasn't so great for Texas that year, but he has been amazing since. And he's been amazing this season. We both really liked the Red Sox acquisition of him before this year

and it has worked out well. So he's coming from being traded as part of a package for a reliever and kind of being regarded as a possible quadruple-A player type who would just never make enough contact to be good. And now he has been the best hitter in the American League and people have been writing about whether it's real or not. And there are indications that it is real, but who knows really. So I don't know.

I guess from today till the end of the season, where do you expect Chris Davis to rank among American League hitters or something? I mean, is he the best? Is he the 10th best? Is he not that good? Okay, I'll answer that. But first I want to ask you a question, which is you mentioned that this is a carryover

from September. Let's say he hadn't done that in September. Let's say he was just same old Chris Davis last September. But then let's say that you take his september numbers you know the last 30 games he played and plot them right here so they were this year's this year's performance was 30 games longer so that was like his his april like we were talking about this in july exactly okay exactly so uh more convincing or less convincing in that case? I guess – I don't know.

I mean I'm hesitant to read too much into something that happened last season. I don't know whether that was before the mechanical changes or not. But I guess less convincing but probably – I guess it should be a little less convincing just because it's more recent, right? I think – well, yeah, I think the way that you described it when you were describing it when you started telling this story, in a way the fact that it was in September made it sound more convincing, like it was a stronger argument because it feels like there's, you know, like we've it feels like two distinct acts and not just him being, you know, hot or whatever. To me, it feels somewhat more convincing that it was September. But I think that's probably that's probably wrong, especially when you consider that September is September opponents a lot of times. My guess is that statistically

there's no real reason to treat September more differently, but I don't know. It feels slightly more real to me because he did it last year and he's keeping it up. It's not just one big number. Anyway, I would guess that Chris Davis will be the 16th best hitter in the American League.

No. It's hard to say because I would guess that he is the 19th best hitter in the American League from this point forward. But of the 18 players ahead of them, some of them are just going to be guys who aren't actually as good as Tim and who are just having their own positive random fluctuations. So I would guess that he is both the 19th best hitter in the American League in true talent right now, and he is also going to have the 19th best true average from this point forward. But the two groups of 18 ahead of them are slightly different. Yeah, it's funny that that commenter and that article came out on May 22nd,

and the commenter pointed out that if you sort of took out his first crazy series of the year, he wasn't actually that amazing. It wasn't that huge a difference. Like he said, in the first 40 games after the ridiculous first four games, he hit.281 with nine home runs and 25 RBI. I don't see any reason to think that isn't sustainable. And that sounded kind of persuasive, like he had a really crazy series to start the season

and then he was just kind of Chris Davis again. But since that article came out, he has hit 5'11", 5'60", and slugged 1,067 with seven home runs in 45 at-bats. So he kind of went crazy again after that. So, yeah. Yeah, I was thinking about Mark Trumbo yesterday and how every month I seem to have a new opinion of him.

And the smartest thing I did was quit saying these opinions in public. It just sort of kept them to myself. And we should probably just, with any player I did was quit saying these opinions in public. It just sort of kept them to myself. And we should probably just with any player that we're tempted to re-evaluate based on whatever they've done in the last four games, 40 games, or maybe 400 games, we should just

always premise everything with I would hate, I don't really know, but if I had to guess. We should just say everything. I don't know, but if I had to guess. If I was for some reason paid to guess. Which we kind of are. We do had to guess. We should just say everything. I don't know but if I had to guess. If I was for some reason paid to guess. Which we kind of are. We do have to guess. We have to write about something.

Yeah. So, you know, with Chris Davis, I can tell you one thing that I'm going to have a drastically different opinion of him probably in six weeks and not necessarily a more correct one. Alright. That's our first show of the week. Send us emails at podcast at baseball perspectives.com and we will get to them

in a couple of days.