Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2241: The Most Fascinating Free Agents and Offseason Storylines

Episode Date: November 8, 2024

Ben Lindbergh and FanGraphs writer Ben Clemens banter about the latest batch of Scott Boras puns, position changes for Willson Contreras and Mookie Betts, surgery for Shohei Ohtani, Skip Schumaker’s move to Texas, and Buster Posey’s front-office philosophy, then (47:21) discuss Other Ben’s top 50 free agents list—focusing on Juan Soto, Blake Snell, Corbin Burnes, […]

Effectively Wild Hello and welcome to episode 2241 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from FanGraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, not joined by Meg Rowley of FanGraphs who's off today. She'll be back next time. I am joined by another member of the FanGraphs staff, other Ben, Ben Clemens. We're here for some double-barreled Ben action. Always pleased to welcome you back. Hello, Ben. Hey, Ben. How's it going? You know, it's alright

It's been better. It's been a tumultuous week But in the middle of this week of upheaval when we all need a little levity in our lives a little distraction Scott Boris rode to the rescue with some of his patented puns And I'm not saying it improved my mood permanently but there was a little while there where Scotty brought a smile to my face. And because you are here and Meg is not, it falls to you to react to the latest and greatest Scott Boris witticisms and wordplay. So I'm sure you've seen this. How could anyone not? I've seen at least one of them. Okay.

Well, I think there are at least five, so some of these may be new to you. This may be breaking Boris news. So I guess I'll read them to you and maybe you can grade them. All right. I don't know what scale exactly one would grade these on. Just like groan worthiness. Maybe just your organic reaction will be enough of a grade, but here we go.

This is one about Corbin Burns. Essentially, he continues to be a Corbin copy of his previous seasons. Oof. That's the whole one? Yeah, that's about it. Corbin, Corbin copy. I'm going to give that saying the wrong word

and then looking expectantly at people hoping they'll laugh because it's like both not funny and not true. Yes, that's the thing about it. It's not true. Very different. I'm not saying he hasn't been effective, but he's been wildly different. Yeah.

And so I feel like if you want to bend the truth a little, you should be funnier. And that wasn't. Yeah. I wonder how long we will keep saying carbon copy because how many people have actually made a carbon copy in their lives. Right. And I guess it's still in common circulation linguistically. We all still say carbon copy. I've said carbon copy. Don't recall the last time I made a carbon copy. If that ever happened, then again, we say Xerox sometimes or photocopy haven't made one of those in a while either.

When do we actually put things on a photocopy machine? Maybe people who work in offices still do that regularly, but I haven't. And so carbon copy, carbon copy persists and Corbin copy. It's what you would want to put out there if you're Corbin Burns' agent. I guess you would want people to think that, yeah, this is the, he's the foundation of having a number one is the second component of this quote here. That's not a pun, but that seems like a better pitch.

Yeah. So you would want to say, hey, Corbin Burns, same guy as always, just as dominant. Don't look at his strikeout stuff or his cutter and its attributes. I know he changed that a little bit at the end of the season. What about like Corbin Burns? He's been really effective for four straight years. Well that's not funny. That's not gonna go viral at all. I'm just saying like then he gives it to his writers and has them make it funny. Please, he does it all himself and he doesn't use chat

GPT or anything. He would never because I really believe he would never stoop to such tactics. This is something that brings him great joy. So here's another one. This is about one Soto and gosh, this one is, is kind of long. I don't even know where to start with this one. Sometimes, yeah, sometimes you have to, uh, there's like a bit of a buildup and you have to go a long way to get to the punchline here. And when you see a video of him delivering this, he has this grin on his face because he knows that he's working up to it. I went to it last year at the winter meetings and he was just smiling like a mad

man while 30 reporters shoved microphones at him. Yep. He is like the Cheshire cat. Okay. So I guess I'll just start here. They or team executives are called upon to be championship magicians. Behind every great magician is the magic one. Damn silence. Oh, Boris is bombing here on Factically Wild with Ben Clements. I would give him a America's Cup for that one in that I don't think it's that funny, but it does at least bring to mind previously funny Boris things. So better than the Corbin copy one where I just went past me and didn't think it was funny. Immediately found reasons to pick Nits with it. I thought this one was at least a groan where I was like, Oh yeah, I remember funny jokes he's

told me before. All right. Here's one about Alex Bregman. He's provided the Astros with that infusion of championship blood. Everything about him is AB positive. That's great. His initials are AB. This one's incredible. I'm going to give this one. And I just flew in from New York and boy, are my arms tired because that makes me laugh every time. And this one was funny. AB positive. Is that like at bats?

Does that refer to it bats also, or is that solely referring to his? You decide how deep it goes. Like his initials and blood and the fact that he said championship infusion before I knew it was going to be about blood was pretty good too. Yeah. Okay. Next one up is about Pete Alonzo. There's been a lot of talk about this being a bear market

for First Basement. But for, what a setup. But for Pete's sake, it's the polar opposite. Oh, what? Oh man, this one's better than the last one. Yeah, this one I actually didn't laugh as much as the Bregman one, but as a writer, I can appreciate the fact that he layered three jokes into one.

I like this too. Yeah. I just think that's legitimately good. If I wrote something like that, it wouldn't be too sad. Yeah. There can be one too many jokes stacked on top of each other. It's like a fun fact with too many qualifiers and the throwing in the Pete's sake and between the bear market and the polar opposite. I agree with Pete's sake. Polar opposite and bear market are really the winners there. Yeah. I kind of like that he just can't help himself. He just had to throw in, like, I have to use Pete's sake somewhere. I'm not going to just file draw that. That's not going to be on the cutting room floor. This is gold. So I've just got to cram it in somehow, even if this

sentence gets a little overstuffed. Okay. And so you had not heard any of these? These are all. No, I think I've probably heard the last one then. Yeah, this is probably the one that was the most circulated about Blake Snell. The Snelling salts have created a lot of whiffs. The market has definitely awakened to Blake Snell. The Snelling salts have created a lot of whiffs. The market has definitely awakened to Blake Snell. I mean, this one's good. Like, yeah, this one's just good. Like, yeah. What can you say? I feel like when he gets too complex, they're often misses the whole boat race one. Like I can just, I can just hear like you and Jeff talking about the boat race one in disbelief.

Yeah. When I think about Scott Boris. So incredulous. Yeah. Yeah. But this one is, it was short and sweet. I liked the awakened going with the, the Snelling salts and whiffs. Like, yeah, the whiffs is brilliant because, you know, double meaning there.

You get your, your swings and misses, but also your whiffs of the Snelling salts This is yeah, I'm a I the last two were both really good. Do you think Corbin Burns is a little upset? I yeah, you think so right throw away like it Corbin's six jokes in Pete Alonso's one Yeah, is this indicative of the quality of the representation? I'm gonna be receiving this offseason is that Corbin copy is the best you can do Yeah, like do you can do. Yeah. Like, do you think, do you think Burns' market is down now? It might be probably not for this reason, maybe because he's not actually a Corbin

copy of his previous seasons, but, but this can't have helped. So yeah, I, this was, I don't know if it was some of Boris' best work, but it was not his worst work. And I feel like he's been on the decline lately and that people have tired of this and that it's, it's kind of worn out. It's welcome a little bit. And he was not working with his A material, but I think he's back. I think this is the Boris bounce pack, which is something people are watching closely this

off season to see if Boris rebounds when it comes to actual free agent contracts and playing the market and finances. But I think this bodes well that he seems to be re-energized. He's brought his pun game back. So that could be a prelude to actually getting these guys some big deals, which they would probably appreciate even more than Snelling salts and whiffs and awakening, probably the market actually awakening and Blake Snell getting the kind of contracts he wants. I have a question for you. Let's say you're Pete Alonzo and you're basically already generationally wealthy and you're

going to get super generationally wealthy with this deal. And let's say that you could either get 10 million more dollars on your contract or the best Scott Boris quote ever guaranteed. I actually don't know what I would pick because the money doesn't have a ton of utility when you're going this high up. I'd probably pick the money. I'd probably pick the money and I could probably hire writers to churn out. If it's not authentic, if it's not coming from the man himself, even if it replicated

his tone, it's not quite the same, but 10 million bucks. Yeah. The marginal value to you might not be great. I guess you could do a lot of good in the world with that. That it might be of more utility to the species and the planet than getting a really great Scott Boris pun, but it would be something to be able to say you had the best one ever. Hey, money's zero sum, but puns aren't. So maybe, maybe you could just strike a deal

where the Mets give the money to charity and then Boris comes up with a good pun. Sure, yeah, it's like the Braves Foundation. It's like the Scott Boris pun foundation. Zero pun game? Yeah, I don't know, maybe not. That's strained even by Boris. We're not ready to work for him yet. Yeah, okay. All right, well, I don't know. Maybe not. That's strained even by Boris. We're not ready to work for him yet.

Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, I have brought you here partly because you produced a top 50 free agents ranking for FanGraphs. And when Meg returns, we're going to do our annual free agent contracts over under draft using the MLB Trade Rumors top 50, which has also been published. We may refer to your valuations and the FanGraph's crowd-sourced contracts predictions as we are drafting,

but that will wait for another day. But I do want to talk to you about the process of producing a Top 50 in concert with some FanGraph's colleagues and also maybe just some of the off-season storylines we're most interested in, some of which probably will be particular players free agencies, and just a couple non-Boris related news items I wanted to get your thoughts on. Two pretty prominent position changes were announced, one pertaining to your St. Louis Cardinals and Wilson Contreras, who has had a star-crossed career as a catcher in St. Louis.

That just hasn't seemed like the best fit defensively between player and pitching staff and organization. We talked about that a lot last year. It didn't come to a head quite as often this year, I guess, partly because he improved, partly because he got hurt and wasn't catching as much, partly because maybe they just got used to not having Yadi back there, and partly because he just hit really well, which maybe makes it easier. Yeah, some of the objections, but he will not be catching anymore, at least not regularly.

He is moving to first base and relatedly, maybe he is unlikely to waive his no trade clause. So it seems like he will be moving to first base DH for his long-term health and longevity, according to John Moselleck, and he is unlikely to catch much at all. So what do you make of Contreras's tenure with the Cardinals thus far and also how this position change affects his value and the Cardinals' positional depth charts? STORM WELLS Star-Crossed is probably a good way of putting it. I didn't really take a lot away from the 2023 nonsense about what the pitchers mutinying

against him and then making him an outfielder where he never played, including during when they made him an outfielder. It's very strange. I think he just legitimately didn't play there at all after they said he was now an outfielder. He just only DH'd. Because why would you make Wilson Contreras an outfielder? It didn't make that much sense. So I didn't take a lot from that.

He's not a very good defensive catcher. I have to say that this year's adventure with him trying to become a better defensive catcher and instead breaking his hand, probably hastened this direction. I think this makes a lot of sense. He hits like a first baseman and catches kind of like a first baseman. I found that the Cardinals were making a lot of sense. He hits like a first baseman and catches kind of like a first baseman.

I found that the Cardinals were making a lot of decisions I didn't love, like playing more of Pedro Pahes than I would, but basically trying to, well, first, trying to appease the pitching staff that didn't seem to enjoy throwing to Contreras still. And secondly, you know, standing in for him when he got hurt. I think it makes a lot of sense. He's going to be 33 next year. He was never a great defensive catcher to begin with. It didn't make any sense when they had Goldschmidt.

Now that they've, you know, as much as said, I think they've just literally said, he's not coming back, like we're not pursuing a reunion. This makes sense to me. It's what you expect of the back end of a contract you sign for a bat first catcher who is not good, like who's also turning 33. So I think this makes sense. It's going to put a lot more pressure on his offense. But I'd rather

have more pressure on his offense and his defense. And if he hits like he did last year 140 wrc plus or even the year before 127 or 134 as he did with the Cubs his last year there. Yeah, that's fine for a first baseman even. Yeah, of course, he might not be a gifted defensive first baseman either, but that won't hurt quite as much. I don't think he's unplayable or anything at catcher. And I think to his credit, he possibly improved in some respects. If you go by stat cast, their stats had him as being above average at blocking and also at restricting the running game.

He's got a good arm. Yeah, his pop time is not great or wasn't this year, but still pretty good at suppressing the running game. Not Molina-like when it comes to that, but not bad. And then the framing went from being really bad to below average, but not horrible. CB Yeah. Although how much of that was him scooting forward in the box, which they don't want him to do anymore.

CB Maybe. And that's how he got hurt. CB You also have the situation where Ivan Herrera probably deserves playing time. He was actually awesome this year. But for whatever reason, the team really wants to carry Pajes because they want a defensive specialist if Contreras is the starter. And so that was restricting playing time. It's true that he's not a disaster back there. And you can certainly have very good teams and even

good defensive teams that play Wilson Contreras. But I think this is another like his war is going to go down. But his value to the team might be higher because I believe he's probably worse at defense on a go forward basis than either the other two guys. You can say, oh, he'd add a lot of value by being, being able to put that bat at catcher. And that's true. But then you can't play a good defender at catcher and who are they going to play at

first base? I get it from a team construction perspective. I bet you when they were working out the deal they were giving him back before the 23 season, they didn't think that this year would be the year he switched. Yeah. But they're a team that has a history of having great catching prospects and then not using them at all. And having those guys kind of atrophy just from not enough playing time. So at least they're doing something about it. I like that.

Yeah. I thought he had a raw deal really got a bad rap, especially his first season in St. Louis. A, you knew what you were getting or you should have. He's Wilson Contreras. He didn't suddenly become a different guy. You played a mazillion times. He's in your division. So I don't know what you expected exactly. It's just sort of like decades of exposure to Yadi kind of broke the Cardinals brains, which I guess I get because yeah, he was an extremely gifted defensive catcher and you get spoiled working with someone like that. And you know, I grew up watching Jorge Posada play for the Yankees and it was like, yeah, you live with the lousy defense because he hits like not a catcher and that's an advantage, right?

And, and you know, maybe that was more costly than we knew at the time because of the framing that we hadn't even quantified yet, but you know, Contreras is not Ryan Domet's level bad at those things. So it was really rough that he kind of got used as a scapegoat and granted, like pitchers complained about his game calling, I guess. And you know, that's not something stat cast has in the percentiles. And that's something that by reputation, at least Yadi was amazing at. So maybe the downgrade was bigger than the stats would suggest.

I mean, that's true. I think that also people just just had already decided in their head that yeah, he was going to be worse. Like, game calling is one of those things where it's, it's not measurable yet. But also, the edges aren't going to be huge, right? Because the correct call is surely some game theoretical mixture of what pitches you call. And it's not like, oh, you know, he's just always calling fastballs. He calls 100% percent fastballs. Like that's not really what's going on here. It's like, no, he's calling 35% sliders and two strike counts. And it should be more like 25. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of like batting orders when people complain about a bad batting order. And

unless you're like batting the pitcher cleanup or something back when pitchers hit, which even then the difference might not be as big as people think, but, but the marginal differences among realistic lineups that a team might actually put out there. It's just not that great. So I agree with you. And that's, I think that's a good comparison, just because obviously it matters, right? Obviously doing it the wrong way is bad, but how much it matters. Plus pitchers can call their own games now if they want to.

That's true. And I wonder whether his offense holds up better if he's not catching one would think the wear and tear long-term, but also short-term. I mean, surely, right? Like, I mean, he literally broke his whole like wrist, arm, hand, like everything. Like that was one of the nastiest injuries I've seen

in years. That was tough to watch, yes. Just avoiding that alone. But yeah, I mean, catchers get ground down. And I think that he's clearly a very talented hitter. So I think this makes a lot of sense, actually. Well, I hope these two just learn to love each other and appreciate each other's strengths

and forgive the flaws. It's like, you know, you get out of a relationship and you get into a new long-term relationship and you're comparing to your previous partner maybe and it's just not fair to anyone. And then, you know, you learn to appreciate the qualities of the person you're with. And Wilson Contreras, well, he's got a lot going for him. And I guess part of it maybe is the fact that the Cardinals pitching staffs have been so reliant on defensive catchers, perhaps more reliant than you'd like them to be because they're not really missing bats so much.

And so maybe receiving matters more if you don't really have great stuff and you're kind of finesse and you know, all the, the receiving and framing and game calling stuff is accentuated and you're kind of finesse and you know, all the receiving and framing and game calling stuff is accentuated because you're not just blowing the ball by people. So probably if Heim Blum has his way, they'll be a little less reliant on that and they'll actually like catch up to the times when it comes to constructing a pitching staff. That's my sense is that they're going to be a little bit more stuff centric. Just it seems likely.

I think that's true. What you said about like relying more on receiving when you are not a strikeout heavy team, but that is just broader in a broader sense. The Cardinals have built pitching staffs over the last like forever such that the defense is bad, you're going to know. It's going to be really obvious because there will be a lot of balls in play. All right. The other positional switch is one that we've seen before, but it's happening again.

Mookie's on the move once more. So according to Dodgers GM Brandon Gomes, Mookie is probably going to move back to the infield next season, either shortstop or second base. So just when it seemed like it was safe for him to pencil in a particular position for a season, nope, at least this time he has warning and it's not a an emergency swap because someone gets hurt or Gavin Lux can't throw it at first base, he is a forewarned and forearmed, but it's still pretty extraordinary. Obviously Mookie switching to shortstop when he did, and even dabbling there,

let alone briefly becoming a full-time shortstop at the age that he was with the career accomplishments that he had was pretty much unprecedented. And I've got to think that if we look at his career as a whole, when it's all said and done for a great player, maybe the best second, best third, best player of his era to move around the way that he does and to be competent and playable everywhere, which is why he kept keeps getting moved so much, right? If he weren't good at a number of positions, then teams wouldn't keep trying him there.

But what do you make of the rationale here for why the Dodgers would move him after he started the season at shortstop and then was playing some short in some second, and then he got heard, and then when he came back, he was in right field, and now back to the infield again. I mean, it's to tell one Soto they're serious, right? Maybe, right? It could be.

That's my guess. I mean, because you don't have to tell anybody this. It's fine. He could just show up at spring training and play second base. I don't think it's like super necessary. I'm guessing that he's not, it's not going to change his offseason preparation too much because he was clearly already capable of playing the infield, spent a lot of time last year on the infield, is such a good outfielder that I doubt he's doing a ton of, like, learning how to play outfield drills in the off-season. I'm just reading this as them looking at the free agent market and going,

hmm, well, a lot of guys were interested in signing our outfielders. Also, maybe we're not as in on Willi Adamas as people think we are. And so we prefer to send the outfielders so Mookie can move around. Let's let the outfielders know we're not as in on Willie Adamus as people think we are. And so we prefer to send the outfielders so Mookie can move around. Let's let the outfielders know we're interested. That's how I read it. It seems to me kind of unlikely that this is set in stone. If it turns out that they sign Adamus and like Gleyber Torres goes there on like a discount deal,

like probably they'll just be like, yeah, you can play right field. He's not blocking anybody, obviously. Yeah. So you think it's sort of a bluff, a signal to Soto. And if they don't get Soto, then, yeah, actually. I mean, I could see them getting like, or someone, bringing Teostar back.

And then Santander. I guess they're just more outfielders in general. Profar and O'Neill and Conforto, and who do you really have in the infield other than, I guess, Gleipur and Adonis, as you said, and Hassan Kim, I guess. I think they're probably not in on Kim. I don't know. But yeah, that's how I read it. I have no inside info, obviously. I have no reason to think this aside from just sitting here on my computer speculating, but that's kind of how I feel about it. I wonder whether it has anything to do with his performance in the field.

It's hard to judge cause he's moving all over the place and Russell Carlton's done studies on that and shown that that does take a toll. Although if you're someone like Mookie who's done it regularly, maybe you're sort of used to it, but he has slowed down somewhat and he's still a great valuable player, but the defensive metrics have, I don't want to say soured on him, but you know, have gotten a little more tepid where he used to be plus plus outfielder in a corner and now he grades out more as like average ish. So I bring back a, uh, a classic old effectively wild thing.

Oh, sure. I don't know if you've heard this, but during the world series, John Smoltz mentioned the mookie bets had saved 10 doubles so far, just with his cutoffs and I, I went about thinking about, I started thinking about whether that's possible. And I mean, no, it's not too many doubles. There's just not that many doubles available. Like, an actually like pretty bad right fielder was playing against bets in this series. And it felt like the Dodgers just had infinite doubles. Yeah. As you're referring to, I've collected examples going back decades of people

saying that so-and-so is worth X or Y and it's just improbably large. And 30 wins. Yeah. And this was much more common before we had something like war, which gave us a framework to talk about these things so that we know there is no such thing as a 20 win player realistically. I don't know that John Smoltz knows that necessarily because he's probably not looking at war so

much. He's probably looking at that as infrequently as he can. So maybe he's still prone to those overestimates, but that's good. I'll add it to my collection. But yeah, Mookie is great as he is. I think we still think of him as sort of a speedster, but he's not really like the Dodgers as a whole. Yeah. sort of a speedster, but he's not really like the Dodgers as a whole, really,

really good base running team, but not a fast team other than maybe Otani. Like Mookie back in 2015, the first season of sack has Mookie was 90th percentile sprint speed since then. I guess he's lost a separate two. He's lost a couple of feet per second. He's down to 31st percentile sprint speed. Since then, I guess he's lost a step or two. He's lost a couple feet per second. He's down to 31st percentile sprint speed. So I wonder whether it is them looking at his range and saying it doesn't grade out so well anymore. And maybe that's less of a liability in the infield, but I don't know. I don't know whether it's more reflection on him or on the market and the Dodgers needs. It could be a bit

of both, but there has been a bit of a decline there seemingly even as he remains one of the best players in baseball. I think that even if he has lost range, it was clear from watching the postseason that he remains like at very least playable. And I think, you know, when he's not switching positions all the time, probably above average, just on instincts. Like, the guy is a very good fielder. And yeah, I buy what you're saying, that they're moving into the position where how fast you run matters a little less.

Yeah. And that seems like a generally good idea if the thing you're worried about is how fast you run. If you look at the components of jump and everything, he's down a little. But it looks like it was down from, it was down largely in the kind of reaction and initial burst. And I can imagine that is the thing that gets most messed up when you're switching back and forth between positions.

His ability to take good routes remains pretty solid relative to how good he is at getting going. So I'm guessing that with more time there he could do it. But yeah, one thing that I'm not sure about is, is it more or less wear and tear to play second? Yeah, I don't know. Historically, the perception has been that second baseman don't age well because they get taken out by double plays.

But then again, now we have less contact there, presumably, right? And you know, there's no neighborhood play anymore. So you do sort of have to stay in there, but then certain types of contact are banned there, at least in theory. So there's probably fewer, just like total takeout slides than there used to be and people going in

with actual spikes and stuff that will hurt you. So yeah, I think that's probably less of a concern, but it's not as if range and reaction speed don't matter in the infield too. No, they absolutely do. Yeah, reaction speed might matter more potentially. Your top speed matters less. Yes, that's probably true. It's more like your, like to use football terms, your 10 yard dash instead of your 40

yard dash, like your cone drill or whatever. I've never really seen, with the possible exception of O'Neill Cruz chasing down a pop-up, anybody really get to like a jaw-dropping speed as an infielder. It's more like how quickly they get places, just the first two steps or whatever. Well, we've got many months to go between now and opening day. There's enough time for Mookie to move a few more times before then. We'll see if this sticks and where he ends up. Speaking of Otani, there was also Otani related news,

which is that he is having surgery or had it already. So this is arthroscopic shoulder surgery. Now arthroscopic makes it sound a little less scary. It's a little less invasive. Then again, this was to repair a labrum tear. That makes it sound a little less scary. It's a little less invasive. Then again, this was to repair a labrum tear. That makes it sound more scary on the other hand, or the other shoulder, I guess I'm up to three different arms or shoulders now.

And that's an effectively wild hypothetical that we've covered, but it's his left shoulder. So this is not his pitching shoulder, of course. And maybe his less prominent hitting shoulder, which is why he was able to keep hurting after, keep hitting after hurting. Yeah, hurting and hitting. Clearly both were happening there. Actually not so much of the actual hitting once he was hurting, but we thought we were

told this was just a subluxation. It was just like a partial dislocation. It was some soreness. I don't know whether subsequent exams and imaging revealed that damage was greater than they thought, or whether it was just a case of, Oh, Tony's going to insist on playing regardless and he's maybe not going to hurt himself worse. So yeah, he's going to be in there, but it was pretty obvious that he was hurting as we said, and he was cringing and grimacing, especially

when he missed the ball. So questionable, I guess, how much he was actually helping being in there, but maybe there was something just to the intimidation factor of Shohei Otani standing there, even if in practice he was a much less potent version of himself. But in theory, he should be ready for spring training. I don't know how this affects his ongoing rehab. It's of course not his throwing side. It's not great. Yeah, it can't be good.

I mean, it's a lot less bad than if this were his throwing shoulder, but you still have to like move your other shoulder when you throw and that would presumably be painful while you're recovering from surgery so it might slow him down again but then again it seemed like he was basically back or more or less built up other than your usual ramp up to spring training so i don't know how much real rehabbing he has left to do so maybe this isn't so much a setback. It's never good to have a surgery. It's never good to tear your labrum in your shoulder, but it seems like it is not disastrous in theory. So that sounds right to me.

I mean, you are a noted Otani fan. When you saw him remove himself from the game, you were like, he's hurt, right? Yeah, I didn't doubt that he might force his way back into the lineup, because we've seen dislocations and subluxations where you can come back from that, but it looked pretty bad, yeah. This news is, it would be hard for it to be less surprising to me.

Like, that once the World Series is over, they're going to be like, oh, Shohei was actually kind of hurt. Yeah. Come on, did you see how uncomfortable his swings were? Yeah. It is very good that it's his left shoulder. I went back and checked to make sure that Bellinger's that sapped his power for so long

was his lead shoulder's lefty, and it was. It was his right shoulder that he tore. That makes sense to me that that would be much worse to tear the lead one, and obviously much worse for a tiny. He was still swinging hard, and I think when he made contact was still hitting the ball pretty hard. Like he was.

Yeah. Well, that's why I'm less worried. It's not like a power supply. Like your back shoulder is much more of a stabilizer. Like I'm kind of thinking tennis here. And like, you know, you generate a lot of the strength from the off arm. And so it feels to me like that's what's going on here.

And it's probably not so much a power outage situation, more as a square up rate and the swing and miss, like some tiny adjustments he can make to his swing path were harder. So I don't know what that means going forward. I would assume it's going to push his pitching rehab back a little bit, not necessarily because it couldn't be done, but because he signed a $700 million contract and who really cares if he misses a month in April, they're going to make a playhouse anyway.

Yeah. So look, it's accumulated wear and tear and anytime you go under the knife or whatever you go under when there's an arthroscopic surgery, it's not good. It's such a tenuous thing, what he's doing and such a high wire act to begin with that anytime you have a surgery and he's had a whole bunch of them now, shoulder, elbow, knee, et cetera, those things take their toll eventually. So it's not great, but I don't doubt

that he can come back from this and still be his usual self for a while in the short term. So we'll see. Just another thing to be nervous about with him, but not to be too much of a doomer about. All right. Also, we had news about Skip Schumacher, a little less exciting going from Shōhei Otani to Skip Schumacher. But Skip Schumacher was seen as a top managerial prospect having parted ways with the Marlins. And it just so happened that there were very few openings this year. So it was just not really a great time to be a manager on the market because you had

the White Sox, which is maybe not the most desirable job. And then that got filled by Will Venable, who Skip Schumacher is not exactly replacing, but sort of filling in for to some extent here, because Schumacher was hired as a senior advisor to Pobo Chris Young with the Rangers. And then Luis Orieta, who was the bench coach for Schumacher in Miami, is now going to be that for the Rangers.

So it's just kind of a tandem, just a package deal here. They're going together in this Miami Exodus that we've seen where the Marlins have kind of cleared house and the Rangers are picking up multiple Marlins people. So yeah, it was kind of just like Chicago and Cincinnati and they went and got Terry Francona. So like, Do you want the Chicago job? Like, I feel like if you showed promise on the Marlins, which I think Schumacher did, I think he seemed to be a pretty good manager. Very hard to talk from the outside. Your reward being managing the White Sox just doesn't.

Yeah. I think I would be like, I'll wait. I'm regarded well, but the white socks have a way of turning well-regarded managers into the butts of jokes. That's true. Yeah. And also, yeah, sometimes you just kind of have to take a gap year. Not exactly, he's not backpacking through Europe or something, but kind of- That would be great. Yeah. But what Heim Blum did basically, or what John Daniels has done, you know, sometimes you see this with executives where maybe the position that they want hasn't

opened up yet and they just kind of need a soft landing somewhere to go after they get dismissed from a job. And then you're sort of waiting in the wings and you're getting exposure to how a different organization does things. And then maybe if all goes well, you are next in line to take over for John Mosey like not saying that skips you. Mocker is going to take over for Chris young, just that he is waiting in the wings now if Bruce Bochy retires. Yeah. I think that that has a good amount of makes it a good fit.

So Boch is entering the third year of his three year contract. So I don't know whether he wants to extend or not, or maybe it depends how the Rangers go, but if he decides to re-retire, then you have Skip Schumacher as an heir apparent. And if not, then he'll probably have his pick of positions that open up next off season or during the season. And it's never bad to get a little front office seasoning too, just because there's so much coordination between the front office and the field staff these

days, that if you can do an AJ hinge style trajectory where you have front office positions on your resume and you've been a manager and you've been a player, then you just kind of check all the boxes. So it, it makes him a more appealing managerial candidate that he might spend this season working for a team that just won a world series a couple of years ago in its front office and get exposed to that side of things. I'd say a team that is highly regarded as someone who has, who kind of mixes like understanding stuff on the field with analytics, like I think Chris

Young is quite well regarded overall. Speaking of that, there was a quote and a profile about Buster Posey, who has been speaking to the press about his philosophies as a Pobo and how he's going to operate. And he's been talking about analytics and the role that they will play with the Giants. And it certainly seems as if there's been a bit of a sea change here, going from Farhan to an ex player and an ex player who's not known for being a super stat head as some ex players are. And so speaking of Exodus, there's been a bit of one from the Giants for an office where Michael Schwartz, who was their director of baseball analytics, has left along with their former GM Pete Petilla to go to Atlanta. And the Braves have kind of a collection of ex-Astro's front office people, such as my

former colleagues, Mike Fast and Colin Wires and Ronit Shaw. And now Petilla's going there too too and he was really highly regarded when he was with the Astros. And that doesn't mean that the Giants are going full old school or anything necessarily, but it was seemingly a symbolic move, but maybe also a practical difference that Posey has moved the analysts out of the prominent position they occupied in the clubhouse. So they had essentially taken over the former clubhouse manager's office. So as soon as you entered the Giants clubhouse, you would see this office where the analysts would be set up just right across the hall from Bob Melvin's office, and now they're getting moved. Not like to their parents' basement or something, like just to a different place, just a little

less prominent central real estate in the clubhouse, and Posey's saying things about how analytics will continue to inform decisions, you know? Like the sort of things that you have to say in this day and age, you're not going to be like, you know, we don't, we look at numbers, we ignore numbers or anything. And he said that analytics and R and D will have a meaningful role in decision-making, but it just won't be physically front and center. And you know, he, he wanted someone with a scouting background to be his right-hand man, his GM. So it seems like a bit of a shift

as we've seen in Houston sort of. I'm interested in the idea that a player whose background most closely mirrors a scouting background would be like, I'm looking to shore up my weaknesses. I'm gonna pick a scout. I do find that interesting. He seemed very sure about it. I saw the press conference introducing Zach Minasian.

I'm pretty sure they'll still spend plenty of money on analytics and make decisions that generally make sense from a math perspective. San Francisco, it's going to be pretty hard to get that vibe out of the city. That's just how it feels. I think if you live here, like Posey does, you get that feeling just how it feels. And I think if you live here, like Posey does, you get that kind of feeling just from being here. And I feel like it kind of makes you think in numbers a little bit, just the day-to-day experience.

So I doubt it's going to be tearing it all down and going by feel. But I find it a little strange. I find it defensible because the last system didn't work so well. Right. It's easier to overhaul your process when your process is not produced great results lately.

I do find it very funny though, that one of the things Posey said was like, well, we're definitely not going to be afraid to go after Juan Soto. What? Yeah. I guess they've been burned by arson judge and others. And so, but, but that's one reason why you want Posey is that you hope he can be the closer and he can work out that deal with Chapman and maybe he can assuage any concerns that superstars might have about playing there, given that he was a superstar

who played there or he can relate to players on a personal level more effectively, perhaps, but sometimes, you know, you hear a quote where he says, like, talking about analytics or R&D or whatever, they're a valuable piece to the entire picture, talking about, like, analysts offering input. Sometimes it sounds like lip service, and I don't know whether it is in this case, but, but sometimes you kind of get the sense that someone's like, well, we know we can't just dismiss this stuff and say we're going old school. But when you say like, oh yeah, like we consider it, it's part of the picture. I don't want to be like Mr. Stathead McGee here, but like it's baseball.

It's a pretty prominent part of the picture, you know, like inevitably. And it, it should be not exclusively. And we've certainly criticized teams that have gone so all in on analytic stuff that they've dismissed scouts because they don't think they offer any utility. And we've kind of said, you know, that's cheapskate stuff. Yeah. Even if you could replicate some functions of scouts, of it's pittance for a baseball team and you're still getting something from that human input and certainly on some levels and some markets. So we're definitely not just like outsource everything to the computer people, but also,

you know, it's not just like a piece of the puzzle in my mind. It's like, it's a pretty, it's a mind. It's a big chunk. I think it depends on... One thing that is interesting is what parts of the job is this about. Because I think there's a lot of player evaluation where the data side is really important. You will not convince me that the correct way to figure out which free agents to sign is to rely on your head of professional scouting and then in tiebreakers get data. Like that seems wrong. But if what you're saying is like, well, we're still going to use our various data tools

to get 90% of the way there, but now we're going to go 88 instead of 90. Like, okay. I mean, perhaps. I'm with you that it always feels a little worrisome because yeah, you don't know, like it's a euphemism. They're using it. They're using whatever they say euphemistically. And so they're not telling you like what percentage change they're making.

And so the potential high end is quite, quite high. And he's extolling the virtues of scouts. And I don't disagree with anything. For sure. You have to measure what the information is telling you with scouts and what their years and years and years and years and years and years and years. He actually said years that many times of evaluating players and what their eyes tell them. There's probably subtleties that they pick up, whether it's on-field stuff or interactions that they see with the player and their parents or a player and their friends

that maybe they can't even articulate. But after seeing it for so many years, there's something that they recognize as either a good thing or a bad thing. I think that is really important when you're talking about bringing a player to your system. Agreed on all of that, definitely. On the other hand, there's a lot of stuff that scouts used to do and used to tell you that Statcasts can tell you just as well, if not better, at least in some cases.

There's just been this convergence between different types of data where it's not just, yeah, we need stats and scouts, but also like, in a lot of cases, those are sort of the same information at this point. And so, I don't know, it would make me somewhat wary if I were a Giants fan. The other thing though is that sometimes you're just paying

at lip service and you're kind of deprioritizing it, but still saying what you have to say so that no one accuses you of being Mr. Old School. But then also sometimes you downplay it so that you don't get a backlash about being too new school or like too computer reliant. And I guess there used to be a bigger backlash to that, obviously, when it was new, but I guess there was also a greater advantage to talking that stuff up when no one else was doing it, or at least implementing it when no one else was doing it.

And now sometimes you see, for instance, Yankees fans getting up in arms about Yankees front office being too reliant on data or whatever. And sometimes there's truth to that. Like you might have good information, but not be great at conveying it. And sometimes it's just sort of a simplistic and oversimplistic stereotype. Right. So I don't know which this is, but you might be tempted to play it up or play it down, depending on your audience.

I would just say though, that having analysts in your clubhouse, I don't know if the way they were doing it was working exactly, but like a couple of years ago, the Giants were getting tons of credit for being able to communicate these insights to players. And hey, we have this big coaching staff and we have all of these liaisons between the front office and the field and look how we're Remaking our pitching staff and we're teaching people to do different things with their swings and their pitch selection All of that is really important So it doesn't have to be some egghead who's conveying those insights But it is pretty important that they do get communicated

and translated by someone to the people who need to be doing these things on the field. All right. We're reading a lot into very surface level quotes. So the proof will be in the posy, in the pudding. We'll see how that all plays out. So I want to ask you about some free agents, some of whom the giants may be bidding on. So your list, it leads with the player that a lot of people's lists lead with. Yeah. Yeah, Watsota number one, probably not a tough call. Even, well, I mean, I guess your next calls

are kind of interesting. I am probably the only person who has Adamas number two. I haven't looked at all the lists. I think Burns is likely to get second billing. I think that makes a lot of sense. Like, why wouldn't he? And I predict him for a larger contract than Adamas and everything.

Yeah, MLB Trade Rumors has Burns second. That is kind of the consensus, but there are causes for concern there. And we started talking about this during the season, just are we headed for another free agency where this reputed ACE signs late or doesn't get the kind of offers that he thinks he's going to get? I mentioned at the time that Corbin Burns' 2024, at least when we were talking about this was basically a Corbin copy of

Jordan Montgomery's 2023. I'm not saying they're the same picture, they have different track records, obviously, but sort of disconcertingly similar, maybe, if you're Corbin Burns or Jordan Montgomery. So do you think there's a chance that this ends up being another dragged out, you know, settle for a short term deal sort of situation, or do you think that Burns retains enough of the number one upside that teams aren't going to be scared off by the declining strikeout rate? I think that teams will not be scared off.

I think that the Jordan Montgomery comp is relevant just in terms of like kind of how the underlying numbers looked that year, but Burns has been doing it for a long time. And because he was like so ridiculous in 2020 and 2021, because he kind of adopted a new pitch mix, and it just blew people away, we kind of thought of him as this like FIP god. Like that's his skill, right? His standout skill is just that he's his strikeout and walk ratios are just outrageous. It doesn't reallyout skill is just that he's, um, his strike out and walk ratios are just outrageous. It doesn't really feel like that's what he's settled into. And if you've looked at his career since then, like in 2022, 2023 and 2024, he's been pretty good and he's kind of changed the way he pitches, like fairly significantly starting in 22 and

just continuing accelerating sense into more of like a ground ball guy, which is and like a bad contact guy. I don't know that that's going to continue forever, but that's what we associate with cutters, right? It's not so crazy. I think the fact that he's just done it for a lot of years is going to give people some solace. I don't think he's going to sign a Stephen Strasburg contract. That just not in the cards anymore. And so I suppose it's possible that he's holding out

for like a really crazy number and doesn't get there. And that leads to one of these late season. But look at Aaron Nola as a point of comparison. And are you really telling me you'd rather have Aaron Nola than Corbin Burns? Probably not, right? Aaron Nola's underlying numbers, if Corbin Burns declines to that, we'd be like, oh no, like things have gotten even worse, like under the hood. But also like Burns is quite durable, like Nola, he's, he has higher top end results. So I would be willing to pay him more than Nola. And it's not like Nola's market was not there, you know, like sure he ended up signing an extension, but I think his market would have been just fine. And their two careers look fairly similar with I think Burns getting the edge across

the board. And so what he signed a seven year $172 million contract, that's he signed that, you know, last off season, I have to imagine that you'd be willing to give Corbin Burns that much. I was a little bit leery of the Jordan Montgomery market just because you're really putting a lot of stock into kind of the last year and a half of performance. This just feels like a better situation to me. I suppose, like I said, that if he really is intent on getting kind of Garrett Cole or the tier down Strasburg money and he's willing to just take it to the wire. You know, if some team offers him seven 180 and he says, no, I want seven 250, then okay, yeah, maybe. But my sense is that it's just going to settle somewhere in the middle, like halfway

between NOLA and Strasburg. And whether that happens in February or January or December, I have no idea. And then after Garrett Cole, who you had on your list, though of course he is not available to all bidders, but number six was Blake Snell. And Meg and I talked about this briefly, but how much do you think the Snelling salts have awakened the market? How much better will he do this year than last year? I spent a lot of time thinking about this projection. Last year gave me some signals that maybe teams don't value BlinkSnow like I thought

they did. You have to then weigh against that the fact that this kind of happened to all of Boris's free agents last year and perhaps it was just some broader misreading of the market. I know that teams are willing to sign very currently good pitchers with some kind of durability concerns to large short-term deals. It seems to me like that style of contract fits Snell fairly well because I would be worried about his durability and I would be worried about his longevity just because he's just he's always been so up and down and that he never throws a ton of innings and he does get hurt. And even if there's nagging injuries,

it's not like he's had huge TJ struggles, but he's always banged up. I wrote a 335 suggestion for his deal, which is, I think, higher than people are expecting him to get an average annual value, but also shorter. And to me, that just feels like a good deal for everyone. I don't think teams are going to give Snell a kind of long-term high-dollar contract.

If he is out for seven years, I imagine the deals will be kind of lackluster. Like they were last year. I think we've already learned that. And this year kind of showed more of what we knew about Blake Snell, right? And so to me, the way that he bets on himself in this scenario is by taking a shorter term high dollar deal.

I can see lots of teams willing to give him that deal because he does look quite good. Right. Like you look at Blake Snell, you're like, yeah, I'm going to be okay if this guy is my number one or number two pitcher. Like, I'm not going to think this team is really missing a lot of this position. I generally think pitching deals in general are going this way, shorter, higher dollar. And something I noted when I was kind of doing my overview of the market from last year is that almost all of the top 50 deals by average annual value are pitchers now, like more than two thirds. Like that's another reason that you want to be doing these like high dollar short deals is it's mostly for pitchers and most of your position players are tied up on long term extensions or their pre-arb or their arb.

Getting flexibility this way makes sense. You're saving money elsewhere. So spend it here, but keep the flexibility by keeping them short. I think that's a likely outcome here. If I were a team that's like trying to win right now, I'd be tempted to value Snell over Burns, actually. CB It is interesting that that trend is what's happening because you'd think that individual pitchers would be making less because they're just less valuable than they used to be. Yeah, I've run the numbers on this before. Your top pitchers just aren't as good anymore compared to your

top position players relative to the past. Cause they're just, they don't pitch as much, right? But they also aren't durable either. So those things kind of combine to produce shorter term deals. And if you're just signing someone for a year or two, then even if they're ancient, like a Max Scherzer or Justin Berlander or someone like that, you're still going to give them 40 million bucks because you feel fairly confident

that they'll last for a season or two. So... I mean, to be clear, when the ones, so does the world hit the market, they are still the marquee free agents. It's just that no one really wants Paul Goldschmidt, to use an example. Like the, if you're an average hitter,

and then there's just like so many reasons that a team would be like, I don't know, like a lot, like a three year deal for this guy. Like we like our rookies. Every team thinks that they can develop a two to three war rookie. They're mostly wrong, but you know, why not take the chance?

Not signing average veteran position players always creates blocking issues. Even if they provide you positive value, the awkwardness in team construction cuts away at that a little. That just doesn't happen with pitchers. Very occasionally, you'll get someone mismanaging their waiver of waiver wire situation.

I think the Cardinals, when Kenan Middleton was coming back but not really able to pitch yet, ran into a jam with this last year. But that's pretty rare that signing a Blake Trinen or something is going to suddenly block prospects. It just doesn't work that way. So I think things are just leaning towards like, yes, the very best, when a very good position player

reaches free agency, yeah, you roll out the red carpet and hit them with a big thing. But in the 30 to 50 range, it's just not gonna be that many position players. That's just not the way the market works anymore. And there are a lot of old time pitchers on your list. A lot of 40 somethings and up, Scherzer, Verlander, Morton, my man, David Robertson. Yeah. All these guys showing up here. And it's a pretty picture centric

list. I didn't count how many pictures you have on the top 50, but I think of your top 17, nine were pictures and that's including Cole, I guess, but even so it's just a really thin position player market. It's, you have the best of the best. You have about the most enticing hitter who will ever hit the market in one Soto, given the combination of his skill and his age. And then it's a big drop off from there. And it would be a big drop off from one Soto

to almost everyone, but no shots at Willie Adamis or Alex Bregman, who you have third. Speaking of potential position changes, he just volunteered that he would be willing to move to second, trying to increase his number of potential landing spots, even though he's still good at third, it seems like. In theory, like when there are fewer appealing players at a certain position or even hitters in general on the market, then that may mean that there are fewer teams in need of great hitters because free agents, they were just playing for someone and now they're not anymore. That team might need to replace them. And so if there aren't that many prominent free

agents hitting the market, then maybe that means teams are set at some positions and the supply is reduced, but so is the demand. But yeah, if you want to hit her. Right. It's rough this year. I think that's an interesting, the whole, if there are fewer players in the market, there's probably less demand. I think that's actually really going to feed into Willie Adamis' market this year. I use an algorithm to kind of give me an idea for what salaries might look like, just because things follow a general pattern. And then I start going in on each one and saying like, well, this doesn't make sense. This doesn't make sense. We're using this too much. We're

using this too little. Look at some previous comps, you know, which teams line up best. And one thing that I really noticed in the shortstop market in particular is that we just had a multi-year bonanza of top shortstop sitting hitting the market, what, three, four years? It's been a while if you count some of the extensions and things like that before then. Yeah, Carlos Correa hit the market three times in one winter. That's true, actually. Yeah, he's most to the boom.

But you've seen a lot at Lindor's trade and extension, Trey Turner. The list goes on. Lots of Zander Bogarts, the Padres themselves are huge driver of short stops in many ways. That's actually one of the things I'm most entertained by and curious about is that it seems like the Padres need a short stop.

Yeah. Which who would have guessed? I thought they built the whole team out of short stops. We should use Jay Kronor or Jackson Merrill or Framene Matisse or Manny Machado. So, but I think that actually puts Adamas in a weird place where a lot of the teams that you think of as marquee teams have either spent a bunch of money

to sign a shortstop long term or have developed a shortstop that they like. Like the Yankees are just not going to sign Willie Adamas. They're just a 0% chance. They like Volpi. And they've really liked this shape, I think, of spending a lot of money on established, you know, super mega top end hitters and then getting defense, which is a thing that you can more easily, you know, acquire from your farm system and seems to go cheaper just across the board using like young

controllable defenders to kind to bolster that. They've done it with Catcher as well. I think that is making this market a little tougher. There are a lot of interesting young short stops. There are a lot of recently high dollar, recent high dollar contract signing short stops. And that puts Adamas in a place where, I mean, the Dodgers are the natural spot for him to go

because they have neither at the moment. They're one of the rare contenders that doesn't have, you know, a young player who they really like or a superstar, and he's not really going back to the Brewers. So you can exclude that, I think. They also have several shortstop prospects who've been playing out of position.

I think that actually limits his market. It's kind of awkward when you're trying to play the Dodgers and, I don't know, the Padres? It's not really obvious where Adamas's best home is, if it's not the Dodgers. I think that's going to hurt his market. And so the reason that he was the free you know, the free agent, I was second most interested, but did not have the second biggest deal is I think that

both, I think he was always likely to be a bargain. And I think the way this off season broke is going to make him a bigger bargain relative to my view of how good he'll be. It's fascinating to think about what might've happened if one Soto had signed an extension with the Padres, which Scott Boris took some flack for this during the World Series talking about how the Padres and Soto were well along the way towards making some sort of arrangement before Peter Seidler died. And I guess it was just seen sort of as in poor taste perhaps to talk about negotiations with someone who is no longer here to talk

about them himself, or maybe it was just a distraction during the World Series. And also, I don't think it was the first time that Boris had said something to this effect, but he said, it wasn't mince and words, if Peter Seidler were still alive, none of this would be happening. Juan would have been with the Padres. He never would have been traded to the Yankees. He'd be a Padre today and presumably for the rest of his career, that was the implication. Peter and I were knee deep in Juan Soto discussions, well advanced. His illness really stopped the process because we knew the organization would be different.

He wanted to push it through even though he was ill. So yeah, maybe it's not super tactful to share text messages from someone who passed away during these negotiations. And perhaps Boris had ulterior motives here in trying to send the signal that Soto is receptive to being back on the West Coast. He doesn't just wanna be an East Coast guy, right? He's always gonna do whatever he can to juice his client's market.

But if that was true, and if Juan Soto had stayed with the Padres, then yeah, this market would be really bleak from a position player perspective. And really just like the entire free agency market, it would just be quite a come down from last year when we had all the Otani intrigue and Yamamoto. And I'm glad that we have the Soto sweepstakes to entertain us and to keep us warm on the hot stove. I think it would be pretty, pretty unfun to talk about a group that does not involve. I, yeah, I'm very glad that Soto hit the market. It like makes a more interesting top end point, but also just having one big free agent that's way clearly better than the others, I think is more satisfying from

a narrative following it perspective. I really enjoyed the Otani and Judge sweepstakes, and I like that we're going to have that style of off-season again. And there's also some intrigue when it comes to the polar bear for Pete's sake and his potentially bear market, because you wrote, this is the hardest I've ever worked on a contract projection. Yeah, I mean, still not that hard. Like I wasn't like, you know. Yeah.

So I don't know if, if Boris has a binder here, but we know that Alonzo thinks of himself as someone who's going to be getting a big long-term deal. Like those numbers have been bandied about and maybe this is Boris blowing smoke. There were reports that Alonzo was offered an extension, turned it down, that he sees himself as like a Olsen Freeman type of contract guy. And I don't know about that. I don't know whether teams will see him that way. So how did you arrive at an estimate?

So I started at Domestika with some kind of like model based estimate and then went from there. I did the same for Alonzo and the model was like, no. I was reminded of an article that Dan Zinborski wrote earlier this year where he was projecting some extensions and his projection for Petalonzo was Mets, and Pitalanza do not reach extension. Because you run the numbers, and you're like, but I keep hearing about what he's seeking. The truth is, I think he's going to get more than the models

say. That's what I projected. I projected him to get a seven-year, $20 million deal. And I think his perceived status, multi-time home run derby winner, a star, like a really a star, like one of the people that people think about when they, when they think of the best baseball players today. I think he's going to stay with the Mets, honestly. I think that makes a lot of sense and that they get a lot of kind of positive externalities from having him. My Mets fan friends think of the team as a

Lindor and Alonso team and maybe an Alonzo team, which is, you know, far from the way it works in terms of, you know, accrued on field value. But like there, there's something to that. And there's something to selling tickets to Pete Alonzo. Do you think he's a lot better than Christian Walker? Yeah, not really. I do think he's better. Like, I think that the floor is a lot higher here, because I'm less convinced that Walker can have a 40% above average offensive season. And I'm more convinced that he could have a flat average offensive season.

I do value Walker's defense at first base, but not enough to offset that. He's also three years older. Like there's reasons that you'd want Alonzo above Walker. When I listed to all my players in preference order, I'm not considering contracts. I'm just saying like, if, you like, if I could sign a guy, who are the guys I want the most? And I have Alonzo ahead of Walker, but also I have Alonzo making $90 million more than Walker.

That's gonna be tough for a lot of teams. He's probably the biggest risk here to end up in last year's Jordan Montgomery situation. And look, maybe this is all just a smoke screen. Maybe he's going to take a deal that is kind of more commensurate with similar offensive producers, which would be a shorter deal, like maybe a five-year deal. It's around $20 million, maybe a little less. But this is the situation where I've seen most like a disconnect between the rumored amount that either he is seeking

or that he turned down in the past. Reportedly turned down an offer of 158 million from the Mets last June 2023. Over seven years? Yeah, that was before David Stearns was there. So I always go back to some Sam Miller research. This is eight years old. The free agency has changed. Yeah.

The seeking, I don't know whether this still holds up in this environment, but Sam found that players received 87.5% of what they were seeking in both dollars and years. So if Alonzo is seeking, let's say he's seeking more than that. If his desires haven't come down, well, I guess you have him getting what? 140. So I guess that could be in the range, but it depends. Yeah.

Cause he's someone who in the old days probably would have made bank. Yeah. Right. Like he's just your, just your big hairy slugger. Like that's just, he's just going to crank some homers. And back when teams didn't worry so much about the aging curve and about overall production and they overpaid for power, probably he would have been positioned- Right, he's the exact same. Yes. Physically and figuratively. And now it's not so great to be a bat first 30 year old first baseman, but he is still

a good hitter. I mean, I will say, like, I have him in a cluster with Teosco Hernandez and Anthony Santander. I think that's kind of the caliber of hitteries. Those are good hitters. Like, you shouldn't be sad having those guys on your team. They're limited in the other stuff they do. But to be clear, like I don't, I think you don't either. Like think he's bad. I just, I agree that there's been kind of a

recalculation of where you want to spend your money on the offensive side. It hasn't been favorable to guys like these. I do think that he's going to comfortably beat what a model would spit out. And I think that that's kind of across the board too, if you look at other people's free agency projections. And that's because like, you should be open to the idea that the model isn't capturing this all right, that it's over-penalizing defenseless, positionless kind of guys,

and that the positional adjustments are wrong, and that it really is hard to have a guy who's as career above average at the plate as Pete Alonzo is and maybe you should pay for the scarcity. I think that if you just completely stuck with some war-based model, it's likely that the inputs of war would make you too low on a guy like this, but not this low. And so I think that's kind of going to be the crux of his market is we all agree that he's going to make more than some soulless five-year

war projection would suggest. The question is how much more and how much more is optimal? Because I do think that the optimal amount to sign him for is more than a pure five-year war model would suggest. CB I could see Stearns and even Cohen being a little less sentimental about him. He didn't come up under them, they inherited him. And maybe if they had gone all the way and won the World Series and he'd been a playoff hero, he was a playoff hero, but they got knocked out, then maybe you would have been more likely to just spend whatever you had to, to keep him there. And I wonder if he has to wait or if really everyone has to wait to see where Soto signs because

if you're assuming that he's really in play, that the Yankees aren't just going to blow everyone out of the water, that this isn't even just a two team race between the New York teams and the Dodgers are going to be in on this and everyone else, then that's just such a big item on your spending list that are you going to sign someone like Pete Alonso before you know if you're going to land Soto? I could see all of the, you know, primarily bat players, like maybe Gleiber Torus on down essentially, just needing to have a bit of a market freeze before they sign because yeah, there are teams who are definitely going to pursue Soto and miss and still sign a top of the market hitter.

I think Teosco Hernandez is like a very direct analog in this market where it's unlikely that you're going to sign him and Soto unless you're, I mean, that'd be a weird team construction. The Dodgers certainly wouldn't, right? Then they'd have Hernandez and Soto and Otani for three corner plus DH spots. Like that seems like it can't really work.

So I definitely think that his market will get a little frozen by that. I don't think it's going to be too bad. I'm really hoping Soto signs at the winter meetings, just like he got traded at the winter meetings last year. There are some judge things at the winter meetings. That would be good timing for all of this stuff. It would be weird to me for Alonso to sign a big deal before Soto signs a deal. I did want to ask about Gleiber because you have him ten high on your list, so you're pretty high on him. And even though 13 players got qualifying offers, Gleiber did not. Was that surprising to

you? Yeah, yes. It makes very little sense to me. Why would he accept a qualifying offer? And if he did, how sad would they be? Those two things just make it very confusing to me that he was not extended a qualifying offer. Maybe he told them he was going to accept it, they didn't want to, but that also doesn't make that much sense. It makes me a little worried about my projection, I suppose. But I didn't project him for a lot of money. 90 million, five years. And on a five-year deal, I could see him getting fewer years. But $18 million a year is definitely

the lowest in my top 15 for average annual value. I don't think he's going to get a ton of AAV. But I watched a lot of the Yankees this year. And I looked at his numbers. And he's a good hitter, right? Like, there's question I think that he's a pretty good hitter. And yeah, I don't really know that he's a true long-term second baseman, but he's not like a complete disaster defensively. Yeah, well, it depends where your cutoff is. It depends where your cutoff is. He's not great there. I think that you can pencil him in at second for a few more years

without feeling too bad about it. I would be very interested in getting someone who has been a very good hitter in a few different ways at his young age on my team at a reasonable AAV, when I'm like a little bit less worried about him kind of aging out of it. He has not yet turned 28. He is the second youngest free agent in the list after Soto. And it's not that long ago when there was the whole like, Claymore Torres is only 23. It was like the only story of the postseason. It's true that he is young and that makes me more interested in kind of giving him more years at a lower dollar number.

I'm guessing his market will go like that. I think that there are players who will get more money than him who produce worse. Another one in a kind of a similar vein is Hasan Kim, who I had one spot ahead of him. I'm very uncertain about his market. There's a lot of buzz about him just taking a pillow contract. I can see the reason that he should do that, but I thought from the deal he signed with the Padres that it suggests to me that he likes long-term deals because that deal when we looked at it we were like, oh, it's for like a lower dollar value, but for longer than we expected and

Like it wouldn't be strange like it then feels strange to me that he was then gonna take kind of a high-risk short-term deal When he could probably cash in and get it get a decent amount of money this year But kind of set himself up for life for real, those two, Kim and Torres, I think are kind of the most interesting free agents in the top 10 in that, I don't know, good pitchers who are going to be good aren't that interesting from what kind of contract should they sign standpoint.

Soto, yeah, I mean, how much money can you offer him? That's the right number. Those guys are a little less interesting to me from a, I truly have no much money can you offer him? Like, that's the right number. Those guys are a little less interesting to me from a, I truly have no idea what this contract's going to be. I think Kim and Taurus are both like, both very interesting markets and very interesting, like, do you want to go short high, like long low, long medium? The qualifying offer thing, it just still baffles me with Taurus.

I hope we get some kind of reporting of what went on there. I don't see him signing a deal that would make a qualifying offer look like a bad decision. Anyone else on the list you thought you were particularly high on or low on or someone you just feel strongly about? Do you have your guys on this list? I certainly wouldn't call him my guy overall. I've made my fair share of jokes at his expense over the past years, but Blake Trinen, I think is underrated on a lot of free agency lists. I don't think that I'd give Trinen a ton of years, but he's great, right? Like he's just one of the best relievers in baseball.

Yep. It seems impossible to me for someone to watch Blake trying to pitch and think otherwise. His pitches just move so much, and they're thrown so hard, and people don't hit them. You watch him pitch, and you're like, oh, yeah, that guy is one of the best two or three closers. So why wouldn't he get the top of the market for relievers on a maybe shorter term deal since he's 36?

I've seen a lot of lists that just have him much lower and that's strange to me. I don't think it's gonna be a long deal, but if he's only getting like a $10 million a year offer, the Dodgers should top it. Like someone should top it. Someone should be willing to pay him more. And so I think that's gonna happen.

I think he'll end up getting a dollars per year number that is the top of the market for relievers. I think that's a view where I have separated somewhat from my forecasting peers. Another group I'd add is the old dudes. You mentioned them kind of when we started talking about this, but Scherzer, Verlander, and Charlie Morton. I would be very interested in signing all of these guys.

Not all three, but like, but what I'm saying is like, if I were a team looking for starting pitching, which is going to be most of the playoff contenders, all three of these guys would appeal to me. And I think that it's hard to sign a bad one year deal as the adage goes. And these guys are a great encapsulation of that. You're always going to over sign pitching anyway. You can probably expect that they're going to be hurt. And hey, there's a chance that they go the way of Erlander and you look at them for the postseason, you can probably expect that they're going to be hurt. And Hey, there's a chance that they go the way of Erlander and you look at them

for the postseason and you're like, Oh, I can't do it. But I don't know that we've thought these guys were done before at various times and they've put up good seasons after that. All three of them, I feel like we've said, Oh yeah, that's it for them. And they've, they've delivered good numbers later. It just feels like a smart bet to take. And if you look at the guys who are in a similar stratosphere in terms of years and dollars, well, I'm going to be more comfortable

with my odds going into next postseason with Verlander, even though he was bad this year, then with Alex Cobb, or with Scherzer, then with Alex Cobb, or Trevor Williams, Frankie Montas. The caliber of guys you're getting for similar money in terms of total commitment. I want the guy who I think is a Hall of Famer likely, or Charlie Morton, a Hall of Very Good guy who might put it back together. I think that that's a good variance bet. Maybe the average outcome for those guys isn't so good, but I want the variance there if I'm signing one of these. So give me one of the old stars. And is there anyone that you're thinking, I wish him well, but not for me? Or is that Alonzo essentially?

That's Alonzo. Shout out to one guy I didn't put on the list, Matt Boyd. And I think Matt Boyd, you could argue that he should have been on the list. I ended up throwing on Jose Quintana as my emergency 50th person when Michael Walker signed. We can retroactively remove Garrett Cole and stick Matthew Boyd on there if you want. Boyd and Max Kepler were the ones I gave some thought to for that spot. I think that Boyd will probably get one of the 50 biggest contracts. I'm just kind of out on it.

This guy has never been good for a full season. Has he ever pitched 100 innings in a year? I don't think so. That would be, if he has it, oh, you know what? He has, but like early in his career, he hasn't for quite some time, for more than half a decade, he hasn't actually topped 80 innings since before the pandemic. Yeah. And that is scary. And that makes me feel like I wouldn't really want to give him a big starting deal. He's not going to be a reliever. He just doesn't look like a reliever

in addition to anything else. So I think that he was one where I just couldn't talk myself into it. It wouldn't shock me if other people do. I guess you could say Burns in that I had him lower on the list than he's going to get money. But I think that's just more that I liked him lower on the list than he's going to get money. But I think that's just more that I liked the three hitters at the top.

So yeah, Alonzo, Boyd, and that's basically it. I did want to just shout out a few storylines that we might be following. Now, some of the most interesting storylines of the off season as always pertain to free agents. So where is Wonsodo going to go and how much is Wonsodo going to make? Those are obviously two of the defining questions of this winter. I'm as interested in the answers to those questions as anyone else is. And you did come up with an estimate for Wonsodo that was short of 600 million, not much short, but both you and the FanGraphs readers and voters were just short of that. If anything surprised me, it was the length of the contracts that you and also the crowd estimated.

You had 12 years and 48 million for 576 total, whereas the crowd sourced ones were roughly 13 years and 585-ish. So I guess it surprises me a little that he wouldn't get 14 or 15 years, given his youth, given the desire to just lower the quasi cap hit, just, you know, maybe if he's a Yankee, the desire to like give him an enormous number, but not embarrass Aaron judges, Avey or something, you know, some sort of soft, soft factor like that. I would just imagine that he will go longer than 12 years, but what do I know? I mean, this is the kind of thing where if I told you that I had high confidence in this prediction, like I would just be lying when you do these projections.

One of the hardest things to do is figuring out comps for people who aren't super like your average free agent. I think I do a pretty good job of years' average annual value for the rank and file free agents. If Soto says, guys, I want a 15-year deal, then he's just going to sign a 15-year deal. That's how it works.

Otani signed the deal that he suggested to teams. Judge got offered the same deal by pretty much everyone, it sounds like, or at least multiple teams. That's kind of how it works that the player figures out what they want, and then they guide the negotiation in that direction. I got to 12 because that just was like, it kind of fit with deals I'd seen before. And I thought that he might want to have a chance to either just be done with the game period at 38, or go somewhere else for his like kind of poo-holes-y like last push at greatness. Like what if he wants to go back to DC? Or what if he just wants to go somewhere else with friends or something? I have a feeling that if he wants 15, he's getting 15. I wouldn't say I feel very confident in this at all.

This just looked in my head good. I worked backwards from there, but I've seen some longer projections for him. Why did Otani only sign 10 years? I, or why didn't he sign nine? Why didn't he sign 11? I just don't have a strong feel here. I doubt that anyone's doing this,

but don't take this to some kind of gambling market projection and be like, what's a 12 year deal locked? Like, I don't know. And yeah, who knows if there will be some unusual structure to the contract. And I think Boris made some comments about that without any puns and said, I don't think tax considerations are the focal point when you're

talking about a business opportunity where you can make literally billions of dollars by acquiring somebody like this. I feel like he's never met billionaire businessmen then. That's the main thing to do. I know, I'm not sure about that. But it does seem like he could exceed Otani's deal in present day value. Yeah, I think that is likely in fact, just because of he could exceed Otani's deal in present day value. Yeah, I think that is likely in fact, just because of the age. Otani's deal in present day value was just, it didn't blow away the top of the market by as much as you'd expect. So Soto, obviously big offseason storyline.

Burns I think is too, not only because he's the best pitcher available, but just some of those interesting wrinkles to his market and will teams ding him at all for some of the aspects of his performance. And of course, the Roki Sasaki saga is for now at least theoretically a big offseason storyline that might amount to nothing. And there's quite a good chance that it will amount to nothing. In fact, you didn't rank him, obviously. If you had, would you just have had him second behind Soto just because of the age or would you be afraid of the durability? Ben Frigge With his contract? Second by a vibe. He might be first, right? Jared Ranere Yeah, I guess if you consider the fact that his earnings would be dramatically

restricted if he were to come over now, then yeah, from a surplus value standpoint, he'd be second, like in terms of players, like I would just like him second most. It's just so rare to get the best pitching prospect on the planet available in free agency. That is an interesting storyline, but I didn't feel like I could rank him on this in like good conscience because it's just so different, right? And he's not a free agent. He's an international free agent, but he's under the bonus cap regime, which is different. If I were ranking a modern day version of CESPAN, it's like I ranked Yamamoto last year, for example. That's because he can actually get a free agent contract. I think Sasaki doesn't really fit for that reason, because he's under the auspices of

the bonus caps. But yeah, I would have him second if it were, like if he were 26 and definitely coming over, I guess that would change how good of a prospect he is. But if, I don't know exactly how this works, but if he was 26 but his arm was 23, I don't know what. But I think he'd be second. I think that's where he'd fit in. Well, that might be kind of realistic because he has the workload of someone who is younger than he is. I mean, they've certainly been careful with him and also he has had various

physical ailments and frailties. And so there's cause for concern there and you know, he's still nasty, but his last season, like the stuff sometimes and also the results sometimes were not quite as otherworldly, especially if you adjust for the offensive environment in NPB, which scoring continues to crater there, but he turned 23 on Sunday. So it's pretty incredible. And yeah, I just like anyone else, I don't have any insight here, but it just seems like there's no real incentive for the Marines to let him go at this point. Unless there is some secret contract clause, as has been speculated and no one really knows publicly. But if there were one, then presumably he just would have triggered it already or it would have happened last winter for that matter. So do you think that it is a good deal for him like money wise to come over now?

No, I mean, it could be really well for Otani to come over earlier. Right. I mean, probably would have worked out I guess just as well if Otani had stayed a couple seasons and dominated completely in Japan. But he got a deal here that was the biggest in history, you know, like he got to deal with, he recognized how great he, like locked in for sure. I think he probably would have made less, but he bet on himself and it worked. Like in EV, I think he gave away some money by coming over earlier. Yeah. I wonder if he had had even more years in Japan as a two-way player, whether that

would have made more teams buy into that or because there would have been more of a track record. Yeah, he can do this. It's not a fluke. On the other hand, he would have been older and still wouldn't have done it in MLB. And so you might've had some doubters there about making the transition at a more advanced stage. Who knows? But yeah, if Suzuki cares about maximizing his earnings, then probably he's not going to come over now if he's like Otani and either doesn't put that first or just thinks it'll work out because he believes in himself, then he could come over and he could have had that leverage theoretically to get some kind of contract, some exit clause, but there's just

no confirmation that that's the case. And based on the fact that he's still there and just, you know, seems to be kind of, uh, holding out and, you know, bucking it various contract offers, but not doing anything more than that. It doesn't seem like he really has the leverage to leave. And if you're the Marines, then you're passing up an enormous windfall. Like Sasaki, he could say, I'll make this money down the line and it's risky because he's had injuries. He could have other injuries, but he could still bet on himself. Whereas the Marines, if he cashes in down the line,

they get nothing. So it just, it would kind of be malpractice unless like, I don't know if you think maybe you, you develop a reputation as a team that is not standing in the way of NPV players going to MLB, then maybe teams will be more likely to play for you or something like that. But it's just an enormous amount of, of like confirmed cash that you're passing off and unless something catastrophic happens in the next couple of years. So it would be really fun. Pretty catastrophic. Like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cause he just makes so little now. So, but it'd be fun if it somehow happens. I would be interested. I really enjoyed when like, I don't watch a lot of NPP games, obviously.

I really enjoyed the world baseball classic look at him. I was like, he's very fun. I love when there are highlights and it'd be pretty cool to just have more of those players play in time zones that I watch. Any other storylines, player centric, team centric, rule change centric, anything else that you're monitoring? For instance, like, I'm interested in the Tigers. What will the Tigers do on the heels of their amazing run late in the season? Will they just buy into that and rest on their laurels and say, oh, we're a playoff team and we'll just run it back and we'll have our young guys get older and we're good, or will they say, actually we're not ready yet and we're

ahead of schedule and we'll wait another year until everything comes together to really break the bank for someone or Or yeah, or will they decide now is the time to push the chips in and will they do that the way that the elder Illich did? Does Chris Illich have a Mike Illich in him? That would be cool. I think I'm skeptical. Yeah, right. So until we see that happen, but I think we'll learn a lot potentially about their plan and their willingness to spend and where they stack up in the central. So that's certainly one team that intrigues me.

I've got two pairs of teams. We've got, we can call them the sudden change teams and the homeless teams. And for once, like I'm not using homeless in conjunction with San Francisco. So we've got that going on. It's the homeless teams are And for once, I'm not using homeless in conjunction with San Francisco. So we've got that going on. The homeless teams are the athletics. That's what they're called now. And the Rays. The Rays situation is kind of out of their control.

There's no lid on their stadium. And it's a very expensive fix to the point where they seemingly cannot. So I think that what those two teams do from a trade, from a player acquisition, from a player disposition, getting these guys off the team to change around the future, I think those two are going to be really interesting.

We say that one's a clown show and one is just the smartest guys in the room in general. Although I don't think that's fair to the Oakland front office, it's more of an ownership deal. But they both have these similarly very confusing situations to be in, where I think you could make an argument for a lot of things being the right move.

I could see the Rays going on a real complete tear down rebuild. Rebuild's maybe the wrong word, but really changing around the way that their team is focused. They already started doing that last year. At the Deadline. And so I think that last year, right? At the deadline, yeah. And so I think that there could be a lot of movement going on there.

They're rumored to be in on one seto. I thought that was kind of funny. I'm not really buying it, but I didn't see that. So I think both of those teams are just like kind of a volatile aspect where I truly don't know what their long-term plans are, but their short-term plans are both very challenging, and that could lead to a lot of organizational change.

The sudden change teams would be the Cardinals and the Giants. From the Cardinals' perspective, it's hard to read the stuff they've been saying this off-season and not think they're rebuilding. They might have even used the word rebuild a lot of these times. That's just such a change. When I was still a Cardinals blogger only, I wrote about how they're just medium as a philosophy,

that they never rebuild, they never push all in, that they never go towards the present or the future. They're always doing both right in the middle. Is Ryan Helsley getting traded? Is Sonny Gray getting traded? is Ryan Helsley getting traded? Is Sonny Gray getting traded? Is Nolan Arnotto getting traded? Those are things that I would have laughed at in the past.

The Cardinals don't do that. That's just not how they operate. But the Cardinals don't, you know, Sineheim Bloom to be their future GM either. And they've done that or like Pobo, whatever. So I think how they operate is a big unknown. And that's weird because they've been the most stable operator.

Like you just knew exactly what they were doing every year. And like not in a bad way, like certainty can be good. But I think the way that they behave in both the free agency and trade markets is truly unknown in a way that it hasn't been maybe the century, honestly. That is something that I'm really watching, because like, Helsley would be ahead of the other Closer son of Celeste.

Like, he's more desirable than Tanner Scott or like, Trinen, I think, because of his combination of age and talent. Sunny Gray would be probably up there with the top pitchers, short deal, but like, really good. Arnotto is, I think I'm not wildly different from him from these top three agents just in terms of, ah, yeah, maybe I'm a little lower on him. I'm not entirely sure. I don't think he's really going to get moved. That just doesn't feel right. Even the rest of the stuff does. But yeah, the way that they

behave is, I think it's a story. Like if you made me make predictions, I wouldn't feel strongly about them. But focusing on what they might do is going to be very interesting to me, just because it's so different. I fit the Giants into that just because I wanted to make it two pairs instead of a two and a one. They're going to be pretty different. Farhan and the Zaydi regime in general

were really big on being the Mathiest guys in the room. And now it's going to be very different. Like, are they going to be... It felt very weird last year when the Giants went out and signed a bunch of short-term free agents, Chapman and Snell and Saler and Jung-Hoo Kim. And it felt like they were just kind of like doing this as a backup plan because they had socked away all this money to pay Judge and Otani and was like,

I don't know, we've got to spend it somehow. But maybe this year, like, there's more of a plan to spend in free agency on specific types of players that the team covets, that Pozzi covets, or that ownership thinks will make sense. So those are both teams where they were teams with money who behaved in a pretty predictable way for a few years. Predictable in like a strategic sense,

not that I knew every move they were going to make, but I knew what their goals were. And now I don't, and I think that's going to be interesting. And I'd lump the Orioles in with the interesting teams that we might learn something about. New ownership, they've had three winning seasons in a row now, they've made the playoffs twice in a row, they still do not have a playoff win to show for it.

And it seems like time to decide which younger guys they're sticking with and where they're really going to invest. And hopefully now they have someone who will actually do that. So we'll see. And they have Burns and other free agents that they will have to fill in for. So we might learn whether this will be meaningfully different this new administration than the old one and whether they're really gonna go for it

and try to turn this thing into a super team and try to win the AL East and try to make the most of this young and expensive core they have. And also maybe lock up that core for a while and sign some extensions because they haven't really done that either. So. I will say that it's funny that every year I'm like, oh, the Orioles are going to change.

You look at it, they're on this glide path toward contention and they're just going to start. They did trade for Corbin Burns. It's not like they haven't done any of this at all. I used to run a small cottage industry of writing articles criticizing the Orioles for being in rebuild mindset. I would just do it every three months and then get a lot of engagement out of that. Because I also believed it and it just kept being weird that it felt like they were behind.

And they've started speeding up and spending a little more money and making trades, trading prospects. But I'm with you, it still feels like they're behind. It still feels like they need to. So I will be very curious to see that. I've kind of burned out on expecting it to happen, but they definitely are making moves in the right direction. And I guess all the TV drama relevant to all of these things. You said three lines I want to listen to. Yeah, it's not a super fun story to follow. I'm not like looking forward to diamond sports group bankruptcy proceedings, but looking

forward to Evan Drellick attending those things and digesting them and telling me what to think about them. Because that will have a bearing on the short-term future in terms of free agency and probably like the state of labor relations and also in terms of like the long-term health of the sport. And you know, there are a couple teams that are maybe on the market and maybe we'll learn from that too. Are franchise values going to continue to soar? Will the twins sell for as much as you'd think or will some billionaires balk at the fact that maybe the cable bubble bursting means that they will print a little less money,

but still probably plenty of money. So those are things that like, you know, it's not really why I got into paying attention to baseball so that I could monitor bankruptcy proceedings of broadcast networks, but it is pretty important when it comes to projecting all of this other stuff and are we going to get a work stoppage and what will the messaging be out of the owners and all of that stuff that will dictate like all of the on-field things that we're like actually interested in seeing. And I don't know what else, I mean, there's always like rules change stuff, but I don't know that

there's anything imminent like we're going to get challenge system in spring training, it sounds like, but it doesn't seem like anything dramatic is on the docket for 2025, but you never know. Sometimes there are surprises. So, and obviously interested in monitoring Shohei Otani returning to two-way play. Although I feel like we're not going to get a ton of that in the off season. He's guarded in general and I guess you'll get just the regular updates of like what he's doing in spring training. Yeah. That's probably when we'll find out like the state of his shoulder and is he expected to start in

the rotation and the Dodgers almost certainly will have to have some sort of six man rotation with Yamamoto and Otani and the limitations there. So, but just the anticipation of just the prospect of two way Otani days, which are just appointment viewing for me, obviously in baseball. Not that he's not fun when he's DHing, but it's, it's a different entertainment entirely when he's pitching and DHing, even if he's not going to steal a lot of bases next season, which I would not be surprised if the tap turns off to a great extent there, but just

to see him doing his two-way play thing again because we don't know how long he'll be able to keep doing that. So I will savor it while it lasts. As I always savor your appearances on this podcast, and probably you'll be back here again sometime soon, I would imagine, because we've got to do a year-end wrap-up of Minor League free agent draft results and preseason bold predictions. Without having looked a lot, I think I did badly this year. I have not spoiled myself either when it comes to the predictions. I think we're just waiting now for

some awards results to be announced, which will happen pretty soon and then we can reconvene and figure out how wrong we were about everything. So looking forward to that. The last thing I know for sure is that I predicted that the second semi-final of the homerun derby would go to a tiebreaker and it did. That happens. That's the only one I know. All right.

Well, you'll be back soon, but thanks as always for filling in. Thank you for having me. All right. That will do it for today. Thanks as always for listening. If you needed a distraction this week, you're not alone. Hopefully this provided one for you. Meg will be back next time and we're planning to do some drafting.

Thanks also to everyone who wrote in to congratulate us on our restraint in not using the fact that we talked about colonoscopies and Garrett Cole to come up with some sort of segue last time. To be clear, this was not actually an example of self-censoring. Just didn't occur to us. Didn't occur to me at least. I don't know how, given how many times we said coal and also colonoscopy. Sometimes you just don't make that easiest leap live. Colonoscopy went okay by the way, if anyone was wondering. All clear down there, in more ways than one. Being anesthetized was actually probably the best part of that day for me. Too bad I couldn't have stayed under a little longer. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon

by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some monthier yearly amount to help keep the podcast going, help us stay ad free and get themselves access to some perks. Jabrumbo, Sean Plamer, David Foster, Anthony, and Amy Lee. Thanks to all of you. Patreon perks include access

to the Effectively Wild Discord group for patrons only, monthly bonus episodes, playoff live streams, prioritized email answers, personalized messages, discounts on merch, and ad-free FanGraphs memberships, and so much more. Check out all the offerings at patreon.com slash Effectively Wild. If you are a Patreon supporter, you can message us

through the Patreon site. If not, you can contact us via email. Send your questions, comments, intro and outro themes to podcast at fangraphs.com. You can rate, review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash Effectively Wild. You can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash Effectively Wild. And you can check the show page at fan graphs or the episode description in your podcast app for links to the stories and stats we cited today. Thanks to Shane McKeon for his editing and production assistance. We'll be back with another episode before the end of the week. Talk to you then. tree. Anything is fair game, even Kike's dirty pants. And maybe if you're lucky, you will

cold call by the chance. You never know precisely where it's gonna go. By definition, effectively wild.