Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2254: Gods Do Not Answer Letters

Episode Date: December 7, 2024

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about a Tigers tweet about future first-pitch timing and other non-topical PSAs, provide a Secret Santa sign-up reminder, consider baseball authority figures who answer fan mail, discuss the impact that the changing economic landscape of college sports could have on MLB drafting and development, react to Danny Jansen’s deal […]

I wanna know about baseball! I wanna know about every single team! I wanna know about Sadglass, and Fancraft, and about O-O-Oh, darling! I'm a very modern fan, reading up on all the analytics! I wanna know about baseball, presented by Patreon supporters, oh, effectively wow! Hello and welcome to episode 2254 of Effectively Wild, a FanGraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Raulia Fangraphs and I'm joined by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you?

I'm good. And the first thing I want to do is signal boost a very important PSA that was put out there by the Detroit Tigers PR staff this week. They tweeted on December 5th at 1 44 PM, first pitch for our game on Saturday, May 24th versus Cleveland has been changed to 7 15 PM. So just wanted to make sure that no one missed that very important notice that at Detroit Tigers PR put out there. It's got roughly 6,000 likes right now. So clearly this did get around and hundreds of retweets and hundreds of replies, even in the diminished state that Twitter is in these days. So clearly this got some significant play, but for anyone who missed this very important notice, any Tigers fans, any Guardians fans

who might have tickets for that Saturday, May 24th game, and they don't know that first pitch was changed to 7.15 PM, I don't even know what the original first pitch time was. But just in case you have already planned out your schedule for May 24th and you've got those tickets and you know, you set up maybe some babysitters, whatever it is, and you just want to get there at exactly the right time that you're not too early, but you don't miss first pitch. Now you know, 7 15 PM. This is the first pitch for Tigers Guardians. Just want to make sure everyone knows that.

Xtree, Xtree, read all about it. The replies are very funny. They're all just like, it's a little short notice for you. Like now you tell us a little last minute, but I guess this is why you have a team PR account so that you can put it out there and no one gets mad at you several months later when they show up at the wrong time for first pitch for May 24th game against the guardians. But yeah, it seems like an odd time to do that.

There were also some people saying, announce a signing or something instead of a change of the, like might be more relevant to me. But for a specific little niche that needs to know first pitch time several months in advance. Now you know. And one other effectively wild PSA, this might be our last episode before the Secret Santa sign up deadline. It very well may not be also our recording schedule for the next week is a little up

in the air. What with Juan Soto and his destination hanging in the balance and also your trip to the winter meetings. So we don't know exactly when we'll be recording, but the Secret Santa sign up deadline is December 10th. So if you want to get in on that, you still have a few days to do that and you can find the form on the show page as always. I know hundreds of people have signed up. I've signed up. Maybe you'll get to give me a gift.

Maybe I'll get to give you a gift, but not unless you sign up. So you still have time to do that. Do you have any important PSAs other than Secret Santa and first pitch of Tiger's Guardians on May 24th? Oh, well, let's see. You know, think about when the last time was that you washed your water

bottle and if you can't remember, that means it's time for you to wash it again because stuff gets grody in there and you can get, you know, like a river disease or some other sort of amoeba. Let's see what other things- That's a really good one. Yeah. When people say, I don't know who needs to hear this, but, and they say something like that, I needed to hear that probably because I'm someone, I have two thermoses set up in a rotation for tea, for hot tea. So I'm sort of double-fisting hot tea thermoses at all times, which is one way to put that, and I tell myself that, you know, how often do I need

to clean these things out? Because it's pretty hot water. It's like 195 degrees when it goes in there and then it slowly cools down over the course of my sipping. But that's a sub-boiling level, right? And so I probably need to tend to that more often. Yeah, make sure you wash your water bottles. Similarly, if you have a countertop coffee maker and you can't remember the last time you replaced the little filter that sits in the water reservoir, probably time to change it again.

They tell you to change those things once a month, and I don't think that's, you know, silliness. I think they're worried about the quality of your water filtration. So if you haven't done that in a bit, also any air conditioning slash heating filters, if you can't remember the last time you did that, it's time to do it, you know,

especially as we're getting into the chilly season, maybe your heat's running for the first time in a while and you're like, oh, that smells kind of weird. That's because you need to change your filter. You should change your filter. It's important. It's important for air quality and fire safety. What other little PSAs do I have? I'm trying to talk myself out of a kind of grumpy mood and I feel like I'm on the right path. So. Yeah. Well, that's all very valuable advice that I was not getting from at Detroit Tigers PR. As far as I know, they told me nothing about these various cleanliness tips. So thank you very much for that. I don't use heat

in the winter and I tell myself that I make up for my exorbitant cooling bills during the summer by not having exorbitant heating bills during the winter. I don't know that it actually all evens out, but- Do the other members of your household have a similar temperature threshold for feeling too cold or too hot as you? My daughter does. My daughter got whatever gene it is that makes me comfortable in cold, which I recognized very early on in her life because we would take her outside and she was born in late September and so it was winter and she was a little baby and my wife always wanted to bundle her up as is prudent to do with a baby just generally I guess. But I noticed pretty early on in her life that she seems just quite comfortable in cool

temperatures and I pegged early on, yeah, she's got whatever it is that I have here. My wife does not have that though. So we have separate working environments in our apartment, which is helpful because we don't really have the thermostat wars so much that people have in office environments, in actual offices, which is good because that would probably be bad for our relationship. Yeah. Does she have like a little space heater in her office? I don't think we need the heat so much, but- No, but you don't, but does Jessie think she needs the heat? That's the question.

Yeah, I don't think so. I think there's enough residual heat from the rest of the building, maybe, that we're just kind of, we're mooching maybe off of everyone else's heat. Good for you. So we don't need to- I mean, this is part of the environmental argument for apartment living, right? It's more efficient from a heating and cooling perspective, I suppose. What other little PSAs do I have?

We're not going to go into it at length because this is really the purview of the Patreon bonus episodes, but I found another horrifying example of painted woodwork and I am furious on behalf of the future homeowners of this house that I will never buy because it's very expensive and in a city I don't live in. But I'm all worked up, Ben. I'm sorry to hear that. Yeah, if people want Meg's interior design thoughts, check out the most recent Patreon bonus episode recorded.

I guess since we're talking about heat, we should talk about one more PSA about the heat of the stove or the lack thereof, which is- Look at you. The Rockies are out on Juan Soto. So. Lordy.

As reported on Twitter and maybe various other social media networks by one Kevin Larson, who has sort of an informal correspondence ongoing with Rocky's owner, Dick Montfort. I believe this is authentic because it's not the first time. I don't want to impugn him, but have we like verified the provenance of this? I don't know in that I have not been forwarded the email, but I know that this is a thing that has been documented with Rocky's owner, Dick Montfort, where he will just respond

to fans if they email him. If you just send an email to Dick Montfort, he will respond, and it used to say, from his iPad, and now I guess it says from his iPhone, so maybe he changed if this is the actual Dick Montfort, which I believe it is. If we got here, if everyone got, got, then please let us know. And then this is just an enjoyable social media troll. But I think this is a documented tradition in Rockies land where Dick Montfort will sometimes just respond and has previously this same person emailed about acquiring Shohei Otani and Dick Montfort, I believe, allegedly responded and said he's a

free agent at the end of the year, but would be fun for a couple months. This was in Otani's last season with the Angels. Well, now the message is from Kevin who emailed Dick Montfort here and said, can we sign Juan Soto? And supposedly, seemingly, Dick Montfort himself responded to say he has said publicly he wants to stay on East Coast, which he has not said publicly, right? Yeah. I don't think he would have said that because that would be bad for his market. Obviously there are West Coast teams in the bidding here and I could believe maybe that he has that preference.

I like the idea that this is the only reason that the Rockies would be out on one Soto if only, if only he would play there. Otherwise they'd be right in the running there and they'd be making a competitive offer for Juan Soto. But I don't believe that he has said publicly that he would, because why would he limit his market in that way? He may have said he enjoys playing on the East Coast, but to my knowledge, at least he has not ruled out playing on the West Coast, which I guess would be news to the Dodgers who've been in the West Coast, which I guess would be news to the Dodgers who've been

in the bidding seemingly, right? And maybe they're not the only ones who've been in the market who are not an East Coast team. So I do like the idea though, that you could just email an owner and get a response quickly too, because again, if this is legitimate, it's eight minutes after the initial email was sent that the reply came in. And I know that Rob Manfred has done this as well, that there are documented instances of fans just emailing Rob Manfred and he will email them back. I actually, I tried once to interview Manfred about his responses to random fan emails. And ultimately that request was declined and he decided not to participate in that story. But I have been kind of tickled by that because

he is sort of this remote commissioner. I mean, it feels like he's in the news a lot these days, but generally I think he's been, if anything, less accessible to reporters than certainly say but C-Lig was or less liable to talk to the press. And yet he will sometimes just dash off a phone sent email early in the morning to someone who just sent him some fan concern. And he also has a documented history. If you request a Rob Manfred autographed ball and email it to him or to someone else at MLB, he will eventually send you a Rob Manfred autographed ball where he'll just sign it

right by his printed name on the ball, I guess, which good for him. Good for your memorabilia collection if you really want. LS. How many of those requests has he gotten in his entire time as commissioner? I wonder. I think it would be kind of funny, especially when all the stuff was going on. I mean, it still maybe goes on to some extent, but all the Sturm und Drang about the ball and the behavior of the ball to get him to sign one, I think would have been kind of a comedic bit of merch, but yeah, I don't know how many people are displaying that as the centerpiece of their autograph collection, a Rob Manfred autographed

Rob Manfred ball, but it's kind of almost this like mom and pop aspect to this big business where you can just, if you guess the email address, and I won't say what it is, but it's not hard to guess, then you could perhaps get a response directly from the horse's mouth. So it's almost charming in a way that these authority figures will sometimes get back to people directly in that way. Yeah, it's a nice thing. It's kind of a weird thing, but it's a nice thing, I guess. Nice? I don't know. It is interesting that there is a greater comfort level with corresponding

with just a random person who is likely to put what you said on the internet then with a reporter who might, who's going to do the same thing, but has like, you know, professional standards that they have to uphold and perhaps will, even if they are critical, like deliver criticism with a minimum amount of snark or, you know, it's just like a, the calculus on that is really interesting to me. Yeah. I wonder what the PR people think of that practice.

I'm sure it like makes them break out in hives to think that the commissioner or an owner is just a dashing off responses willy nilly, you know, maybe half considered to fans who just contacted them without that going through any sort of vetting or anything, right? Like that's gotta be sort of scary for a PR professional. But also if you're a fan, then maybe it's good because you get sort of the unvarnished sentiment from those figures, at least in theory. Yeah. I think a lot of people say things that they would perhaps phrase differently when

caught on wares. I do wonder if at a certain point, like how many emails into the thread with Dick Monfort, do you have to be before Dick Monfort's like, wait, who is this? I think the thing is though, that he's more likely to respond to a fan than to a media member. If a media member just emailed and said, are you in on Soto or something, then maybe the response gets forwarded or, you know, the, the inquiry gets forwarded to PR or something. I don't know that he's as likely to just dash off a response in eight minutes, but if a fan does it and maybe it is sort of a naive thought that this will not be widely broadcast to everyone, even though clearly that has happened multiple times and they should probably know better by now. But I'm all for

people saying the actual things that they think. Sometimes that's come up with Manfred where people have said, well, why would he say something like that? And I think Evandrelik who covers Manfred quite closely has said, well, actually it's valuable. It's useful that he will sometimes, has said like, well, actually it's valuable. It's useful that he will sometimes, yeah, yeah. Just like spout off something that he probably shouldn't have said, but maybe it's a Kinsey gaffe. Maybe it actually reveals what that person is thinking.

And if you're in the media and you want the truth to come out, okay, maybe you'd rather that they said that to you in an exclusive interview or something, but just in general, it's beneficial in terms of like public utility that we all want to know what these people think, the public good, if they have a tendency to just fire off a response, then maybe we actually get a window into what they're thinking. Yeah, maybe. Okay. So one thing that I wanted to know what you think about college baseball. Now, how often do I bring up college baseball

on the podcast, let alone bring it up in December? Almost never. But I was intrigued by a story that was published by the Athletic this week, written by one Noah Furtado. And the headline is, MLB teams now face new competition for talent, college programs awash with money. And the idea is that MLB teams maybe will now face some stiffer competition when it

comes to drafting and signing players because there's more money in college sports these days because of NIL, name, image, likeness. And of course there are other cases wending their way through the courts. There's the House versus NCAA lawsuit. And so there is a window now, a door open for schools to share revenue directly with athletes. And you can offer college baseball teams by 25, 26.

We'll be able to offer up to 34 full scholarships for the first time in the history of the sport. And then there's the increasing NIL money, which is sometimes just an influencer sort of thing, just college athletes who are famous for whatever reason, and they can cash in directly through sponsor revenue, ads, SponCon, et cetera. Or it can be a way that boosters essentially funnel money to players to get them to commit to a program, for instance. So the idea here is that there might be an alternative, a stronger, more attractive alternative for players who in the past,

maybe MLB teams had them over a barrel a little bit, or just had the ability to present such a more lucrative financial incentive to sign with them. Now, some players might be weighing compelling offers from college programs who might say, hey, you can make just as much money via NIL and get a scholarship, et cetera, as you could, getting a signing bonus with the team that drafted

you and then riding the bus in the minors for a few years. So do you think this already is having an impact? Do you think it will have an impact? Should teams be worried about this? Is this a good or bad thing from a player development perspective? I think that it's too early to answer a lot of those questions because they're ones that we will in theory be able to put more specific data to. I think just as a first principle, I am in favor of players having more agency in a process that is for many of them largely devoid of agency. The draft is an anti-labor practice.

If these guys were able to pick their team, if they were able to have their services bid upon, you're not making $100 million as an unproven college player, but you would be able to pick your employer. You might find more lucrative signing opportunities. So there being a countervailing force within that process that gives these young athletes some amount of agency over what they do and allows them to have greater financial security as they go into the draft process and into their experience in affiliated ball, I think is just fundamentally a thing I'm in favor of.

I am going to be really curious to see what the push and pull is from an NIL perspective and a bonus perspective because I think that when separate from any NIL-related know, we have seen in the last couple of years, and I think we're only going to continue to see this if we get further contraction of the minor leagues, that there is an increasing preference for college players over high school players, right? Eric Longanagan has talked about this on the show before. We've heard this from other prospect, that when you have, you only have so many minor league roster spots to allocate and you only have so many draft picks

to use because the draft was cut in half, that you want to use those resources more efficiently. You want to use them on players who you think have a greater likelihood of success. And so you see a lot of teams opting for college guys over high school guys, because there's more data available. You've seen them against higher level competition. There are more fully baked product, quote unquote, in all likelihood because, you know,

college programs are getting increasingly sophisticated in their player dev approaches. That doesn't apply to every college program. There are obvious exceptions to that. There's a big gap between the best college programs and the worst college programs in terms of their ability to help guys sort of actualize their talent. But with all of those provisos taken,

like you kind of want the college guy. With that understanding, I wonder, what is the continued upward pressure on NIL money if it's not going to be bonuses? Because if these guys aren't going to get drafted out of high school anyway, do you have to spend as much, quote unquote, to lure them to LSU, right? To lure them to Florida? So I'm curious sort of how those economics are going to interact with one another. Now, the answer to some of this is the people who care about college baseball, I know that this is a foreign emotional concept to you, Ben, but like, you know, if you're

an SEC booster for a college program, you really care about LSU, right? You really want LSU to win national championships, you or Clemson or whatever, right? You really want LSU to win national championships, or Clemson or whatever, right? You really, Vandy's been resistant to NIL money, but they're kind of starting to change their tune on that. So it's like the investment for the booster is emotional. And so they might just want the best guys no matter what. They don't view themselves necessarily being only in competition with major league teams, but with every other SEC program, right? With every program that

isn't as good, but wants to have a good program and has committed alums and so is getting ready to splash cash around as a way to lure college prospects to their team via the transfer portal. So I think that there's probably still going to be the potential for a lucrative source of money there for college kids because, you know, the people who care about that really care. And a lot of them are like, you know, the second most successful car dealership owner in Alabama. And boy, you know, you're going to give whatever kid money to come play for your team, right? Or you know, the program's really important where you are. And so you want the best hitter on the LSU Tigers to appear in a commercial that says

that your Ford dealership is the best Ford dealership, right? So there's a lot there that makes this a good value proposition for alums and boosters, some of which might be the advertising value of these athletes, some of which is the emotional investment they have in these programs, et cetera. I don't know if we really know what it'll do. I don't know how many kids this actually

applies to. It's obvious that it is a more realistic pathway for more college kids than we necessarily thought it would be when NIL started making waves. We thought it was going to be largely isolated to football and basketball. It's clear that that's not true. There are a lot of athletes that are of interest from an NIL perspective, and there's the booster thing on top of that. So I don't know. I don't know how many kids this is going to apply to. I don't know how the economics of the one will sort of interact with the other. I do think that for a lot of young athletes, the short-term financial ramifications are exciting.

But also when you are making a decision to go to LSU or take a multi-million dollar bonus from the Yankees, I still think there are going to be plenty of players for whom the sort of scales tip out in favor of the Yankees. Just to use an example, because this piece in The Athletic was talking to a lot of the Yankees draft personnel, might tip out in favor of the Yankees over LSU, or Band-Aid, or any of these programs because if you become a New York Yankee, you can rise through the affiliated ranks and then go play at Yankee Stadium, win a World Series, and make big league money money and big league money is bigger than NIL money. So long term, I don't know how often this is going to send kids to campus over signing

with a major league organization because they still can make multiple millions of dollars with major league organizations and at a certain point they get to be a major leaguer, you know, which I assume is their long-term goal. And I don't say that to like, you know, knock the experience of competing in a College World Series and winning a national championship, like that, those are clearly very important experiences to a lot of these guys and they talk about them that way long after they guys. And they talk about them that way long after they have passed. They talk about them that way sometimes when they have been major

leaguers for a long time, right? So I'm not trying to like knock that, but like if you had a choice to be a college world series winner or be a world series winner, I think that like most guys are going to be pretty clear headed about the answer to that. Now you're not guaranteed to be a World Series winner, I think that like most guys are going to be pretty clearheaded about the answer to that. Now, you're not guaranteed to be a World Series winner, not guaranteed to be a college World Series winner either for that matter, but you know, I wonder how these things are going to push and pull against each other because it isn't just the signing bonus question. It isn't just the NIL money. It's like, what do you think these programs can do for you?

It's interesting to me that a Yankees person went on the record about this and that they are perceiving it as an actual threat to the signability of some of these guys because you would think of any organization had an easy time being like, hey, I'm so and so from the New York Yankees. You want to come play for us kid? That that's like a, that's like a no brainer a lot of the time. So for it to be raised by that particular organization is, is an interesting data point. Again, I don't know how widespread a quote unquote issue this is for big league clubs, but it is interesting that like that's the face of it.

It would be one thing if it was the Rockies. Dick Mopper, it's like, I've been, I've been emailing with this kid about his NIL money and I don't know, I guess he's just going to go to campus in the fall. You'd be like, is that about the NIL money or is that about him not wanting to be a Colorado Rocky? But you know, for it to come from the Yankees is like, that's interesting. Yeah. There's no documented case where someone

came out and said, yeah, I'm passing up this first round signing bonus because of NIL. It's just kind of reading tea leaves and trying to divine, oh, did this guy not go because of this? And so yeah, there's this guy who leads off the article, the athletic William Schmidt, who was a right-handed pitcher and probably a potential first round pick, and he was committed to LSU, but it was, I guess, widely assumed that if he was drafted in the first round that he would probably sign somewhere, and he didn't. He went to LSU. And then there's Ryan Prager at Texas A&M, who went back for his junior season

after the Angels drafted him in the third round. And then there is also Tyler Bell, high school shortstop. So these are the three guys who were named here as people whose expectedly high NIL profiles seem to leave a mark on the 2024 MLB draft. But a lot of this is forward looking and trying to project whether this will become an issue because these NIL budgets keep climbing. And of course, maybe it goes without saying, but this is baseball. So it's not the biggest NIL money because college baseball players are not the

biggest college athletes in terms of the revenue they generate, the national profile that they have, even among many baseball fans, yours truly included. So you're not getting quite the NIL potential for baseball. And that's why it's been assumed, eh, this probably won't be that big a deal in baseball. Paul Skeens, for instance, made around $250,000, according to a source cited in this article to play for LSU and the baseball NIL budget at LSU the year the Tigers won the national championship was reportedly about a million just for the whole

program so that's not going to sway you that kind of cash and Paul Skeens is being vastly out earned by his girlfriend when it comes to NIL money but But if your skein's okay, that didn't make a difference for him, but the article is suggesting, well, the budgets have gotten bigger. Most budgets in SEC baseball now range from 1.5 million to 3 million, according to a head coach in the conference who added that one program is working with as much as 4 million and Prager, his NIL earnings will be about double what skeinsz earned two years ago and, you know, probably isn't as big a star, right? So that's why it's creeping up into this territory where maybe

it will make a difference. But yeah, you're already getting a glut of college talent, as you noted, just because of the decrease in minor league levels. There are just fewer minor league teams and those short season teams wiped off the board. And then you're also getting fewer rounds in the draft to begin with, which those things go hand in hand. So you're getting more players staying in college for those reasons.

And then this might be some extra stars who might make a different decision because there's a different calculus. So I guess whether it matters in the long term, what we care about most, I suppose, as baseball observers is will these guys get to the big leagues? Will they become as good in the big leagues as they would have otherwise? And I don't know that there is any clear difference there that we could say, oh, it's bad for development to stay in college longer as opposed to getting into the pro ranks because a lot of these college programs are adept at development as you're probably going

to get in some lower level minor league. And so maybe it doesn't make that much of a difference long-term. LS. I think it just really, really depends on both the program and the org, right? You know, there are plenty of schools that have really strong player dev reputations. I think you see some of the biggest splits on the pitching side, but the same is true of hitters, right? And if you're coming out of Wake Forest or Dallas Baptist or, you know, some of these schools, like, there might not be a lot of, like, developmental meat left on the bone. If you're a pitcher and you're coming out of ASU, you want to go to the pros because you're probably going to get better under a pro-dev program than you are getting,

you know, instructed at ASU. Like, no offense on doubles, but like, what are we doing over there, you know? There's like a big story to be written about the decline of ASU baseball and Willie Bloomquist hasn't been the one to revitalize it. Who could have foreseen this? I'm on it, Meg. I'll take on that. I'll take on that story. I want to see, I want to see you reporting that story and how many times you have to text Bauman to be like, I don't understand this reference that I just got in an interview.

Who is that? They're called head coaches, not managers? What? And like, you know, there's, it's interesting too that, you know, that Jay Johnson wanted to go on the record for this story, right? Like he has an incentive to get guys to come to college. Like college coaches are recruiters, right? That's a big part of what they're doing.

It's a different quote unquote acquisition model. And it's interesting, you know, one thing that this piece doesn't get into, and I think that's fine because it's not the purview of the piece, but it's like, uh, increasingly we are seeing college programs conducting themselves like big league front offices, right? Where they are thinking about their responsibilities as recruiters and as player dev people the way that a GM might, right? We're not that far off from college baseball being a place that like, you

know, if you're a scout and you get let go by a big league organization that is shifting to video, you might be able to find a pretty lucrative job for a college program at some point here because with the transfer portal, they're having to go and find these guys. You need to be looking at high school kids to recruit them and then you need to have a transfer portal scout. I'm not breaking new ground here.

Like, Eric has talked about that too. A lot of the prospect guys are really kind of attuned to this where it's, you know, there's increasing professionalization in those ranks. And it's not just that increasingly it can be kind of lucrative for the players there. The way that these teams, or at least the really good ones, are starting to conduct themselves is looking more and more like big league organizations. So I don't know. It'll be interesting. I mean, from major league baseball's perspective, not the individual major league teams, but like the business entity that is major league baseball, you love to see it, right? Because the more dev you can outsource to college, the more comfortable you can get

your clubs with the work that these big SEC programs are doing and some of the mid-majors, the more justification you have to continue to contract the minors. And I'm not saying that's a good thing. To be clear, I think it, to do a swear, sucks. But if you're the league, this is great. Yeah, keep them in college for a little while. Let the cream rise to the top and see who the best guys are.

You fill out your minor league rosters with those guys, you have some room left for international amateurs, and then you can spend less and less money on player dev, you can have fewer and fewer domestic affiliates. You know, that part of it sucks. And I'm not saying that's the fault of NIL, to be clear, but any forces that keep kids in college to do this kind of dev is great. Like if you're major league baseball, you're looking at the NFL and you're like, God, what a great, what a great method they have.

They outsource all of their dev to the colleges. And that's not to say that guys don't get better once they get into, you know, NFL locker rooms. They do. And they're doing development for NFL teams too, but their minor leagues are happening every weekend in Ann Arbor and Tuscaloosa. Yeah. And of course, there's been a lot of cross-pollination of coaches going to college from pro ball,

from college to pro ball, which is just a sign of- And then back to college. Right. Yeah, sometimes. In D. Johnson's case. Yeah. And oftentimes colleges pay better for those coaches, which is part of the appeal. And I guess this also then puts the onus on major league teams to really develop a good developmental reputation.

Right. They already have incentive to do that, obviously, because it's good to develop good players and it helps you even attract major league free agents. But if you have to sell yourself now to the player you just drafted and it's not like it was when bonuses were less restricted and you could just blow everyone out of the water or go like way over slot or something, you're kind of constrained spending wise. And so now you kind of have to present yourself as a better developmental option. Right.

If the money is close or closer than it used to be, and you can't just blow the college out of the water by saying, here's your X million dollar signing bonus. You also probably have to point to your track record and say, well, in the long run, you'll be best served by signing with us because we'll turn you into a productive big leaguer. And then you can make a zillion dollars down the road. But if you don't have that track record, then yeah, maybe if the college team does, then they're going to have the more persuasive pitch. So all the more reason to improve your developmental pipeline.

And to your, you know, to your point and the piece makes this point, a lot of the time, there is still a very sizable gap between even the top NIL earners on the college baseball side and what their signing bonus would be, right? So, you know, we don't need to overstate things either, but it is an interesting development that it's more of a conversation, that it does sort of afford you an alternative if you're, you know, a high school student and you're trying to decide like, what am I going to do if you really have, you know, a more lucrative to cross my sports metaphors here, if you really have a more lucrative check down on the NIL side, it is a more balanced conversation between you, your representation and a potential draft team.

I think that's good. I'm all for players having greater agency in this process. I don't want to like overstate the effect it's going to have. And I do worry about sort of the broader ramifications on player dev and the minor league system of, you know, the perception that college can do as good a job from a dev perspective. You know, the minute that MLB like really wants to lean into that, I think it's a bad thing for the minor leagues, but players having more agency is good. CB I wonder whether this does increase the profile of college baseball long-term.

Maybe it doesn't because this applies to all sports and NIL is open to everyone, but just the fact that college baseball players now have more incentive to be public figures and to have an online profile and to be quasi-influencers. Are we going to be getting more college baseball players thirst traps? Are we going to get college baseball players on OnlyFans? That's not even so much what I mean as just like, will there be bigger celebrities than there usually are in college baseball and how will that impact the audience for the draft, if at all? Because obviously baseball's draft is just way smaller than the NFL's, than the NBA's, and I think that is always going to be the case for various reasons.

A, those college sports are just vastly more popular. And B, the turnaround time from getting drafted to being an impact player in the majors at the highest level professionally is just always going to be shorter. Although I guess if there are more players proportionally being drafted out of college as opposed to high school, then maybe there's a little less of a lead time there, right? Because you're going to come out as a more finished polished player than you would have if you're coming out of high school and teams have maybe kind of

prioritized college players just in general, cause it's a safer pick and easier to project. But even so, I wonder whether you get more stars, more players that I will have heard of before they get drafted or before we have Eric on the podcast, because they have some sort of online profile so that your average fan might actually have more of a reason to tune into the draft knowing that your team's top pick is not necessarily going to be an impact player for you the next year and maybe you haven't been watching that player's college games, but if they're somehow sort of a celebrity or at least a micro celebrity,

then maybe there's just a little higher rating there. So I don't know how big a difference that will be, but maybe something. I think it will make some amount of difference. I mean, I know that you have your resistance to it, but like college baseball is a ton of fun to watch. The college world series is a blast. And I think that if you are able to pull some more folks into that experience because the Friday night guy

For one of those teams sold you like athletic wear, you know on Instagram Just like pick a thing that probably gets advertised to men like that. That doesn't seem like a bad thing to me It seems like a good thing like college sports are a lot of fun And if the athletes are actually being compensated, you know being compensated, it's a more ethical viewing experience now. They're not being compensated in direct proportion to the revenue that they're bringing in, obviously, so I don't want to overstate the case, but it does rebalance that conundrum a little bit. I'm not an anti-social media person. I use social media. I do worry about these young athletes seeing the most sure way to making money, to be needing to be influencers, right?

Because you just end up so exposed so early in your life And it's really hard to unring that bell, you know? I'm sure that things seem like they're going great for her, but like, I do wonder, you know, in a moment of honesty, like what Libby Dunn would say about her experience online. Hopefully she's not engaging with it directly, right? CB There's all sorts of stuff where it bleeds over into real life and you get vest throngs of people showing up to a college gymnastics meet or whatever it is or being loud or being- Or Steens' minor league debut, you know, and she can't watch her boyfriend play baseball without there being like 30 people asking for her autograph. And, you know, these are

conversations and sort of boundaries that athletes of varying levels of professionalism have had to negotiate for a long time. And once you, you know, if you're taken first overall in MLB's draft, you know, you might not be as high profile as Paul Skeens, but at some point you're going to have fans, you're going to have, you know, autograph hounds at the complex, you're going to have fans, you're going to have, you know, autograph hounds at the complex. You're going to have all kinds of stuff that you have to sort through. So maybe getting some exposure to that early and being able to figure it out on a smaller scale is valuable. I don't know, but I, I do, I think there's like this big rush that a lot of these

kids have been keen to, to capitalize on, to, to, you, to partner with the local Pizza Hut and John Deere Tractor dealership and the Athleisure Ware Company or whatever. And there's obvious financial benefit to that for a lot of these kids and that's great. But to have to be a public facing person with some amount of resource, but definitely not like the resource that an actually famous person has to navigate that landscape, to have someone else like do your Instagram for you. There is cost on a personal level to that. And you know, I don't say it like we should, you know, if one of these kids pops off in

a way that's offensive or whatever, that we need to excuse them. But I do wonder, I hope, I guess, that as we are seeing more NIL money enter that space, both in college baseball and in college sports more generally, I hope that these programs give some thought to what their responsibilities are to help media train these kids, to help them navigate that landscape and come out the other side of it still like a whole person. And then you throw in the pressure that you're getting from autograph people, from collectors, from gambling weirdos, you know? It's not like those influences aren't present if you're all of a sudden the first round

pick of the New York Yankees. Yeah, come on. Of course you're facing that same pressure and maybe magnified tenfold, but you also in theory have the resources of literally the New York Yankees on your side to help you deal with it on some level and an agent who's making like not NIL cuts, but like real pro baseball cuts of money. So I just, you know, I think that part of it is like another layer to this conversation that has a much more direct impact on the athletes themselves and their like personhood and you know, futures than just the money piece.

And like we shouldn't lose sight of that either. That has been me stumping for, think about how much you want to tell people about yourself online. Can't unring these bells, friends. And also just following up on our previous podcast where we talked about the market so far, we finally had a signing of a player who came in on a percentage basis, at least significantly below the contract that they were expected to get. And that is Danny Jensen. I know. Sorry, Danny. I'm not laughing at you. I'm laughing at, you know, I'm laughing. I know not one of the higher profile free agents, but Danny Janssen signed with the

raise for one year and 8 million with a $500,000 buyout on a mutual option for 2026 and Danny Janssen was predicted. Let's see, Ben Clemens had him at two years at 8 million per, so same AAV, but 2 years, total of 16 million, and so did the crowd-sourced FanGraphs median estimate, and MLB Traderummers had him at 2 and 20. So I guess it's just really a product of the fact that he settled for one season. And according to some reports, he decided that he wanted to do one season. That Robert Murray, who reported the signing,

noted that he had multi-year offers, but chose to bet on himself coming off a down season and goes to a place where he'll get consistent playing time. This is another case of a player who is signing to play in a minor league park. Obviously different reasons for that, but he's going there. Seems like the trap would have been a good park for him. I don't know that Steinbrenner Field will be, but obviously he's not really taking a premium here to play in that minor league park. And I guess maybe if he had taken whatever multi-year offers were

evidently out there, he probably would have come in pretty close to the estimates anyway. So it's maybe more of a case for him coming off a down year and saying, I can do better if I come back and I bounce back and I get regular playing time with the Rays and then I'll be back on the market next year, not coming off an 89 WRC plus season, but maybe more like the preceding two or three seasons and then I'll be better positioned long term. So yeah, I guess we don't really have to revise our previous comments about the strength of the market thus far based on the Danny Jensen signing, but it is one data point, one player who has actually come in under the estimates.

But neither of us took the under on Danny Jensen in the free agent contracts over under drafts. So we can't claim credit for that one. Well, and it's interesting. I guess if you want to be a little bit nervous, if you are keen on raising an eyebrow, you might remark on the fact that the catching market is just wildly shallow. And he was one of the better options amidst a slew of not great options, especially after Durandot signed. But also, whatever, you know, I don't want to be indifferent to it, but he's a guy where you could have told me he got paid extra just because of positional scarcity, but also a lot of teams have a reasonable catcher. I don't know. I don't know. Like, what are you going to do?

Yeah. And lastly, by the way, I was alluding to a tweet by Matan Kay, who noted that because Jensen's such a right-handed pulled fly ball guy, that would have worked well for the trop, but he will not be playing in the trop unless, well, both sides exercise their mutual option, which happens all the time, obviously, and the Rays return to the trop in 2026, but there's some barriers in the path of each of those things happening. Also, by the way, meant to mention when we were talking about Manfred that for him to answer emails directly, obviously quite a change from his predecessor, Bud Selig, who is quoted as saying, I've never sent an email and I never will. Which he did use an iPhone. I think it was reported that he had an iPhone. I don't know

exactly. Maybe he just used it for phone calls because yeah, that was a generational shift there, a little bit of a philosophical change. That's one of the reasons why I think there was some optimism surrounding Manfred when he started is just that he was a little younger. He seemed like someone who probably has sent an email, and he definitely has. So that's a change at least. Yeah, you probably, you can't really be a commissioner probably these days and never send an email. Although, you know, there are some famous old rich people who are in that same boat because they just have someone print out their emails and send emails for them. And you know, if I could do that,

maybe I would. What percentage of the emails that Rob Anford has copied on do you think he actually, one reads or two, responds to? It's probably pretty low in both regards, right? Just because I bet he gets copied on a bunch of stuff. CB. I'm sure he does. LS. I bet he does a lot of, okay. Look, I'm not going to respond unless you're a random fan. Let me be clear about my inbox hierarchy here. Yes. And hey, you can email us and sometimes you can get a response directly from us

too at podcast at fancrafts.com. Last thing I will say here, we got an email. This is a, we won't do an email show, which was one option for today, but obviously we have talked enough as it is, and we have a stat blast to end the episode, a guest stat blast in just a second, but wanted to answer one email, a how can you not be panetic about baseball question, which came to us from AJ and he said, listening to episode 2250, Ben and Meg are discussing Yusei Kikuchi going to the Angels. At some point, the Mariners are referred to as the angels division rivals.

And I realized that this was not the way I had traditionally thought of the term. My pedantic question is, is a team your division rival just because you share a division or does there have to be a competitive nature between the teams for it to be called that? I can see the Mariners and Astros being called division rivals.

They have competed for AO West titles recently, but the angels sharing a division but just mucking around in last-ish place doesn't strike me as making them a rival of the Mariners. Am I wrong? I am sympathetic to the notion that not all division opponents have the same level of venom between them. And even if it's not animosity, just like desire to beat those guys because maybe they've had the better end of the record. But I also think divisional rivals and of course divisions change and teams move around.

It's not like that's unprecedented, but generally you're seeing the same club for like years and years. And so I think you have a little bit of desire to beat division rivals quote unquote, regardless of sort of what the balance of the record is between the teams more often than not, because you just see them a lot. And obviously like you want to win your division, so there's that additional incentive on its own. But yeah, I think you're just like more inclined to want to, to, to win against divisions. You see them more often, you know, you have the

opportunity both to feel like you know them and also be annoyed by them. But yes, there are definitely the Mariners and the Astros do not like each other. When those teams play, you are like one hit by pitch away from a fight a lot of the time. But is there Mariners angels animosity? There have, there has been at times, you know, I think, and some of it is like, like, you know, my trout was really good for a long time. So you just were like, I can't believe we're getting beat by this guy again. So there's definitely some of that. I don't think that there's animosity between them at this

current juncture, the same way there is with the Astros. Mariners fans don't like Astros fans very much and those the personnel on those teams do not care for each other and it's it's amazing because like you would think that it's a science-dealing thing and it's partly that and some of those guys are still around but there's been so much turnover on that Houston team and still it's like wow I don't like those guys Mariners and Angels rifles for Jerry DePoto services I, I guess sort of, well, they have both employed Jerry DiPoto. Yeah. I was going to say, I don't think that Ernie Marino views himself as in competition with the Mariners for Jerry's services if I had to hazard a guess.

I use this term though, division rivals to refer to any teams that are in the same division. I do. Are the Rockies and Dodgers division rivals? Maybe we should email Dick Montfort and ask. Obviously that has not been a competitive rivalry. Again, to say that they're rivals doesn't imply that it's a good rivalry or that it's a close or heated rivalry at this particular time, just that they are in the same division. They are technically competing for the same division title. So I think that means they are rivals. And it just so happens that sometimes one rival is so far ahead of the other that it's just not even close. It's not very compelling, but it's still a rivalry. So it's not Yankees Red Sox, it's not Cubs Cardinals, it's not Dodgers Giants. It's not like a

Yankees Red Sox, it's not Cubs Cardinals, it's not Dodgers Giants, it's not like a traditional historic rivalry. It's not one you would emphasize or have more likely to be on a national broadcast or during the interleague rivalry week or whatever it is. But yeah, I would say you could say they're division mates or something like that. I don't know, you could just say they're in the same division and not use the term rival, but it's helpful to have more than one term for things. So I certainly say division rivals. It's just not a good rivalry, not a close one right now. LS. Yeah. Well, and look, we can acknowledge that some rivalries have persisted for longer, have a more storied history without denigrating the current rivalries of the AOS. But how do those big historic nasty gnashing rivalries happen? By acknowledging that they're

rivalries and letting them grow, letting the animosity fester, remembering that one time that one guy hit that guy on your team, even though neither of those guys work for those teams anymore. You know, you have to nurture a rivalry. You've got to give it, you know, fresh soil and you have to water it. And you have to remember the bean balls and you have to remember the time

that the guy yelled the thing at the thing and then the bench is cleared. And Jesse Winker was there almost every single time lately. We don't know why because he just wants to start and end sh**, but you can acknowledge the rivalries as young, as nascent, as budding without saying that they are, of course, they're not the same as the Red Sox and the Yankees. That's not, no, but you know how you get there one day? By hating the Astros. That's how you do it. And they're still, even though there's a more

balanced schedule than there used to be, it's not completely balanced. And historically you have played the teams in your division way more than most other teams. And so it is a rivalry in that sense. You're competing not only for that same division crown, but also head to head more often. So yeah, it's a worthy question, but I will continue to use the term even as a pedantic person about baseball. It applies, I think. All right. Let us end with a guest stat blast, a little Cooperstown talk. They'll take a dataset sorted by something like ERA-, or OPS+, and then they'll tease out some interesting tidbit, discuss it at length, and analyze it for us in amazing ways. Here's to DASATBLAST! Well noted sabermetrician Tom Tango who works for MLB tweeted earlier this week, actually

excuse me, he posted on Blue Sky. Very important distinction. The worst thing we do with Hall of Fame evaluations is using war wins above replacement instead of positive wah wins above average, but only when above zero. War is useful for player valuation just to see if they should be an MLB at all. Wah sets higher standard for value and Hall of Fame is clearly higher standard. I would disagree with the worst thing we could do for Hall of Fame evaluations is using war. I would disagree with the worst thing we could do for Hall of Fame evaluations is using war. I think there are considerably worse things that we

could do and we could quibble with this entire philosophy and we can get into whether we agree with this. But Michael Mountain, listener, Patreon supporter, Discord group member has been way ahead of Tango here, or at least this most recent Tango quote. I guess Tango's been on this beat for a while, but Michael has in our Patreon Discord group been developing his own Hall of Fame system that is kind of in accordance with this idea and gives us, if not a superior way of evaluating candidates for the Hall of Fame, at least a complimentary one, which I think is an interesting perspective and has recently been built out into a website where anyone can check on these things. So Michael is here to share his research with us. Welcome back,

Michael. It's a pleasure to be back, Ben. Thank you. I don't know if a system is really, that may be giving it a little too much credit. I definitely don't want to claim any sort of novel value add to conversations that as you noted have been happening elsewhere and for a while and from smarter baseball minds than mine. Yeah, but you gave it a name, so it's a system. I did give it a name. I've been desperately trying to avoid having to pronounce WAA the way that you do. So having spent some time pouring through leaderboards and data exports from both fan graphs and baseball prospectus, I think the best name that I figured out to come up with, I wanted to name it after a player who scores notably well

by this metric compared to other Hall of Fame predictors or advanced stat metrics. So, Boog Powell, Orioles MVP first baseman from the 1960s and 70s stood out to me. So, I've decided to call this, at least my version, the Boog score, which stands for better than other ordinary guys. Yeah. It's not the worst backronym or the most tortured convoluted one that I've ever heard. It works for me. Definitely not. But as you noted, and Tango described it perfectly well, it's not a very complicated idea. The philosophical concept is just that I don't necessarily feel that replacement level is the best zero point to use for evaluating players either in end of season award voting

necessarily or for more elevated honors like the Hall of Fame. The concept of replacement value makes a lot of sense when you're talking about roster construction and where can you create surplus value by acquiring players above a certain skill level. But when we think about end of career accolades, it makes sense to me to use a higher threshold for competence, basically, instead of having to make mental adjustments for, well, we say about two wars and average player, so you kind of lop that off. That's kind of a decent rule of thumb, but you can do that in a more systematic fashion that makes it a little easier to think through. And again, as Tango noted, the other piece of that then is to exclude any seasons with a negative

wins above average. Again, I think philosophically this makes sense. It's the idea of balancing peak versus longevity. You do want to give people credit for having a long career, but you don't necessarily want to reward them just for hanging on, say, to get to some counting stat milestone and when they're not actually very good. You don't want Pete Rose to necessarily get extra credit for player managing and writing himself into the lineup for another five years at the end of his career if he's not actually producing at or above the level that you would expect from an ordinary MLB first baseman, for example. CB Yeah. I think that's true for the most part when we're talking about Hall of Fame candidates. If someone hangs on a little too long to the point that they're not really a productive

player anymore, people probably mentally discount that somewhat as it is. But there are certain cases where I think it helps push a player over the finish line, clear the bar. If there's some sort of magic number, if we think of sort of 60 wins above replacement as a Hall of Fame baseline, and maybe you would say that we shouldn't, but there are some cases I think where if a player is able to hang around a little longer, they separate themselves from the player who has the Hall of Fame peak, but it just ended too soon, like a Dale Murphy sort of situation.

If he had hung around for a few more years, even as an average player, then I think sometimes that can get you over the hump a little bit. CB I think it definitely can. And that probably has more sway, holds more sway with traditional voters, old school Hall of Fame voters who are looking at more of the traditional counting stats or batting average, RBI, et cetera, compared to a sapermetric approach where I think if you looked at, again, if you use wins above replacement as a cutoff for Hall of Fame voting, yeah, then somebody like Dale Murphy may look a little short from that perspective. But if you use more of a wins above average informed approach, you can make the case that players with that level of peak, they've kind of already cemented their case and whether or not they hang on for an extra five years, in my view, philosophically

shouldn't have much of an impact at all. I think another good example on the pitching side is someone like C.C. Sabathia, who's still on the ballot this year. And Jay Jaffe has written very nicely about how his case may be a little stronger because he did hold on for a few more years and get to some of those counting milestones where if you look at his wins above average cumulative total, his boog score is relatively flat for the last five or six years of his career. So from that perspective, whether or not he did that doesn't necessarily impact this metric at all. Tango, in addition to that Blue Sky post you mentioned, also did a nice little blog write up the other day doing something like this for pitchers, very bare bones. He said he knocked it together in an hour, but this same

he knocked it together in like an hour. But this same idea of figuring out a higher threshold to say for, you can use wins above average. He built his own toy wins above average metric where it had a flexible percentage cutoff. So you could say, how much better are you than a 500 pitcher? Or you could adjust that to say, how much better are you than a 450 pitcher or a 650 pitcher, depending on where your personal preference might be for what that threshold should look like. Okay. So who are the big standouts by Boog or what are your big takeaways? Well, when I was initially developing it, I was thinking that it could also be informative for end of season awards voting.

What I found is that in practice, that doesn't necessarily have too much of an impact just because there's sort of an artificial cap on how much an excellent player can contribute in a given season just because you're limited by how long the season is and how much you can play. So at the top of the leaderboard for a season, it doesn't really do very much in terms of reshuffling. If you look at the wins above replacement leaderboard versus a wins above average leaderboard, the top five or six, I used position players just because it was easier to find on fan graphs. They're basically unchanged. Where it does start to have an impact though is on players who didn't necessarily play a full season. I think Reese Hines is a good example from 2024 actually. He was not in the majors very long. He had 51 played appearances. He played for like a month, but he put up 0.7 Fangraphs War, which if you're just looking at a war leaderboard, okay, that's not that special.

He ranks about 250th among position players. But because he contributed that in such a short timeframe, his wins above average is actually significantly higher because what you would expect from an average player over that span is something far lower. The standard rule of thumb of wins above average is roughly wins above replacement minus two. That only really holds true if you're playing essentially a full season and among players who have roughly equivalent playing time. So for Rhys Hines, his 0.7 wins above replacement number on FanGraphs actually converts to 0.5 wins above average. So almost all of that value is in excess of what an average player would do,

again, given those same 51 played appearances. So by wins above average, he actually ranks 138th, which again, certainly not going to change any end of award season voting, but just an example of how different amounts of playing time can definitely impact players who look differently depending on what sort of a cutoff you use. In terms of actual Hall of Fame candidates, it's a little harder to judge. The basic idea is that I'm trying to use your rank by this metric as opposed to your raw score. Part of what I found comparing this to Jaws is that in my opinion at least, Boo score is a little bit more responsive to and flexible to different shapes of a career, right? So Boog Powell is an example of someone who does score a lot better

by this approach. He has a somewhat short career by sort of Hall of Fame player standards. He didn't do a lot of compiling. His peak was good, but not transcendent. He played a 17-year career, but roughly 11 of those years, 10 of those years, he was sort of an everyday player. He had five seasons above four war, but no transcendent seven or eight win season. The way that Jaws would look at him is to say, okay, we're going to take the seven best years of his career, take that war total, add it to his career war total. But because his peak is broader and shallower, in my opinion, that is doing him a little bit of a disservice because the seven-year

cutoff is arbitrary. If you wanted to really look at where he was contributing above and beyond what Major League Regular will be doing, it would be a slightly broader range of years to count from. And then again, because he wasn't hanging around long into his late 30s, he didn't add what some other players do, which is add one 0.5 to 1.5 wins above replacement a year, which does add to your jaws. But again, under the way that I'm calculating the book score, if you're doing one win in a full season, that's negative wins above average. That's not going to add to your book score at all. HOFFMAN So who are the Hall of Fame people? What does

Dale Murphy's book score look like? Is he a good example of someone who would fare better by this metric or are there others? So Dale Murphy comes in at a 24.3 book score. Some listeners may or may not be familiar with the sort of rough cutoff for Jaws. I believe most positions, the sort of median Hall of Famer by Jaws is around 50, between 50 and 55. For a boog score, it's obviously lower because we're using a higher threshold. So most positions, if you look at who's actually in Cooperstown, the median boog score is usually around 30 or so. So even somebody like Dale Murphy comes up a little short by that metric as well. But some examples of players who are right around

that 30 threshold mark would be Harper actually is at 30.5 right now. Andy Pettit is at 30.4. Ichiro is at 31.5. So again, I think it's a testament to say even though Ichiro played so much of his peak outside of the US, he still produced so much surplus value with the Mariners that his book score ends up being just above the Hall of Fame median for that position. C.C. Sepathia, I mentioned earlier, is about 33. Jacob deGrom is also around 33.

It's interesting to look. I set up spreadsheets that you can share in the show notes with basically every active player who has accumulated positive book score. I looked at what the Hall of Fame pace would be through their age. You can track and say, is this person, how are they tracking relative to what a median Hall of Famer at their age would be doing. Juan Soto is a good example for this, obviously. He's a fun one to look at. Through his age 25 season, he's produced 23.6 points of Boog score and the median Hall of Famer through age 25 had produced nine and a half. He's on 250% of a Hall of Fame pace for his career, which is pretty funny.

CBer No wonder there seems to be a market for his services. AC Yeah. Yeah. And on the pitching side, would you like to guess who is the furthest ahead of Hall of Fame pace for a pitcher, an active pitcher given their current age? CBer Is it Skeens? AC It is Paul Skeens who is at 192% of Hall of Fame pace. Again, obviously, mostly that's because he's so young and a lot of Hall of Fame pitchers have either not gotten started when they're 22 or have certainly not had as good a rookie season as he did. But it's still fun to see that up there. Yeah, the pitching side definitely looks a little less eye popping than the batting side. A

lot of that obviously is due to changes in pitcher usage and the way that the Hall of Fame standards for pitchers have not really adjusted given those usage pattern shifts. But there's certainly still a lot of fun names on there. Clayton Kershaw, Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer are all above the Hall of Fame median. Other guys who are on pace, Hunter Green, Aaron Nola, and Chris Sale. Jacob deGrom is very close to being on a Hall of Fame pace. He's at 97% of median Hall of Famer through age 36. There's a lot more batters who are up there. Julio Rodriguez, Gunnar Henderson, a lot of young guys who are sort of getting started and the shape of their career could be very, there are big error bars on where they could go obviously, but

even people like Bobby Witt or Ronald Acuna are trending at or above Hall of Fame pace through their current age. CB Is this something that would help with pitchers, modern day pitchers who pitch less clearing thresholds that they might have a hard time clearing via war or JAWS even. Your mention of Pettit and Sabathia also and DeGrom especially made me wonder about that. Although Pettit and Sabathia, those guys are close to other more career and peak balancing metrics as well. CB 1 Yeah, that's a good question. I don't know that it would necessarily help them with the traditional Hall of Fame voter analysis and

guys who are still wedded to the idea of old school counting stats. I don't think that it necessarily makes them look much better from that perspective. What it might do is potentially be an advantage over JAWS for certain players, and it's certainly not universal. This is probably a good time to mention that I've been trying to flesh this out and make this as complete as I can. One of the challenges has been that my preference was to use Fangraph's numbers for all of these leaderboards. Fangraph's does not make it particularly easy to find this or calculate this information for pitchers. The conversion from major league average to replacement level is done a little earlier

in their war calculation compared to baseball reference. And baseball reference actually exposes wins above average as a standalone column on their player leaderboards and also stat head searches. Not feeling confident enough in my data wrangling to actually reproduce FanGraphs war almost from scratch that I would need to do to figure that out. I did end up going with Baseball Reference War for pitchers and FanGraphs War for batters in the hopes that maybe someday soon there would be more data available on FanGraphs War for batters in the hopes that maybe someday soon there would be more data available on FanGraphs leaderboards that would enable me to use that going forward.

So Meg, I don't know if David Appelman has any plans to make that a little easier to use going forward, but I would certainly appreciate it. So we can put the request in. He probably would tell you to just use war, but yeah, sure. Yeah. Yeah. I like JAWS obviously because it balances these things. And I think most people just intuitively want to balance these things where you want to give credit for peak and you also want to give credit for career. Meg, as a probable future Hall of Fame voter yourself, do you tend to be more of a peak first person or is it kind of even or have you not formulated that preference yet?

I can't say I've formulated a strong preference about it just yet because I'm still a couple years from my vote, which I do plan to cast on like some people. I mean, I think you have to consider both. I don't know quite what proportion, but I'm sure that it'll balance out in some way or other. And Michael, did some other listener make a site, a web interface where you can look up people by book? Yes.

Sean Kelly took the spreadsheets that I had put together and I sent him some additional data as well and he set up a simple little GitHub hosted page that you can put in a selection of players and get a graph of their cumulative book score for their career and also the year-by-year data, which has been a lot of fun to look at. Kudos to Sean for setting that up. I've had a lot of fun playing around with it. There are a few minor data issues that we're trying to correct currently, but hopefully by the time listeners are hearing this, it will be in even better shape than it is now, which has been very informative and a little fun

tool to play with. Any particular players you want to shout out before we wrap up or anything else that you have concluded from developing this system if we're elevating it to the level of system? Yeah, again, I don't know that I would go that far, but no, it was gratifying to see Tango talking along similar lines earlier. Made me feel like I'm not just doing some crazy nerd snipe hunt here, but it's been fun to play with. I've been very grateful for all of the feedback and conversation that it spawned in the StatBlast channel on the Discord, which is a great place to be. Gunnar Henderson's really good at baseball, it turns out,

no matter how you slice it. Yeah, we needed a new stat to tell us that. But I do like how it helps someone like Johan Santana or someone, if you just want to compare and you can look at to peak War Score, Jaws Score, whatever it is and someone like that will already stand out. But a player like that who had a Hall of Fame peak, it is nice to have just an alternative in concert with other systems to be able to say, yeah, this guy, Hall of Fame peak, even if for many voters that wasn't quite enough. CB 0530 John Santana and Dave Steebe, both above the Hall of Fame median for Steve, both above the Hall of Fame median for Boog score and they are not for Jaws. If you want to use those players as examples for players that Jaws is maybe overlooking,

those are good candidates. Yeah. I guess it just comes down to your preference, how you view these things, what kind of hall person you are, big or small, peak or career. And I guess John Boyce will appreciate the Dave Steeb shout out. And yeah, it's just an interesting thing to consider. Compilers will hate Boog because, you know, does this do a number on Craig Begio's? Does Craig Begio have a bad Boog? He's kind of a classic compiler. I think he's, he's kind of Hall of Fame caliber anyway.

It's more that he stuck around to get to 3000 hits maybe more so than to pad his Hall of Fame resume. But that kind of player maybe wouldn't fare quite as well. Yeah. He's at 32.5, which again is above the Hall of Fame median, but not drastically so. Harold Baines has a boog score of 12. Oh, poor Harold Baines. He's always the butt of the complaints about Hall of Fame admissions. I've done it myself, but I feel bad about it. KS It seems like a nice man. CB Yeah. The site Sean set up should have everybody with a career book score of 10 or more. And I also updated the tier list that we talked about last year.

I did a tiered Hall of Fame thing that was based on Fangrass War. I updated that to use Boog score as well. I can share a link to that in the show notes as well. You can look for anybody in baseball history who was ever above average. It's like 13,000 players. Okay. Well, I like having this available. I think it's a, it's nice when you're talking about the best of the best to have this above average metric, because I guess that is kind of ultimately what we care about. Again, though, I do think there's something to be said for hanging on as a productive player, because there are just so many guys who had the

Hall of Fame peak and then they got hurt. They just fell off a cliff performance-wise, whatever it is. And I don't blame voters for penalizing them for that. I think there's something to be said for providing value over a long run, even if it's not as much value in those latter years to maintain not just major league quality performance, but even just average major league quality performance that has value, obviously, as we often say. And I think it should have some value even for a Hall of Fame kind of Cooperstown career consideration as well. But I think it's handy to have an alternative too, just to be able to single out the guys who were truly elite for a while,

even if they didn't last that long at that level. So we will link to your spreadsheet and we will link to Sean's site. And we thank you for your research and the interesting discussions in the Discord group for our Patreon supporters. And I am somewhat disappointed that you didn't sing this stat blast

because you told us before we started that this was one of the few days of this month that you are not singing because you're a choral singer and I guess this is prime choral singing season. I mean, this is, it's almost the Christmas season. This is when you got to limber up those vocal chords. So this could have been a day of vocal rest for you and you had to talk to us,

but you did not sing your stat blast. That's a new frontier we need to settle at some point, the singing stat blast. It's a busy December season, absolutely. But I was happy to spend a little more vocal energy on my favorite podcast. Can I leave you with one more player since you mentioned high peak short career, Meg Rowley, Meg Raleigh, Felix Hernandez. 29.7 book scores. So he's right at the threshold. He's right there. But yeah, if you like the system and you think it's interesting for Hall of Fame voting,

please come join us in the Effectively Wild Patreon Discord. We're conducting an off-season project to create our own MLB Player Hall of Fame. We are five weeks in. We've inducted a couple dozen players already. We're going chronologically through baseball history. We're into the 1920s now, so we're looking at a lot of fascinating Negro Leagues candidates. And if you like the idea of a book score, you can use that in your voting. And if you don't, you can vote through your own methods and show us how much it is superior. So. Yeah.

Felix, that's a tough one. And especially for you Meg, I think you've alluded to Felix's case. I think you've said you don't think he is. I don't really think he's a. You don't think he should be, or you don't think he will be, or both. I think he's a Mariners Hall of Famer, but I don't know that he has a place in Cooperstown,

unfortunately. I guess if I really prioritize peak, then you can make an argument, but I think having a bunch of different lenses through which to view a candidate's career is really useful because they do illuminate different things. And I don't think that there's like a hard and fast rule about how you should balance peak and longevity and being able to appreciate kind of where a guy falls on the spectrum, I think is really useful. These should be, you know, decisions that are made with a great deal of care. Because as we've discussed on the pod, like the stuff really, really matters to these guys and their families.

So, yeah, Felix felt like a Hall of Famer, I would say for much of his career. And he's just a classic case of this kind of guy that we're talking about where after 28 or so he just, you know, he was, uh, he was still an all star at, uh, 29 and, and yeah, it was kind of a after age 30, just, there wasn't much left there, right? But if you had asked anyone in 2014 or something, is this an Alabama? Sure, of course. Yeah, of course.

Right. And so I could see why if you did that for long enough, and I guess the question is, did he do it for long enough? Obviously he came up young and started to be good fairly early on. So he did still have so He just did so much. Yeah, exactly. And that's a hard thing to know what to do with in a guy's Hall of Fame case,

because some of that is absolutely being driven by the pitcher. And I think that if you were to ask Felix, he wanted the ball every five days and he was gonna take it. But some of that was also the organization making a decision about how he was used. And how much do you hold that against a guy? But some of that was also the organization making a decision about how he was used and

how much do you hold that against a guy? How much does he get credit for answering the call? That's a conversation to have with someone like Felix. There should almost be a separate wing, like a peak Cooperstown, just like a flash in the pan Hall of Fame level. He was obviously far more than a flash in the pan, but like hall of fame level, but not long enough. Yeah.

You know, we can have that right next to the hall of the very good. And then both can like, you know, adjoin Cooperstown. Going to have to do some fundraising for the museum. The hall of the very good for a long time. And then the hall of the truly elite for not a long time. And then the guys who combined both. And that is why they're hall of famers. All right.

After we finished recording, Michael sent me a list of some names of players who rate better by Boog score than Jaws and also vice versa. The players who rate significantly better by Boog at least 150 spots in the rankings higher, Moises Elou, Roy Campanella, Alfonso Soriano, Jason Wirth, and Grady Sizemore, players who rate significantly worse by Boog's score compared to Jaws, all at least 300 spots lower, Johnny Daemon, Miguel Tejada, Lou Brock, Adrian Gonzalez, and Tori Hunter. Some late breaking signings announced, as some had speculated might happen, the Mets made a free agent splash. They lured a former Yankee across town. A player with a four-letter first

name. No, not that one. Clay Holmes, a New York Met. Three years, 38 million. Sounds like the Mets intend to try him out as a starter. Another starter signed. And this one has free agent contract over under draft implications. Shane Bieber re-signed with the Guardians. MLB trade rumors predicted that he would make $12 million over one year. I took the over and indeed the over hit. He gets $10 million in 2025 with a $16 million player option for 2026 that comes with a $4 million buyout. So he's guaranteed at least $14 million for one year if he doesn't trigger the player option, but it is a $26 million guarantee over two years he has the option of earning that much. That is how MLB Traderummers has recorded it on their top 50 page.

Chris Hannel has also given me credit for that amount, one way or another it was more than 12. So I'm fucking a black. Also we were speculating about whether Rob Manford's mention of the Golden Abat slash plate appearance proposal was just a trial balloon and potentially a trial balloon meant to just generate some conversation about baseball in a dead spot in the calendar. Especially conversation that is in favor of baseball defending the way baseball works. Currently, people rallying around the sport suggesting that it's good as it is. Well, he almost said as much. On Thursday,

Manford clarified to go from the conversation stage to this actually showing up in MLB is a very long road. You don't like the idea? I wouldn't be too concerned about it right now, which is a very funny thing to say after several news cycles driven by people being concerned about this. He also said that the initial conversation about this at the owner's meetings that led him to bring this up on a podcast was a very preliminary conversation which did create some buzz.

I do encourage the owners to have conversations about the game. He also said, alluding to the 2015 Levitard interview that we mentioned on our preceding episode, "'It has come out that I have spoken publicly about this kind of change years ago that I was not particularly in favor of it. That remains the case.'"

You know, I have to hand it to him. He got everyone hot and bothered about this, and then he comes out days later and says, relax, this isn't actually happening anytime soon. And also, I don't think it's a good idea either. All right then. Hey, we got some podcast content out of it. Thanks, Rob. If one Soto signs prior to the winter meetings, for all I know as I record this, he's signed

by the time you're hearing this. We will endeavor to produce a podcast expeditiously. I don't know if I'd call it an emergency episode, but we'll try to talk about it as soon as we can. Otherwise, we'll be back early in the week and Meg will talk to me from the meetings. And one more reminder here to sign up for Effectively Wild's Secret Santa before it's too late.

And remember, you can give gift subscriptions to Effectively Wild on Patreon if you think that's something someone might like. And remember you can give gifts subscriptions to Effectively Wild on Patreon. If you think that's something someone might like, and if you might like it, you don't need to wait for some secret Santa to give it to you. You can sign up right now by going to patreon.com slash Effectively Wild and pledging some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going, help us stay ad free and get yourself access to some perks as have the following five listeners, Icy, Ron Von, David Saliba, Connor Beer, and Hunter Kaufman, thanks to all of you.

Patreon perks include access to the aforementioned Discord group for Patrons Only, where you can not only follow and discuss the news along with fellow Effectively Wild listeners, but get access to cool number crunching, like Michael gave us a taste of today. Plus, you can get monthly bonus episodes, playoff live streams, prioritized email answers, potential podcast appearances, personalized messages, autographed books, discounts on merch and FanGrafts 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 group 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 hope you have a wonderful weekend and we will be back to talk to you soon. That was Pass-Pass and better for free Three new episodes for us each week Effectively in my own, my own, my own Effectively in my own, my own, my own