Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 248: Bartolo Colon and the PED Question/Ruben Amaro and Prospect Rankings

Episode Date: July 22, 2013

Ben and Sam talk about whether it’s ever fair to suspect that a player is taking PEDs, then discuss Ruben Amaro’s comments about public prospect rankings.

Why do you ask? Oh, you just asked me. But why do you ask the question? Good morning and welcome to another week of Effectively Wild, episode 248 of the Daily Baseball Perspectives podcast. I am Ben Lindberg, joined by Sam Miller, as always. We've been following the Alex Rodriguez rehab saga very closely since our draft of the the worst bang for

your buck players uh and today was supposed to be the day because we we calculated after the draft that you were slightly under the 200 million dollar payroll minimum if a rod doesn't play this season significantly significantly under i would say say. And did we decide what the penalty was or we just said there would be some sort of penalty? I believe it's one win per million. Okay. All right. Yeah, that could be a difference maker. So how are you feeling now that his return has been, I guess the can has been kicked back another seven to ten days. Well, Ben, I feel pretty confident, and I'll tell you why. It's because none of this matters. Okay.

I thought you were stressing about it. I am somewhat anxious about it. It's true. I was going to be very relieved when he played the first game, and it was so close. I could taste it. And now to have the football moved one more time, I do feel like this is not going to end well.

But I only need one inning. One inning of play. Yeah, he doesn't even have to get up to the plate. He could pinch run. I don't know why he would pinch run in his condition, but if he did, that would solve your problem. By the way, speaking of Yankees with quad strains, do you feel like it's reading too much into it to say that at this age,

Jeter's kind of career-long ability to talk his way into the lineup is now less of an asset than a liability or is that a stretch? Because I mean, I guess, I don't know. I was at the press conference that he gave a couple of months ago at Yankee Stadium, his first press conference since the spring and people had asked him if he was, you know, if he had come back too soon and re-injured himself because of that and he said no. And then it seems like he sort of pushed his way back into the lineup a little bit before the break and then hurt himself again. And now he wants to come back again this week.

And Joe Girardi's like, I don't know. And you kind of feel like he'll manage to talk his way into it again. and kind of feel like he'll manage to talk his way into it again. Like maybe this was a good thing when he was young and had great healing powers and durability, but maybe now that he's old and doesn't, it's not such a good thing? I don't know. I guess I would say my instinct would be that it was probably never a good thing. Just because I think in general you want to be able to make the best decisions

based on what your trainers say and what your doctors say and what your coaching staff says. And I think all things being equal, if you could have all the same performance and all the same character and all the same leadership and everything, but you could get it out of young guys who don't have the power to tell you what to do with them, you probably just would generally prefer that. I think, you know, generally,

it's probably a small problem of having famous players, like super famous players, that they get to some degree tell you what to do. And that probably is generally always a little bit counterproductive. And another thing I wanted to briefly bring up was that I feel like we've talked about PEDs a lot on this podcast. We're going to today. Oh, what's your topic? Bartolo Colon. Oh, okay. All right. I was kind of going to bring him up a little bit, so I'll just wait. All right. So I wanted to talk about Ruben Amaro's prospect list rant. And I'm going to talk about Bartolo Colon. You don't say. Okay.

Ruben Amaro's prospect list rant. Interesting. Why don't I start? Yeah, sure. So, it seems to me that in, I don't know if I would even go so far as to call it a circle, but it seems that in our circle, it is generally considered bad form to accuse people of PEDs, right? I mean, this is a rule that you don't break, right? I mean, there are writers who are always accusing people of doing steroids without much evidence or doing PEDs without much evidence. Or asking the question.

You have to ask the question. Raising, yes, exactly. Yes, just have to ask. Yeah, and they usually get insulted and called hypocrites and called all sorts of horrible things. And, you know, I generally think it's probably a I feel good about not accusing people of using drugs that they haven't tested positive for. I think that's a good thing. So Bartolo Cologne right now is, you know, taking drug tests and presumably passing them. We don't have any reason to suspect. Well, probably taking more drug tests than the average player, right?

Perhaps, I would hope so And so before I go any further I just want to say that I am an extremely trusting person I believe almost anything anybody tells me And so I actually don't have any part of me that thinks Oh, Cologne's probably doing drugs. I mean, I'm so naive that if he's out there saying that he's clean, I just believe it, whatever. I'm a horrible, horrible judge of character. I'm not saying that like I'm morally

better because of that. I'm saying I'm an idiot. I'm a dumb, dumb idiot for that. But anyway, just as the premise, I am not actually accusing bartolo cologne of doing drugs all right but cologne is different than you know say chris davis right i mean bartolo cologne has a drug a positive drug test in his recent history he he has been linked in the even more recent history to Biogenesis. He is also 5,000 years old, as fat as any player in the game, and having the best season of his career after being out of baseball for a few years. Exactly, after being out of baseball for a few years.

And he's throwing hard again. I mean, everything about it is like the sort of thing that the average fan is pointing at and saying, ah, dude's on roids, right? And so I was listening to an Angels game a couple weeks ago, and they're a very non-controversial radio duo, Mark Langston and Terry Smith. They're not out there attacking players or anything like that, but Langston essentially all but accused him of doing steroids right now. In the guise of you have to ask the question, but it was like he was laughing at how obvious it probably is that he's doing it. Angels fans who have a special hate for the A's, they're all pretty brazenly saying, he's a

they're all pretty brazenly saying ah he's a cheater he's a steroid user and so i just wanted to know are we ever allowed to speculate i mean is there anything like if it's one thing to say i'm not going to vote for jeff bagwell because his numbers were so good he had to be cheating right that seems pretty obviously to be kind of unfair to jeff bagwell and to players in general but do we get any point where we're allowed to just say, like, dude's probably cheating, right? Well, we did do that one podcast where you pulled Twitter on how many home runs Bonds would have hit if he had been clean, right? And I said some number that was lower than the number that he actually hit,

and he never failed the test. So I guess in Bonds' case, I would believe it or I think it without incontrovertible evidence, pretty strong circumstantial evidence. I mean, I think that with B it's this has been proven in a court of law right yeah i guess so um so so you're saying just with any active player who hasn't failed a test who's not currently in the in the middle of failing a test well uh i mean we can all agree that bartolo cologne did use performance enhancing drugs at some point right we can agree on that but can we agree on what more or less likely that he's doing it again well i mean we know that he doesn't have a moral objection to it so that makes

it more likely uh but he's also been caught and suspended already which maybe would make it less likely that he would try it again. Well, I, being again, a naive idiot who believes anything, I, I often think, oh, what are the odds that a guy would try it after he's been caught again? He's probably clean. But, but like I said, I'm an idiot. I don't think it's established that he has no moral issue with it. A lot of people do things that they have, uh, ambivalence about. Yeah. Well, he might, he might have ambivalence about. He might have been really conflicted. He might be rehabilitated, I believe, in the power of forgiveness.

Okay. All right. I guess let me just slightly shift this. Hang up and listen. The wonderful sports podcast from Slate, they were talking about I think Chris Davis and about some of the accusations or the questions raised. And Josh Levine said they all kind of agreed that he was probably clean.

And Josh Levine brought up the point that in a lot of sports that have had steroids issues, you wouldn't assume he was clean. If he was a bicyclist, you'd be irresponsible to think he's clean. Everybody just assumes that they're doing drugs. With sprinters, you don't go out of your way to defend sprinters just because they've got clean tests, even if they swear under oath that they're clean, and even if they have these tests, and even if they've been doing this

for 10 years, you don't go out of your way defending him. You acknowledge that there's a pretty good chance he is, and you don't maybe necessarily say, I'll put him in jail without a test, but you know that there's a decent chance, a good chance that he's going to get popped for drugs at some point. But Josh noted that in baseball, I think for a lot of us, there's still a presumption of cleanness. We don't look at every player on the field through the lens of thinking that they're tainted. Some of us might say it, but most of us probably don't, right? So I guess the question is, are we maybe, I don't know, too lenient on baseball players? Or maybe there's just nothing

to be gained from speculating. And then one other question I have about this is, let's say, I'm going to just pick at random, just name a name. Um, just name any name. Melky Cabrera. Well, no,

I want you to name a name of a guy who's clean. All right. So nevermind. I'm not, we won't even play the hypothetical, but you wouldn't generally accuse some random player of being on steroids, even if you thought he was, but,

but you might in your head, you might have all, you probably do. You probably have in your head a list of guys that you, you've probably have thought you might in your head, you might have all, you probably do, you probably have in your head a list of guys that you, you probably have thought about this in your head. You've probably gone and made a list in your head of guys that you bet probably were on steroids. So do you think there's anything wrong with thinking it? I guess, I mean, you can kind of think of it in a sort of Bayesian way, I guess, right? I mean, you can kind of think of it in a sort of Bayesian way, I guess, right?

I mean, maybe certain things increase the probability that a guy is doing something, even if the probability is still low, and even if you wouldn't necessarily accuse him of it. Maybe there are certain things that would make you revise your estimate upward a little bit. The thing that I was going to bring up at the beginning of the show is that generally I'm sort of agnostic about whether a player who's been proven to take PEDs even, about how much the thing that he took helped him. Yes.

And you are too, generally, I guess. Even if a player fails a test and took something that is intended to be performance enhancing, I don't necessarily conclude that it enhanced his performance or that it did dramatically. And so there are two players this year who are coming off of career seasons uh during which they were suspended or after which they were suspended and are kind of having career worst seasons now or at least uh they're worst in a while uh melky which is why i was thinking of him and and carlos ruiz um and i feel like those are two those are two cases where someone who kind of has already decided that if a player tests positive for something, then he was made better. He was enhanced by that something can point to these two guys and say, well, look at the years they had last year.

And then now they're not taking that thing because they got caught and they're way, way worse. taking that thing because they got caught and they're way, way worse. And this was kind of what I was worried about with Melke before the season, because I felt like he was such a good regression candidate, just independent of anything he took. I mean, just his numbers last year were kind of fluky. He had some crazy high BABIP and just a ton of singles and bloopers falling in. And it seemed like a guy who, even if he hadn't tested positive and he continued taking whatever he was taking for the rest of the season, probably wouldn't have been as good in the second half anyway. So it seemed like a case where both of those guys would kind of come down off these career highs, which they would have come down off of anyway,

and people would kind of conveniently tie that to the PD use. And I was going to bring up cologne as, as the counterpoint to that, uh, of a guy who seems to have gotten even better or been just as good. Um, so, so I don't know. Uh, So I don't know. I guess there are people who I have some slightly higher suspicion about, but I'm sort of naive or trusting too. And when there's some other explanation advanced, like when it's Chris Davis and he's a guy who always had crazy power and he tells you, well,

I changed my swing and it's not an uppercut now it's level and I'm doing these different drills and, and he's being more patient and swinging at better pitches and all these other explanations that seem like, you know, they, they could make sense. then I'm inclined to trust those. Okay. So bottom line, we'll wrap it up after this. Bottom line, if you hear an announcer making accusatory claims about Chris Davis today during a game, that announcer, in my opinion, is a jerk and should shut up. Do you agree?

Yeah. Okay. If you hear an announcer during the game today making accusatory claims about Bartolo Colon, is that announcer a jerk and does he need to shut up or is that fair game? I'd say still, probably not. Not a jerk? No, kind of a jerk. Maybe less of a jerk. Okay. Sorry not not a jerk no kind of a jerk maybe less of a jerk okay so sorry still a jerk still still should shut up yeah i don't i mean just in general i'd rather hear an announcer

talk about something that he or she knows something about i mean just you know i'd rather not hear them speculate about anything whether it it's, whether it's who's taking steroids or some stat thing that doesn't really make sense when they say it. So, uh, that, yeah, that's something I'd rather not, rather not hear. Good point. That's a good way. That's a good way of looking at it. Okay, cool. Good. Okay. Uh, so the Amaro thing, uh, did you see any of what he said? Okay, so basically it's from another story about whether the Phillies are buyers or sellers, which has been going on for weeks now.

And this one was in CSNPhilly.com. And basically he's being defensive about his minor league system. He's he. OK. Amaro used the subject of the minor league system as a springboard to rip those who rate minor league systems. We have some guys that may be available. Amaro said clubs have asked about some guys that you don't see on the top 25, top 50 lists of everyone who knows everything about baseball. And they did not. They did not. Oh, well, yeah.

They didn't print that word. They chose not to print that. Yes. There's just a lot of those lists that come out that make me laugh. I don't see anyone working for any major league clubs that do that with those lists it's interesting i don't know what he meant about do that with those lists i don't whether he means ranking prospects which is something that teams do or i guess he he just means that the people ranking the prospects on the internet aren't working for teams.

And, I mean, certainly some of them have gone on to work for teams. So I think we, on one of our early episodes that I hope no one ever goes back to listen to, we talked about Kenny Williams kind of making similarly, well, he was defending his farm system and saying that, yes, our system is always rated poorly, but we keep managing to graduate players to the majors. And these guys maybe weren't ranked as top prospects, but they've come up and they've contributed. So it was, I guess, maybe more of a reasoned response than Amaro just kind of doing an ad hominem attack on the people who are making the lists. But I wonder, you know, if you're if you can put yourself in a general manager's shoes and, you know, there have been there is a Matt Gelb story earlier in the year about how the Phillies believe they have the best scouts in baseball. And for all I know, they do. I don't know. Maybe they do. And so if you're Amaro and you're surrounded by lots of experienced baseball people and you believe that you have great scouts and you have teams calling and asking about people who maybe weren't highly ranked prospects.

Do you think that you would take those rankings into account? Do you think that your perception of your own farm system strength would be influenced by what Jason Park says or anyone at any other site who is respected and does that and speaks to people within the game? Or do you think you would just kind of tend to write them off and say that I know more about my own guys than they do? Well, that's interesting. I think I would take it somewhat seriously. I mean, the thing about these rankings

is that they're essentially a poll of the industry for the most part. In a way, it's got to be useful to some degree to have 29 other teams inside information, which is what this is. They're passing along their information, They're sharing it with you. And to totally ignore it or even, I mean, I think what Amaro was saying is almost more like invalidating it and saying it's not useful, that it's not good information, seems to kind of ignore what goes into these. This is not me sitting in my Honda Fit looking at game footage or looking at stats and trying to decide who I like most.

If there were rankings that were like that, like just some guy who... There are those. There are the Google scouts who make lists. Yeah. If those were the things we were talking about, if somehow those had gotten the prestige that everybody talked about them when they came out,

I could see a GM saying, you know, that guy's opinion, we have looked at his opinion and found it wanting. That seems legitimate to me. But, I mean, this is a, it's a pretty, I feel like it's a pretty true gauge of the conventional wisdom. And there's so many people being talked to at so many different levels. It's a monumental task of reporting. And as a person who believes in reporting and monumental tasks of reporting, you know, that's a pretty valuable thing. I mean, if nobody were doing this, like if you imagine a. If nobody were doing this, if you imagine a world where nobody was doing this and some ambitious reporter came to his editor and said, hey, I want to

pull hundreds and hundreds of industry insiders over the course of not just days but months and years, and I want to use that to get a really detailed gauge of the industry on all detailed gauge of the industry on all of these prospects, it would first of all be unthinkably big and every editor would be like, you'll never finish that. But B, it would be the most ambitious and exciting story pitch in the world. It's almost Pulitzer level reporting. Reporting good thing. Like, I think there's a lot of bad analysis in the world. There's a lot of good analysis, too. I tend to gravitate toward analysis, especially at this age. But there's a, what was I saying? Pulitzer level? Oh, yeah. There's a lot of good analysis, something, but I forget. There's a lot of bad analysis out there, but I feel like reporting is generally a moral good. To me, if you're willing to pick up the phone and call 50 people, you're probably going to come away with a pretty good answer. Now, the flip side to that is that conventional wisdom in any field, in any topic, can turn into an echo chamber, can be misleading, can serve particular interest groups, can be uncreative.

Every four years or so, I get into politics for like four months and I watch the election really super closely and I generally find the conventional wisdom to be awful. Conventional wisdom is not, I would say, a phrase that I use in a positive term very often. And so you could make the case that Ruben Amaro could make the case that a lot of these scouts are saying things that are already established conventional wisdom, and they're not actually necessarily giving particularly enlightening answers. particularly enlightening answers. And if they are merely reinforcing the conventional wisdom that already exists, then maybe the reporters are getting old information.

Maybe they're getting rote information. And so maybe Amaro knows a bit more about what information gets shared with reporters and what the tendency is as far as what people say. So I also wouldn't say from my perspective, from my perch, that it's definitely better than what he has. But it seems to me that it's relevant information and it's not something that I would ignore completely. Yeah. When we talked to Kevin and I asked him something about how public internet scouting compares to the team stuff.

I mean, he said that certainly there are prospects on every team's top whatever list who are probably not on the internet ones. And maybe they should be. Maybe there are people that we've missed. There are people that we've missed. And, of course, it only takes one team to value a guy highly for that prospect to be worth something. It's like when the team that ends up with a free agent is the team that's willing to pay the most and maybe too much, there might be a team who thinks that some prospect who's not really a good prospect is a good prospect and they'll call and treat him as if he is one. Unless I guess they're reading that kind of industry internet consensus and think, well, maybe we're out on an

island with this guy, maybe we're wrong. So I don't know. I don't think most teams would put an internet list on the same level as their internal stuff, but I think most of them would consider it a valuable source and at least take it into account. So I don't know whether this is just kind of a self-serving thing where if you're a GM of an organization that has a really poorly rated farm system, you're not going to say, yeah, they're right. We don't have any prospects, so we can't make any trades. You would want to defend your guys somehow and say, well, we have people that they're missing. It's a better system than they think um so maybe that's just what he was trying to do and he didn't do it in the most

tactful way possible um he should really just say you can't predict baseball guys you can't do it yeah we're probably going to be good everybody says we're terrible we're probably going to be good you can't do it guys just can't be done so that's what he should say that's every time a gm goes to the media and they're like hey how come you're doing this just go dude you can't predict what are you what are you trying to predict man i think he may have said some things that are not too different from that really at points this season um okay all right All right. One show down. Send us emails at podcast at baseball prospectus dot com and we will answer them in a couple of days.