Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 263: Jose Dariel Abreu and the Future of Cuban Baseball/The Unmade Wil Myers Trade

Episode Date: August 12, 2013

Ben and Sam discuss the next potential star from Cuba and the future of Cuban baseball, then revisit a trade for Wil Myers that didn’t happen.

Good morning and welcome to episode 263 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus. I am Ben Lindberg, joined by Sam Miller. from Baseball Prospectus. I am Ben Lindberg, joined by Sam Miller. Sam Russell Carlton just reminded me that this is the anniversary of the beginning of the 1994 strike. And I'm glad that there's no strike. There's going to be baseball today.

So we can be thankful for that. It's the 19th anniversary, though. Yeah, it's not a special anniversary. Which isn't a, no, okay. It's just the 19th anniversary. I wonder if the strike would have been a good hot take answer. Probably not. Yeah, I actually was just thinking that, but I think it was probably pretty hot as it was.

Yeah. Okay, so you... Maybe even, probably, I would say even hotter then than it is now because now we have so many ways to entertain ourselves. Uh-huh. So you are in a different place today than you were the last time we talked. Uh-huh.

Tell the listeners where you are. I'm in a closet. So this is the new Honda Fit is a closet. Would you like to explain why you're in a closet? Oh, I moved and I don't have a backyard anymore now I have an apartment and any room well I think the kitchen will probably work but if I did the kitchen then my wife would hear me and I would feel very self-conscious which is weird

when you think about it because a lot of people are listening to this just not in real time. It's easy to forget about that, though, while you and I are talking. Clearly, yeah. So I think it would weird me out if somebody else could hear it. And honestly, she doesn't even know what the words mean, so I don't know why that would bother me. So I think the plan is that when she's awake, it'll be the closet. When she's asleep, it'll be the closet. When she's asleep, it'll be the kitchen.

And right now it's the closet. The closet is a little bit like the Fit, though, because it gets hot. It's not air conditioned. There's no windows. If you start running out of air, send me an instant message or something and we'll wrap it up. Is this a walk-in closet or are you braced against the door? I'd say it's six feet by eight feet. I'm laying down.

Okay. Well, we'll call it the recording studio. So that means no more animal sounds on this podcast, probably. Nope. Not for a while. No more birds, no wildlife. So that's sort of sad, but maybe we'll hear some coats brushing up against each other, possibly.

Yeah, I might go down and test the range of the Wi-Fi. I would love to go down and do it on one of the benches down on the sidewalk, but I suspect it won't stretch that far. All right. So what baseball are we talking about? Well, first, I just want to note that Felix Hernandez is on pace to strike out a batter per inning this year for the first time in his career, which is sort of crazy. I mean, you look at the list of players who have struck out a batter an inning during

his career, and there's a number of guys who you struck out a batter an inning during his career and there's you know a number of guys who you don't think of as being all that um and felix is actually i believe currently uh sixth all-time in strikeouts through age 27 and will certainly pass it will pass to white good and by the end of this month and has a pretty good chance of passing Don Drysdale by the end of the year. So fourth all-time strikeout guy through age 27. And yet, in this era where everybody's Lance Lynn or Jonathan Sanchez, he has managed to go his entire career without topping 8.7 per nine. And right now he's at 9.2. That's not my topic, but it's interesting isn't it uh yeah

that is kind of surprising to me i mean i know he's not he's not the league leading strikeout guy ever but i i would have thought that he would have gotten above that at some point but that's uh that's the nice thing about getting ground balls and striking people out and having great control and pitching in a pitcher's park i was going going to talk about, and for a while in front of a really good defense, but not always. I'm going to talk about Will Myers. What are you going to talk about? Cuban players.

Uh-huh. Well, we're going to end up talking about the same guy to some degree in the middle. We're going to meet in the middle, I think. And so, yeah, I think. Okay. So, you go. Alright, so this is just inspired by a new defection. A first baseman

from Cuba, Jose Dariel Abreu, has reportedly left Cuba and is somewhere in the Caribbean. It's not really clear where he is or when he will establish residency somewhere and be able to become a free agent, but it seems like at some point that will happen and he will be very well positioned to make a lot of money. He's 26 years old. He is maybe the best hitter in Cuba. Teams have seen him. He played in the World Base made a case for why that was somewhat plausible.

He's more of a slugging type than maybe Puig and Cespedes. He's not really the all-around type player that they are, but will probably be a good baseball player and will make a lot of money for playing baseball. So this just made me want to go back and revisit a listener email that we got over a month ago. And we had planned to answer it, but we didn't get to it. So since this happened... Hang on, though. Hang on. Before you get there. Okay. The best hitter in the world? Well, you know, it was the hook for the article. I don't think anyone necessarily believes that.

But Jonah talked to scouting people. Did he say just might be or just may be? Just might be. Okay, because if he said just may be, then he would just be giving him permission to be if he could pull it off. I mean, that would technically be true. He may be if he likes. It's up to him. Yes, right. But no, it was a might, not a may. And so this question that we got from Michael in Philly, he said, a hypothetical scenario thatS. lifts the trade embargo on Cuba. If this were to happen, how would MLB handle the signing of Cuban players who no longer have to defect to become free agents?

Currently, the CBA allows Cuban players 23 years or older with at least three years of service in the Cuban League, which includes Abreu, to sign as international free agents without being exposed to the international free agent spending limits, while any player younger than 23 or without the required service time would fall under current CBA spending limits for international free agents. I am appointing you, Ben and Sam, commissioners of MLB. Would you leave the system as is, or would you institute something similar to the posting system that MLB has established with NPP, Japanese baseball? The current posting system is somewhat flawed and has fallen under scrutiny, etc., etc.,

but a posting system would allow for the Cuban league to retain some of their top talent for at least a few years. The player would get their fair market value with no cap on spending, and the team's posting players would get a financial infusion by collecting the winning posting bid if a player signs a contract with an MLB team. So that is the question that is posed to us right now. And it was another listener asked Jason and Mike on Fringe Average a couple weeks ago where they thought the Cuban talent pool ranked in comparison to other countries and other international baseball markets. And I think Jason's answer was that he just didn't know, like just really didn't know because he hasn't been there and hasn't seen a lot of those players and that it's not really not really fair to judge the the country and the quality of baseball there by the the few players that we see make it over here and establish

themselves um but do you have any do you have any thoughts on on your ideal solution for this scenario which which probably will will come to pass at some point well before i answer that let me ask you do, are you going to have any thoughts on your ideal solution? I don't feel strongly about, but, but some thoughts, you will have some thoughts. I'll say something. Well, uh, I'm going to pass. I'm very tired. And I didn't hear a lot of that question. No. Well, the basic question is just, you know, if there's no trade embargo in Cuba, then would you prefer that it works like Japan or basically that there's a posting system? So I guess the first question that we have to answer is what is our motive in trying to create the most, I guess, preferable system.

In one sense, I guess as generally as people who think that players should have the ability to make whatever they're worth in a relatively free market, you would say that ideally, Cubans would be able to sign with whichever team they want for as much as they're worth and therefore, you would have them be free agents who were not part of the international spending caps and could just basically auction their services off as it has traditionally been in the past and as, you know, worked, right? But on the other hand, if our desire is to have sort of fairness throughout the sport for all players, it seems weird that in that scenario, a Cuban player would have such a huge advantage over other international signees.

And it feels weird to have like this kind of patchwork system where everybody can sign by different rules and with different freedoms. And so I guess the first question to ask is like, what are we trying to accomplish here? What does the question want us to accomplish? What does the question want us to accomplish? I don't know whether we're taking into account the caliber of baseball in that country and whether we want to preserve it somehow. I don't know if that's a consideration. I don't know. I mean, we're not talking about making these players subject to the amateur draft, but that's something that people talk about when they look at, say, Puerto Rican players being eligible for that draft instead of international free agents and what that has done to the game there.

What has it done to the game there? It hasn't had a good effect on the game there. It hasn't had a good effect on the game there. Puerto Rican... It hasn't? No. I'm ignorant here, so this is not a loaded question, but what do Puerto Ricans do instead of play baseball because they don't have as much financial incentive to play baseball? I don't know. I don't know what they do but it's uh i mean there's been a decline in in puerto rican players uh making it to the majors and and i think that the caliber of play in puerto rico and you know just because there's not as much of a potential payoff there and maybe also just because uh maybe they don't need to do that as much because conditions there are are better than they are in say the dominican um yeah i guess i

guess and clubs wouldn't be investing as much in puerto rico because you don't right yeah you don't have you know it's it's much more like the draft. Well, it is like the draft. It is the draft where you can, it's not really necessarily worth investing a lot of time in players who you don't have a chance to really get anyway. But, I mean, it doesn't, it feels like the incentives for a Cuban ball player wouldn't be affected that much, whether it was a $50 million payoff at the end

or a $5 million payoff. I doubt that there's like, I mean, this isn't like the quarterback in Texas who's deciding whether to play football or baseball for UT. Right. Yeah, so I mean, I guess from a team's perspective, Japanese players, I mean, is it almost like their development is sort of outsourced to NPB clubs in a way? as much of an investment into cultivating those players and and finding them young and building academies and training them um and scouting them uh but then they also have a lot of guys come over when they're 37 yeah uh and you have to to pay more for them um so yeah i don't know. Maybe does it matter from the perspective of either the player or from the U.S. perspective? I mean, there's a lot of discontent, I guess, with just the international draft spending limits themselves. And we've

talked about that and people are against that generally. So I guess if you're against that, then you wouldn't want to add another country to that system. You'd want to have the Japanese model, maybe. Yeah. Again, I don't know whether it's better to have uh to contribute to the bad system that is in place by you know adding more to it or if it's worse to have three different systems going simultaneously so i don't really know i i i don't know it's hard to say yeah it's uh it's kind of it's it's i mean it's, the current system is not in place for a happy reason, but it's sort of, there's like an element of mystery to the Cuban league and to Cuban players that we don't really have with any other country. It's sort of, you know, I mean, when these guys sign, in a lot of cases, no one has really seen them. Certainly we haven't seen them.

And even some of the teams signing them have barely seen them. And you can kind of do translations on their stats and look at what previous Cuban players have done coming over here. But it's such a small sample of people who have that that's not very reliable even. small sample of people who have that that that's not very reliable even so there's just such such an unknown element to a player like this which is i guess why why jonah wrote that he might just be the best player in the world because who knows the the error bars and the projection for him are are so wide uh because the the quality of of competition that he has faced there is really hard to pin down. In 2010, 2011, he hit 453, 597, 986. Yeah, as what, like a 23-year-old or so?

So yeah, that's not bad. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I would guess that the success of Puig and Suspedes would probably make teams a little less hesitant to spend on him, I would think. And Chapman. Yeah, and Chapman, right. Not that they will just give any amount of money to any Cuban player, but if his stats are comparable to theirs and probably are better than theirs, I would think,

at least offensively, then the success of those people who went before would probably give teams the confidence to spend a ton of money on him. people who went before would probably give teams the confidence to spend a ton of money on him. And that will certainly be the case as long as the system is currently in place and he will be an international free agent at some point. And people are throwing around really big numbers for him. If we got $42 million, then maybe he will get, I've heard as much as double that, but I don't know whether that's hyperbole or not. But we'll see. Anyway, Will Myers. Will Myers. So RJ wrote about Will Myers for Monday, so you can go read that. And RJ, of course, watches Will Myers more closely than anybody I know.

And he leads with the fun fact that since the, I think, all-star break, Will Myers is leading all of baseball in OPS, just edging out Mike Trout. And, you know, Will Myers is really having a fantastic season. David Schoenfield, 20 minutes ago or so, did a post on who you would rather have, Puig or Myers, going forward, and doesn't come to a conclusion. As David writes, they're very similar in a lot of ways.

Both are right fielders, 22-year-old right-handed batters who stand 6'3", with big raw power, more speed than guys their size should possess, and strong throwing arms. And he cites their non-Babic numbers. They basically have the same walk rate, the same strikeout rate. They basically have the same isolated power. And it makes you wonder, first off, doesn't it just seem like everybody's awesome now? Like we are living in an era where everybody is the greatest.

It's like nobody flops anymore. Who flopped? Who's flopped recently? Yeah, I've thought about that too. And it sort of feels to me like, I don't know, I mean, we've had Trout come along and spoil us and Harper come along and spoil us and Machado do the same thing. And I keep wondering whether we're going to be looking back in a decade. And, you know, if we conclude that this is indicative of something that suddenly young players come up and don't don't struggle anymore and they're stars immediately it seems like the sort of thing that maybe we should pull back a bit and and

reconsider um and that maybe it just so happened that a few of these guys happened to to hit at the same time um but and i mean there's also shelby miller and jose f Shelby Miller and Jose Fernandez and Matt Harvey. I mean, it feels historic. Yeah, and we've talked about the game getting younger, right? We have. Yeah. A greater percentage of league-wide warp is in the hands of young players than has ever been the case. Anyway, that's not my conversation starter, though.

My conversation starter is that every time I look at Will Myers doing something good, the first thing I think to do is to go check the warps and see if he's passed James Shields yet. I just did that. And he has. Yes. shields yeah i just just did that and yes and he has yes so uh so even taking in even not ignoring the six years of service time versus uh sorry the uh you know no years of service time uh component of it and the fact that he's under team control for six years and the fact that he's dirt cheap uh just looking at this year, dollars irrelevant,

the Royals would have been better off with Myers, which is what a lot of people said, particularly when you factor in that Francoeur would have been out. Granted, I think other win value stats like Shields more than Warp does, but it's still, I think regardless of which you look at, it's pretty close already, and by the end of the season maybe they will all agree on that yeah I don't know uh I don't know who uh who wins in each one but uh reference actually likes um uh Myers more than Warp does so uh although Shields does have a very narrow edge. Anyway, so then I looked that

up and then I think, oh gosh, what a deal. It turned out exactly as... I mean, that's one of the crazy things about this deal is how incredibly predictable everything has gone. Everything is exactly what you thought it was going to be. That's before you subtract Jeff Franceur's negative warp, right? Because if you mentally replace Francoeur with Myers from the start of the season or something, then the gap is huge. But that's still not my point. My point is simply that it has reached the point where I think people are certainly with very very good reason, are going to just look back and go, well, that was the worst move a team made this year.

It was trading Will Myers for James Shields and all the other guys in an effort to, well, we've been over this. But really, what I always end up getting to is then I think, but the A's turned down Brett Anderson for Will Myers. And Brett Anderson has pitched like 30 innings or something. He's been like, he had an ERA over six. He's been worth 0.1 more if I'm, if I'm not mistaken. And you know, all of this, all of the

things that you would have said about Brett Anderson, uh, six months ago are still true in the negative sense, while all the good things that you might have thought about him are now a little bit sketchier. And so really, if you believe that rumor, you would have to conclude that, in fact, the worst move any team made this year was turning down that deal, was the A's turning down Anderson for Myers. Certainly, Shields is far, far, far more desirable at this point than Anderson. It has been far more valuable

this year, but probably going forward, also far more desirable. Anderson's going to have five years of service time after this year, too. He's's gonna have five years of service time and thrown 400 innings yeah um it's crazy so um so i you know anytime i see will myers it for 15 minutes i go down this exact thought process and i finally get to the same point which is do i really believe that rumor do i really believe that the a's turn that down? And I can't resolve it. And so I just want to know, do you think that I should believe that that rumor is true? I guess it's not a rumor. Jeff Passon wrote it. It was Jeff Passon and he wrote it, you know, like months after the fact. So it wasn't even like a click grab. It wasn't like, you know, heard this thing and I'm throwing it out there to get you to click.

On the other hand, it was months later, so it would have had a long time to get distorted in the game of telephone that sometimes happens. So yeah, but it was Passan who I think is probably the best out there. So I take that seriously. Yeah. So it seems implausible. I mean, it's a, I mean, Passon reports a lot of things accurately. He's gotten a lot of good inside stories. But it's really hard to believe that anyone would turn this down.

We talked about it then, and in retrospect, it seems even harder to believe. I wrote a thing for ESPN after the trade was made looking at the history of top 10 prospects who had been traded either before they made their major league debuts, there were only a couple of those, or very early on in their major league careers. And they had mostly not turned out very well. Like they turned out, I think, maybe half as well as the guys who were not traded, equivalent prospects who stayed with their teams.

And so that sort of suggested that the team that was trading those top 10 prospects knew something about them or had some reason to believe that they wouldn't pan out. And so I thought, well, maybe that could be something that's happening here, that the Royals for some reason doubt Myers, even though there really wasn't any sense as far as the industry consensus went that there was any reason to think that he wouldn't pan out. But I wondered whether that could be the case. It certainly doesn't seem to be the case now. And I mean, yeah, given Anderson's service time and injury history and what like Russell Carlton research has, has found about pitchers who have been hurt before and how often they get hurt again.

Um, I don't know. I, I don't, I, I instinctively don't, don't really believe it. It doesn't really pass the sniff test for me. Yeah, me neither. But that was sort of the point, too, of passing and including it, you know? Yeah. I mean, the whole point was, like, this will surprise you, but, you know, what you think about players

is not necessarily true. And here's evidence. So, I mean, he knew what he was doing, you know, when he wrote it. So, you know, I don't know. And his point, right, was that he that Myers is a right fielder and that you can you can get a corner outfielder if you want. It's not it's not really a it's not a rare talent. You can just go out and get one of those guys.

But even so, it's yeah yeah that's really hard to figure i mean if that were if that were true that would be something that you'd have to put in in billy beans i guess cons column when you're when you're yeah one thing and i mean i uh like I said, I really have just so much respect for his writing. And so I hope this comes out right, but he was a royals guy before he became a national guy. And so he sort of had a reputation for having really good royals sources in particular. And so you might assume that this came from a royal source, right? Just based on that, if you don't know anything else. And it's quite possible that he confirmed it with an A source

or he confirmed it with another source or that this is bulletproof. And I think because it's fascinating, I think I basically believe it, even though it's hard to imagine, I think I basically believe it. But if it's from a royal source, you would sort of acknowledge the motives there are a bit different, especially in this case, especially coming a couple months later after the trade actually gets made. Yeah. When was the trade made on on what day was that uh

i'm looking at his his column with this thing december december 9th oh okay so this was so i guess that wasn't months later no this is the day after i think uh well yeah but the a's i'm saying the a's portion of it would have been right Right. Yes. Okay. Uh, so, but months is exaggerating, but you know, at least I guess months in off season time, which is a few days. Right. Uh, yeah, I, I don't know. I mean, I certainly believe that, that he was told that by a source. I, I guess the, the source could have been, could have been obscuring the details a little bit. I don't know. You're right.

I mean, there are motives involved whenever someone tells a writer something. It's for a reason, usually. But, yeah, I don't know. It's a hard one to swallow. All right. Well, all right. That's all.

Okay. So your first episode in the closet, do you think any, well, do you think anybody has noticed that I'm not in the closet anymore? You came out of the closet in the course of this. Does any, do you think that it's noticeable? Do you think people picked up on the fact that I ended up in the kitchen?

It's, it sounds the same to me. If you hadn't, if we hadn't paused while you left the closet, uh, I'm in the kitchen. It sounds the same to me. If we hadn't paused while you left the closet. I'm in the kitchen now. I don't want anybody to feel misled. I am in the kitchen. Yes. Okay. All right. So we'll be back tomorrow and who knows where Sam will be. Send us emails at podcast at baseball perspectives.com.