Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 266: How the A’s Were Built/Why the Dodgers Are Winning

Episode Date: August 15, 2013

Ben and Sam talk about how the A’s are winning in an unusual way for a small-market team, then discuss why the Dodgers have been the exception to the trend of money not leading to wins.

Using stats the way we read them will find value in players that nobody else can see. Good morning and welcome to episode 266 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives. I am Ben Lindberg, joined by Sam Miller. Good morning, Sam. Hi, Ben. Do we have any banter before we begin? Hmm. Hi, Ben. Do we have any banter before we begin? I have a little bit of banter, but I was going to wrap it into my topic because I'm not sure that my topic is going to take more than two minutes to cover. Me neither. Okay, so do you want to just start your topic?

Or what is your topic? It's the Oakland A's. Okay, and mine, I guess, I feel like talking about instant replay, but it feels like there's no point in talking about that now when we're probably going to find out more about what the proposal is later today. So maybe we can talk about that tomorrow uh so my my topic is how about those dodgers okay so um how about them though really they won a crazy they won a game yesterday it's unusual um yeah so start with your banter and go into your topic. Yeah, all right.

So yesterday the A's, they lost in an extra innings game to Houston, and Chris Young nearly had a walk-off run. I saw that. And Robbie Grossman, I believe it was, caught the ball, jumped up and caught the ball. And it reminded me of the situation we talked about not long ago where he caught it and you thought he caught it, you were pretty sure he caught it,

but he just sort of jogged into the infield. So the whole time I'm watching him and thinking, is someone going to ask him? And sure enough, Chris Young stood there at second base waiting for him, and when he passed Chris Young, Chris Young said, show me that ball. And he showed him that ball, and the umpire also asked him to show him that ball. And he took the ball out of his glove to show the umpire that ball. And he took the ball out of his glove to show the umpire that ball.

And so I don't know that – Grossman was on the road, and so it's almost impossible to imagine he would have been able to get away with it anyway if he had. But those were two layers of oversight to make sure that he had caught that ball. And Chris Young was asked about it after the game in the clubhouse and said, you know, you just got to check. It would be the greatest prank of all time. So, yeah, I don't know. Now I'm kind of thinking that this probably actually almost always gets checked on these home runs, especially home runs that are the significant,

because batters really want their home runs. I think batters, in the case of a foul ball, I don't think it would get checked, but in the case of a home run, batters want those. So they probably do get checked, but that was never my point. My point was never could a guy get away with it, but rather what would the reaction be if he didn't get away with it, if he tried it and failed. So unfortunately Robbie Grossman did not try it and fail, so we still have to wait and see. But my point with the Oakland A's has nothing to do with that home run. The A's, who are very good, I didn't really realize this until this week,

but they have, as far as I can tell can tell three maybe four guys on their active roster who they originally signed and developed uh-huh um out of you know 25 right and i'm not counting cesspit as cassis is basically a free agent that they went out and signed uh when he was 26 so you have uh dan straley and you have A.J. Griffin. Sonny Gray. You have Sonny Gray. I wasn't sure if Sonny Gray is on the 25-man today. I think he is. Okay, so then you have Sonny Gray.

In that case, you have four, because the fourth is Sean Doolittle, who you barely want to count because they drafted him as a first baseman and developed him as a first baseman. But you count him. So you've got four guys, and this is really fascinating to me, not just because it's a team that has not that many homegrown players. It wouldn't surprise me if the A's are the lowest in baseball by this measure. It wouldn't surprise me if they were somewhat close to historically low, but that's not

that interesting to me. What's interesting is that the A's are a small market team that generally the idea has been for the last 15 years or so that small market teams win by drafting really well and signing international free agents really well. That's the one place where we've always thought, where everybody has always agreed that that's where you should be investing your money. That's the best dollar you can spend is on the draft pick or an international signing. And you get them when they're young. You get them when you draft them, they have no leverage, so you get them for less than they're actually worth on the open market.

And then you get them, you develop them, you get them when they're young, and you have their service time. And so it's interesting just to see a team that is a small market team that's succeeding on a small market budget, and yet not because of their drafts, not because they've put any extra resources into their draft. Unless you could say that they... Yes, I agree. I know, I know, I know.

And you will say that, of course. They have benefited from their draft. They have traded guys they drafted. They drafted Trevor Cahill, for instance. They drafted Nick Swisher, traded him for Gio Gonzalez, traded Gio Gonzalez for the moon. So clearly there is a ripple effect, and the draft is important too. The draft is another important tool for them in acquiring these players

in second and third generation ways. And so I'm not, yeah. You're absolutely right. It's not an irrelevant thing. It's a significant thing. Their draft is a significant thing. I don't know. I guess it shows something that probably is obvious and should be obvious, but there's more than one way to win even on a small budget.

That's kind of all I have. So can you save this topic? I don't know. But I guess, I mean, a lot of the, how many of the people on their roster did they acquire before they became big loogers? Because it seems like there are quite a few of those guys, right? Derek Norris and, I don't know, Jerry Blevins.

Yeah, Jared Parker, Tommy Malone, Ryan Cook, Brett Anderson. You know, I don't know, arguably Eric Sogard. Parker made one start for the Diamondbacks, but yeah. Josh Donaldson was basically one year after he was drafted. They got him. Freiman had never played above AA. So a lot of them. Yeah.

So does that suggest to you good scouting of other teams' organizations and getting guys who may be their own organizations underrated? Or does it suggest good development that they traded for those guys and then made them better, which I guess is kind of the same thing in that you could see that these guys had the potential to be better? sort of the same thing in that you could see that these guys had the potential to be better. I would kind of lean toward good timing, like just sort of a really good grasp of timing and that might be a cop out. But I mean, everybody knew Anderson was a big prospect when they traded for him. Everybody knew Parker was a big prospect when they traded for him. Everybody knew Parker was a big prospect when they traded for him. I think those trades looked like big time talent halls when they did them.

They didn't feel like master scouting moves or anything like that. Although, certainly Cook has been way better than anybody expected. Donaldson's been interesting because after they got him, he was a first-round pick one year removed. And, you know, after they got him, he basically stalled for a while. And so I guess with Donaldson, you might say it's a combination of coaching and just efficient use of resources, seeing a third baseman there where he had been a catcher. And yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think that there's a little bit of everything in there.

So there's no, I guess there's no easily reduced to one sentence definition of what the new money ball philosophy is with days really. It's not it's not I mean we can't simplify it to guys who walk a lot or

college players in the draft or something like that it's I mean it's I don't know just kind of college players in the draft or something like that. It's, I mean, it's, I don't know, just kind of trading for, for guys without a lot of service time.

And yeah, I guess it, I mean, yeah, it's hard. Well, like with, I, yeah,

I don't know. I mean, it sort of feels like the, that what they've done is simply win every transaction for the last few years. Yeah, right. Just get the better player in the trades that you make. Yeah, which isn't transferable necessarily. No, not really.

You can't necessarily go charge $50,000 to speak to businesses and be like, oh, well, just be better than everybody. Oh, just be way better than your competition. Just be smarter. Just do it. Just do it better than them. What's wrong with you guys? Yeah. And I guess, I mean, you could maybe drill down and find out what it is that makes them

smarter in those moves, what they're looking at that their trading partner is not looking at because there must be something unless it's just a just a run of really lucky moves that happen to work out for them there must be some philosophy here right i mean they must just unless it's just better scouting like but even that you can kind of you know why is the scouting better is it that yeah they're they're prioritizing a particular tool more so than another organization and and it's more important to look at that and and so that's why they're winning these trades there must be something at the at the heart of it yeah yeah. I don't know. I mean, again, like with the trades, it doesn't really feel like they've had guys overperform

what everybody sort of was expecting from the players they acquired. Like the Nationals trade also was, you know, considered a big haul at the time. And so other than Ryan Cook, it doesn't really seem like any of the guys they've gotten in trades have outperformed.

It's just they got big collections of talent back that everybody had been able to identify and they'd sort of taken advantage of the, I don't know, maybe they'd taken advantage of teams' competitive windows to really strike when, you know, to hit them when they really wanted those players or something. I mean, the, the, the, um, the real bargains that they've found have generally been, um, you know, almost sort of like free talent guys like Sogard and, uh, uh, uh, I'm blanking, uh, on other people, but I guess actually, okay, now, now that I think about this, the Red Sox trade with Bailey, pretty much you could definitely say

that the guys they got back overperformed expectations considerably. So now that I think about it, there's a collection of all sorts of things. So yeah, they did. That probably would have... Yeah, okay. So I don't know. It's hard to say. It is hard to say.

It's hard to... You know, it's really hard to boil this down into one sentence because there's... Like, the premise of this topic, there's 21 guys that they acquired in really drastically different ways. They didn't find one thing to do and just keep repeating that. There's not that much that links Seth Smith and Ioannis Sospedes in a team building philosophy kind of way. So yeah, it is hard to boil down here. There was that quote, remember when you did a post last year i guess it was on how how bad we had been

at predicting things and then uh or i guess i wrote that thing about what teams had predicted about themselves and and there was that quote by billy bean right who said that they they couldn't be a competitive team um and i it may have been just kind of posturing with the, with the stadium and everything, um, saying that they couldn't compete in that, in, you know, the way that they are in that ballpark and have higher payroll competitors in the division and all that sort of thing. But it seemed, it seemed like even he wasn't expecting things to come together quite this well or quite this quickly. So it's possible that there is some kind of, you know, everything working out at a high percentile outcome and that it not being genius.

You're saying they're lucky. You're saying they're lucky, which we've said on here before, and we don't know where that ends. It's possible. It is possible. Without knowing how much he was posturing for the stadium, I mean, if he genuinely believed he had a 70-win team and they won 94,

it is kind of hard to know, like, you know, who gets credit for that. If you think you've built 70. But I don't know. First off, we don't know how much he was posturing. Second off, there were moves that they made throughout the season that Billy didn't know they were going to make when he made those quotes. Maybe his subconscious brain is so good at making trades and evaluating players that he doesn't even realize how smart he's being when he's doing these things. He's got to learn to trust himself.

Yes. Believe in yourself, Billy Bean. That's really the point. Believe in yourself. Even if nobody else believes in you, Billy Bean, you need to believe in yourself. You'll make it, Billy Bean. Right. All right. So that was longer than two minutes. Okie doke.

So the Dodgers every day win a baseball game, and they're now 40-8 in their last 48 games. And every day there's a new stat about where their streak ranks among streaks all time and they have the best 46 game streak and the best 47 game streak and now they have the best 48 game streak since 1942 is that since 1942 like somebody did it in 1942 or we're just not bothering to look back? Yeah, someone did it in 1942. The 1942 Cardinals won. They went 41-7 in 48 games. So I guess my first question is what you think the true talent level of the dodgers are of the of today's

dodgers not the dodgers over the whole course of the season when they've had certain guys injured and the roster has changed but the current they still they still have and they still do yes uh but but the current dodgers who are on the field and looking completely invincible right now, what is their true talent level? So, like, just to clarify, the Dodgers who are playing today, not the Dodgers who are playing today plus Matt Kemp? Yeah, sure. Not including Kemp. Because they haven't really gotten anything from Kemp this year and certainly during this run. So, yeah, not including Kemp, not including, I don't know, Beckett, not including anyone else on the 40-man who's not playing.

Billingsley. So you want me to answer that? That's the first thing you want me to answer? Yeah. I don't know. I guess it's hard for me to see them as a hundred win team so i would guess that their true talent is uh probably like 90 like a 94 win team which might make them the best team in baseball in my mind but not the best team

in history yeah that's right okay i going to say almost exactly the same thing. I was going to say 95, which is actually what they're on pace to win this year, I mean, considering their full season record. So yeah, 95. So you have to think about how long does a team have to play at a historic pace before you consider them a historic talent i guess um and it doesn't feel like they're there yet and in part you know

they've kind of had everything go their way also for for this streak to happen. I think they've won their last 12 one-run games in a row. So, yeah. And so I guess then the larger question is to tie it back to the topic that we've talked about a couple times about money not mattering so much anymore or not having a strong correlation or any correlation with with victories whether whether there's anything that the Dodgers have done differently compared to other high payroll teams that haven't won is there is there some sort of lesson that you can take from the Dodgers spending a ton of money and being good as opposed to, you know, the Angels or the Yankees or the Phillies or any of these other high payroll teams that aren't really playing as well as their payroll would suggest? And the Hang Up and Listen, this late podcast that we've mentioned a few times, talked about this topic on their most recent episode. And I started listening to it and then was interrupted and didn't get a chance to finish.

But it sounded like where they were going with it was just that free agent long-term contracts are a bad idea. Or at least that was what Mike Peska said to lead off the discussion, and that extensions, when players are early in their career, have kind of leveled the playing field because small market teams can do that and get an advantage,

whereas the big market teams then have been committing tons of money to Josh Hamilton or whoever, and Albert Pujols, and not getting their money's worth either because they've done something not smart or suddenly baseball has changed and players are aging earlier and it's a young players game and they haven't adjusted to that.

But the Dodgers have sort of done the same thing. It's not like they've built from within so much. They've just had more successful, uh, longterm contracts, right? It's just, well, the Dodgers are,

the Dodgers are essentially a, uh, like a city that was built four months ago. They, they don't have any, well, I guess a year, a little more than a year ago.

And so they don't have any long-term infrastructure problems because they don't have anything that has been around for more than a year, if that makes sense, right? They basically became a big market team in May of 2012. And while they have signed, and this is not my hypothesis, but I'm noting this, it might end up being my hypothesis, but they've spent a ton of money but like they've spent money on like like granky is a long-term deal yeah but he's not in the long-term part of it yet he's they've gotten as much of him

as if they'd signed him for one year neither are josh hamilton or. No, no, no. And so, well, I'm not necessarily saying that that's like part of the cohesive theory. But I mean, if you're saying that if you, if the problem, and Peska's point, I think, sort of came down to like, it's sort of like the black swan idea, where you, like the downside of the unforeseen collapse is so big that it crushes you. He compared it to banking where you can make some profit on a savvy investment, but when it goes bad, it just kills you. These guys who you give $125 million to, they give you nothing and you're stuck with them for five years. And they haven't had any of those happen to them. Now, the Angels have had a particularly high portion of those happen to them.

But it's not like the Dodgers have ridden out the six years that they have to survive with Granke or anything like that. They do have Gonzalez and Crawford. Yeah, but they got those guys a year ago. I mean, they have all the information that they – well, their timeline since they got them is very, has been very short. So they haven't had to deal with quite the uncertainty of it. Now, I think that, well, I don't know. I mean, I'm sort of surprised by how well it's worked out. The other thing about the contracts thing is that if your

payroll is $200 million and you're going up against teams that are $70 million, you can have three bad $25 million contracts and you still have more to spend than the other teams. So it is kind of interesting to try to figure out why these bad contracts are so crippling given that financially they shouldn't be that crippling. Right? Because the Dodgers could afford to have Granke essentially. They could have signed Granke, had Granke never pitched a game, and they still would have been way richer

and had way more money to spend than their opponents. So why is it so devastating when Josh Hamilton sucks or Albert Pujols sucks? The angels, even with Pujols and Hamilton are still spending way more than the A's and yet can't win. So I don't know. I'm just, yeah. And right.

And it's probably not fair to equate, uh, the angels and the Dodgers or the Dodgers and anyone really, except the Yankees, because, you know, you can't just lump them into high payroll teams because their payroll is still so much higher than everyone else's, except the Yankees. And while the Yankees haven't played particularly well this year, it kind of has worked for them every other year where they just spend a ridiculous amount of money and they have made the playoffs almost every single year for a very long time now.

So maybe there's still a threshold, even if the correlation across the league is non-existent right now. Maybe there's still a level at which uh there is something to it i mean if you can spend an unlimited amount of money then that would have to help you right because anytime anyone wasn't good you could just you could just release him and and eat the entire contract and get someone else. And you could always sign the best free agent available, and you'd probably be a pretty good team. Not efficient at all at spending, but you'd probably be good if you could afford to swallow every single mistake

and spend as if it didn't matter, which is, I guess, essentially what they've done. Well, I think that's what's interesting, is that you would think that if you had unlimited money, you could swallow unlimited mistakes. And yeah, it doesn't seem to quite be that way that you do still end up like, you know, these guys end up playing more than you want them to, for instance, when they, when they go bad, you know, Josh Hamilton hasn't just been overpaid this year. He's also played every game. You know, you're not going to bench Josh Hamilton in the first year of a five-year deal. It blocks other people and there's costs involved in acquiring them. You lose draft picks, you lose the opportunity

to make more trades. It's not quite that unlimited money means unlimited freedom to make mistakes. means unlimited freedom to make mistakes. It still does catch up to you. And so I think that's kind of why at the beginning of the year when the Dodgers were 32 and 40 or whatever they were, it did still kind of fit that they were doing poorly. And it wasn't that they had run out of money. At no point had the Dodgers run out of money. They didn't reach that point where they couldn't sign a player

or trade for a player because they couldn't afford him. So you couldn't say, well, they're losing because they spent too much. You thought, well, they're losing because they signed guys who had various flaws. And at the time, we don't know that much about how to protect baseball. So I think at the time it was a reasonable conclusion to make. I mean, we all thought the Dodgers were better than they were playing. We all probably would have said, oh, well, they're going to be better than 500 going forward.

But, you know, that's one of the things about building the way they built is that you tend to get guys who are question marks even though they're expensive. And Adrian Gonzalez was a question mark, certainly. Hanley Ramirez and Karl Crawford and Josh Beckett were all question marks. I thought that Granke was a question mark certainly at the level that they were expecting him for. Puig was a question mark. Money is only one factor in this. If somebody called and wanted to do like a radio hit with you about the Dodgers, and this was a non-baseball, non-sports show, so like you're talking to Teen Beat or something like that, and they want you to explain the

Dodgers, what would you say to them? How would you explain their success? I mean, it's hard to say it any other way than, well, maybe they're just the one team that spent a lot on these guys and it's happened to work out fairly well. I mean, not every free agent signing is going to fail, and not every big contract is going to fail. And a lot of the question marks that you've mentioned have been very questionable. It's not like they've hit on everyone. They've basically gotten nothing from Kemp and from Beckett, and they've gotten worse than nothing from Brandon League. Oh my gosh, I forgot about Brandon League. Right.

So they're paying those guys a lot of money and they've gotten nothing or worse than nothing from them, but they are also paying Karl Crawford a lot of money and suddenly he's back to being just about as good as he was for the Rays and they're paying Adrian Gonzalez a lot of money and suddenly he's back to being just about as good as he was for the raise and they're paying Adrian Gonzalez a lot of money and he's not he's not playing like he did in San Diego but he's been productive they spent a lot of money on Puig and that's turned out to be a better investment than anyone expected and they spent a lot of money on Granky and that's worked out fairly well so far. So, I mean, I don't know.

They spent a lot of money and it's worked out fairly well for them. They spent so much money that they could have a few of the things they did not work out at all, but still have enough people around to be a very good team. So Baseball Reference has Carl Crawford with 1.2 war and Zach Granke with 1.1 as a hitter.

Huh. Like just as a hitter. Not as a player, but as a hitter. Wow. Like just as a hitter. Not as a player, but as a hitter. Wow. Yeah, he's hit well. BP has Karl Crawford at 2.5. That's a large difference. What is the defense?

He has a 7.2 fielding runs above average. Yeah. Defensive runs saved has him at negative one, so that's almost the entire average. Yeah. Defensive runs saved has a negative one, so that's almost the entire difference. Yeah. Interesting. All right. Can we just lazily point out that they're also outperforming

their Pythagorean record by quite a bit, and so at some point we'll probably run out of topics and we'll say, are the Dodgers getting lucky? We'll probably have that. We already kind of did say that, right? The 12-1 run wins in a row is part of that. And I do, in some ways, it's one of my favorite stories of the season that they didn't fire Don Mattingly

and then have played incredibly well since not firing him. I really like that story. Because we can kind of trot that out. Every future time a team is underperforming and the manager gets blamed, perhaps unfairly, or he's just scapegoated, or it's just someone has to take the fall for this. Or whenever a team is playing well,

you see stories that say manager's name has them playing well. Yes. And when a team is not playing well, it's manager can't get them to play well. And when a team is not playing well, its manager can't get them to play well. So Don Mattingly has had both of those things in this season. He has had them playing extremely well after not having them play well. And everyone calling for his head.

And he spoke about it recently. And he said Stan Kasten basically intimated to him that he was close to letting him go. He just felt that he had to just because the team had underperformed so well. And he managed to hang on by the skin of his teeth. And suddenly the Dodgers are great. So I don't know. My natural skepticism about blaming the manager has been reinforced by this turnaround. Cool. We should go back and listen to the episode that we did about whether there's ever an appropriate time for us to call for a manager's firing. I think it was partly about the Mattingly controversy. right? He was on the hot seat, as I recall.

The wobbly chair. Okay. All right. So I guess we're done. We'll be back tomorrow.