Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 288: The Appeal of Year-to-Year Contracts/Ranking Contenders By Rootability

Episode Date: September 17, 2013

Ben and Sam discuss why players don’t choose year-to-year contracts, then rank contending teams by rootability.

You gave me faith to go on, now we're there, and we've only just begun. This will be our year, took a long time to come. Good morning and welcome to episode 288 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives. I am Ben Lindberg, joined by Sam Miller. Hello. Are we to Tommy John's win total yet? Is it 288 or is that Jim Cott? I don't know. If I knew.

Then you would know the answer to that question. I would have stated it in a much different tone. Tommy John, yeah, 288. So, yeah, this is it. All right. All right. Made it. Super underwhelming now that we're here this was our goal how come

we've been talking about this for so long you and i about getting to tommy john's win total that's all we ever talk about right uh yeah often since like the fourth episode that was that was our goal when we started this podcast to get to seems like a weird goal um i had a couple follow-ups from yesterday's podcast if you don't have anything else to say i have two things i have two things to say one of which i have to go before you if you google tommy john uh he is not the first result and his search his surgery is also not the first result a underwear underwear retailer yeah i noticed that one day when i when we did that tommy john listener email and i was searching for intro sounds all the all the videos i could find were about tommy john under undershirts all right now

you you can do yours and then i'll uh so i So I just wanted to mention because I meant to bring it up on the show yesterday. I feel like the Todd Helton case, the discussion that we had, Larry Walker is sort of a relevant data point for that. In that they're, I guess in overall production, sort of similar players, but Walker's probably a better player. Would you agree he has a better case or he's a better player? Yeah. Yeah, certainly. But, you know, also spent a lot of his career not in Coors Field. Yeah.

So it doesn't quite pollute the argument as much. Not quite, yeah. But Larry Walker got, let me see what percentage, he got about 20%, I think. Yeah, his first year he got 20.3 and then 22.9 and then 21.6. So almost flat in his first three years of eligibility. So I feel like that's, I guess, the over-under for Helton. And I guess I would take the under, or should be the under, I would think. Anyway, that's something I wanted to mention in the discussion, and I didn't. Can I say something about Larry Walker real quick?

Yeah, and a listener named Neil also emailed us about that to ask what our thoughts on Walker was, so I wanted to incorporate that. So yeah, what's your Walker thought well I've sometimes kicked around the idea of doing a and maybe this has been done but doing a fantasy draft of um like not it wouldn't really be a draft because you you knew you would already know what happened but basically like ranking the greatest fantasy seasons of all time and the first one I always think of is Larry Walker's 97 season when obviously for reasons that were somewhat bolstered by his circumstances but he hit 366 and at the time of course we were all five by five right so you can ignore the rest but he hit 366 452 720 uh and he had 49 homers stole 33 bases drove in 130 and scored 143 runs not bad 208 hits 208 hits 46 doubles uh 99 extra base hits that was so mvp here it was yeah kind of a kind of a kind of a good year pretty good year yeah um the other

thing that i wanted to mention uh since we were kind of calling out people who were doing the, huh, that 97 season was only a six-win season, according to us. So that's the Coors adjustment. And also bad defensive rating that year from us anyway. Since we were calling out people who were doing the postseason narrative building and writing articles about how being hot in September is all important yesterday. I wanted to compliment a couple people on not doing that or recognize a couple people who didn't do that. Almost everybody in the world, in fact, is going to be mentioned right now for not writing that article yesterday. But these couple people wrote the opposite of that article.

Ah. But these couple people wrote the opposite of that article. So Mark Bradley, who's a columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and is a good guy, friend of BP, and also Evan Drelich, who is a Red Sox beat writer for MassLive.com and the Springfield Republican, had perfect opportunities to write that article because the Red Sox are, you know, winning every game. So you could certainly write the article about how they're peaking at the right time and they're going in strong. The Braves are not really having a good September. I think they're having a losing September. So you could write that opposite article if you wrote for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution constitution but neither of those guys did that they actually both contacted me to ask whether bp had done any research on this topic and and what sabermetricians thought of this and then they they wrote they wrote the story accordingly and cited cited the research and everything so um so i'm glad that

they did that. Not that, not that everyone should consult me before writing articles. And really all I did was just sort of point them to, to work that other people had done. But, but it's, it's nice that, that you did that. Cause, uh, I mean, you'd think it would be the natural impulse to either do that research or see if it's out there already, but it often isn't. So they did it, so good. Huzzah. Yes.

Okay. I don't need to say anything. We'll just move on. Okay. So my topic was going to be on ranking rootability of contenders. Okay. Mine is about free agents going year to year. Okay.

Who goes first? I guess I'll go first. Okay. So a couple years ago when I wrote about CJ Wilson's free agency experience, and he talked about the negotiations and what it was like to be negotiating with the team. One of the things that struck me is that the dollars involved were basically agreed on almost immediately and then they just negotiated how many years. The annual value was negotiated almost immediately and then they were just negotiating years.

It was almost entirely about getting an extra year for Wilson. This is, I think, pretty common. The goal for these guys when they're free agents is, in a lot of ways, to get as many years as possible, which makes sense because you know that if you get worse or if you get a broken back or something like that, you're going to be getting paid for a really long time. It makes sense. That's what the player's incentive probably should be.

But I've sort of been wondering whether we'll ever see a player who is so confident in his abilities or maybe just bold or something and just decides, you know what, I'm going to go year to year. I'm going to go year to year for my entire career. and just decides, you know what, I'm going to go year to year. I'm going to go year to year for my entire career. I'm not going to take the discount that obviously comes, the per-year discount that you give up in order to sign for a longer contract.

I'm going to just let my skills play themselves out and see how much I make that way. And to some degree, Tim Lincecum showed kind of glimpses of this. This is actually what made me think about it. Tim Lincecum, during all his pre-arb and early arb years, was really resistant to the idea of signing a deal that would buy out his arbitration years and some of his free agency. He said, I like the motivation of going year to year. his free agency because he said, I like the motivation of going year to year. It keeps me hungry. And it ended up working out really well for him to some degree. I mean, he was making record-setting arbitration totals, which he wouldn't have had if he had signed a five-year deal when he was in his second year. And so Linscombe kind of showed a little bit of that. But I'm sort

of just wondering whether you think we'll ever see a player do this. And so, to give a hypothetical, if you're talking about a guy like Mark Teixeira, he would have lost everything, right? I mean, instead of getting $160 million from the Yankees or $180, is it $180? Instead of getting $180 million from the Yankees or 180, is it 180? Instead of getting $180 million from the Yankees, he probably would have ended up making probably half that over the life of that deal or maybe 100. But that's still pretty good. You take a guy like Miguel Cabrera, though,

where everything has gone well for him, and who knows what he'd be making right now. I mean, what do you think Miguel Cabrera would be making if he had been a free agent last year or willing to sign a one-year contract for 2013? 40? You think 40? Yeah.

Yeah, and we don't know. It seems like you can really easily make the case that a guy would be worth 40 and might get 40 and might even get more than 40 because it's a short deal. There's a very limited risk from the team's perspective and it's basically when you're only talking one year in the future, you can almost just bank those wins. On the other hand, it might just be such a sticker shock in the short term and you might look at it as like $40 million is such a huge percentage of a team's budget that it might actually be harder to do that and it might be that GMs would actually refuse to kind of be rational

about it. But you have to assume that everybody is rational when they're negotiating for these things and that if clubs are willing to essentially overpay free agents in years, which they do, they do it almost every contract is an overpay in length. They all turn out bad, it seems like, because of that. If they're willing to overpay in years, you'd think they would be willing to overpay in dollars instead. So Robinson Cano is going to be a free agent. What do you think Robinson Cano is going to get this winter? I think he could potentially be a $30 million guy.

Uh-huh. Per year. Yeah. And over. I don't know. I'd say six years i would give anything to be able to see what you google while we're recording because like what did you just google how much is robinson cano going to get paid like that's not on the internet nobody knows i just went to his baseball

yeah went to his baseball reference phase because it because it gives me comfort to be looking at a player's stats while I speculate wildly about him. Yeah, yeah. Oh, look at this. Oh, he was an all-star. Yeah, he won a couple gold gloves. Yeah, you need to know if he was rookie of the year or runner-up. Yeah, he was runner-up. All right, so anyway, what did you say I missed because I was laughing at you in my head?

I said he could be a $30 million guy and maybe could—I could see him getting like six years in that amount. But he's not going to take six years. He's going to go to the team that gives him the longest deal. He's going to get six years. He's going to go to the team that gives him the longest deal. He's going to get eight years. Yeah. Okay, so I don't think he will average $30 million over the life of an eight-year contract, but it would be close. High 20s, certainly.

You think high 20s? See, I was thinking $8,200 is nice and round. I could see him getting $8,200. What are you googling are you doing are you dividing 200 by 8 i could see him getting uh i could see him getting more than that i guess he's he hasn't i mean he's played at basically the same same level he was at last year almost exactly so um So yeah, I think he could get more than that. Okay, so now, alternate question is, what would he get if he only wanted one year? Well, I said 40 for Cabrera,

so I guess you'd have to say like 35 for Cano. Well, that's interesting. Yeah, that's not enough. That's not enough, yeah. It's really not enough. So I probably underestimated what Cabrera would get for one year, or what he should get for one year, maybe. Because, yeah, I think Cano should get 40 for one year, maybe. Because, yeah, I think Cano should get 40 for one year. Yeah, so the obvious, I mean, what people will say is, oh, well, you know, Cano, it's just so

risky if he goes year to year, you know, he's the second baseman, if he, you know, he might not age well, he's probably not going to age well if the second baseman don't age well. And, you know, he'll just be giving up so much money on the back end. But you have to figure that teams know all of that when they're doing the math. They're essentially trying to pay him the right amount. They're trying to incorporate that risk and that decline appropriately. I guess the thing is that teams are bad at that math, I guess, is what we've learned. I don't know why they're bad at that. Why do we think they are bad at that math, I guess, is what we've learned. And so I don't know why they're bad at that. Why do we think they're bad at that?

Because it might be that for players, teams are just essentially handing out free money in these long-term deals for some reason that wouldn't translate to one-year deals. Maybe it's the GM knowing that the sixth year doesn't really matter for him because he's either not going to be around at that point or he's going to have a World Series ring and people will forgive whatever the guy's doing. collapse next year and you had paid him 40 million, you know, you might lose your job over it. But if seven years from now, he's not worth his contract because he's in his late 30s, who's paying attention? And there's often, I wonder what percentage of those long-term deals that don't seem to make sense come from ownership. I feel like certainly a higher percentage of those moves than, than your, your typical move, which is handled by the baseball operations people. It seems that

there are, I mean, you know, like the Prince Fielder move where Michael, it's just sort of stepped in. It seemed like, or Boris appealed to him directly. Um, and maybe some of the angels moves with Artie Moreno, or, I mean, it, it, it's often the case that the person with the most money and maybe the least baseball knowledge is the one pushing for those things. Why would that guy, if it's the owner doing it though, why wouldn't he rather commit only $40 million instead of committing a quarter of a billion dollars? Because he's never going to go broke giving out one bad deal. But a quarter of a billion dollars is actually a lot of money even to a billionaire. So you would think that they would really prefer the one-year deal. I mean, yeah, the whole point is that they would pay a lot more for a one-year deal, presumably.

But maybe that's just not true. Maybe it's just the, I mean, there's some value to a player in being settled somewhere, right? I mean, even aside from the injury risk and the risk that you won't be able to make as much in the long term because you'll get hurt or something. There's some value to knowing where you'll be and being able to, you know, settle your family somewhere and not have to deal with rumors about where you'll be going all season. And I mean, yeah, there's, there is, there's also a lot of value to the opposite though. I mean, you never, you don't get, um, you don't get stuck on a bad team for six years in a row. You don't have to worry about being moved off a position you don't like

when you get older quite so readily. I mean, you would have a little bit more choice about that. You could go to a team that doesn't have – if you're a shortstop and you want to play shortstop, you don't, you know, you don't have to play for a team that's got Jose Iglesias coming up or something like that. Um, so there's a lot of benefit to the flexibility of it. And I mean, certainly the team that's, and I think actually that's another key factor. If, if, if, if as is kind of sabermetric orthodoxy is true and a win that pushes you from 85 wins to 86 is more valuable than one that pushes you from 75 to 76, then teams are constantly

spending dollars that they would rather not spend because they locked up this guy to a long-term deal and then they dipped below that threshold. So like the Astros paying Carlos Lee that money all those years, it wasn't just that Carlos Lee was bad and not worth the money. It was that the Astros had no need for a guy like Carlos Lee, where other teams would have. So in fact, if you could negotiate with a team that most wants your services every year,

that is the best fit for you, there would actually be more efficiency in it. You should presumably be able to get even more money that way. that is the best fit for you there would actually be more efficiency in it you would actually you should presumably be able to get even more money that way yeah that makes sense so someone someone do it someone's got to do it i'd like to see someone we might i'd like to see harper do it i could see i could see harper doing it just just doubt. It's the equivalent of running into an outfield fence financially. Yes, exactly. Nothing's going to change the way he negotiates for one-year deals.

I think it maybe could become more likely. I could kind of imagine Cabrera being maybe the last of the big overpays on a long term. Like if the TV money and the TV bubble doesn't last that long and teams don't have unlimited money to spend, I don't know. I could kind of see them getting smarter and cutting back on these long term deals. And if they're a little less willing to hand those out, then they'll be a little more willing to do the short-term deals. And maybe players will adjust to the idea and it will be something that actually happens. I hope so. Yeah. The only explanation for it not happening is that teams are dumb,

is apparently that teams are behaving irrationally as a group and giving... Yeah, these long-term deals are ridiculous and they seem to be. So I'm not saying that's not a good explanation. That might actually be a perfectly valid explanation, but if they stop doing that, then yeah, we'd see this. I'd like to see someone try it. Anyway, go ahead. Let's talk about your thing. David Schoenfield at ESPN's Sweet Spot blog just ranked the contenders by rootability, according to him. He ranked

14 teams, and he used five criteria. Basically, the franchise misery, how good their 2013 storyline is, their star factor, their payroll. Star factor seems like it would have a negative correlation to rootability. I don't know. To me, it would.

To me, it would probably. To the average fan, I'm not sure it would. Well, to the average David Schoenfeld reader, though. Who wasn't rooting for the A's and the Orioles last year? Yeah, you're right. And fan support is the last one. So he ranked these, and they all actually ended up pretty close together. The obvious winner of the rootability ranking was the pirates uh he actually had the yankees in last um

which i guess probably makes sense we talked about this recently but where are you from of course the yankees are last i just think they get they get a nice 2013 storyline boost and he did the yankees would the yankees would be more rootable if they signed delman young i believe and josh lukey that's how unrootable the yankees are to most of the country to most of the country yeah sure um so so i wanted to to to know your your rootability rankings. And we're just talking about how interesting the story is or how much you want to see them go deep into the playoffs because you just want to see them play more baseball and get more recognition for what they've done or how they've built

or what players they have or whatever it is. for what they've done or how they've built or what players they have or whatever it is. Just going down the likely playoff teams or the strong contenders. Yeah. Well, yeah. First, I'd like to just establish my criteria for rootability. They're slightly different. My number one criteria is always which team I think is the smartest or has behaved the most smartly. I like to see baseball make

sense. So I tend to root for whichever front office either I feel like has done the best or that I have kind of publicly approved of most of their moves because you sort of get locked into your opinions to some degree. And my second element of rootability is the team whose fans get the least out of it if they don't win. Like, if you go to an A's game, you get nothing if the A's don't win. There are no perks. There is nothing good about it. Like, it just sucks to go to an A's game. Except, because of this, because it sucks so bad to do anything but win

like the joy of a win is is palpable i mean it really is an incredible atmosphere to to watch a win in and so i i root for i really want everybody to get their money's worth um and so i always root for a team where i feel like the fans kind of have the most sadness in their hearts, in their lives. So I would say I would root for, that's kind of a proxy way of saying I would root for underdogs, I would root for teams with histories of failure, and I would root for teams from kind of industrial and sort of bankrupt cities. Okay. So that means that you're rooting for the Tigers, the Rays, the A's and... Well, that was just one criteria though. I had a previous criteria that I named first.

Yeah. So you've got a bunch there um okay so so who's on the top then uh all right so the first two spots would be the a's and the rays and um probably probably this year the a's because i spent so much of the i spent a lot of august uh following them and in their their park, in their clubhouse. So I have a little bit of a soft spot for them right now. So A's would be number one. Rays would be number two. Rangers would be number three.

Rangers are always high for me because I like their front office so much. Cardinals probably would be number four. I can't get into the Pirates for some reason. I should, but I haven't really gotten that into them yet. I'm surprised. Five would be the Indians. So you still haven't named the Pirates? I still haven't named the Pirates.

I don't think I've named an NL team, strangely. Five would be the Indians. Six would be the... Well, it would have been... I've always found it very easy to root for the Red Sox, but at this point, I don't. I just can't. I finally have come around to what everybody has been saying.

Six would probably be the... Yeah, the Pirates. Oh, I did say the Cardinals, right? Did you? If I didn't say the cardinals i should have said them okay yeah or five but then the cardinals uh oh sorry the pirates six ish uh and then i would go um detroit seven probably uh braves eight Red Sox nine and I'm not even counting the Orioles and the Yankees should I be I guess yeah the Orioles would have been somewhere up around six or five ahead of the Pirates the Yankees would be down near the bottom the Braves would be down near the bottom and the Dodgers would be last so are the Pirates getting dinged because PNC Park is a nice place to go

and watch a baseball game and so fans fans get something out of it then? No, the Pirates are being dinged for reasons having nothing to do with my criteria. I'm not sure. I just don't have an emotional connection to what they've been doing. But they've got the smart thing going. I know. They seem to. They have certainly fan misery and underdog-ness.

Yeah, well, the other thing about rootability is that there's an arbitrariness to all of it. We all root for things arbitrarily. Yeah. I just said the same sentence twice, but I kind of rearranged the words. Yeah, I don't know. The Pirates would probably be near the top of my list. I don't, I guess I don't, I don't have any particular emotional connection to them, but just, uh, just evaluating which team I should be rooting for.

They seem to be at the top. Um, if anything, just cause we haven't, haven't seen them in the playoffs year after year and they have an interesting sabermetric side of their story. Yeah, I support supporting them. I just don't support them myself. I don't know why. You're right. They fit.

They fit. Everybody's rooting for them. It's good to root for them. I would say that it might just be that, I don't know, the Cardinals, I just think the Cardinals are just such the cream of the crop in baseball that I think that, you know, I sort of maybe have put them up against the Cardinals in my mind. So maybe that's why.

I also forgot to say the Reds. The Reds would be just kind of a mid-tier, a little middle, maybe a little low. I rooted against them last year in the postseason because they were playing the Giants, and so maybe I just have a little bit of lingering-ness to that. I don't have any real animus against them in case anybody is wanting to start that again. So it doesn't matter to you that the cardinals have it the fact that they've been so successful just makes you want them to succeed more you want their success and their their good

process and way of putting a team together just to be rewarded year after year as long as they're still doing those smart things i guess i don't put it that way exactly because there are teams that are successful that I'm not as impressed with for whatever reason. But yeah, the Cardinals and the Rangers have been for the last few years, I've admired everything they've done and the way that they've put their teams together in the same way that I admired the Red Sox a lot in the middle of the last decade. That's interesting.

So you don't really have any fatigue with those guys? You don't want to see someone else just for the sake of seeing someone else? Well, there's five teams in the postseason in each league. And it's not like the Cardinals have won the World Series six years in a row. They won it once. And every five years or so, I see them. But no, no fatigue fatigue what about you uh I think well I'd be higher on the Pirates than you were um probably higher on the Yankees uh similarly low on the Dodgers um I think I'd be higher on the Tigers just because I kind of want to see their team strength rewarded. I feel like they're just a really good team and I want to see them win.

They've kind of underplayed expectations in this regular season and last regular season. That's why I'm not on fire for them. Yeah, I kind of want to see them do well and be rewarded for putting a good team together, even if it's not really any sort of sabermetric narrative to it. And I, yeah, I don't know. I enjoy watching some of their players. And I don't know, probably wouldn't differ too much on the other teams. I would have the Rays and A's up high.

I would probably be lower. I was going to say I'd be lower on the Rangers just because we've seen them a lot. But at the same time time they've come close without going all the way and I could get behind rewarding them for putting a good organization together did you even

did you mention the Braves? where did you have the Braves? toward the bottom I grew up hating the Braves for some reason, and now I don't like the chop. I don't like the smugness of their announcers. But I do like their front office, and I do think that they put out a good product. What they do with young starting pitchers is amazing, and I respect their baseball ops a lot.

They are kind of a team that I would probably root for if they were called like the Durham Magicians or something like that, like if they just weren't in Atlanta and they weren't the Braves. One other thing that Schoenfield mentioned in his piece, and it was just sort of an aside, he noted that the AL has seven of the eight worst teams in attendance, in average attendance. The only NL team in the bottom eight is the Marlins.

And I was trying to figure out whether this means anything. I was, my initial suspicion is that it doesn't mean anything, that it's just AL teams happen to be at the bottom there. I mean, it's, let's see, the bottom eight, starting from the bottom, Rays, Marlins, Indians, Astros, Royals, Mariners, A's, and White Sox. I don't know what to make of that, really. Does that seem significant to you? Because, I mean, there are some very bad teams there.

There are some very successful teams there who seems like should be drawing more. Seems like should be drawing more. There are some smaller markets in that group, but there are some sort of medium-sized or smaller NL markets that are drawing much better. So I don't know. It can't be anything inherent about ALNL difference, can it? It doesn't seem like it. I'm thinking, and it hasn't come to me yeah i don't

see it i mean it can't be uh people don't like the dh and so they're not coming to the games uh it can't be a i don't know like a like a red sox yankees fatigue or something where maybe there's a greater i was gonna say there's a greater payroll disparity between the richest teams and the less rich teams, although now the NL has the Dodgers, so that doesn't work anymore. I don't know. Nothing occurs to me. If anyone listening has any theories about why a bunch of AL teams are at the bottom in average attendance, you can let us know. And there's also not a huge difference between the teams when you rank them in attendance.

Actually, I guess there's a difference of about 4,000 per game between the 8th lowest and the 9th lowest, so that's sort of significant. But I don't know. If anyone has any theories about that, let us significant. But I don't know. If anyone has any theories about that, let us know. So we're done for today. Some of you have

sent us emails for tomorrow, but we could still use some more. So if you have questions, send them to podcast at baseballperspectives.com and we will be back tomorrow.