Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 337: Free Agent Spending So Far/The McCann, Molina, and Smith Signings

Episode Date: November 26, 2013

Ben and Sam discuss the early movement on the free agent market, then break down the Jose Molina, Brian McCann, and Joe Smith signings.

Money burns a hole in my pocket Oh, I wish I had millions of dollars And nothing to do but just buy pretty presents for you. Good morning and welcome to episode 337 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from respect this. I am Ben Lindberg in freezing New, and I am joined as always by Sam Miller in California, where it's probably moderate and mild. No countdown today. It's the first time you've ever not counted. Are you ready to speak? I am because you introduced me so well. Hi, Ben. Hi. How are you? I'm okay. Good.

Yeah. All right. So since you were so upset yesterday that we didn't get to talk about all your transaction analyses, I just thought we'd talk about your transaction analyses. So that was your strategy all along. You knew that you picked Tuesday topics, so you didn't want to blow through all our material yesterday. So you thought you'd string it out over a couple days. First of all, that was not my plan. But second of all, everybody should know that one of my big pet peeves about Ben is all he does is complain about how he can't think of a topic.

But if he happens to wake up one day with two, he feels the need to force them both into a show, even if they're not timely. And like he will gladly, he will gladly record an hour long show instead of just simply breaking one off and doing it the next day. He also does the same thing with his writing. He will write four non, four non timely articles and publish them all does the same thing with his writing. He will write four non-timely articles and publish them all on the same day and then complain that there's nothing for Monday. Just got to get it out there. You don't have to. You don't have to.

I can't hog these brilliant ideas I have to myself. No, life is about budgeting, Ben. It's about budgeting. Well, I'm an inexhaustible well of great ideas. You're not because you run out four minutes later. That's the whole point. You don't have a well. There's no well.

You know what a well is? A well is where people keep their water. It's where you go to get water regularly. You don't have a well. It's like rain. It's just it's a day of rain and you didn't irrigate. I grew up in Manhattan. I just go to the grocery store at 3 a.m. when I need something so I don't have to hoard.

Okay, so we'll talk about all the other moves that we haven't talked about yet. That's good. All right, so first of all, how telling is it that everybody is signing so early? I don't know. Well, who was it who did that research last year? Was it Brian McPherson who did the research about how teams tend to pay more early in the offseason for free agents? I think. I think it might have been him, yeah. I think it was Brian McPherson with the Providence Journal.

And if that's the case, it doesn't seem like there's been a big bump so far. It's strange. I've seen people, like there was an article, Louis Paulus wrote something at ESPN Insider about how there hasn't been a big spending bump. And then I've seen people marveling at how much guys are making. It seems like, I don't know whether it's because a certain person's team signed someone for a lot of money, they think that the whole market is up or what. But it doesn't seem like there's a ton of that. What is your theory about why

people are signing soon? Yeah, well, not only does it seem like big contracts tend to, and as Brian found, big contracts tend to clump early in the offseason and bargains at the end. But it's always been my theory that the GMs that sign the early contracts are expecting the market to be hot. It's basically trying to get ahead of a market that they think is going to be more inflationary than usual, or in some cases, a particular position is going to be, there's going to be a run on a particular position. And so it makes sense after the last, you know, few years of everybody kind of just sort of agreeing that all this TV

money is going to, you know, flood the market with dollars and that free agents are going to be getting ridiculous, ridiculous raises and all that. And I feel like the Hunter Pence and Lincecum contracts, I feel like, right kind of before the opening of free agency maybe contributed to that sense that teams were going to be paying more for people. Yeah, definitely could have. And so it could just be that everybody is expecting that and that this turns out to just be, you know be a dog that doesn't hunt and that in fact, they're kind of getting ahead of a market that isn't going to explode. I'm sure some guys will get paid going forward, but it seems to me that the more guys get knocked out early um the lower everybody

else's salary is because it it i don't know this but i think that um that teams get their budgets get more rigid as the offseason goes on and as they get closer to the season and so even if there are just as many teams with just as many holes in their lineup uh the closer you get to the season. And so even if there are just as many teams with just as many holes in their lineup, the closer you get to the season, they're less likely to pay because they kind of have fixed ideas about what their budget's going to be like. And to me, it's not a given. It's not automatic that putting more money into the game is going to lead to a proportional increase in salaries. It. One half of the equation is certainly how much teams are able to pay for players, but the other half is how much supply there

is of players, and the supply of players hasn't changed. It could be that we've reached the point where teams are spending, they basically feel like they have enough money to pay for whatever they want, but there's still the same number of players. There's still, if Shinsu Chu wants to get paid $400 million or whatever, and he says, well, there's a lot of teams with money that can afford that, there's still also a ton of corner outfielders in the world, in the universe, who can provide some portion of that.

And they're competing with each other as well. They're not just competing for owner's dollars, but they're competing against each other for those owner's dollars. So I don't know if any of that made sense. But I think there's a possibility that the inflation won't be as drastic as people are expecting. There is the Scott Boris strategy of having some marquee guy and waiting a while. And I think he's commented to this effect that he feels that if he holds on to a marquee guy after all the other marquee guys sign, then when it gets to be about time

for spring training or maybe it is spring training then whenever you know like if a team has someone get hurt and suddenly they have a hole his client is the only remaining attractive solution so so it could work i guess for for some guys in certain cases to just hold out and be like the last man standing. But yeah, I think that is the general trend. So were there any... Yeah, Boris usually says that around February when he's got a player left. He usually says that around February when he's got a player left. He's also extremely good at getting those contracts that we've given up on being out there.

He both knows more than we do, and he's also very good at his job. He's maybe very good at making those openings appear that weren't there. But nonetheless, he's got every incentive to say it regardless, usually when he's being asked that question. That is true. All right. So, okay. So we've talked about the larger trend. Jose Molina, 50 run receiver, best bargain in baseball. This is no longer a novel thing though why isn't he using your logic about teams

telegraphing to us how much they think PEDs matter by their willingness to continue paying PED busts why if Jose Molina is as good as you say he is and you think he is, why is nobody willing to give him more than backup catcher money?

Yeah, I kind of wrote about this. And I think, I mean, he's just, he's a really one-dimensional, limited player. Even if you acknowledge his one extraordinary skill that he's maybe the best in baseball at he there are a lot of reasons that you can come up with legitimate reasons why you wouldn't want to sign him he's he's going to be 39 next season he's a large a large gentleman uh he's probably an injury risk. You can't pencil in Molina for 130 games or something. He's physically probably not able to do that. So you can't really commit to him as a full-time starter.

And he can't hit at all. And it's funny he he didn't hit at all last year but he hasn't really declined offensively it seems like like his his stats last year were terrible but they were exactly the same as his career stats he's just always been bad and he's still bad in the to the same degree that he's always been bad. But there's that. There's the fact that he's not a very good blocker. His caught stealing percentage has fallen the last couple of years, which might have more to do with the Rays' staff than his own arm. But clearly, he hasn't gotten better at anything except perhaps framing. So there are all these, you know, warts, right? The

idea of the player with warts that you sign him and maybe you get a good deal on him because there are all these things that make him unattractive and that are reasons for teams not to sign him. And, you know, I'm sure the Rays are probably sick of watching him hit. It's really, it's not fun watching him hit weak ground ball after weak ground ball. But I think they're a team that recognizes his value and has to save money somewhere. And they figure that they can get some bang for their buck with him. And he'll probably do the same sort of platoon thing with Jose Lobaton, or maybe they'll continue to pursue Ryan Hannigan and just sort of, you know, play him half the time and take the hit on offense for his defense. But, you know, I think like if he were 28, say, and, you know, PitchFX had been

discovered and all the framing studies had come out then, I feel like probably then he would get the bigger deal because someone would give him a starting job. At this point, I think the fact that he's signed through age 40 to be, you know, close to a starting catcher at least is pretty impressive. Just the fact that he can get a guaranteed two-year contract despite not being able to hit at all and having all these other weaknesses, I think, is evidence that his framing has some value. I don't get it. No, I don't get it. I don't get what you're saying. I mean, you say he's got one skill, but so does Matt Garza.

I mean, it's not like anybody looks at Matt Garza and says, Matt Garza's a little bit of an extreme case, but it's not like anybody looks at matt garza and said matt garza is a little bit of extreme case but it's not like anybody looks at a pitcher and goes well he's not a very good defender and he sure can't hit we're only going to give him two million dollars i mean melina's skill is you know somewhat equivalent to a pitcher's skill he keeps runs off the board and and i mean i understand that you're saying that the value is chipped away at by all these other things, but we know what that value adds up to. And we know what 25 or 30 runs of framing adds up to. And it's a lot more than $2 million. It's a lot more than $2 million. Even if you think he's a 20 run framer a he's basically a replacement level player and everything else he was yes they

negative 0.2 warp this year 0.4 the year before you know 0.9 the year before that regress and age and all that and you get roughly replacement level add 20 or 30 that's not a two million dollar player so like why you i think you're focusing a little bit on distribution of skill uh in a way that if i were arguing it you would push back on possibly i i well i mean it's certainly possible that he's just underrated i mean i i wouldn't have any problem arguing that that teams just aren't valuing him properly, that they haven't done the work that the Rays have done analyzing him or they haven't bought into the studies or whatever.

There are probably some teams out there that don't believe it, and so that decreases demand. He reportedly had several teams interested in him, but primarily as a backup. And I think that's probably the thing is that, I mean, maybe, you know, maybe Jose Molina doesn't know how good he is. I don't like, you know, you can't be a catcher who can't start, can't hit, and go out and argue that you deserve Carlos Ruiz money or something, I don't think. I don't think a team would trust him to play more than, say, half of their games. And how much money are you going to commit to a guy

who plays half of your games? Because then you have to have some other guy play half of your games, and maybe that guy is a replacement-level catcher. But there's got to be two teams out there that believe these numbers. I mean, if these numbers are valid at all, there's got to be two of the 30 teams

that believe in it, right? Why aren't they in a bidding war for melina i mean two million is so cheap why aren't they in a bidding war for him if if they believe in it because the incentives are the incentives are for them to sign melina for anything less than you know 15 million a year if that's true yeah um i don't know it's i mean it's If that's true. Yeah. I don't know. It's, I mean, it's possible that he didn't go to the highest bidder. I know they wrote a Mark Topkin for the Tampa Bay times wrote about how much he likes playing there. He likes playing for Joe Madden. He likes playing for a contending team. He likes playing close to Puerto Rico. Maybe he's in some way grateful to the organization for being the first one ever to,

you know, give him as much playing time as they have. So it's possible that he did pass up money somewhere else. We don't really know. But I don't know. I think there probably should be a bit more demand for him. He probably should be making more money. It's a weak market for catchers. man for him. He probably should be making more money. It's a weak market for catchers. Are you surprised that framing doesn't decline with age? I'm not surprised that it declines less than other skills. I'm maybe surprised about how gradual the decline seems to be. It's almost imperceptible. And Molina actually seems to have gotten better at it. But I don't know.

When you think about it, it's not shocking to me that it's not as much tied to your reaction time or something. You can maybe anticipate where pitches are going to be and how they're going to move better as you get older and just have the experience to draw upon and perhaps your your technique improves and you learn what kind of you know glove positions and movements tend to get calls and and don't um i mean beyond a certain point i guess you just wouldn't be able to catch the ball anymore. But it doesn't shock me that you could be good at it into your late 30s or so, whereas a skill like hitting declines

much more steeply. I might be wrong about this, but I believe that putting in golf has a pretty steep decline as you get older. And there's no physical reason why that would be the case i mean unless it's something physical like you know eyesight related or something like that but i mean putting seems like the sort of thing that you would expect to age well and that you would you know expect that there'd be a narrative around like old guys getting better as they learn how to putt he used to be a driver but now he's a golfer. I could sort of see why the framing thing would seem like it would be something of a market inefficiency because you can sign guys to age well, but it also wouldn't surprise me if that turned out to be something close to a myth or not

replicatable. It'll be interesting to see. Yeah, that's possible. Anyway, the interesting thing about Molina to me is just his his overall career trajectory it's just really really strange like I looked up it for a lineup card we did at BP a couple weeks ago how often someone gets their their career high plate appearance total at age 38 or later which is what he did last year and it it's happened. This was the fourth time it's happened in the last 50 years. He's, you know, he's been a he was a backup for well over a decade. No one thought he was worth starting. And then, you know, Mike Fast's study comes out at BP. And two months later, a team gives him a chance to start you know a smart contending team

gives him a chance to start when he's 36 it's just it's crazy like clearly there's there's something going on there so I don't know why it hasn't been even more lucrative for him but you know on the other hand if not for, he'd probably be out of baseball by now. Yeah, well, certainly, right? Well, I don't know. Yeah, probably. I don't know. There's a lot of catch positions.

There's some really bad catchers out there. Should we talk about a really good catcher who signed? I was going to ask you. You get one more. I'm not giving you both, but you can either talk about McCann or Joe Smith. It's your choice. Who do you want to talk about for the next four and a half minutes i'm guessing mccann would be of more interest to our listeners i i i am curious about joe smith only because

you know more about the angels than i do and i wrote about how you know joe smith is really good and he's gotten much better trick you're yes trick. You're talking about Joe Smith while explaining why you're choosing McCann. Yes. So he started out as a situational guy, a righty who lefties destroyed, and then he became less of a sinker baller, more of a four-seam fastball pitcher, and now he's, for the last three years, been equally effective against righties and lefties. He's been durable. He's a good reliever. He's one of the more consistent non-closers in baseball. And the average annual value he got, which is a little, you know,

five and a quarter million, is not crazy. There are like 20 relievers who made that much last year. But Jerry DePoto has been, you know, he said the sort of sabermetric standard party line about how it's so hard to build a bullpen and relievers are inconsistent from year to year. And he called it Russian roulette when you're paying free agents to be the back of your bullpen. So why do you think that he signed Joe Smith now and kind

of went away from that principle? Yeah, I mean, not knowing anything actually about it, my guess is that it was the result of heavy input by somebody above him or below him, would be my guess. I mean, Smith is, you know, I don't know, to some degree, Smith, I don't know, Smith is kind of his sort of reliever, his type of reliever, in that, you know, Smith is not a classic, you know, 97 mile an hour with a hard slider who's going to get paid to, you know, be a closer someday.

So the average annual value might qualify him as the bargain reliever that he goes for. I mean, everybody he goes for is kind of a bargain to some degree. And I don't know, maybe you can argue that Smith has a little bit of that in him. But I mean, my guess is that DiPoto almost probably almost got fired or at least, I don't know if he almost got fired, but at least I'm sure it was in his head for the last few months of the season. And at this point without being there, we don't really know what concessions he had to make to kind of keep the peace in that front office or, you know, Artie Marino is always a threat to have a strong opinion about which direction the team should be going.

And I wondered, actually, I'm thinking about this actually a little bit more from the Peter Borges deal, because DePoto didn't seem to be interested in trading Borges until now. And Borges seems like the sort of guy that DiPoto would like and that he would realize is probably somewhat undervalued by the larger market. And so it was sort of odd to see him trade Borges for Fries. And it made me think that it might just be a, you know, kind of a realistic look at the manager and sort of knowing, you know, that he gets to, you know, he gets to pick players, but Socia is going to use them. And if you don't think that Socia is going to use them in exactly the way that you are planning, that's kind of a suboptimal use of your resources. So I don't know. I just thought that maybe in both cases it was sort of a realization of trying to put a team on the field that Socia would work best with instead of maybe imposing his own vision of what type of players Socia would work best with. I don't know. Just speculating. to win now and to not have a completely terrible bullpen again.

And I included a quote that he, that he said in April of last year, where he, he said that he likes to build a bullpen with different looks. He said, you want to try to create as much diversity as you can diversity with, you know, pitches velocities arm angles and smith is of course a sidearm guy who's dropped down even lower over time that is kind of an interesting idea and i yeah i wonder like how would you even test that i wonder whether he's basing that on you know some studies some empirical thing that they've done or whether it's just sort of a theory that it seems like it would be a difficult thing to test whether there's any advantage to that. I don't think you have to necessarily show that there's a sequential advantage,

which might be what you're envisioning. The idea that, you know, like a pitcher coming in after another pitcher or, you know, from game to game might have some advantage. I'm thinking of it more like we hear that teams are sort of moving toward the idea of, I don't know, clustering types of pitchers together or types of hitters together. So instead of saying this batter is four for nine in his career against the starting pitcher and letting that dictate the manager's decision in any way you would basically cluster pitchers so that you would say uh this guy is uh you know a 217 on base percentage against the cohort of pitchers who are most like this guy and sort of trying to to tease out what sorts of skills uh different batters and different pitchers

have and how to how to use the matchups to your advantage. And the more specifically you could do that and the more specifically you could target it, the better your ability to squeeze every last gram of talent out of each guy. So if you have a bullpen that gives you seven different cohorts, that represents seven different cohorts, and your manager is on board with this and has looked at it and knows what you're doing, it might just be that he's able to sort of micro-target his relievers better during games instead of simply just breaking them into lefty-righty closer.

Okay. And I didn't have that much to say about McCann really anyway. I think it's what I expected him to get. It's the contract I pretty much would have projected him to get. I think he'll be worth it. I think it's a big upgrade for the Yankees because only the Blue Jays, the White Sox, and the Marlins had catchers who hit worse last year than the Yankees' collection of

Stewart and Romine and Cervelli and Murphy. I think he'll be a good fit for Yankee Stadium. I think if he does have to move to first or DH toward the end of the contract, the Yankees will have openings at those positions by that time uh but i am not convinced that he'll have to move because he is also a very good framing catcher and we know from from public comments that they've made and some of the catchers that they've signed that the yankees are aware of that and value that. So I'm thinking that they might be willing to live with him as a catcher into his mid-30s as long as he continues to do that skill.

And I would expect them to make more moves to supplement this addition and possibly trade some of their young catching depth at some point because they now have, know gary sanchez and austin romine and jr murphy and guys who were pretty much you know at least a couple guys who are major league ready just about and and would be of interest to other teams so uh i i like the move thought it was a big upgrade just out of, as far as sort of Yankees criminology goes, does this signing of McCann this early in the offseason for the specific terms that he has make you think they are more likely to sign lots of guys or less likely to sign lots of guys?

Does it tell you anything about the Yankees' finances, I guess? I think more likely. You know, I don't know. I know that they are trying to get things done without waiting around for Cano, and they're trying to impose some sort of deadline on Cano. And, I mean, they do. If A-Rod doesn't play next year, and certainly he's going to be suspended for part of the year at least,

they have a decent amount of payroll room to sign some guys. I forget what the exact number is, but I would guess if they made this commitment, it's sort of a, you know, it's a move that you expect McCann to be worth that money at the early end of the contract. And I would assume that they plan to build a contending team around him in part. I don't think they're going to just sign McCann and stop because I don't think they are a playoff team

if they sign McCann and stop, or even if they sign McCann and Cano and stop. So I think there's probably more coming. Okay, emails? Yeah, are we doing an email show tomorrow? Yeah. Okay, all right, so let's do an email show tomorrow. So we need some material then.

So send us emails at podcast at baseballprospectus.com. By the way, one of the questions that we talked about in last week's email show, the Matt Trueblood question about switching corner outfielders depending on the batter. Russell Carlton wrote a nice article about that that was up at BP on Monday called The Corner Outfield Inefficiency. So you should go read that if you want to see the actual numbers in the math as opposed to us just saying things off the top of our heads. Yeah, that's great. Yep. All right. We'll be back with the email show tomorrow.