Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 348: Robot GMs, Bartolo at Bat, and Other Listener Emails

Episode Date: December 13, 2013

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about trading within the division, stats on baseball broadcasts, Mike Trout, and more.

🎵 That's okay It's good to be here. It's great to be here. We're doing listener email shows today. We got quite a few emails this week, so we're just going to skim them and go through them as we record. Before we start, did you see this picture of Robinson Canoe? The one that you called him fat. Essentially, yes. Is it just me? I didn't actually look at it oh let me look at it yeah i'm gonna send it to you uh i'll send it to you it's i don't look at it i have the internet i don't know whether it's just me or he looks huge he looks massive he does

i don't know i don't know what it is it's I mean, there's a billow that could be not his fault, but even if you look past the stomach, his face looks thick, his neck has neck fat, and his back is enormous. It looks, yeah. Someone replied to my tweet and said that it was an outdoors photo shoot, and so he was wearing many layers. Oh. But his face still looks large.

I don't know whether it's the David Ortiz beard he has going on now or what, but I don't know. It's not the picture that I would want to put out to the world if I were the Mariners PR department bragging about the big superstar we just signed. The literally big superstar. Clever. That was clever. Thank you. Do you suppose this becomes a big thing for the next three months? a big thing for the next three months?

Well, I hope so. I was just thinking that on the pantheon of fat player pictures, I think it falls somewhere between fat Derek Jeter and fat Chipper Jones, both of which I enjoyed very much. Wait, so it falls between them. It's better than fat Jeter, I it's better for him or better for us just better for us just more entertaining for us but fat chipper fat chipper is retired though yeah but i i really enjoyed fat chipper and it's great because you never you never know for sure whether

it's just deceptive photography or not because the the day after fat cheater there was like a a regular looking cheater picture but it still sort of persisted for a while. So I hope that this becomes a storyline that we track until opening day. Is this a bigger deal than Fat Mike Trout was? Oh, right. I forgot about that one. No. That was a pretty big deal. That was real, right, at least briefly. Yeah, well, I mean, he gained a lot of weight,

and he says that he always comes to camp weighing more and loses weight as he goes, I think. Well, I was okay with the Robinson Cano deal until I saw this picture. Now I'm a little worried. It's only December. I know. he's got no he's got no obligation to to be in shape right now and it probably doesn't take that long to get into shape i mean it's four months until a baseball game happens put on the off season 15 fine with me

um okay i've gained a few i've gained a few since the season ended you wouldn't want to see me you can gain as many as you want as long as it doesn't affect your podcasting performance. Okay, so let's start. Speaking of large players, I guess let's start with this question from Dan, who says, After you guys discussed Bartolo Colon and his contract, it got me thinking on a general level about how Colon's value may be different in the AL versus the NL. Then I thought about the biggest difference between the two leagues, that now, as a Met, Colon will have to bat two to three times per game. One would figure that at his size, age,

and general distaste for looking interested, Colon is a prime candidate for a zero batting average season. Obviously, the Mets wouldn't care about that, but are there any examples where it might make sense for a team to value a pitcher differently because of the potential for offensive contribution? I think this might come into play in the NL, where relative to the league, an excellent hitter could be standard deviations above the mean. So Bartolo Colon, he is a in 104 plate appearances, most of which came many years ago. In his last, let's see, since 2006, his last hit was in 2005. Since 2006, he's had 19 plate appearances and has not reached base and has struck out 10 times with a couple sacrifices

I wrote about this once, do you remember this? do you remember when I wrote about this? about Cologne specifically? no, about whether teams should pay attention to their you do remember that because I did not remember that now that you mention it, I do I didn't there yeah you you do remember that because i did not remember that now that you mentioned it i do i

had i didn't uh uh yeah so i i did an article last offseason about whether uh whether the difference is um persistent and whether it's significant enough and so here's the conclusions the spread between uh the the top and bottom pitchers for non-pitching warp, which includes fielding, base running, and batting, was 1.9 wins last year, which is the equivalent to the value of Carlos Beltran in 2012, and had a year-to-year correlation for pitchers of about 0.35. And I concluded that paying a pitcher like Tommy Hansen a bit more to

pitch in the AL, or a pitcher like Mike Leak a bit more to pitch in the NL, is a justifiable market decision. Do you want to put an over-under on Bartolo Colon's batting average for 2014? Well, nobody ever goes hitless. That's the weird thing about baseball is they all get hits. And most of them fall in that like 270 OPS range, which is about where Colon is career.

It's possible that he, I mean, I remember when I was growing up, Rick Russell had just given up on the idea. And I don't know if the stats would back me up on this, but I remember Rick Russell would just given up on the idea. And I don't know if the stats would back me up on this, but I remember Rick Russell would just come up and put the bat like lazily on his shoulder and stand as far away from the plate as he could and then walk away.

And Colon seems like the kind of guy who would do that. But he also sort of seems like the kind of guy who might be like Don Robinson and just actually have a lot of power and take big swings. So we'll see one way or the other. But I doubt that he – I would just bet that he'll fall somewhere between the 20th and 80th percentile of hitters. Okay. I'm going to look up Rick Rushall now.

All right. Okay. Well, we can take this question then from Nicholas, who asks or says, I don't understand the concept that the Rays will not consider trading David Price within the division. Obviously, it's not ideal to have him face his old team, I guess, three to four times per year, but there must be a point where an offer is too good to pass up. To me, if I were to receive an offer that provided, say, 120% of the value from a divisional opponent,

then the added value would seem to considerably outweigh facing him three to four times per year. What do you guys think? Is there a point where the value is too much to pass up? If so, how much more? So a listener sent us an excerpt or an interview with Alex Anthopoulos last week, where he was talking mostly about the Doug Pfister trade and whether the Blue Jays had been in on it or how it works when you're a team that sees someone traded for what seems like not

a big return. Are you upset that you didn't get a call from that team asking you to match the offer and that sort of thing? But the hosts asked him at the end of the interview about Price. And of course, he couldn't really answer without tampering. So he very gingerly danced around the question and said, if there were a player like David Price who were available, hypothetically, and he basically ruled out the idea of going after such a player because of the trading within the division thing. So it's something that certainly is on every general manager's mind to this day. I used to think that it was one of the dumber things. Back when I was convinced that everybody in baseball was really stupid,

this was a prime example of teams being stupid. Because if you think that the trade is a good trade for you, then you should actually be more happy to trade within your division because whatever talent you gain, you're taking from a division opponent. So either have some confidence in your assessments or just go away, get out of the game. But of course, then I came to my senses and realized that trades are not zero-sum. The sport itself is largely zero-sum, but the trades are not. There's 30 teams, and two of them can both improve relative to the other 28. And presumably, if you have any faith in your opponents being rational actors

who have an idea what they're doing, they also will be improving themselves. So the marginal benefit to a team finding a trade partner outside their division is actually a little bit greater because they're, unless you actually do think you're hurting the other team. If it was a straight, you know, like if you were trading your shortstop for the other guy's shortstop and nothing else was changing and there were no other factors involved and it was simply a bet that your guy was going to be worse than their guy and you wanted to swap them, then you should because you're hurting them as you improve yourself.

But if you're making a trade that puts you in a position to win this year while giving the other team what they want, which is maybe a thicker farm system and payroll relief and a window in two years or something like that, then you would rather not play into their plan. In fact, I have come to the conclusion now that in almost any sport or game, the best strategy is to simply disrupt your opponent's strategy. And so if that were the case, you would definitely want to avoid doing anything that your division rival

would plan to but of course all the same there are three other teams in your division and you could both improve at the expense of the other three and so you wouldn't be that worried about helping your division rival get slightly better if it

improved you by enough and that was where your best way of improving is. Mm-hmm. All right. I do like when teams trade within the division. I find it to be a—even though I just said what I just said, I do find it to be an admirable and rational bucking of trends when, for instance, the A's and the Rangers make a trade. And I generally support it. I like seeing it happen. But if I were a GM, I would usually try to find the

same means of improvement from the other league. Okay. Rick in Seattle wants to know, what is one piece of data outside of the standard field effects or something similar that isn't currently being tracked that you'd like to see tracked? For instance, John Miller keeps track of every broken bat on his scorecard, which would be great data to have league-wide. So if we're throwing out field effects, so many things are tracked, I think, that we don't even realize are tracked. If you look at InsideEdge's products or BaseballInfoSolutions or all of those various data providers, they really do track almost everything that you could think of. For instance, broken bats, which I agree is kind of a cool thing. I don't know. I think it has some utility probably, but that is tracked by one of those providers.

I've seen some of that data at some point. I guess my pick would be relievers warming up. I don't know whether anyone tracks that. I assume that the team tracks that about their own guys, how often they got up and then didn't come into the game. I kind of doubt that that's something that's tracked by any of the third-party providers, so that would be an interesting thing that I'd like to see.

I don't have an answer for this i i'm sorry okay i would i would like to have an answer i can't think of anything there i'll keep thinking yeah uh do you have an answer to rick's other question which is what is your favorite baseball video game uh the only baseball video game i ever played was Bases Loaded 2. And I liked Bases Loaded 2 a lot, except there were like two pitchers in the game, out of the whole universe of pitchers, who threw slightly higher in the strike zone, and it was really hard to hit them. There was almost nothing you could do to hit them. So you would just keep playing until you got to those games and then i don't know what that is uh you would keep playing until you got to those

games and then you would be hopeless it was awful and you never played another one no but i did like bases loaded too there was uh it was fun i never i play a lot of video games, but I don't really ever play sports video games. I used to play some baseball games. I used to play the EA ones, triple play and MVP baseball, but I never really got into it. If I did play sports games, which I generally didn't, I usually played hockey and soccer games. I felt like they made better video games. soccer games. I felt like they made better video games. Was your answer to the data question

like what you thought would be most fun to know or what you thought would be most ripe for analysis? I was thinking of it more like I was kind of thinking what you could do the most with study-wise. We talked

one show about heart rate monitors and something like that like i would love something that measured um you know heart rate monitor would be good if you could somehow like russell has proposed uh uh sort of uh measuring you know players happiness uh that would be great i would would love to have a constant happiness meter on players. That might be my favorite thing. But those are sort of things where you don't even know exactly what you would want to do with them, but there's like a million things that you can't possibly do without them.

Very pie-in-the-sky things. So stuff like that. Something that monitored players' balance at all times. Yeah, sure. like that something that monitored like players balance at all times yeah sure um yeah and there's there's some company that's marketing a product that is doing like real-time biomechanical stuff just not even having to bring players into a lab and strap them up to a bunch of motion capture devices but just actually being able to do that as they pitch on major league mounds, which seems like it would be an exciting thing if you figure out how to make the most of that data. Okay, Ian asks, when watching my local baseball broadcast. They show 11 stats, starts, record, ERA, innings pitched, hits,

walks, strikeouts, left-handed batting average, right-handed batting average, homers allowed when introducing a pitcher. If you were the person on the production team who chose those 11 stats, which stats would you choose for an audience of BP subscribers or hitters are introduced with five stats which stats would you choose so what if when they flash the little graphic when the pitchers come on the screen and they're warming up what stats would you want to see

in that graphic ideally hmm well I'm pretty good at doing math in my head so the things that I would want to see for my own benefit would be head. So the things that I would want to see for my own benefit would be slightly different than the things that I would want to see if I were trying to like kind of evangelize. Um, but if it, if it were, if it were for myself, uh, and I'm not going to have 11 off the top of my head, but, um, I would like to see, um, I think what I would like to see – I think what I would like to see is innings, strikeouts, walks, home runs, and ERA.

And then a second column with the same five but over the previous month for pitchers. And probably record just to annoy people and keep my dad happy. No, I don't know what the 11th would be, but I think that basically would tell. Like for a reliever, I think I might like to know. If I could have 12 for a reliever, it would be those five plus average leverage index. Those six for the season and for the previous 30 calendar days.

If it were a person who had not spent the previous 30 calendar days in the majors, then I would want those six for the majors and for the minors. I don't even know if I need that many stats. I just kind of want innings pitched, and I'd probably want rate stats. I could do the math in my head, but I'd rather not have to. So if you give me a strikeout percentage and a walk percentage, that would be nice. And maybe a ground ball percentage would be interesting. And I'd like to see some repertoire stuff, which some broadcasts do. Tell me what pitches this guy throws and how hard he throws them and how often he throws them. Yeah, I think I'd rather have ground ball percentage than home runs.

I'm taking that one out. I think given the choice, I would rather just know his ground ball rate than his home run rate. Yeah, me too. And then I don't know for a hitter. I guess I just want to know. I just kind of want to see his slash stats and his plate appearances. Yeah.

I don't need that much more for him. I can dig up the details myself if I need to. There are very few details that I would want to see consistently. Like you could have lefty-righty splits, but, you know, for the most part, I'm just going to regress those to the mean anyway. Like I'm not I'm going to assume that they're that they're not any more telling than his overall stats. I would probably just want this, you know, the slash stats and stolen bases so that I have some idea of whether he can run. I want to know how often he's reached on air. Just just just in case aoki comes up

um uh okay this is uh you you tweeted something about this earlier i think eric asks uh hang on hang on hang on i think that i might like this would be it would be so out of place to to skip from the generalness of slash stats to this but i actually would like to know uh like infield hits plus bunts so just basically we fold those together and just do infield hits just so that i know what kind of a player i'm looking at yeah okay i'd want to know home runs too why not home run sure Sure, so slash stats, home runs, infield hits, stolen bases And average speed off the bat Well yeah, if we can get that I'd be up for that for sure

Okay, so Eric asked whether the next great inefficiency is the Blue Jays knowing how to help pitchers with the knuckleball. And he's referring to a tweet by Shai Davidi from earlier today who quoted Alex Anthopoulos and said that Tomo Oka, who the Blue Jays just signed to a minor league deal and who has reinvented himself as a knuckleballer, to a minor league deal and who has reinvented himself as a knuckleballer, that Oka is a no-risk proposition and that the Blue Jays are looking to bring in other potential knucklers and use their organizational knowledge of the pitch. You retweeted this tweet, so you must have thought it was significant. Or you just clicked on it accidentally. This is gotcha journalism here. Yeah. or you just clicked on it accidentally this is gotcha journalism here yeah i retweeted it because

it is uh it was interesting for a few reasons one toma oka right throwing the knuckleball that was probably why i retweeted it two because uh i had just been editing a uh an essay by shy and so i was i was just flooded with goodwill three we had talked about uh we had talked about this sort of idea right we didn't we do a whole episode on this once who knows we did and we talked about how there's a uh we talked about bill james said about how it's difficult to to develop knuckleballers because you need to build this whole knuckleball infrastructure around them and find catchers who can catch them and coaches who can coach them and all of these associated costs to it. utilized knuckleball ability in the world and that baseball is going to sort of move toward this in or could somehow move toward this then there would be a first mover advantage to the team that um you know builds the infrastructure to support it so uh that's what we talked about originally that's why i retweeted it and uh i didn't have much to say about that besides i saw this tweet

and i'm sharing it. Well, I guess that was basically Eric's purpose in sending it to us. I don't know. It's not as if they developed Dickie. Dickie has kind of been a knuckleball mentor for some other pitchers who are not in the organization. So I guess he could serve that purpose with Boudier's pitchers. And I don't really know what other organizational knowledge of the pitch there is, really. But Josh Toley is there, and I guess he can catch it.

I don't know. The thing about the previous question is that a lot of what I would want to know, almost everything I would want to know beyond the slash stats is descriptive and doesn't do as well with stats for hitters, not as much for pitchers, and doesn't do as well with stats as it does with kind of descriptive words because a lot of these numbers aren't really intuitive or what seems like a high swing rate varies depending on what kind of hitter you are

and how you do your damage and how pitchers pitch to you. So I'm thinking of how if you go to Brooks now and you search for a player, the first thing you see is he does like a hitter at a glance thing using all the hitters' rates at various pitches and his contact rates and everything. And it's really amazing. And every time I go to a player, it helps me focus my opinions or feelings about that player even before I've dug in to all the charts and tables and and spray charts and and such so it'll be like Logan Morrison in 2013 it says against all fastballs

he has a very good eye and a steady approach at the plate with the league average likelihood to swing and miss and I just read that sentence with just the words there's in parentheses there's all his numbers but you can you can either read the numbers or you can skip the numbers. It becomes very intuitive. It takes these numbers that are hard to process in isolation and makes them very understandable. Probably, I would be happy to have slash stats and then just that, where it's a combination of the words and the numbers, but the numbers are very easily skipped over if you're not into it. Like Dan bolds all the key words. So it's really, really easy to read.

Brooks baseball, by the way, is like, I don't know, it got redesigned what, a year ago? It's so good. It's so good now. It's like incredible how much I use it. He has done an incredible job on it. So everybody should have always been using this. But if it's been a while since you've gone to Brooks, it is an amazing place to look at players right now. It's true. I was looking at it when I was writing about Aaron Seabee the other day, and I was actually wondering how to use that

text, because you think of Aaron Seabee as a guy who has a terrible eye. He chases a lot of pitches and he never walks and everything. And so the text says, against all fastballs, he has had a poor eye. Against breaking pitches, he has had an exceptionally poor eye. Against off-speed pitches, he has had a very good eye. I don't know. I wasn't sure what to make of that. Should I conclude that he actually does see off-seat pitches particularly well, or is it just that it's a smaller sample of pitches,

and so we probably shouldn't conclude as much? I don't know what to make of the differences between pitch types, and I guess I'd like to see a combined description against all pitch types. and I guess I'd like to see a combined description against all those guys. Yeah, and you would also want to know how much variation there is from player to player and how consistent those things are because it could actually be that they're our hitter. I mean, maybe Aaron Seabier really is good at spotting a breaking ball, I mean, spotting an off-speed pitch out of the hand, or maybe that's not a location where he generally chases.

A well-placed changeup might not be the location that he chases, and maybe he doesn't like low fastballs, and so it doesn't really fool him. Or, like you said, maybe it's nothing. So I don't know intuitively how much variation there is from player to player and whether that's true. But at this point in my life, I spend probably more time at Brooks Baseball than any other site in the internet. Okay, this one seems like it should be pretty easy, I think.

It's Brady asks, when I'm lying in bed getting ready to go to sleep, occasionally an email idea pops into my head. The other night, as I was wondering how many years would Mike Trout have to play before you would consider him worthy of the Hall of Fame? Assume that Trout doesn't suffer any life-changing Tony Canigliaro type of injury. So the answer is just 10 years, right? I mean, if he plays at this level or something close to this level, then he just has to make it to the minimum number of years to be eligible. In fact, if he played this well for eight or nine years, I would probably support waiving the 10-year eligibility rule just for him. Yeah, rephrase the question. and and actually do you think that there is a point

that uh he could be so good that they would change the rules if he decided to walk away for some reason presumably like let's say it's a non-tragic reason he leaves um maybe it's a part like maybe maybe he gets glaucoma which would be a non-tragic but slightly tragic way. Pretty tragic. Yeah, but I mean not. Oh, is that not tragic? No, it's not. He's not dead.

Tragic is – I think tragic specifically – don't you think tragic specifically is limited to dying? I don't know. Maybe. I would consider that pretty tragic but if you're googling tragic I am I actually want to know I don't know whatever the definition of tragic is I would also amend that

definition to include Mike Trout retiring early because of blindness um so so yeah let's just say let's just say he he got bored and wanted to be in movies or something like that do you think that eight years of this they would change the rules or are the rules the rules uh gosh i would i would support a rule change because at that point, presumably he's an 80-win player at that point if he continues to post 10-win seasons. And if he's an 80-win player, he's better than a large selection of Hall of Famers. How are you going to change the rules for a guy who never even won an MVP? Yeah, and someone who walked away from the game because he didn't care enough about baseball to keep playing um i don't know

if they would if they would do it for him i would i would support it just out of the just from the the it's a museum and you want the best baseball players ever in it. And at that point he would have had the best peak of any player ever. You would, you would support there being no rule to wave you. I can't imagine you would think that there should be an arbitrary restriction on this. Uh, I guess,

I guess so. Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't, I don't know that I would want it to go so far that you're, you know, putting in Mark Fidrich or something because he has like a, a really good year and captures everyone's imagination.

And at that point it's the hall of famous, not the hall of, you know, whatever. But, um, but, uh,

but yeah, eight years of Mike Trout, seven years of Mike Trout for that matter. I would, I would put him in Not six? Six is borderline I don't think I'd put him in for six You're not a

I mean if you're a peak guy though He would have Something like a I mean he'd be a top five peak at that point Yeah even if you added in a zero year Probably To get to seven years Which is what Jay Jaffe uses for his peak calculation. Let me ask you this.

How many wins – he's like a 22-win player so far. That's crazy. In two years. How many wins will he have by 10? Let's imagine he does quit after 10. Okay. How many wins do you think he'll have? All right.

And he just walks away from the game. He doesn't have to quit. I'll say he averages, I don't know, seven wins maybe over the next eight years. So he'll have, what, 56 plus 22. He'll have almost 80 wins. Yeah, that's... And he'll be 30 or less or something. Yeah, he just finished his age 21, so he'll be 29.

Yeah. So let's see. The most that any player has ever had through age 29 is loading. Loading So Mickey Mantle had 84 I'm Knocking out Ty Cobb and Rogers Hornsby For era

So Mantle at 84, A-Rod at 81 So So he needs to get about 60 in 8 years So about seven and a half player which would be a an incredible success that you probably shouldn't bet on but uh that's what that's what some guys do and he's on a good rate uh all right is that it? Can we do one more? Are you leaving? We can do one more. Okay. This one comes from Vinit in Milwaukee. So he is asking whether you could come up with a robot or a computer GM to approximate the moves that a human GM makes.

He says, Baseball Perspectives recently ran a guest piece about team core wins by Jonathan Judge. I wonder if you could use that along with expected payroll and expected team wins, et cetera, to come up with a metric to grade each trade that a team makes. If you could grade each trade, free agent signing, contract extension, et cetera, could you construct a robot slash computer GM to make all the moves a human GM makes? The owner would have to input variables such as win now or win in 2015 to 16 and payroll. The computer would go through each possible move, grade it, and make the best ones. Do you think human GMs would be more or less likely to trade with robot GMs? On the one hand,

there would be no warm human interaction, which doesn't really seem to exist now anyway in the text message era. On the other hand, a robot would not be offended by ridiculous trade offers. Human GMs would offer all kinds of trades to see if they could somehow game the system. No?

Doesn't this feel like a trap? Don't you think he's trying to trap us? This is Murray Chass. He's writing a letter under somebody else's name, and he's going to reprint this if we say something incriminating. Yeah, this is the ultimate stat hidden question. I actually think the answer is a definitive no, and I'll explain why. definitive no, and I'll explain why.

There was a time where I would use Pocota so faithfully in a fantasy draft, in my two-person fantasy draft in fact, that I would just have no opinion whatsoever.

I would just go straight down the line. And what I found is that that doesn't actually work. You have to be able to spot the, say, 10% of cases or maybe 5% of cases where you're smarter than Pocota. It's good to generally rely on a system instead of yourself. Usually, I would say a system, any system is better than no system, and it's good to rely on a good system. However, there are always going to be extremes where you have to be able to spot the mistake and not get tricked by it

because the problem is that those 5% of mistakes are where your opponents are going to zero in on you. You're basically going to be a sitting duck on those 5% of mistakes if you don't spot them. So basically, it's not that, like, let's say the system gets 95 out of 100 things right. Well, in most of those 95 cases, there's not going to be any action. You're not going to be making trades that's like knowledge that doesn't do that much for you because it's basically just you're going to keep your guy and the other team is going to keep their guy and you have this knowledge but you don't do much

with it. But the 5%, if you're actually willing to trade your worst player for the good player, the other way around, your good player for the worst player, then the teams are going to immediately zero in on those and you're going to make all of the 5% of bad trades. You're basically going to get crushed on the mistakes. So you have to be able to filter out the mistakes and say, I'm not going to do that. And as an example, one of the projection systems currently has, at least somebody told me this, Billy Burns, the 5'9 outfielder who was traded for Jerry Blevins yesterday. It has Billy Burns as a better player right now than Mark Trumbo as far as projections for 2014. And that's wrong. That's

not true. Billy Burns is not a better player right now than Mark Trumbo. And if you had a computer that thought it was and was willing to make that trade, it would take 12 seconds for a GM to make that trade and take Trumbo from you and get Billy Burns. You have to be able to say, this does not pass the smell test and I'm not going to do it. So that's what... A sufficiently advanced computer projection system though would have the ability to sniff that, right? I mean, you could incorporate scouting information or something you'd incorporate you know biographical details and he's he's this i mean what pakoda attempts to do by by looking at comparable players and and height and weight and all those things but

but better i guess um and you know looking at looking at players who had that that level of minuscule power at that level and what happened to them when they made the majors and you could you could incorporate scouting reports. Right. We're not saying everyone in the organization is a robot. You'd still have human scouts and you could you could incorporate their ratings somehow. could you could incorporate their ratings somehow um and you could you could make the system smarter i mean you could you i mean there are robot gms right in in baseball video games um i i don't know how how oh my gosh we're now we're now combining the the robot and baseball video game arguments simultaneously if you can get your fantasy team, I already got my fantasy team into this conversation. I don't have a fantasy team, so I can't. Wow. But it's true, right?

I mean, my college roommate, when he wasn't in class, was playing out-of-the-park baseball for like eight hours a day. And that game and any franchise mode in a baseball video game has a robot GM who will propose trades and theoretically will reject trades if you offer a very lopsided deal. major leaguers and then it's easy to compare performance um and and not having a lot of experience with with sort of uh baseball simulators and franchise modes i don't really know how easy it is to game those systems but but that's sort of a rudimentary thing that we're we're talking about here um i would imagine you could be right i mean i i still think that humans um aren't very good at making the right humans are not very good at making something um that is correct but they're very good at spotting something that's wrong like that we're good at noticing when something is just

a little askew right like that's what the uncanny valley is it's like you take one percent away from it and we can spot that. Our brains are really good at picking up minute differences between optimal and suboptimal. And so we can't necessarily create an optimal situation every time, but we can kind of avoid the disaster. So I still think that even if you had a computer system that was extremely effective at making the right decision a lot, I think that the wrong decisions would still be would require

human guidance to avoid. If you're suggesting that there's a robot GM as well as a bunch of humans running it or making the ultimate decision, well that's basically what we're talking about in real life. Every team's got their... I would guess 28 teams, at least,

have their projection systems that are running right now. So the answer is yes. I'd be curious how long it would take the other GMs to realize that there was a robot GM among them, because we keep reading about how the the new breed of gm communicates almost solely via via text at least in the the lead-up stages to a deal and text messages and email uh and if you could maybe maybe that's how they would tell because the computer would sound like an instant message bot and it wouldn't be a convincing facsimile of a GM. But if you're not actually on the phone with these guys every day or seeing them that often, you could get away with it for a while. Just have a figurehead front office guy who pretends to be the GM.

For all we know, every team has a robot GM. For all we know, we are robots ourselves. I'm sure there will be robot podcasters someday. There are already robot game story writers. So there will be robot baseball podcasters at some point in the near future. And then we can finally take some time off. So we are going to take the next couple days off. We will be back on Monday. We welcome you to join our Facebook group at

facebook.com slash groups slash Effectively Wild. As always, there is a lot of good discussion going on in there with many of you interacting. And we ask you to rate and review the show and subscribe to the show on iTunes because that's how we find new listeners. That's how iTunes knows that you're listening and other people know that they should be listening. And you can send us emails at podcast at baseballperspectives.com. So we hope you have a wonderful weekend and we will be back next week.