Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 370: Musings on Masahiro Tanaka

Episode Date: January 23, 2014

Ben and Sam discuss several subjects either closely or loosely related to the Yankees’ signing of Masahiro Tanaka.

Tanaka, recently of the Tokyo Giants, knocks himself cold for the second time this week. Maybe in Japan that's actually better than catching the ball. Personally, I think he's just trying to get out of the lineup. Good morning and welcome to episode 370 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives. I am Ben Lindberg, joined by Sam Miller. all prospectus i am ben lindberg joined by sam miller uh so today we're going to talk about the news that we have been foreshadowing and expecting to happen for some time it it did happen today the dodgers signed sean figgins i actually knew that joke was coming as soon as you started talking. Yeah, I got you. The Yankees signed Masahiro Tanaka to a large contract, which we knew it would be, but I don't think we knew that it would be quite this large.

this large. It is seven years and $155 million, technically, I suppose. Although, much as there was with the Clayton Kershaw contract that we talked about last year, there is an opt-out clause, which will allow him to opt out after his fourth season. And of course, there's the $20 million posting fee on top of that. And there is the money that the Yankees will have to pay above the $155 million because they'll have to pay more on every contract because they'll be over the luxury tax threshold. So I don't know. Not to mention the cost of all those limo trips for his wife from Japan to New York. I don't know how they're going to figure those out. It's a callback to yesterday's show.

Yeah. His wife, I guess, was okay with coming to New York, it turns out. So it's a lot of money. I don't know exactly what the amount would work out to if you added in all those other factors. And you also figure that if they were willing to pay him this much per season over that many seasons and also give him the opt-out clause, as we discussed last year, the opt-out clause theoretically should favor the player, not the team. And so presumably they would have been willing to pay him even more per year if they hadn't had to give him the opt-out clause. So it's a lot of money. I don't think the destination is surprising. I'm pretty sure when we talked about it, I thought he would end up with the Yankees, or maybe I'm just imagining that. I think that's right.

I think you thought he was the Yankees, and I think I thought he was the Cubs. And I'm still surprised he's not the Cubs. To me, it seems like the Cubs should have just spent whatever it took. To me, the Cubs, even more than the Yankees, probably should have just figured the money doesn't matter and signed him. That's what I think. I think the Yankees have more incentive to sign him. That's because you're in a 2014 mindset.

I'm in a 2016 mindset. Yeah, but 2014 is here right now. Yeah, but you're not going to be able to, it's not like there's 30 awesome pitchers who are going to be available between now and 2016. So 2016 might as well be here. It is equally here. Sure. I mean, it's not equally in here, but it's comparably here.

But there will be other good pitchers available? Not really. I mean, like four of them and all of them flawed and half of them costing draft picks and old know old and going to cost too much anyway that like i i think you could you know maybe make the case that that that uh there isn't going to be a better deal than overpaying for tanaka for 2016 i mean so and not only that but i don't think that the cubs only need one awesome pitcher for 2016 i think they'll probably need three so just start collecting them it's going to be hard when they decide they want

to when they when when all their top five prospects are studs and they're like now's the moment it's going to be hard to get all the awesome players they need or maybe it won't be maybe that lesson of the dodgers is really easy uh yeah well i i mean i think think that for the Yankees, Tanaka, at least there's a fairly high probability that he could make the difference between them making the playoffs and not making the playoffs. Or at least I think that he, I don't know, I think you could defensively say that they should be the wildcard team now, maybe. Whereas I don't think I could go along with you having said that yesterday. And I don't know, given the fact that they missed the playoffs last year and they've spent a lot of money to try to make the playoffs this year. And we've talked and I've written about all the incentives that they have to make the playoffs, more so than any other team.

And they really needed a pitcher, and they needed someone who was not ancient. So he fits them fairly well. Yeah, I agree. And I also, if the Cubs had signed him, I could have very easily said that the Yankees should have overpaid for him and how could they let him get away. I mean, there are very strong incentives.

Right, which for all we know is how he ended up making this much money. I haven't really been monitoring. Have we heard anything about what other teams offered? No, I've only heard, all I heard is that the Angels did not make him really any offer. In fact, they did not make a formal offer, even though they were spoken of as one of the four finalists, as recently as a few days ago, which is funny um and the astros offered him more than a hundred million dollars which means that uh they actually you know that they didn't well

i don't know they probably knew that wouldn't be enough um but it's not it's not it's not not making an offer uh well ken rosenthal i think tweeted that the the yankees offer separated them uh he said yankees separated themselves on tanaka but not by much yeah i've what i have found in these situations i feel like we might have spoken about this with um i don't know jose abreu maybe where uh the the cuban player with the white socks on uh where you basically have absolutely no idea how good the guy is and it's like a total mystery of like whether he's actually going to translate and you know what his skills are going to do in the major league level and then 10 teams all bid within a million and a half of each other which is is what it was like with Abreu.

So I was fully expecting to have three months of who knows what he is. And some scouts saying he's an ace and some people saying he's better than Darvish and other people saying he's a number three maybe. And yet at the end of the day, I figured there would be 10 teams within $10 million of each other. The thing about the Yankees and I, I didn't really dig into this topic much today. So, uh, you can educate me if I'm way off on this, but so this puts them over one 89. Yeah. Yeah. And I think they, they might've been over anyway. Uh, it's kind of unclear. It, I mean, over anyway uh it's kind of unclear it i mean it it seems like we've heard many different people calculating where exactly they are at different points in the the offseason and getting to different answers but my understanding of it was that they either were over it or were likely to

go over it anyway uh but that this made it a sure thing well Well, all right. Never mind. I was just going to say because my impression of the 189 is that it was like a huge – like did you ever get a sense of like what the difference is between 189 and 190 for them? Because in my head I never really – I don't know if I ever knew that but in my head I was sort of imagining that this was like a $50 million windfall for them. Yeah. The figure I have in my head is $40 million, and I don't know how it got there, but I'll assume that I read it at some point. So that would basically mean, I mean, if that were the case, and I guess we're saying that that maybe or probably wasn't the case, but if that were the case, then the Yankees only outbid everybody but you know de facto outbid everybody by 40 million dollars yeah if that if that were the case but and so i wanted to bring up the 189 thing because

in retrospect it seems like such a strange strange story that we've been talking about this for a long long time i mean this has been this has been discussed for years now uh that this was part of the yankees long-term plan and and maybe i guess they never actually guaranteed it they just said it was a goal but it came up over and over and over again and if you think of just how many articles were written about the 189 and how many tweets about the 189 and how many times we talked about it on the podcast, and it all seems so silly and like such a waste in retrospect. And I wonder, I mean, first of all, it was always strange, really. It was strange from the start that the Yankees would set any sort of limit on themselves. Even if it was $40 million or $50 million, it seemed sort of strange that they would make such a big deal about it,

that it would be public knowledge that this was what they were doing, would be public knowledge that this was what they were doing, that they would be willing to not sign a free agent, to risk not making the playoffs. Just based on some of the research that's out there about what cost not making the playoffs comes to for the Yankees or how much they stand to gain from making the playoffs, it seems like it wouldn't even save them that much money overall if they were to miss out on the playoffs because they were trying to stay under 189. It seems like it would be probably a counterproductive thing or at least not much of a net gain for them. And the idea that really any Yankee fan was interested in hearing about how the Yankees wanted to stay under 189 always seemed like a strange thing. That was never going to be something

that fans were going to be totally on board with because fans know that the Yankees make money and are worth many, many millions or billions of dollars. And fans are not going to be particularly sympathetic to Hal Steinbrenner's desire to skimp relative to what they've spent on payrolls in the past just to save a certain amount of money. So it always seemed like a very strange thing and clearly was not an ironclad goal that they had to stick to because they didn't not only did they not not only did they not stick to it but they

they didn't stick to it even after getting rid of a rod's salary and letting cano go which was a huge i mean the a rod thing was a huge huge huge boost to this effort. If they hadn't been able to shed that, they wouldn't have even been close. And yeah, losing Robinson Cano, but you figure that either this or Ellsbury is essentially... They signed Ellsbury before, right? But you might argue that this or Ellsbury was kind of the alternative to that because the figures between what they offered Cano and what they paid these guys is fairly similar. They might have just had that kind of slot. But anyway, so you're the guy who used to be a high-powered Yankees executive.

Why? Why did they? Tell me. You were the expert I would go to. I don go to. gain from even bringing it up unless it was some way of lowering expectations and conditioning fans to expect them to spend a certain amount and be a certain degree of competitive just in case they didn't get to that point but they're the yankees when have they ever used lowering expectations as as a strategy so i i don't know. I assume that at some point, someone thought this was a good idea, whether out of just greed or whether they thought maybe it would force them to spend more efficiently and build from within somehow, or whether they

miscalculated the cost of not making the playoffs because of this there must have there must have been a legitimate reason at some point but it seems like it must have been misguided whatever it was if they didn't think that salaries were going to go up as much and that they could maybe have filled the holes that they needed filling you know for you know, for, you know, 20 million less per player, maybe it would have been more realistic. Yeah. Even so.

You know, and also if they hadn't gotten Tanaka, I mean, they didn't know they were going to get Tanaka. Maybe it was like the situation was that they were, you know, willing to go in on this guy because they thought he was a special talent. But, you know, what were their odds realistically? Like one one in four maybe one in three that they'd get him and um you know if the cubs had outbid him or the diamondbacks outbid him or the dodgers outbid him um then they're close and you know then maybe it becomes actually realistic even if it was uh even if they were slightly over maybe it's realistic that they could get under um so know, you kind of want to leave yourself with options

and be able to adjust as the situation goes on. And as the players, I mean, they might not have thought they were going to be able to land McCann, or they might not have thought they'd be able to land Ellsbury or Tanaka. So, you know, maybe it's just the fact that everything came together, like, you know, Walter White, and that they rolled with it, but they weren the the the everything came together like you know walter white and that they they rolled with it but they weren't counting on everything coming together and if everything couldn't come together their backup plan was to sort of bite the bullet a little bit

i don't know what do i yeah i just don't really see even if they thought it was realistic i don't really see what the benefit of broadcasting it ever was. Yeah, because it's not like this leaked out. No, this was not like some internal memo. This was on the team calendar. Yeah, pretty much. This was like on the refrigerator magnet. Exactly.

So I don't know what the point of that ever was, because it was never something that Yankees fans would get behind and support. Don't you feel, and I can only think of one other example off the top of my head, but I sort of feel like over the course of the last six or seven years, there's been this consistent annual Yankees excuse for why they're not going to spend money and it always feels like they have some it always feels like they have some reason for agents to downplay expectations and we all we usually see right through it the example that of course i'm thinking of is but is bubba crosby yeah the most famous example but it feels like they're always going, oh, we can't sign this guy this year, and they sign him, but they're saying for, you know, up until the minute they sign him, they're saying they're not going to, and it might just be a matter of, like, this is kind of

how they negotiate, but it feels like the effect is much, much greater on the New York metropolitan area and the ticket-buying public and the average New York post buyer than it is on Scott Boris and Casey Close. It doesn't really feel like those guys are deked. No, I don't – yeah, I don't think so. And it certainly doesn't seem as if they've been getting discounts on anyone all this time. Can you think of a Yankee signing, a Yankee free agent signing? I'm not saying that there isn't one. I'm just asking you. That you thought was a discount for a mid-tier or higher guy that you didn't feel like, uh, was

either market rate or more expensive than market rate, but nobody really cares because it's the Yankees. Uh, well maybe, maybe, and then the other thing Oh, also, I like how Buster Olney tweeted That the Yankees' internal expectation Is that they are essentially finished adding this winter No more pricey free agents There are no more pricey free agents It's just about they have they have already acquired most

of them um uh they could use a fifth starter i suppose yes they could uh so the other thing they have and they've given up their you know they've given up their first round pick and so if ubaldo is unsigned in three weeks, I guarantee you that his agent and various blog sites will start talking about how he fits nicely in the Yankees rotation. And he does. They should sign him. Once you're over 189, I mean, they're paying a surcharge on everybody they signed, so I guess maybe it doesn't make sense, but now they're over 189, and now they really need to win this year. They're still not any sort of a favorite. They're soft, I would say, in the back end of their rotation, and they can afford to ball them more than anybody else, and the

draft pick cost is less to them than almost anybody else. So, you know, absolutely, why shouldn't they sign him? It would be silly for them not to. It would be. It's disrespectful to the game. So I wanted to ask you about Cano in light of all the moves that the Yankees have made since they... Ben, just tell me about Cano in light of all those. Don't ask me. You have things to say.

You have thoughts on this. You're asking me because you want to swoop in with the answer at the end. Just save me the trouble. Just tell me the answer. We have discussed in the past those findings by Matt Swartz at BP and elsewhere about how players who are allowed to depart via free agency generally are not as good values for their new teams as players who are resigned or extended and stay with their original team are for that team. for that team, which would suggest that teams have some insight on the players that they've seen playing up close, and they have some idea of how they're going to age or something about how they will perform that another team might not know. And so we've talked about how that might make us more or less confident about a player who stays or goes.

So when Cano was allowed to leave, that was sort of my first thought about him, that that made me less optimistic about him. Even before Fat Cano appeared, the fact that the Yankees would let him go, despite clearly needing a player of Cano's caliber sort of surprised me. And now having seen them spend hundreds of millions of dollars since letting him go, uh, after electing not to spend hundreds of million dollars on him, are you especially pessimistic about him or not at all? Because I mean, you could say, I guess, that they just weren't willing to go 10 years, that that somehow made it different from, say, signing a really old Carlos Beltran to three years and also Elsberry to seven years, which you could kind of add up to 10 years if you wanted, and Tanaka for seven years, but really probably four. Does it make you think that they really don't think he's going to be good?

Or what? Because they still don't have a second baseman really first i would just like to uh pause this conversation for a minute and and uh go on a slight uh slight slightly different direction before i forget uh we've talked a lot recently about the uh the fat ball player photo phenomenon and we've never talked about skinny ballplayer phenomenon. And now we have skinny Sabathia. Yes, we do. Where he kind of looks haunted.

So is skinny player the exact same genre? Or is it a slightly different genre? the exact same genre or is it a slightly different genre? Well, it sort of fits into the best shape of his life genre. I think it's different. It is different, right, because nobody's trying,

generally nobody's trying to get fat and so the question is whether the photo is lying or not. Yeah, right. Whereas everybody is trying to get skinny and the question is whether it will matter or not, more or less.. Yeah, right. Whereas everybody is trying to get skinny, and the question is whether it will matter or not, more or less. Yes.

All right. You know, I think once you get to a level like Canoe, there's really virtually nothing that is not known about him. I would say that the clubs, the home clubs, his controlling clubs' informational advantage is minuscule. There's very little about Cano the person that is not known because he's a superstar. There's very little about Cano the player that hasn't been discussed and that isn't apparent to all who see him. And you start talking about

contract terms that are themselves prohibitive, almost literally regardless of player. almost literally regardless of player. And so I would say that with Cano, I don't take that as... I mean, their lack of interest in him or their lack of interest in negotiating aggressively with him was curious and it was sort of reminiscent in a lot of ways of um the cardinals with albert pool holes yeah um and you know the cardinals with albert pools they they turned out to be just just right although except that it's in that case the cardinals had

all of this young talent that they could get cheaply to replace pool holes as production whereas the yankees just let a super expensive guy go and brought in other super expensive guys. Yeah, and also with the Cardinals, Will Leach writes in his essay for the BP Annual this year that, in fact, it's a little bit of revisionism, the idea that the Cardinals were planning on not having pools. In fact, it's very clear if you look at how they built their team and what they were saying going into it, that they were totally intending to sign him

and that everybody else was intending for them to sign him and that it was likely just as much a shock and kind of against their interests or their perceived interests that they didn't sign him, that the Angels simply got crazy. So, you know, which was what I was going to get to, it's hard to know exactly how clubs assess their players in such situations because, as I said, the dollars and the years themselves become more important than the player.

So it is curious though or interesting i guess that the yankees you know scoffed at the very notion of going 10 years for cano and um i don't know maybe even nine who knows maybe eight uh and yet seven for tanaka where i mean what do you think the equivalent is is seven for a pitcher equivalent to 10 for a hitter? I guess age is significant, but on the other hand, Tanaka has never pitched in the majors, so that's significant too. But just generally speaking, broadly speaking, what is the equivalent of 10 for a player for a hitter?

I think that's reasonable, right? Because we were talking the other day about how no one really goes beyond seven for a pitcher, and no one really goes beyond seven for a pitcher and no one really goes beyond 10 for a position player except vado maybe was like 12 buying out some marbiers or something um so that seems like the upper limit for both so you could say that they're equivalent. All right. I forget. Did that answer your question? Did that answer your question? So it's curious.

It's curious. It's not that curious to me. I mean, look. Hey, look. What's curious is the way that they presented themselves in public. But we already established with the first 18 minutes of the show that they have no discipline with the way they present themselves in public, and everything they do is insane, public presentation-wise. So it's no more curious than the whole 189 thing, so I just think that they're hard to get a read on publicly, and that there's nothing particularly about them losing Cano that suggests anything to me about Cano.

Although it is, we've talked a lot about and also written about how it's like it's just no fun or pointless to analyze money anymore. Because it just seems like every team has a ton of money. Because it just seems like every team has a ton of money and splitting hairs over whether they overpaid by a million dollars or something just really isn't all that interesting. And so when the Yankees signed Ellsbury, I sort of wrote, well, it's the Yankees. They can sign Ellsbury if they want because they can afford it. And people have sort of said the same thing about Tanaka. But if you say that the unwillingness to go to 10 years for Cano was actually a real thing, but they had all the money in the world, they would just go to 10 years anyway to keep him. So there's some sort of constraint somewhere. It's hard to figure out exactly where it is unless they just genuinely didn't want him around anymore, which seems difficult to believe.

Very difficult, knowing what we know about Cano, which is everything. And I was going to say that it seemed to me like the Yankees are a very volatile team or a very high beta team as put together in that they have an extremely old offense as I wrote about recently and the older the offense the the higher the injury risk and the the greater the potential for the team to turn out like the 2013 team did and then there's the pitching staff which is a 39 year old guy and a I guess going to 34-year-old guy coming off his worst year, and Tanaka, who has never pitched in the majors. And then I started to think about this statement that he has never pitched in the majors, which has been repeated often.

And I'm kind of questioning whether that really increases the uncertainty to any extent. certainty to any extent. I think it does for us because we haven't really seen him pitch outside of YouTube clips and we haven't been able to look at his pitch FX info except for the 30 or so pitches that we have. And we haven't been reading blog posts about his peripherals for the last few years. So we feel like we don't know him and he's a mystery and he's a black box to us. And all we know is some videos and some GIFs and maybe what some scouts have said. But if you're one of these teams that was a finalist for him, or if you're the Yankees, I would guess that you would feel comparably confident about your evaluation of him, just about as confident in that as you would about someone who has pitched in the majors, say Ubaldo Jimenez or Urban Santana or someone like that.

At this point, you've been scouting him for years. You probably have as much video as you want. You've probably charted his pitches in many different starts. You know his stuff. You've inquired about his makeup. I would think that you know just about as much about him as you would about any pitcher, except maybe, I don't know, if you're, I guess it introduces some extra uncertainty

just if you're switching continents. There's no way to predict how comfortable a player will be having done that because he's never done it before. But for the most part, I would guess that a team that's spitting 7 and 155 on him feels no less uncertain about that than they would uh spending a comparable amount on a domestic pitcher would you agree well ben i think your point that teams have a lot more knowledge about him than we do is fair. I think what you started by saying is that there's less... The gap has to be bigger between our knowledge and the team's knowledge for a player like Tanaka than any other free agent.

I think it is a good reminder that the Yankees, yes, have spent months on this guy, and we haven't in the same way. So I think that's a good reminder. I think what you started saying in that paragraph was that there's less volatility, but what you ended up saying is that there is less, uh, well, I guess you were saying that he's not a worse value for it. And I would say that the latter part is true. I think that teams are capable of, uh, rationally, um, uh, assessing the risk. Uh, but I think that teams are capable of rationally assessing the risk, but I think that the volatility is definitely greater than with Ubaldo Jimenez, and yet maybe not Ubaldo Jimenez.

You tricked me by introducing Ubaldo Jimenez into the conversation. But then the typical pitcher, I think there is a great deal more volatility, but it goes in both ways. than the typical pitcher. I think there is a great deal more volatility, but it goes in both ways. Koji Uehara is the best reliever, other than Craig Kimbrell, in the world. Hiroki Kuroda is way better than almost everyone. Hiroki Kuroda has been as good as David Price since he joined the league. The volatility goes in both directions, but I think there is a great, great deal of volatility. I would say that Tanaka has more volatility than the average pitcher. I would say he has less volatility probably than Michael Pineda.

Yes, I would agree with that. Okay. other question I had was do you think what effect if any do you think that this has on a remaining starting pitcher free agent is this completely

a separate matter because it's Tanaka and he's in a different circumstance or is the fact that he made this money suddenly inflating the value of other pitchers who are still available? I don't really feel that way. I mean, that wasn't my first reaction, so probably not. I don't know.

Yeah, I don't know. It's hard to imagine Jimenez or Santana or someone pointing to this contract and saying my client should make this much because Tanaka made this much. It just seems too different. Although I guess you could make that more volatile argument if you wanted to, and it would be convincing to you. I think it arguably, I don't know, this doesn't make any sense. I was going to say it might increase David Price's trade value. But of course, everybody, I mean, like already people knew that only one team was going to get Tanaka.

So I don't know if it increases it, but it feels like it could. It feels like there's a bunch of teams that... I mean, Price is the only guy on the market who's going to fill the Tanaka-sized hole that you've built in your dreams. So if you're the Diamondbacks for instance or the mariners for instance and you know you're looking around at what's left and none of them look like what you built yourself up

toward so I could see that RJ sent me a funny thing today about David Price which isn't going to sound funny when I read it, but I'm going to read it anyway, even though it'll probably make him mad. He said,

Friedman's going to call up Towers, quote, to knock a sign with you guys? No? Oh, sorry. I was busy doing a deal. Hey, when was the last time you made a deal, Kevin? So he thinks that the Diamondbacks are going to

go crazy for price alright and last last thing a comment on RJ's transaction analysis today was basically an effectively wild listener email although the commenter did not

know it so this is a comment by BP reader Adam hobson who says so say next year scott boris had another steven strasburg type near guaranteed ace coming out of college at age 21 near mlb ready would it be better for them to play by mlb rules take eight million dollars as the top draft pick spend a year riding buses in the minors. Now they're 22. The team will then plan the call-up to push the arb clock back a year so they don't reach arbitration until they're 26. Three years of arbitration gets them the free agency at 29, heading into their age 30 season. They've made some nice money along the way for sure,

but they've waited nine calendar years to make the real money. Or would it be best to go play in NPB, making a tad over $1 million a year for four years until they're 25, then have the team post them, the team will make $20 million, and they can negotiate at 25 as an almost free agent? Maybe there's some rule against that, but I can't help but feel that at some point we're going to lose three or four years of a star as they try to beat this MLB system designed against them. I don't know.

Sure. I don't have my calculator with me. It's allowed. I don't think there's a rule against it. I like the idea. I like the idea. Yeah, I'm not ready to do the math. I don't want to express disinterest in the idea. I just am not ready to do the math.

He could sign an extension after four years and get paid early. I mean, he still gives up those three years of money-making ability, and he still gives up the leverage during his ARB years, but he could get guaranteed money well before the six years. Yeah, that's true. It's a good question. Let's dig into it. Let's talk about it someday. Yeah. I asked Josh K Let's talk about it someday. Yeah. I asked Josh Kuznick about it, the agent who's written some stuff for BP,

whether that's something that he thinks an agent would ever consider. And he said it could happen, but it won't ever happen, because who would turn down $16 million guaranteed for $4 million guaranteed? Well, I'll tell you what. I'll tell you what. It seems a lot. Sorry. Well, he also said, remember that Bryce Harper almost went to the Dominican Republic at age 15 so that he could be a free agent at 16 and that that idea was dismissed after Scott

Boris did his research, which I did not recall. I didn't recall that either. That would have been interesting. That'd be a good book. If you wanted to write a novel, that's not a bad premise for a novel. Well, I do want to someday. Yeah, but you want to write a science fiction novel. It could be science fiction. How is your novel going? how many have you started i haven't started any you've literally never started a novel in your life no well first of all i'm not gonna crazy i wouldn't start one until i were

convinced that i could finish it i know but grade? You didn't start one in fifth grade? Not that I recall. I don't know. I wrote stuff, but not a novel. Interesting. Second, I forget what second. Yeah, what were you going to say? I can't remember. I can't remember anymore.

Something about the $16 million guaranteed for the $4 million guaranteed. Yeah, well, what I was going to say about this Japanese thing is that it would make much more sense for a high school pitcher, a guy graduating high school than a guy graduating college, because the guy graduating high school has got three years before he even starts the six years. Was that part of the premise? The premise was Strasburg type. I was imagining a college guy. Yeah, he said college guy.

Yeah, but if you're talking about a high school guy, by the time the four years in Japan, it's four years in Japan. Well, I don't know that there is, is there a specific number of years? I don't know. Oh, I don't know. Well, if it, if it were four years, then you'd basically would be Mark Appel and he'd be a free agent, which would probably be hugely profitable although uh yeah i don't know it's a good question you know pretty much the answer to all it seems to me that the answer to all of these amazing schemes that people come up with and that sometimes we come up with is that baseball would outlaw it as soon as you tried it yeah they would just outlaw it on the fly it wouldn't even be like one person would get away

with it they would just on the fly they just outlawed and they'd they'd investigate you and then they'd have their uh they'd they'd they'd threaten to sue you until they'd they'd break you i don't know boris can't be broken boris has found and exploited some loopholes in the past before they were closed, as I recall. True. Yeah, true. All right. So that's enough for today. If you were planning to email us that question,

you no longer have to, but we would welcome other questions for our email show tomorrow. So please send them in before late Thursday night, and we will get to them on Friday at podcast at baseballprospectus.com.