Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 450: Locking Up New Ligaments

Episode Date: May 15, 2014

Ben and Sam discuss whether it would make sense for a team to sign a recent Tommy John surgery sufferer to a long-term contract extension.

Am I lying to you when I say that I believe in you? Oh, oh, ooh, ooh. Oh, oh, I believe in you. Good morning and welcome. Good morning. How are you? I'm well need of you Joined, as always, I, Ben Lindberg, am by my co-host Sam Miller, who today is listening on his daughter's Hello Kitty headphones. That's true. Just think, if I had thought of this 450 episodes, it would be this instead of the Honda Fit. It would have benefited from all of our brand awareness. I miss the Honda Fit. Listeners who started listening to us in the last, I don't know, hundred something episodes

don't even know about the Honda Fit era. Got to go back and start from the beginning to find out about that. Okay, so yesterday, a couple of minor items. Yesterday, I proposed that we should have some sort of counter somewhere that would record the days since the last ligament injury. So naturally, one of our listeners came through. Richard McGuire built a page that has a counter that tells you the days since the last ligament injury. And unfortunately, that counter is still at zero because we had another one today.

Oh, really? Martin Perez has a partial UCL tear. That's a sad one. That's a sad one because I just drafted him in our under 25 and under starters draft. And then you asked me whether I had any regrets about doing that, right? About drafting hard throwers because of how often they seem to hurt their elbows lately.

Well, I named specific hard throwers. I didn't name Perez. That's true. You know, the problem with this is that, so with Jose Fernandez, after he had his thing, people noted that you could see it on his velocity chart. You could see basically the exact pitch where he broke more or less. And here, Martin Perez, I assume, I mean, he was doing so well, and then he all of a sudden was just brutally bad for like three starts, I think, maybe two starts.

And so now I feel like, unfortunately, it's creating this idea that anytime somebody has two starts in a now i feel like unfortunately it's creating this idea that anytime somebody has two starts in a row that are bad we're going to overreact and assume that he's got a ucl tear yeah and we're just going to get way too confident in our ability to diagnose pitchers by performance is what i'm saying yes and i don't really like that one of the things that i i don't like about my own instincts and and those of everybody else is this idea that what we see in the present is permanent. When you look at careers, you look at a lot of careers of guys who you could have very easily given up on them or thought that their trajectory was set and then they end up being really good. There's

a lot of down years that guys have or horrible months or horrible three years and then they come back i mean baseball careers are really super weird and have a lot of topography so uh it's kind of better when we don't think that too bad starts with velocity dooma guy yeah i like it better when we're focused on the madison bumgarner example uh you know of a guy who looked completely lost and had no velocity in the minors. And like, we just gave up on him. And then it turned out to be nothing. Like it was just like nothing at all. Like later that very same year, he threw a one hit shutout in the world series. Like it was nothing. And I like it when we keep those examples in our head instead of the Martin Perez examples. Yeah. Of course there, there has been some work done in that area trying

to trying to predict injuries based on looking at various pitch fx stats and that was one of the one of the last things that josh kalk was working on before the rays hired him and our newest addition at baseball prospectus noah woodward has updated kalk's injury prediction model and it's based on velocity and release point and and movement and all these things and comparing to the pitcher's baseline at a certain point in a certain game and seeing how much he deviates from that by and Noah's work is really good but even he would acknowledge that it's really really hard to pick out the guys who are actually hurt from the guys who, for whatever reason, are just having an off inning or an off start. And his model produces a lot of false positives. Although beyond a certain point, there is a certain point where it spits out a probability

that someone is hurt. And I think it's like 80% or something. And at that point, I don't think it's been wrong yet. So there is... Well, it should be wrong 20% of the time. If it's like 80% or something. And at that point, I don't think it's been wrong yet. So there is... Well, it should be wrong 20% of the time. If it's never wrong, then it's... No, really, if it's never wrong, then it's flawed. Yes, that's true. If it's never late for a flight, it's getting to the airport too early.

Yes. Anyway, I wrote something using his data about Ivan Nova and Matt Moore, and he will probably be writing more about that for BP. But I posted a link to Richard McGuire's Days Since Last Ligament Injury site on our Facebook group, facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild, so you can go check that out, and hopefully that number will climb at some point.

Hopefully we will see it say something other than zero. The current record of days without a ligament injury is zero since this site was created. Yeah. That's depressing. I mean, it was created today. Still. Still. Still.

Okay. Wait, wait, wait. I guess we should ask whether this was created because of the Martin Perez injury. I mean, it could be that you said it and somebody said, oh, that's a good idea. But did Martin Perez spur the action? No, he tweeted a link to this site to me early this morning before the Perez news. Did it say? Okay. Yeah, so he has updated it somehow.

I don't know whether he automated it somehow or whether he's updating it manually, but either way. All right. Um, yes, Stephen Tolleson. Yes. He's pitched. He pitched. Hero of the minor league free agent draft, uh, currently on pace over the, a full season, on pace for roughly a 15-war season. And as of today, also a pitcher. Hey, does that count? It counts. Yeah, I guess that counts. So I get two batters faced add to my ledger,

which matches your team's entire total at bats plus batters faced. Uh-huh. The other thing I was going to mention was, did you see that the Mets released Kyle Farnsworth? And I really like his reaction to being released. He basically vowed vengeance, which is not something that we see that often. When pitchers or players get released,

they'll say something, you know, it's disappointing or you understand and it's a roster crunch and i'll i'll play my way back up here you know i'll show them that i deserve to be on this roster or something uh kyle farnsworth said that he he's looking to find a team to play against this team but i mean like i'd like to take him seriously but this is now nine teams that he should have sworn vengeance on, and he is not getting better. Like with every team he leaves, he should see his overall numbers improve,

and they're doing the opposite. That's true. Unless he's gotten worse against every team that he has not played for, he has somehow concentrated all of his good innings against his former teams because his thirst for vengeance is so strong. But I like that. I want to see more of that. I want to see every player who gets released say, you'll pay for this. And the last thing I want to mention, I saw two articles today, one about the Rockies, one about the Marlins, the two surprise teams that we talked

about last week. Both articles by different authors suggested that those respective teams trade for Jeff Samarja. So I'm guessing you would be against that in the case of the Rockies. And both articles, by the way, essentially suggested that it would be okay to trade those teams' top pitching prospects for Jeff Samardzija. So Gray and Heaney? Yes. Gray or Butler for the Rockies or Heaney for the Marlins would be okay in a package for Samardzija. Yeah, no. Yeah, no. No, right? Terrible idea. Terrible terrible idea even if they went in on this together and split him and didn't have to give up either of those I'm not sure I would like it but yeah I'm not I don't know no yes I mean no this is this is like a class this is an entire genre of local sports

column is the the team that hasn't won in a while starts well. And whether they're good or not, the local columnists who are so eager for some of the excitement of writing for a contending team begin proposing all sorts of rational things as though they're the owner of the team and they're dying in November and this is their last chance. And they just, like, you know, they, you know, if you're the Rockies,

I don't know if this was a Rockies beat writer or columnist. Someone with the Denver Post, yeah. Yeah, I mean, if you haven't, it's been years, really, since you got to write about adding a player. I mean, it's actually disappointing that Samarja is the best they could. Yeah. Like how sad would it be if the highlight of your career was writing the Samarja mock trade? Right. Yeah. At least talk about prying David Price away or something. Exactly. Yeah. No. I mean, you can't go all in with Samarja. Like you got to use the word

go all in, right? Go all in has to appear in a column of this genre. And Samarja is not all in. Samarja is a, you know, it's, it's basically a call. I'm going to check to see if either of them said all in. Go all in.

The post, the post article, it said over all in,, it said ball-in. Really? It did not say all-in, though. What do you mean ball-in? How did the phrase ball-in come up? A chance to play Major League ball in the beautiful Colorado sunshine.

And then this is the other one is MLB beat writer Jeff Fricero. Yes. Is there an all-in in there? Joe Fricero. All options are on the table, which is like the political diplomat's way of saying, well, that's not, it's a totally different phrase, but it's also a cliche.

All right. So my topic today is related to the ligament injuries. There was an article by Tom Verducci on Monday, I think. Hang on, hang on, hang on. Save parting with Andrew Heaney, Miami would be wise to weigh what the Cubs would be asking. I thought. Unless we're reading separate articles. Heaney could be arriving in a matter of weeks oh yeah maybe I misread the blurb on MLB trade rumors yeah but Gray and Butler definitely on the table but maybe not Heaney

later on he sort of says that Heaney's not enough to replace Fernandez and if you skipped to this point then you might think that the sort of way that it's demeaning, I mean, not demeaning, but slightly demeaning Heaney to justify trading for Samarja, you might have lumped them together. Not you, but one might have lumped them together. But no, he does not suggest trading Heaney. Okay. Well, the headline on the Denver Post article is Rockies should trade top prospect John Gray for Jeff Samarja. So that leaves no ambiguity.

All right, so Tom Verducci wrote an article earlier this week about the Tommy John, the elbow injury spree. And his theory is that it has, well, his solution, proposed solution is that we should lower the mound. He says it would be less stress on the arms, on the elbows, and that that might do something to counteract it. And that this should be done at every level because he says that the strain of pitching a lot from an early age is what has done it and throwing really hard. And everyone has their theory about what's causing this. So anyway, that's not really what I want to talk about.

He mentioned what used to be an injury of attrition. Tommy John was 32 and had thrown more than 2,000 Major League innings before his groundbreaking surgery has become an injury of too much too soon, too much velocity and too much stress. The average age of the 22 Major league pitchers to need Tommy John surgery this year is just 23.4 years old. So I'm wondering whether we are getting close to the point where we will see two of the big trends in baseball come together.

Now the, the trend toward Tommy John surgeries and the trend toward extensions, which we have talked about and the trend toward extensions, which we have talked about and you have written about. I guess we both have written about. I'm wondering whether we are approaching the point where we will see teams consider signing Tommy John guys to extensions. And I'm wondering whether it would be a good idea, whether it would be an opportune time to sign someone to an extension

or whether it would be a bad time to sign someone to an extension. My thinking is that you wrote an article maybe last year about the future of contract extensions and how we would see teams sort of push the envelope now that everyone gives their young players extensions, it's not just small market teams anymore. To get good deals, you propose that teams would have to sort of be more adventurous or experiment and offer different kinds of extensions to different kinds of players. And one of the possibilities you mentioned is offering extensions to people who have not played in the majors yet. And we have seen that come to pass. Of course, Gregory Polanco was offered an extension by the Pirates and George Springer was offered an extension by the Astros.

So that we've seen so far. I think you also proposed that teams would maybe, did you suggest that they would offer extensions to non-star players that we would see a worse caliber of player be signed to an extension. It seems to me like maybe that has happened. We've seen like Sean Doolittle get signed to an extension. Maybe that's something you wouldn't have seen before. So I'm wondering whether the Tommy John recoverer is, you know,

a recent Tommy John victim is someone that a team would consider signing to an extension given that the age at which these guys are having Tommy John surgery, as Verducci points out, is sort of prime extension age. which is the case with Perez and with Matt Moore and with others. But some of them have not yet. Some of them are in the Jose Fernandez situation where they are not locked up long term yet. So I wonder whether a team would think that this is a good time to approach a player. Now, obviously, you would not want to go contract and pen in hand to a guy the day after he is diagnosed with one of these injuries and look like you are trying to be an opportunist and take advantage of him while his value is at a low point, you would not want to do that. Plus his signature might not hold up in court. It wouldn't look anything like his signature. That's true. But you would want to couch it in a more positive way, not we are trying to profit from the fact that you're hurt by signing you to a lower extension that you would have commanded before we found out about this injury.

But we have so much confidence in you. We are so confident that you're going to come back at full strength, that we want to make a commitment to you now while you're down and out. We don't want to wait until you're back and healthy. We have so much faith. We want you to be a Marlin long-term or whatever team it is long-term. And you figure that at some point in the rehab process, I think every pitcher kind of goes through low points where they wonder, am I ever going to get

back? Am I going to be back to full strength? Or as we talked about with Corey Dawkins a couple days ago, just the months-long, months-long grueling rehab process where you're not allowed to throw and you can barely bend your arm. And it's easy to contemplate that this is a career-ending injury. And once in a while it is. But we also know that success rates are pretty high in 85 or whatever percent of it is. Pitchers get back to roughly the same level so you could imagine teams being willing to make this commitment and we have seen them make very short term commitments to guys who are recovering from the surgery like the yankees signed john lieber

coming off of this injury and the yankees also signed david arts mode coming off of this injury and what the rangers signed soria coming off of this injury. So you you sign a guy, maybe do a two year deal and maybe he'll be injured the whole first year or much of the first year, but you'll get his second year at a below market rate if he comes back healthy. that but i wonder whether we will see just sort of a standard long-term contract extension signed by one of these players now that there are so many of them and they are so young what do you say the rangers should go to pedro figueroa and tell them we want you to be a marlin for a long time uh so yeah no you're right i mean the there's clearly the John Lieber precedent, which has been repeated, although I can't think of the examples since then. Arts, sorry. Did you say those? Yes.

I was quickly scanning the list of Tommy John patients from 2014 to look for the worst one is what was happening there. I can't think of someone who fits the description that I'm talking about. It's possible that I'm overlooking someone who has... Those guys are all... When did Ardsmut do it?

Just a couple years ago. Anyway, those were all guys who were signing with a team, you know, other than the team that brought them up. They were not young. They were established veterans. They were free agents and up, they were not young. They were established veterans. They were free agents and they were trying to get interest. This was something where they were able to offer as an incentive to a team to give them guaranteed money, the sort of upside on the back end of the deal. It doesn't run into the issue that you mentioned,

which is that it looks like profiteering. I agree with you that it makes perfect sense. I mean, the basic premise of all extensions is that a team as a large corporation with a diversified portfolio, is able to take on more risk than an individual who only gets one shot and cannot miss his chance to blow this opportunity comes once in a lifetime, yo. And so there's really always going to be ways to basically skim off these players if you're willing to bet on a lot of them. And so the riskier they are, the more profit you can get. I think that part of the problem that makes this unlikely, and part of the reason that what you mentioned specifically seems like it would be an issue, is that extensions are now so common that you can't help but see them as a club-friendly

maneuver that everybody adopts for strategic reasons. I feel like the George Springer and Gregory Polanco examples, I don't think that three years ago they would have ever turned them down it was not seen as quite such a club friendly thing to sign extensions and it's almost like evan longoria has poisoned the well for everybody uh for all these teams because now everybody's like oh yeah well there's a downside too for me and i think that that's probably somewhat irrational. Although, I don't know. I don't know that the Pirates and the Astros had offered Polanco and Springer enough to make it worthwhile. I think they probably had.

I think probably both of those guys should have signed the deal. But the problem is that with every Evan Longoria that plays out their contract, and you see five years later their name on the top of every bleacher report weekly slideshow on the best contracts in baseball uh it it reminds players that there's a downside for them too um and so i feel like at this point right now that's really in everybody's mind and probably the, um, the easy pickings, um, are kind of, uh, you know, they're gone. So I don't know, I guess I think that, that you're right. I think that this is a way that clubs should probably behave. They're able to emotionlessly weigh the risk, um, and the odds of a, of, you know, of a comeback at full strength and, uh, um, full strength. And they can be patient with it.

And the player certainly is going to be very worried at this point about his career. And about whether he's ever going to get the sort of money that will allow him to order guacamole when he goes out for burritos. But I don't know exactly. I guess what I'm saying is I don't know the time that you do it. Right. I guess what I'm saying is I don't know the time that you do it. So when we talked to Corey about the process of recovering from Tommy John, when in that 11-month process do you do it?

Yeah, right, because you can't do it right after because then it looks – Well, you can't do it right before, especially. No, you don't want to do that. You can't do it right after. You can't go to the guy while he's on the operating table and um and you don't want it to be distracting either you know i don't know how much that matters but clubs and players both seem to think that contract discussions are immensely distracting yes and so you don't necessarily want it to be distracting. I mean, when do you do it? Do you do it once the throwing program starts?

Maybe. Although you figure that once the guy's allowed to throw again, maybe he starts thinking that this is going to work. I'm going to get back to full strength. And if you time it too perfectly, then it looks like you timed it too perfectly. It's like, wow, this guy really knows how to push my buttons. He's like a con man who always has the right response to your objections. And so, yeah, it is a sensitive thing.

I'm not sure the right time to do it. I mean, the best thing to do is probably to do it like the Rangers did it and sign Martin Perez roughly four months before he has Tommy John. And basically, they're all having Tommy John in four months. So just sign him now. Sign every one of them right now. I feel like if you had the right people skills, you had the right approach,

you could pitch it as we have confidence in your comeback. We are betting on you long term, even while you are hurt, while we have no guarantees that you will ever pitch again. That's how much we trust you. We are putting all of this money in your broken elbow. Yeah, but I mean that's the same thing that you would say to George Springer and Gregory Polanco, right?

Yeah, but those guys are – You'd say to everybody. That's what you would say to everybody who's poor and hasn't established themselves yet. But those guys are feeling their oats. They're in AAA mashing and they're about to make their debuts and there's nothing wrong with them. That's true. In a way, yeah, I wonder if actually the

right thing to do is to not sign George Springer and Gregory Polanco right before they come up but to sign them right after they come up and they're like, dag, this is hard. Right. Talk to George Sprer after he went you know whatever you think a ton does springer sign it two weeks ago um when he has actually faced major league pitching and struck out against it a whole lot yeah because i mean right now he's

hitting so you can't do it now right but could you have done it after a month when it was like when that yeah like when the astros all of a sudden looked smart for not bringing him up earlier? Yeah, maybe. When he was hitting 180, 254, 213 after 15 days, then do you go to him with half the price and say, a contract half the size and say, yeah, 15 more days, it's half again. I mean, is this like when your dad negotiates with you when you're eight and you just cannot win because he's always going to go lower? Your dad is listening now. You have a bad experience with negotiating with him.

I didn't say my dad. Did I say my dad? No, you said my dad. Your dad. I know how your dad operates. Yeah, maybe if they had gone to him and I wouldn't have cut the offer that he turned down but if they had token raised it a little bit at a moment of vulnerability, who knows? Of course, you have-

Right, if they had token raised it, that's a good one. That's good. Yeah, if they had token raised. If they said, we have so much faith in you, we're going to give you 24 million. Just think about, I mean, because a million dollars is a lot of money, right? To go from $23 to $24, if you don't have a million dollars, a million dollars is more than I've... I mean, I've been working for...

How many years have I been working? I've been working for 12 years. I haven't come close to a million dollars. Yeah, despite our sponsorship and everything. But, well, I mean, all these players sign extensions because they are worried that what happened to Jose Fernandez or one of these other pitchers will happen to them, right? Well, no, not really.

I mean, well, not Jose Fernandez. It's what happened to, I mean, who is who they're worried about? Most guys come back. Most guys get multiple chances. Yeah. Well, I don't know. I guess maybe... I guess Mark Pryor.

Should we do this? Let's do it. How much? How much? How much is Mark Pryor making his career? Let's do it right now. Spur of the moment. Salary game. I'm guessing. He got a... Didn't he get a deal? spur of the moment salary game

he got a didn't he get a deal oh man if you can't remember whether a guy got I can describe his career arc for you I won't describe his salary because I won't look but I can describe his career arc for you just so that you know if six years or not

his last year that he pitched at all even in inning, was year five. So probably year four of service time because his first year wasn't a full year. So basically he didn't – I don't think – I think he had one ARB year. I think he basically – I think he got one ARB year and then he was hurt from that point on. Okay. So if there wasn't any –

So we don't know if there was an extension, but I can't tell you it was service time. Okay, well, I guess I'll assume that there wasn't. If there was, then that completely blows up my guess. But if there wasn't, then I don't know. What are we talking about? Three years of major league minimum, which was less than. And I'll guess

like 4 million oh god I was going to say 4.4 then I started thinking about 3.9 and then when you said it I didn't want to sound like I was under so I say 4.4 you say 4 whoa he did sign he got the deal

he got 11.8 million I should have stuck 4.4, you say 4. Whoa! He did sign. He got the deal, huh? He did get the deal. He signed for 11. He got $11.8 million in his career. I should have stuck. I thought he, man, my initial remembrance is that he did get a deal. Anyway, the point is that Pryor is the guy that they're worried about being because none of them is as good as Pryor. Right.

And they can all be just as bad as Pryor. And then not only do you not get your you know grandkids rich for life but you've got to work like seven more years trying to get back to make a few extra bucks yeah right the rest of the world but that's that's such a rare thing um that it is to go for something so maybe players shouldn't be so worried about that. But, yeah, I don't know. I feel like the perception that these extensions are super team-friendly, I feel like that has maybe changed a little bit. Maybe there's sort of a lag in realizing that they were team-friendly,

and maybe now they aren't so much anymore, but we're still thinking of the Longoria deal. I think they are. I mean, I know I read the articles about how they're not as team-friendly, but I think that when you're talking about pre-arb guys, they're still team-friendly. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I'm thinking back to my conversation with John Hart where he was saying that they were super they were super team friendly when he was giving them out in Cleveland,

but now, now he feels like they're not anymore. Of course he works for the Braves and they just handed out a bunch of extensions. So he probably wouldn't want to brag about how team friendly they were at that moment. But yeah, they're more expensive than,

I mean, they, they're bigger numbers than they were. I can, I mean, not to disparage John Hart, John Hart, you know, he's a genius.

He's one of the great baseball minds. He's awesome. I'm just saying that all of us have trouble adjusting to modern salaries, and we always have trouble adjusting to it. Just when we think we've adjusted to 2012 salaries, 2013 comes, and we're like, wow, that guy made that much. So I think there's some part of it is that we're just always two years behind appreciating how much players are actually worth. So I think that they're still very team friendly when you compare them to how

much guys are going to be making on the free agent market over the next eight years. And I just don't think that we've quite internalized how big those numbers are. The other thing I guess is that if you're someone like Fernandez or you get hurt while you're on the major league roster, then you are accumulating service time while you are hurt, in which case you are coming back closer to arbitration, closer to free agency.

But then again, maybe you can't expect to make as much from arbitration because you haven't built up the stats that look good in arbitration so but arbitration gives you credit for injury time missed in injuries yeah well anyway hey i want to i want to mention something about extensions and about my piece on the next generation of extensions. The point of that article, besides all those other things, was that I thought that we were going to see at some point, or it was actually talking about whether a 20-year extension would ever happen and whether it would make sense. And I argue that it does if the price is right.

It does and that the price will eventually be right. But Mike Trout, did you see the item about how Trout, when they were negotiating, wanted a 12-year extension? And the Angels wouldn't give it to him. But I like that. I like that he was thinking along those lines. I wish they'd given it to him. Yeah. Although I'm sort of scared about what numbers he was asking about, given what he actually signed for. I'm sort of surprised that they didn't go for the 12-year extension. If he was asking for the same sort of money that he ended up signing for,

but over a longer period, then how could you turn down any number of years at those sort of rates? Yeah, I don't know. We don't know how much he was asking for, I guess. I mean, it's always hard to know. It's weird how they report years, because years are what matter to players, and yet the dollars matter to us.

All right, well, we'll see if any team tries this. Lots of strange things, unlikely things, that we have discussed on this podcast have come true shortly after, whether out of coincidence or probably just out of coincidence. So we'll see. We'll see. Maybe tomorrow, along with tomorrow's ligament injury, there will be an extension offer. All right. So we will be back with another show on Friday. Please support our sponsor, Baseball Reference. Go to baseballreference.com, subscribe to the Play Index using the coupon code

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