Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 480: The David Price Trading Game

Episode Date: June 27, 2014

Ben and Sam banter about the Astros, then discuss what a realistic return would be in a package for David Price.

🎵 Good morning and welcome to episode 480 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives presented by the BaseballReference.com Play Index. I am Ben Lindberg, joined as always by Sam Miller. 480. Big number. Wow. Big number. Wow. Big number. Yep. Keep them coming. That's what I say. Yeah. It's what you've always said right from the start. So you did. Yeah. Real quick. Sorry, I interrupted just because I just noticed this, but I remember watching the Phillies game today

and Dom Brown wasn't playing. John Mayberry was playing, and I was thinking, oh, that's interesting that Mayberry's playing against a righty. And they said that Charlie Manuel didn't say how long Brown would be out of the lineup, and now I just look and Dom Brown went one for four today because the game went into long extra innings. So it was not long. He went one for four. because the game went into long extra innings. So it was not long.

He went one for four. Alexi Ramirez also, by the way, over four. Yes, we were just there. Over four, so it goes on and on and on. Just notified by listener Mike. As we go on and talk about more and more inane things, we get more and more updates from listeners who are happy to fill us in on all of these strange streaks and occurrences

that we're keeping an eye on. So you did some homework on the Anthony Rinaldi seeing two no-hitters in one week accomplishment that we talked about on yesterday's show. You have a post-up at BP about it. Would you like to summarize your findings well there have been uh since world war ii uh which is another one of my arbitrary uh when baseball began to be more real uh dates it's basically normally i i've i've noted 1920 and

and 19 i think 80 uh 88 are too common. It depends on the circumstances, but I also will often use 1950, and I'll often use 93. But in this case, I used 45. And just because I wanted to exclude Johnny Vandermeer. And so since Johnny Vandermeer is a no-hitter, not counting Johnny Vandermeer, there have

been quite a bit of no hitters that were thrown within a week of another no hitter. There've been, uh, 15 now, I think it was the 15th pair of no hitters thrown within a week of each other. Uh, and, uh, there are, I didn't, I didn't find a single interesting, like guy got traded, or umpiring crew was the same, or manager was fired and hired as a bench coach real quickly after, or anything like that. And generally speaking, in almost all cases, the games were far enough away from each other that you really couldn't even create a scenario where some columnist for Sports Illustrated or something would have been at both. They all would have kind of been a stretch. I mean, it could have happened. Probably there were some that happened

and some that didn't. But for the most part, you would think that probably nobody did. And I think it would be generous to say that even one or two did at most of these pairings. However, three exceptions. In 1946, both games were played in New York, one in Brooklyn and one in the Bronx, but all the same, both in New York. You have to assume that there's some overlap there. 400 seems a little high in retrospect, although they were both very well attended games. Very well, especially for the era.

Compared to, for instance, the Boston LA pairing, where in a two-day span there was one in Boston and one in LA, which was the longest distance between two teams at the time, I believe. And only 1,247 people went to the Boston game.

So I feel pretty good saying nobody went to that one, for instance. But there are two that ruin this, that ruin the scarcity. Gaylord Perry and Ray Washburn pitched no-hitters in back-to-back games in the same park, the same teams were playing, one on each team. And then the very next year, same deal. Jim Maloney and Don Wilson, back-to-back days, same clubs, same ballpark. So there's a ton of people who saw both of those. So my estimate was – should I spoil my estimate?

Yeah, sure. It's about the 3,147th person to see two no-hitters in person in the same week. However, since the Vietnam War, he is just the 14th person. All right. So quite an accomplishment. Thank you, Ben. I did spend a lot of time on it. I did feel like it was pretty good to see it up there on the website, on the internet. See people reading it.

Right. To hear you talk about it. Thank you. I'm glad you... You're welcome. Okay. Another update. Just wanted to mention that Kyle Farnsworth Was released by the Astros

Which means that his quest To exact vengeance On the Mets, who released him Earlier in the year, is now On hold, or at least he's going to have to Look for some other way to do it And it's sort of a shame because the Astros Were scheduled, or still are scheduled

To finish their season last few days of September at city field. So Farnsworth would have had a few months to plan. He could have really done something special. I don't know what it would have been. Maybe he would have, maybe he would have just allowed a lot of runs to the Mets so that they would get a worse draft pick. Maybe that would have been his vengeance. But as it is, he will have to come up with an alternate plan. Maybe someone else will give him a chance to get his vengeance. Well, I don't want to get too macabre here. I fear that I'm going to.

I think I already have. But now that he has two teams that he needs to get vengeance on and he knows they're going to be in the same stadium in September, I'm just imagining... You're saying you would ban him from the stadium just in case? Yeah. I'm having this mental image of Kyle Farnsworth and a flamethrower. To be fair, he has not actually vowed vengeance on the Astros,

at least that we know of yet. That was something that he reserved for the Mets in particular because of how and why they cut him. So it could be that there's only one team on his list. Okay, and then finally just wanted to recognize another listener who did something pretty cool, Padre Gomalin. I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. I just listened to Frank McCourt pronounce Padraig, not the Dodgers owner, but the author, so that I would get that correct. Hopefully I did. Padraig made a list, a playlist of all of

the opening songs that have ever been used in Effectively Wild. He made both a text list, which he uploaded to the Facebook group, and also a Spotify playlist. So if you have ever wondered what a song was and been too lazy to Google the lyrics, you can now find out or you can take a trip down Effectively Wild memory lane. So join the Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild to see that and also to see Anthony's pictures of him celebrating two no hitters in one week. Okay, so my initial plan or idea was to discuss the new Astros article in Sports Illustrated by Ben Ryder. Uh, I were, we're not going to do that because, you know, the, the article covered a lot of things that, that previous Astros articles have covered that we have discussed on the podcast many times.

It was a, you know, a good, good summary of the situation. Just told you everything you need to know about how the Astros are going about this and why it's new and interesting. Um, but if you've, you know, read you've read all the other Astros articles in the past, not that much of it will be new to you. There's some cool in the draft room stuff that would be of interest. And I also learned that the Astros don't use high school stats when they're projecting amateur players, or at least they say that they don't because they're too unreliable. I also learned that Nolan Ryan refers to himself in the third person in the draft room, which is probably

not surprising. Probably couldn't guess that. And also we talked the other day when Will was on about the proliferation of the term long form and how much it bothers us or bothers me and Will at least. And as you noted, long form is in the URL of this article, si.com slash long form slash Astros. And now at the top of the redesigned Sports Illustrated website, or at least this page, it says, Sports Illustrated long form since 1954, which is just horrible, just a crime against the internet. If you're Sports Illustrated, you should act like you've been there before.

Act like you've been there since 1954. You should say that all the long form sites have been Sports Illustrated since 1954. Yeah, it does feel like a miss to me i i don't you know i don't go in for the uh you know they made a decision i'm not gonna beat them up over it they're a great company they do amazing work i'm glad they're doing it um i it did sort of feel like uh the guy who's telling a bunch of kids how he was punk 35 years ago and expecting the kids to be like, whoa. But of course the kids are going to roll their eyes. And that's not what Sports Illustrated, I mean, Sports Illustrated doesn't need, they have been, I don't even hate the term.

I'm fine with the term. You and me disagree on that. It's fine by me. It's fine. You and me disagree on that. It's fine by me. But, I mean, what Sports Illustrated does is, I mean, it's legendary to take on this sort of new slang and use it to define yourself. It's disappointing to me.

It's dispiriting, I would say. I will have forgotten it by the morning and continue to think that they are, you know, at the top of the game. So not a big deal. So one just brief thing I wanted to bring up, I was talking about the article with Russell Carlton earlier, and he was saying that, you know, he's kind of wondering what the stakes are now. Like if the Astros experiment doesn't work, either because just bad luck, Carlos Correa breaks his leg and things go wrong, or because they go the A's route.

They're really good for a few years, but they don't actually break through. They don't win a World Series. They don't get all the way there. And we were talking about what the fallout would be from that. Because we talked recently about if the Astros are a success, then will other teams imitate them? Will they inspire copycats? Will it be more accepted to do a complete teardown and rebuild? But what if they fail? Is there any fallout from that? And I'm kind of thinking that, I mean, even though Sports Illustrated has kind of put the

target on their backs, which, you know, it probably was already there already. We've talked in the past about that Houston Chronicle article where lots of teams and players were saying bitter things about the Astros. And now that they've been crowned the 2017 world champions by Sports Illustrated, you could see how maybe there'd be some resentment from teams that have been doing, you know, decision science-y things forever, for a long time. There are a lot of teams that have been doing similar things and maybe have been more quiet about it and haven't gotten the same sort of publicity,

although the Astros have certainly taken the losing to an extreme prior to the winning. But is there really any fallout here? Because I'm thinking, I mean, even if this experiment fails for some reason, even if they don't fully bring it to fruition, it's not like the tactics that they're using here or the decision science stuff that they're doing is really all that controversial inside the game, right? I mean, you'll get your former players who'll bash them on MLB Network or whatever, but no one's going to look at the Astros if this doesn't fully succeed

and say that they did this wrong, right? There's not going to be an anti-sabermetric backlash where all the teams fire their analysts because the Astros experiment didn't work right I mean maybe if it works really really well it will inspire some imitators but if it doesn't can't imagine that it would have all that much of a ripple effect on the rest of the league well the I mean the Astros thing isn't decision sciences. The Astros talk about sabermetrics more than most teams talk about their sabermetrics, but like we talked about with the piece, that's the

extremely generous way of talking about the Astros kind of controversy. Because, yeah, that will always win. If they're saying, oh, people don't like us because we're progressive, yeah, they will win in the end. People will remember them as being progressive.

The Astros thing is losing 110 games every year with a sort of sense of impunity about it. And if they don't win a World Series in 2017 or whatever, however you define failure, as you just did a minute ago, if it fails, no, no fallout. None whatsoever. Nobody will remember except for the small handful of us who talk about this stuff a lot and think about it

in ways that don't really matter. And so, yeah, I mean, I don't know. In the conversation that those of us that we know have, maybe there will be some fallout, some jokes, but nobody will remember. I mean, they're completely correct. Whether they win or lose, hardly anybody will remember what they did in 2012. And so, yeah, I don't think there would be any fallout. I mean, except for the front office.

Right. But that's, yeah, that probably won't happen either. I think they'll probably win. I was surprised that they put a date on it and that Luno, I think, said 2017. And that seems late to me. To me, it feels like, I mean, this has already, I think, gone more slowly than they expected.

And maybe it's just about managing expectations. But I'd like to hear him say 2015. Why not? What's stopping him? I mean, certainly what's stopping them from 2016. 2017 is a long ways away and if you're saying it's three more years until we're going to promise

you anything, that surprises me. Maybe it's prudent but it surprised me. If I had to guess what date they would have said, I would have guessed 2016 and probably if you'd asked me what date they would have said, I would have guessed 2016. And probably if you'd asked me what date they would have said in 2012, I would have probably said 2015. Yeah. Well, we should go back and look. I'm sure we can find a date somewhere.

Maybe. I don't know. I don't know that it matters. It doesn't matter. In fact, I'm not trying to make a point about it mattering. I don't think it changes anything. I don't think that date binds them to any particular plan. I'm just, A, surprised that they gave a date, and B, surprised that the date was as far away as it was. Okay. All right. So the other thing I wanted to talk about was an exercise, an article that the BP staff did over the last couple of days and produced for an article that is up today, Friday at Baseball Prospectus. And it's sort of a sequel to an article you did last year where you played GM, you played Rick Hahn, and you had Jake Peavy on the market and you solicited bids from other BP authors who were role playing the parts of other general managers with other teams.

And they submitted their blind bids for Jake Peavy and you weighed them all and you picked one. And then Paul Sporter did a similar exercise shortly after with Hunter Pence. And then Paul Sporter did a similar exercise shortly after with Hunter Pence. So we brought this back with David Price this year, since he is the number one player who's being talked about at the trade deadline. And I played Andrew Friedman, and we assigned teams to 11 other BP authors, one of which was you. You took the Angels, which was very, very brave of you. And we asked for their authors and they sent them all to me. And there's an article up today with all those offers that you can go and read. But I just want to talk about just in general, the authors, offers that I received. And I sent you a list here. Do you have any

general takeaways? Because I have to say that I am a bit underwhelmed, I think, by the offers that I received for David Price. I have as we record this, I have not yet made up my mind about which offer to accept or another option is to reject all of the offers, which I would be totally willing to do. Andrew Friedman already did that over this winter when everyone thought that he would trade David Price. But I'm kind of underwhelmed by the offers I received, and I wonder whether that means anything.

Just looking down the list, and we picked 11 teams that had been very loosely tied to Price in some fashion over the past few weeks. Maybe someone reported that scouts from that team were in attendance at one of his starts or that the teams were actively talking. Or maybe it was more just sort of speculation with unnamed sources, that sort of thing. But we went with the Blue Jays, the Yankees, the Indians, the Angels, the Braves, the Marlins, the Cardinals, the Cubs, the Pirates, the Giants, and the Dodgers. Some of those options obviously are more realistic than others. And we encouraged the authors who were playing these GMs to try to really inhabit those roles and consider what the team they were playing stood to benefit

from getting price and how much they could afford to give up and their own personal embarrassment that would be at stake if they were to submit a really ridiculous offer. And so looking at the offers here and just kind of you know mentally weighing it i guess against the will myers trade just because as we discussed on yesterday's show the you could kind of argue that it's an equivalent value here price is probably a little bit better than james shields he is he is pitching really well right now he himself says that he is pitching better than he ever has. And yet he's only under contract for a year and a half, whereas Shields was for two years. And there isn't really a Myers-like value on this list. There are no top 10 prospects who are being offered here to me.

being offered here to me. Going off the very tentative top 50 list, mid-season top 50 list that Jason Parks and his prospect staff have been working on, which should be out at BP next week, I've gotten a glimpse of that. And just going off that tentative list, the only top 20 guy that I was offered was Jack Peterson. Well, let me ask you, let me interrupt. That top 50 doesn't use rookie eligibility. Right, right, right. And so Andrew Heaney. Yes, Andrew Heaney would have been on the top 50 if he had not been called up. So the Marlins, Marlins offered me Andrew Heaney, Jake Marisnyk, Justin Nicolino, Anthony Discofani, and Adam Conley and Colby Suggs, big package for Price, Ben Zobrist, and Cesar Ramos. So Heaney was probably the best player I was offered. Second, second best player I was offered was Jock Peterson, who, who is tentatively listed at number

20 on the midseason top 50. Other than that, it's all guys in the 30s. Like, I think I was offered maybe the number 31 through number 35 prospects, just by coincidence. Steven Piscotty and Alcantara on the Cubs. Who else? Lucas Sims, Kyle Craig. Yeah, I don't think either of those was on it. Aaron Sanchez. Aaron Sanchez was 30-idd. Yeah, I don't think either of those was on it. Aaron Sanchez.

Aaron Sanchez was 30-something. Oh, yeah. As was Tyler Glasnow. So there were some guys in the 30s. No real major league. I mean, there were, I guess, a couple of young major leaguers. The Cardinals package was Matt Adams, Piscotti and joe kelly for price and jill peralta so that was really the angels angels angels angels yes that's right your your package

jerry depoto's package tyler skaggs hank conger nate smith and camber drojan but you also asked me to throw in eric bedard as well as price, which is pretty greedy. Yeah, I think that anybody who's watched Eric Bedard for more than six starts would just happily, like even if he's pitching the film, it's so depressing to watch him. He's bad. I mean, he undoes like 45% of Joe Maddon's shenanigans just with his body language.

He is the anti-penguin in the office. You can't help but smile when you see a penguin in the office. You just can't help but kick a penguin when you see Eric Bedard. So that was really sweetening the offering to take Eric Bedard off my hands. So there's no Will Myers here. The Cardinals GM, Brett Sayre, did not offer me Oscar Tavares. He offered me Piscotty. The Pirates GM, who I think was Chris King, offered me Glasnow, but did not offer me Tyon.

Teams were reluctant to give up their number one guy, or even, for the most part, a young guy who is in the majors already, at least in a straight up trade just where they get price back. So I'm wondering what this means. Is it a symptom of the fact that, or an observation that people often make about actual trades or the way that this actually works in the major leagues, that teams are hoarding prospects too much, that they are now valuing prospects too highly, and that they should be willing to give up a really marquee prospect for David Price? Is it that the Myers trade is just an unfair comparison to make, that that was just a bad trade, that that was a mistake, that just no one was was silly enough to give up someone that valuable and and Friedman is not expecting anyone to to give

up anyone that valuable again? Or is it that maybe maybe Price doesn't deserve one of those very, very tip top guys because he is he's great. He's certainly, you know, I think one of the, let's say, top five starting pitchers in baseball right now. Or at least you could make that case. You could. You could very easily make the case, though, that he's much lower. I mean, I don't know which case I would choose to make. I love David Price at the moment.

But, I mean, if mean if you i mean he's been pitching a long time and if you look at his ability to suppress runs it ain't that great i mean it's he's a good pitcher he's a great pitcher he might be he genuinely might be a top five pitcher but you know it's not i'm just saying that he uh he has the same era plus over the last three and a half years as kyle loach that's all okay well that's a fair point so yeah so maybe are we overrating price's value um or you know in expecting in expecting say a top 10 prospect would we be overrating price's value either because we're that would be overrating price or because even if he really is that good, maybe he doesn't give you that much surplus value because he's making $14 million

this year, which is obviously a good price for David Price, but not an incredible deal. You'd have to pay him whatever the prorated portion of that would be for the rest of the year and you'd also have to pay him his his third year arbitration next year he's a super two presumably he'll make what 20 million over 20 million so he will not will not come cheap and then he's a free agent after that so maybe maybe that's just not worth a top 10 guy. Maybe that's why he wasn't traded over the winter. Maybe he either won't be traded now or Rays fans should lower their expectations a little bit.

What say you? It's interesting because when we did this last year, there were, and I was trading PV, there was not even a moment where I thought that I might reject all of them. There were like five easy yeses, and there were a couple that were pretty easy to say general managerial incompetence. The one that I accepted was I think the Pirates and like 19 minutes after it was submitted, I get another email from him saying, I think I overpaid. So, I mean if if the won't trade prospects thing is the... Now, so in that case, though, I was trading Jake Peavy instead of David Price. And so I wouldn't have expected a top 10 prospect. And what I got is a lot of packages that are

kind of similar to price. So that would make me think that this is a less about well it's that basically that there's a certain threshold where the prospect just gets too too sexy for people to want to give up and they don't want to be shamed for for giving up somebody who is such a top prospect and then once you get down to the 30s and 40s particularly, they're just names. And it becomes easier to give them away. Maybe because you don't, I don't know, this is just speculation,

but we know less about them as well. It's like I have less of a visual of a number 30 prospect generally than I have of a top 10. Like every top 10 prospect I can see him. Even if I haven't seen him, I can see him. I can probably draw a sketch to a police sketch artist of his playing baseball. So I don't know. I think that everything you said has some truth to it, and I'm not sure where I come down on that.

Theoretically, I asked everyone who participated to try to take it seriously, because anyone could just offer their whole farm system and sort of ruin the exercise. And you would expect maybe someone to overpay or overbid, because that's kind of what happens in the real major leagues. Often the team that ends up with the player is the one that was willing to pay the most and maybe to pay too much. But even so, pay too much. But even so, you'd think that if anything, just internet writers who don't actually have much at stake here would be more willing than an actual GM to give up a top prospect in a fake trade, just because there aren't actually millions of dollars at stake for us in this article and we haven't actually poured years of time and effort into developing these players we're not actually attached to them personally or emotionally like a gm is so you would think that if anything a bp author a group of bp authors would be more willing to surrender a top name than the teams

would be, I would think, unless you just happen to run into the right person at the right time. Yeah. I mean, the reason that we want to do a good job are different, obviously, but we're all trying to do a good job. There's no point in doing it and, you know, getting it wrong. So I would imagine that the brain is basically trying to do the same thing when it's a pretend thing for show as when it's a real thing for your job. I mean, maybe to the extreme is different, but, you know, we're basically going through the same logical process. The point that you made about not having invested

emotionally in these players as you've drafted and developed them, that's true. Probably a real GM in a lot of cases would be more likely to like their prospects because they selected the prospect for a reason. They have a bias toward that guy. That's how they got him.

On the other hand, say you have three top prospects in your system and one of them after two years in your system you've soured on, then you might be more likely than a neutral observer to want to get rid of him. Maybe that's how these

trades end up happening. I forgot what I was gonna say next uh oh yeah i remember what i was gonna say next is it your expectation then that the ultimate offer that the rays get will and accept presuming there is one and i am presuming there will be one, will it be better or worse than the best offer that you get? Hmm. I guess I'll say better. So you think that we all, I mean, because we're all, not only are we all trying to put together a reasonable package,

but we're also essentially trying to predict what we think the major league conventional wisdom or market is for this kind of guy. So we're doing a sort of a meta thing where we're doing two layers of evaluating. Does it both, does it, do we like this player more than these other players? But more than that, it's what do we think that a typical team would give up? And so you think that we're all underestimating what a major league team would be willing to give up

in a case like this. Yeah, or at least that one major league team somewhere that is highly motivated to make the playoffs for whatever reason would make. But I don't know. I mean, if not, if they don't get a better offer, then maybe we'll never know because they just won't take it. But I wonder whether they would lower their expectations, whether they would settle and accept one of these offers. is if the Rays think that they could get a better deal over the winter for some reason, or they could actually compete, keep price, and go back to the playoffs next year.

So, and either one is possible, I suppose. But after having passed up whatever offers they received over the winter, you have to think that they would start feeling a little pressure to do something just because you don't want to, especially if you're the Rays, you don't want to get caught in a situation where you find out that you just need to dump him because you need to save money or you actually let him go and get nothing in return or a draft pick. Hey, Ben, since this is going to be published by the time most people listen to this,

can you tell me which one you picked? I haven't picked one yet. I don't know. Can you tell me? Can you G-chat me which one you're leaning toward? I can do that, yes. Even if I haven't officially. Can I tell you which one you're leaning towards i can do that yes even if even i haven't even if i can i tell you which one i can i tell you which one i picked or would that uh i i have one that

i'm leaning towards so yes you can tell me why don't you tell me which one you're you first okay so i'm gonna i am you here off air and before i even okay before i even look at it, I'll tell you what my pick is. Okay. All right. So my pick was the Cardinals, Matt Adams, Stephen Piscotty, and Joe Kelly for Price and Peralta. Uh-huh. Okay. Yeah.

I mean, that is definitely one of the stronger ones. Yeah. Yours was my second one. The one that you are currently leaning toward was my number two. Uh-huh. Okay. So that's a cliffhanger. So people should go read the article. I think it will be free for non-subscribers. And also there is a poll

embedded in the article. So you can choose your pick, either one of these trades or none of these trades, and you can see what other readers picked. So fun for everyone. right so that's that uh thank you for listening to the shows this week please join the facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild send us emails for next wednesday at podcast at baseball perspectives.com rate and review the show on itunes and please support our sponsor, Baseball Reference. Go to baseballreference.com. Subscribe to the Play Index using the coupon code BP to get the discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription. Have a wonderful weekend. We will be back on Monday.