Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 511: Diagnosing the Rangers’ Downfall

Episode Date: August 11, 2014

Ben and Sam discuss the factors that have led to the Texas Rangers’ disastrous season.

Now I stutter, now I dribble. Other than that, I'm lost like I was then. The declining form of me. I just shake my nose off a well. Other than that, I'm lost like I was then. The declining form of me Good morning and welcome to episode 511 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives

presented by The Play Index at baseballreference.com. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg of grantland.com. Ben, how are you? Alright, I'm on the road. You sound you? All right. I'm on the road. You sound a lot better than when I was on the road. Are you also driving in a car on the bridge? I'm not. I'm sitting in a hotel room. They put a hotel in the middle of a... In my car?

Never mind. All right. How are you? Okay. Good. So I meant to get All right. How are you? Okay. Good. So I meant to get to this last week, but I forgot. So I have a list of things here for you. I'm going to read you this list. All right.

Wait until I get to the end. This is going to be almost the entire list. All right. Local hardware store. Local hotel. Local salon. Local music instrument store, local printing company, local carpet store, local grocery store, local CPA, local music magazine, corporate media systems company. I'm assuming local, but don't know. They like help you, you know, put the speakers up when you have a conference or whatever.

Local sandwich shop. Local hardware store. Local property management company. Local Italian restaurant. Local party planner. Local construction firm. Another local construction firm. A local paint store.

And a local distributing company. Whatever that is. Where am I, Ben? Are you listening to a game on the radio? You're close. And you're writing down who advertised? You're close. It's not that. These are the banner ads, find home plate at the San Rafael Pacifics game. So these are all the advertisers.

They're all of them. I've told you the entire list of advertisers minus one. Ben, you tell me. What is the last one? Microsoft. Microsoft!

Microsoft! It's Microsoft, Ben. Good guess. It's Microsoft, man. Good guess. It's incredible. What is, I mean, Microsoft is like maybe, literally maybe the biggest company in the world. And they, like, even Chipotle is like, we're not going there. It's probably a $250 or $500 ad. And somewhere there's a person who is worth like $35 million in stock options

who made the decision to place that $500 ad up there. It's crazy. What is that about, Ben? I don't know. Maybe it's just blanket marketing. Maybe they have an ad literally everywhere that it's possible to have an ad. And yet, they have not yet sponsored this podcast. No, because they're getting free advertising right now.

Free publicity, yeah. I guess. Although, it's somewhat mocking of them. Anyway, Microsoft. When I saw that, I just couldn't possibly have been happier. Let's see. A bunch of things happened that I meant to banter about, but I've forgotten all of them in the course of a long weekend.

Do you have anything to banter about i don't really all right so uh let's see the topic is uh is this um two years ago i wrote a piece about the rangers um this was in may the end of May 2012. And I'll just read the introduction. Someday the Rangers are going to be terrible. It is not going to be this day. The rest of this paragraph is about how good the Rangers are, which isn't news to you, so skip ahead if you're not interested in fun facts. The Rangers are doing things right now that are difficult to cope with. Until yesterday, they had the best Pythagorean winning percentage since the 1939 Yankees. they've scored the most runs in

the american league and allowed the second fewest they've got a great farm system and they have one of the half dozen best prospects in baseball they have the lucrative newish cable contract and the only unmovable contract on their books which was michael young's expires after 2013. And so from that beginning, I looked at what could conceivably doom the Rangers. And I didn't think this was likely. I thought it was likely the Rangers would be the World Series favorite this year and probably last year too and probably next year as well. But I did go through seven sort of ways that civilizations decline or have declined

throughout history and looked at how they apply to the Rangers and whether we might see the threat to the Rangers empire, the threat to the Rangers dynasty in one of those. And completely unpredictably and unexpectedly, the Rangers are indeed the worst team in baseball this year they have the worst record in baseball they are worse than every bad team that you can think of um and so i thought that you and i should go over these seven and see which of them applies to the rangers and which of them especially applies to the Rangers. And if none of these applies, then we could decide whether there is a as-yet-undiscovered or unidentified hypothesis or theory of civilization decline that does apply to the Rangers

and that we might talk about. So the Rangers, yeah, okay, that's all. That's all. That's the lead-up. You ready? Yes. All right. Number one, cause number one, overpopulation slash drought.

This was applied to baseball, this would mean that the Rangers would sign too many extremely high-priced players, and that that would limit what they were able to do with anything else, that they would overextend their resources. And as I put it, if they had signed Josh Hamilton, for instance, they would have committed about $100 million to a quartet that, as I put it at the time, would comprise a 33-year-old second baseman, a 36-year-old third baseman with leg problems, a 34-year-old corner outfielder, and a starting pitcher in his 20s with 5.2 walks per nine as a big leaguer. That would be Beltre, Kinsler, Hamilton, and Darvish. They didn't sign Hamilton, and none of those three is a problem. Kinsler is a down-ballot MVP candidate this year. Beltre is a perennial MVP contender,

and Darvish is one of the best pitchers in the game. I think we can rule that out, right? I mean, their problem has certainly not been that they have signed too many people to long-term deals and then have those long-term deals go belly up. Which is interesting because that is, I would say, probably what we think of as the most common cause of doom for a good team or a team that has a lot of money right yeah i think so i mean that's why that's sort of how we that's how we view the the phillies for instance that's how i think people generally view the you know the yankees at this point and uh so on and so forth

yeah that doesn't really seem to apply. They let Hamilton go. They tried to get Granke that winter. They didn't get Granke. They have some contracts now that look like they might be problematic in the future with Fielder and Chu perhaps, but those are not the reason that they are bad this year. I mean, I guess those two guys are part of why they're bad this year, but it's not that they couldn't afford someone that they wanted. All right. Second idea, collapse of essential trading partners. And the idea here

was that the Rangers had drawn a disproportionate amount of value out of trades that they had won decisively, or at least it appeared they had won them decisively. Well, I guess to share wasn't nothing, but giving up nothing that would have been a crucial part of the 2012 season for Elvis Andrews, Neftali Feliz, Matt Harrison, Josh Hamilton, David Murphy, Mike Napoli, Mike Adams, and Koji Uehara. And you might have to remind yourself that at the time, for instance, Neftali Feliz was super valuable and that all those guys were seen as very valuable, borderline stars. And so the fear was that either they would cease being able to make trades because they would get a reputation, although that seemed like a long shot. A reputation as a difficult partner to trade with and win. Or they would simply have bad trades, that there's a lot of luck involved in winning a trade as decisively as they had won a bunch of their trades. And that if a team was dependent on trades, it could just as easily lose by a large portion. What do we think of this one? Well, there's something to that. I mean, have they example, the very obvious example is not a good one.

But maybe they just haven't made as many either, which would also support that explanation. Well, they traded for Alex Rios, and he was good for them last year and hasn't really been this year. They traded, I think they traded for, I don't think this was a non-tender traded i think they traded for i don't think this was a non-tender i think they traded for geo soto and he hasn't contributed anything uh this year yeah he was a trade because they got a mid-year last year right uh they traded for um uh let's see, they traded Soria this year, although that was, you know. Right, well, they sold Garza. Oh, yeah.

And that was, they gave up. Oh, yeah, that was, yeah, and that was John Daniels, I think, has said openly that that's a regrettable move, right? Yeah, mm-hmm. That's one that he says will haunt him although not the cause of their problems this year it's not as though uh edwards and alt would have them in first place or anything like that uh but yeah that wasn't a great trade i mean i i think that you could probably say that um and the other interesting thing is that the that the

uahara trade now remind me was was it uahara the chris davis deal it was right so yes in retrospect that one ended up being kind of weirdly not good for them if So anyway, I would say that what you could say is that they have not made, they have not continued to reap incredible value out of the trade market which is to be expected. They have also probably not, besides the Fielder-Kinsler trade, that's not a significant cause of their last place standings this year. Although, Kinsler-Fielder is not a small thing. That's a 4-5 win swing at this point. And so, you know, maybe it's fair to say that is.

I don't know. I don't know. Are we calling? I don't know that I'm comfortable calling the Fielder-Kinsler trade a bad trade so much as an injury thing, right? Because at the time, it seemed like we were saying that everybody won and that it was a good use of resources to strengthen a weakness. And there were a lot of reasons to like that trade. And so that might be that Fielder might fit into a later one that we'll talk about. All right.

Number three, poor recruitment and development of young replacements. The Rangers at the time were the sixth best system in baseball. Baseball America had them. Sorry, that are by baseball prospectus rankings. Baseball America had them number one. All right. And so it seemed like they were going to be able to keep churning out good major leaguers. But as we know, prospects often turn into nothing.

prospects often turn into nothing, and there's no guarantee that if you have 10 and the average rate is half matriculating, that you're going to get half. You might get 10 bad rolls. And I named another team that had 10 bad rolls, for instance. And so the Rangers, it seems like you could say, had an awful lot of bad rolls. They really haven't had anything come out of that 2012 class, unless you're counting Darvish, which Baseball America did, but Baseball Prospectus did not, of that class who contributed. I'm looking right now. I think that's the case. case. So the farm system that year that was so raved about and that was seen as one of the top systems in the game, these are the top 11. Jerickson, Profar, Martin Perez have

contributed virtually nothing to the team this year. Perez out with Tommy John since April. Profar has missed the year. Alt, gone. Not that good anyway. Neil Ramirez, not contributing. Jorge Alfaro, not yet. Leonis Martin, contributor. Christian Villanueva, Roman Mendez,

Ronald Guzman, Robbie Ross, Cody Buckle. Nope. So basically what you're talking about is Leonis Martin, who's okay, but not, you know, not yeah, actually he's pretty good. Depending on the defense that you believe.

He's okay if you don't believe in his defense quite as much as some players. The point is that they did not turn that incredible farm system, at least yet, into a core, a core of players. You might say that that's it. What do you think, Ben? I haven't heard much from you. I agree with you. I mean, where did their, do you have the BP preseason organizational rankings from 2014 to see where they ranked coming into this season?

Yes, I do. No, I don't. Well, you can find it. Because, I mean, some of those guys have a chance still to contribute. They are just not contributing now because of injury in Profar's case and Perez's case. But it seems like they still have a decent reputation for organizational strength and farm system and everything. Yeah, right. We're just talking i mean these we're just talking about this

year we're talking about this year's disaster yes and i think it's fair to say that some portion of that is the fact that uh particularly with regards to expectations some portion of that is that guys who at the time seemed likely to be contributing by now uh are not and pro par at the top i mean we thought at the time that pro far would be you know an all-star at this point or if not an all-star at least you know a very good ball player and maybe that was unfair but maybe it wasn't all right next one hostile neighbors at the time the AOS was very poor and the Rangers were able to, it seemed, run away with the division

without hardly even trying. And we wondered whether the Angels in particular, but also maybe the Mariners, would get really good and make it a lot harder for them. We ended this paragraph laughing at the very notion of the A's contending. With that year, they won

the division. That year, this was halfway through a season. You typed something like Oakland and then ha ha ha and lots and lots of ha's, but I mean, that was their surprise season, right? Weren't they playing well at the time that you wrote that, at least? surprise season, right? Weren't they playing well at the time that you wrote that, at least? The A's were not. No, the A's were at 0% playoff odds for a month before they started playing well. They started playing well five weeks after this article came out.

So they basically had 0% playoff odds and not notable farm system and no winning record in the previous five games. So I'll defend that position at the time. But anyway, the point is that it seemed plausible that the AL West could get much more difficult and that the Rangers could remain a good team and yet be overwhelmed by dominant teams like the Angels. And in fact, the the rangers did not obviously the rangers did not

project to win 66 games or whatever this year and end up doing however they did to be like a low i think a low 80s team and that did not appear like it was going to be enough the angels and the a's were seen as as better teams coming in um and there there is a sort of a powerhouse division that has developed there uh with two probably the two best teams in baseball as well as a pretend members and no longer 110 last team in humans the the division certainly hurts them uh it's not the division is not why they have a 390 winning percentage, but it is a reason that they are, I mean, that's why they didn't win. For instance, when we talk about the Rangers being disappointing this year,

part of the conversation is that they were also disappointing last year. And the reason that last year was disappointing, even though they won, I think, in games, the A's were better than them, a much better team, and therefore made those 91 games moot. So I think that's a contributing factor. Yeah, definitely. Demographic, yeah. Can you look up, I'm asking you to look things up because my internet connection is barely

up to the task of talking to you, but I'm curious what their record is against ALOS teams this year. Not that they would have a good record against any team, presumably, this year, but just to see how big a factor that is, how much weight we should give to that explanation, because certainly the division has been much stronger this year than it was in 2012, and then maybe we would have expected it to be in 2014 at the time you were writing that article. But I'm curious how bad they have actually been against those division rivals this year. All right. Well, let me tell you. Please do.

Against their division rivals, are uh 17 and 30 uh which uh sorry 17 and 28 uh actually i'm yeah 17 and 28 so uh 17 and 28 is a 378 winning percentage there at 393, I think, overall. So not a huge difference, but it does hurt them. Yep. Okay. All right. Next one is demographic trap, which is that basically they would be in a cycle where they are constantly having to make short-term moves to stay competitive while slowly eroding their long-term viability.

Basically, they would always be competitive and would always have to do trades like, say, trading a bunch of really good prospects for Matt Garza in a second-half push. or Matt Garza in a second half push, or they would always have to sign free agents like, say, Shinsu Chu. And in doing so, they would give up their draft picks, and they would give up their prospects, and they would overpay for guys, and they would pay premium prices for the players that they need to be competitive. I think that that is more of a long-term one than we can say. I mean, for instance, Shinsu Chu, signing Shinsu Chu will hurt them pretty much every day of the next six years. But it is not like at the beginning of the year you went, well, you know, the Rangers would be good, but they signed Shinsu Chu, so now they're going to be a lot worse. would be good, but they signed Shinsu Chu,

so now they're going to be a lot worse. He's not supposed to hurt them yet, and it's just sort of kind of a fluke that he's doing this badly. It's not surprising that he's overpaid. It's not surprising that his outlook is bad. But it would be lame to say, well, they're losing because they never should have signed that awesome player from last year and expected him to be good again this year. So I'm going to throw that one out.

I think it's long-term very relevant, short-term not as relevant. Yeah, you were not expecting them to be bad this soon. You were saying that over a course of several years that kind of thing takes its toll, and it does. But it hasn't been long enough for that to be the key cause here, or even a significant cause, I don't think. All right. Next one is introduction of diseases. This is what we would say is injuries.

And in particular, we noted that no team is immune because all teams have pitchers. And so that one is the big one, right? Yep. That's the story of this year's Texas Rangers? I think so. Yeah, I don't have the current injury stats, but I did look them up about six days ago. I think it was through, through like last Sunday's games. Just looking up the days lost to injury and the percent of payroll lost to injury.

And no one was even close to the Rangers. As of six or so days ago, they were at 1,431 days missed. And that's not just DL days, but also guys who are day-to-day and weren't available a certain day. Corey Dawkins at Baseball Perspectives does a really painstakingly thorough job of recording injuries that every team suffers, and so he had their total at 1, 1431 as of a week or so ago. The next closest team was like 600 away. Like it wasn't even close. They're the clear outlier in that regard this year. 21% of their payroll had gone to injured players,

which was also the highest figure in the majors. And, you know, a lot of crucial absences, right? I mean, basically almost a whole starting rotation gone when you count Harrison and Holland and Perez and Ogondo and Shepard and just all of these guys who are hurt. And, of course, we mentioned Fielder. We mentioned Profar. So, I mean, it's a big chunk of a team.

I don't know whether they would be at the A's or Angels level if they got those guys back. I would guess probably still not. But just, I mean, that's a lot to lose. And even Chu, who's been playing and playing poorly, has been playing through an injury or has been affected by an injury. So it's really a sort of a historic catastrophe in that department. And is there any reason to think that this is uh their fault is there any

do you see any trend here that you go well clearly the rangers are doing something wrong or does this strike you as just one of those unlucky years yeah it seems to be that way it doesn't seem like it's been a multi-year trend where the Rangers had a reputation for poor health or anything. So I can't think of anything that would, I mean, it's, you know, it's a bunch of, or it's at least a couple Tommy John guys and a few other elbow injury guys. But I, you know, I don't know enough to say whether they're doing something wrong with their pitchers and and if they are then it seems to be a new thing so the the best guess is probably just that it's a a fluky thing and then the last one is environmental problems which uh is luck which

is what we call luck uh and that one was like basically if they were actually still good but underperformed expectations by 10 wins or something like that, they could appear to suck. That doesn't seem to be the case. They might have gotten slightly unlucky in certain areas but they are so far beyond even the discussion of what we were talking about at the time, 2012. I was just introducing this as a way that they might miss the playoffs, not end up in last place with the number one overall pick. So probably not luck. Not really luck. Maybe a small factor. So all of these are kind of small factors, um except for uh except for signing long-term contracts um and mostly though it's the introduction of diseases and i guess if

if uh if it's going to be one of these things is that the the best one from the rangers perspective is that the one that you would most want? I know what you mean because it's the one that's like, it's just this lightning striking thing. I mean, if lightning strikes your house, it really super sucks, but it's probably not going to happen in a week as well. However, as we know, the number, you know, like basically the biggest variable for injury, you know, for the next injury is whether you have been injured. If you have been injured, you are a lot more likely to get injured again. In a sense, the fact that all their guys are banged up, not all of them will come back at all, for instance. One of these guys just won't ever come back.

Then one of them will get hurt, you know, doing, you know, will get hurt again. And so, you know, one of them, I mean, you're missing some of the prime years of some of these guys. So even when Prince Fielder comes back, he's going to be older and so on and so forth. So I actually don't think it is the best. I think it might actually be like the second worst or something, maybe the third worst of these. And yet the Rangers seem to feel, at least from their actions, from their comments, they expect to be a contender next year. They weren't sellers at the deadline. They weren't trying to get rid of veterans who were healthy, trying to get rid of Beltre or anything.

They seem to feel that they could come back and be competitive again next year. But how do you think they stack up in terms of, has there been a complete reversal since you wrote this where now their outlook is one of the worst in the division? is one of the worst in the division? Or can you look ahead and kind of say that the Angels have a lot of people locked up and getting older and the A's don't have a whole lot of people locked up and don't have much of a farm system? And so their continuing to excel would probably depend on Billy Bean continuing to make lots of great trades and other moves.

And then the Astros are, you know, maybe still a couple of years away and the Mariners aren't really a powerhouse, although maybe their best is ahead of them. So are the Rangers now in the lower tier of this division? Has this one awful year plunged them that far? I think probably. I wouldn't feel that way except that it already appeared that they were, based on the preseason projections, it already appeared that they were slouching toward mediocrity. preseason projections, it already appeared that they were slouching toward mediocrity.

And so I kind of think that they, I mean, there's nothing that would prevent them from being really good again really fast. I mean, any team could be. They are certainly a smart team. They have some good players. They do still have a pretty good system. And it's easy to change your trajectory in baseball a lot of times. However, I don't feel like they have as good an outlook as the majority

of the other teams in the division. So I kind of am probably more pessimistic. Well, I would say that I'm almost as pessimistic. No, I'm not. I'm not almost as pessimistic as the record is, but I'm sort of as pessimistic as the tone of this conversation has been. And they just lost their assistant GM, for whatever that's worth. Maybe that hurts too.

Yeah, one that everyone really liked. And, you know, around this time they also had lost another one. They lost Scott Service just before I wrote this. And now they lost AJ Preller. And, yeah, those two guys were part of the – I mean, it was like those two and Daniels were the ones that came over when they started that regime. So that's significant, perhaps. Yeah, maybe that should be when you write your next downfall article,

maybe that should be another cause that if you establish your reputation as a smart team that wins for a lot of years, then everyone wants to hire your people and it becomes difficult to keep the group that built the team together. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, all right. Okay. All right, so please support our sponsor, Baseball Reference.

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