Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 542: Our Biggest Mistakes of the Season (So Far)

Episode Date: September 25, 2014

Ben and Sam banter about Matt Kemp, Phil Hughes, and the wild card races, then talk about their most memorable errors of 2014.

This is the number one rule for you said in order to survive gotta learn to live with regrets on a rise to the top mini drop don't forget in order to survive gotta learn to live with regrets. This is the number one rule for you said in order to survive gotta learn to live with regrets. Good morning and welcome to episode 542 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus, presented by the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I am Ben Lindberg, Grantland.com, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Prospectus. Good evening. Hi. Good morning and good evening in my intro. Uh-huh.

Covering all times of day that you might be listening to this. How are you? Pretty good. Anything on your mind? Nothing. Okay. I've had a boring day. I'm sorry to hear that.

Sometimes boring days are nice. A couple things. First of all, since we talked about, since we reviewed our comeback player of the year picks, Matt Kemp is making a late charge as a realistic pick. Do you think he has a shot? Let me look. He doesn't have a shot by war standards, as I recall. But, of course, comeback player of the year has nothing to do with war.

Right. He has OPS over a thousand in September and he's hitting really well for most of the second half of the season he's now now hitting well he's got a 137 OPS plus

coming into tonight and that's after the 105 last year and the 147 the year before that. So he's almost all the way back to being what he was in 2012 when he was an all-star. Yeah. He might be the favorite. Wow. At this point.

Huh. I mean, well, just because there isn't... Do they do it by league? I can't remember if they do it by league. Okay, so there's not a great NL candidate, and it seemed like Beckett was the strong candidate, and he hasn't pitched in a long time, so he's not. Otherwise, I don't know that there is a great NL candidate.

He's got 24 homers. If he got 100 RBIs, I think he'd have it locked up, but he's not going to get to that. He's got, what, four days left, three days left to get 14 RBIs. That'd be tough. That would probably do it. But if he slugs 500 and he can get that average up to 290, yeah. He's a minus 23 defender by baseball references measure,

which sounds amazing, but that's actually not why I bring it up. So that has him at.8 war. The reason that that might be believable is that in 2010 he was a minus 37 goodness that's got to be a record that's got to be well i'm gonna just go out on a limb and guess that that is a uh record for at least post 2000 we got an impromptu play index so we're going to go to season play season finders we're going to do war runs uh fielding and we're going to do what should my i'll do since 1988 use ascending order and uh i get number one adam dunn is minus 43 in 2009. Number two is Matt Kim.

All right. Good play index. Oh, by the way, I meant to mention yesterday. I just had a moment of panic because number four is Chris Gomez, and I read it as Carlos Gomez. Just a second. Nick Castellanos is number... Yeah, Carlos Gomez being at the bottom there

would cast some doubt on defensive statistics. Nick Castellanos this year is the eighth worst. I meant to mention yesterday when we did the Play Index segment that there was recently an addition to the play index split finder that is timely and relevant as we head into postseason time. This was added this month. Postseason success criteria were added to the play index split finder. So you can now, and I'm quoting, refine your searches to include only non-playoff teams, playoff teams, division winners, pennant winners, or World Series winners. And there's a blog post at Baseball Reference where you can look at a bunch of examples of things that you can do with these new tools. So

lots of new abilities with the play index related to the postseason this year. That's really good. I wish I had known that. Yeah. Okay. I also wanted to mention there was a debate in the Facebook group, facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild about the Phil Hughes quandary where he is one out away from 210 innings pitched, which would trigger a $500,000 incentive clause in his contract. So there is the question of whether the twins should essentially give it to him because he was going to get there and then there was a rain delay and he didn't come back out to get that extra out. And so this is sort of like

when we talked about the John Lackey contract clause where if he was injured, he makes $500,000 next year. We talked about whether the Cardinals should just give it to him to make him happy. Now the Twins have the option, if they wanted, to put Hughes in for a relief appearance to get that one out and trigger the clause. However, Hughes also currently holds the record for strikeout-to-walk ratio in a season, 11.6 to 1. If he were to come in and walk someone without striking anyone out, he would lose possession of that record. How much money would it—if you're Phil Hughes and you're making whatever he's making, $8 million base, how much money would you pass up in order to guarantee that you would secure that record? Although not that it's all that much of a risk because he, in his past eight starts, has struck out 52 and walked one.

So he doesn't actually walk anyone anyway. But coming in in the middle of a game, something he's not used to doing, maybe he would have worse control. Are we sure he knows that this record exists and that he has it? Not at all, no. Does this even count as a record? I mean, this is something that... Like, earlier today I almost tweeted that Mike Trout was going to be the first player,

or like the eighth player ever to lead the league in strikeouts and war in the same season. And I was thinking, he is, but really he's the first because none of the other seven had any idea what that word meant and what I'm talking about, right? He's the first one to do it. All the other ones didn't do it. It didn't exist. So I don't know if this record exists to Phil Hughes. The other

thing is that this record is, it seems to me that the K to walk ratio is extremely endangered as a relevant, prevalent stat. And that five years from now, it also won't

exist. Nobody will particularly care about it, or it might be that it's been broken, but either way. It seems like it would be in danger, but the current record holder is Brett Saberhagen from 1994. So even though the strikeout to walk ratio has been increasing, it hasn't set a new record. has been increasing. It hasn't set a new record. No. I think they should just give him the money and not make him do that, I would say. I mean, if you're going to throw him out there to earn the out, you're already conceding it. You're doing something unnatural to make sure he gets his $500,000. One thing that's

unnatural that makes sure he gets his $500,000. You know, one thing that's unnatural that makes sure he gets his $500,000 is you just walking over with a check. And so you could just do that. You could also just give him a really nice car and he probably would be happy with that too. Probably, yeah. And last thing I want to mention is, do you think baseball would be, do you think the,

the conclusion to this season would be more, more satisfying, more exciting if we were still under the one wild card system? Cause you'd, at least we'd have the, we'd have something giant, the giants and the pirates and the, and it'd be sort of a three-team weekend.

Yeah, as it is, most teams have clinched or at least clinched a tie. I mean, the only one that hasn't clinched a tie, I suppose, is the AL wildcard teams, Kansas City and Oakland, but they have three-game leads as we record this over Seattle, so that would take a pretty significant collapse to lose that. So as it is, and I'm in favor of the second wildcard system in general, but as it's worked out this year in particular, we are entering the final weekend of the season with not a whole lot at stake,

not really. Oh, like almost less than nothing. This is the worst case scenario. If the Tigers were one game better, then this would be the actual worst case scenario. There would be no divisions at stake, and there would be no postseason spots at stake. All that you would be playing for

is who's going to have home field in the wild card game. So, I mean, this is the worst possible outcome for the two wild card system. Now, this is not the usual one, so it doesn't have to be an indictment of the system. But, yeah, no, any other playoff formation that you want to come up with would be better for yes for this particular grouping yes definitely of course now we have more more happy fans we've got we've got giants fans and pirates fans and kansas city fans and oakland fans who are all probably going to get to

be happy so maybe that balances out the lack of suspense or excitement for the rest of us. Yeah. I think even the old one team per league makes the playoffs system. No, I was going to say even that might be more interesting, but no, the Angels have pulled away from the Orioles and will not be being caught. So never mind. You might have the Dodgers Nationals with some intrigue.

Yeah, because the – well, no, the loss column is crazy. How have the Dodgers played three more games than the Nationals already? There's not that much time left. No. Maybe they're not going to make up some of those games. Maybe they don't need to. Yeah. Okay.

So topic for today is inspired by something that Ken Rosenthal wrote, and it's a tradition, I suppose, for Rosenthal, writing about his five errors that he made during the season or his five that he feels worst about or wanted to single out. And Ken Rosenthal probably needs to write this column less than almost any baseball writer. He is not wrong all that often, but maybe he's not wrong all that often

because he examines his errors and acknowledges them openly. So we're going to do sort of the same thing that Ken did and just talk about some of the things we got wrong this year and the things that we feel bad about. Maybe some things we feel good about too. Ken's errors that he chose to highlight were Robinson Cano and the Mariners. When the Mariners signed Robinson Cano, he said that it was strange because the Mariners were nowhere close to contention. And he singled out Jacob deGrom, which this mistake was made only a couple of weeks ago when he boosted Billy Hamilton's rookie of the year case over deGrom. And he has since changed

his mind about that. His third mistake was saying that the Nationals should bench Denard Spann when they had a bit of a logjam of position players because he was putting too much weight on single season defensive stats. Number four was criticizing the Dodgers bench, which turned out to at least have some pretty good players on it at the time in Dee Gordon and Scott Van Slyke. pretty good players on it at the time in Dee Gordon and Scott Benslake. And lastly, the Angels. He said that they were not a strong possibility to win the division when Garrett Richards went down with an injury. And, of course, they've been one of the best teams in baseball since then.

So those were his. We can trade off here. Anything you want to start with uh sure uh and i um this is a tough thing for me because i i feel like um i do two things when it comes to uh factual statements one is that i i avoid them right me too uh the One is that I avoid them. Right, me too. The other is that I, over the course of a couple of weeks,

take both sides of them. Yeah, those are sound strategies. Not for cynical reasons, but simply because I don't remember what I think. I'm not, I wasn't, I wasn't necessarily heavily invested in the position in the first place, but somebody asked. So I imagine that with a little bit of sleuthing, somebody could find better ones than these.

But these are the ones that came to mind. So I, about a month and a half ago or so i did a what you need to know you know what you need to know is the uh the recap of the days the previous days events the previous days games on baseball prospectus um looks at a bunch of the games and uh i led with Rick Porcello's wonderful start. And I sort of set the hook or whatever. The nice thing for the Tigers is that they don't have to worry about the Royals. And so they can spend the next six weeks resting players. They had just rested Miguel Cabrera that day.

It was the first time. I think it was the first game Cabrera had rested since April. So I was like, they can start Miguel Cabrera that day. It was the first time. I think it was like the first game Cabrera had rested since like April. So I was like, they can start getting Cabrera some rest and, you know, Torrey Hunter can get healthy and they can spend a lot of time assessing whether Rick Porcello or Justin Verlander is going to be in the postseason rotation for them. And then I wrote about, and it was just a way of getting into how good Porcello was and how good he was that previous day. But, um, at the time, the Tigers were like three games ahead of the Royals, and I was just way too cocky. I wrote something similar, and when I wrote it, there was a more substantial lead.

But I wrote it after the A's traded for, maybe it was the Samarja trade, I think, or maybe it was, I think it was that one. And I wrote about how... Oh, Price? Wait, no, no, go ahead, sorry. No, I wrote about how the Tigers were in this enviable position relative to the teams in the AL West that they were not as good a team as, say, Oakland, but Oakland had this hard fight ahead of them with the Angels,

whereas it looked like the Tigers could just kind of cruise in, and they had everything going for them, being in the less competitive AL Central, and just sort of implied that they more or less had the division locked up. And I don't know what the lead was at the time, probably something around five games or so. And obviously they completely lost that lead after that and then gained it back. But yeah, I also made the mistake of thinking that the Tigers had sort of locked up the central.

Yeah, and they are probably going to win the central. Yes. So, you know, technically, I mean, look, when the playoff odds. That was not going to be one of my five because it did end up being right probably, but yes. Yeah, it's clearly, I was clearly wrong. But yeah, when the playoff odds say that the Tigers have an 83% chance of winning their division, which is what they did in that day that I wrote this, part of those 83% include narrowly winning at the end,

and part of them even include losing the lead and then coming back from behind and winning. So just because it was 83%, I probably shouldn't have been quite so cocky that they would get to sleep super easily during that entire time. They probably, I think it was justified to say that they should feel confident that day, but not that they're going to feel confident every moment between now and then. And they might still lose it. Right.

Okay, I will go with, well, probably the article I regret the most is the Tim Lincecum article, just because it so spectacularly backfired almost immediately. And probably more people read that than literally anything you've ever written in your life. Prior to that, yes, probably. So that was one of the first things I wrote after leaving PP, that Lincecum at that point had pitched about half a season and been an above average pitcher. He'd made 15 starts, 16 games with a 3.03 ERA, 95 innings. And I sort of bought into it, not Lincecum as a really good starter again,

but Lincecum as someone who could stick in a rotation at least and was usable, which he hadn't been for much of the last couple of years. And obviously he imploded almost immediately after that he has a 9.09 era since then in only 30 innings or so but uh that was just in the in the way in which it immediately looked bad that was probably the one that i wish i could take back yeah that's a bad one um i said that derrick jeter was gonna be good yes when i when i cut the audio from the emma span interview that we did earlier this year and i embedded that in the podcast when we talked about jeter last week i excerpted a clip from that in which I nicely, I thought charitably, I thought did not include the sentence where you said that you thought Cheater would be pretty good this year.

Yeah, I wonder, I'm going to see. I think I mentioned that I have a, in addition to having to say things and write things for public consumption. I also have an actual predictions contest that I do with a friend and we predict about a thousand things. And so I actually do have many opinions or predictions that are on the record. They're just not publicly distributed. But I can go back at the end of the year and see how screwy some of the things I thought were. And one of the things that we did this year was to predict all of Derek Jeter's stats. So I'm going to try while we're doing this to find it. Because I wasn't that high on him.

But I did think that he was going to be, you know, I thought he'd be, I probably would have thought he'd be roughly an average hitter. And this is a... I have a belief that I've written about before and that I've found evidence for that missing a season does not affect a baseball player. We tend to think it does. We think, oh, no, Buster Posey missed the whole season

because he got destroyed. And it is true that some guys who get destroyed, they just stay hurt and they never come back. So if you watch a guy get his body destroyed, there's a concern that it won't heal. But if he heals and he comes back, you won't see a real drop-off in his performance. and he comes back, you won't see a real drop-off in his performance. And this is a surprising thing to me when I became convinced of it, but it's generally a feeling I have. And so I think that I was applying that to Jeter,

and while doing that, undervaluing the effect of his age on that equation, as well as simply, if he hadn't missed last year, but I simply didn't know what he had done, and had to predict his 2014 season based only on his 2012 season, I probably should have decreased my expectations a bit more than I was. But the dude did finish seventh in MVP voting in 2012. You did finish seventh in MVP voting in 2012. And so if you start with my premise that missing a year for an injury doesn't actually affect your performance going forward in a significant way, you'd think going from seventh in MVP voting to, what did we say he was? The second worst player in Warp history?

It's up there, yeah. Or down there. Like, that's a big fall. That's like a fall I just did not see coming. I mean, it was not completely implausible that he would hit a bit. I'm more surprised almost that he's been healthy all year and has played the full season than I am about how poorly he's hit. So I've got my predictions here so I can tell you exactly what I thought that Derek Jeter was going to do. One thing, and this was partly a strategic thing, but I predicted zero stolen base attempts.

And he's actually stolen a bunch. He's stolen and or attempted to steal. He's 10 for 12, which is actually more stolen bases and one one fewer attempt than in his 2012 season so i had him hitting uh 281 313 365 which isn't that good i'm off by 50 points of slugging and 10 points of on-base percentage. And 10 homers, so he has four. And so, yeah, that's not that far off. The batting average is off. But it's not horrifying.

I think I just generally was more optimistic. I think in my heart I was more optimistic even than the numbers I put down. I probably didn't have the courage of my convictions. Okay, I will take Andrelton Simmons as my next one. And this was when I was forced to make a bold prediction about a player by Brian Kenney. I went with Andrelton Simmons as an MVP candidate, or if not candidate, at least a deserving candidate, just based on how good his defense was already

and the fact that I thought maybe he could get better on offense because he was kind of a below-average offensive player last year but with a weird offensive profile where he hit for pretty decent power but also never struck out and it seemed like something had to give there like maybe maybe he'd hit for more power or not only did he not strike out he hit 248 with a 247 babbitt and that seemed weird and so i figured he might hit for a better average at least and get his OBP over 300 and keep hitting for a little bit of power

and then put that together with the glove. And suddenly he looks like a realistic contender for one of the best players in baseball as a guy who was worth, you know, something close to five wins last year. So that hasn't happened. a guy who was worth something close to five wins last year. So that hasn't happened. He's been one of the worst regular hitters in baseball, now hitting.245,.286,.333. So he has essentially kept the low BABIP and the low batting average

and the low walk rate and lost a lot of the power he had. So he is not taking a step forward. He has taken a step backwards. He is probably still an above average player maybe because of the glove or average at least, but has not gotten better as I expected him to. So that's one. I'm trying to remember. You, before you went on Brian Kenney's show, you asked me for the answer to that question.

Yeah, probably. I was desperate because I hated bold predictions because, as I probably said at the time, I don't know what it means. Am I supposed to believe the prediction? Am I supposed to think it's far-fetched? Is it bold because I think it's probably going to be wrong? Or is it bold because I believe it and no one else does? And so my understanding of bold prediction is that I wouldn't bet on it, but I think it's possible. So that was what I went with. I wouldn't bet on it, but I think it's possible.

So that was what I went with. I don't know what your answer was. What my answer was to that question? Mm-hmm. Yeah, I'm trying to find that chat. Do you remember when that was? It must have been probably shortly before opening day. Yeah.

In fairness to me, I'm interested in being fair to me, my team bold prediction was that the Royals would win the wild card, and I wasn't sure whether that was bold enough, but if that was bold, that one worked out at least. Yeah, I don't know. I couldn't find it. Okay. All right. This is actually kind of similar to the last one, but I thought that Mike Morse signing was the very worst example of the very worst part of the reason I especially hated it is that I thought that Corey Hart was going to be good. And I thought, they're the same player, basically. Double whammy. But I probably would rather have Hart, and he costs a lot less. And in fact, Morse has been pretty good.

He does do Mike Morse things, which knock his value quite a bit. But he's been pretty good. And Corey Hart's been dreadful, just terrible. And it's not a stretch to say that if Sabian had signed Corey Hart instead of Mike Morse, the Brewers would be in the playoffs. Could be. My next one will be the Pirates, I think. And I expected the Pirates to take more of a step back than they have.

I thought a lot of things went right for them last year. All the reclamation projects that worked out and the bullpen being great, which is not something that tends to be consistent from year to year. And I figured they would be somewhere in the range of a 500 team, somewhere in there, not a playoff team. And, I mean, that's not the biggest miss ever. I mean, if you have perfect information on a team, what's the range is like six or seven wins that you would be off anyway

just by chance alone. And they're only an 86-win team as we speak right now. So it's not a huge miss. And as I wrote recently, part of that is the injuries. They've had the fewest injuries in baseball, which is not something that I blame myself for not being able to predict. But in general, I underrated the Pirates, I think, and I am sorry for that.

Yeah, I underrated them even more than you because we had that bet about how many postseason appearances they would have in the next five years. Oh, that's right. That makes me feel better. I said zero, I believe. And I said two? I i don't know i think i said two all right halfway there you probably did let's see how many of the next five post seasons will include the pirates note note post season defined as everything beyond the play-in game so i've still got a shot darn okay i've got a i've still got a shot i said zero you said two okay i'm skimming this to see whether there's

anything else that i can take from here for my examples of being wrong yeah i i also the pirates and then you know i'll just go ahead and steal this one but uh or jump off of this one since i can't say pirates uh i i don't think i ever said anything tremendously wrong about the orioles because i don't think i ever said anything about the orioles i just didn't i didn't consider them relevant enough to make a prediction about yeah um i do know that my in when i did make an actual prediction in my predictions thing, I had them winning 76 games, which is not how many they're going to win. Nope. So the Orioles, I mean, that's just a complete miss. I don't know.

I don't know why I was so blind to the Orioles. I still don't even know why they're. I was too. And that was the only reason why that might not have been one of mine is that i think the al east was kind of a blind spot for almost everyone so i was certainly one of them i think i picked the orioles to finish fourth and and the rays and the red socks to finish first and second so finish first and second. So that's a miss. That's a miss that a lot of people made,

but it's one of the more dramatic misses one could have made this year. I did get seven of ten playoff teams. Yeah. It's been a pretty predictable season, though. Yeah. It's not like my predictions. My predictions are just nothing but conventional wisdom. Right.

Me too. Let's see how many I got. I also got seven. Okay. And I almost want to use a couple individual pirates as one of mine, because I think two guys that I wrote about a bit or that we talked about a bit didn't follow through on what we expected them to do. One was Gregory Polanco, who was this year's, I think, clearest example, or so it seemed, of a player who was being held down because of service time. And he was, for a while there, hitting close to 400 in AAA. And meanwhile, the Pirates right fielders or Travis Snyder,

Jose Tabata, or whoever it was, were not hitting at all. And it seemed like an obvious case of a team manipulating service time and waiting for a guy to pass the super two time to call a guy up to the detriment of a team that seemed like it might need every extra win. And as it turned out, kind of did. And Neil Huntington said various things about how they didn't think he was ready yet, or he still had things to work on. And there was sort of a tendency to see that in a cynical way. And of course, he has to say something to justify it. But scout quotes said that Polanco was ready and his stats said that Polanco was ready. Anyway, Polanco came up,

he ended up getting over 300 plate appearances and he did not hit very well in those 300 plate appearances. I guess decent, decent patience. He wasn't crazy. Undisciplined 57 strikeouts and 30 walks is pretty good in 2014 but he didn't hit for a whole lot of power he finished with a or has right now a 657 ops hasn't been a starter during the pirate stretch run here so that's one case where maybe, uh, maybe Huntington was on the level. Maybe they really did think that Polanco had some stuff to work on and maybe they were right about that. The other one was AJ Burnett. And we did a podcast about how the pirates messed up by not offering AJ Burnett a qualifying offer and just trusting that he would come back or that he

would retire as he suggested that he might. And then he didn't and he left. And we find out that there was some relationship stuff there going on with the team and the player that might have played into that also. But it seemed like a caseJ. Burnett was going to be a pretty good deal for qualifying off her money. And as it turns out, Burnett has been a durable starter, but a well below average one, and someone who the Pirates really couldn't have used at all. So that's one, Burnett and Polanco. Do we have one more, or do we do five?

I have more. I've lost track. We've definitely done four. My last one, I'm not going to go with Bryce Harper winning MVP. I did, however, think that Bryce Harper was going to win the MVP. My last one is, I never said this.

I never wrote it. I never made any decision based on it. It was only a feeling I had. And it's been a feeling I've kind of had for two years. Ever since Clayton Kershaw had plantar fasciitis in 2012, any time he throws a bad pitch at all, it's like I knew it. I knew he's hurt. And I always expect him to get hurt like if he has a bad inning i genuinely think this is it he's done and it's not a sense of

pessimism that i might feel about you know jose fernandez or or something like that it's like i genuinely think well he had he had plantar fasciitis. You can't beat that. But I haven't heard about it since. It's been two years since I've heard those two words said about him. But like last offseason when he got bombed in the LCS and the Dodgers got knocked out, I thought, yep, he's probably hurt, probably won't come back next year. And then he got hurt in spring training.

And I thought, of course, he was hurt last October. He's probably hurt now. And he got bombed in like his fifth start of the year and had like a 4.75 ERA in May. And I thought, finally the year that Kershaw falls apart. And I don't know what, I mean, I wasn't forced to take any action based on that intelligence. But I don't know how much I, I don't know how, if pushed, I don't know how far I would have gone. I don't know how far I would have discounted him. But I certainly probably would have discounted his future prospects somewhat at that point. And if he had been hurt, right now I'd be talking about how I knew it and taking credit. So I should probably get demerits. Okay, and I guess I'll just say instant replay.

Some of the stuff that we discussed on the podcast before the season and was written about at BP before the season, the idea that the system was poorly designed or that there would be ways in which teams would exploit it, or not exploit it, but just expose its inadequacies by challenging all the time because the incentives favored teams challenging all the time. And it seemed like there was some potential for there to be some serious unintended consequences with the system and it became clear as soon as the season started that that was not

going to be the case there were not going to be a crazy amount of challenges and even though the the pre-season analysis and statistics that were run seemed to suggest that you should just challenge often because there are so few plays that would be smart to challenge and there's not much penalty associated with challenges. So it seemed like it could be a problem. As it turned out, it wasn't one. You could argue, I suppose, that teams just haven't approached the replay system optimally, but I think probably what we underestimated or failed to account for was just how much time you have to make the decision on whether to challenge. And the whole replay review, the internal replay review system with the person in the clubhouse relaying

the word to the bench coach and then the bench coach relaying word to the manager. It seemed like going in that managers would be acting, I think, with less information than they actually have. By the time they're forced to make a decision, they have some pretty good intel from someone who has seen the replay on whether they should challenge or not. And that seems like something that we maybe didn't take into account fully before the season. Since we last talked about Matt Kemp, he has developed a limp.

Oh, no. Yeah. Well, I regret that. That's now one of my greatest regrets of the season there were a couple couple others that didn't rise to the level of worst but I remember this moment clearly on our I think it was our Indians season preview podcast where I had a choice between Corey Kluber and I think it was Danny Salazar because I was I was pretty high on Danny Salazar coming into the year and there was this moment where we we did a who would you rather

have for this year Corey Kluber Danny Salazar and I I part of me wanted to say Kluber because he seemed like maybe the safer pick but Salazar looked so good at the end of last season that I was expecting big things from him this year, and I think I said it was a toss-up, which has not been the case, although Salazar has sort of salvaged his season a bit since he was called up again. Basically, they've been pretty much the same. Don't beat yourself up.

No real difference there. No. the same thing yeah don't don't beat yourself up no real difference there no since salazar came up with his like 3.2 era cory kluber you know has been like levitating won the cy young award probably yeah so that was not a great one i think i also picked archie bradley as my nl rookie of the year i had a third i was just looking at mine. I had him third, but, you know, what are you going to do? But I had Taveras second. Uh-huh, right. And that really didn't happen. Yeah.

You know, I had Madison Bumgarner third in my Cy Young voting, and I, in his first outing of the year, he won, and it was like he went like six innings and gave up three runs, and he was pretty good but not spectacular. And he was pretty good, but not spectacular. And I remember just thinking, well, he probably won't earn the Cy Young, but if he can just get to 20 wins. And all year long, I've been borderline obsessive about Madison Bumgarner getting wins because I thought if he just gets to 20.

Because I think if he won 20 games, he would finish third. But instead, he's going to finish fourth behind Wainwright. And I was just every box score looking to see if Bummer got the win. It seems so important. Well, as we've discussed, when you're a baseball writer, you root for the things that make you look smart. He ended up with 18 with three starts to go. And I don't think he won either of the next two, I think, if I'm not mistaken.

There was also the Orioles' Grant Balfour physical, which in retrospect looks smart, their decision not to offer him a contract. The Brewers, I guess you could say that they're finishing out of the playoffs so maybe we didn't miss all that much but we were so negative about the brewers how many wins are they gonna have uh let's see what they have right now because i had a winning 81 well so that's right on i guess so they have 81 right now yeah it wasn't that we thought they'd be so terrible right now it was more that we thought they'd be so terrible right now. It was more that we thought the franchise was kind of in a bad place

where they wouldn't be contending this year and they weren't really set up well for the future. They made a better run at contending than either of us anticipated. But it was an illusion. I mean, they have a minus six run differential. That might be our best prediction. That could be, yeah. Okay.

Yeah, sure. Rehabilitate our Brewers prediction. I like that. Okay, so that's it. We've acknowledged all our sins. Any one thing that you feel really good about? No. No?

No. When I was thinking about this, you know what? Yeah, okay, sure. I have one. I feel good about the day that Canoe got signed. I wrote a transaction analysis that was in favor of the move from the manager's perspective. And I'm probably exaggerating this in my memory, but it felt to me like that day nobody was writing that, and I felt very alone. Ken Rosenthal wasn't writing that? I felt very alone that day,

and I think that it turned out to be pretty good for the Mariners. Well, I mean, in the sense that they didn't make the playoffs, you could argue that it turned out pretty bad for the mariners they that well i mean in the sense that they didn't make the playoffs you could argue that it turned out pretty bad for the mariners but they clearly got close enough that uh two two breaks uh in another direction and they would have made the playoffs and that's what everybody said that cano couldn't possibly do so i think they were vindicated i think that move was indicated yeah that's a good one Yeah, the ones that I kind of remember being or feeling good about are probably majority opinions, things like Phil Hughes being good, not that I predicted the way in which he would be good, and the Royals being pretty good. And I kind of look back fondly

on the Miguel Cabrera contract analysis, not that that was a minority opinion either, but just the idea that it was not that Cabrera was going to be bad or that he was going to collapse all of a sudden, but just that the timing seemed really strange that if you were going to extend Cabrera before you had to, you had to get some sort of discount instead of paying him to continue to be an MVP type player. And he has been an excellent player. He's been a five-win player this year. But five-win season for Miguel Cabrera is probably his worst season since 2009 or so. And that was the whole criticism of the Cabrera contract.

Not that he'd be bad, but why pay him to continue to be the best player in baseball when odds are he he will decline to some extent and you could just either sign him now and get the discount built in or sign him later after he's reduced his value a little bit and that has played out exactly like the detractors of that deal, myself included, thought. And it's one more year before he would have been a free agent? Yes. So that'll be a topic at some point in the next year.

So never mind. Forget I almost got to that question. Okay. All right. So that is it for today. Please support our sponsor, Baseball Reference, by going to baseballreference.com, using the coupon code BP to subscribe to the newly

enhanced play index for the discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription, and we'll be back with another show tomorrow. I will be covering Derek Jeter's last game, so please wish for clear skies for me so I don't have to spend all day at Yankee Stadium.

We'll be back tomorrow.