Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 569: The Yankees and Free Agency

Episode Date: November 3, 2014

Ben and Sam discuss the Yankees’ free-agent spending plans and their impact on the market.

I've been up all day, down all night, working all the time. Everything I do is wrong, always in the right. Woman, I've tried so hard, done all I can do. They're gonna put me in the poorhouse, keep all the best for you. Good morning and welcome to episode 569 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus, brought to you by The Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg of Grantland.com. Hi, Ben.

Hello. How are you? All right. We have some podcast news that will get out of the way. We're going to go to three episodes a week during the off season, which sounds interesting. But of course there's three holiday weeks in there. So those would have been short weeks anyway. We'll do a full week for the winter meetings.

We'll come back. When do we start doing the team previews? Like beginning of February or so? Yeah, around there. Around there. So then we'll go back to doing five. And if news happens and we feel like it's worth recording a podcast that day, even if it's not scheduled, we'll just go ahead and do it. So it won't be too bad.

Yeah. Ideally, you will only miss the shows that we would have been scrambling to do where neither of us really had anything to talk about. And we scrounged up a topic at the last minute and you probably won't be missing those episodes all that much. There are some dead periods in the off season where it's, it's tough to find something good that we haven't talked about before and that we are interested in talking about. So yeah, we are during the off season,

we are the proverbial fourth outfielder overextended in full-time play. Right. Yeah. But we will keep going. And hopefully those of you who, who enjoy the podcast on your way to work and just take Tuesdays and Thursdays off or work from home on those days. Yeah, that's a good one. That's a good idea. Yeah.

All right. And so I guess the one thing, though, is each of us, when we starts the show, says the daily podcast from. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it says that in the iTunes description. It says it all over the place. Does it say it in the logo?

It does say it in the logo. So I think we just have to, I mean, look, we were never truly daily to begin with. That's true. It was Saturday and Sunday off. So I think we just keep saying it. Okay. All right. So the off season has begun.

And free agent gossip has started. And I wanted to talk about that, but I didn't know exactly how to talk about it. It's such a giant topic to talk about. And so I thought that I would just narrow it down to one thing. And that one thing is the Yankees. And so in the past, for most of our adult lives, you and I, Ben, and much of your teen years, the Yankees were the kind of dominant force in every offseason. It was sort of the default for any free agent was, okay, try to get to the Yankees. If you were trying to predict, you'd start with the Yankees and you'd find a reason they weren't going to sign a player,

and then you'd start figuring out what team they were going to be on. And, you know, you always had this feeling that agents really wanted to get their players linked to the Yankees so that if nothing else, it raised their price. And if you could get the Yankees bidding against the Red Sox or against another big market team, that was even better. And so I don't know what the Yankees offseason is going to be like. I don't know if that way of looking at the Yankees as the dominant force in an offseason is true anymore. It has never been true every year.

They have had years where they've been less active and years where they've been more active, but it was usually true. And so now I don't know where the Yankees are, but more than that um i want to just refer back to the conversation we had about them last year when you in your much much since referred to uh assessment of what they needed to do to get good said they need to sign all the good players and they did and they were still poor. And so this year...

Mediocre, but with a... Again, they won one fewer game than the year before, and I think their Pythagorean record was one game worse. Which is pretty impressive, by the way, if you think about it. To outperform Pythagorean record by like six or seven wins two years in a row. Yeah. That's social territory, man. We're like two more years away from accepting that it's real but yeah i've heard people give credit to joe gerardi for that rightly or wrongly i would give credit to martin prado even though he wasn't

there the first year of this and for most of the second year i still think that that the the idea of martin prado was uh percolating in the Yankees. And so Prado is, Prado is a Pythagorean kryptonite. By the way, no, I'm not, I'm not even going to, by the way,

that's nevermind. So I forget that, that threw me off course, but I guess the first thing to establish Ben Ben, is are the Yankees good? I don't think so. Good? I mean, I'm the one writing the Yankees' annual essay this year, so I will have to figure that out very shortly. But I don't know what there is to be optimistic about in the near future.

I mean, there are maybe some prospects you could kind of get excited about. Not a lot of depth. They've finally reorganized themselves in that department and hired some new front office personnel who will be maybe changing the way that's run, the total lack of young talent on the team right now or lack of impact young talent on the team. But I don't know in the near future what there is to be excited about, really. I mean, things kind of went about as well as could be expected this past year. I know they had a lot of injuries, but you would have expected them to have a lot of injuries with the roster that they had.

And it seems like they're kind of locked into a lousy offensive team in the short term, at least. I mean, there's not a whole lot of upside there, is there? I mean, you could say that maybe Beltran will bounce back after having his surgery and he'll be good. But, I mean, he'll be 38 and coming off surgery. And Ituro will be 41. And Ellsbury will be a year older.

And Gardner will be a year older. No one is really moving into their prime in that lineup. Everyone is slowly or quickly moving out of it. Do you know that last year was the second oldest team that they've ever fielded, which is saying something because the Yankees have fielded some very old teams. Yeah, I heard something about it going into this past season about whether they would have the oldest lineup of all time. Well, they would have if A-Rod had been there.

Right. And I'm trying to remember what your, what your old team theory was. It was, they crash really fast, but old teams are often also, uh, like there's this, there's this dynamic where old teams are often at their peak and then they crash fast. Right. Yeah. I think I, I, if I had a theory about that, it was just that they're high variance, more so than the typical team, and that if you're the Yankees and you've assembled all these old guys, it's because you still think they'll be pretty good. they've all lasted this long because they were skilled players in their prime and maybe they'd have something left but but yeah it can all go wrong very quickly they can all get hurt and have injury stacks and everything can can crater brian brian mccann was their youngest regular last year

i know it's i guess i guess after after they got him Chase Headley became the youngest regular, who's like two months younger than Brian McCann. Yeah. Martin Prado was the next youngest. Was he under 30 at least? No. No. No, none of them were. I guess Headley wasn't when they got him.

Headley started the year under 30. He turned 30 in May. Gardner turned 30. year under 30, turned 30 in May. Gardner turned 30, or no, he turned 31 in August, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I guess, you know, they had Solarte for a while. So they did start a player who was under 30, and Cervelli is under 30. But that's basically it. They probably started, what, may be probably fewer than a hundred

games from under 30 players. Yeah, I probably, yeah, that's amazing. Uh, but, but Ben, what, what you're saying is, is sort of true in one sense, but, we're just a year removed from Brian McCann being a star. Sure, I expect him to be very good. Right, and Ellsbury certainly was a star. And Carlos Beltran was very good, although it's more troubling that he would collapse. Yeah, he kind of tanked in his last season with St. Louis. He sort of lost it in the second half, at least. In the second half?

All right. Well, okay. But he had the exact same year as he had his first year with St. Louis. Yes. Basically, okay. But he had the exact same year as he had his first year at St. Louis. Yes. Basically, overall. And then Gardner is a very, very good player. And so it's not as though they are bereft of good baseball players. I mean, we're grading them on a Yankees curve, aren't we, to some degree?

Yeah, sure. I mean, they still won 84, 85 games the last couple of years. And that's a lot of people gave a lot of people I've heard over the past year, give Joe Girardi a lot of credit for them being adequate, even being mediocre, being kind of in contention and wondering how he did that and what kind of Yankees magic was going on. And I never thought it was particularly impressive. I mean, he has had a lot to do. He's been a busy manager just swapping guys in because they've had so many injuries and establishing new relievers and everything. So he may have done a fine job. But the fact that they have won 85, 84 games doesn't strike me as particularly impressive. That should be the low end of the range if you're going to have the highest or second highest payroll in baseball.

Theoretically, if that goes bad, you should still be decent. decent. I mean, if you're spending it all efficiently or intelligently, the downside of a $200 million team should be missing the playoffs by a few games, not totally tanking. So they've been, I think, about where one would expect them to be, which is not totally embarrassing. It's hard to be embarrassing when you're paying that much money to play players. Even when lots of them get old and lots of them get hurt, there's still some talent there. So do you think they were closer to an 84-win team or a 77-win team in true talent? I'd say more of a low 80s team, I think. Yeah.

And would you say that, without knowing what they're going to do this offseason, which I guess we'll talk about, but would you say that it is more likely that they win, say, 95 games or 68 games next year? It's hard for me to imagine either, Hmm. It's hard for me to imagine either, but I guess, I mean, 95 is a lot closer to where they've been than 68. So I might say that, but I can't imagine it happening either. Tim Dirks at MLB Trade Rumors did his annual off-season preview ranking the top 50 free agents. And as part of that, he predicts where the free agents will land. This is an extremely challenging task, I'm sure he would admit.

I'm sure anybody would admit. As we've shown before, even GMs, when asked to predict where free agents will go, do no better than random chance, which is I guess why RJ Anderson last year, RJ did actually predict using random chance, right? Didn't he? What did he have? He had a random number generator.

Yes, I think he included his picks, but then he also included random numbers. I think Randy beat him, if I'm not mistaken. Anyway, so Tim Dirks has his up, and he has the Yankees signing Max Scherzer and Hanley Ramirez, and I, like an idiot, navigated away from this tab. But those two and then Jason Grilley are the only ones that he had going to the Yankees. He has the Yankees mentioned about 48 times.

Like almost, like not every, but in a lot, a lot more players, the Yankees are mentioned as a possibility. But let's say Scherzer, Hanley, and Grilly, let's just say he nails them. How shocking would that be? I guess do you sort of in total out outlay do you take the over or under on that i think i'll take the under on that that'd be that'd be a lot so yeah it would be a lot but look they i mean so they have to replace carota they have to replace uh jeter they have to replace headley probably because A-Rod might not play third base.

They still don't have a second baseman as far as I can tell. They might have to replace David Robertson if he turns down their qualifying offer. Seems both surprising that he's getting one and surprising that he's going to turn it down. And yet, there it is. And have to replace Brandon McCarthy. So, you sure? Well, I'm thinking of total contract size more so than 2015 salary. So, I could see them spending as much as Scherzer and Hanley and Grilly would cost in 2015. But I don't know that I see them spending as much as it would take to sign those two guys long term. I mean, it wouldn't shock me or anything. You know between 250 and 300 million dollars Probably Yeah and that's

I mean they just came off an off season Where they spent an enormous amount of money And just sort of treaded water Record wise And their attendance Took a bit of a hit I believe right I mean it was still very high

But I guess it didn't. It didn't. That's interesting. Their attendance increased. Well, Jeter. Oh, right. Yeah.

But they still, it increased a little bit, but because of Jeter, probably, presumably. Yes. But they didn't get any payroll revenue, playoff revenue. And as we know, that's like what? What did we find out? That's like $60 or $70 million that they lose from the previous year in operating revenue. So if they're basically building their budget with the presumption that they're going to make the playoffs, I mean, we talked about this. They've dropped from like $350 million in revenue to $280 or something like that just

by missing the playoffs and they missed the playoffs again last year uh and they won't have jeter this year although uh it'd be an interesting farewell tour that just trotted him out like bernie yeah well i mean what was i mean he was making what was his his salary that last year? I think it was like $13 million, wasn't it? $13 million or maybe it was $17? So, no, it was $12.

$12, yeah. So, I mean, he's probably a bargain at $12, even as one of the worst, if not the worst, regular players in baseball to seemingly single-handedly prop the Yankees attendance up, increase their attendance, despite the fact that the team was no better. And this was a year after they missed the playoffs. That is pretty impressive. I don't know how you could isolate the Jeter effect, but attendance alone, let alone the enormous amount of merchandise that was sold. but attendance alone, let alone the enormous amount of merchandise that was sold, I mean, they must have more than made up for whatever they were paying him,

unless they missed the playoffs because they were playing him, in which case maybe not. But otherwise, certainly seems like that was a good deal. So does the fact that they have lost all this money, lost all this revenue, and have no real way of necessarily getting that revenue back next year without Jeter being there, does that though make it more or less likely that they'll go spend $300 million on players. Because it doesn't seem to me that, while it seems unhinged to think that the response to this would be to go buy, I just watched the first episode of Portlandia, so this isn't a reference nobody will get, but to go buy the bigger hot tub seems crazy. On the other hand, what's the plan? I mean, they're going to lose more money, right, if they don't invest. And they've already spent all this money, which you can say is sunk cost. But I mean, couldn't you see it making them more desperate to get back to the playoffs,

get that revenue back, get the playoff swag? Yeah, sure. I could. I mean, it's not a good situation either way. They've kind of spent themselves into a hole here where, yeah, that might be the most reasonable course of action that they should just keep spending. And of course, that could backfire even further. It could plunge them into an even deeper, darker hole that they stay in even longer. And I mean, I guess they could just decide that they're not going to do business that way anymore. They could try to talk up a new rebuilding plan or something. I mean, they've never really done that. That's something that the Yankees have never really openly tried. And, and people will always say, oh, that doesn't work in New York, or it won't work for the Yankees. And

who knows, maybe they will get so desperate that they'll see whether it does. But yeah, I mean, they're, they're kind of locked into a high payroll here with some pretty unproductive players for a few more years. So what would you do? I don't know. I mean, it depends how much, whether they are losing money, whether they're just making less money than they could. I mean, it's always hard to say what a team's actual financial situation is, especially when it's a team with an RSN.

So you can never tell if the team's losing money. It doesn't mean that the whole organization is losing money. And of course, the value of the franchise is probably going up no matter what, right? Whether you talk about the short-term operating losses or not, if the Yankees were to sell, I mean, given what franchise values have been lately, they would go for several billion dollars perhaps. I mean, who knows? So while they're losing in the short term, they are, in a sense, probably not losing anything. So I don't know. So, I don't know, maybe they can just keep throwing money at this problem and hope that they can at least stay respectablees in the early aughts. But doesn't it sort of seem, I mean, as fun as it is to watch the Royals

and as much as we root for teams, the unexpected teams, to add a splash of color to the postseason, doesn't it sort of kind of seem like it wouldn't be as fun if the Yankees had a six-year run of being irrelevant. They really do a lot to make the offseason more interesting, to give you something to root against in the regular season, to sometimes have a great team that's so good that we remember it forever and talk about it, and they give us these great moments.

I don't know if I like this i i thought i wanted this uh-huh yeah when i got it it just sort of sucked all the moisture out of the air yeah that's i mean that's always kind of been the argument right that baseball needs the yankees to be good or needs the Yankees to be good or needs the most prominent teams to be good, that they're the most hated teams and that therefore they generate intrigue. And I don't know. I mean, this was a great postseason. It wasn't like I was at any point giving a thought to the Yankees or thinking I wish the Yankees were playing.

Two years we can handle for sure. Yeah. But your plan for them, though, your plan for them was literally get good enough that they might luck into a playoff spot. Right. It's the New York Yankees, and you're hoping to build maybe an 84.5 win team on paper

and every three years luck into a wildcard spot. Like, that's really depressing. There's got to be something better than in the middle. Well, I mean, they've had a really bad run of drafting and developing players. And obviously, they're always fighting a bit of an uphill battle in that they usually are good, so they don't have high draft picks. And they're always competing. So when they do have prospects prospects they trade them away for

veterans and so that's always made it difficult for them to develop from within but they've managed to do it at various points i mean not only in the the early mid 90s late 90s teams that had a whole core of really good productive players from within. But even, you know, like the 2009 team had Robinson Cano or, you know, still had a productive Jeter. I mean, they can always keep their homegrown players who do turn into stars. So they just have to get a few of them. And they just have been bereft the last couple of years. So, I mean, other than Gardner and Robertson, that is, that's kind of it right now, Betancis. So that will change, I think. I

mean, they can't continue to be as either incompetent or unlucky or a combination of both as they have been drafting and developing players. Eventually, that will change. Maybe the new people that they put in charge will change it. Maybe it'll change just because it can't continue to be that bad. But that's all they need, right? They need a few productive players who are cheap. And if they have that, then they can supplement enough, I think, to build via free agency. It's when they have to construct the entire team via free agency that even the Yankees can't consistently do it. What do you mean when you say a few, how many is a few in your mind? Because it's actually not that

easy to get a few productive regulars. I mean, I watched the Giants go 20 years without developing a productive regular, and that was extreme incompetence and bad luck but it's not that easy I mean average ball players are very rare so how many are you thinking here I wonder how many average homegrown players the typical team had this year I I don't know I I don't know but I mean they have to have like five maybe at least you're including pitchers i'm including pitchers yeah you include or would you include a reliever in that uh maybe maybe maybe a baton says a baton says but not a warren yeah i don't think that, I mean, the, the, the Warrens and the David Phelps and, and those guys, Chase Whitley, those kinds of guys, I don't think they really rise to that level. So I don't know. It's, it's, I mean, it's hard to develop a superstar, but even if they could just

not have to just fill every position, I mean, if they could have a homegrown guy who was league average instead of signing Carlos Beltran, if they could have someone to bring up from the system instead of having to trade for an entire lineup in the middle of the year, which they did, and it worked out really well, and they did that really well, but it's hard to do that consistently and then have any talent left over to develop.

So it's sort of a tall order. It might take a few years. So yeah, it might be a depressing future for now. All right. Who spends more of this offseason in total, total in total outlay, Yankees or Cubs? Huh. I'll say Cubs. And who spends more over, let's say, the next two years, Yankees both years

or Cubs this year plus Astros next year? I'll take Yankees. Okay. So does this have any larger significance that the Yankees are in this sort of spiral right now? Is that, I mean, when you use them as an entry point to talk about the free agent market, are you thinking that there is any larger significance

here that if the yankees are not spending the way that they normally do does that depress the market somehow or is it not all that significant um i don't i don't know i don't think it's i don't think it's probably all that significant in a in a way that would be worth talking about. I think that there will be individual players who, you know, a couple of players who will, at the end of the offseason, think, too bad, if only the Yankees were spending, you know, I might have $8 million more in my life or $18 million more in my life.

And so that's pretty significant to them, but not to us. So probably not. And it does seem like, yeah, I don't know. I don't think it does. And I also don't think that, I mean, I don't think that what the Yankees are going through is necessarily quite as strong an indictment of trying to sign free agents as people will make it out to be either. They've done a very bad job with their free agents. The problem

is that when they do sign these guys, they immediately do worse than we were expecting more quickly. This is sort of the same way that it was with the Angels with their moves. It wasn't so much that they spent big on guys. It's that guys that we thought were good and weren't going to decline rapidly for another three years declined immediately. And that's just sort of kind of bad luck probably. Yeah. I mean, the last time the Yankees won the World Series, they had a little bit more help from the farm system maybe, but still they had gone on a spending spree the previous winter and it worked out just fine.

I mean, big... Robinson Cano. Yeah, Robinson Cano was signed as a free agent and Russell Martin was signed as a free agent and both of those guys are really good. Yes. Right. Like if the Yankees had signed Cano and Martin to huge contracts instead of McCann and, you know, Ellsbury. Yeah. They would have been pretty happy signing those guys to big money deals. Right.

They won the World Series with CeCe Zabathia, a free agent, who was an excellent big part of that team. Mark Teixeira at the time was a very productive big part of that team. Johnny Damon was a pretty big part of that team. So, yeah, of that team. Johnny Damon was a pretty big part of that team. So yeah, it's doable. Maybe it's hard to do, but then it's also hard to develop your own players too. So yes, maybe they will have a combination of developing someone who's decent and just signing more intelligently or more luckily. All right. I've got no more hypotheticals to make you.

I guess I got one more, one last one, and I'm hoping that you didn't look at it while you were there. How much do you think Derek Jeter made in his career? Oh, in his career? Oh, wow. Hmm. I'll say 275. I've got, let's see, I've got 253 plus the Arb years. So I'm going to guess like 260.5.

Okay. 265.2.5. Uh-huh. Okay. 265.2. Wow. What did you say? I said 275. All right. Good. Okay. Well, right in the middle of us again.

Good at the salary estimation thing. Well, the more we do modern players. Yeah. I think if we had had to do Calrican Jr., it would not have gone well. No. All right. I mean, I remember almost every dollar that was ever given to Derek Jeter. Like, we are now to the point where I can recall all three contracts he signed. Mm-hmm.

And, you know, so that's pretty easy. Mm-hmm. Okay. So we will be back later in the week. We will be doing listener emails regularly again. So please keep them coming at podcast at baseball prospectus.com. Thank you to everyone who left ratings and reviews for the show on iTunes last week. And over the weekend, we got a bunch of them.

Appreciate it. Welcome more. Over the weekend, we got a bunch of them. Appreciate it. Welcome more. And please support our sponsor by going to the Baseball Reference Play Index at baseballreference.com and subscribing using the coupon code BP to get the discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription. Join the Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild. And we'll be back on Wednesday.