Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 570: The Offseason’s First Emails

Episode Date: November 5, 2014

Ben and Sam banter about Joe Maddon, Michael Cuddyer, and more, then answer offseason-related listener emails.

I waited for you winter long, you seem to be where I belong, it's all illusion anyway. Good morning, or maybe afternoon, and welcome to episode 570 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectus, presented by the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I am Ben Lindberg of Grantland, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Perspectus. Hello. How are you? I am well, thank you. Can I talk about something?

You can. You may. I want to talk about Snowpiercer. Okay. And if you still haven't seen Snowpiercer, this is not a major spoiler, but I guess it's not a major spoiler, but it's enough of one that if you haven't seen it and you plan to see it, you might skip ahead two minutes. But we've talked in the past about, and here we go, here comes the spoiling, the scene with the shooting in the classroom, right? Right. And it was my primary objection to the movie was that scene because it's not clear what happens to the children.

It seems like they're either all killed, but they disappear, their carnage is not seen, or they have some way of hiding in the room that we're not aware of or they run to the back of the train and we don't see it or they run to the front of the train and we don't see it or something and we uh we did not have a solution to this problem at the time nobody offered a solution there were plenty of hypotheses uh such as cupboards. A bunch of people emailed to tell me, cupboards is always good. Anytime a movie pivots on cupboardry, that's good. But I happened to rewatch the movie. Really? Yeah, my wife hadn't seen it. So it's the rare instance where I'm watching a movie

a second time and I watched extremely closely. It was on DVD. It's conceivable that they recut for the DVD. Right. Podcast listener was listening to your objections. We better fix this. I don't know. It might not be a podcast listener. They might have mentioned this on a Yes! Yankees broadcast. That's true. That would be James Smith's crowning achievement, getting the Yankees broadcasters to talk about Snowpiercer. Effectively wild listener. All right, so I watched very closely, and in fact, there's no mystery at all, at least on the DVD cut.

at least on the DVD cut, just before the shooting begins, you might recall they have a sort of dramatic playing of the violin. The violin bow snaps just before the violin starts. And the students have all gone to the front of the classroom to sit and watch the violinists and eat their eggs. And when the shooting starts, you actually can see in the background of the shot the kids running toward the front of the train. So they do escape to the front of the train. Uh-huh. So that answers that. Well, I'm glad we could clear that up.

Yeah. I wonder why we don't see them in the future. Well, we don't see every train car. I mean, you have to presume. I've wondered how many train cars there are. We see maybe, I don't know, a dozen, maybe 15 in total. But you have to figure. Evidently, there are many, many more.

Yeah, we don't see any living quarters, and we know these people are living. We know that there are enough people to fully populate a beauty salon in the middle of the day. And so that suggests something like a city-sized population or a town-sized population. And since we don't see their residences, you have to assume that there are hundreds of cars at least that we don't see. Although I will note that when they do the math, when they do the calculation at the beginning and she concludes that 74% of the back of the train are going to have to die, the premise of this system is that death has to be proportional, right?

Mm-hmm. That would imply that something like 74% of the front of the train is also dead? Well, I don't know if it's proportional or the balance has to be maintained, so there has to be a certain number of people, which is strange because if you let it get so far out of balance that you have to kill that many people, then maybe you should have done something sooner. If we were going to talk about Snowpiercer plot holes or questions, I could do entire

episodes on that. Probably. Let's sort of pencil that in for maybe January. Yeah, there is that slow period when there's no baseball news, there's no signings, and we're always struggling to find topics. So maybe we'll do a whole Snowpiercer podcast. Maybe we will. It's on Instant. If we do, we'll give you notice so that you can watch in case you haven't seen it. All right.

Yeah, so this is a baseball podcast for the most part. No, sorry. I avoided going into some seriously bad pun territory, so go ahead. So we didn't do a show yesterday as part of our new three times a week system, and there's a lot

of news that happens every day. I found myself wanting to banter about things that happened, and we didn't have a show to do it. So I had nowhere to do it. I guess there's Twitter, but I didn't do a show this year, which I think we did the last couple of years about qualifying offers and who's going to get one and whether anyone's going to turn one down. And for the most part, I mean, it's probably for the best that we didn't do that because it's sort of a predictable exercise. You could kind of tell who's going to get one usually. And thus far, when everyone has gotten one, they've rejected them. So not that interesting to talk about.

But this year there was one strange one. Kadir? Yeah, Kadir. And I wanted to ask if you had any idea what the Rockies rationale for this would be. Ken Rosenthal tweeted what the Rockies rationale was yesterday. He said, create the flexibility to trade an outfielder, possibly Kadir. And one source says he wants a three-year deal. The qualifying offer forces his hand.

And this is a weird one because the Rockies have a pretty full outfield. If they just let Kadir walk, they could field an outfield without him. And it's hard to imagine that if they were to get him to agree to this deal, and it seems like it's in his best interest to do it unless he's really set on getting a multi-year deal and thinks that he won't have as good a chance to do that after this year, that they would have a hard time trading him to another team because I can't imagine too many teams being interested in Michael Kadir for $15-plus million. Well, it is surprising.

In fact, I didn't see a big – I don't know. Maybe I wasn't online when this happened or something, but I was late to this. I saw it like a day after people presumably would have been talking about it, and I wondered why I hadn't read more about it, because it was surprising. I definitely wouldn't have picked this to happen. But I don't know, here's what I would maybe hypothesize. Michael Kadir, he doesn't seem to fit the Rockies particularly, unless they have some information on his battle. Player-wise, he does personality and leadership-wise. He's a clubhouse guy, Rockies type of guy.

Right, yes, he is that. Okay, so you're right. And it's possible that the Rockies have a more sophisticated understanding of the type of hitter and the type of batted ball tendencies that do extremely well in their park, and so maybe they know that his batting performance is more valuable to them than it would be in any other park. However, just from a versatility

position, you're right. He doesn't fit the Rockies at all. Now, let's imagine a scenario where Michael Kadir was on the Orioles or the Royals or something like that. Would it make sense to you then? Probably not. So then here I'm going to blow your mind just a little. Okay. Probably not. So then here I'm going to blow your mind just a little. Okay.

Michael Kadir, last year, 149 OPS plus. Past three years, 126 OPS plus. You got those numbers? Mm-hmm. 149, 126. Nelson Cruz, last year, 140 OPS plus. Last three years, 122 OPS plus. So he has been, now he was hurt for a huge part of last year, and he doesn't seem like a great bet to stay healthy permanently,

but he's not much older than Nelson Cruz. He does offer, among guys who offer no defensive value, I would say Kadir probably offers slightly more. And he has out-hit Nelson Cruz over the past year, over the past two years, over the past three years, over the past four years, in fact. If you go back five, Cruz might overtake him. But he's a good hitter. And so nobody would be surprised, or nobody is surprised, that Nelson Cruz was offered a qualifying offer, was shackled with a qualifying offer.

And in fact, nobody expects Cruz to accept it. Cruz is in pursuit of a three or four or five year deal. So they're not that different, though, as ballplayers. True, yeah. True, yeah. In your article about Cruz today, you pointed out that Cruz has a completely blank injury log for this season, which is something that Kadir can't claim. Obviously, that's a big point in his favor, although he's had injuries in the past. Cruz has, yes. And Kadir has played much less than Cruz in the last couple of years, I suppose, or at least would have if not for Cruz's suspension. OPS Plus isn't completely adjusting for the Coors effect, but maybe if Kadir is particularly well-suited to Coors somehow,

but then again, he would continue to be, presumably, so he would still be valuable to the Rockies. I think that Kadir, he is sort of the one player this year who falls into that sweet spot where the qualifying offer stuff gets nonsensical for everybody involved. It's a little bit more than the Rockies probably want to pay. On the other hand, it's only a one-year commitment. And if you can make a one-year commitment to a guy who's basically your second best hitter or something like that, that's not a bad thing. And Kadir probably would prefer not to take it. He probably would prefer to go out and

get himself a look for a multi-year deal. He's going to be 36 and he's got this health stuff. This is probably his last chance to get a multi-year deal. But he's stuck. He's locked in now. I mean, he probably can't go chase another contract because he'll be kindred if he does, potentially. The Rockies probably figure there's a 20% chance that Kadair turns them down, and then they get a draft pick where they otherwise wouldn't get a draft pick. So you figure 20% of a pick, that's like a $2-3 million discount on the offer, basically. If you're figuring in one out of five universes, they get a pick. So that's a $2 million or $3 million discount. So they're basically offering him $12 million or $13 million for a one-year deal. And he's

a guy they like. He's a guy they like in tangible ways and in intangible ways. I don't think they'll be heartbroken if he takes it. I think they would probably secretly rather he not. And they might actually, I don't know. I don't know if you can. Can you renegotiate? Could they right now? Well, I guess right now they could because he hasn't accepted or declined. But how long do they have? A week? A week, yeah. So they could potentially bang out a two-year $22 million deal instead of this qualifying offer over the next week, which probably would suit everybody a little better. I think everybody would be happier if they did that.

I'd be happier. Yeah, it would make a huge difference in my satisfaction level in life generally. Well, okay. You convinced me that it's not completely ludicrous. That's what I challenged you to do. I'm happy that you did. And there were some other tidbits. So we talked about Joe Madden not being aware of the opt-out clause in his contract that triggered when Andrew Friedman left for Los Angeles.

Initially, it wasn't clear whether his agent had told him about that or Matt Silverman had told him about that. It seems to be the case that his agent informed him about that. But regardless, Madden himself did not know. So there was another managerial contractual ignorance, or another example of that in the last couple of days. Terry Francona, who got an extension from the Indians, described how that extension came together in a Jordan Bastion tweet. And he said, Francona, this says, Antonetti asked me to send him a contract proposal, so I thought about it for a couple days, and I emailed him and said, Chris, before I can send you a proposal, you need to write me back and tell me what I'm making now, because I didn't know.

On one hand, I don't think that's terribly intelligent on my part, but on the other hand, I think it shows that once I sign a contract and I'm comfortable, I don't look back. So Terry Francona, according to him, did not know how much money he was making before this extension. And Ray Ratto on Twitter tweeted that he thinks that these managers claiming not to know the details of their contracts are lying. I don't know what the motivation for that would be. I mean, is this like a folksy thing? Like I don't even know how many millions I'm making?

Or I mean, what other incentive is for them to pretend, if that's what they were doing, that they don't know the details of their contracts or they don't know what their salary is. What does that make us think about them that they would want us to think? It makes us think that they have agents who handle this stuff for them. I mean, I don't know what I paid in taxes last year. I probably did for two seconds, but somebody did it for me.

Right. Sure. Okay. It doesn't particularly bother me. I mean, you have to figure that Francona assumes he's getting paid something like the market rate and or as much as his agent could get for him. And he probably doesn't dwell on it that much. And he also could be lying in this story. Doesn't seem that weird to me. I remember a story that Jay Leno had, according to Jay Leno, I think never cashed a Tonight Show check.

That they would send him his paycheck and he would sort of put it in a drawer and he knew that money was there if he ever needed it. But he never cashed it because he made all his money doing other things. I think that there was supposed to be some, this was supposed to be an in a nutshell anecdote about how chill Jay Leno was or perhaps how rich he was or perhaps how much, I think it might have been about how successful his, or how much he toured. I think it was about how he would still do stand-up shows, and that's how he got his money. Anyway, I never bought that.

And so I suppose if I never bought that, I should be on team not buying Terry Francona. NBC accountants must have hated him If that's true I know, just think about the liabilities on their books Year in, year out If Jay cashes his 90 million dollars Then we won't make a profit this quarter Handwritten at the bottom Right

Okay, and then I think it was Sahad of Sharma, the new baseball prospectus writer who we've had on, who asked Joe Madden about his use of advanced analytics in his introductory press conference. And Madden mentioned a card that he keeps in his back pocket during games, which is dripping with analytics, quote, just dripping with analytics. What would you expect is on a card? So this is a card that has to fit in a manager's pocket. And maybe it's not contained within the pocket. Joe Madden wears

his hoodies. Maybe it extends under his hoodie and we just don't see it, but we assume it's smaller than a lineup card. It's a pocket-sized card and it's just dripping with analytics. What sort of analytics would you expect to be on there? Is this like a pocket run expectancy table that he can consult? Is this the projections for the day, the expected outcome of a matchup between the starting lineup and the pitcher perhaps? Is it a reminder about defensive positioning? Because every team has a big binder in the dugout where you can look up anything. You can look up all sorts of stats, but this card is in his pocket.

This must be the information that he needs to refer to most often during games. What would that be, do you think? Or what would a card that was just dripping with analytics be if you were carrying one? Oh, I think if I were carrying one, it would be just sort of handwritten cheat sheet reminders, like little sentences that I would want to remember.

You know, like the sort of things that if I were reading a book, the things you might highlight and then copy into your notes, like that kind of stuff. It wouldn't be, I don't think it would be like a regular, I don't think it would be the same information game in, game out, just with different players. I think it would be little notes about things to remember about each player. And I don't know what he would do. It doesn't seem like

this is a card that he is himself saturating with analytics that's being given to him. Is that how you would put it? Presumably. Yeah. So I don't know. I think I would probably just...well, I mean, yeah, to say dripping with analytics, I mean, if it were...the things that I think that I would put on that card would mostly be advanced scouting. And it might be advanced scouting done with Brooks Baseball and or my team's version of Brooks Baseball, which is kind of analytics, but it's more just advanced scouting. It's just using these numbers to do advanced scouting.

And so the fact that he said analytics makes you think that it's not just that stuff, right? Yeah. If I had to guess, I would... Maybe it would just be like, it might just be like, I might just have in big letters, don't pitch out. Every day, and you'd print a fresh copy for every game. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I'd expect that it would be maybe some sort of projections for that day,

matchups for everyone on the team versus everyone on the other team, so that you could consult that if you were thinking about pinch hitting, see whether that would be smart, or see whether a reliever move you're considering making would be better than having the pitcher who's in there continue to pitch. Something like that, I would think. I don't know. I mean, I don't know how useful a run expectancy table is. That seems

like something that's probably better to just memorize what it says about the most common situations, not have to look at that matrix every time. I don't know. I hope it's revealed someday. And what is actually the liquid that drips, would you say? If it came from the analytics department, what liquid is dripping? Hmm. I don't know. It's craft beer. Yeah. The answer is craft beer.

Okay. I guess that makes sense. Okay. And then finally, there's this play. I don't know if you saw it. Okay, and then finally there's this play. I don't know if you saw it. It was linked everywhere of a minor league goalie, an AHL goalie, David Leggio,

who I guess is affiliated with the Islanders. And this play happened a couple days ago. He was facing a 2-0 break where the other team took over the puck in the middle of the ice. And there were two guys with it and no one between him, no defenders between them and the goal. And so rather than try to stop this 2-0 break, he unmoored the net. He just took the net off its moorings intentionally, which stops play. And instead of having to face the 2-0 break, then he got a penalty shot, which is like a 1-0 break. So I guess the odds are better in that he doesn't have to cover. He doesn't have to prepare for the possibility that the other guy might pass and score.

the possibility that the other guy might pass the might pass and score so this seemed like a like if we were a hockey podcast doing what we do i bet we would get this question all the time why don't goalies do this often why don't they intentionally stop play by knocking the net off its moorings yeah to get a more favorable matchup and i was trying to think of a baseball comp for this. Is there a baseball comp? Is it just intentional walks? No, no, no. The baseball comp is the infield fly. It's letting the ball drop with the bases loaded in less than two outs.

And the second time a team did that, they made a rule saying that you can't do that anymore. the second time a team did that, they made a rule saying that you can't do that anymore. But basically, it's the idea that you do something that is ordinarily a bad thing that benefits you and that can't be defended against in any way that would be considered fair by the other team. And so as soon as something like that pops up, the rules usually change a lot. Okay, all right. We've bantered long enough.

We've got to get to a few questions and do the play index segment, so let us do that. This question comes from Joe. We haven't gotten a whole lot of hot stove questions yet, so keep those coming if you want us to talk about them next week. But this is one we got during the playoffs and tabled about Jon Lester, who, since he was traded midseason, is not entitled to a qualifying offer. If that's the case, how much more money slash years do you think he gets now that he doesn't have a draft pick tied to him? Do you see Lester getting more money than Scherzer or Shields? So that's a prediction that we can actually make. We will never know how much more money or years he will get because of not having a draft pick tied to him. But we can predict whether he will get more money than Scherzer or Shields.

Do you think, I mean, I think he will clearly get more money than Shields because he's a better pitcher than Shields probably and also doesn't have the qualifying offer and also is a little bit younger and has a lot of other factors in his favor. But could you see the qualifying offer difference putting Lester ahead of Scherzer, or is that impossible? I think it's impossible. I just don't think that those two guys are close enough. I know that some people think they're closer than I do,

but I think that Scherzer is in a different tier and that Lester is very, very good, but he is not Max Scherzer. And it occurs to me that I don't actually know how old Max Scherzer is. I have a guess. Wow, closer than I expected. Let's see, July 27, 1984 and January 7, 1984. Wow, that's incredible. Isn't that incredible to you?

Yeah. Would you believe that John Lester and Max Scherzer are only six months and 17 days apart? I would. Would you have guessed it? To me, Lester feels like a guy who's about four or so years older than Scherzer. I wonder, I guess that's because he established himself as, well, he started pitching earlier, and he established himself as an elite starting pitcher

or close to elite starting pitcher earlier than Scherzer. And he's already had his decline before last year. In 2014, he completely reestablished his incline. But John Lester, a year ago, was seen as a guy who was on the downslope of his career, yes? Yes. And his ace days were four years earlier. He was a pretty good pitcher, but no longer an elite one. Essentially, league average from 2012 to 2013.

And this is a guy who led the league in strikeout rate in his younger days who struck out 10 batters per nine in his younger days. And then he was down to seven for 2012 and 2013, which is what happens to pitchers as they get older. They lose a little velocity. They quit being strikeout pitchers. They hopefully reestablish a way of pitching that lets them have longevity, but they're a different kind of pitcher and most of them get worse. And that's what seemed

to be happening with Jon Lester. That does not seem to have happened at all with Max Scherzer, and so that's why Lester seems old to me. Lester's also a little softer. He's a little rounder. And I generally think of rounder pitchers as being older pitchers. Yeah. And pitchers whose eyes are the same color just sort of seem older. Yeah, that's true. He's also left-handed, and I think I probably think of left-handers as being born three and a half years older.

All right. So anyway, I don't think they're that close, though. I think that they're probably a solid win per year, maybe more difference going forward. Now, as to the question, though, and I'm curious what you think of this, because I don't know. I sort of implied in my Nelson Cruz piece today my answer, but I don't know how much that matters with Max Scherzer. Now, clearly, I don't think any team is going to not sign Max Scherzer because of that draft pick, just like I don't think any team would not sign Robinson Cano because of that draft pick last year. Once you get to a certain point, the draft pick that you give up is just a little pollution in a big ocean. So it's not going to probably change your decision.

However, do you think that it's part of the math that they do? Do you think it affects Scherzer's offer? Do you think that somebody in a front office is saying, well, we'll give Scherzer seven years, $175, but it's going to cost us a draft pick, so we think a draft pick is worth, say, $8 million or $14 million or whatever the number is, do you think that they decrease their offer how high they're willing to go? Or do you think that they really do? I remember one time when I was covering a proposed desalination plant in Huntington Beach. And there was concern that they were putting back into the ocean, that the discharge was going to pollute the ocean.

And they're like, no, we're releasing hundreds of thousands of gallons of water a second and there's just only this little tiny bit of pollution in it. And the city council guy says, if I go out to the ocean and I pour in a teaspoon of arsenic, that's not allowed. And if I put it in a bucket first, it's no more allowed. And so what I'm saying is, does this get completely diluted or is it still definitely a toxic effect in the contract that you're offering? I bet there is an analytics person in the front office who the GM said, hey, tell me what this guy is worth. Tell me what we should offer this guy.

And that person probably factored it into his or her analysis somewhere. But I don't know whether it's something that the GM who receives that analysis is really thinking about. I don't know whether it would really be prominently featured in the GM's mind as he's deciding what to offer. But I bet someone is thinking about it. as he's deciding what to offer. But I bet someone is thinking about it. And I bet if we could somehow compare,

if we could somehow know what the winning offer or what most of the offers would have been with and without, I bet there would be a difference. I don't know that it would dissuade anyone from signing him the way that it does when you're talking about just getting a guy for a year or two. And then the prospect of losing the draft pick, it's much more painful. But yeah, I bet there's something, but there's some difference, but probably not enough to make up the difference between Lester and Scherzer. Probably not so much that we would notice in a

contract that is well over $100 million. Less different, though. Do you think it's less different than if you're talking about Kyle Loesch? I mean, clearly, as a percentage of overall contract, it's a bigger percentage when you're talking about Kyle Loesch or Steven Drew. But do you think that there's something psychological about saying that I'm giving up a thing that I love, a draft pick, for a player that I'm not even that interested in that makes you overvalue the draft pick or be reticent to even do the math and you rather would just say,

screw it, I'm not going to touch this guy. Whereas with Scherzer, the prize itself is more valuable than what you're giving up, and so it's much easier to talk yourself out of not caring about it. Actually, this is relevant, much more relevant than the desal plant. There's that research that shows that people will, if there's a product that costs $1 and another store is charging $2, the person will take that. They'll cross the street to get the one that's a dollar instead of the one that's $2. However, if it's a car that costs $16,984 and the guy across the street is selling it for $16,983, nobody is

going to cross. In fact, even if it was $100 less, they just ignore it. It's the same with vacation. People spend way more money when they're on vacation because they've already spent all this money and the $450 croissant no longer seems to be real because it's completely buried under this avalanche of expenditures. You quit seeing the difference. That would suggest that even if Max Scherzer's draft pick is worth the same $15 million or whatever, that people don't include it in their math, that they overlook it because it's part of this much larger price tag. Yeah, sure.

I bet there's some thought that when you're signing a guy for just a couple of years and you're giving up a draft pick, then you feel bad about mortgaging your future. But if you're going to have Max Scherzer for five, six years, seven years, who knows how long it'll be, then you can tell yourself that Max Scherzer is part of your future, that you're not really mortgaging the future because he's going to be there for that future. He will still be there for whatever year it is when that draft pick would have arrived. He'll still be helping you then. So I bet, rightly or wrongly,

that's something that teams might tell themselves. So yeah, there will be some difference, but probably we wouldn't even notice. No one will decide not to sign him because of the draft pick, I would think. All right, one more and then play index. This one comes... the draft pick, I would think. All right. One more and then play index. This one.

One more thing. One more thing. I think once you get to a point where your shares are less or that level, my impression is that the money almost is a non-issue, that the dollar figure gets established early based on what kind of player it is and all you're doing is haggling over the number of years. And it's more difficult to do the math of draft pick to year than it is draft pick to dollar. And so that might be another reason why it might not come up as much with Scherzer. Okay, this question comes from SJ, who asks, could this work? A team leading their division calls up five pitchers on September 1st to give themselves a 17-man pitching staff for September.

That same day, they decide that their best nine pitchers, regardless of what role they've been in until now, are their playoff pitchers, and they start using those nine pitchers together as a group for one inning each. This group of nine pitchers could now work this way for the whole month of September on a schedule that kind of mirrors a typical October playoff schedule. Two days on, one day off. Two days on, three days off. And at least twice in September, you might want to make them work three days in a row.

For other September days, when you have a game and don't want to use this group of nine playoff pitchers, you would have to use some combination of the other eight pitchers on your staff. Would it work? Will it ever happen? I remember there was a Ned Yost quote about how they kind of played as if they were in playoff mode the last couple weeks as they were trying to make the playoffs. You will hear managers say that sometimes, and that was when he started using Herrera in the sixth or Davis in the seventh or whatever was the last couple of weeks of September. So I think if you had a team that was close, that was fighting for a playoff spot, they'd probably be less likely to do this. I mean, no one's likely to do this. This is obviously very far-fetched that anyone would do this. We don't see teams do this when they have a wildcard game where they have to win.

We've never seen teams show any real inclination to doing this other than just using more and more relievers every year. So it's not likely to happen anytime soon, but would it work? I mean, I suppose if you laid out the rationale and you got players accustomed to that, but there'd probably be a lot of players upset about it and they might not even want to play for your team. But you'd have to sell it as a, we're doing the best we can to win, and then somehow quiet there maybe understandable justifiable fears that this is this is not smart that you

are changing the way that you got there for the first five months of the season you did did something well enough you had a good rotation whatever it was took you to the brink of the playoffs and then suddenly you are completely changing everything you did so i can't imagine it it working anytime soon or being sold to players anytime soon but so what if you were if you were convinced that the all bullpen strategy was a way to go for the playoffs which is intriguing at least then then it probably would work better if you could establish it in the playoffs or in the regular season first which would probably work best if you had a sizable lead yeah it certainly helps that you're doing this in september for a playoff team that is uh that is kind of mentally thinking uh more about the value of winning the the world series

than they are about their contract relative to how they would feel in April and May. In April and May, you know, I suspect that, you know, players want their teams to be in it. They don't want to fall out of it. It's still important. But I imagine that in April and May, you're looking at your stat line and you're thinking, you know, a big part of that is thinking, am I going to have a kind of good year that gets me a lot of money? Or that gets me in contention to win MVP awards and things like that. I guess you could say that in September they're worried that they're going to give back those games or they might be chasing certain benchmarks or whatever.

But yeah, I mean this is extreme and probably to think would go over super well. But let me ask you a more moderate version of this. Let's say you're the Nationals. Let's say Tanner Roark is your fifth starter. And let's say Tanner Roark is like 13 and 7 or something like that. He's having a good year and going into September and he's thinking maybe he can win 15 games or get his ERA under three or hit 200 innings or whatever. But you know that Roark is going to be your something else in the postseason. You know that he's going to be your long man. Maybe he's going to be not your long man.

Maybe he's going to be a setup man if you think that he's more valuable that way. But one way or another, Roark is going to be used differently. Do you think that it makes sense? Do you think it would go over well if you told him starting in September, hey, look, I know the season's not over. I know we have a way that we use you in the regular season, but we're looking at October and we want to get you used to this role. We're going to sort of screw your stats up a little bit and sort of make you uncomfortable so that you're comfortable in October. And you could do that. You could have Wade Davis going two innings. You could have

Kelvin Herrera coming in in the fourth. You could have your closer get stretched out a little bit. You could do some sorts of things. You might tell your setup guys. You might tell Davis and Herrera. I mean, normally it's assumed that in September you rest your guys. But you might tell Davis and Herrera, hey, we need to make sure that you're going to be able to throw five innings over three days. So no matter the situation of the next three games, even if it's 15-2, you're coming in and getting four outs in today's game. You're coming in tomorrow, no matter how many pitches you threw yesterday,

and pitching again, we need to see what you can handle and how well you handle it. Would that go over well, or do you think that it's still being the regular season, those stats still being part of your arbitration case and your career totals, would it just be too hard to convince guys to sort of sacrifice regular season stats for the imaginary hypothesis of postseason usage? I bet you could do that if you had a good relationship with the guy. Well, I will not. I can guarantee you I will not have a good relationship with the guy, so that's it's i will not i can guarantee i will not have a good relationship with the guy so i guess i'm doomed yeah no i don't think you could do it but maybe an actual manager could i think i i think that's possible i think that's doable i mean you'd have

to find a guy who was really into the team winning and wasn't just saying that when reporters asked him whether he cares more about his stats or the team winning so you'd have to know him and he'd have to know you but i i think i mean it's a it's a very reasonable position for the team i think if you are uh if you are planning to use this guy if you're either definitely going to use the guy or you want to use the guy but you're just not sure how he'll adapt to the role and you want to see him do it i think it's it's uh completely possible so yeah i mean most teams have a guy like that too most playoff teams have a starter who won't be starting so it seems to me that and and most teams don't have a good

starter who'll be doing that most teams don't have a good starter who will be doing that. Most teams don't have a row arc. Probably even most playoff teams don't have a fifth starter like row arc. So it's probably not going to be a guy who's on the verge of some milestone stat or something. So maybe that would help a little bit. Or, I don't know, maybe the guys who aren't very good need their compiling stats even more than other people do. But yeah, I bet it's something you could do in the right situation. So play index segment. All right. So yesterday I was toying around with one of my favorite, I don't know, this is one of my all-time favorite fun facts. It got like, nobody seemed to like it at the time, but I love it.

I just think it's an amazing fact. This fact was that the St. Louis Cardinals, since Branch Rickey took over, Branch Rickey took over basically in 1926. He joined as a manager and president in 1919. Then he was a manager for a few years. But the team sucked, and he wasn't the president but for one year of that time. And it really wasn't until he got fired as manager, but then retained as front office guy, that the Branch Rickey vision came into focus for the Cardinals and the organization changed. So we're going to set 1926 as the day that everything

changed for the Cardinals. So since 1926, the Cardinals have had fewer losing seasons than the Mariners, which is, I think, an underrated fun fact because the Mariners haven't existed for much of that time, far less of that time. And so yesterday I was looking at the Rockies who have also not existed that long, and I was comparing what they've done to what the Cardinals have done. And then I took it a little further, and I found that the Washington Nationals, who have existed now for, I think, nine years, if I'm not mistaken, maybe ten, have more 90 loss seasons since 1926 than the Cardinals.

They have four. The Cardinals have three. I mean, they've only existed for nine years or maybe 10. And the Cardinals in that time, that's 90 or 85 years, more than 85 years that the Cardinals have existed, nearly 90. And they've only lost 90 games three times. And so that's not the play index. That's, I think, an interesting thing, though. I think the Cardinals might have, I don't think any team has fewer 90

loss seasons than the Cardinals. I didn't quite go through all of them, but all the expansion teams do, and all the old teams do, and all the old teams do, and all the recent expansion teams, I should say. And so the middle expansion teams, the 60s and 70s expansion teams, I didn't check them. So that's the Cardinals way, not losing 90 games. Not losing 90 games, and really not ever having... I mean, the Cardinals' success over the Branch Rickey nine decades has been really incredible and fairly awesome. But that's not the play index. For the play index, I looked just to see what each team's winning percentage was since 1926,

because I wanted to see if the Cardinals were anywhere close to the Yankees. And that was the initial question. And so I went to the team split finder and looked at season total. The split was just season totals, which is not a split. It's the split of all splits. And cumulative over the course of all seasons. And I looked at all teams from 1926 to 2014. And that gave me a Cardinals winning percentage of 543, which is really good. What's that, like an 88 win season or something like that? But way, way, way worse than the Yankees. The Yankees is at 583. But in doing this, in sorting this by winning

percentage, I noticed something interesting. I wanted to ask you if you find it surprising. There are 30 teams. There are 30 franchises, yes? Yes. Of those 30 franchises, 10 have winning records. 20 have losing records. So what I want to know, Ben, is that surprising to you? Yes. I'm surprised. What surprises you about it and how do you explain it? I have two explanations, by the way. Huh. Well, I guess it, I mean, just without having thought about it, which I haven't,

I just would have expected it to be a little bit closer than that. I mean, this is going back, this is the entire history of franchises, right? Since 1926, yeah. So I guess it makes sense in that for a lot of that time, there was less parody than there is now, than there has been recently. There were years, I mean, before 1926, I mean, by that point it was, well, some of the worst cases of franchises

that were totally tanking and teams that were just, you know, owners who owned multiple teams and were moving their players from one to the other, that sort of thing. By then, I mean, most of that was over, but then again, there was also Kansas City being a farm team for the Yankees for a while, more or less.

So I guess it sort of makes sense in that there have been the have-nots and the haves for many years, maybe a little bit less so now in that the system doesn't, it makes it harder for the haves to dominate the have-nots to the same extent, or there are owners or ownership groups who are solvent. Every team can afford players for the most part and feel the competitive team. But yeah, for a lot of those years, there were not as many teams. There were some teams that were good almost every year.

There were the Browns, the Senators, teams that were bad almost every year. And the teams that were good almost every year were more likely to survive than the teams that were bad every year. So I guess it sort of makes sense that more of the winners would have survived the Darwinian competitive landscape of baseball. They all survived. This is all franchises. So no franchise has dissolved since 1906. They've just become different teams. Okay.

So it's not that. Well, I don't know. I guess there are only so many rich teams. Well, I don't know. I guess there are only so many rich teams. And for much of baseball history, for everything except this little recent blip that we're in, which may or may not be a real thing or a sustainable thing, the good teams have had an enormous advantage over the bad teams. So I guess that's my theory. What were your two explanations?

Well, I don't think the lack of parity thing mostly holds up, with an exception. Because the teams, even if you had zero parity and the Phillies were doomed to be awful for long stretches of time, there's still only one team. And the question is, how come 20 teams are losing instead of 10? And so the only way that would make sense is if the lack of parity greatly, greatly, greatly advantaged the good teams, but only moderately disadvantaged the bad teams. That somehow the Phillies were losing every year, but they were only losing six games under.500, while the Dodgers were winning every year, but they were winning 12 games over.500, for some reason having to do with the lack of parity. And I don't think that that's mostly

true. But I think there are two reasons why this does make sense. One reason, and this one is just so obvious when you think about it, there are 16 basically original teams and 14 basically expansion teams. You might know the curious fact that before the Angels this year, and the Angels just finally got over 500 this year, before the Angels this year, no expansion team had a winning record. And that's because it's really hard to win when you're an expansion team. And for the first few years, you rack up a lot of huge losses. And then even beyond that, you might generally

be disadvantaged. You're, for instance, quite likely in a city that is a second-tier city. That's why there wasn't baseball played in your city until 1998. But, you know, Tampa Bay is offended, but maybe I was talking about Phoenix. You just can't know. So expansion teams lose. They all lose. The Angels, like I said, just barely, barely, barely over 500 in their franchise history. Every other one is under 500.

So when you think about it like this, there are those 16 original teams. Let's say hypothetically that in 1960, before expansion had happened, those 16 teams were perfectly split, eight and eight. That wouldn't be surprising, right? And that would blow up the lack of parity hypothesis because in fact, there were eight and eight. And so let's say eight of those are over 500, eight are below 500. All the expansion teams come in, and all of them are below 500, except for the Angels. Well, that gets us now to 9 over 500 and 21 under 500. Now, some, since these original 16 are playing expansion teams that are lousy, some of them should go over 500.

And, you know, a couple of them do, I guess. But still, you're talking about, you about, I would think that just based on the expansion patterns, you would expect not more than 11-ish to be over 500 for that reason until a century later maybe when the expansion teams have had time to completely flatten the landscape. So I think that's one thing, the big thing. The other thing, though, is that with your lack of parity hypothesis, there is one exception, and that exception is the Yankees. And the Yankees are insane. Like, they're so much better than everybody else for so long. The Yankees over the course of, the Yankees have a 583 winning percentage, which over the course of a 162-game season

would be 94.5 wins. Every year for almost a century, they have averaged 94.5 wins, even during the years when there were only 154 games in the schedule. The Yankees are completely screwing everybody else up. So here's what I did with my play index. I took all these teams' wins and losses over the course of those 90 years, and I weighted each American League team based on how many games they played. And then I reset the Yankees as a 500 team. So the Yankees have won 1,664 more games than they should have if they were a 500 team. So I just parceled those out to the other 14 American League teams. I ignored interleague and there's a little complication because the Brewers were American and now they're not. But basically

I took those and I just assigned them to the other 14 American League teams based on how big a proportion of the overall population those teams have been. And so then I adjusted every team's record. And now we have 14 teams, not counting the Yankees, who we're saying are a 500 team. And of those 14, we have six that are over 500, eight that are under 500, but one of the eight has a winning percentage of.4999, another has a winning percentage of.4993. And so they're essentially exactly 500 teams. They're like a game under 500 or something like that. So that gets us almost perfectly to 50-50. The Yankees, all by themselves, have made almost every team in baseball a loser.

That's another reason for people to hate the Yankees. Yeah, exactly. Your team is a loser, not because they're worse than the average, but because they're that much worse than the Yankees, the Yankees got everybody's money. The Yankees are like six and a half seasons over 500 as a franchise, essentially. If we could play six and a half seasons and they won every single game, that is how far they are above 500 as a franchise. That's low. That's low. That's right.

You said 1,000-something games over? 1,664. Oh, okay. I misheard that. But actually, Ben, I should say that you're right. So that's 10 years. That is 10 years. If they lost their next 10 years completely,

they would still be over 500 by like 40 games. That's a fun fact. In fact, Ben, we're underselling it. That's half of how many games they could lose because I'm taking half of their wins and turning them into losses to bring them into 500. In fact, if they started from now, they could lose more than 3,200 straight games without falling under 500. They could lose 20 years in a row and still be over 500. 20 years, they could have a 20 year losing streak and be over 500.

They're doing their best. I'm actually kind of bummed that we're doing this right now because I was going to write these very words in a piece later this off season and now I don't know if I'll be able to because of my phobia of repeating myself. Right. Wow. All right. All right. That turned out pretty good. That turned out better than you thought.

Yeah, it had a real kicker at the end there. So subscribe to the Play Index using the coupon code BP to get the discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription and look up all the franchise win-loss stats that your hearts desire. All right. Have fun. See you on Friday. Wait, wait. We can't end with the play index segment.

It's traditional that we end with a question. This will be quick. This question comes from Eric Hartman. He says, There's an old adage that whoever gets the best player in a trade wins the trade. Assuming we're sure who is in fact the best player, how true do you think this statement is? that it is true certainly the majority of the time i remember stephen goldman used to write about this i don't know whether he did a whole series at bp looking back at trades or whether this was just a theme that he returned to in a few different articles over the years but i think he contended that in most cases where there is a prospect for stars trade or spare parts for star trade that the team that gets the star wins.

And maybe in the past, there have been cases where they're, I mean, first of all, they're just salary dump trades where the team isn't even really getting anything back except salary relief. So in those trades alone, obviously the team is getting the best player. I mean, you could argue about what it means to win the trade. Maybe getting the salary relief is a win in some sense. But if we're talking about talent and players going to and fro, then I would think that just the salary dumps alone would skew things toward the best player team winning the trade. But I think it's also hard to replace a star with a future star in a trade. That probably happens a little less often than we think,

or that historically it has. Maybe teams are better about evaluating prospects now than they used to be. But I would guess that when you're trading a star level player, your odds of getting back a guy who is as good or two guys who add up to the same amount of value, well, it's against the odds. I don't know what percentage I would put on it do you have a probability guess no uh i i did i had one and it's worthless but i was gonna say i was fluctuating

between 78 and 81 percent uh-huh yeah i i was probably gonna say 75 so somewhere in that range all right so we didn't talk about farhan zaidi going to the dodgers uh maybe we'll talk about that sometime soon we got a question about whether the dodgers are imbalancing the the nl al competition that we've seen the last couple of years uh we've got a few other questions but we need some more since we've got lots of somewhat stale playoff questions. We could use some hot stove off-season questions, preferably not asking us to predict where players will sign or the exact dollar amount that they will sign for. But if you have some winter-themed questions for us, we will take them next week. and we will take those questions at podcasts at baseballprospectus.com. The listener discussion is always going on at the Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectivelywild.

And we welcome your ratings and reviews on iTunes. Wanted to end with a clip, a short clip. This is a clip from Car Talk. And many of you, I'm sure, listen to Car Talk. I spent many hours in my youth listening to Car Talk. One of the co-hosts of Car Talk, Tom Maliazzi, died on Monday. And Dan Brooks sent me this clip a few months ago, actually, from Car Talk because it's a discussion of what happens

when two people who don't know anything or don't know the answer to a question discuss the answer to that question and whether or not they end up knowing more than they would have individually or less. And Dan sent this to me because it reminded him of our listener email shows, and it now reminds me of our listener email show.

So in honor of tom and car talk and just because i've been looking for a spot where we could play this i will now end with this clip we will be back on friday do two people who don't know what they're talking about know more or less than one person who doesn't know what he's talking about. Wow. Let me think about this for a minute. What's your opinion? I'll get this.

I believe that you have definitively answered this query and have put the debate to rest in your recent conversation regarding electric brakes on a cattle carrier. Remember that call? Oh, I do. Amazingly enough, you proved that even in a case where one person might know nothing about a subject, it is possible for two people to know less than nothing. Well, I think we prefaced our answer with the fact that we know nothing. He says that.

He says one person will only go out so far on a limb. Unless he has someone to egg him on. His construction of deeply hypothetical structures and will often end with a shrug or raising of hands to indicate the dismissibility of his particular take on the subject. With two people, the intricacies, the gives and takes, the wherefores and why nots can become a veritable pas de deux of breathtaking speculation. This is a great letter.

Interwoven in such a way that apologies or gestures of doubt are rendered unnecessary.