Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 577: Backloaded Contracts and Listener Emails

Episode Date: November 19, 2014

Ben and Sam banter about non-revelatory rumors and new details about the Giancarlo Stanton deal, then answer listener emails about front-office roles, offensive eras, and more.

Okay, I have to say that I still support the recent decision in the wake of all the violence we've experienced to ban any games with ninjas or guns. Yeah, but... Well, it's just I don't understand any of the rules to this baseball, they call it. You mean America's pastime? Yeah, it feels like more of a fad to me, buddy. I don't really see it catching on. Sure.

Good morning and welcome to episode 577 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus presented by The Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I am Ben Lindberg of Grantland, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Prospectus. Howdy. Hey. How are you? Okay. Good.

baseball prospectus. Howdy. Hey. How are you? Okay. Good. So we could start with a non-revelatory rumor watch. And I got some comments about my pronunciation of revelatory from those who favor revelatory. And Sam and I did some research yesterday, and we found that different dictionaries and different computer pronunciations at those dictionary sites favor different pronunciations of revelatory slash revelatory. Dictionary.com is a revelatory site. Merriam-Webster is a revelatory site. So weird. It's the word's sound. I mean, the word is reveal, but it's also revelation.

This word can't figure out what it wants to sound like. You know, I always assumed that those pronunciation guides, like, you know how if you go to, for instance, if you go to Google Maps or you go to MapQuest or you go to any other site that has map information,

they're all basically using the same data. They've contracted probably, I think, I don't know, maybe Google has moved beyond that, but I think they all basically contract with the same mapping company. And it's just a different interface. And the same with weather. If you go to weather.com or Wonderground or anything else, they're all basically using the same National Weather Service data. And I think I always thought that it was like that with these pronunciation guides. It shocks me that these two dictionary heavyweights would have different pronunciations, particularly because your way is wrong. Why would they put a wrong one in there? It's almost like a trap. It's like they're planting this wrong one in there to see who's stealing their content.

It's like they're going around the world to see who's bootlegging their pronunciations, and then they've got one wrong one in so they can be like, we knew that you're bootlegging this because only we would be dumb enough to say revelatory. But where did I get it from? That's not where I got it. I didn't look it up from

the site the first time before I said it. Maybe it's a regional thing. Anyway. A reginal thing. Regional. Anyway, I won't be pronunciation shamed by the first syllable emphasizing, so I'm sticking with revelatory. What was the other one, though? The other one was inquiry slash inquiry. I don't know which one I said, but I don't think I have a strong preference for that one. Anyway. I would consider both of those to be acceptable. I say inquiry. My girlfriend says that revelatory is cute.

So I'm going to keep saying it that way. Yeah, revelatory. Anyway, these are submissions that I got on Twitter from a couple people. This one from FC Dobbs seven pointed me to a rumor about the Padres being interested in Pablo Sandoval. Having interest. Have interest. Are we okay with have interest? Should we assume that every team has interest in a good player? I don't think that every team has interest in them.

So it implies that they have enough interest to do something about it. Yeah, I mean, it implies that they will do some pursuing of them, that they have talked about him as a possible fit, and they will take action as they see fit. Okay, this one comes from Ken Rosenthal, also brought to my attention by Steven Anderson on Twitter. Orioles may consider moving Norris. Yeah, I think that counts.

That's double layers of nothing before an action could happen. They haven't even considered it. They may consider moving him. They are not currently considering it, or at least that's what this phrasing suggests. I mean, considering is the classic verb that we make fun of here because theoretically everybody considers everything. If somebody suggests, for instance, that you put your foot in a garbage disposal, simply by saying, no, I'm not going to do that, you have considered it.

Once they've brought it up, you've had to consider it. However, I think in this case, the may is actually even the stronger weak spot because everything that is not 100% or 0% is a may. In fact, because the proper style in this case would actually be might. And as anybody who's been drilled in AP style during journalism school knows, may does not mean could. It means is allowed to. And so yes, they are allowed to consider moving north. There is nothing in his contract that prohibits them from thinking about a pink elephant. But even if it were might, even if it were might. Even if it were might, yeah. But still.

The may is, right, I wasn't even thinking about the may might until midway through. You guys all heard me change course. So, in fact, there's three ways that you could mock this pretty easily. So, and yeah, yeah. So I think that's a good one. That's a very solid one. All right. Is there another one?

Yeah. Well, this is just philosophically. That might actually be the leader in the clubhouse. I think it is. We've only been doing this for two days or so. But yes, I think that's the best one that we've had so far. Okay. And how do you feel about checking in as a rumor construction? There was a lot of checking in going on today. Ken Rosenthal reported that a few teams had checked in on Adam LaRoche and

Evan Drellick said that the Astros had checked in on Brett Anderson. This is maybe not different from what we talked about on Monday with the establishing contact. This is a different way of saying establishing contact and not actively pursuing, or at least this doesn't say that there was any active pursuit. This is checking in. This is saying hi. This is how are you doing? Probably even weaker than established contact because established contact could be an investment in the future checked in basically just implies like

they're just kind of gossiping like they just they want to know what's going on they're you know they're not necessarily acting or or a particular like they might not actually have standing in the process but they're interested you know like if you they're for instance right now there are or they might not actually have standing in the process, but they're interested. For instance, right now, there are dozens of reporters who are trying to get gossip about what players are going to do. So if you had the sort of legal right to call an agent at any point and just find out where Adam LaRoche is going for curiosity's sake,

I mean, clearly the world is curious. Why wouldn't a GM be curious? So I think that check-in is weaker than it has established contact with. But not incredibly weak. Not necessarily an automatic pointless rumor. And I think that if you're talking about a team, a player that might be... If somebody checked in with the Orioles on Bud Norris, that to me would be much stronger. Okay, that's it for today. Is it conceivable that the revelatory pronunciation is actually planted by Weedmouse?

I don't know that he has that power. Maybe. Okay, so we should... Even Google Weedmouse. I don't know that he has that power Maybe Okay so Google Weedmouse And Sam Miller if you want to know what that has to do With anything We should talk a bit about Giancarlo Stanton's contract details We've already talked about the deal

In principle but the last time we talked about it We didn't have details about Backloading and as I think we mentioned at the time, the amount of backloading has some pretty substantial ramifications on whether he will remain with the Marlins through the opt-out, whether he'll remain with the Marlins after the opt-out, what the Marlins will do up until the opt-out. So now we know those details, or at least those details have been reported by Jason Stark and others have contributed some additional details. So Stetton is going to earn, I mean, the main takeaway is that the deal is heavily backloaded.

The salary for 2015 is $6.5 million. And remember, he would have been making around $13 million probably after arbitration. So he's taking a huge pay cut over what he would have made in 2015 when he'll be making 6.5 million in 2016 when he'll be making 9 million and 2017 when he'll be making 14 and a half million and then it's 77 million over the three years after that so the the first six years before the opt-out he gets 107 million over those six years, which is 17.8 on average. And then after the opt-out, it's 218 million over seven years, which is an average annual value of 31.1. So almost twice as much per year after the opt-out as before. So this is a huge amount of backloading. And there are a number of ways that we could interpret this or analyze this. So what do we say about this? I mean, the report is that this was his idea. I mean,

who knows how much of it was Luria? Like the temptation is say, oh, yeah, Luria talked him into this. He's hoping that Stanton will opt out and he'll get this great deal on Stanton for the next few years, and then he'll go and the Marlins won't have to pay him for the rest of it, which maybe will be the case. But evidently, this was at least in part

Stanton's suggestion because he wants the Marlins to have the flexibility to sign other players and surround him with, you know, good supporting cast and compete over the next few years. So maybe that's what will happen. If you kind of assume that the Marlins are on the level here and they really

want to win all of a sudden or different things could happen. Anyway, what, what do you think? Um, things could happen anyway what what do you think um i think that it might be loria's greatest con yet that he can withstand that this was his idea i mean it's incredible like like you sort of this has made me this is this has to some degree changed my view of how these negotiations went and how to think about it because I just,

it now feels like this whole contract is like the treasure of the Sierra Madre where it's just these two guys staring at each other with $300 million in the middle and they're like, no, we're friends. We're totally friends. We're going to split this and be happy. But of course, they're completely, well, I don happy but of course they're completely well i don't want to say they're distrustful of each other because i don't know why loria wouldn't wouldn't trust stanton but there's this um thread of i'm definitely getting conned here you're going to uh tie me up to a cactus i don't know how that movie ends you're gonna tie me to a cactus and take all of my money at the end of this.

You know how I have my two-person fantasy league? And the way that this works is that you pick a guy and then they pick a guy and then you eliminate players as you go so that the league gets deeper. So if you have two first basemen and they have no first basemen, you're using all your eliminations to get rid of first basemen. And some years I'll be really zeroed in on some guy who like I know that he's not thinking I'm going to draft like Kila Kaiwe or something like that. And so he'll just be eliminating first baseman, just dozens and dozens of them. And I'm just smiling at him like pretending, no I was you know I was maybe thinking about

getting Travis Buck but really like I I just know that he's never gonna see my long-term plan and I just feel like Stanton and his lawyers are like going over this contract and they're like picking out the finest things and making sure they seal off every loophole and then they're like looking up to see if Lauria reacts and Lauria's just smiling because he knows they're never gonna see his plan he's got some way to screw stanton and they've closed off 25 loopholes and the 26th one is the one he's counting on i just think that uh that they are definitely going to find a way to make stanton unhappy at some point in this deal. This works out pretty well for them. It's an incredible, incredible bargain for the first six years, is it?

Yes. Then it's much less likely that Stanton is going to opt out after that. That's kind of nice because there's this idea that the more likely he is to opt out, the less upside that you get out of it. They're putting all the upside at the front before Stan has any say in anything. And so then if he opts out, well, good riddance, right? I mean, they'll probably be happy. And you've got to figure that even though Stanton has the no trade clause, it won't probably ever stop the Marlins from trading him. It maybe gives him a little bit of a poison pill, some leverage if he gets traded,

but if the Marlins want to make Stanton miserable, no team in baseball is in a better position to make their best player miserable than the Marlins are, right? to make their best player miserable than the Marlins are, right? I mean, given the complete lack of morals, of whatever you want to say it is. I mean, they can definitely get rid of Stanton if they want to. So I don't know. I mean, it feels like this just, you know... Maybe indeed this is all Stanton's idea, and maybe

this plays out perfectly, and maybe he's there in 13 years. But we talked about how, without knowing what the structure of the deal was, it was hard to judge, because we knew that the Marlins would want it as much as possible back-loaded so that they could get the value up front and then trade him if necessary. And we knew that Stanton wanted as much as possible at the front so that he could opt out. And it seems like that conversation was pretty one-sided. Yeah. So the only risk maybe is, well, if you wanted to say that the Marlins just didn't want to pay him for the back end no matter what,

like if they're hoping to just get him cheap for the first six years and then have someone else take him off their hands for the end of the deal when he won't be as good and he'll be more expensive, I guess it's less likely that he will opt out because of this. I guess the only way that they kind of get screwed is if he gets hurt or something and they are stuck with him for the whole thing. But even in that case, I guess they would have been anyway. So I don't know. Is there any way that they don't benefit from this? Is there a scenario where either they get stuck paying for him when they didn't want to? Is there any downside? Yeah, there's definitely still downside. I mean, they still have the $325 million liability. If he comes out in April, takes two with bats and says, I'm actually really scared of the baseball and goes on the disabled list with face broken injuries or whatever, they're on the hook.

Well, yeah, but even in that case, it's better. Oh, right. Because they would have been on the hook anyway. And this way, at least the money 13 years from now when it's backloaded won't be worth as much as it would be if it were frontloaded. So they'd really be paying something like someone on Twitter said it would be something like 260 something if you assume some rate of inflation rather than 325 in present day dollars. So even if his career is over in the first year for some reason and they're on the hook for the whole thing, it's still better for them that it's backloaded. So is there any news that got worse for them in the last 24 hours? No. This is an all-win.

Uh-huh. for them in the last 24 hours. No, this is an all win. I guess some people might argue that it makes it harder to trade him because his salary will be higher at the end. That's just an accounting thing. If you need to eat the money to move him, it's better to have the choice to eat those dollars later rather than having already paid. I mean, I always find that to just be a little bit of accounting noise that doesn't actually mean anything. Okay. Well, we liked the deal before for the Marlins and I guess we like it better now. Definitely. I'm kind of like afraid for Stanton. I am too. I just imagine him laying up at night. You know what it is? It's he's Dustin Hoffman at the end of The Graduate.

And he's in the bus and you just see his face kind of melt. As he's lying in bed, he's so happy and then he's so sad. Well, yeah, maybe Loria will sell the team or something they've got their new tv contract renegotiation coming up pretty soon and maybe loria will get out and someone who's really serious about competing will take over or something okay so today is a listener email show Although we've already talked for a while But we will answer a few emails here So this one comes from Roger Who says

This offseason the Atlanta Braves have fired their GM Frank Wren and have in his place Instituted a team of John Hart President of Baseball Operations And John Capolella, Assistant GM As I see the situation The Braves have one person in charge of the business tasks of a GM, contract and trade talks, press conferences, etc., and one

person in charge of the stat or quant side of baseball, sabermetrics, player evaluation, etc. What are your opinions on this model, and do you see other teams possibly doing this, or could this be the Braves' way of mentoring Capolella, as they do not believe he is ready to handle all of the duties of a GM? This is different in that we've seen a few teams have a president of baseball operations and a GM. And we've wondered before about that relationship, whether it was Kenny Williams as the president and Rick Hahn as the GM, that sort of thing. And that's a little bit different from having a president and having no GM at all, just having an assistant GM, which is what the Braves are doing now. And we've seen a few other teams hire people. A few other teams hire people. And there was an article earlier this month by Bob Nightingale in USA Today kind of about this, about Hart and Cabalella, and about the fact that Tony La Russa is kind of the head of the Diamondbacks baseball operations in a sense.

But they also have Dave Stewart as the GM now. They also have Dave Stewart as the GM now, and it's not really clear with the Dodgers who has more power, whether it's like Zaydi or Burns who have talked about once by Nick Picoro about the Diamondbacks structure when Kevin Towers was still around, is that no one seems to know who to talk to. He's got quotes from people like, I call them and I don't know who I'm supposed to be talking to or who the point person is. And maybe that's an overblown concern. Like probably no one is just not picking up the phone, like has a great trade proposal and just isn't picking up the phone because it's just such a hassle to figure out which person to call. That's probably not happening. One way or another,

it probably gets to the person that it needs to get to. But it does seem sort of inefficient. Like it seems efficient to have a GM and then have the GM delegate to a bunch of different people who are in charge of a bunch of different areas. That makes sense. And a lot of teams have done that. But to just kind of not have a person seems potentially confusing, like more murky than it should be. To not have a person. You mean – so the example you gave of the confusion was that there were two people.

So when you say to not have a person, are you saying to have zero people? Like a clearly designated person who is the leader. Yeah, so to not have a person could mean to have two people. Yes. Yeah. I don't know that I agree. I mean, I think that it is my hypothesis that what we will see as there are so many smart people in the game, and

obviously a finite number of GM jobs, that instead of seeing this kind of title inflation, where now every team has to have a super GM, a president like that, I think that we'll see the department heads basically get co-equal status among each other. You won't aspire necessarily to be the GM, you might aspire to just be the scouting director or the farm director, and that those jobs will actually have more independence and sovereignty and power and clout. And they will be seen as perfectly reasonable destination jobs for even the smartest baseball minds. And you will have a club president who has a sort of 30,000-foot view of things,

but won't be. I mean, it just seems to me that based on what we hear, it seems to me that GMs are way overworked and that they're overworked in all sorts of different directions and it doesn't feel that efficient to me. So I think that it's not necessarily that you're going to have a GM who is in charge of whatever John Capalella is and whatever John Hart is, but that you're going to have a GM who is in charge of whatever John Capalella is and whatever John Hart is, but that you will see a kind of a distribution of power throughout front offices so that each department is a bit stronger and has its own stronger figure at the top. I don't know.

Do you operate by consensus then? Or is there ultimately one person who has to decide because i mean in this nightingale article like capoeira is clearly underneath heart in the hierarchy but he also talks about the marlins where dan jennings is uh like like larry binefest used to be their president of baseball Operations and Mike Hill was the GM Now Hill is the president of baseball Operations and Jennings is the GM And Nightingale says

They are both considered equals In the front office That seems fine to me That seems Good and then they can each focus on the things That they need to do And that they're good at and what they're skilled at. And it can be a distribution of tasks that are based on each one's strengths instead of the arbitrary structure of a hierarchy. Okay. So you'd have one person who has the final say in – I mean, a lot of the departments are interrelated, though. Well, clearly you want to, you're going to have some situations where, you know, a deciding vote is going to need to be cast or where there's going to be veto power.

Right. And ultimately the owner has the veto power just as they do in every team. And the person who has that, you know, whoever is the person with the veto in each decision can decide whether or not to exercise it. But I think that, for instance, if it's the scouting director who is the true expert in that club's scouting, they should be the one to have final say. Basically, a better organization would have them able to make the final say. And as it is right now, they don't.

The general manager does it. And general managers are probably really good at this too. But why not let the scouting director decide who to pick? Well, you mean who to pick in the amateur draft? Yeah, sure. And I'm sure that more or less happens on a lot of teams. It also doesn't, though. Ultimately, the final say is with the GM or higher,

and particularly with high picks, with top picks, with first-round picks. A lot of times it's the GM. A lot of times the scouting director doesn't have much say if you have the fifth overall pick. True. The GM is going to take the lead on that. But a lot of things are ultimately a budget issue also.

So you might have a scouting director who says that we like this guy a little more than that guy, but this guy costs $2 million more or something. And he's not going to be the one maybe who has the best feel for how that impacts spending in other areas or that kind of thing like maybe so it's always going to be that's why you have your theo epstein your president at the top who oversees everybody and has that larger view it's just that it doesn't seem to me that theo epstein needs to talk to 45 gs every day during the offseason. Like that's too much for your top brain. And that's what we ask GMs to do, basically. Yeah, right. Okay, so if that's a big part of it, though,

just like fielding inquiries from other teams, then you would want to make sure that those teams know who that person is. If there's confusion from the outside about who's the best person to talk to, then that is probably not the best way to set it up. That isn't the best way, but I think that the example that we're leaning on that suggests that that becomes a problem is basically Lausa and towers who weren't working together i mean they were clearly like larusa was brought into fire towers and they were just playing out the string and so to me that's more of a larusa towers thing or more of a diamondbacks thing or more specific to that

particular situation like i don't know do you hear a lot of people saying we don't know who to call at the Cubs right now? No, I haven't heard that much. Yeah, you've never heard that. And then when the Astros, when all that Astros stuff, the Astros, what is that thing called, their database? Well, ground control. Yeah, so when ground control leaked,

we saw that people at all different levels of the organization were engaged in conversations with other clubs, and that didn't strike us as a particular weakness. If anything, it maybe seemed like a strength that multiple people could talk to multiple people within organizations and that you didn't have necessarily one person that had to have all the conversations go through him. So there's a quote in this story from Stuart who says, he's talking about the Dodgers. He says, I wouldn't say it's a complicated situation over there, but if I'm calling over there and talking to the Dodgers, I'm not sure who I'm supposed to be talking to. There's a bit of a gray area. They've got a lot of people, a whole lot of people over there with a lot of layers. Maybe that's just a product of Stuart being new and the Dodgers people being new maybe they will straighten that out and the the jennings hill relationship hill says if someone is calling jennings it's like they're calling me and vice versa there's nothing he would tell them that i wouldn't every team's dynamic is different but for

us it's never about ego communication is what is paramount and they're like in offices next to each other so they will just shout through the wall and they'll split up a list if they need to talk to teams or players agents and whoever knows the person better will make the call so if you're if you're working together that closely i guess you're not really losing anything yeah the flip side is that it actually is always about ego. And that there is something maybe, what's the word, utopian about thinking that six co-equal department heads are going to work together and that there's not going to be immediate backstabbing. I mean, there's something probably nice about having a GM who is above them all for organization. Matt Trueblood asked, how many bigger days than Monday do you think the offseason has in store? We know the winter meetings days will

all be bigger, right? Even if it's mostly rumor, there'll be so much buzz that those are guaranteed. But I'm casting my memory back to last winter, and it seems to me the moves all came in bunches. There would be a few days in which seven or ten moves of note happened, then dry stretches. So how many total days see more impactful moves than Mondays between now and spring training? Last winter meetings were really slow, right? I mean, because the weeks leading up to the winter meetings were abnormally busy, and then the winter meetings days themselves were not. But yeah, it's Martin signing and the Braves-Cardinals trade on one day is probably one of the bigger days. But I'd say there will be a day bigger than that but probably no no more than that what are like the top what six free agents are left is that right on on rj's list um so there's not you basically

need to have trades how many bigger trades than hayward are we yeah that's right. Trades are at least more interesting. And that one, I mean, both of those moves kind of came as a surprise, particularly the Hayward one. So that made it feel more momentous in terms of actual wins allocated or playoff odds changed. odds changed, I would guess that that was one of the bigger days of the winter. But I don't know. I think there will be one more. Only one more? Not including winter meetings? One plus winter meetings? Yeah. Yeah, that sounds right. Okay. All right. This question comes from John. I like this question. I have a question about pitch framing. That's why I like it. If the added value from pitch framing is as high as some of the studies think it is, then how can one justify voting for an MVP candidate who is not a catcher? That's a good question. At least if you have a catcher who is already a borderline MVP candidate as we have had the last few years. If there's a Molina slash Posey

slash Lucroy type who's going to finish in the top five or something and by all the war measurements he's within a win or two of the leader and by the framing stats he

was worth two to three wins or something then how can we not pick him so what's your answer i mean i did i picked luke roy second this year so my answer right you should and you can i picked luke roy thinking about his framing and uh just considered i just thought that he was still below Kershaw. But, I mean, I certainly, I had him ahead of Stanton and McCutcheon. Yeah, I think I even thought the same thing in 2013 when Molina finished third behind Goldschmidt and McCutcheon. I think I picked Molina that year for the framing slash defense reasons.

And so, yeah. I had Posey ahead of McCutcheon, too, although behind Stanton. I'm trying to find what I had. Was it 2013 that you thought that Molina, Yadier was? Yeah. And this year, Leroix finished fourth. And yeah, I mean, number two behind Kershaw was just pretty much a free-for-all. There were a bunch of guys with essentially the same values,

so I would have put Lucroix ahead of all of them. So yeah, I guess you should is the answer if you believe the stats. Do it. All right. Play index? Yeah, sure. So I'm just stealing this from Matt Trueblood who sent it to us. And I have actually never noticed this split on baseball reference.

It's new to me. Of course, you can look at if you go to their split finder, you can see, you can split by position, by defensive position. So you could see, for instance, how see who had the lowest on-base percentage from their catchers or the highest slugging percentage from their pitchers. Or if you want, you can look at the entire league at each individual position. And Matt has, I think a couple of times, mentioned to maybe me or maybe both of us, I think a couple of times mentioned to maybe me or maybe both of us, something about position trends offensively over the years.

And so I think this is something he's interested in. And he sent us a query that groups these positions, which I didn't realize the baseball reference does, but it does. You can also split by grouped positions, offensive or defensive positions. So offensive in this case would be first base, third base, left field, right field, DH, and pinch hitters. And then the defensive position grouping is catcher, second base, shortstop, and center field. And so Matt sent it to us because there's this really kind of fascinating trend. He's sorted by basically the OPS split, the OPS plus for the split. And the way this works is if you have, let's say you have a 900 OPS as a hitter, but you have a 990

OPS as a, say, clean-up hitter, then your OPS plus for that split would be, what, 110, because it's 10% better than your baseline, right? So that's what Baseball Reference calls the T-OPS+, relative to your total. So Matthew Trueblood sorted the last 50-ish years of this split by T-OPS+. And the lowest in those 50 years for offensive positions was 2014. And the second lowest was 2013. And the third lowest was 2012. And the second lowest was 2013 and the third lowest was 2012 and the fourth lowest was 2011 so the last four years have all set new records over the past half century for how low the ops of offensive oriented positions has been relative to the OPS of the league generally. Did I explain that?

Would you guess? I think so. So basically in plain English, in words, what this would suggest is that the league is putting a lower percentage of their best hitters in traditionally hitting focused positions, which the flip side of that is obviously that better hitters are at shortstop, second base, catcher, and center field than have ever been there before.

Because if you ran this exact same query for the grouping of defense positions, you would see the highest OPS plus split for them. So maybe that would have actually been a more intuitive way of describing this. But what it means is that shortstop, second baseman, center fielders, and catchers are hitting better than ever relative to the rest of the league. What is the deal, Ben? Why do you think this is? And does the very fact that the bottom of this leaderboard is so cleanly progressive that it's 2011, 12, 13, 14 in order at the bottom four spots. Does that convince you this is a real phenomenon? Sort of. Well, it would help convince me more if I had a rationale that I found convincing,

and I don't yet. So, I mean, so what has changed? Defensive evaluation has changed, maybe has gotten more precise, defensive evaluation has changed, maybe has gotten more precise, and maybe has gotten more trusted and valued. So teams are considering defense more, perhaps prioritizing it more, or perhaps less. If they were prioritizing it more, you would think they would prioritize it more at the positions where you have a bigger impact first. You would think so. So it could be because...

And you would think they would do a better job sorting players so that the truly best defenders are at center field, second base, and shortstop, and therefore might be there despite having weaker offensive performances. So then it could potentially suggest that teams, even though they have a better handle on defense now, what could be that in getting a better handle on defense, they've come to care less about it. That's possible. Like maybe the numbers that they found are lower. Maybe there's less of a difference between defenders than teams assumed that there was before. Or maybe it has something to do with contact rates,

strikeout rates. There are fewer balls in play now. So maybe defense is less important in that sense. I mean, it is objectively less important in that sense. There's less of a separation between the good fielders at a position and the bad fielders at a position because there are fewer opportunities to make plays in a season. So that could be it.

Do you have a better idea? Well, you could imagine that teams are not necessarily more focused on defense or value defense more overall, that maybe defense has always been a bigger part, but maybe they just now appreciate more what a good left fielder or right fielder or first baseman is worth. They might be less willing to simply just punt those now that they've seen that, in fact, the difference, the spread between the top and bottom right fielders in the game is basically just as large as between the top and bottom shortstops and the top and bottom center fielders.

Yeah, like you could have Alex Gordon or Jason Hayward in a corner. Exactly. It's like a 50-run difference between that guy and Bobby Abreu, if you really believe it, or at least like a 30 or 40-run difference. And so maybe they value it more at selective positions uh it could be that um in i don't know you could have met maybe i haven't thought this out but maybe there's something about the offensive era that we're in that um that uh benefits contact hitters that doesn't benefit the big slugging types that were so good in the more home run offensive era, maybe. Could be. Could be that, I don't know.

What else could it be? It's hard to say. It's a challenge. I think that it's, I would guess that it's probably an appreciation of corner defensive value. And of course, third base, by the way, is part of this too. And third base is very close to a defense position instead of an offensive position. And that could be tilting things somewhat as teams appreciate how valuable third base defense is. I don't know.

The thing about it, though, is that that explanation seems to make sense, but how many players are really not in the league now that would have been 15 years ago or that would have been playing a lot 15 years ago or aren't in the league now? Sorry, the other way, too. How many actual roster decisions do you think this is driving? I mean, for the most part,

do you feel like there's this whole mean, for the most part, do you feel like there's this whole group of players who've been forcibly retired because their left field defense wasn't good enough that wouldn't have been 15 years ago or even five years ago? I mean, 2010, for instance, is basically median in this list. Yeah, it would be a pretty rapid change if that were all it is. Or could this just be nothing but the lack of first base players that has been noted?

I wrote about it years ago. Jason Parks was talking about it before that. Right now we're living in a dearth of first basemen, and that seems to be somewhat fluky, and maybe doesn't have a lot to say about the sport or the world, but right now we clearly, we don't have particularly great first basemen at the big league level, and there haven't been really any great first basemen

coming up through the systems, and the first basemen who have been top prospects have a lot of them have flopped. And so that actually might, it's a fifth of the production basically. And we're not talking about huge differences here. So it could just be that first basemen suck. Yeah. And then is there a reason that first basemen suck or is it just a blip, just a cyclical thing? I don't remember if I tried to answer that or if I just, I can't remember

what I wrote. Do you remember what I wrote? Not really. I don't have an answer. Right now. Okay. Well, it's an interesting trend, at least if it is a trend. Yeah. Anyway, Playindex. Yeah, Playindex. Go to basefilereference.com

and subscribe to it Using the coupon code BP To get the discounted price of $30 On a one year subscription Okay, last thing From Eric Hartman Who says it's acknowledged that we are In a pitcher friendly era

However, these things tend to be cyclical In what year do you predict We'll be next in a hitter-friendly era? I'd have to look back at the history to see what the typical peak and valley is But I would guess I would guess Like from the beginning of when people started to say pitchers era, which was what, like 2010 or something, when people started saying year of the pitcher. And now relative to 2014, 2010 looks like a high offense here.

I would guess 10 years after that first year. I would guess 10 years after that first year. So, you know, six more years from now or something, we'll be out of the valley at least. Maybe not the next peak where we're talking about hitter-friendly era, but at least out of the trough. But strikeouts and shifts. Yeah.

I don't know. Strikeouts have been going up for a long time. And we've still had fluctuation from pitcher-friendly to hitter-friendly. Like eventually there's a rule change or something. There's something that counteracts the rise in strikeouts. And I don't know how much the shift is responsible for what we've seen lately. So I would guess that we'll come out of it one way or another. I don't have a better answer. I don't really know.

I don't even, I don't know. I don't know even how to think about that. I'm not sure what I think, because I don't have any idea what is going to be the next shift. I don't know what the factor is that's going to cause the next shift. And so without knowing that, it's hard to know when it's going to come. Well, there will, it's probably safe to say there'll be something if the current trajectory continues. Like if we get next year a little weaker than this year and the year after that a little weaker than that and people are already talking about this constantly offense being down strikeouts being up if that continues for another two years

three years you'd think that something will change. They'll change the... Rob Arthur wrote about how the seeming, the apparent sinking of the strike zone that's been going on for the last several years since PitchFX started reversed itself in the middle of this past season. So who knows if maybe that'll continue and that will kind of reverse this trend

toward low offense or whatever else. People will start getting more serious about the lower the mound or move the mound back or all of the various measures that have been proposed. I would guess that if this sink continued for another few years, we would get to the point where someone would actually do something about that And then it would bounce back You want to hear something funny about you? Yes You left Yadier Molina off your ballot

Entirely last year And the year before In 2013? Yeah, you did not vote for him At all in 2013 I don't remember this at all I don't believe it. Someone's tampered with the results.

Could be. It's not your site anymore. We can do whatever we want with your ballot. All right. So that's it for today. Please send us some emails for next week at podcastatbaseballperspectives.com Join the Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash

effectively wild. Some of the listeners in there are talking about starting an effectively wild blog just for listeners to write things about baseball, original things about baseball. So that would be cool. If that happens, check it out. And rate and review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. It's much appreciated. We will be back later this week. Three, two, one. Good morning and welcome to episode 577 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus. You got noises going on over there?

It's not bad noises though. It's just a little flickering, right, while I get a cup of tea? Everybody can handle that. Everybody can handle a little tea, I think. Run a little water. Run a little water, put the kettle on. Hear a little... You okay? Hi, Ben.

Hi. I'm gonna start over. Good morning and welcome to episode 577 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus presented by The Play Index at BaseballReference.com. You're going to keep the sirens, though. Sirens? I didn't hear the sirens. You didn't hear the sirens.

They're like super loud sirens right outside oh man now I gotta start again right had a perfect take in the can