Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 584: Is Billy Beane Bad for Baseball?

Episode Date: December 8, 2014

Ben and Sam banter about rumors, David Robertson, and the Winter Meetings, then revisit the Josh Donaldson trade to decide whether Billy Beane is bad for baseball.

The Meeting Place The Meeting Place The Meeting Place place. Ben. Hi. How are you? Packing my bags for San Diego. You mock my business trips every time. I actually was going to suggest as the maybe replacement game to non-revelatory trade rumors, game two, non-revelatory trade rumors. The winter meetings attendee who has no need to be there game. Just going to make fun of Grant Brisby for being there. Grant Brisby is going to be scouting out fountains with seven cameras and a notebook

just waiting for somebody to go into a fountain. The only reason that grant frisbee has to be in san diego just fountain watch and and uh so i thought that would be a fun game and here you are the champion the champion of the game why can't the champion and the judge i have no less reason to be there than many other people who have little reason to be there you um have you will travel farther than just than maybe all of them though that's true and uh and you actually have other things and that you should be doing i i know this i'm aware of these things i can't tell people what they are but i know that you have things you should be doing and they are not uh in san diego maybe they will be

maybe they could be anywhere i am they could be what is your plan does it change anything that i am then going to los angeles for the grantland holiday party yeah it does i haven't actually met my editor my employers so that is a large part of the reason why I'm making this trip. Okay, that actually is a good reason. Okay, so now someone else is the champion of going to the winter meetings for no reason. When is the holiday party? Friday. Friday, and you should come on up here.

It's kind of far. I think I Google-mapsed it, and it was not close, but I hope to have lunch with Jason Wojciechowski. It's close by California standards, though. Uh-huh. I mean, it's not close, because where you are, 355 miles puts you in the Gulf of Mexico. For us, though, it's like just a quick hop. It's basically two turns. Two turns, and you're here. Maybe you should hop on down i would i can't yeah you've got a book to edit i've got the book

convenient uh uh yeah the convenient book it's so easy so convenient for me to have a book yeah um so what are you going to do what is your plan for while you're there how are you It's so easy. It's so convenient for me to have a book. Yeah. So what are you going to do? What is your plan for while you're there? How are you going to maximize this trip? What are you going to be working on? What's your plan for tomorrow? I don't really have one.

I wish I had a good plan, but I don't. Having been there before, I don't know. You can do the thing that everyone does where they go look at all the minor league vendors and everything, and you can walk around and see that, or you can just people watch or whatever. Or if you're an actual newsbreaker, you can presumably do that while you're there. But for me and for most people who do what we do, it seems to be sort of sit there and write about stuff as it happens and maybe catch up with people that you know, other writers, other people with teams, and that's about it. Huh. Really? That's it?

So you don't have any – when you land on the ground, you don't have a plan for what your first article is going to be? You're not reporting anything out? You're not sort of on the lookout for one particular thing yet? Nope. Interesting. Does that stress you out or are you just content? Have you conceded that you might not do anything except for transaction analyses that you could do from home? That's what I did last time I was there.

Sort of what I expect to do again. I had a couple ideas, emailed some people. Nothing has come together, so I might just end up doing that. Okay, all right. Well, have fun. Thank you. What hotel is it?

It's the Manchester Grand Hyatt. I've been to a conference or two there in my day. Uh-huh. I drove down there one time to watch a superintendent speak at a California League of Superintendents meeting. It's pretty fun. I was the only non-superintendent in a room of like 200 superintendents. So you must have had more of a plan than I do.

You should do that. If I see any superintendents, I'll talk to them. All right. So any business? Not particularly. We've got a few rumor submissions, but not ones I'm particularly excited about. There is a John Heyman one that follows the standard may-consider construction. I might just stop mentioning may-considers because we've covered that ground. The Braves may consider Stephen Drew for second base. There was a better one, probably Joe Fasaro of MLB.com

tweeted that the Marlins are willing to part with pitching if deal is right. And he linked to his story, which had a headline, Marlins willing to part with pitching if deal is right. They should really, this is again an error. If the tweet was simply, if it was just Marlins willing to part with pitching, that's fine. That would be fine.

That would be a way of saying that the Marlins have decided that pitching is potentially an area of surplus on the team, and if they need to upgrade, if they want to upgrade elsewhere, they are considering which pitchers might be replaceable, that sort of a thing.

And so it is the extra quote unquote information that devalues the whole tweet. I agree. And the same, well, yeah, I think that's often the case. Okay. But anyway, yeah, those are fairly repetitious. Mm-hmm. But anyway, yeah, those are fairly repetitious. Does it surprise you that the Astros have been connected to David Robertson so many times?

It doesn't surprise me, but I was wondering today whether I should be surprised. Because it does seem like... I was thinking about that too, because the standard line when you have a team that hasn't been winning and they're going after a closer is, oh, why does that team need a closer? They don't even have that many leads they have to preserve. That's a luxury item. Yeah, that's been BP. I mean that was one of like the seven founding principles of BP it seemed to me. I remember reading 2000, 3000, 4000, 5000, 5000, 6000. That was just every time a bad club was linked to a closer or whatever that you would hear that. That was just sort of accepted knowledge.

And there's a lot of sense to it. Yeah. And in this case, I mean, Robertson seems like he's going to get a four-year deal maybe. And certainly within that span of time, the Astros expect to be good and need a closer so is it just that they think that he is going to be the best closer available in the next few years and they want to make sure they have him when they need him or did they read russell carlton's article about a year ago when he wrote about whether young pitchers don't develop when the bullpen implodes all the time. And he found he was he was writing about the Astros in that article, and he found a slight

effect that he thought suggested that maybe there was some impact on young pitcher development, but nothing that would make you run out and sign David Robertson. Well, I don't think the Astros are a team anymore that isn't buying. They won 70 games. I don't think they would necessarily consider next year the best year in their window. But this is definitely the bridge year. This is the push for respectability year, right? It has to be.

And so if you see yourself as the 2013 Royals, for instance, and you've got money to spend, which I assume they've got money to spend, and like you said, Robertson will be there through the good years too, and there might not be a better closer who's available to you between now and then. And it's not the thing too, is that, um, you know, you only need one shortstop. It's hard to find a shortstop, but you do only need one of them and you only need, you know, one center fielder and it's kind of hard to find them, but you only need one of them. Relievers are easy to find, but you also need seven of them. Like you're never going to be like too many relievers. We have all these good relievers,

and there's not any innings to put them in. Like, you could maybe make the case that if you had, that there's a little bit of a, what's the phrase I'm looking for? You know, when the return gets less? Diminishing returns. When you have them in lower leverage. But, I mean, you basically, you're never, ever, ever, ever, ever going to stop needing good relievers.

There's never been a team that had too many good relievers. So sure, go ahead and pick them up when you can. It seems good to me. It seems like a good move. And there's also the element, which is probably somewhat significant with the Astros, that maybe each move they make makes it easier for them to get the next guy. Right now, I have to imagine that they're considered an unattractive destination for a good portion of free agents. I don't know exactly how much, Russell will answer this soon,

I assume, but I don't know how to quantify how much more a bad team has to pay to get a guy or how many free agents aren't actually available to them because of uh of how bad they are but these moves seem to have some factor in changing the narrative around a team and making it easier for them to to sign the players they need. I think we talked about this one year ago when we were discussing the Dexter Fowler trade and maybe the Scott Feldman signing in. And I made the point, or the case, I guess, I tried to make the point in Dexter Fowler transaction analysis

that you trade for Dexter Fowler because the difference between maybe winning 60 games and winning 70 is a few million dollars you might be able to save signing guys the following winter if you're the Astros. And so it's really an investment in the next offseason. And you could make the case that David Robertson is somewhat similar, that partly by being a big-name signing makes it easier this offseason and partly by helping them win some more games it makes it maybe easier next offseason. So I'm not surprised they're interested,

and I would think I would applaud it if they signed him unless it was for nine years and $175 million. Although, with inflation, it might not be that bad. I would bet that in nine years a good closer would be making $20 million. I wouldn't bet that David Robertson will be a good closer in nine years. Many stranger things have happened. How old is David Robertson? 29. Too old. He 29 too old he's old uh yeah that's old it's not young good he's been around a long time ben he's a free agent i just

yeah i just put that it's like he's got like six years of service time at this point. It's amazing. Anyway. Yeah. 61, 66, 61, 66, 64. Innings. Yeah. He's been pretty consistent there. Yeah. All right.

Anything else? Not for me. All right. I wanted to ask you about the Josh Donaldson trade that you wrote about for Grantland, because you wrote about it about eight hours after we recorded, and it seemed like you had changed your mind? The headline suggested that I had changed my mind, perhaps, but I didn't write the headline.

The actual text, I felt like, was more or less what I thought before. I was probably, yeah, I think I was probably letting the headline influence. That happens. All right. I did want to talk about the Donaldson trade again, though. Okay. And the reason I wanted to talk about it is because Ken Arneson, who is a great writer, he wrote the A's essay in last year's annual. He doesn't write as much as the world wishes, but every time he does, it's usually brilliant. And he wrote what he headlined, The Long, Long History of Why

I Do Not Like the Josh Donaldson Trade. This history is, in fact, very long. It starts one billion years ago. I will quote, everybody lived in the oceans and everybody had only one cell each. This was quite a fair and egalitarian way to live. And it goes from there through each stage of life's development. This is a joke that people will make about writers sometimes that they that they start in ancient history and go from there but this actually did that but it was it was fun read anyway yeah it was a very fun read and i as i was reading this i thought that it was just a gag uh for most of it i was like, do you remember a year, two years ago,

when Tim Marchman wrote his post-season awards posts at the Classical? And he would, it would be like the A.L. Cy Young, and he would write, his post would just be like

1,700 words on Duke Ellington, and it had nothing to do. And that was a fairly aggressive meta joke. And I thought that was this too. And then, in fact, though, toward the end, and this is what makes this post brilliant, is that you figure out that Ken was actually making a point. He had a very strong point. And the point will, I don don't know it made me really think

a lot this weekend about what it is that were that were rooting for baseball and what it is that the uh... that the general manager is a shin of baseball has done to the game and in particular it made me think about the josh donaldson moving so i'm gonna sort of try to summarize ken's argument

and argument is and i going to skip to the present. His argument is basically that there is often a rational decision that is good for the, say, betterment of the species or betterment, for the betterment of the individual, but that we as humans nonetheless do not always take because we have some sort of humanity, some sort of like, I don't know, lingering, I'm really going to try hard not to misrepresent this, I probably will, but some sort of lingering affection for the group and shared humanity that makes us not act in the most crass, self-interested way possible, or even in the way that is perhaps most explicitly to the benefit of our particular tribe. And that for that reason, some large portion of the population does not necessarily act rationally, but does act in a way that is kind of good for everybody, for us, for people who like love and cooperation.

So I'm going to read now from Ken's piece. Rather than try to keep on stumbling over a summary of it, I'm going to read now from Ken's piece. Rather than try to keep on stumbling over a summary of it, I'm going to read a couple of quick paragraphs. Some customers, of course, maybe 15% to 20% of them, love the competitive chutzpah it took for Bean to trade his best player. For them, winning is all that matters. Others, such as the author of this essay, were appalled. We other 80% to 85%.

Perhaps we are evolutionary dead ends, the kind of people who let our emotions get in the way of us pulling the trigger. Perhaps we are the kind of people who in the end will lose and thus fail to pass on our genes to the generations of people 200 million years from now. We are freeloaders, parasites feeding off the efforts of the 15 to 20% of the population who actually accomplished something. And there's a lot of meaning to some of the words chosen here that if you had read the couple thousand words before it would be clear to you, the 15 to 20% is a significant number. But it's also that Ken is kind of making the point that

humanity might become ever more crassly rational, but that we are still a very young species and we haven't yet developed the perfect, efficient, self-interested gene required to do whatever it takes to survive or to protect our tribe at the expense of others. And so the metaphor, I guess, is that in the same way baseball, sabermetrics, or whatever mode of rational decision-making has not yet evolved to the point where it is always cruel and ugly and perhaps crass, but it is getting there. And that we see it in certain moves, we see it in certain perhaps front offices, and in Ken's estimation, we see it here in the trading of Josh Donaldson.

And did you read this piece, Ben? Yes. Have I gotten close to you? I think so, yes. So that brings up the question, which I want to ask you about, which is that we've talked on this show before. that we've talked on this show before. I think we've talked about Will Leach's article, and you've, I think, maybe written about Will's article, talking about how many of us now associate or sympathize more with the front offices

and the people making the moves rather than the action on the field, that we have become, in essence, GM fetishists. And I think for a lot of good reasons. To me, for instance, the meta game is kind of richer and a little bit more interesting at times than the slog of 2-1 pitches and 1-2 fouls and all those sorts of things that make baseball sometimes interminable. and all those sorts of things that make baseball sometimes interminable.

And it's also a lot easier to identify with the scrawny guy in the suit than the muscular guy who doesn't look like me and does things that I can never dream of doing and who speaks a language that I don't speak and who might literally come from a background that I'm not familiar with. Might literally come from a background that I'm not familiar with. And so there's reasons, I think, why you and I and Baseball Perspectives and many of the people who are listening to this and many of the people who we read have, over the past couple of decades, become particularly focused on the role that the front office plays in the game.

But I'm going to shift a little bit of direction here. When we talk about whether something is good for the game, I have often on this show talked about how there are three interest groups. There are the players, there are the owners, and there are the fans. And depending on the situation, one of those groups might take more priority than another group. Generally, I think that the players have the most stake in the game, the fans second most, and the owners the third most. And yet, what has always been left out of that is that there is a fourth stakeholder in this that I had not included, which is the front offices, the people who actually dictate the way that the game is going to be played and yet are not one of my three traditional stakeholders. And I wonder whether the influence of this fourth shareholder, this fourth

stakeholder group is becoming pernicious because they don't serve the fan, they don't serve the player, and maybe they serve the owner, but they definitely don't, it seems to me, increasingly, they explicitly don't serve the player and they explicitly don't serve the fan, and it has become increasingly aggressively opposed to the interests of of the player and the fan it seems to me and i don't think this happened as much in previous generations but in this one uh this generation that um has you know been a very rich one for the front office watching fan, has nonetheless maybe taken a turn towards something that is slightly a little bit objectionable.

And I wanted to see whether you agree with that, whether that makes sense to you, whether it is a threat to your enjoyment of the game going into the future, whether it applies to Josh Donaldson, and whether you think Ken's essay has a point or actually convinced you of something. Well, that's a lot of questions. I enjoyed the article. I think it has a point. I'm not sure I'm totally sold that this Donaldson trade represents something new or something that even is really opposed to the nature of the game itself.

I mean, first of all, is it new? Is it dramatically different from any other kind of move we've seen before, any kind of move we've seen Billy Beaten make many times before? I wonder how much of... Wait, wait, let's pause, though. Because it is not... I don't think Ken's point is that Billy Bean is evolving. I think Billy Bean has always been this.

Donaldson, like you noted, along with Gio Gonzalez, is a bit more extreme than the other post-free agent trades that he's made. But Billy Bean is the evolutionary leap. He is himself the seminal moment right and so the fact that this doesn't depart from billy bean well that's the point this this is billy bean right and i i don't know i i mean has that really made it less fun to follow the A's? I think, if anything, it's made it more fun to follow the A's. Let me ask. Let me ask.

Okay. Has Billy Bean stated to all his players way before free agency, agency, made it more or less fun to follow the A's? All right. Okay. So you have to take into account that if that is the only way that he can truly keep them competitive, and Ken writes about that a bit, how he wants the A's to win a World Series and he would enjoy them winning a World Series, but that this is just too far for him. just too far for him um but even so i i wonder whether a whether he would feel the same way if there had been a different return in this trade how much how much the fact that it seems like they didn't get a lot back factors into this emotional reaction to it and whether if it works

out just fine and brett laurie's great and the prospects are great and Donaldson declines and the A's win again, whether anyone who currently follows the A's, including Ken perhaps, will actually disengage with the team, enjoy the playoff run less because it was built this way. I guess I have a hard time believing that. Well, you have to, though. I mean, the question of results is definitely relevant. I imagine that the average A's fan got a lot more enjoyment out of trading, for instance, Mark Mulder than trading Tim Hudson, or got more out of trading Dan Heron than Matt Holliday, I guess. I'm trying to think of another example. Because they got, for years they've been able to cheer those players that they added. That definitely makes it more fun.

However, let's say that we don't know yet whether this is going to be one of the good ones or the bad ones. You have to agree that the average A's fan would rather cheer for the player that they A, know already, B, for the most part, love, C, they're familiar with. Not everybody is, for instance, you or I. It's the old rooting for laundry argument. Yeah. I think that there is a transaction cost, a transaction fee from the fan's perspective where you do love the new guy

a little less and you know until you grow to love him more uh but but that's not immediate and uh yeah i would just i don't say look i don't think billy bean is going to ace fans and saying uh i did it i got i got the guy you love more than josh donaldson i mean he he's going to make the case that well they had to do it for financial reasons that it makes them more competitive in the long run but he's not going to convince anybody they actually like Brett Lowry more than they like Josh Donaldson he knows that that's not true

they don't A's fans if the A's didn't have to do this to get better no A's fan was going to propose this, right? Right, but... I have an answer, by the way, from Jason. Okay, what does Jason say? Jason says, less.

He enjoys it. It has made it less fun to follow the A's. He says, I haven't read Ken's essay yet, but I'm more or less on board with him. It's depressing. I don't care about trading bad players at the height of their value like Trevor Cahill. Super trade. Awesome trade. I care about trading Tim Hudson and Josh Donaldson and Brandon Moss. Okay. Well, I guess I can't argue with any expense.

That's Jason too. Jason is at the fairly extreme end of knowing that these players are commodities and thinking of them that way as such. I mean, I imagine that the average person who picks up the newspaper is processing this very differently than Jason. And I don't know, maybe I don't care about that fan. Maybe that fan would be so half-checked out checked out anyway that you know whatever by by a month from now it'll all be reset in his mind yeah well i wonder whether the ace fan can really compare

this way of operating to what might happen if they didn't operate this way if they i don't know if they had been the royals or the piratesates or something. That's the extreme. Maybe that wouldn't have happened. But maybe the A's fan is thinking, I wish that this team could win a different way and could win having the same players every year, but not mentally comparing to what the more likely outcome would be, which is having the same players and not winning as much. And maybe ultimately it evens out. I don't know. But the other question I have about the point is that Ken seems to draw a distinction between this ruthless way of winning

and the nature of the game itself. He says, whether we believe in winning above else or not, sports provide a way to embrace our competitiveness without accepting the violence that often comes along with it. The desire to compete in a non-destructive fashion came about precisely because these emotions are tempering our competitiveness. Otherwise, we just kill each other all over the place. And I don't know that I see the distinction between what Billy Bean is doing and what the players are all doing. I mean, it's not literal violence,

but it is about the most Darwinian environment you could come up with, right? Major League Base baseball and the whole affiliated baseball system is the most dog versus you know doggy dog do anything you can to beat the other guy and deprive him of his livelihood so that you can be better and make more money and whatever the ultimate goal of succeeding in life is it's it's the same sort of ruthlessness on a a civil level but this is the billy bean making a trade is on the same non-violent level it seems to me like it's the same same attitude that players have competing for spots on a roster is is what front offices are doing also.

Well, I don't know that I agree with that. I think that's where there's a difference because there are unwritten rules that players follow that they have created as an etiquette, as manners, as a way of showing that they are in fact not willing to stomp on each other. as a way of showing that they are in fact not, not willing to stomp on each other. But that's well, yeah, I'm sorry to interrupt, but the, I mean the unwritten rules rarely change the outcome of the game right there.

Largely the unwritten rules dictate situations where the game is already decided. And then it's about whether you want to embarrass someone or not, but it's not, it's not, you're not deferring toring to the other team and losing because of it. You're deferring to the other team and winning 8-1 instead of 10-1 or something. And there are unwritten rules in front offices too, right? Like waiver claims or whatever, right?

Like not claiming a guy. It's the same sort of thing. I think that not claiming a guy is sort of mutually assured destruction. I think that's where that comes in. But yeah, you might be right. I mean, I don't... I think that where it becomes... I think where it becomes perhaps a little troubling is not that we want a GM to not make trades that make him better.

I mean, clearly, right, Billy, it is bad for an Oakland A's fan to have his team be bad for 20 years. And so you have to take certain steps to make sure that you are not bad for 20 years. And sometimes those things are going to get in the way. I think that what you maybe sense is frustrating, Ken, is that the fans' response doesn't seem to be a factor at all. And I don't know that this is even necessarily a Billy Bean thing. This might be, as much as anything, a you and I thing, the way that we write about these things. Not you and I necessarily, although sometimes you and I, but this industry of stat head writers who assess these things

coldly and rationally. It is just not an issue whether the fan is happy. It only becomes an issue whether the fan is happy if it is going to keep the fan from spending money and therefore end up hurting the A's. Otherwise, there is no sense that the fan as a group is a stakeholder that should have its wishes respected just as a matter of courtesy. As a matter of business, yes. As a matter of altruism or something, not. And it's sort of the same way with players. It's like, okay, yeah, you don't want to abuse your players to the point where they revolt or they won't sign with you after six years or they won't sign an extension with you or the players association is going to come down with sanctions or you're going to push too far

and lose your pick or whatever you don't want to do that to the point where it's going to hurt you but until it hurts you ask room right i mean isn't there and i don't like like i'm saying i don't know that that is i don't know how the conversations in the front office go. And Billy Bean, I'm sure, is a very good human being. My guess is that he is not nearly that coldly calculating. like the front offices have become like corporations where they have an obligation to their shareholders to make profit. And therefore, you almost have to dump all that garbage into the atmosphere unless the government's going to fine you.

Because if you're not taking every step you can to make a profit for your shareholders, you're behaving unethically as a corporation. The corporation's only morality is to make a profit. And the front office's only morality is to win more games. And if you're not doing things to win games, then you are behaving immoral. And it is a competition. So maybe that's legitimate. And that is, like, it is a competition.

So maybe that's legitimate. Maybe we have signed on to this, that in a arbitrary athletic pursuit where we have agreed that winning is determined by scoring more runs than the other and that ultimately it is the only way that this is significant, maybe that is the right moral code for front offices to follow. Maybe that is the right moral code for front offices to follow. I can see, though, why it is frustrating for a fan and frustrating for a player,

and I can see why it might be better for the game long term if there was a richer and more nuanced morality that guided decisions. Well, yeah, or maybe it's more of a paternalistic attitude, like the front office having the fans' best interests in mind and doing things that the fan might not approve of in the short term, but will be glad were done in the long term like the fan if you put it to a fan vote maybe the fans would never decide to trade a star player someone they recognize and know and have enjoyed watching they would maybe they'd always want Derek Jeter out there at you know 45 just just running out there in the lineup every day hurting the team just because they have fond memories of Derek Jeter. And so at some point the front office has to step in

and say that the fan's ultimate interest is that the team wins and the fan will be happiest in the long run if the team wins. And sometimes you have to deprive the fan of something he or she enjoys watching in the short term, and they'll thank you later. They'll buy tickets later to come see your team, which is winning with new and different players. And I don't know, maybe we're overestimating the extent

to which fans care only about winning as opposed to the personalities on the team, or maybe not. Maybe fans are overestimating their own loyalty to the players. Yeah, I'm not sure. I think the point you make, though, that point, that last one you made, is very strong, and it is possible that that is ultimately what we want. We want a game that is purely competitive so that we can watch it knowing that every step has been taken to try to win

and the integrity of the game in that sense, the integrity of the competition is very pure. I'm not sure that that's not the case. And I'm also not sure that I don't have the same, I will say that I don't have the same reaction to these things that Ken does. I am pretty ruthlessly coldly calculating when it comes to my rooting interests. I don't think that I have been emotional about a move that any sports team

has made in the past 15 years, other than as it relates to when you're losing. So as a person who roots the way I do, these GMs are serving my interests. And again, to just really make it very clear, I assume that these guys are, A, more nuanced than I'm giving them credit for in their decision making, and B, even if they're not, super good people who are not doing anything wrong or evil, this is like totally legitimately within the rules.

And this is a complicated question. Um, so I don't, it sounds perhaps like I'm besmirching things that I don't actually intend to besmirch. Um, but you're right. I, there. I think you can make the case that the things that each interest group does to protect its own interests, in a way, protect the ecosystem of the game as a whole. greedily self-interested to basically steal money from everybody they can, that that money makes the game a richer place and incentivizes players to be better and choose the sport and that it leads to great ballparks and then it leads to great TV productions and that ultimately it makes for a better show even if it is sort of disgusting and icky to see this money being funneled into rich people's pockets. And so in the same way, I think you can make that case for every interest group within it.

I don't know. I generally think that it would be better for the sport if Josh Donaldson didn't have to get traded after two years. I'm sure. I don't know that anyone would disagree with that. Billy Beeden probably wishes he didn't have to trade Josh Donaldson. Unless they don't get along. But other than that.

Right. Well, unless they don't get along, but other than that. Right, and so if that's a given, then the front office is at least a part of that decision. There was no requirement, for instance, that he be traded. They made that decision, and there's a line. For instance, if they traded, let's say that they did the math, For instance, if they traded, let's say that they did the math and they decided that trading Josh Donaldson was worth, I don't know, just 30 million units of whatever. 30 million units is a lot. Say it's dollars.

Say it was worth 30 million surplus dollars. I'd have a hard time saying don't do it, even if it makes Ken sad. But now what if they did the math and it was a penny? And they're like, well, it's a penny. We'll take it. And you would think, well, it's a penny. We'll take it. And, I mean, you would think, well, that's kind of shady, right? Like you're making Ken sad for a penny. You're making tens of thousands of people sad for a penny.

And so we don't really know necessarily where the – how many units of pleasure or how many units of whatever goodness the A's are reaping out of this is. And we don't know where the line is for how many units is worth making Ken sad. To compute it accurately, you'd have to quantify the effect of that sadness. You'd have to figure out whether Ken will attend fewer A's games or tune in to watch fewer A's games and you'll have lower ratings and you'll make less money in the long term. So that's the super two layers of ruthlessness where you have to figure out whether the sadness is actually costing you anything. Yeah, but even if it's not costing you anything, like when economists, I'm going to botch this one. I know it. Here it comes.

You've heard this. this one. I know it. Here it comes. You've heard this. Economists will actually factor a nation's happiness into some of its economic models. And they have ways of measuring how much happiness is worth. They have ways of basically getting people to put a price on their own happiness by seeing what they'll sacrifice for certain things. And so happiness is an actual economic value. And so when we talk about a country doing something rationally, for instance, investing in the arts might not have any profit motive for a country, but it makes sense if you consider the happiness of its people

to itself be a commodity. And in the same way, a team, a baseball team, sense if you consider the happiness of its people to itself be a commodity. In the same way, a baseball team, to the fans, certainly, and I would think to the other shareholders, the idea of a baseball team as being a community, a nation unto itself, has some value. You should want all the other people in your nation to be happy. That is, in a sense, that is the larger tribe. And so if Ken is not happy, whether or not it affects how many games he watches or goes

to, I would think that there would be some good case to be made that Billy Bean or whatever GM as a responsible steward of this nation's decision making should take into account that happiness, at least to some degree. Well, the serendipitous thing is that the interests of front offices and fans have been aligned more often lately. There's been less turnover, more players getting locked up to long-term extensions at young ages. And I wrote about how the turnover rate has declined since its peak in, I don't know, a decade or so ago. And so for now, at least, we are both happy. Front offices get their cheap young players signed up at below market rates

because they're taking a chance on them early. And fans get to experience their youth and their primes and not worry about them leaving quite as early. So that's the happy way to end this episode. Yeah. Okay. All right. So we will look for your emails at podcast at baseballperspectives.com.

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