Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 585: The Winter Meetings So Far

Episode Date: December 10, 2014

Ben and Sam banter about contradictory rumors and the biggest moves made early at the Winter Meetings.

If you hear more rumors, you can just forget them too. Full start the rumors, none of them are true. It's not true, it's not true. I'm telling you, cause I'm hearing you know it. It's not true, so there. It's not true-California episode. We are on West Coast time. Did you break any news? Nope.

Really? No. Disappointed? I didn't see who broke the Samarja deal, and I was all day, fingers were crossed that it was you. Sorry. Sorry to let you down. What have you been doing uh i don't know chatting had lunch with grant brisby what'd you eat been going to this taco place repeatedly what's it called i don't know not interested'm not interested in labels. Just in the foods.

Yeah. I mentioned this to you on the Twitter, but the problem with this idea that when a bunch of news happens, we'll rush out and do a bonus podcast, is that when a bunch of news happens, we have a job to do. Yeah. It involves writing and editing and putting things together. And it's the worst possible time to record a bonus podcast.

That is true. It's such an obvious flaw to my plan. Why didn't we see this coming? We discussed doing a Tuesday episode at some point on Monday afternoon when it was a slow day. And nothing had happened except the Brandon Moss trade. At that point, we could have done it. We had plenty of time in our lives to do it and nothing to talk about. We agreed that unless something big happened, and nothing big happened until it was too late, that if something big happened, we could do something. But in fact, if something

big happened, we could not. That's right fact, if something big happened, we could not. That's right. I was on the night shift writing up White Sox moves. Uh-huh. What do you think about the White Sox moves? Well, we will probably get into that. All right. Why don't we start with a play index?

We're going to do just a winter meetings episode. We've gotten some good emails. Maybe we'll do them on Friday or at some point soon. But since there's stuff to talk about, we will talk about it. So we'll start with a play index, quick play index. A very quick one. I wrote a thing for Fox Sports for Jabo about updating the Hall of Fame probability line. You remember that?

Mm-hmm. So the conceit behind that was that I found how many, where the line is at each age where a player who is above that line in war at that age has a 50% chance of making the Hall of Fame and a 50% chance of missing. In other words, through, say, age 23, if there have been 112 players in history who have 10.3 war, and exactly half of them went on to make the Hall of Fame, and exactly half of them went on to miss it. And so that's the half-likely line, which I have about seven different names for, and I could never decide on one. So I wrote a thing for Jabo about the players

who played themselves onto or off of the Hall of Fame 50% probability team in the last year because of course for a progress report it's possible to play yourself on or off such a list and so I think four there are four new players who are above the

line this year. Justin Upton, Buster Posey, Adrian Gonzalez, and Yasiel Puig. And, of course, you might think, well, I don't think Adrian Gonzalez is going to make the Hall of Fame. He probably won't. Half of them won't. That's the point. I'm on the 50% probability line. So anyway, Puig, though, is interesting because Puig had this but

since he started late, he had to make up some ground and so he just barely cleared it. He's over by like one run. And so that would put him at the low end of this group of 50%. And if you compare him to other Hall of Famers through age 23,

he's right there around the median, but of course he started late. So I used the play index in compiling this story just to see how he did in ages 22 and 23, because most Hall of Famers got an earlier start than he did. And if you limit it to just the years 22 and 23 instead of through the age of 23, Puig is out of 111 Hall of Fame hitters. Do you want to guess where Puig would rank of those 111?

He would rank 42. I think he's 24. I think he's just behind Willie Mays, although one fewer war fought in than Willie Mays. Just behind Yastrzemski, Schneider, Bench, Fox, K-Line, Hornsby, Cronin, Brett, Henderson, Ott, DiMaggio, Speaker, Jackson, Matthews, Aaron, Vaughn, Mantle, Musial, Ripken, Collins, Cobb, and Williams. You might notice that that is not just a list of Hall of Famers, but it is really almost totally a list of inner circle Hall of Famers that have done what Puig has done, which is interesting. It doesn't guarantee anything.

Puig is maybe a 50% shot to make the Hall of Fame, but there are surprising... I was surprised at how many not very good Hall of Famers there were at age 22 or 23. There's not a ton of them, but there are some who played quite a bit in those years and were terrible. For instance, Carlton Fisk. No, he's not one.

He didn't play barely at all. Tony Perez, 0.4 war. Hack Wilson, he didn't play at all. Willie Stargell, negative 0.2 war. Billy Williams, 1.7 war. Barry Larkin, 2.7 war. Ralph Kiner, 2.8. Ernie Banksiner 2.8, Ernie Banks 2.9 so I was surprised it seems to me that making the Hall of Fame would require a few things but one of those things would be starting early and being successful early

you don't think of there being a lot of late bloomers and I guess age 24 doesn't qualify as late blooming but you don't think of a lot of late bloomers in the Hall of Fame you think more of guys who start really good and then fade out and they become borderline, but I guess there are late bloomers too. All right. So that's the kind of simple functional thing that you can do with your play index. Simple,

took about eight seconds to do, four seconds to conceive of, and four seconds to enact. Good tool. It is an excellent tool So go to baseballreference.com Subscribe to the Play Index Use the coupon code BP when you do so To get the discounted price of $30 On a one year subscription

Have you ever been out close To like a Carpenter While he's Doing his hammering? I don't think so. It's one of the most amazing sights to be seen. They are so good with a hammer and a nail. My dad used to be pretty good.

He was a roofer, and they didn't have nail guns at the time, and so he would just basically race across the roof and hammering each shingle with a nail by hand and they're so good they they just smash that nail one time and it goes straight down perfectly every time and they're just flawless and fast and after a few weeks with the play index you and that tool will be like a carpenter and a hammer. It's true. It is a great feeling when you lock in with your play index. You took shop. So I have no non-revelatory rumors to report.

Not that there haven't been any. I think I'm just over it, at least temporarily. I think I'd be more surprised to see a rumor that did reveal something after the past few days. It's just been such an onslaught of rumors that not only did they not reveal something, but the ones that purported to reveal something did not. Whatever it purported to report was quickly contradicted. As we record this, late on Tuesday, the Leicester saga is still unresolved. The latest reports say that he is down to two teams and that other teams are out. And that seems somewhat more reliable than the previous reports of identical things but well he was he was previously down to

two teams and one of those teams is one of the teams that is out and yet he is still this is like uh i don't know i feel like this is like uh some sort of gremlin situation like it's the prestige that's what it is one of the teams goes into the water and another team appears yeah it away immediately it's crazy because there were it's not just the the teams but the timeline has shifted around completely it was going to be monday and then if it wasn't going to be monday it was tuesday for sure and then tuesday night for sure and now maybe it's Wednesday. And, I mean, who cares? Lester can take the whole offseason as far as I'm concerned to make up his mind. But the contradictory reports are kind of incredible.

It kind of makes me wonder how it happens. I don't know. The sources, I wonder whether the bar for source is just so low that people are essentially talking to people who have no more idea where Lester is going than, than others. Is that possible? I mean, I, I don't know. I, I spent the day talking to some front office people and, and Lester came up and I didn't ask them where Lester was going. Some of them asked me where Lester was going as if I have any insight. But I could have tweeted so-and-so source with a rival, you know, rival evaluator says he thinks Lester is going to Team X or not to Team Y or whatever.

Is that what people are doing? Is that how this is happening? Is that how we are getting Red Sox are out? Red Sox are a finalist, Lester is doing this tonight? Or is it just Lester or his agent giving contradictory information? Or is it teams actively spreading misinformation, who is among the more frank GMs out there, confess, admit that he misled the media about the Yankees' interest in Robertson and that they were still pursuing Robertson after signing Andrew Miller because he didn't want to affect David Robertson's market just as a favor to a former player former player I guess so one would imagine that that is going on with other teams and other players and then there are teams that are saying

that they're in on certain players just to look like they are interested in spending or they're trying to win or whatever so people have all kinds of motives for saying these things and I've just declared a moratorium on lester related tweets in my own life ren by the way ren would be the most frank gene yeah well no longer not still is the the strength of the frank overpowers the weakness of the gm in his in that formulation uh uh yeah i think that uh i think that when you say are is that what people are doing uh i think that it is safe to assume that yes people are doing that but that is not the entire data set that There are a lot of people who are also talking to John Lester's agent, John Lester himself, John Lester's best friend, Johnny Gomes, who's planning to sign wherever John Lester signs,

that sort of a thing. And so there is a signal in there. You sort of have to, I don't know, I guess to some degree you have to know whose voice you're going to let be loudest in your timeline. And to some extent you just have to not care that much about which ones are true or not. And some of these have been coming from the most reputable reporters there are yeah this is not just uh you know people cy hersh seymour seymour hersh has been tweeting a lot and you know he's gold so yeah i don't i don't i haveF. Stone had a big one earlier. Uh-huh. Big tweet. It's been somewhat exhausting just to follow the back and forth, which I've almost unwillingly been exposed to from various mailing lists that I'm on and editors planning out what I'm going to write about

or what Jonah's going to write about and trying to coordinate that. And so you kind of have to follow it to figure out when you're going to be writing and what you're going to be writing about. But the tweets often contain little information about that. Somebody in a comment to some, I don't know, some transaction analysis somewhere, I don't know if I wrote it or I don't know if the site ran it, I don't know if it was somewhere else, but I saw some comment where the person was like, I don't know if I wrote it or I don't know if the site ran it. I don't know if it was somewhere else. But I saw some comment where the person was like, I don't know, he said like, oh,

this felt rushed or something. And he's like, I mean, these moves, they're rumored for days in advance. But it's like, I mean, we have a machine that does nothing but produce false positives. I mean, how do you know which one To start working on there Every possible Iteration of Player team pairing is rumored For days in advance of it not happening Too

It's a difficult thing And there's not much consequence Really for getting a rumor Report wrong no one is Everyone always says no one remembers who breaks the news. And maybe that's, it's, that's not really true. I don't think, I mean, it's true that we don't know who broke any individual move, but we know who breaks the majority of the moves. And certainly the people who do, their bosses know, and they get jobs based on the fact that

they break lots of reports and they get on-air roles and everything. So it's not really true that no one cares or no one knows. But it's probably even more true that no one remembers inaccurate reports. No one remembers, you know, some transaction in the past. Someone said that this guy was going to sign by a certain time and then he didn't sign by that time. No one will unfollow that person because of that. So there's not really much of a disincentive to go with something.

Anyway. Quick update, I guess, on our off-season prediction game. Yeah. So I think now four players I think that we picked have signed. Hanley Ramirez signed for $12 million more than you predicted. Sorry, than the line, than Bowden predicted. Robertson, David Robertson, my guy, $7 million more. Nelson Cruz, my guy, $9 million more. And my guy 9 million more

and unfortunately I'm in the hole because Pablo Sandoval who I took the under on signed for I think 8 million more and you're going to get a big bump on Chase Hedley I've been waiting waiting for that Hedley move there was an incredible rumor

that had him at 4 and 44 which would keep me in the game I don't think that I'll get that and 44 which would keep me in the game i don't i don't think that i'll get that lucky but it would keep me in the game uh the problem is that lester so lester it seems like that there there is some tea leaf reading that suggests that he's going he might he might go to boston for less Like I think Bobby Evans of the Giants said something about personal reasons, which would suggest that he's actually maybe going to go for less than he would have made.

So I might actually get hurt on that one. The 150 would have, if it had been 150, I'd be in the game. But if he ends up going to Boston for less than he could get, it would break my heart. I mean, what is with these ballplayers today? Not taking...

Back in my day, you could count on ballplayers going where the money was biggest. You could predict. You could have a contract prediction game and not have to worry about the whims of his wife. But these ballplayers today, it's like all they care about is not having money. Yeah, our drafts would have been A lot less interesting in the reserve Clause era We just predicted that The player would be back with the same team

Maybe we Could have drafted spring training holdouts Perhaps Anyway the Brewers are my MVP of the winter meetings So far My favorite tweet from Tom Hodricourt, who tweeted that the Brewers, I will get the exact wording here. The Brewers have yet to meet personally with an agent or reps from another club.

So they are just sitting in their suite, maybe discussing possibilities, maybe establishing contact, but not personal contact. And I wish more teams would be like them, just show up and not create any false rumors, don't get anyone excited about things that aren't going to happen. Just sit there and talk among yourselves, internal discussions. By the way, we had that other one. Should we? We should just talk about it.

Real quick. We'll wait until after. I'll wait until after the winter meetings. Go ahead. Bowden nailed Liriano, by the way. Did he? I was wondering. Yeah, okay.

All right. So we can talk about some of these transactions. We can talk about, I guess we can talk about the White Sox stuff, the Samarja trade and the Robertson signing. We both wrote about those moves or one of those moves. I wrote almost exclusively about the White Sox side, and you wrote almost exclusively about the A's side of the Samarja trade. So maybe we can each take a side.

I guess we've talked about the a's a fair amount but what have we learned based on the latest trade i mean it seems to be that this trade is maybe the most understandable in terms of what they got back just in in isolation it seems like the the return for this one is more impressive than the return on donaldson or moss i think that um i think that's fair and in a way though it also is the one that most drives home the the the shift that has happened in oakland in the last six months because it's so easy to just cancel out the numbers and realize that they turned, you know, they basically turned Addison Russell into Marcus Simeon.

And I know they, they did, they got Samarja for half a season, which is a big, you know, that's a big thing. That's what they wanted. Right.

But at the end of the day, and again, I might say some version of this 50 times while we're talking about the A's, but I don't think that we know nearly enough or should necessarily impeach the A's process right now or their motives. We don't know exactly what the pressures are on Billy Bean from ownership or what their goal is with each of these moves. However, it just seems like the one thing you can say with, to me, pretty clear certainty is that they are in a much worse position now than they were six months ago and that they seemed like they would be in now six months ago.

And that it's been a while since they made a move that looked good. And he, right now, is kind of lucky he's not Kevin Towers. Because you could see this being, I mean, he doesn't care. But the internet is maybe lucky He's not Kevin Towers because this would be There's a little bit Of momentum of looking at this As a kind of rough losing streak Of really it seems to me Right well

Whenever anyone tries to Explain what the A's are doing Not even necessarily Defend it but explain What the rationale might be. You get accusations of, you know, going out of your way to defend the sabermetric guy, or just focusing on this one team more than every other team just because it's the A's. And I don't know that, I mean, the A's are just interesting, right? They do things that other teams don't do.

So it's not necessarily that we're all just in love with the A's because they like numbers and stuff and we like numbers. And so we have some affinity for them. It's like they do things just more drastically than other teams tend to do. And that is interesting. It's something that you want to write about, try to figure out what it means and why they're doing it. And I mean, it seems reasonable that they had to do something

because they built their whole team to an incredible extent on trades of prospects and everything. And that is a difficult thing to sustain. If you trade all your prospects for major leaguers, that seems to have kind of an expiration date. If you don't have much of a farm system and you're when you trade these guys you're acquiring already established major leaguers who have some service time already so you can kind of see where where bean thinks or thought that he had to do something but it is it is quite drastic as you as you wrote it's it's amazing turnaround, and yet there's still a lot of talent on the team. A lot?

A lot? I mean... It's an okay team. It's not a favorite right now, but they're not out of the postseason picture, I would say. I would's, they're not out of the postseason picture. I wouldn't say. I would guess, I would guess that there's somewhere between the, what, 13th and 21st is, I would guess, is the range. Yeah, I'd probably even take the upper end of that range.

And, and the indications, the latest reports, and we just finished talking about inaccurate reports, so who knows. But the latest reports are that they're drawing the line here, perhaps, that they're not going to continue to sell every spare part or every expiring contract that, for instance, Scott Casimir might stay. And maybe they might even try to reinvest some of the money that they've saved in free agents. might even try to reinvest some of the money that they've saved in free agents so maybe maybe this is the end of the retrenchment for now or maybe not who knows no one can predict what the a's will do but but it's i don't know i mean they've clearly gotten worse and yet they've gotten some useful pieces for 2015 back, and maybe they will add more. When I say worse, worse in the long term and worse in 2015 to me. Yes. To me, they are worse in every one of the next five years from this vantage point

compared to where they were six months ago. And, you know, partly, maybe partly that was, I mean, a big part of that is that they really tried to go for it in 2014. And if, you know, they held a four-run lead in the eighth, which is the typical thing for all we know, maybe it would have paid off. So it's hard to know exactly how much to say that's money in the bank. I mean, they got practically nothing out of that experience. They got almost nothing out of going forward. They got, in fact, I would argue, worse than missing the postseason. Possibly, yeah.

I think that that might actually be i mean you know it's such an unmemorable achievement that they got that it is worth almost nothing and the pain of that game the sense of failure that it creates around that group of players uh it it's like you almost think like i feel like the Brewers had a more successful season than the A's in a weird way. But anyway, that's not though to say that it wasn't worthwhile. That's not to say that it wasn't the smartest thing they could have done. But the thing about the A's that makes it hard to judge these moves

is that we tend to think of teams as being in one of two positions. They're either building or they're selling. They're one or the other. And I think in most cases they are. Now of course even if you're selling, you also want to be as good as you can be within that framework. And even if you're buying, you still would like to keep your prospects as much as you can. You're not just, unless you're the Tigers, you're not banking on the owner's extreme old age to justify any of this. So there's this kind of one-dimensional way of evaluating players' moves a lot of times. And with the A's, it's much more fluid than that. They're doing both things at once in a way that is both impressive

and you want to have some kind of element of that in your character. The ability to hold two contradictory positions at once and make them balance is a good skill. But on the other hand, it makes each move maybe a little less efficient. If you're going all in and then three months later you're going all out, the moves don't necessarily mesh that well. And the impression that I get from each of these moves is that not necessarily that any one of them is so bad, but that they have a cumulative effect of just not, in this case, not in all the A's moves throughout history, by any means,

they're awesome front ups, but in this case, that the cumulative effect of just sort of weakening the position of all of them. They all just sort of got worse because none of the other moves necessarily matched them. And so I don't know. Maybe this is one of those things where in a couple years we'll look back on it and it won't feel that way. But I don't know.

Right now it just sort of feels like we're watching a franchise uh that um is chipping away at what it does well or what it was in position to do well and as for the white sacks i mean both of the pitchers they acquired directly addressed glaring weaknesses on the 2014 team and what would have been glaring weaknesses on the 2015 team. We can talk in a minute about where that leaves them, but just in isolation, I wrote a bit about the White Sox bullpen last season, which was really interesting. It's not often that we can say that a team is very obviously targeting a certain type of player with a certain skill set and some teams have that reputation like you know maybe phillies the phillies like toolsy guys or something or the tigers like hard throwing big hard throwing right handers that

kind of stereotype organizational stereotype but but the white socks really clearly went after ground ball relievers last last year and and it worked in a in a sense they ended up with the bullpen with the highest ground ball rate in the major leagues i mean they they traded addison reed who's a fly baller and then they signed belisario and downss and Zach Putnam, and they already had guys like, you know, Petrica and Lindstrom and other guys. Just like almost every guy in their bullpen had a ground ball rate over 50% in 2013, and then more or less repeated that feat last year. So if they were interested in building a ground ball bullpen in a park that turns fly balls into home runs, maybe that made some sense. But they also ended up with a bullpen full of guys who walked everyone.

They had the highest walk rate in the league. And they didn't really have a defensive team that you would want to pair with pitch-to-contact pitchers. They allowed the fifth highest batting average on ground balls and and they did poorly in in every team defense metric so sort of seemed like they had planned their bullpen just become so fixated on ground ball guys that they kind of ignored the the other statistical categories and also the fact that the rest of their team wasn't so well suited to that. And so this winter, they've signed Zach Duke, who does get ground balls, but also strikes guys out without walking guys, or at least did last season. And now they've signed Robertson, who is, you know, one of the maybe five best relievers over the past three, four years,

maybe five best relievers over the past three, four years, and misses lots of bats and was the best free agent reliever available. Saves or no saves was just the best pitcher. So that was the quickest, best bullpen fix they could make with one signing. And so that turns what was a huge weakness of last year's team onto less of a weakness now. I don't know whether you could say it's a strength now, but it's less of a weakness, and then in Samarja, they addressed their rotation depth, which was a big issue too, because they have Chris Sale, who's also one of the five best starters in the American League, and then Quintana, who's very good.

But beyond that, it was very thin. There just wasn't even a league average guy beyond that. And so they have replaced replacement level starter X with just Samarja, who's a well above average pitcher. Well, he is probably a well above average pitcher. yeah uh he is probably a well above average pitcher his era is is about about average basically yeah i mean yeah he he took a step forward last season he he added plus command suddenly to his skill set yeah which uh if you know, I mean, after the trade to Oakland last year, his walk rate was 2.8% in the American League, which is, I think, the only pitcher to beat that over the full season was Phil Hughes. So that's extreme control command, and he was still getting a decent number of strikeouts and ground balls.

So he was kind of doing it all there and maybe he will regress in that area. If not, he's a top of the rotation guy. If so, he's a mid rotation guy and he's only under team control for one year, although it seems like there's interest in extending him. And even if he were to leave, he'd probably be a qualifying offer candidate and would bring back a draft pick. And so the wait sucks. Can I interrupt real quick as an aside? He seems like an obvious qualifying offer, like a no-doubter. Like he's going to make $90 million, it seems to me, next offseason.

Jason thinks not certain that the A's would have offered him. Do you think that there's any possibility that the A's wouldn't have offered him? Just because they wouldn't want to be on the hook for one year of qualifying offer salary? Yeah. I would bet against that. I guess is there any recent history of the A's offering or not offering, or have they only had traded guys who weren't eligible anyway? Yeah, I can't think of one.

Yeah. The median ERA for a White Sox pitcher last year was 5.56. The median. Yeah, they could not pitch. There were seven guys in double figures. Although that does include one infinite. I don't know if infinite is two figures or more. So they've gotten much better there.

They signed Adam LaRoche. And at least for the moment, they are maybe the most improved team of this offseason. And yet, they have about half of a major league lineup, something like that. They right now essentially don't have a second baseman. And their outfield corner guys are pretty shaky shaky and catcher is is pretty shaky and third base is is maybe a little bit sketchy maybe probably the most solid of those positions that i just named but it is a weak collection of position players beyond you know abreu and and eaton and LaRoche and Ramirez, it is, it's about half of a major league lineup. So it's, I mean, this was somewhat unexpected, right? Both Chicago teams won 73 games last year, both came out and said that they hoped or expected or planned to contend in 2015. But the Cubs were the team that everyone was connecting to every free agent.

They, you know, have the celebrity front office and they have the top prospects who arrived last year and in some cases have still not arrived. And they've got the best farm system in baseball, even so. And it seems like this was a plan that was long in place and we've seen it coming for years. And they were going to cultivate all of this homegrown hitting talent. And then at some point they would sign a bunch of pitchers. And so now they're at that phase of the plan that we could see coming. Whereas the White Sox, this was not really foreseeable. Like at some point this would happen, but this seems a little more premature.

Or at least they, you know, Han hasn't been in control as long as Hoyer and Epstein have. So he hasn't had quite as much time. He inherited a team without a lot of minor league talent and not much international spending or spending in the draft and everything and hasn't had quite as much time to turn that around and so the white socks are are still pretty thin on minor league talent that is close to the majors and so it's a case of we've talked about it before with with the multiple wild card system any team that is you know 500 ish has a realistic shot at the playoffs and clearly they aren't finished yet i imagine they would not have made these moves unless they were planning to actually get some position players at those positions i named but it's uh it's it's surprising like i the moves are fine in isolation.

It makes them a lot better. I did not expect such an aggressive action from them this winter. Does it strike you as too premature? Do you think this is a case of Jerry Reinsdorf not being paid? Speaking of old owners who maybe aren't willing to wait around for a long rebuild as he's suddenly demanding immediate results? Or is this reasonable? Are the White Sox a team that should be doing this right now?

Because it's going to cost them. If they really want to do this in one offseason, they are going to have to get that payroll up to where it was a couple of years ago. I don't think it's premature. I think I would have if they hadn't gotten Samarja. To me, Samarja is... To get Samarja at that price, to not have to give up much,

to have him almost barely is going to even affect their payroll, to add a pitcher of that caliber for one year at that price, get a draft pick at the end of it, seems like a coup from their side. And I probably didn't take them that seriously until that. But, yeah, now they're, I mean, they need to, like you say, they need to get more hitters. But the bar is pretty low for them to upgrade there. And they do have some hitters in that lineup.

It's not like... How was their offense last year? I don't know where they ranked. They ranked... They were... Well, this is not park adjusted. Oh, they had 100 OPS plus. They were a league average

offense last year. And that was... I don't know. Was that with things going well? Maybe that was with things going well. I don't know. They don't have Dunn anymore. But they also don't have Beckham anymore. And they also don't have Canerco anymore.

Right. Exactly, yeah. So, I don't know. I guess they don't have Deaza anymore. He wasn't good. Yeah, I don't know. I guess they don't have Deaza anymore. He wasn't good. Yeah, I don't know. To me, this looks like a decent-ish offense with LaRoche being added. And, you know, the pitching should be good.

Dangerous in October. I like it. Yeah, I'm happy it happened. I mean, the White Sox were kind of a boring team, or at least a team that we, I don't know, didn't have a lot of reason to focus our short-term attention on. And now suddenly they are a very interesting team. So I'm happy to have interesting teams.

I mean, is there an American League team that is not interesting right now like is there I mean if if you just look at the list of teams is there anyone that you would be comfortable ruling out other than maybe maybe the Twins and I guess you could still say the Astros but But some of the teams that we've become accustomed to having in rebuild mode are no longer there. The Cubs are not there. The White Sox are not there. The Astros, it sounds like, are going to spend some money. So it's a mental adjustment to get used to teams that have been in not trying mode for a few years and are suddenly switching over.

Yeah. Do you know, I'm trying to figure out what the White Sox payroll obligation is right now. It was heading into the offseason, they had the third lowest salary committed after the Marlins and Astros for 2015. Yeah, it was about $70 was about 70 yeah it was like 60 million yeah so after duke and laroche they were at about 70 plus the yeah i think we are plus the three arb guys so you know add 10 yeah i think they're at about 80 82 and a half or something oh no it's got to be more than that because it was i think i think

they were going to be at about 80 plus now samarja and and robertson i think they're at like 100 now i don't think so it was 60 coming into the offseason and that was including projected arbitration raises and then duke is like 4.5 or something and uh and samarja is like 4.5 or something. And Samarja is like 9.5, 10, something like that. And LaRoche is, what, 12. And Robertson is a little less than that. I got them at like, wait, well, what's Robertson getting in year one? Because if Robertson, if it's just 11 across the board, then I have him at 10, 20,

30, 40, 50, 60, 70, like 82 plus the pre-arb guys. So that takes him to like 100 plus a couple of... Yeah, that takes him to about... Sorry. I don't know if it's that high.

90-ish. I haven't met about 90ish Well they were 90 heading into Last season but they were They were 120 in 2013 Yeah that was their all time high I think but they've also had 8 seasons of declining Attendance in a row

Which maybe makes it a tougher sell To go to your owner and ask for more money But then again maybe that is the only way that you end that trend. So it's a welcome development. I'm glad that the White Sox did things. According to Kotz, they were at $120 in 2008 and $120 in 2011 and $120 in 2013. So that's adjusting for inflation. I wish I knew exactly what each team could spend.

It's always hard to figure out because I've been waiting for the Mariners for like nine years to go back to their Mariner spending levels. And finally, I just gave up and now they're spending. It's somewhat arbitrary, right? It's like whatever the owner decides he wants to spend. It's not necessarily what they can afford. Even when we talk about the A's and their payroll constraints, they're largely self-imposed constraints. Like not Bean, but Wolf or whoever is quite wealthy and could decide to spend more money if he wanted to. But that is the constraint that they have decided to operate under. The Nationals, Rays, Padres, A's, Twins, Red Sox, Braves, Giants, Mariners, Brewers, Astros, Indians, Cubs, and Orioles combined have the same number of 10-plus ERAs as the White Sox.

Uh-huh. All right. How many pitchers do you think last year had an infinite ERA? So runs allowed and no outs. I'll guess seven. I would have guessed like 12. It's only two. Rich Hill and Nate Jones.

Uh-huh yeah nate jones was a a big reason why the white socks bullpen was bad he missed the whole year essentially with a back injury and then tommy john so um is there anything else that we need to talk about the cubs obviously it did things but they were the things that everyone expected them to do They got a starter In Hamill, they got a catcher in Montero And they continue to Pursue another starter so this is More or less the offseason Script

Yeah I don't feel like Enough happened Few things happened but enough didn't happen Okay One other thing I wanted to bring up. You know that the Braves, seemingly every Braves rumor includes a condition or every Braves trade offer that has been rumored includes this condition that the team that would be acquiring the desirable player,

in most cases Justin Upton, also has to take an undesirable player, whether it's BJ Upton or now Chris Johnson seems to be the guy that they are packaging with the desirable player. What do you think about this? So far, it seems to be a poison pill because nothing has actually happened, but it seems like a strange strategy to me. I mean, if you are packaging the undesirable contract with the desirable contract,

then you're just getting less in return for the good player. And you're also kind of limiting the number of teams that you can trade with because there are only so many teams that would be willing to take a third baseman or a center fielder or whatever no matter how much salary you include so why not split it up if you have if you think these guys are worth nothing then just eat the contract if you think they are worth something then eat however much of the money you need to to make another team interested in the

guy without packaging him with the other guy it seems like an inefficient approach to me yeah i think you're right about that i think it is an inefficient approach because yeah all 29 teams have some prospects uh so all 29 teams could be i mean even if they don't have good prospects, they have some, they have some package of young people that you would take off of their hands. Uh, but yeah, there are like, uh, a good 10 teams that are simply never, ever, ever going to take that money. And oftentimes there are 25 teams that are never, ever going to take that money. Um, so that seems like you're right. Seems to make sense. money um so that seems like you're right seems to make sense okay all right so that is that we will either be back on friday or we'll try the the breaking news bonus podcast plan again which didn't go so well yesterday we'll see but we'll be back sometime later this week keep sending us emails at podcast at baseball prospectus.com Join the Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild. Rate and review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

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