Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 587: Valuing Draft Picks Inappropriately, the Marlins’ Sincerity, and Boston’s Low-Strike Strategy

Episode Date: December 15, 2014

Ben and Sam banter about changes in World Series odds, then discuss how teams value draft picks inappropriately, whether the Marlins are sincere, and Boston’s low-strike strategy.

It's no secret now, everybody knows how I feel. It's no secret now, everybody knows how I feel. It's no secret now. Good morning and welcome to a big number of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast. What number is it? 587. 587 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives. Brought to you by the Play Index. I'm Sam Miller. The Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg of Grantland.

Hi, Ben. Hello. How are you? Okay. are you okay i wanted to quickly go over our odd seasons our odds our off season odds uh-huh challenge uh teams that we were going to predict would see their odds move the most from the start of the off season to the end i have a bad feeling about this uh i don't i don't know why you would i have no idea so you pickedants' odds would get worse. Okay.

How do you feel about that? That sounds pretty good. They have dropped from 12-1 to 14-1. So you are doing well. But not by much. They only need one free agent. If they got Scherzer, I mean, they've only lost Sandoval. That's surprising.

They lost Sandoval. No one thought they would lose Sandoval. And then they missed out on Leicester, which they were never the favorites for Leicester or anything. But the fact that they didn't get in, although they tried maybe, would make people more pessimistic. So I'm surprised that they didn't fall by more. Oh, see, now I didn't think that they would go after Leicester. And so them chasing Leicester now puts them, to me, squarely in the race for Shields and Scherzer. So to me, I would kind of be baking in a 40% chance they sign one of those

guys or Headley. I mean, it seems to me that they're going to spend their money, and Sandoval is a loss, but not an odds-moving loss if the money is spent. So I think a small drop is about right. Rays, you said better. Okay, well, that sounds bad. Not because of anything they've done. They haven't really done much except lose their front office and manager, but maybe that was before we spoke about this.

But just the signings and moves elsewhere in the division seems like they probably would have pushed the raise lower although as i recall when we recorded they were like 66 to 1 or something they were 50 they were 50 to 1 oh and now they're 66 to 1 okay yeah exactly 66 so that's not good yeah uh so that one you you're you're. Cubs, you had getting worse. Uh-oh. Well, they're better. Yeah. All right.

They went up to it. What was it? The Cubs were obscenely high. After the Lester signing and, well, everything they've done, they went up. They were, I thought, too high when we talked. They were fourth. That's crazy. Crazy. Yeah.

That is pretty crazy. If I ever bet on baseball, I would bet on baseball now. You can't make money betting against the futures, though. There's no way. These are all horribly stacked against you. Tigers, you had getting worse. I don't know. Has there been much movement there?

I'm asking you to guess. So what do you think? Do you feel good or bad about that? I feel ambivalent about that. They've gone down a little bit, same as the Giants. Okay. From 10-1 to 12-1. All right.

I'll take it. And then the Mets, you had getting better. Okay. Well, I still believe that, but I'm not sure that has happened yet. It has. 33 to 25. Oh, beautiful. I had Marlins getting better. They are from 50 to 1 to 25 to 1.

That's a gimme at this point. I had the Yankees getting better. They are not from 20 to 1 to 25 to 1, although it only takes one Scherzer. I had the Reds getting worse from 33 to 1 down to 40 to 1. That seemszer. I had the Reds getting worse from 33-1 down to 40-1. That seems safe. I had the Astros getting better.

They have not. They actually have gone from 100-1 to 150-1. Wow. Las Vegas doesn't respect Luke Gregerson, huh? Or Pat Neshek. I guess not. I'm surprised because 100-1 is virtually nothing to start with. And they were a 70-win team that was young.

And it doesn't take much to match the Royals 80 and 82 run differential. But I guess there was expectations that they would sign somebody else. And then I had the Braves getting worse. They are worse, but it's actually fairly small, surprisingly small, from 25-1 to 28-1. So we are currently tied. We are each 3-2. Okay, better than I expected. Okay, what do you got? We were too harsh on the Reds last week, I think. I don't know. I hadn't had time to

digest their moves when we spoke about the Reds, and by the time I wrote about them, I sort of changed my tune we didn't give them credit for the simone trade that that that actually i don't know why i it's just i i care so little about him that it didn't even occur to me that they that that was also a significant trade but they actually got like that trade was as good as the latos one kind of seemed underwhelming yeah Yeah, not that the Latos one, I don't know. There are certainly reasons to be worried about Latos. But just the fact that we kind of talked about them as if that was the beginning of a total rebuild when maybe it seems like that's not the case.

Maybe they just traded a couple guys who were, I don't know, not that great bets for 2015, and they got some stuff back and saved some money, and they might even spend some money now. I'll say with probably 96% certainty that at that point in that day, I did not know who they had gotten back. It was no longer making sense to me. You could have thrown, there were probably 85 names that I dealt with that day. I didn't remember which ones had gone to Cincinnati.

Probably. I recorded half of that episode on the floor in a fitness center and the other half of that episode on the floor next to an elevator in a hallway. And we were talking about the Reds So it's tradition for us to Downplay And the only other thing was that We talked about the Braves Strategy of trying to

Package Upton in with Everyone when they try to make a trade And whether that makes sense And there was a report that the Phillies tried This same thing with Ryan Howard They were talking about a Marlon Bird trade With the Orioles and then all of a sudden Ryan Howard. They were talking about a Marlon Bird trade with the Orioles, and then all of a sudden,

Ryan Howard was also attached to the trade, and that killed the Marlon Bird trade talks, at least for a time. So, I don't know. I'm not really a believer in this strategy of just springing your least desirable player on a potential trade partner, although the Phillies should probably be commended for actually trading people.

I'm under the impression that there's maybe fat A-Rod news. Well, there is, in the Facebook group, someone posted a link to some A-Rod pictures. But based on what I can tell, those are actually old A-Rod pictures that have been repackaged as if they're new. The thing is that there is actual news about Fat A-Rod almost a year to the day after last year's Fat A-Rod picture that we discussed on the podcast. This actually, there was no news. Wait, wait, wait.

Last year's mariachi one or last year's car wash one? There was the mariachi one, and there was also a Fat A-Rod one last January that we discussed, and I think we concluded that it wasn't strong evidence. There was some sort of bulky protuberance under his T-shirt that didn't really look like a stomach. You can find it if you just search for Fat A-Rod. It's like the first thing that

shows up. But we discussed that and I think dismissed it at the time. Anyway. I'm looking at one from 2008 now, actually. Yes, that's the one that someone posted. Which is at a website called thefatlook.com. Yes. Those are old and those are quite convincing, actually, but that was several years ago. You can't have less of a shirt distraction than this one. There's no shirt. There being no shirt.

Yeah. Are we sure that's A-Rod? It looks like A-Rod. But as far as I know, there's no new pictorial evidence, but there was some openly acknowledged evidence of the Yankees speaking about A-Rod being above his spring training weight and how they're trying to get him to lose some weight. But there's no actual new picture from what I can tell. This is the quote from Cashman, not about Fat A-Rod, but in the Fat A-Rod story. Alex texted me yesterday, Cashman said. I said, all things good with you, and he said, yup.

And I just think all things good with you is like not how people talk or text. I like to think that Cashman actually does text in the cadence of a New Testament gospel. All things good with you. I text yup a lot. Yeah, yup, definitely. But all things good with you i text you up a lot yeah yep definitely but all things good with you all things good with you should be the motto of this podcast yeah anyway if a team acknowledges that a player is overweight then that's not fun for me anymore the whole charm of this comes from us doing the csi thing and trying to analyze whether this is an overweight player situation.

If the team just comes out and says a guy is over his playing weight, then I'm not interested anymore. All right. Anything else? Nope. All right. So I wanted to just talk about quickly two things that I got to edit this weekend. One of them we'll talk about first and more quickly probably. One of them we'll talk about first and more quickly probably. And this is a piece that Jeff Quinton wrote for Prospectus,

and it'll be on the site in the morning. So Jeff got to thinking about this thing called mental accounting. And mental accounting, you have probably heard examples of this, maybe on this show. I feel like we've probably talked about it. It's one of the four things that interest me in this world. And it's this idea that you will, for instance, well, the example he gives, I'll just give you the example he gives. You will drive, you would find it, I'm going to quote him, you would find it absurd to drive 15 miles down the road to another car dealership to save $75 on a $25,000

car and yet many will stand in line for an hour in the middle of the night to save that same $75 on a $250 smartphone. Basically, the idea is that $75 is the same regardless, but our brain has sort of weird ways of looking at the value of that $75 depending on the situation. We come up with, I think he says, topical values or something like that for each asset in each situation, and that leads to some suboptimal decision-making. Is this related to loss aversion, where you're more reluctant to lose $75 that you already have

than you are to do something to gain it? I don't think so, other than the fact that both of those things happen in a brain. But I don't think it's necessarily specifically tied to it, but it would be in the same textbook. So he was wondering about this in regards to free agents because you don't hear nearly as much about the qualifying offer pick attached to Max Scherzer, generally, as you do to like a Kyle Osh or a Steven Drew or a Nelson Cruz, where it feels like teams won't sign those guys because the pick is too daunting.

But they will sign, you know, a guy like Pablo Sandoval or somebody that they think is an impact player and so i'm gonna speed this up he wanted to see if that was true he looked for some evidence of it and then he got uh on in the middle of this search he got onto a different topic so if you want to find out anything that he thought about that you can go look but we're talking now about the second thing that he got looking for and this was a gm who told him this and the gm said basically he thinks that teams value the pick much more if it's their only pick so you can have for instance uh you could have uh a first round pick and you might like for the for the Giants for instance they'll get another first round pick because Pablo Sandoval left so now they have two picks so they according to this GM

they are much more likely to give up their pick because they know they already have a pick and so this is in a sense also mental accounting because the pick should theoretically be as valuable whether you have one or two. And yet, when teams have two, they don't seem to mind losing one, even though the value of that pick hasn't really changed. And so this was this GM's hypothesis. So Jeff went looking to see if he could find evidence of it. And the samples are small. We've only had this system for three years. But very interesting, I would say, very interesting conclusions, or not conclusions, very interesting early findings on this. One is that he looked at this, he looked at all 22 qualifying offer

attached free agents before this season, the previous two off-seasons, and looked to see basically who had signed them whether it was somebody who was getting uh who was forfeiting a first round pick or forfeiting a first round pick but also getting another one back or forfeiting a second round pick because they already had their uh a pick protected because their first round pick was in the top 10 or re-signed by a team basically basically four categories and it's sort of almost suspicious how well these clump together it's like these strings of of teams signing players at certain levels they're sorted by how much the player signed for by the way i should say so robinson cano is at the top. He's the best. He's the impact superstar.

And then Steven Drew is at the bottom because he sucked and nobody wanted to sign him. And the pick was almost worth more than he was. And maybe it was worth more than he was. And so there's these long strings of teams clumped at each tier based on kind of what pick they were giving up. It was sort of interesting and not entirely clear why each of these clumps would happen, but to make it very simple, almost nobody signs a free agent if it's going to cost them their only pick. And yet, a lot more teams do sign free agents.

And if it's a, we're talking only first round picks, right? Only first round picks. And in fact, well, for now we're talking only first round picks. So it seems to be that basically teams are much more willing, as hypothesized, teams are much more willing to give up a pick if they have another pick in the same area, even though the value of the pick shouldn't have changed. And if you look at similar free agents but who don't have qualifying offers attached to them because maybe they were traded mid-season or because they're, I don't know, Bronson Arroyo and they're right on that bubble of being a qualifying offer guy.

The similar free agents actually get signed about twice as often by teams that would otherwise have had to give up a pick. So this is a hard thing to describe on a podcast. I acknowledge that. But it does seem like there might be either a suboptimal valuing of draft picks, in this sense, because teams are treating the value of a draft pick differently based on largely irrelevant variables, or the variable is not irrelevant. And there is some reason why teams don't want to give up their only first round draft pick, but they're happy to give up their second first round draft pick.

Do you think that the value of a second first round draft pick is significantly less than a first first round draft pick? That's my question. That's what I'm getting. Seven minutes and 21 seconds took me to get there. I'm trying to think of whether there would be any ramifications for spending. Like your bonus pool, if you have an extra pick, then you have more money to spend there, right? So that theoretically shouldn't...

I mean, if you wanted to concentrate all your money on your top guy and then skimp elsewhere in the draft, maybe it would make it harder to do that. And that you wouldn't even be able to get a good pool over the rest of your picks, then if you're blowing a lot of it on your first pick, then with the second pick, you would have to go cheap. You'd have to get a senior or something, or someone who's not that desirable, someone who would sign for underslot, perhaps. So maybe it limits your options somewhat in that respect. Yeah, Jeff mentioned this and i think they call this i think they call this a slot leverage or maybe bonus slot leverage or something the idea

that uh your picks all go uh into the same pool and so if you use it correctly um you know you want to have enough money at the top that you can sort of spread it around the bottom and then use that extra money to kind of lean on some of your players or talk someone out of college or whatever. And that makes sense, although that idea was really driven hard with the Astros because of the opposite, because they had so much money that it was the excessive dollars, the extra dollars that gave them so much of this.

So I don't know that having just one pick actually gives you that leverage. It almost seems like the second pick is what would give you the leverage to sort of capitalize more on it. So in that sense, the second pick might actually make the first pick more valuable in a way. I don't know. The game theory of draft pick slots is probably not something we understand nearly as well as one guy in every front office tries to understand it. Yeah, I mean, you can understand why teams would perhaps irrationally act in this sense, just because it's got to be fun to have a first-round pick.

It's got to be kind of demoralizing not to have any first-round picks because you just know that you're totally out of the running for the top talents, and you're scouting people who've been on the road all year filing reports on these guys, hoping that maybe someone in their area would be attractive to the team and would be their first round pick. Just know that all of that work not went for nothing, but didn't culminate in what every scout and every scouting director hopes, which is that you have some top target and you like him a lot and he falls to you and you get him.

So in that sense, it's perhaps a little, a little demoralizing not to have one, which doesn't mean that, that they are actually evaluating it accurately, but maybe that would be the psychological explanation for why teams wouldn't value it appropriately. for why teams wouldn't value it appropriately. My small hypothesis is that imagine that you have, imagine that every player in the draft has sort of a consensus number put on them of how good they are. And the other 29 teams have all rated this guy, and the average of their rating or maybe the second highest of their rating or the highest of those 29, is a number.

So the first pick is 100, and the 15th pick is usually like an 82 or whatever. But you happen to have a spreadsheet with all the players in the draft, and you have put your own number on every one of these players. And alongside it, you've got the industry number on all these players. In the third column, you've got the difference. When it's your turn to pick, it's really easy. You get to see who you like more than everybody else likes, and that's the guy you get. You're really excited because you love that guy. You think you're really, really, really excited to have this guy that you love more than everybody else. And that's your first pick.

Your first pick is your favorite guy. But then your second pick is only your second favorite guy. It's like a diminishing return, right? You don't get to differentiate yourself quite so much because now you're taking your second choice, who's going to be closer to just sort of the median or the average that other teams think of him. So you might actually find that, I don't know,

it's conceivable that if you looked at teams that had more picks, I wonder if you would see, on average, like if we looked at all the teams that had one pick in the first round, I wonder if they get more out of their average first round pick than teams that have two, three, four, five, six. I wonder if the more picks you get, the kind of worse you get because you're falling off of your favorite guys a little bit. Yeah, that's interesting.

I'm just thinking of that Rays draft a few years ago when they had some extreme number of picks it was like 12 of the top 60 or something i don't know i'm getting the numbers wrong but they had an extraordinary number of of picks early in the draft and everyone thought that would be like a game-changing franchise direction changing thing for them and thus far those those picks have not panned out yeah because by the end they were drafting their 12th favorite player and just imagine if you were the angels and i don't know if the angels were that this year but were that that year but say you're the angels and you didn't have a pick until you know the third round or late second round or whatever and they told you not only do you not get a pick until the 60th, but whatever

pick you make has to be 12th on your draft board. You're not even allowed to take any of your 11 first choices for that spot. That's basically what the Rays had, right? I mean, they had to pick 12th on their draft board at that point. Yeah. And so it would make sense that they would get a worse player, other than the fact that it's all a crap shoot and none of them have any idea how to do any better than the others. And you could basically just take Paul Prospectus' rankings and probably do

pretty okay for the first 100 or so, my guess. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Second thing is Brian Grozick of Beyond the Box Score, the blog at SB Nation, wrote the Marlins essay for this year's Baseball Perspectives Annual. And I'm not, you know, it's not out for a couple months, but it's good. So go get it when it comes out. But he wrote about the Marlins and about the idea of loyalty and what it means for the Marlins to be loyal or not loyal to players

and what it would mean for them to be loyal or not loyal to Stanton. I'm going to diverge a little bit from it, but maybe kind of the idea is that because they've committed 13 years to Stanton and he's got a no-trade clause and he's even got the opt-out so he's super duper in control if he wants to he can be there for life they cannot trade him that every other marlin in history has been traded except for stanton if he doesn't want to because he's got the no trade clause so for them loyalty is less about keeping him the way that they never keep any of their players and more about using this huge, well, making him happy, being a good team, continuing to put a good team around

him, as I'm sure they promised him they were serious about, and using these incredible discount years that he's given them in the first six years. I mean, he's taking, I would guess, $50 to $75 million less than he would get in the first six years. I mean, he's taking, I would guess, $50 to $75 million less than he would get in the first six years before the opt-out if he had gone year to year. So taking that money and spending it right, not just spending it, but being a smart team, being a good team, and using those six years when he's playing at a discount to put a good team around him, because that seems to be what he wants, right? So the premise that's loyalty loyalty is uh giving stanton the good team they promised him and that he has done everything he can to make possible for them so we've now seen them make a few moves

i want to know if you're john carlos stanton uh what would your wish be for the marlins i don't know today for the next month for the rest of the off season for the Marlins? I don't know, today, for the next month, for the rest of the offseason, for the next five years, you can pick whatever timeframe you want, but what would you want to see the Marlins do? What would be the plan you would want to see to make sure that his six years were fruitful? I think probably first and foremost, I'd want to see some extensions, some other extensions. And that was something that was rumored or reported earlier in the offseason that the Marlins had offered a bunch of extensions or were talking to a bunch of players about extensions.

I don't remember which it was. I think Fernandez was one, although that was considered unlikely. But Jelic maybe, and I don't know, Ozuna and someone else were reportedly in negotiation. So that seems like a promising thing. If other players got extensions, at least through the opt-out year, Stanton's opt-out year, six years in the future or whatever it is, that would reassure me, particularly if some of them got no trade clauses, which seems unlikely since they don't have the leverage that Stanton did. But if that happened, then that would make me feel pretty good because they do have a good young core, developing core.

And if they just kept those guys in place and locked those guys in for the next several seasons that would almost ensure that they wouldn't be terrible I think and then beyond that obviously signings and other good players would would be welcome but I think even just just keeping other guys just doing for other marlins what they did for stanton because that has been i mean those kinds of extensions have been few and and far between uh yeah you the no trade clauses it it's not quite enough to extend them because with the marlins if you sign an extension you just might make yourself a more valuable trade asset. Really, every year that you give up in free agency, that you sign away in free

agency as an extension, you would kind of like to have an even stronger no-trade clause, because otherwise they'll trade them all. Yeah, the extension seems like a significant thing. You don't want to feel, if you're Stanton, you don't want to feel like they gave you all this money and now will either can't or won't acknowledge that they can afford to sign Fernandez. You don't want it to be either or. Me or the good guys.

You know, me or all the other good players. And so that would be one thing. What would you want them to do this offseason? Would you want them making moves like they've made so far, which put certainly a more competent team on the field? I don't know what you think about the Marlins right now. Where do you think the Marlins, where do they slot in in the NL and in the NL East at the moment? I was fairly optimistic. I expected them to be a wildcard contender heading into the offseason. And I don't know, the fact that they have done things probably reassures Stanton. But the things that they've done thus far, I don't think they were bad moves necessarily but i don't know we talked about the the d gordon dodgers trade and how that sort of seemed like maybe a lateral

move or not a huge upgrade and the latos move is maybe more of an upgrade or they gave up less although somewhat risky but the fact that they didn't really take on any money maybe wouldn't reassure me if I were Stanton. If I had just deferred a ton of money and backloaded my contract so that they could go out and sign people. And then they got, you know, $10 million from the Dodgers in the Dan Heron deal, regardless of whether Heron retires. And then the Dodgers also covered the Gordon arbitration cost for this year so that even if Heron walks away, I mean, even if Heron doesn't walk away, I guess if he will, then they probably would have saved money net-net-net in those trades, I would think, because Leitos will be making eight-something maybe, and Heron would be making ten. So they haven't added a ton of payroll, and I don't know that they've gotten that much better. But, of course, there were then reports that they are still going to use money,

much better. But of course, there were then reports that they're still going to use money and they're going to sign a first baseman to replace Garrett Jones and maybe sign another established starter. So who knows if they if they do those things, I would be fairly optimistic about their wildcard chances. Yeah, they're kind of like the opposite of the A's, I think maybe, where they've traded for things to upgrade this year at some long-term cost, but without... It's not an all-in long-term

cost. Gordon signed for a few years, and Latos is potentially a trade bait or at least a compensation pick. They're looking at guys like Mike Morse or Justin Morneau who are kind of like upgrades this year but without costing them a draft pick or without probably costing them a third or fourth year or anything like that. So just like the A's seem to be getting worse in the immediate term, but without giving up or anything, getting guys who are ready, the Marlins are sort of doing the opposite.

If I were Stanton, yeah, I think if I were Stanton, I probably would be anxious. And I don't know that I would even be capable of looking at the team rationally and saying, oh, yeah, no, they need one more year of consolidation before they start moving things on. I don't know. You know you're going to be there six years, probably. I might bite the bullet and let them have a pass on year one. I mean, you know, Fernandez isn't going to be ready for half the year. That's a big deal. Look, they're not going to.

They're kind of in it, but they're on the very low end of being kind of in it for this year, it seems to me. Yeah. It depends partially on Fernandez's rehab and comeback also. But did you see the report in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review regarding the Marlins' comments about Stanton this weekend? There was a Pirates Fest took place. And I will quote now from this article.

When asked for his reaction to Marlins outfielder Jean-Carlo Stanton's 13-year, $325 million extension, Pirates president Frank Coonally chuckled and said, it seems like Monopoly money, doesn't it? Coonally then got off his stool on the stage and stepped toward the crowd. He talked about an exchange he had with Miami Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria and President David Sampson during the recent owners meetings. They thought it was a great deal, Coonally said. I just couldn't get my head around the $3 owners meetings. They thought it was a great deal, Kunaly said. I just couldn't get my head around the $325 million. They said to me, you don't understand. Stanton has an out clause after six years. Those first six years are only going to cost $107

million. After that, he'll leave and play for somebody else. So it's not really $325 million. So what does Stanton think reading that, I wonder? I mean, that seems like a violation of owner bro code or something. I would think, I mean, no matter how much Coonley or other owners or presidents look down on the Marlins or think they're slimy or whatever, they're still sort of acting in other owners' interest in a sense. If they're keeping players' salary down by whatever means, that's generally a thing that other owners like to see. So this seems like kind of violating a confidence. No one minds if the Marlins' confidence gets violated.

But this is kind of the conspiracy theory that everyone wondered about. And when we talked about how we were sort of afraid for Stanton when he signed this deal, this is kind of what we had in mind. So I wonder what he thought seeing this report. Yeah, I was very surprised. And I agree that that violates the code. very surprised and I agree that that violates the code. However,

Loria violated a greater code first by telling a rival president. Like, why? You don't con a guy and then immediately go run and tell everybody who you conned. You've got to

keep your mark to yourself. It just seems to me that loria or maybe it was loria maybe it probably was loria she just shouldn't be running around bragging about how he scammed a guy like especially his guy like the guy he just looked in the eyes and said i love you forever like it's just not a cool thing to have said so i think that this the the far greater sin here is loria uh-huh it sounds it's actually it reminds me of when samson was on survivor like earlier early this year so i don't even know this yeah samson was on survivor early this year and there was a like a little bio for the show

that Craig Calicaterra posted about at Hardball Talk, and in this thing, the contestants talked about their accomplishments and why they would win Survivor, and Sampson's personal claim to fame was listed as got local government in Miami to contribute over $350 million to a new baseball park during the recession. In a recession.

So, this seems like a quality of the Barron's front office. Not only do they enjoy ripping people off, but they enjoy bragging about it. I'm reading that now. Why do you think you will be the sole survivor? I always win, is what he said. His answer was literally, I always win, is what he said. His answer was literally, I always win. He didn't, though. The president of the Marlins always wins.

Yeah, well, he didn't win Survivor, but he does win other things. He wins public stadium financing. I can't say it's not true. The real point of baseball. Let me ask you one more thing before we wrap up. There was an article in the Boston Herald about the Red Sox and the

low strike zone. It was by John Tomasi and it didn't really, like, it didn't have anyone with the Red Sox on record saying, yeah, we're going after good low ball hitters or ground ball pitchers because the strike zone is low it was kind of one of these things where he was kind of connecting the dots and maybe he he got this off the record from someone and couldn't really put a quote in and then he stuck some gm quotes from the winter

meetings or the gm meetings in there about gs being cagey about the strike zone and stuff. And he built it into this narrative about the Red Sox signed Sandoval because he's a good low ball hitter and Hanley Ramirez is a good low ball hitter. I didn't check these numbers. He just cited batting average below the knees or something. But assuming this is true, let's just assume that if you do have low ball hitters, that they would theoretically be more valuable with more pitchers throwing low in the zone because strikes are getting called low in the zone more often. And I don't know whether ground ball pitchers or low ball pitchers would necessarily

be better. There's been some research about pitchers throwing high in the zone and that working better because hitters are not prepared for that because they're seeing so many pitches low in the zone. Anyway, is this something that you would construct an offseason strategy around? Would you be confident enough in this low strike zone thing holding up, particularly since Rob Arthur researched this and showed that this seems to have reversed itself in the middle of last season and then the strike zone rose again in the second half and during the playoffs. So maybe this is something that is already changing. Is this something that you would feel comfortable enough given that the strike zone changes all the time, would you build your strategy around the way that it is called currently?

No. Okay. All right. So I don't know whether the Red Sox are doing that or not, but if they are, you disapprove. I wouldn't recommend doing it. I probably would, because if you feel like you've found a hook, it's really hard to resist that hook. So I would probably do it.

And yet, if people on the internet are writing about it, then everyone is aware of it. Yes. Yeah. Well, not everyone. Maybe not. Maybe not. Almost everyone. Maybe not. Maybe not. Almost everyone.

All right. So that's it for today. Frank Coonley told everybody. One guy told Frank Coonley. Everybody knows. Can't tell Coonley anything. All right. Send us some emails at podcast at baseballperspectives.com.

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