Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 597: Why Aren’t Winning Teams Spending?

Episode Date: January 9, 2015

Ben and Sam attempt to solve the mystery of why losing teams have uncharacteristically snapped up so many free agents this winter.

Maybe even the losers get lucky sometimes. Even the losers keep a little bit of pride. They get lucky sometimes. Good morning and welcome to episode 597 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus, brought to you by The Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg of Grantland.com. Hi, Ben. Hi.

Did you do a Play Index on Wednesday? Did Zachary do a Play Index? Yeah, Zachary did a guest Play Index on plunkings. Craig Biggio's hit by pitch rates and other players hit by pitch rates. It was a good one. Yeah, he's a good one. He's a good one. I never regret missing an episode to be somewhere else.

But I saw people talking to you and to Zachary on the internet about this episode, and it did kind of make me feel left out. Well, you can listen to it. That's an option. No, I know. But I mean, nobody's talking to me about this episode. Right. Yeah. Well, how was your trip? It was good. I was completely shocked when I came back. Nah, not completely shocked. I would say i was surprised and disappointed to come back and see that neither max scherzer nor james shields had signed and um and not only that i went to mlb trade rumors to like that was like one of the first place first things i did when i turned on my computer to see uh to see who had signed them and And I couldn't even find James Shields or Max Scherzer news.

There's just, there's nothing happening. No, everyone took a week off to argue about the Hall of Fame, I think. Oh, is that what it is? Yeah, you left at a good time. You didn't really miss anything except Hall of Fame debates. Okay, so Nobody's freaking out about Max Scherzer and James Shields being

unsigned? I'm not. Does it feel weird? I know that not every signing happens by the new year, but doesn't it feel weird that the number one free agent on the market is unsigned?

I mean, I'm trying to think of a precedent. Prince Fielder was late. People were freaking out about Prince Fielder not signing, and Prince Fielder was not the number one free agent. That was the year that Pools was a free agent. And so, you know, it wasn't quite the same. I don't know. I'm just saying it feels like it's getting late.

Maybe teams viewed Jon Lester as the number one free agent. I don't think they did. I think I would like to see Max Scherzer have to wait until the draft, like Kendries and Morales. It wouldn't make any sense. That's why I would like it. Yeah, there was a rumor about James Shields having an offer from a mystery

team that was a high number, and then for the next few days, people reported on what teams it wasn't. So that was fun. I don't know. Five years, $110 million. That seems high to you? Not

crazy, but a little bit uh yeah but i don't know it's it's it's early in the year i don't think it's we're still a over a month away from teams reporting and and pretty much it's i mean it's those two guys, and then everyone else is gone. There isn't really anyone else interesting, so it hasn't been a really slow market other than those two guys still being there. Yeah, so Prince Fielder signed with the Tigers, and he was really late. I thought there was another late signing that was by the Tigers, but maybe there wasn't. I don't know.

Huh. I was wondering whether this is a Scott Boris Tigers thing. It's probably not, though. Good theory. Yeah, I had seven days on the beach thinking of that. But no internet access, so I couldn't do any research. Well, by the time most people are listening to this, you will be finished with the Baseball Prospectus Annual.

So congratulations and everyone pre-order it. Yeah, thanks. We're very excited. I think they start, I think if I'm understanding the timeline correctly, they start printing it out tomorrow. Start publishing, printing books.

There will be books bound tomorrow. And we're very excited. I wonder how long it takes to bind a book. I don't know. Peter Gammons wrote the preface. Oh, he did? Yeah, we're pretty excited

about that. And Brian Bannister, great friend of the show yeah what are there there's a preface and a forward there's a preface and a forward wow that's not that's not something to laugh about you're really yeah i guess there's always a preface right but it's always written by someone at bp isn't it uh they're right There's always a preface and a forward. And lately it has been forward by BP staffer. Sorry, preface by BP editor, forward by Distinguished Luminary. Right.

Years ago it was preface and forward both by BP staffers. Uh-huh. And we're going with the no BP at all. Okay. Okay. There's lots of other BP in the book, so why have BP there? We wrote one last year, and we didn't have anything new to say, and Peter Gammons did, so it worked out. Great.

So it's going to be good. Everybody's favorite writers will be in this book. Cool. All right. So I wanted to talk about the piece that I wrote for Fox Sports that ran while I was away that I think you read. Mm-hmm. And I'm going to see if I can pull it up on my computer to remember what I wrote. I filed it eight days ago.

Yeah. There's a lot in there to unpack, as people say. Oh, I see here that Carson Sestouli wrote a piece called Finding the Next Garrett Richards. Should we talk about that instead? We can talk about that instead. Sure. So the idea, well, this piece was looking at the teams that have signed free agents this offseason. I think we've mentioned this in passing at some point,

or maybe this got wrapped into the conversation about how there are no teams that are out of it right now, that all teams seem to be contending or see themselves as contending. And so I looked at the teams that have signed free agents this year to see what percentage of free agents, of top free agents, of marquee free agents, have been signed by winning teams and have been signed by playoff teams. And because it was my sense that the winning teams

haven't done a lot this offseason. The teams that were winners last year haven't done a lot this offseason. The teams that were winners last year haven't done a whole lot. And that the teams that have done a lot this offseason, like the Astros and the Cubs, certainly more than the Astros, the Cubs, and the Red Sox. White Sox. White Sox, thank you.

Yes, the White Sox were all bad teams. And this, as I put it in the piece, this on the one hand seems totally rational. You would expect that a team that was bad would have the most need to improve and therefore would most often sign free agents. But that's not actually how the game has ever worked. If you think back to some of the recent off-seasons of the past, the signing is typically dominated by teams that were good and are trying to get even better. And there's reasons for that. One is that the teams that are good are the ones that could afford to sign players, and they

continue to be able to afford to sign players because they're rich teams. And maybe you could argue that they have more incentive to sign teams because they're already in a position where they're trying to stay in the playoffs, where if you're a losing team, you might figure, well, you have a long ways to go, so it's not worth signing a closer this year. And so I looked at the percentage of players of top 40 free agents signed by winning teams, and we're currently on pace for a record low, record low, over the past decade at about 40%. 40% of free agents have been signed by winning teams. This would be, I think, only the second time in that 10-year period where more free agents were signed by losing teams than by winning teams.

And the playoff teams have also signed a record low of about 20%, and that's dramatically lower than any year in the past, particularly when you consider that there are more teams that make the playoffs now than there used to be, and so they should be a higher percentage. And the second lowest, incidentally, was last year, last offseason. So you might look at those two side by side and think that's a little bit of a mini trend. And so I will first acknowledge that we talk about a lot of one-year phenomena on this show. And we always allow that there's a really pretty good chance that it's a fluke. And a lot of times it is. So i'll acknowledge and allow that this

could be nothing that maybe the best perhaps the best explanation for this is one year fluke it's very gracious of you now what is causing this ben well why don't you go through your theories first, just so I don't repeat what you wrote. I'm trying to find this piece. Oh, I actually had quite a bit of trouble finding it myself. It was, while you were away, it was prominently featured on that site, and then it seems to have disappeared. It does still exist on the internet. I have it.

You have it? Okay. It's not an SEO-friendly topic. What is the keyword in this? What would be the keyword that you would put in the URL for this? The keyword that they put was tigers. Yeah. Well, okay. I guess so. All right. So let's see.

First, so, okay. So the way I organize this is that there's two, there are two forces that would push the winning teams and the losing teams together. One is the decision-making of the losing teams. The other is the decision-making of the winning teams, right? So you could ask, why are losing teams signing more free agents? And you could also ask, why are winning teams signing fewer free agents? And you could also ask, why are winning teams signing fewer free agents? Those are two separate questions. They are related because any player that is signed by a team from one group can't be signed by a team in the other group. And so they will obviously add up to 100% ultimately.

But those are two different questions. And so I think that the why are losing teams signing more free agents is really easy. Do you agree? That's a pretty easy question to answer, right? I think so. It might not be an easy question to answer. It might actually be a difficult question to answer. But the answer that we would probably all settle on is pretty simple.

That simple answer might be wrong, but we're not going farther. We're just going to accept the simple answer. The simple answer being, well, hey, there's an extra playoff spot, so you are closer to contending than ever before. The fact that there is an extra playoff spot also means that you are more likely to reap the benefits of contending throughout the summer, even if you don't make the playoffs, because you're going to be perceived to be closer to the playoffs throughout the summer. And along a different line, there's more money in the game. There's more money in the game, particularly for the lower tier teams.

The lower tier teams, as I quoted Tim Britton's essay in the BP Annual, he showed that while salaries are rising throughout baseball, payrolls are rising throughout baseball, they're rising much more quickly at the bottom end and in the middle at the median than at the top end. So relative to the Yankees and the Red Sox, the rest of the league is getting richer and therefore has more money to spend on free agents. And that's an important thing because there's not this lower class that is just totally out of every offseason. And as you mentioned in your article, free agency is sort of a zero-sum thing. There are only so many marquee free agents in any offseason. And so if all of these losing teams now have the money to spend on free agents and they can bid up those free agents to the point that the rich teams or the winning teams, that is, would have to pay some exorbitant amount to beat them out in the bidding, then those losing teams might just end up with a lot of the free agents and then there won't be any free agents left to go around.

And that could be why the winning teams have not signed a lot of free agents. So I want to pause in my listing of the reasons because I want to focus on this one for just a second. I wrote this. In other words, the gap between rich and poor teams has shrunk, the middle class has grown, and now everybody can afford to buy a car. In the real world, the market would respond by creating luxury cars, ever fancier for the rich to distinguish themselves, but there's no factory to turn out more luxury ballplayers. The rich and the poor are mostly shopping for the same goods, and suddenly the rich can't outspend the poor without paying unreasonable prices. So it seems to me, this is off topic, well it's not, I didn't really address it in the piece,

but it seems to me that what we should be seeing is rich teams being willing to spend a lot more for a win than poor teams are. Like when we talk about how much a win costs on the market and we say, oh it's 6 million or it's 7 million or it's 9 million or whatever, shouldn't it be tiered? Shouldn't the Yankees and the Dodgers be willing to spend much more than the rest of the league? And why don't we talk about tiered pricing for these guys for how much a win costs? Because like you said, it's not as though the Yankees can take their... the Yankees aren't a great example at the moment, but the Yankees. It's not like the Yankees can take their $100 million and hire somebody to build them a better ballplayer.

The source, the supply of ballplayers is constant and unchanging, and they're stuck. They're stuck with what's on the market. changing and they're stuck they're stuck with what's on the market so the only way that they can therefore differentiate themselves from the rest of the league and use their money to push the rest of the league around is to pay more for players but they it doesn't seem like they do or if they do it doesn't seem like we pay a lot of attention to them doing it like you know the the dodgers ability to take on all those contracts in 2012 maybe was an example of this. But even still, not really. It's not like we really talk about the price that the Dodgers pay for a win compared to the price that the Orioles pay for a win and expect it to be dramatically different.

Why not? I don't know. I mean, I guess I kind of think that about the Yankees. When you look at those dollar-per-win rankings of general managers, it's always the rich team's general managers are the least efficient spending-wise. It's always Brian Cashman shows up with like gms of bad teams like notoriously bad gms and brian cashman because it's the yankees and they never spend all that efficiently well but that's because they're spending more on free they're not they're

spending more of their money on free agents but they're not deliberately spending more on those free agents. They still lose free agents to people. Does that make sense? It's like they don't have as big a portion of their payroll going to bargains and scrap heap pickups and, you know, guys with one year of service time. But when we hear about how much Max Scherzer is going to cost, when Jim Bowden tells us how much Max Scherzer is going to make this offseason, the answer should be dependent on what team signs him, kind of, right? Although I guess if the Yankees are bidding against the rest of the league, maybe they only have to pay one penny more than the next team is going to pay. Right.

That keeps things from getting... Yeah, it's not like they're going to say, we're the Yankees and we're the Dodgers, so we will just give you 20 extra million dollars just for the heck of it. But if the Yankees and the Dodgers are bidding against each other and the Red Sox are in there too, they should be willing. You would think the Yankees would be willing. If Max Scherzer is worth $170 million to the Reds or something,

you'd think that he'd be worth $270 million to the Yankees. I don't know. I would guess that it's just you don't spend more than you have to, and generally you have an idea of what the other offers are, presumably. I don't know. If you're the rich team like the Yankees or the Dodgers, maybe you get the last chance to bid most of the time. Maybe the agent comes back to you hoping for the high bid

and tells you what his high offer is, and then you don't have to go that far beyond it to get the guy. Yeah, I guess. Yeah, I mean, again, it's not like there's only one rich team. There's a bunch they might be bidding each other up. I don't know. I guess it just goes back to how did the Yankees let Russell Martin walk away. I didn't understand that at the time.

I still don't. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Anyway, going on. And the third hypothesis, and this one is just sort of a variant on the fluke, the one-year fluke thing. uh, the one year fluke thing, but, um, the Cubs and the Astros and the Red Sox, uh, are the, you know, bottom dwellers who are now signing free agents. And they're not your typical class of bottom dweller. They're not like, this is not the baseball of five or 10 years ago where you

had the perpetually poor teams, the bottom, the Pirates and the Royals and the Orioles and the Rockies and the Rays, who were all just terrible and poor. These are three teams that are terrible because that is the posture that they've chosen to embrace for the moment. The Red Sox, obviously,

just for a post-trade deadline, but still. In fact, they're all teams with the fundamentals to support a big market budget. All of them have been top half, even top 10 payroll teams when they've been in a competitive mode. And so it's not that surprising that those three teams would be signing free agents.

They're mid to big market teams. And they're just sort of And now they're reloading. So that would be part of the fluke hypothesis, that it just so happens to be a year that those three teams were all bad and getting ready to get good. One more thing on why the rich teams don't spend more. I guess maybe it matters less now when there's more parity, but in the past, at least, there was always this sort of anti-Yankee sentiment, this constant bridling at the sense that the Yankees could just buy championships. And so there was maybe some incentive for them not to inflame that sentiment. sentiment if it if it became clear that they could always just bid many more millions of dollars per year for a free agent than any other team could then maybe that could have jeopardized that their position somehow it could have led to action by the league you know like maybe more revenue sharing

or higher luxury tax or whatever and so it was in their best interest to play by roughly the same rules just so as not to attract undue attention to the fact that they can spend more than anyone else. Do you believe that that was ever a factor? I mean, you're saying it could have been. And I understand that you're saying this is a possibility, but do you believe that it ever was a factor in a non-signing or in any move the Yankees ever made? Yeah, I believe it. I think so. You believe that, not that it could be, but that it was.

You believe that it happened. Yes. There was some free agent where they went, ooh, this won't look good. Or just that they wouldn't submit just a crazy number for him. They might still bid on him, but it wouldn't be far out of line with what everyone else bid. I took that opportunity of you talking for two seconds

to Google that old Onion story. About the Yankees signing everyone? Yeah, the quotes make it. All right, so those are the reasons that the bad teams are signing more free agents this offseason. Now, so why are the good teams signing fewer? And this one I struggle with in the, again, it seemed like a fairly simple answer, but I was not convinced by myself that it made sense. So The Just as there is How do I put this What is the best way to sum up a thousand words

In this It's the flip side of the same incentive That you were talking about for the losing Teams how they Have more incentive to spend because There are more playoff spots and they have More realistic shot and therefore in reverse... A playoff spot

is cheaper than it used to be. Wait, a playoff spot is cheaper than it used to be? Well, I don't know that I would use that word, but a playoff spot is... there's less incentive for the winning team to spend on the playoff spot for

the opposite of the reasons that there is more incentive for the winning team to spend on the playoff spot for the opposite of the reasons that there is more incentive for the winning team to spend because it's harder to lose that playoff spot if you have one already, if you just had one, then you might feel like you don't have to do as much to keep it because it's easier to make the playoffs now. Yeah, yeah. Basically the idea is that there is less incentive to go from being a good team to a great team now

than there used to be, partly because as a good team, you are likely to make the playoffs. You're more likely to make the playoffs and not need to be a great team to make the playoffs. And if you pursue greatness in a way that damages your ability to maintain goodness. You are likely to risk dropping out of the playoff sweet spot while gaining very little

because going from a very good team to a great team doesn't do a whole lot in a four-round postseason. Right? And so partly now that there's an extra round of playoffs, partly just I think the general awareness maybe that like, you know, it's just not really hardly worth loading up for the playoffs. It doesn't feel like it is because you just it's such a slog and you're just going to lose to the Giants anyway, makes it so that you really want to just hit 93 wins

and adding an extra five wins to 93 is almost as quote-unquote pointless as we used to think adding five wins to 63 is. It doesn't really change your chances of winning the World Series. And it can be very costly, those extra five wins, especially because the first win is the easiest one to add. And every win you add costs a little bit more. And so by the time you've built a 93 win team, it might be really expensive to add those extra five words so that was what i came up with that was my hypothesis i'm not sure that i buy it i can talk myself out of it pretty easily

however uh it doesn't matter necessarily whether it's totally rational or not, or whether it makes sense with everything I know or not, what matters is that it seems to be the case. I mean, this is a hypothesis to explain a phenomenon that seems to be perhaps kind of maybe certainly real. And so whether it makes sense for teams to behave this way or not is less relevant than whether they are behaving this way or not. It seems to me that when the second wildcard was added, we didn't exactly know how teams were going to change their calculus to adjust to that, whether they were going to treat

the wildcard. I think we talked about this in a very early, in the first summer that we recorded this. In fact, I think we had an episode where we talked about how we didn't know whether teams were going to treat a wild card appearance as a postseason appearance or not. And so therefore, when it was the trade deadline, well, are teams going to be really loading up strong to get out of wild card purgatory? Or would they just sort just sort of you know would they treat it more like that was a a sure thing as as a team that was safely in wildcard territory before might have done we didn't know how they were going to how they were going to treat it and it seems based on

this offseason and a little bit last offseason that they might be treating it as the incentives are all pushing them toward pretty goodness instead of greatness. And by the way, one last thing about this. Let's see, where did I put this? This is in the 15 years before the second wildcard spot was added, 20 teams won 100 games in a season, a little bit more than one per year. In the three years since, none has. And so that's a little bit of perhaps circumstantial evidence of the same phenomenon going on. And this is what Zachary Levine would talk about when he would complain about Bud Selig's baseball and the incentives that

have been created, I think. And of course, I'm well aware that it is an ongoing trope throughout hot take journalism that there are no great teams anymore and that every sport sucks because every sport doesn't have great teams like there used to be great teams. It's quite possible I'm falling into the no great teams trap. And I will just refer back to my earlier statement that in 11 months we will probably be talking about how none of this turned out to be true. Right. Yeah. There we go.

Yeah. So I don't have... Can I just, just to make it, I gave you some numbers, but just, I hope everybody has kind of thought about it. Of the 10 playoff teams, basically eight have signed no free agents this year. The Dodgers have signed one. And the Royals have sort of poked away at the bottom. I guess the Giants have re-signed a couple of their guys. But for the most part... Tigers re-signed Victor Martinez.

Yeah, there were a few re-signings. But I also didn't even get into the trade market. And if you sort of think about the trade market and which teams have been trading for players, it kind of becomes even more notable, in my opinion. But anyway, I'll let you talk. Okay, well, I don't have an answer, so listeners, lower your expectations lower than they normally are. But I think, I don't know, anything that I came up with was not necessarily more compelling than your argument about the incentives or the fluke argument, which is always a strong one. I thought maybe it could be that it had just so happened this offseason that the losing teams had more free agents, were losing more free agents than they normally are.

So I looked to see whether that was the case. And I just looked at the MLB trade rumors top 50 from the beginning of this off season and, uh, look to see whether, whether those players were coming from a playoff team or not. And that didn't seem to be the answer. Uh, 28 of the players on the top 50 were from defending playoff teams. And it's not even out of 50 because there were a few guys on that list who were international free agents or posting guys or whatever. So more than half, well more than half of the players on the top 50 were coming from playoff teams.

And that's a third of the teams. So I don't know what the typical breakdown is, but that doesn't seem like it's anything out of line. So that doesn't seem like it could be an explanation. So there are two broad possibilities here, right? The first is that something has happened to change the playoff team's incentives so that they act differently. And the second is that something has happened to change the playoff teams. So you mentioned in your article that the losing teams are no longer losers because they were born in a poor cast, like the Astros and the Cubs and the Red Sox just happened to be losing teams at this period in time. So is it possible that the reverse of that is that the winning teams are no longer winners because they were born in a rich cast? and that in the past, the winning teams tended to be rich teams.

The Yankees would make the playoffs every year, and so they would then spend the most in the offseason. Whereas now that we have all this parity and you have poor teams making the playoffs and you had the A's in the playoffs, not that that is a totally new thing, but the A's were there, the Royals were there, the Pirates were there, and those are new things yeah and orioles and orioles yeah they're i don't think of them as a poor team it seems like they they didn't used to be but have acted

like one for a while so so yeah so that's part of it maybe is that it's easier for teams that don't spend a ton to make the playoffs now. And so that group of playoff teams is not composed only of the biggest spenders, and therefore you wouldn't expect them to spend as much. It still seems like a low percentage. advantage but then when you look at the individual teams like i thought maybe i don't know it's it's kind of hard to come up with these sweeping reasons these trends when you're not thinking about what the particular teams are so i wondered if maybe if we actually go one by one and think about why the teams haven't spent whether that would be enlightening at all. So, I mean, there are a few teams here who it makes total sense that they haven't spent a lot, right? Like the Nationals, the Cardinals, the Dodgers,

who seem to have filled any hole that they really had via a ton of trades and trading away Matt Kemp and dealing from the strength that they had in the outfield to fill holes elsewhere. When you look at their rosters, it doesn't seem like they have some glaring hole that they could have or should have filled on the free agent market. And I happen to see some rumors just today,

like the Cardinals are exploring Max Scherzer and trades for Cole Hamels and David Price. So maybe something like that will still happen. And maybe the Nationals will trade for Ben Zobrist, which was another rumor going around. As you mentioned in your article, if the Dodgers sign every remaining free agent, then this won't be quite as clear a trend. remaining free agent, then this won't be quite as clear a trend. But if there are those, and those are kind of the rich teams on this list, like the Dodgers, the Nationals, the Cardinals could afford people, but it doesn't seem like they have to. And if you look at the reasons that they don't have to, I can't really identify a trend.

Like, how did they get put together? There wasn't some one way that they all got put together that seems like it's something that could only happen in the current baseball climate. So I couldn't really come up with anything there. And then the Giants tried to spend, right? Like, they would have liked to have Jon Lester. There was some indication that they had a very competitive offer for him. And so if he had happened to choose them instead of the Cubs,

then we wouldn't be talking about them on this list. Yeah, but I mean if he had happened to choose them instead of the Cubs, right. But if they had happened to offer him $15 more million than they did, then John Lester probably would have chosen them instead of the Cubs. I mean, maybe not in the individual case. But presumably, they do have the ability to get players. Most of these do come down to how much you're willing to offer. And, you know, know not necessarily but probably and so why aren't they you know why

don't the giants use their uh you know whatever advantage they have as winners and most again you're right on an individual level uh it's it's not as though the giants not signing lester feels like a huge data point or anything like that. I mean, we're mostly mentioning it just to kind of work through the thought process. But I agree with what you're saying, and I think that it's probably compelling. I think that there isn't a team necessarily where you look at it, other than the Tigers bullpen, which I used as the kicker. There isn't really a team where you look at it and go,

well, it's amazing how little they've done. They definitely should have signed this guy, this guy, and this guy. I guess you could say that the Angels should sign Max Scherzer if they could, right? They could use a really good starting pitcher. That's what I was going to say, is that if you're a 93-win team or an 89-win team, well, yeah, you're probably not going to have a lot of holes. You're a good team.

The point is that it seems like it used to be, and the evidence suggests that it used to be, that those good teams would keep reloading. You don't have to necessarily have Pete Cosma at shortstop for that to qualify as an area where you would upgrade. I mean, teams used to just go get players. They liked getting good players. And so they would go find the good players,

and then they'd give them a lot of money, and they'd sign them. And that's what's not happening. It's not that it's necessarily a bad idea i'm not sure any of these teams should have signed any of the players that they haven't signed um but yeah you're right though the the it it doesn't seem like the the particular group of teams and the particular group of needs that they have and the particular group of players that were available. You know, they don't make any of this look particularly striking on a day-by-day basis. All the decisions seem to be, you know, justified. Well, yeah, you could say that the Orioles have lost a bunch of guys and they could have signed someone and maybe they still will.

I don't know. It seems like a kind of a Dan Duquette thing of waiting till the end of the winter. At least that's what they did last year when we spent the whole offseason saying, why aren't the Orioles signing someone? And then they signed people at the end of it. So it could change a bit still. Is it possible that extensions have played some role here where, I mean, i guess it wouldn't be because as i just said a lot of the top 50 guys are people who are leaving playoff teams but in the sense that extensions used to be a thing that

losing teams did or or uh teams that didn't spend a lot did it more often that was their thing and now everyone does it and so they lock up their players long term and maybe they don't need to spend as much on the free agent market or they don't have as many places to spend on the free agent market maybe that's maybe that's part of the whole parody thing that's my best guess i guess is that it's a combination of or assuming it's not a fluke and assuming it's not the the playoff spot incentive thing is that you just have a less

wealthy group of winning teams and playoff teams now in a higher parity era yeah so if we put all of those explanations together I bet the answer is in there somewhere. I bet the answer was probably the first thing we said.

Yep. Should have just made it a 10-minute podcast, as you always want to do. All right. So I will link to this article since it's kind of hard to find. I'll put it in the Facebook group and in the blog post at BP. Is that it? That's all from me. Okay.

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