Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 703: Oakland’s Trade Deadline Dilemma

Episode Date: July 13, 2015

Ben and Sam banter about the All-Star Game and then discuss how the Oakland A’s should handle the next phase of their strange season.

The Stompers trying to go wire to wire here in the Pacific Association for the first half title. It's 2-2 to Ayano. Swing and a bouncer to short. This could do it. Mochizuki has it. The throw to first in time, and that is a first-half championship for the Sonoma Stompers

as they clinch a title, and they have guaranteed themselves at the very least, a spot in the Pacific Association Championship Series at the end of the season. And if not, with a win in the the second half they will clinch the championship overall good morning and welcome to episode 703 of effectively wild the daily podcast from baseball prospectus presented by the play index at baseball reference.com i am ben lindbergh of grantland joined by sam miller Baseball Perspectives. Hello.

Yo. Apologize for the subpar audio quality today. We have a next-door neighbor. I have a next-door neighbor who starts his leaf blower every time we try to record a podcast. And I'm in an echoey room, but it's a podcast. You wanted us to do a podcast, so here's one. How are you? Uh, I'm okay.

I know exactly how you are. Yeah, we're... We're a few rooms apart. You know that that was a lie. You know that I just told a lie. Yeah, you really did. Haven't even had coffee yet or food, and you just woke up after a late night. So you're not doing that well.

But the slumbers clinched the first half of the season yesterday, and you're happy about that. I am happy about that. I am happy about that. All right. Anything to talk about as if we've been paying attention to Major League Baseball? I want to just say two things. One is that it was pointed out to us, and I don't know if this point has been made everywhere in the world, and so this will be a lame point to make. But it was pointed out that when we were talking about the likelihood of a MLB conspiracy

on all-star voting, as you recall we talked about that, in which it was wondered whether MLB took action to undo the royalsification of the all-star team took action to undo the royalsification of the all-star team uh and then extended to the question the much more fanciful question of whether it was conceivable that they doctored the royals in the first place so as to encourage participation and awareness of all-star voting a conspiracy that we don't actually agree uh that we don't actually believe in, but that we talked about for the sake of discussing a thing. Somebody pointed out that it seems almost impossible that MLB would have done that because there are so many players with these bonuses in their contracts for all-star appearances. appearances. And if MLB were caught tampering with something that would affect their pay, that would be a serious legal issue that they would absolutely not want to be involved in.

So it is not merely the matter of whether being caught would create appearances of a game show rigging type scandal or not, but whether Omar Infante would sue them. Yeah, right. Omar Infante had a lot of money riding on making the All-Star game, which he didn't, unfortunately for him. But the Royals as a whole had a lot of money riding on it because of arbitration guys who would probably get more money if they had All-Star games in their resume, and other guys with incentive clauses and everything.

So, yeah, a substantial amount of money was riding on who made the all-star team. Second thing about the all-star game, Robin Ventura was apparently lobbying or something for Chris Sale not to pitch. Because he preferred that Chris Sale get rest. Yes. to pitch because he preferred that Chris Sale get rest. Yes. And it takes a lot of chutzpah for Robin Ventura to say the thing that everybody wants. Like, who doesn't want their players to get rest? I mean, we have this shared sacrifice that all the teams in the league have to do in

order to put together this big jewel of an event. And so Ventura seems like he just, I don't know, it's like he seems like maybe he's the first person who ever had this idea in his mind. Like, yeah, I'd like my guy to get rest. I wonder why nobody's thought of this before. And so I just wanted to know whether you think that uh it will be i mean we've already lost the sunday starters to uh to the uh to the need for rest that's the way to do

it do what matt williams did yeah start max scherzer the day before the all-star break so that he is ineligible to pitch exactly you should because you get to, especially if, well, let's see, now that there's an extra day, you get to restart your rotation anyway. And so say Max Scherzer was going to pitch on really any day, Saturday, Friday, Thursday, any of those days, you just bump him down to Sunday, you don't lose anything because you can have him start the first day back anyway. He's only going to get one start basically Before his next turn of the rotation comes up

So really everybody should do this The last turn through your rotation Yeah And Ned Yost evidently has Talked Robin Ventura into Letting him use Chris Sale But it is I mean everyone is thinking it

Or at least every manager is thinking it But maybe, I mean, everyone is thinking it, or at least every manager is thinking it, but maybe by being the one guy who says it, you actually put some pressure on for a division rival. If a division rival is managing the team, then maybe he'll be especially sensitive about how he uses those players so that he's not perceived as doing something to hurt them competitively. So if you really are serious about it and you want your presumptive Cy Young winner not to have to risk injury,

then you might as well say it. Unless I'm assuming Chris Sale is not a lifelong dream to pitch in this game. Maybe Ventura talked to him beforehand to see if it was because if it is if it's like the player really really really wants to do it then it's probably worth the risk just to make your player happy but otherwise if your players doesn't really care and wants the break then i would want the break so given i don't know given that we're everything is much more serious now than baseball used to be, I mean, the All-Star Game was created at a time when everything was fairly lax,

and these guys didn't have super regimented training schedules, and they didn't push themselves to the very, very, very, very brink of what their bodies were capable of, and we didn't really care about innings limits or anything like that, and they weren't big deals quite so much when the all-star game was started and it has persisted for you know 80 years but it is also in in some ways the way that it's executed as a remnant of a simpler time given ventura's uh you know the ventura precedent and the sunday starter precedent and just the fact that teams more and more are looking for any, you know, any way that they can squeeze an extra run or not lose an extra run.

Is it your opinion that in 20 years the All-Star game will be a game in the middle of the season that players have to participate in. I still think it will be. There's a lot of weight of tradition in the All-Star game. And you can just keep watering down the quality of the All-Star team. Maybe that's what will happen, because it's, what, 76 players are All-Stars this year, one way or another, whether they were initially chosen or whether they're the backups or they're the backups to the backups or whatever.

So eventually you get down to a level where it doesn't even matter anymore. You're not even really that worried about the risk because these are no longer Chris Sale and Max Scherzer. They're some guy. They're DJ LeMayhew or something. So maybe that will happen, which would make the All-Star game even less compelling than it already is, which is pretty uncompelling because we get to see these players any time we want, at any time of day, wherever they are in the country. And the way that they're used in the game is pretty uncompelling, where they're there for an inning or two, and then there's someone else,

and you can't even keep track of who's in the game. So I would expect that it would continue to become less and less must-see TV. But I think it'll still exist. Okay. If they just cut the season down, this would be to 120 games, like I'd like. This would be a to you know to 120 games like i'd like this would be another benefit you could do a whole week yeah and have like lots of padding so everybody gets a break you could have four all-star games sure you can make the whole so what if they made the whole season the all-star game then wow then nobody could complain this should have been a podcast topic. All right. Okay.

So the actual podcast topic is the Oakland A's, who have been a podcast topic before for different reasons. And this time last year, the A's were winning at a historic rate or outscoring the competition, at least, at a very unusual rate. I don't remember what their run differential was at this time, but it was like plus triple digits, I think. It was huge. And then they cooled off down the stretch.

But that was the A's story this year and last year. And this year, it's the opposite story. They are 41-50. They are eight games out in the wildcard race, eight and a half games out in AL West, and they are just a total either fluky or terrible luck or bad roster construction. We could talk about what it is, but whatever it is, they are very dramatically underperforming. Their underlying numbers, how good we think they should be, their baseball prospectus, adjusted standings, third-order record is a real outlier. They are 11 games below where they should be according to the third-order record, be according to the third order record and the same with base runs or whatever sort of estimator that you want to look at based on runs scored and allowed and quality of competition and all those things they should be good they do not have a good record and they have an 8 and 22

record in one run games which is awful so they are the inverse of the 2012 orioles or the 2007 diamond backs or whatever weird team managed to outperform its run scored and allowed they are the opposite of that 2014 royals sure them too oh okay can i can i just to put it in perspective yeah 11 games just so that people know the by third order winning percentage they are the second best team in the american league and they're essentially the cardinals they're more or less tied with you know the cardinals for the roughly third best third order winning percentage in baseball so think about the cardinals think about all the feelings you have with the cardinals and just imagine feeling those feelings for the Oakland A's of 2015.

Like it is a scenario that exists somewhere in the universe. They didn't hack anyone as far as we know. There is a version of you in a multiverse planet far, far away that is cheering this amazing Oakland A's run this year and I I get tweets periodically from the the type of people who file away what baseball writers write about their team in the spring or offseason or whatever and then check back in with them when they got something wrong months later like delightful people and uh because we talked about the A's moves over the off season. I wrote some stuff about them, particularly the Josh Donaldson trade, which I thought was not terrible. Like it sort of made sense. And so now in a way it looks terrible in retrospect

in that Donaldson is really good. I mean, he was really good before. He is still really good. And the A's are terrible now. And therefore, the move was terrible, is an easy conclusion to make. It's a little more nuanced than that, in that, you know, Brett Laurie has been kind of career average Brett Laurie, except he's actually been healthy. And he started terribly, and he's been much better after that. So he's been okay. And then the other guys that

they got, Kendall Graveman has been in the rotation all year and just kind of eating up innings fairly effectively. And Sean Nolan is pitching well in AAA, and Franklin Barreto is hitting well in high A. So if the A's were whatever their third-order record says they should be right now, then you might have a totally different interpretation of that trade. I mean, Donaldson would still be great for the Boo Jays, but you could say, well, the A's made that move, and yet they're still winning a ton, and now they've got all these young guys. And you could put a positive spin on the trade.

So I don't I'm not as interested in rehashing the offseason moves as I am in talking about what they should do now. What you would do now if you are Billy Bean and his front office and they are probably having this conversation themselves, perhaps as we speak. It's the all-star break. It's a time to take stock of what you think your team is and what your strategy at the trade deadline is going to be. And the A's, of course, are always active on the trade deadline, and they've got guys who would be prime trade targets, Ben Zobris, Scott Casimir, would be prime trade targets, Ben Zobris, Scott Casimir, and they could, it's hard to even classify what Billy Bean ever does, selling or buying or both at the same time,

but they could kind of punt on the second half and retool for next year, or they could go for it because of the strength of the underlying numbers, the fact that their deficit is still single digits, it's not totally insurmountable, and the teams ahead of them are not powerhouses by any means. The Angels have been better lately, they've now taken over first place, but the Astros have slumped quite a bit lately. So not unbeatable teams ahead of them. Strong team quality. And either they've been getting extremely unlucky with the one run record, or they've had a bad bullpen, which they sort of had.

But they had a great bullpen last year, so maybe their bullpen will bounce back. Or maybe it's easy to fix a bullpen at the trade deadline. So what do you do do you just give up it's it has to be a hard thing to give up and accept that you're kicking the can down the road another year when a lot of things are telling you that you built a good team that deserves to win right now and it's hard to give up on that, I would think. You meant the 2012 Orioles. Yeah, did I not say that? Well, that's what I meant.

I thought you said the 2012 Royals, and so I was correcting the year. But in fact, I should have been correcting the team, unless I misheard, because those words sound almost the same. They do. I was thinking Orioles. I don't know what I said. Let me ask you just before we get into that. 11 games worse than Pythag last year, Eleven games worse than Pythag last year.

Nine games worse than Pythag this year. Those are two once in a decade kind of outliers that we've seen back to back by the same team. Generally the same roster. Not the exact same roster but much of the same roster.

How convinced I don't know. what would it take to convince you that this is just a skill that they don't have? Like another year? If they played out this year and got to 16 games under, would that do it? Yeah. I mean, this was also, by the way, this is also the same, much of the same roster that had that incredible... What did they have?

Didn't they win like 16 extra inning games or something like that? Didn't they have a thing? Yeah, right. All the pies in the faces. Yeah, it just fluctuates so much from year to year. And there are little clusters that seem like they might mean something like the angels for all those years seem to beat their run scored and allowed and the orioles of the last few years have seemed to do that at times but then there are years like even in the middle of those

stretches there are years where that doesn't happen so i don't know what it means when it doesn't have like maybe maybe they did have the skill but they actually got unlucky that year or something and and so it didn't show up but it would have been even worse if they didn't have their special skill so i don't i don't know i don't know what it would be because last year they had a really good bullpen, which is typically the culprit for one-run losses other than luck. And this year they don't. And I don't know. What would it be?

Lack of clutchness? I don't know. I mostly just want a number. Like, whoa, I just want to know what it would take. Yeah, I mean, I don't think it could happen this year that I would buy it. Maybe a third year of as extreme numbers. Okay. All right.

So your question was, should they trade Ben Zobrist? This is like the equivalent of the Clayton Kershaw, Tim Lincecum thing, right? We knew that Kershaw was significantly better than Lincecum and had probably been getting unlucky as well as maybe underperforming a little bit his true talent. We knew that Tim Lincecum was way worse than Kershaw but had been maybe getting lucky and maybe overperforming his talent. And it was just a matter of how long it would take for that to erase the sizable gap in their actual performance. And we talked about those guys, like, I don't know, like eight starts into the season.

There was time, much time. The A's don't have nearly the time to do this, and they're half the season's done, more than half the season's done. I mean, you have to give up, right? You can't just complain. Well, you can. No, that is what you have to give up, right? You can't just complain. Well, you can. No, that is what you have to only just complain. You can't let it affect you.

I mean, they're not. What are their playoff odds? Do they have playoff odds right now? They do. It's 7%. They're just behind the Rangers and the Mariners and about tied with the White Sox. And those are the odds of a wild card or division. Most of that comes in the form of a wild card.

So are you asking if the White Sox should be buyers or sellers right now? Well, I wasn't asking. I was assuming until recently the White Sox have had a really good run lately. And I would not change my opinion on that probably but but they're way they're way behind right they have the same playoff odds that the A's do I mean basically there's a point a point one percentage point of difference are there are we asking if the Red Sox should be buyers or sellers uh I don't I haven't written the Red Sox off I don't know.

Some people probably have, but I'm still sort of buying. They have basically twice the playoff odds. Who's a good team for me to... Well, are we asking if the Rangers are buyers or sellers? Yeah, I think that has been asked. Really? I mean, I wrote about not thinking... These are all sellers. I wrote about not thinking that they were a real contender,

but they had the best record in the league over a month or so at some point, and there was some buzz building. I would not ask that about them. I would ask it about the Red Sox, though. Okay. And the Mariners? See, these are all, maybe my answer is so obvious because these all seem obvious.

These all seem like sellers. I don't know. The Mariners, I thought they would win that division. I know, but it's not then. Right, I know. But, man, I don't know. Wow.

Really? The Mariners? The thing is, here's the twist. Is that probably one of the four teams I just named will contend for a wild card to the last weekend. One of those four will get hot. And they will definitely be in it at the end. But the problem is you don't know which one. And getting close doesn't mean they'll win it.

And if they win it, it doesn't mean it's one game that they've earned. So you still basically have three situations where the odds are either against them or a coin flip for them to get somewhere significant. So acknowledging that one of these teams will do something interesting enough that your reader, who always sends you emails telling you when you were wrong, can have enough fuel to send me an email saying I was wrong.

Acknowledging that. These teams should all be sellers, I think. I don't see it for the Red Sox yet. That division is so weak. I think they've got a lot of guys who have underperformed. I wouldn't say sell for them, but I guess that's tough to argue with. It's just, that must be the most frustrating feeling for a baseball person to experience,

frustrating feeling for a baseball person to experience having to just all the intricate groundwork that billy beam laid this offseason just move after move after move to put this team together and then in certain ways the results are telling him that he did a brilliant job and he should be vindicated and all the people who didn't understand what he was doing should be uh hanging their heads and hiding in the sand somewhere those aren't the right expressions and and yet uh it looks like completely the opposite of that it looks like he totally screwed up and maybe maybe he did i don't know the numbers are somewhat ambiguous but somewhat but basically if his job is to get good players, and he looks at his players and they're playing well,

then, right, that's kind of the end of his job. Yeah. Right. And so, yeah. I mean, the fact that you could look at the A's individual player performances, if you showed me the A's roster with all their stats and showed me almost any other team's roster and all their stats, you go, Billy Bean did it again.

And so, yeah, it has to be frustrated to be the GM in a sport that has wins and losses. Like, it'd be a lot better for him in this case, and much, much worse for all of us, if we didn't cluster performances in little buckets and then declare a winner for each bucket based on the distribution of talent in that bucket. You know, it's kind of arbitrary. It's kind of like match play, right, and it's not it's not actually the best way to figure out who's the best player or the best team as weird as it is to say it

wins and losses don't do a great job of telling you who the best winner and loser is uh but they're fun yeah and he's been a gm, and he's had plenty of disappointments. Many more disappointments than... He gets to add this to his... He's checked it off the disappointment bingo card. Yeah, when he goes to sleep at night and he does his Arya Stark recounting of everyone he wants to kill, and every terrible baseball memory, he can add this to the list. he wants to kill in every terrible baseball memory.

You can add this to the list. It's even harder now that there are 10 playoff teams and you don't even have to be good to make the playoffs. And so it's not like it used to be when you had to win 95 games a lot of the time to make the playoffs. Now you can just coast in there with high 80s or something. Seems like such an easy target for a team that has played so well in

so many ways and yet the odds are what they are but i wouldn't put it past him to find a way to walk the line kind of like he did this winter to like even if the a's were doing really well he might still trade bento wrist or scott cas, right? I mean, he, I wouldn't put it past him to find some way to trade those guys with an eye toward the future and get something back that would fill a different hole in the short term. But, you know, whether it's, I don't know, shortstop who can actually play defense or something and isn't setting errors records, even though Marcus Simeon's advanced stats aren't all that bad. But something, some way that he could fill a hole right now

and manage to trade those guys at their peak value and still get something back for the future without totally killing the playoff run. So I wouldn't be totally shocked if he found a way to do that and deal those guys and get some kind of brett lorry type back who can contribute right now so i i sort of think that will happen where he'll kind of just keep keep his cards in the whatever the. That's not a good expression either. He won't totally fold, but he will do something.

Keep his cards in the hand. He'll stay in the hand. Stay in the hand. That's the one. Really, you think that is what you think he will do. This is not what you think he... I think so, because that's what he's done for a while now, for the last year at least.

He hasn't done the total sell veterans for prospects trade. He's been one of the leaders of this movement toward sell veterans for some kind of prospects and some kind of other veterans or just guys who are already in the majors or ready for the majors, but have team control left, that sort of thing. So you're just saying that it'll be more like the Samarja deal than the Mark Mulder deal or whatever.

Right, yeah. Yeah, probably. I mean, they're kind of the equivalent of, jeez, I hope I'm remembering this right, but they're basically the equivalent of last year's Rays, right? Last year's Rays were in a very similar position. Yeah, maybe not quite as extreme, but yeah. No, not as extreme, but they had a very good, they had great underlying performances. They were way out of it. They owned a Ben Zobrist and other parts. And they traded David Price, but they didn't trade David Price for a package of prospects. And we commented on the time about that. So a trade like that makes sense.

But, I mean, you're not suggesting that, well, I guess, I don't know, when the Rays made that move, did we think that there was any benefit to what Drew Smiley was going to give them that year? Like, were we still thinking that they were staying in it just a little bit? I don't recall. No one expected Drew Smiley to do whatever he did, start throwing high in the strike zone, pitch like an ace in the second half. But it wasn't total white flag, I don't think. They were kind of long shots already, but it wasn't making them way longer shots.

It was longer. But yeah, but not hard at all. Like the playoff odds for them didn't really change. Yeah, I think that's right. Because we probably wrote about this. Yeah, you probably did a of after the deadline about odds changes because of trades or something they were arguably closer in that they were around 500 at the time they were also arguably further away in that they were for more games out of first and they didn't have the extremely good underlying statistics.

So last year when they traded David Price, the Rays were, they only lost 1% playoff odds. They were 11% to make the playoffs. So they were actually, you know, they were more like the Red Sox are right now than like the A's are right now. So maybe they had, but they're also the Rays, and they're like the one team that trades more guys than Billy Bean, right? Yeah, yeah. So anyway. Probably no one trades more than Billy Bean, but they're up there.

Yeah, so they went from 11% to 10%. So that, yeah, I mean, if you set that as a model for what the A's would do, I don't know if the Rays did that with an eye on perhaps making it to the playoffs, but I think that I remember thinking or writing or saying or someone said that that was one side benefit to the return. It's like, you know, look, if everything magically comes together, they're not going to be like totally kicking themselves for having traded away their pitcher because they had, they did get things back. All right. So I'm going to say

that he trades both of those guys. Okay. And yet their playoff odds, assuming that they don't fluctuate that much between now and July 31st or whenever it is, don't fluctuate that much between now and July 31st or whenever it is, their playoff odds don't fall below 5% after the trades. I'm going to go ahead and say that they trade both those guys, but that it will not be what you're describing. I think that they will give up this year. Okay. And try again next year?

Definitely try again next year. Yeah. All right. You'd think that every now and then it would make sense to give up on a year and really try next year because it's hard to keep doing the try now and try later and keep getting a good return okay so that's it for today we will be back soon you can send us emails at podcast at baseball perspectives.com. We've been accumulating them for a while now, and you can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups, slash effectively wild rate review, subscribe to the show on iTunes and support our sponsor,

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