Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 709: Zobrist, Papelbon, and Other Updates from Deadline Week

Episode Date: July 29, 2015

Ben and Sam banter about history, etymology, lexicography, and Nolan Arenado, then discuss the Ben Zobrist, Jonathan Papelbon, and Mat Latos trades.

Good morning and welcome to episode 709 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from baseball perspectives brought to you by the daily podcast from baseball perspectives brought to you by the Play Index at baseballreference.com. I'm Sam Miller along with Ben Lindberg of Grantland. Hi, Ben. Hi. How are you? I'm not sure. Someone just used calendar as a verb to me. Someone just said my brother and I are calendared to go on a certain date. I've never heard calendared as, well, I think that's using it incorrectly. Calendar is a verb I've definitely heard in workplaces. Yeah, it's very much a workplace word. But you calendar the event.

You don't calendar the participant. So the wedding is, you might say, or was it a wedding? I can't remember. This is not a wedding, no. But you might calendar a meeting, but you wouldn't calendar the participants of the meeting. And so I think he's used it wrong. And so I... Everyone is using it wrong in a sense. So there is no wrong. I don't think so. Why? What would be wrong with using it? I mean,

words, nouns become verbs all the time. They're only a problem if you don't think so. What would be wrong with using it? I mean, words, nouns become verbs all the time. They're only a problem if you don't like them. That's what I'm saying. He can use it this way. Yeah, but he's using it wrong. Why is that way wrong? Technically, they're both wrong, right? In the dictionary, it's not a verb.

Yeah, no, but one of them I said is okay, and the other one I said is not. So you are being a prescriptivist. I am. Okay. Well, I am being a prescriptivist, but mostly I'm the prescriptor. I guess it is in the dictionary, or it's in dictionary.com. I'm not totally clear on... Really?

You're just letting me get away with calling myself a prescriptor instead of a prescriber? I was looking something up in the dictionary, so I wasn't listening. Dictionary.com says to calendar is to enter in a calendar or to register. Yeah, there you go. To enter into a calendar. So he didn't enter himself into a calendar. Maybe he did. No, it's not like the event he maybe the event is that he's coming oh i don't i i suspect call who are we talking about friend who's coming to see a stompers game

oh okay yeah good so it is baseball i was worried we were talking about something off top. No. We stick to baseball here. When is he coming? August 5th. Okay. So you can put that on your calendar. You can calendar that. Okay. Okay.

A reminder, if I may, that people should go buy our Hall of Fame digital magazines for each of the Hall of Famers. Fun reading. Good reading. You can take it with you on a train and have something to read. Or a plane. You can have something to read on a plane as well. And so, yeah, go to your app store. Look for the Baseball Perspectives app.

And see what it's like. Remember to activate airplane mode while you read it no else your plane will crash in a fiery conflagration right exactly but that's the great thing right is that you can like it you you can read it in yes you have absolutely can you get like a bunch like a dozen or something articles at your fingertips and you don't have to have internet in fact if you're not currently calendared to take a plane trip you should probably do that just so that you can carve out some time to read these articles book a flight at your local app store yeah right on ios exactly yeah okay so there was some research on the cortez

story from a listener and member of the Facebook group, Bob Timmerman. And he works as a librarian by day. He was a history major. He took some Latin American history classes. So he felt like he should get to the bottom of this story that we've been telling a couple times. The Ned Colletti anecdote from Molly Knight's book And the Jeremy Guthrie anecdote from Andy McCullough's writing about the Royals This story about Cortez burning his ships That is used as a motivational tactic by various baseball people apparently So Bob looked into whether Cortez actually burned his ships at all

And the answer he found is no The long answer is that cortez and i'm quoting here just scuttled his ships after having all the major provisions removed he ordered the pilots of the ship to sail them onto sandbanks rendering them unusable this accomplished two things one it kept the people in his army who were disloyal to him unable to get away he had one person executed and another one maimed and two it did keep the less brave from leaving. Cortes did leave one small ship behind. Around 1546, historical sources started to mistranslate what Cortes did to his ships. Contemporary chronicles wrote quebrando, breaking, but others read it as quemando, burning. And burning does sound cooler than scuttling.

Another source says Cortes told his men that the ships had been Rendered unseaworthy by damage Done by a wood beetle Yeah I I There is a very very very subtle way that you can Misread this story as it's

A motivational technique that you're basically Backing them into a corner and getting The best out of them and What I've always heard the story not as that, but that it was specifically it was to keep traitors or what do you call them? Not traitors, deserters from deserting, which is not quite such a motivational story. It's like going, well, it's like if Ned Coletti stood up in front of the team and said, I know 15 of the 200 people in front of me are cowards and will flee at the first chance i refuse to let you leave instead they will be among you this year subtly working uh to sabotage your plans because they are cowards and uh and and babies and traitors uh so that's not as exciting as a motivational technique so

instead it becomes the uh the the backed into the corner idea where if we have nothing to to lose we'll just go but it is interesting that that so many people have chosen worse interpretations um of it now so the last mystery of this and i guess we'll ask him after the show but let's let's put down bets andy mccullough's use of scuttle in his article coincidence or no definitely not i say yes really i mean that's what you do to plans what else what else do you do to plans change you can change your plans you can abandon your plans but there's at least a one in if this article were about jeremy guthrie uh doing like a uh like let's say jeremy guthrie was going to do a pie a pie thing you know where you pie the guy who hits the game winner but he was going to do like a cherry's flambe and the pie was going to be on fire and then someone told him

that's a bad idea there's at least a one in four chance That the verb scuttle would be used there as well I would submit that even if Andy says It was not related to the nautical nature of the story That it would be related That his brain would have been more More likely to use the nautical term Because it's a ship related story So you believe

We have determined that you are a descriptivist Not a prescriptivist and that you do not believe in authorial intent um i don't know i i'm still anti-calendar as a verb i think but i i accept that people can and will use it that way so should we ask andy right now and see if we get an answer before the show sure okay add some suspense add some stakes to this podcast. And another listener in the Facebook group named Daniel from Milwaukee took issue with your off the cuff comment yesterday about Milwaukee not having beaches. He posted a picture of what really looks like a beach. I'm convinced that it's a beach.

I guess it's a Great Lakes beach. But another commenter says it's un beach i guess it's a great lakes beach but another commenter says it's unbearably cold uh-huh so they do have beaches but you wouldn't necessarily want to go there uh okay i'm not listening to you yeah i'm obviously typing in here so don't expect a response okay well i'm not gonna keep talking now now that I know my words are not working. All right. It is emailed. And if we don't get a response in the next 20 minutes or so, then we'll go one step further and tweet.

Okay. All right. Okay. Hi. Hi. What you missed is that Milwaukee does have beaches. Oh, of course they do. Yeah.

They've got lakes and the lakes have beaches oh of course they do yeah they've got lakes and the lakes have beaches right okay but there aren't there beaches like whiplash cold yes that you also missed that uh-huh okay yeah okay okay so there were some trades since we talked but before we get to trades i wanted to talk about a reaction to a trade that we already talked about, the Troy Tulewitzki trade. And Nolan Arenado had a reaction to this trade, and it was a negative reaction. He wasn't thrilled about this. He said, I was shocked, we all were, by Tulo getting traded. I'm hurt.

Tulo's been the one guy who has been by my side ever since I was in single A Asheville. It's disappointing. That is not the guy I wanted to see go. I don't know any of these dudes we got, but right. But I think if we were going to trade too low, I would think it would be for an ACE, an established veteran pitcher.

Obviously we are starting to rebuild from the ground up. Wait, he thinks he's going to trade? What league has he been following for the last 20 years? That's what I want to ask you about. So what would the trade deadline look like? What would the trade deadline look like if MLB players were running the show? If there was just some sort of Lord of the Flies scenario,

and the GM has his head on a stake and the players take over and they're the ones who have to upgrade the team is there a seller is anyone a seller are there 30 buyers no so i've told this story once before uh i think if i haven't it's a great story um that i wish was about me but my best friend when he was a kid had the John Ulrich 1990 Leaf, which was – 1990 Leaf was the set in 1990. And the John Ulrich was probably the third best card in that set, maybe the fourth, depending on what month. There was the Frank Thomas card. There was the Kevin Moss card, the David Justice justice card and the john allrood card and

and these were i mean these were more valuable like i think the thomas leaf was worth even more than the griffey 89 effort deck i mean these were the big advance at the time and um and then so the john allrood one was probably worth like 20 or 30 bucks And he had this card that had been folded in the middle. So it had a crease in the middle, but you could only see it. He had smoothed it out and you could only see it in the right light. You had to basically turn it like a hologram and see it. And he traded, so he would trade you this card and then, uh, and then afterward go, I'm glad you wanted that card. I was worried that because of that crease, you wouldn't want it. And then the guy would go, oh, come on.

And then he'd trade back for the card for like nothing. And so he did this like 30 times in his version of this story. And he claims that he got like the same people multiple times and everything. his version of this story. And he claims that he got like the same people multiple times and everything. So, uh, which is all a long way of saying that, uh,

you don't want to trade. It's like with baseball cards. You don't want to trade any cards that you have. And when you're a 10 year old kid, you want all the cards. Your goal is to have all the cards. So you don't want to trade any cards unless you have a duplicate. And quite often, not even then, because you'd like to have all of all of the cards.

But maybe a duplicate you're willing to part with or a card that is burned for some reason. Either it's got damage or you hate the player for some reason that doesn't make sense because you're 10. And that's or you know maybe you're no i'm not gonna go there it's gonna say something dark episode seven nine finally figured out not to do that people love when you do that uh so no one will ever know what i was gonna say you think you do people right now now. It's definitely going to be about death. It was not going to be about death. Everybody thinks it's about death.

This is not about death. This would have been good. Anyway, so, but you have to figure out a way to trade because you want things. And so what I'm saying, a long way of getting to this point, baseball players, I think, are like 10-year-olds with baseball cards. And they wouldn't want to give up anything. a long way of getting to this point baseball players i think are like 10 year olds uh with

baseball cards and they wouldn't want to give up anything and so your first on first blush you'd go nope would never trade anything and yet i think that uh that a lot would still happen that that they get over because they also want things now now that answers your question, would any trades get done? Yes, trades would get done. A lot fewer, though, and I agree. I don't know how the Rockies, other 24 guys, put together a trade involving Troy Tulewitzki. I don't know what possible narrative for their team's future

they could have in mind that would net them anything realistic for Troy Tulewitzki. Right. And Arenado is a young guy. He's going to be around for a while. He'll be there when Jeff Hoffman is the ace. If Jeff Hoffman turns into an ace, he'll still be there. Yeah, so is Tulo, though.

That's the thing. Tulo would have been there longer than Arenado will be there. Well, yeah, or he's signed for longer, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. So one thing we've learned this summer, or at least we've had reinforced this summer, is that personal experience means a lot to baseball players. So you can tell them that so-and-so is hitting 800 in know, 800 in some other league, and you can show them

their stats, but they probably would still opt for the guy who they played with before, and even if he wasn't really that great, but they know he's a good guy, and he plays hard, and that carries a lot of weight, and so Nolan Arnauto doesn't know these dudes. He doesn't know Jeff Hoffman. And he could go read scouting reports or watch video or something, but he won't know Jeff Hoffman. Jeff Hoffman's not even a rookie. He's less than a rookie. He might one day be a rookie. And so I think it would be really hard to ever find a baseball team run by baseball players that would want to rebuild. And with good reason reason because most of them would not be there anymore or maybe they would be because they're running the team now and so they

could keep themselves there i don't even wait for most players you're right they're playing for this summer or you know that they're a lot of them are going to be gone next year and it gets them nothing right to rebuild that's a good point i have a i have a big i have a big theory that i've been working on about clubhouse chemistry that i am saving for the book okay okay thanks for letting everyone know you're welcome um okay trades happened? Do we want to talk about Henry Mejia getting suspended for the same steroid that he was just suspended for again? Only because we've talked about this. We've talked about whether a player who has been busted for steroids publicly is more or less likely than the average player to be busted again. Right.

And concluded that he is. Is which? Is more likely. Okay. Sorry, is more likely. Wasn't an easy answer. We debated. Could have gone both ways.

But we decided that he is. And so, one data point here. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know what the mechanics of that happening are, and there's probably no point in my speculating because we could all imagine strange scenarios where that happens. I think the thing that would keep a person who wants to do steroids from not doing steroids, I'm going to use the word steroids even even though, you know, incorporate and encapsulating all PEDs. A person doesn't, a person who wants to commit a crime doesn't commit a crime because of

the, uh, high likelihood of being caught. And, uh, so my guess is that, uh, Mejia probably got, my guess, I don't know this, but Mejia probably got away with doing steroids for some time, and then he messed up and got caught, and he thought, well, I know how to not get caught now. And so then he probably thought that he had the system rigged. Yeah, that's a good theory. Okay, so what things happened? So the Nationals traded for Jonathan Papelbon, the Royals traded for Ben Zobrist, and the Angels traded for an entire outfield, essentially. Yes. They now have multiple outfields.

And the Dodgers traded for Matt Latos and Michael Morse. multiple outfields. And the Dodgers traded for Matt Latos and Michael Morse. So one thing about the Papelbon trade, and the Papelbon trade involved the Nationals exercising an option for next season at a reduced rate. So he's now going to be a National for next year too. And this was kind of a bad deal for Drew Storen, who had become the closer this year and had done just fine as the closer. This wasn't a case where they were unhappy with their closer. It was a case where they were unhappy with their bullpen as a whole. And adding a closer enabled them to move their old closer to a setup role, and now they have a better bullpen. But Drew Storen is not thrilled about this. And so reporters asked him for his reaction to this and he says all i'm going to

say is i'm aware of the move and i've talked to mike about it i've talked to my agent about it we've had some ongoing discussions until those have progressed i'm just going to leave it at that no comment for now except the comment that he just made pretty much. But as the situation... Much more comment than was expected. Yeah, yeah. Just went above and beyond. But as the situation goes, I'll keep you guys posted. What is the discussion here? What is he

going to keep us posted about? Applebon is the closer. Is is he gonna demand a trade or something what power does he have it's kind of a it's kind of a you know it's unfortunate for him because he got the job he did great in the job and to some extent wait did he talk to his his agent or did he say he was going to talk he says he has talked to his agent huh and. And, I mean, it's not like a situation where you can file a grievance or something. It's not like he has, I don't think, an option that would kick in if he gets a certain number of saves.

I guess I can check his COTS page or BP page to see if he does, but that would be the only situation like when a guy has a plate appearance threshold he has to reach and then his team benches him or something and then you could possibly file a grievance about that but this is just uh you know this is just kind of one of those things that's how it goes yeah well i don't know

what i mean i'll keep you posted as just a way of saying this conversation's over i guess uh because you're right there doesn't seem to be any action that he could take. Storen in the Nationals, this is not the first time that this has been, that they've had a conflict over his role. You probably remember. His father went public. Do you remember that? I don't remember what his father said yeah after uh in 2013 uh he right before he got demoted he was left into a game uh basically to save the bullpen

and he got bombed and gave up a bunch of runs and his father tweeted 102 degree temperature sicker than a dog let's make him wear it um and his teammates were also unhappy they criticized the team about the the way that they used him that day and about the way that they demoted him afterward um so you know i don't i don't know i don't expect him to be super articulate in that moment he probably is upset he's probably having imaginary conversations with the gm in his mind and trying to figure out exactly what he's going to do now uh i first of all uh is he i mean do you have sympathy for him sure i mean uh the whole situation where it actually affects a player's financial future,

whether he pitches in the eighth or the ninth is kind of crazy, but it exists. Let's say that he's not. He's not going to lose any money. He's not going to lose. He has 29 saves this year. He's an established closer. Yeah, that's true. When he goes into arbitration, he's going to get compared to other guys with 25 to 40 saves. No arbiter is going to be like, oh, you're 29. This guy had 31. Like, no, that's not going to be.

Probably, yeah. He's probably done enough. And I'm looking at his baseball prospectus page. So last year he had may earn additional $1 million in performance bonuses based on games finished. That was in his 2014 contract, and his 2015 contract does not say that. So I don't know if that's... He did have that in 2013 and 2014.

It doesn't say that he did this year, but maybe it doesn't include that. Yeah. Just on the... Is it fair that he loses his role to Papelbon? Is that... Like, I don't know. Obviously, the answer is, in the perfect world, the answer is whoever's best would be pitching in the most high-leverage innings

and that none of this who's got more, like, kind of claim on the job would even exist, but this is how it goes. So who do you think has more claim on the job? The guy who has it in Washington right now and is also a veteran and has been with the team a long time, or Papelbon, who is more famous but is coming from out of town uh and has arguably pitched a little bit worse although probably in his mind is certain that he has pitched better uh and uh is more of a veteran and also very good i mean like a top 10 closer in history right papelbon has 342 career saves And Storen has 95 Really is that all Yeah well he wasn't

A closer a lot of his years He was a closer in 2011 and then Not really since then Part of last year I would have guessed that he was the closer For every year but one If you'd asked me to guess It felt like he's always been the closer.

Huh, all right. But he has been on the Nationals. This is his sixth year with the Nationals, so he's at this point probably one of the longer tenured Nationals. And so you're getting this guy who is more of a veteran and more accomplished, but an outsider also, and you were displacing one of your insiders. But on the other hand, it was the only way that you could get Papelbon

because he wants to close, so you had to give him the closer job. So if you wanted to say that you should be the best teammate, then if you want to do what's best for the team, then what's best for the team is to have Jonathan Papelbon as opposed to not having him And therefore You should step aside Baseball players, yeah

Right, exactly This is not a matter of we got Papelbon Now who are we going to use We could have Papelbon and you Be cool about it Or we could just not have Papelbon And we can either look for somebody else, or we can not upgrade the bullpen. And so, yeah, Soren probably, in this case, should be cool.

And in my experience with baseball players, there is a lot of the etiquette of baseball, most of the etiquette of baseball, is geared toward perpetuating this idea that I care about the team more than myself. I don't even look at my stats until the year is over. It's the name on the front more important than the name on the back and all of that. And that, in fact, while there is all of that on the surface, in the language they use, in the jargon, in the way they behave, in the actions they take, in the small things that they do, the way they interact with each other, in fact, below the surface, they are all insanely selfish.

And they care probably more, in most innings of most games, they care more about their own performance than whether the team as a whole is doing well or not. And I don't consider that a failing on their part at all. I consider it to be a necessary deception or a necessary delusion that the game has created about itself over the course of 150 years. But they are all rational actors behaving exactly as I would and as exactly as most of us would. And when the time comes, a lot of times they're able to put that aside for the good of the team. But the standard state of being a baseball player from the time you're about

seven onward is wanting to play well so that you have something to brag to your dad about when you go home, and so that you get the job that somebody else is trying to get instead of you, and so that you get paid, and so that you don't get embarrassed in front of people, and so that you make the Hall of Fame, and so that you get a higher autograph fee when you're retired. And there is something to be said for a front office or for a manager or whatever that says, I know the delusion that you're all pretending to believe in, but I'm going to treat every single one of you exactly as I know you are, which is a self-interested person who is going to make their decision based on whether it is good for you or not. person who is going to make their decision based on whether it is good for you or not.

And I'm going to filter everything through that story about baseball instead of the story about baseball that says we're all playing for one thing. Yeah. Papelbon, by the way, has been good much longer than I expected him to be good. There was a time a year or two ago where everyone seemed to think he was about to fall apart because he had just lost a ton of velocity and he's a fly ball pitcher and fly ball park and it was just a mess it just looked like he had a really low era and was just waiting for it to skyrocket uh his even last year he had a 2.04 era and a like you know fielding independent stats that were half a run to a run and a half higher than that so but he has been he's continued to be excellent and yeah even his even when we thought he was toast because 2013 he wasn't good yeah like a huge portion of the problem was one week he had one really really

really bad week yeah and right his his strikeout rate fell a ton that year went from like 12 per nine to eight per nine but didn't his walk rate too yeah so that's that's the thing i guess he is his walk rate has gotten better his ground ball rate is good all of a sudden this year he's got a over 50 percent ground ball rate he's always been like a high 30s 40 percent guy and just eyeballing his brooks baseball page as you were talking i don't really see a reason for that he hasn't changed his pitch usage or location uh or movement um so it doesn't seem superficially as if something has changed dramatically, but he's getting more grounders all of a sudden. And yeah, he throws 91 now, and he used to throw 95,

and he is about as effective, if not more effective, than he was when he was a hard thrower. Pakoda projects him to be better than Storn for what that's worth. Mm-hmm. Okay. hard thrower so pakoda projects him to be better than storm for what that's worth okay all right so that's a trade uh that happened the phillies traded someone so that's news i guess um maybe it makes you think it's more likely that they will find someone to take cole hamels in the next day or two so the other moves the royals acquired, Ben Zobrist, and this is another example of the Royals getting someone who makes them a lot better, who just fills a hole that they had.

And Ben Zobrist fills a hole on every team, so when you speculate about where Ben Zobrist will go, you could say almost everyone. Anyone who has an opening at second base or left field or right field or just wherever Ben Zobris can play, Ben Zobris would make a lot of those teams better. So I guess he'll be playing left while Alex Gordon is out and then he'll play second because Omar Infante is their second baseman. And so Ben Zobris. And Ben Zobris is not really a Royals type hitter, right? He walks. I mean, I guess he kind of is in that he doesn't really strike out that much, and that's their kind of guy.

But he also probably walks more or historically has walked more than the Royals do as a team. And obviously he's a pretty good defender like the rest of the Royals. And so he makes the Royals better. The Royals just made themselves a whole heck of a lot better with him and Cueto. You couldn't really imagine the Royals improving themselves more at a deadline than getting one of the best starters in baseball and one of the, you know, best position players in baseball over the last

several years so that's about the biggest deadline upgrade it's possible to make and uh the a's got a couple of dudes that max muncy hasn't even heard of that's true yeah so you were you were right about billy bean not doing the balancing act of trading for guys who are good right now and trading for guys who are good later. Although, I guess, who did he? So, for Zobrist, he... Brooks is like, yeah, Aaron Brooks is like the classic AAA starter, low ceiling, ready now.

Right. You know, will eat 170 innings for you and might have an ERA plus of 100 or might have an ERA plus of like 60 and then you just punt him real quick. Yeah. Manea, though, like I love Manea. I mean, I was – this is – so remember how he traded – remember how he traded Addison Russell for Jeff Samarja and Jason Hamilton? Remember that? Yeah. remember remember how he traded addison russell for jeff samarja and jason hamilton remember that yeah and uh and then he traded jeff samarja for marcus semien and some some other stuff yeah and

it seemed like that was like not that there was necessarily anything wrong with either of those moves in isolation but it was just depressing how in like six months he had turned this great thing into this like not great thing it seemed like to me. I feel like Zobrist, he got... I think you could maybe make the case, I don't know, you could make the case maybe that he got more in return for Zobrist than he gave up. Yeah, you could. You could make that case.

It was what, Daniel Robertson was the guy that they gave up for Zobrist, and he's a good prospect, and he's in AA right now. He's 21. He's got a close to 800 OPS, so he hasn't hurt his stock all that much, I suppose. He's basically doing what he did, or, you know, I guess he's not quite doing what he did last year, but he's in a higher league. He's young for the league.

Anyway, Robertson, and who else was in that deal? John Jaso, and then Younel Escobar also came over. Right. There was a boog pal in there. There was a boog pal in there, yeah. And so, I mean, probably Robertson is seen as being higher, but it's hard to do the straight math because uh well for a few that's a few there's a few reasons it's hard to do the straight math one is that jay so and

and you know escobar complicate things another is that zobrist came with a draft pick but he left without a draft pick uh attached to him and uh a third thing is that i just like sean menea like he uh i don't necessarily like him enough to pronounce his name correctly i have no idea how to pronounce it mania mania but uh he was pakoda's one of pakoda's uh i'm trying to remember exactly the right way to phrase this but he has one of the highest basically breakout percentages among prospects uh by pakoda's reckoning and he was uh he's he's very boomer bust because he's had arm troubles but he was like uh projected at various points of his healthy amateur career to go much higher in the draft than he did and uh and i just always like him

so yeah you're right it doesn't i mean it seems like they got most of a Ben Zobrist season and got most of what they traded for Ben Zobrist back for Ben Zobrist. Yeah, good work. Good work on both sides. So yeah, totally strange to see the Royals be the team that does this, but encouraging lots of kudos to Dayton Moore who's gotten

lots of the opposite of kudos over the years yeah so what are the Royals are the Royals the favorite in Vegas do you know? I don't know yes in fact the Royals are currently the favorite to win the 2015 World Series in Vegas.

The favorite. The Kansas City Royals are the favorite. Good for them. Wow. And yet, what is it that the projections are still missing about the Royals, I wonder? By the way, twice as good of odds as any other american league team uh-huh which would not accord with what playoff odds say either the playoff odds support report at bp or at fangraphs or whatever has uh the yankees with better world series

odds than the than the royals and also theinals, which is fine, and the Dodgers also. I wonder what it is that the projections are still just not impressed by the Royals. I mean, it's not surprising because projections don't change that quickly, but I wonder if there's something about the Royals that says that they should change quickly because I know that the projections coming into the year had the Royals at 500 or maybe below 500, probably considerably below 500 in Pakoda's case. And now the BP Playoff Odds Report has them with a 516 expected winning percentage over the rest of the season. And the Royals, or the Fangraphs, has them at 517, and that one at least definitely includes Zobrist. I don't know whether the BP one does yet, but that's, uh, no one would agree with that, right? Like, no one thinks that's right.

And yet we could be wrong, but the Royals are 61 and 38, and they've won, I don't know, like 15 of their last 20 games or something. And they just added Two of the better players In baseball and Yet the projections still see them as a You know 516 Team Which is you know not great It's it's what's a 516

Winning percentage It's 84 wins So I don't think anyone who's watching baseball would think that the royals are a true talent 84 win team right now and yet the stats say they are and often the stats are right about things that no human would say but there's something about the royals that is just not showing up and i don't know whether it's defense whether defensive projections are not good enough your guess that would that would that is i assume your your guess right this is probably my guess something about incorporating an extremely good team defense into

a projection because their pitching staff is not good right their defense their run prevention is not bad. And I would imagine that that is a strange, they are a strange outlier of a team. There aren't usually teams that have a defense this good. And also there aren't many competitive teams that have a pitching staff this bad. And so when you look at each of those, then you probably would think, well, the pitching staff's not good enough to be a great team,

but they do prevent runs because it's all obviously a cumulative thing. So that would be my guess. I could ask Rob maybe by this time tomorrow. And do you have any explanation of the Angels trading for every outfielder? Trading for David DeJesus? Trading for David DeJesus, trading for David Murphy, trading for who they traded for before that? Shane. Yes, Shane Victorino. I don't know. I guess a lot of those guys, I haven't looked to see what their depth chart looks like now, but a lot of those guys are kind of platoon guys right so i assume that they

fit in a platoon style arrangement like uh victorino and i guess victorino was the switch hitter who couldn't switch hit and then stopped switch hitting and i don't know what his splits look like now david de jesus's could be a d. Yeah, I don't know. Murphy's more of a platoon guy, or at least the Indians were using him that way. So I guess there's a way that you can fit all of those guys together. You could have maybe just kept Josh Hamilton instead, but Josh Hamilton gets hurt a lot and they didn't like Josh Hamilton. So instead they got a bunch of outfielders. So that that's fine And Dodgers trade Is there anything we need to say about the Dodgers trade?

They were rumored to be going after The top starters available They were going hard on Cole Hamels was the report A day or so ago And then I guess maybe the asking price was too high So they settled for Matt Latos instead And Latos has been

Better lately And hisos has been better lately and his stuff has been better lately i think since he came off the dl so yeah everyone knew this dodgers needed a starter they got one okay yeah i guess you might say that this sort of shows what you can do with money but also the limits of what you can do with money you can buy matt latos right in the middle of a year even though he's not a free agent you can just go buy matt latos and give up nothing for him and you can even buy a number 34 draft pick and give up nothing for it uh if you're willing to take on bad contracts however you can't get cole Hamels for money.

You can't get Troy Tulewitzki for money. They should have gotten Troy Tulewitzki, but you can't get Troy Tulewitzki for money in the middle of the season. So the limits, I don't know, I guess that's where the limits are. Pretty good ballplayers are available. Great ones aren't. Okay. Is that it? They should get Matt Kemp. They should not get Matt Kemp. No.

But they could if they wanted to. Yes. There could be lots of Padres news in the next day or two. There could be lots of Tigers news. Let's just vow tomorrow to talk about the Padres. One way or another? That'll be the topic. Okay.

Tune in. Except we should probably wait for Friday That'll be the topic. Okay. Tune in. Except we should probably wait for Friday. See what they did. Okay. All right. One of these days, we'll talk about the Padres. Okay.

So that is it for today. We'll be back later this week. We'll talk about whatever else happens. You can join the Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild. You can send us emails at podcast at baseballperspectives.com. Rate, effectively wild. You can send us emails at podcast at baseball perspectives.com rate review, subscribe to the show and support our sponsor,

the play index by going to baseball reference.com and using the coupon code BP to get the discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription. Enjoy your rumor reading. We will be back soon. What was that? That was a duck. Why was that a duck? I just went to the Long Island Ducks.

And when you get there, it immediately quacks. Wow. That site is not safe for work. No, it's not. It's a loud quack. Hey, can we put a call out if any of our listeners are going to any long island ducks games to let me know because i if they do i have a request okay i'll stick that in there any point between now and the end of the year i have a request okay all right thank you