Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 721: The Mechanics and Morality of the Mets’ Matt Harvey Dilemma

Episode Date: September 8, 2015

Ben and Sam banter about GM smack talk, then discuss the Mets, Matt Harvey, and innings limits.

It's only right. I don't play with life, so I don't play with mics. Mic control starts today. Unless you want to learn a hard way to get scarred way. This is not a game. We are not players. We do not play. Mic control starts today. Unless you want to learn a hard way to get scarred way. This is not a game. We are not players. We do not play. Good morning and welcome to episode 721 of Effectively Wild, 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. Hello, Ben.

Hello. How are you? Okay. Excellent. I'm home. You're home Okay. Excellent. I'm home. You're home. It ended. I'm home, and you sound like a new man. It's amazing what a microphone can do. Yep. Ben shipped me a microphone.

I sure did. What was that about? Why? Why now? I did it partly because you lost your old microphone, right? Which was not a fancy microphone, but it did the job. It was like the thing that you plugged into a cell phone, yeah. Yeah. And so you lost your microphone and were using the computer microphone. And I knew that left to your own devices, there was no way that that was going to change.

So I had to take action. I used the computer microphone for hundreds of episodes. Yeah. Well, it's not a very good podcast. Yeah. I'm torn between liking this podcast to be as low effort as possible and therefore liking the aesthetic of a person who cares not what i sound like and uh using free stuff that just showed up like it took it arriving at my door there was no effort for you you had to

you had to open the box but that was exactly it is the it is the truest expression of low effort is being so bad that people just give you stuff like just please like put on this put on these pants i'm the guy wandering around stop making us sound bad it would be a good strategy for getting free pants to just wander around yeah in no pants yeah sure okay hey did Yeah, sure. Okay. Hey, did we ever talk about Kevin Malone and Kevin Towers on this podcast? We, something, I wrote something, maybe I wrote something about Kevin Malone and his run-ins with the fans and the stands. I don't know if that came up in the podcast or I just wrote about it, but what are we, what context are you talking about them in? Yeah, I don't know i i'm well i'll give you the context but i also am not sure it's vaguely familiar because we were

somebody recently asked us if there were any coaching feuds that we knew of like managers feuding or coaches feuding with other managers and uh you and i talked about briefly uh in like we we g chatted about whether we could think of any. And somehow like George emailed me this a couple minutes ago. And it's very relevant to our discussion, but I don't think George was there when we had our discussion. So suspicious, but useful. He reminded us, he reminded me of the Kevinvin malone's kevin towers feud yeah right so

there was what kevin kevin towers said he was the new sheriff in town when he no no kevin kevin malone signed uh oh right kevin malone signed kevin brown from kevin towers yeah in 1998 and declared there's a new sheriff in town and uh this was, Kevin Towers took such offense to this that he posed the next year on the Padres media guide in sheriff's gear. And when Kevin Malone got fired, he sort of did a little victory lap and all that. But the only reason I bring this up

is because this doesn't seem like that bad a thing to say. And yet two and a half years later, when Kevin Malone was fired, it was in every article, every single article about him getting fired, talked about how he had declared himself the new sheriff in town. And in many cases said that he embarrassed the team and listed this as an example of him embarrassing the team. And we've never really talked about unwritten rules of GMing that I know of. Well, we talked about Dave Stewart revealing trade talks. Yeah, we have actually talked a lot about unwritten rules of GMing, now that I think

about it. We've never talked about specifically this one, though. I guess this would be the bat flip equivalent for a GM, right? You sign a guy and then you talk. You talk smack. This seems like fairly banal bulletin board material. It kind of blows my mind that two and a half years later it was still worth bringing up

as though it were part of what contributed to him getting fired. Do you think GMs have a dramatically different limit on what they're allowed to say or what is acceptable? Or is this just a 1998 thing? Yeah, well, I don't know if there are any GMs who would say something like that now that we've lost Kevin Towers. But it didn't seem like... It wasn't Kevin Towers. It was Kevin Malone. I know. Well, we lost him first, but then we lost kevin towers who is

someone who would say something like that but it doesn't seem that egregious to me it seemed it's like an expression people say there's a new sheriff in town it's not even necessarily that braggy anymore it's just it's just like saying cliche yeah right a cliche. Yeah, right. So I don't know. Maybe it was the way he said it or something. I don't know. But you don't hear GMs talk smack very much. I mean, you don't hear them say anything very interesting for the most part anymore because they all say kind of cautious, know cautious corporate sounding sort of stuff yeah

okay i um uh kevin towers by the way george uh george goes on to say that he uh he saw kevin towers who is now a special assistant to reds gm walt jockety and says george i saw him earlier tonight he was in billings montana, watching the Reds Pioneer League affiliate. Towers Backpack still has a Diamondbacks name tag that had the pseudonym Jesse James on it. Wow. Good sighting. Interesting. Which doesn't seem any, like, I don't know how that's better than saying there's a new sheriff in town.

I don't know. Feels weird. How are there's a new sheriff in town. I don't know. It feels weird. How are you, Ben? He's an outlaw. I guess Jesse James was a sheriff also. Was he a sheriff also? No, I don't think so. There is a sheriff named Jesse James in Oklahoma right now.

So maybe it's an homage to him. Maybe it is. You got anything you want to talk about? Depends what we're talking about. Are we talking about Matt Harvey? Yeah. Okay, then no. This is Robert Daly, the Dodgers top executive at the time,

who talked about Malone's comments two and a half years later to Murray Chass quote he sort of dug himself into a little bit of a hole it was an it was an accumulation of things that took place but this has to do with distractions we're here to play baseball not have people read about all these other things all he said is I'm the sheriff there's a new sheriff in town. Well, yeah. Nowadays they just say that there's a process in place and we're looking at 2018 or something or we're investing in the system and a bunch of boring soundbites. So compared to anything you'd hear now,

aside from possibly Dave Stewart, it's pretty edgy. But compared to anything else, it's not. Hang on. I'm trying to find Kevin Towers in long rider type western outfit. Wait a minute. Hang on. No.

I saw burn. I saw in my first Google search, I saw burn. And for a split second, I thought I might have found a burn the shits reference. But I didn't. All right. Forget it. I don't need to see Kevin Towers and chaps. All right, so, Ben, we talked briefly about Matt Harvey a couple days ago.

And at the time, it was about 20 minutes old, the story of Matt Harvey. And a lot has developed since then. There have been press conferences. There have been doctors quoted. There have been plans laid out. There's been a Players' Tribune article. There have been media, second and third wave media criticisms of various aspects of various people's behavior. There's been a Mets victory over the Nationals.

And today, Tuesday, there will be a Matt Harvey start. So what do you want to talk about here? Well, I was going to bring up the optimal way to parcel out the remaining Matt Harvey innings. Okay. Now that we know that there is a limit. So the limit is now what? Well, 180 in the regular season, it seems like, and then unspecified. And 199?

Seems like not quite specified. Can't do 200. What, 1... Well, 180 in the regular season, it seems like, and then unspecified. And 199? 199? Seems like not quite specified. Can't do 200. 200 is too, too much. 199 I can handle. 200, though, starts with a 2. Yeah, so what I didn't realize when we talked about this 20 minutes after anyone started talking about this was that his workload is somewhat anomalous if you look at the fairly limited history of guys coming back from Tommy John surgery and if you just use innings which

is not the best way to do it probably but it's the way that everyone defaults to because it's easy so he's you know there aren't many guys who have come back from Tommy John surgery and pitched this much in an inning. The record, I think, including postseason innings for a guy in his first season after Tommy John is John Lackey in 2013, which was 215 and a third. And that was including postseason so if the Mets went deep into the postseason Harvey would exceed that so it's a lot and and the guys who have pitched over 200 innings and it's only four guys who've come back from TJ to pitch 200 innings postseason included Jake Westbrook Tommy John Adam Wainwright and Lackey and all those guys were older when they did it I don't know if that matters but they at least didn't have as long a road ahead of them presumably so Harvey is is young and you know young-ish and is throwing a lot and you could say that a lot of those innings have been easy and he hasn't thrown all that many pitches in many of those innings and that would

probably be true and he throws lots of fast that many pitches in many of those innings, and that would probably be true. And he throws lots of fastballs, and maybe the fastballs are less stressful than other types of pitches would be. So there are other ways you could break it down, but it is a lot of innings. So it's reasonable to have some concern, I suppose, except it's all very speculative still because there aren't a lot of guys who have exceeded this so it's not like they're pointing to previous pitchers and saying well this guy went past 200 innings and look what happened to him it's a sample size of four in 40 years or so so it's just totally a precautionary thing i mean i guess there are actual medical reasons why you think it would be prudent but it's

not like you can point to previous examples of guys who threw a lot of innings in their first season back and then they fell apart because there just isn't really much of a precedent yeah i mean much has been made of the fact that innings is a strange unit of measurement for someone to to use when you could use pitches although there is something to an inning uh that captures more than a pitch because an inning also includes warm-up pitches uh and um so you know innings if that matters yeah so i don't know i mean innings i don't know that pitches necessarily is uh completely replaces innings they They're both somewhat relevant. But anyway, but it seems to me that the key question here is simply, is he tired? If he's not tired, then the whole idea of all of this, of all concerns about overuse,

are that when a pitcher throws a lot, he gets tired. When he gets tired, A, he tends to lose his mechanics. He might compensate in other ways and put other parts of his body at risk. And if he doesn't get enough time to rest, the normal wear and tear on his arm, the micro tears that happen in every pitcher's elbow all the time, don't get a chance to heal and rejuvenate and regenerate themselves or whatever the correct terms are. And so never in any of this have I heard Matt Harvey say, and I'm tired, which feels weird

to me. I don't know if he just doesn't want to say it. I don't know if it's simply that given that baseball players to some degree have shot themselves in the foot by 100 years of militant policing of each other's toughness, maybe Matt Harvey knows or maybe Scott Boris knows or maybe somebody knows that that wouldn't play well, whereas Doctor told me maybe would play better. I don't know that this is playing much better, but maybe it is. But it feels like if Matt Harvey said, I'm gassed, man, like I'm totally

gassed, that the medical opinion would make a lot of sense. We have virtually no sample size that we've studied, no reliable evidence suggesting that 190 is any worse than 180, or no reason to think that Matt Harvey is either like everybody else or unlike everybody else, therefore do this strangely round number, then I forget where I was going with that, but it feels harder to buy into. Yeah. Well, two or three years ago when I talked to Glenn Fleissig from the American Sports Medicine Institute who works with Dr. James Andrews, he said that there isn't really a reason for an innings limit and that it's really just dependent on not stressing the pitcher. And if you can give him the appropriate amount of rest between starts, then there's no cutoff or there shouldn't really be a cutoff as long as he feels okay

and you're not making him throw every four days or throw 140 pitches or whatever it is. There's no reason why you need a number. And the Mets seem to have handled him fairly carefully. They've skipped a start orman rotation, which Mets starters didn't take to, but that was kind of an attempt to lighten the workload on all of their youngish Tommy John survivors. So, yeah, I don't know why there is a number other than the fact that Harvey hasn't had his payday yet. He's made a few million dollars, but he hasn't gotten the big contract yet. And both he and Boris would like him to gotten the big contract yet and both he and boris would like him to get the big contract in a couple years and so that's a consideration too that's

why you why they're pushing for it you would you would think um so the question that was interesting me is if he only has this number of innings, and it would help if we had an exact number, but they're not going to announce an exact number, but if he has two regular season starts worth, and he would have probably five starts left if there was no limit, so he's going to be rested to some extent, and so he's starting today, so that's one of those starts. And he's gone fairly deep into games this year. He's averaging like six and two thirds innings per start. So how do you use his remaining 14 or so innings in the regular season? And then how do you use him in the postseason? And there was a Bob Nightingale report that said he

might be severely limited in October. He might make only one start a series. He might make 60 pitch starts. And Sandy Alderson responded to that by saying, there is no plan. They haven't discussed a plan yet. So I don't know what to believe about that. But if he has 14 innings left for the rest of the regular season how do you use those to maximize the benefit to the Mets and maximize his preparedness for the postseason because the Mets beat the Nationals last night Monday night so that makes their odds somewhat more secure. So they have a five-game lead on the Nationals, and their playoff odds are somewhere around the 85%, 90% range of winning the NL East at this point. So it's not completely locked up. You wouldn't want to, say, just shut him down because you might need his starter too,

and you also want him to be in shape to pitch the postseason, whatever that entails. I would basically shut him down, and I would use those 14 innings, or if I could, even fewer, to ramp him up again. So, I mean, I would basically shut him down for the next two weeks probably, and then have him go. It makes sense to start him today. So I mean I would basically shut him down for the next Two weeks probably And then Have him go It makes sense to start him today

I mean if you're going to start him You might as well start him against the Nationals Yeah that's true So yeah So now I've got seven left Yeah basically If he goes deep I don't know

How much do you think This is seven left yeah basically if he if he goes deep i don't know i don't know that i'm just how much are we taught how much do you think this is that uh this is a uh such a fraught conversation because everybody expects the mets to choke like if this were expects the mess to choke and to mishandle injuries and health so it's kind of a combination of those things yeah uh if this were a team that otherwise had%, what playoff odds do you need to get to before you can reasonably talk about resting your guys? I mean, in a normal situation, like if this were just, you know, Cologne or something, you wouldn't start resting him right now. If it were, you know, some normal pitcher, you wouldn't start resting him. But right now, we're trying to get a guy rest. We're trying to leverage his innings. I would rather, I mean,

the tricky thing about saying I would rather have those innings come in October is that, you know, you might only have one series in October or two series in October. So you might be saving him for a series that don't come. But then on the other hand, if the series doesn't come, then who cares? Your season is basically what it is anyway, right? So I would say, I mean, I would want to save him as much as possible for October. I think at this point, the World Series kind of win expectancy

of Mets games is hugely, hugely, hugely tilted to the games in October. There are very, I mean, it seems to me fairly unlikely that the difference between the Mets making the postseason and not making it at this point is going to be the difference between whatever replaces Matt Harvey. Like, they'll probably win, and they might lose, but, you know, they might have lost anyway. Who knows? Like, at this point, like, we do this with the trade deadline, right? When we take trades and then we look at the changing postseason odds,

playoff odds for teams that have added players, and it's usually even then in, like, July and August, or, I guess, late July going into August with two months to go, even then it's usually just a couple of points that it moves. And now we have a team that is very likely to make it under any circumstances that only has three and a half weeks to go or whatever it is. How many weeks? Three weeks to go? whatever It is how many weeks three weeks to go What is season in 28th So you know probably the odds are

Like almost Not moving at all with Harvey at this point Yeah and the other thing is they don't Really need Harvey Right now I mean he's Better than the alternative but it's not Such a huge gap because Steven Matz is back now

And he had a good start back. And they have Logan Verrett, who's kind of been a swing man, and he made a spot start and went eight innings in course field and was good. And so they have, you know, like five or six viable starters without Harvey. So it's not like they're going to be starting some AAA scrub when he's not pitching. They have plenty of pitchers. Yeah. Although they, almost everybody who is pitching is also going to be, I mean, not everybody, but a lot of people that are pitching are going to also be coming up against, if not innings limits, at least innings career highs or, you know, That's true.

If not innings limits, at least innings career highs or, you know, everybody goes into October exhausted. And so there is something nice about being able to go to the six-man rotation. So, yeah, I mean, honestly, like, if I could, I would shut him down completely and use all the innings for October. But the Strasburg precedent is that once you shut a guy down, you can't, for some reason, bring him back. I don't know if that was specific to Strasburg precedent is that once you shut a guy down, you can't, for some reason, bring him back. I don't know if that was specific to Strasburg. You wouldn't worry about a three-week layoff

and not having pitched in a game? No, that's why you don't do it, right? So that's why I would want to have some innings available to ramp him up, but I would try to limit them as much as possible. I don't know. I could see giving him two weeks off and then having him do a three-inning start and a four-inning start and then going into October and having an extra, I don't know,

I don't know how many you want out of him. But look, if it gets to October and the dude shuts himself down in October, I mean, what are you going to do? Like, I'm assuming that are you going to do? I'm assuming that I get Matt Harvey to October, and he's going to pitch for me. I'm assuming that all this talk goes away in October, that it's not going to be game six of the World Series. It's going to be like, not today, Skip.

Agent says no. I know, right, because whatever value they're hoping to preserve here by keeping him healthy, I think, would be frittered away if he were to refuse to take the ball in October. There are teams that would just not sign him, right? gets to October and doesn't have any actual damage that we know of and is just purely as a preventative measure refusing to pitch at the most important point of the year. I mean, a potential suitor would just say, I don't want to deal with a guy who does that or his agent.

I just don't want a part of that. I don't want to have to have my players' usage dictated by the agent's war with the media or through the media. So I think at that point, you're right. It would hurt him more than it would help him contract-wise. I don't know that I agree with that necessarily. I mean, it would hurt him more if he tore his ligament in that start and couldn't pitch for a year but the odds that that would happen are probably pretty low you really think that three years from now when he's healthy and he's going 235 innings routinely and he hits free agency and he's 28

years old some team's gonna be like i don't know he might pull the post-Tommy John scam on me again. Maybe not, but I don't know. Makeup concerns dog players for a while. I could see it being an issue. I mean, I could see, I don't know what the reaction would be. I'm surprised by how muted the reaction has been so far from players. Yeah, outside of New York tabloids. I don't know. Look, I'm not out here trying

to make hot takes. Not a hot take, chef. But I still find it just... To me, if it's September posturing, like I said, I'm on the September's more or less a wrap and so if

it's weird that it got public uh and it doesn't necessarily speak all that well to the way that anybody has handled it but uh if this is just about getting out of some September innings fine if he's like legit about maybe not pitching in October or if it became necessary, for instance, the Mets had lost today and maybe lost tomorrow and lost the next day and whatever, and it got close and he wasn't going to do it, I would find that horrifying.

And I try not to judge players. And particularly, I try not to be the pitch through pain guy or the tough it out guy but i mean i think that the thing about the the thing about the thing we don't like about the play through pain mentality is that besides being macho and kind of dumb and aggro, is that it's self-defeating. That you play through pain, you're probably not going to be very good. You play through pain, you might hurt yourself worse, you might have a serious injury, it might affect your career.

And telling another person to play through pain shows a serious lack of perspective about all the things that playing through pain entails and what it means for that guy's career. Okay, fine. Given, I totally agree with that, 100%, in almost all cases. However, I also think that you have to have some perspective about what you're doing here. The point is to win a World Series. That is the goal. It might be an illusion. It might be an

illusion. It might be a delusion. But these teams have to convince themselves that what they're doing matters. And what they're doing is pursuing a World Series. And it just seems to me that when you get to a point that it is the most important time to play, and you're worried about a risk to your arm and your career that is perhaps hypothetical but perhaps real, I still feel like you have to do it. Like I feel like most guys even knowing the risks, even without the peer pressure, would choose to play. Not because they're trying to show how tough they are, but because that's where their priorities lie. They want to win.

I would do it, okay? And I feel like there's something hard to relate to about a guy faced with this situation who chooses a different set of priorities. I don't think, I mean, I don't, again, I don't want to say he's like a bad dude or that there's anything like wrong about it. It's just foreign to me. I think about Rob Nen ending his career, essentially, to pitch the Giants to the World Series. And it's sad and it's hard and I wish that it hadn't happened to him.

But I also think he made the right decision. Yeah, well you can. Sometimes you have a bad choice sometimes there's no right answer sometimes you get hurt sometimes your arm breaks that's part of that's part of what being an athlete is is putting yourself at risk physically and doing things that are uncomfortable or painful or somewhat risky and obviously there's a line there we're not saying that anyone should come back after you know a head injury and put themselves at risk of like some sort of you know serious

debilitating lifetime problem but but this is not that this is not like a human rights issue this is just a small percentage chance presumably like we don't even, we don't even know how much more risk Matt Harvey is in with each additional inning relative to any other pitcher. And, you know, because every pitcher incurs some slight risk with every additional inning pitched, whether or not it's the mounting strain of cumulative innings or whether it's just, you know, any particular inning could be the one where a guy gets hurt. So the more you pitch, the more risk you are in.

And it seems intuitive that a guy who is coming back from surgery would be at more risk, and maybe there's some sort of data that shows that. But no one is showing the study. And so I don't know if there is a study. No one is coming forward and saying, we looked at it and here are the percentages and here's how much Matt Harvey's risk of recurrence increases with each additional pitch or each additional inning. And since we're not seeing that,

I have to think that no one possesses that information. Or, I don't know, maybe Boris has done some study. Maybe doctors have done some study. Maybe there's something they're looking at beyond just, it seems like this is risky. But if it's so nebulous and speculative, and we're talking about a few percentage points of risk either way, then, yeah, that seems like the sort of risk that has to be acceptable for a major league pitcher. All right. So, Ben, let me I want to ask two hypotheticals, one of which was asked of us by Jake Mintz of SESBUS Family Barbecue.

Jake Mintz of SESBIS Family Barbecue. If you're Sandy Alderson and Boris or Harvey came to you and said, Matt will pitch for a sum of money, how much money would you pay Harvey to pitch as much as you want the rest of the year? So he basically comes to you. He tells you that he's following the orders of Dr. Andrews. He is not going to pitch for you beyond 180.

This was sent before, by the way, the adjusted and the player's tribute thing. But let's just say that he says, I'm stopping after 180, so you have 14 innings more of me, or you pay me X, and I will pitch every start. I'll pitch on two days rest for the rest of the year. How much would you pay? I guess basically the question question is how much is matt harvey worth from this point on yeah well i would only do it if i could do it in complete

secret because i don't think it would be worth the precedent of having players be able to hold out and say that they will pitch for a certain amount of money per start or whatever, because then you'd open up the door for all kinds of players to do that. So assuming that weren't a concern, I like, I would take a, we do not negotiate with terrorists approach to that if it were going to be public, but what it would be worth to the Mets at this point in the season to have matt harvey pitching instead of the next best guy i mean it's probably it's probably like close to six figures right it's probably in the six figures six figures like a hundred thousand dollars if it's you mean a hundred thousand dollars ben per per start oh first start in the okay in the postseason, I would say probably seven figures.

Off the top of my head, to some degree it matters who he's replacing. Like you said, the Mets have a really good rotation. The guy he's replacing is also good. But the guy he's replacing would be in the bullpen. Although, not necessarily. I don't know. It would be interesting to see how they handle necessarily i'm not sure that uh i don't know it'd be interesting to see how they handle their like if it's matt's i wonder how they'll use him

anyway uh i would say though that if you take a ace level pitcher a true ace like matt harvey uh i would gladly pay him three million per start in the postseason yeah sure and over maybe and that's just a guy maybe maybe more maybe a lot more now the question is though if he's asking for a lump sum you don't know how many of those starts you're going to get because maybe like i said maybe you lose in the division series and then september as stated i'm not that big on september right now so i think i would pay matt harvey 17 million dollars to pitch that seems low doesn't that seem low you'd pay him that as a lump sum right now not knowing how how many times you're gonna need him i would yeah hmm yeah that seems that seems low actually you

know what it's that seems low as an idea like I feel like if we're talking about Mike Trout, I feel like I'd go a lot higher. But it also feels high in the Mets circumstance. Yeah. I think given the uncertainty about how many postseason starts he'll make, if you were going start to start, then I would definitely say something like $3 million per start or more the later you go into the postseason or the more important the game is in that series, and the more it swings your championship probability. But right now,

he might only make one postseason start. And I mean, aside from the fact that the mets have no money and couldn't do this anyway but i i think i think it's definitely not low given the risk of only needing him once or twice okay uh second hypothetical say you are matt harvey you're in matt harvey's body and it's game 7 of the World Series and it's your spot it's your turn to pitch it doesn't even matter who's next it's your turn to pitch and you know somehow

I don't know how you know this but you know somehow that if you go out on that mound that day that Gani Jones has come to you and he has actually prophesied this to you he knows this for a fact if you pitch that day you will miss the next year completely do you do it yeah i was gonna bring this up earlier the question of whether you could even possibly spin it as

in the interest of the mets as opposed to in the interest of har Mets as opposed to in the interest of Harvey alone. Because the Mets have Harvey for three more years, and there's good reason to think that they'll be competitive throughout those years. They'll have all these pitchers. They'll have Wheeler back. They'll have one of the best rotations in baseball heading into next year. And so there's every reason to think that they will be challenging for playoff spots again just like the nationals just like the nationals so is there any way that you could spin it you being matt harvey and say that you are

thinking of the mets future and not solely your own future And there are three more seasons in which you are under Mets control and you want to be available during those seasons and you don't want to miss one like you missed 2014. And I still don't think that you could convincingly sell that without some hard numbers or some sort of science backing up the risk. So if you knew it and it was game seven of the World Series and you were going to miss all of next year, I mean, you should do it for the Mets, right? I think you should do it because if what matters is winning a championship, then you're going to have more of an impact in this one start than you are likely to have in an entire season of 2016 starts because the odds are still against you know heavily against the Mets

being in the World Series next year even if they are a pennant winner this year so odds are he'll have more influence over the Mets odds of winning a World Series in this one start you know and and I guess it depends who would be starting in place of him but probably in this one start than he would in an entire season to come so I think if he were being purely selfless he should do it all right long long answer thanks Ben same same question but instead of missing next year his career will end i wouldn't do it and i wouldn't expect anyone to do it it might still be in the mets best interest to do it yeah now okay i agree uh now i'm gonna change this a little bit instead of 25 or whatever he is he's 32 and let's just say he's

not going to make the hall of fame he's had a great career but he's not he's not a hall of famer he's had his big contract i mean yeah he's got money yeah but he's had the big one he's 32 by that point he would have had the big one yeah so and the question is should he would he would i blame him if he didn't know would you you're in his 32 year old body and your career is gonna end i would only do it if everyone knew the sacrifice i was making if no one knew that i had this knowledge and i was i was making the sacrifice then it wouldn't be worth it to me. If I could retire a hero, maybe. If I had never pitched a game seven, I think I'd do it anyway.

I think even without the hero. And I would do it probably at any point after I got my first big payday and after my Hall of Fame chances were down to roughly zero. That's a lot. You're asking him to give up, you know, I mean, he could pitch into his late 30s. He could pitch till 40. He could get hit by a car tomorrow.

What do you, you know? It's like sometimes bad things happen. In this case, the thing that you were working your whole life came with a bad thing. And you just have to accept it. It came with a bad thing. But a bad thing could happen in that game and you could lose it, you know, one nothing on a dribbler and that would be the end of your career. You're there for it.

You're there for that. And you got all those teammates who you got to, the only way you get through it is you convince yourself that those guys are your brothers that you guys are at war together and the way you're doing is the most important thing in the world tomorrow you're gonna wake up and realize

well that was a big lie I told myself but the only way you get through it is if you tell yourself that so I think you do it. I wouldn't do it right now, though. Not when you're 25 and have all this future ahead of you and have only made like $9 million. Yeah, I think less. I think it's like $4 million.

Really? Including the signing bonus? Yeah, what was his signing bonus? We should be able to look that up He was a 7th pick What about all that money he got from Whatever he was Shilling on Dan Patrick

They should have paid him well For his commitment to that contract He got 2.5 Okay, so 2.5 And he's making roughly the minimum so far in his career so it's i think i think it's only like 4 million or something uh yeah i didn't realize i thought that he had uh i thought he had one more year of service time than you did i thought he'd had one arb year but no yeah all right well anyway yeah i wouldn't i wouldn't ask it of him now but okay all right

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I'm looking for tools and options. I don't have tools and options here i'm trying preferences what about now oh yeah that's yeah i'm gonna mute it oh you sound so resonant now