Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 724: Debating David Ortiz and Buying Stock in Baseball Players

Episode Date: September 14, 2015

Ben and Sam discuss David Ortiz’s Hall of Fame candidacy and Angels starter Andrew Heaney’s decision to sell stock in himself.

🎵 Tell me when you see me Good morning and welcome to episode 724 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. Hi Ben, how are you? I'm doing well. Do any play indexing this weekend? I didn't. I did. I was away from my computer most of the weekend. And how are you? I'm doing well. Do any play indexing this weekend? I didn't. I did.

I was away from my computer most of the weekend. Upstate, without internet. And I need internet to play index. Hmm. Mm-hmm. All right. Well, how are you? Okay.

Follow any baseball? Do you have anything you want to banter about? Anything? Yeah. Anything this weekend you wanted to talk about? Well, we usually start our shows by talking about Ryan Webb or Matt Albers or Chin Wei Cao or someone on that level of fame. But maybe we could start just briefly talking about players who were very much in the news this weekend. There are two guys I'm interested in.

One, David Ortiz. Can we just do a two-minute David Ortiz Hall of Fame discussion? Yeah, by all means. Because everyone is doing that, but it's kind of an interesting one. So what do you think? Yeah, I mean, I'd put him in there.

Yeah, it's going to have to be a non-standard argument for him because just the usual Sabre thing of citing his peak war and his career war or his Jaws score is not going to work for him. Just looking at Jay Jaffe's Jaws score, which you can find on any player's baseball reference page, it compares Ortiz to first baseman because there aren't really any dh's or hardly any players who've dh'd as much as as he has in the hall of fame so it compares him to first baseman and by that standard he's not really very close he has 50 career war and the standard the average hall of fame first baseman has 66 and Ortiz has 33 peak war and the average hall of fame first baseman has 66, and Ortiz has 33 peak war, and the average Hall of Fame First Baseman has 42 peak war, and peak war is like your best seven seasons. So he's not close by that standard. So then you start getting into other things, maybe the fact that the Twins didn't handle him right and he was ready to hit at a high level

before they unleashed him or before the red sox unleashed him maybe that's a consideration although there are lots of players throughout baseball history who were not promoted when they were ready and maybe they could have done better if they weren't blocked by someone else and it's hard to say whether you should take that into account because we care about what they actually did, not what they theoretically could have done. And then the other thing is that the DH consideration. And then there's, of course, the postseason consideration, which is not included in war, but if it were in his case, would make a very large difference. i i want to by the way i tried to interrupt you before you gave all that but i didn't do a very good job of it i i'm not

sure that i would put him in or not i it's borderline but i'm definitely not mad at people who do and um it seems like uh i i was anticipating that five years after he retired, there would be a big fight where he got Jack Morris. And I think he's more deserving than Jack Morris, and I don't have any issue with it. And so I would not be mad at anybody who voted for him. I'm both pleased to see that while this is controversial it does seem like even among the war sorters among us

it's not as controversial it's not like he's not quite being dismissed so insultingly as I think sometimes Morris was and as sometimes I did to Morris so that's nice I'm displeased to see that we're having this discussion three years before he retires. Yeah, that's true.

And, I mean, when I say I would put him in, I think I, I don't know. It depends how crowded the ballot is. I mean, I would put him, personally, I would put him at about the level that Craig Biggio is. Personally, I would put him at about the level that Craig Biggio is. And Craig Biggio was, he did not make my ballot when I had to do it, but it was a crowded ballot. He was the 11th name, basically. I didn't, I don't think I ever, I mean, my ballot, my fake ballot. I thought Biggio was also borderline and I was fine leaving him off.

And so Ortiz right now is border but uh I I also am having this conversation with the presumption that David Ortiz like I'm thinking of David Ortiz as the guy who's still an awesome hitter and my brain is just sort of mentally thinking of him as not being done yet so that's true if you were if you were to convince if you were to tell me, oh, and he ran into a building today and never played again, then I'd have to sort of reconsider that new information. But my brain is just not doing that with him right now. My brain is thinking of him as a guy who is, like Beltre, for instance, still producing Beltre better. I don't mean to say that they're equal, but he's still producing. And I expect that he'll even further improve his chances.

I also think that, I mean, the postseason thing, nobody has an answer for that. And he is, I think he's third all time in postseason when probability added. And you can say, well, yeah, you got to play way more games because he lives in the wildcard era, which is fine and true. I mean, that's why he's third instead of like seventh or whatever. Like if all throughout history they were playing 19 rounds, then, yeah, somebody else would be up there too. But he would still be extremely high. He's third even in the wildcard era, which is 23 years old,

and behind only two pitchers, so far as I know, one of which is a closer, Mariano Rivera. The other, I think he's just behind Curt Schilling, if I'm remembering this correctly. And I don't know what you do with a win, a postseason win added, but my guess is that I would feel fine saying multiply it by like six or seven. And so if he's at three and a half win probably wins added uh to me that i like my mental adjustment i'm fine giving that 20 20 wins he has a 962 ops

in 82 postseason games 357 plate appearances and 925 OPS in his regular season career. And obviously that's sort of skewed because of the years when he was in the postseason. If you compared directly to his regular season years during that time, it would probably be pretty close because his early years with the Twins were not as good for reasons that have been well publicized so it's probably he's not quite as clutch as it seems if you just compare his lifetime stats in each but he certainly wasn't any worse in october and that that qualifies his clutch basically if you were if you are the same that's that's pretty clutch yeah i think like something like something like 10 of players with sufficient at bats actually probably even less but i think

something like that have better opiates like it's very rare for obvious reasons you have a better ops or to have better numbers in the postseason yeah uh i mean like jeter was very very very slightly better and jeter has this huge reputation too. Right. So is there a difference, because we were talking about him with the Twins and the fact that he didn't get a shot early, is it analogous at all to say that it's not fair, just as it's not fair to say that you can add on value

that a guy theoretically could have accrued if his team promoted him or used him differently. Is it analogous at all to say, well, other player X didn't get to play in the postseason, so theoretically he could have accrued that same value? Do you see that being the same at all? that being the same at all? I wouldn't say I see it being the same because the presumption is not that a guy is going to be a star in the postseason. Like the presumption is not that he's going to have huge monster hits that everybody remembers for, you know, 20 years and that he's going to be the all-time leader in postseason when probability added among hitters like the presumption is that he'll can he'll get at bats but that you know they'll be average at bats who knows so i think when people talk about ortiz it's not just that he has a lot of at bats in the postseason and therefore

has a lot of hits and has a lot of rbis and has a lot of baseball things but rather that he so distinguished himself in a way that very few hitters have been capable of doing. And then there's, I suppose, the DH is a part of baseball now, and it's a position. Like if you're going to put closers in, closer is essentially a position. So if you decided that the best closer gets into the Hall of Fame, then should that also mean that the best DH gets into the Hall of Fame and you shouldn't ding him because he was a DH? That's a position that existed. all this time right then maybe maybe he wouldn't have aged as well or lasted as long i don't know but he's a good enough hitter that i think if there had been no dh he probably would have been playing first base there's no reason to make an argument against him based on him being dh as like

a as like a binary thing right right you could you'd still, you could make a case against him just because he didn't add fielding value. Well, I mean, that's just the war argument, right? Like, we've already acknowledged that his war is borderline. Yeah. And if not low. And I wouldn't put him in without the postseason. Although, I feel like throughout history,

the huge power hitter who bats fourth and gets a lot of RBIs and home runs and those things has kind of passed the test of time. Like, it's kind of never not been cool to be that guy. And the middle infielder with the positional adjustment that gets his war up, that's still a fairly new thing. Like, we know that that guy's also valuable, and I trust that. And if I were building a team, I would use that as my best evidence of value and all of that. I would use that as my best evidence of value and all of that.

But it's just kind of like declaring a book to be a classic right now that just came out is usually a bad idea. You don't really know what's going to survive 70 years down the way. And so that's why I don't really like to read contemporary fiction because odds are you're wasting your time. You're reading a book that doesn't really mean that much. And like, if you look at, I'm going to use an analogy, but I, for instance, for a while read every Michael Chabon book. Right. And then I started thinking, but I don't read like every, uh, Hemingway book because time did the sifting for me and said, oh, you don't have to read a lot of these. Just read a couple.

Read A Farewell to Arms, read For Whom the Bell Tolls, read the good ones. And a whole bunch of other stuff gets kind of lost, right? And so that's what time does. It sifts out all the kind of arguments or the less necessary arguments and leaves you with only the really, really, really good stuff. And so it kind of makes sense to not read anything

that hasn't come out in the last 60 years to some degree. So you would not recommend buying our book? Non-fiction is totally different. Non-fiction, it's important that you read it because that's how you understand the world. Non-fiction is totally different non-fiction non-fiction it's important that you uh read it because that's how you understand the world non-fiction is journalism uh-huh so okay it's totally different which is just to say that there's a sort of a respect for the past i don't this argument sounds horrible this argument is not going anywhere. It's been long. It's been directionless. Bring it home anyway. It's not exactly how I really feel.

But I feel like there is something to be said for the fact that David Ortiz would be a superstar in every era. And he's going to be a superstar 100 years from now. And nobody will ever look at David Ortiz's stats and go, can you explain this to me? at David Ortiz's stats and go, can you explain this to me? Whereas the argument that gets certain other players to fit, like Jimmy Rollins, for instance, is at about the same war as David Ortiz. I'm not sure about that. This is my era, and I'm a part of my era and i'm gonna i believe it as well because it's my era but i'm not sure that it's right like it wouldn't surprise me if later generations talked about our heirs and pointed it to david ortiz jimmy rollins one anyway anyway but did i bring it home you stopped talking so in that sense why do i need to justify david ortiz in the hall of fame yeah i don't know i think i don't know

the point of the hall of fame is to get 500 people to decide whether somebody is a hall of famer or not so i support him if a large plurality of those people vote for him. And I don't really subscribe to the Kevin Goldstein position on the Hall of Fame. Which is taking fame literally. And if you are famous you should be in the Hall of Fame. But there is an element to that with him. Where I think you kind of alluded to it earlier. Like there's not going to be a.

I don't think there's going to be much animosity about this. At least the people who are arguing against Ortiz, I think will probably just say, yeah, okay. I mean, I wouldn't put them in, but maybe it's because I have a smaller hall in my mind than you do, but I can see why someone would put him in. There's no, it doesn't rely on logical fallacies or sloppy arguments. It's not like he hit the most home runs in the aughts or something,

like the Jack Morris had the most wins in the 80s or the pitching to the scoreboard stuff or something. It won't be that. It will be he started late he was awesome once he got established and he got to play in a lot of post seasons and was great in them and that that's it that's that's the case and maybe it's good enough and maybe it's not but i can understand why it would be good enough for someone even if it's not good enough for me and it might be by the time he's done yeah uh, the fallacy will be that he was super-duper clutch,

and it'll be easy to find, I assume it'll be easy to find, 50 other guys who had the same ratio of stat to clutch stat that he did. I mean, he is not as clutch as we think, most likely, right? Probably not. There's probably, I mean, when you really break it down, there's probably like four hits that that is based on above and beyond what a normal great hitter has had. And four hits, just making that number up,

four hits over the course of a career is very easily within the range of normal distribution of results. So probably there will be a lot of assigning him certain characteristics that probably it's fine to be skeptical of those. And the narrativization of his career will probably get somewhat sickening. Yeah. And there'll be he was a team leader. He was the heart and soul of three World Series teams which you know might be true but um there will be some of that yeah i don't know i i it would be different if he like i said it'd be different if he quit today but it just sort of feels like that he has a skill that is hard to find in baseball. Powers at a premium.

Oh, God. Yeah, I know. I know. As soon as I started that, I thought, I'm putting myself in a bad spot here, Sam. Finish it up. Finish it up. Yeah, I don't know. I imagine that – here's the other thing is that we tend to define ourselves in opposition to people we dislike. And I'm not sure that the David Ortiz Hall of Fame for Hall of Fame writing bad writing has

really gotten off the ground yet. In seven or eight years, at some point in the next seven or eight years, it's really going to get strong. The bad writing side of things is really going to get strong. And we're going to, I think we'll start seeing a lot more, um, uh, critical writing and thought about his position. And I could see being so bored of the pro argument that I actually changed my

mind. Um, but right now I just, I actually changed my mind. But right now, I like David Ortiz. I like how he hits the dingers. And the other thing, by the way, Ben, the other thing is that a lot of the argument against him, and this is very reasonable, is that he's not the best guy who's still eligible.

He's probably the 15th best guy who's still uh eligible he's he's like probably like the 15th best guy who's still eligible and i would put all 14 of those guys in as well as him but it you you could make an argument that like there's a a lot of energy going to a guy who shouldn't necessarily be next in line and who maybe takes up some of the votes and takes up a spot. And is it good or bad for Edgar Martinez if David Ortiz has a triumphant campaign around him, for instance? Well, by that point, Martinez will be off the ballot. So it would have to be a veterans committee kind of thing. But is it?

But maybe just the fact that people are talking about it, they could use that as a comp for Martinez. Is it worse that David Ortiz gets in if Edgar's not in, or does it not matter? I mean, is he either, quote-unquote, objectively a Hall of Famer or he's not? And what happens to Edgar Martinez is irrelevant? Yeah, if you're keeping Edgar out because he was a DH and you just have a blanket no DH policy, then it would be inconsistent if you let Ortiz in. So, but probably the same people who are anti-Edgar for that reason will be anti-Ortiz for the same reason. Unless they're Red Sox fans.

Or inconsistent with their arguments. Yeah. Sure. Has been known to happen. It has. But I mean, I'm just saying that, I'm saying, is it worse as a kind of moral good or bad to have a player in the Hall of Fame? If David Ortiz is a worthy Hall of Famer, does his worthiness change by whether or not a superior player gets in?

Do the standards for Ortiz change based on what happens to Martinez? I mean, the idea behind Jaws is that, yes, the standards do change with each person who does or does not get elected. And in a kind of grand scheme of things, large picture, I think that's appropriate. But does it matter for Ortiz whether Curt Schilling gets in and whether Edgar Martinez gets in and whether Larry Walker gets in and whether these guys who are, to my mind, clearly deserving and probably clearly ahead of him get in or not? Do

the standards change? Does he need to wait his turn? Does the standard go way up higher is it a crime against the hall of fame if you start letting in the 15th best player eligible or if the 15th best player eligible is simply good enough are each of these kind of trials independent of each other yeah well that kind of came up with smolts and musina and Schilling. And I wrote about it at the time, just comparing the three of them or, you know, Smoltz to Messina. And it made it more glaring, I guess, when you can look at a guy who is the same as another guy in a lot of ways or inferior in some ways. And he gets in in a cakewalk and the other guy gets no support, it definitely takes away some of the faith in the electorate or the process that goes into this. And if you were a supporter of that player, then it makes it more frustrating that your guy couldn't get in

when the other guy gets in. I don't know whether it makes him more deserving or not, except very slightly because the standards move very slightly when one guy gets in, but it definitely makes it more frustrating. I'm going to give you a fun fact, Ben. Okay. All right. Madison Bumgarner, 342 batters faced in the postseason, 2.3 win probability added.

David Ortiz, 357 plate appearances. So basically 15 extra plate appearances and 3.3 win probability added. So as huge, as clutch, as big as Madison Bumgarner's postseason. Now, maybe you could argue that Bumgarner's World Series win probability added would be higher because some of his excellence was clustered in the World Series. But anyway, that's the point. Ortiz hit 88.4% of his home runs after the age of 27. Stats and info informs me.

That's interesting. That's the most ever for a 500-homer person. I think he and Jamie Moyer have almost the same career war. Jamie Moyer, 50.2. David Ortiz is about 50.2 as well. All right. David Ortiz is 50.0. So he needs to have a good week to pass Jamie Moyer.

Probably pass him by the end of the year. I'm also fine with him not making it. But I think it's probably more fun to vote for him. So I probably would if I could. Your philosophy on the classics is similar to your philosophy on everything, which is just wait because it'll be free after a while. Yeah. I just can't.

I mean, you read these contemporary books, and they're all C-pluses that nobody will remember in 20 years. You go to your parents' friends' bookshelves, and it's depressing. How many mediocre books from the early 80s are still there? There's Bonfire of the Vanities is on every bookshelf that's a good book maybe that's good enough i would i it's i would still say his third best so and yeah but no bonfire i would say bonfire the vanities is probably yeah yeah i'd say it's a good enough book. But the thing is, A Man in Full is on all their bookshelves. That's the thing. That's my point.

A Man in Full is on all their bookshelves. Hooking Up is on all their bookshelves. All right. So just wait several decades. Everything will be free. You won't have to pay for it, and you won't have to waste your time with mediocre stuff you might be dead is the problem oh all right i was gonna bring up another player but i'll save it for tomorrow because we bantered much longer than i anticipated about ortiz his two best books are non-fiction though and so i guess that justifies the

my position on non-fiction okay i think almost every non-fiction almost all non-fiction you read should probably be contemporary with a couple of exceptions. There you go. All right. That's the Sam Miller syllabus. What are we talking about? We're talking about Phanteks. Phanteks? Phanteks. Where's the syllable break there? Phanteks.

Phanteks. Phanteks. Let's say Phanteks. Phanteks. So as you've probably already heard, Phanteks, a company that, to oversimplify things, that sells stock in a player's career earnings, has apparently locked in Andrew Heaney of the Angels. And for $3.3 million or so, you can buy 10% of Andrew Heaney's future earnings, career future earnings, in baseball contracts as well as corporate endorsements, appearance fees if he becomes a broadcaster, anything that capitalizes on his brand as a professional baseball player for the rest of eternity,

10% goes to the shareholders if this deal gets completed and goes through. So there's a lot of places we can talk about this. I think we did talk about this at one point in 2013 as a banter, I think, when Phanteks started locking in NFL players. And I don't remember what our position was at that point, but now it's getting real because now we have a baseball player. So there's a lot of places to go with this.

One is whether you think Heaney is a good candidate for this type of thing. One is whether you think that this is a fair price for this kind of a thing. And then some of them are bigger issues, like whether this is the future, cool or weird or what uh and so let's just start by saying uh is he the kind of pitcher that or the kind of player that you would have expected to be the first to do this well i guess i wouldn't expect it to be a superstar or a sure thing,

a guy who had already established himself as his peak self, because then he wouldn't have to do a deal like this. So I might have expected it to be someone younger, someone even less established, maybe even a minor leaguer, a prospect type. But I think he's not a crazy type to want to do this. He hasn't made his money yet, and he's there. He's close enough that you can see his contract in the future. Yeah, he made $2.6 million as a signing bonus, so he's doing okay, but yeah, he hasn't made his money. He might never make his money. He's a pitcher. I think the fact that he's a pitcher makes him, obviously,

a very good candidate for this. I mean, all of baseball is unpredictable, but if you're a hitter and you're good today, you can probably bet with pretty good certainty that you're going to be good tomorrow at least. But with a pitcher, nothing 15 minutes from now is promised. least but with a pitcher you you know nothing 15 minutes from now is promised um no matter how confident you feel your confidence is all an illusion so uh that makes sense and then yeah he's uh he's famous enough and established enough that um you can see him being somebody that people would

want to invest in there's something somewhat abstract about pretty much all minor leaguers except for about the dozen that the common fan knows that makes it hard to distinguish between. I mean, it's almost like betting on, you know, the NFL instead of betting on some like mid-conference football game or basketball game in the middle of the season where only the Sharks are paying any attention to it uh heaney is you know well known you can look him up you can figure out whether he's good or not you can read people writing about whether he's good or not you can go on statistical websites and see his stats in great detail uh so that makes sense and he's so the deal is that he will receive $3.34 million in exchange for 10% of all future earnings related to his brand, which includes everything, essentially, player contracts, corporate endorsements, and appearance fees.

This is as reported by Ken Rosenthal. That extends into the future. If a 60-year-old Andrew Heaney goes to a card show, if there are cards and he autographs them for a fee, does Fantrex get that? Fantrex get that? I don't know. I think so, though. Probably. The implication is yes.

In perpetuity, which just, like, if I were Andrew Heaney, I feel like I wouldn't do this just because it seems like a pain. A pain, right? It really does. It's like, for the rest of my life, I have to give, it's like a Rumpelstiltskin sort of bargain, where just every paycheck for the rest of your life, and you certainly see why he would do it. He could very well have Tommy John or a rotator cuff or something before he reaches free agency, and he's never good again. And the $3.34 million that he gets now will enable him to live comfortably for a long time, maybe for the rest of his life. So you can see why he would do it, but at the same time, it just seems sort of demoralizing just to have to sign away 10 for the rest of your life

see i don't feel i don't feel so much about the demoralizing aspect i mean it's just it's a it's a tax whatever yeah uh and you either think that you're it's a good deal or not and the more you make the more you have to give away the less you probably care about giving it away. And so it's not so much that as just the paperwork, you know? Like that you have to be thinking about this forever, that you always have to save your receipts. Like one of the nice things I would think about being like really rich is that you don't have to save your receipts. If you buy something like at Target and you're like, I don't if it's my size who cares you're super rich and now all of a sudden he's got to like

every paycheck he's got to keep track of and send in some form and i'm sure he has an accountant who does everything for him i know he does but also like that you can imagine and he well probably i assume that phanteks provides the accountant because it he's got a high, like, if he has to pay for an accountant for the rest of his life just to track this stuff for Phanteks. Yeah. Like, that's, like, now he's keeping an entire family fed just to keep his payments in order. Plus, there'd always be an incentive. If you had your own accountant, there'd always be an incentive. If you had your own accountant, there'd always be an incentive to hide things.

Yeah, so presumably Phanteks will do the accounting, but all the same, you know that, I don't know if it'll be for Heaney this way, but at some point, there's going to be a big disagreement between investors and the athlete about whether money is being hid, whether there's shell games going on, whether he's doing cash card shows and not reporting them.

There's going to be some ad in the local paper in 2048 about how he's going to a baseball card shop and signing autographs for 50 people, the first 50 who show up, and he's getting like $750 for that and he's not going to have reported that and there's going to be a lawsuit. It's like this is just like you've created a bureaucracy in your life where one need and not occur. And so anyway, I would do it for $3.4 million.

I would do a lot of paperwork. Yeah. I would. But I don't know that uh that it's enough like i might rather give away 30 of my income just so you get all the all the money three times the money but with the same number of paper the same amount of paperwork yeah because so the second you do it it's great and you $3.34 million. And then the rest of your life, it's like, oh, I have to live with this now. You get nothing for the rest of your life.

So from the second you sign the contract on, I mean, you know, maybe you go buy a nice house, and you live in that house, and you're happy in that house. But still, the way our minds work, you won't tell yourself when I was, how old is he? 20? 24. 24. So, you know, when he is 30 and 40 and 50, he won't remember the joy that he felt when he was 24 and he got $3 million. Plus, I mean, he's, as you mentioned, he made millions of dollars with his signing bonus

and he is in the major league. So he's not exactly poor. He is not guaranteed to get the giant contract, but he's doing OK now. It's not like it's going to dramatically improve the quality of his life at this moment. Probably it's not like he is, you know, a poor young pitcher from the Dominican and the one payout totally changes his life and pays off his parents' mortgage and brings them to the U.S. and, you know, he's moving from a brick hut to a mansion or something. It's not going to be that dramatic. So it's going to be hard to remember when he's 45 and he's still giving Fintechs 10% of all his earnings.

Well, so it seems like there's a part of what you're saying, correct me if I'm wrong, but it sort of sounds like you don't think he got a very good deal as well. Because if he were getting like a huge premium on this, then that'd be worth it, right? I mean, then that'd be worth it, right? I mean, then you'd be, that would be a smart investment. Like the question is not whether he's, well, maybe it is.

It's not necessarily that the human brain is incapable of reconciling a decision made today that has benefits or debits later on. If it's a good decision, it's a good decision or it's a good investment, probably. But do you think it's a good investment in himself? Yeah, I was gonna bring this up if you didn't, just to say, would you invest in Andrew Heaney at this price? And I think I probably would. I think I would probably bet that he will, over the course of his lifetime, make enough money to justify it.

Although in the future there will be inflation, right? So if he makes $34 million lifetime and $20 million of that is 15 years from now or 10 years from now or something, then it wouldn't be the same as the money that he's giving up now. I mean, or the money that he's getting now. He's getting money now that in 20 years might be $34 million or something. So maybe he's just making a bet based on inflation and based on the survival skills of Phanteks. Like maybe he just thinks Phanteks won't last and that somehow he will end up getting out of this. He won't have to pay 50 years from now because, I don't know, the investors won't be around, the company won't be around, and he'll somehow get a good deal out of this.

It's like the ultimate keeper league. And how long do most keeper leagues last? But even if that doesn't happen, it's not a bad deal. It's not like one of those extensions that we look at and shake our heads like Evan Longoria's first one or something. It's not an obvious case of giving up money. Yeah, you mentioned what if the company's not around. From an investor's standpoint, from our standpoint, the case has been made by Felix Salmon at Reuters, but I think

probably others, that there's actually, it's kind of a weird mechanism of how this works. The Fantex gets 10% of his money and then gives you that money, basically, as I understand it, like it creates a trading exchange where uh those shares can be traded on its own private exchange however uh as felix salmon wrote like you're betting on the player but you're also betting on fantex being a healthy company yeah and that's a big bet if Phanteks either goes out of business or turns out to be super duper shady. It's not quite clear what you get. And so there's like a lot of places for this to go wrong for the investor. And so it's actually quite possibly it seems not a very good idea to invest in this thing just because it's not an established industry.

very good idea to invest in this thing just because it's not an established industry and you don't really want to be you know investing in this kind of thing without any established rules and regulations this is like reading michael chabon's next book without the critical consensus of history telling you whether it was good or not um but from heaney's standpoint maybe it's the opposite i don't know what happens if Phanteks goes out of business next year. Does he have to keep giving – who does he keep giving money to? And again, who does he keep giving money to? Now all of a sudden are you in private – now are there like private suits brought against Heaney to try to garnish those wages? Guys with baseball bats showing up at his door.

to garnish those wages guys with baseball bats showing up at his door is he suddenly living in bleak house where it's like like 15 year lawsuits over every paycheck he has i mean this sounds like it could be really depressing on the other hand maybe he's simply betting against fantex and uh thinking oh they're gonna give me 3.4 million dollars and they're not gonna be around in two years to claim anything for me. I don't know if that's true, but it is a very complicated bet. And I mean, to me, this underscores why this is not nearly as fun as I would like it to be.

What you've done, I mean, what this purports to be is, hey, this baseball player is going to make a lot of money and you can invest in him. You can have a personal stake in him. Just like when you invest in some company and they can use that money and build a factory and create a product and then you get dividends and you make your money work for you while bolstering the economy and contributing to this thing that supports everybody. But it's not really that it's really what you're doing is taking baseball and turning it into a very weird complicated economic shell game that you're probably not qualified to participate in yeah and there's one line in the rosenthal article mlb was concerned about the possibility of such

an agreement leaving heaney vulnerable to exploitation by gamblers, but Phanteks employs a screening process to weed out problematic investors, according to sources. Which seems, I don't know. I mean, I guess if MLB and the Players Union is satisfied, then we should probably be satisfied too. But the whole screening process seems like it could be circumvented. I don't really see. I don't really see. I don't really see. I read that sentence a bunch, and I didn't really see what the problem was in the first

place. If Heaney were giving away 90% of his earnings, then that would definitely be a problem because now all of a sudden the incentives for him shift from be good at baseball and make a lot of money to potentially do something totally different, right? I mean, at that point, it no longer matters almost whether he's good or bad at baseball because he's already got all of his money up front. But it's 10%.

I don't know that his incentives change at all. Certainly, I don't think his incentives change by as much as 10% when he gives up 10% of his income. He still is mostly going to be getting rich or not based on whether he does things just like every other baseball player does things. So I didn't really – I was trying to figure out what that even refers to. Like what is the problem with gamblers in this situation? Well, I mean the problem with gamblers is always that it's going to lead to throwing contests, right? And I mean, the problem with gamblers is no longer we don't like gambling because we have gambling all over the place. Major League Baseball is partnered with what is essentially a gambling site.

So the only problem with gambling is whether it affects the outcomes of the games or threatens the integrity of the games. And I couldn't see a way that Heaney essentially buying an insurance policy for 10% of his income would be affected by the threat of gambling. Yeah, well, because it's like betting on yourself, which is also illegal in Major League Baseball. It's betting against yourself. Well, yeah, because it's kind of, it's like betting on yourself, which is also illegal in Major League Baseball. It's betting against yourself. Well, yeah, that's true.

It doesn't seem like this. But again, it's only 10%, though. It's not like he no longer wants himself to succeed. If he were betting 90% or something against himself, then you could argue. So aside from the uncertainty about fantax would you do this deal would you invest in heaney for this amount of money yes yes okay so you think that he will eventually gross 40 million or something on that on that order uh yeah given inflation it probably needs to be like 45 million or maybe more more. But yes, I do think that Heaney, as a player who has established himself in the major leagues

and is a guy who was a top prospect, is now currently, at least it seems to me, an average major league pitcher and has 15 years of potential income, it seems like it is both a good bet that he will get to $33 million or $45 million or whatever, and a decent bet that he will blow past that. So yeah, I would do it. I would do it also just because it'd be fun. However, I wouldn't do it with the other stuff. Uncertainty about the whole enterprise.

I just always feel like everything's probably a scam. Yeah, right. Okay. Like this podcast, it can't be free. There's got to be a catch. Yes. Maybe his anonymous benefactor will turn out to be Magwitch or something. It'll be more great expectations than Bleak House.

How about Houston Street emerging as one of the least sort of, I don't know, Houston Street has lately been making a lot of quotes that I find completely unlikable. Like the one about how he'd retire if he were not used to the ninth. If he had to pitch in the eighth, he'd retire. And as to this, he called it the dumbest deal I've ever heard. And he's a teammate. Yes, and he's a teammate. And yeah, he basically called him an idiot.

That's not very likable. All right. So that's it for today. We'll be back tomorrow. You can send us emails, podcast at baseballperspectives.com, Facebook group, facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild, rate, review, subscribe to the show, and support our sponsor, the Play Index at baseballreference.com.

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