Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild: Episode 737: Several of the Biggest Surprises from the 2015 Regular Season

Episode Date: October 5, 2015

Ben and Sam banter about an eventful weekend in baseball, then discuss some of the developments that surprised them most during the 2015 regular season.

No alarms and no surprises. No alarms and no surprises. No alarms and no surprises, please. Good morning and welcome to episode 737 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives brought to you by the Play Index at baseballreference.com. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg of Grantland. Hi, Ben. How are you, Ben? I'm great. What a weekend.

Yeah. Baseball was all over the place. I was talking about Goodway. Oh, yeah. I should have seen that coming. Solid, solid effort there. It was in fine form. Yeah yeah it was pretty good all right anything else to talk about that was it i spent my weekend looking forward to and watching that

episode anything else did you do anything else i watched some baseball wrote part of a book there was a lot of really good baseball it was a surprisingly good weekend because nothing actually changed really if you had ended the season on friday or ended the season a week before friday i think the the playoff teams would all be the same and i don't think i think the only thing that was really decided was the royals getting home field and the dodgers getting home field for their series. But the other comebacks and collapses didn't really happen. But so much other stuff happened. I mean, they almost happened, which was exciting in itself. There was the crazy Rangers-Angels game on Saturday with the incredible comeback.

There was Scherzer perfect game and 35 strikeouts in that game overall, which is a record. And there was Ichiro pitching. And there was Chris Sale throwing a 50-mile-per-hour pitch. And Kershaw getting the 300 strikeouts and just tons of stuff. Yeah, I didn't see the Chris Sale one. Send it to me. I'll try. Yeah, he threw a 97-mile-per-hour fastball.

And then he followed that with a 50 mile per hour ethos sort of thing and then he went back to the slider and poor james mckinn ended up striking out it was really not a fair fight but did you how do you uh how do you like the sunday thing where all the games at the same time i liked it it was good i had not even a second screen experience i had a third screen experience going on i had the the rangers game on the tv and the esters game on a tablet and then my laptop too so i was in my little command center well that is that is that is just awful that is horrible that is shameful. Chris Sales pitch. What is this even trying to be?

I mean, there's no skill here. There's zero actual effort at doing this right. I mean, this looks like it occurred to him mid-windup. Yeah, it was the last weekend of the season team is out of it did he only throw the one i think he only threw the one yeah and then he threw uh he threw a slider after that which got a dig deep against james mckinnon yeah but i enjoyed. There's no smile. There's nothing. No. There's no acknowledgement by anybody on the field.

I think he did address it in a press conference after the game, which I didn't listen to. Yeah, that was strange. I don't actually – it's odd to see Chris Sale do something so poorly. And I don't mean, like, that he threw a pitch so slow. I mean that he threw a pitch so something so poorly. And I don't mean like that he threw a pitch so slow. I mean that he threw a pitch so slow so poorly. Like the difference between that and like, for instance, Ichiro, who for years has been telling us or we've been telling each other that he could hit 50 runs if he wanted

and he could have been a pitcher if he wanted. Well, he comes out and he actually looks like he could have been a really good pitcher. A real breaking ball and everything. A real breaking ball. Hit 88 at his age. With never pitching. Yeah.

Yeah. And good mechanics and good control. And you do get the feeling that if he had decided to at age 27, he could have been at least league average, would you guess? I would guess he could have been a reliever. He looks like he could have been a reliever. So Ichiro, having watched that, I want you to tell me what Ichiro's stats as a major league reliever would have been from ages 24 to 32. Give me his like ERA plus. As a reliever. He's so frail.

Yeah, but he's a reliever. Yeah, I feel like he would break somehow. He's frail. He played like 160 games for like 19 years in a row. Well, I don't know. I'd say he'd be a slightly above average reliever. He led the league in games played at ages 36, 37, and 38. Yeah. I think he leads the Marlins in games played now.

Is that true? It was a while ago. It might be. That is the saddest thing that I've ever heard. He's got a 561 ops yeah and they were all like a couple weeks ago they're oh we got to bring him back he's going to be back next year he's minus 1.2 war and he got more games played he does he leads the marlins in games played 153 he does not lead in plate appearances but he does lead in games played

that is the most damning fun fact that i've ever heard that is amazing that is an amazing one yeah so what i was saying is that each row is a guy that we not only was an all-time great player but was an all-time fun player and seemed to always be good at everything. And Chris Sale is not only an all-time great pitcher, but an all-time fun pitcher and seems to be great at everything. And then all of a sudden he comes out with his Johnny Cueto impression and it's total garbage and the whole thing falls apart. Yeah. And yet it worked.

thing falls apart yeah and yet it worked it's like remember that ad for uh nike where tiger woods is uh like juggling the ball on his pitching wedge yeah it'd be like that if the whole thing were tiger woods doing it twice and then going ah and then hang on i can do it hang on and then does it and it's like a two minute commercial of of him going, hang on, no, seriously, I did this earlier. I got like nine earlier today. Were you at the Pacifics game, the San Rafael Pacifics game this year where the soccer juggler girl has like the – She was great. She was pretty good. She didn't look like world record material, which she was advertised, billed as. But I accept that she is when she's not performing at albert park ben

is talking about a girl who was probably about 10 who came out to uh juggle a soccer ball like you know with her feet kick juggle whatever you call that she was yeah she was billed as the world record holder which i'm assuming there's some not not to be disrespectful i'm assuming there's a qualifier left out just because there aren't many world records that everybody can get and that a 10-year-old girl has. For her age group, you mean? Yeah. Like I'm saying a 10-year-old, I mean, you wouldn't expect a 10-year-old to be better than a grown-up.

Like that's all. Like nothing, no insult there. Sure. You just don't expect a grown-up. Kids are better at things. Right. They're still learning is the, I think the appropriate way to say they're still learning okay uh still mastering the craft she used to be a juggler but now she's a pitcher kind of a thing and so anyway i'm guessing

that she's for her age group but anyway she had uh juggled like 5 000 plus times at some point i think and so she came out to juggle for the crowd, and she was raising money for a charity, which is another thing that's great. And Ben's badmouthing her. I thought she was great. She juggled a couple hundred times in front of everybody. Really? I think it was that high.

I don't know. I didn't have a counter going. But I was expecting the game to be delayed because she would never stop and we would be there for hours and it wasn't she fit into a between innings break as i recall it was around 100 that she that she got and it might have been with the margin of error of like maybe 20 on the low side it could have been as low as 80 and i think it could have been as high as like 250. My memory is not great. But I think what you're mainly reacting to is that the form is not what I was expecting from a graceful juggler. Like it turns out that probably anybody who juggles a soccer ball knows this. You keep your leg real stiff.

And so she was sort of – it was like she was doing something with chopsticks. You know, her legs were the chopsticks. They were perfectly straight, and she was just sort go on like I'm doing it with my arms. She was like doing sort of robot movements, just bop, bop, bop, bop. And it didn't look like somebody who was insanely in control. But in fact, that's probably how you do it. And so I remember at first thinking, oh, just that, huh? She's just doing that.

Like it doesn't look athletic and then she was in she but it turns out she was in great control and i i completely buy her as the world record holder ben does but i've never seen anyone better at it ben was just jealous of her calves i think i'm just not impressed by the whole art form. There's a whole bunch of videos of the record being set, but they don't just tell you, Oh, by the way, Ben, what I did find out is that there's actually a name for this other than juggling. What's that? Keepy Uppy. There's a Wikipedia page for Keepy Uppy.

Maybe it's only done by 10-year-olds. Maybe that's why it's called that keepy uppy or kickups is the skill of juggling with an association football using feet football ball by the way an association football ball they don't just call it a football using feet lower legs knees chest shoulders and head without allowing the ball to hit your ground. An incomplete list of keepy-uppy performances. A 25-year-old kept a regulation football aloft for 26 hours. Wow. See, that's impressive.

That's the kind of thing I wanted to see. The fastest marathon while doing keepy-uppy, seven hours, 18 minutes. That's not that great. While bouncing the ball the entire way. Dan Magnus holds the longest distance while doing keepy uppie managed to go 36 miles without letting the ball touch the ground longest keepy uppie while on one's back 21 minutes basically mostly to say keepy uppie yeah uh and uh the most touches in 60 seconds, that's not that great.

They don't, there's no number. So I guess keepy-uppy, now I'm going to call fraud on this whole thing because most of these records seem to be time, not number of touches. And so they advertise for as 5,000 whatever touches, but that doesn't seem to be the officially sanctioned way of setting a record. Yeah, I knew there was something fishy. She's pretty good, though. She's better than you are.

Better than me. What were we talking about? The weekend. Baseball. Mm-hmm. There was an interesting Mark Burley game. That was weird. That was very, very interesting.

Very weird. So he started on one day's rest, which is not quite as unusual as I thought it would be. I asked ESPN stats and info about that because I was wondering if this is something that had been decades or something, but it hasn't actually been that long.

It was 2012. Zach Granke did it, and CJ Wilson did did it and both times there were strange circumstances there's like a rain delayed game or there was a i think granky got ejected after four pitches in a game so he came back the next day he actually pitched in three consecutive games if you count all-star break or something so this was a strange circumstance too but burley actually had thrown a start in the previous game which is different and then he came out and you'd think he was a lock for two innings and not only could he not get two innings he got two outs and gave up eight unearned

runs and lowered his lowered his career all right yeah so that was sad because I like the Burley streak a lot, and I wish he'd gotten to 15 seasons. And if that's how he goes out, I'm sort of sorry that's how he goes out. They were playing for something too, right? Yeah, home field. Home field and not just home field, but, I mean, to face the wild card. They were playing to face the wild card opponent. If they had won and the Royals had lost, I believe they would have won the right to face the wild card They were playing to face the wild card opponent If they had won and the Royals had lost

I believe they would have won the right to face The wild card team Which is as talked about A very much not insignificant advantage Or at least in theory So that was a nice gesture I suppose Well I don't think they expected him to give up 8 runs

No Yeah anything else? Fun fun tori hunter guaranteed a 2016 twins world series title so guaranteed it wow he promised it so his word man's word is his bond spoiled the whole next season now we have nothing to look forward to. Thanks, Tori. What exactly did he say? He hasn't even decided on playing in 2016. No, he might not be there. He didn't guarantee that. I'm reading from the Star Tribune.

Next year, we're going to win the World Series. Hunter promised the announced 24,108 at Target Field in a short impromptu speech just before first pitch. I'm going to say that that doesn't count as a promise if the reporter uses promise simply as a way of avoiding saying the word said again it doesn't necessarily carry the full weight of the law he didn't say i promise he simply he simply said a thing maybe everything he says is binding he's he's just he starts his day with a catch-all promise yeah he also said i love all you guys which i also think that's a stretch

24 108 most of them he hasn't even met yeah it's not love all right okay yeah that's that's all that happened all right so ben let's uh let's do our quick thing and get out of the way. Okay. Someone used 11 pitchers in a game, right, in a nine-inning game. That happened. There was a new record of that also. Oh, my goodness. Yes, October 4th, 2015, San Francisco Giants at Colorado Rockies.

So it was the Giants. The Giants used 11 pitchers in a 9-in game. Well, I guess I'll have to find a new team to root for. And Bryce Harper did not hit 50 home runs. Okay, would you, if they did that Sunday game, all the games at one time, if they did that on a non-final game of the season, like, say, every Sunday,

would it be a net gain to you do you do you like it separate from the playoff implications well realistically i'm not it's not like i'm sitting there from 1 p.m to 10 p.m watching baseball non-stop so it's not like i really need baseball on all day i can flip back and forth so i wouldn't mind it i guess i i don't really want it either if there are no no playoff implications i don't really want it but i wouldn't really mind it's kind of nice to have one day where baseball is over that like i i i also i'm not sitting there for 12 hours a day watching the full slate of games except on a couple days a year, like opening day I do,

and that's a great blessing that I can do that. But all the same, I am usually kind of following to see, oh, who's winning this game, what happened with this guy, and so on. And it is kind of nice to have three hours blocked out and then the rest of the day you don't even have to think about it. It's just not even there. And I normally don't like it when there's not baseball available.

But once a week, kind of nice. Kind of nice too, sort of, for this is obviously not Major League Baseball's primary concern. Obviously not Major League Baseball's primary concern. But with head-to-head leagues that come down to Sunday, it's kind of nice to just do all of them at once so that there's not a lot of roster manipulation where you're putting in a... You have to watch to see whether you get a tiny lead in ERA and then bench all your pitchers and that kind of thing.

You just have to sort of throw everybody out there all at once and then wait and see how it develops. Don't you have your rosters set at the same time or something? I don't know how fantasy works anymore. No, you can update it throughout the day if you are in that kind of league. Okay. Anyway, not probably, like I said, not their main concern. Not my main concern.

Not your main concern. Nope. All right. Should we do our quick thing? Sure. All right. main concern not your main concern nope all right should we do our quick thing sure all right so we are going to talk about the three things that surprised us most this year the three most shocking things the three most unpredictable aspects of this season well i didn't take this

that seriously no neither did i i didn't make my usual spreadsheet, call a scout, talk to people in the game. I didn't do that. All right, so go on ahead and tell me one of yours. All right, well, can I do a blanket, like how bad I was at predicting everything? Yes. Because I could easily just pick three teams that I thought went completely out of nowhere, but that would be no fun. So I don't know what the, like, I could just take the American League as a whole. The entire league is unpredictable, is strange.

The Angels didn't end up making the playoffs, so none of my American League Playoff picks made the playoffs Grant Brisby wrote a thing about Why we were all so bad at projections This year Last week and he started his article By reversing his Preseason projections and they looked pretty good

And he pretended that They were his actual projections for a moment And then he revealed the truth And that would work for me too I think well, if you just reversed everything I picked. So I don't even know what the strangest one is. If I had to pick one, I guess it would be the—see, I don't even know if it would be the Nationals, because they won 83 games. They didn't completely collapse, and I didn't think they were going to win 105 or anything But maybe the Nationals

But maybe the Red Sox With the Nationals You can do this sort of game You can cherry pick this game however you want But with the Nationals Imagine also that I told you at the beginning of the year That Bryce Harper was going to be the MVP And that Max Scherzer was going to be the MVP.

Yes. And the Max Scherzer was going to come within what a throwing air. And what was the other one hit by pitch of two perfect games. Yeah. And that he was going to strike out 10 batters per walk or whatever he did. And that the rest of the division was going to be atrocious. Yeah. The worst division in baseball by far. And the Mets would have a losing record against every other team in baseball. Yeah. Yeah, so that, I mean, I think they were my World Series pick. They were almost literally everyone's World Series pick. So maybe if I have to pick one, just the Nationals, although I kind of like just the American League as an entity.

I don't know any way of figuring this out because you can't possibly figure it out but i'd be interested if if i had access to god's brain or some sort of alternate universe machine uh to see who which players in history have cost themselves the most in their walk year like what they would have gotten if they'd hit free agency one year earlier versus what they actually got. And injuries would probably, like somebody surely went from a big free agent contract to being out of the game because he got hit in the knee or something. But as far as performance, Ian Desmond and Doug Pfister both have to be up there, right? Yeah, probably. What does Doug Pfister get last year as a free agent?

Well, he had shown some signs of decline last year, right? He was on the DL for a while, and he, yeah, so. He only made 25 starts, and his strikeout rate went down, and he finished eighth in Cy Young voting and had a 2.41 ERA. Yeah, right. You know, I mean, he was crafty veteran who was getting credit for outperforming his FIP. And he was like, saying something bad about Doug Pfister

was like saying something bad about the Royals. It was just like, okay, fun guy. Yeah. And now he's like a non-tensor candidate. He's in the bullpen. Yeah. Oh, well, he's a- If he were under contract, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But he's, yeah, he finished the year in the bullpen. Oh, well, he's a... If he were under contract, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. But he's, yeah, he finished the year in the bullpen. He, you know, had a below average ERA. Even with that, I don't know what Doug Pfister gets now, but what would he have gotten a year ago? Like, my guess is that he'd get close to what James Shields got because I think that what James Shields got was lower than what I would have expected James Shields to get.

Like, I think probably James Shields mismanaged it a little bit. But Pfister, he was 30 years old coming off his age 30 season, four and 80 doesn't seem unreasonable for a guy who in the previous three seasons had three, four and five wins above replacement. Yeah. I mean, I guess if Rick Porcello could get the deal he got, then Doug Pfister could get that deal too. But there were some red flags and there was Dombrowski trading him and there was maybe the fact that he was sort of underrated even when he was really good. So I would say he gets under the Shields contract,

but many, many millions more than he gets now. And then Ian Desmond turned down $107 million in the two off seasons ago. Yeah. And I don't know what he could have gotten last year, but he was coming off of a four-win season and was entering his age 29 season as one of the best shortstops in the game, 24 homers, 24 steals. And so 107 certainly seems maybe, if anything, low for what he would have gotten. And I don't know what he gets now. What do you think he gets now?

There was a passage in one of those recent Matt Williams takedowns in the Washington Post about Desmond talking to Randy Knorr, the Nationals bench coach, and asking him if he had screwed up by not taking that extension, which I think probably in retrospect he has. I mean, he's screwed up. Like, objectively speaking, he will make less money now because of that. But that's not the same as saying he's screwed up necessarily. Or maybe it is. I don't know. Maybe it is the same as saying he's screwed up necessarily or maybe it is i don't know maybe it is the same as saying he's screwed up but regardless say that's what he's asking yeah he he cost himself money yeah so what are you asking what he makes now yeah what will he get as a free agent this year well he's how old is he 30 yeah he's 30 and he's only coming off one disaster year it's also. It's also a four-year trend line as far as his offensive numbers go.

And, oh, he got his fielding back up to above average by the end of the year. Impressive. Because he had all those problems early. Yeah. So, I don't know. Contract destination is my worst subject except when I'm guessing old players. I won't make you. Okay. And then the other thing, probably the most, I don't know, to me the most shocking thing about the national season was that Jason Wirth could go from like two years as an MVP candidate, like a MVP down ballot guy guy to just the worst thing in baseball yeah and like i mean that's it shouldn't be surprising because that happens but it always surprises me how fast it happens

and partly it happens fast because you're reacting to the probably unrealistically high bar that a guy set uh some regression is probably expected anyway and then now some regression the other way is is expected i mean he's really somewhere in the middle but to go 4.7 4.1 to negative 1.6 to drop six wins in one season it just always shocks me it never doesn't shock me when a guy drops six wins in a season anthony rendon also dropped six wins at least how are you supposed to do baseball if this is part of it like what does a gm do like there's no team in baseball that wouldn't have gladly had jason worth as their opening day out corner outfielder making you know 15 million dollars or something like that something slightly less than he's getting like every team in baseball

would have taken that the rays would have spent 15 15 million to get Jason Worth and then he just is that bad like he's the worst it's one of the five worst players in baseball you know in total it's crazy I mean at least like well yeah Rendon yeah I guess I didn't realize how bad Rendon was I just thought of Rendon as being absent for the first half but yeah I didn't realize how bad Rendon was I just thought of Rendon as being absent for the first half but yeah I didn't realize how yeah so good he was both of those guys were hurt and came back and maybe they weren't fully healthy it's not that they were terrible with no explanation of their being terrible which is always the most confusing kind but but yeah yeah but well Rendon was hurt and then came back and it was all after the injury Worth Worth was not hurt until, I don't know what he was going through in the first month and a half. Maybe he was hobbled, but the worst part of his season was actually before he ever went on the DL.

He hit.208,.294,.287 in the first 27 games, and that's really what sunk him. So maybe, yeah, I't like have any idea what happened in baseball this year so maybe it was the injury that did it but he wasn't very good after he came back from the deal either nope uh well i will just uh go off of that and say that to me the red sox is not as much this year as a standalone unpredictability but two years ago after they won the world series they were as in as good a position as a franchise could be right they had the best or second best farm system in baseball i think at the time they had you know xander bogarts and jackie bradley jr both looked like immediate future stars they had their two Hall of Famers were still in good health

and under contract to kind of good, reasonable deals. They had all sorts of money. They had basically shed all of their every— I don't know that they had a bad contract after that offseason. And they had a really smart, everybody agreed front office, and they finished last the next two years. That is incredible, Ben. There's no way you can do this baseball thing. There is no team in baseball. I think we actually talked about this around then, not about the Red Sox specifically,

but about which team we would choose if we could choose a team. But you could make a case for the Dodgers because they had infinite resources, and you could make a case for the Red Sox, and maybe you could make a case for the Cardinals. And then those were like the three teams, and the Red Sox have finished last twice. That's amazing. Yeah, they've sox have finished last twice that's amazing yeah they've very convincingly finished last it's very odd and they've done it despite like uh a lot of things kind of going right i mean right mookie bats and bogey bats and bogarts having a very good year and

yeah yeah i mean they've they've made it more respectable in September. In the last couple of months, they've played pretty well. But yeah, it's baffling. So they had that strategy of going with five number three starters, basically. And there were a lot of people who thought, who looked at that rotation and said, that's a bad pitching staff. There's no ace ace and then there were some people who looked at it and said yeah well it's not a great rotation but there's not as you know they they put together what they could they didn't put a ton of resources into it and those guys are all pretty good there's some good arms there uh and they can trade for someone lots of you know cueto and hamels those guys will go somewhere they could pick one of them up if they need to

so porcello ends up with an 87 ERA plus. That's worse than you would have projected. But he was kind of, he was also kind of Porcello-like. Like most of his stats were pretty consistent. He gave up a lot of home runs. And it's not like he'd ever had good ERAs. That was the whole point of Porcello is he had one good ERA in the previous five years and he was entirely a

fit projection machine right and so he had a again he had a worse era than his fit but he also didn't have a great fit i guess what i'm saying is that porcello being as porcello was kind of predictable you can't really give the red socks a pass on that joe kelly finishes with a 89 era plus his career is 103 uh but the year before he was 92 so not that shocking kind of within joe kelly range he added some strikeouts gave a couple extra home runs, and ERA worse than FIP. The Justin Masterson total disaster doesn't make it through the season. Clay Buchholz, really pretty good, and then Hurt can't claim to be surprised at all by that. That's exactly what happens with Clay Buchholz. If anything, the Red Sox front office probably got more than you could have counted on from Buchholz.

And then Wade Miley was basically a league average pitcher. front office probably got more than you could have counted on from buckholz and then wade miley was basically a league average pitcher so the rotation was i don't know if that's to say that it's not to blame or it was to blame it was basically what we thought it would be and they had a bad rotation well if they had i mean they finished only six games under.500. If they had gotten anything from Hanley Ramirez and Pablo Sandoval, I mean, Pablo Sandoval was literally the worst player in baseball. I mean, just the worst. And Hanley Ramirez was pretty close to the worst. And if those guys had been, instead of negative whatever award they were worth,

if they had been whatever they instead of negative whatever war they were worth if they had been whatever they were projected to be which i think was you know decent like maybe five wins or something with the two of them put together i didn't think those were brilliant budget deals or anything i didn't think they were steals but nobody killed nobody was killing those deals though at the time there were people i mean there were people who didn't think highly of them I don't know I remember Jonah writing something fairly negative About it for Grantland

Based on those guys and their personalities And their aging and various things But yeah I don't think anyone Put it on like the worst Deals of the winter It wasn't like a face palm sort of deal i didn't think at least at the time i thought you know whatever they probably won't age all that well but they're decent they'll make them better now and i mean anyone who didn't like the deals

would have thought that they would make the team better now yeah so no one really called this exactly So I mean if those guys had done anything Then the Red Sox might have contended Even with their other problems Yeah that's kind of what I mean by no one was killing them I mean those were deals that Like I wrote about how out of character they were And how they went against a lot of the things That the Red Sox had been saying they were aspiring to do. And specifically, they went against the things that

they did leading up to 2013 and that everybody gave so much credit for. But ultimately, they also were, if anything, they seem to be slight overpays, a little bit on the back end. They were somewhat odd fits. And they were the actions of a team that didn't have a lot of other places to spend copious resources and they seem to at least at the very least with certainty with with pretty much near 100 certainty make the red socks better right now and that of course isn't what happened i mean what what are the red socks this year if those guys had been league average players which would have been a very conservative estimate so well like if they had just signed if they had gotten chase headley instead of sandoval

for a third of the money and if they are half the money or whatever and if they had not even gotten ramirez but just gone with you know one of their nine outfielders yeah right yeah they're you know 500 team and they've got an extra $30 million, and maybe they use that $30 million and get Max Scherzer instead of who they have not gotten. Maybe they would have punted Masterson immediately, or maybe they wouldn't have gotten Wade Miley. Yeah, I never liked the Masterson deal. I put that as my worst deal of the offseason or something when I was writing stuff. Wait, did they re-sign? They traded for him, right? Oh no, they re-signed him. That's right, the Cardinals traded for him. Yeah, okay.

So if you replace... If you can do this, if you can just be a totally omniscient past looking person and they get Scherzer instead of Masterson then yeah, now they're at 500. I mean, those guys were like negative four war.

Now they're like an 88 win team and they're deadlocked. Right. So they're like possibly a playoff team. They're maybe a wildcard team. It could have happened. They could have done it. Yeah. They could have won this thing.

They could have done it with the rotation that they had even if they had not had their huge signings go awry. Yeah. All right. So are we saying saying are we blaming the front office Are we hot taking the Red Sox Front office I don't think you can blame anyone for Negative four war out of Hamler Ramirez and Pablo Sandoval

That's insane that's crazy No one can predict that Alright give me another unpredictable Brett Anderson. Yeah. Well, that's interesting that you say that because you were the one standing up for Brett Anderson when I was saying zero to. You pointed out the optimistic way of looking at it was that his recent couple of injuries had been sort of things like a thumb or like a rib cage or something like that. Things that like he had not.

It's not like he was he was Ryan Madsen coming off of back to back Tommy Johns. You put Ryan Madsen. I'm switching my answer to Ryan Madsen. He didn't have you know, he wasn't he didn't have a bad shoulder all 2014. He was he had become a caricature of an injured guy's stat sheet. But if you were going to take his innings totals for the previous four years and assign injuries to them, he had kind of close to the best case injuries for that stat sheet. Now, that said, in four years, he had thrown 200 innings and was expected to pitch in

all four of them. It's not like in any of them he was out for the year. And then he just doesn't miss a, he never misses a start for the Dodgers. 31 starts. They treated him fairly gently. But I mean, I mentioned this very early, like in the first or second start of the year, or no, it was in spring training. I saw him in spring training. And he had to cover the bag on a ground ball at first. And just seeing him cover the bag, I was like, there it is. He's done. I think I saw a grimace.

And I saw him slide for a ball at one point. And I thought, oh, he's done. Broke his wrist. and he just kept going he was unbreakable yeah but he probably finished what is he top 40 innings in baseball this year probably 180 and a third um yeah he might be iron man workhorse yeah they should start him on two days rest in the postseason. Never saw that coming. No, I didn't either. I didn't either.

He finished 54th in innings. Okay. Ahead of famously durable Carlos Martinez by one inning. Uh-huh. Wow. Did you know that Ubaldo Jimenez pitched okay this year? Yeah, I wrote about him once. Not one of mine, but didn't see that coming. Yeah, he pitched really well and then horrendously

and then, well, the typical Ubaldo. Yeah, interesting. All right, mine is sort of a softball for you, but maybe you're going to get to him, actually. But mine is Francisco Cervelli, MVP candidate. Yeah. If you, I mean, he's he's he won't get probably he might get a down ballot or two as a catcher on a pennant winning team with good offense but he is basically

what people think Yadier Molina is at this point he he is a very good hitter who had a 370 on base percentage who is one of the truly best framers in the game and uh he uh he's no he he's like making like six hundred thousand dollars or something yeah and i guess this isn't it shouldn't be like totally shocking to me because he was a good hitter last year with the Yankees. But it was a small sample and I didn't take it seriously. And the year before was even smaller and I didn't take it seriously. And there was just nothing about Francisco Cervelli that ever promised a breakout. And so when he had these sort of small breakouts and small samples in years where he was mostly injured or inactive, you didn't think, oh, well, now we're seeing it.

Now it's here you just thought guy who was never really anything never much of a prospect never much of a hitter never much of you know anything right like you didn't see this coming did you like you're you've got to be his biggest fan and you didn't see this coming not the hitting part definitely not the hitting part right all the other stuff was why he gets signed. He gets signed despite not being able to hit. But in fact, if you look at it, he's now got in his last 700 plate appearances, he's got a 294, 370, 416 line, which is a 786 OPS.

And I'm just going to do a quick play index and see where he ranks among catchers over the last three years as a hitter i bet he's top five he might be top three yeah if you set the minimum that low i would think probably so i'm going to set the minimum at 650 plate appearances sorting by uh ops plus and all right moment of truth francisco cervelli last three years second best hitting catcher in baseball wow yeah ahead of Messarocco ahead of Grondahl ahead of Derek Norris ahead of Brian McCann ahead of I mean way ahead of Molina just Posey Cervelli Posey Cervelli? Posey Cervelli, yeah. Posey Cervelli. He's a little bit ahead of Luke Roy and a little bit ahead of Russell Martin. I mean, that's surprising, Ben.

That's pretty surprising, yeah. Do you know off the top of your head how he does on the catching metrics these days? I think he's the top. The top this year? Yeah. If you had an MVP vote, he's three wins without framing. Yeah. I don't think he's, no. He's not quite at that level.

You're not putting him on your ballot? So BP has him as third best in like 16 runs, so I don't think so. Not quite there, huh? No. All right all right well worse players than him will get votes yeah that's probably true that's definitely true uh all right go ahead all right well this isn't a good one but it's one that has bothered me all year i don't know why it just has bothered me that i got this wrong and well maybe i know why it's from the uh from the al east preview i wrote which is just wrong from top to bottom but the best off-season move that i had for the blue jays was trading j-hap for michael saunders and saunders has not played he has he has not played baseball i mean i guess he played he played what did he play he played nine games and j-hap has

gone on to be an ace with the pirates all of a sudden and has been you know a solid above average starting pitcher all year And I think this has bothered me because I fell for the Injured or good guy again So this is kind of the opposite Of the Brett Anderson one Where I felt like I learned my lesson With the Brett Anderson one

And then that was When I learned my lesson A few years ago when I was mad about Who was I mad about The pitcher who was always hurt. Sean Markham? Yeah, Sean Markham. So Sean Markham came back and I swore off injured or good pitchers forever. And so I was wrong on Brett Anderson because of that.

But I haven't sworn off injured or good position players. So I thought that the J-hat for Michael saunders trade was a great trade because he was gonna be a two to three win guy and he was a lefty and the blue jays had a righty heavy lineup and then he got hurt in spring training and then he got hurt again and and i mentioned in my in my article when i was calling it such a great trade i said he also has injury issues which makes this something less than a steal but i still went for it because i thought this would be the year when he would stay healthy and be good and i thought j-hap was just some guy and uh j-hap's been really really good and michael

saunders hasn't played so that one just has stuck in my head it's certainly not the most unpredictable or surprising thing that has happened this year but it's one that bothers me all right and um i'll do uh my last one is not so much a surprise that this guy was good at defense but that he was so good at defense kevin kiermeier as a plus 42 defender that isn't even that controversial it doesn't seem like like 42 i think it's fair to say any 42 should probably be regressed somewhat but like nobody's nobody's mocking it particularly like it's one of the great seasons ever and it seems like when writers tackle this number and tackle this player, they say, yeah,

uh-huh, that's right. It is one of the great seasons ever. And we knew he was a good defender, but this guy is basically as valuable defensively as Andrelton Simmons. And with Andrelton Simmons, you saw it coming miles away, years away. Like, it was always there. It was always going to be there. And then it showed up and it was immediately visible. Kier played right field mostly last year he didn't even play center

field primarily for them and he finished like fourth in fielding bible voting for the multi position spot which isn't that competitive because there's not that many guys who qualify as multi position guys he was two spots ahead of Steven Pierce, for instance, which puts that in perspective. I'm looking at our 2014 top-raised prospects, six glove, six arm, which means, yeah, he was an above-average fielder with an above-average arm. But, of course, he's an elite fielder now with an elite arm and

what shocks me is that that's not normally something that you see players get better at it's pretty much a straight slope down as far as aging goes and defense and particularly an arm how an arm gets stronger like that like you hardly ever see an arm change in any way but down. But to go, I mean, he's basically an elite eight-level arm, you know, eight-grade arm at this point. And so I don't know. I mean, I'm guessing he was well-coached and worked really hard. Yeah, he's like Juan Ligares the last couple of years where he was like a plus 30 both of those years

and no one saw him coming. There's been some couple threads at tom tango's site about how maybe it's positioning maybe the razor masters of positioning and that that should get a bunch of the credit for kiermeier i mean i don't when you watch him it doesn't look like he's just somehow being placed in the perfect spot for the ball every time it looks like he's a good outfielder but that's kind of a hard thing to to tell because you don't even really see where a guy starts when you're watching on tv so there's some speculation that maybe some of that credit should be going to the raised coaches or analysts or whoever but but yeah clearly he's he's very good all right

that's all okay we could probably do 10 without even breaking a sweat. We could every page I opened, I saw five more. Yeah. We could do this pretty much all offseason if we really wanted to. We could just start talking, open a page, and just go from there. We might resort to that at some point. All right, so we'll be back tomorrow. Send us some emails at podcastatbaseballperspectives.com.

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