Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 767: The Non-Cookie-Cutter Craig Kimbrel Reaction

Episode Date: November 16, 2015

Ben and Sam discuss the Craig Kimbrel trade and the way to talk about closers in 2015.

Sit on my ass and watch the game like everybody else And when it's on the line that's when they take me down from the shelf You think this kind of pressure is easy you're just kidding yourself Good morning and welcome to episode 767 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from It's easier just kidding yourself How was your weekend? Just wrote some book. Not sure if I like book writing. I would like it if it were all that. I think it would be nice to be completely submerged in one writing project for a long time, but of course that's not how it is. You still have to feed yourself and write other things for other people

and reply to emails and do a podcast, and then it sucks. Yeah, I just want a more constant supply of compliments i think yeah no i know and when it's fun to write something and then have no one see it for months i want feedback i'm used to writing something and then everyone sees it the next day yeah the annual is very can be very dissatisfying for me for the same reason. Not so much the wait, but just that people don't read a book and then

immediately ping you with praise for it that everybody can see. And so you're really, you don't get the same kind of feedback and a lot of it is limited to Amazon comments, which get dominated by the people who respond the amazon comments which get dominated by the people who respond the fastest which is to say the people who aren't really reading it and the people who

give you one star because the shipping was slow exactly yeah the shipping was slow uh speaking of our amazon page our book has a cover on there now so people can go look at that big news yep i went bowling on friday night and i bowled seven rounds and i hadn't bowled in 17 years and i have a very violent delivery i'm what's called a high effort pitcher yeah and uh very violent, very all cutters, basically, hard, spinny. And in order to do this, I have to sort of slam down to a knee to get under it. And it's a mess. Anyway, it seemed like it was fun. And then Saturday, I woke up really sore, really sore. I thought, oh, this is bad. Sunday, I was probably triple as sore. I almost literally couldn't walk up one flight of stairs. I almost had to call for help. That's how bad my body is.

So it's your legs. It's everything. It's my legs. It's my arms. It's my core. It's the side of my right foot where a lot of pressure was going is bad. The glutes are bad. Right now, the left thigh is the worst. The knee that I drop down to is bad. And I can't pour milk. I cannot write. Anyway, that was yesterday.

Today, I woke up thinking I would be healed. And I'm somewhere between Saturday and Sunday. So I'm not telling you this because I want sympathy. This is a warning. This is a public service warning. Writing is really bad exercise. Be careful about bowling. So is it just bowling? What about when you shagged flies in Sonoma or threw in Sonoma or swung bats in sonoma this summer is it any any activity uh those yeah everything that you do for the first time in a long time makes you sore and those made me sore yeah the swinging the bat made me sore but not like this just a little bit and that the shagging flies was fine except that i did the thing with

the neck i kind of pulled my neck and that hurt for three weeks. But that was a little bit of a fluke. So I think the bowling. Yeah, sounds bad. I haven't bowled in years. So I'll steer clear. Just imagine somebody asking you to throw a 15 pound ball as hard as you can 150 times in an hour and 20 minutes. And it does seem like a lot of effort when you put it out. Yeah, it's a heavy ball. It's about as heavy a ball as you can get in a sport. Uh-huh. All right. Okay.

Anything else? No. All right. Let's talk about the hot stove. Okay. Primarily, I think we'll probably talk about the Craig Kimbrell trade. We might also talk about the Colby Rasmus acceptance of the qualifying offer. We might also talk about the Marco Estrada non-acceptance and further signing

to a two-year deal and what they tell us about things. But let's start with the Craig Kimbrell move. I think it's probably safe to say that five years ago, this would be the easiest blog post you ever wrote. Yeah, well, I'm still seeing the same blog post. Okay. I don't know. All right. But all the same, five years ago, this is like easy. This is like the most. This is by the numbers.

You just talk about how you don't overpay for closers. You don't undervalue prospects. You look at marginal value. You look at a few things and it's pretty much done. Do you feel anymore? Do you feel, do you personally feel that it is any harder to write that blog post now than it was five years ago?

Well, it's more boring because we've read it so many times and so therefore there's pressure not to write that same blog post although as i said i mean a lot of the reactions i saw basically boiled down to that so if i were writing that post i would try to come up with ways to not make it sound like that just because it is just very rote at this point. And I think the readers expect to see that. And so you want to be creative without just being intentionally wrong. So I guess. Well, so you think that I get, I mean, my primary question is, is that, do you, is that, is it still a slam dunk of a position? I don't know.

I think there's maybe more openness to the idea that elite relievers are more valuable than war says they are. Although there are a lot of people who make good cases that they're not. But just the fact that, I mean, you know, everything is the Royals right now. And so people draw the Royals conclusions. And Jess Sullivan wrote something last week about the value of elite relievers and how teams with elite relievers did slightly better than you would think based on their war, just like a win a season, which is not so much that closers are suddenly way more valuable than we thought they were. But maybe if they're, you know, two war or three war, maybe it's three war or four war instead.

So that's something. I mean, it still, I think, boils down to the fact that they don't throw that many innings. And a lot of the times the innings that they do throw are not the highest leverage in the game, although the closer tends to have the highest leverage in the bullpen still. So this seems like a lot of prospect to give up for that kind of player still. So I think there's more openness to the alternative or there's more questioning of whether that dogma is true. But I don't know that anyone has convincingly shown that it's not other than the fact that teams keep treating it that way. Yeah. I think there are maybe three kind of ambiguities that are worth thinking about, not just about the closer question, but about all sorts of factors that kind of

go into assessing a trade like this that aren't specific necessarily to this trade, but that feel somewhat specific to the era. One of them is that, yes, everybody looks at the Royals and says, boy, what'd they do? And one of the lessons that people take from it, and I don't feel like it's a wrong lesson. If you just look at how the Royals won, the Royals won because their bullpen was phenomenal. That is as a description of what happened. They're awesome relievers, pitched awesomely, and helped them win. Not just win, but probably even win more than we would have thought with a mindset that sort of didn't give extra credit to that. Now, so that's one, so you could take from that, ooh, let's be the Royals.

Let's do like the Royals. That worked. But it's not, what the Royals did is not trade for Craig Kimbrell. What the Royals did is not trade for Craig Kimbrell. What the Royals did is not sign Andrew Miller. They got these great relievers in a totally unreplicatable way, right? They didn't know that generic fourth, fifth starter Wade Davis was going to be the best reliever in the game. We know that starters get better, but Wade Davis wasn't particularly any better than Zach Britton, who turned out to just be a pretty good reliever,

like a good one, but not the kind that wins pennants automatically. Yordano Ventura, not Yordano Ventura, Kelvin Herrera was a guy that they signed forever ago as a 16-year-old, and eventually he got pretty good. And Ryan Madsen was the reason Jerry DiPoto got fired to some degree, signing Ryan Madsen. And Greg Holland was a 30th round pick or something like that. So if your lesson is, let's get awesome relievers, great. That is sort of the equivalent of step two, question mark, question mark, question mark

though, right? Yeah. I don't know that there's ever been a point in history, or at least recent history, in the last 20 years, in modern history, where teams weren't all running around paying top dollar trying to get elite relievers. It's never like elite relievers were ever undervalued. Everybody's been trying this since the Nasty Boys and Tony La Russa, basically. They've been trying to get elite relievers.

That's the problem is that when you try to do it, you get Blue Shield of California, a reference that a third of our readers will get. You get Blue Shield of California and then people fire you and other people write chapters in books about how you did it wrong. So picking the best reliever or one of the best relievers has traditionally been a pretty bad strategy, not because relievers are worthless, but because of that. So the other thing is that there's always kind of been a little carve out to this rule where even sat heads would say, well, relievers are so unpredictable, so undependable, so short lived, so easily replaced, so quickly destroyed that you shouldn't do this except for the very

very very very very few at the top and that was basically a way of saying except mariano like we did like nobody wants to be the anti-mariano right position and so there was always a loophole if you could get mariano rivera that was the exception we're're good with that. And Craig Kimbrell is, if there is one of those in his era, is that, or has been that, or had been that. And he is the guy, I mean, his numbers put Mariano Rivera's numbers to shame in the regular season to date. He is the greatest reliever of all time, probably, if you don't factor in that there might be a decline phase coming. And, obviously, Mariano has the postseason thing. So I'm not saying that he's...

Mariano. I am not taking an anti... I'm not falling into that trap. I'm not taking an anti-Mariano. But in the regular season, thus far, Craig Kimbrell is, had been, has been, the greatest and most consistent and most dominant reliever of all time, I think. Fair? Fair, yeah. Probably.

You can say that he's maybe already declining a little. for that though uh and whether that was ever a good rule of thumb rivera was a freak show and maybe part of being a freak show was that he kept the freak show going maybe there's maybe maybe he is the freak show even within the freak shows and if you took 10 other mariana riveras nine of them would fall apart kimbrough was not as dominant last year he was another i mean part of the reason that he was a bad move for Preller is that he turned out to just be a pretty good reliever. He was, you know, one of the 30 best relievers in baseball, but he wasn't a clear number one, two, or three.

And so for that reason, I think that you could argue that the Mariano loophole may not have necessarily been good, but whether it was or not, Craig Kimbrell may not necessarily still qualify. He's 28 years old now, which is not young, and I would say that his most dominant year is now four years back. There were very small, almost irrelevant, but very small declines for two years after that. He was not quite the same otherworldly pitcher as far as his strikeout rate particularly and as far as his control particularly. His FIP in 2012 was 0.78. And it was more like two, which puts him at the top, but not Pedro. You know, like that's not, you're not the Pedro of your generation if your FIP is two.

And then last year it went way up. And so it's, yeah, I think there's a reasonable case to be made that you could not like trading Kimbrel prices for Kimbrell right now. I don't know that I agree with that, but there's a case for that. So that's the first ambiguity. The second one. We've got two more ambiguities to go. The second one. Yeah.

I don't want to talk about Marco Estrada. The second one is the idea that, well, say there's a move that you want to make, it seems good to you, and 29 other teams wouldn't do it. It's really hard to know whether that means that you should do it because you found a market inefficiency or if that means that you're an idiot. But like I've never been able to quite square the – what seems to me to be the winner's curse paradox where if you win the bidding on an item, you probably overpaid because 29 other teams said, I don't want to pay that much. And yet like that can't be. Like some moves have to be good. A lot of them have to be good uh half of them roughly half of them well maybe that's i mean that's free agency right because it's open to everyone whereas a trade is not necessarily open to everyone you might be better at at soliciting trades or you might just match up better with a team than the other teams

do yeah there might be other i mean right there are baseball is a little different than buying um 40 million dollar works of art because there are a lot of different ways to acquire in baseball but um the you could i think you could look at this and say that there has been a bit of a correction in the reliever market. We don't see, I think we don't see quite the same number of very long, very expensive, I mean, you know, there's no BJ Ryan contracts being given out right now, right? There's not really five year, what would be the equivalent of like $80 or $90 million contracts being given out to relievers with a year and a half of good relief, right? We've gotten past that, right?

I think so. I think, yes. And I would say that there's probably not, of the 30 teams that are out there, I would guess that maybe two or three would consider something like the Justin Spire contract that the Angels gave out eight, nine years ago, or the Brandon League deal that Ned Colletti gave out a few years ago. Coletti gave out a few years ago. There might be two or three. And I feel like 10 years ago, that was just considered like, that was what you paid. Like you had to go four years on marginal relievers, like four years, like they were giving out four year deals to marginal relievers. Yeah. So there's someone's kind of cite some four year deal from last year, probably, but, but not as not on the same scale. Yeah, I think I might be wrong, but I think that we have, I think we've talked about this, and I think there is evidence

that the reliever market is much more rational at this point. And so there's probably, you know, I think most teams aren't necessarily willing to give up what it takes to get Craig Kimbrell at this point. And maybe that means that the market is overcorrected. And look, if the Red Sox win, I guarantee you if the Red Sox win, one of us will use the term zig when others zagged to describe this, right? It will look good if they win. We will talk about how the market overcorrected and the Red Sox were aggressive about pursuing a quality asset and

it worked for them. If it doesn't work, then you're like, yeah, I don't know what's wrong with them. 29 other teams are too smart to do this. They were the only team that would do this. And obviously, it's really hard to know which that is. It's hard to know whether 29 teams are all dumb or 29 teams are all smart. And to be clear, it's not the contract because Kimbrell got one of those contracts. You know, he got a four-year, 43 million deal with a team option. But what's remaining on his contract, I think probably 30 teams would pay, right? If it were just the money, he has 11 and a quarter due to him this coming season and then 13 and a quarter in 2017 and then a 13 million dollar option for 2018 so everyone would pay that for craig kimbrell it's

just how many of them would pay that and also trade away a bunch of really good prospects yeah yeah exactly that right the price is not the end. It's the prospects. Sorry, we should have said that because not everybody read the transaction analysis. Anyway, there are things that there are times where we suggest that the right

thing to do is to look at where the market is and go somewhere else. You cannot win when you're doing the same thing as 24 other teams. When you're competing for the same assets in the same marketplace, that's when you get into the winner's curse, right? And that you should be gambling, that you should be looking for things that nobody else is looking for, and that you should be like the Royals getting contact hitters, basically. And then there are other times where that doesn't work and you just look like a buffoon

and that's when you get fired or that's when you're Kevin Towers and you're like, wow, it seems weird that he likes everybody more than the industry or hates everybody more than the industry and the trades don't make any sense. And then you get fired. So,

right. Yeah. It's not that different. Like this is, this is this one way or another, you, we will use this trade to explain what happened to the Red Sox next year. But honestly,

we don't know whether the Red Sox are going to win 93 games or 68 games. We have no idea. There's a 25 win spread that we have discovered with the Red Sox alone in the last couple of seasons that we have no idea. Exactly. Thirdly, there is the problem with prospects where we know that prospects produce more value over the course of eight years at better deals over the course of eight years than veterans in aggregate. It's not particularly close. We don't still have any real way, I think, of valuing the, or I guess maybe valuing the declining utility of eight years from now, of a win eight years from now. And partly that's because these are maybe arguably career decisions that these GMs are making,

where like Dave Dombrowski is also an agent of Dave Dombrowski, subconsciously or not. And he doesn't know where he's going to be in eight years. And partly it's that you don't know where you're going to be in the winning cycle in eight years. And partly it's that you don't know where you're going to, what the market's going to be like for various things in eight years. Partly it's that you don't know what the strike zone is going to be like in eight years. It seems undeniable that if you just add up the wars, the prospect side is usually going to win.

And I think everybody, that's not a particularly insightful thing that I'm saying. But even in acknowledging this, I don't think that we have a really good guide for knowing how much to discount wins or how much to put a premium on a win today as opposed to a win seven years from now or even next year or even in September. And even if we had a good guide, it wouldn't be a good guide because there's 30 teams with 30 different stories that it's very dynamic. It's like predicting weather more than five days out. The variables get so complicated and so complex that you're really just now you're back to using one size fits all measures and looking at the historical average. And so for all those reasons, it's hard to say with like any particular confidence that this won't work out or this can't work out or even that there's not some process in place

that makes sense. That all said, I heard about this trade and went what yeah definitely i mean it's easy to do the like armchair analyst thing of like dave dembrowski suddenly is transported to boston where he has a farm system and actual prospects. And finally he can get the closer that he couldn't get and build the bullpen that he couldn't build in Detroit. And so it sort of seems like he just went wild with all this prospect talent he had and gave a bunch of it away for the daisy of his Detroit tenure.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Dave Dombrowski is a Craig Kimbrell away from having two rings in Detroit. Yeah, maybe. But that said, he also signed Jose Valverde, who was, we now know sucks, but was, I think, like the Rolaids Relief Man of the Year or whatever the year before. Like, hadn't he just gone like 51 for 51 in saves or something like that with Houston? Like, Valverde was an investment.

Like, Valverde was a big closer investment. And then he did trade for Soria, who was like a legit relief ace, not quite on the level of Kimbrell, but actually probably if you look at Soria's numbers in the first half of that year before the trade, he probably was as good as Kimbrell was last year, just my guess. And if you look at Soria's history, obviously there's a health gap in the middle, but if you just look at what he'd done,

he is also a guy who, over the course of his career, had been maybe the second best closer in the game behind Rivera when he was healthy um and uh certainly like a top five ish guy um a guy that you'd carve out a loophole for valverde was actually an all-star twice with detroit and once finished fifth in cy young voting the year that he the year that he was at the year that or did he no 2012 was the year that he basically got replaced by phil coke in the playoffs right yeah and then never was yeah yeah exactly valverde right that didn't even turn out badly i don't remember what year i'm thinking about where he

went obviously he didn't go 51 for 51 because he never saved 51 years but he had some crazy year i forget which year but he was really good with houston before they signed him in the year before and so i guess that is that. There you go. That's the whole thing. Like that's everything I just said for 20 minutes in that statement. Yeah, right. He was what he was supposed to be for a couple of years.

And now if we remember him, it's more as a mistake. 2011 was when he didn't blow a save. that's what you're thinking of okay 49 saves all right so uh do you feel like the now we're really way way way way into speculation territory here so we'll just caveat that right right there but this does feel like a dombrowski move like this like somebody, Tim Britton might have said this or something, but like you can't, I think Brian McPherson did.

You can't, no, the other one. Red Tux have too many good, too many good beat writers. Anyway, one of them mentioned that this is like 100%, I don't know if that's true, but 100% that Theo Epstein would not have made this trade. And Ben Theo Epstein would not have made this trade.

Right. And Ben Sherrington would not have made this trade. And we don't know. We don't have enough of a signature of Mike Hazen. But we know the front office is basically still the same front office besides Dombrowski. And that Hazen grew up under those guys and is a guy who presumably shared a lot of their ways of building a team and thinking about a team. Got some Frank Wren in there now, former Kimbrel GM. That's true.

That's interesting. But yeah, I wrote last week. Is this the thing I wrote last week? About former GMs trading for, or new GMs trading for their former players. Yeah. Yeah. Or more, more likely not trading for them. Yeah.

Uh, anyway, so the, uh, again, super speculative, but does this to you suggest that there is like, uh,

I don't know that, that, that this, that Dombrowski and the, what we think of as the more classic Red Sox like I love Dom like Dombrowski is an all-timer right he is he is a great GM um and uh you know in a lot of ways uh like what I asked about a week ago on Twitter which GMs how many GMs do you think will make the hall of fame at some point and who are they and the most common responses were do you think will make the hall of fame at some point? And who are they? And the most

common responses were, do you want to answer this? And to put, to give you a little bit of context, there's only like four GMs. And, um, I think like maybe two of them you could argue were just for winning. And, uh, so it's, it, it has always been extremely rare. So part of the question that you have to answer is, do you think that that's going to always be the case? Or are GMs now sufficiently like managers that we'll see them inducted at the same rough rate that a manager would, which would be, you know, three or four per generation? Yeah, you'd think now that we focus on front offices and executives so much that we would start to see more in the Hall of Fame. Yeah, the only problem, I don't know, I think the only reason that you wouldn't start to see more in the hall of fame yeah the only problem i don't know i think the only reason that you wouldn't start to see more in the hall of fame is that

they don't they're not as photogenic because they don't wear hats like you can't carve a it's harder to carve a uh a plaque of a guy who's not wearing a hat it doesn't look like a baseball guy yeah right you gotta wear hats that's a new the new inefficiency, which is a guy who will wear a hat. Yeah, that's a good point. So active, we're talking active GMs or president of baseball ops, active. So they have to be active. Who do you think will be in there, say, within the next, I don't know, 50 years? I mean, there are a lot of well i i guess alderson i don't i don't it's weird because i

don't like do you have to win world series to be a hall of fame gm you you'd think so you can't just do it for being billy bean and and being influential i mean can you i don't know i guess that's what you're asking but you would put being in if if it were like uh innovators or people who changed baseball or updated front offices or something but if he doesn't win a world series then it seems like a it would be a tough sell for a lot of people so wait you did you say alderson weren't are you talking about alderson or bean i mentioned both i i guess alderson is a is a better bet because he did win yeah so so let's say alderson sabian um which is not something that anyone would have expected several years ago for us to be saying that he would be a hall of fame general manager but sabian and theo and that's probably the that seems like the only

people that have a better than even chance so uh bean and theo were the by far the two most common responses and partly because of that and partly because I agree. I think they're likely in. You're right about Bean. It is tricky. It's very tricky to put a GM in who had 30 some years and didn't win in World Series.

But I would guess that, I mean, Theo seems like if Theo wins with the Cubs, then he's and it's like they might they might wave wave the wave the thing right waiting so uh but i think regardless theo is uh i think bean gets in before alderson so those two were the top two responses. Alderson was probably the next most, and then Dombrowski and Sabian in that order, and then I think Cashman.

Yeah, Cashman has longevity going for him and the fact that we like him a lot. But I don't know. It seems like if you were a... Obviously, he won lots and lots of World Series, but I don't know how much that will be discounted by the fact that he works for the Yankees. Of course he should win World Series, and he didn't really build the dynasty teams from scratch. Yeah, I think he needs another one, too. If you go out in a 15-year run of not winning with 300 million dollar payrolls

then well he won in 2009 no i know but i assume that was six years ago and i assume he's going to be a gm for quite a bit longer and so he if you if he were to go out with a run of 15 years of not winning with 300 million dollar payrolls yeah that would be that would seem to tarnish it but uh and then nobody really mentioned i think one person mentioned friedman and friedman is young and we don't know what he's going to do but just knowing that both his place in the game and his apparent skill level uh and that he's in some ways fit between bean and theo just as far as sheer saber integration into the game. Friedman seems like a bet.

You could bet on him. But anyway, what was I talking about? Dombrowski. Dombrowski was, I think, the fourth or fifth most common response. And the reason I asked the question is because I was writing something somewhere and was wondering about whether Dombrowski is a hall of famer, uh, and is at that level. And of course he's had, you could argue three very successful runs turning bad teams into good ones. Uh, in some cases, extremely bad teams into extremely good ones. He's only won a world series with one of them. And so I don't know if that's a problem, but he's been a very successful GM.

So, that's a prelude to say that it also, I don't know where to put him philosophically with the Red Sox kind of more well-known philosophy. And I'm curious, looking

at this trade, which seems again, to be so much more Dombrowski than what we would consider, you know, Red Sox canon, that I wonder if this is a suggestion of a real split and perhaps real tension to come. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if there will be tension. Obviously, that requires knowledge of the front office's inner workings that we don't really have. But I think you could say that it reinforces the suspicion when he was hired that we'll see a slightly different or maybe dramatically different way of doing business and sounds like the red sox will be a leading candidate for a top starting pitcher so that seems like a break from last year's stance which was we'll just get these guys who are pretty good and we don't necessarily need to get an ace and it seems like he wants the shiny positions he wants the ace he wants the elite closer and so yeah maybe those are areas where the previous regime would have felt like

we're overpaying and maybe he'll feel like we're overpaying but we have lots of prospects and we have money and yeah we want not to have another terrible season so so it does seem like a shift in that sense so um tom broski is obviously comfortable i would say running an organization that has a bad farm system yes uh he succeeded with it now you could argue that maybe that contributed to it in that he made lots of trades. Yeah, exactly. And you could, maybe you could argue that the lesson he would take is that eventually that

comes home to roost and that's why he's not with the Tigers anymore and that's why the Tigers have somewhat of a pretty pessimistic outlook on at least the next year or two and maybe the next seven years. Or you could say, yeah, he's comfortable doing it. And for that, he got to go to a couple of World Series and almost

won some stuff. And it was a good time to be in Detroit. It was a great time to be in Detroit while he was doing that. So do you think that him trading these prospects, which is a good haul, I mean, there was a lot of trade value right there for Kimbrell, suggests that his pursuit of an ace is unlikely to be in trade, that if it was, then he wouldn't have unloaded those guys, and whether it is now kind of a near certainty that the Red Sox will do seven years and give the Dodgers, Cubs, maybe Yankees, maybe someone else, a extremely committed bidding rival for Price or Granke? Like if you, just knowing this, knowing that they're going to want an ace and knowing that he made this move, what kind of chances would you put on the Red Sox signing one of those two guys?

Or is it the exact opposite and you go, yep, here comes the liquidating of the farm system. He's comfortable without these guys and will use them the way he used prospects in Detroit to get what he considers elite right now talent. Well, I think he said, or someone high up in the front office said that this was the big trade of the offseason for them. And obviously we can't just take the GM at his word. He might decide to do something different. He might intend to do something different or something different might just come along that sounds good at the time so those kind of comments are not binding but it sounds like at least he's conditioning people to expect there not to be another trade for an ace and and to think that guys like Betts and Bogarts and and Swihart are safe so I would guess that just based on that and the fact that the Red Sox trade chips from last season or from last winter are now just

really good players that you wouldn't they're not even trade chips anymore they're just they're integral parts of the team who are expected to be really good because they were really good in 2015. I would think that given that and given the market and the fact that there are tons of really good starting pitchers, that they would go after one of those guys. I don't know whether it'll be Price and Granke or whether it'll be someone from the next tier down Cueto or Zimmerman or someone but I would get pretty good odds on one of those guys getting signed by the Red Sox

I wonder if Cueto and Zimmerman will if Sky does his ace ratings again like his Google Doc ace voting game which i love and which i think is great at showing sort of weird biases uh that the public has at the top end of

the pitching scale i wonder how cueto and zimmerman will do this here cueto sort of fought his way into aceness but it always seemed like uh with a little bit of resistance from the public. And I wonder if just in two months, Cueto lost that and will now be considered not ace enough. And then Zimmerman, I think, was going into last year, I think, was the best pitcher in baseball that consensus did not call an ace. But then he was a little less good. And so maybe now he's no longer that thing.

And in fact, maybe there is a lag where now he is seen as an ace, even though he's less of one. I don't know. People hate the ace conversation. I sure do. All right. I don't want to talk about the other things.

We're done. Okay. So that's it for today. Maybe we'll get to the other hot stove stuff. I wanted to say something about Andrelton Simmons, but maybe tomorrow. We do this every day. So you can send us emails at podcast at baseballperspectives.com

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