Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 768: The Angels’ Simmons Incentives and the Braves’ Odd Rebuild

Episode Date: November 17, 2015

Ben and Sam discuss why three free agents accepted qualifying offers, then break down both sides of the Andrelton Simmons trade.

Roll back the meaning, feel out what's seeming to begin, now! You'll find that when you roll back the secret of what's behind, what's above, it's all that I've been thinking of. Good morning and welcome to episode 768 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 ESPN. Hi, Ben. Hello. Hi, Ben. How are you? Okay. Good. Anything to talk about today? Depends what you want to talk about. I'd like to talk about my bowling injuries, but I don't think that that's probably the best thing to spend our time talk about. I'd like to talk about my bowling injuries, but I don't think that that's probably the best thing to spend our time on. So I'm going to, I will be talking

about the Simmons trade and maybe a little bit of the Jonas Martin trade. All right. That's probably it. Okay. Are your bowling injuries back to Saturday soreness? I'm merely tender now. I'm no longer walking with a limp. Good. Yeah. So you wanted to say something about qualifying offers yesterday that we didn't get to, and I just wanted to ask how much you think the acceptances of the qualifying offers by Brett Anderson and Matt Wieters and Colby Rasmus had to do with what we talked about last week, the fact that this year's free agent market is stacked and next year's is not. Because it sounds like Brett Anderson had multi-year offers, and I assume they would have paid him more than the qualifying offer, and he rejected them. And seems like a good reason to do that if you're Brett Anderson I mean it's

it's betting on himself but I mean even he would probably have to think that he was fairly fortunate to stay healthy this year maybe he doesn't think that way when we talked to Stan Conte of the Dodgers who helped recommend that the Dodgers sign Anderson or at least weighed in on that decision. He confessed that he would never have predicted that Anderson would reach 180 innings. So you'd think that Anderson would have some self-awareness about that also. So maybe it just comes down to the fact that there are a lot of pitchers available this winter and not a lot of pitchers available next winter. a lot of pitchers available this winter and not a lot of pitchers available next winter.

And if he does stay healthy, then he would be one of the most appealing options next year, whereas now he's kind of an afterthought. I guess there's maybe kind of two questions there. One is whether I think it's a factor and the other is whether I think it should be a factor, whether I think that Anderson or the others really would have made more money with a weaker class. And I mean, there's, I think that it makes perfect sense that there would be some aspect of a flooded market or a scarce market affecting prices somewhat. But I have always kind of believed the J.C. Bradbury point that, in fact, what we think of as a flooded market is often an illusion that for every player who becomes a free agent, there is an opening. And for every player who doesn't become a free agent, there is not an opening at that team's hold position. And so if, you know, there's the same number of players in major league baseball, uh, there's the same number of talented players in the world and the same number of teams,

none of those things change. Well, technically, technically the first, the second one does, but they don't basically change. Uh, and if nobody is, if none of these stars are hitting free agency next year, then that's fewer teams that are going to be looking to fill holes. And so I think that, again, like, I mean, you can definitely see situations where the equilibrium does get thrown off a little if a lot of guys get injured, or a lot of guys get retired, or perhaps if a lot of a certain position tends to, you know, has a has a an ebb or flow in its natural development for some reason, then there are years where it's better to be a free agent shortstop. And the idea of a bidding war is somewhat unpredictable and maybe doesn't necessarily follow a lot of easy-to-grok algorithms, but sometimes it happens. And if you can get

two teams that are extremely enthusiastic about you for some reason bidding against each other, that helps. On the other hand, you can look at Prince Fielder, who there was no bidding war whatsoever, and they still managed to get a contract that was higher than anybody expected for him some years back. So all of that is to say that if I were a free agent, I would not make my decision based on this. I might consider there to be some small advantage to waiting till next year, but not a big advantage. And I would consider my salary next year or whenever I hit free agency to be most determined by what I had done as a player in the recent past and what I projected to do in the near future and not what Jordan Zimmerman had done or whether Jordan Zimmerman is available. Now, as to whether it is a factor, sure.

Everybody believes. I mean, it could be. Everybody believes the idea. It makes perfect sense that having a lot of other free agents at the position that you play would drive down your price. It seems logical. It seems rational. And probably it's true. Now, is there another catcher available?

Who's the second best catcher available in this class? Is there a top 50 catcher available? I think Wieters was probably the most attractive. Well, the most attractive, but is there even a second one? Chris Iannetta. Uh-huh, who's signed, who's already gone. Right. Yeah, I mean, you'd sign Jeff Mathis.

You'd sign Jeff Mathis. So I don't know that you're ever going to have less competition for Wieters than you do this year. Again, I don't know how much Jordan Zimmerman's availability matters to Matt Wieters. And I mean, with Anderson, to some degree, I feel like one of the reasons that Kennedy and Estrada, well, Estrada is coming off of sort of a career year, so maybe that all by itself explains it. But one of the reasons that I think Kennedy didn't accept the qualifying offer, whereas maybe a position player would,

is that there are 150 rotation spots. There's always going to be someone who needs a pitcher. There's always going to be someone who needs a pitcher the day before opening day. And that's not necessarily true of a DH or a first baseman or a shortstop where there's limited, there are, you know, very limited, restricted possibilities for where you can go. And if those teams don't need you and or don't want to give up a pick for you, then it's hard to convince them otherwise. It's not just a matter of saying, well, I'll take less. It's the, they just don't need you. They didn't, you're selling ice to an Eskimo or whatever it is. But for pitchers, there's always a, you know, a job to go to. You just have to find the right price. And so for, but that same concept would seem like it would make the Anderson's competition for a spot with Zimmerman to be fairly irrelevant as well.

Because one spot is going to get filled by Jordan Zimmerman. One out of 150. And there's going to be one that's filled by Cueto and one that's filled by, you know, there's six guys ahead of Anderson. But there's going to be a lot of spots that need to be filled. I guarantee you that if Anderson were a free agent, at least 10 calls would come to his agent and he could find a place to go. So that one seems not that convincing to me. And then Rasmus, I don't know. Rasmus is just weird.

That whole thing is weird. Seems to me. Yeah. Rasmus, I don't know. Rasmus is just weird. That whole thing is weird. Seems to me. Yeah, well, you can understand why weeders wouldn't take it regardless of which catchers are available just because he's not in a strong position right now. You could imagine him being more appealing next year, whereas the other guys we're talking about, Anderson and Rasmus, are coming off strong seasons, and you'd think there's a better-than-even chance

that they'd be coming off a worse season next year. And so in that sense, it seems curious, and it seems curious for Anderson, who's coming off a good year and a year that surpassed expectations to accept the qualifying offer, when Kennedy, who's coming off a bad year and a year that didn't meet expectations would reject it and maybe that just comes down to the agents kennedy is a boris guy and anderson is not yeah i uh i when i when i say it doesn't make sense i mean i'm I'm saying that the explanation that I'm asked to respond to doesn't particularly make sense for me.

But you can make a case, I think you can make a case for any of, anybody, I mean, I think you can make a case for about seven guys to have accepted the qualifying offer. These three of them, there's all a case. You know, Wieters, right. If Wieters has an all-star year, then he's the anti-Desmond. Yeah. He has a chance to be worth a lot more next year than he is this year. With Anderson, exactly.

I don't remember what exactly. And with Rasmus. Oh, well, with Anderson and Rasmus, look, if you've seen what happened to Morales and you've seen what happened to Stephen Drew, and you know that there's a possibility that teams are getting more possessive of their picks and that they're simply—look, there's 20 teams that are going to give up draft picks to sign free agents. That's a lot of teams that you have to convince to give up draft picks to sign free agents. Now, maybe the fact that there's a lot of them makes it better for Anderson and Rasmus because some team is only going to be giving up maybe a third rounder to get them. And that's not that big a deal. But just not wanting to be the guy who's not playing

in June seems rational to me. The thing that makes them surprising is that there are other guys that I would have expected to have made that decision before them. Rasmus would be much further down the list. So if six other guys had accepted it and also Rasmus, I'd go, oh, interesting. Interesting trend. Rasmus accepting it but some other guys not. You're like, huh. Yeah. Okay.

That's all the qualifying offer talk I have. Okie doke. So on Thursday night The Angels traded for Angleton Simmons We did not record Thursday night And we didn't talk about it yesterday So let's talk about it today Okay

Alright, so first things first What's your take? I like the Simmons side better, I think. I mean, we talked about the kind of rote ways we react to reliever moves or closer signings or trades yesterday, and there's a similar way that you can react to this one where you like the young position player and who trusts prospects particularly pitching prospects and Sean Newcomb who's the headline prospect in the deal gets lots of

strikeouts but he also walks lots of guys and could go either way whereas Simmons his defense at least is a sure thing even if it's presumably a declining thing. It's declining from a very high point. And there's sort of a persistent belief that maybe there's more in his bat, although I don't know if that's something you can really bet on. But his defense is so good and should be so good for a few more years that he has a pretty high floor as a player and he's signed for a while at a pretty reasonable rate so I like the the Simmons side of it probably a little bit more

and I'm kind of interested in the the Braves side of it also but you can say what what your take is first so in the last three years from ages 23 to 25 in the last three years, from ages 23 to 25, in the last three years, Simmons, 14.3 war. Anthony Rizzo, 14.2 war. Giancarlo Stanton, 12.6 war. Freddie Freeman, 12 war. Jose Altuve, 11.5 war. Would you agree that in a vacuum, like taking away the contract,

but let's just say all of them had the same contract that Simmons had right now. They'd all signed the exact same extension. They were all in the same place. Would you agree that all the guys I named would bring back more than that? If you were trading Anthony Rizzo for three years of below market club control right now, you'd get more than a top 50 pitching prospect, a one year of Eric Ibar, and a back end kind of guy? Yes. It's weird that, I don't know that, it's interesting that everybody, I think, kind of agrees that

the golden age for getting undervalued defense was like 2007 ish or so right yeah like when jack z started stockpiling all those guys or the race started the race right the race in 2008 the jack z was i think 2010 uh before that the a's had kind of gone with the uh athletic you know first to third types which is and a little bit more of a defensive mindset and that was kind of and i think everybody sort of agrees that that's old and that there's not really uh a like a an inefficiency around defense and yet a guy who it seems like it's still fairly consistent fairly reliable that a guy with a much more defensive tilt to his war brings back less. And so does that mean that there is still an inefficiency there in your mind?

Or does it mean that this is an area where pretty much all 30 GMs agree that war is actually not quite reflecting reality? Yeah, I think it's a little bit of the latter. I don't know whether it is in Simmons' case. I think if it were some guy who didn't have Simmons' reputation and didn't look like Simmons, if you had a season or two of really impressive wars that were built mostly on his defensive rating like gerardo para

if this were gerardo two years ago yeah and scouts didn't necessarily rave about the guy and maybe he didn't seem to produce web gems with the same kind of consistency then there would be some doubt and maybe there should be some doubt because there's less reliability, it takes longer for defensive stats to stabilize, but war treats them as if we have as much certainty about those ratings as we do the offense, which is not really the case. So in many cases, I would say that defense might still be a little bit undervalued. And maybe it's undervalued because there's that uncertainty about it.

Or maybe it makes sense that there is some uncertainty about it and there should be. But Simmons seems like he should be the exception in that his defensive ratings are so off the charts that even if we were to regress them a little bit, they would still be incredible. And obviously the eye test matches. But it seems like it's more interesting that we can't just brush this aside as, oh, well, it's the noise. Like this seems to be saying, no, no, we know his defense. It's just not as valuable as you would think. And I don't know what reason that would be. And I don't know if you can draw that conclusion from one trade.

But I mean, nobody else offered more for Simmons, presumably, and a smart GM accepted that. So I don't know. It's something to think about, something to keep an eye on. And I don't know how many guys there are that have that their defense is as bulletproof, that the metrics are as in keeping with the eye test as Simmons. And so maybe you'll never get enough case studies to put together a consistent. Jason Hayward, maybe. Maybe Jason Hayward. Yeah. maybe Jason Hayward yeah maybe Alex Gordon although maybe Alex Gordon's got the age factor but yeah maybe Jason Hayward maybe if Jason Hayward signs

a deal that pretty much everybody agrees is a war bargain then we'll start I don't know maybe there are already 10 of these that I could find if I wanted to spend an afternoon fleshing this out. All right, anyway, so a few thoughts that I had about this or a few questions maybe I had for you. I think one thing that's interesting about it is that it's in a way, it seems to me like a long-term move for the Angels, more than a short-term move.

long-term move for the angels more than a short-term move in a way i don't know either it's either i i think it's either a bad move or it's a sort of more 2017 2018 looking move uh for the angels because simmons is not that i don't think simmons is that much of an upgrade over ibar for a year i mean he is he is an upgrade but this comes back to the idea of replacement level being a great concept but you know not necessarily the best way to judge each move from its team's perspective they have holes in their on their team they have a lot of holes on their team there are a lot of places that they could upgrade by a lot simply by replacing the giant gaping hole that they have right now and shortstop was not really one of those.

Like they're taking out a guy who I would sort of expect to be a two, two and a half win player next year in Ibar. They're replacing him with a guy that I would expect to be like a four win player, which is good. But if you're going to get a four win player, then it might make more sense to do it at catcher or at third base or in one of your three awful starting rotation spots or at one of your two, I think, awful corner outfield spots. And they have a lot

to do, right? And the fact that they've put not only their energy, but their top two prospects and really their one good prospect, their one great prospect, into Simmons for a 2016 move feels really weird. But for a 2016-17-18 move, starts to make sense. And so I wonder if this signals that they are looking at 2016 as a kind of semi-punt and that Epler feels like, well, he gets a pass for the first year. Blame that one on his predecessor. But that 2017 and 2018 is really going to be more their window. And it'll be interesting to see how the rest of their offseason follows that idea or not. Because a big part of what the Angels' problems have been lately is that they treat every year as though they're a 94-win team when in fact for the last few years they have not been

and they keep on funneling more money into the short-term and more prospects and more everything into the short-term, which just makes their short-term prospects or their medium-term prospects worse. The medium-term eventually becomes the short-term and so on.

So it'll be interesting to hear. There's a 98- win team in 2014. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. They, they, and they, uh, they always, you know, they have talent, but they have been a series of kind of lackluster rosters other than that year. And, um, and maybe more than any other team, except for the Tigers, they have been spending down the balance for three years away to get good this year.

Anyway, so this might, I don't know. It'll be interesting to see. That's all I'm saying. Or could it be the opposite interpretation if they spend a lot? Yeah, right. It could be. If they think that, yes, they need a left fielder, but they can go sign Alex Gordon. Or, yes, they need a starting pitcher, but they can go sign David Price. I don't know what their plans are.

I don't know how much money they have. But Epler said something about how you can't get a high-end shortstop like Simmons on the free agent market. And, you know, I mean, there aren't many shortstops like Simmons, but you could go get Estrubel Cabrera, who's barely a shortstop, or Ian Desmond, who has his own issues and will be more expensive. So maybe it's just they're looking at this as an upgrade. They're planning to be a really good team again, and they think that the win-and-a-half upgrade that Simmons will be in 2016

will actually matter because they'll be a playoff contender. Yeah, I think that generally speaking, if they go make a bunch of moves to be good in 2016, I will probably consider this to not be a great trade. Because I would rather them have put their resources elsewhere. If they don't, then I might consider it a very good trade. I haven't decided yet. I don't know, well, I guess this is a long way of saying that the motives matter when you're assessing these,

and it's too early in the offseason for me to say what their motives are. Mm-hmm. That's fair. Secondly, the Angels, of course, have a horrible farm system, already had a horrible farm system, have had a horrible farm system. That has been part of why they have struggled with depth and had to sign free agents and had to your idea of doing a book about scott service turning around the angels farm system that didn't work out no didn't really work uh and they uh you know it's obviously it's a problem

because if you can't develop prospects and you have to do things that cost you more prospects and it becomes a little bit cyclical. But we talked yesterday about Dombrowski trading from a very deep prospect pool in Boston. And now we have Epler trading from a very shallow prospect pool in Anaheim. shallow prospect pool in anaheim do you think that the strength of a system uh changes in any significant way uh the economics of trading prospects from it like do you think that a team with a shallow pool need needs to put more value on the few prospects it has or does it not matter is a prospect uh is a prospect's value more or less the same in either context huh i could see a gm treating it differently oh yeah where he is in his life cycle as an executive like if he's if he knows he's not going to get five more years with the system and it's a bad system and he has one or two good prospects

then I could see him being more willing to part with those guys as opposed to using them as the foundation of a strong farm system for the future but whether it's better or not for the team I don't know if it matters I would think that also that if you're a new GM, that might be a good time to get prospects, right? If you're a team, you would want to talk to the new GM who didn't sign and draft and develop these prospects and isn't attached to them. And they're his predecessor's prospects. And he doesn't have the information advantage that a gm normally has with his own prospects yeah yeah maybe not i don't know he gets the he gets the same scouting reports and maybe some of the same people are in place but yeah maybe that and maybe he just

isn't as attached to these guys and is more willing to part with them so it could be a good time to go after prospects. Just talk to the new GM. Okay. I didn't really answer your question. I don't know. No, you answered a totally different question. Yep.

Do you think it matters? I think certainly people act like it matters. And I don't know whether that's because it's right or whether that creates a little bit of an inefficiency where you can take advantage of teams that are deep with prospects, but where you should stay away from teams that are shallow because they're going to ask more. I don't know. I would guess that, huh, I don't know, Ben. I don't know. I don't know how to answer that.

I don't know how I would even go about trying to answer that. That's why I avoided it and answered a different question. I guess what you'd do is you would take, huh, I guess you'd start by looking at a team 10 years ago with a good system and a bad system and seeing maybe what percentage of, huh, I don't know. I'm going to lay and think about it for a little bit later today. I could see it going either way. Anyway, it is sort of surprising, though, to see a team with such a weak system trade from that system. And maybe it's that it is an acknowledgment of the fact that you have you have that your window is now your window is closing, that your medium term window doesn't look great.

But I doubt that's what Epler's thinking. Like, I doubt Epler's like, all right, all in on 2016. And I mean, he just got there. Like, his incentives are all the opposite. He doesn't want to be there for a horrible long rebuild because they sunk everything into next year's team, I don't think. Unless maybe he does. Unless maybe you win the first year and then you get to coast on that forever. Like Bud Black.

Yeah. I don't know. Well, maybe it's just that they want they're thinking of the trout error era which is yeah not just 2016 but it's not long term it's sort of medium term don't they have like five more years of him trout is a free agent after 2020 so yeah five more seasons no options no options right no options so that's you know that's a fairly long time but simmons could be useful throughout most of that time they're worried that the jared weaver window is closed yeah the cj wilson jared weaver window all right lastly very interesting to see uh the braves essentially all of their extension.

You know, when they signed all those extensions, it was, you know, it was interesting. Everybody saw it as like this really encouraging thing for their future, great move and all that. And I don't think we look at these long-term extensions enough as sort of locking in trade value. They're, of course, very good if you want to have those players around and get those extra years, but they're also good if you want to trade them to teams that want to have those players around and lock in extra years. And you don't expect when a guy signs a seven-year team-friendly deal that that's going to get him traded. I don't think we've really seen a team do this have you can you think of other extensions team from the extensions that were traded uh particularly this early i mean there

there are no i'm sure there are people who've been traded with a year or two like like gomez technically with a team friendly extension they got traded two months before it ended but kimroll and and simmons were traded with what three years and three years left yeah and i don't i can't think like i can't think of any of those no and now freeman might get traded as well potentially there's you know i don't know if there's there's talk of it but maybe the talk is just talk yeah it's it's really weird i've been thinking about i mean this is a this tear this qualifies as a as a teardown i think as a complete rebuild and yet we don't think of it in the semi-positive light that we have thought of other recent teardown and rebuild it's It's not the Astros and

it's not the Cubs. And I've been thinking about why that is. And I guess there are a few reasons. It's one that the team just went from being really good and promising to rebuilding, just as you're saying, in a really, really quick way There was no adjustment period There was no The Braves won 96 games in 2013 And they won the East Didn't they have The best record

In mid-2014 Yeah, 2014 They were competitive They finished second in the East Because of that terrible September But before then they were very much a contending team. So they went from like a good young team that had won its division and was maybe going to win its division again or make the playoffs again to just tearing it all down in a month of bad baseball basically so there was no adjustment

period there's no like few seasons of futility when the fans have time to come around to the idea that you have to reset and then the guys that they've traded have all been as you say either under team control or young and in their primes it's not just simmons and kimbrel and you know it's also hayward and upton i mean guys who hadn't had time to decline yet and were young and exciting players like these are all exciting players to watch they're not just good and boring but they're like the best at what they do if you like watching strikeouts and crazy relievers then kimbrough is your favorite one of those guys or if you like watching defense then simmons is your favorite one of those guys so they've traded all these young guys that a lot

of teams would build around and i guess it's the corporate ownership. It's Liberty Media. And so maybe there is some suspicion and maybe justified suspicion that this is not purely a competitive rebuild. It's not that they looked at it and decided that they would be better off doing this, but that some faceless suit said that they had to save money. And that's sort of the history of teams operated by faceless suits and then maybe lastly it's that there's no obvious stat sort of narrative to this it's not like they hired a bunch of baseball prospectus people or they hired a bunch of people who won a world series in boston and talked a big game about what they were doing and the analytics and all of that it's just sort of a seen as a more old school organization and they love pitching and scouting and so it's not as compelling a narrative arc maybe so for all of those reasons this rebuild is sort of weird and depressing i didn't even mention alex, another guy traded when he was, what, 24? And Evan Gaddis was a guy traded when he had a year and a half of service time.

Yeah. Did you mention Gaddis? Yeah. So it seems like a teardown for the wrong reasons, or at least more so than the previous ones did. I agree. I thought that last offseason was weird for that reason. I am not yet in the bad teardown camp

because I think to some degree the worth of a teardown or the scorn worthy of a teardown is how long you keep it going and to what degree you're sort of like, or the scorn worthy of a teardown is how long you keep it going. Yeah. Right. And to what degree you, you're sort of like, I don't know. I don't know that,

like, I don't know. I don't, I guess I'm just not fatigued by this Braves teardown yet. Yeah. And, and it hasn't, it to me,

it's yeah, you're right. The, the obviousness of it is in trading guys who are cheap already. And, and so that is the equivalent of the sort of unnecessary tank. And they've also sent sort of mixed messages with what they've gotten back, which also makes it seem like there's less of a coherent philosophy to it

in that they, which in a way, I mean, maybe is a good thing. Maybe they're trying not to have the years of total futility when they're trading for like shelby miller who is also young and good right now but then when they trade right alex woods for olivera that and yeah so and ibar is a legitimate shortstop for next year yeah who knows if they'll keep him but he's a legitimate shortstop and newcomb's basically you know a maybe a 2017 eta guy and yeah so and and they have the new stadium coming in 2017 so you'd think that they'd want to be not totally terrible then so maybe that's a good thing maybe it's nice that they're not just completely tanking on three or four years or maybe

that contributes to the sense that it's not totally planned out like they're trading these young guys but they're getting some fairly young guys back it's not as clean you can't classify what they're doing as clearly as you could with the cubs and the astros. Yeah, I prefer that. I don't really feel like the... I've never felt like the Braves were giving up on 2017 in any of this. These moves all do seem to be fairly justifiable in a not-too-long-ranging outlook. To me, I still sort of feel like last offseason was weird, and maybe that is enough for me to see all this as a continuation of that.

Like it was an extremely abrupt knee-jerk reaction to two bad months. And I'm not sure that they needed to do that, and I'm not sure that if they hadn't gone into last offseason like 28 other teams did, that they couldn trading players who are affordable instead of salary dumps. It's interesting. It's interesting as kind of an economics trend. But I don't think that, like, they didn't, I think they did fine in this trade. And it's, you know, they got some interesting players back yeah i mean they they have a long way to go if they want to be a exciting watchable team when that stadium opens in that they were one of the worst teams in baseball this year seems almost inevitable that they'd be one of the

worst teams in baseball next year so it would have to be a pretty big year-to-year improvement for them to go from that to exciting young team that people want to pay tickets to see in 2017. So if that's the plan, it seems like a lot of things would have to come together pretty quickly for that to happen. Yeah, but that's the story of half the playoff teams every year true they need they basically need to hit on three of their pitchers like they have a bunch of pitching

prospects they need three of them to turn into great pitchers and that's a little bit of a long shot uh but it happened to the mets i'm not sure that they're significantly worse off right now than the mets were two years ago uh i don't think that they're likely to get there. I don't think that there's a Harvey DeGrom-Sindergaard trio waiting to emerge or anything like that. But that's, I guess, the idea. Yeah. That you get some high volatility pitching prospects

and you hope three of them hit. Yeah, and if you really believe, as they seem to, that pitching development is a strength of their organization, and I don't know how much consistency there is with the Braves. I mean, I don't know how much what Leo Mazzoni did with Tom Clavin or Greg Maddox tells us about what they'll do with this current crop of pitching prospects. I mean, I guess there's some continuity in the farm system as far as coaches and administrators. But I don't know how much that success informs what we think about their current success. But they seem to think that it's a strength of theirs and that they can do it better than other teams can. So if you are convinced of that, then I guess this is what you should do.

Are you, if you were a GM, would you feel any particular guilt or would you feel any particular obligation about trading a guy who signed a long extension with you when he was 23 years old and took some sort of discount to stay with you and like would you feel like there is some sort of covenant there that you don't trade that guy i would yeah i mean i i talked to john hart for an article at bp when they were signing all those extensions and he talked about how when you sign one extension it sort of makes the subsequent extensions easier because you can sell the guys on the idea that they're going to be part of a young core and they're going to play together for a while and they came up together and they're going to be part of a winning team and everything so you do have to

sort of sell them on that idea and then to a year or two later totally flip-flop i guess i'd feel a little bit bad about that i don't it probably wouldn't stop me if i thought it was the best thing for the franchise but but yeah okay all right what's in there okay so we'll do an email show tomorrow most likely so you can send us emails at podcasts at baseball prospectus.com. Join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild and rate and review and subscribe to the show on iTunes. Please support our sponsor, the play index, go to baseball reference.com.

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