Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 778: Your Best Emails, with a Special Surprise(d) Guest

Episode Date: December 3, 2015

Ben and Sam banter about rumors, answer emails about reclamation projects, a free-agent A-Rod, secret contracts, no-trade clauses, and more, and speak to someone who’s not expecting their call.

🎵 Good morning and welcome to episode 778 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectus presented by the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I'm Ben Lindberg of FiveThirtyEight, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Perspectus. Hello. Hey there. Listener email show. Anything you want to talk about before we get to that? Two quick things. Two quick things. One, I've been trying to...

Okay, so yesterday I talked about... I tried to talk about rich teams getting to hold on to their prospects. And I don't think I expressed it that well. I've been trying to condense it. So I'm just going to try one more time. I feel like we are moving toward... We have seen the league moving toward and we'll continue to see the league moving toward a situation where rather than poor teams building off of prospects and rich teams trading their prospects for the poor teams, veterans who are

getting more expensive, that you're now seeing the exact opposite where only the rich teams can afford to get into the free market for guys like David Price. And therefore, the poor and middle market teams have to trade their prospects to get those guys in smaller commitments. And so, in fact, it will now be the rich teams that get to develop their prospects and the poor teams that will be trading them away, which is the point just being it's a flip from 10 years ago, from what we used to think about small and mid-market teams. I think you nailed it this time. All right now I want to know we haven't discussed this but are are we doing non-revelatory rumors again this year? I think so. I assume the bar will be high. Yeah the bar will be high. Yeah new ground needs

to be but I wanted to point out two. Okay. I don't have the exact wording, but one was that the Astros owner is a big fan of Aurelius Chapman. Not sure how that will matter. That was the rumor. Did you see that one? No. All right. I'll get the exact wording for this one. Yeah, exact wording matters with non-revelatory rumors.

It really conveys exactly how non-revelatory they are. Here we go. It's our friend Kraz. I've been told that Astro's owner Jim Crane is a big Aroldis Chapman fan. Not sure how that enters into the equation. Okay. Well, who isn't? Is that revelatory? I mean, maybe. I guess it could be. Who is not an Arolius Chapman fan? Everyone wants Aurelius Chapman. The implication, at least, is that he's a bigger fan than others, and maybe he's a bigger fan than those in the front office, and that he might exert influence. And so I feel like there are

words left out that make it revelatory and that you can assume. So if he's been told, for instance, by the Astros GM, who's like, yeah, man, my owner is constantly talking about Aurelius Chapman, that would be interesting. And I think you can assume that there might be some of that subtext there. So I feel like this is an example of a revelatory rumor that is worded in a benign way because, you know, sometimes your sources require it. Uh-huh. Okay. The second one was just tweeted by buster at least two teams monitoring yoanis cespedes market and prepared to jump in to take a shot if his price tag falls enough okay yeah i think i mean that's a classic uh uh non-revelation rumor where it's like well yeah

of course if the price tag falls enough then i'm involved too i think what makes this a classic and instant classic is at least two teams fall into this camp so 28 teams can't confirm cannot confirm that 28 teams will sign him if his price tag falls now but at least two will yeah at least two are monitoring so that doesn't even mean that they would necessarily jump in they're just're just paying attention to what his market is. You would think that almost every team is monitoring. Okay, that's all I've got. Okay. So one just quick thing.

Jody emailed us about our last email show, episode 774. We got a question about using a better hitter to bat for Andrelton Simmons in the first inning of a road game, and we concluded that it wasn't worth it, that he wasn't a bad enough hitter, and there were other reasons not to do it. But as we probably should have noted, and as Jody notes, there is some precedent for things like this, and he sends an excerpt from Earl Weaver's Sabre bio, and I will read that very quickly. In 1975, he adjusted for Mark Belanger's weak bat during late season division races by listing Royal Stillman to hit leadoff and play shortstop on the road. Stillman, who was called up from the minors once rosters expanded, hit 500, 3 for 6 in those situations, so he usually gave the team an immediate advantage.

When the Orioles took the field in the bottom of the first, Belanger would trot out to short and hit leadoff the rest of the game. Royal Stillman, by the way, career, 89 games, 213 batting average, 77 OPS plus, 634 OPS. It is not as though he had, you know, like remember when Mark McGuire had plantar fasciitis? And I think Tony La Russa would sometimes bat him third on road games so that he could hit once and never have to step on the field. It's not like he had bad foot Mark McGuire. He had Royal Stillman, who the next year hit 091-200-091. That's a gutsy move, Earl.

And the next year, Belanger had a 100 OPS+. Yeah. So not the best. Yeah. The league never stopped Weaver from using that particular ploy. He did it again in 1979, but it did pull the plug on another one of his strategies. In 1980, he fell into the habit of listing Steve Stone as his designated hitter. The motivation was simple.

If the opposing pitcher was knocked out of the game early, Weaver wouldn't lose a position player. If he wanted to change the DH to match up better with the reliever. It was perfectly legal, but the league passed a rule against it, citing that the stunt distorted hitting statistics. Which is an interesting rationale for outlawing something. So, some precedent. And even in the precedent, it probably wasn't the greatest idea, really, even if it happened to work out. There is a good lesson in the latter one, which is that a lot of times you might think there's a little edge to be gained, but it's actually pretty, if it's annoying to everybody else, they'll just shut it down.

And so you only get it for a little bit. And so whenever, sometimes we talk about whether there are ways that you could exploit these various things, like by planting a tree and so on in the middle of the field. And oftentimes we will come down on, yeah, sure. And then they'll tell you the next day that you can't do that. Because they can just do that. There's a metagame going on, too. Okay, we got some good questions.

I'll start with one from Mick. I don't understand how every year there are players who were successful reclamation projects, Hap, Hill, Murphy to a point, yet they almost never re-sign with the team that helped them rediscover the magic. Considering Hap signed for three years and $36 million with Toronto, and disregarding what Pittsburgh could or would offer, what discount do you think the Pirates could have gotten for Hap and still signed him? Or, with most of these situations, is it a combination of greed and ego that players are unwilling to cut their old team any slack you'd think that there would be

more than just a hometown discount it would be bigger than a hometown discount right if you were the team that picked a guy up off the scrap heap and turned him into someone who could get three years and 36 million a, you'd be worried. I'd be worried that if I were separated from that team or that coach who did that thing for me, that something bad would happen. I mean, did people talked about that with like Joel Pinero?

And I was just, I literally have Joel Pinero's baseball reference page open right now. Yeah. I guess that really stuck in our minds. Well, he went to the Angels, so I wrote a lot about it. And so that's one, maybe why he stuck in my mind. So what was his progression? Well, he was essentially like in 2007, the Red Sox tried to make him a reliever.

Do you remember that? When he couldn't stay healthy and he wasn't very good for Seattle, he got worse and worse. He was a former top prospect. And then he went to Boston and he was going to be the closer. And so for that, like the spring of 2007, he was like a trendy fantasy pick because now he's a, he's a starter going to closer and we knew how that worked out. And, and then he was horrible in relief for Boston. He had an ERA over five and after 31 games in relief, they. He had an ERA over five. And after 31 games in relief, they traded him to the Cardinals, who immediately put him back into the starting rotation and had in two, in the next, I don't know.

Hang on. Actually, I couldn't tell you exactly. In three partial years with the Cardinals, he had a 101 ERA plus. His third year, he went 15 and12 with a 117 ERA+. And then went to Anaheim and had almost the exact same year. Although the distribution of his peripherals was a little bit different. But he was still an above-average pitcher for the Angels in his first year. And then his second year, he had some injuries and then was never good again.

Yeah. So you would think a there'd be a little bit of gratitude to the team that that made you good and b there would be fear that if you were separated that you would lose the magic and you'd go back to being whatever you were before so you would think and i don't know i mean he he says they almost never re-sign with the team i don't i don't know if that's i mean i guess the odds are that that they almost never re-sign with the team. I don't know if that's, I mean, I guess the odds are that they would rarely re-sign with the team just because you're on the open market and things happen. I don't know if they re-sign with that team more often than you would expect from chance alone

or something like that, that's possible. But yeah, I don't know. I would be willing to entertain a discount in that kind of situation. Yeah, I agree. I'm surprised on both counts. And look, not to make everything about Stompa, but it is sometimes surprising when you're in a front office to see how good people don't value loyalty in baseball. Because they're really good people. You know they're good people. You know that it's not a bad thing that they're doing.

And you have to kind of recalibrate what loyalty means in baseball because I think there is an expectation in baseball that you're going to move around a lot, that the team is going to trade you, that you're going to trade the team, that you're going to find the right spot. And it is a job that involves a lot of roaming. It is a job that involves a lot of roaming. And so maybe it's, I'm sure that it's, I guess what I'm saying is I'm sure that it is surprising to the front offices sometimes that J-Hap shows so little interest in giving them a deal. But it's probably not surprising to any of J-Hap's teammates. Michael wants to know, what kind of contract would Alex Rodriguez get on the open market this winter coming off his 33 homer, 131 OPS plus campaign? Oh, wow. Good question. It is a good question.

And he's Alex Rodriguez still, right? He's still all the baggage or anti-baggage or whatever it is now. He has it. is now he has it so first let's say it wasn't alex rodriguez but let's say david ortiz had had the exact same progression from 2010 to 2015 where he'd gone from being mvp candidate mvp leader to a good hitter to injured to miss his full year is almost 40 and then has this bounce back season and everybody loves him he's david ortiz then what what does that guy get? Rodriguez was a three-win player on baseball reference. Other than 2013, which was the very bad injury year, and then missing 2014, he's essentially been a three-win player for the last five years. And he's also an old DH.

Yes, right. So there's a limited market for that kind of player. I mean, he gets a one-year deal, and I'd say he gets $9 million. Yeah, Jim Tomey is kind of this precedent, right? Except without the injury. Everybody loved Jim Tomey, and he also was on the downswing of his career at 37, 38, and then had a big age 39 season. He didn't play every day, but age 39,

which is the same age A-Rod is, 108 games, 182 OPS plus, the second best of his career, finished 18th in MVP voting as a part-time DH. And then, let's see, 2011, he made $3 million. Huh. Which is crazy. Yeah, he made $3 million. Huh. Which is crazy. Yeah. He made $3 million after that.

Yeah, that is pretty crazy. And, I mean, I remember this partly because even at the time, it seemed crazy that Tomi would get so little interest. He was a reclamation project who gave a discount. Mm, maybe, because of the twins. Could be. I would say that, I don't know. I mean, look, Kendry's Morales got two and 16.

Yeah. And obviously much younger. He was coming off nothing. Yeah, he was coming off nothing. Is it really that absurd to think that a guy at that stage in his career who wanted a two-year deal couldn't get a two-year deal? I think it's unlikely that he would get a two-year deal. Really?

Even if he wanted that, even if he went out there saying, I want two, give me two. I'm signing for whoever gives me two first. Yeah, I think so. So let's just say that he, let's say that's his number one priority is to get a two-year deal. How many millions could he get for a two? Because obviously someone would sign, if you're saying one year and nine, someone would sign him for two years and nine. What would be the highest two year offer he'd get? I mean, Michael Kadir got two and 24 or 25 or whatever and

he cost a draft pick and he's Michael Kadir. It was 221. 221, yeah. And you know, he's Michael Kadard. He's worse than A-Rod is, right? Yeah. So, and just as fragile. Although, I guess he could play. He was basically coming off an A-Rod season. Yeah.

Pretty much. Except he was 34. Very trajectory over the three or four years that he hit free agency. But is younger, but has less extreme goodness in his past yes i'm gonna say that a-rod would get if or david ortiz if it were david ortiz i will say gets two two and twenty okay david or with rod's numbers now the question is does a-rod's baggage matter anymore i think it matters i don't think it matters so much that he would get the bonds treatment like he might have, you know, a year ago. Now I think he's rehabilitated himself.

He's been a good citizen and a good broadcaster. And he's kind of transitioned into the Giambi clubhouse mentor type in a sense. And everyone talks about what a baseball savant he is and how analytical and great to talk to and so there's still the chance that he tests positive for something or he gets busted or something and then you have a scandal on your hands but other than that like he's not really a cancer in the way that some people are not even the way that bonds was really he's not really like a bad guy that people hate being around. And it's not like he gets the superstar treatment and everyone is jealous of him because of that or something.

It's just that he cheats sometimes and then he lies about it and then he cheats again. But he doesn't really hurt anyone when he's not doing that. No, it seems like he used to be more. Like his teammates used to hate him, right? Yeah, yeah, that was maybe just the contract. And it might have just been the Jeter factor. If Jeter hated him, then maybe that's what we heard. But you're right.

It feels like he's... I wonder how much of the remaining baggage got wiped out by his broadcasting. Because really good. Like everybody liked him. Although that's just baseball twitter i mean i we live in a very small community yes and it's hard to know sometimes we're we i feel like we're a cult and uh so i don't know if that's a shared opinion across

baseball yeah i don't know i would guess that a rod would have very little package at this point that there would be a few teams that wouldn't want him, but most teams would. Like, I bet the Red Sox would sign him right now. Uh-huh. And I bet the Dodgers would sign him. I bet the Dodgers would sign him. Yeah. Maybe.

I don't think the Angels would sign him. I bet Artie Moreno hates him. Yeah, that's probably true. Yeah, so there would be a smaller market, so he'd have fewer people bidding, and his market would be limited anyway. So he'd get less. I think he'd get less, but he'd get something. All right. He hits free agency next year? He has two more.

Unbelievable. He goes on forever. Never. Never does. Okay, let me ask you a question right now. So yeah, he hits free agency after 2017. Will he play 2018? I'll say no.

I'll say he's well-liked enough that he, like, I don't know. He's never going to get a retirement tour, but I don't know. He'll only be, if he hits 20 in each of the next two years, he'll only be 35 away. Oof, yeah. Maybe. Maybe if he's that close. I would put the odds at 30%. Yeah, that's about right.

I think it's probably even a little lower. Yeah, it might be lower. All right. Yeah, and he might want to retire a Yankee or something like that, so he might not want to string it along if he's not actually close to the record. All right, very quick one. Dave says, when reading about the Trumbo trade, I saw a reference to his per 162 games average over the last several years, implying that that would be a typical year.

What is the actual number of games that would represent a typical year? So that you would quote a player's per X game average to get a typical year. I've thought about that before. I think it varies by player maybe a little bit, but if you were just going to say a generic player, I think the, well, if you just look at qualified hitters from last year, there were 140 or whatever. The average number of games played by those players was 147. That seems like a typical full season to me. 147 games. You get 15 off or you get a 15-day DL stint in there.

Yeah, Fangraphs uses 150 for basically their prorated UZR. Right. I don't know why 150, but I don't know if it's influenced by that, but I guess I would have said 150. Sounds about right. 150 is a full year to me. Yeah. If I saw 150, I'd say that guy is durable.

The weird thing, here's the weird thing, Ben. Mark Trumbo games played in his career, 149, 144, 159, 142. It's not like this is like Sean Markham where you have have to cherry pick and cheat. Like he plays full years. Just look at his years. Like what point is being made? If only Trumbo could stay healthy once. Right. Yeah, it's a shorthand.

Like baseball reference has a 162 game average line. And you look at that and you think it's really good because most guys don't play 162 games. So it's somewhat good because most guys don't play 162 games so it's somewhat misleading maybe okay it's like wow over 162 game season trumbo would would average 31 homers right and in his four full seasons he has averaged like 28 homers so you just say he's averaged 20 yeah he has actually averaged 26.2 homers a year okay next question comes from another sam you guys were talking about players picking teams for reasons like restaurants and culture and i wanted to submit jay bruce's no trade clause for consideration it includes seven teams yankees

blue jays a's red sox twins marlins diamondbacks and rays i won't even give my thoughts Yankees, Blue Jays, A's, Red Sox, Twins, Marlins, Diamondbacks, and Rays. I won't even give my thoughts because I want to see what patterns you can draw from this. Yankees, Blue Jays, A's, Red Sox, Twins, Marlins, Diamondbacks, Rays. Yeah. So it kind of looks like he merged the two strategies that people use in these sorts of things. The Yankees and the Red Sox, the presumption being that those are teams that are A, likely to try to get you, and B, you can squeeze for an extension when they do, and then the rest are bad teams. Yeah, well, I guess so.

Yeah, or bad places to play. Yeah, bad places to play. Don't want to play in the Marlins. Maybe he hates the Trop. Yeah, maybe he hates the Trop. The A's are... Minnesota's cold. Arizona's hot.

I mean, he's from Texas, so I don't know if the heat bothers him. Yeah, I wonder. Because, I mean, it's a little, so I don't know if the heat bothers him. Yeah, I wonder. Because, I mean, it's a little scattered. It is, yeah. It doesn't really seem to follow a coherent strategy to maximize the value of the no trade clause. But he must have his reasons. We should call him. Yeah.

Ask him what he has against Minnesota and Miami and Phoenix and Tampa Bay. Yeah. Can you find an example of a typical no trade clause? If you just Googled some prominent player. Yeah, it does feel like there's a real opening for a blog here on every team's no trade exemptions. Sorry, every player's no trade exemptions. Because I would be curious.

I would like to do some analysis on them. And I don't know how often they get published. They can get updated. Yeah, often it seems incomplete. Like there's a report that some team is on it, but it's not the complete report. But maybe players would be honest about it because they put them on the no trade class so they don't have to go there maybe in some cases. So they have no reason not to say that they don't like that city. Yeah, I don't have to go there maybe in some cases so they have no reason not to say

that they don't like that city yeah i don't know i think i would guess that there's a that most of them look like this but maybe with a it's weird that he put every al east team on except for the orioles yeah is there a geographic there's no real geography here they're not clustered like aj burnett's were always like he couldn't fly his wife doesn't fly yeah right and so his would be everybody who wasn't like basically on the uh what is that train called sell sell a seller a seller yeah bruce has east coast west coast midwest he's all over the place yeah i wonder if any hitter has ever put rockies on there he's got three of the you know he's got three of the four expansion teams on here so maybe

he is old school and doesn't want to go to any of those new teams i don't know he values the history and the tradition too much no i do think i actually though i think it would be interesting to talk to every player about their no trade clauses start a blog on that topic yeah probably would all right well we haven't done that so that's the end of this answer play index sure play index is also a uh an answer to an email this email was sent by scott one of our favorite emailers and he asked has any team since 1988 obviously ever started a season without a single player who'd been in the league long enough to reach free agency? To be sure, Mike Trout is making free agent money, but wouldn't qualify under the above definition because he hasn't accumulated sufficient service time. I checked COTS, but didn't see an easy way to answer this question.

Can play index do it? Can play index do it, Ben? It's a pretty big ask for play index. Oh, but it can do it. It gets you about 90% of the way. You do have to do a second step. But I looked at all seasons from 1988 to 2015. I used the batting season finder. So any player, the great thing about the batting season finder is that it includes, I think it includes everybody, even if they didn't bat. And so that's nice.

And so I looked for teams with most players meeting some qualification, sorted by ascending. So it would actually give me the teams with the fewest players matching the qualifications. And it was, and I set it for simply seventh season on. So any player with seven who is playing their seventh season in the majors, because we know that if it's your sixth season or earlier, by definition, you cannot have hit free agency. Now, seventh season doesn't necessarily get you there either, because if you're playing partial seasons,

it's not the same as service time. If you're playing partial seasons, then they won't count as four years for your service time. You could play nine or 10 years if they were included lots of time in the minors and still not be eligible for free agency. But at least we know that from the seventh season on still not be eligible for free agency. But at least we know that from the seventh season on, you cannot be a free agent. So I looked for teams with the fewest

number, the smallest number of players matching this criteria of it being their seventh season or later. And just to double check, it gave me 810 seasons. I checked and there have been 810 seasons since 1988. So we know that all are accounted for. That is always one place that you can go wrong with the play index is that the zeros don't necessarily show up in your results. And so you might think that the team with one example is the fewest, but the zeros don't show up. But in this case, there are no zeros. Every team shows up. You can never really go wrong with the play index no you can't you you can miss you can do it wrong yes yeah you can be too quick and careless there are

a few teams that have like four guys five guys and this is not opening day i went for the whole season i don't care if it's opening day i want the whole season so there are a few guys with four or five players who were seventh season on and it's conceivable that some of those guys were in fact not free agent eligible. But in, I think in every one of those cases, I found at least one player who had clearly been free agent eligible, that they were a veteran. Like, like for instance, the 96 Cardinals had a few guys who were six, seven seasons or more. of them was martin mcguire who was in like his 11th year so we can rule out that team right they definitely had a free agent eligible player now there are three teams with three players that matches and i was just going to go one by one and

check to see if all those guys had actually hit free agency but i was able to conclusively roll rule out two of them and then as i was going to do the last one, I thought, ah, I'm not going to waste my time. I'm just going to go straight to the team that has two. The 1994 Expos had two players that were in their seventh season or later. So I just have to see whether that seventh season came with enough service time to have hit free agency or not. Those players are Randy Milligan, who played his final season in 1994 for the Expos. It was his seventh season, actually his eighth season overall. But the first one, he only played two games.

The second one, he played 40 games. And looking at his service time and looking at his salaries and looking at the fact that he was traded the previous offseason, which implies, of course, that he was absolutely not a free agent, then I can conclude that Randy Milligan had never been free agent eligible. So then I go to the next one. Ken Hill, seventh season, was in 1994. But in his first season, he only started one game, pitched in four, not enough to get him to free agency. And in fact, I don't even think he was a free agent the next year because he was traded in that offseason as well,

although it's possible he had signed an extension. But I can say conclusively that that was at most Ken Hill's sixth season of service time, and he had not hit free agency yet. He was not free agent eligible at any point in his career, which means that the 1994 Expos did not play a single player who had reached free agency. Every single one was Arb or earlier.

Wow. Pretty impressive. Jonah's going to be really excited to hear about this. This is a fun fact. This is going to be the epilogue. He's going to have it, like for the paperback, he's going to have to, I guess he's already got a paperback, but for the... We should call him.

Okay. We should tell him this news. You think he'll be excited? Yeah, I think so. Go for it him this news. You think he'll be excited? Yeah, I think so. Go for it. All right. Call him Jonah Carey is on the phone. Hold on, we're listening to your intro.

Jonah Carey speaking. Jonah, it's Ben and Sam. Hey, how's it going? Okay, we are in the middle of a podcast and we just did a Play Index segment, and there's an Expos-related fun fact that we want to share with you on the air. Okay, do it. Just to get your reaction. We don't have any—we're not requiring any insight.

We just want to see you open the present on Christmas morning, see that it is socks, and still go through with pretending that you're excited because someone put some thought into that present. Considering that I had a spectacularly important phone call that I'm waiting on, like literally now, this was an interesting surprise, but let's do this thing. All right, we'll do it quick. So the 1994 Expos, so far as we can tell, to the best of our knowledge with the help of Playindex, are the only team in history that did not have a single player appear the entire year who had reached free agency yet. Ever?

Ever. Every single player was six years of service time or less. No. What about like Randy Milligan and Lenny Webster and that guy? Dude. Randy Milligan was one of the two that we had to check by hand because Randy Milligan had, it was his eighth season, but he had not yet reached six years of service time because the first year he only played very briefly. The second year he played only briefly. I think he would have been a free agent the next year, but instead retired.

Lenny Webster at that point was only in his fifth year. He was 29, but it was only his fifth year. And the other edge case was Ken Hill. Ken Hill, yeah. Well, Ken Hill, of course, was gone after the next season. Yeah, go ahead. We think that Ken Hill hit six years of service time that season and so would have been a free agent,

although I think he also maybe had signed an extension. They traded him, though. They traded him. Well, they traded him, but I think he had signed it. Had he signed an extension at that point? Oh, hell no. They didn't give out money to anybody. Oh, yeah, that's a good point.

There's no chance. They let Larry Walker walk without offering him arbitration at the end of the year to get a draft pick. On the possible.001% chance that Larry Walker, one of the 10 best players in baseball, and a Canadian, and the heart and soul of that team, might accept a one-year deal in order to stay with the team as opposed to signing a multi-year deal elsewhere. So I guarantee you they did not give Ken Hill an extension. Yeah, you're right. You're right. He hit free agency the year after.

I think that, in fact, I was misled by the salaries. I think he was a Super 2, and so he did get three years of ARB under them, but was not yet to three years of arb under them uh but i was not yet to six years of service time wow in my mind randy milligan was like 72 years old that year this is an amazing stat you totally made my week yeah this is your favorite team of all time right and we just we told you something you didn't know about it and you wrote the book you wrote the book about this franchise i did and now i'm gonna go on Twitter and just say nice things about your book like 50 times and get people to buy it constantly so that I can return the favor.

Randy Milligan was 32, by the way, that year. And I was 19, so, I mean, in my mind, it makes sense that I would think that he was 72 years old. Yeah, yeah. Jeff Gardner. Jeff Gardner and Jeff Fasero. There were three 30-year-olds, Milligan, Jeff Gardner, and Jeff Fasero. But Gardner was only in his fourth year and never played again,

and Jeff Fasero was only in his fourth year, having debuted at age 28. I'm now going to give you another research assignment that you could do on a future show. And you'd have to kind of parse this a little bit, because the specialization relief era, maybe you have to start with the beginning of Tony La Russa's career. But I would venture to say that the 94 I exposed, if you were any relief innings thrown by left-handers than virtually any other team in the last, let's say, 25 or 30 years, they were all righties, the good ones. And Felipe Alou did not give a damn. It totally worked out a great bullpen.

Well, that is the easiest thing in the world to search. So I'm going to go to the split finder. I'm going to 1988. I'm going to split type platoon splits. Oh, can I do I can't do two though. I can't do two splits at the same time. The double split always gets you.

Yeah, exactly. So I can't do it in real time. I could do it very easily at another point, but I can't do it live. We'll call you back some other day. By the way, nothing more riveting to podcast listeners than Sam Miller going on baseball reference in the middle of the show to do a search. That's every show. That's why you're an award-winning podcast. All right.

Well, everyone go buy Jonah Carey's Expos book, Up, Up and Away, even though it does not contain this fun fact, because Jonah just didn't do his research, just didn't do enough interviews, didn't come across this fun fact. But maybe in the second paperback edition, he can slip it in there somewhere. My next book will not be about baseball, but I love your book very much.

When Montreal gets a baseball team back, you will do a new edition of Up, Up and Away, and then you can put this fun fact in there. Not true. I will actually be the Magic Johnson-level figurehead owner of the team. That's actually what my role will be with that franchise. It's not mutually exclusive. You can do both.

Fair, fair. I like it. Thank you, fellas. See ya. Hopefully this was a nice fix for people who missed the Jonah Carey podcast. Good luck with your very important call. Thank you. Okay, bye.

All right. Done. It's funny. Play index. When we call people unexpectedly, they're always waiting for a very important call. Just like Ned Garver. Play index, promo code BP. $30 for the whole year.

And if you get it quickly, you can beat me to the left-handed relievers record that Jonah hypothesized. Yeah. All right. A couple more. Darius says, I just read the head game. And in the chapter on Warren Spahn, he writes that Spahn almost never started against the Dodgers for three years in the 1950s because the Dodgers' powerful right-handed lineup and the short fence and left at Ebbets Field were both bad matchups for him. I also found a Joe Posnanski piece commenting on this. Do you think there is ever a situation in which teams might adopt this approach now?

The change in reliever usage has obviously changed the role of the starter significantly since Spahn's career, but in extreme situations, such as a fringy left-hander up against the Jays in the Rogers Center, would a team get enough benefit from skipping that starter, calling up a spot starter, or shuffling their rotation to ensure that the pitcher in question missed that series? shuffling their rotation to ensure that the pitcher in question missed that series. Would it have too much of a negative impact on the pitcher's confidence, even if the team thought it was worthwhile otherwise? This is something that we talk about in the playoffs a little bit, when you have the flexibility to decide that you don't want to start someone on the road, or you want to start Johnny Cueto in Kansas City,

or you don't want to start Derek Holland against the Blue Jays or whatever it is but during the regular season it's that's obviously much more difficult and and yeah this used to be much more common I mean I think teams used to shift around starters sometimes to like Whitey Ford would start against the Red Sox a lot or you know whoever the rival of the Yankees was at that time. And it's just more flexible. You would kind of use them at higher leverage games to a certain extent, whereas we don't really see any of that now. Almost none of that now.

So is there enough leeway? I mean, well, the crazy thing is that, I mean, I guess maybe Warren Spahn is, maybe they moved him up. If they bumped him up and threw him on short rest or something, then it would make, but I mean, like, Warren Spahn is your best pitcher. Like, you don't want to, you wouldn't want to do anything that would limit the number of innings he would throw, even if it is a bad match. Like, Warren Spahn in a bad matchup is still your best pitcher. Right? Yeah, sure. And you're not, you're certainly not saving him for the postseason because he ain't playing the Dodgers

in the postseason in 1955. And so it does sort of feel weird. I'd be interested to see how they did this without it looking dumb. Because can't you imagine being 14 in 1955 and they're like, yeah, we're not going to start Spahn against the Dodgers. Your head would explode. How'd they get away with that? We should call Warren Spahn.

Yeah, I don't think he's available. But, so you can't, I mean, calling up a spot starter is not really something you would do because it's not like teams just have good starters that they're not using for no reason. I mean, you could flip-flop guys. I mean, occasionally you'll see a team like if there's an extra off day earlier in the season or something, they'll skip the fifth starter. That kind of thing happens. So there's a little shuffling that goes on. But I don't know, with a five-man rotation and fewer double headers, maybe it's harder with fewer double headers. I

mean, you have fewer off days. It's a 162 game season and you play six days a week or seven days a week. And so it's tough. There's not a lot of flexibility and everyone has a five man rotation. So that's another thing. It's not a three or four man. So you're kind of having to use everyone just to get through it. Yeah, there is a I think that one of the lessons of Russell Carlton, like one of the sort of large overriding lessons of Russell Carlton's work is that most of the time when you think you've got a plan to squeeze a little extra value out of some opportunity or situation, the difference is so small that it almost inevitably is the case that you should just use your best players and and so i think like we had this conversation a couple times with stompers about whether it would make sense to shift the rotation to have a certain player pitching against a certain team either to leverage that player or to avoid matchups and ballpark issues and um it never got much traction read our book read the book um okay last one from nick this is also kind of a throwback to an earlier era of baseball question

how would the baseball experience change if player contracts weren't made public and the only people who knew contract details were the 30 gms slash owners and the individual players in other words the contracts themselves would stay the 30 GMs slash owners and the individual players. In other words, the contracts themselves would stay the same as they are now, but the media and fans wouldn't know how much and for how long players were signed, and teammates wouldn't know how much more slash less they were being paid compared to one another. So obviously this is the way it once was, but that was mostly in the reserve clause era where you didn't really have a lot of long-term contracts and the money wasn't anything like what it is now. So it would be different now. I wonder whether this would keep salaries down. It would be totally different than it was when

salaries were not public in the past when baseball players made normal people salaries or close to it. Now it feels like we are entitled to know. We deserve to know because it's such a huge commitment if you sign a David Price. I mean, can you imagine if the Red Sox signed David Price and you didn't know how long he was going to be a Red Sox? Just like we have David Price for an unspecified amount of time. Yeah, you'd have to know the years. You can't be engaged in the planning of your team if you don't know how long you have control of those players.

And that's to some degree true of the dollars, but much less the dollars are negotiable. The years, though, those are real. Whether the player exists in your team's roster is just binary. I think that you would see more players choosing to go to teams based on the avocado factor. I think that there would be a lot. I actually do think that more players would choose soft factors, non-monetary factors in making the decisions if the dollars weren't public. I think that to some degree having it be public puts pressure on – well, for one thing, it puts pressure on you to support your union. it becomes more than about the money. It becomes about your status and about winning and about being the best and about putting yourself in that tier with other players in that tier. And if it were all private, I imagine that some players would probably be a little less focused

about getting $1 more than other people. So that would affect the business. I mean, it'd be nice, I think, to be honest, to be able to write about the David Price signing and not even have to think about the dollars. Yeah, that'd be great. Like, it'd be a lot more fun as a writer if when David Price signed, you could just write a 1,500-word piece extolling the greatness of David Price and not have to even think about it as an economics decision. But that's just me. That's just selfish.

I don't know if it's better or worse reading. I don't know that Vernon Wells gets booed so much if he's, nobody knows what he gets paid. But I also think that probably, well, for one thing, these dollar figures are not actually released. They're leaked, right? Yeah. It's impossible to imagine anything not leaking.

Right, and so, yeah, it's not like there's a rule that when you sign a guy, you put it in the press release. Teams won't even confirm officially most of the time. And so it would probably happen anyway. But I wonder how good we'd be at guessing. Like, I wonder if every Angels fan who would have known how much Vernon Wells was getting because we would sort of know. We would have a pretty good sense of how much Vernon Wells was getting because we would get, we would

sort of know, we would have a pretty good sense of how much everybody got paid. Like we would know when he signed that extension, we would be able to assume that he was paid a lot for it and we would still know he was bad. And maybe it wouldn't matter at all. Maybe it's all expectations and just the idea that he's worse than he used to be would be enough for fans to hate him. Yeah. And I don't know, players would talk. Players would know what they were making, I think. Players would have some sense, I would think. So, and teams would probably, I mean, this would kind of encourage, I don't know if it would encourage collusion,

but it would definitely encourage knowledge sharing among teams, I would think, because there would just be so much less awareness of what the market was, or you'd always want to be pumping people for info. What did you give this guy just to know what you should give this guy? So I don't know. That would be sort of a danger area. You would have fewer players getting scapegoated for seasons, I suppose, or you'd have fewer guys be targets because of their salaries. I mean, you would know who was making the most money anyway, but maybe if you didn't have the specific number, it would be a little hard to hate them. So that's all I can

think of. Yeah, me too. All right. So that's it for today. Good emails, still some good ones left over. Please keep sending good ones at podcast at baseball perspectives dot com. Join our Facebook group at Facebook dot com slash groups slash effectively wild and rate and review and subscribe to the show on iTunes. at all unless you knew roughly how much guys made and so that would create a need in the baseball information marketplace to be able to estimate with pretty good confidence what guys are making relative to each other and so it probably wouldn't really change anything at all like i think we'd be able to piece together with about like 90 accuracy how much guys were making and it would i think it would almost have almost zero, zero effect. Now, the more I think about it, the more I think no effect.

Except for the occasional avocado signing. Right. Okay. And you can support our sponsor, The Play Index, which we used for much of this episode, used to make Jonah Carey's week. And you can do that yourself. Find some Expos fun facts for him use the coupon code bp

when you subscribe to get the discounted price of 30 on a one-year subscription and we'll be back tomorrow I'm a-walkin'