Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 781: Are Teams Going Overboard in the Bullpen?

Episode Date: December 8, 2015

Ben and Sam banter about Hall of Fame voting and David Price, then talk about the recent trend toward teams acquiring multiple elite late-inning relievers.

How could I move the crowd? First of all, ain't no mistakes allowed Here's the instructions, put it together It's simple, ain't it? But quite clever Some of you been tryna write rhymes for years But weak ideas irritate my ears Is this the best that you can make?

Cause if not, and you got more, I'll wait But don't make me wait too long Cause I'ma move on the dance floor When they put something smooth on So turn up the bass, it's better when it's loud Cause I like to move the crowd Good morning and welcome to episode 781 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 ofh of 538 hey ben hi i used the play index yesterday for an article that i wrote at fox sports on hall of fame voter clusters uh-huh where what you can basically predict about a guy's or gal's ballot if you know for instance that he or she voted for lee smith or that he or she voted for jeff bagwell and so on and baseball reference was very helpful in that that's interesting what did you find oh you'll have to read it ben couldn't get a teaser it's who knows uh here let me see. I'll give you one fun fact. This is not in the article. Okay, so Sammy Sosa last year got 7% of, was named on 7% of ballots. If you voted for Jeff Kent, there was not one person who voted for Sammy Sosa.

46 people voted for Jeff Kent and not one of them voted for Sammy Sosa. Huh. Not one. Interesting. There is something mutually exclusive about Sammy Sosa and Jeff Kent. And I do think there is. What kind of person votes for Jeff Kent? I don't know what that means about you. Does that mean you're a sabermetric person or does that mean you're an old school person? ways what i found that with another oh i didn't look at bagua by the way i looked at shilling voters but uh i found that in other cases bag uh kent and sosa it's weird because nobody voted for both of them but the same types of people voted for them in some cases which it seems to be the black ink voter or the mvp type voter so not the war voter if that makes sense bag kent and sosa are both uh below the war standard or the jaws standard for hall of famers and uh yet you know kent has had a very high peak and

is you know fairly famous for what he was uh and won an mvp award of course sosa is Sosa. And so people who voted for Kent or Sosa tended not to vote for guys like Mussina and Walker, guys who were slightly more quietly exceptional throughout their careers. So that tends to be what the Kent voter is. But I will tell you that Kent voters generally were more pro Fred McGriff than non-Kent voters. Makes sense. I guess it's just very big haul voters. Well, except for they were, that's the only guy they were more pro on than the average. They were very low on Bonds, McGuire, and Sosa, obviously Sosa. And they were low on Schilling, which was odd to me because I don't see the connection there, but they were very low on Schilling. And then they were essentially the same as everybody else on all the other main

candidates, Edgar, Mattingly, Mussina, Piazza, Raines, Smith, Trammell, Walker. So Kent voters basically were low on steroids guys, but not low on kind of semi-suspected steroids guys. Like Bagwell and Piazza definitely take a hit from the speculative voters, but not Kent voters. Kent voters, they do not penalize Piazza or Bagwell at all. Anyway, I found it to be some interesting results. Sure, go ahead and read it. Yeah. By the way, speaking of Hall of Fame candidates, deserving Hall of Fame candidates, Mike Messina should probably be the first pitcher to make the Hall of Fame after spending his whole career in the American League. You mean should be like if it were your world, but not? Yes, he should be. i don't know whether he will be i'd like to think that he will be but in a just world he would

beat david price actually ben actually actually ben uh-huh actually ben yeah in a just world dave steve would oh okay well right in a more realistic just world uh. All right. I wanted to mention one thing about David Price's contract negotiations. There was a report by Bruce Levine that, quote, Cubs offer to Price was creative at $7.161 million, third to Boston and St. Louis. Now, the punctuation in this makes it hard to know which clauses are connected to each other and so i don't think he's saying that seven and 161 is itself a creative offer like like we'll we'll wow him with with with the number 161 like he'll never

he's probably never seen that number in any capacity so i'm guessing that that there's that basically cubs offer price was low but creative and um so i'm wondering what you think was creative about it uh one possibility of course was that the cubs uh would have agreed to move to the american league right or uh he gets to play a position on days when he's not pitching so he gets to hit he's the dh dh on days that he's not pitching yeah but otherwise i wonder what i wonder if we'll ever find out what the creative part of that was so he said it was creative but then didn't explain what was creative about it so far as It seems like it would be the obvious follow-up. Maybe it was incentives or options or something. Maybe...

He has an opt-out after every year. They would pay him seven years and $161 million, but let him play for the Red Sox. Yeah. Let's see here. No, there's no follow-up. I'm going to see whether there's any extra detail in an article that was written, I don't think, by him. No, no, no. Nope.

Okay. Well, take his word for it. It involved a poem. There was some short fiction involved. It was like a singing telegram offer of a contractor. It was the means of delivery. I don't know. I'd like to know.

Uh-huh. Yeah. I'll work my sources. All right. So then, Ben. Yeah. Anything else you want to talk about? No.

All right. analyses at Baseball Prospectus include the Red Sox trading for excellent relief pitcher Carson Smith, the Orioles signing excellent relief pitcher Darren O'Day, the Royals signing excellent relief pitcher Joachim Soria. Never did figure out how to pronounce it. Joachim? Joachim. I've always been a Joachim Soria. Never did figure out how to pronounce it. Joachim? Joachim? I've always been a Joachim person. Yeah, that makes sense. The Athletics, which we already talked about,

signing excellent relief pitcher Ryan Madsen. The Rangers signing excellent relief pitcher Mark Lowe. And the Cubs signing excellent relief pitcher Trevor Cahill. And the Nationals signing Oli Perez. There was also a transaction analysis that was in progress and scrapped of the Dodgers acquiring elite relief pitcher Aroldis Chapman. And so first off, in case anybody is not familiar with that, the news is that apparently a trade was agreed to in which the Dodgers would acquire Eraldis Chapman.

And then they found out that Eraldis Chapman about a month, a little more than a month ago, had a domestic violence complaint against him in the Miami area that involved him firing a gun eight times. And so that makes everything uh scary and awful and the trade seems to be uh either on hold or dead and so we're not i don't think we're going to necessarily talk about that specifically but about the idea that the dodgers uh would have attempted to acquire, that this would be a thing that they desired, I think, fits into something that I would like to talk about. Hokeem Soria, evidently. Hokeem Soria.

According to baseball reference. Hokeem, never have I ever. No, I've never heard that one. I've heard the other ends of the spectrum. Yeah, we're so bad at Spanish players' names. Not me and you. We're bad at all names. Me and you are bad at every name.

But I really do. One of the things I love about ESPN Radio baseball broadcasts with John Shamby and Chris Singleton is that they make a genuine effort to get players' names correct. And it's such a small thing. We should aspire to that. We really ought to. I looked up how to say it. So we're trying.

Yeah. So a couple things here. A couple of different angles here. First of all, well, I don't know, maybe it's just one angle. So what we've seen is that the Yankees last year went out and made their big purchase, a elite top six in baseball reliever, even though they already had an elite top six in baseball reliever. We saw the Red Sox go out and not only get a top six in baseball reliever in Craig Kimbrell this year, but then went out and got Carson Smith,

who I think you can make a pretty good case is at least top dozen right now. Last season alone was top, I don't know, like three. Yeah, exactly. The only reason you wouldn't put him there is a combination of less history with him and some apparent decline in stuff as the season went on, perhaps. Adding to Koji Uhara, who when healthy is also, I would argue, a top 10 reliever in baseball. And then we have the Dodgers, who also had a top six reliever in baseball, and Kenley Jansen, and adding to him with another top six reliever in baseball.

So let's put the O'Day's and the Madsen's and the Soria's and everybody else aside for now. And let's just talk about this phenomenon. You could. Yeah, right. OK, you could put O'Day in that class if you wanted to. I mean, it doesn't fit into the acquiring multiple types of these guys yeah right as far as effectiveness over several years i know but you could every bit as good ben though you could also talk about how the cardinals have trevor rosenthal it doesn't fit the theme right i just don't want to denigrate back off don't want to denigrate o'day just because he's denigrating stuff yeah so So this is fascinating for a few reasons.

But the main reason that this is fascinating is that for 20 years, it has been kind of a fundamental part of stat head orthodoxy that closers are all overpaid and that you shouldn't pay market rates for closers, that they're unreliable, they're not as valuable as they appear, that they just make too much money for too few innings.

Don't do it. Get Keith Folk, then trade him for Billy Koch, and then trade him again for Keith Folk or whatever. And here we see three teams, all of whom are rich, but also all of whom are smart and, you know, as most teams are, have, you know, stat head foundations acquiring two closers. It has now gone from don't pay for closers to pay for a couple. Yeah. As many as you can. All the closers. all the closers and so i wonder if this means that the market for closers has not inflated with over the past 10 years or whatever as it has with other players that a starting pitchers you know might cost twice as much as he did seven years ago but a closer really doesn't like you

know the price over the bj ryan contract to now it doesn't seem to be that big. So it could be that, or it could be that we live in a world that is ever dependent on relief pitchers and that more of your innings are going to be to relief pitchers. And so you need to get more of them, or it could be that they're simply copying the thing that is right in front of them, that they are just all simple people who saw the Royals and said, we want that. Or it could be that in fact, relief pitchers are much better now than they used to be relative. And that the, there are, um, there are simply more great relievers than there used to be. And where it used to be that you would only want to pay for Billy Wagner or Mariano Rivera. Uh, now there might be a dozen guys who are close to that level of reliability or even more so

or it could be that we were wrong all along and that in fact jp ricardi ricardi ricardi ricardi see all all people all people ricardi yeah jp ricardi uh was right in that B.J. Ryan was his finest achievement. And there's probably other explanations here. So I want to know what you make of the two-closer model. Because really, I mean, Carson Smith, maybe Carson Smith is overextending this. I don't think so, but maybe he is. And maybe Uhara isn't good enough to fit. And so maybe you throw out the Red Sox, maybe. But I kind of to fit. And so maybe you throw out the Red Sox.

Maybe. But I kind of don't think that you need to throw out the Red Sox. But to have basically the four, like four of the five or six best relievers in baseball on two teams right now, and not by chance, not like they were developed by these teams and it just so happened that they came up at the same time but to actually go out and pursue essentially the best closers to essentially either not close or to displace another one of the best closers feels like a very interesting a thing that two years ago was a hundred percent unthinkable do we even need to separate the royals from this and soria from this if anything they are the the progenitors of this and they seem to always want to have three of these

guys i don't i mean soria i don't think is really that great he's certainly nowhere near the carson smith kimbrough chapman class right but they are essentially saying that they want a closer in the seventh inning which is what they've had for the past two years when they've been good and everyone has envied the back of their bullpen and it seems like okay they let madsen go and they essentially swapped madsen for sorry i mean that the terms are almost the same 322 for madsen, 325 for Soria. No, I'm not. I refuse. First of all, by the way, I just want to note that in the previous paragraph that I stated, it was, again, in this hypothetical world where the Dodgers had Harald Chapman.

Of course, he's not. They wanted to. They wanted to. We're talking about the intention here. All right. Now, Soria's a setup man. I mean, sorry i could close for a for would close for a lot of teams closed last year he he closed for part of last year no he closed for part of last year and then he got traded to a team where he did not close

and he's he is definitely closer quality look he's one of the 30 guys who would close if they were perfectly distributed around the league but he got got set-up man money, right? I mean, he's not getting four years and $44 million. This is not Andrew Miller. This is not taking a guy who is undeniably one of the six to ten best relievers in baseball and then putting him in the eighth inning. Soria is essentially— It's also adding him to a team that has maybe the best reliever.

No, but Ben. Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben. Yeah. It's also adding him to a team that has maybe the best reliever. No, but Ben. Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben. Yeah. It's the same principle, it seems to me. It's just stacking awesome guys at the back of the bullpen. They paid, well, I think that he fits into the larger discussion about reliever value. That is true. I don't, and it's fine, fine.

You can have it if you want to. But it's not Chapman and Jansen in the same bullpen. It's not Miller and Batances in the same bullpen. And I think that's really what is most notable about this. And, you know, like, again, it's, it's more that teams were paying top closer prices, either in trade or salary uh or opportunity cost to have two of these guys soria's he's he signed for setup man prices right i mean he's that's like saying well the a's have manson and and do little well yeah they have a setup man too or the astros have nishak and gregerson yeah they got a setup man yeah i would i would dispute that just because Davis, it's like having two of the very, very best eighth inning guys or one of the best ninth inning guys, but one of the very, very, very best eighth inning guys now in the seventh.

And so it is still the same idea. It is still closer creep, right? They now essentially have three closers. They don't have Batantes and Miller, but you're right. They do have three closers. They don't have Batances and Miller, but you're right. They do have three closers now. So a team, again, yeah, I think that's fair to say that after years of us yelling, don't sign closers, the Royals have basically collected three of them. And nobody's selling Royals stock right now. Nobody's dumping their Royal stock over it. Yeah.

So Joe Sheehan wrote a newsletter article this morning, basically the don't sign the closers article. And he pointed out that maybe O'Day is different. Maybe you pay for O'Day because he's really good. But signing guys like Madsen and Soria just seems to go against the fact that if you look at all the best relievers every year, most of them just seem to be found art, like Madsen, who was nothing last year and then was something.

Like Wade Davis, like Kelvin Herrera. Right, or Andrew Miller. Every one of these guys are Delon Batonsas. Yes. So Joe's point was basically don't do this. You don't need to pay for these guys because they're everywhere. And people don't realize how good the average reliever is right now. And so the average reliever stats look to someone who grew up watching baseball in the PED era when everyone was scoring a ton and people weren't striking out as much.

I mean, the average reliever this year had a 3.7 ERA and struck out 8.5 per nine. So it's just, I mean, those would have been excellent numbers when I started watching baseball and now they're running the mill. So there is this idea that these guys are everywhere and you don't need to pay for them because there's always a Ryan Madsen that you can just pick up off the scrap heap. And if you can't do that, then it's a failure of your scouting system or your player development system or you know you can't just take an osuna from a ball like the blue jays did and just turn him into a good closer there are all these different ways that you could get good closers and so if you pay for one it's a

failure yeah from that perspective and and i don't know if if joe also made this point and i don't know if Joe also made this point, and I don't know if it's still true, but I think it is still also true that good relievers are less likely to be good in a year than good starters or good shortstops. Yeah, or good bullpens relative to good offenses or starting rotations. Yeah, yeah. Rex Brothers would have been a top 10 bullpen guy before 2014, and then he had an ERA of 6. It seems like I haven't seen an updated study or anything of this sort, but I think that it is also the case that you are more likely to get a dud if you go multi-years for relievers, partly because most of them, even though you're asking less of them, most of them do have flaws as baseball players, which is why they ended up in the relief role in the first place. So, all right, so Joe said that in 20— Even like the A's, their bullpen, 2014— Jim Johnson? Yeah, well, 2014, their bullpen had, I think, the third best ERA, something like that, and last year, third worst. Jim Johnson. was great for a couple of years and, and that just happens. Yeah. And so I think that basically I, I agree. I think like I've said it before on here, but the, the lesson of the Royals is that having great relievers worked, but the lesson of the

Royals is not that you should go out and invest all your resources in great relievers. They, they did not. And I don't know, I mean, it does seem scary and maybe not actually the best way to just count on finding these guys. And so I understand why teams would look at their bullpen, which everybody's bullpen also always kind of looks like it needs help. Like probably 26 teams walked away from this year thinking we need to upgrade that bullpen and of the ones who didn't they're probably losing ryan manson and then they think well we got to replace ryan manson uh and so i see why there is a great uh desire to go out and get these guys and uh but i also do think that that is basically right that um that the great reliever is, I mean, Ken Giles, for goodness sake, right? Ken Giles was awful in 2013 in high A.

And then in 2014, he had one of the five greatest relief seasons of all time. And I guess there's not really any opportunity cost to this. I mean, if you have Ken Giles and you go sign Aroldis Chapman, that doesn't mean Ken Giles isn't still going to emerge. And let's do a quick subtopic here. At what point do you get declining returns by having too many great relievers? I would say that if you had, for instance, seven Kenley Janssens, well, the seventh one, you really ought to trade because he's in mop-up work for you and some other team would pay a fortune to have that guy in high leverage. So the seventh Kenley Jansen is not really returning full value to you relative to your needs and his market value. At what point does that kick in, would you say? As long as one of them is the seventh inning guy

and one's the eighth inning guy and one's the ninth inning guy i don't think you're really sapping any value maybe you could give yourself some extra value if you were to use them interchangeably in some way like if if the dodgers had gotten chapman and they used him to get saves when lefties were up and use jensen to get saves when righties were up or something like that. Maybe you could get some sort of multiplier effect from it. But the one trend that's been pretty consistent for decades now is that relievers are pitching fewer innings, not as a group, but individually. Actually, if you go back, I looked the other day, if you go back 15 years or even 25 years, the percentage of innings pitched by relievers is virtually the same as it was even then post La Russa, post Eckersley.

It's about a third. Relievers pitch about a third of the innings. But the individual relievers are pitching far fewer and there are more relievers in the bullpen and there are more pitching changes and fewer batters per reliever. So at this point, just about every elite reliever is a one inning guy. And that's certainly true of Chapman and probably true of Kimbrell and there's, you know, true of Davis and there's the occasional longer outing, but for the most part, they're one inning guys. Davis and there's the occasional longer outing, but for the most part, they're one inning guys. And so even if you put three of them together in the same bullpen, they're not really, I don't know if they're stealing each other's outs at that point, because you have a seventh inning guy and you have an eighth inning guy and you have a ninth inning guy, and they really are confined to those

innings in an ideal world. Maybe they wouldn't be. And maybe if you were really smart, you would get a few of these guys and use them for multiple innings. But if no one's going to do that, I don't know if they're really robbing each other's opportunities until you get four, maybe five of them when you have an elite reliever pitching in, say, the fifth inning

when it's maybe a low leverage opportunity or he just doesn't get a chance to do it because the starter's not coming out early enough, then you're leaving outs on the table maybe. But I don't think anyone is at that point. Yeah, I think you could maybe make the case that the seventh inning you're losing a little bit of it because there are definitely a lot of games

where your starter is pitching into the seventh and maybe you and me and joe madden uh would have a lot fewer of those but the fact is that uh there are a lot of games where um it's two to one and your starters in there anyway uh so you're not going to the seventh inning guy on the other hand there are also games where your eighth inning guy isn't available and so now it's great to have a seventh inning guy who can pitch in the eighth uh and ditto with the ninth uh but uh but i think you're right at the certainly if there's any loss in having two it's minimal and that's i think kind of my my point that um which i haven't made but i'm going

to right now the point that nobody saw coming, uh, that we always thought, oh, well, you know, closers are overpriced, right? But if you start with the presumption that, uh, a elite closer is not overpriced, that a Kenley Jansen is worth it, or a Craig Kimbrell is worth it, uh, then it's just as true that another one is worth it in the eighth. And so you can go one of two directions. You can say all these closers are nuts and I don't want to pay market rates for any Andrew Millers at all. And that would be fine.

You could probably make a pretty convincing article about that. But once you agree that one is worth it, I think that you almost have to conclude that two are worth it. And so maybe that's what we're seeing is that teams are just sort of appreciating that part of the flip side of everybody saying forever the ninth is no different than the eighth is also realizing that the eighth is no different than the ninth. Yeah.

Yeah. It's not paying for saves. It's paying for a different three outs that in many cases are just as important. Yeah. All right. So now on, as to the fact that, you know, eight guys got either signed or traded or almost traded in a day, relievers are also in tradition the most fungible and easiest to find and least scarce, kind of in a way, the least scarce resource in baseball. And we've all had fantasy leagues,

and we all know about position runs, where all of a sudden there's a run on short stops or a run on catchers. And the positions where there are runs on those things tend to be the areas where there's the most scarcity, where you start to panic because there's a finite number of good shortstops and you don't want to get left out. And I wonder if it's just coincidence or if you find it significant that basically, like the day after, I don know i guess ryan manson signed maybe that i don't know if that's the kickoff point or what but all of a sudden every team needed to have their needed to lock in their reliever basically their eighth inning guy or in some cases ninth or in some cases seventh but uh needed to get that bullpen help because uh there maybe is a feeling this is a weak class

that relievers are scarce all of a sudden and that um they didn't want to get left out so do do you think it's significant that so many of these signings essentially happened in a 24 to 36 hour period uh at the expense of all the other pieces i mean we haven't heard as mark norman and pointed out like you haven't heard a Justin Upton rumor all year and all offseason, and yet every team is going out and doing all their work to get their relievers. It's almost like first area of business, get reliever. And I don't know if it's a coincidence.

I don't know if it's an illusion. But do you think it's significant that they've all done this almost seemingly like the market was moving intelligently as a, what is that thing called? Emergence. Is it emergence? I think that's the thing about how birds and ants and things like that think. They don't have to communicate they all think the same they think as a group even though they're not communicating with each other do you know that like a hive mind that is not actually communal yeah yeah it's like a sort of a different level of intelligence and integration like it's like a non-communicative intelligence uh-huh well you can do some some googling about that all So yeah, so in baseball, that would

be MLB trade rumors, basically. Everyone is refreshing MLB trade rumors and seeing that other teams are acquiring relievers and figuring we better do that or hearing that from trade chatter or something. It seems like not a coincidence that all those moves happen at once. I mean, Kimbrel happened a while ago, but there has been a flurry. Maybe it has to do with some of the best starters signing also. Maybe if you're LA and you miss out on Zach Greinke and David Price has already signed, then you figure, well, we'll get an elite closer and that's the way that we'll make up for losing Zach Greinke. So maybe that's connected too. But yeah, I mean, it's hard to think that teams are really perceiving that much scarcity in the reliever market because it

does seem like there are a lot of these guys. But yeah, it doesn't seem totally coincidental that this is happening all at once. And happening fairly early, happening, you know, on the first day of the meetings, happening, you know, relatively early in the offseason. This is not everybody waiting until February and picking up the scraps, the Matt Herges' that are floating around. Matt Herges being, to me, the quintessential scrap heap reliever available in February, even though he's long gone. He's very available these days. He is. Yeah. So the other consideration is the human factor, the soft factor of acquiring multiple elite relievers, which is something that would be or would have been potentially an issue with the Dodgers. Kind of the same thing that we saw with the Nationals last year.

They had Drew Storen. They went and got Jonathan Papelbon. We could say that that was an early example of this same trend, perhaps. And obviously, that seemed not to work out so well. There seemed to be friction. Storen was the established closer. He wasn't happy to lose his job. And there were immediate reports of friends saying Kenley Jansen wasn't going to be happy about losing his closer job, that sort of thing. So maybe you can compensate for that by giving an extension to the player, something like that. Or maybe this just won't be an issue for very much longer

because teams won't be paying for saves and relievers will realize that teams aren't paying for saves and then they won't care about getting saves anymore. But that seems like something that is still some years away. So when you trade for Carson Smith, he was a guy who was closing for the Mariners last year. And so now he's not going to be closing and that's going to impact his arbitration earnings. If you're Carson Smith, maybe you're not totally thrilled that you're getting buried behind Craig Kimbrell, but there's nothing you can do about that because you're Carson Smith and it's your second year in the big leagues and you're a team's property anyway. But it does seem like a consideration that teams have to take into account if they're going to sign established closers and

put them in the same bullpen. It's the case that smith is more valuable to the red sox in one sense more valuable to the red sox than to another team because his arbitration cost will be so low so the surplus value of adding carson smith is greater for the red sox than if the uh you know brewers signed him uh-huh so in a in a in a weird way having two of these guys is almost like signing two free agents in the offseason where your second pick that you give up isn't as valuable as the first one uh so i don't know if that's a factor or not i mean it's certainly it's well i guess it's a factor with the tonsils right yeah signing andrew miller saves the yankees you know theoretically if you don't mind doing this to your player now a smart team

would keep its players happy by saying, we're going to pay you for your performance regardless. Maybe a smart team would. Maybe a team with a lot of money that can afford to do that would. But another way of thinking about it is that if they spend $44 million on Andrew Miller and it suppresses Betance's arbitration earnings over the next four years by $12 million, Miller's like a super duper bargain now. Yeah. Matt Herges, by the way, 11 year career, played every year,

legitimate reliever for a very long time. Dates, he was signed as a free agent. All right. January 1st, April 1st, January 24th, February 18th, November 29th, and January 16th, and January 10th. Also, at one point, traded in March. So he was out there. You could get Matt Herges if you wanted to. Yeah, complete fluke that I named a guy that that actually applied to. Well, maybe he wasn't. Maybe you knew more than you thought you knew about Matt Hurchis. Yeah, so I don't really know how we talked earlier about how relievers seem more volatile than other types of pitchers.

I don't know how much of that is just the sample size. I don't know whether we've corrected for that. Like if an elite starter pitched 50 or 60 innings a year, they would swing around a bunch too, just from randomness and balls in play or facing bad, facing good opponents or whatever it is. So I'm not sure if you, if you correct for that somehow and, and, you know, equalize the sample sizes, then maybe relievers wouldn't look quite as volatile as we tend to think of them as. But on the other hand, it's sort of a job with just that inherent volatility. So maybe you should just pay less for it anyway, just because it's going to be 50 or 60 innings and who knows what might happen in that span of time, how Royals influenced do you think this is?

If the Royals hadn't won the World Series this year or made the World Series in the preseason, if the Royals weren't coming off back-to-back pennants, would you be seeing this same trend? I actually want to say no. And I don't know how to quantify it, and I don't know if that oversimplifies things, and I readily admit I might be completely wrong, but I kind of think no. And I don't know how to quantify it. And I don't know if that oversimplifies things. And I readily admit I might be completely wrong. But I kind of think no. Yeah, I kind of think no also. So then the question is whether we actually learned something from the Royals or whether we were just deceived by the Royals into thinking that that was the way

that you build a team or that you can build a team like that if you want to, which is two different things. Yeah. All right. So I suppose that is it for today. You can send us emails for probably tomorrow, maybe tomorrow depends on what happens at the winter meetings at podcast at baseball perspectives.com. You can also join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild. We'll see back tomorrow.