Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 783: The Astros Get Giles, and a Heyward Hypothetical

Episode Date: December 10, 2015

Ben and Sam banter about Serial and basketball, then discuss the Astros-Phillies trade and Jason Heyward.

Now tell me, what's my man up for today? Cereal, get out! Cereal, get out! Cereal, get out! Wake up in the morning, just like you're trying to say it. Good morning, and welcome to episode 783 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, Baseball Perspectus.ference.com. I'm Ben Lindberg of FiveThirtyEight, joined by Sam Miller, baseball prospectus.

Hello. Hello. Does it surprise you that MailChimp still sponsors Serial Season 2? I think that there's probably some extra benefit to them. Hometown discount? Hometown sponsor? No, it's not so much that. It's just that, I don't know,

it's like they're a character in the show in such a way that I'm not sure a new sponsor would get that. Do you think that goes both ways? No. That there's value to cereal in having MailChimp? I don't. No, I don't think that. No, I don't either. position is when he leaves have you soaked up all the benefit you can get from him and now it's better to bring in you know another gm who can bring a different perspective does he essentially

leave all that value so like does mailchimp still get that or is mailchimp now locked into pop culture consciousness forever and no longer needs to spend a dime they're going to be like they're going to be cashing syndication checks on serial uh mailchimp associations for you know 35 you're like like vh1s i love the the teens 30 years from now there will be some guy doing some guy doing a mail impression exactly and so maybe there's no need to keep on going that well for them. But I don't know. Not surprised. that is expected to have a six-figure audience, maybe a low six-figure audience, as opposed to the seven-figure audience that it did have. So I'm sort of surprised that coming into this year with no underestimation of the audience that they would not be outbid by someone bigger.

Uh-huh, yeah. I'm going to do a serial-style investigation of why they decided to sponsor Serial again. Yeah, no, you're uh you're right about that yeah all right but well as a podcast that probably doesn't get well for us i mean if we hit it if we blew up we would still exactly the baseball reference play index right because we like the play index exactly like we we are we will fight every possible sponsor that comes along. And so, yeah, it is.

Maybe they have the same loyalty. I don't know. To the mass mailer. Really, the same work they do is reach clients via email. Right. Hey, I have a question. Oh, OK. Go ahead. I wonder what year since 2003, you think the highest percentage of active GMs had read Moneyball? Huh? So you're asking if I think it's gone down at any point or is it just a steady climb?

I don't know. I'm asking what the trajectory is. It could be a steady decline as the book is no longer in airports, or it could be a steady incline because you're hiring people who are raised, or there could have been a parabola. I don't know. First, let me ask you a question, I guess, to start by answering it. You just have to think, how many of the 30 do you think active right now have read it? I would say 25 and five of them figured they didn't have to because they've seen the movie or they've read about it. We're at the point where GM ages line up with people who read the book and then wanted to get into baseball, right? Like Farhan Zaidi read the book and then he set the resume to the A's and now he works in baseball. That's absolutely true. But it's also the case that some people just don't read books. Like some smart people just don't read books. Like that is not how they choose to be smart. That's true.

I would think that it has not declined from its peak. I would say it's still at its peak. Okay. So 25. And how many do you think had read it by 2004? 14. Okay. That actually seems, I think, yeah, I might guess that that's high.

I might say like nine in 2014, and I think I agree that it is still climbing, not because people are reading it, not because they're reading it now, but because, right, people are in the game who read it back when they had free time. Is it now peaking though? Will it decline? When will it decline? It will at some point. I mean, yeah, there's going to be a point at which you won't have to have read it

because it's just so out of date or it's so in the culture. I mean, it can still teach you something, I think, at any point in the future. But I would guess that the peak will be will be off its peak in say 10 years. Okay. All right. So you think that it might get up to like 28 or 29? No, I think it's peaked, but I think it'll stay at that peak. Yeah. I was thinking yesterday that I kind of have basketball podcast envy right now. I kind of wish we could talk about basketball. There's a lot of interesting stuff happening in basketball. Maybe it's just because there's no

actual baseball going on. But wouldn't it be fun to talk about the Warriors and the Lakers and Kobe and Steph Curry and the Sixers? Yeah. It does sound like things we would enjoy talking about. Is it conceivable that we're like the cooks who've been in the kitchen all day and don't smell the wonderful food anymore when it comes to baseball? Is it? Well, maybe, but I was thinking it's because there are no extreme teams like that in baseball right now. And I kind of miss it. There's no team that's like threatening to set records for how good it is. And there's no team that loses every day because i mean a few years ago there were the astros or the cubs they were rebuilding teams and now they have rebuilt and there are other teams that are rebuilding but i don't think they're going to bottom out as low as

the sixers or the lakers are in their sport so we i mean there's we talked we talked a lot about that though i got really tired of talking about it. Yeah. Yeah, I wouldn't necessarily want to talk about the Sixers that much because it's the same story, really, as the Astros. But the Lakers are losing in a really interesting way. Botstove, by the way, just eight seconds ago tweeted, the Giants finally read Moneyball. Okay. Which is weird.

That's really weird timing yeah well bot stove tweets that a lot i think that's one of its stock phrases oh is it yeah but yeah because there are no extreme there no like it's parody i mean we've talked about that and it's probably a good thing for baseball that there are no totally dominant teams that win every day and there are no 50 win teams that's probably a good thing but i kind of miss the extremes i don't know i to be fair i have not watched a single second of basketball well the name let's just i've consumed these stories through hang up and listen and the podcast and 538 and everything else so i well that's what i like i know it but that's what i mean by that we're by that we're not in the kitchen for basketball.

It is really interesting. I mean, this is because I like to walk and because the Warriors are on the radio where I am and because I'm a pathetic front-runner bandwagon fan when it comes to non-baseball sports. I have been listening to every basketball game, every Warriors game this year, at least for the last like 15. And so it is the first time I've been exposed to this sport in a very long time um and uh you're right it is it does seem like an interesting time but so the things you named you you have the Sixers which was the Astros and we talked a lot about the Astros you have Kobe which was Jeter and we talked a lot

about Jeter yeah yeah I guess that's equivalent. We don't have a Warriors. I will grant you that we don't. Not only do we not have a team that's that dominant, but a team that is that aesthetically pleasing, a team that is that universal. I guess the equivalent to the Warriors would be maybe Bryce Harper's season. I mean, like Pedro was the warriors of baseball, probably because

he was not only dominant beyond anything that anybody had ever done before, but in a completely pleasing and non morally ambiguous way. And so like bonds was not quite that because it was neither of those things. It was arguably not aesthetically pleasing and it was morally ambiguous. And there is no team equivalent. What the best team in our lifetime is, would you say the 114 win Yankees or would you say the second round knockout Mariners? I'd probably say the Yankees. Yeah. And not anything remotely like what the Warriors are doing. You just can't do it. No, you can't really do it in baseball.

Yeah. No, but I mean, relative to what the typical team did, it was similar. Yeah, you're right. 11 matches for Moneyball. Going back to November 20th. Actually, no, six. Expos have found moneyball 2.0 yeah all right not that not that eerie no all right um one uh basketball related and baseball

related thing when we talked about the derrick cheater question the derrick cheater jersey question at what year would derrick cheater jerseys not be? What did we say? The majority of jerseys in Yankee Stadium or the most common jersey? Most common jersey. Yeah. So Darren Revell tweeted something yesterday about the only jerseys that have sold better than Porzingis over the last month. Curry, Kobe, LeBron. Wait, wait, wait, wait.

Better than who? Porzingis. I have no idea who that is. Okay. Maybe we shouldn't do a basketball podcast then. We're not ready. What is Porzingis. I have no idea who that is. Okay, maybe we shouldn't do a basketball podcast then. We're not ready. What is Porzingis? He's the Knicks guy, you know, the tall Knicks guy, European Knicks guy who everyone loves. Never heard of him. Okay, well, I've heard of him even though I haven't watched a single second of basketball. Not even changing channels accidentally.

Maybe like one of those autoplay ads when you go to espn.com and you see some highlights inadvertently i might have seen some basketball so anyway the only jerseys that have sold better than his over the last month curry kobe lebron durant michael jordan michael jordan still in the top five jersey sales i'm surprised he's not number one really well i mean for i'm surprised he's not number one. Really? Well, I mean, I'm surprised he's not number one, not just because... See, the thing about Jordan is not just that he is... I mean, he's a billion times better than Jeter. So not only is he the best player in the sport,

but he exists like Star Wars as a marketing, as a merchandise delivery system. I mean, he has lines that he puts out for people to line up and buy. It is not that he's simply an athlete. He is merchandise. He is merchandise. That is why he exists. And so that people are still buying Jordan's stuff. I mean.

Shoes, yes. Yeah, but why not jerseys as well i mean why not jordan jordan is a is a brand name yeah right a pretty big brand name no jeter has a brand but jordan is literally a brand name like he lit is lit like you bought jordan's like it's literally a brand it's like going i bought cheerios yeah right if you bought's, I don't know what that would mean. That could be a few things. Yeah, okay. So I won't adjust my Jeter estimate based on the Jordan jersey sales. It's actually really interesting that none of the others are retired. I mean, that seems like maybe more relevant to the Jeter that there's no, you know, Shaq jersey that's being, that's at the top or no no bird jersey or no johnson jersey

basketball is kind of i mean it's a star league there aren't as many players there's they're higher profile players and so it doesn't surprise me that current players would be on that list i'm impressed by jordan still being there another thing related to an email answer we had on the last show when we talked about whether Sandy Koufax not starting against the Giants for a few years and how you could possibly arrange rotations to have guys face certain teams or not face certain teams. And we concluded that there probably wasn't all that much flexibility because of the way rotations are arranged these days. So Craig Goldstein reminded me that in June, the Orioles did this sort of with Wei and Chen. They optioned him to high A the day after he pitched, and they called up Chris Parmelee because they wanted to see Chris Parmelee, and they didn't want Chen to pitch against the Blue Jays

because the Blue Jays kill lefties and he hasn Chen to pitch against the Blue Jays because the Blue Jays kill lefties and he hasn't pitched well against the Blue Jays so they skipped Chen's start and he came back and made a start against the Indians a few days after that but doesn't he have to doesn't he have to stay down there 10 days well he had an option and he did stay down they skipped the start of his so he made a start and then they optioned him and. They skipped the start of his, so he made a start and then they optioned him and then they skipped the start and then he came back. So I guess he came back June 26th.

So I think it was maybe the minimum. So anyway, that was an example of a team doing this and Chen was very upset that they did this. Oh, really? Really? Yeah, and I remember this when Craig reminded me. He went on Facebook and he went on Twitter and he tweeted, I am in excellent physical shape. I feel great and I am ready for my next start.

I just pitched eight innings of shutout baseball. I am disappointed my routine is being interrupted. I will continue to work hard and do my best to perform. Thank you for all the support. So he was not happy, and his agent who happened to be scott boris called the decision grossly irregular so he got involved and everyone was upset about this so that's the the fallout from doing this thing uh if you are a player you do kind of want the club to waste its options that they have on you like that it probably will never matter for Chen. But if your club wants to waste an option to skip one start,

that is probably a net gain for your career. Again, it probably doesn't matter for Chen, but for many players it would, and it even theoretically could for Chen someday, but probably not. So he gets paid either way. I assume it's easy enough. Did they actually relocate him?

They didn't relocate him, right? Like he stayed in there. No, I don't think he went to high A. And so as long as they keep giving him the per diem and as long as his, there's no real way it would affect his. I think your service time counts if you're down for fewer than 20 days or maybe that's only for Rookie of the Year voting. But for Rookie of the Year eligibility, I think you have to be down 20 days before

or else it counts for your Major League service time. So if that's the case. Yeah, he's a free agent. So maybe it impacts him in that he gets one fewer start to impress people or his innings total is lower or whatever. No, right. But but i mean if they just skipped him and didn't do the the paperwork would he have still been mad because that happens yeah maybe maybe not maybe it's embarrassment of being option i mean i assume he understands

that it's just a paperwork thing i don't yeah i't know. Maybe it is insulting that a guy who leads the team in ERA and is an established major leaguer with four good years under his belt would be skipped to avoid a right-handed lineup. That's probably it. Probably maybe we wouldn't have heard about it if not for the novelty of the paperwork, but maybe he would have been exactly as upset. All right.

So just something on the Astros-Phillies trade. Ken Giles goes to the Astros. The Astros finally get their dominant closer that they've been wanting to get for a while now. It was a, I guess it was a four for one, which is something we talked about when we talked about fan trades. Often four for one trades are crazy things that fans come up with, but in this case, there were prospects. So the Astros gave up Vincent Velasquez and Derek Fisher and Brett Oberholzer and Thomas Eshelman. I guess two things. This doesn't fit with what we were talking about the other day about teams paying for elite relievers when they already have an elite reliever because the Astros

had a good bullpen most of the year, but they never had a Ken Giles type reliever. They had guys like Will Harris and Tony Sipp and Pat Neshek and guys who were good, but not overpowering. So now they got the overpowering guy but does this package that the phileas got back kind of go in the same trend toward royals influenced bullpen additions does this seem well like this is like this is giving up a starter a promising starter who started pretty effectively in the majors this year for a bullpen guy. Like if this is like the sabermetric mantra would be like, you know, you always want the starter over the reliever. And this is going for the reliever over the starter.

And obviously they're not exactly the same. Yeah, I think that it basically is part of that same discussion. It's part of this, at least part of this, maybe. Well, it's part of the discussion. Yeah, because five years ago, if I had told you this trade was going to happen, that some team was going to trade, what is Velasquez? A top, basically a top 50 prospect?

I think he doesn't have prospect stats anymore, but. Coming into last year, he was. 75th. Yeah, 75th at BP and then improved his stock, I would say. So, I don't know the, I mean, we don't really know. Other than Velasquez, you and i don't really know that and i guess overholter but we don't know that much about the guys involved so it's hard to say exactly how big a package this is but if we assume this is a big package if we assume that that the phillies got a lot i mean given what teams were asking for

for chapman and given what kimbrough brought back and given that Giles has a lot more service time or a lot less service time and will be cheap and is basically been equally as dominant, I will just assume that they got a big package. This is a big package, stated and accepted. So if you'd known five years ago that some team had traded a big package for a closer, then yeah, you would have guessed that it was a non-Stathead team. You certainly wouldn't have guessed that it was perhaps the team on the vanguard of Stathead commitment. And so in the sense that, yes, this is a team paying a large price for a closer, a team that has certainly read Moneyball and that at the time that they read Moneyball would have

taken the lesson that you should not pay big prices for closers, then yes, it fits that trend. And I don't think that this is new. We've known for at least all off season that the Astros were ready to go spend a lot on a closer, not cash money, but spend a lot of talent to get one of these three or four names that we were hearing. I think they were linked to Andrew Miller. I think they were linked to Chapman, at least at the deadline. And they obviously were linked to Giles. And I think they were linked to maybe Kimbrel at the deadline too.

Maybe not. And so this is not new information about the Astros, how the Astros value this particular set of skills. It is new relative to five years ago, though. And maybe, when did this start? When did we start seeing a... I don't know, because we, I mean, we were talking about relievers not making crazy money anymore, like earlier this offseason, weren't we?

Like when we talked about craig kimbrough we talked about kimbrough contracts for closers and how that didn't seem to be as common anymore yeah we talked about we speculated that closers are no longer overpriced and that if they're no longer overpriced then it makes uh less sense to stay away from them as a uh philosophical matter. Yeah. But like, can you, what, it's hard to know. Like it's hard to separate teams into stat head and not stat head. But I guess there's, well, let's see.

So DePoto is maybe the, has lately been the biggest proponent of not paying big money for relievers. When he went into Anaheim, he made a big deal about saying that he didn't think that was the right way to spend money. He had all sorts of quotes about how he was not going to be giving Papelbon money to Papelbon or anybody else and stuck to that. And it went terribly because Ryan Madsen never got good, never got healthy. Sean Burnett broke right away. Freire dissolved. And there was one other, I forget. And he didn't completely turn his back on that, but they did give,

Houston Street was the big acquisition at the deadline in 2014, and a fair amount given up there in as much as the Angels actually had a fair amount of anything in their system to give up. And so I consider that to be a little bit of a concession to the notion of paying for a closer. And so then when he goes to Seattle, he trades Carson Smith, which by trading a guy, you're essentially saying trading a guy is the flip side of not paying for the guy, right? You're cashing him out. You're saying that you would rather have the resources that that player is worth or would make than that guy himself.

On the other hand, you went and got Joaquin Benoit, who is a notable expense. So anyway, let's just say that as of two, three years ago, it was still common for the GM who was broadcasting his stat credentials to stay away from the top of the market. Now, what are the exceptions since then? I wouldn't consider the Astros of last offseason to be an exception. They went mid-market, which is the point. Yeah, they went for Luke Gregerson.

Yeah, so that's... I wouldn't quite consider the Yankees to be an exemption Because the Yankees always have their own budget Certainly wouldn't Well the Let's see I wait I might have one Certainly wouldn't consider the Rays to be so They have sort of sat around that

Seven million dollar max For their closers when they've had to get one Which is I think getting Grant Balfour and getting uh rafael soriano was notable at the time because it was not paying a guy the minimum uh and so that was notable that was more than i that was maybe a step toward this direction but still not upper end but of course the rays aren't going to get the upper end anything anywhere no matter what so maybe this is let's Sox were getting O'Hara as like a one year reclamation guy. What other teams? Give me some other teams. The Indians didn't, the Blue Jays haven't. So those are, those are the main

stat head teams, right? And then the finally, but here's the one that I thought of a couple seconds ago. But I think the moment where this changed probably in my head or in our heads was when Billy Bean traded for Jim Johnson. Yeah. Because Jim Johnson was making like $11 million in Arbor was about to. And that was seen as a very large expense for the A's, a very uncharacteristic expense for the A's, a very out of character expense for the A's. And we all, because it's the A's,

because it's a Billy Bean move, instead of mocking it like we would Dave Stewart, we very carefully studied it and squinted at it. And four hours later wrote our pieces saying, I understand it. And so we probably all, I think probably that day, a lot of our positions softened.

Yeah, that's as good a time as any although that worked out pretty terribly oh horribly just the worst just the absolute worst yeah at least they didn't at least they traded jamil weeks and not josh donaldson for right all right so ken giles is is great at relie, and he's young, and he's under team control and all these other things. So he is not – it's not like an example of paying for saves or something. I mean, he did get saves, but he's awesome. So my question is, let's say over the life of their pre-free agency contract. So Giles – Wait, wait, can I interrupt real quick?

I think we're going to... So you're not paying for saves for Ken Giles, but you obviously are paying for the future saves. Is there a distinction anymore? Do you think there's any significant distinction between the guy who has saves and the guy who obviously is being brought in to get saves? Do we pay closer prices for closer quality now,

regardless of whether there's a capital P before proven? I think so. Well, I mean, if he hadn't saved at all, if he hadn't been a closer at all for the Phillies, or if Carson Smith hadn't been a closer at all, hadn't gotten any saves, would they command the same price? I don't know. I mean, I guess maybe there's, on some teams, there would probably still be some discount, I think. What do you think about, does Darren O'Day's contract reflect a non-proven closer discount? Or is 4-31 for O'Day what he would get if he had 46 saves last year?

I think he would get more. Well, I'm not sure what combination of, like, the fact that it's O'Day and he doesn't throw 100. He's not the typical closer-looking pitcher, which is maybe why he's never been a closer. So I'm not sure. I mean, no one's paying him to be a closer. The Orioles, they haven't used him as a closer and they're not going to, I would think. So that still probably reflects some judgment on his skills, his value. Okay. All right. Go ahead. Sorry to interrupt. Well, so my question is, Giles is great. We both agree Giles is great. If you put Vincent Velasquez in the bullpen, and he did spend some time in the bullpen last year, and there's a possibility he might end up in the bullpen because he has had injury issues,

and, you know, it doesn't have a very deep repertoire, throws lots of fastballs, etc. But he's, you know, he threw, he averaged over 95, even though he spent most of the season in the rotation. If you put Velasquez in the bullpen, what percentage of Giles would he be? Do you think over, I mean, Giles has signed through 2020 and Velasquez has signed through 2021. So if you just, you just said, okay, Velasquez is a reliever now, he's going to be a reliever between now and when Giles is a free agent, how much more value would you get out of Giles, do you think? Because we've seen so many starters, not even good starters, go to the bullpen and be good relievers,

and he seems to have the stuff to be a good bullpen guy. And I just wonder if you committed to him as a reliever, what percentage of Giles he would be over the next several years. It's funny because if you were writing the analysis of this trade you and you're sitting there in your room trying to think of an angle you could imagine thinking this exact thought and then rushing to the baseball reference page to see how he did as a reliever and i did that and seeing the awful reliever splits and going, ah, now I can't write it. Because he was not really better as a reliever than as a starter,

which doesn't necessarily mean anything. It might take a minute before you figure out that, oh, you can do different things. And he was throwing multi-inning stuff in some instances, and he did strike out more batters and so it's not you know it's not a like it doesn't discredit your your question at all it only makes it harder to write that piece yes um i ben it's so i mean look it's the thing is that like again like we talked about two days ago ken giles was so bad two days ago uh two days

ago two years ago yeah and like he was so bad he had an era of six in high a and then the next year he had like the third best relief era of all time and so there's not a great one-to-one relationship between what you were doing two years ago and how good a reliever you are. Right. That's, that's the devil of the whole thing, right?

Like it's really hard to know. So like, you know, clearly if you ask this question two years ago and said, who's going to be the better reliever? Well, Alaska is, Giles wouldn't even make the majors probably.

But, uh, you know, know you're you're saying let's let's first let's just say let's just say ask two simple questions okay given what ken giles has done over the last two years in 116 innings the 116 innings that you've known his name what do you anticipate he will do over the next three years uh how many innings and give me an era and just that just that just give me those two things okay well you don't even need to give me any it's just we're assuming that both stay healthy okay all right all right so now give me an era over the next three years as a reliever it's it's 156 for his career it's a 182 fip it's 12 strikeouts per nine it's three walks

per nine it's a good ground ball rate. It's a good ground ball rate. Yeah. Is it a good ground ball rate or is it just a good home run rate? It might just be a good home run rate. It's an okay ground ball rate. Yeah. Well, I think offense might be trending up again, which would sort of change

things, right? The second half was pretty high offense compared to the last couple seasons as a whole, but'll say uh 2.7 2.7 wow yeah you're you're doubling his era almost yeah close okay what let me uh let me ask to to sort of calibrate this engine what would you say wade davis's will be uh wade davis uh the is basically the one guy he and batantes are basically the the two guys who have been able to uh to you know match or better giles over the last two years in certain aspects so davis basically has an area of one over the last two years what will his be 2.2 okay and then uh baton's ace over the last two years uh 1.45 what will his be i'll say uh i'll say about davis about the same same as davis that's interesting

i basically wouldn't i don't think i would really project any reliever to have a sub two over a three-year period or whatever we're talking about uh okay i think uh last year we talked about how craig kimbrough's pagoda projections were insane because we had him projected for like a 1.4 or something which was like a run better than anybody else so i don't think you're wrong but yeah i mean even davis and and batances FIPS that were well over two, even though they had their one something ERAs or one ERA. All right. So low twos is basically your max and you're putting Giles at worse than the max.

Yes. Okay. And so then last question. Well, I'll answer those before. I will say Davis 185, Batances 2.2. I'm with you on Batances and Giles 2.3. Okay. All right. Now, Duvalasquez. Huge error bars around this. I'll say about, gosh, I mean, he had like a 3.46 FIP as a guy who started most of his innings and he has the fastball and he has the prospect value. He has all of that.

So I'll say 3, 2.95. All right. I, yeah, I would say, I mean, is he, I'm trying to think of a comp, of a top 50-ish prospect, which I think Velazquez was top 75 preseason, but I think he was higher by the time he got called up. I think if we were to do this now, I think Velazquez would be higher than top 50. If he had eligibility, he would be higher.

So like Trevor Rosenthal was that, and Carlos Martinez was that. They both were really great relievers. And it's, I'm trying to think of one who wasn't like, who just like a top starting pitching prospect who came up as a reliever and just sucked. Now some come up as starters and suck. And then by the time they go into relief, they still don't, they're still not good, but you don't, you don't know why. But, yeah, is there a top prospect who came up and had like a 4.4 ERA as a reliever? Nothing comes to mind.

I mean, it doesn't happen that often that a top starting pitching prospect. I mean, it happens for like a David Price period where it's just the playoffs or September or something. But like Chris Sale was a great reliever. Of course, Chris Sale is a superstar. david price period where it's just the playoffs or september or something but like chris sale was a great reliever of course chris sales a superstar neftali feliz was a great reliever until you know he stopped being that i'm looking at the top 100 of 2013 and i'm gonna see who has come up as a reliever so kevin gossman hasn't been dominant but he's been used so weirdly that it's hard to even know what he is or how they're trying to use him. I mean, he's looked dominant as a reliever at times.

Oh, okay. So Aaron Sanchez. We have an Aaron Sanchez. He was a reliever for a year, right? He's been awesome as a reliever. As a reliever. So there's him. There's Carlos Martinez at number 43 who's who was you know

very good there's trevor rosenthal at 45 by the way sanchez was 32 so these aren't top 10 guys these are guys that are around over the last because so we've named three a rotis vizcaino uh well he got hurt that's right i mean are we not are we taking a point off for that or is that just an injury thing yeah let's call it an injury thing yeah i don taking a point off for that, or is that just an injury thing? Yeah. Let's call it an injury thing. Yeah. I don't want the merits for that.

No. I guess, okay, so J.R. Graham counts against us. Okay, well. He was 63 two years ago, and then he debuted this year, used almost entirely as a reliever, although as kind of a two-inning guy swing almost a swing man at times and he wasn't very good at all there's him i think that's pretty much it for guys who have been used as relievers in the majors yeah tony singrani he was 91 yeah i mean he was well okay okay he was made a reliever

After he struggled as a starter right Yeah yeah kind of If you want to call it struggling Tony Singrani is kind of a weird dude He's not a comp for anything J.R. Graham like He's a twin like he doesn't Strike people out

I don't know Maybe it was weird to have him Ranked like i don't know maybe it was weird to have him rank there i don't know but we basically we named i named five guys three of them were dominant one of them was bad and then one of them is singrani who is a very odd case but admittedly was also very bad as a reliever this year so i will say yeah i'll say like uh god i that's the thing like velasquez 28 285 yeah velasquez didn't disappoint really i mean he didn't he it's not like you would be moving him to the bullpen because he showed he couldn't start or something like singrani or like he just didn't have enough pitches or something so if you just take a guy who is actually an effective starter

and put him in there that changes things a little relative to some other people we talked about but yeah okay so so you you have a run worse than yeah i am but i have him almost identical to what you have giles and i don't trust my assessment of giles anymore than i trust yours okay so but but yes i think that he is unlikely i think that giles as a has established himself as a top five reliever at the moment which doesn't promise anything but at the moment and i would not bet on a non-top five reliever uh on any non-top five reliever to be a top five reliever no top even even an ace i mean look yeah like if syndergaard were a reliever right now but yeah but yeah okay realistically all right yeah i mean i don't really

fault the estros for making the move but i wouldn't be surprised if if you were to do that and velasquez obviously has the the upside of being a good starter which giles does not have but if you were to put them in the same role i would guess that the gap wouldn't be as huge as i wonder yeah i wonder if part of this is just that you don't think he's going to be a great starter and you don't want to deal with the headache of of because like i don't know maybe that maybe it's a pain to to bring him in and say well if they bring him in and say we don't think they bring him in and say, we don't think you're going to be a starter, we want you to be a reliever, and he doesn't want to do that, and maybe the team doesn't like this, and maybe you start having to have a lot of conversations. And if you don't

do that, if you say, all right, we'll give him a chance, well, now you've got to give him a year to maybe fail and maybe get hurt and maybe lose confidence and maybe cost you a division. And so maybe it's just a headache to convert a guy like for soft reasons. Yeah, maybe. Whereas if you bring in Giles, every Astro in the clubhouse except Luke Gregerson is stoked. Right now, like every single one is like, we finally got the guy. Sorry, Luke. Yeah. But we did.

Yeah, right. Okay. Last thing. It sounds like Jason Hayward is getting close to signing. Did you read the Tom Berducci article about Jason Hayward? About Jason Hayward? No. Okay. So he basically, he wandered around the winter meetings and he talked to people and he asked them about their uncertainty level or

their doubts about Hayward or what they would pay Hayward. And as he mentions, Hayward is a, he would be an outlier if he signs a hundred million contract, which obviously he will. He'll become the first outfielder to do so without scoring or driving in a hundred runs in his career. And the only people who have done that in the past are non-outfielders Albus Andrus and Joe Maurer and Kyle Seeger. Obviously positions where people think about defense more than they do for a corner outfielder. And there are lots of quotes.

He talked to managers and quotes from guys saying he's not a middle-of-the-order hitter, et cetera, et cetera. And we talk about Hayward's war a lot. Everyone just sort of, you know, like if someone comes out and says, oh, he's not a guy, he's not a run producer or whatever, then the sabermetric people will point to his war and his war ranks among the best in baseball over his career over the last few years. On the other hand, if you were a GM, like it's

easy for us to say that he has the fifth highest war through his age 25 season. Only A-Rod and Trout and Andre Jones and Albert Pujols are ahead of him or, you know, his war over the past few years. And only a few guys are better. Trout, Josh Donaldson, Paul Goldschmidt, Adrian Beltre, guys are better trout josh donaldson paul goldschmidt adrian beltre only guys ahead of hayward over the last few years but if you were a gm what discount do you think you would apply to your contract offer to hayward because his defense makes up a large proportion of his war and i'm i'm assuming that the defense that i have access to, the defensive metrics I have access to are. I would. Yeah.

Well, let's say they, they agree. They agree. And I trust them. Yeah. Well, I wonder,

I don't know if you, I mean, if you trust them as much as like offensive stats or something, then this question doesn't really make any sense. So I'm assuming that you, well, you might still don't trust them as much as it might still no it might still make sense because you might think that that defense is going to age well yeah

yeah and you might think that i don't know you might conceivably think that defense uh individual defense is overvalued by these metrics generally because the individual is part of a system in which uh maybe some of the deficiencies of one player can be covered up or maybe some of the benefits of another player might be overlapping. So you could conceivably devalue it anyway just as a basic war model. So I've got – I mean, look, we know what they have access to. We know they have access to StatCast. Over the past three years, by the way, his defensive war is 42%, 42.5% of his overall war. So almost half of his value is defense.

There's also the fact that maybe whether or not I would devalue that, maybe if the market does, I can still convince him to devalue it. It partly depends on how much leverage the guy who's selling has. So I would say that if I were going to give, if Paul Goldschmidt and Hayward, who are basically the same for Warwise, if those two guys were available to me, then I would say that I would give... It's really scary to think about when you have a $200 million contract riding on.

It's very easy to say on a podcast or write in a blog post that you would pay this guy like his war suggests he should be paid. But then... If we're talking about... See, the thing about Hayward is that he is... A lot of times when a guy has really good defense at, you know, at his age at 25, 26, 27, that, that range, usually he's playing a premium position. And so you can say, well, the defense will slip and I'll just move him down the defensive spectrum.

But Hayward is a great defender already down at the bottom of the defensive spectrum. And so you're just losing runs. As he gets worse, you're just losing runs. There's really no, there's no like adjustment you can make. He's already adjusted. So you just are just pure run loss as he gets worse. And I don't know if that's actually different, but it feels worse. Whereas if he were a center fielder, you go, ah, we'll move him to right when he gets older. Right. I would say off the top of my head, just off the top of my head, that if they have the same war and the same war projections, and I'm doing this over an eight-year contract, eight years, do you think? Yeah. I would pay Goldschmidt an extra $60 million.

So what percentage is that? You know, a quarter, maybe like like 20 to 25 you'd pay hayward i'd go like three quarters of what you would pay someone with his war who had a high percentage of that war being offense let's say i would give in an in a in an eight-year deal i'd go 240 for hayward and 300 for goldschmidt like i'd try to talk them down yeah but like i would think that both of those would be, if I were a team that could afford it, those would be justifiable contracts. Maybe a nine year deal. Maybe it's a nine year deal though. And if it were a three year deal, then I would say like 2%. I'm mostly, I'm mostly applying this penalty. Okay. So it's not the uncertainty about whether

he actually was that valuable. It's the uncertainty about whether he actually was that valuable. It's the uncertainty about whether he'll remain that valuable. If I have access to StatCast, it's mostly the remain that valuable. Now, maybe it's 6% in the immediate future. Okay. And mostly, kind of mostly for the, I do think that we're kind of moving to a model sort of like the, I think, I think sort of like the NFL model where the individual is subservient to the system in a lot of ways. And you can debate the value of a quarterback because you don't know how much of that is the offensive coordinator, the head coach and the scheme. And whether you could just put anybody in, you know, whether you could put a lot of different quarterbacks in that system and have his numbers go up. And so I do sort of feel like the more that shifting comes into play, the more an individual fielder is just less valuable

than his individual numbers would suggest or, or less, less costly than his individual numbers would success. I think that 10 years ago, my answer would be different. But I think if I'm looking at the next eight or nine years, I'm looking at this guy as a little bit more of a cog in a defensive system and that I don't necessarily have to pay any individual player to be that cog quite so much. Okay. All right. So interesting contract.

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