Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 786: The Longest-Awaited Listener Email Answers

Episode Date: December 18, 2015

Ben and Sam banter about a fictitious player from TV, then answer listener emails about Mike Trout, opt-ops, paying players not to play, persuading a parent to value Barry Bonds, and more.

And my mama couldn't be persuaded when they pleaded with her daughter, don't marry that gambling man. Mama couldn't be persuaded when they pleaded with her daughter, don't marry that gambling man. Mama couldn't be persuaded when they pleaded with her daughter, don't marry that gambling man. Hello and welcome to episode 786 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives, presented by the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I'm Ben Lindberg, 538, joined by Sam Miller, Baseball Perspectives. Hello. Hello. How are you?

The same. Great. We're finally going to do a listener email show. I have one thing to send you before we begin. It's a picture that was posted in the Facebook group by a listener named Tom, who has a very difficult to pronounce last name, so I'm not going to try. It starts with an O. I would guess Altarshevsky. Yeah. This is a screen cap from an episode of Madam Secretary, which is a show that I saw once

when my DVR recorded half of that show instead of Good Wife, which it does every now and then. It's a show starring my childhood crush, Taylor Leone, as Secretary of State. And evidently, there was an episode that was tangentially about baseball. And we talk a lot about how TV shows should have common sense consultants or ads should have common sense consultants. And we also talk sometimes or write sometimes about how TV shows treat baseball. I'm just looking at this now. It's okay. I'm just looking at this now.

From what I gather, there was an episode where Teoleone has to enlist the aid of a Venezuelan president and a sort of Hugo Chavez-esque figure. Oh my gosh, this is brutal. This is so bad. She recruits a famous Venezuelan baseball player to go to Venezuela and I think offered a play for the Venezuelan World Baseball Classic team or something. Anyway, this is an image of his career stats, which seems to be on an iPad or something. I'll post a link to it. And on the show, there's this player, Emmanuel Manny Azucco, and he's described as the 15th on the list of all-time hitters. Seems like he's probably supposed to be a Pujols figure because he's a first baseman for the Cardinals with number five, except he's Venezuelan instead of Dominican.

Similar face, too. Sort of, yeah. So Tom posted this image of his career stats, which was on the show. And I just want to discuss a couple of the ways in which they're completely crazy. Yeah, looking forward to this. Good. Go. So I don't know what my favorite part is. So he has 9,300 plate appearances, 9,334 plate appearances, and292 at bats so even though he has a career 441 on base

percentage and a 361 batting average so his obp is 80 points higher than his batting average but he's apparently only been walked or hit by a pitch roughly 40 times in like a 20-year career something like that he's got 209 home runs and and he slugged 799 which is impressive i guess he's got got 413 doubles that's not that's not that many doubles his no his his extra base hits do not come close to equaling that kind of slugging percentage. His OPS is 102. Right. There's no decimal there that would make, there's no, it doesn't say it's OPS plus, it's just 102. Yeah, so that's a problem.

That is a problem. He has 1,238 walks, by the way, so that kind of calls into question the on-base percentage. What else? He has more home runs than strikeouts, which is very impressive. It hasn't really been done since the days of DiMaggio and Yogi Berra.'t know what are whether what are the other good things here well they they bother to list total bases which which you can see all the components of his total bases you can see his hits doubles triples and home runs and somehow he's got a thousand and ten more total bases than is than are accounted for here which like, that's the first sign of a cheater. If you ask me, I mean that, that doesn't add up like literally that literally does not, uh,

does not add up. Um, there is, uh, did you, I'm sorry, did you say that he struck out 206 times? Yeah,

I misspoke in 9,300 plate appearances. Well, if I'm taking this literally, he struck out about one-fifth of one time. Right, it's.206. He struck out.206. .206, yeah. His career strikeout total. Yeah.

He has a C on his cap, which maybe is supposed to be Cardinals, except it's yellow and the rest of his uniform is blue and there's no logo on it anywhere. They also have his season stats. Yeah. And then right below it, they have his season stats again, and they're completely different season stats. He has 41 more hits in the second one, and he has a 400 batting average, which is 100 points higher than it lists in here,

and he also has 29 extra runs. And also, baseball card. He scored 135 runs in 2008 the other thing is that the other thing is that i just like manny like a manual quotation marks manny azuko like manny is his name that's not it's not like he's he's not like i think that his name they would just say man by this point wouldn't everybody just call him manny right like who puts many ramirez in quotation marks right right exactly yeah uh exactly that he also did you mention that he is uh in this insane career where he has a full season i mean a full career with a what is actually a 12,240 OPS.

He has somehow only driven in 1,000 runs while scoring 1,700. Yeah, that's really unclutch. Kind of a, maybe he's a leadoff hitter. He's a table setter. Yeah, and it's just weird because this is not hard. He also has a 361 career batting average with 2,918 hits and 2,292 at-pats, which is a 314 career batting average. It's just so easy to get this right, Ben. They listed so many stats. They listed every baseball stat.

They listed caught stealing. Yeah. so many stats like they listed every baseball they listed caught stealing yeah yeah you think if they were gonna list every single stat and show every single stat they might ask someone it's so easy like i that's look like i get that like if my wife were writing for this show she'd have to say hey what are some good numbers right like tell me what would a great player do but it's so easy to do to be consistent internally within the stats like that is not a hard thing to do no not at all i don't get it maybe it's a stealth marketing campaign they wanted to be mentioned on baseball podcasts who criticize their their stats yeah it worked there's also a 3-0 count on him and he's

not even wearing a helmet i don't know if you can see that that's true in the scoreboard it has a 3-0 count anyway i love it so weird a lot of yeah a lot of a lot of problems here. So easy to do this. This is a four-second problem. It is. Yeah, there's got to be. I mean, evidently, even if there's no one in the writer's room who knows anything about baseball, they must know someone who knows something about baseball. They could email podcasts at baseballprospectus.com. They could subscribe to the Playprospectus.com. Subscribe to the play index.

Even if you don't want to do the math. Literally just go steal Babe Ruth's numbers. Sure. You're done. You're good. And then we probably would still mention because we'd be so impressed at our eagle-eyed. Although the 714 would be a dead giveaway. Yeah.

But yeah, the 209 home runs is really weird. Like why would they only give him 209 home runs? That is really strange for a guy who's, like, 800 and is a star. And they're obviously trying to make a point with these numbers. What do you think the point is? That he's a superstar, that he's the greatest player ever. Well, 15th of all time. That's what he is, according to the show.

Oh, okay, yeah. But, well, still, that's pretty good. 15th on the list of all time. That's what he is according to the show. Oh, okay. Yeah. But still, that's pretty good. 15th on the list of all-time hitters. That could just mean batting average. How old would you guess this man is by his picture? 36. Oh, really? I would have said like 28, 27, 28.

I think he's age appropriate. Really? Yeah. All right? You have face blindness I do He has young hands Yeah That's why he's the 15th of all time Manny

Manny Quote unquote Alright well thanks to Tom For spotting that If anyone else notices instances of statistical problems on baseball shows, please let us know. Oh, my goodness. All right. Okay. Not only that, but this guy's a free agent in 2018.

Oh, yeah. That's probably true. Wasn't mentioned in Jeff's article. All right. Question from Coreyory we got a bunch of opt-out questions some of them were just asking us to restate what we've said about opt-outs before but cory wants to know how the value of an opt-out differs between a pitcher and a hitter is it possible that opt-outs for hitters are less team-friendly in a way that opt-outs for pitchers aren't? Like pitchers are just so susceptible to breaking and so unreliable and injury-prone that maybe we should treat opt-outs differently depending on the player?

I think it's a lot more likely that in the time between the contract being signed and the time that the opt-out comes out, that a pitcher will either have lost all of his value or held a greater portion of his value. There's just less of a linear degradation that makes it all so kind of predictable for hitters. linear degradation that makes it also kind of predictable for hitters so i would guess that you're more likely to be like like for instance zach granky who are people who have opted out granky opted out and jd drew opted out and sabathia sabathia opted out and sabathia and granky were essentially not just as good as when they signed the contract when their opt-out came up but probably better like granky granky undeniably better right i mean yeah he got a lot more money even adjusted for inflation um and i just don't think you're likely

to see that with hitters partly because you're less likely to see continued growth from a great hitter between 27 and 31 or whatever, but also because even if you do, you're still like, well, but now he's 31, and you're not going to project him to keep saying that that way. But with Granke, I wouldn't really predict any age-related decline over the next couple of years few years i would predict uh the normal amount of attrition for a pitcher yeah that he could break at any moment but if you told me that granky was still you know healthy just as healthy in two years as now

i would expect him to be pitching about as good as he will tomorrow. Whereas with a hitter, I would go, okay, and also he's probably worse. So yeah, it seems like there's more of a binary kind of aspect to the pitcher. Like with Cueto, for instance, it doesn't really seem like it's likely to be a close decision for Cueto. It's either going to be the world's easiest opt outout or the world's easiest stay here. And hitters are kind of more in that middle ground where you might, as a team, have a different opinion

of the player, but it's sort of negotiating whether he's in the upper end or the lower end of a fairly narrow range of forecasts. Yeah, okay. People treat them differently and there's probably some reason for that. Still not so much that you would

say that it favors the team, right? No, not so much that it favors the team. I've been thinking about the Quado one a little bit and the cueto one the opt-out comes so soon that that you can sort of see that as a way of landing cueto i mean it really does seem to be the case that uh if cueto opts out the giants will have cashed out a huge profit and if he doesn't opt out well they were going to be stuck with that anyway and they might rather sure they might rather have him for those next four years so they might still prefer he not opt out but as a way of inducing or attracting a free agent that you like so much it seems like that i i think i sort of am now thinking that the two year is better than the three or the four year for the club because the

closer you get it the more uh likely he is to it's weird i don't know i don't like talking about opt-outs anymore they're too confusing they really are all right moratorium on opt-outs on this podcast okay all right anthony sent us an email exchange and he wants us to help him out. It's an email exchange with his dad and it's about Barry Bonds. And he says, help me persuade my dad. So his first email to his dad, and I'm assuming that this is picking up in the middle of an ongoing conversation. an ongoing conversation. He says, Barry Bonds, Justin Pittsburgh was more valuable than the following Hall of Famers entire careers. Then he lists them, Jim Rice, Tony Perez, Nellie Fox, Ralph Kiner, Ernie Lombardi, and Sandy Koufax. And then he includes a link to a baseball reference play index report, which is, or I guess it's not a play index report. It's just a baseball reference report, but still close. So his dad responds, he did have great stats, but was awful in the clutch. There are a few memorable moments to his career compared to those you list. He also wasn't a leader in the clubhouse.

That's what makes a great baseball player. Signed, dad. And then Anthony responds, it's hard to say someone's not clutch when they have a lifetime 700 on base percentage in the World Series. Anthony's dad says, once again, he had great stats, but did not do well when it counted, especially in the early 1990s with the Pirates. Go look at the batting average he had in those playoffs. And that's the end of the exchange.

I assume they're still on speaking terms and are planning to spend the holidays together and have managed to get past this. But Anthony wants us to help persuade Anthony's dad that Barry Bonds was good at baseball. Well, I guess I would say that there's probably no point to trying. No, we've talked before about how it's impossible to persuade anyone of anything

The more you try it only makes them more dogged In whatever they believed before you tried to persuade them Yeah So there's probably nothing that you can do Anthony You might have to just give this one up The thing we don't know It doesn't seem like there's a PED component to this dispute At least not in the part of it that we've seen.

The data is not claiming that Barry Bond's stats are illegitimate because of how they were obtained. He's just saying that they, you know, that he was a compiler or that he was doing all this when it didn't count it. And when it counted, he wasn't good and that therefore you have to discount the things that he did. And I guess he's saying that he's not Hall of Fame worthy just because of that. So I don't know. I don't know how you persuade someone who isn't questioning the legitimacy of Bonta's stats, although maybe that's a subtext to this. Maybe he's looking for reasons to knock him down because of that i would guess that the fact that we're talking about only the pirates ears is i would i would speculate that the preamble to this was uh dad saying it was all steroids and anthony saying

even before the steroids he was a hall of famer and and Dad said, nah. Yeah, right. That could be. Yeah, I think that the best way that you convince him here is you live a life well. You earn his respect in a lot of different ways. And you maybe make it known in a non-argumentative way that you believe Barry Bonds is a great player. And then that's an important thing that you have thought through and have very little doubt about and that you never, ever, ever bring up. And that in the way that you live your life, he will see a man of authority and seriousness. He will see that you're not a frivolous person. And gradually, without even realizing it, he will be persuaded by by your actions. It's like, it's like just threatened

to cut him off from the grandkids. There's a line from, ah, geez, I forget who it is, who said it. I want to say it was like, like, St. Augustine or something, but I bet St. Augustine is like the Mark Twain of fake religious wisdom. But there's a line from somebody like that that is something like pray continually, sometimes even use words. And it's sort of the same way with arguing that you should argue your point all the time but but rarely have to use your you use actual words to persuade you should you should uh you know it should they should look at you and go i want to believe what he believes because he is a smart person uh-huh yeah so if you if you were able to establish his baseball credentials in some other way, then maybe it would extend to his beliefs about Bonds. Yeah, exactly. I would say send him our Bonds podcast, but that wouldn't help

because we didn't talk about Bonds' clench stats. So he could use the same comeback that he's used against Anthony's other arguments. Yeah. Bonds, not that I would bring this up, but Bonds actually had a good third series. Bonds had three post-season series with Pittsburgh and he was good in the third one. And if you just, if you want to be, if you want to convince by cherry picking, if you just, you lop off the first two and then go from 1992 on, which includes some Pittsburgh and some pre, then he has great post like insane postseason numbers and you could say uh he was young and it took him time to grow into that role but he clearly did yeah sure you could say you might even drop in sort of uh phrases that your dad

might appreciate like learned from his elders veterans he found yeah he found his uh he he found his place in the game learned learned from veterans, stepped up. Yeah, probably stepped up sounds like a line that would go over well. Yeah, okay. Try that. See if it works. Let us know. I'm now seeing it.

I'm seeing this attributed to St. Francis of Assisi, which, again, he's the Martin Luther King of attribution. But the exact phrase is preach always, sometimes preach the gospel always, sometimes use words. Okay. Sometimes just use a link to the baseball reference page. Yeah. All right.

Alex says, today, if you had the chance, would you trade trout for two identical copies of Jose Fernandez? And this is using their actual contract statuses. So let's establish the terms here. Fernandez is three years from free agency. And so we'll be getting ARB money for those three years. So what do you think is an estimate off the top of my head would be that he'll make something like 40 in the next three years if he stays healthy. Like something like 8, 12, 20 or so. Yeah, I guess even more. Really?

Let's see. Let me see what he's projected. He's eligible for arbitration this year or this coming arbitration period? He is eligible right now as we speak. Right now. So he is. Because he came up, they brought him up. Well, oh, was he a Super 2?

Because they brought him up on the first day. Yeah, right. So he made, oh, but he only made $650,000 last year. Yeah, so Matt Swartz has him projected for only $2.2 million this coming year. Goodness gracious. Yeah. I don't know if maybe the model that is used doesn't work so well for outliers like Jose Fernandez. But so, yeah.

I mean, if he continues to be as good as he's been and doesn't get hurt again, then that will go up very quickly. So let's just say, let's go, let's err on the side of a little bit higher and say three years and 40 million but with no with no commitment so theoretically if he blew out his shoulder then you'd pay a lot less yes okay trout meanwhile is five years and 130 140 million so 5 and 140 so you could either have five years of Trout at 140 or six years of Fernandez running concurrently. So not six years away from now, but the six years of right now Jose Fernandez for about 80. So is one year of Fernandez, one extra year of Fernandez, and $60 million enough to overwhelm the whatever war difference there are.

So Trout in the next five years probably would be forecast, projected for somewhere around 40-ish war, right? About 80 a year. Yeah. And Fernandez, I would guess, is probably four and a half-ish a year. Uh-huh. And I would maybe consider that, well, I would consider that low, but wrongly, probably. Yeah. So let's say he's 27 over six years.

Trout's 40 over six years. We're just adding up the wars right now. We'll talk about it, but right now we're doing the add up the wars. Okay. So we've got about a 13 war gap for about $60 million, which would be a bargain. You would rather have Trout. Yes. Right. Because the difference of 13 war is, you know, whatever, if you were going to pay for that in free agency, is you know whatever if you were going to pay for that in free agency it'd be over a five-year period it might be like 120 million or something all right so now we talk about what factors would uh supersede that math so maybe you think an ace pitcher is more valuable maybe you think an ace pitcher i mean you can trade Fernandez. You can't really

trade Trout. Although I guess in this scenario, Trout is being traded, but you could theoretically trade Fernandez for a ridiculous return. And now you're going to get, if you want to, if you wanted to, if it fit your team's needs, you could, without huge political ramifications, trade Fernandez for a lot more wars and a lot less money in a prospect return, potentially. With Trout, you're stuck with Trout. So that's maybe one thing you might rather have. The obstacle to trading Trout is probably more on the Angels' side than it is on other teams' side. It's not like other teams wouldn't be interested if the Angels were seriously interested.

Yeah. And I guess if Fernandez was on the Angels, you'd probably would have the same thing. And if Trout were on the Marlins, you would probably have Trout would probably be traded. So yeah. All right. So fair enough. So that's not an issue. So then we have the, we have the, we have the boomer bust factor.

You're much more likely to get nothing or to get very little out of Fernandez than you are Trout. Trout is as sure a thing as there is in baseball. That sentence is going to look bad in four years when Trout, his leg has fallen off in a horrible training accident. That's included in the war projections that we just came up with, kind of. Yeah. So, well, it's included. Yeah. There is, I would say that the error bars are much higher, though.

Yes. Yeah. And with trout, I mean, trout's floor in about, what, it's about probably in 98% of cases, trout's floor is 20 ish wins over five years what how what percentile would you have to go to to get down below 20 wins for trout's next five years would you guess so he'd have to be a less than a four win player on average over that time yeah yeah that's got to be like fifth percentile. Fifth percentile. And then what percentile to get him down to 10?

Like one. Yeah, okay. Agreed. Whereas for Fernandez, it's probably like a 12th percentile gets him below five. Yeah, he could hurt his shoulder and be done. Yeah. I would say a one in eight chance that Fernandez produces fewer than five wins over the next three years. Maybe, although we're talking about six years, so it'd be two and a half wins over the next three.

That might be a little... Five for one Fernandez, I can see being 12%. Five for two Fernandezes. Of course, if we have two Fernandezes, we're talking about two actual Fernandezes. So then the chances of both busting... Do they bust in... Are they like... In tandem? Yeah. As one one goes so goes the other yeah what is that thing quantum entanglement are they quantum entangled yeah maybe

sure if there are clones of them then that probably is consistent okay so then the boomer bust is the same i uh so i would say that if i'm a gm i would i would well that helps trout i would i mean unless i'm in a very weird situation where i guess if i'm maybe a team that is uh that has to take riskier bets because i'm a small market team like if i'm the a's for instance maybe maybe it makes sense to go the boom-bust route with Fernandez. Doesn't it? There's also the postseason factor. I mean, if you can get there, I know.

But I know, but seriously, though, if you could get there and you had two Jose Fernandez's in the postseason, you'd rather have for those three and a half weeks, you would opt for two Jose Fernandez's over one Mike Trout. Yes, you would opt for two Jose Fernandez's over one Mike Trout. Yes, you would. You would. Just right, like, even though we've established that they're, you know, they're not significantly better than Trout probably over the course of a full year, I think it's undeniable that for that month you would rather have two Jose Fernandez's.

I agree. So if you're a team that expects to make the postseason and you're thinking, I mean, then so much of the value is going to be concentrated in that. And it's not like it's a huge lopsided skew anyway in the regular season. So yeah, I think if I was a team that thought i had a 45 postseason odds uh per year just by the fundamentals of my organization i would i think i would take fernandez all right especially because it turned down especially because it is only projecting three

years out three years out twice but it's not projecting six years out. Yes, that's true. And so I feel more confident that Fernandez will be there for me. And with Trout, I mean, now I'm projecting five years out with Trout, and I'm less confident that he's still an eight-win player. Confident, but less confident. Also, there's a second draft pick at the end of it. Yeah, that's true. So take fernandez okay all right i'll take him too all right who do we need to tell do we have to

tell anybody like do we have to arrange for this to happen now or can we just leave it as is not sure we have the power to clone j Fernandez. All right, play index. We're there already. Yeah, we've been talking for a while. No kidding. All right, this is an extremely quick play index, maybe the quickest. I was looking at some generic pitching prospect, relief pitching prospect the other day, and he's 6'5", five and i thought that's pretty big

big body you'd say big body yep and so i looked at play index and i wanted to see what year he would have been the tallest player in baseball what the most the latest year he would have been the tallest player in baseball and as recently as 1933 he would have been the tallest player in baseball. And as recently as 1933, he would have been the tallest player in all of baseball at six, five, which is not that tall, but he would have been the tall, tied for the tallest player in baseball. So I, so then I did a yearly search for guys who are at least six, five to see how it has changed over the course of the sport. And I looked just at pitchers, because if you look at this, if you look at old timey ballplayers, even back then you saw more tall pitchers and very few tall hitters. So I just limited it to pitchers and I searched for number of pitchers matching 77 inches or higher per year and saw how many per year. So it's just a count per year.

All right? Okay. There were many fewer players in the earlier years. There were many fewer players, right. And so like in the 1900s, there was one. Cy Falkenberg was the one, and he was the guy. And then he hung on through the teens, but was joined by about four to six guys per year. That dropped after World War I, oddly,

maybe because Cy Falkenberg got old. And now we were down to, in some years in the 20s, two, Slim Harris and Eppa Rixie, the two primarily. Slim Harris, by the way, there were three who show up most. But actually, there are four. This is interesting. There are four in some years. And if you look at the 20s, the four names that most show up, Eppa Rix okay slim harris slim mcgrew slim love slim love three of the four tall guys were nicknamed slim they just i guess that makes sense it's Just right away. They give you a uniform number and they call you Slim.

It's in the contract. I wonder if anybody ever called Eppa Rixie Slim. I'm going to Google. Let's see. Okay. Eppa Slim Rixie. Unfortunately, we can't call him. No, but similar Southpaw contemporaries include Slim Sally.

It shows up uh no i do not see epa rixie being nicknamed slim at any uh at any point unfortunately so then in the 30s it drops down to one one six five player in the 30s and it's epa there's no slims left no uh so sometimes it's more late 30s it goes up to three ish harry boils which is appetizing yeah uh and then in the uh 40s uh after uh they uh everybody tall had to go fight in the war so 1945 it bottoms out again at two, Johnny G and Pinky Woods. And then after the war, immediate spike after the war. So sevens, sixes, fifties, it goes up to 12 one year, but it's still sevens and sixes. So basically what we're saying is there is still, even through the 1950s, there does not seem to be any particular appetite for the tall pitcher, right? There are a few more than there were in the slim days when pickings were very slim,

but still very, like we're talking four in 1958, for instance. And then in the 60s with expansion, so yes, we're starting to add to the league. And by the end of the 60s, by the early 70s, we're almost doubling the size of the league. But in the 60s, it goes up very quickly to the 20s. By 1969, there are 27. So in 11 years, we've multiplied by, you know, by about on average by about five to six times the number of tall pitchers in the 70s

it's there's a second spike in 77 which coincides with uh with another small expansion but not enough to explain how it goes in 77 it goes 42 48 49 54 in 1980 so from 1969 to 1980, we've had another doubling. And then it stays totally steady until strangely the next expansion, which again, increases the player pool, but only by 7%. So the numbers are extremely consistent from 1980 on. 54, 47 61 52 48 50 52 54 55 54 53 70 okay so in that one year 17 that we added 50 players to the player pool maybe 48 i can't remember if they were doing 24 man rosters then but we added 50 players to the player pool and of those 15 17 were six foot five pitchers just seems like a lot right uh-huh 70 78 we're in the 70s throughout the two throughout the 90s and then we're in the 80s throughout the 2000 through the first half of the 2000s and then we have in 2006 the real

the real spike i would say this one does not coincide with any expansion at all, but we go from an average of about 70 to maybe 80 a year to almost overnight from 2005 to 2006, we break into the triple digits. It's never dropped below triple digits again. 2011, 2011 it peaked at 123 so between say 1995 and 2011 it doubled yet again to 123 uh not one of them not a single one of them nicknamed slim and uh and that's where we are so it is um it has not been necessarily a smooth uh rise in tall pitchers. And it also does seem to be to some degree a modern, like a very recent thing, which I guess if you and I have both edited prospect writers, this is not that surprising. No.

surprising no but somewhere in the mid 2000s the value of the tall pitcher seems to have taken a a leap in evaluative for evaluative purposes and so now we're up to 100 and 120 per year there are seven slims in major league history yeah all pitchers yeah heights slim sally 6-3 slim harris 6-6 slim love 6-7 slim emmerich only 6-1 slim mcgrew 6-7 wow 6-7 in the 20s yeah slim embry 6-2 and slim harrell 6-3 interesting seven slims And then there are one, two, three, four, five, six, seven more guys who were nicknamed Slim but didn't go by Slim. And five of them were pitchers. So there have been position players nicknamed Slim. Jerry Kindle, who was an infielder, was nicknamed slim 62175 that's not even slim

that's not even like for the standard for the standards of the day that's about five pounds underweight yeah right i mean 61 180 i think was the standard grown athlete male of that day so 62175 is barely noticeable maybe he wore it well jim hazelip a pitcher who went by slim 61186 hmm what 61186 yeah slim and that's not fat enough to be ironic no no no No, no. Maybe he was really, I'd say he was really skinny when he came up, except he only pitched in one game his entire mid-yearly career. There's also, there's a guy named Turkey Tyson whose nickname is Slim. Yeah. And his dimensions are very weird.

6'5", 225. dimensions are very weird six five two twenty five i was gonna say six five fourteen and a half pounds frozen in a nice uh in a nice brine yeah he's listed as a pinch hitter because he had one major league plate appearance during the war but still if you're named turkey tyson your nickname isn't slim your nickname is turkey i get why you get the nickname slim i don't get why you get the nickname Slim. I don't get why you get the nickname Turkey. Was Tyson's chicken, like was Tyson's poultry farm in existence yet? So his bullpen page on Baseball Reference says he was called both Turkey Tyson and Slim Tyson, apparently because of his size. Maybe Turkey was just something you called.

How big was he? Six, five and a half, 225. So I don't know. Turkey, does that mean you're big? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Can't call him either.

All right. I wonder why it's so pitcher skewed. Why do you think that is? Is it because? Well, partly because the six, seven guys you named, tall and thin, tall and thin was not an attractive body type for a hitter. Yeah. All right.

Good play, Index. Oh, thanks. Coupon code BP, baseballreference.com. Well, Lowered expectations By saying it was Going to be the Shortest one ever And then it

There's a good amount Of content there It's like Like 11 minutes We just went Alright John says So I was thinking

About the Grinke signing And about how he's Openly admitted in the past That he signs with the team That pays him the most money And that he would Gladly sign with a Last place team if that team paid him the most. I don't fault any ballplayer for going for the most money, but it got me thinking.

How much would some insane billionaire have to pay Greinke or any other star free agent in his prime to never play baseball again? That's a really good question. In other words, an insane billionaire, he doesn't even have to be insane. Maybe he's sane and he knows he has a billion dollars. And what else are you going to do with that? Offers Granke a contract that pays him a certain amount of money per year for a certain period of years. And Granke can only get that money if he does not play baseball for any professional team during that time. Contract would take Granke through what would be his age 38 season or it could take him

through his age 42 season or whatever assuming that granky and other star players love to compete and all that how much money would it take for them to give up their livelihood potentially for the remainder of what should up the burden of working. Yes. I mean, how much different? First of all, I guess, is there any precedent in any other field that you can think of? Like, do you think that like Nicki Minaj playing the bar mitzvah or like Pearl Jam playing like corporate events in the night in the mid nineties.

I think I remember Pearl jam doing this, but I might be badly slandering Pearl jam because the whole point of me remembering it is that it's so out of character for them in the mid nineties. And so maybe they didn't, but, uh, is it that different from, I guess the, yeah. Cause nothing is stopping Nicki Minaj from then still putting out an album and playing at Ozzfest or wherever she wants to play. Yeah, it would be like if maybe it's like the equivalent of the Wu-Tang album

that only one person gets to hear. Yeah, but that wasn't commissioned for one thing. That was imagined by them. And again, it doesn't restrict them from doing anything else. True. And it's not like Wu Tang's like, we've only got a finite number of Psalms. We've only got 30 in our heads.

We better save these. I mean, it's, it's like, yeah, they, they've got, they've got some to spare.

So has anybody... Just disliked someone's work so much that they paid them to stop? Well, maybe not even that, but has anybody for any reason chosen to do something that prevented them from doing the thing that they were great at and they wanted to do. Like for instance, Jim Brown quit football and became like an actor, but he presumably wanted to, like there was no duress there. He didn't, he would rather do that. But I'm trying to think of like, like, I don't, this is not it. This doesn't hold up. But the first thing I thought of was like Hollywood screenwriters who, who were blacklisted and some of them were, you know, actually like they actually chose to be communists at the, uh, cost of their career.

And so maybe if we could then put a dollar value on, on being true to one's political ideology, we can't, there's nine things wrong with everything i just said but like as if we could use that as a proxy of sorts for putting the value a value on it but i can't think of anything where someone had to make that choice no well how about like politicians who give up their political careers to make money in the private sector or lobbying like if they thought they might be a presidential candidate sometime down the road how much would you pay to give up your presidential aspirations that would kind of be comparable like if how much would a crazy billionaire have to pay um you know hillary clinton right now to not run for president anymore yeah but i don't know any political candidates who really think they have a a shot actually not take it i know that's

the problem yeah we're having trouble thinking of i'm thinking of examples that could be but have not actually been demonstrated in any way i don't. I would guess that it depends on the person. It depends on... It's like Howard Dean. He's like an advisor at a lobbying firm now, but that's because he's not going to be president. But when he thought he was going to be president or had a shot, he ran. So I think that it's a lot higher if you're a guy who's still playing for the Hall of Fame. Like I would imagine the answer is very different for Jeff Samarja than it is for somebody at Zach Granke's level where you might have eight more years and then be eternal. Yeah.

And Granke is going to be like a third of the way to being a billionaire by the time he's retired. Yeah, there's that too. And yet the money does seem to matter at least at a point the money does still seem to matter to people yeah like i would think that if someone offered granky four and a half billion dollars to me that doesn't seem controversial like if someone came and offered granky four and a half billion dollars he would take that to never play again probably yeah i mean he's he's made 110 million and he just signed a 206 and a half million dollar deal so he's career earnings gonna be well over 300 million by the time he retires and that's if he doesn't sign another contract after that so he's already he's already

told us though that the money matters yeah money matters right and he will go to the diamondbacks instead of the team he was playing for whatever for you know not that huge a difference in money i think that the money uh as we've talked about i think the money matters to these guys more for the status and for the validation than it does uh for the actual purchasing power. And when, you know, when you're talking about a few extra million dollars. And so they would not get that validation or that status to be paid to walk away. Basically, I don't think so.

I would say that it needs to be, I'd go like 3.8 times future career earnings. So whatever your future career earnings are 3.8 times future career earnings. So whatever your future career earnings are, 3.8 times that. What if it were like you were being paid to quit because you were so good by a fan of your rival or something? Then it would be some status. What if he was about to sign with the Giants or something? Well, people would hate you though.

People would despise you forever if that were the case that's true it's also if if you're 37 and they're buying out the last two years of a career that you're kind of tired of anyway that's obviously a lot different than if you're 30 but um i'm sticking to it 3.8 times. So for Granky, Granky will make 206 million plus maybe a little bit more after that. So let's say in his mind, he's thinking he's got $245 million in earning potential left. So it would take, yeah, like 925 million or so.

Okay, so the billionaire would pretty much have to give up almost a billion. Well, most billionaires, yeah, most billionaires don't have exactly a billion dollars. No. But most of them are clustered toward the one billion. But even if they did, he'd still have way more than you and I will make in our entire lives. That's true. He would be so rich if he gave $925 billion, a million of his billion dollars away. He'd be so rich.

He'd be so much richer than after I make the decision to not get guacamole. All right. Last thing is from another Ben who says, you mentioned that most teams are believed to have a war equivalent metric that they employ. How different do you think the metrics can get from each other? And in what ways from the leading war calculations we as fans have access to? I ask this because as I follow the offseason analysis, I'll see sites do an analysis of how a team's war at a given position has moved and at what cost as a pretty basic means of evaluating transactions. What I wonder is how much we can glean about a team-specific version of war from their transactions. For example, one way to interpret the Pirates' offseason thus far is that they've managed to stay about level in overall team war while shedding significant salary, but I wonder if the team's offseason also tells us

that their metrics were even lower on Pedro Alvarez and Neil Walker. And they view the turnover at those positions as net gains before even considering the dollar save. Thoughts? I don't think I know enough to speculate on this. So I want to hear your answer. I think there are like maybe there have been some times in recent years, like if there's something that teams are considering that other teams are not at all considering, like when catcher framing stuff caught on and you could kind of see that like maybe the Rays were valuing Jose Molina differently than other teams. Or maybe the Pirates valuing, I don't know, Francisco Cervelli or whoever differently from other teams and they keep trading for good framing catchers and that sort of thing.

So that could maybe tell you that that's a bigger part of their war than others. But otherwise, I don't know that you could tell from any one specific move. I would think that, I would think, as you've said on the show, that probably not that different in most cases from the publicly available metrics and that if anything they're just more reliable in small sample sizes because it's using a different better data source for fielding that kind of thing and you don't need three seasons to tell if someone's good maybe you only need one or part of one and i would think that maybe you'd have better projections in the future if you were incorporating scouting and doing like a lot of specific work on aging curves specific to a certain player. And maybe you would, you know, if you wanted to project like how a guy would do in your division, maybe you'd even go in depth and look at what pitchers are in your division and how he does against certain types of pitchers. Maybe they're more sophisticated at that kind of thing than we are.

But, you know, for the most part, the good guys are still going to be good. The bad guys are still going to be bad. So I don't think you could glean anything from most moves. Yeah. All right. That sounds right. Cool. So podcast at baseball prospectus.com please continue to send us emails you can join our facebook group at facebook.com

slash groups slash effectively wild rate and review the show on itunes wait ben real quick yeah i just want to uh i looked at the long-term projections for Fernandez and Trout. Okay. And actually, for the next three years, it is almost exactly four and a half wins per year for Fernandez. And then what did we say? Forty wins total for Trout? Yeah. We have them at like 33, which I'll take the over. Yeah. Okay.

So not too different. Yeah. Yeah. About 33, 34 Alright, and coupon code BP Use it when you subscribe to the Play Index Get the discounted price of $30 On a one year subscription

Have a nice weekend, we'll be back Next week