Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 789: Premature Takes on the Kenta Maeda Contract

Episode Date: January 4, 2016

Ben and Sam banter about the unusual number of unsigned position players, then share their initial reactions to the Dodgers’ signing of Kenta Maeda.

Happy New Year, my only vice. What a compromise. I am open. Happy New Year, my only vice. What a compromise. I am open. You could have hit me with the baseball Good morning and welcome to episode 789 of Effectively Wild,

the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives, brought to you by the Play Index at baseballreference.com. I'm Sam Miller, along with Ben Lindberg of FiveThirtyEight. Hey, Ben. Hello. How are you? I'm surprisingly okay. This used to be, or usually is, one of my

least favorite days of the year. Kind of the post-holidays hangover vacation, whether an actual vacation if you're in school or sort of a vacation if you're in work that week between Christmas and New Year's. And my birthday's on Christmas. So all of the good times of the year were concentrated in this few weeks. And then I was always depressed the first day coming back after that to the real world, but not so much this year. Why do you suppose? I think because of the book. I think because we were working on the book over the break and we're so tantalizingly close to being finished with the revisions that I have that to look forward to. Good. Well, you should write another book after this then. Yeah, totally.

Seems to be, seems to be the secret to a happy life. Uh, anything, uh, besides your, uh, emotional state that you want to banter about? Not really. Okay. Well, me neither. Well, may, I guess, yeah, sure. Uh, I guess it's not my topic, so we might as well banter about not really okay well me neither well may i guess yeah sure uh i guess it's not my topic so we might as well banter about it okay what's up with the hitters what about the hitters none of them are signed ben that's true so i'm looking at our top 50 free agents and uh hayward is signed and after hayward the next best hitter at number four isn't. Nor is number five, nor is number seven, nor is number eight, nor is number 11, nor is number 12, nor is number 15, nor is number 17. Excluding Zobrist and guys who took the qualifying offer, you have to go all the way down to Daniel Murphy to find another

hitter who's signed. Whereas of course, every pitcher up to Wei-Yin Chen, who is our number 22 free agent overall, has signed. And then the three guys after him, four guys after him, five guys after him are all signed as well. So of course, everybody knows that the hitters are all unsigned and the pitchers are all signed. But do you make anything significant out of it? Or is it just the market kind of moving as a school of fish and everybody will end up getting paid at the end just as though this all happened in December? Yeah, I'm sure everyone will end up with jobs, but I don't know if there's, in some years, you can kind of point to one player that's holding things up, like in the Tanaka winter, it seemed like everyone was waiting to see if Tanaka would be available and for how much.

And so that kind of held things up. I don't know that there's a hitter equivalent to that. I don't, I don't really think so. The Orioles wanted to sign Chrisris davis and he didn't seem to want to be signed yet people have been talking about cespedes and gordon there's been negotiation obviously and there's been rumors and news but i don't know why some of these guys haven't signed yet right it's not as though some team like is waiting to see where cesspitous goes before they sign howie kendrick yeah no and maybe they're waiting to see i mean these are all

corner outfielders we're talking about other than other than davis upton the corner outfielders are upton cesspitous and gordon and even those three aren't real, like, you know, they're very different players. Cespedes can play center. That was one of the, the great walkier revelations was that he can kind of hang in center. And so I'm sure that he's out there telling teams that he can play center. Uh, but you know, there's some overlap between him and Upton, but Gordon is kind of a, in a lot of ways, a very different player, but I guess, yeah, I guess a corner outfielder. Different corner than the others. And different kind of player and different role and very different,

I would imagine, very different contract coming to him. And then after that, you have a first baseman, a center fielder, a shortstop, a second baseman, and Denard Spann. So not a lot of real overlap among any of those guys nope yeah i don't know people have been busy with pitching for whatever reason and then the next hitter after those guys after uh daniel murphy and estruble cabrera is david freeze who's a third baseman so there's nobody in his way. Yeah, not really sweating the David Fries free agency too much. No, but it's also kind of odd that David Fries hasn't signed.

I mean, we've talked about how the later you go, the market usually favors the teams and disfavors the hitters, and you don't normally see that usually one guy or maybe two guys ends up either waiting too long or misjudging the market or getting paid, but later than you expect. But an entire class of free agents making it to the new year is odd. Yeah, that is strange. I mean, we're only, you know, it's just barely January. We're only a month after the winter meetings or not even. Yeah. Yeah. So it's not super late. It's definitely notable that there's been so much pitching activity and

not as much corresponding position player activity. But I don't know. It's not so late that I think there's some kind of market force going on necessarily. All right. So I'm looking at, I just Googled real quick, and MLB Trade Rumors two days ago wrote a post on January free agent signings. 2011, the only significant January signings were Adrian Beltre, Rafael Soriano, and then February had Vlad Guerrero with a one-year deal for the Orioles. So that was 2011.

2012 was Prince Fielder, which everybody remembers is the big late signing in late January. The only other deals were Coco Crisp and Hiroki Kuroda, which were fairly small-ish deals. 2013, Nick Swisher and Edwin Jackson signed right after New Year's for four years each. Raphael Soriano and Adam LaRoche got two-year deals. And then Michael Bourne and Kyle Loesch made it out of January unsigned. And then last year, the only significant free agent move in January was Max Scherzer deal. And then later, Colby Rasmus signed for one and eight, which seemed low. James Shields signed for what seemed low.

And Frankie Rodriguez signed a one-year deal. Two-year deal. I think a two-year deal. Two-year deal, yeah, in February. So that's basically four guys in the top 30 or 40 free agents last year. And now we have like 10 in the top 20. Yeah, okay. That's unusual.

All right, good. Just all I wanted to hear. Can you use the word super weird? Weird. That's weird. Now I've got to get you to say super later in the show and then splice it together.

Tweet it. Alright, so I did I wanted to talk about another move though that did actually happen. And I'm curious whether you'll find this move super weird. If you do, feel free to say so. Okay. But the Dodgers signing Kenta Maeda to one of the odder.

I don't know, odd. Maybe odd's the wrong word. Complicated. Unique. Unique. I can't say one of the more unique because unique is binary. One of the less familiar contract structures. Super weirdest.

There you go. Contract structures that we've ever seen, I think. Fair to say? I mean, after, let's see, just off the top of your head before we start, what are the super weirdest contracts that you can think of? I have two in mind off the top of my head. Maybe three-ish. I'm trying to think of long-term.

I mean, there are weird ones like Tim Wakefield's. That's my number one. If we were drafting super weird contracts. That's number one. Right. Basically just giving the Red Sox the option to keep renewing him. Permanently. Yeah, forever. Yeah.

That's a weird one. What else? I mean, like Wayne Garland, the deal that some people have compared this one to in that it was a decade long. Yeah. That was odd. An odd move, but only in retrospect. I think at the time nobody knew what free agency was going to be or what contracts were going to be like. I guess it seems weird because it's Wayne Garland.

Didn't Dave Winfield sign a 10-year deal? Yeah. Let's see. Let's look up Wayne Garland. Wayne Garland coming off a 20-win season, 25 years old, Cy Young votes. You know, I guess it's not – that one would be weird if it were signed today because who would be the equivalent there? That would be like if – well, I guess it would be like maybe if Dallas Keuchel or maybe more realistically if Colin McHugh signed a 10 10 year deal right now, it'd be like that. But that was the first days of free agency. I mean, like nobody had any idea how to do it.

Yeah, right. They were, it's like going, that's the weirdest bike riding I've ever seen. Well, yeah, it's the first time you ever got on a bike. Looks weird. What else? Roger Clemens, maybe? he ever got on a bike looks weird what else roger clemens maybe oh right where he got a prorated deal uh for every coming back played basically year yeah and it was such a expensive deal yeah and he didn't have to be with the team all the time he was just there sometimes yeah those are weird the the uh chase utley i remember trying to figure out whether the Chase Utley deal was good or bad because it had like three vesting options for three different years. Do you remember that one?

Yeah. And it was like, you couldn't tell whether the back end was super team friendly or not. And so I thought of the Wakefield one, I thought of that one. And then I guess you could say the John Carlos Stanton one is odd because it's so team friendly upfront. So he has the opt out, but he also basically is costing him a ton of money. It seems like in the first five or whatever years,

however many years before the opt out. So I don't't i forget what we saw talked about but yeah that one it was an odd imbalance as far as player opt-out goes so then we have this one and we don't know the details yet uh we are there that it has been reported that they will take a while to finalize which isn't surprising because they're very complicated but uh eric steven rounded them up as we know them for true blue la and most of these have been reported by either christopher miola who nobody knows but has broken news from maeda's uh agency before and so seems to be reliable and joel sherman of the new york post and the basics are that it goes

for eight years and 25 million dollars not per year which it's i actually had to think when i first saw eight at 25 i had to think what's more realistic here and knowing that it was the Dodgers, if I wasn't following closely, I could have seen it. But it's eight years. If you had given me those two options before the news came out and asked me which was more likely, I probably would have said the 25 a year. Exactly. So eight years, total of $25 million. Of course, the Dodgers also have to spend $20 million on the posting fee. So that's eight years and $45 million guaranteed.

Eight years, by the way, eight years is a long time, but $25 million is not a lot of money. Neither is $45 million. But then a lot of incentives, $10 to $12 million a year in possible incentives. Incentives, some people don't know this, but incentives can basically only be for playing, not for how well you play. So you can't get an incentive based on how many shutouts you throw. You can get incentives based on how many batters you face or outs you get or innings you pitch or games you start or-based incentives. And if they are, say, reachable, then maybe the upper end,

he would be getting $15 million a year over eight years, plus the $2.5 million a year that the Dodgers have to pay, prorated out over those eight years for the posting fee. Which he doesn't get, of course. He doesn't get that right. It goes to his old team. Right, but that doesn't matter whether he gets it or not. It doesn't really matter.

It's what the Dodgers have to pay. So the Dodgers will be paying at the upper, upper end of this, if all of this is true, about $17.5 million a year for eight years, but with very, very, very little of that guaranteed. So if he's horrible and they don't want to pitch him, or if he's hurt and they don't want to pitch him, then they're only going to pay $45 million over eight years, which is a crazy low amount to guarantee a guy who is a question mark to some degree, but well, we'll talk about that,

but who, you know, I think most people probably, well, I'm looking at Tim Dirks on his free agent top 50. He estimated $80 million guaranteed before the off season. And so it's, you know, it's half the guarantee. And not only is it half the guarantee, but it's twice the years that anybody would have expected. I mean, to get him for eight years, if he's good, is forever. And he's, what, 27? So it's not like this takes him into his late 40s or anything like that. So it's a very interesting move for a number of reasons we can talk about. I guess there are three interesting reasons.

I'm just going to lay it out here. Three interesting reasons. One, I'm going to write them down so i don't forget them one uh relative uh uncertainty of japanese pitcher two dodgers prioritizing risk or i don't know what is uh absorbing risk now what is it that the dodgers are doing dodgers uh dodgers are i guess the way to say it is they're chasing uncertainty instead of going and getting david price going and getting jason hayward going and getting any of these guys who are relatively sure things they are chasing uncertainty although they might have liked to have a couple of those guys and they tried to get a couple of those guys they didn't try the way that they're allowed to try which is offering more money than other teams true they tried apparently other ways

uh number three betting on onecontract precedent established here. All right. So, Ben, where do you want to start? Let's start with the first one because you've written about it. Relative uncertainty of Japanese pitcher. Are Japanese pitchers relatively uncertain, Ben? I wrote about this. You did.

You wrote about it. Yeah, you talked to a bunch of GMs about, or maybe you talked to one, I can't remember, about whether it was about the uncertainty of Japaneses about, or maybe you talked to one, I can't remember, about whether it was about the uncertainty of Japanese hitters, or maybe it was about the uncertainty of... Yeah, that's right. It's coming back to me. Yeah, Asian hitters in general, foreign league hitters. And I remember a GM basically saying, I think I remember, I don't necessarily remember this, but basically saying, yeah, we have no idea what to do with hitters. We have no idea what to do with Norioki, but we're pretty good at pitchers. Yeah. Well, definitely relievers. Relievers seem to do just fine when they come over because

they're basically doing the same job that they were doing in Japan, other than some slight differences like the ball being different, that sort of thing. But the schedule that they're pitching on is pretty much the same. Whereas starters, I think there's more uncertainty because they're changing the way that they work. And they're being forced to work in a five-man rotation for the first time in their careers or for years. And Joshian wrote a whole thing today going through the history of Japanese starting pitchers. And it's funny because in the MLB Trade Rumors post, there's a line about the successful transition of NPB arms like Tanaka and Yu Darvish reducing the uncertainty regarding Maeda and Sheehan basically came to the opposite conclusion and says that it increases the uncertainty because there is a history of guys doing well for a year or two, maybe even being among the best pitchers in baseball for a year or two, but then invariably something bad happens,

whether it's Nomo, who was great for a couple of years and then just a middling starter thereafter, although he hung on for a while, or guys like Darvish, who was one of the best pitchers in baseball but has been hurt, and Tanaka, who has been effective but hurt at the same time, and Matsuzaka, who really had one good year and then was hurt and bad. So all of these people have come over and established themselves as good early on. And you can see why teams wanted them

and why teams paid a lot for them. But then something happens. And maybe that has something to do with the workload. The fact that I think, let's see, Maeda pitched 206 innings and I think led the league last year. Japanese pitchers just basically top out at about 200 innings.

And not that major league starters pitch that much more now, but more of them reach that mark certainly and some of them surpass it. And it's just a different schedule and you're pitching with less rest and recovery and maybe that's a difficult adjustment to make so it seems like there is a lot of uncertainty long term with with these guys and a lot of them have come over and

succeeded right away but then broken down episode 55 the unpredictability of japanese players oh good recall well kind of i have no idea what we said so do japanese i don't you don't know this go do research man do i mean do japanese players japanese pitchers break down in japan or is there something about coming here changing workload workload, changing baseball, changing whatever? Yeah, you always hear that there's less Tommy John surgery in Japan. And I'm kind of rising. Yeah, I'm looking forward to Jeff Passon's book because he went there and found out about

that. And he knows things about that that I don't know. So we'll find out. But it seems like it's less common there. And maybe that's just because people don't throw as hard. And it seems like throwing hard is one of the best ways to hurt yourself. So do you think that when a Japanese pitcher comes over here, he throws harder? Well, you hear that, that there are fewer holes in the major league lineup. So there are fewer places where you can take a batter off.

And there's a DH. There's no DH in Japan, or at least in the Central League, I think. And so you don't get that break if you're coming to the American League. And so you don't get that break if you're coming to the American League. And you would think that if every hitter is better and you're putting more pressure on yourself to succeed in this new place, that maybe you are closer to your maximum effort all the time. But I haven't seen any data on that. I don't know if it exists.

You quoted Dan Evans in your article at the time. Evans believes the transition is toughest on middle infielders and starting pitchers starters must learn to take regular turns in five-man rotations after years of pitching with six or seven days of rest as evans acknowledges that can be a difficult adjustment as it involves teaching your body to respond to a different throwing routine and also getting used to working on a different calendar entirely evans thinks relievers have the best chance of replicating their production since to a different throwing routine and also getting used to working on a different calendar entirely. Evans thinks relievers have the best chance of replicating their production since their roles differ little across leagues. The numbers back up his belief. A 2009 study at Baseball Perspectives by Clay Davenport revealed that while Japanese starting pitchers suffer a 20% performance

penalty after arriving to the majors, Japanese pitchers are almost unaffected the historical struggles of japanese infielders might be bad news for nakajima but the success of relievers like kaz hasaki takashi saito and koji ohara bodes well for long time hanshin tigers closer and fellow relief fellow free agent kuji fuji k, famous major league ace closer and huge, whom Dan, forgive me, whom Evans believes will quote, be a standout reliever immediately. Uh, so it's, I guess it's hard. I mean, relievers, as we know, it's, it's interesting because relievers are probably the easiest to relative to, uh, well, the easiest to scout relative to scouting, you know, American players. And yet we also know that relievers are inherently unpredictable and prone to blow up because of

sample size issues and the fact that they're generally flawed players. To begin with, let me then close the Japanese uncertainty portion of this by asking you whether you think that if you, certainty portion of this, by asking you whether you think that if you, Darvish, were a free agent right now, his contract adjusted for inflation and so on would be different than it was when he actually signed. And I guess same question for Tanaka. If they had happened to have been born two and three years later, four years later, and hit free agency or been posted this winter, would they get different contract offers? Do you think that the Maeda signing is an indication that the league sees these pitchers as riskier than they did when Darvish, Matsuzaka, Sanaka were hitting? Maybe. I don't know if I would have guessed that before this this contract I didn't guess that before this contract so in light of this contract it's easier to interpret

it that way and then you can start citing cases like Darvish and Tanaka guys and Iwakuma, guys who've been fragile and broken at times. So sure, yeah, probably. I don't know if that would apply to Darvish because Darvish seemed like kind of an exception to that in that all the things that you often hear about Japanese pitchers, whether it's about their build or about their stuff or their velocity, that sort of thing, Darvish, whether it's about their build or about their stuff or their velocity, that sort of thing.

Darvish, those criticisms and caveats didn't really apply to him because he's big and he throws really hard and he throws everything. So if he were on the market, I'd still think he would get a big Darvish kind of deal. So I don't know, maybe withida maybe it is that you just he's not a big guy and he is he doesn't throw that hard and maybe some teams think he's more of a mid or back rotation type of guy than the ace that everyone thought darvish would be and that he was before he got hurt all right so now to the dodgers uh since Friedman took over, they have signed Brett Anderson, Brandon McCarthy, both seen as volatile, high-risk, high-injury-risk kind of guys that they pursued. They have signed Hector Oliveira, and i think well let's see a number of the cuban signings predate them uh anyway they signed uh hector olivera they signed chase utley they signed

scott casimir who is sort of a similar kind of guy and now they've signed maeda who whether you think he's risky or not the contract suggests that they think he is or that he is being treated as such uh and that he's going to have to prove himself uh they've also signed you know they also traded for howie kendrick and jimmy rollins who are extremely safe bets and yasmani grandal who isn't particularly risky bet so it's not they're only getting risky players however they haven't signed that i can think of they haven't made any single huge acquisition right is that is the biggest star they've acquired thus far brandon mccarthy yeah they haven't they haven't signed anyone to a mega contract from outside the organization. Yeah. And so this is, for one thing, it's completely different than how the Dodgers were being

run under Ned Colletti, but also under Stan Kasten. But for another, it's very similar. It's like essentially how the A's and the Rays were run, except with more capacity to sign more of these guys. But it feels like they're in a lot of ways bringing the same philosophies that they had in Tampa and Oakland to the Dodgers. And we kind of talked about and that they, I don't know, sort of see themselves as really trying to play the small market game, but better and with more money rather than playing the big market game? there are advantages to working within those constraints. And maybe that's why teams like the A's and Ray's have been at the forefront of the analytical movement and why they've largely been very successful given their contract, their payroll, because those constraints force you to innovate and maybe force you to be smart and maybe don't allow you to make mistakes on the

same order as other teams that can spend a lot more money. So I can see advantages to wanting to port that mindset over to the Dodgers and not just spending freely on whatever great free agent is available because there are limits. Every team team has some sort of limit it seems and if you can continue to be efficient then that obviously helps but if you're the dodgers you also get the added bonus of being able to buy the best free agent every now and then who fits your roster really well and you would think that they would take that option. They would exercise that option now and then, unless they really think that free agents are such terrible buys that it's just never the best move to make, even if you can afford it. Yeah. I feel like we're, you and I and others are

kind of constantly evolving on the question of whether teams with the sort of money that the Dodgers and Red Sox and Yankees have should make the kind of moves that so often end up regrettable. And I think that maybe my peak go ahead and do it moment was when the Angels signed, I don't know, maybe it was Josh Hamilton. And it was like everybody had seen how disastrously the pool holes and CJ Wilson deals looked even after one year. And yet it didn't in any way keep them from going and just making another incredibly big investment in another guy they wanted.

And that you can never really like, there's always going to be a way for the rich teams to find more money to be rich. And I don't know, that was maybe the peak. And maybe I've come down from that a little bit, partly because Josh Hamilton was really bad and the Angels have been bad. But I think shortly after that signing, though, that was when we noticed the extremely low correlation between money and success in the league. correlation between money and success in the league. And one of the reasons seem to be that, yes, having lacking these sorts of restraints that are put on small market teams, big market teams get these big contracts that not only cost a lot of money, but which they seem to be able to outrun, but that lock them into relatively bad players. And that's probably more than anything.

I mean, Carl Crawford is still playing, you know? And it's not that Carl Crawford is keeping them from signing somebody better. Maybe he is, but it does seem like their teams are able to outrun these contracts more than we give them credit for. But that Carl Crawford keeps playing, and who knows who he's blocking? Or who knows what move they didn't make? Or who knows what gamble they didn't take earlier on. And so, I don't know. I always, I think that we were probably were way too hard on the extremely rich teams acting extremely rich and taking a

little too much pleasure in watching some of the bad contracts turn really ugly. But on the other hand, it does. I mean, I don't know. Do you think that Friedman, when he was with the Rays and he saw the Red Sox sign, say Lackey and Crawford, do you think he was jealous? Maybe not in those specific or, well, I mean, when he, when he lost Crawford to the Red Sox, I would, I mean, I would think so. Really? He probably, I mean, he didn't want not to have Carl Crawford So you don't think that he went

Aha, got him right where we want him They just sunk all this money into Carl Crawford And I know from marginal value over replacement player That that's a bad move And if they just keep doing this then we'll spend them down to our level or below and that and that uh theo will get fired and end up in the nl and then his replacement will get fired too yeah and i mean do you do you think he saw that coming or do you think he really thought i hate this game i hate i i hate that this is so unfair that they get to go sign Crawford and that we never get to.

I think there must have been an element of the latter. Maybe he thought that was too much money to spend on Karl Crawford. Maybe he even thought if he had had the money to spend on Karl Crawford, he still wouldn't have spent that much on Karl Crawford. But still, losing players and watching other teams take them in your division. I mean, he, he couldn't have known that that contract would be such a disaster that Crawford would get hurt and hate Boston and decline so soon. I'm not giving him credit with that much prescience. So I would would i would guess that losing your best player at the time to your rival must have been frustrating on some level so i wonder if he thought if i ever got a team like that i would i wonder if he had an idea of how he would respond i don't know i i mean i expected him to

to continue to do smart things and try to operate efficiently, but also be willing to make some large expenditures at times. I do think that one thing that somebody really smart one time told me, in fact, I think it was when I was writing about the lack of correlation between money and team success. the lack of correlation between money and team success. They said if their team suddenly got X million dollars more and they could spend it, they would spend at the bottom. They would always spend at the bottom. The smart way to do it is to spend at the bottom of the roster, not the top.

And I think that that's probably, I don't know that it's been tested. I've never tested it. But I do think that that is plausibly the right way to do this. And you could make the case that the Dodgers are continuing to spend money. I mean, they are signing a lot of people. If you just stack up how many people they add compared to the Rays and the A's, they are spending more money, obviously, a lot more money.

But they're doing it to have depth. They're doing it to have no weak spots. They're doing it so that they don't have Pete Cosma playing shortstop in October or something like that for them. And that seems smart. Now you can make the case that taking on a lot of risk puts you in a position where you might end up with that anyway. You might end up with Chase Utley playing second base in October,

but they've signed and added so many quality major leaguers that there's overlapping risk there's uh still you presume a little bit of margin to add guys as they need them which they might not quite have if they were signing the grankies and the haywards instead so um, um, so yeah, maybe it's, maybe that's a perfectly reasonable way to do it. And, uh, I don't know. I think I still, I think I prefer the way that they're doing it. It seems smarter this way, right? I mean, it seems surprising that they're letting these great, relatively, relatively sure things go to other teams over money because they have money more than any other team and sure things are really good. Uh, but it's not like they're not building a really good team and it's not like

they don't have 25 good players out there. Uh, and, uh, there's no team other than the Cubs that I would, uh, less want to have in my division, uh, this year and next year and the year after that. Uh, so this isn't really criticism. It's more huh i guess yeah yeah i mean last year people wondered why they didn't sign a more certain starter like why they didn't take the money that they spent on brett anderson and brandon mccarthy and give it to james shields instead people people wondered that at the time because shield seemed like a sure thing yeah and as it turned out, Brett Anderson was better than Shield. And McCarthy broke right away, but Brett Anderson was really good. And I guess there were times during the year when they needed starters.

I mean, they had 16 pitchers make at least one start for them. And they resorted to Matt Latos at one point. So they did have guys like Scott Baker and McCarthy and Brandon Beachy who were injury types, and they ended up contributing nothing, basically. But they also then found people like Mike Bolsinger, who was like an analytics find, and he was really good. And they won 92 games, and they won the division by eight games and they went into the playoffs with clayton kershaw and zach renke and had as good

a chance as anyone did so they could have i mean they could just keep signing people and maybe build a a 98 win team instead of a 93-win team or something. But maybe they haven't had to, and maybe this is more sustainable. There's no boom and bust. It's not like a Tigers situation where they sign a bunch of people, and then those people get old, and then they're stuck with those people, and they don't have prospects because they've been forfeiting draft picks and trading prospects and

dodgers just have this thing where they have kind of a you know they have a sustainable roster here it seems like and they keep adding people to it but then they are able to call up people like peterson and and seager who they didn't trade when people thought maybe they should trade those guys and they didn't. And now they kind of have a higher floor as a team because they have those guys locked in for a while. All right. Last thing. This is probably the most personal risk that any player has ever taken on his own performance, especially relative to his total earning power. Do you like it? No.

Again, there are a lot of details we don't know, but I don't know why he would have signed this deal as of now. I mean, we don't know what other offers were out there, but there were other teams interested. The Diamondbacks had been talking about him for a year i don't know if they were as competitive post granky and and uh post miller as they would have been before but they were supposedly interested and the astros were supposedly interested and i don't know maybe it was the only West Coast team that wanted him. But still, it's strange because if he hits all the incentives and he is really good,

and to hit all the incentives he would have to be really good, then he'll make decent money, I guess. What did you say, 17 or something is kind of the max he can make over this contract? I mean, if he did make 17 per year for eight years, I mean, that's a lot. Yeah, it's a lot. He'll be rich. He'll be rich.

But man, like if you're going to bet, if you're going to give up so much certainty to get the upside of being good, like I would think you'd want a lot. Like I would think the incentives would be like 30 million now the problem is that you can't get 30 million here the problem is that you can't ask for anything more than innings and or you know or the like so it is kind of hard because there are bad pitchers who get 195 200 innings a year uh that you don't want to pay $26 million to.

But like, I don't know if I were him, like he could come over and win three Cy Youngs and only get, you know, 17 and a half million a year, which is normal. That's a normal thing that happened. Like Dallas Keuchel won the Cy Young and he didn't make that much, but Dallas Keuchel didn't give up a whole bunch of potential earning power in order to bet on that upside. And it just feels like a very, it feels like a low ceiling given how low he has accepted the floor, but maybe it's, maybe he has no choice. Maybe that's what was out there for him. Yeah. But that's, that's confusing

if that really was what's out there for him. I mean, if you have to imagine that is maybe teams are really lower on him than we thought, but given what other guys are getting, I mean, what are the other, I mean, given what Jay Happ got or any of the other, you know, Marco Estrada or pretty good pitchers, decent pitchers without really much longer track records of success than he has, it's strange.

I mean, if you want eight years, then you obviously have to give up some annual average value, average annual value, but why would you want eight years so much that you're only getting $3 million a year? It's very odd. getting three million a year it's it's very odd i mean that's like that's like league average salary basically is what he's signing up for or maybe a little bit more and league average salary is like including pre-arbitration guys who are making nothing so it's weird i don't i don't know how to explain it it's not even like he's really betting on himself so much because even if he maxes it out it's really not that huge a deal so right the the yeah exactly so uh so then the what are the chances there's an opt-out in this because if he's really betting on himself there's an opt-out after year two and then he really gets paid and then the dodgers are taking on a bit more risk because

like let's say it was two years now the dodgers are on the hook for you know 45 million guaranteed if he's horrible and 20 you know maybe 45 over two years if he's good and uh and then he'll opt out and get paid when he hits free agency at 29 and everybody's seen him pitch in the majors. That would make a lot more sense, right? Yeah. So just knowing that, just knowing how much more sense the whole thing makes if there's an opt-out, would you bet that there is an opt-out? Yes, I think it's very likely that there's an opt-out.

I agree, thereby invalidating like like 80 of what we just talked about well even i mean if there is an opt-out is it still i mean even if there's an opt-out after two or three years i i mean well then you have to then you really the three million a year then makes more sense because the dodgers do have to pay those $20 million for just two years or three years of service. And so now you're talking about, you know, you're talking about even if, like, let's say he didn't pitch and he still opted out after three years. That's still $29 million over three years, which isn't that cheap. I mean, it's pretty cheap, but it's not that cheap for a pitcher who hasn't pitched in the majors yet. And if he's actually good and opts out,

then you're paying that plus the $10 to $12 million in incentives every year. So that actually looks like a normal contract structure, just basically because the posting fee is all up front. So there's got to be an opt-out. There's an opt-out. Yeah. Okay. We're reporting it first. All right. So's an opt-out. Yeah. Okay. We're reporting it first.

All right. So we're done? I'm done. Okay. So you can send us emails at podcast at baseballperspectives.com. Now that the holidays are over, we'll probably be back on a more regular schedule. You can join the Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild. Great review.

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