Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 796: Podcasting Under Pressure

Episode Date: January 13, 2016

Ben and Sam banter about Ian Kennedy and their free-agent-contract predictions, then answer listener emails about the Dodgers’ front office, The Players’ Tribune, Coors Field and Gerardo Parra, silent free agents, and more.

Too many people going underground Too many reaching for a piece of cake Too many people pulled and pushed around Too many waiting for that lucky break That was your first mistake You took your lucky break And broke into... Hello and welcome to episode 796 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus

presented by the Play Index at BaseballReference.com I'm Ben Lindberg of FiveThirtyEight, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Prospectus Hello Hey there Your boy Ian Kennedy is all over the rumor mill Oh is he? Yeah I'm Ben Lindberg of FiveThirtyEight, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Prospectus. Hello. Hey there. Your boy Ian Kennedy is all over the rumor mill. Oh, is he? Yeah.

John Heyman tweeted that the Royals seem very focused on Kennedy, but others are still in. So there is an Ian Kennedy market. It's bad news for you. Oh, no. Our contract predictions game. No, I'm now tanking for picks So I want to lose this by as much as possible You're only about $110 million behind me right now And is Kennedy the last player on the board?

No, Chris Davis You have the under on Ian Kennedy's contract And you have the under on Austin Jackson's predicted $20 million contract. Don't you have Chris Davis? I do. I have Chris Davis and Cespedes. I might take a hit on Cespedes. How much do you have?

I took the over on Cespedes at 126. So I might take a hit there. We'll see. Davis, I took the over on 120. And he's apparently. Just take this Orioles deal. Which is what, 144 something 150 150 150 put this thing away yes i'm scared it's gonna dry up if he waits too long but anyway he's gonna sign a

pillow contract if he does that would bring us right back into it what would he get what would he get 82.7 million dollars in the right direction right now, and you're at negative $29 million. So if he took a pillow for $25 or something. What would he get? At this point in the offseason, it's actually probably harder to get your full value in a one-year deal because teams don't have the flexibility to spend as much this

year, but they do have the flexibility for like 2022. And so it's probably actually easier to talk your owner into approving 150. It might be easier to talk your owner into $150 million deal right now, this year, that goes for six years or seven and is somewhat backloaded than it would be to talk him into like a 30 million dollar one-year deal right now yeah that's true so i don't know it's probably too late to save you but i am curious about what ian kennedy gets because we talked about him earlier in the offseason and he not only has the qualifying offer attached to him the draft pick compensation but also is coming off a pretty lousy year i saw some rumor i at some point in the offseason i saw numbers attached to him and

they were not encouraging for my position uh-huh okay we're gonna do emails anything you want to talk about before then uh no okay let's start with kelvin We may have answered this in some form about two Dodgers general managers ago, but Kelvin is asking again because Alex Anthopoulos has been named the senior vice president of baseball operations, bringing the Dodgers front office total of current or former GMs to six. front office total of current or former GMs to six. And Kelvin says, with the Dodgers acquisition of many of baseball's arguable top minds over the past few years, I couldn't help but wonder if there becomes a point

of diminishing returns. Put another way, do you believe it is possible for there to be too many cooks in one front office? If so, at what point? And the Dodgers, of course, have Andrew Friedman and Farhan Zaidi and Josh Burns and Anthopolis now. And Jerry Hunsaker is a special advisor. And Ned Colletti, still hanging in there as a senior advisor.

So lots of former GM firepower. Yeah, and it's not as though, so far as we can tell, it's not like they made Anthopolis the director of scouting and Burns the director of player development. It's not like they've got overqualified people in standard roles. They have just more people than there typically are roles near the GM or advisor level. And so it's hard to know what they do, and so therefore it's hard to answer the question. And, um, I'm interested to hear your answer cause I don't really have one, but I, uh, I do have a second question, Ben, which is, uh, whether you think that there is a finite enough supply of good GMs that the Dodgers are gaining any advantage by keeping these guys from other teams. Is there a team that is now noticeably weaker because Anthopolis is in their camp and therefore not running another team? Probably not noticeably.

Yeah. I mean, if they didn't have these guys, as many as, what, three of them might be GMs for other teams right now or two or three of them. But then again, if they thought they would be, then they might not be with the Dodgers. We don't know. We don't know what their compensation is. We don't know what they get out of it. I mean, it could be that. what their compensation is we don't know what they get out of it i mean it could be that like didn't uh jp richardy say that when sandy brought him on i think he said you know i'm not really at

that point in my life anymore where i'm going to be able to put in the like sort of be the obsessive front office guy that is required in baseball and And so it might be that Burns and Anthopolis are using this as something, I don't want to say like a sabbatical, because I'm sure they're working way more hours than I am. But there's probably some relief to not having the weight of a franchise on your shoulders. And you can do it temporarily. You don't, I mean, it's not like they're taking themselves out of future job positions by any means. And they're young.

They have long futures ahead. So who knows? I mean, for all we know, they have kids in kindergarten and they're, this is a, this is a more appealing position in a sport that has, it sounds like from what we hear, put a ton of strain and stress on their employees and their employees' families. Yeah. So I assume that if some other team offered these guys a president position or even one of the GM positions that still means something, they could leave or they could interview for that probably. So like Anthopolis, we know left because of the circumstances with the Blue Jays and he was the GM and then they hired Mark Shapiro

and they hadn't worked together before. And Shapiro supposedly wanted to be involved in baseball decisions. And so Anthopolis, his contract was up. He didn't want to work under those conditions. But I think by the time that happened, there wasn't really a GM vacancy anywhere. I guess you could always do the president-GM thing and put him in somewhere. But his options maybe at that point were limited. And so he figured, I'll go to the Dodgers and learn something from these guys and be part

of this respected front office and probably win some more. And it won't hurt my future job prospects at all. So it could be just kind of a layover, pick up some knowledge from other smart people and see how another team does it. And then eventually go do your own thing. In answer to Kelvin's question, though, I mean, I think that Kelvin has or if he hasn't, then I am now giving you been a free article idea that I would love. I would want to know what the other 29 teams think of this if I mean, because they would know better whether this sounds like a nightmare, or whether it's what they wish they had.

And it'd be very interesting to sort of find out from the rest of the league, from GMs and AGMs and special advisors to GMs, whether like what they imagine this front office works like, what the vision of this front office is in their head. And, you know, whether they think it sounds like too many cooks or whether they think it sounds like the answer to all the things that make their jobs hard. Yeah, I mean, we've talked about this. Like, I think you made a team of rivals comp maybe the last time we talked about this or that sounds like something you might have said. But I don't know. Yeah, we have no idea how this works. some friction developing because everyone who's been a former GM probably thinks they could be a GM again or in the right situation or thinks that in some cases they know better than the person

who's making the decision or they disagree with that person. So it would have to be very clear what the power structure is and you're an advisor and I want your input, but you're not the decision maker here. So I'm assuming that that was all worked out clearly, but yeah, I mean, you could imagine putting six former GMs together and then having them have to pull together might not always work perfectly. I mean, we have so little idea of how it's structured and how it works because none of these guys really talks, certainly not about their own front office organization. So it's really hard to say. I mean, it could be purely a good thing. Just a bunch of smart people who've made these decisions before and can help each other make other decisions. Or with the

wrong personalities, it could be bad. So, and we have in the past assumed that there is a benefit in terms of dealing with other teams, pulling off trades, pulling off complicated multi multi-team trades because you have, you simply have more people who are qualified to have those conversations. You can mix and match relationships better. And you're not as uh you know pressed for i mean there's the amount of bandwidth one gm has in trying to cover 29 other teams and 800 other agents is stretched and when you have a lot of people who can have those conversations that seems like it helps and i think that we have previously speculated that that was probably or quite plausibly a factor in the Dodgers' ability to pull off that really very complicated series of moves that one night in December 2014.

Right, yeah. And I asked Stan Kasten about that afterward, and he said he thought any team could have done that. But of course, if they think that having six GMs is an advantage, then maybe they would say that regardless. So if I were a Dodgers fan, I think I would be happy that they were just accumulating tons of smart people until I had a reason to think otherwise. Yeah. Okay, Pele wants to know,

I was curious as to why there are no interviews with free agents in the offseason. One would think that beat writers would call the free agents and pressure them for comments, for example, Justin Upton, or if he's working out in Florida or in Arizona, someone's got to be there right now and should be able to approach him with a microphone, ask him where he is in the negotiations, what his status is. It seems sometimes like baseball players are treated very gently by the media compared to if you look in another area like politics. Well, I think that they, I mean, clearly the agent wouldn't want them talking, right? Yes. And so then the question is whether there's a reason that they would be less disciplined or would ignore that. And I think that the fact that it is pretty, they have a very easy out. They say, well, my agent's handling that. And, you know, I'm not in, you know, I'm not in the room or my agent is taking the lead or whatever the case may be.

I'm looking forward to hearing what he gets it. I mean, it feels like you're giving them in this situation, they have a very easy way to no comment you and that is all they ever want and so if like if they could they would probably have their agent answer questions about the pitch that they hit for a double in the eighth inning too but there isn't somebody they can slough that off on yeah they can though for this and so you know given the opportunity to not talk to the media especially when it's almost certain that the agent has told them at the beginning of this process, do not answer questions. We don't negotiate in public. It does no good for you to be talking about this this way.

I have a plan. I have a strategy. I've been through this, you know, hundreds of times before. Do not talk to the media. You'd have to really get a guy off his guard probably to get him to slip up on that. Yeah, and they can avoid us really easily. They can, yeah. I mean, during the season, there is a time when they have to get changed

and they have to be at their locker in the clubhouse and writers are allowed to be there. at their locker in the clubhouse and writers are allowed to be there. And if they don't want to talk, they have to actually tell a human being face to face that they don't want to talk, which many of them are comfortable doing, but it's still harder to do than just not responding to a text or a voicemail or whatever. Like earlier in the off season when I was talking about texting Rich Hill, so I could write something about Rich Hill and he didn't answer. And then I heard from another writer who said he had been trying to do the same story and he didn't get an answer either. So there's no incentive to do it really, unless you think it's going to help your negotiating position somehow. And then even then your agent probably wouldn't want you

to do it. So you'd have to have someone who, you know, maybe a combination of a personal relationship between a writer and a player or a player who says things he shouldn't say. And so it's probably not for lack of trying. It's probably not for a lack of interest. It's just lack of incentive on the player's part. So Ben, do you think that the typical ball player has an agent, especially once he becomes a veteran? I think that if you're a rookie, a draft pick particularly, and your leverage is very complicated and limited, then it's different. I think if you're a minor leaguer and then it's also very different, but let's say you're, um, uh, Prince Fielder. Do you think Prince Fielder has an agent because he thinks that his agent will get him a greater, you know,

more money than the agent's cut. And therefore this is profitable for the player. Or do you think he has it just because he doesn't want to deal with it and he has an agent the same way that he has someone to take care of his dry cleaning? I would guess the latter. The doesn't want to deal with it. Yeah. Yeah. If every player represented himself, which occasionally a player will do, I mean, you probably would get less money on the whole, I would think just, but a lot of it would probably be just that you don't want to deal with it. You don't want to call around every front office and you don't want to produce a binder of your stats or whatever. You don't, you just, I mean, a lot of getting deals for free agents is

You don't, you just, I mean, a lot of getting deals for free agents is hassle. It's just knowing people and knowing who to talk to and being willing to bug them and go over a GM's head to talk to the owner, that sort of thing. So you would get less money, I think, on the whole. Agents probably even after accounting for their commission are probably worth it just purely on contract alone. Because agents, they don't take that big a cut, right? It's like 3% to 6% is standard, I think. Yeah, which is still a lot of money. It's a lot of money. It's a fairly small percentage.

But you also, to some degree, you give up a little bit of your sovereignty. I mean, there's probably a little pressure, at least in some cases, to do what the agent wants you, or it might be, you know, the agent is perhaps giving you advice that is swaying you, even though it might not be the most, the highest priority in your life. So I could see wanting to be in control of your decision and to be the one representing your desires without that intermediary who might have conflicting interests, be they specifically

getting the most money over all else or be they other clients that that agent has. So I could sort of imagine, I mean, you're a smart guy, Ben, if you were a ballplayer, I would guess that, I think I, I think I would guess that it would probably not be disadvantageous for you to do your own, uh, representation because you're smart, right? And you, you're, uh, conscientious and you're disciplined and you put the work in. But it also sounds like it would be an annoying, a tremendous annoyance. And other than team negotiation, there's a lot of other things like marketing factors that I would say that a ballplayer just cannot handle himself.

Like that seems way too complicated. The world is way too big for a ballplayer to think of. It's not 30 teams that you can really easily narrow down to three teams and knock it out pretty easily. Very complicated that way. Well, we had an agent for the book, and we did that because we didn't know anyone, right? Right. How many books?

We didn't know where to send it. I mean, we had the same – well, you know, she helped us with the proposal also. But say we had been able to do a good proposal, we still would have had no idea where to send it. Plus, they wouldn't have known us and they wouldn't have known that, you know, coming from us, it was a good proposal. No, I think, well, that's absolutely true. To me, that's the draftee or the rookie example. example now if you were stephen king or if you had 30 books under your belt yeah i don't know that the same calculus yeah probably not no then you could say you had a new book and wait for people to bid for it yeah people know basically people know what a stephen king book is worth

probably yeah okay question from brian and stepven and steven king knows the editors and the book houses and things like that and they know him yeah brian on a recent email show sam mentioned aggressive running and if you're not getting thrown out you're being too timid on the base paths if this is the case what is the acceptable rate of running into outs and would that be the same rate as being caught stealing? Does it stand to reason if you are never caught stealing that you are not attempting to steal enough? Or are there too many variables?

Catcher's arm, pitcher's time to the plate, pitchers move to first, et cetera. What about being picked off? If you are never picked off, are you not taking as big a lead as possible and therefore not giving yourself a better chance of not making a running out? And is beingot blonde toot bland how do you pronounce that i go bland i go bland

toot bland thrown out on the basis like an income poop ever acceptable yes to the last to the last answer i mean i guess if if nincompoop i mean a toot bland doesn't apply to every instance of being thrown out right right nincompoop is you know, a two plan doesn't apply to every instance of being thrown out, right? Right. Nincompoop is, you know, defining the situation. So I guess being a nincompoop is to say that you did a bad thing, a dumb thing, and the dumb thing is never a smart thing, probably. Although kind of, kind of though. Every two plan is a avoidable mistake. There you go.

It's not just purely a result of aggressiveness. It's that you forgot the situation or you weren't paying attention or you misjudged something very badly. Now, the larger question is just too complicated. It depends on the situation, right? Yeah. But in general, yes, you should get caught sometimes. And if you're never getting caught, then you probably aren't trying enough because there's a break-even point that makes it acceptable to try to steal or try to advance a base or whatever the situation is. And you have to make an estimate of how often you think you would be successful. And beyond a certain point, it makes sense to try, even if you aren't always successful.

And obviously you're not going to calculate that down to the second decimal point as you are making that decision on the bases, but you should have some intuitive sense from your experience as a baseball player of how often you could get away with this thing and how costly it would be if you don't get away with it. Some amount of not getting away with it is expected and acceptable

and appropriate. I think that if Eric Hosmer had been thrown out at home, he would have largely still been praised for the effort, assuming it wasn't. Well, I don't know. Do you think, let's imagine, let's imagine that Duda makes a good throw and Hosmer's out by four inches or even a fourth of an inch or even he's called safe and it's overturned on replay. It's that close. The two plan get tweeted and or do columnists the next day praise his gutsiness and say it was just that close

or do they say he ran them out of a huge situation and now the Mets have momentum? And if the Royals can't close it out in game six, well, boy, oh boy, is Hosmer going to go down in history as one of the great goats of all time? And there are only two options, Ben. Yeah, well, we talked about that play after it happened, and people were saying it was a mistake, even though he made it, right? Wasn't that what we talked about, whether it was a mistake, even though it was successful? Yeah, but see, that's tricky because they were really arguing with Joe Buck. More than anything, they were taking issue with Joe Buck,

who was excessively praising Hosmer. And I think that in a lot of baseball arguments, you really have to be careful that you're not confusing a baseball or a media argument with a baseball argument. In a lot of cases, I mean, the stat scouts divide is long gone, but the media fan divide is as strong as ever. And people do hate their media. I mean, people hate them. And so a lot of times I think people, writers, bloggers, tweeters, general fans are looking for any opportunity to embarrass a broadcaster or columnist or writer or whatever. And I believe that the instinct to criticize Hosmer was really about criticizing Joe Buck. And if Joe Buck had never said anything, it's a different world. Yeah. I would think that on the whole, people would have approved of the aggressiveness because it's so identified with the Royals.

And for the most part, that has served the Royals well, or it's been given credit for the Royal success. So if it didn't work out one time, you couldn't completely flip flop and say their aggressiveness is bad. So I think he would have at least gotten a pass. Yeah. So a pass, but you don't think praised. I think he would have at least gotten a pass. Yeah. So a pass, but you don't think praised. See, he should be, if you believe the premise of this question,

if we're saying that you should be thrown out sometimes, we're saying that we should have praised him. Yeah. And if we praise him when he's safe, then we should have praised him even though he was out. Yes, that's true. That we should look at baseball actions not as individual discrete events, but as a collection of behavioral tendencies that will pay off in aggregate. And I think that in Hosmer's case, in the Royals case, and maybe in baseball case generally, I think that it was a good move regardless of how Lucas Duda threw the ball.

Yeah, I think the praise would have outweighed the criticism even if he hadn't made it. Okay, Gary asks, why do sports writers feel the need to openly mock the Players' Tribune anytime it's mentioned? Do they? Well, most of the articles on that site seem to be very well written. Is that the reason there are so many derisive comments from writers? Levitard, Bob Ryan, PTI, etc. It comes off as jealousy. People that write for newspapers also have editors.

I don't think readers are ignorant of reality. Why does it seem like writers get angry if a jock picks up a keyboard? Any insight from a couple of professional sports writers would be interesting. I'm going to accept the premise that writers do feel the need to mock the Players Tribune. I haven't noticed that, but I haven't noticed a lot of things. Definitely. I mean, initially, certainly. Initially, I also i also yeah you and i did probably right yes i think the reputation has improved i mean initially it was not clear that there would be value in that and maybe some of the early pieces didn't really contradict that suspicion but there have been some excellent pieces there. I mean, I don't read

it regularly. I tend to read it either when something really good or something really bad is pointed out to me, but there have been excellent things. And it seems clear that there is a purpose for the site, that athletes are getting something out of it. And you can see why I guess the, maybe there is some sense of being threatened by this, by some sports writers, just because athletes can go to the players tribune and write their own story and they don't have to have it filtered through the sports writers interpretation of events.

Maybe some of the mocking is like the, the titles of the players at the site. I don't remember what they are. Yeah, but does that... Correspondence and hero chiefs. It's totally tongue-in-cheek, though. That is why you should love... If there's a good reason to love the Players' Tribune,

it is specifically that self-awareness. Yeah. I don't think anybody expected a Derek Jeter joint to be so self-aware. Yeah, that's true, right? Because that's not really a Derek Jeter quality. And maybe people criticize it just because it's written in the player's voice. It has the player's byline, but obviously has been edited. And I mean, in some cases, I don't know if it varies by piece, but in some cases, it's probably more of a as told to than an actual athlete

sitting down at the keyboard and banging out this piece. So maybe it's that, maybe it's that the site is presenting it as the athlete's own words when we assume that they've been massaged pretty significantly before they get to the website. But I think, yeah, I think the initial mockery has subsided for a good reason. So I think you can judge something like an article on the Players' Tribune in one of two ways. You can ask whether it was put together in a very pure spirit, whether it is totally honest, whether it is organic, and I don't know, like the way that you would do it if you wanted to write an article about Brady Aiken's Tommy John surgery and whether it follows the protocol of your journalism and all that sort of thing. That's one way of judging things. And the other way is to say, is the product good?

And I think that for journalists who live process all day, every day and think a great deal about process, it is very easy to say, well, clearly this is not really written by the player in a lot of cases, or to the extent that it is, it is heavily rewritten by professional writers. And those writers are behind the scenes and they don't allow you to see any of the blemishes. It's sort of like saying, you know, that, you know, a Taylor Swift album, for instance, is a marketing package in which I'm just going to go quick digression. I think it's unfair to use Taylor Swift for this example, but I'm using it because people use Taylor Swift for this example,

which I think is unfair. You can say that it is a marketing package in which somebody is chosen for their appearance and then a conglomerate of professionals remake it or build it and then put it under her name and expect us to like it because it is by the person, even though it is not by the person. Right. So that is, I think, a way that people, the other way of judging something is, is it good? Does this, whether there are 30 people involved or one, whether it is a suit in Manhattan or a, you know, somebody working, you know, from their office at home. Is the product

good? Is it enjoyable? Is it revealing? And it seems to me that to a degree that I was not expecting, the Players' Tribune articles very frequently are good. And caring too much about the process, I think, is sort of silly. The point of all of this is to have a good product for the world to enjoy. And if all you can look at is the seams and all you can look at is the behind the scenes stuff, you're really missing the point. You're, you know, you're focused on an exercise rather than the result. So, you know, I think that journalists like to look at the way that other people do their work and admire it or criticize it. And I certainly, I mean, I sort of feel this way too, where I will sometimes, do you know the dollop, Ben? No. The dollop is this

American history podcast where these two guys tell jokes about history. Like one of them tells a story about history and the other guy reacts. He doesn't know anything about the story. He's hearing the story for the first time and he reacts. And I laugh a lot at this podcast and it is funny, but I realized that what I, what really makes me laugh is just admiration and shock that he can come up with these jokes so fast and so cleanly. And I just, I'm always shocked that he's pulling it off. And if you step back and think, okay, well, what is the joke? What makes it funny? It's okay. I mean, there's, it's funny, but like, I'm like laughing very loudly as I'm walking down the street in the middle of a crowd.

And what I'm really laughing at, or what I'm really responding to is the skill and the adeptness. And I think writers don't like looking at the Players Tribune stuff and thinking that they're not seeing the skill and the adeptness that it purports to have. That really this has all been edited together after the fact and made to look a little bit more natural than it is. So that's probably why people find it not satisfying because they are writers, but I like it. It's good. Yeah. Okay. Play index segment, which comes from a listener email. Sure. Peter says, hi, I just saw the Rocky signed Gerardo Parra. So I went to baseball

reference and looked at his splits at Coors Field. He has a slash line of 283, 344, 382 for an OPS of 725 and zero homers and 194 plate appearances. His overall slashline of 277, 326, 404 and 730 OPS is really close to his Coors line. It seems odd that the Rockies would sign a player who doesn't excel at Coors. Do you think teams factor in the success of a player in their park when they're signing him? In my opinion, it seems the Rockies didn't look at this or is 194 plate appearances just too small of a sample to make it a factor. I will note, first of all, that in fact, the OPS is lower, slightly lower, but the slash line is actually better because it is much more OBP and, uh, uh, heavy. And, uh, so in fact, he has been a more valuable, well, not more valuable, but it's a more valuable slash line. So I, uh, we can answer the question, but first I, um, I wondered how rare this was. I thought,

uh, well, so I went and I looked, uh, I used the split finder for all guys who had at least 100 plate appearances at Coors Field. And then I took those 301 names, put them in a spreadsheet along with their career OPSs and saw what the Coors OPS is relative to the overall OPS and see see how unusual PARA is. And my first thought was, if PARA is unique in this sense, it would be really significant. And then I realized that actually the exact opposite is true. If you think about it, it's sort of weird. It seems like it's sort of a paradox. But in fact, the rarer PARA is, the less significant this would be, because if it's very rare, then we would know that essentially that our assumption is that ballplayers hit better at Coors Field with overwhelming consistency. And if there is an outlier like Parra, it would take great evidence to convince us that

he is not like all other ballplayers. And therefore, whatever sample he has would have to be huge. Whereas if there's a, say, a decent portion of people, a decent percentage of players who are worse at Coors Field, you could imagine, oh, well, maybe it's actually not that uncommon for different skill sets, different hitting styles to do poorly at Coors Field. So in a way, the more there were, the worse it would be for Parra. But anyway, how many do you think, what percentage of batters do you think are worse at Coors Field than elsewhere in a sample of 100 plate appearances or more, Ben?

30%. It's actually only 13%, which is more than I was expecting. Less than you were, obviously, but more than I was expecting. The worst ever relative to his overall performance is Lyle Overbay, who had a 522 OPS at Coors and a 776 OPS overall, which means his Coors OPS was 67% as high as his overall. There's a second thing that I want to stress about this or that I think this illuminates. Whenever we do these sorts of play index queries

where we're looking at just portions of a player's overall performance and seeing who the outliers are, it's always important to remember that sample size matters. And this really demonstrates, I think, just how much the size of the sample matters. The worst ever, remember, 100 is my minimum, right? The worst ever is Lyle Overbay at 102 plate appearances. The second worst is Mark DeRosa at 101. Then we go 143 and then Jose Cruz at 103. Then we have 148 and then 107 and then 101. If you go down to the other side of this list where the extreme

outliers on the positive side are, the most positive is Ryan Ludwig with 101. The next is Jeff Conine with 103. It really is always wherever you set the minimum, the outliers are always right on the minimum. It's not just that 140 is less than 300. It always right on the minimum. Like it's not just that, you know, 140 is less than 300. It's like, whatever the minimum is, that's where the extreme is going to be with such precision and with such reliability that it demonstrates to me time and again, how important the sample size is. Does that make sense? Yeah. Uh, like it's always, it's almost like creepy how often, like if i set it at 99 probably the answer to this would be a guy with 99 yeah it's crazy that is to say that the sample that para

has which is only 190 something or whatever is 194 is a significant factor if the the more plate appearances you i mean there's almost nobody above him with more plate appearances than that which strongly suggests that plate appearances is the determining factor of whether a hitter is going to end up on the extremes of this list, like Parra does. There's another factor that can skew this. Lyle Overbay is a great example of this factor. Lyle Overbay's career OPS is much higher than his career at Coors Field. His plate appearances at Coors Field, though,

are heavily skewed toward the decline years of his career. When he was with the Blue Jays, he very rarely played at Coors Field, and those were his best years. And so with Parra, that's not a huge factor because Parra has played most of his career in the NL West. They're fairly well distributed. His second best offensive year was last year, and he had the fewest plate appearances in Coors Field.

And so it skews it somewhat. You would expect Parra to, based, if you just do a weighted average of his seasonal stats, you know, overall seasonal stats, you would expect, and didn't give him any extra boost for Coors Field. It would narrow the difference slightly, but not that much. So I don't know. I mean, Parra is also very close. It's not like there's an extreme split. This is not Lyle Overbay, whose OPS is 250 points lower. Parra's is five points lower. And basically what it comes down to, I looked at Parra's hits, walks, strikeouts, line drive rate, doubles rate, all those things. And in fact,

by pretty much every measure, he has performed at least as well or better at Coors Field as he has elsewhere. His batted ball and contact tendencies are just as good. It's really just that in 194 plate appearances, he hasn't managed to hit a home run. You would expect him to have hit, I think, three based on his normal home run rates. You could imagine various things about a park affecting a hitter, be it the hitter's eye or the dimensions of various parts of the field, or maybe something else like just him being uncomfortable there or whatever. But it doesn't seem to be the case that any of those things apply to Parra. He's just missing a couple of home runs. And if he had a couple of home runs, his slugging percentage would be higher.

His on-base percentage is already considerably higher. And we wouldn't necessarily be talking about this. So I think that in the specific Parra answer, this is not indicative of the Rockies not caring. Although I also suspect that the Rockies probably don't care much. Yeah. For hitters. For pitchers, they might.

Yeah. Plus, Coors Field has been a road park for him, and now it'll be a home park for him. Oh, yeah plus course field has been a road park for him and now it'll be a home park oh yeah good point so he'll get the home field advantage that he didn't have and he had the home field disadvantage every other time he's played at course field and now he'll have the advantage so maybe that turns it around a little bit but yeah i would guess that maybe it came up at some point in the rockies front office when they were deciding whether to give him a three-year deal, but I wouldn't suppose that it was a long discussion. Ryan Ludwig, 1240 OPS at Coors Field, 780 overall, which is the biggest spread.

And then Jeff Conine, who's a great one because Jeff Conine had... Jeff Conine probably has my favorite Coors splits in individual years during those like the 2000 year where things were really off the rails he had like something like i don't know it was like 1100 and 400 or something absurd like that and he complained about course field that's what i liked about jeff conine all right last Coupon code BP, by the way. Use it when you subscribe to the Play Index. Get the discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription. Okay.

This question we won't be able to answer, but maybe we'll try. John says, Terry Francona lives in a hotel in downtown Cleveland during the baseball season. Let's say he has the room for 190 days. The cost of renting that room individually for each night would probably end up between $150 and $250. What do you think Francona pays for the season? How much of an extended stay discount does he get? Does he get a better discount because of who he is or no discount because he doesn't need it? If he pays $150 per night, it comes to $28,500 for the season.

If he pays $250 per night, it's $47,500. The guy makes millions and can afford either option, but my guess, Ben, is that the club uses that hotel a lot. Probably road teams stay there. Probably other ballplayers stay there. Certainly, probably when they come in, when they acquire a player, before they've found a place to live, they probably stay there. My guess is that the club pays for Francona's housing, that it is part of his contract, and that they get a good package deal yeah i wonder

if they would have a i mean would a home team have a deal with a hotel in there i guess they might just because if you call players up from triple a or something they're not going to have a place to stay or even if you call people up for like September, call up a rookie for the month, he's probably not going to rent a place or it would be nice if he didn't have to. So yeah, maybe you would have some kind of bulk deal with that hotel. Either way, he's probably not paying for it out of his own pocket. I would guess that that is in his contract somewhere. But if anyone knows about baseball teams and extended stay discounts at hotels,

please let us know. Someone will. Yeah, probably. Podcast at baseballperspectives.com is our email address. Our Facebook group is facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild. And you can rate and review and subscribe to the show on iTunes. We will be back soon. Did you see that smash Mouth covered under pressure?

Nope. As a tribute. How was it? Sounded like Smash Mouth singing under pressure. Here we go. Hang on. Huffington Post headline, Smash Mouth posts touching reminder that there will never be another david bowie never be another smash math either so the beginning sounds normal oh there's lorne yeah

this is sunny yep feels like summer smash his back Yep. Feels like summer. Smash his back. More than anything, that sounds like something that would have been on the soundtrack to The Faculty. It's very horror show. It's got the sort of sunny vibe because it's the smash mouth guitar. But if you just sort of shift your perception slightly, it's really like this guy just sort of screaming at you. And it's a little scary.

I'm uncomfortable. I really, this feels like, yeah, like that sort of scream era of horror movies where there's like this sheen of polish because it's sort of a second-generation horror movie where they're playing with the genres and all that, and so they like, you know, it's very smooth and polished, and yet then there's the slashing in the middle of it. That's sort of what this feels like to me.

It's like suburban slash rock. Let's call it that, suburban slash rock. Smash rock. Smash rock. Suburban slumash rock. Smalash rock. I've stopped it for now. I will start playing it at random moments during the recording and you won't know man when he screams let me out and like

that kind of harmony comes into it's really no it's really it's a really aggressive it's really super hostile listen to it again and just listen to the let me out like especially the let me out at like 130 it's like let me out it's like that it's really hard that's pretty good wow yeah oh my gosh anything ever happens to steve harwell oh you mean like i'm gonna be i'm to be like Mark Wahlberg in that movie. You know, Ben, when I was 16, 15 or so, I can't remember if I ever told this story to you or anyone. I probably have. But I was really into ska and this sort of cheap pop punk.

And one of the things I liked about it is that particularly for this sort of stuff, it's a very satisfying thing to sing along to because there's usually some internal rhymes and some nice buoyant momentum to the lyrics to the vocals and usually the uh the range the vocal range required is very limited especially from on the especially on the punk side where it's uh you know all in the same general pitch and uh so i you know i loved singing along along and thought that I'd be a good singer in a dorky punk band. And I would go to like concerts. And in the back of my mind, I would have this fantasy in my mind that they were going to see me singing along to every word

they were going to pull me up and let me be the singer. And so then one day when I was in college, fairly early on in college, I was writing about music for the school paper. And I had done an interview with the band Sugar Cult. Do you remember Sugar Cult? Nope. Sugar Cult was, you know, a pop punk band that came out around, I don't know, 2000, 2001, and had some anthemic type bad pop punk songs. And so, you know, I'd spend an hour and a half with them before the show. We were hanging out. We were friends and everything like that. And in the middle of the show that night, they say, hey, does anybody, we want to have someone come up and sing. Does anybody know the words to, I think it was I Want to Be Sedated. It might've been blitzkrieg bop.

And I just started casually tell the person that I came with, Oh yeah, I know the words to that song. And, and, and, and a bunch of people yelled and I realized that I could have just run up there and jumped on the stage because they knew who I was. I wasn't scary. They had seen me. I could have just gone up. That was my moment. They had handed it to me. And I just didn't even think to. I was such a dummy. I didn't even go up and do the one chance I had to go on stage and sing with an actual band. And then the person that they ended up bringing up knew zero of the words. That could have changed the entire trajectory of your life. Probably not. In your big break.

Yeah.