Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 801: The Big-Contract Catch-Up

Episode Date: January 20, 2016

Ben and Sam banter about the resolution to a legal case they discussed last week, then discuss the Ian Kennedy, Chris Davis, and Justin Upton signings.

I got news for you, there ain't no blues, I got news for you. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I got news for you, there ain't no blues, I got news for you. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I got news for you, there ain't no clues I got news for you No, no, no, no, no Hello and welcome to episode 801 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives,

presented by The Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I am Ben Lindberg of FiveThirtyEight, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Prospectus. Hello. Hello. 801 episodes, that's a lot. I wonder at what point we're actively turning off potential new listeners who don't want to listen to an 800 episode backlog. I would guess like 210.

Okay. Yeah, it's not as if you need to catch up. Look, I mean, the thing about it is i i think most people when they go oh well there's a baseball podcast they assume we're going to talk about the news of the day and that like the narrative of the podcast is not a particularly key element right and so i would imagine that that people who get turned off by our podcast are turned off just by the content. Not by feeling like they've – right. It's not a superficial turn off. It's a deep-seated turn off.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, look, if someone told me – it's not like I wouldn't listen to like, you know, well, any baseball. To like, you know, well, any baseball. I mean, I just wouldn't expect a baseball podcast to be where you would go for for like long established smouth mash smash, smash, smash, smash mouth inside jokes. Like I would just think they were going to like, oh, well, they're going to talk about Ian Kennedy today. I'm curious about that. Thing is, I think we will talk about Ian Kennedy today. about that thing is i think we will talk about you and kennedy today so we're subverting our expectations of regular listeners and meeting expectations of non-regular listeners anything you want to banter about let me just real quick okay i will uh say that uh if you um that i wrote

a piece today about the fastball velocity flame on TV broadcast graphics. And I would just, if you aren't a person who typically goes to read my work or Ben's work, but you do like this podcast, it's a relatively effectively wild-esque topic. And so you might like it. And so it's at Baseball Perspectives today. It's free for all. So, you know, you can go ahead and read it. I'll read it.

Yeah. Have you read it? I have not read it yet. It's very rare for you to recommend that someone consumes something you have produced. So this must be special. Well, it's not. Yeah, it's not. It's basically a listener email question.

I don't think it actually came in as a listener email. it's basically a listener email question. I don't think it actually came in as a listener email, but it's, somebody asked me some months ago, whether the graphic has kept up with the changing era, because we all know that people throw harder. So, you know,

that's basically like we could answer it on a typical Wednesday email show. And since we're putting off the email show for a day, this is your fix. But there's some surprising, I would say there are some surprising conclusions. Cool. Well, I'm intrigued. All right. So we had Nathaniel grow on last week to talk about various legal cases. One of the ones we talked about, the first one we talked about, Garber versus Office of the Commissioner of Baseball, has been settled. This was the TV lawsuit that had the potential to do away with the blackout policy and had some other

ramifications for the league and for the way that games are broadcast and the way that baseball makes money. And Nathaniel mentioned that it was likely to be settled. There was some precedent for a similar NHL case being settled early, and this one was settled just before it was supposed to start. And the terms are probably a little disappointing if you were hoping for the best case consumer scenario. Basically, the blackout policy is still in place. MLB TV costs less for the league wide service, and they're going to be single team packages, which cost even less than that. And there are some other concessions, like there's a new service that's coming called follow your team where beginning in july subscribers who

purchase that option for ten dollars have the option to watch out-of-market broadcasts of games featuring in-market teams but you still have to subscribe to the local regional sports network so if you're a cord cutter you are still cut off so out of when you say out of market you mean it's the uh the other team's feed not it's a road game yeah right so nathaniel wrote an article about this so you can go read it in detail at fangrass if you want to but he said in other words a detroit tigers fan living in new york city will now be able to watch the det broadcast of a Tigers-Yankees game, so long as the fan also subscribes to the YES Network. Well, did Nathaniel by chance write an article about the flame in TV broadcast graphics? He did not. That would have been quite a coincidence.

Good. Well, I'll go read that. Okay. All right. So we are going to catch up on some contracts today, as much as I'd like to talk about the Players' Tribune And players who were converting from cricket all week There was baseball news And we're a daily baseball podcast And we'll talk about some of that news So there were three big deals signed

Over the last few days, several days Ian Kennedy went to the Royals Chris Davis went back to the Orioles. Justin Upton went to the Tigers. And we've talked about all of these players this off season with Upton and with Davis. We were talking about how strange it was that position players hadn't been signed yet. Some of the most prominent position players, well, lots of pitchers were off the board. And of course, Chris Davis and Ian Kennedy were part of our contract predictions game at the beginning of this offseason. So we talked about them. Should we start with Kennedy, since he was a prominent figure earlier in the offseason on this podcast? So

Kennedy went to the Royals for five years and $70 million. This is, I think, somewhat shocking if you had told me that a couple months ago, maybe even a week ago, in that a lot of people expected Kennedy to take the qualifying offer. He was seen as one of the most likely candidates to accept that offer because he was coming off a season that was not good. It was bad. You could probably say bad. Another thing you could probably say is that it was three seasons.

Yeah. Well, that's true. Yeah. There are, I guess there are mitigating factors. Jeff Sullivan walked through some of them last week. He's coming off his worst season. He's coming off a season when he was basically, you know, as far as OPS allowed, at least, he was the worst qualified pitcher.

And you wouldn't expect the worst qualified pitcher to get a $70 million deal, especially with the draft pick compensation attached because he did turn down that qualifying offer and there's an opt-out after a couple years so he really got the whole package he got the opt out he got the long-term deal he got a decent average annual value and he is still ian kennedy he got essentially the same contract because let's let's just the fifth year is an illusion right i mean nobody expects him to be good in five years particularly so call it a four-year 70 million dollar deal right okay if you want and that's that's the james shields contract that james shields signed what 10 months ago 11 months ago as the third or fourth best free agent in the class.

Yeah, right. Yeah, there's been inflation, it seems like, in this segment of the market more so than any other segment. I mean, some of the— The starting pitcher segment? Yeah, or not even— The two, three, four starting pitcher? Yeah, basically.

Right. The mid-rotation guy. The Samarja. Yes. Samarja, Leak. The Chen. Yeah. Mike Leak and Wei-Yin Chen both got 580 and Kennedy 570 with the opt-out.

So, yeah, this is the area of the market. Like, you know, Granke got a lot of money. Price got a lot of money, but not really more than people expected them to make. People expected them to make tons of money. Not that much more than Sabathia got, you know, seven years ago or whatever it was. Right, yeah. So the top of the market is kind of incrementally increasing, it seems like. But the middle of the market is just skyrocketing all of

a sudden. I would hypothesize that this is the segment of the market that always most shocks us with its inflation. And that perhaps, I wonder, there might be a second tier to this hypothesis, although I don't know what it is yet. like i remember when guys were getting like three years and 30 as number three starters in about 2004 and that was considered shocking and you know like uh like nobody could just nobody really appreciated the value of the number three starter, I think. And it was seen as like crazy that that's what an average pitcher gets. And after that, I think there was a couple years where the market actually came down a little bit for everybody. So maybe you could argue that this is the bubble getting to its furthest.

I'm not sure if that's true or not. But I think that basically there's always a clash between the value that teams put on innings and the value that are the blemishes that fans see in these kind of mediocre starters. Yeah. Okay. That's possible. Yeah. I mean, you, you often point out that people are always shocked by how much money people are making, that we're all bad at adjusting our mental frameworks for how much money players are worth or how much money teams pay them like they're worth. And so maybe that's even stronger for the flawed player because with the elite player, we can always say, well, he's the best. So you pay him the most money. Whereas with these guys, it's very easy to see what's wrong with them.

the most money. Whereas with these guys, it's very easy to see what's wrong with them. There are reasons to be semi-optimistic about Kennedy, I guess. I don't know. Jeff Sullivan pointed out that he moved on the rubber pretty significantly and he was much better after that. And of course, he's durable and the Royals need a durable starting pitcher because they have some guys who aren't particularly durable or can't be counted on to be durable. He also has the Kauffman field factor working for him, but that doesn't work as well for him coming from Petco. I mean, fly balls and home runs have been a problem for him. Hard contact has been a problem for him.

But if you're bad in Petco, you're probably going to be bad everywhere. Although, of course, the Royals had a great outfield defense and the Padres had a pretty bad outfield defense. So maybe that makes some difference. But it's not as if you could expect Petco or Kaufman to be a panacea. It definitely makes some difference. But most home runs are not the defenses failing.

But Petco isn't as extreme as it used to be. Not quite. And Kauffman, if you told me, I don't know if this is true, but if you told me that Kauffman is a harder place to hit home runs than Petco, I would not at all be surprised. So I don't know if it is. Yeah, it could be. It's probably close. Yeah, Petco has not been as home run suppressing, but it's still among the most or maybe the most offense suppressing. Definitely, though, this is the ideal place for Ian Kennedy to pitch.

Probably, yeah. Although, just curious, right now we know that the Royals last year had an elite outfield defense, and the year before and the year before, maybe the great defense of all time, outfield defense of all time, but certainly one of the best. Kennedy's going to be there for four or five years. How confident are you that they will have good outfield defense in three years? Because, of course, Gordon will be old. Kane will be older.

Who knows who will be in right field? Do you think that Dayton Moore has demonstrated that this is something he prioritizes and will always have good outfield defense? Do you think that Kane and Gordon are going to age particularly well in those spots? Or did he, you know, did they kind of fluke into having these really elite guys out there? And there's no reason to think that in two or three years, they, the state of their outfield defense won't have reset toward the medium yeah well Kane just got a two-year extension right so so Kane and Gordon are going to be there for a while I mean I would I'd be somewhat confident about Gordon being at least a competent left

fielder for a few years and that he's been so far above the average there and the average there is so low. Competent, but he'll also be in his mid-30s and Kane will be over 30. Yeah, I wouldn't bet on any outfield being significantly above or below average like three years out. I mean, it's like even with teams like a good team today, you can't even say that that team is more likely to be a good team in three years than a bad team today like the the effect just doesn't last very long so i would assume that's true for subsets of the team too when jared weaver signed his extension with the angels it was definitely brought up that that was a similarly great fit for him because of the ballpark and because of the extremely good

outfield defense the angels had at the time and peter borges ended up getting traded mike trout is not certainly not stretched in centerfield but he's i wouldn't say that he stands out as a lorenzo cane quality defender and then they've had a whole series of random guys rotating in at the corners um and so it's not i i wouldn't guess that the angels have been particularly above average as an outfield defensive unit over the last three or so years either so right yeah and could we use the edinson volquez contract as a comp to show how much things have changed in a single year because i, who would you rather have, Volquez coming off his 2014 or Kennedy coming off his 2015? I think clearly Volquez, right? Or maybe not clearly. Volquez was a guy who had outperformed his peripherals, whereas Kennedy has, if anything, underperformed

them. But they were the same age, I think. Kennedy's 31. Volquez was 31 at the time. Volquez was clearly coming off a better single season. Much, much better by DRA. But not by FIP. Not much better by FIP. A little bit better. But still better, yes. Still better.

Although probably not by ex-FIP. Maybe not, no. Because Kennedy's peripherals are good until you see 31 home runs and 168 innings at Petco, which matters. And I don't think Volquez had the qualifying offer, right? I don't think he did. He didn't. But Volquez didn't get an opt-out,

and he got a two-year $20 million deal with a team option. Yeah. I mean, look, you're're not gonna trick me into saying something nice about ian kennedy here but volquez would be by comparing him to volquez who you volquez had been extremely consistent on a peripherals level for years and years and had been extremely consistently bad in a runs allowed level for those exact same years yeah and then he randomly has one year where he spikes a era so i had like zero faith in volquez wrong i was wrong but i had zero faith in volquez i was right with you yeah and and i guess the other big difference is the durability volquez did

pitch 200 innings for the Royals this past season, but it was his first ever 200-inning season, whereas Kennedy has had a few of those and has not had the same amount of missed time. So that's part of it, but still it's not a huge difference. If I asked you which one you'd rather have, you'd have to think about it a bit, and yet Kennedy's contract

is enormous compared to what Volquez got a year ago. It seems to show some progression in this part of the market. Well, I mean, yeah. Or another way of saying it is that Kennedy got the same contract that James Shields got a year ago. Right. Yes. That'd be another way to put it in perspective yeah i boy i like i really have a hard time thinking about volquez's even being uh able to sell himself at the level that kennedy was trying to sell himself at so but i don't know is kennedy's how where does kennedy's contract compare to uh samarja's in your mind it's you know it's 20 million dollars less and samarja is coming off of a really a disaster of a season two yeah uh season at least and samarja was good more recently but not necessarily better in his career than kennedy so samarja is a 96 ERA plus and a 384 FIP in his career.

Kennedy is a 97 ERA plus and a 399 FIP in his career. Of course, Kennedy had the, that one amazing year four years ago, he's roughly as durable as Samarja has been, as durable as Samarja has been and is also coming off of a horrible year. So I wonder if... Of course, we didn't like the Samarja contract either. No, we didn't. So we're just comparing it to another contract that we thought was weird. Well, I think when the Samarja contract was signed, we talked about it as, oh, wow, look at that.

Teams still are buying into Samarja as a profile, as a guy, as a big guy who throws hard and looks like an ace and has been traded for a lot in the past. And they're still buying that even though he's 30. And at this point in his career, he has a thousand innings of not very good pitching. And we thought that that was the story about Samarja. And I guess maybe what you're getting to is that, in fact, Samarja was just the first of like four or five of these contracts that are all similar in terms and similarly flawed pitchers. And Kennedy and Samarja, Kennedy sort of changes the story that we should have been talking about with Samarja all along. It still seems like when they dip into the free agent market, at least other teams' free agents, the reaction is mixed, to say the least.

At least at the time it happens, maybe not so much in retrospect. I mean, their payroll is going to be up by, I think, about $20 million, which is something you'd sort of expect to see from a team that has gone from being terrible to being great and having lots of success and postseason money and attendance boost and all that. And Gordon being brought back was a surprise, but a positive surprise, I think. But when they've brought in other teams players, it's always been kind of perplexing. Like last year with Volquez, we didn't like Volquez. We were totally wrong about that. But he didn't seem like a guy you would want to sign to a multi-year deal. And then Kendris Morales totally didn't seem like one just because he'd been coming off years of not being good.

And, of course, he was excellent. And who else? Guthrie and Vargas. Yeah, Guthrie and Vargas. Guthrie was a trade and re-signed, but Guthrie and Vargas are the two that come to mind as the Kennedy predecessors. Maybe, I don't know, Gil Mashes was significantly better than Kennedy, right? Even Gil Mash, who that contract was seen as the worst deal of the season, of the offseason at the time, and a sign of a

franchise that was completely directionless mesh was probably i i would say mesh was a significantly better pitcher had a better outlook than kennedy although he was also getting paid a lot more relative but also five years yeah maybe not that much more relative alex rios was the one i was thinking of from last offseason that okay seemed questionable, and that one actually did turn out to be bad. So there's still, when they spend, at least when they go outside the team to spend, they're still kind of confounding. You loved Omar Infante.

Right, Infante has turned out to be bad, but I thought it was fine. So I don't know. Royals' trade results are confusing in multiple ways. Okay. So Chris Davis, I guess, is the other one that provoked some gasps when his terms were announced. Really? Yeah, a little bit. Why? Well, for one thing, it seemed like there was no market for Chris Davis. So that was part of it. I mean, there just weren't really openings at first base anywhere else.

And there weren't really rumors of anyone other than the Orioles being interested in Chris Davis. And then Boris was trying to portray him as a corner outfielder, it seemed like, because there weren't that many potential landing spots for him. And he took his time. I mean, he got that offer. It was reported months ago, a $150 million offer, and then just sort of sat on it for a while. And it didn't seem like anything came of it. So it seemed like the Orioles were kind of bidding against themselves. were kind of bidding against themselves. And maybe this is a case where Boris went to ownership, went to Peter Angelos, who supposedly likes Davis a lot, and sort of bypassed the front office the way he does.

We don't know in this case exactly how it went down, but it seems like that's kind of his MO. It's like in high school when I wanted to buy Grand Theft Auto and I couldn't buy it myself. So I got my grandma to buy it for me. So that's part of it. Although it was also sort of reported that Angelus likes Davis so much that he was willing to spend this money on Davis, but wouldn't have been willing to spend it on anything else. So it's kind of like you're choosing between Davis or nothing. You you can't even do the opportunity cost and say they could have gotten this guy for that amount of money because reportedly they

wouldn't have spent that amount of money on anyone else. So that kind of complicates it. But it's just Davis is kind of a one skill guy. It's a really nice skill. He has great power. He has hit more home runs than anyone over the last few years. But that's kind of it with him offensively and defensively. He's nothing special. And he's 30 and he's big and he looks like Adam Dunn and Ryan Howard and other scary looking guys. And so there was, I think, a fear that he would not be someone you'd want playing for you at the end of this contract. On the other hand, it was announced that there's a lot of deferred money in this deal. About $421. And there's no opt out, although there is a no trade clause. But I think it's just that Davis is sort of scary because you can imagine a Davis with less elite power not being that great. And you don't even really have to imagine it because we've seen that player. We've seen him a couple of years ago. I mean, he's had the two incredible years, particularly 2013, when he hit 53 homers. And then this past year, he hit 47 and was almost as good. But sandwiched between those great years was the one year where he was barely above replacement level. He was a sub league average hitter. And

then the year before his big breakout, he was just a good hitter and was maybe a league average player as a good hitter. And that's sort of what you envision him being at some point, maybe not too terribly far into this contract. Like if he keeps hitting 50 homers, then great, this is a wonderful deal. If he hits 30 homers, like he did in 2014 or in 2012, then it's not such a good deal. So it's just one of those ones where you can very clearly picture the decline, Chris Davis. I mean, we hate most free agent deals. And so like, I'm not saying this is going to turn out great i'm it's more that this seems like about the contract you know not maybe maybe there's a

couple maybe there's 10 million more 20 million more whatever than you'd expect or one year but this is sort of the contract you expect for a player of this profile i mean he's not that old though though he has old player skills he's still in his 20s which is significant for a free agent and you know he's coming off a 47 home run season so nothing that he gets would surprise me that much do you think that there's anything about the distribution of his offense over the past three years do you think that chris davis is a kind of a binary hitter where he will there is something significant about that year 2014 that makes it so that you can't just average the previous three seasons and say well that's his true talent and

you know some weeks will be good and some weeks will be bad but you know he's a you know 140 ops plus hitter uh and that's that's what he as opposed to, well, he's always whatever one switch away from being horrible for a year and hitting 196. Yeah, I mean, you would think that it would have to increase the uncertainty a little bit. I mean, if he had just been, so what is he? He's averaged like, what, four wins or something over those past three years? But of course, he was like a seven-win player and like a six-win player and then like a one-win or half-win player. Well, on reference, he's six and a half to five.

So four and a half, four and a half per season. So four and a half, four and a half per season. So if he had been four and a half, four and a half, four and a half, you'd probably be more confident in the projection than you would be if he's going from six to one to five or whatever it is, I would think. I mean, I guess you'd have to do a study on that to see if that's actually true. That seems to be the perception, and it seems intuitive. I don to see if that's actually true that that seems to be the perception and it seems intuitive i don't know if it's actually true but yeah i mean you could imagine just having seen him struggle like that then maybe whatever caused that struggle recurs it seems like like the way that when a player demonstrates some skill you, okay, he has that skill. We know he has it. He's more likely to get it back and show it again.

It's kind of the inverse with Davis. We've seen him struggle and therefore it seems more likely that he'll struggle in the same way again. Yeah, it's very hard to ignore that season. And I do think that if it were smoothed out and if he were say 10 worse in each of the good seasons and 20 better in the middle season that probably there's less hand-wringing over this contract and my guess is that in you know most cases that sort of thing is an illusion but also you're right it's hard at. I mean, he didn't really have a good month in that entire season. Yeah. Uh, like he was bad in the first half, bad in the second half.

He was bad in April, May, June, July, August, September. He was just consistently not a good baseball player. And I don't know, you know, there's another way of phrasing that is, well, whatever was wrong with him, he fixed it. and if you look at the years where there's not something wrong he's a you know he's an mvp caliber player uh and so you could very easily say well i mean particularly if he has an explanation i don't know if he does but you know maybe he had um a mono or something probably not but maybe he had something that he goes oh yeah no i know i was off that year I know why I was off that year. I read the secret.

I'm not going to be off anymore. And you could convince yourself that, in fact, the distribution of his performance is actually very encouraging going forward. And, you know, honestly, like, I don't know. I could go either way. I mean, the pessimistic way of looking at it is to say, well, this is a hitter who has very low margins. And when something gets a little bit off, particularly because of his strikeout tendencies and because he really has to hit the ball square to get any value. I mean, so much of

his value is coming from his ability to put the barrel on the ball 50 times a year and elevate it. And if he's just a little bit off then he can't you know his main problem becomes a bigger problem and his signature talent uh becomes uh that much harder for him to uh to recapture which he's not really in any way like josh hamilton but i always felt that way about josh hamilton who was you know his approach at the plate was so bad in a different way than Davis, but his approach to the plate was so bad that always seemed like, well, when he's on, you know, his talent carries him and you can't get anything past him and you can't stop him. But when he's just a little bit off, he has so little margin that he becomes, you know, quite

bad. So that's a pessimistic way of looking at it. I find myself though, kind of leaning toward the optimistic way of looking at it and saying, well, a lot of the things that are problems in our lives are not persistent problems. Again, not knowing what Davis's was, but you know, hypothetically, you're going through a divorce or you're, you know, you've, I don't know, you've got a sinus problem, you're getting sinus headaches, who knows? But they're not necessarily things that are persistent. They're that year. It was a bad year. It was a down year. Something bad happened to you that year. You lost your job, your car broke down, you were stressed, whatever. Whereas the sort of true talent of your personhood might be a little bit more

persistent and consistent. And so I find myself not having that much trouble talking myself into the optimistic view that that is an outlier based on very specific circumstances that are not really that likely to repeat. There's still a lot of downside to Chris Davis and who Chris Davis is a hitter and the contract. And, you know, like the default for free agent contracts of more than two years is to go, yeah, that's going to get bad. And yeah, this one will probably get bad. I'm not defending it or anything like that. But I think that you could easily give Chris Davis a lot more generous assessment than that. And another thingllivan pointed out at fox was that

davis has become a much more extreme pull hitter over the last several years you know pulls more than half of his batted balls he pulls like four out of every five of his grounders and pulls a lot more of his flies than he used to. And obviously it worked for him. He hit 47 homers. He was really good. But it kind of goes along with the perception that he has old player skills. It's seen as something that old players do

to kind of compensate for declining skills or maybe it's a symptom of declining skills is pull percentage and lots of pulling and of course it makes him somewhat easier to defend than when he was more of a all-field hitter although that's not the case when he hits the ball over the fence but it just kind of goes along with the chris davis's scary perception and the other thing is that the orioles are kind of in no man's land a little bit. They're coming off a 500 season. They haven't done a whole lot.

They have brought back Davis. They got Wieters back on the qualifying offer. But other than that, they're mostly the same team. I mean, they have Mark Trumbo now. They didn't have Mark Trumbo before. But other than that, it doesn't seem like they are a great candidate to be significantly better than they were last year. I know that the Dakota team projections aren't public yet, but according to the Fangraphs one, they are pretty close to the

bottom of the American League in the projections. They're projected to be 78 and 84 and the worst team in the AL East. Obviously, the Orioles have defied projections in the fairly recent past, but true talent wise, it doesn't seem like they're set up to be a strong contender. Maybe Davis makes them a moderate contender and no Davis makes them no contender at all. So maybe that's worth something, but they still have some holes in the outfield and at DH and they have kind of a weak rotation, which was a problem for them last year and doesn't seem that likely to be a strength this year. So it's partially that, like if you're going to sign Chris Davis, you want that to count in the first few years of the contract when he'll presumably still be worth what he's being paid. And it doesn't seem like the Orioles are that well positioned to take advantage of that.

But maybe there's value to being even a long shot at contending as opposed to no shot. Yeah. All right. long shot at contending as opposed to no shot. Yeah. All right. Lastly, Justin Upton, who went to the Tigers. Terms are six years and 130 million. He also has an opt-out two years in. So we did a show on the AL Central last year. Last week. Right. And we talked about the Tigers and I think we mentioned that they had a outfield hole that Cespedes or Upton would look pretty good in. And now Upton is in that hole. So does this dramatically change the outlook for them in the Central? Dramatically? Probably not dramatically, but it changes the outlook for them in the central

yeah good analysis by us so i mean the i don't know the terms are fine isn't it interesting that uh or maybe is it interesting that so many guys are getting opt-outs to go into the mega market. Yeah, that's true. That Upton is going to have the option to opt out and compete with Bryce Harper and everybody else in the insane free agent market. I wonder if that's significant at all or whether it is simply that they figure, well, having it in two years is better than having it in three years. Yeah, that might just be the soonest you can get an opt-out.

Yeah, exactly. Or whether it's agents determining that it's better to be in a market with a lot of buyers, regardless of whether there is a lot of product to sell, or maybe it's something else totally different. I'm surprised. I would think that Upton would have been able to get, I don't know. I don't know what he would have been able to get well i don't know i don't know what he would have been able to get but upton seems like a good guy to get to have asked for a one year opt out because you know he like he's he seems like a fairly sure thing like it doesn't really seem like there's gonna be a lot of consistent guy that we were proposing as the alternative to the Davis model.

Like his last three years, he's been a well above average offensive player in sort of the same rough range. And maybe that range is not quite as high as people expected, you know, in 2011 when he was great and young and seemed like the sky was the limit. But he's settled in as a consistently above average player. Yeah, so if I'm the Tigers and he wants a one-year opt-out, well, I figure, A, there's not that much risk on Upton. Upton has much less bust potential than the typical hitter because he's very young. He's got a broad base of skills. He's been healthy.

He's a young. He's got a broad base of skills. He's been healthy. He's a consistent performer. And so I'm not that worried about him not opting out and sticking me with six years of him. And I think at this point, I'm kind of not that excited about the possible upside of the deal either like it I just I kind of don't really think he's ever going to develop into an MVP consistent MVP candidate at this point and so the really the reason that you know you give him the that you would give him the one year opt-out is just you know he got sort of stuck in this market for whatever reason there wasn't a buyer out there for him or the market didn't develop or it went slow and he panicked or whatever the case may be. And he probably thinks that in a different winter, he might get more. And so you give him

the opt out basically so that he can gamble on the market again. And you don't really expect anything. I don't particularly expect anything to change for Justin Upton. I figure he'll hit free agency next year or the year after or the year after that. And the only thing that'll be different is he's older and has a little bit less future ahead of him. But it's really just about giving him the chance to find better terms for himself. Whereas a lot of these opt-outs, you're really gambling on whether the guy's healthy, whether he's going to stay healthy, whether he's going to develop, whether he's going to stay healthy, whether he's going to develop, whether he's going to break entirely. And you're giving up the upside of him further developing or, you know, adding a pitch or

whatever, and you're taking on the risk of him getting hurt. And so they're kind of different conversations than this one is. So I don't know, two years is, I guess I'm saying that why not give him one, but two is unheard of until fairly recently, right? I mean, wasn't Cueto the first two-year guy? Everybody else, or maybe Hayward. Does Hayward have a two and a three? The norm has been three, right? Hasn't the norm been at minimum three years before you get an opt-out? Yeah, it's definitely, I mean, opt- outs in general have become more common lately but it seems like as they become more common they've also been sooner

yeah anyway good move good enough move yeah it's fine i mean it's hard to i'd rather have upton than did we say that wait i can't remember have i have i i'm on je. I think I'm on record in our Krasnicks episode saying whether I prefer Upton or Davis. I don't recall. Because wasn't that one of the questions? Was it? We should probably consult the Krasnicks again. All right.

Consulting the Krasnicks. Might as well update all the Krasnicks if there are any. It's been a couple weeks since we did that oh it was upton or hayward uh right yeah okay good yeah okay so when we definitely liked hayward a lot more than upton uh and hayward got a lot more than upton and the gms were pretty closely split on hayward and upton it was 20 to 14 in favor of hayward which is a lot closer than i would put it in my head. Anyway, that's now settled. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of hard to critique Tiger's moves because it just, I mean,

they have an owner who has said that he doesn't care about the money and he wants the best players and he really wants to win a World Series. And I mean, there's a limit, obviously, to how much he cares about the money or doesn't care about the money because he's not running the highest payroll in baseball but still it seems like a appropriate amount of money for Justin Upton and if Mike Illich wants to win a World Series and doesn't want to embark on a long rebuilding process which is understandable then this is a pretty good way to try to delay that. This might be my favorite of all the big moves made this offseason of all the top tier free agents. This might be the one that I kind of like the most from the team's perspective.

And I also like it from the player's perspective. I just think this is a nice, clean contract that everybody does well in. Uh-huh. Yeah. It's a nice upgrade for a team that needed an upgrade. Yeah, I think it's the right team too. I think it's the right team in the right spot. I think that the Tigers are the team that should be going out and getting Justin Upton, and so good for them. There's another, by the way, there's another Krasnik that's relevant. Now, which free agent power hitter would you rather invest in for the long haul chris davis are you on a cesspit and that was split 17 to 15 for cesspit and davis got seven years and cesspit although only only by one team always important to remember only by one team

and uh cesspit is like hoping the mets will improve their offer from one year to two it sounds like at this point like you you haven't heard much now that is of course the same sort of laughing uh tone that i took when we were talking about a lot of these free agents who didn't have rumors about them two weeks ago and then suddenly they're signed for more or less what you expected them to sign for right so probably like there it's long been the case that the deeper into the offseason you go, in aggregate, the less player-friendly the terms get. They find their markets shrinking, teams without flexibility. You kind of don't want to be the last free agent standing. And I wonder whether this year, when we use that same way of looking at the unsigned free agents going into January,

whether in fact that will no longer be the case and whether we should get used to off seasons that span the entire off season instead of getting crammed into a two week period of December. Maybe it's just simply the case that going forward, January is going to be part of the hot stove and maybe at some, even February will be, but that we should probably, it's only one year, so we can't say that. But I wonder if we should get used to or quit thinking of January as being the point where players have lost their leverage. Maybe that's just not the case anymore. That would be a welcome development for people who do a daily baseball podcast in the office.

Yeah. Not just that too, but honestly honestly, I find the crammed together December seasons to be too much. You wake up in May and you're like, oh, that guy's there? They happen too fast. It's too much. You can't process. All right. Okay. Well, look at us.

We did a topical newsy episode. So we've caught up on the big contracts. We'll probably do a listener email show tomorrow. So you still have time to get your questions in at podcast at baseball prospectus.com. You can join the Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild coming up on 3,300 members. You can subscribe and rate and review on iTunes and you can support our

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