Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 805: How Much is That World Series in the Window?

Episode Date: January 27, 2016

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about Yoenis Cespedes’s contract, relievers winning awards, how much it costs to buy a World Series, prospect comparisons, and more.

I will buy you a garden where your flowers can bloom. I will buy you a new car, perfect, shiny, and new. I will buy you that big house way up in the West Hill. I will buy you a new life. Yeah. I will buy you a new ride joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Perspectives. Hello. Yo. Missed a day. So we had our, I'd say, last big book deadline or last book deadline that required a ton of work.

So we wrapped that up yesterday. Again, if you are planning on getting the book, we'd appreciate a pre-order. And if you're pre-ordering, we'd appreciate that you click on the link on the BP homepage and order through there so that BP gets a tiny percentage. Anything you want to talk about before we get to emails? I don't believe so. All right. Well then, let me answer a question from Dylan in New York,

just because we didn't talk about the Cespedes deal on Monday. Dylan says, because we didn't talk about the Cespedes deal on Monday. Dylan says, with UNS Cespedes turning down a reported $110 million offer from the Nationals in exchange for the Mets' $75 million offer, I got to thinking, what's the largest difference between the cash amount a player wound up accepting versus the one they reportedly turned down?

Cespedes' is $35 million. Has there ever been a bigger difference? I presume this is not play indexable, and thus may require a bit of digging. This is not play indexable and really there's no good automated way to do it because we're talking about the difference between accepted deals and offered deals and no one really records offered deals in a systematic way. Nor are offered deals even necessarily reliable. Yes, that's true also. But I think, I mean, in general, we would assume that the differences are not huge. We've talked about this before, how teams or how free agents decide where they're

going to go and how much factors other than money play into it. And clearly they do play into it at times. Cespedes supposedly liked being in New York, but this $35 million on the surface difference is really a no million dollar difference. It's really once you adjust for the differences in these deals, the Mets deal is obviously a three-year deal and there's an opt-out after the first year. So he's getting 27 and a half million, basically. He's signing up for a one-year $27 million deal. And if he decides to stay for the next couple of years, then he'd get, I think, 23 and a half in the two years after that. But this obviously gives him a great opportunity to get another contract because after this season, he'll be choosing between basically a two-year $47 million deal and whatever is available on

the market next year. And if he has a good year, you would think he could do better than that. So he will almost certainly opt out. Whereas the Nationals contract was five years and it was $110 million, but the opt out was after two years and there was a ton of deferred money. So according to reports, it really was like $77 million in present day value. Wow, that is super deferred. Yeah, it's very, very deferred. So that really kind of erases the difference. So he turned down, so basically he would have gotten, let's ignore the opt out. And if he'd signed with the Nationals, it would have been like signing for two extra years and two extra million dollars? Basically, yeah.

In real money? Wow. Yeah, I mean, we're relying on reports because it's not a deal that actually happened. But I think Peter Gammons said that it would be paid out over a 15-year deal. And I think he said that the present day value was 77 and the present day value of the Mets deal would be very close to what it actually is, 75. So there are always these differences, whether it's tax rates you have to factor in or front-loaded, back-loaded differences or opt-out differences or incentive differences. So if I mean, if there is what seems like a huge difference on the surface, then there probably is some other explanation.

There's probably something that actually brings the totals closer into line. Would you rather as a player have the opt-out be earlier or later? Probably earlier. Why? Well, I mean, in Cespedes' case, probably earlier is better just because he'll be younger when he can exercise it. And therefore he can get a longer deal and has more close to prime years left that his next team wouldn't be buying. This is like, we've answered questions in the past about, you know, why don't teams offer players a ton of money to just play for them for a year or two? And why don't players do that? And we've talked about how it's kind of, it would be betting on yourself to do that, because you would be foregoing the safety and security of a long term deal to go year to year and potentially cash in more.

If you continue to be a productive player, then you keep getting prime money for each year that you sign that contract. So that's sort of what Cespedes did here, except that it seemed like his market wasn't where everyone thought it would be. I mean, I'm sure if he had gotten the, wasn't where everyone thought it would be. I mean, I'm sure if he had gotten the, you know, six year, $125 million deal without crazy backloading that people expected him to, that Jim Bowden and his free agent predictions expected him to, and that I expected him to when I took the over on that, then odds are he would have taken that. Like everyone takes that kind of deal. And so that sort of deal just wasn't out there for him. And so he is, I guess, betting on himself to some extent that he will continue to be an appealing player a year from now and that the market will be weaker and thinner and that he'll be able to get more money that way.

Yeah, I think logically earlier holds up. It'll be different for different players depending on how they age and all that but basically the point of the opt-out is that you're getting the club to submit to commit a lot to you in the long run if things go poorly while avoiding getting locked into a deal in case you improve or the market gets better. And so the less the player has to commit to the club, in theory, the better. It's also much less likely that something terrible is going to happen to Cespedes in year one than in year five or four or three. And so if Albert Bell's back happened to him or something like that,

If Albert Bell's back happened to him or something like that, it's less likely that he could essentially get what is free money in that situation, kind of, in a way. But the plan, of course, if he opts out, is not to sign. It's not like he's going year to year after that. The plan would be that he would get a new long contract that would cover those years anyway. I mean, basically, to some degree, what an opt out is, is trying to turn your five year deal into like a seven year deal or an eight year deal. Because once you opt out, you can theoretically still sign that long deal as long as you're still good and as long as you're still young and as long as you're still good enough that you would choose to opt out. So as much as anything, it's really about trying to extend the amount of time that you would choose to opt out so so as much as anything it's really about trying to extend the amount of time that you are covered in the event of your you're having albert bell back

uh was it back or was it hip was albert bella hip sorry albert bell was hip yeah uh anyway so yeah shorter i think the earlier the opt out the better i don't think there's any logical way to avoid that conclusion. Okay, we got an answer to last week when we talked about Josh Donaldson. You wondered when the last time a player had been traded just prior to an MVP season. And some listener who I can't find right now must have been a Facebook comment or a tweet, did the research and found out that it was Willie Hernandez, who was traded in 1983, May of 1983, by the Cubs to the Phillies, and then won the MVP award with the Phillies in 1984.

And we got a question by coincidence about Willie Hernandez from Andrew, who says, I was reading the Hardball Times Annual 2016 recently, and I got to Josh Distelheim's essay about the 1984 Tigers. What struck me in particular was when he pointed out that Hernandez, the team's newly acquired closer, won not only the AL Cy Young Award, but also the AL MVP Award. While he had a very fine year, 140 innings pitched, 1.92 ERA, 2.58 FIP, he was far from the most valuable player. His 3.2 Fangraphs Award doesn't crack the top 30 for pitchers, and Cal Ripken should have run away with the MVP.

It's hard to imagine if a reliever had this same season, even sniffing MVP first place votes. Do you think that this will ever happen again? A full-time relief pitcher winning the Cy Young and the MVP in the same season? If so, what sort of season would it take? Would it be possible to see this sort of player coming, like being drafted first overall, or would they inevitably be a fluke conversion a la Mariano Rivera or Wade Davis? I think this couldn't happen again. You don't think a reliever could possibly win MVP? I don't think so. I mean, barring a big change in reliever usage where guys go back to throwing 100 innings

a year and bring back the fireman and all that i don't think i don't know it's it's weird like the popular perception or the media perception of closers and relievers is just as elevated as ever or it seems like it is i mean you know sabermetric sort of writers have been banging the drum about saves not being a great way to use relievers and leverage and all that for many years. But you still get the sense that teams want good relievers. They want good closers. We've talked about this this offseason. Teams are stockpiling relief aces, and yet even the best relievers make less money, get less guaranteed money than a mid-rotation starter,

which sort of shows you how teams actually value relievers in practice. But it's weird how for a few years there was a push to put all these relievers in the Hall of Fame, and now it seems like there isn't for the most part like we we talked about uh who did we talk about hoffman and wagner and lee smith and lee smith right um so you know hoffman almost got in wagner didn't come close lee smith seems to have sort of missed the boat on that so I don't I don't know where relievers stand in the public perception now but I would say it would be very difficult for a 60 inning reliever to win an MVP award I mean we've seen elite dominant relief appearances

well the very best we've seen the very best I just, I mean, Mariano Rivera is the greatest of all time for career, but on an individual season level, Craig Kimbrell and Wade Davis both have cases for the, you, I would say, the last legitimate candidate that I remember is Francisco Rodriguez, who saved, what, 62 games for the best team in the American League in 2008. And 62 was the record, of course, and blew away the record, the previous record of 57. And he finished sixth in MVP voting and he, he got one first place vote. And so that kind of shows you that how close he got and also shows you how close he didn't get because only one out of 30 were actually willing to vote for him. And I do think that with your ballot, I think that it's a lot easier to sort of try to capture a lot of different things or to be interesting or to, I don't know, tell a story with your ballot. And so if you're thinking about a guy like that for fifth place, I could see it being really easy to to rationalize it.

But clearly, no, nobody wanted to put him first. I think Mark Wicker, his hometown sports columnist, was the one first place vote. think mark wicker his uh hometown sports columnist was the one first place vote and uh let's just say that the local angels blogger at his site uh did not approve of that vote and insulted him and got insulted back for it that was me me and mark wicker had a fight uh that was the first day on the job for me literally my first day as a baseball writer hot takes and traffic yeah unfortunately the comment threads to that which were mostly him uh insulting me uh have disappeared um so he finished sixth and this year 2015 the only relievers who got votes at all were w Davis, who got one 10th place vote

with a 0.94 ERA, incidentally, on a division winner, 0.94, 0.94. And Trevor Rosenthal, who got the equivalent of, I think, a sixth place vote. I don't know. He might've gotten like three ninth place votes and an eighth place vote or something. But he got he finished 17th with five total points, one point more than Curtis Granderson. So that kind of shows you the limits of where they're able to get at least this year, because Wade Davis was as good as you can be. The year before Greg Holland finished 16th, he had 13 total points, which is like the equivalent of like, you know, three six-place vote, something like that. And nobody in the NL, no reliever in the NL got a single vote. So if you go back a little farther, like say to 2003, Gagne finished sixth with 143 points. finished sixth with 143 points uh and in the same league john smoltz finished 18th but with only nine points and billy wagner finished 23rd with the same number of points as rosenthal and keith

folk finished 15th with 20 points and mariana rivera got three points and was the last man named. In 2002, there were guys who finished 8th, 12th, 15th, 15th, and 18th. So definitely more common, even in the one-inning closer era, definitely was a lot more common back then. Kimbrell has finished eighth, 11th, and 23rd. So it is still possible because Craig Kimbrell finished eighth to get up there. But let me see. I doubt Kimbrell got a first place vote. And he did not. So yeah, I think your conclusion is pretty much spot on unless they started throwing. How many innings would you say they would have to start throwing before they would be serious? I mean, already as it is, pitchers don't really get fair consideration for

MVP, like they're dramatically underrepresented in voting based on their, their wars. So then you throw into that the lack of innings, and the fact that they're sort of seen by some voters as being the failed versions of starters. I mean, it would have to be like, you know, 130 innings um and the fact that they're sort of seen by some voters as being the failed versions of of starters i mean it would have to be like you know 130 innings or so just to get really serious traction right yeah well i mean maybe you would stand out from the pack if you threw say 100 and no one else threw more than 80 or something maybe you would just be so good compared to other relievers that people would give you points for that. I think points, but probably not.

Not first place. First place. Yeah. When Eric Gagne won in 2003, the NL Cy Young. Won the Cy Young. Yeah. Yeah. When he won the Cy Young, I mean, even that, like, how recently, I mean, how have relievers

fared in Cy Young voting even recently? Because when Eric Gagne won the Cy Young in 2003, he got 28 first place votes. And the only other guys who got votes at all, got first place votes at all, were Jason Schmidt and Mark Pryor, who each got two first place votes. So that was just a landslide and even that i think would be hard to imagine now for a reliever to get that kind of consideration yeah uh it's davis in 2014 was eighth in al cy young voting and got no first place votes. And that was really just as spectacular a season. Yeah, the problem is that the spectacular seasons aren't rare anymore. That there's, there are four or five guys who are capable of having a low ones ERA and,

and being, you know, almost that dominant at the time that Gagne did it. That was, you know, and being, you know, almost that dominant. At the time that Gagne did it, that was, you know, arguably the greatest relief season of all time. And you could say the same thing about Dennis Eckersley's prime when he won the Cy Young MVP award in 92, finished fifth in MVP voting twice, finished sixth in MVP voting once. And it wasn't so much that he was more dominant, and it wasn't really that he was pitching in a different role

than closers are now. It's just that it was new and novel. And probably the same about Willie Hernandez, to some degree, at the time. He was probably used – I don't know how to – actually, I don't think I'm qualified to talk about Willie Hernandez. So forget I said Willie Hernandez. The Gagné season was uh was really extraordinary i mean like eric gagne's 2003 strikeout rate would have led the major leagues

in 2015 and that's pretty crazy given how much strikeout rates particularly reliever strikeout rates have risen in the 12 years between those seasons. I mean, he struck out 44.8% of batters he faced. And the leader last year, Earl, this Chapman was at 41.7%. And Gagne was way above like Chapman led all other major league relievers by one percentage point so you know there were lots of guys sort of nipping at his heels whereas in 2003 Gagne led by a full 10 percentage points he was at 44.8 percent and Jose Valverde was second at 34.8 percent so he was just sort of in his own category at that point and he also threw 82 innings which would have led everyone but batonsis last season so he was in his it was crazy gagne's season i think it was the best

fib in history up to about 2012 or 13 uh and yeah i mean it was a it was an absolute like i don't remember being i wanted jason schmidt to win that year because I liked Jason Schmidt. But I don't remember thinking that it was weird that Gagne was, you know, the greatest superstar closer that we had seen since Eckersley, probably. Even more so, I think, at the time than I even considered Mariano Rivera to be. But if you look at what Gagne did that year, he had a.337 ERA+. He had a.86 FIP. Those are both amazing. Davis' ERA+, is.396 and.444 in the last two years.

So even adjusted for league, his ERAs are better. His FIP was 1.19 in 2014. You can look up Craig Kimbrell but similar uh you know he had let's see Kimbrell had uh Kimbrell had ERA pluses of 399 311 he had a FIP of 0.78 one year so it's Kanye if you do the thing where you only look at him relative to what everybody else in his position was doing, yeah, he was Babe Ruth as a closer. But then a bunch of guys have sort of caught up to him and don't stand out because their competition is so much better. If there was only one Wade Davis, then I could see Wade Davis getting those votes right now but way davis's numbers uh while better than anybody else's don't make your eyes pop out relative to you know guys like chapman and kimbrough and uehara and

kenley jansen and there's just a lot of really awesome relievers right now yeah i mean even if you had uh if you had say carter caps's 2015 for a full season, he only pitched 31 innings, but he had a 1-1-6 ERA. He struck out 49.2% of batters he faced. season. And even if you did it for a playoff contender, and even if you pitch 70 innings or something, it still wouldn't be close really to what Kanye did relative to the league at the time, I don't think. And even if you had Carter Capps' season, I mean, I don't know. If you had Carter Capps' season and you pitched 80 innings and you saved 60 games and you played for a team that won its division. I don't know. You'd get some MVP votes, certainly.

Or you'd get some Cy Young votes. I still don't know whether you'd get MVP votes. But it seems that, I don't know, relievers continue to get paid fairly well, although still not much relative to starters. People still think relievers are very important, but it does seem like they are regarded a little bit differently. When you look at Clayton Kershaw winning the MVP award, Clayton Kershaw that year was basically allowing well let's see he allows a half a run less per nine innings uh than any other pitcher so he's you know he's 10 or 15 wins better than any other pitcher and like than any other pitcher and he's going up against the very best pitchers of course because he's a starter and if you look at what wade davis does relative to the next couple best pitchers it's like you know it's a couple runs over the course

of a year so it's just it's leveraged runs but it's harder to to see the mvp case when you're you know only a couple runs better than carson smith or you're only a couple runs better than ken giles or you're only a couple runs better than guys who you barely even know when the season begins. Yeah. Okay. Zach says in episode 801, Ben was talking about Tigers owner Mike Gillich and said they have an owner who said he doesn't care about money. He wants to win the World Series, but there's a limit obviously because they're not running

the highest payroll in baseball. So how much money would it actually take to buy a championship? Let's set the bar at willing to bet all your possessions. What's the minimum amount of money do you think it'd take to be certain next year is the year? Would it change if you could pick a specific year sometime down the road? Ken Giles allowed nine unearned runs last year. Oh, so he's a mirage. That's a lot of unearned runs last year. Oh. So he's a mirage. That's a lot of unearned runs.

Yeah, that's a lot for a closer. That's more unearned runs than Wade Davis allowed runs. Wow. He also had a great fit. The Phillies were the worst defensive team. Yeah, he had a great fit in the year before. He didn't allow nine unearned runs. Still, though, that's a lot.

Anyway, what was the question question as for zach's question how much money would you have to spend to buy a championship quote unquote and you can define that however you want it's baseball so you can't really buy a championship and we talked a couple days ago about the cubs and how they're four to one favorites to win the World Series this year and how probably no team should be four to one just because there's so much uncertainty in the playoffs particularly. So even if you get there, you still have a worse than 50% shot to win the World Series unless you are some crazy super team and this came up once i think russell carlton did a post at bp maybe about how good you would have to be to be a better than even

chance to win the world series assuming you get into the playoffs and it was something kind of crazy right like you'd have to be uh some super team maybe you can find it while i'm talking so to buy a championship again you can set the bar wherever you want there but let's say how much would you have to spend to be the favorite every year the favorite so not 50 but the not 50 50 i think is is crazy but yeah but it's also well that's the no it's it's crazy but that's the point yeah well to be the favorite every year who you know who knows like the cubs are the favorite this year right so how much how much would no they're not but to be the favorite every year you would have to spend a ton of money because i mean unless you were incredibly good at building a team,

I mean, even the Cardinals or whoever you want to use as the example of the best team are not the favorite going into every season, probably over a longer span than a few years at a time. So to continue to be the best, if the worst team in baseball in October wanted to be the best team in baseball by March, how much would it have to spend? Could you even do it? If you had taken the Reds or the Brewers or whoever at the end of last season and said, I want this to be the World Series favorite by the time next season starts, could you do it just with the free agents who were available free agents who were available plus your farm system to trade from yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna

guess yes i'm gonna start by saying i think so yeah so and this was a strong free agent year but but yes all right so then you'd have your rotation could be price, Granke, Zimmerman, Cueto, and Chen, something like that. So that's a pretty good rotation. But it's not historically good. No, it's, yeah. It's really good. But is it better than Strasburg, Scherzer, Zimmerman, Gio Gonzalez, and what we projected Doug Pfister to be? Not, I mean, probably, but not much.

Are Price and Granke, do they project better, do you think, than Strasburg and Scherzer did last year? I'd say yes. Okay, and then Zimmerman is either a push or Zimmerman was better last year. So Zimmerman, now you'd rather have old Zimmerman is either a push or Zimmerman was better last year. So Zimmerman, now you'd rather have old Zimmerman. Cueto, Gio. Cueto not knowing what he is exactly.

Big volatility. Worried about his performance in the second half over Gio, who's steady Eddie, the most consistent pitcher in the game. It's close. Yeah, it's close. I could see it going either way. close yeah it's close i could see it going either way and then uh you know fister against you know leak or samarja or chen or seems pretty close so it's pretty close and the nationals missed the playoffs but now this team is going to have all the hitters too so maybe it'll it'll get better

i'm not saying the nationals are proof but it's not like the necessarily the greatest rotation of all time you still also though have your farm system so you could maybe trade for jose fernandez and then i think you could make a better case and then you'd have what chris davis playing first hey howard howie kendrick playing second uh ian desmond playing third I mean short David Fries playing third Oh no you have Ben Zobrist So Zobrist is in there Maybe you have Zobrist playing third or second And then you have an outfield of Upton, Hayward

And either Cespedes or Alex Gordon Yeah I mean Even if you're the worst team in baseball When you start you're probably going to have A couple players who would still crack this lineup. If you were the Reds, you would also have Votto. You'd have had Todd Frazier. So Todd Frazier would have been your third baseman.

Yeah. You need a catcher, but you could trade for a catcher. And then for depth, you have your entire starting team from last year as backups, basically. And your entire rotation from last year can move into the bullpen. Plus you still have Chapman. So yeah, that doesn't seem too hard. But I don't think that team gets you to 50%. No, I don't think so.

But I would guess that it could get you to high 90s to win the division preseason, depending on your division. Now, if you're the reds and you're going up against the cubs i'm not sure i i could see that team projecting i mean it's hard to know what the depth would be and whether you get totally absurd with it uh with the depth issue and whether alex gordon is your fourth outfielder and uh you know whether dexter fowler is your fifth outfielder and daniel mur Murphy takes a bench role and all those things. Scott Casimir is like your sixth guy out of the pen.

If you go really crazy with depth, then that's probably unrealistic. You'd still have to talk those guys into coming. But maybe you sign those guys first and you don't tell them what you're doing. By the way, Russell Carlton found that to be a 50-50 shot to win the World Series, assuming you've already made the playoffs and made it past the wildcard game, you would have to have a regular season record of 113 and 49. So you'd have to be, you know, the 98 yankees basically which seems pretty reasonable except that you'd have to be in order to be a hundred percent chance to win 113 then you'd have to actually be a true talent much higher than that right russell mentioned that right if you win 113 games you probably got really lucky to get that high and this is a and if you are right and if you are a true talent 113 team you could still just get unlucky and win although you'd win the wild card at the very worst i was

gonna say you could still get unlucky and have a team in your division get lucky and maybe you're 98 only gets you the wild card because you're in the nl central uh and so then now you've got to win the wild card as well so things could go wrong your talent might change as the year goes on but eyeballing it it looks to me like you could have put together all those guys that i said for like a billion and a half in total commitments plus uh luxury tax which isn't yeah plus luxury tax that's true yeah now you're 30 on a lot of that uh but it's not that why i mean that's 1.5 billion of total commitments but a lot of those guys are signed for six or seven years and even those commitments include opt-outs so they're going to opt out so 25 i don't know you're looking at you're basically

looking at signing you know 13 regulars or starting pitchers for around an average of maybe 20 million each so that's like you know 260 you're barely over where the dodgers are and and then you say you have your final your relievers in your bench spots maybe that's another 12 at 10 million each so you're looking at somewhere between 350 million and 400 million. Okay. Which isn't that bad. And, you know, we've given them, I mean, we're spending, we're assuming that they're buying all free agents. Like you said, they did have a team already. They might have some guys.

Like, I don't know, maybe Billy Hamilton's still on this team somehow, and that's the major league minimum. And maybe you've got a few guys like that. Yeah, of course, if you wanted to keep doing this, you would have no farm system because you would have used it already. And you might be horrible. You'd get no draft picks because you would be losing all of them when you sign free agents, so it would get harder and harder every year,

which is, I mean, that's sort of the situation the Yankees have been in for the last several years or when they missed the playoffs a couple of years. They ran out of farm system because they hadn't drafted and developed well in part because they were always trading people or losing draft picks. And so they had to keep raising their payroll higher and higher just to be in contention. And eventually that's a hard thing to sustain even if you're the Yankees indefinitely. So you could do this once if you were mega rich without bankrupting yourself. I don't know why it hasn't been done. Because really if you have $8 billion, you can spend a billion and a half of it, and you're still a six billionaire.

And so like why have a team if you're not going to do this at least once? I mean, if you're a guy who, you know, kind of maxed out his wealth to get a team, sure, I understand. But like if you're worried about only leaving your heirs a billion or six billion instead of eight i guess the reason that you don't do it is because you could end up being you still might not win and just thinking about how annoying that would be like that would be the the worst way to do baseball to spend a billion and a half dollars to just completely obliterate the way teams do things spend a billion and a half dollars, and then still have them lose. It'd be like, you know, that guy Alderson spending like a billion dollars on the election and then having everything go against him, you know? It'd be like that.

It'd be way more annoying. It'd still be a pretty good shot that that would happen. It'd be way more annoying than simply losing on just in natural ways. Like you expect to, I mean the the point of competition is that it's supposed to be hard and if you do it the way that everybody does it and you lose still you can say well hey not everybody wins every time but if you spend all this money there's this you've kind of convinced yourself that it's a sure thing and then to have it taken from you would be especially bad. Okay. Play index. Play index. All right. So Ben, we know that some teams take the third time through the order penalty more seriously than other teams, right? And we know that some teams

are more willing to pull their starters after two trips through in order to get a better pitcher in, starters after two trips through in order to get a better pitcher in, right? And some teams are less willing to do this. So it might make sense that if there was a pitcher who was particularly good through the first two times through the order and particularly bad the third time through the order, that the team that is willing to pull him early would get more value out of him than another team and therefore ought to be more willing to pay him than another team right yes it would be like for instance if all 29 teams in baseball were insistent that yadier molina was a short stop but you were the one team that was willing to move your molinas to catcher uh well, not only would you get more benefit every time you got a Molina, but you ought to go out and get Molinas

because nobody else would think Molina was any good. Everybody else would look at Molina and go, well, that guy's a bad shortstop. We don't want him. And you're like, he's a great catcher. I do want him. So you ought to be able to go out and trade for that guy and make profit, right? Yeah.

All right. You're the only team that thinks Jason Hayward or Cespedes can play center or something, although maybe that doesn't work as well because they just might not be as good at it and it might come out as a wash. But anyway, yes. All right. So I looked at the 91 pitchers in baseball who have thrown at least, I think, 175 innings worth of innings the third time through the order since 2011.

So active pitchers who have basically pitched a lot in the last five years. 175 innings through the third time through the order basically means you've thrown, you know, at least 600 innings or so. I mean uh uh yeah 600 innings or so in the last five years so you're a regular pitcher okay yeah and then i looked uh at how they had done the third time through the order i used uh whip for this as a quick and dirty stat because era can be a little tricky for various reasons one is that you know you're you might be relieved the third time through the order and so a better pitcher might be coming into strand or not strand those runners another is i'm not sure like it's sort of weird like if uh say you uh say you you know hit a guy uh the second time through the. And then the next batter is the leadoff hitter the third time through the order and he hits

a home run. Well, the runs count the same, even though, uh, the damage was obviously a lot worse the third time through the order. Um, and so I used whip, there would have been, there were better stats, but I used whip, which is simple. What are the likely, what are the odds that you are going to put a guy on base if you're facing him the third time through the order? Okay. And I compared that to their whips the first and second time through the order.

And then I simply compared it. Okay. And so if your whip was 20% higher, you would have a whip plus 120. Okay. And so if your whip was 20% higher, you would have a whip plus 120. Okay. All right. So high is bad. Low is good. So then I sorted by who had the highest and lowest whip pluses. And we know that there are certain qualities in a pitcher that help them the deeper they get into the games, like having what a variety of pitches seems to help and some guys lose velocity some guys quickly yeah so it it makes perfect sense

that some guys would be better or worse that this would be a true skill or lack of skill it also makes sense that in small samples we would get a lot of noise so I have a couple of things for you here. One is that it doesn't seem to be the case that better pitchers are better the third time through the order. You mean they're, they decline by less, right? Like if I just look at the top guys and I just look at the top and the bottom of the leaderboard don't have that much difference. And in fact, the guys who are relatively better the third time through the order actually seem to be relatively worse overall. Not by a lot, probably not by enough that I would conclude anything. I would probably just say that they're close.

They're about the same. But there doesn't seem to be a pure skill-based reason for having a third time through thethrough-the-order skill. That's kind of interesting. Kershaw is the best example of a very good pitcher who is not actually any better the third time through the order relative to his peers. Kershaw has the seventh highest whip plus on this list. So out of 91 players, he has the lowest whip, but the third time through the order, it's higher. It's still very good.

He might actually be the best pitcher the third time through the order. In fact, I'll just go ahead and search that. Let me see if he is also the best third time through the order. So he is actually also, yes, he is still the best. He has the best whip the first two times, as well as the best whip the first two times as well as the best whip the third time but the the gap between him and the rest uh shrinks considerably uh in fact he's only one point of whip better than david price the third time through the order but he's

like 17 points better in the first two times and he's's just, he's way better. He's like 15 points better than anybody else the first two times. So Kershaw, you would say, is not very good the third time through the order by Kershaw standards. And he doesn't have a change up. So maybe that's relevant or maybe it's not. So the other thing is that there seem to be, and this somewhat surprised me, but there are more lefties in the good the third time through the order portion of this than the bad the third time through the order portion of this. And that's surprised me. I would probably guess that it's nothing, that it's flute, that it's not a huge extra number or anything like that. But if it were true, if lefties are better the third time through the order, can you think of a reason why? You would sort of think it might be the opposite partly uh that there are more pinch hitters available

to hit off a lefty and therefore he might be much more likely to see pinch hitters the third time through the order and lefties in general i think as a class of pitchers rely a little bit more on deception and funk and therefore you would think that pitcher that hitters would have an advantage the more times they see them but maybe it's also the case that lefties get pulled more quickly and therefore don't go through the third time the order as much when they're faltering i'm not sure do you have any idea nope all right so then the answer to the question is that the very best, the third time through the order, this isn't very interesting to me,

but the guys who are the best are Chris Tillman, Clay Buchholz, and Wandi Rodriguez. So if you're a team that really likes to ride pitchers as long as you can, you might see a benefit to getting Chris Tillman and Clay Buchholz, uh, more than a team like the Cubs or the Rays would, but pretty much everybody else is again, is, you know, on the other side of the Cubs and the Rays. So it's not like there's probably a real market inefficiency. If there is a market inefficiency, it would be on the other side. So who should the Cubs and the Rays go sign? The answer is Dylan G g dylan g is is the worst third time through the order pitcher relative to his overall performance he is not great though the problem is he's not great anyway uh and so it's not like you'd get him and you'd you'd discover this like phenomenal awesome phenomenal, awesome pitcher. Even in the first two times through the order out of 91 pitchers,

he ranks 65th. So he's still a below average starter among starters who pitch regularly. But, you know, he's a competent pitcher. He's right there with Giovanni Gallardo, Francisco Liriano, John Neese, Ryan Vogelsang, A.J. Burnett for whip over the last five years. So you could make the case that Dylan Gee is a qualified three number, you know, number three starter, uh, the for, for 18 batters. And then after that, he becomes a disaster. His whip goes up to 1.6. He's the worst of all pitchers. I believe, uh, he is the, sorry, he's the worst of all pitchers i believe uh he is the sorry he's the third he's the third worst pitcher the third time through the order um in raw numbers only aaron harang and trevor cahill have been worse than him the third time through the order uh joe saunders has been slightly better

than him he's the next on the list so basically dylan g undoes any value he has as an innings eater by getting full really early and then throwing up. So Dylan Gee is the answer. And also interesting to me is that the next name on the list is Jake Peavy. And Jake Peavy is a guy who I already knew was very bad the third time through the order anecdotally. Like I think Giants fans all know it. I think it was talked about a lot in the postseason in 2014 just by looking at him we all sort of uh intuited that this is a thing about him and here we have numbers that show that it is actually true our eyes are picked up on this jake pv uh is just slightly better than dylan g relative to their true performances uh their

overall performances the third time through the order. So there you go. Tampa Bay should get Dylan Gee. The Cubs should get Jake Peavy. And nobody should get Wandy Rodriguez. Okay. Well, I think I'll just note that in his opus on the times through the order penalty at Baseball Perspectives, Mitchell Litchman found that it takes a really long time for this to mean something.

It's like BABIP or something. He said it's like eight seasons of full-time starting pitching until you can really trust that starters first time, second time, third time through the order splits mean much maybe you could improve on that if you brought in other factors like the pitches he throws and velocity loss and all that yeah i would say that uh that makes a lot of sense okay let's see if i have a quick one to finish on well leo says i've been reading a lot of prospect lists recently, and I noticed that comparisons to former prospects is really rarely used as a criterion when ranking. For example, if 80% of players with similar prospect profiles to X found success in the majors, shouldn't that be a good sign that X will be successful in the majors too? I was wondering how accurate you think prospect comparisons are for judging a player's future success. And if so, why aren't they used more often? So I know that statistical systems do it this way. So whether it's the CODAs upside scores and long-term projections for prospects, those are in some part based on comparables and some of those comparables

will be players who panned out and others will be players who didn't pan out and i think similarly the kato system that chris mitchell uses at fan crafts is based on something like that also looking at baselines at certain levels and what it means to be good or bad at certain skills at certain minor league levels and age brackets and all that sort of thing. In theory, a non-statistical system, which is just a scout or a prospect ranker, is doing the same thing, just not doing it with math or maybe not showing all the work. And sometimes you'll see a prospect writer who say, so-and-so reminds me of Greg Golsan or whoever, some prospect who had some sort of profile and didn't pan out. I think more often you probably see

comparisons to players who worked out just because, you know, maybe it's more interesting to the reader. The reader is more likely to know who that player is. And the writer is more likely to remember that player because he worked out and then stuck around for many years. So you probably see fewer comparisons to prospects who didn't work out than you should. prospects who didn't work out than you should. But in theory, at least, scouts and writers are drawing on their database of all the prospects they've ever seen and remembering what didn't work for certain guys and dinging the current prospects appropriately. I would guess that on the whole, you're kind of more likely to reach for a comparison to a player who did become a big leaguer and did succeed just because that example is more easily accessed. But in theory,

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