Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 806: How Quickly Chemistry Can Change

Episode Date: January 28, 2016

Ben and Sam banter about a Salvador Perez extension and a strike-zone change, then discuss the rapid reversal of the Athletics’ clubhouse and what it might mean for the Nationals.

All my knees are begging, please, oh All my knees are begging, please, oh All my knees are begging, please, oh Hello and welcome to episode 806 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives presented by the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I'm Ben Lindberg of FiveThirtyEight, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Perspectives. Hi. Hi. So there are days that I question what we do here. There are days when I don't feel like talking about baseball in the middle of January. There are days when I think about how this isn't the greatest money-making venture of all time.

But then there are days when I get some validation, when it all seems clear that we are onto something good here. Yesterday was one of those days because I was followed on Twitter by Smash Mouth. And this is because Smash Mouth is on a baseball campaign, right? Yeah, Smash Mouth wants to keep Tim Lincecum in San Francisco. And you're the guy to do it. So they didn't follow you.

They know the difference. They didn't just lump us together as two people who do a podcast occasionally about smash mouth they seem to know that i'm the one who's really in their corner for things that they did 17 years ago okay here's the dirty secret i don't follow smash mouth on twitter uh well sure why would you you like their music not their tweets yeah right they are artists but not in every medium right yeah okay all right if they started if they started tweeting in song you would follow them yeah well they did tweet their cover of under pressure so i guess i i might have missed out on that if i hadn't seen it elsewhere on the internet so maybe i should follow them just in case there are some twitter only smash mouth tracks

who else did they follow on the baseball side i think they followed grant uh-huh that makes sense good company i don't know who else okay good job ben see if you can get a blurb from him on on our book on our book cover. On our book? Yeah. Smash me. The only rules it has to work is the Astro Lounge of books by two authors about running independent league baseball teams. Uh-huh.

Okay. Yeah. These guys are walking on the fun. They did a cookbook. So they're authors. They're published authors. All right. I have a topic, but before we get to that, a couple things. So there's been some news about a Saudar Perez extension. We got an email about it from a listener named Mike, but it was something I

was wondering about too, that the Royals andz are talking about renegotiating his deal. He has had one of the team friendliest deals and he is signed for a few more years, or at least their team options for a few more years. And they are evidently getting close to reworking this somehow. And so he's making $2 million this year. and then there are team options for the following three years at $3.75, $5 million, and $6 million. So that carries him through his age 29 season. If you were the Royals, what would you do with Perez? Would you want to extend Perez? Would you want to extend Perez?

Because since he has signed that deal, I would say he has maybe become a worse bet long term. When he signed that deal, he was in his early 20s. He was a well above average hitter, just not even just for a catcher, for anyone. And he had a great defensive reputation. And since then, he has declined pretty significantly as a hitter which has coincide with his being used pretty would you say he's been ridden hard and put away wet has he been put away wet uh well i mean certainly if if you believe that there's a cumulative fatigue effect on catchers uh yeah i mean there there might be, like, how old is he right now? He is 25.

He turns 26 in May. And he's probably, I mean, he didn't, he started early. He didn't start obscenely early, so he might not. But catchers usually start a little later. He made his debut at 21, and he caught 150 games plus two deep postseason runs it wouldn't surprise me if you told me that he's on pace or you know that he had a shot to say start the most games of any catcher or catch the most innings of any catcher through you know age 30 or whatever the case may be i don't know who his competition would be for

that but you know he's definitely on the high end he's caught an obscene number of innings obscene yeah i use the word obscene in a value in a neutral way just to say that it's a lot uh as when you consider the post season and if there was a cumulative fatigue effect uh then sure the so the question is figuring out how much that how much the career innings uh that you've caught matters for your rate of decline after a certain age and also whether there's potentially, because with a pitcher, it's not just throwing innings, in a season, but if the last – the innings in October are maybe more damaging to your health outlook because you're throwing them while sort of tired at the end of a long season. If there was that same sort of thing, then maybe Sal Perez's last couple hundred innings of each year are even more worrisome.

So I don't know the answer to that but yeah it's there i mean as if the ridden hard and put away wet uh applies to catchers then it's definitely there for him more than probably almost anybody since pudge who and remember pudge was out of the game by like 28 right yeah well right and i wouldn't say his defensive reputation has suffered. He won a gold glove again this year, but his defensive evaluations, at least the statistics, have hurt him somewhat since the catcher framing stuff caught on because that is a weakness for him defensively. So what I'm saying is it would maybe not be such a bad thing to just have him through age 29 and then not have him anymore. Or at least that I wouldn't necessarily be highly motivated to want to extend him beyond that.

I guess the argument for doing it is that he's a team leader and you want him happy and you don't want him sulking about the bad deal he signed and his agent advised him to sign. But on the other hand, you might not want to want to commit to 30 something Sal, right? I mean, or at least you might want to wait a while to see if that is something you want to commit to. Yeah, I'm not sure I would be. It wouldn't be near the top of my list. Oh, I definitely wouldn't be. I mean, it would have to be. So i'm not sure i would be uh it wouldn't be near the top of my list oh i definitely wouldn't be i mean it would have to be so the thing is it would have to be at a heavy discount because first of all it's four years away second of all it's the royals and so the royals aren't a team that presumably would be the leader to re-sign him if he hit free agency

so they're not going to want to pay anywhere close to full market prices for what he thinks he is yeah the listener who emailed us mike was wondering whether he might actually cost himself money long term if he were to renegotiate now and extend now well uh if his career went well then he certainly would that for as with most extensions uh is it a good so but is is it the wrong time for him to even negotiate is it a particularly bad time for him to be thinking about extending i mean it seems like letting a team like the royals be the only bidder on you is always going to be kind of a bad economic decision for you i mean if you're only going to have one bidder you'd really like that one bidder to be a team that you can push up somehow. Like if the one bidder is the Yankees or the Dodgers, you might do okay. If the one bidder is, you know, the Rays or the Royals, well, you're probably already acknowledging

that you're not going to be getting, it's not going to be a real intense negotiation. They're going to have pretty strict limits on what they're going to be able to spend. And they did just give Ian Kennedy $70 million. Well, now that's, that's their, that was their Sal Perez fund. That's probably the last money they'll spend for a few years. Yeah. I mean, it's not an ideal situation for him to get. He's not going to get a Buster Posey extension out of this, I wouldn't think. But to the question of whether the Royals should do something to make him happy right now, you have four years of him at a great price and you're going to be happy to have him. So how many wins are there in soft benefits to him feeling like he's a part of your team for beyond four years is a very good question. I mean, I would think that I could see giving him a two year extension now and taking him to age 31 and maybe giving him, you know, pretty good price.

Like I could see giving I could see extending like, okay, so right now he's got four years and 17 million left. And that looks like if you're laying in bed at night or you're, you know, jogging on the treadmill and you just keep thinking four years and 17 million, I'm an all-star for goodness sake. Uh, then I could see that being frustrating. Three time all-star for goodness sake, because four and 17 now. And so I don't know how much the human brain gets fooled by simply turning that 4 and 17 into like, you know, 6 and 51.

If it were 6 and 51, well, now the 4 and 17 is gone. I don't know if he'd still be thinking, I can't believe I'm only making $3 million this year. Or if now he's thinking, I'm a $50 million player. That's pretty good. I could see going and giving him two extra years at $16 million each on the end of this and not feeling too bad about it. But then he doesn't get to hit free agency until he's 32 as a catcher who's been ridden hard. And that seems like it costs him his one bit.

Like you could very easily see him not being an enticing free agent at all by 31, 32. Huge guy too, if that factors into how you think catchers age yeah five year run of ops pluses since he came up 128 to 115 to 105 to 91 to 89 right that's right uh so yeah i you obviously you if you're the royals you don't want your catcher sulking and you also don't want to establish a precedent either for your players or for the industry that a guy who gets signed to an extension that ends up looking favorable to the team can simply hold you hostage and so you have to figure out a way to find the compromise. And it seems to me that the compromise is giving him at least one or two years of grown-up wages

at the end of this. But I'm not totally sure that he would want those if it pushes back his free agency. Maybe you give him two years and 32 on the end of this with an opt out uh before them so he can hit free agency at 29 if he wants and then he's uh happy to be there because now six and 51 looks like a real player and uh he's not dreading uh that he's giving away his one bite at the apple i think maybe that's the compromise yeah you should get smash mouth the lobby for two-year extension to Sal Perez right now with an opt-out before the two years kick in. Right, yeah.

When Smash Mouth tweets about baseball players, things happen. That's the best way to effect change. All right. By the way, Ben, home runs 3-11-13-17-21. His home runs and his OPS Plus in perfect uh disagreement with each other interesting very cool i guess his uh walk rate has gone the way of the ops plus his walk rate has gotten horrifying he uh his batting average his batting average a league-wide thing but yeah well the league didn't drop 40 points no yeah so there you go all right so speaking of the league drop one comment

rob manfred made was about the strike zone raising the bottom of the strike zone from the bottom of the kneecap to the top of the kneecap which doesn't sound like a big change kneecaps aren't that big but this is something we've talked about before all the numbers have shown and manfred confirms that the strike zone has been falling in accordance with the way that the league has instructed umpires to call pitches and that that seems to be responsible for the downturn in offense and there was a rebound in offense in the second half of last season that I'm writing about, but it wasn't really strikeout related. People still struck out a lot, still tons of strikeouts.

And just wanted to mention this because it seems like you would think that hitters would adjust to all of these things. People always talk about the pitcher-batter balance of power and it's cat and mouse and everything, but lately it just seems to be cat. It just seems to be pitchers doing things and batters not being able to respond to them. And you mentioned that in your article about the flames on the chyron on baseball broadcasts. You looked at how hitters have done against fast fastballs over a period of several years and found that they haven't gotten better at that at all and there was an article at fangrass by august fagerstrom about francisco

liriano and how he throws fewer pitches in the strike zone every year and like he throws pitches in the strike zone 36 percent of the time so So like almost two thirds of the time he's throwing a ball or what would be a ball if hitters didn't swing at it, but they do keep swinging at it. And that this is a league wide trend that pitchers are throwing fewer pitches in the strike zone and hitters are still swinging at a higher percentage of pitches outside the strike zone. And there just doesn't seem to be any adjustment being made that hitters aren't doing better on fast pitches and they aren't learning to lay off pitches outside the strike zone.

And all those things, it seems like, probably go together because if pitches are faster, there's less time to react and maybe you aren't as good at telling whether a pitch is going to be in the strike zone. And so you expand your zone as the actual zone has also expanded. And so it's just a bunch of things that are contributing to strikeouts. And people don't like strikeouts, it seems like, for the most part. There is one adjustment that hitters have made have been able to make that has kept i mean you know offense went up last year so you know it's obviously not

impossible for hitters to adjust completely and they have adjusted as far as count leverage and they're swinging much more aggressively at the first pitch which has the benefit of you know getting a lot more damage on pitches early in the count that are relatively easy to hit and also taking away uh in the sort of next step of the game theory taking away the pitcher's free strike at the beginning so there's that but right if it it seems like to some degree the uh hitters are making some adjustments that they need to make uh in order to uh you know to hit better which is good but pitchers are making adjustments that they need to make in order to, you know, to hit better, which is good. But pitchers are making adjustments that can't be adjusted against. If a pitcher can throw 95 and

you can't hit it and they can throw even more 95 as a group, as like pitcher kind, if they can just keep throwing more 95 and hitters don't have a way of adjusting to that, then it's potentially creating this imbalance and you know the strike zone is the most obvious easiest way uh to adjust that imbalance if you are the governing body what was your you wanted to move the mound back is that i wrote an article about what that would look like just because people kept talking about moving the mound down and making the mound lower. And so I figured, what if you could just move the mound back six inches or a foot or something? And what if?

I think that would probably work. Is that what you found? Was that your finding? Yeah, that it would help. How much did you want to move it back? Like a foot? Yeah, I think it was a foot. Uh-huh. That'd be fun. I don't remember what the math was, but you could go look it up. I wrote about it at BP.

I wonder, yeah, a foot wouldn't change the balance of the infield much. I was wondering what it would mean for pickoff throws, but I don't think a foot would be that noticeable or six inches would be that noticeable. Yeah. So, yeah. All right. Get Steve from Smash Mouth on it.

But I'm curious, though i i intend to look into this uh even further because to me this was the the chiron thing started as just a you know fun curious thing to look at uh and i thought it was fun and i was curious but then sort of stumbled on this thing that if true i didn't look at it that deeply, but if true, it seems really interesting to me. And so I do intend in the near future to go look even deeper at that. But does it surprise you that hitters after years of seeing 95 mile an hour pitches are not any better at hitting 95 mile an hour pitches? Don't you, wouldn't you expect that the greater exposure to these pitches would lead to a collectively better ability to hit them? Well, I wouldn't really expect that reaction time would improve. And so...

You wouldn't, huh? See, I would. And I would be wrong. It's interesting to me that... I would expect that hitters would cheat more maybe. I mean, like, you know, like not that they would suddenly become super beings who can just react better, but that they would, you know, anticipate that they were going to see these faster pitches and they would start their swing earlier or something. And that that might make them better at hitting those fastballs, even if it might make them worse at hitting those fastballs, even if it might make them worse at hitting other things. Yeah. I would have expected reaction time to improve just

because, I mean, obviously if I went out and tried to hit 85 right now, I would have no chance. But if I stayed in a batting cage and tried to hit 85 or maybe 95 in a batting cage, I'd have no chance. But if I stayed in the cage all afternoon and worked on it, you know, I would get better at it. And so I would have, obviously I'm not a good comp because they've been facing, you know, relatively top velocity all their lives and there's nothing new for them necessarily. So I would have expected to see some improvement. And it's interesting to me to hypothesize that there is simply a, we talk about the limit of how hard a human can throw without destroying his arm from the pitcher's side, but there's also perhaps a limit to what

the human brain can process and that we might be reaching that point where hitters have bumped up against their ceiling. And now it's a question of whether pitchers can continue to, I mean, ceiling and now it's a question of whether pitchers can continue to i mean if if in 20 years at you know if the trend continues i mean as i as i showed in this chiron piece it what 95 plus pitches are up like 80 percent over 2008 i think something like that the numbers are wrong but something like that if that trend continued and you could imagine in 20 years where maybe there's, you know, an average pitch at 90, an average fastball at 95, and there's no defense for it, the game might just stop. It might just quit playing. It's the only way this podcast will end. Yeah. Okay. So this can be brief, but what I wanted to bring up was an article in the San Francisco

Chronicle about Billy Butler. And one of the things that Billy Butler mentioned was that the A's had bad clubhouse chemistry. And he said, to say we had a bad clubhouse was accurate. You see, there's definitely people who are not here anymore that were part of the issue. I think whenever you have a season, you lose as many games as we do. As we did, that's always going to be a question. I don't think anybody's going to get along in a losing environment. Nobody wants to lose that much. So he said it was at least partially because they just had a bad season, but there were also evidently people or a person who was contributing to that and is no longer there. I don't know if he's talking about Brett Lurie or someone else about the A's and clubhouse chemistry and how they seem to have a great clubhouse chemistry and you wondered why that was and you kind of you

recap you you tried to figure out whether it was intentional or accidental I did did you at least like the writing? yeah I mean right it was trying to figure out kind of whether it was intentional or accidental from the front office's side and kind of whether it was a true talent

I guess within the clubhouse whether those guys actually had something that made them, you know, good at this, whether that, whether that not those guys necessarily as individuals, although maybe the, the Gani Jones factor and the Brandon Inge factor from the previous year, or maybe just the space, maybe there's just something about, you know, the organization. the space. Maybe there's just something about, you know, the organization. Maybe there's something about the fact that they're the, the junkiest clubhouse in baseball and that, you know, you're sort of forced by architecture and finances to behave in a way that's a little bit more

collective and communal or whether it's something about the way that they were winning or the way that they play, whether it's something about the fact that they were doing so many platoons or whether in fact it was all imaginary and whether there was nothing particularly interesting about that clubhouse at all. And if I was just asking leading questions and if they were, if the right people were being quoted saying it, but in fact to 20, you know, to 23 members of the clubhouse, this was nothing that they will remember. to 23 members of the clubhouse.

This was nothing that they will remember. And so then to go back, if you'd asked me, I might have guessed that, in fact, this accidentally correlated or unintentionally correlated to the A's personnel strategies in performance. They had a lot of platoons. It seemed like almost everybody was platooning. They had a lot of guys who were getting a chance that they hadn't got elsewhere. You had a lot of guys who were from different organizations, and so they had not come up as any kind of a clique.

There was not insiders and outsiders in that clubhouse. They were pretty much all outsiders, like a huge percentage of the team were guys who'd been picked up off waivers or gotten by trade because almost the entire team had been acquired from elsewhere at that point. And there was, you could imagine that leading, that making it harder for everybody to come together. Or you could imagine that it would break down some of the hierarchies because you don't have guys who, you know, have been there and feel like it's their turf. You don't have guys who are making a lot of money. Oh, that was another thing because they can't spend money.

There were essentially no rich guys in the clubhouse. So you didn't have a lot of the sort of traditional places you might expect a hierarchy to develop. trying to do this, without engineering it in any particular way, it was a convenient byproduct of their strategic strategies. So that would have been probably my guess at the time if I'd been forced to explain. Yeah. So the A's front office people told you it wasn't intentional, really, that they were going after talent and they just happened to get some good guys. And the players seemed to think there was some intention to it, regardless of how it happened. That was 2013. A's had the best clubhouse. They were supposedly winning more because of the best clubhouse or, you whatever always hard to establish the cause and effect but had a great clubhouse 2015 bad clubhouse just two years later lots of the same players still there yeah

according to by the way according to one guy and who and i think that the delightful twist here is that if you think about it seems like a pretty good chance that billy butler's the problem and that in fact what he sees what he sees his bad clubhouse is that he had a lousy year he was now the one rich guy in the clubhouse he was also the underperforming guy in the clubhouse he also oh another thing that i thought was was helpful to their chemistry was that you had so many guys playing different positions that you didn't have the infielders, the outfielders, the catchers, the starters, the relievers. You had catchers playing other positions. You had infielders playing outfield. You had outfielders playing infield. You even had Sean Doolittle, who was a reliever who had

been a position player. And you had starters relieving and relievers starting. And so you wouldn't necessarily have the five or six different groups. And so, but Billy Butler is, you know, clearly he's a DH. He doesn't fit into any of these. So if there's anybody who would feel isolated in that clubhouse or who would feel stress or who would feel anxiety or aloneness, you could imagine it being Billy Butler. He's also, you know, the, in a lot of ways, he's, imagine it being Billy Butler. He's also, you know, the, in a lot of ways he's, he, he might be the guy who you, well, I just said it, who would, you might expect would feel the most lonely. So I have no idea if Billy Butler was a great guy in the clubhouse or not. Maybe he's the jolliest man in the world. Maybe he's the mayor, but probably like there's a, you got to figure if

you're playing the odds that there's a, yeah, there's a, there's a 50% chance. Well, there's a you got to figure if you're playing the odds that there's a yeah there's a there's a 50 chance well there's probably an 80 chance that butler is just responding to losing that it looks worse when you're losing but uh of the other 20 it seems like maybe you'd say it's a coin flip of whether he's responding to guys that were you know actually bad in the clubhouse and a 50 chance that he was the malingerer and of course it seemed wrong because it seemed like a bad scene to him because he was the unhappy one. So I felt like that was the fun and subtle subtext of his quotes. Yeah. All this talk suddenly about the Nationals being a toxic environment and bad clubhouse and players spurning them because of the clubhouse. And there was a discussion on MLB Network the other day. Ken Rosenthal was reporting some rumblings.

He said the other thing you hear rumbling about in the industry is that players don't want to go to Washington. They perceive that based on the fact that the Nationals have tried to sign a bunch of people or trade for people this offseason who ended up going elsewhere. They did get some players. They did sign Daniel Murphy. But they went after guys like Hayward and Zobrist and Cespedes and Upton and Darren O'Day and Mike Leak and tried to trade for Brandon Phillips, who didn't end up waiving his no-trade clause. And when the Zobris to the Cubs thing happened, James Wagner of the Washington

Post said that the Nationals weren't really close to getting Zobris because, quote, he didn't feel as comfortable in the Nationals clubhouse. And so there is this perception that players are avoiding the Nationals because of the clubhouse. And there was a lot of reporting about their clubhouse last year and, you know, just the choking the Papelbon Harper dispute, which everyone saw. And then all the stuff about Matt Williams and the team not being happy under Matt Williams. And so just seems sort of surprising to me that if this is true, that players would be putting such an emphasis on the Nationals clubhouse when it seems like we see teams go from good clubhouse to average clubhouse to bad clubhouse from one year to the next or one year to two years later. And I would say that a year ago maybe or two years ago, the Nationals would have been seen as a very desirable location

for free agents to go. Certainly one of the best teams, and you could probably say they still are. And it seems like the things that caused last year's problems maybe have been resolved. I mean, Matt Williams is gone and Dusty Baker was hired. And if anything, it seems like Baker was probably hired because he has a reputation for being someone players like and someone who can handle a clubhouse. And they traded Drew Storen, which maybe sort of helps resolve the store in papelbon

tension although the real source of that tension is still there so i mean is it possible that like people don't like jonathan papelbon to such an extent that the nationals are having their entire offseason derailed by by that just by that reputation for a team having a bad clubhouse. And does that make any sense? I mean, we know that there are examples of teams that won despite having bad clubhouses or guys who didn't get along, but you could still understand why someone wouldn't want to be a part of a clubhouse where people didn't get along. Even if the team was still winning, it would be a less pleasant work environment. But it just doesn't seem like there's that much consistency to this. If we could quantify this, if we could give each team a chemistry rating for each season,

it seems like the year-to-year consistency of it would not be all that great. Because manager changes and front office changes and players change and the team goes from bad to good and good to bad and it just doesn't seem like uh the sort of thing that if i were a free agent and i were signing a long-term deal that i would give that much consideration to yeah i mean i hope that you're right i would love i would love for papelbon to get blamed for bringing down an entire franchise simply by his presence like that not almost nothing would make me happier i'm worried that i'm worried that in fact what what we've seen

oh god i i don't think this is true but i mean what we saw with players who didn't you know didn't like bryce harper before last year because they thought he was overrated, which is essentially it seems like people resented him because he was young and hyped, and also maybe kind of showy and sometimes a jerk and fiery. I'm worried that it's going to get blamed on him, and it might be the case that there are players who don't want to play on a team

where they know that it's Bryce Harper who's going to get so much attention that they're going to be sharing a clubhouse where half the clubhouse belongs to a guy that they have heard bad things about or for some reason have bad opinions about. And so that makes me a little nervous. I don't know if it ever mattered. I mean, just to check that, you probably would want to see

whether there was any indication. I don't know how you would find that, but any indication that this was ever an issue with Bonds and the Giants clubhouses because nobody ever took up a larger share of a clubhouse, literally in his case, than Barry Bonds, and nobody was sort of more universally disliked, I think, than Barry Bonds in the game. So I don't know if that was something that was talked about

or I don't know if there's any evidence that it was an issue with Bonds. But if it's Papelbon specifically, I think that the best bet is that Papelbon probably won't be there for that long, maybe this year. But if you're looking to sign a four-year deal, you can probably bank on a few non-Papelbon years. Yeah. Maybe they don't like – it's also – who knows who they don't like.

Maybe they don't like Jason Wirth. Maybe they don't like Jason Wirth. I don't know. Maybe they're worried they're going to trade for Billy Butler. Yeah, right. Well, there was another weird thing that was brought up in that discussion where Harold Reynolds pointed out – he called it the elephant in the room, that so much of this team is represented by Scott Boris. And it is a very high percentage. It's like nine players on the 25-man roster, basically, and a lot of the really good players.

Scherzer, Wirth, Gio Gonzalez, Strasburg, Harper, Stephen Drew, Oliver Perez, Danny Espinoza, Anthony Rendon. All those guys are Boris guys. And so Ken Rosenthal responded, that's a possible factor. And I did hear that from one agent of another player this week that one aspect of this that made him reluctant was the fact that it is team boris in the perception of many why i know that's what i'm wondering if you were why would it worry you if you were if you were a player who wasn't represented by boris and or you were the agent of a player and you weren't scott boris why would it worry you that there was such a heavy Boris client presence on this team? Would it be the perception that they're going to form a Boris block or something? Because there's such important people on this team

and people that the Nationals would want to keep, that they're going to have a bigger say or something? They're all going to vote as one or say or something like they're all gonna vote as one you're not gonna talk your way into a into a theory that makes sense here you can talk for a long time i don't know none of them yeah and do players hate do players i can't imagine players hate boris no i mean there's a there's a relationship between rizzo and Boris, right? I mean, that's been written about just because there's... So maybe you get the sense that Boris clients get preference somehow,

or they would get what they want. Like if a Boris client doesn't like how he's being used, then maybe you give in to that guy sooner because you don't want to annoy Boris and all the other Boris clients or something like maybe it's you know like a clubhouse fault line like you wrote about in those chemistry articles Boris and non-Boris no you're doing it again Ben no no matter how long you go no I don't know I'm sorry I don't think that there's – I don't think that Boris clients have a secret shake. Yeah.

It's a weird thing. I don't know why that would be a factor that a free agent would take into consideration. Anyway, all I'm saying is – Who wrote that? Or who said it? Ken Rosenthal, who is, know the best interesting yeah wait and was he quoting he says it's something he heard yeah yeah it says he's something he heard from another agent so agent jealousy is the most likely motive here right i suppose for it being said yeah it's weird

anyway i guess what i'm saying is the Nationals right now have a perceived chemistry problem, but these things change very quickly. And it would not be at all surprising if three months from now we're reading about how Dusty Baker has brought everyone together and it's a new year and it's a new group and all the negative feelings from last season are gone and the nationals are winning. And then it will seem silly that players were turning down the nationals based on this. If in fact, that's what happened. Okay. That's it for today. You can send us emails at podcasts at baseball perspectives.com.

You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash Effectively Wild. And you can rate and review and subscribe to the show on iTunes. Support our sponsor, The Play Index. Go to baseballreference.com. Use the coupon code BP. Get the discounted price of $30 on one year subscription. We'll be back soon. It's all about chemistry.