Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 820: The Posing Pineda Edition

Episode Date: February 17, 2016

Ben and Sam banter about a picture of Michael Pineda, then answer emails about deferred contracts, players they wish would write books, Michael Jordan the minor leaguer, and more.

I don't want to be a fat man Have not the patience to ignore all that I turn men to myself I thought my problems came from being fat I won't waste my time feeling sorry for him Waste my time feeling sorry for him I see the other side through the end Roll us both down a mountain and I'm sure the fat man wins Hello and welcome to episode 820 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectus

presented by The Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I'm Ben Lindberg of FiveThirtyEight, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Perspectus. Hello. Howdy. How are you? The same. How are you? Okay.

We're going to do a little break from our team preview podcast series, a one-day break. We're going to do a little break from our team preview podcast series, a one day break. We're going to do emails and whatever other banter we may have accumulated during the preview podcast series. Do you want to do a quick discussion of a fat player photo? Sure. It's been a while. Is it big Panetta?

It is. That is a fat player photo. It certainly is. I will link to this in the usual places where we link to things but we were uh emailed this photo by george bissell who's doing many of our team preview podcast this year oh if i google by the way i google uh fat michael panetta and the first return is a story from 2014 yankees michael panetta isn't fat anymore uh-huh and then the second one is from 2015 that said and i just see out of context is that he's not fat anymore

and then here let's see this is as this is from last year the skinny on michael panetta he's eating less okay so all right so he has a history. So this isn't coming out of nowhere. This recent wave of fat Pineda speculation was started by a Twitter photo from Ryan Hoke, the Yankees MLB.com beat writer who tweeted a sort of oddly composed photo. It appears to be in the parking lot in florida at the yankees spring training facility and i don't know what the context for this photo was hey you look fat come over here yeah let me exploit your appearance in this very tight sweater you were wearing it isn't on you're right it is an odd photo it looks like he's on the other side of some shrubs.

Yeah. He looks like a knight of knee. He looks like he's trying to hide himself behind the shrubs. Behind a shrub, behind one single shrub. Like he's carrying it around with him to obscure the stomach. But yeah, it's so,

so I don't know. I'm trying to imagine what the situation was that Pineda was just coming out of his car and Oak was just talking to him across this, this greenery and said, Hey, can I take a picture and put it on Twitter of you right now when you look very, it's going to be very unflattering, just so you know. It's not necessarily the case that he expected it to be unflattering. No. I mean, as we've talked about with fat player photos,

a lot of times it's all about the posture, and a guy can go from fat player photo to not fat player photo in a single frame, depending on his posture. And so it is possible that Brian didn't expect, that this was not Brian's purpose for taking the photo maybe he took a picture of i'd have to look but maybe he took a picture of every yankee who came out of the parking lot maybe every yankee called him over and said hey what's on your ipod and can i get a quick picture and uh with the shrub can you pose with my shrub and that uh that this just happened to be the one that got

forwarded to us because uh chase headley didn't look fat right oh yeah look in fact andrew miller picture same place same parking lot now not uh no shrub looks like brian has uh has come around to the other side of the shrub but this this is, yeah, in fact, there's two tape recorders here. Brian is taking a picture, I think, and there are two tape recorders visible. So this seems to be where players finish. Once they arrive, this is where they come over to do their quick media availability. Here is Andy Pettit, not fat.

Skinny Andy Pettit, yeah, looks good. In the same place, Big Mike Pineda. Let's see. Any others? Those are all. Oh, Tanaka, same place. Still no shrub. This shrub is strangely included as though it's trying to like for perspective.

So that you can compare it to, you know like you you put a quarter down so you can see the size of the bug kind of the shrub is to well look he's as big as a tree uh anyway tanaka is the same place so that's why he took the picture there was nothing uh nothing i don't think nothing intentional about this although the tweet hashtag the big mike the yeah he does he starts with big mike but is that just big mike's big nickname i don't know i mean he's he's always been big in one way or another he's a large man yeah uh yeah 2015 the 2015 season was supposed to be big mike's coming out party says uh says river avenue blues uh a healthy tanaka and big mike on the roster says guardi goes yardie big mike panetta seems close to says new jersey.com uh nj.com tonight was all about big mike

says pinstripe alley okay welcome back big mike says new York Daily News. So these are all pre-fat t-shirt. So I think that Brian is an accidental accomplice here. Yeah, okay. I think we can rule out angle, unflattering angle on this one, right? This does not appear to be the case where it's just posture or wind. I mean, I guess you can never say conclusively, but this appears to be one of the better documented cases of a fat player photo.

Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of times... It's not just the roundness around the middle. No. It's also... And there's no billow at all. A lot of times the billow is where you get your deception. Yeah.

The billow goes one way or another based on the wind or gravity but this is a fairly tight shirt um and it's hugging him yes i might say too tight not not originally a tight shirt maybe maybe not yeah and he's got a little bit of a maybe it's just the angle but he's got a little bit of a double chin going on. I don't see that. There's something there. It might be. I don't see it is all. You have different eyes than me, but the shadows don't help him.

No. This is a shadow picture, a bad shadow picture. But more than anything, I think it's his width more than anything. It's a straight ahead photo. So I think in straight ahead photos, I've learned to be a little bit agnostic about the kind of contours that you think you see. Sometimes you think you see a bump and from another angle, you realize that it was the shadow or it was the posture or it was the angle, but it's, it's hard to miss see a guy who's just wider.

Everybody can tell a 2x4 from a 2x6. Of course, players can go from fat player photo to regular player photo in the course of spring training. Spring training is a long time. Yes, sir. Some players report with a little extra winter padding, and then by the time opening day rolls around, they look like they're regular cells again. Still probably not what their team is hoping to see when they glimpse them across a shrubbery in the parking lot, but it's correctable. But this is,

I think, one of the better examples that we've been sent. All right. You want to do emails? Sure. Let's see. All right. We got two questions about deferred salaries and they are related. One is from John in Chicago, who says, let's say you are Mark Adonacio, the owner of the Brewers, and you are looking to raise the value of your team. Are there any rules preventing Mark from offering ridiculous deferred salaries? For instance, in 2018, signing Bryce Harper to a 10-year $600 million contract with 75% deferred over the following 10 years.

Then as the Brewers' success raises their financial prospects, Mark would sell the team for a large profit before the deferred contract bills arrive. Along those lines is a player's deferred salary guaranteed if his team files for bankruptcy. Then there's another question from Ben in San Francisco who asked this because of the deferred payment structure of the Chris Davis deal, and he wonders if enough attention is paid to the net present value of contracts. My question is, assuming that the agent gets paid right away, not over the next 21 years,

does he get paid his percentage of the full notional value of the contract, the $161 million, or the net present value, which is closer to $147 million? If it's the former, which I suspect it is, the agent is incentivized to delay payment for as long as possible to ensure the maximum notional size. From the team's perspective, as long as they are free to set aside money at whatever schedule they please to offset future obligations, it seems also in their best interest to drag things out. So why don't we see more payment structures like this? Are players too smart to fall for it? Or is there something else that protects the player

from having the time value of those deferred payments taken from them? And there was a comment from Andrew Friedman recently, because the Howie Kendrick deal had a fair amount of deferred money. And I will read the quote. He said, anytime you spread out money, it's helpful looking at commitments over a long period of time. So why don't we see more deals that are just extending very far into the future, like the kind of Bobby Bonilla type contract where the team is just putting off the payment forever? I guess the first question about the brewers, I mean, it's not like if you just defer the payment forever, it's just going to be forgotten about and falling through the cracks or something. When you sell the team, the new owner will

probably ask if you have any multi-million dollar liabilities in the future. Yes. So you can't just backload every contract and then have your players playing for free and then sell the team for a massive profit because you don't actually have a present payroll. When the next owner acquires the team, he will inquire about all the money that you owe players. And so that obviously that seems like the logical answer and yet we do know that when you know he sells the brewers he's going to make he's going to make a huge profit on what he bought it for that you know he'll get a billion dollars and what's you know what's a hundred million dollars then uh whereas they these guys do seem to to pay a lot of attention to whether they're in the red or in the black in the current day they They seem to be, I don't know if this is exactly true,

but the impression that you get sometimes from hearing the way they talk, seeing the way they run their businesses, particularly when you think of a team gaining a billion dollars over the course of a couple of decades in value, to see them penny pinch over a couple of million, over Ricardo Rincon or whatever. It does seem like they're a little bit tunnel visioned or a little short sighted when it comes to the day to day to having a quote unquote balanced budget. And so even though the question

kind of presumes that owners are financially irrational and that doesn't make sense because they're super rich people. It does kind of seem like they are like, that's the impression that you get. It'd be interesting to hear someone who is, who knows, who is smart and has, I don't know, is a billionaire explain why they're not because otherwise all indications to us are sometimes that they are. And that's kind of weird. Yeah. Right. Wasn't there something about an agent in there? Yeah. Well, otherwise all indications to us are sometimes that they are and that's kind of weird yeah right wasn't there something about an agent in there yeah well he wants to know whether the agent gets

paid based on the net present value or whether he's getting paid probably like yeah i i don't i don't know but i think i think the agent probably gets paid at the exact same time that the player gets paid that when a paycheck goes to the player a paycheck goes to the agent probably gets paid at the exact same time that the player gets paid. That when a paycheck goes to the player, a paycheck goes to the agent. And maybe that's why. Maybe that's why there aren't these. Maybe the agent doesn't want the deferred money. I doubt that's the answer.

But I said it. Okay. Question from James, who is wondering about the menu of options free agent strategy. Just over five years ago, the Texas Rangers were in a bidding war for free agent Cliff Lee. That was a different world when Cliff Lee could command a bidding war. In the days before Lee's official departure from the Rangers, the team's front office announced they'd offer Lee a menu of options. the team's front office announced they'd offer Lee a menu of options. This menu presumably featured fluctuating year lengths, annual earnings, options, and clauses. Thereby, this menu was an early indicator that the Rangers were not entirely clear on what mixture of years,

annual income, options, and clauses Lee most preferred. My question is, are there any situations in which a menu of options is an effective free agent strategy in final negotiations? Will it always be an indicator that the team is at least a bit tone deaf to the player's priorities? Also, why would the Rangers organization announce this menu to the media if it informed every organization that they weren't entirely sure what Lee most wanted? I can't think of any recent examples of a menu of options strategy,

at least one that came to light. When the team announces in detail the offer it has made, sometimes it seems like maybe a clue that the team is not expecting to actually get a deal done or just wants the pr value of having been known to make a big offer so that when the player goes elsewhere they can say we made an offer we made many many offers we made several offers and it wasn't taken and so it's not our fault don't blame us if your favorite player goes to play for someone else. So that might be part of it. There could be times when it would benefit the team or give the team a better chance of signing the

player, I suppose, but I don't know what those situations would be really. I mean, you could certainly give multiple options. You could give a option with an opt out and say, this is a short contract, but you get to get out of it sooner. But there's always going to be a deal that you would prefer and that you would just offer first and hope that the player takes. Yeah. I mean, a menu of options, like the player, when you sit down and you go, so what are you looking for? He has the menu. He gets to choose what he says there. So there's always an implied menu of options. You are, to some degree, you know, you are the White House chef and, you know, he comes down to you and says, can I get whatever? And you're

the White House chef. You're supposed to have it all, right? I don't know how the White House chef works, but that's how, that's the impression impression that you get that the president can have whatever he wants right and so then he asks and the team says yes or no to that thing but there's always an implied range of choice like he gets to tell you what he's looking for he gets to tell you whether he's looking for short term with high annual or long term or deferred or whatever it's a conversation. So to me, the Rangers saying that they had a menu of options was a non-revelatory rumor. And you're right. Anytime a team talks about their offer to a player, I think I've grown increasingly more suspicious of all of those because there's no real reason to say what you offered unless you're trying to convince your fans that you were a really super serious contender.

And so then you have to kind of question the motives or the honesty of any statement and why they're framing it that way. All right. Jason from Palmyra, New Jersey says the recent Dan Heron tweets we discussed in the talk about the Players' Tribune and the act of pre-ordering your Sonoma Stompers book, thank you, Jason, got me thinking about baseball books. Here's my question. If you could commission any current major leaguer to write a book for your entertainment, so the only requirement would be that it is interesting to you, not that it would be profitable, who would you choose? Would it depend more upon a great backstory? Would you choose someone with a fascinating career arc? Would it depend more upon a player's candidness, his writing ability, the people he encountered

in his career, or something else entirely? Well, I mean, even baseball players who are like two standard deviations better at you know cleverness and writing are probably not like the kind of people i would definitely want writing a book you know like for instance pedro martinez just wrote a book and pedro martinez is uh if not the most fun player of my lifetime definitely top four off the top of my head. I mean, he's just unbelievably fun. His career was unbelievably fun. His trajectory was fun. He was fun at every stage of his career. And he's super fun as a guy, you know, like he's charismatic and funny and irreverent and candid and different and smart and all the things that you would want. And, um, and I read that book and it was fine.

It's not like, it's not like I'm dying to read a book like his followup or anything like that. It was just whatever, you know, you sort of, you read the first 10 pages carefully and then you start skimming really fast. So I wouldn't have read it. I wouldn't have really wanted to read it if it were not my kind of job to have read it. And because I wanted to write something about it, I wanted to, I had an idea for what to write, I think. And so I read it to, so I could write that thing. But it's not a, you know, there are thousands of books I'd rather read than that one. And so it's going to be hard to top Pedro in any of those categories. So you basically just have to pick the guy who's the truly best writer, best,

funniest person, seems like smartest person. And so the, you know, the obvious answer is obvious, right? Everybody would say that Brandon McCarthy would probably write a good book. Yes. Like I would read, I would read a Brandon McCarthy book. It doesn't have to be about baseball. That's probably the test is which that's the question should be which baseball player would you most want to write a book about something else and that's that's the answer like i would read brandon mccarthy's like vampire novel yeah is there i mean is there any other answer there i mean i don't know that any baseball player has no he's like six the thing is he's is, he's six standard deviations away.

That's what I'm saying. I didn't really get through the standard deviations point, but two is not enough. You think two is because you get so weighed down by the monotonous boringness of baseball players that you're like, wow, that guy used a verb that is slightly unusual. He's funny. But in fact, that's only two cents like that's still really boring and so you got to go so far uh and you know brandon mccarthy is is like you know he could he could do anything and he'd be entertaining um so uh so him uh but he's so far like i think at least based on what we've seen, there are probably people who are as funny, as clever, as smart, but they choose not to demonstrate that ability to us publicly.

They would just, like, the type of person who is that funny might not be the type of person who wants to put themselves out there quite so much. So maybe they're hidden. Maybe they're all in the shadows. But nobody comes to mind as particularly close. Yeah, not really. Every team has a... Oh, well, Sean, maybe Sean Doolittle. Did you read the thing that Sean Doolittle wrote

for when Buster only went on vacation in summer of 2013? Doolittle wrote his column as a guest columnist one day, and it was genuinely very funny, and it was genuinely very well done it was like a um it was like a parody of uh of the kind of classic piece on the a's at this especially with the time when the a's were so good uh about how uh how they don't have money they they're there it sure is different in oakland but they make it work, right? It was this piece about all these tropes of poverty tourism in Oakland's clubhouse. And it was very funny and it was so well done that I truly got like more than a third of the way through before I got that it was satire.

I was like, oh my gosh, some of these things are amazing. Like, like I was writing about the A's chemistry at the time and I'm like scribbling notes. I'm like, oh my gosh, the thing. And, and then I finally thought, wait a minute, like that is that, and then I realized, okay, it's a joke, but that's a good satire. Like when you can get, like a person who was reading at 80% attention level could plausibly have gotten to the end and not gotten it. And that's what you want. You want for satire to be good enough that somebody leaves a comment believing it to be true. And I believe that Doolittle's probably got a lot of this.

So Doolittle might be my number two. Four players who were good on Twitter for reasons other than the fact that you like them because they're baseball players and maybe you'll just automatically follow them because that's the way you interact with baseball players but the the you know the handful of players who it's actually worth it to follow for just pure independent of baseball entertainment value those are the the top draft picks for book writer, basically. And they might not have particularly interesting backstories. I mean, you know, I would say that those guys and his being hurt all the time and then getting healthy and using new pitches and using stats and then getting hurt again and getting hit in the

head. And so he's got some intriguing plot lines and Doolittle is a converted guy and he throws fastballs all the time and then he stopped throwing fastballs all the time and you wrote 10 articles about it. And so he has some material for a book, but they wouldn't be anywhere near the top of the list of players whose backstories would be the best book material. You know, you would want someone who has a dramatic escape from Cuba or, you know, some incredible hardship

or in their early lives or, you know, there are many, many more interesting origin stories. But if the player actually has to write the book, then even the most or the most fascinating origin story might lead to a terrible book. Now, if you can draft a ghostwriter and you can get a great ghostwriter, then I think the actual material matters more. Although, again, you still need the player's personality to come across. And that's probably, I don't know what percentage that's the ghostwriter and what percentage it's the player being willing to open up and really invest himself in the story but it's definitely both of those things i never read r.a dickie's book but it seems like a lot of people did did you i did not uh-huh so i

don't know if that one was good but maybe that was good i there was a book that came out in 2009 i think maybe eight no i think nine uh that was Odd Man Out. And it was written by a guy who had played a season for the Angels short season team named Matt McCarthy. Matt McCarthy? Matt McCarthy. And he was a, like, he went to, I think, Yale. He was buddies with the other guy who went to Yale, Breslau. And so he was like a senior sign, played a season in, you know,

short season or wherever they were at the time and wrote a book about it. And that I found that to be a very entertaining book. I read it all the way through very quickly, like maybe in a day. And it was a very successful baseball book, except then it turned out that like he was, he had a hard time with book, except then it turned out that like he was, he had a hard time with accuracy, um, maybe intentionally, or maybe I should say, um, well, I don't know why, but he got a lot of stuff wrong and it took a lot of the shine off the book and it's hard to know what was

real and what wasn't. And I don't find myself going back to the book that much for that reason, uh, or at all for that reason. But it was a successful book. And I think that the combination of being a guy who was fairly mature, fairly smart, and that it was writing about a scene that's a lot more colorful than baseball can ever be. I mean, a book that is about the majors is almost by definition going to be fairly antiseptic. It might be it has advantages in that, you know, the players and, you know, the stakes and you can drop all these famous things. And so when you have a story about, you know, Yasiel Puig's stuff getting thrown out of the bus, it has a lot more familiarity and stakes than if you hear about the low A right fielders, things getting thrown off the bus. So that's the definite clear advantage that major league teams, major league books have.

But if you're writing about it from the inside of a locker room, it's almost certainly going to be, you know, terrain that's been covered more elsewhere that is a lot more polished, that won't have the same color that a minor league book would have. But it's just, it's hard to write a baseball book about the majors. That's my point. It's just, it's hard to do it. Yeah. Unless you're going to provide a deeper level of access than anyone else has. Like if you're, I mean, if you're going to be a trailblazer and be uh you know jim bouton or jim brosnan who came before him and wrote the long season then it's very interesting just because no one has done that before and i guess a current player could probably ramp that up if he wanted

to and provide a even more candid view of what it's like to be a baseball player in the free agency era when players are super rich and super famous. And that might be a, that might be a fascinating book. Then again, you'd have to really want to be a book writer because players don't have much financial incentive to, to write a book. Now They don't really need to write books if they are successful players. So speaking of our book, a few hours ago, a messenger came and took it out of my hands. It's now literally out of our hands for the first time in ever. After months of working on it, we've now come to the point

where if we wanted to change something, we probably could not. We cannot. We're not allowed. They're printing it like tomorrow, aren't they? I don't know. But yeah, we just spent the last week reviewing the page proofs and looking for any last little fixes we want to make. And yeah, now it's just, I guess it should be a liberating feeling, but it's sort of

a scary feeling. I'm kind of worried that I'm suddenly going to think of the perfect analogy and I'm going to kick myself that it wasn't in the book. Hey, Ben. Let's answer the question though. Getting past the best writer aspect of it, whose career would you most like to read about? Active player, whose career would you most like to read about from the player's own mind? If, if all of their minds were equal, if, if we gave them all credit for having a equally sharp minds and internal

lives, Dickie's a pretty good one, by the way. I mean, I could see why that I could see just, just thinking about it. I could see why that would be a book that a lot of people would enjoy and maybe I'll read it.

Yeah. Yeah. Someone like Josh Donaldson, I guess is an interesting trajectory. Yeah, it is. Prospect to written off to MVP. I would almost go the other, like I always wanted to write a book about Brandon Wood. Yeah. So just a, just a big bust. I mean, yeah, I guess. That's not how I would pitch it to him. You might pitch the publisher that way.

David Peralta? Yeah. It could potentially be interesting to just have the most preternaturally talented player if he were able to actually convey what it was like to be that, to be Bryce Harper or something. You know who writes well about that is Bob Gibson. Bob Gibson, at least the book that I read by Bob Gibson was surprisingly good. That's interesting, actually, because he's one of those great players who is known for being a bad coach, perhaps because he was so talented that he wasn't able to communicate with lesser beings. Like the new book that just came out, the John Wertheim and Sam Summers book,

This Is Your Brain on Sports, says, as exceptional a major league pitcher as Bob Gibson was, he was exceptionally subpar as a major league pitching coach. The Hall of Fame fireballer was famous for strolling to the mound to counsel one of his pitchers and hissing, just throw the damn ball over the damn plate, which doesn't sound like the makings of a great literary mind. So it's interesting that he was one. Surprisingly enjoyable and surprisingly educational.

He wrote a book with Reggie Jackson and they kind of alternate chapters and it's about the battle between batter and pitcher. It's called 60 feet, six inches. And it's surprising. I mean, there's really a lot in it, a lot of good stuff in it. And I particularly liked Bob Gibson's parts and I think he's written other books that I haven't read. So it's really hard. That's all I'm saying. It's really hard. Vladimir Balentine would be a fun one. Yeah, I guess that's true. What's it like to go from prospect to sort of scrub to suddenly superstar, transcendent superstar in another country? I was going to say Josh Hamilton, but he has a has, he wrote a book and I did not read it.

Wow. Did you see what Ballantine did last year? No. He only played 15 games. I don't know if he was cut or injured, but he hit 186, 327, 302 in 15 games. So his OPS is in Japan. First year, So his OPS is in Japan. First year, 783. Second year, 958. Third year, 1234. That's the year he hit 60 home runs. Fourth year, 1007.

Fifth year, 629. And didn't play anywhere else after that. All right. Well, that's going to be a good chapter for the book. All right. Do you have a quick play index? Sure. Yeah. So this is a quick one. I want to look at whose subs played best last year. This is not the same as whose backups played the best, but whose subs played the best. So basically pinch hitters, defensive replacements, injury replacements, anybody who came in to a game.

to a game. And the only reason that I'm bringing it up, because it's not a great query, I think you would admit, is that it's a pretty good result. The bottom is the Tigers with a 455 OPS. So they had basically 200 plate appearances from their subs. They had 165, 231, 224 and the median is 618 a 618 ops which is the giants the orioles are at 617 those are the 15th and 16th team so we're looking at subs who basically hit about you know the bottom of what you expect from a major leaguer sometimes even worse and then you go up and there's not a huge spread. It's like 618, then 622, 630, 633, 638. Cleveland is 10th at 644. The A's are fifth at 697. So the White Sox are fourth at 698. So we basically have almost no examples of teams getting good production. Number two is the Blue Jays at 731, which kind of makes sense because you could imagine that if, well, first off, they had a really good team with a lot of depth. But also, you know, they had a bunch of superstars who might have gotten some of those at bats if they were coming off the bench or whatever.

But, okay, the number one, though, is the Houston Astros. And the Houston Astros' OPS from their subs was 852, which is 121 points higher than anybody else. The difference between them and number two is the same as between number two and number 18. They just had this phenomenal bench performance. It's actually going back to 1988. It is the fifth best bench performance of all time. But of course, most of those came during the offensive years.

The only team that really was ahead of them and in a non-supercharged era is actually the Orioles from the year before, who had the fourth best. The Astros also were, they were not one of the teams that used its bench the fewest you could maybe imagine that if they had then that would make it easier because they're not you'd like the rain the royals only used 128 well i guess it works the other way though too because probably the worst they are the less you use them anyway they were kind of right around in the middle so the the Astros had this incredible bench performance. So now I'm going to do one more thing.

So I would guess that that is, it seems like it's a very good reflection of your roster construction if you're able to have a really fantastic bench. But on the other hand, maybe it is something that is very likely to regress just because, well, as you said, it's very atypical to have your bench be that good. Yeah, and it's probably very unlikely to repeat. It's a very, very, very small sample.

I mean, I don't want to oversell this. This is a ridiculously small sample. It's like 250 plate appearances for the whole team. And in case you're curious, so Jed Lowry leads the way. OPS, overall 7-12. OPS as a sub, 25-24. Pretty good. And so he's better.

Domingo Santana is better. Colby Rasmus was better. Jake Marisnyk was better. These guys are all better by like four, five, six, 700 points of OPS. Obviously small samples. Jonathan VR is better. Max Stassi was better. Preston Tucker was better.

Matt Duffy was the same. Luis Valbuena was better. Hank Conger, slightly worse. And Chris Carter was worse. And that's pretty much how they did it. Yeah. All right. Baseball reference play index.

Use the coupon code BPp get the discounted price of 30 on a one-year subscription all right we have five minutes um all right well this is one that you have written something about i believe and it is always a fascinating subject to discuss is from chris who says the popular narrative in discussing Michael Jordan as a double A baseball player is to laugh it off as a bonfire of his vanity or to cry out as costing a faceless career baseball player his maybe only chance to make an impression. I think it's one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. He was past his athletic prime playing a sport he hadn't played for at least 15 years. He walked over 50 times and fewer than 500 plate appearances. He stole 30 bases.

I think it's amazing that a non-baseball lifer could play at double A and strike out only a quarter of the time. It's not that he only hit 200. It's incredible that he could hit as high as 200. And I think that is indisputable, right? I mean, Chris says it's the popular narrative that he was bad and embarrassing. And that is probably true in the larger culture or among people who, you know, just know basketball, basketball fans, people who know that Michael Jordan was the best ever at one sport and just a not great minor leaguer at the other sport. But I think anyone who has any awareness of baseball and how hard it is to do what he did and some awareness of minor leaguers and the typical prospect trajectory and all of that, I think among those types of people, it's the popular narrative that he was amazing yeah i um i think that it's i

mean it's it's look michael jordan was horrible at baseball like that's not in dispute he was absolutely horrible at it he uh he was very bad at it by the standards of all the baseball we watch uh but i think it's a it's a plausible question to ask whether uh his baseball performance is actually more amazing and remarkable than his basketball career if you really want to get down to it uh because of uh you know all i get it well it either tells us something amazing about michael jordan that he was able to perform uh at a you know a kind of credible double a level like not a good he was one of the worst players at the level but it was credible you know like you wouldn't if you were me or you and you went out to watch that game you

didn't know it was michael jordan you wouldn't notice over the course of a game that that guy doesn't belong there other than the fact that there's not many guys that tall uh playing uh in the outfield uh so that either tells you something really about Michael Jordan or something about baseball, which is that I, I, it's not totally clear to me that baseball is, is hard. Uh, I'm still, uh, agnostic about whether baseball is the hardest sport or the easiest. Uh, cause it really, I don't care how good an athlete he is. He shouldn't be able to do that after not playing baseball for 20 years and never facing anybody even close to the level of talent that he's, he shouldn't be able to do it. So either he's way better, like, Oh God, it's incredible that he did that. Or baseball sucks.

I'm not sure which. Possibly an embarrassment to baseball more than it is an embarrassment to michael jordan yeah but yeah it's it's incredible for all the all the reasons that chris said for him to do that was uh something i i wish i had been old enough to pay more attention to at the time then if if Michael, if Michael Jordan were, if the exact equivalent thing happened, say he had never done it, but the exact equivalent happened now. And I don't know if there is an equivalent to Michael Jordan, but maybe it's LeBron. Yeah, let's call it LeBron. Let's say LeBron quits and goes and plays baseball.

But now you have minor league baseball TV and you can watch the games. How many games do you watch LeBron play over the course of his season? Or how many innings or how many events? Yeah, I'd probably watch 10. I'd probably get bored of it. Tracy McGrady pitched for the Sugarland Skeeters in 2014. And I thought, oh, that's interesting. And then I made no effort to watch his four games.

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