Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 846: Nihilistic Trivia Time

Episode Date: March 23, 2016

Ben and Sam banter about a LaRoche-related White Sox conspiracy and update Ryan Webb’s save outlook, then answer emails about Ryan Howard, Trout vs. Goldschmidt, a terrible trivia question, and more.

What are y'all gonna do? You know what? Come here. You know, I almost forgot. I got you something from up north. What is it? That there's called the baseball. Whole new sport was invented a couple years back. Some regulars in the Yankee Tavern were going on about it. And this is for catching the ball. Put your hand in there like that.

And you and I, we got to break this leather in, right? Like on the saddle, so that it works right. Some fellow in the tavern was suggesting that you tuck the ball on in there so that you get to know each other a little better. Why don't you go up to the house and do that now, Ben? Hm? Good morning and welcome to episode 846 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus presented by our Patreon supporters and the Baseball Reference Play Index. I'm Ben

Lindberg of FiveThirtyEight, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Prospectus. Hello. Howdy. That intro clip you heard was from Underground, the new WGN America show. Set in 1857, but through the first two episodes, it's definitely a baseball show. Third episode is on tonight. Doing emails today. Anything you want to banter about before we begin? No. I wanted to bring up, you know, we missed the whole Drake LaRoche saga, which I'm not so sorry about that we didn't get a chance to talk about that.

But I've seen many other people discuss it from various angles, from the labor perspective, from the management perspective, from the truancy perspective, but I haven't seen it discussed as a conspiracy theory about the White Sox brilliant scheme to get out of Adam LaRoche's salary this year. Yeah. That's one way to look at it, right? Yeah. Take it to the brink. Some brinksmanship over Drake LaRoche. There's essentially no benefit to having Adam LaRoche at a $13 million salary for this year. He is projected to be a replacement level player, basically a league average hitter

who plays first base and DH. And there is essentially no value to that. I mean, the White Sox have had a lot of sub replacement players in their infield over the last couple of years, one of whom was Adam LaRoche in 2015. So unless you think that there's going to be a big bounce back coming from LaRoche at age 36. This is a guy whose last sentence of his BP annual comment was, if he can't find a new way of doing things that accounts for his age, LaRoche's career as an acceptable big league hitter is over. Maybe Kenny Williams read his BP annual and said,

hey, I have a way out of this. I will tell him he can't have his kid in the clubhouse every day, and he will walk away and retire and we will get all that money back. Yeah. I, um, I mean, at some point, hundreds of episodes ago, we talked about whether a team would murder a player. Um, and, um, and there is always, uh, uh, you know, there's these perverse incentives where once you get to a certain level of pay, you can't necessarily trust the team to treat you in a, well, how do I put this? where somebody saw an opportunity, might have, somebody plausibly might have seen a chance to get out of a bad contract situation.

The Angels didn't end up doing that with the Josh Hamilton situation. In fact, the Angels basically put their money where their mouth is by simply taking all of that money and dumping him even still. And there's the A-Rod and the PEDs thing. But I think that it is not nearly the simplest explanation in this case. No, I don't think it is. Yeah, I do think that if Adam LaRoche had hit 37 home runs last year, I think it's very safe to say that they would have worked this out.

Yes, right. Yeah. I don't think he necessarily set out to get Adam LaRoche to retire in a clever way. But I also think that if Adam LaRoche were better at baseball, he might've just tabled this matter for a year. If it were Chris Sale's kid, and Chris Sale evidently thinks of Drake LaRoche as a kid or a leader or something, but if it had been Chris Sale's kid or some other superstar's kid, then maybe you just don't push it. But if it's Adam LaRoche, you push it. Here's the reason I don't really buy the conspiracy exactly. Having just said, I mean, look, I just essentially said that it's not even a conspiracy. I just said that they would have worked it out if LaRoche was good. So the fact that they didn't work it out is an acknowledgement that he's not good and that Kenny Williams' incentives are different because of that.

And that probably played out in the endgame here. But the reason that I don't think it's a conspiracy is I don't think that, I mean, Kenny Williams did not go to LaRoche with his opening offer. You retire now, or like that wasn't his only, like, I very, very seriously doubt that Kenny Williams went to him expecting that LaRoche was going to go home. Like, I think, why would you expect that? Right. It's, it's such an implausible response to this request. And so then, so then it doesn't really make much sense if he's, right? I guess that's the whole logic. LaRoche seems to believe that this was a pre-negotiated part of his agreement with the White Sox and that he would not have signed with the White Sox if they had not had this agreement

that his kid could be in the clubhouse every day. So I guess they've talked about this before and maybe LaRoche said it was a deal breaker before. You would still not expect someone to actually follow through on losing $13 million because your kid can't be in the clubhouse every day. So yeah, I don't think that was actually the goal, but maybe he had discussed the scenario during the negotiations. The other thing is, and I think that this goes against what I said about how if he was good, it wouldn't matter, is LaRoche says that he always said, hey, if my teammates have an issue with this, if anybody has a problem with it, then,

you know, I won't do it. And he found when he found out that there was an issue with it, he opted not to do it. And rather than not do it in the way that he keeps playing baseball and his son goes home, he opted to do it in the way where he goes home as well. And so even if Kenny Williams, say Kenny Williams had gone to him and said, hey, we need you to ease up on the Drake thing. Some people have a problem with it. And Adam LaRoche had said, absolutely not. I hate you, Kenny Williams. And Kenny Williams had said, oh, okay, I didn't know you felt that strongly about it. Sure, you can keep bringing him every day.

Adam LaRoche, if we were to take him at his word, would have then said, no, it doesn't matter. The point is not you asking. The point is my teammates having an issue with it. And since they have an issue with it, I now have to follow through and quit playing. Like, it is a promise that he made, in a sense, right? Yeah.

So you might think that Kenny Williams was aware of that promise and knew that if he just nudged a little bit that maybe he could push Adam Lerch away. I still think that it's so not the simplest explanation that I don't really accept it. that I don't really accept it. But, you know, once it was revealed, like you can't necessarily blame Kenny Williams for even bringing, you know, for even asking because LaRoche claims that he wanted to know and that he didn't want to be the guy whose kid was annoying everybody.

And if he found out that his kid was annoying anybody, he had said, I i'll stop and he stopped so i might have some timelines wrong here some details it's possible yeah this has been well covered and there have been many updates on the original coverage all i'm saying is no it's probably not a conspiracy but the white socks are probably not worse off today oh they're probably better off they're probably better off they're certainly better off that's the point is that it's we don't we don't particularly like that the sport exists in a way where uh teams can find these end arounds around bad contracts that seem

perhaps unfair like it it is fair that adam la roche should, you know, doesn't, Adam LaRoche as a bad baseball player does not deserve another big contract after this. But it isn't really fair that a team would treat him differently because he's bad once the guaranteed contract is signed by using this sort of personal leverage point. by using this sort of personal leverage point. And if you thought that that's what the White Sox did, and I guess I do because I said that this wouldn't have resolved itself this way if it were different, then that's not very fair. Adam LaRoche should be treated exactly as well or as poorly as everybody else, regardless of whether he hits 37 home runs or, you know, or, or nine. Although maybe being given the ability to have his kid in the clubhouse every day as being treated

better than everybody else, or at least clearly not everyone in the clubhouse had signed off on this or, or been told to understand probably that there would be a kid in the clubhouse. It goes to whether this was really negotiated in advance if if it's something that he explicitly negotiated then you can really wonder why the white socks or the nationals or anybody would have felt empowered to negotiate on behalf of his 24 teammates yeah uh and that would have been a bad move on their part but la roche's but now my guess is that it probably wasn't exactly but i don't know how would i know I know? I would say that all takes that I have were actually given by Stefan Fatsis on Hang Up and Listen. This week, he said exactly what I probably would have said if forced to talk.

And here I am being forced to talk and being forced, because Stefan said it all, to say new things instead. Yeah. Well, when the White Sox make a big deadline deal and take on some salary this year, you can thank Drake LaRoche. Or not really Drake. You can thank Adam, I guess. I kind of feel bad for Drake being made the cause of this. I will. Yeah. I will also say that I've been in some clubhouses and there really is a lot of Drake in major league clubhouses. And I could see a lot of players complaining that there's too much Drake in clubhouses. There's a lot of Drake and it, you know, I could see a lot of players saying too much

Drake, you guys, too much Drake. Can we get some other non-Drake music? Right. Good one. Okay. So we'll get to emails. Right. Good one. Okay. So we'll get to emails. The only other update, Ryan Webb, all time games finished without a save leader who I believe shook President Obama's hand today in Cuba. Quite an honor for Ryan Webb, perhaps an honor for the president as well. I gave him a 30% chance to get that elusive save when we talked about it whenever it was. But now, of course, Brad Boxberger is out for two months or so with a muscle strain. And that means that Ryan Webb's chances are even higher. So according to the AP report about this, Kevin Cash did not name a new closer. The AP says the team

will distribute the role for now among Alex Colomay, Xavier Cedeno, Danny Farquhar, Stephen Jelts, and Ryan Webb. So Ryan Webb is now fifth on the AP depth chart. Wait, who is the second name? Xavier Cedeno. Oh, it's so close to alphabetical. Cedeno and Colomay are, right? Because Colomay is CO? Yes. Okay. And I was going to say that it seems like they were just going alphabetical, but they're not. That might be how they're doing it. Because Cash says we have a number of guys that could try to fill that void for the first month of the year. We will close how it matches up and who is ready to pitch on each given night.

So Webb just has to be ready to pitch. Bring your shoes, buddy. Yeah. Do not do that thing where you forget to wash your uniform and you're late to the game or your mom has to bring it later and you sit in jeans in the dugout waiting for it to dry don't do that i've done it so if he was 30 before i'm gonna say he is it's got to be up to 50 now well i didn't i didn't you didn't say i would have i think i don't remember what I said, but I will bump it from eight to 30 now. Okay. All right. Speaking of contracts for first basemen who aren't very valuable anymore,

Dan from New Jersey says, Ryan Howard has a $23 million team option for 2017 with a $10 million buyout. What would have to happen for the Phillies to pick up that option? So it's 23 million with a $10 million buyout? Yeah, so they're on the hook for $10 million regardless. So one year and $13 million? Yeah. Not that much. Well, so his...

I mean, nothing that he's done in the last three years. But no, I mean, his 90th percentile Pocota projection is 255, 331, 464 with 28 homers, 1.5 wins of a replacement player yeah they did that he still doesn't get it yeah he does i don't think really you think if he hits 28 home runs with an 800 plus ops that they won't pick up a one-year deal for their for you know this guy who's been a huge part of the franchise i mean howard will definitely keep playing baseball if he does that. Yeah, but he won't get... Well, essentially, this is the Adam LaRoche deal,

because that's $13 million one year. That's what Adam LaRoche is walking away from. So would someone sign Ryan Howard to Adam LaRoche's contract if Ryan Howard were coming off a 28-homer season and going into his age what 37 season you're basically describing adam laroche's uh season before he got the two-year deal that's true 250 259 259 362 455 with 26 homers yeah that's basically true howard will be i guess a year older or so than laroche was then but more or less the same otherwise.

And LaRoche did get that deal. So yeah, I guess, all right, if he hits his... I mean, he's still not a very valuable player because he's not a good defender and he is limited in that you kind of have to platoon him or you probably should platoon him. So it's still not like a deal, but maybe the fact that it's howard and he has that standing in the organization maybe that would do it so if he bounces back to when was the last time

he had a season that good like in 2013 he only played part-time so the home runs aren't there but yeah basically the same rate stats yeah 266 266, 319, 465. Yeah. That was 80 games, and he was worth 0.6 warp. Yeah, so that's basically the same, 1.5 over a full season. Right. So is that worth it? Ruben Amaro would do that, but would the new front office do that? Well, it's a little more than $8 million a win.

Yeah. It's not where they are on the win curve, but it's also Ryan Howard. Right. I mean, they're going to retire that guy's number. How often is this kid in the clubhouse? That's what we need to know, yeah. Well, all right. If he hits his 90th, if he hits his 95th percentile projection,

then I guess you might pick him up just because they're on the hook for that 10 million already. If it were, if it were a cheap buyout and they could get out of almost all of that, then you would. But the fact that it's not that much more than they have to pay anyway, eh, maybe, or, you know, if he thwarts a crime or something, if he, uh, if he becomes a hero for some non-baseball reason, maybe that helps. I don't know. It's not totally out of the realm of possibility, but it's very unlikely.

All right. Eric Hartman says, what would happen if a qualifying offer free agent accepted the offer but failed his physical? And I wasn't sure about this. I asked an assistant GM, who I thought might know about this, I asked an assistant GM who I thought might know about this. And he said that once the player accepts, he is a signed player and teams give exit physicals, or at least this guy I talked to said that every team he has been with or is aware of gives exit physicals to every player at the end of the season. So they would have a pretty good grasp on the player's

physical state and thus they would know before extending the qualifying offer whether he would pass the physical or not, because he probably already did. Or if he didn't, then you wouldn't give him the qualifying offer. So I don't think you would see this exact scenario arise. That's what I would have guessed. Okay. Question from Ryan. Listening to episode 840, the underrated Trout edition, caused me to look at the 2009 draft class. It was there that I saw that Paul Goldschmidt went in the eighth round, number 246 overall. What do you guys think is the more egregious error? 21 teams passing on Mike Trout in round one,

including the Nationals and Diamondbacks twice each, or all 30 teams passing on Paul Goldschmidt seven plus times. My first instinct would be to say Trout, but to think that 245 players got selected before Goldschmidt, who is probably a top 10 player in the league, has me doubting that decision. That's a good question. My first instinct was definitely going to be to say Goldschmidt and not Tr but let i'm just gonna we'll just go through the numbers so trout was

picked 25th call it 24th because it was so a 24th overall pick is what supposed to produce three or four wins on average maybe six wins i don't know something like that yeah through his uh cross-controlled years or in his career or whatever trout is already at 40 ish wins and by the time he gets to the end of his uh club control years his six plus years of service time he'll probably be around 60 and so that's 55 wins more than than uh his draft pick would tell you whereas with with Goldschmidt, Goldschmidt has produced 24 wins so far. And by the time he hits his free agent period, he'll probably be at like, I don't know, 35 or so, maybe a little more. So 35 wins.

And he's in a draft spot that has probably an average return of about, I don't know, maybe two-tenths of a win or, I don't know, maybe eight-tenths of a win or somewhere in there, but probably less than a win on average uh for your you know for the for the years of control so so you know trout is plus 55 goldschmidt's like plus 35 maybe plus 40 clearly trout wins but do you count it like that or do you look at it as percentage where trout was essentially eight times nine times maybe 10 times better than the draft pick. He is the equivalent of getting 10 picks at his spot or Goldschmidt who is,

you know, essentially 80 times or maybe 200 times better than the average draft pick. So I don't know which way you go with that. Yeah. I was thinking of it sort of, you can look at it two ways. I think one way you could look at it is, I mean, these are both top tier talents. These are both guys who should be first overall draft picks if you knew what they were going to do. So Trout, all these teams passed on him, but most of them only passed on him once. The thing is that there were teams that saw Trout for what he was, or it seems like they were, you know, maybe not best player ever through age 24 or whatever, but there were teams that saw Trout for what he was, or it seems like they were maybe not best player ever through age 24 or whatever.

There were teams that evaluated Mike Trout as an early first-round draft pick. The Angels would have taken him earlier. A bunch of other teams you've written, you've cited various reports, and those are all somewhat suspect because they're often after the fact, after Mike Trout is like the best player ever. And they're like, yeah, we we would have taken him at such and such a pick or we had him there or whatever. But there were teams that saw him as at least the first round pick. And so for any one team that didn't take Trout with their first round pick, you could say, well, they missed something that some other baseball team didn't.

And their peers saw Mike Trout as a potential future well, they missed something that some other baseball team didn't. And their peers saw Mike Trout as a potential future superstar and they missed it. Whereas Goldschmidt, you know, almost as good a player, basically, no one saw it and no one saw him as remotely close to a first round talent. So it's hard to blame any one team because all the other teams missed it. No, not just all the other teams. The Diamondbacks missed it seven times. Yeah. So it's kind of more of an indictment of the industry as a whole, I think, that no one

saw Paul Goldschmidt as a future star and no one, absolutely no one, every single team was given several chances to take Goldschmidt and no one took him. So that sort of says something bad about the ability to project baseball player performance. So in that sense, I mean, that's a more egregious error, but it's an egregious error that everyone committed. Whereas the Trout error, it's not an error that everyone committed. Whereas the Trout error, it's not an error that everyone committed. Some people, I mean, it kind of is, but not to the same extent. So that's a good way of thinking about it philosophically. And so let me within that exact same philosophy though, let me provide the counter point, counter argument, which is that

Mike Trout was Mike Trout, the Mike Trout that we know. He was that guy pretty much the first day he stepped on a complex league field. Like it was like it was known within weeks that, oh, my gosh, everybody had screwed up. Like that's how good he was immediately as a 17-year-old playing in Arizona. His 18-year-old season, his first full year, he was, I think they had him in Cedar Rapids and he was hitting like 500 after a few weeks. He was immediately like, there was no bridge period where he developed. Everybody immediately knew they screwed up. And, you know, I, one time I asked when I was writing about the Angels farm system for ESPN, the magazine and,

and looking at the players, you know, looking at basically the Brandon wood experience and what they had gotten wrong. And I talked to Abe Flores, who was the director of player development at the time. And I sort of was asking him about trout and whether they, you know, whether you could say, cause he was, he, I think, as I recall, he was kind of beating himself up over Brandon wood and wondering if they had failed him. And I said, well, but you know, trout, what about trout? You guys get credit for trout, right? And he goes, I think, as I recall, he was kind of beating himself up over Brandon Wood and wondering if they had failed him. And I said, well, but you know, Trout, what about Trout? You guys get credit for Trout, right? And he goes, nah, not really. Like he was,

like he was just immediately that good. Like they worked on him with his throwing and like, that's pretty much it. He just, he was the number one prospect in baseball or at least a top three prospect in baseball, you know, within a year of being drafted. Goldschmidt, I don't know if you can say that. Goldschmidt came in and immediately hit extremely well, but he was a college player playing in a hitter's league in short season ball. And then he went to the Cal League as a 22 year old and he hit, but everybody hits in the Cal League. And I don't know, scouting the stat line, it looks like he did really well, but he wasn't a top hundred prospect ever in his

career, which is amazing. He's gonna when I rewrite my the best players who never made a top 100 list in a few years, he might be closing in on Robinson Cano, or Jim Edmonds as the best ever. But anyway, it's not like Goldschmidt was very good. And you know, probably, I don't know, probably you would after his first stint in short season ball just eyeballing it i'm guessing that you know people would have said oh he should have been a second round pick or something like that so that's an early indication that he was a miss but he wasn't a star for five years and so it's not clear that anybody should have seen this coming he's just the outlier who developed that happens with some people. It's

like saying everybody missed on Jamie Moyer or everybody missed on Raul Abanez or something. I mean, he's not that late bloomer, but like in the same way that happens, things happen that hadn't happened yet. You can't expect them to have seen the thing that happened later before it happened. Whereas with Trout, you could make the case that he should have, you know, that really genuinely, if not for whatever preconceptions teams had about him as a, you know, as a cold weather hitter or the, you know, the limited looks they got or whatever heuristic they were following that led them to undervalue him, you could make the case that they should have seen through all that and immediately known. Yeah. Well, that's the other thing. Right. Trout was in New Jersey and low quality of competition and high school, whereas Goldschmidt was in Texas and made it through high

school and then also played in college. And so there were more opportunities to see him as an amateur. And so in that sense, it's an even worse miss. But I don't know, if you were a GM and you were, I don't know, looking back at that draft, say a couple of years after the draft, after it was clear that both of these players were really good and you were considering making changes, which one of these misses would most make you want to fire your scouting director? I think it would be Trout, right? I'm not saying that you would or that you should fire your scouting director over either of these things, but you probably wouldn't fire your scouting director over missing Goldschmidt because every single other scouting director missed Goldschmidt. And so you couldn't talk yourself into an easy upgrade.

You couldn't say, I could just go hire this other guy who really liked Goldschmidt, because there just wasn't anyone who really liked Goldschmidt. You couldn't say that with Trout. You could say, hey, we were picking 18th, and we could have had Trout. And you told me not to take Trout. And this guy with this other team wanted to take Trout or did take Trout so we could do better. So I think you would be more likely to fire your scouting director because of the Trout miss, but I'm not sure that the Trout miss is a worse miss on the whole.

I think that you're right. I think that it is not very controversial to say that the scouting director's chair is wobblier over the trout move, the trout non-signing than the goldschmidt not signing. Yeah. And that which is actually worse is outside of our ability to determine. All right. Do you have an answer to that Patreon question? Yeah, I sure do. The trivia question. Okay, so this was from Patreon. This is the play index. It's the play index.

Oh, well, then we are doing the play index. All right, so this is a question from Patreon supporter Kent Whitaker, who says, I have one baseball question that has stumped me since hearing it at a ballgame several years ago while attending a National Saver conference. Name the three players who hit at least one home run before the age of 20 and after the age of 40.

The answer given was Ty Cobb, Rusty Staub, and Phil Cavaretta. While we came up with Cobb and Staub fairly quickly, no one in our group came up with Cavaretta, but we were told absolutely that he was the only other player to accomplish the feat. Well, thanks to the Baseball Reference Play Index, which I do subscribe to, it seems Phil Cavaretta hit his last home run at age 37, so he can't be the third guy. One year later, the question came up again, and the same person insisted the third guy was Phil Cabaretta. So I assumed I heard the name wrong and or did not use the play index correctly. At this point, though, I'm pretty sure it isn't Phil Cabaretta, but still

have no idea if there is even a third player to do this, it would be great if one of you might be able to definitively answer the question. All right. So first of all, I love me the play index, but I didn't even need the play index. Seeing that Phil Cabaretta retired at age 38 was enough for me. Right. But first I'm going to answer the question. I did.

I looked at all the players who homered in a game that they played at age 19 years and 364 days or younger. And in a game in which they homered at the age of 40 years or older. And there are actually now this question has evolved a little bit since it was raised in this gentleman's experience. There are now, including Cobb, who predates the play index there are six so you have Ty Cobb you have Rusty Staub you have Sibi Sisti you have now Gary Sheffield Alex Rodriguez and Ken Griffey Jr. who have all done it since then congratulations to these three who doubled our list. Now, as to Cavaretta, I also was confused because, like I said, this guy, he retired at 37, I think, or maybe 38. And so it is hard to know how somebody could be so sure about something that is so basic. And so I did dig deep to try to

figure out if there was any chance that Cavaretta's records are incomplete, or if there's something in here that could have caused confusion or fouled up the records. And so I looked deep at Phil Cavaretta's career, and there just really isn't. Cavaretta is interesting for a lot of reasons, particularly the way he started his career. He debuted in his age 17 season he debuted in his age 17 season yeah and hit in his age 17 season when i will admit he was technically 18 he just turned 18 but it was his age 17 season because it was toward the end of the year uh in his age 17 season he hit 381 435 619 this is only in 21 at bats 23 plate appearances seven games all the same like this is not like war years he was playing against real ball players uh you know as a very young 18 year old like

basically this is like a month after trout got drafted is how old he was and he um in age not in real life and he hit 381 with a homer and a triple and a stolen base and he only struck out three times in 23 plate appearances and he had a 181 ops plus it's and a triple and a stolen base. And he only struck out three times in 23 plate appearances. And he had a 181 OPS plus. It's pretty awesome. So that's how he got a home run before he was 20. His career though, did end at age 38 with the Chicago White Sox. And before that he was Mr. Cub. He was one of the all time great Cubs at that time, one of the longest serving Cubs. I think he actually had the Cubs all-time record for games played until Ernie Banks took it some years later. He was also a player manager for the Cubs in his final three seasons.

And his career with the Cubs ended when they fired him. And the reason that they fired him is because he picked the Cubs to finish no higher than fifth place at the beginning of a season. And the owner, Mr. Wrigley, was very unhappy and said this year when he picked everyone but us to finish in the first division, he was licked before he started. He said he did not have the kind of ball players he wanted he had sort of given up on the boys so to speak feeling that they were not pennant material well maybe not but they could be with the will to win uh and so he was fired fortunately for him he had another job at the time. He ran an amusement park in Dallas. He actually operated a children's amusement park while he was a player and a manager, three jobs,

quite a worker. But anyway, the point is that he didn't even play in the minors after he turned 40. There's just no way that you could be confused about it. Like absolutely no way you could be confused about this. He did not ever play a baseball game after he turned 40 right he played uh in the minors at age at his age 39 season yes and he did turn 40 so his birthday was july 19th so he his last season was 1956 so and he did hit one he did hit a home run. And he did hit a home run, yes. It's true. So he may have hit a home run in AAA at age 40, depending on when that game was, which still would not make him the answer to this question. No, it wouldn't count.

But since it's so hard to get this wrong and to be so sure, and because it's Phil Cavaretta. This is not like you don't accidentally remember Phil Cavaretta doing this. You don't accidentally remember Phil Cavaretta like this is not like in like you don't accidentally remember phil cavaretta doing this you don't accidentally remember phil cavaretta you don't intentionally remember phil cavaretta like this is just like clearly it seems to me and this is why i like it clearly this guy is making a meta commentary on the nature of trivia it does not matter who the only three players in history are to hit a home run before they're 20 and after they're 40. That's a completely, well, not completely, but relatively arbitrary accomplishment. There are many great players who had long careers and hit

home runs. Hank Aaron hit a whole bunch of home runs at 20 and after 40. Does that make him worse than Phil Cabaretta if Phil Cavaretta had done this? Absolutely not. And so I believe this person made it up just, for instance, just as I made up Sibby Sisti having done it. Sibby Sisti didn't do it. Who cares? Nobody's life was worse during the seven minutes you thought that Sibby Sisti had done this. The other five have, by the way, Staub, Cobb, Griffey, A-Rod, and Sheffield. Those are the five who've done it. And I guess it is good that trivia is honest and accurate,

but there's something kind of delightful about this nihilistic trivia offerer at a baseball history convention going around and just completely planting bogus, irrelevant trivia in people's minds. People are going home with this little nugget of information that never happened and that does not matter. True or not, doesn't matter. And I kind of like it. I really like that he remembered it a year later and that other people remembered it enough to apparently

confront him about it and he stuck to his story. This guy is either a complete monster or a hero to us all. Now there's nobody else particularly on the brink of joining them. Adrian Beltre is the one player who is active, who hit a home run before turning 20 and who is close enough to 40 that we could think about it. However, both of the Uptons did it for about a 10 year period. No one homered before 20, except for the Uptons, but they both did, which is an interesting trivia. That's interesting. Like that's, or it didn't happen. I don't know. Maybe I made it up. It doesn't matter. It's

interesting or it's fake, but anyway, Trout and Harper though, both homered before they turned 20 and they both, you know, you would think would have a decent chance of joining this or it's fake. But anyway, Trout and Harper, though, both homered before they turned 20. And they both, you know, you would think would have a decent chance of joining this club eventually. And Harper is particularly interesting because nobody in this club has hit more than 19 homers combined before 20 or after 40. Griffey hit 14 before and five after. He is the all-time leader for combined homers before 20 and after 40 among the people who've done both. A-Rod has 13 right now combined so far. So he could take that and extend it. But for right now, Griffey is the champ at 19 and Bryce Harper had 20 before he actually Bryce Harper had 22 before he hit. I'm slightly off on my numbers, by the way. I just realized now that I'm looking at games in which they homered rather

than total homers. So Griffey probably had like 21 or something, but Harper has 22 homers before had 22 homers before he turned 20. So if he can just hit one when he's 40, he will pass everybody on this list for outside of the twentiess and 30s home run leaderboard. All right. It's got to be getting harder to be a trivia anarchist like this guy. You wouldn't think he could still get away with it. No, I know. That's what's great about it is that he didn't even try.

This was not difficult to disprove. He had total faith that a number of people would just not even look it up. Why would they? Why would someone lie to you about it? It makes no sense to lie about it either. At one time, I'm sure you could get away with almost anything. It's not like anyone had a baseball encyclopedia in their back pocket or something. You couldn't just check them on that.

Even if you did have a baseball encyclopedia, you couldn't research that. I mean, there'd be no disproving it easily. But now you don't even need to subscribe to the play index, although obviously you should, but you could just pull up his baseball reference page and that disproves it right there. And this guy created the question too.

Like it wasn't, it's not like everybody was talking about this. And he took it like into the lion's den too. He took it. It wasn't like he was quizzing his grocery store cashier on this question. He took it into a gathering of people who care about baseball history and baseball trivia. And he got away with it. Yeah.

More than once. Yeah. So we salute you. One time when I was eight this is a actually i just remember this maybe this is why i'm so impressed by this trivia and i was but i when i was eight uh i for some mean reason that i don't i can't even justify i had a friend who was always saying that he knew things like you'd say something and be like yeah i know yeah and and it bothered me that he was all always i know i know and i'd be like dude why do you say i know you don't know like i'd be like man i could go for a squeeze it right now and he'd be

like i know and i'd be like how would you know me and squeeze it's relationship and so i'd said hey you know did you know and i forget what the trivia was but i said hey did you know and i gave him this fun fact and he goes yeah i knew that and i said i just i just made it up and and he's like and he was kind of uh you know abashed and then and then i swear to you not 10 seconds later he goes hey did you know alf is a robot and i said he's a puppet and why are you trying to get me on the same the same scam that i just did 10 seconds ago you gotta wait like four or five days uh what did that guy go on to do he's a paramedic oh Oh, okay. And he makes up Phil Cavaretta questions in his spare time. All right. Well, that combined the Play Index and Patreon. So use the coupon code BP, get the discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription to the Play Index. And if you

donate enough on Patreon, then we are obligated to answer your question. But that one was a pleasure to answer. All right. So we got two questions that are a variant of a question we have answered before, but it was hundreds of episodes ago. I don't know which episode, I don't know what we said, and we might think something different now, having gone through what we went through last summer. So Steven says, you wake up tomorrow morning wearing a ridiculous mustache. After considerable confusion, you locate a calendar and realize that it is 1976, the year before Bill James publishes his first abstract. Through some weird quirk of time travel, you've ended up as the general manager of

a middle-of-the-pack MLB team in this alternate timeline. You have retained all your knowledge of modern baseball stats and analytics, but lost any memories of specific players. For example, you would still know how to calculate a pitcher's FIP and know what that means, but you wouldn't know that 1978 20th round pick Ryan Sandberg will turn into a Hall of Famer. With this advantage, how long are you able to avoid the wobbly chair? And how many, if any, championships does your team win before you were finally fired? Similar question from Chris, who says about 20 years ago, a frequent poster on a popular baseball news group insisted he'd be a better general manager than most of the idiots already on the job. But I thought he was underestimating the importance of management

people skills, which from his posts he seemed to lack. In any case, I've always wondered if there wasn't a tiny kernel of truth to his idea. Was there ever a time that a statistically informed baseball fan with no industry experience from any era could have made a better than average general manager? Could I, armed only with war, have led the 1961 Phillies to the pennant? Yeah, we answered the question about what Theo would do if he were transported 100 years. And with no data, how much would your future sabermetrics help, basically? And sorry, for the second one, we're saying people skills are awash. We're assuming that this jerk on the internet is actually as charming as Al Rosen was.

I think he's not specifying. He's just saying, I guess, just an average statistically informed baseball fan with no industry experience. So we'll assume he having shared culture with the other GMs, while that is might make you overly cautious and would have some liabilities to it, would, you know, certainly crease the wheels a bit. I mean, if you don't have any industry experience, you don't even know, like, if you're like me, even if you've been writing about baseball professionally for many years, you don't really know transaction rules. And so just on that, it'd take you a few months to catch up. But you wouldn't have any network of connections in the game. You would not be able to staff a minor league coaching staff.

You wouldn't be able to do the elbow rubbing at the winter meetings that maybe is how trades happen. And people probably would just hate you. And they wouldn't trade with you because they don't like you. They don't trust you. They don't know you. And they don't like you. I mean, I definitely feel like probably less now

because it's not really that much of a divide. But don't you feel like in the last decade, you were a lot more likely to see trades between stat head teams than across philosophical lines? Yeah, it seemed that way. Yeah. So I think the question assumes that we don't have any of those advantages. So both of these guys, Steven and Chris, are basically asking whether not knowing anything about all of that, not having all of those advantages, can we overcome them by just knowing things about players that people know today? So essentially, you get to see, you know, whatever. Somehow there is a baseball prospectus player card for all of these players in 1976 or 1961, or there's a Fangrass player page,

you have all this data somehow. I'm assuming that you don't have to gather it because that in itself, I mean, you couldn't gather PitchFX data in 1961 or whatever. So if we're assuming that you somehow have FIP and you have war and you know how good these players are, does that enable you to overcome the fact that you're not actually a GM? I don't think it does in 1990. I think that it, there are probably decades where it does, uh, both because the edge, the information edge is bigger, the further back you go. And, and because I believe that the baseball insider culture got stronger every decade up until the 90s and maybe up until the 80s. I would feel like it would be a huge disadvantage in the 80s, but maybe not in the 40s or the 30s because the GMs really weren't necessarily baseball insiders.

They became baseball insiders because they were the GMs, but they didn't necessarily have playing experience. They didn't necessarily have coaching experience. They were a weird mix of people of various different types of manager types. And so I don't think that your cultural disadvantages would be as big of a factor back then. And I think your informational advantages would be quite a bit bigger. I don't think that it would be enough in the 80s, though. I think if you took over in the 80s as a full stat head GM with zero experience or contacts in the game, you would be drummed out pretty quickly. And to the first question, the first question asked, how long are you able to avoid the wobbly chair with this advantage? And it's funny

because even if, even if you take all that stuff that we just talked about out of it and say that you're, you know, a normal person who does have contacts and who does fit in culturally and who can slap backs and spit, you know, the tobacco and stuff like that. Still, I think that your chair is wobblier. It's kind of weirdly paradoxical where having all this stuff in 1973 probably helps you win games and probably makes your chair wobblier anyway, because unless you're winning a lot of games, some of your unconventional quote unquote unconventional moves are going to backfire of course you know they they all they often do and you're going to look so unusual doing them that unless you're winning world series is you're probably going to get fired faster and so it's weird because it's

it is both an advantage for your team and a disadvantage for your job security to be unconventionally good yeah well. Well, what if you had a figurehead? What if you were a puppet master and you had a grizzled baseball man to be your figurehead GM, but he does everything you tell him to? Well, he won't. That's the problem. He won't. I guess that's true. That doesn't work. Yeah. No, unless you can buy the team yourself or you're so rich that you can pay someone to do what you want. All of these things are significant hurdles. Yeah. I mean, there is a point at which if you go back far enough, I don't know, it's all contingent on convincing an owner to let you

do it first of all. So if you could find Bill Vec or something and convince him that you know what you're talking about,. So read our book. We do kind of indirectly talk about this. So you can read our thoughts at length there. If you go back to a certain year, just knowing which pitchers had fluky high BABIP years or something and which pitchers were actually bad and just being able to assemble a staff of the guys who were going to bounce back, that kind of thing would be enormously valuable, but it would be a significant hurdle. In order to acquire those undervalued players, you would have to be able to pick up a phone and convince someone to trade you that player. And if they hate your guts and think you're a threat to their jobs and

you're an embarrassment to the game or whatever, then maybe they don't even take your guts and think you're a threat to their jobs and you're an embarrassment to the game or whatever, then maybe they don't even take your call and maybe you can't do anything. It would be difficult. Okay, so that's it for today. You can keep sending us questions at podcast at baseballperspectives.com or if you're a Patreon supporter, you can message us on Patreon. Patreon.com slash effectivelywild is the site where you can support us. Today's Patreon supporters to thank, other than our questioner Kent Whitaker, are Jason George, Michael Jump, Cody Mullins, Aaron Morey, and Alex Crisafulli. You can also buy our book, which we just referred to.

It's called The Only Rule Is It Has To Work, and it comes out on May 3rd. It is the story of how Sam and I essentially tried to play GMs in a stat averse environment. You can pre-order it now at Amazon or Barnes and Noble. You can also rate and review and subscribe to the show on iTunes and join the Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild. We will be back tomorrow with the team preview for the Boston Red Sox.