Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 870: Reevaluating the Astros

Episode Date: April 26, 2016

Ben and Sam banter about Matt Albers, Mike Trout, and front-office hiring trends, then discuss whether the Astros have answered the doubts about their rebuild.

I never thought that this could happen to me In only seven days It would take a hundred of us For memories to fade Good morning and welcome to 870 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives, brought to you by The Play Index at BaseballReference.com and from our loyal Patreon supporters.

I'm Sam Miller, along with Ben Lindberg of FiveThirtyEight. Hey, Ben. Hello. How are you? Feeling good. What about? About our book, which we are a week away from releasing. And thanks to a lot of people who've pre-ordered, many of whom listen to this podcast, is already receiving a second printing. So that is a good sign. Yeah. I think To Kill a Mockingbird also got a second printing. So that is a good sign. Yeah, I think the Kill a Mockingbird also got a second printing. So yeah, it also got some others, but it started with the second one. Yeah. Yeah, I'm really excited for everyone to read the book and for, you know, reviews and media appearances and all of that hype stuff. But I'm more excited for people who listen to this podcast to read it because we've been talking about it on the show for a year and we did the whole thing because of this podcast and we write about the podcast in the book.

So this is kind of the core target market. I hope that lots of other people will find and like the book. But people who listen to this podcast are people who should like it in theory the most. Yeah, I think it has been an overwhelmingly positive experience from the first day onward. But the worst part of it is definitely the period where nobody can read it. And you're just sort of stuck waiting to see if they will enjoy it. Yep. All right, that's out of the way.

Anything else? Did you see Matt albers in action yesterday kind of although i i didn't really i saw lots of reaction and and i watched i think i watched like a four second clip on mute and nothing nothing happened that made me get the phenomenon so explain this it's much better not on mute and i will send it to you now, and I will play it now for the listeners. And if you don't want your children listening to be exposed to cursing middle relievers until they're older, then just skip ahead a few seconds or cover their ears. What a good play by Matt Albers.

Another scoreless inning for Matt Albers. As he is through the inning Will go to the line 6-5 Chicago Wow It's actually a book reference It is He didn't know it

But he is What did we decide it was called a couple days ago Not a callback but a call forward He is calling forward to a scene from the book that is very similar. So this is Matt Albers recording the final out of the eighth inning yesterday in a one-run game on a very nice fielding play. He fielded a bunt and threw it to first in one motion. And that was his 30th scoreless outing. That's, if you don't count inherited runners scoring.

And he was pretty psyched. So if that is how excited he gets about an exciting hold, then I look forward to one day, perhaps him getting to celebrate a save, because I can only imagine that he would use even more interesting language. It is amazing how rarely the dugout mic picks up profanity. Yeah. Every single time I hear a mic start to pick up dugout chatter after a home run or after a guy goes back to the dugout, I am braced. And it's almost never, it's weird because it's an extremely profane, maybe it's not extremely profane –

maybe it's not as profane in the majors because there are fans sitting a few feet away. I think we've talked about that, though. I think that we think that the sound doesn't carry that well out of the dugout, and so maybe they don't have to censor themselves. But I'm surprised. I mean, you know, there's 25 guys excitedly pounding on another person's helmet, yelling at him, yelling for him. And just the language in such a situation, it seemed to me when I was in such a situation, was very quickly profane. And I'm surprised at how well-behaved major leaguers are when the mics are on

them. Of course, the crowd noise and the stadium noise is slightly louder in the major leagues than it was in the Pacific Association, so maybe that helps drown out some of the things. You definitely do, though, hear the dugout

in a lot of these home run reaction shots where the guy goes into the home run line or whatever in the dugout, in a lot of these home run reaction shots where the guy goes into the home run line or whatever in the dugout, often the mic is turned on, and you do hear, but you don't hear the bad stuff. No. Anyway, Matt Albers. Yep. Excited man.

Yeah, three games finished this year without a save. Ryan Webb has won, so Albers is at 91 lifetime and Webb is at 99. And just curious, how about Fernando Abad? Have you noticed? I have not checked on Fernando Abad. Well, he's the sleeper. He's the third place guy. He's the Kasich of this race. And last year he sort of slipped into the conversation a little. He's only about 20-some behind right now. Yeah. Well, polling suggests he would do well against Clinton. He's pitching.

He has not allowed a run yet this year. He's thrown nine and a third scoreless innings, struck out 12. I don't know if he's finished. Doesn't look like he's finished any. He has not finished one this season. Okay. All right. All right.

And quick thing, Rob Arthur and I wrote something for FiveThirtyEight, which is up now. I'll link to it in the usual places. It's about the front office hiring boom in baseball over the last several years and how many teams have hired analysts. So, you know, as recently as like four years ago, there were a third of teams had no full-time statistical analyst on staff and now everyone does and the numbers have really skyrocketed it's about that it's about gender imbalance a little bit because these employees are overwhelmingly male but it's also a bit about scouting because of the old moneyball era concern that stat heads would drive scouts out of the game, that they'd make them obsolete, that they'd make them redundant.

And you were not surprised when I told you about this finding, but I think some people might be, that Rob and I looked at media guides from this spring and from the spring of 2009 mostly, or in some cases 2010, and compared the number of full-time scouts that teams employed then and now. And teams employ way more scouts now, post-Moneyball-inspired stat-head hiring boom than they did before. It's about 10 more full-time scouts on average per team now than it was seven or so years ago, which is a lot. And so, you know, any concerns about stats becoming obsolete are, you know,

totally unfounded or way premature, at least according to what we found, because while some pro scouts or advanced scouts may have been replaced by a video or statistical analysis scout doing preparation on major league baseball, that has been far outstripped by more amateur scouts, more international scouts. Teams are expanding into countries where they had no presence a decade ago and just really flooding the zone with scouts in all of those areas. So you are not surprised. I think it makes a lot of sense that this is the case, but other people might be surprised to hear that just based on the rhetoric from some articles about how this is a tougher time for scouts because of stats taking over teams.

Yeah, it's the least surprising thing in the world that there are more scouts. Although, sorry, did you break down advanced scouts versus other stuff? We didn't, but advanced scouts are really a minority of scouts. No team really had more than a handful at any time that I looked at. So I think in some cases, some teams may have downsized a little in that area. Although even if they got rid of advanced scouts

who travel and go to actual games, they replace them with a scout, essentially, who watches video or does some sort of preparation. Some teams have people who are actually, you know, their titles are scout, video scout, or advanced scout, but doesn't travel with teams. So that has maybe been a slight impact. Maybe there are fewer of those guys, but it's almost imperceptible next to the expansion and other types of scouts. All right. Anything else?

Nope. The reason why it's obvious, by the way, is that teams are really rich and teams have tons of money. And the only thing they can do other than give it to players, which they haven't really done in a way that keeps pace with how much revenue they're getting, is hire people or let the owner keep it and pad his bank account. But now that there are limits on amateur spending and international spending, and there's revenue sharing, and there's luxury

tax, and all these things kind of combining to keep payrolls down, teams are more willing to expand in these other areas. So they're hiring lots of people who are cheap. And as Rob and I found in the article, it makes a big difference. Yeah. And if you want to describe the modern front office in a way that reflects a difference from previous generations, it is this insatiable desire for more information, for more data. And of course, everybody sees scouting reports, scouting in general as creating information, and not just creating information, but creating information that other teams don't have access to. So in a way, the fact that TrackMan and PitchFX and StatCasts are everywhere makes a lot of, you know, a huge amount of the information that teams get

shared information. And you can maybe make a difference by how you process or what you focus on, but everybody's got the information. If you hire a scout though, it's all yours. It's a proprietary. And I think that, uh, GMs love proprietary information. Uh, so it makes perfect sense that they would be hiring more. I think also, um, I think that the average manager, not baseball manager, but manager of any company, uh, just likes to have a lot of people working under them. It's a way that shows that they're winning in their life. And so I think they would probably mostly all rather hire, you know, there's some part of their brain that would rather hire another person than put that money into better nutrition for low A players. Because there's a, at the end of the day, you can

count how many people work under you but it's hard to count how many hot dogs you've eliminated from the world yeah okay uh there was a game uh dodgers game that went long uh not long ago and uh it was revealed afterward that yasiel puig was the dodgers emergency catcher really which is particularly unusual i mean that is one of that just does never really it's never yasiel puig it's never that guy because not only is he does he have no catching experience that we know of but he's very good and your default is to seems like especially now you unless you happen to have a guy with some catching experience like maybe neil walker or something like that or maybe josh donaldson even that, we're not sure. But unless you have somebody like that,

you default to the guy that you least mind getting hurt. So like the Giants, Andrew Bagley asked the Giants manager, Bruce Bochy, who his was a couple of days ago yesterday, I think. And the answer was Kelby Tomlinson, which is not surprising. Kelby Tomlinson is the last giant that you would name on a Sporkle quiz. And that's usually who your emergency catcher is. Puig, though, is not that. So I think that we're to take this answer seriously. It's particularly funny because it's Puig who, I don't know, like, Puig has the arm. Certainly.

But otherwise, he's not the guy that you think, who is the most focused player on this field? Uh-huh. And, I mean, it would just, I don't know. You can imagine a good novella written about Yasiel Puig, emergency catcher. Because there's a lot of psychology to Yasiel Puig's game. Yeah. Well, after the ridiculous plays he made this past weekend in

colorado i do not want to see him behind the plate ever i want to see him in the outfield where he can throw balls hundreds of feet and not get hurt uh i'd be interested in knowing every team's emergency shortstop like if you had to bring if you had to bring an outfielder in or a catcher or a pitcher you have to have a non-infielder playing infield. Anyway, further updates on small things. Many confirmations that sometimes diabetes can feel a bit like don't-a-be-dees is an accurate transcription of the commercial I thought that I had heard. There is in fact a company that is going around routinely saying sometimes diabetes can feel a bit like don'tabetes and does not see any issue with that pun. Third, Mike Trout homered yesterday. And so just a quick update,

he is now on an 11 war pace for the season. He is third in the American League and fifth in baseball in war, which means that this time a week from now, I expect he will be leading baseball. I think I tweeted last year something like, I forget what it was. It was around this time in the season. And it was basically like playing off of Russell Carlton's idea of when samples are big enough to start getting meaningful information. And my conclusion was it is when you look at the leaderboard and Mike Trout is leading the league in war. That is when we know that our stats have stabilized. And so he's pretty close. He also now has a 171 OPS plus, which is higher than his career average. Mike Trout is having one of his best years. Awesome. All right.

That's all I've got for banter, I believe. Okay. All right. So I wanted to talk about a episode that we did, episode 166 of this podcast back in March 2013 was about the Astros. And specifically, it was about an article that was written by Danny Knobler

about the Astros and what this kind of... We were not kind to this article. We found that it was creating this bizarre straw man where in his framing of it, scouts thought that the Astros were going to be bad that year and blogger types. And possibly bad forever. And that's the non-straw man part, I think. Assuming that his scouts, assuming that he actually found a representative sample of scouts,

and that blogger types thought that they were going to be pretty good or something like that, which wasn't really true anyway, that led to a conversation about whether we, the general community, were too optimistic about the Astros long term. And along with the Danny Knobler article, part of the material that we used to discuss was a Bill James quote from, I think, the Sabre seminar that winter, in which he said that, I forget the exact words, but with confident type phrasing, he said that he had little doubt that five years from now,

the Astros would be winning 95 games every year. So it is now, this is year four of that. It is not five years yet. It is year four. This is the fifth season, by the way, that we've been doing this podcast. That's a long time. It really is. It is. When you consider that we were, that I sort of, the whole first season, I was planning it to be a one season thing. Anyway, it is now year four and the Astros, of course, as most people are aware, have gotten off to a very poor start. I think that makes it a little bit more interesting to talk about it,

but it is not my intention to focus on that poor start as particularly relevant. However, it's there. Poor start plus underwhelming finish last year. Well, that's what I was going to say, yes. It is relevant that since they've been – they're going on like 100 games as a 500 or so club now. Yeah, sub-500. Sub-500 club. And so I thought that we could revisit both Danny's article, Bill James' prediction, and what we said.

This is going to be us talking about us talking about other people talking. That's the episode. So first off, one of the central claims of this Danny Nobler article was Scout's conclusion that there were not actually really any good players on the Astros that it wasn't just that they weren't good then, but that people couldn't see the good players on the next good Astros team on that roster yet. And I stuck up for that roster. I said that while it's true that I didn't see much star potential other than Altuve, that it did seem like they had a pretty good core of players

who could be major leaguers on a good team, who could be starters, if not all-stars, and that that goes a long way because then you don't have to trade or sign free agents to fill every position. You have guys who are cost-controlled and can contribute. And I named, who did I name? I named Jason Castro, Chris Carter,

Matt Dominguez, and I think I named Marwin Gonzalez and Justin Maxwell. And Altuve was the gimme. I get, you know, everybody knew Altuve, but it is interesting to me that the rest are not really. Castro is still a major leaguer on this roster, but probably the weakest spot on that roster. He had a very good year that year and then has had very poor years since then. And this year is one of the worst hitters in baseball, although leading the American League in triples. in baseball, although leading the American League in triples.

Chris Carter has a career, but he was allowed to walk as a free agent this offseason. He was, what, non-tendered, I think? Mm-hmm. I think I said Jonathan Villar, maybe, instead of Marwin Gonzalez. Jonathan Villar was traded this offseason for a not that exciting pitcher. He might have—it'll be interesting to see what Cy Snead turns into. He could be a good number three starter, or he could just be a fringy guy who never really makes the jump to the majors. But it's not like the Astros' success over the next five years hinges on Cy Snead, so I think we can call VR's spot on that roster to be fairly irrelevant to this Astros team.

Matt Dominguez flamed out. The defense was not enough to make him. Oh, I said Brandon Barnes at the time. Brandon Barnes was traded with Jordan Lyles for Dexter Fowler, who was then traded for Luis Valbuena. And so there's a contributor on this team that came from Brandon Barnes, although it is not Brandon Barnes. Justin Maxwell was traded in a move that I think we liked the return, but whoever they got back is not contributing for them. And I also praised the pitching staff at the time and thought that it was interesting, but Bud Norris, of course, is gone. Lucas Harrell, and bad. Lucas Harrell is not a contributor on this team.

And Philip Umber. Yeah, Harrell is one guy that Lunau mentioned in that article as a future contributor, along with Castro and Altuve. Exactly. And then Philip Umber, of course, did not make it through the season. And then Philip Umber, of course, did not make it through the season. Meanwhile, and so anyway, so this is to say that, in fact, other than the obvious Altuve, I think that the general perception was right. There really wasn't a lot of the next great Astros team on that roster.

It wasn't simply a matter of them playing the young guys and watching them grow a la the Royals. They didn't really have the young guys to watch them grow, with the exception that nobody saw coming of 6-10 starter that year, Dallas Keuchel, who was named by nobody. Otherwise, I don't see really anybody on this team who's doing much for this team. We have tons of promising players who were going to be part of the next great Astros team, but that's because they were right in the organization who were going to turn into major contributors. So maybe it would have been better at the time to look at their system as a whole rather than the terrible, you know, 50 win roster. I think what I'm more getting at with this whole question is how, uh, how well we can assess, uh, a team's future four years in the past. And so, I mean, yeah, I think that this is one of the ways

that the article kind of cheated a bit. Like at one point, Jeff Lunau says that he thinks there are seven or eight parts of the next good Astros team that are there right now, but only, I think he only named three that were on the majors. So presumably he was also talking about the minors. And, and yeah, if you look back at their system, Carlos Correa had already been drafted. George Springer was already in the system. Domingo Santana was in the system and he was part of the Carlos Gomez trade. Lance McCullers was already in the system and VR was already in the system and so So was Jonathan Singleton

Who was their top prospect and he didn't turn Into anything but that's how it goes so was Delano DeShields and they lost him in Rule 5 but that's how it goes So yeah no there's but I'm not sure exactly what point To make out of that I mean every Team has prospects at the time and

The Astros at the time had the I think they were as we said in the episode, they were depending on what org rankings you were looking at between fifth and seventh. And we sort of know what that means. So, you know, they had a good system. They didn't have a historically great system. You can sort of say, well, there's not really much at the major league level, but they have a pretty good system. And so I don't know that from that you would draw the conclusion. In fact, I know, flat out, you would not draw the conclusion based on what we know their major league roster to have produced

and what we know their minor league system to have been in the aggregate at the time. That would not lead you to the conclusion that they are going to win 95 games every year, five years hence. And so... I think we said at the time that you wouldn't really say that about any team ever. We did. We absolutely did say that.

But to the degree that we were optimistic, we said also at the time that a huge part of the reason that we, that others were optimistic was actually not about any of the facts on the ground, farm system or major league roster, so much as a general faith in this front office. And we debated, not debated, we hemmed and hawed a little bit about whether that was our bias showing through, how important that is as data. I said that I thought that it was actually more relevant to the team's outlook, to a general outlook for any team than knowing their farm system, that if I were to pick two factors on which to base a team's forecast, I would use the general assessment of their front

office as well as their payroll before I would even look at their farm system. And so let's segue to that question. Would you change how much we prioritized our assessment of the front office? Looking back, I think you had already written your piece about how every team is smart now. And so it's harder to, you know, be extra smart. But do you feel like the Astros front office deserved the extra bonus points that we were giving the club at the time? Because I'm sure we could have found other teams that had similar cost-controlled talent at the major league level and similar strength at the minor league level that we were not so bullish on for the future because we were not so excited about what the front office was going to be able to accomplish using all of their fancy stats.

Were we too taken in by that? Or is where the Astros are a reflection of some extra excellence that they got from Luneau's group? Well, in the article I cited earlier, Rob Arthur ran some analyses to try to figure out what the impact of hiring statisticians was. of hiring statisticians was, and he found that early in the period we were looking at, like 2009 or so, it could make a really huge difference even after controlling for payroll and market size and farm system. Just having a full-time stats person at that time, which is an indication that you had some buy-in and maybe you had been building a stats department for a while could be worth as much as several wins over your next couple years. So it seems like it was really valuable at one point. By 2012, 2013, it was probably less valuable, but I'd imagine there was still something to it. And Lunau had been successful in St. Louis, and I think it was fair To give him some credit for that

And I don't know If we had said The Astros are guaranteed to be good Because they hired a bunch of baseball Perspectives people, I don't think that would have been Fair, but I don't think we were Saying that really either So I don't know, I think there were

Some lines drawn because of The way the Astros operated. You had some sort of old school sniping at them, and then maybe the new school sort of circled the wagons. And, you know, it's like your old thing about how when you try to persuade people of anything, they just become more intractable and set in their own position. So maybe there was some of that where the sniping produced a counter reaction where we were suddenly more confident in the Astros because they had hired this sort of new school front office.

But I think it was fair to be more optimistic about them than we would have been with a different front office that hadn't had anyone accomplished and maybe wasn't doing anything different than the old Astros regime was doing at the time. By the way, also Preston Tucker was in the system. Jared Cozart was on the major league roster and brought back Jake Marisnyk and Rio Ruiz and Mike Fultanovich were in the system and they brought back Evan Gattis.

So if you look at the 2016 team, if you go looking backward, it is a... Did you mention Vince Velasquez before? I didn't mention Vince Velasquez before. Was he in the system? He was. He was drafted in 2010. Okay. So he was in the system.

He brought back Ken Giles. And so if you look at their roster right now, McHugh and a couple of signings in the bullpen and Feldman and Pfister are exceptions, and Colby Rasmus, pretty much every other piece is either was in the system or is the direct result of being in the system. So you can say that the Astros of 2016, in a way, were fully present in 2013. So then I guess that brings you back to the question of whether the Astros of 2016 and 2015 and perhaps 2017, maybe specifically what we think of as they're going to look like in 2017, are a commendation of that roster, or if that's damning, if the fact that they are 6-14 right now

and that they limped to a fairly weak playoff appearance last year as a wild card, whether that is, in fact, condemnation of their roster at the time and whether Nobler's scouts were actually exactly correct and I think that I think it's I don't know is this a good team right I think so I thought so coming into the season it's funny that one of our listeners Samuel pointed out in the Facebook group that the Astros have had the AL player of the week or co-player of the week in every week of the season thus far, and yet they are tied for the worst record in the league. I mean, there's still a ton of talent on this team.

And I mean, I guess it's mostly been the pitching that's been bad, and there were some concerns about the pitching coming into the season. But there is still a ton of young talent on this team. So I'd be surprised if last season, which was, you know, everyone thought the beginning of something and even earlier than we had expected it to begin. I'd be surprised if that turns out to be the peak or the culmination. Yeah, I guess that ultimately in trying to resolve that four-year-old conversation, ultimately in trying to resolve that four year old conversation we have to decide whether we what we think of as a successful

outcome of this process is. Is the standard extremely high for the Astros to be able to claim victory? I mean short of it let's assume let's take World Series out of it because if they win 82 games and that gets them a playoff appearance and then they win the World Series

then all bets are off and then they win the World Series, then all bets are off. And if they win 116 games but don't win the World Series, I think it would be unfair to hold that against them. So leaving playoff success out of this, what would it take, do you think, to convince 2013 Sam and Ben that the Bill James assessment was more correct than the Danny Nobler's Scouts assessment. bad for many years in order to be good. At the end of that, it wasn't just we'll be bad this year, and then we'll be back next year, or even two years, it was three, four, five years down the road. So if you are consigning yourself to being bad for that long, then in order for it to have been worth it, theoretically, then you need to be good for quite a while on the other end of that to justify it, right? Because if you were totally terrible for three, four years, then if you just make one playoff appearance on the other

side of that, then that's not worth it. I don't think anyone would sign up for that. So I think you need to be a perennial contender. And I guess we could define that as, I don't know, five years, six years, like the length of a player's pre-free agency service time, basically. If you're good for that amount of time, then I would say you've succeeded regardless of whether you win a World Series during that period. I mean, the odds are still sort of against you to do that because of how hard it is to do that, even if you are really good. But if you make the playoffs year after year for several years, then I would say their plan worked. So they still have a lot of work to do to get there.

Yeah, they do. I think it's fair to say that they are not there yet, that it is not obvious that they're going to get there yeah and i don't know what the expectation at the time was for them in 2016 but i think that probably we would have expected it to be more obvious that they were i mean they're you compare them to the cubs i think and it's fair to say that the cubs were uh the cubs did it much more successfully to date than the Astros did, even though they've accomplished more or less the same thing up until this season. The Cubs look like the surest bet in baseball to be really good for the next five years. And the Astros could be, and you could also still see this, just sort of petering out.

And that they could be the thing that they dreaded uh the most the whole reason that they went into it like this was to avoid that horrible purgatory of the five-year run where you win 75 to 84 wins every year um and then at the end of it you're disappointed and you have to rebuild um that could still happen ironically it could happen that they could this team could end up being exactly the thing that they were they went to all that effort to avoid i i'm not sure which i still think that they're a good team you said that they're still a good team but there's work to do for sure yeah and i think you probably need to be an elite team at some point in the post-rebuilding process to make it worthwhile.

If you don't win a World Series, then you need to be an elite team. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I hate to judge teams on whether they win a World Series or not. No, that's why I'm taking the World Series out of the math because it's so fluky. So ignoring the World Series, then you do have to be. Again, if they win a World Series, it doesn't matter how good or bad they were during this run. I think they'll say, well, you know, we won a World Series. Yeah, sure.

But yeah, if we are evaluating them on the process as opposed to the results, which is what they themselves, that's sort of the standard that they set up, then we probably shouldn't factor that in too heavily. But yeah, I think you need to be what the Cubs are now, which, you know, the Cubs are probably the best team in baseball, certainly the best team in the league. They might not win a World Series, but they did everything possible to win a World Series. Whereas the Astros won a wildcard last year. So they have not been the best team in their league. They have not been the best team in their league They have not been the best team in their division Even necessarily So I think if you are going to sign up for 50 win seasons Then you need to come out of it on the other side

Not just being the 4th or 5th Best team in your league And sort of limping into the playoffs But being the best team in your league At some point Not that your odds of winning a World Series are all that much better As the best team as opposed to the 2nd or 3rd best team in your league at some point. Not that your odds of winning a World Series are all that much better as the best team as opposed to the second or third best team. But still, if you built the best team in baseball, or the best team in your league, at least, then it's a lot easier

to say that it was worth it. One last thing from our conversation is that I talked about the benefit of carrying such a low payroll being that you could, you know, put all that money into bonds. And then when you're ready to spend it, you have all that extra money. So if your true payroll is $130 million based on the fundamentals of your organization, then for those few years, if you were spending $100 million less than that, you ought to be able to spend $170 or $180 when you need it. And the Astros didn't really spend any money this offseason particularly, and they have a $99 million payroll this year, which is $1 million more than the Indians, and 23rd in baseball.

So, and, you know, there are places that they could have spent this off season and there are places they could have upgraded this off season. Do you think that I was wrong and that major league budgets just don't work that way and, or that I underestimated the loss of revenue that goes with this? Or do you think that the Astros are an exception and that for a team in general, they, they could count on that? Or do you think that they are still holding on to those bonds and that for a team in general, they could count on that? Or do you think that they are still holding on to those bonds and that we're going to see the $185, $190 million payroll next year or the year after? Well, it does seem like the way operating budgets work in baseball, you just sort of get your budget for the year and you spend all that money.

Because if you say, I'm going to save $5 million for next year or something, then it just won't ever get spent. It won't be on your budget next year. It doesn't seem like that's the way that budgets work, but it should be the case that if you build a competitive team and you have a lot of cost-controlled talent on that team, then you'd think that would free up more space for free agents and for those final pieces. So I think it was reasonable. We don't know what kind of contract the baseball operations people had with their owner or what sort of expectations they had. You know, if they were told at the time, just, you know, get us through this thing on a Schusting budget for a few years And then I will open up the Pocketbook or the checkbook on the other

Side of that well that would Affect our evaluation Of what they did and Then it depends on whether the owner is True to his word and spends when He says he was going to spend but yeah I mean the Astros are in a position where They should spend I mean

It seems like every win would be valuable for them right now. They do have lots of cheap, productive players on the roster. And so there's room to spend. So yeah, I mean, if they don't spend, if they don't become a top tier payroll team in the next few years, then I think maybe that would retroactively affect my evaluation of what they've done. I don't know. I mean, it was sort of predicated on it's not a small market. And at some point, they should be able to spend to supplement this team with money from outside players. So yeah, if they don't do that, I don't know Whether it's more on the front office or on

Ownership or on front office For trusting ownership and Operating in a way that suggested ownership Would act like that. Last thing the Playoff odds as we have them today Have the Astros finishing with 80.6 wins so round up 500 team and

A 31% chance of making The playoffs. Do you take the over or the under on those assumptions? That seems about right because I would have expected them to be something like a high 80s win team maybe. And now that they've started 6-14, they could play like a high 80s win team and finish as a 500 team. So I'm not confident in taking either the over or the under. That seems like right about where I would place it. Yeah, I think that it would be my bet that the AL West is the division that's won with the fewest wins this year. Yeah. And so that helps. Maybe, I'm not sure that I, yeah, yeah, I think I would take the, I don't know, not gonna, not gonna say I tricked you into giving an answer, not gonna give an answer.

Well, my answer was a non-answer, so I win. All right. That's all. All right, that is it for today. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Today's Patreon supporter shoutouts go to Peter Seltzer, Brock Boner, Jennifer Dow, Daniel Tilling, and Phil McRae. Thank you. You can also buy our aforementioned book. The only rule is it has to work.

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