Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 88: Wil Myers, the Royals, and Rumors About Trading Top Prospects

Episode Date: November 26, 2012

Ben and Sam discuss what we can learn from the rumors that Royals prospect Wil Myers is available via trade.

Good morning and welcome to episode 88 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives. I'm Sam Miller in Long Beach, California. You are Ben Lindberg. Ben, how are you? I am very well. How was your Thanksgiving and Thanksgiving weekend? It was just delightful. very well. How was your Thanksgiving and Thanksgiving weekend? It was just delightful. Very well. How was yours? It was good. I had the traditional Thanksgiving foods, and then I went into my bunker to write player comments for the annual.

Who cooked your food? My great aunt. Who cooked your food? My great aunt. Exceptional. All right. You have brought a topic for us to talk about today that's baseball related. Yeah. I want to talk about the Will Myers rumors and RJ Anderson's article about the Will Myers rumors, which is up on Baseball Perspectives today, today being Monday.

What are the Will Myers rumors? The rumors, I think as, I don't know if it was originally reported by Jeff Passon or maybe Michael Silverman, a Boston writer, but it has been reported that the Royals, and the language differs depending on what rumor you read. But Jeff Passan said that they have been shopping Will Myers, which sort of implies an active role, whereas other writers portray it as listening to offers, which is a much more passive representation of what's happening. But they have, in some sense, let it be known reportedly that they are willing to trade Myers for starting pitching. They have already, of course, acquired some starting pitchers this offseason or signed one they already had, trading for Santana, as we talked about, and then signing Jeremy Guthrie.

But they feel that they are not done. And I guess their position players currently on the team and prospect-wise are stronger than their pitching, and they are open to doing something to correct that imbalance. And Myers, of course, if he is not the top prospect in baseball, he is certainly on the very short list. So it would be something if he were traded. And we talked, I guess it was a couple of weeks ago, about how teams seem to be or might be becoming more willing to trade their young players and possibly even their prospects,

trade their young players and possibly even their prospects, which we theorized could be because it's easier to quantify their value now, or there have been attempts to quantify their value and that by putting a number on it, it has made teams more willing to trade them. And so now there's Myers. And RJ wrote a very good article about this. He quoted both of us, which made it even better. He quoted us doing a podcast, incidentally. Well, he quoted me. And now we're doing a podcast about it. Right.

It works both ways. We're all just kind of flattering each other. Or out of ideas. Yeah. I did want to bring up one theory, or I don't know if you can call it a theory, but I am getting this sense increasingly that the rumors that we read about most often are not necessarily as accurate a representation of the actual market as we generally perceive them to be, I feel. I wrote an article about Justin Upton last week and how he has kind of been on the verge of being traded more or less constantly for the last two and a half years or so. And of course, he hasn't been traded at all. And it seemed like those

rumors kept being refreshed or renewed because Kevin Towers, the Diamondbacks GM, was just extremely willing to talk about Upton's availability or what his status was exactly. And so whenever a writer needed to write a story about a rumor, and Upton is an interesting player, they could go to Towers and Towers would say something, something sort of newsworthy almost or something you could report. Not that he was saying, yeah, we really want to get rid of this guy, but he would say, well, yeah, he's available or there's been interest, something like that. And then that would start a whole new wave of rumors. So I am wondering now if what we generally perceive to be the players that the most trade or free agent activity is centered around has more to do than we typically think with just who's willing to talk about those players.

Does that, I mean, like Justin Upton, is he actually a guy who has been one of the most available players or involved in the most rumors over the last two and a half years? Is he a guy that's really attracting as much attention as you would think just based on Googling results for Justin Upton in trade? Or is it just that he happens to play for a team that has a general manager that is willing to talk to the media about these things? Well, I mean, you're giving the credit to Kevin Towers. I mean, the other half of the rumor is the guy who's reporting it. And not to cast aspersions on any

particular reporter or any particular rumor. Cause I think that rumors reporters actually probably, I don't know, I think some of them in particular do very well. Um, but you know, there's a lot more interest in Justin Upton. There's a lot more scouts. If you're talking to scouts and front office guys and, you know, major league baseball sources, they're talking about Justin Upton a lot more than they're talking about Alexi Amorista. And so you're more likely to hear that rumor. You're certainly much, much, much more likely to turn around and report it, to follow up on it, to try to get more on it.

I'm sure that the bar for reporting is lower. I'm sure that the bar for reporting is lower. And I do wonder when we talked about, I guess, whether it was going to be the case that more of these trades happen. But I think certainly there's going to be more of these types of rumors reported. More players are going to be considered available just because there's like a billion guys doing the reporting right now. And the threshold for reporting, I think they would acknowledge is, is a bit lower in, you know, with Twitter and everything like that. In newsworthiness. I mean, it's, it's worth a tweet or a story now if someone is not interested in someone. It is, yes. So I think that there are – that's one theory.

I think that other theories I might have specifically about Myers or I guess in any case like this, but maybe specifically about Myers. One I think is that the Rays and the A's – well, certainly the Rays have made it known that they're willing to kind of maybe listen to offers on their pitchers, their young pitchers who are also kind of the type of talents that you wouldn't have expected to be available a few years ago. And if you've ever been at a poker table, you know how much players tend to tighten up or loosen up as kind of a unit. A table gets looser, a table gets tighter, and there's a certain amount of wanting to get in on the action, and when one person is willing to listen on those players, you

start thinking, well, geez, I like those players, and you kind of reevaluate what you're willing to part with. I think that— Yeah, or you don't want them to be traded to another team without at least exploring the possibility that you could get them. Yeah, I mean, I could be proven wrong about this, but I think when you talk about Will Myers getting traded, really 98% of the scenarios involve the A's or the Rays. I mean, he's not going to get traded to, well, there are probably a number of teams he's not going to get traded to. He's not going to get traded to the Mets.

He's going to get traded to the Rays or the A's because they have a lot of young pitching and they have the type of front offices that are willing to make these kind of paradigm shifting trades for young players. So, you know, I think if the Rays and the A's weren't in the position they were in, you might not quite hear quite so many of these rumors. So that's one theory, is that it's essentially just the A's and the Rays that are driving it. One theory is that they just don't like him, which RJ kind of talked about, but didn't seem to find much evidence for.

And the precedent of Upton is interesting because I think that Kevin Towers kind of went out of his way to say, early on to say, oh, it's not that we're trying to trade Upton. We love him. We know he's super valuable. We would only trade him for a boatload. But kind of every year it seems to be more clear that there are tensions between him and the organization. ESPN, the magazine wrote a long piece about Justin Upton. And there's certainly tension on his end from these trade proposals going around. And if there's tension on his end, you can imagine that that, you know, that tension would grow in both directions.

So I don't know that there's any evidence that that's the case with Myers, but it's certainly a possibility. And I think a fourth theory that I have that there's probably not much evidence for, but it's kind of a pet theory I have, is that if a team drafts, Myers was a third-round pick, which kind of means that the Royals drafted him with a, I mean, they scouted him really well. They knew him backwards and forwards, and they knew his limitations. They thought of him as a third-round pick.

They thought of him as a better player than the other teams that passed on him at the time, but they had really studied him, and they had an idea of what kind of player Myers was going to be. They did not expect him to be the number three prospect in baseball three years later, expect him to be the number three prospect in baseball three years later. And I think that it might be the case that the team that drafts a, you know, a mid round or a late round pick has a harder time adjusting their, their expectations of him when he breaks out. I always wondered whether that was the case with, with Brandon Belt, where the Giants, you know, the Giants scouts obviously weren't so enamored with him that they drafted him in the first round.

They drafted him, you know, kind of in a middle round. And I don't know, it could just be that they, because of that, they kind of have a fixed idea in their head about what that player is. Whereas a team that, you know, if you're not that team, if you don't have quite so much invested in him and you haven't studied his strengths and weaknesses, you might not have such a hard time adjusting. Yeah, I like that theory. Or maybe even a theory that I like less is that maybe there's sort of less pressure on a team or if a team uses its number one pick on a player, then it sort of feels that it needs to justify that to the fan base or to get something great out

of that pick possibly. Whereas it looks later in the draft, it's like, well, we never said he was that good. Oh, no. And you're cashing in. I mean, you're essentially cashing in before your investment goes broke again on you. That definitely makes some sense to me, the idea that they can profit right now. They might not see the downside of trading him quite as much as they would if he was the number two pick in the draft.

Looking at the list that RJ did, RJ did a lot of legwork to look up all previous prospects who had been ranked somewhere in Meyer's vicinity to see which of them had been traded. I think he did within three years of that ranking. And he found that only one, Brad Penny, had been traded before he actually appeared for the team that drafted him. Everyone else at least got a cup of coffee or something before the team decided to trade him. But looking at that list, there was kind of a mix of players who went on to be quite good and quite a few players who fit the narrative that their original team saw something in them that the prospect evaluators in this case baseball america did not uh guys like delman young or andrew miller or andy marte guys who never

panned out or certainly didn't pan out to the extent that their prospect ranking would have led you to think that they would. Looking at that list, if you were a team interested in Myers, how much would it give you pause that the Royals are making him available? I don't know. Probably not that. In this specific case, not that much pause. I think that there's, I mean,

there doesn't seem to be any makeup issue with Myers, and that's the one thing that you would think that the Royals would have an information advantage on. I mean, there's so much scouting and there's so much information available about prospects that I would feel pretty confident in my ability to scout a player. And it makes perfect sense for the Royals to trade a position player for a pitcher. There's a clear incentive. If it does for anyone, I guess, which I don't know if it does,

to trade a young hitter for a young pitcher is the answer. I mean, if they called me up and offered him to me, like if they sort of, if it just kind of became known in the industry that they're more receptive to these offers than you would normally expect, then it probably wouldn't freak me out. If they called me up and they were like, boy, that John Danks, you're looking good. Do we have anything we, you know,

if they start offering him for guys, then I might be a bit wary of it. But I don't know. I wouldn't be that worried based on the information that's available. You know what's interesting to me is that Passon wrote that everybody is based on the information that's available you know what's interesting to me is that um passin wrote that uh everybody is available on the royals uh alex gordon and billy butler and mike mistakis and eric osmer and will myers everybody except that uh alcides

escobar and salvador perez which surprised me and both of those guys are are good and they have good contracts and salvador prez has an incredible contract and salvador prez might be like my second or third favorite player so i can see why they're attached to him but like why say anybody is untouchable like what does that say to myers right i mean if you if you tell myers hey look you know we're just we'll listen on anything don't take it personally i, we're not going to trade you. I mean, nobody's untouchable, Will, except Sal Perez. Yeah, it sort of surprises me because the Royals are known as sort of a tight-mouthed team.

They're not a team that talks like Kevin Towers, so you don't typically hear these things about them. Passon's a Kansas City guy, though. That's where he came from. So maybe he's got a little bit of an edge. Yeah, that is possible. I guess it would be like the ultimate irony or the ultimate suffering for Royals fans. All this time, the narrative about the Royals or about Dayton Moore in particular has been that he was very good at evaluating young talent and scouting and drafting, but not so good at major league moves. So I guess it would kind of be the ultimate suffering for the Royals

if it turned out that he did manage to promote all these talented players to the majors and then traded them away in bad trades as his his weakness came back to bite him i don't expect that to happen but that has kind of been always the the concern with this royals rebuilding movement that he wouldn't be able to supplement the young players with the veterans that you need or the right veterans that you need. So I hope that doesn't happen for the Royals fans who are listening. Okay. All right.

So that's the end of the show. We'll be back tomorrow with episode 89. And we are one and a half days away from the email Wednesday. So if you want to email us a question a little bit in advance, the email address is? Podcast at baseballperspectives.com. And we'll be back tomorrow.