Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 898: The Expendable Ex-Superstars Edition

Episode Date: June 6, 2016

Ben and Sam reevaluate the Dodgers’ mega-trade from 2012 and discuss how far Carl Crawford, James Shields, and Ryan Howard have fallen....

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Hope you'll never grow old Hope you'll never grow old Hope you'll never grow old Hope you'll never grow old Good morning and welcome to episode 898 of Effectively Wild 898 898 Yeah 897 in. 898. 898. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:00:26 897 in the can. Actually, 898 in the can, because we already pre-recorded a future episode. I don't think we know about that yet. Yeah, well, it's on iTunes. Brought to you by The Play Index at BaseballReference.com, as well as our supporters at Patreon. I'm Sam Miller, along with Ben Lindberg of FiveThirtyEight. Hey, Ben, how are you? All right.
Starting point is 00:00:47 All right. I'm going to have to retcon that when we get to that future episode. This was a weekend with many reminders of our mortality, so I'm glad that it's time for the podcast again. It was tough for former superstars making somewhere between $20 and $ million dollars this season there was yeah so that's what we're talking about oh okay well you keep taking my banter for actual topics what's a retcon i i know i i sort of know the word retcon but i feel like i don't know it in the sense that you're using it particularly or or maybe i don't know it at all. So can you tell me what retcon means? Yeah, it's short for retroactive continuity. And it means that you have to alter previously
Starting point is 00:01:32 established facts in order to not screw up the continuity of the story. So you have to go back and explain something that no longer makes sense if you're going to tell a story in a certain way. Explain something that no longer makes sense if you were going to tell a story in a certain way. I see. So, like, you might have to, like, so season one happens, season two happens, season three Walt disappears for good. Right. And then season six, when you're wrapping up, you have to reference some new information from season one, two, or maybe even three to explain Walt's disappearance, which you weren't at the time planning to do because you didn't know that Walt was going to decide not to be an actor anymore. Right. Yeah. I don't think Lost just didn't retcon a lot of things,
Starting point is 00:02:14 just kind of let them happen and never explain them. But yes, that's a good example. Okay. All right. So if you want to banter about people making less than 20 million or more than 25 million, now's your chance. No, I got nothing. All my banter was for people in that small salary bracket. So let's talk briefly. My banter is about James Shields and two things about James Shields. And one is that I want to talk about Fowler, Ron Fowler.
Starting point is 00:02:45 Okay. The, you know, one of the owners of the Padres, chairman or managing chairman or managing something. He's the boss. He's the big boss of the Padres. And, of course, before the James Shields trade, there was the 10-run outing that James Shields had in which Fowler described it as an embarrassment to what? To the organization and to himself, I believe. And I, that's a stupid thing to say, but I was just sort of struck by how concerned we now are
Starting point is 00:03:12 with like the, okay, how do I put this? So we used to be really into baseball, right? Like we were really into ball players and we all wanted to be Derek Jeter. And then we grew up and we wanted to be the GM and make the moves. And now it feels like we've gone to this point where we're really concerned with whether teams are making their players happy. And so now I feel like we sort of want to be HR, like we've now shifted from all the way to being HR. And we really want, like, we were really concerned
Starting point is 00:03:45 with whether the GM or the owner or the manager or whatever is making the players happy. And that's fine. I mean, it matters whether the player is happy. And it probably that thing that Fowler said cinched James Shields getting traded. And so that's relevant. And so I don't have an, as we are right now,
Starting point is 00:04:04 I don't have an issue, but I see as a little bit of a slippery slope here do you do you sort of do you does that ring true at all to you do you sort of feel like get what i'm saying well there's been a lot of discussion of how the player's happiness might affect his on-field performance yeah that's the that's the impetus for caring about these things It is, that's the gateway To caring about these things And because that is now generally accepted As a non-controversial way
Starting point is 00:04:34 Of thinking about things It's hard to argue that we shouldn't Take great interest in whether The catering is good Yeah But I don't know that It's fine where it is right now. I'm happy with baseball as it is right now. I'm happy with our conversations.
Starting point is 00:04:50 But I do feel like it's possible that we're going to get to a point where it gets, we're boring. We're everywhere, it's all boring. So. Yeah, well, maybe it's just that there are fewer dumb teams or fewer teams that make big mistakes that we can talk about and write angry blog posts about. And so now we focus on whether they're making their players happy, which seems like comparatively a smaller deal than teams making crazy decisions with signing players or trading for players or looking at the wrong indicators. So it seems like a less consequential matter.
Starting point is 00:05:31 But maybe this is what we're left with. The other thing about James Shields is James Shields is, you know, he's a guy. You know, we know how good James Shields is in his career. He's a 110 ERA plus guy. He's a number two starter, right? That's what he is. Super durable. Yeah, maybe a number three, but you bump him to number two because of his durability and
Starting point is 00:05:54 because for a long time you believed he was good in big games. Good guy to have on your team. Pretty much everybody, for most of James Shields' career, pretty much every team would have been better with a James Shields. 110 ERA plus guy okay the three years before the royals got him he had well if you tailor it right you can get 110 era plus in like the previous two and a half years and then the four years since the royals got him 109 era plus so basically you know over a long enough time period it all smooths out and James Shields is James Shields. So then we have one move where the Royals get him and everybody agrees that
Starting point is 00:06:31 they overpay and that it's a terrible trade that not only undervalues the things they gave up, but overvalues what James Shields is and treats him like something better than a 110 ERA plus pitcher. And then we have another signing where the Padres get him at the end of a depressed market. And everybody, I think, pretty much agreed at the time that they got a good deal, that that was a lot less than we thought James Shields was going to get at the start of the offseason. And maybe it was still, you know, all four-year deals for pitchers are worrisome. But, you know, clearly James Shields, he was coming off of two very good years with the Royals. MVP votes one year, Cy Young votes another year. And it seemed like a no-brainer that you give him, what, four years in 76 or
Starting point is 00:07:17 whatever he got. So then the Royals' terrible move turns out aces because James Shields pitches really, really well. And then the Padres' James Shields move turns out aces because James Shields pitches really, really well. And then the Padres James Shields move turns out to be a disaster because James Shields pitches really, really poorly. And if you look at those four years, he had a 112 ERA plus in those four years. It's just that he was awesome in two of them and terrible in two of them. And I don't have a, well, I do have a point. It's a point that I make a lot often. And it is that we miss on these moves by huge margins that like, it is very rare that a move comes down to, you know, a half win here or there. Like these guys are constantly just the, you know, getting paid to be the best player in baseball And they're the worst Or they're being paid 5 million dollars
Starting point is 00:08:06 And then they become an MVP candidate That's just It puts into perspective How difficult baseball analysis is Because it's not that we're always a little wrong It's not even that we're persistently wrong in one direction It's that we miss by miles And so that's James Shields' last four years
Starting point is 00:08:22 The dumb trade turned out awesome And the smart signing turned out a disaster. And all along, James Shields was literally just doing his thing in a weird order. Like, his starts 2015. He signed that deal. And the Padres at the time were building up this big contender. And he was kind of one of the last pieces of the team that they put together and made their decision to try to contend more plausible at the time. And so he was obviously, you know, he got less than people thought he would get, but he still got $21 million a year for four years. And now the following season, he is traded to a division race that is very much up in the air to a team that is just a few games behind the leader in the division and needs pitching and you'd think you know if you could have could have somehow showed people this scenario a year earlier they would have said wow this is a pennant race altering move and no one
Starting point is 00:09:33 really paid that much attention to it it's like he's a back of the rotation starter now and this was a salary dump and fine this is what you do if you're the White Sox, but who cares? Yeah. I mean, he's going to have a 110 ERA plus, though. It should be. It is potentially. I don't think the White Sox are quite there anyway, so I don't think it's going to be enough, but who knows what else they'll do, and maybe they'll get hot, and maybe the right player will have a breakout.
Starting point is 00:10:01 I mean, James Shield is definitely a guy that I'd be looking to add if I were a team that was over 500 right now. So it seems like a pretty good move. Yeah, take up a home run to Bartolo Colon though. So the other thing, the Royals fan who's seething right now at my 110 ERA plus, you know, shruggy emoticon rant a moment ago is saying, no, you idiot. It's that the Royals made him better. And it's that the Padres made him worse. And, and, you know, there you go. There's a data point. It's an anecdote, but you know, counts. It counts as a thing. Maybe they did. Yeah. So then who knows what the White Sox will do with him? Maybe they'll make him better too. Maybe Don Cooper. Yeah. I don't know. I'd have to know whether
Starting point is 00:10:49 they've got enough motivational speeches and whether Jeremy Guthrie is starting fires in the locker room. Yeah. All right. Anything else about that? Nope. All right. So Carl Crawford. A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece at Baseball Prospectus that looked at the Carl Crawford trade and specifically who was winning it on a day-by-day basis over the two years since it had happened. and decided on a scale of 1 to 10 how much the Dodgers were winning it every day in the course of those two years because it was a trade that really had been, I think, fairly radically re-evaluated a couple of times over just those 18 months because some things had really worked out for the Dodgers, because we got a better understanding of the lack of payroll limitations they seemed to have, got a better understanding of the lack of payroll limitations they seem to have because Gonzalez had a couple of phenomenal hot streaks and then a couple of really bad cold streaks because Josh Beckett and Carl Crawford were flipping between good health and bad health.
Starting point is 00:11:57 And sometimes they were healthy and doing well and the Dodgers were in first place and sometimes they were injured and out for the year. And meanwhile, Ruby De La Rosa and Alan Webster were also going on their same journeys that we could filter all this through. And so there were times when you would say that the Dodgers had really gotten a lot out of this trade and where I assigned them a nine on a scale of one to 10. And then there were also times where you would say that it was a completely destructive trade, that just a couple months later you could say it was a completely destructive trade that had cost the Dodgers their opportunities to be a much better team and that they were
Starting point is 00:12:39 kind of as flailing of an organization as a $270 million payroll organization could be. And they were a one that like it would, it would, it actually went from nine to one in good faith. I went, gave it a nine and a one within three months of each other. And so, as I said at the time on August 25th, 2012, when the Dodgers took three of the Boston Red Sox biggest contracts, Ned Coletti accepted one other burden, more than a half decade of second guessing. With Adrian Gonzalez and Carl Crawford each locked up for more than five years, it would be at least that long before we'd be able to close the book on the move. For that matter, with Alan Webster and Ruby De La Rosa potentially on the cusp of long big league careers, great careers for all we knew slash know, Colletti's
Starting point is 00:13:22 exposure to second guessing might run through 2020 or longer. And since then, of course, Coletti lost his job. This is while the trade still sticks to his resume. It is somebody else's problem. But Karl Crawford somewhat closed at least some portion of the book by getting himself DFA'd. And so I wanted to know what you think about this trade from the Dodgers perspective Now, two years after I wrote that piece
Starting point is 00:13:53 Well, no one they gave up has made them feel bad about it So that's part of it Well, De La Rosa's a solid pitcher I mean, they could use De La Rosa right now De La Rosa, yeah, he's solid But it also took him, what, four years to get to solidity. He's no longer even with the team that traded for him. He didn't do anything with Boston. No. And both he and Webster were traded in the Wade Miley deal. So, you know, I mean. No, I totally agree. I mean, he, it's not, and it's not as though he's,
Starting point is 00:14:24 you know, going to finish fourth in Cy Young voting this year either. No. I mean, he, it's not, and it's not as though he's, you know, going to finish fourth in Cy Young voting this year either. No. I mean, you could, you could probably argue that the Dodgers would have been happy to have Carson Smith, which is really what Ruben de la Rosa had turned into. Yeah. And, but now they, now even Carson Smith, if they had Carson Smith, that would, they'd be regretful of that too. So. Yeah. So there's nothing they gave up other than money that really makes them feel bad about making that trade. And the money probably makes them feel a little bit bad, but not that bad because they still have a ton of it. And it seems like they, they never run out of it really well you know i guess they they kind of do they didn't sign zach granky but they still have the highest payroll and it hasn't
Starting point is 00:15:10 really affected their ability to put a pretty good team together so you know adrian gonzalez has been good for them even crawford had a couple pretty decent years for them, so it worked out kind of okay. Not in a dollars-per-win sense, but in the sense that they didn't really give up any great talent, and they got a little bit. It's okay. It's certainly gotten itself out of the territory of terrible trades that will show up on, show up on the worst of all time lists. Yeah, I agree that it has gotten far beyond the worst of all time trades list. No doubt about it. It seemed at the time, I don't think we really realized how much flexibility the Dodgers were going to have. So it seemed like the sort of thing that could really pin down a franchise.
Starting point is 00:16:04 And as I'll point out in a minute, every dollar that you spend is a dollar you can't spend somewhere else. And so I think that you're giving them a little bit too much of a pass on that. However, it is not as though we've been watching the Dodgers the last three offseason and saying, wow, it's just too bad they don't have any money to sign players. Like, they've clearly had a lot of room to add a lot of players, a lot of to change their organization in a lot of ways, to have a lot of GMs even. They've been able to afford the GMs as well. But, I mean, also, though, if you're not going to do the dollars per win thing,
Starting point is 00:16:41 then why are we counting dollars or wins? Like, you've got to do the dollars per win. Don't You got to do the dollars per win don't you have to Do the dollars per win yeah you should But I mean for big teams like the Dodgers it's it's usually less Impressive than it is for smaller Market teams so for a long time the Yankees could spend as much as they
Starting point is 00:16:58 Wanted it seemed like and And then if you ever criticized The Yankees move then then you'd say well Geez does it really matter though because they havekees move, then you'd say, well, geez, does it really matter, though, because they have unlimited money? But then you'd always remind yourself, well, they didn't get Beltran. You know, they didn't get – and so you just hang on to Beltran. Beltran would be your weapon or whatever, your counterargument for everything. And so with the Dodgers, they didn't get Tanaka.
Starting point is 00:17:20 They bid for Tanaka. They didn't get Tanaka. They didn't get Granke. They didn't keep Granke. And, you know, there's a lot of other free agents. They didn't get Tanaka. They didn't get Granke. They didn't keep Granke. And, you know, there's a lot of other free agents that they didn't get. So why don't we treat those guys as law? I mean, they have a budget, presumably. They do have a budget.
Starting point is 00:17:38 So if they're spending a lot of money on Karl Crawford and Adrian Gonzalez and Josh Beckett, and I'm not, I mean, I don't know what the dollars per win are I'll do that in a second But like clearly if you're Spending your money on lesser players You would be able to sign Better players right Sure yeah the only reason Not to look at it that way is
Starting point is 00:17:58 If you think that they just Wouldn't have paid more for those Players anyway just You know maybe they drew a line in the sand and they looked at their projections and Andrew Friedman said, I'm not comfortable giving this much to a free agent starting pitcher or something like that.
Starting point is 00:18:13 And so even if they'd had an extra, I don't know, you know, 10 or 20 or whatever million dollars on hand, they would have just saved it or used it on someone else or something. So unless it's that, unless it's like, we just, we don't give contracts of this amount to free agent pitchers over 31 or whatever, but otherwise, sure, you should count it. So they have, they have spent to date roughly $170 million and gotten 17 wins according according to Baseball References model. Of course, now
Starting point is 00:18:46 Carl Crawford's last, the $21 million that he'll get next year, as well as the $21 million this year are completely sunk costs. And so I have to add that. And then Adrian Gonzalez is perhaps arguably in his decline phase, and he's still owed, well, $65 million that we haven't counted. And so how many wins do you think Adrian Gonzalez is good for for the next two and a half years? Five. Okay. So, yeah, so you're looking at about 22 wins and at about the rate of $12 or $13 million a win. Or $11 or $12 million, maybe. About $12 million a win,
Starting point is 00:19:29 which I think you could make the case that the Dodgers are a team that can afford to spend $12 million a win on free agents in the right circumstances when they're depending on the needs at the time. You certainly would never say the Rays should sign a player who's going to cost $12 million to win or the Pirates. But I think the Dodgers can handle a couple spots in their roster if that's the best that is available.
Starting point is 00:19:56 And so then the question really is whether you're willing to say that was the best that was available. I mean, Adrian Gonzalez, Carl Crawford, and Josh Beckett is not really the foundation of a world championship team. And you could argue that with that amount of money, maybe you could get the foundation of a world championship team. $250 million isn't that much either. It seems like more than it is. So I don't know. I would say that I would give this right now, I would say it's a three. I would rate this a three on the Dodgers winning the deal. I think that they still get the benefit
Starting point is 00:20:33 of having put a good team on the field faster than they otherwise would have. And I think that's significant for them. Whether it matters or not that they did that, at least it was identified as a priority by a front office, by the ownership. And if that's their priority, then you have to judge their actions based on whether it, um, whether it helped that. And it did help that they were, they were better faster than they otherwise would have been. And at the time it seemed like it was getting kind of hard to, in fact, we wrote articles and stuff about it. At the time, it was harder to get good players than it had been before. And I would argue even than it is right now, that we were in the extension glut and it
Starting point is 00:21:17 was the new, the two wildcard era. And so there were a lot more buyers and there were only one or two teams that were really tanking aggressively. And it just felt like it was harder than it had ever really been to get, or at least in the free agency era, that it was harder than it had been to get good players. And so they did that. And so for 2013, I think that even though they ultimately didn't win the World Series or even get to the World Series, you can see where they were going with that. Yeah. And if they wanted to send a signal that the Dodgers were spending now and that people should come play for the Dodgers and the Dodgers would pay for players, there was no better way to do that than to take on this enormous load of contracts from the Red Sox. So they sent that signal very convincingly. Exactly. And then from there on, it's hard to play the butterfly flapping its wings game.
Starting point is 00:22:10 It's hard to know how much that mattered for their next offseason, whether having sort of some certainty made it easier for them to go target certain free agents, whether it was an easier sell to free agents, whether they got more revenue because they had made the playoffs. They signed their huge, huge, huge franchise altering TV deal about five months, six months after this trade. And I don't know if it mattered at all. Like, I don't, I mean, you know, let's say it went from 6.8 billion to 7 billion. Well, that would pay for the whole thing. I don't know if that's how things work. I have no idea, but we're talking about, now we're talking about huge numbers. Now we're talking about million with a B. So it's hard to know. But yeah, I mean, I think that probably
Starting point is 00:22:54 the way that we tend to analyze these trades, you would say that it is on the downslope, that it had a moment where it looked like it might be good. I mean, there were months where Carl Crawford was good for the Dodgers. There were months where you're like, wow, he's back. He's back to being Carl Crawford. And then there were months also where Adrian Gonzalez was an MVP candidate. You know, Adrian Gonzalez, this is slightly off topic, but I want to give you a semi-fun fact. Last year, Adrian Gonzalez started really hot right yeah and in fact uh he started so
Starting point is 00:23:28 hot that in the first three games of the season he had five home runs and two doubles uh and 10 hits like that's a really good series uh he ended up the uh he ended the season with an 830 ops which is really pretty good for a player in Los Angeles. If you just take away the first three games, just the first three games, if he had a flu, his OPS for the season drops 50 points. 50 points of an entire season in the first three games. Anyway, so there were times where Adrian Gonzalez was an MVP candidate. And so I think that, like I said earlier, there were times where it looked like this might actually have turned into a sneaky good trade for the Dodgers, not just by the standards that they set at the time, but by the standards that we would normally use. And I think it has completely probably fallen off of that.
Starting point is 00:24:20 Not a great trade and also not a disaster. I think, you know, everybody probably can say, okay, we made a move and some good things happened from it. Some things we expected to happen from it came out of it. And the enthusiasm with which we treated this trade the day that it happened, where it seemed like the biggest news of the summer, kind of in a sense a little bit of a letdown, at least from the Dodgers' perspective. From the Red Sox perspective They won the World Series Yes, right Yeah, I think that's about right There was a feeling at the time
Starting point is 00:24:54 That we might see more of this type of thing Where in the absence of good players On the free agent market We might see teams taking on a lot more bad contracts As a way of getting good players. And that never happened. No, not really. I'm surprised. I wonder why. I wonder why. I wonder if it's because everybody has money now. And so that could be teams are less like we thought that there were these really rich teams with these really big TV contracts that were going
Starting point is 00:25:25 to be able to absorb more contracts than were actually even available to them. And maybe what actually happened is that the floor rose considerably. And so there's fewer teams that are just, you know, like basically paying down payday loans and desperate to get out of some of these contracts. Or maybe it's the fact that maybe the extensions did this. Maybe with the extensions, there are fewer, more of kind of small market teams, payrolls are tied up in these relatively friendly deals. Even when they go bad, they're relatively friendly. And so you don't have examples of, you know, the small market teams going out and even getting
Starting point is 00:26:05 into this crazy free agent market because they've invested more of their money in the extensions. So many recent trends to choose from. We can pick one out of a hat. Could. All right. I think that's all I have to say about this. You have anything to say about it? No. There's also the fact that it seems like everybody really likes Adrian Gonzalez. There's also the fact that it seems like everybody really likes Adrian Gonzalez, and that seems like it's been kind of a crazy clubhouse for the past few years. And I'm sure that if we had a Dodger person on here, they would say that he has brought tremendous value by being a stable force and a veteran force and a multicultural force in a clubhouse that has been somewhat Crazy as it was Okay
Starting point is 00:26:48 The other between 20 and 25 million dollar guy I was going to mention In my banter along with these other two Is Ryan Howard who had One plate appearance all weekend And had a Bud Light Lime Bottle thrown at him at the conclusion of it So he probably had the saddest weekend of all.
Starting point is 00:27:07 Was it glass? I would guess it was one of those plastic-type ones that you see at the ballpark. Was it by the home crowd? Yes. Wow. Which is not nice. It's not totally out of character with the Reputation of Philadelphia Phillies Fans vis-a-vis throwing
Starting point is 00:27:28 Items at players but Yeah no one no one deserves to have Bud Light Lime thrown at them Well I hope the front office has taken Steps to make Ryan Howard feel Better about himself since then It would be Very interesting to know
Starting point is 00:27:43 What they get to reach him While benching him will he be a philly on september 1st i think he's actually been received fairly well by philly's fans this year he hasn't he hasn't habitually been thrown bud light lime bottles at uh he has been terrible of course and has now basically ceased to play. But there's less reason to give him the Karl Crawford treatment, I guess, given that the Dodgers just had so many outfielders and no places to put them. And I don't know that the Phillies need that roster spot right now as much as the Dodgers did. So I would guess he finishes out the season.
Starting point is 00:28:29 It would be just one more indignity on top of all the other indignities if they cut him this close to the end for a team that has certainly exceeded expectations but is probably not going anywhere. So I guess he finishes out If you were a contender and You know you were freely available like You he would cost you nothing you would pay Him nothing and he would just be The power bench bat That you would have when
Starting point is 00:28:57 Roster you know when rosters expand And maybe going into the postseason right When roster strain is not Nearly the problem that it normally is. He, over the past, over the previous three years, he had a.275 true average against the right-handers. And this year, that has completely collapsed. He's hitting.154,.222,.338 against right-handers in 144 plate appearances.
Starting point is 00:29:23 22-338 against right-handers in 144 plate appearances. Do you think that he's even worth having as a bench bat for, like, taking away roster crunch, taking away everything else? Would you want him on your bench to pinch hit and hit against righties? I think I would. I think I would. I mean, we're not supposed to make too much of one season of splits right and we're talking about 130 at bats versus righties this year compared to probably several hundred over the last few years so so uh yeah i'd give him a shot unless you know unless the the scouts look at him and say he's completely cooked and you should believe
Starting point is 00:30:03 the platoon splits from this season. Otherwise, the Ryan Howard of the last few years would have been a useful bench bat against righties. So on the right roster for league minimum, sure. Yeah, here's the counterargument. What I just told you about his 2016 splits is not really about his splits. It's about his overall performance. He's been terrible against everyone. Yeah, he's worse against everybody everyone he's yeah he's worse against everybody he's just a lot worse and so it's not
Starting point is 00:30:28 like you know it's not like all of a sudden he has a reverse split and we can just throw that out he's just been bad and then the multi-year splits were not exactly great i mean he was he's probably about a 276 true out 275 true average is probably league average for when you have the platoon advantage yeah i mean last year you know that's very recent last year he hit 20 home runs against righties and 367 at bats he did he also had a 304 on base percentage against righties yeah but he was still worth having as a bench bat yeah if you needed a home run and it was a right-hander on the mound. I'd be interesting to see. He seems like he might be the kind of guy who now is essentially, well, I don't even want to say quad A,
Starting point is 00:31:14 but the kind of guy who can hit a mistake. There's total speculation. But can hit a mistake, can hit, you know, a cement mixer slider. And so it could be the case that in fact, against a right-handed closer, for instance, he would be completely melted down. Yes, that's possible. So it'd be interesting to see how, like what sort of split he has for good pit against good pitchers, as opposed to, you know, very bad pitchers. Yes. I would do some research on that before acquiring him. His splits against power pitchers last year were not notably bad. He was fine.
Starting point is 00:31:53 Okay. All right. That is it for today. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Today's five Patreon supporters are Grant, Jay Barnett, Jimmy Choi, Gareth Weidgetunge, and Corey Rubin. Thank you. You can also buy our book, The Only Rule Is It Has To Work. Go to theonlyruleisithastowork.com for more information. Father's Day is coming up soon, so if you're looking for a gift, consider buying our book.
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