Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 908: Remember the Rays?

Episode Date: June 20, 2016

Ben and Sam banter about Santos Saldivar and discuss Tim Lincecum’s comeback, two player demotions, and the decline of the Tampa Bay Rays.

You know that I, I love you Beautiful freak, beautiful freak You know that I, I love you Beautiful freak, beautiful freak Beautiful freak, beautiful freak, beautiful freak, beautiful freak Good morning and welcome to episode 908 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectus Brought to you by The Play Index, BaseballReference.com and our Patreon supporters I'm Sam Miller along with Ben Lindberg of FiveThirtyEight.

Hello, Ben. Hello. How are you? All right. It's been a long time since I got the number wrong. Yeah, that's true. I used to get the number wrong a lot. Yes, you did.

You have anything you want to talk about? Well, our guest from a few weeks ago, Santos Saldivar, who was a stoppers pitcher we signed based on college stats from a spreadsheet. And he came out for Sonoma and was great and the best pitcher in the league probably after the day he debuted. So we had him on the podcast a few weeks ago because the Milwaukee Brewers signed him and added him to their minor league system. So he debuted yesterday for the Helena Brewers, which is a Pioneer League team, advanced rookie league, and he did okay. He stranded a couple runners when he came in out of the bullpen. He pitched an inning and a third, gave up a couple hits, and I believe an unearned run.

There was an error behind him. Struck out a sixth rounder. So he did it. So he's an actual baseball player now. And he told me that he was not happy with his stuff and everything was up. But he is getting better every day. Good for him. 23 pitches, 16 strikes. Gotta love that. Yeah.

It's a good strike rate. And three of them swinging. Yeah. Well, good. That's awesome. Congratulations. It is. And three of them swinging.

Yeah. Well, good. That's awesome. Congratulations. It is. I listened to two almost full Helena Brewer's games waiting for him to show up. And then naturally he pitches in the game that I did not listen to. Yeah. Well, apparently I was not listening to the broadcast because I was at an A-ball game myself.

Apparently, I was not listening to the broadcast because I was at an A-ball game myself, but there was a part on the broadcast someone told me where Helena's announcer talked about Santos scaring someone with a curveball, which we've seen. Yeah, awesome. Yeah, it doesn't actually matter if you listen or not. It happens all the same, so that's good. All right, how was your A-ball game? Pretty good. Yeah, I was at the Staten Island Yankees Sabermetrics Day event yesterday, and they played the Aberdeen Ironbirds and Orioles affiliate. So it was good. It was mostly just schmoozing with other baseball writers and readers. Signed some books? I did. Okay. Is there anything else?

Nope. Not for me. All right. let's see. We got a suggestion that I like for what we could name perfect one-inning appearances where you strike out all three of the batters that you face. The suggestion comes from Eric, who suggests Wagners, which I like. I think Wagner is one of the most underrated players Of our lifetimes And it's perfectly appropriate That something would be named after him And I especially like that Wagner was the leader In Wagner's

Until the day that Eric Came up with this name And about an hour later or maybe an hour before Craig Kimbrell tied him And now is the co-holder of the record And Wagner will be forgotten But that's okay. Cy Young's not actually the best pitcher ever either.

And so I think it's perfectly fine to have something named after a player of the past. And it makes more sense now that he doesn't even, well, he won't even have the record that he is in the past. So I'm going with it, Wagners. I don't know when I'll ever use that, ever. And I don't even really care about that he is in the past. So I'm going with it. Wagner's. I don't know when I'll ever use that ever. And I don't even really care about them, but all the same, I only cared because I wanted to see Craig Kimbrell pass him and he has, so maybe I'm done, but maybe Chapman will close the gap. All right. So there's that. I am not going to go any further than this, but I, uh, I will say that I, my suggestion for runners on second and third is a double clutch situation. Double clutch.

Double clutch. Oh, okay. I see. It's sort of like a pun. All right. Yeah. Should we mention just to stop all the tweets that runners in scoring position is one way to refer to that? I mean, whatever, though.

It's not really because runners in scoring position is a category of all plate appearances with a runner in scoring position. Right. Well, it depends. If you're looking at a statistical split or something, it is. If you're describing what's happening in the game in front of you and you say there are runners in scoring position, then that probably means second and third. You probably wouldn't say that for bases loaded, although technically it is also true if bases loaded. Yeah, it's fine. Okay, that's all the very small stuff.

Got any more very small stuff? Nope. All right, then it's on to the only sort of small stuff. Tim Lincecum pitched for the Los Angeles Angels, and I don't know if you were listening to Sportswriters Blues, the podcast with Pedro Mora and Andy McCullough, but Pedro said that when the Angels signed Tim Linscombe, he was getting tons of questions about Linscombe. He was getting all these tweets about Linscombe, like this was a really big deal.

And then he realized that by clicking on their bios that it's all Giants fans. Angels fans don't care at all about Tim Linscombe. No Angels fans were like, what's Linscombe going to do? It was all Giants fans. Like Angels fans don't care at all about Tim Linscombe. Like no Angels fans were like, what's Linscombe going to do? It was all Giants fans. And so maybe that's, I'm falling for that. But Linscombe pitched. He went six innings. He gave up like one run, I think.

And so everybody's very excited for Tim Linscombe to be back. He's not actually back. I don't think he was throwing 90. He struck out two. He walked two. He got, I think, seven swinging strikes in an entire start, which is very poor. And he gave up a bunch of line drives and fly balls, too. So it's not looking great.

But I wanted to just briefly fantasize about Tim Lincecum actually being back. So Lincecum, he is a man with a war, right? Like we know his war. It's, well, it's 23 on baseball reference and it's 25 on baseball prospectus. And we know basically what it takes to get to the hall of fame as a starting pitcher. Usually it takes about 70 wins, 65, 70 wins, although of late that has not been enough for some very good pitchers who are well above that, but so it goes. 65-70, maybe 75 wins to be a safe bet for the Hall of Fame. Linsingham is a different kind of case though because he was so good. I mean, you wouldn't really necessarily have the same compiler worry with him because he was the best pitcher in baseball for a few years. You know, maybe up to three or four of them over that span, he was the best pitcher in baseball.

He had back-to-back Cy Young Awards in his first two full seasons. He was a bona fide phenomenon. He was, you know, an all-star his first four seasons. He threw probably, I would say, the most dominant postseason start of my lifetime. And so he is a guy who kind of has this mystique and peak already covered, I would say. I mean, that's why Pedro Mora is getting tweets about him, even though he hasn't been good for four years. And so I want to know if you think that, and he's not going to, but I want to know if you think that his career war requirements are lower than normal. Like, I'm trying to figure out what he needs to do in his 30s to still get to the Hall of Fame, because there was no doubt in my mind at 27 that he was going to the Hall. And of course,

now he's not. But what does he have to do? So he, do you think that Tim Lincecum with that in his, on his resume, with those high profile moments and so on needs 70 wins or can he get in with less? I don't think he could get in with less. I don't think his peak was long enough. I think it was very high. It was high for two years, maybe three years. It was like a four-year peak, basically. And then he fell off a cliff, and he won the Cy Young in two of those years and was good in all of them, but really great in those two.

And so that's just not enough. That's less than a Johan Santana peak. That's like a, I'm trying to think of a good comp, it's like a Brandon Webb peak or something. It's really good, but I don't think it was sustained long enough. So even if he came back and transformed himself into like a league average pitcher for the next five years or something, that wouldn't be – I don't think there's really any way he could get there even if he managed to transition into a second part of his career. And I don't think that his peak is really any higher than the typical Hall of Famers peak because it just wasn't long enough. Yeah. I'm not suggesting he could be a league average pitcher.

No. Yeah, I know. If he had to be, say he needed 60 wins to get there, then there have been 15 pitchers since 1950 that have been a 37- win pitcher from age 32 on so that i mean he'd be one of the 15 greatest like old pitchers ever uh and if you think that he needs to get to 70 there are only seven so he basically would need to be one of the seven or ten best pitchers after 30 ever so uh all right hopeless totally completely hopeless Yes. The odd thing is that of those

seven, one of them is Curt Schilling, and he's not going to make the Hall of Fame, even though he is like way, way, way above. You know who has the most wins from age 32 on? Wins above replacement. Nolan Ryan. It's not. Nolan Ryan's actually only eighth. Randy Johnson. Randy Johnson's second. It's Phil Necro. Phil Necro from 32 on was a Hall of Famer. 81 wins. Wow. More wins than a number of Hall of Famers from just from 32 on. And well, yeah, I guess he won the ERA title at 28. Before that, he basically didn't pitch at all. All right, okay, let me preface this by asking you to remind me where you stand on defensive metrics, publicly available defensive metrics. Generally speaking, when you see them,

assuming that they don't badly diverge from what you thought of a player, do you think that they make sense generally? Yeah, I think so. I wouldn't start, you know, looking at individual months or anything, but if we're talking about a season or something, I think they're usually directionally correct, at least. Yeah. All right.

So this weekend, two players who were, well, two players were basically demoted who a year ago you wouldn't have thought would be candidates to be demoted. One is Randall Gritchuk, who got sent down to AAA because he's not hitting at all. And the other is Ruzny Castillo, who got put on waivers. And these are both interesting to me because if you look at at their wars they're good ball players still um so gritchuk last year was a plus seven defender uh by drs in 103 games the year before that he was plus 4 and 47 games in this year he's plus 10 and 62 so you put it together and it's like a season and a third of games and he's a plus 21 right fielder in his career.

So that means that if you believe that, if you believe that he is, you know, a very, very good defensive right fielder, then this year with his 78 OPS plus, with his 206, 276, 392 line, he was still a one and a half win player in 60 games, which puts him well above average for a major league player as a value. And, you know, makes him something like a three-ish win player over the course of a full season. You don't normally demote your three-win right fielders. And then Castillo is a little different because he hasn't played this year, but over the course of his three partial seasons with small appearances in the majors. He has 99 games played, and he is a

plus 18 fielder, which would put him like at Jason Hayward's level or Alex Gordon's level, if you believe those. And so even though he is a horrible 262, 301, 379 hitter in his career, he is still a 1.7 win player over less than 100 games, which would also put him well above average for a season around a three win player. And so I'm curious whether you think that we can draw from these votes of no confidence in defensive metrics by the Cardinals and the Red Sox, or whether you see other explanations? Well, depends who the alternatives are, right? So the Red Sox are doing okay without Castillo, right? They've got plenty of talent. So maybe they just feel that even if he is a great defender, they have better options. It's possible also that they want to get these guys straightened out as overall players.

Grichuk was actually a really good hitter last year and was like a stat cast exit velocity star and was hitting tons of home runs. And people were predicting big things for him this year reasonably. And that has not happened. year reasonably, and that has not happened. And so if you think that's still in there, then maybe you want to send him to Memphis and try to get him back to the guy he was last year. Even if it does hurt you defensively in the short term, maybe you get the good Gritchuk again for the second half of the season. So that could be one reason why. And as for Castillo, I don't know, maybe just the Red Sox have a ton of talent, but it is tough. I mean, when you've been as bad as those guys have been and you've Grichek hitting 206 with a sub 280 on base percentage, it's, I guess if you really believe in it and you think he's helping you, then you stick with him anyway. It's the kind of thing where it's hard to sell to fans and media and maybe even other players in the clubhouse who are wondering why this guy is still, you know, playing without contributing at the plate, which is much easier to see. So I would guess a combination of those factors and maybe with Castillo particularly, some small sample with the defensive stats.

Yeah, and I don't know. I think that with Grichuk, that's a good point. If you think that spending a week and a half, I mean, he's obviously a better hitter than he's been hitting, and if you think having him spend a week and a half. I mean, he's obviously a better hitter than he's been hitting. And if you think having him spend a week and a half in AAA might reset him offensively and get him back to average, then even if you're making yourself worse for those 10 days, even if you're replacing a true three-win player with a two-win player for those 10 days, if you're getting back, you know, a four-win player, which is maybe what he is when he hits,

then it's worth it because you'll have that four-win player for a lot longer. It's always tough to know for many reasons, not least of which is that you don't know what's actually going on in his head, why he's actually struggling, whether he would have turned it around tomorrow anyway, whether this will work. And you add to that the uncertainty of defensive metrics from our angle, from where we stand, and it's hard to know.

But the reason that I'm thinking about this is that I have been wondering for a while whether, given that teams are very smart for the most part, we generally think of all 30 teams as being fairly smart at this point in time. It's not like it was. And also given that teams have access to, that the information gap that they have over us is larger than it's ever been, thanks to StatCast and other things. I've been wondering whether the most important data on every player is how the league treats him, how teams treat them. And if, for instance, just knowing what Ian Kennedy's contract is, is more predictive than, you know, Pocota or another projection system or my own thoughts about Ian Kennedy.

If that is the single most important piece of information you can have is how much a team wanted to pay him or what a team thinks of him or he bats in the lineup, or whether he gets pinch hit for. And so do either of these moves make you reconsider either of these players' defensive metrics? If you had to guess, would you guess that the Cardinals have better statsing Grichuk is a worse defender Than DRS says And if you had to guess Would you guess that Castillo is a worse defender Or that the Red Sox have stats Showing that Castillo is a worse defender than DRS says

Or do you just think it's all those other factors That go into play Because rosters are tight And players aren't always available Yeah I guess I would suspect that they have stats showing they're not as good as they are just because if they were both as good as they are then they'd be they'd be among the elite right they'd be really pretty special i mean what uh gritchick is is a

plus 10 drs in in fewer than 500 innings so yeah over a full season he'd be a you know like a kevin kiermeier he'd be a total stud so i would guess that uh if you're if you're regressing that or something then you you probably don't conclude that he's actually that good so yes i would say that but it's also probably just tough i mean maybe it's possible that the front office thinks he actually is that great, but Mike Matheny is like, I have this guy hitting 206. I don't want this guy anymore. So, you know, it's really hard to say. It could be a much simpler thing than it seems like from afar. But yeah, I would guess that they do not think that Randall Gritchick is a stud center fielder. All right. Poor Randall Gritchick. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know.

There have been some confusing Cardinals seasons this year. Like the, I mean, they just made Colton Wong into a center fielder, right? Because he wasn't hitting at all. And so they sent him down and they changed positions with him. And that was after he, I wouldn't say broke out, but he was getting steadily better. And he was, you know, an average player last year, at least. And then he got a big extension or, you know, pretty sizable extension, which is a nice vote of confidence. And then he stopped hitting too. And now they're switching

his position. So they've had some confusing developments with young Cardinals players. All right, last thing I wanted to talk about, ask you about, is that the Rays got swept this weekend by the Giants. The Rays are now 31 and 36. And the Rays before the season were Pakoda's pick for the AL East And I would say that was the team that Pakoda was the most bullish on Relative to the rest of the world I remember Rob Nyer being on MLB Network talking about Pakoda projections

And generally, if you're booking your show you bring rob nairon to uh you know to talk about why projections are good and to explain them and to uh you know maybe to explain why they make sense even though they're counterintuitive and for the rays rob's like yeah i don't i don't think they're that good and i think that's wrong and so uh when i looked at the pakotas for the first time this spring i that one jumped out that jumped out yeah it was like that and the royals obviously yeah so um but putting aside the projections well don't maybe not putting aside the projections but maybe a little bit putting aside the projections the rays are now 31 and 36 they have only been outscored by like

eight runs so maybe they have been playing like a 500 team, but they have not been winning like a 500 team there. The one team in the AL East that you could say is falling out of a very tight division race. And they are now on a three-year run of being basically a bad team. They won 80 games last year and finished in fourth. They won 77 games in 2014 and finished in fourth. And this year they're on pace to, you know, win mid seventies and finish in last. And so I, it's that three years is not, I mean, three years is three years and they, it is particularly interesting if you think that they, you know, maybe should be a better team, that they are underplaying their projections. But even if you don't think that, is the Rays run over?

Do you have any reason to think that the Rays will be a good franchise in the future? Or did their run as a team that could outsmart their market expire? Is it just not a league that you can do that in anymore? And unless the Rays, you know, do a full rebuild like the Astros and line themselves up for a big, you know, sprint, rebuilt sprint, are they a team that is no longer capable of being smarter than their cast? Yeah, they've been what they've been, even though Evan Longoria is basically back to being Evan Longoria again. Something that I wrote about last year and I think we might have talked about on the preview is that Longoria just suddenly stopped being a superstar and was just a pretty decent player.

And now all that power has come back, and yet still the Rays are lackluster yeah it's uh it's a good question because it it was so improbable that the rays managed to be so good for so long and to turn themselves around so dramatically in 2008 and then we wondered at the time when when friedman left and when Madden left, we wondered how much of the Rays' magic was leaving with them. But to be fair, there were certainly warning signs before then. And there was kind of just a fallow period in the drafting and development. And it just seemed like the Rays had to do everything right to keep being good every year. Without spending much money, They had to draft high, and they had to develop those players, and then they had to trade those players in smart deals

before they became expensive and get the new generation of good players back. And so really, if they just went a year or two without making some new superstar from within their system or making some new superstar from within their system or making some brilliant trade where they swindled some other team, then that was kind of it. And so, you know, Price left and Crawford left before him and, you know, other guys who were the foundation of that team moved on and they just didn't have the players to replace them.

So I think we can probably now say, I mean, it's hard to say because we gave all the analytics and the R&D a lot of credit for their insights and their success, and they still have a very big analytics and R&D department, and a lot of the people who were there during their success are still there. And so it might just be that the rest of the league caught up. It might just be that they got lucky before and they're getting unlucky now. But yeah, given the disadvantages that they have and have always had in that market,

you'd think that the odds were always against them And now they're Kind of no longer the model For winning despite all of these Institutional disadvantages Yeah I think you're right that it is Just as I don't know I mean Chris Moshe wrote a piece Well he wrote the essay in the 2016 annual

About how the Rays Took over from the A's As the team that we look at to see what the trend is, like whatever the raise are doing. Like if the raise, you know, it's like if the raise hit into a bunch of double plays one year, we would actually for a brief second be like, oh, it's hitting into double plays, the new market inefficiency. And so whatever the raise are doing, like you just do a leaderboard sort, and whatever the Rays are on top of, from like kind of a process perspective, you think, ah,

strategy. And that's still sort of the case. I totally believe, no, exactly. I think it is exactly still the case. And that's why it's sort of weird to think about the Rays as unsuccessful team, because I don't think that's any less true. I do still think that they have as much kind of brain talent or whatever in their front office as any team, and I think that maybe they might even have the best way of thinking about baseball, not just having smart people around, but having the best way of managing those people and thinking about the game. And yet I also don't feel like that's enough in this era.

I don't know how much you can separate yourself. One thing is I don't know how much you can separate yourself. Theo, I remember talking to me about how when we were struggling in the summer, the lesson he took from that summer, obviously we were a very, very different thing on a very, very different scale, but he said the lesson he took from the summer is that, you know, one person or even a couple people just can't do that much on a baseball team. It's a big organization. There are a lot of forces at play. And, you know, ultimately you're, you're, you're not as important as,

you know, the 25 guys on the field and how, how well they play. They, they have to go out there and play and you never know how well they're going to play. And so it might just be that... Theo Fightmaster, by the way. Theo Fightmaster, yeah. When some people hear Theo, they think of another baseball executive. I don't, but you're right. Some people do. And so it might just be that the era of front office, I don't know, front office superstardom might be winding down. And that, I mean, it's not that different from what you wrote four years ago, where you wrote specifically, I forget who you wrote about, but what did you call that? Keeping up with the somethings.

Keeping up with the Freedmen. Keeping up with the Freedmen. Yeah, specifically about that. For one thing, it's that every front office has, you know, very similar front office. And Russell and Kate Morrison are writing about that this week. But you're not likely to have a radically different mindset in your front office than any other team. For another, I mean, everybody's using the same data. And I don't think we knew going into this whether having access to awesome terabytes of data was going to be a flattening thing where now that everybody has it, it's really hard to have information that nobody else has, or whether it would be that some teams would

really emerge as being able to deal with it better, that they would find better ways to use it. And we still don't know that. It might be that this is like the more years teams spend with this, the more deviation there is between them. But it sort of feels so far that it has been flattening, that you haven't really seen a lot of, you haven't seen teams taking this and going in really extreme directions. And the other problem with having all this data is that whatever you do is immediately visible, because now every team has very precise data on what you're doing, and it's hard to hide anything. And so it's, I don't, I think that if small market teams were hoping, or maybe not small market teams, but sort of smart teams were hoping that

StatCast was going to advantage them more than it advantaged other teams. I think that maybe that hasn't played out so far. And I sort of am skeptical that it will now. I don't know if you are. But the other thing is that it, as we talked about with the Cardinals and drafting Albert Pujols, where for a day I wanted to give the Cardinals less credit for being a great organization for the last decade and a half, it is really the case that the Rays had a very brief but bright draft period where they were drafting they drafted amazingly particularly at the top but not even just at the top they had an amazing draft or two uh and then they had an amazing trade the delman young trade if you look at it is one of the you know three or four great trades of of our generation the way that they not only, not only did they take Delman Young and turn him

into Matt Garza, who was very good, and Jason Bartlett, who was very good, but that they then turned around and traded Matt Garza for Chris Archer, who is, well, still very good. And they traded Jason Bartlett, well, they didn't trade Jason Bartlett for much, but they turned this one asset into a franchise. And it's all the more impressive when you consider that that one asset was a huge bust You know, the biggest prospect bust of his generation They turned nothing into a franchise And that is amazing and awesome And you don't have to take credit away from them to note that it's probably hard to repeat

And that you can't count on them doing that again Yeah, it was tough They just just they had to keep hitting on everyone and they had to just keep making these moves that turned out great. And they had to have Zobris become a superstar on a crazy economical contract. And they had to, you know, lock up Evan Longoria forever on a deal that barely paid him anything. And they had to pick up Carlos Pena for nothing and have him turn into a 40 home run superstar. And so they did all those things and, and they are still,

I mean, they still make some smart moves and some smart pickups. I mean, they, Steve Pierce, Steve Pierce is good again. They were the preseason favorite from Pagoda and I don't pretend to know more than Pagoda.

So it could just be that they are, it could be that they are the best team in the al east right now and they're just having a bad season that happens too although i still don't i still don't see it no but yeah yeah i mean it's it's hard you have to have everyone turn out great to keep doing what they did and even though they might still be trailblazers or thought leaders or whatever you want to call it i mean last year we were talking about how they were handling their pitching staff differently, and maybe that was out of necessity more so than the times through the order effect. But still, they were doing it, and no one else was doing it, and they were taking all these guys out early.

And then there was the thing about how they were hitting earlier in the count, swinging earlier in the count, dramatically different, and that seemed to be a an inefficiency they were trying to exploit and maybe those things helped them but they might have helped a couple games here and there and that doesn't matter because you know Desmond Jennings didn't really turn into a superstar that they needed him to be and Steven Souza turned out to be just you know kind of okay not the the underrated projection darling that they probably hoped he was. And so Brad Miller's fine, and these guys are okay, but they didn't really, you know, just hit home runs with these deals, and they kind of need to. I mean, I don't know.

They still get a guy like Logan Forsythe, and Logan Forsyth turns into a really, really good player all of a sudden. So it still happens that they get these undervalued guys maybe, but they just don't have as much talent, and it hasn't all worked out. And it's tough. Even if you do have one of the best R&D departments, so do the Yankees, and so do the Red Sox, and so do the Dodgers, and so do the Red Sox and so do the Dodgers and so do the teams with all of the money in the world. So it's hard to do what they did and they did it for a really impressively long time. Yeah, you don't have to change much about this team to envision it being a lot better. I mean, we didn't, it wasn't fate that we're having this conversation right now. If, you know, if Matt Moore turns into the prospect, you know, it becomes

the pitcher that he was projected to be. And if they stop the Will Myers trade without bringing the Washington Nationals into it. And if instead of getting, you know, a bunch of really, really horrifyingly bad hitters to be their low cost framing catchers. They had hit on, you know, Francisco Cervelli instead of the Pirates did. Then we're having a very different conversation. I, on the other hand, they didn't. For two of those, they didn't. I mean, the Steven Souza trade is, like, really going to go down as, not as bad as the Delman Young trade was good, certainly, but

a really bad, bad, bad trade. I mean, you'd rather have Joe Ross or Trey Turner than Steven Souza. Yeah. And I mean, they've been doing this catcher thing for like five years, and it still is kind of amazing that they haven't been able to get one who can do anything with the bat. I mean, every other team does it. Like lots of teams are getting framers for cheap. Doing the same thing with their first base DH situation.

Like almost since Pena, they just keep going through these guys, Logan Morrison and James Loney, and they just haven't really hit on a big sort of like Pat Burrell type success. Or, well, Pat Bur burrell was success for them but yeah um you know like a carlos pena type success right or from the giants perspective a pat burrell type success yeah right uh so all right um we very early in this show did a game where we predicted what which team would be the last one to win the world series of the 30 and we were like sort of trying to think about like what what uh fundamentals about the

teams uh may what which team had sort of the worst fundamentals and we didn't even consider the rays at that point i mean the rays were a team that had a bad ballpark in a bad city uh in a tough division but they were so smart and had been so successful that, you know, their fundamentals, as they were at the time, were really strong. And we probably would have named at least half the league, I would guess, before we had guessed the Rays. So I wonder if you think that the Rays really are that different from the teams like the Padres and the Brewers that we were sort of naming at the time, which, you know, teams that obviously could win. I think the Indians are another one of those teams. They could win. The Indians could win this year.

You have good years. You have bad years. But you're really disadvantaged. Are the Rays now just as kind of disadvantaged as all the other poor teams. And if you were picking the last team to win a World Series starting right now, would the Rays be one of your picks? Yeah, I mean, I guess they would be pretty close to the top of that list. They have the second worst attendance in the league. They have the worst payroll or lowest payroll in the league.

They don't have a super strong farm system and they are not particularly good right now. So those are kind of all the elements that we looked at and considered when we were doing those rankings. So there's really nothing to set the Rays apart, except for the fact that they do still have some good, recognizable, productive players, and they have the past. And they have years of us treating them as an outlier, because they demonstrated that they were one. And so they still have smart people, they still have tons of scouts. When I was looking up every team's scouts earlier this year, the Rays had tons of scouts and they had scouts in parts of the world where other teams did not have a full-time

scout. So they are clearly trying to do all the things that they were doing before. But I don't know that there's really any reason to put them above. But I don't know that there's really any reason to put them above I mean, the Brewers were the team that we settled on As the furthest away or the least likely to win or whatever it was Because of the same reason Small market, not a very good team in the present Not a good farm system, etc, etc

And now you would put the Brewers ahead of the Rays, right? Probably. I mean, they've, they've built one of the best farm systems. They have promising young players. They poached some of the, the Rays smart front office minds. And so now you look at the Brewers as a team that's on the upswing and maybe you would take the Brewers ahead of the Rays. So yeah, I mean, there aren't that many teams that have more going against them than the Rays, which was always the case, but now there aren't as many things going for them. All right, last question. Pakoda still likes the Rays a little bit, but it has knocked them down to, you know, to only the third best team in the division

going forward, which I imagine you'll, you and I would both still think is too optimistic. But even scaling that back a little, 500. Are the Rays a 500 team for the rest of this season? Keeping in mind, they have essentially an even run differential right now. Yeah, right. Yeah, I mean, they're not far from that. I don't know if there's anything about what they've done that I could really count on them getting much, much better. Maybe Jennings will be better. Maybe Archer's ERA will be lower. So maybe Moore's ERA will be lower. They have pretty good strikeout and walk ratios and bad home run rates. Archer and Odorizzi and Moore and Smiley, all of those guys.

So maybe that stuff comes back to the pack a little bit. So I don't think they're far from a 500 team, but I'll probably take the under, I guess. I would take the over on them as a 500 team, but with also the understanding that it's trade deadline season and this might be a team that is very different in a month. Yes. Right. All right. Okay. So that is it for today. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild.

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