Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 91: What Will the Braves Get from B.J. Upton?

Episode Date: November 29, 2012

Ben and Sam break down the Braves’ signing of B.J. Upton and discuss the discrepancy between different appraisals of his value.

Good morning and welcome to episode 91 of Effectively Wild, the Baseball Perspectives Daily Podcast. In New York, New York, I am Ben Lindberg. And in Long Beach, California, joining me from the Honda Fit is Sam Miller. Hello, Sam. Hi, Ben. So today is my day to bring the topic. And you exerted some pressure earlier on me.

I suggested. You tried to tamper with the process of picking podcast topics. of picking podcast topics. And I caved and I have brought the topic that you strong-armed me into bringing. So we are going to talk about BJ Upton signing with the Braves. Oh, good, because I saw something on this on Twitter. I saw that something had happened with BJ.

But I didn't see any of the actual news. So I look forward to hearing from you. You set me up. So yeah, there was a development in that he signed with Atlanta, whom he had been connected to pretty much all offseason. And we heard that he was their top target. And it made sense for him to be their top target, probably. target and it made sense for him to be their top target probably and they acquired the target uh for what was what were the terms five years 75 that's exactly right well that's exactly what

was reported yeah uh so was there anything in particular that you wanted to start off by talking about what did you think of it uh It seems just about right to me. I don't know that it's an incredible bargain and I don't think it's an overpay. It seems like about what BJ Upton should be worth, I think. I'm okay with it. So that's not interesting at all. So there are a few things about this deal that are interesting to me because of the kind of uncertainty that they introduce. Yeah, Upton is interesting. I'll just go through the three of them one at a time. One is that there actually is quite a wide range of opinion about what BJ Upton has actually done. There's often a wide range of opinion about what players are going to do.

But in fact, I would say that BJ Upton has a much wider spread of wins above metrics over the past few years than most players. And so it actually has kind of created these sort of two alternate worlds that I was able to kind of pick up on on my Twitter feed, where if you are going by fan graphs metrics, BJ Upton is easily worth $15 million a year. He's been worth 14 wins over the last four years. So that's three and a half wins a year. So you'd be paying like $4 million a win, which is a bargain if he maintained that.

Whereas if you go to baseball reference, he's worth half that. He's actually the same guy, depending on where you look, half as good. And so if you are looking at those metrics, you're seeing a guy who has been worth less than two wins a year through his chronological peak, theoretically. And I guess BP has kind of split the difference. He has split the difference. It's at 9.8. And so that's satisfying.

But so it's interesting to see. I mean, I think we probably all see this these days where, you know, like in a political discussion, people on the right and people on the left have kind of different realities that they're arguing from. And you could see this a little bit in a sort of smaller way today with BJ Upton. And so that actually leads nicely into the second thing, which is that 9.8 wins above replacement player, Warp, would be 2.5 wins a year. And it's actually the lowest of the top seven free agent outfielders this year by quite a bit.

He actually had the lowest of the seven in 2012 and the lowest of the seven in 11 uh and the lowest of the seven in 11 and 12 combined and in the three year line and in the four years combined so whatever time period you think is relevant he's worst of the seven uh and yet he's going to end up with the second i would say the second highest contract and that felt weird to me and i'm not sure that i like it uh i think that um the the the that the reasons are kind of obvious. One is that Upton has a lot of perceived upside, both as a player who has shown flashes of brilliance and also because he's younger than everybody else.

But I told Jason Focacovsky that, I think, maybe I told Ian, that it sort of feels like people are treating him almost like he's 24 and that there's definitely growth in his years. But he's 28, and he's been playing Major League Baseball for seven, basically seven full seasons. And I don't know that it's right to assume that. And I think that's an interesting question of how much age matters in these cases. I doubt that he gets this deal if he's 30.

And I don't know. That's kind of odd to me because age is suggestive, but it's not, as we've talked about, it's not necessarily a massive difference in the short term. in reference to somebody mentioning that he's a change of scenery guy, that not all players are easy to motivate all the time, and that this is maybe especially hard when you're playing in front of minor league attendance figures. And the idea being that there's reason to suggest that maybe Denton hasn't been inspired to play at his peak level. And that is an interesting idea because on the one hand, it suggests that there's there and you can be optimistic.

On the other, if I were signing a guy for five years, I think that it might be most troubling that there's motivation factors and that a guy who is hard to motivate might actually be hard to motivate everywhere and that that might actually be a big red flag. So, these things are interesting because they make it easy to argue on either side of the deal and I'm not sure where I fall on any of them. I will note that Pocota, before 2012,'t i haven't we don't i haven't seen the updated 10-year forecast but before 2012 pakoda projected um uh crimony i've i've blanked

i think it's about 11 warp uh for yeah it's 11 warp for 2013, 14, 15, 16, 17. So the five years in this deal. Presumably this might go down slightly because he actually underperformed Pocota's 2012 projection. 10 or 11. You're basically talking about paying $7 million to win, which is steep in this market.

Even if there's inflation, it's steep in this market. That's not to say that it's necessarily a bad move. Atlanta had a need. Maybe they didn't think Pagan was going to hit the market. If maybe they have a feeling that the Giants are close with him or something like that. Certainly you could see wanting to stay away from Josh Hamilton. And there seems to be some strange like sense that there's no chance that they were ever going to sign michael bourne for some reason it's never quite clear on so you know you need a center fielder upton fits their needs but i don't know it all just feels odd to me that the guy who has been the seventh best of the seven is going to get paid the second most of the seven uh yeah it surprises me to hear that stat i wouldn't have guessed that um he's kind

of an interesting mix of overrated and underrated by i don't know whether it's the same people or somehow doing both at the same time or it's just two different camps but there is the sense that he that we haven't seen his best yet or that at least we haven't seen it sustained yet. Maybe we saw it in 2007 briefly, and that it will come back at some point. And that there's also the, I guess, competing sense that he is overrated because of those tools and that he hasn't been all that good. I mean, I guess depending on what stat you look at, as you say, and I guess, I mean, the main difference between those win value stats is, I assume, his defense, right? Ours basically says he is an average center fielder.

defense, right? Ours basically says he is an average center fielder. Defense is a big part of it, but surprisingly, the difference shows up in his offense and his base as well, which is odd because those don't usually vary all that much from metric to metric, and in Upton's case, they really do. And it's also hard to say what he is right now because he is just kind of morphed into a different player or different players over the last several years. I mean, when he was 22, he was great. And then he didn't get, he really hasn't gotten back to that point at all yet. And of course, he had the shoulder injury, which seemed to hurt his power dramatically for a couple of years. Last year, he had a career high home run total, but did it with a lot more aggressiveness so that he actually had an on-base percentage under 300, whereas before he had been a better than league average guy. And early on, he was a very good on-base guy.

average guy. And early on, he was a very good on base guy. So it's hard to say whether I mean, if his recent trend towards becoming more aggressive were to continue unchecked, then you could see it becoming a big problem a couple years from now. But it's probably not really safe to extrapolate from that. I know Keith Law mentioned that he thinks that Upton was trying to hit home runs to increase his value for free agency. In which case, I guess, maybe that backfired. Unless people were kind of blinded by the home run total and didn't notice the other things. kind of blinded by the home run total and didn't notice the other things. But I like it in that the Braves had a hole and didn't seem to have a great replacement coming from within the farm system anytime soon. And he had been mentioned as someone the Phillies were going after.

So it never hurts to not let a player go to a division rival though I probably wouldn't ever make a move for that reason well a minor move maybe but overall I think if you just kind of take the middle and just assume I guess just because you can't tell whether he is the guy he used to be or the guy he is right now if you take the middle estimate there and you take the middle estimate between the different competing win value metrics, then you kind of end up with what they paid him, I think, basically. So I don't know whether the other stuff is a distraction in that we'd just be better off going with sort of a standard aging curve and ignoring all the other information about Upton, which might be misleading in that it's hard to say what he will be as soon as next year, let alone five years from now. But when I looked at

Adam Jones's extension, which I guess was for a similar amount if you look at the same age seasons, I found that really the decline, the concern with Jones was that he didn't walk much. And I guess I looked and found that basically the age at which that would be expected to become a big problem was also the age at which the contract ended, which is, I suppose, the same age as Upton's contract end. So I'm not that concerned about a contract that takes him through only his first couple of years of his 30s. It doesn't seem that dangerous to me. Yeah. It's interesting because Upton has the most perceived upside of all the free agents on the market except for maybe Josh Hamilton. But somebody argued to me that he got paid because he has the least downside,

that he's the least likely to fall off a cliff. If you accept that, if you accept that he has the least downside and the most upside, then he makes a lot of sense. And I guess that's what you pay for with age by a 28-year-old. That's why you sign that age play. And it's what allows you to project a little bit more. So BJ Upton has never received a single MVP vote in the next five years. You cut out a little bit there. What was your question? In the next five years, will he receive an MVP vote? And how high will he finish if he does you cut out a little bit there what was your question uh in the next five years

will he receive an mvp vote and how high will he finish if he does uh i well there's always the the sort of crazy vote that comes in now and then for a player who doesn't really deserve it and you can't really predict that. So I would say he hasn't gotten a single, even like a 10th place vote. He has three postseason teams and another one that, well, at least one more that came very close, and not even one Jeremy Affelt type. Right. Jeremy Affelt type. Right. I guess I would say that if he hasn't gotten one so far,

he will continue not to get one because I don't really expect him to be better than he has been. But it certainly wouldn't surprise me. Do you think that there's ever been a player who got $75 million? And has never gotten an MVP? But that is a topic that you should research all-star uh appearance none of the three nothing and of course uh lacking not one piece of although that's not quite as damning especially for a player who does a little bit of everything as he

does yeah well I mean if he is underrated, it's not necessarily by the people who are paid to evaluate baseball players. If he's underrated, it might be by the fans, and it might be by the writers, certain writers. But I think this contract alone seems to indicate that his skills are valued pretty appropriately by the marketplace, or at least by one general manager. So I guess the lack of black ink stuff hasn't really clouded most people's perception of him in the game, at least. All right. Well, I've talked that issue through.

Okay. Do you have any theories about the next big free agent who will sign and force us to do a show about his signing? Nope. Okay. Well, we will probably have a bunch of them next week, and we should probably figure out what to do about next week, because I will be in Nashville. But I guess we can do shows from there.

Okay, so we're done with episode 91 and we will be back with one more show this week, tomorrow.