Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 916: State of the Standings: AL West

Episode Date: June 30, 2016

As the regular season’s midpoint approaches, Ben talks to Joe Sheehan about the state of the AL West.

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Once upon a time in the west Good morning and welcome to episode 916 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectus presented by our Patreon supporters and the Play Index at BaseballReference.com I'm Ben Lindberg of FiveThirtyEight, my regular co-host Sam Miller is off in the wilderness somewhere this week, so I have been helped out by a combination of Joe Sheehan and Rennie Giserely. We are at the midpoint of the regular season, and so we are running through each division, talking about what has happened and what we expect to happen over the next few months. Today I'll be talking about the AL West with Joe Sheehan, who writes the Joe Sheehan newsletter at JoeSheehan.com and also contributes to SI and The Athletic Chicago.

We talked a few days ago, and I've been parceling out that content episode by episode. Just so you know, the recording quality on Joe's end varies a bit throughout the episode. He was traveling this week, and we had to use a couple different methods to capture his words, but it should be adequate throughout. So we will pick up where we left off with the AL West. Moving on to the AL West, and as we speak, the Texas Rangers have the largest division lead of any team in baseball, and that is not something I foresaw. And if you had told me that, you know, Hugh Darvish had only made a couple starts at this point in the season, and, you know, Prince Fielder

seems to be just about done, and, you know, Prince Fielder seems to be just about done. And, you know, all the other things that have gone wrong for the Rangers and the injuries and Shinsu Chu missing a ton of time and Josh Hamilton being out for the year. And, you know, this litany of things that have gone wrong. And yet somehow here they are with a double-digit division lead. I don't know exactly how to explain how they have gotten here, but here they are.

Well, they've outplayed their Pythag by a million. They're this year's version of the Orioles. Actually, as you were talking, I was digging up on my very old about-to-be-replaced laptop, 17-5 in one-run games through Saturday. By the way, that's with some bullpen blowups. Sean Tolleson has an ERA of, it looks like

your credit score, I think, something in the four figures. It's been really bad. They've had a lot of things go right in close games. And that's not to say it's not real. It's not to say, but typically when teams go 17 and 5, one win games, we don't think they're quite as good as their record. talk about that. People get very mad when you talk about record in close games or performance in high leverage situations that isn't repeatable.

We keep saying it's not repeatable and the next team is going to be the one that's repeatable. It's not. The problem is this division only has

one other team. Well, it depends. The Astros are now over 500 and I think you can make a case for them but the Rangers, they're like 17 and one

against them in the last 18 times they've played them. They own them. The Mariners are the team I had win the division and that looked pretty good up until about three weeks ago. and one against them in the last 18 times they've played them. They own them. The Mariners are the team I had winning the division. That looked pretty good up until about three weeks ago.

The starting rotation hasn't really worked out. They've had some unfortunate injuries for Hernandez and Walker. They just didn't have the pitching depth to put up with that. The offense was better this year, which is what I expected. I still think this race ends up closer, whether it's because the Astros continue to make a push or the Mariners do, but the

Rangers are going to fall back to earth. The reason I think that they might not is John Daniels, I don't know if the Rangers are the best organization in baseball, but they're on the short list. John Daniels is an excellent GM. They have the depth to go out and make an aggressive move if they want to. Tremendous farm system. We all know about the Profar

Odor-Andrus triangle. They can't get all those guys on the field at the same time. Drix and Profar, if you just dropped them onto a team and let them play, I'll say it'd be one of the 125 best players in baseball for the rest of the year. That's an incredibly valuable trade ship. So the Rangers are most likely among those three teams to improve themselves. The Astros could just call up Reid and Bregman and get a lot better. I guess they've probably called up Reid by the time you've heard this, folks. So they get better internally. And then the Mariners, I'm not sure the Mariners have either of those things. They don't have very much in the upper

levels with which to improve, and they don't have a whole lot to trade, make improvements to the rotation. So I think you're going to end up looking at another Texas race here. I think the Rangers are the better team, but this will get closer before the year is out. Yeah. I mean, the Rangers don't seem to have those teams that outplay their Pythag. We tend to attribute it to managerial genius. And I guess Bannister just hasn't been around long enough to build that kind of reputation. And maybe a year like this is how it happens. But when the Orioles did it, it was Buck Showalter, Buck Showalter's a genius. And, and we aren't really saying that about Bannister yet. And, and the bullpen that the Orioles had that year, again, we're, you know,

we're talking about Sam Dyson and, and Matt Bush of all people, but it's not quite the bullpen that the Orioles had in those days. It's not anything in the region of the Royals bullpen. So it's hard to say, even to make the usual arguments that you make for why a team could continue doing this improbable thing that they have done. I don't know that you can even make that case about the Rangers. So maybe they are a team that you could supplement and make better in some way. You could send the first baseman on a cruise. Yeah, right. Sure. You've, you know, you've had Bobby Wilson catching for a while, Bobby Wilson and Brian Holiday. And that's, that's not a combination that anyone would

have forecasted success for. So, you know, and obviously if you get Darvish back and Darvish is as good as he was for those two starts over a half season or something, then that makes a big difference. But I agree. I mean, coming into the year, I thought this would be the Mariners year. I was also kind of too high on the Mariners last year, but I didn't think the Astros were going to take a huge step back. And since that early struggle, they have basically been the Astros again. And even without the ace level Keichel, you'd think there's enough talent on that roster that they are going to remain in this thing. So I think it could be a three-team race. At least those two teams will remain in the wildcard picture. Maybe the Rangers have built up enough of an early season lead in a sort of fluky way that they've put that out of reach.

But you'd think there are three teams in this division that will at least be in the picture up until the last few days of the season. Yeah, to be clear, if one of these three teams drops out, I think it'll be the Mariners. I don't think it'll be – I think it'll be the Mariners just give up too many runs as they're doing as I have this conversation with you. That's going to be the fall apart. The Rangers struggle is going to be the same thing. I mean Holland on the DL, Lewis on the DL. I think the probables for this week include Charlie Huff and Bobby Witt. They're really – I mean they've got depth and bulk and Chichi Gonzalez and guys like

that, but they don't have anybody who can replace even the innings they're getting from Lewis and Holland. They're going to be piecing that staff together even if Darvish comes back. They're going to have a lot of starts to fill, a lot of innings to fill. That increases the load on the bullpen, which has been pretty overworked so far this year. It used to be Texas would get to August and give up 1,000 runs, and that stopped last year. But the reinforcements, Hamels, Dyson, and Diekman, they had a very strong run prevention month in August. You could see that this could be one of those years where the Rangers get to August, it just all falls apart. I will say that I think

this division, I'm still not sure that this division winner gets to 90 wins. I think I had him at 89 to start the year and it would not at all surprise me, even with the Rangers, quote unquote, banked wins, to see the AL West won by 89 wins. So Prince Fielder has had an encouraging 10 days or so. He's on a 10-game hitting streak during which he is OPSing 1,000-something. And before that, the season was about as discouraging as it possibly could have been. So I don't know whether your answer to this question would change based on 10 games of success or not. But before that, I know I think you'd written about him at least once in the newsletter at some point this year. What do you think the Rangers

should do with him, could do with him? Is there a reason to hang on to him? Is there any possibility of getting rid of him? I mean, how long does he have, do you think, as a productive player or as a player, period? Negative 1.5 years. In the time since the trade, I want to say he's been roughly a replacement level player, maybe a little bit better than that. The problem with Fielder is that even his upside isn't that high at this point. He's a negative base running value, negative defensive value, probably should be a DH. And he stopped hitting.

It's not that he stopped hitting for power. It's that he stopped hitting fly balls. The one thing he can still do is hit singles it seems and you know you'll see him hit against the shift a lot he gets a lot of balls into what you know what a shortstop position might be when it was shifted against him but just not a ton of value and when you're paying i forget how much of the contract the rangers owe him but i mean there's not a lot of precedent for walking away for that kind of from that kind of money it's a really tough. He's owed $96 million over the next four seasons. If it's just about offense, I mean, I think there's an argument that Jerickson Profar is a

better offensive player right now. And I think there's an argument that Joey Gallo might be a better offensive player right now. So in the same way that the Rangers got Mazzara on the field through injuries and got Profar in the field through suspension, they're going to have to make a proactive decision now. It's not just going to be fate's going to line up and they're going to get their best players on the field. At some point, they may have to say, you're not one of our best players. Now, everything I know about Jeff Bannister tells me he's not going to do that. He very much has that player's manager, takes care of his guys, the end to him. And I think it would be completely out of character for him to go ahead and just not play Prince Fielder. The problem, of course, is if you don't play Prince Fielder, he's a dead roster spot. The only value he has is batting four

times a game. So really tough situation. I don't expect them to do anything radical this season. I think they're just going to carry the dead weight. The 10-game cushion they have helps. They can do a little something. They can wait it out longer than they might have otherwise. But this is a problem that's going to trail them into the offseason. And the Mariners, I mean, as we speak, they've hit the second most home runs majors, which is a strange thing to say about the Mariners. And all of their offseason moves seem to be geared toward on-base percentage. And Jerry DiPoto was talking about OBP, and that had obviously been a weakness during the Zarensik years.

And they haven't been spectacular in that area. They've been kind of a mid-leading team OBP-wise, but they hit home runs, and they hit home runs on the road, and they hit home runs at home. Robinson Cano having a great season is not a huge surprise. He was great down the stretch last season. And Nelson Cruz continues to defy the dire takes on his contract, which I think many of us were guilty of. I'm going to slowly walk out of the room now. Well, I think we were all. You know who had a good couple of last winters in his job? Jack Cerencik. Yeah, right.

The popular perception of him as a GM just fluctuated so wildly over His time in Seattle you know he was the Genius when he took over and he Rebuilt the roster and he made it into this Defense first team and they had a lot Of success at least for a year And then that formula stopped working and he Fell in love with the right Handed low on base slugger type

And in Nelson Cruz's case That was a pretty good infatuation To have in retrospect. But yeah, a guy like Leonis Martin, who I know you've liked for a while. I don't know if even you liked him to almost 200 isolated power level. No, no. I thought it was going to be a completely different shape of a player. Absolutely. Yeah, right. And they've gotten very little out of Adam Lind, which was a move that I think a lot of people did like.

And, you know, he was kind of a type of player that the Mariners had been missing. And so they've done it not in really a way that I expected exactly. But they've been a pretty good team up until the last few weeks when the wheels all came off all of a sudden. And with the Mariners, you know, if you look down their roster, you look at the ages, most of them start with threes. There are some exceptions, but there aren't a lot of young guys on this team. And so there seemed to be a sense that DePoto was kind of trying to put together a winner while they still had productive Cano and productive Felix and productive Seager. And he was just trying to paper on those guys and

Nelson Cruz and bring in enough talent that they could contend with them for a few years, but maybe was just sort of postponing the inevitable. Do you think that there's enough talent here and enough generations of talent here to sustain a winning Seattle team without doing a teardown, without doing a rebuild? Or is this just kind of a holding action? And, you know, at some point, and maybe that point is sooner than you'd like, Felix is not going to be productive anymore. Cruz is not going to be surprising us all anymore. And you might have to start from the ground up again. It's a tough spot. Jerry DiPoto didn't have a situation that he could rebuild. If you look at the core, I mean, Jack Cerencic, for all the grief we gave him, his last two big moves, Cruz and Cano, worked out better than anybody expected,

at least so far. Cano still has 14 or 15 years left on the contract. And I don't think DiPoto had much choice. I liked what he did this winter. Ioki didn't work out. Lind hasn't worked out. But in terms of trying to upgrade the OBP, this team had had such a disastrous OBP. I think their OBP for the decade was 300 coming into this year. So I like what DiPoto tried to do. And I think that with Cano having no trade value, I can't see anybody as well as Cano's playing, even taking on the seven years left on the deal. Cruz might have some trade value.

You know, the King probably doesn't at this point. If you do that, you're talking about a whole different thing anyway. I think that you've just got to try to ride it out with the core you have right now. I thought it was good enough. I had them winning 91 games. And the division this year doesn't look like it. I mean, you look at losing.

Akuma hasn't pitched well. Hernandez had good results, but he didn't pitch particularly well. Then he got hurt. It started to look like James Paxton stepping up here. I mean, if Walker and Paxton pitch well throughout the rest of the year, I do think they can hang in this division. I don't think DiPoto can go into even next winter and say, well, we're going to try to start over. It's not much of a farm system. They're probably two, three drafts and international signing periods from having a good farm system. Yeah, that's the next question I was really

going to ask you is not whether there's a Felix replacement. You can't really replace Felix one to one, but whether there's someone who could step up and kind of take that mantle of the head of the rotation, or even, you know, if Felix bounces back somewhat, just be that number two. That's kind of what they've been looking for. And they've been hoping Tywin Walker would be that. And he sort of has been that. He's still home run prone. And then, as you mentioned, Paxton put together a nice string of starts, at least until his most recent one. And then there are guys like Carnes and Miley hanging around. And so I'm not really sure whether there is a top of the rotation here independent of

Felix. Do you see either of those guys taking a big step forward, whether it's Walker or Paxton? I mean, if you look at Walker over the last calendar year, the numbers are fairly impressive. Certainly the strikeout and walk stats are nice, but he still gives up some runs. So I don't know whether the one guy they really need to step up and take that top rotation spot is there. I agree. Walker, to me, is probably a two at his best right now. He's not a one. Hernandez, who's one of my favorite players, and it kills me to say it, isn't a one anymore.

But the thing about it is they don't really have... You see some teams dip into their sixth, seventh, eighth starters, and it's a disaster. You look at the Mariners, and they have seven guys that wouldn't mind running out there. You mentioned Carnes, who I remember talking to a lot of guys this winter who just loved him. Jason Coletta, Rotoire, Paul Sporer,, Fangraphs, who were talking him up all offseason. You look

at Paxton, you look at Miley, who's basically a league average minus starter. It's not that mean, they just don't, they have depth. So they've been able to fade these injuries to Felix and Miley's been hurt, but there isn't a front of the rotation. They have to score. It's odd to talk about a Mariners team like this, but they have to score a bunch of runs to win, and I think they can. I think it's a good offense. Back in the bullpen will be interesting. I don't know if you've had a chance to see Edmund Diaz at all.

He's kind of called up, and, I mean, this is kind of the next really exciting reliever that we'll be talking about. They've got Benoit back. You know, C-Sheck's leaving a side role. C-Sheck's no better than the third-best reliever in that bullpen. I think if you look at Diaz and Benoit as the core of a pretty good bullpen. Again, a lot of this depends on, do the Rangers run away and get to 95? In which case, I don't think the Mariners can catch them.

But if this thing ends up being a three-team scrum around 87, 88 wins, I think the Mariners can beat it, though. And you've written at length about Felix and just how unusual it is for a player of his caliber to go as long as he has without pitching in the playoffs. And I mean, the really disturbing thing is that if it doesn't happen now, you could conceive of it not happening really indefinitely. I mean, for the foreseeable future, this is kind of, you know, either this year or next year, this sort of window while he's still really good. And while the team is good enough to dream around, this is kind of it. And if it doesn't pan out for the Mariners this year,

then there's no telling how long he could go without making it there. And he's, you know, signed with the Mariners through 2020, which is his age 34 season. It's tough too, because he just, he's got twice as many wins over replacement as the next best guy who hasn't appeared in the playoffs since we went to eight teams in the playoffs back in 1995. It's insane how big a gap it is. We're talking about guys not going into the pro season 50 years ago, 60 years ago, you know, Arnie Banks being the most famous example. If you go back to expansion, when four teams started making the playoffs,

Hernandez is something like sixth among players. You've got guys, I want to say, like Buddy Bell and Toby Haring. It's just really amazing that a guy could play this long in the three-division format and never reach the postseason, which underlines the failures the Mariners have had since 2001. You know what I think about? Frank Thomas. And, you know, we're talking on the phone here. Maybe I'm getting this wrong, but didn't Frank Thomas, the year he got a ring, play 14 games, he dove, tore a muscle, missed the year, and the White Sox won the World Series? I'm pretty sure, and I almost see like a Felix thing happening where, you know, he'll be on the roster because that contract,

with his current level of performance, probably isn't tradable. And five years down the road, the Mariners will win a World Series with Felix, you know, doing the Karl Malone coming off the bench for 15 minutes a game role and not actually being a big contributor to it, but getting a playoff appearance and maybe a ring that way. It's just, I don't know, as a fan, Ben, forget analyst, you want to see the best players on the biggest stages. And I think I would really love to see Felix Hernandez get that opportunity.

It's why I talk about Mike Trout being traded a lot, because I want to see Mike Trout on that stage. We can talk all we want. I mean, I'm a regular season guy. You know that. That's how I value teams and players. But the fact of the matter is, casual baseball fans, general sports fans, media, television, value guys for what they do in October. And guys like Trout and Hernandez, if they never get on that stage, will always be less than to the majority of baseball players. Yeah. Thomas played 34 games in 2005. Somehow managed to hit 12 home runs in those 34 games, but yeah. So you would still take Mariners over Astros now, even though the Astros have righted themselves and actually moved past the Mariners?

No. Well, given all of the information I currently have, probably not. Knowing that Hernandez is out, knowing Aoki didn't work out, he got DFA'd, optioned, I guess. Knowing that the Astros might have Bregman in the lineup in the second half, which I didn't think was going to come that fast. I think looking at these teams from this day forward, the Astros do look a bit better. With the Astros, I think we kind of got a sense maybe last year that there was an inevitability to these rebuilds that we've seen. You know, the Cubs, the Astros, once you tear it down, once you start over, if you do it right and you stick to this plan, then you will come out the other side and you will

build one of the best teams in baseball. And we've seen that happen with the Cubs. And so that's kind of what teams like the Braves or, you know, some other teams, they're banking on that formula working and it doesn't always work. It doesn't always pan out perfectly. And so I wonder whether you think the Astros, now that we've seen them, you know, scrape into the playoffs once, and of course, they started slow this year, but they've come on of late. Do they have the foundation that you want? If you're going to resign yourself to being the worst team in baseball for a few years, then you not only have to come out the other side and be a competitive team. I think you have to be one of the best teams in baseball for that strategy to really justify itself. So do you think that they have

the talent on the roster, whether it's this year or, you know, however long this window lasts and this core stays together? Do you think they have what it takes to ascend to that level, whether it's, you know, quite the Cubs level or not? You know, will they be by far the best team in their division for a few years in a row? Will they be the best team in the American League at any point with this core together? Or will they fall short of that and be an 80-something win team that never really breaks through? I think those are tough standards when you look at the development that the Rangers and the Red Sox do. So the Astros could be the sixth best team in baseball but never win their division because the Rangers have become that good. I will say that.

I do think Reyes, Springer, Altuve, you look at Reid coming up, you look at some of the other prospects they have, that's the core that can win. I think you start with those three guys, and I think most GMs would take that. The problem, as I see it, we talk about the Cubs. The Cubs did it developmentally, but then they went out and spent the money. And we didn't see that from the Astros the last two years I was advocating two years ago for them to sign Max Scherzer not because I thought they were going to win the division last year make the playoffs last

year but because it was a we're going to be good over the next six years we need a number one starter they pocketed so much money during that stretch where they had these 30 million dollar payrolls if they're not going to reinvest that money into the team, if they're going to continue to run a bottom third payroll, that's where it goes missing. You can have 15 wins making $8 million a year, which is what they have. But if you're not going to add to that with quality free agents, you're always going to fall short. I think that's the shame of it now. You've got a big market and they've screwed up their media. I'm not saying that they haven't. But if you're not going to fall short. I think that's the shame of it now. You've got a big market and they've screwed up their media. I'm not saying that they haven't, but if you're not going to supplement the development by going outside the organization when the time is right, you're not going to be

able to get over the hump. And I think we're seeing that with this team this year, this missing, like that one starting pitcher could really use. And that's going to be a problem over the next couple of years because that pitcher just isn't going to be on the market again until 2018, 2019. And you mentioned Altuve being part of that core. I mean, he just keeps getting better and better every year. And it almost feels like an old-fashioned career arc at this point because we've seen so many guys come up and be brilliant from day one. And there's been research that suggests that aging curves look different these days than they used to. But Altuve is kind of the typical career path where you come up 21, 22, and you show some promise, but you just keep better. You keep getting better and better as you age into your physical prime. And he just seems to keep adding abilities every year. I mean,

we knew that he could hit for average. We knew that he could steal bases. We then found out that he could really hit for average. He could win a batting title. But even when he won a batting title, he wasn't a superstar. He was by far the best player on that Astros team, but he didn't have a five tool fully rounded game. And now he does. Now he seemingly does everything. He is slugging 560 right now and he has you know been among the the five or so best players in the league and i don't know whether that's just what he is now or whether we'll look back and this will be the outlier year where he was one of the best and then he goes back to just being a very good player for a while do you have any sense of that do you do you see him building on this or sustaining this? Well, two years ago, I talked about him at a conference.

I remember saying, you know, in 2014, he showed all of this growth that he kind of had to dig a little bit to find. Better contact rate, better strikeout walk, a lot more power. He was driving the ball more. He really liked to see that. He was 23 at the time, I want to say. So this is just a continuation of that process. And really, since the day he came into league, he's just gotten a little bit better. I think I compare, it's too facile, I know, to say Pedroia. I feel terrible saying that. But you've got the diminutive second baseman thing,

who turned out to have a lot more game. And to have a complete game, Pedroia never stole bags like Altuve did. But everything else they do, they hit for average, they hit for power, they play a good second base. And they've been better than they're expected to be coming out of, well, for Altuve coming through the system, the Pejora coming out of Arizona State, Florida State. I get them confused. It's really something to see.

And I don't think you can expect him to get any better than this. But if you tell me he was going to hold this level for two to three years, I absolutely could believe it. You guys, you don't think a second baseman is being five-t tool players, and he doesn't have the arms. He's not a five tool player, but he's about as complete a player as you're going to find at second base. All right. And the bottom two teams in this division, there's just not a whole lot to talk about, I guess, other than- The problem is there's not a lot to talk about in the context of this series, as opposed to we could probably do an entire week on the Angels and an entire week on the A's.

Yeah, and Sam and I have done the depressing Angels discussion. I know. And, you know, it just – it seems to keep getting worse and worse. Like this past week when they – Jared Weaver threw a shutout. What are you talking about? Yeah, that happened. He threw a Maddox somehow.

They traded Kyle Kubica to the Rangers, who was their was something like their fifth best prospect coming into the year. When you're getting rid of your fifth best prospect and sending him to a division rival for cash in the middle of that season, that's not a great sign. It's never a good sign. About the quality of your farm system. Or your bank account. Yeah, right. So I don't know. I mean, just briefly, what would you do if someone told you to take over the Angels today and you begged to take over any other team instead and they said, no, it has to be the Angels?

What would you do? I'll take any of the jobs. As long as I can stay in New York with my daughter, I'm fine. Well, again, this is the problem Jerry DiPoto had that Billy Epler has now. Who's in charge? What do I get to do that doesn't have to be run by the guy above me and the guy below me? Let's say that you have full creative control. I'm trading Mike Trout.

Okay. And I don't want to go down this road with you. I've written about it, texted. You guys have done it. But here's the only question I'm going to ask. If you decide you're not trading Mike Trout, then tell me the roster, roughly speaking, of the next good Angels team and when you can put it on the field. That's my entire argument is if you don't want to trade Mike Trout, tell me what plan B is. Yeah, I think Sam and I said that over the winter that if you don't want to trade Trout, then you have to go to Arnie Moreno and say, are we going to be able to spend all of the money?

$225 million. And even if you're going to do that, who are you getting in this next year? There's nothing out there. Yeah, right. It's bleak. I don't know where you go. I mean, there are reasons why you would take the Angels over some other organizations if you were starting from scratch just based on – Well, the Rockies.

I would never take the Rockies. Yeah, right. Sure. But just based on present talent. Well, the Rockies. I can say about the A's. There's some overarching strategy. There's some kind of angle that they are pursuing. Or it's easy to say, are they trying to win? Are they trying to rebuild?

They don't really fit into one of the boxes that we can easily assign most teams to. They aren't exactly tanking. They aren't exactly rebuilding. They aren't exactly tanking. They aren't exactly rebuilding. They aren't completely terrible right now. So I don't know if they are just kind of caught in between in the way that, say, you know, the White Sox are or something at this point. But, you know, how long will it be till the next good A's team? I couldn't really say whether it will be a year or two or five or six.

Yeah, I've been under the impression they're trying to get the ballpark situation situated out and yeah david and billy are just kind of hold it together until then it's you're right it's not a rebuild i think in part because you don't want to if you're trying to get a new ballpark maybe putting a series of 55 win teams out there is it the way to do it remember the braves didn't the braves kind of were working on secret deals for the ballpark before they implemented this plan. The timelines are hard to figure out, but I think the A's kind of want to try to stay reasonably competitive. But the A's and the Braves have been the two organizations that have put the lie to the stat head idea. And I want to put it on stat heads.

It's my idea too, where if you win, people will come. And now we have two organizations and quite possibly a third in Cleveland where winning teams are not driving attendance. And we have to look and say, you know, maybe the other issues, whether it's lousy location, a lousy ballpark, a lousy ballpark in a lousy location, or, you know, the fact that the city around you has disappeared, which would be in Cleveland's case, maybe these are just things that can't be overcome. It's really hard.

But I do think the A's have kind of an intractable problem until they can get, I don't specifically mean the physical structure of a ballpark, but maybe get the team relocated to a place that allows them a greater access to revenue. All right. And then lastly, we are heading into the deadline. Billy Bean, notorious for making trades at the deadline, setting the team up for the future. We talked a little bit about the Angels And we focused on trading Mike Trout Because there just isn't a whole lot else To move of value on that roster

But maybe that's not quite as true Of the A's Obviously there's Rich Hill If he comes back from the injury And is able to show that he's healthy Then you would think that he would be headed somewhere But do you think that anyone else is particularly movable on this roster? Daniel Valencia, of course, has been linked to the Mets as the most obvious David Wright replacement on the market.

And, you know, Sonny Gray is in an interesting position where he came into the year as supposedly the rare, untouchable Okunde, and now has not pitched at all like that kind of pitcher. So do you think there's much on this roster that Billy Bean could use, or David Forst, or whoever could use to put this team in a better position for the next few years? Well, I'd go to the name you didn't mention, which is Sean Doolittle. And I look at some of these other players, and Valencia has bounced up and down, Redick has bounced up, and I have trouble getting a handle on what those guys true talent is. Sean Doolittle has been good and injured.

When Doolittle is healthy, he's a fantastic left-handed reliever, goes full innings, can work from the seventh to the ninth. He's pitched as early as the fifth this year. So you can trade for him and not have to have the Papillon Chapman problem of he has to pitch the ninth. I believe he signed to a very reasonable multi-year deal. I look at Doolittle as somebody who, you know, Andrew Miller and Chapman are going to get a lot of the attention going into the deadline, but Doolittle is somebody who could also have that

same level of impact on a team's bullpen. I think he's probably, I think he's the most valuable proper have right now when you consider Gray's lost a little shine, Redick's been hurt. I just don't particularly think Danny Valencia could absolutely be wrong about that, but it's a roster. How are you this bad and don't have trade value and you don't have young players that are ready to come up? I mean, it's a really difficult situation for the A's right now. And what I do know is that the core they have right now isn't good enough. So you may as well start flipping people. All right. That's it for today. Thanks again to Joe. You can and should subscribe to his newsletter at joeshein.com. He is running a special offer for Effectively Wild listeners.

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Send us emails at podcastsatbaseballprospectus.com or by messaging us through Patreon. Five divisions are down, which means that one more remains. Tomorrow, Joe and I will be wrapping up our conversation with the AL East. I close my eyes and watch it dangle conversation with the AL East. Anger on the breeze. I think that'll do it.