Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 949: 2016’s Contract Turnarounds

Episode Date: September 6, 2016

Ben and Sam banter about MLB’s copycat comedians, then discuss players whose big contracts seem much more movable (or unmovable) after perception-altering 2016 seasons.

Shoot, I'd start... He sets down like today, he set down on the first nine, it was in the back of my mind. And he's just... wild enough to be effective. Good morning and welcome to episode 949 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives, brought to you by the play index at baseballreference.com and target brand aluminum foil for 29 cents less than the leading brand you can get target brand aluminum foil i'm sam miller along with ben lindberg of the ringer hi ben hi how are you doing part of your new espn deal you're plugging target Target? No, I just had a weekend with lots of Target brand aluminum foil, and it really works. Oh?

Yeah. What were you using it for? We made a robot. Okay. Is that the intended use of Target aluminum foil? I can send you a picture if you'd like. It is a use of it. It's just, I find Target brand everything is almost indistinguishable.

Target brand is great, but Target brand Saran Wrap is garbage. It's just complete. I mean, it is literal garbage. As soon as you use it, it is simply unusable plastic garbage, and then you throw it away. So as soon as you begin using it, but the foil is great. The foil is every bit as good as Reynolds Wrap. Well, great. Noted Target fan Buck Showalter approves of this intro. Yeah, how was your weekend?

Fine. Didn't make any robots, didn't use any aluminum foil, but it was restful. Good. And do you have any banter? No. All right. I would like to just point out two more examples

of baseball players stealing each other's bits to progressively less success, in my opinion. I watched Edwin Encarnacion do the Adrian Beltre, Elvis Andrews thing where one of them pretends to catch the pop-up while the other one is actually catching the pop-up. You've seen that. Yeah. And that's hysterical. When Beltre does catching the pop-up. You've seen that. Yeah. And that's hysterical. When Beltre does it, that is legit gold, right? Yes. Yeah.

Everything Beltre does is funny. Yeah. He walked to the plate last week with his helmet on backwards because he was facing Pat Venditti. That was funny. Everything is funny. Yeah. And Beltre and Andrews in particular are especially funny together.

Yeah. They are a modern modern day comic duo in the grand tradition of i don't know abbott and costello and laurel and hardy yeah so i love it when they do the pop-up routine so encarnacion did this and unlike with beltray and well for one thing he didn't like he's just stealing another guy's bit uh but he and he was also doing it very half-heartedly like there was very Little commitment he had no He had no like body language behind it

But also like Devin Travis the second baseman Seemed like not in on it Didn't didn't care Didn't notice and You know I don't know Poor execution The other thing is that I have to admit I only saw a link to this and I did not have a chance to watch it.

So you can correct me if I'm wrong. But my understanding is that Bryce Harper ripped off Joey Votto's fake foul ball toss into the stands bit. Yeah, and somewhat half-heartedly, I would say. I don't know whether we can give Votto the copyright on that. I mean, he has popularized it this season, and I've admired the heel turn that he's taken. I don't know whether he gets credit for originating the fake toss into the stands. That seems like something that has been done before.

I'm sure that's been done before as a taunt. But definitely he is the modern perpetrator of that. So yeah, I would say probably counts as ripping off Votto. All right. I won't go any further on that then since I haven't even seen it. All right. So those are the two things that I noticed this weekend. All right. All right. The other thing I noticed this weekend, which is going to be what we talk about today. I was watching a baseball player who is a

veteran, a highly paid veteran, a famous veteran, who was playing very well in the game that I saw him in. And it occurred to me that he entered the season with an unmovable contract that everybody would have agreed that nobody would take that contract off of his team's hands. If they wanted to move him, they would have to include pieces or absorb the money. And then now here we are just five months later, and I believe that he is not under an unmovable contract anymore, that in fact, lots of teams would take that contract,

and if his team were to move him, they would get value back. And then I was watching another player, similar player in a lot of ways, who I think going into this year was under a perfectly fine contract. And now, five months later, is probably playing under a contract that his team could not move any longer. And it just struck me how much can change, particularly when we're talking about guys

who we have a ton of experience with. We should be better at evaluating them than anybody else because we've seen them pitch or play for thousands of at-bats or even, you know, maybe thousands of innings. And we know, you know, we know 150 years of aging curves. We can see them with our own eyes. And their contracts are so huge that they, you know, they should be, these are not, these are not little, you know, you know, they should be, these are not, these are not little, you know, speed boats that should be turning on a dime. They're big, massive things that should have pretty big margins around them, margins for air around them. And yet in just, in just five months of baseball play, a lot of what we would have thought about these players and their contracts has, has pivoted 180 degrees.

And so I thought we could talk about a few of those players who have either gone from worth their contract to not worth their contract in just five months' time. Or, even more interesting to me, is the opposite. Guys who went from not worth their contract to worth their contract. Unpredictably, unexpectedly. And who basically give lie to what we thought we knew coming into the season about

how certain they were to be on the decline. So I asked you to bring a couple of examples of this. I brought a couple of examples of this. And so we're just going to talk about a couple of veterans who dramatically shifted their trajectory this year. Sound okay? I am prepared to talk about this topic. All right. So why don't you start? And maybe if I'm lucky, we'll spend 40 minutes on that guy and I won't even have to bring one up. Go ahead.

All right. Well, I'll just say that since you stipulated that we are not talking about contracts signed last offseason, we're not going to talk about contracts signed last offseason. Exactly. But if we were to do such a thing, we would have plenty of contracts to talk about. There are some contracts that look really great, but I would say that those are in the minority. And there is a large group of big free agent deals that teams probably wouldn't sign again if they had the chance right now or wouldn't be able to move those contracts without eating some money.

It's a long list. I mean, Hayward, David Price, Chris Davis, Zach Granke, Justin Upton, Alex Gordon, maybe, Dee Gordon, maybe. You could argue about some of those, but all definitely deals that have depreciated or players that have depreciated since those deals were signed. So we are skipping over those, but they exist, and we acknowledge their existence. Yeah, I think it was Aaron Gleeman who wrote a piece that was, I think, about this offseason's signings. I might be wrong about who wrote it, but it really is an amazing offseason if you go back and look at the players that signed. Nobody, like almost nobody looks like a good signing. Like this might go down as one of the worst off seasons for free agents ever in time.

Yeah. I think Dave Cameron might've written something about that. So it was gleaming. It was gleaming. It was a, it was an article titled winter of their discontent of their, of the 12 contracts above 60 million, at least half and as many as 11 could be described as going poorly so far. And I think 11 is probably right.

Yeah. All right. be described as going poorly so far. And I think 11 is probably right. Yeah. All right. So I have a couple groups of movable and unmovable and different degrees to which they have changed those valuations this season. I'd say that in the movable camp or the contract that has become the most movable relative to how we perceived it last season. Probably on that list, you'd have Rick Porcello, I think, would be up there. He was a guy who signed an extension with Boston that was mocked almost immediately. He had a down year last year, and it looked as if they had signed him too soon and given him too much money. And now he's having

an excellent year. And he's gone back to being at least as good as he was before he signed that extension. So now it looks like a reasonable rate. And he has three years left on that deal after the season and $62 million on that deal. And, I mean, it's not like the greatest bargain in baseball, but teams would take that contract. Teams would pay him that much money today. So that has moved, I think, since a year ago. Yeah, no, absolutely.

That came up at Sabre Seminar when Dave Cameron was doing his closing Q&A. And he looked right at Tom Tippett and basically challenged him to deny that Rick Porcello cleared waivers last August. Not that Tom Tippett, nobody, Tom Tippett doesn't have to listen to what Dave Cameron says. And so he just ignored him. But that's the Red Sox head analyst, for those of you who don't know. Exactly. And so, yeah, Porcello was, the contract hadn't even kicked in yet last summer. And I think it was, yeah, I mean, he got four years, 82.5 million.

Just curious. He was coming off of a very poor year, one of his worst. And he also had only started 28 games, had only thrown 172 innings. For a guy who you, at least up to that point in his career, you could have said two things about Porcello, maybe three. You could say he's young. He's got some promise. There were always some suggestions, you know, some indications.

There were always, you could always write a piece about Rick Porcello, breakout candidate. You know, he had a good pedigree and all that. And you could say, well, at least he eats innings. And yet, looking at his career up to that point, he was far as innings eaters go not a very good innings eater He for instance he started 31 31 and 32 games from 2011 2013 and yet in those years He only went 180 276 and 177 innings. He'd only cleared 200 once he'd only cleared 185 innings once and And so he's not even like a guy that you could say, well, at least he's going to take the ball and give me six innings

every time. So just curious though, Ian Kennedy got five years and 70 million last off season. You can pick what years you want to do, but like, let's say, okay, Ian Kennedy, you can pick what years you want to do, but like, let's say, okay. Ian Kennedy, previous three years,

550 innings, 85 ERA plus Rick Porcello, previous three years, 553 innings. So, uh, three innings more and 98 ERA plus. So considerably better than Kennedy and much young. Well,

yeah, much younger, four years younger. So do you think is it outlandish to think that porcello would have gotten four years and 82.5 million if kennedy got 70 is it is it out i'm not betting that he would have but is it outlandish what we saw last offseason samarja got 90 kennedy got 70 is it crazy to think Porcello would have gotten 82? Yeah, that's not totally crazy. I mean, a lot of people thought Ian Kennedy getting as much as he did was crazy.

Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So given that the craziness happens, is it crazy to think that craziness would happen? And not really. At a certain point, you're in the twilight zone and you just have to roll with it. So Porcello this year by baseball references model for wins above replacement is ninth in the league. And he is still amazingly only 27 years old, which like he's as young as Drew Pomeranz, for instance, who seems young. He's as young as Danny Duffy, who seems young. Yeah, he's younger than Jake DeGrom, who is lumped in with the Mets young starters. He's as young as Steven Strasburg, who seems young. Wow. He's younger than Jake DeGrom, who is lumped in with the Mets young starters. He's as young as Steven Strasburg, who seems young.

Wow. He's younger than Kenta Maeda, which maybe that's misleading. He's younger than Dillon Batantes. He's young. He's a young guy. Okay. He's young is what I'm saying. He's as young as Matt Moore.

He's younger than Jeremy Jeffress. Keep going. he's younger than jeremy jeffress keep going he's younger than uh he's as young as hunter strickland he's younger than hector ron known he's barely a babe he is young he's as young as james paxton i i that did it that's it right you can't do better than that can't top that he's as young as he's as young as michael panetta oh wow okay okay all right he's young case rests he's young then okay all right so so he's uh he's 19 and 3 which i only bring up because at some point, hundreds and hundreds of episodes ago, I went on record as saying that while I hardly ever, ever, ever know a guy's win-loss record, hardly ever, ever, ever care a guy's win-loss record, there is a point that I start to love it.

And if you go 22-3, that's a point that I, that I start to love it. And, uh, like if you go 22 and three, that's a record that I will remember for 50 years. So I'm kind of rooting for him to win some more games and go like, like 24 and three, how cool would it be if a guy went 24 and three? Pretty cool. It'd be pretty cool. So if Rick Porcello was a free agent right now, not right now, nobody could sign him. But, uh, in November, what November, what is he looking at? He's getting the standard number two starter deal, the six years 140 or so. Yeah, I don't see why not. All right, Rick Porcello, way to go. All right, I'm going to go with another guy who's younger than you would think,

although I'll just leave it at that. Felix Hernandez. Ah, yes, On my list. All right. So Felix Hernandez, uh, came into this season with four years and 125 ish million dollars on his contract, uh, which seems like he would have gotten that. Right. I mean, right. Yeah. Yeah. He was, um, I think everybody had identified that there were some trending indicators that were not so great, mainly his velocity. But if you look at what he was doing last year, you know, on the surface by traditional, by sort of more traditional

metrics, he was just fine. He was very, you know, even very good. He got Cy Young votes. He was an all-star. The year before that, he was the Cy Young runner-up. So while I know that it was common by all of us to point out, like, wow, he doesn't throw as hard as he used to. His strikeout rate was 8.5 per 9. His career strikeout rate is 8.9. His walk rate was 2.6 per 9. His career walk rate was 2.9.

And he was well-recognized as one of the best pitchers in the American League. So, I mean, realistically, I don't know that he would have gotten a David Price contract if he'd hit free agency last year. I don't think he would have. But I could see something like 7 and 175 or something like that. So the fact that only 125-ish was committed to him made him a good property. And this year, I do you ever have that experience where you you have a fun fact, it's like ready to go, but you get greedy and you're like one more plate appearance and it'll be even

better. And then and then it just it just goes sideways on you. So there was a point like two starts ago where Felix had the lowest strikeout rate of his career, the highest walk rate of his career, and the highest home run rate of his career. And his ERA was exactly his career ERA. It was like 3-1-4 and 3-1-4. Only it wasn't. It was two hundredths off. And so he goes if he throws one more inning it can be better than or at least equal to his career era but if it's better and then he just went everything went sour now his era is three seven five he's gotten bombed two starts in a row his era is now much worse than his career career era uh so i'm in retrospect pointing out that there was once a fun fact about Felix Hernandez's start.

But, yeah, I mean, now Felix is interesting because I feel like he – we had an article about his start against Chris Sale. And it mentioned that, you know, like these are two guys who entered the season as two of the best pitchers in baseball and had had dramatically different, you know, seasons. And I was sort of struck by the fact that at that time they had the exact same ERA, and yet nobody was talking about Felix Hernandez as an ongoing ace. He is one of the first early identified, like one of the best early identified collapses, I think, in baseball. Assuming this is a collapse, which again, his ERA is not in Weaverland or anything like that. But it seems like everybody was picking up on Felix's problems even before they showed up in his peripherals. And then they were picking them up even before they showed up in his ERA and his win-loss record, which they haven't in his win-loss record. But I would bet that if you pulled this the smart the public the the aware public

the public that follows baseball closely i would bet that you would get a projected era a a wisdom of crowds projected era going forward over four which is not good for a three starter or at least not good for a two starter certainly not good for an ace. Felix now is owed about 80 million, a little more than 80 million over the next three years. And I don't think he would get that if he were a free agent this year, even though he's only 30. It seems like he's got time to reinvent himself, but he's got to do that. Otherwise, if he keeps pitching the way he is pitching in the style that he pitches, it really does seem like it could be a long 30s for him. Am I wrong? You are not wrong, it really does seem like it could be a long 30s for him. Am I wrong?

You are not wrong, sadly. Which is a bummer because you, Felix, among many things, I mean, he is a, he is a, he's just a favorite, right? Like he not only is, has been a great pitcher, but he's always been an incredibly fun pitcher to watch. We, he is one of the youngest pitchers that we ever got to see in our lifetime. He was up when he was 19 and he was great when he was up when he was 19. He was one of the most fun prospects, I think, of the prospect era. And he has always been a fun guy who played the game in a fun way and was interesting and hit dingers in his first at bat and things like that. And yet never, never a postseason start. We've all been waiting for him to finally get a chance to pitch in the postseason. I think he'll get there. I think at some point either the Mariners will get there.

They might get there this year, but at some point the Mariners will get him there, or he'll end up on a team later in his career that will be playoff bound. If he has six more years in the majors, the odds are with 10 teams making the playoffs that he'll make it. But he won't be Felix anymore, most likely. We will watch Felix make his playoff debut the same way, perhaps,

I fear, the same way that we saw Adam Dunn get to. Although, Adam Dunn didn't even make the roster, did he, in that wildcard game when he finally made the playoffs? Am I remembering that right? He might have been on the roster, but he didn't start. Was that it? Could be.

Anyway, yeah, it'll be one of those things where he'll be, you know, he might get bombed. He might not even be in a rotation. Who knows? We don't know. We can't say. But it seems like the triumphant Felix Hernandez postseason appearance where he comes in and is an ace and shoves is likely not to happen. That will likely not be the bow on his career, right? I don't know if there will be a bow on his career, not that he needs one. So is he a Hall of Famer? How much, I guess,

let me say, how much work does he need to be a Hall of Famer? Well, let's see. His peak Jaws score must be very close to the Hall of Fame average for a pitcher, right? Let's see. He's at 80 warp. He does a lot better on warp by warp by DRA than he does by baseball references model, which is a runs base. And I don't know how he does on Fangraphs, but by warp, he's at 80 warp, which is like a ton. Like that is like, he's 30 and he's already at levels like that would compare with, I don't know. I'm going to guess a

name. I'm going to guess Blylovin. Let's see. Blylovin. Uh, no, not even close. Another name. Uh, that was a horrible guess. Tom Glavin. I'm guessing Tom Glavin. Yeah. Oh, that's too low. Tom Glavin. I'm guessing Tom Glavin. Yeah. Oh, but that's too low. Try another one. John Smoltz. He is 80 warp, which is already, yes, he is already three warp away from John Smoltz. And he's only 30. I wonder what Felix Hernandez super closer would be like in his 30s. I wonder if he would be a super closer if hez that not as many people read. It was in the Hall of Fame e-book that Baseball Perspectives put out for all the Hall of Fame inductees for each of them last year. And I wrote about how John Smoltz is the model for the Hall of Fame career going forward. It used to be pretty simple. The Hall of Fame career was you win 240 games, and pretty much everybody who won that many made it, and very few people who didn't made it. But with Smoltz, he demonstrated the modern pitcher's career,

which is you get injured, you reinvent yourself, you recover from your injury instead of having it end your career. Maybe you build up some value in the, in, in the bullpen. And so I wonder if Felix is going to demonstrate that he's only 30. He's got, you know, 10 years of a healthy arm potentially if he can make it work. So there's still warp to be gained. But as it is, it'll be an interesting, I think he, he doesn't have enough wins, does he? There's no, no, there's no There's no There's nobody Getting elected to the Hall of Fame with 153

Wins as a starter, right? He won a Cy Young with 13 wins That's true 13 and 12 records, so if anyone's gonna make the Hall of Fame with a non-impressive Win total, it'd probably be him And I think people know he was On some pretty bad teams for a long time

Because of the playoff drought. I suppose some voters might hold him, I don't think he would make it. But if he held on, even if he just was an average pitcher for a few years and had that kind of tail, I think maybe he might make it. I don't know. His peak stats don't quite measure up to the average Hall of Fame pitchers, according to the other win value stats, but he's been perceived as a Hall of Famer in the making, certainly. Yeah, and I don't know that you can necessarily always compare. It seems like a lot harder to compare. Well, so with batters, if you want to compare batters against generations, well, that's not that hard. You've got to make some leaps of faith and leaps of logic, but you just adjust for the offensive era,

adjust for the ballparks, and you're there. But with starting pitchers, they're used differently. There isn't even an adjustment there that you can do because they throw fewer innings, they start less often, and that means that they're going to collect less value and also presumably have better rate stats because they're not being asked to go, you know, nine innings and throw 160 pitches. So it seems like you do have to measure pitchers against their peers rather than against the previous generation to some degree. And Felix's peers would be, what, Granke, Price, Verlander, Kershaw. Yeah, and anybody else at that level, Hamels, I guess, Matt Cain,

and maybe a few others. And I think that he's probably third. I think he's probably the third best pitcher of his generation, which is a Hall of Famer. If you're a starting pitcher and you're the third best starting pitcher in your generation, it just depends where you want to draw the boundaries of generation and how he does in his 30s. Because almost nobody makes it to the Hall of Fame without doing something in their 30s.

Everybody's a compiler at the end of the day when you get to the Hall of Fame, unless you're Ralph Kiner Okay, so for my next pick I'm going to take a player you just mentioned And it's a player that we would have said Many of the same things we just said About Felix a year ago Or at last year's All-Star break

Certainly And now he has a much better case For being worth the money that he's going to make, Justin Verlander, who is signed for almost the same amount of money as Felix, right? He has three years left after this year at 28 per, so 84 million or so. Over those three years, it's just a little bit more than Felix. And Justin Verlander has been good again, It's just a little bit more than Felix, and Justin Verlander has been good again. Not peak Verlander, but he has seemingly found a way to compensate for reduced velocity and make those adjustments and pitched a little bit differently

and in a way that is conducive to his new strengths. And he's been good. He's been very good since really the middle of last season. So, you know, would he be signed to exactly this deal today? I don't know. Would Justin Verlander be getting $28 million per year if he were free agent right now? Maybe not, but he'd be pretty close. Yeah, I think he has become underrated.

I completely wrote him off. Like I 100% whiffed on Justin Verlander's there. Like I was burying him. And, I mean, we talked about when he signed his contract, his extension, which was one of those veteran extensions where the team signs them before they have to, the Howard and Cabrera type extension. And we talked, it was everybody pretty much, like, at the time, Verlander was the best pitcher in the American League, if not in baseball.

He was coming off, or close to coming off an MVP season. He was an ace. And we talked about the dangers and whether we could rip the deal for the timing, even if we, you know, approved of the deal of the player in the deal. And when he fell apart at some point, I took a victory lap on that, which is always a bad idea. Never take a victory lap until it's over. He's ninth in baseball in DRA-based Warp. He leads the American League in innings pitched, which is a pretty impressive accomplishment for a 33-year-old. impressive accomplishment for a 33 year old he's throwing uh like he's he's you know got this slider that he never had but he used to throw a fairly traditional sort of slower-ish slider for

relative to his fastball and then he throws that real hard upper upper 80s slider and he's got the second highest strikeout rate of his career uh he was a, like you mentioned in the second half last year, he was under the radar, was just a complete monster. Like he was one of the best DRAs in baseball in the second half. Like he is a top 10 pitcher. And I also don't know, like we've seen in the not distant past, him be mediocre and looking done. I don't know how much the injuries that he went

through, the core injuries, are things that you would expect to maybe come back. But if you took his name out of it, if you just looked at a guy with his, well, I guess don't take his name out of it, but if you look at his overall career and you look at what he's done over the last year and over the last two years, I think you're talking about a guy who's not far off from what Zach Greinke was. He's older, to be sure, so I don't think you're looking at six or seven years necessarily. But what did we say he is? He's got three years and 84 million. I think that he would clear that easily. I think he would clear 84 easily. Yeah.

Okay. So he's a good one. Yeah, he's a good one. Who else? Let's say Adam Jones. Adam Jones. I'm curious to know what you think about Adam Jones, because I'm not, I'm not, I'm not digging in my feet here on this one.

Because he's 30. He's only owed $34 million in the next two years. So I'll just say I want to talk about Adam Jones more than I wouldn't take him at two years and $34 million. I think I wouldn't. But Adam Jones is a guy who did not necessarily play baseball in the stat-head-approved pretty way. Like, he is one of the worst walkers in baseball. He was playing center field, but not in a way that the metrics loved him, especially when he signed this extension.

He was considered to be an overrated defender, winning gold gloves, even though the metrics said he was, you know, average or really worse than average in center field. And that made it probably over, you know, easy to overlook that he was a very reliable, very consistent producer. And producer is a little bit of a loaded word. Producer, you hear producer and you hear ribbies. And that is part of what he was. He was a guy who, because he put the ball in play, because he swung at everything, he would drive in runs while having a low on base percentage. well, there's got to be more you can get out of that with a better approach, and overrated by the larger baseball world that sees ribbies and home runs at the expense of on-base percentage and negative fielding metrics. But I think it's clear that he was, in retrospect, he was worth

that extension. Not everybody loved that extension, but he was worth it. He has clearly earned that value, earned that contract all the way out. It was a good extension. He was not Vernon Wells 2.0, not even close. At this point, he's 30. His OPS plus has dropped four years in a row, steadily small amounts, but down, down, down, down seven points, down three, down five, down eight. He is now a league average hitter. And unsurprisingly, he has poor defensive metrics at even, even at among, you know, in the systems that were not, you know, that harsh on him before. This is the first year he wasn't an all-star. Last year was the first year that he didn't get MVP votes. Do you buy the trajectory model for assessing him? Like, does it seem like next year he's going to be worse than this year? Or does he seem like a regression type guy who has some bounce back in him?

He started out terribly this season and has kind of corrected course, but he's probably going to end up right around where he was last year. So it's not way out of line with what he's done lately. And I don't see any huge sign that says he should be way better. So sure, I would say no reason not to project roughly the same or slightly worse again. All right. So he's going to be, he's going to end up at about average this year. He's going to be about a two win player, three the year before five, the year before that. Uh,

is he still average next year? If you're looking at him, I mean, I think even if he's average, he's worth 17, $16 million. But is he an average player next year? Or is he,

has he dipped to below average by April 1st of next year, is he now a below average major leaguer? I'd say no. I'd still say average. Okay. All right. So then Adam Jones is still good to go. Okay. All right.

We can keep going, or we can... I have a couple of guys that... Well, maybe one or two guys that I just want to ask you about their contract status rather than reassess them. So if you want to keep going, we can. But if you don't, we can just do a quick spitballing on a couple of guys. Yeah, we could just do a lightning round. I have a few more names here. So one guy I was going to bring up is Robinson Cano. And that's kind of a tough case because he is still owed a lot of money over a lot of years. He has $168 million left on his contract after this season, but he has been very close to peak Cano this year,

and he was also in the second half of last season, but he had various issues in the first half of the season, so his year didn't look as impressive, and it wasn't as impressive on the whole. But he has been back to Canoe now. And I mean, you liked that deal when it was signed, I remember, just because I edited what you wrote about it. And so I remember, but it doesn't look terrible now. It's still a lot of years, a lot of money, but he has not really declined all that much if you just compare this year and what he was before the contract.

Yeah, he's been a six-win player two of the three years he's been in Seattle by baseball references model. If the Mariners add six more wins, he might be the MVP right now. As it is, he'll be a top 10 MVP. I mean, you can both like the deal as it was signed and say he's lived up to it and also say that you wouldn't sign the rest of it right now. Because of course, you sign those deals mainly to bank the value up front. And they've banked a lot of value up front. I mean, they've gotten somewhere between around 15-ish wins for around $70 million, which is a total bargain for a free agent. So, you know, most deals move towards sunk cost by the end of it, especially for guys like this. I, a 34-year-old second baseman who's owed, how much did you say, 160?

168. 168. I mean, I would probably say no to that, but I think that he – so I would say that it's still unmovable, but he has gone from – he has turned the deal from a failure from the Mariners' perspective to exactly – more or less exactly what they were hoping for. Basically, he had a – he threw a couple of unexpectedly bad months into last year, and that will cost them, but that happens. Otherwise, this deal has gone pretty much just right for them. They've got two MVP caliber years out of the first three. And unless you're Andy Van Slyke, it wasn't exactly like he was crippling them in his one down year. So yeah, I mean, I think that he salvaged the deal, but I think still just the nature of these things is that you don't take the last seven years of a 10-year contract or

whatever it is. Yeah. And by the way, when we say unmovable, in theory, you can move any contract if you eat some amount of it. Yeah, we mean without. Right. Yeah. Another way of saying it is, would he get claimed?

Yeah. Speaking of which, I had Ryan Braun on my list of potential players here, but he did pass through waivers. And I don't know whether that is because he has a no trade clause with a lot of teams services and he's still obviously a very very good hitter and not much of anything else but an above average player overall and he is signed for 79 million more dollars after this year i count 80 20 80 okay maybe 80 yeah i count exactly 80 anyway not important so what 20 what, 20 per year? 20 per year. Yeah, if you count the buyout. Uh-huh.

So if he could continue to be an above average player, then the math would say that he would be worth $80 million over four years. So that'll be 33, 34, 35, 36. Uh-huh. Yeah, I'd sign him for four years and $80 million right now. Okay, so he was one on my movable list. And on my unmovable list, I also had David Robertson and James Shields, who I think have crossed convincingly into that territory this season. Yeah.

We haven't talked about this, but is Shields opting out? Oh, I don't even remember what the terms are. So he has... I'll tell you the terms. He has 44, if you count the buyout. So two years and $44 million after this year. And, um, he will not have a pick attached to him because he was traded. Okay. So I would say he should probably not opt out of that. It's, there was a point where it was just like obvious that he wasn't going to but also i i think we might have even said that it was like you know he was maybe six good starts

away from being back like people really react to starting pitchers especially established starting pitchers uh who come out of tailspins uh and he had a good era but with insanely low strikeout rates like like derrick low-esque strikeout rates and then he was bad again and he has not gotten back to so i think it is an obvious no opt-out he didn't have to do much i think even after that historically bad run that he had bridging the trade he didn't have to do much to see $45-plus million in his future. I mean, you can always hold Ian Kennedy up and go, well, geez. Like, you just don't have to do a ton.

But he has not gotten better. I think it's an obvious no-opt-out, and I think that, yeah, now the White Sox I think are stuck with him, even though Shields would be, like, the third-best pitcher on the market this offseason. I still think he keeps the 44. And then who's the other one you said?

Yeah, Robertson. Robertson. Okay. All right. And these are not guys who I think switch, but I'm curious what you think Michael Brantley would get if he were, say, a free agent this year. Brantley barely has played, has just barely, barely played this year. And he hasn't been good when he has, but of course he barely,

barely, barely has played this year. You'd have to consider it very troubling. I think there's no doubt, I think, I shouldn't say no doubt, but I think there's no doubt that any team would take his contract as it is right now. He is owed $8.4 million next year. The year after that, there's a $11 million team option with a million dollar buyout. This is a guy who, if he comes back to even his three-win player status, not even his seven-win MVP contender year of 2014, even at three wins, he's a huge, huge bargain. But what would he get if he were a free agent right now? I mean, it's almost one of those things where I'm not sure you could work out a deal with him other than a pillow contract.

So I might say, well, 3 and 36 or something, but I don't think he would sign 3 and 36. I think he probably would get, what, 1 and 10? Yeah, that's what I was going to say. All right. And then Miguel Cabrera. I'm curious if you think that anything has changed with Miguel Cabrera. This was the first year of his contract, so that means he is owed what? 220, I think.

Okay, 220, 210, 220, somewhere around there. He is still one of the best hitters in baseball. He has aged much better than Albert Pujols, which he was about the same age as P holes was when, um, when Camara signed his extension, he has aged much better. He is still an elite hitter, uh, you know, a hall of fame level hitter, uh, in his, um, you know, this year he has a three 16, three 89, five 56 line. He's been healthy. He's going to end up playing almost every day. He'll get MVP votes. He'll, he might be a top 10 MVP finisher Again And so Every year that he ages you go

Maybe we shouldn't have mocked that deal Do you think that I don't remember, did we mock that deal? You and I, I think we probably did, right? We probably did, we probably said the same things That we said about the Verlander deal As you pointed out earlier So yeah, I mean it's definitely not out of the

question that he could age like Edgar Martinez or something and, you know, just be a really good hitter when he's 40. That wouldn't surprise me at all. But would I give him his current contract right now? Probably not. Probably not. Okay. He, uh, he's also played the field almost entirely all year. So he's not, you year So he's not at DH level yet He's been roughly an average first baseman So yeah I think that at the very least Unlike the Ryan Howard deal

Unlike the Albert Pujols deal even You can say in year one Glad we had him Even at that price So one year down And the Tigers even banked some value with one year down. But if he were a free agent right now, best guess? So he is 33.

He'll be 34 next April. Say he'd get 6'180". Yeah. I mean, I would rather, I think I would still take him right now over Chris Davis a year ago even with the age yeah uh and Davis got seven and 161 so I was gonna say maybe seven and 161 so uh he's not too far off uh I'll say you know yeah around 160 okay all right that's all all right so we will stop there Sam mentioned Target at the beginning of the episode. He didn't mention our Patreon supporters who actually have supported the podcast. I will thank them now.

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