Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 955: Pass/Fail Grades for Every Out-of-it Team

Episode Date: September 21, 2016

Ben and Sam banter about Padres GM A.J. Preller’s suspension, then discuss whether each of 2016’s non-playoff teams should consider its season a success or a failure.

Save him from all the anger he chose to embrace, he chose to waste. Who am I to judge? Failure to some isn't failure to most. Good morning and welcome to episode 955 of Effectively Wild Daily Podcast. Isn't failure the worst? How are you? All right. The website we used to record the podcast was down all day yesterday, so we didn't do a podcast, but we're back in business today. We are. Yeah. And so is the website that we used to record the podcast. Yes.

I wanted to briefly circle back to apple pears, which I went back to Trader Joe's and I saw that these apple pears were actually behind a sign that said Asian pears. And so they had not, this was not a matter of me misreading. They have actually labeled these Asian pears, but the sticker says apple pear. And I looked on the internet and apparently Asian pears and apple pears are the same thing. They are two different names for a product that is marketed. I will say that this Asian pear was like no Asian pear I've ever eaten. It was very similar, but the surface of it was applier. The flesh was very similar.

The skin was smooth and polished, though, more like an apple, less like a pear. I'm still kind of like I'm not sure whether it was whether I just got a weird Asian pear or whether there's a spectrum. I don't know. So I'm just conditioned to find some difference because it had a different label. I know I wondered. I was afraid to eat it. I was going to do all this before I ate it because I didn't want to. I didn't trust my assessment of

it. Once I had had all these potential fallacies by, you know, potentials for bias introduced to me by the label, I didn't, I didn't want to be on record as saying something that I didn't trust, but the website that we use to record the podcast was down yesterday. And so I ate the pear. the podcast was down yesterday, and so I ate the pear. Anyway, one other thing, Rio Ruiz, pinch hit in his major league debut and was pinch hit four before he could dig into the batter's box. This is a callback to the live episode that we did. He is currently the only player in history whose entire career in the majors is this, is a pinch hitting appearance in which he did not bat.

So admit it. You're rooting against him ever playing again. A hundred percent. He will probably. He will probably play again, though. It seems very unlikely that Rio Ruiz's career is over. But, you know, got a shot. Got a shot at it.

Right now it exists. Good to know. Do you want to briefly share any thoughts about A.J. Preller? Well, I did a podcast interview with Dennis Lin of the San Diego we had talked about it, and maybe we will talk about it now, is, I think, as you mentioned in our book, how there is sort of this fine line between cheating, rule-breaking, and just intelligently exploiting the rules. And so it wasn't clear whether what he did was just violating an unwritten rule and kind of a gentleman's agreement and the way things are typically done or actually breaking a rule. And if he was not breaking a real codified set of instructions for how you record players'

medical information, then maybe what he did was smart in a sense. Maybe he pulled off some trades because the Padres were not reporting this information that he wouldn't have pulled off otherwise. I don't know. You might think that it would just come back to bite him anyway, apart from the 30-day suspension, which came at an opportune time, I suppose, for the Padres, because what is AJ Perla really even doing right now if he weren't suspended? But other than that, it would probably hurt relationships. And I'm sure even more people are anti-AJ Preller now than they were before. And so that will probably erase any

benefit of just being able to make a couple trades or get a little bit back in trades that you might not have been able to get anyway. But it does kind of fall into that legacy of exploiting loopholes and outright rule-breaking. Yeah, I don't have a take on this. I've been having a hard time knowing where to come down on it, either in support or not in support of him. I guess that to the extent I have any opinion, which is not to be mistaken for an opinion in general, like I don't have a thumbs up, thumbs down.

But the fact that they, like it doesn't seem like he did a very good job of hiding it. Like there doesn't seem to be any intent of being all that misleading. Like he, it's from the way, maybe you can correct me, but the way that I read it, the Padres were fairly it the padres were fairly up front that they were opting out of this system by their actions right like that the average team has like 60 or something entries by this point in the year and they had like 10 which is just like you would think that uh if you wanted to disguise it you would also have like you'd have 45 or something like that but But you'd cover your tracks

And there doesn't seem to be any track covering here Which I think is not to say that I'm pro-AJ here But I think that that one detail is a pro-AJ detail Although that could elude a team you're trading with Because if they're only looking up the records for a couple of players That they're talking to you about trading for and those guys don't have many entries they might not look and say well how many entries do the padres have as a whole they might just say oh well this guy wasn't hurt yeah no it's not it's it's it is um i don't know that it i'm not sure that it is his obligation

though to proactively say that we're opting out of it. But it at least shows that I think that it does sort of show that there wasn't a cover up that it was like, oh, well, we're just going to like we'll leave this thing here. And if you notice, you notice it's on you to notice. But if you don't notice, that's good for us. Like it sort of feels like avoiding like you don't look if you're't notice that's good for us um like it sort of feels like avoiding you know like you don't look if you're if your dad asks you if you uh mowed the lawn uh when he comes home late it is a lie to tell him that you did if you did not however if you were supposed to mow the lawn and you didn't and he comes home late and he can't you know it's dark you can take advantage

of the darkness to maybe get away with it like you're not nobody expects you to walk up to your dad and go by the way i didn't mow the lawn like yeah that's uh that is probably and so i i wouldn't uh like my punishment for the guy who lies to his dad would be um a lot stricter than the guy whose crime is didn't mow the lawn like to me not m not mowing the lawn is like, okay, it's a different crime. It's a much smaller crime than lying. I'm getting way too many opinions in this segment considering I don't have any. The other thing is I do think that suspending a GM for a month is weird, and I don't like that as any sort of precedent. Like,

I don't like that to be what MLB thinks is the way you discipline a club for what they decide is cheating. And if MLB's position is, well, it's not cheating, and so we don't want to give them a real punishment, then don't give them a punishment. But if your position, which it is, is that it was cheating, and therefore he does need a punishment, have a punishment that makes sense. Like this is not a – I don't believe that suspending a GM for a month means really hardly anything at all. Even if it were in the middle of the winter meetings, I don't think it would mean anything at all. Particularly in the last month of a playing out the string season, it doesn't mean anything at all. And I just don't like this as the precedent for how MLB is going to handle teams that really do cheat to their advantage. If you want to strike back at them,

you have to actually do something that will cost them their gains. Otherwise, you've got a moral hazard here. Well, do you mean that it doesn't do anything because you can't really police whether the GM is working or not? Or, you know, if he's communicating with people? Or do you mean that it just doesn't matter if you don't have the GM for 30 days? I would say 80% of the former and 20% of the latter. Uh-huh. Okay. Yeah, it does seem like a difficult thing to regulate. I mean, he's probably still going to be able to, you know,

access the Padres database or whatever and like plan the offseason. I mean, you can't stop him from thinking about baseball, which is kind of part of a GM's job. And yeah, particularly in the Padres case, because they are done, they're not going to the postseason. It's, you know, more than a month away from free agency and winter meetings and GM meetings and all that. So probably no real concrete cost. Then again, I wonder whether the Cardinals precedent had any bearing on this, like whether either the fact that there wasn't a more severe penalty was because the Cardinals didn't get a more severe penalty, and that was probably a more severe crime. So either that or maybe they were worried that this was sort of a trend that they wanted to kind of nip in the bud, you know. We want to show that we're taking a hard line with this, so we're going to have a real concrete penalty

so that front offices will stop messing with each other. I don't know whether that had any bearing on this, but it was hard not to think of that as a somewhat tenuously related precedent. But I don't know. I agree. I think it's hard to say whether this was outright wrong or just smart or inadvisable. I think on the whole it's probably not smart. I think, you know, for one thing, you're— They did get Anderson Espinosa.

They did. Probably. Probably, I would say. I don't think that that's why they got him. Right. Probably. They would have been fine anyway. But you can't say that it hurt them in any way.

It hurt A.J. Preller's reputation. Which could hurt the Padres in a real way. It could, but it probably won't. I would be very surprised if it does I mean I would say that this is Something that will be in AJ Preller's Obituary someday But like

Sixth paragraph and He won't mind because he'll be dead Otherwise I don't think I think that There's a possibility that it hurts His standing in the industry if these things pile up. So it's potentially a brick in a way that hurts him professionally. Yeah, and because he had this reputation already.

Because he had the reputation. He had the Rangers infraction. This is piling on to that. But I would also guess that those bricks never get built up to the point that it matters to him. And I don't think it matters to the padres at all like i would be unless there was some i yeah i'd be very surprised if if this had any actual real world uh consequences for the padres beyond whatever the suspension does or doesn't do yeah you could say it's morally questionable not just because you're potentially deceiving a team

but also because you're potentially putting a player at some elevated risk if a team doesn't know about some ongoing issue or, you know, can't see what's been done before when it's deciding how to treat him. That's something that could potentially come back to hurt the player who is innocent and all of this. So I don't know. I wouldn't do it. I don't think I don't think it's worth getting away with it once or twice for all of the problems that come your way when it's unearthed. But I agree, it's not quite as open and shut as one might think. Yeah, and I don't have opinions on it.

Okay. All right. So, Ben, there are currently 16 teams whose playoff odds are below 2%. We can say that their seasons are done. They are not going to the playoffs. There are two more teams whose playoff odds are under 20%, and yet another one whose playoff odds are 21.6%. They are unlikely to make the playoffs, but we'll see if we want to talk about them. But for now, we'll limit it to the half the league that is out of it, that is done, that failed to accomplish what every team sets out to do and

will not be winning the championship this year. I wanted to talk about those teams and see whether you would declare their season successes or failures. Okay. And the premise of this is that there are 30 teams and only one wins the World Series, but I don't think that 29 teams would say their seasons are failures. Some of them might consider it successful that, you know, I remember feeling in 2011 or so that the Astros had to feel pretty good because Marwin Gonzalez and Matt Dominguez had developed into useful role players or something like that. And that was, I think, a fine way of assessing their season. Or maybe it wasn't. Maybe I thought in the hole that there weren't enough of those, but I can't remember.

But the basic idea is that there are more successes than there are World Series champions. And so I want to go through the losers and see which of them you thought would say that their season was successful. And I don't really want you to say whether their season is successful because I don't want to impose our values for that organization on them. I want to know whether you would guess that the GM goes home on October 3rd or whatever and says, job well done. Feel, you know, feel good. Feel good about that season. Feel good about what we accomplished. Uh-huh.

And maybe the answer is no to all of them. I don't know. Okay. You ready? Yeah. All right. San Diego Padres. Success, not success.

63-87, tied for last place in the NL West. Yeah. And their GM is AJ. He just got suspended. I heard. Yeah. Yeah. Nothing strikes me as, I guess the biggest success you could say is that they moved on

from the last failure in a, you know, pretty convincing way. I mean, they made some trades that helped undo the damage that had been done generally well regarded exchanges and at the major league level i don't think there's really all that much you could say says success or or failure i mean i don't know no one expected all that much and and they were pretty. So I guess you could say that they have begun to dig themselves out of the hole that they dug for themselves last year. And so in that sense, it's a success, right? The outlook for the Padres is better today than it was at, say, the All-Star break last year

when you wrote your article about whether the Padres were better off than they had been over the winter, and it looked like they were worse in every respect and were sort of hopeless as currently constructed. And now maybe they've made enough moves and acquired enough talent that you can say they're like any other rebuilding team that's just embarking on that process and in theory will eventually be good again so i guess you could say that's a success yeah they were uh right you're you refer to the piece that i wrote for jabo which was late summer of last year when they just had the worst outlook like their farm system was brutal the contracts they had going forward

were brutal the team they had was horrible. There was really nothing good that you could say about their previous eight months or so. And it didn't seem that they were fixable. And they, I don't know when we're starting our assessment period. I don't know if we're counting like the Craig Kimbrell trade, for instance, which was on the eve of the season, right? Or no, it wasn't. That was the first Craig Kimbrell trade was on the eve of the season. This one was in November. Never mind. But I mean, certainly to have Drew Pomeranz, the guy who on opening day was a fringe

major leaguer who you might hope to get 16 starts out of, to turn him into one of the best trade pieces and to get like, you know, a potential star out of that is a big success. And to get rid of Matt Kemp, uh, is a big success. And on the other hand though, I think the only reason that I wouldn't say a yes, certainly they're better off. I think they are better off than they were at the beginning of the year, but, uh, in aggregate, but to have, uh, Andrew Kashner and Tyson Ross, who were their two valuable pieces, both just turn into completely non-valuable parts for them, is a big loss. And I think that if you were figuring out how you get the Padres out of where they were, using Kashner and Ross to sort of reset the team as trade pieces was how you were going to get there. And they ended up getting, I mean, well, Ross, obviously, wasn't traded and isn't traded.

And Kashner had just, you know, more or less a meltdown. And I'm not that into the return that they got for him. And then James Shields, sort of the same thing. Shields was a guy who basically had a terrible year, melted down, and they ended up having to, you know, take nothing to get rid of him. And so I would say that those are our losses for them. But, you know, Pomeranz in a way just took over that spot. Pomeranz took over where, you know, you might've seen Tyson Ross. Yeah. So I would say that I feel a lot better about

the Padres than I did one year ago when I wrote that piece, but I don't think I feel any better about them than I did on opening day. And so I would consider them to have lost. I would say it was a disappointing season. And they were really bad too. You can't, you know, nobody expected the Padres to win, but even if you're a team that projects to be in fourth place, you still kind of want to win 82 games. You'd still like to have an interesting summer. And the Padres were bad from jump, and they have been a bad team all year in a sort of depressing way. And they've had kind of depressing storylines around them as well,

like the Prowler thing and like the James Shields thing and all that. Although they are the subject of the new Fox series pitch. Oh, are they? Yeah, which is pretty good. I just did a podcast about that too. So that's good PR, I suppose. Fictional Padres are in a better shape than the real Padres. Yeah, I don't know.

I think they are better off than they were, but that's also a pretty low bar. I don't think we can say that They're necessarily a success just because they Are better off So not abject Failure but not success we're doing Binary here yeah I'm not gonna go Home and feel great about this year Alright Diamondbacks

Tied with the Padres 63 and 87 and Probably the nothing Even needs to be said right this is the clearest failure in major league baseball this year yes this is a team that not only had expectations for itself but put a lot of investment into those expectations that now will severely less lessen their chances of succeeding in the future yeah i don't think any team goes home even if oh let's see here if man look if the blue jays lose on the last day of the season and don't make the playoffs maybe they go home more depressed than the diamondbacks

otherwise or the giants i guess if the giants miss the playoffs they'll go home more disappointed than the diamondbacks maybe but otherwise the diamondbacks are the failure of the season yeah i can't even tell how they think about themselves. For all I know, they might be in complete denial or have some other spin on this, but I don't see any other way to think of it than that. So yes. All right. And then the last team in the NL West, the Rockies, 72 and 78, after hovering around 500 or sort of pushing toward 500 in the summer and even flirting with the idea of being a buyer at the trade deadline. They've kind of fallen off. But what say you?

Yeah, I think they're definitely closer to success than the Rockies have been in quite some time. They have a positive run differential, which is, I think, that qualifies as a success, probably. Yeah, they are a 500 team right now according to Pakoda which was Not true at the beginning of the year yeah so that and you know the combination of the results and Some of the young players who have established themselves and and you know been useful whether It's Trevor story or David Dahl or John Gray who's coming off a really great start or you know any of Those guys there's a enough young talent there that you can point to this being the beginning of something. And they also exceeded 2016 expectations.

So, yes, I would say the Rockies are our first success. Yeah, they haven't. They're an interesting team. They haven't really had anything go wrong for them in like seven months, unless you count Jake McGee. And like DJ LeMayhew turning into like kind of a bonafide star almost, which I don't think anybody really saw coming two years ago and even one year ago. And yeah, I mean, Story, Trevor Story is, you know, one of the great developments that any team had this year. Arenado maintaining superstar level performance is great. There's not really anybody other than Carlos Gonzalez who's sort of aging out of the window.

And right now they have four starters who have been better than league average starters by ERA Plus. In fact, well, yeah, four, four. And those guys are all coming back next year. They're 27, 24, 26, and 26. This is, I don't know, this is not a team where I exactly see, like, oh, well, you know, two more good things happen, and all of a sudden they're winning 93 games.

So I don't know that I'm, like, excited to be a Rockies fan or anything like that. But they've had a good farm system, and a lot of things went well for them this year and there are certainly players who you expect to be better next year than you expected them to be this year six months ago which i guess is the test so success rockies feel good yeah all right uh cincinnati reds um same record as the Diamondbacks and the Padres, but even less hope of competing beforehand. I mean, they were maybe the most, other than the Braves,

probably the most punty team in the NL going into the season. Yeah, yeah. I remember Joshian writing some not terribly negative things about them and how they might be the team in that tanking class that could actually approach decency, but that didn't happen. And they've been terrible and they haven't obviously had the public PR problems and front office dysfunction stories that the Diamondbacks have had, but they've been every bit as bad as a baseball team and not a particularly interesting or exciting or watchable baseball team. It's Joey Votto and some guys. So I don't see any clear indication that this is a success. Yeah, they had Jay Bruce bounce back at the right time. So that would be one successful thing that happened. They had

kind of Adam Duvall, but you know, not really. They had Rizal Iglesias looked like he was turning into a thing and then now he's a reliever because his shoulder can't handle it. And otherwise it's hard to find anything really good that happened this year. And I don't know if you count this as part of this year or not, but it has to just burn them up to see what the Yankees got for Haraldus Chapman. Yeah. Yeah, there's been a pattern of the Reds not really getting as much as everyone thought they would get for their players. And some of that was this year. So, yeah, nothing successful here.

Reds not successful. Okay. Brewers. You know, the Brewers, they're interesting because when I went on went on MLB Network to talk about Pocota, when Pocota came out, I remember Ron Darling was aghast that we had the Brewers winning as many games as the Royals, which is as much a statement about where, you know, where Pocota had the Royals as about the Brewers. But I think that Pocota had the Brewers at like 78 and Ron Darling just kept going. They're tearing down. They're in full rebuild. And I remember thinking, no, they're not a bad team. Like I could totally see them getting there and they're not going to get to 78. So I guess in that sense, they're a

little disappointing, but they're probably going to get to 74-ish when it comes to the end of this. But of course, that's not that relevant to their future. What is relevant to their future that happened this year? Well, they remade their entire roster, really. And Stearns was one of the busiest GMs last winter and made a ton of moves, not that many high profile ones, but just really turned over, I think, half the 40 men after he took over in short order. And, you know, some of those guys have turned out to be good. I think their offseason was generally regarded as extremely successful and smart and efficient. And they have had some players really pan out from those moves, like Jonathan Villar has been very good and Junior Guerra was a surprise success. So they've had lots of guys like that, sort of, you know, smart, kind of low-profile pickups.

And they made more moves at the deadline. They seemed to get good returns for guys like, you know, Lucroy and Will Smith and Jeffress. And they now have what is widely regarded as either the best or second best farm system in the game. So I think between that continued successful remodeling and the team not falling to the depths, at least yet, that we've seen of other recent rebuilding teams, I think it qualifies as a success. Yeah, probably the most dispiriting part of the team is that you come into it with Jimmy Nelson and Taylor Youngman looking like they were going to be cost-controlled pitchers who were good enough to be maybe a number two and a number four on a playoff-bound team. And both of them were really disappointing this year, I would say, in ways that you don't count on them to be in a rotation of a playoff contending team necessarily anymore. And so I do feel like you can see the core of a good team here. I also don't know where

you get five starters between now and then. And so maybe that's daunting at the end of the year, but I basically agree. Is Jonathan VR, how do you project Jonathan VR next year? I don't know. He's like a four or five win player this year. He's going to be, you know, he's going to be a 2060 guy. One of those. Yeah, I don't know. And hasn't he been like a not very valuable base runner,

even though he has been a high volume base stealer? Yeah, the different base running Metrics disagree a little bit but yeah he has not been a he has not been a very productive Base runner yeah well i don't know but uh between him and and they also had three innings from Someone named damian magnifico so i think if you have damian magnifico on your team You had a successful season yeah youngman by the, I'm checking because he was so bad that he got sent down to the minors. And then he was so bad there that he got sent down to AA.

And I was wondering whether there was going to be some yips reported or something. It looks like he cleaned it all up in AA. He's been good in AA. So I guess you can't even blame it on the yips. All right. All right. Next, we have the pirates yeah one game under 500 yeah i wrote about the pirates last week i think i mean we're kind of grading on a curve here obviously i you know a few years ago four years ago or something the pirates being this good would have been a success. And if the Reds or the Padres or the Diamondbacks had the record that the Pirates had, that would be a success.

But based on the expectations for the Pirates, I think you could probably call this year a failure. I think some of their stars have not played at a star level. And I wrote about the whole Ray Searidge reputation and how they haven't had a whole lot of their reclamation projects pan out other than Ivanova recently since the trade deadline. Other than that, it seems that they went into the year not having done a whole lot, whether that was because they were overconfident in Searidge or because they just couldn't spend the money or what, I don't know. But they didn't do much, and people said, hey, they didn't do much,

and then they haven't done much in the season. So I think their offseason was sort of seen as poor planning, and I think it has not worked out in most ways. And I don't know that they've Affected my long term outlook for Them all that much I don't think They're suddenly a disaster Or anything but I don't think this year Was a success yeah they

Were projected by Pocota to Be like an 82 83 win team And they were yeah they were the Royals of the NL they kind of were under the radar but they Were outperforming their Pocota projections by As much as the Royals were and it's always a shame when you find out that the magic trick that you do is actually not a magic trick, you know. So preseason staff predictions at BP had them finishing in second place ahead of the Cardinals with two first place votes and, you know, clearly ahead of the Cardinals by our staff predictions. Next year, are they, is there, is it close to that? Or do you think that

it'll be a pretty clear consensus among staff that they're third place or worse and no first place votes? Hmm. Well, obviously depends on the off season, but based on what we know now, I'd probably guess that I would end up putting them around the same place that I would have put them this year. Yeah. I want to say I would too, but I around the same place that I would have put them this year. Yeah, I want to say I would too, but I should check to see. Yeah, I had them in third place last year. And I even think that I know how many wins I had. I think I had them winning 83. So that seems about right to me.

But again, it sort of goes back to the magic popped, I guess. Right. But that's clearly an unsuccessful season. They're the first team that we've said that intended to be in the playoffs, and they're not in the playoffs. And, you know, I don't know. I kind of found their trade deadline to be depressing. Uh-huh.

Right. And then also to have the trade deadline then be followed by their somewhat predictable hot streak as they played a very soft schedule made the trade deadline look even more depressing because they looked like contenders all of a sudden. And they fell apart and you could now wonder, well, what if they had gone into July thinking of themselves totally differently? So I say non-success. All right. Braves expected to be bad. Every bit as bad as expected.

Yeah, right. This has been basically what everyone thought the Braves were going to be. It doesn't really say success or outright failure to me. It kind of just is what we thought it would be. So I don't know that they've done enough to move them into the success bucket. Like, I don't know how, how could the Braves have qualified as a success this year, if they had brought up a bunch of really talented young players and they'd done well. I mean, you know, they've done that to a certain extent. They got Dan to be Swanson to the big leagues.

And so there are some examples of that kind of thing. And some of their prospects have gone backward, I guess. I don't know that they've really changed their outlook all that much, but they also haven't accelerated the timeline. There's nothing that you look at this team and say, oh, this is going to be a contender sooner than we thought, or they're going to be good next year or something so i don't think it really i mean i guess we have to pick one but it just it's a very neutral season i think i could see look if swanson had come up and been gary sanchez or if aaron blair had had a good year you know if you'd have things you could build on and there are every team has some of those things i mean freddie freeman is even better than i thought he was six months ago i mean he's a superstar

uh like they they they had at the beginning of the year they had freddie freeman and now they have anthony rizzo basically and that's an upgrade in my opinion so that's good and ender and ciarte had another good year which you know the diamondbacks were so eager to give him away apparently that you wondered and but he's great and so there are there are things like that but i mean blair anthony wrecker yeah uh they to win on the other hand uh blair was a disaster and uh they didn't manage to like you would sort of hope that you like even If you're a terrible team you kind of want to have Three good relievers Come out of the pool of muck that

You start with and you know one of them is your Closer next year and two of them you trade at the Deadline for value and they didn't Get anything like that so it really is close To a push I would Yeah I would say right I'll say I'm not comfortable saying success So I guess I'm going to say failure.

They're also not going to get the first pick, are they? Oh, yeah, that's true too. So, yeah, I mean, it's kind of unfair to put all the failures in the same category because some of them are really bad failures and some of them are just a little itty-bitty failures, but it's not a success, I don't think't think so failure it is agreed all right phillies well i guess the phillies have done they kind of also fall into the more or less met expectations category i think they came into the year projected to be just as bad if not worse than the braves i. But I remember doing our season preview podcast and the Phillies episode was significantly more upbeat

than the Braves one was because we knew that there were going to be some fun, promising players on this Phillies team and they seemed to be closer to the other end of the tunnel than the Braves were. And they've been better than the Braves, of course. They haven't been good so have they done enough they they had some successful surprise players although there's sort of some asterisks to those seasons like it was because they're left-handed that was a bad

baseball reference joke sorry because i'm yeah i don't get it yeah they put asterisks next to their names if they're left-handed oh i see this is a horrible horrible horrible job i'm staring at their page and there are literally asterisks next to their seasons and so i couldn't help but say forget it go so uh they are closer to success for me i think than the braves are on the other hand i guess they've had some players who kind of went in the other direction, right? Like, Michael Franco had a really promising 2015 and then

took a step or multiple steps back. So, are they closer to where they want to be than they were at the beginning of the year or that we thought they would be? No, I don't think so. But I don't know. I guess they kind of fall into the Braves category for me. I'm having a hard time declaring success.

How is Jeremy Hellickson on their team? Yeah, that's kind of a failure that he's still pitching for them, I suppose. Yeah. I don't know how Nola's... What is Nola? Yeah, he's another one. What kind of hurt is Nola? Nola is... He's another one. What kind of hurt is Nola? It was an elbow thing. UCL sprain, flexor sprain, PRP injection. One of those kind of nebulous, is he going to get Tommy John? Not yet, but we'll see kind of situations.

Yeah, I... So that probably sinks it for me. I think if maybe two months ago, I would have said that Velazquez, Eikhoff, and Nola, like, I can build a marketing campaign around them next spring. Like, that's good. That's really good. But now I don't, and two is not enough for a marketing campaign. And that's a bad lineup. It's like a really, really, really bad lineup.

It's like a really, really, really bad lineup. And the one guy who was supposed to be batting third or fourth for this lineup for the next seven years was worse than Adam Duvall. So, yeah, I don't – yeah. I think they had a fun first half. And so for that reason, I think that they're also higher than some of these other non-successes that we've said but i think i'm also saying not quite a success maybe even closer to success than the braves so those two are both razor thin right we would if i let you we would call them pushes yeah all right marlins 75 and 75 500 team they have at times looked like a success they have they almost made the playoffs yeah so which is you know i mean they were a pick they i remember we talked about i

think maybe on the season preview episode that they are always a trendy pick it seems like they're you know every year someone picks the marlins to do well, and they have some talented guys. And so you can kind of imagine how all of it could come together. Maybe just does stability qualify as a success? I mean, Barry Bonds has been the hitting coach all year, and they haven't had a fire sale. And there hasn't been any crazy, you know, Loria stuff going on. It's just been a baseball team, basically. So maybe that's enough to be a success. I mean, and, you know, on the field, they've been decent. They've been almost good enough.

They had Ichiro. They had Ichiro. They had Christian Jelic take that step forward that everyone was waiting for. They had Jose Fernandez be Jose Fernandez and not get hurt or anything. Yeah, and like legit Jose Fernandez. He is as good now as he was before the surgery. He might be the second best pitcher in baseball.

Yeah, sure. So, okay. So that clears the bar for me. I agree. I think that's a fun season. I would love it if my favorite team's median season was the 2016 Marlins. I'd be perfectly happy with that. Yeah. Stanton is the big one downer, right? Yes. He was fine, but you expected more from him. He's hurt again. And there is always the possibility that he doesn't age well and that he doesn't opt out and that you end up with that extremely backloaded deal that goes forever.

But, you know, that's so far, so far in the distance. Yeah, Marlon's success. All right. Quickly to the ale. I think this will be easier, which is good because i also would like it to be over sooner angels are uh just above i mean the the angels nobody expected the angels to compete they probably might have had more hopes than i did uh but they were not quite like the diamond backs where they were really making a push but all the same they are the diamond backs of the of the al maybe are they yeah i don't know

that's not the front office stuff that's true without the front of stuff but yeah it's been it's a it's just sort of been a depressing season and another season that i just it's even more depressing that you it almost has gotten to the point now where instead of redeeming things no matter how bad they get the presence of mike trout just makes it even just even harder like it he's gonna like it oh man what he's gonna finish like 24th in mvp voting because and it's not really but it's it's hard to i don't know it's kind of hard i so i don't know the less said the better. Not success. And really the pitching. Oh, oh, they're pitching. They're poor pitching.

They're poor young pitchers, Ben. Yeah. Garrett Richards and those guys getting hurt. Probably that alone would be enough to push them into this category of failure because there just isn't much on the other side of the ledger. Yeah. All right. A's.

A's. No one really knows what to make of the A's these days. I was watching an A's game the other day, and I was trying to think of one player that I would want to watch play baseball. Yeah. Yeah, maybe the most anonymous team in the majors this year. Yeah. Just not a lot of notable storylines,

like Billy Butler and Danny Valencia fighting is kind of the most memorable part of the season so between that between sunny gray just between the not being good at baseball not knowing where they stand exactly it seems like failure they did turn six million dollars that they gave to rich hill Into probably $40 or $50 million worth of young Pitching prospects And a half season of Rich Hill I mean that was

Huge It should be a success just for signing Rich Hill Although that was technically last year But it happened since last season Yeah It's weird because we can Say well the Rich Hill thing was amazing And added so much. And then it's hard to think of the other failure, like to counteract it. It was just boring guys doing what you expected in a way that. Chris Davis is, you know, he had 40 homers, right?

Yeah. So that's another good thing. Yeah, I mean, okay, so not a success, but not really just sort of because that was the path they were on. You don't really see them doing any better next year, for instance. And I think that's a prerequisite to calling a season a success. All right, Twins. Well, they've been worse than people expected them to be. Glimmers of hope though That definitely changed the perception Byron Buxton

Hitting lately and so he'll probably Come into next year as the Big breakout player everyone picks So there's that There's the fact that they are Finally changing some things around And searching for a GM From outside the organization

So that could be a positive sign. I mean, that's been the big complaint about the Twins is that they never fire anyone. They never bring in new blood. So they have finally committed to doing that. That's a step forward. And they still have talented young players, some of whom have played pretty well, but they have been really bad and worse than anyone expected them to be, I think. So can't quite go to success, I don't think. Definitely some positive signs. Here's what I'm going to say. I'm going to give it to them. And here's why.

All right. We all know that it is to your franchise's benefit if you are going to be bad to be as bad as the Twins are. And yet i cannot applaud a team that goes there on purpose i cannot do it i it is i believe it is my duty as a fan to shame a team that tries to get as bad as the twins are the twins got to be that bad with none of the moral ambiguity because they it was an accident they genuinely were not trying to be that bad. They tried their best every day of the last 365 days, and they just couldn't do anything except get this bad. And so it was sort of a cake and eat it, too, kind of a thing. Yeah, I guess that's true. And also, if you're – I mean, what is Brian Dozier if they trade him this offseason?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's like – that's a franchise rebuilder right there. And that was not going to be true six months ago or even three months ago. So, and I think you're right. I mean, if you look at the, I think if you look at Buxton, Sano, Kepler, that trio, Barrios is a little bit more complicated. But if you look at that trio, I think you see, you know, some good signs for all of them. Some good signs.

Yeah, sure. Maybe I'm being too rigid in my thinking. My thinking being that they are the worst team in baseball by a lot. But by accident. By accident. I don't know. That's the funny thing too is that that should be disqualifying. The fact that it's by accident should make it not successful. And if it's on purpose, it should make it successful. But I don't want to – I like it. If they kept the – I think the regime change, part of it hinges on who they're able to get. If they find that their top three picks for GM don don't want to work for them that would be bad uh if they you know hire dave stewart

then maybe that would be bad so it partly hinges on you know what the things that we're not going to be able to assess for many years uh but i don't know i mean you feel you certainly feel better about the twins today than you did 15 games into the season yes but maybe not maybe not on opening day yeah maybe not on opening day I mean like I gave them credit for some good things happening to Sunil Buxton and Kepler but we already loved those three we already we already baked in that good things were going to happen to them and arguably fewer good things happened to them than we would have liked i mean yeah you know we were thinking they had like three rookie of the year candidates right exactly and they're not yeah exactly so yeah yeah maybe i maybe i maybe you're right all right tough call but be nice if

we disagreed on at least one team okay i'm saying'm saying success. All right, I'm not. Okay, the Royals. Sorry, the Y skipped one, the White Sox. White Sox, failure, I think. They kind of entered the season as favorites to be a failure, maybe. I don't know. Just because it just seemed like they'd finally done some things, but not enough things. And they weren't really ready to rebuild or anything and they just seem sort of aimless i mean we talked about them when like before the trade

deadline about what they should do and we couldn't figure out what they should do and they don't seem to know what they should do so i think they were trying to contend right they've been trying to contend each year and they did not contend and nor did they make any meaningful steps toward contending in the future i don't think so failure i think that's right aimless team is one knock against them and team that was good enough to fluke into a division like it wasn't outlandish to think that they could win 87 they didn't win 87 uh and so the two ways that they could have made the season successful i don't think either one happened and not only that but matt alfers era is up 500 percent yeah that's awful they did give him a save opportunity though yeah uh all, now the Royals. Royals, yeah, probably.

Well, it's not far in either direction, I think. Once again, I suppose they have beaten the projections, not as convincingly as they had the last couple years, but they still beat them. And they had lots of injury problems, which you probably don't really look at as a failure. I don't know. It's something that happens to you Maybe you were responsible in some way But we can't say that So it's not something that you chalk up to poor planning Or anything like that

It just, it happens They've played pretty well Otherwise well enough that they even made a run at the end there And made things interesting for a little while And played entertaining baseball So, you know, I don't know. It's, I mean, this is kind of a year when, I mean, they have some free agents coming up and they had some guys who, you know, like Hosmer just looked like they had taken that step and then went back or Moustakas got hurt or Gordon got hurt. And So a lot of individually

Failing seasons or disappointing Seasons but as a group I think they probably Clear the success bar I think that I would call them a success And I think that they I think they would call it a failure Yes right any defending

Champion that you know ends up Winning whatever 82 Games or 85 games or something is probably going to So that's a really good one. Mike Moustakis seemed to be taking a step forward, and then he got hurt, and it's not a big enough sample to say one way or the other. And I, even though he's been great, I think Kelvin Herrera took a step forward this year. And like to me, he's now, I didn't really buy him before,

and now I buy him. I get it. So those are good. And so those would all be things that you would consider successful. But yeah, it's a lost season for a team that was, you know, won the World Series and went the year before. But yeah, like you said, I mean, it doesn't really tell you much about next year that is negative.

Every year that Eric Hosmer plays like a league average first baseman is i think dispiriting but and lorenzo kane was basically a league average player again and yeah had injury issues and yeah that sort of thing so i i would say um that well let me put it this way i think pakoda would call it a success because they had meaningful games late into september but i think they would call it a failure yeah they had meaningful games late into September. But I think they would call it a failure. Yeah. And what would you call it? In this exercise, at least we started out saying that we were looking at it from the team's perspective.

I think a failure. I think I would. I'm not saying it in like the process failed them or people should feel bad about themselves or anything like that. But I think you go home disappointed to have 83 wins with this roster yeah coming off of that year yeah my snap judgment was success but i am flip-flopping on that i think you know they're they're a team that is in the period when they're supposed to be making the playoffs every year that's what they've been doing that's what they hope to do and probably expected to do So they didn't do that Alright, last two Tampa Bay Rays

I mean, look, there's The Rays, there's a whole Pakoda problem there too, because Pakoda Was outlandishly High on them relative to the conventional wisdom And so if you have That anchored in your mind that they're a competitive team And they're going to have like the second or

Third worst record in the American League It's hard to call that a success at all. I mean, they were the preseason favorite by Pakoda. So to be not only not in the playoffs, but to be as bad as they are would have to crush you if you bought into that at all. I don't know how much they bought into it. My guess, my guess is that they did. My guess is their projections had them winning mid 80s. Just a guess. No knowledge whatsoever. But knowing how similar projection systems tend to be, I would guess that their own projections had them mid-80s and that this is a big letdown for them. or at least was very surprised to see it. I wouldn't have judged their season based on that, but I also wouldn't really judge it that positively based on anything else.

So, failure. I also don't like Matt Duffy not that much as a player. I like him fine. He's a role player on a good team. I don't buy him, though, as a starter on a good team, as a three- or four-win player. to me they they had they went into that trade deadline uh with a very interesting collection of pitchers uh and i um am maybe a little disappointed that what they ended up choosing to do from all of that was get matt duffy and you know again like

duffy could be a good player on a good team uh but more of a role player. So I'm not that inspired by what they spun out of this season. And they had some successes. Evan Longoria is back to being Evan Longoria again, which is, you know, something that hasn't been talked about all that much, maybe because he's on the raise, but he's been great again, and they've made some other smart moves here and there. And Chris Archer's season is probably a failure just because he was expected to be maybe the best pitcher in the league. He was sort of like a Cy Young favorite coming into the year, and then he really had a dismal first half, and he has salvaged it.

He's made himself back into a good pitcher who could bring a lot back in a trade but i think people expected him either to be you know the best pitcher for the rays or to be traded for a ton or one of those things and neither of those things happened and another year has passed so and every day that steven souza and trey turner both exist yeah it's hard it's hard to wake up to yeah uh all right last one i would say the easiest one the inspiration for this whole thing in fact is the new york yankees which feels like an across the board success unless yeah you unless at some point you became really emotionally invested in them winning the world series this year which would be justifiable and tempting yeah maybe you're disappointed but uh successes at the big league roster successes

in the farm um and uh more successful contending team than you would have expected and really a you know a complete coup at the deadline and gary sanchez and gary sanchez yeah yeah maybe the the easiest call on this list or on this episode at least so agreed yeah i mean maybe the most successful yankee season of our lifetime that did not end with a parade yeah yeah because every other every other season that didn't end in a World Series was considered a dismal failure, right? Even if it was in game. Sometimes especially if it was in game seven of the World Series that the season ended. And if you asked Steinbrenner about it, they might still say that it was a failure just because that's the standard Steinbrenner line.

But, yeah, I mean, barring a terrible end to the season here, they're going to be a winning team. Again, somehow, despite being outscored by a bunch. And that's pretty amazing. And they made great trades. And they now have one of the strongest farm systems in baseball. And they also had some guys debut. And one guy looked like a superstar after he debuted. And they salvaged something out of CeCe Sabathia. had some guys debut and one guy looked like a superstar after he debuted so and they like

salvaged something out of cc sabathia and so yeah there's just a a lot to be proud of there yeah and also not only did like for instance the beltron trade not only did they get a lot for beltron but beltron had to be really good for them to get them there at the beginning of the season if they tried to trade beltron they wouldn't have gotten that for them. So, yeah, just good things happening all over. All right, so we have successes. Losing teams with successful seasons, we have the Rockies, the Brewers, the Marlins, the Yankees, and arguably the Twins.

All right? All right. Well, that was fun. That will do it for today. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild five listeners who have already done so. Daryl Purpose, Hubert Sue, Dave Barker, Casey Malone, and someone who wishes to be known as backside of magic. If you pay us $5 a month to do this podcast, I will happily thank you as backside of magic. Not once, but twice. You can buy our book, The Only Rule Is It Has To Work, our wild experiment building a new kind of baseball team. Check out the website at theonlyruleisithastowork.com for more information, and please leave us a review on Amazon Goodreads if you like it. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild, and you can rate and review and subscribe to the

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