Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 976: Which Way Will the World Series Odds Go?

Episode Date: November 15, 2016

Ben and Sam revisit their conversations about Cubs-parade attendance and multiple Andrew Millers, banter about Eddie Gaedel, and discuss which teams will see their World Series odds improve or decline by the most before Opening Day.

If you want a winning game, if you want a perfect game, Bet you'll never lose my love, you will win, I bet ya. Oh yeah! Bet you'll never lose my love, you got to win, I bet ya. Good morning and welcome to episode 976 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectus, brought to you by The Play Index at BaseballReference.com and our Patreon supporters. I'm Sam Miller of ESPN along with Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Hi, Ben.

Hello. How you doing? Doing okay. I've got a few things to gab about, but do you? I didn't until we just got an email about 10 minutes ago that I figured we should read one more. I thought we were finished with the Cubs parade attendance topic, but one more email from a listener named Tim. Just stealing it. You're just taking it from me. Oh, so this is, okay.

You're just going to steal the email. It's addressed to both of us. I just feel like I've been doing most of the lifting on the Cubs route so far. So if someone's going to get the credit for taking it over the finish line, but that's fine. That's fine. I hand off the baton to you with like literally eight feet to go in this relay. Go ahead. All right.

with like literally eight feet to go in this relay. Go ahead. All right. Tim says, I've enjoyed your ongoing investigation into Fox 32's Cubs parade attendance estimates. I believe I can provide some closure. Last week, I met with Jamie Lundblad of Chicago's Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events. He organized the rally in only 24 hours, and their internal estimates put the attendance around 1.5 million people.

He said that the number would be much higher if they factored in spectators in buildings, particularly the office high rises around the park downtown. However, he said it would be dubious to claim them as attendees just because they took a few minutes out of their day to look out the window at a crowd. So according to Tim, that is the official estimate, 1.5 million. Yeah, and it might be tempting to then say, well, how do we trust that? But the fact that they had internal debates about whether to count people in office buildings suggests that they took it seriously, that they really had an honest and true desire to get to some truth here,

not just a number that could play in a headline, but some actual truth. And so I defer to this. I believe this is, in fact, the final say, the final word. And honestly, like 1.5 is, that's a bad, like when Matt, I can't remember if I said this. I can't remember if I even replied this to Matt. But when Matt was sort of giving me his explanation for what he thought the number was, Matt Trueblood, I was thinking that in a situation like this, I would probably just go with whatever I would have guessed in advance there were going to be and stick to that.

Not like there's any real reason for having a number in advance. and stick to that. Not like there's any real reason for having a number in advance. Like, I don't actually have a good way of knowing how many should have gone, let alone how many did go, but that I still sort of felt like even after all this, the best estimate was still going to be what I would have estimated before. And I would have estimated 1.8 probably before, I think. And I might be, that number paradoxically might be changing. What I, what I think after that I would have said before might not actually be consistent because I think, I think I've bounced a few numbers around in my head and maybe I'm now slowly gravitating toward the quote unquote correct number.

But I like 1.5 because it seems to fit what I already knew about the world, I guess, from 36 years of experience. So 1.8 million might have been my estimate. 1.5 is close. I think it makes sense. All right. So that is settled. I wanted to settle one other thing that we talked about in the last email show, which is the multiple Andrew Millers. If there were, let's say you had five Andrew Millers, and one was the closer, and he was used as a traditional closer, and one was, you know,

sort of a seventh, eighth inning guy, and he was used as a traditional seventh or eighth inning guy, and one was a fireman, like this Andrew Miller kind of was used for the Indians, and one was more or less like this Andrew Miller kind of was used for the Indians. And one was more or less a mop-up guy. And one was converted to a starter.

And we need to pick some stats for the starter just for the sake of this question. So let's say this starter, he throws 196 innings with a 3.78 ERA in Cleveland. Okay. Okay. So you've got five Andrew Millers and everybody can see they're the same. They all, maybe they have different haircuts. Maybe this isn't a weird world where everybody accepts that there are five Andrew Millers, but their pitches are the same.

You know, they have the same skills. Their pitch FX is the same. They have the same, you know, more or less same. They have the same, more or less, the same strikeout rates adjusted slightly for their role and the greater demands put on them and so on. So five Andrew Millers. I want to know how wide a spread you think their salaries would be if they all hit free agency at the same time. Would they all be signed to be closers or so? Would there be some bias against some of these Andrew Millers based on pitching in lower leverage or higher leverage? Would the saves Andrew Miller get paid more than the setup Andrew Miller? I don't think so. world and that teams are evaluating pitchers entirely based on how well they are at pitching

instead of how well they were in it, or I guess how valuable their role was perceived as being. Well, not necessarily, but if they're identical clones, yes. Yeah. Okay. So people don't realize that they are clones they they don't like these are these are somehow seen as being five different people with you know five different brains i'm saying that their their pitches are suitably clone like but but they all have different names they could even all be from you know different different countries if you want okay they. They look different too? They look different. Nobody knows that they're clones. Somehow it is disguised.

Okay. So their pitch FX stats and track man stats look the same. Yeah. But everything else is different. Yeah, exactly. And maybe their stats would be different. Maybe mop up Andrew Miller would go into games with such a different mindset or I guess strategy, a goal than closer Andrew Miller that in fact, their pitch effects would start to branch off into these different

roles. Pitch effects is like maybe mop up Andrew Miller throws a lot more fastballs and throws a lot more strikes and is different. But yes, if you shuffled them all up and put them in the closer role, their pitch effects would be identical. Uh-huh. Yeah, I'm sure the guy who was used in the highest leverage spots would probably still make more money.

I mean, if there were another pitcher out there who had the same stuff as, I don't know, Kenley Jansen or something and was a free agent this offseason also, but had pitched in wherever mop-up roles or just didn't have the saves and the closer aura or whatever, I think he'd probably get less money. So just because of maybe some lingering uncertainty about whether he could pitch in that role and whether everyone is equally well-suited to pitch in that role.

So I don't think it would be that huge a difference. I think it'd be a smaller difference than it used to be, but there would still be a difference. And who gets paid more, fireman Andrew Miller or closer Andrew Miller? Let's say fireman Andrew Miller has thrown 28 more innings, but has, you know, one save, whereas closer Andrew Miller has 46 saves. Who gets paid more in that offseason? I think if the real Andrew Miller were a free agent right now, I think he would get more coming off the season he just had than if he were coming off a season in which he had been used the way the Yankees used him all year. Or, you know, let's say he was just a traditional closer, same guy. I think he would definitely make less money than he would

make right now. Does that depend on him having previously closed? If, if let's say Kelvin Herrera had done exactly what Andrew Miller did this year, but you know, went in a free agency with, you know, zero career saves or whatever he has, would he, would he also, if he had the exact same level of dominance and versatility? Yeah, I think that might change things a little bit because with miller you know he can do the other thing if you want him to he has done it he did it for a year so i think probably yeah i think if the guy had no actual closing experience that might might hurt a little bit okay her Herrera got 12 saves, by the way, this year. Uh-huh. So that is a slightly outdated question. Yeah. All right.

And then last thing I want to banter about is today I read You Could Look It Up, the 1941 short story by James Thurber that predated Bill Veck's use of Eddie Goodell by about a decade. Have you ever read You Could Look It Up? Nope. So it's a short story that ran in the Saturday Evening Post. Thurber was one of the great short fiction writers of his day. And this story is almost exactly about Eddie Goodell, 10 years before Eddie Goodell. And Bill Veck denied that he was inspired by this, although it's hard to see. Well, maybe it's not hard to see maybe it's such an obvious thing for bill veck to to decide anyway that it's not a surprise that two

creative minds would think of it uh but i this got me thinking well this got me reading a bit more about eddie goodell uh one of the sadder wikipedia pages i would say that you could find did you know that he uh was beaten to death at 36? No. Yeah, he was. It's really awful. And that's awful enough. I mean, really, it's awful enough. Like for anybody, that's awful. For somebody who was in the public eye for roughly 15 minutes. And it's of, in a way, seems offler. But also, he was 3'7", and that is so awful to think about. Like, that is so just disgusting to think about. Was it a crime? Was it a crime kind of thing? Or was it just a regular crime?

Wikipedia does not get into that detail, and uh went only one or two more places after this so this is what it says uh on his wikipedia page on june 18th 1961 the unemployed goodell who had just turned 36 was at a bowling alley in chicago his birthplace in hometown goodell was followed home and beaten his mother discovered eddie lying dead in his bed he had bruises about his knees and on the left side of his face. A coroner's inquest determined that he had also suffered a heart attack. Oh, my goodness. That is the grimmest possible. But even sadder, if not quite as grim,

Bob Kane, the pitcher who faced him in that game, went to his funeral but was the only Major League Baseball figure to attend the funeral. There's a lot of sadness here, Ben. I'm not going to lie. I want to shift it to the less sad. I'm going to change the subject to my question, which is why I want to bring this up. Let's say that Bill Veck had been so inspired by the success of this plan. He got his walk, and none of the pitches were close, maybe Maybe if he had decided to keep doing this, what would have happened? Let's say Goodell was made a permanent member of the team. How would it have played out? Give me a, give me a, give me a career. Well, I don't think he would have lasted long anyway. I think, I mean, he would

have, so he was a pinch hitting in that game. Would you have continued to carry him as a pinch hitter? I guess so, right? We're talking about him playing a position. Well, that's part of the question. The question is, what is his on-base percentage? If it's 1,000 forever, then yes, without a doubt, you keep him as a pinch hitter. Yeah, I mean, it's not. I think we've talked a lot about pitchers and whether they can throw pitches in the strike zone,

whether they want to or how often they can do that. And we kind of think it's maybe less often than the typical person would think, or at least hitting their spots is harder than you would think. So obviously with him, you're not afraid of him hitting for power. You would pitch him like you pitch a pitcher or maybe even more so like that and on the other hand he has a tiny strike zone how often would he walk i mean he would never swing right he'd probably never swing so i think he would probably have like a 300 OBP with no power and no hits. Okay, 300?

Yeah. Really? He had it, according to legend, his strike zone was an inch and a half tall. Well, that can't be true. Probably not, but that's what Bill Beck said. Well, that's not true. I mean, he's two and a half feet shorter than anybody else. I mean, he's half.

It's half. At least it's half the size. Yeah, but than anybody else. I mean, he's half. It's half. At least it's half the size. Yeah, but you could just, I mean, you don't even have to throw a real pitch, right? You can just throw what you're playing catch with the catcher. And I doubt he's going to swing or that he's going to hit it all that far if he does. So I don't think you even need to wind up and do a delivery. And I think under those circumstances, I don't think he would walk as much as you'd think. All right. So then that's simple. If he has a 300 on base

percentage, then that's, it's simple. He, uh, this, this couldn't have survived as anything other than a gimmick. What if he did have a 700 on base percentage though? And, and then he's clearly worth a roster spot. You him to pinch hit either uh late in the game or you know if you want to in the first inning you could have him lead off every game and then replace him as soon as he gets on yeah got a pinch run for him every time so you're using up roster spots no well no you're using i mean you you're using him as a pinch hitter to get on base and then you're replacing you're putting him in you're putting in the normal leadoff hitter for him. Or more likely you would put in the normal number eight hitter because you don't want to have your pitcher pinch run. You also don't want to burn an

at bat from one of your better hitters. So you would move everybody in the lineup down one spot. You'd have your number eight hitter pinch run for him once he got on base to lead off the first. And you'd start off every game with a man on first which every time you do that it's probably worth at three or four five percent of a win so it would definitely be worth the roster spot if he were anywhere close to a thousand i would guess it'd be easily worth the roster spot if he were anywhere close to six or seven hundred on base so so just now allow that premise how would it have played out i think he's worth a spot in that case i i would guess that there would be a rule change of some sort to prevent that happening i don't know exactly what the language of it would be but i don't think baseball would want the browns to be able to keep

doing that over and over and to inspire other teams to do it also so i think probably there would be some sort of rule change. Like, uh, I think when didn't Bill Beck, like he had a moving outfield fence once and tried to like lower it and raise it or move it in and move it out. And there was a rule change so that he couldn't do that anymore. So I think probably you wouldn't be able to do it long, but it would be worth it as long as you could. Yeah. It'd be, it'd be interesting to know what rule change they could make because you can't you can't just have a rule that eddie goodell can't play i don't think that would be no but you could have something about pinch hitting with your first batter or something unless there's an injury maybe yeah well all right it just so

happens that we did get a kind of a little bit of an answer about whether it would have been sustainable. You probably don't remember this. I didn't remember this. But in 2009, York, the team in York in the Atlantic League, invited a man who was three foot two inches tall to spring training. And he had four plate appearances, of which three ended in strikeouts and one ended in a walk and that's against independent league pitching it's also with independent league umpires

he complained that he saw actually very few strikes and that the umpire expanded the strike zone significantly which might be what would have happened if eddie goodell had stayed on as well i watched the video of his first at bat, and the pitcher did not have a... It's hard to say, but the pitcher didn't seem to have a hard time hitting the strike zone, at least up-down. Like, all the pitches looked really awfully close. So it might not have been as hard to throw strikes,

even to Goodell, as legend has it. I mean, we've all seen exactly one picture of Eddie Goodell batting and growing up, you heard the story of how they, you know, they couldn't throw it. They couldn't, they couldn't hit the strike zone. And there's one, the picture that we've all seen, the catcher is kind of on his knees and his target almost seems to be like at Eddie's, at Eddie's head. And it implies that like every pitch was too high but uh according to um again according to to just to wikipedia kane delivered four consecutive

balls all high but only the first two were legitimate attempts at strikes the last two were basically half-hearted tosses in uh as kane didn't take the remainder of that at bat too seriously. One last note, apparently Goodell's death remains a cold case. I'm reading from a blog on baseball history by a man named Bill McCurdy who writes, and I'm going to just trust that this is accurate, from what I can tell, there was no real evaluation performed on eddie's blood contents in the sketchy post-mortem that followed almost everything about his death had been concluded by the chicago police from eddie goodell's reputation as a heavy drinker and combative personality since money was missing the chicago police concluded that eddie goodell had been

attacked and robbed but that he was able to make it home before i'm gonna stop okay because of his quote reputation the chicago police department declined to investigate his death any further uh carson wrote about it in 2013 carson sistuli today's glimpse into the horrible eddie good's death, December 4th, 2013. So maybe we can link to that. That probably has a lot better information. All right. Let's talk about 2017. Actually, let's not.

Let's talk about 2016, the winter of 2016. All right. I have sent you a link to a page on Bovada, the online sports gambling site, because we are going to play who will win the offseason. We played this last year. And the way this works is every team has been assigned a likelihood of winning the World Series as of November 1st. It has not been updated since then, which is interesting and just goes to show you, I think, how unseriously a bookie has to take these prop bets when the odds are so heavily stacked in the

house's favor. We've talked about this, but if you add all this up, there'd be like four World Series champions because everybody is given much better odds than you would actually give them so that you can't hardly make any money. And so even though teams have been signing players and making trades, it does not look like any of those have caused them to update their odds because they don't need to care. They're just going to win no matter what. But they will update them as the offseason goes on and before the season starts. And we will, at the beginning of the season, be able to look at the World Series odds and say who most improved their chances of winning the World Series this year. And from that, we will determine who won the offseason.

So I think last year we drafted the teams that we thought were going to most improve or most drop. And I think we will do that again. And you pick a team and then pick which direction. Does that sound about right? Yes. And theoretically, these odds have already banked in the expectations that some teams are going to buy or some teams are going to sell. So if, you know, if the Giants go out and sign Mark Melanson tonight, that might not move the odds because it might have already been expected that the Giants would be buyers and that they would improve their

bullpen and the smart money would have already calculated that. And so this is to some degree looking at who will execute the expectations or who will not execute to the expectations. And to another, it's who will defy expectations, who will be buyers and particularly successful buyers that we don't see coming. And this game today, this week is somewhat inspired by the fact that I wrote a piece at ESPN about which teams were maybe, in my opinion, or based on a sort of assessment of where they are and where the market is, the most likely to be this year's Diamondbacks or this year's Padres and White Sox from the year before. The team that goes out, does a ton, and yet still is bad and lives to regret winning the offseason. So partly I want to know who you think is going to be the aggressive buyer.

So anyway, long lead-in to the show. Hi, Ben. How are you doing today? All right. All right. So why don't you pick a team? All right. So we'll link to these odds in the Facebook group and the blog post at BP so you can follow along if you'd like.

I will take for my first pick, I think I'll take the Tigers to fall. So the Tigers right now are what the... They're tied for 11th at 22 to 1. Yeah. So that seems a little high to me just based on some of the comments that they've made about, you know, getting leaner. And it seems like maybe they would sell and there are those Justin Verlander rumors. And again, that is something that happened before these odds were made, I suppose. Or maybe not. Maybe the Tigers have been competitive for a long time now. They've been buyers. They've been trying to put a winning team together. So if they deviate from that this offseason, then they will sink down these rankings. So I would guess that they will have been leapfrogged by some other teams by the time spring training starts. Yeah, that's a good pick. I think it's clear that they have not, that these odds do not expect them to be sellers. They are behind 10 playoff teams and the Astros.

So clearly these mark the Tigers to be a winning team and a team that's trying and a team right at the cusp of all the other playoff teams. So do you, there have been what rumors about Miguel Cabrera being traded? There've been rumors about Justin Verlander being traded. Do you think that the Tigers could, might conceivably just trade everything? Like, is it possible that we're looking at a hundred lost team by the end of the off

season? Or do you think it's really just about getting rid of one of those two huge contracts when each is still, each is still movable? Yeah, I think it's probably that. Well, I mean, if you're going to get rid of one of those, then you might as well go all the way, right? But I don't know. I don't even know how much those guys would bring back

if they're coming off great years, but they're signed for a long time for a lot of money. So I don't know how much surplus value there's perceived to be there. Well, it's just that they're each one bad month away from having an unmovable contract again, as it is. I mean, I don't know. I'm always surprised by what teams are able to trade as far as money goes. I'm surprised that the Red Sox were able to trade Crawford and Beckett. I'm surprised that the Blue Jays were able to trade Vernon Wells. So you never rule out that there's a team that wants a famous player and

doesn't see one that they can sign. So I would guess that on the right day, each of those contracts has value to at least one other team and they can move them. But each player is, like I said, one bad month away from that not being true anymore. They're really like right on the cusp of everybody is waiting, I think, for each of those players to be old. And so it's not going to take much for the Tigers to be stuck and realize that they moved an offseason too late, if that's at all their their goal so i don't think it's necessarily as much about getting a big package of prospects back or anything like that so much as just sheer terror at where they could be at some point in the future yeah so all right good pick i will uh put my money where my article is and i will say the angels will go up the angels are currently at 50 to 1 which is the 20th team they're um behind the marlins and behind the whites i should have picked the white socks to go down that'd be a good pick uh they're behind the marlins and the white socks right now and i i don't know we don't a, I mean, I said this when I wrote the piece,

it's hard to judge the Angels front office. We don't really, I mean, it's a fairly new GM, been there only a year, and a new GM in that Billy Epler hadn't been a GM before. And so we don't have a huge sample of how he operates. But what we do know is Mike Socha and what we do know is Artie Moreno. And Artie Moreno has been pretty single mindedly focused toward competing for first place for the last seven years, even though they've only been close to first place or in first place one of those years. It's always been kind of a, it seems like it's always been kind of a challenge to persuade him to make a move that is long-term focused instead of short-term focused. From really the Vernon Wells trade onward, it has at times felt like a franchise that is sort of toggling between tilt and just on the brink of tilt. And I mean, I think that there's probably a much higher than normal level of frustration

in that franchise than in any other relative to what they should have done, relative to how much money they've spent, relative to how they they view themselves and relative to the number of Mike Trouts everybody has. The Angels, I would think, would really be particularly frustrated with what they haven't been able to accomplish in the last few years. And Mike Socha's contract is coming up, I think, has two more years in that extremely long contract. And I just would guess that the mindset for those two, Artie and Mike, would be that there's no rebuild coming, that every year is the year, that there's enough talent on the team, and that there's enough money to spend, that they ought to be able to put a good product on the field. And so, Fangraph's very, very, very, very, very early projections had the Angels as being surprisingly good. And that's basically due to a enough talent in the lineup, a Mike Trout in center field. And I would consider very rosy view of the health of the starting rotation.

health of the starting rotation. And if you talk yourself into thinking that the rotation is healthy, that it is going to come back, there is upside in guys like Skaggs and Garrett Richards and Matt Shoemaker, you don't have to really force it too hard to sort of think you're maybe two signings away. And so I could see the Angels being in a lot of rumors, I guess, is a long way of saying I could see the Angels being in a lot of rumors, I guess, is a long way of saying I could see the Angels being in a lot of rumors this offseason, more than they would be if everything were exactly the same, but they were called another team. Yeah, makes sense. All right. Well, I feel like I should take the White Sox to fall now, because they are the other team that has been the most vocal about selling or not buying, at least, that has been a buyer and a contender for some time now.

And they're right in the middle of the pack of these rankings. And, I mean, honestly, if they hadn't said anything, I might have said they would fall just because they don't seem to be in a better position than they have been for the last few years when they've just kind of been hovering in no man's land. So if they are now actually going to tear it down and rebuild in some way, then, yeah, it seems like they would fall. But even just where they are, I mean, they're ahead of the Marlins, the Angels, the Rockies, the Rays, a bunch of teams that I would probably put ahead of them even if they were to try to tread water in 2017. So I'll go with them. All right. I will pick the Astros to go up. It's clear, as I mentioned, they're the only non-playoff team that is in the top 10 already. They're tied for ninth with the

Texas Rangers. And so it's clear that there's already an improvement baked into this. And maybe that implies that additional signings are already baked into this. But the Astros team payroll varies from source to source and site to site. And so wherever you go, somebody's going to have a different payroll for the team. But the Astros last year were somewhere like around like 23rd or 24th, I think, in total payroll. And they've been that low or lower for years and years. They shouldn't be that low fundamentally. As a city and as a market, they ought to be able to spend more than that. The fact that they've been saving money for years, I would think, would mean that they might have even a little bit more money.

And I just have been waiting. I've been waiting for at least two years for the Astros to just say, now's the time. Back up. We're signing seven guys. And they don't really need to sign seven guys. And it seems clear that also they're philosophically opposed to building from the free agent market. And so I don't actually necessarily expect them to go out and sign every big name player or anything like that. But they're one of the teams that it seems like could do that this off season, that they probably have money

that they could spend if they want to. And that they are a good team in that part of the bell curve where spending money makes a lot of sense. And there have already been a few rumors attached to them, including that sort of surprising Miguel Cabrera possible trade rumor attached to them, which is just smoke and nothing more. But I think that I expect the Astros to be the big buyer and or a big buyer in this offseason all right so in which case i'm saying that their odds will go up and it wouldn't shock me i'll say this it would not shock me if at the end of this offseason the astros are second on this list okay yeah sure i will say for my next pick i'll take the phillies to rise i think yeah not that i expect them to blow open everything and sign everyone but they could they have lots of

money to spend and even if they didn't do a thing i think they're better than the reds who are in front of them probably better than the twins who are in front of them, probably better than the Twins who are in front of them. They're the second longest shots by these odds. So I would expect them to look considerably better than that by the end of the offseason, whether they do anything or not. But there is a good chance that they'll do things. Who would you, at the end of this offseason, who would you expect would have a higher payroll, the Braves or the Phillies? How did they compare this year? I do not know.

Let's see. They were basically identical. They were within $4 million of each other, according to one place I'm looking. Actually, they were, yeah. So the Braves were 25th and the Phillies were 25th. Uh-huh. 26th. Okay.

All right. Well, I think, so the Braves have already signed Dickey and Colon, right? Right. And they're entering their new stadium and you figure that they'll probably want to have a not completely terrible team for that. So I'll say Braves. All right. Then I am now trying to convince myself that the Braves could be good next year.

Hang on. Give me a second so I can kind of wind my way into this. Maybe. Let's see. Boy, it's not looking good. I can see it. Could I see it could i see it is it i'm trying to figure out whether it's possible that cologne and dickie are what you do when you have no plans to do anything else or if they're what

you do when you have plans to do a bunch of other things so could the braves see themselves as a contender this year in which case they i think they're stopping i think that they i think they consider kemp to be their big off-season addition all right uh and then cologne and dickie are there to give uh to make it respectable and it wouldn't surprise me if they you know made one more move i don't know who the fourth best reliever is but oh yeah maybe they get darren o'day or not darren o'day sorry no not, maybe they get Darren O'Day. Not Darren O'Day. Sorry. Not Darren.

Maybe they get Brad Ziegler. That would be their option. So I don't think that will move them up enough. So I'm not going to pick them. I'm going to call this my last pick, by the way. And I want to pick a downer team. I want to pick a team that's going to get worse. So the Cubs right now are so far ahead of everybody else on this.

If the Cubs did nothing except lose Dexter Fowler, if that was their entire offseason was letting Dexter Fowler go somewhere else, they would still basically be this favored to win, right? Yeah, I think so. And I think wasn't the top pick in this draft last year the Cubs to fall because the Cubs had crazy odds all of last winter, and as it turned out, they won the World Series. But they had, I don't remember what it was, but it was higher odds than you should ever give a team,

even if it is the best team in baseball. But yeah, I mean, I think with the combination of the hype, and I don't think losing Fowler would do that much because you would just say, well, they have Schwarber now, and they have Valmoraora and they have a bunch of young guys who will be better. So I don't think there's really anything you could do to the Cubs this offseason to bump them down that much. All right. I will then just I'll I'll take the Mets going down. I'll say Cespedes leaves. Walker leaves. They don't do anything else. And Noah Syndergaard is set to miss the first six weeks of the season by then.

Uh-huh. All right. So for my last pick— Wait, you don't have to make a last pick. You're welcome to. Oh, okay. Well, I would, but then I'll have too many picks. I would have taken, I think, the Rockies to rise.

Oh, yeah. I said that. I said that one in my article. Yeah. Well, yeah, right. So, I mean, I just—I think the Rockies are pretty. Oh yeah. I said that. I said that one in my article. Yeah. Well, yeah. Right. So, I mean, I just, I think the Rockies are pretty good as it is. And yeah, you, you identified them as a possible buyer and maybe a, maybe too much of a buyer, but even if they didn't, I mean, they were, they were just pretty good this year, especially later in the year. And they established

some, some good guys, some good pitching. So right now they're behind the white socks for instance. And yeah, I just, I think they'll, they'll probably be a little closer to the middle of the pack than they are in the current rankings. Okay. Let me just ask you to go up or down for three teams.

Would you guess that the Royals chances get better or worse? It looks about right, but if they had to go one way or another, I'd probably say up Tampa Bay rays, better or worse it looks about right but if they had to go one way or another i'd probably say up tampa bay rays better or worse up up so better uh yeah i could see that going the opposite i could see them in this market trading a trade they might trade archer or something yeah uh and uh new york yankees better or worse yeah that's a tough one so uh right now they're just behind they're the tigers and the cardinals and then the yankees and obviously if they turn back into the old yankees all of a sudden and they start buying people then they'd go way up i don't think they'll maybe maybe i'll say down

just because i don't think they'll do that yet, and maybe this is pricing in some expectation that they will do that. Okay. All right. Since you didn't mention it, I liked your article last week about the off-season demands. If we're not going to talk about that, I will just mention it for a second. People should go read that. free agent says that he's looking for something over an off season, whether it's number of years or number of millions of dollars.

You looked up like almost 80 examples of free agents doing that over some number of years. And you looked at how close they get to that. And well, I guess I won't spoil it, but it's a, it's pretty interesting. You, you arrived at an actual answer.

So it was satisfying. Oh, thank you. I, I forgot that came out on Veterans Day and so I have to re-put it out there. So I'm going to do that

right now. Alright, I like that one. Okay, so that is it for today. Alright, you can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild five listeners who have already done so Jason George, jody majone michael paretti harris kingsley and xander berg thanks to all of you you can also join our

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