Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 984: Advice for Teams With Too Much Money

Episode Date: December 2, 2016

Ben, Sam, and BP’s Russell Carleton banter about Nolan Ryan as a reliever, the possibility of a strike in 2021, and how teams should use the money the new CBA prevents them from spending.

So take your dollar, your francs, your rupees, no thanks, I won't get down with no pounds. Never need to leave this house. Don't need the money box, cause I can lost and lost. Oh, what I need right here, right here with you, my dear. Don't need the cash machine to make our days happy. So do me a favor, Don't jingle your chainsaw Hello and welcome to episode 984 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives

presented by The Play Index at BaseballReference.com and our Patreon supporters. My name is Ben Lindberg. I'm a writer for The Ringer, joined as always by Sam Miller of ESPN. Hello. Hello. We are joined also by a frequent guest, although I guess it's been a while, it seems, Russell Carlton of Baseball Perspectives. Hello, Russell. Hey, it's good.

We finally have somebody from BP on the BP podcast. Well, we had Jeff on earlier this week, so he counts. Before we talk with Russell about our topic, there's some banter that I think Russell's suited for as well. Sure. We got an email yesterday in the email show, we talked about Nolan Ryan and trying to compare him to starters today who don't throw as many innings and how one of the things that made Nolan Ryan extraordinary was his incredible ability to throw more innings and more pitches than any man alive. And we got an email that is sort of interesting from Matt,

who suggests that if Nolan Ryan were pitching today, it might not be that his career would have been most similar to Justin Verlander's or any of the other starters I named. But in fact, that Nolan Ryan raised today might have actually ended up in the exact opposite role, throwing fewer pitches than almost anybody else that he would have been converted to relief early on. And Matt's case basically boils down to this. Ryan, in many ways, was fairly similar to Billy Wagner. Both pitched almost exclusively with their fastball, only occasionally mixing things up with a good curve. Both struck out a

ton of guys while having certain glaring weaknesses. For Ryan, it was walks, while for Wagner it was home runs. Ryan was allowed to be a starting pitcher despite his flaws. While Wagner's small size meant that the Astros decided to make him a reliever as soon as he hit the majors, Ryan wouldn't have that problem, but his lack of control would probably mean that his team would move him to the bullpen within a season or two. It's also worth noting that Ryan claimed to have never thrown anything but a fastball until he was 23, according to the Nyer James Guide to Pitchers. Mariano Rivera was allowed to start with only a great fastball when he was 25, but soon after that he was moved to the bullpen. So I think some of the

reason why Nolan Ryan was a unique pitcher is that guys like him rarely get to start for long, let alone 27 years. If he pitched today, I would think he would end up with an ERA similar to that of Mariano Rivera or Billy Wagner because he didn't need to go for nine innings each time out. Do you think that it is possible that in fact, Nolan Ryan would have been converted to the bullpen early on and that all the things that made him special would have been sort of nipped in the bud stage? Well, thinking about that, I have to imagine that, you know, he would have at least shown the ability to go, you know, I mean, 200 innings over the course of a season or, you know, seven innings a game if they played pitch counts with him. But the fact that he would have been able to

do that, I think they would have given him a chance to start for as long as he possibly could. I think that the fact that there are a lot of guys who are high strikeout, high fastball, guys who get moved to the pen because they can't sustain it. But the fact that Ryan obviously proof of concept is right there. The fact that he pitched so many innings and then he showed that he could do that. I think that teams would have, would have given him the chance to start for, for an extended period of time. So the proof of concept though, didn't show up, arguably didn't

show up until, until quite a bit later, until really until he was 25 and with the Angels. His last year with the Mets, he went 10 and 14 with a ERA plus of 86, and he walked seven batters per nine. And at that point in his career, he had 500 innings as a major leaguer and had walked six per nine. Now, it's hard to know whether that six per nine is also era dependent and is also a byproduct of Nolan Ryan's obvious strengths and that people would have seen it as a strength. But it does seem like a lot of, like there are good prospect starters who get moved to the bullpen for, you know, less reason than that, like Trevor Rosenthal, for instance, and never move back. And particularly if you can sort of point to something in their development that makes you think, oh, well, he would be a better reliever than a starter. Anyway,

there were some red flags in his development, no third pitch, no second pitch. And I think that from 25 on, it's obvious that Nolan Ryan would have been kept in the rotation. It's really in that in-between phase when he's old enough that a team expects him to start contributing, but young enough that you haven't actually seen it work. And I think you could argue that through 24, which is a fairly advanced age, 500 career innings in the majors already, he hadn't proven that it could work. Maybe he would have followed more the Cliff Lee path, not in the sense of the type of pitcher that he was, but basically, Cliff Lee back in the early 00s was kind of a bad starter. I mean, he didn't seem to,

he was kind of floundering around. And then what they did, he was with the Indians at the time, they just kind of stashed him in AAA and hoped that he would develop. Again, keeping him a starter, I'm sure it was tempting because he was left-handed. Oh, maybe we make him a loogie or something like that. But then eventually something clicked for him. And then he, what was it, 2008, he had his first 20-win season and he became, you know, he was, you know, quote unquote, the best pitcher in baseball for a couple of years in there. And he had that run. I wonder if he would have had that path where they would have just, they would have kept him a starter, but they would have kept basically hoping and hoping and hoping that something would kick for him at AAA. In his last minor league stint, it was when he was 20 and he was in AAA. He pitched three games all in relief and threw seven innings and struck out 18, which is pretty good.

Yeah, that's okay. All right. Shall we move on? Yeah. Wait, Ben ben you didn't give your opinion ben i agree with russell okay i don't think yeah i think if you have nolan ryan who's like legendarily great at endurance i think he ends up using that skill one way or another all right so we are going to talk about je Passan, who is actually my guest on today's Ringer MLB show. He also wrote an article about the CBA and it covers a lot of the CBA's details. And if you want lots of CBA details, go read the article or listen to the interview on the other podcast, but his article is kind of about the risk that there could be a strike next time, which is kind of a counterintuitive thesis, I think, just because things seem to go so smoothly this time. And he thinks that because this deal will sort of cement the imbalance between players and owners when it comes to the share of revenue and the hard cap in the

international market and all of that, that those tensions will bubble up and boil over and that the next round will be much more contentious. And he talks to many sources within the game who share that view. I guess we could just quickly go around and do you guys buy that? I think personally, I don't, I think. I think it's so far away that who knows. But I would guess that, I mean, if anything, this year's CBA is just a continuation of a trend toward the owners getting a bigger piece of the pie. And the players really didn't seem to put up much of a fight this time. And unless something drastic happens between now and five years from now, I mean, as long as everyone's still rich and everyone's still getting richer, I don't know that they'd be any more likely to jeopardize that than they were this time.

Do either of you guys disagree? I don't have any reason or expertise to disagree with Jeff or any of his sources. So I would say that I mostly nod and go, interesting, interesting. of his sources so i would say that i mostly nod and go interesting interesting uh that said it feels like every year a strike just feels more out of place in the modern world like in the modern game like we we don't even really like it's it seems like when there is a strike nowadays uh it just feels like i don't know nobody, there's no sympathetic party. Nobody really thinks it makes much sense. There's obviously a ton of money in the game. And while that doesn't quell the either side's motivations or desires to get their fair share

of that money, it becomes sort of harder and harder to convince the public that we need to have a work stoppage that, you know, rich, these rich people on both sides shouldn't be able to just work it out. So it feels like it just to me, it feels like strikes are a thing of the 70s and a thing of the 80s and a little bit of thing of the 90s. But now it just feels weird. Like it feels like, like somebody predicting that rotary phones are going to come back in the next five years. Because like, well, we haven't, you know, as good as cell phones get, we haven't solved the basic problem that cell phones are garbage reception. And that when you're talking to somebody on a cell phone, there's like a second delay and you're talking over each other.

And really they should resolve that. But we're not going back to the rotary phone. I don't think this metaphor really works. But I don't know. It just feels weird to me. It feels like every five years we go, it's going to feel more like a relic of the past. I guess what I'm saying is that it doesn't feel like the way that we do business anymore. And it will feel in five years probably even less like the way that we do business yeah why strike yeah because you know ever everybody's getting rich yeah it has been the way that other

sports have done business fairly recently uh-huh but baseball's different in many ways but yeah i don't i wasn't you know i wasn't alive in the 70s i wasn't aware for aware for the 80s strike. But like, to me, the NBA strike just felt like farce. Like, everybody just agreed that it was stupid. And it didn't really accomplish much. It wasn't even that it made people, I don't know, this is just very subjective, but from a person who didn't hardly follow the sport at all. But it didn't feel like people were, you know, upset that they weren't getting their NBA games. It felt like people were like, what is this? This is like, like dumb. Which obviously wasn't a vaccine against it. It happened. And it could happen. And you know, like you say, it happened in hockey happened with, you know, NFL refs. It's still though, just feels like

not something grownups do or would do. Yeah yeah i don't know i i think it's probably easy to maybe get lulled into a false sense of security just because it's been a while yeah and since we've been covering baseball it hasn't really been a possibility so maybe we'd be too quick to rule it out i just i don't know that this deal, which doesn't seem to change anything that fundamental, I guess you can argue that having any sort of hard cap at all on anything is a fundamental change. But otherwise, it's not a dramatic restructuring. So if this one was passed easily and everyone keeps getting rich, I don't know that I buy that suddenly everyone's going to draw the line next time around. But it's possible. Jeff has talked to more people than I have, that's for sure. So do you think if it got ugly in this league or in any other that you would see a successful,

do you think we'll ever see in the next, I don't know, even half century or so, a successful attempt to just break the union entirely? There's so few unions these days. It's not like a part of the average American's life. And I mean, unions are, you know, largely confined to the public sector, where they're also being broken. So like, I'm thinking about that book that I talked about, Baseball's Power Shift by Christopher Swanson. And so much of the development of baseball labor rights, and ultimately the baseball union, tracked public sentiment for labor rights and the union. It was very much a part of the larger culture and the larger labor economy. And that was a big part of what both sides were playing to as they tried to develop and then

quash efforts for the union. And in as much as that matters, baseball's union, pro sports unions, are just such an outlier these days, which isn't to say that they don't do good. I mean, my premise would definitely be that they do good. They are fair. They are good. It should be there. It should be strong. But there's 300 million people reading, you know, picking up a newspaper or reading a forwarded email these days that are also part of the public opinion. And the fact that like the baseball union is an outlier and particularly baseball players are themselves outliers in terms of their earning potential.

I just wonder whether there I wonder whether owners in this sport or any other would see this union as in any way vulnerable. any other would see this union as in any way vulnerable. Well, I mean, I think that you've got a case where, you know, I mean, this starts getting bordering on some political stuff, but the wider labor movement, you know, was representing people who, against corporations and in public sector contracts, where you're dealing with some things that are, you know, maybe not life and death issues, but, you know, very high, high, you know, if we're talking about wages, the difference between 30 and $40,000 in salary, well, that's, you know, that's a big deal, you know, now, and, and, you know, from, from the corporate side, they might say, well, you know, look, this is all about

expenses on, and on whether or not we can continue to run this business or not. The baseball union, you're dealing with people who are arguing over whether they're going to be paid $9 or $10 million next year. And the owners, they'll be okay. The game will go on. So I mean, I think that the usual dynamics of labor and labor relations and unionization probably don't really apply in baseball. This is kind of a thing that, you know, the players have their advocacy group, and they should, and the owners have theirs, and they should, and they, you know, they kind of get together and they make up an agreement on how they're going to police things and deal with the pressing issues of the day. But I don't think that there's any incentive

for anybody to really go after the union because it's more just kind of an advocacy group than anything. Yeah, yeah. Both sides can basically live with... There's no pressing urgency to blow up the system because both sides are basically happy and arguing over exactly just how happy they're going to get and for that i guess that brings us back to 2021 i feel like the same thing would basically apply that it's not worth that the things that they're arguing about are not the sort of things that are worth losing a year's income or losing a year's revenue over all right so we are actually going to get to the topic, which is there's a passage in this Passon story that says, With the same severe penalties in place for exceeding the bonus pool in the amateur draft and now the hard cap internationally, executives spent Thursday asking, where do I spend my money? I spend my money? This is a fairly common refrain after every new basic agreement, and yet this time it resonated, not just because of the international rules, but ones intended to rein in major league

payrolls at the highest level. So Jeff is saying that there's more and more money in the game, fewer and fewer places to spend it, and this is something that people said after the last CBA, and there was probably some merit to that, but there were still places. There were the teams that went way over the international limits, which now they can no longer do. And teams that, I guess, at least some that went over the luxury tax level, and that's going to get more costly now. going to get more costly now. So harder to spend on basically anything, any of the traditional methods of talent acquisition because the penalties are either very severe or just hard capped. So we wanted to talk to Russell and see if he had any ideas for how teams could spend their money to make themselves better because this is sort of a theme of your writing,

and maybe we've even talked to you about it on the podcast before. You were an early or at least vocal advocate of spending on minor leaguers and feeding minor leaguers and not feeding them fast food, and it seems like a lot of teams have picked up on that, and I'm sure there are teams that could still improve, but that does seem to have become an emphasis for a lot of teams over the last few years. So is there anything out there that you see? What would you recommend to the team executive who has everything and doesn't have a place to

put it? He has a whole bunch of money burning a hole in his pocket and has nowhere to spend it what a what a horrible thing i mean you could give it to charity i um tis tis the season to be giving remember the neediest well you know i well i mean you know and and some of that goes into the the minor league stuff that i've written about and you know i think that if you think about okay bonuses are capped salaries are not capped but you know there's the luxury tax and that's still in place and that's serving as something of a cap unofficially. And so now you get into, okay, well, what do teams spend money on that isn't salaries or bonuses? And some of those creature comfort things start happening. And I wonder if we start kind of getting into teams, getting in an arms race over some of those creature comforts.

For some reason, over the past couple of years, I keep hearing stories about, oh, such and such team just redid their locker room or they redid their training facility at their spring training home. Some of those types of things. Because, you know, if you can't offer somebody more money, well, you can maybe offer them more perks. Maybe you do more stuff around, I could say the most, you know, self-serving thing. And well, maybe you hire more people from BP to be analysts. Yeah, but where would you spend the money, though? Well, on data feeds for the analyst to process. But I mean, yeah, when I read this initially, I'm like, where would you spend that money? I am wondering if we're going to start

seeing because i remember a few years ago when the nhl had the new collective bargaining agreement one of the things they had as part of their salary cap uh was that the salary cap hit that you took on a contract was equal to the average annual value of the contract. And I forget what team it was and who it was that they signed because I don't really follow hockey. But I remember reading the story where there was the team that decided, you know what, we're going to sign this guy. We really want, we're going to sign him to a contract that I think they wanted him for like seven years or whatever it was. And they figured that that would be his last contract. He would retire after that. And then after that moment,

after that seven or eight year period that they wanted him for, they put a rider on the back of his contract where they signed him, quote unquote, signed him for 10 more years at $100,000 a year, which adds another million to the contract, but it adds 10 years to the denominator for average annual value.

And I wonder if we'll start seeing some creative financing games along those lines. I mean, obviously, MLB doesn't have a salary cap, but you can see some of those games that when people start sitting down and playing around with, okay, where's the loophole? And I wonder if in next year at this time, we're all talking about this cool loophole that's named after some player that we haven't even imagined, but currently somebody is pouring over the details of this in their, in some team front office, trying to find that point and say, hey, you know, if we did this, we could kind of skirt around and spend more money on players. So I kind of wonder if, you know, the, what we've really done is that

we've just kind of made it an arms race for who has the best people who read all the fine details and can come up with ways to cheat legally cheat but cheat right yeah there's always something that some sort of unintended consequence so i don't know what it will be but yeah you'd think that teams would come up with something so so yeah okay so you can get snazzier facilities which would maybe have the dual benefit of actually helping prepare your players better, but also helping incentivize them to come play for your team. And yeah, well, I guess the problem is that the CBA kind of hard-coded some of those things. Like one of the CBA's provisions is that every team has to have a chef in the clubhouse, right? I think I read that in one of Passan's tweets or like two seats per player on the spring training bus, like little perks like that are now in the CBA. So maybe there are even fewer places where you can set yourself apart from other teams. And then you could keep

hiring staff. You could just have more coaches, more analysts, more scouts. I guess that's something that we'll see. That's something we have seen. Obviously, teams have way more scouts and front office people, analysts than they used to. So that can continue. I don't know whether that gets to a point where it's too many people and it's inefficient in some way. It's, I mean, it's interesting that you say more scouts, more coaches, because I think we tend to think of it that way. That's the opportunity. But I meant to ask Jeff this when we talked about the Yankees prospects. I meant to ask him if he had any idea whether the Yankees being a richer team

also pay their coaches more and would therefore be able to recruit the better ones. And I meant to ask him, I don't know if he would have known it, but my sense, my understanding has been that basically that is not the case for teams. That it's not like there is a big arms race, you know, for the best roving catching instructors. That maybe the best roving, maybe that's because the best roving catching instructor ends up being some team's third base coach the next year or gets promoted within the game. But when I wrote about the Angels farm system and how they were trying to rebuild it and invest more in it, they had increased their player development budget from $9 million to $12 million. A lot of that was spent on revamping, improving, building their Dominican

facilities. But there were also things like, and these are what I listed, hot breakfasts at spring training, a supplements budget, cell phones for coaches, and travel budgets for coaches' families. And it's interesting that it would be cell phones for coaches, travel budgets for coaches' families. Those are a form of compensation. They are a form of quality of life and so on. But if you want good coaches,

well, why not just pay them an extra $60,000 a year more than the Royals would be paying or more than any other team would be paying? And I find that it seems like when we talk about the personnel of a team, we get so narrow-mindedly focused on the 25 people who are playing. We treat them as the talent. They are the talent. They've always been the talent. And the manager is the talent. The players are the talent. Increasingly, the general manager is the talent. It really isn't an aircraft carrier in an organization. There's hundreds of people who are all, in essence, the talent. They are all contributing to the exact same thing. They all have a role with the exact same goal. And yet we only really

pay attention to how much more the Yankees or the Red Sox are able to pay for a setup man instead of how much more they are able to pay for the roving catching instructor or pitching instructor. And so I wonder why we never hear about that. And one hypothesis I might have is that these teams are essentially, I'm going to use the loaded word. I don't mean it in a loaded sense, but in a sense, they're sort of colluding. I shouldn't even say it in the sort of, but like the Yankees, you know, presumably maybe these teams know that like the expenses are all pretty minimal that, you know, every team could afford to spend an extra $250,000 on their coaching staff.

And if a team like the Yankees or if a team like the Pirates decided that that's the best way to spend their $250,000, that would be great for like a year, but then everybody else would just do it too because the money is actually fairly inconsequential in the larger budget. And that there's a sort of unspoken, maybe unacknowledged, maybe even subconscious cooperation among teams to not allow this sort of salary arms race anywhere but the 25 men on the field. Yeah. I mean, I wonder if they're, one of the things that we might see is kind of a flattening of the salary structure along the kind of the, you know, the 25-man support staff, if you will, which would, you know, encompass everybody in the front office and the, you know,

the roving catching instructor, the coaches, the minor league assistants, and all those sorts of people. Because, I mean, if you think about it now, that roving catching instructor, and you mentioned him getting promoted to third base coach the next year. Well, you know, he might be an amazing catching instructor, but he might be thinking, you know, look, I mean, I, I want to make a little bit more money. I, you know, I have a family to support, I've got whatever. And so, you know, maybe I'm going to agitate politically within the system and try to work my way up and work my way up to a position where I make a little bit more money, but then my amazing talents as a catching instructor really aren't being fully realized. But, you know, if you

flatten out that structure a little bit and, you know, kind of everybody's making more similar amounts of money, then he doesn't have to agitate. He's kind of like, oh, you know, I can, I mean, I could go be the third base coach, but why? I'm good at being the catching instructor and it's not any more money. So I wonder if teams would benefit from something along those lines where they weren't setting up or they were setting up a system where people were incentivized to stay in places where their talents could best play up rather than having them itching to become more higher compensated positions where their talents could be useful, but their specialized talent, something that they're really good at, that's not what they were doing. So I mean, I wonder if that's something that we could see. And again, that money isn't consequential, but again, where else are you going to spend it? Yeah, I think that's a really good point. And if you think about, you know, the Peter principle in application, if you're a team that has a surplus of money, but maybe not, but you know, a surfeit of opportunities to win a World Series, you would rather the Peter principle be applied in a way that your roving catching instructor would be paid $5,000 more than he's actually worth. He's risen to a

pay grade that he is not quite maybe worth rather than a position that he's not quite qualified for where he could do damage. Of course, you can see executive compensation continue to rise. I don't know if it'll be the full Louis Paulus inflation that he wrote about that executives would be worth, but Theo Epstein's breaking records. And obviously he has demonstrated that it matters who your GM or president is. So if you have tons of money to spend, then maybe an owner applies some of it there to bring in the most prestigious executive and then the next team has to spend more on the next candidate and then that just sort of spirals a bit but again probably not likely to be an enormous difference i don't see a place where you can spend all of the money

i mean we're talking about many dozens of millions of dollars that teams are now not going to spend going over international or accruing penalties and luxury tax or whatever it is. I don't know if there's a one-to-one place you could pour that money into. I wonder if we'll see some stadium renovations then. Some things where if you're going to— The public will pay for that well i mean but well i mean if they won't pay for a new stadium but you might see you know a stadium or you know an owner say oh okay well then let's add some some new feature let's build a ferris wheel in center field or something like that so that you know mid-game people can ride on it and maybe catch the pop fly that that it's hit out there and but you know i mean it's it you start getting into well you know, I mean, it's, it, you start getting into, well, you know, what else, what else are you gonna spend it on? And if you can't put a better product on the field, you know, these people are still in the business of entertaining us. This is still an entertainment product.

during two outs in the eighth ending in a one-run game. And, you know, people are going, I'm standing up and putting my hands up. And so, you know, there's people who are just kind of going there to be part of something and be entertained. And maybe because this is still an entertainment business, maybe they kind of spend more on the entertainment aspect of the game. Yeah, or you, I mean, it might be worth, like, I don't know, could you imagine that rather than every team spending more money against each other, that we see more cooperative efforts where minor league clubhouses, they all spend, you know, $200 million collectively to subsidize, you know, professional baseball league in China

or something like that. That could be fun. And although I could imagine that then in the next, if that, I mean, if that's really what happens, I could imagine then that the players would come back in that next CBA. And this is Jeff's point. They're saying, you know, look, we basically, you know, we agreed to these caps and this sort of stuff. Basically, you've taken that money and you're spending it on a league in China where there's no baseball culture like there is over here. And, you know, we could be we would be happy to take some of that money and put it in our pockets. And we would be happy to take some of that money and put it in our pockets. And so then you get into the CBA negotiations and then it just becomes the same process again of why are you spending it on that?

And is that in the long term better for our bottom line? And if it's not, well, then we just want the money right now and forget your baseball league in China or whatever it is going to be. Do you guys think that there's any room for baseball to grow through marketing? Like right now it's like what, a $9 billion industry, $9 billion in revenue a year or something like that. I'll give you an outlandish hypothetical, but if they decided that they were going to spend an extra $3 billion a year in marketing to try to build this sport, would they sell one more ticket than they do? Would they improve revenue at all? Is the amount of revenue at all limited by the amount of marketing they're currently doing or is it conceivable that that they could uh you know have some sort of a moonshot uh initiative in the game that would actually grow the game and make it bigger next year bigger in 10 years bigger in 100 years than it is well the moonshot

had a target it had the moon and you know i mean it's it and it's up there and everybody can see it nobody's gotten to it yet and so i mean be, I think. Other countries could be the moon for baseball. I mean, you're talking about geography and, you know, I mean, do we want to start, do we want, you know, a baseball team in London? Do we want, you know, but I mean, how does that even work in terms of playing the games? Boy, I mean, that would be, I'm stammering because this is one of those impossible questions to answer, because I'd want to say that the ROI that you would probably get on a campaign that big probably isn't worth it. But at the same time, I'm sure somebody could come up with a proposal that would

be much smaller, that would have a positive ROI that would be appropriate, that wouldn't be a moonshot, but it would be something. So in the strict sense, yeah, I mean, I'm supposed there's probably some marketing idea or ideas out there that could grow baseball. But I don't think that there's that big, let's spend $3 billion and the increase in market size will grow our revenues $10 billion. Sitting in my car here, I can't see that where it is, but then again, I'm just looking at a fence. All right. Have we exhausted our creativity? I'm pretty much created out. I will never be able to do anything creative again. It's definitely getting harder to come up with answers to this question.

We're doing our best. I think they should invest in even slower motion cameras. Like I love the Coors Light freeze cam. It's great. But I mean, what I'm proposing is twice as many frames per second. Okay, sure. How much is that going to run you? $3 billion. One Josh Hamilton.

Probably. All right. So we will end there We'll keep brainstorming Feel free to send us your brilliant ideas And we'll talk about them next week You can find Russell writing every week At Baseball Perspectives You can find him on Twitter

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