Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 987: The Stove Was So Hot

Episode Date: December 9, 2016

Ben and Sam banter about Veeck As in Wreck, Willie Mays, and the term “hot stove league,” then discuss some of the Winter Meetings’ major moves, including big closer contracts and the Chris Sale and Adam Eaton trades.

What do you want me to do to make it happen now, happen now? What do you want me to do to make it happen now, happen now? Hello and welcome to episode 987 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectus, presented by our Patreon supporters in the play index at baseballreference.com i am ben lindberg of the ringer joined as always by sam miller of espn hello i like that you sort of started with your like uh your high energy ringer voice and then midway through you sort of realized where you were and you dropped an octave oh it's just all effectively wild done Done 980 something episodes of those.

Want some banter? Sure, yeah. All right. I got a few. I got a bunch. Okay. So I am reading Vek is in Wreck. Oh, great.

About, I don't know, third of the way through. And two things that I wanted to bring up. One is particularly good. So he's talking about the two players that he had that sort of found second careers in the game as clowns. Yeah, right. So one is Max Patkin, who was like... Yeah, clown princes of baseball. Exactly. So Max Patkin was like a literal clown. Jackie Price was more of a, almost a baseball acrobat. Like he could hit baseballs upside down or swinging from a trapeze, or he could throw two

baseballs at the same time in different directions and all sorts of crazy things like that. But what stopped me is this. Okay. So this is from, this is about Jackie Price. I was so impressed with Price from the first that I tried to get Detroit to hire him to perform in the 1945 World Series. Hank Awana, whom I had sold to the Tigers, had got them into the series with his pinch hitting, and I was naive enough to think that entitled me to ask a favor. Instead, the Tigers hired Al Skakt, known as, quote, the clown prince of baseball.

Baseball is soaked in tradition. I might even say it is pickled in tradition. And one of the most inviolate of these traditions seems to be that baseball humor has to be unfunny. Ah, oh, wow. Okay. This has enabled scat to last a long time. So, Bill Beck, way ahead of me on that. He's got his finger on the pulse 50 years ago. There are many, many sections of this book that if I wanted to,

I could read and play the who is he talking about game and make you guess Mark Mulder again. The second section, this actually doesn't come from the book itself, but from extra reading that I did on the topic. So you know, of course, you know, most people, a lot of people know that one of Bill Beck's most audacious schemes was to move the fences in and out. So originally he would, he built, he basically built a screen. I think it was like a 60 foot tall screen because he realized that the right field fence was so much shallower and his team didn't have any left-handed power hitters. So he built this huge screen, right? And then he got more and more nuanced with the way he used it, rolling it to different parts of the field,

rolling it, I guess, in and out. And then finally, I will start reading, any given day it might be in place or not, depending on the batting strength of the opposing team. There was no rule against that activity as such, but Vec then took it to an extreme, rolling it out when the opponents batted and pulling it back when the Brewers batted. Vec reported that the league passed a rule against

it the very next day. And we bring, I think we've, I don't know if we've ever brought this up, but when people ask us, well, why doesn't a team just do X to sort of take advantage of some loophole? We sometimes say, well, because the next day the league would close the loophole. And this is a sort of an example of how that would happen. They would just say, well, that's no fun. And they'd close it. And so you might get a day out of it and everybody would hate you. But however, this thing that I was reading goes on. However, extensive research by two members of the Society for American Baseball Research suggests that this story was made up by Venn. The two researchers could not find any references to a movable fence or any reference to the

gear required for a movable fence to work. So can I keep reading this book? Do you believe that he is making up whole cloth stories of this significance? Hmm. I don't know. Good story, though. But I don't know. Good story though. But I don't know. I'd like to think that most of it is truthful. That's it. You're the world's foremost expert on this book. Well,

not exactly. I haven't done any historical research to support it. Do you recommend I keep reading if I inform you that this book is all lies and hearsay. It's a fun read regardless, I think. It is a fun read. It's a great book. I'm enjoying it a lot. Two things that I learned not from this book, but that I have recently come across. One is that Willie Mays was known to his friends and associates as Buck.

Does it make you think any differently of Willie Mays to think of him as Buck Mays all the time? Like if he had gone by Buck Mays, would his career be looked at any differently, do you suppose? Buck Mays. No, I think he could have been a Buck. Buck Mays. Yeah, Buck Mays. If it had always been Buck Mays, then we would have said, sure, imagine if he had been named Willie. Okay.

I don't, I think that you might be right. I think you might be wrong. I think it might have been a hindrance. I think less of Buck Mays than I do of Willie Mays. It's a pretty baseball name. I mean, Buck, Buck Mays. It's very baseball. It is very baseball.

It's true. I feel like Willie Mays might have benefited from Willie McCovey, though. It's just the two Willies, you know? Didn't Mays predate McCovey? Sure. I don't mean like he got his start in baseball because of it, but I feel like having- In what way did he benefit? Well, the two greatest players in the history of the franchise, you know, basically were both named Willie. That seems like, I don't know, it just feels like a killer bees sort of situation. He's pretty good at baseball, though, also. Yeah. The other thing is that when he was old, when he got very old, he would not jog into the dugout during innings that he was not scheduled to bat. He would jog over to the bullpen and rest there because he was very

old. His legs were tired. And that was sort of an allowance that he gave himself. Do you believe that if a player did that today, it would be seen as Bush? Do you think a player would be criticized for that? I don't think Bush so much as just—I think definitely he'd be criticized for it just for being too big for the game or too big for the team or it's big league, right? It's more big league than Bush. You're in the big league.

So but still, that's kind of more what it is. I think maybe if you had a Willie Mays type player, like who could get away with that today? Is there someone who could get it? Like if Ichiro did that, could he get away with that today? Is there someone who could get it? Like if Ichiro did that, could he get away with that? Probably, right? I think Ichiro could. I think that the key is that he's old. Yeah, right. A great player who is old, he's earned certain perks. What about though Griffey taking naps? Yeah, well, that was just sad. That wasn't so much. I don't know if he was criticized. I guess he was criticized for it, but it was also just sort of depressing because he was not good and he was kind of out of shape relative to he was and how time ravages us all. And so I think that's so disconnected from the team. Being asleep during the game, that's saying I don't even care about the outcome of this game,

which I think is sending a slightly different message than I care so much about the outcome that I'm going to rest myself so that I can be better in the game. What about Clemens? Correct me if I get some of these details wrong, but didn't he negotiate or was trying to negotiate that he didn't have to travel with the team all the time? Yeah, he did. Yeah. I mean, when he was doing the half season deals where he'd just come back mid-year and he also had that, I didn't get the sense that it was a huge issue. He was on good teams doing that. Okay.

All right. One last thing I learned about old-timey, semi, not old-timey, mid-century baseball from yet a different source, the Hot Stove League. How old would you guess that term is? I mean, I've just given you the answer. But how old would you have guessed that term is? I would say first decade of the 20th century Oh wow

See now I wasn't aware of it until early first decade of this century And so I would have probably guessed it was a term that came from the 80s, the 1980s But in fact there was a book, The Hot Stove League in 1955 by Lee Allen And it meant something totally different. I mean, it still meant the off season, but it had nothing to do with rumors or transactions or winter meetings or anything of the sort. It was, here's a summary of the book on Amazon. Before the modern era, the closest fans could get to big league action during the long winters

was sitting around the hot stove in general stores and barber shops, exchanging bits of baseball history and anecdotes from the uplifting to the unseemly. These fascinating true stories are collected in the Hot Stove League, and they chronicle everything from the first electrically illuminated night game and Babe Ruth's legendary gluttony to such curiosities as why some of the most populous states produce the fewest major league players. So first of all, weird sounding book. Second, different meaning altogether. Same root, same root, basically, same root word, more or less, but same root idea, but totally different. Yeah, didn't know that. And are we going to talk about the Eaton trade?

If we are, then I will save the last thing. Sure. We could talk a little bit about the Eaton trade. All right. So we'll get into winter meeting stuff. Oh, by the way, AJ Ellis went to the Marlins. So I guess the mutual interest between Ellis and the Phillies was not all that strong. I never bought it. Just trying to sell you a line of AJ Ellis and the Phillies, but you were not buying it. All right.

So the winter meetings just happened and they really happened. Capital H. Lots of things happened and I'm very tired. I had to write about some of those things and all of my thoughts are scattered. And I've talked about some of these things on one podcast and written about some of those things and all of my thoughts are scattered and I've talked about some of these things on one podcast and written about some of them also. So I don't know if there's anything you want to focus on in particular, but maybe we can start with the Chapman signing just because maybe it's the most perplexing. Like all of the other things that happened were very

interesting, very juicy trades, great players changing teams, great prospects changing teams. It doesn't get juicier than Chris Sale being traded for the best prospect in baseball. That's about the best you can do with a blockbuster, I think. That never happens. The best prospect in baseball never gets traded, and it's very rare to have a player of sales caliber who is under team control for a while get traded. So obviously it happened because both of those things were happening.

One of those guys would not have been traded for really any other kind of player. So it had to match up like that. Anyway, really interesting. And it's got to be fun for White Sox fans to see their team actually rebuild and get an incredible head start on doing that after years of watching the Cubs do it flawlessly while the White Sox just sort of floundered around. All of a sudden, the White Sox have a really good farm system in like two moves. So pretty impressive. I thought they did a nice job. But those are just kind of moves that make sense. A team that needs to get better right now got a really good player who makes them a lot better, and a team that needs to rebuild

got players who helped them rebuild. So the Chapman signing is maybe the most perplexing major move that happened. I don't know whether you agree, but Yankees signeded a role as Chapman for Five years and 86 million dollars and that Includes an opt out after the first Three years and A no trade clause for the first Three years that then becomes a limited No trade clause after that

So this is a obviously A record breaking contract It's the most money ever given To a reliever Easily beating out Mark Melanson who Set the record a couple days ago Record-breaking contract It's the most money ever given to a Reliever, easily Beating out Mark Melanson who set The record a couple days ago And before that it was Papelbon and

We haven't seen a five-year deal For a free agent reliever since BJ Ryan, which didn't work out so well So I guess there's the Money, there's the Is Aroldis Chapman or any reliever Worth this much money? Does it make sense for the Yankees to be the team bidding on this guy? Do we think that he'll be used any

differently or is he going to be exactly the same? Lots of questions. Do you have any reactions to this signing? I haven't done the inflation math, but it feels to me that the cost of closers sort of stalled out for a while. And so really, if you were to, my guess is if you were to chart the trajectory of baseball salaries and closer salaries, that Chapman getting $86 million would not look out of place. Only looks out of place because over the last few years, all the extremely best closers have been pre-free agency under club control. And there hasn't really been, there hasn't really been, has there been? I can't think of the last time that like a top three or four closer was hit free agency. And so maybe you can think of one. hit free agency. And so maybe you can think of one.

Yeah. So the Papelbon deal was five years ago. That was the end of 2011. So that seems like a long time for a biggest contract to last. I mean, maybe it's not. Maybe like the A-Rod deal lasted a while, I guess. Right. So maybe it's not. But yeah, I'm trying to think of who were the big ones. I mean, obviously there haven't been any really huge ones or there probably would have been someone getting that much money. So. Well, yeah. And I mean, it's not that elite closers have been signing for less than Papelbon. It's that they haven't been free agents. Right. And so, so that doesn't seem odd to me. 86 million seems, well, it seems right about what I would have expected, I think. Well, definitely it's what people expected a month ago. It's, you know, MLB trade rumors

predicted that Chapman would go to the Yankees for five years and 90 million. So yeah, I mean, relative to where our expectations were heading into the off season, I five years and 90 million. So yeah, I mean, relative to where our expectations were heading into the off season, I think it's very predictable relative to a year ago, six months ago. I'm not sure about that. How much of that inflated expectation had to do with the postseason that we saw and Andrew Miller and relievers just dominating the whole narrative for that month. You know, it's funny because if you didn't look, we didn't need the postseason to this postseason to have an inflated sense of closers. I mean, just look at what Chapman was traded for a few months before the postseason. it was a huge multi-year sacrifice in order to get a guy,

primarily for the potential that one or two situations come up that nobody but him can handle. I mean, the Cubs were already going to walk to the postseason. They were already going to have home field the entire way. They went and got Chapman because they foresaw that there would be one or two games out of the 11 wins that they needed in which they, you know, that somebody like Chapman or Jansen or maybe one or two other guys could handle. And so they went and got him. That was already there. What's funny is that Chapman blew that moment. Like he totally coughed it up.

And it is a good reminder that it is psychologically, it feels like Aroldis Chapman is extremely different than Mark Melanson or than, you know, Pedro Stroop for that matter. But in one inning, there's not a huge difference between them. There's a very small difference between them. And that nothing is certain, nothing is guaranteed even with Chapman, which is not to say that you shouldn't spend a lot on Chapman, especially if you're a team that isn't going to necessarily walk to the playoffs and needs to save, you know, 48 games in a year. But it is to say that there's already an extremely romantic notion of what closers do that is not really necessarily all that logical.

Now, what Miller did was unusual. But, yeah, I mean, that's one team. Other than that, we saw, you know, a little bit of expansion of the closers' role into earlier moments in the game. But otherwise, basically, it was the same old stuff. We saw long outings. That's what I mean. We saw Jansen and we saw Chapman, who didn't do very well. Right, you saw them coming in a little bit earlier.

Instead of coming in in the eighth, there were, what, three outings, I think, where the closer came in in the seventh. So that is new. That is interesting. I still sort of feel like, though, that the moment that, well, I guess that the cause for this current moment that we're having with relievers has much less to do with the 2016 postseason or Andrew Miller and more to do with the Royals, more to do with the idea of having two or three of the six best relievers in baseball instead of having only one in your bullpen.

And so to me, it makes a lot of sense. I mean, the Yankees basically did exactly what they did last offseason, except I guess they don't have Andrew Miller anymore. But I mean, it made even, in a sense, it made even less sense last offseason, except that Chapman was a distressed asset and they could get him for cheap. But they've already shown that they like having two or more elite relievers to lengthen their bullpen, and it seems fairly natural to me. So if the Cubs had lost that game after the Davis-Homer off Chapman, do you think he gets the same contract?

Yeah, I do. I mean, I guess if I said no, then I'd be saying that the Yankees aren't smart. What does Ben Zobris double have to do with Aroldis Chapman's value? Yeah, no, nothing. Okay. So yeah, I think, well, so a couple things I think have happened. I think Sabre people used to reflexively dismiss how much teams paid for relievers and say it was a mistake. And if you look at the various wars, they will still say that teams are paying too much for wins from relievers. But now you don't really see anyone kind of clinging to that dogmatic line. You see people saying, well, yes, but if you look at this study and that study, it seems like maybe there is some extra impact of having a high leverage reliever and also wars not accounting for playoffs. more and more like they have the last couple years. This past season was the highest percentage of innings

pitched in the regular season by relievers, and then it jumped way up in the postseason, even relative to 2015's postseason. So starters were getting hooked earlier and earlier, and so there is a legitimate case to be made that if you are a team that is pretty confident that it's going to be going to the playoffs, that a reliever really is much more valuable than the regular season war, we'll say, because he has an outsized impact in games that really matter at the end of the year. So there is a justification that you can make now that is sort of saber friendly and every team is saber friendly. So I think that is part of it. It's, it's that these prices are coming up for relievers,

but it's a result of a few different trends that are making that seem more sensible. I just saw, I found a very sad table, Ben. It's 2007 relief pitcher salary rankings. And the highest salary listed is Matt Cain. Wow. It's very depressing. David Robertson, I guess, would have been the closest thing to an amen. And I guess you could make the case. What did he get?

I forget. Four and 48, four and 48 maybe. Maybe four and 52. Yeah, 48, 4 and 48 maybe? Mm-hmm. Maybe 4 and 52. Yeah, I think 4 and 48. Yeah, and he wasn't your classic flamethrower closer, and he still did well. He was coming off of, you know, his worst year. Yeah, right. All right, so that's Chapman,

and I don't know if there's any larger takeaway from the other moves. I mean, Dave Dombrowski continues to do the Dave Dombrowski thing. When he was young, he was good at building up farm systems. And now in this stage of his career, he's good at tearing them down for good reasons, hopefully, theoretically. And he left a lot of wins behind him with that tattered farm system in Detroit. And he is doing the same thing in Boston. He has traded half of the Red Sox top 10 prospects since he took over, which was not that long ago. It was August of last year. And I think half of the other guys on that list either took steps back or got hurt, And I think half of the other guys on that list either took steps back or got hurt, or maybe he would have traded them too. But I guess that's—the team is sort of Dombrowski-proof to a certain extent just because of Bogarts and Betts and Bradley. And those guys will be around regardless. I have detected mixed feelings from Red Sox fans about this just because he's kind of just trading away all of Charrington's prospects. And Theo and Charrington had that at least stated philosophy. They didn't always follow it perfectly, but of trying to build a winner that was also a player development machine and having a really good farm system and also having a really good big league team, which seems doable if you're a big market team, successful team.

So he is clearly going one way and not the other, and maybe Red Sox fans would have been more receptive to that before they won a few World Series when they would have done anything for one than they are now when making the playoffs is really the important thing. And adding Chris Sale helps you make the playoffs, but they probably would have made the playoffs anyway. And now he only makes them a little bit more likely to win the World Series once they're there.

Whereas if, say, Moncada had panned out for the Red Sox, then maybe he would have made them more likely to make the playoffs for years to come. I will, I mean, this is not an original idea or anything like that, but in defense of Dombrowski or the argument, not in defense, the argument in favor of this is that the point of prospects is not to develop prospects necessarily. It's to get major league wins. And however you do that can serve your final goal. I mean, there's not any rule that says that your prospects have to play for you

to be valuable to you. And a lot of teams have made a lot of profit trading prospects. I mean, I don't know. I'm somewhat, I'm not even necessarily saying that I take this position in this specific case, but I remember, you know, a very long time of Brian Sabian winning, building winning teams by trading prospects who went away and never turned in anything until the day that they did. And then things got sad. But, but I mean, I remember there was just this long list of prospects who were, you know, named prospects that had gone away and had major league careers that were not that interesting. had major league careers that were not that interesting. And so you use your currency however you need to. I wonder how, I feel like Chris Sale is somewhat divisive right now,

more than he certainly was a year ago. I think he's great. I think he's, I don't know, maybe the fourth or fifth best pitcher in baseball, maybe. And so I would be thrilled to trade for him. I also think that the pitching to contact narrative that he and the White Sox were pushing early in the year, I think it's just a lie. I think that he doesn't throw as hard anymore. And I don't think there was a, I think maybe there was a strategy

once he realized he wasn't throwing as hard to maybe adjust a little bit. But I don't think that he was intentionally not throwing as hard. And that can be something that derails careers and it can be something that doesn't derail careers. And Chris sale had a great year last year. So it's far too early to say that his has been derailed, but it is a,

you know, it is a thing about him right now. Yeah. I don't know the, the pitching to contact stories started in spring training, so it wasn't as if they just sort of retconned their way to that or used it after the fact. I don't know. Maybe he showed up at spring training not throwing as hard or something, but it started pretty early, and he did throw more in the strike zone, more often in the strike zone,

throw more in the strike zone more often in the strike zone and threw more fastballs and did things that you would do I guess if you were trying to pitch for pitch for contact and I don't know whether he would say that it worked if it was an intentional thing he did pitch more innings than he's ever pitched in a single season and he was obviously still really good. So I will be curious to see what he looks like early next year because if it was purely a conscious choice, then maybe it's something the Red Sox would want him to undo, not that he was in any way ineffective. So yeah, that'll be interesting. That does change your outlook for him pretty significantly.

So I don't know that I'm fully on board the conspiracy cover-up theory, but it's possible. Yeah, and I'm probably overstating the extent to which I disregard the narrative. I just don't really see it as, I guess, regardless of, maybe a better way of putting it is, regardless of whether the plan was the plan and whether it was intentional and so on. I don't believe that he was throwing less hard by design. I think he was throwing less hard by the result of physics. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely rare to see someone choose not to throw as hard as he can. So that should make you a little bit skeptical, but I don't know. It wasn't, I don't think it was like a gradual decline that had been

happening and it did start early in the year before the season started. So I don't know. There's probably more information out there, but yeah, I think you're right what you were saying about the trade. Everyone always writes that now, and I always feel like writing that, but I don't have a good source to cite. Do you have a good source about when you say, well, the team that gets the superstar usually ends up winning the trade? That's sort of like an accepted truth, but I don't know that I've seen the research. I wouldn't know where to link seen the research or I wouldn't know where to link to it other than just anecdotal evidence. So I don't know if someone knows of a good study on that, that I can link to in future articles, please send it to us.

Bill Vec specifically says the opposite. Oh, he does. Not exactly. He refers to trading a $200 dog for $200 cats as a push. Okay. All right. So since you can get your bit of Adam Eaton banter in, we can talk about Adam Eaton. And I like Adam Eaton a lot. Do you? Yeah. Like that much? Do you like him this much? I don't like him like Nori Aoki much but i i like him a lot i feel like i think it was because and maybe i've said this on the podcast before but in 2013 when we were putting out the bp prospect list he was not on it which seemed insane to me and like i didn't

do anything about it i didn't i didn't mean, I talked to, I don't know, whoever it was, Jason at the time about it, but I don't know, like BP editors don't generally meddle with the prospect staff's lists. And so I didn't either, but it seemed nuts to me, not like knowing anything really detailed about Adam Eden, other than the fact that he was already in the major leagues and playing really well which seems like maybe you're one of the best hundred people if you can do that so yeah that perplexed me and I guess that was just a symptom of him getting underrated for the reasons why guys like him get underrated. He's maybe not super toolsy and he's good at a bunch of things and not amazing at any one thing

and that kind of thing. And I like sticking up for that type of player. So maybe Nationals fans are disappointed that they didn't get Sale. Maybe they're disappointed that they didn't get McCutcheon because he is much more famous and a bigger name.

Although at this point, I think you'd probably rather get Eaton right if only if not purely on a performance basis certainly on a team control basis Eaton is signed for like five more years at really reasonable rates so and he can actually play good outfield defense although much better in a corner thus far than in center. Anyway, what was your Adam Eaton talking point? I wanted to know whether you had any speculation about Bryce Harper's tweet. Oh, his wow? Whether it was a good kind of wow or a bad kind of wow? Yeah.

Yeah, it's a good question. I feel like if you were celebrating, you would elaborate, right? Like if you were really pumped about this move, you would say, and he did follow up on it, right? Well, yeah. Said something about Eaton, but. It took him 14 minutes to follow up. And it was a, yeah, he wrote, welcome to DCAE. Let's get it done. Hashtag nationals, which you could very easily say that he just, he is not, he does not tweet the way that we tweet.

He tweeted for a minute and then he went away and then he thought I'll tweet again. And that was that. Or you could say, wow, in 14 minutes, somebody with the nationals was able to send him a text message saying, hey, that tweet is getting misread. You should clarify it or something. And Bryce Harper realized that he should clarify or maybe unclarify it, depending on what his intention was. So Harper is, I feel like, generally speaking, players like major leaguers and they don't like prospects. They think that the whole prospect game is a sham. Trading from your roster to get young players is almost always unpopular in a clubhouse. However, and so normally, I mean, it's a no-brainer that

if a team that sees itself as a competitor, or if it doesn't trades prospects for a good veteran, that is going to be a popular move. That is what players like. However, I wonder if Bryce Harper is the opposite because Bryce Harper is, he is the ultimate prospect and the ultimate prospect made good. And I wonder if all of his life experiences have taught him it's not so long ago that he could forget that easily right i was i was just wondering if is he actually is it conceivable i don't think it is because he was always playing with people who were five years older than him but is it conceivable that he even played in the same circuit with giolito like the same travel ball or showcase uh sort of circuit probably not because

harper was was so often playing his older kids and giolito's year too younger but they're both west coast they both would have been like you know at 14 13 14 15 it's conceivable that they would have known each other. So anyway, Harper's past complicates things a little bit. Yeah, I think if not for that, I would definitely, well, yeah, I mean, I think with the average major leaguer, I would think it was a good wow, probably. And Giolito was on the team, so he's not just like an abstract name on a prospect list. He was in the clubhouse for a lot of the year. He wasn't particularly good, but he was there. So he has some major league aura to him. I don't know. Adam Eaton doesn't strike me as the sort of player that you say wow about I mean I might say wow yeah but it doesn't right he's never he's never made an all-star team and you know all his stats

uh are acronyms so uh it does seem like you don't say wow he could you know it's also possible that it was less about giving up Giolito and so on if it was an unhappy wow it was less about giving up Giolito and so on. If it was an unhappy wow, it was less about giving up the prospects and more about, oh, well, we've just spent three days hearing McCutcheon and Chris Sale rumors, and now we get this 5'8 dude whose nickname is Scrappy or something like that.

Of course, his nickname is Spanky, right, I think. But of course, he wouldn't know his nickname because he's only Adam Eaton. He would only know that it was something embarrassing. And so it might be like, oh, wow, that's all we've got. Like he knows that they've got this package that they're shopping for superstars with. And it turns out to be Adam Eaton. And that's the wow. Like it's less about giving up the prospects and more about giving up McCutcheon. In fact, maybe that's the best way to think about it if it was a critical wow.

It's also very possible that it's not a critical wow. But I sort of feel critical wow. Yeah, I think I lean slightly in that direction too. But does Harper do that? Is there any recent history of that i feel like yes maybe i'm confusing it with the like stanton john carlos stanton that's that's what i was just thinking of yeah let's see i'm gonna google uh bryce harper criticizes management no no no i don't know i don't say we criticize nationals fans think. He criticized Nationals fans. Oh, right, yeah.

Which is, you know, maybe it's the same sort of thing. Oh, questioned his manager at one point, but that was a few years ago. So it's somewhat out of character. Maybe it's out of character, maybe it's not. This is all speculative. All right. Anyway, as to the trade itself, I wrote a piece about Andrew McCutcheon character maybe it maybe it's out of character maybe it's not this is all speculative all right anyway i uh as the trade itself i wrote a piece about andrew mccutcheon that came out yesterday

and as part of the research for this i looked at all the extensions that had been signed during the extension boom you know we used to talk a lot about extensions when they went from being a an occasional you know pre-arb extension specifically when they went from being a thing that the indians and the rays did sometimes to being a thing that every team did with every one of their stars and their young stars. And so I looked at five years of extensions for players who sign them for fewer years of service time, extensions four years or longer, including options and extensions that bought out at least one free agent year. including options and extensions that bought out at least one free agent year. So, which is basically a way of saying these are young players who signed long deals that would keep them with their team for longer than they otherwise would have been with their team.

And we're closing in on half of those players getting traded during the extension. And usually with many years, multiple years left in the extension. And it just struck me as very interesting to see how the extension is not actually about keeping your player longer. It is just about turning them into a more valuable asset that you can move. And this is not a, you know, this is not a bad guy thing or anything like that. But it was very interesting to me that this is what the extensions have turned into. Movable assets. The contracts, movable assets. The

contracts are movable assets, of course. And so with Sale and Eaton, Sale had three more years of club control. Eaton had five. And it does seem to me, maybe, I haven't gone this next step, but it does seem like maybe a real change now that a lot more teams just sort of look at it as, well, if we're not going to be good this year, then this player is worth more to somebody else than he is to us, even if we are going to be good the next year. So like Eaton, obviously the White Sox intend to be winners within five years, probably within two years, but they trade him anyway because, you know, why have a guy around when you're trying to suck? him anyway because, you know, why have a guy around when you're trying to suck? And it is odd to me. Not odd. It is a thing to observe and remark upon, I guess. Because the White Sox don't feel like they're that far off. They had a terrible farm system. They did for 20 years.

Of course, they also weren't always that good, but they had a, you know, they had a core of Abreu, Quintana, Sale, and Eaton, who are four, you know, extremely good players, all under club control for a very long time, and I haven't, you know, I have not totally gamed out the way that I would have handled that organization, and I can see the case for rebuilding, and they clearly weren't going to be good next year, I don't think, and clearly their efforts to jump a tier in the last two off seasons ago, mostly and a little bit last year, clearly those failed. But it seems like they failed without much long-term damage. It was mostly just money. They weren't seven-year deals or anything like that. It wasn't further gutting their farm system particularly. And it seemed like this was a team that had a pretty great core of four guys and might very

plausibly say, okay, well, if we take this year off, if we save up for 2018, 2018's a target. And yet just punting even one year necessitates trading two guys who had eight years of club control and were you know arguably your two best players interesting is all interesting yeah i mean they're probably not done right they're gonna do more and so they probably will be bad for for i don't know a couple years right unless they really get lucky and and hit on all of their prospects i think they put themselves in as good a position as one could doing what they're doing, but yeah.

All right. Anything else you are dying to talk about? Nope. Okay. Then you can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild five listeners who have done so already. Brian Kelly, Ethan Lutzky,

Michael Christopher Tortoro, Josh Ford, and Joseph Blumenthal. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild. And you can rate and review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. I have a new episode of the Ringer MLB show up. Michael Bauman and I also talked about some winter meetings moves. And we interviewed Eric Thames, new Brewers first baseman, who just got back from basically being Barry Bonds in Korea for a few years.

He has a really interesting story. You can contact me and Sam via email at podcast at baseballperspectives.com or by messaging us through Patreon. We will be back soon. I heard you wear makeup. I heard you wear makeup. I heard you make up all the stories you tell. Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh