Rates & Barrels - The Mark Eichhorn Gambit

Episode Date: April 9, 2020

Rundown3:02 Project GOAT, Round 1 Results!9:08 The Mark Eichhorn Gambit16:33 Appreciating Todd Helton's Peak22:38 Drafting Past Seasons for a Simulation?29:59 Nick Castellanos & Happiness40:05 Who Was Blocking Francisco Lindor in 2014?47:38 Can Players' Emotions Be Effectively Measured?Follow Eno on Twitter: @enosarrisFollow DVR on Twitter: @DerekVanRipere-mail: [e-mail] Get a free 90-day trial to The Athletic: athletic.com/free90days Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's episode of Rates and Barrels is brought to you by Remarkably Remote, a new daily microcast from the experts at GoToMeeting, all about making work from home work for you. With indispensable intel on how to stay sane, motivated, and productive at home, we're here to help you in this brave new remote working world. Find us on smart speakers or subscribe on your favorite podcasting app. You can also listen at gotomeeting.com slash tips. That's gotomeeting.com slash tips. That's gotomeeting.com slash tips. Welcome to Rates and Barrels, episode number 85. It is April 9th. Derek Van Ryper here with Eno Saris. Lots of good stuff on this episode. We're going to have finalized Project Goat standings, several mailbag questions, a wide range of topics. Some about a possible simulation season where you can draft players for multiple years.

But that was really interesting concept. Nick Castellanos is the subject of one of those questions and anything you could imagine is in the mailbag this week. So thank you for a lot of great questions. You know, how are you holding up after running the project goat standings into the wee hours of the night? I have to say, man,

I was pretty happy. There's a couple pieces like the support beer in this one. I've had to do some data entry, just kind of go through and do this and don't think. And it was pretty zen, man. It was kind of what I needed. I haven't been as productive as I'd like this week. And sort of emotionally been low.

Energy's been low. I'm coming into the fourth week of being in this house and dealing with this stress. And, you know, it's been getting to me. But just kind of zoning out and typing some numbers was just about all I could handle at times. And so this was a welcome respite from trying to dream up more content, which is, I have to tell you, not super easy right now. No, it's good to try and break up the periods of time in which you have to do that. I found the process of cleaning out the email inbox last night similarly cathartic. Seeing 238 emails in the inbox was taking the very particular parts of me and just challenging me for the last

week or so, and just to sit down and make sure that we accounted for the entries, that people got the sheet who didn't have it yet who want it for later. Something about that, as simple as it was, it felt like I checked a big thing off the to-do list. So that progress definitely felt good. But we have results, right? We have standings. We do. And we have multiple interesting strategies in the top 10. So there wasn't just one way to skin this cat. Why do people talk about skinning cats?

It's such a disgusting thing. Another terrible old-timey expression. Yeah. Why do I know these things, too? Anyway, Kyle Belback, come on down. His team name, COVID-19 Task Force, was the winner of the Goat Challenge. And he was a saves punter uh other notable things about his uh his group that uh i see just looking at standings is that he was really good at runs

and average uh those were his two best feet forward when it came to the hitting side. So he was in the top 20 in wins, in the top sort of 10% in strikeouts, managed to be top half in ERA and WIP, even though he punted saves, and had a team that was okay at home runs and RBI and really good at runs and average. So he is the winner with 1,479.5 points. That's a lot of points. Kyle sent an email with his submission, too, so I think it would be appropriate to read it since he won.

It reads as follows. Hi, Eno and DVR. I'm done. It's time to send this in. I can't look at it anymore. Created over 70 teams and easily spent 20-plus hours on this thing. There it is.

Godspeed to anyone who can beat this squad. Some notes. It absolutely killed me not to use 2007 A-Rod 20 plus hours on this thing there it is speed to anyone who can beat this squad uh some notes it absolutely killed me not to use 2007 a rod or 2007 hanley in some form or fashion i'm using a rods six best season which is agonizing couldn't give up 99 pudge though or the other 2000 seasons that i ended up using kills me not to use helton or bagwell but i need 97 walker and 19 verlander from the rockies and astros the 94 strike limited some potentially historic seasons for bagwell thomas griffey loft and bell gwynn maddox and others and realizing that i could use 83 reigns at second base was a major breakthrough that's that's the andy barron's trick that's the he used two andy barron's

tricks the uh punting saves and Tim Raines at second base. I made a sort of oblique reference to that when we were going into this. Yes, and he also wrote, It took me a while to realize that punting saves is the best way to maximize points, at least I think it is. And at least in this run, Kyle, it proved to be. Keep up the great work, guys. Definitely one of my favorite baseball pods to listen to.

So, yeah, congrats, Kyle. I mean, clearly put the time and work in. And I'm sure there were other people who put in almost that much time, maybe even more in some cases, and maybe they were within the top ten. Yeah, another interesting thing. another interesting thing I'm going to revert to first name, last initial

from here on out Ryan P with his team name Why Not was second place he was also a saves punter and also he didn't score better than Kyle in runs.

Uh, but he was in runs and RBI monster. Um, and that was his trick on the hitting side. He did not score quite as well, uh, as our winner when it came to wins, um, but did a little better with strikeouts. But his whip, while Kyle had 185 points for whip, Ryan had 134, which is what I would have kind of assumed if you had to use starting pitchers instead of relievers, that you would have an ERA and whip discrepancy. But I think what Kyle and Ryan figured out was that if you're using the best starting pitchers of all time, you can get seasons

that have numbers that look like, you know, the video game reliever numbers, you know, seasons like Pedro Martinez and, you know, Greg Maddox and the big unit put up some of those seasons. The ERA starts with a one. So, you know, if you use those right seasons, the penalty for using a starting pitcher is not that bad. What I see in number four and five is very interesting. Horacio G, with team to be named later, is third place. And what he did was he had one closer. And that got him really close.

He was within two points of second place. of second place. And one closer allowed him to, to get 30 points on top of the saves punters, because there were about 30, there were 34 teams that punted saves. That's about one sixth of the total number of entries. Yeah. So one sixth of you punted saves.

That meant that actually a fair amount of you were splitting the saves number. And that has some benefits and some drawbacks for all the save punters. At some point, it becomes useful to have a closer and i want to mention uh team 11 aaron l uh who did not name his team he had 10 saves and i believe that's the mark eichhorn gambit yes finkel is eichhorn um not the name of that team but probably the most popular pun based off of the the name uh he was the guy we kind of were hinting at on our episode on tuesday who had that really good season in 1986 so he pitched 157 innings struck out 166 batters, only walked 45, gave eight home runs, and finished with a 172 ERA and a.955 whip. But yeah, we're talking about a guy who had 14 wins and 10 saves,

and all of those appearances, all 69 of those appearances came out of the bullpen. Just a really bizarre year. I mentioned some acknowledgements as far as voting for awards he was third in rookie of the year balloting in the american league and sixth in the cy young voting that year and what he did for aaron's team that's really interesting is um since he gave him 10 saves he kept him out of the very bottom of the saves group. And that actually gave him, by just giving him 10 saves, even if you had one save, by getting out of that scrum of 34, splitting 17.5 points, what you do is you get a bunch more points. So Aaron got 39 points in saves just by having 10 saves. And he had, functionally, a punt saves team otherwise.

So he actually went toe-to-toe with second place in terms of he actually tied second place in wins and was competitive with them in Ks as well, although not quite as competitive as the top ones. The top two teams had around 180 to 200 points in strikeouts. And Aaron, with his I-Corn approach, had 148 points in strikeouts. So if you had given those extra 40 points, he would have been in the top three or four. given those extra 40 points, he would have been in the top three or four. However, he would have lost another 20 points in saves. So there are a few different ways to do this. I also want to mention numbers nine and 10. Gordon P, some guys remembered, and Jeff G, tug of my fingers, came in ninth and 10th, and they did something that I did not think would work at all.

They did all relievers. Yeah, that's definitely a way of shaking things up a lot. My theory on why you might consider something like that is you've written about this. We've talked about this a bit. You've written about this. We've talked about this a bit. Some of the really great starting pitcher seasons and hitter seasons overlap the same year. And maybe you can find years that you don't necessarily need for a hitter by using relievers. And that might open up a totally different pool of bats building that way, aside from the categorical implications of going all reliever let me actually look at jeff's uh you know his his submission here because

you know it's it is fun to kind of uh look at great reliever seasons they're often um you know overlooked tug mug McGraw. And that's a fun one too, because relievers used to throw more innings in the 80s. And the 80s, we talked about being very hard, being a tough decade to find value. So he had Tug McGraw and Raleigh Fingers, and those two guys combined had 170 innings with 11 wins. That's the other point that I was trying to make,

which was that your closers will get wins. Your starting pitchers will not get saves. So that's why while everyone was sharing the 34 points at the bottom, no, it's not 34 points, but sharing the 34 standings at the bottom. No, it's not 34 points, but sharing the 34 standings at the bottom of saves. These guys, even though they pretty much punted wins, got three and four points out of wins. So they also got one and three points out of Ks, but look how much they dominated. Whereas the punt saves guys, because there was 34 of them, they didn't quite get all of the points when it came to strikeouts and wins and stuff.

You know, the punt saves person that won had 196 points in wins. Because these punt winners, these punt starters, Jeff had 207 points in saves, 208 points in ERA, and 208 points in whip. Remember, 209 is the maximum. The winning categories in an overall sort of contest sense is huge. It's a lot of points. It completely flips the script. So it's really interesting. You said that was a 12th place entry?

Jeff is 10th and Gordon P is 9th. Okay, so two of the top 10 did that. Pretty much punted wins. I see, looking at Jeff's, that he actually had Greg Maddox in 1995. I suppose he wanted to try and get out of the bottom of wins. And Jeff did get four points

in wins compared to Gordon's three. But Gordon got 207 points in saves, whereas because Jeff didn't actually use that last reliever, he got 203 points. So it looks like we probably, we had fewer teams that turned in the all reliever strategy, but we still had about five or six. And the best two of those made the top. And again, we find that Gordon P, the best reliever strategy guy, had 203 points in runs.

Wow. And 194 in average. So it looks like focusing on runs and average was a strong way to go about this. Jeff also had 197 points in runs and 187 in RBI. So he really focused on runs and RBI. And I believe, I don't know if it was Jeff, somebody wrote that when they did Z scores to look at the best seasons, they saw that in runs and RBI, the separation, the standard deviation was highest.

the separation, the standard deviation was highest. So you could separate yourself from the pack more relatively compared to the other stats. And maybe that's because runs on RBI are the biggest numbers you put up in any counting stat. They just seem like at the extremes, the numbers can get very far away from what is normally a great season. Yeah, and I think that's what they were trying to say. It's like, you know, what's the Todd Helton year? I think it was 97. I'm going to pull up his page real quick. Not 97, too early for him.

2000, Todd Helton was the 147 RBIs and 138 run score in a year where he hit.372 with a.463 on base and a.698 slugging percentage. Jesus. What a year. He had 103 walks against 61 strikeouts that season. Oh, weird. In 697 plate appearances.

And he was only fifth in the NL MVP voting that year. He kind of had a short peak, huh? Yeah, yeah. That's fair. Bunch of injuries at the end, huh? If you look from 1998 to 2005... Oh, I want to do this on the game log dude i'm gonna go from the beginning of 1998 to the end of 2005 so how many years is that that would be three six eight years so eight year peak

i'm gonna i would go to this anyway uh 5 000 plate appearances with 14 percent walk rate 11.5 strikeout rate 338 average 435 obp 609 slugging 47% better than league average 265 homers, 908 runs, 901 RBI that's that's a really good stretch and then of course after that he hit like, just eyeballing it

280 with like 10 homers a year for the next seven years 10 12 yeah so that's that's a pretty pretty harsh fall off i think otherwise he would have been uh a hall of famer honestly like if you had more just a more graceful uh denouement as they say in French. Um, back to the goat challenge. Uh, one fun thing is, uh, Jeff's, uh, ERA and whip, uh, which were, uh, he got 209 points in both. So the winning ERA and whip, the very best ERA whip you can have by doing the all reliever strategy was a 1.21 ERA and a 0.81 whip. So, so ridiculous. Yeah, it's pretty, pretty nasty when you get to use the best seasons of all time. There's more in here. I'm going to try and write it all up for Friday to, I'll give you guys the full results, the Google Docs so you can see where you ended up. But 209 entries and the top 10 itself proves that there's not only one way to

win this thing. And the twist is to beat it again, to beat it once you know the targets and once you know the strategies. And the only question is how we do the collating and what sort of rules we put on it. Do you have to have had a bracket in before uh to join in on the twist um because it was this was a bear i have to be honest with you like all in all it was a bear uh just sort of hand collating copying pasting um it would took a lot of time but maybe maybe all we have is time and we just do this but that's the twist is now that you know that 34 teams punted saves um you know how do you beat first place do you punt saves along with them or do you try the icon strategy uh the one closer strategy so um it basically is what do you do once you know the targets once you know uh what do you do in year two of this challenge basically um but congratulations to kyle and ryan and harasio uh cory r 10 points for gryffindor

uh in fourth place uh luke j with dunster group in fifth place scott eggerston eggs and whoa bacon i like that name uh in sixth place ke And then Gordon P. and Jeff G. That's her top ten. And congrats to those guys. Top ten out of 209 is almost like a co-winner bracket. So really good job, guys. And I'm going to write this up for you guys and talk about which team. We didn't need the tiebreaker end, but just by gathering those,

we can tell you which teams were used the least. It might be a little bit harder to tell you which players were used the most, but I can tell you a little bit more about the strategies and maybe give you some hints for how to do the twist and maybe set up the rules for the twist. But one thing is you guys all have the brackets, and even now, now you're hearing this, and you know kind of what the twist is, you can go back to work. Yep, you can start working on the best possible lineup, knowing the most likely way to get there. And it kind of goes on forever, at least it goes on for a very long time.

If it's not actually forever, unless you could add new seasons as new seasons happen, then it would really go on forever. Yeah, change the rules. I know some people have done like a draft version of this, I feel like. Yeah, so we had a mailbag question that came in from Oren. And he writes, our league had an idea for how to replace the season a draft where you take one season of one hitter and one pitcher from every decade and then simulate so that's kind of a

similar concept but you could you could project goat it where you're just drafting and taking years away from the board and all that and play it out that way just tabulate it in spreadsheet but he was wondering if we know if there's a game whether it's Op or score sheet or something like that where you could actually do the draft and then simulate with combinations of old seasons i don't know of a platform that

runs that so i kind of wanted to bring it up on the pod in case anybody out there has played some variation of one of those games or something that we're not even discussing and that way they could write in let us know yeah actually you can do it here because i think a lot of people could enjoy something like that yeah for sure uh and i think it it doesn't you know it doesn't work on the scale that we were doing um but there is that fun aspect of drafting, which is anybody listening to this enjoys the draft. So, you know, I do, I, I, I don't know how to, I wouldn't know necessarily how to prepare for that draft. I saw an idea kind of mentioned in our

chat yesterday you were asking a question about something and it was suggested that we draft beers i thought oh what about a beer draft what about a 24 round you know a case beer draft i don't know what the rules would be like what what beers are in the pool and i don't know how you score a winner but i was just excited about the idea of drafting 24 beers, even though there might be no means to do any of those things that would ordinarily be associated with determining a winner and a loser. Yeah, I'm struggling with that myself. I'm trying to do a beer bracket.

And how do you determine winners, and how do you fill out the bracket? Normally, you fill out a bracket, and if reality goes the way you go, you win, that sort of deal. But my idea is to actually use the bracket as votes that determine the outcome of the bracket itself. So the bracket itself that people submit is the vote that determines how the bracket looks at the end. Does that make sense? So you would give everybody the initial matchups. Everybody would take them independently, fill them out to completion, and then you would take all the completed brackets and then aggregate them into the overall actual results? Yeah.

Because then you have a vote on every well you wouldn't have every vote though on every actual matchup i wouldn't have a lot of theoretical matchups i think the way that i would do it is basically if you crown uh a beer as the overall champion that's worth x amount of points right so i turn your bracket into points for every for every beer that you voted for. And then I can leave your bracket away and then it becomes less about the particulars of your bracket. But, you know, I've given each of the beers points based on your bracket. I go to the next one, give them points, aggregate all the points, and then the points determine a champion. And then I can sort of retroactively fill in the bracket by using point totals to kind of flow through.

You know what I mean? Yeah, so the benefit of considering doing it this way would be to shorten up the amount of time compared to running matchups in Twitter polls and having like what Baseball Pods is doing at Baseball Pods on Twitter is running the podcast bracket, which by the way, if you'd like to participate in that, you should at Baseball Pods. Chris is the guy's name who runs it. I think you and I, you know, this show Rates and Barrels has a big matchup coming up against the Sleeper and the Bust, you you know a show that you literally used to co-host and uh friends of our show no less yeah yeah and please i think we're into the next round um and it we're we're up against uh old friends of ours uh at the sleeper

in the bus so we're gonna we're gonna need your votes honestly it's gonna be a tough match up there a great podcast and great friends and so there's not going to be any mud slinging but uh i think the next round is i think we're into the sweet 16 or the elite eight and we're gonna be up. So, yeah, we could use our vote. Yeah, the thing that's so difficult about it is that the Twitter poll thing is cool, but there's like a lot of single polls, and then you're sort of aggregating all that, and it takes a long time. Maybe taking time is good. is good. The problem with mine is collecting the brackets in any sort of efficient manner. I don't like it wouldn't be great to kind of have to go and look through everybody's bracket and and then type in points, you know, for each beer and and, you know, do it that way,

sort of hand collate. There's not even a copy paste action I could do. So, um, somewhere in between the two, and I just think I might've had a revelation is that, um, in essence, I'm asking people, uh, to, to rank, however, and I could just say, just rank these beers. The problem is that, um, matchups based on how beers are alike. You know, so I have like, you know, this is this is a thing that has both, you know, like Sierra Nevada Pale Ale and Bud Light in it. But Bud Light is in the lager bracket and goes up against, you know against Coors Light and those, whereas Sierra's in the IPA bracket. So I do kind of want to retain the bracket thing and not just have people rank beers. So I was struggling with how to do this.

And if anybody listening is like a whiz with Google Forms or collecting this kind of data, I could use a little help. I could definitely use a little help. Um, I could definitely use a little help. And if your recommendation is just to do the, uh, the Twitter thing, uh, the Twitter poll thing, then, then just tell me that because I, uh, I'm trying to figure this out and trying to make it fun for everybody. Um, and, uh, I've never actually seen anyone try to put Coors Light in the same bracket as Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. So I think it would be worthwhile.

Maybe bring together people that like craft beer and people that don't care about craft beer and see what happens. He's a madman. He's a madman. He's a madman. Some other interesting questions that came in in the last, I don't know, fortnight or so, to be completely honest. I was finding mailbag questions at every corner of my email box. So I sincerely apologize for the lengthy delays in getting back to people. So we have one here.

It's about Nick Castellanos. And it reads, we have all this data, but we have nothing to measure attitude. I listened to a discussion about Nick Castellanos, whether his Cubs experience could be maintained in Cincinnati. I'm a Michigan resident and a Tigers fan. It was obvious Castellanos was unhappy, very unhappy in Detroit. He burned out on the losing and felt defeated by a ballpark where home runs become doubles. He goes to Chicago.

Those issues vanish, and look what happened. Cincinnati's a great home ballpark for him. The team's competitive. A huge year for Nick Castellanos would not surprise me one bit. You know, I think one of the things that launched this question into the email box was a profile that Al Melchior and I did on Castellanos on Fantasy Baseball in 15. And the main thing for me with Castellanos is that this is the best home ballpark he's ever played in by far. I mean, Comerica, even Wrigley, where he went crazy in the second half last season, those are pitcher-friendly environments. And to give him a full season or, well, maybe it

doesn't come in 2020, depending on the Arizona plan and everything else, but eventually playing him in Cincinnati for 81 games should give him a path to be maybe a 35 home run guy for at least the early part of that contract. Yeah, I think this is a fascinating question. And years ago, I would have laughed at it and said, you know, this is something I don't care about. I care about numbers. I care about ability. Everyone's going to figure out their right approach that works for them mentally. But now when I listen to someone like Ian Kahn talk about the way that he looks at players and the kind of psychological considerations

that he makes when he's looking at a prospect, I don't think they're as crazy. I've talked a little bit about how one of my kids has a high motor and the other one doesn't. And that high motor must be related to energy and just sort of what's going on in his body. But it also is a little bit about being the second kid and having to fight for everything and having just sort of a fighter's mentality. And, you know, that's a sort of a mental thing. And the way it plays out is that he's fairly dominant for a five-year-old when it comes to physical things. He's very physical and very physically active

and physically successful. I think that these things matter. I also think of Francisco Lindor. When Francisco Lindor came up, he hadn't necessarily had the best minor league season the year before. Let me pull this up so I'm not talking out of my butt. I remember this pretty well because somebody said,

why are you doing so much better in the major leagues? Let's see here. Let's put the minor leagues in there. The year before he came up, 2015, what he'd been doing in AAA, 284, 350, 402. So he had a 402 slugging in AAA for the Indians. He'd hit two homers and 262 plate appearances. Like, it's not that good, you know? But it was his second try at AAA.

And even the year before at AAA, he hit 273, 307, 388. So to some, there was a chance that Francisco Lindor wasn't that good. You know? Like, look what he did when he got to the Major League. But look what he did when he got to AAA. Like, he's not that good. But when he got to the Major Leagues, the lowest he's slugged since is 435. And, you know, he's pretty much just lit the world on fire.

And somebody asked him at some point, you weren't doing that great in the minor leagues. And he goes, I was bored. There's definitely something to this because Francisco Lindor is one of the best players in baseball. And he spent five years almost in the minor leagues, kind of brought along level to level. Didn't get skipped over any levels along the way, right?

I mean, 122 low A games, 83 at high A, 109 at double A, and 97 at triple A before he got to debut. So not full seasons, but just about full seasons. Everywhere he played. And he probably knew. He he said you know what i'm better than everybody on this field like what what motivates you when you're the best player on the field and you get to a point where you feel like no matter how good you are you're not moving up any faster the team has decided you're waiting this long to come up because we want you to come up at this time and want to keep you for this long that could have easily been

part of what was going through his mind it could be easily going through the minds of a lot of players who are in a similar situation yeah and he was i mean he was like 18 and 19 years old in a ball and they made him do every single a version of a ball um and in 2012 how old is he he's 19 years old in 2012 and a true 19 doesn't turn uh wait is he 18 then 2012 he would have been 18 because he turned 19 in november november so as an 18 year old uh in a ball he yeah he had a 102 wrc plus but he's 18 years old and then when he turns 19 in A ball and in AA combined he's about 25% better than league average

around then he probably thought yo I'm a big leaguer and that was 2013 and they made him do 2014 again in AA, 2014 AAA, 2015 start in AAA, and I'm somewhere in 2014, 2015, and he's like, yo, come on. And you can actually see it.

He does AA again in 2014, and he's 10% better than the league average. He's doing well. And then instead of bringing him to the big leagues in 2014, they sent him to AAA for another 38 games, and he's actually 88 WRC+. That's where he was probably pretty disappointed, where he's like, come on. Like, AAA, really? And when he went back to it, he did better,

but then he lights the world on fire and doesn't look back. Worst he's been in the major leagues is 9% better than the league average. So, you know, boredom. and doesn't look back. Worst he's been in the major leagues is 9% better than the league average. Boredom. I think that for Nick Castellanos in Detroit, the team is terrible. The team is asking him to move to first base, which negatively affects his future earnings capacity. And then he says, I don't want to do that because this team is not winning anyway.

And if I play first base, that affects me poorly. And then that got out, like maybe somebody leaked it or something. And then all the Detroit fans are against him and saying he quit on the team. And, you know, from their perspective, I can understand it. But from the player's perspective, now the fans hate him. He knows the front office is not in love with him. They can't trade him away for what they want. And so he's just really stuck. And he feels like he just needs to play out the string. And I think that anybody who's thinking about their work habits right now in the middle of this crisis knows what it's like to feel like, I'm just going to play out the string. Because this stuff is hard.

Yeah. This is not fun. I feel like the world hates me and I just need to get through this, especially people with young kids at home right now. They're just trying to subsist, man. And so, you know, I would say, yeah, I, maybe I'll admit it. My work is not the A plus plus that I'd like it to be. And it's because of all this stuff weighing on me. So anybody who's going through this crisis right now, I think can understand how your work productivity is related to how good you feel. And I think that, you know, you know, not to blow smoke on my own ass or

anything, but I think that my work with the athletic before this was some of my best that I've ever done. And I think that's partially because I think the athletic is one of the best places I've ever worked. And in terms of treating their employees right, in terms of, you know, just thinking about the employees from top to bottom, I think this is definitely, I would say it's the best place I've worked. So, you know, these things are all related. And that's why, you know, the Seattle Mariners, I really, one of the things I really like about what they're doing is they think about the soft science. And one of the things they'll tell you about what they want to do with their prospects is, and some people will roll their eyes at my wording, but basically give them a safe space. And I know that that is a political

word, but what I mean from that is like, make them feel when they're talking to their coaches and when they're working, everybody is, is, is rooting for them. Everybody's trying to have them succeed. The, the whole idea of like being traded and being evaluated, that's like something that's done somewhere else in a, in another room away from the place that they show up to work every day. The way place they show up to work every day. The place they show up to work every day is a place where they should feel safe and valued and that everybody is rooting for them and working to get the most and to have them be the best they can be. So that sort of philosophy changes certain aspects of the coach-player interaction. It makes players feel like these people care about me, you know, and these people

care about me and they want the best out of me. I like this place. I want to do the best that I can, as opposed to maybe what Lindor was feeling in 2014, which is, man, they're just trying to suppress my salary. They don't want me to get make as much money as I can. They don't feel like they're in the right part of their wind cycle or whatever it is. They don't want me to make as much money as I can. They don't feel like they're in the right part of their win cycle or whatever it is. They don't want the best for me. If they wanted the best for me, I'd be in the show right now. Yeah, and if you look back, off the top of your head, do you remember who played shortstop for the 2014 Indians?

I have the answer, so if you don't have a quick answer, I can tell you who it is. Oh. Who was blocking him? Who was playing shortstop in Cleveland in 2014? Oh, I think it was a guy they traded for, like a Pirates guy or something. So it was Esdrubal Cabrera. Oh, it was the end of Esdrubal Cabrera,

who should not have been playing it short anyway. Right, yeah, right. Everything Francisco Lindor is supposed to be is a premium defender first, and maybe he'll be a good hitter. That was kind of the scouting report on him. No doubts about the glove. Probably going to be a good hit tool guy. No one expect him to have power like he does.

That's just an awesome development story that I think merits its own conversation. but for two years they had as drubal cabrera in 2013 to 2014 not really performing as a hitter and being a extremely limited defensive shortstop while lani chisenhall was playing third base it's like the left side of their infield was not good and he was a guy who would have been an immediate defensive upgrade they could have played cabrera at third they could have moved cabrera around whatever they had ways to make that work, and they didn't do it. And I don't want to – I'm not trying to hate on the Indians. I understand the Indians' feeling about the amount of money they can spend and how they need to work and how they need to get the most out of their players peak windows how they need to

uh maybe you can say cynically suppress salaries but they need to like move players in and out at the right moments salary wise you know they still had a struble cabrera and they had lonnie chisholm cheap right so they felt like this is uh this is gonna work and then we're gonna let as drew cabrera go and we're gonna plug in lindor after that's basically what happened all right in 2013 though just going back i think about where they were in their their progress towards the team they are right now they won 92 games in 2013 so they were a good team where that extra nudge even defensively could have been a difference and in 2014 they only won 85 games. So if you go

to spring training, if you're Lindor and you go to spring training, and you're clearly the best defensive shortstop around. There's no one touching your ability defensively. And you watch Azdrubal Cabrera go out there and do his thing. And I'm not trying to pick on Azdrubal Cabrera either. I'm just highlighting the fact that

he was the Johnny Peralta of his time. Yeah, he was. An Indian. And that's, again, in the framework of even as that, Ezra Cabrera would look amazing playing in our softball league or something defensively. He'd get to balls

that no one could get to. It's amazing. Again, this is not about Cabrera, but I think mentally what that does, when you see someone and you are clearly better than them at the job and you don't get the job, that will bring you down. It doesn't matter if you're a baseball player.

It doesn't matter if you sell insurance or you build things. It doesn't matter. If someone better than you continually gets something better than you, you're just going to be frustrated by that, and it's media to advance narratives. It usually happens on the way out. After they trade a guy, you start hearing, oh, well, he was this and he was this.

And it's kind of trying to explain the move or whatever. So it's not usually while a player's there. But if you have that feeling, if you have that feeling from your front office that they don't care about you, they just see you as a piece in the machine and you're going to be, oh, here, Oakland Athletics. You know, love the organization for a lot of things they do. They're really good at a kind of arbitrage and fading prospects for the most part and trading for established major leaguers that are undervalued. They might be elite at that. But in terms of player development, we've talked about some of their shortcomings. And in terms of creating an environment in the clubhouse, Bob Melvin is pretty good at it. But the organization creates this idea of, oh, yo, I'm here while I'm here, and then I'm going to be gone. You know?

No one sticks around. And so, you know, that feeling, it's not impossible that that feeling has contributed to late year slides and inability to win the playoffs. It's not impossible. There have been worse teams than the athletics teams that have won at all. Yeah, the Royals four years ago

or five years ago. And what did the Royals do? They came up together. They won all the way through the minor leagues and their organization promoted them every time they were good and promoted them all the way into major league jobs. And they were best of buds. You know, they really liked each other. And they really knew each other all the way up.

And, you know, that sort of camaraderie led to a really high peak without maybe some of the brilliance that the A's have. You know, I don't, I wouldn't say that the Royals, we had a little discussion about online about the Royals. Did they do the super bullpen? But when I broke down what the Yankees did with Cashman, the Yankees have maybe like three times the bullpen war of the royals since uh 2000 began and they had super bullpens starting in 2000 um whereas the royals kind of uh did that for a little bit so i would say that that was actually a yankees innovation the super bullpen um and uh especially the modern version of the super bullpen and uh the royals, you know, did some things right.

I'm not trying to denigrate them, but I'm just saying that, like, and especially in this way, I'm celebrating them. They did the right thing with their prospects, right? They brought them all up. As soon as they deserved it, they kind of brought them all up, and they were like, here, this is our core. They've been winning everywhere. We're ready to go.

Even with Alex Gordon, they might have done the right thing. They brought him up. It didn't work out. They sent him back down. They brought him back up again, and he was an important part of their long-term winning strategy. So, you know, there's something to the psychological aspect. Look at Sonny Gray. You know, there were some changes he made mechanically and some changes he made in pitch mix and especially in pitch strategy pitch location strategy from coming from the Yankees but a big part

of why he succeeded was they put him together with his old college coach they had him go to Vanderbilt and throw and they basically gave him an extension and said we value you we think that you're good and we're going to make you comfortable. Um, so I don't know that I can, you know,

maybe the followup question will be, you know, what teams are good at this and what teams are bad. And this might be the hardest thing to figure out. Um, because you don't know how the coaches are interacting with the players on a daily basis. You don't know how the coaches are interacting with the players on a daily basis. You don't know how every player feels. And that's why I've actually stayed away from this kind of analysis is because it's really hard to know how someone feels. Unless they're very open about it, yeah. Unless you're going to give someone a profile of mood states frequently and measure it. Right, so that's the original question is how could you measure it, right?

Yeah. You could. It would be very scientific, very detailed, like daily check-ins. The buy-in that would take from an organization is something that I don't think we're even close to yet. That's like one more level. Take the most progressive organizations that handle people really well. Treating people well in any facet of life is very important.

It's a fundamental just right thing to do. I don't think there's an argument against that. And yet in business, somehow, that gets lost. But it's actually smart business. I think even if you didn't care about people, treating them the right way is good for your bottom line. And I think somehow that gets lost. It's so apparent in the way minor leaguers are treated in particular.

That to me is the biggest proof of ownership not getting it, not realizing that if they treated these people well, they would be much better off. Even though it looks like it would hurt the bottom line, it would actually probably help the bottom line in the long run. Yeah. That's something that comes up with the minor league stuff. The one thing that occurs to me is I did work on a psychology project called the Happiness Project at Stanford. And one thing we did was we gave people beepers. Actually, that was the beeper study. The beeper study was we gave people beepers. It was called actually there was a beeper study, the beeper study. We gave people beepers and we asked them to record their current state of mind on a one to five sliding scale for like, you know, six or seven different emotions. Happy, angry, sad, whatever, you know. And then at the very end, just write a couple sentences about what's happening right now, what you're doing right now, how you feel and what you're planning on doing. So it is possible. We learned a lot from that.

We learned a lot about coping mechanisms. We learned that people were generally got happier as they got older because they had these coping mechanisms. I've talked about this study before. It actually, it's possible. And I just don't know how long you, what the scope of the project is. It might be possible in spring training. You've got everybody in the organization there and you've got them there for a month or whatever. And maybe you could create an app, right? And the app pings them and they just have to go on the app, slide one thing, one to five, one thing, one to five, right? And at the very end type in, you know i'm taking a shower and uh afterwards i'm gonna go get drinks you'd have to you have to convince them that they have to be

honest in this and that it won't be used to evaluate them right um and to say oh this guy goes out too late at night and so that that's maybe where the buy-in comes in but in terms of a project that's doable for a major league organization that's maybe where the buy-in comes in. But in terms of a project that's doable for a major league organization, that's definitely doable. They absolutely have the resources to do it. And you would learn a lot. You would learn a lot about players that aren't necessarily good at opening up about their feelings. And it might actually be very helpful for them. You would learn a lot about how to run an organization that values their players.

How to run an organization that makes them feel valued, how to run an organization that gives them coping strategies. Absolutely. I think that would be a really successful thing. I think it might actually go a long way for injuries, too. I think you are absolutely right about that. We do have to wrap up this episode. I am sharing my recording space with my lovely wife it's all good if you're enjoying the show on a platform that allows you to rate and review it

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about it again in the weeks ahead that is going to wrap things up for this episode of rates and barrels we are back with you on tuesday thanks for listening Thank you.