Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1179: The Nate Colbert Report

Episode Date: February 22, 2018

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the Rays’ Carlos Gomez signing, the Padres’ improbable all-time home run leader, and the players’ portion of MLB revenue, then answer listener emails about running a team with the eye test or with stats, the effects of breaking the batting order, a serial rebuilding team, a pitcher fatigue […]

In this otherworldly land of ours, I've walked by the buildings, I've walked by them all. I've walked by the skyscrapers, lonely and dark, in the lonely financial zone. By the sea, I have walked under moon and stars the ringer joined by jeff sullivan of fan graphs who has been writing about the race pretty much constantly since we stopped recording yesterday they're interesting yeah i mean i i know this is like a a particular off season where i think a lot of internet people have been conditioned to now kind of hate the rays and i can't really speak to that but they're they're interesting it's fun to have the off season going and it's fun to try to figure out exactly what the Rays are doing. And it turns out there's really nothing more nefarious to it. They're just being extremely Rays.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, you wrote or tweeted or both yesterday that you thought they might start adding now after they've made a bunch of trades, and they did. They signed Carlos Gomez, who surprisingly probably signed for one year and $4 million. That doesn't seem like a lot of money. No, it sure doesn't, especially not for a Scott Boris client. I don't know. I had a one-time chat today on Wednesday. I switched places with Kyle McDaniel. This doesn't matter.

But I had a chat on Wednesday, and somebody asked early in the chat, like, hey, now that the Rays have an opening, does it make sense to maybe sign like carlos gomez or jose batista and i looked at it and thought yep it uh it sure does and because carlos gomez kind of struck me as like an older version of steven suza's skill set well then later in the chat news came out that the rays signed carlos gomez for a very cheap contract one year and four million and uh yeah when you when you dig in carlos gomez does everything kind of like steven souza does he's just older and a little more fragile but souza is only a year removed from major hip surgery so it's not like he's a pinnacle of durability and the rays got a slightly worse player and an older player but they also get four prospects for it so extremely rays move as they intend to be like a half decent team there I think that they're better than the Orioles they're probably around the Blue Jays level depending on how high you are in the

pitching nowhere close to the Yankees or Red Sox but I don't this is this is not a tank I know people are losing their minds over what the Rays are doing because there's a lot of familiar faces going away but a lot of familiar faces always go away with the Rays. I know it's just been compressed lately, but they're not tanking. Or if they are tanking, they're kind of doing a funny way of keeping Chris Archer. Yeah, and Kevin Kiermaier and others. Yeah. The Rays front office reads fan graphs. The odds are decent that someone with the Rays was reading or has read your chat. I wonder whether a chat or an article has ever inspired a trade very quickly or someone just reads a suggestion from a Fangraphs chatter. Carlos Gomez, yeah, why not?

Sure, I'll give him a call. Then you work out a contract. I mean, it has to have happened at some point, right? Wasn't there an earlier instance this offseason where a chatter of yours essentially proposed the giant matt kemp trade or something that happened yes but then on the other hand you remember like what the orioles just signed andrew cashner and then word was they'd been working on that since november yeah i don't know how long it takes to convince yourselves like yeah we're just gonna settle for one another here because we can't do

better yeah i don't i don't know like i would love to know what's the fastest a free agent has ever gone from no contact to signing with the team i would love to know yeah i'd like to know that too there's a lot of like questions about the mechanics of making transactions that i'd be interested in talking to a front office person about i once had justin hollander on the ringer show and he was pretty good about giving details on that sort of thing. I think we will answer a question potentially about that topic later in the episode. Speaking of which, this is an email show. We'll get to emails very shortly. A couple of quick banter things. I don't know if this is a well-known fun fact or not,

but I think it was new to me. I came across it maybe in the Facebook group in the wake of the Padres-Hosmer signing. Do you know who the all-time franchise leader for Padres home runs is? I used to, and it's a player who I think was good, but I forgot about all the time. So please do remind me. Well, it's not anyone obvious. So if you do know it, it's probably something you heard from someone pointing it out to Marvel at it, basically. Yes. The all-time Padres home run leader is Nate Colbert. Yes, that's the one.

That's the name that I get reminded of like every three years. It means nothing to me. Right. I'm sure this is well known to Padres fans and many other trivia fans, but somehow I think this had escaped my notice. So Nate Colbert has 163 career home runs, and that is not a lot of career home runs. Actually, he has 173, but he had 163 as a Padre. Padre, and that is improbable, obviously, that a franchise that would be entering its 50th season now has never had someone hit more than 163 home runs. It's a very Padres fun fact. That's like the most Padres fun fact you could probably come up with. I think just looking at the list of other

franchise home run leaders, there's no one within 60 60 the closest guy is Luis Gonzalez on the diamond backs who of course have only been around since 98 he has 224 and then there are only two other teams within 100 homers of Nate Colbert I think the Rays who just traded Evan Longoria, who was about to pass that. Longoria has, what does he have, 261 home runs. And then maybe somewhat more surprisingly, there are the Mets, who have not really had a storied history for position players. Daryl Strawberry is their all-time leader at 252. David Wright is 10 behind him, and the odds seem to be against him passing him. But really to have played 49 seasons and never have someone hit more than 163 home runs. Obviously they've had some pitchers parks. They've had the Marine layer. It's not a particularly home run friendly

environment, but still Nate Colbert. I'm looking at the Padres list right now. Can you name the rest of the Padres top five? Because I think it's much easier. It is, yeah. So Colbert obviously first. I have it in front of me, actually, so this will not be fun. Well, never mind. The rest of the top five, right, it's the people you would probably guess before you arrived at the actual answers. Just Adrian Gonzalez, who is two behind Colbert, Phil Nevin, Dave Winfield, Tony Gwynn, and then Ryan Klesko,lesko ken caminiti chase headley who has 87 and now has a chance to add to his total so it's funny because you look at this seven players in padres history

have hit at least 100 home runs uh for the padres but like i think the yankees are going to have seven players hit 100 home runs this season so records are being shattered by the day, just not in San Diego. Yeah. I found a fun Sporkle quiz about this, which appears to be updated and has the top 10 for every franchise. So I'll link to it if people want to test themselves. So I guess we can talk briefly about my article today, which has been something we've been sort of dancing around on previous podcasts. But a couple of episodes ago, I mentioned that I have no training as an economist and feel somewhat out of my depth when we discuss baseball economics and that baseball economics are not really the reason I got into writing about baseball.

And so I've sort of been hopeful that it's not something that we'll have to cover on a daily or podcast-ly basis for the next three years. But after having said all that, I then immediately wrote an article about baseball economics. And I've been curious because there's been a lot of conflicting information out there about just what the state of the market is. it is and it's really hard to say what should be done or what the problem is exactly if you can't discuss something as fundamental as well what percentage of revenue are the players making now and what did they used to make and what should they make and what will they make and so i tried to wrestle with that question in this article and it's pretty complicated okay so yeah this is good so i'll interrupt or at least take advantage of this break because maybe this flows better if i

ask you questions about what you did so ben what did you uh what did you do how did you dig into not only i guess league revenues but also identifying what they count as league revenue to which players are partially entitled well i, I sent a lot of emails. So I emailed MLB, I emailed the MLB Players Association, and then I emailed several economists because, again, I know nothing. So I think what has been reported recently and also not so recently at Fangraphs, at Deadspin, at other places, is that the players' share of revenue has fallen, and some research has put the figure at 40% that players are accru week said that it is 50-50 or approximately 50-50 and that it has been roughly in that range for at least the last six or seven years. And so there was a wave of responses to his quote about that, blog posts, tweets, et cetera, citing the 40% figures and saying essentially that Manfred was lying or distorting the truth in some way. And it's really hard to determine that just based on public figures. And I think the reason why a lot of people have been bandying about the 40% figure is that that is what you get if you just divide player payrolls like at COTS Contracts or USA Today or some other public source by the estimates of MLB revenue at Forbes, for example.

And none of those is really official. official and it turns out none of them is totally comprehensive how you define revenue and how you define the player's portion of that revenue is pretty complicated and there are a lot of decisions that you can make or not make there but the way that mlb defines it and according to the players association spokesman that i emailed with how they define it too. Basically, I asked MLB, give me some stats to support what Manfred said. They sent me some stats going back to 2010 that gave me the revenues for each year, the players portion of the revenues for each year, and they broke it down a little bit into the components of those earnings. So like what major leaguers are making, what major leaguers combined with minor leaguers are making. Spoiler, that number isn't all that

much higher because minor leaguers don't make much money, unfortunately. But they were putting the percentages at 50-50 and closer to like 56 or 57 when you add in minor leaguers. And that includes the players' benefits plans, for instance, which you won't find on COTS contracts but is a significant amount of money. It's like $14.4 million, I think, per team, which is more than $400 million, is going to player benefits to the union. is going to player benefits to the union. And then there are the postseason shares, which accounted for about $84, $85 million last year, so significant dollar amounts. And so if you add those in, then suddenly the number rises from 40 to 50, not counting minor leaguers, and that's

much more palatable or sounds more equitable. And so I got those numbers from MLB, sent them to the MLB Players Association. They had their economists look at them, and they have access to more complete financial data that we don't. And they confirmed that the numbers were basically accurate. So basically, both sides agree that the current state of things is roughly 50-50 and that that hasn't changed for quite some time like if you look back at the data they sent me which went back to 2010 or the AP report from a few years ago that went back to 2006 essentially for at least 12 years or so the percentage as MLB and the players association define it has been between like 48

and a half and 51 and a half or so it just hasn't fluctuated that much so it seems highly significant that it's not like you're just getting league approval for your numbers because of course then you think well then they're pushing some sort of agenda when you get the players union agreeing i mean that i don't want to make too much of what's been out there. I know that at Fangraphs, Nathaniel Groh posted a plot of player money as a percentage of league revenues in like 2015. And I think that kind of started the conversation. And that plot showed that the player share had dropped rather precipitously. And of course, Emma Bachelieri recently wrote a deadspin about this.

You already mentioned all this. and of course emma bechlieri recently wrote a dead spin about this you already mentioned all this but it it's to have the player side agreeing with the league on this it removes what has been like the foremost talking point and so while it doesn't mean that the player's share won't be diminished moving forward because now teams are getting closer to the competitive balance stacks it does say a lot about where the two sides are and i'm'm not going to say that it takes a weapon away from the player side because the player side has agreed with these numbers all along. It's just that from our perception of the player side, there is less of a long-term trend here for them to be concerned about.

They can be concerned about the pace of this offseason if they want, because that could be indicative of how things happen going down the road. But it seems highly significant that things have not changed for more than a decade since the luxury tax was folded in. Yeah. And it seemed like speaking sort of off the record to people on both sides, it seemed like they were kind of both relieved that I was asking about this because I guess they have both been frustrated for different reasons by the different numbers that have been out there because obviously it makes MLB look like liars if people are citing different numbers and then it makes the Players Association look kind of incompetent. I guess you could say it also improves their bargaining position or makes it more sympathy inducing if you think that their percentage of revenue is lower, but it also looks like they've been really bad at their jobs. And I guess if you're super cynical, you could say that maybe the Players Association leadership has some incentive to make it look like they're doing

better than they are just so that the players don't completely lose confidence in them. But I would hope that they would have more loyalty kind of to their bargaining position and that if MLB were really seriously distorting things, they would speak up and object to it. higher going back like 15, 20 years. It used to be closer to the 60 range, maybe even peaked slightly above that. I think in 2003 was the peak. And so it has fallen over a longer term, probably just because of revenue sharing and the luxury tax and things that earlier CBAs did institute. So you could say 50-50 is a problem. I mean, I think it's roughly in line with the other sports that are salary capped, and maybe it just sounds sort of fair 50-50. I don't know if there's really an objective way to determine what the player's share should be. So if you want to say that it has been higher in the past, it should be higher in the future,

the trends are somewhat worrisome. I wouldn't disagree with that. I think certainly it makes sense to be vigilant. But you also don't want to extrapolate from one weird offseason that when the dust settles might look a little less weird than it did in the moment once these guys really are signing. And suddenly we've seen three nine-figure contracts this month that were roughly in line with expectations. And so I think maybe the collusion talk has died down a bit because of that. But they should definitely be looking at a lot of the long-term trends that we're talking about and wondering whether they need to do something in the next round of bargaining. But it does make me think we're not quite as close to the brink as you might think just from reading some of the reports from this winter. So you mentioned that this seemed to, I don't know how much you investigated the other leagues, but it was at least vaguely comparable?

Yeah, I think all of them are roughly in that 50% range, which I don't know how they all kind of arrived at that. Maybe it's just the simplest, most obvious solution. And like, there are all sorts of methodological issues here. You know, it's possible that, for instance, some teams could be like hiding revenue, you know, if they own their own regional sports networks, for instance, maybe they could kind of cook the books a little and manage to hide things from the Players Association by saying, well, this was not the team revenue, this was the RSN revenue or something like that. But one of the economists pointed out that teams sort of police each other a little bit because they all have incentive to make sure that teams

earnings are accounted for because of revenue sharing. So maybe that kind of counteracts that. But there are all different ways you can define this. It's finance. It's complicated. It's neither of our areas of expertise. But for instance, for these numbers, MLB uses net revenue in some areas, like with Major League Baseball Advanced Media, for instance, and their argument is essentially that, well, they can't spend money that they don't actually have, which, you know, I guess is fair from one perspective or maybe not fair from another perspective. The Players Association is evidently fine with them defining things that way, but I suppose you could quibble with it.

And then there are some sources of revenue like the one-time payments that each owner is getting this year because of the BAMTEC sale, the stock sale to Disney, which is going to be like 50 million or more per team. I don't think that would really be counted in this. And so if you put that in, well, then the player's share of revenue falls. There's an argument that that is fair, that it really it's kind of a philosophical thing. Like, do the players deserve a share of revenue that came from a company that MLB built? Basically, you know, like a streaming technology company. On the one hand, the players didn't directly contribute to building that company, but it wouldn't really have been feasible probably if the players weren't playing and attracting eyeballs and kind of creating the

product of Major League Baseball. So I think people look at those things in different ways, and maybe you could define things in different ways that would get you different answers. But evidently, both MLB and the Players Association are comfortable with how this is currently defined. Despite a lot of the grumbling and maybe justified grumbling that we've heard this winter, maybe things are still, I guess, more peaceful than one might glean if you were just becoming a baseball fan this winter and had only read articles this winter. Because 50-50 seems like the target that the Players Association wants. That's what Tony Clark has said it was in the past. That's what he has said that they essentially were aiming to maintain in the last CBA. And there just really isn't hard evidence yet that they have missed that target. They might, but to this point, there's no conclusive proof that they have. I imagine with MLB AM, neither side might have understood at the beginning. I don't know when the company's formed, but ML mlb tv launched i think in 2003 so we're talking about something that's more than a decade and a half old and i'm not sure they really understood how

powerful that platform that separate business was going to become so you would think that because it did exist at first because of the games on the field that i don't know some sort of players union like stock option share would exist just to give them some of the initial benefit. But, you know, for all I know, that does exist. And they're just not entitled to this particular $50 million payout to every team. I don't know. But I did intend to ask, although it sounds like you have a point you want to make in response.

So I'm going to let you do that before I ask you the follow-up question. Well, they do get some revenue from Major league baseball advanced media and from like mlb network and from share of merchandise and sales from that so it is part of it i think maybe this bam tech sale is different from the ml bam i mean at this point we're probably putting people to sleep with abbreviations for different MLB things that are not actually baseball. Sacks! But yes, the revenue,

they define total revenue as total club local revenue plus Major League Baseball Advanced Media net income plus MLB network net income plus MLB players distributions. So it's a bunch of different things and neither side would give me exact figures broken down into components. If we do this during the playoffs for like our live Patreon game broadcast, we just talk about player share of league revenues, we could probably end the broadcast after about like 40 minutes

because no one's going to be around anymore. Now i i can understand that one of or maybe the chief concern is that this offseason you could argue and i think there's evidence to the contrary but you could argue that teams have shied away from putting that much money toward free agency especially for older players i don't know if it's actually worked out that way now that a lot of players have signed but let's just say that the union is concerned about the money that's going into free agency this time around. Did anyone that you contacted raise that point or talk about potential solutions down the road, maybe shifting more money toward younger players if this is going to be a pattern? No, that was sort of outside of the scope of what I was asking. I'm sure they're

thinking of that and they should be thinking about that. And I mean, we've gotten a lot of emails from listeners saying like, well, here's how you fix it. You just make arbitration different and you make players eligible for free agency earlier, or you just restructure the system.

And yes, they'd love to do that, but all of this is collectively bargained and anything that is going to benefit the players will either have to be kind of intimidated out of the owners or gained by giving up some other kind of concession. So I'm sure that in the next round of bargaining, and again, the CBA doesn't expire until 2021, that is something that they will be concentrating on, or it should be. But I didn't specifically speak to anyone about that now. I believe we said this is going to be quick banter. And we're up to about, let's see, where are we on the nose? 25 minutes, just about.

So that's not bad. What if we can just keep on putting off emails? What else you got on revenues? It's an important topic, I guess. It's not the most scintillating one, perhaps, but it's something that kind of informs a lot of the other discussions that we've been having and will be having. So we probably had to talk about it. But, yeah, let's get to some emails. So did socialist baseball Twitter lose its mind?

Actually, not. Not so much yet. baseball Twitter lose its mind? Actually, not so much yet. I had my colleague Michael Bauman read a draft before I published it just to kind of market test it to see what the objections would be. And he suggested a couple tweaks that I incorporated, but otherwise seemed okay with it. So I haven't gotten a lot of blowback about it. Some people have asked good questions about some of the definitions that MLB uses. And again, I think there are different ways that you could arrive at these numbers. These are just the way that both sides evidently have agreed to arrive at those numbers, but there are quibbles one could make. The hardest thing with follow-up questions to articles that are informed by experts, but that you are not personally an expert in is that you really can't answer the follow up questions very well. without watching any of the games. So assume the coaches on the field are able to make normal mid-game decisions

like pitching changes, et cetera, but all front office decisions must be made in the blind. You, the GM, have complete access to all data that exists, but that is all you have. No video, no game watching. And then the other option is kind of the opposite. He's asking which of these basically would be better. The other option, how effectively could you manage a team without access to any of the data?

So you can watch all games and your team still has access to all video of MLB and minor league games, but you have absolutely no access to any data. The coaching decisions can still be made on the field, but the coaches also must manage without any data, pitch counts, etc. Assuming Team A and team B were carbon copies of each other, which team would be better? I don't know if that makes sense, if they're carbon copies of each other. Well, this is a question about managing the team or general managing. I think it's about general managing the team. It's like, which one would we be more effectively

able to construct and operate? If it's just eye test or purely stats yeah no give me the stats and uh i mean look i don't know if i don't know if according to these rules you can create stats during the eye test like maybe you just watch a bunch of video and mark down who struck out or who didn't but yep nope if there's especially now there's enough data out there that you can get a really good idea of what a player truly is without without seeing them. Obviously, video is helpful. But one thing I've learned about, for example, like Major League Baseball scouting departments is that we've seen a lot of scouts lose their jobs. And I'm not saying that that's good or that, well, that that's good. But with draft leaderboards in particular like a lot of teams practically have like an automated draft system and i'm not going to say that that doesn't have

shortcomings and of course drafting players is very different from building a major league roster but teams have clearly decided that it's more cost effective to statistically analyze even amateurs than to have people you look at them with their, which is what was always done. So I would imagine that there's going to be a compromise over time and teams will continue to staff scouts, but pretty clearly the industry has made a decision that it's going to lean on analysis with amateurs and there's only even more thorough analysis that can be done with big leaguers. Yeah. I mean, at the major league level, I think you'd take the stats just because the stats are so comprehensive now and essentially are kind of converging with scouting information and the eye test. I mean, stat cast information describes what you see, more or less, not perfectly, but it's getting to be a better proxy.

I mean, maybe this answer would be different for someone who has a different skill set than we do. I think you and I would be more effective if just given the data than we would if trusting our eyes. We're not trained necessarily to rely purely on our eyes when evaluating baseball players, although that is a component of what we do. So I think for me, I'd take the data at the major league level. I think for me, I'd take the data at the major league level. The further from the majors you go, the less useful it is and the more it hurts you not to have the video or the actual eyes. So that's a problem, you know, as far as replenishing your pipeline, basically. But at the major league level, I think you take the stats and I mean, if anything, it saves you time to have the stats instead of having to watch every single game. I mean, I guess if you're an experienced evaluator, you don't have to watch every game to form a good impression of a player, but you and I might just have to watch everything to have any idea what is happening. And it's a lot easier to look at a database and less time consuming just like just

even even if it was like five percent worse than the eye test just for quality of life alone give me the numbers and i can just do everything before lunchtime right okay gary says today the following tweet went out from rich eisen's account there's an idea being floated in mlb of a manager being allowed to bat whomever he wants when trailing in the ninth. MLB exec, quote, no other sport has the best players sitting on the bench in the final minutes of a game. Imagine LeBron, Brady, Ronaldo watching from the sidelines. Ignoring for the moment that this will never happen because Rob Manfred doesn't want his obituary to have the word pitchfork in it, I was curious for your thought on how this would affect player salaries.

Would righty and lefty specialists see an uptick in their value? Would the Mike Trouts and Joey Vatos of the world see their salaries rise for the extra usage they could expect? Would Bryce Harper's upcoming contract negotiations see him getting $50 million a year? Would the traditional slugger see his value restored? These are all fun questions, but if you need to focus on one, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. If all contracts were voided today and a free agent frenzy were to result, which single player would see his value most increased by the concept Aizen mentioned? I don't know, Anthony Rendon, but maybe, no, probably some sort of closer. But I think that what this would do is it would effectively shift more money to the best players, to the best hitters and the best relievers. And you would figure that not only are you giving those players more plate appearances per season, but you're also increasing the leverage,

or at least the average leverage of those plate appearances, which is effectively increasing their plate appearances even more. So you would have teams very uninterested in signing, or at least less interested in signing, like a glove-first shortstop. And more into, well, actually, now that I think about it, maybe if you have that shortstop and uh and more and well actually now that i think about it maybe if you have that shortstop less of it oh this could get interesting maybe not that much would change because if if you have like a a glove first shortstop who can't really hit well then you

don't have to worry about him batting in the ninth that's true probably so then you reduce the oh hmm okay okay i think he would still see some shift i think that money would still go toward the best hitters but maybe it would be less dramatic than i initially thought and then on the on the pitching side i think that already teams want dominant closers and the classic dominant closer doesn't really have a platoon problem because otherwise that wouldn't be a very dominant closer so it's like i guess you could try to pay kenley jansen even more but most teams already know what they want out of a guy in the ninth inning so i don't think that there would be a whole lot changing

there but teams would probably put a little more focus a little more money towards specifically the ninth inning guy and less so the the seventh and eighth inning guys yeah i mean obviously this is never going to happen and i doubt it's been seriously considered it's such a fundamental alteration to the way baseball works and i've talked myself into liking the way baseball works where this fairness essentially where every team has to set its lineup and then kind of the chips fall in a certain way and you might end up with your worst hitter in the most important moment and that's that and obviously you can employ some tactics to try to get around that in some ways but there's only so much you can do i think it's probably a challenge to baseball's popularity and marketing efforts for instance that you can't hand the ball to the best guy or hand the bat to

the best guy in the most exciting moment i think that's something that adds a lot of drama to other sports and probably helps make other sports athletes into superstars is that you know that you're going to be passing the ball to this guy or this guy's going to be throwing the ball in that most important moment. And in baseball, you just don't have that. And that has an appeal of its own certainly and it's not going to change but i've seen a lot of people say oh this is the worst idea ever i don't know it's not the worst idea it's it's an unfeasible idea but it would be a an interesting sport in a different way if it were possible i don't think it would be better interesting but it would be differently interesting i like the way it is now because you have tony womack hitting a game-tying double off the mariano vera in the ninth inning so i mean

that's also interesting and you know if you look at the nhl there are lines there are shifts it's not like you get to keep your best players on the ice all the time and at least in overtime maybe in the final minutes you do if you use your timeout this is getting into the hockey weeds the frozen weeds but in overtime which is very exciting uh the worst players on the team will see the ice often or at least the third line. Even if the coach sits the fourth line and in playoff hockey overtime because he just doesn't trust his fourth line, you're still going through three lines guys and three lines of defenders. And those aren't always going to be your best players. So there is some sort of equivalent of this in other sports, even though in baseball, you can do the least leveraging of your plate appearances. Yeah. Now, would this increase offense overall? Because I mean, teams already have more flexibility in the pitcher they can use. They can bring in the closer,

the shutdown reliever for that important moment. And, you know, they could pinch hit for a bad hitter, but your pinch hitter is generally not going to be a great hitter. If he were, for a bad hitter, but your pinch hitter is generally not going to be a great hitter. If he were, he would have been starting. So in this case, you're going to get the superstar coming up much more often in a crucial, you know, runners in scoring position sort of situation. I don't know how this works from like a substitution perspective. Like if, I mean, can you just reuse a pitcher that you used earlier? I don't know if that's part of this proposal, but there's definitely less to be gained, I would think, on the defensive side than the offensive side. So I would guess that the net effect of this would be to increase offense.

Yeah, you would be, you would not really be changing the number of plate appearances, but you would be giving a greater share of those to the good hitters, which means that the overall batting line would increase. Right. And then what's the cost like i mean you can't just keep using the great hitter whenever you want so how does this work even functionally do you just like skip him the next time up you can't like you can't just use him for multiple spots in the lineup right you can't just keep using the best hitter. Maybe you'd have to, instead of being like, I'm going to use these three hitters, maybe you just start from whatever lineup spot you want and just proceed from there. I don't know.

It's not going to happen. No, it's not. All right. Joe asks a question that may have been answered in some form on a previous podcast, but I don't know. The Effectively Wild wiki isn't complete yet. It's not? Not quite yet. Get after it, people.

So Joe says, We are in an era of baseball where rebuilding isn't really viewed through a negative lens, provided it isn't seen as being done to cut costs. Jason Benetti talked about how White Sox fans are very optimistic and seem to be happy with where the team is. People love to dream on their prospects. Their farm system is the result of selling off the stars from their stars and scrubs roster for future value. This got me thinking, what if the Astros decided to sell off their

valuable pieces? Imagine the Hall, Correa, and Altuve alone would bring them toward the top of the prospect rankings. What if they kept going and traded Springer, Bregman, Redick, McCann, McCullers, Peacock, Giles, Verlander, and so on, all for future value? Do you think there is good chance that the return they get for their players never becomes better than those players would be in 2017? Could they become the best team ever? How many players on the top 100 prospects would be in the Houston organization? prospects would be in the Houston organization? How would the fan base and MLB in general react? What if they did all this and then did it again with the return from the first fire sale? So it's just an ever-renewing

fire sale slash rebuild where you build up the best team in baseball and then you immediately disassemble it for parts. I have a vague recollection of having answered a question like this not super long ago. The funny thing is the Astros right now, least at fangraphs project for 101 wins which is easily the best projection and also the best team projection that i've seen since 2005 so they're already there

they are yeah amazing but yeah this would be i don't look i don't remember what our answers were the first time we answered a question like this so my answer today is hilarious absolutely hysterical i don't know what you would do i mean you you could if you're the astros you could say look we got to where we wanted and i think that maybe the team just doesn't have the same sense of urgency to try to do it again so we're just gonna scrap it and start all over we've earned the benefit of the doubt because we already did this once and look how well it worked so we're just gonna do it again because these people didn't want to try super hard you saw what happened to the cubs in the in last year's first half they had like world series hangover and you know right lost that fire yeah no exactly so you

know you know what a good way to light the fire trade them all trade them all somewhere else let them be somebody else's lazy problem oh my god i would yeah i mean imagine imagine seeing the first trade or maybe no you know what not the first one because you could be like oh the a i would yeah i mean imagine imagine seeing the first trade or maybe no you know what not the first one because you could be like oh the astros traded i don't know who's good the astros traded george springer that's weird but you know they're so good they could afford it okay okay so they they could still it's like a move to the future but their present team is still amazing okay fine the second one would be so weird it's like what do you mean jose altuve was was traded they're still the probably the best team in the division these

guys are approaching free agency like uh you know maybe their value will never be higher you'd have people trying to talk themselves into like this is the perfect time to get the most value from him yeah right like garrett call he's coming up on, what is he, two years left? One year left? Like, yeah, mid-season move. Somebody wants an ace? Well, the Astros have four of them, so let's trade one. Yeah. Oh, God, I love it.

I actively want for this to happen. Yeah, obviously it would get to a point where this would be universally condemned, I think. But, you know, it would be very weird. I mean, I guess you'd run into a problem maybe where if a team as good as the Astros tried to do this, they might just flood the market with their own product, essentially, and, you know, depress the prices for all of their players because they're putting all of them on the market at the same time. So maybe you wouldn't get back as much as you would think that you would i don't

know would you ever be as good again as you are right now would you be better i mean i think it's generally believed i think i don't know that i've seen that convincing a study of this but i often hear that like the team that trades the best player in the deal rarely gets or usually doesn't get a player back who turns out to be as good as that player. Maybe the overall value does equal or surpass the value of that player, especially when you take into account years of team control and all of that. But when you trade a superstar, you don't usually end up with a superstar who is of the same caliber, I don't think. But you could acquire just so much talent from this that, I don't know, even given the uncertainty of prospects and player development, I mean, it seems inevitable that you would be good again. that you would be good again. I mean, in theory, there's no reason why you couldn't do this because you're just trading present value for future value.

And if it's like a fair exchange of present value for future value, then you could keep doing that forever in theory. But maybe there's some kind of transaction cost or penalty each time you make one of these moves so that you're not getting full value back and that those little differences would sort of snowball i don't know i think the problem that a team doing this would face aside from you know the people hating them is that you would uh you'd run out of 40 man roster spots uh pretty quick because you'd be trading for way too

much talent this is every so often we see like a loaded team have to designate like a pretty talented young or just look at the rule five draft pretty good players end up in the rule five draft because their their teams run out of uh run out of roster room but just uh just for the sake of some creativity so the astros as mentioned projected 101 wins the other four teams in their division project for anywhere between 79 and 84 wins right now according to fangraphs 84 being the angels that's a 17 win difference between the astros and the angels which means you could take out the following players replace them with replacement level players and the astros would still project to be first carlos correa jose altuve and justin verlander or if you prefer dallas keitel the astros could lose all

three of those players and still project for first place in the American League West. They are very good. Yeah. Alright. This one I believe you've already answered in some form. This is from Zachary Bartley, Patreon supporter. Bluetooth headphones will beep

when the battery gets low. It's an annoying beep that basically says, hey, I'm at 30% energy here, plug me in before I die. What if pitchers had a similar warning? Not a drop in arm slot or any of the other indicators of fatigue, but a loud beep. I am also picturing a bright blur of red light coming on on top of the hat that announces to the watching world, hey, this guy over here is at like 30%. How would the game be different? And I guess this reminds me of like a video game where players have energy meters

and you'd know that you have to start warming up a pitcher because his meter is getting low and he's starting to lose some stuff. But this is real life. Well, I don't think a whole lot would change. I think already, certainly during the regular season, we don't see pitchers get pushed that hard, especially now. Starts aren't lasting that long.

And I think that players have a fairly good idea when pitchers are starting to tire anyway. And I don't know what that really does for you as a hitter. Maybe it's emboldening. Maybe it's not. I don't really know. But one of those gutsy performances that keeps coming to mind for me, you can think of Kenley Jansen in 2016, or I was recently thinking about Wade Davis this year in game five of the NLDS going up against the Nationals, and Davis threw, how many pitches did Davis throw? 44 pitches. That doesn't sound like so many, but they were very, very stressful

pitches. As I recall, he was clearly gassed as he was going into the ninth inning, and then what he did in the ninth inning was he got Trey Turner to fly out. He struck out Jason Wirth and he struck out Bryce Harper. And as I recall, the last pitch to Bryce Harper, Wade Davis's 44th and his most gassed pitch he's arguably ever thrown, was an amazing cutter low and in that Harper swung right over. So even though Davis, he would have had the little light going off above his head anyway, he threw an amazing pitch so i don't really know what you would do as a hitter maybe the light would be distracting you know pitchers aren't allowed to wear like jewelry or anything glinty

so maybe the uh maybe the light in that way would actually work to the pitcher's advantage especially if it were flashing yeah i i mean i don't know whether pitchers it probably differs by pitcher like maybe some guys sort of hit a wall where they have a sudden drop off and stuff and other guys just kind of tail off slowly. And other guys like Justin Verlander get better the more tired they are seemingly somehow or at least are able to throw hard really deep into games. So maybe it doesn't work the same way with everyone. And maybe the alarm needs to be set at a lower threshold. Like, I mean, when a guy's at 30%, I think you know, right? Even if it's only just like, well, pitchers, starters tend to throw like, you know, 100 pitches or something. So if he's thrown 70, I guess you could say he's at 30%

in a way. That's maybe not the right way to calculate this. I don't know. But maybe the difference is between like, you know, 0% or 5% and 10% or something. okay, this guy has enough left that he can kind of reach back and make the pitch he needs to make here, or he's just so gassed that he can't, and he's just going to serve up a meatball. Or, I don't know, I guess your meatball odds maybe go up in some kind of linear fashion as you get more tired, or I don't know if it is linear. It's hard to know exactly how tiring affects people. Maybe this would be more useful for relievers because starters have a predictable usage pattern. They tend to wear down in predictable ways, whereas relievers, it's unpredictable.

You have guys pitching on back-to-back days, back-to-back-to-back days. They've had outings of different lengths. It's a little harder to know what a reliever has left when you decide to put him in. So maybe it would govern bullpen decisions more so than anything else. Here's what I'm picturing now. Pick a manager.

It doesn't really matter. Let's call him Dave Martinez. Dave Martinez, it's like the seventh inning of a Nationals game. It's, I don't know, the middle of June. Nobody cares. But Dave Martinez comes out in the seventh inning. Max Schererzer just walked a guy and Martinez is like, hey, Scherzer, you got anything left? And Scherzer's like, yeah, coach, no, I'm fine. And they just lock eyes. Then the light goes on right above Scherzer's head. Yeah, that's right. It would

make it harder to lie, I guess. So there's that. Or, well, one way it would be helpful, I don't know whether this counts, but like if something and I'm going to try to pitch through it because I don't think it's serious or I don't want to let on that it's serious. If this alarm gives that away, then obviously that has a major impact. But yeah, I think it helps the pitcher's own team more than it helps the opposing team. I don't know if like pitchers really vary their pitch selection all that much as they get more tired, other than the fact that maybe they're going to the lineup a second or third time and they're trying to work in their secondary stuff more. But that's more a product of trying to be unpredictable than it is trying to throw a lower energy pitch or something.

If there was some sort of like injury alarm, then I think that Rich Harden never would have even been able to fall asleep. Just been like, shut up, shut up. Just ends up cutting his arm off. You're mentioning Dave Martinez just made me realize that we got through the whole Tigers preview yesterday without mentioning their new manager. They have a new manager too. Rod Gardenhier. Remember him? Nope.

Clearly we didn't. We didn't. We didn't. We didn't ask about him at all. Sorry, Rod Gardenhier. Remember him? Nope. Clearly we didn't. We didn't. We didn't ask about him at all. Sorry, Rod Gardenhier, for slighting you. I feel so weird. I never, I think we've talked about this before, I never think about managers anymore. Not even like once.

When you asked, Jelsea, about Dave Martinez yesterday, I was like, oh, yeah, managers. That's like a job that people have and it's probably important but I just never ever ever think about them and in the playoffs or there's chats and people like whoa what do you think about Mike Matheny doing this I think I don't care it just doesn't I don't it never it never occurs to me yeah in the playoffs we talk about managers much more than we do during the regular season but their prominence definitely

has has decreased somewhat so let's do a stat blast want to do a stat blast set me up they'll take a data set sorted by something like e r a minus or o b s plus and then they'll tease out some interesting tidbit, discuss it at length, and analyze it for us in amazing ways. Here's to Deistoplast. Okay, so this one actually is a response to a listener question from Nick Corsetti, Patreon supporter, who says, With your recent discussion on extra innings and the dynamics with an extra base runner, it got me thinking generally about performance in extra innings. Are we able to ascertain who is the best player in MLB history in extra innings? That is, if we isolated only at bats or innings pitched in extra innings. And he asks about which player has the highest war in extra innings. I don't think that's a question we can answer, but you'll answer it in a different way. Nick says, his long career. However, my heart and physical body live in Boston, so it may be hard to accept

that anyone is better in extra innings than David Ortiz himself, based solely on 2004. Okay, so I can't, first of all, run calculations for extra inning war. It doesn't exist. And I can't do anything for the playoffs using the Baseball Reference Play Index. It is not searchable in this way. But I can tell this you can't look through history uh for the extra innings split and so i don't know how best to go about this but the all-time leaders in hits in extra innings unsurprisingly p rose he's tied for number one along with willie mays they both have 83 career hits in extra innings which is quite a lot i don't know what i was expecting but i guess there's just a lot of extra innings over the course of a player's career.

Now, as far as plate appearances go, number one, Pete Rose. He's always number one in everything. Pete Rose batted 367 times in extra innings. He batted 293. He hit two home runs. Willie Mays hit 20. That's good. So at uh at all hitters who have batted in their careers at least 100 times in extra innings i am not going to do tops plus here i'm not going to do sops plus even ops plus just regular ops do you have a guess for the best all time hitter by ops in extra innings barry bonds uh no think mike trout but first but first uh ty cobb mickey mantle oh okay yeah uh barry bonds 1.004 extra innings ops that's good but mickey mantle 1.305 he's got a lead third place ted williams but uh what i like second place justin upton 1.242 ops in extra innings over

his career carlos pena actually ranks fourth at 1.164 now if you're going to look at the best of course it's always fun to look at the worst so do you have a guess for the lowest all-time extra inning ops with the hint of we talked about this player on the podcast today oh today i was gonna guess bill Bergen. I don't know if there's a split going back that far for extra innings. I think they just stopped the games. Carlos Gomez. Absolutely.

Not only is it Carlos Gomez, it's Carlos Gomez by 99 points. So second to last, there's a Larry, is that a Larry Bittner? Two eyes? What the hell kind of name is this? Look, I understand. Okay, if you were a Cubs fan or something, this guy played in the 70s and the 80s, and he played in more than a thousand games. So clearly, Larry Bittner had a long career,

but I don't think I've ever seen a last name B-I-I-T-T-N-E-R. That's unusual. That's a weird one. But anyway, this is not about Larry Bittner, who incidentally had a career war of negative 0.9. Carlos Gomez has batted 102 times in his career in extra innings. He has 11 hits, zero home runs. He has an OPS of 0.354.

He's been about as bad as pitchers in extra innings. So his T-OPS plus is terrible. Maybe this is why he only cost $4 million for the race. Everyone knows that when you get the extra innings, his tops plus is terrible maybe this is why he only cost four million dollars for the race everyone knows that when you get the extra innings carlos gomez folds now that's hitters there are also pitchers all-time leaders in innings pitched in extra innings the yankees favorite goose gossage is at number one 199 and a third innings tug mcgraw 196 and then there's a 18 inning roughly drop off between mcgraw and john franco and hoyt wilhelm but whatever extra innings pitched that's interesting enough but of course you want to know who was good so i set the same minimum of 100 batters faced in extras and the lowest

all-time extra innings era belongs to sy acosta whoever sy acosta is 0.74 extra inning era he allowed two earned runs and 24 and a third innings and as i am here trying to learn about baseball history on the fly while being recorded saya costa lasted basically three seasons so he did not have a very long major league career he was pretty good he had one really great season in 1973 and whatever he was good in extra innings now second place steve gromek this is not a who's who of the best all-time pitchers but there is bj ryan in third place and brad klontz in fifth i miss brad klontz it's uh klontz and kleska were just two players to enjoy having coexist so those are the lowest all-time eras in extra innings but just as with

the batters why not look at the worst? And so let's make sure that I'm pronouncing things correctly. The highest all-time ERAs in extra innings, there's Milt Gaston, maybe Gaston. In third place, ERA of nine, there's Wit Wyatt, which is also a fun little alliterative name that I haven't heard before, 9.27. And I'm going to click this name so that I don't mispronounce it, or maybe I will, but Shackles. Okay, great.

Bob Shackles. Bob Shackles threw 20 extra innings in his career. In those innings, he allowed 32 hits, 18 walks, and had four strikeouts. He allowed 21 runs, had an extra innings ERA of 9.45. His nickname was the Golden Greek greek apparently he exceeded his rookie limits in 1951 and he pitched for some teams who cares bob shackles terrible in extra innings i don't seem to have a win-loss record for him so let's just assume that he was terrible but let's see are there any recent players up here there's jesse chavez he's 11th worst bobby ayala he's 12th

worst slash also just generally the worst if you're a Mariners fan. J.J. Hoover, Pat Neshek are up there, Roy Lee Jackson, but no one compares to Bob Shackles, who I'm going to go into his actual career splits and see what this was all about. So Bob Shackles in extra innings. I would love to know how many games he lost. So now I'm just wasting time. Innings, innings, innings. I would love to know how many games he lost. So now I'm just wasting time. Innings, innings, innings. While you look it up, I'll tell you that Sayacosta is the answer to a baseball trivia question. The first pitcher to bat in the

American League after the introduction of the DH. Sayacosta. I am glad to know that. Okay, so I don't have any win-loss records for for bob shackles in extra innings i only have 16 games 20 innings 21 runs allowed an ops of 983 but in the ninth inning he only had an era of 2.878 so bob shackles as long as he didn't push him too far that's okay all right that's all i got well thanks for the question nick this is a question that you can't answer but i would be interested in an answer i I wonder who has played the highest percentage of his innings in extra innings, if that makes sense. You'd have to set some minimum, obviously, because it would probably be some guy who got called up and made his one major league appearance in the 11th inning or something. But among players who actually had

long careers, I wonder if there was anyone who just had a disproportionate number of extra inning appearances and just kept ending up in tie games over and over again and was cursing his luck for years. OK. It's probably something that washes out for most players, but there had to be some unlucky guy. I could look that up. So but I got curious. OK, so we know Kevin Euclid, his nickname was the Greek God of Walks. Okay, whatever. I'm on the baseball reference list of nicknames.

So Bob Shackles, as mentioned, his nickname was the Golden Greek. Harry Aganis, his nickname was the Golden Greek. And at last, we have Lou Skizas, whose nickname was the Nervous Greek. So I don't know anything about that one, but we've got two golden Greeks and a nervous one. And I think that the nervous one is more interesting. Yeah, no, I want to know what he was nervous about. Maybe we can find out. Well, let's see.

He was born in 1932 and is not dead, according to baseball reference. So something to think about. Oh, interesting. But maybe he wouldn't want to answer the phone. He's pretty nervous. All right. Question from Cody.

I have a question regarding an expanded roster and free agent contracts. Do you think expanding the roster to 27 or 28, but still requiring teams to designate 25 active each game would help boost free agent contracts again? And obviously it would help boost earnings and payrolls. I assume this was actually something that was discussed in the last round of competitive bargaining and I think came fairly close to happening. There was a story about MLB PA nixing an idea proposal to go to 26-man rosters, and that was going to be in exchange for lowering September roster sizes from 40 to 28. So again, if you're

adding roster spots that teams would have to pay, there's going to have to be a concession there, which in this case would be decreasing roster spots on the September rosters. And Players Association decided not to do it at that time. It could be revisited at some point, but I think the concern was that there would be a loss of service time if people couldn't debut in September, and maybe there'd be fewer opportunities for people to kind of have their first exposure to the big leagues. does but i don't know whether it would increase free agent prices like per player per war or anything but there would just be more players so in that sense i suppose it would help yep yeah okay that was a an easy one all right let's do this one so this was the one i was teasing earlier this is from luke he says i like most offseason fans have been running a million hypotheticals in my mind about how teams could sign a free agent who's not an ideal fit and then make some trades to make it a good fit or improve the team. My question is, do we know whether the order of these events has

an influence on the trade return a team gets? Does getting a free agent and then trying to trade your player mean you will typically get a worse return? Or maybe just trading away your player than trying to sign a free agent mean you will have to pay worse return. Or maybe just trading away your player than trying to sign a free agent mean you will have to pay more for the free agent. It does seem like being the team that everyone knows needs to move X player would make a team lose some negotiating leverage. I understand that this would be quite difficult to quantify.

I'm mostly just wondering what your opinion on this might be. I'd like to hear an experienced front office person talk about this because I'm not positive, but I would guess that there are certain situations where you just so clearly telegraph your need or your strategy that teams could kind of make you pay extra for that. But I'm not sure that it would be a major effect. Like we just saw, you know, the White Sox, for instance, sold off a lot of really valuable players and everyone knew what they were doing

and what their strategy was. And they still got great returns and top prospects. And I think generally we're perceived to have gotten fair value. So I guess the thing is that if there's a need for a player on another team, they're not going to deprive themselves of that player just because they know that you need to get rid of them. Yeah. So, I mean, in theory, we could try to get

somebody who works the Brewers on to talk about their outfield right now, because Ryan Braun is taking grounders at first base because everyone assumed the Brewers are going to trade an outfielder for a pitcher by now, but it hasn't happened. So bad news for Ryan Braun, bad news for Eric Thames, bad news for Jesus Aguilar. It's just, it's complicated in Milwaukee. But what I would say is a team should never assume it's getting a free agent until said free agent is actually acquired. And I do not at almost any level believe that being too deep or being overloaded reduces your leverage, even if teams know, even if the brewers made it abundantly clear hey look domingo santana is the guy to go he is the guy we're going to trade even if the

brewers did that that doesn't mean anything because there's more than one team interested in trading for domingo santana and those teams are the ones fighting with one another that's where the leverage comes from it's not about the team trading the player it's about the team is trying to get that player because that player can only go to one team. So that is what sets the market. Yep. All right. This is hopefully a quick one also.

This is from Mike who says, you both have significant others. If you had to name your child after an MLB team, which name would you choose for a boy or for a girl? Something like Dodger Lindbergh or Astro Sullivan. For the spirit of my question, please ray marlin and angel because those are already actual names what would be the goofiest name or the best name well there's red so red is already kind of a name maybe it should have belonged to uh to the exceptions blue jay would be a silly name but you could just shorten it shorten it to bj i think that if I were actually trying to name a child after a baseball team,

I would lose my fiance post-haste. So that wouldn't really be much of a conversation. I bet there are some Dodgers out there. It wouldn't be a complete shock, just some like, oh, we're having our third kid. We thought we'd go a little off the wall. Let's have a Dodger because, you know, it's kind of cutesy. It doesn't really mean anything, at least now. You wouldn't want to name a kid dodger in the 60s or 70s but

in any case i don't know did you come up with anything different certainly you wouldn't want to name a kid white socks no you probably wouldn't want to go with indian either that would be a bad idea i i don't know if you how much you can tweak the name whether you have to like if the name is plural can you make it singular or does it have to be plural? But I think I would like Padre. Padre's a nice name, right? I'd name a kid Padre. I mean, you would be the Padre, technically. That's true. That could be confusing, but it's a mellifluous name. That's a hard word to say, but what else? Are there any other, like, I mean, i mean giant is a name yeah giant is not terrible brewer's not that bad a name oh no that probably is the name also yeah i guess that's a name cub

like i think we we basically call our nephew cub or something like that pretty often it's a nickname of course but it might as well be a name right Right, yeah. Pirate would be bad. I could see Philly. Philly would not be a bad name, right? Yeah, I could go with Philly. I like that. All right, let's do... And Royal, I guess, is not... That's a name, sort of.

I don't know. Royal Tenenbaum. All right, we can do this one quickly. Let's see. Joseph says, a typical career of an MLB knuckleballer is that of washed up starter who loses his velocity and adopts the pitch as a last

effort to prolong his career. A small handful are able to wield the knuckleball effectively and find success despite the absence of a meaningful fastball. Seems like pitchers who are already effective with their traditional arsenal don't experiment with adding the pitch. Why would a badass bother with a knuckleball when he's already a badass but what if he did what could noah cinderguard or luis

severino do if they learned a decent knuckleball if r.a dickie can win a cy young with an 80 mile per hour fastball what could a knuckleballer with a 95 mile per hour fastball do surely there's at least one superpower pitcher now or in the future capable of learning a good knuckleball how unstoppable would he be i mean the the equivalent we see of this is like zach grinke will mess around with a slow curve every so often or you darvish will do it cleeden kershaw buses out very infrequently vicente padilla did it all the time i think that the the problem the reason the pitcher would say we're not going to do this is it's a just a different throwing motion you would you would telegraph that you're throwing the knuckleball the hitter would know now even if the hitter knew that

doesn't make it any it doesn't make it hittable because the hitter would stillgraph that you're throwing the knuckleball. The hitter would know. Now, even if the hitter knew, that doesn't make it any, it doesn't make it hittable because the hitter would still not know you were telegraphing the knuckleball until the ball was almost out of your hand. So it does add to the degree of difficulty. But as a pitcher, if you're taking Noah Syndergaard, you probably can't throw a knuckleball effectively at all using his regular throwing motion. And then if he didn't use his regular throwing motion, he had to slow down his arm to throw a knuckleball then at that point he's messing with his mechanics and then he is changing unintentionally the way that he throws his other

pitches because then you're going through two different deliveries at the same time it would seem to be incredibly difficult to be able to master the two so i'm not saying that it couldn't be done or that some enterprising player shouldn't attempt it, but I can't think of why anyone who has a real repertoire would want to put his career in this kind of jeopardy. Yeah, right. I mean, it's just, it's a hard thing to do, obviously, to go from one motion to another in one completely different grip to another. That's one of the many reasons why this hasn't happened. But if it could happen in theory I mean, yeah, the lack of unpredictability would be the biggest issue, I guess

Because in theory, you know, if you can add a good pitch That is better than some other pitch that you have It would make anyone better I'm just, I'm not sure whether in this case it would Because it just might be so obvious Although maybe the knuckleball is the one pitch where the fact that it's obvious doesn't matter that much, right? I mean, that's the whole point of the knuckleball. Everyone knows it's coming almost, but it comes and it's unpredictable and no one knows where it's going.

So I guess in that sense, it might still work. But yeah, no one has really had the incentive or the skill set to pull this off yeah i guess i don't know why if you're a pitcher who has a really good fastball why you would bother trying to learn a really good knuckleball if you could just spend that time trying to learn like a really good change up because then that's also a very very difficult pitch to hit so if you can master a pitch you might as well master one that blends in right and last one from rob here a hypothetical. If players really are getting sick of owners deciding that winning is too expensive or too much of a hassle,

could they build incentives into free agent contracts where they get a significant bonus in any year that the team's win total falls below a certain threshold? Could this work? Obviously, most players couldn't get away with it. But if Harper or Machado insisted on it next year, surely some team would give in. What are the potential downfalls? Could you see a player going full heel and signing a contract and intentionally underperforming in order to sabotage the team and increase his own earnings? How much would the bonus have to be to act as a proper incentive? I don't know if there's any precedent for this. The only thing I could think of was Edwin Encarnacion has an attendance contract clause. So like if the Indians draw, I think it's

2 million or more or something, or, you know, some number above that, then he gets a million dollars at each attendance threshold, something like that. So I guess that actually worked out for him, right? Because the Indians drew 48,000 people more than 2 million last year. So congratulations to Edwin Encarnacion. We actually answered a question once about what he personally could do to increase attendance and trigger that clause. But this is different. I'm trying to think of if it would like

run afoul of any rules or anything i'm not immediately coming up with a reason why you couldn't do it i mean i guess if you're a player like harper or machado no team involved in those negotiations is likely to be terrible anyway these are the big spending so i don't know i mean if you set your threshold at like 90 wins then well the teams are unlikely to try to sign you so hard you could conceivably do it but if you're just trying to avoid like a team that's tanking you set a threshold at 65 or 70 wins where you're unlikely to encounter that anyway but i did i don't i don't there's so many like i know you can have incentives but you can't have like performance-based, but you can have like innings or playing time incentives built into contracts. I don't know all the ins and outs of this. I don't even know where to look it up.

Yeah, it's tough. I mean, teams would not want to do this and to set a precedent for this kind of contract. But in theory, like if a player were toward the end of his career or something and just really, really didn't want to sign with a team that was going to suddenly sell off or something. I mean, I could see there potentially being some interest on the part of some players. And if it's a superstar who just made it an absolute condition, then someone would go for it, I guess. But I don't know. I mean, it would have to be a significant amount of money to really sway him and teams would not want to do that. I don't think they would want to have their hands tied like that. But in theory, sure, I suppose so. Unless we immediately after recording think of an obvious reason why this wouldn't or couldn't work. Okay, so let's say it's Bryce Harper. and let's say that there's a threshold of i don't know 75 wins team can't be

worse than 75 wins or else harper gets x amount of money how much money would it have to be to convince bryce harper it might be worth not only tanking his own performance but like spreading the flu and like injuring his teammates by like i don't know putting ball bearings on the floor and like glass shards how much because i mean he'd already have his guaranteed money anyway right he'd have his big yeah like life-changing generational changing contract this so i don't maybe it's something that he does near the end of his career ideally it's something he doesn't do ever but you know everyone's got a line, right? Yeah, sure. Yeah, this is along the lines of how much would it take to get Bryce Harper to go play in Japan or the Mexican League or something.

Here he's staying, but he's not winning and being bad. So a lot, I guess. I don't know. There's all this talk of tanking on the organizational side, but no one ever thinks about the players tanking. Right. Thanks to Rob for finally about the players tanking. Right. Thanks to Rob for finally being the one to raise that idea. All right. Well, we can stop there.

Lou Skizas, by the way, the nervous Greek, was evidently just very superstitious. He had a habit of rubbing a metal in his back pocket between pitches and apparently had other rituals too. That's the only information I've been able to glean thus far. I guess that's kind of interesting, but that's more like the superstitious Greek. Right, yeah. I don't know. I mean, I guess if you're superstitious and you don't do your superstition, you're nervous about it, but I don't know if that's quite apt.

Maybe there's more to the story. Well, he went from having a really good season in 1957 to barely ever playing again. So whatever he was superstitious about didn't really work. All right, we can stop talking. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Five listeners who have recently pledged their support include Tom Binney, Carlos Collazo, Listeners who have recently pledged their support include Tom Binney, Carlos Collazo, Colin Ray, Steve May, and Bob McManus. 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 Effectively Wild on iTunes.

Please help replenish our mailbag. Keep your questions and comments for me and Jeff coming via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system. Thank you to Dylan Higgins for editing assistance. As a reminder about the Effectively Wild wiki, mentioned it earlier in the show, go to the show page at fangraphs. You'll see a link to the wiki. You can start contributing. There's also a signup sheet if you want to claim an episode to recap and summarize in the files section of the Facebook group. Thanks to everyone who is helping out with that crowdsource project. That will do it for today.

We will be back next time with the next two teams in our season preview series, New York Yankees and the Baltimore Orioles. I would probably invest my life in you. My dividend would be such a hit, baby. Even thou, Joe, know you need a chance.