Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1266: Labor WAR

Episode Date: September 6, 2018

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Dee Gordon‘s walk rate, Jonathan Villar‘s daring baserunning, how much the “opener” has contributed to the Rays’ success, and Todd Frazier’s variation on the hidden-ball trick. Then they bring on FanGraphs writer Sheryl Ring (22:02) to discuss what the MLB Players Association hiring new lead negotiator Bruce Meyer […]

Hey everyone, just so you know, the episode you're about to hear was recorded before the news that Tommy John surgery has been recommended for Shohei Otani, which clearly merits some podcast discussion. So, we will be turning to, and we will have another episode up later today, in which we will focus solely on that. So, keep an eye out after this episode for another one in a daydream. Can't focus on the other team. Hunting you all day and night. Now I'm ready for a fight. This is war. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is war. This is war. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is war. I can't be your friend. Cause I gotta knock you out. You're doing all right. You're doing all right. That's great. So am I, I guess. We will be joined on this episode later on by Fangraphs' own Cheryl Ring to talk about labor and MLBPA hiring Bruce Meyer and also service time manipulation. After that, Ben and I will also talk some more about service time manipulation. Can't talk about baseball in September without talking about service time manipulation.

I guess we haven't talked about rosters getting bigger. Maybe we'll do that later. That's just another thing that comes up every single year but before we get to those things i guess we have a little bit of banter i just want to throw a few numbers at you i guess these are bantery but something i've followed along all season long for some reason d gordon just walks i don't know how often do you pay attention to d gordon's walks i'll tell you so right now in uh in the major leagues the fifth I'm looking at qualified players. Fifth lowest walk rate, 3.6%.

It's also tied for the fourth lowest. So I guess those are both fourth lowest. Tie for the second lowest walk rate, 3%. Belongs to Eduardo Nunez and Salvador Perez. Lowest walk rate in baseball, D. Gordon, 1.5% walks. He has eight walks all unintentional. So it's good for D. Gordon. He's earned him. Got a WRC plus of 74, but this

is one of the lowest walk rates in Major League history. Not the very lowest, but it is one of the lowest in Major League history. D. Gordon. So, nothing else relevant to throw out there. I don't know if D. Gordon's going to draw a walk in September. He hasn't walked since August 10th, which was also his first walk

I think in like more than a month so d gordon not getting on base because why would you ever throw him balls something else i would like to throw out there both kind of tampa bay rays related so the rays right now are 75 and 63 which is they're not even like underachieving really anymore they're just straight up good at this point. Like they're on a pace to approach 90 wins. But as we have done all year long, it's also fun to look at the Rays' base runs performance, their estimated performance of how good their record should be.

This was, of course, a year we came in expecting there to be, what was it, like six or seven super teams or something like that. So the Astros, Red Sox, Yankees, Dodgers, those were all expected to be super teams this year like that so the astros red sox yankees dodgers those were all expected to be super teams this year so were the cubs the raised base runs winning percentage now is up to fifth best in hall of baseball it's the astros first then red sox then yankees then dodgers and the rays rays fifth best base runs team in baseball third best base runs team in their own division but based on base runs alone there would be only four games out of first place in the american league east so tamp bay is getting

going and it's interesting because of course blake snell has been amazing all season long he's been amazing since the start of the second half of last season but blake snell does not make a pitching staff himself but of course the rays have been using the opener they reintroduced the concept of the opener or something that's caught on with some other teams every so often but the rays right now according to fan graphs they rank ninth in baseball in total pitching staff wins above replacement which is quite good that is by definition in the top 10 and if you look look at the runs allowed version of Wins Above Replacement, they rank 10th just between the Athletics and the Nationals. So the Rays pitching staff this year has worked out.

They just threw another combined shutout on Tuesday of whoever they were playing. He was the Blue Jays. So the Rays are impressive. They've made pretty much everything work. Currently, I think one of my favorite things that's been going on with the Rays are impressive. They've made pretty much everything work. Currently, I think one of my favorite things that's been going on with the Rays is that they've turned G-Man Choi into a good everyday player. He's been on a variety of different teams. Anyway, this isn't a G-Man Choi podcast, but Tampa Bay Rays.

It's not only they're no longer just treading water, they are a legitimately good baseball team. They're not good enough to make the playoffs because the A's won't lose very often. Although I will point out the Rays have actually closed to within seven games and they're a game and a half away from finally passing the slumping Seattle Mariners. We've been talking about the Rays for a while and I don't know how much they've been talked about elsewhere, I do wonder how the conversation would be different about them and about baseball in general if their actual standings looked more like their base run standings. And if they were actually in playoff position, maybe people would be talking about the opener even more. I don't know. We've certainly talked about it plenty this season, but it does seem to be spreading now. I know the A's are now using the opener sometimes.

I think the Rangers and the Twins have or are experimenting with it. So it seems to be catching on, and maybe that's because it's been successful in the sense that the Rays have been pretty successful. It's hard to say how much of that is attributable to the opener or how much the opener has benefited them because you just don't really know how to evaluate it. It's too small a sample really to just look at record and say, well, they've won this many games or they've lost this many games and therefore it worked. And you don't know what would have happened if they hadn't been using the opener. I do know because Joshian pointed it out that they've allowed the lowest ERA in the first inning of any team in the majors this year, which is probably not a coincidence. And they have also faced hitters in the third time through the order far less than any other team in baseball this year.

Just 368 of the raised plate appearances against, that is the raised pitchers played appearances or total batters faced, have been in the third time through the order. And that is more than 200 fewer than the next lowest team. So that's a big difference. And as Joe also noted, since they really implemented this strategy and in games when they have used this strategy, which sometimes it's hard to classify as opener or non-opener, but Joe tried to figure that out and he said that they are 27 and 22 in those games specifically, which is good because they're using this in games where you wouldn't necessarily expect to win that many games because it's primarily not with Snell or Glassnow or Archer, you know, the best starters on your staff. It's kind of the back end guys where you would expect to be probably 500 or worse, and they've been better than that. So as far as we can tell, that seems to be working. It's not, I would say, even the primary reason why they've been good this year.

I don't know. How would you assign, like if you had to assign a percentage to why the Rays have been good or better than many people expected, how much of that would be the opener? Because the opener is fun and flashy and innovative. And so we've talked about it a lot. But maybe that means it's getting outsized credit for how good they've been. Right. The opener is just kind of one of those. It's a weird thing the Rays have done.

But remember, the point of the opener is really you're just shifting innings around and the starter i mean you still have relievers who are effectively starters when the opener pitches and they're still going 50 60 70 pitches they're just not seeing that third time through the order but the penalty is not so severe when you work that deep that it's like you turn a bad pitcher into a good one if you don't let him pitch that deep so i think the opener probably explains like two percent of the rays success this season if i were to be honest whereas i think you're just looking at a team their offense is actually it has an above average wrc plus which i think is kind of surprising considering when you think of the rays offense name a player you can't not even one and you look at the pitching staff and i think think it's just been good and relatively deep from start to back.

There's not really that many bad pitchers that they've had on the team. Now they've cycled through a bunch of pitchers. That's something they have not been afraid to do. And I think that there's validity in Zach Greinke's concern that the Rays' system can result in decreased compensation, less money going to pitchers because the raise just kind of like use them and then shuffle them around. Now, I think that the natural counterargument to that is, well, as innings are moved around and as different pitchers throw different innings,

then the money will just be spread around among the pitchers as opposed to reduced amounts going to the best pitchers. But I don't know because this is a different kind of pitching staff. We will have to see how it evolves. And the Rays have never really paid their pitching staffs a lot of money anyway, right? Yeah, it's hard to say because, right, I mean, you'd think that like an arbitration, for instance, which still largely relies on traditional stats like wins and saves and so forth, that if you get fewer of those because of the opener,

then it will hurt you. On the other hand, someone is still winning the games. And I think Mike Petriello pointed out that it's possible that the opener strategy is actually enhancing the odds of winning the game for some pitchers. I mean, some guys, like if you are the opener, then you're not going to win that game because you can't go five. But if you're the guy pitchers affected by the opener strategy. arbitration, but maybe the arbitration system or the free agent market changes to pay players what they're worth under this new opener strategy. If this becomes dominant, maybe, I don't know, maybe certain guys at the top end of the rotation will get less, but guys at the back end of the bullpen will get more because they're pitching more innings than they're being the opener. I don't know how that will shake out. It seems like a valid concern, but it's a little too soon to say for sure that it's definitely

going to hurt players financially. Right. I mean, we already have a system where money is being shifted more toward the bullpen. We saw last offseason, like the one class of players who didn't pay any sort of financial penalty were good relievers. Now, of course, maybe in response to those relievers generally not being good, that go in the other direction but money and innings are already going toward the bullpen anyway and away from starting pitchers and importantly the rays have never been like a payroll leader like you don't look at the rays to be the model of how money is going to be spent because at least as long as they operate like this they're always going to be trying to bring players up when they're young and cheap and they're going to be having like some sort of taxi squad constantly shuffling relievers between AAA and the majors and now again

because every time we talk about the Rays we should address this point I think it is possible to admire the Rays for the way that they operate while wishing that they didn't have to operate in this way but in the way that the rays are not all their owner i think it is a the people who are responsible for running the rays have done an incredible job of managing the roster with their limited flexibility it is a shame that this is the situation they have been forced into but that's that is their current reality so until the rays spend more which is one guy's decision then it's uh it's really remarkable how well they have managed to sort of transition without ever going through a deep rebuild. Right, yeah. Forced into just by the ownership deciding that they have to be in that situation and they're only going to give these because you don't want to praise the raise for not spending,

but you also want to acknowledge that if they're not going to spend, the people whose decision it is not have done a pretty good job of working within that parameter. So it's kind of a weird thing to talk about, but you have to hand it to them on some level, at least hand it to some of them for getting the raise into this position without actually spending as much as you would think that they'd have to to be in this position. Yeah, I can guarantee you that every single member of that front office would love to have another $75 million of payroll flexibility to work with.

They don't have it. They can't really compel ownership to give it to them. So anyway, let's talk about a few other baseball plays before we move on to the meat of the podcast. There was something Sam Miller tweeted out, his favorite play of the 2018 season. I'm going to take him at his word, say that he was sincere. This is a play in a Mariners-Orioles game on Tuesday,

a game of decreasing playoff significance. But it happened in the seventh inning. And you watched this clip shortly before we started recording. i also watched this clip after listening to it on the radio didn't sound so impressive on the radio as it looks on video but joey rickard came up the orioles were waiting by who cares what score joey rickard came up with uh with one out and runners on first and second and he hit a fly ball to left field fly ball was caught and now i should say that runners on base were jonathan vr at first base and bravik valera on second what do we know about bravik valera well you're about to learn one

thing about him he's an aggressive base runner and so is jonathan vr so the ball was caught in left field runners on first and second and the runners on first and second decided this is a good opportunity to tag up to move to second and third the throw from left came into second base where the tag was there in plenty of time to beat jonathan to the base. But what Jonathan VR did, this is what's really impressive to me, because this wasn't just one guy making a clever heads-up play. This was two sort of coordinating, even if accidentally. I haven't read about this play. I don't know what the quotes are about it, but throw goes to second base ahead of VR, where VR is about to be tagged out for the last out of the inning. Valera at this point is moving on to third. VR slides, stops short of the tag,

and then turns around and gets himself in a pickle, and he starts running back to first base, forcing the infield to try to get VR out, at which point Brafic Valera takes off from third and scores, advancing two bases. And of course, as the throw goes home to try to get Valera out, VR turns around and makes it into second. So we've seen defensive miscues before, and D. Gordon apparently had some trouble getting the ball out of his glove to throw home. Maybe Valera could have been out if Gordon had been quicker. I don't know.

But not only did Valera move up two bases on a sacrifice fly to left field, but it was only made possible because Jonathan Villar slid short of a tag and then got up and turned around to run to first base, which I don't know who has that. You see players get into pickles often, but I can't think of many, if any, circumstances where a pickle began with a runner who had already slid. You know, you slide, and if you're out, you're out. So just a remarkable heads-up base running play all around by the Orioles, who are by far the worst team in baseball. Yeah, I know. You wouldn't expect this to come from the Orioles, who have not been a good base running team, although they haven't had Jonathan Villar all season, and he has been a good base runner. So yeah, this was good. I don't know to what extent there was forethought here or whether it was just sort of an instinctive thing but it was fun and

rundowns pickles are i think among the most entertaining plays in baseball i know sam has a soft spot for pickles so i like this one a lot i don't know whether it's like something that should be done more often or whether it was just kind of an unusual confluence of circumstances that it actually worked that well this time. But fun play. Yeah. And you had also shown me a play I didn't see. It involves Todd Frazier. Would you like to describe it? Yeah. So Todd Frazier, he dived into the stands to catch a foul ball, and he came up after some time, he re-emerged, and he had the ball or a ball in his glove, and it appeared as though he had caught this foul ball in the stands. The umpires gave it to him, said, yeah, batter is out, and then it later came out via some video

work by SNY that Frazier had not actually caught this ball, that you could see the ball not in his glove, but that he had replaced the real baseball with like a Spalding sort of ball, like a rubber ball that I guess a kid in the front row of the stands had had sitting there. And Frazier, as his body just kind of slid over the front row there he brought the ball down with him and so at some point when he was collecting himself after having collapsed in a heap there he put that ball that rubber ball into his glove and he brandished it as if it were a baseball and the umpire didn't look that closely and frazier very quickly tossed it into the stands it was an inning ending catch so it it wasn't weird that he tossed into the stands but clearly he was trying to get rid of it before the umpire noticed that this was not an actual

baseball and then you could see him when he was back in the dugout gesticulating to some of his teammates and it looked like explaining that he had gotten one over on the umpires here so clever todd frazier well played right not exactly a peeled potato gotten one over on the umpires here. So clever, Todd Frazier. Well played. Right. Not exactly a peeled potato that he showed to the umpire, but nevertheless, very clever play. And it's one of those things. And I think whenever you see some sort of weird, controversial play or something like this,

you always go to the slippery slope argument and you follow it all the way to the bottom. Bottom of the slope? Top of the slope? Bottom? I guess it's a slippery slope, so you're only going one direction. You go to the bottom of the slope and you say, all the way to the bottom bottom of the slope top of the slope bottom i guess when you would it's slippery slope so you're only going one direction you go to the bottom of the slope when you say well what would happen if this happened in the world series and what i can't help but wonder is what would happen if this happened in the world series because i would love it i think because it's it would be like if this if this play were to decide a world

series we'd never stop talking about it. And of course, some team would be cheated out of an opportunity or whatever. And as a baseball fan, you would never let it go. And I would think if this happened to my favorite team, if I were a younger and more dedicated fan of a particular team, and then this happened, you have a player who didn't make a catch, but he's given credit for a catch, and then the World Series is over, then I would probably, I i don't know break up with the sport and set my apparel on on fire but that would be one of the most memorable plays that ever would have happened in baseball i don't even know like would would they have convened i guess maybe they would have convened a replay review of this if there were stakes but they didn't after this play, correct?

No, I don't think so, as far as I know. And yeah, there's a fine line between gamesmanship and bad sportsmanship, I suppose, and this probably falls on the latter side of the line for some people, and I understand that. We're briefly, briefly going to talk to Cheryl about catcher framing because there are people who think that that's bad sportsmanship or cheating or exploiting the rules in some way. And from one perspective, it is.

And this is sort of the same, except this is more egregious, I guess, because it's not like the catcher is using a second rubber ball in his back pocket that looks like it's in the strike zone that he's just pulling out and showing the umpire. He's using the actual baseball, whereas Todd Frazier is bringing in foreign objects here into the field of play and claiming that they are regulation baseball. So this is, it's kind of like if you are rooting for Todd Frazier or you have no rooting interest, you say, oh, heads up play, smart player, clever, cunning, and if this goes against you, particularly in an important game, then you say that he's

cheating and breaking the rules and making a mockery of the game, and both of those things are true to an extent, but to me, this is just funny. Yeah, no, I know Sam had worried, worried, I don't know, Sam had observed that when baseball institute had expanded instant replay some years ago we would maybe be in the end of players lying

and it uh it hasn't it's just changed the ways in which players lie or at least it's it's narrowed the field of opportunities for players to lie and todd frazier found a way to lie convincingly to the umpire and this is always this always feels like a bit of a blind spot where the player goes over a rail and he's completely obscured from view and some umpire has to chase down and try to see what happened. And now in the playoffs, because there are more umpires on the field, maybe someone would be better positioned to say, no, that's a rubber baseball.

That's not the ball that was supposed to be caught. But I don't know. Maybe if you're the home team, you should have fans position loose baseballs around rails near the border and then you take them away when the other team is in the field just as uh just as you know you never know when there's going to be a chance like this because you know this happened at dodger stadium for the met so if any that's that's being a bad fan right exactly all right should we take a quick break and we will be back in just a moment with Fangraph's Cheryl Ring. I'll make those medians when I can. Yeah. I pay my dues ahead of time.

When the benefits come, I'm last in line. Yeah. I'm proud to be a union man. So last week when Ben and I were doing an episode, I teased the idea that we were going to talk about labor strife. We never actually got there. We filled up an hour somehow not getting to what I thought would be the main topic of the episode. Very proud of us. But anyway, very recently, the Major League Baseball Players Association hired one Bruce Meyer.

He's a veteran sports attorney. He was also recently written about by Fangraph's legal correspondent. I don't know what Cheryl Ring's job title is, but in any case, we're talking to Cheryl Ring about it because she recently wrote an article at Fangraph titled, The MLBPA Has a New Chief Negotiator, That Being Bruce Meyer. So Cheryl, hello. Welcome back. Hello. How are you? I'm doing very well. How are you? I cannot complain. The sun is shining. The fall is coming. Playoffs are on their way. Love the fall. Love the fall. That's good, because the last time we had you on, the sun was not shining. You were in a torrential downpour, as I recall.

This weather is so much better. So, just to get more to the point, what can you tell us about who Bruce Meyer is? We'll start there. What is Bruce Meyer's legal background? The easiest way to describe it is if litigation was baseball, Bruce Meyer would be Mike Trout. He is very much one of the very best trial lawyers in the country. I honestly can't think of more than a couple of other people who I'd rather have try a case for me. And when it comes to sports law, particularly labor relations, and most interestingly, labor IP and collective bargaining, there really is nobody better. I put this in the article. He actually wrote the textbook on how to handle collective bargaining, sports law, IP, sports injuries,

all of that. He is the authority. He is to sports law what Schwem is to fair housing law. And that's a reference that probably I'm only the center. But seriously, he is a gigantic deal. And the reason that he's such a gigantic deal is not just that he literally wrote the book on it, it's also because he is one of a very few attorneys, number one, with multiple multi-million dollar antitrust victories. Number two, he's actually been the only attorney in the country who has won unrestricted free agency rights in two different major sports, baseball and football. And number three, he is also the leading authority when it comes to player IP and player IP litigation. So he's actually won these cases

before over and over again. So he really is one of the best attorneys in the country and probably one of the best attorneys in the world over the last 100 years. Well, that seems like a good hire based on that resume. It seems like for a while now, I mean, the narrative about Tony Clark has been that he's a bit in over his head and overmatched and we don't exactly know what transpired in the negotiating room. We just know what the results are and what some of his public comments have been and that some of the players have been dissatisfied with his work. And it just always seemed like, you know, he's not a labor lawyer and there's nothing that says that you have to be a labor lawyer to go up against MLB's labor lawyers. And of course, the Players Association

has had lawyers, even if one of them wasn't spearheading the negotiations. But it just always seemed like you would want to fight fire with fire to a certain extent. And I guess now that's what they're doing. Oh, sure. And to be fair to Tony Clark, I think he's gotten a bit of a bad rap just because and yes, I know that the MLBPA has a long history with experienced negotiators like Donald Fair, for example, handling this kind of negotiation. But Tony Clark was never sitting in a room across from Rob Manfred one-on-one saying, OK, this is the language we're agreeing to. It doesn't work like that when you're talking about these big agreements. But at the same time, the disadvantage that MLBPA has been at over the last couple of CBAs is that Rob Manfred, for example,

is a labor lawyer. They're coming at this from a completely different set of goals at the outset. And the MLBPA has been somewhat passive, I think, in how they've gone about these negotiations. One of the interesting things I saw in the comments to the post I wrote was how many people say it's a bad idea to hire a litigator to negotiate something like this. But I would beg to differ, really, because some of the best negotiators who never see any litigation are experienced litigators because it creates an incentive for the other side to not walk away from the table. So if you're sitting across the table from Bruce Meyer, for example, you're going to try harder to reach a deal, even if you're making

concessions you wouldn't otherwise, because you know his record, because you know what he can do, and you don't want to be on the other side of a courtroom from him. And some of the best negotiators also are litigators because most cases end in settlements. So you have to be able to negotiate big, complex deals. And Bruce Meyer is one of the best in the business at that. So putting Meyer at the head of the negotiation team is kind of like a carrot and a stick type thing. They're saying to MLB, number one, if you don't approach this from a different angle, we have someone that we're comfortable with litigating with, taking the next step with. But at the same time, here's someone who has also been very successful in negotiating this kind of agreement before. And so clearly he's someone that

you can negotiate with in good faith. And I think that that stick is something that the union has not had in the past couple of cycles, and it's been reflected by the product. So Meyer was hired as the senior director of collective bargaining and legal. And of course, the negotiation of the next CBA is still some time away. This current CBA doesn't expire until, what, 2021. So in your estimation, I know that right now this just happened. This is all sort of ambiguous at the moment. But what do you think the MLB PA's angle is in in hiring Bruce Meyer of course it's it's good to have the legal support and he has his background but you know in Major League Baseball there is still free agency even though people think that free agency died this past winter but players already have that

right so and you know it's it's extremely unlikely that in the next CBA for the free agency window is going to say be moved up a year or two. That seems like that's a non-starter. So what do you forecast as maybe the top one or two or even three priorities for the MLBPA in the next CBA that they negotiate? You know, you hire Meyer for two reasons as a trial lawyer when it comes to his area of expertise. Number one, antitrust, because he's one of the top antitrust lawyers in the world right now. And number two, for intellectual property. And you could make an argument that intellectual property for right now, especially

with the CBA, doesn't really matter all that much. But that's not entirely true, because you've started to see, and I wrote about this earlier this season, really weird crackdowns, things like Mike Clevenger's shoes or Ben Zobris' cleats being black, things that are ordinarily associated with intellectual property, culminating in Rob Manfred making comments about Mike Trout not marketing himself appropriately in the league's mind. Meyer is exactly the kind of guy you'd want to defend your league in that instance. And I think that his hire now, as opposed to later, was very deliberate. Number one, it gives him a lot more time to get on board, learn what the

players are going for, figure out what his priorities should and shouldn't be. Because if you bring him on board a year before the next CBA, that's a pretty quick crash course to figure out what it is that your clients want when you're negotiating a deal that big. But bringing him in now, it gives him more time to talk to players. What are your priorities? What are we trying to accomplish? And figure out what assets the MLBPA has that can be used in those negotiations down the road.

And the intellectual property has to be at the top of that list simply because this is what he does probably better than anybody. He's been interviewed about this. He talks about this at a very high level that nobody else really has in this industry. He has an understanding of intellectual property on an international level and on an interstate level, which gives the union a massive amount of leverage that really can't be overstated. And I wrote about this a little bit. The last couple of weeks, we've talked about rights of publicity, for example, with Trevor Bauer filing a lawsuit related to the supposedly unlawful use of his likeness. If Meyer were to sit down with the league and take a hard line on intellectual property, saying that players are entitled to a significant amount of the cut

for that MLB gets from marketing, for example, from MLB Advanced Media. If they were to get a larger cut from Facebook contracts, things like that, all of a sudden he gives them access to revenue streams that they didn't have access to in the beginning. And I think that if you hire somebody whose main focus right now, having basically done everything in antitrust that can be done, whose main focus right now is creating new intellectual property rights and protecting property rights that exist, that is very much a message to the league that they intend to take a hard line on that in a way that the union really hasn't in the past decade or so.

in a way that the union really hasn't in the past decade or so. So maybe this hiring means that we should expect more wars of words or publicly acrimonious comments. Is that the case? I mean, maybe that would have happened anyway. But up to this point, Tony Clark has kind of been seemingly a pretty good-natured, friendly guy. Like, I mean, he will put out a statement every now and then taking issue with something MLB did or didn't do, but it hasn't really devolved into bitterness and insult slinging or any really hard line stuff. And maybe we will see more and more of that now

with Meyer in the fold and with the deadline approaching. You know, it's, I think it's one of two possibilities. Nobody hires a litigator because they want to make friends with the other side. Right. But you don't have to be friends to work well together. And, you know, MLB is not stupid. They have their own really good lawyers and they know what Meyer brings to the table. actually is that the opposite will happen, that they don't want to give Meyer a reason to file a lawsuit because he is one of the few guys who would have to be a heavy favorite whenever he files a lawsuit. Usually you think whenever there's some kind of labor unrest in the professional league, the owners always have an advantage because of just how deep their pockets are. When it comes to Meyer, he is the great equalizer. He is that guy who knows the law so well, he can walk into court and give his client an advantage just by being there. My guess is that at least for right now, MLB is going to back off a little bit

because they want to feel out what his goal is, what is his mission, because he can't be everywhere at once. And like any good litigator, he's going to early on come up with a list of things that are worth fighting over and not worth fighting over going into the next CBA. The thing that's going to be really interesting to me is this winter's free agent market. Because if there is a significant difference in spending, I'd be willing to bet that at that at least a one factor in that was the presence of Meyer, because Meyer is that guy who can if there is a collusion case to be made, he's the guy who can make it. And I imagine that even whether there was or wasn't last time around, MLB will not want to give him any reason to start coming out and talking about potential cases because they know

he'll file them there may be at some point where they try to test him to see how far he's willing to go but i think the real test to see how this is going to go is when we come to late january early february and see who is unsigned and what the players have who have signed have signed for and if we're seeing spending that's more than last offseason or even back to previous levels, I think it'll be very much a signal that MLB is ready to give concessions simply because they want to avoid the bad press and, frankly, the potential legal losses that would come along with litigating against Meyer. I wish we had wins above replacement for labor lawyers because it sounds like Meyer would be way up there. You know, so do I.

It would be really interesting to rank them. So if you look at last offseason, now last offseason's free agent class was nothing like this upcoming offseason's free agent class. But if you just look at it, by and large, it looks like teams were right not to spend few of the free agents have worked out quite like maybe people would have expected them to and the money overall has there's been more money poured into those players than the value that teams have gotten back so the teams would point to that and say look we were we were right now when you when you look at these things the simplest thing to do is try to estimate total league revenues and then

estimate how much the players are getting there There are varying demonstrations of how this is broken for players over the past 10, 15 years. There have been some plots that have shown that players are getting less of league revenue than they used to, whereas Ben dug in. He wrote an article, I don't know, a year ago, less than a year ago. It must have been less than a year ago, where players are actually getting something like, what was it, Ben? 56% of the revenue. I don't think it was that high, but it was higher than what had been reported elsewhere because what had been reported elsewhere wasn't considering some factors like benefits and things like that that do add up to more than if you just take the salary alone. But it's hard to decide what should count as the denominator for revenue and what shouldn't.

So it's hard to say. Right. It's complicated. But what was it? I think the players union essentially signed off on the numbers being correct and that they were. Which did surprise me. I mean, to the extent that they're confirming the numbers as a matter of law, generally benefits and things like that aren't in salary and they're not supposed to be included in salary in most states. So the fact that they were including benefits and things like that as a distribution of the revenue, that's something that was actually really surprising

to me. And, you know, I could be wrong, but that's not something I think that they're going to do moving forward, especially now that they have Meyer in the fold. Right. So, I mean, really, even if the players haven't been getting less of the pie significantly over the past 10 or 15 years, I think that based on last year's free agent spending, you can at least figure that moving forward at current trajectory, they would end up getting less of the pie. And so fundamentally what this negotiation, all these arguments come down to is the players want to make sure that they're keeping up, that they're getting more of the money. So given that it's going to be very difficult to compel teams to spend more in free agency than they want to, because ultimately if they don't get a free agent, then they're hurting themselves, you know, free market rules and all that.

What do you think it looks like for players to get more of the pie than they are getting or than they are projected to get if you cannot convince teams to actually pour more money into free agency than they're comfortable doing you know the interesting thing about last year's free agent class is that i i wonder how much of the well these free agents did not perform argument is that is confirmation bias and i was thinking about this the other day when i was looking at Alex Cobb. So Alex Cobb, they were signed to that big contract by the Orioles, and he was absolutely putrid the first half of the year. But if you look at the second half, he has a 4.08 fifth, which is a lot closer to what his true talent level is. And he's actually looked a lot more like himself, at least to me, in the second half. So you look at some of these players and i think there is data and i think

it's something that the folks on fan graphs have written about too that players who miss spring training tend to get a lower start they tend to be get back to themselves later so it's almost the self-fulfilling prophecy where teams say well we're assigning you late and then they would they don't perform you see we were right i mean we we saw that with Stephen Drew a few years ago with, I think, Boston. I'm not convinced still that the current CBA wasn't the main factor when it comes to why spending was so low, because it wasn't just where they were spending the money. It was also when they were spending the money that was unusual. And granted, it was a really weak free agent class. And it is also, you're right, that was unusual. And granted, it was a really weak free agent class. And it is also, you're right, not an apples to apples comparison, this free agent class

with the coming free agent class. But by the same token, there's going to be a lot of mid-tier free agents who I think make good sense as comparisons to last year to see, OK, what are these guys getting? And it's that mid-tier that's going to tell us if something has actually changed in light of Meyer. The pie is something that probably isn't going to get looked at until the next CBA. And the revenue streams of the future are also going to be different than they are now. One of the things we talked about last time, sports betting, that's the extent of that money pie, we don't know yet,

but we probably will have a much better view of it by the time that CBA comes around. So it's really impossible to speculate what the union is going to be focusing on and what they won't be. I can tell you that MLB Advanced Media is going to be a hot topic because of the intellectual property that the players have that's associated with that. So while there are cases that say that statistics themselves are not protected intellectual property, the player likenesses and things like that are. So if MLB is using their likenesses to market the market stat cast or using their likenesses to market the statistics, at that point, then it does become

something that you can say, well, that belongs to the players because you're using player likenesses. And that's just one example. So my guess is that the current next frontier is StatCast, but it's going to be sports betting that determines who's getting what in the pie. And it's also going to depend on whether or not what we're seeing in terms of the quote unquote, vocal network bubble actually ends up bursting. We've seen a lot of these big TV contracts, they show no sign of abating, and they're making the teams a lot of money. And given that they are showing these players, it's going to be interesting to see how big of a cut of that pie for the new

CBA that the players actually want. So one of the questions at issue in the next negotiations will be service time. And that's another topic that you've been writing about recently. This has been coming up all season and for many seasons in the case of several players in 2018 alone, but recently has been an issue with the Mets specifically. And the Mets are under fire as usual, this time for David Wright, who is in the majors but not active in the majors. He was rehabbing in the minors and the minor league season ended. He was brought up to the majors, but he has not been activated.

And the Mets have been subject to accusations that they are committing insurance fraud by not activating Wright. And then at the same time, they are getting criticized for not calling up Peter Alonso, their big first base prospect who I think led the Miners in home runs this year, but is not being activated because, of course, he is working on his defense, or he has defensive work to do, as does every player who seemingly is otherwise ready for the majors. So tell us about the Mets and why, in this situation, maybe they don't deserve criticism at least any more than every other team does. Well, the funny thing about the Mets, and you can say many things about them and their thrifty nature, but on this one, especially with David Wright, I don't think they're actually doing anything illegal here. The argument seems to be that the idea that there are different health standards for the majors and minors doesn't make any sense. If you've been medically cleared for the minors, then you should be medically cleared for the majors. But looking at this deeper, when I was looking around for writing this piece,

it looks like the Mets actually did have limitations on what Wright could do in the minors. He was not allowed to dive for balls. He was consistently taken out of the game relatively early, not just because of his back, but because the spinal stenosis means that he consistently loses arm strength after five to six innings. So the Mets decided, and you can fault them for the decision, they decided that he was healthy enough to play under those limitations in the minor leagues. Now, in the majors, where in theory, at least, the Mets are trying to win, that's a completely different standard.

You're not going to necessarily want a third baseman who can't throw for the second half of the game. And you're also not going to want a third baseman who can't dive for balls. And he isn't really allowed to slide all that much in the minors either. So, yes, he has put on some highlight reel plays moving forward, moving back. But his lateral movement is something that is essentially non-existent at this point. It's understandable, therefore, why the Mets would say, well, there is this higher standard. We want Wright to be able to go side to side fairly easily before we call him up. So the argument, I think, is not that the Mets are

exaggerating Wright's injury. I mean, just looking at him, you can see that he's still moving in pain. I think a better argument would be that it doesn't make sense to let someone play in live games if they are that hurt because it might aggravate their injury. So that doesn't mean that they're committing insurance fraud. Insurance fraud would mean you're either making up the injury or exaggerating the injury. But there's no real way that David Wright is healthy enough to play third base at the major league level right now. And so for that reason, I think saying the Mets are committing insurance fraud is just not it's not legally correct. And I don't think it's factually correct. So as far as Peter Alonzo is concerned, of course, right now, it's not just

Alonzo. We've got Eloy Jimenez, who's not going to be in the majors this year. We've got Vladimir Greer Jr., who's not going to be in the majors. I don't need to go over all these cases. We've seen them all before. Just say Chris Bryant. People know what you're talking about. Service time manipulation. And if you talk to any executive, if you talk to any executive off the record, everybody knows what's going on. Everybody does it. And, of course, it's in every single team's best interests long term to keep a player in the minors because, you know, a few weeks of bringing a player up are not worth the extra year of team control. This is all fundamentals once you see the dark side of baseball reality.

So right now, every single team that does something like this is acting in its own long-term best interests based on how the CBA is written. So I don't know if you have a proposal for how you could make this system better, because I think everyone would agree that baseball would be better to have players like Jimenez and Alonso and Guerrero in the majors right now. But if you were, let's say, Bruce Meyer, but if you were the players union, how would you approach this? And what sort of, assuming owners wouldn't make a change for nothing, what are manipulating Byron Buxton's service time by saying, oh, yes, that is a consideration that we have to take into account. So teams are not really even hiding it anymore with the wink, wink, nod, nod working on his defense. It's becoming a problem not only because it's affecting the product on the field, but also because on the rare occasion you see somebody do something about it, like Chris Bryant, who filed a grievance about it. It takes it's essentially buried. Bryant filed his grievance back when he was first called up.

It's still not resolved today. As we sit here today, that grievance is still pending. And, you know, in the civil courts, you can have cases pending for two, three, four years. But at some point, when you have a grievance that's supposed to be going to arbitration, that's the kind of thing where you're expecting it to be resolved before then. And the only reasonable response is to say that one party is stalling this. And I doubt that it's the player because Bryant has no incentive whatsoever to keep this going indefinitely. The thing that I would do personally, there is such a thing called collective arbitration. It's something I'm planning to write about in the future. There is a possibility that you could bring a grievance on behalf of multiple players, either separately or together, and say that the service time manipulation is legally dubious. And I wrote about this back in March, an article titled A Possible Legal Argument Against Service Time Manipulation.

And it was based on a really great law review article I read by Patrick Keswick for the Boston College Law Review, based on something called the Covenant of Good Faith and Fair Dealing. called the Covenant of Good Faith and Fair Dealing. Keswick's idea was that you have justified expectations when you sign a CBA, that the other side isn't going to try and use the CBA to undermine your own interests. I thought that perhaps a better argument would have been to say that,

especially for players who aren't on a 40 man, by keeping them in the minors deliberately, the league is essentially denying especially for players who aren't on a 40 man, by keeping them in the minors deliberately, the union is essentially, the league rather, is essentially denying the union membership to players just for their own pecuniary benefit. And I think that that's a violation of the covenant of good faith and fair dealing. The reality is, however, unless these players decide that they wanted to make some kind of big hey about this, dissolve the union, file a lawsuit, it's not going to change until the next CBA. The thing that I would be willing to give up if I were the union, I would consider with some kind of salary cap for

major league teams as a percentage of revenue for that team. But I would demand a salary floor. And I do agree with those people who are saying that there should be a set age at which everybody reaches free agency. 28 seems reasonable to me. I think that's what I would go for. That way, there is no longer an incentive to keep somebody in the minors to wink, wink, work on their defense. The problem that you're going to run into is that anytime you're going to have a system, there is going to be a loophole that people are going to try to use. So what you could end up with, and this is the flip side of saying, okay, everybody's a free agent at 28. If a team knows they're going to lose a player at a certain age,

irrespective of what they do, there is a much greater incentive for them, especially with pitchers, to abuse that right. So the risk that I've seen some people, some law and economics people say is that you could see teams calling up pitchers before they're ready just because they throw hard and telling them to throw 140, 150 pitches a game, knowing that this team will be rid of them at some point, probably before their elbows blow out and it'll be somebody else's problem. So the worry there is that it would undermine free agency for players, that you would cause a greater injury risk. I think that concern is kind of overblown, partly because teams,

you know, elbows are fickle things, shoulders are fickle things. Your elbow could go tomorrow. Throwing a baseball is an unnatural act. But also because if you were to set free agency at like 28, you're theoretically still getting two to three years of the player's prime as part of the free agency. You could see a realignment of what the free agent contracts look like. But I think that the tradeoff of going with a set free agency year would be worth it. I mean, think about how it would change the game if instead of at 31, Aaron Judge hit free agency at 28. That's something that could be huge in terms of the bidding war and the publicity it would generate. And I think that's good for the game. Yeah. I guess there would

always be issues because even if you do it by age, you have guys who are drafted out of high school, you have guys who are drafted out of college, you have players who were signed as amateur free agents at 16 internationally, and they'd be in the system forever before they were 28. So that's tough. I've seen other suggestions that you could just tie it to years as a professional, which maybe gets around some of those problems. So whenever you become a professional, which maybe gets around some of those problems. So whenever you become a professional, whenever you sign, then that starts the clock and that gives teams incentive not to dally too long and to delay you when you're ready. Maybe that's a more workable solution. I don't know. But one of those proposals, it seems like should be pretty high up in Bruce Meyer's

mind or someone's mind at the Players Association. Yeah, the one thing I'll say about the years of professional service, nothing in the law or an agreement is ever easy. And it will come down to how you define the word year. So minor league seasons are much shorter than the major league season. Some minor league seasons, especially down the short season ball, are shorter than the full season league. So if you define a year as a calendar year, the other risk that you run, you say, well, a year is like 100 days of service. Essentially, you have exactly the same thing that you have now, where there's a little loophole that people can use to send people to extended spring training, for example, where they're not actually in a professional league and they don't get that service time to

postpone free agency. So there are going to be problems with whatever system is developed. And that's why most of the law folks that I've spoken to like the idea of an age because it's easy to define age. But there are drawbacks with every system that we come up with. Yeah. And the has to work on his defense thing is just sort of insidious because there's no real way to refute it, which I mean, look, a lot of players do need to work on their defense. There are players who have to work on their defense before they are fully well-rounded big leaguers. And I'm sure that is true in some cases. But really, it's an argument that we can't counter because the Mets can't say

Peter Alonso needs to work on his offense because we have really good offensive stats. And we could point at the stats and say, how does he need to work on his offense? He's hitting 36 home runs. But we don't have as good defensive stats, particularly in the minors. So if they say that, you just kind of have to throw up your hands and say, well, it's probably BS, but maybe he's one of the players who actually does need to work on his defense. So there's just no way to refute it. It's very smart and cunning and frustrating. It's also frustrating because nobody's going to work on their defense not playing in games.

frustrating because nobody's going to work on their defense, not playing in games. So it loses a little bit of its luster for me if you're talking about, well, you know, Peter Alonso needs to work on his defense and the minor league season is over. That's the thing. I think that kind of the lie, it doesn't really support what they're saying if there is no way for him to do that. All right. Well, we appreciate you joining us in the middle of a busy workday and producing all of the content that you produce for Fangraft despite having a full-time job, which seems like it's on the side because you do so much for Fangraft these days. And there are other articles we could talk to you about. I'd love to ask you about your is framing cheating argument, which is fun and a topic that we talk about all the time.

But you've got to go. So I guess we'll say short answer. No, not really. Framing is not cheating. And you can have me on another time for me to tell you why. Yes. OK. Short answer.

It's because the umpire says what a strike is. So if he says that something is or isn't a strike, then it is or isn't a strike. And it's his fault, I guess, for being swayed by the catcher. That's your reading of the rules. Anyway, we appreciate you coming on and covering all these topics that I think are probably

undercovered in the baseball blogosphere just because there aren't that many people with your expertise. So go check out Cheryl's work on Fangraphs and find Cheryl on Twitter at ring underscore Cheryl. Thank you very much for coming on again. Thanks for having me. Okay, so I'm very glad that we were able to have Cheryl on. And now we're going to do the unusual postscript addendum. I don't know, a little some thoughts after the fact because Cheryl had to go but there was a few things to talk about. And I know that service time has been I mean, service time manipulation comes up every year because it happens every year because there's always a top five of any prospect list. And then teams always have their familiar incentives to keep those players in the minors.

And one of the things that Cheryl proposed when we were talking to her was an age-based system that would determine when someone becomes a free agent. And I just had a few thoughts. And I don't know if you agree, disagree. But in terms of how to fix this, I would think that one of the reasons this hasn't been fixed now in part, it's because this affects a small number of players every year, and the union itself is not strongly incentivized to fix this

for players who are not yet in the union. But also, a fix is not so easy to settle on. And one of, I guess there are a few problems with a potential age based free agency system i think i believe this is something that is used in for example the the nhl but for for one thing in the nhl there were fewer players who were maybe going the uh the college route and thinking of there's there's the potential that this could decimate, for example, college systems, because teams would be looking to have players in their systems for longer. So, for example, if you had a player become a free agent at the age of 28, then if you draft someone out of college and he's 21, 22 years old, then he's going to go into the minors. You'll have him there for probably a couple of seasons, and then he comes up, and he's not under team control for very long, whereas teams would strongly prefer to have players who they could have for a very long time. And so you'd be looking at international signings, you'd be looking at players drafted out of high school, teams would be focusing more on those players, which means maybe you would have players wanting to get drafted out of high school more often, because that's where the team focuses. I don't know, it seems like that could be a complication. And another thing that has crossed my mind as well is if you were going to do an age-based system,

you would maybe or probably need to come up with some sort of different system for pitchers and position players because pitchers are at their best, or at least their arm strength is at its best when they're the youngest, and the pitchers break down a lot more often than position players do. And one of the, I don't know if it works out this way through actual compensation numbers, but it feels like there is a lot more risk if you are a professional pitcher that you will never get your payday. And so there's an element of concern to me that if free agency wasn't until 28, then you would have pitchers who might have been just as valuable as a position player through age 27, but the

pitcher might be more hurt or his career might even be over by that point. And so I know that as we talked about, there are problems with any system you come up with, but the age-based system seems to come with some potentially serious ones. Yeah, it does. It's really hard to come up with the perfect solution for this problem. And I don't know, it's been discussed that maybe the minor leaguers could become part of the MLBPA. And that's another subject that Cheryl has written about that I would have liked to bring up before. But that is pretty thorny itself in that there are

reasons why it might make sense, but there are a lot of reasons why it seems like it wouldn't be a very natural marriage between major leaguers and minor leaguers because these are two distinct groups and bodies of players with different and at times conflicting goals and incentives and there's something of a competition between them so that's a really tough thing to do i mean if you admitted all minor leaguers into the mlbpa it would suddenly be majority minor leaguers into the MLBPA, it would suddenly be majority minor leaguers, I guess. And I don't know if they would have fewer rights or less status somehow in the union. I'm not a lawyer like Cheryl, and I don't know all the implications of

that. But it seems like it's a lot harder to do than just say, well, make all the baseball players be in one union. I think there are reasons why they're not and why it might not work that well. But the current system doesn't work perfectly either. And even young major leaguers are currently not all that protected by the Major League Baseball Players Union. It's sort of oriented toward getting veterans their due. And these days, with the way the game is going, that hasn't been as winning a formula as it once was. Right. And now it is worth pointing out, I guess, that while we can focus on the cases of Peter Alonso,

Vladimir Guerrero Jr., and Eloy Jimenez, you can look at a team like Byron Buxton as well. You can look at a team like the Padres, I guess. They did just promote top prospect Luis Urias. I don't know exactly how that's going to be pronounced because everyone does it a little bit differently, but we'll go with Luis Urias. They also recently promoted Francisco Mejia. Now, he has been in the majors very briefly before when he was with the Indians, but the Padres have at least called up some prospects and they're using up some service time now, even though the Padres are clearly not close to contention. So it's not like this is

something that happens all the time, but this is something that does continue to happen. And I think you and I would both agree that baseball would be better to have the good players up in the majors right now, and they are not. But I guess I can't tell if maybe an age-based system comes with these complications, and now the current system comes with some complications that are very unattractive. But now I understand the argument. If you simply change the rules so that a service year required far fewer days of being in the majors, I know the argument is that, well, that just shifts the window

and you would still have the same things happening. But if you, for example, said that a service year was like, I don't know, 50 days of being on a major league roster instead of 172, then teams would face a more severe performance penalty for not bringing up a player who was ready, right? So it seems like it wouldn't be a perfect solution, but not only would it be an improvement on the current one, but by keeping the same basic rules in place, but just changing the number, it seems like it would also be the easiest to negotiate because you wouldn't be overhauling the system itself. You would just be moving the definition of a service year, which I think would be more palatable for all parties involved.

Yeah, it was interesting that Thad Levine of the Twins actually acknowledged the Twins' thinking on this. the twins actually acknowledged the twins thinking on this. I mean, not that he is thinking about Buxton any differently than any other GM or team is thinking about its young player that it's not promoting, but he actually came out and said, I think part of our jobs is we're supposed to be responsible to factoring service time into every decision we make. We wouldn't be doing our jobs if we weren't at least aware of service time impacts on decisions we make, which is true. And again, nothing that every other executive at baseball doesn't think. But at this point, I think most of them are conditioned not to actually acknowledge that. I guess the thing is that Buxton is like the one player you can't say he has to work on his defense. It's like,

although I guess with Buxton, you could say he has to work on other things. He has to work on hitting for more than a month or two at a time. But yeah, I was surprised that Thetleveen actually came out and said that because in this environment that never goes over well. Yeah, right. You would have been perfectly easy to say Byron Buxton needs to work on his offense. He's been a bad hitter, even when he's been a good major league hitter. The underlying numbers weren't really encouraging.

But I guess if you are an executive, maybe you feel like this will be a refreshing moment of honesty. But it's easy to see how. If people are already looking for an executive to say something that's just kind of talking around the truth, then you might as well just stick with the precedent. If you stick with the precedent, then you will get a known amount of uproar. Whereas if you, you know, as like people say, if you say the quiet part loud, then you're going to get a different kind of uproar. And, you know, better with the devil you know than the devil you don't. So, yeah. And maybe you just leave yourself more open to a grievance being filed at some point if you actually come out and say, yeah, that was service time as opposed to just the defense or offense or whatever nebulous thing that the player is still working on

right so now what do you think of the short-term benefits for a team that actually does promote a prospect every so well like i don't know i think of the mariners and they brought up michael pineda for example and he was on the roster right out of spring training or if you look at the white socks they did bring up Michael Kopech. This year they did not bring up Eloy Jimenez. I think it's not hard to explain why that's happened. Kopech is a hard-throwing pitcher. It's more difficult to bank on him being healthy and effective

seven years down the line than Eloy Jimenez, even though I think the White Sox would agree that they're both very good prospects and they're both part of the core. But what do you think is sort of the real short-term benefit of calling a guy up? What would the Blue Jays have to gain from bringing Vladimir Guerrero up before September? Well, goodwill on Twitter. I don't know what that's worth, but there's that. There's presumably some attendance bump, I would think, if you're a team that is kind of in the doldrums like the Blue Jays are this year, and you call up one of the very best prospects in baseball who also happens to be famous and well-known because of his name and his father.

You'd think that some people would come out to the park to see that player or watch the games that wouldn't have watched the games otherwise. I don't know exactly how to quantify that. Otherwise, I don't know exactly how to quantify that. But yeah, I mean, in the Puget's case, they're not going to be contending for anything with Vlad Guerrero or without him this year. There are times, naturally, where when you call up a player, you actually do benefit from that. And maybe you make the playoffs and you wouldn't have made the playoffs otherwise. I guess the example that is the easiest to cite would be the 2010

Braves, right, who called up Jason Hayward on opening day, even though he was 20 years old at the time. And Jason Hayward, it turns out, had a career year probably at age 20, which no one would have expected exactly. But that year, the Braves won the wildcard, right? And they needed those wins. So they benefited from that in multiple ways in that they got a good player that people could see all season. And they also were able to make the playoffs. And who knows, maybe they wouldn't have without that six war or so season from Jason Hayward. So that happens. But if you're a team that's totally out of it, I don't knows, maybe they wouldn't have without that six-war or so season from Jason Hayward. So that happens. But if you're a team that's totally out of it, I don't know.

Maybe you gain some attendance. You gain some goodwill. You gain possibly some insight into a player. I don't know whether you do in all cases or most cases. But seeing what a player can do at the major league level, introducing him to that atmosphere and that pressure maybe helps him in some way for the following year again i don't know how to quantify that but these are all somewhat nebulous things that may be benefits but it's hard to say that they outweigh the benefit of getting an extra full year of that guy once he's theoretically in his prime or close to it so you can understand

why this keeps happening as long as it's technically allowed yeah and anecdotally it feels like we've entered near where prospects are spending less time in the minors than they used to you can look at a guy like Acuna or even more visibly you can look at a guy like Juan Soto who came up very very quickly he spent remarkably little time in the minor leagues before coming up and being dominant now clearly his being so good in the majors retroactively justifies the haste with which he was promoted. But it's sort of you're at a conflicting point where service time manipulation is more evident than ever. And yet players are also moving quicker. So it's sort of moved things up while also moving things back.

So I don't know. It's complicated. We haven't solved it today. But I think we've probably talked enough about this. So do you agree? I do. And I've been meaning to look into whether players are coming up younger or with less minor league experience. I have a request in for some stats on that, primarily for the book, but maybe when I get them at the end of the season, I've been waiting just because there's so many September promotions that could change things. But I will be curious to see whether that actually shows up in the numbers. Because I remember writing about it back at Baseball Prospectus in like 2011 or something, but I wasn't able to look at a long-term trend. And things have changed quite a bit, even since 2011, when it comes to youth in baseball. So

we'll see. Agreed. So we will leave it there for today, or at least for this episode today. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. Following five listeners have already decided to do that. Philip Baker, Timothy Cullen, Drew Broadfoot, Joel Berger, and David Rifkin. Thanks to all of you.

You can also 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 and other podcast platforms. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. Please keep your questions and comments coming for me and Jeff via email at podcastfangraphs.com or if you're a supporter via the Patreon messaging system. All right, so stay tuned. It's a doubleheader. Check your podcast feeds. You'll soon see a new episode if you're a supporter via the Patreon messaging system. All right, so stay tuned. It's a double header. Check your podcast feeds.

You'll soon see a new episode if you don't already. So we will talk to you again shortly. Let's play two. Red and green was the color of the ground manipulation. Pale blue was the color of the steel manipulation. Yellow, yellow was her hair. Icy gray was her glare. Manipulation.

Manipulation.