Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1296: Hot Prospect Content

Episode Date: November 16, 2018

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Willians Astudillo‘s current strikeout-less streak, a few more people who gave much more than 100 percent, and end-of-season-award voting, including Mike Trout’s showing in the AL MVP race, Jacob deGrom and pitchers as MVPs, and why Jeff voted for Justin Verlander for AL Cy Young over victor Blake […]

There's a hundred million people in my mind Which is me, and which is not Which is me, and which is not There's one kneeling down his fingers to the cross It ain't me, so am I lost Hello and welcome to episode 1296 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I'm Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs. Hello! of the ringer joined by jeff sullivan of fancraft hello according to mlb.com but really in my lb.com it looks like williams estudio is uh batted three times on thursday evening for the uh caribbe stay

i'm not going to try that and he has hit his first home run his first home run of the winter league that would bring him up to if i am adding this all correctly 93 plate appearances that would be his first home run he's got eight doubles a triple five walks zero strikeouts still at zero the next highest at bat total for anybody in the league with zero strikeouts is 22 for wilfredo jimenez if you look at uh at the whole leaderboard williams estudio as uh he's up there in at bats he's not the league leader but pretty much Estadillo. He's up there in at-bats. He's not the league leader, but pretty much everybody above him has struck out double-digit number of times. Andy Wilkins.

You might remember the name Andy Wilkins if I don't really have a follow-up. You probably don't remember the name Andy Wilkins. He's been an affiliate of baseball before. Maybe he still is. I don't know. He's batted 91 times, similar to Estadillo. He's got 30 strikeouts, homers 19 walks just a completely different route to like a pretty decent final ops but astadillo is batting 333 slugging 444 that

number is actually even higher now so for anyone out there who's wondering what's going on with williams astadillo you know as soon as you turn on this podcast you must wonder no longer he is yeah not striking out in v in Venezuela we actually got a tweet a little while ago from Octavio Hernandez who is a baseball writer in Venezuela and he linked us to a leaderboard that looks like it's a Venezuelan baseball stat site and it actually has Astudillo at 104 plate appearances so I don't know where the discrepancy is there but either way zero strikeouts so he is uh very much an outlier and this is actually Octavio sent us a list of all of the Venezuelan baseball seasons with a hundred plate appearances at least and sorted by the

fewest strikeouts and top of that leaderboard, a lot of Williams-Estadillo. He's number one. He's number two. He's number four. He is just an entity unto himself. So yeah, he is taking it up a notch, if anything, his contact exploits this winter. So fun to see. Speaking of Williams-Estadillo, baseball announced the MVP awards.

I don't know. Do we do the awards? What are we doing here? A little bit MVP awards. I don't know. Do we, are we going to do the awards? What are we doing here? A little bit of awards. So preview of the rest of this episode. Most of this episode will be a conversation with Fangraphs writers, Eric Langenhagen and Craig Edwards. We are going to talk about prospects and changes in scouting and player development. There's been a bunch of prospect content on FanGraphs this week. So mostly going to talk about that. Also going to talk to Craig

about the new gigantic broadcast deal that was just announced with MLB and Fox. But we'll get to that in a few minutes. One quick follow-up that I have for you before we get to award stuff, a little bit of award stuff. I have a few submissions from people about players and people giving a certain percentage of effort, a follow-up to our conversation last time about

players giving more than 100%. So first one I want to mention, this is a submission from Kyle. He says, this is not a baseball example, but comes from the show Survivor. During season five of the show, there was an unfortunate incident where a contestant, Ted Rogers, may have acted in an inappropriate manner toward a fellow cast member, Gandia Johnson. There are no confirmed details of the story

since it happened at night and cameras were off. Reality TV, always wholesome. However, the morning following the incident, Rogers said to the camera that he was 150 to 200% happy with the wife that he had, despite the less than ideal circumstances to get this great wisdom. Thought it would be worth passing along. This is not actually an effort percentage, but it still seemed relevant because we had not really heard of a range like that. We had heard a lot of specificity, 110%, 120%, but to say 150 to 200%, that is pretty imprecise. I want more precision. I think that if you were to convert that to an effort metric,

he was putting zero to 50% of his effort into preserving his marriage so yes that's true it reminds me a little bit of uh if you have a pitcher who's coming back from injury and he's he's doing his rehab he's throwing a bullpen and then there will be tweets or statements or even the pitcher himself or say oh yeah i'm going out there and i'm throwing at 75 and i always wonder i always wonder how you control that and it might be one of those situations where the human brain is actually better at doing this just with our body without our knowledge maybe if you go out there and say i would like to throw at 75 then you actually do throw at 75 that would be an interesting thing to study and maybe it already has been studied by teams or at places like

driveline but it's always it always amuses me. Your rehab, you throw it 50%, then 75%, then sometimes you go out there, you're giving 90% to 95%. But at that point, what are you really doing? Right. Next example comes from Dan. I think a couple people pointed this out to us because it's a pretty well-known historical example. This is also not an effort example,

but in 1972, presidential candidate George McGovern said he backed his vice presidential pick, Tom Eagleton, 1,000 percent as Eagleton was under fire for receiving mental health treatment for depression. Three days later, Eagleton was dropped from the ticket, which makes me think I kind of have a hunch that the higher you go with your percentage, the less sincere you are. Like I'm more inclined to believe the 110% guy than I am someone who just says a thousand. Because at that point, you don't actually feel a thousand. So I don't trust you anymore. Yeah, I agree with you. Also, I have a new quote. Okay.

So we have a couple different sources for this uh i agree that the closer you are to 100 as long as you go over then you do sound more sincere because even though you're breaking the law of uh of numbers i guess that at least you're you're at least hinting at the idea of being constrained by by the limits by the uh i don't know the not quite asymptotes but we've got new kent easily repeats region one wrestling championship by mike moore correspondent on february 13th 2011 this is from the daily press and if i can find the quote this is from new kent's nolan schultz i injured my back in october and have worked hard to get back it's using back two different ways in the same sentence my My goal is to be a state champion, the junior said. I will have to give 220% effort.

We also have from UPI, the little old lady becomes powerful. I don't know what that means. I'm not going to read what that means. I'm just going to do the control F. But Gastineau decided that because several key jets are hurt for the Bengals game, quote, instead of 110%, we're going to have to give 220% Sunday. Because we have injured players, we're going to have to try twice as impossibly hard. So I'm up to 220.

You got anything else? What do you got? I have one last one, and this just might put an end to this topic forever because I don't know how it could possibly be topped. This comes from a listener named Daniel, and it's a link to a website called crash.net, which I guess is a motorcycle racing website, which doesn't seem like the best thing you could name that website. I don't know. But this article includes a lot of terms and names that I am so unfamiliar with that it's even hard to describe what it is. But this is about a motorcycle race, so I'm just going to read it. Alex Espargaro spent last week's test focusing on new components such as the swing arm, which gave

good sensations as he looks to bounce back from a shocking run of technical issues that have seen him complete just one 2018 race at full speed. Quote, Le Mans is a lot of stop and go, and the Aprilia is not the best for this, as Pargaro said of this weekend's race, but I don't care about the layout or the country we're in. I will give one million percent, one million percent in the next race to put the bike on the podium. One million percent. And I was happy to find a Serena Williams quote here about someone giving 300%, but I lose. Please, 300, get out of here. Then this gets even more confusing. Okay, continuing.

And with just a tenth place in Texas from the four rounds, the Spaniard is prepared to throw caution to the wind. Quote, if there is a very small positive thing in all of this, it is that with three zeros, it's difficult to fight to put the bike in a good position in the championship. I don't care. I will go 100% every weekend to try and fight for the podium until Valencia. This is the same guy.

In a quote two paragraphs later, he went from 1 million percent to 100%. He is all over the place. I don't know what Espargaro was thinking here. I found an article from Daily Writing Tips. It's by Simon Kuhn. It's a two-minute read. The headline, 100 100 will suffice it's quite common to read of people particularly sportsmen and performers promising to give 110

effort england cricketer andrew flintoff for example once promised to give 110 in every game he played of course to do so would be impossible i'm not going to actually read this two-minute read on the podcast, but this has at least been written about by somebody who's at least trying to offer some pushback and just say, stop giving. You are all very good players. We are all very good players. You will beat Shelbyville. We will beat Shelbyville. You will give 110%. That's impossible. No one can give more than 100%. By definition, that is the most anyone can give. In fact, the reason this came up

is because in the penultimate paragraph, there is a, quote, search the internet, and you can find people saying they will give 1 billion percent effort, and so on, presumably, until we reach infinity percent. So that is all that came up when i searched for a billion percent i was just trying to dash your million percent to

smithereens but also i guess the uh the speaker immediately smashed his own estimate to smithereens yeah all right so quick awards convo all the awards have been announced now. Most of them were pretty predictable. Mookie Betts won the AL MVP award, and Christian Jelic won the NL MVP award, and Jacob deGrom won the NL CyGrom got only one first place MVP vote, I believe. Shout out Nick Pecorro. Yeah, friend of the pod, Nick Pecorro. I don't know if that's surprising or not. Maybe it's sort of surprising. I mean, obviously, there are a lot of voters who feel like pitchers should not win the MVP award because they have their own award. And I know that technically they are eligible for it.

And so it's sort of silly that Jacob deGrom only gets one first place vote because he may very well have been the most valuable player in the NL. Now, maybe he didn't get more because he was on the Mets and Jelic was on the Brewers. Maybe it's a playoff team thing. It seems like maybe there's less playoff team or good team bias for the Cy Young than there is for the MVP just because MVP has value. And so people really pay a lot of attention to the word value, which maybe they don't for the Cy Young. Anyway, if Jacob deGrom can only get one first place MVP vote, we might as well just separate these awards, it seems to me, at this point. It's just why even have pitchers technically eligible for this if no one's going to vote for them anyway. That is one thought that I had.

The other thought is that Mike Trout got 24 of the second place votes for the AL MVP voting, which I was kind of encouraged by. I honestly didn't know where Trout would come in here because I certainly could have seen JD Martinez finishing up there or Jose Ramirez. I know he didn't finish all that well, but obviously he and Lindor and JD Martinez were all playoff teams, good teams. And yet Trout was still second place, a distant second. But I think that shows the respect that the electorate has for him. Going back to DeGrom, I noticed that DeGrom's first place vote from Nick Pecora as well. And so there are 30 ballots that are submitted for each league. And Jacob DeGrom showed up on 22 mvp ballots in

the national league he of course won the scion so 22 is what what i don't understand is why you have i i already wrote about jacob de grom in the mvp case like a month or two ago and i i don't need to restate it i think we talked about it on the podcast we probably did but i i guess for it should at least someone should just say either we're voting for pitchers or we're not. And now, of course, the rules already say pitchers are eligible, which seems like it would be an open and shut case. But right now, to have DeGrom sort of half in, half out, or I guess three quarters in and a quarter out, I don't know what the result result is telling us what does it mean that 22 people think that a pitcher is eligible for the mvp i don't i don't know but if this were any closer than those eight people who left to grom off could have cost him the mvp award and i think

we've seen that before so it's just kind of it's frustrating and i don't want to say that you and i have different perspectives on this and that's fine i uh i'm an originalist what is that a textualist i don't know the words but i i think it says pictures are eligible therefore i think pictures should be eligible and yeah they have their own award too but that's great sometimes pictures can have two awards that's fine people aren't playing for the words they're playing for the world series and more importantly they're playing for money so i don't think that pictures should be excluded but i do think that someone needs to at least offer some sort of update that says pitchers are absolutely eligible or pitchers are absolutely not eligible because this in-between is just ridiculous. DeGrom got a first place vote and he was left off of eight ballots. What kind of world are we living in?

Yeah, that's the biggest problem with this world as far as I can see. So Sam Miller had an AL MVP vote. Good looking ballot from Sam. You had an AL Cy Young vote. I did not have any votes because, again, I'm in the New York chapter and every other voter is in the New York chapter of the Baseball Writers Association. So I still have not ever had an award vote, which I don't mind, but it's just sort of strange because depending on where you live in the country, you can vote almost every year or no years, but that's the way it is. So you got to vote for ALMVP, and that I think was clearly the most controversial, divisive result, and you did not vote for the fellow who won so we should probably talk about that one briefly we all get two senators man no matter what city you live in i the seattle chapter is

smaller but we've got equal say in the baseball government i don't know the front page the front page of bbwa.com the the headline of the article for mookie betts winningts winning the MVP is it's batting champ Mookie Betts wins AL MVP. Who effing cares? Just call him Mookie Betts. Great player Mookie Betts wins AL MVP. You just have to throw in some traditional bull. So, yeah, so my vote was for AL. So Young and I chose Justin Furlander over Blake Snell.

One of the interesting things about this is that you submit your ballot between the end of the regular season and the start of the playoffs. And then all the results come out a month and a half later. And I forgot what I did. So I was as surprised as anybody else to see who I voted for. I mean, I remember that I voted for Verlander over Snell, but I completely forgot the rest of my ballot. And so that was a nice little eye-opener. And then I got to write about it and try to retroactively justify what I did. And I think that what's interesting about this year's AL Cy Young race is that it came down to sort of an innings versus quality argument.

And I feel confident that I made the right decision between Verlander and Snell. But where I'm still a little squishy is I still don't really feel great trying to rank relievers with starters. I put Blake Trinan fourth, but I could easily, as I say this, the 40% of me wants to say no reliever should pretty much ever show up on the Cy Young list. And I don't know where I'm going to be a year from now. And I know Trevor Bauer posted a tweet where he was comparing himself to Blake Snell because of course he would do that. And he compared himself rather favorably

even though Trevor Bauer did not get almost any Cy Young support at all and there is an argument to be made there I mean if you're going to say that Snell is a deserving winner even though he only threw 180 innings then Bauer threw 175 innings missed a similar amount of time why not open the door to Bauer and for that matter if you are going to choose snell as the winner even though it threw 34 fewer innings than verlander why not chris sale who threw 22 fewer innings than blake snell and i still don't feel really confident about my footing here i didn't include sale on my ballot he would i think it was amazing and i would have had him in the next five but he didn't make it i docked him because he only threw 17 innings in August and September combined,

and I just feel like availability has to be a factor. But the proper counterargument to that is, well, what is war for? War balances performance and quantity, and Chris Sale had a really good war, and I don't have a good response to that. Maybe I was wrong, but I do feel confident that Justin Verlander should have won. So at least for the most important spot, I feel good about that. But everything beyond that, I'm still kind of confused, even though I voted. That's not a good ringing endorsement of my ballot.

Well, yeah, I had no strong opinions on this because I didn't have to have any strong opinions. opinions on this because I didn't have to have any strong opinions. But when I saw that Snell won and then looked at the stats, I was sort of surprised that Snell won. I agree that Verlander should have won. I think that if I had had a vote, I would have voted for Verlander. And it's funny, I mean, Blake Snell probably has the least name recognition of any other contender for this award. I saw a lot of consternation about who's Blake Snell, and I just heard of this guy a little while ago, and suddenly he's the AL Cy Young Award. And is this Ian Snell? This is a different guy? Oh, okay. So in terms of being good for baseball or marketable, probably Blake Snell is the worst thing that you could have done, but that shouldn't be a consideration. I just think that Verlander had a very sizable advantage in innings.

I mean, 34 innings, right? That's a lot of innings. And in terms of performance, you can make a case that he was as good or better than Blake Snell. It just depends what stats you're looking at and what your philosophy is on voting for retroactive things that happened. There are people who think, well, Blake Snell allowed fewer runs. I mean, that's why he won this award, presumably, is that, A, he had more wins, and I know that wins are clearly not the be-all and end-all anymore. Jacob deGrom was almost a unanimous winner, I think, except for one voter, and he had 10 wins. But if you have kind of a toss-up, I'm sure that, you know, the

fact that Snell was, I guess, the only 21-game winner and one of two 20-game winners this year. Probably helped a little, as did the fact that he had a 1.89 ERA, which, other than Jacob deGrom, was the best there was. So that was probably why he took this award. But if you look at FIP, if you look at XFIP, you know, the various defense independent stats, they say Justin Verlander was better. And Justin Verlander had a higher strikeout rate. He had a lower walk rate. Justin Verlander was really, really good this year. So it all depends. If you say, well, runs are all that matters and it happens, so it's in the books, then you could say that Snell pitched better. But if you say, well, did he actually?

If we're only looking at the things that were actually under his control, Verlander seemed to be more dominant, and it sure looks like Snell probably just got a little lucky, and he happened to pitch really well with runners on base, so he had a very high strand rate, and he had a low BABIP, and all of that. It's not a projection award we're not saying who would have been better if you had pitched this season a thousand times or who'll be better next season but it gets complicated even when you're looking at it

in retrospect because you can say that well yeah we're looking at what actually happened but part of what happened is what was directly under the pitcher's control and verlander was better at those things all these things are complicated and they're also they're not pointless because they matter to the players but like at least when we're doing regular baseball analysis which is complicated the idea is well we're trying to get a good player and then make this team good or make this trade even or whatever the the end game is is pretty obvious this we want this team to make a good move but with awards you've got these basically unanswerable questions and for what what are we doing even somebody gets like i don't know a hundred thousand dollar bonus or maybe hit some incentive in in

their contract but otherwise i've never in all of my years of following sports i have never once cared about an award and i've been a very emotional fan like a more typical like super fan of sports teams in the past and even then i thought well this doesn't matter what matters is the games that are played and whether the team is good and so i i would like to feel more confident about filling out my cy young ballot and what i did after justin vertlander maybe i was wrong to have blake snell in second place maybe it should have been garrett cole maybe it should have been chris sale i don't know garrett cole was really good arguably better than blake snell but maybe i was biased by that era but not only am i having trouble getting to an answer i'm'm getting no guidance for an answer. And I'm not convinced that there is an answer, in which case we're all just kind of beating our heads against the wall for absolutely no reason but to generate some sort of a hot take content in the middle of November, which I guess is a purpose, but it doesn't really feel good.

It doesn't really feel good. Yeah. Yeah. The other complicating factor, which one of our Patreon supporters, Isaac, asked us about is the times through the order effect. And that comes into play here because you have Verlander who went, I guess, what, 6.3 innings per start. You had Snell who went 5.8 innings per start. I don't know what the percentages were of the number of batters that they faced the third time through the order, but I'm sure that Verlander had a significantly higher percentage. The Rays had quick hooks, of course, and Snell was not going as deep into games.

So part of the rate difference is that, too. So it's not just that Verlander had more innings on Snell it's that you could say that all those innings kind of came deeper in the game or he was facing more guys just for the third time in a game and so that would have an impact on his peripherals on his rate stats which again were pretty good compared to Snell. But that's another adjustment you could make. And I don't know whether you penalize the pitcher for that or not. It's probably the manager's decision to pull him.

But if you wanted to say that Snell should win because he has a better ERA or something, well, if he had pitched as many innings as Verlander did, probably wouldn't have had quite as good an ERA so it gets complicated yeah Verlander threw 27% of the batters that Verlander faced were the third or fourth time through the order and for Snell it was 21.6% so a clear advantage for Verlander in these splits where again I don't even know what we're doing but those are numbers so So that's something to point to. Blake Snell, his ERA by trips through the order. These are ridiculous splits, but who cares? First time through the order, 1.01.

Second time, 1.76. Third time, 3.89. So I don't know what that tells you, but I'm just going to leave it there. I don't know what that tells you. It doesn't matter. But Verlander worked deeper, and this is going to be one of those complicating factors that we're going to maybe see more and more often as we do Cy Young voting moving forward. But then also less and less often as just like the workhorses completely disappear because that's also going to happen at some point, right? So in a way, baseball will solve this on its own.

But then we get to deal with like the bulk guy role and award voting. You think it's all fun and games and you're critical of the people who do it and then you get a ballot and you're like oh no these are hard and they take a lot of effort and work and then even when you get there you're not really pleased with where you end up except that mike tractioned win at the mvp almost every year yeah although this year you could make a very good case for Mookie Betts winning. Aside from the playoff stuff and the narrative and the teammates support,

Mookie Betts was just a deserving winner. He was great. So, yeah, I don't think it, I mean, Verlander will be fine. He has won a Cy Young before. I think this is his third runner-up Cy Young finish. I think he also has a third place and a fifth place, two fifth place finishes in there.

I mean, it's not a case where some guys you look and you say, well, down the road with their Hall of Fame voting, maybe the fact that they won one Cy Young instead of two Cy Youngs, maybe that makes a difference. But I can't imagine it will for Verlander because if Justin Verlander doesn't make the Hall of Fame, then no starting pitcher will make the Hall of Fame in this era. So ultimately, I don't think it makes much of a difference. Yeah, Justin Verlander is going to be fine. All right. That it? Yeah. Yeah. Because we got to do this again tomorrow. So let's stop it now. Yeah. Okay. So we'll take a quick break and we will be back with Eric Langenhagen and Craig Edwards.

Just so you know, there was a problem with Eric's mic. It's a bit blown out, but we did what we could. I think it's tolerable. But just a heads up or ears up. Okay, be right back. The ultimate good move Life will be a piece of cake Please find me a river Right, it is the start of the off-season, which means it is prime prospect season.

I've been thinking of this as Scouting Week at Fangraphs, and then I said something to Kylie McDaniel about, hey, we should do a podcast about Scouting Week, and he said, is it Scouting Week? So I guess it's not technically Scouting Week, but I'm just thinking of branding here. There's a lot of prospect content on the website, and two of the people who have been bringing it to the internet are with us now. One of them is one half of the untitled McDonaghan project that I hope gets a title at some point soon hey eric eric longan hagan hello hello no i don't think so no you're sticking with that yeah titled forever i think

it'll just be ump like we'll just refer to it as ump yeah that works and also joined by fancraft's writer craig edwards hey craig i am also here. Thank you for confirming that. So Eric has been doing the more scouty stuff and Craig has been doing the more statty stuff, but I guess these old distinctions are breaking down. We're all stats people and scouts people these days. So I guess I will start with Craig because you have, I don't know how you've had time to do all the different studies that you have done this week Presumably you were working on them for a while before now But you have done all sorts of cool prospect valuation work and looked for positional biases in prospect rankings And just, I guess, a very broad question to begin with

Why do we want to value prospects? How is that useful to us to I guess. But in a world where teams trade prospects for proven major league players or sometimes for other prospects, it helps to have a way to compare them in some way. And, you know, I think that it's hard to compare, you know, prospects to major league players without putting some sort of a dollar value on those players, because when players get traded, they're traded along with their contracts. And, you know, if you're Christian Yelich or Chris Archer and you have a favorable contract, then you have to figure out some way to figure out how much value a team is going to get out of that player and that contract. And prospects sort of have an unknown contract ahead of them. And we can sort of make estimates based on what other

prospects have done in order to compare them. And Eric, how is it helpful to you and Kylie, as you're making these lists, as you're coming up with your rankings philosophies, you started the team by team rankings with the Cardinals this week to have these numbers and these baselines in mind. Yeah, it's there are a couple of different reasons. The reducing everything to a monetary value is helpful because then we can start doing it with other stuff, too. Right. Like we can start doing it with draft picks and international bonus pool slots yeah then we don't have to think of the players as humans we can just call them dollar values that's always more convenient yeah and that's part of the reason that like we've been reticent to dive into this until now but also

and like there is sort of a gross aspect we're going to have Meg on the podcast on the UMP podcast to talk about why we're gross for doing this but also we have essentially said that hundreds of minor leaguers are grossly underpaid and here's some evidence to prove it, so that's good

but yeah, there are a lot of different reasons for doing it, and also it's just a good check on, hey, the guys at the top of the prospect rankings should produce more you know like it is a check on how we are doing on this side of things like lining these guys up yeah that's true actually being able to say so and so is 50 million dollars of surplus value to a team or expected value to a team, I think maybe just highlights just how valuable these players are and how little they are being paid.

So if anything, it kind of helps make that argument about, hey, these guys are worth all this money. A, why wouldn't you want to invest in them and make sure that the conditions are ripe for them to prosper but also hey these guys are worth this much and they're getting paid this much and those numbers are not at all close together yeah obviously that's going to be a huge issue during the next cba you kind of already see it coming and just the way baseball players are compensated in general i think is going to be a huge talking point but we don't think you, I don't necessarily think every 40 future value hitter is worth

exactly $2 million. This is just sort of like, we're just sort of looking for a blanket way of valuing really farm systems as a whole. Ranking farm systems, I haven't done it, you know, since the two years and some changes I've been at Fangraphs, I haven't lined up the farm systems because it really is even more subjective, in my opinion, than evaluating an individual player because there are clearly some teams that do things a specific way, teams that cast these wide nets at the lower levels and have all these really interesting athletes on the backfields and try to make something out of them,

and those guys don't really do well on prospect lists unless you have someone like living and seeing all those players in Florida or Arizona. And so like, it's hard to capture the value of quantity. And I think that doing this, what Craig has done helps us do that a little bit better, where we can look at Cleveland's farm system and see, wow, look at all these really interesting 17, 18, and 19-year-olds that they have that are 40s and a bunch of them are going to turn into something and a bunch of them aren't and try to quantify that a little bit more and see what that shape of a farm system looks like compared to the Blue Jays farm system, which has this monolithic figure at the very top that's worth, according to Craig's math, more than some of the

weaker farm systems are put together. Just another Mariner's podcast. So not to delve too far into the methods, but of course, all of this talk is about the methods that go into the studies. And one of the things that's really interesting to me, you, both Eric and Craig, and I guess Craig has done most of the number crunching, but you have built this around feature value or FV, which is sort of the chosen prospect grade, according to Eric and Kylie. But of course, FV is something that doesn't exist

if you go back five or 10 or 15 years. So how did you go through the process of essentially converting prospects as they were ranked into prospects that were in accordance with the the template that you were using? Yeah, well, you know, Baseball America, you know, going back to 1996, you know, didn't necessarily have all the same values published. So in order to make it useful, going forward, I sort of I asked Kyle Kyle and Eric what is roughly the appropriate number of prospects that we would find at each sort of grade level, and then put those numbers back on all the old lists so that they would hopefully be useful for future lists.

so that they would hopefully be useful for, you know, future lists. And I think that by doing it, the other way is to try and go through and approximate every single prospect that existed prior to 2010 and determine, you know, their individual number of values. And I think trying to go do that with, because we have the benefit of hindsight would lead to potentially a ton of errors just because you recognize the names of the players that pan out and you also recognize the big players who didn't pan out. prospects, you know, we roughly should have at each level, it makes it more useful going forward when we're coming up with the values. I know Jeff Zimmerman said it was a huge pain in the ass to go through when he did his study in determining all of the values that they, that Baseball America did have for a few years or whatever. And I chose an easier path. Yeah, give us the Vlad Jr. numbers and the gulf between Guerrero and everyone else, because it's wide.

I think that, you know, what the results of the study, you know, generally showed is that, you know, the guys who are, you know, the best prospect or the second best prospect, they just, they have a lot better outcomes than the guys ranked, you know, third or lower. And I think that, you know, one of the things that at least these results showed is that, you know, the 65 versus 60 isn't as big of a distinction. You know, those guys are sort of pulled pretty close together. Whereas if you get up to that 70 level, if you're the number one prospect in baseball, your outcomes are going to end up being pretty good. And, you know, out of everybody, like I think maybe just Delman Young ended up really, really bad. But everybody else, you know, they had pretty close to star level outcomes.

And, you know, that's averaging everybody out. And so if you look at these type of players, they end up, you know, with 20 to 30 war over their, you know, first, you know, five to 10 seasons. And that's an all-star level player. And you take that 25 to 30 war, you, you, you back it out and you, you say, what's that worth right now? And it's, it's worth more than a hundred million dollars. And, and, you know, it wouldn't surprise me if, if Vladimir Guerrero were made a free agent right now, but were subject to, you know, whatever bonus rules made it so that you couldn't offer him, you know, X amount of dollars over so many years. It wouldn't surprise me to see the bidding go towards $100 million,

if not a little bit more. You know, we saw even in some more restrictive situations, we saw Moncada get $60 million between, you know, the $30 million the Red Sox played plus the $30 million in penalties. And I think that, you know, Moncada at that time versus Guerrero at that time, I think that there's a fairly big difference. And, you know, I think that for the most part, Guerrero justifies that. I'd like to wonder, last year, Shohei Otani, I think they put a 70 on him. What kind of bonus would he have gotten if it hadn't been for the restrictions on what he did? I mean, you've got to think some team would have shelled out 80, 90, maybe even 100 million dollars in order to have him on their team. And I think one of the things that, you know, going back a little bit, you know, all of these valuations are based on the current system that the players and owners have negotiated.

If tomorrow they decided to scrap it and say that you could become a free agent after four or five years, we would have to rerun all those numbers if they decided on different dollar values for arbitration or a triple the minimum salary. I mean, that sort of thing would change these valuations. The reason that the players are so underpaid relative to the value they produce is because of the CBA as it currently exists. So you have Vlad Jr. at $112 million of value, and Fernando Tatis Jr. is at 65, so almost half of, you know, a little bit more than half of Vlad. And as was mentioned, $112 million, that is more than seven entire farm systems are projected to be worth.

So we get this question every now and then, like, would you trade, you know, it used to be Mike Trout for this farm system or whatever. So, Eric, are there other considerations here? If someone went to the Mariners at the very bottom of the farm system rankings or the other teams that are below Vlad Jr.'s value, Giants, Cubs, Diamondbacks, Royals, Orioles, Red Sox, if this were somehow a realistic consideration, is that a smart move to trade your entire farm system for Guerrero? I don't think so. I just think there's probably value in risk mitigation and some of these teams, the total farm system valuation is probably artificially low because as I said before, like there are so many of these, so many of these forties are 18, 19 year old kids who two years from now will be 45, 50s, 55s on this list. So no, probably not. As good as I think Vlad Jr. is, and he really is incredible,

I've had the opportunity of watching him for the last five weeks here in Fall League, there's a chance that he gets hit with a pitch here or tweaks a knee there or he's already probably pushing 250 pounds at age 19. Who knows what's going to happen with him physically. This is a freakish physical entity. Yeah, he is very thick. Yeah, so he's listed on the following roster at 200 pounds even. The other day he was standing on first base next to Peter Alonso,

who's listed at 240, and Vlad is like clearly bigger than he is. It's not close. So yeah, like there are all sorts of things that could go wrong with any individual. But from a sheer talent perspective, yeah, he's certainly in a class on his own out here. He's, the gap between him and the next best guy here in Fall League is bigger than the gap was last year

when Acuna was clearly the best guy here and Victor Robles was next. So I think, Eric, I think we have something like this conversation. than the gap was last year when Acuna was clearly the best guy here and Victor Robles was next. So I think, Eric, I think we have something like this conversation whenever we talk about prospects. And I don't know if your answer has changed at all from the last time, but how do you sort of determine where the line is between having a talented system and having good player development? Like if you've run your numbers, assuming now when you have all these numbers crunched, it sort of assumes the league average ability to turn out prospects of a certain future value level.

But if you had, say, we'll just keep using the Mariners because just for anyone who hasn't read these posts, they are last. They're in last place. And that is not a surprise. I think if you read fangraphs, read any prospect source

the mariners farm is bad but right now the mariners farm is estimated to be worth 43 million dollars if you were to hand that same farm system to any team that has maybe a better player development system assuming that there is one how much do you think that player development system would be able to add to that estimated value? Yeah, so this is a good question. I do think, especially now, that player development is an area where some teams can really separate themselves from other organizations. And so if we were to hand, and again, the Mariners are sort of their own thing right now because of what is happening with their player development situation, which is a whole other can of worms. But yes, in short, I do think that there's a huge gap between some of these teams, and I would identify the Dodgers and the Yankees as the top of the heap as far as player development is concerned.

I don't know. There's probably a way we can quantify it. There are probably certain prospects who we can identify that have changed organizations and who have increased in our estimation of future value. You could probably start to quantify player development a little bit. And then the flip side of that coin is the way that knowledge is permeating throughout player development across baseball. Now, like we've seen this exodus of Houston Astros front office intelligence, like more teams, teams are going to start to learn how the teams that are good at this are doing it. And that stuff changes quickly enough.

And player development people are fired often enough that it's hard to have a large enough sample to start to quantify that. So there are some issues with it. But in general, I would say, yeah, like there are definitely some teams at the bottom of this list who I would, if you took the talent in that system and handed it to the Dodgers or the Yankees, yeah, I do think there would probably be several more players who we'd be ranking. Yankees, yeah, I do think there would probably be several more players who we'd be ranking. And there are some players too who, you know, like Max Muncy and some of the other, Chris Taylor, players who aren't even prospects are altered in a real way by player development, but that's not necessarily part of our scope of analysis. And so that falls outside a place of like where it can be quantified. So there are a lot of pitfalls, but yes, I do think that maybe there's a way you could start to look at specifically

like returns on draft picks and stuff like that. If we were to convert expected war return on each given draft pick into a monetary value, and then you were to look at what the Yankees turned Jordan Montgomery into, and et cetera, then yeah, you could start to quantify that stuff. Yeah. And I think that taking that information and looking at the number of 40 prospects, and because everybody has a lot of 40s, but there is a ton of value in getting those guys to be 50s or 55s, whether that's in the minors going from low A to double A, or whether it's taking a guy who's a 45 in double A and triple A and then turning him into a three-war player. I was kind of surprised when I was looking through and got the results of

the valuations, how big of a difference it was. But when you can get prospects to jump up a few grades, it really changes their outlook. Yeah. And Eric, something I'm writing about in the book I'm working on with Travis Sachik about player development, we're touching on a lot of the stuff that you just alluded to there. But one thing that's clearly true is that there's just more data at all times. There's wearable data, there's TrackMan data in the minors, there's Rapsodo, there's all this stuff that we don't have out here in the public sphere. And of course, teams have always known more about their own players than public prospect rankers knew. known more about their own players than public prospect rankers knew. But now that gap seems to be growing because teams have blast sensors on all their hitting prospects and they have high

speed slow motion cameras on all their pitching prospects. And there's just this wealth of information that is not available to us. How much of that are you able to glean just from talking to sources or just from, I don't know, looking at how teams promote guys or how they talk about guys? Do you feel like you're missing more than you did even just a few years ago? Or are there ways that you can kind of keep up? No, there's, it is a problem. It is. And there are things that we can deduce from talking to people in front offices. The way people are talking about prospects is changing. And the people we're talking to about prospects is changing. So yes, there is like a huge information gap and we are recalibrating some of the way we

look at these players and some of it is more heuristic now as a way of sort of capturing the, being more general while because we know that we can't be as specific as we want to is sort of a thing that we've started to do. Maybe not purposefully or consciously, but I do think we're doing it. And then some of it you can start to see, like some of the quote unquote track man guys who are pitching prospects, when analysts describe them to you, you can start to look for it. You can see what they're talking about when they're talking about guys with like flat back spinning four seamers that play well up in the zone like you can see that i you

can look for that now so some of that is applicable from like a visual scouting standpoint but in general yeah like i don't have rapsodo stuff i know what edutronic cameras do but i don't have one i don't think appleman's gonna let us get one and some of it you know speaks to this other issue of scouting kind of going away at least a little bit and i think that's clearly starting to happen and it's sad but it's it's definitely happening and so yeah like there's a gap between where we are and where teams are and i think that gap has grown what we're going to do about that going forward is hard to say, but we're aware of it and open-minded about how to adjust. Yeah. Well, we still need scouting types to come on podcasts, so you're safe. I don't know about the scouts who work for teams. We can just get a track man unit to come on the show though, so you're good. That's good. At some

point, probably you'll be able to recreate what i'm saying with some amount of machine learning so that's fine yeah uh we've already been replicating jeff's not even here i don't know if you've noticed it's all been so this is maybe more more theoretical but you you think of how teams certain teams have long been able to sort of uh i don't know scrape the bottom of the barrel, find that undervalued player at the major league level. And now pretty much every single team is able to think along the same lines. But do you, do either one of you think that there remains an opportunity for, I think of something like the Adam Lind trade the other year, right? With the Mariners and the Brewers and the three young, low-level prospects that the Brewers wound up getting for a very forgettable player.

And then one of them wound up being Freddy Peralta, who's already a major league pitcher and very good against at least right-handed hitters. And that was a pretty quick turnaround. And trades like that always make me wonder, do you think there exists a real and somewhat quantifiable opportunity for teams who really know what they're doing to go out and just kind of almost plunder the ranks of like the 40s and the 45s to kind of beef up the system without necessarily trading for prospects at full value. I do think that teams that are better able to parse out some of the data that like, because it's clear that Freddy Peralta has an extreme, like, unique release point, right? And that part of why he's so successful, especially against right-handed hitters, is it comes from that release point. And there are people who can do

three-dimensional, you know, physics equations. And if you have a release point and you have the point at which the pitch crosses the plate like you can interpolate all sorts of things from those points uh i i'm convinced that teams are doing stuff that has shown them that the angle at which the pitch crosses the plate like is relevant and uh that some teams understand this stuff better than others do and so yeah you can go target guys who, it's sort of like when you're playing NBA live or like a baseball video game and you're doing a fantasy draft and you just sort the remaining players by speed or by their jumping ability or by some sort of thing. And like you find these guys and you turn them into something,

use this one specific skill and allow them to ride that to some sort of success. I think that's what's happening. I think you can apply that to prospects now. And just the specifics of what those things are very team to team. But I think a lot of it is coming from this new data. Yeah, I think there's always going to be opportunities to sort of capitalize on areas where other teams are maybe behind or that, you know, you're ahead. I think that, you know, a lot of it might boil down to opportunities where, you know, you have teams that a single A team only has so many roster spots and maybe, you know, year in a year where you've got a bunch of space for more of those guys, or you're in

a year where you have guys that you have to protect in the Rule 5 draft, and you're going to be put in a spot where you're able to take advantage of where another team might be sort of full or might be favoring other guys, and you can identify some guys that might be a better fit for your organization. And it's one of those things where, you know, like Eric's saying, you sort on this. You know, you're not going to be able to say there's 30 organizations and 6,000 minor leaguers. Like, this is the guy I want. You're going to have to identify, you know, 200 or 300 guys that might be possibilities,

and you might be able to get one or two of those guys and hope it works out one of the things that's happening now for sure is their teams are looking for players to buy low on based on performance there are players who you know whether it's a spin rate or it's it's exit velocities who have superlative physical abilities that are now measurable in these ways that aren't performing. And that's where some of the stuff like the high-speed cameras come in. Like the Astros have had someone here in Fall League with an Edgertronic camera to have a high-speed video of pitchers' release points. And you can see if you're a high-sp spin pitcher, but your spin direction is inefficient. Well, the Astros know that now because they have the track man data that says what your

spin rate is, but they can see in slow motion that your release point does not affect a great spin direction. And so that's potentially someone that they would be interested in acquiring and fixing and turning that player into something more than they were before they acquired them. So it's not just technology or any individual technological thing that's being used in baseball now, but now they're being used together in all sorts of different ways. Should have had you on after the book came out.

I think that would have been better. Craig, I think you mentioned the big separation between the farm system values that maybe you were even a bit surprised by it. And I don't think it would surprise anyone that the Padres are on the top and the Mariners are at the bottom. But the distance between them, the Padres you have at $458 million of expected value. The Mariners are down at $43 million. So that's Padres more than 10 times as valuable as the Mariners. Does that surprise you? And you can look at some of the teams that are close to the bottom there.

Now, some of them are teams that are currently bad, like the Orioles and the Royals. So that's a double whammy. And then there are teams like the Cubs or the Red Sox who are second worst. Well, they just won the World Series, or those two teams have won recently, so maybe they've promoted a bunch of prospects recently, and that's why they're way down there. Yeah, I mean, you know, and you take the Yankees, for example, you know, Miguel Andujar and Gleyber Torres are two really good, really young players, but they're not accounted for in the list. I mean, it's not an exhaustive sort of return on how the farm systems have performed. It's more of a snapshot of the guys who are in the minor leagues right now.

And so you have to sort of separate that from the guys who are in the majors versus the guys who are in the minors. And, you know, in terms of the value, it's hard to compare. But when you have 10 or 12 guys and among the top 100 or so prospects, and you have other teams that have zero of those players, you know, you're going to have a major disparity. And, you know, if I were betting on whether or not all of the prospects currently in the Mariners-Meyer League system were only going to produce $40 million of value, I would probably take the over. It's sort of way too low in terms of what we would expect, but based on the number of decent prospects they have, that's just where they are. And I think that

I used $9 million a win and that's sort of, I don't know if that's standard or if that's overshooting it or undershooting it. I guess we've got to wait and see what happens, this free agency. But it's not like you can just take all of those values and then, you know, you can't monetize the value that these prospects have because I'm only comparing to the cost of something on the free agent market, which is a limited market where teams can only go after players who have reached, you know, six years of service time. I think the other sort of interesting aspect of that is if you have a 50-level prospect,

and I'm saying that that prospect is, their present-day value is about three wins, so they're probably going to produce around six to eight wins. The odds of them producing one and a half wins per year for four or five seasons is pretty low. What's the correct odds are that 50% of the time the player is going to do nothing, 10% of the time you're going to end up with an all-star, and about 40% of the time you're going to end up with an average player. And so it's not that each player has this exact value. It's that across the board, if you look at all of these players,

that's sort of where they end up. And so if you are going to put a value or a monetary value, however you may do it, you're going to want to look at the average of these players, because you can't count on being able to track the guy that's going to become the average regular versus the guy that's that's going to to end up not doing anything so right now i'm still i'm looking at this table on fan graphs where you have the values for every team's farm system and if it's possible to do this with prospects by looking at the uh the history of what prospects of certain values have done it would presumably be even far easier to do something like this with players already in the major leagues

to look at total value remaining and projections and surplus value for everybody on the major league roster, active roster, 40-man roster, whatever you want. So have you thought about taking this into the major league level and then eventually you could just kind of end up at sort of a surplus value number

for each organization? Understanding, of course, that would be a sort of a surplus value number for each organization. Understanding, of course, that would be a lot of work. And then part two of the question being, how few minutes after you were to do a project like that, do you think that you would be snapped up by a baseball team to work for them and take this all out of the public view? To answer the first question, yes, I have thought about it. But I also needed a bit of a break after doing this. I don't know why, this table is so small. I think that the background information would be a lot easier to do because all you really need is the five-year zips and the person's salary information. You know, come up with a surplus value for

basically every single player on a major league roster. You'd have to make certain assumptions about arbitration. But like, you know, a guy who's going to be a free agent in two or three years is going to have X value. A guy that is a free agent in one year is going to, you know, have Y value. And I think that that's something that you could definitely do. And I think that in general, people would be surprised at how little players that only have one year remaining on their contract are worth.

And it's sort of why those players get traded not very often. You're not high on Paul Goldschmidt's blockbuster hall prospects here. I'm not. You know, I think that and one of the reasons why is because it's very hard for a team to give up the type of prospects necessary for another team to give up a Paul Goldschmidt if he's already on their roster, because Paul Goldschmidt's give you a very good chance of making the playoffs, which is what the team wants to do. But giving up your own prospects is something that's generally hard for teams to do. And if you're going to give up prospects for a player who's going to be gone in one year,

then it's doubly hard to sort of justify that because you just don't have the same sort of attachment to Paul Goldschmidt if you're not the Diamondbacks. Whereas if you are the Diamondbacks, you do have that attachment. You say, look at this great player. I'm not going to give him up for the 75th best prospect in baseball. That's ludicrous. And Craig, you also did another study looking for positional biases in the historical prospect rankings. And to my surprise, I think you didn't really find a whole lot of evidence that Baseball America at least has been biased, has been ranking shortstops or something way too high. If anything, possibly third basemen have been

a bit underrated. It seems like third basemen are always underrated in everything. But I don't know whether you were surprised at all by that, Eric, or whether you and Kylie have talked about that, because I know that you two are always kind of trying to watch yourselves for biases and for getting caught up in tools instead of certainty and short-term value. And so you wrote a new Fangraphs scouting primer, and we may have had you and Kylian at some point to talk about changes and how you kind of wanted to differ from past mistakes that may have been made with public prospect rankings. But what's your updated thinking on the state of prospect rankings or how you are doing things differently in that area?

So yeah, I guess I wasn't that surprised that there weren't biases in the BA rankings. I guess in general, Kylie and I tend to think that pitchers may be a little bit overvalued just because of their rate of attrition. And part of the thing that we talk about in the new scouting primer is that we kind of want to have a clear amount of time that we're projecting the prospects for, in part because the multi-year window of evaluation, as far as what these players are doing in the big leagues, kind of captures better the volatility that pitchers especially exhibit. I think I use Sonny Gray as an example in the piece as someone who's like, where do

you rank Sonny Gray? You can look at any big leaguer and say, okay, well, where should this guy have ranked on a prospect list? big leaguer and say okay well where should this guy have ranked on a prospect list and i want to look at like that six or seven year window during which the they are forced to be employed by whoever owns their rights as like that sort that window there's like a lot of reasons that i get into it in the piece and yeah like things have changed and uh we are reflective about our process and when we are wrong and why and uh i don't know as far as like the other stuff goes with craig's work i guess the lack of second baseman makes sense right because a lot of second baseman are just x short stops

craig was it did you measure that was it the position that the players ultimately ended up at or was it the position that they had at time of ranking it was the position at the time of ranking so yeah like ian kinsler or whoever was a shortstop right okay so yeah like that sort of stuff makes sense and so yeah i think that the third base thing is i think it just stems from our bias against corner guys when really third base the the level of offense at third base isn't really all that far off from what it is in center field we we kylie and i try to look at third baseman and center fielder in the same sort of way like when we're breaking ties as far as lining players up on a list goes so yeah you know i think as long as there's a process and you're open about it and there's logic to it and you're using that logic and it's clear in your rankings that it's being applied.

I think there are a whole bunch of different ways to line these guys up. I talk about that in the piece too. to take a big league mound tomorrow is super valuable to like the Diamondbacks this year would have killed for somebody like that instead of, you know, they were on thin ice for much of the year. Guys like Clay Buchholz and Chris Medlin were taking turns in the rotation for them.

But like the Padres don't want that guy and the Giants don't want that guy. And there's just a lot of different ways to line these guys up based on where teams are in the competitive cycle, let alone your own personal preferences for the type of prospect that you want. If it's the toolsy Monte Harrison type or the super safe, immediately ready Brian Anderson types. I think there are a lot of different ways you can line players up.

So I apologize, Eric, for maybe putting you on the spot with a difficult question that will test your memory. But you look at the teams that are at the top. You got the Padres, Braves, White Sox, Rays, Blue Jays. Look at teams at the bottom. Mariners, Red Sox, Orioles, Royals, Diamondbacks, bad news, Orioles and Royals. This is going to be a bad start to time, but I was curious if you can recall, at least anecdotally, I know you said you haven't really ranked farm systems in a couple of years, but at least off the top of your head, can you recall teams farm systems that you remember getting better or getting worse in a surprisingly short amount of time? Yeah, and it's always teams that undergo significant rebuilds. Like if you would have looked at this, a ranking with this math eight months ago or no, a little over a year ago now, right?

The Marlins would have probably been near the bottom of it too. The Brewers, when they started to rebuild a couple years ago and acquire like Isan Diaz from the Diamondbacks and that group of players, some of whom are in the big league club now, that team turned things around very quickly. the big league club now that team turned things around very quickly the Braves went from a relatively bad farm system to acquiring Tukey and Dansby Swanson and then drafting all these pitchers who have panned out pretty quickly that's another example of it you know if the Cubs would probably be an example of this and had they not traded away Eloy Jimenez and Gleyber Torres and some other players as well but of course they've had a parade so that's fine and then yeah I mean the Padres too have really added a whole lot of talent in a lot of different

ways since AJ Preller has taken over and then rebuilt the uh Wobbegon roster like the Craig Kimbrell deal andin upton like once those guys started to be sold off the that system got very good very quickly so it is possible and like i would just like to remind everyone that like the these rankings are based on where we had everyone ranked at the end of the season and so as we redo everyone's write-up like some of this stuff is going to change somewhat drastically over the next few months like i know the diamondbacks will probably have two more 50s than they do right now just based on how jazz chisholm and dalton varsho have looked in the fall league and there are a lot of examples like that where this stuff will change but

generally at the very top it won't well. I just think they're dedicated to rebuilds and teams that were very aggressive internationally because they had the opportunity to be were able to do that quickly as well. That's not necessarily the case anymore because of the way international signing rules have changed. You can't go spend $140 million on Cubans and Dominicans and have like 10 really

interesting players suddenly in your system anymore you have your pool amounts are capped they're hard cap now and you can only spend so much internationally that will slow teams uh desire to rebuild as well so yeah in general i think it's going to come from trading players away but uh but it is possible to have quick farm farm System turnarounds yeah the Padres Have 46 ranked Prospects on this list and no Other team has more than 36 That is pretty good

That's a big separation there of course the Padres Have been bad to mediocre For a really long time now So they should have some prospects but Still is this like up There with the best systems you've seen or that you're aware of in the last decade or two? I mean, I don't know.

Do they compare to like the Royals system several years ago before they won? Is it kind of in a class of its own or do you see comparables there? I think this is sort of its own entity because as I said, like this style of international amateur acquisition only existed for a short period of time, right? Like you just had when the Yankees and Rays started to spend way over the soft cap and pay all this money in tax. It started this short run of like loophole exploitation where teams were adding a ton of talent internationally at one time. They did not care that they were going to be in this penalty box and not be able to sign any international players for more than $300,000 individually

for two years. They just figured, well, we'll spend all this money. We'll acquire four or five years worth of talent at one time. Who cares if we can't really do it for the next two years? It's totally worth it. And there were some teams that had the opportunity to do that twice during this cycle. And the Padres were just really good at it. And then some of it is just luck too, right? Like Fernando Tatis Jr. was not a highly regarded international prospect.

Fernando Tatis Jr. was not a highly regarded international prospect. He had physical growth that was significant between when he was 16 and 17. And A.J. Preller saw him in person on the backfield while he was with the White Sox. The kid had not even put on a White Sox uniform to play any sort of official game. He was just working out during extended spring training. And they fleeced the White Sox in the James Shields trade and like they got Fernando Tatis Jr. Like that's just not a replicable thing. It was a one-time situation and here we are.

And then they did that with Estorri Ruiz to a degree as well. So yeah, like this is just sort of its own random thing. I've never seen anything quite like this. And there are so many guys to sift through in the system that I'm sure we've also missed one or two of them. Like there are definitely prospects in the Padre system who aren't on our list, who are legit prospects, who just because the sheer volume of guys we were trying to corral, we've just missed. So I look

forward to finding out who those guys are. We might be criminally low on Tucupita Marcano, for instance. And yeah, like it is a joy to go to Peoria and spend time on one side of the complex and not the other. How low do you have to be on a prospect to be criminally low? I don't know. It probably depends on like maritime law and like other, cause like if it's a Venezueluelan prospect maybe it doesn't matter we can't uh or we could be imprisoned just for having an opinion on them at all but i don't know i think in arizona though that like it's it's very libertarian here so i think i can kind of do whatever i want i remember when cory kluber when cory kluber won his scion like

10 different scouting evaluators went straight to prison. Oh, yeah, right to jail. The last thing I wanted to ask, really both of you, is with at least a lot of this network crunching, the models are there and they can be repeated down the road. But this is all, you know, looking backward. It's based on previous player development, previous player evaluation. And now, obviously, every team is trying to get players from their farm. And there are only so many roster spots in the majors to go around only so many players can pan out but given where

we are with player development with scouting with everything we assume baseball is getting better and smarter and more efficient by the day do you think that we're going to start to see more of the highly ranked prospects hit or do you think we're going to see more of the highly ranked prospects hit? Or do you think we're going to see more of the lower ranked prospects break out? Or will the balance remain more or less the same as what we've observed for the past 10, 15 years? You know, I think that if there's one thing that could change, you know, and this is just based on the hottest trend, but if you see a lot more pitchers maybe who are, you know, 50 and higher, maybe you see fewer busts. If teams get a little bit better at keepingly and still get some value from them.

that you can do to get you know some of those players to be necessarily a lot better than they are but then you know and some players just aren't going to work out some players are going to blow their arms out some some guys uh you know are just going to to struggle and not make it or you know just uh take a little bit longer to to develop so I think that if there's growth, I would think it would be in sort of the back end of the top 100 rather than the front end. I think that, and we're in this period of time right now, I believe, but I think that there will be a multi-year window where a lot of guys come out of nowhere and are really good who we did not expect would be very good. I think the Dodgers hitters that I mentioned before are examples of that. I think Josh James with Houston is an example of this. And I think it's all because of how player

development is progressing. And it's about teams targeting and acquiring players who are undervalued, who that they can fix and turn into something. And I think that that's going to occur pretty frequently for the next several years before everyone catches up. And it might fundamentally change what we are looking for when we're looking at amateur players and low-level minor leaguers. Because at some point, baseball in general and Kylie and I will have a better idea of what is teachable and what is not. And what the physical prerequisites for major league viability are. for major league viability are and what skills need to be in place from the jump and what can be installed like software. And so we're trying to stay on the cutting edge of understanding that stuff in the public sphere. Teams are very disincentivized as far as letting that information out into the public.

They really do not want us knowing and applying that logic to the way we write about and talk about players. Can confirm that. Yeah. But this is where things are changing the most right now. It's in player development. And, you know, from a scouting perspective, even on the amateur side,

because the pro side is the one that is most uppity right now about contraction, like employment contraction. And on the amateur side, resources are being focused into other areas. A lot of Division I schools are being allocated toward junior colleges and sifting through lower level high school players, players that weren't necessarily on the showcase circuits, which also have trackmans. It's at Area Codes. It's at Petco Park for the Perfect Game All-American showcase. Like there's, there's this kind of data on high school players now too. So I think it's changing and, uh, it's a lot of different things are changing and it's happening very quickly. And yeah, I think that, uh, that we're in a, in a period of time right now, I'm very privileged to, to write about prospects, but it is a time right now when it's, it's going to be easy to look bad very frequently and miss on a lot of guys who can be fixed and tweaked. And I don't look forward to it. Craig, I just wanted to end with an unrelated question here,

since we have you. This was a day where Major League Baseball announced that it just got a whole lot richer than it was, and it was already very rich. But there is a new broadcast deal with Fox Sports. It is a long-term deal, seven years. It doesn't even start until 2022, and it's worth something like $5.1 billion, which is a 50% increase from the current rate. In probably not entirely unrelated news, Rob Manfred got a five-year contract extension, and most of his job is continuing to make the owner's money. So good job, Rob Manfred, I guess. But what does this mean?

Obviously, it has maybe implications for labor issues and the next CBA negotiations because this is a ton of money that is not necessarily going into the player pool. But what does it even tell us about baseball and its popularity and its value as a media property that this far in advance, baseball is getting a raise? Yeah, I think the 50% number sounds like a lot, but you have to keep in mind that the other deal started back in in 2014 um so the the new deal which like if you go back to the old deal they negotiated that one at the end of 2012 to start in 2014 this deal it's it's the end of 2018 it doesn't start till 2022 so i i don't know there's some impetus on on probably both sides to sort of get things done fox wanted to get their future sports rights squared away.

Baseball, you know, loves to get some guaranteed money. So I think that the deal in itself, looking at like the sheer number values isn't, you know, as instructive. I think that it's just a continuation of the last deal. It's more steady growth than some game changer. But it also says that, you know, the people have been talking about, you know, a cable bubble for nearly a decade now, and the money keeps pouring in. And this is sort of an indicator that, you know, at least for another decade, that money's pretty secure. You know, there's obviously been some pitfalls with, you know, the Dodgers and the Astros had their local deals blow up, but the Cubs are about to get themselves a new local deal and

it's going to be big. The Yankees are about to buy back Yes Network from Fox after they sold it when it was valued at like $3 billion. The money is still out there. It's still rolling in, whether it goes to the players good shape, both with, you know, this guaranteed money as well as with all of the back-end technology that they have to sort of weather any storm and provide things direct to consumers. The main problems that they have and that they're going to continue to have for a long time is making sure that, you know, they develop the next audience, you know, from the kids who are 6 to 15 now. They need those people to make sure that when they're 25 to 45 that they're still watching baseball. Yeah. Well, it's good for baseball, I guess, that obviously there's been a gradual decline in the number of cable subscribers.

But if there's some sort of tipping point where it just falls off a cliff, all of a sudden baseball will have national broadcasters locked into Pujolsian contracts for another decade or so. So I guess there's sort of a safety net there. All right. Well, thanks to both of you guys for coming on. You can find Craig on Twitter at CraigJEdwards, and we will link to all of the studies that he produced this week that we talked about. You can find Eric on Twitter at Longenhagen, and you can hear him and Kylie on the Fangraphs audio feed. If you are a prospect hound, we probably don't fulfill all your needs on this podcast. this podcast and if you're someone who goes back to up and in and fringe average and is looking for another good prospect content podcast check out ump on the fancraft's audio feed i'm not going to say the whole thing thanks to both of you guys this was fun thank you yeah thank you all right that will do it for today one cool thing i want to make sure everyone is aware of one of our

listeners zach wenkos is organizing an effectively wild secret santa for make sure everyone is aware of, one of our listeners, Zach Wenkos, is organizing an Effectively Wild Secret Santa for this year, which is kind of cool. There's been a lot of discussion about it in the Facebook group. You do not have to be in the Facebook group to participate. You just have to sign up by November 28th, and then the recommended amount is $20. Zach will match you up randomly with another listener, And the idea is that listeners will send each other baseball themed gifts or podcast themed gifts, whatever you want. Maybe you can preorder the book that I was just talking about. So I will link to the signup form where you put down your name and address. Please only sign up if you intend to honor this commitment. It would be

nice if people didn't flake on this and get gifts and not give gifts. So thank you to Zach for organizing. And if you to Zach for organizing. And if you want to participate, just check out either the Facebook group or the podcast post, the show page at Fangraphs. There will be a link there where you can sign up. Oh, and also I remembered that Sam Miller actually wrote an article about baseball in romance novels for Baseball Perspectives a couple years ago. Can't remember whether we talked about it on the podcast or not,

but just following up on the romance novel segment in our most recent episode, I will link to that as well if you want more examples of baseball pros in romance books. You can, of course, support this podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners have already done so. Russell Eason, Jesse Thorne, Dan, Mick Reinhardt, and Andy Karl. Thanks to all of you. You can join the aforementioned Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectivelywild. You can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Please keep your questions and comments coming for me and Jeff via email at podcastoffangraphs.com

or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. We will be back very soon with a familiar voice on the next episode, so talk to you then. I'm the hillbilly I'm the real Saturday Yeah, oh yeah On Friday On Friday On Friday On Friday

On Friday On and on On and on On and on You can't stop me now On and on I am I am I am I am I am I am I am