Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1319: Scott, Bore Us

Episode Date: January 9, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Oliver Drake‘s new (and also old) team, the Mets, Brodie Van Wagenen, and Keon Broxton, the Yankees signing Zach Britton, how data and technology have helped some free agents and hurt others, the state of free-agent spending and baseball’s economic past, present, and future, Scott Boras’s latest linguistic […]

I feel so rich and a-hot for two, two rooms, a kitchen, I'm sure would do, give me not a lot of, just a plot of land, and I'll swell, I'll witty, I'll grand. Hello and welcome to episode 1319 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs. Hello! Oliver Drake has been traded. He is on the move yet again and yet again to a team for whom he's already played, Oliver Drake, on January 4th. So between our last podcast and this one he went from the blue jays who had designated him for assignment to the rays for cash it was a trade that's effectively a waiver claim i don't know what the difference is maybe the trade is a little bit more money than the waiver claim but nevertheless oliver drake new team same as the old team same as one of the old teams yeah the blue jays who just cut him loose that was his second stint with them and now he's

going back to tampa bay so clearly there are teams that like him a fair amount and have acquired him multiple times but then don't like him enough to keep him so i don't know we'll see whether maybe oliver drake will get to be an opener this year i am looking at he actually got to spend the first four months of 2018 with one consistent organization. He was with the Brewers. And then in early May, he was designated for a summit. We don't need to go over the entire Oliver Drake summary again. But I'm just looking at this list of logos and order.

Brewers, Indians, Angels, Bees. Throwing the Bees in there. Angels, Blue Jays, Twins, Rays, Blue Jays, Rays. So he has at least, I don't know, stayed in the same division for a couple of months. But Toronto and Tampa Bay, different countries, difficult to be further apart, at least when you were talking about the eastern half of North America. So happy new year, Oliver Drake. You're moving back to Florida. And maybe his pre-existing lease is still valid. I don't know. Maybe he's not even, I guess he doesn't have to

move yet right because it's still the off season who knows where right yeah oliver drake is spending his time probably massachusetts but pretty soon he's got a few months before he has to commit to anything because i think he has learned the lesson that he should not ever feel secure hopefully he will again one day but yeah if you missed our oliver drake interview episode 1304 he gets into some of the human costs of being constantly designated for assignment and changing teams which are continuing we really should have oliver drake's wife on because it sounds like she's the one who has suffered the most from this saga if you're oliver drake i mean you say he has a few months but i don't i don't want to scare you but we're barely a month away from the start of spring training

players reporting yeah right well i met before opening day although opening day does not end his uh it never ends so yeah you wonder he go he'll go to spring training with somebody and then in camp what's going to be more difficult oliver drake trying to make friends with his teammates or his teammates trusting oliver drake enough to try to make friends with him right why even put in the effort to get to know the guy when he's going to be moving again? All right. Well, we're doing some emails today, a few emails today. It hasn't been that long since our last email episode, but a few things we should talk about before we do, because there have been some transactions and a bunch of sort of minor trades like Kevin Ploiecki going from the

Mets to the Indians and J.D. Davis going from the Astros to the Mets, but also Brewers favorite Keon Broxton going to the Mets. Where are you with Keon and your level of enthusiasm for him these days? I don't like the move because it hurts Reimer Liriano's chances of getting playing time in the Mets outfield. So bad for my minor league free agent draft prospects, but maybe good for Keon Broxton. Good for Keon Broxton. Good for Sam and myself because the hell with Reimer Liriano, although it's interesting, you have Liriano, you have Broxton, you have Juan Ligares, and there are three not old centered field options and any number of them you could conceivably see putting up like a two or three win season just for whatever

reason but relative to i was looking at outs above average the the stat cast metric that's available at baseball savant and i was looking at that over a few years and keon broxton has rated as one of the top defensive outfielders in the game over that span and a name just near him Juan Ligaris and in terms of offensive output Keon Broxton of course has considerably more power but in terms of actual production not that much of a difference the key here is I guess that Juan Ligaris has had trouble staying healthy and Keon Broxton has had trouble not striking out all of the time so it's going to be a good thing for the mets i think broxton is more interesting than lagares he's healthier than lagares he has more

upside than lagares hits the ball harder than lagares but it is still kind of weird because this is a team that has now i presume broxton is in line to start more often and they've kind of bumped a low offense ready hitting quality defensive center fielder for a low offense ready hitting quality center fielder with liriano in the minors but this does at least prevent the mets i think from playing too much rajay davis so kian broxson and juan lagarce are more interesting than he is and uh just overall it's been interesting to see the mets be so active but clearly the entire game here is to try to improve the depth because this has not been a very deep team and they are essentially swapping out minor league depth i guess low minus depth

for major league depth right now just more moves that the mets are making to focus on the short term yeah so it seems like brody van wagonen is making a bid to be nl depoto i mean no one can quite be that but he's like depoto light. He's the NL's closest equivalent. He's been pretty busy with the trades. And I guess you figure when a new executive comes to a team, you come in with a plan and you, especially when you're in the hiring process, you pitch to the ownership, you pitch to the people hiring you on some plan that you're going to put into place that you're going to make the team a contender right away. Everybody goes in and says, we want to make the team a contender right away, unless you are with the Orioles, in which case you say, we're not going to do that. Right. Or if you're Jeff Luno and you come in and say, we want to be one of the worst teams ever for a few years. We're going to roll in millions of dollars from, I don't even know where the

revenue comes from. You're drawing local ratings of literally 0 dollars from, I don't even know where the revenue comes from. You're drawing local ratings of literally 0.0. But regardless, so Van Wagenen is coming. And it's funny, if you go on Twitter, it's hardly a reflection of what society is like. Or maybe it's actually a deep reflection of what society is like. You can have a few different perspectives here. But if you look at, the Mets have made three trades over the weekend, right? They traded Ploiecki, and they got Lockett. They they traded for broxton and they traded for jd davis and if you look at uh the replies

underneath all of those moves you see all these people are like oh typical mets just not gonna spend not gonna do the team got robinson cano they got edwin diaz they got jurist familia wilson ramos the mets have and not mention, at least according to several reports that neither side has refuted, the Mets offered a $60 million to Yosemite Grandal that he turned down. And then they signed Ramos. So like the Mets are making moves. They are fishing in the, I don't know, big pond. Is that an expression?

Well, it's an expression now. No, they're fishing in the, I don't know, big pond? Is that an expression? Well, it's an expression now. No, they're fishing in the ocean. That would be a better expression because a pond is still a stock. We're going to get to the swell-up nonsense in a minute. But the Mets have made really high-profile moves, and they've been involved in high-profile rumors. And I know, again, it's senseless

to just focus on these people who are posting on Twitter because it doesn't really matter these people are going to complain no matter what but I just can't get past the what have you done for me lately mindset where the Mets have been like the team of the offseason and still this is so like deeply ingrained now in I think Mets fan psychology that the team will just never make a splash or they'll never do what the fans want them to do and here they are brody's trying maybe against his best interest but he's trying and it's it's like the fans don't want to accept that you can make minor moves and big moves but i don't know you can debate the the quality of these trades but

davis is a good depth piece for this year broxton a good depth piece for this year. wrote about, a little bit higher profile. The Yankees re-signed Zach Britton to a deal that if you look at just the superficial stats or even the full season less superficial stats, you might be surprised that Zach Britton got as much money as he did because he got a guaranteed, what, $339? Is that right? And there are other options, which we will also talk about in a second. But the fact that he got that much, you might look at that and look at some of the other relievers who signed, even David Robertson, and say, well, why did Zach Britton get that much? He definitely was one of the very best relievers in baseball, but lately hasn't looked like one. So explain to the people why Zach Britton was able to cash in. I don't know. So going into free agency, we saw David Robertson's line with the Phillies for two guaranteed years. He represented himself and Zach Britton, he wanted three years going into free

agency and Zach Britton got three years and Davidid robertson got two years and it seems like the yankees essentially wanted britain more than they wanted robertson now you look at zach britain and his his numbers haven't been bad since uh 2016 and between 2014 and 2016 when britain converted to relief full-time he was one of the best single-inning relief pitchers in the world. He was amazing. I don't need to remind anyone of that. He was so amazing that the Orioles didn't use him in that playoff game. Anyway, in 2017, he had a couple stints on the DL with forearm soreness, which is bad. In 2018, he had a stint on the disabled list because he blew out his Achilles, which is differently bad.

But he came back, and if you look in both seasons the ground balls are still there he is the premier the foremost ground ball pitcher in baseball at least in the major leagues nobody is really able to consistently elevate the ball off Zach Britton his sinker still works the problem and what makes me a little skittish is not only have his his strikeouts have declined that his walks have gone up but he hasn hasn't thrown strikes. He's thrown fewer strikes than almost any relief pitcher, regular or semi-regular relief pitcher over the last couple years. He's thrown like 58, 59% strikes, which is not that far off of the league average, but still, this is a guy who has just not had the same location. He hasn't had the same ability to make hitters chase that he had when he was at his best. So there are a couple ways you can look at this.

On the plus side, the sinker still works, and when batters swing, they still miss roughly as often as they used to. So clearly there's still something there with Zach Britton, but his velocity is down, his walks are up, his strikeouts are down. And when I was looking at the numbers, it's kind of like the Yankees gave three years and 39 guaranteed million dollars to scott alexander who's fine but remember the dodgers left him off of their playoff roster for a series or two there this most recent october he's also a great ground ball pitcher but not great otherwise and the yankees at least at present have an infield that has luke voight and miguel andar, and they're missing their starting shortstop for the first few months, Gleyber Torres, is air prone at second base.

Not a great defensive infield either, at least barring a Manny Machado acquisition. So I don't think it's a bad contract, and certainly when you're talking about the Yankees, there's no such thing as a bad, or at least there shouldn't be such thing as a bad contract, but Zach Britton puts them, it looks like, about a million or two over the competitive balance tax threshold so there are just a lot of factors here that point to uh the fact that this is a little weird i would much rather have robertson uh at his deal than i would britain did he make some changes after he came over from baltimore that would make you more optimistic about him because he did say some things publicly about, you know, when he went from the Orioles to the Yankees, he was like, oh, teams give information to their players. I didn't know that. I've never seen such wonders as information on my pitches and what makes them effective and where I should throw them.

where I should throw them. So did he make any major changes after that trade that lead you to believe he will be more successful and that maybe that's why they were confident in him? Only some subtle stuff. It could be one of those things where it'll take a little while for the information to seep in and actually cause adjustments on Britton's part. But even when he was great, and he was great for a while, he was mostly a one-pitch guy. He was great because he threw a sinker, and then batters couldn't do anything with it. So in a sense, you could say, well, the Yankees only have to remind Britain that,

hey, if you want to be great, just do that. But because his velocity is down, because it might not come back, because any number of things might have changed about him, he did throw a few more. He has a breaking ball. He's thrown it a little under 10% of the time, but he threw more breaking balls he's thrown it a little under 10 percent of the time but he threw

more breaking balls in two strike situations and that's that can be good because hitters are still looking for the sinker in all situations so if he throws a few more curves that could be a good thing but also after joining the Yankees it was only a handful or two of this but you could see Britton threw a few four seam fastballs which he just didn't do with the Orioles. And in his last appearance of the playoffs, he threw two consecutive four-seam fastballs to Andrew Benintendi. They didn't look like anything special if you just watched them on TV. One was a ball and one was a called strike, but it was something that he just hadn't done before.

So it's at least some hint that maybe the Yankees told Britton, you know, if you had this other fastball that you also threw to keep hitters off of your sinker, then it just makes everything better. So that will be something to keep an eye on in the months ahead to see if Britton is going to become like a three pitch pitcher or realistically, just in his case, maybe a two pitch pitcher where the second pitch is one of two pitches. But there are signs that he could be better. But again, it's a little bit like wish casting at this point. We don't know that the curveball is actually good or that he can use it consistently. We don't know that the foreseam fastball is going to be good.

We have only seen Britton be great as a sinkerball pitcher. So we'll see if the Yankees... Clearly, my inclination is to give the Yankees the benefit of the doubt because they are very smart and Brian Cashman has led an underrated front office. But this one, at least on the surface, is surprising to me. Yeah, because Joe Sheehan was making a point in his latest newsletter about how sometimes you will see teams really buying into a small sample performance now because we have this data that allows you to be more confident in a small sample performance. So on the one hand, some guys end up making less money because maybe they have an outlier platform

year heading into their free agency. And you look at it and it's maybe just like a weird babbip year or something kind of wonky that you don't really expect to continue and in the past that out of character year might have led to a big long-term contract because teams weren't as good at projecting player performance and they might have said oh this is who he is now this will continue to be who he is and we'll pay him accordingly. And then he would just regress back to what he was. On the other hand, you can make some even smaller sample judgments now just because you have this pitch level data and batted ball level data that can tell you that a guy has made significant changes. So in some cases, that might help someone like Nathan Evaldi, for instance, who made certain changes and then had a great year and ended up getting a good deal of money.

So it's something that I think about, too. I was at MLB Network last week recording the top 10 series with Mike Petriello and Brian Kenney and Vince Gennaro just when we kind of go through and rank the top 10 players at every position. Did this last year, too. And I think those will start airing on Saturdays starting this week. So we were doing that for relievers, and I was weighing that kind of thing too because I had Ryan Presley very high on my relievers list and would not have even been considering Ryan Presley this time last year for our relievers list. And it's because of his 23 innings or whatever it was, plus a few postseason innings for the Astros when he made

some real changes and was absolutely dominant and had great stuff and was just using it in a more optimal way. And so you look at that very small sample and you kind of buy it. Whereas in the past, you might have said, eh, 20 innings, anything can happen in 20 innings yeah i i agree with that it's it's hard to tell when you were fooling yourself and when you're actually seeing something real because you can say you know this this is weird to bring up but i was this morning i was just looking up trevor may you remember trevor may he disappeared for a while because of tommy john surgery from the twins but he came back and he threw like 25 innings of relief last season and he was amazing he was like really really good. He trimmed his walk right in half, kept striking everybody out. And you look at that and you think, well, okay, is he great for 2019? And so much of

this can be difficult, I guess, with relievers. And you can see how in the free agent market going into 2018, the class of players that wasn't hurt at all were relievers, right? We saw relievers do well. They got two, three-year contracts, and then a lot of them didn't work out. That's not proof on its own, but it's at least some evidence to suggest that teams were seeing things like, I don't know, is Tommy Hunter a good example? One example. He wasn't even terrible in 2018 to my recollection, but you saw a number of relievers who were good suddenly in 2017, and then they they got paid and then they struggled in

2018 but it's going to be hard for teams not to end up tricking themselves into believing in that stuff because it's so tempting to think we can see an undervalued breakout because the statistical record isn't there there's just more reason to think that you're seeing some real signal even though a lot of it is going to remain noise because the law or whatever it is of small samples remains every bit as valid as it ever was. Yeah. And even if you do something in 20 innings that would lead to success, if you kept doing it, it doesn't mean you can keep doing it.

Sometimes guys will find that perfect formula for 20 innings, but they can't keep it up for the next 20 innings. So there's still some unpredictability there so you had just alluded to this but the britain contract as well as the kikuchi contract those are both boris clients and they have well i was going to say unique structures but i guess they're not unique because they both have them so this has a term scott bor Boris has named no it does not have a term he said a stupid word but it's not the term it's not what we're going to call this

everybody's calling it everybody's saying this is what it's called do you want to I almost don't even want to dignify it by mentioning it but I guess we have to I don't know what else to call it but Ken Rosenthal reports that Boris calls it a swell-opt.

This is so stupid. Define the swell-opt. How many times do we need to – okay, Scott Boris is not a wordsmith. He's not good with words. He's actually remarkably terrible with words. What he's great with is arguments. And so he can make a compelling argument to billionaires to pay his clients money but just because he's an agent who talks a lot and tries to use metaphors by no means suggests that he's good at it he calls it the swell opt because of because in

this structure and we'll summarize it quickly again in the britain contract he can opt out of his contract after two years but the yankees can also pick up a fourth year. So if the Yankees don't pick up the fourth year of the contract, then Britton can either opt out or stay in the contract for his third year and then hit free agency. I didn't explain that very well, but in any case, he calls it the swell. He calls it the swell opt because on the one hand, the player can opt out after two years if he thinks he can do well in the market, but also the contract can swell if the player is worth the money in the team's estimation.

It's a swell option for both. It's a swell option for both. The reason, to Boris's credit, it's at least it is a pronounceable conjoinment of words but it sucks because it doesn't it the word his term for it doesn't actually tell you and you can't hear that and then understand what what the structure is so in that sense it's a failure it's also a failure because it sucks and i don't know what you should call it but what you could well i i had considered spending some time this morning coming up with just a list of alternative names for this structure but it's just i'm so put off now by the idea of scott boris even trying to give it a name we don't need to give it a name it's just a structure there are options

in it can we just stop can we please stop pretending that sc Boris is like the freaking poet laureate of the United States when he's just a guy who wears suits and talks really loudly a lot to anyone who will listen? And we still give him the time of day. We still quote him constantly. Whose work, whose function are we serving when we retweet Scott Boris and his bullshit swell up? This is such a this i hate this term i hate this term he's good at using words so poorly that he gets us to talk about them which is that a skill that may be i mean it's a repeatable trait of his i don't know whether it's intentional or whether he's stumbling into it, but it seems to be working. Anyway, the contract

structure, I won't say any particular name for it, but I guess it started with Jake Arrieta last offseason. And this seems like a symptom maybe of the fact that teams are warier of committing long-term to free agents. And so you're getting all of these innovative ways to try to get more value for the player. We've seen the proliferation of opt-outs just everywhere. And it's just like ways to get more value without actually getting more guaranteed years. And that leads me into the last thing I wanted to say before we get to a couple emails, just sort of summing up the state of free agency, because I wrote that article for The Ringer this week, and everyone has been writing that article. It seems like the market is extremely slow. And historically speaking, it is. It's actually

quite a bounce back from last winter. I think we maybe underrate just how devoid of activity last winter was, but there have been about 40% more free agent signings than there were to this point last winter, and about 40% more dollars committed to those free agents too. So there has been a bit of a rebound, but it's still way down from the previous four or five years, and I don't think that's going to change. I mean, Manny Machado's going to sign somewhere sometime soon-ish. Bryce Harper's going to sign somewhere sometime soon-ish. It seems like they both have sizable offers in hand. So that's going to bring up the total dollar value here. So it's not that the total number of dollars devoted to free agents has

fallen precipitously. It has decreased a little bit and it hasn't increased even as revenues have increased. We heard this week that there were record revenues again in MLB in 2018, $10.3 billion, which is only a slight increase from the previous year, but also doesn't include other things like the payout for the BAMTEC Disney streaming spinoff that every team got about $50 million for. So free agent spending hasn't kept up with that. But I think the even more notable trend is just how everything is getting pushed toward the end of the offseason. It used to be that lots of deals were done before Christmas, and now lots of the deals

are not done before Christmas. I had this in my article. I looked back at a few of the previous off-seasons. So this time two years ago, the biggest free agent remaining in terms of dollars he eventually got was Mark Trumbo, who was a two-win player the previous year and signed for 37 and a half million dollars and that offseason the 10 biggest deals were all done before christmas so starting with the 2012 to 2013 offseason six biggest contracts of that winter were all signed before christmas so were the six biggest of the next offseason four of the five biggest of the following one the three biggest of the one after that then the 10 biggest of the one after that then the 10 biggest of the one after that and then there was last year where just nothing had happened the five biggest free agents all signed after christmas and a bunch of them signed in february

and even march and here we are and obviously machado is still out there and harper still out there and grandal is still out there and kimbrel and Keichel and Pollock and lots of appealing players. So it seems like teams are just pushing things later and later in the winter. And I think that has the effect of depressing salaries somewhat because you get closer to opening day and team seasons are going to start when the schedule says opening day is, but player seasons are not going to start ever unless they actually sign. So you start getting close to actual games and the pressure mounts. And I think it's the players who tend to cave. I was listening to a podcast not too long ago.

It was about dolphins. And I remember there was a story of a woman who lived with a dolphin. She was down in the Caribbean and and she just kind of wandering around she wound up involved in a study and she lived for i think it was like a year in an apartment and the apartment was flooded with water and in the apartment there lived a dolphin and the idea of this controversial study was for the woman to try to communicate with the dolphin to try to teach the dolphin some form of i don't language, maybe even English, see if dolphins were capable of learning English.

And over time, she recorded everything. And over time, she could tell that the dolphin would learn to respond when it was appropriate to respond, like picked up the sort of the conversational tempo, the cadence of it. And so the woman would introduce herself, and then the dolphin would try to say, like, hello. And if you just kind of really key it in and you convince yourself, I think dolphins are capable of speech. And then you listen. Like, you say, hello, dolphin.

And then the dolphin would, in turn, wait for the pause and then respond with, like, meee. And you would think, the dolphin can speak. The dolphin said hello. Scott Boris is the dolphin. Scott Boris, all agents are dolphins, and Scott Boris is the one dolphin who is trying to communicate with people. And you were like, oh, it's such a special dolphin. It's not a special dolphin. Anyway, as far as the market is concerned, I got an unsolicited text message yesterday from a front office person who was just sort of thinking like, oh, what if we had an off-season trade deadline just to try to usher things along?

Dave Dombrowski mentioned that, yeah, earlier this winter. I think he only wanted it so that he could take time off. He was like, we have to work all winter because moves are just taking forever. So he wasn't thinking like, let's get players more money. But yeah, that idea had been floated. more money but yeah that that idea had been floated yeah and there's also been the idea of an off-season free agency deadline which i i these things obviously come with their problems if you have a free agency deadline then what do you do with the free agents who aren't signed they just can they not work when is when is it when is it lifted or if you have a trade deadline what if

somebody gets injured or or something worse happens like there are issues with any sort of proposal like that it's not even necessarily clear who this is worse for because as you said the the people who work for teams are having to work more or at least spread their work out over a longer period of time and it's it's not entirely clear that the players are losing out on money you can look at cases like last year lance lynn lost out on some money maybe greg holland lost out on some money now maybe greg holland wasn wasn't advised very well by his communicating dolphin agent. And he took less money than he could have gotten otherwise. But, you know, there were still Eric Hosmer got his money. Hugh Darvish got his money.

J.D. Martinez basically got his money. Alex Cobb did okay in March. Alex Cobb did very well in March. And this year, like Manny Machado is going to get his money. Bryce Harper is going to get his money. Yasmany Grandel already turned down $60 million. Not sure he's going to do better than that. AJ Pollock, I don't know what he's going to end up getting, but at least he had the opportunity to get something like McCutcheon money from the Phillies before it went to McCutcheon, which is appropriate because it's after him that the currency is named so i don't know who this is

worse for but it is certainly the reality of what's going on right now now we can say that the market is slow because there are a lot of players left but again offers have been out there on the table and at this point i don't know with like machado and harper both them being the the premium free agents on the market offers haveers have been extended. We know that. I don't know how much higher the offers have to go, but at this point, like, hundreds of millions of dollars are available to them. We already know Harper turned down at least $300 million from the Nationals. It's just a matter of whatever other details there are,

and maybe those players are still trying to figure out what their destinations are. But, like, the market isn't just sitting back. And I do put at least a little bit of stock in the argument that teams work slower because hiring has gotten so much more, maybe not difficult, but time consuming. The hiring window is, I think you understand also, is like October and November

is when front offices try to staff up and fill holes that have been created. And I know it's not sexy. It's generally not very public. You know, every so often we see a case like Mike Fast is available and he can go join some front office, but there is a lot of turnover. And I think maybe more than ever because there are so many more front office jobs than there have ever been because that's where so much money is. There aren't any restrictions on that. So there's a lot of people getting hired. There's a lot of people changing teams, which means you have to find interview replacements, which takes up a lot of time.

And even if it's less important to a team than trying to go get like Craig Kimbrell or something, you still kind of have to build out your staff, or at least it takes up time that could go to a player pursuit. And you're trying to get the staff nailed down sooner. And it's not fun. You don't're trying to get the staff nailed down sooner. And it's not fun. You don't want it to take as long as it does. But anyone who's ever been involved in a hiring process knows that it doesn't take place overnight.

So that is at least one reason, one legitimate reason, I think, why things move slower, even though it doesn't excuse the entire pattern. Yeah, and some of the hiring is getting more creative. We've seen some nontraditional hires, particularly in coaching and player development. So it's not just, you know, bring back some retread who's been bouncing around the big leagues forever. It's, well, let's just go get a college coach or go get an independent instructor or someone who does hidden gifts on Twitter or something. You know, you can find all this coaching and development talent everywhere. And so teams are scouring areas that they haven't before. And that is partly because, I mean, as you said,

maybe Craig Kimbrell is more important to the team's fortunes than those hires. But on the other hand, not necessarily, because if you hire the right player development people and you can build a Craig Kimbrell for a lot less money than Craig Kimbrell, then that can be a big difference makerll for a lot less money than Craig Kimbrell, then that can be a big difference maker too. And that's part of this. Obviously, we've talked about how front offices have gotten better about projecting player performance. They realize that players age.

They tend not to be as good after a certain point. And if you can develop someone, bring up a young player who makes a lot less money, then that makes sense, economically speaking. And so that's a big part of this too, just that a lot of the talent in the league is concentrated among pre-arbitration players. And that means that the Players Association has to get those players paid, and that's easier said than done. But the other thing, and I'm not the first person to point this out, is that I think teams just have a lot of money when the offseason starts. They're sort of set. I mean, you will hear them crying poor and saying the luxury tax and we can't afford this middle reliever because we're going to go over and really take into account the franchise valuations that are constantly increasing, take into account the broadcast deals, all the shared revenue. Teams are just getting so much money before they even sign anyone before the season even starts that I think their financial fortunes are more divorced from their on-field fortunes. Your revenue was really dependent on your ticket sales, which was really dependent on how well your team played and how well you could sign players and get fans excited.

And that still matters, but it doesn't matter as much because you've got revenue sharing and you've got teams dividing up all of this outside income that comes to them whether they win or not. And so now you have teams and baseball operations people still want to sign players and make their teams better but ownership i think has less incentive to do that because it's like well we could go sign this free agent but we could also just not and keep all this money and probably still make a ton of it anyway and so i think that's the thing you're getting to these points late in the off season where players need to sign somewhere to keep playing. But teams are like, well, this guy would make us better. But do I really want to spend for this guy if I'm just going to be manufacturing money anyway?

So I think the incentives have changed and that has probably hurt players a little bit. It's so easy when you're looking at a team to think, well, you know, one player isn't going to make the difference. And it's true. I mean, even, you know, Mike player isn't going to make the difference. And it's true. I mean, even, you know, Mike Trout's team hasn't won more than 80 games in three years. And he hasn't made the playoffs. And even when Trout did make the playoffs, they got swept by the Royals and Trout got one hit. So it's easy to look at a team and think,

well, this team is more than just one player. We think we're confident in our internal player development. We already have these stars in place. Why really worry about adding one more big-name player or two? And I get that temptation. So Sean Doolittle had a thread that he posted on Twitter on, I think it was Monday, that was just sarcastically talking about how baseball is dying because he linked to a Forbes article about the league bringing in a record.

I think it was like $10.3 billion or something. And so he was just talking about how attendance is down and well, maybe attendance wouldn't be down if more fans believe that their teams were competing. And this is where I think there's an interesting trap where let's say, I don't buy the argument that there are like 10 or 12 teams right now who aren't trying to win. I don't think that's true. I think it's an oversimplification, but there are of course rebuilding teams. There have always been rebuilding teams, but anyway, let's just grant the premise that there are 10 teams not trying

to be good. Okay, so moving from there, let's say that all of those teams were trying to be good. Let's say all 30 teams were trying to be as good as possible. Now, I don't know what that even does to the trade market. That's killed almost right away because everybody's trying to add. So congratulations, there's free agency. But in any any given season there is a specific set number of wins that can go around so if you have every single team that's trying to win you're still going to have teams in last place you're going to have bad teams you're going to have good teams it's just going into the season maybe you won't be quite so sure who's going to be good or bad but the tears will emerge not every single team in baseball can add wins you can't make every team 10 wins better and so fans maybe you go into a season to think oh our team could be in the hunt

and maybe this is what it was like before there were such widespread year-round projections you go into like the season in 1996 and you think well maybe this will be the year for the tigers or whoever was good or bad that year but you figure it out pretty quick and attendance is kind of down in april anyway because it's so cold and terrible outside almost everywhere but then you go into the season and you still have last place teams and fans aren't going to pay to go see a last place team plus there is the whole conversation about sure attendance is down but is revenue from attendance down because teams try to optimize these things and that's data we don't really have so there's a conversation to be had about whether baseball is supposed to be revenue optimized

or whether it should be more affordable for fans to be able to take their families, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But this is a little more complicated than it seems because it's not necessarily a bad thing for baseball teams that attendance is slightly down. And it's not necessarily clear that more teams quote unquote trying

would bring attendance up because that is not how these things go. It's not quite so simple. Yeah, that's true. I mean, there's a question about whether the revenue will continue to climb year after year if there are certain things that are fan unfriendly and maybe teams are just kind of locked into these big contracts, TV broadcasts that are giving them lots of money, but maybe, I don't know, the next round won't go so well, or you'll scare fans away, or this will be a bubble to some extent. Although MLB just locked in another really long-term big national contract, so it doesn't seem to be ending anytime soon.

I think the kind of frustrating thing is that we're going to be having exactly this same conversation for at least the next two winters, I think, because nothing really significant can change until the CBA expires, which is not until December 2021. So we've got at least the next two winters, and then maybe the one after that will be slow because teams will be waiting to see what actually happens with the CBA. There's probably more of a chance of a strike than there's been in a while. Hopefully that won't happen. But we're all sitting here saying, well, yeah, the union has to get the players paid earlier in their career.

That should be their big goal. Hard to say exactly what they will give up to get that. But again, I mean, we've got years, almost three years until the CBA expires. I mean, we've got years, almost three years until the CBA expires. And until then, we're just going to be kind of rehashing these same points and pointing to the same trends and nothing really can change. Yep. I am so tired of hearing about the competitive balance tax. I am so tired of hearing about how it's a deterrent for teams. The overage fees are small.

They're so tiny. The luxury tax. Yeah. Unless you go like way over and trigger the highest penalty, which has a draft pick cost, or if you're going way over year after year after year, and then the penalties increase. But otherwise it's like, you know, you go over the lowest tier and you're talking about like a couple million extra dollars or something. It's just, it's nothing to teams. No, it it's it's been a great i don't know marketing on their part to present the argument that we just can't go over this tax but the tax is so small and even i mean look the draft pick cost is hard you your your highest

draft pick falls 10 places unless you have one of the top what 10 or 15 draft picks in which case your second highest pick falls by 10 places if you like blow the competitive balance x out of the water and even that that is effectively i'm sorry to talk about players as assets again but that is effectively a penalty of like a few million dollars in terms of your draft pick valuation you'll still get a pretty good player in the first round even if you fall 10 places didn't uh did the red socks go down 10 places right in their draft pick you know who's who's not crying right Right, yeah. I think they had that and they had like a $12 million penalty or something for having the highest payroll in baseball.

And, you know, obviously works out for them not only in that flags fly forever, but that they probably make a ton of money from winning the World Series. So, I mean, only one team wins the World Series every year, so you can't count on that. But if you do spend a lot, you have a better chance of making the playoffs at least, and then you get extra revenue. So, yeah, it all seems like it kind of washes out or comes out in the team's, maybe there had been more trade activity to compensate, but turns out that's not true. I asked Dan Hirsch to run some numbers for me that are in my article, and the number of trades this year and last year are actually not up really at all from previous years. So it's not just different moves, it's fewer moves. So let me just end this segment on a happier note. Looking at Pelota Binaria, Williamss estadio has gotten 18 playoff plate appearances in venezuela he's got two walks zero strikeouts and he's six for 16 he's betting 375 in the playoffs these are high leverage plate appearances people and that's the deal it's just a

hitting machine it continues yeah by the way one last thing about free agency i'm i'm enjoying the speculation about the white socks strategy of just accumulating everyone who Manny Machado likes in order to sign Manny Machado. How far would it make sense to take this strategy? I mean, we know that they traded for Yonder Alonso, who is Manny Machado's brother-in-law. They just signed John Jay, who's one of his best friends and training partners. who's one of his best friends and training partners. Last offseason, they signed Wellington Castillo, who is also evidently close friends with Machado. Like, what percentage of your team do you want to devote to buddies of Manny Machado in order to convince Manny Machado to sign with you? And what if it worked? How short-sighted would Machado have to be to think,

you know, John Jay's going to be here for for a while it's like it's year one yonder alonzo's not gonna be like a long time white socks player wellington castillo is gonna be a long time white socks so it's it's short-sighted but it's also like look the white socks needed a backup outfielder because their outfield is bad so like john jay makes a certain amount of sense but this if it's not so transparent and it's probably so transparent then i don't know how strange a coincidence this is but like how do you bring this up in meetings if you're the white socks you're meeting with machado you're on the phone are you just like hey hey check it out you know you know who we got you know who we got like what how do you do you just kind of hope machado notices do you hope jay and alonzo

and cassie are just like send him texts yeah i guess you're hoping that they do the recruiting for you but i mean you wouldn't want to like devote roster spots to players who are actively hurting you just to get i mean we've seen this sort of thing in basketball i think there are fewer players on a team so one player can make more of a difference. Even Manny Machado only affects your odds of everything so much. But, I mean, if it's a tiebreaker, if you kind of like a player or you could go get this player or that player and that player happens to be best buds with this free agent you want, I mean, I guess it makes some sense. But you probably wouldn't want to build mean, I guess it makes some sense, but you probably wouldn't want to build your whole strategy around it because who knows? What if the friends have a

falling out or Manny Machado just decides based on other factors, like how much money he's offered or something. So I don't know. It's funny though, to imagine this being a strategy. You know what would probably work better? Okay, hear me out. John Jay signed a one-year contract for $4 million. Yonder Alonzo was under contract this year for $8 million. What if, instead of having those players, the White Sox gave Manny Machado an extra $12 million? Right. That would probably work better and save you some roster spots, but I don't know. All right. Stat blast? Yeah, short one. Amazing ways, here's to days still past. This was one of those ones that was an ass ache to put together, and it's not rewarding, but I've been looking at the twins a little bit because I think the twins are kind of like the secret possible contender.

I'd forgotten they're going to have Michael Pineda back this year. He missed all of last year. He did sort of that two--year tommy john surgery contract thing plus of course they have the hopefully imminent venezuelan winter league mvp on their roster in some manner or form but i was looking at the twins and one of the things that's so striking about them is how volatile they've been in the last few years right they have been all over the place and so i was looking over a five-year span what i wanted to see this is sort of inspired by old studies I did on how Ryan Rayburn was the most volatile player in baseball. The Twins, I'm just going to read five consecutive winning percentages.

This is not fun, but I'm doing it anyway. Lots of numbers. Starting in 2014, 432, 512, 364, 525, 481. All over the place. They have not stayed on the same side of 500 in any consecutive season. So I saw over those five years, their winning percentages have moved by a total of 432 points. So 432 points movement over the span of five years or four changes. That's an average change of more than 100 points of winning percentage per season i was curious how that stacked up all time what teams have been more volatile than the 2014 to 2018 minnesota twins the answer is a lot of teams the answer is a lot of

teams have been more volatile and it's a it's a two-way tie and we're going back more and more than a century here but the 1914 through 1918 you might actually already know this off the top of your head a little bit. The 1914 to 1918 athletics are at the top, but this is, yeah, not a team that was actually volatile. So maybe this is a measurement problem, not a team that was volatile like the twins, but here's the thing. The A's over those five years changed by a total of 585 points of winning percentage. However, most of that, and by most of that, I guess I should say like two-thirds of that happened between the first two years.

Because in 1914, the A's had a winning percentage of 649. The next year, it was 283. What a just like absolutely dreadful. I believe Connie Mack sold off all of his best players because he was upset at the Federal League or something like that. So the A's are tied for the top here, but they're tied with the 1917 through 1921 White Sox. The White Sox in 1917

also had a winning percentage of 649, but then 460, but then 629, then 623, then 403. So the White Sox between 1917 and 1918 lost a lot of their best players to world war one just a horrible thing where we all agreed to murder one another for a while so the white socks and ace tied atop total movement of 585 points over the span of five years that beats

the twins by a healthy margin but whenever you have a top of the leaderboard you also have a bottom of the leaderboard do you not and so bottom of the leaderboard, do you not? And so I could also look for, because I put this all together, the team with the least movement over five years. As long as we're having a boring stat blast, why not look at the most boring teams within it? And so I guess sometimes I ask you for a guess,

but there's really no reason for me to ask you for a guess. There's no reason why you would ever know this. But let's just say that the most boring team of all time over five years was 1970 to 1974 San Diego Padres. Here's why. Total movement, total movement over five years, 19 points of winning percentage. In 1970, 1970 was the Padres' second year of existence. And it was a good year. As an expansion team, they won 52 games. As a sophomore team, they won 63 games. Way to go, Padres. 11 game improvement. Really, that's something. Padres win totals over five years, 1970 to 1974. 63, 61, 58, 60, and 60. So the Padres were exactly the same, basically, for five years in a row. The Padres were exactly the same, basically, for five years in a row. In their division, they finished sixth out of six in 1970.

The next year, they finished sixth. But the year after that, they finished sixth. After that, they finished sixth. But they got all the way up to sixth after that. I will say that, at least to their credit, they were at maximum 42 games out of first place, at minimum 28.5 games out of first place. But the Padres, 1970 to 1974, so little movement. Just a total of 19 points of movement. The 1960 to 1964 Indians are the runner-up

with just 25 points of movement in winning percentage. So those are the most and least volatile teams of all time over a five-year span. I regret the work that I did into putting the spreadsheet together. It was, I think, deeply unrewarding. Okay. Well, thank you for doing that deeply unrewarding work. One last thing I meant to mention this, but the average MLB salary actually decreased in 2018, partly as a result of some of the changes we were just talking about. Actually, only the fourth time that that has happened in the past 50 years. The first two

times were 1987, collusion, and 1995, which was a shortened season because of the strike, and then 2004, and now 2018. So there's definitely something unusual going on and some people will say it's collusion again. And I guess there's no way to disprove that, but we've just suggested a lot of alternative explanations. So we've got time for just a few emails here. So this one comes from Matt. A while ago, I was thinking about potential alternate ground rules, one of which was allowing the home team to decide which direction to run the bases, that is, swapping the location of first base and third base. The direction would be declared before the game.

I floated this idea to my brother, and he immediately came up with a, in my opinion, much more interesting rule variation. What if you let the batter decide which direction to run the bases after putting the ball in play? The rules would be roughly as follows. Draw a circular area 10 feet in diameter centered at the back tip of home plate. When nobody is on base and the batter puts the ball in play, the batter declares which of the corner bases is first base

by exiting the circle in the direction of that base. Prior to leaving the circle, both corner bases are treated as first base, meaning the fielding team can force the batter out at either base if the batter has not yet left the batting circle. Once the batter leaves the circle, the base he is headed toward becomes first base, and the other base becomes third base. If a batter puts the ball in play and there's a runner on base, he must run the bases in the same direction as his teammate. If the batter exits the circle in the opposite direction, he is automatically out. So essentially bases are empty.

The batter gets to decide whether he wants to run clockwise or counterclockwise, and that changes which base is first base or third base. And then as long as there's a runner on base, then the following batters have to run in the same direction that that guy did so that you don't get mid-base path collisions from guys going opposite directions what do you think okay that was that was my great concern okay so let's walk this through we have a we have a hitter and he hits okay any sort of line drive fly ball doesn't really matter he's just gonna go it'll be a

regular hit probably odds are you're gonna have guys who uh hit a line drive and then they just go to first base like normal because they're used to it. So you will probably have the majority of lefties running to first, the majority of righties running to third as first because of the time out of the box. We know from stat cast that lefties are quicker to first base than righties are. So let's take the average ground ball to short. I'm going to guess that as a hitterter you are going to run automatically in the direction where you find that your momentum is taking you just because it's more natural first step but if you

hit a ground ball the shortstop and the shortstop will retrieve the ball and then he'll look up and i guess there's going to be a split second right where the shortstop doesn't quite know exactly where he's going to throw so you're going to have probably an increase in errors and and pump fakes yeah so you'll have so this would probably this would increase like grand ball babbitt right by some small amount but a real amount plus most batters are righties and if they get to choose to go to third base and that increases their speed or decreases the time it takes them to get there then they should in theory beat out more grounders. But, well, on the other hand, the throw is a lot shorter

because you're pulling the ground balls, right? Yeah, good point. You just get a lot of third basemen who I guess would be first basemen, but they would be just taking the ball themselves. This would be a nightmare for scoring games. But, yeah, that is a good point you'd have fewer throws and the interesting thing is that you'd have to choose your fielders differently i mean obviously certain fielders end up in certain positions because they can more easily make the

throw to first whereas here you can't count on the throw going to first you're gonna have to do everything and you're gonna have to have people who actually have some range at both corners instead of just sticking the slow guy at first base so it's definitely gonna change who ends up playing which positions right so you would have first baseman need to be a higher priority on first baseman being able to throw a slightly lower priority on first baseman being able to throw a slightly lower priority on third baseman being able to throw but you would still have a higher defensive bar to clear to play the infield because there are more responsibilities so then this probably goes hand in hand with the universal dh so that those slow like the the luke voights of the world

can still get jobs but i would guess the actual numbers of the game would not change that significantly because ground balls are still mostly outs. I don't think that would change, but you would have a few more throwing errors and certainly a few more bang bang plays where the runner beats it out. Yeah, Matt suggests that maybe we would see more attempts to bunt for base hits because you could aim for either way and no one would know which way you were going to run out of the box. I don't know whether that would help, but I think just the general unpredictability of

it would help batters because just in baseball, just generally, the defense sort of starts the play and then the offense responds to it, which is weird and backwards compared to some other sports. And so the batter is always reacting to what the pitcher and the defense is, there would be an element of unpredictability there that I think you would just see fewer plays being made just because you wouldn't really know which base you were thrown to. So I think it would probably make things, well, more complicated and much more difficult to explain to new fans, but maybe more entertaining too. In the short term. Short term, more entertaining. Long run, you would get used to it like anything else. I don't think it changes the game in a material way. Okay, it does change the game and

it makes it a little closer to Pesopolo than baseball has been in the past, but still, distant, distant cousin. Anton says, why isn't there more push for televised games from the other leagues? With all the money being spent on MLB television rights, I'd think some network or streaming service would be interested in picking up winter ball. MLB players, similar time zone, no direct competition with the MLB season.

There seems to be room for NBA and college ball, NFL and college ball. You'd think baseball could handle an extra league or two well maybe you could see something on mlb network and i think i could be wrong but doesn't mlb network occasionally air maybe like the dominican championship or something caribbean series maybe i've been serious yeah i forget sometimes you can stream those things and you can find illicit streams if you want to also. But yeah, I mean, there's not a lot of this, but I think Winter Ball would probably be for a pretty niche audience, despite how often we have talked about it. Maybe we're for a niche audience, but I mean, we love the Venezuelan Winter League because it contains Williams Estadio.

But I don't know how many casual baseball fans would really want to tune in. Yeah, I mean, imagine the ratings for a game between the Padres and the Reds, and you're looking at the ratings that aren't in Ohio or California. And what would the ratings be for that? Because baseball is already such a regional game, a tribal game, and fans have so little interest in watching teams that aren't their own now i don't think that's that's a reason not to air some games as at least as a trial to see how they do because let's face it what is lb network doing all offseason bryce harper hasn't signed anywhere manny machado hasn't signed there you don't need to rank the top 10 players at every position yeah and i would rather watch a game in the domin or Venezuela than watch that again.

But like, do you, and certainly when they have like their reruns of programming, because you're on and then they're going to show that up. So like three or four times probably. So I get that those probably get better ratings.

Like I think there's an argument to have some more Winter League games if the rights allow for that. You probably need a better camera crew and technology on location so it's expensive but it would be worth trying but certainly there's very very little demand to do this with frequency yeah i think so too and it's not really akin to college sports because i think in college sports almost everyone has some level of rooting interest in someone so they're following their team their alma someone. So they're following their team,

their alma mater, and then they're following their rivals in the same conference. So there's a built-in rooting interest there. Whereas if you're an American fan watching a Venezuelan winter league team, you might root for certain players, but you're probably not going to be attached to a particular local team. So I think those are obstacles. I'm sure our audience would appreciate if it were easier to watch these games, but our audience is, it's not exactly the same as the general baseball audience.

I have banter, surprise banter from Mark Feinstein. The D-backs announced they have hired Johnny Gomes as the organization's outfield slash base running coordinator. Johnny Gomes as a career base runner, he stole 50 bases, it's not terrible, As the organization's outfield slash base running coordinator. Okay. Johnny Gomes, as a career base runner, he stole 50 bases.

It's not terrible. But as an outfielder, Johnny Gomes was bad. He had a career defensive run saved of negative 67, career ultimate zone writing of negative 40. Now, this is clearly there's a difference between teaching and doing. You can know all the right things to do. You just might not be capable. And Johnny Gumbs just never had the build of someone who's going to be an amazing base runner or outfield defender. But he was a low minors hitting coach for somebody last year.

I don't know how much further could you get away from someone who was a quality outfield defender and base runner. That's a good question. And it's kind of interesting, right? Because you see lots of hitting coaches who were bad hitters and lots of pitching coaches who were bad pitchers, but you don't really see base running coaches who were bad base runners. I guess maybe is that because, I don't know, if you're a bad hitter, you still hit all the time, whereas if you're a bad hitter you still hit all the time whereas if you're a bad

base runner you basically just don't steal which is a big part of base running so you can't really coach something you never even did it would be weird if there were like a guy who were an expert in the technique of base stealing and had like no career stolen bases so maybe that's why but there is a split there because yeah as you're saying you don't have to have been good at everything to instruct other players but there are certain things that i guess you just never even become qualified to instruct other players unless you were pretty good at them yourself i would guess that this is a pretty clear case of the diamondbacks want to have johnny gomes around and therefore they gave him a job. Exactly, yes.

Okay, this question is from listener Ben on a recent episode of Fangraphs Audio, cross-promotion. Meg and Sam were talking about excitement in baseball and noted in passing that one thing that increases excitement in football is that the defense can score. They were particularly talking about safeties. Could something like this be good for baseball? Here's the best suggestion I came up with. Could we give the defense half a run for every inning where they strike out the side? That would greatly increase the batter's incentive to put the ball in play, which would be good. On the other hand, it might also increase the pitcher's incentive to pitch for a strikeout.

However, it seems like pitchers are almost always going for strikeouts nowadays anyway. Obviously, this would never happen. But thoughts? Would this be advisable or desirable for the defense to be able to score i mean i look i'd be hoping to try first of all you're not you're never going to make half runs right yes that's a that's a non-starter and i think that the half run penalty for striking out the side might be too strict too stern i don't really know uh really know. But people love great defensive plays. Certainly they love home-run robberies, which are kind of like defensive scoring in that they prevent the offense from scoring.

But I guess that's the defense's entire job in every sport. So, I mean, you'd have to get pretty creative with it. And I think that it's not just the traditionalists who would be against it. I don't think there's a big appetite for this. But But I mean, look, I'm open to hearing out proposals. I just don't think that's the one that's going to convince me. So in football, you've got field goals and you've got touchdowns and you've got extra point conversions and you've got safeties and all this stuff. I don't know much about football, but I know there are lots of ways to score and different increments of scoring. Whereas in baseball, you only score by crossing a home plate and you only score one run at a time. I guess you can score multiple runs by hitting a home run, but it's still individual runs put together. So it's kind of an issue because you would have to go to fractional runs and no one wants fractions in scores.

And that kind of is a deal breaker, I guess. There's just no way to divide the run without it getting complicated and annoying. It's maybe less about the defense scoring and more about a sudden change of possession, right? Yeah, right. Because you can have an interception and takeaways in hockey and basketball and soccer, etc. So maybe it's less about fractions of runs for the defense and more about, well, actually, your turn at bat is over now because of something that you did.

And then the inning just flips. Now, again, I don't know what could possibly cause that in a way that would make everyone happy but i mean it would it would be interesting and you can't be striking on the side because then the possession already changes but i don't know what would in your mind justify an an instant end of the inning yeah i i don't know like uh an immaculate well immaculate inning that doesn't work that's the end of the an immaculate, well, immaculate inning. That doesn't work. That's the end of the inning. Immaculate plate appearance?

No, I don't know. There's, I mean, swinging at a really terrible pitch. It's just so embarrassing that you have to stop hitting now. I don't know. Yeah, you can't really, you can't do it. You don't want to tie it to like a failed replay review or something because that just incentivizes for your replay reviews. And you can't do like you don't want to tie it to like a failed replay review or something because that just incentivizes for your replay reviews and you can't do like a three pitch strikeout because those happen all the time now because pitchers are so good and you're hurting players

who are more strikeout prone so i don't i really just don't feel like baseball is has the appropriate structure for this yeah all right last question this is Dave. He says, it's hard to imagine a more exciting hypothetical baseball player than Vroom Vroom Guy, who gets a hit every time but can't stop running. What's the least exciting baseball superpower possible? What if a player could stay in a rundown indefinitely? Is that the most unbearable hypothetical player? Every time he got on base, he could stay in a rundown until the defense made enough errors for him to score, which would take hours. Would teams start walking the guy ahead of him in the lineup to block him on the bases? Would opposing teams eventually just start letting him score on walks and singles to save time? Pickle guy is outstanding. I love pickle

guy. If it went on forever, though, I mean. Well, so pickle guy is essentially vroom vroom guy, right? Because he would get himself into pickles on purpose. He would just get to the next base, and then he would lead off, and then he would get a pickle, and then he would keep going until he would score. Pickle Guy, every time he reaches base, scores a run. That's true. Yeah. Well, I mean, pickles are among the most entertaining things that could happen in a baseball game. And if a player did have a skill for that, which Sam has written about Josh Harrison, right? And his pickle skill, his ability to stay in rundowns.

But it's fun after five or six throws. But if you were to do it all day, I don't know. Anything that just leads to you being able to prolong the game indefinitely is bad. I mean, we've talked about the guy with the superpower to foul off an infinite amount of pitches or a really high amount of pitches, and that would be kind of cool for a while, and then it would be extremely boring. So anything like that would just make this guy the

least popular player in baseball. Yeah, a guy who never makes any throwing errors is like the least interesting superpower that I can... I mean, there's already the guy who fouls the ball off all the time, but at least that you could sort of leverage into some sort of scale or entertainment. But like, imagine a pitcher who, every time he attempts a pickoff throw, he throws it on target to the first baseman.

He doesn't necessarily get the runner, but he never throws the ball away. That sucks. I hate that guy. I don't want her to pitch. Right. That's what they always said about that guy he just never threw away a pickoff attempt really was just the best at that would you ever become

known for that do you think is there like no absolutely not where you would just like realize you know what never seen this guy throw a pickoff attempt. No. You would have to play for 100,000 years, and no one would. I don't even know, because it just gets mixed in with throwing errors, right? Yeah. I guess you'd be like, oh, this guy never made a throwing error. But even that is a subcategory of overall errors, and this player would still make an error on round balls and stuff. So, no.

No one would ever notice. Everyone would die without ever noticing the thing that you're best in the world at. Yeah. Yeah. It would be good, I guess, if a pitcher could make throws to any base without errors, because that's something that pitchers do at times. And it's always embarrassing when they do it because it's like you just threw this ball 95 miles per hour with pinpoint control.

And yet you can't just lob the ball over to first base. And yet we've seen that many times. So if a pitcher were perfect at that, that might get noticed. But pickoff attempts specifically, no. Yeah. All right. So we will end there. I wonder if the Diamondbacks thought they were getting Ghani Jones instead of Johnny Gomes.

I also wonder what Nora Morse thinks of all this. A couple callbacks there for the longtime listeners. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners have already signed up at Patreon and pledged their support. Kevin McCall, David Salem, Jonathan Brunt, Jared Palmer, and John Foster. Thanks to all of you. You can also join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectivelywild. It has been described as the best reason to be on Facebook.

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