Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1324: The Salary Trap

Episode Date: January 19, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Willians Astudillo’s final winter league stats, the retirement of Ricky Romero, the upside of a slow market, and the anticlimax of a big free-agent signing, then (11:25) bring on Baseball Prospectus director of editorial content Patrick Dubuque to talk about why we know how much players make, how […]

Money don't matter tonight, it sure didn't matter yesterday Just when you think you've got more than enough, that's when it all up and flies away That's when you find out that you're better off, making sure your soul's alright Hello and welcome to episode 1324 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast presented by our Patreon support as I am just sold in a Fangraphs, joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Hello, Ben. Hello. How are you? I'm doing all right. Not writing a book so I'm great every day. We will be joined later in this episode by another person who is no longer writing or editing a book that is Patrick Dubuque of Baseball Prospectus. We will be talking about whether it is ethically and morally right to talk about baseball player salaries at all but before

we get to Patrick's delightful interview, we have a little bit of banter, I think. I can say that we officially draw the curtains on Williams Estadio's 2018-2019 winter ball season. His team has been eliminated from the playoffs in the fifth game of the series. Estadio wound up 1-4 with a double in the

final game. His playoff campaign ends. I will just read out some numbers. 49 plate appearances 43 at bats 15 hits he batted 349 in the playoffs on base percentage of 408 slugging percentage of 488 four walks one strikeout so that brings his venezuelan total to five strikeouts this is in the entire winter ball season and i know winter ball it takes place when you're not really paying a whole lot of attention to it i think you have a concept that it's happening but you don't pay that much attention and in the past when i've thought about winter ball i've thought like oh yeah it's like something

that players do for like a month month and a half maybe two williams s to do a bad 310 times in venezuela since the end of the regular season like 310 plate appearances that's half of a major league season right there five strikeouts 310 plate appearances that's half of a major league season right there five strikeouts 310 plate appearances five strikeouts uh we i think aren't going to talk about williams estudio anymore because he's no longer playing he will come up i'm sure in our net well okay we'll see what happens but he'll he'll come up i'm certain at length in our twins season preview i don't know if he's going to do anything that is of podcast noteworthiness while he's not playing hopefully he spends some time just relaxing not playing baseball whatever

it is he likes to do but anyway books are all closed astadio eliminated his team eliminated still a valiant effort for the runner-up venezuelan m Yep. Well, thanks to him for getting us through this winter. I wonder, because you mentioned it is a lot of experience, I wonder if you looked at, say, players who were the same age and roughly the same skill level, but take one group that plays winter ball and another group that does not play winter ball, I wonder if there's any apparent improvement in the group that does play winter ball.

Because if you're at a certain age, now there are guys hanging on in their 40s and they just play winter ball because it's what they do. But if you're a prospect and you get that additional half a season of facing pitching, even if it's not major league quality pitching, you'd think that there probably would still be some value there I would think just getting to see all those pitches Just all the extra reps So I'd be interested in seeing a study

Just if anyone wants to put the work in See whether Winter Ball actually helps you develop Yeah, go do it Winter Ball numbers are really, really hard to track down In any sort of consistent form So somebody else, this is one of our several calls for somebody else to do the hard work on a different note you know a name i haven't thought of in a very long time it's interesting because somebody in my chat asked me about brett anderson

on friday and when brett anderson was like a really interesting rookie a decade ago because he was a guy who got granders and strikeouts right when all of the analysts loved guys who got granders and strikeouts and another guy who emerged in that same rookie 2009 season who got grounders and strikeouts was the blue jays rookie romero and apparently on friday rookie romero has announced his retirement now this is one of those soft announcements ricky romero has not pitched in the major since 2013 he's 34 years old i think we had a sense ricky romero was retired but when i clicked on ricky romero's fan graphs page because i have genuinely nothing better to do right now i uh apparently there was an article written in february of 2013 titled ricky romero sinking and not

sinking very bad headline title article written by one jeff sullivan and i uh of course this is one of those articles i absolutely had forgotten about writing. You could present the entire thing to me right now, just removing the byline, and I wouldn't recognize it as my own writing. We all evolve. But I'm looking at it, and there's an excerpt in here. I'm going to read you. So this is from the article I wrote, but this is excerpting from an article in the National Post by John Lott. Okay, so this is via John Lott. Brandon Morrow's research startled Ricky Romero. It showed that Romero had almost given up on a Okay, so this is via John Lott..77 worst among big league starters morrow found those figures on the brooksbaseball.net website printed them out and gave them to romero quote i was a little bit amazed by it romero said tuesday pulling the sheet from his locker this is six years ago brooks baseball of course was in existence

obviously six years ago though and ricky romero didn't know he didn't use his sinker as much i can't even conceive of something like that being able to happen now without a player being aware of it. Yeah, that's not a tiny change either. That's like, he's throwing it half as much as he was before. That seems almost like would have to be a conscious thing.

I mean, we all fall into bad habits or different habits, and sometimes we don't even realize that we're doing it. So I guess that was what was going on. But if you're a pitcher, you have to make a conscious choice to throw a certain pitch every single time you throw one. So you would think that there wouldn't be vast variations in your percentage of throwing certain pitches without some intentional change. So that's interesting. Yeah, you would think not. Now, of course, if Brandon Morrow were a more

thorough researcher, and if he had been more intellectually honest with rick romero he might have pointed out that between 2009 and 2010 when romero was also a very good starter he threw his sinking two seamer about 11 of the time which is the same as what he did in 2012 turns out there was more to the story what was happening was that rick romero i think was injured and just declining so anyway the information provided to romero romero did not i think explain why he struggled so much but also was not presented in a way that provided all the necessary information so what happened to rick romero lots of things don't pitch kids i think is the most important uh point to make here and i think i uh that's that's pretty much all i've got to say about baseball right now because baseball is not doing a whole lot

to generate much interest. Actually, I should ask you a question because a lot of people have complained publicly. Privately? Well, publicly, mostly publicly, that the offseason has been slow and boring. And it's true because, again, you've got Harper and Machado and Keichel and Corbin and Kimbrell still out there as free agents and Real Muto still waiting to be traded, etc. There's no Shohei Otani this winter, which is going to just lead to a necessarily a letdown because that he was, was and is a god. But yes,

I think I've come around. I know it's been a slow off season. I know this has been in particular for both of us sort of a slump week for thinking about baseball because there's just nothing. But imagine a world where the Harper and Machado contracts had already been signed, and Kimbrell and Pollock and Keichel have signed, and Real Muda has been traded. Then what are we doing? It's just differently boring. At least this way, we get to, in theory, look ahead to moves. You never know what the next Rosenthal breaking news tweet might come out, because the alternative is January and February suck. Yeah. No, I think that's true. I think we're all pining for the alternative, but really it's roughly the same number of moves being made. They're just being distributed differently.

Maybe it is better to have that anticipation. I guess once you get to this point, you can, you know, we're a month away from pitchers and catchers reporting, which is also a letdown because they report and then nothing happens for like another six weeks. But it's a milestone. At least you feel like you're getting closer. And so maybe that's part of it, that it's nice to have these moves happen in the dead dark of winter where it feels like baseball is so far away, whereas now they might not

sign until baseball is almost back again. Who knows? So that's part of it. But it is true. When a big free agent signs, you think it's going to be so exciting. And if he signs with your team, it's exciting. But for most people, he doesn't sign with their team. And then what do you say?

It's just we've already talked about who these players are. We've already talked about how good they are. So you can talk about the terms of their contract if you want to, although as we're about to talk to Patrick with, maybe we shouldn't be doing that. And then what else you talk about? Okay, well, we know he's with this team, so he fits this way, and here's how he affects their playing time. And this team missed out on him, so what can they do instead? And that takes a couple hours, and then you're done because it's not like these guys are coming out of nowhere,

especially after you've been talking about them for months on end. It offers some finality, but not really a whole lot of additional angles for research, really. Right, and look, I know that Patrick Corbin isn't a sexy name like Bryce Harper or Manny Machado, but when's the last time you thought about Patrick Corbin signing with the Nationals? Biggest contract of the winter.

Like, huge move. It doesn't matter anymore. You sign, you have a player sign or you have a player traded and it's really, really interesting for a day and then the next day

you're like, okay, now what? And that's just a sign of our own impatience as human beings but baseball is just going to operate how it's going to operate these players are going to get signed they're going to get traded it's all going to happen and then as soon as Bryce Harper signs with the team like you said one team's fans will care about it the rivals will be maybe upset by it

and everybody else will just stop caring and even the team that gets him the fans whether I don't know let's say it's the Phillies let's say the Phillies sign a Manny Machado or something. Then within one day, Phillies fans are going to be like, can we get Bryce Harper? And then they're just going to be disappointed when they don't get Bryce Harper. So look, if you're listening to this, it's the middle of January. You're not going to be happy. This is not a happy time of year.

This is deeper than baseball. We should all be able to just take a vacation in the middle of January, go to Palm Springs. We should all descend upon Palm Springs in January. Well, on that note, we will take a quick break, and we'll be right back with Patrick Dubuque from Baseball Perspectives. Now we are joined, You're not too sad Cause if you never left Now we are joined, rejoined, by Patrick DeDue from Baseball Prospectus. I realize Ben and I were talking the other day about how, I mean, this has been a hard week for Ben anyway, work-wise, just because he finished the book.

And it's been a hard week to write. This is a lull. This is clearly like the lull in the baseball calendar. Not a lot is happening in January. And we were having trouble coming up with like really good podcast ideas. And then we both had read an article written by Patrick Dubuque at Baseball Prospectus titled Cold Takes, his article, What They Make. And Ben and I were talking.

We were like, oh, you know, it would be nice to have Patrick back on the podcast. And then I went into my email archive and I typed in Patrick's email and I realized that 357 days ago, we emailed Patrick in a similar fit of desperation to come on the podcast and serve as a guest to talk about an article he wrote at Baseball Prospectus. So I guess we have a developing annual tradition. Patrick, hello. How are you? Hi, I'm good. How are you guys doing?

Doing okay. Thankful that you were available on such short notice because, boy, let me tell you. Let me tell you, I got nothing to tell you. So you read the article and it's titled What They Make. And this is an article that kicks off in the lead. You referred back to a Sports Illustrated cover from, what was it, 1987? There was a cover feature article titled What They Make in Sports Illustrated. So I guess there's no better place to start than in the same place you started in your article. Explain, if you will, to all the listeners, what was your lead? So yeah, this is actually, ironically, kind of one of the first SI covers that I remember as a kid. Because it's not a usual SI cover. The next week, actually, was the hot 1987 brewers who had started 17 and one and it was all about how they were the the new best team in baseball they finished like

90 wins and like 10 games out of the playoffs but uh but this one is just basically a series of mug shots of all of various players randomly with their names and their salaries and their teams. And that's it. And it says what they make and it's bold letters. It sounds like a scandal the way they put it on this cover and you go inside and there's, it's just what they make. It's like, they don't,

they didn't lie. It is literally just a list of every single major league player and how their salary was. And this would have been our, our episode this week. We should have just done what they make and we could have just listed every salary that would have gotten us through an episode well it's crazy i mean this was just it was just considered newsworthy by itself it didn't you didn't even like what an easy week for that guy whoever wrote it just there you go done exactly right so yeah so i started thinking

about because i you know have recently emerged from my own book. We just finished editing the 2019 version of the Baseball Perspectives Annual. And so I'm just kind of... Yeah, thank you. Go get it now. You can pre-order it. Pre-order it on Amazon. That wasn't why I was saying that. Basically, I was saying it because I was kind of coming up for air myself after kind of being underwater, dealing with everything for weeks and weeks.

of being underwater dealing with everything for weeks and weeks and i was looking at you know transaction analysis and i just wondered you know all these stories about player salaries and i started wondering why do we need to talk about this why do we need to worry so much about what every player is actually making because obviously as 30 years ago and still today we care intensely but i'm not sure why yeah i was just looking before we recorded there was a instagram post by evan longoria who he posted a picture of bryce harper manny machado greg kimbrough and dallas keitel and he said we're less than a month from the start of spring and once again some of our game's biggest stars remain unsigned such a shame it seems every day now someone is making up a new analytical tool to devalue players especially free agents as fans why should value for your team even be a consideration it's not

your money it's money that players have worked their whole lives to get to that level and be deserving of bottom line fans should want the best players and product on the field for their team and as players we need to stand strong for what we believe we are worth and continue to fight for the rights we have fought for time and time again. So this is the larger conversation that we have been having all offseason and last offseason and probably for the next couple offseasons. But it does kind of come back to value, which involves what the player is making, or at least we have made it involve that so that's the question i guess can we divorce those things can we just talk about the value of the player or any particular transaction without bringing money into it because the money's out there and we like the money like i think that there is something actually appealing to us as fans as just kind of a stat.

I think we like thinking about it the same way we like thinking about batting average and everything else. It's another thing about sports to sportify and to consider. And I think there's two parts to why we care so much about salaries. And one is the game aspect and the fact that we are all trained, we have trained ourselves and we have been trained to think about player salaries as part of our team's obligations. And that we have identified with the owners using players as chess pieces because we are much more comfortable thinking about ourselves as moving

the pieces than being an actual knight on a horse. And it's much easier for us to consider it that way. The other thing I think is that we've been taught that higher player salaries is equal to higher ticket costs. And I don't think that based on what we're allowed to know from what we're told about the finances of baseball teams, I don't think that that's a reasonable assumption to make. Well, so one of the things that you bring up in your article that I think is accurate is that a lot of the writing that's done, not just in contemporary analysis, but also just baseball writing in general for the past few decades, has been presenting things generally from

the team's perspective. This is what the team did. This is how this player or this move fits in with this team and its budget. And this is how this team is trying to get itself ready for contention or whatever the team is trying to do. And you don't see things written so much from the player perspective. It was like, hey, look, I just got a lot of money and I earned it because of all the work that I poured into this for the past 20 years of my life, whatever. And the media has presented one, certainly has been more sympathetic or at least provided the view from one side of this more than the other. So where do you come in? And I think this is what we talked about last time similarly as well, but that was an article

that was written about Andrew McCutcheon 357 days ago or whenever it was. But the way that most people relate to baseball, at least as fans, is from that team perspective, right? Because everybody has favorite players, but generally those favorite players are on their favorite team, and generally if a favorite player leaves a favorite team, the fan will stick with the team more than the fan will stick with the player. Are you looking for suggesting maybe more of an overall realignment in how fans relate to the game, or just that fans

should ultimately worry less about how their favorite team is trying to place pieces together i think that it is kind of interesting that i'm on exactly a year ago because this piece does kind of feel like a spiritual successor to that last one you know last time we talked about how teams were suddenly mid those mid-level teams weren't really trying to win that much anymore and how everybody was kind of folding at the same time. And now we're looking at basically a year later this extension of that logic, which is now that there are fewer mid-level teams that are trying to push the teams at the top, the teams at the top no longer feel as much pressure themselves to improve and to constantly push their salaries to the limit, which is why you're seeing what we've got with the Indians and the Cubs this year. They're like, well, you know, we can save money and still exceed the expectations that are set by, you know, say having the Tigers in our division. But as far as what we do as fans, I think what's

interesting to me is that when when we go to opening day we're consuming a baseball product and we consume it in two ways we we consume it by thinking about it like at times like this when there's nothing else to do but think about it but then we go to the game and really all that really matters is how good the players are right if if you you know if your team goes out and signs a player that they aren't supposed to sign, like say the Padres did with Eric Hosmer last year, because it didn't fit correctly in the window and in the narrative of how they were supposed to build their team, they still made their team better. And you still got to see more wins. Theoretically, Eric Hosmer didn't end up actually providing those.

But theoretically, if your team spends money on players, they're going to win more games. And therefore, watching baseball will be a more pleasant experience. And it doesn't have to be any more complicated than that, really. And it's odd because we all grew up following baseball and then writing about baseball in an era when the money mattered, or at least it mattered more than I think it does now. I mean, there were real constraints. There weren't enormous TV deals. There wasn't MLBAM, you know, just everyone getting a huge cut of that revenue. Like there wasn't all of this off the field stuff that teams were just raking in money from, regardless of how the on-field product did. And so we go back to the Moneyball era there,

you know, early in Moneyball. Now, now you can look at it and say, well, the A's just should spend more money. Like, who cares if they managed to win on a budget? They should just have a bigger budget. Their owners can afford it. Every team is worth billions of dollars. And so it's hard to escape that mindset that I think we all entered into. When we started analyzing baseball, it really mattered if you spent $10 million on this guy because that meant that you couldn't really spend $5 million on that guy. And so you had to figure out, is this guy more worth $10 million than that guy is? And so it almost seems like we're just past that point, except that teams still operate that way. It's just it doesn't seem like they have still operate that way. It's just, it doesn't seem like they have to

operate that way. And so we're in this weird position where we analyze moves that way because that's how it used to work. And that's how teams pretend it still works, but it doesn't really work that way. Yeah. And I think 15 years ago, budgets were extremely predictable. And the dollars per war mentality that our modern sabermetrics have brought is based off of, we know how the aging curve works. We know how much players should be worth. And we also know how much teams generally have to spend. There were always a few exceptions, even at the time. Obviously, the Yankees, even during peak dollars per war era, had that asterisk next to them. They could do whatever they wanted. But everybody else, we kind of knew exactly what they could do

based on the size of their market. And as those alternate revenue streams came into the league, ticket sales and actual fan influence is waning, which is what's brought about a lot of the tanking or the rebuilding that's taking place now is because you don't have to really worry about selling tickets as much it's not as big a chunk of the of the pie so because budgets are just not as predictable as they used to be we don't know and they also don't really let us know right we we get to know every single dollar amount, every single thing on the player's

side as far as how much they make. But as far as the other side, not only do they not tell us, but even if they open their books, I mean, they're big books, right? You could have a team that's losing money, but also have a television subsidiary that owned by the same people who was raking in cash. Yeah. Or just the value of the franchise is appreciating, regardless of whether it's actually in the red or in the black for that particular year. Right, and it doesn't, they keep going up. It's very weird. So in that sense, like, if we're not allowed to know, then it shouldn't, I don't know if

we're ethically allowed to talk about it. Because we are, we do have an, and I'm not a journalist. I'm the opposite of a journalist. But the media has an effect on what they cover by how they cover it. And it seems like simply by talking about one side and not being able to talk about the other side, we're affecting the playing field. What is the opposite of a journalist? Anyway, let's step back. Not graphs. Not graphs is the opposite of a journalist. So let's step back and to play a little bit of a devil's advocate, I guess, you had referred to the Padres signing Eric Hosmer to, what was it, $144 million, which is something that we know. We know that they did that. I'm not sure any other team was really going to come close,

but I can't just connect two dots. But we look at the Padres right now, and the Padres have a good up-and-coming roster, a better roster than they had last season. And the one thing they're really missing right now is a quality third baseman. They don't have that. Will Myers going back to the outfield, etc. Will Myers can't play first base because of Eric Cosmer. You know who would look really, really good in a Padres uniform now and for the future, who would really help and align with their supposed contention window is Manny Machado. Now, I assume, again, the Padres owner could probably afford Manny Machado just flat out regardless, but if not for the presence of Eric Hosmer, you would assume the Padres could

and would be an actual player for Manny Machado, even though right now we've been given no indication that that's actually true. So leaving aside the fact that the presence of Eric Hosmer didn't actually make the Padres better last season. That was just bad statistics. What would you say to the argument that you do have to worry at least a little bit about money because the presence of Eric Hosmer has prevented Padres fans from getting involved in the sweepstakes for a really, really good peak era Manny Machado? Well, first of all, if that is your argument, as you hypothetical Padres owner, then one could easily then equally advocate and say, well, you knew he was going to be a free agent. You knew they had this giant free agent class. And maybe you thought Eric Hosmer would be a four win player this year, and that would help.

But, you know, some lack of foresight might be accused of you for not thinking ahead to the fact that Manny Machado and Bryce Harper were rather publicly going to be free agencies here. The other argument is that if you're going to set a budget, you have to be able to prove it. You can't just say, oh, well, we can only spend this much because we have no reason to believe it, even if it sounds reasonable. And certainly Hosmer versus Machado is an extreme case of nine-digit salaries, but you still have to show some evidence that you couldn't just do both, because really what it's coming down to is the teams that are willing to pay are the ones that are going to get the talent. We made fun of Mike Illich and the Tigers for years, and it turns out that they were the only heroes. the only heroes. Right. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of a confusing thing to know how to write about or talk about because we're not saying that teams should be run like a charity. I mean,

it's nice if it were just for everyone's benefit and all the owner cared about was just making all the people in that city happy and didn't care about money or profits at all. But that's, you know, it's a business and we understand that. And it's great if you can get an owner who's willing to lose money on a baseball team because he has tons of money from other stuff and how much money do you need in life? But there are not an unlimited number of that type of person. It's just how do you know when the team is actually in danger of not making a profit or losing money? It's really hard. And they know that we don't know. And so they can pretty much say anything. And we know that sometimes they say misleading things because there's just no way to call them

on it. So it's a really tough thing. And it's especially frustrating because it's baseball, and we know everything about everything. And we know all the stats even better than we used to. And as you're pointing out, we know all the salaries. We do not know that other half of the equation. So it's really hard to know how to treat it. So you're the, what, director of editorial content at Baseball Prospectus, I believe it says on the masthead. So what would you want a typical transaction analysis to look like these days? I haven't obviously sent the mandate down to tell everyone how to do it, and I'm not sure yet, but I feel like theoretically, if you could give that information out and you could say he made nine million dollars and have it be free of connotation have it not affect how people felt

about their team and whether they could sign other players then there would be no problem but i don't know if you can ever do it i i think that there's there's too much association with that money ball era and that dollar per war mentality that i think you just have to you know just talk about the rest your team got a better player and and the funny thing is that for working on the annual this is essentially what that is we don't talk about finances that much in the annual it's just about the team composition and who's going to play what role and how good they are and uh you know how funny their name is a lot of the time. And that's really, it could be enough. I know that it's hard to tell media members in mid-January that,

hey, you know, there's nothing to talk about, but let's actually talk about less. Let's analyze less. But I'm kind of leaning that way, to be honest. I met someone at the gym this morning who said he's on an 11-month contract, and I like the idea that we could just take a month off, all of us. Just be like, you know what? We can talk about so little that we'll just talk about nothing in January. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing. How do you make it interesting while omitting that aspect of the analysis? Because that was where

you used to be able to really offer some value just as an analyst, just like, hey, this guy is worth this much, he's getting paid this much, that means it's bad or good because you could have spent this on this guy who's making this much and he's this good. It's like, you know, it's just another layer of the analysis as opposed to, well, this guy is projected to be worth three war. And the guy you had before was worth two war. So now this guy's a war better than everyone can do the arithmetic, you know. So it's like and especially because it's not even like in the past you would have maybe your reader would not be as familiar with these numbers as you were. And so they would be looking at the batting average in the RBI or something.

You'd come along and say, no, look at this other stat. He's actually better than you think. Now, the typical reader, at least probably at the sites that we're writing for, they're looking at the stat pages, too. They're looking at the projections like they know basically how good these guys are. So this is just a media member problem, but really how do you still provide value as a pundit if you can't analyze that? Well, and I think, you know, ideally it's interesting, like the concept of opportunity cost and the opportunity and the concept of having to divide one's resources and manage them is very interesting. It's a cool part of sports if we could be certain that it was fair.

And that's the problem is that because we have half of it, you know, a salary cap isn't fair because we can't make sure that the players are getting the right percentage of what money is owed. And you can't just say, okay, well, let's take all the money and divide it by 50. And then the 50% for the players is part of the salary cap, and you have to pay exactly that much. It just doesn't work because of those hidden revenue streams or even revenue streams that you didn't identify that show up, like advanced media, right? When you bargained last time, you had no idea that was going to happen.

The writer's strike in 2007 for Hollywood was basically about, everybody had bargained everything, and everything seemed cool, and then suddenly there were billions of dollars that nobody had accounted for, and there they were, and they had to strike over it because nobody had discussed it before. I wish that we could do it. I wish that we could talk about Machado and Hosmer and say, here is the choice between those two. But the way the game's set up, we can't.

It's interesting. One little change I think that you can observe in a little bit of recent writing, and I don't know how widespread this is, but we used to speak in terms of like bargain contracts or great contract or bad contract. You would see articles written about here are the five or ten worst contracts in baseball, when what that actually means is here are the five or ten contracts where the player is doing the least for the most amount of money. So I think that you can see the beginning stages of sort of a shift in terminology away from good contract, bad contract to team friendly contract versus player friendly contract, which I think is more objective and it doesn't convey any less information. Anyway, that way I think it would help to get away from, for example, demonizing Albert Pujols and Dan Lozano for getting Albert Pujols as much money as he made. But this is all separate from the point, the question I was going to ask, where we can talk about what the situation is today and the fact that we do have closed books on one side

and very open books on the other. But what is your perspective on the fact that, you know, the owners and the teams are acting within their rights as negotiated through the CBA and that the last CBA and maybe the past few CBAs have just been negotiated such that the player side was ending up making too many concessions and not getting enough. How much are you willing to actually blame owners for acting within what is their right to do based on what the players union has, for better or for worse, agreed to? the players union has for better or for worse agreed to well i i don't think a bargaining agreement is the only form of morality even in a capitalist society i think that that you should

still follow rules even if no one is making you follow the rules even if the other side is is negotiated poorly you can still act in good faith and not try to rip them off or try to take as much as you can that is a very naive argument but I do kind of believe from an ethical standpoint, you can still stand by it. I also think that, you know, from the standpoint, we are looking at, you know, two years until the next, you know, the next CBA comes around. At this rate, there probably is going to be a strike. And I don't know how well it's going to last. Nathaniel Groh wrote an article for Paygraphs last year saying that if there is a strike, it's going to be really bad for the players. And he makes a pretty compelling argument based on what a position of strength the owners have. But it seems like if you are in the owner's position,

the optimal solution is to avoid the strike because strikes are bad. They're bad for everybody. They're bad for everybody. They're bad for business. They hurt the sport, let alone the incomes. You should probably just take just as much as you can to keep from striking, to keep that strike from happening without just gouging with impunity as much as you possibly can get. And I feel like that latter scenario is where we are right now, where the owners are just, they can't see two years down the line and think, well, we're going to give back a lot of these additions, not just through the bargaining, but through the devaluement of the spore that we have created by that strike. I just don't think it's a good idea to just try to get as much as you possibly can at every single moment. That's why you don't own a baseball team.

It's true, or a business. Yeah. So for the past 10, 15 years, we haven't had to talk about labor issues in baseball all that much. It's just been this PACs, C-League era. I don't even want to give him credit for it, but it has happened that way where we've kind of just been focusing on the baseball and not so much on the union versus the league and whether we're going to have a strike. And that's been nice. And I don't think any of us really got into this to

talk about labor issues. Now that we're in this, we can't not talk about them because they're very important and they affect the future of the sport. And of course, they go beyond baseball and you can learn things from baseball that apply to other areas of life. But are you already sick of talking about this? Are you excited to talk about this? Do you wish that we were just talking about this team's going to sign Bryce Harper and who's going to win the NL East this year or whatever? Or do you enjoy having this as kind of a diversion from the on-field stuff? Or are you thinking, oh, man, two more years of talking about labor battles and economic issues, and that's just going to overshadow everything else? I would much rather talk about positive things than negative things.

I know that Bryce Harper as a topic is boring, but at least it's a positive boring where you know we read things and we're happy and we like the sport and we're not constantly frustrated by it i would just rather i would rather we all just have you know enjoy the sport as it goes and be able to get what we want out of it leave whatever we don't and not have it drowned out by one overarching thing that eventually just ends the sport all together for a while. Yeah. This is going to be kind of a bigger question and also a very naive question. But in the conclusion of your article, you write about the concern of whether we can talk about the player salaries ethically. It's something you've already brought up during this podcast.

And so we can say, okay, maybe it would be more ethical, maybe better for the moral good if owners invested a greater amount of their revenue into player payroll. But let's say, so if money that the owners don't invest into player payroll is money that the owners then have, and for all I know, I don't know all the financials of these owners, maybe they're very philanthropic, and maybe they're putting that money towards some other more positive view. So how do you rank or gauge the nobility of reinvesting money in a baseball team versus investing enough in a baseball team and then having, this is all just all about opportunity costs. We're just talking about somebody else's money now, right?

That's an incredibly difficult question. But fortunately, we do have those minor leaguers there. And so as long as they're being paid 12 cents an hour, like the benchmark's pretty low. Once they start fixing stuff like that, then we can start thinking about maybe, you know, questioning what's right as far as how to tax versus how to have philanthropy on, you know, in greater society. But for now, like we got people living in other people's homes eating burgers every day. So let's start there. They can't afford to pay the minor leaguers because they're all just funding orphanages. That's why. You want to take the money away from the orphans to pay the minor

leaguers? Is that what you're saying? In a sense, aren't the minor leaguers the orphans? Or it's the next generation, one of the two. So it seems like a very strange life to be a player and to have all of these details about you known not only your work performance just every swing and every pitch and every result of everything you do on the field can you imagine if we all had our stats just publicly tracked and we're out there for everyone and then what you're making so that if you're not producing that much, then people can yell at you from the stands about how you're not worth your salary or whatever. I mean, it seems like it's great to be a baseball player in a lot of ways, but those are ways that make me happy that I'm not one. Not that that was ever an option for me,

but I'm just saying I don't envy, I think, professional athletes for that reason. It sounds like an extremely stressful and difficult thing. You're just you're exposed for all to see. Every time I write an article that doesn't land, I just want to quit. I would last like I'd last maybe 20 minutes as a baseball player and I would strike out once and I'd just be like, okay, that's it. I'm going to go do some job where nobody can quantify my performance in any way. I'll be an artist. Right.

Yeah. I mean, I guess there's traffic counts, but if we're lucky, then our performance is not directly tied to those. But that's kind of the equivalent, I guess, if you're at a place that is just like you got to hit this number for this month. And even so, though, like your bosses might know how much traffic you're generating, but the person on the street doesn't know how many hits that you got with your last post. So it's just a whole order of magnitude of your life being exposed to everyone else's consumption. Yeah, I mean, in a way, it'd be nice if baseball were just a video game, and we could criticize everyone with impunity because there were no actual players. Of course, there'd still be people making the video game, and then by criticizing the video game, we would be

criticizing the owner. So I guess we can't really get away from being jerks to somebody at some point through fandom. Fans are monsters. We will eventually tear down somebody somewhere. Speaking of monstrous fans, let's say that this is something that a push that has to come from the outside. You can frame this

conversation as we are if a fan is critical of a baseball player for making too much money, you can say, well, of course, money know, money that doesn't go to the players, it's money that's going to the owners. And then would you rather the money be in possession of millionaires or billionaires? There's a several difference of zeros between a millionaire and a billionaire. But do you think that for the average baseball fan, if you're trying to involve sort of a groundswell of momentum to get people talking about this more often. Do you think that it's possible to get the average baseball fan to even consider caring about the plight of millionaires?

Can a baseball fan see the difference between millionaires and billionaires? Or do you think that maybe the focus would be more effectively placed on the plight of minor leaguers who, as you said, make virtually nothing? I think minor leaguers are the way to go and it's it's unfortunate that baseball has curbed that to some degree by making the minor league by robbing the minor leagues of its of a lot of its character and turning it into a player development factory you know you don't have what we would have had with the pcl back in the days where players just stayed in the pcl because they wanted to stay on the West Coast and just were happy to be in their own league. As far as, I mean, the biggest thing to help the millionaires, I think,

would be to dispel the myth that those millionaires' salaries are hurting the player through how much the fan has to pay. The idea that in any way ticket prices or beer prices are linked to player salaries and that the reason why their seat costs so much is because this greedy player is making this much. That's the thing I think that needs to be attacked first. If you're if you're on the player side and you're trying to get public opinion on your on your side of it. Yeah. And that's a tough one, too, because, of course, you are loyal to the team. a tough one too because of course you are loyal to the team you identify with this franchise and this uniform and root for the laundry and all the rest of it and so the typical fan is thinking i want my team to be as good as possible i want my team to be playing this is a main source of

entertainment for me my loyalty is to the team and you know you have a lesser loyalty to certain players on that team that you get attached to but ultimately it kind of just comes down to the team and you know you're have a lesser loyalty to certain players on that team that you get attached to but ultimately it kind of just comes down to the team and so it's hard it's almost like an abstract argument that you have to make like yes so we know that you have this tribal affiliation with this franchise and this logo but you have to consider the people and you know economics and uh these guys are making this much and these guys are making that much. It's a harder argument to make probably than just got to support the team like the putty from Seinfeld kind of argument. Yeah, part of it.

Baseball and professional sports are just too profitable. I think part of the problem is that there's just too much money and that teams and the corporations that are the teams have gotten so much better at detecting the value of their product and extracting it. And that's why you see so many jerseys. That's why you see so many things. These other revenue streams are because they know people will pay for them, that there's a value to it. And that's what sets the ticket price is that we're willing to pay it. And the only way to improve that would be to increase competition, which would involve eliminating the antitrust exemption and making there be more supply to match this greater demand.

But we can't do that. So 30 teams it is. You know, it's funny for all the information we know about major league player salaries, you actually have to work to look up what minor league players make, which is an interesting coincidence. It's just not out there in the headlines. I can't imagine why that is. Now, Patrick, so we already had one person on this podcast earlier this week to pitch a book. That was Ben. And we did not bring you on to try to pitch a book. But as you said, you did just complete all the editorial work

for the next Baseball Prospectus Annual. So is there anything you would like to say about that annual? What will allow it to stand out? Or just if you would like to let anything off your chest because you have been underwater for a number of months, you just want to scream into the void for a few minutes? No, I mean, it's the Baseball Prospectus Annual. I think that we did a good job this year

it's uh it is bigger than ever i know because i spent literally days just trying to figure out how to cut blank lines out of pages to get everything to fit in a way that could be affordable but why is it bigger just more players or more things there are so many middle relievers now guys that's true you know i didn't of that. I thought of that in other contexts. There are just more baseball players these days. We had to make rules about the number of stat lines we give a player because we had certain players that would have 10 stat lines because they'd be in three leagues each year. Oliver Drake. Oh, Oliver Drake.

It's a nightmare. so yeah so like everything there's more to say and there we obviously have more tools than ever to analyze players so that's good we actually can do you know i've over a year over the years the the length of player comments like i i once i went back to the one of the 90s versions of the annual and it was like three sentences and i thought that's insane they're all almost like three paragraphs it feels like now because we just have so much more we can use to talk about players yeah but we've got a we've got a great slew of essayists we have nick offerman wrote the chicago cubs essay this year and it's uh fantastic it's a it's a really fun read and uh yeah like fangramps on cheryl ring wrote an essay about uh the first woman baseball player. And I think it's a really good book.

And it's always a good book. I think it's always worth reading. And this one's no exception. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to getting my copy, although I'm going to have to figure out what to do. Because I have a shelf on my bookshelf that is entirely devoted to baseball prospectus annuals from 1996 through 2018. I have them all, and it is now full. Even if I go horizontal on top of the vertical ones, I don't think I can squeeze another one in there. And then I have to figure out what to do.

Do I just colonize a new shelf with one lonely BP annual? a new shelf with one lonely BP annual. I've been dreading this for the past few springs because I've known that this decision is coming. So it's inevitable. But what do you think the value of continuing to have a book like this after more than 20 years of putting them out? So much has changed in the way that we cover baseball, what is available online to us at all times, not just spring training when pitchers and catchers report, when you used to get the previews that would come out and you'd say, oh, I wonder what happens this winter and wonder what's going to happen this spring. It never ends now. There is always content coming constantly. So why do we still like this? Because I still do.

I think the writing quality is the number one reason. content coming constantly. So why do we still like this? Because I still do. I think the writing quality is, you know, the number one reason. Like, we have 60 contributors this year, and we brought in so many people to write. And I think that ever since, you know, I don't know how far back, but that's really been our prime focus is to make it as enjoyable to read and, you know, to be able to pick through i kind of like the randomness of a book sometimes like you just flip in a way that you can't really do with a web page or many web pages is you could just open the book to a certain page you can randomly self-select and just read a couple players or read part of an essay and you know also i am you know as somebody who owns a lot of books like i i did not make the transition from physical text to uh to digital one but there's there's you know

it's it's better to read a book than to read something on a screen uh it's a more comfortable campaign one of the things that i remember because i i loved it was some of those earlier baseball prospectus manuals annuals or the books that sort of inspired me to get into baseball writing in the first place because i loved the the blend of numbers and and having to be clever just like the the snark and the sense of humor and it was just it was right in the wheelhouse for like late teenage years jeff sullivan and one of the things that i i think i've noticed over time is is we've had more and more data on every individual player than you were referring to how those old annuals used to have like three sentence write-ups and now the write-ups are all like three paragraphs. I don't even know how many pages you wrote about Williams Estadillo this season, but we have so much information. leave any informational stones unturned but do you sense that maybe it leads to have you observed

maybe it leads to the write-ups being more divorced from things specific to the players themselves you know whether it's less about personality quirks or moments they're remembered for and more about here's their strikeouts here's their walks and as i remember like there there are still captions from players 15 20 years ago that i still have it firmly implanted in my mind and they're inextricable from the players themselves and now i don't know do you do you sense that the captions are more impersonal or do you stress that writers do a good job to connect them to who the players are i feel like actually probably the opposite of the case and the reason is that the stats do such a good job now of telling the story

by themselves it frees the writer up to instead of having to talk you don't have to talk about walk rate it's right there you don't have to talk about there you there's so many stats there that you have to be more original and you have to you know talk about the stuff that those stats don't cover i also i just really like the format i really like 180 words on anything i feel like 180 words is the perfect number of words in a lot of ways because it's it's it's constrained to the point of almost being poetic a lot of the time you have to summarize you have to you have to break this down in a way that you have to leave stuff out you can't say everything about no no player hopefully could ever be summarized by 180

words so in order to do that in order to shorten it down like that, you kind of have to dig into the essence and find, you know, either the interesting thing. I don't think we don't, we don't do as much snark as we used to, you know, that's kind of nineties and early aughts era stat writing,

but definitely you, you, you're focusing on writing stuff that's, you know, interesting or that catches the reader off guard. And in that way, it's actually kind of freeing to write captions in a way that a lot of other sports writing doesn't really quite scratch the same edge. Yeah, because I think a few of the recent annuals have been very well received. There was a period where I think the annual went through a bit of a dip and then had a format change, and it's been very strong since. But you look on the Amazon reviews,

for instance, and there's always some stray voice out there that's like, why are there all these jokes in here? What are these pop culture references? I'm trying to win my fantasy league here. Give me some info. And there's a certain percentage of readers, I think, who are just there for kind of the straight dope on the player. They want to know how good this guy is going to be and how good the team is going to be. And if you do have one of those that's just kind of a joke

but gets to something about the player but doesn't really pertain to his performance specifically, then there's some portion of the readers that will be turned off. You can't please everyone. But having written for the annual and edited a little bit, that was always something we

were wrestling with. Yeah, you can only have one book. And I always think of the person on Amazon who complained that it wasn't entirely in alphabetical order. I mean, I'm sorry, man. But yeah, definitely one of the things I've emphasized the years that i've edited is that you should you know it's fun to make jokes but you they should have something to say we should never go with an entire comment where it sounds like you've never heard of the guy and they're just making a joke about their name obviously with line outs when you have literally

one or two sentences for guys that are you know know, 19-year-old pitchers in single A. You know, sometimes you're just going to make a joke. But, you know, the idea is to make it fun to read but not just gags. And I think that's the balance we try to reach, you know, which with 2,200 players, you're going to fall on one side or another sometimes. Can I ask, last November, it was announced on Baseball Prospectus that the site was under new management. It had been bought by announced on Baseball Prospectus that the site was under new management. It had been bought by writers for Baseball Prospectus itself.

Can I ask how that's going? I think it's going quite well. There are obviously a lot of things that we have been wanting to do the previous couple of years that we weren't able to do. And there have been a lot of constraints and a lot of confusion about what we could be. There have been a lot of constraints and a lot of confusion about what we could be. And they aren't all happening at once, but we are already making a lot of significant changes to the site. One of the dramatic things that we want to emphasize, DRC has already come out and has been, I think, pretty successful in this presentation. We really want to concentrate to make our statistical information more accessible, both literally by being able to actually reach and sort the stats in a way that people could actually use them, and also just by better communicating what we do.

We have a new training section under Brian Grosnick that we're going to do a better job of explaining what makes our stats good, how they should be used, what makes them useful, and make everything a little bit more intuitive. We've got projects across the site. We're doing more international focus. Sungmin Kim has been writing for us about the KBO, and we're going to look more into other leagues as well, maybe even Australia. But we have a, it's really finally a chance for us to get to do all the things, all the cool ideas that we've had for the last couple of years. And I think that the whole 2019, the funny thing is that we're going to get to,

you know, every time we get to do something, it'll be something new and exciting. And they might not all work, but it will be a chance to to do a bunch of new stuff okay well patrick i would like to thank you very much for being available and for being available on short notice for the second time within a calendar year and it's funny because we just talked to sungmin kim about kbo and his ready for baseball prospectus in the previous episode so thank you to baseball prospectus for providing guests for us in a time of just deep, unholy desperation looking for something to talk about.

Because I don't know, Scott Boris hasn't returned my messages, but it's probably for the best. So Patrick, thank you for coming on. It was a pleasure. Well, thanks, guys. I appreciate it. Talk to you next mid-January. All right. That will do it for today and for this week.

Thanks to you all for listening. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners have already done so. Bases Loaded, Landon Jones, Scott Lowry, Clark Bundy, and Bill Terry. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com

slash group slash effectivelywild. And you can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Please keep your questions and comments for me and Jeff coming via email at podcastfancrafts.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. And you can preorder my book, The MVP Machine, coming out late this spring. Go get it now if you're interested.

I know this has been sort of a strange week because I was finishing that book at the beginning of the week and then we kind of compressed everything at the end here but thanks for bearing with us have a wonderful long weekend if you are in the US and have Monday off and we will talk to you shortly next week That's all I know right now That's all, that's all I know right now I'm yours and you're mine That's all I know right now

That's all, that's all I know right now