Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1427: Most Valuable Podcast

Episode Date: September 6, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Meg’s time in the mountains and subsequent September disorientation, attempt to divine the family dynamics of a Colin Moran vs. Brian Moran matchup, talk about the Twins pulling away in the AL Central race and the implications for Cleveland, and discuss the downsides of the annual debate about […]

We belong to each other, brothers and sisters, brothers and sisters. So be strong for each other, brothers and sisters, brothers and sisters. Got to be brave in a scared world brothers and sisters hello and welcome to episode 1427 of effectively wild a fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our patreon supporters i'm meg rowley of fraphs, and I am joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? I am doing quite well. How are you? I'm well.

Good. Well, we were just talking before we started recording about how you were away for the long weekend and after that in the mountains, and then you came back to a different sport with new players and many more players, which must have been somewhat disorienting. I mean, it was for me too, but there was there when everyone kind of started trickling up from AAA. Yeah. It's always a little disorienting. I mean, when it's guys who you're excited to see, like notable prospects, you're like, hey, it's that guy. There he is. Got to see him. It's so cool. But a lot of the time it's just like, hey, here's another backup catcher. And here's this lefty reliever type. I watched the NFL season kickoff last night, which was a very bad game and made me in a way that is not, hey, like my sport,

but made me really like my sport. And I figured there aren't going to be any baseball games still on when this is done because there were a bunch of day games. And then the Mariners and the Astros were in extras. And I was like, oh, no, it's extras in September. This could go on forever. It didn't because the Astros are pretty good at baseball. And Matt Whistler is still sort of iffy as a pitcher. But it had the potential to be just a bunch of just a bunch of guys i didn't know ryan

court played first base which is actually kind of cool because you know he's had he's had quite the journey but uh yeah it's the thing about september it's very confusing it's like going it's like going to a high school reunion and running into a bunch of your former classmates spouses and you're like do i know you Am I supposed to know you? Have I met you before? It feels like that. Yeah. Well, fortunately, Eric Langenhagen

has chronicled all the call-ups for Fangrass, although I guess more of the most promising players, the prospect-y ones, who are the ones we should be paying attention to, but also we should be paying attention to the ones who have not been here for a while and maybe won't be here for a while because it's kind of cool that they get this chance to do that. And they probably won't in future Septembers, which is sort of sad.

But yeah, get used to the 17-man bullpens while you still can because after that we'll be back to merely, what, eight or nine-man bullpens. Right. what eight or nine men pull pants so yeah it does seem as if we are mostly endeavoring to address the symptoms rather than the disease itself it seems like we can have more direct sort of roster rules around that and it wouldn't even have to be some kind of spooky ban the shift nonsense that we all think is overreaching like i don't know just say you only have so many pictures you can be active on a given day or what have you. Yeah, right. Well, I wanted to get your thoughts on something

that happened on Thursday, and this was the matchup between the Moran brothers. And I wanted to get your perspective as a sibling on this, specifically because having not been a sibling, the sibling relationship is largely a mystery to me. Although my wife is one of five siblings, so I've kind of been introduced to it through her. But the dynamics of that obviously vary from family to family. But this was, for anyone who missed it, a nice heartwarming moment.

But I wonder whether it's tinged with some sort of sibling rivalry undertones. And so I wonder whether you have any insight into that. So this was the first time that brothers had ever faced each other in one of the brothers' Major League debuts. So Brian Moran, who is the older brother, he is about to turn 31. He made his Major League debut and he happened to be pitching against the Pirates and his brother, Colin Moran, who is the younger brother and has been in the big leagues for a few years now, he is 26. And Colin Moran is a former first round draft pick. And Brian Moran is a guy who's just kind of been a journeyman in the minors. And he was a seventh rounder. I think he got to AAA when he was 23.

And this is his first time making the majors. And he's been in a number of organizations. And he just finally got his shot. And it just so happened that the second batter he faced was his own brother, Colin. And he struck him out looking on a 3-2 count. And I just, I wonder what was going through their heads at this moment. Like certainly happiness for Colin, I'm sure. But like, are there other things going on there?

I kind of wonder because you're always like competing for your parents' affections. And like the family was sitting there and they very neutrally reacted to the outcome of the plate appearance like they were kind of smiling but they weren't like cheering that brian struck out colin because i guess that would be weird so you have to like show your neutrality in that situation i think that there are a couple of possibilities here i think that in all likelihood colin was quite excited for his brother i mean when you are if you are the more professionally accomplished sibling yeah uh you have an opportunity in a moment like that to like exhibit graciousness toward your your sibling right because like the results of that plate appearance matters very

little to colin moran yes and his future with pirates will not be impacted by that in any kind of material way. The results of that plate appearance for his brother matters a tremendous amount. Yeah. And so I expect that he was mostly just very excited for his brother. But I think that if we wanted to allow some room for some darkness in our interpretation of this event. I think we always should. room for some darkness in our interpretation of this event i think we always should yeah i wonder what percentage of brian wondered if his brother let him have it yeah right let him have the moment especially because he went he went down looking right he did yeah and he did he fouled off a

couple pitches early in the plate appearance so he wasn't just like standing there. And I think on 3-1, maybe it was, he took a pretty healthy hack at it. So he made it look good. At least he looked like he was trying on that final pitch. The pitch was more or less right over the plate and Colin just took it. And maybe he was fooled and wasn't expecting what he got. I don't know. Or maybe he was just kind of conceding.

It's hard to say because there must be some temptation. Like it's a Pirates-Marlins game. Like nothing is at stake here. I mean, something is at stake in every Major League Player appearance, obviously, for every player. But in the grand scheme of things, this is about as meaningless as it gets. And so there had to be part of Colin who was thinking, maybe I can help out big bro here. Yeah. Let him have his moment. Especially because, well, Colin Moran, he'd had a hit, I think, at least one earlier in that game. Yeah, two, I think. Moran had had a hit, I think, at least one earlier in that game.

Yeah, two, I think. Two doubles. Yeah, good job him. Yeah. And it was still early in the game, which is why you think maybe there was no sort of tomfoolery, although especially because the Pirates were behind, I think, at the time. So, you know, he has incentives within the confines of the game to try to, you know, press the point and get some runs on the board for his team. I'm sure he would deny to his brother that this is what happened.

I'm sure he would say, Bri, Bri guy, no. Like, of course not. You just got me, man. You got me with a good pitch. And hopefully he sounds more convincing than I just did. And, you know, at Thanksgiving, they're going to laugh about it. And hopefully he sounds more convincing than I just did. And, you know, at Thanksgiving, they're going to laugh about it. And they're going to say, ah, those bad baseball teams we were a part of.

But remember that plate appearance? I sure did get you. And it'll feel good for Brian because Colin has been quietly getting him whether he was in the batter's box against him or not for years now yeah that's the thing it's like when you're the younger brother and you're better at the thing that you both do then that's the other thing is that most siblings don't enter exactly the same field so you don't have like a head-to-head comparison like that like maybe one sibling ends up i don't know making more money or being better known or something like that. Like maybe one sibling ends up, I don't know, making more money or being better known or something like that. But if you're in different fields and you do different things and they bring you satisfaction in different ways, then it's not really like a

head to head competition in the way that it is when you're both professional baseball players and one of you just gets drafted sooner and gets ranked higher on prospect lists and gets called up sooner and it's the younger brother i don't know whether that makes it harder or easier because like it's harder for a younger sibling if they're perpetually trying to catch up to an older sibling but then maybe it's also hard for an older sibling if the younger sibling surpasses them in the very field that they have chosen to go into. So who knows how that all plays out and is underlying what they're thinking at this moment. I think that it's probably best for people who are related to each other to do very different jobs. Like, you know, as you noted,

like I have siblings, I have a slightly younger sister and then a much younger brother. And my sister, my sister's a stay-at-home mom. She's a great mom. She's got two beautiful little nieces. And, you know, she's very good at her job. She's a fantastic mom. And I like to think I'm good at my job. And there's no, it's no problem because we have different jobs.

And we are doing different stuff. So it's, I think it's much cleaner when you're in vastly unrelated fields. And when you're in related fields, it's probably, I wonder which is better for the overall family dynamic. Like, I think probably the Seegers have it figured pretty well. Because like Corey Seeger is a better baseball player than Kyle Seeger. But Kyle Seeger has made $100 million. Right. So that's nice.

Like, he's probably pretty stoked about that. And he's a good, you know, especially in the second half of this year and in the course of his career over time, has been a good little player in his own right. So I think that's probably the ideal scenario because everybody has their thing that the other guy doesn't have and so everyone has something yeah and you can just you can just take satisfaction and i do think though that the marants probably have a nice little uh additional wrinkle in this which is that one of them is a hitter and one of them is a pitcher and that's probably yeah that's probably a good approach also because like you know you're you're uh you're you're you're up for different awards at the end of the year basically i mean neither of them but like theoretically uh and so uh you know you're you're not swimming in the same pool you got different

you're on different leaderboards so it's fine like you're never gonna see mor same pool. You're on different leaderboards. So it's fine. You're never going to see Moran and Moran next to each other and be like, oh, one of those brothers, that brother's better than the other brother. So maybe the ideal baseball sibling scenario is two different positions, preferably a position player and a pitcher.

One of them has a big contract and one of them is better and then everyone gets along pretty well maybe yeah obviously there have been very lopsided talent brothers in baseball before so this is not new and of course you have the same thing with fathers and sons which i'm sure gets very complicated in many ways too so and it's not like colin is a superstar like he's he's been in the big leagues for a while but he currently has a negative 0.1 wins above replacement this year at least according to baseball reference the page i'm on right now largely because of uh very subpar defense, at least according to DRS. It appears that he committed an error later on in this very game.

Uh-huh. Okay. Well, there we are. So it kind of was interesting to see their reactions, their outward reactions and emotions, because Colin was unsuccessfully hiding a smile, and it kept creeping in, and he sort of kept looking at his brother whereas brian seemed to be all business like he didn't betray at least that i saw any sign that he was facing his little brother and maybe that was because it's his big league debut and it's just like a maelstrom of emotions even if you're not facing your brother at that point and

every big leaguer seems to say that they have like no memory of their big league debut and it was just a a big blank in their mind because they were just so overwhelmed by the moment so i don't know whether that will apply to the brands or not or whether this will be even more memorable because it was a brother on brother matchup but yeah it not really, they weren't like making a mockery of the situation. It wasn't like they were slapping each other on the back and laughing at each other, like Jimmy Fallon breaking during an SNL skit or something. They looked like baseball players doing their baseball player thing,

except for Colin occasionally smiling. But it was a fun moment and I don't know why I have to delve into the depths of what may be going on in their minds and emotions but I am curious about that as an only child who is always on the outside looking in at these things I think that it's a very valid question I had forgotten that Colin Moran was originally drafted by the Marlins. It's another fun little wrinkle here. No, I think it's a good question. And the smile thing, again, this is the – like you said, like Colin can smile because it doesn't matter. But like you, Brian, you know, Brian, you got to be serious because you don't want to look like you're cracking wise or not taking the moment seriously.

You've been working for it your whole life. So it is the privilege of comfort that Colin got to enjoy in that even though he ended up being on the losing end of that particular at-bat. Yep. Well, that was fun. And it was the first time it's ever happened, which is pretty cool because there's been a lot of baseball and a lot of baseball brothers. So it's just very unlikely, obviously, that you would face your own brother when you're making your league debut, and I'm glad that finally happened. Yeah. All right.

I've got a couple other things to bring up. Do you have anything on your mind? I think it's funny how the AL Central has sort of swung back into a comfortable twins lead it really has so i've been thinking about i've been thinking about those twins uh and how um how fun that is gonna be in the postseason because it's nice to have well i guess they've recently been a wild card team but it's fun to have people sort of back in the divisional races in a way that they haven't been in a minute. Yeah, when Cleveland caught up at that time, I actually thought that they probably had the edge in the division. Whether or not they were demonstrably better team, they seemed to have the easier schedule the rest of the way.

And they had some players, it seemed like, who were on the comeback trail. rest of the way and they had some players it seemed like who were on the comeback trail and since then they have lost jose ramirez and cory kluber had a setback so some of the things that we thought would materialize did not and also they just haven't played that well and so yeah they have fallen far enough behind now that they are probably playing for the wild card at this point. And they are now trailing there too. So everything that we had been saying about Cleveland and their offseason and the regrets that they should have, yeah, very much back on the table. And we got an email from someone actually who asked about this. And if I can find it, I will read it now since we're on the subject. Listener Sam says,

Around the deadline, y'all chatted about the Giants' situation of how a recent hot streak can actually make it harder for a team to make a deadline decision. You've also spent a lot of time talking about Cleveland's terrible offseason. My question is, even though their second half resurgence has been fun and may even lead to a wild card, do you think it will actually hurt the team in the long run? A season finishing a dozen or more games back would be humiliating for the tribe, but it would have forced the front office to at least try to be proactive. If the team finishes closer to first, I am worried the front office will play the getting injured players back is as good as signing new players card and be terrible this offseason. Just curious to get your takes on how finishing a season can positively or negatively impact a team's offseason approach.

I think it's a really good question. I think it depends a lot on what motivated the sort of inaction in the prior offseason. sort of inaction in the prior off season. So I think I don't say this with special inside insight into the Cleveland front office, but my suspicion is that were they allowed to spend more money, they probably would have done that, right? Those budgets are set by ownership, not by the, or at least not entirely by the front office. So I don't think that the kind of budget conscious, if we're trying to say it in a slightly neutral way, approach that Cleveland has taken to constructing their teams has a whole lot to do with where they are in their competitive cycle because even when they have been very, very good,

they still haven't splurged, splurged on spending and done what we might expect. So I don't know in their particular case how big of a difference it's going to make, mostly because I don't expect them to spend ever. Yeah, right. I mean, I guess it could make ownership sit up and take notice and potentially maybe they were overly confident in their chances and felt like they didn't have to spend. And so missing the playoffs entirely could be a wake-up call where they realize, okay, we actually do have to spend to put a good team on the field and get people to come see it. So that could happen.

Yeah, I definitely think it's probably more of an ownership question than a front office question. Yeah. And I think that they are going to very shortly here face some really tricky questions. They aren't tricky. They're very obvious that you should just try to do whatever you can to make Francisco Lindor a lifelong member of the Cleveland organization. But in a couple of years here, they're going to have to make some choices around Lindor. And so I could see them potentially justifying a lack of spending now in ways that would be about having room to spend later when they need to make a decision on Lindor. But I think we should probably be skeptical of that line of reasoning. But yeah, I don't know. I think that ownership tends to be pretty slow to react to individual seasons indicating

an institutional problem with how you're spending. So I would be surprised if we saw a significant shift in their approach just based on one season of missing the postseason, especially given the injury concerns that they've had this year. So I don't imagine it's going to make them sit up and say, hey, you know, what we really should have done was just even make Michael Brantley a qualifying offer. Yeah. We probably should have even done.

I'll be surprised if there's that quick of a turnaround, but I don't know, perhaps I'm underestimating them. Yeah. There are times where maybe it benefits a team to have a worse record that reflects their underlying performance. I think there are teams that in the past maybe have been misled, been overconfident because they had one of those seasons where they were super clutch and they ended up with a much better record than run differential or whatever measure of underlying performance you want to use. And so that dictated their path into the off season where maybe they were more complacent than they needed to be, or who knows, it's just better to probably see your talent reflected in your record.

These days, I don't know that it would actually confuse a front office to have a mismatch between those things. But maybe ownership. Ownership is not necessarily looking at the same things that the front office is. And if ownership sees a 90-win season or something and the front office is saying, well, actually, we were a true talent 83-win team or whatever, I don't know that that argument would be all that persuasive to an owner who's just like looking at the wins and the people who came to the ballpark and

everything. So on the whole, I mean, obviously you want to win as much as possible at all times, I think. But in terms of just being realistic about where you are and what you need to do, it's probably better if your record actually reflects your team. Yeah, I agree. Although, you know, like I think that we, and many of us did, looked at the Cleveland roster in this offseason and were like, hey, we think your outfield is not very good and you should make them better. And we can show some very, you know, rational and reasoned and measured analysis to that end.

And then the ownership group was like, no. Yeah, right. Who knows? Owners can be fickle. I think you're right that baseball ops people would prefer that you want your actual record and your Pythag and your base runs record to all sit right on top of each other. Because then you can have very candid conversations with ownership that don't let sort of excitement and feeling enter the picture. But sometimes you want excitement and feeling to enter the picture.

So it's all very complicated. Yeah, right. Were you going to bring up something else other than AL Central? Oh, I was just going to bring up a moment of confusion that can only happen when you have been away from baseball for a couple of days. And I will say that it is very silly that I had this thought because I was only really able to go away because we had a consolidated deadline. And so there would not have been really any reason for me to see this and think what I thought, but I had a little brain misfire because I looked at pitching probables. I guess the other thing I was going to bring up was that Oakland's been playing good baseball lately. there was a a pitching probable when the angels were playing the the a's that was p sandoval versus whoever oakland was throwing and i was like did i miss a lot of

things did i miss many things while i was gone it's pablo sandoval now but it wasn't it was patrick so that's my fun story about being in the mountains. Okay. Why don't you just stay in the mountains all the time? The mountains just sound so nice. It's so nice there. You can work remotely. It's quiet. Just be a mountain person. The internet is not reliable enough to have your job be dependent on it.

I see. And it is definitely not robust enough to allow for streaming in any kind of real way. And so it would be very hard to watch baseball. And you know, I like that when I go up there, I like that it's a little hard for me to work. Yeah. As a person who's inclined to work too much, it's a useful mechanism, you know? know well i guess it would put crimps in our podcasting plans so yeah that would yeah it would not be good for you it would be make it very tricky although i did find one spot right next to the propane tank where i got a very clear cell signal so perhaps we could do uh we could do effectively wild by the propane tank i felt like

a teenager like sneaking cigarettes i was standing there with my phone next to the propane tank. I felt like a teenager, like sneaking cigarettes. I was standing there with my phone next to the propane tank, like scrolling. Yeah. I'm very familiar with being in wilderness areas and trying to find that one single spot that will allow me to do work that I probably shouldn't be doing in the first place. So I'm hesitant to wade into these waters, but I feel like we can at least dip our toe into the debate about value when it comes to awards races because this came up again on Thursday we don't need to get into all of the specifics I suppose but there was an article that came out and the article's premise was essentially that players who don't make much money are more valuable than those who do, which is not an original idea.

I mean, this is going back to the whole concept of dollars per war, which has been part of this apermetric discussion for years and years now. But this was sort of framed as as well, should it be a consideration in awards voting? And when you're talking about value, obviously, it's only more valuable to ownership, to people who are paying these players that they are not making much money. And so it seems somewhat misguided to actually make this part of how we hand out awards races and is certainly out of step with, I think, the conversation that we're all having about baseball these days as a whole, given the labor situation. because this is obviously not the first time that that particular point has been made or just the larger point about value and how do we define value. And I think Craig Calcaterra tweeted something to the effect of like 95% of articles that include the phrase, how do we define value or the definition of value is

turned out to be pretty bad because it's just not a really rewarding or productive debate to have. And yet we are stuck having it every single year at this time. It's just the scourge of the late summer because we have a Most Valuable Player award. And I don't think that is going to change. We're always going to have an MVP award because there's so much history tied up with calling it the MVP award. And it's entered the larger lexicon beyond baseball.

We talk about MVPs. I mean, business people talk about MVPs. It's just the phrase that we use. to change the name of this award to most outstanding player or best player or whatever would maybe resolve this silly debate that we keep having over and over and over again. But it is frustrating that we keep having it, or at least to me, and I try to ignore it for the most part and not get too caught up in it. And I don't get all that invested in awards races anymore and who wins awards races. But this particular debate bothers me just because it's such a dead end, and we've had it so many times, and I feel like it would probably be best for all of us if it just were

clarified and if we had some sort of ruling here And of course the MVP award As it is currently laid out There is no definition of value A 2010 Anna McDonald article from the Hardball Times Talks about the instructions that voters receive And I don't think these have changed at all since then Or really since the start So she writes

The rules of voting remain the same As they were written On the first ballot in 1931 Number one, actual value of a player To his team, that is strength Of offense and defense Number two, number of games played Number three, general character disposition

Loyalty and effort Number four, former winners are eligible And number five, members of the committee May vote for more than one member of a team. And the ballot, I think, also says there is no clear-cut definition of what most valuable means. It is up to the individual voter to decide who is the most valuable player in each league to his team. The MVP need not come from a division winner or other playoff qualifier. But, of course, many voters interpret it to mean

that it usually needs to. And so we end up with these different camps that define it in different ways. And we have the same circular arguments every September. And I don't know that any new ground is ever covered here. And I'm just sort of sick of it at this point. So I almost wish that the ballot could just be changed to say it's the best player or just to say you shouldn't consider the player's team's position or whether it's a contending team or something. But I'm open to arguments that we benefit from this ambiguity, but I just don't know that we do. I don't think we do at all. And now we can't even go to Costco apparently because we might get this debate sprung on us

while we're trying to get one of those hot dogs. I find I agree with you that it seems odd that we have to do this every year because I understand that there are very few new things under the sun, but we seem to have exhausted this particular ground. I think that we don't need to dunk on this particular version any more than has already been done because I think it's been pretty thoroughly dunked on. But one of the issues that I had with that particular piece was that it seems to me that if you are going to, and I think this is the absolute right approach, not debit Mike Trout for being on the Angels because him playing on a losing team and not being a division winner or someone likely to play October baseball is not his fault, that you cannot

then also credit Cody Bellinger, for instance, for a contract that he couldn't negotiate, right? He's stuck on a league minimum deal through no fault or choice or preference of his own. And so I had a hard time sort of squaring those two things because it seemed very logically inconsistent to me to rightly point out the issues with what a player can't control factoring into their MVP case. And that seems like it should go both ways. I think the other issue is, you know, theoretically, it is very valuable to have players like Cody Bellinger producing at the level they are while on league minimum deals. But that having value to someone who isn't just the owners is contingent on that money getting reinvested in the payroll of the club. And that isn't a given. I mean, I think Molly's piece pointed to AJ Pollock as a potential beneficiary of Cody Bellinger making way less than he is worth. a lot, but we actually have a value tab in our leaderboards and it just does a simple dollars

per war calculation, right? So Cody Bellinger has created almost $60 million of value, right? This year, it just takes his war and it multiplies it by, I think we have 8 million as the free agent dollar per war figure that's feeding the sheet. But when you have a team that has spent much of the off season talking about how hard they are going to work to get under the luxury tax threshold to then say, Cody Bellinger's league minimum salary allows the Dodgers to invest in their team, it just rings pretty hollow because it runs counter to what they have presented publicly as the stated goal of their organization, which is to not have to pay the tax again. Right. Yeah, that's true. And

well, I mean, I guess there are multiple ways to look at it. It certainly felt like when we started writing or a decade ago or whenever, it did feel like there was more of an opportunity cost when it came to choosing to pay this player instead of that player. It was like, well, you could kind of pass judgment on a free agent signing because it was like, well, you paid this guy this many millions and you only had this many million to spend. And so it was all about how are you going to spend those millions in the most efficient way? And so if you went and got this guy for X million, while this better guy was out there for Y million or something, we could kind of compare and say, this would have been the better decision for the team to make. Whereas now that just seems to sort of be off the table because it just kind of, it's hard to define whether teams have any actual constraints anymore. And to the extent that they do, they're sort of self-imposed. And so now it's just like, well, the team is essentially just deciding

this is how much we want to spend more so than having its hands tied. And so it's not really an interesting conversation to have anymore to talk about limits and here's what this team had available to spend because at some point they just sort of decided, you know, not that they could spend an infinite amount, but they could probably mostly or all spend more than they do and be just fine, especially given the value that accrues to franchises and how much money owners make when they actually end up selling the team. Not that you can lose an unlimited amount of money in the meantime, but most of them can afford to lose a lot. So it's just- You're going to get a billion dollars for the Royals. The Royals!

Right. Yeah. And yeah, you do have the sort of soft cap now that you didn't used to have. And so I guess that's something of a limit, but again, it's more of a choice than a limit, really, or at least from what we can tell without these teams actually opening their books and being honest about them. So that's the problem with that kind of conversation. And I think that that's not obviously the most common argument you hear that salary should play a role in the MVP voting, although that does resurface from time to time. Usually it's about the team performance and this guy actually helped his team get to the playoffs and this guy didn't. And so this guy who didn't, his contribution, can it even be valuable if you don't make the playoffs? That's the point of playing the season. And so that's the idea that is continually trotted out. And it's frustrating because you can't say it's wrong because there

is no wrong because the award specifically says you can just define it however you want. And so you can argue about why it's not the best way to do it, but some people will persist in thinking it is, and fewer than there used to be, I think. I mean, award voting has improved, but it's almost like once you have an objective standard, it makes it even more glaring when you depart from that standard, so that I think baseball had to implement replay review, for instance, because we all had replay at home and we were watching it on TV. And so it's just embarrassing and it looks bad when everyone at home knows that someone screwed up and that a call went the way it shouldn't have and that a game turned on that and no one in the game can do anything about it. I just don't think

that's really a tenable situation. You could say that maybe it's the same thing now with calling balls and strikes and robot umps, maybe to our dismay, but on the whole, when you can see whether every pitch was in the strike zone and see the umpire's accuracy and watch the replays and everything, maybe long-term it's difficult to actually carry on this situation where you're relying on the human insight while we humans have so much other insight after the fact. So maybe it's similar with MVP voting because we have war and we have multiple ways of calculating war and we have warp and all these things and whatever your war of choice is, you can look at a leaderboard. And so when you get like a Juan Gonzalez MVP award because he had lots of RBIs or something, that would just look very bad now. And so you don't really get that kind of glaring mistake. I guess I can call it a mistake now. But you do get people getting snubbed because of their teams, which just seems to me like it kind of defeats the purpose of having this award in the first place. And I get that like debate has been built into it from the start. And it's always supposed to have been a subjective thing. award was really created, at least in its current incarnation, as an alternative to the batting

title race where it was just an objective who had the most hits or the highest number of hits and number of at-bats. And that could be sort of swayed. There was a controversy where maybe Ty Cobb lost out on a batting title because people let his competitor have hits because they didn't like Ty Cobb. And so the idea was just that, well, we won't base this award on a statistical benchmark so that Napalajeway can win it by bunting his way past Ty Cobb or something. It'll just be up to the writers and they can just come to the decision they want. And I guess it's worked as intended in the sense that we have a debate every year and people get columns out of it and their arguments about it

in a way that maybe there just wouldn't be if everyone was like, well, yeah, Mike Trout's the best player, so he gets this award. And that's kind of the end of the discussion. So if the purpose is to have debates, then I guess the system is working as designed. It's just that the debates are usually the same and they're so tired and fruitless that they just don't enhance my enjoyment of this time of year at all. but I think it was Dave Cameron who wrote a piece that I really enjoyed a couple years ago when there was some amount of controversy, and I'm doing air quotes, about whether Mike Trout should win MVP.

And I don't remember what year it was because it could have been any year lately. And he noted that a lot of MVP voters who did not vote for Mike Trout in the first position did have him down ballot, often in the second or third spot and that they had cited his the team he played for as the reason they didn't vote for him and Dave rightly pointed out that like if that matters he shouldn't be on your ballot at all right if that matters to you then anyone who's on a team that doesn't make it to the postseason should just be stripped away and And I think he rightly noted that they probably would have felt very silly not having Mike Trout in any of the years

that he was, you know, like a full-time player on their ballots. And so they put him on there and they didn't really care about the sort of logical inconsistency that was there. So anyway, that's a good article and people should read it. But I think the debate part is theoretically good because i think you know the the gap has widened a little bit between christian yelich and cody bellinger for instance but for a lot of the season they've been neck and neck and i think talking about what is persuasive to you in the seasons they've had yeah is like that's great fun so write that piece right like right right on the fangraphs combined war leaderboard right now bellinger yelich and anthony rendon are all within 0.6 wins about replacement each other you could even throw cattel marte in there he's within

a win of bellinger so poor cattel i was sorry can i just as a side i was talking about this with a friend last night that like I'm sure that Cattell Marte is thrilled with the season he's having because he's having an incredible year. But there has to be part of him that's like these three guys couldn't have just been hurt for three weeks because like this would be an MVP season. How many of those is he going to have? Right.

So anyway. Yeah. Also, Jacob deGrom, by the way, is only one win back of Bellinger. Right. So anyway. into it and the playoff thing is just like it ends the argument really it's like bellinger yellich that is a fun debate and if you just settle it by saying well bellinger is a playoff team and yellich is not then that's not fun and if you settle it by saying well bellinger is on a playoff team but that team won by so many games that they didn't even need Bellinger. And so Anthony Rendon really should be the guy because the Nationals needed his contribution more than the Dodgers needed Bellinger's, let's say. I mean, that's another way you could end the argument. But again, not that interesting.

It's just it's more interesting, I think, to talk about the players on their own merits. And as the award says, like their contributions on offense and on defense, which and games played, which does not factor in the rest of the team's performance. Right. And I think that, you know, the business of baseball is an important thing for us to cover, both so that we, you know, have a more complete understanding of the sport and because whether we want it to or not, and whether we might quibble with the system or not it does affect who ends up being on the field but the reason we care about any of that stuff is because we want to watch them play baseball and it just seems like this this one thing should be about how it's just such a great opportunity for us to marvel at the seasons

that these guys are putting up and the years they're having and the changes they've made year to year. I mean, you can and we have written article upon article about Cody Bellinger and how he's adjusted his swing and his approach this year and the results that it's yielded and the defense and all of that. That stuff is so great and interesting and rich a text. And it does not, as you noted, it is an open conversation that lends itself to actual debate instead of a closing off based on some either team record or some arbitrary understanding, not arbitrary, but sort of uninteresting understanding of value to

ownership. So let's make it about these guys because these guys are really great. Yeah, that's a good point. I think, yeah, it puts more of the focus on their performance, which is the whole point of an individual award. We're rewarding individual performance. So that's where the spotlight should be. debate someone's defense versus their offense and you could look at various aspects of their offense and you'd have to you'd have to do everything manually like just kind of in your head essentially because there was no stat no leaderboard you could look at so someone would say well this guy's been the best hitter and then someone would say well well, but his ballpark benefits him. And someone would say, but this is a great glove guy. And it was really hard to put all of that on the same scale and make the mental adjustment. And the upshot is that you ended up with probably a lot of really undeserving

MVP award winners, at least looking back through the lens that we use today. but it was at least more of a debate because there was no truth that we were really able to access, and we're closer to that now, certainly not all the way there. But there are still things that you can discuss and debate, and there are still disagreements between the value systems, and you can talk about clutch and whether clutchness should be a part of it. I don't mind that debate it's the same sort of debate but i don't mind it because that's actually can play every position yeah right so be excited about that talk about that first we're not capturing all of the value

of that in his uh you know in the defensive side of his war i'm sure we're not like there's no way that any of the public metrics are. How make it about that? Yeah, sure. There's a lot you can talk about. Or when you're talking about, like, Cy Young debates, because value is not in the name of that award, it seems like maybe there's less of an emphasis on making it a playoff team person.

But I think that's still there. But there are still really interesting debates you can have there about Lance Lynn versus Justin Verlander versus Garrett Cole versus Mike Miner. There are different ways of deciding what a pitcher's value was and doing that accounting. And I think that can be interesting. And these are ways to decide kind of collectively what aspects of performance we value. And I think that can be a very useful conversation to have and change the way I think that we looked at players to have and maybe we're past that discussion now or there aren't as productive debates out there but i still think especially when you've got like five players within one win above replacement like none of us pretends that the stat is so precise that it can actually answer that question and so we are left to answer it however we feel like answering it and i just

think it's kind of a cop-out or just a bummer to answer it by saying well this guy is disqualified because his teammates aren't good or his gm isn't good or his owner isn't willing to spend or whatever it's just that's no fun we could make a separate award for that if we want to you could have like a championship probability added award or something where it really does heavily take into account the team's position there are stats for that and that could be an award i guess but it's just never what i've wanted this award to be and And I wish we could just not rename it, but reframe it and just specifically say, all right, let's stop arguing over semantics.

It's just the worst kind of debate to have about this. It's not even really about baseball or about the players. So let's just take that ambiguity out of the conversation and we'll still leave some ambiguity in, but that particular way of just ending the we'll still leave some ambiguity in but that particular way of just ending the debate will just be tossed out and i don't know that there's any chance that that will happen in the foreseeable future but i long for that day well and it's just tricky too when you look at you know when you look at mike trout even with the contract extension there is

sort of this funny bit of like mental gymnastics going on where you want to ask like do you really think that his contract is reflective of his true value to the angels yeah right like we've had this conversation they're probably you probably can't as a baseball team given i mean you could but it would be challenging like it would be hard to pay mike trout what he's actually worth like any deal he signs is at a discount because of how good he is so there's also just this sort of weird bit of trickeration that sounds more value laden than i probably mean it to be there's just it's there's some slipperiness to some of the terms that are being used here in some of the math that uh is i think not super productive

so we should make it as you said we should we should embrace debate that opens up rather than closes that's a really nice way ben that's nice i like that yeah that's a really nice way of thinking about it yeah okay yeah we're bbwa people and, I think, more and more of us who think that way. So maybe when people like us are old enough to be running the thing, maybe it will change. I don't know. Yeah, maybe. So people can still write their columns and debate their picks. So that will still be out there.

Right. It just won't be the same column every time. If you want to make a case that Cody Bellinger should be the MVP, you can just make it. Yeah, very good, compelling case. It doesn't have to be that one. You can just write that piece. Just write that piece.

Also, this is just a little research tip from me, Meg, to other people. If you're going to put together leaderboards, Meg to other people. If you're going to put together leaderboards, be careful about leaving the qualified hitter and pitcher filters in at Fangraphs because sometimes it filters out guys like

Fernando Tatis Jr. who should probably be on one of those lists. Darren Judge, I think. Yeah. Good point. Just be careful about your filters. Yeah, that's something even I struggle with at times. Oh, yeah. I make that mistake sometimes.

Even though I am constantly sorting fan graphs with reports. That is occasionally if something looks wrong, just make sure that you don't still have something selected that you don't want to have selected. That's a very common pitfall. So the last thing I wanted to bring up is the tragedy of Daniel Palka, who right now is going through kind of a Chris Davis-esque streak, but not really a streak because it's been broken up into a few different stints. And that's the thing I want to talk about. So Daniel Palka right now, White Sox outfielder and DH. Oh, my God. Yeah. You want to sit down before you look at Daniel Palka's stat line from this season.

Oh, no. Daniel Palka's played 19 big league games, 60 played appearances. He has hit 19. 19. Just not 19 something, 19 19 and he has a 133 obp and a 19 slugging percentage that's your your standard one for 53 performance with six walks and 22 strikeouts and a hit by pitch don't want to take away the hit by pitch from Daniel Palka. But that is your typical negative 54 OPS plus. And I guess it would be maybe a little bit better on the WRC plus side. Negative 52. Only so that is Quite disturbing I'm sure if you're

Daniel Palka but the thing that Stands out to me about it is that It's obviously very similar To the Chris Davis 0 for 54 streak In that this is a 1 for 53 streak And the 1 was

Like a bloop single Where Palka was Playing the Royals and the Royals were shifted and he kind of like soft liner the other way that would have been a routine out for the shortstop, but no one was there. So he got a single that had like a 34% hit probability and even that seems generous, but that was the one. And yet this has happened over three different big league stints this season. So he was up, I think, on opening day, March and April. And then he was up briefly at the end of June and the beginning of July. And now he is back for September. out in slow motion and meanwhile interspersed with this utter failure daniel palca had a perfectly fine triple a season where he had a 126 wrc plus in triple a in 471 plate appearances he hit 27 dingers and granted everyone in triple a hit 27 dingers this year but still he was fine and so

I wonder what it's like to be Daniel Palka and to like be pushed and pulled between these two worlds one where you are the epitome of futility and one where you're pretty good like you're a really good hitter you're sort of

a slugger and added to that he also hit 27 homers last year in the majors, right? So he was a pretty good hitter there. So it's not like he has never succeeded in the major leagues. So it must be kind of a disorienting thing because, like, when he's in AAA, does he feel like the guy who's hitting 27 homers and is a slugger and is like someone who fans would be happy to have come up? Or is the major league failure still hanging over him? And when he's back in the big leagues, does it bring him any solace that he hit 27 AAA homers? Or is it just like I'm one for 53 where I am right now. And that is all that matters. I suppose that if ever one, if ever one were going to take solace in their triple-A home run totals, this would be the year, right?

Because you would probably say, no, it wouldn't be. You know what? I'm going to take it back. It would be the opposite. I guess it would be, yeah. Yeah, because you'd be sitting there saying, it's the same stinking juice ball that they they have it why can't i yeah hit that same stinking juiced ball a long long way yeah one time i i mean like obviously you've you've narrated you you said

what his line is and so intellectually i, I know that his ISO is zero, but there's something about seeing an ISO zero. It's like, wow, that's zero. Yeah, zero. Zero. Well, I would imagine that he is probably actually fine, even though he is probably discouraged, certainly. But I would think that he is not devastated by this because it is

scattered across a couple of different stints, and it is only 60 plate appearances. And so I think that if you are going to survive a baseball career, you have to be able to put long stretches of bad into some kind of perspective. And he has the comfort of knowing that, you know, he has been a league average hitter in the majors before. And so he can look back and say, I did have a 110 WRC plus in 2018. I, as you noted, I hit 27 home runs. I did do that.

I am capable of doing it, right? Like the capacity exists even if I'm not demonstrating that capacity right now. But yeah, man, he has to just be really ready for the off season. I think you would need a, you just need a break. You just need to not be in the cage for a couple of days. Yeah. I wonder whether he just wants the season to end now or whether he wishes it were longer so that he could somehow salvage this. I was thinking of in Alex Spears' book, Homegrown, which we podcasted about not long ago, he talks about how very early in their big league careers, guys like Jackie Bradley and Mookie Betts were pretty uncomfortable in the big leagues, which was partly because of the clubhouse atmosphere at the time, but also because they struggled somewhat, especially relative to their minor league performance. And so at times, I think it was Bradley, but maybe also Betts, like when they got sent back down, they were relieved. It was like, I'm back in AAA. Like, I own this place. Like, I'm completely at home here, and I'm playing with my buddies. These are the people I came up with, and I know that I can kill it in this league, whereas

everything in the majors is serious and not very fun, and it's kind of gloomy. And even though that's the dream, that's what I've been aiming for this whole time, it's like right now, I'm kind of loving life more when I am in AAA than where I want to go. And I wonder whether Palka has felt that this year, like when he was in AAA and mashing and the whatever it was like one for 40 something at the time in the big leagues was hanging over his head. Was he like, I want to get back to the big leagues right now, today, so that I can salvage that stat line and I can get this off my back? Or was he thinking, oh boy, it's really a relief to be back here in AAA where I am performing very well at my job and I don't have this hanging over my head, or maybe I do wherever I go. So I'd love to know. I guess this is almost like when I wanted

to plumb the depths of the Moran's mind at the beginning of this podcast. I want to know what is going on in Daniel Palka's head when he is in AAA versus when he is in the big leagues when those two seasons are diverging so dramatically. I wonder if it's a little bit like, I don't know if you do this, I am a list maker because I have so many things I have to do's a little bit like, I don't know if you do this. I am a list maker because I have so many things I have to do in a day. And if I don't make a list, I'll forget some. And sometimes the list feels very overwhelming. And so I will put things on my list that I've already done so that I can cross them off. So I can demonstrate to myself that progress has been made. And I wonder if going back to AAA is a little bit like that for him

where it's like, no, I can cross stuff off my list. I know how to take an at-bat. I know how to swing at stuff. It's like that thing that people always say about prospects who are in the minors, like they have nothing left to prove at that level. And I wonder whether Daniel Palka felt like he had nothing left to prove at that level or when you're one for 40 something in the big leagues do you just have to prove to yourself that you can still hit somewhere yeah and so maybe it is still heartening to go back to the next

level down and see that yeah I can still do this and's the same ball. And it's not quite the same caliber of competition. But it's not entirely different world. It's the next highest level. It's very hard to hit here. And if I can still hit here, then I can probably hit there even though I haven't lately. So I would think it would still be reassuring to hit 27 dingers in triple a even if you have a zero iso in the majors zero zero zero zero there's not a one at the end it's just zeros all across i think though that he probably i think you're right that he probably wants to

i mean he absolutely wants to hit no matter what. But I think, you know, there is some there's some liberty to be found in the new years line on a stat page. Right. You're like that years behind me. But as Chris Davis shows, we are very quick to do the mental math to extend back to the prior line if there is continuity with it. Yeah, we're very cruel in that way. We are so mean. And so I am sure that what he would like is to put i mean he doesn't have to he just has to put a couple he just has to put a couple hits up and then when we get to 2020 we're gonna look back and we're gonna be like man damn

puck had a real rough 2019 but here he is off in a new year whereas if he lets this thing hang we're gonna we're gonna be writing articles the next chris davis question mark which as an aside we will not run an article with that title at fagrass because it's too cruel but someone will write it there are a lot of mean people in the world and uh some of them probably don't like the white socks i don't imagine they dislike daniel polka personally i don't know anything about him. He's probably a fine person, but you know, people will be snarky because there's, there's money to be made in snark. So I hope that he gets it together a little bit so that we don't, we don't draw that continuous line. It's like when you're, you're doing a maze and you have to, you can't pick up the pen or, I don't know what I'm trying to say. You know what I mean. Yeah, right. You have to retrace the.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I saw a very unfun fact that Corey Schwartz tweeted about this, that he's one for 53 on the season. And that is the most at bats ever by a position player with one or no hits in a season. So you don't want that. You don't want to be the subject of that. Fun fact. Now,

if he gets a second hit, will he then be the position player with the most at-bats ever with two hits or one hit or something in a season? I don't know how hot he has to get in these next few weeks to get himself out of that territory entirely. But even one hit, would that be progress? That'd be movement in the right direction, especially like a good hit as opposed to a gift from the shift. So I hope that Daniel Paca gets his dinger in the next few weeks here. I hope he gets 10 and no other hits, just because then the stat line will be real weird looking

a healthy ISO at that point yeah you're like that's respectable man normally it's me who's like hey have you seen this crazy crazy line but you had it yep I wish you could have seen my face I looked like the

guy in the scream painting it's like a very slow motion sneeze I wish you could have seen my face. I looked like the guy in the Scream painting. It's like a very slow motion sneeze. On that note, I suppose we can stop podcasting. So I will talk to you next week when perhaps Daniel Palka will have multiple hits this year. And I will be around to see them. Yeah. All right.

Bye-bye. All right. That concludes our baseball armchair psychology session. Thanks for listening today and this week. You can support the podcast and ensure that there are many more weeks to come on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild and signing up to pledge some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going and get yourself access to some perks. The following listeners have already pledged their support. Matt Wine, Sean McGuire, Sean P. McNamee, Ryan Quinney, and Spencer.

Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild, and you can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Please keep your questions and comments for me and Meg and Sam coming via email

at podcastoffangraphs.com or via the Patreon site if you are already a Patreon supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. You can buy my book, The MVP Machine, How Baseball's New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players. Your reviews and ratings for that are appreciated too. And we hope you have a wonderful weekend and we'll be back to talk to you early next week I'm gonna be 19 forever Yes I will 19 forever No matter what you say 19 forever

I'm gonna be 19 forever