Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1941: The Biggest of Payrolls, the Smallest of Payrolls

Episode Date: December 14, 2022

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley discuss the two teams at the top and bottom, respectively, of the MLB payroll hierarchy, the New York Mets and Oakland Athletics, touching on the Mets’ signings of Brandon Nimmo, Kodai Senga, and David Robertson, the A’s trading away Sean Murphy, and what a vast disparity in spending does and […]

You can call me the great pretender In a way it might be true But I'm the last of the big time spenders And I've been spending time on you Hello and welcome to episode 1941 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Raleigh of Fangraphs, and I am joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, not of the New York Mets, although maybe one of the only people who isn't employed by them.

Hello, Ben. How are you? Doing well. How are you? I am also not employed by the New York Mets, but I am well nonetheless. Well, we will be talking about those Mets and probably also the team on the opposite end of the payroll spectrum, the Oakland A's. Maybe we can just do a best of times, worst of times, biggest of payrolls, lowest of payrolls episode today because, yeah, the winter meetings are over, but the moves have kept coming. Lots more transactions to talk about, and many of them Mets related.

So I guess Brandon Nimmo broke after we recorded the last time. Correct. But then that was followed by David Robertson, and that was followed by Kodai Senga. Yes. So the Mets now are basically breaking the scale when it comes to payroll. So we can discuss the implications of that a little bit just because we all kind of wondered, is Steve Cohen just going to go for it? Yeah. Just push through every tax threshold and spend like someone who is worth

many, many billions of dollars. And he has answered that question in the affirmative. So he's really separated himself and the Mets from the next biggest spenders, which used to be the other team in New York. They used to be the big spenders, as recall but no longer yeah you know they still they still have time but they'd have to they'd have to really mop up and perhaps apply for exceptions to the 26 man roster rule in order to start chasing the mets yeah it's it's interesting you know we we tend to display payroll two ways right we have like actual team payroll. And that's like, you know, how much money are the guys making? What are you paying for the guys

to work for you next year, right? And then there's luxury tax payroll, which includes other stuff, you know, like benefits and all kinds of other stuff like that. And, you know, normally like that is, that's a sufficient, that's sufficient. That's enough for us. Because, you know, candidly, the number of teams that have approached even the second or third, you should really be thinking about, and this math comes courtesy of John Becker, who did this for Eric when he wrote up the Senga signing for us. You know, like they're currently set when you include their payroll and then also the tax penalties to spend over $400 million on the Mets next year.

And also, it seems clear that Steve Cohen doesn't care, you know? next year. And also, it seems clear that Steve Cohen doesn't care. And so if Steve Cohen doesn't care, I don't think that we need to be overly fussed about it in terms of hand-wringing. I think that there are a lot of ways to conceptualize the resources that are available to a major league organization. There's the existing roster, which it feels kind of icky to think about people as a resource, but you can trade players both from your big league roster and from your farm system. They are a resource in terms of your ability to get other things that you want to complement the big league roster and hopefully win.

I think we have gotten to the point where we start thinking about more amorphous things like you know player development and the acumen of your front office as a resource right to allow your roster to punch above its payroll weight but i think that what these signings suggest steve cohen believes is that like the money is a resource right and when you have a lot more of that resource than many of the other owners in the league, you should treat it like that. And if what you want is to put a winning baseball team on the field and you don't want to deploy other resources because you want to retain those players or perhaps your farm system is just okay or whatever the case may be, use the resource you have, right? This is a resource. He's using it like resource and you know it's putting them in a position to have a pretty fearsome rotation

they continue to have you know a really good group of position players and so i think you know will this inspire other owners to behave similarly i mean're going to have to respond to the existence of the Mets in the free agent market because that resource being deployed means that other teams are going to have to match it at certain points if they want to sign players who they like. But I don't know. I don't know if it's going to move the needle for other owners. But from Cohen's perspective, he's deploying the resource he has.

And that is resulting in a rotation that has Justin Verlander, Max Scherzer, and Kodai Senga. So that seems pretty good. And a bullpen that has Edwin Diaz and then interesting and good options beyond that. They have entirely rebuilt that rotation now. They lose DeGrom. They lose Walker. they lose Bassett, who signed with Toronto. And so they bring in Verlander, they bring in Jose Quintana, they bring in Senga. Senga's not even on the Fangraph starting pitcher depth charts yet. And yet the Mets still have the best projected rotation, even without him him with Carrasco as well. And I know there have been some rumors that they might trade Carrasco away. I don't know whether there is some limit to Cohen's spending and they actually do want to trim a little payroll or whether they just think he's expendable at this point or whether

that won't happen. For all I know, they could add to the roster and the payroll. They might not be done yet. But I was just thinking, like, it seems like they're completely breaking the roster and the payroll, they might not be done yet. But I was just thinking, it seems like they're completely breaking the scale and it's mind-blowing, these numbers, just relative to what other owners are doing or have been doing. I do think if you look back a bit, it reminds me of what the Yankees were doing in the middle of the 2000s. 2005, according to Kotz contracts, the Yankees had about a $210 million payroll. And second place was the Red Sox at 125. So just in terms of the percentage difference, that's a way bigger difference that the Yankees were ahead of the field than the Mets are currently ahead of the field. And that Yankees payroll figure, there was a tax even back then. So I assume this does not include that. So it would have actually been higher than that. So if you inflation adjust, weirdly, it seems like with contracts and payrolls and also box office

totals, we just don't bother to inflation adjust, even though we know that there's a lot of inflation. We'll just compare what a movie made decades ago to what a movie might make now as if the money is exactly the same. If you look at the Yankees' 2005 payroll in 2022 dollars, it's like $320 million, which is just below where the Mets are now prior to all the luxury tax stuff and all the tax stuff. So it's not really that different. And I was just thinking about the A-Rod deal too, because the A-Rod free agent contract

that he got from the Rangers in 2000, that blows everything out of the water. Now, if you inflation adjust that bad boy, like $252 million in 2000 is like $436 million now. So even with the giant contracts that we've seen handed out and the long-term contracts, that would still blow them out of the water. And A-Rod, of course, was a young future Hall of Famer as far as anyone knew and one of the best players ever to that point. And so it made sense that he would make that much. But in a sense, it's almost like the scale has not been broken as much as it should have been based on what happened before. Like payrolls didn't really keep up with revenue, which was one of the big complaints of the Players Association. And so now maybe this is things springing a little bit back toward there.

So I don't know that it's necessarily unprecedented if you do the inflation adjustments and account for the context there. But in the context of very recent years and what other teams are currently spending, he is absolutely blowing them out of the water. And it's kind of fun to watch from afar just to see an owner actually deploy their billions that they have. And Steve Cohen has more billions than the other owners do, but a lot of them have multiple billions. So they could run payrolls like this. Peter Seidler does not have as many billions, but he has some billions and he is spending many more dollars than most of the other owners in his net worth range. So what we do seem to be seeing

now, and we've talked about it, Ken Rosenthal just wrote a column about it. Some owners are grousing and grumbling about the Seidlers and the Coens and the Middletons and these teams that have just really decided to go all in and actually use their cash to try to purchase wins and get better. And other owners are like, hey, wait a second. I thought we weren't doing that. Didn't we agree not officially in a collusion kind of sense? Yeah, because we would never. No, but informally, I thought we were all just, you know.

We had an understanding. Yeah, we like owning these franchises and being famous. But we also like pocketing some cash every year and not just the many billions that we might get when we sell our franchises ultimately, but actually being copycats or a new kind of owner that wants to get into this business and try to beat them dollar for dollar or not, or whether they will just be head and shoulders above everyone else and reap the rewards. useful to our broader understanding of what the capacity for these teams is to have two teams that not completely opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of market size, but who are quite a distance apart from one another in terms of market size being willing to spend like this, right? Like you would be able to say, or at least be more sort of readily able to dismiss the spending of the Mets as sort of an aberration that is specific to Cohn if it was just Steve Cohn being like,

here's all my money and I'm going to spend it on baseball. But the presence of the Padres in this conversation is, I think, in a lot of ways more illuminating because of course Steve Cohn can afford to spend this kind of money on his baseball team. Guys who have had the capacity to spend maybe not quite to this level but or have quite as much money as Cohen does away from baseball but who have had a lot have existed in the game before but to then have the Padres say no we have money too and like we want to spend it on this baseball team because we want to be like

the sports attraction in san diego and we'd like to win a world series i think you know really gives perspective on the the capacity of teams like this to to spend is every team in a position to spend quite this much i mean probably not like i think that we can want owners to invest in their rosters and be more inclined to do so because of capacity we can want that at the same time that we acknowledge that like there is a difference between what say the a's can do and what the the mets can do but it isn't as wide a difference as the a's would like you to think it is right like those things can be all true at the same time most teams are not bumping up against the limit of where their payrolls could be and yeah financially ruin them right

they're not there so if we were to get there at some point like if you take this to some logical or some might say a logical extension where it does just become about how many billions your owner has and how big your market is. If every team were operating with the same sort of efficiency and intelligence, if it just came down to dollars, which I think a lot of people do, they do think that. They see what Steve Cohen spends and they say, oh, we need a salary cap because this is unfair. that. They see what Steve Cohen spends and they say, oh, we need a salary cap because this is unfair. And yet you look at the projections, like the Mets did not win their division this past year. And I asked Dan Szymborski for the updated NL East projections and the Mets are still trailing Atlanta by three projected wins, right? So they're way outspending Atlanta. They're way outspending

everyone now, and they're still not even projected to win their division and then let alone win a championship because the way that baseball is set up, even if you are the best team, you're still unlikely to win a championship and really dominate the league in a way that you could in some other sports. So I think given all that, we're not near the point where it's like distorting competition. Like, could it get to that point? Is there some extreme where everyone starts to do Cohen and then it just becomes about how big your bank account is and the ones with even more billions can win? Like, I guess there is some dystopian MLP scenario where that becomes the case. But I just don't think we're there yet because even with Steve Cohen just wildly outspending everyone, the Mets are not like a super team. Like, they're a very good team. They just won 101 games, right? And they're projected to win 93 currently. And that's pretty good. But even so, you have Atlanta, who's winning in other ways and is projected to be better now. And they're the team that won a title a couple of years ago. It's not as if the Mets' results are mirroring their payroll to this point, where they're just winning way more games than every other team. And certainly, there's some correlation. I mean, it depends on the season.

Some seasons there just doesn't seem to be any correlation at all. But of course, if you can spend a lot of money, like a lot, a lot, then yeah, you have a bigger buffer. You have more room for error. You can hand out some contracts that don't really work out for you and you can just eat them or you can bring in other more productive players on top of that. So I'm not suggesting that there is no benefit to be derived from outspending other teams or having a

higher payroll, but it is far from determinative. So it's not really at a point where I'm that worried about this sort of skewing the competitive landscape immediately in a way that will reduce my enjoyment of the sport. Yeah, I don't think that, I just don't think that we're anywhere near a point where we have to, quote unquote, worry about that. Not just because we have teams who make a conscious decision to spend a lot less who are good, and not just because we have teams that have players signed to under-market contracts for a long time, but there just aren't a lot have teams that have players signed to under market contracts for a long time, but there just aren't, you know, there aren't a lot of teams that are sort of tilting in at, at this level of payroll clearly. So I just, I don't, I don't think that it's something that

we really need to fret all that much about because you would have to see a lot of owners take a pretty dramatic turn in terms of their approach to payroll to be approaching anything like the sort of dystopian future that people are worried about. The distorting effects on competition can be found in baseball. They're not payroll related, right? It shouldn't be lost on anyone that part of why we had so many teams that were winning more than 100 games this year, part of that is because those were really good clubs. But part of it was because we had a lot of teams that won like 60. There are forces within the major league landscape that can have a distorting impact on competition.

can have a distorting impact on competition. But to think that those are exclusively can, you know, sort of confined to the payroll space or that the ones in the payroll space are either like super urgent or having the biggest effect just doesn't seem to gel with the rest of the landscape when you look at teams that are not the Mets. Right. So, yeah, I'm less worried about the one team over 300 million than the, let's see, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 teams under 100 million. And that's just in terms of the scale that are not trying as hard as they could than the team at the top that is trying not even necessarily as hard as it could. Steve Cohen could spend even more if he wanted to. He would not be ruined or anything.

But he's spending as much as he really needs to at this point because no one is pushing him even higher. So we just don't know exactly where the line is for each market because these teams don't share their numbers. They don't open their books. So we're always sort of speculating. We can infer a fair amount just from the amount of revenue that we know every team has, just from broadcast deals and BAM tech payouts and all of that, and just every team's sort of baseline attendance and merchandise and concessions and all the rest. So you can tell just from that that there are some teams that just perennially do not spend nearly as much as they could and probably as much as they're just even getting before the season starts, basically.

So that seems to be a bigger, more immediate problem, I think. basically. So that seems to be a bigger, more immediate problem, I think. And I don't know where the line is for each individual franchise beyond which they would not turn a profit that year, which is not to say that these teams need to turn a profit every year, right? I mean, I think some owners run them as if they're any other business and they actually do need to just be in the black every single year, but it's not like an existential threat for these businesses the way it might be for some others if they were losing money in any given quarter or calendar year. Because, of course, they're constantly appreciating, right? And they get favorable loan rates and all of that. And if you want to check out and cash out at any point, you can do that and you can get yourself billions of dollars and probably much more than you paid for the franchise if you've been holding it for any significant amount of time. So can the Padres spend as much as the Mets and turn a profit in 2023? No. And perhaps they won't turn a profit in 2023. I really don't know. I think they're probably banking on the fact that they just drew 3 million fans, and now they have given fans even more reason to be excited and buy tickets and come out to the park.

And they do have that city not totally to itself, but more to itself than most sports franchises do in their respective cities. So I think they see that there's an opportunity there. But also it does seem that Seidler just really does want to win more so than maybe most owners do or that his calculus is a little bit different when it comes to turning a profit versus winning more games. So I don't think it's really a problem to this point. Could it become a problem? Yeah, I suppose so.

But it seems like the more immediate pressing problem is the owners that are just not competitive enough as opposed to the ones that are more competitive. Yeah, I tend to agree with all of that. I mean, I think that there is a point at which they would be approaching like being unprofitable, but we don't know where that point is and it seems like it's very far away from where they're currently spending not the Padres specifically but just baseball teams generally and I think that you know a lot gets made of the the lack of perfect correlation between wins and payroll but I think that in some ways that's evaluating the decisions of teams like the A's on like the wrong by the wrong criteria.

Like, yes, you care about the win piece because that's a big part of watchability. Right. Like that's why a lot of these teams are in such dire straits. I mean, I don't know if you want to talk about the A's now or save it for later, but like, you know, it's not just that the A's are being cheap and we have sort of a pro labor sensibility and want players to be paid. Well, like I think that that's largely true, but also like this is a bad baseball team and it's not going to be fun to watch,

you know, like when the guy on your team making the most money is a led Miss Diaz, like something has gone wrong, right? Like something has gone wrong. Something has gone wrong in the way that you are constructing your club. There are other guys on here who are interesting, and they have some prospects who are interesting, fine, but this was a team that lost 102 games last year,

and they're worse now. They're worse than they were, and they already just lost 102 games yeah right so like what are we doing you know yeah no and you look at i don't think it's like a good thing that the top spending team without even accounting for taxes and penalties and all that has a payroll that is like currently 7.3 times higher than the bottom spending team. I don't think that's good. So I think I would want to see the bottom come up more than I would want to see the top come down. But even so, if the highest spending team is outspending the lowest spending team by a factor of seven, the highest spending team is not going to win seven times more games. It's going to win more games, but the payroll, there's not like a perfect correlation between your success and your payroll. And obviously the distribution of wins is not as wide as the distribution of dollars. a team that is spending a ton, I think it's partly because they know that money is either no object or less of an object for them.

And so they don't have to do certain things and try to win in certain ways that other teams do. And I think that that maybe makes it so that there is better competitive balance than people would think given just the payroll disparities. Because you do have, and I know that the Rays are kind of an outlier in just how well they do what they do but you have teams like the Rays and you have teams like the Guardians and maybe the Orioles right now although they seem like a team that should be spending more at this point but they feel as a competitive team in 2022 without spending a lot like these teams can manage to be good.

And I think part of it is that they do have those perhaps artificial constraints for some other team, then I think by necessity that front office is just going to sweat the small stuff more than the other front office or it's going to do things to try to eke out more war per dollar than other teams do. And that might mean that you take yourself out of the running for certain free agents and Zac Eflin becomes a record contract for a free agent for your franchise, right? And you're not even going to bid on bigger free agents, even though they would really benefit you if you had them. And so you're just going to go draft and development and you're going to stockpile

minor leaguers. There are just a lot of ways to win. So if it got to the point, and it seems like we keep thinking we're maybe going to get to the point where the rich teams are also the smart teams and the rich teams are doing everything to win that the cheaper smart teams are doing. And so you would think, well, they're just going to steal their lunch money basically because they're just going to do everything that the Rays are doing or that the Guardians are doing. basically, because they're just going to do everything that the Rays are doing or that the Guardians are doing. And then they're also going to spend like the Yankees or the Mets or the Dodgers. And that hasn't really happened. It kind of has happened. I mean, the Dodgers are great every year. So they're the best example of that. They've only won one title, right? Just MLB is set up in such a way that even if you're the best team, you're just not going to win most of the time. And so if we are judging success by titles and postseason success,

as it seems like most people are, that's more of a feature than a bug, I guess, from a competitive balance perspective. Because if we were going purely by regular season results, then you'd say, well, the Yankees haven't had a sub 500500 season since the early 90s, and the Dodgers win 100-something games every year at this point. And so in that sense, they are making their money work for them. But no one gets all that up in arms about it because the Yankees haven't won a World Series since 2009. And the Dodgers are liable to exit quickly from the playoffs playing seemingly inferior teams. So MLB is sort of set up in such a way that these imbal and does all the things that the quote unquote progressive teams are doing. If they don't have the same payroll constraints, self-imposed or otherwise, I feel like they just they aren't going to bear down in certain ways. Maybe they aren't going to innovate as much. I don't know.

Or maybe they just aren't going to be as precious about needing to extract every last dollar from every deal. And so they're going to be less efficient, if that's the word you want to use it, in terms of like dollars per war, just because they can be. And that's okay. And it doesn't hurt them in any way. And they can still get to the same number of war just by spending more dollars. And that is fine from their perspective. So I feel like you're always going to have teams that are toward the bottom rung of that payroll, some of them, that is, that are just doing things a little differently and maybe more effectively than the teams that are spending the most. And therefore, that's going to sort of suppress, minimize the

disparity between them in terms of results, even if the disparity is there in terms of suppress, minimize the disparity between them in terms of results, even if the disparity is there in terms of payroll, which is not to say that they still couldn't be better if they just spent more money. Well, and I think that part of it is like, we view the advantage of having payroll resource to deploy differently than we do like being a really good player dev organization or hiring really smart people to work on the analytics side or having like a superlative scouting staff because those things are credits. We view those things as credits to the organizations that they're attributed to.

And we view the difference in payroll as embarrassing to the owners who aren't spending as much, right? Like those are, that's how we tend to think about that stuff. And I think that we have to kind of just turn it on its head a little bit and acknowledge that like a willingness to spend is, you know, maybe not always super efficient, but it can still be effective. And it is as much a credit to the owner who decides

to do it as it is, you know, a statement about the unwillingness of other owners, right? We don't look at the Rays and their player dev engine and say, well, you know, how embarrassing for the Reds or whomever, right? I'm not picking on the Reds for any reason other than they were the team that came to mind. But, you you know we credit the rays because we view it as i think because we view it as skill right we view it as skill whereas the other thing is just money and it's like well yeah it's just money but it's just money that's being spent on you know sanga instead of another formaldehyde shark sculpture right because you only need so many of those you know ben i think once you have one you kind of have like you're like okay i get it now like i'm i'm satisfied right it's not a thing you

need to stockpile like when you buy an extra thing of laundry soap so that you don't have to go back to the store that might not be a relatable example to you because i remember like cabinet storage space being at a premium when i lived in new york but you know what i mean like you just need one you only need arguably you might not need any formaldehyde sculptures but you don't need you definitely don't need more than one right one is enough without to this point but yes right you know if you're gonna get one you're you're good after the first one and so I think that we view some of the other stuff as skill versus money as just like this funny money account that like billionaires spend and i i get that and i i get sort of valorizing the hey we we've hired smart people and we've

combined their expertise with like the expertise and skill of our players and those things combined have produced like more skill than we thought we would have and that's great because now we get to watch a more skilled player than we would have before but if you're a fan of a team another way for you to get to watch a more skilled player than you would have had before is for your team to say we're going to be competitive in the free agent market and now you get to watch i don't know manny. And now you get to watch, I don't know, Manny Machado. Now you get to watch Sandra Pogarts. I'm not saying that all of the signings are perfectly sensical.

Sometimes you just build an entire team out of middle infielders. But there are worse things than that. So I think that it's useful for us to, certainly as people who talk about the sport for a living, to help people kind of change their mindset on that to the extent they're interested in doing that. And that doesn't mean that there aren't bad, quote unquote, bad free agent signings in the sense that you're committing like a lot of payroll space to a less good player

when you could be committing that same payroll space to a good player, right? Like the Padres are another great example of this, right? They were until very recently employing Eric Hosmer who isn't very good and got a lot of money and to their credit they were like that's not going to stop us from spending a bunch of money on a bunch of other guys who are better right and that's good because it would be too bad if they just were like well I guess we're done now because we have one Eric Hosmer we don't know what to do with him so I just you know I understand the concerns around competitive balance. And I'm not saying that like every player produces at a level where they're worth a

hundred million dollar deal. And I'm not saying that every signing is the best use of payroll resources, you know, with the understanding that you might spend that money on another better player and get better production and put a more entertaining product on the field for your fans but like we just they're gonna be okay you know like if the Mets are suddenly bad next year it's not because they it's not gonna be because they spent money on good free agents like that's not the reason so it's just everybody it's fine it's fine you know and we can I think that it's useful for us to

talk about the budget realities of these teams, but also acknowledge that some of those realities are them artificially constraining themselves and we don't have to evangelize for that artificial constraint. That's all I'm saying. Yeah, it would be hard for

a team like the Guardians, let's say, to get to this payroll range, really. They just signed Mike Zanino, so I think that they're on their way. Yeah. Like the only other team, for whatever reason, it's like Mike Zanino is like the perfect Ray. And now he's like the perfect Guardian to my mind, which is funny because this is a team that never strikes out and then mike zinino is gonna be like hey guys i got a new approach yeah right yeah they will be like what is this life form we didn't know you could play baseball like this but yeah there are

there does seem like there are certain players that kind of make the rounds of like analytically oriented teams like teams that sort of see players in somewhat similar ways and they'll just give a chance to the same players in sequence. But what I was going to say is that if you get up to 300 million or 400 million with penalties, some portion of that payroll is probably going to be what some people might call dead money, or you're probably going to be paying some players who are not producing a lot in terms of value that year. Like just to get to that point, you almost have to, like you can't really build from within and have young, productive, cost-controlled players and also get to a 400 million. I mean, I guess you could, but like if you were going to say, okay, let's go wild and

do a supermarket sweep with the current Raze roster or even the Guardians roster or something like if you gave them one offseason to do it now over time, maybe they could build up. up to the 300 or 400 range and actually be making marginal upgrades at many positions because they have a lot of cost-controlled players who are productive and who are there already. And so you can't really do that much better. Like they've done a good job with drafting and development. And so unless they were to sign the best available free agent at every single position, even if it's making them like a fraction of a win better because they already have a very good player at that position or something like it would be it'd be hard to spend that much and also have that young cost controlled core and having a young

cost controlled core is still one way you can win if you're good at it. So if you are the Mets and if you are the Phillies or the Padres or whomever, like probably something went wrong along the way and you just decided to spend through it. You know, we're going to spend anyway. OK, that deal didn't work out. All right. We're going to go get this other player and hope this player works out and you have the freedom to do that or the willingness to do that. But it doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to be leaps and bounds better than the next best team like with the mets you can easily construct scenarios where things go wrong for

the mets it's not hard to imagine scenarios where things go wrong for the mets even though this is the post-wilpon mets and things are run a little bit better over there they're not so far removed that you can't be doom and gloom and fatalistic and you can't look at that rotation, which is great. But also Senga, who's about to turn 30, is easily the youngest member of that rotation. So it's not hard to imagine Scherzer and Verlander wearing down or breaking or declining. And Quintana and Carrasco, Quintana wasn't even good a couple seasons ago. I mean, all sorts of things could go wrong. Quintana wasn't even good a couple seasons ago. I mean, all sorts of things could go wrong. And I really like Senga. And that seems like a smart signing relative to some of the other deals we've seen for starting pitch he throws very hard that is maybe more hittable than you would think just based on the velocity.

But then he has a wipeout splitter and he has a whole range of other offerings. So I'm not saying he's an ace like Otani necessarily in MLB, but I don't see why he can't be an effective mid-rotation starter. And that's all they're asking him to be here. an effective mid-rotation starter, and that's all they're asking him to be here. So even though they're spending so much relative to other teams, they're not better than other teams or not that much better than the other good teams that are spending less, and things could easily fall apart for them. So if we were to get to a point where they were just invulnerable and completely dominant and you felt like the season was over before it started, then that would be a bummer. But I just don't know that we can get there in baseball. We got an email from a Mets fan, Patreon supporter

named Russell Goldstein. And this is interesting given what we've been talking about. He said, I'm having a bit of a fandom existential crisis and I need you to be my therapist for a minute. For background, I'm a lifelong Mets fan who has suffered through the Wilpon years, coming close to a championship a couple of times but always ending up in disappointment, always being the younger sibling to the Yankees and growing up always being frustrated seeing them buying every player to win. The day Steve Cohen took over the Mets, I was over the moon excited, knowing we would finally have a payroll that would be competitive. However, during this offseason spending spree, surprisingly, it has kind of made me question what I'm actually rooting for or why we root at all.

At what point does a team become just hired guns only here to end this championship drought? Am I actually not actually rooting for the Mets to win games, but by the transitive property, I'm just rooting for Steve Cohen to spend more money? If the Mets win the World Series, aren't I just celebrating the spending of $350 million? I know that the issue here is that the system is broken. The Pirates or A's could spend $400 million on players, but they don't, or some number of millions more than they do. But do I need to just accept that Cohen isn't doing anything wrong and remember that baseball is just a wonderful, amazing distraction from this horrible, rotten slog to rigor mortis? Help! So he's feeling like it's just mercenaries. I mean, even if it's someone

like Nimmo whom you're bringing back, I guess if you feel like that it does come down to how much you spend or, hey, our owner is richer than your owner and that's why we won, that probably wouldn't be super satisfying. I just, I don't know that it's at that point where the dollars dictate the results to such an extent that you have to feel that one to one relationship. Like there's still a lot of uncertainty. I mean, if you did give the Rays 350, 400 million dollars and they continued to operate the way that they have, then I wonder what they could do with all that money. But the Mets weren't the Rays before they started spending all this money. all that money but the Mets weren't the raise before they started spending all this money and so I don't know if you're a Mets fan you're probably a little bit drunk on just the the riches here that your franchise hasn't had at its disposal or hasn't used previously and maybe you

also feel like oh are we the baddies now like are we the Yankees like are we the team that's just buying championships I just I don't know that it's like feasible to buy championships yeah I'll be like you can't do it yeah I think that that's right and I also again I think you know I can't make you feel a different way about it if you feel a particular way about it but first of all I think it's probably worth noting that like a not small chunk of the millions that got spent this offseason were spent in service of retaining a player who was homegrown, right? So some of this is, hey, we want to stay in the Brandon Nimmo business. Or I give Brandon Nimmo a bunch of money because we like Brandon Nimmo, right?

So some of it is in service of retaining your own guys. Not all of it, obviously. So like some of it is in service of retaining your own guys, not all of it, obviously. But yeah, I think, you know, when you get down to it, like think about teams. There are teams where they draft or sign the guys who end up being their stars. And those dudes are in the organization from day one.

They never move around. But one, I think that, you know, being overly fixated on the mode of player acquisition is sort of a fruitless endeavor because teams acquire and move players around all the time in a lot of different ways. And there's nothing novel about signing free agents. It's just novel in terms of the dollar amount that's being attributed to them here. So there's that piece of it.

There are plenty of guys who end up being like really important, you know, players on contending teams who, you know, they might spend their entire big league career with your club, but they moved around before that, right? They came over in different moves and different trades. Mostly I think that like when you walk into the ballpark and you look down on the field and you see a free agent,

maybe the way to feel about it is that guy really wanted to be a Met, right? And part of what made him want to be a Met was a big check. But like that guy made a proactive decision to come here and be a Met or if you're Francisco Lindor to stay a Met, right? So they want to be there with you. They want to be there with you on a special, what could be a special run at a championship. And, you know, I think it's fine to look at the guys who you've been paying attention to and thinking about and dreaming on since they were prospects and feel something special about them, right? Like I feel a particular special kind of way about Julio rodriguez because he's

just been a mariner from day one right and i feel a special particular kind of way about edgar martinez because he spent his entire big league career with seattle but i have gotten a ton of enjoyment out of guys who were only there for a couple of years, and they made a choice to be Mariners. And that was exciting too, right? Like that's affirming to your sense of fandom. So I don't know if that's persuasive. I don't know if that kind of moves the needle, but you know, to recap, like I think that we tend to forget or minimize all of the different ways that players move around, how tip, how sort of normal that is now, right different ways that players move around, how sort of normal that is now, right?

That guys do move around a lot in the course of their careers, much more than they used to. And also, like, they made a decision to come hang out with you in Queens. That's great. Like, be excited about that. That's so fun. Like, sure, the check mattered,

but, you know, I think Senga got offers, right? think sanga got offers right brandon nemo got offers justin verlander got offers and these offers were bigger but like he made a decision to take this one that's exciting you can feel excited about that that's pretty great okay so maybe we can transition to the a's via the three-team trade with the braves the mets division rival because as i said dan gave me the upstated standings and the braves stillam trade with the Braves, the Mets division rival, because as I said, Dan gave me the upstated standings and the Braves still on top with a projected 96 wins to the Mets 93 as things stand. The Phillies at 89 and then the Marlins and the Nats have slipped down even further. So the Nats have gone from 67 projected wins to 65. The Marlins from 79 to 75. Marlins, very disappointing. Maybe it's on me to expect them to have done anything at this point. But as Dan was saying, you could say that they are maybe arguably, along with the Red Sox, perhaps the biggest losers of this offseason thus far in terms of projected wins or losses. And there was just an article in the Miami Herald I was reading last week

about how Kim Ang was saying that the team we have right now is not going to be the team that you see on opening day. But I think it's probably already too late to do with this roster what would need to be done. They need offense. They need bats. They maybe need to convert some of the pitching into hitting. They're not doing anything. They're just sort of sitting on their hands and watching their opportunity float away and their division rivals just get even better. I mean, they finished way

back in the East last year and the gap has not narrowed this winter. So it's disappointing. I would really like to see them actually get good and do something and try to correct the imbalance on that roster because there are a lot of players I enjoy watching on that team. So they along with I think you could put the Orioles in that boat of like they should probably be doing something at this point, although the Orioles are better as currently constituted. But just seeing them sort of sign Kyle Gibson and thus far declare it a day. There's still time, but like, why can't the Orioles sign Carlos Correa? Yeah. Anyway. Why can't they?

Yeah. He seems like he'd be a good fit for them. I know they might not quite be ready to win that division yet, but they seem like they could be in the business of signing someone like that who will be good for some time. Anyway, the NL East, the Mets, despite how much they've spent, are still not on top. The Braves are, and they are trying to get better however they can. And so they have made a trade, a three-team trade with the A's and with the Brewers. The Brewers, who are just like, we're a part of this for reasons.

Yep. So the trade is Atlanta gets Sean Murphy, one of the very best catchers in baseball. Just put the posterior aside for a second if you can, just based on his- Hard to do, but sure. It is hard to do, but just he's a great defensive catcher. He's one of the better hitting catchers. He's just, he's really good. I like Sean Murphy very much as a player.

And the Braves get him Milwaukee somehow gets William Contreras yeah sure and Justin Yeager from Atlanta and Joel Piamps from Oakland I don't know how that happened exactly but that happened and Oakland meanwhile gets Kyle Muller Manny Pina Freddie Tarnarnock roy bercelinas and the centerpiece from their perspective estuary ruiz from milwaukee so everyone is is marveling at the brewers role in this because they basically just traded ruiz who's like an extra outfielder for them for William Contreras. Yeah, they did. They did do that.

Who's a young catcher coming off an excellent season under team control for several years. So it seemed like the Brewers just sort of gave away a spare part just for the service of being a middleman in this trade and finding a match between Oakland and Atlanta. They just got themselves a very good young cost control player. They just got themselves a William Contreras, you know? They were just like, at the end of the day, we have somehow acquired a William Contreras. Yeah. So it seems like everyone was like, okay, the Brewers somehow won this trade,

despite from afar, like seemingly not even needing to be a part of it. But there they were. There they were. It seems like, I mean, they were just kind of a prospect broker because I guess the A's really like Estuary Ruiz. And I guess there are reasons to. But, boy, they are really banking on their evaluation of Ruiz being higher than it seems like the industry as a whole. Literally everyone. Yeah.

as a whole everyone yeah so because sean murphy like and look there were some reasons why you could justify trading sean murphy other than just to save john fisher a very small amount of money like really not much at all i mean manny pina is making more than sean murphy yes in 2023 yes he is probably not after that but yeah no not after that, but yeah. No, not after that. Murphy will get more expensive. And for all I know, they might get rid of Manny Pina too. So I wouldn't be surprised. But really, the reason why they felt moved to trade Murphy, aside from the fact that he's entering arbitration and going to start to get more expensive, which is probably the

primary reason, is that they do have a lot of catching depth in that franchise trade. And they got Shea Lank Lears from also the Braves in the Matt Olsen trade. And he's basically ready to go. And you could argue that you'd be wasting him a bit if he's stuck behind Murphy. So maybe that gives you freedom to trade Murphy if you get the right offer, if you really get a good deal. Shea Lanklears always makes me think of this disturbing Stephen King story called The Lanklears, but I will not hold that against him. He is a good, promising player. But really, it seemed like from all the reporting and rumor mongering that they were asking for a lot from other teams.

They were asking for top top prospects as you would think they would like more of a quality over quantity kind of deal that's not what they did here that's not really what they did here and i always feel bad in moments like this because like estuary ruiz is just sitting there being like what the hell did i do to deserve all of this scrutiny except try to play major league baseball but yeah i think it is not unfair to say that their evaluation of him is is pretty far out of sync with the rest of the industries which doesn't mean that they can't be right but like every public facing prospect evaluator and a lot of team people i've talked to have been like this guy's a fourth outfielder. He's super fast. He literally stole 85 bases in 114 games.

That's a lot. And he has shown some power, but he really doesn't hit the ball hard all that often. And look, there are definitely exceptions to this. It is not a hard and fast rule. But to be traded twice this close together and to have gone through two different teams evaluations and have them at least determine that he is extra that he is you know part withable

in a short amount of time isn't it's not an encouraging indicator right so i don't know right yeah like you could look at the stats and look at the stolen bases and then look at the combined minor league line was very impressive looking. I mean, a lot of it was was double A driven, right? He had a thousand eighty five OPS in double A in the Padres system. He still hit fairly well when he got to triple A with the Padres and with the Brewers. And then he didn't hit in some very brief big league time with both teams. But it was very BABIP driven, and you would expect him to have a high BABIP, the kind of player he is, but perhaps not quite that high. And it's hard to be a really valuable player unless you're really a defensive standout if you don't hit the ball hard. He just doesn't really do that with any kind of regularity. So I'd like him to succeed because it seems like he would be kind of a fun player and we'd certainly need some players who steal 80 bases. But yeah, I don't know that he'll get on base often enough to do that in the majors. Anyway, they're just really putting a lot on him and he's not particularly young,

right? I mean, he's already a major league player at this point, basically, but he's turning 24 in February. And Murphy's older than probably some people think too. I mean, he's 28 now, but he's just really good. So you could kind of scratch your head a little bit with the Braves just trading whatever prospect capital they have, which is not a ton at this point after upgrading and promoting players from within and all the good things that they've done. But, I mean, they took a position of strength at least last season and made it a bit better. But they had, at least according to fan graphs, the third most war from their catchers of any team last season behind the Phillies and the Blue Jays. So you might say, well, why use your prospects to upgrade at that position if you're already pretty set there, if you have Contreras and you have Travis Darnot, who had a great year. year. And probably they feel like, well, for one thing, you get Murphy for a few years and he's the best of those players. And maybe they feel like they got the best of Darnot and Contreras last year. I mean, Contreras was really good, but it's not a huge sample. And maybe they don't think he's that good a hitter as he was in his rookie year. And maybe Darnot, I mean, he can be a bit

inconsistent and also from a health perspective too. So maybe they felt like they were set up to decline a bit there or they just don't like Contreras' defense or whatever it is. But they took a position that they were already really good at last year and probably got better, certainly got better in terms of projected value for this coming season, I think. But getting Murphy for them, they had been connected to him in rumors prior to this. And I think people thought like, huh, it's just it's kind of a surprising destination for him.

That's such a nice way of describing the reaction that those rumors got online when they broke. That's maybe nicer than any of the words spoken about it sure like why them i mean they're already good they have good players at that position even young cost-controlled players so so why them of all the teams that could use catching help it's hard to knock them too much because i think they got the best catcher and they got better at that position and the best player in the deal and all that but you might wonder what does that mean for their evaluation of Contreras I guess because a lot of people said well why didn't the A's just take Contreras back like why didn't the A's just take Contreras back Ben yeah why involve the Brewers why take Ruiz why not just Contreras

and I guess maybe that speaks to well for, for one thing, again, maybe they really like Langoliers and their other catching prospects and they could have taken Contreras and then spun him off somewhere else. But maybe they just felt like, oh, we like Ruiz a lot for whatever reason. But to trade Murphy and not get like a consensus top 100 guy, that is that is very surprising so between all those things and the continuation of the a's just completely tearing down their roster that was last competitive a couple years ago and though they have uh signed some small amount of money to sign the likes of aledmus diaz and jace peterson etc like there, it's just, it's mean to call it like a smoking ruin on this roster. It's not a serious Major League Baseball team. I'm sorry.

Like, this is not, this is deeply unserious on the part of the A's. And I don't want to knock any, again, I always feel bad for the players who get swept up in these deals because it's not their fault that the A's aren't serious, but the A's aren't serious. This isn't a serious team. It is clearly more interested in relocation than it is putting anything like a good major league product on the field in, not just in 2023,

but you look at this A's team and you look at their farm, when do you expect the next good homegrown A's team to come up? I don't think it's soon. It seems like they've prioritized players who are close to major league ready. They've gone for guys who are already in their 20s, already in the upper levels of the minors or already having gotten some cups of coffee. So in that sense, it seems like they're trying to avoid a long and deep tank and they're trying to just turn it around fairly quickly. But also it seems like they just haven't gotten kind of consensus high ceiling guys who could be a core, a championship caliber core. So I don't know. Maybe it wouldn't be that long until they're better than a 60 win team or a 50 something win team.

But do they have it in them to be a 90-something-win team? I don't know. Maybe. But it doesn't seem like you can point to that many obvious guys and say, oh, yeah, he's just going to be leading the way in a year or two and that will be a championship contender. So it's pretty bleak. I mean, they're just, like Murphy was really maybe their only above average player last year because they just traded everyone else. And now Murphy's gone, too. And we talked about the Elvis Andrus debacle, which was like one of the more transparent things. It's just everyone else like they traded all these other guys. That was one thing. But Andrus was like in the middle of a good season for them, one of their most valuable players. And they just did not want his option to vest. And so they're just like, nope, we're going to bench you

and then we're going to just release you and then you will go on to be good for the White Sox while we get no production out of this position. It's just very clear what they are prioritizing

and it is not winning. So they are a franchise that like over the period of decades has won a lot of games more than you would expect them to win based on how much they have spent on their payroll like they're one of those teams we were talking about the guardians the rays that has managed to like defy its its payroll destiny right but lately it's just it's been bleak and there's just not a lot of watchable players and people have not come out to watch them which is totally predictable and you could argue even part of the point like people who think that this is just like a major league the movie type

situation where they're just trying to burn their bridges and get out of town i mean if they are if they have been like they're doing what they should do in order to do that because it's just not a watchable team at this point. Right. And I want to preface this by saying that there are a lot of very talented and smart people who work for the A's, but they also don't seem to be on the cutting edge when it comes to, certainly when it comes to analytics in the way that they could claim in their money ball heyday. And so the sort of avenues they have to punch above their weight, the way that say the raise might just seem far narrower and more limited than they were even a couple of years ago. So it's just like,

there's not, they don't have the mechanisms to outperform the, the really disastrous approach that they have taken to payroll. And, you know, it's going to manifest on the field every day next year. So that really stinks because, you know, this, this was a team that not that long ago was in the playoffs and in the playoffs for good reason, deserved to be there. They weren't winning the division, but they were certainly competitive within a division that is also home to the Astros, and you just can't say that now. It's really too bad. It's too bad for the people who work for the team who aren't ownership.

It's too bad for the people who work for the team who aren't ownership. It's too bad for their fans. And again, too bad for these players who are just like going to have to hear it every day. And it's not their fault. I imagine that is extremely unreliable. But John Fisher, A's owners, reported net worth is roughly the same as Peter Seidler's. So just putting it out there. Anyway, that's the A's. That's the Mets. I guess just to wrap up, there have been a few other transactions maybe we could just briefly touch on. So a lot of movement in the catcher market and the twins have gotten their guy, Christian Vasquez, for three years and 30 million. So I've always kind of liked

Christian Vasquez going back to his young elite framing days with the Red Sox and things didn't really work out with the Astros either from the Astros perspective or for his because he didn't play as much as he wanted to and he didn't hit as much as they wanted him to. But overall, I think he's a pretty good catcher. So I think that's a reasonable deal. And they needed someone who can actually field back there, I guess, because I guess we're giving up on the Gary Sanchez might actually be a playable catcher at some point idea. Yeah, it seems like a good fit for team and player and

yeah it's like the man that market thinned out so fast yeah it did yeah it wasn't deep and it wasn't deep yeah it was not deep to begin with and then it like really you know the thing is it then continued to thin out yes murphy on the move and both Contreras' changing teams and now Vasquez, so fairly slim pickings left. And then on the starting pitcher front, so the Giants have made a couple moves, having been thwarted in earlier moves,

but they have signed Shamanaya and former Effectively Wild guest Ross Stripling to the same deal. Each of them, I guess, got roughly the same amount of money over the same amount. Each of them, I guess, got roughly the same amount of money over the same amount of time, two years, $25 million. So the Giants just, they seem to really like them, those kind of mid rotation, back of the rotation type pitchers, and maybe they hope to get even more out of them. But Stripling is solid. He's been a swing man for

much of his career career but he's coming off a really strong season and i've always just felt like if you just left him alone in a rotation he could maybe hold his own there and then mania i guess would be the the more prominent name the the one who has had better results in certain seasons but he's coming off a rough year that sort of scared everyone off, especially the second half of that season. So the Giants are hoping that his health holds up and that they can help him harness his stuff and that they can get more out of him than he gave this past season. But he seemed like someone who would have been in line for a much bigger deal had 2022 gone not happened yeah i guess you

could say about almost anyone who had a down year but sure but him in particular yeah i think stripling was good last year i think he will be good i like that signing i think that i don't know if if sean mania can course correct um after his 2022 but kyle kishimoto wrote about his signing for us at fan graphs and i liked the fit with san francisco before i read kyle's piece and then i liked it a lot more even after just because they have a good track record with guys who have arsenals that look a lot like manias and helping them to unlock something new or to reach a new level. So I like that. And Susan Slusser is reporting that they are still in on Rodon, even after signing Stripling. So I don't know if he will land there,

but having missed out on Judge and some of the other shortstops who have signed, it sounds like they are putting a lot of energy into the pitching market. I wonder what that means for them in terms of their appetite for Carlos Correa. But yeah, I don't know. I like it. I still think that they could use some more offensive oomph.

But preventing runs, if you score a couple, as we've talked about, that's a way to win a baseball game, Ben. So it is. And the Blue Jays also made some moves. So they signed Chris Bassett. They also traded for Kevin Kiermaier or signed Kevin Kiermaier. Signed Kevin Kiermaier. He was a free agent at this point. Yeah. So Chris Bassett, they also traded for Kevin Kiermaier or signed Kevin Kiermaier. Signed Kevin Kiermaier. He was a free agent at this point. Yeah.

So Chris Bassett, I feel like Chris Bassett, he's like, I don't know, there's something not super exciting about Chris Bassett. But like he's solid. Yeah. Which I guess is something you say about someone who's not super exciting. But I don't mean to have it be a disparaging thing because, I mean, 63 million over three years. it be a disparaging thing because, I mean, $63 million over three years. So they are paying him more per year than, say, the Phillies are for Tywon Walker or the Cubs are for Jameson Tyone. But they gave him less total money. And frankly, I think I would rather have Bassett for that amount of money than those other guys. He has been pretty dependable just in terms of above average results, above average workload.

Like you put it together, he's a solid starting pitcher. And that's just exactly what the Blue Jays needed. And in this market where it seems like mid-rotation guys are all exceeding expectations, it seems like this is a pretty reasonable deal to get Chris Bassett on from the Blue Jays' perspective. Yeah, I agree with that. I think that this feels like it is funny because the zips for the Blue Jays went up, and Dan was like, hey, the Blue Jays should sign another starter. They could use one.

And then they were like, we agree. Here's Chris Bassett. I was like, that was good. And tomorrow, the A's zips is going up, and it will be less good. So sorry, guys. I was like, that was good. And tomorrow the A's zips is going up and it will be less good. So sorry, guys. But yeah, I think he does what they need from a rotation guy really well, which is like provide good above average,

if not always like super superlative innings. And he tends to do a lot of that. And they needed that because, you know, they have some question marks in terms of bounce backs with Berrios and and we don't know what they're gonna get out of kikuchi so like yeah i like it it feels like a good feels like a good fit ben it does yeah and kiermeier allows them in theory at least to slide over george springer to a corner and i just i don't know at some point kiermeierier is not going to be an elite center fielder, right? Like that is not something that generally people are really good

at doing late into their careers, like playing a good above average center field. And Kiermaier will turn 33 in April and he's coming off labrum surgery, right, like which sidelined him for parts of the season. Hip. It was a hip issue. And that kind of tanked his defensive ratings this past season. But it's hard to know what to make of that because maybe he was just affected by the injury. But then is he going to bounce back all the way to what he was? Like, are you confident that you're getting a good defensive center fielder out of a 33-year-old post-injury Kevin Kiermaier? I don't really know at this point.

I mean, it's not like they made a major commitment to him. So it's not like that would be a big problem. It's just that they want to get themselves a good defensive center fielder. Hernandez and now they've signed Kevin Kiermaier and then they slide Springer over and they're just kind of going for better defense, which, yeah, that's another way to improve your run prevention, as we have also discussed. So on paper, I guess that should work. I just, I don't know. Like Kiermaier, he's roughly a league average-ish hitter most years.

And so if you're getting that in a very good glove, then that is a very valuable player to have. I just, I don't know how long that portion of his game is going to hold out, but obviously they're hoping at least one more season. Yeah. I think that all of that is right. And I think the only other thing I wanted to mention maybe is that we were talking, kind of joking, speculating about whether a team was just going to offer a really, really long, like Ilya Kovalchuk lines too, and that they were, in Heyman's words, contemplating a deal for $400 million plus over 14 years that would have taken Judge to 44 years old. However, Heyman says sources say they would not have been allowed as MLB would have seen the additional years as only an attempt to lower their official payroll to lessen the

tax. So we were talking about whether we would get to the point where teams were just tacking on so many years that it became transparent that they were just trying to lower their luxury tax hit and that Rob Manfred might step in and say, no, you're not allowed to do that. So if this reporting is accurate, then it sounds like, yes, the Padres were thinking about that and also yes MLB was thinking about just knocking that down and saying no we're gonna draw the line here so I

don't think any team has gotten to the point where it is monkeying with the CBA to such an extent that the league would have grounds to step in and do something about it but it sounds like the Padres were getting to that point. So I don't know whether they were planning to have this be front-loaded or whether it would have been the same AAV throughout, but just for 14 years and then a mid-40s Aaron Judge, theoretically still under contract. But this seems to have been a bridge too far perhaps for them

and at least perhaps for MLB. So if that was kind of the limit I guess they were thinking of testing it and ultimately decided not to yeah I think that's right and Munitaka Murakami also there was a report that he will be coming to MLB after 2025 yeah everyone who's been wondering when will we get to see him in the majors, he was wondering that too. Just had an incredible 56 Homer triple crown season this past year. And now we know that they will post him, his team. The Occult Swallows has agreed to post him after three more seasons.

So that will be his age 25 year. And then I guess he will be free of restrictions on spending and they can post him and make some money and he can make some money but if he is as much of a monster then as he already is and was in his age 22 year then there will be a massive bidding for him like i don't know that it will be shohei otani next offseason level but he might be one of the best hitters like i think he is probably the best young hitter that age in the world already yeah at least based on projections so when he becomes available if it's that year as planned he'll still be pretty young and unless he's taken a step back in some way teams are probably already

setting their sights and hitting the countdown clocks and trying to make payroll room for when he becomes available yeah yeah I think that he is probably inspiring awooga noises awooga alright so

let us stop here with the past blast So this comes from 1941 and also from Jacob Pomeranke, Sabres Director of Editorial Content, Chair of the Black Sox Scandal Research Committee. And he writes, 1941, closing the door on 300. In another case of nothing new under the sun, Lefty Grove became the 12th Major League pitcher to win 300 games on July 25, 1941, and some sports writers immediately lamented that no one would ever reach that milestone in baseball again. It took Grove three attempts to win number 300 as his Red Sox rallied to defeat Cleveland 10-6 at Fenway Park thanks to a bases-loaded triple by Jimmy Fox. Three starts after that, the 41-year-old suffered an injury in the first inning and never won another game, retiring after the season ended. In the sporting news, Fred Lieb took a stab at predicting who might come next. Quote,

It is quite possible that this generation of fans is seeing the last of the 300 game winners in Bob Grove. This writer does not particularly subscribe to the belief held by many that this generation, including its ballplayers, is getting soft. However, the livelier ball has made a great deal of difference in the game, and the old-timer would have laughed at a 10-man pitching core. Next to Grove, the three ranking present-day pitchers in Games 1 are Ted Lyons of the White Sox with.242, Red Ruffing of the Yankees with.240, and Carl Hubble of the Giants with.236. Of the hurlers of today, only Bob Feller seems to have 300 victory possibilities. Bob is not likely to be called into the Army until next November, but the summons will

take a year or more out of his career at his very prime. And there's no telling what exposure and the different exercises required to whip a husky young ballplayer into a soldier will do to the prize arm of baseball. Jacob concludes, Lieb was correct about all of the pitchers he named. None of them reached 300 wins, not even Bob Feller, who joined the Navy just five months later when America entered World War II. He would miss the following three seasons and finish with 266 wins. The next 300-game winner wasn't active in MLB yet when Grove joined the club in July 1941.

In September, early Wynn made his debut with the Washington Senators. Like Grove, he won exactly 300 games over his 22-year career between 1941 and 1963. But another pitcher would actually beat him there. In 1942, Warren Spahn was called up by the Boston Braves, but then he joined the Army and earned a bronze star in Purple Heart in combat during World War II. He finally recorded the first of his 363 career wins at the age of 25 in 1946 and reached the 300 win mark in 1961. So, yes, writers have been sounding the alarm about the extinction of 300 game winners for quite some time, but it has gotten more acute over time.

And certainly now I think we could be like Fred Lieb and lament that we might be seeing the last of the 300 game winners or might have already seen them. And we would not be wrong to think that. Like in the past, historically, I never bet against anything happening again. History is long and the game could change in a way that favors starting pitchers getting wins again more if anyone is still paying any attention to wins. But these days, Justin Ver has done it thus far. So if he can do that, then he's close enough to the point where, yeah, maybe it's feasible, but the odds are against him and the odds are really against everyone else. I mean, even if you just say the field, I don't know if the odds are in favor of it happening just because pitchers don't pitch as long into games. They don't pitch as many innings.

They don't make as many starts. Managers don't prioritize getting them the win as often. People don't prize the win as much. It's not necessarily something we need to lament just because of wins and pitcher wins in the stat. We talk about the changes that this has wrought in the game and how we don't love the de-emphasis of the starting pitcher. It's not so much about the wins for me as it is about the spectator experience. But I think more so than at any other point in history, you could very reasonably look around and say, yeah, this might be the end of the road for the 300 game winner, at least for the foreseeable future. It would certainly be the one that I felt the most confident in, put it that way. Yes, yes.

in for something I wrote, I had a great opportunity to remember some guys and then also talk to some guys I had remembered because not only have I continued to get some great remember some guys former major leaguer Facebook friend recommendations. In recent days, I have noticed Tom Candiotti, CJ Nikowski, Jerry Naren, Ryan Sandberg, a great name, Jesse Barfield, Trott Nixon, Greg Blosser, who I would not really have remembered was a major leaguer, except for the fact that he had his uniform on in his Facebook profile photo. And then I looked him up and, yep, he did play a few games in the majors. Ozzie Canseco, umpire Jim Joyce, just continuing to supply some great names. Thank you, Facebook. I don't always know i guess that

they're legit like was that actually ryan sandberg or was it someone posing as ryan sandberg right i don't know i didn't actually friend him so he's not my friend what kind of i mean look i don't want to insult ryan sandberg but like what kind of person's impersonating ryan sandberg i don't know like just asking that question i'm guessing greg Blosser is actually Greg Blosser. Probably. He's not an imposter, but Ryan Sandberg, I'm a little less confident. Anyway, I mentioned that because I got to do an oral history. This is actually the first genuine oral history I've done.

I enjoy oral histories. I've written fake oral histories, but this was like a real one that I wrote about the SNL sketch, Baseball Dreams Come True, which came out 25 years ago today as we're speaking on Tuesday. It aired on December 13th, 1997. And this was the sketch that featured Chris Kattan and Will Ferrell and Helen Hunt, who was hosting that week. And Chris Kattan was playing a kid in bed who just he wants to be a baseball player. And then as soon as his mom puts him to bed and leaves the room, a multitude of baseball players just parade out of his closet one after the other and gradually just convince him not to be a baseball player by being so off-putting and being drunk and loud and

smoking and hitting on his mom, et cetera. And there are 15 major leaguers in that sketch. And I talked to most of them. And it turns out that the sketch was actually written by brand name writers, Robert Carlock and Adam McKay, who have gone on to write and show run and direct many series and movies that you have heard of. And before that, they combined to write this Baseball Dreams sketch. And so I got to talk to most of the eight of the 15 players. And I talked to Todd Zeal. And I talked to Todd Zeal. I talked to, I guess the biggest name in the skit is Scott Rowland, and I did not get to talk to him. But I talked to Cliff Floyd, David Howard, Greg Jeffries, Jeff Fasero, Mark Wohlers, Marty Cordova, Russ Davis, and Todd Zeal, along with Carl Locke and the agent who put them all together because I had always wondered having seen the sketch like why these players it's like

15 players from 10 different teams like all different skill levels and ages and experience levels and I always wondered how did these guys get in the sketch like did they write the sketch that called for 15 baseball players and they were just like let's put the call out any baseball players

who happen to be in New York this week just show up on the Saturday Night Live set and we'll put you in a sketch or what? No, it turns out they actually had a common bond and they were part of the same agency. And the sketch was sort of reverse engineered because the agent said, hey, I've got all these baseball players in town this week. You want to write a sketch for them? And they did. So it's kind of a wild story. And the players all enjoyed reminiscing about it, as did the people involved in the creation. So I'll link to that on the show page. But always fun when you get to remember some guys and then also call them up and talk to them. So people who remember that sketch fondly may enjoy the piece. All right. One thing I neglected to mention, by the way, those giant starting pitcher signings were

good news for me in the annual free agent contracts over-unders draft. I took the over on Ross Stripling on MLB Trade Rumor's predicted $18 million. He got $25. And I took the under on the predicted $52 million for Sean Minaya. He got $25 too. So that's a large lump sum added to my total. I am six for six so far. Meant to mention two things about two catchers. First, if the Brewers can help William Contreras improve his defense the way they seemed to help Omar Narvaez when he got to Milwaukee,

then this could be an even bigger fleecing. And second, Meg mentioned Zunino and his strikeouts among the low strikeout guardians. Someone in the StatBlast channel of our Discord group for Patreon supporters asked what the greatest share of a team's strikeouts over the course of a single season is, and listener Asian Brave, who previously conducted the Mike Trout Twitter emoji research, he did a little check and he found that that would be Jimmy Fox, who accounted for 119 of 465 Red Sox strikeouts in 1936. That is 25.6%. That seems to be the record since 1914. And the others are also early. Vince DiMaggio, 1938. And then, of course, the great Gorman Thomas in 1979 and 1980, up around 23%. Vince DiMaggio again in 1943. Chet Ross in 1940. Dolph Camille in 1941. Reggie

Jackson in 1982. Gorman Thomas again. Rob Deere, another brewer. Ralph Kiner, etc. I think when there were fewer strikeouts in general, it was easier for an outlier to make up a higher percentage of Team K's. In recent seasons, he found Adam Dunn would be the king, 2012 White Sox, he was 18.5% of their strikeouts. It's the likely candidates, the usual suspects, Dunn, Chris Davis, Mark Reynolds, etc. Might be tough for Zinino to have a really impressive rate, though, even on the Guardians in this high strikeout era, and as a catcher, who's only going to get into so many games and appearances. Also, the most recent edition of the Bill James Handbook has a list of 300 win candidates. There are not many of them.

They give Justin Verlander a 29% chance of getting there. The only other pitchers they put on the list are Max Scherzer at 5%, Garrett Cole 4%, Clayton Kershaw 3%, Adam Wainwright 3%. 3% seems too high for those guys, in my opinion, certainly for Wainwright. 1% for Zach Granke, less than 1% for Johnny Cueto. And those are the only pitchers who even make the list. So yeah, not looking great for 300 win candidates. However, looking great for Effectively Wild's secret Santa.

I teased this last time, and now it is officially open. Zach Winkos, a listener, organizes this every year and he has opened it up again a little later than usual. So everyone get your signups in. You can sign up between now and December 21st and then you can send out your Secret Santa gift when you are matched at that point. And for those who have not participated before, you just fill in your information. The recommended amount to spend is about 20 bucks. And you just send some sort of thoughtful baseball-related gift to the person you were matched with. And you get one in return. So actually, the deadline to sign up is December 20th at 9 p.m. Pacific.

So that's midnight Eastern on the 21st. And then you'll be matched. You'll be emailed your match's info. And then you send out something that will get to your recipient between Christmas and New Year's. And then if you're in the Effectively Wild Facebook group or Discord group, you can post a picture so everyone can enjoy the gift you got. It's fun.

I participate every year, and I've gotten and hopefully given some fun gifts over the years. So please do check it out. There's a post in the Facebook group. I will link to that and also to the entry form on the show page. You don't have to be a U.S. resident to participate. You can sign up from any country. Zach makes an effort to match overseas listeners and participants with each other to cut down on shipping costs if possible.

You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks, while also helping us stay ad-free. Ryan Goldgeier, AJ Leinberger, Nick E.D., Ken Berger, and Greg Sells, thanks to all of you. group just for patrons as well as access to monthly bonus podcasts that meg and i host plus discounts on merch and access to playoff live streams and deals on ad-free fangraphs memberships and more you can join our facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild you can rate review and subscribe to effectively wild on itunes and spotify and other podcast platforms you can contact me and meg via email at podcast at pangraphs.com or via the patreon messaging system if you are a supporter you can also follow effectively wild on twitter at ew pod

and you can find the effectively wild subreddit at r slash effectively wild thanks to dylan higgins for his editing and production assistance we will be back to talk to you a little later this week. My flesh holds the truth of the mind. My flesh holds. I'll explode.