Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1943: Weird Decisions

Episode Date: December 17, 2022

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the Yankees signing Carlos Rodón, Rodón’s recent trajectory and future, New York teams at the top of the payroll leaderboard and starting-pitcher projections, the career of the late Curt Simmons, and the perfect pace of this offseason. Then (31:06) they answer listener emails about the best players to […]

Hello and welcome to episode 1943 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs and I'm joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? Doing well. Another day, another big contract for Carlos. Yeah. Talked about Carlos Correa last time. Today, we have Carlos Rodon to talk about. Six years, $162 million for the New York Yankees. How about that? A lot of millions of dollars, you know? Yeah. By the standards of

this offseason, it seems almost pedestrian. It's under $200 or $300 million. And if it's under eight years, it seems like nothing at this point compared to where Carlos Rodon was a couple of years ago. It's quite a windfall, which we can talk about, I guess. Yeah, definitely. So this is, I guess, the lastrea came off the board, that was kind of like the last real elite, like, difference maker, gets me super excited kind of free agent. But Carlos Rodon, you know, he has a case to be in that group, certainly. And people have called him an ace. The Ben Clemens Fangraphs post called him an ace in the headline, right?

Referred to the fact that the Yankees now have two aces. Two. Yeah. Not just one, but two. Ace definitions. That's one of my least favorite arguments over who is an ace and what is an ace. I don't know that I would put him there, I guess. But everyone has a different definition and it's mostly meaningless.

But really, like the only reason I was sort of slighting Carlos Rodan was not because of his recent performance, but because of his long term track record, which may or may not be relevant at this point. But over the past two seasons, if we go by Fangraph's war and why wouldn't we? Why wouldn't we? He trailed only Corbin Burns and Zach Wheeler in FanCraft's pitching war from 2021 to 2022. Now, he was 42nd in innings pitched over that span because, of course, he missed some time, particularly in 2021 down the stretch. But he was just so good on an inning per inning basis that he was still one of the most valuable pitchers in baseball and projects to be again, at least in the short term. So there's maybe a bit more uncertainty about him than your typical ace level effectiveness pitcher, but probably not that much more because every pitcher is risky and could potentially break you know at any at any moment like they could be

walking down the road and they could be like oh no i have broken you know they all sound like cartoon characters yeah it could happen yeah it could happen uh i guess that could happen to all of us you know ace or not but yeah i think it's funny how we think about injury risk when it comes to pitchers because on the one hand they could all break at any moment. And on the other hand, like they, the ones who have broken previously, we look at slightly more scant. And I think that's appropriate. And then on our third coming out of our head hand,

there's like you get to the other end of the, like all the way to one end of the spectrum. So you can loop around where it's like, oh, this guy like very recently had Tommy John. So I'm weirdly less worried about him. Yeah, right. Fresh UCL. Yeah. Because it's like it's brand new and it doesn't mean he can't injure it again because guys do that.

But you kind of swim in weird waters when you're signing a really good starting pitcher. when you're signing a really good starting pitcher. But when you think about the ways that this Yankees team had to improve itself or sustain its level of play going into the offseason, like the obvious thing that they needed to do was re-sign Aaron Judge, and they did that. And then you're thinking about like, what are the ways that they can kind of raise their ceiling

relative to the rest of their division? And one of those ways would have been, say, bringing in like Carlos Correa, the other Carlos and shoring up shortstop, which, you know, I know that they are very excited about their young prospects at that position,

but is, you know, still a spot that could use an upgrade on their roster as it's currently constituted. But then it's like, um, you know, the other thing that you can do is just sign the best free agent pitcher who isn't Jacob deGrom available. Am I underrating Justin Verlander?

I might be, but I still think I would prefer Carlos Rodon. I think I'm comfortable with the assertion that I just made. For one year? No, maybe not. But for like this deal, you know? Yeah, over the next six years. That's's cheating it's cheating what i just did yeah okay one of the best pictures on the free agent market there that's appropriately caveated to you know be very good as you said on a per inning basis you hope that he's able to sustain the improved health and availability and now all of a sudden you know a

rotation where you were like wow we're, you know, a rotation where you were like, wow, we're really, you know, banking a lot on like Frankie Montas. Now you can bank on him less like Frankie Montas as a five. That's that's fine. That makes good sense. And then, you know, you go Cole and Rodon and Severino and Cortez and you're like, wow, that's a that's a real good rotation that they have right there. So I feel I feel like they did they did a good thing and now when you look at our payroll breakdown like look it's perfect ben as it's currently constituted i want to make an argument for this array being what i want to see from baseball are you ready for me to make an argument it just makes good sense that the Mets and the Yankees would lead the payroll rankings. That is the teams in the biggest media market in the country with all kinds of resources

doing what they ought to. And then it speaks to the health of the game more generally that the third team is the Padres, much smaller market, but one dedicated to winning and really excited and then and then that you would have the phillies who had a big payroll in 2022 but were you know disappointed by their world series last saying no no we're gonna get better too we're doing the thing and then you have toronto which had you know the ability to spend maybe hasn't spent quite to the extent that their fan base would like but is like you know finally getting to know the luxury tax threshold in a way that they haven't before and then you have the angels who i don't know you have the angels i don't know man like

at some point it'll work right like a good reminder that uh spending is not necessarily guaranteed that you will win so yeah sometimes there's you know and so i i'm i'm pleased i'm pleased ben because you want you want teams to deploy all of the resources that they have available to them to try to win particularly when they're in divisions that are as competitive as both of the east and we're we're seeing the yankees and the Mets sort of answer that call and many of their division mates doing the same. And then Boston's trying or something. I don't know what Boston's doing, but there you go. I'm pleased. It doesn't feel great to me, Ben. Can I say a thing that doesn't feel great to me? Are you ready? Sure. Feels bad that the Rockies and the Cubs have a higher payroll than the Mariners. I don't know how I,

you know, like, I don't know about that one. That seems, anyway, we'll kind of keep an eye on that. But yeah, good to be Carlos Rodon and good to be the New York Yankees, I think. Yeah, it does feel appropriate that the two New York big market bigots are on top there. Usually in the past, maybe they've been in a different order. It is Mets first, Yankees second. Now, I guess the only downside of this is that people will look at this and think, oh, it's unfair and it's a rigged game and you can't compete and we need a salary cap, et cetera, et cetera, right?

If it's like so predictable that the New York teams are on top and obviously like they are more able to spend than other teams are. So that's the only downside, I guess, is that it might lead to the impression that baseball does not have a good competitive balance because the two New York teams are just outspending everyone. Whereas even though that's true, baseball has had pretty good competitive balance. But it just feels right for them to be throwing their weight around. And you see the same thing on the Fangraph's starting pitcher depth charts,

where it's the two New York teams on top, although in a different order, because the Yankees now with Carlos Rodon, equipped with a Carlos, are in first over the Mets. And yeah, I mean, they've got great top of the rotation talent there with Cole and Rodon. They've got pretty good depth with guys like Domingo German and Clark Schmidt and Davey Garcia, and you can go down the list. So a little less aged than the Mets rotation, I guess you could say. And I guess Rodon, just the two-pitch pitcher repertoire, which is a fairly accurate label for him. He throws his fastball most of the time and his slider a great deal of the time. And then occasionally he will dabble in other pitch types.

But he is pretty much a two-pitch pitcher. And it obviously hasn't held him back. There's something about that that feels like it shouldn't work quite as well as it has worked. You have to have great stuff. Obviously, if you're getting by as a starting pitcher with primarily two pitches, then they need to be really, really good pitches, as they are for Rodan, as they are for Kevin Gossman, let's say. So maybe if something were to slip, like if he were to lose velocity, perhaps he would be more vulnerable, let's say, than a pitcher who has a larger repertoire and could compensate by just mixing pitches more. So that's something that makes me slightly nervous about him. Like he's not old.

What is he, 30? So he'll be in his. Like he's not old. What is he, 30? So he'll be in his... That was a whack out of clear blue nowhere. Yeah, he'll be basically as old as we are by the time this deal is done. He's not old. You know, it's fine because that's like a number I can deal with.

Yes, as old as we are currently, we will be older then. Yeah, unless something really weird happens. Yes, but that would concern me slightly. Sure. I don't know if that's totally backed up by the research. I don't know if there has been research about this. Certainly, pitchers who have more pitches, they are more resistant to, say, the times-to-the-order effect. I don't know that they're necessarily more resistant to age-related decline, but I wouldn't be surprised, or velocity-related decline.

I think one sign of that may be, if I recall correctly, some of the studies that Mike Fast and Jeff Zimmerman have done about whether starters or relievers are more sensitive to velocity loss. And they found that it's more costly typically for a reliever to lose some amount of velocity than for a starter to probably because relievers just tend to be dependent more on one or two pitches. So if something were to slip, if he were to have some sort of injury and come back not completely at full strength or just the normal wear and tear then maybe he could reinvent himself who knows but as his uh pitch

mix stands today i would say that there there might be a quicker drop off and then there is the injury risk which of course you know he's had all kinds of shoulder issues in the past. And he's coming off his best season, like his really his first season where he was both very good and durable by the standards of today. Yeah. And so that makes me a little bit nervous when someone in his walk year, and I'm not saying because it was his walk year, but it just so happened that it was his walk year, does something that he's never really been able to do before and puts everything together, all of the promise that he had. And then that thing that you just did for only one year for the first time ever. So it's kind of concerning. But look, he's been really effective and he's got great stuff.

And I see what the Yankees like him. And not in a Joe Kelly kind of way. Yeah, not in a Joe Kelly way. Yeah, he's got great stuff and also has been very effective with that stuff. great stuff and also has been very effective with that stuff but but really his trajectory over the last couple years is just wild because he was non-tendered after the 2020 season much like kyle schwarber i guess who has also really resurrected his career since then yeah and unlike schwarber who i think signed in january of 2021 it took until February for Rodin to sign back with the White Sox again. And I think it was like the I took that personally last dance meme with him because I think he said that it was kind of a wake up call for him that he was non-tendered.

He was not expecting that. And he maybe rededicated himself in certain ways in response to that. And whether that was why or not, I don't know. But since then, he's been on a pruning basis and even not on a pruning basis, one of the very best pitchers in baseball. But it took some time for the White Sox to trust him. I mean, they never really did, right? Because they just let him go. They just let him go, Ben. It was weird. It was weird. At the time, people questioned it, that they did not offer him a qualifying offer. But that seemed to speak to a lack of confidence in him, which seemed semi-justified only because his shoulder issues had cropped up again and he had lost some velocity or had just been fatigued down the stretch in 2021 and had not been as effective or as available. And that made some sense, I guess, given that he was pitching more innings than he had previously, but it wasn't so many innings. So whether that was a case of maybe the White Sox had just seen too much of Carlos Rodon,

like the old, not as good and not as dependable Carlos Rodon. And so that's what they were still seeing in him, whereas maybe a different organization could see him with fresh eyes. But for whatever reason, the White Sox basically had a vote of no confidence in Carlos Rodon and let him leave, even though, as it turned out, they really could have used Carlos Rodon. They really could have used him. And, you know i think

you're right like i don't want to attribute all of that decision to being cheap right like i don't want to attribute all of it to that but also i think that that was part of the motivation too right because like i think that when you're assessing the decision to make a qualifying offer or not like the worst thing that happens is a guy who has recently been very good for you just re-ups on a deal that is still probably below market and the best thing that happens is he doesn't and then you get draft pick compensation so i just like i think that the i don't know that the risk reward is always properly calibrated on those choices and i don't think it was here yeah typically i think

though that teams have the best sense of their own players and so that did make me wary when the white socks made that decision as good as it wasn't all cheapness to be clear but i think yes there was definitely like a susan of cheapness yeah and right even if they didn't really want him back you'd think that they could have anticipated that someone would want him enough to pay him more than that. And but who knows, maybe he would have accepted it. That would have worked out great for the White Sox. Yeah. But he got to ultimately a deal with the Giants instead and richly rewarded them. Yeah. Yeah. And that right. Like the fact that the White Sox, who theoretically like they had seen him, he'd been in the organization a long time, like they knew his health as well, not really. Maybe they were just too conservative or cautious or cheap or whatever it was. And so now that he's had the additional season and stayed healthy and still been quite good, then now no one has doubts anymore, I guess. So it's great for him. It's quite a come up from getting non-tendered and teams not being all that interested to being one of the top pitchers on the market and getting $162 million. Not bad. Yeah, not bad. And when I think about how he pairs with this organization in particular and how it... And I might be giving New York too much credit here so I want to acknowledge that that is a possibility I don't think that the Yankees have shown a particular

talent like a really incredible talent for keeping their pitchers healthy relative to the rest of the market I don't think they've been like old school metzing it but like they've had injury issues in that rotation so it's not like you know him going to the yankees makes me think oh well he'll never be hurt again because like that's not what they have demonstrated like a particular skill in doing but when i think about a guy who has some of the performance-based risk factors that you talked about right like what might happen if one of his two very good pitches starts to slip it feels like this is such a good pairing for him with respect to that stuff, right? Like if you're the Yankees and you're as good at pitching

development as they are, you probably sit there and say, well, yeah, there's some risk of that, but we'll probably be able to help him figure out how to do it differently or better, right? And so that might be giving them too much credit. And I don't want to disparage Rodin's ability to course correct himself, but it feels like a good fit in terms of their ability to maximize his existing skill set, but then also help him to adapt that skill set if and when he needs to because of some of the potential pitfalls that you mentioned. So I like it a lot. I think it's good. It really is a ridiculous slider. It's a very good fastball. It's so beautiful. It's a great slider. It's just very, it is an aesthetically pleasing pitch to my mind. It's like, oh boy, look at that one. I was just thinking when you were talking about how any pitcher or any player or any person for

that matter could get hurt at any time, which is a cheery thought. I was just reading a great obit and life story by Craig Wright in his newsletter, Pages from Baseball's Past, which I subscribe to and always recommend, baseballspast.com. But he wrote about Kurt Simmons, the Phillies and Cardinals great who died this week at 92 or 93, actually. Don't want to shortchange a nonagenarian ever. He's a friend of Effectively Wild favorite Bobby Shantz. And Shantz mentioned when we talked to him that Kurt Simmons was not doing so well. So he passed away this week and Craig wrote about his career.

And he had a really great career, kind of a Hall of Very Good type career. Could have been even better, which you could say about so many pitchers, but his initial injury, so this sounds extremely painful. So this is 1953. So he'd had a really great start to his career and was just an incredibly promising young pitcher. I guess that was his age 24 season at that point. And he'd been an all-star that year. He was an all-star the previous year. He was just off to a really great start. On June 4th, he was mowing his lawn.

Oh, no. Yeah. And on a hilly section, his left foot slipped under the power mower. Oh, I hate you. I hate you for telling me about this. We're in a fight oh sorry uh content wording belated to wait content wording i guess i did say it was gonna be painful but you did but i didn't appreciate the like well what are you gonna do you're you're kind of

trapped here you're you're on the podcast so it's like um you remember that really bad m night chamelon movie the happening yeah where like the plants decide to kill us which like you know we kind of suck as far as plants are concerned so in suspense when you said really bad m night shamalon movie it could have gotten so many ways after that yeah i was waiting to find out which one you know i think that some of them when you revisit them they're like better than you remember you know yeah so some of them are good some of them are good you wish that mel gibson you remember. Yes, some of them are good. Some of them are good. You wish that Mel Gibson weren't involved, but some of them are good. But do you remember the happening with Zooey Deschanel crying over Tiramisu?

Doesn't a person lay down in front of a writing mower to die in that movie? That's what I just thought of, Ben. Now you're thinking of it too. It feels like retribution and you wouldn't be wrong. This was not intentional. Fortunately, Craig continues, he was wearing his heavy army boots, or the damage might have been much worse.

As it was, prepare yourself, his toes were mangled, his big toe was badly cut to the bone, and he had to have surgery to amputate the, quote, entire outer joint of the toe. So, he only missed a month somehow and continued to pitch decently after that.

But he was not as good. Was it his plant foot? Well, excellent question. No, it was not. So that helps. Otherwise, yeah, he probably would have had to miss some more time. But he was not as good ever again after being mangled by the mower. And the following spring, he had a sore shoulder. And some people thought, well, this is

probably caused by the foot and toe injury because maybe he altered his delivery without even knowing it. Oh, it was like compensating in a way he didn't appreciate. Yeah. And so he had shoulder inflammation for years then. And elbow surgery and shoulder surgery were at least a sore shoulder. He himself said he thought that the shoulder injury and the foot injury were not so related and that people had made too much of that link. But whatever the reason, he had multiple ailments. multiple ailments. And then he kind of reinvented himself as more of a soft tosser, pitch to contact type by the standards of the day. And he had a really nice, good second act with the Cardinals. Actually, like when he was the ages that Carlos Rodon will be during this contract, like, you know, 31 to his mid thirties, basically. So he found

a different way to do it, which is something that a lot of pitchers have done. Frank Tanana comes to mind, someone who just was a flamethrower, just an archetypical power pitcher as a young guy and then got hurt and had to change some things. So I'm not saying that that will happen to Carlos Redon. First of all, I'm not saying he will mangle his foot with a mower. These are not risks that I encounter as an apartment dweller. The downside, I don't have a lawn. The upside, I can't mangle my own foot with a

mower while mowing that lawn. I can't believe how many more times you've said it from the first time that you said it. Anyway, I enjoy it when a pitcher can reinvent himself and find a way to be effective with diminished stuff. Although it would be nice if pitchers could just keep their A stuff longer. That'd be great too. But Kurt Simmons, an inspiration to all, though also a

cautionary tale when it comes to lawn care. Oh man, it's just like a i have a very active imagination and so you said it and now i'm just going to think about it with a visual attached like and can you just imagine you take taking your shoe off when you realize you've done that oh yeah i need to be sedated yeah man you don't you don't have a lawn either i assume right, right? There's a little bit of lawn. A little bit of lawn, but not... Be careful out there. There's no hills involved with the lawn. That's crucial, yeah.

Wear your army boots, I guess, just in case. Yeah, that's another thing. He missed time for military service, which was another thing that detracted From his career totals Anyway, really good pitcher, good life Rest in peace, Kurt Simmons, last of the Wiz kids

Anyway, that was a digression I meant to say, after Rodan is signed Now, okay, so Dansby Swanson Sort of the last man standing from People's top tens at least And maybe top fifteens or so on the free agent list. And he may sign sometime soon. For all I know, he may have signed by the time people are listening to this.

But I think that this offseason has been really to my liking in terms of its pace, in terms of how it has parceled out transactions. Like this is kind of a Goldilocks off-season for me, I think, not to be confused with the so-called Goldilocks ball, but a Goldilocks off-season just in terms of not too slow. Compared to previous quote-unquote normal off-seasons, like pre-pandemic, no lockout, et cetera, we were all bemoaning how slow things moved and how great free agents were still hanging around like when spring training was starting. And that has not happened, right? And we've seen, you know, there was a slow start, but I think a slow start is OK in November. Yeah.

Just because, you know, we're all still winding down from the excitement of the playoffs and we're still kind of basking in that. And we haven't gone into withdrawal yet with baseball news. And you have some consciousness that it's a long offseason and you don't want to just like, you know, burn all your material really early. So you wait until the winter meetings and we got just a frantic, super exciting winter meetings week and aftermath of the winter meetings. So that was a ton of fun. And baseball got some headlines and got some attention at a time when it might not otherwise. So that was great. And now most of the big business has been conducted prior to the holidays. So we can all just kind of relax, right? Like you don't have to worry that Jerry DePoto is going to sign, well, anyone. I don't think we really have to worry about that

generally, but yeah, I take the broader point. Or even AJ Preller, right? I wouldn't put anything past him, but you don't have to fret quite as much on Christmas Eve or whatever that there's going to be some that when they sign, you have less to drop, more to drop. I don't know. Anyway, of the guys who are like, I'm going to interrupt someone's evening level of signing, it's really just swanson who's left like no offense to andrew benintendi or anything but like if andrew benintendi signs between december 26th and january 2nd like he's a 2023 meg problem you know like he can wait and he's a good player and you know we'll write him up and everything but But that's not a 2022 Meg problem during that week anyway. I'm not disrupting someone's holiday for Andrew Benintendi.

Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. So I think it's good that teams, you know, like the stockings are stuffed, like the presents for fans are under the tree, right? And it gives you more time to look forward to what next year's roster is going to look like and get excited about it and perhaps sell season tickets from the team's perspective. But you know who's going to be on the cover of the media guide. And just

it's good to, I think, get some of that settled early. And yet there's enough still left to happen that it won't be just a total nothing in January and February. I mean, and by the time you get to February, like pitchers and catchers are reporting, which is ultimately kind of a nothing burger, but at least like it's a milestone. It's a signpost. It's like, okay, we're getting there. And the closer you get to opening day, the easier it is to tolerate a lack of news. Doesn't necessarily mean it's easy to podcast, but still, I think it's better to have the bulk of the news concentrated in the first half of the off season before the end of the year than after. And so I feel like this is kind of perfect. Like we had a little time to wind down after the season.

Then there was frantic activity that was super exciting. Then we have more time to wind down and enjoy the holidays. And then there's still some business to conduct when we all reconvene in 2023. And then before you know it, it's spring training. So this has been good. And I don't know if this will always be the new normal, but it's nice that having gotten back to some sort of normality post-CPA and lockout and pandemic, et cetera, that we could go back not to the normal that immediately preceded the pandemic, which was too slow. And everyone was wondering, is free agency broken? And this is terrible.

But the normal before that. This is kind of recalibrating, resetting. I'm pleased with this pace. Yeah, I think that this is pretty good. Now, I've just said, I'm not going to disrupt anyone's holiday. And then Preller's going to trade for Garrett Cole somehow or something. Nonsense. And then I'm going to have to redo it.

Now that we have Carlos Rodan, Garrett Cole is expendable. Yeah, totally expendable. Get rid of that guy. Who needs him? He's a bum. for like yes garrett cole somehow or something nonsense and then i'm gonna cross right on garrett cole is expendable yeah totally expendable get rid of that guy who needs him he's a bum you know and so then i'm gonna have to be like hey sorry everybody but who wants to write up this crazy transaction yeah but you know in terms of the stuff that is predictable like the business we know is in all likelihood and particularly as you've noted given the pace of this offseason and sort of the urgency the team seemed to have around signing guys, the business we can kind of predict being completed before pitchers and catchers report. Here we are. Isn't that nice?

Yep. So if you're a team that was trying to get better this offseason, I hope that you've gotten what you wanted to get done because there's only so much. Yeah. Not a ton of difference fakers out there no all right let's uh answer some emails okay all right here's uh here's one from josh this is in the spirit of the season i'm supposed to get snow tomorrow and that had me thinking which players would you want on your team in a snowball fight oh so. So I guess the big question is what is your pitcher position player breakdown? Is it all pitchers? Because I could see a case for some position players.

First question, I'm not clear on how you win a snowball fight. Because every snowball fight I have ever been in, there hasn't really been like a clear victory condition. Winner, yeah. Like there's no way to win. Generally, it's just a free for all until you get tired, gets tired and cold and then it just peters out. Right. Like there may be more organized ways to have snowball fights. Like maybe you have a certain number of snowballs pre-prepared or or you could play it like paintball style where like once you get hit by a snowball, you're out of the game, you know, dodgeball style. But like with the telltale snow mark that is on you, although I guess everyone has snow on them probably in a snowball fight just from traipsing around in the snow and being in the snow.

So that might make it tough to tell. But there are probably like we won this snowball fight or like, OK, we have achieved our objective. But generally, I guess it's just maybe you win by pummeling the opponents until like they just are in submission because they're tired of getting hit by snowballs, I guess. Like Buddy the Elf. Yeah, I guess so so really all you want is uh players who just throw hard and and quickly i guess because well i think that there's an argument for more than just pitchers like i think that there's probably a good argument to sprinkle in like some short stops and third baseman you know you think about potentially second baseman depending like you think about potentially second baseman, depending, like you think about guys who are good at throwing on the run, throwing from different like platforms, basically. And they seem like they would be useful in a snowball fight if what you're trying to inflict is like maximum. I don't want to say damage because like this should be fun, right? It's literally a snowball fight, but like who can land a snowball from a variety of

of different throwing angles most often but with like let's assume you know snow that is like wet enough to hang together but not so wet that it's painful when it hits you right this is like nice idyllic snow that where you can just have a good time and then like you said you're you're cold and wet at the end and everybody goes inside and drink something warm like that kind of like nice competitive but not like nasty kind of so and so then i think there's an argument to be had for infielders of various stripes because you know we see them make throws like that all all the time probably don't need a first base swing because you're not trying to catch them you know you're not trying to like dig it out that's not what you're trying to do. Maybe catch your crew. And yeah, maybe an infielder would be better prepared for that than a pitcher, even if they don't all have the arm strength.

And also, I guess you want some agility and conditioning and athleticism because you also want to avoid getting hit by the snowballs. And so some pitchers are pretty athletic and run a lot and others do not necessarily. So that's another point. And I guess a lot of the effectiveness of a team in a snowball fight comes down to the snowball preparation. Right. So you'd really want someone who would be good at packing the snow, just like not so hard that it hurts, but also not so loosely that it just comes apart. Right.

And I don't know that anyone in particular would be particularly well prepared for that, but you would just want to make sure, prioritize someone who can just create snowballs that will carry and find their target, which could be anyone on a team, I guess. Maybe you'd want some sort of like a veteran mentor, backup catcher type, just like packing the snowballs on the side and handing them off to people. Who knows? Or like an umpires, you know,

umpires. Yeah. Just pulling them out of their, their snowball bag. Yeah. Right. Huh. Or I guess maybe someone who rubs stuff on the ball,

doctors, baseballs, perhaps. But again, we're not trying to, we're not trying to like, you don't really need like that much more zip than you just get from from reasonable arm strength right like because

we're again we're not trying to hurt anyone and people are no doubt thinking well well what about catchers right because they yeah they're used to throwing out base runners and like that's that seems valuable but also you're right right that having probably more mobility than the average catcher is important. So maybe you have like Real Muto or Sean Murphy, but you'd have to clear a pretty high bar, I think, athletically to be, not to be a big league catcher, although you have to clear a very high bar there too. Yeah. Not to be a big league catcher, although you have to clear a very high bar there, too. But there's like a particular kind of athleticism that we're interested in here that that may be less common in the catching contingent. Yes, they can be a bit lumbering in some cases. They can be a bit lumbering. Someone like O'Neal Cruz, let's say, although he presents a big target, which I guess you could say about some catchers too. They tend to be maybe a bit wider.

You know, you want to keep a low profile. Yeah, have a narrow silhouette, which I guess O'Neal Cruz gives you. Like he's big. He's spindly. Top to bottom, not as much left to right. So between that and his arm strength, that'd be good. Probably like a Javi Baez would be good in one of these, just with the arm strength and the agility and all that. So yeah, I think actually, initially I was thinking you'd just stack your roster with

pitchers, but more and more I'm thinking probably not because it tends to be fairly close quarters to a snowball fight too. So you don't necessarily need someone who can make like a UNS Cespedes each row type throw from an outfield corner either. It's not really a long distance thing typically. Oh, man. Ben, imagine Mason Wynn in a snowball fight. He'd be perfect, right? Yeah.

Because he gives you the pitcher arm strength and the infielder agility yeah really zip it i mean hopefully no one in your snowball fight is throwing the ball 100.5 miles per hour because that seems kind of dangerous right but also i don't think that the aerodynamics of a snowball facilitate that maybe in the same way that a baseball does so i think it could be okay but we've got to keep an eye on it. Everyone practice safe snowball fighting. Yeah. You don't want to lose an eye because there's a rock in there by accident or something.

That would be bad. Yeah. Now that I think about it, though, you probably want Otani on your team. I was thinking, would you want position players or would you want pitchers? Well, why not both in one guy? Whatever the question is, take Otani. Always an easy answer. All right.

Here is a question from Dave. You recently discussed whether three distinct baseballs were used across the league last season. This got me thinking, what would baseball look like if MLB literally only used three individual baseballs for every game for an entire season? How long would the season take? Would MLB play three games at once, each using a single ball? This seems most efficient. Or would all three balls need to be used for a single game apiece in order to keep things moving along when the

ball lands out of play? Second, would fans accept, as they do in many other ball sports, that when a ball lands out of play, it needs to be returned? Oh, yeah. And three, how would this change the look and feel of the game over the course of the season? The balls would deteriorate over the course of the season. Seams would rip. Scuffs and blemishes would eventually cover the entire surface of each ball. Does this increase strikeouts as pitchers start to get all kinds of wacky movement? At what point does the added movement become a nuisance?

Yeah, this is an interesting question. I think you wouldn't have enough days in the year to complete the full 30-team, 162-game schedule. Well, and you just wouldn't have a usable ball. No, at a certain point, it would just be completely in tatters. Yeah. Yeah. So I guess. Right. You would either have very long individual games if you went with just one ball at a time and had to constantly pause and retrieve the ball or you would just I mean, you just would not be able to complete the schedule. And even if you had three balls in one game, that game might be a bit snappier, but then you'd be able to play even fewer games. So that just wouldn't work. You'd have to shorten the regular season. Also, I think as far as the fans handing the balls back, that is how it used to work in the earlier days of

baseball, but it's been cemented for so long that fans get to keep the balls as souvenirs that I think you'd have a hard time going back to taking balls back from fans in the stands. And I think what you'd have to do probably is put up more netting. You'd have to put up netting that would block everything, right? Like not just protect the people immediately behind home plate in the lowest section, but maybe go from like the field to the upper deck and just block the entire stand so that every ball would just hit the net and bounce back off, right? Otherwise you would constantly be losing the ball. You wouldn't be able to get people, you wouldn't be able to compel people to return the ball and you wouldn't be able to find them and they would hide it. So I think you'd have to do that. You'd have to net off the stands so that a ball could not go into the stands.

Well, part of the uptick in the so-called live ball era was not just that they made the ball more lively, but that they replaced the balls more often. And if you were to use the same ball, even if it's better constructed than it was back in the dead ball days, like it would quite quickly just become a complete mess. Oh, yeah. A misshapen lump and just have seams going off every which way and have the cover hanging off. Oh, yeah. if you could scuff it and scuffs would happen on fouls, et cetera. But there would come a point, I suppose, where it might actually benefit hitters because, well, you wouldn't be able to throw the thing accurately. It just wouldn't hang together. It would become a snowball-like consistency. And at that point, I don't know that you could throw a strike anymore. It wouldn't reach the plate.

So you might not actually be able to hit it, but also it would not be a strike and you might just walk everyone and the game would never end. So this is not good. This is not a good plan for any number of reasons. Yeah, I am intrigued by how quickly the crowd would like devolve into peer pressuring people to throw stuff back. But I just think this would be such a slog. And then at some point, just not baseball at all because of all the problems it would present that you just named. At a certain point, you're just like kind of playing hacky sack, like with your arm. Yep.

The baseball itself would no longer be a baseball. It would not be functional. And at that point, it is no longer baseball. So, yeah, this would be disastrous. Much more disastrous than having potentially multiple models of ball would be just having one ball that you have to keep reusing. All right. Matthew, Patreon supporter, says, I drafted this message before you read and responded to the listener question in episode 1941, which starts off in a similar manner, but takes a very different tack, about

your Steve Cohen discussion in that episode. I am a lifelong Mets fan, having suffered through the miserliness and the Metsiness of the Wilpon years, and I am so thrilled that the team was able to re-sign Brandon Nimmo and replace DeGrom with Verlander and, and, and. The team was so much fun last year, despite the ending, and I'm really excited for next year. It's pretty clear that Cohen's billions and his willingness to say F you to the other owners is changing the landscape for the team. And as you touched on, it may force other owners to adapt and spend more themselves,

which would be a big win for everyone. However, I think it's important to register another emotion in this conversation, unease at the way that Cohen is using his money to buy his way into the good graces of society. We've talked about this before when he bought the team at intervals since, mostly in a joking manner about his doing of crime. But I think it's a vital part of understanding what he is doing in the sport, and I hope you all address it again in some depth. He's not the worst offender out there, of course. We're in the middle of the World Cup hosted by, because they bribed a bunch of FIFA officials. The country then proceeded to allow thousands of migrant workers to die during the process of getting

ready to host. Meanwhile, they also own one of the top European clubs, PSG, while rival states with their own ethical transgressions own several others, KSA, Newcastle United, UAE, Manchester City. And until recently, Russian oligarchs controlled several major teams across the continent. There are similar tales to tell in basketball, in golf, with the Olympics to a certain extent. You have a baseball podcast, of course, not a global sports podcast. But how would you fit Cohen and his spending into this global context? Are you worried about other people or literal countries in similar circumstances buying more baseball teams?

Might Cohen be something of a force for good in the baseball ecosystem because his goals, laundering his reputation, primarily are so vastly different from his fellow owners, turning a tiny profit

by keeping costs down? Sorry if that was a little bit of a long rant or comment or discursive or something, but I worry about these things. Primarily, I worry that as a fan of one of these teams, I might fall into the trap that Cohen is set of rooting for him personally because I root for a collection of people he employs.

I worry even that I am inherently complicit by paying for tickets or merch or just rooting for the Mets and sending positive vibes about them into the universe. So is Steve Cohen sport washing here? Should we feel bad about the Mets being the trailblazer here when it comes to spending? Because this is all part of Steve Cohen's dastardly plan to restore his reputation. I've been thinking about this since we got this email. I'm going to say a series of things. I don't know if I'm going to come to a conclusion at the end of it. Because on the one hand, I think that he is an extreme

example of an existing phenomena, which is that he is both spending more money and has a lot more money at his disposal than some number of the existing owners in baseball, other owners in baseball, I should say. And so he is an outlier in that respect. But he is, I think it is a difference of degree rather than category. And so, you know, I don't think we have to hand it to him in terms of his like financial dealings as a hedge fund manager. like financial dealings as a hedge fund manager. And I think that he is using his team, I imagine probably for his own enjoyment, more than a sort of calculated strategy of reputation laundering, although I could be wrong about that. I don't know if he cares whether people like him or not. It does seem, I mean, he got on Twitter

and he did seem to be soaking up that right you know public yeah there are definitely parts of his personality at least as he has manifested them on social media that seem to care a great deal about like how people perceive him and it's not like we're wanting for examples of billionaires who, despite having enough money to theoretically insulate them from having to care about that stuff or engaging with it being, you know, big babies. So it's not like that would be a new phenomena, particularly on Twitter. the sort of overriding motivation seems to be that like this is the new fun toy that he has in his possession and that he wants to enjoy owning it in a way that is perhaps a little bit different than like those sort of reputation laundering that we think of when we think of sports washing it can be both to be clear but. It's not like a live golf sort of situation exactly, I don't think.

Right. And so there's that piece of it. And then there's what we do as consumers with the understanding that on the one hand, the most direct lever that we sometimes are led to believe we can pull is a monetary one and withholding monetary support. But also, I think that that impact tends to be relatively limited, at least when it's on an individual basis rather than organized. But I don't want to let people off the hook either, right? Like, sometimes I think that acknowledging the reality of like, they're not being ethical consumption under capitalism is a way to that people are like, so it doesn't matter what I do. And it's like, well, no, it still does matter, right? So there's that piece of it. I also want to acknowledge the

difference that exists between like, someone even someone as wealthy and powerful as Steve Cohen relative to a state, right with with state power and all of the authority and power that comes with that and sort of the direct control that it brings in terms of other people's lives. So like those are different even though I don't want to downplay like the hugely outsized influence on the world around him that someone with Steve Cohen's financial resources can have. So I think that all of that is to say that it is like a big yucky soup that we tend to swim in when we are fans of things in this era of our existence. So I think that it's fine for you to enjoy the Mets, particularly when like the manifestation of his money is like, you know, paying really good athletes to be good

at their jobs. So there's that piece of it. I do think that it is really important for us as like consumers of sports to not get overly enamored with these guys, right? Like when people were like, Uncle Steve, I'm like, please relax. No, please relax. Like this guy, this guy's like done financial crimes. He's done some crimes. So like chill. There's like good reporting on this that you should read. So like I think you can enjoy the Mets and also not like feel the warm and fuzzies towards Steve Cohen.

And I think that we are able to hold those two two realities and ethical choices like in our hands simultaneously so all of that to say like enjoy the mets don't become a fan of billionaires like this is a bad idea and uh because they're gonna disappoint you if nothing else like even if the ethical part of that doesn't bug you like they're gonna let you down because that's kind of what they do and i think that it is an unfortunately necessary conversation for us to keep having because like it is clear that at least when it comes to state actors that like they view they view sport i think appropriately as political and they view it as like another arena in which they can try to assert and grow and maintain soft

power so like that's a good thing for us to be mindful of because yeah like fifa seems really corrupt and like bad stuff happened around this world cup that like is very well documented so like you don't have to hand it to them right but i think it's okay for you to enjoy the mitts still right and if you decide you don't i also like i think the flip side of that is that you don't have to keep being a fan of a thing if the behavior of the owners of that thing you know inspires like a little voice in the back of your head right there's nothing wrong with you saying i'm out on this now. I think this guy is icky. I think that there's a lot of precedent just in American sports where you don't have, at least in the same way that you have in some of the examples in this email, the same state presence, state ownership presence,

people saying this owner is a piece of crap and he treats people terribly and I don't want to root for him anymore, right? Like, I imagine that there are fewer Washington Commanders fans now than there used to be because of what their owner has done. So it's okay for you to decide, I'm out on this. I'm not going to give this person my emotional or financial investment anymore because I find what they do distasteful. That is a perfectly reasonable reaction to this kind of stuff also. I don't know. to like throw the ethical violations of the like opposing fans owners not that they own the fans but the owners of the teams those fans root for back at them as like a gotcha not because they care about the ethical issue but because they want to do a gotcha right it's like they've gotten tired of saying count the rings and so this is the next argument in the litany and like that's a key too don't do that because like your owner is probably not actually better in any meaningful way.

And you're not doing that in service of trying to like improve the circumstances around whatever issue it is. You're doing it to like gotcha, count the rings, and other fans. So it's like you're not honoring those concerns either. So it's just, I don't know. It's a tricky, it's a morass, Ben. I feel like I was a little rambling, but it's hard to nail down an exact thing there. There's a lot, it's complicated. Yeah, it is. Interestingly, Steve Cohen hasn't tweeted since November 9th when he tweeted about the Edwin Diaz deal being done. Lots of other deals he could have tweeted about since then, but he has not.

I don't know what that means. Maybe he's not an Elon fan. Who knows what's going on there. Who knows? Maybe he has just finally realized the thing that all of us realized, which is if we had the money that these guys have, you would just never hear from us ever again. Or we'd do jokes. just never hear from us ever again. Maybe. Or we'd do jokes, you know? It's like we'd do some jokes. We'd be committed to the jokes.

But like, this does not, go be on an island, you know? Go plant some trees, save someone. What are we doing here? Yeah. I do think that a part of why billionaires buy teams is so they can be big shots, like not necessarily so that you can think they're good guys and moral, ethical people. But, you know, they can just be big shots in their town, in their city. People can be grateful to them if they spend their money to have their team win. And Steve Cohen, he's from Long Island. He's a Mets fan.

Like he does just want the Mets to win, I think. And that is part of his motivation. It's not like he's purely just, I want people to forget about my financial crimes, so I will buy the Mets. I don't know how much he is actually Bobby Axelrod from Billions, but Bobby Axelrod from Billions, he didn't necessarily need to be loved by the public. He wanted to make money and get to do what he wanted to do. From billions. Like, you know them and it would be cool to be venerated by them. What we're saying is you don't have to venerate necessarily. You can be pleased, I guess, that your billionaire is a bigger billionaire than the other billionaires and that he's actually spending some of his money, But it doesn't really have to go beyond that. But if you're going to say that you want your owner to be a wonderful person with no problems in their record or anything,

then you're going to have a hard time ultimately finding a team to support because they all mostly are billionaires and a lot of them have done stuff that was somewhat unsavory. mostly are billionaires and a lot of them have done stuff that was somewhat unsavory. So and speaking of owners, we got a couple Bob Nutting questions here. People love Nutting and talking about Nutting. So Seth says, let's say Bob Nutting named you GM of the Pirates. Congrats. You go to him and say that in order to build a better team, you'd like to have the team be more active in the free agent marketplace and increase spending. He counters by saying, I've listened to Effectively

Wild and read other industry studies that say that there seems to be very limited relationship between the payroll of a team and their on-field success. Given that, why should we spend more? And I guess this would be Bob trying to do a gotcha, trying to hoist us by a card. And I guess I would say that while some low spending teams have had considerable success, the Pirates have not been one of them. And so they should do something differently from what they've been doing. So if this were a conversation with the raise owner, it would be a slightly different conversation because you could still make a case that they should spend more, but it wouldn't be based on lack of success necessarily. I mean, you could say that we would have had more success and we could have some postseason success, but you couldn't say, well, we haven't been competitive spending what we've been spending. But with Bob Nutting, I think you could say that. So I guess one thing you could say is, well, you should hire front office people like the Rays to implement a plan to win without spending. But you could also just say, well, we haven't spent and we haven't won. And so we should try to do something differently. And it certainly can't hurt to spend. And continuing to repeat this plan is not wise. every organization. And some organizations have proven more capable

of winning without spending so much than others. So if you're one of the latter, then I think there's an easier case to be made for ramping up the payroll. Well, and I think in addition to that, this isn't perfectly true, right? There are certainly exceptions to this rule, but I think that in addition to the impact it has on the sort of odds that your roster sees the postseason or is even just competitive over the course of the season, even if they don't end up playing in the playoffs, generally when you spend money on good players, you have good players and they're fun to watch, right? Ultimately ultimately you are in theory in an

entertainment business and so one of the benefits of spending money on good players like don't maybe like do the eric cosmer contract right um but like if you spend money on good players even if your team doesn't have a corresponding like jump in the standings you've given your fans more fun baseball to watch and that's in theory like one of the things we're here to do so i think that's a compelling argument also yeah the flip side of buying a sports team to sports wash yourself is that you might get the opposite of the intended effect where you buy a sports franchise and you're vilified. Right.

Then you're Bob Nutting. Yeah. Then you're bottom line Bob. And I guess he's much more known than he would have been without buying the Pirates, but not in a good way, not for good reasons. People who know him curse his name. Yeah. So unless you just think all news is good news or all publicity is good publicity,

then that's not good. Maybe you would rather be anonymous and not vilified. So you do, once you buy the team, you then have to invest. It's not sufficient just to buy it and then have everyone bow down before you. You actually have to spend some money so that they will be glad that you bought the team and will not think you're a cheapskate. So, yeah. Yeah, definitely. Because we, you know, it's funny, like, I wonder if there's a way to, like, measure this with Q scores or whatever. or whatever. But I think generally, the people who are most likely to know the names of the owners of a team at all are fans of that team and then national writers. And then the exceptions to that tend to be either the really successful or the really putrid franchises, right? You're not a

big football guy, Ben, but you know who Bob Kraft is, right? Like, you know who that guy is. So there's that piece of it where you can be, I guess, a more anonymous owner, someone who isn't on the tip of the tongue of a person who isn't invested in the specific fortunes of that franchise. But I think you have to clear a certain winning bar before you can get into that like safe band of anonymity because otherwise you're bob nutting so that seems that seems bad and the other nutting related question because there were two this one uh is also fit for the season this is from j, Patreon supporter, who says, It's December 24th, and Bob Nutting,

after relenting in withholding the Scouts' Christmas bonuses, goes to bed. During the course of the evening, Bob is visited by three spirits, the ghost of Christmas past, Andrew McCutcheon, the ghost of Christmas present, O'Neill Cruz, and the ghost of Christmas future, the 2023 first overall draft pick personified. Bob awakes a changed man, no longer interested in nutting his ball club, and instead

dedicates himself to running the Pirates as charitably as possible. How would this manifest itself? Do the Bucs acquiesce in all arbitration negotiations? Do all pre-arb players receive a base salary of $1 million? Do all scouts get personal services contracts when they retire? Interested to hear your thoughts. So I don't know in this scenario whether he becomes the biggest spender, whether he's going dollar to dollar with Steve Cohen, or whether he is just lavishing dollars on people who otherwise would not get them, like people in the organization who are sort of behind the scenes or players who are not in the phase of their careers where they're making a ton of money.

So I guess this is just like being generous, whatever would qualify as generosity for an MLB owner. Yeah, I think that like there's the free agent signing piece. MLB owner. Yeah, I think that there's the free agent signing piece. I don't want to oversimplify the case of Cruz here, but there's being quick to promote prospects as soon as one is deemed ready, having their on-field readiness be all that determines when they make the big league club versus surface time considerations. That's one way to quote unquote be generous, right? Be ready to start the clock when you think a guy is ready rather than game him for an extra year. So there's that piece of it.

I'm sure that, you know, there are salary considerations for front office folk. And, you know, like one way an owner could be quote unquote generous would also be to concern themselves with like the financial well-being of all of the other people who aren't part of the organization the way we tend to think about it, you know, scouts and coaches and analysts and players and whatnot. But also like, you know, maybe what you say is, hey, if you work at PNC Park, that's what their ballparks called, right? PNC Park. You work at PNC Park, you're going to make $25 an hour, right? You could make sure that your concession and sort of game day staff are paid well. You could say, I don't know the extent of their unionization, but you could make sure that you come to the table to bargain in good faith if they're unionized, stuff like that. What else could you do?

You could artificially depress ticket prices. Yeah, true. You could say, we as a thank you to our fans, especially after this long and at times very trying rebuild. My Scrooge face. Yeah, sorry about having done that. You could open the window and say, hey, you there, boy, go get a giant goose and also give out these tickets.

And they'd be like, that's weird. What's this goose? Is it a turkey? It's a goose, right? It's a Christmas goose. Yeah, I think so. A Christmas goose. So you could say we're capping ticket prices.

We're capping concession prices at this number. We're going to have special family days. And they might do some of this stuff already. I don't want to disparage them. We have so many reasons to poke at the pirates, so I don't want to poke at them inaccurately. But we have family days where the kids get in free and everybody gets a hot dog or whatever.

I think that there are a lot of ways that you can deploy financial resources to make the the game day experience better and some of those are going to be personnel related making sure that you have really good players for folks to watch and some of them are going to be more sort of ancillary to the experience but still important like if, if you can take your family of four to the ballpark for the day and you know, the parents can enjoy, uh, you know, perhaps an adult beverage of their choosing and the kids can have a soda and a hot dog for free. And you can do all of that for like a reasonable sum, like that enhances the fan experience. So I think there are a lot of ways that if owners want to be non-scroogey that they can do that. And I think

the good news, if they view it as an opportunity, is that they can impact a lot of different people who have a vested interest in the team, either from an employment perspective or a fan perspective. So go forth, Bob. And then he'd be, he, instead of being Scrooge, she'd be like, Bob Cratchit. Oh, perfect. That's a guy named Bob Cratchit. Oh, perfect. That's a guy named Bob in that story. Yeah, right. Perfect.

Okay. Yeah. God bless us, everyone. Everyone. I guess you could pay minor leaguers more, too. Yes, absolutely. I mean, they're unionized now, but yeah. Yeah, you could say, hey, that's not enough for me. Whatever you end up agreeing to in your CBA, we're going to meet that and then exceed it by 20% or whatever, you know? by the rumors that the Dodgers may be adopting a less active approach this offseason to go all in on Shohei Otani next year, I've concluded that the only way to prevent the Dodgers from signing Otani may be to allow a new type of contract. Let's call it a lottery contract. In this scenario,

all 29 teams would decide that Otani signing with the Dodgers would be an absolute disaster and decide to pool their resources to outbid the Dodgers. For the sake of this argument, let's just say the contract is 10 years long. Once every team that wants to contribute money has done so, there will be a lottery to decide who gets Otani, if he accepts the larger structure of the deal, of course, with the odds corresponding to the percentage of the contract each team gave. So teams like the Giants or Padres, who would very much like to sign him and want him to keep him off the Dodgers, decide to contribute $10 million a year. A team like the Angels, who want to keep him or any other team who wants a serious shot at signing him,

might contribute this much as well. Small market teams like the Rays or Guardians would probably still contribute at least a million or two a year for a long shot at Otani. A couple of questions for Otani specifically. How many teams do you think would buy into this? How high do you think they could get the AAV to? How good would a player have to be and how much of a perceived advantage in free agency would one team have to have in order for other teams to buy into this? I don't think teams would even consider this with anyone but a generational talent like Otani.

I still don't think even a lottery like this would convince Otani to take it over, let's say, a $45 million a year contract from one team simply because of the uncertainty behind it and the chance he could end up on the Pirates. Oh, poor Pirates. They ended up in this question, too. But it's interesting to think about. In the end, I imagine the only contract signed by the system would be the Rays trying to save money on some 31-year-old reliever who no one has heard of. So every team chips in to the Otani fund, the keep Otani away from the Dodgers fund. And Otani has to decide, do I want to take presumably more money here? I don't know how much more money it would be. So this is like the draft lottery, basically, where your contribution corresponds to your odds of getting him, I guess. team that gets Otani. And in this scenario, he agrees with this and is fine with playing anywhere

in exchange for whatever amount of money he gets, which seems unlikely. Doesn't seem like something he would want to do. Doesn't seem like he has ever prioritized money, especially. Certainly, he didn't in coming to MLB. And it seems like if you could just kind of read between the lines of some of his comments that he would really like to be with a team that wins some baseball games and perhaps makes it possible for him to play in the postseason. So I don't know that he would have any incentive to do this

because he's made a decent amount of money despite being massively underpaid relative to his production. And he gets more endorsements than anyone if you count his kind of global endorsement value. So he's set. He doesn't have to do this. And I don't know what the advantage would be if money is not his top priority because, yeah, he might just end up back on the Angels again or he might end up somewhere even less competitive right so this might just be impossible with him there might be some players who would go for it because they do just want to make the most money which is also defensible yeah so if that were the case

and as we've discussed like hey if you're rich enough you can live anywhere and probably set things up to your liking and your life will be good in a lot of ways regardless of where you sign and where you are and it's not even that predictive more than a couple years out like which teams will actually be competitive at that point so you could just sort of spin the wheel and say i'll take the cash and hope i end up somewhere good but uh with him yeah yeah, I don't think – I think it's a non-starter for him. But it's an interesting idea. I don't know whether teams would want to keep him away from one other team enough to do this is the thing. Well, and you get to a weird spot where you're like,

what ends up being the gap between the amount that you have to put in to feel like you've really nailed the odds of getting him versus what it would just take to sign him right yeah you know so there's that conundrum and then with otani specifically like he correct me if i'm wrong but my memory of him he had a you know there's a hard cap on how much teams could spend on him when he first came over from npb because of his age but even within that cap system i i don't think that the angels had the most pool space that they could have potentially devoted to him right like he they acquired more than they had in order to get closer but i i believe they did not have the most they They didn't have the most.

And so, you know, like one of the teams that had more was say the Seattle Mariners, just to like, you know, push on a bruise myself. So I think that he has demonstrated that at least once you've cleared a certain bar and to your point, even with the FTX debacle, like his earnings since then have been significantly larger than his base salary was in that year uh and then his signing bonus was but he

you know he has demonstrated that like having the agency to determine where he goes is important to him so i think that he would say no i I think the PA would say absolutely not. And I think even the league would be like, no, I don't care for this. It would be an interesting, like as a thought experiment, I find it very interesting. I would be really fascinated to see how teams approach it because it has similarity to the draft lottery in some respects but there is much more they are they are able to put their thumb on the scale with much more force

right in this scenario than they would be in the draft lottery where it's just like suck a lot you know like yeah good luck i think that this is there's a much more direct influence to be had over the outcome and so i would be very curious to see like how teens approached it although as the last couple of weeks have shown i mean i know that there's been all this stuff about the dodgers specifically with him although i think that they you know are far from the only team but like are the dodgers the right team to be putting in this hypothetical or Or is it now the New York Mets? Could be. Is it the New York Mets? I mean, I know that.

Have we heard from Otani lately about how important the West Coast thing is to him? I don't think so. Yeah. I mean, like, because I know that that was, I think that that was reported in a direct from him kind of way, not in just like, hey, you know how Japan and the West Coast of the United States are closer to one another way? There was stuff said about Otani that had that flavor. This soft season, we've found that that's not always the case.

Not always the case. Multiple prominent Japanese players have signed with East Coast teams. Right. But some of the speculation about what was important to of tony sometimes had the flavor of like i i've i see that these are closer to each other and it's like i don't know that's a real thing but i think that he he himself said like i would prefer to have a to be on a west coast team but i don't know what the state of that is and where it ranks in his hierarchy of signing needs. Maybe it isn't the Mets, but maybe it is.

Maybe it's, I don't know, maybe he's going to just be blown away by an offer. Who knows? It'll be, oh boy, oh, oh, you think this offseason was fun. Oh, oh, oh. You're like Aaron Judge, it'll be like, who? Next year, that's rude to Aaron Judge. But I think that the frenzy around where Otani will sign will reach a fever pitch. Yeah, it does seem to me that the teams that would really be interested in this would be the teams that know they have no chance of actually being the high bidder for Otani.

And so maybe they would pool their resources and say, well, we can't get them on our own, so we will all chip in something and then we can make a collective offer. And each of us will at least have a chance of getting Otani as opposed to no chance. that that would be a bigger offer than he got from any other individual team, just like the collective bid from the bad or less attractive or lower spending teams. So I guess that would be like a cartel of terrible teams could just get into league with each other and say, we will each just have some sort of chance to get him if he were willing to entertain our offer. But everyone else would just be like, eh, I will just try to be the high bidder

and get him all to myself and not have to take a chance. Although you're always taking a chance when you're trying to bid a free agent that they will just choose someone else, even if maybe you do spend the most money. All right. Last question comes from Ricky, who says, As the Braves put Jake Odorizzi into Game 3 of the NLDS, I was thinking to myself, they must want to give up a lot of runs. Then I wondered if that would be a good strategy. What if a team were to give up 30 to 40 runs in a game,

with the idea being that the other players would become so exhausted from continuously running the bases that they wouldn't be able to rest up enough to be ready for the rest of the series. How many runs would a team have to allow for this strategy to work? I'm guessing they would need to allow hits over home runs to force the players to run harder. Would the other team stop trying after a while when they realize you aren't giving it your all? Right. He's just so punchable and so resilient that his opponent in the ring can just get exhausted by punching him that the other team will just run out of steam and be unprepared to play you in future games. I mean, I think that the commissioner would intervene on this immediately because that game would go like 12 hours.

Can you imagine how long it would take to score 40 runs? hours can you imagine how long it would take to score 40 runs i mean we've had games where it's like you know there have been a lot of runs but not that not that many right you know that's yeah it's uh there'd be the question first of all of could you do it because well i guess you could if you also instructed your your fielders not to make plays because even if you put a position player pitcher or someone worse than a position player somehow in to pitch, you would still get outs eventually just because hitters would pop up or they would hit the ball hard right at someone. So you would also need to instruct your fielders not to try. And I guess what you could do if you wanted to take this to extremes. So be tough because there's only so much roster space. But if you were to, let's say, like, and you can't freely substitute players once you've set your postseason roster for a series.

postseason roster for a series. So if you wanted to, you could just have not real players or you could just put, I guess, everyone who's on your 40 man who would not otherwise be on the active roster, including minor leaguers who've not even been at the big league level. You put them on the roster knowing that you will just play them in game one and you'll have just a bunch of not ringers, like the opposite of ringers out there, like people who are just intentionally trying to lose and they're there to tire out the other team successfully, and then you put your A lineup back in for the rest of the series, which will be fresh while the other team is exhausted from its exertions of that first game. That's one way you could do it. Or you could do kind of half measures and just have your bench players start, let's say. Because the problem is you do still have to have players out in the field. Right. So while this team is hitting and running around the bases, you still have to be- Your guys are getting tired too.

Yeah. I guess unless you instruct them to just stand still and not even make an effort, but then the other team doesn't have to make an effort either really. So they could just stroll around if they wanted to. And there's a limit to how much you can sort of futz with the 40 man in service of this right it's yeah you know you'd need guys with a lot of options and even then you're limited in how many times you can option them in a year now and so i don't think this would be a sustainable strategy over the shockingly enough i don't think that this would work over 162 games oh man what What would this team do to our understanding,

to projections and stuff, right? Oh, yeah. It would screw up, run differential. Oh, yeah. All kinds of things. I think Pat would be like, I tap out. You sort out what kind of team this is on your own. I don't have time for this sort of math, right?

Yeah. Yeah, it would be i mean can you imagine what it would do to to ticket sales for the first game of a series because like once you know this is what you're in for right you're not are you going no no you're like i'm staying out of that one right i'm gonna i think that there's a lot about this that just wouldn't be practical. Imagine like setting your rotation. Yeah. Well, teams do a very slight version of this when they just leave a pitcher out there to wear one, as they say, right?

And you just – you want to save the rest of your staff. And so you let a pitcher who maybe isn't that important or just doesn't have it that day stay out there and take their lumps because you want to save the rest of your staff. So that is the very measured version of this. But yeah, lots of problems with this. I think the main problem really is that your guys have to be out there too, or at least your defenders, and they do have to make some level of effort or the other team would immediately not make an effort.

And if it became clear that you were not trying and not competing anymore, probably this might fall under, well, umpires have some discretion, right, to just step in and say you can't do that. Right. They do. So they can rule like if they're unsafe conditions or that kind of thing, they can step in and say like you have to forfeit like this. We can't go on. So maybe there could be that sort of situation would happen or they would like call up the commissioner and just be like, hey, they're obviously sandbagging here. They're not trying to win. And there would just be consequences for that.

So I don't think you could get away with it. Like you would not be allowed to get away with it. But also it would be hard to get away with in a way that would actually benefit you probably. I think that's right. Interesting thought thought though. And Jaco Derisi, I think he only gave up a couple runs in that game. So I don't think that that's what Atlanta was doing in this case. He's not that bad.

But yeah, like that is, I mean, position player pitching is also a version of this essentially. It's just, we're not going to use a real pitcher. Like the game is out of hand and we're just gonna save our staff here and put in a not real player and you can run up the score and that's fine so yeah like this happens to some extent right but taking it to this extreme probably it would just stop working as well it'd be tough to implement. All right. So we will end with the Pass Blast. This is episode 1943. And so this Pass Blast comes from 1943 and from Jacob

Hamrenki, Sabre's Director of Editorial Content and Chair of the Black Sox Scandal Research Committee. He writes 1943 All-American Ump Show. In 1943, the All-American Girls Professional League began play during World War II with the backing of Chicago Cubs owner P.K. Wrigley. The league used modified softball

rules at first before switching to overhand pitching and baseball rules in 1945. More than 600 of the most talented female athletes in the United States and Canada were able to make a living playing ball for the next dozen years in the All-American League. What the league didn't always have, however, was the most talented umpires. The Racine Journal-Times sports editor Keith Bream complained about the men in blue, and yes, they were all men, even in this women's league, in this column on August 13, 1943. Quote, There has been plenty of criticism of the All-American Girls Softball League umpires by the fans in attendance at the games. If umpire Charles Olinberg never made a wrong call at the plate or on the bases, he would still be a poor umpire. He has an exalted opinion of the authority of his position, which is equaled only by his ability to tell any manager or player everything that said individual has told him for the entire season. Here's a typical example of the work of Ullenberg, who incidentally is likely to quote every word of this article to the ballplayers at some crucial point in a future game.

In a game at Rockford, Sophie Kuris of the Racing Bells thought she had tagged a Rockford runner sliding into second base. Ullenberg called the runner safe. Sophie protested, which she has a right to do. Later in the game, Kuris made a poor throw to first base on an easy ground ball. You didn't look so good on that one, chirped Ullenberg. That seems inappropriate. When Kuris turned to reply, Ullenberg majestically warned her, be careful or I'll throw you out of the game.

What kind of major league umpiring is that? Piling up of grievances is bound to weigh on any man and subconsciously lead him to develop a mania for throwing players and managers out of games as well as to call players out before the plays are completed. Jacob concludes, Ullenberg lasted only one season

as an umpire in the All-American League and two weeks later, he had to be escorted off the field in Rockford after making quote- unquote, weird decisions. That's great. Why are you being so weird? Weird decision in a crucial game between the Peaches and the first place South Bend Blue Sox.

Weird decisions. I need to know more about what the weird decisions are. Just like obviously wrong calls or just weirder than that? What does that mean? I don't know. Near the end of the war he was hired by the Carolina League. He umpired in the men's minor leagues for

parts of four seasons and was released midway through the 1948 season. Later that year he began refereeing a new professional soccer league based in St. Louis where he continued to make enemies on and off the field. I don't know whether his decisions were weird or not.

Weird decisions. Weird. What does that mean? I want to know what it means. Me too. Alright. I meant to say, by the way because the the red socks designated cheater downs for assignment as i'm sure you saw so yeah it was sort of the centerpiece uh prospect at least below major league player acquired in the mookie bets trade and so this led to people

reflecting on the mookie bets trade which was not popular as it was. But the fact that it has not produced a star player and that it seemingly will not produce anything for the Red Sox in the form of cheater downs, that led to condemnation of the trade and everyone kind of rehashing old grievances, which have never completely healed understandably i wonder like if you're the red socks like do you hold on to it if you're heim bloom too whose reputation like even though he was presumably instructed to make the mookie bets trade and had just taken that job when he made that trade the fact that they've not gotten a superstar back and granted like there was only one year of mookiets left on the contract, and he was not an inexpensive player at that point. But still, you got to get someone better back if you're trading Mookie Betts,

which you shouldn't do anyway. But I wonder whether you hold on to a player like that longer, just because you know that as soon as you release him and give up, essentially, then you're kind of conceding that the trade didn't work out the way you wanted it to. Yeah. Like, obviously it didn't because Jeter Downs had not turned into the player that they were hoping he would turn into. But, like, as long as he's on the roster, like, theoretically, he could do something someday. You know, and he was just in the majors very briefly in 2022 he had 14 games and

didn't hit it all and looked overmatched and really hasn't hit above double a i guess i just i wonder like as a face-saving move if you're like the gm whose reputation is tied to that trade yeah whether you wanted it to be or not whether you're just like you know what let's uh let's give him another year you know who knows maybe something will click or at least like we won't have a news cycle about the fact that this player didn't pan out and what that says about me yeah i do wonder i mean i think that there is a difference when you are made when you make a trade with the idea that it's really going to improve your team and then it just doesn't pan out versus you have, like you don't trade, I'm not saying anything that contradicts you

or that is particularly revelatory here, but like you don't trade Mookie Betts even with just a year of team control left without like the full buy-in and at the instruction of ownership, right? And so, I mean, I'm sure that, I don't know heim bloom but like i would imagine like what people think of him matters to him to some degree because

what people think of us matters to all of us to some degree but the most important constituency from his perspective which is the one that is going to say you get to continue to be the gm of the boston red sox is satisfied right because I think it's not controversial to assert that the monetary component of that deal seems to have been like the motivation for it rather than pure talent acquisition. And so I don't know. I think it's different if you say are trading like James Shields for Fernando Tatis Jr. than if you're trading Mookie Betts because ownership has said we can't get this guy extended at a deal we're comfortable with, so move him while you can.

Those are different things, whereas you might hold on to the guy to be like, no, he can do a thing. But maybe if you hold on to those players on your roster longer, there's more time for the comparison to unfurl like maybe it's better to cut bait early before you're like wow we're really in like year whatever of the jeter downs experience and he's still doing this versus mookie bets right like maybe maybe there's something to identifying that the trade

has been lost and just moving on as quickly as you can i don't know but i i think that like i said the the constituency that matters the most in terms of bloom keeping his job is probably not like looking at that and going i can't believe you did that like they are like yeah we told you to do that you know true right and i guess they needed a spot on the 40 men at that point right so that was at some point that maybe matters more than what people will say about you if you have to designate him for assignment right yeah maybe he'll uh resurrect himself somewhere else maybe he's claimed and we'll see he'll land somewhere perhaps he'll make some other team happy that did not trade mookie bets for him which like i don't want to ascribe malice again to a person i don't know

but like if you're heim bloom aren't you sitting there hoping this guy better be out of baseball in a year because like right like if he goes to oh no ben you know the worst possible outcome cheetah dads goes to the dodgers resurrects career, becomes even a serviceable everyday player. And then you're just like, oh, I'm really in it now. Yeah, becomes the double play partner of Mickey Betts for the next decade. I think in that case, even an ownership group that was like, please go do this, might be like, we might have to move on for you because now we feel embarrassed. But recent history suggests that folks who have the resources to own sports franchises are perhaps less embarrassable than we would like them to be. So maybe not.

Okay. I have a few details about the weird decisions that Charles Olinberg made. So the Kenosha News reporter wrote that umpire Charles Ulnberg made some weird decisions. He ejected Gladys Terry Davis, the Rockford shortstop from the first game of a doubleheader, and then sent her to the bench in the second game for protesting a called third strike. Davis was on her way to becoming league batting champion. It was at that point that the bottle tossing started. So the fans had to be appealed to by the manager to stop tossing bottles. On the following day, fans worked up ahead of steam over a number of umpire decisions until the ninth inning, et cetera, et cetera. So I guess not as much detail as I want here.

But there were some, I guess it was just kind of not good decisions more so than weird. Maybe Olin Berg overreacted and had kind of a quick hook perhaps. But we've answered emails about, I think, certainly managers and maybe umpires also just making like actually weird decisions or no decisions at all and what would happen if they just kind of quiet quit or or loudly quit in the middle of a game and what recourse there would be so this was not that i guess it was just almost run-of-the-mill ump show sort of decisions as opposed to truly weird ones yeah yeah but i mean those are they're they're kind of weird though they're kind of weird are they. They're kind of weird.

Are they not? You know what I was hoping they would be rather than weird? I was hoping they'd be wacky. Yeah, right. And they weren't wacky. They weren't wacky. All right. Well, Meg was talking about how Andrew Benatendi is not quite the caliber of free agent that would cause her to pull someone away from holiday festivities to blog.

But now she won't even have to think about that because he has signed. We can't seem to get through an episode even now without someone signing before we post it. The White Sox have signed Andrew Pennantendi to a $75 million five-year contract. I guess Meg may have also mentioned something about the White Sox being cheap. Not on this particular deal. I think this easily exceeded expectations. cheap. Not on this particular deal. I think this easily exceeded expectations. The Fangraph's, Crowdsource, and Ben Clemens predictions for Benintendi were $56 million over four years,

and the MLB Trade Rumor's prediction was $54 million over four years. So he beat the AAV estimates by a little bit and got an extra year tacked on the end, which who hasn't this winter? So in the context of this offseason, it's not that surprising. We've seen so many overs. But there definitely was a second or so of sticker shock when I saw Andrew Pennantendi in $75 million. You can see how it makes sense. The White Sox need an outfielder. They need some on-base percentage.

Pennantendi maybe projects as an average player or so per year over the life of this deal. I mean, he's usually not been much better than that. 2018 was kind of the outlier. Since then, he's been about average or a little worse or a little bit better. And then he got hurt at the end of last season. He's lost some speed. He just doesn't really fit the typical profile of a productive corner outfielder in that he's not going to give you a ton of power. But he's only 28. And I guess this is kind of the going rate for an average player.

You figure seven and a half million per win above replacement or so at this point. Double that. You get yourself Andrew Benintendi, at least if you think he'll be average throughout the life of the five-year contract. In other AL Central Corner outfielder news, the Minnesota Twins signed Joey Gallo to a one-year $11 million contract. And if you had told me a year ago that one year hence, Andrew Benintendi would get $75 million and Joey Gallo, who was at least twice as productive in

2021 by war, would get $11 million, that would have been a big shocker too. Maybe not quite as big as the Carlos Rodon contract would have been two years ago, but still pretty big. Those two guys are linked in my mind because they play the same sort of position. They were both Yankees last year. The Yankees essentially decided to swap Gallo for Benintendi, and they're completely different players. Strikeout rate-wise, batting average-wise, power-wise, etc. In the past, Gallo's been better, but his platform year was more of a pit year. The real implication here, though, is for the free agent contract over under's draft, because this basically gives me the victory. This was a costly one for Meg. She had the under on Benintendi at $54 million. So this is a $21 million subtraction from her total,

which takes the gap between us now to about $41.5 million. And it also completes her board. So all of her picks have signed now. She ends up about 114 million in the right direction, but I'm at about 155, and I have the over on Taylor Rodgers and the over on Brandon Drury left. So unless those two essentially decide to play for free and sign for about a combined six million dollars or so, I think I'm good. I think I can spike the ball at this point. So thanks, Jerry Reinsdorf, for all but handing me a victory here. Oh, and we couldn't even post this episode

without the Red Sox having another newsworthy designation for assignment. I think Eric Hosmer's name came up earlier in this episode. Well, after we finished recording, the Red Sox DFA'd him as well. That reminds me, since we're talking about players getting DFA'd,

we got an email from listener Brendan, who's also a Patreon supporter, who wrote, It is with the utmost regret that I write in with a how-can-you-not-be-pedantic-about-baseball observation. Whenever a player is designated for assignment, it seems to be almost universally referred to as the player being DFA'd, but similar to the issue with saying RBIs, the D in DFA'd is coming from the first word, turning designate into designated, because saying a player was designate for assignment is obviously grammatically

incorrect. But just like with RBI, there's no need to modify the acronym. Both designate for assignment and designated for assignment could be represented by DFA. I apologize for this message, if it isn't something that you've noticed before. As with many of these, I think this may fall into the camp of who cares because everyone knows what is meant. That is true. But now I notice it every time I say DFA'd and wonder, should I say DFA? But no, I think I will continue to say DFA'd. Good pedantic question, though. Worth pedantically pointing out.

I'll remind everyone that you can still sign up for the Effectively Wild Secret Santa through early next week. The sign-up form is on the show page, again, open to everyone. Exchange small baseball-themed gifts with fellow Effectively Wild listeners, who might be me. And you can also support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com

slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners have already signed up, pledged some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going, get themselves access to some perks and help us stay ad-free. Charlie Crossgel, David Specht, Kevin, Joseph, and Mitchell Dixon. Thanks to all of you. Patreon

perks include access to the Effectively Wild Discord group for Patreon supporters, as well as monthly bonus episodes, one of which Meg and I will be recording this weekend. You can also get a signed book and an ad-free Fangraphs membership and discounts on merch and even an appearance on an email show

if you're a real high roller. Check out the offerings, patreon.com slash effectivelywild. You can also message us through the Patreon site if you are a Patreon supporter. If you are not, you can email us at podcast at fangraphs.com. You can also join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectivelywild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms.

We really do appreciate your positive ratings and reviews. You can follow Effectively Wild on Twitter at EWPod. And you can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash effectively wild. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing and production assistance. We hope you have a wonderful weekend, and we will be back to talk to you early next week. They all hate him Full of misery Till one day

He saw a vision And it changed him Eternally