Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 287: Preparing for Postseason Narrative-Building/Guerrero, Helton, and the Hall of Fame

Episode Date: September 16, 2013

Ben and Sam discuss the onslaught of articles about which teams are best-suited for October, then talk about the Cooperstown cases of Vladimir Guerrero and Todd Helton.

I feel like I hear faint crickets. Yeah, I do too. Yeah, you're right. They're there. Nice to have them back. Good morning and welcome to episode 287 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus. I'm Sam Miller, and having just come out of a tremendous yawn as a hit record is Ben Lindberg. I'm in my usual Sunday night state of nervous exhaustion post-Breaking Bad, so I'm trying to keep it together here long enough to do the show.

All right. What do you want to talk? Yeah. Yeah. What do you want to talk about though? Do you have something to talk about? Did you have something to say? I was going to say that my office smells like pickles because I'm making pickles in my office.

Huh. But that's not about baseball. Is this the – this has become the Portlandia podcast yeah I figure you pay a premium for the pickle so I might as well just get the cucumber you must be spending three times as much per pickle it's pretty simple you get a cucumber you put some garlic in there some peppercorns and uh some kosher salt and you just let it sit there for a few days

and it's a pickle so this is the first time i've ever tried it so i'm looking forward to it but it's like that what what if you let it go too long what happens happens? I don't know. I like them half sour, so I assume if I let it go too long, it'll just become a dill or something, and I won't want it anymore. I don't know. If it's exposed to air, it will rot, so you have to submerge it. How many pickles are you in the habit of eating? I eat about as many as you put in front of me, really. I'm making six right now. So this is the first time I've ever made my own. So we'll see how it goes. I went through a phase when I was about 23 of clipping coupons. And I really, I knew that coupons are basically a scam to get you to spend money you wouldn't otherwise spend. So I was very conscientious of that. So I would basically only buy things where I was making

profit. And one of the things that you could always really just murder the grocery stores on was pickles if you waited for the double coupon days or whatever. And so I always had pickles. And I probably kept those pickles for seven or eight years because whoever eats a pickle, just for no reason, who eats a pickle? Speak for yourself.

I used to. Jason Wojcicki is dying of excitement right now that we're talking about pickles. When he listens to this in two months. Yeah, my mom used to make me cut, cut coupons and file them in this big coupon book that was like, it was sorted by, by type of type of product, I believe. And there was just over overflowing coupon books and the coupons usually expired before they were used but it was one of my weekly my weekly duties um okay end of that okay uh did you see joey vato's flip no okay can i send it to you and you can watch it without making sound

uh probably all right well if you can do that while we talk i feel like we we often differ on on flips we talked about victor martinez's flip at first and we talked about the iglesias scoop flip uh we both agreed that iglesias was incredible but we were sharply divided on victor martinez's flip um and at the time you you you said that the mark burley flip was the gold standard in flips. And I saw a comp between this Vado flip and that Burley flip. And I'm curious to see what you think. Well, unfortunately, I'm right now stuck in a commercial about bad internet speed.

Okay. Well, if at some point you get to see it, Let me know. I might go looking for an alternate. But yeah, okay. We'll talk about it before the end of the show. Okay. And congratulations to Vladimir Balentine, who broke the single-season home run record in Japan. We talked about him a couple of weeks ago,

so I figured we should just... Do you think he listens to this or something? No, I don't think so. But he hit two in one game and blew by the record. So congratulations to him. Again, you say congratulations to a person. Yeah. Are you expecting this message to get to him?

Not really. Can you just say we're happy to have seen it? Sure. I'm not that happy. I'm watching the flip. Okay. It's a nice flip. Let me see.

Let me see. So underwhelmed by flips. You've never seen a flip that you liked except for Burley. That was a good one. That was much better than Martinez. The thing about the flips is it's just, I continue to go back to this, the idea that, you know, basically, flipping the ball is easy,

right? Flipping it accurately is difficult. So, let's say... Every flip is just random. Yeah, I figure if you're going to miss left 10 times and miss right 10 times, that at least once in those 20, you're going to end up getting it square

in the middle. And so what we're just seeing is, you know, basically the lucky few who, you know, by randomness managed to get it in the middle. There's nothing particularly, I'd like to see them, I'd like to see Votto repeat this play multiple times. And like Burley did. Burley has repeated the flip multiple times. I believe that Burley's flip is his true talent.

That's part of his skill set. With Votto right now, it's a small sample. Okay. All right. What's your topic? This Morosi piece about the Royals. Ah, okay. And I figured that we could maybe talk about Vladimir Guerrero and Todd Helton.

Okay. Can I go first? Yes. So I read this piece that John Paul Morosi wrote for Fox Sports today about the Royals and why, well, the lead is, if you're a fan of an American League contender, please consider this unsolicited advice.

Root against the Kansas City Royals. Root very, very hard. And his premise is that the Royals are going to be the dominant team in the postseason. And I reacted very, I would say I reacted strongly toward it. Yes. I reacted very, I would say I reacted strongly toward it. Yes.

Not because of Morosi's piece specifically or Morosi by any means, but just this is the type of article that we're going to start seeing a lot of in the next few weeks. And I just can't take them. I really have a hard time dealing with these articles. I really have a hard time dealing with these articles. And I just wanted to talk through it and figure out or just sort of identify the things that drive me crazy. And also I have a question, a conversation starter, if you will. But the basic idea is that once we get into the postseason, the dominant story of baseball is these short series. And writers have to essentially act as though they have some insight into the short series. And so they start figuring out, and I think with sincerity,

I think they start figuring out which team they think is going to be best for those short series. So we're going to hear all sorts of explanations for why a certain team is a a better uh playoff team than than all the other teams and so morosi just got there first basically with with uh with this column and so this is why i'm talking about it but uh the basic flaw is that it's just this and you have to narrativize something that probably either isn't really real or that you have absolutely no way of knowing. I mean, it's way too complicated to actually do and, you know, to figure out. And yet, you know, you believe it. And so you have to sort of narrativize it and create a narrative around it.

And this article, this piece that Morosi writes, you can see how much he has to strain to create the narrative. And so I'm just going to go through a few passages. I guess his thesis statement is, the Royals are built for the playoffs as much as any other AL team. And I should note that the way that I found out about this is that his tweet actually said something like, well, I'll tell you exactly what it said. His tweet, again, commercial about slow internet right now.

His tweet was, your team's season might be doomed if the Royals make playoffs. I'm serious. He could be pretty provocative on Twitter from time to time. Yeah. So this is a nut graph the royals are built for the playoffs as much as any other al team name a characteristic shared by recent october darlings they have it so already we have that they're built for the playoffs as much as any other team so it started out with your team is doomed because the Royals are coming. And now it's just, well, they're as good as anybody.

Name a characteristic shared by recent October darlings as though like recent October darlings is a thing. More relevant than all the other October darlings ever. And what even is an October darling necessarily. And then I'm going to skip those characteristics because we're going to go through them later. But we see after naming some of these characteristics, he says, all of those traits were on display Saturday when the weather, 65 degrees at first pitch, and atmosphere, sellout of 41,800, made it seem as if the postseason had arrived already. Well, I mean, this was, look, they, it was 65 degrees at first pitch.

That's not like the weather. If you're going to start citing the weather, I want 45 and like, like, uh, you know, you can see the player's breath and app, the sellout of 41,800. It was in Detroit. It wasn't in Kansas city. If it had been in Kansas city and there'd been a sellout, I could see that being significant, but it was in Detroit. It was the 13th highest attendance of the year for Detroit. So you're sort of picking out these details and turning them into evidence when they're really not evidence in any sort of way. He describes the way that the game ended. The Royals won that game 1-0. I believe they threw the runner out at home to end the game.

It was like not a walk-off, but they ended the game with a put-out at home. And so he writes, out. Game over. Narrative on. Yeah. So, I mean, explicit acknowledgement. Yes, I thought that was curious. I mean, it's almost

meta-analysis of his own column. This was a huge win for us, Yos said. We had to have this win tonight. We this was a huge win for us yo said we had to have this win tonight we haven't had a ball game all year where we had to win tonight was it we italicized had to win this ball game so then they lost today so if they had lost yesterday and won today that wouldn't matter because yesterday was a must win so then clearly today must have been a must win too right and so they lost so does that end i i mean i don't think that marosi is saying oh now it's over um uh so the idea of a must win is always false narrative unless you're in an elimination game

in many respects the royals have proven their mettle already saturday's win clinched the season series against detroit 10 and 8 I mean they lost days they ended up 10 and 9 against Detroit like that doesn't seem like significant evidence to me that no I mean clearly that they have a winning record they're gonna have winning records against some teams but like they're one in four against the A's so can the A's rest easy knowing that they're gonna crush the Royals probably not. If they make the playoffs, and let's say they end up beating the Rays out for the final playoffs, but they're 20-22 against playoff teams.

So, you know what I'm saying, right? That's not evidence. That's just a little... They played 19 times and they won 10 of them. It's not that big a deal. So then finally, I'm going to get to the gist of his argument is the characteristics shared by recent October darlings that they have. And I want to know from you,

I want you to basically rank these characteristics by significance. So if you think that they are a zero for significance in picking who's going to do best, then they would be at the bottom. If you think they're like a 10, they'd be at the so there's six and i want you to rank them so if you can keep them in your head uh hot at the right time check at 35 and 21 they have the al's best record after the all-star break okay so hot at the right time okay lockdown lockdown bullpen check they have the al's lowest bullpen era and a closer who tigers manager jim leland said

maybe the league's best so lockdown bullpen number three formidable rotation which i love because like he's not going to tell us it's a great rotation it's it's formidable only like they share with last year's october darlings a formidable rotation of jamess is a true ace. Irvin Santana leads the Royals starters with a 3-2-3 ERA, which is like kind of a weird, like it's a closed system. Somebody is going to lead their starters with an ERA. You can't cite that he leads his team's ERA as evidence that their ERA is good. To be fair, I mean, they have the lowest ERA in the American League, I guess, as a team. That's true.

Which is partially bullpen. But yeah, okay, so yeah. What's the next? That's true. However, it's a 3.23 ERA in a pitcher's park, okay? And Jeremy Guthrie is supplying his customary 200 innings. Airtight defense, check. And they've permitted only 3.8 runs per game, fewest in the AL,

which is not the same thing as an airtight defense, but okay. Athleticism on the bases, check. Led by the fleet, Gerard Dyson, they top the majors with 141 stolen bases. And charisma, check. The team's young everyday players came through the minors together lost in the majors together and are now relishing their first chance to play meaningful september baseball so can you rank those six things hot at the right time lockdown bullpen formidable rotation airtight defense athleticism on the bases and charisma for significance uh so you

want me to rig each of them from zero to ten or relative to each other? Relative to each other, top to bottom, and you can tell me what the top one is on a 1 to 10 and what the bottom one is on a 1 to 10, just so we basically know what the window is that you're within. Alright. I'll put lockdown bullpen first. Mm-hmm.

Then, I guess... See, are we talking about things that confer an advantage above and beyond how good the team is i mean yes yes oh yes because the twist the twist at the end of this is i'm going to then ask you what overall quality of the team is right okay because because they are 76 and 70 or something like that 76 and 71 or 78 and 71, something like that. Which seems to be kind of a significant detail. The fact that they are like the eighth best team in the league seems relevant to me.

It does. And the main thing, and I finally, after thinking about this, and I know I'm interrupting you, but after thinking about this all day, I realized what kills me about these pieces is that they act like all these descriptions of how a team wins are more significant than whether the team wins. To some degree, I remember this with the Shane Victorino free agent signing when everybody was ripping that deal from the Red Sox perspective, we might've even ripped it. I think we did. And, and one of the things was that people would go, oh, well you can't hit lefties and like, look at how bad he is against lefties. But I mean, like, you know, his war. So like, what do you care if he hits lefties? Like that's embedded. Like you've already, you've, you've started the conversation with the war and now you're like

adding things that are already within the the war right and so with the royals like obviously if they make the playoffs they're going to be a good team all the playoff teams are good teams they if they make it they are going to displace another good team that has embedded within its wins all these good characteristics they're not like this like the specifics are just so much less important than like the fact that you know they're either good or they're not so anyway uh so yes above and beyond i'm only i'm only interested in the above and beyond factor okay with the caveat that i don't know how much i believe any of these things confer that much of an advantage above and beyond um I'll say lockdown, bullpen.

I'll say formidable rotation. And then defense. And then athleticism on the bases, I guess. Which athleticism I'm taking to mean that they are actually good at running the bases, which I think is the case for the Royals. They're decent, at least. I think I care so little about hot at the right time that I'm actually going to put charisma above that. Charisma second to last. That is how little I care about how a team finishes the

regular season. And that reminds me of an article I saw last week because it's the same sort of thing you're talking about. There was an article by Doug Miller at MLB.com called September Heat Can Keep Clubs Warm in October. And, you know, it was exactly what you'd think, that finishing strong is a key to winning in the playoffs and how you finish matters. And the author looked at the last 10 World Series winners and how they had played in the final month as justification for this theory. And even looking at those 10, and there was no real explanation of why we should look at only 10 as opposed to all of them. But even looking at those 10, it didn't strike me as that strong an argument. A lot of the ones that he

mentioned played well in September, but he also mentioned where September ranked in their months of the season. And for a lot of them, it was like, well, it was their third best month of the season. It was their second best. It was their fourth best. There were a couple teams that didn't play well in September. And then at the end, it was just like, well, I proved that. Yeah. I mean, you essentially cannot possibly win this column. So just there is almost virtually no reason to try to write this column.

It cannot be won. We staked our freaking reputation on this idea for years, and then after we had a few more years of data, it was like, oh, well, no, I guess that didn't work out, right? Yeah, so I tweeted out Jay Jaffe's BP article from, I don't know, a couple years ago where he took a really in-depth look at this and didn't just look at the last 10 teams or whatever. He looked at, you know, how every team finished and how they did in every round. And he basically concluded that there might be some slight

advantage, like a team that's, you know, at its healthiest or something at the end of the season, that's probably a good thing. But on the whole, it was not predictive really in any way. And yet articles continue to be written about it, and there's no burden of proof for you to write one of these articles. It's just you just state it as if it's a fact, and you provide some circumstantial evidence to support your preconceived notion about it, and then that's it. You're done with your column. And no one really calls you on it, or your editor doesn't

say, hey, how about you do a more rigorous look at this? It's just, okay, that's... Or write about Koji Uehara instead. I mean, everybody who's writing this column right now, uhara instead just i mean everybody who's writing this column right now just stop and write about koji uhara yeah um so i will say that i will say that i actually in this particular case i might actually say hot at the right time is my number one in in a good way just because he didn't he didn't say hot at the right time they're 19 19-7 in the last two weeks or three weeks. It's the last two-plus months. And going by the idea that teams, going by the old Billy Bean thing that we talked about once,

where you have the first few months to build the team you want. And so you might make the case that the Royals um right now are not the same team that the royals early in the season were that this is that you know the last 70 games of the season might be you know somewhat more telling than the first uh 80 or 90 were although yeah right it's not yeah it's not like the dodgers it's not a where likegers where they got a bunch of injured guys back. They're kind of the same people for the most part. Yeah, basically that's true. Maybe some of the young hitters took a step forward or something,

and Hosmer seems to be fixed, and that is significant, I guess. But anyway, so I rank those things. Um, anyway, so, so I ranked those things and yeah, I mean the, the record or the run differential or whatever measure of team strength you want to look at seems to me to be by far more important than any, any individual facet of how a team wins. Yeah, I'm with you. All right. And yet we're still going to do playoff previews

in a couple weeks we will be doing I hope that we just we use this experience to inform the way we approach it it's hard to do because people want to read those things and we want to

give them what they want to read and it's want to read those things, and we want to give them what they want to read, and it's fun to read previews of series that mean something, but at the end, I don't know how much value it adds other than just doing a projection based on team strength. I mean, you can do a deep dive on the rosters and say, well, this team has a bunch of left-handed hitters that are important to their offense. And this other team has some shut down lefties who will come in and neutralize them. And you can kind of find those things.

Or I don't know, maybe one team isn't good at holding runners and the other team is good at running. You can kind of find those things we talked about this not too long ago whether whether we think there's really any any advantage that a team has against any any other particular team above and beyond team strength and yeah i something probably but not a whole lot but we'll we'll still write those things, probably. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's still... There's a reason we're watching these things. I mean, you just don't...

You don't write about it as though, like, you have more insight into the game than, you know, the collective wisdom of the planet. Mm-hmm. All right. Were you ready to move on? Please. Okay, so this weekend there were news about Vladimir Guerrero officially retired

and Todd Helton officially announced that he will retire after this season. So we don't do a whole lot of Hall of Fame talk on this show, but I figured we could do a little bit with these guys because they're both kind of interesting cases. And we actually got a listener email about Helton a couple of weeks ago, so I will just read that now. Scott emailed us and said, I'll admit personal bias since I've been a fan of the Rockies since day one. However, this is not intended to be a leading question. I'm just looking for an expert However, this is not intended to be a leading question. I'm just looking for an expert opinion,

but I'll take yours as a substitute. Ouch. Scott, shots. Sick burn. What are Todd Helton's chances of making the Hall of Fame? Obviously, his best years were pre-humidor, and he sharply declined in the Coors Light age. How much of the decline is due to injuries,

and how much due to the humidor is an interesting question. For years, I've assumed that he'd fall short of Cooperstown and didn't give it much shot. But then he talks about his career war is around the 60 war, which is often bandied about as the cutoff for the Hall of Fame. So he wants to know if he has a shot. know if he has a shot um and i guess we can talk about whether he has a shot and whether we think he should get in because those are often two different questions uh do you have a strong opinion either way about helton no i mean he's he uh he's right at the uh right at the place where you can't have a strong opinion yeah i mean right he's the he's the textbook borderline guy really well either he is or vlad is yeah you know in their own ways they both kind of are yes um so i i would say i i i think that i for for no real good reason at this point i think i lean no

on helton and wouldn't be sad if he got in and i think i lean yes on vlad and wouldn't be sad if he got left out yeah and i think it's i think it's i think it's very likely vlad makes it and it's probably fairly unlikely that helton does i agree uh and i think the stats uh i mean we have we have guerrero at 63 warp we have helton at 53 warp uh which is a pretty big difference I'm not sure if the other Reference has it at 61 for Helton And 59 for Vlad Okay so that's very close Which is interesting

Because Helton's Defensive stats at BP are actually Very good Park adjustments? Yeah I guess so So I wanted to read something that Bill James wrote recently As I was saying last week Park adjustments? is a Hall of Famer, yes. His numbers are so good that it's disorienting. My son Ruben asked me the same question, and I told him a story I remember reading about Dick Stewart when I was maybe 14 years old.

Stewart hit 66 home runs for Lincoln in the Western Association in 1956, didn't make the majors for a couple of years after that. Stewart said that when some young player in the Pirates system would hit 35 homers and drive in 100 runs, the club would get all excited about him but then when he hit 66 homers and drove in 158 runs the numbers were so fantastic that they didn't know what to do with them so they just wrote them off that's helton his numbers at his best are so fantastic that people don't know what to do with them so they just ignore them but my interpretation of his numbers is that he is above the line, which is an interesting way to think about it. Because the Coors thing is, I mean,

you have to deal with that head on, whether you're a yes for Helton or no for Helton. That is kind of the defining aspect of his candidacy, I guess, as well as the fact that both he and Guerrero were very high peak people. I think their peaks were clearly Hall of Fame level, but they were essentially done. I mean, just looking at, I mean, Vlad's last four-win season, he was 32, and Helton was, well, charitably, if you round up, 33. So both of them had injury issues. Guerrero DH'd a lot. Helton had the back troubles.

So they were both kind of done as star level guys in their early 30s and then Helton had a longer decline phase and Guerrero just kind of disappeared um what were you going to say I don't I don't remember oh uh something about cores were you going to talk about cores the I don't I don't know what I was going to I I do know what I was going to say but I don't know that it fits your flow so if you want to keep going and keep going mine mine can be tucked in at the end I don't know that it fits your flow. So if you want to keep going, keep going. Mine can be tucked in at the end. I don't know if I have a flow. But Helton, if you look at his top 10 years or his 10-year peak,

it wasn't like he was anemic on the road. He couldn't hit it. He was still a 300, 400, 500 guy on the road, I he couldn't hit it he was still a 300 400 500 guy on the road i think for a 10-year period and of course that was kind of uh you know the peak offense era so you you you have to adjust those numbers downward slightly because of that but i don't to me and you're exaggerating slightly on that as well. I think it was close. Really?

I think so. I think so. Let me – I'll see if – It looks like – yeah. I mean he has like a five-year period where he's above that. And then he has three years where he's a little below it right after. And yeah, so maybe if you tuck in, you might be able to get that in there. Yeah, sure. And he was – He was phenomenal on the road.

I mean, he has a couple of just insane, like in 2000 on the road, in 2000 on the road, he hit.353,.441,.633, which is good. Like that's a good line on the road. The thing about Coors that is – and Bill James' description or the word that he used, disorienting, really does apply to Coors in that era. Because we know – I mean we basically have ways of neutralizing for ballpark that we more or less take less take as you know fairly reliable and fairly accurate but nobody knows what to do with cores and so people just they don't even it feels like people don't even they just look right past the uh you know the ops plus type things and just you know assume that there's something wacky i mean you hear this all the time with you know like with

carlos gonzalez too where they point out, his splits between home and away are much bigger than they would normally be in another park or even for most players in Coors Field. But sometimes that happens. Sometimes you get splits that, especially over a couple of years, that veer wildly in one direction. It doesn't necessarily mean that the park is doing more work than your math tells you it is. But I think people think that Coors Field did more work than we're giving it credit for with Helton. Yeah, and there's probably going to be some tendency

to just throw out those stats because it was Coors and the crazy Coors era era and you look at the numbers and they're huge and and and people don't we've talked about before how people don't really like to adjust they don't really like to do hypothetical things with stats they just want to know what actually happened but they're very aware of you know peak peak cores that there was something strange going on there. So yeah, I wonder whether there will be a tendency to just kind of throw it out. Yeah. Yeah.

I think there probably will be. Probably more than is fair. Let's see. No, that's not going to work. I'm trying to look something up. As you can tell, it's not going all that well. Do you to look something up you can as you can tell it's not going all that well um do you want to hear my favorite todd helton fun fact sure you've read this once before because i i wrote it in an essay i'm not an essay in an essay an essay uh in an

article that you edited uh so when i was going through miguel cabrera's triple crown year um and looking at you know how it would have held up in other years if he'd just taken those numbers uh todd helton in 2001 and obviously i mean i know the ballpark and the era are huge so this is not a pure fun fact at all but in 2001 he actually had a higher batting average and a higher home run total and a higher rbi total than cabrera did in his triple crown year so it wouldn't have just knocked him out in one or two categories but all three and the previous year 2000 he beat him in two and was only two home runs behind in in in the third and of course like i said cores is a big difference but he had a 163 ops plus that year and cabrera had a 164 ops plus in his year so uh

you know sort of uh it puts it in perspective i feel like he is john all rude basically from 2000 to 2004 he had the 10th best road OPS in baseball. So does that, which way does that point you? To me, that's a perfect place for it to land because it does not, it is, it is exactly the border between Hall of Famer and not Hall of Famer, if you ask me. If you're a first baseman and your true talent is the 10th best hitter in baseball, you are like right on the cusp. I don't know what to do with you.

I think it helps. Probably. So he's ahead of Vlad by 10 points. He's ahead of Tomi, although Tomi was, you know, a different age. So that might not be fair, but he's ahead of Chipper Jones,

but obviously a different position. But, you know, he's behind Jim Edmonds in the same period. He's behind Lance Berkman in the same period. He's behind Jason Giambi in the same period. He's behind Sammy Sosa in the same period. He's behind Sheffield in the same period. And Sheffield's the only one of those guys really with a shot. And a couple of those guys have real position and defense advantages over him too yeah uh so so yeah i think he's i think he's a almost a perfect match for john all root really if you look at um i mean we have we have helton at 53.2 warp we have all root at 52.3 warp uh so they're within a win there. And if you look at their neutralized stats at baseball reference,

they have Helton at 292.387 batting average OBP. They have Ulrich at 291, 393. So essentially the same. And then Helton has about a 30-point edge in slugging. And I don't know. I guess they're both good defensive first basemen. I feel like maybe Allroot was better. But I feel like they're very comparable players.

And Allroot just fell right off the ballot. He got no interest whatsoever, which was a shame because he was one of my favorites. And Helton, I think, will last a little longer than that. But I don't see it really happening he seems he's clearly below like bagwell and tome and i feel like maybe you can make a case that he's he's roughly in the same range as like mcguire palmero but without the ped stuff which maybe will help him um but i i guess i'd lean towards no i wouldn't be upset at all if he got in but i don't think that he will get in um and then guerrero why is it that guerrero feels like a stronger case do you think hardware well hardware and because there was nothing polluting his insane greatness for those first seven years.

I mean, I guess if we had had, probably if we had had, actually, to be fair, if we'd had advanced defensive metrics at the time and we relied on them, probably there would have been a lot of people bad-mouthing him when he was winning his MVP awards for being only a six or seven win player in years when there were you know better players so uh I don't know I mean he if if what did he he won one MVP award and he had like like five top five finishes or something yeah uh yeah he won in 2004 uh and then he had a yeah he had a he had a fourth place, he had a third place another third place a sixth place I mean it's not a good thing that MVP awards

dictate how I feel about Hall of Famers but I do it affects me I guess I even though I know that those votes don't really do a very good job, I still feel like it captures something about the zeitgeist that sticks with me. He's also just kind of a more memorable player.

I mean, he's fun. He's kind of more fun than Todd Helton. I like Todd Helton, but he didn't hit crazy pitches two feet outside the strike zone and not wear batting gloves. He was just kind of dependable Todd Helton. Yeah. Vlad should be in any Hall of Fame

that he's eligible for. Yeah. Another player who announced that he will retire after 2013, Mark Katze. It's finally over. I'm sort of sad because Kotze has been like the he's still playing guy for the last like four to five years. So I'm sort of sad that that's coming to an end.

Didn't we have a Mark Kotze anecdote on this show once did we? we talked about him in the Clubhouse Leaders episode no I don't want to repeat it so I'm not going to tell it there is a Mark Kotze anecdote that I have about my own life

but I'm not going to risk repeating it I'm not going gonna risk repeating it like mark kotze has repeated his sub replacement play for the last nine years do you know what mark cuts his career earnings are uh i you know i'm gonna answer that in a second but i were i was just talking to jason the other day about how billy bean managed to get joey divine for mark kotze like mark kotze was coming off a 57 OPS plus, and Joey Devine was like future closer all over him. Somehow, he pulled that trade off. That's underrated

best bean move ever, even though Devine pitched like 35 innings for the A's. Mark Kotze's career earnings. I'm going to guess that he had about a 60-year peak where he was making about $8 per. Then he's probably made like $1 million per for the last seven years. Before that, before free agency, he was making like $1 million per. So I'm going to guess $68. A little high, $50.75. Okay. Yeah yeah he peaked at 8 million you were right about that but he was only right there for a year all right all right that's one of my favorite games you guess how much yeah we should do an entire episode we should do an entire episode. We should do an entire episode, and we should solicit requests for who we should make each other guess.

That's a good one. The first one we did was Ty Wiginton, right? And you were impressed that he had made almost $25 million. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Maybe we'll do that. All right.

In the meantime, though, send in emails, podcasts, at baseballperspectives.com for the Wednesday show, and we'll be back with a normal show tomorrow.