Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 330: A Lengthy Listener Email Show

Episode Date: November 15, 2013

Ben and Sam answer a strong selection of listener emails on award voting, the BBWAA, defensive stats, Phillies analytics, lefty catchers, free agent compensation systems, and more.

great in its use of negative imagery more than anything else but that central cohesive stroke you know it must lead to an artist's work leading from one to the other screaming his opinions in my ear what i'm talking about like high intensity you understand a hot medium what i would give for a large shot as a horse manure good morning and welcome to episode 330 of effectively wild the daily podcast for baseball. Hi, Ben. How are you? Good, thanks. How are you?

Good. 330 is a significant baseball number for me because on the West Coast, when games start at 4.05, on weekdays, 330 is when I officially used to quit working at any job I ever had and start just staring at my computer waiting for games to start. So 3.30 is when the local economy, the extremely local economy slowed down slightly. And now staring at the computer and waiting for games to start is your job. It is, yeah. That's nice.

games to start is your job it is yeah it's nice so it's an email show and this is um i would say an unprecedentedly uh good or at least deep crop of questions uh normally i i move all the questions to a folder and then i star the ones that i i would like to answer or are worth answering. And every single one is starred. Every single question is starred. So two-hour show? We're not going to get to nearly all of the good questions. Maybe sometime we'll get to some more of them, but I'll just start clicking on random. So David asks, Baseball is one word.

Why does B-B-W-A-AA get spelled and pronounced with the second B? The acronym is painfully awkward. Use your influence to correct this. And so I went, I thought I knew why, and I went to check and found an old BBWAA card, membership card from the 1930s that was being sold on eBay. And sure enough, baseball was still using the two-word spelling for the BBWA, which is somewhat surprising because baseball as one word seems to have been fairly established by 1908 when the BBWA was founded.

And in fact, the New York Times switched its house style to one word in 1880, 28 years earlier. So it seems very surprising that they would have gone with the two word style. But they did. BBWA has never been the most progressive organization. But they did. BBWA has never been the most progressive organization. That's actually a cheap shot, and yet it's irrelevant. Another reason is that the Boxing Writers Association of America is the BWAA, And I would imagine that that predated

the BB... Well, no. It was originally formed in 1926. So, when did you say the BBWAA was formed? Do you know? 1908. Okay, so that's not the reason. Do you know what else?

Do you know what else? The BBWAA hasn't changed since 1908? Its website? No, that's not true. Yes, that's it. No, they actually have, though. Do you remember the website a few years ago? It was like neon green. It was hideous.

I do remember it. All right. So Peter writes, on last week's show you talked about the Phillies finally adding a stats guy to the front office, but noted it was just one guy. You talked as if that was not nearly enough, so it got me thinking, what are the first things that a person would do to bring analytics into an organization that had never used them? I think in that conversation, Sam said he'd take that job in a heartbeat. So Sam, what would you do? Do you remember?

Did I say that? Yeah. I mean, I would take any job. Yeah, I would take any job in a heartbeat, but I mean, certainly would not be good at it. I mean, and I have no illusions of that. I mean, I would take it in like, like anybody would probably take it because it'd be fun and you'd get a few good weeks before they got rid of you. But I have an answer for this. I don't know if you have an answer for this. Do you have sort of a grand plan that you could implement or a philosophy that you would implement that hasn't been implemented?

Well, that seems sort of ambitious for this situation, right? I mean – Okay. Yeah, sure. Fair enough. So what is the – you have one day to prove that you belong and what would you do to build your brain trust? Talk about how I went to scout school, probably. I don't know if... That's what you would do?

To fit in. Oh, yeah. Get on their side. I see. I don't know. The first thing you could do to bring analytics to the organization, I mean, like show them like a, I don't know, like show them a baseball reference page and walk them through the columns

and tell them what it means. I don't know. I feel like you could do some basic things. Like you could, I don't know. You could explain like aging curves or something i feel like you're just talking about explaining you're just talking about explaining you're not talking about building something you're just talking about like how you would communicate i i i think you're vastly underestimating the the phillies exposure to this stuff. I would guess that they know what aging curves are.

It's hard to tell from their signings. I don't know. Maybe. I feel like, well, maybe. In one day, I don't know what you could, you can't build a... I feel like you and I are answering this question. I think we're both we're

trying to answer this question different ways so let me tell you what i was thinking because i think that he's asking like what would you do like if you were the manager what you know of a new department like what would you bring to it and so i think that if i were a team building a a a stats department from scratch and even if i weren't even if I were a team that were already establishing or that had already established a stats department, I still think that some teams should do this. It's going to sound maybe self-serving and certainly self-congratulatory,

but I actually think that a team should buy baseball prospectus and keep the editorial independence so that we would keep publishing whatever we want and we could be, you know, as critical of the team as we wanted. find talented people who are qualified to work in the front office and sort of test them in a way. Because they just hired Colin.

There are, if I can say this, I think there's at least one more announcement that will be coming at some point in the offseason. And there's a whole slew of people that teams have hired in the recent past and going back into the slightly more distant past. It seems to me that if you're using us as your minor league system, but you have to share it with everybody else, that there would be a big incentive to not have to share it with anybody else. It would almost be like if every team in baseball were using the scouting bureau and you got to be the only one that wasn't using the scouting

bureau and you could still also use the scouting bureau, it would be a huge advantage, like a massive advantage I would think. So I don't know, I don't exactly know, once I bought Baseball Perspectives, I don't exactly know what I would do, like if it would be a matter of having people at the site do work or do research or have consulting with the team as non-employees, or if it would be sort of a first right of refusal for anybody moving into the game or whatever. But somehow I would try to take ownership of it. Because, I mean, right now it feels like a resource that is being tapped by many teams, and I would want to be the only team that was tapping it.

Yeah, okay. But then if you, I'm trying to, I mean mean would we continue to attract talent if we were just like an in-house organ of the phillies where we didn't publish anything except for well no we would we would publish we would still be okay it would still be total editorial independence there would still be a site there would still be a book we would still write every word that we write that the primary features of of what we do would be the same. I'm not exactly sure. So we would just be like indentured servants of some sort?

No, we would be an arm of a larger company. It would be like when – it's like how Jay-Z has his own label. We would just be a label under Sony or under whatever a bigger label is. Like how everybody's got their own little labels. It wouldn't be intentional. And so, yeah, I think more people, I mean, if it were explicitly an avenue toward working with a team and perhaps working for a team eventually, yeah, I don't think there'd be any problem. Something like this actually was discussed once many years ago before our time at BP.

I don't think it went that far, but it was discussed. I would say, yeah, I don't know. If I only had one day, I guess I was going to say I would just put up a job listing. It would be a productive thing to do, assuming that I have permission to hire some other people. Who would you hire? You don't have anybody that you would hire? Would you hire a person you know? What field would you hire somebody from? What type of person would you want to hire?

I'd have to hire programmers and database guys. Oh, my gosh. You're so unfun on this question. Jeez Louise. Like you wrote that piece about how the Indians were using Saber metrics for marketing promotions. You could say that you would hire a stat head to run your Twitter account or something. You could say anything fun and you're saying that you would tell the GM about aging curves and you would put up a job listing for a programmer.

I've got nothing. I'm sitting alone here in my department tapping my pencil against my desk. I need warm bodies in here. Then the job interview starts as soon as you say hello. You've got to be ready for this. By the way, the Indian sabermetric marketing and attendance approach that I wrote about apparently didn't work that well. No, they got outd drawn by the astros so bad 14th in the american league so i don't know i might have to go go go back and revisit how intelligent i think that whole thing was um all right yeah matt matt trueblood um friend of the show says do you think the emerging comprehension of an emphasis on pitch framing will lead us to a left-handed catcher in the majors

soon bear with me because this actually gets interesting um the reasons for which lefties are never allowed to catch boy's been flimsy there's the minor issue of a half beat lost on throws to third but it's not a huge deal and here's where i should uh do the obligatory mention that rob nyer and bill james speculated that there's no left-handed catchers because if you can throw hard enough to be a catcher left-handed you get funneled into pitching where you're more valuable but that's obligatory i have to mention that every time on balance getting a left-handed player behind the dish is a larger structural advantage than being a left-handed than being left-handed is a physical disadvantage so something will have

to happen in order to top conventional wisdom on this front and i wonder if that something is framing consider no mlb umpire has probably ever umped behind a left-handed catcher if the first few guys to do it are smart and technically sound i would think they could manipulate an arbiter even better than a right hander could it's entirely possible that the reason most plate expanding calls are on pitches to the third base corner of the dish has to do with the angle and attitude of the catcher's arm, body, and glove when the ball arrives. If that's true, it would follow that a lefty catcher would better frame the outside corner to righties, and that's actually the more valuable corner of the plate for pitchers

to control, since a majority of plate appearances are taken from the right-handed batter's box. Seems like the time for a lefty catcher could finally be upon us. Do you agree? Yes, I do. box seems like the time for a lefty catcher could finally be upon us do you agree uh yes i do and we had an article about this actually earlier this year at bp um max max markey wrote a an article asking whether it was time to lift the ban on left-handed catchers and made exactly the same case. No kidding. Yeah. So, yeah, I don't see why not. His conclusion was, while the hypothesis of an advantage in framing might be far-fetched, and he shows pretty decent evidence that it isn't completely far-fetched,

I can't find any reason for lefties to be at a disadvantage, and given the spread in framing talent, I would lean toward keeping a small door open for southpaw backstops. Here's how I would envision the ideal candidate for this out-of-the-box experiment, a lefty first baseman in the minors whose bat appears to be adequate for the show but not at an offense first position and who isn't suited for a move to the outfield. Would an infielder turn catcher be able to put up better framing numbers than guys who have donned the tools of ignorance since day one just ask russell martin uh so yeah i i think so um right i mean it makes it makes perfect sense for the reasons that Max and Matt said. Okay.

So yeah. Good. Sure. Resolved. Yeah. Resolved. That could be your first day as the stats guy. I'll put up a job list.

How much better would that, how good would that answer have been, Ben? Your answer would have been like a superstar level answer if you'd said left-handed catcher. Darn. Brady says, I was on a rant last night about how we force analyst hats on columnists and beat writers by giving them award votes i feel researchers and real analysts should be given the privilege of determining who wins the hardware since they should understand how the game works better than anyone else uh this is before i go on it is i think it is a it does seem like a serious flaw in baseball writing that we ask the same people who report on trade rumors to tell us who the best players are.

Those are two very different skills and – I feel like they are – or they should be related. I feel like you would be better at one if you're good at the other right i mean i don't know it's like the well no to me it's like the guy who covers um hollywood for the wall street journal's business section and the guy who reviews the movie for the wall street journal are two different people they're two different skill sets and i don't uh i don't think that it's a disaster to conflate the two. There's some familiarity with the industry and the topic for sure, but there are enough people in this world who want to write about baseball.

There are way too many people in this world who want to write about baseball that it seems like we could have more specialized roles. I think it's good to have specialized roles. But I feel like even if you're just someone who breaks news or reports rumors, it's still beneficial to you to understand how teams value players and what makes players good, right? So that you know whether a rumor is at all realistic and you know whether there's a

chance that it might happen unless you're just parroting whatever someone tells you. You have to have a sense of whether a trade is balanced. And to do that, you have to know how to evaluate players, right? And how teams evaluate players. I mean, I think the idea of having to separate analysis or separate analysts from columnists or reporters sort of makes sense, but it's baseball. You know, the concepts are not extremely difficult to understand. We're not asking anyone to calculate the statistics themselves, but to be able to understand what they mean and generally what goes into them, especially if there's something that the teams themselves are looking at and paying players based on, you should know that and you can know that. And you can know that, I think.

Yes, I mean, I guess it's fair. If these guys are being asked to analyze, it is fair to ask them to do the best job of it. I'm just saying that it might not be the best idea to ask them to analyze. It might be better. Because certainly, I think you would admit that you can't do what they do, correct? You have no shot. Like supporting rumors and breaking news? I wouldn't be as good at it as people who are good at that.

Yeah, I would be horrible at it. I would be the worst at it. And so, yeah, I mean they could certainly certainly clear, with effort, they could clear a minimum bar that would satisfy most of the Internet. But the fact that they, I mean, they don't. They don't want it, right? I mean, a lot of them don't particularly want it. They're not interested in it. And they feel like they know enough. So if you're an editor, I guess the question is, if you're an editor i guess the question is if you're an editor

do you look at at what's going on and go oh it's working perfectly or do you say my rumors guy does rumors and my non-rumors guy does um you know batted ball analysis uh well i don't know i think probably most readers at a mainstream outlet agree with whatever the reporter slash columnist's stance on these things is. So in terms of not alienating your readers, it's probably fine as it is. Oh, no, readers agree with everything. Readers agree with everything and disagree with everything. I don't know. I've seen the comments on my articles at espn and they don't agree um yeah but they don't agree with

they don't agree with with with anybody they don't agree with buster either i mean they yeah everybody everybody you know you think right they think he hates every team right there's two there's two things that that guide all you know all responses like one is hates everything, so you're going to get a ton of negativity no matter what you are. The other is that we very passively consume many things that are just put in front of us. For instance, the TV show Family Matters is not a good show. It is a garbage show. If I were to write a comment on the TV show Family Matters, I would say some nasty things to it. But also, if it's on TV and if I'm sitting on a couch, I will watch a marathon. And I won't complain during that

watching of the marathon. And so if you're a newspaper, you can really get away with giving, as long as you're generating new content every day and putting it in a big piece of paper and charging not that much for it. And there's ad, there's coupons. I mean, most people who get newspaper get it for the coupons. So you can get away with an extremely low level of analysis. Or you can put a high level of analysis in and you don't get any actual profits, but you feel better about yourself putting out a good product. You don't get any actual profits, but you feel better about yourself putting out a good product. Well, if I were an editor, I would do my best to get people who can do both things and cover things in an analytical way and also write well and also report ideally.

So, yeah. So since we're not talking about editors, though, since we're talking about the BWAA, if you were the head head of the BBWA, would you change voting protocol at all? And let me, I guess I'll keep reading the rest of the question. How do you go about creating an association of analysts, researchers, knowledgeable baseball people so we can attempt to create a powerful alternative to the BBWA? I would, and presumably many others would respect an award given out by this panel over the alternatives. I first reject the premise. I think the world is awards crazy in a way that dilutes all of them. I don't feel the need for new awards in any capacity, in any part of my life.

In any part of my life, there's a book that I've been meaning to read for a couple of years that I've had recommended to me multiple times about awards culture. And once I read it, I'll have even harsher words to say, I'm sure. But generally speaking, I mean, there are broad attempts at this that get voting – that have voting done by all the people that you like. I mean, the SB Nation does theirs and gets good results. Certainly the IBA. We do the Internet Baseball Awards. We've been running the results of those all week at BP. And all the winners are the people that you would want to win.

Yeah, exactly. The results are perfect. They are exactly what you want. And, you know, nobody shows up for the IBA ceremony. Um, the, the fielding Bible has done a good job and, and I'm not, I guess that'd be an interesting case study to, to figure out why. Um, but the field, the fielding Bible does do a good job. Um, but generally speaking, um, I think that the realization I had today while wondering why I've grown to care less and less about the awards is I realized today, I think for the first time maybe, that the point of the game is not to win an MVP award. It is actually separate from the game. It has nothing to do with the game itself. The point of baseball is to win, to

win baseball games. The MVP award is a secondary effect that comes along or doesn't come along. It doesn't really matter whether it even exists. This is just one group of people that decided they would have a vote that nobody conferred it upon them so far as i know they just decided they were going to have a vote i mean they were what spalding or something was was sponsoring it and you know no big deal just gonna do a vote and uh the players and the sport in the world decided they cared about that vote not you know it wasn't it wasn't engineered right it it just sort of happened there's a market for this and they filled it first and it doesn't affect anything. There are no games won or lost after the fact because somebody didn't win the MVP.

So once you acknowledge that it's 30 people who are not selected by you to represent you, they are not your congressman, they don't affect your property tax or your water bill. It's really easy to just move on. Yeah, right. And I guess this kind of goes back to the discussion we had with Brian Kenney when we talked about whether there's, you know, whether we should care if someone doesn't do good analysis or something, whether we should confront them or just let it go. And I can understand, I guess, why it's frustrating for people. Because Brady says a powerful alternative to the BBWA. The BBWA is not powerful in itself. Its power derives from you caring about what it says, right?

Well, it's awards. It is a powerful organization if you're a reporter trying to get access. Oh, well, yeah. It's awards. Yeah. Yeah, but... Right, so there's no...

It has power in a sense, I guess, in that it influences public opinion to some extent just because the people who are in it are also writing columns at places where people read them and maybe are influenced by what they say and what they think. But right, we don't need to, I don't think we need to create our own organization that just, just to tell ourselves that we're right about Mike Trout being better than Miguel Cabrera. I mean, it's just, we know that that's true.

So forget about what anyone else has said. I don't know. And if you want to convene a panel of people who agree with you to confirm that they agree with you, it's easy to do that. The world makes it easy to sort right now. now and nobody who um i mean everybody who thinks that mike trout is better than miguel cabrera has many opportunities to uh to have that belief uh confirmed um just by going on to your self-selected group of readers and internet friends and having them tell you yeah it's just it's not it's not all that useful but it's it's uh comforting. And so we should all feel comforted. And I don't even know.

I will say, the Hall of Fame is, the Hall of Fame I think is maybe slightly different because the Hall of Fame is a little bit of, it is a little bit of a public utility that we all share and that, as I understand it, did select the BBWA. The BBWA was not electing hall of famers all along and then a building sprung up um they were you know they were asked and so somebody could say

well you guys have done you've done this long enough or you haven't done a good enough job i mean it seems perfectly reasonable that just as CBS could lose its license, for instance, to broadcast on CBS Airwaves, that the BBWA could breach that trust and somebody could demand that the vote is rearranged. And there's a case to be made for that. I don't feel the same way about awards, which are really just nothing but a straw poll, more or less. Yeah, I mean, and there are various internet alternatives, right? There's Baseball Think Factory does the Hall of Merit, and Barry Bonds was elected last year, and Clemens, and Piazza, and Biggio, they're all in. Memorable speech, very memorable speech. Right. So if that makes you feel better, great. They're in, but there's no actual building that you can go visit. So I guess that makes it a little less meaningful. But yeah. And as for the awards, I don't even know whether people disagree really about Cabrera being, you know, about Trout being better than Cabrera, vice versa. It doesn't even seem like people who voted for Cabrera think that now, or at least some

of them don't. They're just really parsing that valuable versus best distinction, which is even more meaningless than the arguments that we've had in the past. So as long as the definition of the award is ambiguous, or at least people interpret it to be ambiguous, I have no interest in getting into that discussion because then we're not even arguing about the same thing anymore. So Michael asks, or writes, I should say, there's not really a question, there's a wonderful suggestion. So Michael writes, I agree with you that the current free agent compensation system is lousy. If there must be free agent compensation,

it should be done without penalizing the signing team. Here is my suggestion. Teams make qualifying offers to any free agents they want to keep. A qualifying offer can be for any amount of money in any number of years. The player can accept or decline a qualifying offer. So I'll sum up as we go. So if the Giants wanted to make a qualifying offer to Andres Torres to get compensation, they could offer him anything they want.

They could offer him one year and $1 million. The player can accept or decline. All right, step two. If a player declines, if Torres declines this offer, he is free to sign elsewhere with no penalty to the signing team. If the player does sign elsewhere, the team that made a qualifying offer, the Giants in this case, is allowed extra money towards signing amateur players, either drafted players or international free agents. The amount of extra money a team is allowed to spend is equal to 2% of the total value of their qualifying

offer. They're free to take that money or spend it. So Torres signs with the Cardinals, the Giants get $20,000 more in their, in their, you know, say in their draft pool. As an example, under this system, the Red Sox, oh, he gives an example. The Red Sox might make a qualifying offer of five years and $100 million to Jacob Ellsbury. If he accepts, he signed at that price, if he declines, the Red Sox get an extra $2 million to spend in the draft or international players. On the other hand, if they'd only offered one year and $10 million, their compensation would be only $200,000. They couldn't offer something ridiculous like $750 million,

because if they did, Ellsbury would just accept the offer, and that would be his contract. So no team would make an offer beyond what a player was worth to them. Signing teams and free agents themselves would not be penalized, which is crucial, and teams that lose valued free agents would still get useful compensation. And I mostly just wanted to read this because I think it's a very elegant solution to the problem. I think that there are, as I wrote, there are a number of problems with the current system, one of which is that such a small number of players bring back compensation that it doesn't really seem to fairly compensate teams that lose free agents.

And the qualifying offer is a completely arbitrary and unrealistic contract offer, so it's not really realistic to what the game is like. But this is really nice because every player carries compensation that is more or less exactly relative to the amount of money that a team is willing to offer them, which we consider their true talent level. I think that there's only one issue with it and it still remains the underlying idea

of compensation for teams who lose free agents. I believe that at least part of the idea of compensation is to promote players staying with their teams. The league has decided it is in the interest of the sport or that it is good for the sport or good for the aesthetics of the sport when players stay with their teams. And secondarily, to give incentives for, you basically want to create a system where players stay with the team so that the free agent market isn't quite so open and therefore the amount of money that is spent is somewhat suppressed by a lack of mobility. And anytime you give compensation to the original team if they lose their player, you are now giving them an incentive to not sign their

player. So for instance, let's say in this Jacob Elsbree example, the Red Sox essentially get say $2 million or whatever million dollars in value if Ellsbury signs elsewhere. So he is actually worth, say he's worth $100 million to every team. He's actually only worth $99 million to the Red Sox because they get a million if he leaves. And so you can't really give incentives to teams to let their players walk if what you're trying to do is encourage them to keep their players. to let their players walk if what you're trying to do is encourage them to keep their players. So that's why I think the compensation system in general is either poorly thought out or doesn't know what it wants or wants something else that I haven't quite identified.

Yeah. And I like the question that you asked in your article. I forget how you phrased it exactly, in your article. I forget how you phrased it exactly, but you said something like, this seems too simple. I'm afraid to ask this question because it seems too obvious, but why is there any compensation for someone whose contract is completed?

They're no longer property of that team. That team has no claim on them any longer. They signed them for a certain number of years those years have passed uh right it is no longer property it is like the analogy i gave was if you if somebody comes and steals your house you can complain that they stole your house now you're homeless but if you just check out of the hotel and another person moves into the hotel room after you've gone away, you don't get compensation. You don't get to claim to have been wronged because you checked out of a hotel,

which is basically what happens when a contract expires. All right. I guess I'll do one more. Daniel says, what sabermetric statistic do you guys think is the least complete or in most need of improvement? He gives examples of bad defense. He's trying to lead us toward defense uh that's the one that seems the most limited to me but maybe you guys have different ideas if you're big on the validity of defensive stats that they're currently calculated any info to persuade me would be helpful um do you have an

answer to this either defense or not defense do you have does anything jump out at you uh it's hard to come up with a better answer than defense because defense is pretty important so and we've got a pretty good handle on offense and we've got a decent handle on pitching in most of most of pitching at least so so yeah i mean i guess I'm with him on defense, and I don't have a great argument to persuade him. I think the thing he talks about how Trout had, like, negative defensive value according to some metrics this season, and it's just it doesn't mean that he was a bad fielder and that he was a good fielder last year and now he's a bad one. It has a lot to do with opportunities. Like Trout, I don't remember how many home runs he saved in 2012, but there were a few certainly. Like Carlos Gomez brought back five home runs this year.

And that obviously is partially talent. It's someone who can time their leap and jump high enough to catch a ball and be coordinated enough to bring the ball back down with them. But it has a lot to do with just chance, just having balls be hit in an area where it's humanly possible to catch them. So Carlos Gomez... And just barely, just barely. I mean, anybody who's played Little League remembers,

like, you know, basically you only want balls to be hit at just the right distance so that you can make a sliding catch and look really good. Like, if a ball is too easy, it's not that much fun. And if it's just, like, a foot too far, it's, you know, you can't catch it. And you just like those very, very few where you get to slide are just gold. They're, they're, they're like perfect situations for you. Yeah. And I forget what the run value that, that BIS gave

Carlos Gomez for his home run saving catches this year, something like eight or nine runs. And he's probably not going to have those runs next year not because he'll necessarily be a worse center fielder than he was but he just won't have the opportunity to distinguish himself in that way so so that's part of it it's just that there's just an inherent variability to it because there aren't as many opportunities to catch uh that are, you know, that would be tough plays as there are, say, plate appearances in a season. So it just, it doesn't necessarily even out from year to year. I have a small thing. I think that positional adjustment and defense should just be combined. that uh positional adjustment and defense should just be combined i think it's silly that we say that you know uh you know some guy was a plus four defender in left and some other guy was a

plus four defender at short as though the i mean i mean obviously if you're paying attention you know those aren't equal yeah and if you're if you're really paying attention you just do the math in your head and you know the positional adjustments you know by heart but it really seems like you should be able to get a defense number just one defense number or trout i mean trout was you know let's say trout was a minus this is not the case but if he was a minus three defender in center field this year that's still really good like compared to miguel cabrera or not cabrera is not a great example but but, uh, compared to, you know, Prince Fielder, who might've been a minus three defender, that's a huge, huge,

huge, huge, uh, upgrade. So I think that one number for that would be, would be great. Uh, okay.

Can, Oh, let's do really one really quick one. Another one from Brady who just says simple question. How many Cy Young's will Kershaw win in his lifetime? Oh yeah. So I, uh,

I actually looked this up. No, I didn't look it up. You can't look this up yet. This is not on the internet. Kershaw has the best ERA plus through 25 of any pitcher in post-Deadball history. Do you know who number two is, by the way? If you've been paying attention to my Twitter feed, you shouldson no post dead ball oh uh i have not been paying attention to your twitter feed um uh barry zito really wow yeah yeah uh so uh so kershaw is number one and

so it's hard to find comps because everybody is worse than him. But if you look at the 10 guys below him, and off the top of my head I don't remember all of them, but it's Zito, then Apier, then Seaver, then Clemens, Pedro's on there, Blylevin, Pettit, Musina, Santana, and one other guy. If you look at the 10 guys below him in the post-Sai Young era, from age 26 on, those 10 guys won 10 Sai Yungs. So you might say one Kershaw is the best of those 11. And the mean is not a good substitute for what he is.

And you might also note that it's not evenly distributed. It's not one per. It's five for Clemens, I believe, two for Siever, two for Pedro, and one for Santana. So six guys got none, and who do you think Kershaw's more like? The four I just said, or Zambrano and Pettit and Zito and Aviar? I mean, even knowing that, you know, even if you look past the kind of fact that those guys aged worse in a lot of cases from this point on. Even through age 25, you would never confuse Zito and Kershaw, I wouldn't think. Right.

Or Zambrano and Kershaw. So I don't know. One is statistically reasonable, but I'd go two. I think that it's underselling him. I wouldn't go higher than three as a bet. He might win seven, but I wouldn't go higher than two. I wouldn't go higher than two as a bet. So I'll say two. Okay. I'll say one. All right. Uh, okay. So thank you for the excellent questions. Maybe we'll get to some of the ones we didn't answer next week, but please continue to send them to podcast at baseball perspectives.com.

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