Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 336: Paying Peralta, and Punishing PED Users

Episode Date: November 25, 2013

Ben and Sam discuss Jhonny Peralta’s contract with the Cardinals, and whose responsibility it should be to publish PED users.

He painted dudes, lay in the blues He claims that he wore the blue suede shoes I was ashamed to say it when he went to the army That's right, John, his name is Johnny Johnny Royale Johnny Royale Good morning and welcome to episode 336 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg. Ben, how are you?

Okay, Pretty tired. I expected to have a very peaceful weekend, and that didn't happen. Do you want to tell us about it, Ben? Well, we're probably going to talk about it, right? Oh, you mean work-wise? Yep, just work-wise. I didn't do anything fun other than writing about transactions, which is fun. I learned something about football today.

What is that? They talked quite a bit during the football game, the big game, about Bill Belichick's preference to use a left-handed punter, a left-footed punter, because the spin is different and nobody's used to fielding left-footed punts. And there were like seven or eight fumbles on punts. It was amazing. It was like just this incredible moment where this thing that is probably worth – I mean it's like the kind of the classic thing that will suggest

and then like you'll do the math and maybe it works out to a one run a year and you're like, hey, it's $500,000. They should do it. It's like a classic one-run-a-year strategy and literally seven or eight months. That's interesting. Yeah, you see that in a lot of sports. I wrote a thing about that once about left-handed pitchers,

and there's the same thing with left-handed servers in tennis and just the lack of familiarity with the angles is an advantage. All right, so I want to talk about Johnny Peralta. And specifically I want to talk about this movement or something that seems to be bubbling up that in response to him getting a good contract, maybe a market rate contract, maybe even a little bit more maybe a market rate contract, maybe even a little bit more than a market rate contract. This idea that it's the straw that breaks some camel's back and will force baseball to have stricter PED penalties. The phrase that pays is, it pays to cheat. Brad Ziegler tweeted that. Ken Rosenthal used it for a headline.

And it's a thing that we've been hearing. You know, you hear about it, you know, constantly from like sort of bitter fans. If Bartolo Colon throws a shutout, you know, like two years after his or a year after his suspension, you'll hear, ah, well, you know, it pays to cheat. after his suspension, you'll hear, ah, well, you know, it pays to cheat. But here, in this case, they're saying it specifically literally paid Johnny Peralta for him to have used PEDs because presumably, you know, the thinking goes he was better than he would have been, and because of that, he made a lot more money. And so let me skim this for a decent paragraph to read from Ken Rosenthal. All right.

I remain skeptical of harsher penalties as a panacea. Agreeing with the position of some in the union that the fear of getting caught is a more efficient, more effective deterrent. Michael Wiener, the late union chief, held that position. But I doubt the new union leadership can persuade the players that it is still the right one. Peralta is the final blow. So I guess I want to know, first off, if it is your opinion that a problem needs to be fixed here. And if it is your opinion that Johnny Peralta is being paid because he cheated. I don't think he is. And I wrote an article about the signing

and my sort of takeaway about this, and I hadn't really seen anyone complaining about it yet, but I wrote something about how I figured that various columnists and fans will be up in arms about the fact that his positive test and his suspension didn't seem to cost him a cent. But the more interesting takeaway for me, I thought, was not that teams don't punish PED users by not paying them as much, but that teams evidently aren't convinced that PEDs do anything, right? Isn't that kind of the takeaway? That's what I was thinking when this deal was signed, because if the Cardinals believe that Peralta's year last season was PED enhanced, and then he got caught taking whatever he was taking and suspended for it and presumably he would be less likely to continue taking the same thing again then they would be worried right they'd think oh he's gonna fall apart now that he's no longer taking whatever he was taking but clearly they're not concerned about that at all right there they gave him a ton of money he's their fourth highest

paid player they're clearly not concerned that his performance was tied to the performance enhancement right you know you know my favorite part about the last minute and a half is is how excited you are by the novelty of your thinking when you said i think you said this exact thing like four months ago did i at some point, this sentiment has definitely appeared. I thought I had a hot take. It's conceivable that I said it and you weren't listening. But definitely this was discussed. It was maybe discussed when Peralta came back.

And maybe we talked about how they were doing and they could get him back in the lineup or maybe it was about the Rangers being mad that Cruz was taking a suspension or maybe we were talking about somebody getting traded Marlon Bird or something like that getting traded I don't remember but definitely

definitely you have said words along these lines try to have one hot take and then take it away from me that was my only chance but isn't that kind of the i mean yeah no it's super interesting and and in fact i uh even before um even before this but i mean certainly someone will do it now someone's already done it'll be on some site tomorrow there's no use of of us even keeping this a secret anymore because someone will definitely write this. But someone is going to analyze the free agent contracts of...

You okay over there? Yeah, mouse. Mouse fell. Cordless mouse, the devil. Somebody is going to analyze the free agent signings of PD players to see whether they actually do get paid more or less. And so, yeah, I would guess that before this, they had gotten a little bit less. Like, well, it's hard. I've been going back and forth in my head.

Cabrera seemed to not get as much as he would have otherwise. I don't know if you saw it. We got a question from Eric Hartman. It's not the email show, but it is about this. So I guess I might as well bring it up now. He asked, coming off a near MVP caliber, two-thirds of a season, Melky Cabrera signed a modest two-year $16 million deal. The common parlance at the time was that GMs couldn't trust his hitting.

Wasn't the result of his PED suspension. If anything, his horrible 2013 season may, though I'm dubious, serve as evidence of this. It seemed that a PED suspension could serve as anathema for a potential free agent's value. However, this offseason has flipped the script, with Peralta receiving a very handsome contract in line with what might expect even without his suspension and high demand for Nelson Cruz. It seems that there's no high demand for Nelson Cruz, it seems that there is no penalty applied for their suspension. And his question was, what was so special about Mielke that he got dinged for that? Yeah, well, and the answer to Mielke is partly his longer history and his BABIC, right?

Right, I think so. So those would be competing narratives, although it's possible that there was also some PD taint. We can't say, I mean, for one thing, just because one GM signed Peralta doesn't mean that 29 others would have. Maybe 29 out of 30 teams think that it does. I mean, that's the thing about free agent signings is that it's hard to draw market trends from them a lot of times because you don't get the mean, you get the outlier, you get the extreme.

And so only one GM has to think that, and you don't necessarily know what the second bid was. evidence of this because Bartolo Colon had a real good year with the A's in 2012 and came back for like nothing basically. He got paid $3 million on a one year deal. I think I'm remembering this right. It wasn't an option I don't think. I think they brought him back for one year and $3 million. Then you think, well, maybe he got the same penalty, but he had a much better year. He had like the second best year of his career this year, and nobody's like really talking about him at all. He didn't get a qualifying offer. I know he's old, but he was really – Neither did Peralta.

Oh, yeah, interesting. Which is very strange. That is very strange, although kind of. I mean he got four years and 13 million right basically and that's like napoli last year got 3 and 13 before the hip thing and uh hunter got 2 and 13 and at that time her qualifying offer was 13 so we talked at the time about how that was sort of funny but then we but then we also realized that maybe they wouldn't have gotten that if they'd had a draft pick attached to them. So it's not that surprising that Peralta could get $13 million average annual value over more years when he didn't get a qualifying offer from the Texans.

Anyway, so I wanted to use Cologne to make one point, but then it doesn't seem like Cologne necessarily makes that point. Who else is there? Rosenthal brought up Marlon Bird. Does the timing work for Marlon Bird to do this, or not really? Well, wasn't his suspension season the bad season for him? Yeah. And then he came back and had a good season.

Yeah, exactly. It seems like a different class of – it's a different thing. I mean, that would be like going, oh, wow, no one's holding it against David Ortiz. They signed him two years ago. So, yeah, I don't know. To your point, I think it seems to be – I mean, I guess once more and more of these guys sign,

we'll be able to put together a little bit more of a study. But, yeah, it doesn't seem to me like there's a league-wide decision that PEDs are doing much. And, yeah, I mean, Peralta got what? Didn't they say that Peralta got offered like 4-48 from another team? The report was that he took a big discount to go to the Cardinals, which is crazy. I don't know whether he had an offer in hand

or he was just asking for a lot more. But that was the report, that he took less to go to St. Louis and got $53 million. Yeah, I think that there was an offer that was like 4 and 48 or something like that and hayman reported that like the team that offered that was told it wasn't even in the ballpark uh yeah gammons i think it was said that uh that they were hinting to people that they had a four-year 52 offer and that a team was told that they weren't even in the game for that and that he was seeking 56 to 75. I mean, it's not directly related to the PEDs, but why do you think we failed to see how

much he got coming? It's kind of funny because now that it happened, it seems like most of the takes are that it's fairly reasonable. But as recently as a couple of weeks ago, no one was projecting anything in this neighborhood for him. In my article, I wrote about some of the people who make free agent contract predictions like Heyman and Heyman surveyed a GM and an agent. And Jim Bowden at ESPN made predictions and they've proven very accurate in the past. And the first nine guys, nine guys that he made predictions for signed before Peralta and he as a group nailed them. He was like six million or so off. Like he projected 219 and they got 225 or something. And then he was 30 million off on Peralta.

He projected two and 20 for him. And Heyman was right in that same neighborhood. And the GM and agent, I think the GM he talked to said two and 16. And then he gets 4-53. I figured maybe the Cardinals found that everyone was so convinced that they were going to trade for someone that maybe everyone was holding them hostage and trying to get Shelby Miller out of them for J.J. Hardy and that sort of thing.

And so maybe they just figured, well, we'll just take the hit. We have lots of reasonable contracts elsewhere and we don't do this often. We don't really sign free agents for a lot of money. We never do that save for Matt holiday. Uh, and so we'll just do it this time and it'll be a big upgrade in the short term. And, and that's that, but it's strange. I, I, I exchanged emails with one front office person earlier today, and he said that he had never misread a market as badly as this one. Wait, so what did he tell you is the reason that everybody was –

He was as surprised as I was. I don't know. All right, so I guess two possible ideas. was i don't know so all right so uh i guess two possible ideas one is that um uh people had established this idea that ped position players get a going rate and they kind of over um uh over what is that term what is that term when you see a phenomenon you uh recent see if or oh anchoring or something no no no no you uh you overfit overfit okay uh maybe they overfit that kind of idea um or i mean my feeling about this at least as regards to why everybody is calling it somewhat reasonable now uh even though nobody was expecting it my kind of feeling is that everybody thinks that peralta is a minus 10 defensive shortstop because he's fat and he's kind of slow and he had to move off the position once.

And you just, you hear about the Tigers' terrible defense. You know that the Tigers' pitchers all had terrible FIPS. You know, they're ground ball pitchers who all had, sorry, who had terrible FIP ERA gaps. And so you just sort of think, well, Peralta's a minus 10 shortstop. And then the Cardinals sign him, and you sort of give him a little bit of a benefit of the doubt, and then you look at the stats, and they all say he's average. And you sort of go, oh, well, I guess he's not a minus 10 shortstop.

And you change your mind, and you think he's a he's an average shortstop and once you add 10 runs a year to his value uh on defense he's worth it yeah he's he's having a crazy backwards career which i wrote about like he's doing everything out of order like he right his original team that drafted or signed him and developed him and saw him every day for a decade thought that he should move to third base when he was 27 to make room for Estrubel Cabrera, who has been a negative defender according to every defensive metric. So they move him to third at age 27, and then his next team moves him back, and now he's locked up to probably be a shortstop through you know his mid-30s so that's backwards people don't usually get get better at defense but if you look at his his defensive ratings he he certainly has seemed to and then he's making money out of order too he was he was a he was a free agent at age 28 that That's when guys cash in, when they get to be free agents, when they're still sort of in their prime.

And he got a two-year deal, two years guaranteed for like $11 million, less than $11 million, with an option for a third year. And so now he's 31, going to be 32 in May, and now he gets the four-year deal? I mean, the market has changed, but it's just a really strange trajectory. You think that's weird, Ben. He's seen season four of Game of Thrones, but he hasn't seen seasons one through three. That's even weirder. It's not even out yet. It is even weirder.

So, all right, let's go, though, before we end, let's go to the pertinent point at hand. GMs don't have any responsibility to, I don't know. Well, the thing about this is that I don't even think you can say that he's getting paid for cheating unless you think that GMs are incapable of pricing this information into their price. Because if players were paid completely retroactively for what they did, then sure, you could say you get paid for cheating. If everybody's working for incentives and each home run actually does get them paid, then fine. But GMs are basically paying for what they think you're going to do next. And so unless you think that teams are totally incapable of making rational decisions that price this in to the future, he wouldn't be getting paid more for what he's done.

I mean, it's all out in the open. You could very easily make the case if maybe salaries were going up and you suspected lots of guys were cheating that weren't getting caught, you could make that case. But Peralta got caught. It's all out there. It's all known. It seems pretty hard to make the case that he's being cheated or he's being paid for cheating.

So what it really comes down to is that you want to see them get penalized for cheating, right? Right. I mean, it's just, it's like kind of, I don't know, it bothers people to see the world's richest happiest people continue to be rich and happy when they do things wrong. And so, you know, I guess that's where it comes down to what Rosenthal is talking about, where the solution is to, you know, instead of thinking like somehow the rational market is going to do it for you, you know, the market

being an amoral thing that can't really do that. So instead of expecting the market to do it, it has to be done by players in the league. And it's, I don't know, I mean, I kind of think that Brad Ziegler's point is off and that it's probably, I don't know that I think it's well thought out or not. But, you know, I think it's probably, I'm kind of glad that he's saying it. I like to see players criticize other cheaters. I think that's what's effective is when players make it a peer pressure thing as well as rally the union to do something about it. Those are the two most effective ways, I think, to stop PED use,

which is generally considered to be a good for the game. So I think it's good even if Ziegler, I don't know, he's probably off, but he's often in the right way, is how I feel. Yeah, sure. And I do wish people would kind of have the same attitude towards PED use that teams do teams do though which is that maybe it doesn't do that much because then we probably all be less worked up about it I don't mind being worked up about it I don't even think it does that much and I still don't mind being worked up about it yeah because then what happens when there is one that does something mm-hmm what you've already

you've already blown your moral high ground you gotta take you gotta take cheating seriously whether it does something or not it is actual cheating and maybe the result doesn't matter as much as the intent but the the idea that you know johnny peralta hit 303 last year oh steroids uh or melky cabrera hit whatever he hit for two-thirds of a season no steroids when you can look and say, well, he had a really high BABIP, maybe he's just getting lucky. Steroids don't make you lucky. I don't know.

It seems like there's an alternative explanation. Goldstein always, if I'm remembering this correctly, Goldstein always thought that Peralta was much better than the internet gave him credit for, even defensively. It's my recollection. Can I say anything about other moves or are you going to hang up on me? I'm going to hang up on you. Okay.

I spent all weekend writing about transactions. I have so much to say. You could point people to our website, our URL address. That's a good idea. Uh, baseball prospectus.com is our, it's our website. Uh,

and I wrote a bunch of articles there about all the moves that have a lot of them. Yeah. Like seven. Yeah. And other people wrote articles about other moves. Basically we covered everything. So if you're interested in anything I have to say about,

uh, Joe Smith or Brian McCann or my man, Jose Molina, just go to baseballperspectives.com. All right. Thanks. See you. Bye.