Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 351: Life-Changing Lessons from Recent Transactions

Episode Date: December 18, 2013

Ben and Sam discuss recent trades and signings, focusing on moves by the Indians, White Sox, and Diamondbacks, Kevin Towers’ changing approach to building a bullpen, and the reliever market.

Hey, Big Spender! Spend a little time with me. Good morning, and welcome to episode 351 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from BaseballPerspectives.com. I am Ben Lindberg, joined as always by Sam Miller. Do you have any pre-episode banter? No, I was on Will Leach's podcast earlier today. No, you're bantering right now. No, well, I'm explaining, I was just going to explain that I got a lot of banter out of my system.

Ah, I'm explaining, I was just going to explain that I got a lot of banter out of my system. Ah, I see. Okay. His whole show is largely banter. It's a very, it's a bantery show. It's very comfortable to be on his show because it's, even when he steers it in various directions, you just feel like bantering. It feels like good banter. So if anybody wants to check out my banter if it's on it's on will leach's podcast yeah if anyone wants to check out my world series preview on on will leach's podcast that's still there too yeah i felt more much more comfortable on will leach's podcast than i did on my own

we should probably just both go on will leach's podcast once in a while and that's it. Okay, so transactions, Sam. Teams are making them and we've been analyzing them. We've been writing about them. And I figured that we could catch up on a few because you've written some interesting things about transactions. And I know you hate to talk about things that you've written. Not as much as you hate to come up with an original topic. Exactly. So let's touch on a few of these transactions that have been made over the past few days. I guess we should probably, thematically, we could probably tie a few of these together because there have been a lot of

relievers signed in the last few days. And I've written about some of those guys and you've written about some of those guys. Will Leach has probably written about some of those guys and you've written about some of those guys um you will leach will leach has probably written about some of those guys probably uh you wrote about the grant balfour signing the orioles signed grant balfour uh to a two-year 15 million dollar deal i wrote about the the john axford signing oh what did you what did you think of the Axford signing? You've been really interested about my opinion on the Axford signing. You see right through me. Well, I think it's kind of an interesting signing, not so much in isolation, but when you look at what Cleveland has done with its closers as a whole over the past decade, decade plus, really, that the current regime has been in charge, it's kind of kind of interesting because they've made a lot of comments about wanting to trade for someone with closing experience, someone who has had saves in the past.

And we often, you know, I guess that the sabermetric orthodoxy is that teams shouldn't pay for saves and you can make anyone a closer. Or at least you can make a lot more people closers than teams can. You can make anybody good. Anybody good is the standard starting point. Right. then teams can only do... You can make anybody good. Anybody good is the standard starting point. Yes, right, right. And so maybe it seems sort of strange for Cleveland, which is one of the early adopter sabermetric front offices, to be emphasizing saves

or emphasizing back end of the bullpen experience. But when you look at the history of Cleveland closers, it is not a distinguished group. I went back and looked at all the Cleveland closers since 2001, which is when Mark Shapiro took over as GM. Bob Wickman, a lot of Danny Baez or a little Danny Baez, way more Joe Borowski than I can imagine any team, any other team would have would have tolerated. Some Jensen Lewis, some late career Kerry Wood and the last four years or so, Chris Perez and now Axford. And if you if you add up all these guys numbers together and and of course the offensive context has changed over this time, but if you just look at the standard Cleveland closer line, just looking at the Indian save laser from each of these seasons, you get just sort of a generic OK reliever, a 3.57 ERA, eight strikeouts per nine innings, and a two and a half strikeout per walk ratio. And they've never really made a very long-term commitment to a closer. They've never paid a ton of money for a closer. They've never gone out and imported some elite flamethrowing guy. And really, when you look year by by year they've had better relievers in the

bullpen than their closer almost every one of those years and that is probably the case now with with certainly cody allen who seems like he's at least as well suited to to be a closer type as as axford is um so it seems to me that they value having their best relievers in a non-closing role. And I remembered a quote from Terry Francona when he was the Red Sox manager in 2010, when Daniel Bard was dominant as a setup man for Jonathan Papelbon. Papelbon, and Papelbon blew seven saves. And people were kind of talking about Bard as the heir apparent as closer. And Francona said, when you have a guy that's not pigeonholed into that closer role, oh, man, that's an unbelievable weapon, he said late that season. And he said, just like last week, before the Axford signing, about Cody Allen, we used him in so many high leverage situations. From the sixth inning on, we went to Cody against lefties or righties to snuff out a rally.

He was so good at it, and I think he would continue to get better. It's hard to lose a guy like that. And about Brian Shaw, he said he could do it in the ninth. I have no doubt. But what he does earlier is valuable so it seems like there's a trend towards signing an established closer or having an established closer possibly just because the indians know that players seem to prefer predefined roles and predictability or uh or that it's easier for a manager to have sort of a go-to ninth inning guy but it doesn't seem to me like they really value the save despite their their comments about people pitching in the ninth inning

uh i think they want to have someone for that role but they don't really want to break the bank for someone with that role and they don't think there is any particular closer mentality it doesn't seem to me so Axford fits into that group I think I think there's there are things to to like about him certainly he he threw a lot harder down the stretch last season and the Cardinals made some mechanical fixes of course and he pitched very well for them and he's been good in the past. But to me, he sort of fits into that second, third-tier closer group, which is usually what they have. This does come up every once in a while when the best reliever in a bullpen is clearly the setup guy.

And someone will point out, well, you know, a lot of times you're facing tougher hitters in the eighth anyway. In fact, I think on average, Joe Posnanski once found that you do face tougher hitters in the eighth. And, you know, you have more flexibility. And so maybe it's a good thing that this eighth inning guy is in the eighth and not pigeonholed into the ninth. And that seems well and good, except that it's very rare that the eighth inning guy actually pitches in higher leverage on average than the closer. pitches in higher leverage on average than the closer. And I'm sure if you look at the Indians over that time period, it is, I would, I would bet without looking that in, in almost all cases, the closer had the highest leverage index. So it's not as though, I mean, the thing is that

your eighth inning guy, the way that relievers see these roles quickly gets pigeonholed in an eighth inning situation yes right and i don't know if the indians are actually better at breaking that mold uh or not um i had one year where for dumb reasons i was very focused on vinnie pastano and i don't remember i don't remember looking at him coming into bases loaded in the sixth inning situations uh and and surprising me with how aggressively they used him or anything of the sort um and so while it is it does seem promising that your best reliever can play more like you know a free safety um and roam

around a little bit it seems that that doesn't actually happen all that much. Yeah, that is true. And yeah, like in 2011, which I think was Chris Perez's maybe first full season as closer, he had 36 saves and he was fairly effective. But the Indians had four guys who pitched more innings than he did with lower ERAs and were generally just sort of better. Perez struck out 39 guys in 59 innings than he did with lower ERAs and were generally just sort of better. Perez struck out 39 guys in 59 innings, and they had Joe Smith, and they had Rafael Perez, and they had Pestano, and they had Tony Sipp, and all these guys just sort of being better than him.

But yes, you're right. It is often the case that the setup man is just the eighth inning guy instead of the ninth inning guy. So I guess I like the fact that they don't go out and sign the best closer available to a three year contract or something. But but yeah, maybe it is sort of a stretch to say that they're really using their setup man any differently than any other team. It would be interesting to look at. Yeah, and I mean, they wouldn't be able to afford to sign the best closer to a three-year contract anyway. That's not really an option.

The choice they really have is to sign Joe Borowski or to sign know, to, to get the, well, I don't know. The question is how much the save adds to the price tag. If they're paying for saves, they're paying for saves. Right. And well, right. Maybe that's not really an issue, but maybe it is. They're also kind of keeping costs down potentially with their, their better relievers. Right. I mean, if they, if they put Cody Allen in the closer role right now, then he's going to be making more in arbitration and he's going to be making more as a free agent because he will have those saves.

So if they keep him as the setup man and use him more or less the same way that they would in the ninth, but in the eighth instead, he will not cost them as much down the road. Arguably true. Yeah. Although then Chris Perez just costs more right and and then they can't trade Cody Allen for as much when they want to but you can you can release chris Perez um uh that that Joe Borowski season is 2007 Borowski is maybe one of my favorite seasons. Just, I mean, five plus ERA, 45 saves.

So not only does that tell you that you can be a closer and get saves without being particularly effective, but then my favorite part, I think, is that he never really lost the job and he started the next season as the closer, which I really enjoy. And he got a few saves that season before, I guess, he got hurt, and that was it for him. But that's one of my favorite reliever seasons. So there have been other reliever moves made that we can analyze as part of a trend, I suppose.

You don't want to know my favorite reliever season. Sure, go ahead. Do you have one? I do, yeah, I do. My favorite reliever season is Sean Chacon. Oh, yeah, that's a good one. 35 saves with a 7.11 ERA. Yeah.

Yeah, that's a great one. Right. The difference is that he never got any saves. He got one save after that like three years later. 52 stride gots, 52 walks. Yeah. Well, it was Coors Field So hey, that was only a 70 ERA plus But yeah, I think the best thing about the Borowski season

Is that he came back the next year And he said we want more of that Come to our Facebook page and write Mike Williams' name somewhere on there Yeah, facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild sam won't be there i will um okay so there was also a trade between the white socks and the diamondbacks involving a reliever the diamondbacks traded matt davidson for addison reed you wrote about this uh sort of in the context of Kevin Towers' bullpen building. And we talked about Kevin Towers, I guess, last week and the Diamondbacks last week,

so we don't need to pile on. But we could talk about his bullpen building specifically. And we, well, we got a listener email that I will read about it, but can you sum up the difference between Towers' Padres bullpen building and Arizona bullpen building? Yeah, I kind of just wanted to do a quick retrospective of Kevin Towers in San Diego because we all knew at the time that he seemed to be, to have all these like, you know, really good relievers. But, you know, we didn't really know what Petko's role was and all of that and there was always a sense that you know some of these relievers were were overrated um they had to be right because they were coming out of nowhere we had never heard of any of them and they were putting up like you know nine to one strike out to walk ratios and for for nothing as rookies and all that. And so I wanted to kind of look back at it and look at that group because it turns out that pretty much all of those guys had,

well, pretty much all those guys had success elsewhere. It seems now that this was not a Petco creation at all. Mike Adams went on to be a very good reliever in Texas, and Mujica went on to be a very good reliever in St. Louis. And Ryan Webb had a really good couple years with Florida, a really good year last year with Florida. And Freire is a closer in Anaheim and is significantly better than anybody at the time thought.

And the other guys who, like Thatcher and Gregerson, just left, but both of them brought back pretty good returns, which signals that the league believes in them as well. So this was actually not just a Petco bullpen. This was like he put together this kind of group that spread out. He put together this kind of group that spread out. You know how sometimes you'll hear about an NFL coach and all his assistants are, 12 years later, are head coaches of their own. This was like a bullpen that actually fanned out and took over the National League. So it kind of is still amazing to look at them. They had a nickname.

They were the penitentiary, which is kind of a terrible nickname. It doesn't really make sense, but they were good enough to have a nickname. You and I actually pronounce that word with a different number of syllables. Penitentiary? That's how I would say it, yeah. Yeah, I think you're probably right. Okay. So I forgot where I was going. Oh, anyway, the point is that these guys all cost nothing.

I mean, it is striking how little they cost him. Arguably, the second biggest investment they made was Ernesto Freire's unreported bonus out of Colombia, which was probably like, you know, 15 grand or something. Everything else that they gave away was nothing. I think they probably traded a total of maybe 100 innings, 100 major league innings, and 30, well, and like, I don't know, maybe a couple hundred plate appearances for this entire unit. So now Kevin Towers has been on a little bit of a losing streak. After, it should be noted, coming to Arizona and building a very good bullpen in like a year, in 2010, in some degree, 11,

and seeming to have this knack for it, the last couple years has been more or less a losing streak when he's uh he's been the guy giving away good relievers as throw-ins in trades when he's done reliever for reliever swaps he's gotten the worst of it and um he has uh been investing more in relievers than he ever did uh in san diego so even if they did turn out like you know heath bell did not turn out good but even if he had it would have been a know, Heath Bell did not turn out good, but even if he had, it would have been a much bigger investment than he ever did in his last, you know,

half dozen years in San Diego. Um, and Addison Reed arguably is the same. I don't think he, uh, in, in the sort of six year golden years in San Diego with his bullpen, I don't think he ever gave up anything, uh, that would qualify as a top 100 prospect for a reliever either. So I don't know. It's somebody. So we got an email and I will break from tradition and read a listener email on a Tuesday or Wednesday show. This is from Fuzz, F-U-Z, who asked, isn't it maybe that Towers was lucky before and not so lucky now I know a multiple year run of good padre bullpens is compelling but given reliever performances are fickle maybe it was luck and now he is he has lost his touch yeah yeah my probably I mean my my instinct well I mean I don't think that it's ever any completely luck these are guys who got where they are for having some abilities, but yeah, my, I mean, my feeling probably is that it mostly was luck. Now, I don't think it's necessarily luck that like, I think that it was smart and good, you know, a good strategy to build the bullpen he did as he did. I mean, it's not luck that he had a bullpen of waiver guys and trade throw-ins that

were, you know, relatively productive and roughly as productive as, you know, the angels $25 million bullpen was. But it's probably somewhat lucky that, yeah, sure.

It's, I would say it is lucky that, that they became as good as they were. Now, that said, Heath Bell was a Sabre darling before the Padres got him, and Mike Adams was a Sabre darling before the Padres got him. So neither one of those necessarily was unexpected. Yeah, there seemed to be a process behind it where you would get these guys who had good minor league stats or had some success at some level and just weren't valued by their organizations for whatever reason and would just acquire them for almost nothing. It seemed like there was a plan there. There was like an organizing philosophy trading for undervalued assets there.

And now I don't – I mean even – I'm sure if we had Kevin Towers on, he would probably recognize that there is some difference in the way he's approaching it. And he's giving up more for those guys. So the question is why? And I don't know. We've struggled to understand the things that he has done over the last couple of years. It's just, it's so many years of team control outgoing. And Reid is a young guy, too. So this isn't the best example of that. But they've just they've traded so many years of team control for fewer years of team control. And and that's that's fine. If you get back a lot of wins in the short term and you're you're a playoff team and you're competitive and those wins help you win a division title or something, but they're just sort of treading water. Literally last season going from 81 wins to 81 wins and seems like they're about an 81-win team again.

And at some point you figure giving up all of those young guys is going to come back to bite them i would think and if it hasn't paid off in a short-term title then then that's not good well but they are the undisputed favorites in major league baseball for 2014 i mean everybody agrees they're a powerhouse and they can't possibly lose right right addison reed was certainly the last piece of this 116-win puzzle. Yes. And then the Orioles— I don't hate that trade, by the way.

No, it's— It was more like the end of this 24-month run of transactions that, you know, it sort of punctuated it. But, you know, in isolation, Davidson had nowhere to go. It was a reasonable guy to get and a reasonable guy to give up. I don't like me that much, to be honest. No, neither do I. That seems to be the thing, is that they keep trading these guys who have nowhere to go, or at least they're somewhat redundant, but they don't seem to be getting full value back for them, which I don't know whether they just kind of want to clear their desk and

get the clutter out like three three numbers on his phone don't work so he can only call chicago yeah uh but even if a guy is not worth even if he's not indispensable to you because of of the depth that you have at his position or something you can you should still try to get full value for him and i don't know i mean presumably they have tried but it seems like the results haven't really borne that out um and he had to call he actually had to call rick hon and ask rick hon to call atlanta to make the upton trade proposal well and that was the fact that uh this was like a one in a long the latest in a long string of perplexing diamondbacks moves and the latest in what seems like a an increasingly long string of of kind of good white socks moves um which maybe contributed to the perception of this trade a little bit. I agree it wasn't really a

tremendously lopsided deal, but I liked it better for the White Sox, and I like a lot of the things that the White Sox have done over the last half year or so. I don't think they're— Such as? What's your run? What's your roster of good moves? What's your run? What's your roster of good moves? Well, I like the PV trade. I like trading PV. I like Abisal Garcia. I like the Adam Eaton trade quite a bit.

And signing Jose Abreu, I don't even really know if I like it because I'm not sure what he's going to be, but if he, if he fulfills the sort of potential that some people think he that. And the farm system is improved, according to people who know those things. So I like what he's done lately. Just curious, piggybacking off the conversation we had yesterday about GMs, is there a part of you that unfairly thinks that Kenny Williams has, like, no say anymore in the front office and Rick Han like that that basically what I'm saying is is there a part of you that unfairly gives all the credit to Rick Han and none of the credit to Kenny Williams and thinks thanks thank goodness they cleared that that office or do you appreciate that Kenny Williams is actually in a position of more power

now and might just be doing good work yeah I I'm sure sure he has had a lot of input on all of these moves. I don't know. I would feel like I imagined myself in that position, in that moving up and letting someone take over the GM role, but then being a team president or whatever. And I feel like I would want to be pretty hands-off, right? I wouldn't want to take that job and then just do the job, continue to do the job and meddle sort of.

And if I had a lot of confidence in the person who did have the job and had worked with him for a long time, I feel like I would almost take sort of an advisory role but not quite as active a role as I had had before. So I would think that that's sort of the dynamic there, but I don't know. It seems like there's been a pretty clear shift in philosophy just from Williams, who was never rebuilding, to Hahn, who has sort of acknowledged that they needed to do that. Yeah.

And then the Orioles signed Grant Balfour and you use that as a springboard for some research about what teams are, are generally paying for relievers and you test. I believe, I believe it's best referred to as quasi research. Yes. You came up, you came up with an unsubstantiated theory and then you tested it in a not very rigorous way. But the conclusion was still interesting. teams were paying much more per win for relievers and you kind of tried to take a look to see whether that was still the case this, this winter. Uh, and what did you find? Yeah. Well,

so the piece was by originally by Rich Letterer and, um, Rich Letterer. There's so many letters. There's a Joe Letterer in my life and there's a Howard letterer and there's a Annie Duke. So, uh, I have any letterers in my life except this one. Okay. So, uh, they're not in my life exactly. They're just, I'm aware of them. Uh, so Rich letterer, um, uh, the, the thing that was interesting about Rich letterer's original piece isn't so much that, you know, teams were paying more for relievers. It was more that, uh, that he was kind of making the point that we're using the wrong number. When we talked, at the time it was like a $4 million per winner or whatever was the going rate. And we would all refer to it as $4 million a win.

And so then someone would sign Matt Holliday and we'd be like, oh, well, it was less than $4 million a win or more than $4 million a win and use that to kind of conclude something. And his point was that we're using the wrong number because relievers are a totally different market. And when you take them out, everybody else costs quite a bit less. And so you should be kind of using a lower number. And so I've always had that in the back of my mind and I always forget it and then it comes back and I wonder why we don't pay more attention to that but um the one of the things that was talked about with the after Balfour's um signing is that you know this was a responsible reasonable signing of a reliever and

that's kind of been the the norm this offseason and so I uh uh wanted to see whether Lederer's conclusions had changed at all, if this market was in fact showing relievers treated like normal players in terms of value. And I'm not sure they should be, as we've talked about. Maybe it could be that we're not appreciating what a reliever does, and that there's a rational reason that 30 GMs all agree, or at least 29 GMs all agree that relievers should be paid a little bit more. So I very, very, very hastily put together a way of trying to assign win value to players and then looked at their average annual value and then split them up between relievers and position players and starters. And the relievers are paid way more per win right now and uh so that's one thing that you might take from this the other thing you might take from this is when you hear everybody talking about seven million

dollars per win uh this offseason um it might actually be six million dollars a win except for relievers so you might just keep that in mind when uh shinsu chu signs or whatever the case may be and you want to do the math and yet it does seem like there hasn't been uh a whipping boy reliever signing so much this winter except at least until boone logan right which i i mentioned a couple days ago but um the other i mean no one has been signed to a longer than, longer than a three-year contract, as you mentioned. And I, maybe it's, could it be, because it seems like this was a pretty rich reliever market. There were a lot of people with closing experience available. I don't know whether it's that that has kept the price down for each of them

individually, possibly. But yeah, I didn't like the Logan signing, but the other moves I was kind of okay with. Even the three-year deals, the Javier Lopez signing and Joe Smith, I was kind of okay with those. The Dodgers signed J.P. Howell to a two-year deal with a vesting option for a third year, which seemed fine given what J.P. Howell was this past season. None of the others has really bothered me individually. I think that the ones that I think jacked the rate up were, and I don't have my note cards in front of me, but I believe it was Jabba Chamberlain has been sub-replacement level over the last two years. I used the last two years for data, by the way. So he basically gave zero wins to this math. And Chad Qualls has been sub-replacement, although he gets credit for more because of the dumb way I did this. But anyway, Chad Qualls jacked it up. And Matt Albers jacked

it up. And so those are not big money things, but all of them were basically contributing nothing and costing non-trivial money. Two of them by the Astros, incidentally. And then Logan was bad. And actually, Balfour was not good. But Warp does not like Balfour. And as I ended the transaction analysis that's not totally unreasonable so so his is actually considered high based on what he's done mm-hmm okay well we've pretty much touched on all of the the

reliever signings if there has been a transaction that we haven't talked about one of us or RJ Anderson has written about it at Baseball Perspectives. So you can go find out about it there. I like the Omar Infante move quite a bit. Wrote about that this weekend. RJ wrote about the James Loney deal, which I think he liked more than I did. Wasn't a huge fan of that. And then everything else is pretty minor.

The Yankees signed some old injured guys, which fits the rest of their roster. So that's enough for today. We'll be back tomorrow with another show, and we welcome your emails to podcast at baseballperspectives.com. Keith Law did a podcast earlier today. He had Nick Pecorro on to talk about the Diamondbacks, and then he had John Daniels on to talk about the Rangers.

And in both of those conversations, the notion of there not being any power hitters anymore was cited. They were talking about Rangers prospects who hit for power and don't make a lot of contact. And he said something about how there's no power anymore. And then Nick said something about Trumbo and how power is at a premium. Are we just wrong about this? I don't care if we're the only ones who say it. It doesn't matter.

We can't possibly be wrong. John Daniels is pretty smart. Yeah. pretty smart uh yeah i mean i think no i think that if if your point is a you know a point that we've made in other ways that with offense down we need to mentally adjust our expectations of what is a good hitter and you know what is not yeah that's legitimate i mean mark trumbo's power mark trumbo has 50 home run power in 2000 and so if the point is you know you don't appreciate what kind of power he has he's Greg Vaughn then that's legitimate if your point is that his 36 home runs are more valuable now or whatever I don't see how that makes sense

yeah take that Daniels I mean if he's so, how come he was the youngest GM ever hired? Why couldn't he be older? Good point. Youth is at a premium. General managers.