Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 429: The Dodgers, DirecTV, and Baseball’s Broadcast Bubble/Your Finest Emails

Episode Date: April 16, 2014

Ben and Zachary talk to David Lazarus about the Dodgers and baseball’s broadcast bubble, then answer emails about Scott Boras, Brian Cashman, the AL East, and more.

So hold on, hold on, don't burst my bubble, no, leave my bubble alone, yeah, I'm not all around you now. Good morning and welcome to episode 429 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives presented by the BaseballReference.com Play Index. the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus presented by the BaseballReference.com Play Index. I'm Ben Lindberg, joined today by Zachary Levine, who is filling in for the vacationing Sam Miller. Later in the show, we will do listener emails as always, but first we will talk to a guest. And our guest today is David Lazarus, who is the consumer columnist for the Los Angeles Times and KTLA-TV Channel 5. Hi, David. Hi, thanks for having me. So we wanted to talk to you about an article that you wrote last week. We've discussed and many people have discussed what seems to be or what could possibly be a broadcast bubble that

is affecting Major League Baseball and individual teams right now. National broadcast revenues are skyrocketing. Local broadcast revenues are skyrocketing. Local broadcast revenues are skyrocketing, driven by the fact that live programming is very big in the DVR era. So we've been wondering when this bubble will burst, if ever. And you made the case in an article for The Times that we might be seeing the beginning of that bubble bursting with the Dodgers and that it's possible that DirecTV is sort of the pin pricking that bubble. So can you take everyone who might not be familiar with the situation through it and what the conflict is right now and what's at stake? Sure. The question here is have we reached a tipping point in exactly the issues you're citing?

And what's going on here is we've seen regional sports networks for a long time now it's pretty much business as usual in the cable and satellite business they cut these hefty deals with sports teams and then they pass along all those costs to the cable and satellite subscribers whether they want these sports channels or not all right now we have the new management of the Dodgers really turning the screws on Time Warner Cable, which paid over $8 billion for a 25-year exclusive right to distribute a new Dodgers channel. Thus, if you're a Dodgers fan, and L.A. has a lot of them,

if you want to watch Dodgers games on TV, well, first of all, you need to be a Time Warner Cable subscriber because they're going to carry the thing. However, Time Warner Cable wants every other paid TV service in the area to also carry the channel. So we're talking about DirecTV, Dish Network, AT&T's U-verse, Verizon's Fios. U-verse, Verizon's, Fios. And on top of that, they want every single subscriber of every one of these services to pay $4 to $5 a month for the Dodgers channel, whether they want to watch it or not. And there's been a lot of resistance to this, not just from a lot of people who say, I don't want my cable bill going up by another $4 to $5 a month, but as well from the pay TV companies, which are saying, you know what, this is probably going to push people's bills into a territory that's going to start an open revolt.

And so DirecTV is leading the resistance. And it's very important because while Time Warner Cable accounts for about a one-third market share in the L.A. area, DirecTV has a roughly 30% market share, which makes them a very, very influential player here. And the other pay TV guys have all kind of scuttled off to the sidelines and let pay and let DirecTV catch all the heat for this. And they want to see how strong DirecTV can hold the line here. And DirecTV's position is, we love the Dodgers. We're more than happy to pass along a Dodgers channel to any one of our subscribers, and we've got over a million of them in the area,

anyone who wants it, but we don't want to force it on everybody. In other words, DirecTV is saying, we'll offer it, but we'd like to offer it on an a la carte basis. And the others are standing around saying, maybe us too. And if indeed we have reached that point, well, first of all, it's going to have big implications for all the other sports networks, which might not be everyone's cup of tea. But you extrapolate from that and suddenly you can start thinking about the Golf Channel, Nickelodeon, MTV, and gazillions of other channels that might not have universal appeal. gazillions of other channels that might not have universal appeal. And to be clear, this is not really an issue that affects the Dodgers' bottom line, or at least it's not good for the team that many of its fans can't watch its games right now. But the agreement is already signed that that money is coming to them one way or another. So what really is at stake here is future situations like this, right? Teams that haven't gotten on board the broadcast bubble so far

who still have renegotiations coming up, they have a lot at stake here depending on the outcome of this standoff. Well, you could say the Dodgers are sitting pretty because they've got over $8 billion in revenue guaranteed to them over a quarter of a century. That's great. On the other hand, they have garnered a quarter of a century. That's great. On the other hand,

they have garnered a lot of fan ill will for fencing off their games onto pay TV and then moreover requiring people who have grown accustomed to watching games on ordinary over-the-air channels that can be accessed with an ordinary antenna to now have to pony up maybe $4, $5, maybe even more as the years go by on a monthly basis, even during the off-season, apparently, to watch these games. I think we've reached a point now where people are just sick of both teams and their multimedia partners trying to reach deeper and deeper into people's pockets for pastimes and enjoyments that, you know, for a long time were seen as popular entertainment and now are increasingly becoming premium commodities.

And you did speak to someone with DirecTV who said that he had crunched the numbers and that they had found that most of its subscribers in the area oppose paying what Time Warner is demanding, though I'd imagine that those who are in favor of that are probably, if they are a minority, are probably a pretty vocal minority. I mean, that has to be a tough pressure to resist for a full season, although we have seen that happen in other markets. Indeed. And I think the cautionary tale here is the Comcast Sportsnet Houston channel, which was carrying Astros and Rockets games. And in that case, Comcast, which is a co-owner of the channel with the teams, tried to foist it upon other pay TV companies in the Houston area at a very high price that

they resisted. And now that channel is in bankruptcy. And there's a great danger that the Dodgers channel could go the same way simply because Time Warner Cable can't make this pencil out financially unless they make every other pay TV subscriber take the channel and subsidize their wildly overpriced deal. If they offer it a la carte or if they offer it at a lower monthly price, say two bucks a month, three bucks a month, the deal no longer pencils out and the company is looking at a loss. And as you know, companies don't like looking at losses. Right. And the thing I wanted to add about the Houston situation and sort of ask you about this was I was covering the Astros for a few years and sort of caught the very beginning of when this all was starting to happen. And sort of the theory there was that this wasn't going to happen while the team was as bad as it is.

And one of the theories was once the Astros got good enough that people started demanding it, these things would work out. But now, I mean, we see the Houston Rockets, the other half of that are a very good and very entertaining team. And now we see this happening with the Dodgers, who is probably the were the favorites going into the season to win the World Series and are just a fascinating and entertaining team, and who isn't a Vin Scully fan. So I guess does the fact that the team is good and watchable and people are demanding it, does that have any impact?

Or would we see this working out the same way, whether they were projected to be a 95 win team or a 95 loss team? That's a great question, and it's clearly a factor. Obviously, Time Warner Cable rolled the dice and assumed that the great popularity of the Dodgers, as they found with their Lakers channel, would carry the day, and that fans would just demand that the other pay TV companies got with the program. But that doesn't seem to be the case. And it's really these high prices involved. got with the program, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

And it's really these high prices involved. I think fans are extremely loyal and extremely monogamous with their teams, but they also resent being played for chumps. And there's this feeling here that Time Warner Cable just assumed that everybody would fall in line with a deal of over $8 billion, which is kind of unprecedented out there. And they assumed wrong, quite simply. And fans are basically saying, this is too much. You people are just trying to make more money off of the backs of fans' goodwill. And I think people are feeling deeply resentful about that. And that's what Time Warner Cable and probably to some extent the Dodgers did not anticipate.

You mentioned in your piece that if something were to change here, then DirecTV would, as you say, have to revisit its own regional sports channels in Pittsburgh and Denver and Bellevue, Washington that aren't offered a la carte. So is this a case where a victory by them here would hurt them in other areas, or would it just lead to subsequent similar battles? Well, that's why I'm saying that this is possibly a tipping point, because Houston is Houston, but LA is LA when it comes to media markets. The number two TV market in the entire country after the New York market. So we cast a pretty long shadow out of here, as do the Dodgers for that matter. And it seems clear that fans and pay TV subscribers would be well within their rights if indeed some sort of deal were cut to offer the Dodgers channel on an a la carte basis

to then say, well, wait a minute. Philosophically speaking, this is no different from any other premium channel or pay channel that's out there, and why are you treating this differently from others? And that's an extremely important conversation that we have not had enough, and it's about time we started going down that road. I'm not saying that a la carte is the answer to all of our TV woes, but let's look at some of the numbers. According to the NPD group, the average cable bill will be $123 a month as of next year. Meanwhile, the ratings company Nielsen says that the typical TV viewer watches only 17 channels on a regular basis,

which means you're probably paying for a couple of hundred channels that you never watch, which is unique in the business world. I can't think of any other industry where consumers are forced to buy products that they don't want. And this has reached a point now, especially with sports programming, where it's gotten out of hand, quite simply. The teams and their business partners have driven prices to such stratospheric levels that it's no longer the great American pastime when we talk about baseball. Now it's a huge business endeavor where the rich are getting much richer, and it's all being taken out of the backs of the poor fans. And I think fans are, as I say, tired of being played in these situations and are standing up and very correctly saying, that's enough. What have been the ripple effects from this?

Are radio ratings noticeably up? Is it an opportunity for the Angels to sort of make a dent in the market? And do they have any better structure? And I guess I'll ask that question for right now, a couple of weeks in. And then if this keeps going on for a year or two years, do you see either of those things happening? Boy, it's hard to say. I haven't heard of any strong Dodger fans flipping over to the Angels. I mean, this is cats and dogs here.

So I'm not expecting that, although, you know, people have just got to take in a game. Well, it's not that hard now to go down to Anaheim and catch an Angels game. I think, if anything, what we are going to see is a surge in business for sports bars that get Time Warner cable. And you'll see more and more sports bars, in fact, switching from satellite, which is a very common platform for the sports bars, over to cable so that they can then build themselves as the venue where you'll be able to catch Dodgers games.

And if there's an upside to this, then baseball becomes a more communal experience because you'll hang out with other fans, and that's a lot of fun, to be honest. But I think that we're going to see some movement one way or another more sooner than later because Time Warner Cable can't eat these losses for very long. They have to get this channel out there one way or another. And in the past, we've seen these kind of clashes of the titans over things like AMC and The Walking Dead and other such programming that are very popular. And so it's used as leverage to get deals cut. I think there will be a deal cut here.

But the last time I spoke with DirecTV, they showed no sign of caving. The last time I spoke with Verizon, they suggested that they thought a la carte was the way to go for the Dodgers. And you really don't get that kind of talk a lot from other pay TV companies. AT&T is kind of being a little more, you know, hands off on it as is Dish. But I get a real sense that the wind is blowing against Time Warner Cable and in turn against the Dodgers in this deal. And that's why we could see this whole thing exploding. And you spoke to someone with Time Warner who, of course, said precisely the opposite thing, as you would expect.

Maureen Huff, the vice president of public relations, who basically made an appeal to tradition sort of argument and said, it's simply not how the business model works. sort of argument and said, it's simply not how the business model works. It's not how it's traditionally worked, which is, you know, the kind of argument that we've seen marshaled in support of many things that didn't make sense and were subsequently changed and repealed. So is that the best they can do? That is the best they can do. And I'll tell you, any time the best argument that a corporate entity can muster is, well, this is the way we've always done it. Consumers should be just standing there with their mouths open, especially at a time like this, when we live in an iTunes, YouTube kind of world, where consumers of media have grown used to getting the product they want

sliced and diced the way they want it. You don't buy whole albums anymore. You don't even have to watch an entire episode of Tonight Show anymore. Now you get the little bits and pieces that you want. This is how consumers have grown accustomed to taking in their media. And any media titan that can't accommodate this new landscape is going to find itself in real trouble. And Time Warner Cable is trying to defend the old way of doing things, the Jurassic Park way of doing things, in an era where their

customers are cutting the cord in droves because they feel they're being treated disrespectfully. And any media company that can't acknowledge these trends is going to be hurting, and it's going to be hurting in a big way. And last question, do you think it's possible to conceive of this entire process unfolding without government intervention? Because it has seemed like an area where Canadian government, I think, has been pretty aggressive about pushing for unbundling. And we've seen some bills. John McCain sponsored a bill in the Senate called the Television Consumer Freedom Act of 2013, which looks like it's going to stay in 2013 thus far. And there was a similar bill brought up in Congress,

and there hasn't really been any movement in that. But do you think this is an area where the private sector and the public could sort this out on their own in a way that would warm Ron Swanson's heart? Or eventually, are the sums involved so large that there is going to have to be some sort of oversight involved? Well, money talks. And obviously, the broadcast industry, the pay TV industry spends a lot of money in Washington, which is why we haven't seen any crackdowns on this blatantly anti-consumer business practice, at least not yet. However, once we start seeing cable bills getting into the, on average, $123 range, as predicted for next year, you're going to get a lot more lawmakers who will be more sympathetic to the plaintiff cries of their electorate when they

say, I can't afford these bills anymore. And I think the pay TV industry is going to do everything they can to stay ahead of any regulatory changes and head them off before they face something really onerous. And I think what we're going to see, it's almost inevitable now, is the pay TV industry will spin off sports channels into a separate tier. That's a big chunk of change of people's bills. And the industry is going to try and mollify the FCC and lawmakers to keep them from taking a more rash action. But I think a more rash action is inevitable at this point. I don't think we're going to get into pure a la carte, at least not right away.

I think we're going to see tiers of programming probably within the next, let's say, couple of years. You'd see a sports tier, a movie tier, a variety tier, maybe a reality TV tier, various ways that they can parcel out groups of channels, maybe a dozen, maybe a couple of dozen that would lower people's bills. And then the next move from that will be a la carte. And as with Canadians, I think we'll see experimentation with it. It doesn't have to happen nationwide. We can see it in a few states as a laboratory. And I think California would be an excellent place to start because it's a large enough state where we can see what the impact of a la carte would be on program diversity and on pricing of channels. And if it works here or doesn't work here, then we can see it play out over the rest of the nation. All right. Well, we'd encourage everyone to go read the full article and get all your thoughts.

We will link to it at Baseball Perspectives. And in our Facebook group, you can find David's writing at the LA Times at latimes.com slash our Facebook group, you can find David's writing at the LA Times at latimes.com slash Lazarus. And you can find him on Twitter at David Laz, L-A-Z. So thank you, David, for joining us and for striking fear into the hearts of cable executives across the country. Great talking to you. All right. We'll be back in just a moment with your email questions of the week all right so thanks again to david joining us. That concludes the guest interview portion of the podcast. And this begins the listener email portion of the podcast. I think this is a first. This may be the first time that someone other than Sam has participated in a listener email show.

Got to say, many of these emails were addressed to Ben and Sam. So I hope people will not be shortchanged to get answers from Ben and Zachary. But we will do our best. So let's start with a question from Tony, who asks, Is Scott Boris losing influence and his position as baseball's best and most important agent? I ask because the past four or five months have been very bad for him. First, there is the Cano exit and signing. Second, there's the ruling against him in the Beltran case, where his frankly legally offensive stick-with-me provision was held to be unenforceable. Third, there is his repeated inability to adapt to the qualifying offer-free

agency rule. Last year, two players of his signed last minute contracts, and this year it's even worse. Has Scott Boris's run as the sport's best agent ended? No one is writing or talking about this, but it seems like a pretty interesting story. And there was also a story recently about Boris objecting to some comments made by an unnamed executive in a Buster Only column about Kendris Morales and Stephen Drew, which, I don't know, sort of, I guess he is just doing his due diligence as an agent, but sort of smacked of desperation that he was arguing that these comments could affect his clients who haven't been able to get a job for months now. So maybe we've had this conversation last year

a little bit when there was the Kyle Loesch stuff going on and that ended up okay. But now, you know, I guess it's fair to argue that Boris has not had the best winter and beginning of spring. But is it enough for you to think that he is losing his grip or his place at the top of the agent power rankings? I guess for him to have lost his place, you would have to put somebody else up there. And I'm not it's not Jay-Z. And I'm not sure who we could talk about that it's going to be. What I what I would think, though, is and I know you guys have talked about this with front offices is just that everyone's becoming smart. The money's gotten so big that you probably have fewer people out there who don't know what

they're doing because they become really obvious to weed out. And any player who signs with one, say, as an amateur or something would would very quickly realize that this isn't the way to go about securing your future. And I think that where we've gotten now is maybe just that Boris is the highest variance, maybe that he's the guy who is willing to take risks that nobody is, you know, letting guys wait it out. that nobody is, you know, letting guys wait it out. But I don't think that that I'm willing to say he's he's lost that that spot at the top of the list because I can't replace him there. And I just think that the marketplace has has become so much more competitive as as the money's gotten bigger. And that's sort of just been a natural thing. Yeah. When I wrote that article about how GMs haven't been fired recently, one of the things that kept coming up was that there is just a closer relationship, closer working relationship

and maybe also a closer personal relationship between most GMs and owners now where they are kind of on the same page and have the same plan and they communicate regularly. And maybe that has made it harder for Boris to pull off his patented move where he goes over the GM's head and appeals directly to ownership to sign a player as he did with, say, Prince Fielder. Would you fault the agent of a player who had a qualifying offer go against him this year. Would you say that they should have anticipated this, at least for someone like Morales, let's say, who seemed like kind of the most obvious candidate to be affected by that?

Yeah, I think that's certainly fair, that if you look at what he costs, and then you look at what he costs with a draft pick thrown onto it and uh the way he's being valued i don't think that's an unfair criticism but um there are there are going to be cases where and there probably have been where we're waiting it out and uh you know if three first basemen had gone down in spring training, maybe we would see this turn out differently. It was definitely a risk. I think that if Morales were a guy who valued that certainty, I would certainly fault the agent. I wouldn't want to have an agent who was going after a different goal. But, um, but yeah,

I think that if, if the player and the agent were done and we want the biggest deal possible and we're willing to take some risks to get there, then, then, uh, I think that's what Boris went after and they just missed. It does surprise me that Steven drew is still available.

I mean, there, there are teams that could really, really use Steven Drew. And in some cases, looked like they could use Steven Drew before the season and maybe look even more like they could use him now. I mean, the Yankees seemed like an obvious candidate. And, of course, they've already got some guys banged up. Got Cervelli playing first base, and then Cervelli gets hurt and Jeter hurt the Blue Jays seemed like an obvious candidate for Drew before the season and that was before

Reyes got hurt before his tourists got hurt now they're really struggling there you know the Tigers Alex Gonzalez has gotten off to about as as bad a start as as we would have expected so it does surprise me that no one has has you know broken the glass and and pulled the alarm and signed steven drew i mean that's got to happen at some point this season i would think you would think so and i don't know if it'll be after the draft or or when it's gonna be all right uh this question comes from kevin in pittsburgh says i have a simple question rooted in a certain broadcaster's righteous indignation at baseball players' unwillingness to direct their batted balls away from defensive shifts.

The question is, in general, do you think hitters have the ability to redistribute their batted balls with any significance? Is it possible to beat defensive shifts simply by becoming a less stubborn hitter? I can't help but think that if such a thing were truly possible, players would be all over it by now. Like a player doesn't want a 400 batting average on his resume come contract negotiations. So this is one of my pet topics for this season. Not so much about the redistributing batted balls, but about the bunting. I started a Friday series at BP where every week I will take a look back at the preceding week and see which players bunted against the shift or to beat the shift. In the first couple weeks of action,

I did the first post on this last Friday, and there had already been three of these, just kind of, you know, textbook cases. Two of them turned into singles. One of them was by Raul Banez, who is old and didn't beat it out. But I think that makes all the sense in the world to bunt when the left side of the infield is wide open. I think the numbers support that. The traditional argument that maybe guys aren't prepared to bunt, they don't have experience bunting, and so you can't ask them to bunt. I think there's probably something to that, but I don't think it's impossible to get that experience. Brendan Moss is the guy who was kind of the poster boy for it this spring,

had really no experience and never attempted a bunt before this year, and is a big pulled ground ball guy, has the highest percentage of pulled ground balls in baseball. And he was getting sick of the shift. So he said, I'm going to bunt now. And he learned how to bunt with the assistance of the A's coach, Chip Hale, and seems to be pretty good at it. And he did it in spring training and he did it already in the regular season. And I'd like to see you guys do that more. Now, the question of whether you can redistribute batted balls, I think, is tougher. We saw Adam Dunn do that last year where he seemed to sort of flip a switch midseason and obviously was the classic shift candidate, the slugger who pulled everything. And in the second half, I think after May last year, he really hit ground balls the other way much more often and was shifted against less often and actually hit for a pretty good batting average, which was unusual for Adam Dunn, and still hit for decent power, too.

So it seemed to work for him. I don't know whether that's something that every player feels comfortable doing or has the ability to do. player feels comfortable doing or has the ability to do. Although you'd think that if Adam Dunn could do it, most guys must have better bat control than Adam Dunn or somewhere on his level. So I wonder whether people could do it. It's definitely a more drastic step than just laying a bunt down from time to time. Right. And yeah, my tendency would be to answer that, yes, you can do it, but that your average would go down, that you would be to answer that, yes, you can do it, but that your average would go down, that you would be overcompensating in something. And you wouldn't be the kind of guy who could do it midseason like that.

I would think that's the exception. But as to your work on bunting, I think that every year that we see offense workouts going up and everything, it becomes an even better play but when as the you know it was if you know if barry bonds were getting shifted or something like that in 2003 2004 then that's not a good play but if if you're talking about this offensive era that we see 10 years later and uh the kind of expectations that we have whenever anyone comes up to the bat, especially if you're in a matchup situation. Did you notice in your work whether they were, you know, whether it's been mostly when the pitcher has the platoon advantage too?

I would think that over a whole season that might bear out too as you're a lefty hitter who gets shifted more likely to do it against a lefty pitcher yeah one of the ones that i i pointed out in the first week was garrett jones versus geo gonzalez which is a a matchup that you know shift or no shift is probably not going to work out well for garrett jones because he doesn't hit left handers so that right that just made it made it an even better play and and it's true. I mean, the worse you are, the worse your offensive production is, the more sense it makes to do this because, you know, the worst the expected outcome from hitting away is. And it used to be that often only the best hitters in baseball were shifted,

whereas now, you know, Ryan Flaherty has shifted again. So if you're Ryan Flaherty, then it makes all the sense in the world to do this. So I think we will start to see it more often. I'm using data from Inside Edge, and they only had 40 of these attempts on record in 2012 and 50 on record last year. So I'm really curious to see how many it will be this year, because shifts were up last year. They seem to be up so far this year. And you just kind of wonder when batters will counter and adjust and stop letting teams get away with this. All right. Question from Chris. I always hear people say that Brian Cashman continues to be a good GM. Looking at the evidence, the Yankees' current team and farm system, I have a hard time

determining how this could be true, at least within the last three or so years. Their cots page is pretty incredible, as it is mostly huge contracts that are either on the back end and getting ugly – out to Rodriguez, Teixeira, Sabathia – or big new free agent contracts to Naka, Ellsbury, McCann, Beltran. Their depth is illustrated by the fact that Kelly Johnson is taking over their first base job while Teixeira is hurt. Likewise, they have no young players who look to be core cost-controlled pieces going forward, and their farm system is very poor. So has Brian Cashman been getting a pass, do you think? I think Sam and I have talked in the past about how he has managed to spin things in such a way that when there is a bad Yankees deal,

Yankees ownership is blamed and not Brian Cashman. And it's hard to attribute blame and credit there. But, you know, I mean, Cashman has won World Series. He won World Series not just with the talent-rich team he took over, but also a team over a decade later. But that team, that World Series winning team, was put together by sort of signing many of the best free agents who were available that winter, which you could look at and say that anyone with a certain amount of money could have gotten that done. So do we give Cashman too much credit other than I give him all the credit in the world just for staying power, for managing to keep this job this long in this market with this ownership group? But as far as putting a team together, do you think he is overrated? Yeah, I mean, as I listen to that string of criticisms, the only one that I would really be sort of tough on Cashman for was the farm system and the fact that they haven't produced a good young player in a while.

I think the fact that their page is littered with, you know, with huge contracts is that's from from ownership. And that's been the Yankees model for a long time. And that's also the response to having a bad farm system is you have to go out and get those guys if you want to uh be competitive so it it really fits with that then you talk about kelly johnson backing up first base does and i mean he's a backup he's i mean yeah they had they had the alex rodriguez situation and they had their first baseman get hurt that's not something that i would would go killing a GM for. I don't think that's the worst thing in the world. Kelly Johnson is not the worst hitter that you could imagine having

as your backup first baseman. But yeah, you used to give the Yankees a pass for the fact that they hadn't produced much talent because you would say, oh, they're a team that trades those kind of guys away and uses their farm system to build it up. But that's not really all that true these days. They do most of their acquisitions by just going out in free agency. It's not like there are a bunch of guys out there that you can say, oh, wouldn't it be nice if he were still a yankee right now

it's been it's been so long since they even really had a trade chip right attractive i mean there's there's montero i guess but and last year i think you want to would have wanted diana navarro to be a yankee but yeah um yeah so i i don't know, obviously, they're a team that has not tended to have high draft picks. And that takes its toll year after year, whether it's because they're winning a lot or because they're signing for agents a lot. They never pick in the top of the draft, really. You have to look at the drafting and the player development, and there have just been so few hits. You'd like to see at least some late-round successes, you know, a Cardinals-style steal here and there in the late rounds. And those have been pretty few and far between lately. Right.

Yeah, and even like a Boston style at the end of the first round in internationally. I mean, it's not like Boston's getting top five picks ever. Right. And it's not like GMs are making the call necessarily on which players to draft. It's more that they're putting the people in place who do make that call and trusting those people. So you could question his judgment on hiring or allowing certain people to stay employed, but not so much his own personal scouting sense. But it's tough to evaluate him. He gets a lot of credit for sort of the supplementary moves, I guess, because it's hard to give him any credit for just signing the best free agent available. He has gotten some credit for, you know, picking up an Eric Chavez or someone, someone who teams have written off and ends up being a productive bench player.

In the last season or two, he's just had to go, the Yankees have had to go to the bench so many times because of injured starters that, I don't know, that it's possible to have enough depth to survive the amount of injuries that they've had. All right. Next question comes from Dan Brooks, who asks, what is a catch? And to answer this question, we have Dan Brooks of Baseball Prospectus and Brooks Baseball. Hello, caller. You were on the air. Actually, I called you. Yeah.

So you have asked us a question that seems deceptively simple. I would have said it was simple last season or any of the previous seasons, but it has proved to flummox Major League umpires so far this year and has been pretty difficult for us to decipher as observers as well. So you've been thinking about what defines a catch and what separates a catch from a non-catch and and what should be the distinction between them. So what have you come up with? Oh, well, I just think that, you know, it'd be interesting to, like, keep a record, you know, of of constantly throughout the season,

just try and come up with what a catch is like today and then next week and then several weeks from now. Because, you know, it's going to change, right? As we get new evidence, you know, like what we would have said a catch was a week ago is very different from what we say a catch is now. And it's sort of being written as we go. And so anyway, you know, so that was my thought. But so, okay, so the ball goes into the glove, right. It's, it's not a catch yet. Right. And we should give a little bit of background. Can you,

can you talk about the play that, that you and I were discussing a little bit earlier today as, as the latest example of this confusion over, over what's a catch and what's, what's a transfer and, and, you know, when a catch becomes a catch. So this was in the Texas, um, Seattle game. and what's a transfer and, you know, when a catch becomes a catch? So this was in the Texas-Seattle game. I can't actually remember all the specifics and who's involved, but the bases are loaded, and there's, like, a comeback grounder to the mound,

and the pitcher sort of flips to the catcher, and, I mean, the runner— it's Aaron Seabier, right, that's the catcher? Yes. And runner it's aaron tibia right it's a catcher yes and and and the runner is out by 40 feet you know um and aaron tibia's foot is on the plate and the ball is in his glove and then because the runner is out by 40 feet and the bases were loaded and it was like come backer to the mound um the natural thing for Aaron Seabee to do next is step off the plate and move, you know, a few feet up the line and then throw the ball at first, right, to make a double play. Right.

So Aaron Seabee goes to take the ball out of his glove. And it was, you know, it's one fluid motion because it's a transfer play. And he doesn't actually drop the ball. He just sort of bobbled it and then catches it again in his hand. And amazingly, you know, even though if you had stopped time at the time at which Aaron Seabee had, well, first of all, we'd all be dead, but then you would have said, oh, clearly the guy's out. And Aaron Seabee actually never drops the ball, but he never actually secures the ball until he completes bobbling it on the transfer attempt.

And so I can't even remember who the runner is, but he's ruled safe, even though he was out by 40 feet. Yes. And so, I mean, all of these plays, you watch them, remember who the runner is but he's ruled safe even though he was out by 40 feet yes and and so i mean all of these plays you watch them and instinctively they seem like catches and it you know it to to quibble over when a catch becomes a catch i mean it's it's almost a gulliver's travels sort of arguing over which end of the egg is the best one to break it on. You know, it's hard to find the distinction here, but the implications, as you and I were discussing, are sort of significant because, you know, when can a runner be confident that a catch has been made?

When you are a base runner and an outfielder seems to catch the ball, do you tag when the ball appears to enter the glove? Because that catch, that what looks like a catch could become a dropped ball if the fielder then drops the ball on the transfer. So it's, you know, it's sort of this weird thing where a thing can be a catch at one moment and then become something else the next moment based on something that happens later in the catching process. Yeah.

I mean, the funny thing. So, so, okay. So first of all, there's going to be, there's like that issue. There's like the, you know, when is it okay to run issue, which, you know, it's easy to sort of dismiss as like, okay, well, that's never going to happen. You know, nobody in the outfield is going to catch the ball and then purposely drop it. But, you know, I feel like I've seen – you see it like three or four times

this season when there's like a soft line drive hit to the shortstop, and they sort of realize if I bat this down instead of catching it, like you need to wait through catching it. You know what I mean? Like it's one of those plays that's sort of like they don't have any time to decide. It's going to their head. And they sort of catch it, but then they realize, oh, God, well, if I drop this, this is an easy double or triple play.

You know what I mean? And I feel like you see that play a couple times a year. And what typically happens in that play is, you know, the batter gets ruled out and, you know, the umpire sort of looks at the shortstop like, don't do that, you jerk. But, you know, I mean, if the rule is you can do that, then that's sort of weird. at, then that's sort of weird. And, you know, I don't know. I just feel like those kind of

things are going to come up and, you know, alright, so umpires are not dumb and they'll be able to deal with those kind of plays. But, you know, then there's also all sorts of... I just feel like there's so much gray area right now in terms of what constitutes a catch.

And, like, when the out is actually recorded that, you know, I feel like we're going to need rules about it. Well, you guys are being sensible. I'll throw in the example of the third out of an inning. A guy, I know you guys like to talk about this on the show with having to show the ball to the umpire do you have to take it out of your glove what if you're gonna you take four steps you're gonna go throw it to a fan and it falls out so how long do we have we have to watch him back to the dugout if he never takes it out of his glove so we we were talking about this earlier on Google chat. You know, so there's that clip that everybody from Boston will immediately recognize.

It's, you know, Fulk has it. He underhands to first, and the Boston Red Sox are the world champions. As soon as Doug Minkiewicz demonstrates that he has clear possession of the ball, you know, like, that would have been a pretty weird call. You know, does Doug Minkiewicz actually have to, like, show the umpire, look, I caught it? And what happens if he doesn't? You know what I mean?

What happens if he has the ball in the glove and throws the glove off in celebration or something? Right. Yeah, that's more or less what he does, right? He takes the glove and he has it in his butt, the ball, but he throws his arms up in the air and, you know, they start hugging and everything like that. But I don't really ever remember him completing the process of the catch. So we understand that this is kind of a trial run. I mean, it would be nice if all the kinks

could have been worked out before actual games mattered and counted. But we, you know, we were told from the beginning, really, that this is sort of a process and, you know, we'll see how it goes and Major League Baseball will adjust based on what happens this season. And it's very likely that we will see this change. Does either of you have a theory on what the ultimate outcome of this will be? How the, how the rules, how the language will be altered so that we can stop having these plays that really, you know, don't conform to what our understanding of what a catch is? Yeah, I think it'll go back. However it's formalized, I think it'll go back a lot closer to what it was. Where that a catch has to do with not taking it out but when your glove is

squeezed around it and that if you take it out on a transfer uh then the umpire will be able to look at that and decide that it was in the process of a person reaching a hand into the glove and taking it out, and that will still be a catch. But I just think that I don't know how you write that down. It's probably going to have to be a lot clearer than whatever I just said, but I think it will look a lot more like the way the rule was interpreted up until this year than what's going on this year, where things that look like obvious catches haven't been ruled that way. If there's one thing we know, it's that Major League Baseball

does not write ambiguously worded rules. That's right. Well, you know, the thing about it is, I think the reason why everybody wanted replay in the first place is because I think one of the most frustrating things as a baseball fan is it's like there's 15 seconds after the play, there's an unambiguous picture that shows that the umpire blew the call. And everybody in the world knows that.

In fact, the umpire, in a lot of cases, just knows he screwed it up. And the manager comes out and he's like, well, are you sure you saw it? And there's no mechanism for correcting errors. And so, you know, really what the point of replay is is to get more calls right. And they're doing that. But then when you start making calls wrong, which everyone can see are plainly wrong, because of rules-wiring, more or less, where it's like you have some rule and it's just poorly worded or poorly defined, and it just needs to be changed.

Clearly, replay is working. It's just not working entirely well right now. And so, you know, it's not making sense for them to go to video and make things worse. You know what I'm saying? Like that's what seems like it's happening right now in some cases. And they should just make it so that umpires don't have to go to video and make things worse. Yes. All right, well, we'll let you go.

Thank you for coming on and making a valiant attempt to answer your own question. No problem. I think it'll be fun to revisit this in, like, two months, and I wonder what we will all say. Yes, I don't doubt it. All right, thanks, Dan. All right, later. All right, so that takes us to this week's sponsored Play Index segment.

Zachary, you are a Play Index user. You're not just a plant. You actually use it yourself. And so you have taken on the responsibility of Play Indexing for us this week. So what have you come up with? for us this week. So what have you come up with? Sure. Well, this is it's sort of an extension of some fun I was having with the play index when I did the article about Australian baseball and how Australian baseball has been really good at sending pitchers over to to the United States and to the major leagues, but but not so much in position players. And so one of my favorite elements of the play index is that you can do any search you want and then do a sort by place of birth. You can screen for, filter for a place of birth,

whether it's a country or pick the United States and then pick a state. So when I was writing in Texas, I did a big article about Texan born players and trying to make a best of team of guys from Texas. So I wanted to be able to keep using that feature. And one of the things I thought about was something that I think Jason and Mike Farron or Jason and Kevin talked about on their podcast, which is this sort of typecasting of Dominican born pitchers to be relievers, that the Dominican pitchers

come over to the U.S. and sort of the thought that there might be some lazy evaluation going in there and that the Dominicans are much more likely to be relief pitchers. And we can definitely leave the sort of the why of all that to someone who's a little more familiar with that environment down in the Dominican, whether it's the way guys get scouted is just through velocity mostly and just big arms. And those guys tend to go to the bullpen or what it is. But mostly I'm curious about whether or not that shows up in the numbers. And if so, is it trending back toward the U.S. trend or is it trending toward an even higher percentage of

relievers now? And so I went into play index and I'll walk you through this a little bit. Went to pitching season finder from 1901 to 2014, which is considered the AL era, the time that we had both the American League and the National League although we'll see in a minute that we don't need nearly all those years because there were no Dominican-born pitchers in the majors for about half of that time. And then to distinguish who's a starter and who's a reliever I went over to pitchers role and clicked started 50% of games and then went down to place of birth is Dominican Republic. And up at the top, just at the top of the search

form, I did find seasons with players matching criteria. So what that means is it won't give you the pitchers. It will just give you the years. It will say like in 1997, X number of pitchers born in the Dominican Republic made 50 percent or more of their appearances as starters. So you can sort that either by number or by time. So you can either rank them or be able to see how things have changed through time. So I got to the next page and did just a sort by year. And then you can click on the CSV, which is comma separated values, and put that into Excel or whatever your data analysis tool of choice is. So I did that for both Dominican starters and Dominican relievers. And then I took the place of birth criteria off because there have been through time, there have been more pitchers, you know, a higher percentage of

pitchers in 2013 were relievers than they were in 1924. So I just needed to make sure that what we were seeing was actually a trend in Dominican pitchers and not just the trend in all pitchers across baseball. So I put everything, all four of those things into a spreadsheet, Dominican starters, Dominican relievers, all starters, and all relievers. And the first thing we saw is that up through the 1950s, there were no Dominican pitchers in baseball. So we can really start in about the 1960s, or if we want to wait until there are consistently double digits every year,

we have to go to about the mid 1980s otherwise you're i mean there were 100 in 1968 but that's because there was only one right so um the trend has been uh it's definitely been decreasing uh the percentage of start of Dominicans who were starting pitchers. In 2010, the game of baseball was 33 percent starting pitchers. There were 211 pitchers in 2010 who made a majority of their appearances as starters, and there were 426 who made the majority of their appearances as relievers. So 33% of pitchers were starters. That same year, there were 11 Dominican pitchers who were starters and 60 Dominican pitchers

who were relievers. Wow. So that was 15% compared to the 33% across baseball. But, and that was the low point. Back in 1998 was the last time it was actually higher than than the major league percentage, where 40 percent of Dominicans were starters and 39 percent of pitchers across baseball were starters. So from about 98 through about 2010, it's been decreasing. But since then, it's it's been on the rise. It went from 15% in 2010 to 23% in 2011 to 27% in 2012.

So a pretty big jump there from 15% to 27% in two years. And then last year 28 percent and then so far this year which is a number that I don't really trust 38 percent I think that number is going to change although it's been it was 38 percent among all pitchers and last year for a full season it was 35 so I expect all pitchers to go back down to about that 35 percent level being starters. So we've seen in the past three or four years a reversal of that trend. And I don't know if it's been sort of an industry-wide awareness that this is happening and guys, teams trying to be a little bit smarter about it, or if it's sort of a fluky trend, or if it has to do with just this current crop of pitchers, or if it's the fact that starters are throwing 100 now too, so why not?

But I just think it's interesting that for about a consistent 12 years from the mid-90s on, it was decreasing by percentage of starters, and now it's on its way back up again. Yeah, that is interesting. I wonder if your Dono Ventura is sort of an example of this reversal, where he was talked about as a relief candidate, not a big guy, sort of a very hard thrower, and maybe wasn't originally very mechanically sound. And so the discussion was, do you put him in the back of the bullpen or do you start him? And for now, the Royals are starting him. It seems like he holds his velocity fairly well,

and he has improved his mechanics in some of his secondary stuff, and it seems like he can certainly hack it as a starter for now. So you might as well use him as one. That's interesting. I wonder, I don't know whether it has anything to do with the fact that all starters aren't going as deep into games, and so there isn't as much of a difference maybe between a starter and a reliever, although relievers are now going less than an inning at a time, so the gap has probably stayed about the same. I know, I don't know of

anything major that would have changed in the culture as far as how guys are developed. Maybe it's just that lots of teams have Dominican academies now and signing guys or scouting guys younger and younger and maybe have a better sense of what they're capable of or what their development is, as opposed to when you're just looking at a showcase or you're just watching some guys try out and seeing how hard they can throw, basically, without worrying about whether their mechanics are sound or whether they have a breaking ball or a changeup. I wonder whether that will continue. So that's the Baseball Reference Play Index segment for this week.

whether that will continue. So that's the Baseball Reference Play Index segment for this week. Please subscribe to the Play Index. Use the coupon code BP to get the discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription. All right, let's wrap up with a couple more questions. Let's take this question from Dan, a different Dan, who says, I've been a Tigers fan since the early 90s, and after a solid decade of terribleness,

these last 10 years have been amazing. But now as I look at the aging roster, the Cabrera extension, and the Barron farm system, I'm beginning to realize that we are the 2017 Phillies, right? I mean, it's just about certain that in four to five years, we're going to be where the Phillies are now, with a painful rebuild in store, possibly made worse by a slowdown in the pizza money once our wonderful owner passes control of the team to a new generation. I know that flags fly forever, but how can I learn to live in the moment with the great team we have now and ignore the impending doom of the last half of this decade? So do you have any encouragement to offer Dan? Is the doom impending? And if so, how should he treasure the winning moments he has left?

I mean, the Angels are the Phillies. I've lost track of the analogy of the years, but the Angels are the Phillies, too, if they don't take a pick at the end of the first round and get Mike Trout out of it. I mean, there are things that can change the fortune of your franchise, and that's a hell of a lottery ticket to be banking on. You don't bank on that kind of thing. But there's a lot, there's a real lot that can change between now and when it looks like doom. And you just, you never know whether this owner gets even more desperate,

whether there becomes a new owner who has even more money. I mean, what if, you know, what if someone like Dan Gilbert gets involved? You don't know what what that era will look like. I'm silly to be projecting ownership into the future right now, but there are just so many things that can change. ownership into the future right now. But there are just so many things that can change. But I understand the point that, yeah, on paper, this looks like with a lack of top prospects and the aging direction of this franchise, that it's something that you'll have to soak it all in now. Yes, there is an unmistakable odor of doom, which I, you know, maybe motivated the Cabrera extension to some extent when you look at where the Tigers would be without Cabrera a couple years from now and it could be ugly and so maybe that's why

they wanted to make that move possibly before they had to or at least without getting a major discount just because if he were to walk away things could get ugly fast whereas if he were to stay things could still get ugly, but maybe not quite as quickly. So, you know, I mean, it is hard to predict. And there are certainly scenarios we could concoct, I think, where the Tigers manage to remain a contender. And you probably, you know, you have to have more faith in Dave Dombrowski, probably, than you would in Ruben Amaro to somehow pull something out of his hat here. But if things do go downhill, at least you can treasure the good times, right? You got to see

Justin Verlander and Miguel Cabrera in their prime and Max Scherzer and Prince Fielder and many other great players and winning teams. So no one gets to win forever. Do you think the Prince trade was an acknowledgement that doom is coming and that they are at least going to do something to try to head it off? I don't know whether the money saving was motivated by necessity or by a desire to sort of retrench and have some kind of youth movement going while the team is still competitive. We didn't really see the follow-ups to those moves that maybe we were expecting when they were made, but maybe there are dominoes still to fall. And you just hope you get more than the Phillies did when they traded away Cliff Lee. Right. Last question from friend of the podcast, Eric Hartman. He asks, what is the next year that the AL East will not be considered the toughest division in baseball?

And he didn't ask, but I will add an addendum to that. When that year comes, what is the division that will displace it? That's a great question. Yes. I mean, how long has it been now that we could say that the AL East has been the reigning toughest division in baseball? I mean, is it going on two decades? Boy, I did know this at one point, and I think it's close to one decade where every... I mean, do you add up the wins is that right it's hard to it's hard to come up with a metric for this right because the al east is always gonna feel stronger than it is just because it has the the marquee the the two marquee teams of of the sport at least from uh

from the attention that they get outside their markets probably. But I think it's going on 10 years. And the last five years, they've been 30 or more games over 500, something like that. So don't quote me on the exact numbers, but it's not an illusion that the past several years it has been the American League East. And one, but another way to interpret it is if you are not the number one team, which is the hardest division to win, and that could be just the team that has, like if the Dodgers just are a powerhouse this year or next year,

do you consider a team where you have to beat out one 100-win team tougher than a division where you have to beat out maybe three 85-90-win teams. Right. Yeah, if I had to pick a division to usurp that title, I mean, I guess the AL West makes some sense just because there are teams that have big payrolls there, and you've got the Astros coming along with their young talent, and you figure that the Angels and the Rangers and the Mariners will continue spending or have the potential to spend. And, of course, the A's have a front office that has proven to find value year after year, and their ballpark situation can only get better. So I guess if I had to pick one, it would be the West. Yeah. The only other one I would consider

would be the the NL Central yes that's what I was going to say yeah right because you know you've got the Cardinals who seem to be just a perpetual victory machine and you've got the Reds who have been competitive for a while now and you've got the Pirates who seem to be well run and have some young talent and of course you have the best team in baseball don't forget them milwaukee brewers of course who sam and i picked as as like the least likely team to win a world series and yes and then you've got the cubs who seem to have a plan and and young talent coming along so so those would be my picks and we got through this whole answer without actually picking a year i was hoping you wouldn't say that. Usually I'm not the one to call attention to our non-answers,

but do you have a year in mind? 2017. I think it's going to be sooner than you think. Okay. Sounds reasonable to me. It might. And if I were going to miss on one side of that, I would say even maybe 16.

All right. Well, that wraps up an extra long episode of Effectively Wild. Thank you for filling in today. Yeah, thanks for having me. This was fun. And please, everyone, start sending emails for next week at podcast at baseballperspectives.com. Please join the Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash Effectively Wild, where there is an ever-growing community. And please rate and review the show on iTunes and subscribe to the show on iTunes.

Helps us add new listeners, and it's always appreciated. So thanks for listening. We will be back with a new show tomorrow. Hi, you've reached Dan Brooks. Leave me a detailed message, and I'll call you right back. Hi, Dan Brooks. We were attempting to call you to speak to you for a podcast, but you weren't here.

Bye. I should have said hi. That was rude of me.