Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 521: The Rusney Castillo Contract

Episode Date: August 25, 2014

Ben and Sam take the Ice Bucket Challenge and then discuss the signing of new Red Sox center fielder Rusney Castillo.

Good morning and welcome to episode 521 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives presented by the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg of Grantland.com. Ben, how are you? Wet. So I apologize to everybody for this. Ben and I, we were both ice bucket challenged and so Ben did it. We were both ice bucket challenged by BP colleagues, or in my case, maybe semi-former BP colleagues. You mean semi-former because I'm about to fire Daniel Rathman?

Yes, for challenging you, and my challenger was Jo-Am Rahi. So you did it. You're currently dripping. I'm about to do it. And we'll get it taken care of. It'll be over soon, everybody. Sorry. All right. So I'm about to go. Here we go. All right. I'm outside in the morning. Not so bad. I thought you were doing it live. Not so bad. I recorded my water cascade too. So this will be a short podcast because we're cold.

So, all right. So, Ben. Yeah. Are we going to challenge anybody? Do you want to jointly challenge? Yeah, we will. We're kind of, I guess, uncomfortable with the whole idea of challenging. We don't want to put people on the spot, even if it's for a good cause.

You know, people do their own charity things, and there's a lot of pressure that comes along with being challenged, as we found out. So we are going to challenge listeners of this podcast, faithful listeners of this podcast long-time listeners frequent emailers frequent facebook commenters their reward for sticking with us for so long is that we are now gonna put them on the spot to dump a bucket of water on themselves cold water so my three are going to be ericman and Matt Trueblood and Scott Holland. All right. I will challenge official scorer John Chenier. I will challenge Eli of the Reliever League.

Eli, who we're all rooting for. I don't have a third one. Okay. So that's that. All don't have a third one. Okay. So that's that. All right. That's that. All right. So a lot of banter today and a topic that's maybe more like banter.

So a couple things. First, Ben, did you see the Astros yesterday abandon their dugout in the middle of a game? No. I guess that they were going to have a team meeting in the middle of a game or pep talk or a chewing out or something of the sort. And so they left the dugout. They all left the dugout and they went into the tunnel, I guess, behind the dugout out of view of the cameras. And I just thought that was interesting because these guys, their job is to perform baseball in front of people. And yet, presumably because they didn't want the camera to be on them while they were being whatevered, they left.

They left the camera. And that seems interesting. Like it feels like in one sense, baseball is trying to show us more of the game, you know, more camera angles, microphones all over the field, sometimes microphones on the umpires or on the players, interviews mid-game. They really want us to feel like we are as close to the game as we can possibly be. And on the other hand, the players in this generation,

not generation, in this era, have so much attention on them and are aware so much of how much can be seen by cameras. And we've seen that with, for instance, pitchers having controversies over smudges on them and everything. They're very well aware that there are 70 cameras on them at all times, are kind of revolting at that. In this case, revolting by leaving the field of play, leaving the cameras, like hiding from us in the middle of a game. And I don't think I can recall that ever.

I can't recall ever seeing that. I can't recall seeing an entire team flee the cameras to sort of find the one spot in the house, to use real-world TV show world terms to find the one spot in the house where there are no cameras where they can go off and be alone no I can't recall an entire team doing that it's

one step from forfeiting yeah it is yeah so maybe that's the anyway I wonder if we'll see more of it I guess I would. I don't... I guess I would say I don't like it. I would like to see cameras in the tunnel, to be honest.

Yeah, cameras everywhere. Yeah, there ought to be cameras in the tunnel. I guess it might be somewhat awkward. I mean, the tunnel is also where their toilet is. The toilet's not in the tunnel, but the toilet is right off the tunnel. And so it might be awkward to... I mean, if we were able to count how many times every player went to the bathroom, we would do that, and that might be awkward.

So maybe you shouldn't have the camera on the tunnel. But anyway, all right. Maybe you shouldn't have the camera on the tunnel. But anyway, all right. Second thing, I'm rereading, well, I'm reading the updated, the 2009 updated version of You Gotta Have Wa, the book about Japanese baseball. And I just came across this line that will be very fitting to us and to Robert Arthur. All right. Whiting writes, Matsui was such a perfectionist,

talking about Hideki Matsui, Matsui was such a perfectionist that he once telephoned his former manager and mentor back in Tokyo to have him listen to the sound of the bat as Matsui swung it. Did it cut through the air with the proper whoosh he wanted?

So not even crack of the bat. He wanted to know whoosh of the bat. So that would be something that Rob Arthur could look at. Yeah. Seems surprising that that sound would make it through an international call. You say surprising. I say unrealistic. Yeah.

I say it sounds like crazy talk. Yeah, I think so. Maybe he just needed some positive reinforcement. Yeah. So, yeah. The whoosh. The whoosh of the bat. The whoosh of the bat is a phrase that I would like to get going.

So I think that you will likely start seeing that in articles that I write. I would like to have three whoosh of the bat references in the next 18 months. It's my goal. That's doable. Finally, speaking of things that are not real, I was at a ball game on Friday and I talked to a player with a phyton necklace. So I asked him, hey. I'm sure there were many.

I said, hey, does that work? And he said, yeah, it does. I mean, you've got to believe in it. And I said, so like, and I'm not trying to be a jerk. I thought he was actually saying that it was just sort of a comfort thing. I said, so like if you had like a lucky rock or something and he goes, no, not like that. I mean, it, it really does. You know, he was arguing that it really does work. And, um, the example that he, well, the thing that really knocked me out was when he said, and keep in mind, these are things

that are not real at all. He said that, in fact, they're so powerful that if he sleeps with them on his wrists, he wakes up sore because there's too much energy in them. It's too much that it's doing. And so he had to stop sleeping in his fighting necklaces

because they're just too powerful for a man's subconscious. Huh. What possessed you to ask this particular player when you could ask almost any player given that so many of them wear them? It wasn't a major league game. So I was just standing outside. We were standing outside before the game, like waiting for something to happen,

waiting for somebody to come out. And we're, there were like four people and we're just sort of sitting lazily. So we had, time was on my side, I guess you would say. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Good, good marketing by fighting. Uh-huh. Yeah. Um, all right. No. All right. So I wanted to talk about Rusne. Rusne or Rusne? I've heard Rusne, but I am far from an expert on the subject. All right. Good. Let's talk about who you're far from an expert on. I wrote about him for today, so I know some things, but one of them is not how to pronounce his name correctly. Oh, excellent. I didn't even know that you'd written something about him.

All right. So Rusne Castillo, the Cuban import signed by the Boston Red Sox for $72 million over six years and perhaps a couple of weeks. Is that his contract? Yes. Basically, it's six years starting next year, plus they have him this year if he's ready to contribute and if his visa issues get sorted out, he can contribute for the rest of this year. And he can opt out of the last year.

And yeah, including 2014 as a year not only lets him play if he's able to sort that stuff out and if they want him to play, but it brings down the average annual value of the contract, which matters maybe for luxury tax purposes. Yeah, it matters. Yeah, okay. What do you mean he can opt out of the final year? There's an opt out.

It's like he can opt out of the final year, whatever, 2020. opt out of the final year, whatever, 2020. He can choose to take the, I think, $13.5 million it is for that last year or become a free agent. Okay. Well, gee, since you wrote about him, tell me what to think about this. What did you write about? What was your point? I wrote a little bit about him just based on talking to some people and then i and then i wrote about what what it means that this is the the largest contract that an amateur has signed

what it means that that he made more than abreu and abreu made more than puig and puig made more than cispedes and uh and what this progression is telling us. So I guess I spoke to a couple international scouting directors who had seen him, um, and had seen a lot of video on him and read reports on him. And, uh, they were, they were not members of the Red Sox organization and they were, they didn't really think that he merited this kind of contract, that they said he is more of a fourth outfielder, backup outfielder type, definitely not an above average player. what they had seen, didn't think he even had the upside of Cespedes that they wouldn't have put, or at least one of them wouldn't have put a 40 or $50 million valuation on him. And he ended up getting quite a bit more than that. So that's somewhat interesting, but it's also interesting that people said exactly the same things about Puig, certainly. And to a lesser extent, Abreu, there was talk about how the Dodgers offered a Puig.

It was crazy, quoting someone in a Ben Battler Baseball America piece. And there was all this consternation in the industry about why they were spending so much on this guy that no one had really seen. about why they were spending so much on this guy that no one had really seen. And of course, that's turned out to be one of the friendliest, team friendliest contracts in baseball now. And so people have seen, I think, that even the highest paid Cuban free agents in the last couple of years have been great deals by the standards of domestic free agents. And so this is inflation. This is a rise in prices and a greater willingness to pay for these guys. And so the question is, at what point, I guess, it becomes a bubble or at what point teams

are just paying for Cuban guys because recently Cuban guys have been a really good bet but maybe maybe there aren't a whole lot of Puigs and Abreus still left and becoming available so one of the scouting directors was telling me that that you know teams are kind of doing the copycat thing focusing on Cuba but they're getting in kind of late and at this point if you're just really heavily getting into that market, maybe you've already missed out on the best players or certainly the best deals. And so that's kind of going on here too, that this might no longer be such a great deal as it has been in the last few years as teams have sort of funneled money into Cuba because they can't spend on international guys that are limited

and they can't spend in the draft, and free agents are not becoming free agents as often, or at least at attractive ages because of all the extensions. So the Red Sox signed him, and according to ESPN, these are the teams that were the finalists to sign him. The Red Sox, the Tigers, the Phillies, the Yankees, and the Giants. That's four top five payrolls, and then the Giants, who are, I think, seventh. Is it generally just a pretty good idea that the bargain,

or maybe, it depends how you want to look at it. If you want to look at it as that the bubble has developed, that we have reached the bubble point, or if you want to look at it as there was an inefficiency, that the inefficiency is gone. Is it generally a good assumption that when the top five payroll teams are signing the guys that the bargain is gone. Yeah, probably. And I'll read part of a quote from one of the scouting directors that'll be in my piece at Grantland at some point. He said, it's already begun. You might not be hearing about it because a lot of them aren't making it stateside or they aren't big enough names, but I go down to the Dominican and everybody's got a Cuban now. And no matter what the name next to the Cuban guy is, if he's Cuban, I'll have to go see him. The majority of them, I go, oh yeah, I can get that guy from Tulane in the 22nd round for $1,000.

And they want $600,000 for the guy because he's Cuban. And if I were an agent showcasing these guys, I would be doing the same thing because history has started to show us that those guys either do better or you just attach the Cuban thing next to them and they become more valuable. So I don't, I mean, I'm sure there were plenty of other teams that were interested or that could have used someone like this, but maybe the fact that those are the teams that were reported is a reflection of the fact that the bidding was very competitive. And yeah, maybe the teams that might have seen an inefficiency here and wanted to spend in an area where they could spend and compete and get a lot of bang for their buck are priced out of the market now. So how in the world do we explain that there was ever an

inefficiency in the first place? It's not as though Cuba is this country that nobody's ever heard of. It's not as though nobody had seen a Raldus Chapman pitch or a Yohannes Cespedes barbecue a pig. These were guys who were well scouted. They had been competing in various international events in their career. They had big physical tools. They came from a country that has a 50-year history of churning out baseball talent. And it's hard to imagine, and they were free agents in a system that didn't really have any restrictions on what people could bid on them. So it's really hard to imagine why there was ever an inefficiency.

It does seem sort of strange to think that, like, I mean, so the Yankees, the opposite of the Yankees, the A's signed Cespedes and they were the runner-up for Chapman. up for Chapman. And it's weird to think that there was this time where the A's would be spending more on anything than anybody else would without it being something really creative or really under the radar or really risky. And this doesn't seem to have been really any of those. So why weren't the Yankees and the Red Sox just signing these guys all along? And why aren't they all getting paid exactly what they're worth? What possible artificial restriction could there be on their market value? I guess it was mostly just risk aversion, just not wanting to commit a certain number of dollars to players that you hadn't seen all that much. I mean, even just a few years ago, I think it was harder to get video. Now there are more streams, Internet streams of Cuban baseball broadcasts,

and teams kind of collect those, although they obviously still feel that they need to see the player in person before they commit many millions of dollars to him. But, I mean, Puig was kind of different in that people really hadn't really conducted a workout or he sort of conducted a workout but it was sketchy and he wasn't there when he was supposed to be and lots of people didn't see him and so there really was very little information about him at least at least for some teams so you can sort of understand it with the other guys i don't know I guess it was just a, I mean, even the ones people did see, they weren't seeing as much as, say, probably even a draft pick that they would take high in a draft. You know, they might have followed around college or high school.

And the competition wasn't, the competition isn't that great. And so maybe that's, that's how you end up with guys like Abreu getting this reputation for having a long swing or a slow bat or something. It seems like just because they didn't really need to have a quick bat so much because people didn't really throw that hard. And so maybe it's hard to project whether they then will be able to catch up to major league pitching when you haven't really seen them do that or you've seen them do that just for an at-bat or two in the World Baseball Classic.

And maybe it's, I don't know, maybe it was hard to convince owners to do it. Maybe there were baseball operations people who were happy to do it, but they couldn't convince owners to spend all that money on a relatively unknown player. But yeah, in retrospect, it seems hard to understand, but I don't really remember. I mean, when these players were signed, did the internet community question it? Was there a whole lot of, why aren't these guys going for three times more than that? I don't remember all that much of that. Yeah, everybody's always freaked out by every new salary milestone.

And I remember, for instance, writing the explanation of the – I'm crying when you bend. What is it called? The curse. You know, the buyer's curse. Winner's curse. Winner's curse. There you go.

Yeah. I remember using winner's curse as the peg of the Eraldis Chapman signing. So, yeah, I don't – It wasn't seen as that, but we're not... I mean, we didn't know anything. We're not the teams. We hadn't scouted these guys. So the velocity thing really seems significant.

I mean, I... When... For instance, I was at the Area Code Games and I was talking to somebody about the showcase schedule during the offseason and how they keep having showcases in the winter and why it's necessary, why you don't get to see enough of these guys in the spring. And somebody told me that for pitchers, it's not actually a big deal.

You just need to see a pitcher throw. But they have to invite the pitchers to the showcase because the whole point is that scouting directors wanna see what the hitters can do against velocity and a lot of years won't face anybody who throws ninety during the high school season they might not face anybody who throws eighty-two and it's just impossible to scout a hitter or and you know trying to assesses major league future if all you're seeing

him face is 82. And so you need to basically, you need to force these guys onto the same field whenever you can so that the hitter, you can see the hitters. And so it does seem like that's a tremendously challenging scouting feat to scout hitters who aren't seeing 95. And so then that makes me wonder, okay, about Castillo. Puig is obviously a lot younger. Most Cubans, when they come over, are a bit younger.

Not all of them are, though. Cespedes wasn't much younger, for instance. So do you think that there's anything particularly risky, though, about signing a guy who's basically 28 and doesn't have the years of, like, kind of, I don't know, training against that stuff? Do you think that there's a point where it's just simply too late for your brain to adjust to 95? Maybe, yeah. I don't know. to 95 maybe yeah i i don't know we've we've seen puig and and even abreu adjust pretty quickly and and i mean puig chases outside the strike zone much less often than he did last season

uh he's walking more often those those complaints about his undisciplined approach haven't really held up and i don't know whether that is because he's much younger or because he's just so skilled that he would have done it anyway. So I don't know. The fact that that he is that Castillo is 27 will be 28 next year is is kind of a cause for concern. Like if he were if he were ready right now, it wouldn't be so worrisome that the contract will be over when he's 32, 33. But if he takes a couple of years to adjust, then yeah, that is kind of bad because then by the time he adjusts, he's on the downside already. Or you're right, maybe he passes some threshold where it's harder to adjust. So that's kind of a concern, yeah.

Yeah, I'm not even so much thinking adjust as just doesn't, never has the skill. Like, you know, that he has missed his chance to develop this. But I guess it's, I don't know, there's probably nothing to it, right? Because like Abreu is what, a year younger than he is? And I don't know, are there other examples of, is there any other example of a guy who, well, so I guess what's the velocity difference between

the US and Japan? It's not nearly as great as the velocity difference between Cuba and the US, right? I wouldn't think so. But it's still not insignificant. And we've seen Japanese hitters come over and some of them have struggled, but not all of them have struggled and they've struggled it seems like for different reasons. So yeah, it's probably nothing. I'm probably making too much of it or actually now that I'm making nothing of it at all, I'm probably making just enough of it. It is interesting that the players that have, the ones that we think of, the

big three, basically, Cespedes, Puig, and Abreu, it is interesting that there's essentially been no adjustment period. We saw that Puig changed his approach, but he was amazing from day one. He was amazing in spring training. He was wild at the plate, but incredibly effective. It's not like we've seen him get better. He's just been phenomenal all along. Abreu has been insanely good from day one. And Cespedes never really got better. He arguably was at his best in his rookie year. And that's, I don't know, that seems interesting.

Doesn't that seem odd? Like, wouldn't you expect there to be some curve? Yeah, well, there was talk about how those guys might need to spend time in the minors, and Puig did briefly. It's not really clear whether he needed to, though. But that was, I think, the expectation, that there would be some adjustment period. And for those guys, there hasn't been. But maybe it's dangerous to just base everything off of those three guys who were maybe the most talented guys in the country. So maybe they were able to adjust because of that.

But we've seen some other. Can you name a player, though, that adjusted otherwise? Can you name a player who came over, struggled, looked lost, and then over the course of three years, like you might expect from a college draft pick or whatever, became very good? Not off the top of my head. Yeah.

I mean, I can't really either. But maybe we're not just thinking hard enough. Let's see. What was Yunil Escobar's? When did he, because he was good from his rookie year, but maybe he spent three years in the minors. He spent two years in the minors. But he was young. I mean, that was an age when he should have spent two years in the minors. It's not like he came over at 27 or anything. Kendry Morales took some time. He had a, well, he actually he was a different one.

He was extremely good when he came over in the minors and then sort of stalled for a couple years. But he was also very young. He was very young too, yeah. Well, I don't know. Maybe there haven't been all that many guys in this age group yet.

Just not that big a sample of 27, 28-year-old Cuban guys recently, maybe. All right. So last thing, Ben. The Red Sox, of course, more than any big market team and more than almost any other team, have been sort of vocally opposed to long-term deals. If they signed a free agent to a seven-year deal or even a six-year deal right now, we would be very surprised by it. If they went out and signed John Lester, for instance, for six years, we'd be like, whoa, that's against what we expect the Red Sox to do.

The fact that they signed this guy for six years, the Red Sox would do. The fact that they signed this guy for six years, is that enough information to conclude that they think that these guys are still vastly undervalued? That they're not just defensible signings, but that Castillo is still well underpaid if they're willing to go six years for him? Yeah, I think so. And they certainly did a lot of work following this guy for the last few years. And they sent eight scouts, someone reported, to his workout. And then they had a private workout with him. And even the people I spoke to who weren't that high on Castillo were very quick to give the Red Sox credit for doing research and probably for knowing the player better than they did.

So although they wouldn't have paid him that much, they were not willing to really criticize the Red Sox for paying him that much because they sort of figured that the Red Sox had their reasons. So yeah, in the last couple of years since the 2012 collapse, the Red Sox haven't signed or traded for anyone i think who would put them on the hook for more than three years victorino was a three-year deal and when they traded for craig that was he had three years guaranteed left and so this is effectively twice that or just about and i guess the it's a combination of the fact that he's fairly young.

So he's 27. So by the time this deal expires, by the time it's over, or by the time he opts out, he'll be younger than Victor Reno will be next year. He'll be either the same age or a year older than Craig will be at the end of his guaranteed years. So it's not like they're going much deeper into the 30s for this guy. It's still sort of the same ending range that they've shown themselves to be willing to

accept. And yeah, maybe they just do feel that even though the bidding was driven up, that it's worth it in this case, that it's still such a, a below market deal that they're making it up anyway. Cause I mean, if he, if he does become even an average player, this will be a perfectly fine deal. Uh, if he becomes an above average player, it could be an excellent deal. So you can understand that too. Alexi Ramirez, another guy whose best year as a hitter was his first year. Mm-hmm.

You know what I mean? Yeah. It's interesting. Uh-huh. I'm looking for others right now. And basically those are all, we've named pretty much all the Cubans who signed somewhat old and were good that are currently active. Uh-huh. Okay. All right.

We are going to go dry off. So that is the end of this podcast. Please support our sponsor, Baseball Reference, by going to baseballreference.com. Subscribe to the Play Index using the coupon code BP to get the discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription. And please send us emails for this week's listener email show at podcast at baseballperspectives.com.

We will be back tomorrow.