Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 543: The GM-for-Top-Prospect Trade

Episode Date: September 26, 2014

Ben and Sam banter about the most famous players, then talk about the relative value of top prospects and elite executives.

Good morning and welcome to episode 543 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus presented by the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I am Ben Lindberg of Grantland.com, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Prospectus. Hello. Lowest energy introduction ever. this hello lowest energy introduction ever i'm staring out the window at a rainy day in manhattan contemplating the many many hours ahead of me at cheater fest tonight hey ben i want to ask you a question this was a diamondbacks headline a week ago okay and i just want to get your assessment of the quality of the pun. Okay.

Mark Trumbo struck out four times in this game. Okay. What do we call a four-strikeout game? Golden Sombrero. So this is Golden Trumbrero. Oh, I was wondering if that could be it. Is the MB, because the only similarities between those, the only way you can make that a... And an O. No, no, well, I was going to say

it's the M-B. Yeah. In the middle. Right. So you can mash those up into a portmanteau. There is a place where the two words meet in the middle, but is it enough? I don't think it's enough, no. Okay, so we are saying

golden sombrero is not going in the Dixon baseball dictionary? No. Who is responsible for that submission? That's David McCombs, who actually has had a pretty decent run. He won the next day with mile-high meltdown d-backs banished to nl west cellar uh which doesn't sound like much but there was a lot of mile high competition there was rocky mountain low there was uh another rocky mountain low there was yet another Rocky Mountain low. There was mile-high losing streak. And there was, and I like this one, Rocky Mountain sigh. Okay, well, compared to that, maybe Golden Trumbrero is pretty decent.

Yeah, it just doesn't. Unless he struck out in exceptionally high leverage situations, it's unlikely that that would rise to the level of a headline. Just like, for instance, Giants take huge step to playoffs in Arizona, also probably wouldn't. And also like close but no cigar probably is generally not specific enough. No, probably not. Okay, before we start,

I wanted to ask you about this Jeter Q score thing. There was a story in Time about the standard baseball is doomed because no one has ever heard of a baseball player other than Derek Jeter. And so when Derek Jeter's gone, no one will be talking about baseball. No one will know any baseball players. And this has been brought up before in the New Yorker and other places. This one actually included some numbers from the Q-Score company. And according to the Q-Score company, Jeter owns the second highest Q score which is a

general favorability rating and I guess also incorporates just how do you know this person have you heard of this person Jeter trails only Peyton Manning among athletes in the U.S. population wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait yes derrick jeter is the second most famous u.s athlete yes more than tiger woods evidently impossible not possible ben i don't know not possible impossible tiger's had a rough few years jeter's having a great year. This is Q score, though. This is not, I mean, that helps him. The roughness of the years has arguably made him more famous, right? I don't know. Maybe the Q score company doesn't think golf is a sport.

Send me a link to this. Okay. There isn't really much more detail about it than that, but I have sent you a link. So there's not a whole there's not a full rundown of all the players no but according to this the only two baseball players who have are recognized by more than half of the u.s population are jeter and a rod and a rod i'm guessing does not have a high favorability rating. He's not in the top 15, which we don't know other than Jeter and Manning. So, and Henry Schaefer, there's a quote from this

executive VP at Qscore who says, baseball players aren't even on the national radar for the general population. They're just not out there like players from other sports. Oh, I see. So it says here that, okay, you might have said this, but in this it says that a Q score, in quotation marks, it says he owns the second highest Q score, a generally favorable rating or a general favorability rating. So this is not recognition. I suppose not. It's favorability. Yeah, right. Or I guess it's a combination of both because you have to be recognized by half the population also. Yeah, it looks like there's a filter, a recognition filter, but then what they're saying he's number two in is favorability. Okay, so this maybe is not that different from the usual ratings discussion where baseball, you know, a tight playoff game is outrated by a regular season football matchup between two bad football teams and everyone says that baseball's dying because no one's watching it. And then there is a wave of people who respond to that and say that while baseball is not the ratings juggernaut that football is, it is quite strong compared to just about everything else.

And that it's more of a regional game with strong local ratings that don't really translate to the national stage so well. So maybe the same sort of thing is going on here where you'd have a bunch of baseball players with favorability, high favorability and awareness ratings in local markets, but not so much on the national scale. But is this, I wonder if this is, first of all, is it unusual? Like if, you know, when Jeter came into the league, would there have been more baseball players on this list, do you think? I mean, at that time, I assume Ripken would have been on that list. Maybe Griffey would have been on that list. I think Griffey would have been, yeah.

Maybe Bo Jackson probably, I guess, would have qualified, but sort of for unusual reasons. He would be the exception that proves the rule. Right. And maybe people said this. I don't know whether people said the same thing about Ripken leaving and who's going to take over Ripken's mantle because he was sort of the same face of baseball thing going on at that point. And Jeter came along right at the right time to take that over. So I don't know. There's a quote at the end from this executive VP guy who says that baseball is going to have a very tough time finding the next Derek Jeter.

guy who says that baseball is going to have a very tough time finding the next Derek Jeter. It's going to be like when the NBA was trying to find the next Michael Jordan, which happened, I guess, like pretty, pretty quickly, right? I mean, there have been basketball players who have been on this list. I mean, you get a LeBron or you get a lot of other famous basketball players. So Jordan goes away and someone else comes. And you can imagine the same thing happening in baseball. Maybe there's some young player right now. Maybe it's Mike Trout who goes to the playoffs for his first time ever this year and gets that exposure and maybe gets back a few times and maybe he wins an MVP award.

And suddenly Mike Trout is, is a more of a national figure because he's now the MVP and he's on the playoff stage. And then Mike Trout plays a few more years and, and he becomes, he becomes the high profile baseball player that baseball lacks right now. It's possible to imagine that or some other player going through the same transformation. So I can't decide whether this is something meaningful or not or whether

it always looks like there would be a void after whoever the top guy is right now retires. So let's sketch out over the past, we weren't alive for this, but let's go back to say the 70s. Who, over those 40 years, who would have been in the top name for each kind of period of time? Starting in 70, I guess

probably Hank Aaron would have been. Frank Robinson, Hank Aaron, probably been Frank Robinson Hank Aaron probably not Frank Robinson I'm just thinking of the best players at the time but we're not talking about the best players early mid 70's

we're going with Hank Aaron Jim Palmer was very famous of course but I think Hank Aaron takes it. So then late 70s, Pete Rose did a lot of commercials. Could it have been Pete Rose? Yeah, probably. I would think so. And then early 80s, who would it have been in the early—

Ricky Henderson? Yeah, maybe. who would it have been in the early Ricky Henderson could it yeah maybe I think of Ricky's sort of heyday fame heyday as being like late 80s more than that but I don't know who would have oh well when there was like a

15 year period where it was just Nolan Ryan so probably Nolan Ryan from well it was definitely Nolan Ryan for the probably Nolan Ryan from, well, it was definitely Nolan Ryan for the second half of the 80s. I guess Mike Schmidt probably wouldn't be there. Joe Morgan probably wouldn't be there. I'm just thinking of George Brett, maybe.

Yeah, George Brett, though, Kansas City. Mattingly, maybe mattingly yeah i mean yeah not not early 80s but a little later yeah dave winfield oh well aussie could it have been aussie not probably that probably not until the late 80s there was i think that what i'm thinking is that as we name these guys it seems like's, a lot of these guys we're naming, I think, of as more late 80s going into early 90s. And so you could probably argue that in that five-year period, there might have been a similar void. And then there was this moment where the previous generation and the new generation came together. generation and the new generation came together and you just had it feels like you had a 15 year run of people who would have crossed the 50 threshold like ozzy and like nolan ryan and

like griffey and like bonds and uh like probably greg maddox and mcguire and sosa yeah jose can say go um you know bo jackson like i I said, and Tony Gwynn, certainly. Probably Cal Ripken, like you said. So, yeah, there were probably like nine or ten guys that overlapped with each other somewhat. And right now, yeah, it does feel like there's not only is there not a jeter level guy but there aren't there isn't a whole tier of gwynn level guys at this point either i think that kershaw will cross 50 when he after after he wins the mvp award this year and uh after his postseason i i think he'll easily clear the 50%. I think maybe even more than Trout. He could, well, I don't know.

He and Trout will both be pretty big stars for the next few years. You think so? Yeah. Quigg? Quigg, maybe. Could be. Maybe not unfavorability. Has any non-native English speaker reached this level? We haven't named

one yet except for Sosa. Yeah, you're right. I guess that maybe makes it more difficult. Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it certainly makes it difficult, I would think. Yeah. So, yeah, I don't know. I'm not sure. but I, probably I think Trout and Kershaw will both cross over into, uh, you know, like the, my, my, my mom has heard of them. Yes, I would think so. At this point, she has heard of Trout. I would think so. She's probably read your story on him. She has not heard.

You're doing your part. I'm confident she has not heard of Clayton Kershaw uh-huh you've written about him too not for after espn the magazine she only pays attention to espn she she does not recognize baseball perspective like she said it's behind a paywall that's probably why she can't read it. Has she heard of it at least? She has. That's the 50% rating, Q rating for your parents? She's heard of Baseball Perspectives, yes. She occasionally listens to the podcast.

She's out of the country though, so I don't think she's listening to it right now. Okay. Alright, so today we're talking about an article that Jeff Long wrote for BP. It's up on Thursday, and it's called Buxton or Bean? And it poses the question, would we rather have our team's top prospect or whatever GM we view as the best GM?

Or how would we rank front office brainpower relative to on-the-field talent? And Jeff goes through the history of player for manager trades and player for executive trades. And it's not a long history and it's sort of a skewed sample and doesn't tell us very much. and doesn't tell us very much. There was the Bean trade for Eucalyptus that almost happened or reportedly was being talked about when it looked like Bean was going to go to Boston. And there was Theo being traded to the Cubs from the Red Sox, and he already was with the Cubs. So it's not a situation where maybe the Red sox had a lot of leverage if the guy

wants to leave then you don't have a whole lot of leverage in the trade talks and he goes through the the manager trades too and most of the players traded for managers are just sort of scrubs for the most part and kind of yeah kind of though i mean you have basically Two guys who were either A year removed or two years removed From being an all-star But also guys who were not under team control For a long time Yeah

So that doesn't tell us a whole lot As Jeff mentions And they were not perennial all-stars Yeah, and as Jeff mentions It's not like there is a league-wide auction for these guys where everyone can bid, which would maybe give us a fairer sense of how they're valued. So that doesn't help us a whole lot, the empirical approach. basically his top 101 or his top 83 or his baseball talents that he would put in his prospect list of baseball talents. And those include players and top prospects, and they also include lots of executives. And he puts Billy Bean eighth, for instance, and Andrew Friedman ninth and

Theo Epstein 10th. As he says, he's kind of putting them in tiers more so than one over the other because it's hard to get a precise ranking of how good these people are at their jobs. But the main questions he asks are where on a top 101 prospect list would you put the guy you consider the best GM? Where would you put the best manager on that list? How many GMs and how many managers would appear somewhere on your top 101? And are there factors at play in your decision besides the value relative to prospect value

that you think the best GM and or the best manager provides? the best GM and or the best manager provides. And so I went and looked at those curves that people make of the expected value of top prospects. For instance, Neil Payne at 538 did it this March. Lots of other people have done it, but just looking at the expected war from each position on a top 100 list. In this case, he was looking at Baseball Americas. And when you look at it that way, the hits get mixed in with the misses, and overall, the expectation doesn't seem all that great. Like the number one prospect, whether it be Brian Buxton or whatever,

historically, the expected future value of that guy is as neil writes about 17 wins above replacement over the next seven seasons that's 2.5 war per year which would be solid for a starter but something less than an all-star on average so that's what you're looking at with the top prospect in baseball. So with the top prospect on a team, generally you're looking at significantly less than that because there's, it's a, it's a linear exponential thing where the top prospect is worth a lot more than even the number two prospect in terms of expected value. It tails off very, very quickly. And by the time you get to like the number 20 prospect, which is obviously the top prospect for a bunch of teams or would be, you're down to the

10 war or five to 10 war range in the seasons of team control, which isn't really that much. So if you think that a general manager has a high value over replacement level general manager, then you can pretty easily make the case that you would want the GM over the prospect. You can. And there's a lot going on in this piece. There's a lot to think about. And almost every paragraph, it felt like to me, whether they were things that Jeff himself pointed out to think about, or just things that you would naturally think about, every single one, you could sort of stop and ponder all the different directions of uncertainty that this would go. So one of them, one of the things that I think, you know, I definitely want that guy in the organization. But just looking, you get so many of them, there seem to be so many

of them that you sort of feel like you're not going to run out. Like we've talked about, you wrote about how everybody's smart now, for instance. And right now there are, I don't know, there are some GMs that I don't think are that great at their job, but it's not as though their GMs, it's not as though they have their positions because there's nobody else who can replace them. Their organization just disagrees with me about my assessment of their GMing ability. Maybe it's a philosophical thing, maybe it's an inertia thing, maybe it's a personality thing. But there are certainly, it seems like, let's say there are six GMs that I think should be, I don't know how many there are, but let's say there are six GMs that I think shouldn't have a

job. There are certainly six non-GMs who I think are deserving of a job and from day one would seem like median or better GMs. So the question then really is how much talent do you need at the second tier in the front office? How much talent do you need for your assistant GMs? How much talent do you need for your scouting directors, for your player development directors? Because if you take this further and think, okay, well, we have, say we have eight director level positions or higher going all the way up to maybe team president, then all of a sudden you don't just need 30 of these smart guys. You need 240. And if you think that each of those eight is something like equally valuable to the organization

in terms of the amount of good or damage they can do, then it becomes a much, much, much more difficult thing to fill all those roles across the league. And you might then, in that scenario, if you were drafting these guys, you might then really feel like you have to pick them early before the rest of the league starts scooping up all the talent, lest you be stuck with front office brain talents. I mean, maybe you'll get your GM guy at 25, but then maybe you're, you know, 220 and below for your other seven and you're in trouble.

So that's one big challenge is figuring out how much scarcity there actually is and whether the replacement level for each of these positions in a front office is different, whether the amount of impact, how much different, and whether it's more like having eight specific positions you need filled or whether it's more like when you're drafting your fantasy league, your fantasy team, and you just have five outfielders. You just have to get five, and it doesn't matter whether they're all good or that experience when you're drafting five outfielders, you know, and it doesn't really, you just have to get five and it doesn't matter whether they're all good or, you know, you know, that experience when you're drafting five

outfielders and you just have to fill a whole pool of five outfielders. So even if you have four good ones, it's not like you can go, oh, well, I've got four good ones. Now you have to get a fifth good one too. Um, so that's, that's one challenge. The other thing is that any attempt to place value or to establish the perceived value of these front office guys completely comes up short. I mean, based on any market that you're trying to find, you're going to find real limitations so uh well at least arguably jeff makes the case that for instance salary is not a good guide for how the league um places value on these guys because uh the the nature of the job means that gm sort of he compared it to me in an email he compared it with the president the president for instance for instance, makes less than a replacement level second baseman. Nobody thinks that the president is less talented at what he does or that his

role in the world is less than that guy is. It's just that there are various reasons that a president is willing to work for way less than his market value. One of those is that he's going to make a ton of money after he retires. So you wouldn't conclude that presidents are only worth $450,000 or that anybody could do it. And so that's one thing. And when you start looking as, I liked the idea that Jeff took of looking at the trade value, the established trade value that teams have put on it. You have sample issues and you have various things that make it hard to assess. Like, okay, well, when Theo Epstein was traded, was he the best GM? Or was he like, you haven't even established where he ranks among GMs.

And so that's a tricky thing too um but mostly the problem is that this isn't done and so there's not a uh there's not a full competitive market for another team's gm um because there's a sort of a by custom gms get to be where they want to be. They're not like Major League Baseball players where they're expected to go wherever a team trades them. A GM is going to usually want to work, or the team that employs a GM is going to want that GM to be happy where he is and to be there by choice. And so usually when a manager or a GM gets traded, usually he wants to leave. Usually when a manager or a GM gets traded, usually he wants to leave and this is like trying to get some value out of his departure more than it's trying to cash in a commodity. So it's really hypothetical at this point and very difficult to assess. Anyway, that's a long way of saying that it's hard to answer.

I think everybody has, I think, probably a very different idea of where they would put, um, their favorite GM on a top prospects list. And I've gone back and forth while reading this. I think that, I think that my, I think that I generally agree with where Jeff puts his top guys. And I think I generally start to disagree where he puts the sort of third and fourth tiers. I think once you get past maybe the top six GMs and maybe the top two managers, I'm not sure that I see enough distinction between the rest to put any of them on the top 100. And he also makes the point that maybe you get more lasting value from a GM, from an executive, because if you have a top prospect, even if he pans out and becomes a useful player, you have him under team control for six or seven years,

and then either he leaves or you have to start paying him so much that his surplus value is not nearly what it was before. And maybe you get nothing out of him beyond those years. And a GM maybe institutes some system or process or philosophy that can outlive him, that can stay in place after he leaves for whatever reason. And maybe he can groom other good replacement executives who are young guys who work under him. And maybe he can leave more of a legacy than a player whose contribution to the team is over as soon as he stops playing. Yeah, and you could almost, taking that idea,

you could almost make the case that every good GM is worth more to another team than he is to his current team. If he established this culture in his club, then some perhaps large percentage of his value is now used up and can never be reclaimed. You could make that argument. You could also very easily make the argument that continuity is maybe the most important thing in any front office that clears some reasonable replacement level of intelligence

and functionality, and that continuity is so crucial that, in fact, no GM should ever be traded, and that the only reason that these trades should go through is if it is completely out of your hands as a team. Theo's going to walk. Theo's going to just quit on you otherwise and break his contract or retire or whatever, and you want to get something out of it. You could make a very strong case that every GM should be traded, every good GM should be traded tomorrow, and that no good GM should ever be traded except under extreme duress. And maybe you could also make the case, though, that if all of these GMs

and all of these teams have this system in place, then you're not really getting that much benefit by getting the GM because all your competitors already have either a good GM or a legacy of a good GM who left some functional system behind. And therefore, you're not getting that great of competitive advantage unless you're way behind and you're just so far behind the pack that just catching up would be a big boost which might be the case for for a handful of teams still do you think that there's any any possibility that in the future there will be a more robust exchange of front office and managerial talent, or will they always be a sort of non-tradable class of employees? Yeah, I can't really imagine that. The only way, I mean,

Louis Paulus, who was writing for BP earlier this year and then left to take a team internship, wrote about how he thought front office people were severely undervalued and were worth way more than they're being paid. And that the first team to realize that and start paying exorbitant salaries, relatively speaking, to front office executives would have an edge because all of the executives would want to go work for that team. So if that ever happened, if one team ever came to that conclusion and said, we are going to double and triple and quadruple what these people are paid because we think they're worth it, because relative to what we pay for players, they're still good, good values. Then maybe you would see something like that where

in fact, it's possible that no team has done that because if one team did it, then every you would see something like that where, in fact, it's possible that no team has done that because if one team did it, then every team would have to do it, and suddenly they'd all have to be paying a ton of money to executives, and so they've all kind of collectively agreed almost to keep the price down. But if that ever happened, then I guess you could see a bunch of executives migrating to that high paying team and then other teams having to raise their salaries to compete. And maybe you would see more turnover. And I mean, the problem is maybe that all the contracts include clauses generally that you can't leave unless it's for a higher position. And there are only so many of these highest level positions to go around. So once you have all these people in place, there usually aren't more than a few vacancies every year that people would be allowed to interview for.

that people would be allowed to interview for. So it's not like you could leave one position for an equivalent position with another team while your contract is still in place just because that one paid more. You wouldn't be allowed to do that. And teams probably wouldn't even try to do that because then they'd have to worry about their own people being poached all the time.

Yeah, you could imagine a world where the GM becomes, uh, you know, kind of extinct. And in, instead of a GM, uh, the entire organization is, is run almost like committee of director level positions. And, uh, uh, so in, in that scenario, if, if, if, if everybody weren't working toward the GM position, but instead were a little bit more specialized and being the director of scouting would be as prestigious a job as you could basically get, other than maybe team president, you could see in that scenario there would be a lot more openings and there would be it would kind of lubricate the market some i would think uh in that scenario i don't know if that scenario is happening but you could imagine it would happen sort of more specialized more skilled and more prestigious uh department level positions and jeff puts his top manager, Joe Madden, at number 47 on this list. Would you put a manager that high?

Yeah, I would rather have Joe Madden. I would trade the number 47 prospect for Joe Madden if I had a really lousy manager, I think. Yeah, you could probably make the case that... I wouldn't do it for the number four manager or the number five manager, but I think for the very best or the second best, I think I would rather have him than a number 50 prospect. Yeah, you could make the case that even if the manager position is not really as important as the general manager position, that there's more variability in managers and that almost every team maybe has either a smart front office or a smart GM and not every team has a manager who's willing to listen to that front office. And so maybe the

bigger advantage could be gained from getting a good manager if you don't have one, because if you already have a good front office in place, but you have a manager who doesn't listen to that front office or resists that front office's recommendations, then you're not getting the full value of that brainpower. So if you suddenly unlock that brainpower by getting a good manager, then maybe you've just made yourself much better, even if the position itself is not as important. Yeah, the problem is that we don't actually know who the most valuable manager is or the most valuable general manager is.

We have our opinions. We have partly based on objective analysis and partly based on the narratives that we've bought into and partly based on a lot of flukishness and incomplete information. So the tricky thing, if I could get the best manager, I mean like when Chris Jaffe wrote his book on managers, he found Tony La Russa to be basically the best manager of the modern era by a long way. And I think La Russa was worth, in my recollection, it was like two or three wins a year,

which is the same as the expected top prospect. The problem is just that you don't know that it's Tony La Russa until the end of his career. You still don't know it's Tony La Russa. Chris Jaffe made a great run at it, but we don't know that Chris Jaffe's method actually worked. So even if you knew that the best manager was worth more than most prospects will be, you don't know who the best manager is.

And there's a lot of uncertainty about prospects too, even the ones who are really good and close to the majors. There's still some combination of objective statistical methodology for rating them and subjective ones and scouts ratings and what they look like when you watch them play. So pretty high bust rate on those guys too. Okay, so that is it for this week. I'm sure both of us will be writing playoff previews next week, so maybe we will talk about that and preview some of the series, and then we will be in playoff mode,

and we'll be talking about games and playoff storylines a lot of the time, I assume. So thank you for listening this week. Please support our sponsor, Baseball Reference, by going to baseballreference.com, subscribing to the play index using the coupon code bp to get the discounted price of 30 on a one-year subscription please join the facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild and rate and review and subscribe to the podcast on itunes your ratings and reviews help us find new listeners. And please send us listener emails for next week's Wednesday show at podcast at baseball prospectus dot com.

I am off to pay my respects to the captain. Have a wonderful weekend and we will be back on Monday.