Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 580: Don’t Leave Home Without Listener Emails

Episode Date: November 26, 2014

Ben and Sam end the holiday week with listener emails about Red Sox spending, the least similar teams, clubs doubling down on position players, and more.

And you can fly, fly as a kite if you want to, faster than light if you want to, speeding through the universe, thinking it's the best way to travel. The best way to travel. Good morning and welcome to episode 580 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectus presented by The Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I am Ben Lindberg of Grantland, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Perspectus. Hello. Hello. How are you?

Pretty good. This is our last show of the week. We're going to end it on a multiple of five, which just doesn't feel the same anymore now that we are no longer a five show per week show for the time being, but still it's nice. So we will talk today and give people something to listen to on a bad weather Wednesday as they head home for Thanksgiving. We are going to do listener emails. Is there anything you'd like to talk about before we begin? No. All right. I guess, first of all, so somebody just tweeted at us a rumor,

what is deemed to be a non-revelatory rumor by the person who tweeted it at us. And this rumor is, report that Cubs offered Lester a six-year deal of more than $135 million is not accurate, which seems to be very revelatory. So I think that we're seeing probably an unnecessary lowering of the bar. I think that we need to... In fact, we received a tweet from someone else earlier in the day who sent us a link to that original rumor that is since rumored to be inaccurate

and suggested that the original rumor itself was non-revelatory, which it was clearly very revelatory. I mean, one of these is inaccurate. The initial report can't really have been accurate and also the report about its inaccuracy. But they both revealed something or purported to reveal something specific. The Cubs made an offer to a particular player for a certain number of years for an amount above a certain number.

So these are specifics. This is potentially useful information. So yes, I would urge everyone, we are happy that people are monitoring the internet for us and letting us know about these things. But before you tweet, think about it. Think about whether it meets the standards that we have established thus far in the podcast. We're small hall. I think we're small hall guys. And I think basically, well, we're not in the real hall, but in the non-revelatory hall. We're small hall. So basically, if it's not less revelatory than our least revelatory rumor, I would just swallow it.

I think that we're looking for new frontiers. It's like that guy who went up in the sky like 95,000 feet and did the jump, the Red Bull jump. You know? Yep. And then a couple years later, just a few weeks ago, somebody else went higher and did the jump. Right. He didn't go slightly lower.

That guy didn't go up and go slightly lower. He went higher. That's right. We're trying to go all the way to the sky where the air is so thin that you can't see or think. That's the air that we're reaching for at this point. The other thing is, please don't reply to the author of the rumor insultingly and CC us. we would rather that not happen yes right please don't insult them just in generally in general but if you're going to leave me out of it ben you can you can put ben in and if you want you can cc grant brisby i'll give you an example of a rumor that not of an insult but of a rumor

that goes even higher perhaps than ones that we have talked about thus far. This was an older rumor. This was from mid-October, actually. But just as a good example of what we're looking for, this was submitted earlier today by a listener named Patrick. And it was a Twins rumor from the Pioneer Press, and the rumor goes like this. I think it's a rumor. It says this. If the Twins can't re-sign free agent Torrey Hunter, plans are to trade, sign a free agent, or go in-house to find his center field replacement. So this is essentially saying that if the Twins can't re-sign Torrey Hunter, their plans are to obtain a center fielder somehow.

Continue fielding the prescribed number of baseball players. Exactly. That is their plan. They plan to abide by the rules of the game somehow next season. So that's the sort of non-specificity that we have in mind here. Did you read Chad Finn's thing about covering baseball off-season? The one thing in that that just completely blew

my mind was that it was only 13 years ago that the A-Rod signing with Texas broke in a newspaper in the morning. It was unknown to the world until they put it in a newspaper and delivered it to hundreds of

thousands of homes. That was the means of delivering it. That's incredible. It is. That used to happen. Yeah, not very long ago. Okay, we only received one other possible rumor that might meet the standards. This was a quote, though.

So I don't know. We've discussed quotes in the past, and I'm kind of of the opinion that if a baseball person says something that's non-revelatory, you can still quote it without yourself meeting that standard. So I will put it to you. This is from, let's see, Brian Murphy of KNBR who tweeted, asked about the SF Giants' interest in free agents, Lester Scherzer's shields. Larry Bear told us,

I can confirm we are interested in starting pitching. I'm increasingly finding reasons to defend these, as you might have noticed in the last couple days. So I'll defend that one. My read on that is that Brian Murphy, I think it's common to sort of tweet summaries of or excerpts of or some of the things that the person said. Yes. Brian Murphy is not in the business of breaking news. I don't think he would consider himself a rumor leader in the field. And so I don't think that he tweeted that thinking that he's the new Chris Cotillo with a beard.

I think he was simply saying this is what we've been doing this morning. So I'll stand up for Brian Murphy. Yeah, I agree. I mean, Larry Baer is the one we should be mad at. Right. But if you're going to put that question to a team executive, I mean, they can't say that they are interested in a certain free agent, right? I mean, they can sort of in a vague sense say that he is a nice player or something, but the CBA sort of prohibits them from talking about interest in particular players or offers or terms or anything like that.

And I saw an interview with Brian Cashman recently where he was asked about those same players and he said something about how they need some pitching, but he wouldn't comment on those specific players. So if you're going to pose those questions to a person with a team, you should expect that kind of answer, which is probably why we don't have team executives on this podcast all that often. So we will get to emails now. That's why you do you think?

Well, yeah. I mean, we're incredibly well connected, so that can't be the obstacle. So we got a couple emails that are not questions that I want to read. They're just comments, just information. So this first one comes from someone whose name is Redacted. It's just sources, we can say. And he says, I recently started work for a hockey team, and while looking through the team's shared Dropbox

to find a folder called, or he found a folder called the, insert team name, way. I opened up the video, and it mostly showed clips of players on the team running into people while phrases like intensity and fast and physical flashed on the screen. It sounds like Zoolander to me. This video is shown to all players in the organization. My team's way perfectly conforms to how Sam describes most baseball teams' ways,

ambiguous in its difference from any other team's style of play, and full of concepts that can only be seen as universally conducive to winning. Are there teams that emphasize a lack of intensity? Thought you might enjoy this anecdote. And we did. So we wanted to share it. I don't know if there are teams that emphasize a lack of intensity. Maybe there are teams that emphasize the cerebral aspect of competition more than others,

more than the physical. But even in those cases about hustling to get the extra edge i bet yeah i bet the pop warner football team that snoop dog coached some years back was very unintentional right and this question or this comment comes from russell carlton who is baseball prospect author, has been on the show many times. He says this is an email that only listeners of Effectively Wild can appreciate. This weekend for my real job, I was in Washington, D.C. for the annual Conference of the National Federation of Families for Children's Mental Health. Great organization. They had a silent auction of various items with the proceeds to fund the organization. Since it was DC, they had items from various DC and Baltimore sports teams.

They had assigned baseball from Ryan Webb. Ryan Webb is apparently the force that holds the universe together. But what that means is that someone will bid for the ball and the Federation of families will take the money and maybe save someone's life with it. Hopefully Ryan Webb gets his save sometime soon. Thank you, Russell. Although

I've got to say that I don't think that the Federation of Families is going to get a whole lot of money for the Ryan Webb signed baseball. I went on eBay and looked for Ryan Webb signed items. We already know that Matt Albers pants, game used pants are not a big draw, but I couldn't find any. Well, I didn't really look for game used Ryan Webb draw, but I couldn't find any. Well, I didn't really look for game used Ryan Webb items, but I looked for autographs and there are actually quite a few. There are more Alicia Webb, WWE Diva signed items that come up when you search for Webb autographs. But there are some Webb, Ryan Webb autographed cards and postcards. There is a Ryan Webb autographed team postcard which you can buy now for 6.95 there is a autographed tops card four dollars autographed 2004 prospects card ryan

webb eight dollars 2006 ryan webb three dollars so you can buy a r a Ryan Webb for a few dollars. There is one Ryan Webb signed official league baseball autograph, which is on sale for $14.99 or best offer. So that is what the Federation of Families can expect to receive, sadly. Okay. So while we're doing our part to make Ryan Webb autographs more valuable. I have a... So far, the market is lagging behind our interest. I generally have a hard time with charity auctions, just in general. Like, emotionally, I always feel a bit of sadness about... Not in this case case because Ryan Webb's

swag is pretty awesome but I always just have a very hard time looking at silent auction items and thinking about the gap between the intention of the person giving them and the intention of the person who is willing to bid $80

but not a penny more for a $250 gift certificate like there's just something sad about it as a transaction that it just bums me out to no end well we commend Ryan Webb for doing his part in signing this baseball

if you put a $100 bill on a charity auction, a silent auction somebody would bid $15 somebody would bid $16 and another person would come Somebody would bid $15. Somebody would bid $16. And another person would come in and bid $17. And it would not get over $35. Oh, that's too bad.

All right, we've got a couple factual sort of hot stove nuts and bolts questions that I thought we could dispense with quickly. This is one that I think we talked about years ago perhaps, but we can just give a quick refresher. Andy asks, quick question. How come when a player has a no trade clause, a lot of times both the Red Sox and Yankees are on those lists. And there are, there are a few reasons why or how few ways in which players choose the teams to put on their no trade lists. One of them might actually be that they don't want to play for a particular team,

but a lot of it is that you have leverage in mind and you're trying to imagine the most likely teams that would trade for you because you want to have leverage in that case. Maybe you don't want to go or you want to extract some other value from it, some kind of extension or getting an option picked up, that kind of thing, in exchange for waiving your no trade clause. And of course, the Red Sox and the Yankees are always among the most likely teams to be trading for someone. So you put the Red Sox and the Yankees on there, just wagering that they will

be the ones who are most likely to trade for you. So that's it. It's not just that people don't want to play for the Red Sox and Yankees, although maybe there are some who do or don't. Yeah. I like Justin Upton's no-trade teams. It feels like every year he updates them and I hear the new list. And it is always a hodgepodge of teams that you can tell he doesn't want to go to and teams that he really would love to go to.

And he's just trying to make the most of that possibility. And another question in that vein comes from Darren in Auburn, Washington, who says, What if a team felt they had better skill at negotiating contracts with team-friendly terms and immediately signed a guy because they felt he was a good value regardless of need. For example, let's say the A's thought Butler was undervalued at 330 but weren't that interested in him given the current construction of their roster. Prior to the season starting, could they realistically be able to extract value for negotiating a good deal and flip him if the free agent market gets more expensive or dried up as we progress through the winter? Or are these contracts so efficient that there wouldn't be anything to gain

by doing this? And the reason we don't see teams do that is because you can't do that. You cannot trade a newly signed free agent until the following June 15th, unless he gives you permission to do that. And of course, you'd have to give the player something to get him to agree to give you permission. And by the time that you're giving up something to the player to get him to agree to that trade, you have probably given up more than you can gain any surplus value that is left over after you sign him to this contract. So even if you are amazing at signing free agents to below market deals, it is probably not worth your while once

you factor in the cost that you would have to pay to get the player to agree to the trade. So that's that. Okay, let us talk about this question. Well, we got a few questions about Headley and Sandoval, which we talked about on Monday. I guess a couple people just kind of asked us which contract we like better. Matt Truebud asks, who do you figure got a better contract of these two? It's interesting, isn't it? Weighing and valuing various options correctly might be the things that even many semi-savvy fans do worst. All other considerations aside, would you rather be making $98 million over five years with a club option at the end of it, or $88 million over four years with the chance to make it $110 million in five? And we got a question from another Matt, this Matt in Portland, who asked if you were a

major league GM with an average team and an average farm system, and you had the ability or requirement to take either Sandoval and his new contract or Hanley and his new contract from the Red Sox, which one would you select? So do you have an opinion? So those are two different questions, two different questions, but essentially asking the same thing. No, they're not. Matt's making a point about how it's difficult to compare a four-year contract to a five-year contract where the average annual value changes but you get more years. In that answer, I would say that as long as the dollars are fairly comparable, and they basically are,

like Pablo Sandoval and Hanley Ramirez will not know in any significant way which of them has more money over the next four years. They will both have more money than they need. So as long as I'm rich for life, I would take the shorter deal at the higher average annual value. And I don't know if it would pay off in the end. I don't know if it's better just to take the money when you can get it and just assume that you're not going to be playing at any point in the future, that far into the future. But I just don't think it would be very fun to get paid to not play baseball well. I think it would just be kind of a drag. I know that it's better than...

It's a very Gilmash attitude of you. Well, getting paid $20 million to suck at baseball is better than getting paid a million dollars to suck at baseball, I guess. But I just don't think it would be that fun. I think that... Vernon Wells had the option to opt out of his contract in the last couple of years. He did not exercise it. I think this is an instance where in the moment, you would never turn away from the money. Given the option, unless you're Gilmash, given the option, you'll always take the money.

It's too hard to do it when it's right in front of you. We are addicted to money. We just are. We're addicted to money and you can't walk away from it. However, addictions are often only kind of powerful in the moment. And if you're three or four years, like if you're addicted to alcohol and somebody's like, you can't drink for the next month, you would have a really hard time. But if someone's like, in five years, you can't drink for a month, you'd be like, oh, well, okay. I can handle that probably in five years. And so I think that I would take advantage of that and I would walk away from the money four years in advance. And you're not really walking away from the money. You're getting a higher average annual value.

But I just don't think I would have much fun playing out the last years of a contract where everybody hated me. And so I would kind of rather not do it. So from the player's perspective, that's what I would say. Now, from the team's perspective, all they care about is whether it makes financial sense in the long run. And so from the team's perspective, I don't know. It depends on the player. I would guess that the shorter deal, higher average annual value is probably better for them. Yeah, I think that's right. I'm with you there. All right. And as for this, I'm with you there. Alright, and as for this, I don't think that there's a real reason to think that we know one way or the other. They're both more or less, they seem to be both more or less the same, and both players have big margins or big bars of what they could possibly do in the next five years.

So I'm not going to say with any certainty or anything like that, but I would rather have Hanley at that price than Pablo at that price. Okay. What about you? I don't really disagree. They seem to be very similar players, projected value-wise. So I think I more or less agree. It's kind of a wash. I don't find it that hard to ignore 2011 and 2012, which dragged down some of Hanley's projections and which dragged down kind of his recent numbers, if you're looking at them in any given time period. I don't have a hard time just kind of ignoring them and assuming, well, something was up.

You know, something was up with his shoulder a lot of the time. He was in a situation where he obviously wasn't happy. He was fighting with his teammates. He was on a losing team. Nobody wanted to be there. And so it's sort of easy for me to put a little more emphasis on 13 and 14 than I normally would at the expense of 11 and 12. Okay. And we got another question inspired by our discussion of those guys. This question is from Michael in Floyd's Knobs, Indiana. Do you know why Floyd's Knobs is named Floyd's Knobs? Do you? I do. I don't. It was named after Colonel Davis Floyd, an Indiana Jeffersonian

Republican who was convicted of aiding Aaron Burr in his perhaps conspiracy to secede from the union and went on to found Floyd's knobs, which Knobs because it is near the Knobs Stone Escarpment, a rugged geologic region in southern Indiana. So that's why it's named Floyd's Knobs. You read that. You just were reading that. No. I got a good education.

Michael says, noting that a contract decision, well, first he speculates that maybe Sandoval seems to be worth so much more or that teams are willing to pay so much more than they are for Headley because he is more marketable perhaps, or maybe that that's a factor. says noting that a contract decision on any player is ultimately a combination of the player's ability and the team's profitability we need a metric that someone come that somehow combines war and a player's worth off the field if attendance were to rise five percent year over year due to new player acquisitions or improved results that alone is worth tens of millions annually meanwhile any team handing out new contracts in the midst of negotiating a regional TV or radio deal should be viewed in a vacuum. Perceived overpays become bargains overnight if the acquisitions move the needle even a smidgen on a long-term broadcasting deal. Maybe he meant shouldn't be viewed in a vacuum. So this is theoretically right, but I'm going to guess that it wouldn't move our valuation all that much for

most players. There are cases where it would. I wrote a little bit in my essay in the upcoming Baseball Prospectus 2015 annual, which Sam is editing and which you can all go pre-order now if you'd like to, about the value of Derek Jeter, not the wins above replacement value of Derek Jeter, which we've talked about, but the financial off-the-field value of Derek Jeter. But he's a unique case. I wouldn't say that there are many cases where a certain player is going to increase attendance

a whole lot more than a comparable player value-wise. I mean, there might be some players who were projected for three and a half wins who were just much more famous and marketable and appealing than others. But I would guess that on the whole, that is not going to move the needle all that much for most players. I think he's right, though, that when we talk about teams that are in the midst of negotiating some big deal or getting a stadium built or something like that, then maybe that does change the calculus a little bit. But why isn't Floyd's knobs possessive?

Because his name is Floyd. How did it get pluralized or if it is possessed? I don't know if they're saying that it's the knobs near Floyd or if it's the knobs of Floyd. But either way, it should either be Floyd knobs or Floyd's knobs. It's been a long time since I covered this in class. Also, the high school is Floyd High, and it's in Floyd County. Singular, singular.

Huh. Maybe there was an apostrophe, and they dropped it, because who wants to write an apostrophe every time? I don't know. Michael, in Floyd's knobs, if you know the answer, let us know. Yeah, I think that you're right.

The cases where it's a factor, even a smid it's a factor, even a smidgen of a factor, are fairly low. And usually those cases where it is even a smidgen of a factor, I would say usually that detail gets brought up more than necessary. Yes. Okay. All right. This question comes from Brett, who asks, who are the two least similar teams in Major League Baseball? My initial thought was Padres and Yankees. That was mine. Payroll, league, geography, history, stadium size, fan base. Headley having this. They've both had Headley though yeah but i was hoping one of you could one of one of you could come up with something more interesting and justify it

somehow so clearly not you you've come up with padres and yankees oh man yeah it's so it's just so hard not to just go rich team poor team and think of them more or less like that. But I guess it would take a much more complex graph or chart if you were going to. Because there's a lot of variables that make up a team. Like what else would you even think of? Like you could think of, I mean, i just was going to try to say something other than money and i was just going to name another proxy word for money so i am really having a hard time getting past money well what about philosophy what about phillies and astros you've got you've

got one team who's done the most aggressive rebuilding plan we've seen in recent years, just tearing it down completely and starting over and not really hiding that fact or sugarcoating it all that much. And then you've got the Phillies who have gone way out of their way not to rebuild and have been clinging to the core of their old team and insisting that they could compete with it and refusing to trade anyone. And the Astros are a team that talks about their use of analytics all the time.

And the Phillies, if anything are the opposite. Yeah. The problem though, is that that's just, that's a momentary description of them. That's a short term. That's like you and me are fairly similar people in a lot of ways.

And it'd be like someone saying, well, Sam and Ben are the most different because sam's at the beach and ben is riding the subway like the that's just what we're doing at that moment and the i don't know that it necessarily speaks to the core of the franchise in a major way although um you know the certain teams have enough continuity over the course of decades that you could argue that uh that it is become something more than a temporary thing and certain teams have uh even uh philosophies although the the longer they last the kind of more generalistic and vacant uh vacant vague uh i meant to vague, but vacant is better. They become like we like pitching and scouting, that sort of thing. But the continuity itself is a factor.

The twins, for instance, you could say that they have a philosophy because they've had these same guys for 35 years but more it seems more interesting to me is the fact that they've had the same guys for 35 years that continuity is such a big part of it and so like i'm reading these uh the bp annual essays right now and um the the ones every once in a while there will be like the reds one last year and the white socks this year, really do kind of look at what the franchise has been over the course of many decades, like going back to the 70s or the 80s. And I always like those. But it's hard to write them for every team because there isn't necessarily a lot of continuity over the course of decades. I mean, it is true. I think that maybe it would be, I'm going

to avoid putting too much emphasis on the actions of the front office over the last few years. I will say maybe like the Mets and the Indians will be mine. Really? On what grounds? Well, maybe not the Indians. I don't know. Well, I mean, obviously they're in maybe the two most extreme markets. Okay. And I was going to say the Mets have just been, well, the Mets have been, you know, sort of punchlines.

Even when they, even weaving in periods of extreme goodness, they've always been kind of a little bit of a joke. Like even when they were good, like Vince Coleman was throwing bottle rockets at toddlers. good, like Vince Coleman was throwing bottle rockets at toddlers. It seems like they have a permanently dissatisfied fan base with expectations of both greatness and embarrassment. I was going to say, I think of the I think of the Indians mostly from like 90, you know, the early 90s on when they had this great run of being, you know, a super classy, classy, a super classy organization, very cutting edge, very successful, very Midwestern, although they're not Midwestern. And even since then, you don't get the sort of gnashing of teeth that you sort of get from some other fan bases. They just seem to be fairly quiet. They're quietly trying to win, and then they quietly struggle, and then they quietly try

to win again. They're just sort of in the background of Major League Baseball. And as a background team, they nonetheless put together some fine runs and some successful teams. The problem though is that, of course, the Indians were the team in Major League. And so they were actually that punchline for a decade before that. So maybe it's not the Indians, but maybe it is. It's hard to beat Padres Yankees. It is hard to beat Padres Yankees. It's tough when a listener asks us a good question and gives us the best

answer in the question, and then we have to try to top it. I'm still sticking with Phillies and Astros. Astros traded Hunter Pence in 2011. Phillies traded four Hunter Pence in 2011. And Michael Bourne. Michael Bourne. Yeah. Could come up with so many.

Okay. Let's see. Would you care to do play index now? I'm kind of distracted by the previous question. Okay. To be honest. No, sure. I will.

So this one, I'm going to make you guess something. Oh, no. But it won't take long. So I wanted to know who had the most surprising, maybe not quite the word, or most out of character. Who had the most out of character seasons this year in major league baseball so what i did is i went to play index and i um i filtered for 2014 uh hitters with like 250 more or more plate appearances and pitchers with like 75 or more innings, mostly as starters. And I put them in a spreadsheet. And then I went to all active players who had 1,500 career plate appearances or more, I think, and like 300 innings or more, and put those in two different spreadsheets. And then I used VLOOKUP to put all that data into one nice little

column so I could see there each players ERA plus last year or his OPS plus last year and his career ERA plus or his career OPS plus and then I created the ERA plus plus or the OPS plus plus which is your OPS+, except instead of being scaled to the league average, it is scaled to your average. So whatever you are is 100. That is your average OPS, because you are you. You are a unique snowflake with your particular OPS+. And so then I looked at 2014 to see who had the best OPS++ relative to that OPS. So what I have here is I have, I mean, you know, I have them all, but I have a list of the 10 most overachieving pitchers, the 10 most underachieving pitchers, the 10 most overachieving hitters,

the 10 most underachieving hitters, and I just want you to pick one of those to guess. And I'm going to see how many you can name in the top 10 without naming a person who's not in the top 10. All right. Okay. So I'll start with hitters. You could start with and you could do them all if you want. I could do all? Yeah, you can just pick one. It doesn't matter to me. Okay. Michael Brantley? Where are you here? You're going on good hitters. You're doing good hitters. All right. Michael Brantley is a good answer.

Michael Brantley had the sixth highest OPS++ last year at 136. He had a 136 OPS++. What did you say the minimum plate appearances was for this season? 250. So I can include Justin Turner?

You can, number two. You're looking at something. That's fine though, I don't mind. You're looking at something. That's fine, though. I don't mind. You haven't looked at the, you haven't done the two-page research. I'm not giving away anything. No, yeah, you can do this. Justin Turner is a good answer.

All right, so you are two for two. All right. Play along at home. By the way, this is why I did this, because I thought people would be able to think of the names in their head and see if they were right. Steve Pierce. Number one.

Best OPS++ in baseball this year at 147. Okay. Devin Messarocco. Number three. All right. All these names are coming off the board. Okay. And what did you say the minimum was for previous years? I think it was $1,500. Well, no, I have a $1,487 here, so it might be $1,200. All right. Yeah, I have a $1,200 here, so it's probably $1,200.

No J.D. Martinez then. That's too low probably. I don't know what I said it at because JD Martinez is here he's there okay we can count JD Martinez or we can count him I would I would say him if he meets the plate appearances minimum so okay all right but don't say Jose Abreu especially because that would be his OPS plus plus was a hundred yeah right okay

and what all right, so ERA+, how about I'm looking for overachievers again here, Jake Arrieta. Wait, you're switching spreadsheets on me. Sorry. You were supposed to go until you

missed one. Okay, so you're going... You said I could just do... Oh, I see. You're doing the four board thing. You're doing the four-board thing. You're playing four boards at once. Yes, exactly. That's a better strategy. Jake Arrieta, number two, with a 166 ERA++.

Uh-huh. Okay. In fact, I'm going to... How many innings did I tell you? You said, I think, 75 this season, but I don't know what you said for previous seasons. I said, yeah, I said career, I think I said 250. And so, in fact, Jake Arrieta was number one.

I made a note that Michael Pineda was number one if I lowered it to 245 innings, which I only made a note because I thought, I was trying to decide whether I even needed to make a minimum for career innings, which I only made a note because I thought I was trying to decide whether I even needed to make a minimum for career innings. I definitely needed one for this season's innings. But for career innings, the lower you get, the more this season's OPS Plus is going to weigh the rest.

And so, the smaller the career, the less likely it would be to to be off off the thing and so so it was amazing to me that michael panetta was number one despite only having like 240 career innings um and he was number one by like quite a bit at 172 the the highest for hitters or pitchers so anyway he's off okay all right so you can do the bottom too. The bottom is fair game. Okay, so other pitchers. So let's see. If it was 250 minimum prior to this year, then Dallas Keuchel does not qualify.

Garrett Richards does not quite qualify. Very close, but not quite. All right, well, if i can do over achievers all right i'll try clay buckles uh clay switching spreadsheets again here clay buckles is the second lowest era plus plus at 66 all right um so what do i have now like Like six? Seven. I think you're at seven. No, I think you are at six, yeah. And I'm trying to get to ten before I get eliminated. You're at seven.

But that's, I was trying to see, I didn't explain what I wanted you to do. I just want to see how far you can go now. See if you can go all the way. 40 for 40. All right. I wonder if this guy meets the minimum josh harrison would not qualify all right how about seth smith uh seth smith uh no you have blown it although josh harrison would have blown it too if he had qualified and you had said him.

All right. Do you want to go for one low on the hitters? Okay. Steven Drew. Yeah, he's on there. I was really just trying to make you say Jose Molina. I just really wanted to put that knife right in you. So Jose Molina was the lowest at 34.

Which is impressive because he's been a bad hitter for quite a while now. Yeah, he started at 64. He might be the lowest guy on this list starting point, actually. And they had the worst OPS++. So he's the lowest. Mark Ellis, John Baker, Raul Abanez, Paul Canerco, Nate Sherholtz, Alan Craig, Ryan Rayburn, Alfonso Soriano. Those are your bad guys. The good ones that you didn't say, Juan Uribe, Michael Saunders, Troy Tulewitzki, which is pretty impressive, Carlos Gomez, and Victor Martinez. And the pitchers

and I think these guys all make the career, but I might be wrong. Danny Duffy, Corey Kluber, Edinson Volquez, Henderson Alvarez, Doug Pfister, Felix, Kershaw, Cueto, Lester, and maybe Lance Lynn. And then on

the bad side, Edwin Jackson, Cahill, Masterson, Lincecum, Kane, Verlander, Ubaldo, Bedard, and Bart Lance Lynn. And then on the bad side, Edwin Jackson, Cahill, Masterson, Lincecum, Kane, Verlander, Ubaldo, Bedard, and Bartolo Colon. So there you go. Those are your over and under achievers. And a couple of them were old, like Canerco's and Ibanez, they're old. And I thought about eliminating guys

at the extreme ends of their career because it doesn't really seem to fit the spirit. mean canerco didn't underperform canerco overperformed by making it this long uh but uh there were so few of them in fact that i just went ahead with it all right fun exercise you can create your own fun exercises by subscribing to the Play Index using the coupon code BP to get the discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription. We will continue with a couple more here. This question is from Vinit in Boston who says, Have you noticed a recent trend of teams acquiring players for positions at which they are already strong or at least competent? And he gives us some examples.

The Cubs acquire Addison Russell when they have a dozen shortstop prospects. The A's get Billy Butler when they had a good rotating DH strategy. The White Sox get Adam LaRoche when they had Abreu. And the Red Sox get Pablo Sandoval and Hanley Ramirez, who'd both play third in 2015 if they were on different teams. Thoughts? Have you noticed this trend Now that Vinit has brought it up do you think it is a trend

Um Hmm I hadn't noticed it Particularly And It takes three to make a trend and he named four Yeah so I noticed it when these moves were made That like

Each individual Yeah like the Cubs getting Russell where are they going to put all their infielders they have all these guys who can play shortstop that was something that people talked about of course but I didn't connect the dots between these moves I don't know whether we should connect

dots but maybe I mean I don't know there seems to be more of an emphasis on depth, but that usually goes hand in hand with positional flexibility, which is not necessarily, it's about moving Baez to second and getting that positional flexibility and then being able to trade Castro or do something else with Castro. I don't know. Maybe it's just position player depth, teams betting on position players, stockpiling position players. I don't know. Maybe it's nothing. Well, if you buy that fewer guys are getting to free agency and thus it's harder to sign free agents and they're more expensive

because they're scarcer, then it would make a certain amount of sense in two ways. One is it's harder to add good players, so you just get the good ones when they're available. You just are happy to take them, and you'll figure it out later. But two is if the free agent market is becoming a kind of – if there's inflation in the free agent market, then you would expect that the trade market would also get loosened up a bit, and therefore there would be a certain amount of inflation in the trade market would also get loosened up a bit, and therefore there would be a certain

amount of inflation in the trade market. It would basically be like when house prices go up and then apartment prices go up, too, because they're not totally independent of each other. And as one person gets priced out of the one market, they go down to the other one, and then that one gets crowded. So maybe there's just teams figuring it's actually pretty easy to trade players for good value these days. I don't know. It's just a hypothesis. The original premise of the hypothesis is perhaps even questionable.

But that's the first thing I thought of. Mm-hmm. Okay. And Vinit also wants to know that if you had Jason Hayward and Alex Gordon in your outfield corners, who is the worst defensive player you could put in centerfield to still have an average outfield defense? Or would you even put someone in centerfield or go with two outfielders a la Sam Miller's idea? centerfielders idea well if i were going to do that i wouldn't do it with hayward and gordon because you know i'd i mean dyson and kane would be would be much better than than hayward and gordon don't you think um if you were going with two men yeah two guys who were in corners i don't care how good they are in the corners they are not the two best outfielders in baseball okay uh so for starters i would have a centerfield uh but. But what's the word? I don't

know. I guess I believe that... If you have like a plus 20 guy in left and right. Yeah, so the question really is if you have a plus 20 guy in left and a plus 20 guy in right, then does a minus 40 guy give you an average center field, an average outfield, or is there enough overlap between positions? And there is a lot of overlap. If you look at how many balls a center fielder and a left fielder and a right fielder could

catch, I mean, there's balls that a left fielder and a center, I'm sorry, there's balls probably that a left fielder and a right fielder could both catch. So there is certainly overlap out there. So the question is, does a minus 40 center fielder get you to average, or is it conceivable that in fact a true talent minus 60 center fielder could get you there? Because the corner guys could cover for so much of what he does, right? And if we're talking about a minus 60 center fielder, that means you could probably put what any corner guy out there would be a minus 60 center fielder that that means you could probably put what any corner guy out there would be a

minus 60 center fielder do you think just like a even a with a below average corner guy i mean yeah right yeah yeah yeah i well yeah i'm trying to i keep getting hung up on adam dunn well yeah well he was barely was barely a corner guy. I don't think there's an outfielder in baseball. If you believe that Hayward and Gordon are both plus 20, which is not necessarily a completely proven fact, but if you believe that they were both plus 20 corner outfielders, I believe you could put any other outfielder in baseball in center field.

Of course, why would you? Why wouldn't you just move Hayward to center and then put that guy in right? Yeah. Do you think Hayward would be? You want to get an answer to this question, obviously. Do you think Hayward, what would, I want to know, because this came up recently when I was talking to somebody about hayward uh i want to know what you think hayward would be in center and what you think gordon would be in center yeah drew fair service wrote about

wrote about hayward in center recently because it's it's kind of curious that he doesn't play center. He has played some center in the fast. He, he's bigger and taller than center fielders generally are, but it's kind of hard to see how that hampers him in any way. I mean, he's still fast, he's still rangy. So it seems like he has the skills for the position and he's played there before without it being a disaster so i think i think he'd probably be fine out there i i mean i don't know there there has to be some reason why he hasn't played center and maybe it's just that that the braves have happened to have good center fielders that they've happened to have guys like gupton who maybe is a little bit better than he is or is perceived to be better

than he is. So I don't think there's anything about his skill set that suggests that he couldn't do it. So I'd probably take Hayward over Gordon just because Hayward is quite a bit younger and has played some center and it wasn't awful. So that alone is probably enough for me to pick him over Gordon. I'm going to go with the Mets and the A's. All right. Why? A lot of the same things about the Indians, but without quite the 80s and 70s and rivers being on fire kind of thing. Although the A's are not anonymous in a way that the Indians are anonymous.

So maybe I don't like the A's, actually. The A's have always been loud from the 70s on. In fact, the A's of the 70s and the Mets of the 80s have a lot of similarities. So maybe it doesn't work. What about just Rockies and Padres? What about the most extreme offensive environments? Is that enough? No, that's like saying that you and me are different

because our parents are different. But you and me are similar. It is a fact that you and I are similar. The circumstances around us don't dictate who we are. Park's a big part of a team's identity. It influences how you build the team. It is a part. It's not enough of a part.

If the Mets played in Coors Field and the A's played in Petco, it would strengthen the argument. Mm-hmm. Okay. All right. We're almost done here. We've got so many questions from Matt's. I think I've got questions from at least four different Matt's in my file here.

We're at 55 minutes. Yeah. All right. So we'll just end with a Thanksgiving-themed question from Eric Hartman, who says, which MLB player is most like a Thanksgiving travel day? An arduous, awful experience with, presuming you like your family and friends, a great payoff. Is the answer all prospects?

I'm going to say the answer is just an interminably paced pitcher who is a good pitcher. I don't know who the best answer is. I guess David Price was the slowest pitcher in the major leagues last year in terms of time between pitches, and yet also one of the best pitchers in baseball. So I wouldn't say that watching Price is arduous and awful, though. I mean, he's slow. The slowness is annoying, but it's still fun to see his stuff, which is fun in itself.

So maybe it would be more like Joe Peralta is agonizingly slow, but maybe he's not a good enough payoff. Yeah, I was going to say J.P. Howell is the hardest thing for me to watch in baseball, but the payoff isn't there. I would say present day Fernando Rodney, all time Juan Gonzalez. Okay. All right. Pretty good. So we hope that you all have good travel days and get wherever you're going safely and have a nice break. Even without a new episode of Serial and even more devastatingly, a Friday episode of Effectively Wild.

We will be back next week with more shows. If anything exciting happens in the meantime, you can talk about it with fellow Effectively Wild listeners in the Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild. We welcome your questions for next week. I've starred a few to talk about then that we didn't get to today, but please send us some more at podcast at baseball prospectus.com. And if you are thankful for this podcast and want to show your thanks, we would be happy if you left us some ratings and

reviews on iTunes, subscribe to the show on iTunes to help us convince other people that we're worth listening to. We are just a few ratings away from 500. So have a great end of the week and weekend. We will be back on Monday.