Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 785: The Tantalizing 2018 Free Agent Class

Episode Date: December 17, 2015

Ben and Sam discuss whether the awe-inspiring 2018 free agent class is something MLB teams should be planning for already.

Everyone's a thread we're woven together Read it in the tess and frame And just read the book of you The book of me We're fading into memory But something is left A gesture, a phrase, or a photograph A warped web

Good morning, and welcome to episode 785 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus, presented by the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I'm Ben Lindberg of FiveThirtyEight, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Prospectus. Hello. Yo. We're back. Finished our book. Sort of book sort of yep sure did it's a nice feeling yeah now uh now we go on to the uh important and very difficult work of trying not to knee jerkingly lower expectations for it every time someone brings it up i thought you were gonna say editing and revising no nope nope just fighting the urge to tell people it sucks. Just got to fight that urge. It's not like us to not say it's going to suck, but we've got six months of hard work ahead of us.

Not giving up until it's out. That's right. We've got to become self-promoters. Yep. All right. I'm in a good mood. Yep. Mostly because of that.

And it wrapped up just so fortuitously in time for my all day Star Wars marathon. Is that right? Yeah. If it had finished up one day later, would have jeopardized my plans. I just caught up on what happened in baseball over the last week when I wasn't paying attention. Anything you want to talk about from that time? No, no, no. I don't know what we're going to talk about that that time? No, no. No. I don't know what we're going to talk about. That might affect my answer. I thought, you know, why don't you like my idea?

I like your idea. Well, then why are you fighting it so hard? I'm going to start. I might start releasing my own cut of this. You'd have to figure out how to record it i happen i know that's true but i've got some free time yeah all right so you had an idea for this episode yeah go ahead it's your show no it's your show my show it's your show go away no no no it is your show it's thursday this is the Monday show on Thursday.

No. Really? I mean, what about Thanksgiving, though? We didn't declare that Wednesday was a Friday. We took Friday off. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. We did an email show. Those are both of our shows.

No, but that's what I'm saying is that I had to come up with two topics that week, and you had to come up with none. It's the luck of the draw. No, this is the same. We're drawing again. This is just a – it's the same deck. Okay, but it's your idea. Just talk. All right. Jeff Passan's article in Yahoo Sports over this past weekend

about the incredible class of 2018, the free agent class of 2018, which his headline says, We'll change MLB as we know it. And then he goes through the many players that will be part of this free agent class and the ways in which it will change MLB as we know it. Yeah, I'll take over for now thanks all right so i don't know uh i don't know that i have much to say about this but it is a incredibly satisfying article to read in the same way that like the first time you go to coachella it's incredibly satisfying to like look at this incredible list of bands and then you

actually go out there and you realize like oh well three of them are playing at once and uh you know one of them you pick one but then you end up going to the most crowded one anyway and and it's like so crowded that you don't even get a very good seat and so then you leave and by then the other two have quit playing and you know you're too hot and everything like that and so so like you have all these great players that are really fun to imagine being free agents just individually. Uh, and then you put them all together. And so the big thing, I think that, uh, we can discuss whether we think it's historic, but I mean, I think it's fair to say that it's always going to be easier to do this exercise three years out than in reality, partly because some guys won't hit

free agency. After all, they will sign extensions perhaps. But also partly because guys just aren't going to be as good in three years. Most of these guys, in fact, will be worse in three years than they are now. And so I, as an example, quickly looked at the top 25 players who were all 28 or younger. So these are the top 25 players in all of baseball in 2012. And then I just looked at the ones of those who were under 20, who were 28 or younger. And so- Did you use play index for that? And then I just looked at the ones of those who were under 20, who were 28 or younger. And so I use play index for that. I did.

Yeah. Cool. Coupon code BP. Did I? Yeah, I did. I did. I did use play index for that. So advertising. So these are not just to be clear.

These are not the 25 best players under 28. These are the players who are under 28 who are on the list of the best 25 players. And those players included Denard Spann, Aaron Hill, Josh Reddick, Austin Jackson, Martine Prado, Michael Bourne, Chase Headley, Brett Laurie. All those guys were basically coming off seasons where they were stars uh for that year five win plus players and at the time young at the time either in their prime or even younger and now i just named a bunch of guys who are old not very good uh feel even older than they are or uh you know for like you forgot they existed like like austin Austin Jackson is a free agent,

and Austin Jackson's going to get one year and $6.5 million, or something like that. I forgot about Aaron Hill. Yeah, right? How shocking is it that he was 28 or younger three years ago? Or ever. Or ever. There were others, by the way.

That's not the entire list list but those are among the i mean that's like half the the list of players who were 28 or younger for pitchers same exercise matt king jared parker matt latos chris medlin matt harrison i mean matt latos was i think 25 or 24 he was 24 that year and he was coming off of a top 25 year in all of baseball as a pitcher and uh now he's a free agent and he signed did he sign a minor league deal or did he sign like a one year what did he what what kind of ridiculous deal did he sign for the angels or not the angels tabs on i don't even remember the angels traded for him and he was horrible and then oh i don't think he has signed i think i'm sorry i i don't think he has signed. I think, I'm sorry. I don't think he has signed. I think that I'm thinking of, we don't know where Matt Latos is.

That's the point. That is the point. Yeah. He, he was not on the top 50 free agents list that I edited. That's what I was thinking about with Matt Latos. Um, and I mean, Latos would have been one of the, uh, premium guys listed. And so, so this exercise that, um, that, uh, well, and, and I'm going to get to why, uh, Jeff is a hundred percent right about it, but just to walk it back somewhat, you basically, you take a bunch of guys who were all really good this year, look at their age, and then forecast who's going to be good, uh, or who's going to be a free agent in three years. And, uh, it, it captures a big group of people, many of whom aren't going to be that good. And then you can also, if you want, pad that list with guys who aren't coming off good years

but were recently, and then that just expands it more. So there are, like, I would say that when Jeff makes his list, it goes for, like, three paragraphs long. Actually, he did three full tweets. And by the third tweet, I think that the three-tweet group will be way, way winnowed down. Now, however— I will say that in his article, I felt like he should have quit while he was ahead. He should have, right.

Because at a certain point, you're talking about— He's like, Bryce Harper, ooh, and Clayton Kershaw, and Jose Fernandez, and Matt Harvey. And then all of a sudden it's Charlie Blackmon, Brian Dozier, and AJ Ramos. I agree. Guys who, if they were free agents right now, I would not be excited about. That said, though, the point is 100% true. Yes. The first tweet he had, and it's the same in the article.

I'm going to look up the tweet because when I saw that tweet, I almost gasped thinking, like, wow. So, just the first tweet here. Free agent class of 2018 includes Bryce Harper, Josh Donaldsonosh donaldson andrew mccutcheon manny machado david price jason hayward clayton kershaw jose fernandez matt harvey dallas keitel chris sale and that is incredible right like that is like breathtaking you have basically with harper Basically, with Harper, Machado, and Fernandez, you are going to have, well, at least right now, you have three of probably the ten best players in baseball, like maybe a top three pitcher and then two of the ten best players,

and they're going to hit free agency at 26 each. They will be, assuming they're all healthy and assuming that you know what they haven't collapsed before then they have the potential to be three of probably the six or seven best free agents in history and uh so that's and so that's just the start of the tweet dude like then you have right like jeff spells out in the article i mean you have the mvp in josh donald then you have, right, like Jeff spells out in the article, I mean, you have the MVP in Josh Donaldson. You have, what, last year's MVP? Did McCutcheon win it last year or did he finish second?

I think he won. Okay. And then you have the Cy Young winner and the Cy Young runner-up in the AL. This year you have Kershaw, the greatest pitcher of his generation by a mile. You have Chris Sale, who might also be in the conversation for the second best pitcher in baseball. And then you have Harvey and Hayward. And that's all in one tweet. And that's pretty amazing. So do you then, and so then- Cut to one in 2013, by the way. 2014, he was third. Okay, thanks. So then the question is, how much do you believe the kind of theorized explanation

for what some teams like the Dodgers in particular are doing where they seem to not be that aggressive for free agents, especially relative to how we heard about how much money there is in the game and how it was just going to be unstoppable spending sprees throughout baseball because of all these tv contracts and then we see the dodgers basically sitting out uh these free agency um opportunities this year uh and we had a kind of a hard time explaining it when i think we did the granky episode maybe um and we very briefly mentioned the explanation well that maybe they're looking ahead to we didn't have specifics but we were maybe they're looking ahead to that range of years when guys like harper and strasburg

i named but he's not then but strasburg and other guys were going to be, Kershaw would be hitting free agency and whether they were sort of lining up their finances for that. And Jeff makes the case that not only are these incredible, is this incredible class of free agents going to be available, but simultaneously you have the Dodgers essentially could have, well, at the moment they have $3 million committed to that year, assuming that Kershaw opts out. And the Phillies, I'm just going to read now, the Phillies in recent years among the top five spending teams in the game have not a single penny on the books for the 2019 season, according to BP. The Rockies books are clear that season uh the yankees will only have 57 million dollars on the books uh and then you know the dodgers at three million so uh how much do you buy the idea that teams in 2015 are looking ahead to that class and are making decisions specifically to be freed up? I think not very much. There are a lot of teams spending this offseason, as Jeff notes in his

first paragraph. Baseball is going to smash its free agent record for dollars spent by many hundreds of millions of dollars. And I could see some teams paying some attention to it, but it doesn't seem like it should be the centerpiece of your strategy because, as we discussed, as Jeff acknowledges, some of these people are going to sign extensions and maybe Jose Fernandez and Bryce Harper are not going to sign extensions because they're Boris guys because they're going to make an extreme amount of money.

But a lot of this class will sign extensions or will get hurt or will be less impressive. So I don't know that I would plan three years ahead. Maybe if you're the Dodgers and you know that you're going to be competitive every year, or at least you plan to be because you can spend a lot every year, then maybe you would look ahead. But would you make a move that would really hurt yourself, hurt your team now or for the next three seasons? I mean, that's a long time. You can't really, like you're not going to punt on 2016, 2017, 2018 for the chance of getting Bryce Harper. I think you would keep it in mind, but I think you could explain what the Dodgers are doing by the fact that they had huge luxury tax charges and record luxury tax charges.

And those were only going up and they go up so quickly. And if you can get under them once, it really helps. I mean, they'll never be under it probably, but it seems like it would be a risky thing to take into account as anything other than, oh yeah, right. And those guys are also available then. So it would be, it'd be nice to be able to, I mean, they're probably front office people who are looking at this list the way that we are and marveling at the names and thinking it'd be nice if we could compete for those guys. But you're only going to sign like one of them, probably. So, I mean, you're probably not going to get Harper and Fernandez and Harvey or something.

So it's one player three years down the road who will be worth six or seven or eight wins or something, you're hoping, and at a market rate. So it's not like, I mean, free agency is not the foundation of anyone's team, really, or it's hard to win if free agency is the foundation of your team. So it seems like a stretch to me that this would be dictating team strategy in a very significant way this far in advance. good as you know carter caps and joe mauer right now like you don't like it's not like when that winter comes not only are all those guys going to be available but they're all going to be 30 off like you're not getting any deals on them you're going to be paying for them just like you would be paying for them i think unless you believe the idea that i don't flood the market i know you don't but the the idea that if you flood the market and there are tons of great free agents available then it depresses the price for any one of them.

And we've talked about that in the past. And you subscribe to the JC Bradbury theory that more players available means more teams that need players. And therefore, it shouldn't really lead to a reduction in price. And I probably believe that, too. lead to a reduction in price and i think they probably believe that too now uh that said though there are i think when you're talking about four guys here probably given age and talent harper machado uh fernandez and kershaw you are talking about players who do not uh who are just simply not available in the normal course of team building uh you can't it's not like like like for instance hayward is going to be a free agent you would not wait till 2018 to sign jason hayward uh by saving money in

2015 not signing jason hayward if you want jason hayward you could you could sign him now um but those four guys are kind of like they are the equivalent of, you know, the number one overall pick in an NBA draft or something like that. It's just like that's the only way to get those guys to get players like that, except by having, you know, extremely good fortune. You can either have extremely good fortune and get them through a draft or some other means, or you can buy them the extremely rare times they come up for free. So I could imagine thinking, well, we're going to have a four times in a lifetime opportunity in 2018 to get one of these guys. And so taking some steps, taking some actions to put yourself in a position to do it. I also think though that three years is a long ways to be thinking of that. I could see, I could start thinking about it maybe next offseason,

and I could definitely see people talking about it in 2017. But it feels like just a long ways away. Whether it would be smart to or not, I have a hard time thinking that a GM is capable of showing that restraint between now and then. I mean, if you don't sign the guys now, you're not going to be the GM in three years. Yeah, that too. Right. Yeah. And it's just like, I mean, one of these guys is just such a small fraction of your team. Yeah. And even if you're one of the teams, right. If you're one of the teams that is going to get Harper, right. Yeah, like this entire free agent class is, it's incredible as Jeff says, but the headline, which, you know, he probably didn't write about changing MLB as we know it, goes back to the old question that we have asked ourselves.

If baseball were different, how different would it be? And probably not very different in most cases. So even if the free agent class of 2018 is crazy and it's the best we've seen in some time and, you know, three or four of the best players in baseball are available, it's still a tiny fraction of the talent in the league that's becoming available. And you're paying free agent prices for those players. So only a certain number of teams are in a position to do that and profit from that and you have to have this baseline like if your goal is to get to 40 wins above replacement or whatever these guys are still only a fraction of that and they're the fraction that's probably not giving you much surplus value because they're free agents and it's going to cost however many

millions of dollars per win relative to pre-arbitration and even arbitration players. So it just seems like it's more of a finishing touch to a roster than a, we will build an entire team out of this free agent class because that would bankrupt you no matter how much money you saved in the intervening three years. If you are, though, a team like, say, the Phillies, who's obviously not going anywhere in 2015, and maybe not in 2016, but maybe yes in 2017, do you postpone a year looking ahead to that class, do you think? I would try to be good before then, I think, regardless.

I don't know that I would think Bryce Harper is the thing that we need. I mean, it'd be nice to have Bryce Harper, but we have three years and we've got some promising rookies and maybe we can just build a pretty good team before then. And if we happen to be good and have some money and Bryce Harper's available, then we'll go after him too. All right. So then the question is, how did this happen? Because there was a time when you and I were on this very show talking about the endangered free agent. Everybody Good was signing long pre-arb year extensions that took them off the market until they were older. And there was a point where we were talking about how this was why money no longer bought wins because the only way to flex your financial muscle

was on the free agent market where it was an increasingly sparse group of good players who were then able to command even more. And I had a tweet that's embarrassing on about 45 levels from, I don't know, like March of 2012 after his extension talks with the Giants broke down or something like that when I said Tim Lincecum is going to be the last good free agent.

So hey, you paid me for that tweet. You gave me money to write that tweet. So how did this change? I wrote a headline called Farewell to Free Agency. There you go. But I had a question mark at the end of it. Oh, so that means... So I built in a hedge.

Well, yeah, especially because the law of question mark headlines is that the answer is always no. Yeah, true. All right. I saved myself. So I know how it happened, but how did it happen? I think I know how it happened, but how did it happen? Well, as we talked about at the time, it's kind of a cyclical thing, perhaps, because i don't know if this is the primary reason but once a bunch of players do sign extensions then the players who haven't signed extensions are

suddenly in good position because they're the only free agents available and therefore they have more incentive not to sign extensions because they'll be the centerpieces of the market because all the other potential young superstars signed extensions. And then it swings back the other way where everyone wants to be the superstar who didn't sign the extension because then you can hit free agency when no one else does. So I don't know if that's the reason for this. I don't know if it might be too soon for that to be reflected in this, or maybe it's just a bunch of Boris guys all at once. What's your theory? Well, I think so when the extensions came up, the idea of the extension is that the player wants security and so gives away some of his maximum earning potential in order to get that security and i think that players figured out after not too long especially

seeing some of these deals that went really long that they still had a lot of leverage over the club uh and so they would get the security in the shortest deal possible. And so I don't know how much it applies to these players specifically, but I think that that's kind of the idea behind the opt-out, right, is that you're going to get them to give you a guarantee while preserving your ability to hit the free agent market a lot sooner. And, you know, like, for instance, with Cespedes, basically, as I recall, I might be wrong, I think this is right. The A's were able to get him primarily because they didn't, they didn't require six years that they would give him a shorter contract so that he was able to hit free agency before too long. And, you know, you get your

four years, you can get your $36 million, you've got your life-changing, your tier one life-changing money. And then rather than trying to get the six years guaranteed at that kind of nobody knows who I am quite yet and I have to take a discount to prove it rate, you hit free agency, having had a chance to establish yourself as a star and then you get more money.

And with Mike Trout, that was kind of the thing where the Angels wanted to go longer. The dispute was not the normal contract dispute where the player wants more years and the team wants fewer. It was the player wanted fewer years and the club wanted more because Trout wanted to get his tier one life changing money payday, but without giving up any more than he had to and so i think you're increasingly seeing players who are getting their paydays while preserving the option to hit free agency as many times as they can and as young as they can and then because a lot of the players jeff mentions in this class are players who hadn't signed extensions yeah Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, Adam Jones signed an extension. Andrew McCutcheon signed an extension. Clayton Kershaw signed an extension. And these guys are, I mean, by the time 2018 comes around, Adam Jones is going to be 33. And Andrew McCutcheon is going to be about the same age, right? And because they signed extensions and they didn't become free agents the first chance that they had. And so they're not going to be as appealing in three years as they sound today when they're still in their primes. They're going to be, I don't know,

who's the free agent this year that is Alex Gordon or something who's already, no, he's, I mean, he's just 30. Who's, who's a 33 year old free agent this year? Well, Zobrist almost. Yeah. So who signed an extension? Yeah. Right. So, so that's the thing is that you get to be a free agent and, and some of these guys will still be good enough that they'll get huge deals anyway, but you are becoming free agents when you're 32, 33, 34, not when Jason Hayward just did. Yeah, I would, uh, I would expect my, my guess would be that we're going to see a lot more deals for the top tier. Like I think that the mid tier guys, you know, you'll still get your Luke Roy contracts and your Sal Perez contracts. I continue to think that the game is going to go in that direction even more aggressively

and we'll see longer deals for younger players who have even less star profile. But I think that for the guys who have the star profiles, like Machado and Harper, they're seeing that they're giving up too much to take some of that risk away. And I think the ones who do sign, you're going to see a lot fewer options tacked on at the end, team options tacked on at the end. And they're going to be shorter deals. I think you're going to see deals that maybe buy out one year of free agency, but not the ones that go longer than that with a whole slew of club options tacked on. like a whole slew of club options tacked on. And then, of course, I mean, the list that Jeff has includes Hayward,

who is obviously just signed a contract. So that's an opt-out. That's a guy hitting free agency again at 29. And Kershaw is an opt-out. There are other guys who are on there that are also opt-outs. Yeah. Okay. Fun time, though.

I've read this article like four times just because I like it's fun to look at the list i like looking at the list it's really fun yeah all right by the way have you seen the uh the love that tony cruz has gotten since we talked about tony cruz we did a banter about tony Cruz, former Cardinals backup catcher, now current future Royals backup catcher who never plays, has been stuck behind really good, really durable catchers. And since then, Yadier Molina posted on Instagram to sort of lament the loss of Tony Cruz.

And by the way, speaking of players with interesting punctuation tendencies yadi or melina on instagram is like three commas surrounded by spaces on both sides and obviously english is not his first language but it's not like triple commas is a thing in spanish either so i can i'll send you uh i'm there by the way chris sale i actually uh i saw later i just saw a later tweet and uh chris sale actually has a club option and will not hit until 2019 uh-huh i am looking at yadier molina's twitter well i just I just sent you his Instagram about Tony Cruz. And he says, very sad. First Tony, now Jay, referring to John Jay.

Wow, maybe I am next. Well, I know his business for them. They don't care about anything, only business. For me, we are family. I am so sad. Yeah, he might be talking about Iyam iam by the way it might be that he's predicting iam is gonna retire next yeah you don't technically know no no that's true yeah the well the weird thing is uh first comma uh space comma space second one space, comma, comma, comma, space. Third one, space, comma, comma, comma, comma, space.

Fourth one, space, comma, comma, no space. Fifth one, space, comma, comma, space. He had every possible combination. How do you end up with three commas? You know what, Ben? Yeah. If we ever do our parody, if we ever go into the parody song business uh the effectively wild parody song business i think that we're gonna have to to

to redo comma comma comma comma comma camalina comma camalina. Kamalina. He just put his finger on the key and just left it there for a while. Let me real quick prediction time. We're off that topic and back to that one. So Harper, Donaldson, McCutcheon, Machado, Price, Hayward, Kershaw, Fernandez, Harvey Keichel. I want you to pick an extension and a terrible. So name a guy who will have an extension by then and not hit free agency, and name a guy who will be terrible, just terrible.

Which guys are eligible here? Harper, Fernandez? Harper, Donaldson, McCutcheon,ado price another opt-out by the way hayward kershaw fernandez harvey keitel keitel terrible okay which i don't believe but in that group maybe and extension and now those guys seems like well was Kershaw in that group? Yeah. Okay. I'll say Kershaw. I mean, he has a.

But he could, yeah, he could renegotiate. Right. A new contract before, like the Sabathia model. I'll say that happened. And one more of Price, Hayward, and Kershaw. I don't know if there's enough in maybe Kershaw since he's already taken. But of those three opt-outs, do you see one not opting out? Not opting out at all. Not opting out, not renegotiating.

Just that's his contract. No. See, to me, Keichel seems like the most obvious extension here. But he's also probably the most... I mean, it's hard not to bet on him as the terrible one. But I'll go Keichel extension Donaldson terrible. And I will say... I will also say no opt-out. But I'll go Keuchel extension Donaldson terrible. And I will also say no opt-out, all opt-outs.

All right. The other thing I was going to say is that Hayward listed Tony Cruz as a reason why he wasn't re-signing with the Cardinals because Tony Cruz left. Not explicitly, but he mentioned that the Cubs have this young core, whereas the Cardinals have all these players who are retiring soon or are gone, like Tony Cruz. So should have kept Tony Cruz, could have had Jason Haber. All right, so you can send us emails,

which I've been saying for about two weeks without actually doing an email show. Maybe we'll do one tomorrow. I don't know. I'm 90% sure we will. Okay. So send us some at podcast at baseballperspectives.com. Join our Facebook group, facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild.

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