Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 803: Coin-Flip Friday

Episode Date: January 22, 2016

Ben and Sam banter about Yoenis Cespedes, then revisit the Josh Donaldson deal and answer listener emails about umpire inadequacy, the Ausmus-Matheny paradox, and what it would cost to pay minor leaguers minimum wage.

You don't wanna know more Ain't you been down this road before? So leave it alone Just leave it alone Oh, this ain't nothing new The only thing you got is you So leave it alone just leave it alone

hello and welcome to episode 803 of effectively wild the daily podcast from baseball prospectus presented by the play index at baseballreference.com i I am Ben Lindberg of FiveThirtyEight, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Prospectus. Hi. Hey. Yesterday we talked about why no one has gotten a one-year opt-out, or an opt-out after one year. Today there are opt-out after one year rumors. Oh yeah?

Who? Yeah. Buster only tweeted. Wait, can I guess? Can I guess? Sure. There aren't that many players left, so. Ian Desmond.

No, Desmond rumors were just one-year contract period, I think. But only tweeted that the Mets and U.N.S. Cespedes are discussing a three-year deal that would have an opt-out after the first year. Oh my gosh. Imagine telling you, even three three months ago that Cespedes was going to get a three-year deal. I mean, think about it. Okay. Cespedes, when he came over and nobody had any idea what he'd do, got a four-year deal. And now he's coming off of a season in which he was like a five-win player. And he's been a reliably three- to four-win player in his career. And for two months of the season, there was actual conversation

about whether he was so good that he should be an MVP for two months of performance. Yep. And now he's going to get a three-year deal from the Mets. Right. Not even from a – I mean, nothing – look, not even – I don't even – I don't know if I can say it without making it seem like just the Mets. But it seems like especially because it's just the Mets.

Like they're the team that he – I don't know. You would maybe – you would sort of think that he would view this as a slap in the face coming from the Mets. If he just went out in the market, didn't give it to him, well, fine, he can accept that. It is what it is. But he did all these heroics for the Mets. He celebrated with the Mets. And for them to then start negotiations in the two-year range, you would think would be a giant turnoff of the conversation like it's just it

sort of sounds like the sort of low ball that the player ends up holding against you like you know john lester and the red socks uh extension offer that one time you know yeah and so uh it almost seems least likely that he would sign a humble contract with the Mets of all teams. It's like as though he's almost taking a pay cut. Yeah. There's another rumor about a five-year offer from the Nationals, so maybe he ends up taking that one. That's not the Tinder one, though, is it?

No, I don't think so. What was the Tinder story? I saw an allusion to it. Somebody on Twitter who I think, I don't know enough about him to say definitively, but my sense was that he is a fake rumor Twitter guy, as we know about. We know about those guys. was reporting him to the Nationals. And part of his reporting was that supposedly there was a woman who was a match with him on Tinder in the Washington area. And he said that he was going to be in the Washington area around that time. And then he offered her $5,000 to not say anything. And the least realistic part of this is that she said,

no, it's really important to me that instead of getting $5,000 in American currency, I tell a rando with 57 followers on Twitter so that he can tweet it and no one will believe him. Right. Well, that sounds legit. Yeah. This Nationals rumor is coming from Ken Rosenthal, who generally has better sourcing than some guy on Twitter who's talking to some person on Tinder.

Yeah. Anyway, so he might take the longer one unless he thinks he's like a pillow contract candidate just because there's been so little interest or at least this has dragged on for so long and maybe he thinks there isn't much of a market for him right now. Although he'd be the strangest pillow contract candidate ever. I mean, coming off by far his best year. Normally the pillow contract is a way to reestablish your value when it is at an all time low. This would be like what we talked about with Upton, where it's just an acknowledgement that the market got away from you for whatever circumstance. He's not going to be seen as more valuable in a year than he is

right now, but there are other forces at play. Sometimes supply and demand gives the, I mean, you know, gold is not any more valuable today than it was yesterday or 10 years ago or anything, except the market says it is. I mean, it's not like you can actually do more with gold now. Like, wow, gold has sure rehabilitated itself. Wow, gold has really made some improvements. I wasn't interested in gold before but since it you know learned how to hit the slider now i'm really interested in gold gold is gold and yet you know the value of gold obviously changes a lot and so maybe the value of cesspitus will just be different in a year because somebody deems it so yeah could be are you at all surprised that the astros didn't sign chris davis that seemed like such an underexplored match to me.

Why? Well, because I believe that they probably have money. They've been carrying way below, payroll's much lower than they could afford for years. If they saved any of that and invested in something like, for instance, gold, they'd be doing okay right now and they have you know a ton of guys who are cross cost controlled so you know they should be able to spend money you you would think they should be able to spend money and still be doing okay uh and uh first base is kind of their one place where they don't have a guy and chris davis fits what we know they like in hitters

right yeah unless guys with power yeah unless it's really the right-handed aspect that plays up in minute made uh and he's not right-handed enough but yeah chris davis seems like if ever they were going to give a free agent contract to somebody at least least to a hitter, he would be the type of guy and this would be the type of need. Maybe they just maybe it's just what we were talking about. His aging outlook looks particularly ghastly. And they did the actuarial tables and said, well, we only like that guy when he's 24. Right. OK, I want to get to a few more emails.

I will start with one about another player that the A's traded. This is from Austin, who says, just saw a story about Josh Donaldson and got to thinking about how much benefit of the doubt Billy Bean got last offseason. After looking back, it really seems like a fail. Am I right, or does Bean deserve more slack than I'm giving? It really seems like a fail. Am I right? Or does Bean deserve more slack than I'm giving? So Bean obviously did get criticism for that deal at the time. I don't remember what we said about it. I wrote something at Grantland that was pretty defensive of him. I mean, it sort of started with the premise that this is weird and doesn't seem to make sense, and then tried to figure out why it might make sense. And I think the headline probably made me sound more bullish about it than I was in the text. And so because of that, there's this one random guy on Twitter who tweets me every three months or so to say, hey, Ben, how's the Josh Donaldson deal going? I guess that has been a fulfilling exercise for him.

So it was definitely strange at the time. And so he got some flack. And then I think when a deal seems really strange, there is a natural kind of equal and opposite reaction to try to figure out what they were thinking. kind of equal and opposite reaction to try to figure out what they were thinking and probably stronger with someone who has the track record of Billy Bean. And I think we talked about at the time, or maybe we've talked about other times, whether someone with a good track record should get some more benefit of the doubt. Like should Billy Bean, who does something weird, get at least more of an effort to explain what he's thinking than, say, Dave Stewart, who does weird things but hasn't really proven that he's a good GM yet? And I think it's reasonable to do that. You can get into trouble, obviously, if you're just bending over backward to try to praise every move a GM makes. But there are, you know,

previous examples of things being did that maybe seemed surprising or wrong to some people and turned out well. Anyway, I guess the most positive interpretation of that trade in retrospect is the A's won 68 games. So even if you put MVP Josh Donaldson on the team, it doesn't really make much of a difference from a competitive standpoint. They got Franklin Barreto, who is now a top 20 position player prospect in baseball, and they got some other stuff. Again, the most positive interpretation, I think baseball reference says that Brett Lurie was an average player, if you factor in his defense. So they got an average season from him, and they good in AAA and is still under team control for a while. And they traded Brett Laurie for a couple guys. So they still have those guys. So anyway, that would be the, I guess, the defense. I mean, it's hard to defend because Josh Donaldson was the MVP

and had a career year. And I don't know if you can blame Bean for that. I mean, I think the most reasonable expectation was that we'd seen the best Josh Donaldson already. You know, he's going into his age 29 season. There's no real reason to expect him to have a career year. And he did. And so that makes it look worse. But I'm guessing that if he could do it over again, Bean probably doesn't do it. So in that sense, it's certainly a fail. it was a, quote, fail, which is what Rob Nyer called in his big book of baseball blunders, a blunder, which is a mistake that is not just a mistake in retrospect, but that you could have seen coming. And so does this, with more information, with more knowledge about the pieces involved, can you then take that information and go back to the time and see how there were errors in process and that even as a concept the trade didn't make sense or made even less sense than you realized at the time

and the second is did he lose the trade and that's just results right i mean yeah somebody loses a baseball game that doesn't mean they failed the baseball game they just lost because somebody's gonna lose and it's virtually i mean it's crazy to say this because it's one guy with one year but it's almost oh well no i guess i mean no because barretto uh i was gonna say it's almost impossible to imagine him winning this by you know any objective standard uh but barretto of course barretto is the the great hope yes you know Graveman and Nolan are just they're just not going to do it they're not going to be those guys and if anything their stocks have dropped I would say since uh since he got them but they were never really going to uh be the kind of players who could overwhelm a MVP season from Josh Johnson

at something close to the major league minimum. And then, you know, the guys that they got for Laurie are just kind of guys. They're not really seen as any particular upside plays. But Barreto is a potential star. So it's conceivable. Johnson was making over $4 million, by the way. I mean, you know, still obviously a great, great, great deal. But yeah, he was arbitration guy already. Fair enough a great great great deal but yeah he he was

arbitration guy already fair enough okay super two i think he was a super two yeah super two right yeah beretta could still could still win it i mean if he turns into a hall of famer or if he turns into i don't know if he turned into eric ibar just to name a guy would would that i think that if he did then there's still a chance that on a you know a wars per dollars kind of a way of looking at it. The A's could still end up getting the most wars for slightly fewer dollars, but they're way out in the future. And you have to decide how much discount way out in the future. You could also make the case, not that the A's knew that this was going to be the case, but you could make the case that the A's didn't actually lose anything because if they'd gotten Josh Donaldson this year, they would have finished essentially exactly where they did in the AOS.

Although even that is kind of a thorny issue. I mean, for one thing, if he'd had an MVP first half, they maybe could have gotten more for him when they traded him. Oh, yeah, definitely could have gotten more. That's part of it. Well, maybe could have gotten more. I was going to say definitely could have, but... I mean, he was a superstar already. He was a superstar already,

and you might have fewer... Less of team control. And fewer buyers, perhaps. Yeah, so maybe he could have gotten more. The other thing is that, I mean, the A's were a 68 win team that for most of the season had underlying numbers that suggested they should be much better than that. I mean, their Pythagorean record was 77 win team and their base runs record

might've been even better. They had a total bullpen collapse and terrible record in one run games and all of that. And so you don't really know how to evaluate that. Like if Bean thought, well, we're going to be a 73 win team or something, then that is different than if he thought they were going to be an 85 win team and still traded donaldson yeah and also underperforming your your pathag is kind of like butterfly effect territory right like yeah if if they were that good and even if we assume that they were that good well then the i mean the distribution of the runs weren't going to necessarily like if you replay the universe the distribution of the runs is probably not going to turn up in the most disadvantageous way possible. So just having, I mean, if he, I don't know, like the whole, you have to decide how real the underperforming of one's Pythagorean record is.

You could make the case that if he had just traded josh donaldson 40 seconds later and then the whole world is different and if the a's play exactly to the same talent level that they demonstrated in 2015 but with a 40 seconds later different world sequence of events they might have 194 like the if the the stable thing is talent level the unstable thing is incredibly bad luck and bad sequencing and so i yeah i mean i don't know how you play that out it's too complicated to think about it i mean okay look i think that it is probably the case, probably the case, and I don't know if this is satisfying to say, and I don't know if we need to go there, but if you just swap out Josh Donaldson for Brett Laurie,

and Nolan and Graveman, and then replay the season, the A's probably win the AL West. Wait, you think that's likely? Yeah, because I'm not going to dock them 10 wins for bad luck or 15 wins or whatever it was. Yeah, except that I don't know. But I don't think that leads you anywhere useful, though. Like I'm saying that it is probably true in my mind, but it is not useful in analyzing. Like I had to say it because it is true in my head and I'm here talking

and that's what I'm, you're asking me to talk. You're asking me to say, what is happening in your brain right now, Sam? So that happened in my brain and I said it. All right. But I don't, I don't think that leads anywhere useful. So, so that's, I'm saying I'm building a brick wall and saying that road is a dead end. Let's back up and go somewhere else. Okay. All right. Now, so we're going to remove the, well, the A's lost anyway factor.

All right. All right. So then here's where I think this trade in retrospect gets much, much worse for Billy Bean. And this is just bad luck, and it's all narrative, and it's not pure analytics. It's not any analytics. But okay, so he trades Josh Donaldson for a package of stuff

that a lot of people didn't like as much. It's baffling. We talk about it. It's interesting. And it comes up in all this discussion that Josh Donaldson was kind of irreverent toward Billy Bean and kind of insulting to him, right? Publicly and directly, right? And so then people who want to build a, you know,

a case against Billy Bean as a GM or as a leader go, oh, look at that. Thin skinned, can't even take criticism and therefore trades away his, his best player. What a dope. And that's a fairly fringe viewpoint. Like you and I would not hold to that viewpoint. I think probably, probably based on what we know. And, uh, probably most people don't like that is a, that is an internet, uh, message board kind of viewpoint, right? It would be, it would be lost to the, uh, minority, uh, view, uh, in history, but history. But then Josh Donaldson goes and does something that makes this trade extremely memorable. Like if Josh Donaldson had just been an all-star, then fine. This trade would just go down as, oh, it wasn't a very good trade. It was, you know,

better than the Hudson trade and worse than the Mulder trade. Somewhere in a very long career of Billy Bean moves, this would go down as one of his lesser ones. Maybe this would be like the Jim Johnson trade. And people would remember it some, but they wouldn't talk about it a lot. But instead, this will maybe go down, particularly if the A's were to say struggle for the next four years, if the A's were to say struggle for the next four years, say, this will go down as maybe one of the defining moves of his later career.

And therefore, I would guess that the fringe view that this was a personal issue that Billy Bean allowed to spread into his decision-making will be repeated probably by some historian 60 years from now even. This trade will now become one of those few moments from history that stands up above the rest of the moments of history. And because of that, I think Billy Bean will probably be linked to that accusation for decades. And all because Josh Donaldson did something extremely memorable. It doesn't help that the Blue Jays became the best team in baseball and made the playoffs for the first time in decades.

Exactly. You could imagine that if if josh don if he traded josh donaldson to you know the diamondbacks and josh donaldson had been like a seven win player and the diamondbacks had won 83 games and donaldson had finished fourth in mvp voting then i don't think this trade gets remembered for as long as it does but yeah the fact that i mean how there's got to be fun facts about trading an mvp? Like this has to be the first time an MVP has been traded in 60 years or something. Probably. Like on the eve of winning an MVP?

Yeah, exactly. Like this probably never happens. This will be a trivia question, you know, your Geico trivia question, you know, every few years. And people will remember it. And yeah, the fact that the Blue Jays won the division, that they broke this long post-season drought, that they went to the LCS, that Donaldson was the MVP, that maybe he'll win it again this year. Who knows? All serves just to make this a very long lasting story for history. And it's not one for various reasons, but especially because of this fringe accusation that he did it for spite. It's not one that plays well in his legacy.

Yeah. Okay. Like it's a bummer. It's a bummer trade. It is. It was a trade that I – right. I didn't like it at all at the time. At the time, you, as you say, my recollection of our conversation was that you also laughed along with me at how it was difficult to how you really had to strain to find something. And then you talked about how old he was and how he's much older than Laurie.

And you ended up probably coming to its defense more than you felt in your heart. But that's where we were, I think, when the trade was made. in your heart. But that's where we were, I think, when the trade was made. And since then, events have only served to make it much worse for him, if not necessarily any worse in our assessment of it. Right. Okay. All right. Question from Michael with Catchella, finally public. That was the name for the day at BP where all the new defensive stats came out. And Brad Osmus anointed the best defensive catcher of all time. I have some questions for the both of you. If it had been released a month earlier, do you think it would have made any impact on Osmus' Hall of Fame votes?

I discussed this with other folks, and while Osmus was known as a defensive catcher, I don't think many people would have considered him the best defensive catcher ever. Do you think many of the voters consider him the best defensive catcher of all time? If Coachella stuff came out five years ago, would he have lasted maybe an extra year on the changes on the all-time catcher leaderboards because of these new stats. And Osmus was the biggest beneficiary of it. He was like a 16-win lifetime player before this at BP, and now he's a 40-win player. So he picked up 24 wins above replacement player which is pretty huge and i'm also wondering about this in relation to jorge pesada who is up for induction next year and lost something like 13 wins in this accounting and is like the third worst defensive catcher on the list now. So does this stuff impact their chances or should

it have, I guess? Because you often hear people say that so-and-so was the best at this one thing, and that is used as something that bolsters their Hall of Fame candidacy. And if Brad Osmus is the best defensive catcher of all time, or as closely as we can tell based on the stats we have, that's a big point in his favor. And I wonder whether, given some years, if he had been on the ballot a few years later, after these stats had come out and been circulated, whether that would have helped him at all. I mean, he's still not a Hall of Famer, though. Right. Right? Yes. No. And so it's easier to say that he would merit as many votes as other players of his level get. Yeah. I mean, if David Eckstine gets votes and Garrett Anderson gets votes and Mike Sweeney gets votes, then I think certainly Osmus should get votes.

But we don't generally like applaud those votes and go, those are great, accurate votes. We sort of go, huh, who voted for Mike Sweeney, right? And so if Osmus had gotten eight votes, would we go, well, that's an enlightened voter? Or would we go, huh, who used one of their 10 votes on Brad Ausmus yeah I think I mean I'm as fixated on catcher defense as anyone but if I had a hall of fame vote I would not vote for Brad Ausmus because he just wasn't a good enough hitter he was a bad hitter and so he's not a deserving hall of famer and so yeah I don't think he was snubbed. He was maybe snubbed in the sense that no one even thought about it. No one even considered him remotely close. And, you know, he's as good as some people who got votes or were considered for votes. And he's probably better

than some of them, I think. But since he doesn't deserve to be in any way, I don't really care whether he gets zero votes or four votes. Yeah. By the way, I thought the piece that you wrote on him was tremendous. One of my favorite things you wrote this year, very close to my favorite thing you wrote this year, last year, at least. Thanks. I like the book you wrote more. That's good. But anyway, one of the things that I thought was really interesting is that you went back and looked at what BP annual comments, I think, had said about him. And essentially, there was never a nice word said about him. It wasn't like, boy, this guy is a great defensive player, but he sure gives a lot of it back

with his offense. It was just, you know, like relentless mockery of him. with his offense it was just you know like relentless mockery of him and and i think partly that's that was a reaction to what was seen as excessive praise for his defense yeah and uh so it's it's good i think that a big part like i think i've said this about other defensive metrics but i think a great thing about defensive metrics is that they they establish the range of value more than they tell you i mean it's great that they tell you. I mean, it's great that they tell you who's good and who's bad. But I think the most important thing that they tell you

is how much more valuable a good person is than a bad person is. So that simply so that you can put that in perspective. And I think if we had known that 10 years ago, 15 years ago, even without having the detailed analysis of how good Ausmus was, I think it would be much easier for writers of that era to have been able to accept, okay, well, presuming he is actually this good,

presuming that all the people who know catching particularly well are not wrong, presuming that there's something to the public assessment of him, which isn't always true. In Jeter's case, for instance, it's not always true. But if it is true, here's how much praise he deserves. And I think that it would have, even without knowing exactly how good Ausmus was, it would have softened a lot of the criticism of him and, you know, probably treated him more fairly in his career. While we're on the topic of Matheny's, I mean, of Ausmus's, how does, I haven't looked, how does Matheny do? Because Matheny and Ausmus were in a lot of ways, the same player during their career. And, does, I haven't looked, how does Matheny do? Because Matheny and Osmus were in a lot of ways the same player during their career. And, and yet I haven't noticed in writing about

and editing these catcher beasts, I haven't noticed Matheny's name. No, I think I might have seen him in a comment on one of those articles from someone also bringing this up, that he doesn't do that well in them. And so that sort of shows the challenge of, even of knowing how valuable catcher defense is now, it shows how challenging it would have been to write about guys like Matheny and Ausmus 10 or 15 years ago, because in fact, while Ausmus was deserving of great praise and much of the great praise that

he got from traditionalists, Matheny was exactly probably as overrated or maybe not but uh for the sake of keeping the sentence shorter exactly as overrated as the uh probably uh BP uh mind thought that he was right and it's confusing from an evaluation perspective because both of those guys had great defensive reputations, but the stats say only one of them really fully deserved it. Like, Osmus' career fielding runs above average now is 261 in the positive, and Matheny's is 17.7. Yeah, which is an amazing, like, that's an amazing difference. And if you believe that we can measure this stuff now, and I do, it really is. It's funny because, wow, I mean, Ausmus, the Ausmus case

is just such an endorsement of expertise and the eye test and the value of, uh, of baseball experience. And Matheny is such an indictment of the same. I think if you did a Krasnick and polled GMs 15 years ago about which one was better, or made 10, I don't know how many years, which one was better, it probably would have been pretty close to a split vote. And in fact, one guy is average

and the other is the greatest of all time. Yeah. Jeff Pado Nastro wrote an interesting article as part of that big rollout also about just how it's difficult to scout this stuff because you sit behind home plate to watch baseball if you're a scout often or even if you're down the lines or something you can kind of tell how a catcher receives the ball i mean you can tell if he's doing something really bad and obviously you can scout of tell how a catcher receives the ball. I mean, you can tell if he's doing something really bad. And obviously you can scout his blocking and his throwing and everything.

But the receiving is such a subtle skill that it can be difficult if you can't actually see his glove. So, yeah, I talked to a I talked to a scout who was behind the plate one time about how confident he was in his assessment of framing. And he was a former catcher. And he said that he thought he was very good, that he could tell within a couple of pitches. And I think that he is probably, that is, I think that you probably can tell in a couple of pitches a good percentage of a player's technique. Like you can probably see it. You probably see it just the way he, I don't know. I don't know how general I'm willing to go, but you might be able to see it in the way he walks. You know, you might be able to see it in

his eyes. Like you might be able to see into his framing soul, but certainly just by his technique, you can probably pick up a lot very quickly and very easily. But yeah, from behind, I was sitting there when he told me this and I was thinking, we can't even see his glove. Right. Like, how are you doing it? Yeah, right. By the way, so 2000 to 2006, these are the NL Gold Glove winners for catcher. Matheny, Ausmus, Ausmus, Matheny, Matheny, Ausmus. And so that's a split.

I mean, for those seven years years matheny won it four times osmus won at three neither one won it before or after and so in their heydays uh they were both in the same league uh and they were basically split with matheny getting one more all right i do think it could hurt passata's case by the way i don't know that passata had i don't think strong case anyway it's kind of an outside case But the fact that he was seen as a poor defensive catcher and this supports that certainly might, whatever support he might have had. If he had been a Piazza kind of case

where Piazza had a bad defensive reputation, but the stats say, no, he was actually good. If Posada had had that, then maybe that could have pushed him into what, actually should be a Hall of Fame category, but it pushes him the other way. And Kelvin says, though I am not an avid NFL fan anymore, I found myself captivated by the Packers versus Cardinals game on Saturday, and one moment in particular, the overtime coin toss. If you haven't seen it by now, the referee for the game botched the coin toss by tossing it directly in the air without the coin flipping. The players and referee all noticed this gaffe, and so the referee reflipped

the coin successfully this time. Flipping a coin is obviously as easy a task as one can be assigned, and this was such an awe-inducing gaffe for me. I've been trying to figure out a baseball equivalent for this scenario and I simply cannot. Is there any task so mundane that an umpire could butcher it so badly that it would be on par with failing to flip a coin in overtime during a playoff game? I think simply like if you were the home plate umpire and you just forgot to watch the pitch like they throw a pitch and you

just were looking off somewhere else and you heard it and you looked back and you thought you had to ask yeah right i think if you try to brush off brush the dirt off the plate and you brush more dirt onto the plate yeah but time is called and you can you know you can take another swing at it it's not like you know you have to it's not like you have to take a run off the board or anything right well the coin flip was just a do-over yeah but you had to take you took you had to take possession away from a team that had possession right at least at least for a moment yeah play was affected you try to call the replay people in new york and instead you just call a wrong number but you just would dial it again i don't know it's not like you'd get

it's not like you'd be like well i got joey now joey has to decide. Yeah, there's no perfect equivalent. Joey, tell them on your TV. Just not watching. Just spacing out. I remember seeing, this is not the answer, but I remember seeing a guy hit a home run that was called fair. And it landed, I don't know, it was just deep just deep enough for home run so this wasn't like one of those high ones that you know you're like you lose it in the sun or anything like that so this was just a normal home run that landed in like the third row and it was probably 10 feet

foul and it was called fair and it was the most like nobody, like the team that got the home run was laughing on the bench. The next ball that was hit like 75 feet foul and they called foul, got a huge Bronx cheer. Like everybody in the stadium knew it. Like the announcers knew it. We all knew it. It was the weirdest thing. And I mean, just like by a good, maybe 10 feet is an exaggeration, but like six feet isn't. Yeah, there was a moment in

a stompers game this summer i think i mentioned in the book actually where one of our players fouled right he fouled tipped he fouled off a pitch and he had two strikes on him so the entire team our dugout was saying foul foul because they were worried that the umpire was going to call him out and instead the umpire called it a ball and our player walked on a foul tip which i've never seen in the major so that's pretty bad that's about as bad as not watching at all i had a this is off topic but uh one of our scouts for the stumpers uh played high school ball and uh his coach had a, this is off topic, but one of our scouts for the Stompers played high school ball and his coach had a secret play that they would use if they needed to run late. So if he got a runner on, if he, oh no, it was, it was, if he ever got runners on second and third with less than two

outs, what he would do is call for the squeeze Because if the guy gets the bunt down and then the throw goes to first and nobody is watching home plate anymore, because nobody's watching the guy at the trailing runner. There's only two umpires. So nobody's watching the trailing runner. So the guy on third comes in to score. And then the guy on second just cuts straight across. Like, well, he cuts, you know, he cuts 20 feet off the corner

and then just comes straight home and only one person in the stadium is positioned to see it and that's the third basement assuming that the bunt doesn't go to third base and so the third basement is just completely losing his mind like he's mr robot like he's the only person in the world who can see this and he's yelling and he's so certain but there's nothing anybody can do and that was a real play that they really would run in in high school like a high school coach i love that that is weren't there like 1890s orioles known for doing that yeah john mcgraw teams i think it was yeah there was definitely the cutting over the mound yeah the because i think then there was only one up and so when if there was a ball hit to the outfield and he had to turn his back,

then the runner would cut straight across. Matthew says, I was thinking about the minor leaguers class action suit, which we discussed with Nathaniel Groh last week, and was curious of the potential domino effects if the court rules in favor of the players. If the players were to be paid actual minimum wage, would teams just take the cut in revenue? Would we see a spike

in ticket and merchandise pricing for minor league teams? Would we see teams reduce their number of minor league teams or players? Or would we see some other consequence? So I was thinking teams have six affiliates generally, something like that. So each team has, say, 150 minor leaguers or something in that ballpark. And you have 30 teams. And so that's 4,500 minor leaguers. There was an article in Sports Illustrated about that case, and the lawyer who wrote it claimed that a lot of minor leaguers make between $3,500 and $7,000 a year total for playing. So if we put the middle in $5,000 or something, 4,500 players times $5,000 is $22,500,000. So even if you doubled that, and that's spread across 30 teams. So 22 million

over 30 teams is not much at all for teams. And so even if you doubled that, even if you tripled that, you wouldn't think it would be such a significant expense that a team would consider, say, cutting teams or cutting players, right? Like now we talk about teams don't spend enough on minor leaguers nutrition. They should spend more on minor league playing conditions because if it leads to one more good major league player, then you justify all the expense. then you justify all the expense. And maybe we'd be saying the same thing if teams, you know, if like if the Marlins cut an affiliate or something because they didn't want to pay for minor leaguers who were actually making minimum wage, then we would say it's short-sighted, it's inefficient. You get one player from that team, it pays for all the other players. So I don't know that it would make much of a difference,

which maybe just goes to show how wrong it is that they are paid so little because teams could afford so much more. Do you think it would be in any way an expense that would force teams to make cuts or raise prices? Or would they just say, well, okay, that was nice. Well, it lasted. We got away with it for a while.

Yeah, I think mostly it would just if it if anything i think it might quietly affect free agent contracts for big leaguers like there might be slightly less money to throw around to josh hamilton yeah but yeah i don't i don't i mean look the there's not really another option for major league teams they need they need the farm system set up now right there's an option for the owners of the teams if the owners of the teams themselves had to start paying more if their expenses went way up then you know you could see them going out of business which is why mlb subsidizes and pays for these salaries uh and so that wouldn't be a factor. I don't think, I think MLB would pay 10 times what

they pay for the farm system. Maybe not 10 times, but maybe 10 times what they pay for the farm system if they had to, they just don't have to. Right. That's what I was thinking also. Okay. So that is it. You can replenish our email stock at podcast at baseballperspectives.com. We'll get to that next week. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild. Recently described by a commenter in the group as the only thing left that salvages Facebook. Have people been rating and reviewing? They have. Oh, good.

Yeah. Yeah, it's been a while since you've asked, but it is important to you. Yeah, they continue to trickle in, and I continue to enjoy the compliments. Ben, that's really the only place that Ben gets validation for his life's choices. Pretty much, yeah. And you can support our sponsor, The Play Index, at baseballreference.com. our sponsor, the Play Index at baseballreference.com. Use the coupon code BP when you subscribe to get the discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription. Big weekend. Looking forward to this weekend. Got a blizzard coming. Gonna go sledding in Central Park and watch the Royal

Rumble and watch X-Files. Can't wait for this weekend. Hope you all enjoy the weekend as much as I will. We will be back next week. Well, this might be an opportunity to get you to predict the coin flip. If you want to. It's got to be on a surface that will make enough noise. Okay. Don't screw it up like the ref. Oh, am I flipping?

Yeah. I don't know if you could predict over Skype. I don't know if I could either. I don't know if you could predict, period. But you seem to think you can. I do think I can. All right. right hang on i'm getting a coin i'm getting a quarter i'm gonna flip it on my kitchen floor i'm gonna let it land do you claim that you can always predict or that you can predict more than random i so here's the thing i am worried

that i'm now overthinking things like when you go to england and you're like, okay, you got to drive on the left. You got to drive on the left. You got to drive on the left. You got to drive on the left. And what you're really saying is do the opposite, do the opposite, do the opposite. And eventually you start doing the opposite of the opposite. And now you're in trouble again. I'm worried. I'm worried that I'm no longer trusting my instinct. And so, so far it hasn't been an issue, but I'm worried that I'm going to end up thinking too much and no longer doing, you know, the good blink response. But no, so to answer your question, no, I believe I can do it with, you know, something like 90% certainty. And I also believe that I have perhaps by

acknowledging this skill now reduced my ability to replicate it. Okay. All right. So I'm going to flip the coin. I'm going to flip the coin on the kitchen floor and let it land. You call heads or tails. I will then predict heads or tails, and then I will see whether it is heads or tails. Okay? Okay. So don't call until I have a chance to hear it. Oh, you know what?

Just call it. Just call it right now. Okay. Heads. Okay. You call heads. All right. Now I'm going to flip and then predict.

Okay. I have an answer. It is going to be heads. predict. Okay. I have an answer. It is going to be heads. Okay. Oh, it's tails. Well, at least you win. Doggone it. All right.

I might have to work on this. Okay.