Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 889: Three Aces in Distress
Episode Date: May 23, 2016Ben and Sam banter about burning clubhouse belongings and banning intentional balls, then discuss the shaky starts to the season by Matt Harvey, Sonny Gray, and Dallas Keuchel....
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You have torn it all apart, I'm watching it burn.
Watching it burn.
Good morning and welcome to episode 889 of Effectively Wild,
a daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives,
brought to you by the Play Index at Baseball Reference
and all of our supporters at Patreon. I'm Sam Miller, along with Ben Lindberg of FiveThirtyEight.
Hey Ben, how are you?
All right.
What do you want to talk about?
Well, before we dive into the meat of the episode, a listener named Lance posted a link
in the Facebook group, wanted to see whether it falls into the taxonomy of burn the ships stories. So it's a story about Matt Harvey in Newsday.
And it says,
The Mets huddled on Friday to begin the daunting task of reassembling Matt Harvey's shattered confidence.
Their options ran the gamut.
Most were traditional, such as dispatching the embattled pitcher to the minors for a head-clearing sabbatical.
A person briefed on the situation told Newsday.
Others were more radical
Such as emptying Harvey's locker
Assembling the belongings into a pile
And setting them ablaze
Some hoped that the gesture might symbolize
A much-needed fresh start
And that he could rise from the ashes
So is this a burn the belongings?
Do you think it counts?
Or is it completely different?
Yeah, it's completely
different there i don't think there are any analogous parts it's uh simply has one common uh
common ingredient yes did i see also that bobby parnell did this to himself that that's what
inspired this idea i don't know i think that i think that let, Fire Locker, setting those belongings on fire, which then Mets
reliever Bobby Parnell did last season when he was struggling.
Uh-huh.
All right, then.
So it's a new genre.
Yeah, I mean...
Burning your belongings.
Look, the thing about Burn Your Ships, which is so different than this, and I would argue
so plainly evil, is that it is really a matter of management
taking away all agency from the players or from the employees, and that it's really just
a cruel ultimatum.
And this is a totally different thing.
This would be perhaps, if Harvey did it himself and willingly, then it would be kind of a
cathartic thing that would be perfectly fine
and his own motivational tool.
And if it was done to him, it would arguably be risky.
It might not be a thing that he would like.
But again, it's not like you're refusing to give him new uniform.
I mean, that would be if you made him pitch nude, that might be very similar to a burn the ships.
Yeah.
Kind of a thing.
No.
But this is more of a purify yourself in the fire.
Yeah.
A Targaryen gesture.
I, yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
All right.
Is that it?
Yep.
Okay.
I wanted to give a plug to an article on BP today.
It's an interview with Rich Hill.
Yes.
Done by Tim Britton, the great Red Sox beat writer who is reviving the Prospectus Q&A feature for us.
And he got Rich Hill for the first one, which turned out to be not just satisfying to Rich Hill fans because Rich Hill's name is in it, but Rich Hill turns out to be very wise and really kind of interesting.
And you learn a lot about a wise pitcher's mentality.
And there is, I think that there is a tendency sometimes, which I think I roll my eyes a little bit at this tendency,
to find out that a ballplayer has some interest in stats and then to like lionize him.
And now he's our favorite player
like now he's twitter loves him uh and i don't think that you know looking at brooks baseball
is a moral act and so i don't i don't really get that excited to find out that uh that a player is
somewhat interested in this stuff however in this case this is a player that I already loved. And so
then to find out that he's also wise and curious, I guess maybe curious more than wise,
it would be a better word. Interested might be a good one, is gratifying. The other thing is that
he refers to his DRA when he was in Cleveland, which predates DRA.
And so that tells me that either he saw DRA and went and applied it to his career, which shows a tremendous amount of initiative, or in fact, he invented DRA before we did, which would be really impressive.
And it's one of the two, so 50-50.
Yeah, it's a very, very technical interview.
He really goes in-depth on all the aspects of his performance
that you can look up in a machine that tracks that.
So he seems to have really checked out all the information that's out there.
Yeah. All right. Secondly, I wanted to just very quickly, very, very quickly mock a great
tweet that I saw, which was insane, but amusing. All right. Next, I just want to very quickly
mock a tweet. I don't want to be too malicious about it. So I'm not even going to say who did
it because we could all make this tweet. I just, I like it. I like it because it reflects a certain way of watching
the sport and kind of losing perspective in the most obvious way possible. But this tweet was
from yesterday and it is, as ridiculous as Kershaw's 88 to 4 strikeout to walk ratio is,
to walk ratio is, Syndergaard's 75 to 9 K to walk ratio is just as ridiculous.
I mean, all the numbers are worse.
It's pretty much a direct comparison between comparable numbers, and they're all worse.
So that's all.
I enjoyed that.
I've felt that way before, too. Yeah.
That's all. I enjoyed that. I've felt that way before, too. Yeah. Well, there's a tendency always to want to anoint some other pitcher as the best.
And we had our Cinderguard episode earlier this season.
And so, I don't know, it just gets kind of stale to say Clayton Kershaw's the best every single time.
And yet that has been the case pretty consistently for years now.
And so when someone else does something incredible, we are very quick to point out how incredible that is. But often Kershaw is doing exactly the same thing, if not something better. And he also has the track record of having done it much longer.
It goes back to my claim that all fun facts are lies.
They require lies because it's like the point that Jordan made, I think Jordan made on the Bonds fun fact episode.
The greatest fun fact really would be Bonds hit more home runs than anybody in history, but there's just not that much you can do with it. And so what we do kind of do is we're trying to use numbers to strengthen this sort of hyperbole that we're using.
And you can't just lay out
a leaderboard, because that's boring, and you would just look at it and go, oh, some
guy's on top.
That's impressive.
Now I know who's best.
You want it to be fun, and you want it to be hyperbolic, and so you sort of layer a
few elements of color and or deception to it.
And this is sort of like the problem of when your deception doesn't work.
Like this is why you have to have a couple extra steps in a fun fact,
like to turn it into like a magic trick.
Because otherwise then you just have two numbers and one is better than the other.
And you can't really argue that the worst one is better.
It's hard.
It's really hard.
I like the tweet. And you can't really argue that the worst one is better. It's hard. It's really hard. I like the tweet.
All right, third thing.
Do you have any strong feelings about the intentional walk rules change?
I don't have very strong feelings.
I have sort of the same feelings that I had
about the fake to third, throw to first being outlawed,
which is that I was sort of fond of it
and I liked
that it worked very, very
rarely, but did work occasionally
and we got something fun out of it.
But I haven't really missed it since
it was gone, so I feel
sort of the same way about the intentional walk
in that it feels
sort of unnecessary. It's
this weird part of the game's DNA that never really had to be there.
We could have always just skipped this.
It's almost automatic that it works the way it's intended to.
I enjoy it just because of the extremely rare case where it backfires,
but also because I like the difference in styles of pitchers throwing intentional walks.
I like that most of them will just lob it in there and just make sure they get it to the
catcher's glove, but other guys will actually throw really hard and throw almost real pitches.
So I like that there's a difference there. And I sort of like, I guess, that there's a crowd
sort of like i guess that there's a crowd participation aspect to it in that you get the the booze and you give fans an opportunity to register their displeasure with this tactic
which maybe just tells you that you should just eliminate it entirely from the game i don't know
that it shouldn't even be an option because no one really likes that you can do this i don't think
it shouldn't even be an option because no one really likes that you can do this, I don't think.
But otherwise, I don't care all that much. I mean, it's not a big time saver. So it's not going to affect anything either way in that respect. So I wasn't advocating that we get
rid of it. But I also don't care that much. Yeah, when you're when you're editing an article for
for length, you eventually get to the point where you're, uh, when you're editing an, uh, an article for, for length, um, you
eventually get to the point where you're cutting what are called widows, which means that you've
got like an eight or nine line paragraph. And if you can, if it ends with, you know, like the word
gas is the, is, is its own line at the end. If you can just cut any word in the whole paragraph,
then now you're going to cut a whole line, even though you don't have to cut, you know, seven words.
You only have to cut one, right?
And there is a tendency when your editor comes back to you and goes, you know, this is great,
but it's way too long.
You've got to cut 145 lines, which is a lot of lines.
You're like, oh, well, okay, I'll start with the widows.
And you don't start with the widows. And you don't start with the
widows. You start with the sections. You got to start with the sections. You only do the widows
when you're at the very end of the process, because you're not going to find 145 widows.
And this feels like a widow to me. If you really want to cut the length of games,
I just don't want to, I think I don't really want to hear 25 years of efforts to cut
45 seconds here and there
You know either figure it out or accept it
Accept the game the way it is
I mean the minute that an
Intentional walk takes is not only
Only a minute but it's not a boring minute
It's usually part of the exciting part
Of the inning right
I guess less so if there's
If it's the pitcher coming up and it's the
number eight hitter. But a lot of times it happens in a rally. And as I wrote about for Jabba one
time about why baseball is boring, what makes baseball boring, the aspects of it that are
boring compared to the parts that aren't. Like a lot of the problem is that, well, the slower parts
tend to be the boring parts. Like the commercials come at the boring parts. So they're not drawing
out the suspense, for instance. They're just like the rally ends, now you're bored, and then here
comes two and a half minutes. And it's just too easy to turn the game off. And it's not like in,
you know, football or basketball where the timeouts come when you're like really excited
and it's a cliffhanger.
And to me, an intentional walk usually comes in the rally.
The rally is exciting.
And if you're lengthening the amount of time you spend in rally mode, that doesn't seem too problematic to me.
Anyway.
Yeah.
All right.
So, Ben, here's the topic.
Okay. A few days ago, actually about 13 days ago, I did a chat on Baseball Perspectives.
And somebody asked me, I forget the exact wording, but gave me three pitchers and said,
which one of these are you betting against?
And they were three struggling pitchers.
They were Sonny Gray, Max Scherzer, and David Price.
And so that night, I picked Sonny Gray. But that night, Max Scherzer, and David Price. And so that night, I picked Sonny Gray.
But that night, Max Scherzer struck out 20,
and then he struck out 10 in six innings in his next start.
So Max Scherzer is back.
Nobody is any longer worried about Max Scherzer.
David Price has been very good for two starts since then,
and so nobody's worried about David Price.
Sonny Gray got even messier and is now on the disabled list.
And I wanted to sort of rephrase the question,
but with three new pitchers, or three with replacing those two.
With Sonny Gray, Dallas Keuchel, and Matt Harvey,
who have all had a lot written about them in the last few weeks,
few days maybe, because it
does feel like we're getting to that point in the season where you really start worrying
about pitchers and even the small sample size caveaters start worrying about those pitchers.
So we have three pitchers who were all exceptional last year.
And what makes them all interesting to me is that they all had or were the subject
of very significant decisions, either late last year or over the offseason, that can now be looked
at in totally different ways. Matt Harvey, of course, the decision was made to, I guess, let him overrule doctor's advice and keep pitching pretty much unskipped,
pretty much unrestrained into the postseason and to go 30-ish, 38 innings, I think, over
the doctor's recommended kind of soft cap.
And now he's, of course, been horrible this year, and they're talking about burning his clothes.
Dallas Keuchel, it's kind of unclear exactly what the extension talks were with him.
But in August, it was reported that the Astros were discussing an extension with him.
In November, there was some talk that they were discussing or going to discuss. And
then in January and February, it was reported that they had not discussed. So I think it's
fair to say that there was some discussion about discussing. And if Dallas Keuchel had been intent,
it seems like the Astros might have been a willing partner in discussions about
locking him up long term. And now he's been terrible.
And Sonny Gray was the rare Oakland Athletic who was declared untradeable, untouchable,
more or less.
Not those words exactly, but Billy Bean took the rare step of coming out and saying, I'm not trading Sonny Gray.
And Sonny Gray has also been terrible.
And now he is on the disabled list with a strained trap.
So, Ben, let me ask you a question.
When you have a pitcher who's been tremendously worse than his established level of talent over the course of time that we're talking about, coming up on two months, give me your power rankings of top three things you look at to decide whether it's real and in what order you go. And it seems simplistic to say, but before I would even dive into the numbers and try to dissect it even further, I would just look at those two things, velocity of strike rate and walk rate.
Because, you know, I mean, those are kind of the cornerstones of pitching success.
And you can get most of the way to a pitcher's statistics with just those statistics.
can get most of the way to a pitcher's statistics with just those statistics and they kind of point you toward deeper further investigation if a guy's walk rate is bad like sonny gray's has been
compared to his past or dallas keichel's has been compared to his past then you can use that as a
springboard to diagnose him further and say that his command is off or his location is off or his
mechanics are off or whatever it is but those are sort of the the surface level characteristics that
you would start with and they would point you toward one thing or another does uh home run rate
at this point mean a lot to you uh definitely less i mean it it might mean something, certainly, if all those guys are throwing meatballs and getting home runs hit.
We know that in many cases that can be a little bit deceptive.
And the home run to fly ball rate, which is elevated, sometimes that doesn't mean all that much or it comes back to what it normally was.
So I wouldn't look at that first, but if a guy is struggling overall and he
is also getting hit very hard, then that's something probably worth paying attention to.
Maybe eventually you would use stat cast exit velocity as a proxy for how hard a guy is getting
hit. I mean, that is literally how hard he's getting hit we just probably need more time before i know exactly how much to make of that but that's something worth looking at also
yeah i would go first i would look at velocity second i would look at fip and third i would look
at probably overall strike rate uh although i also think that my, and before that I might actually go look at
how he was pitching immediately before and to see whether there was any kind of trajectory
toward this. And if I can basically broaden the sample size or, or expand the sample size
of the period of struggle. So in all three of these pitchers cases, there's
something that makes it, I would say notable, particularly notable, but they're different
kinds of things. So Harvey is, his velocity is down. It's down quite a bit. It's down like
two miles an hour. And I don't know if I don't, I always, I always struggle with the scout quote,
I don't know if, I don't, I always struggle with the scout quote,
because as we've talked about, you can find a scout who will tell you anything if you don't mind throwing out 100 quotes from scouts who say, nah, he's fine, right?
So we don't know how many scouts said he was fine before they found the scout who said,
for instance, on Harvey, quote, there's no deception in his delivery.
He's throwing across
his body and the hitters are getting a good look at everything. There's no fear factor,
no intimidation. Or the scout who said he's got a confidence problem. And in that case,
I don't even know if I would trust a scout who said he's got a confidence problem.
It might just be that he's sad that he's getting hit. So there's a cause and effect thing there as well.
But with Harvey, the velocity is down considerably.
And to me, even if he's pitching well, then I would be scared.
I think most of us are.
I mean, we've been through this with Felix Hernandez, I think, recently, where Hernandez is getting outs.
He isn't allowing runs.
Hernandez is getting outs. He isn't allowing runs. And even before this year, when his FIP kind of collapsed, there was a persistent worry that Felix was no longer throwing as hard. And we went through
this with Jared Weaver for a long time, where his velocity was dropping and he was still getting
outs, but it still felt like Cliff was coming in. There's a, I've noticed a real desire on the part of a lot of TV broadcasters to say that there's too much emphasis on velocity and assessing pitchers.
And I think that sometimes they're saying that because they want to talk about how great a guy like Dallas Keuchel is who doesn't have to throw hard.
And that's good.
We can all get behind that.
It is really fun when there's a pitcher who doesn't have to throw hard.
And I don't think anybody disputes that
We all know that there are a lot of ways to get outs
But sometimes I think
That it's designed to
Make us not worried about a pitcher who's throwing
A lot less hard than he used to
And it's just a fact that you should
There's just really not any disputing it
Can that pitcher reinvent himself
Yeah it happens
Sometimes there are outliers There are guys it happens sometimes. There are outliers.
There are guys who make it work.
There are exceptions to every rule.
But it's pretty much undeniable that it's better to throw hard than to not throw hard,
especially if you aren't throwing hard because you no longer can throw hard
and that it's not a choice that you're making for stylistic reasons.
And normally, I mean, Mike Fast put the math on it.
There's a pretty clear connection, a pretty clear correlation
between losing velocity and giving up more runs.
And there are a lot more guys who we worry about
and then they really do collapse
than there are guys who, you know, Frank Tanana it and build long careers.
I mean, the very fact
that frank tanana comes up every single time frank tanana retired 27 years ago and we're still using
frank tanana if frank tanana is your example was worse in his post velocity yeah that too like he
he successfully reinvented himself and yet still was worse than he had been when he threw it really hard.
Yeah. And you might know better than I do. I don't know. And Doug Thorburn writes about this
every year. The velocity movers, the guys who change velocity from one year to the next,
he looks at them then the next year, which is good. I think that's an important
thing to think about. Generally, there's not a lot of guys who bounce back in my kind of anecdotal
sense of things. I don't know if you've ever looked at or if you're aware of any research about
how often velo comes back, like how, I guess, how much velo fluctuates over two-month periods. If
we should just assume that this is,
for Matt Harvey, that this is just as likely to be a small sample fluke as anything else.
I assume it's not. I generally assume that he's throwing as hard as he can and that the body
doesn't really add a lot more to it unless you were broken and get fixed.
Yeah. I'm sure there are times when it does bounce back,
but I would guess that the majority of the time when a pitcher loses velocity, it stays lost.
Yeah. And so then you have Sonny Gray, who you pointed out the walks. There's also the home runs,
which are, you know, double his career rate. And that's home runs are very prone to small sample
problems, but all the same, you don't want to give up a ton of home runs are very prone to small sample problems but all the same you don't want to
give up a ton of home runs obviously it's usually a bad sign but the other thing with sunny gray is
that there was some trajectory in a bad direction as the season went on particularly with the fit
metrics uh and so he has not lost velocity i think that's really uh that he passes the first, I guess, test. He fails on FIP, but then he also was sort of,
his FIP, his peripherals were not going in a great direction last year.
And I think that there was some probably indication
that he was not going to be a Cy Young candidate
if he had kept pitching that way.
That in no way suggests that he was going to fall off a cliff, as he has.
And the funny thing is that of the three, his velocity hasn't gone down,
and yet he's the one who's injured.
And so injuries affect players in different ways,
and sometimes injuries are lingering and sometimes they're convenient
and sometimes they're convenient and sometimes they're
signs of something very worse. But for Sonny Gray, I would still say, I don't know, I'm not sure
between those two, between the two we've talked about, who's more troubling to me. I guess I,
I guess I would say that Harvey, so it, these are all really, the funny thing and the reason that
maybe it's an interesting question is that the two pitchers that I've talked about, the way that these negative indicators have
affected their performance have kind of gone opposite of how you would think. Like Harvey
is not throwing as hard as he used to. And that's clear and that's easy to see. And yet he's not
injured that we know of.
And his FIP is actually not bad.
I mean, it's not good.
It's not as good as it was.
But if you looked away from the ERA and the record, he's the one that you would say,
oh, he's pretty close.
You know, he's striking out.
He's like, if he had four more strikeouts and four fewer walks,
then basically his strikeout, his His fit would be the same as it
was last year. And so he's the one that you would say there's least troubling about in the
performance. And then Sonny Gray has the velocity still, but he's the one who's injured. And his
is the fit that's really horrible. So there's not always a clear line between even these indicators
and what you're expecting. So then Keiko, I don't know if anything about Keiko would have me exceptionally worried on the first three things that I glance at.
What about you?
What's your take on Keiko right now?
Well, the last time I looked, sort of everything was worrisome.
His velocity was down.
I believe it still is. And of course, it's April,
so you have to be a little careful about looking at velocity in April because a lot of pitchers throw more slowly in April. But his was down almost two miles per hour also, right, compared
to last season's full season or a mile and a half or so. So that's significant and maybe even more so
in a case like his where he is not throwing very hard as it is. So when you're averaging 89, 90 and
you lose a mile per hour, I would guess that probably hurts you more than it would if you're
going from 96 to 95 or something. So there's that, and there's also the walk rate is up too,
and his pinpoint control from last season,
from really the last couple seasons, is not there so much anymore.
And he was just, you know, because of the kind of pitcher he is,
obviously there were concerns About how well he would
Hold up long term anyway
In our Astros preview this year
I think we asked whether there
Was any more reason to worry about
Dallas Keuchel than there was about some other
Cy Young winner with the same stats
Or whether it was fair to ask
That question. Asking that question
Alone is a sign that
We had some concerns just because
he doesn't fit the typical profile for the best pitcher in a league. So much of his success was
predicated on this pinpoint command and being able to throw low and away and low and away and
over the black repeatedly. And that seemed like it was just so perfectly calibrated for a season or two there
that if you were to be off by a little bit, there just wouldn't be as much margin for error with a
guy like that. And it seems like I think hitters have adjusted to him a little bit where he used
to kind of come in and steal a strike and then go outside with the low and away pitches for the
rest of the plate appearances,
and there was nothing they could do.
And I think now they're kind of jumping on those early pitches in the strike zone a little bit more,
and so he doesn't know quite how to counter-adjust to that.
So I think it's a mix of all of those things,
and because he's a guy who engendered some sort of concerns about how long he would be able to pitch at an elite level anyway.
I think everyone is obviously more worried about him than probably both of the other guys in this conversation.
Yeah, his velocity is down two miles an hour on the season, but it's only down one in May compared to last season.
So how's the strike zone this year?
I don't know. Yeah, you're wondering because he's a low strike guy who benefits from that.
Yeah, and also partly because, you know, it's just sort of a rule of thumb that a sinker baller is
going to be prone to walks because you're basically throwing pitches outside the strike zone to you want them
to hit pitches that are right at the edge or below you're almost never going to purposefully aim in
the strike zone and last year he managed to have a really you know close to elite level walk rate
which is a really hard thing very few sinker ballers managed to do that for very long yeah
and i wonder if you have any insight into whether the strike zone was particularly kind to him as it was last year,
or whether there's been any change in that this year.
I don't, but I know that between his struggles and the report that MLB will likely be raising the bottom boundary of the strike zone as soon as next season. This is
not a good year so far for Dallas Keuchel because you would think that that would perhaps hurt him
disproportionately. And I'm guessing that if MLB is pursuing that so aggressively that there hasn't
been a big change in how strikes are called this season. I haven't seen any studies or anything,
but I haven't seen any suggestions that the low strike that we've gotten used to over the last few years
has changed this season. So coming into this season, I think that we might have put all three
of those pitchers in the same kind of bucket. I don't know that I would have had a strong feeling
about which was best or which was worse. So going forward this season, how do you rank them?
And don't hold Gray's 15-day absence against him.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, I mean, because there's so much data at our disposal, we can dig so deep into these guys and find things that seem worrisome.
and find things that seem worrisome.
So Jeff Sullivan did his Sonny Gray post earlier this month,
and he found that he wasn't throwing the kind of breaking ball that he'd thrown before,
and his breaking balls were all kind of jumbled together, and it seemed like maybe that was indicative of mechanical problems
or perhaps health problems that were manifesting themselves in mechanical problems.
So it did seem like there's something going on there.
So I would probably rank them in order of how optimistic I am.
I'd say Harvey, Gray, Keichel.
I agree.
That's exactly how I would have them.
Now, similar but different question.
Rank the decisions that each of the relevant parties
Made last year based on
I guess how
How much you still think it was the right
Decision versus how much
They'll regret it so in the Mets
Case we'll call it a shared decision between
The Mets and Harvey in the
Gray case we'll call it the A's decision not to
Trade him and in the Keichel case we'll
Call it the decision not to work out an extension
With his team
So best decision first
Okay
Alright so best decision
And we're talking about from the team's
Perspective? No okay so
Keichel is the player's perspective
Gray is the team's perspective
Harvey is a joint press release
Right okay
Alright I would say in order of how good the decision was, I'd say Harvey first.
I wouldn't draw a direct line between what's happening to him and last season. Maybe there
is one, but I don't know that we can say that there is one. So I'd say that first, given that the Mets were in the playoffs in the World
Series, that mattered. And then next, I would put Keichel next, I think. I have a hard time
blaming him. You know, if you're a pitcher and you've had great success for a couple of years,
and you have to put some faith in yourself and trust yourself to continue succeeding. And so I can't
blame him for wanting to get one more year at that level and really, really cash in. So I won't fault
him too much for that. And then I'd put the A's making Gray untouchable or off limits or as close
to that as a player can get. I guess I would put that last or worst just because if the a's are
going to be a team that trades young talent and and they've always kind of been that team in the
right situation then there's no reason to think that gray was immune to the reasons that you trade
young pitching for it pitching doesn't last and weird things happen and pitchers fall off a cliff and you want
to get the most value you can while those players are at their peak so i don't know that i would say
it was a bad decision but it was the worst of the three okay sounds good disagree no not really i
think that with probably more with keitel than with gray but but really for for either of the i
mean i think you're definitely right that the har decision is... There's the least reason to tie it to this year, and there's the
most, you know, flags fly forever, right? And with Gray and Keichel, I think they both benefit from,
you know, being pitchers where you don't have to be great for a long time to get paid or to cash out.
You just have to be great at the right time.
And, you know, Kaiku could basically go, you know, 6-28 this year.
And yet if he has a pretty good year when he's a free agent in three years, you know, even a pretty good year, he'll get more than he would have made signing an extension.
So, you know, he's not there yet. He's got to get pretty good again and he's got to not blow out his shoulder um but and
you know i think the same with sunny gray if sunny gray gray comes back and uh throws a you know two
hit shutout in his first game back off the dl his trade value is probably virtually unchanged from
where it was five months ago yeah but uh yeah i think that probably the A's had more to lose.
I mean, Dallas Keiko was going to get extension money, right, which is already somewhat suppressed,
whereas a Sonny Gray trade could have been franchise altering.
I mean, for goodness sake, how much did the, I mean, if you do the trade tree for the Mark Mulder trade or really even the Dan Heron trade, it's like four moves in one stroke.
Yeah.
All right.
All right, then.
That's it for today.
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