Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 92: Why the Twins’ New Prospect Isn’t Their Type/Why Didn’t Russell Martin Make More Money?

Episode Date: November 30, 2012

Ben and Sam discuss why prospect Alex Meyer isn’t the Twins’ usual type, then wonder why teams didn’t think Russell Martin was worth more than the Pirates paid him.

What are we listening to? A baseball in the dryer. Yes. Hello and welcome to episode 92 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives. I'm Sam Miller in Long Beach, California, and I'm with Ben Lindberg in New York, New York. Ben, is there anybody you'd like to wish a happy birthday to today? Yes. Happy 29th birthday to Craig Gentry, whose birthday was actually Thursday, if you're listening to this Friday. But he is the Jose Molina of fourth outfielders.

And one of my strange player fixations that happens when I write an article about someone for some interesting or unusual thing and then never stop thinking about that thing whenever I think about that player again and form some sort of strange bond. I was trying to figure out a couple days ago whether Craig Gentry would have any trade value. Let's see, what is he? I'm looking for his service time and stuff. Is he an arbitration guy already? He is not. I think he has two years now.

Well, he has trade value in my heart. Yeah, I mean, is there really that much difference between him and Brett Gardner? Is there any difference? Between him and Brett Gardner? I think there probably is. I mean, I don't know. I think Gardner probably has better on-base ability, I think. I guess Gentry has a.344 lifetime OVP in only 476 play appearances.

But before this season, he was regarded as pretty much nothing offensively. I think he kind of had a BABIP year. And I got attached. Gardner is also one of my fixations. He gets hit by a lot of pitches. Gendry. Yeah, 10 this year. That's a thing that I particularly like.

Anyway, we're both going to talk about topics today. Your topic is what? My topic is the prospect that the Twins just traded for Alex Meyer. Okay, and I would like to talk about Russell Martin. So why don't you start by talking about the prospect that the Twins just traded Denard Span deal. And as I was reading the various reviews of the trade and the analyses by the prospect people, including our own Mark Anderson at BP, it struck me that the phrases or the terms that were used to describe Meyer are not terms that I have seen really used to describe a Twins pitcher in my lifetime almost, or since, well, it's been a while. So

in Mark Anderson's, in Mark Anderson's half of the trade analysis at BP right now, he says that Meyer can run his fastball up to 98 miles per hour, has high ceiling talent, and has a true plus slider that can miss bats and helps him maintain a high strikeout rate. So I read these things and I wondered what had gotten into the Twins. Are they having some sort of midlife crisis where they want to suddenly get flashy fastball pitchers who strike people out after years of not doing that? The Twins, for basically as long as i can remember following baseball have been a team that doesn't strike out a lot of batters and doesn't throw the ball very hard of course those two things are

connected and in 2012 they were once again at the very bottom of all 30 teams in strikeout rate and at the bottom of american league teams in fastball velocity, third lowest overall. So this has always been a fascinating thing to me because it seems that just about every other team is pursuing a completely opposite type of pitcher. People draft and acquire pitchers who can throw hard and who can strike people out. And there's a good reason for that. Those pitchers tend to be better pitchers, all else being equal. So I'm fascinated kind of by the Twins' persistence in this strategy that no other team is pursuing. They are a team that is known for its continuity. Pretty much every Twins front office employee has always been a Twins front office employee going back decades. When this team fires or reassigns a general manager, it rehires the previous general manager. There's just no turnover on the twins run. Garden hire is always the manager. Alexi

Casilla is always the utility infielder. These are the same twins year after year. And obviously, we can't say that trading for one prospect who doesn't fit this profile is the start of any sort of trend or change in the way that the twins evaluate talent. But I wonder how you make sense of the fact that they have kind of stubbornly just not fallen in line with every other team and have gone after the Nick Blackburns of the world when everyone else is actively avoiding that type or at least discounting that type. I wonder how much of this is just, I mean, probably at the major league level, I think

it's a trend that is pretty apparent. I mean, they don't go after guys like Jonathan Sanchez. They go after guys like Carl Pavano, who is supposed to be with them at next week's winter meetings, incidentally. who is supposed to be with them at next week's winter meetings, incidentally. But I don't know. I mean, it would be interesting, I think, to look at their minor league systems in the low levels because it's conceivable that this is just, I mean, it could be the result of which guys have made it of the ones that they've drafted.

I was just glancing at a couple years of their high A team just now while you were talking, and they had respectable strikeout levels. They had, actually, it seems to me, pretty high strikeout levels, and it's just that those guys didn't get famous. They kind of flared out. Our minor league baseball guys uh as a group right before the podcast to ask if this was as strange as it seemed if meyer's if meyer is really as as atypical of a

twins prospect as he appeared to be to me uh nick flaris answered and said that there are a few guys in the system who kind of throw hard. He said Hudson Boyd, who was a 2011 draftee, was supposed to be a power arm before he got fat-er and decided that he may or may not want to be a prospect. And then Berrios and Bard, who are both 2012 draftees, he said, have thrown multiple innings in the mid-90s, but he doesn't know if that will stick at the pro ranks. So I think it seems pretty consistent. It seems to be an organizational thing. I guess there are guys who stand out, but for the most part, it's not as if they have a bunch of hard throwers in the minors

who just turn into Blackburn along the way. Well, in that case, I would just guess that it is a matter of – I mean, I think that the Twins realize that strikeout pitchers are better than not strikeout pitchers. I think that they know how the sport works. They know how pitching works. They know how – certainly, they probably know how the sport works. They know how pitching works. Certainly they probably know how prospect development works, and they would probably rather have guys who strike out batters if all else were equal. you're unlikely to outbid those 29 other teams for that thing without making mistakes and you think that you've identified something that is undervalued even if you acknowledge it's inferior um then you know you go for it i i mean when well i don't know okay so in 2000 maybe six or seven joe posnanski wrote a piece about uh what the Royals should do to kind of get radical and try to

compete given their limitations. And he suggested like as a hypothetical that they only sign pitchers who are throwing, you know, 82 mile an hour fastballs and are five foot nine. And Joe Posnanski was not arguing that those guys are the best players. I mean, he knows that the best players are 6'7", and they throw 98. It's just that if you're trying to get a certain amount of bang for the dollars where you can spend them, the worse option can often be the better option. And my guess is that the Twins feel that they probably see upside in some of these guys because they have experience working with pitchers of that sort. And they see that they're really cheap.

And so if you're looking around for things that are cheap, those are the things you get. In this case, they had a trade commodity. They didn't have to be cheap. They could ask for a lot. And they got the guy that I'm sure they would love to get in every trade. Francisco Liriano is, of course, an exception to this, and they didn't sign him or draft him or develop him. They got him in a trade, and I'm sure that Brian Sabian would have gladly handed them a soft-tossing low-A pitcher instead, but when they were able to get a guy with a good arm, they did,

although Liriano was a long ways away from the majors then. So I don't know. I think that if the Twins front office and, well, I don't know. It might just be that they would always look for a bargain. But I think it's much more about looking for a bargain than about not knowing how pitching works. I would have agreed with you maybe, but then as you were talking, I remembered last season, as in 2011, there were a bunch of stories about how they were trying to change Liriano into a pitching-to-contact guy. I remembered an article that Colin Wires wrote at VP about this. So he quoted Ron Gardenhier as saying about Liriano,

We've told him forever that he's a strikeout pitcher. We understand that he can strike people out. We've told him forever that he's a strikeout pitcher. We understand that he can strike people out, but if he really wants to become a pitcher, pitch to contact. Use that two-seamer and use that slider down and in every once in a while and that changeup, but pitch to contact early. That'll get him deep into games because his stuff is so good, there's times when you need to go for the strikeout.

That's when you save your Mr. Nasty, as they say. You throw the nasty pitches then, but other times you need to pitch to contact to get you deeper into games when you want that big strikeout, maybe with a man on second and you've got an open base, take your shot with your stuff. So Colin kind of looked into that and tried to figure out if Liriano would actually be better as a pitch toto-contact guy, or whether anyone who was capable of striking out pitchers would be. And he concluded that no, people wouldn't be, and Liriano in particular wouldn't be.

So there's that. I guess that the one strikeout guy they had at the time, they were kind of trying to unstrikeout. I mean, I guess it's kind of understandable because it's not as if Liriano was dominant or anything. When he was dominant years ago, they probably weren't telling him to do that. So maybe it was kind of a way of dealing with his inconsistency or struggles.

But the idea that you need to save your strikeout stuff for an important situation seems backwards to me. I mean, wait until you get into a jam to try to get a strikeout. Why not get the strikeout and avoid the jam entirely? Well, that's a bigger topic. Christy Mathewson would disagree with you. Well, we can get into that another time then. Probably not with Christy Mathewson, disagree with you. Well, we can get into that another time then. Probably not with Christy Mathewson, though, who's dead.

Yes. But yeah, anyway, I don't know. I'm kind of skeptical that it seems like there's been evidence over the years that they really prefer the pitching to contact type, more so than they feel like they're just getting better value with these other guys. I don't know. I could be wrong.

I was just Googling up a quick Aaron Gleeman article about how the Twins need to change their pitching philosophy and revamp their approach from late September. And he says it's hard to say whether it's their pitching coach so much, Rick Anderson, who's been their pitching coach forever, of course, because he works for the Twins and is therefore a twin for life. He says it's hard to say how much of it stems from Anderson's well-established preferred pitching mold and teaching methods versus the front office simply not targeting hard-throwing high-strikeout arms.

But whatever the case is, it needs to change and they need to adapt. Yeah, I mean, I'd be interested to see if it's worked, if they've gotten more or less for their money and for their draft positions over the course of the last day. I mean, it's always hard to make judgments about any front office because you're dealing with a relatively small number of actual players. I mean, there's actually not that many personnel decisions that they make over the course of a couple years. But like you say, the Twins have been doing this for so long that we've got a pretty good pool of players that they've either picked or signed or traded for. And you could actually start to put together a decent model of what kind of return they've gotten and how it relates to the league as a whole.

Well, maybe one of us will do that. But the Twins were certainly successful doing what they do, as counterintuitive as it sometimes is, for years and years with low payrolls. So maybe they know what they're doing, and the last couple of years have been the aberration more so than the successful years were. Maybe. I doubt it. Okay. Okay, so Russell Martin signed today with the Pirates, two years, $17 million. And it's Friday, so as we always do on Friday, we have to talk about pitch framing. And so Russell Martin is a near-elite pitch framer. He's not Jose Molina, but he is somewhere between the second and fourth or fifth best

probably in baseball according to uh baseball prospectuses numbers and cumulative run saves maybe not per pitch but he he has caught a lot of innings and a lot of pitches so that's helped him rack up all the runs saved but yeah he's good yeah so. Yeah. So, okay. Good. So, um, if you, uh, you know, if you treat these runs, just like you would treat any other runs, you're talking about 15, uh, you know, on average 15 or so runs a year. Um, which, you know, we, I mean, we talked about BJ Upton yesterday and how, depending on which metric you like, he's either a very good player or a below average player. And in the same way, Martin is either a very good catcher

or a below average catcher. He's about a 1.5 warp player without the framing runs, so that would make him about a 3 or a 3.5 warp player if they were in there. And yet, here we see again, even though teams seem to be interested in this information and say that they're interested in it, both on and off the record and hire Mike fast,

nobody paid for it. He got, he, Russell Martin was essentially treated as a one and a half win player. The Yankees, in fact, obviously they were hampered by the luxury tax goals that they've set for themselves. But according to a John Heyman tweet, they valued Martin at $6 million per. There were other teams bidding for him, but apparently not more than the Pirates,

because Martin said it was a business decision. The Rangers and Mariners, who were reportedly in on him apparently bid less. So this is not a market that is paying for these runs. Why do you think they're not paying for these runs? Yeah, I mean, you think the same thing about Molina last year where clearly the Rays were signing him because of the framing, almost certainly, because you don't make a career backup catcher with a backup catcher bat a starting catcher for the first time in his career at age 37 if there's not something else going on.

In Molina's case, I could see it being a concern about his age and his durability and his conditioning and whether he could actually hold up to a bigger workload. Although even in a more limited workload, he'd be worth more than he made. Um, I think there is still, I think certain people on teams are very convinced by these numbers and very interested in these numbers. And I think there is some resistance to it by other members of front offices. I don't think it's been universally embraced. Whenever some new discovery like this comes along, some counterintuitive thing like catcher framing or how much catcher framing appears to be worth, it takes some time for it to percolate and to become accepted. And various teams embrace it to differing degrees. And teams are not monolithic entities.

And teams are not monolithic entities. So a stat guy on a team might believe in framing, but not be the guy who's responsible for making player personnel moves. He might make a recommendation, and the person that he makes a recommendation to might not take that recommendation. So I think it's probably just going to take some time. I think that it's not universally believed in yet, at least, that this is important to the extent that these recent studies have shown. But I think over time it will become more accepted. and what I wonder is what will happen then,

because once every team decides that it's important to have a framing catcher and either figures out how to teach its catcher how to be good at this or to recruit catchers who are already good at it, I don't know what kind of implications that has for the game and for the run-scoring environment, and that would be very interesting to see. But for now, it seems like at least this is still an inefficiency that is not being exploited unless uh well yeah i'm not even going to say unless it seems like that to me i wonder if uh russell martin's agent brought this up yeah uh i wonder too i wondered that with. Because, I mean, when you have a guy like Molina, why would you not bring that up?

Because it's hard to sell him on his bat. And if suddenly all these studies come out that say that the guy is the best ever or the best we know of at doing this one thing, I guess if the people you're negotiating with don't believe in that thing, then you can't really use it for leverage. Well, yeah. I mean, it seems like agents, at least from the looks that we've occasionally gotten to see at Boris Binders, agents don't limit themselves to intellectually rigorous evidence. But yeah, I don't know. Maybe they did. It'd be interesting.

I mean, I'm not, I don't know if they did or not. I would be fascinated to find out. Somebody should ask. Russell Martin's agent. Well, the catchers who, I mean, Cody Ross went, or sorry, David Ross went to the Red Sox, who are known as a stat-savvy team. Same with the Rays and Molina.

The Pirates have people like Dan Fox and Joe Pichian. Or actually, I don't think he works for the Pirates anymore. But Dan Fox works for the Pirates. And so maybe there's some correlation there between sort of Sabre's savviness and willingness to sign a framing catcher although i don't know it seems you could there's about 26 teams that you could have very easily said that about has yes so i don't know that that applies but i don't know it confuses me uh all right well um i guess maybe we'll um maybe we'll find out when AJ Brzezinski and Mike Napoli signed

whether there's any effect if they signed for less, although I don't actually know about AJ. I sort of have it in my head that he's probably not good at this, but maybe I'm totally wrong. Yeah, I kind of have a sense that he's not good or that he's not. I don't know that he's bad, but I don't think he's especially good. I wonder what will happen when Ryan Domet becomes a free agent again, which I think will be not until after the 2014 season,

because he's just the worst. And the Twins have Ryan Domet. They signed him last offseason, though, right? So after this was all in the public domain. Yep. Although I didn't really get the sense that they intended him to catch at that point, that it was going to be less catching than he ended up catching. And then he ended up catching just as much as he had the year before with the Pirates, I think.

Yeah. All right. Anyway, that'll do it. It's the end of the year before with the Pirates, I think. Yeah. All right. Anyway, that'll do it. It's the end of the week. We'll be back on Monday with episode 93. Send us emails at podcast.baseballperspectives.com because you have nothing better to do with your weekend, I'm sure, than to ask us questions. So, yes, Monday. We'll be back.