Baseball Between the Numbers | Jonah Keri | Talks at Google

Hello.

The authors of Google Program is happy to introduce Jonah Carey. Mr. Carey is editor and co author of the book between the why everything you know about the game is wrong, which has been described as, and I quote, essential reading for all baseball fans, even those who hated math in high school. As one of the foremost baseball experts in the country, he's also a contributor to ESPN.com and also writes for Investors Business Weekly and was a former contributor to Baseball Prospectus, which I'm sure, if any of us are familiar, is the standard for baseball analysis now. So any of us who are familiar with sabermetrics and Moneyball, I'm sure we're going to have a lot of questions for Mr. Carey. And this being All Star Game Tuesday, we're very lucky to have him as our guest today. So please join me in welcoming Jonah Carey to Google.

So what I'm going to do is I don't really like hearing myself speak too much. So I'll talk a little bit and then it'll just be we can just go questions pretty much for the rest of the hour. I'll just give you a little spiel on the book and just tell you a little bit about where sort of I'm coming from as a baseball writer, and we'll kind of go from there. So this book, Baseball between the Numbers, this is a collaboration of a whole bunch of people from Baseball Prospectus. And the basic idea was we wanted to create a book where people could kind of, if you were in a bar, these are the kind of questions that you would debate with your friends. But the idea is that instead of you're just sitting there and all you got is weapons or the beer bottles that you can hit your friend with on the head, you've got kind of statistical weapons at your disposal. So you could kind of say, well, okay, David Ortiz, I think he's a clutch hitter. Well, we can actually test this because we can go look and we could say, well, how does David Ortiz's performance deviate in clutch situations in late innings with two outs, you know, the game on the line versus the rest of the time. And a lot of times what we find is that when you do the research, it completely contradicts what the conventional wisdom is. And that's why we say why everything you know about the game is wrong, because conventional wisdom just tends to have it wrong so often. So we go through, we talk about clutch hitting. There's a chapter called did Derek Jeter deserve the Gold glove? And Derek Jeter is considered to have a great defensive Reputation, especially in the mainstream. And if, you know, follow Saber at all, you know that that's complete bs. It's completely not true. He's a great offensive player, almost underrated offensively, but defensively he's overrated. And there's, you know, a bunch of other stuff here. There's. Is Joe Torre a Hall of Fame manager? This is a little funny that we're asking this question now that everybody in the world thinks that he should be fired, but, I mean, he's won all these World Series and all this stuff. Our team's letting their closers go to waste. So this is one of my favorites. I'm a child of the seventies, and Goose Gossage was coming up just as I was just starting to follow baseball and Gossage's performance. He was so great. But the thing that made him great was he didn't just come in for three outs in the ninth inning. He might come in in the seventh with the bases loaded, and it's a tie game, and that's the out you have to get. That's the most important one. And it's crazy now to think, well, Mariano Rivera's not coming in the sixth or seventh inning, Jonathan Papelbahn's not Houston Street's not. Whoever your closer du jour is, none of these guys are going to do that. And that's absolutely what Gossage did. He was a fireman, a real fireman in the true sense. So today, what managers do is they tend to manage by the book. And it's very frustrating. There are eight or nine chapters in this book that just go through how risk averse managers are. That the way teams are managed is very counterproductive because it's all about doing things by rote. The manager wants to be able to just sit in the comfort zone and say, this is the time I use my closer. This is the time that I bunt, this is the time that I hit and run. And they're wrong 85, 90% of the time. It's unbelievable. But these guys just do it because there's job security in that. If you do things that are expected of you and something goes wrong, they say, well, the player screwed up, he made a mistake, he didn't produce, he didn't bunt, he didn't get to save what have you. And any kind of creativity in managing, in assembling a roster in any of this stuff would just have such a huge advantage over anybody else. You look at some of the teams that are a little bit innovative in the way they do things. So the A's are a great example. Locally, they've found ways. I mean, Moneyball, obviously, great book, even if you're not a baseball fan. Just great lessons. But on the baseball lesson specifically, they found something that they could exploit. They realized that on base percentage was an unexploited resource in the market. And they said, well, hey, wait a minute. If we go get these guys and they're kind of ugly players, or John Jaha or Matt Stairs, these fat guys, and all they do is hit home runs and walk, that's valuable. There's value in that. And we can get them real cheap. And so that's what the A's ended up doing. And what kills me about the A's is, so this happens. And then, you know, people come out and they're asking Michael Lewis and asking Billy Beane. Well, the cat's out of the bag. Everybody knows about on base percentage. I guess he can't do that anymore. And the A's were like, okay, we'll come up with some other stuff. And they build good defense and they find other ways to win games. And then what happens this year? Guy named Jack Cust. Who? Nobody. Who's Jack Cust? I don't know. He's this guy and, you know, basically baseball prospectus and in the sabermetric community, we were on his bandwagon, I don't know, in 1999 or something, a long, long time ago. And he's sitting and he's waiting in the minor leagues, and nothing's happening. Nothing's happening. And he's 22, 23, and he's going into his late 20s, and he's not a prospect anymore. And he comes up. And if you have a fantasy league, I guarantee you tried to pick up Jack Kust or you tried to trade for Jack Kust or something happened with Jack Kust. Because this guy's killing the ball. And he had the same skills he was, you know, he can't play defense, but he walks, he hits home runs, and he's an effective hitter. And there are guys like that all the time. Tampa Bay Devil Rays have a guy named Carlos Pena. He was, you know, kind of went through the A's at one point, and he was exactly that kind of player, too. I mean, he was a good hitter, but he didn't have maybe, you know, he had the pedigree, but people gave up on him. And, well, it wasn't really working out. And he's come in, he gets a regular chance. And I mean, the Devil Rays aren't in the spotlight or anything, but again, he's their best player. And if you have fantasy league, you either have Carlos Pena or you want Carlos Pena. So it's the same kind of thing. And it's amazing that even though you get conventional wisdom, it's rebutted by, I guess you could say sabermetric wisdom. People supposedly catch on, but even then they really don't quite get it. They don't quite go all the way in following their hunches and following facts and really figuring out what's going on. So that's kind of what the book is about. It really gets into all this stuff and what we tried to do in the book also is some of these guys, some of my co authors, are geniuses. I mean, I'm not that smart. I'm the guy who synthesizes the information. I'm a journalism major coming out of college. I've always been a writer. I've never been a mathematician or statistician of any kind. I understand the concepts. I can take them from complicated levels and make them simpler. And that's sort of what this book does. So even if you're not necessarily wholly into this stuff, you follow it kind of a little bit, but you can't do regression analysis or that's just really not your cup of tea. It really doesn't matter. You can go through this book and you'll find all kinds of stuff that you know. It's pretty easy to understand, but it's still intuitive and it's still going to make you think and it's still exciting, interesting stuff to read about. So. Absolutely. I mean, I think that it's a great, great read and it's a good argument settler too. You sort of get in there and you say, well, I thought that about David Ortiz, but maybe not. Or Derek Jeter or any of these guys. So that's the book. My gig right now, my main gig is I write for ESPN.com actually there's a story that should be up just about now. It's called the no Stars. So it's the opposite of the all stars. It's the worst players in the league and the ones who get the most playing time and hurt their teams the most. So Jason Kendall's like the poster boy for this. Royce Clayton did not make it because Royce, well, Royce Clayton lost his job to John McDonald though. Not really.

I mean, John McDonald has a better batting average against left handers since the A's. Royce Clayton got both starts against left handed pitchers.

Can I tell you something. I'm in an experts league called labor, which is, you know, people from ESPN and CBS Sportsline, all the Roto sites get together and it's so deep and it's so competitive. There are 12 teams. It's Al only. And I'm ashamed to say this, Royce Clayton is my shortstop. I mean, it's sort of. I had no choice. It was a deep league anyway, so. Yeah. So you get situations. Yeah, it's terrible. The rest of my team is good. You get situations like that where. Sorry, I lost my train of thought. Oh, yeah. So no, Stars is a good one. And then over the weekend, I was in Vegas and I bet on baseball for the first time, too. And I probably shouldn't be glorifying betting, but I'd never done this in my life. And I went six for seven. And it was never. And it was pretty interesting, too, because I went in there and it was just kind of the simple concept, just trying to exploit little quirks in the system and trying to go ugly, especially. One of my favorite picks of the whole weekend was I took Jason Simon Tacci against the Brewers. For those of you who don't know who Jason Simon Tacci is, he was in the major leagues for a couple years, and then he left in 2004 and he just went away and he was gone for three years. And he comes back and he goes to the Nats, who are one of the worst teams in baseball. And they're facing the brewers this past weekend. And the brewers are one of the great stories of the first half of the season. And this is such an obvious slam dunk for the Brewers. I mean, there's no possible way that the brewers can lose this game. And I look at it and I say, there's no possible way the brewers can lose this game. I'll bet on the Nats, please. And it worked out perfectly. So, I mean, it's funny how something that's counterintuitive. It tends to go pretty well in baseball oftentimes. Now, one game is a small sample size, and anything can happen in one game. But that's kind of the point, that underdogs can prevail over favorites. I mean, aside from the betting implications, if you're in the playoffs, let's say, and this is another thing that it gets into in the book, the playoffs are such a small sample size. You have a five game series or a seven game series and anything can happen. You know, you could have one team, the absolute inferior team, could beat the superior team. I mean, we saw Last year, the Cardinals won the World series. They had 83 wins last year. So, you know, this happens. The Marlins won the World Series recently. They weren't the best team when the Angels won it, they weren't. When the Diamondbacks won it, they weren't. They were the teams that got hot over that period and found a way to win. So all kinds of lessons like that, you know, and that's, like I said, I really don't want to hear myself talk too much. I'd much rather just Kibbitz take questions. And we could just go, you know, the rest of the hour and do that. So it could be anything from. If you literally have a question about your fantasy team, if you want to have some sort of big picture baseball question, that's fine. I didn't mention it was my day job, and I just switched it. I was with Investors Business Daily. I was a stock market writer who kind of did baseball on the side. I've switched it. I'm now a baseball writer who does stock market stuff on the site. It's a very weird combination. I'm pretty sure there's nobody else in the world who does that. So I suppose if you have some question about some intellectual, oh, how do the two worlds meet? Or something like that, I can answer something like that. I'm a college basketball junkie. I can answer that stuff. You want a souffle recipe? I'm good for that, too. So whatever you got, I'm good. Go ahead.

This is just a random fantasy question just because.

Yep.

I happen to have this problem a lot. What do you do when you're in a fantasy league and somebody's team is doing so poorly that they start fire sailing their players? And do you have any advice for what the rules should be regarding commissioners vetoing such deals?

I can't stand vetoing trades. It really bugs me because one person's definition of what a good trade is is different than another's. And I'm considered the shark in the leagues that I'm in. Not. Not because I'm so smart, but because I'm extremely aggressive. And I'm the annoying guy who keeps emailing you offers, offers, offers, until it's like, okay, fine, fine, let's do the deal. And fits my personality. And is your league a keeper league?

I'm sorry?

Is your league a keeper league?

No.

See, if it's not a keeper league, then what's the point? What is that guy trying to do then? I mean, first of all, I'd punt that guy out of the league so that he's not in it next year. Seriously. I mean, if he's going to do that, that's just ruining the integrity of the league. Beyond that, it has to be. I don't like vetoing trades, but I feel like if you pick the right owners, you shouldn't have to worry about it. So it almost starts at the beginning. If you're talking about what do you do right now I feel like you're kind of stuck. You know what I mean? You can't. Unless it's something literally, if it's Royce Clayton for Vlad Ichiro and Magaly or Adonez, I mean, unless it's something like that, you're kind of stuck. You can't really. There's not much you can do about it. The other way you can combat this, of course, is if you change the format of your league and it becomes a keeper league, then there's recourse. And if you trade Vlad, but you pick up Homer Bailey or someone who's going to be good in the future, okay, that's a trade that's going to make sense. And there's a reason that it would look lopsided but isn't really.

Use Carlos Pena as an example of the Devil Rays picking him up and he didn't get a chance. Two full seasons with the Tigers. You know, some people might have said he did good with 20, 20 plus home runs, 80 RBIs, but low on base percentage, isn't it? And how can you expect him to continue what he's doing?

Well, Pena didn't really have regular playing time all that much. That was the thing.

Almost two full seasons with the Tigers in 0304 right after the we're gonna.

Have to look at. I mean if someone has Internet access because I'm pretty sure he didn't get like 500.

He's had over 1500 at bats, major.

League at bats rear before this year.

Right.

So I mean, you know Jack Cus, yeah, he's been around for ever crushing the ball walking.

But you know my impression of pain.

To say later, well yeah, the devil raised the gnats. Have an opportunity to take a flyer on anyone.

Right.

But you're not going to give a guy where he's going to go through a whole month of not doing anything right. He got hot with the Devil Race. I just don't think that's a good example.

Well, again, I mean if someone could check that, that'd be interesting. But I mean my impression of Pena was that he kind of got some Kind of chance, but not enough of a chance. And then his pedigree and his skill suggested that he could be a late bloomer. I mean, the guy's still 29.

Well, it's easy to say he'll be a late bloomer after he blooms now, but. And it's not even a, you know, a full season, so let's see him next year or two years from now or.

I mean, I would find it. I would find it difficult to believe that he would regress from being a 1050 ops guy to being a useless player next year. My impression is he's going to do well. I mean, did I opinion absolutely pegged? No, but I thought he would be a pretty good player. No way I thought he'd be good. This good. I mean, I'm not trying to say, you know, hindsight's absolutely 20 20, and I'm not implying. Oh yeah, everybody knew he'd be a superstar, but there's no reason not to spec on a guy like that. And you're talking about the Devil Rays. Why wouldn't the Yankees do it? I mean, Doug, this is just a general example, but a guy Like Doug McKiewicz, he's a known commodity. He's a terrible player. He used to be a good fielder. He's not even a good fielder anymore. He can't hit, blah, blah, blah. Everybody knows that. Why not take a risk? I mean, it's the whole risk averse idea.

Him the year before.

What's that?

That's had him in the year before.

And he wasn't good. I mean, so, you know, what was the point? They can always look for something else.

I'm saying they had Pena the year before.

Right. But they did not let Pena play. I mean, that's. I know you could say that he played in Detroit, but he did not play in New York.

Part of his contract was they had to bring him up by a certain date. Didn't fit in there and you know.

Right. But they chose not to because they felt content with the lousy first base situation that they had. And Pena is one guy. I mean, they could have taken a flyer on anybody else and he would have been an improvement on Doug McKiewch. It's a fair point about Pena. I mean, there was definitely he had been given some kind of chance.

I just one of the things argument with the, you know, sabermetrics and Moneyball is, you know, just because you picked a guy in the first round, you paid him a high bonus, you shouldn't keep give him, you know, chances over and over and over. If you pick wrong.

Right, right.

You did, you know, and Pena when he was with the Tigers and then going to A's. Yeah, he's a high round pick and had a lot, lot of potential, but he kind of falls in that argument of how long are you going to wait for him?

He, I mean, but he was still a pretty good hitter in the minor leagues and, you know, there was still a sense he was young enough that it was possible they could work out for him. You know, I, I'll go along with you halfway and say that Pena is not, not as good an example as Cus. That's. I think that's a fair point. Absolutely. I couple questions. The first one is about clutch hitting. You had mentioned before David Ortiz, and I'm a Boston guy, so I'd be interested in hearing more about that because basically Ortiz is God in Boston. And second question is, does Billy Beane really walk on water? Basically, do Poppy and Billy Beane walk on water? I guess there's a chapter in the book, it's called it's okay to swear. Right? Well, it's YouTube, but whatever it's called, why doesn't Billy Bean shit work in the playoffs? It's a mild swear word and the joke is that. It's the joke that is in Moneyball. He says, you know, they ask him, oh, Michael Lewis says, well, you know, why aren't you good team of playoffs? He says, all my shit doesn't work in the playoffs. And you know, it's supposed to be funny, hahaha. But it's frustrating to Billy Bean into the A's because they're not getting it done. And you know, I don't worship at the altar of any individual general manager. Actually, my favorite general manager in baseball is Dave Dombrowski, who's probably considered a little bit of a scene scouty guy. But think about what this guy's done. I'm a Montreal native, big Expos fan my whole life, so you can feel sorry for me if you want. He builds the Expos team up in the early 90s. I mean, this is the team that had the best record in 1994. With no resources, with no money, he just gets it done. He goes to Miami, he builds the Marlins team up, builds the first World Series winner, he leaves, and the next year they won the World Series. That's ostensibly his team too. And then he does it again with the Tigers, and he's got a totally different method. And in many cases he had less money than Bean did with The A. So, you know, Bean's gone definitely part of the way in terms of just building a consistent winner. But you can make that case about Terry Ryan and the Minnesota Twins, too. I mean, the Twins, what, they made Division 4, made the playoffs four years in a row, something to that effect. Again, very little money, but they did it from a scouting side. Just find something that you do well. I mean, if it's going to be really a stat heavy approach, fine. If it's really scouty, fine. If it's a couple combination of both, that's fine. So, you know, Bean has been successful, but I don't. I don't think he walks on water. I mean, I don't buy that. I mean, as far as Ortiz goes, what the book gets into is it talks about what you would describe as clutch hitting. And basically the argument is most of it is just kind of circumstance that there's not much deviation between what a guy does in the regular situation and the rest of the time. And then some of it is luck that, you know, it's just something can happen or not. The clutch ability is defined in the book, and you could argue about some points in the book, but it's defined as maybe 2% of a guy's profile that there is some ability to influence it one way or another. But the guys that seem to take most advantage of it are guys that are contact hitters. In other words, if you have a situation where it's two outs in the ninth inning and it's a tie game and you need one hit to win the game, it doesn't matter if you hit it out of the stadium. It matters if you dump the ball into left field and drop drive the guy home. The best clutch hitter in the study was Mark Grace. Mark Grace, whatever. You know, he's a pretty good player, but that's exactly the kind of profile that he had that for that purpose, he was considered clutch. Was he a good situational hitter or was he clutch? It's hard to say. So Ortiz came out somewhat ahead in the study. In other words, he was one of the guys that rated pretty well. But because of his years, I mean, people forget what he was with the Twins. He was a pretty good player who wasn't a great one. It's just with Boston, he's done these epic things. And the other issue with Ortiz is that a home run to win the game is more dramatic than dumping a single into left field. So people forget about the times that maybe there was a runner on second and they didn't need two runs. They needed one. And he struck out or he popped up or whatever. So he's still better than the norm. But it's not so great that you would say, I'm going on the free agent market. David Ortiz is there. I'm paying $20 million extra because it's a clutch hitter. It's just not the case. He. There's a little bit there, but there's not much. The question is, what are the chances of the Tigers winning the World Series? Yeah, they're very good. I mean, you know, you look at their starting rotation, Verlander and Bonderman, I mean, that's as good a duo as anybody in the league. Kenny Rogers is good. Come back and done very well. It's very solid. And the thing that impresses me is they had the 8th best offense in Major League Baseball last year in terms of run scored. They're number one this year. They go out and they get Gary Sheffield for, you know, prospects. They did a good job of that. Maglie Ordonias is out of his mind. This is an interesting thing. I was reading an article about this recently. What do you do with a guy like that? Brett Boone did it a few years ago. I could probably tell you why Brett Boone had that kind of season, but Brady Anderson did it a few years ago. I could probably tell you why Brady Anderson did, too. You know, Maglordonez, is that the case with him? I mean, is there something illicit going on? I don't know, but he's just out of his mind. He's never had a season like this. He was a good player, but he's statistically the best player in baseball this year. So it's kind of tough. Is it going to maintain? Is it going to go on? Whatever. But for right now, in the here and now, you look at the Tigers and you say, well, they profiles the team that can win the World Series with that kind of offense and that kind of starting pitching. However, there is a book, a chapter in the book Baseball between the Numbers and. And it's the Billy Beane chapter. And what it talks about is that there's three elements that really help you win a lot in the playoffs. Good starting pitching, especially the top two guys in your rotation because they're going to start more good defense and a good closer. Now, this is a little different than the sabermetric norm. Everyone's on about OBP and offense and all this stuff. There is no correlation between a good offense in the regular season and a World Series winner. Based on this study, this is 30 years of data, something to that effect. Good offenses, sometimes they win and sometimes, sometimes they don't. Zero correlation, nothing. So, you know, if you have that the case, then you say, well, wait a minute, I need to build that kind of team. And you look at the Tigers. The Tigers one weakness is their bullpen this year. Joel Zamia was their best reliever last year. He's injured. We don't know how well he's going to do. Fernando Rodney was probably their second or third best reliever. He's injured. Their next best reliever was Jamie Walker. He's in Baltimore. Todd Jones, he's old, fat and bad. So I mean, you know, it's not a great bullpen. And that could be something that could come to bite them where maybe they get to the playoffs. But they're facing the Indians or the Red Sox and it's a ninth inning and Travis Hafner or David Ortiz is up and they just have no answer for someone like that. So it could literally come down to that kind of one game scenario. And in that scenario, I don't feel great about the Tigers chances, to be honest with you. How do you rate Brian Cashman as the general manager? That's a good question. And it's very hard to say because when does Brian Cashman start, start and George Steinbrenner stop? And it's not even Steinbrander anymore. It's other people. It's Stick, Michael and Randy Newman and other people in that front office. I mean, this is. They have a two tiered front office. They have about seven or eight guys who sit in an office in Tampa and they make a lot of decisions. And then they have Cashman who's in New York almost by his lonesome. He has kind of his immediate staff and that's it. It's very interesting and different than any other team. If Cashman was left to his own devices, I think he would probably do a better job than he has, considering the influence that other people have had on him. I think it's less now because Steinbrenner is not as involved. But I mean, if you look at just, if you just say, okay, forget the politics and forget all that and just let's rate what the moves are. Yeah, they're not very good. And you know, the thing that really bothers me about the Yankees is that they're willing to settle. In other words, they say, well, we have a great offense, we have all these guys and you know, cheater and a rod and all these guys. We don't have to worry about first base. We're just going to punt first base entirely because we don't care. The problem is that sometimes things happen that you don't expect in baseball. In fact, it happens all the time. So Bobby Abreu. He's not Bobby Abreu anymore. Johnny Damon. Nope. Jason Giambi. Nope. And all of a sudden, half your offense isn't good and you've still got this lousy first baseman. So you've dug yourself into a hole for no reason. They had the money, you know, they had the will. Well, they didn't have the will. They had everything except the will to go ahead and upgrade that position. So that's one example. I mean, the bullpen hasn't been good, certainly, and there have been other things that have gone wrong. And to me, one of the biggest issues is that the Yankees farm system since the Posada Gita Rivera era has not produced all that much. It's starting to come around again. Wong and Kano Wong is the Cy Young candidate. He's been great. And in the minor leagues now they have Phil Hughes. They have a guy named Joba Chamberlain who pitched in the Futures Game. Dellen Batantis, who's a guy from the Bronx, is a really exciting 67180. He's just a freak. I mean, he's like Pedro Martinez, but taller. I don't know if he's going to be that good. But they have all these pitching prospects, so starting to come. But they've had this lag in homegrown talent, and it proves that even a team like the Yankees, if you don't have guys coming up through your farm system who are going to be effective or even star players, you're going to run into problems because you can't patch, patch, patch. Eventually it's not going to work. Especially if you just say, I don't care about the bullpen, I don't care about first base. We're good enough. We're going to get it done. That's not going to work. In your abstract, it talks about economic pressures, examples being marginal, players lured to steroids. I'm assuming perhaps because they think that their numbers are going to be better, they'll get better contracts. And it talks about how fans are having a harder time trying to get into the game. Skyboxes, rising ticket prices. The Yankees just announced, I think, $2,500 a seat per game for their 2009 season when the new stadium opens. Well, you and I aren't buying that ticket, but I hear you. Yeah, can you talk about how perhaps these numbers are abused by players and organizations? Well, absolutely. In the book, it gets into, I mean, again, the book is pretty contrarian. And what it gets into is that, you know, there's a notion and owners will often play this card, they'll say, well, ticket prices are high, so we have to raise salaries. Or, sorry, salaries are high, so we have to raise ticket prices. And I mean, that's false. It's a supply and demand issue. $2,500 in New York, that's a drop in the bucket for someone. Merrill lynch goes in and they say, oh yeah, we want to entertain our clients. We put 10 of them in those tickets. It's 25 GS and they're signing a what, a $50 million deal with somebody, some investment banking deal. So it's all a supply and demand issue. And there really isn't any correlation between the two. It gets into baseball stadiums too. It talks about should cities build baseball stadiums? Why? I mean, you're building it on public subsidies, but these owners obviously have the money to do it. It you're just basically handing them a check. And there's no reason. And I'm a huge baseball fan, but I absolutely do not believe the government should be subsidizing this stuff. There's a lot of better things that governments can do with their money. So. Yeah, definitely. And you know, you mentioned steroids is another example. Economics are prevalent everywhere in the game. I mean, it doesn't even occur to you that you could say, well, there's this 20 year old kid and you know, he's five'10 and 175 and he's hit five career minor league home runs. He's probably not gonna make it. Okay, let's try something else. The gap between what a guy makes in the minor leagues and what he makes, the major league minimum is about $327,000 right now. And in the minor leagues and the high minors even you're probably making, I have to check this, but it's something in fact the 60 or 70. And when you're really on the lower levels, you're making 20 or $30,000 a year. I mean, the gap is huge. You think about that for a second. If he has even marginal success in the major leagues, you know, Willie Bloomquist signed a two year, I think $2.5 million contract. Nafee Perez got multi year contracts and he just got busted for drugs, of course. And you know, it's amazing that just a little difference in these guys. If you Just almost stay in the big leagues for long enough, you develop a sheen that, oh, this guy's a major leaguer. He deserves a contract on merit. Naefe Perez never deserved a contract for anything in his life, but he's a major league player. Okay, we'll give it to him. So, yeah, absolutely. I mean, it goes from the lowest levels up to the highest. You can make the case about anything. Even if you want to talk about umpiring, I mean, when the strike occurred, umpire strike that year, the quality of umpiring was so poor, we almost took for granted how good it was the rest of the time. And it was, you know, it was a money issue and it was a benefits issue, and it's all tied in. It's like any other industry. It's like Google. It's like, you know, retail industry. It's like anything. I mean, money is going to rule the day ultimately, for sure.

I'm an Astros fan suffering through another first half.

I feel for you.

A guy like Adam Everett who's out with a broken leg right now, how do you weigh, you know, probably the best defensive shortstop in the major leagues against probably there are several pitchers who hit better than him in the major leagues. How do you compare those two and decide whether Mark Loretta should be our starting shortstop?

So there's a pretty easy way to do this. The Baseball Prospectus guys do this pretty well. They have the ability to break down offensive defensive contributions into number of runs and number of wins. So the way it works in Major League Baseball is you say, well, if this guy's worth 10 runs to his team over the course of a season, that's about one win. Whether it's offensively or defensively. The absolute best defensive shortstops, Ozzie Smith in his prime, Dave Concepcion, guys like that, Omar Visquel and Adam Everett might get up to maybe, maybe 30 runs saved over the course of the season, which is a lot. That's three full wins with nothing other than his glove. So all you have to do is take his offensive number numbers and say, what does the average shortstop do? Or what is the replacement level shortstop, meaning the guy you can pick up off the street, what does he do? And you just take the offensive numbers and you weigh that versus the norm and you say, okay, he's worth minus five runs or he's worth plus two runs or whatever. It's going to be probably pretty close to. If you're comparing it to a replacement level player, he's about zero. Because you could pick up a guy like Adam Everett offensively Off the street. Like you said, he's not all that good. So, okay, he's worth three wins over the course of a season. What's Mark Loretta worth? So you compare his batting to what the norm is going to be and you get the same result. You compare his defense. You know, if you ask me what I think the Astros should do, I mean, I think it behooves them to leave Everett in there because he's younger than Loretta and there are long term reasons that you could leave him in. But if you're talking about if the Astros absolutely needed to win right now, or even if they need to win one game right now, it's pretty close. I mean, Loretta is so good offensively, almost above what he's been in the last couple years. Really good. Came down a little bit now. Really good. Again, it would almost be a toss up, maybe slightly leaning toward Loretta. But Everett, his defensive contributions are that good. And it's a good example because he is the extreme. There are teams that use these guys who don't hit and they have a defensive reputation like a Mankiewicz, but they're not that good. Everett is the best defensive player at the most valuable position, the best defensive first baseman in the major leagues. I mean, maybe in the history of the major leagues. Let's take Keith Hernandez, Maybe he'll save 12, 13, 14 runs a season. It's just not that valuable position in terms of quantifying it. Defense is not as valuable generally speaking than offense. So, you know, Everett maybe could qualify, but almost anybody else. In that example, you go with the offensive guy.

I have a question about, sorry, Starting pitching and complete games in general. Because when I was a kid, I remember, like, seemed like her size was throwing a complete game every time out. So what is with the downward trend of complete games with starting pitchers? Is that the way it's going to be?

Yes. Two reasons. This is more an informed opinion than. I can throw a lot of studies at you, but okay, so the first reason is hitters are better now. And you know, Hershey's are wasn't quite throwing that many innings. I think he was in his best year. And again, you could probably look this up, but I want to say it was about 230, 240 innings a season roughly. So it wasn't that much more than the elite pitchers. Now it was a little bit more. And he went through that one season, of course, where he was unhittable. So if you throw a shutout and everything is a ground ball, yeah, it's easy to go the distance. Most pitchers can't do that, but in general it's the quality of hitting. Even if you go back a little bit before Hershiser, you can just talk about the 70s, right? I mean, there were guys like Mark Belanger in the majors and these guys who were kind of Adam Everett's, except they were worse offensively, much worse in many cases. And lineups would have maybe two or three of those guys where it be offense, offense, offense. And okay, you accept that I have Rick Dempsey in my lineup because he's a defensive player and that's it. If a pitcher has to work harder to get these guys out, you know they're not going to last as long. It's pretty simple if you want to go way back. One of the best baseball books I've ever read, and I highly recommend it, and it's probably about 90 years old right now, is called Pitching in a Pinch by Christy Mathewson. Christy Mathewson, for those of you who don't know, one of the best baseball pitchers of all time, Giants. I mean, he was terrific. And what he said in the book is that he likes to conserve his energy against the weaker hitters so that he can go forward and, you know, get through the whole game. And this is in an era when every. It was almost a given that, okay, you have to throw a complete game almost at every time up relief pitching didn't exist. And here's this guy, he's the best pitcher of his era. I mean, you know, automatic hall of Fame and all this stuff. And he's saying, yeah, you know, I pretty much slacked off because I knew this guy had no chance of hitting me. And I did it with this guy and this guy and this guy. And that allowed me to get through and I could face Jimmy Foxx or Babe Ruth or any of those guys. So that's, you know, that's one. And the other thing I think is awareness, you know, that Baseball Prospectus was at the forefront of this stuff, talking about pitch counts and all that. I don't necessarily agree with all the methodology. I think that using a base 10 system is pretty silly. 100 pitches doesn't mean anything. It could be a hundred with this guy or 87 with this guy, but just the idea that counting pitches and just paying at least a little bit of attention to what this guy's doing is going to matter and help pitchers health. So I think it's. I'll give you a third reason too. We think of. We have. Everybody in the world has selective memory. So when we say, oh, well, everybody threw more back in the day. Well, you only remember Nolan Ryan or Steve Carlton. If you think back 30 years ago, you don't remember the completely forgettable pitcher who washed out of baseball two years, probably because he had an arm injury. So we're thinking only in terms of the elite guys. Not everybody lasted longer than Nolan Ryan did because he's Nolan Ryan. But that's not the case with Everybody. Just like 30 years from now, people are going to say, oh, pitchers lasted longer and they're going to remember Roger Clemens. They're not going to remember Jason Simon Tachi.

You mentioned Mathewson taking that approach. And a lot of times you hear when, you know, guys are throwing 98, 100 right out of the pen or, you know, right from the beginning of the game back then, you know, Walter Johnson or guys that could throw didn't throw like that every pitch. But now there seems to be this psychological part of throwing hard. I think Zumata said stuff about it last year when they were like, pitch, you know, less or whatever with the Tigers. And he's like, no, I want to, you know, hit 100. There was a game a week or so ago where the Yankees scoreboard malfunction. So the pitch count and the radar gun wasn't there while Messina was pitching. And he did very well. And they were wondering if he couldn't see how hard he was throwing, if it took his mind off of that. Then this goes back to you were saying earlier about the bullpens and managers kind of sitting in a comfort zone. What is, you know, that's bullpen by committee really hasn't worked very well. Ben tried a few times, the Red Sox a couple years ago. A lot of people point to, you know, knowing your role, knowing you'll pitch in the seventh and the eighth and the ninth helps people, even if they're professionals at their top of the game in that comfort level. What's your solution or potential solution? How would you run a bullpen if not, you know, the way it is now?

Okay, it sounds like there's sort of almost two questions in there. So I'll start with the thing about the radar guns, because that's a great point. So when I was with Prospectus, one of the things I did was Q and I love to Q A. General managers players are very interesting on the field, but they usually don't have interesting things to say in interviews. Pat Neshek, by the way, of The Minnesota Twins, one exception, very cool player. Go to his blog, patna.com it's great. He's very interesting. He writes about some hockey, but he trades baseball cards and he's 26 and he's like anybody in this room except he happens to be playing major league.

Baseball as of last year. He'd hang out side the player hotels of NHL teams to ask for autographs and his teammates are like, you're a pro baseball player, you should not do that.

I know. I mean, he almost made the All Star game. He's a really. He's a cool cat. That's very interesting, Patnisha. Anyway, so with GMs. One of the GMs that I became reasonably close to is actually Tim Pora of the Astros. He was the assistant general manager at the time that I interviewed him and I asked him about. It didn't start off with this question, but it came around to radar gun readings and stuff like that. In fact, I think I asked him something that was tangential and his answer was about that. And he said it completely screws pitchers up, that they're just obsessed with lighting up the gun. And I think the reason for that is that in scouting terms, if you see a guy that throws 95 and he's 18 years old, you get excited and if he throws 89, you get less excited. The guy's going to get drafted. Again, economic ramifications, just what we talked about. He's going to get drafted higher, he's going to make more money and all that stuff. But when you get into the major leagues, you're in the major leagues, you don't need to light up the radar gun, you need to get out. And I think that that gets lost a little bit, that whatever is emphasized when you're at prep or when you're in college or when you're in the minor leagues, when you're being evaluated gets lost. In other words, maybe it's a predictor of success to a certain extent, but the ultimate success is just about how you approach the hitters. So yeah, I think the radar guns do have a way of kind of messing with people. The second question about the bullpen you were asking me about bullpen by committee and why it doesn't work. Well, what I'd like to see is they replace the humans with stat generating robots because it would be much more predictable for my fantasy team. But failing that, I think the best thing to do ultimately is you have to kind of deprogram these guys a little bit from their roles. So you talked about that. They're used to a certain role and all that stuff. The guy that comes to mind to me is Troy Percival. So Percival's story when he was in the major leagues, I think there's a fair chance that he was using other stuff that was not quite legal according to the game. But let's say that he wasn't using illegal stuff. We know for a fact he was interviewed. They would talk to him about what's your preparation for when you come into a game in the ninth inning. So starting at about the, I think it's the fifth, he would start drinking coffee. He averaged. He said this was his estimate. I'm assuming it's higher. Probably 10 cups of coffee between the fifth and the ninth inning until he came into the game. I find it hard to believe he didn't spike the coffee with something. But let's say he only drank coffee. I mean, you guys work in an office environment. You know what like two cups of coffee does? You're loopy. I mean, ten cups of coffee. So this guy is preparing for the ultimate purpose of getting so frickin fired up that he's gonna, you know, go buy these guys in the ninth inning. And if his role was not like that, what's he going to do? Is he going to change the approach? Is he going to change his preparation? So yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, so it just becomes this, well, yeah, and what if they don't use them in the ninth inning and what if they use them later? Like this can all get messed up and you have to, you know, relief pitchers are in that role or they're in that mode because they know they're coming in at a certain time. So does that mean that you have to stick with the roles or does that mean that you have to come up with a different approach and just be willing to train them? I think it's like you said, that they are used to what they're doing. So if you're going to do anything, if you're going to change things, you need to tell them in advance. You can't say, we'll see. We don't know what's going to happen this season. You have to tell them. You have to get them into spring training. You have to say, you there, Allen Embry, you know, you're a versatile pitcher. You could be our closer one day, you could be our seventh inning guy, one day you could be our eighth inning guy, whatever. So I think it's just a matter of the manager communicating with the player. But like we said, managers like to manage by rote and teams don't like Risk and all this stuff. So it's not just a matter of will this strategy work or not. It's will anybody be willing to do it? Because if you fail. When the Red Sox didn't work that year with a bullpen by committee, and by the way, that was a lousy bullpen. They didn't have very good personnel. They got Keith Folk the next year. They could have used Keith Folk in the seventh inning and they would have been just as good. He was a great pitcher. But the point being that because it failed, they got all this criticism. Teams don't like criticism. So anything that you see that's unconventional, bullpen by committee. My favorite is four man rotation. I think there's actually a lot of merit to considering a four man rotation, maybe with a Sunday starter that you could slide in there occasionally. But there's enough off days and pitchers are going six innings at a time anyway. You find four efficient pitchers. They don't have to be dominators. They could just be, you know, Maddox type, shimming Wong types. Just put the ball on the ground and get out of there. If you could do that, I think that would work too. So anyway, it's a long way of saying that if you were to do that, you have to change the way players think about their roles. If you don't, it's going to fail.

Back to clutch. So we talked about David Ortiz and the stats don't bear out that anybody is really all that clutch a hitter.

Except for Mark Grace.

Right. So there is sort of an implication there. If clutch were a real measurable thing, then, you know, did the guy really just get suddenly that much better or why can't he be that much better early in the game? You know, there's some slight slacking off there that hitters don't need to do because they go hit four or five times a game. It's not going to wear them out. Pitching on the other hand, you're going to go until you're somewhat worn out. So you mentioned Christy Mathewson, said he slacks off on the worst hitters. So there is this slacking off on the worst hitters and going harder on the better hitters. So my question is, has anybody ever looked at clutch pitching? Sort of comparing Roger Clemens performances against David Ortiz as compared to David Ortiz's average performance as compared to, you know, his performance against the Adam Everetts of the world? In other words, does a good pitcher hold good hitters more below the good hitters average ability than he does compared to the lesser hitters? And has anyone ever looked at those?

I can only sort of answer that question in terms of that level specificity, I think. I mean, I haven't read anything like that and that's a very good question. I mean, I think that would be very interesting. What a lot of people prospect is hardball times. Like all the sabermetric outfits on the web, they use something called leverage. So it's more about the situation than the hitter where a pitcher will be given more credit if it comes in in the seventh inning with the bases loaded versus he has a, you know, bases empty up three save in the ninth. So if you see a pitcher who's doing really well in the high leverage situations, not only will he have a high ERA and all this stuff, his saves might not even be that high, but his leverage score will be off the charts. So. Yes, but if you're talking about individual hitters, no, I have not seen that. And that could be very interesting actually.

Okay.

Yeah, clutch pitching is really what I was getting at. So that's that leverage.

Yeah, leverage is an interesting stat. Prospectus has it if you go to the site.

So back to the psychological vet you talk to. You know, you said you interviewed a lot of GMs and assistant GMs, so I think I read something about the Orioles doing psychological testing of their players. And I think LA Troy Hawkins was one of the pitchers who their profile was he couldn't be a ninth inning pitcher, but he could do very well in the seventh, eighth. And I think that's pretty much his career shown that every time he's pitching the ninth, he's not done well with the Mariners and stuff. Can you talk a little bit more besides what the Orioles are doing have done or other teams and how much stock they put into that?

The team that did this probably more than any team was the Cincinnati Reds. I can't remember the guy's name. I wish I could, but they had a guy, he specialized in what's called brain typing, I guess. And they brought this guy in and they were gaga over him and they paid him a lot of money and he went in and did it with the whole team. And again they printed out the results and they did all this stuff. And when was the last time the Reds were good? Right. I mean, so it didn't. It's interesting to get more research in there, but ultimately you have to have the players to get it done. You can know more about the players that you have, but you still need to get the talent. So as far as are guys suited to individual Roles. You know, I think that for the most part the whole argument that closers grow on trees, that's pretty true. I mean, if you're just talking about the simple basic closer role where you come into the ninth inning again, bases are empty, you have to get three outs before the other team gets two or three runs, a lot of pitchers can do that. I do think on the extremes weird things can happen. In the major leagues though, a guy like Hawkins, yeah, he might be that kind of guy, where he just absolutely is too jittery to get it done. But what's interesting is that very few of those guys fall through the crack or I guess get through the system. What ends up happening is the minor leagues becomes this weeding out process. In other words, if you're an aspiring engineer and you want to work for Google, you're going to go through and you'll start off and you'll be with this startup and it fails. And you'll do this and you'll do this and you'll do this. And if you're faced with deadlines and you're getting big contracts and it's not working and you're just not producing product, you're not going to make it to Google or whatever the pinnacle of the industry is, it's not going to happen because there's going to be that weeding out process in Major League Baseball. The idea is that if you're a nut job that, I mean, if you're a pretty talented player but you just, you can't hold it together in clutch situations, you can't do anything, you won't make it. I mean, it's just too mentally tough to be a major league baseball player. Not only one game, 162 games, you have to be on or if you're a pitcher, starting pitcher, 35, relief pitcher, 70, 70 times a season, you have to be willing to come in there, 50,000 people are screaming at you and you have to throw it within a box that small. I mean, so absolutely the minor leagues, high school, college, little league, I mean these are all a proving grounds to narrow it down to these guys who are not only physically gifted, but mentally and emotionally too. I mean, look, it's so funny about LA Troy Hawkins that he's had a career this long because you could tell that there's a little bit something loopy with the guy. Although I will say that when the Phillies play the Rockies, I don't know if you read this, just I guess it was yesterday or a couple days ago, it was windy and rainy and all this stuff. And the tarp was blowing all over the place. Four or five Phillies players come in and they help him and they do all this stuff. And the only Rocky who volunteered was LA Troy Hawkins. He was the only one willing to come in there. So maybe he should have been a grounds crew member. I don't know. That might have been better. Okay, do you think the. It is worse?

The huge investment for Japanese players.

Sorry, say again? Is it worth. Do you think it's worth it? Is it worth it? I mean, in some cases yes, and in some cases no. And when you hit the absolute perfect situation, it works better than anything. I mean, Ichiro is a classic example. I lived in Seattle for a year and I got to see it firsthand. And plus I'd read about it and written about it and all this stuff. I mean, Ichiro, to me, is maybe the most valuable player in the American League this year. His stats are depressed by Safeco Field, but if you look at what he's done and the defense that he provides and everything, he's a great, great, great player. But the revenue that these teams bring in again from Japan or from anywhere. You know, Chin Ming Wong has a gigantic following in Taiwan. I mean, gigantic. Everybody in Taiwan wants to know everything that's going on with this guy. Well, you know, if you're a pitcher from Louisiana, it's not like everybody in Louisiana is watching to see every pitch that you throw. So it's a very different thing. And, and there does seem to be this national pride issue, which translates into dollars. So if you find the right player, it could definitely work. Matsuzaka looks like he might be that guy Ichiro Nomo when he was good. But at the same time, you have guys who, they're just not that good. So it's hard for. Tomooka is a great. I mean, he's an ex Expo, so he's a good example. Tomooka had some talent, but he didn't work out. So the teams don't really benefit. I mean, how much national pride is. Is a country going to take? When a guy's getting thrown softballs out there, they're just belting them out of the park. So it's like anything else. If you have a good player, it's going to benefit. And if you don't, not as much. But on the extremes, when you have a guy like Ichiro, that's almost a more valuable commodity than anybody else. I'll go you one more. He's going to be free agent at the End of the season, whatever number you want to put on this guy, Maybe he's a $15 million a year player. I say you pay him 20 because he's worth all that stuff off the field. If the Mariners have to pay him four years, $80 million, they should do it because they'll make that money back.

One more question, preferably someone hasn't asked yet.

What are you looking for at the trading deadline? I'm looking for teams to not show any balls whatsoever because that's what always happens at the trading deadline. I mean, you know, they're going to talk a lot and things are going to play out a certain way, but ultimately not that much gets done. What I always find interesting is that there's always one or two teams that get a deal done earlier, that there's this mid June trade that comes out of nowhere and it helps the team a lot. We haven't really seen that this season. You know, Burley, I guess, was the guy who was rumored to be in trades, and that hasn't happened. And Dontrell Willis should have been traded two years ago. And that's not hindsight. I was saying that two years ago. I mean, Dontrell Willis, to me, didn't have those peripherals that he would be able to bring it forward. Now he's at the stage he's going to start to make serious money next year. He's not even, probably might not even be the best pitcher on the Marlins. I mean, they have all these young guys that are coming up. So he's a guy that should be traded. But will teams take the extra step? And here's the other thing. You don't always get a lot for these guys, especially if it's a free agent to be, you know, you could say, well, I really want Mark Burley or Jermaine Dye or any of these guys who are pending free agents. But historically, over the last seven, eight, ten years, what we found is these guys, there's not much return going on. Teams are just not willing to ante up that much. So you get in a situation where there's a willing seller and there's a willing buyer, but they absolutely can't agree on the terms. And it's a little maddening if you think about it. So let's say Mark Burley was on the market. He's one of the better pitchers in baseball. He's durable. You know, he's going to be good for the last three weeks of the season. If you're a team that absolutely needs one pitcher for the stretch run, he's a perfect acquisition. But you say, well he's going to be gone in three months because he's a free agent and you know he's not a Scott Borris client. But let's say he was a Scott Boris Klein, we know he'd be gone. It's an automatic, right? So teams aren't willing to do that for a rental. But it's not a rental in Major League Baseball if you lose a free agent. He's a high level free agent. You get two compensatory draft picks. Usually the picks will come in around number 40 overall, number 60. That's pretty good. That's second round talent. The Oakland A's have made a complete living out of doing this. One year they traded a guy named John Adkins, who I guarantee you nobody remembers for Ray Durham. And Ray Durham had a very nice season that year. And that was the year The A's won 102 games and it went great. I mean Durham was a perfect acquisition. And what happened in the end of the year, Ray Durham was a free agent. Bye bye. Ray Durham, hello. Two draft picks. And I'm trying to remember if that was the Nick Swisher year, if that was the. Before the Moneyball year. He's nodding. It was. So I think one of those picks might have been Nick Swisher. So basically they traded John Atkins for Ray Durham, Nick Swisher and somebody else. That's pretty good. And if you've got a good scout, scouting and player development system, you absolutely want to take advantage of this loophole. It's a loophole flat out. I mean, teams can find a way to do this. They should be looking to acquire every kind of half decent player that they can at this point because they're going to help the roster now. They're not going to cost a lot and you're going to get free draft picks because the Elias Sports Bureau doesn't know what it's doing when it rates the system. So this is definitely a situation where you have to arbitrage the situation. Billy Beane's done it and the smart team should do it too. It drives me nuts that teams don't make more trades because especially the buyers can really, really benefit if they know what they're doing. I can take, I mean, I can sit for a couple more minutes. It's fine with me. It's up to you guys. Sure.

On similar lines to the last answer, it bugs me at the start of the season if, if someone's coming up on the last year of a contract. And everyone says they have to either sign him to an extension or trade him now because if they keep him to the end of the year, they get nothing. Because if they keep him to the end of the year, they get his services for this year at the hugely discounted rate that they signed him to when they got the contract originally. It's like, I think this is, you may have guessed from my examples that I'm a Jays fan. Vernon Wells, this past off season he's due to get, he's getting 5 million this year and people are saying we should trade him. It's like if you're trading him, you have to get from the other team the difference between Verdon Wells market value and the 5 million you're paying him. And nobody's going to give you that.

Yep. I mean, we could switch places. That's a better point that I'm going to make. But yeah, that's exactly right. You know, that's definitely true. And teams miss this and I think what ends up happening is a lot of this stuff plays out in the media where, oh, there's a rumor that Vernon Wells is going to get traded. There's a rumor that Mark Burleigh is going to get traded. It's also only suits the city in question. So the guy from the New York Post writes in and says, oh yeah, the Yankees can get Vernon Wells for Miguel Cairo, no problem. Dodgers can get Troy gloss for the.

Third base prospect who's got an OPS of.700.

Exactly. I mean, it's just. Exactly. You just get those weird divergences happening. So yeah, no, that's absolutely a good point. And the smart teams don't do that. They won't give the guy away for pennies on the dollar. I'll tell you something. The one, the Washington Nationals get a lot of abuse and Jim Bowden gets a lot of abuse as his general manager. But when Alfonso Soriano came on the market, on the trade market and they were shopping him around and they were saying, you know, Alfonso Soriano, da, da, da, and nobody stepped up for Soriano and Bowdoin got ripped for it, why did you hold on to Soriano? You didn't get anything for him, whatever? Well, it turns out, I mean, based on what I heard and what sources told me, that there were no good offers at all. So instead of doing that, instead of saying, we don't just forget it, we're not going to bother with this, we're not going to trade this guy, they Wait till the off season, they get their draft picks and they have Soriano at that discounted rate all season. So, yeah, you know, if teams aren't going to step up, the heck with them. Just don't trade the guy to them. I mean, it's up to them to deliver something. The buyers have to give you something or the sellers have no reason to sell. Go ahead. So there are a couple outfielders last year who had down seasons. Bob Abreu and Maglie Ordonez. Yeah. And one of them's top player in the league now. And one is waiver wire material. Right. Are there any good predictors for telling whether a guy's going to rebound or whether he's on his way down? People have laptops, can either back me up or completely contradict me on this, but I'm pretty sure that Maglio's power didn't kind of do that, that he struggled a little bit, but a lot of it was an on base issue and he still seemed to have a lot of his core skills intact. Abreu, I'm going to try to remember this. I think it went 30 home runs and then 24 and then 14. There might have been one more season in there. And I mean, he went straight down in home runs. He was still hitting doubles, he was still walking and all this stuff. But he was over 30 and you could see this stuff coming down the pike a little bit. That he wasn't going to be that power hitter. And with his skill set that relies a lot on stolen bases, to be honest with you, and his speed and his athleticism, that's going to start to go away. And if the power is not going to be there, what are you left with? You're left with that best of league average outfield. Whereas Maglio, he had leg problems and all this other stuff. He didn't have the best batting eye in the world. He wasn't 100 walk guy sometimes, but he still had some power. Now I still say this is a huge fluke by Maglio Adonez. And whoever tells you that someone could predict this, unless it's his mom, it's impossible. Nobody knew that Maglio would do this, but at least you could see a little bit of the inklings of the skill set being there. And the thing about Abreu or Adognes for that matter, sometimes there could be a player who goes along and I mean, you completely can't see it coming. The guy who comes to mind for me is Tim Salmon. Salmon, when he was coming up in his early 30s or whatever, he was still hitting 30 home runs every season. Now he had foot problems. So there was an injury that contributed to it. But I mean this guy literally fell off the cliff. Dale Murphy, if you're a little bit older, you're going to remember Dale Murphy. Same thing happened to him. I mean he was an MVP caliber player, maintains a pretty good level for a while and then just does this. It just happens when you get over 30 years old. It's a risky proposition and that's what's so amazing. People talk about, oh, there's later peaks and they're into their 40s and stuff like that. First of all, I think there's a reason that these guys are going this far and secondly, I think that it's not an absolute. We can see in a breu, we can see these guys that sometimes will fall off and whether or not they're using anything, it's not foolproof. And sometimes these guys are just going to fail. Because it's a young man's game. You usually peak age 25 to 29 roughly. Most players still do that even in this era.

You look at a team like the Tigers who, you know, pressing for breaking records of futility a few years ago and now are, you know, pretty good team made World Series last year. You look at a team like the Orioles who spend millions upon millions of dollars and hasn't done anything for like a decade. What do you do? This is like a high level question. What do you do with a team like the Pirates? Do you just hope that they're going to pull a Tigers and someday be good? Do you use the Orioles as an example that, well, if you have millions of dollars, you're not necessarily necessarily guaranteed to do anything anyways. I mean, how can you create incentives for teams not to just suck it up and do nothing?

The first article I ever wrote for Baseball Prospectus was published on February 28, 2002 and it was called the Success Cycle. The idea of the Success cycle was if you're a team like the Pirates, you owe it to yourself to not get ahead of yourself and to start to build gradually and draft well and do all this stuff and kind of come up and once you see the opportunity, then you start to add pieces. You start to add pieces and as you get closer you do that and then there's a team that's already further along, maybe you're the Blue Jays and you're an 80 odd win team and okay, you could start to spend the money and then there's A team like the Red Sox, where you're in great position, you know, you're just looking to tweak along the margins and maintain. I completely don't believe in that theory anymore. I think that it's garbage and I don't know what I was thinking. It's not that linear. The game doesn't work that way. You know, the A's will. I think it was 1999 or 2000. They traded Billy Taylor, who was their closer for, well, a young guy anyway, and they picked up Jason Isringhausen to be their closer, who was much younger, and they picked up another young guy and they picked up another old guy and they traded another young guy. They were doing things at the same time and good teams find a way to do that. They'll build on the fly and they'll just seize on opportunities. So if the Pirates have an opportunity to pick up a really good player right now and he's a veteran, maybe they do it even though he costs a lot of money. It's not obvious that they're going to win right now, but because of other factors or if they're just trying to build young wise, then they're going to say, okay, we're going to go with these prospects and do it that way. But the big thing is they have to draft and develop well. And the Pirates have not done that. I mean, they haven't had. Who's the last impact player to come through the Pirates farm system? Jason Bay was not a Pirate prospect. He was actually Montreal Expo's prospect. Giles did, I think so Giles would be the last guy. So I mean, Giles in his prime was what, eight years ago? Something like that, Maybe six years ago. So it's been a while and there certainly hasn't been that run of great players. And the other point, which I had on the tip of my tongue and I was trying to think of it, oh, is the economic impact. And this is talked about in the book too. And it's a little bit talking about kind of success cycles sort of is it gets into when teams should optimally spend money. So although, you know, the Tigers were spending money a little bit before when you would expect them to because they were still below.500. They signed Maglio and Pudge Rodriguez and all these guys and people said, why are they signing these guys? It doesn't look like they're all that good yet. It took a while for it to really hit. But the sweet spot to spend money in Major League Baseball, you know, on a neutral level, is when you're at about 83, 85, 86 wins. Because if you find that five or six win player, that's the difference between maybe going to the playoffs or not. And if you just talk on a pure revenue model, the number of fans you're going to generate as you get into the pennant race and maybe make the playoffs and all the revenue that you're going to get is much more than whatever you're going to spend for the guy. My advice to Pittsburgh is to fire the entire front office and start drafting better. And I'm not trying to be glib, that's absolutely true. They have to get better prospects and they have to develop better. And Dave Littlefield I don't think is that guy. But I think that if they get start to get better, they still have Ian Snell and Tom Gorzalani. They have some guys, if they start to get a little bit better and maybe they get to 77 or 78 wins, maybe they jump it a little bit and they start to build from there, but they're not even at that point. So they really have to be focused on a bottom up approach right now. They need to get some prospects in that system.

Were those NL Central win numbers that you were giving or Major League Baseball?

No, no, Major League. I mean the American League is really tough this year. But I think, you know, if you look at what the NL East, I mean the Mets are a very good team, but they're on pace for what, 89 wins right now. So if you had 85 and you could sign some Magliardonia's equivalent, why you do it? Maybe 83, you know, because at least you're in the mix at that point. That point. Yeah, well, right, exactly. Exactly. Okay, that's fine. Cool. And I'll hang out so you guys can come up if you want.