Dan Szymborski FanGraphs Chat – 3/3/22

Dan Szymborski: <weary>

Clark the Cub: This should be good.

Dan Szymborski: Nothing is good at the moment!

Zack: What is the best possible explanation for Gleyber Torres? It just doesn’t make sense

Dan Szymborski: If Gleyber Torres doesn’t make sense, you must acquit!

Dan Szymborski: I guess the ideal possible explanation would be that he had a secret injury which magically healed this offseason

Northside: Pretend you live in a universe where teams make crazy trades. The Dodgers and Angels swap Betts and Trout, along with the players’ long-term contracts. Who got the better end of the trade?

Dan Szymborski: Trout

A’s fans: Majority of fans: The owners are cheap and evil! Pay the players what they’re worth!

Us: First time?

MilwaukeeBeerjays: Is it that I can’t find anything with the new layout which honestly I don’t love, but I don’t see an article about Jeter stepping down?

Dan Szymborski: I don’t think we had one? It’s possible that nobody felt that they had anything specifically different to say about it that wasn’t already

Dan Szymborski: And it happened at time so other stuff was happening!

Jefferson: What do you think the food selection was during their 16-hour negotiation marathon? Do you think they could have come to a deal if it was chilli instead?

Dan Szymborski: They should do negotiations like hot ones.

Dan Szymborski: The wings get hotter and hotter until you make the deal.

Dan Szymborski: And if you bow out, the other side gets their most recent offer implemented if they finish *their* wing

JJ: Help me feel something that isn’t emotionally analogous to dropped french fries

Dan Szymborski: I don’t!

Dan Szymborski:

Dan Szymborski: That’s the reference, BTW

Formerly interested in baseball: I canceled my MLB.tv subscription after the owners scuttled Opening Day. I’m not saying it’s a big deal; it just dawned on me that I had better things to do than give money to these owners, especially the team I want to see is blacked out half the time, anyway. What I wonder is whether a lot of people feel the same way and if it makes any difference.

Dan Szymborski: It certainly puts me in a conflict of interest, since my current career is baseball related!

Scotty: Hey Dan, just wanted to request you and some other Fangraphs guys and gals do some MLB The Show sim game twitch streams during the lockout! Loved watching those in 2020.

Dan Szymborski: We might! I might then have to buy the most recent one. I hadn’t because I’m still trying to snag a PS5.

Dan Szymborski: Though that’s on hold right now.

Matt: Any realistic reason to be optimistic that the CBA is signed by April? I’m clinging to anything I can at this point

Dan Szymborski: No.

Dan Szymborski: The owners appear to be intransigent and TV money pressure isn’t an issue until you lose 25 games or say

Clubby Stapp: With a 12 team playoff, shouldn’t they go back to just east and west divisions?

Dan Szymborski: Yes

Thomas Bayes: Does ZiPS use pitch data (movement, release point, velo, extension, etc) in its estimations for pitchers? I feel like it would be useful for smaller samples

Dan Szymborski: SOME things. A lot of other stuff we’re still working on squeezing out what’s predictive and useful

Guest: If the evidence is strong that playing in Coors hurts players, is there anything that could be done to the Coors environment to mitigate this? Or is altitude altitude and nothing can be done?

Dan Szymborski: I think the humidor is as much as you can do without other issues popping up

Dan Szymborski: Like you start changing the ball itself for high elevation, you start to possibly alter things awkwardly

Dan Szymborski: And while that evidence is significant, the effect isn’t *strong*

Jefferson: Zips going full scorched earth on Shewmake made me sad

Also Dan: I just saw your tweet about a salary cap and it’s something I’ve been thinking of for a while now. The CBT is already basically a salary cap so does it make sense for the players to just embrace a cap at this point? At least when you have a salary cap you also have a salary floor and the cap is tied to total revenue so it will go up as revenue goes up. That’s how it works in the NFL anyway, not sure about other leagues

Dan Szymborski: That’s kind of my feeling.

Dan Szymborski: If the players are already basically under a salary cap right now.

Dan Szymborski: Under a different name.

Dan Szymborski: Then you might as well go for an *actual* salary cap that comes with the benefits.

Chris: Are the rsns and national tv deals going to give Manfred an earful for the latest report on the owners using them as leverage or is this just par the course?

Dan Szymborski: I don’t think conversations become uncomfortable until actually money looks like it’s being lost.

Guest: Would putting a roof on Coors help?

Dan Szymborski: Probably not.

Guest: Someone forgot to put locks and chains around the gloves before they took that pic for the home page featured article

comish4lif: They should name the top 30 issues to negotitate for the new CBA, then have the 30 owners and 30 player reps go head to head – issue by issue. Max Scherzer vs Steve Cohen on the CBT.

Dan Szymborski: Issue #28 – Should Bobby Nutting be launched by trebuchet? Debating it is Bobby Nutting vs. Andrew Miller

Guest: Have stock prices gone up for Master & Yale locks because of the lockout and all the photos required?

The Stranger: What if you pressurized the Coors dome?

Dan Szymborski: I dunno if it makes a park effect difference

Dan Szymborski: Wasn’t the Metrodome air pressured?

VG: Hi. What do you think ZiPS really likes about Bryan Ramos to rank him at #20? Thanks.

Dan Szymborski: Good plate discipline, very good for his age at the level, thinks he can play the infield

Ham: Why is Miguel Vargas top 10 in the ZIPS prospects?

Dan Szymborski: ZiPS doesn’t see him as 1B-only right now

The Sid: Has there been any thought of using replacement players during the lockout?

Dan Szymborski: I’m sure there’s been a thought, but I don’t think MLB’s going there yet

Dan Szymborski: They got slapped down pretty hard last time after all

Dan Szymborski: and they don’t want to be forced to play under the old CBT again

Dan Szymborski: err CBA

Dan Szymborski: The CBT explicitly sunsetted on a date

Dan Szymborski: So there’s cbe no CBT

Guest: If you pressurized the Coors dome, could I cook my beans faster? Not for chili, mind you, for cholent.

Dan Szymborski: Just how much pressure are we talking about here?

comish4lif: I keep hearing people say that if you get a Salary Cap – it comes with a Salary Floor. Does it? If everything is part of the CBA, the floor is a negotiated item as well.

Dan Szymborski: It might, it might not. The revenue guarantee is the key

comish4lif: What to do in Colorado? Dan, think BIG!
Build a pressurized dome. Set the pressure to sea level, and you can match the playing field size to whatever sea level stadium you like. FTFY

Dan Szymborski: I don’t know how hard this is to do

Dan Szymborski: Or expensive

Dan Szymborski: This is completely out of any area of expertise I have!

comish4lif: If you are new to baseball labor issues, be careful if you google CBT.

Dan Szymborski: is cognitive behavioral theory a hot button topic?

Dan Szymborski: I really don’t know

comish4lif: Pressurized dome in Colorado? Instant Pot field?

The Sid: Is the lockout just a means of the universe imploding to prevent the Mets from having a rotation topped by DeGrom and Scherzer?

Dan Szymborski: You do have to feel they’re trying to lockout COhen too

Insert Witty Name Here: The chatters don’t realize the part of the charm of Coors is the view of the mountains in the background.  Put a dome and you lose that.

MilwaukeeBeerjays: Do you play action RPGs at all? Like the Elder Scrolls series and zero Dawn?

Dan Szymborski: I’ve played a ton of elder scrolls

Dan Szymborski: haevn’t played zero dawn

Dan Szymborski: So yes

Dan Szymborski: but I do tend to prefer classic JRPGs

Dan Szymborski: I’m a lot more excited these days for new Falcom Trails releases than Final Fantasy ones.

Guest: I noticed that FG projections for my team went down after ZIPS was (were?) incorporated. Why do you hate my team so much?

Dan Szymborski: TO make you sad.

Billy Marlin: Re: the salary cap. I can see the appeal of conceding that point and accepting a cap tied to league revenue… but since the owners have demonstrated they do everything in bad faith, how could the players trust that the definition of “revenue” doesn’t get manipulated and twisted once the ink is dry?

Dan Szymborski: They’re doing it now, though.

Dan Szymborski: A constantly twisted revenue guarantee is probably still a lot better than a complete lack of one.

FannyGraphy: Hi Dan, I had a question about player aging; I’ve seen the aging curves and things of that nature, but I was wondering about how do you see player skills typically age? or how does ZIPS see it? Like for example, does a hitter’s contact start to fade first? power? eye? or do some skills improve with age, like perhaps plate discipline? Thank you

Dan Szymborski: ZiPS doesn’t have a “baked-in” set of rules in this sense.

Dan Szymborski: ZiPS compares players, on the fly, to a very large cohort of roughly similar types of players

Dan Szymborski: There’s no part of ZiPS that says “OK, if X goes up A%, then Y goes down B%”

comish4lif: I keep hearing pro-owner people say that “baseball contracts are guaranteed” – most baseball players don’t make it to free agency, anyone pre-arb can be released at any time.

What percentage of MLB players are on a guaranteed contract?

Dan Szymborski: Most (but the minimum salary means that a huge chunk of players aren’t)

Dan Szymborski: But here’s the thing: there’s no rule that *requires* guaranteed contracts to free agents

Dan Szymborski: You can *offer* Carlos Correa a 10-year deal that’s made up of nine team options.

comish4lif: The owners’ books: the MLBPA sees the owners books right? Or at least some version of them? What does it say about the integrity of the MLBPA that this data is never leaked.

Dan Szymborski: They see *some* data. But they don’t get to do what, say, a forensic accountant would do

Confused: I’m looking at Julio Urias’s projections and note that Zips has him with a significantly better FIP than THE BAT – 3.44 to 3.86. As you might expect then, Zips is projecting better underlying metrics across the board (at least where comparisons are available) such as K/9, BB/9, HR/9.  Yet, the projected WAR is an identical 3.8 for both systems.  Since FG WAR is FIP-based, how this the case?  Zips is projecting 5 fewer IP, but it’s hard to believe that could cancel out a 0.42 FIP advantage over ~170 IP.

Dan Szymborski: is it in the playe rpage or from the rundown?

Dan Szymborski: Hmm, couldnt’ tell you

Dan Szymborski: But I also don’t know if THEBAT’s WAR is submitted or FG-calculated

Moog Powell: What’s your favorite kind of immature humor?

Dan Szymborski: Puns

Andy: If losing 25 games is the pain point that suggests that they need to to sign the CBA by around original opening day. Are we that optimistic?

Dan Szymborski: No, I think that’s most an optimistic scenario, not the most likely one.

Dan Szymborski: I dont’ think I’m goign to die before I’m 45, but that doesn’t mean my prediction is that I’m going to die at 45.

Dan Szymborski: At least, I hope it isn’t; I turn 44 in June.

Non-Mex Mex: Why stop at a 12-team playoff?  Can’t we include the other 18 teams in a loser’s bracket to determine for once and for all (well, for 2022) whether Baltimore or Colorado is worse?

Dan Szymborski: If owners were willing to be creative, you could even make a 30-team playoff that still preferred the normal probabilities from team quality

Dan Szymborski: but they’re not

Dan Szymborski: because it’ snot just about the playoff money, it’s about making success more random and thus, team quality worth less

Insert Witty Name Here: Should the players just keep making more demands as more games are lost? For every game missed, the minimum salary demand goes up 100k?

Dan Szymborski: You have to be careful because the legal requirement to negotiated in good faith is a two way street

Dan Szymborski: If they’re playing admittedly satisfying games like this, it weakens their NLRB complaint and opens them up to one

Manny Trillo: As this drags on into probably at least May, what chance is there the players manage to get missed games rescheduled? This would seemingly push the end of playoffs back to neutral site like the 2020 WS. Is there a shot of that happening with explanded playoffs anyway

Dan Szymborski: THat’s going to be the tough part.

Dan Szymborski: And we have a lot of tough parts!

Dan Szymborski: The number of games is a mandatory bargaining subject. Which means that players have to *agree* on the number of games to be played or at least the number of games they’re paid for.

Dan Szymborski: RIght now, the MLBPA’s position is that there will be 162 games played and 162 games they’re paid for and that is not MLB’s position

Dan Szymborski: And the more games lost, the more this becomes a problem.

Dan Szymborski: You could have a scenario where it’s July, they have an agreement on everything that’s currently an issue, but there’s still no CBA because they can’t agree on how many games and how many games the players are paid for

Metropolitan Immolators: Was there ever a point that anyone would have guessed that Oliver Perez would retire as one of the oldest players in the game?

Dan Szymborski: The day before he retired!

Confused: More on Urias’s projections: I thought Zips DC was Zips rates applied to FG staff IP projections.  And the FGDC was blended Zips/Steamer rates applied to the same staff IP projections. Yet, ZipsDC has 130 IP and FGDC has 159.  Do I misunderstand?

Dan Szymborski: Wait, that’s not supposed to be.

Dan Szymborski: I’ve sent a message to David aboutr that

Guest: Can you run ZiPS backwards? What happens if you plug Votto’s last season in, and project backwards? What does his earlier career look like?

Dan Szymborski: I can but it takes a little work

Dan Szymborski: I did that with Ted Williams

Joe: Do you and the other projection gurus (steamer guys, Ariel Cohen, Derek Carty) have a group chat?

Dan Szymborski: No. Or there may be one and I’m just not invted

RVA Empire: Are there enough data points to see if the ZIPS Top 100 has a higher correlation of success than the BOARD Top 100? If so, I’d love to see the results and FG internal discussion [eats popcorn].

Dan Szymborski: ZiPS has done very well, but it’s also not looking for the exact same thing

Guest: Who is your favorite minor league signing of the offseason thus far?

Dan Szymborski: I’m kinda curious if Dan Straily’s HR improvement in korea can persist back in the US

SJ: What are we listening to today?

Dan Szymborski: Not much, this week has caused me to have a giant permanent headache.

Dan Szymborski: I did listen to the 3/1 episode of the Everyday Driver podcast.

Pat: With the Orioles moving left-field back to Harford Road, what sort of adjustments do you think teams will need to make? Will MLB allow leftfielders to play on Segways?

Dan Szymborski: I don’t think it’ shtat big a deal.

andrew: I think most if not all people in this chat are pro-player (myself included). Can you attempt to steel-man and give the best realistic pro-owner argument?

Dan Szymborski: OK, though please note that I do not believe this at all.

Dan Szymborski: “From a fundamental standpoint, it’s true that baseball’s revenues are growing much faster than salaries. However, the basis for that revenue growth is in areas such as internet and international revenue, which are primarily being generated because of our investment in there, the risk of which we all assumed, not the players , who simply played the same baseball they always have. No player had any skin in our investment in MLBAM, so why would they be automatically entitled to those gains? We gave the players an opportunity to get a salary cap with a revenue guarantee in 1994 and they went on strike and then sued us. Their slowdown in revenue is due to their intransigence about the partnership we offered them, leaving us to take the risk.”

Dan Szymborski: Now, please note that this is not my argument.

Dan Szymborski: But you ASKED me to play devil’s advocate here, something I do enjoy doing.

Dan Szymborski: When I was a high school senior, social studies was one of the only few classes I didn’t nope the hell out of that year (the others were prob/stat and wind ensemble/orchestra). Towson was becoming a law and public policy magnet at the time and the GT course at the time was basically arguing SCOTUS cases for the whole year. I always tried to take the unpleasant side!

Guest: Hi Dan! What, if any, impact do you think a sustained lockout would have on the development of prospects who are on the 40 man, but would probably start the season in AAA. Do you think generationally there’s something going to be messed up with how players develop due to the lack of consistency over the past 3 seasons?

Dan Szymborski: I think for guys like MJ Melendez and Nick Pratto, a year could have significant consequences

Dan Szymborski: (I could probably put together a better pro-owner argument in time, but I only had like 45 seconds to think about and start typing)

Laffy Tuffy: Do you like Dan Straily or Aaron Brooks more for 2022?

Dan Szymborski: Straily. It’s not like Brooks because a K machine in KBO

comish4lif: From the perspective of MLB catching legitimate criticism for not promoting the players, how necessary was it to remove player likenesses from team websites?

Dan Szymborski: Actually quite so.

Dan Szymborski: There are legal reasons for that.

Guest: In the 60s and 70s, the media and the fans were very pro-owner. This seems to have changed. Bill James has theorized that this is because we can actually assign values to players now in a way we couldn’t years ago, so it’s easier to see which players are getting ripped off. Does this seem right to you?

Dan Szymborski: I think that’s a reasonable hypothesis

Guest: How many owners do you think would have accepted the players latest offer? Are the owners mostly united? Are they split evenly? Or is there a group of ten or fewer holdouts?

Dan Szymborski: I think they’re *mostly* united but I get the sense that there’s 10 or so who are VERY resistant to moving on anything

Jonathan: What is Zips DC?

Dan Szymborski: ZiPS pro-rated to depth chart

Pirates Hurdles: RE backwards ZiPS – That would be great to do for a guy like Gurriel to see what might have been.

Dan Szymborski: Don’t make me tap the sign!

Dan Szymborski: https://blogs.fangraphs.com/should-yuli-gurriel-and-jose-abreu-be-hall…

Frank Thomas the Tank Engine: How much do you think attendance will be down (vs 2019 last regular year) once games restart?

Dan Szymborski: 20%

Dan Szymborski: But it also may come down to how ugly this continues and how quick this resolves.

Dan Szymborski: If they came to a quick deal this weekend (ha!) it might not have any effect

Dan Szymborski: but this prediction is based on them not coming to a quick deal this weekend

Jonathan: Hot take: this is the player’s fault, but they’ve done a better job creating the narrative

Dan Szymborski: Don’t look at me!

Frank Thomas the Tank Engine: When MLB eventually goes to 32 teams, do you favor the 4 division per league alignment?

Dan Szymborski: NFW

Wireless Joe Jackson: Does a sustained lockout affect the timeline for when prospects become Rule 5 eligible?

Dan Szymborski: It shouldn’t

Dan Szymborski: HOWEVER

Dan Szymborski: if the whole season is gone, that kinda makes things tricky with 40 man rosters

Dan Szymborski: And if there’s no baseball for the entire year, well, it may not be my problem to worry about anymore

Didace: I am neither pro-player nor pro-owner – I am pro-baseball. In general I agree that the owners are playing hardball (heh) more than needed, but the players have a little bit of cognitive dissonance going on with one issue. They are adamant that the system needs to be set up so that all teams are incentivized to be more competitive, but then they want the “salary cap” increased so that big free agents have more upside but then only a few teams can spend that much.

Dan Szymborski: But there are some problems here

Dan Szymborski: You don’t like the CBT being raised

Dan Szymborski: Fine.

Dan Szymborski: NOW. Where’s the player share from revenue growth going to come from?

Dan Szymborski: The players are hte ones that proposed a different revenue sharing system that incentivized winning and investing in team

Dan Szymborski: the OWNERS said no.

Dan Szymborski: Basically, it’s a fake competitive balance scheme. Why should the players be shut out of baseball’s revenue growth forever because Bitty Bobby Nutting didn’t get as much in his trust fund as he’d like?

Pirates Hurdles: Ha, I thought you had done that, but then your answer made it sound like you havent done ZiPS backwards, lol

Dan Szymborski: It makes sense to translate performance that happened

Dan Szymborski: I do backwards for Ted Williams

Gonzo: What happens first: a player breaks rank and says they should take the best deal possible and go play; or a wealthy owner breaks rank and calls out the cheap owners?

Dan Szymborski: I think a player simply because it’s hard to be as disciplined with 1200 people

Frank Thomas the Tank Engine: Re: Rule 5 draft:  Rule 5 itself says its the number of Rule 5 drafts after the player signs (with a minor exception if a player signs right before it).  So the lockout normally should not affect it unless there is no Rule 5 draft this year.

Dan Szymborski: But I think the issue is that you have to *protect* players from Rule 5 drafts.

Dan Szymborski: And you do it by putting them on the 40-man roster

Dan Szymborski: which makes them union members

Didace: “Where’s the player share from revenue growth going to come from?” Higher minimum salary, bigger bonus pool, free agency sooner…  I never said the owners would go for it.

Dan Szymborski: But free agency sooner doesn’t increase the amount of money there is out there

Dan Szymborski: Nor does a bigger bonus pool.

Dan Szymborski: They’d run into the same caps

Dan Szymborski: If Steve Cohen isn’t going over a punitive cap to sign six year guys, he’s not going to for four year guys

Josie: When a player doesn’t have a ZiPs line in his profile, but has a ZiPS DC with a line of .211/.281/.343, what does that represent?

Dan Szymborski: I don’t know how that would be

Dan Szymborski: Unless there’s a database issue

Dan Szymborski: It would help if you told me the player! I don’t have all their lines memorize

Dan Szymborski: d

Frank Thomas the Tank Engine: With 32 teams should MLB go back to 2 divisions per league?

Dan Szymborski: Yes

Farhandrew Zaidman: Muncy’s return for the start of the season is uncertain, JT keeps declining defensively, Eddie Rios is coming off an injury and may not be very good, and Beaty has never been very good regardless. Do the Dodgers have a “hole” at corner infield?

Dan Szymborski: I wouldn’t call it a hole yet

Dan Szymborski: but it’s a soft spot.

Guest: The reason I asked the Votto ZiPS question is I would find it interesting what his career might have looked like had he used his new “swinging for the fences at the cost of discipline” approach his whole career.

Dan Szymborski: That’s a bit trickier

Dan Szymborski: I’ll ponder it

Wireless Joe Jackson: You ever play the FF6 Brave New World mod?  Reblances all the equipment and character abilities, limits each character to a few espers.  I really liked it.

Dan Szymborski: I have not.

Dan Szymborski: Now wouldn’t be a great time as I’m playing through the pixel remaster right now

Dan’s Mom: When are you having kids!?!

Dan Szymborski: I know that’s not you mom

Dan Szymborski: Mom’s gotten off me since my sister has kids

Dan Szymborski: and since mom thinks her two year old is very similar to me, she’s already exhausted enough babysitting

Dan Szymborski: For those that haven’t played FFVI

Dan Szymborski: This discussion ended similar to the CBA discussion Monday-Tuesday

Dan Szymborski:

Wireless Joe Jackson: How is the pixel remaster?  I’m hesitant to pay AGAIN for a game I’ve paid for like 4 times already.

Dan Szymborski: Terrific. Worth it just for the modernized score

Dan Szymborski: The opera is VOICED

Dan Szymborski: (Now, I’ve already heard the concertized version, but it’s great to have it in game)

Josie: Few examples for the .211/.281/.343 line: Yoenis Cespedes, Justin Smoak, Aaron Altherr. All guys who were out of MLB in some form or another last year, but listed in FA in the DC. Obviously some kind of a placeholder, and I get why they wouldn’t have a projection run, but saw that number popping up a few times!

MilwaukeeBeerjays: Favourite ff6 PC? Mine is sabin. BUM RUSH SON!

Dan Szymborski: I like Edgar.

Dan Szymborski: Because the tools are hilarious

Dan’s Mom Again: When are you going to get your junk out of our house?

Dan Szymborski: She woudln’t say our! My dad died in 1997

Dan Szymborski: On that note, it’s time for me to head out for another week.

Dan Szymborski: Thanks for coming everyone!

Dan Szymborski: Hope to see you all next week.