FanGraphs Audio Presents: The Untitled McDongenhagen Project, Ep. 7
UMP: The Untitled McDongenhagen Project, Episode 7
This is the seventh episode of a weekly program co-hosted by Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel about player evaluation in all its forms. The show, which is available through the normal FanGraphs Audio feed, has a working name but barely. The show is not all prospect stuff, but there is plenty of that, as the hosts are Prospect Men. Below are some timestamps to make listening and navigation easier.
1:41 – Our plugs, because we wrote a lot in the last week or so
2:52 – TOPIC ONE: FanGraphs’ Craig Edwards on his prospect asset value research that was rolled out this week over four articles
5:45 – Jason Heyward vs. Ronald Acuna Jr. in terms of service time and using that to count WAR
10:58 – Adjusting FV grades throughout a prospect’s career and how Craig adjusted for that and positional bias
15:15 – Can we put a dollar value on variance?
19:00 – Can we apply this framework to big leaguers?
25:15 – Craig takes a flamethrower to new managing editor Meg Rowley
25:45 – TOPIC TWO: New FanGraphs managing editor Meg Rowley joins the show to talk about the dark side of prospect asset value and what’s going on with the Mariners
27:00 – Are we bad people? You decide! (Meg decided.)
28:50 – Meg drops a swear. (Meg didn’t.)
30:50 – Kiley tries to defend himself
35:45 – Scrooge McDuck is referenced
40:25 – Does baseball’s salary structure need to completely change?
47:55 – Kiley proposes an ignored market inefficiency
52:10 – Meg bums everyone out
52:33 – We try to sort out our feelings about Dr. Lorena Martin’s accusations against the Mariners
1:14:13 – TOPIC THREE: Lightning round!
1:14:50 – SUBTOPIC ONE: MLB’s PDP program for high school players is expanding; how does this affect middle and lower income high school players, prep pitcher’s health, data collection, multi-sport athletes and the scouting schedule at large?
1:26:45 – Will this increase the trend of having more non-scouts having input in draft rooms?
1:28:10 – SUBTOPIC TWO: Houston and Baltimore’s front offices hiring influx, where they stand with staffing, how they’re making decisions and what assets Baltimore should be moving in the short-term
1:46:17 – SUBTOPIC THREE: U. of Arkansas pitching coach Wes Johnson was hired to go straight to the big leagues as the Minnesota Twins pitching coach on Rocco Baldelli’s new coaching staff. Is this a new pipeline of high-end college coaches heading straight to MLB?
1:53:00 – The job that MLB teams are outsourcing to the internet
1:56:30 – A somber goodbye to our dearly departed Carson Cistulli
2:02:12 – Eric brings up our third bummer topic of the podcast
Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @kileymcd or @longenhagen on Twitter or at prospects@fangraphs.com.
You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.
Audio after the jump. (Approximately 2 hr 2 min play time.)
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Kiley McDaniel has worked as an executive and scout, most recently for the Atlanta Braves, also for the New York Yankees, Baltimore Orioles and Pittsburgh Pirates. He's written for ESPN, Fox Sports and Baseball Prospectus. Follow him on twitter.
On this day for giving thanks, thank-you for two hours of quality baseball entertainment to help me during all the driving I shall be doing on this (otherwise football-oriented) weekend. And for all the work you’ve been putting into this podcast in its short life so far. This and Effectively Wild are the only sports podcasts I have set to automatically download onto my phone because I know I will enjoy to them.
Well I agree totally that the draft is a bad system which is mainly there to depress wages and stifle market based competition for labor. And any competitive balance concerns from abandoning it could easily be handled through changes to revenue sharing.
And you do a good job of mentioning how the union has consistently negotiated for the inflating the value of existing players/members in exchange for deflating for the value of future players/members. This behavior is both sad, and exactly what one would expect from such an institution, the incentives make perfect sense.
At the same time I don’t at all sympathize with the seemingly default assumption you all have the owners somehow owe *players in particular* (as opposed to their employees more generally) a larger share of the revenue. Everyone in the baseball universe is bringing value, players, coaches, trainers, ops staff, IT people, the owners. It doesn’t seem fair/right/efficient that there should be this laser focus on making sure that the first or second most well compensated group (players) gets an even larger portion of the pie just because they happen to have a lot of collective bargaining power.
Yes the players are somewhat hard to replace (sort of, I think we are finding in recent years that a lot of players people would have argued are difficult to replace are actually quite easy to replace and that the labor market for players is pretty deep), but the owners even moreso. Certainly fewer people with the wealth/desire to own a team than there are players. And front office staff, scouts, et cetera are often paid in some sense “below market” simply because there is a such an oversupply of people interested in these jobs.
And I will never understand the idea that say the BAM revenues which were created by the league/teams business and IT staff/partners somehow should help prop up the players, instead of you know, the staff who actually created/manage it.
The problem with Craig’s analysis is that the value of player’s is so heavily contingent on the overall structure of the system. So it is hard to use what the current system says about player values to argue for what their values should be in some other system because changing the system is going to radically change their values. Certainly we know a lot about the player’s values relative to each other, but before you go pushing the share of revenues around based on that analysis you really need to had a model for how all the other parts of the ecosystem are contributing.
I feel like a lot of baseball writers, and fangraphs too at times have their viewpoint and sympathies in the analysis mediated/skewing/dominated by the fact that may of their relationships and pieces of information on these issues come from players and agents. There is not much hard hitting analysis of what medical staffs should be paid. But of course that is also due to the fact that there is a lot of public information on player performance and the relative differentials, and almost none on medical staff perfromance.
TLDR: I suspect if you somehow had perfect information and did an actual analysis of the contributions of all MLB employees, you would actually find that the players are grossly overpaid compared to all other employees vis-a-vis their economic value (impact on bottom line).