Now it begins, let it begin

Clean up time, clean up time

Clean up time, clean up time

Trousa check and I were on MLB Network on Tuesday promoting our book the MVP machine which I am promoting now by mentioning it go get it and we were taken by surprise because the draft came up and neither Travis and I really a draft expert who is qualified to talk about that under the best of circumstances let alone when we're focused on the book but the topic was sort of the skew toward position players in the first round of the draft this year and whether that is meaningful and I think that's sort of an interesting thing. I

am kind of interested in the draft from that perspective like the strategy and what types of players get picked more so than the individual players because I don't know that much about the individual players and we don't have to know most of them for three years or so if they even get good then but first six picks in the draft this year were all position players and I think of the 32 players picked in the first round only 10 were pictures and they were mostly concentrated toward the back half of the first round and not sure to what extent that's a lot of the

long-term trend or whether this is just a one year thing and I know that the perception was that this year's draft was kind of weak on pictures but it sort of makes sense that things would be headed that way right do you think it makes sense it could be a small sample blip but like long term trends would suggest that you'd be more likely to spend your topics on position players right for a few reasons yeah you know I was talking to is talking to RJ about something yesterday and some phenomenon some trend that we noticed and I

said you know it makes sense and then we talked about why it made sense and then I said of course if it were the exact opposite that would also make sense and we be able to talk about why that would also make sense whatever teams are doing if they're doing it you can say well that makes sense otherwise they wouldn't be doing it and you can find the reasons why it makes sense and it does make sense I mean it if you sort of think of the Cubs model of building a team which was to invest in a lot of young position players to really build the young position player part of their

farm system in their future and try to get all those guys to be ready in a few years and then when you're ready then you go out and get the pictures this is an accident now of course the braids did the exact opposite but let's focus on the Cubs which has you know I guess it has like two or three benefits one of which is that your if you're good at hitting right now you're much more likely to be good at hitting in three years then a picture who's good at pitching right now is necessarily likely to be good at pitching in three years so if you're

thinking about getting players that are you know three years away then you you focus on the hitters I mean it makes sense that you basically would want to invest more in pictures that you're going to use right away and invest less in pictures that you have to count on keeping healthy yeah so that makes a lot of sense and I guess that's the main reason it makes a lot of sense yeah well I mean on one and it's probably easier to project or at least evaluate in the present pictures then it is hitters because

it's just I mean it's just generally easier I think to scout pictures than scout hitters most scouts would say and in college now you you have data on pictures where you can see exactly what their stuff is and that's kind of all you need to know whereas with hitters you can you know see exit

below and launch angle and all that stuff but mechanics come into play and the quality of the competition comes into play whereas pictures you're just looking at what are they throw and how well do they throw it and in theory that should transfer over so you could argue that you should be more confident in your evaluation of pictures than hitters and so you would be more inclined to spend a topic on a picture your confident in on the other hand you're a lot less confident in the long run just because picture

pictures get hurt and that has always been the case it's maybe even more the case now with pictures throwing as hard as they do so that's one reason why I think it would make sense to concentrate on position players and the other one is just the trends in picture usage and I mean there were what 13 pictures last year who threw 200 innings in the majors I mean that's the best case scenario is that you become a top of the rotation starter and top of the rotation starters don't make as big an impact as they used to because they don't throw 250 or more

innings so I think if you're looking for a franchise cornerstone type player which you are early in the first round then you'd want to go for a position player and the other thing that we talk about in the book and that comes back to the whole data driven player development movement is that I think it's probably a little bit easier to build a picture to make a picture than it is to do that with a position player at this point so if you see a picture who is maybe not polished but he's got some raw stuff that looks promising or

whatever he's got something that you like and you think you can get more out of him maybe he's doing something inefficiently but has an arms speed or something like that and you think well we'll take this guy who needs some molding and development in the second or third round and we can make him into what would be a first round talent so I think all of those reasons suggest to me that this might be a real thing but maybe we can talk about this on the next episode when we know the actual pictures involved.

Yeah I also have something that I've kind of been treating as true I haven't really tested it so I could be wrong about this but if you look through baseball history expansion whenever you expand the number of teams what we find is that it turned out that how do I put this expansion creates more picture scarcity and when there's no expansion the pictures catch up and there is less picture scarcity and it's been a long period of time without expansion and I think that's the most important thing to do is to get a picture that's not going to be a real thing.

I'm not going to be a real thing without expansion and I feel like at this point pictures aren't very scarce there's a lot of pictures out there which is one reason that teams are able to use so many of them in relief and build their pitching staffs around bulk around the concept of having lots of pictures capable of pitching effectively for an inning or two I mean that's partly because relief pitching is is easier but I think it's also partly because every every organization except for one right now has enough pitching you know kind of to get through 50% of the time.

So I think that's about 1500 innings and so if you just feel like you're the draft is an opportunity for you to get something that isn't readily available impact hitters are right now probably scarcer than you know pictures who can dominate for an inning in relief which is how you're probably going to use them.

In February about how the old saying there's no such thing as a pitching prospect is almost looking literally true on public prospect lists for professional players so if you look over time there fewer pitching prospects at the top of public prospect lists in the past few years which I think could be because of all the trends we've been talking about here so it makes sense that if that's the way things are trending in prospect rankings for professional players that might also mirror the way things are looking on lists for amateur players so maybe that's what we're seeing here.

All right well another month has ended and a new month has begun and so you have published another piece on the hall of Famers that might pass last month so who are they Roberto Alamar good one Ernie Banks very good one and Fred Clark.

You know not quite as impressive you know Fred Clark.

Sure Fred Clark was a dead ball era pre turn of the century era outfielder who was all up I probably maybe more famous as a manager I I was aware of him as a manager because I he had he has some he's on some leaderboards for managing he was a player manager from the age of 24 it was a very different era he was a 24 year old manager and player and yeah Fred Clark he's better than Fred Clark everybody.

Yeah so were there any interesting factoids that you turned up in this time well a factoid as you know is a seemingly plausible sounding fact that turns out to not be true what you what you have fun facts.

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