The midnight that I opened you

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Good morning and welcome to episode

1590 of Effectively Wild, the baseball podcast on

Fandcrafts.com brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Sam Miller of ESPN along with Ben Mimberg

of the Ringer Hello Ben

and we have a guest today. I'm very excited to have this guest for this topic. We're talking to Justin Hollander who is the

Vice President and AGM of baseball operations for the Seattle Mariners. Hello Justin. Hey guys. The reason that we have Justin on is

this this show here. We have an affinity for minor league free agents and the minor league free agent pool and minor league free agent process

every year we draft minor league free agents that we think might make an impact in the majors and we do you know fairly poorly and

a year and a half ago

Justin was in charge. I correct me if I'm wrong about that description

but was in charge of the minor league free agent process for the Mariners and had an offseason for the ages

and we're gonna talk to him about what I would consider one of the more impressive

achievements in the sport during my lifetime. So Justin welcome. About seven years ago Carson Sistouli wrote a piece

for Fandcrafts looking at what the expectation is for minor league free agents what like basically what you can expect from minor league

free agents and what he found he looked at 1600 players over a three-year period and found so 1600 players

he found 18 of them in those three years produced 0.5 war or more in the following season. So 0.5 war in the following season would qualify you as a

tremendous success six per year out of a pool of about 600 and only nine of those 18 were over one more and only two were over two war

and nobody was over 2.3 so we're not generally talking about difference makers in your minor league free agent process in

2018 2019 obviously I'm gonna start slow I'm gonna bury the lead here but last year you had Brandon Brennan and Zach Grotz who were both from that pool

...