A REMARKABLE INTERVIEW: THE STORY OF NELSON FIGUEROA: PART II

 Retold by Jeremy Mand

On Thursday, February 28^th, Nelson Figueroa, the former long-time Major League Pitcher and SNY studio analyst, agreed to do what I initially thought would be a brief interview on his career, the game of baseball, and of course the Mets, for the Mack Mets blog.

This week, we will hear Nelson’s thoughts on the current state of baseball, including his thoughts on analytics, the financial aspects of the game, former Mariners’ CEO Kevin Mather’s comments, and the upcoming labor discussions. Please see his thoughts below:

On Kevin Mathers, Mariners President, who was fired this week because of comments about service time manipulation? What are your thoughts on that?

“One of the things as a player that you realize early on is that free agency is such a huge thing. But you don’t have any control over where you play and when, for the first 5, 6 years of your careers. Players like Kris Bryant know their service time is being manipulated – and he challenged that as you know. It’s obvious what the teams are trying to do. Now you see teams taking a different tact, tying up players early. Acuna comes up and the Braves overwhelm him with a $100 million offer. But one thing you forget about that contract is that just a few days earlier, the Braves signed Albies, a great player himself, to a $35 million contract. How do you think Albies feels about that contract when he sees his teammate get paid what he got paid a few days later? So, there is always manipulation. It’s part of the game. It also doesn’t necessarily come from ownership – front office guys have learned to run their budgets as efficiently as possible. These contracts are chess moves, they are a way to keep contracts and contract sizes in check. It also applies to salary minimums as well, which I think is $629,000 in the major leagues, lowest in most of the major professional sports. In a $10 billion industry, it seems that there should be a fairer way to distributing that money than how it’s done currently. But I also understand where the owners are coming from as well. The [owners] are mostly business men, and players are like real estate, in that regardless of what market you’re in, you’re basically square footage that has a certain price per foot, and for players it’s basically WAR; and it’s really impersonal; or another analogy more in relation to free agency is players are like cars, because like cars we depreciate value over time. By the time they reach free agency they only have so many years left, and if you’re not a star or a starter, you’re pushed out of the league for someone younger and cheaper, having had your prime years taken from you.” 

It seems the players have a lot of strong arguments to make as they head into labor negotiations: Service Time Manipulation, Free Agency Age, Minor League Pay; Tanking; What do you think they can achieve? What do you think is most important?

I think free agency should be the biggest priorities for the players. If you’re over 30 or 32, and you’re being compared to guys who are 28, the front office guys are going to go younger. And it’s not that a team wants to keep marginal players around, it’s just we’re paying a rookie a 1/5^th of your salary, and possibly overpaying for a star, so that leaves the middle of the road player out of the game. The other thing to consider with this is depth, and when you’re building your team from the two extremes, you’re missing out on the depth pieces. There is no middle ground for the player. 2 years ago we saw a couple of examples of the type of contracts I think we should see more of; Lance Lynn and Alex Cobb, they are 2,3,4 type of pitchers, not front line starters, and they commanded 4 year deals commensurate with their value. 

Are there aspects of the game that you think should be quantified that isn’t currently?

“Yes. For a pitcher, there is no way to quantify confidence or mound presence as an example. But the most significant aspect of the game that I would want to quantify if I could is FEAR. The body armor that players wear today, it takes away the nerves you might have against an inside fastball”

Do teams over-complicate the game with analytics? How much of what is learned is actually translated to a player’s success? For example, say were to give a single player all the information he has available to him today, during a previous era, how much of a competitive advantage would it give him?

“There is no such thing as too much information. When its game day, it’s invaluable to prepare as much as possible. However, there are variables that occur during the game that do not show up in the data. There is a human element. What if, for example, a pitcher has a really good slider and the numbers support that, but it’s not working that day. You have to adjust, you can’t just blindly follow the data when you’re in the game. So there are definitely real time variables that are not accounted for.” 

Analytics as well as scouting has geared pitchers to learn how to throw harder and harder, the average fastball velocity is the highest its ever been. Will we ever see a pitcher like Greg Maddux again? A premiere control artist?

“Kyle Hendricks is the modern day Maddux. He has terrific mound presence. He challenges people with his change-up. Will we see an adjustment back to pitching? Yes, I think so. Right now everything is peddle to the meddle, but once that becomes the new norm, it doesn’t seem as unusual. So right now we’re seeing players testing the upper limits of velocity, I think some have hit 105 recently, but no one is going to go 110. The other way around is to go slower, to pitch more. There will be a rebirth of the slick.”