Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1438: One and Done

Episode Date: October 4, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller discuss the AL and NL wild card games (touching on Max Scherzer, Stephen Strasburg, Nick Anderson, Oliver Drake, Yandy Díaz, Avisaíl García, Josh Hader, Trent Grisham, and others), bid farewell to the Brewers and A’s, and analyze the Rays’ and Nationals’ division series prospects, then answer listener emails about the […]

Not a worry for what comes around, we'll all be tested just the same. You're on the wild side, and I will always remain. You're on the wild side, it's where you'll always be. You're living proof that there's grace in this world. On the wild side, living free. Hello and welcome to episode 1438 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangrass presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg

of The Ringer, joined by Sam Miller of ESPN. Hello, Sam. Hello, Ben. We've had a couple wildcard games, so we can talk about those. We can do some spinning forward on Division Series, and we can do some emails. Where do you want to start? Oh, I'll let you lead this one. Great. Well, I suppose we should start with wildcard games. We've had two of them. We have two teams eliminated, two teams advancing. One game was probably more exciting than the other game, but there's some things to say about both of them. So should we take them in chronological order and go with the Nationals knocking off the Brewers? Any big thoughts about this one? with the Nationals knocking off the Brewers. Any big thoughts about this one?

Well, I mean, like the big thought, like the sort of obvious big thought is that the Nationals have maybe the best starting pitcher in the world, and he caused them to fall behind. And then the Brewers have maybe the most unhittable relief pitcher in the world, and he caused them to fall behind, which is just the underlying premise of everything we say is like, we know that all of this gets undone in the least predictable ways. All we can say is who we think is good

and then watch them defy all of that. Yeah, and it's really the fact that we try to break down these single games, it's even more ridiculous when you're talking about a single wildcard game, which when do we ever during the regular season, devote the amount of time and attention and analysis to a single game that we do when October rolls around? And yeah, you know, that thing that we sometimes do jokingly, like satirically of of acting like something that happened on opening day is going to be uh that we can somehow project that over the rest of the season and so and so is on pace for you know 9 000 rbis and like the whole

that that's like the joke the joke is ha ha ha and this is the you know analyzing it in in a certain way is exactly the same thing except for like for one of the highest stakes games of the year. Like one of the five or ten highest stakes games of the year. So it feels somewhat more justifiable because the stakes are so high. But underlying it all is the fact that chaos does not settle down for one game, no matter how important it is. And you mentioned Max Scherzer, best pitcher in the world. I agree with that, but he was not dominant in this game. He was not his best self.

He went five innings. He did strike out six guys, but he also walked three, and he gave up a couple dingers. And that was kind of the concern for him coming into this game, because after he had been on the IL, he had come off and pitched not really like his usual self. I think his strikeout rate was still pretty strong during that time, but overall his numbers and his peripherals were not peak Scherzer as they had been before the injury. So I guess that concern kind of lingers now into the division series because he didn't go out there and throw an eight inning shutout or something. So that's somewhat of a concern, I suppose, heading into

the division series. Is Max Scherzer merely good or is he his typical self? Let me ask you something. So one of the nice things about piggybacking Scherzer and Strasburg is that you have Strasburg. Like he can go three or four or five, maybe. Who knows how many innings he could have gone if the Nationals had needed him to. And so that takes a lot of pressure off Scherzer. He does not need to treat this like a normal game. He can treat this like he's an opener in a sense. And if it goes better than that, then that's great.

If he ends up going seven, fantastic. But if he only ends up going two or three, that's also acceptable because they have, you know, co-ace backing him up. And so that frees him up. He does not have to throw the first pitch of the game thinking about the hundredth pitch of the game. He might, he very well might not need to throw a hundred pitches in this game.

And I think that shows up. If you look at his previous postseason outings, his average fastball velocity in each of those was very much in line with his regular season velocity. So like in 2015, his average fastball velocity in the game he started against the Mets was 94. In 2016, his average velocity against the Dodgers when he started was 94.7 and then 95.4 in the second start. In 2017, the start that he made against the Cubs was 94.7. Those are all right in line with his regular season VLOs.

This year, his average fastball velocity was about 95. But this year against the Brewers, it was 97. That was like a real jump. against the Brewers, it was 97. That was like a real jump. And you could, if it were a different pitcher, if it was say Brandon Woodruff, maybe you'd say, ah, it's the adrenaline of the post season. But we have a long history of Max Scherzer pitching in the post season. He has a long history of pitching in the post season. He does not seem to draw from that adrenaline. Typically he pitches it like he normally does, which is phenomenally and like an ace. But this year he came out, he was throwing harder than usual, a lot harder than usual,

which strongly suggests, it doesn't prove, but it strongly suggests that that's the result of him knowing the plan, of him knowing that it was not the bullpen coming in after him, but it was Strasburg and that probably someone told him, hey, you don't need to worry about going deep in this game. This is not that game. You should be just as good as you can possibly be, as amped as you need to be, you know, to get us a few innings toward Strasburg. And I wonder if you think that there's a risk there, that generally speaking,

we think, oh, it's really good that a starter has a shorter, a shorter outing and he can, he can really lay it all out there from the first pitch. But is it risky that you're essentially asking a really good pitcher to behave differently than he's used to in the hundreds of starts that have made him this, this ace that it could be good for him, but there's the possibility that it will actually be bad for him and that pitching in that sort of unfamiliar way might actually cause him to make a couple of extra mistakes or to be a little bit

extra, you know, slightly out of control. Yeah, that might make sense, especially if you're Max Scherzer and you're already the best that a pitcher can possibly be. Any deviation from that? I mean, conceivably, it can make you an even better Max Scherzer, but maybe it and I don't have to worry about like mixing my pitches quite as much. And maybe that comes back to bite you if you become too reliant on a certain pitch because you feel like you don't have to save something, but it actually would benefit you to save something. So I can see it Max Scherzer, but he's going to throw a little bit harder, then I'd say, well, he'll probably be even better. So it comes down to whether there could be other changes there or whether he's throwing so hard that it affects his command or something like that. It's probably pretty unpredictable and would vary by the pitcher. Yeah, it should. It sounds really good. And probably in the aggregate, it seems like it would be a clear advantage for for starters but like a few years ago zach levine looked at how starters all-star starters do when they're pitching in relief and they come out and they're throwing much harder than they normally

do and he found that they don't actually do as well as the relievers in those all-star games even though they are you know much better pitchers than the relievers, like that's why they're ace starters instead of ace relievers. And when they're used in the advantageous way that relievers are, they don't actually get much better. They throw harder, but their performance jump is not that great. And so it may be that is, I mean, this is all circumstantial, but that seems to suggest maybe that there is something about the unfamiliarity of pitching at that velocity level or with that sort of sense of urgency and adrenaline that takes some time maybe to get used to. And this is one of the, I think, one of the conundrums for playoff teams is that you know

in the postseason you're going to be using players differently, particularly pitchers. You know that you're going to have your starters pitching with very different expectations than they do in the regular season. And you know that you're probably going to be asking your relievers to throw longer outings, maybe more frequently, and also with extra urgency. And so you can't obviously have them play that way throughout a long season because they burn out. But it seems like if you could, you would kind of want to sprinkle those sorts of situations into the regular season so that this is not unfamiliar when you get to the postseason. And I think we've seen some teams do that in the past with their bullpens. It's not a closed case that this is why

the teams were doing this, but I think with the Dodgers with Kenley Jansen a couple years ago, for instance, after, I think it was after the 2016 playoffs when they used him very aggressively for multi-inning appearances, and he hadn't really done that all that much in the regular season. The next year, they had him throw a lot of two inning saves or four out plus saves. And it seemed like that was kind of an attempt to prepare him for the postseason. I mean, they weren't using him that way by default, because again, it's hard to get through an entire season. But it seemed like maybe that was intentional that they had an eye on October. And there were a couple of other examples that I have seen or that that came to mind when I was thinking about this, that I can't now pull up off the top of my head, but where it seemed like the team was trying to work their relievers in particular in some postseason type ways, just so that there is some familiarity with it, some practice, I guess, at pitching that way. I should say, by the way, Max Scherzer's stats before and after the injury, the back strain,

he was on the IL twice, once shorter, once longer, but it was the same injury. So I'm going to count that as before and after injury. So before he went on for the first time, 19 starts, he had a 2.3 ERA, including the first start he made off the the il and then he went back on and then came off again 4.81 era in eight starts that makes it sound like oh he was twice as bad as he had been before the injury but of course it's a lot closer when you look at the peripherals his fip still a lot worse after the injury but that is like all home run rate. So it comes back to this discussion we've had in the past about Justin Verlander and Edwin Diaz about are these homers fluky or bad luck or are these pitchers doing something to give up all the

dingers? So before the injury, he had a 0.63 home runs per nine, which is fantastic at any time, especially in the highest home run rate era ever. After his injury, he had a 1.88 home runs per nine, which is not good even now. And that's almost the entirety of the difference. So if you look at XFIP at Fangraphs, which normalizes the home runs per fly ball rate, just essentially assumes that any deviation from the league average rate of home runs on fly balls is pure luck. He went from a 2.83 before the injury to a 3.02 after the injury, which is not a lot different, obviously. So maybe he went a little less deep

into games, I'd have to check, but it's really a difference in home run rate. So whether you think he was getting a little lucky with home runs before the injury or unlucky after the injury, that is the bulk of the difference. He's still very much missing bats and I guess his walk rate went up slightly, but not a whole lot. So that's what it comes down to. Yeah. Although he, his swinging strike rate went from 17% of all pitches before the injury to 14%, which is not an inconsequential difference and does sort of bump him from elite swing and miss pitcher down to good swing and miss pitcher. And as you say, he did have much shorter outings. He had only one outing where he went over six innings, like for instance the month before he went on the il eight seven seven seven eight eight so right those are more difficult innings that he was pitching at

the end of those starts and that would have probably drawn those two x fips a little bit closer yes and they were handling him with care of course during that time but they were also trying to win every game because they really needed to. So if they had felt that he was fully healthy and effective, then they would have had him throw as many innings as he had before the injury. It wasn't like they were just resting him because they didn't need it anymore. Yeah. I think the key thing is that the two starts that really hurt his post-injury numbers were the final two. And in those, you can really see where the home run thing that you're talking about meant everything.

He had 21 strikeouts in 13 innings. He had one walk in those two starts. So 21 strikeouts in one walk, but four home runs. And that's where the ERA jumped by almost a third of a run. And that's where the numbers became a little less gaudy for the season. And that was basically two starts with four home runs and otherwise total dominance. So we talked last time about the Nationals bullpen and it being a big weakness. But of course, in the wildcard game, you can bring out Steven Strasburg for three innings.

It is suddenly not a weakness at all that's not really something you can do with regularity later in the playoffs although I think it's become more common to see that I think teams are using starters more often in relief in the playoffs I'd have to check that you don't have to check it I wrote about this in fact I wrote about this at the end of last offseason with the Red Sox and I I wrote for a preview, a long preview piece on each team's bullpen that will go up really relying on those relievers, they had, you know, pretty much every day they had a starter who was in the bullpen, either because he had already pitched his last game in that series or because he wasn't pitching until much later in the series or just because it was his throw day. And so they used Porcello and Eovaldi and Sale and David Price all out of the bullpen.

And they threw, as I wrote last year, those six pitchers threw a total of 16 innings of relief. They allowed seven hits and one earned run. That one earned run coming at the end of Eovaldi's six inning relief stint in game three. They struck out 16 and walked three. Their combined win probability added, including Eovaldi's loss, which crushed his win probability in that game, was about a half a win, roughly what Josh Hader's was in the postseason. They were collectively the elite closer every team wants in October, cooked up entirely out of

ingredients lying around the pantry. And you're right that they can't go to Strasburg every day, but I think that probably almost every game, if they're really intentional about this, and if their staff is up for it and prepared for it, they probably will be able to have one starter available almost every day. And later in series, they might be able to have two starters available. Yeah, well, that's just a manifestation of the fact that teams seem to be treating October differently. For a while there, it was like the playoffs were basically approached more or less like the regular season, which in retrospect, it'd probably be interesting to look back at like the early years of the wildcard era and how teams ran their pitching staffs during that time. Well, Ben, you did that too.

Let me read another paragraph. You did that too? Let me read another paragraph. We looked back since 1969 when division play, when division play began for pitchers who made at least two starts in a postseason, which was to avoid including pitchers who were primarily relievers, but were pushed into one emergency start. So made at least two starts in a postseason and at least one relief appearance in the same postseason from 1969 through 2016. There were about two per year with only two postseasons in

which there were at least five in a year, but there were seven in 2017 and there were six last year, the most there had ever been in consecutive postseasons. All right. And I'm sure if you did the same thing for like percentage of innings pitched by your top relievers, let's say, you'd see a similar spike. So it's kind of fascinating that it took so long for teams and for managers to adjust. Now, I don't know whether that's partly a reflection of changes in schedule and TV coming to dominate how the games are scheduled and the series are scheduled. Maybe there're more off days than there used to be. I'm not sure. But it is sort of striking, even just in the past few years where the schedule hasn't changed dramatically, that teams have just sort of realized like, oh, yeah, we should not manage the way that we did all season long. I guess it's the default assumption.

If you didn't know anything else, you'd think, well, it's still baseball, so I should baseball the way I baseballed all year. But, of course, it's different conditions and different incentives and circumstances. And so it makes all the sense in the world to do what teams are now doing, which is just kind of treating every pitcher as a guy who gets outs. And you want the better guys who get outs more efficiently to pitch more of your innings, and it doesn't really matter when those innings are. You don't have to save your best reliever for the ninth inning. You don't have to save your starter for a start. You can kind of mix and match and just put in the best guy available at any time within moderation. So that's what we're seeing now, And I think that makes it even more

difficult, as we were saying last time, to try to figure out, okay, how do teams win in the playoffs? What's the secret sauce in the playoffs? Because whatever it was 20 years ago is not what it would be now. And there's just not enough of a sample to say, this is what benefits teams in this era, because I think we're still in the period where it's changing by the year and teams are getting more flexible and more open-minded and less strict about how they use these guys. Yeah, I have an untested hypothesis

that the secret sauce in, the reason that it's so hard to talk about the secret sauce in the post-season is that the secret sauce is mostly effective bullpen work, but that is not the same as saying best bullpen right right because of the nature of relief work knowing even how good a team's bullpen was in the regular season and particularly over the course of a regular season when those people change is not that predictive of who's going to have the best bullpen for the

next three weeks or you know in some cases forpen for the next three weeks or, you know, in some cases for some teams the next one day. And so you might, again, this is untested. Both parts are untested, but I think that it might be that the secret sauce is mostly or that it is largely the ability to get great relief work and that that does you very little good when you're trying to predict who will have the secret sauce it's not like you can say oh well it's speed or it's defense or it's you know three ace pitchers in the top of your rotation or those sorts of things that uh you can draw from the regular season there just isn't much to draw from the regular season that is going to tell you who's

going to blow the lead in the eighth inning right That's a reference to Josh Hader. Yeah. Well, speaking of that, I was just going to switch to the Brewer side of things. So Woodruff was great, and then Hader was the one who gave things up. And of course, there's a focus on Trent Grisham, who made the misplay, although it was a bad hop. And I think replays showed it to be less of a misplay than it looked initially. But of course, that's one of those plays that's going to get remembered, which is sort of a shame because, of course, Grisham bailed the Brewers out by playing as well as he did when Christian Jelic went down. And I guess there's sort of a poetic justice in the guy who plays Jelic's position coming back to bite them in Jelic's absence,

the Brewers finally suffered for Jelic's absence. But again, Grisham was great for them down the stretch. And this play was, I think, more understandable than it seemed at first. I mean, yes, he was probably very focused on the throw and maybe was not devoting as much attention as he should have to keeping the ball in front of him. But that just kind of piles on to the top of the rest of that inning, where you had Taylor with the disputed hit by pitch, and then you had Hader just not looking good, just throwing hard, but not really looking like he had much command or much breaking stuff. And he just sort of put a fastball right over the plate.

And Juan Soto is a really fantastic hitter. And it's cool, I guess, that he was the one to deliver the knockout blow so that he could be in the highlights and he could be in the next MLB We Play Loud montage video celebrating this big hit. You've probably watched that play more closely than I have. And I hadn't thought of it before this particular moment, but did he have a play at home? I think he probably did, but I didn't really concentrate on that aspect of it as much as should he have gotten in front of that ball or how did it elude him? So I don't know, but that allowed all the runs to score. There was no way to come back from that.

That changed the lead. That changed the whole complexion of the game. Obviously, you had that dramatic late inning lead change, which you did not have in the AL wildcard game, but that made things exciting right from the get-go. You had sort of a signature postseason play in the first game of the postseason, so that was kind of like, oh yeah, we're back. This really matters. Every play counts in an incredible amount now. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you feel bad for Trent Grisham just because you would. No matter what the nature of the mistake that a player makes to cost his team a do or die game is you're going to feel bad for him. And the fact that he's I mean, all the

backstory there, all the characteristics of him at this point in his career make it even harder. But it really, I was, I was felt particularly bad because of how much the weight seemed to fall on him afterward when he did not come into this. He did not come into the play until after Josh Hader had already blown. I mean, assuming he wasn't going to throw him out at home, had already blown the lead. had already blown i mean assuming he wasn't going to throw him out at home had already blown the lead and i mean if you're if you're talking about well i mean it's a bummer for for anybody who blows any part of any game but yeah grisham's role came after i think uh we already would have said like that the brewers had blown the lead and had sort of collapsed at the at the last moment so poor poor guy he's gonna he's gonna be remembered probably for having a bigger role in this than he needed to.

Yeah. And for Brewers fans, I'm sure they're just as disappointed as anyone is when their team plays one postseason game and is eliminated. But they, I don't want to say they were lucky to get there, but getting there, let's say, was a triumph for them. It was something unexpected, and they overcame a lot in terms of injuries and the absence of Jelic. So not that that necessarily makes it easy, but maybe that eases the sting a little bit. It's not like this was a super team that dominated all season long, and suddenly they lose one game and they're gone. They kind of snuck in, which was very exciting, but this was the outcome that you would have expected, at least for the first time in a while.

Things actually went as expected with the Brewers. play the Dodgers, and that is kind of a matchup of really great starting rotations and maybe shakier bullpens, although to put those two in the same category, I don't mean to equate them. I mean relative weaknesses perhaps, but for the Nationals, far more. So this will be a fun series. Pretty much all of them will probably be fun series, but the starting rotation matchups in this series will be pretty compelling. They sure will be. I wanted to mention one thing that I noticed in this game that was a small thing, but in the fifth inning when the Nationals were batting in the bottom of the fifth and they had two outs, nobody on. They were trailing three to one. Victor Robles was batting and Max Scherzer was on deck. Okay. And this was when they were getting ready to

remove Max Scherzer from the game and put in Steven Strasburg. So again, two outs, nobody on, pitcher spot on deck. And so they, three things could happen here. I mean, a lot of things could happen, but if Victor Robles had made an out, then that would have been the end of the inning. Nobody would have batted. If he got on, then somebody would bat. And of course, there are different ways of getting on. One thing that he could do would be single. And another thing he could do would be like double or homer.

And so Ryan Zimmerman was on deck as the pinch hitter in that situation. Of course, if there was an out, Zimmerman would not be needed. And Scherzer could have just as easily stood out there if he'd wanted to. Although I don't know why he would want to, knowing he's probably out of the game. Anyway, but when Victor Robles singled, then Zimmerman went back to the dugout and Brian Dozier came up to pinch hit. And so we saw there, Davey Martinez is, we saw, we saw what he was thinking. We, we knew what he was thinking in the previous batter. We did not know when Robles was hitting, but afterward, because of this change, we saw what his brain

was doing, which was saying, if Robles gets on first, I'm going to send up Dozier so that he can maybe hit a dinger. And if Robles doubles, triples, or homers, maybe homers, we don't know homers, doubles or triples, I'm going to send up Ryan Zimmerman to maybe get a single and drive him in. And I just thought that it was interesting that given that that was his decision tree, that that was the fork that he was anticipating, that he chose to put zimmerman in the on-deck circle assuming by sending zimmerman out there assuming the more advantageous event for his team would happen and also the less likely one but the one that would be more

like the better outcome like the double or triple he sent up the pin he sent out the possible pinch hitter for the double or triple instead of the pinch hitter for the much more likely single or walk doesn't doesn't mean anything except for i it feels like he chose optimism in a way in an inconsequential maybe even slightly disadvantageous way because ideally you probably as a hitter you probably do want to be on deck so that you can you know kind of inch around back and get as good a look as possible so maybe it would have been even slightly better to send dozer up there for the more likely situation but he chose to just say nope i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna ask the universe for what i

want by assuming it will happen. And it didn't happen. And then Zimmerman went back to the dugout and Dozier went back out as he was more likely to have done all along. Yeah, it's like The Secret, right? It is like The Secret. Sean Conroy's favorite book. That's exactly right. Just put it out there in the universe. Exactly.

All right, switching to the Ea wildcard game. So less intrigue in this game than in the NL game. No lead changes, no late inning questions about who would win. The Rays took an early lead. They hit a couple dingers. Yandy Diaz hit a couple dingers. Obviously, Al Garcia hit a dinger, and they won 5-1. And the A's threatened a few times, and Charlie Morton kept getting the pitch that he needed, the batted ball that he needed and got out of those jams. And that was that. The A's lose yet again in a playoff game and you kind of feel bad for them, not just because of the history, but also because it seems like they're sort of doomed to this position for a while now. I mean, they're bringing back most of this roster

and important components of the roster they can expect to have for more of next season. So there's a very good chance that they will be back in this exact position next year. And it's just hard to imagine them being bad, but also hard to imagine them being better than the Astros, which means that they may very well be doomed to more wildcard game appearances, which is sort of unfortunate because they had a heck of a season. And coming into this game, you would have said the A's had the advantage in terms of power hitting. That was one big strength that they had that the Rays didn't really seem to have. And then the Rays hit four homers, which of course they did. And Yandy Diaz, who had just returned from the injured list, hit a couple of them. And the Rays sort of showcased how incredible their bullpen is,

which we can talk about that a little bit. But any other thoughts from, again, this single game that we are way overanalyzing? One, not so much about the game, but it's just something that I noticed in the game and I have been wanting to talk about for a couple months. Did you notice the play when the Rays hit into a possible double play and the A's didn't turn it quite in time, Profars bounced the throw, and the runner just barely beat it out. And I think Alex Rodriguez made a comment about how it was a little bit slow on the turn. Did you notice that play? I don't recall. Well, I was watching the other broadcast, but. All right. So there's some backstory. I think there's some backstory to that play that's relevant and A's fans will know this backstory. I don't know

if it got that much attention throughout baseball this year, but I've been watching it as a kind of a miracle, like almost a John Lester-ish type miracle throughout the year because Jerickson Profar in April had what seemed to be a pretty severe case of the yips. Like he was throwing, like he would just spike every throw and it looked really awkward and it did not seem like he could play second base at all. And I, in fact, I think, if I'm not mistaken, I think that he had briefly gone through a period the previous year when, yeah, Levi Weaver wrote in The Athletic that he was worried that Profar had the yips that year too. So Profar, he fixed this kind of, but as I watched him throughout the year, it never looked like he fixed it. He never got over it.

He just kind of figured a workaround, which is that he would really focus on his target, take his time. He would take a little, just a tiny micro beat to look directly at his target, and then he would throw. And now, I didn't watch enough A's games that I can speak from a position of real authority here. I might be misreading this from very limited exposure, but throughout the year, it still seemed to me that he was not throwing very accurately and that he was very slow to throw. And so in that double play, to my eye, it looked like, yes, he took a little bit of a pause, as was familiar to me from watching Profar throughout the year. He took a little bit of

a pause to focus on his target. And then he threw and he threw it 10 feet short of first base. And that cost him the double play. But the miracle is that Profar had this seemingly debilitating obstacle in his baseball career in April. He wasn't able to get past it entirely, but he did figure out a way to get kind of around it. He had seven errors in April. He only had six errors for the rest of the season. And I am just impressed that this real weakness, this real vulnerability that came up in his

season and in the A's season ended up being something that they could kind of like make work that he did not have a lot of throwing errors that he seemed to be a fine defender after that. And it's kind of a, you know, there's just little tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny way that it still affected him on maybe on the very closest plays. And it came up in that situation. But but by and large, Jerickson Profar, like he he did it. He he he got through it. I'm a theme of us talking about ballplayers.

I think sometimes seems to be that we're in awe that they don't just like mentally break down when things get difficult or scary. And I am just saying right here that I am impressed. Yeah, that's admirable. All right. So I guess on the A's side, part of the plan went as expected or foreseen. Like, Lizardo was great for three innings, and Hendricks was good for another inning. And so they held the race scoreless after the initial scoring. But Sean Minaya had his worst start after coming off the IL.

He still struck out. Five guys didn't lock anyone. But he gave up the homers. He gave up four runs. And that was that. And I saw some second-guessing about the decision to start Minaya over Fires, which I certainly can't second-guess because I thought that made sense. And also, unless you think Fires was going to throw a shutout, I mean, they were not going to win this game without scoring off of the Rays. And that's the thing, it just looks really difficult to score of the Rays. And that's the thing. It just looks really difficult to score off the Rays. And you can read too much into a single game, obviously, especially when

it's a wildcard game and it's all hands on deck, et cetera. But that kind of is what the Rays did all season. I mean, they didn't hold teams to one run every game, but they were really, really great at run prevention. We talked about this before and they looked the part in this game. Morton went five and then they run out this parade of relievers who most people probably have not heard of. And even I like, can't say I spent a whole lot of time focusing on Diego Castillo this year or Emilio Pagan. You know, I was more aware of Nick Anderson who got four outs in this game all on strikeouts because that's kind of what he did all year, especially after he went to the Rays and he was just totally, totally dominant with them. He struck out 17 per nine after the mid-season trade to the Rays. That's almost 53% of the batters he faced

while walking 2.6%. So his strikeout rate minus walk rate with the Rays was actually 50%, which is just really extraordinary. And they gave up some good prospects to get him, but he is just one of those unhittable relievers who, if Jeff were not working for the race, he would probably be blogging about. So that showed up there. And then it just goes so deep with them. And some of these not well-known relievers are just so effective that it kind of feels like they can throw someone at you who has like a 35% strikeout rate in just about every inning. It's really kind of intimidating to face them in a short series as the Astros will now have to do. And Anderson too, for what it's worth. I mean, Anderson was doing this in April with the Marlins too. He struck out, I think he struck out, I'll just get the exact number.

He had 13 innings. He struck out 27 in those 13 innings, and he didn't unintentionally walk anybody. So his strikeout minus unintentional walk rate in April was 100%, or what is it? No, I guess it's actually very similar because it would be 50. He had like a 53% strikeout rate anyway in April, and then he had a very bad May.

And then he was quite good with the Marlins after that too. So from June 1st until he got traded, he struck out 29 batters in 21 innings. And he walked for not quite the same level of dominance. But I mean, this is a pitcher who in, I would say in three months of the season, was arguably the best pitcher in baseball, best reliever in baseball during those months, and had two good months on top of that, and then had the one bad one. I mean, he's something. What did you make of them warming him up so much?

I read that as he's the poochie, And that that is a sign of that he is the guy that they're going to be constantly looking to get into the biggest moment. And they just kept feeling like that biggest moment was getting postponed. And so they didn't go to him rather than thinking that it was like maybe I guess you could say that that he was not. You could take from that that he was not a priority to get in but I read that as he was the priority to get in is that how you read it yeah and there's no reason why he shouldn't be a priority to get him as he showed once he was in and that does underscore the fact that we're talking about how the postseason is different for players and could it affect someone like Max Scherzer to have different guidelines as he goes into a game?

Same is true for managers, obviously, where maybe this is less true for the Rays and Kevin Cash, just because they kind of play a more postseason-ish brand of baseball all season long. But with your typical manager, who's usually not going to consider bringing in his elite reliever in the sixth inning or something in the regular season, that is an adjustment. And even if you are mentally, psychologically on board with that idea, I think it can be difficult to fully embrace it and flip that switch. And you have to be careful about it because you don't want the guy to be up and down three times and getting warm and cooling down and warming up again, especially if you're going to make a long postseason run and it's at the end of a long season. Maybe that takes a toll where you get to game seven of the World Series and that comes back

to cost this guy something. So it's an adjustment for managers too. And you could say that managers matter more in the postseason than in the regular season, much like the pitchers, they have to deploy optimally. It stands to reason everything matters more in the playoffs. But I'm saying that the, I guess, the importance of the decisions that they have to make and the number of decisions that they have to make increases along with, say, the percentage of innings that they're using their best pitchers for. percentage of innings that they're using their best pitchers for. So it can really cost you because if you assemble this shutdown October bullpen and then your manager manages as if it's July or just doesn't go all the way, then you end up with a Nick Anderson not pitching in an

important moment and maybe you lose. Again, all these decisions come down to percentage points, especially if you're talking about the Rays and their pitching staff, where just about everyone is really good. But yeah, you're going to see Nick Anderson in more important spots in the next week or so. So Oliver Drake, I don't know if you knew exactly how impressive he's been against lefties this year, but Oliver Drake against lefties was the hardest pitcher in baseball to hit. He is right-handed, but lefties hit 147, 163, 196 against him. He struck out 33 and walked two. His stats against righties are, well, I mean, he looks like a lefty specialist.

He has the splits of a lefty specialist. His stats against righties aren't great at all. He had an 865 OPS allowed. He struck out 37 and walked 17. If he were lefty, we would be talking about him as the most specializing lefty specialist in the game. And his best pitch is a splitter, which is one of those pitches that sometimes has a reverse platoon split. And he throws it. I did not know this, but apparently I heard this on the broadcast last night. He throws it 80% of the time to lefties. And so I have always in my life been fairly skeptical of these reverse split relievers. I generally think that even if they have a split,

even if that split is somewhat persistent, I'm still a little, I would be hesitant to actually use them in a way that, uh, that counts on that. I feel like it's, it's always probably due for regression, no matter what their repertoire is. And, and I could be missing opportunities to have reverse split specialists in my life, but I've just always been like it. I'm never really convinced. Are you convinced by Oliver Drake if they use him just as the Dodgers plan to use Adam Kolarik as like a one inning guy or one batter guy? Would you think, would you have faith in that? Or are you expecting this to be somewhat illusory by the end of it? I think I'd have some faith. He looks capable of that to me. I mean, if you were doing it

statistically, you'd want to regress and hedge and it would be less of a pronounced split. So that's probably what I would expect, but I would trust him in a spot like that. Yeah. Okay. I'm looking forward to seeing it. Like I said, I'm usually suspicious of it, but now that I'm not suspicious of Drake for the most part, I'm eager to see it. I'm now now that I'm Not suspicious of Drake for the most Part I'm eager to see it I'm eager to see Them bring in the righty to get the lefty every Time and you know The Rays are getting a lot of credit I think For the guys who hit the

Homers in this game because the big Difference makers offensively were Garcia And Diaz and those are Two guys that the Rays acquired Coming off unremarkable Or perhaps disappointing seasons. And as everyone wrote at the time, they were sort of exit velocity plays in that they had both hit the ball hard, but the results weren't really there.

Maybe Garcia had gotten a little unlucky. Maybe Diaz just kept pounding the ball into the ground. So even though he hit the ball hard, he didn't make a big difference on offense. And so the idea was that the Rays are buying low on these guys, and maybe they'll get the Garcia bounce back, and they'll get Diaz to hit the ball up more, and he'll tap into his very obvious power, and then he'll be great. And I don't know that that happened to a great extent. Obviously, in this this game those signings paid off and those guys were fine when they played for the race this season but they weren't dramatically

better than they had been before like garcia had a better season than he had had in 2018 but a worse season than he had had in 2017 he was fine like his babbit bounced back and i'm sure his wobo was more in line with his ex-woba and he was fine he was like average-ish as a player maybe a bit below average i guess average if you prorate his playing time so it was fine but it wasn't like oh my gosh brilliant move by the rays really and then yandi diaz offense, just on a per plate appearance basis, if you look at WRC Plus, was almost identical to what it had been in Cleveland. Even if you look at the expected weighted on base average, almost identical, one point away from what it had been in Cleveland. And his isolated power nearly doubled. So that looks like a case of this paying off. And he went from one homer to 14 homers in about twice was way down. So maybe this was more of a sustainable

thing, but his launch angle was only up on average, like a little over a degree. I don't know about the percentage of time he was getting it in the launch angle sweet spot or something like that. But in terms of the quality of his contact, it was more or less the same as it had been in Cleveland. So I don't know. Paid off in this game. Paid off to some extent over the course of a season, but wasn't like you would add these guys to the annals of brilliant player development moves or amazing under-the-radar transactions. So I don't know.

They were fine, but a little bit of the razor brilliant and they got these guys and no one else saw it seems a bit overblown to me yeah i like yandi diaz and he terrifies me but that was definitely an april a big april story that flopped right yes i think so but it's also a big october story now that succeeded so by the way oliver drake against lefties it for the season he threw 78 splits which is a lot but since since july 1st he's thrown 82 percent since uh august 1st he's thrown 84 percent and in september he threw 86 percent splits to lefties wow 86 he's basically a one pitch like if that was a fastball we would he would be sean doolittle like that is as extreme of a one pitch pitcher as you basically get like that's

more or less mariano rivera and the cutter right yeah or kenley jansen in the cutter and he's doing that with a splitter yeah that's weird so the matchups for the ALDS between the Rays and the Astros are just, I can't imagine matchups getting much better than this. You've got Verlander versus Glasnow in game one, Cole versus Snell in game two, and Granke versus Morton in game three. I mean, that is a marquee matchup in every game. Estimate how many innings each, no, no no estimate how many innings you think each team's top three will go well i'd say probably the astros top three goes like twice as many innings so like top three like 20 and 10 yeah that sounds about right like 7 7 6 and 4 3 3 right yeah so on the race side of these matchups it's glasnow and snell, but it won't be Glasnow and Snell for most of those games in all probability. But still, big names and you'd have to be sort of scared. Like if you're the Astros, I mean, the Astros are the best team in baseball. They're better than this Rays pitching staff. Obviously, the Astros offense is significantly better than the A's offense that the Rays shut down in this game. But you look at Glasnow and Snell and Morton, and then this parade of really great relievers coming in after them, that is

sort of scary. Like, it wouldn't surprise me at all if the Rays upset the Astros in this series. It's not the expected outcome. It's not the more likely outcome, but it would hardly surprise me if that happened. No, the difference is going to be the offense where one team has a much better offense than the other one because these are the two best pitching staffs in the American League. And I rate the Astros the second best bullpen in this postseason. So there's not even like the, again, the same, same thing with the Dodgers where you kind

of, you're forced to say the strengths and weaknesses of each team and the Astros, uh, bullpen is sometimes held up as like, not quite as incredible as everything else, but that is a really, really, really good bullpen too. It's just that the depth of the lineup is very different. Yes, for those two teams. So I've got a few playoff related emails we can answer here in the time we have left. Did you do a stat blaster? Yeah, I get well, no, I didn't. But I have a fun fact that came from blasting stats. I don't even know if it's fun. But I looked since 1988 to see which teams had the biggest. The highest TOPS plus for a bullpen since 1988 is not the Nationals.

They're third all time in that time behind surprising. No, I don't know. Maybe not surprising, but behind the 94 and 95 braves and so it's a little bit that's misleading though because a t ops plus does not compare your performance in a split to your performance in not that split but rather to your to your opi to your performance overall and since bullpens take a greater share of innings now than they used to. The Nationals bullpen OPS allowed is pulling up their staff OPS allowed more than it would have in 1994 when they would have thrown a smaller percentage of innings. And so they're just behind those Braves of the Maddox, Glavin,

Smoltz years. But I think if you actually were to do a ratio of bullpen performance to staff performance it would be higher so uh probably this is a historic historically large gap between a team's bullpen and their rotation which is not really that revelatory i'm sure if i'd asked you to guess at the beginning of this segment you would have actually guessed the nationals particularly given that we're talking about the Nationals. Yes, right. To tip off. So yeah, not really a stat blast.

Well, I sort of have one, or close enough that we can play the song. They'll take a data set sorted by something like ERAus or O-B-S-plus And then they'll tease out some interesting tidbit Discuss it at length and analyze it for us In amazing ways Here's to day-stab-lust So this will be quick, I think, but this is a listener email from Ed who says, By my count, the Twins this year have almost twice as much baseball reference war contributed by foreign-born players, 29.3 war, as by American-born players, 19.4 war. Is this a record or anything close?

And I asked Dan Hirsch at Baseball Reference for some help with this one. He sent me a list of all the teams. And I should say that Ed, in his breakdown here, is counting Puerto Rico-born players as foreign-born. So Hirsch went with Ed's distinction there. So this is really domestic United States, technically actual literal states versus non. So that's the breakdown that we're doing here. And by that definition, yes, the 2019 Twins have the most war from foreign-born

players ever. That tops the 2004 Dodgers, who were at 28.6, and the 2003 White Sox and the 2017 and 2018 Cleveland was right behind them so obviously as you would expect all of the top teams are from recent years how recent how recent like what is the what is the the curve look like well let's see the top, I guess if you go, you have to go down to the bottom of the top 20 to get to even teams in the early and the 91 Rangers. But really, like there are no great outliers here where you're seeing like a team from the 70s sneak in or something. I'm scrolling, I'm scrolling, I'm scrolling. I guess, let's see, 1969, Minnesota. That's the only team in the top 50, and it is literally number 50 that is actually from before the 90s. So yeah, obviously the game is getting more international, and this list reflects that. Now, Ed also asked about the ratio, that. Now, Ed also asked about the ratio, and the Twins' ratio is not extraordinary. They have 59% of their war from foreign players by this definition, because even though they have the most foreign-born war, they have a lot of war overall. They're a very good team. So if you wanted to know the ratio, it's sort of screwy because there are negative wars involved here. But one

standout that Dan pointed out to me, the 2001 Expos had 20.9 war from foreign-born players and negative nine war from U.S.-born players. So the U.S.-born players on that team were just totally dragging it down. which year's expos 2001 expos i did not look to see who was that bad it's it's hard to have like negative nine war period on your team right i mean that's that's a lot of negative war on a team so peter bergeron was negative 1.9 ryan minor was negative 1.4 michael barer was negative 1.4. Michael Barrett was negative 1.2. And Jeff Blum was negative 1.1. That's four negative ones in there.

That is a lot. Yeah. Actually, if I just sort this list by negative war, it looks like that is the most any team has had since 1915. So that's really the story here. has had since 1915. So that's really the story here. It's not that their American-born players were so bad, but just that they gave so much playing time to bad players. Yeah, Andy Tracy, negative 0.8.

Randy Knorr, negative 0.7. Brad Wilkerson, negative 0.7. Milton Bradley, negative 0.6. Lee Stevens, negative 0.6. Mike Mordecai, negative 0.6. Mike Thurman, negative 0.5. They also had Fernando Tatis, who is from the Dominican Republic, and he was also negative 0.6 Mike Thurman negative 0.5 they also had Fernando Tatis who was uh who you know is from Dominican Republic and he was also negative 0.8 and then they have a first baseman from Panama

Fernando Seguinal who was a negative 0.8 as well that's a yeah that is a lot of negative wars yeah and also worth mentioning a couple of other recent teams here that show up high on the ratio rankings. So the 2014 Rangers, which was the team that had a ton of injuries or what we thought was a ton of injuries until this year's Yankees, they had 20.5 war from foreign born players and 0.3 war from U.S. born players. And the 2015 and 2016 Phillies were very similar to that as well so not extraordinary this year's twins in terms of ratio they're just really good they have a lot of good players from everywhere but they do have the most foreign born war ever so that's pretty cool the 2001 Expos leading war from an American born player player was 41-year-old Tim Raines at 0.5, and he was... Yeah, that's the end of that story.

Okay. All right. So since we were just talking about the Rays, let's answer this one from Anthony, Patreon supporter Anthony. For the sake of this question, let's assume that it's Thursday morning and the Rays have advanced to the ALDS And we no longer have to assume that is the case Including current roster, farm system, and built-in financial advantages Which team do you think has a higher expected number of World Series wins in the next five years? The Yankees or the Rays? The Yankees obviously have way more money, have seemed like the next big thing for two years now, and won more games this year. But the Rays have the best farm system and might actually have played better than the Yankees this year, at least according to base runs.

The Rays also get to play the Astros in a five-game series this year, which I think is a slight advantage to their 2019 odds, meaning that if the Yankees and Astros advance, they would have to play the Astros in a seven game series yeah although if the Rays beat the Astros then the Yankees won't have to face the Astros at all yes that is true too so yeah according to the Fangraphs farm system rankings right now the board the Rays do have the most valuable farm system in baseball, according to expected value. And the Yankees are down at scrolling, scrolling 21st. So there's a big difference in farm system value there. But of course, the Yankees have a lot of good young players on the roster. They're a good team.

They have a whole lot more financial abilities and flexibilities so would you say that one has i mean if you're talking about a five-year timeline i guess probably the most likely outcome for either team is zero world series probably but does one have an advantage over the other oh you know the rays the Rays have done some things. They've really accomplished a lot given the revenue they get compared to the rest of the league and the limits that they put on their spending compared to the rest of the league.

It's really something, right? They've already accomplished a lot more than you would think on paper given where they start. They have also never won more than 97 games in a season as a franchise. And you have to wonder whether there is something like a ceiling on what a team with a $50 or $60 million payroll can do.

I mean, obviously, there's no ceiling. Things could all break right. It could all line up just perfectly. But it might just be that it's not really realistic to win 100 games with that kind of payroll no matter how smart you are except in extraordinarily anomalous seasons whereas the Yankees frequently win 100 games and so I would make a big difference because obviously that can be the difference between a wild card game and a division title as it was

this year yeah and also because it could be the difference between being better than all the other teams and being only as good as all the other teams although in this case as anthony said i don't as anthony said that's true actually better than the race yeah but i would i would say that this email was more persuasive than me than i expected from the first two sentences and And that given a couple of hours with it, I might surprise myself with what I could persuade myself into thinking. But in two minutes, I'm not swayed. I'm only surprised and impressed with the argument. Yes, I agree. I would still default to the Yankees. So this one comes from Andy,

Patreon supporter Andy. How do you think it would change the general culture of team building if there were no playoffs or championship to aspire to? Let's say the regular season was all there is and the goal was just to be as entertaining as possible. Would front offices still undergo massive rebuilds in the hopes of sustaining a winning record or would they just sign some good players and hope for the best because there's no specific goal in mind other than having fun playing baseball and putting on a show for the fans? Would you see teams invest primarily in skill sets which are more exciting, even if they don't necessarily contribute to winning,

like stolen bases, contact hitters, defensive athleticism, etc.? There could still be personal awards like MVPs, Cy Youngs, and batting titles to keep players trying hard, but fewer reasons for teams to stress and fear seasonal failure. Could fans stay invested in a product like this over a full season? You know what's interesting is that we don't play the bottom of the ninth if the game has been clinched, and yet we do play all the games after seasons have been clinched. I mean, there's obvious reasons for that.

You still sell tickets and make money, and it would be a real planning and scheduling burden to not know whether games are going to be played en masse and all that. But just philosophically, nobody thinks we should play the bottom of the ninth even when the home team is winning. That would seem somewhat ridiculous, like an unnecessary use of our time and resources. Whereas we do think that it's perfectly natural.

And in fact, it would be extremely controversial to argue otherwise, to play those games that don't technically mean anything. So there is already, I mean, I would say the answer to this question, which is more complicated than I'll probably be able to answer right now, but the answer to this question is already out there. We already see how teams play when they're not in any sort of race and how teams kind of continue to go about their business. And there's not, there is neither a kind of a collective rolling over. You don't quit. You don't, I mean, you, you play the games, you don't quit trying. You don't quit. You don't, I mean, you play the games.

You don't quit trying. You don't quit really doing much of anything except for maybe on the periphery where you might play some more young guys and start setting yourself up for next season. And you also don't see a lot of effort to make the game more entertaining in other ways. You don't see teams in September really dramatically trying to reposition what they are doing now. Like to try to sell their product to the fans is a different thing now. Like you don't see a huge push to say, all right, well now we're going to be the weird team or now we're even going to be the, like you don't see them pulling up their

exciting high A prospects to entertain the fans it's it that's not part of the the decision making they just sort of do regular baseball so is the answer that it would look pretty much the same do you think probably i think a there would still be stakes because the stakes would just be being the best team right you'd the championship i mean it's called best team, right? The championship, I mean, it's called the championship season, right? The regular season. That's the technical term in the MLB rules. So that's what it would be. Finishing first, winning the division, having the best record in the league, whatever, like that would become the new playoffs. Now,

I don't think that's quite as exciting which is why we evolved the playoffs I think there was a sense that hey it'd be fun to have the best teams play each other at the end of the year and then decide a champion based on that so that's how we got the playoffs so I think this would not be quite as exciting as what we have now but there'd still be something at stake and I don't think I mean do teams do rebuilds and everything right now with the World Series in mind? They do, of course, but they're doing it so that they can be the best regular season teams possible, which has the byproduct of getting you into the playoffs and giving you a chance to win the World Series. But you're aiming to make your team the best in the regular season.

So I think the most entertaining team is still typically the best team, the team that wins the most. So I don't know that you would see a whole lot of teams saying, winning doesn't matter. Let's just get a bunch of wacky guys who do strange stuff and we'll have the weird roster and everyone will come see this like we're some sort of circus act or something. I think probably you'd still draw better if you were a good team.

And so I don't know that it would dramatically change anything except for maybe making the end of the season feel like a letdown a lot of the time. Yeah, I thought it was just a great final day development that Stevie Wilkerson made that catch for the Orioles. That this season that was so pointlessly uncompetitive and basically a punch line the whole way through and could only at its best sprinkle in little moments of of individual performances or surprises or you know maybe a comeback in a game or something like that uh that it ended with the play of the year, like the

probably most highlightable defensive play of the year in game 162 between two teams that don't matter. I thought that was just a little bit of an act of mercy by the baseball gods to Baltimore fans and to baseball fans that had to put up with the Orioles all year long. And because of that play, I also noticed in the roundabout way that baseball research happens that Stevie Wilkerson this year had the highest strike percentage of any pitcher in baseball. Stevie Wilkerson pitched four times. He faced 22 batters and he threw 76% strikes, which is the highest of any pitcher in baseball.

He did not walk any of those batters, which is also a little bit of an act of mercy. Because if you're going to see Stevie Wilkerson pitch four times, the only way that that experience can get really worse is if he's walking the park. So good for Stevie Wilkerson in a way that was highlighted and shared and gift and also in a way that was not noticed except just now made the Orioles experience slightly better this year. Okay. While we were talking, the Mets fired Mickey Calloway, by the way. Okay. So that's what, seven now? Seven managerial changes, I think, so far, which is kind of a lot. I saw a note from Mike McCurry of MLB Network Research.

He said there have been only three off-seasons since 2000 in which at least seven clubs made a managerial change, 10 teams after the 2002 season, eight teams after 2006, and seven teams after 2010. eight teams after 2006, and seven teams after 2010. So this is not unprecedented, but it's been a while since we saw this sort of turnover. And in Callaway's case, you could say that the Mets, if anything, exceeded expectations based on their preseason forecast this year. But I would not argue too hard in favor of Callaway keeping his job, given all the public discord that beset that team and some of the comments he made and some of the tactical moves he made although it's kind of hard to assign responsibility if people were dictating those moves to him it's it's the Mets so you can't

really say it's the manager's fault when who knows what the GM and the owner are telling him to do all right that will do it for today. Thanks to everyone for listening. We'll get into the Division series on the next episode, of course. Don't want to give a short shrift to the Braves and Cardinals. I did write about the Braves and about how their rebuild went partly as planned and partly not as planned. So you can check that out at The Ringer right now. You can also support this podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going

while getting themselves access to some perks, including a couple of upcoming playoff livestreams. Matthew Berger, Matthew Rose, Melissa Danielson, John Fleming, and Will Gentry. Thanks to all of you. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Please keep your questions and comments for me and Sam coming via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are already a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. You can buy my book, The MVP Machine, How Baseball's New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players.

Your ratings and reviews for the book are appreciated as well. We'll be back with another episode later this week. It may get pushed into Saturday, depending on our playoff and writing schedules, but Meg and I will talk to you soon. Now, after you hear the outro song here, if you want to stick around, I'm attaching a bit of bonus audio that was sent to us by Julie Parker,

who covers the Giants for SF Bay, and she was our Giants season preview podcast guest this year. Megan, Sam, and I, of course, have been talking about promising homers, guaranteeing homers, people requesting home runs from players, and Julie sent me this snippet of audio, which comes from an interview with Scooter Jeanette on August 5th before his first home game after the Giants acquired him, and someone asks him for his favorite memory of playing in Oracle Park, and he launches into the story about a homeless man. He doesn't make clear in this story that the man is homeless, but he clarified that to Julie after the interview, who asked him to hit a homer,

and well, I'll let Scooter tell the rest of it. I'm also going to leave in his next answer from that interview where he explains the origins of his nickname scooter because i didn't know the story and it's a good one so stick around for some scooter content thanks to julie for that and we will talk to you a little later this week I'm having such confidence, oh, playing on your television. They're rolling out eternity with those numbers that they throw at me, oh. That's a long division. I did my first homework here last year. I did my first homework here last year. And what's crazy is there's a gentleman that I met a few days before I was going to the gas station to get some Gatorade and stuff. And he, you know, trench coat, you know, on the street.

And he came up to me and goes, you're Scooter Jeanette. And I'm like, wow, how do you, like it was kind of surprising that he knew me. And he's like, oh, I watch every game. I've been to, you know, every game since, you know, the park opened. He stands and looks through the chain link fence out there and right, and his objective is to get home run balls. So like a dive in the water, he'll do the whole thing. And I told him, like, I'll hit you on it. I kind of forgot about it last day. It was a getaway day, a day game, and I hit one. And after the game, I'm walking to the bus, and there's a guy in a trench coat with a ball.

I'm like, I get on the bus, and I start thinking about it. I look on the app, and I see the highlight, and I see this guy run and get the ball. And so I get off the bus, and he's like, I got your ball. You actually hit me a home run ball. So that was a special thing. What are the chances of that? It's pretty amazing.

A lot of pressure on you from now on. Yeah, right. He told me to sign it. I'm like, do you want me to put the number of home runs of the date? He's like, no, I just have all the guys sign them. I'm like, where's this guy keeping all these balls? It was very, very special. Did you all come by Scooter from your young childhood?

I gave myself that name. You did? Yeah, when I was four or five years old. I was a big fan of the Muppet Babies. It was kind of a spin-off from the Muppets. Scooter was my favorite character. He was a crazy one and kind of ornery. I found a lot of similarities between me and him.

I was in the car one day with my mom, graduated from a car seat, so I'm just in the back, but obviously seatbelt. She put it on, and I got in this habit of waiting until she started driving and then say, hey, mom, look, and I would unclick it. And I did that like three or four times. She would have to stop, get out of the car, put it back on, and I would unclick it. And I did that like three or four times. She would have to stop, get out of the car, put it back on, tell me not to do it.

And she got fed up and went to the police station. And I just remember a police officer, a big, tall police officer with a badge, and I remember being scared. And he asked me what my name was, and I made up Scooter. And my mom never heard it before. And he was like, what's your real name? And I'm like, Scooter Jeanette. And I didn't answer, I guess, for a year to get a name.

Ryan's my real name. And so they had to call me Scooter, and that's how I got my name. It's okay to say that publicly. Is there a statute of limitations that's expired? I think it's been enough time. But now I definitely, all my checks are Ryan, all my insurance card, license. Do you think you were how old when this exchange happened with the law?

Four or five. Basically, the only thing that makes sense is I thought that I was going to get arrested or get in trouble if I answered my real name. Have you researched your marketing opportunity here with all the scooters? Oh, geez. Scooters have been a big issue here. Yeah. What's crazy is that they don't have to go through a lesson or a course.

Or a helmet. Or, in some cases, a breathalyzer would be nice. Be careful walking around out there. Yeah, I don't know if I want to get into, you know, that game. You know, things come and go, and, you know, let's hope that nothing crazy happens.