Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1442: The Generous Tipper

Episode Date: October 11, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about Sam’s thoughts on Clayton Kershaw, Joe Kelly, and Dave Roberts, Tyler Glasnow’s pitch-tipping, Gerrit Cole’s strikeout streak, and the future of the Rays, the Astros-Yankees and Nationals-Cardinals championship series matchups, and whether it ever makes sense to predict a postseason sweep or a series lasting the maximum number […]

Hello and it hand it in my pockets and chip in hello and welcome to episode 1442 of effectively wild a baseball podcast from fangraphs presented by our patreon supporters i am ben lundberg of the ringer joined by sam miller of espn hello sam ben i just listened to you and meg talking about the final game of the Dodgers Nationals. Yeah. And I have some thoughts. Okay. I really appreciated your conversation.

It took me on some swings and helped me formulate some thoughts and clarify some thoughts. And so one of the thoughts that I had been thinking about a lot since the frequent shots of Clayton Kershaw in the dugout after he allowed those two home runs and then the outpouring of articles and tweets and so forth talking about how bad everybody felt for Kershaw was comparing that to the experience of being Joe Kelly, which is kind of very different than Kershaw. Kershaw, of course, is so good at baseball and has so many supporters. And when he fails and feels extremely sad, feels heartbroken, he gets this tremendous outpouring of support from people who see in him a kind of an experience they relate to. And they think it's not fair. He's so good. He doesn't deserve to be defined by this. And his teammates support him and his coaches, there were articles about his coaches coming over to support him. And of course, you know, you and Meg and everybody else supports him. And for Joe Kelly, Joe Kelly's experience is much more common for baseball players, which is that when he fails, he doesn't have millions of people who already know and love

him and are maybe tend to forgiveness in his regard he just has to wear this this this will define him in a way that's much stronger than Kershaw's blip of failure in the postseason will define him it's not his his failure in that game is not defined against the larger body of success it is not seen as anomalous or anything like that. And so I don't, I assume that Joe Kelly also has a lot of support in the clubhouse and from his coaches, but not from the larger, larger body of baseball fans. He will just simply be seen as a goat, probably unwelcome in Los Angeles going forward. And that seems really, really very hard, very challenging. And, you know, we don't, you know, he's not on camera

for the rest of the game as this sort of sad thing that we feel for. He just has to be alone in a way. And so then I thought, what is it about Kershaw, though, that draws such empathy from us or such relatability? Because I can actually personally relate to Joe Kelly a lot. With Kershaw, it seems on the surface that I can't really relate to him because his failure in this game comes... The reason that it's so striking is that because he is so good, we presume that he must have so much self-confidence, such a base, such an expectation that he will thrive and succeed. And so it must be just such a jarring jolt to his sense of self

identity to suddenly be in the position of failure. I think that's why it seems so powerful on screen. And I cannot relate to that. When I have had failures in my life, it has not been, wow, this really conflicts with my sense of self-confidence. It has been much more the, wow, this really confirms my self-doubt. And so that's why it sort of feels on the surface like I should relate more to Kelly than Kershaw. But I think that what makes Kershaw's sadness relatable in that moment is that we all every day have anxiety and worry and stress and self-doubt. And we all, I think, have something that we sort of fetishize as the thing that we, if we just do this, then things will be better. For me, it's time. For

instance, I feel a great deal of stress about wasted time and the feeling that time is passing and that I'm not using it right. So whenever I start, like I have a Sunday and I'm stressed about work and I think, oh, I'm a loser. I'm going to have another bad week. Things aren't going well. I put way too much faith in this idea that, oh, well, if I just get control of my time, if I quit wasting time on, you know, some distraction, if I really organize my life and get all this stuff in the kitchen clean and organized and get all my notes ready and plan my day down to the minute, now I will finally have success. But everybody has, I think, the thing that they think if they just get this in order, then everything will be good and they'll feel confident again. And Kershaw, a lot of people, I mean, obviously for a lot of

people who have financial insecurity or who don't have financial insecurity, the idea is that if they just get more money, then they will quit worrying about things. Or if they just get, you know, some relationship in their life resolved and whatever. But Kershaw is kind of this evidence that you can actually never be secure, that it does not matter how many good games you pitch or how good you get at baseball. It doesn't even matter if you become the best player in the world of your generation. You are never safe from the failure, from the thing that you are fearing. And it puts into perspective the fragility of our own plans, our own sort of attempts to bolster our self-identity.

It just can't be done. We are inherently fragile. We are inherently prone to moments of brokenness. And so to see him there, I think is a reminder that we are in a lot of ways in a dangerous world emotionally and in other ways. And it is a reminder of that. And I think that by feeling empathy toward him, it's a way of also reminding ourselves that even though it is a dangerous world, we have support networks and we have a sense of shared humanity

and that people will sympathize with us and forgive us. Yeah, Meg always says that she gets very anxious when starters come in to pitch in relief. And I don't know if that's part of it, the sense that maybe if we try to do anything different from what we know we deviating from it in the very slightest way and having it all fall apart. So that's probably part of it, too. I don't really know how Dodgers fans feel about Clayton Kershaw. I know how Twitter feels about him, maybe, or Dodgers fans on Twitter. Dodgers fans on Twitter, but I don't really have a sense of whether there is animosity now, whether you've accumulated enough of these moments now where even the regular season greatness can't completely make up for what you feel when you think back to games like this and moments like

this. I don't know whether it ever can equalize or cancel out what he has done during the regular season. I don't personally feel the affection for him that I feel for, say, Rich Hill, let's say. Kershaw seems like a perfectly nice guy, but very intense in a way that I don't really identify with myself. And I think the fact that I felt that attachment to him was partly because I just objected to people labeling him with this choker label before I felt like it was warranted and some of the arguments that went on around that probably made me more predisposed to support him maybe in the way that Mike Trout coming up in the cabrera trout wars and the war wars maybe made me more pro trout at that point than i would have been otherwise so a rod

and jeter in the last decade was yeah i think something where people started to feel a lot of emotional feelings one way or the other toward each of those based mostly on the way that columns were being written. Right. Yeah, I think that's a big part of it. The decision to use Joe Kelly and to stick with Joe Kelly. Also, I had some thoughts about that. When he came in to that game, I was very surprised that they went to Joe Kelly in the first place. And I was trying to figure out why it was, if it is simply that Dave Roberts thought Joe Kelly was better than Kenley Jansen, or if there was something else. And so I had this theory. One of my theories was that there were

five batters at that point until Juan Soto was going to come up. And it seemed to me possible that Dave Roberts was thinking, well, I'm going to want to get Kalaric in for Juan Soto, which means that whoever I bring in now is going to only have five batters, which is basically like on average, it's like an inning plus one batter or maybe an inning or maybe an inning plus two batters. But you assume that the pitcher comes in, pitches a clean inning, gives up one base runner. comes in, pitches a clean inning, gives up one base runner. And if he was thinking, maybe I need to get two out of Ken, and so I'm going to bring in Joe Kelly here to get basically one inning and maybe an extra batter or maybe two out of Joe Kelly

before I have to remove him from the game, bring in Kolarik, and then get Jansen in there and be able to ride him for two innings. And so using his reason. And so then Kelly comes in and he sort of fouls this up first by getting the first three in order. Like you can imagine that maybe if he had allowed one base runner in that first inning, then he would have gotten eaten out of the way, or maybe he would have gotten through Rendon, at least in a plan.

He would have had to get those players out. But so he gets the first three. He looks so good. You send him back out for the two. And so then Eaton, he walks Eaton. And so basically by looking so good in those first three and getting through them so cleanly, now he has put Roberts in a position where he's sending Kelly back out for the start of a second inning if this was the plan. Now he's got to send him back out for the start of the inning because

Soto is still not up. So then he sends him out there to face Eaton. He walks Eaton and you think, oh, well, you should pull Joe Kelly, but now you've got the right hander up. So with Rendon, you definitely can't bring Kalaric in for Rendon, and you don't want to bring in another pitcher for one batter, because you're trying to get whoever is in there out for Kalaric and Soto, and so then you have to let him face Rendon, and then Rendon doubles. If Rendon had singled, then it's really easy. You pull him and have Kalaric face Soto, but since Rendon doubled, then you maybe sort of get this the you get the case for the intentional walk I mean I wouldn't have intentionally walked in there but you know you set up the the

force and you just avoid Soto entirely and so now you're still not bringing in Clark and now you bring in Joe you you have Joe Kelly there and so that's what my my thinking was for how Dave Roberts, by one act at a time, got sort of forced by circumstances into having Joe Kelly load the bases with nobody out. But then, of course, then he leaves Joe Kelly in for Howie Kendrick and two more batters. And that's where my theory that he had Kalaric on his mind breaks down. And unless you think something, well, I mean, I guess not unless. That's the end of that thought. But now to transition into a somewhat related thought, I wrote an article for ESPN about these two intentional walks in the division series that we had mentioned. One was when Davey Martinez intentionally walked Max Muncy, representing the tying run in the ninth inning, which is a very unusual move.

And then another was when Mike Schilt intentionally walked Brian McCann, representing the winning run, to face Dansby Swanson, which was also a very unconventional move. And in fact, these moves are really, truly very unconventional, and I looked at how unconventional they are. And one way of thinking about it is over the last five years, the exact situation, that exact, those two exact situations, same base runners, same innings, same homer away, same number of outs, same score, have come up 500 times. And in those 500 times, managers have only intentionally walked the batter twice, twice out of 500. And in both cases, the gap between the hitter who was up and the hitter who was coming up was much, much larger than McCann to Swanson or even Muncy to Will Smith.

And so my takeaway from this, my hypothesis or my, I don't know, conclusion from this is that they managed differently just because the postseason felt different. Not that there's any structural reason why you would walk those players in the postseason as opposed to the regular season. The stakes are, I mean, everything is basically the same in the regular season for those moments. The stakes are extremely high. you do almost anything to win the game you're so close to the conclusion but nobody ever does it in the regular season and they did do it in the in the postseason twice and i we talk about players when we talk about players choking or players coming up clutch in the postseason. The premise behind those words is that the stakes of the situation

change the player's mindset. They change how they're going to perform because they are affected by the stakes. And I think that's generally a pretty spurious way of thinking about player performance, but it's also sort of impossible to say that that's what it is because a player making an out is just so common that how would you ever say that that wasn't supposed to happen, that that was unusual. Players make outs all the time in high and low stakes and you would never really be able to say, ah, it was his mindset. And the same for a home run. Players often hit home runs. So even if they do it in the biggest moment, how would you say that that's his mindset or the pitcher's mindset or anything of the sort? It's just normal baseball. That's normal baseball things happening. But here in these two cases with the managers, it seems like they purposefully chose to go with their gut. They chose to make these moves that were really unconventional that you would never do in the regular season and that there was no structural benefit or structural reason about the postseason that you would do it. And yet they did. We actually saw both of these managers change their behavior because of the situation. And so the notion of choking and coming up big in the clutch for players, which I have a hard time with,

the clutch for players, which I have a hard time with, seems like those maybe are loaded words and maybe not the right words and maybe not the most accurate or specific words. But the sort of idea behind them seems to be what caused those moves, that managers themselves actually do get affected by the situation and make moves for no other reason than that the stakes are high and they're going with their gut and it leads them to weird places. And I wonder if that's a way of thinking about Dave Roberts and Joe Kelly and leaving Joe Kelly in. I mean, it felt like there was just a lot of gut work going on there. And by the way, leaving him in for Howie Kendrick, which was obviously a great, I mean, it seemed like a crazy

move in a lot of ways. And it worked out really, really, really, really badly. But maybe then you would also say that he got sort of roped into sticking with Joe Kelly, because now he's thinking about getting the ground ball and Joe Kelly's the better ground ball pitcher. And there were maybe no good solutions there, but then he kept on leavinge kelly and so at some point along the way it feels like dave roberts just made a move because the postseason i mean there's something about the postseason that was maybe clouding his decision making or or causing him to to think like well this is this is too important to go against my instincts And so he went with his instincts and that was a disaster. It was, yeah. And I'm looking at

Ken Rosenthal's article today, which is titled Dave Roberts Meet Grady Little. But I am also looking at a report from Jorge Castillo of the Los Angeles Times, who says that Dave Roberts will remain the Dodgers manager in 2020,

according to a couple sources. So bad as this seems to just about everyone, it looks like he's going to be back. He has a lot of lives. It's tough for Roberts because a friend of mine, a Dodger fan, texted me saying like, yeah, he likes Dave Roberts in the regular season, but he makes crazy pitching moves in the postseason. And every manager makes crazy pitching moves in the postseason. They all do it. They all have to do it. And then they also choose to do it. They all have crazy pitching moves.

And we remember the ones that don't work out, which is kind of like a banal thing to say. But with Dave Roberts, by managing deep into the postseason every year he has to make even more he has to just keep making crazy pitching moves because that's the nature of the postseason until one doesn't work out and then like that tends to end the season for him and so he gets remembered for them I don't know if you if there was some way of counting up all the crazy pitching moves that every postseason manager does, has to do, controversial moves, debatable moves, and seeing whether Roberts makes, I don't know, more crazy moves or that a greater percentage fail to work out or something. But yeah, I mean,

he's made a bunch of crazy moves that worked too. So I'm not surprised that he's coming back. I thought he would come back, but I guess at this point I wouldn't have been surprised either way. Yeah. Well, what you were saying about clutchness or whatever we want to call it, that is one way that people define it. It's not that you perform so much better in these situations than you do usually. It's just that you don't let those situations disrupt you and get you away from whatever you normally do. situations disrupt you and get you away from whatever you normally do. So I guess that would be a case of a manager instead of making the move that he might make in May. Not that you would want to handle your bullpen the way that you do in a typical regular season game either. It's like a

hybrid of the two sort of where you do want to be ultra aggressive in that situation and go with your best players for as long as possible. But that's not really what he did. So I don't know what that was, but maybe it was a one-time only event. Last thing, when Max Scherzer was running out of the bullpen to celebrate the final out, you guys mentioned that great gififable image of Max Scherzer running out of the bullpen to celebrate the final out and Scherzer runs like 10 steps and then turns around and is like looking to see if anybody's behind him did you have a moment thinking about the time that Max Scherzer celebrated a walk-off too early or was it a final out was this it was a walk-off right he thought it was a walk-off he thought it was, yeah. Yeah, and back to the that's Max conversation.

I wondered whether Max Scherzer got eight steps out and thought, wait a minute, how many outs were there? Or what inning are we in? Yeah. But that's Max. Yeah. All right. So division series are over.

Championship series are set. There's only been one game since Meg and I spoke and it was not the most eventful game but we can just go over it quickly I guess some of the interesting things from it the Astros did hold on unlike the Dodgers they held up

their end of the bargain when it came to the super teams making it that far and it was a competitive game it was a competitive series the It was a competitive series. The Rays hung with them all the way. But the story, obviously the story every time Garrett Cole pitches is Garrett Cole these days, but also the pitch tipping of Tyler Glasnow or purported pitch tipping, which is ironic because this is something Jeff and I used to talk about. I remember like last postseason, I think, where we kept hearing that different pitchers were tipping their pitches.

And we were always sort of skeptical about that. I think at least when like media members pointed it out or when there was just kind of rumors that someone had seen something, but nothing specific or in some cases there were specifics but they weren't really that convincing this time and i wasn't studying it closely myself so i i haven't done a video breakdown to see if i could see whatever it was but there were a lot of former players who are now media members or twitter people who were saying that they could spot these things and then glasnow himself said that he reviewed the video and saw that he was doing this. And some of the people like, wasn't it Kevin Franzen or someone was tweeting like, oh yeah, I picked this up in

spring training and he's still doing it or something, which is also perplexing because like, if this is something that he does all the time why does no one usually hit him and is it just an astros thing is it someone with a secret camera or something it didn't seem like it was it seemed like the players were passing along whatever they were each seeing as they were going from better to better and then you wonder well why aren't the rays seeing this thing if it's so incredibly obvious and why aren't they telling him to change it or did they? But it's just not something you can easily change when you're in the middle of an elimination game. I don't know.

I'm always kind of confounded by pitch tipping. And I assume it happens and is very significant sometimes. But I also assume that a lot of the times we hear about it, it's not. So I don't know how to tell the signal from the noise, but this seemed like a signal based on everything I heard. Yeah. I don't know. I don't have much to say about that. Does it matter to you that Alex Bregman says no, this is his quote, no, no, no no when asked whether he detected something in glasdale he's as tough to face as anybody do you pull is there a reason to to deny that you were seeing tipped pitches is there an unwritten rule about either taking advantage i mean there's clearly picking up on a

tipped pitch is uh is a big part of baseball and a big part of hitting. But is there an unwritten rule about acknowledging it? Is it considered a less noble victory if that's how you did it? Yeah, I assume it's not like keeping it in reserve in case he's still doing it next season, taking the long view like that. I would think, yeah, maybe you just don't want to show him up. Is it showing him up or is it actually excusing his performance by saying he was doing this thing we found this probably easily fixable flaw and usually we wouldn't hit him we only hit him because of this maybe that's part of it too that

you don't want to cheapen your own accomplishment by saying that you were picking up on this thing so i don't know but, maybe it is just, maybe there's an element of like we outsmarted you instead of we beat you fair and square just testing our mettle against yours. Yeah. Does it matter that he then, after these first six batters

that produced all the runs, the four runs that he allowed, that he then went strikeout, strikeout, popout, strikeout, popout, popout, groundout, that nobody got the ball out of the infield for the next eight batters? Yeah, right. That adds to the mystery, unless he corrected it mid-game, but it sounded like he didn't realize what he was doing until after the game. So I don't know if it's a matter of, even if someone's tipping pitches, it's probably still sort of hard to hit them. Even if you know it's coming, I'm sure that helps a lot, but he still throws really hard. So

I don't know. That just adds to it because you'd think if it were pitch tipping, it would just be kind of a constant stream until he's out of the game or changes something. Hmm. Should teams have a designated pitch tip watcher for their own pitchers in the postseason? Yeah, they probably do, right? Well, I'm talking about. There's someone on every team who's kind of like the go-to person for that. Is there like, is there specifically somebody who is like, that's entirely their job is just to watch the pitcher for whether he's tipping like to put themselves entirely in the mindset of the batter and all you're watching is glass now and seeing whether you can pick something up.

I don't know. I guess it would maybe depend on who that person is. If you're someone who's not starting, if that's your skill, then you could focus all your attention on that. I remember when Jeff and I had FP Santangelo on, he was kind of the guy who would pick up on those things and pass them to his team, according to FP Santangelo. So I would think so. And it wasn't like Carlos Beltran with the Udarvish pitch tipping. Was that what it was? He was the one who saw that and passed the round.

So I would guess that most teams have one or two guys who sort of specialize in that, but it's not like their entire job. It's not funny enough to say out loud. What do you think? Should I say it out loud anyway? Sure. FP stands for F pitch tippers. Also, the thing about pitch tipping too, and I don't know, Glasnow said that it was pretty obvious, but he didn't say what it was that I saw. Sometimes when people talk about pitch tipping, I mean, I think when we hear it, we usually think of it as like, oh, he's holding his glove a certain way, or his glove is maybe shaking in a

different way when he grips one pitch or the other. But sometimes when players talk about it, they talk about it in the way the ball comes out of his hand. It's much more subtle that it can have to do with your release point or with how much of the ball is sort of visible as you're going through your motion. And so it's not like a behavioral thing, but it's more of a mechanical thing. And if it's the former, then that seems like something that would be very easy to adjust if you spotted it, if as a, you know, as a teammate of the player and if it's the latter then I think that they I think every pitcher kind of has a little bit of I mean the ball looks for almost everybody the ball looks slightly different coming out of your hand just because of the way that you're gripping it and

showing it and and that's probably impossible to adjust to and maybe might be intrinsic. And so I don't know which one Glasnow was doing, but I think there's a quote in here. Yes, Kevin Cash. I'm aware there is speculation about pitch tipping. It's something that we have discussed. It's a little tough to do that, make an adjustment in game five of a division series. But at the end of the day, give the guys credit. So this is all very, there's a lot of ambiguity here it's not clear whether glasnow was aware of this it's not clear whether the rays were aware of this

it's not clear of whether this is a long-term thing or a short-term thing it's not clear whether this was fixed or not during the game it's not clear what the nature of the pitch tipping was and it's not clear whether the astros were aware of it and it's not clear what degree it relates to their success against him and it's also not clear whether he was continuing to pitch tip pitches even after he was dominating the astros for his final two and a third innings uh so uh because of all that not clarity uh i I don't know. I don't know what to say. Yeah, I never know what to say about pitch tipping. It's nice when it's really obvious. Like when it's really obvious, like the guy holds his glove, like say at his chest when he comes set to throw a curveball and at his waist when he comes set to throw a fastball.

That would be something we could talk about. Yeah, well, if it were so obvious, then it would be fixed pretty quickly, probably, or you wouldn't last if you were doing that constantly. So it makes sense that it's not something that we can see that easily, but then it makes it hard to talk about because you never know if it's real or how much it actually contributed to the performance. So I don't know in this case if the Astros are the best hitting team in baseball, like one of the best hitting teams of all time. So it's not as if they necessarily need someone to be tipping pitches to score four runs. So there's that too. It's not like they

completely destroyed him. And as you said, he sort of settled in. So I don't know what to make of that. Now that I look, it actually does seem to be more or less what you were describing. Glasnow said, I came back to my locker and I had about 9,000 texts about it. It was one of a pitcher's worst nightmares, the dreaded tell. I'm reading from Anthony Kastrovitz's article at MLB.com now. Glasnow said he has occasionally fallen into a pattern of a higher glove height when setting his hands before throwing a fastball and a lower glove height before throwing his curveball. This time, that small issue showed up on the big stage and became a big problem. As soon as Glasnow saw the texts, he watched the video from his start. It was pretty

obvious. That's what hurts the most. Just something small like that can make such a big difference. I'm not trying to make the excuse. I don't know if they had it or didn't, but from what I could see, it was pretty obvious. But once you give up four runs and Garrett Cole is pitching, it certainly seems over and he has not lost since mid-July and it's kind of hard to imagine how he could lose. But by him, I mean the Astros have not lost a start that he has made since then. And it just seems so automatic with him. What do you think of the Garrett Cole fun facts about strikeouts? We talked about his record setting or record chasing strikeout rate at some point, right? Or the fastest to 300.

Was that what it was? And that was not so satisfying. But the one that was going around on Thursday night, the ESPN stats and info stat about the most consecutive innings with a strikeout, which normally I wouldn't say is fun because it's a strikeout stat and it's devalued in this era,

much like the home run stats are. But it was such a big gap that maybe it's still sort of fun. So most consecutive innings with a strikeout, including regular season and postseason since 1961, Garrett Cole, he had his streak of 73 consecutive innings with a strikeout snapped in the third on Thursday, and evidently Pedro Martinez with 40 is next so that's a gigantic gap so maybe that makes it fun yeah like the what is it he's up to 11 straight starts with 10ks or more which that's very impressive but that doesn't impress me quite as much as just never missing an inning with a strikeout. That impresses me more.

Totally valid fun fact, worth putting into the world, worth retweeting. I personally don't tend to respond that much to streak fun facts, just because the goal is not to strike out one per inning. The goal is not to strike out at least one per inning. Striking out, say, three in the first and three in the third and none in the second is obviously more of uh in line with the strikeout pitchers goals and incentives than striking out one in each of those three and so it always feels like uh there's a little bit of getting too too wrapped up in the way that these outcomes organize themselves into tidy little units rather than

looking at the overall body of the performance. I like streaks as a thing to follow just because it adds tension. There's a lot of tension to a live streak. And so this would have been something that had I been following it, I would have gotten enjoyment out of it. It would not probably be the one fun fact I would use to describe Garrett Cole's strikeout dominance, except for, like, which establishes pretty well what we're talking about. It's not like he's the first pitcher to ever strike out 13-ish per nine as a starter. Randy Johnson did it, and Pedro Martinez, I think, did it, and Chris Sale did it. In an era when it was even more impressive. Yeah, I mean, those seasons are even, I mean, that's why they're the greatest of all time. And Chris Sale did it last year. And so as an extraordinary streak,

I don't think that it is merely a era thing. If you value the streak, the streak is in fact quite anomalous, even compared to extremely high strikeout pitchers. But like, again, it's not like, that's not what Garrett Cole was going out there to do. Like a winning streak, for instance, you are trying to win every game. That's the whole point of of that game is to win it.

You aren't trying to to win every inning with one strikeout. Like you don't win an inning with a strikeout. You're trying to get three strikeouts if you can. And so for that reason, I will probably forget this quite quickly, but it's good. It's fine. Yeah fine it's a solid fun fact I would have if I had known about it I definitely would have tweeted it like if I had come up with that one

I would not have kept it to myself it's good good work alright so anything else on this series on the Rays valiant effort you tried to stop the juggernaut and you came pretty close so good job Jeff I guess to whatever extent you were responsible for that

a bully for him yeah I yeah good I I think it was uh the look with the I said this at the beginning of the year with the with the Rays the challenge for for the Rays or the big obstacle for the Rays is that even when they're good, there are teams that it seems like the bar for greatness right now in this era is higher than the Rays were likely to be. It was easy to look at the Rays coming into the season and say, oh, that's a good team. They could definitely win 92 games, 93 games, 95 games. Maybe they ended up winning 96, I think, but they didn't, it didn't seem like they were likely to win 103.

And it seemed like in this particular moment in time, someone's going to win 103, probably in their division. And that's more than anything else. Like a lot of teams are looking at their season and going, boy, I hope X player on our team doesn't get hurt. Or boy, I hope this free agent we just signed for six years doesn't age really badly. Or boy, I hope the manager that we just hired turns out to be a savant. And there's all sorts of ways that they're nervous. Things could go either way. They just don't know and they they hope that they reach their their ceiling with the rays it's almost like what you have to root for as a ray is that the that the ceiling of other teams comes down because if if you're a good

95 win raise team and maybe that's kind of close to your max, and you've got a division where every year one of the Yankees or the Red Sox wins 103 games, then you're in the wildcard game every time, and that's just a hard way to win the World Series. And that happened. The Yankees won 103, was it? And the Rays had to go through the wildcard. And then, not only that, but then they had to go through the wild card and then not only that but then they had to

go up against the astros who might be the most talented team in major league baseball history and so again even though the rays had built this this really good team with a lot of great pieces and that was really successful and that in many years might have gone into the post season as a favorite just because they like for many years, 97 wins, 96 wins. I can't remember. Is it 96 or 97?

I should get it. I, I, I have lately realized that I've become way too casual about just throwing out wind totals on this podcast and on other podcasts, like on hang up and listen, I referred to the 111 lost Tigers, and they lost 114. And I need to be more careful about these things.

The Yankees won 103. The Rays won 96. All right. Where was I saying? What was I saying? Oh, yeah. So in a lot of years, 96 would be the best or the second best in your league. And you'd be going up against a bunch of division winners that won 94 and you'd

be a favorite going in but the rays had to go in as not only as a wild card but then go up against a team that was considerably better than them more talented than them and yet they took them to five they could have very easily won game five there was they pushed the astros all the way i mean we saw the the nationals push the dodgers to five very comparable and they beat the dodgers and so i think that from a proof of con i mean they don't need to be told that baseball has a lot of randomness in short series and that if they just keep making the playoffs then you know maybe good things will happen they know that that's part of the premise but uh for us as a as just a proof that there is nothing about being the Rays that is necessarily not good enough to win the World Series is good I think they the bottom line is that like they'll

they should feel a lot better going into next season than we felt about them going into the season even though we were somewhat optimistic about them this season. I'm always scared of teams that succeed with great bullpens, unless it's like the Yankees where you've just invested so much in that bullpen and you've got five closers. Then I'm less nervous, but even then a little bit nervous. But when you have a team that the strength of your team, the unquestioned strength of your team is like six relievers, all of whom kind of came out of nowhere at some point over the last 18 months, then I'm always nervous that those six relievers, every single one of them could be out of baseball in 18 months. I mean, you look at the Brewers bullpen from 2018, for instance,

and obviously the Brewers ended up with a great bullpen by the end of 2019 too. That's one of the things they do really well. It's one of their strengths. But I wrote a piece about the 2018 Brewers bullpen in last year's postseason and how they had been the stars of the postseason and where they had all been five months earlier. And one of them was a trusted reliever in the major leagues at that point.

And by the end of the season, they were all dominant and everything was awesome. And that was why the Brewers pushed the Dodgers to game seven of the LCS and everything like that. And it's like Corbin Burns ended up being like, had an ERA of like nine this year. And I don't even think is a Brewer anymore. like had an ERA of like nine this year. And I don't even think is a brewer anymore. Jeremy Jeffress had an ERA of like 5,000 this year and is no longer a brewer. And Corey Knable was unavailable for most of this year. And those were like three of their, their four or five dominant relievers. And so it just, it goes that fast. The Razors are very good at that part of

the game. And maybe they will they will maybe maybe they both will be able to rely on their top six next year or maybe they have six more coming right after them but i always feel a little bit more nervous about those teams than i do about teams that have you know three mvp candidates and two scion candidates yeah although they do have what the most valuable farm system it seems, so that helps. Yeah, definitely. All right, so championship series are starting. I never know how to preview these series really because we've just been talking about all these teams,

and they're mostly the same teams, and they mostly play the same way against different teams because that's the way baseball works. against different teams because that's the way baseball works. So you don't really get, I guess you can talk about like the equivalent of the Adam Kleric, Juan Soto matchup if you have that in a certain series, but you don't always have that. And otherwise it's not so much an X's nose sport where it's like, this guy's going to cover that guy. And how does this person match up with that person

with some exceptions occasionally. But I think generally speaking, you have the one series that was the one matchup that people predicted. I think everyone sort of expected Yankees-Astros would come out of that first round. And so it's hard not to be excited for that matchup, I think, just given that those are the hundred something win hundred three and hundred seven I believe win teams and the big bad

Yankees and Astros going toe-to-toe that is I guess the closest we're going to come to the Astros Dodgers World Series that I sort of wanted to see. This will be pretty close to that, really, when it comes to just great teams going at it. And then on the other side, you have the underdog in both series. That series should be great, too. I think Cardinals-Braves, at least until Game 5, was my favorite series of the last round, and I would not have predicted that.

So who knows? Maybe Astros-Yankees will be a dud, and Cardinals-Nats will be great. But it's fun, obviously, that the Nats have finally gotten to this point, and that DC gets to see them in a seven-game series, and we get to see Scherzer, and we get to see Strasburg, and we get to see Juan Soto continue to have sort of a star-making postseason, it seems like, at least so far. So these are all good things that I'm excited for. But I don't know off the top of my head if I LDS series between the super teams, between the Astros and the Rays and the Nationals and the Dodgers, is that you don't need to have two equally, seemingly equally matched teams to have a very dramatic series.

The Cardinals and the Braves actually did seem to be fairly evenly matched and they had a good series. But that's not a guarantee. There's no... That said, all right. That said, yeah, these should be... There doesn't appear to be a sweep likely in either of these series just because the Yankees and the Astros, neither team has a weakness that's really all that exploitable and neither one is like has has shown any weakness in this postseason.

It's not like we're reevaluating. I don't think we're reevaluating the Astros in any way just because they got taken to five games by the Rays, right? No, they looked, you know, most of what is supposed to work for the Astros looked really good. The exception would be that Zach Granke got hit hard. And so now it feels like when people write their series previews, instead of talking about the big three,

there's going to be a lot more talk about the big two. But Zach Granke is still Zach Granke. He hasn't changed. a lot more talk about the big two but Zach Greinke is still Zach Greinke he hasn't changed and I think maybe the the choice that the Astros made to go to Justin Verlander on short rest has now I I don't know it feels like that has caused a little bit more of a crisis feeling around their fourth starter game what whoever that is, whether that's Urquidy or whether it's a bullpen game or whether it is a starter coming back on short rest, it doesn't feel like, oh, well, they've got six starts from these amazing Hall of Fame pitchers and then one that they'll have to figure out. Like every team's got one that they have to figure out. I mean, the Cardinals,

I guess, probably the Cardinals and the Nationals have fourth starters that they like, but that are not of the same sort of postseason level that we think of, you know, Jack Flaherty and Max Scherzer being. And the Yankees have quite possibly a bullpen game mixed into theirs. And so the Astros will, too. That doesn't seem like a big deal. But and then I don't know the Astros bullpen. I like the Astros bullpen a lot in general, in the abstract. It feels like there's more of us, more conversation about that bullpen being not as good as other teams' bullpens. But I think it's a really good bullpen.

So they don't really have a weakness. The Yankees just rolled. I mean, that was a really impressive performance over a 101-win team. That was a really impressive performance over a 101-win team. They had the best offensive division series of any of the eight teams, and they had the best pitching series of any of the eight teams. And right now, Severino looks really good, and Paxton's been on a long roll. And so there's no real weakness there. And so it doesn't feel like either one of those teams is likely to just fall apart and get overwhelmed.

And then in the other series, both teams have real flaws. And I feel like at this point, both teams' flaws are seen as being in the bullpens. More justifiably for the Nationals and the Cardinals, but like we talked talked about mike schilt didn't seem to have that much trust in his relievers and even though most of his relievers did just fine in the division series they were not asked to do a lot they were not called into a lot of moments where you would have expected relievers and they were not generally asked to do the sort of two and a third inning relief appearances that you see trusted relievers do in the postseason. And their closer had two really bad outings and may or may not have lost his job. It's a little unclear right now, given Schultz quotes.

So neither one of those games, neither one of those series seems like either team is probably strong enough to rip off four straight wins. I mean, of course they are, that they're likely to do that. So yeah, I feel like even though the Astros and the Yankees have these two great offenses, I feel like it could be a series of almost pitcher's duels, which would be really exciting. And I feel like even though the Nationals and the Cardinals both have rotations that they trust a lot right now, I feel like it could be absolute chaos from innings six on, and you could have a lot of late game swings. And so I don't know. I don't know that there's

ever been a postseason matchup where I thought that has no potential for intrigue, but these both seem like solid series. Yeah. Well, since you've mentioned the prospects for a sweep, I just wrote my sweep manifesto. Yeah, you hate the sweep predictions. Yeah. I made the case that no one should ever predict a sweep in a postseason series and arguably should never predict a series to go to its full length but the thing is that you can't predict anything that none of them you're you're picking none of the four outcomes is more likely than 50 like they're all they're all like whatever you're picking is a plurality so basically though if you you want to you can lay it out but because i i think i i also have been i've had thoughts on this on the record

in the past and i continue to to have thoughts about the logical thing the logical processes we go through when deciding how many games to predict series that we right can't even really predict who the winner is but go for go forth mostly we we avoid predicting at all that that's the best thing to do if you can manage that. But if you are in a situation where you have to predict who's going to win and how many games it's going to go, I just want some consistency. So there was a specific prediction that was made about the Nats-Dodgers series that sort of set me off because it said that the Nats had like a 40% chance to win the series. And, you know, it said like, I guess the betting odds, the money people were saying that they had about a 35% chance. So

this person was saying, oh, it's certainly better than that. So, okay, so they have a 40% chance to win the series from the Dodgers, which means a 40% chance of winning three out of the five games. But then the prediction was that the Dodgers would sweep, which is saying that the Nats are more likely than not to not win any games in three, which just seems inconsistent. But not really. You're saying that the Nats are more likely to get swept than they are to win exactly one or exactly two. Because if you're picking a length, if you've committed yourself to picking a length of a series,

you have to pick one of them. And while a team that is maybe only 38% likely to win a game, a single game is very likely to win a game in three tries. They are not necessarily more likely to win exactly one, which is another one of your picking options, or exactly two, which is another one of your picking options. So let's say that, let's say that they were, you thought that they were, say, say they are 58 to 42 underdogs in a typical game. All right. Well, in that case, they would be only, well, that doesn't, it's not going to work.

The math isn't going to work, but they would only be 20% to get swept. So I think you're right. Bottom line, I think you're right. But logically speaking, let's say that they were, you know, 34% likely to get swept. Then you would say, oh, well, you can't pick a sweep. They're only 34% likely to get swept, then you would say, oh, well, you can't pick a sweep. They're only 34% likely to get swept. But if you're picking between two other options that are 32 and 33%. Right. Yeah. But I think that the sweep option is still the least likely. Yeah. In this case, you're right. I think that you're right, given the sentence that you, Yeah. In this case, you're right. I think that you're right, given the sentence that you, the decision making that you've described the writer making. So also, like, when people make predictions, if they're not betting on it, then nothing is at stake. And so part of it is just for the fun and for the entertainment value. And maybe you want to be bold and you want to say, oh, this was smart. He saw that coming. He knew that this team was actually better than the world thought it was.

And you get some credit for it. Whereas if you just say, oh, they're going to win in four or if we're talking about a seven game series, they're going to win in six or something. Then, you know, whatever. It's wishy-washy. It's a weak prediction. And fortune favors the bold when it comes to these things. We've talked in the past about whether it makes sense to ever predict a seven game series because, um, the, you know, that in any seven game series, you know, with a hundred percent certainty that it's going to be three to two one way or the other after five games.

And if your point is that these are two evenly matched teams, that there's hardly anything separating them, well, there's basically a 50-50 chance that the team that's up three is going to win game six and end it. And a 50% chance that the team that's down three-two is going to win and force a game seven. a seven game win, you're saying that, well, if they're exactly evenly matched, then there's no difference between six and seven. Like logically 50% of those series should end in six and 50% should end in seven. And it's not because one team is better, but it's because they're evenly matched. And if you think that one team is slightly better, then they would be more likely to win in six than to win in seven because they would be more likely to be up three games to two. And if they are up three games to two, they would be more likely to win game six than lose game seven. So if you're picking a team, you have already announced by picking a team that you think one team is slightly better. And so you should basically never pick seven games.

It makes no sense to pick seven games. never pick seven games it makes no sense to pick seven games now you should if you think a team is better than it is more likely that uh that they would win in six so so again to the the the formula here is if you think they're exactly evenly matched you get no you have no reason to think it will go seven instead of six so seven is no more logical than six and if you think they're not evenly matched then they are more likely to win in six so seven is no more logical than six and if you think they're not evenly matched then they are more likely to win in six than seven so you should pick six so six is almost always the correct answer but as you say this is mostly because i don't even know if anybody takes bets on how long a series goes probably not well. Well, maybe someone somewhere. But mostly what this is, entirely what this is, is a attempt, a proxy of defining how close you think the teams are matched up.

It is nothing but a signal. It is like a way of trying to put in perspective what you think the gap is between the teams. And so in that sense, you pick the number that most reflect. And so that's why everybody picks seven when it's close. Right, which I used to do. And it was pointed out to us, I think, to me by a listener who said that because I used to think, oh, yeah, this will reflect the fact that I think it's really, really close.

I'll just add this extra game on there because they'll need another game to decide which team is better because it's so close. I did a roundtable where one of the questions was, will this Astros-Yankees, so the Astros-Yankees two years ago played seven games in an epic seven game matchup. That was an epic seven game matchup. Will this series do the same and like i wrote about how like oh yeah i mean i could see it being an epic closely matched playoff thing but i kept going i really don't want to concede the seven game but i also it's a round table i'm not gonna have this conversation in a round table so i i i fudged and i i did say yes to seven. I just ignored the seven part of it. But then I just said, like, I could see it being an epic series, okay?

And then a couple questions later, it was who will be the ALCS MVP? How loud is that cereal bag rustling in the background, by the way? It's audible. It's audible. Well, that's what it is, folks. I'm eating cereal now. Someone else is though. So then a couple questions later, I was asked who will be the ALCS MVP.

And if you think it's going to go seven and that the Astros are going to win, then I think the best, the only smart pick is Garrett Cole, just because of how good he's been pitching. I mean, obviously the odds are that someone else will do it. But if you're picking one person right now, Garrett Cole looks like the best bet to be the MVP of the series. He will quite possibly have two great starts, including Game 7, and if the Astros win with his two great starts, including Game 7, he's a good shot to win the MVP.

But if you think that it is actually unlikely that a series will go Game 7, which it is, it is unlikely that it will go game seven and that the, that, well, even if you think the Astros win, it's unlikely that it would happen in game seven. Cause if they're perfectly evenly matched, then it's not any more likely to go seven than six. And then you also have five and four. And if it doesn't go seven games, then Garrett Cole will only start once and he's not going to win the mvp if he only starts once and so then i had to write that you would pick garrett cole if you thought it would go seven but the odds are it won't go seven and i thought am i going to get an am i going to get asked by my editor to clarify in light of my previous it will be epic and i i worried for a while until i didn't get an email and I thought, okay, I think I'm safe. Because I do think it's a closely matched series, but I can't get past this little thing,

bit of logic that has no place in a round table. So I picked pregnant. That's one way out of it. It's being pretty pedantic, but now that I'm aware of it, I can't forget about it. It obviously is completely inconsequential and i don't think i have any special insight into who's going to win or how long the games will go and i don't think anyone's keeping track of anything i'm saying and i'm not even keeping track of anything i'm saying but still it's like the principle of the thing yes

so did you while doing this did you look at the frequency of series lengths yeah and yeah it's the samples are still sort of small it's not really conclusive like if you look at the best of sevens it basically breaks down the way you would theoretically think it does worth you know the fewest is sweeps and then there are fewer game sevens than game sixes, and I think slightly fewer game fives than that. The best of fives are a little stranger in that there are more sweeps than you would expect. And I was trying to figure out whether that actually meant something. I was looking at the wildcard era, which is a substantial number of series, but still not enough for this deviation to actually be statistically significant. So it may just be randomness.

But, you know, there may be other things that at the top of the rotations or something like that. Something that makes you more likely to, I don't know, if you win two, then maybe you're better than everyone thought you were. I don't know. There's probably something that maybe skews the odds there a little bit, but I don't think enough that I would want to predict a sweep. Okay. All right. So I guess that's that. Now we'll just watch some baseball and talk about it next week.

All right. I will link to that article about predicting postseason sweeps and predicting series to go the full length. I think it's kind of counterintuitive, but it's changed how I think about these things. But it's changed how I think about these things, and I have some stats in there about the difference between the postseason and the regular season when it comes to how him in rather than take him out earlier once the Cardinals got out to that big lead so that they could potentially bring him back earlier in the NLCS to start. And this will be relevant as the series goes on, perhaps. So Eddie says, I crunched the numbers several years ago. I'm a Tigers fan, so it was during one of their playoff runs for starting pitchers during a seven-game series. It turns out that mathematically it works out such that the percent chance of a game happening is directly inverse to the

importance of that game. In other words, the only thing that is important is how many starts you have your best pitcher available for, not which starts. Put most simply, let's assume you have a 50% chance of winning game six and game seven, and you're up 3-2 in a series. Win game six and you win the series, lose game 6 and you have a 50-50 shot. Game 6 is thus worth a 50% chance of winning the series. Game 7, by the same token, is worth a 100% chance of winning the series, twice game 6, but is half as likely to happen as game 6. That math works for the whole chain, regardless of win probability. I reached out to Mitchell Lichtman on Twitter yesterday to double check, and he confirmed,

in short, there was zero benefit for the Cardinals aside from bullpen availability, which I don't see happening given his age, making Flaherty available for Game 1. The reduced likelihood of Game 7 happening versus Game 5 is offset by the increased importance of a potential Game 7. This is different from not using your closer in the ninth of a tie game because the importance never goes up in extra innings. So I think that's a good point. I'd still say it may have benefited Schilt to pull Flaherty sooner, especially once you're up by 12 runs, 13 runs, just for multiple reasons. I mean, I think the bullpen factor is something to consider. And also, as I mentioned, just keeping the workload low for a guy who's had a career-high

number of innings and high stress innings. But yeah, I think that's a good point. It probably matters less than most people think to get a guy going early in the series, unless you are going to potentially bring him back for a Game 7 relief appearance, let's say. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners have already signed up, pledged some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going, get themselves access to some perks, including later this month a couple of Patreon-exclusive live streams

that we'll be doing during playoff games, Grant Bartow, Dominique Banfield, Guy and Doll, Mike Waller, and Philip D. Cowan. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash Effectively Wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. You can contact us via email at podcastwithvanagraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are 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 reviews and ratings for the book are appreciated as well. So that will do it for today and for this week. Thank you for listening. We hope you have a wonderful weekend and we will be back to talk to you early next week. You're little, you're spinning around Modern and lovely, go beyond, go quick Hanging, hanging, moving over Bye.