Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1591: More Like Expanded Nayoffs

Episode Date: September 17, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller discuss Rob Manfred’s desire to make the 16-team playoff format permanent and how the absence of off days will affect the 2020 postseason, then conduct a Stat Blast quiz about the best same-named teammate duos, plus a non-quiz Stat Blast about pitcher usage in seven-inning doubleheaders. Audio intro: Rhett Miller, "Permanent […]

Go back to sleep, go back to sleep Nobody wants to hear about your stupid dream Don't wake me up, you might do permanent damage Permanent damage Don't wake me up, you might do permanent damage Permanent damage Hello and welcome to episode 1591 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Van Graffs presented by our Patreon supporters. I'm Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by ESPN's Sam Miller. Hello, Sam.

Hello. Can I ask you a philosophical question about the playoffs? I want to know whether you think it is better for baseball, it's more interesting, it's more tactically exciting, however you want to define it, that the playoffs be the same as the regular season in as many respects as possible or different from the regular season in some important respects, let's say, because this is a conversation that we're all having this week because we got some news about when and how this year's playoffs are going to happen. So there are going to be two neutral sites in Texas and California,

and the World Series is going to take place in the Rangers' new park in Arlington. And that is not surprising. We sort of knew that for a while now that there would be quasi-bubbles for that. But what maybe had not been realized and had not been announced until just this week is that there aren't going to be any off days until the World Series. So the first three rounds will just be played every day continuously. And it makes sense that that's the case because typically you have those days for travel and now they won't need travel because they'll be in the same place. But it also is quite disruptive to how teams organize their rosters and deploy their players in the postseason.

And one consideration is that they didn't seem to know that this was the case until this week. It seems like teams are finding out along with us, or at least Aaron Boone said that the Yankees didn't know until this week, Darren Boone said that the Yankees didn't know until this week, which again is just another example of sort of destabilizing things and eroding competitive integrity maybe because if you knew that, you might have done some things differently at the trade deadline if you knew that you needed, say, a fourth and fifth, you now have a test of your regular season roster. You actually have to use the players who got you there. And on the other hand, you don't really get to flip a switch and say, OK, it's the playoffs. I'm adaptable. I can do things differently now. I can skip these pitchers. I can use only these relievers. That's a test of whether managers can do that, can adjust on the fly. And that's also something that in a typical season, at least, you can plan for.

You can build your roster to be more conducive to winning the playoffs if it doesn't prevent you from getting there. So do you like that aspect of this or dislike that aspect of this? So, I mean, before I answer the larger question question just as far as 2020 is concerned i i sort of like the league doing things to make us take baseball less seriously i think yeah i think that the one of the goals for this year should be that everybody is comfortable choosing safety over competitiveness and so by by changing the rules on the eve of the season, I thought that one of the benefits of that was like, well, how could you really take this season all that seriously? They doubled the number of playoff teams an hour before the game started. And I

don't know that that was intentional, but I thought it was a nice side effect that we would kind of be a little bit chiller about everything. And so if they're changing rules now for the playoffs too, it sends the same sort of signal, which is that this is a fun season. We'll do what we can. We'll try our best. We aspire to play baseball, but we're not going to be so beholden to the schedule

or to norms that we're going to, you know, do risky things. Now, they have still done some risky things. And so it's not as though they have been. But I mean, you know, like canceling the Cardinals took like two and a half weeks off in the middle of the season. And that was a I don't think that if we treated this season as seriously as we had been conditioned to treat previous seasons, that necessarily would have happened. I think there's something about the way that we've

treated this season as a weird one that made that possible and that was good. I mean, you wouldn't have had a season at all if they were treating it as seriously as a regular season, right? Because it's only 60 games in a best case scenario. Oh yeah, that's true. Yeah. So putting 2020 aside in the larger sense, do I like that the post season has been traditionally a different than the regular season that you can, that you're rewarding differences in team's roster usage that you're making possible a style of play that is not possible in the regular season? Yes, I do like that there's a difference. I don't think that it needs to be exactly the same as the regular season. Yes, I do like that there's a difference. I don't think that it needs to be exactly the same as the regular season. I think I have two reasons for that. One is that I don't

think that there is anything about the regular season that is purer or that is even exists because that was somehow seen as the platonic ideal of baseball. A lot of the ways that baseball is scheduled is not because people thought it was the best, but because it was necessary in order to have a baseball season. You want to have as many games as possible, both for economic reasons, but also because you want to have as big a sample size as possible

to try to determine the best teams in the regular season. And so you have to make the season as many games as possible. In order to do that, given that it's an outdoor sport that can't be played in rain or snow, you have to cram them in to as tight a schedule as possible. Given that, you need larger rosters, deeper rosters. You need to train teams to use the 25th man or even the 40th man on their roster. And so that's all a reaction to the strictures of the regular season itself. It's not that someone said, well, what's the best way to determine a champion? We're going to pick

25 players and put them on a team and have them play 162 games in 180 days. That all sort of fell from the needs of the regular season. And so then you go to the postseason, and there's no need to stay beholden to those decisions. You can choose a different way of doing things. And a better way, maybe, of determining a champion is to figure out which team's best players are better. And by having those off days within the postseason,

you get to let them put more of the weight on those best players. And so I like that. Now, it creates a disconnect where you might say, oh, well, you know, so and so was the best team in the regular season, and then they weren't rewarded in the postseason. And maybe that's not fair, but that doesn't bother me because you've already completely disconnected the two by taking a large sample sport, 162-game season, and then the fact that the league treats the postseason as a completely different event, like, for instance, home runs that Mike Trout hits in the postseason. Well, I guess that he doesn't hit in the postseason. He never hits him in the postseason.

Home runs that Babe Ruth hit in the postseason don't count to his career total. So the league has already made a very clear separation between what happens in the regular season and what happens in the postseason. And it has determined that we have a whole set of records for the regular season. We have a record for the most wins by a team in a season. And then we have a separate thing, which is the tournament to decide the champion. And they don't try to be the exact same thing. They're kind of rewarding teams on parallel lines. And you obviously want to reward the same basic skills. You wouldn't want to change in the postseason to basketball.

That would be weird. Literally, you wouldn't have them playing basketball games. They're baseball players. And so you basically keep the rules, but having some tweaks in roster usage or in pace of scheduling seems perfectly fine with me. And the fact that there's some difference between them also seems perfectly acceptable to me. Not necessarily, I wouldn't insist on it being that way. And of course you could make changes in the post-season that would make it worse. So not every change is going to be a good change, but the way that it has played out, I think has been pretty good. And I will actually miss the off days in between the series this year, specifically. Yeah, I'm kind of conflicted about this because I feel like I'm philosophically,

I just lean toward being more of a regular season guy than a postseason guy. I like the big sample. I like proving your true talent and how good you are and that you really deserved to be that good and to win. And in a way, I kind of almost prefer just the low stakes throbbing of baseball in the background for six months than the extremely intense month or so. As much fun as that is, it's just a totally different experience. And I guess I'm happy to have both of those different experiences, but they are joined together in this sort of weird way.

And one day the regular season ends and then you go to the post-season. And I kind of like the idea that you have to construct your team to have a certain amount of depth that has to be good over the long haul. So you can't take any shortcuts, really. You can't just say, well, I'll get three really good starters or I'll get three very good bullpen guys and that'll be fine. That's all I need. No, those weaknesses and shortcomings will be exposed over the course

of six months. Now, if you plan it well enough that you are able to sort of front load your roster or make it a bit top heavy, but not so top heavy that you miss the playoffs, then good for you. I guess you figured out a way to use the rules to your advantage. So you had enough depth to get through the regular season and then you made yourself a formidable October weapon.

So if you can sort of thread that needle then I guess it's interesting and intriguing and fair that you would be rewarded for that and it's something interesting to think about too when October starts because in baseball like we almost throw the analysis out the window when the playoffs roll around because it's like well who knows I mean best of five you know coin flip game best of even. There's no way to predict any of this, so we might as well just go along for the ride. But if you do have a team that is a dramatically different playoff team, at least on paper, than it is during the regular season, then that's something to analyze. That's something to think about. So I guess I do kind of like that aspect of things.

And if this were a normal season and normal circumstances, then I would want everyone to know what the playoffs were going to be going in and how many off days they were going to have so that they could plan accordingly. And I don't think that Rob Manfred and MLB are hoping that everyone will take this less seriously seriously that they'll have the reaction that you are identifying here but i do think that that is the byproduct of it and like you i'm not upset about that either so there are certain teams that it could make a real difference like if you're i don't know the yankees or or something and it seemed like you were fairly well constructed to have a good top of your

rotation and back your bullpen but maybe there's some depth issues or something you know you're probably not going to be pleased to have this sprung on you after you went through the trade deadline without really doing anything and you know i don't know maybe they should have guessed that that this might happen you know you could look at the moves that some other teams made, and perhaps they figured out that this would happen and planned for it. So maybe they just had more foresight than other teams. But it's definitely going to be different, and it's going to play out quickly. It'll just feel so rapid fire, like there just won't be time to digest where series stand or anything like that it'll just be one after the other and there will be even more games potentially because there's an extra round

of playoffs here but each of the individual rounds will just seem like it ends very quickly i think much more quickly than we're used to yeah i think that you know in a way we kind of have the best of both worlds here which is that we we get a lot of conversation out of which teams are built for the postseason. There's like we talk a lot, not not we, you and I, but also you and I talk a lot about which team is dangerous in October and which team has like, you know, three great starters that can really ride or like a bullpen that's going to like be extra valuable in the postseason. And so there's a lot of conversation, a lot of interest and intrigue, and it gives you the sense of a lot of variety. And that's great. And then also simultaneously, if you just look at it, none of that really matters. Like if you look at the, you know, 100 years of postseason baseball or even the last few decades of postseason baseball, as far as anybody basically knows, there really isn't a secret sauce. There isn't some way of

building a roster or a particular type of skill set that your team can have that shows dramatically improved or even measurably improved postseason performance relative to just, you know, knowing your record. And I know that in our short-term memory, we have the Nationals, who are a very shallow pitching staff last year, and managed to ride their basically five, six, I guess six credible pitchers to postseason victory. That's how it's supposed to work,

and that's what we envision. But that's not the norm, and a lot of the Nationals probably success is a little bit fluky. It didn't have to turn out that way. Of course, if they'd lost the wildcard game, which they very nearly did, then we wouldn't be talking about the Nationals as a model for anything. And more likely what happens if you have a shallow team and you think, or a shallow pitching staff in particular, and you think, well, maybe we can ride our six good arms, is that your six good arms end up getting gassed and you end up needing, I mean, you need, you just end up needing your full roster throughout

the postseason. Maybe not technically, maybe not your 25th or 24th, but you know, you'd be surprised how often a team really ends up needing. I mean, Michael Martinez made the final out of the 2016 World Series. So we get the best of both worlds, which is that we get something to talk about, and then it doesn't actually distort the postseason in any real way, and I think that's pretty good.

So one of the nice things about— Yeah, I agree, though. One of the nice things about the days off, too, is that it gives you time to breathe and to let a series really simmer. And to have I think it's nice to have some playoff days where there are four games going and somewhere there's only one. There's a real variety in October where you've got like some days you have one game, five, you know, a win or go home game. And everybody can focus on that. And then some days you have all four playing. you know, a win or go home game, and everybody can focus on that.

And then some days you have all four playing. And if there's no off days, I guess you'll see what the NL will start one day and then the AL will start the next day. So you'll still have some of that. But without the travel, you'll have less than that. Nobody's worried about that, though. That's not a concern. There will also be decisions to make about whether you actually do want to start, guys, on short rest this year because there may be some teams that elect to do that. And in a usual October, it's not that great a consideration.

You always hear that there are some pitchers who have never started on short rest before. They're not comfortable doing it. They're not capable of doing it. And it's not that big a deal, really, because you can still skip some of those rotation spots but this year or this system you would actually have a decision to make there if you think you have someone who can do that and it's worth skipping a fifth starter let's say it certainly does seem at the studies i've seen or done in the past that there is some penalty there that if you have pitchers going on short rest in the playoffs they just don't pitch as well. But there's still a decision to make there.

And do you want to push your relievers harder than usual? We've seen some teams ride relievers pretty hard in previous Octobers, but at least they had days off between games. And now that won't be the case. So you hope that people are not trying to use pitchers the way that they would when there would be off days in the playoffs and they're burning everyone out but then they may decide that well this is the time to burn guys out this is the playoffs and maybe in some cases those players are willing participants in that or they actually are equipped to do that

so that's another thing that we might end up talking about that sort of falls under the umbrella of strategy or tactics yeah one of the things that i think is undeniable i think it's undeniable someone might argue this but the model of postseason where your top six pitchers throw a lot more of your innings is way more entertaining than the model where you're using 12 or 13 different pitchers throw a lot more of your innings is way more entertaining than the model where you're using 12 or 13 different pitchers i mean it's just it's a lot more fun to watch the famous players and to watch the good players and also to have them used in in kind of a more expanded role which is enabled by like i mean to to actually not just to see them more often not just to have them on

your tv screen more often but to actually see them trying to get the fourth out or the seventh out that maybe they're not used to getting in the regular season is just more fun. And I mean, postseason should be fine, should be entertaining. But the postseason pitcher usage is one of the great entertainments that the postseason produces. Yeah. And if this were to become permanent, then you'd imagine that maybe teams will try to prepare pitchers for that. You know, in the past, it's been something where maybe they would try that in the last week of a regular season or something, but this is not going to become permanent, right? Well, what scenario would this become permanent? I don't think this will be permanent. I mean, there is a good chance

that the 16-team playoff format will become permanent. Whether they then will add off days back in, I assume they would because there will be travel at some point in the future, let's hope. But if they do keep this playoff format, then there would also be an extra round. And in the interest of getting the playoffs over with more quickly and not stretching into November they might have to compress it at least a little bit more than they have in the past and then do you give priority to pitchers who have shown that they can pitch on a accelerated schedule like that or do you try to condition them to do that knowing that when it counts the most you're gonna be asking them to do that, knowing that when it counts the most, you're going to be asking them to do that. I don't know. But that is the other newsy thing that came out of this conversation is that Rob Manfred made it very clear, unsurprisingly, that he wants the expanded playoffs to be permanent.

And he loves it. The owners love it. He said that they would pretty much all approve of this. There's an overwhelming majority of owners who have endorsed this concept, and he said, I think there's a lot to commend it, and it is one of those changes I hope will become a permanent part of our landscape. Of course, the players have some say in this, and you would think that they would want to use that for leverage, but I really hope that this doesn't happen again. Not at all surprised that this is Manfred's position, but it's very clear now, if it wasn't before, that all of the rules changes from this year, while they did make sense for this season and these circumstances,

it was clearly also a Trojan horse to try to get these things to be a permanent part of the game. And Manfred said, one of the few good things about the pandemic is that it has provided an opportunity to try some different things in the game on a one-year basis. That, I think, has been a positive overall. And I agree in the sense that it's nice to see that you can mess with some stuff and still have it be baseball and have people enjoy it so that in the future,

if we're arguing about moving the mound or whatever it is, maybe there will be a little less resistance to that. On the other hand, I hate the idea of 16-team playoffs as a permanent part of baseball, and I have been dreading this all along. And it almost makes it hard for me to enjoy the postseason because I'll be watching it thinking, if this goes off without a hitch, if everyone likes this, then that'll make it even more likely that this will stick around. And I just really don't like it. 10 teams to 16 teams in one year and saying, okay, well, we'll just stick with that now because it's such a huge difference. Like DH in the NL, well, we've already had DH in one league for decades and it was clear that that was coming. So fine, it doesn't bother me. The writing was on the wall and the extra inning runner rule that you have fallen in love with, well, that was being used in the minors and that was part of the conversation. So maybe that you have fallen in love with well that was being used in the minors and that was part

of the conversation so maybe that could have happened at some point anyway and seven inning double headers that was happening in the minors too and that's been something people have been talking about and that seems maybe the least likely of those to stick around but it might stick around but the 16 team playoffs no one was talking. They didn't add teams. It's not like they added teams. No, it's the same number of teams. Right. If you thought that 10 was optimal before, then why are we going to 16 in one year? It is really weird. It makes no sense.

Because nothing has changed in the number of teams since 1998. And so is he saying that the last 23 years have just been bad? Yeah, we were doing it wrong just we failed we we're sorry we owe you all an apology we've been failing for 23 years turns out that eight teams and 10 teams were not enough because otherwise like yeah like nothing i guess what he maybe what he would say is that baseball's kind of i don't know that baseball's claim on the attention span of the country has changed and like the world has changed that like people's expectations for sports has changed that

the benefit that high visibility events like the postseason are a bigger part of the business model than the day in day out grind of the regular season or something like that but yeah i mean it is a big it's a big jump i mean if you like i i i would imagine that in the last 23 years if you went back and looked at the next six teams that would have been in the playoffs for those years you know like the six teams that were the closest to the playoffs that didn't make it i bet you'd find like two where you were like oh i'd be kind of interested to see what they did in october yeah like last cleveland last year i'd be kind of interested to see what cleveland last year would have done in october kinda but otherwise it's not like there

were a whole bunch of really awesome exciting teams that that got bumped they were all like they're all middling i mean this is like this is like when like Wake Forest has like a bad 17 and 12 season and gets into the NCAA tournament as a 10 seed just to like fill it out. That's the kind of, that's the kind of quality that you're, you're bringing in to the postseason. So it doesn't seem like you're getting there. Now, probably I've talked in the past about how much I would love to see a 16 team playoffs so uh forgive me for you getting that in the playoffs i do want everyone now i i think if you skipped teams 11 through 16 and just brought in teams 25 to 30 then i'd be interested like you want to if you can somehow get to teams 25 to 30 then you've got some something that could happen but teams 11 to 16 aren't interesting enough to be underdogs they're not adding variety they're just worse versions of the teams right above them yeah it just it's really hard i think to claim that this is anything but a pure revenue maximization play which which it probably is but i don't know how you could even make the case that it's anything

other than that because it's such a dramatic departure and it's something no one was calling for really. Like plenty of people were calling for more offense or fewer pitchers hitting or faster games, you know, whatever. All these other changes are stemming from something that people were actually demanding or, you know, pace of play or whatever it is. But no one was saying, give me six more playoffs teams, give me most of the teams in the playoffs. Like maybe some people were saying, well, we could try 12, maybe 12 would be good. But no one was saying, let's just go straight to 16. And I just, I hate it. I hate the flukiness of it. I don't like what I think it would do probably to incentives to build better teams.

But beyond that, I just, I don't like the idea that you could be a not good team at all and make a run at the World Series. At that point, I guess you could say, well, it's underdog, it's Cinderella run or something. Yeah, it's not. It's not, though. Like an 81-win team Yeah, it's not. It's not, though. Like an 81-win team is not an underdog. It's not a Cinderella. No, it's... A 68-win team could be, but like an 81-win team is just mediocre.

No, yeah. And if you're going to still say we're going to watch 162 regular season games and then we're going to let more than half of those teams into the playoffs to battle out in something that's almost meaningless in terms of determining which teams are superior. Then you're taking away my interest from that very long six-month prelude to the playoffs. It seems like, okay, we'll just get this over with and get to these massive playoffs now. It just it seems like, OK, let's just get this over with and get to these massive playoffs now. And and then even if you said, well, OK, we'll eventually take away regular season games, that might not be a bad idea regardless. But then you're still swinging the pendulum even further in the direction of randomness and just, you know, not really true talent, not mattering all that much. And I guess that's just not really what I want from the sport. So it disturbs me. The one thing that I don't know if this is

explicitly stated or not, but the one thing that people were saying that this that this might plausibly be a solution to is the the incentives of giving more teams, you know, an incentive to try to win this year that like you have that that rebuilding in baseball had become an embarrassment or a problem or a financial problem for the league or, you know, bad for for labor, bad for all sorts of reasons. And so by lowering the bar to make it to the playoffs, then maybe you incentivize more teams to not go into these these three-year tank jobs uh but to actually go for it because that was the idea that was part of the idea behind my every team makes it idea and i will also just note that my every team makes it idea was also designed to make it more likely that the best team would end up winning the world series uh not diluting the postseason so that it would be less likely that the best team wins the World Series.

But does adding six teams, just like eyeballing this year, well, I guess we can't eyeball this year because this year is so weird. Do you think adding six teams to the playoffs makes it more likely that the Tigers and Orioles and Marlins would have spent last offseason trading for and signing good players? Maybe, I think so, with a corresponding lack of incentive for teams that are already pretty good to get any better. But I don't know if I'm in the minority here, but I don't feel like tanking has been as big a problem as I think it's often made out to be. And I think there's something to be said for just kind of ripping the bandaid off and being bad for a few years if you come out the other side of it. Actually sustainably good,

and not just sort of stumbling along in this 500 nether world for a while where you can plausibly convince yourself you're a contender, but often you're not really, and a bunch of things have to go right. But I guess in this world with 16 team playoffs, then you never actually have to build that good a team. You can just kind of occupy that no man's land where you're good enough to dream, right? occupy that no man's land where you're you're good enough to dream right so yeah yeah i'm trying to the when you go through the rebuild you sometimes i i feel like when this when the rebuild trend began a lot of times it was sold as we're gonna get through this bleak period and then we're gonna have sort of a permanent winner. It was more about building a team that could just be permanently good. You would rebuild once,

and then you would quit making the same mistakes, and you would be steadily between, you know, 89 and 94 wins, and you could make the playoffs every game. And that was the promise kind of to the fans. And that was sort of what the Dodgers were criticized for for a while is that they seemed content almost to be a permanent 90, you know, low to mid 90s win team. And what actually happened to some degree was that you ended up with these super teams. So you had the Astros who are like unfathomably good for a three year period and then the Dodgers who are like, you know, arguably one of the five or six greatest teams ever over the past three or four years and then you have the yankees who are you know a hundred plus win team which generally speaking it used to be really rare to see teams project to win that many games and to see this many hundred win teams and so it almost felt like

an accident that the rebuilding created a bunch of super teams. And in my head, it has been reframed as you tank so that you can have everybody get great all at once and you can be a super team. But it was really that you tank so that you can have everybody get pretty good and cheap all at once and then you can have a long window. good and cheap all at once and then you can have a long window and so if you think of it as the you need to be a super team to win the world series these days versus you need to be sustainable so that you can just make the playoffs every year then the reaction to the 16 team thing would be

different right it would make it you you wouldn't have to rebuild for as long to be a permanent playoff team true in in a 16 teams so like you wouldn't have to tank for three years maybe you could tank for one year and then you could kind of get back in that window whereas if you need to be a super team in order to get through it now you need to even be a greater super team in order to get through it because the playoffs just got harder. And so now maybe you would need to tank for four years to get to the 108 win level that it takes to survive the post season reliably. And other teams are doing the same thing maybe, which makes it harder to do than it was at first. So it could go either way. You could see a team deciding a one year rebuild is enough, or you could see a team deciding it needs to go four years. It depends whether they think they need to be the 2017 Astros or whether they only need to be the 2019 Nationals to win the World Series. Yeah. All right. Well, that's today's grousing

about Rob Manfred. So we can answer a few emails here. Well, we probably can't. I have a sort of a long stat blast. Oh, okay. And I got to call this in 20 minutes. And it might take 20 minutes to do this stat blast. Wow. It might. All right. All right. Stat blast. They'll take a data set sorted by something like ERA- or OBS+. R-A-M-I-N-E-S-O-R-O-B-S-P-L-U-S-T. 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-stub-lust. It's a fun, it's a fun, I think it's a kind of a fun one not for the results but because you're going to get to play a game all right so the other day i was listening to the mariners game on the radio and there was an ad where uh mariners legend dave vallier was saying that i forget what the ad was for it might have been for like a car stereo or like a like a home stereo system or something like that but he was saying he likes to listen to the mariners games and he hates to miss out on anything

he says he wants to hear or maybe he says he doesn't want to miss either of the kyle's and so of course he's alluding to to kyle lewis and kyle seger and those two players have the same name and they represent the i would say they represent the current roster's most promising player in lewis and and its most significant connection to the past in seager so uh you call them the kyle's there that's a thing like the killer bees or the you know on one team or the kyle's in seattle and i was trying to decide whether those two players meet the standard of being a name branded unit, whether that, whether that's enough,

whether two Kyle's at the level of play that the Kyle's rat justifies being the Kyle's. So I wanted to see how often two teammates of the same name were both impact players. And I set the bar pretty high. I said, were both impact players. And I set the bar pretty high. I said they have to have both had at least five war in the same season.

So, you know, MVP ballot types, down ballot MVP type seasons, clearly all-stars in the same season. And they have to have exactly the same name because your identification has to be very precise. To me, William and Bill are not similar names in any way. One person chose to be Bill and one person chose to be William. Those are differences. I'm not calling them the same thing.

So they have to be the same primary name. So there are four pairs in baseball history. Oh, and they also both have to be hitters. Because I don't think that you very rarely see a pitcher and a hitter cross over into the same team branding they're like two separate halves of the team yeah so four pairs in baseball history the first one is just like you're already thinking it right you already know the first one i'm not thinking about oh okay so the only one came to my mind when i thought this through and it's the willies right you got you got willie mccovey and willie mays and they are the the best of of these

groups they were both over this threshold together five times in 1963 1965 66 68 1970 their their peak together was 17.1 war in a season, which they actually did exactly that twice. So that's the famous, the willies you would Dave, Dave Valle definitely doesn't want to miss either of the willies. Now the second one isn't quite as famous because I think it's got a plainer name. And because one of the players is so much more famous than the other,

but it is the Joe's Joe DiMaggio and joe gordon who uh both reached this threshold for the yankees and and unlike the willies they actually did it in four consecutive years from 1939 to 1942 so for four years in a row peaking with a combined 14.7 war you didn't want to miss either of the joes the third third one is active today, and they met this threshold together one time last year. Do you happen off the top of your head? Does anything jump out at you? No. It's a tough one.

It's the Mats, Matt Chapman and Matt Olson. So Matt Chapman was 8.3 war, and Matt Olson was 5.4 war. And you don't want to miss the M mats at the plate or on the field. They're both excellent defenders. So I think there's a lot of, you could definitely brand the mats. And then there's a fourth one. And so that's where we're going to spend a bunch of time today. Earlier this year, Josh Levine was playing this game on Hang Up and Listen that I fell

in love with. He would give 10 clues. He would be thinking of a famous athlete, and then he would give 10 clues about that athlete. And you would try to guess who it was as quickly as possible. You could only guess once if you got it wrong and you were out. Of course, you weren't guessing. The people who he was hosting the podcast were theoretically guessing. Anyway, I loved this game, and they quit playing it. And so I am just stealing the concept here to see if you can guess this last pair of same-named teammates.

Are you ready to try? Lucky me. All right. Do you already know the answer? No. Okay. All right. So everybody else can play along, Ben. Don't blurt out the answer. If you think you know it, just send me a message or just say, I think I know it and send me a message.

And then I'll tell you whether you're right or wrong. And if you want to guess more than once, that's fine. You can guess as many times as you want. You can guess five times every second, if you want. Okay. I'm going to refer to these two as guy one and guy 2, and I am 100% sure that I'm going to slip and accidentally say their actual first names at some point, and when that happens, the game will be totally ruined for you, Ben, but then we'll just edit that out. All right. I hope that happens soon.

Okay. All right. Clue 1. And remember, these start out harder, and then they get. Okay. Clue 1. Guy 1 was born in Huntington Beach, California, where I had my first reporting job. While covering this Orange County city of 200,000 people, I wrote about a middle school

class president who picketed his own graduation because the principal forbade him from delivering his irreverent commencement speech about a fake house in a real neighborhood that was actually just a disguised sewage pump station, and about city leaders' lighthearted plan to issue business permits for lemonade stands, which led to a massive backlash from people complaining of government overreach. So Huntington Beach, California. Ben, do you know the answer yet? I definitely do not. All right. Clue number two. Guys one and two combined for 107.9 career war. Each of them is also the father of a major leaguer and their sons have combined for 0.2 career war. Huh.

Okay. So this seems like a good clue. I don't know the answer. But you're telling me that, okay, so they combined for basically together like an inner circle hall of famer. And their offspring are major leaguers but not good ones. Correct. Okay. Well, that doesn't help me yet. You'd have to figure that combined they would probably be good because they qualified for this list, but they could have qualified one year and not been good otherwise. So you're telling me that probably they were both Hall of Fame adjacent players, perhaps, or,

you know, maybe one of them was and the other was a one-year fluke or something, but probably they both had somewhat substantial careers. And obviously having major league sons narrows things down a bit, but not enough for me. All right. Did we play the song? The Stat Blast song? Yeah. Yes. Okay. All right. Clue three. Okay. Guys one and two were teammates for 11 seasons, but they only made the postseason together

once. That year, they won the division series three games to two, but they lost the league championship series three games to two. That was a clue, Ben. Yeah, it was but uh i'm someone who never remembers any outcomes of playoff series that doesn't actually help me that much all right there's a there's a there was a subtle extra clue in there i don't know someone picked it up all right okay clue four an early scouting report for Guy2, who at the time was in high school,

has one of the all-time scouting report howlers, just a complete mis-evaluation of what the player would become. I'm not going to tell you what the report got wrong, but I will tell you what the report said. So this is the scouting report for high school playing guy two. Hitting, a future grade of four on a two to eight scale. Power, future grade of three. Running speed, future grade of six. Base running, future five. Arm strength, future four. And arm accuracy, future five. And the report continues, second base might be his position, has good infield quickness, and is a leader. Wants to play pro ball, but football

people have interest also. Is a good athlete. And in fact, Guy Tu got about 100 scholarship offers to play football. He considered going to University of Florida to be a running back. But when he got drafted by a baseball team, he said, quote, I was going to give myself two years, give myself two years, see what happened. If things worked out, I would continue to play baseball. If things didn't work out, I was going to walk on at the University of Florida and play football. Sure enough, he debuted in the majors at age 19. Guy one was once asked whether guy two ever talked about football. And guy one said, Oh, he talked about football all the time. He said he could have been just as good or better at football, which didn't surprise me. I mean, the way he was built and

the way he ran, I'm sure he could have been. He definitely wouldn't have played as long. That's probably the main reason he decided to play baseball, the longevity. So he made a good choice. Okay. The clue here is that, well, one of the clues here is that he was misscouted. Well, I mean, the clue, you don't know how he was misscouted. The clue is that he was miss scouted well essentially i mean i mean the clue you don't know how he was miss scouted the clue is that i read you his high school scouting report and told you that he was a great football player that he almost went to the university of florida and that he i guess you could say that according to his teammate he could have been a great football player because of quote the way he was built and the way he ran uh-huh a lot of clues a lot of clues

circled circled in a big red pen by me for your benefit okay all right what's uh you said five war was what you were going with here yeah five war each it's baseball reference i assume not that's going to change my guess yeah okay all right. Yeah. Okay. All right. Clue number five. Okay. Guy won, meanwhile, wasn't drafted out of high school. He was super bummed. He went to play at a junior college, and then he went to a four-year college where he emerged as one of the all-time great college baseball players. He won the College World Series at Cal State Fullerton, and he won the Golden Spikes Award. Earlier this year, ESPN did a fan vote of the greatest college players ever,

and Guy One was nominated, but he finished seventh among first basemen. I think that he was a victim of recency bias and name recognition more than anything. I think you could argue that he should have finished as high as second among all-time college first baseman. He was a candidate to go first overall in that year's draft, but the Mariners had that pick and they took Al Chambers, who played in 57 major league games. Many years later, the Mariners interviewed Guy One for a managerial job, but they passed on him. And indeed, one of the great surprises of Guy One's career is that he was never a manager. For about a decade, he was constantly talked about as a potential manager. He managed in the minors. He was a hitting instructor, a third base coach, and for the past half decade, a bench coach. This year, he quit coaching and per a John Heyman tweet, quote, simply, he didn't want

to be separated by close to 3,000 miles from his grandkids. Good man, stellar playing and coaching career. End tweet. Hmm. I have a theory. Okay. I guess there's no cost to me guessing I would encourage it in fact so if I were to guess it correctly you're going to keep going so that other people can keep playing so I'm not going to spoil it for anyone right? correct you're going to type this to me yeah that's correct

you did it okay very well done i have uh well i i was just looking up one i assume i mean you got the first name yes well i was just uh looking up one of these players for a different reason which uh maybe occurs to you or or maybe you don't know. Maybe it's a complete coincidence. Probably it is a complete coincidence. Total coincidence. Okay. There is a reason why I was reviewing one of these people's careers, and it's very fresh in my mind. Interesting. So there's a little clue for me to people. Interesting. What could that be? All right. Okay. I'll go on to clue six. I used to have, I, Sam Miller, I used to have, I would estimate, about 80 baseball cards of these two players. Now I have about 40 because I gave half away.

Yes. I gave half away. If you're a longtime listener or reader of Sam Miller, that should do it right there. All right. Clue seven. Amazingly, remember, 11 years together on the same team. Amazingly, they were never on the same baseball card together. And one blogger who is a fan of their team wrote about it recently.

In fact, he wrote, quote, it was an annual disappointment for me throughout the 1980s. Every year I said, this is the year that the tops team card for their team will be guy one and guy two i think the tops photographer was pranked for the 1988 card as it features vance law and hubie brooks my theory is he asked if someone could point out guy one and guy two for him, which is a very good joke if that is true. Yeah. All right. Clue eight. Clue eight.

Okay. The top baseball reference comps for these two players. For guy one, Todd Zeal. For guy two, Lou Brock. Okay. All right. Clue nine. todd zeal for guy two lou brock okay okay all right clue nine guy one's first and middle names are timothy charles guy two does not have a middle name last clue clue 10 i will tell you what the howler in the high school scouting report was. You might remember if you've been taking careful notes that the future grade for Guy 2's base

running was a five, which is average. Guy 2 would turn out to be one of the, I would say, three greatest base runners in history. I would say probably the second greatest and maybe the greatest. All right. Time for the big reveal. I guess. Should we reveal it? Yeah.

Okay. I think we probably should. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe people want to think about it. Should we stall? They could pause. It's a podcast.

Well, okay. They don't have to keep listening. I'm going to give them, I'm just going to sort of, I'll tell you what, I'm going to do another quick stat blast and then I'll give the answer after. Okay. All right. This is a quick one. No need to play the music. Yesterday I was watching a pitcher and a doubleheader and, you know, he was pitching well and I got to be that complete games were like pitchers really put a lot of of kind of like

i don't know prestige on a complete and not a not even prestige like they saw it as their role to to finish the game if they could and so there was a sort of a you know a horse getting near the barn kind of feeling about a pitcher who was getting close to the end of a game. And then over the last decade or so, complete games became not just hard, but basically they never happened. We're talking a few dozen a year. And so it's hardly even worth thinking about it. And so I think in some ways I wonder

whether it just makes it even easier for managers to pull pitchers a little earlier because there's not even like really that hope that he's going to complete it. Like you just, you go into the game knowing that this is a collaboration. And with these new seven inning double headers, I wondered whether the mindset would go back a little bit and whether pitchers would, would go back to seeing a complete game as, as possible. And, and if it was possible, if they would then go back to chasing after him a little bit more. So I just quickly looked at all the doubleheaders this year to see whether pitchers are more likely to go seven innings in those games, which is a complete game, than they are likely to go seven innings in a different game, in a normal game, because you could imagine that maybe if two pitchers have gone six innings, one in a doubleheader and one in a regular game, the one in the doubleheader

might be kind of fighting for that last inning to finish it off, whereas the one in the long game, he knows he's not going to finish it off, so he might as well hand it over. So of course, the counter possibility would be that it would be the opposite, and that knowing that you have a seven-inning game allows managers to pull their starting pitchers even earlier because they don't have to ask as much of their bullpen in that game. And still a third tweak in this logic is that it's a double header, which means it's part of two games in the day. And you might be more incentivized to let your starting pitcher go deeper because you know that you're going to have to use your bullpen in game two. So I looked just to see what the pitcher starting pitcher usage is in

these double headers so far. And in fact, pitchers are more likely to go seven innings in a nine inning game than they are in a double header. And like a lot, in fact, almost three times as likely. In nine inning games, the starting pitcher has gone at least seven in 12% of games. In seven inning games, the starter has gone the full seven, only 4.5% of games. And in fact, if you go back to, if you go to six innings, it is also, it's about half as many pitchers go six innings in the seven inning game. And I thought that it might be that, that a greater percentage of pitchers who made it say six and a third would be allowed to finish the seventh inning and get that complete game. But in fact, the rate of pitchers pulled through six and a third, or even six and

two thirds is higher in the double headers they're more likely if a starting pitcher has gone six and two thirds he's actually more likely to get replaced in these double headers than he is in the nine inning game which surprised me yeah that is surprising and the total usage of starting pitchers in these double headers is much lower but i thought that this might be because a double header means that now your rotation is messed up so you might be seeing a lot more openers and if you're seeing a lot more openers or you're seeing emergency starters who are only going to be in for a short period of time then maybe that's what's throwing off the percentages so i threw out all games in

which the starting pitcher threw fewer than three innings i I just chucked them. And so now we're really only focusing on starts where it's a real starter making a real start. And even still, pitchers are only about half as likely to go seven in those games. Once they've made it into the fourth, they're still only about half as likely to go seven innings in those games as they are in a full game.

So apparently the idea of having a complete game on the back of your baseball card is just a completely archaic notion. They've just abandoned it entirely, even when it becomes much more feasible. Yeah, I guess it could be related to most of the doubleheaders played this year have been recent, like later in the season. At least the pace has picked up. But maybe it's partly the fact that teams were being more careful with pitchers when the season started because of all the injuries and because of the strange buildup to the season. Or I guess just the fact that if you have more doubleheaders, then your spot in the rotation could come around again more quickly or something

like you're just saving guys for the next game like it i don't know i don't know if it's a a clean comparison right just because of all the things that are strange about this season but you're right that uh there's certainly a lot less emphasis on complete games now and fewer and fewer complete games and i guess it makes sense that if we've sort of de-emphasized that stat period, then you would continue to care less about it. And maybe you'd care even less about it because if you pitch a seven inning complete game, it doesn't even feel like what we've been conditioned to think is a complete game, right? It's not even an accomplishment. It's not like, oh, he went all seven. He's a workhorse.

You know, he finished what he started. I don't think you get the same sort of sense of satisfaction, really, from finishing off a seven-inning start that you would from a nine-inning start. Probably not. But you do at least get to say that you did it yourself. As the starting pitcher, you got the assignment. You finished the job. The game was yours. win if you won it was yours nobody else was needed and also it does show up in your stats and you know players like cheap stats too you know like closers aren't like

well that save was too easy save me for the hard ones they they'll take the they'll take the one out when the tying run is on deck and they only need to come in for one out save just as much as they'll take the the hard ones and so i i thought that maybe pitchers would still like those complete games yeah all right here's the big reveal the clue the clue that i wondered if you would catch maybe you did catch but it didn't help you is that the one playoff appearance they made they won the division series three games to two but they lost the lcs three games to two of course the lcs is a seven game series but it was briefly a five game series and the only time that it was a five game series when there was also a division series was the strike short in 1981 season and if you're maybe maybe that wouldn't help you but the team

that lost to the dodgers in the lcs in the strike shortened 81 season was the Expos. And the players are the Tims, Tim Wallach and Tim Raines. Yeah, I'll tell you the thing that may have helped me there. Get it as quickly as I did. And I'm sure there are plenty of listeners who got it earlier. But it happens to be Tim Raines' birthday today. It is his 61st birthday. And I get an email every morning from baseball reference Stathead, and one of the things they include in there. And sometimes I click and I review some things

about that player's career. So I was reading a little bit about Tim Raines earlier today and his football career and all of that. But it took me a little while to remember that Tim Wallach existed. I was like, okay, Tim, Tim, right. Tim Wallach, yes. But I think I would have gotten it on the baseball card clue because I remember the guy who wants every Tim Wallach card and you have talked about that before. Yeah. All right. So that's it. Okay. That will do it for today. Thanks as always for listening. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks. Matt, Andy Ferris, Francesca Ossi, Greg, and Teddy Ballgame.

Thanks to all of you. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments coming for me and Sam and Meg via email at podcast.fangraphs.com or via the Patreon listing system if you are a supporter. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild. And thanks as always to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. We will be back with another episode soon, so stay tuned and we will talk to you then. Seems I know we'll never come through. Seems as though I'll ever be blue. I'm singing the blues. You tell me and I'll tell you.

Who means my happiness? Sing along with me, I'll see you through. Could I answer yes to? Hear me talking to you. Well, you ought to guess who. Look, here comes the price. Who's my excite? Nobody else but you.