Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1600: Blown Calls

Episode Date: October 7, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller discuss the merits of stats about the success of teams that hit more home runs in the playoffs and then review the first several games of the division series, touching on the unparalleled power of Giancarlo Stanton, the Yankees’ piggyback pitcher decision, the Astros’ resurgence, the overtaxed Padres’ bullpen, the […]

🎵 Thanks, I thought you'd give me the right advice I thought you'd let me in for one last time Hello and welcome to episode 1600 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from FanFrax Presented by our Patreon supporters, I'm Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Sam Miller of ESPN Hello Sam Hello What do you make of the stat that's been going around, that goes around to some extent every postseason, about the record of teams that out-homer other teams?

Because right now, as we record on Wednesday morning, teams that have out-homered other teams are 16-0 undefeated in these playoffs. And I have very mixed feelings about this stat. I do not find it to be very revealing, which I guess is the point. But to me, it's like almost self-evident. It's like almost tautological, like the team that has outscored the other team is undefeated in these playoffs i know it's not exactly the same but i almost think of it this way and also there's never any baseline or context it's not like well in the postseason teams that out homer other teams do better like i i never know is this suggesting that this is the way you win in the postseason because teams win even more when they out-homer their opponents

than they do in the regular season. Like regular season teams usually win when they out-homer their opponents too. So I don't really know what to make of this stat. So I've been playing this game lately called Farkle, I just learned, which is a dice game that my sister's family plays. And it's a good game for if you're kind of doing like quarantining because you can play it from like opposite sides of the room if you have your own set of dice. Anyway, so there's no like shared game board. Farkle. All right. So the thing about

Farkle is that you play multiple rounds and your strategy is going to change tremendously depending on whether you're ahead or you're behind, right? This is going to be a very long metaphor, Dependently, depending on whether you're ahead or you're behind, right? This is going to be a very long metaphor, analogy, I should say. And so if you get ahead by, you know, a little after a couple of rounds, then the other person has to start being a little bit more risk-taking. And so it ends up that the game might be not close at all because you're just continually getting zero points in pursuit of a big score while the other person can kind of play it safe. All right. So there's a stat that a broadcaster that I used to

hear a lot would talk about a lot, which was the first run that a team scores. The team that scores first wins X percent of the time. And this, I used to kind of get a little bit driven crazy by by this stat coming up almost every time that the home team or the the you know that the host team scored first i would hear that this this stat that the other team that scores first wins x period and the implication by bringing like we already know that it's better to be ahead than behind so you're not you're not revealing any deep truth like of course you want to score first. But the implication, I think, is somehow that the first run is more important than just a random run. That by getting ahead first, then maybe there's a psychological edge or maybe it changes the gameplay in such a way that, you know, like you're more likely to be able to execute your vision of how the game is going to go with the starting pitcher going X innings and then the reliever, the good relievers coming in and all that. And so the implication is that the first run is better than say the second run, by the way,

it also sounds really impressive because the team that scores first wins something like 70% of the time, which sounds like a lot, but that's because to score one, you usually have leftover runners on at the time, or you score more than once at that instant. So if you score with the three run homer, it's not the first run that makes you a 70% favorite. It's the second and the third run really do a lot of that work too. And so it's not really just one run that's scoring. Anyway, the thing about the home run thing is that you're right. It't i mean home runs are obviously runs they're good they're they're really good like a team that scores that hits more home runs almost by definition scored more runs on home runs and the team that scored more runs uh in one part of the game has

a big head start so the question is does home runs have some symbolic value or do home runs correlate to some other aspect of the gameplay that would make them especially important? And I think that one of the reasons that you hear this stat brought up nowadays is that it's a backlash to the opposite point of view, which is that a team that depends on home runs is somehow failing and is prone to droughts or is one dimensional or is only has the glamour muscles, but doesn't actually do what it takes to win. And so there was this like long, I think, long push to denigrate home run hitting teams.

And so now you have the backlash where it's like, well, you guys, duh, home runs are good. The team that hits the most home runs wins more often. And so for all of those reasons, I think that you're basically right that it doesn't tell you anything particularly notable. Of course, home runs are, it's better to hit more home runs than your opponent. And it's all in this sort of slush of abstract notions so that it's not even really that specific about what it's saying to us. It's, it's like, it's not really giving you any like degree of specificity about like what, what is actually happening. It's just very blunt and says that the team that scores more home runs is likely to win. And then from that, you're going to draw your own kind of moral or lesson from it.

But it's, it is all, I would say it is all kind of pointless. I will, though, say that I'm glad you brought this particular point up because yesterday during the Rays radio broadcast, they had tape from an interview, a pregame interview with the Rays pitching coach, Kyle Snyder. And he was asked, is it more important for the pitching staff to limit walks or limit home runs? And, you know, the obvious answer is it's more important to limit home runs. Like that's pretty intuitive. All home runs score.

Some walks score. And therefore, it is just literally more important to limit home runs than walks. it's just literally more important to limit home runs than walks unless you think that there's something about pitching like a walk heavy pitching approach has other downsides to it that you're constantly behind in the count or a home run tolerant pitching approach has other upsides to it like you're attacking hitters or whatever and so like i don't think kyle snyder was literally answering the literal question because then he would say it's more important to limit the home runs. Instead, he's answering some vague question about whether it's better to attack hitters or not.

And the inexactness with which this question is attempting to describe baseball strategy feels just kind of like, like dull and disappointing, I guess. And so that's what where I come down on this out homering your opponent is worth whatever thing it just it doesn't, it just feels like it's kind of like an overly simplistic attempt to answer something fundamental in baseball that we struggle with. And it's not getting there. It's not getting anywhere near there. It's just sort of throwing this bomb into the mix.

Yeah, I think you're right. It's kind of a corrective to the opposite narrative, which you still hear a lot about how small ball is more important, particularly in the postseason or home runs or rally killers or whatever. particularly in the postseason or home runs or rally killers or whatever. I don't know if this is more common in baseball or whether there are equivalents in other sports. Like the people in football say you don't want to score touchdowns. Like you got to get those safeties, got to get those field goals. That's how you win in the playoffs. Like, I don't know if there's a perfect equivalent. Maybe in basketball, people were resistant to three-pointers over jump shots or whatever, but it just seems like in baseball you hear this even more. And maybe it's mostly an aesthetic preference that people just enjoy teams that put the ball in play more, or maybe, as we probably talked about before, it can be more frustrating if you have an all-or-nothing team, if you are sort of sitting back and waiting for the home run and the home run doesn't come and meanwhile you're not putting anyone on base or if you do maybe you're striking out with runners in scoring position you look more futile

i guess if you are just not even putting anyone on base even if you know you're you're more capable of scoring a bunch of runs when you do finally break through. So there just seems to be some resistance to it. And that's why many people, including me at times, we've written articles about, well, is it actually better to be a contact-oriented offense in the playoffs or a less home run-reliant lineup in the playoffs? And over and over, those studies have suggested that it just doesn't really matter that much, that maybe there is some advantage to contact hitting when you're facing particularly hard-throwing pitchers, as you tend to do in the postseason. I saw Darren Willman tweet that the average fastball velocity was 96-something in the games on Tuesday. But then

there's also the advantage of if you can score with one swing, you don't have to string together a bunch of hits against good postseason pitchers and defenses, which is tough. So really, it just doesn't matter all that much. Home run-reliant offenses and non-home run-reliant offenses decline by more or less the same percentage when you get to the postseason, and pitching and defense is better, the weather is colder and everything else. So we just really look for something that points to a way to win in the playoffs. And it's just really hard to identify a concrete way to win in the playoffs. So because there are people saying the opposite, that you don't want to hit home runs, which just seems obviously wrong and yet people

persist in saying that like on national broadcasts so i guess you have to have this stat just to kind of correct the record and say well no actually when you hit home runs it's good which doesn't even seem like something we should have to point out at this point and also when you allow home runs it's bad which is now this is this is sort of like a second front that kyle schneider is introducing the not only do you not want to have an offense built on home runs but as a pitching staff you do want to allow home runs he's not actually saying that but it's now going kind of both ways that well yeah again yeah kyle okay he was just answering your question in a yeah way that seemed like people would respond to.

And maybe it seems more relevant now just because offense as a whole is more homerun reliant. And so teams tend to score a high percentage of their runs on homers. And I think Rachel McDaniel pointed out that 20 of the 24 runs scored thus far in the Yankees-Rays series have been scored on the homerun. thus far in the Yankees-Rays series, have been scored on the home run. So I suppose that this would be maybe more closely correlated to success in this era when all you do is hit home runs, and that's like the only way to score sometimes these days. I guess it might be more relevant then, but it just still seems like something that we should not continue to have to keep saying, but I guess we will anyway. So we haven't talked much about the Division Series action thus far,

so I guess we can catch up on a couple things of note that have happened over the past few days before the next slate of games begins. So maybe the thing we could start with, which is sort of the dominating the conversation at the moment, is the Yankees-Rays managing and Aaron Boone's or the Yankees attempt to out-Rays the Rays with kind of a quasi-Curley-Ogden maneuver, where they started Davey Garcia and pulled him after an inning and put in Jay Happ. And this is kind of an example to an extent of what I was talking about and writing about last week, which is that I think we make too much of managerial moves in the postseason. And I get why it happens, right?

Because managers have all the time in the world to think about what they want to do. And they decide this is the best decision. And if you think that decision is a mistake, it seems like an unforced error. Whereas how mad can you get at a pitcher for giving up a home run, or a hitter for swinging through a ball, or a fielder for whiffing on something? They're not trying to do that. They didn't do it on purpose. It's a failure of coordination. So it's easier to forgive if not forget. And we can tell ourselves that we would have made a different and smarter decision in that situation, whereas we can't convincingly tell ourselves that we would have made a different and smarter decision in that situation whereas we can't convincingly tell ourselves that we would have hit that breaking ball or we would have struck that guy out but i still think we make too much of managerial moves

for a few reasons one because managers don't make decisions on their own so obviously this decision boone gets blamed for it or could have been credited for it in a different universe where it worked out, but he's just the public face. That's almost like one of the points of having a manager is to put someone out there and say, this person is pressing the button, so blame him or give him the credit, whereas really it's kind of a collective effort of the GM and the front office and the coaches and the analytics people and everyone else. So Boone is sort of the point person and ultimately has the responsibility for everything that happens. And then B, there's just so much we don't know, whether it's like sophisticated matchup

stats that we don't really have access to and good batter versus pitcher projections or information on the conditions of the players involved. Maybe they're hiding an injury or something. You never know. And then the real reason, I think, is that no manager really swings the game that much in terms of expected winning percentage. Obviously, managers have an impact in that they choose who is in the game at any particular time, and then those players either play well or don't play well and so you can trace it back to the manager for putting in this pitcher or not putting in this pitcher and say it's because

of him but really if you were just to look at the probabilities of what was expected to happen there wouldn't be that big a swing between whatever starting hap instead of garcia or starting garcia instead of happen letting him go longer or you know leaving Garcia in longer whatever it is so can I interrupt real quick because this is one of those things where I wasn't after the Yankees lost I saw that there was like a lot of people upset with Boone yeah but it wasn't clear to me what exactly like because I wasn't like totally locked into the conversation was there a uniform demand for what he should have done like i know that there was a sense that like well boone bungled that but was everybody

like pretty much united behind the idea that he should have done x instead or was it just well they lost so something must have gone wrong yeah i think it was more the latter because i saw people suggesting different courses like i saw some people were upset that he didn't just start Tanaka because Tanaka is maybe their second best starting pitcher and maybe you just start him in game two. I don't think that matters at all because it's a best of five series with no off days. So Tanaka is only going to start once. So you start him in game two or start him in game three. It really doesn't make much of a difference i don't think and there might even be an advantage to holding him which might be why the yankees did it because you figure you might get a longer outing of him and so you can then sort of stagger your pitchers you expect to go deeper into games to lighten the workload on your reliever so

that was one thing i saw other things i saw saw was just, well, Garcia's just better, you know, just let him keep pitching because he's just better than Hap. He could still come back in game four if they want him to, so he's not burned for the series. And also, I don't think you could have used some obvious opener in this situation or the Rays wouldn't have fallen for it, right? And then you couldn't have pulled the switch and gotten the platoon advantage. And then you couldn't have pulled the switch and gotten the platoon advantage. And then I think maybe the most common criticism and maybe the fairest criticism is that Hap just didn't want to do this. And so if it's clear that you have a veteran pitcher who doesn't want to be used this way, that you shouldn't try to force him into that role. So we can talk about that. I also saw some criticism that was just like, well, this is too cute, or it's overthinking it, or it's trying to get too clever. I don't think that's really a valid criticism, because like people have pulled the same maneuver in the past, and we celebrate it for being clever, right? So if it's clever, then that's good. I don't know if it can be too clever. It either makes sense or it doesn't, right? So I don't know that it was like, oh, we're going to do this just for the sake of being creative or experimental or out of the box or something. So that just seems like almost, I don't know, anti-intellectual or like pro-orthodoxy type reaction. I saw some media member refer to the

calculus crew in the Yankees front office, and it reminded me of us being called the corduroy crew with the stompers. But the point that Happ wasn't comfortable with this, and he made it clear, I think, in his postgame comments and said he expressed his preference that he wanted to start. And so if he wanted to start, then maybe you just say whatever marginal advantage you get here from starting Garcia and then pulling this handedness switch so that in theory you get the platoon advantage against the Rays lineup, which is lefty heavy. Although they didn't go with their like nine left-handed hitters lineup. I think it was only five and Garcia had gotten past a lot of those. So I don't know that the potential

advantage was that great. But the idea is just that, well, even though Hap said once he was in the game, he went about his business the way he would have in any other time and he tried just as hard and whether he wanted to be in that position or not didn't really affect him. Perhaps it still did. Perhaps there was some part of him that had reservations about it or was miffed about it or didn't prepare the way he would have otherwise. And so just why mess with it? There isn't that much of a difference between Hap and Garcia. Just start one or start both of them in different games and don't worry about trying to get

the platoon advantage because it's just not worth putting a player in a position where he wasn't comfortable with it. Yeah. It's really hard to know how seriously to take Hap's feelings after the game just because, you know, he had a tough night. And I mean, you know, you know how we are humans. Yeah. It's a lot harder to, you know, to be happy when you had a bad night.

And so that's not necessarily to say that he wasn't in a position to succeed or not. I mean, I don't know. Yeah, I don't have that much to say. I think that, you know, this does go back to what you were saying and what we talked about last week about not overreacting to one game in a division series just because, you know, they do have, they are going to lose some games not every game is not a must win and this was a game that the Yankees were probably going to lose they were one way or another going to be outmatched Jay Happ is not as good as Tyler Glasnow yeah and even if you know he's a starter and he's got his whole routine I mean he's he's

a worse pitcher and so they they tried something with a weaker pitching plan yesterday, and it didn't work. It wasn't, I don't think, destined to fail or anything like that. I don't know. I mean, you're right that there is both a certain amount of respect that management should show to the players when they're instituting these plans, partly out of human kindness, but also because I think we do generally believe that players do better when

they're comfortable and when they have some idea of what to expect. And anytime something like this fails and you have the players saying after the fact that they didn't really know what was going on. It really does point to like that should be the easy part that it should be the easy thing to as the manager to make sure that everybody knows what's happening. On the other hand, there is a little bit of a tricky thing where if Boone and the Yankees decided this was how they wanted to do it, and then they go to Jay Happ before the game and Happ goes, absolutely not. I can't pitch that way. Well, then you're really in a bad position because this was the plan that you wanted. You know that Happ's going to do it.

You know he's going to go out there and probably not be affected too much. But then if you ask him, like, hey, I don't know. You kind of just want everybody to be in the mindset that they're going to be prepared to help when they're called upon. Right, yeah. And you don't want to make it a thing where, like, every player has veto power over the strategic decision. So it's kind of, it's a, I guess I just said that should be the easy part, but that's not really the easy part, is it?

said that should be the easy part but that's not really the easy part is it you can blame both of them like i guess you could blame boone or whomever on the yankees for not working around whatever hang up hap has about this you could also blame hap for having this hang up in the first place because like it's 2020 and it's the postseason and there are no off days and it's just like pitch whenever they ask you to pitch i I mean, look at the Rays. Like, the Rays have everyone in that pen saves games at some point. Or, like, you know, it's openers. It's starters. I mean, hardly anyone has rolls.

Or I guess their rotation is a little more set than it has been in recent years when it wasn't as healthy. But basically, it's almost like positionless baseball at this point. wasn't as healthy but basically it's almost like positionless baseball at this point and so if you're jay happ and you're not garrett cole like yeah you just have to be ready to pitch whatever like i don't know that you should you know jay happ who last year made three appearances in the postseason for the yankees all in relief uh-huh yeah so he's done it before and and he was warned it wasn't like they said you're starting jay and then suddenly david garcia was out there and they never told him like he he had some inkling that this was coming even if he wasn't happy about it and maybe this was something that was just building because

hap has been unhappy about how he has been used i think throughout this year like he's thought or accused the yankees of manipulating his usage because of a vesting option, which I think the this point you just have to be ready to play whatever position or come in whatever inning they ask you to because that's just how baseball works now and that's kind of what being a team player is at this point just saying yeah I'll do whatever you tell me my role is I'll come in and try to get guys out it's more or less the same job whenever you come in so I think maybe it wasn't like a brilliant plan. It wasn't maybe a perfect time to do this or the expected advantage from doing this wasn't so great. Maybe that it outweighed whatever discomfort Hap had. But like if Garcia had come in and not given up

a home run to a Rosarena who just never makes an out anymore, or if Hap had come in and not given up a home run to a Rosarena who just never makes an out anymore, or if Hap had come in and not given up a couple of home runs in his outing, then we might all be saying, brilliant by Aaron Boone to do this maneuver instead of trying to stick with one of these guys who individually are not that great. He made the best of it. He stole something from the Rays' playbook and he beat them at their own game. That's probably what people would be saying about Aaron Boone if both of those guys had shut down the Rays. So the question is, did they fail to shut down the Rays because of the way they were handled? Or did they fail to shut down the Rays because the Rays are pretty good and they're not great

and because it was one game? I kind of lean toward the latter. So I don't know. I'm not saying it was a brilliant move or anything but i'm also not saying fire erin boone or whoever because of this move and the fact that it backfired anyway that outweighed jean carlos stanton hitting two more home runs and as i said on on the Ringer podcast, those were the two types of Stanton home runs that he hit in that game. He hit the one that, I guess they're both types that almost no one else hits because he just hits the ball harder than anyone else in the world. But sometimes that manifests itself in an extremely long and majestic home run, like the second one he hit, which was measured at 458 feet

or something and seemed a lot longer than that. And then sometimes he hits the one that barely clears the fence, but wouldn't for anyone else because he hits it at like a low launch angle. It's basically a line drive that just never has time for gravity to take it below the fence because he hits it so incredibly hard. So he hits home runs on trajectories that no one else hits home runs on. And sometimes that can be the high apex ones that go forever. And sometimes it can be the low liner ones that just keep going. Yeah. You said, I only saw one of them and you said the two types of Stanton home runs. And I immediately knew what the second one must have been. Because you're right, all the other big guys, they all hit the same like they're there. I you know, you know, me, I don't love home run highlights, right? Because the longest home runs tend to be fly balls to, you know, center field or just off center that like land in this big expansive seat but like it's like it's not that interesting and you know it does it really at well you know and so that's

how the the big guys tend to hit their longest home runs kind of more up the middle and the really nice ones are are either low line drives which stanton hits or down the line and so so here's a here's a fact here's a fun fact yesterday john carlos stanton accounted for three of the four hardest hit balls in in all of play in all you know in all of action he would have had the hardest except chad pinder very narrowly beat him with him with one of his home runs or with Pinder's home run. So he almost had the three hardest hit baseballs in all of play yesterday. And doesn't it kind of feel like it's almost hard to explain why Giancarlo Stanton is not better than he is?

I mean, he's great. There's nothing wrong with him at all. He is a complete treasure. He has perhaps added more to the aesthetics of baseball during his career than anybody, you know, with maybe the exception of like Anderton Simmons or, you know, maybe some pitchers who do funny things with pitches. But he hits the ball like he just is. He is the Eraldis Chapman of hitting the ball, right?

He dominates the leaderboard in a way that it is not approachable for anyone else. This is another one, but Freddie Freeman's hardest hit ball all year is slower than all three balls that Giancarlo Stanton hit yesterday, just in one game. And Freddie Freeman's going to be the MVP. And Freddie Freeman is a power hitter, and Freeman's going to be the MVP. And Freddie Freeman is a power hitter. And he's going to be the MVP. And Stanton hit three baseballs. And they all went farther than Freddie Freeman is capable of hitting a baseball. And you would think it's not like Stanton strikes out more than everybody else.

It's not like he's like a completely limited athlete otherwise. He is basically a normal baseball player in every way. And then at the most important tool that you can have, which is the ability to the greatest hitter of your era, one of the greatest hitters of all time, maybe the greatest hitter of all time. And it's sort of interesting that that isn't how it works, that, you know, like there's only so many feet you need from a home run, I guess, is the key thing. Although in the other home run, the second type that you you described anybody but him doesn't get a home run no in the first one anybody anybody in the world who hits the ball on the barrel like he hit the ball on the barrel gets a home run on that one it it just travels 35 feet shorter but they all get a home run on that the other one though that's like a single that gets the runner to third for anybody

else. And so you would think it would add up. It's sort of surprising that it doesn't add up. Isn't it sort of odd? It is. Yeah. I mean, I guess in recent years, obviously, the big problem has been health. Yeah. And he plays like 20 games a year the last couple of years and still ends up with the hardest hit balls of the season because it's not something you need a lot of sample size for. It's like, you know, whenever he hits the ball, it's incredibly hard. So whether he plays 150 games or 18, it's still probably going to be harder than anyone else. It's like the Chapman thing. Like, you know, he can throw one inning and he'll still throw the hardest pitch of the season probably. So it's partly that, but you're right. Like even when

he's been healthy healthy he's like a seven win player instead of you know a 10 win player or something which uh i guess it's he doesn't hit for high averages so that you would think though that hitting the ball yeah you think hitting the ball harder than everybody else all the time would would cause higher averages though yeah that's true and he he does strike out more than the league average. And that's part of it. And he's like a pretty good defender, certainly an adequate defender,

but not a gold glove type guy. And he's not adding much on the bases usually. So it's part of that. Like he's not one dimensional, but he clearly has one way better dimension. So it's all of that. But yeah, you're right. Like with his otherworldly skills, you'd think he'd be better.

His career high OPS plus is 169 and Mike Trout's career low OPS plus is 168. So I guess, I mean, the simple answer is just that like a huge percentage of the work that goes on in the batter's boxes knowing where the strike zone is precisely and that's what mike trout has and that's what most hitters don't and stanton isn't bad in that respect he's just normal um and being otherworldly in the ability to discern a strike uh turns out to be as valuable maybe more valuable even than being otherworldly in the ability to uh slam that sledgehammer down and send it the thing going what's the thing in the fair the thing that goes the what do you call

that oh uh the the hammer yeah the test of strength that what do you what goes with the bell it hits the bell you hit the hammer the thing goes up and hits the bell what hits the bell i don't know what is that what do? What do they put on that toy? What do you think that is? If you had to guess, what is it? Just like a little piece of metal. I don't know. Does that have the proper name?

I don't know. I don't go to a lot of county fairs, I guess. Tell me if it has a name, though. I'll look it up. You talk about the next game. Okay. Can I give you a quick stat blast? Cause Megan,

I didn't do one and I have one that is relevant to this game. They'll take a data set sorted by something like ERA minus or OBS plus. And then they'll tease out some interesting tidbit, discuss it at length and analyze it for us in amazing ways. Here's to Daystablast. So because Aaron Boone decided to start Davey Garcia He gave me an opportunity for a stat blast here Which was inspired by listener Adam And he wrote in with the subject line

Davey versus Goliath, very good He says, I'm watching game two of the ALDS Between the Yankees and Rays Where the starting pitcher matchup is the 5'9 Davey Garcia Facing off against the 6'8 Tyler Glasnow. Has there ever been such a drastic height difference between two starters before regular season included? Off the top of my head, I can't name many starters listed below 5'9 or above 6'8,

so I would think an 11-inch difference is pretty rare. I would also love to know the all-time head-to-head record between the taller tossers and the shorter shovers. So I have an answer here from listener Adam Ott and his handy RetroSheet database, which goes back to, I don't know, at least most of the modern era of baseball history. 11 inches is rare, as Adam guessed, but it is not a record. In fact, there have been 36 starting pitcher matchups with a bigger mismatch in height between that. And the record is 14 inches, both fairly recent.

I guess you'd expect it to be fairly recent because pitchers are super tall now. So the biggest mismatches in starting pitcher height in 2016, Alex Meyer, who is 6'9 Started against Marcus Stroman Who is listed at 5'7 And then the other 14 inch Mismatch Randy Johnson In 2000 faced Daniel Garibay who was 5'8 And Johnson of course was

6'10 so 14 inches then there's some Handful of 13 inch ones Stroman vs. Glassnow Actually in. Stroman versus Glasnow, actually, in 2018. Stroman versus Pfister in 2016. Randy Johnson versus Tom Gordon in 1991. Stubby Overmyer versus Mike Namick in 1943. That's a blast from the past. And Stroman again versus Mike Pelfrey in 2017. So lots of Stroman, lots of Randy Johnson, as one would guess. But according to Adam's database, this was the biggest mismatch in postseason history.

So it was anomalous in that respect and historic. And Adam actually did the work to see whether the tall pitchers tend to beat the short pitchers. pitchers tend to beat the short pitchers. And he found that in regular seasons, teams that start a taller starting pitcher are 85,675 versus 86,323. So the shorter pitchers actually win the matchups overall. And in the postseason, teams with taller pitchers are slightly ahead, 688 to 672.

So that sort of surprised me because you tend to think of taller pitchers as being better. But I guess if you're a short pitcher who makes the majors, it must be because you do things well that compensate for your lack of height. And so it's a pretty even matchup. The preferred term for the part of the strength game, which is called a high striker. The name of that game is the high striker. And the word for the thing that shoots up is generally called the puck. And in fact, appears to sometimes be a hockey puck, but it is a puck. By the way, something you said just then in that stat blast reminded me that I've been meaning to note for a while that the term soft tosser must be the strangest thing about baseball to people in England.

So, yeah, I guess like I could imagine that that might be why baseball doesn't catch on because we we say soft tosser, and that's too odd of a phrase for British slang to handle. Yeah, that could be confusing. People think about like, you know, wicked googly's or whatever cricket terms that sound strange to our American ears, but there must be just as many baseball terms that are equally confounding. So, okay, well, high striker and puck. All right, that are equally confounding. Okay, well, high striker and puck. All right, I'm prepared for my second career as a carny. All right, so let's move on, I suppose, to the other AL game.

Probably not quite as much to say about the Oakland-Houston series. Astros are up 2-0, and thus far it's been basically an all-Astros show. Astros are hitting a lot, and Astros are pitching pretty well. So it's, you know, Correa, who is up to his usual postseason heroics, but also Springer, who's up to his usual October heroics, but also some of the guys who slumped surprisingly during the regular season, Correa, Altuve, etc. So George Springer, I think he entered the postseason 13th all-time in championship win probability added. And the championship win probability added has migrated to baseball reference and so

on. But there's like a slight inconsistency in how they're presented. And so I'm doing a little extrapolating. But if I'm right about this, he has added about five percent of championship win probability added this postseason which would put him probably uh let's see like 11th all-time now just behind mickey mannell and so george springer i mean just postseason like i mean an all-timer right yeah just absolutely outrageous an all-timer what would you guess his slash line is in the postseason i actually i know what his ops is because i've. What would you guess his slash line is in the postseason?

I actually, I know what his OPS is because I've looked. I don't know his slash line, but. So his slash line is 281, 364, 579, which is a 943 OPS, which is good. Which is good. Like that's good. It's better than his OPS in the regular season. It's clearly consistent with a person who would you know ops in the regular season it's it's clearly consistent with a person who would be very valuable in the postseason but it's interesting that he's not

just i mean he's he's a little better in the postseason and yet i guess what i'm saying is it's not just that he has hit better in the postseason but even within that framework, he has hit even better during the postseason when it's like the peak postseason moments. That his championship win probability added far outstrips just his postseason performance. He is like super clutch, and then among the super clutch, he is super clutch. Yeah. Yeah, he's picked his spots pretty well and just been also very good overall.

He's had series where he's looked bad and been unsuccessful, which shows you the folly of really reading into any player's postseason performance in any given year. Like, you know, he didn't hit in the 2017 ALCS sandwich between two great series, or he didn't hit well in the first couple rounds of 2019, and then he turned it on in the World Series. So I guess he's concentrated a lot of his production in the moments that mattered most. Like, he has a 12.95 career OPS in 14 World Series games. And you're probably more likely to remember that than his 385 OPS in wildcard games or something. So yeah, I think that's part of it.

I meant to say that about Stanton too. Like I can't remember a player looking more like, like a good player looking more vulnerable and exploitable than Stanton looked in the last couple of postseasons. It really did look like, oh, you can pitch this guy. If you just know what his weakness is, he'll chase this pitch or he'll swing through this pitch. And yeah, he's scary if he gets the bat on the ball, but you can find ways around that. And I think there was some conversation about him being a postseason bust or unclutch or that. And I think there was some conversation about him, you know, being a postseason buster on clutch or whatever. And then now he's just, you can't get him out

and he hits a home run every game. So it really, it fluctuates from year to year and series to series. So what we talked about last week, which is that the Astros, it wouldn't really surprise you to see them turn out to be much better than their regular season record and yet on the other hand we've only seen two games and so it wouldn't much surprise you to

see this just be two games nope nothing would much surprise us period no and not much to say about it except that at the moment their stars are hitting they were there was a comment that one of the broadcasters made after stanton homered yesterday which was uh that the postseason is when you need your best players to be your best players and and i thought i was moved by that and then i thought wait a minute but don't people always talk about how postseason is when like unexpected heroes step up so i guess you can say it either way they're both good stories but at the moment the astros best players the players who've you know carried them through post seasons and who showed different levels of vulnerability during the regular season this year are smashing which is what their plan was yeah and also they're getting good work out of guys like Frambois

Valdez who's been fantastic in both of these rounds whether as a starter or as a reliever and they're doing that Astro style thing where they're using some starters in relief to great effect. But I don't know what that team would have done without Frambois Valdez this year because without Urquidy for part of the year, without Verlander for pretty much all of the year, without Osuna, without half the bullpen at times, they really needed innings.

And Valdez has just been great, like a legitimate Cy Young contender even and I don't know that anyone really saw that coming because he had all kinds of control problems the last couple seasons and now he just doesn't and he's really good he gets grounders and misses bats and has good control and does everything you want to do and so I guess the concern for the Astros now is that Zach Greinke is having some arm issues and is not starting Game 3 or Keedy is. So if that lingers and if they advance and they don't have Greinke in the next couple

rounds, that would be tough to piece together the innings just because any shortage of arms is going to be magnified in a format where you don't have any off days. So it's tough to get by without Greinke, but thus far in the series they have. All right, so over on the NL side, I guess the Atlanta-Miami series, we've only seen one game as we spoke, and it went about as well as you would have expected for Miami, which is not very well. Atlanta hit. They have a great lineup. They showed it. Marlins bullpen, not good and was not good in this game. So not so much

to make of that. I guess the storyline of this series now is the bad blood between Acuna and the Marlins, which has been the case over the past couple of years. So everyone was talking about tensions between the A's and the Astros or the Rays and the Yankees. And now it's the Acuna-Marlins beef that has flared up yet again. So I don't know whether the plunking was intentional or not. It's tough to tell because Acuna has just owned the Marlins to such an extent that whenever he gets hit, it's going to look like a retaliation for something that he just did because he always recently did something really good. And that was the case here, too, when he hit a home run and then got hit. And I don't know, the circumstance made it plausible that it was not intentional, but they seem to think it is.

But they seem to think it is. And Acuna tweeted, they have to hit me because they don't get me out, which is true. Basically, that has been the case. And Miguel Rojas was hit by baseballs and possibly defending himself by spiking someone is not like the the big takeaway from this series but maybe it will be okay uh so uh this is where i wanted to mention the thing that's not really about the series at all but they're playing at minute made park right i have that one right correct yes okay so they're playing at minute made park and um the okay so here's the policy for minute made park uh the astros policy is to close the roof if there's a threat of rain a threat of excessive wind above 30 miles per hour a heat index of about 88 degrees for a night game or if the temperature is below 65 degrees it takes two to three hours to cool the ballpark once the roof is closed which plays into the decision major league baseball has the final say

over the roof during the postseason section 11.7 of the mlb postseason manual states the commissioner or a designated representative shall determine whether a ballpark's retractable roof shall remain open or closed before and during any postseason game. The roof was closed yesterday. Yesterday, there was no rain, nor threat of rain. The temperature was quite moderate. And the reason that the roof was closed was, do you know why the roof was closed? I don't know.

Maybe they said it during. Okay. Apparently, the reason the roof was closed, according to the Marlins broadcast, was that they didn't want to have shadows. And so I'm wondering how you feel about that. Baseball is an outdoor game by tradition when possible. And I think people generally prefer it as an outdoor game to an indoor game. But of course, it's also a game that can be difficult to play in certain weather conditions,

particularly because of the composition of the baseball. And so it makes a lot of sense that you wouldn't play in extreme heat and you can't play in rain. But to me, saying that the positioning of the sun during certain hours of the day is an act of nature that is too extreme for us to go outside in, I was disappointed. It's a very, very, very small gripe that i have and i know that there is something tedious as well about the shadows but i felt like a concession to to to i don't know to something i would have liked the roof to be open now maybe it's just safety maybe it's unsafe i don't know how i know we, I know the shadows are overspoken of. Well, if it's a safety thing, then there would be rules about playing in shadows.

Right. Yeah. So it can't be a safety thing. I'm taking safety off the board. You can't say it's a safety thing because otherwise then they would have to admit that they're constantly imperiling their players. So it's not a safety thing. In that case, I say shadows are not a good enough reason to play indoors.

Yeah, I guess I can get on board with that. Yeah. I still don't know how much the shadows matter. And I want to know because you hear it without fail in every single October broadcast whenever there's a shadow anywhere. Like if there's a shadow like, you know, on one sliver of the the field you're hearing about it for three innings beforehand here come the shadows and then when the shadow's there it's like oh shadow's crossing the plate now shadows between the mound and the plate oh shadows past the mound it doesn't matter anymore it's just constant shadow updates and gerald schiffman wrote about this for bp i think

a couple years ago and couldn't confirm that there is an effect. It's hard to disprove, but nothing stood out to him in the numbers. And I believe he is working on a follow-up now, which I eagerly anticipate because this is just like the most fundamental maxim of post-season broadcasting is that shadows change everything. And if that doesn't turn out to be true, I'll have to question everything. But you hear it so much, and it seems intuitive. And so I believe it to some extent. But I wonder if it's as big an effect as everyone says it is, or maybe Gerald would have found the effect more easily. But yeah, I see what you mean. It affects both teams equally. Or I guess, in theory, it could. Maybe in practice, it doesn't because of just, or I guess in theory it could, maybe in practice

it doesn't because of just the timing of half innings. Maybe it affects one team more, but you can't really predict that probably. And I don't see it as a safety issue either really. So yeah, I say play on, but it does highlight like how much of a difference there does seem to be between these neutral parks when it comes to the ball carrying. I think everyone's used to Texas being a hitter's park and the ball carrying really well there, but that does not seem to be the case at the new Texas park. The ball just does not get hit out there, and so we're seeing balls fly out of the West Coast parks and day games and heat and all of that. So people have kind of questioned, is it the ball or is it the environment?

And maybe it's both. Who knows at this point? All right. So moving on to, I suppose, our last series here, Dodgers and Padres. Dodgers took game one and have Clayton Kershaw going against San Diego. So Mike Clevenger tried. He made a valiant effort to come back from the issue that has been plaguing him here. And he only made it through 24 pitches, just barely got to the second inning before he had a big velocity drop and had to be removed from the game. And I saw a quote where he said, the discomfort in his arm feels like bones are hitting in the back of my elbow,

which sounds very uncomfortable. That doesn't sound like something that I would want to experience, particularly if I were trying to throw a baseball. So he didn't last that long, and that put the Padres in the position that they've been in thus far in the postseason, which is trying to get through every game using like nine pitchers, which just doesn't seem to be a sustainable strategy. Like they've managed it pretty well and it worked well enough for them to get through the Cardinals, but it's a lot harder to do that over a best of five series and also against the dodgers so i don't know who's going to give them length but

they they need to get some because it's again they're in that situation now where teams and relievers are not used to pitching every day out of the bullpen anymore and so now they're being asked to do that and eventually that's going to fall apart i I'm curious. I think I guess it was a year and a half ago. Was it a year? Did we have Andy? No, Andy didn't do the play, the Dodgers season preview this year, or maybe he did, but I wasn't there. A year and a half ago, Andy McCullough did the Dodgers season preview on this show. And we asked if Walker Bueller or Clayton Kershaw would be the postseason starter in October. Obviously, this was projecting into the future.

What do you think? By the end of the year, who will be seen as the ace? And then he said, oh, he didn't think there was any doubt about it. It was Walker Bueller. The torch had been passed. Kershaw had shown some signs of decline. And Bueller was, of course, on the upswing. And Bueller has been incredible as a pitcher.

In fact, in started game one of the wildcard series and started game one of this series. I'm curious, though, to know whether you think that Kershaw, well, I guess I'm just kind of feeling to see what do you think of Kershaw at this stage relative to your kind of the line graph of your confidence in Clayton Kershaw throughout his career you know he was he was phenomenal again this year he added some velocity he was in some ways as as good as he ever was in his peak in some ways he wasn't quite as good so there are some peripherals issues there still but uh in some ways as good as he ever was during his peak and then of course he

just had not just probably his best postseason performance but what could have been you know one of the all-time great postseason performances ever and Bueller of course is very good but do you think that in fact Kershaw has has has taken that back should Kershaw be seen as the ace of this staff again and particularly going into game two? Do you feel that way about him? Yeah, I think I do. Just partially because of Buehler's issues with the blister or whatever, and not having been able to go deep into games and being a little inconsistent lately.

So I don't feel like he is 100% necessarily. So that's part of it. But also, Kershaw has rebounded. He's gotten better. I feel pretty good about him these days, which is maybe sort of a silly thing to say, because probably you should always have felt pretty good about Clayton Kershaw, but it hasn't always worked out that way in the postseason. I actually wrote about Kershaw today and did sort of a deep dive into his season. I kind of write like an annual exploration of what's going on with Clayton Kershaw. And the last couple of years when I've written versions of that article, the news hasn't

been that great because he was losing velocity and trying to find ways to work around that with pretty good success because even Kershaw who's throwing 90 or whatever still has great command still has great movement still has great breaking stuff so it's not like your typical pitcher who throws that hard he he still has more than your usual number of ways to to get people out however hard he's throwing but I think there's a pretty big difference when he's throwing 92-93 than when he's throwing 89-90. And there is like a 100-woba point gap between how hard Kershaw gets hit on fastballs above 90 and below 90. And is that totally real? I don't know. But if there's anything to it, it matters because he's basically eliminated

the the sub 90 mile per hour fastball at this point like you know he doesn't have his mid 90s velo back but he also doesn't really have 80s velo anymore and I think maybe that's an important difference for him I still don't exactly understand how he's so successful because his approach is pretty predictable, I find. Like when I look into his numbers, it seems very clear to me what his strategy is and what he's doing. Like it's extreme. It really stands out. Like on the first pitch of plate appearances, and I noted this in my piece, and I think Mike Petriello wrote something similar today too, he throws a ton of fastballs, like more than almost any other

starter except Walker Bueller actually on the first pitch. So he comes out, he fires fastballs, he throws most of those fastballs in the zone, and he steals a lot of strikes on first pitches because batters usually don't swing even on pitches in the strike zone on first pitches. And you'd think against Clayton Kershaw, because he does this consistently, you'd think they'd say, hey, go up there swinging, look for a first pitch fastball strike because you're usually going to get one. And yet that doesn't really happen. And so he gets ahead.

He has a first pitch strike rate now that's as high as it's ever been in his career, way higher than the league average. So then he gets ahead and he goes to like all breaking balls. Like when he's ahead in the count, he throws 75% breaking balls. Even when he's behind in the count after the first pitch, he throws like 60% breaking balls. It's way more breaking balls than any other starter throws after the first pitch. And it works. Like he gets ahead and then he stays ahead.

Only a few otheritchers had the advantage In the count as often as Kershaw did this year and so You'd think that you'd say Hey guys go up there swinging and Maybe the Padres will I don't know But that wasn't really a trait of theirs This season they were like middle of the

Pack when it came to swinging at first pitches Or first pitches in the strike zone That is something to be aware of with the Braves, I think, if the Dodgers do get to an NLCS matchup with the Braves, because they swing more often than any other team in the majors at first pitches. And so they might ambush Kershaw in a way that would work out for them. But I don't know. Padres haven't really done that this year. Maybe their scouting report will say to do that today, but you'd think it would be exploitable. and yet it hasn't really been exploited, which maybe is just a testament to how good Kershaw's stuff still is. But Padres were the best team at hitting breaking

balls this year, at least in terms of expected weighted on base. So in that sense, it's not a great matchup for him. All right, I would like to end with an anecdotal observation I made that I developed into a trend with about one hour of baseball observation behind it. Dustin Palmentier, by the way, pointed out in his Sackbunt newsletter that you could make the case that where the game the padres dodgers game one was decided or flipped um was a pair of calls umpire calls fairly early in the game um one was a 3-1 pitch to trent grisham with the bases loaded in which walker bueller got a borderline call missed his target but just just got it right, right, right, right, right

on the lower inside corner and got the call to even the count or not even the count, but to do a full count. And then he got Grisham to get out of the jam. And then the next inning with Fernando Tatis leading off, he had a 3-1 count and threw a pitch that was clearly outside and got the strike, got back in the count, and then struck Tatis out. So these are two 3-1 counts, 3-1 pitches. And then about an hour before that, Peter Fairbanks had been in a terrible jam. In a terrible jam, he came out and had no control whatsoever, walked the first batter, fell behind to Gleyber Torres, was in a 3-1 count, and threw a pitch that was way outside, way outside, and got the call.

And so my new theory is that the 3-0 auto strike is starting to become the 3-0 auto strike is starting to become the 3-1 auto strike that umpires are treating 3-1 pitches the same way they treated 3-0 pitches to some degree which is if it's close they're going to call it and you gotta you know as a hitter you should be up here swinging don't don't expect me to help you walk to first base this is all very speculative but i do have a little bit of extremely incomplete and irresponsible statistical work that i did in the 40 seconds before we started recording so okay first of all i will just note that the the pitch to grisham was 13% likely to be called a strike, according to ESPN stats and info, 13%. The pitch to Tatis was 3% likely to be called a strike.

And then the pitch to Torres was 0% likely to be called a strike. So within an hour, we had a 0, a 13, and a 3, and they all went to the batters or i should say to the pitchers so from 2015 to 2019 if you narrow pitches down to those that are between 10 and 50 likely to be called strikes and this is based on location not based on the count so count irrelevant all right location all that matters between 10 and 50 likely to be called strikes based on their location on all pitches 26.9 of those pitches are are called strikes which is about what you'd expect it's right about in the middle 26.9 of all pitches in the in those locations are strikes 26.9 in three one counts it's 27.1 which is very, very slightly from 26.9 to 27.1, a very small bump. And then on 3-0, it jumps up to 28.5.

And so that's the auto strike. If it's close enough, the umpire looks for reasons to call it a strike. So there's a clear jump there from 0.2 percentage point jump at 3-1 to a 1.4 percentage point jump on 3-0. And so that's the auto strike. You can see it, right? You can recognize that. So if you look at the percentage of those pitches, the 3-1 pitches that have been called

strikes in 2020 broadly, remember 27.1% was our 3-1 standard for the previous five years this year it was 29.6 which is you know like a lot more that's 2.5 percentage points more that doesn't prove anything for one thing these pitches are all in a very very broadly defined bucket and so it could just be that more of these pitches tend to be falling closer to 50 than to 10. And it could also be the strike zone seems to be a little bit bigger, which at least according to stats and infos classifications is consistent. If you look at all pitches, there is actually an increase in those pitches being called a strike on all counts in 2020, but it's a smaller jump. So in all counts for those locations, the increase went from 26.9% in the previous five years to 28.3% this year. So that's an increase

of 1.4 percentage points. So clearly by these definitions, simply more of those pitches are called strikes generally, but still the increase was much bigger in 3-1 counts. So from 1.4 percentage point increase to a 2.5 percentage point increase on 3-1. And so there's a significant difference. Now we don't have nearly enough, we don't have any useful information in the postseason, but there have been eight taken pitches in this postseason on 3-1 that are in that location, and four of them were called strikes which uh is why i noticed it yeah it's like the the adage about how you can't give good teams extra outs which we have heard invoked many times this postseason whether it's uh with the cronin worth throw to hasmer the other day against the the dodgers who have such a great lineup already or whether it's the Semyon error that led to that Astros rally. The same

thing sort of applies to giving extra strikes to good teams, although it's the umpires doing it in some cases and not the opponents. So there have been some very notable examples when all of Twitter rose up to criticize a certain umpire and when it seemed To affect the game in some ways It does matter Getting those calls correct There are times when it really can hurt Your team yeah Torres ended up walking Anyway so it did not affect that game in any way He walked on the next page

Alright well we've got to go catch Up on the latest Twitter drama The Astros are all tweeting about A fake news report or so they Say about how they're all privately trying to get back at the teams they consider their tormentors, like all the teams that they beat when they were cheating and now are aggrieved at. So everyone hates the Astros even more. I'm kind of looking forward to like an Astros-Yankees ALCS if there is one. I mean,

a Rays ALCS would be fun too, but Astros-Yankees in terms of just the sheer hate generated by everyone in baseball who hates both of those teams, but probably hates the Astros more. I don't know. I guess America would have to root for the Yankees in that situation. That would be strange. Anyway, we'll see if we get there. All right, that will do it for today. Thanks for listening. Personally, I feel like what the Astros are whining about is not so much that people are mad at them for cheating, but that people are thinking they were only good because of the cheating. And obviously they brought that belief on themselves by being cheaters, but also they're right about being good regardless. So if they're using the fact that people were

writing them off to motivate themselves, that makes as much sense to me as any of the real or perceived slights that teams always use to motivate themselves. Like the Marlins wearing their bottom feeders t-shirts. That's what teams do. They pretend that nobody believed in them, even if somebody did. Even if everybody did in some cases. So if you're the Astros and everyone hates you, for valid reasons, you might as well channel that into motivation to take those teams down. Like, in their minds, probably if they win this year,

then no one will be able to say that they only won because of the cheating. Although they did get into the playoffs with a losing record this year, but there were other reasons for that. As we follow the twists and turns of the Astro's Hatred Index, you can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild again we'll be doing our usual patreon exclusive playoff live streams soon so sign up now at the ten dollar a month or higher level to be notified when those are happening the following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some small monthly amount to get

themselves access to some perks and to support the podcast jeremy keys nicholas ziegler robert beretta paul bellows and matt fogelson thanks to all of you you can join our facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild 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 meg and sam via email at podcast at Fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. And in case you were wondering, teams that have hit more homers this postseason now 17-0 after the Braves beat the Marlins on Wednesday. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. And we'll be back with one more episode later this week.

Talk to you then.