Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1917: You Seem Upset

Episode Date: October 19, 2022

Meg Rowley returns from her trip to Seattle to banter with Ben Lindbergh about attending the 18-inning ALDS Game 3, the Mariners’ heartbreaking loss, the fans’ heartening response, and the franchise’s future, as well as overmatched postseason hitters, what scoreless extra-inning games could portend for the zombie runner, the outcomes of the other Division Series, […]

I'm ready to tell you my secret now Do I make you proud? And I'll have to look away It happens every day If I do anything, I can win If I do anything, it'll end for me If I do anything, it gets cold If I do anything, I'm on fire

If I do anything Hello and welcome to episode 1917 of Effectively Wild, the fancrafts baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I started to stumble. I tried to pick it up again and then I dropped it. You missed an episode and it's all falling apart. It's all falling apart. This is episode 1917 of Effectively Wild, which is a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. And I am Meg Rowley of Fangraphs. And you, you are Ben Lindberg of The Ringer.

Ben, how are you? Didn't notice that you missed a beat at all. Sounds like you have been with me the whole time and you've got that intro down cold. It's fine. Everything is fine. Welcome back. Thank you. You had a good reason.

I guess it was a good reason, although it turned out to be sort of a sad reason. I don't know. Maybe not. You tell me. But you were not here last time because you were at T-Mobile Park in Seattle seeing a baseball game or really two baseball games

crammed together in one. You were at the Mariners game. The Mariners lost, sadly. Yeah, I was. I was there. I even wrote about it. What? You wrote a great Angelian recap. I enjoyed quite a bit. People. What? You wrote a great Angelian recap. Thank you.

I enjoyed quite a bit. People have said that, and it makes me feel very uncomfortable, but I'm glad that people enjoyed it. They certainly gave me a lot to work with, didn't they? Yeah, they did. Ben, I'm here to tell you that despite them losing, it was maybe the single coolest sporting thing I've ever seen in person. Oh, that's great.

Yeah. I was worried that I was going to ask you to relive a traumatic experience here, but I'm glad that's not the case. No, it wasn't. It was really something. It was very cool to be in that ballpark and feel the energy that was present really for pretty much the entire game like i don't know if everybody had their red balls or they had they had other forms of liquid courage at their disposal but the fans were fantastic the pitching was thrilling i know that there were some i saw on twitter which definitely means that we should pay a lot of attention to it, who were saying, this is the argument for the zombie runner. And I was like, no, this is thrilling, though.

Yeah. I was actually, not to interrupt, I guess, to interrupt, but because you brought that up, I was going to ask you about that because we had the really long, scoreless Astros-Mariners game and then the almost as long, scoreless Rays-Guardians game. Yeah. And I enjoyed those things. And like you, I think those were arguments against the zombie runner. But I kind of wonder whether MLB will view it that way, whether Rob Manfred, who's already

predisposed to want the zombie runner, will view it that way. I guess there would come a point where a scoreless game could get tiresome. Now, obviously, because it's the playoffs, because these were really important games, because they were not night games, I think, crucially, that helped in both cases. Yes. Those were extremely intense and entertaining and great. And it would have spoiled it for me to play scoreless games for nine innings and then say, OK, we're going to change to wacky fun ball rules now. And now you can score a bunch of runs. So I love that that happened that way. It does, I guess, highlight something that's been something of a trend this postseason, which is just teams not hitting very well, or I guess you could say teams pitching

really well. One or the other, hitters have looked kind of overmatched this postseason so far. Like the strikeout to walk ratio is way out of whack. Even the strikeout to hit ratio is extreme. There's just been a succession of aces and flamethrowing late inning relievers, as always in October, but maybe even more so. So that maybe points out that, okay, there are perhaps some offensive problems here, and that's why we want to change some rules potentially. So I do wonder whether MLB will look at that and be like, well, we can't have these long, long scoreless games where we're going 13, 15, 18 innings with nobody scoring. Therefore, we must impose the zombie runner. Whereas you and I, I think we're looking at that and saying, this is great. Not every day, but at least in the playoffs, this is good. This is much better than the alternative. Yeah. I think that you're just, you're always going to have a hard time convincing fans that someone's season should end

with a gift of a runner on second base. And I appreciate that Manfred is like, he's got to be in his proverbial bonnet about this issue. But I think the relative scarcity of games like this, the fact that the ones that we got this postseason, at least despite their length, were quite thrilling and full of atmosphere and tension and i think that that probably helps and i i think that clubs and probably importantly

their owners are gonna say look i don't want my season to end because a zombie runner is is crossing home plate you know that just it feels like a bridge too far in the postseason now i've been wrong before but i want to think that because there is such a primacy being placed on postseason play to perhaps to the detriment of the regular season which is something i imagine we will talk about on this episode um you know just how much we buy into that idea. But I think they want it to feel dramatic and at least in terms of the coverage that I saw across sort of the baseball media landscape and even at MLB.com,

like I think everyone recognized that that 18 inning game while long was like a classic, you know. That's a game I think we'll talk about for a long time. I think you're right. How willing we are to be delighted by those things definitely depends on when first pitch is and the fact that it was a one o'clock start certainly helped but i was like hey i i got here at like 9 45 it's yeah eight yeah were people standing for most of that game?

Yes. Yeah. All of that? Did people sit at some point once it's like 16th inning? Yeah, there were definitely moments where people would sort of sit, but very quick to be back on their feet. people there who every time i looked over from my vantage i was in the auxiliary press box which is out in right field for those who are familiar with i almost call it safeco again with t-mobile park they converted the hit it here cafe into the auxiliary press box it was but it was one of the nicer ox boxes i've ever been sometimes those ox boxes are like i have climbed a mountain in order to maybe have the the table slash piece of plywood that my computer is on drift off into the ether, never to be seen again. But this was a very nice setup, so well done by the Mariners.

But there were times when I would look down and I was like, oh, that guy's just been, I think that guy's just been up this whole time. I bet his Apple Watch is like, no, you can sit down. It's okay. You should sit down it's okay like you should you should sit it's okay to sit now but no people were raucous and excited they remained raucous and excited even though they spent more time at the ballpark unable to buy beer than time at the ballpark when they could i did wonder how many people were like rolling into their hangovers as they were sitting there yeah but yeah i was just i couldn't believe not only the level of energy but just how long it was sustained you know i know that there was some discussion of this by folks who weren't familiar with what

was going on like sort of weather and climate wise in seattle but like the the air quality was terrible there were wildfires yeah it was hazy on the screen for most of the game. Yeah, it was quite smoky. The air quality index at first pitch, I think it was like 155. So, you know, they were sitting out there in conditions that were not ideal for a long, long time. And, you know, the first time that it really felt like the air had kind of gone out of the place was when Jeremy Pena hit his home run. But until then, you know, it didn't take much for them to be on their feet, just really cheering and waving their towels and having a great time. So I thought Seattle showed very well. I was like, this is an argument for

more pussies in baseball in Seattle because look at how they do. They do so great. Yeah. You're so great. Yeah. You're a professional. You were there to cover the game as a media member. There's no cheering in the press box. Presumably there's no cheering in the Ox box either. Was it at all difficult for you to restrain outward signs of excitement? I mean, when Leo makes that catch or when he almost hit his homer or any of the other high points?

Did you have to repress some sort of utterance? A little bit. I think that the whole thing was just so thrilling that my baseline state of excitement was pretty high for most of it, even as the action dragged on. Just because of where I was in the box, I was kind of near to several Mariners PR people. So I think that if I had had a slip up, they probably wouldn't have told on me because, you know. But no, I mean, it was just, it had a couple moments.

I had a couple moments through the course of that where I was just like, you know, my job is pretty cool. And I think that was the overwhelming feeling more than any particular bit of excitement. You know, it's a weird thing because it's like I wanted Seattle to win and I did have sort of the internal conflict of, well, if they do that though,

I have to be back here in like 10 hours. Yes. So I wasn't rooting for them to lose, but i did get to a point where i was like if they won more quickly it would be fine and every time the top of the astros lineup would come up i was just like how many how many shots are they really going to give you on on helvarez like it seems like a bad idea to keep giving him opportunities to beat them and ultimately ultimately, it wasn't him, which I suppose is some sort of small victory. But the whole time I was like, oh, here he is again. But it was as good as a loss can be, I guess.

I think that a lot of the things that had sort of marked the first two games of that series and made it feel kind of depressing in some of the ways that we talked about, right? Where it's like, this is a fun and exciting team. They have some really talented players, you know, they have Julio, they have this rotation, they have this great bullpen. And there were times in there where you were like, well, how good is, is some of that stuff? You know, the bullpen finally faltered. Bullpens do that, but it feels bad, especially when it's to a division rival, right? You know, you're so excited for some of those starters.

And then Luis Castillo gives up this big home run to Jordan Alvarez. So it's like, it felt like a really nice bit of redemption and sort of permission to the fans there to try to ride a high into 2023. It's like, well, bullpens regress, and it seems impossible that they will do this three years in a row, right?

But there are teams that do, and they were incredible. It feels unfair in a way that someone actually had to take that loss, that Penn Murphy had to take that loss. Somebody had to, but it's like you give up one run to the Astros in 18 innings, and it feels like you should get an exemption from the official scorekeeper that anyone has to take that loss. It's just the reality of it, but that's not anything that needs to mark your resume in a bad way, and George Kirby was great.

I wrote about this in the piece, but it was so fun to listen to these guys behind me. This guy's like, and George Kirby, it'd be so easy to forget George Kirby. Don't forget George Kirby as we're all filing out of the ballpark. And I was like, yeah, man, you're right. He like, he really, he had a great start. He threw some great innings.

We're now confident that Eric Swanson is not, like hasn't been left behind in Canada or decided to become a youth pastor matthew festa unsung hero of that game like it yeah like i had such confidence in matthew festa he just like he was so businesslike he was just like mowing him down like can we can we leave this guy in longer like i didn't have a rooting interest the way that you did obviously but i was still experiencing some secondhand anxiety pretty pretty significant just because of the stakes and everything that went into it there. And there's that anxiety that starts building once you get to like two outs

in the home half of the inning, in the offensive half. It's like as soon as you get the third out in the top half, it's like, whew, right? And you know that you have a half inning to play with here. You don't have to be nervous because you can't lose yet or you can't even have a deficit yet. And so it's like a little breather, a little lull in the anxiety. And hey, you might have a walk off and then everything will be wonderful. But then once you get to like two outs and the first couple guys get out then the the dread starts building because it's like oh no i have to go through that gauntlet again all again jordan's are gonna be up or tucker or bregman or atuve or whoever the heck yeah it just seemed like

jordan was always up to bat it just seemed like they were constantly having to deal with Jordan Alvarez. But really, for a sweep, it was not lopsided at all. The Mariners were only outscored by four runs over the course of the series. And that was a very credible performance in the last game there. I think I saw both teams had nine no-hit innings in that game. Not consecutively, but just total. So there was just a lot of good pitching going on oh yeah i guess maybe some bad hitting also i don't know it's hard to figure out which is which this postseason probably a little bit of both but mostly the good pitching i think and

really it's just like it easily could have gone the other way but the astros are so deep just to get to that point and to have Garcia and Urquidy in the bullpen. Yes. Like what a luxury. I mean, not a luxury, like it's a testament to their depth and their play development and everything. But like when the Mariners are kind of running on fumes and using their last guys and then Robbie Ray is out there and he did okay in his short appearance, but I think everyone was nervous about seeing him yeah it felt like a threat right and meanwhile it felt like the Astros it's like let's play three it's like we could keep going you know and I think I saw Garcia

had the second highest postseason win probability added by a reliever in a game after Yuzmira Petit in the 2014 NLDS. And he looked like he could have kept going. And then you had Urquidy behind him. So they have so much depth. To get to the 18th inning and still feel okay about your pitching situation is pretty impressive because the Mariners just completely emptied it out and were just riding Robbie Ray for as long as that game could have gone on. Yeah, it was not comforting to see him start to warm. I didn't sit there and go, well, this is going to go well. Wearing good pants. Yeah.

You know, it's like, I guess we all better tighten our pants up and sit up straight and hope for the best here. But yeah, I think that you can't. At one point, I was messaging with Michael Bauman about what was going on because he had been at the ballpark and was like, what the hell is this? It is a crazy thing that you have spent as much time over this day as I have at the ballpark in the last little bit and i think that he he noted the same thing you did which was like oh they they can just keep going here they still had javier and or kitty at their disposal right you know and he was like this is gonna go 30 scoreless and i'm like oh that's the nicest thing anyone's ever said about Robbie Ray. That's just the nicest thing anyone's ever said about literally last year's ALSI young winner.

What a weird, what a weird sport we like so much. But yeah, it was, you know, there were a lot of performances in that game that I think will sort of be lost to our memory when, you know, the big highlight that we will see will be Jeremy Pena hitting a home run but you know really all of the the relievers who came in with the exception maybe i guess of diego castillo like really acquitted themselves well and it was fun to get to see each of them sort of at peak performance right to like see the version of matt brash that you know has that slider but can

really put it where he wants to and just make jose altuve look completely lost like yeah jose altuve did you know this ben he had kind of a garbage division series he did he had sort of a bad time and you know so there was that piece of it and then then you got this nice bounce back for Paul Seawald, which had to feel good for him. But you also saw the vulnerabilities of this team, right? You saw sort of the underbelly of the 26-man roster when you have Adam Frazier and Jared Kelnick and J.P. Crawford taking really important postseason at-bats.

You can deal with one of those guys, but it's probably not great that their options were as limited as they were. So I think that this was a good stepping-off point for them. I think the way in which they stayed in it highlights their strength, both in their current roster and sort of organizationally right that they are able to pull these pitchers in and really help them to to optimize um sometimes in ways that their prior organizations haven't been able to but it also showed some of the areas that they can improve going into 2023 you know i think there's a lot of opportunity for them to

to upgrade the bottom of the roster and you roster. And they shouldn't settle for that, right? I hope that what this team, and by this team, I mostly specifically mean their ownership group, will say is, what a great taste of this we got. Look how wonderful this can be. And just to put it in very cynical terms, look how potentially profitable this is for this organization, right? If people are going to be this excited, if the Seahawks are only going to be so-so, if we can really ride this, like, we have an opportunity to change the sports culture, at least for men's sports, you know, the Stormers are great every year. So I don't want to discount

them in the Seattle sports scene by any means. But, you know, when you look at the big four men's sports, like really an opportunity to reshape the landscape in terms of what people are prioritizing in the Northwest. And I think a really good way to do that is to continue to commit. I don't want to say they haven't done that. Like they just gave Julio Rodriguez the deal that he got. And, you know, Luis Castillo got the extension that he got.

So clearly they are trying to put their plan into practice, and now I hope as they go into the offseason and the ability to sign, guys will look around and say, okay, our farm system stinks. The way that we're going to continue to improve this roster is to spend in free agency. And some of those moves, there are a lot of good bench players who are probably upgrades on some of the guys they have but also this is a really good free agent class so i hope that they

look at their opportunities in the free agent market and say you know much like kylo ren and star wars like more more but probably more dramatically because that's how he did it. It was a very dramatic performance, but I don't know if you've seen that. Yeah. real storybook ending and you mentioned in your piece i think it was julio's maybe second to last at bat when he popped up and you said why would we expect this game to you to easy narratives right like julio made the great catch and he almost homered and yeah you could have concocted a scenario where he hits a walk-off homer and everyone goes home happy. But it wasn't quite that, but it was close enough, I guess, for this season. And because there's a lot of justifiable, understandable optimism

about them being back, not in another 21 years, but hopefully in one year, not a lot of years, that eases the sting a little bit. But I thought that was really nice because it could have been, hey, we got here

and then we just get swept right off the board by these division rivals who were always winning and woe is us but it was not that it was everyone sort of seemed to pick themselves right off the mat so that was really great to see well and you know this might not have the same resonance for you as someone who has not navigated sports random in seattle as it will for our listeners who who live there but i think the moment that really drove home for me and this is just one anecdote right but like that really drove home for me that things have sort of shifted was you know as we're walking back to the the train to to head out these two guys you know one of them they were both in Seahawks jerseys,

but Mariners hats. They had clearly been at the game. And I imagine that they got the same email that I had, which was the Seahawks being like, here's our game time tomorrow, because they were going to have to move the start of the Seahawks game if the Mariners had won and we're going to be back on Sunday. And one guy turned to the other and he's like, you know, asking if they should start a, you know, Seahawks chant. And his friend is like, not yet.

Like, you know, and it was clear they just wanted to like sit in that moment and be in proximity to baseball a little while longer. And maybe we're also conscious of the fact that like other people around them might not be quite ready to be done either. to be done either. But it was just like a nice, it was nice because it's, you know, when the Mariners were bad, like you'd hear Seahawks chants at Mariners games. Yeah.

Which was sometimes galling, Ben. Sometimes I felt galled, but it was nice. It was a really, it was a very cool experience. I feel very lucky that I was able to be there in person. I think that having watched some of it back on MLB TV, you do get a good sense of it just from the broadcast, but it was pretty special to see in person. So it was very cool. Great. Well, I'm glad you got to go. And man, to read after the series, whenever a team gets eliminated, or I guess wins the World Series, all the news starts leaking out about the injuries that they were playing through.

So, Big Dumper, the whole time, playing with a broken thumb and a torn ligament in his left hand since early September. Catchers, man. Catchers, just a different breed. They're a different breed. catchers man catchers it's just a different breed they're a different breed yeah they're they're an entirely different sort of of human person yeah yeah it was incredible to hear that and i hope that he gets to just you know walk through the off season maybe not using his hands at all or it's not that one maybe he's just like this hand is on hiatus until February when I have to report. Yeah.

Like, that's his catching hand. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure it was cushioned and padded and splinted and who knows what else. But still, man. Yeah. I mean, that's just, it's unbelievable. Like, that had to hurt, I'm guessing. Like, every time Andres Munoz comes in.

Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Throwing a zillion miles an hour and Khal Raleigh's hand, his thumb is broken. Yes. It's got a sting. Oh, my gosh. Probably sting is underselling it. So, wow, that he was able to play it all and also get some huge hits.

Yeah. That's really something. Yeah, it was pretty incredible. And I was like, I just couldn't, you know, I'm sitting there in the press box. And I was like, oh, I got to stretch. I feel creaky. And then I was like, oh, God, his knees are filled with lava. And then after the fact, we find out his hand is too.

Thank goodness. Yeah. So just to situate everyone in time here, I guess we could have said that earlier, but we are recording on Tuesday evening, just moments after the Yankees defeated the Guardians. And just as the NLCS is about to begin, which is weird that there's no break between those things. So the ALDS just ended. The NLCS is about to start. So there has not been an Effectively Wild episode since the end of those series. So we have a little bit to catch up on. I guess we just caught up on

Mariners-Astros, but the Yankees did manage to fend off the Guardians in five games. And now we also have a Padres-Phillies NLCS matchup that is getting underway as we speak here. So we kind of have a upset series and a chalk series, just a couple of favorites and a couple of underdogs here. And I guess we could talk a little bit about how they got there. But also there has been a larger conversation spurred by all the upsets, fewer upsets than there could have been if the Guardians had pulled out their ALDS that might have just sent everyone teetering off into madness just because the upset conversation was consuming everyone as it was. Oh, gosh.

So we do get yet another Yankees-Astros-ALCS matchup, the third in six years, right? And another grudge match and rehashing, sign-stealing gate, et cetera. So yeah, there's that. But at least we have some novelty in Phillies-Padres. And I am actually kind of interested in this upset playoff surprise conversation. I've been thinking a lot about it and having sort of existential wrestling with the significance of the postseason and why we care about it because we get really extreme reactions

when there's an upset. So the Dodgers get knocked off by the Padres and we know there was a huge gap between those two teams in the regular season. And four games of NLDS later, the Dodgers are sent packing the Padres advance. Same thing with the Phillies and the Braves. So you have teams that are within the victors division and did much better than the victors over the course of the regular season, bowing out and going home. And obviously, you get a lot of recriminations and you get a lot of second guessing about

managerial moves and everything. But really, you get some extreme reactions, which are, I think, on one end of the spectrum, you get maybe the local columnist slash sports talk radio host kind of reaction. I love you anonymizing a particular city one might think of, you know, on a timely publication from that city. Yes, but not only the Los Angeles Times. Also, New York tabloids, right? Same thing when the Mets lost, right?

So you have that kind of knee-jerk reflexive, this is a disgrace, this team is a failure, everything was for naught. Put them all in prison. Yeah, chokers, bunch of bums, blow up everything, right? That kind of reaction, which like obviously the people who instigate those things, it's their job to rile up everyone and get listeners and get clicks. So on some level, I think they know what they're doing. Probably. They definitely know what they're doing.

They definitely know what they're doing. Like your mileage on what they're doing might vary, but they know what they're doing. Right. Yeah. They're doing their jobs. It's a little different from our jobs. They're doing,

they're certainly doing a job. They're doing some job. Not a job I would want, but it's a little different from our jobs they're doing they're certainly doing a job they're doing some job i would want but it's a job so there's that reaction and look i don't think it's just these rabble rousers and media it's also like fans right i mean fans feel that way too maybe they feel that way in part because they've been conditioned to feel that way by reading local comics. There might be some priming of the pump, yeah. Yeah. But also, I think fans really do feel that way. It does mirror the sadness and the frustration and the anger that comes from being knocked out of the postseason. On the other side of the spectrum, well, you might have some people in the middle, right, who have what I would consider a fairly healthy attitude toward all

this, which is disappointing. I'm sad. I'm sorry, but I will recover. And we had a great season to get here, and we know the deal with the postseason, and this is just the way it works. And then I guess you have sort of the extreme stat head reaction, which is just like, none of this means anything, and it's a small sample, and it doesn't signify anything about the strengths of these teams or their true talent or anything. And I've kind of come to believe, I guess, that that extreme reaction from the local columnists and the sports talk radio people, which I don't share, but I feel like it's almost a necessary evil if you are going to ascribe significance to the postseason. Because I was reading, say, Joshian's reaction to some of these series. And, you know, he breaks down all these series in great depth and he considers all the X's and O's and everything. But he will

also, I think, acknowledge correctly that there are only so many conclusions we can draw from these outcomes. So just to quote from one of his recent newsletters here, when a good team beats another good team in three of four, it doesn't mean anything. The Padres played better than the Dodgers did. The Phillies played better than the Braves did. We have to be able to stop there and not look for larger truths. There aren't any to be found in 36 innings of baseball. I'm on board with that. I believe that.

I subscribe to that. I might even go further at times. Sometimes I think a playoff victory, it's not even clear that the victors did outplay the losers. playoff victory, it's not even clear that the victors did outplay the losers. I think in this case it was, but sometimes teams will advance even though they get outscored in a series just because they cluster their runs more efficiently or luckily or however you want to say it. It's kind of murky about who actually had the better series even though one team wins. But I don't know that you can maintain that attitude and get fully into October. And Joe, by his own admission, he's self-described a regular season guy. I mean, he's covering the postseason in great depth, but he's someone who prioritizes the long haul and the six months that lead up to the postseason. And his eyes are fully opened to the fact that,

as he noted, it might not have any larger significance if Team X beats Team Y. But I don't know that you can maintain that attitude, that very philosophical stance about the significance of this and actually get invested in the outcome of the playoffs. Because really, if you're just going to view it all from a remove and say, oh, well, they played three, four or five games and this is who won. It doesn't really mean anything more than that. How can you really care if you win, right? Like it all becomes kind of a coin flip. And how excited can you get about a coin flip and how excited can you get about a coin flip? Can you really root for that? So I feel like the local columnist, Sports Talk Radio, some fan extreme reaction, it's really a product of MLB trying to pump up the postseason as this is exciting and this is like a necessary evil,

or at least it's an inevitable byproduct, I think, of structuring the season the way it's structured, where there's just so much emphasis placed on the postseason. It's like you can't just be like ho-hum if you lose, but also consider winning the most exciting ultimate goal, right? So I don't know that you can have one without the other necessarily. If you build up winning the world series as this is the be all and the end all and and i don't think you should necessarily but but i kind of understand that i i get it like if you're fully into this and you're viewing it as as something where it really matters like this is important Well, then you can't consider it the same as, like, winning the most games in May or June.

Or you can't say that winning three out of five in a division series or, you know, winning three out of four is the same as winning a four-game series in July. Yeah. Right? Like, it is, in a sense. Like, it doesn't tell you that much more about the respective strengths of those teams. And yet you can't really view it that way if you're actually going to get invested, because otherwise it's like, what are we even doing here? You know, you start to question the whole exercise. It's like you're Wile E. Coyote or something and you're running in canary. And you look down. the team that you beat, or it tells you something about your clutchness or your character or whatever it is. Because if you're just writing it off as, well, they were better this week or in those few games, I don't know that you can maintain that stance. If you can, I guess I admire anyone who can get fully excited about winning, but then

not get super dejected about losing. I was talking to Zach Cram, my colleague about this, and he kind of compared it to winning the lotto. You get super excited about winning the lotto. You don't necessarily get depressed about losing the lotto because you don't actually expect to win the lotto for one thing. But I don't know that that holds for me because if you win the lotto, you get tangible rewards. You get many millions of dollars and the things that they could buy. Whereas if you win a postseason series, all you get is kind of the intangible bragging rights and gloating value, right? And sort of

the secondhand pride and sense of accomplishment when your team wins. But all of that kind of goes away unless you actually do convince yourself that it means something, right? So that's what I've been struggling with over the past week or so. And it's almost made me accept the extreme reaction more because it's like, okay, this is completely disproportionate and overblown. And yet they're getting into the spirit of the thing. And I don't know that you can get into the spirit of the thing without just completely going overboard and getting ridiculous about what it all means. So I think a couple of things.

Let me see if I can say them in an order that makes them sound like a coherent point. A new challenge. As an aside, man, Ben, writing hard takes it takes it out of you you're like oh i hadn't done this in a minute yep some of the first drafts were very purple so i think that it's useful for us and i think effectively wild listeners are perhaps better primed to do this than most other baseball fans. So really, this is just going to be an argument for everyone to listen to our podcast, I guess. But the only reason any of this, no matter how the regular season is constructed, no

matter what form the postseason takes, no matter how many games it goes or doesn't, that only means something because we say it does. There's nothing inherent to baseball that matters. We make meaning together out of this thing. And acknowledging how tenuous that can be and sort of how unlike, say, the law of gravity it is can feel a little like you're staring over the edge into the abyss, right? Because you're like, does this actually mean anything? Only because we say.

And that might feel a little yishy for some people but I think that it's not as if the only meaning we can take from watching postseason baseball is now we know more than we did before we know something more definitively than we did at the conclusion of 162 games that's certainly one meaning we could be aiming toward I think that we all know by toward. I think that we all know by now, well, I would say we all know by now, but to your point, we do this every year. Aided and abetted by, you know, folks who gotta, you gotta file something sometimes. But I think that, you know, we could try to design a perfect playoff system that really made it difficult for any team that wasn't the best team

in the in the league to win but i still i think we would fail at that pretty profoundly i think that that's actually quite hard to do and i don't know that we'd want to succeed at it because i think one of the other meanings that we make in the playoffs is the experience of watching our team and the possibility that they might do something awe-inspiring for us right and i think that that is as important a meaning to make as anything else we spend a lot of time we have a whole we have a whole regular season to say something about how good the Los Angeles Dodgers are. Right. And nobody, I mean,

like they're probably our Padres fans were like, they sucked all along, but like, you know, people who aren't partisans in this fight can look at the hundred win teams that were bounced. And even as they acknowledge some of the flaws that might exist in those rosters can probably say like,

these were good baseball teams. You look at the Dodgers, nobody's confused about the quality of the Dodgers except maybe the columnists who cover them so you know i think that we've we've expressed that meaning we've we've we've ripped apart that puzzle and and sort of figured out that that puzzle box and so this you know 30 some odd days is for something else and i I think that, you know, one of our concerns with the new postseason format was that it did not provide sufficient incentives within it for its project and its meaning making for us to have the best regular season possible.

And so I'm sensitive to that concern because I share that concern, right? I do worry about what happens if teams look at this postseason field and the roster they decide to draw inspiration from is the Guardians. I'm sorry, Guardians fans. I know you had a really rough day. But in terms of the spending piece, not the fun, young, exciting, rock the baby piece

because that piece is awesome. And the spending would also be cool. But I don't want other teams to look at Cleveland and say, well, this is the model for how to do it. I want them to look at Los Angeles. I really want them to look at San Diego and say, this is a small market team by the standards of Major League Baseball. And they were just like, what if we were just like a really good team and we didn't worry about the media market piece of it? And we spent money on the roster and we made aggressive moves at the trade deadline and we were really good. And so I want that to be what we draw from postseason play. And so it's not unimportant what happens in October in terms of the regular season. It has consequences.

But first, I think it's unsurprising that we are seeing more 100 win teams lose in October because we're seeing more 100 win teams. Right. Yeah, exactly. And some of that is because of this stratification between the really good teams and the teams that are just like, well, maybe we'll win 88 games and that'll be enough. And that makes it sound like I don't have respect for what the players in the front office in Cleveland have been able to do with very limited resources, because I think that that's pretty incredible. But I think we all agree that that's not the model we want the entire league to

adopt. So it's not super surprising to me that we're seeing more of those teams lose just because there are more of them. And this really weird thing happened where, particularly with the Dodgers-Padres series, people are getting all worked up about, how do we not have the Dodgers anymore? And it's like, well, I don't know. The Padres went out and traded for literally Juan Soto at the trade deadline, right? They didn't get Tatis back, but they've invested money in their roster. the Padres went out and traded for literally Juan Soto at the trade deadline. Right. You know,

they didn't get Tatis back, but like they've invested money in their roster. They've made big moves. They looked up at LA so many games ahead of them. And we're like, you know, what would help is if we traded for Juan Soto, like we're not done.

We're going to keep trying. We're going to keep doing stuff that we think will make this a more competitive ball club, not just now, but come October and come next season. And that's what we want teams to do. So I get the sting being sort of front and center for a lot of people if they, you know, if they root for the Dodgers, if they root for the Mets, if they root for Atlanta. I get that. I also understand the instinct that people might have that that sting isn't enough, that maybe they don't feel like the sting is enough

for them to talk about how the last couple of weeks have made them feel. They're trying to hang ornaments on it that grounded in something that says something about the game. There are things we could take away from this that say things about the game, but I also think it's fine for people to just be like, I feel really disappointed that I don't get to keep watching my team play baseball. Yeah, there's that, right? The off-season started. You know, I have to be done now.

I don't get to watch these guys. Some of these guys might be on other teams come next year. I mean, not in Atlanta's case, but, you know, for all the other rosters. And so I get it. And I do want the regular season to matter. It matters to me. And I think that maybe there are ways for the league and for baseball media and for fans to try to not completely decouple them from one another, but do more to acknowledge the regular season greatness, right? Yeah. But it's funny to hear LA fans really soar when it's like,

I'm sorry, but wasn't your favorite team a 100-win wildcard team that bounced another 100-win team that had won the division? Didn't that happen last year? Right? For the Atlanta fans. Didn't you guys just win a World Series having won? How many regular season wins did Atlanta have last year? It wasn't even 90, was it? Wasn't it like 88? It was 88. It was 88. Look at me and my little safe of a memory. So that takes me to the final thing I'll say, and then we can decide if I've said anything at all, which is that I think that when we're kind of having conversations about this stuff, like it is useful to remember that ain't none of us really that emotionally consistent year to year, you know? think it's okay for different circumstances to like strike us differently as fans of a thing right you know when you're when you're the upstart if you're you know if you're a philly fan if you're a san diego fan the fact that there is like a variability and a variance to this is really exciting because sometimes you ride that variance to the nlcs and if you're ager fan, it's fine for it to feel like it stinks this year.

If you're a Braves fan, it's fine to feel like it stinks this year. And it's also fine to have a year ago been like, well, we were just the team of destiny and we had a harder road, but we figured it out. I think that that's fine. I think the part of it that I'm surprised by

is that there's a long history of less good good than some teams, teams advancing far in the postseason and even winning the World Series. Like, again, last year it happened. But some of the recent, you know, primacy of really good teams winning is sort of bizarre. Like it hasn't always happened that way. And so it's like the variance isn't new now maybe we want to think about do we really want this many teams the answer is probably no but look we have this many teams do we want to think about reseeding after each round so that we are

balancing the matchups a little bit more favorably to the teams that are really good i'd be open to that i think that you know there's a lot to be said for that and that that would probably alleviate some of the concern that this postseason has brought about. But I think this postseason has been really fun and exciting. And, you know, I am not in love with having more playoff teams, but I really like that the wildcard is a series now, you know, and we've seen some great performances and it's exciting to not have it be completely predictable, right? Think about it this way. I guess the thing I would say is either you can be consistently angry about our projections or you can have a perfectly consistent world that hews entirely to what we think is going to happen, but you can't have both of those things and you

love getting mad about our projections. It's one of your favorite pastimes. It's so nice. It makes you so happy to think about how we don't respect you at all, even though that's not really what this is. So, like, you know, it's fine. It's good to have a little zhuzh. It is kind of curious that this conversation has sprung up

because, yeah, upsets are not new in baseball. This has been either a bug or a feature, depending on your perspective. Sure. Going back quite a ways, it's not even like there was some new, shorter series introduced this season. It's not like the best of five is a new invention this year.

We've had lots of best of fives. Yeah. We've had lots of upsets. You could even make a case that, if anything, it is harder perhaps for wildcard teams to advance under this current format, even though the results wouldn't say so. The fact that you now have to play a full series and maybe be disadvantaged coming into, you know, we get into the whole conversation about is it better to have a buy and be rusty or not. But I think you could argue that if anything, it's harder for those teams to advance.

It's just it's happened to work out that there were a couple of big upsets. And I think you're right to identify just the stratification of the regular season, which Rob Arthur wrote about for Baseball Perspectives this week as a big factor, because if it were just a 97 win team beating a 93 win team or something, it might be an upset, but it wouldn't be shocking. Yeah, we wouldn't have much to say about it, probably. Right. And nothing really that happens in the postseason should be shocking, but it will still shock when a 111-win team loses or even when a 101 or multiple 101-win teams lose. 101 or multiple 101 win teams lose. So the fact that you have that disparity between teams now, that's not really mirrored in their respective playoff odds, right? Like the fact that you won a whole bunch more games in the regular season, it doesn't really produce kind of a

corresponding advantage in the postseason. And so you're still subject to an upset, but it looks like a bigger surprise just because you were so good in the regular season. There was such a big differential there. But it seems like there's sort of an upset sweet spot because if the favorites always won, that would be boring. Why even bother playing? If the favorites never won, if every series ended in an upset, then that would be weird too it'd be like well what does this even mean right and why are we wasting our time playing this whole regular season before we even get to this point if the better teams are just going to lose right so you need that happy

medium you need like a goldilocks zone of upsets where mostly or usually the thing you expect happens or at least it it's maybe a little bit more than just random so that you feel like there's some signal amid the noise, but not so much that you just feel like, I don't know what I'm watching here. This is complete chaos. Chaos could be fun, but I do think that there needs to be some significance to it. And I think that, yeah, once you've decided that the arbitrary activities of throwing or hitting or catching a baseball is worthwhile, is entertaining, that this is something that we collectively care about, the regular season then does a decent job of establishing which teams are the best at those things, which the postseason does not.

But I think that a lot of people will persist in thinking that it does. I really do think that if you could convince everyone, if you could wave a wand and sort of inculcate the Joshian mindset in everyone that, hey, it doesn't mean anything. It's just a few games, just like a few games at any other point in the season. I think if you could do that, for one thing, it would change a lot of people's minds because I don't think that's how most people view these things. Maybe on some intellectual level,

if their teams are not involved and you sit them down in a non-emotional moment, perhaps they would concede that. But if they have some skin in the game, then they don't think that. And it's hard to think that when you're watching because one team looks better than the other team usually. The team that wins had a better series. It looks like they were just outclassing their opponent. It seems like it means something.

It seems like it tells you something. And so you could run all the studies you want and talk about probability, but no one really buys into that. Most people don't buy into that. Just like, well, we won the coin flips this time and they lost the coin flips. And I think maybe we're better off this way. Maybe we're better off this way, right? Maybe we're better off with this sort of mass delusion almost in a sense of like this does mean more than statistically we think it means because that enables people to get excited and get invested and also for the heartbreak and just the disparity between the heartbreak and the elation you get when things go your way. If we were all just kind of calm, even keeled at all times, just kind of rolling with the losses and the wins in equal measure, then I don't know that that would be as fun for people. That's not what a lot of people are looking for from sports. For some people, it is. But others, I think they just want to totally throw themselves into it and convince

themselves that it does mean something. And perhaps the players feel that way. Certainly, when they're in the dog pile after they win and they're spraying champagne, they're not going, we happened to get a little lucky and we won three out of four this time and we could have been some other series during the regular season that we would have lost and this doesn't signify anything. No, they're feeling like they earned it and they're feeling pride and accomplishment. the dejected losing team sitting with their head in their hands watching the other team celebrate. They're not just thinking, oh, well, you know, didn't go our way this time. Doesn't really mean anything about our overall strength relative to theirs. They're kicking themselves because they lost. So I guess you could say that maybe there is an alternative. Like, I think that is maybe, I don't want to be an exceptionalist here, but that's

maybe especially kind of an American mindset. We're intolerant of ties over here, right? There has to be a winner. And when there is a winner, it's because they earned it and they deserved it and it's your gumption and you're a self-made team, right? So if we could kind of have the European soccer model, maybe, not that there aren't plenty of soccer hooligans and everything and people who get invested in that in that way as well. Famously very calm, collected. Yes, exactly. But you get the same juice from the regular season, right? Exactly. But you get the same juice from the regular season, right? You might not have playoffs at all and you just get your jollies from whatever, like the pleasure of watching the beautiful game and having that to share with people in your community and having it be kind of a collective shared experience. Or maybe it's that you just did a little bit better than you were expected to do.

You know, it's not even like there's a lot of parity in those leagues. There are teams that always win or come close to winning and teams that never do and hardly ever have a chance. And maybe you just set different goals, you know, if we're a little bit better than we were last year or we exceed expectations a little bit or we avoid relegation or whatever it is. And so I guess in theory, you could have that kind of mindset in baseball where it's just like the long season and you maybe had this to a certain extent prior to the playoffs and the expanded playoffs when you just went straight to the World Series or before there even was a World Series. It was just, hey, we were the best team over the course of the season or we all had fun out there. I don't know if it was ever quite that, but maybe it was a little less postseason centric. So I think it is all sort of silly on some level,

but also really nice on some level because people have fun with the playoffs. People also get very upset about the playoffs. So I guess it's a double-edged sword. And if it's a coin flip, then there are two sides of that coin. But I do think a lot of it does kind of come down to convincing yourself that it does mean more, that it does signify something about your team and its strength compared to your opponent's strength. Because if you didn't have that mindset, I don't know, at least for me personally, I think it would be hard to get as invested in it while maintaining the idea that it was just another series. We play, you know, 53 game series every year and this was just the 51st and we happened to lose this one oh well aw shucks

you know like i think that is more what i would gravitate toward if i you know even if i weren't kind of getting more invested in no it's the playoffs it it means something even though i i know on some level that it doesn't mean that much in that way. Right. And I think that in that way is the important part, right? I think the way that it might be helpful for it to shift for people is to have it, it means something. It just doesn't mean that we've determined the best team, right? Because, and I think the other thing, and this maybe is just like going to really set people off their

axis, but I mean, it's hard to win 100 games if you're not a good team. But there's variance in the quality of 100 win teams too, right? Yeah. There's variance in the quality of division winners. There's just variance. And so I think that if you want to poke holes in how you ascribe meaning to a particular achievement of either the regular season or the postseason, like there are going to be avenues to do that. And I think that the lesson might just be to say, well, this does mean something. It just doesn't mean what the 162 game season meant. It's aiming at something else, right? You know, you're trying to do something different.

And, you know, that isn't to say that, like, fans shouldn't care about whether their favorite team wins or loses. Like, of course they should care about that. The caring about it is what makes it meaningful, right? The fact that you, like like have a memory of that moment being significant to you, potentially spent with friends and family, like that's what makes it meaningful. You know, I think the kids that went to that Mariners game

and managed to stay awake till the end, they're gonna tell that story for the rest of their lives if they care about baseball, you know? There are a lot of ways to make meaning. And that doesn't mean that we shouldn't think about, like I said, the incentives and sort of broader effects that certain kinds of meaning making structures have versus others. Again, it's all made up. So we get to make it up in a way that we find to be pleasing and if we decide

this isn't what we want like we can adopt other structures we can tweak we can pursue other things and other means of crowning a champion but just because it doesn't tell you just because you can't come away being like well it turns out actually that the Padres were better than the Dodgers all along they're just a better team. You know, we had it wrong. It was all luck and variance. And there's, you know, we're glad we had this postseason to really figure it out so that we know what's what. Just because we can't say that doesn't mean it's not meaningful.

And it doesn't mean that you can't feel disappointed when it doesn't go your way. Like, you know, that's part of this. That's why the joy part is so resonant because we know that alternatives exist. I mean, maybe not for Dodger fans because they've had a pretty good run lately. But, you know, generally, there's a lot of heartbreak to be had in liking baseball. And, you know, I will say this. I don't know how we balance these things against one another. I don't know whose enjoyment and experience of it should take

sort of front seat. But there are more people who watch the postseason than just fans of those teams. Yep. And so I think there is something to be said for ensuring that the postseason experience is dynamic and exciting and thrilling been eliminated who are going to keep watching through to the World Series. So, yeah. I think it's just that, you know, when I was a kid rooting for the Yankees, now I was a Steinbrenner era impressionable young Yankees fan. And the constant message of that team was anything other than winning the World Series is a failure, right? So I think you kind of internalize that if that's what you're told. But also, I think when I was a kid, I believed that, well, the best team won, the better team won the postseason series. If you won the World Series, it meant you were the best

team. I think that's what I thought at that time. I think that is what many fans continue to think. Like my mom, you know, she's sort of a casual kind of nominal Yankees fan. And she'll sometimes ask me, are the Yankees going to win the series or whatever? And she's never satisfied with my answer because I will say, I don't know. I don't know. No one knows. It's really not possible to know. They are maybe a little bit better than their opponent. Maybe they would win more often than not. But beyond that, I really couldn't say. And she's never satisfied with that because she thinks like, well, are they the better team or not? If they are, then they'll win or they should win. But I just can't go there. you'd need a best of 75 series in baseball to have the same advance rate for the better team to advance that you get in the NBA and a best of seven, right? Because people think like in the NBA, well, the better team wins. And that is usually a reasonable conclusion in the NBA playoffs, not always, but usually. And I don't know that people appreciate just how different and how on the other end of the scale MLB is when it comes to that. I just, you know, I don't think it's easy to hold that in your head as you're watching these games.

playoffs without thinking they mean anything. Like that's totally possible if it's just, hey, I enjoy baseball. I want baseball to continue. I'm having fun watching with my friends and my family here. Like this is nice. You know, if that's the way that you appreciate the playoffs, more power to you. That's great, I think. But I think probably most fans don't view it that way. They view it as like this is going to decide something, you know, like this is going to tell us something about these respective teams. And while I might be inclined to disagree or dismiss that on some level, I'm also kind of happy, I guess, that that attitude persists and is even maybe the majority opinion, because I do think that it leads to the postseason being as exciting as it is. I just, I think it is kind of a core part. And that if you took that away, as you said, like we could totally look at the playoffs in the regular season as entirely

separate entities with different goals, but I just, I don't think most people do look at them as discrete entities. And so I think they are thinking the regular season is how we determine which are the best teams. And then you get to go to the playoffs and you get to continue to prove that you're the best team or, you know, show it anew. And because of that, you get the extreme columnist reaction saying that the season is a disgrace because we lost the best of five series. And that's very silly. this season is a disgrace because we lost the best of five series and that's very silly but you also get the extreme joy which i have experienced and many fans hopefully experience at some point in their life because you won a short playoff series which if you were again just being very philosophical and unemotional about it i don't know that you would be able to feel that same

level of just like, you know, nothing can compare to that really. In my experience, I don't know that anything can be more joyous than your favorite sports team winning in some incredibly exciting way in the postseason. And I do think that at least some of that traces back to us ascribing that importance and significance to this series that is maybe not statistically justified. So I guess what I'm saying is that while I think in some way it's unhealthy to have that extreme stance of all that matters is the postseason and if you don't win, it's a loss and you're chokers and you failed. I also think that it is maybe like I'm trying to look on the bright side of that and see the good in that reaction, which is basically like this is the other side of the coin of getting super, super happy when you win. And it's nice that sports can bring that joy to people. And so can you have one without the other? I don't know. I don't know that you completely can, to be honest. So I guess that's what I've been thinking about. But it is odd, I guess, that this has become such a prominent conversation now because, again, it's not new. Baseball has always worked like this to some extent. It's just we went a little maybe too far in the upset direction. Not for my taste. I'm happy to have the upsets and to see some new and interesting teams actually match up here and not the same ones over and over.

Even though I'm sorry for the teams that did a great job in the regular season and don't get to keep playing. And I am. I would also describe myself as sort of a regular season guy. I think I would consider myself as sort of a regular season guy. Like, I would be a hand out a regular season trophy person and then start over again or, you know, hand out a different trophy for the postseason. Like, I think that ship has sailed. But that is sort of my personal stance, I suppose, it's funny now that the full championship series field is set, right? Because as you noted earlier, like we have, you know, we have sort of the upset side of the bracket with Philly and San Diego. And then like you don't get more blue blood, the Astros and the Yankees. So like it's kind of we're kind of it's OK. You know, we're kind of, it's okay. You know, we're kind of doing okay. And I do wonder if part of what we are reacting to is just that it happens to be lining up with,

you know, the first year of the new format. Next year, if the CS is the Astros and the Yankees and the Dodgers and the Mets, nobody's going to say anything. And we're all going to say, it's so boring that the teams that we all predicted as having you know and that we projected as having the highest world series odds at the beginning of the season are the ones that are playing for you know a trip to the fall classic how boring wow i

don't know if i've ever called the world series the fall classic out loud that slipped that was weird you do run out of you just get so bored sometimes just saying world series over and over again the other thing i would say is that like you that Cal Raleigh played an entire month and a half of baseball with a broken finger and torn tendons. This stuff matters to people. It matters to these guys. We're numbers people. You and me, we're numbers folks. We like the numbers.

It doesn't need numbers to matter. It's not dependent on that so it's okay you know yeah what i'm saying is yeah it's it's dependent on not that yeah to some extent to some extent and i i think that you know my reaction to this would be different if like the upsets we had were all like 80 win teams like that would be bad because that would point at other stuff that had gone horribly wrong but i think this is a fun field and i think that it's cool to get to see a variety of teams and fan bases represented is that bill walton behind home plate in san diego i don't have it on i'm concentrating fully on podcasting right now i have the game on on mute on my other screen just so that i can keep a little eye on it you know i just gotta keep a

keep an eye on what they're up to brandon marsh is on deck i'm gonna change the subject briefly did you read the piece on why he's wet all the time today why is he wet he pours water on his head oh well this was from gosh i feel bad i don't remember which of the barba boys actually wrote the piece i just saw it retweeted from the cesspitous family barbecue account and i'm realizing that i didn't make note of the byline how rude of me anyway it was jake it was jake mince that feels right yeah apparently brandon marsh well he also sweats. It's not like he doesn't sweat.

He's not like an alien, but he douses himself in water. So he is artificially wet anyway. He's one of the wet ones. Speaking of long-haired players, Harrison Bader without the long hair, it's just not the same. It's not. It's a crime. Performance-wise, I guess it is. It's not a Samson situation. He's hitting for power. He did well in the series, but he just looks like a different guy. And I ascribe less joy to him because his flowing locks are gone now that he's a yankee i know you're all very serious about yourselves over there not you it's not your problem but you yankee folk not the fans fans i bet

are would be fine with hair i bet they're like hair is fine some not my mom my mom is like are they still doing the facial hair good i hope they keep doing the facial hair? Good. I hope they keep doing the facial hair thing. Okay, interesting. So does she not like Cortez's mustache, or is she okay with that? I don't know that she actually pays enough attention to know that, but there's some conservative streak in her likes the old-fashioned facial hair policy, apparently, anyway. Yeah, interesting. Well, we've talked some about what the match-ups are going to be here, albeit in an indirect kind of way.

Yeah. Yeah. I didn't feel like there was all that much to say about the division series because, well, most of them didn't go the distance. It wasn't like they hung on one moment necessarily. I mean, there were certainly some controversial decisions and things that people wish that their managers could take back. But I think in most of those cases, yeah, you could nitpick some decisions, but often there was a better reason or a more obvious reason why the team that lost, lost. They just didn't hit. They just got outpitched pretty clearly. Yeah, you could quibble maybe with some pitcher usage decisions,

you know, like Brian Snitker trying to push Spencer Strider a little too far, probably, you know, like got a couple of dominant innings out of him and they had said that they only wanted two or three and they kind of pushed them too far, having not pitched for a month in a game. And then things fell apart a little bit. Okay. there's that. Or, you know, people, there's the usual Dave Roberts kind of controversy. I think much less so than in some prior postseasons. Yes. You know, there were people upset maybe about using Yancy Almonte instead of Evan Phillips. You can just say Craig's name.

You don't have to be coy about it. We love you, Craig. It wasn't like, you know, the most questionable Dave Roberts. There's always something, right, with Dave Roberts and pitching usage. This was not nearly, I think, to the extent of some other series. Well, I think that we joked at some point this season as more of their rotation sort of either was hurt to the point of not being available at all or was clearly still coming back from injury or maybe appeared a bit compromised, that he just wasn't going to have enough starters to get up to any shenanigans in the postseason.

He wasn't going to be able to deploy those guys in relief. They had this incredible bullpen. So he stuck to script for the most part, which I think when Ben Clemens graded the managers in the division series on the NL side, the AL will run tomorrow because obviously we didn't have a complete grade until today. We'll have an AL preview. It might run 10 minutes before the game starts, but whose fault is that?

It's not ours. Can blame those Yankees. Get mad at them, not me. Yeah. And the weather. And the weather. Yeah. But it's more satisfying to get mad at people i think than

nature because nature feels so impersonal because it's not a person yeah hence all the nitpicking of pitching moves because that's something you can very easily criticize that's an intentional decision as opposed to why didn't you just hit that 101 mile per hour fastball like yeah that'd be nice too but that's hard so yeah and like hey i i understand i got very worked up about robbie ray and when and how he was deployed and i understand that when you have a guy who's had as as incredible a season as evan phillips that when your season is on the line you're like but why where is isn't he, when will, you know? So I get it.

But yes, I think that as these things go, it was not the most egregious sort of performance on that squad. Dave did a mid-plate appearance pitching change, just a little treat for Effectively Wild. It didn't work, seemingly. So that was another thing he got criticized about because he did something unusual. And I don't exactly know what the rationale for that was anyway. It was 1-0 when that happened. But I got some tweets just because I'm the strategy, the mid-plate appearance

pitching change guy. Anyway, I guess the other maybe kind of controversial managerial pitching move thing, I guess there were a couple in the Cleveland series. And then in game five, you know, the rainout did advantage the Yankees to some extent. Again, it was MLB that made that call. It was not the Yankees making that call themselves. And frankly, MLB could have done a better job about making that call. I think really like we need to figure out the way to humanely call games due to weather like in this case they had fans come out sit there for hours

no updates seemingly like between you know five something and nine something when the game was finally called there was nothing it was just well it's not starting on time. And it seemed like the radar and these things are not infallible and weather patterns can change. It seemed like they were probably going to have to start late and that that had been apparent for a while. But you never know. I mean, I saw some people say, well, they should have just pushed back the start time to 9 p.m. or something a day in advance, and then people wouldn't have had to wait around, which is true. But then, you know, what if clear skies happened unsurprisingly? So I don't know. But once people show up and take the two hours or whatever that it takes to get into Yankee Stadium for a playoff game, then to sit there with no updates for hours, and then you can't get refunds, right? Like you can't exchange that for another game. I mean, there might not be another game, but either you come back at 4 p.m. the next day

when people might have work or whatever, or you're out of luck and there were quite a few empty seats, understandably. So yeah, I feel like the communication at the very least could have been better. Some of this, you're subject to the variability of weather, but also like, you know, kind of keep people apprised about what's happening here. So that was not great. But because that happened, the game got pushed back a day, which meant that the Yankees could start Nestor Cortez instead of Jameson Tyone. And maybe it refreshed their bullpen a bit. They had used Wandi Peralta, I think maybe three straight days. It seems to be about the only reliever Aaron Boone trusts at this point. There'd been that miscommunication maybe with Clay Holmes earlier in the series.

Yeah, that felt, you were like, ooh, you guys got to figure it out. Yeah, you knew Boone was going to get killed for that because even though his bullpen is depleted if you lose with Clark Schmidt on the mound and then Clay Holmes comes out and says, actually, I could have pitched. Yeah, you're going to get. Yeah. But Boone, you know, he was looking at it as we can only use it in an emergency, which was also not a great line because that seemed like an emergency. Yeah, sure did. Yeah, he meant like he's our absolute last arm out there. But also, I think that seemed like an emergency to most fans. So that wasn't great. That seemed to speak of a lack of urgency, even if that wasn't what Boone meant. Anyway, I guess all is well in

the end because they won the series and Holmes pitched okay in a couple of games. But, you know, he has his shoulder issue and they haven't wanted him to pitch on back-to-back days. So I think the rainout probably gave them a little bit of a leg up. Obviously, they might have won anyway. But because of the way it worked out, Cleveland stuck with Aaron Savali, and that didn't go great. Were you surprised that they didn't just go to Bieber and have him on a very short leash? I was a little surprised, yeah. I wouldn't completely kill the move because I see what they're thinking. If you want to advance, yeah, your goal is to get to the championship series, but also you want to have a good chance once you get there. And so the difference between

starting Bieber on short rest for a few innings and then not having him until you're a few games into the championship series, even if you managed to win LDS game five. I don't know, like for their championship odds as opposed to their winning the division series odds. I think it was defensible. Now, I did see some people suggest, well, maybe they should have gone with an opener. defensible. Now, I did see some people suggest, well, maybe they should have gone with an opener. Yeah. They could have had a more effective reliever facing the heart of the Yankees lineup or the top of the lineup there. And yeah, I think you could make that case. Ultimately, who knows? Because again, the Guardians scored one run in that game. It is difficult to win. I mean, the Astros did it, unfortunately, for Mariners fans.

But it is tough to win 1-0. Yeah, but it took them 18 innings to do it, Ben. That is true. So, you know. That is quite true. Yeah. But, yeah, again, I guess you could look at this as, well, it was a decisive blow for big ball over small ball. And ultimately, the Yankees' big bats, you know, Judge hit a homer or two in the series, and Stanton hit a homer, and they quieted all those

soft-hitting Guardians. But again, as we were saying, maybe none of this means anything in that sense. So while I do think that that's true, that I guess that's the superior game plan, that the Yankees' offense was better than the Guardians' offense, I guess that's the superior game plan that the Yankees offense was better than the Guardians offense I don't know that this game or this series proves it but that's the way it happened to work out so is there anything else to say about these rounds I mean we we saw some thrilling baseball yes so that was that was great fun I mean disappointing for many but thrilling for others and I kind of like how the bracket has sorted itself out that we will

have you know regardless of who wins either of these championship series we are set for a something something of a David and Goliath world series although it feels silly to say that because it's like you know how the Padres have Manny Machado and literally Juan Soto? Right. Yeah. And also, you know, if the

Phillies advance, they've got Bryce Harper and JT Real Muto and, you know. Yeah. A lot of stars on this team. A lot of stars. Yeah. And the scrubs part maybe matters a little less in the postseason. Yeah. Because like, look at how good the back of the Padres' bullpen has looked. Like, the Padres didn't have a great bullpen on the whole on the season, but now they've got a pretty lethal late-inning combo there. So suddenly, well, maybe that's all you need at this point. And I know they haven't gotten a ton out of Soto offensively, but he's been hitting the ball very hard. Yeah. He looks dangerous. He always does, really. ton out of Soto offensively, but he's been hitting the ball very hard. He looks dangerous.

He always does, really. He's won Soto. But yeah, you have a lot of star power between those two teams. There are a lot of similarities, really, between the regular season results of the Phillies and the Padres and just the way that they were built and some of the characteristics of those teams. So you have the intrigue of the Padres. Of those teams. So, and you know, you have the intrigue of the Padres. At least you have one team in the mix that could get on the board championship wise.

So that's something. And the Phillies haven't been there for a while. So yeah, you have your chalk series and your underdog series. And then someone from each will meet in the end. Philly keeping the possibility of a fangrass world series ring alive right because of corinne so uh it's just the fun abounds then we really got to figure out when we're going to do a live stream for this this year championship series i think we got to do one now and then one in the world series probably is the best way to do it, right? It sounds like a good plan to me. Yeah, I think that's what we should do. All right.

Well, this was fun, and it will continue to be. I think I appreciated Joe Musgrove's comment about beating the Dodgers, which was, these guys dominated us all season long, but we got hot at the right time. And acknowledging that, I'm sure, did not diminish his enjoyment of beating the Dodgers, even though they had dominated. So you can, again, it's kind of a cognitive dissonance, but you can maybe hold those things in your head, at least if you're

a player in uniform on the field. Like, hey, you know, they beat us up all season, but we got the last laugh, the last word here. So that's a good way to look at it potentially. So kudos to Joe Musgrove, I guess, for that. But yeah, it's going to be good. I'm looking forward to these series. I mean, it looks hard to beat the Astros right now, but it's not actually that hard to beat anyone in the playoffs. Right.

As we've established. So that could happen. And you've got good pitching matchups lined up for this Phillies Padres series, one of which is transpiring as we speak. Yeah. Right now. Yeah. We have Darvish versus Zach Wheeler. This is great.

My advice to the Yankees most immediately and then to whichever team emerges from the NL is just, like, should the Yankees not manage to take care of business is just, like, this Jordan Alvarez guy, he's really good. So just, like, just be really careful because he can end your whole season just by himself. Yep. Sometimes with a little assist from his friends, but that you're done.

Pretty good. Pretty good. I will say one last thing about being in Seattle, and I wrote about this in the piece, but just the level of discernment that the Seattle fans had in their choices of who to boo in the Astros lineup, both during player introductions and then as guys were coming to the plate, was it suggested an understanding of when folks like Kyle Tucker or the aforementioned Jordan Alvarez, who got the business,

but that seems fair because he had just devastated that fan base for two games, right? But nobody was given Chaz McCormick a hard time. Trey Mancini, unscathed. Jeremy Pena, I'm sure if he had hit a home run and then the Mariners had managed to come back and walk it off, he probably would have been booed in game four, but was not overly booed.

And look, you know, your mileage can vary on how much you still care about that or want to give any of these guys a hard time. But just as someone who witnessed Dodger fans, who granted have a much more personal stake in the whole situation than I do. So I don't want to make light of that. But booing literally the Astros Futures game participants. It's not like a a moral giftedness it's mostly like a deeply seattle thing right where it's like well no we want to we're a restrained

group in general we waited for the light to turn to cross the street when we were wreaking havoc after the super bowl so uh yeah i would like to break news on the podcast. Are you ready? Ah, yes. Bryce Harper just hit a home run. Oh, how about that? Yeah. So, one all-fills. Harper's really raking.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, boy. He got it. I don't know that Yankees fans will be quite as discriminating when it comes to which Astros to boo. Goodness. I think it will be largely a blanket booing with louder boos reserved for some players. First of all, I don't know that that will be true. The decibel level might be so high it is indistinguishable.

Again, I'm not saying it's like a moral giftedness. It is just like a discernment that I was impressed by. Because, you know, mostly it suggests that people know the year that Jordan Alvarez debuted. And that's good to know. You know, it's fun. Yep. All right. Well, we should end with a past blast.

This is episode 1917. And this comes from Jacob Pomeranke of Sabre, Black Sox expert. And we are almost up to the Black Sox now, but not quite. So this 1917 dispatch will not be Black Sox expert, and we are almost up to the Black Sox now, but not quite. So this 1917 dispatch will not be Black Sox related. Jacob calls this 1917 a pitcher's daydreams. In 1917, Ernie Shore of the Boston Red Sox, fresh off a famous combined no-hitter with Babe Ruth, which has come up on the show before, was asked by Baseball Magazine to share the secrets to his success. Shore, a farm boy from North Carolina who was also a college math professor in the offseason, took the opportunity to imagine the future of what we now call pitch design.

Here's what he said in the magazine's September 1917 issue. Suppose the pitcher could throw a slow ball, which came up lazily enough, and then, just before it reached the rubber, shot suddenly across with an unexpected burst of speed. That ball would disconcert the batter a little. And if he could mix up that delivery with a ball, which came up fast till it got to the plate, then almost stopped and fairly crawled across the rubber, he would have some pitching record. No, I am not drunk. I am merely daydreaming. he would have some pitching record. No, I am not drunk.

I am merely daydreaming. I wish I knew how to pitch that way, for if I solved the secret of either form of those deliveries, I would hold out for a salary of $20,000 a year, and I would get it. After all is said and done, we know very little of the influence of air currents and the effect of certain twists to the horsehide. Pitching is still in its infancy,

and perhaps the twirlers of the year 2000 will have just such impossible deliveries, and looking back a hundred years, we will wonder how we poor dubs got by on the curve and the fastball. And that kind of came true. So Jacob writes, back in 1917, Shore was likely much more creative in his daydreams than on the mound. He relied heavily on two great pitches, what we later might call a sinker-slider combo. But he had the mind of an engineer, according to his Sabre bio, and he was one of many pitchers in that era who were always tinkering to stay ahead of hitters. Oh, and that no-hitter he pitched with Babe Ruth, it was one of the weirder first innings in baseball history. Ruth walked the first batter, punched the umpire, and was ejected.

Then Shore came on in relief. The runner was thrown out trying to steal, and he retired the next 26 batters in a row. But Shore certainly sounds like someone who, if he'd had an edutronic and a rapsodo, he would have been using those things back then. But he kind of anticipated those advances. And I was impressed. I hadn't actually seen that quote. Probably would have come in handy. I probably would have cited it in some writing before now if I had. And Jacob said, so many great proto-saber nuggets in Baseball

Magazine back then. And Jacob said, I assume FC Lane, not Big Ernie, wrote the actual words here, but assuming they did have at least one conversation about air currents and inventing pitches before this article went to print, I sure would have liked to be a fly on the wall for that one. And FC Lane, kind of an early proto-sabermetrician, he wrote a book called Batting, which sort of anticipated more modern ways of quantifying offensive performance way, way ahead of his time. And maybe this is another example of that. So I don't know how much of this was Ernie Shore and how much was FC Lane, but maybe a combination of both. So it's another cool example of people anticipating something, say, a century or so before it

actually came to pass, before the technology showed up to make that possible. Yeah, it's funny how that always happens. All right, we can end there. Okay, something I was reminded of by listener Chris in the Facebook group is that the famous Sam Miller quote on episode 551 of Effectively Wild, the rigor mortis quote, the point of the entire enterprise of baseball games, well, that was prompted by an earlier discussion of the playoff format and of upsets and of why we care about these things.

As Sam said back then, the point of it is not to decide who is the best team. The illusion that that is what we're doing has long been a powerful draw to sports, but it is ultimately not the point. There is no scenario where the universe will care or remember who the best team was out of this collection of collections. It only matters in as much as we create this illusion that it matters. If you lose even the illusion, then it becomes problematic. That's kind of what I was getting at. When there are maybe too many upsets, then we lose the illusion that what we are doing here are trying to decide which team is the best at baseball. But as Sam said, the point is not to have the illusion. The point is to entertain people and make them forget that we are all dying right in

front of each other, et cetera, et cetera, which is, I suppose, what Meg was saying without necessarily the reference to death. Still, the illusion is important, I think, and the illusion sort of slips when a lot of underdogs win. Because if we don't have the illusion, then we are perhaps not as entertained. And then we're right back to the horrible rotten slog to rigor mortis. Some similar discussions and themes have recurred over the course of this podcast, but that's okay. That was back in 2014. It's probably all right to revisit these things eight years later. Perhaps our thinking has changed. All right, as I marvel at a majestic Kyle Schwarber home run, if Schwarber and Harper are hitting, the Phillies will be pretty tough to beat. Let me give you an update on the first of our two playoff live streams for Patreon

supporters this month. We're planning to do one this Saturday for NLCS Game 4. Again, this is a Patreon perk for our supporters at the $10 a month level and up. We yammer during a game, we bring in some friends, we chat with you. We just hang out and watch and discuss some baseball. It's usually a fun time. So Saturday evening will be the first of those, and then we'll aim for another during the World Series. We're going to be hosting these on Discord this year. We've got a great Discord group for Patreon supporters. Any of our Patreon supporters is eligible to join that Discord group, even at the lowest monthly level. So everyone who is eligible for the live streams is already also eligible for the Discord group, and it's free to sign up there.

You just have to create an account and link it to your Patreon account, which is not too tough. You should get instructions on how to do that when you sign up for our Patreon. I will also link to those instructions on the show page, and I'll email out those instructions to everyone who is a Patreon supporter already. So we hope to have a bunch of you join us for those, and to support us just in general, which you can do by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some monthly or

yearly amount to help keep the podcast going, help us stay ad-free, and get yourself access to some perks, potentially including those playoff live streams. Thank yous today go out to James, Noble Zarkon, Joe Vincent, Ben Franks, and Lee Kennedy Schaefer. Thanks to all of you.

Again, you sign up for Patreon, you get in a Discord group, you can get access to these live streams, you can get monthly bonus episodes that we host and publish. You can get ad-free Fangraphs memberships and discounts on merch and more. And wow, not only have I now seen the majestic Kyle Schwarber Homer, I've also seen the even better Bryce Harper reaction gif, which I'm sure I will be seeing a million more times in the coming years.

It's really beautiful when you witness the birth of a gif that you know will be on baseball Twitter's rotation for time immemorial. Thank you for giving us the gift of this gif, Bryce. You can contact me and Meg via email at podcast.fangraphs.com

or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. 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. You can follow Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms.

You can follow Effectively Wild on Twitter at EWPod. And you can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash Effectively Wild. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing and production assistance. Thanks to all of you for listening and indulging my overthinking why we enjoy the playoffs. Possibly overthinking. Maybe it was just the right amount of thinking. Either way, we will be back with another episode a little later this week. Talk to you soon. I don't know why

I like you, but I do. I don't know why I like you, but I do. I don't know why I like you, but I do. I'm just trying to fire a cannon from a canoe. I don't know why I like you. I don't know why I like you, but I do.