Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 194: Outlawing Endless Games/Would Baseball Be Better Without Playoffs?

Episode Date: May 2, 2013

Ben and Sam discuss whether the league will ever take steps to prevent extremely long games, then talk about what baseball would be like without playoffs.

Good morning and welcome to episode 194 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectus. I am Ben Lindberg, joined by Sam Miller. How are you? Pretty good. How are you? Okay. What's your topic for the day? Playoffs. Play are you? Okay. What's your topic for the day? Playoffs. Playoffs? Timely. Okay. Mine is riffing on something Rob Nair wrote about outlawing long games. Yeah. That's interesting. I didn't see what Rob wrote

But Tango Tango wrote a little something about that Recently too Oh, I don't know if I saw that Well, I'll probably Tell you Yeah, he didn't say Well, he didn't really say much about it

He noted, he might have been Riffing on Nair as well Anyway, so it sounds like we both have topics That are not He didn't really say much about it. He noted. He might have been riffing on Nair as well. Anyway, so it sounds like we both have topics that are not particularly relevant to anything, and we'll just ramble for a bit. I do want to note that yesterday we answered a question about pickoff throws and whether they should be counted as pitch count, part of the pitch count, or how much they should be counted as part of the pitch count. And I want to note that Travis, who sounds like he knows what he's talking about, emailed and let us know that a big reason a pitch is so stressful on the arm is the additional force placed on the kinetic chain due to the downward slope of the mound tom house says a max effort throw on flat ground moves two times body weight as force off

the mound is more like five times a pivot throw is based on a pivot i'm sorry a pickoff throw is based on a pivot and so moves less force through the arm even if thrown with the same effort so that seems smart doesn't that seem smart sure and russell carlton uh emailed us both and you read the email right do you want to sum it up can you sum up what he said uh about pickoffs i guess he he said that he maybe plans to write about it i think think, based on what he was looking at, but that it possibly varies by pitcher in its impact on outcomes. Yeah, so let's... Okay, so if he's going to write about it,

we won't ruin his... We won't step all over his next article. Yeah, but he did confirm your estimate of the Braves' chance of striking out 17 times in a game. Oh, yeah. Yeah, exactly. I think I said that they had slightly worse than one in two chances of doing it this year.

And he did the math and estimated that they have a one in 314 chance of doing it in any particular game, which would be about once every two years. And since April is gone, that means slightly less than a 50-50 chance this year. So there we go. Yep. All right. What were we talking about? What's your topic?

The long games and whether they should exist. Oh, yes. Long games. So we'll head on into it, Ben. Okay. All right. we'll head on into it then okay all right uh so we saw the other night uh two very very long games monday night the mets and the marlins played for 15 innings and then the angels and athletics played for 19 innings uh and rob wonders if if this is uh something that eventually baseball will find a way to outlaw.

And, I mean, he says other levels of baseball set limits and somehow they endure. He mentions that the American League used to have a curfew, that you couldn't start an inning after 1 in the morning, which they dropped at some point. So there is some precedent for it. And he kind of goes through and lays out the reasons why it might make sense to cut games off at a certain point. And he mentions that, you know, three A's in that game, I guess, got hurt. Or I guess, in a lasting way, two of them did.

I mean, Chris Young got an injury. Brett Anderson, who was kind of injured at the beginning of the game and then had to pitch, also got hurt. And wasn't that the game Borges got hurt in too? Yeah, Borges got hurt also. And Crispin Anderson went on the DL. Now, of course, Crispin Anderson always go on the DL. So we might be kind of falling prey to, I don't know.

I mean, we might be attributing this to the long game when really it's just two kind of fragile players. And, of course, Anderson was kind of hurt before the game. But he also had to pitch in the game because of the extreme circumstances. So you could kind of say either way, he was hurt already, he was going to go on the DL, or he was kind of hurt, but he would have been okay. Yeah, I think the Anderson case is particularly compelling because he was literally scratched for that game because he was hurt,

and he was forced to throw five and two-thirds innings. So that's a pretty compelling point in Rob's favor. Or I don't know if Rob is making that point. I mean, he speculates that this sort of game leads to more injuries just because more than, say, two discrete games on two different nights would uh because players aren't conditioned to play two games in a row and that if you're asking them to to do that and play twice as long as a normal regulation game or longer than that in in the case of the ace game um that you know it's something that pushes their bodies beyond what they're conditioned to do and makes them more likely to be injured.

And he didn't really have any data to back that up, as he acknowledged that it's kind of a hard thing to look up. But it makes sense that it could be true. And his other reasons that he lays out, his first reason, they wipe out the bullpen. His second reason is the injuries. His third reason is that few fans are still around at the end to actually see how the game ends. His fourth reason is that players are zombies the next day, that there's a carryover

effect of some sort. And then his fifth reason is that it just inconveniences everyone who works at the ballpark or covers the game or has to stay later. And then, of course, in favor of the long games, he has that they are traditional, that this is how it's been done, that part of the appeal of baseball is that there is no clock and games can just go on and on. His second reason is that they are cool, which I, of course, agree with. And his third reason is Twitter, because Twitter is really fun when a game like this happens. Because, you know, normally baseball Twitter is very disjointed and everyone is watching and tweeting about different games. disjointed and everyone is watching and tweeting about different games but when one of these crazy 19 inning things happens uh everyone who is still awake is watching only one game because there's only one game to watch and and it's fun uh it was really fun to watch that game the other night

because i was up late writing or editing or something and and it was weird and wonderful to have a baseball game on and an exciting baseball game. I was actually shocked. I woke up and not many tweets happened at four in the morning. I think I woke up at about four that morning. I looked at my timeline and there were like 15 tweets from you and you tweet maybe 15 times a week. I got into it. Yeah, you were super into it. Were you drinking gin?

I was drinking green tea. I just hopped up on green tea. So yeah, that was fun. So these games are cool and it's kind of, I don't know, it's nice to just never know exactly when a baseball game is going to end or at least I think it's nice, but it would certainly make sense if there were some sort of limit on, I mean, on most activities, you kind of have some limit on how long it's going to go.

So I guess I wonder whether you think the reasons in favor of limiting the length of games are strong enough to outweigh the fact that these games happening. Because as it is, you kind of have to build your roster with the knowledge in mind that any game could go 20 innings and you have to have enough players or you have to have your roster set up in such a way that you won't be completely screwed if that happens and that you won't be pitching position players in the 10th inning. So I wonder what the position player pitcher breakdown would be or how big bullpens would be if teams could be confident that, say, I mean, obviously you'd still have some extra inning games. I guess

you would just limit the amount of extra. So I don't know. It's not, I don't know how often it happens that a team plays more than, say, 15 innings. Probably not more than, what, I mean, it probably just happens a couple of times a season, if even that. Pretty easy to look up. Yeah, so it's not necessarily something that a team is building around as it is and constructing its roster as it is, but I don't know. Maybe if there were no chance of that happening, there would be some sort of change.

Anyway, that's what I'm wondering. Well, I'll be honest ben i had a lot of thoughts uh and they all kind of piled up on each other and now i don't remember what i wanted to say or where to start i will tell you this there were uh four games last year that went longer than 15 innings and there were another it looks like five that went 15 roughly five or six um so they're pretty rare you know it feels to me like the general trajectory of of a league like major league baseball that's trying to appeal to the largest possible audience is to uh you know to to um one by one take away the things that we love and replace them with things that we hate. You know, we being the super fan, right? Yeah.

And it would kill me if they took away X-Running Games. Just out of curiosity, I'm having audio problems. Are you having audio problems? Not that I can tell. Okay. I think it's my cord, so it's on my end. But anyway, when a game like the Marlins-Mets that happened earlier in the night goes 15, and a team scores in the top of the 15th,

you immediately start rooting for the other team to score one and only one because you just, you know, you can't stand to see it end. And, you know, the longer it goes, the better it gets. And this is just such a delight in my life. It is maybe the greatest, it might be the greatest delight in my life is extra innings that gets uncomfortably long. And it is specifically the fact that it is uncomfortable it is the fact that uh eventually a position player is going to pitch eventually

a pitcher is going to play left field um you know eventually these things just start getting really really crazy and the fact that everyone was getting hurt in that game not that you root for players to get hurt but that's not a bug. That's a feature. Right, exactly. It was so much better that some player was getting hurt every inning and then bringing it closer and closer to a position player pitching. And, yeah, I mean, that was great for us. There was a group of fans in the bleachers at the A's game,

and after the game they all took a picture together um probably 40 of them and i i swear to you that picture almost made me cry it made me so happy to see this little community of people who stuck it out six hours on a school night and you know i i don't know i don't think i need to convince you of this i mean it to me it's a beautiful thing but. But let me propose this hypothetical universe where baseball ended after, maybe it didn't end after nine, but maybe the rules changed after the ninth inning to accelerate an ending. Or, you know, there was a drop dead deadline at 12 or something like that. Don't you think we would be getting questions for Email Wednesday, don't you think we would be getting questions on for email wednesday proposing a rule change where the game goes forever and trying to envision uh all of the uh unforeseen consequences of that

and they would all be amazing we would all be super excited about that idea and we would be proposing it um i mean it is it is baseball is the most boring, repetitive, monotonous sport because it's just game after game after game after game after game after game after game after game after game after game. And just knowing that there are possibilities for the freakish to happen is what makes it fun. And this is the perfect way to do it so tango's post which might have been a sponsor of a header i don't know if it was but uh... he he was arguing that that the fans voted uh... with their feet basically nobody nobody stuck around for the end of that

game and so what fans are telling you is that they're not interested in that they don't they want to see the ending they don't want to see a game that goes forever that they have to miss the ending um you know obviously they want to see the ending and they're not happy that they had to leave before the ending but they had to leave and uh i mean i think that's a fair point to uh but i don't think it's a it's a particularly relevant business point i don't think anybody's a particularly relevant business point. I don't think anybody goes to the ballgame or rather I should say chooses not to go to the ballgame because

of the fear that they might have to leave in the 16th inning. It's a rare occasion. I would also be bummed if I had to leave, but it's never made me not buy a ticket. Right. So I forget what else I wanted to say during that. But absolutely save the X. I do think that there's a decent chance that it will end eventually, that they'll figure out a way to – I would think that they would figure out a way to accelerate things, like by putting a runner on second to start the inning or something like that. And actually yesterday we had a question that we didn't get to that asked,

and I actually was almost going to make this my topic tonight, but it asked if baseball decided there wasn't enough offense, how they would fix it or how we would fix it if that were deemed a problem. And one thing I think could be a possible solution would just be to limit the number of pitchers you could have and to say maybe nine or ten on a roster. And so you would really have to – pitchers wouldn't be able to specialize and you'd have to face it, go through the lineup to – you know what I'm saying. Anyway, I think if that were the case, you would have to put something in place to keep extra innings from going too long because in that case, it would get freaky too soon, basically. You'd run out of pitchers too soon.

So I think that if they ever did, it would probably be a saving the pitcher kind of a thing. I don't think anybody's too concerned about Coco Crisp. He's, you know, or Chris Young or Peter Borges. I doubt the rate of injury goes up too much in the 17th inning for position players. Although the rate of injury does go up if you have to change positions. And I imagine there's more position changes. Yeah.

Unusual positions being played in extra innings. But basically it's a saving the pitcher thing. You have guys who are forced to do things they wouldn't normally do, and then the next day they have to come back. But whatever. I don't care. Honestly, I'm not a person who cares too much about injuries, and if that's the price for having weird things happen, that's a price I'm willing to pay. Yeah, I agree. I would miss those games tremendously.

Man, probably the best, I should find this game, but maybe my favorite regular season baseball moment of my entire life was around 1990 or so. And it was summer, so I was allowed to stay up late. And I had to go to the hospital. For some reason I was at a hospital. My sister got hit by a car or something like that and I was listening to the Giants and the Phillies on the radio. All these details are probably wrong but the gist is correct. The Giants were playing the Phillies, it went extra innings, it was something like the 12th inning and they loaded the bases with nobody out the phillies did and uh the giants got out of it and that was just the best the best five minutes of my life i mean it was better than it was better

than any moment of the world series in 2010 it was just incredible i'm gonna do a tracer on that story and uh-huh and it'll turn out that you concocted the whole thing i concocted a great deal of it because my sister got hit by a car, but it was in the middle of the day, so it wouldn't have been that. Okay. All right. Playoffs.

Joe Posnanski wrote today in favor of eliminating the playoffs, basically. I don't know if you saw this. I saw the headline. And his points are basically that the playoffs don't reward the best team, which is true. And we've talked about it before, but we can always talk about it more. His points in the more kind of philosophical or romantic perspective are one, that playoffs are a sort of squishy american thing uh like americans like cheap and fast and they don't particularly care if they um are i you know kind of like they

don't have the sort of harsh realism that europe would have and that, you know, like Europe is, has a kind of a truer ideal of rewarding the best, if that makes sense. Two is that, um, uh, playoffs don't represent life, uh, because life is about doing the day in, day out. It's not about getting lucky, but it's about, you know, working hard every day and never missing a day and, you know, full effort all the time and having the rewards pay off over the course of a long stretch. I guess those are the two kind of points that he would make. And then he sort of, I would say, completely concedes the point and actually comes out in favor not of getting rid of the playoffs, but of having the playoffs, but kind of talking more about the pennant winners,

the teams that have the best record, which seems to me to be a personal choice. And he can do that. The fact that people don't talk about that seems to me that the market has spoken and that it's not really something that an organized league would declare by decree, but rather would just have to come by people wanting that and people, I guess, don't want that. And so that's the point but um playoffs pro con do you care uh I've I mean I've read the I guess I've read the suggestion that there should just kind of be two different champions like a regular season champion and then the season just sort of starts over like a just a month long different season that's the playoffs, and then you have a champion of that also. Which is basically – so wait, I'm confused. That's what we have? That is not what we have?

Yeah, I guess you would just change the – you'd just put them on an equal footing. You wouldn't have a World Series and a – It's just the size of the plaque, right? Yeah, pretty much. That's exactly what, what, what we have right now. Yeah, I guess so. Um, yeah, it's just, you know, you would have a, uh, I mean, I guess you, you get a flag for get a, you get a pennant for, for winning the regular season or for getting to the playoffs, but maybe, I don't know, maybe it would have, would have been

different when there weren't so many playoff rounds and you won the pennant just from being the best regular season team, whereas now even the pennant is a playoffs-influenced thing. I don't know. I mean, I like the playoffs, I guess, for the same sort of reason that I like extra inning games. They are exciting and they're different from the six-month slog that precedes them. And everybody watches them all at once, and so it's more fun on Twitter. Yeah, that too. Yeah, and there's just, I mean, there are more just higher stakes on each inning, each pitch than there are during the regular season. And I mean, I kind of enjoy regular season games more.

rooting for one particular team, I kind of would dread the playoffs because I felt like they just weren't as much fun because I was actually worried about the team losing all the time, whereas in the regular season, it's just kind of this relaxing thing. It's baseball every day and no particular loss has any great import. I don't know. I mean, personally, I guess I do do what Joe is saying and kind of put more of an emphasis on the regular season winner, at least when I think in my head about what the best team in baseball is in any given year.

It's not probably usually even the, the world series winner. Um, so in my own head, when I think about it, I guess I already, I already do that. Like I, I don't really consider say the giants, the best team of 2012 or, or the team that would necessarily win the most games if you simulated the season over and over again. So, yeah, I don't know. I guess I already do that, but I still enjoy the playoffs and would not want them to go away. I also basically already do that, and I also don't really, you know, who cares? I mean, I don't really remember beyond like a month after the season ends

who the best team was. And I don't care a great deal beyond the end of the season who won the World Series. It's a fun thing to watch. And then it ends and you move on to the next season. That's sort of what makes baseball, in a way, kind of tedious, is that you work all year for this incredible thing, and then at the end it

only matters for 25 people it doesn't really matter for us uh but i uh would argue most i think i would i would maybe argue uh strenuously against joe's suggestion that uh playoffs are not like life and that life rewards uh the you know the day-to-day and not the lucky. I think that life is exactly rewarding the lucky. The idea that success only comes from hard work or that it always comes from hard work is crazy. And the idea that luck is not a huge part of everything that ever comes to you from the place that you're born to the timing of your best days to the people you happen to meet. I mean, I look back at all of the steps that were necessary for me to be where I am now,

and every single one had a huge element of luck in it and probably more luck than hard work. So I think that it's wonderful, in fact, that there are essentially two champions. That there's the season, which gets you to the playoffs, and which I think is probably the most important thing for a team is to get to the playoffs. Certainly for me as a fan, I'm much more interested. I think I'm more interested in making the playoffs. I think it's a bigger loss to not make the playoffs than it is to lose in the playoffs.

And then to have this sort of second weirdo tournament thing that doesn't actually represent anything real and yet takes on greater significance, I think it's great. I think that it perfectly captures the balance between having to survive a hard season and having to get crazy out of your mind lucky for a month. all else being equal, I guess the person who works harder or is more talented will tend to get more breaks or be in a better position. And I guess that's sort of the same thing with baseball. If you are a talented team, you will win more World Series because you will be in more playoffs and you'll have more opportunities, I guess. You'll get there more often.

But then there's also the element of luck and that once you get to that point, it seems like there's not a whole lot of predictiveness based on what you did before you got there. you did before you got there. So, so yeah, the idea that the idea that the playoffs are, are irrelevant because they, uh, they don't capture true skill in the course of such a small sample. It is only an issue if you're looking at it on a one year timeline. I mean, we're, most of us are going to live 70 or 80 years, uh, or God willing longer. And we're going to, we're going to sit, we're going to have decades of baseball seasons. The luck essentially gets unsorted out over the course of a lifetime. If you pick a team when you're nine years old that plays good baseball for the next 75 years, you're going to get to do parades. If you pick a team that plays lousy baseball when you're nine years old for 75 years, you're

not. The number of banners that you get to celebrate in your life will actually pretty well correspond to the strength of the team that you accidentally choose based on geography. I guess the one thing that maybe bothers me a little bit about the playoffs is that it kind of rewards different aspects or different kind of teams or at least a team that that is really well suited for the regular season maybe is is not as well suited for the playoffs even if we can't necessarily tell if we can't predict but I mean just the just the fact that it's kind of a different game I mean from game to game the the rules are the same,

but because the schedule is so different and you can just go with three starters or whatever, I mean, it kind of, a team that struggles in the regular season where you have to use every guy on your roster then gets to the playoffs and almost has it easy. And that bottom of the rotation depth doesn't matter as much because those guys don't pitch anyway and you have days off and you can move things around and kind of hide your weaknesses or hide your lack of depth in a sense.

Very fair point. That's a fair point. I'm not saying that the playoffs, yeah, I'm not saying the playoffs as constituted are perfect. But we want to keep them. We want to keep playoffs and we want to keep long games. Baseball is pretty good as it is. Yeah.

Okay. All right. All right. One more show this week. We'll be back tomorrow.