Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2224: The 2024 Postseason Primer

Episode Date: September 28, 2024

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the 50th anniversary of the first Tommy John surgery and how baseball would be different if the procedure had never been pioneered, then (15:14) preview the 2024 postseason by pinpointing the biggest strength and weakness of each AL (21:40) and NL (1:00:17) playoff team. Audio intro: Jimmy Kramer, “Effectively […]

Hello and welcome to episode 2224 of Effectively Wild, a FanGraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Raulia of FanGraphs and I am joined by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? I'm okay. I anticipated that question, I mulled it over and I decided I'm okay. Okay. That's good.

Yeah. I mean, it's better than being bad, I guess. I wish that you were doing fantastically, but some know, some days that's not where you are. No, I can't quite go fantastic. I don't want to exaggerate because someday I really will be feeling fantastic and I will say fantastic and I want that to mean something when I do.

So we have playoffs starting soon. Don't know if you've noticed. I'm sure you've been doing a bit of planning for that. So we will devote most of this podcast to some playoff preview. I did have one banter topic to propose, which is this. We talked about Jackson Job earlier this week. He subsequently made his debut for the Tigers,

pitched the scoreless inning on Wednesday. Wednesday was also the 50th anniversary of the first Tommy John surgery, which was performed, as you may suspect, on Tommy John. And that was performed or co-performed by Frank Job, no relation to Jackson Job, as far as I know. And yet it was a nice little coincidence that Job's made some news on Wednesday.

And so I was thinking, well, what if Dr. Frank Job, the late Frank Job, had not helped pioneer that surgery? Where would we be today without Tommy John surgery? Would we be better off in some ways? Would we be totally worse off with the epidemic of picture injuries that we've talked so much about just be worse than ever and the baseball landscape would be littered with broken elbows and ended careers?

Or do you think that the rise of Tommy John surgery, the standardization, almost the routinization of it has contributed to all of the max effort pitching that we discuss and sometimes lament these days? Do you think the injury situation would be worse or paradoxically counter-intuitively might it actually not be that different and we just sort of would have a steady state of injuries and find our level one way or another?

I guess the question that you're really asking me is how sort of cynical and indifferent to human suffering do I anticipate the sport to be? And let me say what I mean by that because a lot of things contribute to elbow injuries and I don't want to put it all on increased velocity. But like we know that there is at least a correlation between guys throwing harder and their propensity to get hurt. The optimistic part of me thinks that without a reliable mechanism for guys to come back and to have successful careers after a major elbow revision, that the frenzy for more and more velocity would not have happened, or at least would have been far more gradual.

And that maybe then we would have had injury rates that were sort of similar. It's not like guys didn't get hurt before the invention of Shami John. Like there's a reason that everyone was like, hey, that's pretty cool. You know, like guys got hurt and guys careers either got, you know, derailed or they came back and weren't as good or they just ended completely. But I would imagine that, or at least the optimistic version of me would imagine that maybe we wouldn't have hit the gas on gas in quite the same way without this mechanism to ensure guys could come back and be at least when they've only had one revision largely

able to regain their previous form. The cynical part of me thinks that pitching goes better on average the harder you throw, and we see the sport in general be pretty indifferent to pitcher injuries now when we have Tommy John. And indifferent is maybe unfair of me to say, but like there's sort of an acceptance that there's this trade off, right? That you want to be really good.

Yeah, resigned to it. I think you could argue, I'm not saying that I'm necessarily doing this, but I think that you could argue that maybe that equation is out of balance and that it's, you know, that we're prioritizing some of the wrong things. I don't know that I'm given to have confidence that we would arrested ourselves in the pursuit of speed. And you know, maybe it's because I spent part of my afternoon yesterday crying about the end of the Oakland athletics that I feel sort of cynical about the sport. But I don't know, I find myself torn between those things.

The equivalent argument to this maybe is, you know, there are people who think that part of the increase in concussion rates in professional football is actually in some part due to the helmets, right? That it gives guys sort of a false sense of confidence in their ability to weather impact. And even with good helmets, you still can suffer concussions and you can have several concussions and they can compound and you can develop CTE. I think that like there's maybe something to that, although it's not like rugby players do get concussions, right? And they don't wear helmets. They get pretty gnarly concussions. I don't know what we would have sort of arrived at as an acceptable risk reward on that without Tommy John, but there might've just been a necessity to kind of cool it a little bit

because we feel like teams are stretched in terms of their pitching depth now, and they have this option to have guys come back and very often come back sort of whole and themselves. I don't know, man. Maybe it would have been fine or maybe it would have been an existential threat to the sport. I don't know. Well, you said you find yourself torn.

I guess the good news is if you find yourself torn, there's a surgery out there. Oh, boy. It's called Tommy John surgery. It depends. If you have torn a specific part of yourself, at least there is some recourse. So I think we would unquestionably be worse off. I just, I'm not sure how much worse off. I'm not actually having a revision, a revisionist history of revisions and saying that actually Tommy John is a bad thing. No, I think it's

a good thing. I think many think it's a good thing. I think many careers have been saved. Many pitchers we've enjoyed watching, we would not have gotten to enjoy watching at all at the major league level or certainly not as long, including Tommy John himself. And every time a pitcher comes back now from that injury and returns to their previous level, roughly,

I give thanks to Frank, Joe, Benko that this is an option out there. But it is kind of like our usual perennial question, how different would baseball be if it were different? And so often the answer is not that different. In this case, of course, we had a whole lot of baseball pre-Tommy John. So it's not totally a hypothetical,

what would baseball be like without that? Well, we saw what baseball was like, or we didn't because we weren't born yet, but a lot of people did. But then again, that doesn't really necessarily guide what it would look like now because so much else has changed. And so a world where we have many of the other trends we've seen in modern baseball without Tommy John surgery, maybe it really would be utterly disastrous because I don't know that the pressure to strike out more hitters and miss more bats and throw harder, that would still be present. We still would have had the sabermetric movement. We would have had the greater recognition that strikeouts are really valuable for pitchers and that VELO is good. Once we started tracking pitches, then we would have known, okay, yeah, throwing

hard, it actually is really good and having nasty breaking balls and throwing pitches that put more strain on your arm, but are also harder to hit. I think there still would have been a drive to do all of those things. And so it's good that we have some mechanism to fix broken pitchers fairly reliably. And if we didn't have that, then yeah, maybe there would be greater caution, but I'm not sure if that would be a countervailing force. Cause the problem is that the rewards are short-term. Oh, I get to throw harder.

I maybe get a whiff here and I get out of this jam. And then the penalties are longer term, or at least you hope they are, that someday down the road, I might get hurt. And so if you're a young man and you're pitching for financial security, would you have that thought in the, maybe not the back of your head,

but somewhere in the middle of your head, hey, I could really get hurt here and one tear and I'm done. And so I better exercise some restraint here. But then again, you're pitching for your career. Are you really going to, given that you don't know for sure that you'll get hurt or you might not get hurt on this particular pitch? So let's air it out. And would teams be factoring that in more so than they do now when there's just, you know, next one up kind of mentality? Maybe I guess there'd be fewer next ones to come up because so many of them would have been hurt and had their careers ended, but I don't know, there just seems

to be such a wealth of hard throwers now that maybe all of the trends that we talk about, the fungibility, the disposability of pitchers, maybe they would just all be even worse and we'd be sort of in the same boat, but it would have sprung more holes. A lot of leaky arms, you know, leaking all over. Yeah, we talk a lot about that peltzman effect, that risk compensation, that, oh, seems like we're safer. We have some protective gear. This is good, but oh, okay. We have this armor that we wear on our hands and elbows. Well, then we can stand closer to the plate and then we get hit even more or bikers wear a helmet. Maybe they're a little less cautious and they're more likely to get knocked off their bike and

hurt their head anyway. Yeah, but here's the thing. Wear a helmet though. So here's the thing though, wear a helmet because like you do bonk your head and you have the helmet on, it goes better for you. So wear the helmet and your seatbelt, don't smoke. Of course, yes. But also subconsciously, there might be some part of you that's thinking, well, I'm a little less likely to die if this happens, so I can take a slightly greater risk. And I guess those calculations are somewhat rational to an extent, but yeah, when you have these young men in a highly competitive field fighting for millions of dollars, everything is set up, all the incentives are in line to let's just throw caution to the winds.

And so I just don't know. Like pitchers used to pace themselves more, but I don't know that they pace themselves so much because of the threat of injury, it was more like, well, I'm expected to go deep into the game, so I have to hold something in reserve here. And maybe that helped a little with less max effort pitching. So a world where no Tommy John, but also all of the trends and incentives that we're seeing today, I guess would be the worst of both worlds. It's an even worse timeline without Tommy John.

So again, I'm grateful that there's Tommy John, but sometimes also it's like, well, there's going to be a kinetic weak point. There's going to be a point of failure in the chain. And so we've gotten better at fixing elbow injuries. And so maybe that's less of a problem than shoulder injuries. A shoulder injuries now are harder to fix. Like you get more scared when you hear of a shoulder injury. Cause, mm, rotator cuff or I don't know, something else.

It's, it's not as, quote unquote, automatic to come back from that. And then, you know, we've strengthened certain, like teams have gotten better at avoiding shoulder injuries, maybe in the first place through throwing programs and whatnot. And then maybe the elbow is the weak point. And I guess it's preferable for the elbow to be the weak point because we can fix that more reliably, but maybe you're just kind of rearranging the deck chairs. It's just, it's an arm, it's a shoulder, it's a forearm. Like some, something's going to fail if you're doing those repetitive high stress motions and maybe you're just kind of shifting from one type of injury to another, which I guess some are still worse than

others, but yeah, I don't know. It's tough, but I'm, I'm glad that, uh, we can fix UCLs fairly well. We need bionic, uh, elbows. Well, we'll get there at some point. We need heads that don't crack when exposed to pavement. We need six that look less cool when you try to smoke them. And look, it's, it's a thing we have to lie to teens about you guys. We have to lie and say, because they still look cool. It sucks. You know, they're bad for you. Don't do it, but they

look cool. You know? I guess that's a good example where if you're talking about vaping or jewel or whatever, it's not good to do those things. It's not good to be addicted to nicotine and to have those harmful chemicals and everything, but it's probably less bad than smoking a cigarette and also not only having the nicotine addiction, but then having all of the carcinogens in your lungs and everyone who's within nose shot of you. And so you're kind of trading one evil for a lesser evil and that is good. I think that's an improvement and yet it's not a panacea. And so maybe you're talking about

something similar when it comes to injuries. You can fix one thing, but then something else will break, the center cannot hold. And then also you might change your behavior knowing that you have that fallback option, that there's some sort of surgical safety net there. So it's all kind of complicated. It's a great advance, it's a triumph of modern medicine and yet it has been far from a cure-all or a fix for what ails baseball.

And in some ways you could argue it has perhaps enabled some of the worst things about baseball today. So kind of complicated. Hopefully that connection I drew there between Jackson Job and Frank Job is the only connection that Jackson Job has to Tommy John surgery in the foreseeable future. I can't believe you're saying this part out loud. I was like, what's the worst part of this segment going to be?

The part where Meg admits that it does look cool when you smoke cigarettes as opposed to vaping, which I gotta say, I agree with you, but also you all look like dorks. I don't know what to tell you. You look like dorks and I know it smells better than cigarette smoke, but it doesn't smell good. Someone lied to you about that. They should tell the truth.

Anyway, I was like, that's gonna be the worst part of that. That's gonna be the part that we get emails about. No, no. Jackson Jobe is fine, everyone. Don't worry about Jackson Jobe for now. And in fact we get emails about. No, no. Yeah, Jackson Job is fine, everyone. Don't worry about Jackson Job for now. And in fact, get excited about Jackson Job because we're about to see him pitch in the playoffs. It sure seems like, so that's exciting.

We are here on the verge of October and the postseason. And we've made mention of this before, but podcasting gets extra complicated when the postseason rolls around. There's never a good time to record, especially in the early rounds, because there's going to be a game every day and maybe multiple games. And so whenever we record, we're going to be behind whatever the series is. And also we shift into this mode where suddenly we're analyzing short series and individual games. And that can be fun for a spectator to just get lost in a single game and every moment

matters and all these decisions. But also if you're an analytical sort or you're trying to talk about these things, then it gets a little tougher to do on a single game or even single series level where there's just so much randomness and so much that's unpredictable and okay maybe that managerial move wasn't the optimal managerial move but also it probably changed your win expectancy by three percentage points or something so let's not blow it out of proportion so it gets kind of tough I find to talk about baseball even as the baseball itself is extremely intense and enjoyable and anxiety-inducing.

It's especially anxiety-inducing when your team is involved. I'm not suggesting that you and fellow Mariners fans are going to be happier this way. I would never suggest something like that. I can't believe I keep getting whacked with this. I come into the pod and I present my wallet to the wallet inspector and I get fleeced every time. I just remember the one time in my knowing you and in your adult life when the Mariners were in the postseason. I was a wreck.

You found that, oh, actually, this is not fun. I was a wreck. I was a living wreck. And I was surprised, right? Because here I am, I'm the managing editor of FanGraphs, and I have this remove from the whole thing, and I don't feel anything about this team anymore. And, you know, they get there and the wild card starts and I become a fan goblin and I was so stressed and it was so terrible. And then like, you know, then I had to snap back into work mode because I was lucky enough to get to cover their home game against the Astros.

It was, it was very trying for me personally, Ben. Yeah, well, aren't you so pleased then that you can just de-stress this October? No, I'm furious, but this is what it is. This is the thing we sign up for. This is fandom. Why do we do this? It's so stupid.

And I didn't feel my fandom as strongly this year as I did the year they made the postseason, partially because I was able to sort of tap into my ongoing frustration with the franchise, which helps to establish something of a remove, although you're still feeling, feeling. So who knows if that's even good analysis. But I, Ben, Ben. CB I'm sorry. That's okay. I mean, look, I didn't do it. I'm not the one who squandered the best rotation

in franchise history. I had nothing to do with that. I was just sitting here being like, please, what is this about me? Well, twins fans and Mariners fans can commiserate and hug each other. Hopefully that will help. That was a bad, bad loss to the Marlins last night,

you guys, holy Moses. Yeah, the twins as we record here on Friday are technically not eliminated yet, but we're gonna eliminate them from contention for this podcast coverage. So sorry, twins fans, if they somehow miraculously make a comeback and squeak in, then they can put this podcast

on the bulletin board and say, Ben and Meg doubted us. They never believed in us at least three days ago. And I believed in them very much three months ago or more months than that. But yeah, that's been kind of a collapse too. So that's a sorry state of affairs, unfortunately, but we are not going to include them in our roundup here of postseason teams. What we wanted to do that we hoped would have a little more shelf life is just to preview each playoff team in terms of a strength and a weakness that could help them, could hurt

them, could come back to bite them, could be their Achilles heel in the month to come. Because you start getting into previewing specific playoff series. First of all, we don't know all the matchups as we speak yet, but also the shelf life is short and those series end quickly, especially the early ones. Plus no one knows anything. And if we're breaking down the keys to the series or whatever, like those things might not come into play at all. Or if they do, it might just be by chance.

So we just wanted to look at, okay, what's the strength and weakness of each team? And then as we follow them through the next month, we can refer back to that, oh, they've managed to transcend this apparent weakness. Oh, this actually has come home to roost, as we suggested, this would be the bugaboo for them. And in fact, it has been.

So initially I thought maybe we'd go in terms of ascending World Series odds or something, but I think we'll actually just be breaking it down by league. And you wanted to start with the AL you said? Okay, so we're gonna do AL strengths and weaknesses, and then we will switch things up for the NL and we'll do weaknesses and strengths. I don't know, we'll just be more negative national leaguers, I guess.

And then we'll split those responsibilities up. So you get to be positive Meg, and you get to shine a light on every team and identify the strengths. And I get to be negative, cynical Ben, doom and gloom Ben, and I get to identify a weakness that could sink each roster. So this is sort of a why your team could win, why your team could lose kind of conversation. Hopefully handy for our listeners as a playoff primer. So let's start. I guess we can do ascending World Series odds within each week. We could. I just did it in seating order.

I just did it in that order. So we can do it however you want. Whichever. Yeah. We have our notes either way, I suppose. So okay. We sort of have our notes either way. Let's start with the Tigers then who have the lowest World Series odds,

according to fan graphs, 2.3%. But hey, it's not zero. They're in it. It's not zero. And who would have anticipated that a few months ago. So they have all but completed, as we speak, this Cinderella run of theirs, which seemed in doubt even just a little more than a week ago

when I talked to Jason Benetti. It's like, gosh, this is fun, but at some point they'll be pinched and wake up or it'll be the road runner looking down and realizing that they're running through thin air and will fall down, but that hasn't happened. They just keep squeaking out close winds and it's just been a ton of fun to follow them

on this improbable run here. So give us the case for why that could continue. What do the Tigers do well? There's an obvious answer to this question. You could highlight Scoobel, right? You could highlight Riley Green. And those things are, I think, in terms of if I'm identifying an individual player on the pitching staff and among their hitters to like really

lead the way here. That's where I'm going, right? I also want to like try to highlight some aspects of these teams that are perhaps a little unexpected because like Riley Green has a 136 WRC+. You know Riley Green is good. You know Tarek Skubal is good, right? Like he's the best pitcher in baseball this year. But I think that the thing that has really helped to keep the Tigers in this, especially

after dealing Jack Flaherty at the deadline, has been their bullpen. Their bullpen has been pretty okay overall in terms of their full season stats. And then in the second half, they've been the fourth most valuable bullpen in baseball, trailing only the Brewers, Padres, and Guardians. They're doing it with guys like Tyler Holton, who has an ERA under one and has basically been worth a win, and Brandt Herter, who's kind of doing an opener thing sometimes, and Will Vest, who they got back as a rule five guy from the Mariners. These are guys who aren't big names, and they don't really strike out a ton of dudes,

which they get away with in part because of another part of their team that has been good, which is their infield defense. Sixth in baseball with 22 outs above average. And then you add to that Job, who I'm going to not get too excited about because as you noted while his inning was scoreless, it was, say it with me now, one inning. But he looked good. He looked like the version of him that sort of prospect folks have heralded. So they have Scubal and then they have like Keiter Montero and now Casey Meis is back in the fold and he's only been pitching okay, but like he's coming off of this injury. So you take those guys, you take a bullpen that has pitched a ton of innings in the second

half and has managed to comport themselves well, even though again, they don't have a bunch of like household names holding down the back end of that bullpen. And when you're looking at shorter series where you're not going to be reliant on their worst starters, it could work, right? We've seen a version of this a lot in the postseason, the most dramatic and successful versions sometimes win the World Series. So do I think it's likely? I don't, Ben.

I don't think it's particularly likely, but I think that you throw Scoobal in there and maybe Riley Green hits some home runs and I don't know, they figure out who's playing third base for them as JJ Affey noted when he was running through the worst positions in the AL field today. Their third base spot is kind of up in the air, but I don't know. I'm going with the bullpen to be different, to be a little under the radar. Yeah. And I guess you wonder, well, will they run out of steam? They've ridden these relievers so hard

just to get to this point and to sneak into the postseason that maybe the fairy dust wears off in October and they all hit a wall at once and then that stops working so well. Cause sometimes we see a team that makes a deep run in October does so by riding a bullpen and sometimes it's not even a good bullpen or doesn't seem like it. It would have been, but then it's just lights out for a month.

It's just not that many games and that can happen. So yeah, maybe they just keep doing what they've been doing and it propels them not only into October but deep into it, or maybe they expended that magic just to get here. We'll see. So for my weakness, I could have just done the flip side of that, which is the starting pitching. And I considered that, although I think I'm going to go to the starting pitching well for some other teams here. And I don't know whether that's just the general weakness of starting pitching and the fact that, as we talked about last time, the best starters just aren't even that valuable these days compared

to the best position players or injuries again have reared up and hurt some of these teams too. But that has been kind of a consistent theme as I prepared for this podcast. I'm not so thrilled about this rotation. The Tigers, what their success suggests is who needs a rotation? Maybe you just need one ace, one scubal, and then you just mix and match and you do openers and bulk guys and you can get away with that.

So will they keep getting away with that? Who knows, but they've made it work for a while here. So I'm gonna go with their on base ability or lack thereof. They are just not a team that gets on base. And- It's not a good offense. No, and that we could say about other AL Central teams

that we will shortly be discussing here. Not a lot of offensive powerhouses in that division. So maybe I'm not singling them out or suggesting that that's a unique flaw of this Tigers team. And maybe they're just, you know, Tigers team of destiny. Nothing can stop them. No weakness can get in their way, but they have had issues all season getting on base.

The only teams with a lower OPP this season are the White Sox and the Marlins. And the Tigers are one point better than the Marlins. So that's not good. And if you look post all-star break during this time when the Tigers have been winning, they really haven't been any better. I think they have the same OPP post all-star break than they do full season. Now there's a few other teams that have been even worse and thus are ranked below them,

but they haven't really gotten better. I guess in September they've been middle of the pack, but I never really know how far to drill down on these things, because like you can get into trouble if you're looking at full season stats and then the roster as currently constituted doesn't really reflect what they were doing in April and May. But then again, if you just slice too fine and say, oh, they've been okay in

September, well, you know, what's more telling the full season performance or the extremely recent performance? So I'm going to go with the on base issues, even the Javier Baez-less Tigers, not exactly a great team at getting on. And I know that the playoffs, it's short sequence offense anyway, and you're not really trying to string hits together. You're trying to go for the big blow and you know, it's not like they're that great at that either.

So yeah, this is an issue for, for their AL Central rivals as well, but I'm going to go with OPP. This is an issue for their AL Central rivals as well, but I'm going to go with OPP. Here is one final bullpen stat about the Tigers. So they lead the majors in relief innings pitched in the second half. They have 326 and two thirds innings pitched. The next highest team is the White Sox with 259. So like when we say that they are leaning heavily on that bullpen, they are really leaning heavily on that bullpen.

Yeah. And of course that's counting bulk guys, quasi starters as relievers, but still. And they have bulk guys. Oh Ben, do they have bulk guys? They got some bulk guys. But yeah, there's really not a rotation to speak of. It's just like a couple of guys who are starters and then also all these relievers.

By the way, the Tigers, I assumed when I first saw how low their OPP was that they just wouldn't walk, but they aren't that bad at drawing walks really. That's not their issue so much. It's kind of a general across the board, like a lot of low average hitters, like the walk rate is, it's not terrible, but it's, you know, toward the bottom half. And then also like they strike out a fair amount too. So I could have just said offense in general,

but I wanted to be a little more specific than that. All right. Next team up in the AL World Series odds, not straying far, we are looking at another AL Central Club, the Kansas City Royals. What do the Royals do well, Meg? Again, like I think it's inarguable that the single most important individual player on the Kansas City Royals is Bobby Wood Jr., right? 10.3 war by our estimation of war, 168 WRC plus, superlative defense, 30-30 season, great, great player. Could, in a different year, would be the MVP, right? If it were not for the season that Judge is having. But I want to talk about their starting pitching because we've highlighted this several times on the pod that their

starters outside of Reagan's have really exceeded our expectations. We thought those guys should be sort of innings eater guys and nothing more, but Royal's starters are tied with the Braves in starting pitching war. They trail only Seattle in starting pitcher ERA, their fourth in baseball in starting pitcher FIP. And even in the last 30 days when their fourth-starter Brady Singer has really keeled off, he has a 5'6", 7' ERA and a 5'1", 3' FIP, they're third in the league in starting pitching war.

And they also lead baseball in ERA minus, which as our listeners may remember, Parking League adjusted, lower is better. The thing that I'm really interested to see with them is sort of the composition of the outs that they're able to get because they're not a big ground ball team. And when you look at the way that their defense lines up, like the Royals defense rates very, very well, but the real strength of that defense is the infield defense, right? It's not that the outfield defense is bad, it's just more of a mixed bag.

You don't have standouts at every position. So I'm going to quote from Ben Clemens' recent piece where he ran down some of the more maybe under the radar difference makers for each of the contending teams from Ben. Per Statcast, Kansas City's infield defense has been 31 outs above average, which like you guys, that's a lot. That's me editorializing Ben's words, not Ben's words. Their outfielders have been three outs above average. The Royals preferred lineup is light on outfield defense, in other words. The Royals' pitching staff isn't particularly focused on grounders, though. They're in the middle of the pack when it comes to ground ball to fly ball ratio, and Brady Singer is the only one of their playoff

starters who effectively keeps the ball on the ground. Opposing teams will be looking to elevate against the Royals, keeping the ball away from Witt's all-encompassing glove. That might go double in Kansas City, where Kauffman Stadium's cavernous confines mean that balls in the gap can travel a long way. Isbell is so good that he can cover for some of those corner deficiencies, but if the Royals opponents can pepper the pole side in the air, Kansas City's defensive excellence will be blunted." So I am very curious to see sort of how those two aspects of their team interact with one

another come playoff time, but want to make sure that the guys beyond Regans, I mean, Regans has been outstanding, but they have been very strong sort of across the board in terms of their starters in a way that I really did not anticipate. And I think that when you get beyond sort of Witt's individual performance, it has absolutely been the thing that has propelled them this year. And I think has the potential to be a difference maker for them. Come October.

That's a good one. Yep. And while you're shouting out to other Ben, I did also want to mention for the Tigers, he mentioned how much they've struggled against good fastballs. Yeah. Which, you know, that's part and parcel

maybe with just not being a great offense overall, but that's been a specific weakness of theirs. And you see a lot of good fastballs or certainly fast fastballs in October. So I never know how much to make of pitch type performance stuff because it may not be that predictive. You always, it's like you're breaking down single games and you're like, oh, this team has struggled against sliders this season or something. And it's, you're trying to look for any kind of edge and maybe you're just overfitting. You're just finding something that it's not really a hallmark of this team. It just has happened to be the case and might not continue to be.

Okay. So for the Royals, I'm not the first to point this out, but a big difference between this Royals team and the last Royals teams to make the playoffs 2014, 2015, Salvi is still here, but a great back of the bullpen is not. So that was kind of what powered those Royals. It was, let's have a great defense, which they still do, and let's have a great back of the bullpen and then let's be speedy and slappy and score enough runs. Yeah. And they do not have the great bullpen part.

So as I just said, you never know. You can go on a bullpen heater and unexpected sources of great relief may surface. But yeah, it's just, you know, they've kind of rebuilt this bullpen as they've gone. You know, they've got Lucas Erceg comes over from the A's. He's been solid, but he's not like you're scared to see Lucas Erceg come in to protect a lead in October.

I mean, great story for him converting and being an effective reliever and everything. But you want a big hairy bullpen monster out there. And they just do not have the Wade Davis Kelvin Herrera kind of combo, you know, the seven eight nine that they had back in in 14 and 15 and They have some starters out there that they've moved to the pen like Chris bubich and Daniel Lynch And again, they've done fine Sam long like they've got some And again, they've done fine. Sam Long, like they've got some dependable-ish options out there, but not the kind of options that when you feel like you're down, you feel like you're out. Right.

And that's what they had in 2015 and 2014. And that gave you some confidence because, Hey, even if we could just scratch across a run here and take the lead, then just hand it to Herrera and Greg Holland and Wade Davis and everything will be fine. No, as long as the Royals are in the playoffs this year, it's going to be white knuckle city for their fans. White knuckle city. So that's the Royals whose World Series odds were second lowest in the AL and I guess also overall.

So their world series odds were actually, I guess, tied effectively with the Tigers at 2.3%. Next up on the AL list is the Baltimore Orioles at 5.1%. So a little lack of faith, perhaps. But, yeah. Okay. So, and that lack of faith is not like an official editorial stance of fan graphs, but it is going to feel like it because my strength for the Orioles is the offense, kind of. So the Orioles, like America, are a land of contrast, Ben.

So in the first half, they went 58 and 38. They scored 474 runs. They had a team WRC plus of 117, which led baseball. All of their qualified hitters had a WRC plus of at least 115. Gunnar was at 170. Westberg and Santander were at 131 and 127 respectively. Adley was at 123. Montcastle was at 115. They led the league in home runs. In the second half, as everyone knows, they're 30 and 33. And a lot of that is because of the pitching, so I'm not going to step on that because I

have a feeling that that's going to be your weakness. But they've scored 290 runs. Now, as we've noted, second half shorter than the first half, so that has something to do with it. But they also have seen a drop in production from some of their key bats. Some guys have kind of bounced back, right? Like Cedric Mullins had a pretty lousy first half. He has a 140 WRC plus in the second half.

Gunnar and Colton Kauser have 136 WRC pluses. Santander is still hitting well. But Adley has fallen off a cliff. He has a 69 WRC Plus, not nice. Jackson Holliday looked like he had figured things out when he first came back up, but he has cooled and he has just a 72 WRC Plus. Mountcastle has tanked. Westberg broke his hand. Now, I want to be clear, this is still a good offense. They

have a 108 WRC plus in the second half, but it's less good. And when you are a team that has a pitching staff, both the Serner's and the Bullpen, that the Orioles have, that's a problem because the way, the sort of most obvious path forward for them if they're going to make a deep run is to just knock the ball around, score a bunch of runs. And I think that they still have plenty of capacity to do that. And we need to see kind of how Westberg looks in particular coming back from injury. But he didn't have a lot of time to ramp up, right? He had a rehab start and then I think got like basically a week after they activated him to kind of get up to full major league strength and speed. And it's a less imposing offense than it was. Still an imposing offense. Also, Ben, I also think

that we need to allow for the possibility that the Orioles will have contracted some sort of collective river disease because did you see the pictures of them having champagne or beer out of the Homer host? They were all at the same time, all of them pouring it. I don't want to disrespect the Orioles Clubbies. I'm sure that they do a great job. I'm sure that they clean that thing every day, but I'm just here to say you're probably still not cleaning it enough.

Clean it more. Clean it more. And to everyone listening, when was the last time you cleaned your water bottle? Go clean it after you're done listening to the show. You go clean it right now. Podcasts are great to listen to while you're doing dishes. I was worried about Adley too. He just, he hasn't been the same. I mean, he got hit by a foul ball back in June and he's been playing and x-rays were negative, but something's been holding him back and he's had back issues also. So he just seems a little bit banged up and not at full strength. So that's a good one.

Yeah, I am going to talk about the pitching. I will mention also the defense I would say is not a strength for them. In fact, I would go so far as to say it's a weakness. And that's what I'm here to talk about. So I don't know that it's the worst thing about their roster, but it depends on which metric you're looking at and of course who is actually on the field on any given day because that's changed a lot over the course of the season, but they've been below average defensively.

But yeah, let's talk about the starting rotation. When have we not been talking about the starting rotation for the Orioles? Seems like we have been since the season started or before. And I'm a little heartened by the fact that as we talked about last time, Corbin Burns has seemingly fixed his cutter to some extent and he's looked better lately. And Eflin has been a huge addition for them and gives them a pretty solid number two, I guess. But the news that Grayson would be out, that's tough. And then you're talking about piecing things together.

You've got Suarez who has filled in ably for them all year, but Suarez and Kramer and Povich, and you only need three good starters for me to say, oh, this is okay. So two is almost at three. It's only one starter less than three. It's one entire person, Ben, is the thing about it. You know, it's one whole guy.

Yeah, it reminds me of when we had to explain how many games you need to win in order to win a postseason series. I shouldn't say had to, but we chose to repeatedly. We chose to. Yeah, many times. That'll probably not be part of our playoff preview today. I don't know that people love that. But if anyone needs a refresher.

Yeah. Of all the bits we've done, I don't know that that ranks as one of the top five. You know, we got feedback on that. Jared Ranere So that and, you know, just, I mean, they're down almost a whole rotation between Bradish and Means and Rodriguez and Tyler Wells. They've just lost so many guys there. And then of course, they're down Felix Batista too. So they've just been mixing and matching and trying to piece that group together. And Craig Kimbrel is gone, which at this point was addition by subtraction, but they hoped it would be addition by addition when they signed him for whatever reason.

He was good for a while, but it's just a little thin, both bullpen and rotation. You can't call either of them a strength and collectively, I think you could call them a weakness. So they have to out hit that weakness. And as you noted, there might be some questions about that too. So this is why the Orioles haven't played very well of late. There are questions about the roster. This is why they fell out of contention for the Ale East and had to content themselves with a wild card and maybe the calendar will flip and they'll forget about all of that and they'll go back to being great again. But yeah, there are some issues and some shortcomings there. Okay.

Next up, the Houston Astros at 5.8% odds to win the World Series. We always knew that the Astros were going to end up here, that it was inevitable. We should just skip the early series and just give them a bye to the ALCS. You know they're going to get there. But yes, to you as a Mariners fan, probably not the best news, but even when they were struggling to start the season, we were warning everyone, you know? We were warning people. They're the serial killers that are not actually dead. Don't take it for granted that you're safe. They're the serial killers that are not actually dead.

Don't take it for granted that you're safe. They're going to come back, not like morally speaking, but just in terms of their ability to consistently contend. And even when you count them out, here they come again. So how have they done it? What has powered the success and weight might continue to? Okay, Ben, here's the deal. So the Astros have Jordan Alvarez and he's been otherworldly this year.

He's been dealing with this knee sprain, but he is, I think, one of the best hitters in baseball. I know that people know who he is, but we do need to keep reminding people that he is just supremely talented, right? Yes, and has been a supreme postseason performer for whatever that's worth. Yeah, incredible in October. Bregman has picked it up in the second half and Kyle Tucker is back and has been very good, albeit in a quite limited sample, but he has a 192 WRC plus in the, you know, 67 odd played appearances he's had in the second half. And Diaz and Carantini are

both hitting well, which has to feel very strange to Astros fans who were used to years of Martine Maldonado, right? But the thing that kills me, Ben, is a rotation that in the second half of the season is the best in baseball by our version of war. I am furious. 7.8 war, a 3-2-4 ERA, a 3-3-7 FIBA, 27% strikeout rate. And that is despite six starts and 27 and a third innings from Verlander who has an 8-8-9 ERA in the second half. Okay?

Frember of Aldez has a 1-9-6 ERA. Hunter Brown is at 2-2-6. They reworked Kukuchi's arsenal. He has a 2-7 ERA. And as Clemens noted earlier this week, Frember has just, he had this almost year-long stretch where he wasn't bad, but he was not living up to the reputation he has as one of the better starters in baseball. And then the All-Star break rolls around, he re-emphasizes his curveball, which is one

of the better ones in baseball, and all of a sudden he's getting more whiffs and he's getting more strikeouts and he's going deep into games, right? He's gone like seven innings in I think seven of his last ten starts. And that's to their benefit because their bullpen is kind of shaky even with the presence of Hayter. But like this team that has had so many pitching injuries and that looked so bad and was like Spencer Arigetti who looks like he's figured things out isn't ready but we have to throw him out there because we just need someone to eat innings

because all of our dudes are hurt. Has a baseball taster in a baseball right now. And I am furious to the point that I sound like a Muppet. Yeah, I can see how that might be frustrating. So mad then. So there's other stuff that works here. There are other things about them that I think are shaky. But the, the rotation, figuring stuff out in the second half, I think is really what,

what did it? It's what allowed them to affect what was basically a 15 game swing in the AL West standings and now they're going to the postseason and the Mariners are going home and I am just sitting here again Not knowing what more I can say Anyway, that's what I have on the Astros Okay, I meant to mention by the way when I was talking about the Royals bullpen as a weakness I stand by that. However, they do have Will Smith the reliever and Employing Will Smith has had an extremely high correlation

with winning the World Series the past three seasons. So there's that. So the Astros, I don't know if this is the best one to pick, but I think it is weakness. I guess it's good as weaknesses go, which is their base running. There's not a good base running team. They're one of the worst by Fangrass base running runs. Their third last in that metric. They don't steal a lot of bases, but it's not just that. It's just a general running malaise

and they're not a young team. I mean, a lot of this core has been around forever as we know and are getting up there in years or have had various physical ailments. And so it's not a bunch of burners and they're going to be probably primarily a station to station team in October. And again, as weaknesses go, I think that is better than being bad at pitching or bad at hitting in general.

And they're not that they're a good offensive team. They're one of the best because, you know, they have some holes maybe at the bottom of that lineup, but it's, it's lengthier than you'd think. And every team has a hole somewhere just about. So I'm going to go with base running. But if, if you have others you want to mention, I almost feel like it's kind of a cop out to say base running because in the grand scheme of things, I think it's, it's not as big a deal, but of course, in any given game or series,

it can be an enormous deal. Yeah. I mean, they aren't like a particularly standout team defensively. Um, you know, it kind of depends what metric you look at, but they're below average defensively. I think they're at negative four outs above average. I mentioned that they've had guys who have sort of come on in the second half, but it hasn't been the best year ever for Bregman and L2 of A. So maybe there's some of that. Tucker's been good, but he was hurt for so long, so is he just on a heater?

Is he Kyle Tucker again? I don't think that they are indestructible, but the fact that they can hit the ball really well, they can just not showcase their worst pitchers. I think that they have a weak-ish field ahead of them. Like, they have Detroit in the wild card in all likelihood, at least as the standings are currently constituted. And I would take them over the Tigers, so. Okay, we've got two more AL teams. Guardians are actually second here at 6.2% World Series odds. I'm shocked by that.

I am too, actually. Some real respect for the Guardians. I have no respect. No, that's not true. But I'm surprised by that just given how far over their skis they are from a base runs perspective. I wonder if this might mirror our strengths and weaknesses for Detroit, but we'll see. What you got for bullpen. Oops. What you got for Freudian bullpen slip there. Wow, slip. Unlike the bullpen, which doesn't slip very often. It doesn't. No, it doesn't.

It's the bullpen. Well, let us extol the virtues of the Guardian's bullpen. They have a 2-5-9 ERA. They have a 3-2-7 FIP. They have been worth almost eight wins. They have 15.42 win probability added. The next closest team in the AL is the Rays. They're at 6-8-1. The next closest team overall is the Brewers at 13.7. Their situational win, so when you take WPA and put it over leverage index, leads baseball. We've talked about Emmanuel Closet, but like Cade Smith has been fantastic, Hunter Gaddis has been fantastic. I was surprised, and people may have backed into this when they heard me say how many

innings Detroit's bullpen has thrown, but they don't lead the league in relief innings. They're starters, and I don't want to step on your potential weaknesses here, but have been underwhelming by contrast. So when you marry their bullpen with the fact that they also great out very well defensively, they have been able to sort of cobble it together on the pitching side, despite a rotation that is pretty weak and an offense that's just so-so. So yeah, the bullpen, like it's so straightforward. What else could you say but the bullpen?

And that can again be a difference maker in a good way. But if I had to pick a strength, I just, you know, is it consistent? Is it reliable? Is it repeatable? Will it suddenly go south? Who knows? But really it has propped them up all season so far. That's why they're here. And yeah, I think the rotation is what I was going to say probably, but we could pick from a couple options here. Yeah. The rotation, I think I likened it to the Tigers a second ago.

It probably has more depth than the Tigers rotation, but also no Terek's sc Scoople in it. So I don't know, pick your poison, I guess. Depth is less important in the playoffs, but they've gotten through just kind of Tanner by being it and Gavin Williams and Matthew Boyd has helped them and Alex Cobb briefly, and then got hurt again and Ben Lively has been huge for my minor league free agent draft team and you know he's been all right for them just kind of taking the ball and going out there and being meh but that's kind of what they've needed to get the ball to the bullpen so no one there like the guardians are probably not going to have the upper hand in most of their

starting pitcher matchups this postseason. So that hurts them and it also doesn't really help that they can't really rake. They're not gonna mash to make up for that weakness. It's not a great offense and it's gotten worse as the season has gone on. And so when I was talking about Detroit's issues with on base percentage, again, you could say the same about the Royals in recent weeks and months. And you could say the same about the guardians who started out hitting for more power than expected, and that's kind of tailed off too. So it's just, it's not a particularly impressive

offensive team at best it's maybe average-ish. And if you're average league wide, then that's going to make you well below average among the playoff teams. Yep. They don't even, I mean, I guess they, they still put the ball in play, not quite as much as they did

when they were so celebrated for that previously. The Astros, they don't get enough credit for that, I think we could have mentioned that when we were just talking about them a second ago, but the Astros throughout this run have done a really good job of combining power and contact capacity. So yeah, it's nice if you can put the ball in play

and it's nice if you can just be all or nothing sluggers. The all is good, not so much the nothing. But if you're the Astros, they have managed to be a team that historically at least has hit for power, perhaps less so this season, while also putting the ball in play. And that's the best of both worlds. So Cleveland's still pretty good at not striking out

and they did up their power. This is a much different Guardians lineup than the last one we saw in the playoffs. Cleveland's still pretty good at not striking out and they did up their power. This is a much different Guardians lineup than the last one we saw in the playoffs, but yeah, they're not going to out hit you most likely. So they're going to out bullpen you and maybe they will outfield you, but everything else, yeah. Which takes us to the last American League team, the New York Yankees, who have World Series odds of 16.5%. What would you identify as the Yankees' strength?

I don't know if you- Literal physical strength. I've heard about this, Ben, but the Yankees' offense is pretty good. Specifically. And specifically within that, there are these two guys, I don't know if you've heard of them, Aaron Judge and Juan Soto. The Yankees have a 117 WRC plus as a team, which is tied with the Dodgers for the best in baseball.

They're non-judge, non-soto regulars. So like guys who qualify for the batting title have a 95 WRC plus. Yeah, which is what the Tigers have as a team, by the way. So it's like Tigers are like, what if you took judge and Soto off the Yankees? Off the Yankees, which like perhaps suggests that if a opposing team is able to put together an effective plan for dealing

with Judge and Soto, well, it gets easy after that because we just spent time talking about how the Tigers offense is not very good in so many ways. But you do have to deal with Judge and Soto who combined have a 200 WRC plus. Or you can intentionally walk them, in which case now you suddenly have runners on. Right. Judges 220 WRC Plus is the best non-bonds individual season of the expansion era. They're pretty good, and those guys in particular are pretty good. And again, it's not as if there isn't a way to deal with them, it's just that the way

to deal with them is something that no one in baseball has really been able to do very effectively this year. And it's not like they haven't seen, like I know that there's some wanting pitching in the AL East, but they play other guys besides those guys. So it's going to be tricky for teams to figure out what to do with those two. Jared Ranere Yes. If you go into a series against them and your keys to the series are just neutralized judge and soda. Well, good luck with that. No one has yet managed to do that, but sure, if you were able to do that, that would be great. Okay. Well, weaknesses for the Yankees other than the rest of the lineup, I've got to mention the base running again, because they rate even worse than the Astros. They're dead last in Fangrass base running runs, and that's not really new for

the Yankees. They have been sort of a station to station team, which has been frustrating to Yankees fans. When they are not hitting tons of dingers, then they're not going to be out there manufacturing runs either. That's just not their game. So, you know, if they do continue to hit tons of dingers, then they'll be just fine and you won't really care that they're not really taking a lot of extra bases, but they don't take a lot of extra bases. Now, the newer weakness for them is the bullpen,

which is just, it's not very good. That has been a consistent strength of theirs over the past several seasons is that they've just managed to keep churning out, hard throwing, nasty, waydenning bullpen arms without a ton of name recognition or acquiring them from other teams and turning them into big bullpen weapons.

That has kind of run out for them this year. And there have been season long concerns about clay homes. Right now there's just kind of a who is the closer conversation happening with the Yankees and granted who is the closer is, is often an open question for teams. More so these days, you don't have as many designated capital C closers who get every save opportunity. Those save opportunities are much more widely distributed and teams play

matchups and there's less to that designated closer position. But if you can't find a closer less because you're doing a raise style, well, let's just use whoever is the best option for the situation. Then we just don't have any great options right now. And that's not great. And that's where the Yankees find themselves. So they just don't have a lot of just nasty dominant bat missing guys at the back of that pen and it projects to be one of the worst pens right now. So that is a change for them and that is always as we covered

with the Royals that that's something that you, it's not like Mariana Rivera never blew a postseason game as my mom would certainly remind me and everyone else. It's a distant callback. It just remains my favorite thing you've ever told me about your mom where she's like, who's this bum? Yeah. She was not impressed by Mariano because she remembered a couple of his notable postseason collapses, even the greatest October closer of all time. He had a couple of lapses and when you're a closer in the postseason, your lapses are going to hurt. They're going to be costly. They're going to be decisive. So it happens to everyone. But are you happy going in with Luke Weaver and Tommy Canely and Clay Holmes and Tim Hill? There's just a lot of question marks there. And now there's Nester Cortez uncertainty,

or I guess certainty. He's out with a strained elbow flexor for at least a while. So yeah, it's a little thinner there without some of the guys that they've had at the back of that pen in recent years. Tim Hill looks like a guy who plays like an old timey bootlegger in a movie and then like dies in the first act and the gang has to avenge him. That's what Tim Hill looks like. Like avenge me. All right, on to the old senior circuit

and we'll start with the Atlanta Braves who are the only team we're talking about today that as we discussed them are not in playoff position. They are a game behind the Diamondbacks and the Mets in the race for that third and a wild card, but it's close enough that we figured they did merit inclusion. They're still very much in this thing.

So what do you want to say is the strength of Atlanta? I think the thing that I'd like to highlight about the Atlanta Braves is the starting pitching because I imagine you have a number of weaknesses that you're going to bring up here. It's pretty impressive to me that the Braves rate so highly. Our version of war really likes them. I'll remind people it's a fit based version of war so that might have something to do with it. These guys are doing pretty well in that score.

But when you look at their rotation, and I will also just put the caveat on what I'm about to say that when you look at how Chris Hale's velocity, fastball velocity is trending over the second half, you could feel concerned about that if you were inclined to feel worried about the Braves. Because it is trending down. They're not doubling, they weren't doubling him up to get two starts in. They were going to give him extra us this week. I don't know where they're sitting with all of that now that they're playing a double header on Monday and who knows if they're going to be able to get this game in against

Kansas City today. And we will once again say that like this hurricane situation is really dire for human people on the ground in a way that's more important. and also it is irritating that this was not planned for in a better way by both the Braves and Major League Baseball. But I remember writing about Sale back when he was good pre-injured Sale. And I noted even then that he had a tendency to break down. He has not been a successful postseason pitcher. It's just 10 games, seven starts, but he's got a six plus ERA and that kind of goes hand in hand with the fact that he had historically worn down

later in the year and he's still been pitching well. He's very much been effective and is sailing to the Zion Award. But yeah, maybe some kind of concerning trends there. Yeah, it might be a concerning trend if you were looking for a reason to be worried. And obviously Lopez is dealing with the shoulder, right? He had a shoulder thing. So we have to look beyond the pure sort of performance numbers that you would see a fan grass, but it's like, sale has been transcended. I think he's the Cy Young favorite in the NL, right?

And then the Lopez reliever to starter conversion experiment has gone really well. Freed isn't what he's been when he's been his best, but he's been a very effective starter for them. Schwellenbach's been pretty good. Morton, and you imagine that they will kind of move some of those dudes around and they don't need all of them because you famously don't need five starters, da da da. And so some of those guys will probably see time in the bullpen. They'll be able to like worry less about who their fifth starter is going to be.

But considering that this team lost Spencer Strider so early for them to have done what they've been able to do from a rotation perspective is pretty spectacular. And it's really cool to see Sale have this resurgent season and for Lopez to do what he has done. So I'm going to point to the rotation as their strength, particularly if they are able to actually get into the playoffs, if they are able to, you know, as they're moving guys around maybe get some of the guys who are retired rest. Like I think it could be good.

Now all of that is predicated on them not having the jankiest possible wild card rotation because who knows what the next couple of days are going to bring for them. Again, things look better from just a pure weather perspective in Atlanta right now apparently, but it was obviously terrible overnight, so I don't know what condition that field is in. They have to play this series against the Royals. I'm sure the Royals are sitting here going like, why is this going to be a problem for us potentially? And then they have the doubleheader Monday. So some of their rotation advantage might be blunted just based on how they end up having to line guys up for the wild card if they get in, but they

have some pretty formidable starters at their disposal if they're able to get there. Well, the weakness is fairly obvious, which is their inability to be healthy. That's not really, maybe that is kind of a cop out, but if they had their better players, then they would be a better baseball team. So that's kind of goes without saying, and yet I said it anyway. So health would be one obvious weakness, but that's been a problem for them all season long. That's nothing new.

So I suppose I would highlight the offense, which is related to the unavailability of, say, Austin Riley and Ronald Okunyu Jr. That'd be a pretty big difference. And it's not just that, it's also the guys who have been healthy have not been as good as they were when they just had an unbelievable, one of the best offenses of all time. So it's not a truly bad offense.

It's weak relative to the Atlanta offense that we saw recently and that we thought we might see again this season. It's much more pedestrian. It's still an above average offense and I think has even been better later in the season. I guess most of the best offenses are concentrated in the NL this year, maybe because the AL Central is not in the NL. So that could be part of it.

Obviously there are a couple good hitting AL teams, but really, you know, it's like the top teams by WRC plus, you have to go pretty far down before you get to the first AL team in the playoff field. It's the Astros. So stacked up to the other NL playoff contenders, the Braves lineup looks thin and fairly weak. It's kind of Marcelo Zuna and everyone else. I mean, Matt Olson has been better lately and that helps. And

they did just get Ozzy Albies back, but there are more weaknesses, more holes than we've become accustomed to seeing in that lineup and even some good hitters who just don't have the numbers that we're used to seeing from them. Yeah. All right. Next up on the list, the first NL team that is actually assured. Well, no, that's not quite true either. We have to go a ways before we get to an AL team that is assured of a

playoff spot as we speak, but the Mets would be next. They're currently in playoff position with a 3.2% World Series odds. What would you peg as the Mets strength? Well, I could give them a strength, but didn't we say that we were gonna do weaknesses first? That's right, wait. It's my fault, I skipped the line, it was my fault. But what's wrong with the Mets?

What's wrong with them, Ben? I had a hard time limiting it to just one thing. Yeah, it's like most of the stuff. It's like, yeah, most of the things are not great about the Mets. They hit well, which I assume you're going to talk about, right? I am gonna talk about that.

Yeah, other than that, they don't really do anything well and they don't do anything so poorly that I would want to single that out really. Obviously not having Sanga hurts them, the rotation, they've just kind of patched it together and it's worked surprisingly well as we've discussed, but can that keep working? I don't know. I just look at everything except their offense and I'm uninspired to say the least. So I don't know that I can pick just one aspect that is more glaring than all the others. I guess I could go with rotation.

But yeah, you could say rotation, you could say bullpen, you could say defense, you could just pick your poison. Yeah. This is going to sound like damning with faint praise, but we didn't expect the Mets to be here at all. And neither did they, right? They very intentionally were like, this is sort of a step back year for us. We have to kind of clear the decks of some of these contracts that we had and sort of get ready to be competitive in 2025. We know that they're going to be big, big betters for Juan Soto. If one wanted to feel appreciative for what one has in front of one, you could be like,

oh my God, oh my God. Wasn't even doing a joke. But oh my God, this is so dramatically in excess of any expectations we had. But the flip side of that is that this team is in a playoff position right now. We'll see where they are come Monday evening, but they are very vulnerable. And I think you're right to highlight the hitting as sort of the strength, but that has caveats too, right? Because Lindor is having this fantastic, I would say season, but really second half, July onward.

But he's had the back stuff, man in his 30s, having back issues, relatable. McNeil really turned it around, but then he broke his wrist, right? So Alvarez has been just okay. But then you have some second half performances that I think are really great. Mark Vientos has come on really strong, Pete Alonso has come on really strong, Iglesias I think has dramatically exceeded expectations. They've been able to lean on him in a way that I really don't think they anticipated they would. But JD Martinez has kind of fallen off in the second half. Winker has been slightly below league average as a hitter. So it's still an incomplete team. Are they able to put enough together to put themselves into a playoff position? Yes, they've been able to do that. But apart from the Tigers,

they feel the most vulnerable of any of the teams in the playoff field as it is currently constituted. Because I think that this year, as we've talked about, all of the play the teams in the playoff field as it is currently constituted because I think that this year, as we've talked about, all of the playoff teams have their blemishes, but I think that the Mets don't have a standout thing, right? Because even, as I said, their offense, which has been good and has been quite good in the second half, you know, and has really rebounded from being just very poor in the early going. They're eighth in the league in the second half in terms of war from their offensive players. They're tied with Toronto with a 109W or C plus. They're like eighth or ninth from a WRC plus perspective. Really dramatic rebound

compared to where they were, but I think still quite vulnerable overall. So sorry, best fans, I don't mean to sound down, but that's kind of where you are. So we'll see. I feel like I might be underrating their pitching just because it has performed. I look at the names and I think, how is this working so well?

And it's not like they're the guardians or the brewers where they field really well and that makes their pitching look better. They don't do that so well. So I don't know how it's working, but it's worked long enough that maybe you have to hand it to them at some point. If you look at this month, for instance, they've been the best team in baseball by Van Graaf's pitching war, their starting rotation is number one,

their bullpen is number five. What surprised me even more is that their projections are really strong. If you go to the fan grass depth charts and you look at the starting pitchers and the bullpen pitchers, they're like second to Atlanta in each of those categories. And yet I look at the people who are in the pen or the people who are in that rotation. I think is the smoke and mirrors or how have they managed to do it? And yet they've done it and it's propelled them to this point. So maybe it keeps working somehow.

It just somehow doesn't seem like it should have worked this well. So, but here they are. All right. Next team on our World Series Odds leader, somewhat surprisingly to me, is the Brewers who are at 4.2% right now. They're right at one where the Diamondbacks are. I would have expected the Diamondbacks to be lower as they are the other team that is

kind of hanging in the wind here. So I guess we could just go with Diamondbacks if we want, just because, you know, brewers have their spot sealed up. Do you want to go with the Diamondbacks? Yeah. Okay. If we, if we do Diamondbacks, this is another team where I felt moved to say starting pitching and just, I don't want to be a broken record, but.

Which is weird, right? Because it's not like there isn't talent in that rotation, but it just hasn't been sort of good and available simultaneously for much of the year. Zach Allen's coming off an 11 strikeout start, so it's not like they're always bad, but don't, sorry, I'm just doing the Diamondbacks for you because I watched so much of them here. It's like, what version of Brandon Fatt are you gonna get on any given night? And why do all of these guys have cramping

just all of the time? Put more air conditioning in that ballpark. Can Kendrick, my God. Yeah, maybe you answered your question there. That's fine. But yeah, I expected this to be a strength for the Diamondbacks because it was a weakness last year during their run when it was kind of a gallon and okay, Meryl Kelly.

And then you kind of hoped Fatt was stepping up and seemed like maybe he had unlocked something. And then we thought he would carry that into the season. And there's been a big ERA FIPP gap with him, but it hasn't been the clear progress that you hope for. And then Gallin is good and you thought like, okay, they shored up that weakness. They learned that lesson. They went out and got Jordan Montgomery and they got Eduardo Rodriguez. And then those guys either struggled or were unavailable or both for most of the season. So it's still, despite the fact that they identified that

as a weakness and I would say took appropriate, aggressive action to upgrade it, they find themselves more or less back where they were last year, where it's kind of gallon and then you just hope for the best after that. Yeah, and like I think Merrill Kelly is good, I think, but like the bullpen is not all that great, although the gink remains like, but you know, Steve Walz has sort of been in and

out of that. Closer roll and puck has been good, but so it's just the pitching side of things is not the best, but Ben, do you know what is really genuinely very good for the Arizona Diamondbacks? Yes, but tell me anyway. That offense is amazing, particularly in the second half. So in the second half, they have the highest WRC plus in baseball. They've hit the most home runs. They have the third lowest strikeout rate.

They have the third highest walk rate. They have the most fastball runs above average. Their ability to hit fastballs, best in baseball. They're also really good against breaking stuff and slow stuff. So it's like they are hitting on all cylinders in a way that was definitely not present in the first half. But Corbin Carroll has very much come out of his slump. He has a 147 WRC plus in the second half. Eugenio Suarez, 152. I know that Keetel Martell has been hurt for stretches, but 189 WRC plus. Jack Peterson has been hitting well.

Jake McCarthy has a 106 WRC plus, but when you compare that to what they were getting out of Alec Thomas, you'll take that in centerfield, inside the park home runs aside. Loris Grail Jr. is hitting well, Grichik has been good, Gabriel Moreno has been good when he hasn't been hurt, Pavin Smith has been fine, although I do wonder how much of his WRC Plus is just him hitting against Justin Freelander. That's a little callback for those who paid attention to the game where Pavin Smith destroyed Justin Freelander's season. It's kind of amazing. They still have a couple of guys where you imagine as they get more reps

coming back from injury, maybe they start to turn it on again. Christian Walker looked spectacular in the first half of the year, and then he had an injury and he's been slow to come back. He's like a 91 WRC plus since his return, but he was one of the best hitters in baseball just a couple of months ago. So this offense is really good. And I think, you know, if you're a D-backs fan and you want to contrast this team to last year's team and you want to think about the things that play ever so slightly better in the postseason than they do in the regular season, this team actually hits home runs. That's nice because last year's team, they didn't do a whole lot of that. This year's team hits home runs. That's nice, because last year's team, they didn't do a whole lot of that.

This year's team hits home runs. How nice. Okay, well, let's move to Milwaukee. We got the Brew Crew here. And yet again, this is kind of what I was saying. I didn't want to go to the starting pitching well too early because I thought it would be a frequent refrain. And that's been a common complaint about the Brewers

all season long. And that's been a common complaint about the Brewers all season long. And yet here they are. They've managed to get by with the defense and the bullpen work and supporting the starters that they have. Yeah, I know, sorry, spoilers. But that's why it hasn't sunk them, but it could still in a big moment. And you look at, they don't have a single pitcher who has amassed even two and a half fan graphs were. Freddie Peralta is at 2.4 and is kind of by default the ace of this team. And they just, they don't really have a single guy. Like Peralta is good and Tobias Myers has kind of come out of nowhere to bail them out. And they have guys, but like no, yeah, just not all, no standouts. So they're kind of in that category of maybe unless Peralta is pitching,

they're not going to have the upper hand most likely when it comes to the starting pitching matchup. So again, like their strengths are good enough that they've managed to transcend that. And it's strange that that's the weakness, just as when we talked about the guardians, you're used to saying that's their strength and that's how they're going to get it done. And that has been holding them back. That's been their weakness, not a fatal one, obviously to this point. But yeah, it's going to be kind of a different Brewers postseason experience from some previous ones where it was like, look at all these aces and if only they could get some offense.

Yeah, if only they could get some offense. And you know, I don't want to overstate the case on the offensive side of the ball. Like they are right around sort of league average as a combined offense, at least in the second half, they were a little bit better in the first half, but we'll all recall that like a resurgent Christian Jelic was available to them in the first half in a way he hasn't been lately because he had to get the back surgery. But as you sort of alluded, like the thing that has really proven to be a separator for them has been their defense, which is fantastic. Particularly their outfield defense or infield defense is still quite good, but they basically are running out like three guys who could play center field to varying degrees of success

in all their outfield spots. We should highlight Jackson Churio coming on just as a complete player, the way that he has hit in the second half versus sort of his slow start, I think has been a major storyline for them. One of the many Jacksons and one of the more successful ones. And then their bullpen has been fantastic. You know, again, you can see a version of this team where if they are able to, you know, kind of keep it together, keep in it enough, their bullpen can close the door.

It's been especially good in the second half. And then, you know, their defense is sort of available to help bail out some of their pitching, I suppose. But yeah, like it's defense and bullpen and Jackson Trujillo. All right, well that brings us to the Dodgers, who actually have only the third highest odds of winning the World Series. Yeah, 12.1%, still significant. I think that's right. I think that's right.

Yeah. I mean, again, starting pitching, you can never have enough pitching. This is an epiphany I've had on the podcast before I shared with everyone that insight that I was struck with, that you can never have enough pitching, but it does apply to the Dodgers. We've talked about that to no end. And the end is not in sight on this episode because it's still a weakness. And look, Jack Flaherty is good. Yamamoto is good, but also has not gone deep into games since he came back and has been good two out of three times, but it's just not really built up to be like working really hard in October to this point. And then you're just crossing your fingers that you get a good day from Walker Buehler, who just really has not had that many good days this season.

And other than that, you know, like who do you want starting a game for you in the post season? It's just a bunch of Landon Nacks and Bobby Millers and just it's- Shohei Otani. Shohei Otani. I don't think he's gonna start a game.

I'm kidding, I'm kidding. I mean, they may break that glass at some point because- Anyone would do it, it would be Dave Roberts. Yes, absolutely. And the fact that he even entertained the idea, that makes me think. You can tell, you can tell. He wants it so bad.

He wants to call him into pitch so bad. You can just tell. Yeah, if he knew there was no chance, I don't think he would have said that. He wouldn't have brought it up. And once he even entertains the possibility, even if he says there's a sliver of a chance, I just, you know, he's not going to be able to resist.

Yeah. Intrusive thought for sure. He needs the team from inception to get that idea out of him. Like, yeah. Yeah. And look, it'll be a great moment, great spectator experience one way or another. You are going to throw up when it happens, Ben. You are going to text me. You are going to be sweating and throwing up simultaneously. But what if it works, Meg? What if it works? That's the little voice in Dave Roberts' head.

That's my voice. Maybe he's hearing me. I don't think I would actually advocate for this to happen. And yet, when it inevitably does, there will be part of me that thinks, ooh, this is happening. Yeah. So we'll see if, I mean, they have to presumably get into the postseason, a ways for that even to happen.

I don't know if that would happen initially, but they're gonna just be depending on this decimated, I mean, the technical definition of decimated, they're way beyond that. This is, they are demolished. They are just, they've, I wonder if they would want like some of the guys that they have jettisoned over the course of this, would they want James Paxson back? I know he got hurt anyway.

He got hurt anyway, but I take your point. Tends to, but at one point it was like, look at this, they have more starters than they have spots for starters. And Kershaw could return at some point this postseason, but it's going to be a couple of weeks it sounds like until that's a possibility. So it could, you get a great outing from Flaherty and a great outing from Yamamoto and that might be enough for them at least to get through a DS let's say. But yeah, the whole plan for them was like, we've got all these injury prone

guys, but we just need like three of them to be healthy when October rolls around and they don't have three. They have maybe two. But Ben, do you know what they do have? Yes, they have a lineup. Boy, do they have a lineup. I know that last night anyone watching that Padres Dodgers game had the terrifying thought that Freddie Freeman might have broken his ankle. It seems like it's a sprain. Andrew Friedman said after the game that they are not too worried, I believe were his words. The Dodgers are not going to have to play in the wild card round, so Freddie will get

some time to rehab. They're not going to play him this weekend series, but their offense is like preposterously good. They have a 117 WRC plus over the course of the whole season. It's 120 in the second half. Otani has been Otani. We don't need to say any more words about him. Betts has been good. He's back playing a good right field. He's 125 WRC plus in the second half. But I think that what's been impressive to me is sort of how the rest of the supporting characters in this team are playing. Max Muncie is back and he has a 158 WRC plus in the second half. And Gavin Lux seems to have figured something out.

He has a 148 WRC plus in the second half. And Teosca Hernandez has been very good, has a 142 WRC+, and Tommy Edmond is at a 110, which isn't amazing, but has been very useful and has brought lineup stability for them. Really the only everyday player who has swooned in the second half has been Will Smith, who has a 75 WRC+, but when everyone ahead of him is hitting great, it doesn't really matter. Freddie Freeman, set the ankle aside, has had kind of a weird year. He's dealt with his own injury stuff, obviously. There was the very scary situation with his son.

And even Freddie Freeman, in a weird year where he's not up to his usual standard, has a 120 WRC plus in the second half. This lineup is so scary and they might have to score like nine runs a game every night because the pitching is, as you said, apart from Flaherty is like very up in the air, shall we say. Could be fine. It could be fine. You know, Walker Buehler could be fine. Could be,

but that hasn't been how it's been really. They're going to have to score a lot of runs, but they're very well positioned to score a lot of runs. It would be kind of funny if they did it this year, you know, with Otani not being able to pitch whatever Dave Roberts might decide to do in the postseason. All of their other pitching hurt. Yamamoto unavailable for a long stretch of the season. All of their other guys down. And if they did this, I mean, come on, come on. The other thing that I'll note about their offense that I think is interesting, and Ben

pointed this out when he wrote about the Dodgers for his like October difference makers. This is a much more kind of locked in lineup than we've seen from Dodgers teams of the past. And by that, I don't mean like locked in, like they're going to hit the ball, although they do a lot of that. But there is a lot less lineup variability with this Dodgers team than we've seen from prior postseason teams. A lot of their success in the past has been predicated on,

they have their core guys and then they have all this versatility around them. They're able to swap guys in and out and kind of play platoons and do all of that. They can still do some of that, but they only, like Lux and Kiermeier are really their only lefty kind of rotational guys. Then you're dealing with how you deal with Teoscar, I guess, and the slumping Will Smith. But they're largely leaving these guys in to sometimes see the less advantageous handedness of pitching.

So I'm just curious to see how they deal with that as the postseason continues. But yeah, they sure can't hit, boy. All right, well, that takes us to the second team in the NL, just ahead of the Dodgers, though not ahead of them in the NL West, although they made it kind of close there at the end, the San Diego Padres, who right now have a 12.7% chance to win the World Series, according to Fangrass, And I don't disagree, even though they're not going to win that division and maybe

have a harder road as a consequence, just looking at the rosters, I would kind of prefer the Padres right now, I think, to the Dodgers team. So I get it. for the Padres right now, I think, to the Dodgers team. So I get it. And it's my job to talk about the weaknesses. But I guess what I would single out for the Padres, A, the defense, they are maybe the worst defensive team in the playoffs, I think you could say. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. It's not like they're abysmal. They're not like, you know, Phillies a couple of years ago kind of bad defensive team, but they're not a good defensive team. And most

playoff teams are, which I don't know if it's surprising or not, given all the fuss about, they have a shortstop at every position. Yeah. On the one hand, you'd think like, well, if all these guys have shortstop experience, then every other position should be easy for them. They should have a bunch of above average guys everywhere else. On the other hand, if those guys are not playing shortstop, all but one can not play shortstop on any given day. Then they're all playing out of position in some sense, or they're moving around or learning positions on the fly.

So yeah, that's an issue for them. Yeah. I guess it kind of depends on the metric you look at. Like outs above average has the Orioles as worse and the Dodgers as worse and the Astros as worse. So they're not the worst, but it depends on the metric probably. Probably depends on the metric.

As it always does with defense, right? But I guess the other thing is that, and this is getting a little more granular, we've kind of kept this to big picture, like big parts of the squad, like base running, defense, offense, starting pitching, relievers, we're not getting super granular

and drilling down to like individual players or pitch types, which maybe would be more useful, but then again, that can kind of get you into trouble if you start getting hyper specific about things that might not even come into play. If you look at their offensive performance, it does vary quite a bit based on the handedness of the opposing pitcher. So they are not a good hitting team or haven't been against lefties. They are a below average offense against lefties. I think they're the worst versus lefties offense non AL Central department.

Whereas against righties, they rake and only the Yankees have been better by WRC plus. So you wouldn't say that the offense is a weakness for the Padres, but I guess you could say that potentially depending on the hiddenness of the pitcher on any given day. So they do have a lot of lefties switch hitters. They've got Arise, they've got Merrill, they've got Cronenworth and Profar's a switch hitter and yeah, they just have not performed against Southpaws this season. So file that one away. File that one away, but they have still been pretty fearsome. Their pitching has been quite

good. They had all of these departures. We talked in the off season about how they had to replace the better part of her rotation. It's pretty incredible given that and the fact that Darvish has been unavailable for a good bit of the season, but their rotation is very stout. The reinforcements that they brought in to bolster that bullpen at the trade deadline have been very impactful. It's a pretty strong group and I think that I don't want to say that they are the most complete team in the NL because because I'm gonna maybe save that

for the next team that we talk about. But I think that if you wanted to sort of categorize their general strength, it's the fact that they are competitive and very good in pretty much every aspect of the game. Like there are definitely some weaknesses to your point. They have this sort of handedness disadvantage from a hitting perspective, but their bullpen is very strong. Their starting rotation is very stout. You could pick nits. You could point out that Robert Torres has been kind of bad lately.

But I think that especially given where they were in the offseason, the pieces that they lost and sort of where we thought they were going to be from a competitive perspective as they had to reduce payroll. Like the fact that they are where they are and that they look as complete and strong as they do is really impressive to me. And speaking of impressive squads, we're up to our last team, the Philadelphia Phillies, who have the highest World Series odds, 17%. And they are the team, I think, that it was hardest for me to find a flaw for.

They are quite well-rounded. And all of these strengths and weaknesses, as we mentioned last time, I don't think there are really any great teams in this playoff field. There aren't super teams here, so this is all relative to this season. A lot of these teams might have weaknesses relative to the typical postseason. It's just not that inspiring

a group. Everyone has some sort of flaw here, but the Phillies, it's tougher to find one. And it's a fun progression that they've had. We've all kind of learned and grown with the Philadelphia Phillies over the past few years because going from just squeaking into the playoffs and then getting better. And then this year actually winning the division and just looking like the strongest team in baseball for much of the season, they've gone from the upstarts without playoff experience to now like very seasoned October veterans. Not that I think that helps them or hurts them one way or another necessarily, but the narrative about them

is probably different where it's not like, you know, you hear every now and then a team will be given credit for like being oblivious to playoff baseball. It's like they don't even realize they're on this stage. Like they don't know enough to be nervous or something, which always seems odd to me. But then you hear the opposite, oh, they've been here before. If anything, Dan Zinborski has found that being younger, having less experience is advantageous, but you know, that's a tiny edge, if any. And so we've seen the Phillies like improve as a team. And if there is any edge to just having no playoff history,

as Dan found that time, well, they, I think, have more than made up for that with the fact that they're just a better baseball team now than the previous incarnations. And the previous incarnations went deep into October, which doesn't mean that this one will too, or that this one will go deeper. It would be extremely baseball playoffs for them to have the best team of the

three and get knocked out early, but they are better positioned to stay in than they have been. So I guess my weakness, if I have to pick one and I do, cause that is the job that we've appointed me to is just the outfield maybe. The outfield is the relative weak point for the Phillies. Now, they're not a bad defensive team as they used to be. They aren't. No. And even last year we talked about after they kind of remodeled mid-season, hey, they're not that bad now. And coming into this season, I remember Matt Gelb on the Phillies season previous saying,

I think this is actually an above average defensive team. And you know what? It has been. Not dramatically so, but it is far from a weakness for them now. But the overall production for their outfielders has still been, well, their 19th in outfield war on the season. while they're 19th in Outfield War on the season and they're 20th in Outfield WRC+. So if you're going to find a weakness, it will probably be in the Outfield. And they've made changes as the season has gone on yet again. But again, we're talking about, we're picking from strengths with a pretty well-rounded roster here and this probably stands out. Yeah. Unless you get to play off Castellanos and his playoff defense resurfacing.

But Johan Rojas' offense, of course, we've known for some time that's going to be an issue and yeah, overall, it's just, it's not great out there. Yeah. But on a season long basis, they're fifth in war from a hitting person among their hitters, their starters are third, seventh by fifth by ERA, their relievers are fifth in reliever war, fifth by when probability added. And as you noted, like even defensively, they rate out pretty well. So this is just a very complete squad. Now we have seen them play even just in the second half,

like they had a stretch where they were not playing very good baseball. I never liked to judge how the Phillies are actually playing by Phillies Twitter because they could be up 10 runs and half of fan base would be like, I hate them. Why do they always do this to me? Love your beautiful, weird, himbo boys. It's fine.

You guys are doing great. But they've had stretches where they haven't been as good as they can be, but they've also had stretches where they've been pretty spectacular. And when you think about how they're going to be able to shorten up that rotation to only highlight their best guys and they have a number of them. Like it's a pretty imposing group that I think could get even better when October rolls around. So I think if I were to give you a take, like if I were to have a takey take, Ben, I think the Padres and the Phillies are the best teams in the NL. I think that they're, I think that I like, just as a team, I don't think, you know, to

your point, the Padres are going to have to deal with more games. And so that always puts you at a disadvantage. But just from a pure like team composition and strength perspective, I think I'd take Philly and San Diego. And I'll also add that part of those bad numbers that I cited for the Phillies outfield were the way that Castellanos started this season. Just couldn't hit at all for the first month and was subpar in May too. And since then, he's been more or less his usual solidly above average self at the plate. So now that Castellanos is Castellanos on offense, that helps address that deficiency.

Yeah, totally. All right. Well, we've done it. We've talked about all of the playoff teams or potential playoff teams. And now you are forewarned and forearmed for the month to come. You're prepared for postseason baseball. And we'll talk about how many of the things that we. You're prepared for postseason baseball and we'll talk about how

many of the things that we discussed as strengths and weaknesses here will probably be just the opposite once the playoffs start. Yep. And don't smoke cigs, even if you think it looks cool. All right. That will do it for today and for this week. Thanks as always for listening. And thanks to those of you who wrote in, including Donald and Shane, Patreon supporters, to note that MLB's extra long highlights videos on YouTube, which I ranted about last time, the ones that include extended sequences that do not encompass the play being highlighted, must have been edited by Jeremy from Sports Night. Here's a clip from the second episode of that series. Hey Jeremy, you got a second? You bet. I looked

over your Cubs Marlins tape. Yes. And it's good. Thank you. Very good. Thanks. Especially for your first time out. Thank you very much. I guess the one note that I would have for you would be about length. Yes? Yeah. Usually we get 30 to 40 seconds for each game. A little bit more if it's a game chock full of spectacular plays and or playoff consequences and a little bit less if it goes the other way. But 30 to 40 seconds is usually the rule of thumb. I see, and how long did mine run? Eight and a half minutes. Ah. Yeah.

That's long. Yeah, it ran a little over, yeah. I don't know what to do. You should make it shorter. I tried everything. You should try making it shorter. What's the key? In this case, make it a lot shorter.

I can't imagine what I'd cut. Well, you start off with Cedric, the lead-off batter in the top of the first inning. Yeah. Making it a lot shorter. I can't imagine what I'd cut. Well, you start off with Cedric, the lead off batter in the top of the first inning. Despite the fact that nobody scored until the fifth inning. There's action beyond scoring. Yeah, but Cedric ground that out to the shortstop and was thrown out at first by quite a large margin. Yeah. Well, that is what is called a routine ground ball. In your search for things that are newsworthy, let the word routine serve as a danger sign.

There's nothing routine about it. Casey, the guy's hitting.327 since the All-Star break. He's drawn 22 walks in the leadoff position, and he's a threat to steal second every time you put him on. He fouled off seven pitches. And you show each and every one of them. You bet I do. We usually just show the pitch that puts the ball into play. But then you miss the battle. The battle?

Yeah. He started him off with a fastball up and in. then slider away, slider away, comes back with a split finger change, drops the curve off the table, sets them up off speed, then jams them high and tight. That's what got him out. It was a ground ball to the shortstop. The inevitable conclusion to a job well done. We have 14 baseball games to cover. Yeah. 30 seconds apiece. Right. Your tape is eight and a half minutes. I'm out of line. You gotta make it shorter. It goes on from there, but unlike Jeremy, I wanted to edit that clip at some point. Can't believe I failed to make that comp myself, though the laugh track in those season one sports night episodes can be quite discomforting.

Fortunately they fix that later on. As Jeremy says, it's tough to trim those moments between pitches, cause that's when the storm clouds are gathering. That's one reason why we like baseball. The drama, the suspense, the buildup, not so suited to the highlights format though. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going, help us stay ad free and get themselves access to some perks. Omar Perez, SH, Dan Morley, Nicole, and Alfred Zhang. Thanks to all of you. Patreon perks include access

to the Effectively Wild Discord group for patrons only, monthly bonus episodes, another one of which will be coming out soon, playoff live streams, two of which we'll be doing next month, discounts on merch and ad-free fan graphs, memberships, autographed books, prioritized email answers, and so much more. Check out all the offerings at patreon.com slash effectivelywild. You can rate,

review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. You can find the Effectively Wild Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild, as well as the EW subreddit at r slash Effectively Wild. You can also check the show page at FanGraphs or the episode description in your podcast app for links to the stories and stats we cited today. Thanks to Shane McKeon for his editing and production assistance. We hope you have a wonderful weekend

and end to your regular season and we will be back to talk to you next week. It's effectively wild and it's wildly effective at putting baseball into perfect perspective impressive for smart and impeccably styled It's the wildly effective, effectively wild Spin rate along shangle Bad that they're in war

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