Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 550: An NLDS Progress Report

Episode Date: October 7, 2014

Ben and Sam banter about Terrance Gore’s future, then discuss Clayton Kershaw and the Cardinals and the Giants-Nationals series.

Good morning and welcome to episode 550 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives, presented by the amazing Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg, who is a very good sabermetric writer with virtually no BS in his writings. Hi, Ben. Hello. How are you?

Okay. My writings are for Grantland.com, we should mention. I am well. I am looking forward to talking to a woman next to me. And suddenly in the middle of her conversation, she stops and she points to something behind me and says, oh, that's a really cute sign. I bet that'll get on TV. And I didn't even have to turn around. I didn't even have to look then.

I knew. And I turned around and indeed it was a man with a sign fashioned out of a broom that said how sweet it is. Of course. Well, see, that that's it the people love that headline i thought about walking around there were a lot of people with brooms and i had an idea that i did not go through with them just simply walking around and anytime someone with a i saw someone with a broom saying how sweep it is and seeing. You would have gotten a lot of high fives.

Probably. All right. Anything to start with? Well, I will mention my tweet, which you responded to, about Terrence Gore yesterday. I'll share the results. I asked Twitter how many regular season games it thought Terrence Gore, postseason sensation, will play next season and over the course of his whole career and got many responses. And yours was the most negative response or tied with the most negative.

You were one of only two respondents to say that he would play zero regular season games next year and zero regular season games for the rest of his whole career the averages were 23 regular season games next year and 150 career so explain to me well for the 23 seems ludicrous there's no way he's playing 23 games next year, right? That does seem too high, yes. And one of the reasons why I asked this is because I was kind of curious whether with all the attention on Gore, who is pretty much an exclusive pinch runner, whether people would overrate his career prospects. whether people would overrate his career prospects,

because, of course, he is probably, what, one of the worst position players ever to get a major league plate appearance. Is that fair to say, do you think? I mean, just based on the fact that he was hitting, you know, OPSing 540-something at high A and then got a few plate appearances at triple A and wasn't completely terrible. But compared to, I mean, he's basically Herb Washington, except Herb Washington never got a plate appearance in the majors,

and Gore has had a couple. So do you think that that is a fair assessment, that he is one of the worst position player hitters ever? Yeah, I mean, I've never seen him field. And so he's fast, so it's conceivable that he is an elite defender. Yeah, I don't think he is, or at least I saw someone ask Keith Law whether his speed translates to defense, and he said not so much, no. his speed translates to defense, and he said not so much, no.

Yeah. I think you could – look, when you say one of the worst, yes. You have not given me a denominator. He is definitely one of the X worst ever. Right. Everyone is. Yeah, everyone is. Well, I'm not, but everyone who is, that it is.

Because you did give me a numerator numerator and I am not one. However, yeah, he is, you could make, you might be able to spend an afternoon and show that he is the worst, conceivably, but probably not the worst, but he is one of the worst, yes. There is no way he plays a game

outside of September next year, in my opinion. Yeah, so I considered limiting my question to September, whether he would ever play a non-expanded roster game. But based on the fact that the average response was 23 games, that suggests that people think that he will play a pre-September game because he won't get into every September game. So that suggests that there would play a pre-September game because he won't get into every September game. So that suggests that there would be some pre-September games. So make the case for zero and zero

because you would think that based on what he's done this postseason that he would at least be on a September roster if he's on a team with any chance of making the playoffs or even if he's not necessarily. All right, so here's my case for 0 and 0. The first case is that it's far more likely that he gets 0 than any specific number. And so I decided to go with the mode. Instead of trying to give you the number that I thought was the closest to the average of all the universes, I wanted to give you the most likely.

And the most likely number is zero, right? Just logically, that's probably true. And I wouldn't have done that. I mean, you could make the same case if you had asked me how many games, say, you know, I don't know, who's a player? Joe Panik. You could have asked me the same thing about Joe Panik, and logically, maybe zero is logically the correct meaning. Maybe it's more likely that something happens

to keep him from playing in the majors next year than that he hits any particular number. I don't know. So zero seemed like a safe guess. So zero seemed like a safe guess. But it also holds up just based on Gore's actual situation for a few reasons. One is that the Royals already have Gerard Dyson. So as far as teams needing an elite speed guy, they need him less than most. So it's not an automatic that he would make the roster.

And, you know, there are, it's not like, even with expanded rosters, you do have 40 man limits. You have various reasons that you might not have him up there if you don't need him. And they might, arguably, they might not need him. And the Royals might not be contenders next year. He might be hurt next year. There are all sorts of reasons that he might not be available in September or necessary in September. And I think that the other thing is that, well, this is more, like right now they're using him in the postseason, but if

they had anything better than Raul Abanez, I doubt he would have made the postseason roster this year either. It was sort of more the function of them not having, I mean, Raul Abanez didn't have a hit in more than a month, and he didn't have an extra base hit in two months. And that, to me, if they'd had even Brennan Bosch like the Angels had, I could see them having chosen that over Gore to have a left-handed bat. Now, as it turns out, Gore has been useful. He's been exciting. I'm certainly thrilled that they have him. I think they're probably glad that they have him. But I don't know that it was an automatic that he was going to get used in this role. So, you know, I think that it's, I think it's more likely that he gets one game in his career

than zero. But it's more likely he gets, even if you broke it into range, like say 0 or 1 to 10 or 11 to 50 or 51 to 100 or 100 to 500, I still would probably take 0 over any of those tiers. Yeah, it would be, I mean, people compared him to Joey Gatright or Tony Campana and other speedsters who couldn't really hit, but he's a worse hitter than all of those people. So it would be kind of fun if he did find his way to a roster just every September or every October, if the team that needed him most for a playoff run just acquired him somehow and he came back into the skies like how he's comet every every september that would be that would be fun but that probably won't happen because he's

under team control for you know as long as the royals want him now for several years and and by the time that he's a free agent by the time he gets to minor league free agency time or major league free agency time he will probably not be valuable anymore yes probably had a pretty early expiration date and that he has one tool and that tool is is a skill that declines pretty much right away for most guys so he will be yeah he sorry he will be slower next year he'll still be fast but he will be slower next year we saw with billy ham Hamilton this year that even being the fastest runner perhaps in Major League history is no guarantee of huge base running value. And although, I mean, we saw last summer, 2013, it looked like Hamilton was unstoppable,

would never get thrown out. It was just unbelievable. And this year he had a poor stolen base rate and 56 steals, which is just not that special. And Gathright, I know that you alluded to this. So Gore this year was 23 in high A with a 550 OPS. Gathright when he was 23 got 60 major league appearances. He played in AAA and hit 326 over 260 plate appearances. He played in AA and hit 341 with a 399 on base percentage and 381 slug. So he was very good at those levels when he was 23.

I'm not sure about Tony Campana. Tony Campana can't hit, so maybe it wouldn't work as well. Anyway, it's a strange thing because you have a guy who is getting a ton of attention in the postseason and has the potential to be some sort of playoff hero if the right situation happens to arise, and yet we almost certainly just won't see him next year. He will just go away again, no matter what he does.

At least for five months, for sure. Campana at 23 was also at high A, just like Gore, and he hit 284 with a 650 on OPS. So he wasn't very good. So that's the best case for... Wow, Campana's got 500 blade appearances in his career yeah not not just 250 games but 500 plate appearances yeah all right what did you want to talk about before we broke down terence core's career um so let's see, I guess two things, uh, one from each series, Kershaw will pitch tonight

against the Cardinals. And there were two good pieces written about, um, two very loud narratives about Clayton Kershaw. One of the, one of the narratives was that the Cardinals own Kershaw because his stats against the Cardinals have been so much worse than against everybody else in some non-small number of starts. I forget how many starts. They've hit him and like literally nobody else in the league has hit him. And the other is that they were tipping pitches. And this was something that even before it, well, I don't know what they were, I don't know if they were saying this on the broadcast, because as you and I talked about,

we missed the crucial eight minute period where all the wildness happened. But when I saw my Twitter feed from the events themselves, there were people saying saying it looks like the Cardinals know what's coming. There were allusions to this sense that they were just in total control and were like, if not, you know, maybe being tipped, maybe they just had a read on him or something. And so that's the other one is that the Cardinals were able to crack his code or he was tipping pitches. And so in either one of these narratives, today would be an extremely dangerous start for Clayton Kershaw. He would either be going against a team that owns him or a team that sees right through

him. And so there were two good pieces written about these. One was by Russell Carlton, who looked at the ownership, and one was by russell carlton who looked at the ownership and one was by jeff sullivan who watched that inning um and broke it down on a pitch by pitch uh level uh to see what actually caused kershaw to get hit and um what we would conclude about the cardinals said bats did you read either of these pieces i read read Russell's and I read Mike Petriello's look at what Kershaw did. I did not read Jeff's yet. Okay, so let's start with Russell's because Russell's is a little bit easier to talk about, a little simpler to talk about in a conversation

that we've had with pitchers before. So Russell looks at his numbers, which are, of course, very, very poor against the Dodgers, and breaks it down into the peripherals. And did I say Dodgers? I might have said Dodgers. I meant Cardinals. Anyway, and then he breaks it down into the peripherals. So if you look at the things that are not ERA, you see that Clayton Kershaw has pitched extremely well by the traditional measures against the Cardinals.

He has struck out nearly as many batters against the Cardinals. He has walked only slightly more batters. He has allowed no more home runs. His FIP is 2.78 compared to 2.46 against everybody else and while that's obviously worse it a doesn't represent anything like ownership 2.78 would be a Cy Young caliber fifth and b the Cardinals have been really good over the last four years so of course it will be somewhat higher it's the one of the best offenses in baseball um and the uh the only difference here is Babbitt. The rest of the league has a 280 Babbitt. The Cardinals have a 343 Babbitt against Kershaw.

He has been incredibly good in every aspect of his game, except that singles have been falling in. And so that makes you ask the follow-up question, well, maybe singles are falling in because he's been getting hit harder. But the default in a sample like this is to assume that Babbitz over the course of, you know, seven starts or whatever, 10 starts, is a product of luck or circumstances outside his control. So convincing to you? Yeah, I think so. As Russell points out,

you would expect Kershaw and any pitcher to be slightly worse against the Cardinals than he would against a league average offense. So his numbers would be slightly worse. You would think the Cardinals have been consistently one of the best offenses in the league over the last several years. So you'd expect to see something there. And so, yeah, I buy the random variation argument. I couldn't completely rule out the idea that there's something to it, but it seems to me that the more likely is that there's not, that you could find with any pitcher, you could find something like this for some team.

And it stands to reason that one team would just purely by chance have a better success rate against Clayton Kershaw over a small sample. Yeah, and especially when it is something that we think of as actually being by chance. I mean, it is possible that a guy is giving up a lot of line drives because he's leaving pitches fat over the plate. That is possible. However, it's really hard to imagine a pitcher who is so well able, so able to thread through all these dangers such that he is able to strike out just as many batters and allow just as few home runs.

And yet there's like, like he's, he's getting crushed on singles. Like it's hard to imagine the, the sort of Venn diagram of this guy who can control these three huge parts of pitching. And then this one that we know not to take seriously he is completely helpless and uh and not assume that there's that that is that that is a fluke it's hard to imagine that that particular threading yeah yes all right so uh so kershaw should not have any issue with the cardinals tonight other than he might have with any major league team because anybody with a bat is dangerous all right and he's All right. And he's on short rest.

And he's on short rest. Oh, we should talk about that. We'll talk about that. All right. So now that does not preclude the possibility that the Cardinals in the, what, seventh inning of Friday's game did own him. It is, I don't think Russell would purport

to have answered the question of that one inning. Maybe they owned him for eight minutes. And so we turn to Jeff Sullivan's piece, and Jeff looks at every pitch. And the idea that they knew what was coming, when you hear that, what would you think that looks like? Having not seen the action, what does it look like that they know what's coming? I guess that they don't miss when they swing at pitches. Or they don't swing at bad pitches, either one. So good takes and authoritative swings? Yeah, sure. I mean, it's sort of subjective,

but you could look at it statistically and say they don't have a lot of out of zone swings or whatever, or you, or they aren't missing on swings in the strike zone, or you could say that they just look comfortable that certain swings look better than others. All right. So it's, it's hard to, to summarize a pitch by pitch account of like eight batters. And so I won't, but the, well, I guess I will summarize, I won't recap his recap. Uh, but, um, basically the idea you get, which you don't even really need Jeff's words. Jeff, Jeff looks sort of looks at the purpose behind every pitch, the execution of every pitch, and maybe what the hitter was looking for at every pitch shows you the pitch.

And then he kind of gives you his assessment of what went wrong or right. And I think even without the assessment of what went wrong or right, you would pretty much draw the same conclusions when you watch this slowed down and pitch by pitch. There was no assessment that he had where I had something different in mind.

It seems pretty, which is my way of saying it seems pretty obvious that when you're watching it, what Jeff is saying is correct. So there's a few things that go wrong for Kershaw. He does miss fastball location, probably more often than you expect from Kershaw. Now, I think that if you watched any Kershaw start with this in mind, you would think that he missed fastball location more than you expect from Kershaw. Now, I think that if you watched any Kershaw start with this in mind, you would think that he missed fastball location more than you expect from Kershaw. You don't notice how often he misses fastball location, but just like every pitcher, he does miss fastball location. So some of these hits came because he missed on fastball location. To Holiday, basically,

he threw a pitch in Holiday's sweet spot because he was behind in the count. Holiday hit it. That's not particularly shocking. With Peralta, and that one he didn't even really miss location. It was just he threw it where Holiday likes it. With Johnny Peralta, he misses location, leaves a fastball right in the middle of the plate. That is the pitch that everybody in the world knows Johnny Peralta hits. I mean, you can't blame anybody on this one, except it was a bad location.

Johnny Peralta hit it in a fastball count. So, so far, we're up to two batters, nothing suspicious. Yadier Molina, he leaves a slider up. And he leaves a slider up in a count where Molina probably would have been expecting a fastball. And so the slider up actually plays kind of perfectly into what he's looking for if that makes sense um so because it's not a slider down it's not a change up it's not a fastball up all right so that's a bad pitch He throws a basically he gets ahead of Adams 0-2. Adams looks bad on a swing.

And then he throws a slider, which is basically the same slider he struck Adams out with earlier in the game. It's a very good pitch, but he's thrown the pitch to Adams three or four times. It's not a great swing by Adams. You wouldn't look at it and say ownership. You wouldn't say he knew what was coming. He just sort of dropped the bat on the ball and hit a grounder through the infield. So that's not suspicious. Then he strikes out Pete Cosma and just completely destroys Pete Cosma. Like Cosma looks stupid, check swing, does not know what's coming. John Jay slaps a fastball the other way.

It's good hitting. There's nothing really to it. It wasn't authoritative. And he was behind. Oh, and one other thing about John Jay is that the umpire cost Kershaw a strike. Kershaw completely buckled him on a curveball in the middle of the strike zone. The umpire called it a ball. And so the buckling suggests he didn't know it was coming.

The umpire's call put Kershaw on a fastball count instead of maybe a slider or a put-away count. Throws a fastball, Jay slaps it the other way, good piece of hitting. He destroys Tavares, three pitches, complete dominance. And as Don Mattingly said later, as Jeff writes, this is basically probably the plate appearance that kept Kershaw in the game. He looked so good against Tavares, and really had looked so good against Cosma two batters earlier,

that you would not have thought that he was being dominated based on these at-bats. And then he throws a pitch to matt carpenter that is uh in the fat part of the zone it's a missed location it's perfectly hittable and carpenter hit it carpenter's a really good hitter so uh i guess i did recap the recap but uh the basic idea is that upon re-watching these in a little bit of a more deliberate way, you see a perfectly reasonable reason for every hit. Some of them were missed pitches, some of them was good hitting, some of them was a little bit of luck, some of them was bad umpiring, and mixed in there were situations where Kershaw looked just as good and the Cardinals looked just as hopeless. I don't see anything

remotely pitch-tipping-like here. Nope, neither do I. And Mike wrote about it at DodgersDigest.com, and he looked at it in a slightly different way. He didn't go pitch by pitch, although he did single out some individual pitches, but he just looked at the numbers and there was a clear difference in terms of things that Kershaw was doing. His horizontal release point all of a sudden changed relative to the earlier innings. His percentage of grooved pitches, which is something that you can find at Brooks Baseball, which is basically just a pitch thrown in the middle of the plate, middle height, middle horizontal location, that skyrocketed up in that inning and uh he started throwing a bunch of fastballs more fastballs than he had thrown earlier in the game which uh you know could could mean that he just got in a mental

rut and it was a sequencing thing or maybe he just didn't have a great feel for his breaking ball or he didn't think he did at that point but you can look at all these things that changed in what kershaw was doing and that seems like it's an adequate explanation for the fact that he had a bad inning. I don't think you have to read into it. I mean, it's, it's strange to see Kershaw get hit.

And so maybe it's natural to come up with some reason we're used to Kershaw being great always. And so when Kershaw is not great, maybe it's natural to think that what changed is the hitters and Kershaw being great always and so when Kershaw is not great maybe it's natural to think that what changed is the hitters and Kershaw was still great but the hitters were ready for him in some way that hitters usually are not but it looks to me like Kershaw just had a bad inning it it happens maybe this is part of why we advocate taking starters out early sometimes they get tired sometimes they just lose it.

So Kershaw has got a true talent, according to Pagoda, of a 2.36 ERA. Given the fact that the Cardinals have hit him hard, does that affect, in your opinion, his projected ERA against them at all? I mean even even having debunked these two things is there any possibility that right now he's sitting in the clubhouse scared because he has bought into the narrative he thinks that the cardinals have ownership over him is there anything whatsoever does your 2.36 become even a 2.37, or is it a total non-issue? I guess what I'm saying is that is there any reason for anybody to ever write that this matters? I don't think so. I mean, my 2.36 goes up just because it's the Cardinals.

It's the Cardinals, yeah. It's a good team. Although the Cardinals, they have a bad lineup this year, though. They actually had a below-average lineup this year. Okay, well, then maybe not. So, yeah, I don't think so i i don't know i have a hard time imagining that a team is really in the best pitcher in baseball's head that the guy who's gonna win the mvp award the cy young award is amazing uh probably probably i mean if if we look at the numbers

and think he's been fine against the Cardinals, then probably he thinks he's been fine against the Cardinals, just remembering what he's done to the Cardinals and maybe being, you know, lipped and blooped with singles, but striking them out and not walking guys. I'm sure he's aware of how he's done against them. So I don't think so i i wouldn't really change my projection much at all or at all the uh the card here this was tucked into to russell's

piece it wasn't really part of the piece but they went from i think third in runs scored last year or maybe third in offense or something like that or maybe fifth to uh to 20 let me think let me find it uh from third last year to 24th this year which uh partly is because they lost their their bad uh their uh runners in scoring position freak show mojo right but but i didn't i hadn't really like i knew the cardinals didn't have as good a year this year as they did last year but that huge huge drop off sort of snuck up on me and i guess it's partly because alan craig was not a a star was first quite terrible and then was gone and it's partly because uh yadier melina was no longer a superstar hitter,

and it was partly because Carlos Beltran was gone. Molina was hurt for a while. Molina was hurt for a while, and then Carlos Beltran was gone and replaced with Oscar Tavares, who never really became an impact hitter. And I guess maybe swapping out David Freese for Colton Wong hurts a little bit. So interesting. Anyway, all right. So Kershaw on short rest we had this exact conversation last year the exact same one except it was it was ricky nalaska was the other option instead of dan heron dan heron is better than ricky nalaska so i guess it does change the math a little bit although Although, gosh, they're very similar, those two.

But this feels like the exception to our reluctance to go to guys on short rest, right? I mean, there is a gap between pitchers where you can assign the short rest penalty to the guy and still have him be better. And that seems to be clearly the case between kershaw and heron the only the biggest argument i would say against it is that um in this scenario best case you win this game and then you have grinky pitching on full rest you win that game and then you have to start the nlcs without your best pitchers. So Ryu presumably would start game one. Kershaw would start game two, and now Granke can only go once.

Whereas if, I mean, Dan Heron, probably the Dodgers with Dan Heron might have actually been the favorite or not a huge underdog against the Cardinals in game four. And if they had won that, then I guess you still would have to go with Kershaw, and then Kershaw wouldn't be able to pitch until Game 3. So actually, yeah, that doesn't even add up. I guess it just depends on whether you... Yeah, eh, I'd have to think about that one.

But you're going to have Ryu starting Game 1, and you'll have Kershaw pitching twice, but Cranky only once in LCS. So maybe that's a little bit of a loss. I don't know. Anyway, though, pretty obvious move, right? I think so, yeah. Dan Heron pitched pretty well in the second half. He was quite good, but you're right.

I mean, even if you penalize Kershaw for whatever the penalty is, he is still going to be better than the next best guy. And so it's sort of dangerous in that, you know, on short rest, this might be more of a bullpen game than it would be usually, and that has not been a good thing for the Dodgers, is not a good thing for the Dodgers. And that has not been a good thing for the Dodgers, is not a good thing for the Dodgers. So if Kershaw were to leave early, they might be in trouble anyway.

But yeah, I don't have a problem with their going with Kershaw and Granke in elimination games. Last year, the Dodgers were ahead two games to one. That's the difference. And so it actually mattered a bit more to tease out what it would mean for the nlcs in this case it doesn't matter quite so much because you have to win them both uh just to go on um all right so that'll happen today the giants and nationals will also happen uh that didn't seem likely to me that yesterday was the one game that you would circle and say the giants can probably win this one the other game that you would circle and say, the Giants can probably win this one. In every other game, they had the pitching mismatch against them.

They were at home yesterday. They had their ace going yesterday. Doug Pfister is very good, but he is, in most people's mind, the number three or four starter on the team. And the Giants lost on a bunt. It seems like pitchers throwing the ball plays a disproportionate role in postseason games, doesn't it? Yeah, I wanted to write about that. This is something that I looked at last year because there is this perception that pitchers,

when they're throwing anywhere but home plate, they are wild and they are more likely to throw the ball away. And you can think of examples when they've done that and it's been costly, like Mariano Rivera in 2001. Before the Luis Gonzalez hit, there was Rivera throwing the ball into the outfield and that was costly. And it does seem to happen often. And I looked at this last year

and it doesn't really show up in the numbers. Like if you just look at throwing errors as a rate or as a percentage of assists, it doesn't really show up. And that's, I think, because pitchers have so many easy throwing opportunities. There are so many times when a pitcher assist is just an underhand lob from 10 feet away. And every now and then that goes wrong also. And maybe that's why we remember it so much because it seems so easy that when a pitcher screws up one of those lobs, it sticks in our heads. But it might also be that they are less accurate when they're throwing the second or third. And I would certainly buy that, but it's kind of swallowed in the numbers by all of those easy throws to first, and so pitcher error rates don't show up as all that crazy compared to other positions. But yeah, you're right.

On this particular play, it wasn't so much the throwing wide as it was the decision to throw at all because the runner was basically there while the throw was still in the air and maybe Buster Posey has some responsibility for that in that it seemed like you could hear him saying three as Bumgarner was going to get the ball and it's the catcher's job there probably to direct the play and so uh you can't really blame bum garner for that and and maybe sandoval should have tried to come off the bag instead of staying on the bag but but yeah it was it was a pivotal play although as it turned out the giants couldn't score anyway so i don't know that they would have won regardless. And this, of course, doesn't hold up logically. The whatever happened next wouldn't have happened next.

But they did give up a hit. And so if he had gone to first, there would have been two on with one out, a runner on third. Odds are runs coming in. Odds are pretty good two runs are coming in. It's not as though the Giants were in a position of strength. So I was in right center, not in the field, but in the stands at the time. And so I had a pretty good view of that play, actually. And as it was happening, I don't know if this would hold up to scrutiny upon watching replays,

but from my angle, it looked like he had an easy out at second and Ramos was running. So I was thinking, you might get a double play if you go to second and no chance at third. When he turned to third, before the throw he was even made, I knew the game was over. Yeah. So I don't know if he actually had him at second or not, but it looked like it. That was a very aggressive bunt call from Matt Williams, right, with two strikes on Ramos, keeps the bunt sign on,

right-hander against a left-hander, hasn't laid down a sacrifice successfully in four years, and a force at third, and a guy who can't run. So it could be a double play, too. Very, very aggressive. On the one hand, you say that's why the bunt can be so dangerous, is that you put the pressure on the defense to make a play you never know what can happen you put the pitcher in a position to make

throws he's not used to um and uh and it can get crazy out of hand as it did um if if he had fouled the ball off for strike three would we be having a very different conversation right now in fact you could maybe argue that Bumgarner's bigger mistake is just giving him a ball he could bunt on an 0-2 count. At that point, I don't know how much you can pitch for the strikeout. And maybe he didn't know the bunt was still on, so maybe he's pitching to a hitter, a major league hitter. But if he had known that the bunt was still on,

I wonder if he throws a different pitch there and gets a little bit greedy and pitches for the strikeout because at that point it becomes kind of easy to get a strikeout or certainly easier. Yes, you're right. And, yeah, I mean, that is something that we don't normally factor in when we're looking at whether a bunt is a good play or not. It's every now and then something crazy happens and you get someone throwing it away and you get

an extra base. And that is something that factors into the numbers when you looked and see whether a bunt is the right play or not or how bad a play it is. There's always that remote possibility that something really good will happen, even better than just advancing the runner. So it's part of the calculus. But yes, you're right. And Bryce Harper had a catch that in retrospect we might say was a game-saving catch early in the game. The Giants kind of won rally against Doug Pfister.

They had runners on brandon crawford hit a ball into deep left center and uh harper caught it at the wall denard span said probably the best catch i've seen him make all year to be honest all year i've seen him be tentative with the wall out there so to me that was the best catch normally he shies away from the wall he had no fear he went back and kept his eye on the ball and made an unbelievable play harper had a a big walk during the nationals rally i think what he homered right in the eight yep eight or nine harper shies away from the wall uh since his thing okay yeah that's that's been a narrative um about him since then uh and uh although he never will, he swore he never would.

Right. I forgot. I forgot about that quote where he was never, he was never going to let a wall tell him how to play. exactly. Anyway, I honestly, at this point,

legitimately don't know what the Bryce Harper narrative is going to be at the end of this postseason. I guess depends if the Nationals win, because he went 0 for 7 in game two and was seen as a huge choker. But then, I don't know if people will remember that catch. I don't know if it was a tight catch. And then the home run was a mop-up home run yesterday. He did have the big home run against Strickland in Game 1,

but that was like a solo shot down by three, I think. It was, yeah, down three, nothing. So I don't know. I don't know if people come out of this talking about how Harper is a superstar, which is what he has kind of looked like to me for parts of the series, or if they will say he has been a win probability added killer for the Nationals, and it's still part of the problem. I honestly don't know. But he kind of looked like a superstar yesterday.

It was a big game. It was a huge game. And it was probably a memorable game. Should be a memorable game. All right. That's it. Okay. So please support our sponsor, Baseball Reference.

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