Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 972: The Cubs, Game Seven, and the World Series

Episode Date: November 4, 2016

Ben and Sam reflect on what they learned from Game Seven of the World Series and the Chicago Cubs’ first championship since 1908.

She still broke right down after all Because she knew that it was all over Hit and fall and let it fall This was all, now it's all Around and sitting on the ground And not everybody's at disadvantage Speaking with a second language Hello and welcome to episode 972 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives

presented by our Patreon supporters and the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Sam Miller of ESPN. Hello. Hey. I'm working on very little sleep here. We've both written about this game.

I assume we're going to find something to say about this game that we haven't already said. How much did you have to throw away when Rajai Davis hit the home run? Like how much writing or how much research or how much mental preparation? Or did you have like a frame yet? I didn't have to throw really anything away as it turned out because I was writing about the Cubs either way.

Bauman was writing about the Indians either way. was writing about the Cubs either way. Bauman was writing about the Indians either way. So because we could split it that way, I had kind of come up with a Cubs win plan and a Cubs lose plan and had sort of started working on each of them. And I was further along on the Cubs win version. So for a moment there, I thought it had set me back.

But as it turned out, not really. So I got to enjoy everything without having to worry about what it did to my story was that uh the same for you because no it wasn't I I was after I think I mentioned this but after the Cubs took the game in Cleveland I had an idea of how I was going to write it. And so then I had to, I was sort of rooting for that then because I wanted to write that. And then the Indians pull ahead 3-1. So then I, over the next, that night and the next day, I got maybe 60% of the way through a Indians piece. And then I went into game seven, basically blank. And then after the Cubs pulled

ahead, well, after the third, or maybe after the fourth, I started writing. I had a much better, I think I had a much better piece than either of the previous two would have been. And that was it. Like that was gold that survived right until the home run and and then i just re i threw it all out and could just enjoy the game without rooting even implicitly for either team yeah no longer mattered at all to me and i just waited until it ended you should publish the version that we'll never see in uh tweets or something it wouldn't it would be totally boring. It was like, it's now the least memorable parts.

I mean, it was all about parts that were going to be super memorable and now they just aren't memorable. Yeah, well, almost everything. I felt that game was pretty memorable. I don't know. I'll enjoy re-watching it at some point a few years from now

when I have four and a half hours set aside. And I'm sure I'll remember parts of it that I've forgotten already just because there was so much to keep track of as I was writing. I was asking my editor, like, what inning was that? When did that happen? Did this happen before that? There were so many twists and turns. So yeah, I don't even know how to approach this, really. I don't know how to get our minds, wrap our minds around a game so momentous that everyone was watching more so than any game for the past 25 years, and it didn't disappoint. I assume it didn't disappoint, right? Like, if you were a total non-baseball fan, this was your first baseball game ever,

I assume you would have thought, wow, this is the greatest sport ever right or maybe not maybe this is four and a half hours long and i don't know what's going on and all these guys are making errors and the umpire is terrible and i don't know what anyone's doing so i'm not sure if it was the best advertisement for baseball or what was the what was wrong with the umpire yeah strikes and really oh i weird ones there were some weird games to me in this series along those lines but i didn't notice it in in this game at all i thought so i thought it was a game where just everyone was constantly screwing up and it was great like the managers that's how i felt about game five yeah yeah i mean in this one, obviously there were

heroics and players doing great things and really great plays, but even a lot of the great plays were sort of made possible by other players not making great plays like Chris Bryant scoring on the, on the tag up from third on a shallow sack fly or Almora taking second on a tag up. Both of those were Rajai Davis sort of not putting himself in a good position to catch the ball and throw. And he was the guy who was out there for defense instead of Tyler Niquin. And yet, of course, he hit one of the biggest World Series home runs ever. So everyone who Did bad things mostly Redeemed themselves like Javier

Baez had bad plays but he Also had a home run and It was just I don't know just a really Really rich game Davis The sack fly I thought was on Davis the Almora tag I did not think was on Davis at all Yeah I mean it was a really deep

Ball it was really deep for a second it might be, it was a really deep ball. It was really deep. For a second, it might be gone. It was at the track. Yeah, Almora's good. You know, Almora's fast, I should say. I think there's, I actually think that we're somewhat misled because the standard operating practice when you're on first base and there's a fly ball hit

to the outfield is to go halfway. And so we sort of feel like, oh, wow, tagging from first on a sack fly must be tough. But it's I think it's more a matter of choice. Most base running basically does not usually ask you to do that. That is not, you know, the strategy there. But if it is, I think that we would if that was what all of a sudden became the priority in baseball, I think we would see a lot more not not regularly, not to fly balls to, you know, straight away left or anything like that. But I think that probably, you know, if baseball wanted to, there'd be a ton of those tags and we

wouldn't think it was quite so unusual. And, you know, particularly a play like that, where you're sort of like, you're backing up on it because, you know, it's back deep and, you know, he's not coming in on it and he's got to sort of in a way feel for that wall and feel for the warning track and he's a little ginger navigating the area so I don't know I feel like in that play Davis didn't really do anything noticeably wrong and I think that Amora probably would have tagged on you know pretty much everybody in baseball except for Kevin Kiermaier in that situation. Personally, I haven't I haven't done a deep dive on it. But that was my feeling watching it. So yeah, I don't even I mean, we don't have to dwell on the mistakes. Because as

it turned out, it just it all added to the drama and the suspense and the errors made things more interesting. It looked at least like people were kind of getting affected by the pressure of the moment. I don't know whether that's true, but you could certainly perceive it that way. And normally good fielders were making fielding mistakes and normally good managers were making what seemed to be managerial mistakes. And I don't know, it's just, it took so many different twists and was just so perfect the way it worked out that I don't even, you know, we could get into whether Madden pulled a pitcher too early or left another pitcher in too long or Francona called for a bad bunt and a bad intentional walk and all of those things are probably true. But I don don't know i'm happy everything happened the way it did which bad bunt did frank frank gonna call for yeah it was i think it was roberto perez in the third down one run after coco crisps lead off double uh-huh and it was early in the game and

they were behind so they needed multiple runs and so i didn't didn't think that was wait weren't they weren't they only behind by one though yes so they needed multiple runs that's true but i i mean we were all about to write the piece about how dexter fowler completely changed you know the game by hitting that lead off home run and how this was a this was a this was a game that felt like it was being played to one because of the way that the pitchers were lined up. And just because we knew it was going to be impossible to score in this game. So, I mean, you have to admit that like we all had that lead written. And Francona is probably just thinking the same thing. Like he knows that if he's down one nothing in the fifth, it is not like a normal game where you know sort of playing seven or eight until you get to end game uh this was a unusual circumstance and i could sort of see playing to uh

to to get the tie there and it's not it's not like perez is like i mean okay press fine hitter but i'm not gonna i'm not gonna justify the bunt on anything other than that i'm not even gonna like because i look i i was tempted to make a stronger case that would have fallen apart i'm just gonna leave the case where it is. I think that there was a, I don't know, there was a way that that run affected the next six innings potentially. And it just, I mean, the whole game was kind of a culmination of the month. All of these storylines that we had been monitoring, not just, you know, who's going to win the World Series and who's going to end the drought, but all the bullpen stuff that we'd been talking about nonstop and the Indians, Kluber, Miller, Allen trio.

And to win this game, the Cubs had to beat those guys. And they did. And they scored runs off them like no other team had been able to score runs off of them. And all of the innovative managerial closer usage kind of, I don't know whether it came back to bite them in this game, but it stopped working so well. We had talked about whether there was a point at which you could keep pushing these guys and eventually they would hit some sort of wall. And I don't know whether you can say Miller hit a wall. He maybe pitched in some tough luck a little bit, but he didn't look quite as unhittable as he had.

And, you know, I don't know if you can trace that to the meaningless innings in game four or not or whether it was just a cumulative effect and it wouldn't have happened anyway. But he was not quite as unhittable. He allowed runs in his last couple appearances. his last couple appearances. And then Chapman, of course, was not his usual self and was not hitting his usual radar readings and was throwing lots of sliders that weren't very good and just didn't seem comfortable or, you know, seemed out of gas. So I don't know whether you can tie that directly to the game six relief appearance that everyone criticized at the time, but maybe it was also just a cumulative effect. But between those two guys and Kluber,

who, you know, who knows, maybe he would have been bad anyway. People are bad on full rest starts sometimes, but coming as it did on the heels of two short rest starts, it was easy to tie that to how hard he'd been worked. So all these things that we'd been watching for a month just kind of unraveled right at the end, just in time for the maximum intrigue. Because, you know, in some of

these games, it seemed like once you got a lead, that was it. And both of these teams were really, really good at preserving leads once they had them all year. But here, the Indians kept it close until late in the game, and the Cubs had a lead late in the game and neither of them could put it away. for seven games and they were tied, which is very dramatic. But what's really like another way of thinking about that is that we already know that that postseason is a bunch of small samples and that seven games is not really the best way to determine who the best team is, but at least it is seven games. And what this season ended up hinging on is literally a sample of one inning that like, it's almost like you have like a, you're polling, you know, you're doing a poll and, uh, you say, well, we, it's a, you know, we're very, we're very convinced that this poll is reliable because we had a, you know, we pulled, you know,

4,000 likely voters. And it's a huge number, except really it was like 2000 2000 at the end of it and so then you pulled one extra guy and declared a winner and so like the sample is sort of big but the margin is like it like literally zero and yet and yet um for you know for the you know for the cubs it counts as much as any four game sweep would have and for the indians even though they were closer than you know like there have been there have been uh 68 world series champions since they uh since they won their last one and uh they are like they were closer than every other team and it's weird it's just weird it's weird i It's weird. It's just weird. It's weird.

I don't know why it's so weird to me, but it seems weird to me that a season comes down to a sample of one inning. It's what makes it fun. It's awesome. It's weird, though. Yeah, well, they were the best team all year, of course, and probably the most deserving from a talent and performance perspective. So you could kind of say, well, they were the best team and the best team won.

And that's true. But yes, they could have lost so easily. I'm definitely more thinking about this from the Indians perspective than the Cubs perspective. Like the Cubs, I agree. I don't think you can build a better team than the Cubs, really. And they were fully healthy, which is an amazing thing. Like they played a World Series. At the end, yeah.

At the end. And they didn't have a single key player who wasn't available. And if they hadn't won, it just would have felt like baseball is just total chaos. Almost too chaotic. And so they built a powerhouse. And as you, I think you wrote, they're going to probably be a powerhouse for a long time. I feel more like I'm kind of in the mindset of the poor Clevelander today who, you know, doesn't have a powerhouse necessarily going into next year, should be good, but not a powerhouse and has to watch like an entire you know multiple generations uh we're we're pending on a sample

size of one inning that's that's hard yeah i would i don't know how i'd feel as an indians fan i'm i'm sure i'd feel extremely disappointed right now and last night to have come so close. On the other hand, I don't know, maybe time would make me feel lucky for how close I was just because the team was written off in some circles just because of how injury-affected they were heading into the playoffs. And to have made it to a game seven, 10th inning against the Cubs without half of their rotation or two thirds of their best starters. I mean, it was very impressive that they made it that far.

And without Brantley. Yeah, well, sure. Brantley too. Like, if you look at the moves that the Indians have made, it's sort of, it's weird to think about how they all affected this team in ways that were totally unexpected. So, you know, of course, you have some really great moves. You have the Carlos Santana deal, which was an absolute coup at the time and turned out to be just as great as, you know, every Dodgers fan feared. And you have, you know, the Kluber deal, which was like, as I wrote about,

Kluber was the seventh paragraph in that trade story, and he ends up being the best pitcher in the American League. And you have some great player development, and you have some guys who worked out, and you have Francisco Lindor, who was a great high draft pick who turned out to be a superstar and that sort of predictable. So you have this mix of predictable and unpredictable in terms of who was there and who was contributing. But then you think about the moves that that of players who were not contributing.

And those were actually the big moves, like besides the Casey Blake and trade, not even the Casey Blake trade like they were trading a guy who was a two month rental for the Dodgers. Uh, it wasn't supposed to be the trade that they built their friend, the next seven years of their franchise around Lindor Lindor is one, but I mean, he's a first round pick, but you know, how many eighth overall picks turn into Lindor? Uh, not that many. Uh, and teams have had lots of picks that higher higher without but so if you look at the the guys who um were supposed the moves that were supposed to build this franchise though you have the cc sabathia trade which turned out great they got michael brantley out of it who was

an mvp caliber player just two years ago who is totally totally under, who is a great player, paid below market rate because he signed this extension, who is one of the best outfielders in baseball, didn't play a game for them in the postseason, barely played all year. You have the Cliff Lee trade. Great trade. You get Carlos Carrasco back.

He's one of the eight best pitchers in the American League. The whole Cleveland Indians 2016 season was built around having one of the best big threes since Oakland. They were going to be the best big three, the best front three in baseball. And that's because when they had Cliff Lee, they got value out of it. They got Carlos Carrasco, didn't pitch an inning in the postseason. And then you have their big push to respectability. They're right on the line going from good team that's been patient and waited for some of their young guys to develop.

Now they're going to go over the top. They're going to get the last stars that they need to really make them a front-running team. So they sign Nick Swisher and Michael Bourne, two guys who were coming off like three, four-ish win seasons. Bourne even more. I think Bourne was coming off like a six-win season at that point. And nothing from either of them like basically never got a good game out of either of them. Instant collapses. And they end up trading those two basically as salary dumps.

And they contribute nothing to this postseason. So the unpredictability of baseball is worth somebody saying something about sometime. It's really an underreported aspect of the sport yeah whereas the cubs kind of everything worked out what's the way right other than other than hayward what's the last move they regretted i guess maybe if you stretch starling castro trade but it's not like castro has a place on this roster i mean he'd be the most redundant of redundancies at this point. And so I guess you could say, well, they traded a guy who was useful to most major league teams and all they got back was Adam Warren, who flopped. But otherwise you have Hayward who, as Anthony Rizzo said, they wouldn't have won that game if not for

the rain delay and Jason Hayward so you could make the case you could make the case that he's the most valuable player in the history of the world and that Dan Hirsch's championship probability added should just have like it should just he should just do like Perez Hilton style he should just write Hayward in giant letters over it but admitted admittedly, the Hayward deal has been terrible. Name another move that they regret in the Theo Epstein era. I know.

There's just so little. There's not even a draft pick. Can you even think of a draft pick they regret? Well, I mean, not all of their draft picks turn into major leaguers. A first round pick, though. Their first round picks under Theo were Almora, who, okay, but he's a contributor. Sure. And he's 22 or whatever.

Yeah. Right. And then Bryant, who, of course, and then Schwarber, and then Ian Happ. And, like, so you, you know, I don't know that any team will be able to say they got more out of their, you know, that four-year run of first rounders than they will. after position players and just decided to figure out the pitching later and sign free agents and trade for undervalued pitchers from other teams and then just make sure that they drafted and developed position players who, as we know, are more predictable and more dependable, although not so much that you can just take it to the bank that everyone is going to be the

part of your World Series winning foundation. Michael Bourne, by the way, was 29 coming off a six-win season, and in the four seasons before this, he had 19 wins above replacement. 20 wins above replacement? He went 6-3-6-5 in the four previous seasons. And then they sign him, and he produces 3.6 wins over the entire life of the contract other than the arietta move is there a cubs move that turned out in a way that was i guess not predicted like lester has been great but he's like an oh yeah well kyle hendricks hendricks yeah

yeah i was gonna say yeah and obviously he was picked up at an earlier point in his career i mean he made his major league debut at the Cubs, so it wasn't like he was Arrieta coming off of struggling with another team. But yeah, obviously you don't trade for a guy and expect him to be a possible Cy Young winner. So yeah, I mean, it's incredible how they managed to do that. I don't know whether we give them too much credit or whether it's even possible to give Theo Epstein too much credit

after all that he's accomplished, but I don't know. I mean, the only things you tweeted last night that he should now, what, take over the Angels or get Mike Trout a World Series. Well, yeah, I said that he should end the Mike Trout World Series drought. And unfortunately, I didn't realize that you could also take that as saying he should trade for Mike Trout, which would be fine. I recommended it earlier this year, I believe. But that's, I was more, never mind.

I was more saying about he should go to the Angels. Like implying that it was just as important to me and to baseball fans and also just as challenging. It was mostly a joke. Was there, is there a game you remember having more fun watching yeah game story concerns aside sure yeah yeah a bunch okay sorry this is a great game i wouldn't bother me if you said it was the greatest game ever but yeah i mean i don't think i mean you didn't self you didn't even ask me you didn't ask me if it was the greatest game ever though you just asked for there's a game i had more fun

i could probably name 50 well yeah all right i guess uh if you're i don't know watching with your friends or your dad or something and it's your first baseball game or yeah that was a good one it's one of the 50 reasons dale murphy homered and uh jose aribe got in a rundown got out of a rundown in fact got out of a rundown and when he got in the rundown we all screamed pickle it's a great game i remember nothing about my first baseball game how old were you the blue jays played the yankees that was it how old were you i don't know i don't even remember that okay yeah i can't even try to baseball reference find it. There's just no context clues. Oh. All right. I don't even know what else should we talk about.

I think we've even talked about my first game before, and I think that I looked it up. I don't remember if this was a lineup card at VP or if I looked it up on this podcast, and I think that I misremembered key details that I probably just repeated. Uh-huh. Yeah. So what else could we talk about? Well, what do you make the Cubs players in particular, well, everybody really, but the Cubs players in particular and the media in particular making this so much about the rain delay?

Rizzo said that he didn't think that they could have won without the rain delay, and once the rain delay happened, he didn't think that there was any way they could lose. And I solely because of the Hayward pep talk. I think so. Yeah, I mean, that's that's what is cited the Hayward pep talk that just them bringing each other together. The Verducci account, the Hayward speech seems fairly short. I don't even see Hugh Glass mentioned in it. But then it was followed by, you know, a bunch of like everybody sort of jumping in like, OK, I'll just quote, we're the best team in baseball and we're the best team in baseball for a reason, Hayward said. We know Hugh Glass's story because he lived and we know it because people. Oh, wait, sorry.

No, I switch back to mine. Okay. We're the best team in baseball, and we're the best team in baseball for a reason. Now we're going to show it. We play like the score is nothing, nothing. We've got to stay positive and fight for your brothers. Stick together, and we're going to win this game.

Other players began to speak up. Keep grinding, Chappy. Chappy, we've got you. We're going to pick you up. This is only going to make it better when we win. Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, it's not, it's not enough to say we're like, wow, we're really good at baseball. And we just outplayed everybody. And in the 10th inning, we scored more runs than they did. And because that's the rules of extra innings, they ended the game and, and we won the world series. And, uh, we're so glad you're happy that instead there, that there's this instinct or this urge drive to make it about a narrative that they are only

actors in that they aren't even like, they're not even the authors of this anymore. They are now being kind of moved around by this, I don't know, fate or movement or like revolution or something like that. So I wonder when you see this, do you bristle at all at it? Is it at all frustrating to you that it's not simply enough that they built an amazing baseball team that won a bunch of amazing baseball games because they hit the dingers? I guess I understand the impulse, but I'd like to know what the Indians were doing in their clubhouse during the rain delay. We have to know what the Cubs clubhouse over replacement was during the rain delay. But when I was watching, I mean, I loved that there was a rain delay. I didn't want a long rain delay, obviously, but I thought that

was just the perfect length. It was like the game just froze there on the verge of being over. It was 50-50 after all of the craziness that led to that point. I think the win expectancies were perfectly even at 50-50 and then suddenly it starts raining and it was just perfect and it played right into everyone's jokes about how this game was never going to end because no one would be allowed to win and all that. And obviously it would have killed all the buzz if it had been an hour-long rain delay or something. But 17 minutes was just the perfect amount of time to take stock of everything and appreciate the moment

and savor all the suspense. And when I was writing, I didn't know any of this inside Clubhouse stuff. So I barely even mentioned the rain delay other than that there was one and that kind of added to the weirdness. But it wasn't at all essential or integral to my enjoyment of the game to know that there was this clubhouse pep talk going on. So if they want to tell themselves that, and obviously they felt it was an important part of the story but i i didn't need that i didn't need someone to to give the the hollywood sort of speech to make that game special it was pretty special without that yeah i'm going to come out in favor of it in this

particular case and not not not because it's the cubs although there's a good you know good case that the cubs are already part of like every one of these players is playing in somebody else's story that this is a a story that has been you know has had many many acts with many many different characters and in some sense they are part of you know they obviously are part of that story much more than you know say the 2014 giants were or whatever um. But I also like the Rizzo thing. I understand the Rizzo impulse in this case because I really do think that, well, okay, I'm going to probably make some stuff up as I go and maybe get progressively deeper and make progressively less sense. But I was thinking about what Cubs fans are feeling today, and I know there's a lot of different people having a lot of different reactions to it, and some of them are still drunk or still figuratively drunk, and they just could not possibly be any happier, and this happiness is going to build and build and build.

who are like me, who woke up this morning and were really happy that the Cubs had won the World Series. But there was also a little part of their brain that they were suppressing that was sort of looking at the polls and realizing that, in fact, they were less happy than they were last night, like that the giddiness had worn off. And this little part of the brain that is, you know, had worn off and this little part of the brain that is you know anxiety or or any whatever knows that it's never coming back that that they got a hit that will just never be matched uh and they know that it's now a sort of a a little bit of a slide forever now where this world series will be further in the past and less uh less in front of them less maybe even they fear that Series will be further in the past and less in front of them, maybe even they fear that it will be less meaningful to them, and that they will come to just sort of bake this into their life experiences,

but it will never seem as important as it is right now, because in a sense, it's not important. It's just a baseball game played by people who are not you. And I don't know if players feel that way as well, but I do think that baseball players play partly because they, they like the money. They like the attention because we're all, you know, we all have to have a vocation and this is their vocation. They do it for the same reason that, you know, that you edit this podcast and it's, it's their duty on this earth. But I think they, I think the thing that makes it, but I think the thing that makes it really special for them or the thing that, that makes it something that they love and treat not just as a job is that they,

they come to believe that the team aspect is actually bigger than the game itself and that even if you lose you have teammates that will be friends for life that you can trust forever that you'll always have these shared memories you'll always have your your inside jokes and your jargon and your you know they'll have your they'll they'll send you texts when um when you know the ap reports 45 years from now that you are, I don't know, sick. Does the AP do that? Anyway. And so in a sense, I think this was really just about recognizing that they were a team,

that the team aspect of it was incredibly important, not just to the push and not just the success, but to the experience, win or lose. And it's a way of, I think, Rizzo romanticizing that team really almost to the breaking point, but in a way that will make it permanent and memorable and that will treat the team as bigger than any individual personality as we sort of build the history of this championship. And at the very least, it will make people more patient with Jason Hayward, I guess. That's true too. Yeah. I think you're right. I would bet that if I had some sort of omniscient Pocota that was 100% accurate, I would bet that my projection for Jason Hayward would go up after that speech.

That whatever it was, was lower. Granted, every Cub is going to be cheered relentlessly during the first game of next season. But Hayward gets a few extra at-bats before I think he has to start pressing again because people are going to love him. He's going to hear about how special he is to this team. He's going to feel supported. Yeah. He probably already was going to, but he's going to feel more supported now.

He'll feel like he earned it. You want to feel like you're contributing. Yeah. He did make some good defensive plays, which he did all year, but to have the pep talk. And some great base running as well. Yeah, he did make some good defensive plays, which he did all year. But to have the pep talk. And some great base running as well. Yeah, sure. But to have the pep talk that made the Cubs win,

according to maybe the best player on the team or best hitter on the team or second best hitter on the team, and the longest tenured guy on the team, that's pretty important. I wonder how Hayward gets to be the guy who delivers that speech. He's not the oldest guy. He's not the longest tenured guy. I find that it's often a surprise. And maybe it's that being the oldest guy, maybe, I mean, if you had to guess who it

was going to be, you'd probably guess David Ross. Right. And if not him, I don't know what his personality is, but maybe Lester or maybe Rizzo. And Rizzo is the star. He's the longest tenured cub. He's also got this great, it seems like he's got this great outgoing personality. Lester, of course, is the proven winner on this team. The most sort of serious one without being a red ass. Right, exactly. And then Ross is grandpa, right? He is everybody's. It's like Rizzo said, he's like my best friend, my dad, and my brother, which is a fun family to imagine. But maybe being a leader partly is about having unpredictable voices step up as well. I don't want to take any of the agency away from Hayward because Hayward,

like, but because Hayward did this, like, this is absolutely something that Hayward did. And maybe it was him all along. Maybe he is the leader all along, but there's, I don't know, maybe there's some benefit to it being a voice. You, I, again, I, I feel like I'm cheating Hayward. I was going to say a voice that you haven't heard before for all we know he's always the guy who gives the speech so and uh i don't know but the fact that hayward is not good at baseball right now uh makes him a surprising candidate more than right more than anything else yeah and um and i don't so you know maybe maybe it means more coming from a surprising candidate i'm not sure i like i like hayward a lot by the way and i yeah sure and really like i was rooting for him this i i thought if i'd had more time i thought about basically just tracking the

jason hayward redemption narrative throughout this postseason and it just and so in the back of my head i was watching every bat thinking well if i were writing that piece, if he gets a hit here, that'd be big. And he just kept not getting it. And I wish I had been working on that piece all along. There's no way I could go back now. It would take way too much time. But if I'd been working on it all along, it would have been amazing because the redemption came and it wasn't even on the field. If you buy, I mean, if you buy, but but it doesn't, it almost doesn't matter if you buy

it anymore. Yeah. It's there. All right. Good for him though. Yeah. Anything else? No.

Okay. While we were talking, Andy, Andy Martino at the New York Daily News wrote a piece. The headline is Joe Madden did his best to try and add to Cubs misery. He choked as manager in the World Series. This was tweeted by Andy. Thusly, he said, actually, Joe Madden was so awful, I crawled out of my hole to write about it. So is this an article that you are eager to read right now? Or do you have feelings of rejection

toward it i don't disagree that he didn't have a great series i think but i don't i don't really care to dwell on it right now if you did want to write this piece if you felt so strongly that you did want to break down every move and make the case that the Cubs won in spite of him. What day is it acceptable to you? Hmm. I mean, the longer you wait, the less relevant it seems, right? Or I wouldn't do it the day after, but I wouldn't wait that long because at a certain point it'll just be, why are you, why are you bringing this up when everyone has already had a parade and everything? So I don't know, maybe I'd wait till tomorrow. Uh-huh.

I think that there are certain things that don't hold for a month, that you can't wait a month, but you can wait 30 years. Uh-huh. And I wouldn't mind writing this piece. Well, what you hope for is that Madden gets another chance in the World Series at some point in the rest of his career, and you get to write about it then and show how much he learned. Like, I think I wrote last year, I Terry Collins, remember, let Matt Harvey go into the game, back out for the ninth inning, and it blew up. And yeah, you just felt so terrible for Terry Collins. And I wrote a piece then that was basically about everything he had learned from his challenging, from his sort of previous managerial failures and how I think I, as I recall it, this was a, it was a move that reflects like the sort of

impossibility of being right all the time, but also reflected the growth that Terry Collins had made and how much better he was as a manager than he had been earlier in his career. both that Terry Collins had made and how much better he was as a manager than he had been earlier in his career. And so that's a different situation. But that's sort of like I think you could dive into Joe Maddon did a bad job at some point in the future. It's fine today. He's not writing for a Cubs audience or a Cleveland audience. He's just a New York columnist. Why not?

Yeah, it's easier if you lose the World Series and then go on to win it later or something. But if you won it anyway, I don't know that anyone's all that interested in reading about the things you learned or the mistakes you made. That's true. I'm just waiting for the Roger Angel take. I have the New Yorker's Twitter open in a tab. I'm excitedly clicking over to it every time there's a new tweet. And there is just one that said Roger Angel.

And I thought, yes, this is it. And no, it's a link to his election piece, but hopefully sometime soon. Anyway. All right. Well, great game seven. Great Cubs season. That was just the most fun season by a baseball team in a while, I think. Yeah, I agree.

And so that was great. It was fun to watch them from afar or on TV all season and good playoffs. So thanks everyone for listening. Sorry, can I do one more thing? I cheated everybody on a play index yesterday. My play index was garbage. I have a slightly, I have one that I did this morning. I was curious.

There were 34 games in this postseason, and I was curious what the most is. And that's in a really quick and dirty way, that's sort of a proxy for how good the postseason was because like I said, game sevens make up for a lot of bad game twos no matter what. And so there were 34 games this year out of 43, and the all-time record for most games in a postseason is 38 so that we were four short of the record 38 was done in 2013 but it was

also done twice before the wild-card round including in 2011 2011 there were 38 games in 41 possible games whereas this year there were 34 out of 43. So that 2011 postseason was quietly really amazing, and I don't think that I was writing for you yet. I wasn't writing for you yet. No. But, yeah, that was a great season. The 2003 matched it. They also had 38 out of 41.

And if you go all the way back that you can find seasons where there were max, there were every possible game was played, but only in the LCS rounds, which is not obviously not surprising. In 72 and 73, there were 17 games possible and 17 games played. There were still five game LCSs at that point. So it was, you know, five games, five games and seven, which is not that impressive. There was an 85 and 86. There were 20 out of 21. So that was after they went to seven game LCSs. And those are pretty much the peaks.

So I wish I'd thought about this earlier in the postseason because that would have been something to watch and keep track of but 79 is kind of pretty close to the average um there's there have been years 2007 there were only uh 68 percent of the games were played uh there were 28 games out of 41 possible which is crazy um so 34 is kind of close to the median, a little bit on the low side. Uh-huh. All right. Well, they packed a lot of excitement into those games. So we will leave it there.

You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. Five listeners who have done so already, Corey Lack, Joe Karras, Nick T, John Speed, and the great Meg Rowley. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectivelywild, Thank you. euphoria and we drafted our favorite moments from game seven effectively wild style i mentioned this yesterday but one more quick plug the only rule is it has to work our wild experiment building a new kind of baseball team which is our book that you can find out more about at the only rules it has to work.com is up for a goodreads choice award for best non-fiction book of the year we would

love it if you would vote for us because the first round of voting ends on sunday and you can find a link to the voting page pinned to the top of the facebook group which again is facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild or you could just google goodreads choice awards you can get the discounted price of 30 on a one-year subscription to the play index at baseball reference.com one more quick plug i have started another podcast it won't be of interest to all of you it's a video gaming podcast, but I'm doing it every week with Jason Concepcion at The Ringer. It's called Achievement Oriented,

as in video game achievements. Get it? Our first episode went up last week. Our second episode goes up tomorrow. So if you're at all interested in video games, please check it out. You can find it on the main Channel 33 feed on iTunes. You can contact me and Sam at podcastatbaseballpers baseball perspectives.com or by

messaging us through Patreon. We will talk to you next week. I just wanted to go away. I can see the light above me. I'm in the sound of a brand new song. I don't want to hear your reasons. Cause I know what's right. I know what's wrong.

I can see the light above me In the sound of a brand new day I'm not gonna settle for less And I don't think things are ever gonna change I just want it all to go away