Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1111: The World-Series-Winner Draft

Episode Date: September 16, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter (one last time) about Cleveland’s winning streak, Lenny Harris and an Ichiro record, Jeff’s successful search for the fly-ball revolution, and the increasing difficulty of scouting position players, then draft the World Series contenders that would be the best (and worst) stories. Audio intro: Eagle, "Pinch Hitter" Audio outro: Everclear, "Now […]

I'm good enough to play on the team, team. Just step up to the plate when they need me. Hey, hey, now I make it look easy. I'm a pin shitter, pin shitter, pin shitter. I'm good enough to play on the team, team. Just step up to the plate when they need me. Hey, hey, now I make it look easy. I'm a pin shitter, pin shitter, pin shitter. Hello. Hello. And welcome to episode 1111 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our many innumerable, very loyal, deeply blood loyal Patreon supporters. I am Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs, joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, who is here taking time out of his wonderful space week to talk about baseball. How are you? I'm good.

We can number our Patreon supporters. There are 801. It's a good number. Wish there were more. I can't get that high personally. I've never... No, it would take a while to get there, but you can look it up. Yeah.

Yeah. Space Week at the Ringer has been going on all week. It's something I initiated because I like space and I talked my editors into it. So not much of a baseball connection really, other than the fact that we did a Ringer MLB show with the former showrunner of Star Trek Deep Space Nine about the baseball episode of Deep Space Nine. So you can go check that out if you're a nerd like me. You could have also used this as your opportunity to write a bunch of stuff about the Astros. Yeah. No, someone suggested, Mike Petriello suggested that I have orbit on the podcast, but i pointed out that

mascots make lousy podcast guests a lot of dead air what language you would speak no just it would just be a lot of dead air i think so are you sure that your editor got the right message when he sent an email and said hey i really like my space she is going on vacation next week so mission accomplished yeah uh well uh is there anything you'd like to banter about on this uh this friday before well okay let's just do it so okay the indians won again yeah they just okay so we should uh so the indians are up to 22 yesterday uh thursday they won their maybe the first game of the streak in dramatic fashion they almost lost one yeah they didn't uh they didn't clobber a team they uh they narrowly escaped by beating the Royals by one in extra innings. Francisco Lindor, blah, blah, blah. Game-tying double almost copy Alex Gordon. Alex Gordon has turned into a pretty bad baseball player. So the Indians up to 22, which I guess has spurred some amount of what would be unavoidable debate over who holds the true all-time record and the only team in front of them that could have any case is the 1916 giants

who as i think many people understand now won 14 games in a row then tied and then won 12 games in a row yeah so certain new information has emerged if anyone was not aware of this what the deal with that tie is that that tie goes down in the team's schedule the game log because something has to be done because these stats from that game counted. However, the game that was tied was ended early because of, I don't know what it was, rain or darkness or scurvy or something, and then it was replayed the next day

and the Giants won the game. Even though the tie is there and it makes things look weird, it seems like the proper way to look at that streak is that they did indeed win 26 consecutive games and that one just yeah didn't really didn't really count i think that's fair i think so as well so it's 1916 so there are a lot of other asterisks you could attach to that winning streak if you want to i think that if you

were to era adjust winning streaks somehow probably 22 in 2017 is more impressive than 26 in 1916, I would think, just because of so many things, just because of the player pool, for one thing, and parody and how much information is out there in the game and competitive balance. And I don't know what teams the 1916 Giants beat during their winning streak, but I would guess there were some pushovers because there always were at that point in baseball history. So I'm going to say this is the most impressive winning streak, but still not the record winning streak, I would think. Right. Most impressive, longest winning streak for 100 years. Yeah. But still not the longest of all time. But of course, the Indians still have a chance. They still have not lost i can tell you that one of the interesting things about the 1916 giants is that

winning streak or no they finished with the seventh best record in the league out of 16 teams so they wound up kind of just okay i haven't gone in to look at the entirety of their winning streak but i'll do that right now and uh let's look for how many times in that streak they beat the Philadelphia Athletics, who that season finished 36 and 117. 36 and 117. So looking for Philadelphia. Winning streak begins. Giants win one game, then they sweep a four-game series against,

it looks like the Philadelphia Athletics. No, that's the Philadelphia Phillies. Ah, okay. They were confusing. Okay, that team was a good team. So nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. athletics no that's the philadelphia phillies ah okay they were ah confusing okay they that that team was a good team so nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing none of their winning streak came against what was one of the worst teams in the history of professional baseball so all right congratulations to the giants who incidentally finished the year one and four and then missed

out on the playoffs which at that point was only a series between two teams anyway one of the fun things about the indians winning streak is that the last time they lost was a game started by Corey Kluber, arguably the best pitcher in baseball this season. Yeah, well, it's incredibly impressive. It was a fun one because I had been hearing people say that the thing that set this winning streak apart from the A's winning streak is that the A's, the Moneyball A's winning streak had a bunch of like storybook type endings and comebacks and walk-offs. And this Indian streak had just been all dominance and they'd only trailed by like one full inning in this entire stretch. And so that changed. There was like finally a highlight worthy ending for number 22. So this point i just kind of want them to win out i guess

they can just finish the season with wins go into the playoffs with uh you know whatever it would be a 40 game winning streak something like that and you know get swept in the alds yeah what is strange about i i don't want to say it's more impressive but what's weirder comparing the indian streak and the giant streak because you mentioned the difference difference between the Indians and the A's. But when the Indian streak began, they were already playing really good baseball. They were they were 69 and 56. So they were clearly going to win their division. They were one of the best teams in the league.

But when the giant streak began, they were the 11th best team out of 16. They were 59 and 62. So in terms of the improbability, I would say that the Giants kind of get a leg up. But again, we're talking about 1916 before there were lights or steamboats or Western colonization. So really not too much of a comparison to make. I think the only fair way to play this out is to dig up the 1916 Giants and force them to play a game against the Indians to see who stands the best chance.

I bet they would walk a lot, but they would not be able to pitch. I think there were steamboats. Wasn't that long ago. All right. So I have a stat that I want to relay. This was passed on to us by listener Logan. I had not known about this, but it is very relevant to our interests. So for some reason at the very beginning of your tenure as co-host, we talked about Lenny Harris

a whole bunch. It kind of became a running joke and that proved to be an unsustainable pace of discussing Lenny Harris. So we have regressed to the mean Lenny Harris-wise, but Lenny Harris is back today because Itro has now broken a record that seems to have been held by Lenny Harris wise but Lenny Harris is back today because Ichiro has now broken a record that seems to have been held by Lenny Harris we just did about 10 minutes of inconclusive play indexing that we did not force you to hear because there's all kinds of different records whether you had pinch hit plate appearances or pinch hit appearances and then you stayed in and you got additional plate appearances it's kind of hard to parse that but we think that Ichiro is now the single season record holder certainly in pinch hit appearances and pinch hit what games I guess times pinch hitting and times entering the

game as a pinch hitter he's got everything basically he has done the most pinch hitting in a single season that anyone has ever done. He has surpassed Lenny Harris in that respect. The really fascinating thing is that I believe he is two away from maybe a more prestigious record, which is most pinch hits in a single season. And that is held by John VanderWaal, who had 28 in 1995. Itro now has 26. So he has a shot to break this thing. He's been pinch hitting evidently in most Marlins games, right? I mean, he has what, 98 pinch hit appearances as we speak right now on the season? Seems like it. Yeah. And so he's getting into most Marlins games as a pinch

hitter. And if he does that over the remaining few weeks here and he picks up a few hits then i think this is actually really cool because if he gets this record he will be the guy who holds the all-time single season hits record period right with 262 and then he'll also be the guy with the all-time single season pinch hits record or you know tied or something if he just gets a couple more which is pretty incredible that's just like another weird amazing thing that itro would have done and it would be sort of indicative of how he has held on forever and he was a superstar and one of the best players in baseball and now he has entered this phase where he's ancient and he's just hanging on forever. And this is a hard record to set in 2017 because pinch hitters are kind of extinct or endangered at this point.

Other than Ichiro, teams don't really carry the John VanderWaal, Lenny Harris type so much anymore because they have to fit in 13 relievers or whatever it is. type so much anymore because they have to fit in 13 relievers or whatever it is. So there isn't really a dedicated pinch hitting bench spot on a lot of teams, but the Marlins have carved one out for each row. And yeah, he has a chance to hold these two incredibly different single season hit records, which I think would be pretty awesome. When we started this, I didn't care very much. I thought it was going to be like a Lenny Harris throwaway reference. But now that I think about it, you're right. I like that you can have both the records and it works out for him because he's been he's in maybe the best possible situation to set this record, which of course is not a coincidence because he has set the record. But he is the obvious fourth outfielder and the

obvious best bench hitter on a team with absolutely zero depth and with three outfielders who are clearly better than he is so he'll like never start in front of stanton ozuna or yelich he can't play any other position but he's always going to be the first guy off the bench for that team so just because of the way the marlins are built it's like well it can be itro or it can be tyler moore or like aj ellis or mike gavillas it doesn't, there's just, there's nothing. So Itro for a few years has been in this identical situation where the Marlins have had no depth. So he's been the obvious first guy. So credit to Itro. And I guess it's a good situation for him to be in. If you know that you're not going to start, at least with the Marlins, you know that

you're going to play. Itro, the last few years with the Marlins, over the past three years, he's batted about a thousand times, which is pretty stunning for a team that has Stanton, Ozuna, and Jelic. One of the weird, interesting side facts about Itro, who is currently 43 years old, this season, it would be the first season of his career he has no triples,

and the first season of his career he has no stolen bases. Even last year, he stole 10 bases. This year, zero. He has one cut stealing and according to stat cast he has the exact same sprint speed as kyle seager oh all right so that's where does that rank among players like percentile roughly kyle seager doesn't sound super impressive no and and other names around that kenny's vargas Daniel Murphy, Chris Carter, Jan Goms.

Ichiro ranks 316th out of 444. So what is that? That's sort of sad, but he's been getting work anyway. Yeah, that would be the 29th percentile. That's Ichiro. But so Ichiro's sprint speed this year, according to SEAC, is 26.5 miles per hour top speed. That's what it is, right?

Miles per hour? It's feet per second, I think. Feet. Of course, feet per second. Miles per hour. That would be way too fast. So, yeah, 26.5. But then going back to 2015, Ituro was at 27.4.

So, he has lost about nine-tenths of a foot per second. That's an annoying unit of measurement. Anyway, nine-tenths of whatever you want to say. We can just say he's lost a step. The time-honored baseball way of measuring things, a step. He used to have the same sprint speed a few years ago as Oduble Herrera, Nuri Aoki, and let's see, who's a good name to pick out here? Pete Cosma. Why not? Here's a Pete Cosma reference. Enjoy it, everyone. All right. Well, he's still there. It's more than most 43-year-olds can say. So you did some detective work this week that I thought was commendable.

So I'm commending you and asking you to explain it to the listeners. You found the flyball revolution, sort of. There's been a lot of consternation about this because we've heard that lots of hitters are trying to raise their launch angles and are trying to aim for the fences and have changed their swings in certain ways. And some guys have had notable successes doing that. But if you look at the league wide rate, it hasn't really changed all that much. hit as that's classified kind of just the rough ground ball fly ball classification as there were before this whole fly ball air ball revolution discussion started so there's been some question about whether this is just kind of an anecdotal thing or whether it does actually constitute a trend and i thought you provided some compelling evidence not dramatic evidence maybe but what

looked to me like a strong indication that there is actually something happening here. I think the evidence is pretty dramatic because what I did find is that there has not been a grand ball hit this season. I don't know if you noticed that, but not a single one. Maybe I'm underselling it. Yeah, no, that is pretty momentous. So yeah, as you mentioned, if you look over the 10, 15 years of information we have, league-wide grand ball rate has basically not moved more than like a percentage point or two in in either direction it's been very stable and even though the classifications are subjective still it's a pretty good indication that there has been no dramatic league-wide shift however we do have now three years of stat cast information and

three years of people saying get the ball in the air get the ball in the air fly ball revolution etc and it was difficult for me to even type the words fly ball revolution because in a sense i'm so over it but still i was curious and i wanted to see what hitters were doing so league-wide launch angle has gone up by one degree compared to two years ago which is not very much but it's something but i wanted to dig in a little deeper i had mentioned to you something that surprised us both on a recent podcast where looking at the numbers, this year's exit velocity in the league was actually down a full mile per hour. And that kind of stuck in my head. I wanted to investigate what might be happening. So I went into the data at Baseball Savant and I bucketed all of the balls in play

by the league and I bucketed them by launch angle in differences of about 10 degrees. So I went from all balls hit under 30 degrees, negative 30 degrees, I should say, balls hit between negative 30, negative 20 degrees, negative 20, negative 10, etc, all the way up to above 40. And I just wanted to see what's been going on trend wise in the league in those different buckets. And what's interesting is that this year compared to the last of years, there are more balls in play being hit at the very lowest angle. So the most ground volley of the ground balls. Then there is a reduction in the sort of the medium negative angle. So sort of the negative 10 to negative 20 degree ground balls are reduced in frequency.

And then you see slight increases in all the angles above that so you see a few more few more balls hit in the air and also a few more balls hit extremely negatively which i interpreted to mean that you have players who are trying to hit the ball in the air and then when they fail they're sort of getting these mishits where they're just nicking the ball the timing is off and so the ball just goes straight down. And are we thinking that that's where the overall decrease in exit velocity comes from, those mishits? Yeah, I think that would be a big part of it because I also did another part of the analysis was looking at the average exit velocity by bucket. And what we find is that the biggest decreases in exit velocity are also at those extreme

negative angles. So for every bucket, I don't know how best to put this so it's easy for listeners to understand, but think about all the different buckets from most negative to most positive. So every bucket moving up from the most extreme grand ball to the highest fly ball. So going in ascending order of that. I analyzed the exit velocity differences of 2017 compared to the years previous to that. I just wanted to see the differences in average exit velocity. And there was the biggest decline at the most negative launch angle. So those balls are being hit the weakest relative to how they used to be hit. And as you

move up bucket by bucket by bucket, the difference in exit velocity gets less negative and then eventually more positive, which is another way of saying that balls being hit in the air are not being hit any weaker. They're actually being hit a little bit better, very slightly better than they used to be hit. And all of the all of the ground balls are being hit worse, which would further suggest to me that the batters are trying to make their good contact above the horizontal, so to speak, and then the ground balls are being hit worse, which is interesting. Again, nothing too dramatic, nothing really astonishing or nothing you'd certainly notice if you were just watching a game on TV because it's just so subtle. But you can see that there's an increase in productivity at the highest angles relative to last few years. So I know that you have found in your research that the ball in 2017 is not different from

the ball in 2016, or at least now I don't remember if that was you or somebody else. Maybe I think Alan Nathan wrote about that recently. He found that there was a big difference looking from 2015 to 2016 in the ball, which accounted for a lot of the extra homers in that period, but that, yeah, there didn't seem to be an additional difference from 2016 to 2017. Can't remember if that exactly matched up with what Rob Arthur found or not, but it does seem like the most dramatic difference in the ball came a couple of years ago when the home run rate first spiked. But of course, the home run rate has continued

to climb, which means that something else has to have been going on. And the best explanation for that seems to be what you're talking about right now. And what's interesting is that at sort of the ideal angles between like plus 20 and plus 40 degrees, productivity is up this year, even relative to last season. And even though the exit velocities have remained basically the same, I don't know exactly how to explain that. I don't think that there's been any sort of league-wide trend toward smaller ballparks or anything that's suddenly manifested over the past several months. So players are just doing more at those higher launch angles than they did even last year when the home run spike really came into being. So I don't know how to explain that. It would seem to be suggestive of some further difference in the ball. But if we're going to rule that out, then whatever, maybe it's a measure of sort of, I don't know how else

to put it, but player intentionality, where if they're actually really trying more often to hit balls between 20 and 40 degrees, then they're just getting better results. Maybe it means they're pulling more of them or something because you can do more damage to the pull side than up the middle. In any case, it seems to be reflective of a league wide shift in favor of batters trying to hit the ball in the air. And honestly, there's every reason to try to the ball in the air. Even Ichiro has hit as many home runs this year as he hit the previous three years combined. So granted, that's only three. But nevertheless, you've got Francisco Lindor is not a power hitter hitting 30 home runs

Jose Ramirez is right behind him you've got Scooter Jeanette with a bunch of home runs Freddie Galvis last year hit 20 those just I don't need to recite all the weird names of guys who have hit home runs but there's just so little reason to hit a ball on the ground that it really does feel like we are seeing a league-wide shift and the reason that ground ball right has stayed mostly the same i have to imagine is one because of mishits two because well a trend takes a while to catch on with everyone and three pitchers are still trying to get ground balls and they have just as much to say if not more of a say than than hitters do it's not as if you can just go up do a yonder alonzo and put everything in the air maybe that's a bad example because Yonder Alonzo has done exactly that. But still, pitchers are trying to avoid the balls in the air that

hitters are trying to hit. And so that's just you get the the back and forth of it. And even in Alonzo's case, if I'm not mistaken, this is a guy who's tried to hit more balls in the air on purpose this year. But his ground ball rates the first three months of this season were in the 20s. And over the last three months of the season, they've been in the 40s. So it's not through anything Alonzo is trying to do. He's not trying to hit more ground balls, but pitchers have managed to find some way to try to keep them on the ground more often responding to his improvement. So pitchers are trying to keep the ball on the ground if they can't get a pop up batters are trying to hit the ball in the ground if they can't get a pop-up batters are trying to hit the ball in the air so it's just going to be a battle because pitchers are going to try to find some way to avoid home runs even though they are kind of struggling to do so at the moment yeah so

i feel pretty comfortable saying that the record home run rate has been explained more or less we know that the ball was a big part of it. And we know that hitters have changed their approach in part because of the ball, because they've been rewarded for this different approach. And that's showing up in the numbers too. So it's partly the ball, it's partly hitter's approach. Maybe there's a bit of other things in there too, pitchers throwing harder, et cetera. But I think that is sufficient to explain it. we still don't know why the ball is different whether it was a complete accident whether someone did something on purpose what exactly in the manufacturing process changed we don't know that but as far as explaining with stats

other stats i think we've done a decent job of that and we don't know if it will continue or whether the ball will revert to the old model or anything but it's much less of a mystery why this is happening than it was say a year ago separately i would like to say that since you had your article published about aaron judge he is 292 and he slugged 958 aaron judge this month it's only half of september but so far this month he's at 262 and he has slugged 738 he is uh he's having number he's posting numbers that look almost identical to the numbers he had the first three months of the season aaron judge maybe back yeah certainly seems like it not totally shocked to

see that so yeah he is ending on a high note and also we'll just quickly shout out a secondary article you did after your Flyball article, which is kind of about the side effects of those changes that you found, which is that it's difficult to be a scout these days. And we've kind of touched on that briefly on the podcast. I know that Carson has touched on it on Fangraphs Audio. But as you pointed out, it's tough to try to project minor league players these days because the minor league hitting environment seems to be somewhat different from the major league hitting environment. There's a different ball. The home run rate is

up relative to a couple of years ago, but not by nearly as much as the major league rate is. And as you mentioned, we're seeing all of these Lindor types who weren't projected to hit a ton of home runs hit a ton of home runs so it's really hard at this point to figure out who's going to hit for power or who's not because so much of it is dependent on the ball or on changes in player approach which is a hard thing to predict too and between that and defensive shifting and strikeouts and it's hard to evaluate defenders now or maybe it doesn't matter quite as much as it once did because you can position guys perfectly and there are fewer balls in play it's just a tough job now to try to pinpoint the future

value of major leaguers it's always been a tough job but i think things have made it even more difficult than it used to be yeah i, I think pitchers are roughly as flummoxing as they've ever been, because you never really know when a guy is just going to like learn a slider, and then suddenly that's going to make all the difference. So pitchers can still kind of get better or worse overnight. And so that's that's going to be difficult. And of course, there are sort of league wide changes in pitcher usage that are taking place. But pitchers just in generally still kind of unpredictable. But as haters haters go one of my favorite things about one of your early articles about the home run spike was when you compared what's gone on at the major league level to what's taken place in the minors

very simple analysis but a lot of people either don't think to look at it or they don't know where to find it baseball reference makes it very easy to look at how home run rates have moved in all the different leagues. So I thought it was worth revisiting that just to see how the trends have been. And as you go from low A ball all the way up to the majors, you see an increase in home run rate pretty much level by level by level. That's been true for a while, which is not too much of a surprise because the players, the hitters are getting older and they're getting more physically mature and they're just getting better. So you see more home runs. but over the past three years major league baseball has more meaningfully separated from the home run

rates at even the highest levels of the minors and the difference now if you look at home run rates on contact used to be that the majors were higher than the upper levels of the minors by like a few tenths of a percentage point and now the difference is more than a full percentage point where the major leagues this season i believe it's for all out of all batted balls 4.8 of them are home runs and in triple a 3.5 of them are home runs which doesn't sound like a big difference but it's a it's a pretty substantial difference especially when you consider that triple a folds in like albuquerque and the pacific coast league all these hitter friendly environments and still you've got the the home runs and the majors taking off and there's really i don't need to say more than

you already said it's just to put it most simply it's just a different game i don't know what kind of defensive shifting takes place in the minors i've never cared to learn about it and i'm sure that shifting does take place because you want players to get used to it as they climb the levels but still if you're a scout you are trained to evaluate these players based on their classic five tools and you're going to evaluate their power and the defense and everything else and the defense it just doesn't matter as much now because there is less space you have to cover that part is has more to do with the infield than the outfield outfielders still need to cover a lot of ground, as Mike Petriello and Darren Willman and the StatCast team revealed yesterday with their outs above average set.

Byron Buxton, big difference maker in the outfield. So outfield defense is still important. But infield defense, you think about if you have a guy who has Lindor or Andrew Oden Simmons level talent as a shortstop, that's still going to make him better than the average shortstop in the major leagues. But he just has to cover less ground. And that is a reality of the game we have now. And I can't imagine it's ever going to go away. But the bigger issue is the power because not only it's a different game in terms of how the ball flies in the minors versus the majors. And not only does that mean you're trying to imagine a player's

power in a more hitter friendly environment, but he also're trying to imagine a player's power in a more hitter friendly environment but he also might just try to hit for more power in the majors than he does in the minors because it's just more conducive to trying to do that there are greater rewards to be found so i don't know exactly what that means but if you figure that the spread in power utility has been reduced in the minors and the spread and defensive utility has been reduced, then that just makes it harder to separate the good players from the bad players or more meaningfully, the just good enough players from the not quite good enough players. So hard to be a scout. That's too bad. Yeah, it is a different ball in the minors. It's

manufactured by Rawlings, but it's made in China as opposed to the Costa Rican manufactured Major League ball. So there's some slight differences there. All right. So we have about 15 minutes until you have to leave for your chat. So I guess we will try to cram in your actual topic. Let's do a quick draft. Quick draft. I don't know.

I think we're originally going to do a draft of three. Maybe we only have time for two. But I'm going to send you a link. And maybe you don't need this link. But this is a link to current playoff odds in uh in the major leagues and uh from the from the good teams i wanted to draft not the teams that i think we think are most likely to win the world series because we are probably as we usually are on the exact same pages in terms of who we think is going to win the world series but i'd like to draft teams who we would like to win the World Series for whatever reason. It's all personal preference. And because I guess I only told you about this at the last possible moment.

In fact, I only told you after we were already talking. I guess that means I should probably go first unless you have a strong desire to go first. Which team you would most like to win the World Series? Or I guess we could even mix it around. We could draft one team that we most want to win the World Series and one team that we most don't want to win the World Series, even though that might piss some people off. I don't know. Whichever one you prefer. All right.

Well, I'd take the first pick if you're giving it to me. If I'm at a slight disadvantage here, I'll take the first pick. So, yeah, I mean, I don't have any personal rooting interest in any team, but just going based on kind of general utilitarian-ness and which story would be most interesting. I would say at this point, it just has to be Cleveland, right? I mean, I think coming into the season, it may have been Cleveland just because they have the longest drought of winning one. And I mean, you know, there are teams that have never won one that haven't been around as long, but it's been an awfully long time since the Indians won a World Series. And of course, they got close last year. It kind of feels like it's their turn. And now they have this winning streak, which has been, I guess, one of the most exciting stories of the season. So it

feels as if they have earned it now. They have been the best team in the league and they've been a fun, exciting team. They have, as you have documented, maybe the best pitching staff ever. They have a lot of other really personable and exciting players. So I can't really think of a team that quote unquote deserves to win more or that would be more fun than the Indians. I think, you know, we've seen a bunch of other teams, Red Sox, White Sox, Cubs kind of get the monkey off their back after having not won for a very long time. And the Indians are now in that position. So I would say that that would be the best story, the most cathartic win for their fan base. Okay. So I'm trying to pull

up the numbers. So right now, okay. So base okay so i'm trying to pull up the number so right now okay so the indians after yesterday they have moved all the way up to second place all-time pitching staff war they still have 15 games left to play they are at 28.6 wins above replacement as a pitching staff 1996 braves the only team higher at 29.5 so the indians less than one win behind the 1996 braves for the highest ever pitching staff were. Pretty good. Yeah. Okay.

I will see your Indians and I will raise you. I think I'm supposed to say the Mariners because they're the team I like the most. But yeah, that's fine. Yankees. Here's why I want the Yankees to win the World Series this year. And it would be fun, first of all, because as much as people don't want to acknowledge it, the Yankees do have kind of the story of a successful rebuild. They've folded in some youth, etc.

It's a rebuild that's been done well. But I miss baseball's sort of identity politics, if you will. I I don't like since I rooted for the Red Sox back in 2003 and 2004, and I regret it to this day. I didn't want those Red Sox to win because we lost something. And when the Cubs won last year, we lost something else. We lost those teams that never win. And so, I mean, we still have teams that never win. We still have the Mariners and the Rangers and the Nationals. There are still some sad sacks, but we don't have that evil empire that we used to have. And I want a villain. And I don't think that I'm not comfortable with the

Dodgers. The villain should be what the villain has always been and the villain has always been the Yankees and I want that to come back I want people to hate the Yankees again it's just it's weird it doesn't feel like baseball at this point for having to be like oh I don't really like the Yankees but Aaron Judge is so good and Gary Sanchez is one of the best power hitting judges and what an impressive rebuild they put I get it but we're supposed to hate them and i think that i think the yankees probably thrive on being hated i know that we talked about those those fan polls some months ago and people do still hate the yankees but it's not enough because they've been down they haven't been a good team for years i want them to win this world series i want them to win next year's world series i want them to win several of the world series in

the next decade because i want to hate them again because right now we don't have the sad sack losers and we don't have the villain indians the indians could never be the villain of major leagues well they'll just be annoying nationals can't be a villain they're going to lose bryce harper anyway even if you don't like him astros i think nobody really likes but that's more kind of a just like an ethical thing it's not like you're trying to destroy us you are the team that we all want to unite to take down kind of thing. So I want some of those identities back. And there's there's nothing I think that can happen. I mean, if the Indians won this year, that's just another sad sack loser that we lose. You know, no, it's just like, that's the longest drought right now. So if that goes away, then what I want some of those stories, I miss the storytelling aspect, and I want to hit the

Yankees again. So Yankees World Series 2017, and 2018 and 2019. Okay. I'm guessing that's going to be an unpopular pick. I don't care. Shut up. So would you rather draft? I think we can squeeze it in. You want to draft another second place? Go quickly? Sure. Yeah. All right. I'll take the Astros. I think there are a lot of good choices here. I think equally good choices here. I'll take the Astros. I think. There are a lot of good choices here. I think equally good choices here. I'll take the Astros. They've never won a World Series. They have executed the rebuild extremely well. They have a good, fun team. It has been a legitimately great team. And I think that it would be fun if Carlos Beltran finally won a World Series. That would be nice. And they have a lot of young stars, too, who are going to be a big part of the game for the next decade. So I'll say

them. And you get to see Verlander win one if they win one. And I think it would be fun if they won one. I don't hugely distinguish between them and a few other teams, but if they won, that would be a satisfying outcome to the season i think i don't know how many times people will have to remind me that justin verlander is on the astros it just doesn't sink in and i don't know if it's ever going to sink in okay okay astros that's fine that's fine people could get behind that and you have a little hurricane related sympathy i can get i can see that yeah sure that'd be fine second pick i'm gonna go with the uh i'm gonna go with the angels surprised they're still out there dangling.

Angels not likely to make the playoffs at all. But just from the perspective that what we always want to write about every single day and have to prevent ourselves from doing so is Mike Trout. I think every single day we wake up and think, oh, what can I write about Mike Trout today? And then our editors are like, please stop. Please don't just, even though our editors are probably on board with the Mike Trout thing anyway. But I want the Angels to win and I want them to win in a very specific way where it's because of Mike Trout. It's because almost exclusively because of Mike Trout. I don't want him to like limp to the championship while like Cole freaking Calhoun hits like seven home runs.

I don't want a weird Adam Kennedy situation in the World Series. I want the Angels to win it all. And I want Mike Trout to win the, I guess, the wildcard game MVP and the ALDS MVP and the ALCS MVP and the World Series MVP. I want the Angels to win every single game in the playoffs. And I want them to do so because Mike Trout goes three for five in every game with two home runs. I just want him to just write the story that will define the rest of his career.

I want it to happen now. Just get it out of the way. I don't want to end up in a situation where Trout gets to be 30 or 33 years old and people say oh he how good could he be he he never won at all and and then he ends up on some good team but he's a diminished version of his former self which means he's still probably a seven and a half win freaking player but yeah i just want him to do it wanted to get it over with and even though the angels are not a very good team when mike trout is in there they're good enough and he's capable of doing enough damage. So I would like that to happen. Okay. I'm going to take the Nationals as my next pick. I think they are, of course, one of the only existing franchise to have never even been in a World Series along with the

Mariners. They have, I think, done enough over the last several years to earn that spot. They're really good this year. They've been really good for a few years. I'm kind of tired of the Nationals choking in the playoffs story, so I don't really want to hear that again. And they have tons of really fun stars. Harper, Scherzer, Strasburg, Rendon, the list goes on and on. They would be fun. It'd be nice to see them get the spotlight in Octoberober and this group will be broken up most likely to some extent at least after next season so if they're gonna win one they'd better do it so i'm gonna go with the nationals as my next pick okay nationals pretty

good i'll go with the brewers okay you're picking the teams that are probably not going to be playoff teams but well yeah you picked the top three. Yeah, that's fine. Yeah, well, I guess he didn't say Dodgers, but I'll take the Brewers. Probably not going to make it, but I think it would, plain and simple, it would be fun. I think that it would be a very rapid coronation after their rebuild

that barely started rebuilding in the first place. They are currently without their best pitcher for the rest of the year in Jimmy Nelson. I imagine that Keon Broxson would probably hit about 13 home runs along the way just to try to validate his season but yep i think after all the talk last year about how the cubs had arrived and they were going to be a dynasty how great would it be to have them knocked out and lose the world series because a division rival who was supposed to be one of the worst teams in baseball just decided to steal the world series out of nowhere

so yeah that would be fun yeah would you like to draft the team you'd like the least to win the world series real quick before we end uh for me it probably would be the yankees actually i guess i i see your your point about having a villain but well i don't know i'm not ready for them to get back to that point i think at this point it seems likely that they're going to be good for quite a while and that alone will be enough to ensure their villainy. And there are just so many other stories this year that are good, teams that have never won, so many teams that have just never had what the Yankees have had so many times. So I'm ready for the Yankees to win one in a few years. They'll be good for a while, but I'm not ready for them to take it yet. I think it would be sort of a shame if they knocked off all these other teams that have never had that chance. So just in the interest of fairness, and maybe that's silly, the universe is not fair,

neither is baseball, but I'm going to say Yankees have to wait their turn. Such is life. I guess I want the Yankees to win the World Series. I want them to sign Hugh Darvish, and I want them to sign Shohei Ohtani. Yeah, I probably would have had the Dodgers higher on my list before their recent losing streak. Like if they were going to have one of the best seasons ever, regular seasons ever, I probably would have wanted them to be rewarded for that and to see the best team in baseball win and Kershaw win and all of that. for that and to see the best team in baseball win and Kershaw win and all of that. And now they're still probably the best team in baseball, but not in as exciting a way as they were as of a few weeks ago. So yeah, they're not high on my list anymore. Although of course they haven't won

for quite a while either. Right. It would be weird to see the Diamondbacks win the World Series just because it's like a year after they got rid of their front office, but so much of that talent is still around. So it would be some kind of weird Jerry DiPoto, Jack Zarensik situation where the old front office leaves and all of a sudden the team gets better through little. Anyway, I guess in closing the team, I would least like to win the World Series. I'm sorry about this. It's the Twins.

And the only reason is because if the Twins win the World Series, both of us will be fired because what are we even doing? The Twins at the start of the year, looking the fan graphs preseason playoff odds the worst teams in baseball were projected to be in order the padres reds white socks brewers phillies braves and twins i know that the brewers are there and and i already picked the brewers to win the world series because that would be fun but twins last year they lost what 103 games last year their pitching staff has been helped this year by picking up Bartolo Colon when his ERA was like 10. I get that Byron Buxton has turned it around and he's had like a good few months in a season where he has not been a good player. And Kyle Gibson has had like a decent second half and Jose Barrios.

I like the idea that they could win the World Series after being buyers and then sellers at the trade deadline that would be fun that would absolutely be fun in the same way it would be funny if the rangers won the world series after trading you darvish but uh yeah look it's not that i actively don't want the twins to win the world series because it would be like a neat story but if that happened it's like what are we doing like what are we what are we really like people would they'd start to see through us at that point. They'd be like, all right, we don't need whatever this is. And you can't see, but I'm wiping my hand to signify all of baseball analysis. So in the interest of preserving the job that I have,

that allows me to do the things that I do, we really can't have the Twins win the World Series. Okay. And the remaining teams that we haven't named, I would draft them in this order. I think I'd go Mariners, I'd go Rockies, and then probably, gosh, Mariners, Rockies, Dodgers, I suppose, would be next on my list. And then Diamondbacks, and then Cubs, Red Sox, Yankees, I guess, at the bottom. Oh, yeah. So that's going in order of teams you would like to win, two teams you wouldn't like to win. Right, yes. Yeah. Then I'll go. I'll take the Mariners.

I have to take the Mariners. Mariners, then the Dodgers for the similar reasons the Angels. I want Kershaw to get the Trout thing, or the Trout to get the Kershaw thing. I don't know. Mariners, Dodgers, Diamondbacks. I guess Red Sox over the Cubs. Oh, no. Rockies over the Red Sox over the Cubs.

And then whatever. I guess the Cardinals are in there too. But nobody wants to see the Cardinals in the playoffs anymore. Like just give it a break for like 10 more years. Yeah. It's a really good group though. Overall, there are a lot of very exciting choices in this field. So looking forward to the playoffs.

We should mention that while we had previously given some conversation to the possibility of a five or six way tie in the American League wildcard race, separation has occurred. So Twins own the second wildcard slot, but then it's the Angels three back, Mariners three and a half back. No one else is closer than five games away. So yeah, things have happened. It seems like nobody actually wants to win that wildcard spot except for the Twins. So we had fun.

Yes, right. I think a few writers have come up with five-way tiebreaker scenarios which as we discussed do not exist but i think russell carlton came up with one and someone at mlb.com too so solutions are out there but yeah looks like we won't need them all right uh i'm doing it again okay i'm trying to get your chat on time you don't want i'm always always late who cares I will just point out because I don't know if you were aware of this but Now that the American League wildcard has achieved

Some separation the National League wildcard is actually Closer the Rockies occupy the Spot but then the Brewers or Cardinals are both Two and a half games back which Makes them makes that a technically Closer race than the American League wildcard So now time to shift our attention Now I'm done.

All right. So the Indian streak is over. Stopped at 22. Of course, it took a one-run loss to do it. We had a good run, guys. It was fun while it lasted, and it lasted a really long time. So I think I said that yesterday's episode would be the last one with another up-down email. Let me give you one more. This is from listener Dave. Instead of proposing a new way to interpret up and down, he is proposing that we just go around. We do away with up and down entirely. Here's Dave. As for the up the line, down the line debate, we are once again dealing with problematic prepositions. The difficulty is that in the current and contested usage, both up and down are malapropisms. A baseball diamond exists on a horizontal plane, whereas the prepositions up and down refer to verticality.

A batter can pop up or get the bunt down because these phrases describe the verticality of the ball's trajectory. Up and down have nothing to do with horizontality, if that's a word. A broadcaster can say, wild pitch, and Jones heads down to second base as easily as saying, wild pitch, and Jones moves up to second base as easily as saying wild pitch and Jones moves up to second base. Why? Because in both cases the prepositions are being misused and are, as such, completely arbitrary. That said, let's scrap them in favor of more appropriate prepositional phrases. The ball is hit along the line. The throw is off the line. The runner moves to second base. Behind the bag. It gets through Buckner, etc. From now on, let's use accurate, specific prepositional phraseology when describing horizontal movement. After all, the English language has more than 40 prepositions from which to choose. All right, Dave, I don't know if we can convince every English speaker to go along with that, but you've made a valiant effort.

You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. Thank you. Dylan Higgins for editing assistance. Keep your questions and comments for me and Jeff coming via email, podcast, the fangraphs.com or via the patron messaging system. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. We will be back on Monday. Breakdown, say it to me. Nothing ever seems the way it ought to be. Nothing ever seems right now that it's over.

Yeah, then maybe we can be friends maybe we can be closer and have fun like we did in the old days now that it's over