Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1115: Has The 2017 Season Been Bad?

Episode Date: September 26, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan follow up on their Glory Hole Recreation Area discussion and banter about a Brandon Crawford bunt attempt, an Andrelton Simmons deke, Oakland catcher Bruce Maxwell’s decision to kneel during the National Anthem, whether the 2017 season has been bad, and how one would even decide such a thing. Audio intro: The […]

I'll write you a song, and it won't be hard to sing. It will be a natural anthem, familiar it will seem. It will rally all the workers on strike for better pay. And its chorus will resound and boost morale throughout the day. Hello and welcome to episode 1115 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Bringer, joined by Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs. Hello. Hello. How are you?

I'm okay. How are you? Also okay. This is the first time I've ever had to search my own email inbox for the words glory hole. And what did you find? Okay, so we have, I think, some sort of answer. We were discussing last week the glory hole recreation area in Northern California, and neither one of us is really entirely sure what a glory hole was. Well, I mean, we know what a glory hole is, but we didn't know what sort of glory hole would have a recreational area named after it presumably supported by the american government so we got several emails i don't know if it was up to the six the half dozen that i predicted uh i don't i

think it exceeded six but i didn't uh i didn't keep meticulous track so let's see uh maybe the most detailed email seems to have come from ben johnson we can call him uh ben j or maybe b johnson bj probably not but in any case now that his name is out there a glory hole has to do with a uh a dam and a body of water and why don't i just uh why don't i just read this down having grown up in close proximity to a prominent one that referring to glory hole i felt i should chime in the type of glory hole you mentioned is usually in a large body of water by a dam it's an overflow spillway for excess water if the level gets too high and would otherwise threaten the integrity of the dam i've never been to the particular one you mentioned but there's a well-known parentheses to locals glory hole in lake barry essa by the

monticello dam there's a sweet picture on the lake's wikipedia page of it in action linked in the email not linked in this conversation. I remember boating in the lake as a kid and being super afraid of getting too close and falling in. I highly recommend that anyone who's listening to this buy some sort of source of internet material. You should just Google Lake Berryessa, B-E-R-R-Y-E-S-S-A, Lake Berryessa Glory Hole and see the pretty incredible pictures of what that looks like when the water is at a very high level and going into the hole. Yeah. Someone, maybe it was Ben, sent us a video, a link to a video of a drone flying over one of these glory holes. And it was pretty cool. It looks like a giant whirlpool and you can't see why the water is going down there when it's

covering the glory hole, but it is quite a sight. So, yeah, we learned something. I don't know much about the lake near to the glory hole recreation area that was being discussed, but I'm going to assume that it is dammed and that the dam has a glory hole or at least used to. Perhaps that assumption is incorrect. Maybe it is just a really really dirty kind of recreation area maybe maybe it is named because somebody thought no i like going to glory holes but you know i don't know uh teach teach their own but at least now we have one definition of what a glory hole is in a uh in a a family friendly way yeah and thanks to everyone who also submitted other funny names for areas.

And Big Bone Lick State Park in Boone County, Kentucky was a popular one. Multiple listeners submitted that one. And that comes from fossils that were found there and also a salt lick that was there. So you put those things together, big bones and the salt lick you get big bone lick and that explains that so i had a couple highlights or low lights i wanted to show you i don't know if you saw brandon crawford's bunt over the oh i sure did let me just interrupt you though real quick just to point out because i'd forgot to mention that uh something i stumbled upon i think it was last year maybe the year before uh the whiskey dick wildlife area uh it is a uh it is a protected area in the columbia basin whiskey dick wildlife area anyway

please continue with your baseball conversation yeah so you saw this bunt this is brandon crawford the tweet i saw called it the worst bunt attempt of all time. Hashtag don't bunt. This was against Clayton Kershaw, so understandable that someone would look silly against Clayton Kershaw. And I'm surprised that baseball players don't look silly more often. I guess they look silly fairly often. But this was an extremely uncoordinated bunt attempt, or at least it looked that way and what happens is the the ball is more or less it's on the inside part of the plate i guess it is i don't know if it would have been a called strike or not it was a strike because he offered at it but it was framed it was not far outside the strike zone but crawford i guess trips as he is beginning the bunt attempt. So it looks like it would have been almost a drag bunt,

like he was kind of halfway out of the box already. And his front foot just catches or buckles as he makes that step. And so not only does he miss the pitch with the bunt attempt, just completely whiff, but he also falls down and is on all fours. He's on his hands and knees and lingers there for a moment, gets up slowly and gingerly. And it looks very embarrassing. This is how I think a normal person would look playing baseball. And we don't get to see actual graceful baseball players like Brandon Crawford look this way all that often. Just an accident, but a funny

moment. I think it's somewhat important to point out, not only did Brandon Crawford whiff on the button fall down, he fell down while taking what appeared to be several steps forward. So it was like a delayed fall. He wound up falling probably maybe a fifth or a quarter of the distance toward the mound. Yeah, coming out of the batter's box when he finally comes to a stop here it's really something extreme i've never i i've never seen that i've never seen anything like of that genre we've seen players like over swing hand fall down and the helmet comes off or they go down to a knee or whatever but i've never i've never seen like the aggressively incompetent bunt where a player just like launches himself forward into the grass so

congratulations Brandon Crawford baseball does show you something new every day and also uh props to Brandon Crawford for responding to that gif in turn with a gif of Homer Simpson retreating into a bush oh I didn't see that well it was uh I believe one Sam Miller or maybe no it was Grant Grant uh Grant Rizzivi retweeted the Brandon Crawford response This morning Well that's appropriate because I was going to say That we were both Basically our reaction is like Nelson from The Simpsons

Just pointing at the guy who falls down And saying ha ha But it was worthy of that sort of response I have one more highlight to show you Which I have just sent you also And this is kind of at the opposite end of the spectrum of coordination. So it's been a while on this podcast since we watched an Andrelton Simmons highlight and just marveled at it in real time. But that's what I want to do here.

This is from the Astros Angels game on Sunday. And this is the kind of play that might go unnoticed. It's not one of those spectacular Simmons plays where he makes some incredible grab in the hole, and then he pops up and he throws it, and you can't understand how he did that, and it looks like he defied gravity. This is more of an effort play. did that and it looks like he defied gravity this is more of an effort play so what happens here is there is a single to right and there's a runner on first when the play starts so the runner on

first is rounding second and he positions himself Simmons positions himself in the usual place like for the cutoff, but he's between the second base bag and the third base bag, and it looks like he is just going to let the ball go through, let the throw through to third base, and so the guy who just singled, Carlos Correa, thinks that the throw is going through to third, but instead Simmons cuts it off and he throws to first and he gets Correa leading off the bag. So clever deke to begin with. Then Simmons runs to second base where he receives the throw from the first baseman to, you know, block Correa's path to second. Then by this point, the runner on third is almost home. So Simmons then turns around, whips the ball to home plate, and then the catcher runs him up the line.

And then Simmons sprints over to third base again to be ready to get the throw, which he didn't need to be because there was no throw. But in this play, he must cover like the most ground that an infielder covers in a play of this length you could probably stat cast that but he's everywhere it starts with his deke and then he is sprinting over to second and he's sprinting over to third and this is sort of one of those almost like jeter flip play type things where it's like, how was he in that position? How did he get over there? How did he think to do that? So this was more of showing, I guess, the awareness of Simmons, but also just the effort that he puts into defense as opposed to just the incredible coordination and grace that he shows on his typical almost routine highlight.

It's a really successful deke too because i had to watch the replay about five times before i figured out what was going on yeah because there's there's a lot more to it because you know he has the initial deke where it looks like he's going to let the ball go by and then he grabs it and he tries to get the runner off first etc but then there's all the rest of the play too where where both he and the catcher are sprinting toward third base and i had to try to figure out who had the ball so then i had to go back and re-watch so he successfully deked me kind of like when a player dekes a cameraman except in this case i guess i'm not the cameraman i'm just the observer but simmons got me at home he got me a few times and because it's the kind of thing that you can't really measure

and you i don't even know how a player gets like defensive stat credit for something like this because you know you are basically on the field when an out is made on the bases but you don't get direct credit for it because we can't really measure it it's hard to be able to compare a simmons to other players like i don't know if there are other short stops who make dekes like this or who have anything that's even close to his on-field awareness it's it's fun to think that nobody does because it's most fun to think about those just like situational awareness outliers. But I really have no idea. All I know is when I've watched baseball games, I haven't seen anyone who seems as clever as Simmons, but maybe I don't pay enough attention to this stuff. But Simmons is a lot of fun. I don't think that there's anyone who

does what he does. Yeah, I guess dekes are maybe one of the few aspects of defense that we have not quantified to this point i wonder whether this is one of the things that like baseball info solutions takes into account when they have video scouts and they have this whole long list of good plays and misplays i wonder whether dekes count at all but that's something that you probably can't even stat cast so you'd have to have someone watching and counting all the dekes and some dekes probably aren't even on video so that's probably just kind of a blind spot and it's one of those things that you know there's probably not some super deker whose deking is worth like wins every season or something like that but in the way that you know Javi Baez is a really good tagger, and we all became aware

of that when tagging was not really a skill that people generally thought of as a skill necessarily. And that, I think, has been quantified to some point, or at least, you know, you can look up transfer speed and that kind of thing. So maybe Deaking falls into the same category. Maybe there's some masterful Deaker who is adding runs every single season from Deaking. And maybe it's Simmons. So here's why I think that maybe we are the wrong two people to be co-hosting the same podcast.

Because so often you will end up saying what I'm right about. Like I was just going to bring up the javier baez tags and then and when we're talking to some guests i can't count the number of times where like the next question you ask was the next question i was about to ask and so maybe maybe there's maybe there's too much overlap between the two of us maybe we need to take a break yeah we need someone who just thinks nothing like us and who we can't stand and uh says things we would never think of saying to be a third co-host possibly. Yeah, but he worked for Fox Sports. All right. So this is not the topic or the main topic for today, but we almost can't not talk about Bruce Maxwell, which is not something that we would have ever said before on this podcast probably. But Bruce Maxwell became, as far as anyone knows,

the first MLB player to kneel during the national anthem, joining the more widespread protests in other sports. In response to, it's not exactly clear if there's one specific thing it's in response to at this point. I think the meaning of that gesture has broadened a bit. Initially, it was a police brutality and discrimination kind of protest. Now it is still that, I think, but maybe also a response to Donald Trump's very public comments condemning people who are doing this sort of protest. And that, of course, only strengthened athletes' resolve

to make some sort of stand or the opposite of stand in this case. So we wanted to just acknowledge it, say a few words about it. You actually had a somewhat earnest tweet about it, although maybe that was just a setup for your Denelson-Lamette joke one tweet later. But was there anything in particular you wanted to say about maxwell god it was a maybe among the least important angles of this but as i was paying attention to everything that was taking place because this this was the story all weekend long and it began with our president's announcement of protesting football players and then basketball

kind of took over the spotlight the next day and then it was what saturday night when when maxwell took the knee and it was at that moment when i think it it clicked in my head that okay now now it's spread here now it's spread to the thing that we yeah that we have to care about that we that we cover that we write about and now now already already it's been so difficult on a daily basis to wake up and write about baseball for like the last year or so just because there's been so much that is of greater importance going on and now it's just like another another layer to that we're like today i'm sure i'm going to write two whatever articles about whatever baseball analysis and it's just my i don't know how my heart can be in it because

it's just not the story that matters whatever those articles are because i haven't been alive long enough to have gone through many of these like watersheds in in american sporting history i'm sure there have been a few that i'm just not recalling off the top of my head, but this feels like it's some sort of turning point. I don't know exactly where things are turning, but it feels like this is, I don't know if it's the politis... Oh my god, I'm stumbling on this word.

Politicization? I don't know if this is the official politicization of sports, or maybe it's if this is just about athletes fully coming to understand the the gravity and and the visibility of the platform that they have because in this country we have given athletes one of the most powerful platforms that exists and it only makes sense that in some amount of time athletes would start to take advantage of

that because they they begin to realize oh i have all this power why am i not using it to fight for only makes sense that in some amount of time athletes would start to take advantage of that because they they begin to realize oh i have all this power why am i not using it to fight for whatever causes that i believe in of course we've had outspoken athletes before and on on all sides of things but it is just it's so widespread now and it's it's not gonna like maximal is he said he's going to kneel henceforth i don't know when i was picking up my girlfriend from the airport yesterday after her trip near the glory hole recreation area we were i was explaining like okay so here's what you missed sports changed this weekend sports changed forever and uh the question that we lingered on because we couldn't figure out what

the answer was was so like what would what would it take for it to stop and that i don't know because you know it's not like let's have a conversation. Let's let's fix it in America. I don't know what the end goal is. So it's just going to be kind of ongoing until I don't know when. Yeah. Michael Bateman said that on the Ringer MLB episode, which is probably up by the time the episode you're listening to is up.

We asked Jeff Passan about this because Passon is, I think, the only reporter Maxwell spoke to on Sunday. So we got the details on their conversation. But yeah, Michael made the same point that if Maxwell is going to protest until society changes, essentially, then that's probably going to take longer than his career. So he might be kneeling forever. So, yeah, I think, you know, I think one thing that distinguished this was just the way he went about it. You know, I don't really understand how anyone I understand, but I can't totally sympathize why with anyone gets all that upset about this sort of gesture, because it's just a protest that a player feels like he should make and I can't imagine being bothered by that I don't see it as something disrespectful and especially in Maxwell's case because of the way he went about it which is he talked to his teammates first he

talked to ownership they had a statement ready to go when he did this in support of him. They had, you know, teammates supporting him during this gesture. Mark Canna had his hand on Maxwell's shoulder and will continue to do that. And he was embraced right after. And Maxwell, of course, comes from a military family, was born at a military base, has a father and grandfather who are veterans. It's clearly not intended as some sort of sign that the country is not worthy of respect or the flag or the anthem or any of those things. It is just pointing out that there are things that could be improved. And this is one way to bring attention to that. And he had his hand over his heart and he faced the flag.

So again, I don't think that this is something that anyone should be mad about. You don't necessarily have to think that you would have done the same thing and you would have made the same sort of gesture. But the way that he did it seems unobjectionable to me, even by the standards of this sort of protest. And even so, I had to block or remove a few people from the Facebook group over the weekend, which is not something that I normally do. I don't moderate it very closely, but there was all sorts of inflammatory stuff in there related to this. And yeah, I was watching actually a video of Steph Curry on Saturday responding to Donald Trump's comments about Curry declining to come to the White House for the celebration of the Warriors championship. And I was just thinking, this is so pervasive in other sports and baseball has just completely escaped or hidden from it.

And there are a lot of reasons for that. It has to do with the, I think, racial and geographic makeup of baseball. It has to do with the fact that black athletes are an extreme minority in baseball, whereas they are the majority in football and basketball. It has to do with the schedule. As we're saying, Maxwell is going to have to be kneeling and answering questions from reporters about the kneeling every single day. I mean, the season is almost over, but there's another season next year, and it's not like football where there's one game a week when you have to answer those questions.

So there are a lot of reasons why baseball has sort of stayed out of this up until now. But yeah, right after I was watching that Steph Curry video is when I saw the first tweets about Maxwell doing this. So I was surprised that it had happened and that it was Bruce Maxwell who did it. But I think it is admirable that he put himself in a precarious position. Possibly, I'd like to think that that's not the case, but he is certainly not a player who has his financial future or his playing future secured. So if there is some risk here of a backlash of employment ramifications, then Bruce Maxwell is one of the players who would be most subject to that.

Yeah, right. Like you said, it's hard to imagine. If you are going to stage this form of protest, it's hard to imagine someone doing it more thoughtfully than he did, just trying to cross all the T's and dot all the I's and just trying to tie up all the loose ends such that the one remaining potentially objectionable aspect of it is just the protest in the first place. And of course, protests are never widely popular. If they were, then there wouldn't be a reason for a protest, you know? So of of course, I don't want to end.

I don't want to be in a situation where I refer to some sort of protest gesture as an objectionable because, of course, you can't necessarily judge what people will object to. And other people have very different values from myself. Both of my parents were in the military, but I don't have the same feelings than many other family members or veterans themselves do so obviously there is something objectionable here because there are many many people who object to it and i'm sure they're not all just doing it for twitter troll points but you know this is a wave that has now i don't know encompassed isn't the right word. Whatever. The wave has crashed. What do whatever waves do? It's got it's got a crest. Waves crest. Yeah. Well, is this wave cresting? I don't know. Roll in. They crash against the sand. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Do a lot of different things.

Any hydrologists out there, we might as well get emails from you, too. Let's let's talk hydrology. Talk about waves. Yeah. It's here. It's in baseball. I'm certain that for a while, this conversation has been taking place within baseball. We have not been exposed to it. But of course, Adam Jones has been one of the most outspoken faces talking about the various racial concerns that baseball players are aware of and that they talk about in the clubhouse.

This is the first outward expression of this protest. It's not going to go away. There uh presumably going to be more of it slow at first but it's not going to go away we saw enough messages of player support for maxwell over the weekend that you know that he's not alone but this is it's going to be divisive and people can talk about how they want sports to be their escape but guess what too bad it bad. It's not. Sports is not an escape. It's not an escape for them. It's not an escape for us. And I know that you want it to be that. But the reality is that as long as we elevate professionals, well, I guess not just professional

sports, but as long as we elevate sports and the players who perform them to such a level that we do, it was in a sense inevitable that they were going to start trying to use that because it is the greatest way that the players can affect the sort of change that they were going to start trying to use that because it is the greatest way that the players can affect the sort of change that they want to see. There's no better alternative than this kind of protest. This is the most disruptive one possible. Yeah. And I understand that reaction that people have where they want to keep politics out of sports. I understand that impulse. It is, of course, impossible because they are inextricable in so many ways. But there is a level on which you can watch and enjoy and appreciate baseball without thinking about the politics, really.

And I know that there is a national anthem before every game and you have flyovers by military jets. And so you can't really separate them. But you can enjoy baseball, I think, without necessarily thinking about public ballpark funding or paying for minor leaguers or how immigration affects a few players every year. These are all things that, you know, maybe it's myopic to ignore, but there is just kind of that childlike level where you can enjoy baseball just based on who's winning and who's getting the hits and what the pennant race is shaping up to be and who's going to win the World Series. And I understand why people value having sports be that for them, because for all we know, they are consumed with national affairs in every other aspect of their life.

It doesn't necessarily mean that they are ignoring larger issues in every facet of their life. It might just be that baseball is that escape for them, and I get it. didn't want to spend Saturday reading these threads in the Facebook group where people were angry and insulting each other and trying to decide who went over the line and who didn't. That wasn't fun. I would have preferred, I guess, that those threads just be happy and about baseball and all of that, but there's just no way to avoid it. And, you know, one possible response to that is just, well, too bad. And that's a fair response, I think. These are issues that a lot of people have to deal with on a daily basis. So if you want baseball to be this one area that is not affected by those things, well, you just may

not necessarily get that because it's not really a thing that exists. But I do understand the impulse. It's just that when something like this happens and when you have the president directly tweeting about athletes actions and essentially inciting more of them to take that action there's just really no way to silo those things off neatly and even pretend that they are not related. Yeah, and I guess we can say this as well. If you are a fan, and we'll just focus on baseball because this is our sport, but if you are a fan and you really just want baseball to be your escape and you don't want to think about baseball as having the same gravity

as all these other subjects that are current, you still can. It's still going to be there. First of all, they don't even usually televise the national anthem, which is the only area where these protests have been or will be taking place. You know, when Bruce Maxwell crouches and you see him on TV, it's because that's his job. He's a catcher. So you're not going to you're not going to be confronted with this stuff during a game. There's still going to be all the same articles written as always about here's what this pitcher is doing.

Here's how this guy is getting on base. Here's this guy slumping. Penner race is still going to be the same pen and race is still gonna be the same playoff still gonna be the same there's going to be some conversation that creeps into your your field of vision i guess about this stuff because you can't not have on this podcast right now yeah you can keep pressing that forward 10 seconds button but we're just gonna keep going you can avoid this mostly if you want to. And that's that's perfectly fine. For the longest time, I avoided world news or political news because I just didn't care to know. I don't do that anymore. That's my own choice. But I was pretty ignorant about what was going on when I was

in college. I didn't participate and I didn't have all the same awarenesses of other students at school who had a lot of protests about things like the war. But in any case, the escapism will still be there. it'll just require maybe a little more effort on your part to avoid the people or places who are talking about what you're trying to escape but it's all still going to be there box scores are going to look the exact same mlb tv is going to look the exact same and maybe for a few minutes of a given game's broadcast the announcers will talk about some off-field issues or maybe more likely they won't because the networks that broadcast these games probably don't want to offend a half the

audience when they are playing the game so sports as an escape still so obviously present for you to be able to escape you can still come home from work and turn on a game at seven o'clock and watch baseball for six and a half hours until the game is finally over and then you can go to sleep and that will be it right all right so moving on to the main topic for today which can i can i interrupt real quick talk about it longer than we just talked about that yeah sure because i realized i did have one very very very quick banter point and just to make sure that this feels balanced so i wrote an article not saying that the marlins were good but i wrote an article in celebration of the miraculous miami marlins right when they swept the padres they were on a hot streak and they were at that point 66 and 63

and they were all of a sudden miraculously in the wild card race immediately after that article was written and published the marlins lost 16 of their next 18 games and they were terrible and they were the marlins okay so i only bring that up to make sure that you don't feel attacked when i point out that since you publish your aaron judge article yeah he has gone 17 for 53 yeah he has batted 321 these are the the triple slash 321 okay that's pretty good 451 we've seen that before 962 and his wrc plus has been 240 aaron judge will not be caught by mike trad this season neither will jose altuve but judge and altuve both atop the fangraphs position player war leaderboard at 7.3 aaron judge so totally back great timing always fun when these things go up yeah when they do yeah i was thinking of maybe bantering about the al mvp race today but

it's so close according to fangrass it's literally tied right now that we might as well wait a week i guess because who knows maybe aaron judge will hit 10 more homers or something in that time and that could actually decide it so we'll i guess we'll do some kind of awards thing at the end of the year it's not a subject i'm passionate about, but there are actually some interesting races this year. And not so much about who will win or who will not, but just the thought process on how you would decide that one person is more worthy than the others kind of, I think, fit for discussion. Let me tell you one that's not. I'm supposed to vote for this year for the American League Rookie of the Year Award.

Whenever the ballots are sent out, there's explicit instruction, do not talk about your vote until the awards go public. Well, let me tell you, I'm not going to talk about it. I feel like by even acknowledging it, let's just say the player

who's going to get my first place vote is not the player that I expected to at the start of the season. I thought this was going to be Andrew Benintendi's season. And he's had a pretty good one. Too bad. Yeah. Yeah. I wonder whether this will be how close to unanimous it will be. Nothing is ever unanimous.

But I just I mean, the player that uh cannot acknowledge that you will be voting for has about a five win lead on everyone else at this point so i just i can't imagine voting for anyone else so the nominal topic for today is actually inspired by a listener email from a patreon supporter named josh wilson We received it this morning, and the subject line was, good teams are good, bad teams are bad. And he wants to know whether this has been a bad baseball season. And I'm just going to cite his evidence here that it has. He writes, as of Monday morning, September 25th, the American League has only five teams over 500, morning, September 25th, the American League has only five teams over 500, all the playoff teams,

of course, and 10 teams under 500, everyone else. The National League is a bit more balanced, but still mostly bad, seven above 500, eight below 500. So this year is not only very unbalanced, with 60% of the league being under 500, but it's been 19 seasons since the good teams dominated like this. And he lists the over and under counts in each season going back to 1999. He says, had to go back to 2003 just to find a year this unbalanced, but at least that was on the positive side. That year there were 18 teams over 500 and 12 under 500. We haven't had this kind of bad balance since 1999, which was also 12 over 500 and 18 under. The good news is that just five of the last 19 seasons have been quote-unquote bad by this measure, so we can generally conclude that baseball is good. But as an AL fan, I have to admit I'm eagerly awaiting the playoffs just to shed

all of the extra cruft. So this seems a bit fluky to me, but what do you think? Is this the worst season since 1999? And I guess we have to decide what makes a baseball season good or bad and whether this is one of those things. And I have kind of a hard time with this. I've heard other people making this argument. I think Grant wrote something recently about how this is maybe the most boring September that we've seen in a long time. I've heard Stephen Goldman say that he has felt that this season has been just underwhelming on the whole. a season good or bad because there's just so much baseball in every season, the same amount of baseball, in fact. And I don't know how to decide whether a season is good or bad. I guess the most obvious way would be competitive balance, would be parity, would be the exciting pennant races down the stretch. And in that area, this season certainly seems to fall short. I guess you could go with surprise teams. You could go with great teams, which it seemed like this season

had for a while, but then ended up not really having so much. You could go with record chases on an individual level. You could go with just the style of baseball that is being played overall, the offensive environment. There's a lot of ways and a lot of contributing factors here. So I always kind of have a hard time saying, oh, this season was good and that season was bad. It's also a personal thing for many fans. Obviously, it depends on how the particular team that they are following most closely did. So I don't know. There's no rigorous way to assess a season necessarily. But do you think that the lack of balance is a fair way? And do you have any thoughts on whether the season has been good or bad? I guess I can't speak to what it's like to come at this from an ordinary fan's perspective,

because as much as I do support one team a little more than the other teams, it's like to come at this from an ordinary fan's perspective because as much as I do support one team a little more than the other teams it's not that I don't come at baseball the way that the average baseball fan does we come from sort of a weird position uh you and you and myself so I think that you look at how this season's played out and when we did all the preseason projections and even before the preseason, we all knew pretty well who was going to win each division. And indeed, it has worked out like that. We all expected the Red Sox, Indians, Astros, Dodgers, Cubs, and Nationals to win the divisions. We expected them to be several games better than the next best team in each division.

And guess what? They are. The closest division right now is five games. And I mean, there's a week left. So whatever. It's not like there have been no division races at all red sox had to pull away from the yankees at some point the cubs just this past weekend had to officially dispatch the brewers but i mean did anyone ever

really anyone ever really think the cubs are going to lose the division to the brewers now sure you could say at the all-star break the the brewers were up what five and a half games at that point so you know that was interesting there there's been so much. And I know because when you and I think about baseball and we have to find stuff to write about, we get to just look, we get to hunt for stories, we get to story hunt. And so we can be entertained by anything on any given day. All we need is like one or two stories. And that will be what suits us as compelling and it was really interesting the cubs have underachieved this year the the cubs were never supposed to be in a close race in the first place you think it looked like everything was going to be set with the mets and the giants winning the national league wildcard well guess what they both suck and so instead we have like the rockies good story still fighting for their playoff lives but they're in the diamond backs what a massive turnaround the twins lost 103 games last season they're gonna make the playoffs with what rotation do they have

it's terrible they traded away players at the deadline the twins who were just recently trying to hold off the rangers for the second wildcard both those teams sold that's wild yeah and like you have the player who i can't talk about maybe winning an award on the Yankees just having like one of the greatest rookie seasons in history. And he looks like he's already he's clearly capable of doing things that only Giancarlo Stanton can do in the game. That's insane. You have the question of, well, is Clayton Kershaw still the best pitcher in baseball? And I don't know if that's true because you have Corey Klubrink or a sale.

You have the Astros sort of like officially reaching sort of the peak after their rebuild you have the brewers who are rebuilding but also eight games over 500 or four games over 500 that's a different topic i guess i don't know i don't know which one i believe there's there's a lot so i can't i i get that it's not a compelling season in that we don't have like a frenzied final week all of the races are basically decided except there's a little bit of uncertainty for the national league wildcard so i get that this season has in large part wound up where we basically thought that it would except for i guess the the twins part yeah and the diamondbacks rockies part so hey look i mean right there that that's 30% playoff representation that we didn't expect.

I think that's pretty good. And the Brewers are two games out of that wildcard spot. So, yeah. Although I think we both know that this is just going to end up with the Cardinals taking that last spot. All boring like, but whatever. Yeah. Yeah, so, well, you just made a pretty good argument in favor of this season, I suppose. I mean, it's been fascinating to me because of the home run record. And you could argue that that is a better version of baseball. You could argue that it's a worse version of baseball. That's really personal taste. But just the phenomenon of all these home runs and why they're happening has made the season inherently interesting to me. And as a result of that, you get some individual performances that are really compelling. environment but you know you have stanton hitting all the home runs you have judge you have smaller more contained but still very interesting streaks like bellinger or hoskins or you know chapman i

mean just all these guys who have come up and had these incredible runs many of them rookies and that has been really fun to monitor and yeah i think we think we're ending on kind of a low note because we've got a week left to go in the season and the NL wildcard, the second NL wildcard is really the only spot that is realistically at stake here. And so that's a little lame and that is not the ending we were hoping for. It wasn't so long ago that we were talking about five-way tiebreaker scenarios and crazy endings to the AL wildcard race, and that just didn't materialize. So we're not ending on a high note, but I don't know. And as you mentioned, the teams that turn out to be the best teams really were the predictable best teams, and we didn't get historically best teams as it looked like we would

because of the Dodgers slump because the Astros kind of came back to the pack a bit so you can't really say that this season was distinguished by you know one of or two of the best teams ever as it looked like we might be talking about at various points in the season so I don't know if this season will age well I don't know if we'll look back at 2017 all that often other than for the home runs and for the few guys who have hit the most home runs we won't be looking at it like the last day of the 2011 regular season when things got crazy there probably won't be that kind of ending and you know maybe that's enough to say that it's a subpar season I don't think there's anything that makes me say it was a legendary all time unforgettable season.

But they all kind of just blend together for me as soon as they're over. And you remember things from each one. But I just don't tend to think of individual seasons being great or not on a league wide level so much. Right. Yeah. It's hard. I don't want to judge it by the destination because even though the season has, again, there's going to be at least 30%

surprising playoff teams. 3 out of 10 will be teams we didn't expect. That's pretty good. There's still room for 40. Yeah. And the teams in the playoffs, by the way, as we've talked about, are a pretty compelling mix of teams.

Like a lot of teams that, you know, some teams that have big fan bases and are the most popular and accomplished teams but also a lot of teams that have never won world series that have been bad for a while that have a lot at stake here so i think the playoffs themselves have the potential to be really good and so if if that's the case then we might remember the season for that oh yeah, yeah. No, playoffs. I mean, every single division winner is like an elite level baseball team. So it's either going to be a story of, well, this juggernaut stomped this other juggernaut or, hey, the Twins won the World Series. Who knew how that was going to happen?

But you look at, so not only is the playoff representation going to be a little bit surprising, I don't know what we want out of a season, but probably 30 or 40% surprising playoff teams would be around what we'd like because you don't want 100% surprising playoff teams because that means that what we expect doesn't matter. You want baseball to be a certain amount of predictable, but I don't think you want to judge it by the destination either because it is the journey of the season. The fact that as I was thinking about not too long ago, like the Brewers have been fighting the Rockies and have been kind of like bandwagoning the brewers to get there just because whatever i i guess there's something that is appealing to me about the brewers and i i've been like thinking about them for the last few weeks like can can you just overtake the rockies but then i have to remind myself oh wait but the

rockies are also a cinderella story it's just it feels so old because it's been five and a half months since the rockies started being good it's like even if the brewers don't pull it off they're still like a surprising this is just it reflects how long the season is that now in the year where the Rockies are finally like good again. Yeah, I'm already kind of just used to it. But you figure, yeah, where we are now, there's only one moderately entertaining thing to watch for the final week. But like you remember, very recently, the American League wildcard race involved the entire American League. And sure, teams have faded out of that recently.

But still, that was more than five months of something to watch. And you figure after action on August 23rd, after action on August 23rd, just over one month ago, the Indians were 20 games worse than the Dodgers. They're one game back. Yeah. One game back for the Dodgers. They're one game back. Yeah. Yeah. One game back for the best record. The best team. We were talking about the Dodgers is challenging the Mariners win record

or the other team's win record. So whatever. But the all-time wins record. And then they immediately just couldn't win a baseball game. And then the Indians ripped off the second asterisk longest winning streak ever,

which is insane. Yeah. Like you still think the A's got a book written about them because they went on longest winning streak ever which is insane yeah like you you still think the a's got a book written about them because they went on a winning streak and like this is an un it's been for a september where like most of the races have been decided oh my god it's been an interesting september just because of like two teams yeah no that's true yeah the dodgers entertained us in multiple ways right they entertained us because it looked like they were one of the best teams ever for a while. And then they entertained us because they couldn't win a game for weeks. And so that was fascinating on both sides of that. So yeah, I mean, I'm

talking myself into liking this season more than I did at the beginning of this conversation. You could probably do this with almost any season. Do you prefer this kind of outcome predictability wise? Because we had the season, what was it, two years ago when just everything was upside down and the projections were further off than they had ever been in the projections era and teams that were supposed to be terrible were really good. And it just felt like we didn't know anything about baseball for one year or this year where all the teams that were projected to win the divisions are going to win the divisions and yet there is still a little bit of unpredictability you've still got a few teams

that exceeded expectations so do you prefer this kind of season where you kind of feel like you do have a handle on how baseball works, but there's still a little intrigue on the margins or that kind of season, which was just crazy and almost made us feel unmoored from being able to analyze baseball, but at the same time was very surprising and maybe in a sense chaotic. And maybe that is more entertaining in a way. They're both deeply entertaining. The other one, a little more entertaining, just coming from the position of I want to have my job.

I think that we need a little more of this season because that season made us look very silly. I think that if I had to come up with some sort of, I don't know, matrix isn't the right word, but some sort of template for what I want out of a season, I would think that going into any year, say this year, we go in with six teams that seem like pretty strong division favorites. I would have liked to see one or maybe two of those division favorites upended somehow, like if the Brewers or even the Cardinals somehow overtook

the Cubs. And I would really seal it for me. You still want the teams that you think are going to win to win most of the time because you do want to at least i want to feel like i have some sort of handle but i wouldn't mind just one collapse but we still have those collapses because like the giants have been awful the mets have been awful the pirates have been they haven't collapsed in the same way but they are quite bad the blue jays have collapsed the mariners have used more pitchers than like anyone ever so there have been those teams that have sort of fallen apart. But when you don't have a division leader doing it, then you,

you miss a little bit of that. I don't know, visibility or significance or impact or something. But outside of that, like I thought coming into the year, we knew the five nationally playoff teams and we only knew three of them. So that's not, that's not bad.

Yeah. All right. So I'm going to say this was a baseball season. And I don't think it was a bad baseball season. I don't know what would be a bad baseball season. I'm trying to cast my mind back to a season that I would say, wow, that season sucked. I mean, I guess 1994, if they don't complete the season, that is a bad season. Otherwise, I don't complete the season that is a bad season otherwise i don't know i don't know that i mean i guess there are little things on the margins the races the standout seasons

you think back obviously to seasons that had record chases or legendary finishes but even seasons that had legendary finishes those finishes were probably of most interest to like two fan bases and every other fan base didn't particularly care. So I don't know. Just the idea of judging seasons or rating seasons on a league wide basis is sort of strange to me. But this one, I think when you just look at the standings or what the standings will be on the last day of the season i get why you would say it's not a good season but if you look back at the whole thing the whole six plus months had a lot going for it so i agree with you going back to 1994 i agree you have to complete the season but i know we've talked about this before but just just to really drive the point home so

that everybody can understand what was great about 1994, aside from how they didn't complete the baseball season. The four worst teams in the American League were the four teams in the American League West. Yes. The team in first place when the season ended, the Texas Rangers, had 52 wins and 62 losses. Incredible season that was taking place. And the real downside of that season not completing is we could have had a terrible baseball team win a division and in the playoffs which would have been fun yeah I heard Mark Normandin reference that recently he was saying that people get upset about some things that we didn't get to see the end of that season like I don't know what the Matt Williams home run chase

and the Expos being great and all that but he is most upset that we didn't get to see the outcome of that AL West, which could have been and seems like it would have been a sub 500 division winner. All right, so we will leave it there. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Five listeners who've already pledged their support include Chad Post, Ronald Januszewski, Jeff Gilbert, Matt Muzia, and Aaron Schaefer. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild.

Please don't say anything that will make me have to kick you out. Most people haven't. You can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for editing assistance. As mentioned, there's a new episode of the Ringer MLB show up with Jeff Passan. Always love a Passan episode. And we didn't just talk about Maxwell. We also talked about netting.

We talked about Otani. We talked about some unrelated things. You can find that on the Ringer MLB show feed. You can keep your questions and comments for Jeff and me coming via email at podcast.fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system. And we will answer some of those emails on our next episode. Talk to you soon. And I've waited so long for my sunshine.

Shine, shine, shine. Well, I've waited so long Trying to put it in song Where the riser falls Living ain't quite so bad after all