Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1118: The Playoff Prep Podcast

Episode Date: October 3, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about John Jaso’s possibly career-ending comments, the ends of the Dodgers’ and Tigers’ seasons and the teams that have never had a first-overall pick, the selling points of this postseason, the changing consensus about the best team in baseball, how to analyze the playoffs and manage playoff games, the […]

When you're outsides in, inside out, and you're downsides up, upside down, yeah you're upsides right, right side up, yeah don't it make you wanna twist and shout when you're inside out. episode 1118 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. My name is Ben Lindberg. I'm a writer for The Ringer and joined as always by Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs. Hello. Hello. So we must acknowledge at the start of this episode, as we have to do all too often, we are podcasting in the wake of yet another national tragedy, which always feels strange and you feel like you have to acknowledge it. There's no really sufficient way to acknowledge it, yet then transition to talking about baseball for the rest of the episode. There's no graceful way to pull off that transition. I don't think I will spare you any thoughts about baseball being a distraction at times like this, etc., etc.

But we as a country keep finding ourselves or putting ourselves in this situation. And our thoughts are on one level about baseball and the playoffs and what we're about to talk about. And on another level, as always, with the victims and their families. So here we are again. Yep. I was trying coming into this, and this is obviously not the first time that you or I have had to try to do some regular work on the morning or afternoon of something that grants our work such perspective. There is no simple way of, I don't know if it's justifying what we're doing, but we know the significance of what we do relative to the significance of events that have taken place.

But you can't really, I guess, expect everything to stop. We're here if you want to listen. If you don't want to listen, you don't have to do it. If you don't want to read, you don't have to do it. If you want to just focus all of your mental energy on helping, I fully encourage you to do so. Help in Las Vegas, help in Puerto Rico, help in the Virgin Islands, just help however you intend to help. And when you need some sort of five minutes of mental relief, we're here to talk to you about John Jaso and his tailbone.

That's right. Yeah. John Jaso is bringing the peace of mind that we need these days. Yeah, we're going to do a general playoff preview-y episode. Of course, the playoffs are about to begin. The regular season is over. But a few things we wanted to banter about beginning with JSO, who sounds like he might call it a career. And he is, of course, famous to Effectively Wild listeners for being the original user of the phrase, such is baseball and such is life. And he has taken that philosophical stance now, extended it to his own life. And it sounds as if he might be done with baseball. He said in a story that was published this weekend, traveling, living simply, being anonymous,

that sort of stuff. That's his post-baseball plans. Really, I just want to live a simple life. I have a sailboat, so I just want to sail away. If you live on a sailboat, it's really hard to live complicated. You have to keep things simple. So that's kind of my catalyst and everything and my ride and my home. And he says his mind is going elsewhere these days. And I think a lot of us know the feeling, not a lot of us probably sailing away on a sailboat, but maybe we would like to. I wonder, I have an easier time relating to sort of the Daniel Norris van life kind of lifestyle. I know very little about boating, but I would assume that living on a boat is not markedly different from living in a van. The van life is a lot more common among sort of the dirtbags, the hikers, the climbers, the mountaineers,

and the boat life. I'm not entirely sure, but I would assume that they were people of similar mindsets, similar living simply sort of perspective. And so I already kind of had a hunch that horrible, horrible dreadlocks aside that John J. Sue and I sort of shared a number of world outlooks. And even though I am not in position to take my $17 million and go live off the grid, I'm glad that he's able to. I guess he hasn't started, but he's able to at least think about living out his dream, living anonymously. And you could say that perhaps he didn't go into too much tremendous detail, but perhaps John Jaso will go from living as a pirate to living as a pirate. It could be, yeah. If anyone is interested in the John J. So lifestyle but doesn't have a sailboat, isn't

quite ready to take the plunge, there is one way you could get a simulation of this. I don't normally make video game recommendations on this podcast, but I do do a video game podcast called Achievement Oriented at The Ringer. And we did an interview not long ago with the creator of a game called sail away which is a sailing simulator that you can get on pc on steam and it models the entire world so you can sail anywhere you want everything is realistic they have real-time weather patterns so if there's a storm somewhere in the world you can sail there in sail away and be inside that storm the ocean is the color that it is in real life everywhere in the world it's a very peaceful game so if you don't have the means

that jso does but you want to pursue the lifestyle look into sail away you could uh you could also just sort of make yourself sick just rock back and forth for several hours at a time yeah pee in a bucket and throw up a lot don't shower just you can you can live you can live the boat life on land you just have to make a lot of sacrifice that's right so it is the end of the regular season do you have any closing thoughts on that perhaps dodgers related okay so first of all i feel bad brewers missed the playoffs by one game shouldn't have had so many back-breaking losses in the final few weeks their fault anyway too bad for them good for the rockies so in closing the story of i guess late august early september stretching into mid-september was how the indians were amazing and unbeatable and the dodgers were

terrible or at least had turned for the terrible i don't know if there was some sort of monkey's paw arrangement that they made, but the Dodgers collapsed and you already know all this wonderful listeners. But on August 23rd, after play, I think it was on August 23rd, August 23rd. I'm just going to keep saying that August 23rd, the gap between the Dodgers and the Indians was 20 games. Yeah. September 20th by September 20th, the gap was down to one game. Less than a month.

That's like what? Four weeks, basically. And the Indians shaved 19 games off the Dodgers lead. And the Dodgers finished the best record in baseball by two games over the Indians. After the Dodgers lost their however many games it was in a row on September 11th, they came back on September 12th. And over the Dodgers remaining 18 games, they won 12 of them. They went 12 and six down the stretch. That's the second best record

in the National League. The Indians, of course, never really slowed down. But as much as I think there has been and will continue to be focused on what the Indians did, really, that's amazing. But I cannot get over the fact that the Dodgers gave the Indy. You could think of it as the Dodgers giving the Indians a 19 game head start and they still finished with the best record in baseball. The Indians, great team. The Dodgers, amazing baseball team. Good for the Indians.

That's great. Yeah. Dodgers better. Yeah. And as you were telling me just before we started recording, they totally righted the ship after their swoon, slump, collapse, whatever you want to call it. People were scared and panicking about what this meant for the Dodgers. Turns out, probably not a whole lot.

Yep, probably not. We'll see. I mean, Kershaw hasn't quite looked like Clayton Kershaw. There are still issues with the team. There are concerns. But what team does not have concerns? The Twins don't have a fully healthy Miguel Sano. I don't know exactly what bryce

harper's mobility looks like with the nationals but michael brantley michael brantley is a dan salazar yeah name a year that danny salazar hasn't been a an issue yeah if there's one end of the season that i would really want to talk about or at least just just highlight so on the final in the final game of the year pablo sandoval hitting a walk-off home run to help the Giants help the Giants I guess I could say they won a game that it didn't matter but what do I have here through August 4th the Detroit Tigers were 51 and 57 that was the fourth worst record in the American League but you know kind of record that still sort of had them on the fringes of the wild card race at that point they were 51 57, but only looks like five games out of the wildcard race where they were chasing the Royals.

I have no recollection of that. So apparently on August 4th, the Royals were the wildcard team and they were three and a half games ahead of the Twins. Well, what do you know? So that's not how things turned out because see, after August 4th, the Royals went 24 and 30.

That's not very good. The Twins went 33 and 22. That's very good. And the Tigers went 24 and 30. That's not very good. The Twins went 33 and 22. That's very good. And the Tigers went 13 and 41. That is nine and a half games worse than the Orioles, who are the next worst record in the American League. It's seven and a half games worse than the Mets, who had the worst record in the National League.

The Tigers finished 13 and 41, although according to their run differential, they were supposed to finish 15 and 39 so you know they underachieve but the tigers wound up with the worst record in baseball so they will draft first next season i don't know anything about the draft i don't know anything about the draft after the fact let alone several months in advance so i'm not your guy but i can i can tell you the first pick always better than the second. So congratulations, I guess, to the Tigers who have ushered in their rebuilding phase with a vengeance. They have really gone gangbusters after the first pick. And it turns out when you trade Justin Upton and

Justin Verlander and Miguel Cabrera is bad and you trade JD Martinez and all that stuff, you have a pretty bad baseball team that's left. And they lost Michael Fulmer to injury. They traded Justin Wilson. I don't know what else happened. Of course, Victor Martinez wasn't able to play very much. I think down the stretch, they lost Alex Avila. Bad baseball team. Yeah. Yeah. We got an email this morning from Martin from Canada. He just says he's from Canada. It doesn't get more specific than that. He says that it's about the number one draft picks in which franchises have not had them. So he writes, according to the font of all knowledge on the Internet, Wikipedia, there are eight MLB franchises that Dodgers, Giants, Cardinals, Blue Jays. And he says, How long do you think it will take until all of the teams will have tanked hard enough for a first overall draft pick? Or are there any market intangibles that mean that a team will be cajoled into spending or retaining some talent to avoid such a fate?

For example, I could see this happen in Boston. Even when they were bad, they were never truly bad. But on the other hand, the bottomless pit of money called the Yankees had a few lean years when George Steiner-Renner was in the MLB sin bin, and that netted them two first-round picks. I'd like to see what you think about this. P.S., if you were taking odds on which one of the eight would be among the first to get a top pick or would be the first among them to get a top pick. It's the Reds. Yeah. Assuming no trading for one, which team would you bet on? Yeah.

I think you have to say the Reds. I don't know if the Reds will get worse from here. I think, if anything, it might be more likely that they have already bottomed out and will pull out of this abyss perhaps over the next couple seasons. So maybe they have narrowly managed to avoid this fate. But still, if you put them up with these other eight, I'm not sure. the next couple seasons so maybe they have narrowly managed to avoid this fate but still if you put them up with these other eight i'm not sure i mean i guess you could say the giants because the giants came close right what was their record must have been very close to the the worst

this year oh yeah didn't they finish just clear by one game why don't i tell you so the answer is that the tigers finished with 64 wins and 98 losses and the giants finished with 64 wins and 98 losses i guess there's a tie break oh it was last season's record i think okay so the giants just came as close as you could possibly come without getting it so i guess they have to be up there i know that they've been talked about as a moderate bounce back candidate at least least for next season, but there's enough concerning stuff there. And then you have the Blue Jays who were kind of approaching what looks like the end of

this window that they have had, perhaps at least with this current core. So maybe they're there too. I just, I don't know. If you play baseball long enough, decades, centuries, obviously all of these teams will get there if number one picks continue to be rewarded the way they are now but there are some teams on this list who should never get there like i i can't really construct a scenario where the dodgers have the worst record in baseball because the dodgers should always have one of the biggest payrolls in baseball and as martin

mentions the yankees you could say the same about them and they have had that. But teams like the Red Sox and like the Dodgers, it's hard to imagine them getting there because just being able to outspend most teams should get you, if not a good team, at least not the worst team. Looks like the last time the Dodgers were truly terrible was 1992. And in that season, they went, I should have done this better. Oh, well, wait, the Dodgers were truly terrible. It was 1992, and in that season, they went... I should have done this better. Oh, well, wait. The Dodgers had the worst record in baseball that year. What happened?

Dodgers in 1992 finished 63-99. Who had the first pick in 93? Who did have the first pick in 93? I guess let's find out. Let's look at the draft in 1993. Amateur draft, 1993. The first pick went, oh, expansion picks. No, wait, nope.

First pick in 1993, Alex Rodriguez with the Mariners. Well, how did that work? The Mariners were a game better than the Dodgers. In 1986, the two-phase draft system was changed. Instead of holding a second draft phase in January, the franchise who could not sign their first-round selections awarded a supplemental first round pick the following amateur draft. The first pick of the first round is awarded to the worst team in the American National League. Each season, the two leagues alternate the first pick and proceed through the first round in reverse order of finish from the previous season's standings.

So the Mariners had the worst record in the American League in 1992, but they were still a game better than the Dodgers, but I guess it was just the American League's turn? Yeah, so who had the first pick in 92? What a terrible idea. In 1992, the first pick went to the Astros, who took Phil Nevin. Couldn't pass up Phil Nevin. Yeah, but who and in 1991 the worst

record belonged to the cleveland indians by eight games and they drafted second they took paul shuey okay so the dodgers just barely missed getting it just like the giants did this year so so it's possible even for for them to get I mean, maybe things have changed since then. I don't know. They have this giant TV deal that is padding their payroll now, but that might not last. There's a cable bubble perhaps. So maybe that collapses at some point and the Dodgers spending comes down to earth a little bit.

They have a young, good core, so it's very difficult to imagine them getting there anytime soon. But yeah, long enough arc of history, every team will get there at some point. Yeah, you had mentioned the Red Sox among those eight, and in 2012, they finished 69-93. That's the most terrible they've been. Recently, that was still, thankfully for them, 14 games clear of the Astros, who were fielding a high school junior varsity ball club that really overachieved that season, if you think about it in those terms. But Red Sox, I can't imagine them losing that many games again. But of course, you can never really imagine these things until they happen. I never thought that 2008 and 2010 Mariners would lose over 100 games.

But guess what they did? That was fun. Yeah. So if you give them 50 or 100 years you're gonna have some horrible things happen i mean who knows how long the dodgers are going to be in the position that they're in right now but yeah for the foreseeable future uh reds i will just keep saying the reds until it until it happens because you know how many pitchers they've developed one one pitcher yeah what was it just to wrap up our dodgers discussion you said they went 12 and 6

after their terrible period which was the the second best record in baseball second best in the national league okay so yeah all right so playoff previewing the playoffs of course start on tuesday with the al wild card game between the yankees and twins i will be there i'm looking forward to it. And this is Monday morning. We're talking, but this is already the fourth playoff preview podcast I've recorded somehow. Did the Ringer MLB show, did Hang Up and Listen, did The Red Seat, which is a Baseball Perspectives Boston podcast. So I feel like I have already discussed all of the playoffs. But one thing that came up on my Hang Up and Listen appearance, Josh Levine was mentioning that it seems as if the favorite this year has changed a few times over the course of a season, which is different, I think, from 2016.

consensus favorite. They were the projection systems favorite. They were the team I picked and probably most people picked. And they were also the best team during the regular season. There was no real reason to switch from the Cubs to anyone else. So they basically just ran the table as the favorites. And that was not the case this year, I think, right? Because if you go by the projection systems, the Dodgers started out the season as the favorite. And I think a lot of people doubted that or doubted that there was a big gap between the Dodgers and the Cubs. Turns out there was. But I think even the projection systems have now switched to the Indians going into the playoffs. And there's probably a period early in the year when maybe the Astros were the favorite too. So at least a few teams have had some time

as the favorite for the World Series this year. And it really looked like the Dodgers would be the slam dunk one. But the Indians have now overtaken them in World Series odds, according to maybe all the systems, certainly Fangraphs, certainly 538. And that feels right to me, I think. Just as you mentioned, they ended up just barely behind the Dodgers. They are in the stronger league because yet again, the American League

soundly thrashed the National League in interleague play. And I guess you could discuss whether that matters so much when you're looking at just comparing the best team in each play. And I guess you could discuss whether that matters so much when you're looking at just comparing the best team in each league. But I think there's something to that. And we've talked about how they have the best pitching staff in baseball that should serve them well. Terry Francona has proved himself to be a pretty adept postseason manager. So is there an argument for another team? Do you think the Dodgers still have a claim as the favorite not that favorite means all that much in the baseball playoffs no okay yeah I don't either really I think I think for most of the season it looked like the Dodgers were the clear best team in baseball

and if they did not win the World Series there were going to be a lot of people thinking that they had choked or disappointed or something. Maybe people who don't really understand how the baseball playoffs work. But yeah, just in the four weeks or so that we just talked about that stretch where the Indians closed the gap in record, I think they also closed the gap in being the playoff favorite so at this point i'm i'm looking for reasons to pick any other team and not really coming up with any yeah i think probably tuesday morning i'm gonna take a look at what i think are going to be the playoff rosters or maybe what will actually be the playoff rosters and work out all the numbers to see how teams sort of project based on how their hitters have done or how their pitchers have done and just trying to work that out to see uh statistically how things break down people always talk about how like offense is down in the playoffs and there are a few reasons for that one it's just colder in october and you know eventually november but also the quality of the pitching that makes postseason rosters is absurdly

good it's like uh if you took the average pitcher in the playoffs it's always like the equivalent of i don't know a pretty good closer or like a number two starting pitcher. Just there isn't really bad pitching that throws important innings in the playoffs, except for whatever the twins use, I guess, on Tuesday. And you can't really mirror that with elevated quality of hitters. Of course, the hitters who play in the playoffs are better as well, but they're not quite as good as the pitchers are good. And so the pitchers will tend to dominate but the indians just don't have any kind of pitching weakness anywhere yeah they i'm i'm going to write up an article right after this podcast is over to confirm that by the best measures we have the indians kind of just had the best pitching staff

in baseball history or at least at least in the integration era. They led in Fangraff's War. They led in Park Adjusted FIP. They led in Park Adjusted ERA. Indians, amazing. And now they're going to have, what, Mike Clevenger and I think Danny Salazar in the bullpen. So they're just going to come out throwing 98 for two innings at a time

on the off chance that one of their starters is bad, which't going to happen indians are just so good and what's interesting is like the astros just had one of the best hitting lineups of all time they have a really interesting pitching staff that they're going to i don't know what they're going to do with like lance mccullers and colin mccue and some of their back of the rotation starters but the astros great team and i don't even consider them I'm not even close to thinking of them as a favorite Nationals they won 97 games doesn't matter to me the Dodgers won 100 they're the best record in baseball and I still I look at them and I just think that they're they're a little worse than the Indians are because I don't know what they're going to do I don't I guess trust

their non Jansen relievers quite as much and know, part of this is probably some recency bias. And part of this is maybe underselling people like what I guess Brandon Morrow. I guess I can see why I'm underselling Brandon Morrow in my own head. But as good as the Dodgers have been, again, maybe I'm just overreacting to how things have been over the last month and a half. But I just the Indians seem pretty, pretty clear to me. So it's going to be funny in a few weeks when the Indians have been eliminated by, I don't know, maybe even the Twins, and then we just all try to retroactively make sense of what just happened. Yeah, this is always a strange time of year for people like us because we're forced into analyzing single games and short series. And I think in

baseball, the best, most perceptive analysis is often done over larger samples. And we don't have that luxury in the playoffs, really. And all of a sudden, we switch into this mode where we're criticizing or approving of, usually not approving of, every managerial move, every roster spot decision. We become these micromanagers or backseat micromanagers, which is just not something you really have the energy for over a 162-game regular season. And you have to manage differently in the regular season because you have your eye on the long view.

And there are some managers who can switch from that long view to the short-term view and just can toggle between playoff mode and regular season mode. And then there are others who can't do that or slower to do that. And sometimes their teams suffer for it. So we're back in that time of year where Twitter is just like, you know, live reacting to not pulling pitchers the third time through the order. And we have to talk about that every year for the fourth consecutive year or whatever it is. And I mean, it matters, but it gets a little tiresome to repeat that same refrain. And of course, there's always a desire to pinpoint something that works in the playoffs

or something a team can do to win in the playoffs. And I am more of a believer now than I used to be that there are things that prepare a team for the playoffs disproportionately, but it's so new, I think, and so recent that that's the case that we can't really make that statistical argument yet. Like in the past, there's been things like Nate Silver's secret sauce at BP that tried to use various team attributes to predict playoff success. I forget what it was. It was like maybe defense or the quality of the closer or something like that.

And it was retired not long after by Colin Wires because it hadn't proved predictive. And there were concerns about whether it was just sort of fitting the model to past results, whether it was actually isolating something that actually helps you win in the playoffs. And I feel like there's just a break, maybe even last year, but certainly in recent years between the modern playoffs and the past playoffs because the playoff format is different. There are more teams, obviously. There are more off days during the playoffs, which allows teams to structure their rotations and use their bullpens a certain way.

And we saw teams really embrace that last year, sometimes by choice, sometimes by necessity in Terry Francona's case, because the Indians were so shorthanded. And there was a big change. And you wrote about it. I probably wrote about it, too. Just teams using their relievers for a higher percentage of their innings and those relievers being more effective than ever before. And so it feels like we are now in a brand of postseason baseball where there really is something to the idea that if you had, say, a week back of the rotation, a week back of the bullpen, that might have hurt you over 162 games.

It doesn't really hurt you over whatever the number of games you end up playing in the playoffs is because you can just find ways to get around those weaknesses. And so you talk about certain teams that seem to be better positioned for the playoffs than they were for the regular season. And I guess the most obvious example of that would be the Yankees. I don't know if you agree with that or disagree with that. Obviously, they were really good over the course of the regular season, too. But the fact that they had kind of a weak back of the rotation doesn't matter now. They can just use Tanaka and Severino and Gray. They had very deep bullpen, best bullpen by war in the second half. They have dominant guys they can throw out there for an inning apiece from the fourth fifth inning on if they want to and they also have the most home run oriented lineup which a lot of people think is a weakness in the playoffs i tend to think is a strength just because you can't count on stringing singles together against the best pitchers and best defenses in baseball so i think the the short

sequence offense works best so do they stand out to too, as the best playoff team relative to regular season team? I guess this jumped out to me because I thought, OK, this is this is starting things. I've been on the Tommy Canely bandwagon since like the second week of April because that was one that actually worked out. Like, wow, look at these early numbers. Maybe that's predictive. And it was it was predictive of a Tommy Canely breakout. But anyway, Yankees have like six or seven or eight really, really, really really good relievers and then they can convert a starter to relief if they want to so they've it seemed pretty clear for a while that the yankees were going to be built to be particularly strong in the playoffs at least on the pitching side that was before the one would have even been sold unlike the the severino breakout or what have you but i don't know chad green i'm supposed

to write this probably not great article for ESPN this week that's talking about like the team, every team in the playoffs, their secret weapon, which whatever, that can be kind of fun. It's kind of like X Factor, but maybe a little more objective. And I don't know at this point if Chad Green counts as a secret weapon because I and other people who write about this stuff have been calling attention to him for months because of course we love strikeouts and chad green has earned our notice so i don't know i don't have a good sense of how secret chad green is anymore but if anyone out there isn't completely sold on how amazing chad green has been he's been super amazing he's been like clayton

karshoffer half the innings but he's been like a maybe for all the talk that we talked about chris devinsky earlier in the year like chad green kind of did him even better and i don't know how aware of that people are i don't know if the average fan still thinks of like well the yankees are tanaka and chapman and batances and if only we still had andrew miller i don't know what the average fan thinks i don't live in new york or any yankees fans but if i'm going to guess that maybe there are just so many interesting pitchers on that team that you can't give equal thought to all of them. So I don't know. Do you think Chad Green is a secret weapon? I'm kind of asking you for help here from my article because I don't know who the Yankees secret weapon would be otherwise. Yeah, I mean,

it's hard to put ourselves outside the bubble of fan graphs and effectively wild and very well-informed baseball fans. I think if you asked the typical casual fan who Chad Green is, they probably wouldn't know, right? Because he's a second year player. He was a not particularly effective starter before this year. He's a Yankee, so that helps with making a player high profile, but he's not a big name. He's not a former top prospect or anything. He's 26. So I think he counts. But in the second half, he had a.88 FIP in 36 innings, which is really crazy.

And that whole bullpen, it's not like they even need to do any unorthodox managing, really. It's not like they need to do what Terry Francona did last year, where it was like bringing in Miller, Allen at some earlier time than usual or stretching them longer than usual. Joe Girardi doesn't have to do that. He can just use each of these guys for an inning apiece, basically, and just go from the fourth inning on with just an unhittable reliever. I mean, there's Chad Green, there's David Robertson, there's Canely, there's Chapman, there's Dillon Batances, who I know some of these guys have had some control issues. Batances certainly has. The command hasn't been there at times. Still a very effective reliever on the whole. I'm not even mentioning other guys like Adam Warren or

Jason Shreve or, I mean, he hasn't been very effective certainly recently, but it's just a incredibly deep and good bullpen. So, I mean, Girardi can just do the Ned Yost model of like each guy gets an inning and you bring him in at that assigned inning. He doesn't even have to get creative. It's just, you have to get the starter out early to find a way to use all these guys. Yeah. Somebody asked in my chat last Friday what storyline I think is going to stand out as being a surprise in the playoffs. And I get the sense that so last year, the Indians bullpen usage, and in particular, their Andrew Miller bullpen usage, it seemed really like creative genius. But I think that it was,

it came about in large part just because of the desperate state of the pitching staff. Like they were forced into having to do that. I don't think that's going to happen again. I don't think we're going to see somebody pitch like Andrew Miller pitched last October. But one of the sort of carryover effects is that I do expect the Yankees

are going to be hyper aggressive with their bullpen usage because I think that, I'm going to guess from all the transactions they've made this season that this has sort of been kind of the Cashman front office and maybe Joe Girardi plan all along. Of course, you trade for Sonny Gray because you want some sort of starter help in the playoffs. But I don't think that you're going to see Severino Gray, Tanaka or whoever the fourth star is going to be. I guess that would be Sabathia. I don't think you're going to see them pushed very deep because they just don't need to do it.

Yeah, that's right. So that'll be the kind of thing where Girardi, if he doesn't have a quick hook, he will be roundly criticized for that, I think. But yeah, it's just, it's a really strong playoff field. It's a lot of fun stories, a lot of good teams. We talked about this recently. Only 12 teams finished with winning records. So down the stretch, there weren't a lot of exciting pennant races. It was kind of a dull end to the season. But I think that the upside to that is that the teams that did make it are really strong. And you have all kinds of great stories. You have a bunch of teams that have never won a World Series, the Astros, the Rockies, the Nationals slash Expos. You have the Indians with their 68-year drought. The Dodgers and the Twins haven't won in more than 25 years. And then MLB gets what it

wants too. I mean, it probably wants the things I just mentioned, but it also wants big teams with big fan bases that people like to like or hate. And MLB gets the Yankees, the Red Sox, the Cubs, the Dodgers. So this is kind of a best case scenario. I don't know that this will end up rivaling last year's playoffs, just in terms of the Cubs story, there may not be a single story as compelling as likely to capture the non-fan as the Cubs story was but I think on the whole this is just a really strong field of teams and a really fun field of teams and I'm looking forward to it and it's it's hard to know what else to say because there's only so much analysis you can do of the playoffs with one-game eliminations or five-game or seven-game series. There's all sorts of randomness here and would not be all that shocking if the Twins end up winning this thing even.

So I don't know. I run out of things to say at some point, and I just sort of sit and wait. I mean, it's been a while, really. I would say my own consumption of baseball has really changed over the years. And there was a time when I was a fan of one team, and I would watch that team every single day that they had a game. It was like part of my routine. I would come home. I was still in school at this point, so I didn't have a lot of post-school plans. And I would just plant myself on was still in school at this point, so I didn't have a lot of post-school plans, and I would just plant myself on the couch in front of the TV. It was a staple of my evenings.

I know that was the case with you for many years, both for fun and for blogging, and that has not been the case with me. Probably hasn't been the case with either of us. It's rare nowadays that I will actually watch a full regular season baseball game. I kind of consume baseball via highlights, via snippets, via an inning or two at a time from this team or that team. There's just too much baseball to really devote my attention to one team's season in earnest like that. But then once we get to October, once the playoffs start, I'm watching almost every game in its entirety, really. So it's just a different, almost flashback way of enjoying baseball for me. And there's just no way to get around it that the stakes of the postseason are just an inherent draw. And after a six-month slog in some cases, or at least a slow

ending where each game doesn't matter that much, doesn't have that sort of stakes, it is really energizing to go to the playoffs and to go right to single elimination games. I'll be tomorrow in Yankee Stadium with a baseball atmosphere that I haven't experienced in a while, at least, I guess, since I was at the single elimination game that the Mets were in. Yeah, as much as I sort of dread the month of October for what it does to the workload, I guess, or at least the work unpredictability, like, you know, I remember last year with the wildcard game and the Orioles not using Zach Britton, it's like, all right, well, now, not only was I think live chatting that game which went for like five or six hours but then it was like all right now we need to write really late at night about not only the Zach Britton non-decision or decision but now I need to

try to think of a way to write it in a way that isn't already being written by other it's just it's stressful because it means that I think one of the advantages of of what we do is that we can find a topic when we're writing during the regular season that we think maybe nobody else is writing about. And in the playoffs, that doesn't really exist. Or at least if it does exist, you have to work. Like you were mentioning earlier how we are sort of put in the role of having to look for like those those moments those little adjustments or little little in-game things that you wouldn't write about during the regular season because who cares what eris medial contra is doing when he's reading how to steal second base nobody cares

but if you're in a playoff game then all of a sudden every single individual moment matters so that makes it kind of fun but i have been quite excited for the month of october like i know friday i think friday is our first of the the four game playoff slate and even though I know like I I have enough experience with these back-to-back-to-back-to-back playoff game days that by the fourth game it's like I don't I don't care anymore I can't really can't really do it but I love from I guess my own privileged perspective of being able to actually watch day playoff baseball I know people complain about this all the time and that's a conversation for another day but I love just being able to actually watch day playoff baseball. I know people complain about this all the time. And that's a conversation for another day. But I love just being able to wake up. And I guess I don't I don't wake up at like 10 in the morning, just to be clear, I do like have regular, regular hours, I have a real job that has responsibilities. But I love just having

baseball important baseball all day long. And even though I know, like a day playoff game never quite feels like a playoff game in the same sense. I just I love this time of year and it's like great weather the first week or two in Portland and everything is great. And even though I can't go outside and enjoy the weather because, you know, baseball still, this is a wonderful time of year. And even though the first round can be overwhelming because of the amount of action and how every game is important, but there are four series going on at once, it narrows pretty quick. And then before you know it,'s like halfway through the the league championship series before i don't know how much more you wanted to talk about this because like you said this is your fourth playoff preview but i did want to i guess i want to bring up a few things just

real quick unrelated to what we've been talking about but just so i could put it out there because the uh the season ending numbers are official now i can tell everyone let me actually check with the pitchers real quick just to make sure but because anyone might be curious the uh the best player in baseball i believe was aaron judge aaron judge finished the war of 8.2 so good for aaron judge best war in baseball the worst do you have a guess you probably have a guess probably a very good guess albert pooh holes he uh he finished at negative this is fangraphs or finished at negative two negative 2.0 war uh he was an everyday player played in 149 games he had a wrc plus of 78 so he had a war of negative two there are a bunch of players at negative 1.2 they all tied for being the second worst players in baseball they include

all of the following names chris be, Amir Garrett, Sean Kelly, Trevor Plouffe, Alexi Amorista, Ryder Jones, Tyler Saladino, and Mark Trumbo, who I bet the Orioles wish they did not resign. So yeah, Pujols there. The worst hitter in baseball this season with a WRC plus of zero, Luke Maley, played for the Blue Jays.

Apparently, I didn't know that. But anyway, the only reason I saw them was because I was looking something else up because I wanted to talk to you about this. I don't know if you've already talked about this on your other podcast. You talked about stuff you can analyze in the playoffs. I understand.

I have not sought this out myself, but I have heard from several people that there are people who want the Yankees to sit Gary Sanchez to playoffs in Romine in the wildcard game. Let's just spend a few minutes. Let's spend a few minutes talking about Romine versus Sanchez. What is the argument here? Yes. Yeah. I don't know if they're people or just one person. I believe this was a column by

John Harper, possibly in the Daily News. That sounds familiar to me. Maybe he is reflecting something that fans think, but the idea is basically that Gary Sanchez allows a lot of passed balls. I think he allowed, what was it, like 16 the last time I looked, which was, I think, tied for the most in the majors. And he's been criticized for this. I think Joe Girardi has acknowledged that it's a problem. There was even a brief period where Sanchez was benched to work on his defense. Maybe there was a writer at Pinstripe Alley I happened to see compared this to the Robinson Cano not hustling narrative that followed him throughout his Yankees career. And I wrote about

that once, and I figured out that it probably cost the Yankees something like four singles a year, and maybe not even that because if Cano was preserving his health by not sprinting down the first baseline every time it may have helped the team in the long run it just wasn't a big deal but it became part of the reputation and perception of this player and was just blown out of proportion it seems like the same thing is happening now with Sanchez with these pass balls. And I think there have been maybe a couple costly cases where he allowed one and a runner run scored as a result. But really, on the whole, just based on what we know about catcher defense now, it's just not that big a

deal compared to everything else you do. Not only the fact that Sanchez is a really good hitter, especially for a catcher, but he's also a good defender in other ways. Positive value in framing, positive value in throwing, according to BP. Overall, positive as a defender and I think was maybe the best catcher in baseball. It's like neck and neck with him and Posey, I guess, or Tyler Flowers, if you fully subscribe to the framing figures at BP. So yeah, it's crazy to suggest that Sanchez should be benched. I mean, by all means, help him work on his blocking. Might as well try to perfect his game. But the idea that you would want to sit him in favor of a guy who can't hit at all relative to Sanchez is crazy and totally self-defeating. It's batshit insane.

Gary Sanchez is the second best probably catcher in baseball, best catcher in the American League. This year he had a WRC plus of 130. Austin Romine, you can subtract 80 points from Sanchez's WRC plus, and you're still higher than Austin Romine's WRC plus of 49 Austin Romine slugged 293 this season Gary Sanchez probably did that equivalent in one game he was a very good and if you if you start by the baseball prospectus so just looking at their total fielding runs above average which includes framing includes blocking includes throwing all the detailed stuff that baseball prospectus does gary sanchez finished with the 11th best rating i guess in baseball among all catchers regardless

of playing time he was nine runs better than average looking at everything and indeed bad blocker ah what a horrible way for the yankees to lose 2.8 runs over the course of a season romine pretty he's fine you know good defensive catcher plus 1.2 runs better blocker than sanchez although hilariously still below average as a blocker austin romine and if even if you look at the egg i look i don't love i don't love catcher era or whatever has a stat for reasons that i'm sure any listener could come up with if they haven't already thought about this you know catcher eraer ERA, lots of problems. ERA already has problems as a statistic. And looking at catcher ERA, you're not controlling for the pitcher. Whatever. Let's just move on. This year, when Gary Sanchez was catching for the Yankees, they allowed an average of 3.83 runs per nine

innings. 3.83 runs per nine innings. Sanchez catching. When Romine was catching, 4.54. That's worse by most of a run and we haven't even talked about the fact that gary sanchez goes up with an actual badness hands yeah it's just a horrible opinion i don't know i i don't want to blow it out of proportion because i haven't sought out the the like patient zero of this but whoever came up with it i'm maybe maybe the person you named is correct maybe not i don't know i think both of us are probably better than to subject ourselves to this kind of writing at this point but horrible idea horrible idea and you know what if sanchez goes out there on tuesday and his past ball problem loses the game for the yankees well it doesn't matter it doesn't change the idea that

sanchez should still be starting the game although Although, what a, that would be a delightful twist, incidentally. Yankees lose on a fastball outbreak. Yes. Judge, by the way, finished with, I think, officially the fourth best rookie season ever, according to Fangraphs, were behind Mike Trout, Shulis Joe Jackson, and by a tenth of a win, Doc Gooden. That is not counting one from the 1914 Federal League. So amazing season.

And you mentioned he had the best war in baseball. I think baseball reference has Altuve just a few tenths of a win ahead. I don't know which one of those is likelier to win the MVP award. I get a feeling, a sense that maybe it's Altuve. It doesn't really matter to me which of them wins. I think they're about the same and they're delightfully different. And it's wonderful that they are the two names at the top of that leaderboard, just given how different their physical appearance and their playing style is. So we're going to talk a lot more about the playoffs the rest of the week. Obviously, we don't have to break down the individual series right now. We have a couple more podcasts coming,

so we'll probably get into other teams in a little more detail later. And our playoff schedule will probably be a little more variable than it is during the regular season. We're going to fit podcasts in around games and around writing and watching. So we'll still be doing the same number of podcasts, but maybe at different times. And we'll alternate between emails. We'll probably still do some emails, but maybe fewer depending on how much playoff stuff

there is to talk about. One thing that broke while we were just talking that maybe we don't have a lot of time to discuss at length, but feels like we should acknowledge. Evidently, according to Ken Rosenthal, who tweeted this eight minutes ago, Braves GM John Cappellella is expected to resign today, according to Ken Rosenthal's sources. And people listening to this might know more about this story than we do as we speak. But according to Rosenthal, again, this resignation believed to stem in part from issues with Braves talent acquisition in Latin America. Special assistant to the GM, Gordon Blakely, also involved in issues hashtag Braves are facing. Sources tell The Athletic. So this is surprising. This kind of comes out of nowhere for me. I know Rosenthal had

written a story for The Athletic not long ago about some sort of dysfunction in the Braves' fun office. I don't know if it explicitly mentioned this scandal, but evidently there are shenanigans going on with the Braves in Latin America, and their GM might be the one to take the fall. This, I guess, would be an example of a rebuild that is not going as quickly as certain other rebuilds we have seen in Major League Baseball. I already haven't been in love with the Braves direction. I know people have talked about the farm system, but there's been so little that has graduated and been successful at the Major League level. And I don't really love a lot of their young pitchers because it takes a lot for me to buy into a young pitcher. But the Braves rebuild was already not going great relative to some of the other rebuilds. And this sort of

top down dysfunction, again, I don't know anymore. You just broke this to me and this was just broken to you on the podcast. So, you know, this is fresh, but this, so what? This is a pretty extreme outcome. So I see Jeff Passan is reporting. Again, this might be old news to people listening. If so, apologies, but Passan reports that Kapolela and the Braves have been under league investigation in recent weeks, and at least one anonymous complaint had been filed with the league. But this is pretty extreme to have a GM resign over something like this, because we have seen similar scandals, right? We've had A.J. Preller was suspended when he was with Texas for some international signing shenanigans. He was not the GM at that time, but he was not forced to resign. Of course, he then had subsequent scandal with the Padres and their medical disclosures

or lack thereof. He's still running the team. And then you had the Red Sox who were caught making some bonus shenanigans also with international prospects. And they had some penalties they had to tear up some contracts that sort of thing but i don't know that anyone resigned or was fired let alone the person who is ostensibly running their baseball operations i know there's been some question about who is actually running things there just because they have shareholds still

around they have john hart still around uh who brought in Kapolela or at least elevated him to his current position officially. So this would be different from those previous scandals. I don't think that this sort of thing is unique to the Braves, certainly, but maybe in some way this was worse or more directly implicated in executive. I mean, this even goes back to like what Jim Bowden with the Nationals, right? Bowden, Bowden, I never remember. He doesn't deserve the proper pronunciation. Right. But under his regime with the team, there was a scandal about bonuses being skimmed off the top and going to people with the organization. So there's unfortunately a long history of this sort of thing, but in most cases it doesn't cost a high level executive their job.

Yep. So whenever I hear about something that is where an organization is being investigated in Latin America, I always just have to assume it's something similar to what the Red Sox were doing, where they're just trying to package players together. But if the Red Sox, I mean, they were punished. They were dealt some sort of blow for what they were doing, even though it seemed like many teams are doing the same thing. But in order to actually get the general manager out of his job, like he's not resigning because he's an honorable fellow. Presumably he's under significant pressure to resign.

He just wants to, I don't know, get out in front of this or a forced resignation or what. But this is I don't know if I don't we don't know any of the details about this aside from it seems to have something to do with what's going on in Latin America. But this seems like this is going to be, it's going to be a big one, maybe an unprecedented one, whatever it is. Passing, just tweeting three minutes ago now, we should just keep podcasting all day as these tweets come in. Jeff said that the Braves organization has been a wasteland of

infighting in recent weeks. According to numerous sources, chaos centered around Kapolela. Early on investigation, little evidence had been found to corroborate a number of accusations levied against Kapolela, but evidently that must have changed later in the organization. So Rosenthal saying that it is the team being investigated for circumvention of international signing rules so this is something I'm sure that we'll find a lot more about in the coming days and it'll be interesting to see how this affects the rebuild because we haven't really seen this sort of thing where I mean Kaplow maybe was not solely responsible for the Braves rebuild in the way that say Theo was the architect of the Cubs

rebuild or Luna was the architect of the Astros rebuild but we haven't seen a process like this get interrupted with a change I mean unless you count like Sam Henke with the Sixers that happened to him but for the most part we've seen GMs kind of get to stick around and shepherd their rebuild into fruition. And that evidently not going to be the case with the Braves. So this is probably a story that we can talk about again once we know more, but seems like something that we should mention. Turns out that when you are dealing with potential assets, and these are people, of course, but let's refer to them as baseball assets, young players who have tremendous value, who are going to be paid some small fraction of their actual market value it turns out you're

incentivizing wrongdoing in several forms pay players what they're worth just real quick i'm just looking at a blurb you know it's all season wrap-up stuff so i'm just going to read you a line this is about the angels and uh and their off-season plan a line that jumps out to me angels general manager billy epler said sunday that he plans to talk to justin upton's agent this month to quote express exactly how we feel about him end quote i'm just going to leave that out there as something kind of ominous and disconcerting that sounds like like a we need to talk text or something yeah that sounds scary here's here's exactly what we think about your client this is not going to be done in public and secondly uh just because we might as well do this this will

be the only podcast we do before you go to the game tuesday night so uh twins yankees ervin santana versus louis severino although it's also going to be ervin santana and trevor hildenberger and etc against louis severino and chad green etc we will be podcasting again presumably wednesday after the game is over hopefully after the game is over i guess it could be a very long game prediction please well i think the yankees are clearly the favorites here they are not only the home team but the better team by far they have what the second highest run differential in baseball this season the twins had the lowest of any playoff team they what they barely outscored their opponents right i think did they end up outscoring

their opponents it was like plus one i mean for the last game of the season oh okay so that's that's better than i expected so the twins i think are probably the the worst team in the playoffs the yankees well you could make the case that they're among the best, but it only matters so much in a single game. Irvin Santana has had dominant starts this year, and if he has one on Tuesday, then that will be the end of the Yankees. I don't know what you put the probability at, something like 65-35, 70-30. I mean, Yankees have the better starter going in this game, by far the better bullpen, the better offense. They're the home team. They have everything in their favor. So that only means so much in a single game, but that's, I think, how you have to project this.

Yeah, the fan grasp right now, we have it at about Yankees win two-thirds of the time. During the season, the Yankees went four and two against the twins outscoring them by eight and yeah obviously I have to take the Yankees and I will pick the Yankees by eight runs okay that's aggressive all right so we will be back to talk about that game after it happens you can support the podcast on patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild five listeners who have already pledged their support include Angus Kellett, Andrew Gross, Nathan Kruger, Alex Kapuscinskis, and Sam Curry. Thanks to all of you.

Want to shout out a few listeners who've come together to create cool things. I'm always happy when the podcast brings people together. First at Banished to the Pen, our sister site, spin-off site, baseball blog started by Effectively Wild listeners, Darius Austin and Ken Maeda and Rob Maines and others created and illustrated sabermetric baseball cards. They're meant to explain sabermetric stats and concepts. You can download them. They have more on the way. You can find them at banishedtothepen.com. I know Banished to the Pen is also looking for writers,

as always. So if you're interested in writing about baseball on the internet somewhere, get in touch with the Banished to the Pen people. Others have gotten their starts there and gone on to write for other sites. I also want to mention Antonio Lozada and Corey Lack, two Effectively Wild listeners who met in the Facebook group and teamed up to create a playoff preview. It is also beautifully illustrated. They called it the Buford Brothers Playoff Preview 2017. You can get it on Amazon for Kindle. You can also get the PDF. They sent me a copy and I enjoyed looking through it. I'll post a link in the Facebook group, but you can find a direct link at Antonio's Tumblr, which is chapulana.tumblr.com slash book. That's C-H-A-P-U-L-A-N-A. Congrats guys on getting that

together in time for the playoffs. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectivelywild. It is always a hive of activity during the playoffs. Lots of good game threads going on. You can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for editing assistance. If you're in the mood for more playoff preview,

there's a new episode of the Ringer MLB show up today too. Michael Bowman and I talked to our colleague Zach Cram, covered some of the same ground Jeff and I just did, but also got into some other areas that weren't covered uneffectfully well today. You can also find my interview with Bill James, one that Jeff and I teased on last Friday's episode. That is up now on the Ringer's Channel 33 feed.

Just search for Channel 33 on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts, as they say. Please keep your questions and comments for me and Jeff coming via email at podcast.fangrass.com or via the Patreon messaging system. We will talk to you all soon. And then she looks me in the eye. Says we don't last forever, man. You know I can't begin to doubt it. Oh, cause I just feel so good, so free, so right I know we ain't never gonna change our minds or body

Here comes my girl Here comes my girl Yeah, she looks alright She is all I need tonight