Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1121: Is This Really a Revolution?

Episode Date: October 11, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the inaccessibility of playoff stats and the average length of this year’s playoff games, then discuss whether we’re really witnessing a revolution in postseason pitcher usage before breaking down each of the division series, analyzing the latest controversial managerial decisions, and bidding farewell to two more eliminated teams. […]

But you won't fool the children of the revolution, now you won't fool the children of the revolution, now you won't fool the children of the revolution, now you won't fool the children of the revolution. Revolution is no way! how impossible it is to find playoff stats. It's crazy. It's like, I know that regular season stats are more meaningful and the things that we use to judge players' careers and do most of our analysis of, but every October we get in this weird spot where the things that are happening in the game are like inaccessible to us all of a sudden. It's like harder to find playoff stats for Major League Baseball than it is to find like

low level indie ball stats or something i don't know there's just like no no designated place for this you can't find them on fan graphs you can't find them at baseball prospectus you can't find them in the usual places i am like scrambling and going to websites i never go to to figure out what is actually happening in the postseason why do we do this to ourselves it was easier for me to look up how often nick sine got hit in like summer college leagues than it is to find a league postseason era i know which by the way is like almost five yeah right now but which i went to espn's team stats because they have postseason stats and they say the league average era for major league baseball in the postseason right now, for starters, is 8.53, which is wrong by like three and a half runs, I think. I think what the page is doing is just averaging the team ERAs.

So you have like the Rockies with a 27 team ERA and the Twins with an 18 team ERA. And their one games are counting as much as like the Cubs and the Nats having low ERAs in three games apiece. That's like the best place I know how to look. So this is rough. I don't know. I know. Maybe the easiest place to go to

that has everything together is MLB.com that has the postseason stats right there, except they're just like formatted horribly and they don't have the numbers you necessarily want and they don't combine them for the league. And it's just, it's clumsy. the mlb.com stat pages are not good baseball reference you have to go digging fan graphs it's even worse because i don't think we have anything that's even team-based and you have to like click an impossibly small little button on

a player page just to see what they've done in the playoffs and we have this conversation probably every year but i mean on one hand you talk about october performance is like the only performance that matters right if you talk to a broadcaster these are the most important games that anyone will ever play in their career and yet we just treat the numbers like they don't exist like they just a player goes into october and it's like daniel disc also just hit his 30th career playoff run probably yeah it's like well that's great that you could pull that up but why don't we use why do we ignore these numbers for 11 months of the year it's it's baseball i mean the things are happening and sure

the level of competition is a little bit higher but this is real barry bonds's career a home run record is not the record that we think that it is because he homered in the playoffs why doesn't it count yeah there was a stat during the cleveland broadcasts night, the Yankees-Indians game about Roberto Perez having like the second highest home run percentage in the playoffs for any player ever or something crazy like that? I would never know that. There's no way to look that up easily. I guess it's probably from Elias or something. about this and someone was asking us a listener named Brett about how you compare like a hall of fame type regular season career with postseason hall of fameness like if you're just an incredible postseason player how much should that count how do you weight it had that kind of conversation

on the podcast before but it's it's really hard to know I guess how much to credit a player for their postseason performance because it's something that some players don't have the opportunity to do. That's always the comeback, I guess, is that so-and-so might have great postseason stats, but that's because he played on great teams and got a lot of chances to play in the postseason. And maybe he had something to do with the fact that those teams are making the postseason, but Mike Trout has barely any postseason stats and that's obviously not his fault so it's kind of a weird thing where in the regular season obviously everyone has the same opportunity to play the same number of games and that is not the case in the playoffs right but it still it seems like the numbers should at least be i don't know

supplemental instead of impossible to find like let's just so one there's a conversation uh david ortiz will make the hall of fame almost certainly and just using the numbers at baseball reference because that's where i already am david ortiz has a career wins above replacement there of uh about 55 and edgar martinez is at 68 therefore just on that basis alone why should david ortiz make the hall of fame and edgar martinez shouldn't well easy answer they both should but one of the things that because david ortiz did so well in the playoffs he had 85 career games in the playoffs he batted almost 400 times and of course he was very good in the in the playoffs and Edgar Martinez batted 34 times he had like a third as much playoff playing time and and so that doesn't really mean anything about

Edgar Martinez or David Ortiz but the fact that Ortiz was so good in the playoffs certainly shouldn't not count so it's just a it really comes down to just what kind of constant you want to use to weight those playoff at bats a little extra because i think that it makes sense that they should and i certainly would think that from a statistical standpoint that would put david ortiz over the top one of the things that i think gets weirdly lost with Derek Jeter. And I'm sorry to go here, but I am going to praise Derek Jeter. People point to the fact that I think, let's see, let me pull up these playoff numbers,

which is not easy, but I'm going to do it. Yeah, Derek Jeter obviously made the playoffs like all the time. So that makes this easy to compare his playoff performance and his regular season performance. But let's go with whatever batting average. Who cares? It's a proxy. Derek Jeter, career, regular season performance but uh let's go with whatever batting average who cares it's a proxy Derek Jeter career regular season batted 310 Derek Jeter career in the playoffs batted 308 I have seen this point used dozens of times to say that Derek Jeter

not clutch but actually that's amazing because he hit 308 in the playoffs against the best pitchers in baseball and he did this over more than 700 plate appearances. So those numbers, if anything, suggest that Derek Jeter, very clutch in the playoffs. So the fact that he had twice as much postseason playing time as David Ortiz had over his career. So not that there was ever any question that Derek Jeter is going to make the Hall of Fame, but like his playoff case is impeccable. Yeah, it's a weird thing. There is one excellent site, I think just a generally underrated site the baseball gauge at the baseball gauge.com which i've mentioned before dan hirsch who runs that site has helped me with a

lot of research for articles they do have postseason stats pages that are more useful than many others where you can look at batting and pitching and you can sort by starting pitchers or relief pitchers or by position and ballpark and team. So there's a bit more you can do at that site. So as always, the Baseball Gauge surprises me with how much it actually includes. So everyone go check out that site, support that site. I always find it very helpful. So I want to talk about one main topic, I guess. There are just so many things we could potentially talk about. It's like during the regular season, there are constantly games going on, but we can't just talk about individual games. That would be

super boring for everyone. But in the playoffs, every game that is played is a potential podcast topic. There is some decisions, some individual performance that people would want to hear us talk about, some managerial mistake potentially. So there have been a whole lot of those since the last time we talked, like five days ago or something. So that's a lot of ground to cover. And in the playoffs, everything kind of has a very short expiration date because there are many more games the next day and people don't want to hear

about games and series that are already over. We now have eliminated teams, of course. The Diamondbacks are done. The Red Sox are done. So we can talk a bit about probably all series at some point and some of the most notable decisions. But I did want to start just by talking about this idea that we're seeing some revolutionary pitching usage or player usage in these playoffs, because I think that's been kind of a consensus or a prevailing to what extent that is actually true and to what extent we're just seeing some things by happenstance. It's like the tweet that Carson had last night where he said, it's the future. Every pitcher only throws a third of an inning. Every club has 27 pitchers. There are no batters. There aren't even bats. And it kind of felt like that because we've seen a lot of starters pulled incredibly early. We've seen teams do things like, you know, bring Chris Sale back in relief.

Okay, that's not unusual. But the Astros bringing Justin Verlander back in relief in game four, even though he was slated to start in game five. That was weird. I didn't see that coming. We've seen a ton of quick hooks. weird. I didn't see that coming. We've seen a ton of quick hooks and Bradford Doolittle from ESPN pointed this out last night, or I guess he was just relaying word from ESPN stats and info. And the stat was with Cleveland's Trevor Bauer departing after one and two thirds innings in New York. Much to your dismay, I know. That's now 10 starters who have gone three or fewer

innings this postseason. There were seven such starts in the entire 2016 postseason, and the all-time record is 12 set in 2011. Crazy stuff, says Bradford. And I wonder how crazy it is. I mean, on the one hand, whenever you say something is like an all-time playoff record, that always sounds more impressive than it actually is, because we're in this new playoff format. There are many more games.

There are more series. So you're essentially just giving today's players a huge head start on most of the baseball players in history who only had the opportunity to play one playoff series or two playoff series. So that doesn't mean so much. But, you know, we certainly have seen a lot of starters get yanked very quickly this season. And so there's been a lot of talk about bullpenning. And yet no team has actually intended to bullpen in the way that most people talk about it, right?

It's just it's people getting pulled early because they're bad. And then the bullpen comes in. But even with like Severino or, you know, other people in the wildcard game who were bad or gray or whatever, it was not intentional tactic. So I don't know. We're at a place now where I think the average starting pitcher ERA, honestly, we just tried to calculate it three different ways, three different sites and got three different answers.

I tried it ESPN and the baseball gauge. You try a baseball reference. We got three different answers for what the actual starting pitcher era this postseason is but it appears to be very close to five so yeah it is not over eight no so what does that mean if anything to you do you think there's anything different going on here from a tactical perspective or is this just a run of bad starts whenever you were watching a single game when watching the the red socks and the astros yesterday and chris sale was relieving first and i saw him warming up in the bullpen which i thought was was weird but i figured okay this

this kind of makes sense because he's is available and the red socks have their backs against the wall they have nothing left to lose no game is more important than this game they just need to do what they can to keep this game under control give themselves a chance to win which say i'll help them do so it made sense and then when the astros started warming up just in verlander i thought well that's weird i definitely wouldn't have expected it but we i have always have to stop myself from assuming that weird is bad or that weird is really good but i figured well okay they're warming up verlander but they're gonna have keitel so he's fine and a verlander released for a few innings it's probably not going to disrupt his his championship series schedule too much and and you know i bet aja

hinge has just a long enough memory to remember that will harris kind of started the meltdown in 2015 against the royals and in reality the asters haven't really had a very reliable middle reliever recently. They've only had Ken Giles, who's been, you know, a dominant closer inside the park home run be damned. So I figure, well, maybe AJ Hinch just doesn't really trust his middle relief for pretty good reason. And he just wants someone to bridge the gap to Ken Giles. And so the fact of the matter is that yesterday we saw Rick Porcello and Charlie Morton, and they were relieved by Chris Sale and Justin Verlander, such that if you saw Sale and Verlander pitching in the later innings and he just flipped on TV, you would have assumed that they started. So it was weird. But whenever you have some sort of possible sweeping

trend, every single individual case is kind of excusable you can come up with a reason for why it's happening there's a a pattern of increasing open-mindedness i guess and i think that it is breaking down some walls i don't think that any of this is intentional but i certainly don't think the managers are forgetting that there's a difference between a starter and a reliever but there is maybe more of an idea of okay every out here is important we're in the playoffs and we are probably able to use pitchers in ways that they're not quite necessarily so familiar with we can use them out of the bullpen everyone is has got a whole bunch of adrenaline and nothing is more important than this so let's just try to get as many apps as

possible i think the fact of the matter is that entering play i think yesterday playoff starter era was over six yeah so that kind of helps to explain why starters were right having such short outings but if anything there might be there might be a little hint of an over correction in that we've seen plenty of managers already this month react promptly to a starter who's having a yeah a bad beginning and saying okay you're done but now you you and i have both seen research that indicates so that's not really predictive right like mitchell lickman is his published stuff on this like all the time that a starter who's having a bad inning doesn't really mean that he's going to have a bad next inning so like if you think about severino coming out against the Twins in the first inning like I

don't think anybody well I certainly I wasn't watching that thinking well he's going to allow 30 runs if you let him right yeah yeah I figured well that's a bad start yes but instead of managers leading on their starters too far now they're just leading on them a little less like Dusty Baker Dusty Baker pulled it now Max Scherzer pitched into the seventh inning yesterday so it's not like he didn't get a chance and he was pulled after he allowed his first hit and I know that he had a hamstring injury but do you think Dusty Baker any other year of his life would have pulled a pitcher like Max Scherzer

to go to the Nationals middle relief after he allowed his first hit of the game? Yeah I mean that seems unlikely. I don't know whether Dusty is like paying attention to third time through the order and necessarily following that. I would imagine that that had more to do with the hamstring and just not wanting to push him too hard than any baseball wide trend. I mean, I don't know. That's the kind of thing where, I mean, what was the other game? Wasn't there a game? I'm terrible at remembering which playoff events happened in which games in which years, but what was the game where the Nationals made a similar decision where they took out a starter? Maybe it was Scherzer brought in the closer. And, you know, analytically, at least it was probably the right call. Once you get a starter that deep into the game, generally, you know, your typical postseason reliever is going to be more effective than that. And if you have your best reliever available, then definitely going to be better than that, at least based on your expectation. But that was not the case that was what drew store in right so you know i don't know this was earlier in the game of course but i'd have to think it has more to do with scherzer's health than anything because scherzer would never want to leave the game if

it was left up to him so i think you're right though that's kind of what i was thinking that maybe it's just that managers if there is anything they're doing differently it's just that managers, if there is anything they're doing differently, it's just that game down but Joe Girardi I think wisely did not wait and so he never had an opportunity to but it wasn't that Girardi wanted to take Severino out after a third of an inning obviously in Monday's game he left him in for seven innings because he was pitching very well and I don't know if he would have left him in for seven in the wildcard game, but I'm sure he would have been happy to get five or six out of him if he was pitching that well. But Severino just didn't have his command,

or maybe he was a little amped up. I don't know. So I think that probably has a lot to do with it. And I think Mitchell Lichtman also was pointing out on Twitter that this is a pretty good collection of offensive teams. He noted that of the eight last remaining playoff teams, their average run scored per game with both teams combined above average for their starting lineups was 0.7 runs, which is a lot. So you're just going

into the game, you're looking at 10 runs a game, at least against regular season pitching. And then you have the juiced ball that maybe people still aren't used to. You have the weather. It was humid and warm as I was sitting in the press box in New York last night, kind of unusual. And you also have a good collection of hitters parks. Mitchell also mentioned that the average park factor for runs among all these teams was 1.016. So that's skewing things a little bit too so i don't know it seems as if there's some sort of revolution happening here but i i think maybe we might be overplaying that a bit and i wouldn't be surprised if the rest of the playoffs sort of

settled down in that respect yeah and you you think well maybe maybe the trend is going to catch on from last year's teams are going to heavily use their best reliever, just like the Indians did with Andrew Miller, etc. Maybe after these playoffs, we can stop talking about Andrew Miller every time we talk about the playoffs. But now it's like, if anything, the trend is just like, well, let's use our best starter and relief for a few innings at a time. So I don't really know what the trend is here, except that managers, I guess, have demonstrated that they're not going to push starters too deep which is good it's one of the things we've been arguing for for i don't know basically ever or at least as long as we've had some numbers to back it up i would not expect that managers all of a sudden had some light bulb click on above them that says starters can only go three innings and no more than that because

that's just not managers are not that extreme they don't want to have that sort of departure and the fact of the matter is that yesterday louis severino went seven innings against the indians and he went seven innings because he was great he threw 113 pitches and now granted maybe he was able to throw 113 pitches because joe gerardi did not lean on him too hard when he made his first start he threw i don't know what it was like 26 pitches or something so he was probably fresh and then so he was able to go seven innings and tommy canley cleaned up the mess one thing this isn't necessarily directly related but one thing that i want to slide in just because i don't want to let it just go by during the regular season this is for all teams just league average not just for the teams in the playoffs

each team averaged 4.7 runs scored per nine innings. Now in the playoffs this year, so far the average is 4.8 runs per nine innings. So run scoring is up one-tenth of one run each team per nine innings. Well, the average game length per nine innings in the regular season, 185 minutes. That is three hours and five minutes per nine innings. Do you have a guess for the playoff average game duration per nine innings do you have a guess for the playoff average game duration per nine innings this year so uh 185 you said is regular season i will say man the game i was at yesterday just

felt endless it was so slow uh i would say one nine man i can't really think of a game that's been like i'm trying to think of like what the short game in these playoffs has been i guess they're i'll tell you i'll tell you the shortest like the hendrix game maybe cubs and nationals game one of their series the shortest game of the playoffs three hours and two minutes yeah right man, probably like 205? 225. Oh, my goodness. Three hours and 45 minutes. This is not per game. This is per nine innings. So we're talking about, I mean, I'm sure this is going to regress, but I looked at all of the playoff years since 1995. So the wildcard era. I looked at this last night. I didn't do anything with it, but I was just curious. You know know i just do 30 minutes of research for fun for no reason in the middle of the night so this is the highest

average duration of the wildcard era so far now i would expect that this will regress down a little bit just because it's so extreme but once again we're looking at a run increase from the regular season of one tenth of a run per nine innings and we're at 40 more minutes now playoff games always yeah take longer this has been true this is not so much of an outlier when i looked at the 23 years of of data i think there was one year that was at like 217 minutes and there were a few other years that were over 200 minutes but uh i think it was jeff passant had a tweet yesterday after the the astros came back to knock off the red sox he said like that was a four hour whatever game game, but every minute was worth it.

Very suspenseful. And, and you know, that's true. That game, that game was great. Just like how the, the Clayton Kershaw Dodgers nationals game five last year was great.

Even though that game took like seven hours and 13 minutes basically to play nine innings, it took way too long, but it was great. Every minute was not every minute, but many of the minutes were gripping. But if we're going to be honest, I don't want to be one of those guys who just sits here and complains about how long baseball takes that's not fun

that's not why anybody watches and nobody likes to hear that and i enjoy the playoffs but the playoffs cannot have an average game length of three hours and 45 minutes per nine innings that is untenable yeah people will not accept that and these games are taking too long a baseball game is three hours in the playoffs you can give it three and a half that should be plenty but the fact of the matter is that the cubs for some reason the only game playing today is at like 2 30 my time which that's fine with me that's great i'll take it but i'm not gonna expect that game to be over by 5 36 i'm yeah i'm that's probably going to go until seven o'clock for no reason yeah i don't know i mean i know i get it there are longer commercial breaks

and we've seen more pitching changes but 40 minutes per nine innings yeah how it's crazy how is it happening and i really yeah like you said i don't want to be the guy who's complaining about this because he has a deadline or whatever like i was in the press box for the game yesterday i didn't even end up writing anything just because the game just didn't lend itself to any interesting angle, I didn't think. But, you know, sure, that was maybe part of it, but that wasn't most of it. I mean, I was at the wildcard game and that had its slow moments too, but I was pretty riveted during that. And Monday's game, I was just, it was mind-numbing. There were so many pitching changes and mostly not with a very close score. And it was just a very slow game. And I'm trying not at least to say this from the perspective of someone whose job involves watching or writing about these games. just that is a long time to ask your typical fan who is even just watching one team to watch

baseball and it's unpredictable how long the game will go but it's predictable that it will be a long time and given that the games are mostly starting later too that is just uh it's especially as the the postseason goes on and there are fewer games per day that is just a really a lot to ask so i don't know what the solution is. I mean, obviously, playoff games get longer because there are longer ad breaks and that sort of thing. But it's also the game on the field. And I think it's been shown, right, that there's a longer time between pitches in the playoffs, which, again, makes sense. Every pitch matters. And so, I mean, that happens during the regular season, too. In high leverage moments, the Every pitch matters. And so, I mean, that happens during the regular season too.

In high leverage moments, the game slows down. And in the postseason, just every moment is high leverage just about. And so it's understandable. And there are tons of pitching changes because managers are trying to get the edge as often as they can. So I can't really tell them to manage the game differently. So I don't know what the solution is other than, I suppose, when, I will say when, not if, the pitch clock comes in, that would cut down on at least some of it, at least that tendency to take longer time between pitches. So maybe that'll

help a bit, but yeah, I mean, once you're getting much closer to four hours than three on a regular basis, that is, people will sit through a longer game just because the stakes are higher. But man, these are some slow games. Shout out to the Cubs and Nationals. There have been 16 playoff games so far. And the Cubs and Nationals have played three of them. And those are the three shortest games of the playoffs so far. So hooray, pitching.

Yeah, that's the series that's actually had good starting pitching. So it's not a coincidence. So one more tweet I saw about this issue. Wanted to ask what you thought. This was from Forrest McCracken yesterday. Forrest, obviously the kind of discoverer of BABIP, writer of that seminal article at Baseball Perspectives that got everyone thinking about defense-independent pitching stats, has consulted for various teams, etc., etc., he said,

I will repeat what I said last year. Either pitcher usage in the playoffs is broken or pitcher usage in the regular season is broken. And I believe he tweeted this during that sale for Orlando game. Do you think this is true? Do you think it has to be true? And if so, do you have any ideas about the way in which it would be true? I think he was saying essentially that he actually had a follow-up tweet. He said, if this usage has effects on sale and Verlander's next start, you're borrowing from today and paying tomorrow. And he said, you know, maybe you wouldn't exactly manage like this in the regular season, but that if you think this is helping you in the playoffs, then some version of it must be helpful to you in the regular season.

So do you agree with that? Well, I guess you could say that there are interpretations which would be agreeable. But as gets discussed every Octoberober the playoffs in the regular season are just very simply quite different and in the regular season you i mean for one thing you have farm system you can dip into in the regular season but you just have so many more games and fatigue just adds up and you don't have the same adrenaline factor and in the playoffs like if if you take the astros and you're you're using verlander in game four because you just want to have that bridge to get to Giles, well then, sure, you're sort of borrowing maybe from Verlander's next start,

but you're also trying to prevent the existence of a game five in the first place, which would, in theory, sort of add to your team. I don't know, maybe add to your team's chances of winning in the ALCS because you're giving them a little more rest and certainly you're just trying to not give yourself an opportunity to lose the next game and you certainly can't expect that in the regular season you could have something like verlander and sale coming out of the bullpen in between their starts because that would be insane they would just they would die they would literally die on the field they would just become dead people and then be like well now we just lost two of the best starting pitchers in the world because we just use them in the bullpen as well

yeah so he's right that when you have these things happening in the playoffs you are borrowing when you are using when you are leaning on a pitcher heavily in some way that the pitcher is not used to you are borrowing something from the future but you just don't face this kind of single game leverage in the regular season almost ever so i i get that maybe managers focus a little too much on the game in hand and they don't think about the fact that you are affecting your future chances but the effect that you're having on the future chances is so nebulous and unknowable i think that if the astros needed i mean what david price jogged out to the bullpen yesterday after throwing something like 50 pitches in game three like david price is almost

certainly not available for yesterday's game and he's throwing with a quarter of an elbow right now anyway but something tells me he would have been able to go out there and muster a few fast balls at 95 miles per hour just because this is this is the playoffs and i in the postseason compared to the regular season i think that maybe maybe teams and managers just have a higher tolerance for injury risk because you are using these pictures in such a way that you are trying to end the season with your players having nothing left in the tank. Which you can't do in the regular season. And that's dangerous.

And maybe it shouldn't be that way. But I guess it's a helpful indicator that the playoffs really do matter a lot to these people. And we can talk about the playoffs being random or maybe all the money is in the regular season or whatever. And maybe this is just a glorified tournament. And it is just a glorified tournament. But this is what they're all playing for. i don't know i get the general point but i think that there are too many differences to have that message really uh i don't know ring true hit home you pick the expression yeah no i think i'm with you there i think just this is not

necessarily a sign that pitcher usage is broken at either time it's just a sign that pitcher usage has to be different at those two times because the format is different. It's just a different version of baseball. And I think the two versions of baseball are diverging as time goes on. If you had looked at early postseason baseball, which was essentially just the World Series, I'm not sure that you would have seen all that much difference because at that point, starters basically finished all their games. So you would just start your starter and that would be that. Maybe you'd pitch them more often or occasionally bring them in out of the bullpen, but there just wasn't all that much to do and the schedule wasn't so different. So I think we're in

a place now where we have these two brands of baseball in a way that we didn't before. But I don't think that necessarily means that one has to become more like the other. So I thought what I like about the way that pitchers are used in the playoffs is you and I and so many people agree that the playoffs are essentially random and you can't really build a great team for the playoffs in such a way where you can really like cement your probability of winning the whole thing but i like the way that teams use these different strategies because it at least allows me to believe in the illusion that there's more control yeah i don't like the idea of the playoffs being as random as they as they really are and so now if you think about it yesterday yesterday the red sox nearly beat the astros because andrew ben Benintendi hit one of the stupidest home runs you can hit in Major League Baseball.

And the Cubs beat the Nationals because Anthony Rizzo hit a terrible pop up that just happened to follow in between a couple defensive players. So like Anthony Rizzo didn't really do anything good, but the Cubs won anyway. It was a clutch outcome, but not really a clutch result anyway. So there is clearly a lot of luck involved. And maybe the Nationals didn't deserve to lose. and maybe the red sox didn't deserve to pull ahead but i still am firmly of the belief that the playoffs are very chaotic and random but i don't like it and i would prefer it to not be true and so to see teams going to such i guess relative

extremes to try to win every single game it makes me it makes me feel good because it allows me to sort of believe that there's a greater amount of actual human agency in these games. No, I know what you mean. I was thinking that too, and it does seem true. I mean, there are ways, of course, in which the playoffs favor certain teams over others just because of the way their rosters are constructed, but it is true that the outcome in the late innings, for instance, I guess is less uncertain than it would be in a typical game, for instance. Like if the Yankees are ahead after seven or something like

that, like they were yesterday, they were less likely to blow that game than they would be presumably during the regular season just because they would be willing to use anyone and everyone and you know they brought patantis out and he couldn't throw a strike and just looked broken and so he was removed and tommy came in and was great i mean it just seemed like how could they possibly allow three runs here it just seemed almost impossible now it probably wasn't actually i don't know if the odds are are actually all that different but yeah i know what you mean it does seem like just because teams are doing things differently and really pulling out all

the stops that in a way it's a truer reflection of the team's respective talent levels than say your typical three or four game series in May or whatever would be. But it's also true that both teams are doing that. And so maybe that kind of just cancels that out. It's not like one team is kind of pressing that advantage and the other is not. They are both pressing that advantage. So yeah, right. And it's sort of testing a talent level that we don't ever test except for in october because again these teams are behaving differently from how we've seen them for the previous six months and it's funny talking about the the yankees less chance to blow it in the later innings and i was just remembering off

the top of my head well let's see chad green recently gave up a grand slam craig kimbrough just allowed a couple runs yesterday andrew miller allowed a home run to greg bird to let the yankees win the other game like even even the dominant guys except for Kelly Jansen who's bulletproof have like allowed runs but whatever you're right because every team is doing it it means that maybe there's less of an advantage to be gained but again if you if you figure that okay teams are behaving in ways that are different from what we saw all regular season but still the playoffs are always the goal and they have built teams to try to win in the playoffs then even though this is the first time we get to see them tested, yeah, it's comforting to try to believe that teams are doing,

that teams have maybe a greater amount of control over the outcome than they really do. I always prefer less randomness, even though I am a strong believer in the randomness of the game. All right. So are there any particular plays, decisions that you think we should touch on? I think we probably missed our chance to talk about Joe Girardi and the replay debacle and the hit by pitch debacle. I wrote about it. Everyone wrote about it. People are probably sick of hearing about it. the the national series which is ongoing at least as we speak if not necessarily when you the listener are hearing this and that's a weird one because as john taylor of sports illustrated tweeted the nationals have gotten 12 no-hit innings from strasburg and scherzer combined and lost both of those starts somehow which is very nationals in the playoffs unfortunately for

them things like this keep happening to them. I don't know what to make of that because obviously in this postseason in particular, when starters are getting yanked immediately, if you get 12 no-hit innings out of your starters in two games, that seems almost impossible to lose. But of course, the Cubs have gotten good pitching too and have just had timely hits and that's that. And so the controversy, which we already touched on, was should Dusty Baker have removed Scherzer? And

I don't know. We kind of talked about that already, but this is just a lot of misfortune. Obviously, there was earlier managerial controversy in this series in Joe Maddon's handling of his bullpen when Harper hit the home run and Zimmerman hit the home run to tie it and win it respectively. Any thoughts from this series on either of those things or anything else? I think that I came into this expecting that the Cubs and Nationals, not that we ever really know these things ahead of time, but I figured that the Cubs and Nationals would be the closest series. And even though it's not necessarily going to go to five games, we'll see what happens on Tuesday. I think it's all the games have felt extremely close because they've all

been extremely close but i was i was less surprised to see scherzer come out because i think that made enough sense but i was more surprised to see that the reliever that baker went to was sammy salice now granted this is maybe my own my own thing but i've i've pretty much never before once thought of sammy salice and i had to look up his numbers i had to confirm that he is indeed left-handed i haven't gone through all the splits because again i'm one of those people who's of the firm belief that at the end of the day it's the players who make the difference and managers are just there to very narrowly shift the probabilities around and i certainly don't want to i don't know impugn the managerial character

of dusty baker because at the end of the day he's he's a winner at least in the regular season these teams tend to be good that all being said Max Scherzer was removed in the seventh inning he had just allowed a one-out double to Ben Zobrist first hit of the game and Kyle Schorber was coming up so I get why Baker wanted to go to a lefty so that he could pitch to Schorber which he didn't get to do because the Cubs also have a bench so they were able to go to Alper Almoraora and Al Mora hit a line drive single. I just don't quite understand why when the Nationals had a one run lead, there was a runner in scoring position and they had eight outs to go. Why did this not go right to Sean Doolittle or Ryan Madsen?

And that's that's my only question. This is maybe one of those little indicators that as much as we're talking about playoff trends and pitcher usage, Dusty Baker is sort of out there on an island. He did not elect to lean heavily on his best reliever. His best reliever is Sean Doolittle. And I haven't looked at the numbers recently, but I'm pretty sure Doolittle doesn't have much of a platoon split. I do know that he has very good out numbers in that he gets a lot of outs, probably a lot more outs than Sammy Solis gets, especially if you figure that Solis is going to come in and he's probably not going to face a lefty. So you're talking about Solis versus a righty or Scherzer versus a lefty or Doolittle versus, I don't know if the Cubs would have hit

for Schwarber in that case, but I mean, Doolittle or Schwarber, there's two outcomes. Schwarber's going to hit a home run 8% of the time and he's going to strike out 92% of the time. So whatever. I'm going to leave that one alone. But yeah, I'm less concerned. You pull Scherzer, he's going through the order for the third time. He's already thrown 98 pitches. He was hurt recently. So whatever. I get it. I don't know how long Baker would have stuck with Scherzer if he didn't allow a hit just because, you know, his pitch count was just about to climb over 100. But Solis was a weird one. And I would question that. And even though I think we all understand there are better indicators than ERA, Sammy Solis' ERA this year was just about six. That's a very high ERA. Not the kind of ERA that you want to be pitching in that kind of situation. No idea why that wasn't Doolittle.

Yeah, the Nationals had the most innings or highest percentage of innings pitched by their starters this year, at least among National League teams, maybe among all teams. But that's not like Dusty Baker doing a wooden prior kind of thing. It's just that they had a good rotation and for much of the year, a bad bullpen. And I don't think he was really running anyone into the ground. That was just a smart way to handle the players he had at the time. And I think it was Joe Sheehan pointed out in his preview of this series

that the Nats had also done very well, Nats pitchers, relative to the league in pitching in third time through the order situations, just, you know, probably again, because Strasburg is good and Scherzer is good. And he also mentioned that the Cubs had been, I think, the best at hitting the third time through the order or hitting pitchers they were facing for the third time in a game. I don't know whether that means anything. Could just be random. Could mean, I guess, that they're just better as a team at picking up things about pitchers the first couple times they see them and then using those things the third time. Or maybe they see a lot of pitches.

They wear down pitchers who are then tired the third time they face them I don't know what it means exactly but he highlighted that as a factor that could help decide this series and I guess it kind of hasn't I don't know just because I don't know if it has or it hasn't I guess in this case Scherzer wasn't allowed to test that and stay out there so it didn't really come into play in the pivotal situations but it's obviously a tough luck series if you get two great starts like that in three games and you are still losing the series so it would be I'm sure extremely depressing and upsetting for Nationals fans if they get booted again from the playoffs without winning a series even though they've had a lot going for them in this playoffs. But that will be decided soon. I guess we could briefly

discuss the series that are over. We did talk about the Red Sox and Astros handling of their pitchers in that decisive game four, but Red Sox are done, Diamondbacks are done, and nothing all that surprising about the outcomes of these series, really. We still haven't seen an upset in any playoff matchup this year. This was kind of how we expected it to go. I don't know whether anyone would have expected a sweep in the Diamondbacks-Dodgers series because the Diamondbacks are really good. But the Dodgers, it seems, have fixed their flaws such as they ever were and are playing well and just outplayed the Diamondbacks.

I don't know how much there is to say about that. I mean, obviously they had impressive games from, say, Cody Bellinger, for instance, who I've watched that video of him going into the dugout to catch the foul ball several times trying to figure out whether his teammates or someone should have helped him more or not. I don't know whether they were worried about interfering with him or, you know, like getting in his way or having the catch invalidated or something because he was being propped up by players in his dugout or something, but it looked like he almost seriously hurt himself while a lot of people just kind of sat there and watched.

So that was made for a lot of good gifs and screenshots, as did the fact that the Diamondbacks had horseback police guarding their pool so that the Dodgers couldn't go swim in it, which was excellent. What? What was going to happen? What was going to happen if the Dodgers went over and they wanted to celebrate in the pool? right and it was a whole big thing for whatever reason because baseball is very silly sometimes but yeah mounted police guarding guarding the pool from any incursion by dodgers players that was very amusing enjoyed that quite a bit what would the police would they would they shoot cody bellinger if he wanted to go for a swim like what was would they arrest like could look i get it if there's police there like probably don't cross the police just don't yeah don't focus on the pool but still what a that's that's just security theater that's all that is there's just just the the chase field tsa on horseback uh yeah so i guess for anyone who

who laments the way that the playoffs don't necessarily select for the best teams we've seen the better yankees eliminate the worst twins we've seen the better diamondbacks eliminate the worst rockies we've seen the better dodgers eliminate the worst diamondbacks and we've seen the better astros eliminate the worst red socks so so far everything is going about right the indians and yankees are both extremely good given their playoff build so it makes sense that they're going the distance cubs and nationals i don't really have a clear favorite one of the weird things so first of all when when bellinger made that catch i it was the last out of the inning and bellinger would have been returning to the dugout anyway yeah so like in one sense good for him for getting a head start i i wish that the camera didn't cut

away because i wanted to know bellinger made the catch and then he had to i guess show that he had the ball in his glove but the camera cut away before i could see whether bellinger returned to the field before returning to the dugout because i feel like if I were him I would have just fallen into the dugout and then just immediately sat down because why bother going back down but or going back out but uh alas no replay indicator he just fell into the dugout and avoided getting seriously injured did a very clever little move with his glove hand I think it was maybe it was his other hand to grab the railing down the stairs to brace his fall just very they're very thoughtful a very thoughtful catch by Cody Bellinger one of the surprise I

guess there were questions there were a lot of questions about the Dodgers pitching but you go into this series and you've got Kershaw and Hill and Darvish getting the starts and Darvish looked really good but you know there were legitimate questions about the Dodgers middle relief and it's just kind of shocking to see that the Dodgers' bullpen, aside from Kelly Jansen, the two primary bridges are Tony Singrani and Brandon Morrow, and they're good, which is just, you know, funny. Bullpens, but also Kenta Maeda made two appearances out of the bullpen.

He lasted two innings, two clean innings, four strikeouts, and Kenta Maeda has been sitting 95 miles per hour. lean innings, four strikeouts, and Quinta Maeda has been sitting 95 miles per hour. I get, we've seen all the research that says starters are better when they relieve and they throw harder when they relieve, but it's not true for everyone. Some guys adapt better to the bullpen than others. Archie Bradley gained like four miles per hour out of the bullpen. I never would have looked at Quinta Maeda and assumed that guy's stuff is going to play up. He just didn't see him the type, you know? But here he is. Yeah, it is really hard to predict.

And that is, I think, one of the best things about the playoffs is that you get to see people pitching in ways that you don't normally. And so David Price can suddenly be a hero and have Red Sox fans applaud him for once because he pitches great out of the bullpen. And obviously he'd been very effective out of the bullpen at the end of the regular season too. And yeah, you never really know. Like you put John Lackey in the bullpen, for instance,

and you don't really expect John Lackey to come out like firing 99 or something, but you never really know until these guys get a shot at doing it because like David Price, even with no elbow, looks unhittable coming out of the bullpen and yeah Maeda I wouldn't have said oh that guy has like the intensity that is typical of a closer who comes in and is so amped up it is you know throwing extra hard because of that role but yeah it has worked out that way by the way i like that stat that darren willman had about how the slowest fastball the yankees threw in game four was 96 miles per hour oh my god i believe it was the first fastball i think i noticed that severino threw like a 96

mile per hour fastball to start off the game which i took to be a positive sign because if he if he was like overexcited for the wild card game, as I think even his teammates and manager implied that he might have been, I think first pitch he threw in the wildcard game was 99. I mean, it's not unusual for him. First of all, he averages like 98 or something. It's crazy. But he got up to that even later in that first at bat. He was touching triple digits, I think. Even later in that first at-bat, he was touching triple digits, I think.

But just the fact that he took a couple miles per hour off that very first pitch of the game seemed like maybe a sign that whatever adrenaline he had coursing through his veins in the wildcard game was a little more subdued the second time around. Anyway, that gives you some idea of why the Yankees are a formidable postseason team, at least when they have Severino going, who throws really hard, and then everyone out of the bullpen throws really hard but then they also have masahiro tanaka who as you documented does not throw very hard and does not need to and is making fastballs obsolete so that worked for them too yeah the yankees are simultaneously like the hardest throwing team ever but also the team that throws the fewest fastballs ever yeah or at least you know like on record so and there are obvious reasons guys like Tanaka, CeCe Sabathia and Jordan Montgomery are really dragging

down those fastball numbers because they just don't have very good fastballs so they don't throw them very often but I got an interesting comment I wrote a post that was fine about Tanaka the other day and how Tanaka might just one day kill the fastball like in his start against the Indians I think he threw 16% fastballs and so he threw 15 fastballs and zero cutters according to brooks baseball out of 92 pitches so he had the lowest fastball rate and the lowest hard pitch rate of his entire career by a decent margin against the indians and he was just splitter and slider and curve and splitter and slide on curve and somebody commented well why why is it that we don't consider his splitter to be a fastball and i mean i don't i don't know

like i don't have a good answer to this pitch classification is weird like you know you talk about like brooks baseball will classify a cutter as a hard pitch uh because a cutter is like a cut fastball well a splitter can be a split finger fastball i don't really know what tanaka throws his splitter on average is about four or five miles per hour slower than his fastball but it's only two miles per hour slower than his cutter so is is his splitter his fastball he kind of uses it like he uses his fastball so i don't know to not masa here tanaka is i guess killing the regular fastball but if yeah it's really a matter of interpretation because he uses his splitter so much and it's clearly his best pitch so maybe that is a fastball i i don't know is is the point and plus here tanaka either doesn't throw fastballs or he does and his fastball is insane yeah all right well is there anything that

we haven't touched on it's hard to know when an episode about the playoffs is over because there's like always some other angle i will say that i I think Gary Sanchez has been doing an excellent job behind the plate. We talked about that craziness about people saying that Sanchez should be benched or DH or play first base or something. Obviously, he's blocked by Greg Bird anyway at this point, but I think he's done a good job. It looked like he was getting a lot of extra strikes. Maybe it was a larger than usual zone for both teams in game four, but he seemed to be framing well. He blocked well in the Tanaka game. Don't think he had any wild pitches or pass balls, even though Tanaka was, as he always

does, throwing lots of splitters in the dirt. Looked good. Obviously has been hitting too. Just kind of drove home the insanity of questioning whether Gary Sanchez should start playoff games. And that was an extremely sloppy game for the Indians defensively. And I wasn't sure what to make of that. Like for a second, I was thinking of, you know, well, maybe I could write, oh, this is the secret weakness of the Indians. They have this incredible pitching staff, but their defense isn't actually that good. I don't know if that's true. I mean, if you go by UCR, defensive run saved, they're a very good defensive team. If you go by like defensive efficiency or park adjusted defensive efficiency, actually not that good. So maybe there's something to that, but the people who

were screwing up mostly in game four were not people I would classify as bad defenders with the possible exception of Kipnis in center field, which is kind of questionable. And he looked awkward on that one sack fly where he didn't really set up well. But for the most part, it was like, you know, Roberto Perez is a very good blocker and framer. He just had a ball pop out of his glove for whatever reason. Urshela is a good third baseman, and he caused like a bunch of runs to score on his own with a couple bad plays, a ball that just ate him up and another ball where he just looked towards second and then threw wide to first. So I don't know if there's any larger significance to that it was just a sloppy game for them right in the same way that yesterday at one point even in the seventh inning the cubs said zero runs zero hits and four errors yeah which i mean the cubs don't have a bad defense but you know ben zobra said something happened and ozzy catani had something happened and kyle

schwarber had two things happen on the exact same play so schwarber kind of schwarbed it over there in left field and that nearly proved to be a very costly mistake. But the Cubs rallied away from that. And I think that it's easy to want to build up a strong narrative that says something about, oh, this isn't how the Indians play. And something is clearly wrong. They just can't close out the Yankees or whatever. That's nonsense. But it is not nonsense to point out, well, this isn't how the Indians play. And something went very much awry.

And it opened the door for the Yankees. So as long as you don't make too much of it, it is definitely extraordinary. And those are the fun games to talk about. The games where really, really, really weird and unusual things happen. All right. Well, we have a game later today as we speak.

This is Arrieta versus Roark in Chicago, which in theory should favor the Cubs. And that would be the end of that series. But we have no idea what to expect from Jake Arrieta. Essentially, he pitched like 10 innings since the start of September. So I don't know. And then the day after that, we've got Sabathia versus Kluber in game five in Cleveland, which seems like a pretty heavy mismatch in favor of Cleveland. I did not really expect to see CeCe Sabathia going in a decisive playoff game this year, but that's where we are. I guess you could criticize the way the Yankees lined up their rotation. Maybe you could say that Tanaka should have started earlier in the series or that

Severino could have because he barely pitched in the wildcard game. I don't know. That's hindsight from me, at least. So that clearly seems to favor Cleveland. But, you know, I always find myself like I can sense when I'm about to say something like, it's the playoffs, anything can happen. Like I can hear the words about to come out of my mouth. And obviously they are true words, but I hate to say them again just because we have to say them so often. So I just stopped that sentence right there.

Yeah. Okay. So let me just say this, because this is weird. You think of Jake Arrieta and you have an impression in your head. That's fine. And you think of Tanner Roark and you probably have another impression in your head.

Certainly we're not, I don't pay very close attention to Tanner Roark. I'm sorry for any huge Tanner Roark fans out there, but he's just not the most interesting Nationals pitcher for me to pay attention to. So I still kind of held on to this old impression I had of him as being like a pitch to contact, kind of maybe weak contact guy who I never really believed in. So, okay, this year, Tanner Roark, faster average fastball than Jake Arrieta by a little bit. And in the second half, Tanner Roark has struck out more than a quarter of his

opponents which means in the second half he had a higher strikeout rate than Jake Arrieta so who knows what that's about but Tanner Roark not the Tanner Roark you thought he was unless you're a Nationals fan in which case you are way ahead of me okay yeah yeah there are a lot of playoff matchups like that that maybe seem more like mismatches than they actually are like even in the NL wildcard game Granke versus Gray seemed like something of a mismatches than they actually are. Like even in the NL wildcard game, Granke versus Gray seemed like something of a mismatch. But if you go back to like the beginning of the second half or when Gray came back, they were basically the same pitcher down the stretch

and neither of them pitched well. But that's just one example that stood out to me. So, all right. Well, we have kind of previewed those last two games then. So we will reconvene most likely tomorrow and we'll take emails. So send us some emails. We'll talk about them soon. Excellent. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild.

Five listeners who've already pledged their support include Mark Santos, Mitchell Dixon, Alexander Elschultz, Shane Allen, and Casey Shankland. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectivelywild. There's never a better time to be in that group than the playoffs. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for editing assistance. Keep your questions and comments coming for me and Jeff via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or through the Patreon messaging system. Also check out the Ringer MLB show feed for regular episodes. Also, without the playoffs, we will talk to you very soon. Thank you.