Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1123: Judgment Calls

Episode Date: October 14, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Yellowstone-explosion sensationalism and discuss the improbability of the Cubs’ 277-minute NLDS Game 5 victory over the Nationals, the game’s umpiring oddities and errors, the Nationals’ and Cubs’ reputations and legacies in the wake of the series, and what to do about instant replay and slides. Audio intro: Thom Yorke, […]

🎵 I don't have the right to interfere, to interfere. Hello and welcome to episode 1123 of Dispiriting Washington Nationals Postmortem. I am Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs, joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. I should say that the postmortem is involuntarily brought to you by our Patreon supporters who are not necessarily in this for the crushing despair that is being a fan of the Nationals. Now before, I'm sure everybody who's listening to this, I'm sure 60% of the people listening to this want to hear us talk about the Nationals and the Cubs on Thursday night. I always have something I would like to discuss that has nothing at all to do with that beforehand. For a little background, every so often, this has happened, I'd say maybe three times. Maybe

three times this year, I have been in Gmail and Ben has sent me a message that is linking to maybe the latest Yellowstone supervolcano sensationalism. And this comes up fairly often. There was an article that Ben sent me yesterday in USA Today. There were several of these articles, but USA Today is the one that he sent me. And usa today there were several of these articles but usa today is the one that he sent me and the headline this is by matthew diebel the headline reads yellowstone super volcano may blow sooner than thought yeah m dash and could wipe out life on the planet yeah so i could try to talk about this on my own but i thought that i would reach out to my good internet friend eric clemetti eric clemetti is on twitter at eruptions blog he also writes for discover magazine for a new blog titled rocky planet he used to write for wired but he has

moved to discover eric clemetti is also an associate professor at denison university he is a professor of geosciences he writes about earth science and he is a expert on volcanoes wonderful company good credentials wonderful credentials i asked him in email if he could write a one paragraph summary of why this is sensationalism he responded with two although i guess you could say that he responded with three there is a one sentence paragraph i will read eric clementi's words now in response to the latest and also in response to all general yellowstone super volcano sensationalism. Quote, so Yellowstone, we meet yet again. For those of you unfamiliar with Yellowstone,

it is a giant volcano in the middle of the United States, Wyoming to be exact, that we call a caldera. It has produced three of the largest eruptions on earth over the last few million years, large enough that we would no longer need to worry about a central division in either league. Because Yellowstone is known for these super eruptions, it gets a lot of attention in the media and amongst these people who enjoy worrying. However, much like the much ballyhooed hitter with quote, some pop in his bat, but not much else. Appreciate the baseball illusions in this paragraph. Eric Clemente, also a fan of the Red Sox and the Mariners. However, much like the much

ballyhooed hitter with some pop in his bat, but not much else, for 2017, think maybe Ryan Schimpf, Yellowstone isn't that scary. How much do you want to panic when Ryan comes up to bat? A little, maybe, but you know the chances of a home run are low compared to the chances of a strikeout 36% in 2017. Yellowstone is just like that. Three big eruptions over the last few million years, some smaller eruptions in between, mostly nothing in the last 70,000 years. Potential is there, but threat is very low. Now, like I said, the thing with Yellowstone is that it is a media darling. With every new study, a parade of articles shows up in the media, each taking turn to crank up the hype and confuse the science. The latest is about a study by Christy Till and

her students at Arizona. They wanted to answer a question. How quickly does it take for Yellowstone to go from quiet repose to eruption? Is it 10,000 years or a few weeks? You can look at how elements are zoned in crystals to get a sense of how long it took to heat up the magma before an eruption. Chrissy's group's work suggests that the heating might only start decades to years before the big eruption. Geologically, that's super fast for something that might disgorge over 500 cubic miles of volcanic ash and debris. Does this research mean Yellowstone is currently changing? No. Does this mean the volcano is more likely to erupt in our lifetime? No. Does it fundamentally change what we think of the danger Yellowstone poses? No. We know more about it, but we are in no greater peril, and that is very,

very low to start. That's Yellowstone, your 80 power, 20 contact volcano. No signs of coming out of the slump. Wow. Eric's just demoting Yellowstone to AAA El Paso. I'll read very quickly as well. So again, Eric is on Twitter at Eruptions Blog. I love following him because in the middle of the baseball playoffs, every so often I will see a video of someone standing on a peak near an erupting Japanese volcano. The erupted quite recently it was exquisite but he also linked out to a brief twitter thread from christy till advisor to the project in question so sort of her project christy till is an earth scientist at arizona state christy till is on twitter at at this underscore life not based underscore ball this underscore life And so she says Yellowstone has

had more than 23 smaller eruptions since its last eruption since its last large eruption 631,000 years ago, a future Yellowstone eruption is more likely to be one of these small lava flows. That's if there is an eruption at all, but it is possible Yellowstone will never erupt again. Volcanic eruptions are not like earthquakes that have recurrence intervals, so Yellowstone is not due or overdue to erupt. All signs of activity at Yellowstone are normal. There are no signs of eruption, as some media outlets are reporting. Our research is on events leading to the last large eruption 631,000 years ago.

It means nothing about current probability of an eruption. Yellowstone gets so much of the hype, but just forget about it. Something else is going to kill you. Well, sorry to disappoint everyone who is hoping that Yellowstone would put us as a country or species out of our misery and Nationals fans suffering,

but it sounds like that's not the case. That is about all that I have. Now, if Yellowstone were to erupt, my understanding is much of the gas and ash would blow toward the east. It would eventually encircle the globe. This is in the event of a massive super eruption, which again is unlikely in the event of an eruption in the first place. It is also worth remembering that when Yellowstone has had its massive eruptions before in known history, it has not caused any sort of extinction event a little less depressing and awful, but I don't know if that helps for people listening in the DC area. We have to talk about NLDS game five,

and we're recording the morning after, so we've gotten some sleep. We have some perspective on this game. We've had time to reflect, and all I can think of still is, what the heck was that? What was that weird baseball game? That was the strangest baseball game. I actually was thinking earlier in the day when I read that a company had paid $100,000 to have the Metro kept open for an extra hour till like 1230 or whatever they were saying at the time. I was thinking you are underestimating playoff baseball in 2017 if you think that going to 1230 is enough for people to see a whole baseball game and then get on the subway because that was not going to happen.

So we had a four hour and 37 minute affair. And at the end of it, Cubs won. Somehow there was an incredible amount of weirdness along the way and heartbreaking developments for nationals fans who have now lost what four nl division series in recent years and have still yet to win a playoff series with this group of players i mean i don't even know where to start exactly i guess you start with the umpiring weirdness and the replay weirdness, since that is what everyone is thinking about. That is not entirely what decided the game. There were lots of ways in which both teams played terribly, but that is maybe the most salient thing. inning where on consecutive plays there was an intentional walk a passed ball strikeout a catcher's interference a hit by pitch and of course the great baseball reference tweeted that that sequence of events had never happened before and not only had they not happened in a row but

those four things had never happened in an inning at all in the 2.73 million half innings in their database and only five games whole games had all four of those events and so great fun fact baseball reference and maybe we know why that has never happened before because very likely it should not have happened here either. I don't know. So we've got the catcher's interference or the interference call that was not called. There was one that was called, but then on the Javi Baez backswing,

I don't know. Do you want to set this up? I've been talking for a while and it's hard even to summarize what happened here. I mean, I feel like I was talking for a while about a super volcano at the start of this so uh one thing i will quickly mention before we proceed this was the longest nine inning game in postseason history i didn't bother looking up the regular season but very possibly also in the regular season so this game was as you said four hours

and 37 minutes long and that eclipsed by five minutes last year's NLDS game five that the Nationals also lost now that game had seven runs this one had 17 it made a little more sense that this game took so long just because there were so many runs in fact the third longest nine inning playoff game was the 2004 ALCS when the Yankees beat the Red Sox to 19 to 8 so more runs means more time but good lord that live blog took forever and as part of that live blog we had the fifth inning yes the inning that made me so thankful that i was live blogging and therefore not tasked with trying to write a coherent article about this game because it's just it's this is this game is a book this game is a book yeah no one would want to read

because i'm not even sure i'm not even sure if that was a good baseball game it was a close baseball game yeah but it kind of i don't know it kind of, I don't know, it kind of sucked. It kind of sucked to watch. It wasn't well executed. No. I'm sure, I mean, Cubs fans, I'm sure, are relieved and happy. But it doesn't really feel like anyone won this game. It's just someone lost a little bit less, I guess.

And I think after the fifth inning, when the Cubs went ahead 7-4, we will get to the hobby or bias play in time. I think maybe after the fifth inning when it was seven to four and then the Cubs added a run to make it eight to four I think at that point I'm gonna guess and just based on the sound of things at at the Nationals ballpark that everyone all the fans are just kind of in in shell shock and then they probably just figured rightly at that point like oh it happened to us again this is just the thing that happens to us and then so when the nationals rallied later on and they came so close and then jose lobotan we'll get to that i think that by then maybe i could be completely wrong

in this but having been and still being a fan of some sports teams and i've seen games kind of like this you just kind of you assume the loss earlier and then it's all just kind of gravy later on when the team tries to rally so in a sense i think the game is so long and so horrible it kind of let nationals fans off the hook a little bit and then i think they got a lot of their dejection out of the way and like the fifth and then from there on it's just kind of a a soft a soft ending that offered them a little bit of hope but okay we should just let's just now i've been talking forever yeah fifth inning yeah fifth inning cubs are already leading at this point because of an addison russell double the cubs are leading the nationals five to four yeah and they have runners on first and second max scherzer is pitching he's just intentionally watched jason

hayward which he did not do from the beginning but the lesson here by the way is don't take matt albers out of the game i think that is the lesson that anyone should draw from this because everything was fine when matt albers was pitching and then they pinch hit for him which i was upset about because it deprived us of the chance to see matt albers at the plate in a playoff elimination game but after you remove albers that's when all hell breaks loose so So keep that in mind. And one should not forget that Matt Albers has, oh, wait, no, he's batted a lot of times before. Well, I was going to say last year, he probably led baseball with an OPS of 3.000. He had a double as one plate appearance, but that overlooks the fact that earlier in his career, he batted a lot.

It was terrible because he's a pitcher. No recollection of his having pitched for Houston. That is just an era that has passed me by anyway fifth inning yeah scherzer intentionally walks jason hayward which sounds like a silly thing to do but scherzer had already thrown him two balls so at that point he thought well why mess around with a lefty when i can just strike out javier baez on three pitches which he did because javier baez is not a good hitter i don't care what anybody says but bias struck out in such a horrible fashion. This brings up Sam Miller's worst rule in baseball. Baez struck out at a

pitch that was so bad that Matt Wieters couldn't corral it cleanly, so Baez started to run. Baez made it to first base. Wieters had to go get the baseball, tried to throw to first base. The ball eluded the Nationals' first baseman. It eluded the the ball eluded the nationals first baseman it eluded the guy backing up the nationals first baseman because the throw was so bad that allowed another run to score so not only did bias reach on the play but russell came around to score hayward moved third bias went to second the inning continued the cubs would score again on a hit by pitch because why not that followed the catcher's interference which is only the 14th catcher's interference in the history of the baseball playoffs.

Two of them have happened two days in a row. And anyway, at issue here is that on Baez's backswing, after he swung so forcefully and horribly at the third strike, his bat made contact with Matt Weir's helmet. Made contact with the side of the helmet. I think that the replays were fairly unambiguous about that. It didn't seem to me to interfere with the gameplay so much bias was likely to make it first base anyway and it's not like his backswing caused matt weeders to make a bad throw unless he got like a micro concussion that manifested immediately so i'll read a rule that i think no one had ever seen before in the history of baseball yeah rule uh this is a comment

i guess from the official rule book quote if a batter strikes at a ball and the misses and swings so hard by us he carries the bat all the way around and in the umpire's judgment unintentionally hits the catcher or the ball in the back of him on the backswing it shall be called a strike only parentheses not interference the ball will be dead however and no runners shall advance on the play. I don't know how to interpret that rule because I'd never heard of it before. I don't think Major League Baseball knows how to interpret that rule because I'm not sure that anyone has ever seen this in any dusty corner of the rulebook ever. But reading that rule, it seems like it should have been a dead ball and Baez should have been out by the letter of the law. And the letter of the law would become important later on in the same game. But I guess the Nationals were

given an explanation later that maybe you have in front of you. I do. Yeah. So I can't claim that I was aware of the specifics of this rule at the time. Certainly Ron Darling was not because he immediately dismissed the idea that this mattered in any way. And this was kind of a microcosm of the whole game because it was an example of just everyone being bad. It was Baez being bad. It was Wieders being bad. It was other nationals being bad. It was umpires potentially being bad.

So even if this was called incorrectly, obviously this was not a good play by the Nationals, but it does seem as if they should have been bailed out here. And so, yeah, you just read the text. And so the text mentions in the umpire's judgment. And what seems to me to be the case here is that maybe the umpire was interpreting differently or misinterpreting what is supposed to be subject to the umpire's judgment in this play. So I will read the postgame comments by crew chief, home plate umpire, Jerry Lane. And this is, it's a funny quote because he says, in my judgment, literally four times in like as many sentences. There's a character on The Good Wife, a judge who like makes you say, in my opinion, after everything you say in court, or else you'll like be in contempt of court. And that's basically what Jerry Lane is doing here with In My Judgment. So he says, backswing interference is a play where

a guy is stealing, or there's a play being made, a runner hindering the catch, which I mean, first of all, that assertion is not actually in the rules, right? I mean, he's just, he's saying that. And then he says, it was a wild pitch and went past him. That is no longer in that particular description, in my judgment. In my judgment, the passed ball changed the whole rule around to where, in my judgment, it had nothing to do with anything. Therefore, it didn't have any effect on it, in my judgment. So he got four in my judgments in there, almost as if he any effect on it in my judgment so he got four in my judgments

in there almost as if he was referring to the in my judgment in the rule actually there are more in my judgments so just a second here when the ball gets past him all right in my judgment he didn't have any more opportunity after he had a chance to field the ball there was no further play that could have been made on it the grays of the helmet didn't have anything to do in my judgment with anything at all with that particular play i understand it's pretty much my judgment i got together and found everybody was in agreement that's what we went with he got one more judgment in there later and uh i think so it seems to me that he is interpreting this to mean that the part of it that's supposed to be up to his judgment is whether this contact impacted anything, whether it interfered with the actual play.

And at least according to the letter of the rule book, I guess we could argue about the spirit of the rule. But the only thing subject to the umpire's judgment in that snippet that you read is whether the bat actually hit the catcher's helmet. in that snippet that you read is whether the bat actually hit the catcher's helmet, right? In the umpire's judgment, did he unintentionally hit the catcher or the ball in back of him? That's the emphasis, though. I think it's on whether it was intentional or not. I think that's what the judgment applies to. Right. Okay. And he's not arguing that, right? He's not saying, I thought it was intentional or I thought he didn't hit him with the bat. He's just saying, I didn't think it mattered. I didn't think it hurt the Nationals. And so, therefore, the Cubs should not be punished for that, which to me seems like that is not what the rule is saying. That's of all, I don't know if he knew that Wieders was hit because maybe he couldn't see it. It was happening in a way he wasn't looking and Wieders was gesturing to his helmet and getting the umpires together to confer about this. happened and this is not subject to replay review for whatever reason it seems like if a hit by pitch is subject to replay review there's no particular reason why this shouldn't be unless

i guess it's the judgment aspect of it but if we're arguing about whether he actually hit him or not with the bat he definitely did hit him with the bat so maybe they just missed that and are coming up with a explanation to kind of cover the, for themselves here and saying, well, it didn't matter anyway. So that's what we were saying. Anyway, it seems to me not entirely consistent with the rule as written in my judgment. Uh,

yeah, it would be, okay. This was such a new kind of play. I agree that ultimately the, the fact that bias hit weeders in the helmet, he hit him. It was, it the fact that Baez hit Wieters in the helmet, it was obvious that he did hit him, but he didn't hit him really hard. Wieters didn't fall to the ground.

He didn't have a seizure. The helmet just kind of moved a little bit, as I think Wieters was already turning his head. So I understand that if this had been called a dead ball and if that had been the end of the inning, then I think Cubs fans could have been rightfully a little bit upset just because... Yeah, no one was going to be happy about any outcome at this point. And I mean, based on how the play went, at the end of the day,

the rule is stupid that runners can go after striking out in the first place, but that is the rule. We've always known that rule. And I think that given how the play went, Nationals can't be too upset. It would just kind of stick in your craw that if that had proven the difference and you know maybe it did prove the difference i don't really know that the nationals fans could argue that well we lost because of misapplied technicality so i get that yeah i think that the game turned on something later that makes the the fifth maybe a little easier to stomach just because there can be all this fury about what happened in the eighth inning. So I don't know in what order we should even talk about this game.

I mean, there was Michael A. Taylor hitting a ball for a home run that was 10 feet off the ground. Javier Baez swung through a pitch that was somehow even higher than that. There was a lot that happened in this thing, but i don't know do you want to is there anything you want to talk about before we just move to the eighth maybe we'll circle back i guess but yeah i mean i guess you make a good point there like if this were the only thing that had gone against the nationals then maybe they could feel bad about the call potentially being applied incorrectly, but they messed up, right? I mean, the weeders didn't block the ball, and that's kind of on them.

And I don't think that being hit by Baez's bat actually had any impact on the play. And so it would have just been kind of bailing them out on a technicality, as you're saying. And maybe they should have been based on the rules, but it's not as if they did something good and were not credited for it. It was more like they just were not saved by a kind of rulebook ex machina kind of thing that no one even knew about. So it would have felt almost cheap the other way if this had had an impact. So I guess, I don't know, you could still be angry about that and feel entitled to, I think. But yeah, no one was going to be pleased about any outcome of that play. Whereas when we get to the eighth and the Jose Lobotan play, I guess we might

as well just talk about that now and maybe we'll circle back to other aspects of this game. But the Nationals were rallying and it's so hard to keep the sequence of events in this wild game so what was the score at the time of the lobotomy play uh nine to eight so uh daniel murphy in the bottom of the eighth wade davis was pitching he was going for a seven out save he walked daniel murphy to lead off that's bad he walked anthony rendon batting second that's bad so Davis has 12 pitches into the inning with no outs Adam Lind comes off the bench for a heroic first pitch double play so we're almost the worst imaginable outcome of that could have been a triple play but

Adam Lind's third postseason play it appears not as good as his uh first two so Lind bounces into the double play and then it feels for the 11th time in the game like the Nationals are doomed. Then Michael A. Taylor comes up, singles up the middle, off the fists. It's 9-8. Taylor's single is followed by a single by the offensively woeful Jose Lobaton. Lobaton goes first. Taylor goes second. Taylor is the tying run at this point.

He is very fast. So he just needs a single or a dropped third strike that gets to the backstop to score trey turner comes up and on the third pitch of trey turner's at bat lobotan is picked off at first base it was a back pick by the cubs it was a back that was originally called safe because lobotan was right safe it seemed yeah yeah so great throw by wilson conteras, who does backpicking a lot. It was right on target and good job by him. But the controversy came because, yes, he was initially ruled safe. He appeared to the naked eye to be safe. He appeared to the first like eight replays to be safe. And then ultimately, after much reviewing of the tape, there was a split screen that shows pretty convincingly that he was technically out in that his, you know, some part of his body.

What was it like his foot or something? Or I don't even remember what part of him was just infinitesimally off of the base. of the base you can just see like the slightest separation maybe a little bit of a shadow that suggests pretty strongly that at that instant he was not fully in contact with the bag and Rizzo had held the glove there was still applying the tag and so according to the rules of baseball he was technically out and this is a play we've seen many times, and it makes everyone mad every time we see it. And certainly for all of baseball history before replay, this would have been safe. No one would have been upset about it. And now it's the replay issue that crops up in football and other sports about what is a catch?

How do you even decide when a catch is? football and other sports about what is a catch how do you even decide when it catches and we have the same thing about safer out on these very specific tag plays where essentially just physics and momentum and gravity just brings a player very slightly off the bag it's not laziness it's not not paying attention it's an almost just unavoidable i mean i guess you could slide with a slightly different technique that would definitely keep you in contact with the bag. But this is not something that players have grown up and been groomed to care about because this was not something that mattered until recently in baseball history.

And there's only so much you can do when you have a large human being trying to slide back into a little bag. And maybe at some point during that action, you're just going to pop off it very, very briefly. It's not because you are trying to advance to the next base or anything. It's just because physics. And so every time this happens, I think it feels cheap. It feels wrong. It feels like a perversion of the sport and what people wanted replay to be. And I don't know that anyone was happy about this other than the Cubs and maybe Cubs fans, but I didn't think this play was going

to be overturned just because the first several replays I saw did not look clear and convincing. And I mean, even I don't think I had seen a clear and convincing angle even by the time someone in New York evidently did and overturned the call but this just always feels terrible and it feels like the game is just being decided on something even worse than the umpire's judgment on a rule that no one had absolutely credit credit to Contreras again for making a strong back pick and if this had come down to like an almost absolute tie, except then they go to replay and Contreras' throw

beat Lobotov back to the bag by like half of one frame, whatever, that's fine. You go to replay and you say, okay, the back pick worked. And he's out. He was out because the throw beat him. But the throw didn't beat him. Lobotov was back safe. This rule sucks and here's why.

So it's absolutely true that it's always been true in baseball that if you come off the base, you could be tagged in your app that's true you cannot argue that point and i think that is that is the point that people can't uh bring up in defense of this rule mostly because the team that they root for has benefited from these calls and so therefore you decide that this is uh this is great not a travesty at all but the the reality is that because we have instant replay because we have these hundred thousand dollar cameras at bases, we're just seeing things clearer than we ever have. And we know now that runners come off the base when they slide. It doesn't happen all the time.

Of course, there are better slides and worse slides. But when you have the base that's like harder than ever, it's like sliding into a brick wall practically, except that it's also low enough that you can roll an ankle over it because bases are incredibly dangerous and i can't believe that we have them right now in the first place i don't know why they're not like bags like they used to be soft bags if you're sliding into a soft bag you're not going to lose contact with it the way that the way that happens now but we can see clear than ever that when you slide into a base much of the time i don't i haven't looked at enough slides to know what like the frequency is but you can see that part of the body will come off the base and it's just open something up that nobody ever knew about and so if you if you figure that this has always been in the rule book but if if we had the knowledge from the beginning that this was happening and if we had this technology from the beginning then a rule would almost

certainly be in place that you couldn't review these things because this is stupid this there's no purpose there's no purpose there's no benefit to baseball for lobotan to be out on display he was back to the base before the throw was back to the base before he was tagged and he didn't do anything any intentionality that he was trying to drift from the base he wasn't he clearly wasn't like trying to barely slide into first we can get to second or something that's that doesn't make any sense and so you have and it wasn't carelessness it wasn't like his mind wondered and he stepped off the base absolutely not you could say oh well he should learn to slide better and that's fine and you know what if they don't do anything with the rule then all players will learn to slide eventually in such a way that they don't lose

contact with the base if that means that they have to slide into bases less forcefully or they go a little slower then i guess that's going to work to the pitcher and defense's benefit because the base runners are going to have to be a lot more cautious and i don't know if that's something anybody wants i don't know i don't know what the the long-term implications are going to be but i my opinion is that baseball has to deal with this because that play sucked and it killed it killed what could have been such a fantastic inning maybe trey turner was going to strike out two pitches later he does that a lot he's not that good of a hitter but the fact that the nationals had gone through the Lind double play

and then Taylor and Lobaton, Lobaton got a hit. Jose Lobaton got a hit in this inning. And the fact that the Nationals had a chance, and even if Turner makes an out, it at least means that in the ninth inning, instead of Turner, Worth Harper, it goes Worth Harper, Zimmerman, and then maybe Daniel Murphy. And I don't want to be too specific to this game because the momentum won't always feel the same. The stakes won't always be the

same. The situation won't always be the same. But that rule, that call has sucked from the beginning. And this is what the third year, I think maybe the fourth. I don't know that we've seen these reviews called for and and they work credit to the managers who were able to use them. I was thinking when I was eventually taking a shower last night i was thinking about like if if i were a manager and i were in this situation or a situation like this i might all regular season long i might like protest to never challenge a play like this just because i think it's it's bad for the game but if you end up in a game like this you can't not take a look at it it's just you can't give up your position you can't reduce your own chances of it. It's just you can't give up your position. You can't reduce your own chances of winning

just on principle because people wouldn't respond to that very well. Nobody likes a principled loser manager. So you have to challenge the tag, but it's just, it's bad. It's bad. I hate it. There's no benefit to the game for it.

I don't care if the rule has always been whatever the rule is. I don't care who you root for. I don't care if this doesn't happen very often. It sucks. And we saw it yesterday and I hate it and I never want to see it again. Yeah. And I'm pro replay. I like replay. A lot of people generalize from plays like this and say, does anyone actually like replay? Has replay made the sport better in any way? And I like replay. Replay gave us a John Lester pickoff the night before. That alone, I think, justified its existence. But no, I think even with this occasional terrible,

annoying call like this, I think we're better off with replay than not just because of the good calls that it helps us get right. But there's no reason why it needs to be a trade-off like that. I think there are things that we can do here. And most people, when they criticize this kind of call, don't offer a way to fix it because it is not easy to find a precise wording or rule that will allow you to review the calls that you do want to be able to review and not the calls that you don't want to be able to review. That is kind of tricky because obviously you want some tag plays to be reviewable. And I like the fact

that getting to the base before the ball is no longer an automatic safe call because there are a lot of times where a player should be rewarded for like making a really clever slide, that kind of thing. Like your body's not there, but you reach your hand around to the base, that kind of thing. I like that. I think that's a skill and that's fun. And that's something that players should not be penalized for or should be rewarded for. They do something good. But this is a little different from that.

And I don't know that anyone has made a better suggestion than Dave Cameron, who has made this suggestion before and made it again today at Fangraphs in a post. And I don't know that I've even seen any other suggestions because, as I mentioned, it's a tough thing to formulate. But Dave's suggestion, if I can kind of sum it up, and it's a little complicated, so I don't know that I'll get it exactly right. But he's essentially saying that there should be sort of a vertical safe zone, like kind of the airspace above the bag. If you're just trying to get back into the bag on a play like this and your whole body is above the bag, there should just be a safe area, essentially. So Lobaton's whole body was on top of the bag. area essentially. So Lobaton's whole body was on top of the bag. He was not attempting to advance to second base or anything, or you could apply this same formulation to any base. And that would

be the rule that there's this safe area after you establish contact with the base. If you're then coming back to the base, if you get tagged on some part of the body that is above the base directly, but you're not actually touching the base, that's okay. And I think, I don't know, maybe you could come up with some kind of case where this would lead to a play or a call that you didn't like. But I think we'd be better off with this rule than the one we currently have. Agreed. I haven't seen anything better than Dave's suggestion either. And the negative response I've seen has been the same stuff that well the rule has always been there that if you're off the base you're off the base yeah but i don't know i

think his rule works fine i think it would be easy enough to apply i think if you if you want to go really detailed and really search for reason to complain you could say well what uh what about the the hidden ball trick uh should you be allowed but if you only apply it to slide plays and the hidden ball trick does not have to do with the slide play when the blue jays did their sort of pseudo hidden ball trick late in the season that's different the runner wandered off the base it's easy to not lose contact with the base when you're just standing on it there's no excuse for leaving the base under those circumstances so not that the big concern here is little gimmick plays on defense but in any case easy enough to avoid and yeah i'm a i'm a believer in in dave's play i think that if you want to point out that there could be a downside you

could say well if you're talking about a vertical safe space then what if a runner is sliding into the side of the bag and then he seems to make it safe but his his foot comes maybe over over the bag and just out of the vertical safe space we don't have an overhead camera to my knowledge on bases to know when a player is actually over the base but i mean in pretty much every circumstance it seems like when the runner comes off he's hovering over the base i don't think that we've seen a situation where a runner is off to the side very often and if you have slid in such a way that you are not actually over the base that probably was a bad slide you probably should be out so even though this would still leave room

for umpire judgment i don't care because it would 99.8 of the time we would be able to avoid these plays and and you can't get rid of judgment calls completely but if you can get rid of many of these horrible horrible blights on the game then i think that you should do it and just like when baseball had to change its weird stupid catch rule on the fly you remember that that was ridiculous they have changed these things before and i don't know if this isn't quite like that because that was absurd that was a mockery of the game and this is just the letter of the law being applied in in a novel way but oh man i would sure love to game. And this is just the letter of the law being applied in a novel way. But, oh, man, I would sure love to see baseball change this rule in the offseason.

And I just I don't know if the groundswell of interest is there within the league. But that was a we've seen this in the playoffs. I don't know, maybe a half dozen times. There's a lot of eyes on this way and nobody likes it. Yeah. Lest anyone think that Dave is a secret nationals fan who's biased against the cubs he wrote almost exactly the same article last year like october 10th 2016 or something like that when javier baez was called out on a very similar play at second base in the series against the giants so yeah maybe this is the high profile example of this kind of play that MLB needs to do something about it because

as usual there needs to be someone hurt or something embarrassing to provide the impetus for MLB to do something maybe this was it so maybe Nationals fans suffering is not in vain maybe Jose Lopetone's sacrifice here will lead to a rule change over the offseason. I wouldn't be shocked to see that. But yeah, I think we need it at this point because no one likes this. I don't think anyone feels like this is making baseball better. And I mean, people will say the same thing about any replay. You can find someone who just hates replay review and it slows down the game and human element, et cetera, et cetera.

But I think it's got to be almost universal that no one thinks this is in the spirit of it so i i think we've we got to do something and unfortunately it will be too late for the nationals and max scherzer just had everything you could possibly have go against you go against you in this game he barely was hit hard and yet he allowed a bunch of runs. And it was kind of shocking because we're conditioned now to see the starter, the ace pitcher come in, in the elimination game and just shut down the team. And that's always fun. That's one of my favorite parts of postseason baseball. And maybe some teams have gone overboard with that

move this offseason and sometimes it's worked and sometimes it hasn't. But bringing in guys not even in elimination games or guys who were slated to start soon anyway, it's a little bit more of a debatable call. But I think we all knew with the way that Max Scherzer was wired that he was going to get himself into this game at some point. And there was no reason to think that everything would just come off the rails as soon as he got into this game. And just based on how he pitched, I mean, I'm not going to say he was brilliant, but I don't think he deserved this fate. And it's sad for Nationals fans. And like, I don't want to be too anti-Cub either, because I've seen a lot of Cubs backlash too. This is obviously the third straight NLCS that the Cubs have appeared in. And I think they're getting a dose of the Cardinals kind of backlash where the team is there

every year and they're beating teams that have not been there. And maybe in the interest of fairness, this other team should be there once. And so people are kind of sick of the Cubs. And I don't really think that's fair to the Cubs. They haven't done anything to deserve a backlash other than be good at baseball. And they built this team in a smart way, and they have a lot of good, young, compelling, fun-to-watch players. And I'm not sorry that the Cubs are there again. I don't think it's really just to say that baseball is worse with the Cubs than the NLCS or anything, but because they were playing the Nationals and the Nationals have this sympathetic story and all this heartbreak in their recent past and really more painful to be really good and keep having these heartbreaking playoff losses or just to be bad every year. I mean, maybe the Nationals have had it better than a lot of teams over the past five seasons or so because they keep winning the division and putting good teams on the field and getting to this point. So there's something to be said for that as opposed to just putting out a 70 win team every year but it does set you up for this sort of more lasting heartbreak like you know just being

bad and not making the playoffs is it's a drag but it's not really something that causes you agony all offseason and that's what the nationals are facing you just have to ask some hardcore nationals fans whether they enjoyed 2006 through 2010 more or whether they're bigger fans of 2012 through 2017 because the Nationals used to be absolutely dreadful. Let's just click on an arbitrary season here. 2008, who was their best player? Christian Guzman, okay?

Christian Guzman was, if I'm remembering this correctly, Christian Guzman was eventually traded for tenor rowark so congratulations to the nationals for that i should mention while you were talking i was on youtube watching some slides by billy hamilton and each row and to their credit they seem to be able to slide pretty effectively without coming off the bag hamilton i've been watching some headfirst slides where he grabs the base and doesn't come off and each row just is perfect just perfect at the minute details not so perfect at the greater details of the sport anymore but he at least still has the details down gold itro a clean slider but yeah if if baseball isn't going to do anything about the

slide and the coming off the bag rule then i guess next spring training everyone is going to be learning better ways to slide or at least they should but yeah so from the from the cubs and and the sort of internet contrarian or hater perspective there's there's absolutely nothing surprising teams start to feel overexposed over covered this is the cubs for heaven's sake so it's not even like if if the royals made the playoffs a third year in a row and and made some run after going to the world series two years in a row i don't think the royals would feel overexposed in the way that the Cubs do because of course anyone who covers baseball or creates advertisements or anything, they're going to love having the Cubs in there because there's just so much attention

that you can get for featuring the Cubs. So that's inevitable. The team gets only so many chances to feel fresh. One of the things that I am modestly worried about in the back of my head, if the Mariners are ever good. Which first of all. Number one concern. Will the Mariners ever be good? But in the event that they are. I think that they will get one year. The first year that the Mariners make the playoffs.

They will be America's bandwagon. People will love the team. Because they have been suck. For so long. And so they will get the one chance. And then you don't want to blow that chance because if you if they then made the playoffs the next year then it would just have a different feel they wouldn't feel so fresh and warm because people freshness is a fleeting concept

now i think if you if you make the playoffs and lose the wild card game that that doesn't really count i don't think i think you need some sort of series appearance at least, but fans get used to a team pretty quick, I think. I mean, think about how quickly we got over the Royals being good. What a sentence that is. Or the Pirates a little before that, even though the Pirates didn't really make it too deep into the playoffs. But they got good all of a sudden. The Blue Jays got good all of a sudden. And you just get used to it.

Even this year, the Rockies were pretty good, but then by the second half of the season, we just got used to the Rockies being good, which we never should have done because the Rockies were not good for a long time. Anyway, so it's inevitable that, of course, some people are going to turn on the Cubs. The lovable losers moniker is gone. It's dead.

It's dead for at least to the next 108 years or whatever it's going to be, and there's no recapturing that. That is one of the, I guess you could say, small downsides of winning the World Series is that, OK, well, the identity that the Cubs had is gone. It's gone and it's dead forever, just like it was with the Red Sox. And so, yeah, you're going to start seeing some backlash to the Cubs credit. I think that you you look at that team and you look at the team that the Cubs have had. And if you had to identify someone to actually hate, like when people hated the Yankees, like, oh, they have Alex Rodriguez and everybody hates Alex Rodriguez.

And you have the Red Sox. And boy, it's so easy to hate so many of the players that were on the Red Sox when they were good. And Curt Schilling, may he rest in peace. It's just an awful, awful, dreadful human being he's turned into. But maybe we didn't know that when he was playing. That doesn't matter. That's not pertinent. But with the C who do you who do you hate who would you hate on these cubs and the sense i get is people are just people don't know how to express the fact that they're over the cubs and i think that they they just say that they hate joe madden but like what fun is it to just be annoyed by a manager like that's just so unsatisfying from a

fan perspective i have to think yeah right i don't know maybe madden's tactical reputation outstrips the reality at this point or people are just sick of how much credit he gets but he's clearly a successful manager who was liked by his players and has done a lot of innovative things over the years so yeah yeah, it's not a great backlash target. I guess last year, there was a Roldis Chapman, right? And people could, I think, justifiably dislike him and the team for acquiring him. But this year, I don't know, it seems like more of a team level backlash to all the hashtags and everything and fly the W. Every team has hashtags.

Right. That's Cub. Yeah. Every team has some annoying slogan, I think. And so I don't know that that's unique to the Cubs. And yeah, I mean, a lot of their players are just fun and not bad in any way, as far as we know, like off the field. So I don't know. I think that's part of the reason why I can't really justify any kind of being over the Cubs myself I think they deserve to be here you know I don't know so I'm okay with the Cubs winning

it would have been nice for Nationals fans to see their team win a playoff series but to kind of hold the Cubs accountable for that is is tough yeah I mean I guess it would be really easy to hate John Lackey just because you know he's the john lackiness of him but i mean he's not like an integral part of this roster you're right about the the chapman thing and i know that left distaste in a good number of people's mouths last year when the when the cubs won but he wasn't there in 2015 he's he's not there now he's on a different team in the league championship series now he could say okay maybe javier baez is overrated and i get it he is he is overrated but he is a hell of a lot of fun to watch even though

he's not that good he just makes baseball fun the events he's involved in are just more exciting than your average baseball event Chris Bryant and Anthony Rizzo like baseball couldn't basically baseball couldn't dream of a better pair of teammates just for marketing and PR purposes they're like just great they're just for marketing and pr purposes they're like just great they're just great like across the board they're great at everything and they're great ambassadors for the sport john lester i don't know i don't know what is really debatable about john lester's bona fides like he's okay he was involved in the the red sox chicken and beer situation a few years ago but that's laughable in retrospect i don't know i guess jake arietta made the mistake of one time modestly expressing his political opinion but

that doesn't really that's not unique across the baseball landscape so i don't i don't know i guess john lester was mad about that nacho man in the stands recently he was it's like okay well yeah it could have been more fun i guess about you're reaching and maybe you don't maybe if you're gonna hit the cubs you don't need to like anchor it to a player so i don't know i think that if everyone if you don't like the cubs it is well within your right to just not be happy that they're back in the championship series now granted if you're gonna feel that way about the cubs well guess who they're playing it's the dodgers and guess who's in the other league championship series it's the yankees not a whole lot of necessarily fresh blood in there

as much as the Yankees do feel like they're a little bit fresh weird feeling there where the Yankees are the underdog but anyway if you aren't thrilled that the Cubs are back that's fine totally your thing and uh you just I guess you can't uh you can't staple it to a member of the roster or the coaching staff you can just kind of be unhappy and you can want the Cubs to lose. And that's fine. Sometimes it can be surprising if you watch a sporting event and you don't exactly know how you're going to feel about it until it's actually going. All right. Well, because of the timing this week, we didn't actually discuss the end of the Yankees series.

I guess we didn't get to talk about the Strasburg madness. And that's the way the podcast crumbles. I guess in October, there's just way the podcast crumbles, I guess. In October, there's just a constant deluge of stuff that happens, and we move on to the next thing. And those things have been well covered. Do you have any closing thoughts on either of the series that is about to begin? We've got Cubs now and Dodgers starting this weekend.

We've got Yankees and Astros starting later today as we speak on Friday morning. Good series. Going to be good series. Yeah. I agree. Yeah. I don't think there are, I mean, I think there are favorites here probably. You'd take the Dodgers, you'd take the Astros, but they are not lopsided matchups.

They should be competitive. And I don't know if we could break them down in great detail, I suppose. But we've been talking about these teams for a while now. I think we know these teams. It's going to be fun. I mean, I was kind of looking forward to an Indians-Astros matchup of like best pitching team ever versus almost best hitting team ever. And we're not quite getting that.

But the Yankees were probably the best pitching team that was not the Indians and watching their bullpen go to work against the Astros deep and good lineup is going to be a lot of fun there's the Beltran finally perhaps winning a World Series storyline there's Altuve versus Judge. There's will Judge make contact? There's all kinds of fun storylines here. But yeah, I don't know that there's anything I have a pressing need to say because we will very soon be discussing how these series are going. And there's seven game series. So we're going to be talking about these four teams for a while.

Final thoughts. Okay. So Nationals Cubs, as as mentioned at 277 minutes the longest nine inning playoff game ever so i ran a query to look also at the regular season so there are on record only three longer regular season game nine inning regular season games than yesterday's cubs nationals game five at 283 minutes, we have a game from September 14th, Yankees-Red Sox. The Yankees won the game 8-7. 283 minutes,

Yankees-Red Sox 8-7, 2007. Why not? At 285 minutes, we have a game between the Yankees and Red Sox from the year 2006, August 18th. To make matters worse, the second game of a doubleheader. The Yankees lost to the Red Sox 14 to 11 that game

took very it took 15 minutes shy of five hours and so that was 285 minutes and according to the play index and i think we can both agree that the play index is is the smartest baseball resource in the world so second place longest baseball game 285 minutes first place this is a game from may 5th 1928 this is a game between the st louis browns and the washington senators clocking in at 1245 minutes i see nothing to argue here so what would that make this 1245 minutes would it make this a game that lasted uh approximately 20 and three quarters hours sure the washington senators beat the st louis browns six to five and this game actually only went eight and a half innings the winning pitcher was bump hadley uh the

losing pitcher was who cares because he was relieved by someone named general crowder and someone else named boom boom beck uh there was a lefty who pitched in this game lefty stewart batting fifth for the washington senators was aussie blue g which is just a fantastic name that apparently i've clicked on before bucky harris muddy rule was a catcher red barns played left field just uh there was a guy for the for the browns playing first base his name is lou blue which is just all kinds of fun playing left field was heidi manouche uh there was a red crest playing a shortstop so two reds in this game two reds a, a bump, a boom, boom, and a loo blue. So all kinds of fun.

I don't know why this game took 20 hours and three quarters of another hour, but I see no reason to doubt the play index. So the longest game in baseball history, almost 21 hours, Washington Center to St. Louis Browns. Sounds like it's true. Yeah. Checks out. Yeah.

All right. One parting thought here. Everything has been branded this postseason like every series has been sponsored by a specific company which i don't know if that's happened before but it keeps leading to these crazy sentences it's like a major league baseball thing so when you read articles at mlb.com it seems as if they are contractually obligated to refer to each series by its full name which is like the series presented by the sponsor. And so you get these really crazy sentences like, I'm going to read just the first sentence from a Mike Petriello recent article about the Astros.

This is not a criticism of Mike. Mike is wonderful. We both like Mike. He is great. of Mike. Mike is wonderful. We both like Mike. He is great. And I'm sure it was not his idea to have this sponsorship agreement, but he is bound by it, as is everyone who writes there. So this article begins, let it never be forgotten that in order to beat the Red Sox in game four of the American League Division Series presented by Doosan to advance to the AL Championship Series presented by Camping World, the Astros first had to beat the best pitchers the game has to

offer and then it goes on after that so every time you mention the american league division series you have to say presented by ducon every time you mention the alcs you have to say presented by camping world it uh it saps somewhat from the luster of the playoffs, I would say, to have to refer to it that way. I don't know why Doosan is sponsoring a playoff series. This is a South Korean, what, construction company. I don't know what benefit they're getting here. I don't blame anyone for extracting payment for publicity here, but this is putting some writers in a very silly position. It's the MLB.com writing equivalent of in my judgment.

Yeah. All right. Well, I've got to go get married, so I guess we should stop now. Dedication to the podcast. Yeah. I'll be podcasting right before the marriage, podcasting right after the marriage. I will make one concession. I will not podcast during the marriage, but we will reconvene to talk about the start of the various championship series presented by various corporate sponsors very soon.

You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Five listeners who have already pledged their support include Chad Post, DeBron Rz nick taylor seth resnick and kevin dinan thanks to all of you you can join our facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild and you can rate and review and subscribe to the podcast on itunes thanks to dylan higgins for editing assistance if you're looking for something else to listen to michael bowman and i did discuss the things that we missed on Effectively Wild. The Strasburg start, the end of the Yankees Astros series, some championship series preview on our most recent episode of the Ringer MLB show. So you can find that on the Ringer MLB show feed. Please keep your questions and comments for me and Jeff coming via email at podcastfancrafts.com or via the Patreon messaging system.

Enjoy the weekend of baseball. We will talk to you next week. We don't need to think for ourselves No, we don't need to think at all When the school says go, we go It's a judgment call It's a judgment call