Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1124: Winging It

Episode Date: October 17, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Ben’s wedding weekend, the outfield-wall padding at Minute Maid Park, the rapid repair of a behind-home-plate sign, and a very long pause between pitches, then discuss the first four games of the championship series, including Joe Maddon’s decision-making in Game 2, the Cubs’ moribund offense, the pivotal plays […]

Hello and welcome to episode 1124 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I'm Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs. Hello. Hello. How are you? I'm doing okay. I had a less exciting weekend than you did, but this is also the second podcast you've recorded since becoming a married person, so maybe there's no need to belabor the point. Ben Lindberg, now a married person. Congratulations. Do I sound like a married man? Do I sound different? Do I sound deeply committed in a lifelong relationship?

Yeah, you sound shifted towards some sort of emotional permanence. So congratulations. I'll just keep notes on how this seems to have changed you, but I'm going to try to avoid any sort of marriage joke because there is no new ground. Skipping right ahead. Did you have a chance to pay attention to baseball this weekend yeah a little bit i was i wasn't able to watch the the yankees astros game on saturday because i was getting married and then that was my wedding night i wasn't watching a whole lot of baseball but

i was like in the hotel lobby watching Yankees-Astros game one the night before. I was kind of seeing snippets here and there. I was checking my at-bat app here and there. And then Sunday I was back in time to watch Cubs-Dodgers. So I didn't watch all the baseball, but I think I am fully apprised of the baseball that was played. You didn't want to be one of those grooms who demanded a projector screen during the wedding to have the game on the wall? No. My phone was actually confiscated so that I would not be tempted to check anything during

the actual ceremony itself. I did get it back during the reception, which was good, but everything went well. It was very nice and I was happy and Jesse was happy and sorry you couldn't make it, but I know that you had a very good excuse which was that I got married in the middle of October which was probably bad from a writing and podcasting perspective yeah as a matter of fact with that in mind let me share with you a text message that I got from Dave just the other day Saturday October 14th this is a message sent at 12 24 p p.m. Pacific time. Quote, Ben got married in October on purpose. Did you talk about this on a podcast? Did you call him a crazy person?

See, Dave Cameron also got married in October, but that was before. That was years ago. I don't remember how many years Dave has been married for, but that was before current responsibilities. But that's all right. You are not exclusively a baseball writer anymore, and your website has other baseball writers. So at the end of the day, there are things more important than writing about how the Yankees lost a game to the Astros because Gary Sanchez couldn't handle a bounce throw. Yeah, yeah. Jesse likes October, nice fall weather, leaves changing. I put up very weak resistance when this was initially proposed, but ultimately I caved and it went fine and my colleagues picked up the slack. But the ceremony itself went almost flawlessly. There was just one error, one flub that I made, which is that when you're repeating your vows, my great uncle was officiating.

It happened to be his anniversary too, his 44th. So that was cool. And he made it pretty easy for me, very digestible little statements that I was supposed to repeat back. And it was, you know, I, Ben Lindbergh, I, Ben Lindbergh, et cetera. It was pretty easy to remember. But then the very last line is a real mouthful. And there's no, I guess, easy way to break it up. So he said the whole thing at once. So it's, in token and pledge of the vows between us, or the vow between us, maybe, with this ring, I thee wed.

And that's a lot to remember. It's a bunch of words. that's a lot to remember it's a bunch of words it's a high leverage situation i'm about to put the ring on her finger and i said in token and pledge of the vow between us with this wing i thee wed i kind of elmer fudded it which in my defense it's a tough phrase to say. Try saying, with this ring I thee wed, several times quickly while you're actually getting married. And it's not the easiest, but hopefully it was cute. It got a laugh. I actually just mispronounced it in my head.

Yeah, it's tough. There's like W sounds on either side of the ring. And so I understand why I did it. I don't know. Maybe I left myself a loophole there. If I ever want to get out of this thing, I can just say, I didn't actually have a wing with me, but I don't know if that would hold up. At the very least, and you know, in the event that things remain happy in this relationship, now you can just have to set yourself up for decades of wing-themed anniversary

gifts. Yes. No, I will not be hearing the end of it so anyway we can talk about actual baseball did you have some baseball banter before we get into breaking down games and championship series which both stand at two nothing toward the astros and the dodgers respectively and we'll get to that in just a moment yes so uh let me i'm gonna send you a picture i'm gonna see if this can work because this is something that happened on okay i think I have sent you now a picture on Skype. Is that true? Yeah, I think that's true. Okay, click on the picture.

Okay, all right. And then the picture opens up. So this happened on Saturday. You would not have seen this, although maybe you watched highlights. I don't know, but you're looking at it now. Saturday, top of the fifth inning. Yes. The Yankees had a runner on some base.

They're losing at it now. Saturday, top of the fifth inning. Yes. The Yankees had a runner on some base. They're losing 1-0. And Todd Frazier reached out and poked a long fly ball to the, I guess it's not Enron field anymore. What's it called now? Minute Maid. To the Minute Maid left center field fence. And the ball hit the fence on the fly and remained there. It remained there about, it looks like, I would say, 12 feet, maybe 10 to 12 feet off the ground. It got stuck between the chain link fence,

which is a silly thing to make a fence out of, and some padding that is 12 feet off the ground, which is a very silly place for there to be padding. So this was ruled, I think, a ground rule double, an actual ground rule double, non-automatic double, which is a common slip up that people make. But this would have been either an actual ground rule or a hastily arrived at impromptu ground rule. I don't know if there was a ground rule for this, for what happens when a ball gets stuck in the padding up there. But really, so George Springer, you can see him in the picture. He's turned around gesturing like, I don't know what to do with this.

There's a ball up there. It's the ball that we need. I can't get it. And I think the umpire ruled that a dead ball shortly thereafter. And Springer tried to throw his glove at it, which always fantastic it didn't work should have had aaron judge come out there well that's what okay so the first the first thing is why is their padding so high off the ground such that it would be impossible for any human being to collide with it i understand there's the padding around george springer's shoulder level in this image and that makes

sense because you're going back to the fence you can tell that the padding is where like the the poles are that keep the uh the chain link fence in place so you need the padding it's just like in a trampoline gym they put the padding over the poles between the trampolines which should be an indicator right there that you shouldn't have a trampoline we don't need to talk about trampolines but why why the second padding why the second padding up and i don't know to talk about trampolines. But why the second padding? Why the second padding up? And I don't know if there's more above it. I didn't even check. But for what purpose?

Even Aaron Judge himself would not be able to strike that padding. Is that where the home run line is? No. That orange kind of line that is on the edge of the padding? Or is that just nothing? That's just lighting. Actually, it's probably lighting and dust. That looks extremely dusty.

Someone needs to dust the padding and left center field and minute made park but otherwise why why the padding it's clearly not to dampen the ball bouncing off the pipe because you can see in the picture there is a unpadded pipe just above it so someone is being over concerned i mean look i get it you want more padding the less padding. But what human? What human? I don't know. That is a strange place to put padding unless it's supposed to hold in a billboard or something. There's a billboard to the left and lower left of this thing, but it doesn't look like there would be any in this spot where we're talking about. So I don't know. Even if you jumped up as high as you possibly could and stretched out your arm, I don't think you would make contact with this padding. The second point to make here, do you or do you not think that baseball would be improved if it was George Springer's responsibility in this instance to get the ball and the ball were not blown dead? Yeah, I think definitely better. I think I saw a clip of him throwing another ball at this ball in an attempt to get this one down. I think I saw that and it didn't work. So yeah, I'd love to see that because then you would have to have a plan, right? You'd have drills for like the outfield to form a human ladder or something where the center fielder would run over

and squat and reddick would climb up on his shoulders and be able to get the ball so and you'd see like certain teams would be really great at retrieving balls from places where they're not supposed to go or there's that time in what it, like a spring training game where the ball got stuck under the fence and Ioannis Suspidus was out there and he just kind of looked at it and didn't know what to do. So we would have seen him crawling under there, trying to fish it out with a coat hanger or something. So yeah, I think definitely maybe the bullpen could keep some implements out there for poking and prodding and maybe some kind of net. I don't

know whether you'd be allowed to use foreign objects or whether that would be banned and you'd have to just use your own ingenuity. But I think this would add a great wrinkle to the game. Right. And that would probably also help to keep Yitro employed until he's 50. Yeah, that too. Okay. And so the other thing, and you were able to watch the Dodgers game last night. During the game in the bottom, a lot of things happened in the game, and we'll talk about them later. But among the things that did happen in the game that we won't talk about later, in the

bottom of the seventh inning, there were two outs and Justin Turner fouled off a pitch. And Justin Turner fouled a pitch directly back behind home plate, like a backwards line drive. Probably a good play in cricket. I don't know. Don't at me cricket professionals and the foul ball hit in the middle of an advertisement for camping world which is presenting the championship series justin turner of course justin turner's foul ball hit in

the middle of the eye in camping and it it like destroyed the eye it just put like a baseball sized hole yeah there was a hole there's a hole in the camping world sign and there was like shattered bits and detritus around it and you could tell when the next pitch was thrown like obviously there's still a hole in the advertisement we go to the top of the eighth inning and for the first pitch of the inning it's been repaired the camping world sign is new but the eye is patched over or the the eye looks fine it looks like nothing had ever happened there but if you look closely i don't have a picture to share here right now. But if you look closely at the bottom left, our left, I guess, viewing left, bottom left of the camping world sign, you see that there's a broken bit just down in like the blue, like

sort of the background color that the camping world in white font pops from. So you can tell there's like a broken section down there, which would imply, I guess they would have replaced that probably earlier in the year or whenever, maybe in game one. Maybe it happened because Camping World doesn't sponsor all the Dodgers home games, of course. It's just sponsoring the championship series. So the long story short, how many Camping World signs are back there and how did they replace it so quickly? Yeah, that's a good question because this was obviously it's not one of those like green screened ads, which I think they had maybe on the outfield fences, but that was not what was going on here

because there would be not a hole in that case unless you were really going for great realism where you simulated a hole in the green screen so as not to disrupt anyone's suspension of disbelief. But yeah, no, this was an actual hole in the sign and a great job by, I guess, either the Dodgers grounds crew or the camping world grounds crew.

I don't know if they have their own grounds crew to monitor, to tend to this sign, but I mean, to get it replaced that quickly, obviously the installation must be easy. And I guess they just had some backups there for this very eventuality. So they were really well prepared, better prepared than Josh Reddick was for that ball to be lodged in the pointless padding. Now, there's a possibility that Camping World has designed sort of a self-healing

advertisement, which would make me terrified of the coming Camping World dominance of the nation followed by the continent in the world but i guess if the camping world sign number two was destroyed in the eye and then they replaced it with one that had a broken bit in the lower left i guess that would pretty strongly suggest they only have two camping world signs then back there i need to re-watch game one and find out when that sign was broken yeah all right one other thing i don't know if we will talk about but you tweeted this i think what right before the walk-off that john lockheed allowed to justin turner dang it you tweeted that he went two minutes and 12 seconds

between consecutive pitches to chris taylor with zero pickoff attempts how did this happen what was he doing okay for those so it was it was like a full count i think so already there's a full count ninth inning run around base to us you can you know the average time between pitches here is probably going to be more like 30 to maybe even 35 seconds pitchers take longer when the count goes deep but yeah there's that still leaves an unexplained a minute and a half so john lackey looked in and everything came set and then he stepped off and then he was like a half. So John Lackey looked in and everything came set. And then he stepped off.

And then he was like, kind of shook it off. And he looked in again. And he went through the whole thing again. And then he stepped off. And then he shook it off. And he looked in. Yeah. I think the announcer noted it, right?

He says, someone said something like, is this gamesmanship? Or is he just trying to mess with Taylor? Yeah. Yeah. He did say that. He said, is this some sort of like veteran game? No, I guarantee you that's not what it was I don't know exactly what it was but it wasn't John Lackey being like I'm more experienced than you I'm the one who's going to look competent because he didn't because he stepped off twice and then Wilson Contreras called

one of his completely unnecessary mound meetings that he seems to do seven times an inning and so even though it's not like it's not like a regular time between pitches where lackey looks in and then he just comes set and stays there for like a minute and 55 seconds because that's never happened although that would be hilarious but in this case it was two step offs and a mound meeting between pitches there was a runner on base there were two runners on base but or no there was just the the one. It doesn't matter. I don't know if that's the longest time between pitches where there has been no pickoff attempt, but that's at least 99th percentile, probably 100th. There have been very few delays quite like that,

and John Lackey completely deserved to lose the game on a walk-off home run because go to hell if you're going to take two minutes and 12 seconds between pitches i have no tolerance for that behavior yeah all right so let's talk about the actual game and of course the ending led to a lot of criticism of joe madden who not only used john lackey in that tide in the bottom of the ninth situation classic kind of manager not using the closer in the tie game on the road type situation, and then justified it by saying that he needed Wade Davis for the save, which caused Twitter to self immolate, essentially. And that's something that we see every year. You know, Dave actually published a post today, not quite defending that move, but defending it by saying that Madden actually made like three worse moves with the same game, which was not helping Madden's reputation, but maybe his reputation for the specific move. So the defense, if you want to make one, of using Lackey here, and to be fair, Lackey had pitched what a scoreless inning in two thirds in game one, but he got zero outs in game two.

He walked a couple of guys, then gave up the three run walk off to Turner. So the defense here would be that Davis was tired. He had pitched a lot in what game five of the NLDS. He pitched a 44 pitches and looked like he was laboring at the end. And so he was available, but according to Madden, only available for one inning and not even necessarily a full inning. If he came in for a partial inning, that would be the end of the Wade Davis outing. So he would not be allowed to sit out a half inning while the Cubs batted and then come back out. And so you only get to use him once. And so to maximize the use that you get out of this guy who's only available in those conditions,

you'd want to bring him in for a clean inning. And so maybe if you knew that you can only use him for that one inning, then you might as well wait and hold him. And you don't know how long this game's going to go. It could go to extras, etc. And if you're bringing him in in the middle of this inning, or you're warming him up in the middle of this inning, maybe you only get one out or two outs of Wade Davis instead of three outs of Wade Davis. That is, I guess, the defense, although Lackey didn't end up getting any outs. So Davis could have gotten a full inning if you'd brought him in at any point during the ninth but what do you think of the blowback and the half-hearted tentative defense yeah it's it's

clearly not exactly the same as Buckshaw Walter and Zach Britton for one thing Wade Davis isn't as good as Zach Britton and for another thing I think John Lackey and relief probably isn't quite as bad as you Baldo Jimenez although ironically Brianrian duncing shows up in both games in this game for a little longer i get it i mean we all watched davis in game five of the nlds and he was pretty clearly pushed to his limit now grant that his last pitch was fantastic and i don't think he could have yes i don't know if he's thrown a better pitch in his career but i get that you need he need more time and he wasn't going to be available for as long as his men would have wanted. And so I understand if you can only use Davis for about an inning, you think then it's not as bad.

So it's not quite like Britain. And also, this is not an elimination game. It's just, you know, an extremely important game. Now, I think the sort of larger point, and Dave goes into further points about Madden's uh at least what Dave thinks were Madden's mistakes yesterday like starting Jason Hayward ignoring his pinch hitters and riding Brian Dunsing don't ever ride Brian Dunsing he's not a horse but I I would think that Joe Madden has been around a while he's been a successful manager and I have received a lot of tweets the effect of his Joe Madden overrated and you know you get these tweets all the time i'm getting just a fraction of what i'm sure like cubs and dodgers and national other national writers are getting about the same subject which i get and i'm glad that i don't have

to deal with that volume of tweets about joe madden but this would come right back to the point that got lost in the mix last year where with buck showalter who i think is a terrific baseball manager overall, and he made a tactical blunder. And Joe Maddon, I think has made a few tactical blunders. And it does not mean that he's not a terrific baseball manager. It means that he is a very good baseball manager who is not a perfect baseball manager. And once again, the eternal reminder that managers have far greater responsibilities than deciding strategies in game except those are the only things that they do that you get to see as a fan and so it's the easiest thing to criticize

i think that the cubs are thrilled absolutely ecstatic to be able to have joe madden he is there to foster a very energetic and supportive clubhouse atmosphere and unfortunately it didn't foster an atmosphere where he would have been comfortable making other decisions yesterday but i guess that means my partial defense of joe maddon is he's good but he had a bad day yeah and it's not the first bad day I mean he obviously took a lot of criticism last year in the World Series especially like if he had ended up losing that World Series I think a lot of that would have been blamed on him and he was saved from that by the Cubs winning game seven the way they did but I think even so I remember someone wrote a column about how like Madden did his best to blow that series

like right after they won and I think between that and I think it's just his reputation is kind of greater than or his national renown is greater than maybe what it deserves to be. I mean, his off-the-field stuff is great and players like him and he seems to be good at settling down a clubhouse and having his players respect him and he does wacky stuff and wearing themed outfits and bringing animals into

the clubhouse and music and all kinds of stuff that seems to kind of keep the team loose and maybe after a certain amount of hearing about that and how brilliant Joe Maddon is, there's just a natural backlash to it, just the way that, as we talked about recently, there's kind of a backlash to the Cubs just because they're there and they're good. And at this point, a lot of people are sick of hearing about them after their third straight appearance now in the NLCS.

And I don't really think that's justified with Maddon. I don't know. Maybe it is a little more, but people have portrayed him as this brilliant, deep thinker. And then he shows up to press conferences wearing like cool uncle clothes or some kind of weird hipster outfit that I don't know if he was the Rays manager and he developed a reputation as being extremely innovative and forward thinking and he was the pioneer of shifting at the time. And so we're used to thinking of him as this managing savant. And so when he seems to make the same kind of mistakes that all managers make and then says, oh, we were saving him for the save, then I think there's a perhaps greater scorn directed his way than there would be for most managers. So I don't think he's a brilliant tactical manager, but overall, he's probably still a plus.

And given what he's accomplished, just presiding over the Rays turnaround from absolutely terrible to World Series team and then winning a World Series with the Cubs and getting back here, I think clearly he is competent at some pretty important aspects of the job, but he does still make these mistakes that most managers make. I wonder if you can draw some parallels between him and sort of Billy Bean, where they used to maybe be a lot more extraordinary than they are now just in this environment. Madden, of course, was willing to embrace progressive tactics in his days with the rays that other teams weren't doing and of course just about every team is caught up now the the managerial landscape is not like

the front office landscape where every team is the same there are still your mike matheny's out there and your various other examples i'm not pulling off the top of my head so maybe madden just doesn't stand out the same way that it used to when you see a lot of stuff whenever you write anything about the a's now and how they haven't been very good for a while and you you see a lot of people thinking that maybe Billy Bean is overrated. And given where he is relative to the rest of the landscape, yeah, he probably is overrated now. But I think that Dean is not oftentimes not being judged based on what the A's are now, but rather what he used to be. And he just happens to still be in position to have a job and try to be guy to the team now. But Madden used to be a great and really fun

and interesting to write about. And now a lot of teams are doing similar stuff, but yeah. Yeah. I mean, maybe his greatest advantage as a manager early on, or one of them was that he seemed to work really well with Andrew Friedman and they had a good rapport and they could share information both ways. And at the time, you know, in the late aughts or whatever it was, that was less common than it is now. And I think now we're seeing that more and more often that the managers and the front office are on the same page and they work closely together and their whole staff so yeah probably less of a differentiating factor but he does still seem to command the respect of his players with some exceptions he's occasionally anchored some veterans but i think on the whole probably an asset but yeah he he does make these kind of flubs that i think people are surprised when he does it because he has this reputation.

And so it's even more glaring. But he has not had a particularly good series. But I don't think he is the primary person at fault here. He's had weird bullpen hangups this postseason. And maybe some of them are justifiable. But he doesn't seem to trust anyone really. And so he didn't trust Justin Wilson in the division series just seemed totally reluctant to use him based on the shaky month that he had with the Cubs and so he just

kind of languished on the back of the roster and then got replaced in this series by Hector Rondon who is another guy Madden has fallen out of faith with at points and so I think you know now he seems to like Brian Dunsing. I don't know. He doesn't really have a shutdown option in the way that the Dodgers do or that the Yankees do or that the Indians did. So it's a little harder to manage this bullpen and really this rotation than it is for a lot of teams. But it has not been very pretty to see him try to get the ball from the starter to Wade Davis. And, you know, I think a lot of the blame, though, obviously has to lie with the Cubs offense, or I guess you could say their opponents pitching,

but it's been a very weak offensive performance by the Cubs this October. And with the exception of an LDS game five, when they just doubt that one run win, but scored nine runs, they haven't scored more than what three in any other game they've scored two and one in the first two games of this division series they had scored zero two three and three in the other four games of the division series so it's been a lousy several games for the cubs lineup yep and i guess if you are a cubs fan who's panicking first of all get over yourself you just won the world series second of all don't forget that last year in the nlcs the cubs won game one eight to four and then they got shut out two games in a row and all the talk was about how the cubs had forgotten how to

hit and all of a sudden they'd met their match and you know if you get shut out and game started by clayton kershaw and rich hill i think that it kind of makes sense when you can take a step back and after the cubs were blanked in consecutive games they scored 10 runs then eight runs then five runs and they won three straight games against the Dodgers and won the series went on to the World Series which they won yeah that could totally happen again and obviously they're at a disadvantage now without Corey Seager who generally speaking the Dodgers were a lot better when Corey Seager was in the lineup this year and you know he had his elbow issues and that kind of coincided with the team's slump a little bit but he had seemed to recover he had a decent division series and then

somehow hurt his back between the division series and the NLCS and was left off the roster in a surprising move and again it's baseball it's a short series losing one guy however good is generally not going to cost you a game not going to cost you a series but if you're going to lose anyone and have it hurt it would be Corey Seager who is one of the best players in baseball and Dodgers are deep and they have options to replace him and they've got guys like Taylor and Hernandez who can slide around and fill those spots and they've had Charlie Culberson of course who, who is a huge step back from Seager in the long run, but has had a pretty good couple of games filling in for him. And so they

have managed to take this 2-0 lead without probably their best position player. And so they have to feel good about that because he would probably be back for the World Series if they make it there. So their lineup has not been overpowering, but they've done what they do well, which is take a lot of pitches, walk a lot. They were the best in baseball at doing that, and they have continued to do that in this series, making Lester walk five guys, Lackey walk two guys before the Turner walk-off.

So their strengths are playing up, and they have a much clearer back of the bullpen setup with now relief ace flamethrower kenta maeda is in there and they've got brandon morrow looking great and then jansen is as always amazing so i think that i don't know what can i say they are playing better and they are better and they have a better chance to win this thing yeah it's really striking they're in both series of course there are teams up two games to zero and in the nlcs the Dodgers right now after two games, they've drawn 13 walks and they have 12 strikeouts. The Cubs have drawn two walks.

They have 21 strikeouts. And then, of course, in the ALCS, it's also striking. The Astros have walked four times and struck out nine times. And the Yankees have walked four times. They've struck out 27 times. That's not all Aaron Judge because I didn't know this. But let's see. So Judge has struck out three times in the ALCS. That's not great aaron judge because i didn't know this but let's see look so judges

struck out three times in the alcs that's not great and seven at bats but carrie sanchez five strikeouts brett gardner five strikeouts aaron hicks greg bird starling castro three strikeouts each turns out that if you don't make contact or if you don't draw enough walks then it's going to be a lot more difficult to score runs and whatever we knew the astros were a very good contact hitting lineup they struck out the least of any team in baseball this year in the Dodgers. They've got 13 walks to the Cubs too in the Dodgers. This year had baseball's lowest chase rate. So they swung at balls out of the zone the least often.

And even Yasiel Puig yesterday drew three unintentional walks. And in his other at-bat, he went ahead 3-0 before the Cubs pitcher, whoever it was, fought back. So Puig came close to four unintentional walks in a game three is his career maximum he's only done that twice before so even Yasiel Puig getting in on the action so the Dodgers without Corey Seager well this is maybe a good reminder that when a very good baseball player is missing it can still be hard to tell provided it's just one and provided it's not I guess the starting pitcher yeah so i guess we can transition to that al series and yeah you're right that is really striking i mean the the yankees are a good strikeout pitching staff with their bullpen and

their hard throwers and severino and everyone who's pitched in this series tanaka these are all strikeout guys and still the astros have just refused to strike out and generally in the playoffs we say that it can be a good thing to be kind of an all-or-nothing offense and the Yankees are constructed that way and have scored the highest percentage of their runs on homers of any playoff team although not among the most teams of baseball I think they were sixth or something in that category but the Astros have that contact-driven lineup. And usually you would say, well, that's a negative in the postseason because it's harder to string together hits and positive events for the offense because the pitchers are so good. The defense is so good.

And Yankees might have the best defense in the league. So you'd think that the Astros putting a bunch of balls in play would play in the Yankees' favor in a way because they're really good at converting those balls in play into outs. But the Astros are not just a contact-driven team like, say, the Royals were. They are also a great power-hitting team and a patient team. And this is the best offense that anyone in living memory, aside from maybe Roger Angel, has actually seen play. And this is living up to its billing they're good at hitting for power and they're good at just stringing singles together

and we've seen both in this series i guess it should be noted that while the astros are up two games to zero they've won both games two to one their current batting line in this series is batting average 190 obp 242 slugging percentage 276. So it's actually kind of like a series full of Charlie Culbersons. But still, that's better than the Yankees. And yeah, I think that the contact clearly has been there in the series. Lou Severino, I know he came out with a shoulder thing and the Yankees have, they say they've cleared him. We'll see if he gets another chance to start in the series. But it never looks good when a pitcher like Severino comes out of a game throwing four innings without a single strikeout that's kind of one of those statistical indicators

that maybe something was a little bit off but yeah yeah we've seen the contact hitting in this series and Carlos Correa I think I'm going to write pretty soon but just the plate coverage that he's been able to show has been incredible in in game two he hit a home run I forgot who I guess it would have been Severino he was facing he hit a home run the other way on a two strike pitch that was like a 99 mile per hour fastball outside off the plate and he just hit a home run the other way anyway that's the one where the the little kid kind of reached over but didn't really it was a home run right and then the the game winning double which granted should have been a zero out run into out at home though i don't know a better way to put that but correa hit a double off chapman on another like 99 or whatever mile per hour fastball just in like

the low away corner and he just drove it to the right center gap so that's just the fact that correa is still like just newly i think 23 years old it just really underscores like this this is why people have been talking this guy up for a while i know he hasn't been on like the mike trout level but you can see that kind of leap offensively because he's just he's so good but in any case the astros have been able to win two games without really hitting yet but just yeah comparing the strikeouts the strikeout numbers in this year the yankees haven't even given themselves a chance yeah i wrote something at the all-star break i think we were like predicting a staff post about who would be the the best player in the second half or at least we were like predicting a staff post about who would be the best player in the second half,

or at least we were asked to make predictions. And I just predicted that Carlos Correa would be the most valuable player in the second half. And almost immediately, of course, he got hurt and missed a huge chunk of the second half. So that didn't happen. But that was where my thinking was with Correa at that time, which is that basically, yeah, he's been fantastic, but he is about to ascend to that level where we're talking about him as, if not the best player in baseball, maybe the leading candidate right behind Trout. So I think maybe he'll get there finally if he has a full healthy season next year. And yeah, I mean, this has been a really exciting series and it swung on a couple plays that could have gone either way. I mean, this has been a really exciting series and it's swung on a couple plays that could

have gone either way. I mean, all of these games in both series have had some thrilling endings. And yeah, we can talk about the Altuve send and that play and whether it was a smart send or not based on how likely he was to score, although he obviously ended up scoring. Unfortunately, it's a case where Gary Sanchez gets blamed for bad defense again, and we were just trying to come to his defense and pointing out that, yeah, he's not the greatest at blocking pitches, but he's good at framing, he's good at throwing, he's obviously great at hitting.

And I thought he'd actually done a pretty good job of blocking in this series as a whole, or in the postseason as a whole, I should say. But, you know, it came down to this play where Altuve, by all rights, should have been out. He was 25 feet, according to StatCast, from the plate when the throw from Gregorius, courtesy of Judge, came into and made contact with Sanchez's glove. But, I mean, I can't really blame him all that much for this play because the throw was not good. It was a bad feed. It was a short hop. It was in the dirt. And, you know, it's a pressure-packed moment. Obviously, he is monitoring where the runner is. He's, I guess you're not that worried about being run over by Jose Altuve relative to

most players in baseball, but still you're checking to see where he is and how you're going to apply the tag and you're trying to time it perfectly. And we are talking about one second here, which is a lot in the realm of plays of the plate, but not a lot in real life terms. And he had to corral this bouncing ball that's coming in at high speed because Gregorius has a good arm and then he has to turn and apply the tag and figure out where he's going to touch it to Altuve with the ball so not easy and you know maybe a better gloved catcher would have made this play maybe Sanchez would have made this play seven times out of ten I don't know but this time he didn't and he's kind of at fault for that but

definitely not fully at fault for that and you could criticize Gary Pettis if you want. A lot of people have for saying it was a too aggressive ascend in that, you know, he decided when the ball was hit, basically, that he was going to send Altuve, even though the ball got to home plate a long time before Altuve did. And it worked out fine. And Altuve's fast. And he was even faster than usual on this particular play. And of course, if he had been thrown out,

they still would have had Correa at second in scoring position with two outs. So it wasn't quite the... Oh yeah, right. One out. Well, I guess if Altuve had been thrown out, then it would have been two outs, right? Because there was, I think, Redick before that, potentially. Yeah. Yeah. So it wouldn't have been quite the Alex Gordon scenario. But anyway, it was really exciting. And that's the thing. When Gordon didn't go in the World Series, it was probably the smart move. But it was still disappointing that we didn't get to see it happen. And this time, I don't know, maybe sending him wasn't the smart move.

But it was really exciting that we got to see it happen. So from that perspective, I'm glad it happened. Yeah, this is why the Alex Gordon conversation is never going to die. Because it's not a matter of just working out the timing. You want it to just be a matter of working out the timing. And maybe Didi Gregorius and Gary Sanchez isn't quite the same duo as Brandon Crawford and Buster Posey, two absolutely fantastic defensive players.

But the whole idea of sending a guy in this situation is to just put pressure on the defense. And you can't just assume that everything is going to be perfect. Gregorius is a good arm and sanchez is a good defensive catcher but when you put pressure on the defense it all it takes is it's not even a bad throw just like a not great throw and who knows you know you could have sent gordon even if he was going to be out by a second and a half it just takes a ball a little in the dirt or just offline and all of a sudden gordon scores anyway so that's just the thing that is unknowable i do think the the math is a little bit different i doubt this is what was going through uh pettis's head but there was one out

but this was aroldis chapman on the mound and if you had stopped al tuve and you have runners at second and third with one out well what kind of chance do you think you really have of getting that runner home from third marwin gonzalez is up next and he's not so much of a great contact hitter for the astros he's fine he's he's certainly not uh too strikeout prone but he's he's still marwin gonzalez and that's still harald chapman and then after him was zula guriel followed by carlos beltran so it's not like the best hitters in the lineup necessarily we're coming up for the astros and with one of the best pitchers on the planet on the mound you figure well maybe it's worth just kind of giving

it a shot now i don't think that you could ever say that it's worth giving the runner a shot when he's not even in the frame when the ball arrives at the catcher that's just that i think is strongly suggestive of a bad send but i haven't worked out the win expectancy math on what kind of odds you need altuve to have and i don't know what kind of odds there are this is a a just a unique scenario where you don't know exactly how the defenders are going to respond so it's uh it's fun it's fun to see what i would call irresponsible base running and i i get why people want there to be more action in the game instead of just this by the book lawyer ball or whatever you want to call it because it either at the very least it makes for out to the plate which are great and at the best of times it makes for ridiculous outcomes that I'm not sure anyone deserved what happened. Altuve, I don't think deserved it. Gregorius, I don't think

deserved it. Pettis didn't deserve it. And I don't think Gary Sanchez deserved it. But what happened happened. It's all done. And so the Astros have the lead. Yeah. And, you know, by the slimmest possible margin that they could, as you mentioned, it's two 2-1 games. And I mentioned this on the Ringer MLB show, but this is something that has either helped or plagued both of these teams all year long. The Astros had a good record in one-run games. The Yankees had a bad record in one-run games. Those are really the things that set them apart during the regular season, because if you look at their run differential or any of the underlying stat ways of evaluating teams. These teams are basically

neck and neck, but they were separated by what, 10 wins or something like that because of these one run records. And I don't think that means anything. If anything, you would think that a one run record aside from the team's talent and just pure luck would be based maybe on the bullpen and bullpen management. And I think those are things that the Yankees excel at for the most part. So I don't know if there's any significance to this but this is the way it's happened and we mentioned the 27 strikeouts and obviously most of those came courtesy of Dallas Keuchel and Justin Verlander who were fantastic and I don't know that A.J. Hinch necessarily has a clearer idea of what he wants to do with his bullpen than Madden does,

but he just hasn't had to make those decisions because Keichel went pretty deep, at least by the standards of starting pitching in the 2017 postseason, which is like if you go four, you're ahead of the game. And Verlander obviously pitched a complete game, 124 pitch gem. And I mean, he was just brilliant. And Tom Verducci had a great piece about the changes that Verlander has made and how he's very into preparation now and he has altered his slider and it's nastier than ever and it was definitely nasty in game two and I mean Verlander's a great story getting him in that mid-season trade was incredibly important. This Astros team would not look nearly as scary without him. And he has totally delivered on what is turning out to be one of

those midseason trades that we will talk about forever. Yeah. I guess before moving on just to Verlander, it's worth pointing out, not only have the Yankees lost, not only are the Yankees being outscored by two runs in this series, but you have Altuve, who's basically supposed to be out of the plate but then he's not so there's a run right there and then of course in in game one greg bird was thrown out at the plate by marwin gonzalez on a close play so it's just like that that is the difference those plays for the difference in this series right now like that even though it's a 2-0 series it really couldn't be closer so who knows you know now the astros the astros knew their strength was going to be the top of the rotation and now you've got the charlie morton brad peacock part where neither one of them really ought to see a order the third time through so it stands the reason the astras are

about to have to use their bullpen so there could be some more run scoring coming up but the astras bullpen is actually pretty good it's not quite like the state the cubs bullpen is in so anyway moving on to verlander i was was reading the same Verducci article as you and as many other people have. And one thing that's curious, there's the anecdote of Verlander, I guess, looking at the grip of himself throwing his slider. And before Verlander was traded, his slider was already changing with the Tigers. It was already slowing down. It's kind of weird because Verlander used to throw, at least based on the pitch tracking information, he used to throw like a regular slider. And then I think it was last year, it just suddenly started getting harder and looking a lot more like a cutter. It

lost more of its sink, it gained some velocity, and it was a good pitch for him. He had a really strong 2016 season. And then I guess it was determined that this year that slider cutter was becoming a problem for some reason. And so he started slowing it down and adding a little more depth to it. But that was happening even before the trade to Houston. So this is another thing I'm going to try to write about when this podcast is over. But I don't really know what I'm supposed to say about it because this slider was changing even before he was traded to Houston. But clearly Verducci was able to get that information, if not from Verlander himself, then from someone who works with the Astros. And that would be a weird thing to make up.

So I don't exactly know what I'm going to find. Verlander made some kind of change, but I guess maybe the bigger point is that he was already changing his slider at the time of the move. But maybe more important than anything that specific and granular is that this is a pretty good example of when a small sample is not just a small sample. Verlander, of course, was traded at a time when his season numbers were not fantastic, but he had ripped off something like six or eight or maybe even 10 strong starts basically in a row. And he looked a lot like sort of classic Justin Verlander. And when the trade was made,

and a lot of people try to point to the recent success Verlander has had, then anyone who was pessimistic about the trade was saying, oh, the Astros gave up a big prospect haul and Verlander's recent results are just a small sample and you have to look at the whole season and he hasn't been very good which is true but with a guy like Verlander and there are not very many players on Verlander's level in the first place but with a guy like that I think you just sort of have to give him the benefit of the doubt he's had sort of struggles before that he's always been able to adjust away from. His stuff was always there. And I think that when you have someone like Verlander and he looks like he's healthy, I think you can just sort of assume a true talent level and figure, well, he's probably going to find it unless his stuff is worse.

And since his stuff wasn't worse, well, he found it and he found it at the right time. So not often do you see one of those impactful midseason trades that really makes a difference in the playoffs. But you really couldn't ask any more of Justin Verlander than he's given the Astros so far. Yeah, and the change or whatever changes he has made is not really like the changes that CeCe Sabathia has made. And that was the kind of thing that we thought Verlander was going to have to do, that he was losing speed on his fastball a few years ago, and it looked like he was going to have to try to find a second actor's career where he was more of a finesse control guy or slowed down his breaking stuff or whatever. And he really hasn't had to do that. He was maybe dealing with some unrevealed injuries at the time. And now, I mean, he still throws

really, really hard. He's one of the hardest throwing pitchers in baseball even now, whereas Sabathia actually did lose a lot of stuff and has had to become like a cutter guy and has been a king of soft contact lately, which is different from how he was before and maybe not quite as good, but still pretty effective these days. Verlander has not yet had to make that transition. Yeah, maybe he is more inclined to look at video and scouting reports and analytics, and Verducci had some good anecdotes about that. But he still has great stuff, so it's not as simple as just saying that he has managed to compensate for declining stuff by being smarter. I mean, maybe he has, but his raw stuff is still really great. So it's been an incredible career, and it's been fun to watch him have this kind of second wind after we all wrote him off. So I don't want to give Keichel a short shrift,

but it's hard not to after that kind of throwback complete game start from Verlander, but Keichel was also great and just vintage Keichel, and everything was down and out of the zone, and he was just preying on these hitters who were taking perhaps generous strikes. And yeah, I mean, Aaron Judge has been a focal point of a lot of the criticism just because his contact is bad. And I think whether it's a team or a player, if you are more strikeout prone and you're more of an all-or-nothing offense,

I think you leave yourself vulnerable to more of a backlash when things aren't going well. just not as glaring, I think, because when it's the postseason and everyone's on the edge of their seat and it's scary and high leverage at all times and you're striking out and you're not making contact, there is that still prevailing belief, I think, among fans that like, well, when you put the ball in play, good things can happen. And if you don't put the ball in play, no good things can happen, which is true to a certain extent, but maybe more bad things can happen if you do put the ball in play weekly. Anyway, I think it just sticks in people's mind when you have guys on base and it's a big moment and you just watch a pitch that gets called strike three or you swing and miss.

And Judge has done a lot of that this postseason, and I don't think it's entirely his fault. I think a lot of it is the strike zone. And when he has had good moments, they been really really important good moments but i think just the yankees as a whole and judge as a microcosm of the yankees it's more of an all or nothing lineup and when an all or nothing lineup is more nothing than all it's a lot easier to criticize and it just looks worse even if it's not necessarily achieving worse results yeah right it sort of comes out of the same line of thinking that leads to football coaches not wanting to go for it on fourth down very often

because they just think that, well, it's not worth the chance of looking bad. And it just, it's sort of, I guess, a conservative observer bias where you think, well, at least if you put the ball in play, you've done your job and then you make the defense make play, which of course is not true

because you can hit a lot of weak balls in play. But a guy like Judge or a guy like gary sanchez who is not nearly as strikeout prone as aaron judge but still clearly strikeout prone at least against good pitchers they're going to strike out and the difference between a good couple games and a bad couple games is going to be basically turning one or two of those strikeouts into a long fly ball or line drive that is either a double or a home run and that's it figure if a guy's going to take i don't know 20 swings over two games maybe two swings is going to be in the entire difference between a guy who was really helpful and provided the big extra base hit and

a guy who just struck out one too many times so judge is not the only guy who's been striking out a bunch for the yankees he is of course the guy who's struck out the most and his alcs statistically is really a wonder or ALDS, I should say, statistically is a wonder to look at how often he struck out. It's not all the strike zone, but I just I can't bring myself to assume that Aaron Judge is just some kind of bad now. I don't think anyone's figured him out. He's just faced a bunch of good pitching and everyone, especially Dallas Keuchel, is just throwing everything down and away. And I think the Indians tried to bust him a couple times up and

inside it's kind of one of those fastball up and in and soft stuff down and away situations which is not unique to aaron judge that's a pretty common approach to a lot of hitters but it just hasn't worked out for him so far but i've seen him go up and tomahawk a few of those high inside fastballs he got trevor bauer double with uh with a double which was important and what he I don't even remember the AL wildcard game anymore he homered in that game right yeah now granted that was the twins so it's kind of like a playoff pitching exhibition like let's just get you warm anyway remember how the twins made the playoffs but I I figured judge judge is not going to remain quiet now granted Charlie Morton and Brad Peacock are going to be pretty difficult matchups for him because they're right-handed strikeout pitchers who have really good breaking balls.

So it's not like it's going to get that much easier for Judge. But I figure we haven't quite heard the last of them yet. And that ALDS, however, will remain a baseball wonder, at least for the foreseeable future. Yeah, and you found in an article last week that the playoff strike zone tends to be a little larger than the regular season strike zone. And I think you argued compellingly that it's probably not because the umpires are suddenly being more generous. It's that the pitchers are better and more command guys and maybe better framing catchers. And so you just have guys getting more calls on the edges than they do in the league as a whole. And that probably has to hurt Judge more than anyone just because his

strike zone is already so big that if it gets bigger as a percentage basis on those borderline calls, it's getting even bigger than anyone else's is getting bigger at this time of year. And I mean, we've seen it he's he's gotten rung up on a lot of pitches that are just not strikes and like even aaron judge would not be able to reach them and i think that's just generally something he has to deal with just umpires kind of you know giving pitchers the high strike against judge because he is so big, but then also giving them a low strike or what is a low strike against him, but is a typical strike against most players. I guess it's hard to just mentally port your zone essentially from a typical human to Judge. And so there are a lot of calls

that have gone against him, not to be a complete Judge apologist. He hasn't been great, but he has had big moments and he has had big moments and he has had things go against him. And yeah, he's not the only one struggling. I mean, Gary Sedge has also been bad at hitting in this postseason. So it's not just Judge, but he is, you know, whether for good reasons or bad, he is always going to be the highest profile player in this lineup.

I think you're onto something there where Judge is, you know, he's a gargantuan entity. so his his strike zone already is going to have the largest perimeter and so if you figure that if the strike zone gets bigger then it's getting bigger right around the boundaries then he just has more area to lose there is because if his perimeter is expanding but it's already the biggest so i'm trying to think of the right mathematical way to put this but strike zone go big for aaron judge go real big in playoffs more big than like a brett gardner strike zone because brett gardner strike zone will get bigger just as every player strikes and will get a little bit bigger in the playoffs but judges in a sense maybe it's like the the

zone boundary might expand the least percentage wise for judge just because he already has the biggest zone but then it's expanding and just like the the inner and outer edges of a zone are already so tall that if you well you know look you get it you know what i'm trying to say i don't need to use my words communication is only like 10 about words and 90 about look you get the meeting right so i'm i'm done yeah well i mean often it just comes down to something as simple as that. Like with the Cubs, Chris Bryant and Anthony Rizzo are not hitting. So the Cubs are not winning games. Or with the Yankees, Judge and Sanchez are not hitting. Or we saw the same thing with the Indians and Lindor and Ramirez or Encarnacion being hurt. I mean, when your best hitters don't hit for a several game stretch, it doesn't mean anything, but it happens and it hurts you nonetheless. So that's where we are. And now we've got two 2-0 series.

The series are switching locations. So Yankees coming back to New York, Cubs going back to Chicago. I'll be going to some of the games in New York. Is there anything about the upcoming games that you want to highlight? Any matchups? Any pitching decisions

any weighing in on which of these series you think is likely to become i don't want to say competitive they've both been competitive but in terms of the actual state of the series let's see real quick just going back to an earlier point i just looked it up to make sure so in justin verlander's first full season in 2006 his average fastball was 95.1 miles per hour this year 95.2 Justin Verlander has lost not a thing that is unbelievable it really is unbelievable yeah I mean I don't know if there's I wonder if he is unique in the pitch fx stat cast era in that to go from age what 22 to now 34 with like zero fastball loss I mean granted the league as a whole has has thrown much harder in that time but I mean you know I guess part of that is from improved

training techniques and and the way that pitchers have been used and so I guess you could say that maybe relative to the league he has slipped a little but relative to himself not at all and he's definitely an outlier in that respect okay so anyway pertinent to the upcoming games there are just a few things i want to throw out related to the pitchers that the astros will be using as starters charlie morton i like brad peacock i like they have had different but very interesting seasons so i don't think that we're going to see the astros push either guy but just just in case, I'm going to tell you some career splits for both pitchers and know that the 2017 splits basically mirror the career splits.

So this isn't just me being selective. Charlie Morton, going to read you a few ERAs, and these are ERAs related to times through the order. Career for Charlie Morton, first time through the order, ERA of 2.84. Boy, that's good. Second time through the order, 5.07. Third time through the order area of 2.84 boy that's good second time through the order 5.07 third time through the order 5.72 so probably don't push charlie morton this year let's look the same it's like amazing he had an area of 1.25 the first time through the order fantastic

charlie morton so good 3.71 7.18 don't push charlie morton as for brad peacock i can tell you it's going to be similar but let's just use some different numbers anyway. Career. Brad Peacock. First time through the order. 2.47 ERA. Who knew? Brad Peacock.

No idea. Second time through the order. 3.59. Wow. What a good pitcher he must be. Third time through the order. 8.48. Don't use Brad Peacock.

Third time through the order. This season, it's even more fun. First time through the order. 0.92 ERA. First time through the order. Opponents batted it's even more fun first time through the order 0.92 era first time through the order opponents batted 145 and they slugged 198 second time through the order 3.35 wow we can really use them great fourth inning brad peacock third time through the order 8.84 don't use brad peacock a third time through the order bad idea yeah but i think the astros presumably know that they're not going to let him do that and it's going to be the lanson

mccullers and or chris davinsky show yeah i guess that makes sense given that peacock's a guy who just came from the bullpen and has fewer pitches to work with less ability to vary pitches as he moves through the game so yeah i'm sure they'll be cognizant of that and that we'll be seeing a lot of those middle inning guys anyway they've been fun series if we told you they were both two nothing you'd probably say oh that's a bummer but middle inning guys anyway they've been fun series if we told you they were both two nothing we'd probably say oh that's a bummer but it's not really they've they've both been fun and close and we'll be watching all week and we'll be talking to you about more games soon so we will end there you can support the podcast on patreon by going to patreon.com

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If you're in the mood for more playoff talk, Michael Bauman and I have a new episode of the Ringer MLB Show up. You can new episode of the Ringer MLB Show up. You can find that on the Ringer MLB Show feed. It's always tough at this time of year when everyone is interested in the same things to try to differentiate my multiple baseball podcasts, but I do my best.

I know a lot of people listen to both, and I'm glad that you do, so I don't want to subject you to too many of the same opinions. If I can help it, you can contact me and Jeff via email at podcast.dangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system. Get to some of your questions next time. We will talk to you soon. to share your mind to heaven just like this ring of gold you know where