Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1127: A Whole New World (Series)

Episode Date: October 24, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Jeff’s weekend trip and discuss the end of the ALCS and the Astros’ crazy curveball reliance in ALCS Game 7, the Astros’ reluctance to use regular relievers, the Yankees’ outlook for 2018 and beyond, why this World Series isn’t easy to analyze, whether the Dodgers and Astros are […]

Hello and welcome to episode 1127 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, who was away for the weekend climbing things, I assume. What were the latest Sullivan's travels? Describe where you went, what you did. No, no climbing, no climbing this time it was hiking every no sure so every every October my birthday falls in the middle of October every October that's the way that it works in October also happens to be the month that the baseball playoffs take place but yeah I never want to let baseball entirely consume my life so we always take a day or two or three away over some weekend to go do something in celebration of the birthday and so get married maybe you could do that in the future i will based on two of my role models that

seems to be the thing to do so we uh just got a place up at a timberland lodge on mount hood which is a classic wpa construction high mountain lodge ski lodge up on mount hood but uh ordinarily wonderful place to use the base camp to go do some hikes uh or or climbing but there was a mountain storm that was uh on the mountain while we were there gusting winds of about 60 to 70 miles per hour knocked out the power which was a lot of fun but they had an outdoor heated pool and hot tub this is not at all to brag everyone has been in a pool or a hot tub, but I have never had the sensation of being in a pool or a hot tub outdoors when there was a mountain storm taking place so that your upper body is freezing and getting blasted by slush and freezing rain and your lower body is quite content in the warm.

That sounds nice. Hot tubs are generally too hot for me unless it's freezing outside and it kind of equalizes itself. yeah i would like that yeah have not had that exact sensation before and being in the hot tub and wondering like why do my ears hurt oh because it's probably like 15 degrees and they're getting blasted by rain but in any case i was the timing was about as bad as it could be aside from anything having to do with the world series being that this was during Game 7 of a league championship series, but I was able to keep track of what was going on on my phone, and it seemed like it was no contest at all,

as Lance McCullers just kind of spun his way to the World Series. Did you think that was an at-bat app bug when it said curveball 24 times in a row? I guess if there was anyone who was going to do it, it was going to be him or maybe David Robertson or maybe Rich Hill. But I mean, at this point, he's throwing a curveball that averages, what, 88, 89 miles per hour. He's throwing a curveball that's faster than Kyle Hendricks' fastball by like a few miles per hour. And I think if you're Lance McCullough, I mean, he's never, he's had a hard fastball, fastball but he's never had a good fastball i don't think i don't think it's ever been particularly successful

it's always been a fastball to set up the curveball but i mean look he's already throwing a million curveballs right so if there's any truth to the fact that maybe this puts his arm in a greater risk well look his arm is already screwed one way or another just by virtue of being lance mccullough so if you can just do this and just pitch your team to the World Series and figure, well, I'm going to take a chance here, but I'm probably going to have a hurt arm eventually anyway. Or, you know, every single season that he's been a professional, he's had some sort of arm problem.

So whatever, why not do it? He's clearly most comfortable throwing that pitch. So why even have a fastball? Yeah, it seems like an effectively wild email question. Like, would this be possible in a game, let alone game seven of the ALCS? And I mean, bold time to try this strategy. And I was able to determine with help from David Appelman that this was the curveballiest game that a team has ever had in the pitch tracking era.

So going back to 2007 or so, no team has ever thrown a higher percentage of curveballs in a game than the Astros did in this game because Morton threw a lot of curveballs too. And McCullers threw 41 out of 54 pitches. So that was more than 60% curveballs for the Astros in that game. The previous high was just over 50, and that was also the most curveball-heavy outing of any pitcher with a minimum of 50 pitches, and it wasn't even close. I mean, McCullers was like close to 80% curveballs, and the previous high I think was maybe also McCullers or maybe Hill or someone like that, but it was like in the 60s. So this was just a more extreme version of this strategy we've

talked about it and there's been that big Tom Verducci article about teams embracing curveballs and you've written about teams going away from sinkers in particular and the Astros led the majors in curveball spin rate and they've targeted those guys that's how they ended up with someone like Morton and they've thrown a lot of curveballs, but this was extreme and crazy and a lot of fun to watch. And it's true. I was talking to Michael Bowman about it. It wasn't like every curveball was like the kind of stereotypical darting down and away type curveball that you think of when you think of the Lance McCullers curveball. There were different speeds and different locations,

and some of these pitches were strikes, obviously, but Yankees were still chasing a ton of these pitches out of the zone, below the zone, and I just wonder how long it could work. Like, Brian McCann wasn't even calling pitches at a certain point. He was just nodding, and, I mean, how long can you get away with that before batters are like okay i'm sitting curveball here i'm guessing curveball because that's the problem with just relying on one pitch i haven't had a chance to check whether this was the most consecutive pitches thrown of a single type ever i'm well no we know there's been aaron cook yeah right and

ari dickie's probably thrown a bunch of knucklers or cologne and sinkers or whatever. So probably not. But for a pitcher who usually does mix his pitches at least a little bit, this was just crazy. And I don't know if it was because he was on short rest and maybe didn't feel like he had his best fastball. It was, I mean, it was bold to use Lance McCullers On short rest to begin With like a you you wouldn't have thought

Coming into the series that McCullers Was going to be maybe the number two pitching Star for the Astros and people Were questioning why he was even getting a start And then for him to have a great start And then be brought back on short rest With his effectiveness issues Throughout the second half and also his

Long-standing health issues I mean that was I was going for it and throwing curveballs constantly was going for it and good for them it worked travis sachik wrote something about this on fan graphs as you know any self-respecting website is going to have some article about the astros throwing all these curveballs and and mitchell lichtman showed up in the comments and so you get the the usual thread here yeah of like okay so here the astros are a whole bunch of curveballs in a row and then someone says well then that's being too predictable and then mgl comes in to say well obviously it's not being too predictable and something something something game theory so here's the question that i guess i have for you which is essentially the

same question that you just asked of me or at least of the audience is how many curveballs in a row would lance mccullers have to throw for the Yankees to be like okay next is a curveball yeah because the whole idea is that even when he's throwing 20 21 22 curveballs in a row the the hitter is still up there thinking like no he's gonna go fastball he's gonna go fastball I've seen pitchers before it's gonna be a hitter oh crap it's his ball low and away again I'm Aaron Judge and I've swung through this pitch for the 100th time yeah in the playoffs I wonder what the zone rate of the curveballs he threw in that outing was. I don't know.

Let me check. Yeah, you could check. That would be interesting because there were some certainly in the zone where it wasn't like, okay, I'm just taking this pitch. And a lot of them were far enough out of the strike zone that you wouldn't want to swing at them. So you would just need that realization to click, okay, I'm going to take a pitch here. And I mean, maybe some Yankee did take a pitch at some point and guessed curveball and it was a curveball, but then it was a curveball again after that.

So like, I guess maybe it's almost like the John Lester not throwing the first thing that you wrote about where like, we know that he's not throwing a first for like a multi-year period here. He's not going to do it. And yet runners just wouldn't seem to take advantage of it because maybe you speculated and I thought seemed convincing just that ingrained habit of, okay, there's a lefty pitcher on the mound. I have to stay somewhat close to the bag because he could just fire over here.

And even if you read it in the advanced scouting report, he doesn't throw over. Even if you see him not throwing over, it's just really hard to shed that belief that hey he could throw over here so i wonder if the same thing is at play with mccullers where it's just like well he's not actually gonna throw 24 consecutive curveballs in a game seven no one has ever done that before that's not gonna happen so maybe it's that and maybe it only works once i don't know like maybe i mean if this is his regular game plan obviously like if he makes his first two starts next year and throws 100 curveballs or something i mean i'm guessing going into game three these hitters are going to be briefed enough that they're going to expect curveballs here and maybe he just does a total switcheroo and goes back to throwing something else but i can't imagine this would work long term but i mean maybe that's the perfect time to do it

alcs game seven when no one expects you to try something you've never tried before yeah right if you're gonna have a twist like this and you want to and you think it's gonna work you want to save it for just about the highest leverage situation you can think of and it does not get a whole lot more high leverage than game seven of a league championship series now related to the lester thing you know the whole idea he would throw over for basically two years in a row and then you know this year he did successfully pick off tommy fam and ryan zimmerman zimmerman more recently in the playoffs and fam during the season but it sort of uh confirms i guess why runners were unwilling to believe that he would

never throw over because there would one day come a day when he would presumably feel comfortable making some sort of ugly looking but still remotely accurate lob over to first base. And it did work. And so if you are a hitter, not that the hitters are facing McCullers having John Lester in the back of their mind, but they're just thinking like, you never know. He's a pitcher and every pitcher I've ever known has thrown fastballs. The answer, by the way, McCullers threw 41 curveballs in the game, and according to stat corner analysis, the 46% of them, so a little under half, were in the strike zone. And yet, even though fewer than half of those pitches were in the zone, only 10 of them were balls, five were called strikes. There were 10 whiffs, 10 fouls, three grounders, 2 fly balls, and a pop-up. McCullers also threw one change-up in the game. It was a ball. Okay, so 46% zone rate, you said, was the... Yeah.

Okay, well, that's actually, I mean, what was the league average zone rate this year? It was 46%. So that's, I mean... Something like that, yeah. He was actually throwing strikes, I guess, about as often as usual. They were just all curveballs so maybe I mean just taking would not have been a perfect strategy because he still would have gotten you looking on some of those pitches I guess just realizing that if it was a strike it was going to be a

curveball would have been helpful for hitters so I don't know whether they made that realization I mean you'd think that like after the first couple innings, hitters would be going back to the bench and like, oh, what did you see? What's he throwing? Curveballs, curveballs, curveballs. Maybe they thought he would, I guess it's just that like, you must always think, well, okay, he's going to change it up now. Like a lot of times pitchers will throw the same thing or mostly the same thing the first time through the order, and then they'll vary it up the second time, the third time, give guys different looks. And maybe they were expecting McCullers to do that, and he did not.

And here's the fun thing about it. Batters swung at 63% of McCullers' curveballs. So that's a lot. Usually, if you look at curveballs, those pitches are not swung at very often. And now McCullers has a different curveball from the average curveball by about 10 miles per hour. But it's ordinarily a pitch that gets a lot of called strikes and a lot of balls out of the zone. But batters swung at 63% of McCullers' curveballs and only 4 out of 12 fastballs.

They wound up taking the fastball because they just didn't know what was happening. Huh. All right. Well, that is fascinating. That was, I mean, that's one of those weird things that at least gives us some basis to go on when we're talking about some hypothetical scenario down the road where we get an email about what if a guy threw one pitch, which I'm pretty sure we've gotten before and maybe even answered on the show. And now we have at least a four inning test case for that. So fascinating. I look forward to seeing what McCullers does in the World Series, I guess, even before next season. Does home after trailing a series 3-2 have now won. Yeah, that's right.

Is that correct? I haven't confirmed. Yeah, 14 out of 28, that's right. And I think also teams that have won game six, maybe after being down 3-2, I think they were 13 for 15 before the series. And so now would be 14 for 16, which is maybe just a small sample, but weird. Yeah, I haven't seen that or looked at it. But let's take this 14 out of 28 to be true.

Ordinarily, we expect that a given team in a given game in the playoffs will win about 54% of the time, assuming they're at home. That's just the home field advantage, et cetera. This is fairly well established. So if you are a team down 3-2 in a best of seven series, you have to win your final two games. And if you're going home, then you have

to win both those games in a row. And if you assume that you have a 54% chance of winning one individual game, then you have a just over 29% chance of winning both remaining games. So using some handy binomial calculations, i put in the probability of winning 29.16 percent of the game look i don't need to go through the numbers i ran some math is the point to try to figure out how likely this would be and because you know 28 still seems like a small sample of series and it is but nevertheless there is a 1.6 chance based on these numbers that you would end up with at least 14 out of 28 series wins based on these numbers so that's a that's a very low chance and i don't know i don't know what kind

of chance would be comfortable assuming randomness and maybe still 1.6 chance suggests that there's a decent chance that this would happen just from randomness alone but it's pretty slim so this could be could be something here i don't know what would be here but yeah uh yeah no i'm just gonna try a lot dangerously close to a momentum argument here i think but but yeah it is but you wouldn't but you still wouldn't have momentum because you'd be going home down three two in the series that's true i guess it's an anti-momentum argument i don't i don't know i mean you'd have momentum if you won the first game whatever do you but I mean like you said if you win if the factoid is true that you recited off your head that teams that win game six after being down three two and we have one like 13 or 15 or 14 of 16 that I think that's right that is a

that would be a momentum argument I think that's true yeah goodness yeah weird so anyway the Yeah. Goodness. Yeah, weird. So anyway, the Astros, I guess just to close the book on that series, which was a really fun one. I think maybe the implication that extends to the World Series is the fact that they got through game six and seven really without using a regular reliever except for Ken Giles for one inning of game six. And other than that, it was Peacock as an eighth inning setup man and then Morton directly to McCullers and you can understand why that is just because the Astros pen was pretty lousy especially if you strip out the starters being used as relievers both in the ALCS and in

the ALDS so it seems as if Hinch has kind of lost faith in some of those relievers and so it will be something to watch throughout this World Series does he go to guys like Gregerson and Harris and Giles and Musgrove does he trust them in big spots or does he just keep throwing starters out there and going with McHugh and McCullers and all these guys wherever possible and I don't know I mean it's it's kind of like when the Astros offense was slumping, we said, well, the Astros offense is good. They're not going to keep slumping. And of course they didn't.

They scored, what, 11 combined runs in games six and seven, which is fine. And you could say the same thing about the Astros bullpen, I suppose, in that it was also good for most of the season. Not as good as the offense, but good. And so maybe Hinch is being too reactive here by going away from these guys and making decisions based on how they looked in the first couple series. I don't know. On the other hand, they are pretty well equipped with starters who have bullpen experience and have been pretty good in that role, and they can't use all of them as starters so might as well use them somehow just not as afterthoughts so that's kind of i guess one of the storylines going into the series is just how do the astros set up when it's not keitel

when it's not verlander yep the astros became the 30th team to win a best of seven series while being outscored yeah they were outscored by the yankees by two now this is not this is still not the 1960 pirates who won the world series while being outscored by 28 28 runs but nevertheless the astros certainly had their offense show up at just the right time and the yankees had their offense disappear at just the wrong time and yeah looking forward when you talk about a thin bullpen or whatever you want to say the astros bullpen is unreliable even ken giles has looked vulnerable you figure this is one area where you have an advantage you go into the playoffs and you think if you have a really

deep starting rotation then maybe that's not so great for the the playoff environment you think of the diamondbacks who were strong one through five well the fifth starter theory in the playoffs doesn't mean that much neither even does the fourth starter but if you can get that fourth or fifth starter to shift into the bullpen as the astros have done with the players that you already discussed then that helps you helps give you some cover and if they have sort of starter endurance it even gives you cover as if that pitcher were like two relievers perhaps so even though the astros let's just do the andrew miller thing again even though the astros don't necessarily have their own andrew miller there's nothing to say say that Lance McCullers couldn't be that sort of Andrew Miller equivalent. I know that they have Chris Spence.

Devinsky was supposed to be that guy. Yeah, he was. But although for the past few months, he's been pretty not good. So that's one of those trend lines for the Astros, where a lot of their good statistical relievers have been less than effective over the past month or two or three. But Devinsky did his job to help the Astros emerge at the start and now you can I don't know have they announced who's going to be their fourth starter I don't know why they would now no the Dodgers have but the Astros as we record have not yeah I guess the Dodgers make it pretty easy but

yeah whether it's going to presumably it won't be McHugh he hasn't started in the playoffs yet so it's going to be Peacock or McCullers but it doesn't really matter which one you use because the other one was a good starting pitcher and both of them have relieving experience obviously both of them have really really really good breaking balls but Peacock has a different breaking ball than McCullers does I would think I don't know maybe Peacock I think has a slightly bigger platoon split and McCullers has sort of a reverse platoon split because his curveball is so freaking good and hard for lefties to deal with. So I don't know which one of those you would rather start. But just the idea that the Astros can go into this series knowing that, you know, you can't trust Peacock or Morton to work that deep.

But you can piggyback one with Colin McHugh and the other with Lance McCullers or both of them with Lance McCullers. I don't know who seems who knows how rubber armed his arm is when he stops throwing fastballs all of a sudden. So the Astros have a lot of options they have a thin bullpen but they have two extra starting pitchers who can help that bullpen quite a bit as they already have yeah something i've been thinking as i've been trying to come up with things to say about this series or preview pieces to write is that it's a really great matchup exciting matchup we could just list reasons why we're happy these two teams are playing each other at this moment and there are a lot of them it's not an easy series to analyze i wouldn't say

just because these two teams are so good that i think just previewing a series is easier when there are weaknesses to expose right when you can say oh here's this team's weakness and it matches up in this way with that team's strength and you can exploit this and watch for when they get into that situation. Here's the thing that could kill them. And that's really hard to do with the Dodgers and the Astros. And both of these teams are so strong top to bottom that I kind of feel like I'm more just hyping the series than I am analyzing it because I don't know that there are that many vulnerabilities to expose. One thing I'm interested in just going into game one is the Keichel versus Dodgers matchup in that that's, you know, the guy who does not throw pitches in the strike zone versus the offense that does not chase pitches outside of the strike zone. In theory, at least, that should be a bad matchup for Keichel. I haven't finished running the numbers, but generally when you look at something

like that, I've looked at that kind of thing for, say, teams, for instance, in the past, and generally it's true that, at least I've found, that, say, a pitcher or pitching staff that tends to throw pitches outside the strike zone and get teams to chase will fare worse than one would expect against an offense that does not chase outside the strike zone. have against Keichel? I don't know. I mean, it's tough to say. You saw Keichel succeed with that approach in his first start in the ALCS, and in the second start, it didn't work so well. He was throwing more pitches in the strike zone. The Yankees kind of made him come up a bit more. He's usually the lowest pitch thrower in the major leagues, and he had to come up into the zone a few times because the Yankees weren't chasing quite as much and they got some timely hits and that was enough to beat him in that game so I do wonder whether the Dodgers discipline neutralizes Keichel a little bit maybe that is an edge that the Dodgers have here but for the most part I keep looking at the series just kind of coming

down to hey these are 200 plus win teams. These are the teams that we thought in the middle of the summer would maybe be matching up in the World Series. They are probably the best in each league, or maybe the Indians were the best in the AL in the end. But for most of the season, these were the teams we were thinking of as the best. And there's no shortage of storylines and stars, whether it's established players at the peak of their powers guys like you know kershaw versus verlander or young guys like korea versus seager or you know al tuve of course or carlos beltran finally trying to get his first world series i mean there's so much here so many watchable players and compelling players and great teams which is exactly what you want i just i feel like

i have less to say about this series other than, yeah, this is going to be great. Yeah, it doesn't even, it's not like when the Red Sox would make the World Series and you think, well, what are they going to do with David Ortiz in the other park? Because if anything, when the Astros go to the LA, they lose their worst hitter.

So it doesn't even matter. And as a fun fact, Dodgers pitchers this year is hitters 297 OPS, Astrosers 296 so no real nothing there so the dodgers you know they have the position player depth that they can have a pretty good dh i don't know who it's going to be but the answer is andre ethier probably i guess i haven't actually looked that over but the dodgers will have options they have a respectable hitter when they go to houston and then houston is not going to lose that good of a hitter when they go to LA and then it's going to help their bench depth etc so yeah it's it's hard to find a sort of compelling angle as far as the Dodgers offense and and Keichel goes it is interesting to look at like the uh the adaptability

of the lineup not that you can ever really in good conscience talk about a lineup while having the same mindset as we've talked about a million times baseball is an individual game but we saw in the final game of the NLCS against jose quintana the dodgers came out really aggressive because quintana's whole thing is throwing first pitch strikes and trying to get ahead early with fastballs and the dodgers were like well we're just not gonna let you do that so even though we're a really patient lineup we're just gonna go on the attack i think three of six or four of seven or whatever some number of their first X number of hitters, large Y number of hitters swung at the first pitch or at least the first strike that they saw from Quintana.

So the Dodgers were able to go aggressive and they've shown all year that they're a disciplined lineup. And yeah, it will be very interesting to see whether they can just kind of force Keuchel into the zone. The Astros aren't exactly the same kind of lineup. They're more aggressive than the Dodgers are. But I was really interested to see how Masahiro Tanaka would match up against them in the series.

And the answer was quite well. Tanaka was terrific for the Yankees, just not quite terrific enough to help them win the series. But he avoided fastballs and stayed out of the zone, and the Astros couldn't really help themselves. And they struggled against Tanaka. But the Dodgers are a different sort of really good and really deep offense. So that'll be fun. And then, of course there's going to be the the Verlander thing

where the story is going to be well Verlander has been really good but the other sort of alternate timeline is alternate narrative will be well how many times did the Dodgers think about trading for Justin Verlander now they have to deal with him in the World Series although I guess they have Hugh Darvish of their own so that's not so bad of a fallback. Yeah, I mean, it's just whatever you want, whether you want old veterans who are still hanging around and looking for that first world series or just ace versus ace. I mean, in baseball, the whole head-to-head matchup between individual players angle,

unless you're talking about a pitcher and a hitter, and even then it's maybe four times in a game or fewer if it's a starter who's going to get pulled so when we say you know Correa versus Seager or Verlander versus Kershaw it's not as if those guys are like covering each other or something or like you know maybe they're hitting liners to each other or something Kershaw and Verlander might not even pitch in the same game in this series. So it's not maybe as compelling as it would be in football or basketball, where you're talking about stars actually playing defense against other stars and trying to score against other stars. That is maybe more of a headline thing than it is in baseball. But still, I mean, Correa versus

Seager, I mean, that's the future of the shortstop position along with Francisco Lindor, probably for the next decade plus in baseball. Altuve is maybe the best player in this series. And then, I mean, Kershaw and Verlander, two potential Hall of Famers, probable Hall of Famers, certainly in Kershaw's case, who Verlander seems to be back at more or less the peak of his pitching ability and Kershaw has pitched well this postseason now that he hasn't had to make short rest starts so like you could just keep listing great aspects of this series but yeah it's hard to come up with okay here's how this team matches up well or poorly with the other and I don't know the Dodgers have

home field advantage and maybe that in itself is enough to give them the edge here i think looking at the projections i don't know what fangraphs projections say about this series maybe you can tell me 538s last time i checked had it 55 45 in favor of the dodgers which seems fair if if anything it's not closer than that i don't know it's it's it's pretty tight fangraph says 52 something to 47 something basically basically 53 47 in favor of the astros oh really uh for whatever that's worth but i don't know if the dodgers roster has been updated to have corey see well it has okay so yeah let's just call it 50 50 yeah who knows who cares it will play out

the odds right now uh there's every reason to think that the series is way too tight there is no favorite if when you get to writing and you're you're searching for a theme or a lead i can give you one because i just received a promotional email promotional email to my alternate email address and i'll just read it out loud to get you hyped up for the world series good afternoon i received this in the morning it's a good day to be a baseball fan the 113th world series starts tomorrow, parentheses, October 24th. No kidding. After 2,430 regular,

I'm still going, regular season games and three tiers of playoffs, the 2017 season boils down to a week when the stakes are as high as it gets, as they get. Has explained the concept of the World Series. It's very clear.

Absolutely. Best of all, if you happen to like underdogs and plot twists, we can count on seeing role players and extras playing hero on the game's biggest stage. Just as we did 70 years ago in the World Series, they called all caps Electric October in 1947. Like, who knows? I guess they just had electricity in 1947. The Brooklyn Dodgers met the NY Yankees in first series ever to be televised. Oh, parentheses, hence the name.

There we go. I see. The first integrated World Series. It was Jackie Robinson's rookie year and the beginning of an 18 season run during which 16 World Series would include the Yankees or the Dodgers or both. Electric October by Kevin Cook takes you back to that series and particularly to the six players whose lives were changed forever. We know your readers would love this story

and we'd like to offer you... Well, I don't need to read that part. Anyway, promotional email, but all hail Electric October. Well, this one will also be electric. I believe it's going to be televised. So, yeah, it's going to be fun. I don't know. Do you have

any other... I always feel pressure to, like, here's going to be fun. I don't know. Do you have any other, like, I always feel pressure to like, here's the X factor in this series. Here's the thing that the casual fan doesn't know, but we know because we've spent hours sorting leaderboards and looking at depth charts. And you may not realize that the pivotal matchup in this game is going to be this guy you're not thinking of versus this guy you're not thinking of. And yeah, I don't know. going to be this guy you're not thinking of versus this guy you're not thinking of and yeah i don't know i mean it's basically a toss-up in the series and it's a matchup of the best teams in baseball

and that's great and it's kind of the second consecutive year we've had that or at least you could make a case that we've had that so we're getting spoiled now after a run of not the best teams being in electric october we are now having the best you said it wrong electric october and i think uh i don't know we're all happy and looking forward to the series and excited and there's just only so many ways you can break this down i think yep uh i it's it's nice because in october it's never it's never that great when not the best team ends up representing Major League Baseball as the champion or or you just get a matchup where clearly it's not the team that was supposed to make the World Series. And, you know, the playoffs are a tournament. We say this every year. It doesn't select for the best teams necessarily. But it's just always a little weird when you're writing about a World Series where like clearly superior teams have been knocked out because you don't know quite what to do with it because the world

series doesn't crown the best team in baseball and it was kind of a relief when last year it did and this year i don't know who was better between the astros and the dodgers but i'm comfortable with either one of them being the best there were seven or eight great teams in the playoffs this year and one of them is going to win and there's no shame in being the loser it's going to be difficult obviously for either team and either fan base to lose this World Series. But I hope that fans aren't able to lose sight of what is taking place and the significance of just being here.

And even, you know, even if you're a Yankees fan or a Cubs fan, you can think as a Cubs fan, well, we still have that core. We can still be right back where we were next season. And if you're a Yankees fan, they're just going to probably keep getting better and better. And the whole idea here, I know we tell ourselves or fans tell themselves the point is to win the championship but really the the point is to be captivated by baseball for as long as is possible and if you're a yankees fan well you got there minus one and a half weeks

like that you had one hell of a year you had a better year than 27 other fan bases did and baseball just kind of had you it was able to be the background noise of your life for whenever spring training started middle of february all the way up to the later third of october so you kind of got everything just about everything you could have wanted out of the yankee season cub season ended with more of a fart but still you got several several months of good competitive baseball. There was even a little turnaround story in the middle of the Cubs season, which no one expected would be the case. So a lot of twists and turns.

And it's so easy at this point to just focus on who's going to win and who's going to lose. But we don't know. And it's not really the thing that matters so much anyway. You can say that you're rooting for the Astros to win because it would be a great local and national story the city overcoming adversity to win a championship but even just being in the championship the whole idea is to build community and bring people together and distract them gives them something to be hopeful for and even if they lose that's that's okay because it's bringing people together so long story short the real winners are well I didn't have anything to say here we're all we're all going to be winners even those who feel like they're the losers yeah nice moral yeah i i guess we could

spend a few minutes talking about the yankees since we didn't really and i know how disappointed you were that we didn't get yankees in the world series as as the biggest Yankees booster out there. So number one Yankees fan, this guy. Yeah. So since we talked a little when the Cubs were eliminated about what the Cubs have to do and their prospects for being back in this situation soon, should we spend a few minutes on the Yankees and in a similar vein? I think that they are. I mean, that's the thing with almost every

team eliminated this year there hasn't really been that sense of finality of like well that was their window is closed now they had a good run it hasn't really been that I mean not every team that made the playoffs this year is a lock to be back but for the most part at least for 2018 a lot of them all of them really have strong cases to be back. None of them seems like they're about to just run into a wall or anything. So I think that also applies some kind of setback or retrenchment a little bit in 2018 specifically they do have more minor leaguers on the way and then of course there are the free agents they could be adding in time for 2019 so I think they're they're just fine and of course they have Judge and Sanchez and Severino and all these guys for the long haul. But I guess maybe in the very short term, you don't know what's going to happen with Tanaka, with Sabathia facilitate that spending on free agents next winter. So even though it seems like we're heading into a Yankees-Red Sox hegemony era here again,

maybe there is a year where the Yankees are vulnerable. Like, you know, not that they're going to actually have a losing season for the first time in decades, but maybe they won't just roll right back to the playoffs. On the other hand, they were a better team than their record showed this year. So even if they do take a step back, as far as underlying performance, that might not necessarily be reflected in their record. Yeah, I never wrote this up, but I have mentioned several times before that I have a spreadsheet of 13 years of projections. And if you compare projected record to actual record, the Yankees were not the biggest overachiever this projected record to actual record, the Yankees

were not the biggest overachiever this season because their actual record was quite a bit worse than their sort of estimated record, their estimated record based on the other things that they did. So using base runs, which just estimates team wins and losses based on all their underlying statistics and gets rid of timing elements, the Yankees base runs record was the biggest overachiever i guess relative to projected records so in that sort of artificial alternate reality sense the yankees were the most overachieving team in 13 years based on how they were projected for the season so that's a hell of a thing to take into the offseason because they had you know obviously aaron judge led all position players in major league baseball and wins above replacement which no one would have expected and no one will expect

because Mike Trout will play a full season hopefully next year. But still, Judge, obviously, huge season. Luis Severino, way better than people thought he was going to be. Chad Green came out of nowhere to be one of the best relievers in baseball. And on and on, all the way through the roster, there are players who performed as well or better than they thought they were going to. So you go into the offseason and once again you're going to have questions about the rotation because of Tanaka like he said and Sabathia and I think Jaime Garcia is a Frasian

and also who cares about whatever Jaime Garcia's fate is so the Yankees are going to have to rebuild the rotation I don't know it just kind of I have a gut feeling that they're going to bring Sabathia back for a year or two so he can be sort of the fourth or fifth starter but they're going to score a lot of runs i think maybe the most interesting thing otani aside i guess this winter but the most interesting thing to watch with the yankees is what they're able to get from the presumably inevitably traded dellon batances because he's going into his second year of arbitration i think i think he has maybe two more years of control i can look this up really quick so while i talk the page loads and it tells me that dell and patances is two more years of team control he just made three million in his first year of arbitration this year of course there was a big deal was made of that but tenses wanted more money and he was worth more

money he didn't get it yankees i believe it was randy levine who said some things he probably shouldn't have said to the media anyway pat, Patantis, good reliever, seemingly, but also sort of pitched his way out of any sort of role for the Yankees down the stretch and in the playoffs. Seems like an inevitable trade candidate. Bullpen is so deep. And of course, if you're the Yankees, you could say, well, if we just kind of let him pitch his way back into shape and find the zone, then he can be one of the most valuable relievers in baseball again, like he used be but they're so deep and i think that but chances in the yankees could probably just stand to have a breakup i guess they could this seems like it's a change of scenery trade that's just waiting to happen and i don't know how much teams will pay for him because his stock is clearly down

he couldn't throw consistent strikes but he is one of the most unhittable relievers in the game today. And he's been so for so many years that it's not like he's a one-year possible fluke. So he's got a lot of value. He's proven he can go multiple innings at a time. He's thrown nearly, I think, 90 or 100 innings in a season before.

And he's going to be in demand because every team wants a guy like that. When he's going well, every team wants a guy like that in front of their closer or even to be their closer. So maybe Patancis ends up being one avenue by which the yankees plug their starting rotation i don't know what they get for that but that's going to be an option it's it's a trade ship maybe the yankees wouldn't want to be a trade ship but given where they are i don't

know how patantis comes back with that team i don't know how that team would want to bring him back instead of just flipping him and that's going to be a really interesting piece to move because kind of like how we don't know what Jake Arrieta is going to get in free agency. We have I have no idea what Batances is able to get on the trade market. Yeah. All right. Well, do you want to end with a few thoughts? Again, we'll be circling back to the World Series in our next, you know, three, four episodes, however long it lasts. So we'll be getting into other aspects of that. Do you want to end with any thoughts on managerial moves that have been made since the last time we talked? Because the Dusty Baker dismissal news surfaced just like minutes after we finished recording our previous episode. And then,

of course, it seems as if the Mets have hired or are about to officially hire Mickey Calloway, former Cleveland pitching coach, and Red Sox seem to be hiring Alex Cora. So all that stuff is sort of happening here in the lull between the Championship Series and the World Series and Dusty Baker. Getting fired, let go, not brought back, however you want to classify it, was certainly surprising, I think, for a lot of people, me included. Okay. Well, let's see. We talked about briefly the Tigers and Ron Garden hire, and the thesis of that was whatever. Red Sox and Alex Cora, I don't know. I don't know. The Nationals and Dusty Baker is the weird one here. I like Mickey Calloway going to the Mets, if only because I think every team who has poached

some senior member from the Indians hierarchy has been more or less pleased with what they've received. The Indians lineage, their tree is spreading more and more to the point where even if the Indians don't win the World Series every year, probably someone from the Indians is. There's just kind of everywhere. I think Callowaway has been a quality pitching coach he's been talked up such that i think almost from the instant he became the pitching coach in cleveland i think people saw him as a future manager he seems like he's a great communicator he's had great success and luck with his pitchers so maybe he'll bring some element of pitcher health and stability to the mets which is probably an overstatement but it's something to hope for. And as far as

the Nationals and Dusty Baker, look, I don't, the Nationals, they're not like a mess of an organization the way that some other ones are, but they're a confusing organization because they are just alternately like really aggressive and super cheap. And I can't tell exactly when, and I don't even know if they know when they're going to be either one, like they'll drop everything to go give Max Scherzer a crazy like deferred contract and free agency even though they didn't really need him it seemed but then they'll like not hire bud black because he wanted more than two million dollars and so they end up with dusty baker who did it seems like a great job for that team and then they just were unwilling to make a commitment to him it seemed like mike rizzo wanted him back

but then the owners are just decided no for what? And it seems to me that the owners are probably just putting the blame on Baker that the Nationals couldn't win a couple of game fives against a really good Dodgers team two years in a row. And I don't know, it doesn't seem fair. Baker did a good job. Nationals wound up in an unfortunate position as far as the managerial circus goes, because they waited a week or two to lose their manager and guys like Alex Cora have already been hired. So the Nationals do a lot of things right, but this one is confusing to me, but maybe I'm too much of a Dusty Baker apologist. No, yeah. I think a lot of statistically inclined people have found themselves in that maybe

unfamiliar position of being Dusty Baker defenders lately, because, I mean, the things that he has historically gotten criticized for, he doesn't really do anymore, doesn't do as egregiously anymore. And obviously the game has changed around him, but he has changed with it and he doesn't run pitchers into the ground. And I don't think he's a brilliant tactical manager, but I don't know that he makes any more tactical mistakes than your average major league manager. And he seems to be well above average when it comes to keeping players happy and managing a clubhouse and not having anyone choke each other, as far as we know. At least certainly not on TV in the dugout. So those are all positives.

And the Nationals basically did what they were expected to do this year, right down to losing in the NLDS. And I don't think that that is his fault. I mean, there are decisions you could critique in that series, but there wasn't like some kind of glaring move that he made that I think will go down in infamy and in history. I think he had an okay series and he made a couple cuff calls that could have gone either way. And, I mean just about every manager has made mistakes so I don't know if there's some kind of personality conflict or bad blood between Baker ownership or what maybe there's more to the story than we know but just based on the superficial stuff it's it's a tough dismissal as it was when John Farrell was let go I think given the Red Sox' recent success, but probably even more so just given where the Nationals were before Dusty took over

and the kind of conflict that they had and the lack of confidence in their previous manager. And under him, it's been mostly smooth sailing with playoff losses. But again, it's hard to just lay all the blame for that at his door. So I'm with you on that. And yeah, the Mickey Calloway hiring, I mean, in theory, at least, Again, it's hard to just lay all the blame for that at his door. So I'm with you on that. And yeah, the Mickey Calloway hiring, I mean, in theory, at least, I guess it makes sense to put a pitching coach in charge of the Mets since they are such a pitching-centric and pitching-reliant team. And maybe best-case scenario, at least, there were a lot of cases where you would just have

Terry Collins starting a guy, and it's like, why is he even pitching now? Why is this happening? Maybe a pitching coach will be more sensitive to that type of issue and just won't push these guys harder. I mean, I was having this conversation with Michael Bauman, you know, would you want this job or not want this job? Like Callaway is a pretty young guy and the transition from pitching coach to manager is still fairly uncommon, but it's not unheard of. And so he was a highly regarded guy. Let's assume that he had other options or would have had other options. This wasn't his only chance at getting a managerial job. one because on the one hand there's the possibility of a big payoff right like if you bring stability to the mets and these pitchers actually have a healthy season under you and it's just not a complete just dumpster fire and terrible then you will be hailed as a genius i think whereas you know maybe it's just such a toxic organization at this point and so dysfunctional that no good can come of it. And

maybe you just want to give this kind of just steer clear of this whole team as long as this current regime is running it. So I don't know, which one would you lean toward? Yeah, it's not easy. But you know, if you figure you want to be a manager, you don't want to go to Detroit because they suck. You don't want to go to Boston necessarily because it's just such an insane environment to be a manager. And you don't want to go to the Nationals because it might lose your job in a week and a half and so you figure well then your opening right now is is with the Mets and even though the Mets seem like they're not rotten but they're just kind of like messed up from the top down we just heard so much about their ownership over the years so it's not exactly the same situation as the Diamondbacks

where they had a whole organizational overhaul but I I think that if you're looking for a team that could just be way better in 2018 than they were in 2017, like the Mets, they have to be at or near the top of the list by even making very few changes because they can just bring back what they had. And once again, it's so easy to see so much success from the players they already have on the roster. I mean, you get a full season from Syndergaard alone, and all of a sudden there's a whole bunch of extra wins. The division is still bad aside from the Nationals. So you go in there, and if you're a Callaway, of course, the media landscape is going to be difficult, but you get the benefit of being compared against your predecessor, and you get the benefit of having all this talent already in-house. And if you can succeed in New York, then that's going to give you

a lot of leeway down the road if you want some sort of change, if you want to go to another team, even if you want to go to another major market, you could say, well, I was I was there when the Mets turned around and I helped steer that ship. So there's, I think, a lot to gain, assuming Callaway wants to be a manager for a while. If he didn't, he made a weird move. But otherwise, I think there is there's a lot to gain similar to how the Diamondbacks had new blood come in and inherit a similar roster. And then all of a sudden it was much, much better. So won't be exactly the same. Still the same ownership group in there, but plenty of talent in-house.

And I think if you're a Mets fan, there's reason to hope for a wildcard growth next year. All right. So I guess we can wrap up there. And we'll be returning to the series, of course, throughout the week. So enjoy the World Series. And we will be returning to the series, of course, throughout the week. So enjoy the World Series and we will be back very soon. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. Five listeners have already pledged their support. Include Ian Swirka, Nico Zerbonia, Victor Flores, Kanan Crist, and Rob Haverkamp.

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 effectively wild on iTunes. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for editing assistance. If you're looking for something else to listen to, Michael and I, as mentioned, have a new episode of the ringer MLB show up on the ringer MLB show feed.

We talked lots of playoffs to keep your questions and comments for me and Jeff coming via email at podcastatfangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system. We will talk to you later this week. Would you like to work or play or want to soul and do this right today? Everyone laughs. Can't believe what's going on around here. New world rising. Everybody kick their blues away.

Not for today, but evermore.