Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1277: The Best Baseball is Back

Episode Date: October 2, 2018

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about a wild end to the regular season, including the season’s final Willians Astudillo update (maybe), endings for Joe Mauer, David Wright, and Mike Scioscia, Khris Davis batting .247 again, the Orioles’ final ignominy, surgery for Shohei Ohtani, final regular-season stats about strikeouts, hits, homers, and fastball velocity, Jeff […]

I never had to bow to you when we began Now I can play your tune, your command And if you say nothing, then that's something I'll understand Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah When we began When we began time yeah well if you care well if you care Hello and welcome to episode

1277 of Effectively Wild a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer joined by Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs Hello Jeff. Regular season baseball is complete there are no more regular season games of all the batters. Hello, Jeff. Regular season. Hello. Baseball is complete. There are no more regular season games.

Of all the batters who batted at least 90 times, Williams Estadio will lead the major leagues in batting average. Officially, he finished at.355, 97 plate appearances, most of those at bats because, as you know, doesn't walk, doesn't strike out, seldom hits homers. Williams Estadio batted.355, Mookie Betts batted.346. Christian Jelic wound up at.326. I suppose it was possible for him to pass Estadio on Monday,

but it would have required a very, very long baseball game with Christian Jelic, I guess, getting, I'm just going to guesstimate here, about 25 hits. I haven't done the math. I can also say that because Estadio reached new round numbers we can set the playing time minimum to a higher round number get the hell out of here bravik valera and your 75 plate appearances nobody cares astadio league leader in contact rate for batters who batted at least 90 times also for batters who batted at least 80 times so valera is gone also i can i can now say as a as a matter of fact the contact rate that

was shown that's been shown on fan graphs and the contact rate that you look up on baseball savant is different oh so scandal Bravik Valera I forgot all the details here because I was doing this last week but Bravik Valera on fan graphs was not being charged with his foul tips which oh no foul tip is effectively a swing and miss. There's no real difference. That's not contact that anyone cares about. So it actually turns out Bravic Valera has had a lower contact rate this whole time than Williams Estadio. But regardless, he's out of the picture.

We don't care about Bravic Valera and his stupid broken finger. Williams Estadio, first place. Has our vendetta against Bravic Valera now extended to you trying to actually get his stats on fan crafts lowered to look worse. Look, I wouldn't worry about it. All right. I'm going to be monitoring his contact rate just to see if you put your finger on the scale. All right.

There are so many ways that we could have started this episode. That was, I guess, the most predictable one, but probably not the most nationally notable way that we could have started because a whole lot has happened since our last episode. It has been a wild weekend and Monday because we got an unprecedented two-tiebreaker day on Monday to decide the NL Central and the NL West. Before that, there was so much happening this past weekend, lots of it relevant to topics that we've talked about for much of the season, including the one that you just gave us an update on.

But Joe Maurer caught a pitch. David Wright made everyone cry. The Orioles finished with 47 wins, which is fewer wins than a replacement level team, technically, which is sort of set at 48 wins. They also finished with the biggest division deficit since, I believe, 1942, 61 games behind the Red Sox. Gosh, so much happened.

Chris Davis actually hit 247, which was obviously the highlight of the weekend for many of us and will be a topic of discussion later in this episode. Lucroy was announced as a pinch hitter on Sunday after Chris Davis's first two hit lists at bats, which just as it looked like he might plummet to 246, we were saved. Thank you, Bob Melvin. Haven't been that excited to hear Jonathan Lucroy announced as the hitter in, well, ever. And Chris Davis became the first hitter ever to finish with the same batting average in four consecutive seasons. I don't know. What was your favorite thing from this weekend? We had the ties in the two divisions. We had Giancarlo Stanton getting pegged after hitting a homer by a fan on the Green Monster in Fedway as he rounded second base. So much was happening.

The Baltimore Orioles. Look, I shared in the era Chris Davis enthusiasm. Now the other Chris Davis probably batted 147, but I wonder to what level of awareness do you think, when you pull a player in the last game, teams do this often, and it's a good way to get some applause so the players don't actually finish the entire game 162. Now the A's might not be at home again. So they were at home this weekend right

i wasn't even paying attention but yeah yeah great so what i just said was valid so you you know you can understand why you you pull a star player in the middle of the game you want that standing yeah lots of players were getting pulled yeah yeah so nothing weird there but i you do wonder if any like what percentage of of bob melvin's brain do you think thought i'm gonna do it now before the number changes do you think someone must have mentioned going to do it now before the number changes? Do you think more than 0%? Someone must have mentioned it to him, right? I don't know whether he was asked about it after the game.

For all I know, he's commented on it. But he must have been aware of it. I don't know. All of Twitter was aware of it or at least baseball Twitter, which is different. But I don't know. I mean, I'm grateful to him for doing it even if that was not his motivation, because Davis was in there because he had a shot at 50 homers. He entered the day with 48. And so I was worried that they would leave him in there because technically he could have gotten two more at bats and hit two more homers and gotten to the nice round number.

But they had mercy on us. I was talking about this. We had a long chat on Fangraphs on Mondayay just a live running game chat during the two games that were taking place and davis's batting average came up because the nl game got pretty boring and i think some of the elements that just really tickle me about it is that one 247 is just such a boring unremarkable batting average like it means nothing it doesn't mean you're good it doesn't mean you're bad we are so obsessed with round numbers in baseball. Milestones, batting 300, batting 400, hitting your 500th home run. 247 is such a stupid number.

It's like it's got the worst hand in poker right in it. And it's also just absurd. Like his other numbers have changed around it. Like all of his other statistics have been completely different over the years. And the league batting average has been changing such that 247 is basically normal now so there's just so much to like about i think it's the perfect distillation of like ridiculously stupid but appealing baseball fun facts because it means nothing and yet i don't love it as much as you but i i love it in large part because of you

yeah well i'm glad that i could share my enthusiasm for it. And I should say we have a couple guests lined up for this episode. So in a little while, we are going to bring on the great Jason Benetti, the White Sox and ESPN broadcaster. He will be one of the people calling the NL Wildcard game on Tuesday, and he's going to be doing sort of an alternative stat-driven broadcast, and we're going to talk to him about that and about the game in general and broadcasting in October in general.

And then, because I love Chris Davis and his 247 average, I am going to bring on Jim Albert, who is a baseball stat professor. He is a stat professor and also likes baseball and writes about baseball and i'm gonna have him on at the end of the episode just to talk about the 247 feet but a few other things i think we should get to can i interrupt you before you get to that so i'll just i'll just say something else because you mentioned the orioles and i would just like to share now a fun fact with you that is now official so i have these team projections, right, going back to 2005. I talk about this every year.

And the team that has most overachieved its preseason win projection was the 2012 Baltimore Orioles with a difference of 23 extra wins. They won 93 games that were projected to win just 70. That's bad, but then it was good. Last year, the San Francisco Giants won 25 fewer games than they were projected to win before the season. Now Madison Plumgarner got hurt and the whole season spiraled out of control. The Giants were the biggest underachiever based on 13 years of projections. We have a 14th year of projections now. The Baltimore Orioles won 47 games.

They were projected to win a lot more than that. They were projected to win 29 more games than that. They were projected for 75.5, so 76 wins at Fangraphs before the start of the season. I will mention one last time when we talked to Brittany Giroli about the Orioles before the year, she gave an optimistic win projection because the Orioles tried. They did not go into a rebuild. They signed Chris Tillman, which whatever, but they also signed Andrew Kashner, and of course they signed Alex Cobb.

The Orioles were trying to be some sort of fringe wildcard contender. They were going to have Zach Britton pitching again. And just a big old nope, just a real nope of a season for the Orioles who came in trying to make the playoffs and wound up with the worst record in baseball, I would imagine, since the 2003 Detroit Tigers. I haven't confirmed that, but it has to be true. Yeah, no, it's I don't know how they ended up doing that. I mean, luck went against them, obviously,

and they weren't good. No one expected that to be good, but no one expected them to be nearly that bad. And of course they traded players at mid-season and that didn't help. And Chris Davis was Chris Davis, but I don't know exactly how they ended up where they ended up but I kind of enjoyed just seeing how low they could go sorry Orioles fans but it was sort of

fun to see a 61 game division deficit which we have not been alive to see before this so that So that was something. They were out of first place by 14 more games than they won. Yeah, that's, well, it's not a fun fact for them, but it's sort of a fun fact for us. Second highest opening day payroll in franchise history. Wow. Yeah. Well, I mean, they did exceed their projections like more than any other team did over a span of several years, right? Because they just got so many great bullpen performances that they kept beating how good everyone thought

they were going to be. So this was just kind of evening out the scales, I guess, all in one season. So yeah, that it got ugly. But a few other things that I wanted to get to. This felt like a weekend when a lot of things were ending. A lot of careers were potentially coming to an end. I mean, that's always kind of the case when a baseball season draws near. That's just a part of how the sport works. People cycle in and cycle out. But this one felt more so than usual. We already talked to Levi Weaver about Bartolo Colon and Adrian Beltre and the

possibility that they might not be back, but seeing Maurer catch, even sort of as a staged stunt where no one was swinging because it would have endangered his brain, which would not have made it a nice moment at all, but

seeing him get back there one more time, and I don't know if this will be the end of his career or not, but seeing that, seeing Wright get his last curtain calls, that was nice. And I guess there were other notable endings too. Mike Socha is done as an Angels manager. I don't know if he is done as a manager manager, but that feels like something that I can barely remember a time before Mike Socia was not managing the Angels. Right. He's been around since, gosh, what, the late 90s? I could easily look this up, so I could confirm. So you mentioned that Socia will not return as called by Ken Rosenthal. Yeah, Socia's first year managing was the year 2000. Ken Rosenthal with a little Twitter flair there at the end of the year when Socha made his announcement.

I was proud of him for that. But regardless, Socha was one of the last powerful managers in baseball. He was just a relic of a time when managers held a lot more sway in the league. This is nothing new. We've discussed this before. But given that Mike Socha is is now, he's going into his age 60 season, if you want to call it that, he is accustomed to a certain manner of managing. Do you think that he is hireable in this era of front office driven baseball?

Yeah, that's a good question. It seems like it would be such a comedown for him to go somewhere else because no one is going to put him on a pedestal and give him kind of a carve out as his own unique situation the way that the Angels did. He was sort of grandfathered in there. And I can't imagine he would get the same terms somewhere else. And frankly, I don't know if he deserves to because it's not as if he's had a whole lot of success lately not that i hold him responsible for that but it is something that you have to think about when you think about him because much of his success with the angels was concentrated in the first half of his tenure and when i saw billy epler say something about how he thinks it should be a hall of fame career you know maybe that's just a nice thing you say about a guy when he's on his way out with

your organization. I don't know that there's an actual argument there. I mean, if you look at the whole sum of his career, 19 years, he finishes with a 536 winning percentage and one pennant and one World Series title. And that's good. And that's impressive. And speaking of teams that seem to exceed either their projections I guess it was in some cases before the projections era but expectations and sort of run differential

and everything they used to do that year after year after year and he had a lot of success with that model of team and then it seemed like he tried to cling to that model of team maybe a little too long after the angels no longer were that type of team and maybe that hurt them whereas it had helped them before and then after that I don't know if he helped or hurt he was just sort of there and he was an institution and the Angels didn't really put a good team around him Mike Trout aside so no I can't imagine him getting the same sort of gig but who knows maybe he would swallow his pride and say, I want to keep managing and I will adjust. Right. I mean, you look at like this offseason landscape, I don't know exactly who's looking for a manager, but like the Blue Jays are going to be looking for one.

The Phillies are committed to the guy that they've got. And the Cardinals made their relatively hasty decision to extend Mike Schilt. And so the Cardinals aren't going to be looking for anyone. There's not a ton of jobs, I guess. Would you even, like, you know, the Reds are presumably going to be looking to replace Jim Riggleman, and is a team in the Reds situation really going to look for a guy like Mike Socia to take over that clubhouse?

And it's just so hard to visualize. So, you know, with a fading veteran, you can at least see that if a player wants to stick around, then it'll take a one-year contract, maybe with a fading veteran you can at least see that if if a player wants to stick around then it'll take a one-year contract maybe with a rebuilding team or it'll take a minor league contract with the spring training invite but Mike Sosha can't really sign as a spring training invite as a coach going into next year so I haven't read about whether he wants to extend his career at all or if he'd be interested in taking some sort of peripheral sort of bench coach kind of role but it is going to feel weirder to not have mike sasha in the game than it's going

to feel to i don't know not have joe mauer and that feels ridiculous to say out loud but if mauer is done and if mike sasha is done sasha was certainly more conspicuous at least toward the end yeah i mean a lot of long-term things coming to an end. I mentioned this on Twitter, but David Wright, you can trace his roster spot or his origins with the Mets back to 1967 when John Matlack was drafted just five years after the Mets started as a franchise. And you can trace it's like, you know, Matlack leads to this guy and that guy leads to that guy. And, you know, nine players later, you get David Wright. And it's this unbroken line of transactions that takes you to Wright. And when I did that, I tried to trace those transaction trees for every team back at Grantland four years ago, which is a horrible experience that I put out of my mind.

That was the longest one I could find. Then by a decade, no one else went back that far. So I'm sort of sad that that has been snapped now. But if it's going to end somewhere, you want it to end with David Wright. That seems like an appropriate way to put that to rest. What was that process for you? It was the worst. It was like literally looking up every player who was on rosters at the time.

No! Yeah, it was. There's probably some like programmatic way that you could do it now with baseball reference data possibly, but it was tough because it was like compensation picks. It wasn't just like trades or, I don't want to think about that and I will never do it again unless someone can automate it for me. Anyway. I wish that you would have asked me first because I would have told you not to do it.

The audience for the work that that, you might as well have written a book. You did write a book. Just you should have written a book. You did write a book. Just you should have written a book. Yeah, I guess so. It was a well-received article, but I don't know whether any reception could be worth the work that that took. Ugh, anyway. So another thing that I thought we should mention just to tie a bow on it, this is something we talked about early in the season, but now that the season is complete, we can report that this officially is the first season ever with more strikeouts than hits. There were about almost 200 more strikeouts in the major leagues this year than there were hits, which is a milestone of sorts. Neither of us is really an alarmist about the rising strikeout rate,

Neither of us is really an alarmist about the rising strikeout rate, but it is rising. And there is, I think, a point to noting that we officially passed this threshold here. And I was sort of struck by, you know, maybe after the playoffs we can go back and look at in home runs is Nolan Arenado, who finished with 37. 37 led the NL in, what, the second or third highest home run rate year ever? Now, granted, there were AL guys with more than that, and Chris Davis ended up leading with 48, but it's still so strange. And I wrote about this as we talked about last week, looking back at the so-called steroid era and what was contributing to the offense at the time. And that is one thing that is really different about this time and that time is that you had guys hitting 60 and 70 in those days. And now in some leagues, you don't even have guys hitting

40. It's just that everyone is hitting 15 or 20. Looking at the league-wide strikeout rates, this goes back a little bit in your point, but I will note, it's a small factor here, but the strikeout rate did go up by seven tenths of a percentage point from last season to this season overall. But I will note, as you have also noted, that the strikeout rate for pitchers went up four percentage points. And I don't think either one of us really cares about that. Pitchers are terrible.

Don't let them play anymore. You took a stance. You wrote an opinion article. And it was received. And some people received it differently than others. Pitchers had a terrible season at the plate because they suck. So if you remove the pitcher factor, you just look at the league's hitters, looking at non-pitchers, the league's strikeout rate went up only half of one percentage point. The league

walk rate went down one-tenth of a percentage point. There were something like, let's see, what is this, 500, roughly 500 fewer home runs this year than last year. There were fewer runs by about 900 or so, which I don't know if that means anything to anyone, but the league batting average went down to 252. The league slugging percentage went down to 417. But I think this was a year that when we talk about the quickly rising strikeout rate, it has clearly been doing that. It's been going up, or at least it hasn't gone down in a very long time, but the differences are so small like you don't notice a half percentage point increase in the striker rate there's still a lot of contact the rate of three true outcomes this season

was essentially unchanged from last year it's a very very small increase so whatever your concerns are with where baseball is today, it's not changing that fast. There is time for Rob Manfred to evaluate this and figure out if he wants to make changes, how he's going to make changes, because the baseball is not in jeopardy of there suddenly being way too many strikeouts and the game being dead and boring. I understand some people already feel that way, but this is really, it only looks like it's happening overnight if you look at baseball trends going all the way back to baseball's origin. But in the moment, nothing is really out of control. Not a single thing is out of control right now in baseball. I agree. And this is probably something we will revisit in the long, long, cold, topic-devoid winter. So now that we have lots to talk about, there's one more thing about the regular season and this past weekend that I wanted to mention before we turn our attention to the playoffs, which is, well, there was one gif that everyone enjoyed of Noah Sindergaard swinging and having his bat break mid-swing, which was weird and just very symbolic, I suppose, of the Mets.

But I thought the more telling Mets storyline was, did you see the press conference that Jeff Wilpon gave where he claimed that the reason that the Mets have not spent much on the free agent market over the last few years, UNS Suspitous aside, was because Sandy Alderson recommended that they not and that the reason that they only have three full-time analytics people in their front office is because Sandy Alderson recommended that the organization not expand the analytics department. He just sort of said, oh yeah, all the things that you're mad at the Mets about. All Sandy Alderson's fault who is not here right now because he is getting treatment for cancer and we're hiring a new GM. And oh, yeah, none of that was my call.

In a week of implausible public statements, I think these were among the most implausible that I heard. Yes, I did not. I read about the the will ponds i did not watch or read a transcript of the press conference and of course the mets last offseason did spend money on the free agent market they just spent it poorly it turns out they spent on a bunch of mid-tier players who turned out to be not mid-tier players but in any case you can do you remember when when the dodgers were a mess you remember when the league had to step in because of their ownership concerns and then the dodgers got better than they won the first place in the division six years in a row now, officially, and the Dodgers are an unstoppable juggernaut. How much more frustrating is it as a

Mets fan to just look over and see that that's been happening? If the Dodgers were still run by Frank McCourt, if the Dodgers were still, or even just any other baseball team, would it be better or worse to be a Mets fan and just have to deal with the fact that no matter who the team hires, the ultimate problem here, it's not like it's an insurmountable problem, but the problem is coming from the highest ranks of the team. So they can hire a new GM

and they can bring in his own people or her own people to staff the front office, but ultimately the rot remains. And I don't know, do the Dodgers make you feel worse as a Mets fan just seeing where you could conceivably be? anytime soon is I guess it's possible that maybe he is parsing this in such a way that Sandy Alderson didn't recommend signing lots of free agents because there was no budget to sign them. And so Alderson said, well, we shouldn't sign free agents with money that ownership is not giving us. So I guess technically it uh alderson's decision not to hand out contracts that

the mets were not willing to spend on so if you condition people to never ask for something they'll never ask for something so congratulations to the best i guess right can i uh before we transition into the guests if there's one more sort of baseball trend related thing for me to throw out there i have nothing beyond a point, but this is something that just surprised me as I pulled it up on a tab. So league wide fastball velocity this year went down for the first time. And I don't even know how long the average four seam fastball, according to Brooks baseball, according to pitch info went down by three tenths of one mile per hour. And the average sinker velocity went down by two tenths of a mile per hour. This was the case for starting pitchers, and this was the case for relief pitchers who

lost half of a mile per hour off of their four-seam fastballs, so this is something that had been steadily rising year over year over year over year. One of the contributing factors to probably arm injuries but definitely strikeouts, and it's not like everyone is throwing soft now, but this was the lowest league average four-seam velocity since 2014. So that's weird. That's weird, right? Yeah, that is weird. And that wasn't the case, I don't think, when I looked just, I don't know,

it doesn't seem like that long ago. There was a point, I think, where we even mentioned on the show when answering a listener email not long ago that it looked like we were in line for another increase. So either the data must have changed or pitchers changed down the stretch or something. But, yeah, that is kind of curious. I don't know what it means exactly. Maybe it means nothing. Maybe we've actually hit some sort of plateau.

I suppose we will see next season. Yep, that's all I got. All right. And by the way, Shohei Otani wasted no time. He underwent Tommy John surgery on the first post-regular season day that he could. So we wish him well. We hope that he is as adept at healing as he is at everything else and that he will be back by opening day or not too long after opening

day as a hitter so the die is cast there i do before we get to jason just want to briefly talk a bit about the games that we saw today not that either of them was a fantastic game but still noteworthy obviously that we had two tiebreakers on one day in one season, which has never happened before. And I love that it happened in this season of all seasons, the season when there was supposed to be no suspense and everything was decided and super teams and there's no hope in faith. And we ended up on not even the last day of the season. Well, it turned out to be the last day of the season, but it was supposed to be the day after the last day of the season, and the season was not long enough. So as it turns out, the Brewers beat the Cubs. The Brewers are your NL Central title winners, and the Dodgers, as mentioned, did prevail over the Rockies, and they took their

sixth consecutive title. So any thoughts on what happened here? I know that Cubs fans are upset. We talked about this on a recent episode. It seemed as if they had the division sewn up in September. They had a five-game lead at some point this month, but they didn't have a terrible September. I mean, they didn't hit well, but I think they were, what, 16-12 for the month, or maybe that was coming into the last game. I don't know, but they were a winning team. Wasn't like they totally collapsed and blew it. It was just that the Brewers didn't lose a game, seemingly, this month. And that's kind of how the Rockies and Dodgers ended up where they were, too, because the Rockies did not lose a game for quite a while there too. So if you're just kind of cruising along and the team behind you goes on an incredible run and catches up to you, that's not a good feeling, but I don't know that it should be a fire everyone feeling. Right. I liked Monday as sort of a warmup for the wildcard games. I know people have talked about how it feels too abrupt to have teams eliminated so quickly after the end of the regular season.

And the stakes, obviously, were not that. The stakes were half of that, I guess you could say, on Monday, because the losers still had a roughly 50% chance of staying alive. They just have to play a game on Tuesday. But I missed the stakes a little bit, because you can look at the two games and say, well, the Cubs and Rockies still have a chance. It was effectively a double elimination tournament that's been set up for Monday and Tuesday. But I would love to know, and I guess we won't know because both the Cubs and the Rockies are going to be tired. They both played Monday, but it would be interesting to know exactly what kind of penalty the teams face for being tired and having to come back and play

again on Tuesday. I don't know if the Rockies are actually going to be starting Kyle Freeland on short rest, but I at least saw chatter to that effect. The Cubs will have John Lester, who is not as good as he used to be. And I don't know, it was also, as far as more subjective observations are concerned, how often have we seen Cubs fans take over Miller Park? But during this game, Brewers fans were, I don't know what their numbers were, but they were certainly loud. So if you volume adjust the Brewers fan population in Wrigley Field, it was really impressive and something I don't think that I had experienced before, even just watching on TV. So that made it kind of fun.

If there were Rockies fans in Los Angeles, they did not get to make noise because they didn't really have anything happen for them. But the Brewers Cubs game was fun, and then the Dodgers-Rockies game was a little bit of a bust, but at least it was a sort of a, I don't know, is it fair to say a coming out party for Walker Buehler? He already spent the whole season being good. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, it was a great matchup with Buehler and German Marquez, who was incredible down the stretch, and I'm sure a lot of people didn't know that because, again, Rockies.

And people don't seem to pay attention to Rockies and Rockies pitchers when they do well. And he looked good at times, even in that start. I think he struck out nine and clearly had some nasty stuff. And he just got bitten by Bellinger and Muncie, Max Muncie, of course, coming up big in this game as we all predicted the season would end with a Brewers-Cubs and Rockies-Dodgers double tiebreaker day on which Max Muncie would be one of the offensive heroes in the middle of the Dodgers lineup. Naturally, that happened. But yeah, Bleeler was was really impressive but he has been for a while

now and he's one of those guys who threw a lot of innings and was supposed to be innings limited at some point right and that just never happened because they couldn't afford to lose him right and so I it's going to be interesting to see how how much slack Buehler gets now in the playoffs moving forward I was wondering and I guess now this goes back to Sunday, but the Cubs knocked the Cardinals out. There were the four games of import, right? There was the Cubs against the Cardinals. The Brewers were playing the Tigers. The Dodgers were playing the Giants.

And the Rockies were playing the Nationals. And the closest of those games was, I think, decided by five runs. And that was the Cubs and the Cardinals. Yeah. Bunch of blurbs. Yeah. I was wondering. It would be interesting to try to do research.

Now, this would be hard, which I guess it means it's the next thing you can do for Grantland five years ago. But to go and check like the final weekend when you have teams that have to win facing teams who are just completely out of it. And it would be interesting to know if those games work out any differently

from how you would expect them to based on like the numbers and the projections. Because at least anecdotally, Sunday gave the sense of these teams just don't care because this they just they got destroyed and we never we always talk about how like the your focus and your energy level just doesn't make the difference in baseball like it does in other sports but it could certainly make a big difference if the other team is like mailed it in a month and a half ago so like like Dodgers Giants especially you think maybe the Giants try to get up and and just offer some kind

of competition but that was that was humiliating yeah doesn't anyone want to be a spoiler anymore i never thought that being a spoiler would motivate me personally it seems like kind of a kind of like an ill-spirited thing like why would you get motivated i mean unless they're your rival or something why would it be fun for you to knock someone out of the playoffs? I don't know. It's not like you're, I mean, someone's going to make the playoffs, but you just have to take out your bitterness about not making the playoffs on a team that is better than you. I never totally got that, but I'm sure it's a thing. What did you think about the Nationals' decision not to start Scherzer on Sunday, which caused some uproar.

I mean, it tells you right there, people and teams just aren't motivated by spoiling. It just doesn't mean anything to them. So I get, I mean, what's the point? Why start? I mean, I'm sure Scherzer wanted to start, you know, if only because he's kind of in the Cy Young race, I'm sure he would have liked to be out there, and he's just Max Scherzer. He's super intense and looks like he always wants to pitch. But I don't know whose decision that actually was. I read various reports, but people were upset that they were not making their full effort when there were playoff implications. Their explanation was sort of bogus, I thought, that it wasn't like someone was going to be eliminated based on this because everyone was at least in the playoffs in one way or another, right? That's what they said.

It wasn't going to decide whether someone made the playoffs or not, but it was potentially going to affect the outcome of the race and who's going to be in the wildcard game and who's going to win the division, which is a very important thing. So I don't know if that explanation made a whole lot of sense, but if they just didn't want to start their race in a game that meant nothing to them, I guess that is their prerogative. This comes up, it feels like, every year, maybe every two years or something, where a team ends up in a situation like this. And at the end of the day, you can talk about how the team has some sort of moral obligation to offer their best effort in every single game if they're playing a competitive game. And of course, the players on the field are going to want to be trying. But I mean, you're the Washington Nationals. The game means nothing to you.

You don't have to care about the race. And teams are playing younger players September call-ups during the month anyway. Teams are playing younger players September call-ups during the month anyway. So I never really understand the hysteria that goes into freaking out about a team not starting its best pitcher or playing its best player in a circumstance like this. Because ultimately, your responsibility is to your own players, your own team. And you don't really have to care about the pennant race because, as demonstrated, the Nationals were not even involved in the pennant race. So it was not their race to really care about that deeply. And it feels a little artificial to ask them to care about it because, as far as they're concerned, it's just not their problem.

Well, since we started recording this episode, Kyle Freeland has officially been announced as the Rocky starter for the wildcard game on three days rest, which I think he's only done once in the past. But, you know, I'm sure he will be somewhat diminished by that when we had him on the podcast and not have the foresight to ask him how he would feel if he would pitch in a wildcard game on three days rest. But you'd think that would hamper anyone's performance. I mean, the thing is that we're in these wildcard games. No starter is going to have a very long leash. If you're Kyle Freeland, you'd have a longer leash than most

considering the season that he's had. But we're going to talk to Jason in just a minute a bit about this game. Any thoughts on this particular matchup that we didn't cover with him? Well, John Gray has been so bad lately. the Rockies couldn't realistically go to him and feel confident with Freeland I don't know how much of this is just that old mythology of sinker ballers are better when they're tired because that's nonsense but anyway you can at least hand the ball to Freeland and just hope that adrenaline takes over and then if you win then you get to rest him so it's going to be an adrenaline play and then you hope Freeland goes about five innings it's going to be a risk the Cubs are better than the Rockies are the Cubs are at home their starter is not going on short rest so I'm not saying I don't think the Rockies have any sort of real advantage here but Freeland is

clearly the best guy that they have to offer so it is not a surprise to me and I don't think it puts the Rockies at a grave disadvantage to start him all right and I don't know that we'll have another episode up before the AL wildcard game on Wednesday. I will be at the AL wildcard game on Wednesday. So any thoughts on this? I think that this is a game where we are actually going to sort of see a bullpen game. We always, always, always talk about how someone or other should do the bullpen game in the wildcard game. That's been a reliable Fangraphs post for the past several years, and no one ever takes any blogger up on that or hasn't in the past, although the Yankees sort of inadvertently did last year

when Luis Severino got only one out, and that worked out fine for them. But it sounds as if the A's are basically going to do that. They've been using the opener strategy down the stretch, and it sounds like they're going to have Liam Hend They've been using the opener strategy down the stretch, and it sounds like they're going to have Liam Hendricks start this game as an opener for them, and then kind of bullpen it from there, which is sort of how they've gone through this entire season, and that has worked out fine for them too, and Yankees obviously have a very deep bullpen too. As we will mention with Jason in a moment moment the bullpen game

thing is going to be a storyline that we discuss throughout this month so i don't want to belabor it here but what's your guess for combined innings pitched by starters in this game uh well hendrix will do one maybe yes so small but still more than last year's AL wildcard game. Yeah, probably. So there's that. It's going to be—what's funny about Hendricks hitting the start is Hendricks is the guy that the A's actually designated for assignment during the summer because he was bad and they didn't have a role for him. And here he is technically getting the start in the wildcard game. But the thing that does interest me about this matchup, and I know it's all going to come down to one one baseball game there's no sense in trying to predict it but the a's have

a lot of right-handed pitchers in their bullpen or in their starting rotation who they'll use out of the bullpen and so not only did the a's last i checked and i'll confirm this is still true but i pretty sure that at least at fangraphs the a's led all teams in second place they led second place in major league baseball in position player war uh the A's and they hit basically as well as the Yankees did this season they defended better than the Yankees did this season so the A's are more competitive in this game than I think people assume but also the fact that they have so many right-handed pitchers they can offer out of the bullpen is going to put a lot of pressure on what few left-handed batters the Yankees have in the game. So as always, this game's probably going to end up like 11 to 3, and I don't know which team's going to win it, but the

A's at least have a more competitive pitching staff in this game than I think you would assume based on you just look at their rotation and think, bleh. Right, yeah, I mean that might hurt them a bit in a longer series, but in this particular game, it shouldn't. And as you mentioned, they're a good defensive team. They had the second highest ultimate zone rating of any team this season. They had the highest fly ball rate offensively of any team this season, which is a good attribute to have in a high home run rate era. So, yeah, they're a good team. We didn't necessarily expect them to be here but

they deserve to be here and it should be a good matchup i'm looking forward to being there last thing i'll say is that the 2003 detroit tigers at least won 11 games in the month of may this year's baltimore orioles their best month was march when they went one and one other than that the orioles never won more than nine games in a month this year. They went 1-7-9-6-9-8-7. That was their—I don't—if you just combine March with April, the Orioles' best month, they went 9-16 in the month of July. So bad year for the Orioles, it turns out.

I don't know if anyone was paying attention. Poor Orioles. Someone in the Facebook group posted a picture of an Orioles fan I think at the last game of the season and he had a custom jersey that the name said prospects and the numbers just said zero zero which kudos to that guy I guess it's not totally accurate they have some prospects now that they traded everyone but I like the sentiment of the jersey good job I lied I lied. There was one more thing I was going to say, because the team against the Orioles had the best record this season. The New York Mets, three and one. I found a Chris Davis quote about hitting 247. He said, I don't know. I'm just kind of speechless.

It's just weird. And Bob Melvin said, you know what? That is tough to comprehend. Going into the last at bat, I wasn't really sure if it would remain there. So that sounds like he knew he was aware of this. But he says it feels like if he had 10 more at bats, it would remain there the way his last couple of years have gone. That's almost impossible to do. The power numbers have gone up. He's a better hitter, even though the average looks the same. But I can't explain that. The baseball gods obviously want him to hit 247. I think Chris Davis's quote is the 247 batting average equivalent of a player quote. Yeah. All right. We will take a quick break and we will be back with Jason Venetti. Take me to school, boy. Leave me alone, boy. Slap me a bone of the universe. Take me to school, boy. Leave me alone, boy. Slap me a bone of the universe. So we very cavalierly made plans late last week to talk to Jason Benetti on Monday afternoon. As far as we knew, we would all be available, but baseball had other ideas, and Jason Kennedy had to call a baseball game that was not scheduled for that day. So we are talking to him on Monday evening, just a little while after the last out of the game that

he called, and about 24 hours before the next game that he is going to call, which is the NL Wildcard game. Hey, Jason. Hey, guys. How are you? We're doing all right, even though baseball has conspired against us with scheduling matters. But we're excited about the game that you are going to call tomorrow. Not that watching you on White Sox broadcast is not exciting in its own way this season, but tomorrow you are going to be calling on ESPN2, the NL wildcard game on an alternative broadcast that I guess is sort of stat cast powered. And you did something a little like this during the Home Run Derby. And I know that there have been similar things like this on MLB Network and on Fox. But is this a first for ESPN, sort of this kind of a playoff game with a stat sort of slant with Eduardo Perez and Mike

Petriello joining you on the call? So yeah, I think what I would compare it to ESPN-wise is the mega cash they do for the college football playoff and sometimes for the first game of the regular season. So for that, there'll be multi-channel experiences, including guys on the sideline calling it his homers, and then Bill Walton in an Uncle Sam costume talking to Jay Billis, and the coach's room, which is awesome with the clicker and whatnot. So they've done alternative stuff for big games before, but stat cast heavy and advanced metric heavy is something new other than the home run derby.

So we are pumped. I was just having an impromptu production meeting with our team and Mike and Eduardo, and we're stoked. It's going to be great fun. So how do you determine the audience and the appetite for a more stat-heavy broadcast? Obviously, as has been said, this is something that has been tried before, and I don't know exactly how steady you're going to be. But to what extent, I guess, is this kind of you all collectively flying blind and just seeing if it works? Well, I think the assumption, Jeff, is that we have an audience because we're doing it.

And then there are some basics. Like, I don't think you're going to see batting average in our show. You're not going to see pitcher win loss record in our show. There are some basics that I think people who follow baseball in this way will understand. But I also think that people turning on the game aren't going to necessarily miss what we're leaving out. And I think we're also going to tell stories of players. We're going to talk about the humans involved, but it's going to be more OPS, some weighted runs created plus, you know, instead of just saying, hey, it's not windy at Wrigley Field. What are the numbers that back up exactly what that, as Craig Council called it today, low scoring run environment means? I think you're going to see a telecast that we're trying to be very welcoming while also not presenting folder all, you know, not presenting things that are just said because they're said. So we're going to have a great time.

We're going to try some new stuff. We're going to take some risks. But we're also like, I think you guys will completely understand because you follow baseball in this way. I think you guys will completely understand because you follow baseball in this way. But I think the presentation of, say, what does it look like when you're facing a pitcher the first, second and third time through the order? What can we compare that to? That type of thing that some of us take for granted will be presented to people for the first time. And I think if we do it right, if we do it in an interesting way, it's not going to seem like a bunch of people sat in a laboratory and cooked stuff up. It's going to seem like a baseball game that's just a little beyond what you normally see.

Maybe not a little beyond, maybe a lot beyond. If this were the AL wildcard game, I hope there would be batting average because Chris Davis will be playing in that game. And that is important to me. I don't care about his OPS or his WRC plus, only the 247. important to me. I don't care about his OPS or his WRC plus, only the 247. I love your insecure attachment to Chris Davis's batting average, as though it will leave you at any moment. Like, why is mom going to work? She's never coming back. No other player has ever done it four seasons in a row. So how is I supposed to trust that

he could keep doing it anyway i i think as far as i've seen you have close to a 100 approval rating among effectively wild listeners who have complained about every single other broadcaster but not you that i've seen and i can only imagine that you paired with mike and eduardo and stats is kind of a dream come true sort of best possible broadcast. But do you think that long term, there is a future where we continue to see the main broadcast and the alternative broadcast that is sort of more stat centric? Or do you think that eventually, those things just merge in some way? No, I think so. I think it's how you frame it. I don't know that we're necessarily going to be more stat centric. I think we might be different stat centric. And if you're going to be completely hubris based, better stat centric, you know, that type of thing.

I think it's just a matter of taking what we typically see and changing the prism with which we view it through. So that's what it is for me, is figuring out what the best stats to apply to a scenario will be and not to necessarily just say something because we typically do it. I just think it's a paradigm shifter much more than a paradigm buster. I don't necessarily think it's going to be just stats. I think it's just going to be a different way of presenting baseball, armed with Mike Petriello and everything that MLB Advanced Media and baseball savant does for people that believe in it. So before his formal retirement from broadcasting last week, did you talk to Hawk Harrelson at all about what you were going to be doing tomorrow?

No. No. No. No, I didn't do that. I was actually talking to some Cubs people in the media room today and there was this W hanging on the wall and I said, where's the T

before the W and the T-W after the W? But no, I mean, that's the fun part about what's going on here in Chicago. You know, Hawk was beloved, and rightfully so, for a lot of things, and he's not a big sabermetric guy, and that's okay. But no, we did not have deep discussions

about how to apply OPS Plus in tomorrow's telecast. But that doesn't make him a bad man. It's just a different way of approaching it. So you mentioned the times to the order and the bullpenning. And in a way, I'm almost pre-exhausted about talking about that because we're in for a month of it now. And this year, it seems like we've been talking about it for the last three months, too, because of the opener and position players pitching. And is that sort of the storyline that you are anticipating and or dreading heading into this month that, you know, it's going to be the thing that game after game, whether you're calling or listening, it's going to come up at some point? Or do you think that the audience knows this now?

some point? Or do you think that the audience knows this now? Or do you think that managers have changed the way that they behave in the playoffs now because of these stats to such an extent that you can't really go a game without mentioning it? Did you say pre-exhausted? Yes. I think next time I make a turkey or something in the oven, instead of saying preheat the oven. I'm going to say pre-exhaust the oven to 350. I kind of like that. I think generally having that conversation and seeing the nuances of it is helpful. It's also mind-numbing at points, and I get that. But I think also if you keep having the same conversation, even people who are not inclined to advance stats are going to say at some point, let's do something different, or they're going to be open to something different. So I think the backdrop slash wallpaper of what everything sounds like typically

is good for the advancement of the game, because I think it signals where nuance can sneak in. So I get what you're saying. We know it's going to happen, right? We know that's going to happen. So you kind of steel yourself for it and you have the conversation and you try to find some way to spin it forward. So as an experienced announcer, obviously you have your certain daily routines when you were doing preparation for the broadcast. Now I understand it is not yet tuesday as we record

this so you haven't yet experienced the day of this broadcast but how has it already been different and how do you anticipate the preparation for this game is going to be different from what you are so accustomed to doing like does it make you does it make you nervous because i mean you're you're talking to hundreds of thousands if not millions of people on a regular basis but you're going to be doing it again tomorrow but does it make you feel any different just like psychologically when you're when you're going into it? Or is it just going to be another baseball game with different numbers that you talk about? Are you trying to make me nervous? Because you said like, oh, yeah, is it making you nervous that you're talking to thousands, millions of people?

So what I would say that was like some sort of weird psychological experiment you're doing on me. What I would say is, I think it's of weird psychological experiment you're doing on me. What I would say is I think it's actually freeing because there are moments where you're doing a quote unquote regular telecast where you're not going to go off and say, oh, his weighted runs created plus his X because it sounds a little esoteric. Well, with the backdrop of this actually being sanctioned, people tuning in to know what they're going to get. I think it's liberating in that you can just go anywhere that the stats take you. And you can have that discussion and you can go a little deeper because you don't have to, quote unquote, worry about the audience and worry about being over somebody's head. Although we're still going to try to be accessible and help people understand who are just having an entree into this world. We aren't necessarily going to worry about

a conversation at length being too far. So I think it's actually freeing. I really do. So stats aside, alternative broadcast aside, you've only had, oh, about 10 minutes or so of knowing for sure that this will be the matchup, so I'm sure that you have much preparation ahead of you. But these two teams playing each other, just kind of canvassing our audience, it seems as if Cubs fans are all perched on the ledge en masse right now. Rockies fans are in yet another wildcard game after almost getting that first division title. Are there any particular storylines that stand out to you here? Matchups that you're interested in seeing? It's difficult to preview a single game, but what are some of the things that you're thinking about?

That sound you hear in the background is the alarm of Rockies fans, actually. No, I think one of the storylines certainly is exactly where are your bullpens. Joe Maddon has used quite a few guys in the last couple of days. Now, he seemed like he was conserving some folks earlier today in order to have C-Sheck face a minimum of batters and etc. But I don't know where the Cubs bullpen is considering how many people he used the last couple of days. That said, you can stack your roster for this wildcard round because it's a separate round. So first things first, I'm interested to see exactly what the rosters look like and exactly who's playing with these 25 guys on each of these teams. The other thing for me is, what does a left-hander on the mound

mean to the Cubs lineup in a playoff situation? Does Hayward play? Where do you find your spot for somebody off the bench that's a left-hander, hypothetically? Where's Daniel Murphy go? So I think lineup-wise, especially for the Cubs, construction-wise against the left-hander, that's intriguing to me. You are going to be talking about teams who are a lot more successful than the White Sox, the team that you would talk about the most during the course of the year. Thanks, Jeff. Are you nervous yet? There's going to be a lot of people paying attention.

Billions of people are listening to this question. Volcanoes of people. Hot volcano of talent. I forgot what the expression was. there's going to be more metaphors i already saw one about mike sasha being a lighthouse today so like things it's already ramping up anyway you you're going to be talking about a playoff game between two good teams in a league that's different from the league that you cover and players that are different from the team that you cover and now obviously you know quite a bit about baseball and you're exposed to it even just by talking about the white socks you see a lot of other teams but what what hell was

that sorry i was nearly run over no that's uh well i'm glad that you weren't i would be another thing to be nervous about but given that you have now officially billions of people you have one day to prepare for this matchup between teams that you don't cover. So I guess this is sort of just related to the previous question that I asked about preparation. But how quickly are you able to get to know unfamiliar rosters? This is why you follow the game throughout the course of the season. I mean, I'm not saying that there's not a crush because there is. Like we spent a good chunk of the second half of that game between the Rockies and Dodgers

just sitting and talking about guys and what do you see in here and what do you think of this guy and where your mind going and all that sort of thing. But, you know, you watch teams throughout the year. I have friends who cover both teams. Obviously, the Cubs are in the city, so that's helpful as well. But you just it's, it's a crush. I mean, the thing I compare it to is for college football season, we get our games typically on Sunday for either Friday or Saturday. So you're learning to deal with 200 people in the course of six days.

You're not going to know everything, but you're going to try and you're going to try really hard and you're going to figure out what you know and what you don't know and fill those gaps with good questions to the manager. And, you know, we'll sit down with Joe Maddon and the Rocky side as well tomorrow. And, you know, players, coaches will be all good. We're ready to go. We can't keep you too long because you have to prepare for a game that the entire world will be watching. But are there any other stories, teams, players that you are particularly interested in watching the rest of this month? Any storylines that you expect to come to the fore or things that you love or hate talking about every October that always resurface? Yeah, I think what's most interesting to me is how biased am I about the Cleveland Indians?

I think what's most interesting to me is how biased am I about the Cleveland Indians? Because I love their rotation. I firmly believe that they will give the Astros a series. And I don't know exactly if it's because I've seen them 19 times that I believe in them, or if it's because they're actually really good that I think they can give the Astros a series. A lot of people seem to not believe that,

that I've talked to. But that to me is the series that I'll have my give the Astros a series. A lot of people seem to not believe that, that I've talked to. But that, to me, is the series that I'll have my eye on most because you know how it is. You watch a team for long enough, and you either really believe in what they do or really don't. And I think the Indians could very well end up somehow in the World Series this year. If we have just a minute or two for one final question,

the last thing I wanted to ask you is, obviously, Ben and I are biased in your favor. I think you were fantastic. You were an excellent announcer, one of the best in either league, at least that I've listened to. And I enjoy your presence, enjoy your voice, enjoy your sense of humor, all those things.

It's flattery and more and more flattery. You wouldn't believe how many people are listening to me compliment you right now. Billions of people. The numbers you haven't even heard of, units of measurement. You are one of several baseball announcers who do this for a job. So what was the process for you being selected for Tuesday's broadcast in the first place? Did you volunteer?

Was there an application process? How basically did this come to be? Yeah, I think it's in part just the fact that the Home Run Derby went well. You know, Eduardo and Mike and I got along very well. I have kind of a bent toward statistics, advanced stats. And, you know, I think it's in part because I'm, you know, this is tooting your own horn, but you basically said, like, why are you good? So I think the one thing I'd say is I like asking questions of people and I like figuring out what I don't know. So I think that's how we ended up getting together for this is because we all, the three of us are genuinely curious people who like to raise more questions than we have answers

to. So that's, that's kind of the goal with this telecast. And hopefully we end up raising even more questions about how to present baseball on TV. Plus, you're already in Chicago, so you save ESPN some plane fare. Yeah, no, it's because I'm cheap, Ben. You nailed it. Tens of people heard that comment. All right. forward that comment all right so last thing you when we get to the playoffs we we sort of hear the same narratives i feel like often from broadcasters whether it's momentum or it's how a team came into the playoffs or it's experience and veterans and no proof is ever

cited other than maybe personal experience if it's someone who was on the field at some point. Do you subscribe to any of that? Will we be hearing any of that? Do you shake your head when you hear that? Or is it just sort of part of the background noise? No, psychology is important, but it can't be distilled into one word with a capital letter, like he is clutch. Tell me what he's like in that moment. And I think it's more believable. Tell me why momentum exists. I'll probably tell you it actually doesn't. But, you know, I think the why and the who is this person is much more important than basic sportsy phrases. And we all grew up with them. So it's difficult to completely avoid them.

But, you know, I just want the the offense and the pitching and the special teams to all play at the same time you know i'm just looking for a great game from both sides three phases of the game really all right that's what we're looking for look they all even out guys they all even out well we've got to let you go so please uh weave your way around the traffic and stay up all night to prepare for this pivotal career-making or breaking alternative broadcast that you were doing on Tuesday.

And if you survive that, we wish you good luck with the offseason. Not that you ever take that much time off, but off from baseball, at least. And we look forward to hearing you much more often on all the White Sox games next year. I appreciate that, guys. And I also like alternative broadcasts because we sound like a garage band from Tacoma.

Right. It's the hipster broadcast. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Jason, thank you very much for finding time to talk to us. Thanks, guys. I'm going to trampoline out of here.

All right. We will take another quick break, and I will be back with Jim Albert to discuss the improbability of Chris Davis hitting.247 four years in a row. Just give it some time You can hit my line like 24-7 24-7 24-7

Hope you wouldn't listen anytime So over the weekend, I was tweeting a bunch about the incredible Chris Davis 247 feet, and I got a few replies from people who wanted to know what were the odds. And I didn't trust myself to answer that question, so I thought about who would be both as geeked about this as I was and actually equipped to determine the answer or an answer. And the first person I thought of was Jim Albert, a math and stats professor at Bowling Green University and the author or co-author of several books about baseball stats, including curveball, visualizing baseball, teaching statistics using baseball, and analyzing baseball with R. Fortunately for us, Jim was available and is joining me now.

Hey, Jim. Hi. Thanks for having me. Yeah, happy to. So was I right? This seems like it would be in your wheelhouse, and I remember reading a chapter in Curveball about probability using batting average. So does this warm your statistical heart as much as it does mine? Well, I guess it's an interesting question.

I guess the thing I was thinking about, it's funny that you wake up in the middle of the night and you start thinking about these kinds of things, but I guess the issue is not the computation, but the issue is what's the question? Any computation you make is answering a certain question. For example, here's an answer. Basically, we're talking about someone as a hitting probability. Let's suppose you know exactly what the hitting probability is. Now, we don't know that, but let's suppose that Chris Davis' hitting probability is 247, for sake of argument. Seems like a safe assumption. Okay, then you say, well, what's the chance that he's going to, for four seasons in a row, get a 247 batting average?

And that's, you assume that these outcomes are independent. You know, they're just coin flips. And so it's his binomial probabilities. And so you multiply, you know, four binomial probabilities together where you get exactly that. 97 hits the first season and 137 hits the second season. 140 and 142. Okay. And you get a number like 2.7, 10 to minus six.

But then I thought about that and said, well, really, that's the probability of getting those four outcomes. But that really is not the question because that doesn't really answer the question because what's interesting is not the fact that he's batting 247, but what's interesting is the fact that he got the same batting average four years in a row. Right. So to me, the question, so basically, I answered, I had an answer, but it was to the wrong, I think at least the wrong question.

The right better question, maybe that's not the best question, a better question would be what's the chance that any hitter gets the same batting average for four consecutive seasons? Yeah, right. And so it doesn't really matter what he gets the first season. The interesting thing is, what's the chance that he'll get the same batting average in the next three seasons? And that's a different competition. So the first question is saying essentially that if we assume that his true talent batting average is 247, which again seems like a safe assumption, although I guess you probably talent over this number of at-bats. And it's at that point, once you get to a certain number of at-bats, I mean, the more at-bats you have, the more likely it is that your actual average will reflect your true

talent average, right? But this is a... Well, actually, that's not quite... Well, I mean, the probabilities are more diffused. And so I don't know. The actual probability of hitting that same batting average is relatively small. Because it's unlikely you're going to hit your true probability. It'll be somewhere in the neighborhood of that.

And that's the most likely value. But it's not necessarily very probable. But anyway, yeah. But then you get the ball. But my point is, that's really the wrong calculation, because we don't even know. We have nothing fancy about 247. Yeah, and his true talent batting average has probably changed over the course of this streak, right? If he was a 247 hitter at the start of it, he probably isn't now.

But anyway, as you're saying, how would you even go about trying to determine the answer to how likely is it that anyone gets any average four years in a row? Well, what you can do is you can say, okay, here's someone with ability at 247. And then you just say, what's the chance that he's going to, well, basically, no matter what he has the first season, that doesn't really matter. The question is, what's the chance he's going to match that the next three seasons? Now that will be a, that's not quite so unlikely. I mean, it'll be a little, it'd be a bigger, the the more it's a more likely thing to happen than the first thing i computed because you don't care what the first batting average is all you care about is the remaining three match that okay so what i'm saying is you're

not people are not excited by 247 they're excited by the fact that you have these matches yes and you're saying that even though that has never happened and there have been many seasons and many batters, it is not as unlikely as you would think possibly that it would happen? Right. It's not. Okay. Let's go one step further. Why we're focusing on one player, right? So really, if I did a simulation, I would look at not one player, I would look at a lot of players. I would say, okay, in this course of, let's say, 30 years of baseball, and you make some reasonable assumptions, then what's the probability of interesting things happening? What I'm saying is that when you look at things in broader scopes, then things often don't seem as surprising as what you see for the one season. For example, I think I did one paper once on Oakland's 20-game winning streak, the Moneyball winning streak, and people were asking. That was really interesting.

But really, in the context of many years of baseball, you would expect some team some year to have that kind of winning streak. Do you think that this streak is likely enough that you would expect it to happen in the number of seasons that we've seen, or probably not? Probably not, because since it hasn't happened before, probably not.

But what I'm saying is it's not. So my point is, these calculations I was doing are really, to me, they're the wrong calculations, because you should look at it over a broader section of years. And then you're considering more, It's like it's like the birthday problem. I mean, what's the chance that someone's going to match my birthday? That's pretty small. But if you look at a class of 25 people, the chance that there's some match somewhere in the class is over 50 percent. So it's the same kind of thing where there's so many ways that you can imagine birthdays

that it actually becomes a more probable event. But certainly, if you look at down to my level, sure, I'm surprised if somebody has my birthday. That's a less likely event. Yeah. I mean, batting average is such a variable statistic that it's somewhat surprising to see this. I mean, guys go all the time from having great batting averages to bad batting averages, and it could be that their talent fluctuated or it could just be a bunch of bad bounces. I mean, even if you are a 247 hitter throughout that time and you are an especially consistent hitter, you still wouldn't think that something like this would happen just because there's so many other variables outside of the direct control of the hitter and there's the quality of the competition

and the ballpark and the fielders and just random chance and so I think that's why everyone got so excited about this but as you're saying it's kind of a more complicated question than just multiplying independent event probabilities against each other so it would be satisfying if we had an easy, simple answer. But you're saying that that... Yeah, I guess one I should mention too is that, I wrote a paper a couple years ago about how batting average is basically, there's three relevant rates. There's the strikeout rate, and there's the home run rate,

and there's the rate of balls that are in play the way that he moves. Now, if you look at, I looked at these stats for Chris Davis the last two seasons. Okay. So his strikeout rate dropped 42 points this season, but his hitting and balls in play went down by 29 points.

So those are dramatic changes. So he really didn't strike out as much, but he compensated for that by not getting hits involved in play. So that was really, that to me is bizarre. His home run rate was the same. 12%. Yeah, that's kind of the, I mean, in other ways, he has changed quite a bit throughout this streak. I mean, there are years when he's walked a lot and years when he hasn't walked as much. And he's obviously gained power since the start of this streak. So he's a little bit of a different hitter and better hitter overall, but the batting average is always the same. And the fact that he is still a strikeout hitter, still above average strikeout rate, that would make this less likely,

right? Because you'd expect even more variability if there are fewer balls in play. Is that true? I guess that's true because you have a smaller sample size. It'd be more apt to... To me, the home run rate is a pretty consistent measure of ability. I think that's pretty consistent.

Likewise, strikeout rate tends to be... There isn't much but right. The hits and balls in play tend to be more variable. That's true. Interesting also this season that the other Chris Davis, the one in Baltimore, also had a notable batting average. So that's interesting too. He had a notable everything. Not in the way that you want to be notable.

No, no, no. Right, right. Well, okay. So this is a more complicated answer than you could probably fit into 280 characters on Twitter. So I feel justified in not attempting to answer, but I didn't get any more specific than saying roughly a gazillion. That was my answer to the question, gazillion to one. Can you even ballpark what kind of odds we're talking about here with the more accurate formulation of this question, or would you have to get in there and do the math? Well, I actually did just say, I'm actually speaking, I'm at Boston today, and I'm getting into some talks in Boston, and I'm having dinner tonight with some Harvard statisticians, so they like baseball. So I'm sure into some talks in Boston. I'm having dinner tonight with some Harvard statisticians.

They like baseball. So I'm sure this will be a lively topic for discussion tonight. I can let you know when I find out. But anyway, they're interested in these kind of issues. But to me, it's fascinating because, of course, batting averages have always been fascinating. For example, people love the 300 batting averages. If you look at it over history, there's a spike at 300

because there must be some extra incentive for chaining that batting average. So people either bench that last game or something happens, so they get that 300 batting average and they get their extra amount of money and their tie rings, So they're interesting characteristics, you know. protect the 247 but I guess you could say that Bob Melvin was tampering with randomness and chance there by actually putting his finger on the scale and saying no it will stay at 247 I do

wonder yes and never know all right well I appreciate your coming on and if you do do the complete calculations and have updates for us please let me know and I will pass it on to our listeners. And while I have you, I noticed that Analyzing Baseball with R has a second edition coming out this December. Good holiday gift for baseball nerds. And people

always ask us, how do you get into baseball? What should I learn or study if I want to work in baseball? And I have told them to read that book and follow its instructions because one of your co-authors, Max Markey, does work for a baseball team, and all baseball teams value the sort of work that you did there. So what's new in the second edition? Just more analysis, more baseball data, more R? Well, I was very lucky to get Ben Balmer on my team, because Ben's just the opposite of Matt.

Matt Ben used to work for a baseball team in that. And then he got into academia. And then also, so the book is more modern in the sense that we use the more modern, what's called Tidyverse code for R. So it's very different looking code. It's a little more intuitive, a little more readable. And we talk about StatCast, the new StatCast data. And there's a little more intuitive, a little more readable. And we'll probably talk about StatCast, the new StatCast data. And there's a chapter on that, and there's also a new chapter on capture framing, which is obviously a popular topic now. We illustrate fitting models to estimate capture framing. So, yeah.

Great. So it's one of those new things. Well, I look forward to getting it and putting it on the shelf next to the first edition, where I look at it from time to time and wish I understood it better and feel bad that I don't. But other people actually have gotten good at it and gotten jobs. And so I recommend it. So, Jim, thank you very much for coming on. Well, thank you. Okay, that will do it for today. By the way, meant to mention this earlier, I got an email about this last week. There was apparently a poll conducted by Seton Hall about whether people prefer a multi-game series or the wildcard round. According to this poll, which was conducted among 780 Americans on landlines and cell phones with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.6%, public opinion favors a multi-game series over a single elimination wildcard game 47% to 26%, which sort of surprises me. I don't know whether it's just because the polling audience skewed older and the wildcard is new and not what people are used to.

I get it. Certainly if you want the best team to win, multi-game series is better. But I've kind of embraced the randomness of it. Even with a longer series, there would still be an awful lot of fluctuation. If we want to crown the best team, we could just declare everything over after the regular season. The postseason is silly and doesn't make much sense and doesn't tell us who the best team was, but it's an awful lot of fun. So I am very much looking forward to the single game wildcard competitions. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild signing up to pledge some small monthly amount following five listeners have

already done so kade madsen darren jones kurt hackamer andrew simon and steve kashur thanks to all of you you can join our facebook group which is always hopping in october facebook.com slash groups slash Effectively Wild are usually threads for any game that's going on. We will continue to fit in email shows when and where we can, so please keep your questions and comments for me and Jeff coming via email at podcastoffancrafts.com or via the Patreon messaging system.

Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. We will most likely be back next after the wildcard games to recap those and preview the division series. Schedules during the postseason always subject to change. One way or another, we will be back to talk to you soon. space There's nothing left here to remind me Just a memory of your face Take a look at me now There's just an empty space

But to wait for you is all I can do And that's what I've got to face Take a look at me now. I'll just be standing here. You coming back to me is against the odds and that's a chance I've got to face. Hello and welcome to episode 11... nope. That was a weird one.