Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1282: Play-By-Playoffs

Episode Date: October 12, 2018

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the response to their writing about the demise of the starting pitcher, the sources of their unease about baseball’s bullpen takeover, and the difficulty of previewing playoff rounds, then set up and break down the Astros-Red Sox ALCS and the Dodgers-Brewers NLCS and revisit the dullness of the […]

Tell me how you feel about me, do you like, like, like me? Tell me what you really feel, do you like me? Just say you do! Hello and welcome to episode 1282 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. Hey, Ben. We're going to be previewing the championship series a little bit later in this episode.

We will also be talking to Brittany De La Creta about her great article for The Ringer about women in broadcasting. broadcasting. But before we do, my opinion piece came out and you piggybacked on my opinion with a piece of your own, which you didn't exactly express an opinion as strongly as I did in your piece, but you did agree with my opinion, which is a form of expressing an opinion. So it seems like neither of us really like the evolution of pitcher usage, at least in the narrative aesthetic sense. I wrote my piece, we talked on the show about how I sort of miss having the starting pitcher as the protagonist of the game, who's kind of the constant. And it's really fascinating to see how he adjusts and how the opposing team adjusts to him. It's really fascinating to see how he adjusts and how the opposing team adjusts to him. And we're losing a little of that element as we go towards this bullpen-centric model. And so you polled the audience, and the early results indicate that the audience agrees. Yeah, you were taking my banter, although I guess you're not because you just led to me.

So, yeah, I piggybacked off your post, which was very convenient because mine was easy and yours was hard. And yeah, whenever I do one of my polling posts, I try not to express what I think because I don't want to bias the way that people vote. And I think that it's more interesting to see what thousands of people think as opposed to just what I think. So I can say, since this podcast won't be published until well after the post is already published, I'm not going to be biasing anything. I do think I'm going to miss traditional starting pitcher routines. And I know that this gets complicated because it's easy to say you're going to miss something that you grew up with and have always known. And you don't know what the future is going to be like. And let's face it, you and I are not going to get like fall away from baseball because pitchers are used a little differently.

They've already been used differently and we're still here. So understanding that we're all going to adjust in the same way that we adjust to a website that changes its front page formatting, the current results, I asked everyone how they feel about the diminishing importance of the starting pitcher, whether that's openers, bullpen games, or starters just not lasting very long, Luis Severino maybe not being supposed to start the fourth inning for God's sake, as opposed to talking about the sixth or seventh and so i gave people five options i asked them how they felt and i gave them the options uh strongly positive somewhat positive neutral somewhat negative and strongly negative and i can tell you based on preliminary data 43 percent of

respondents feel somewhat negative about this trend 24 of respondents feel neutral and 15 more percent feel strongly negative about these trends so that gives us 58 of respondents feel some form of negative about the trend versus just 19 of respondents who feel positive about this that's a three to one ratio now yeah i haven't polled people about how they feel about other trends. I don't know what other trends there are. I guess rising strikeouts would be one. But that is interesting to me. I understand. I would have expected maybe a few more positive votes for the novelty. And then you could argue that, well, the novelty goes away when everyone's doing it. So then that's not a valid reason to say that it's positive. So it is interesting. And I guess as I think about it,

that it's positive. So it is interesting. And I guess, as I think about it, what are the reasons to feel positive about, let's say the trend were going in the other direction. What are the reasons to feel positive about that? Because as soon as someone starts doing something and has success, then you just expect any competitive advantage goes away, right? So if you have all these teams who were limiting the role of the starters and then leaning on the bullpen more often, the competitive advantage argument is very short-term minded. So even that goes away. But anyway, to get back to the point, it does feel like people are going to miss the protagonists as such, and I think that I will too. In fact, I'm pretty sure I know that I will too. Yeah, and it's just, well, you can read the piece and we've talked about it a bit if you

want the fully fleshed out argument. But I just think that there are so many more pitchers in baseball today. There were 799 players who threw a pitch in a major league game this year. Some of them obviously were position players, but still almost 800 guys. And that was like a 43% increase relative to 20 years ago when there were no fewer games or fewer teams or fewer innings than there are today. It's just more bodies accounting for those innings. And it's hard to feel that those people are characters that you know them in the way that you would say a starter who goes deep into the game a lot of the time because you're just seeing teams use these taxi squads and

shuffle guys on and off the back of the roster and bring up some guy who throws 20 innings and then he's gone and it's it's hard to really feel like you know those people that you have a history with them the way that you would with a starter. There are many fewer pitchers that get to, say, 200 innings even, and the change seems to be accelerating. This is like one of the longest term trends in baseball. I mean, it goes back almost to the beginning of starters pitching fewer complete games and fewer innings per start, but it has really accelerated just in the last few years here, as we've seen bullpenning kind of take over. And the fact that the Fangraphs audience feels so against this surprised me, because that, you would think, would be the audience that would be

the most predisposed to appreciate the strategy and the tactics and getting every win that you can. There's been so much attention paid to the opener at Fangraphs, and you would think that your readers, that the people who are voting in your surveys would be the people who appreciate that the most. So if even they have an instinctively negative reaction on the whole to this, that makes me wonder what the numbers would be for more of a mainstream audience. and it would be worth running the poll again in a year two years down the line five years down the line just to see how how opinion is shifting because of course people will the people who stick around will become more accustomed and more open to whatever the game is at that point in time but i can tell you when when we're done recording this you talked about how many more

pictures there are i think your piece said what the increase in total pitchers of like 43 percent over the past 20 years or something just absurd and so i'm going to be writing something kind of quick about ryan presley who there's most people wouldn't know who ryan presley is but it's no big deal he's just maybe one of the most dominant relievers who was in baseball today of course it happened suddenly this is what happens with relievers but i'm gonna i'm gonna read you a i don't know top 10 list i guess because i've already got this in front of me ryan presley this year threw the most unhittable pitch uh that is the the pitch type that got the highest rate of whiffs this is the uh just multiplying swing rate versus whiff rate to get whiff rate i guess so r So Ryan Presley's slider this season, Ryan Presley's slider this season,

generated a swing and miss 33% of the time. That is very high. 56% of all swing attempts against the slider missed the ball. Very good pitch. Nobody knew it. But here's the top 10 of the most unhittable pitches this season. They are, by the way, just as a warning, almost all sliders. Ryan Presley's slider, Will Smith's slider, Patrick Corbin's slider,

Jace Frye's slider, Tanner Scott's slider, Pedro Stroop's slider, Edwin Diaz's slider, Sir Anthony Dominguez's slider, Hector Neris's splitter, and Ken Giles' slider. So in there, now pitch type whiff rates are not the be all end all of pitcher dominance but in that group how many people know who jace fry is or tanner scott or even ryan presley even will smith who's been around for a while how many people know who hector narris is if they're outside of philadelphia serenity dominguez was like a first half he's sensation but he kind of unfortunately started to get

worse as the team melted down around him. So he didn't really get the chance to become a national name. So how many, if you go beyond that list, you don't have to go far to find Kirby Yates is up here. Kyle Gibson, Amir Garrett, Trevor Hildenberger. So there are just so many relievers who are good and it changes all the time so the you want i think part of is as as you alluded to in your article you also with pitch starting pitchers you just get more familiar with them you kind of have a good sense of which starters are good and

which starters are are more vulnerable but as we start to introduce more relievers the upside is well that's more opportunities for pitchers it's more opportunities for them to make names for themselves of course we do get to know good relievers and maybe with trends as they are we'll get to know more good relievers because every team will will have them but if you don't if you're not able to count on which relievers are actually good, I mean, for God's sake, how many good relievers aren't on playoff rosters because they were bad in September? There's like, I don't know, 10 of them? I think Matt Barnes is considered risky by the Red Sox.

He had a dominant season, but he was bad in September. Is Matt Barnes good? I have no idea. I couldn't tell you if Matt Barnes is good. People don't trust him. So if you also just don't know what to make of the individual relievers that come in it does it does feel like it's just more difficult to relate to the game i liked your your example of kind of thinking of it as a television show because that's what it is it's just a very very

very long television show it lasts a very long time. But if you don't know the characters, then you will naturally just connect to it less. Yeah. And that was one of the questions that my editor had for me was, well, do you think that we will get to know these guys as this model of pitcher usage changes? That maybe right now it seems like you just have all these generic right-handed relievers, but if they take on more prominent roles or at least relative to starters then will they be better known and I guess it's hard to say it's possible but I just feel like there aren't enough innings to go around with those guys and even if you go from 60 innings to 70 or 80 or 90 innings it's just not going to give you the time in the spotlight

and the screen time, if you're thinking of it as a TV show, that a starter gets or historically used to get. So I don't know that there's any way, as long as you're going to have these giant bullpens where you're just piecing together each game, that the individual cogs in those machines can really take on as prominent a role or get to be as well known and so I think that is the advantage and the bright side of this is that there's more variety like I could see someone saying well it's boring to have the same guy pitch all nine innings and this way you get different faces and guys come in and they're throwing different pitches, and they have different styles. And that's true.

Like, I'm glad that there's a place in the majors for Kazuhisa, Makita, or Pat Vendetti. Well, I don't know. But there was, briefly at least. And I'm kind of glad that these guys who traditionally probably wouldn't have been able to crack a big league roster they now can even if it's only for a while and as you say like some of these almost anonymous guys can have the most unhittable pitches and in the past there were probably plenty of guys who had an unhittable one pitch but that just wasn't enough to have a big league job because you had to get through the lineup a few times and you had to have a couple or a few different pitches that you could consistently throw and get guys out with. And now you don't really need that anymore. You just need one really nasty pitch and then maybe one show me pitch and you can get by just fine pitching in a year or two at a time.

by just fine pitching in an inning or two at a time. So there's a positive aspect to that. But for me, it is outweighed by the negatives, at least for now. And that was my big concern in writing this and expressing this was becoming one of the baseball grumps that we have talked about and just being a version of that guy with more stats and more graphs, but is ultimately just doing the get off my lawn, yelling at clouds kind of argument that something is new and therefore I don't like it. But there's a lot of new stuff that I do like and that I am open to. And a lot of things that people lament is the downfall of the game, like strikeouts, for instance, where I've kind of taken the opposite stance and said, no, this is kind of okay. It's not that big a deal. So to me, that makes, I guess, I'm more confident in my own reaction to this because it's not just my blanket reaction to every new thing that comes along. And there's a difference between saying, I don't like this,

I will never like this, and I hate this game, game and saying i don't really like where this is going but you know i'm open to it and maybe i'll adjust because you don't know what your perspective is going to be as is i don't know 15 teams are using the opener maybe you will come around to it maybe you'll like the bulk guys and one of one of the things that is sort of a the hidden upside i guess of introducing all these new pictures is that you do get just more opportunities to find rich characters rich backstories guys who came out of nowhere people can you know you get one of those those spring training fluff pieces or just like backstory pieces that says this guy came out of a small community and i don't know the dominican and he was given a small bonus but he did this one thing

he worked really hard etc etc etc his family went through all these things and i was in the major leagues that's great what a what a great story i i feel bad for treating it as if it's generic but he did this one thing, he worked really hard, etc., etc., etc. His family went through all these things, and now he's in the major leagues. That's great. What a great story. I feel bad for treating it as if it's generic, because these stories are all really touching and heartwarming. I just don't want to go into detail about a hypothetical baseball player. But you have these opportunities to find these really, really interesting stories, because there are just simply more players who show up on a major league roster.

But I do wonder wonder as you as i'll use your your screen time term because i like it as you have players who are getting a lesser share of screen time it makes me wonder if baseball we're in an era this is the let the kids play commercial era right now we have see ken griffin jr every day saying let the kids play as they have these rolling video clips of javier baez n Nolan Arenado, and etc. And this is convenient, I guess, in a sense that we, or I should say baseball, we're not part of baseball, baseball will need players to, I think, be more demonstrative, be more charismatic, to just be more interesting characters because they need to make the most of the screen time they get. Now, so many of the

players you think about when you think of expressive baseball players happen to be position players who aren't having a meaningful chunk carved out of their playing time. They're still there in 155 games a season. You don't hear so much about the really charismatic seventh inning lefty reliever. I don't know how many of those there are but if if more players were able to i don't know feel comfortable expressing themselves and just showing who they who they really are then it would help them become less anonymous and it would help to ease the transition because right now it really does just feel like the starter comes out in the fifth and then we just have this line of the hard throwing righties you throw really good sliders and then that's just

it there's so little to differentiate one from the next all right well i can go vote if you're interested now that we have uh totally skewed your opinion but uh i'll link to my article and your article and you can come to your own conclusions i i think that analogy to a website redesign is a good one because there's always just an instinctive recoiling what is this this is new i don't like it where do i click how do i find the thing that i liked before and usually you get used to it and then by the time they redesign the website again you're attached to that website fan graphs has gone through this very thing not all that long ago when when lookout Landing back in the day

changed its format, I remember the community got so upset that the web design people got emailed death threats. I shouldn't be laughing. This is really terrible. I don't think anyone was serious about it. None of us enjoyed that. We were very...

Those of us editorial members were young and very close-minded to change But it turns out the people who were making the changes knew exactly what they were doing And the site changed much, much for the better Yeah, all right, so let's talk about the championship series Series, plural, I never know how to emphasize that So that series sounds like multiple series But you know what I'm talking about.

There's an ALCS and an NLCS. And one more reminder, you and I will be doing our simulcast, our first of two, this postseason during NLCS Game 1 for Patreon supporters at the $10 level and up. You're still in time to sign up if you're interested, if you're hearing this on Friday. So the NL series starts first. The AL series starts first, the AL series starts second. It's always hard to break down playoff series, I find. There are a few different ways you can do it. You can do like the classic position by position sort of breakdown, like this team's got a better first baseman and that team's got a better shortstop, which

is kind of fun, I guess, but doesn't really tell you anything about the overall team strength. Or you can just talk about those overall strengths. It's just hard because A, you're talking about a best of seven series. B, you're talking about baseball, where there's just only so much matchup stuff that really matters. It's just not a sport necessarily like basketball or like football where you have these dramatically different play styles and you have the X's and O's and you have these specific game plans and plays that you can run and this guy is going to be guarding that guy. It just doesn't really work that way in baseball. And so you're always kind of looking for these slight edges where maybe you can make a case that this team is especially well suited to play this team because of this little factor here. And then often it doesn't end up playing a role in the World Series about Dallas Keuchel versus the Dodgers, which very well could be a matchup that we see again very soon. And that to me was a case where I felt pretty good about having actually provided some useful information possibly because Keuchel's this guy who, especially last year, he really just avoided the strike zone and he got guys to chase.

And so I looked up Keichel stats versus hitters who chase and Keichel stats versus hitters who don't chase. And it turned out that he's like totally dominant against guys who chase and just very mortal against guys who don't chase. And the Dodgers then and now are a very selective team. And so I kind of figured this is a team that for that reason and other reasons matches up very well with Keichel from the Dodgers perspective and did that work out I don't know I guess he was not great in that series he made a couple starts he had a five something ERA he didn't look that good was it because of that X factor that I identified? I don't know. It was two starts. Who knows? It was against a good hitting team that is kind of good against everyone. So,

you know, even after the fact, I don't really know whether that was actually the reason, but I could at least show some compelling stats and make a case for why it might be. And it's hard to do that. So are there any ways in which we can do that for either of these series and say that there is some hole that one of these teams can exploit against another instead of just defaulting to, well, the Astros are probably the better team and the Dodgers are probably the better team? Okay. I looked. I tried. Realistically, here's what we know. Dodgers-B the better team. No. Okay. I looked. I tried. Realistically, here's what we know.

Dodgers-Brewers, for example. Brewers have a better defense. Dodgers have a better rotation. Brewers have a better bullpen. Dodgers have a better lineup. What does that all mean? Hell if I know. Red Sox-Astros.

Astros are not virtually bulletproof. They don't really have weaknesses. Their rotations are kind of comparable. I still refuse to give into the notion that david price is just terrible in the playoffs i am a stubborn holdout i would take david price over i don't know any brewers starter that's for damn sure in the playoff game so the astros have very good pitching staff but i think the red sox pitching staff is underrated in large part because i think people sell david price short in large part because i think people sell their relievers short based on recent data but i do actually think that matt

burns is okay i think ryan brazier is pretty good and i think craig kimbrell is better than he looked in the ninth inning of that yankees game where he tried to blow it in dramatic historic fashion so the red sox can hit the hell out of the ball the astros they're not they're not perfect especially i don't know where carlos correa's health is right now because he was terrible in the second half coming back from injury. He did hit a home run in the ALDS, but you know, the Astros, their position player core is like

Springer, Altuve, Bregman, and Correa. And outside of that, they're fine, but there's nothing real special about the rest of that roster. And so if Correa is not at 100%, then you can see how the Red Sox who have JD Martinez and Mookie Betts and Xander Bogarts and etc match up at least as well in terms of position players so I don't see that much separation the Red Sox did win 108 games in the regular season

this year in the tough division they are very good so not a huge separation there I do think the Dodgers are better than the Brewers, but the great equalizer, of course, is that the Brewers' bullpen deserves a lot more confidence than the Dodgers' bullpen. So if the Brewers are able to turn it over the bullpen after three innings and the starter hasn't gotten into too big of a mess, then that'll be interesting. But, I mean, you just look at their starters are going to throw at least, I don't know, what, 15, 20 innings, depending how long the series goes,

and they're just not good. And the Dodgers lineup is. And the Dodgers lineup is good for both sides because they have a bunch of depth, a bunch of switch hitters, platoon hitters. So it's just going to be difficult, I think, for the Brewers to not end up trailing by a couple of runs in the first third of the game. And then my early sense, which of course means nothing, but that they will the first third of the game. And then my early sense, which of course means nothing, but that they will spend the rest of the game playing catch up. Yeah. And there are guys in that Brewers pen who've been worked pretty hard this year. I mean, this is how they got to this point was depending on those pitchers. And you never know if that

will catch up at some point this late in the season. But then they've also sort of gotten reinforcements in that Corey Knabel came back from his injury and looks like his old self. And then you've got Corbin Burns and Brennan Woodruff and these guys who were sort of added to the Jeffress hater foundation. And now that's a pretty deep group. So Council, I'm sure, will continue to be very aggressive.

And as my colleague Zach Cram put it this week, it's kind of like the bullpen and the mixing and was that the Brewers decided not to start Julius Chassin until Game 3. I think a lot of people had expected him to start Game 1 because he's probably their best pitcher, and instead it will be Gio Gonzalez and Wade Miley. I don't know what that means, whether it's like the Brewers are trying to deke the Dodgers into starting worse players, like putting David Fries and Matt Kemp out there or something. Maybe they feel like they'll do that and those are just worse hitters, or maybe there are other reasons. I don't know. Did you have any thoughts on that decision? Well, here's my thought. So Wade Miley is left-handed, Gio Gonzalez is left-handed, Julius Chassin is a starting pitcher who had the Brewers' lowest ERA. Wade Miley is left-handed, right?

I got that. That's correct? Yes, that's right. Yeah, he seems left-handed. So Julius Chassin is dominant against right-handed hitters. Absolutely dominant. But he is exploitable against lefties. And the Dodgers are going to have a pretty good, should have a pretty

good left-handed lineup that would go up against him, like Julius Chassin versus Max Muncy seems like it could be a real problem, Cody Bellinger is going to be in there, etc., I don't need to read you the entire Dodgers lineup, but there are players in the Dodgers lineup who are, of course, right-handed, or who might have problems against Chassin, but my early hunch, just based on the way that's laid out, I mean, Gonzalez and Miley being left-handed and Chassin, but my early hunch, just based on the way that's laid out, I mean, Gonzalez and Miley being left-handed and Chassin being right-handed seems like the big separator. And when you have more lefties against Chassin,

that is a problem because he's never been good against lefties in his entire career. His whole improvement this year, to whatever extent that there was one, was just shutting down righties even more. So, you know, Julius Chassin would be good against Manny Machado. He'd be good against Matt Kemp, probably. But other than that, he is a real platoon-heavy starting pitcher.

So he's someone that the Brewers are going to have trouble making a game plan for, probably, against the Dodgers. So that's what, that's currently my hunch. And with this Brewers rotation, there's really, no one is really better than anyone else. The rotation is so mediocre that it really does all come down to the specific matchups. I guess one thing you could say is that the analysis that I just mentioned for Dallas Keuchel also applies very much to Wade Miley, who is a very Dallas Keuchel-esque pitcher. In fact, Wade Miley had a lower zone rate this year than Dallas Keuchel did. Minimum 80 innings. There were 173 pitchers in Major League Baseball this year, and only two of them had lower zone rates than Wade Miley. So you would think the Dodgers have the lowest chase rate in the majors. In theory, maybe they will not be chasing wade miley stuff and that will get him

into some trouble i should probably just copy and paste my dallas keitel article and do a control f and replace keitel with miley and voila new article but that's something that you could look at i suppose in game two yeah and i think i said to you last october when you wrote that article i really liked it i like i thought it was smart it was good implementation of the analysis i thought that your results were interesting and understandable and if you wrote the same thing about wade miley i don't think anyone who could connect because i don't think anyone cares about wade miley or how the dodgers profile against him yeah good point so they're both good teams they both have good offensive teams the dodgers hit a bunch more homers than the Brewers

did but there's not an enormous mismatch there it's just a couple pretty flexible rosters with moving pieces and guys who just kind of slot in depending on who the pitcher is and it'll be interesting to see them mix and match those parts. But other than just kind of thinking that the Dodgers are the better team, I don't have a strong feeling about one team having a huge edge on the other. So I don't know. I think that the Brewers have the bullpen edge. Obviously, I'll be curious to see how much Kenta Maeda pitches in this series because he only pitched one time in the division series for one inning. And he was such an integral part of the Dodgers run last October.

I think he got into nine games and allowed one run, I believe, and sometimes pitch multiple innings. So he can be a really valuable guy in that role. And he really hasn't even had to be utilized thus far. So I don't know. And he really hasn't even had to be utilized thus far. So I don't know. Are there any other quote unquote X factors that we need to mention about this series? If I could say one thing that now when at recording time, Ross Stripling is sort of on the Dodgers pitching staff bubble. He was a phenomenal strikeout walk pitcher this year, just wound up in some sort of home run trouble, much worse down the stretch.

And I was reading an article and I apologize for not recalling who the author was, but the article was saying that Ross Stripling was tipping his pitches. And this goes beyond just your basic pitch tipping article because it says that when Stripling was throwing, like Chase Utley immediately picked up on how he was tipping, and I think it was Brian Dozer and Rick Honeycutt immediately picked up on what he was doing and the article laid out in specific detail. Here's what he was doing when he was throwing a fastball. Here's what he was doing when he was throwing a curveball.

And I saw that and I thought, oh, that's really interesting because so rarely do you get explicit detail of how a guy was tipping pitches. And so I went to the video and I don't get it. I checked a lot of stripling starts. Recent games, I went back to like July and May and I don't get it. I checked a lot of stripling starts. Recent games, I went back to like July and May, and I don't know. I looked at fastballs. What was he supposedly doing, if you recall? His foot position was supposedly different on the rubber.

Initially, in the article, it says that he would do something different from the stretch. And I was like, okay. So, well, his splits aren't actually worse with men on base. This is weird, but it turns out roster playing throws from the stretch all the time so when he was throwing a fastball or a curveball something about his feet would be aligned differently one would be in front of the other or something and his glove would be i think held a little higher when he was throwing a curveball something was that was apparently supposed to be readily apparent to some of his teammates and and

a coach and i looked and i don know. I thought it would be easy. I thought I would have an easy article to just supplement basically an article that was already written, videos and images, and be like, look, here's Ross Tripling. But I couldn't see a thing. I couldn't see a single thing. And I don't want to believe

that the whole thing is just a setup, that it's all lies, because that doesn't make sense. But it also doesn't make sense the other way that I can't see anything. The usual TV cameras should be sufficient to spot what was allegedly being tipped. So I just don't know. And I also don't know if Ross Trepling is going to be on the roster anyway. So this all doesn't matter for a hill of beans.

But still, it was very frustrating because ordinarily you'll see an article that's like, this guy's been tipping his pitches and then you don't know what you're even looking for and it's hard to find and maybe it's just an excuse to make him feel better. But this was so detailed and so believable, I thought, sure enough,

it'll take me five minutes to spot something. No, didn't. Couldn't spot anything at all. It's always a good gimme post when there's an article like that in a newspaper, maybe, that they can't use screenshots or images or GIFs. And so it will just describe these things, but you can't actually see it. So then Jeff Sullivan can come along with his GIFs and actually show it to you and just get a good post out of it without actually new information other than visual.

Yeah, that's exactly what I thought. Yeah, well, sorry it didn't work out this time. That's all right. I got to piggyback off your post now. It didn't work instead. So the Brewers, I believe, haven't lost since September 22nd. That is a long time To go without losing obviously Easier to do when you're not playing every day But I'm going to guess that

That streak will end sometime Soon but it should be A competitive series and a pretty Fun one so looking forward to it As for the other one I think yeah these are probably The two best teams in baseball And it's always fun when Two of the best teams can match up at this moment.

And you mentioned Price, and Price is kind of a linchpin here. And I said the same thing about Sale going into the division series, but Sale looked pretty good. So now it seems like Price is the new, even bigger question mark. is the new, even bigger question mark. And this is not the team that you want to be facing to establish your postseason bona fides, right? Like this is the Astros against left-handed pitching this year, I think had a 123 weighted runs created plus, which was way better than every other team against left-handed pitching.

So they just demolished lefties. And so even if Price has no postseason baggage, that's a tough matchup anyway. And the Astros have been more human against right-handed pitching and also against good velocity. I never know whether that means anything when a team hasn't been very good or has been very good at hitting especially good fastballs. it's just a smaller sample inherently.

And I just don't know whether it's really predictive of anything. But you could look at Nathan Ivaldi and say, well, he's a righty and he's tough on righties and he throws really hard. Maybe he's a good matchup for the Astros. But who knows? Coming into the division series, we thought that Indians pitching was probably a good matchup for the Astros because they were going at them with Kluber and Carrasco and Clevenger and a bunch of righties. And look how that worked out. They got destroyed. So it's a short series and the Astros are good at everything. So who knows? Yeah, I saw some article on Thursday morning to the effect of if David Price is going to turn it around to the playoffs there's no one he'd rather face than the astros and i thought that's not true in the least because they're a very good team they just

won the world series though and i think it was he's pitched well against them right but yeah come on who cares so yeah it's i i think that in in the alds the Red Sox won. Hot tip. The Red Sox beat the Yankees in case you weren't paying attention. But it seemed like there was just such a temptation for the entire story to turn on. Here's how unreliable the Red Sox bullpen is. And there were just sharks in the water waiting for the Red Sox to lose because of the bullpen. And then that would be the story. It was like it was predetermined.

And then it was fine. And Chris Ale came out of the bullpen. And I don't know. It was like he was predetermined and it was fine and chris ale came out of the bullpen and i don't know it all just worked out so i do think that will it is admittedly i think the red sox biggest weakness is unless you're going to be like catch offense from catcher because they're terrible but it's like weirdly specific and also martin malden on it was not a great hitter so the red sox bullpen is worse than the astros bullpen pick a pitcher on the red sox and he is worse than the Astros bullpen. Pick a pitcher on the Red Sox, and he is worse than the Astros equivalent of that pitcher. I think that's probably true almost entirely across the board as I think about it. Craig Kimbrell, I guess I'd take over Roberto Rosuna.

But anyway, that is the bullpen will be the potential weakness. But again, when you're talking about four to seven games, Ryan Brazier could look like Matt Burns could have his first five months this series, or he could have a September in this series. And I don't know. And even if he had a September, the Astros still need to hit those pitches. So it's just stupid and complicated. And if Gary Sanchez didn't get slightly under a Craig Kimbrell fastball that he threw in down the middle of the plate, then maybe the Red Sox aren't even here at all now. So it's all weird and complicated. And I will say that even though we're talking about the ALCS now,

I noted you made a prediction without making a prediction about the NLCS in that you predicted the Brewers would not sweep. Yes, I did. I, in turn, will predict that the Astros will not sweep the Red Sox. Okay, well, that's slightly more controversial. You're going out on a little bit of a longer limb there. I'm going to go over another limb. I'm going to be a squirrel jumping to another tree.

Also, the Red Sox won't sweep. Ooh. Okay. Making it interesting. Yeah. Get ready for a game five, but maybe not any more than that. I'm not going to make any more predictions. All right. Well, we said that we had the inkling that those division series were unusually uninteresting.

And I saw a Dan Hirsch tweet to that effect that had some objective backing for that feeling. leverage index for each year's division series collectively and 2018 had the lowest average leverage index during the division series round of any division series round 0.89 where of course one is just kind of an average situation so 0.89 that is bad and not only was it low leverage but it was also short series and barely over the minimum number of games that we could have seen so combination of non-competitive series and non-competitive games within those series so yeah it was basically as boring as we thought it was so it almost will have to be better from here on out it's funny because dan hirsch would put in like i don't know how much work goes into those calculations but it's probably not an insignificant amount of time and so he would put all that work into generating a tweet whereas either one of us could turn that into 1500 words and do our job for the day

now you can't just like take it necessarily and i guess the moment has passed but just a weird separation between responsibilities here yeah that's right okay so we will enjoy these series we will talk to some of you during NLCS game one and of course we will continue to chronicle the championship series as they proceed but right now we will take a quick break and we'll be back with Brittany de la Creta to talk about women breaking into play-by-play Said I know what you do, and though it's the same to you. Can't keep down a girl who loves music. All right, so we are joined now, as promised, by Brittany de la Creta. She made an excellent debut at The Ringer on Thursday with a piece on women in sports broadcasting,

not solely in baseball, but largely in baseball. And this is something that we've wanted to have someone on to talk about for a while now. So when we saw her piece, we were happy to have that opportunity. Brittany, thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me. So I guess just to set the scene, can you talk a little bit about the broadcasting landscape and the role that women currently play? You know, normally I would say what percentage of play-by-play people are women, but the percentage, at least when we're talking about play-by-play, is so low that it seems like it almost makes sense to just use raw totals and numbers more so than percentages because you can almost count the names on your fingers.

But that is changing as you document in your piece, fortunately and belatedly. So where do things stand currently? Yeah, I think actually in a better place than even I thought going into the piece in that I've actually been trying to pitch a story like this for close to a year now. And so I've been gathering names and doing research. But even still, once you start talking to women in the industry, you know, shockingly, they're the ones that know the other women in the industry. So I have a list at this point that that's nearing 30 women in some variation at different levels and different sports, which is still a very small part of the broadcasting landscape. But I think it's a

lot more significant than a lot of people realize. And this is particular to play by play. And I think that's really important to make that distinction that when we're listening to a broadcast, whether it's on TV or on the radio, there's usually two, sometimes three people in the broadcast booth, and they usually have two distinct roles. There's a play-by-play broadcaster who is calling the game. They're telling us what, when, who, where. They're giving us those details. And then there's a color analyst who's filling in the how and the why and giving a context to what the play-by-play broadcaster is describing. So those are the two different roles. And this piece looks specifically at play-by-play because I feel like women are even less visible in those roles than they are in both sideline reporting

and color and analyst roles. So I really wanted to hammer down why it was that it's taking so long to see women rising and breaking through in that role in particular. So you do manage to end on a somewhat positive note that there is more interest, there are more opportunities. But when you mentioned that to Yankees broadcaster Susan Waldman, that there are more women out there who are exploring these opportunities and starting to get some of these opportunities, she kind of scoffed and said, oh, is that really true? So where do you think is the sort of, I don't know if border isn't the right word, but where is the disconnect? Why do you suppose Susan Waldman maybe is taken so much by surprise by the information that you were able to provide for her?

I think because she works in baseball. And since this is a baseball podcast, we can talk a little bit about the fact that I think that baseball and hockey as well, but baseball in particular, has been much slower on the uptake for this. And we can say that for a lot of things about baseball. We use the word traditional to describe the sport quite a bit, and it's slow to change in a lot of ways. And this is one of them. So I think that Susan's surprise comes from the fact that she's in the sport. A lot of the play-by-play broadcasters that I spoke to are working for large networks. And so they cover a range of sports. They might do college basketball. They might do some football. They might do some soccer. They're bouncing around. And baseball in particular tends to be, people who do baseball tend to

just do baseball. There's a lot less people just sort of falling into a game here and a game there. And so I think that because she's in the baseball world, it doesn't seem like much is changing because, like she said, she's the only broadcaster full-time for an MLB team, and she's color commentary. So there's not a single MLB team with full-time play-by-play broadcaster that's female. Yeah, and I mean, I guess the silver lining or the hope is that in baseball specifically, there are a lot of professional jobs to go around just because there are a lot of professional

baseball teams. You have all of the minor leagues, and someone has to do those jobs. And hopefully it'll be a little bit easier to break in at that level and get some experience and then make it to the majors. So there are some women in the lower levels of professional baseball who maybe mainstream fans may not have come across who I guess are the hope for the next generation right now. So could you highlight some of the women who are doing that job currently? Yes. And since the piece published today, I found out about even more than are mentioned in the piece. So currently in minor league baseball is Emma Tiedemann. Apologies if I said her name incorrectly.

She does play-by-play for the single-A Lexicon Legends, and they are the Royals affiliate. There's Kirsten Karbach, who's doing for the single-A Clearwater Thrashers, and they're a Phillies affiliate. Melanie Newman is doing double-A Frisco Rough Riders play-by-play, a Texas Rangers affiliate. And Susie Kuhl, who has probably the best name in sports media, is doing some play-by-play for the Salem Red Sox, the Red Sox single-way affiliate. And as far as I know, there's another

woman who has a pending offer that hasn't been confirmed yet. So we could potentially see five women doing play-by-play in the minor league next season. So this, in a lot of ways, comes down to a conversation about representation. And if you were to pick someone who could stand as, I don't know, a flagship representative, you would probably have a broadcaster for the pride of Major League Baseball, the New York Yankees. Now, Susan Waldman hasn't been doing television. She's on the radio side, but she's been there for 30-odd years, maybe exactly 30 years. And so I guess this is sort of the entire conversation we're talking about. But why do you suppose that Susan Waldman was the first so long ago and so little progress, at least on the Major League side, has been made since then? Why do you think that even working with the Yankees and broadcasting the Yankees hasn't been able to make a bigger impact?

I think that for a long time, gender diversity in sports has sort of been like, we have one and that's enough. Which is not to say that Susan Waldman has ever been a token. She earned her job and she was good enough to do it and that's why she's there. But I think that, you know, I saw this when I reported on gender diversity and umpiring, which I've also done. And currently there's two women umpiring in minor league baseball, and it's the first time there's ever been more than one at a time. So I think for a long time, having one woman or one or two women has been enough because people can say, well, look, it's not all

men. There's this one. But what we're seeing now is women are making more strides in the workplace and gender equality is becoming, you know, more realized in some ways that people are saying that one is not enough, two is not enough, and that gender equity or even just fair representation looks like having a lot more women than just a handful. And I grew up in New York, and so Susan Weldman was one of the voices that I heard and have heard the most, really, during those sort of formative years, whether it was on WFAN sort of formative years, whether it was on WFAN or WPIX or now on the radio with John Sterling, it seemed almost normal to me or not as rare as it is just because that's what I was exposed to.

And it just sort of seemed like that's the way it was and should be. But as you mentioned in your piece and as Susan says to you, she was an extreme outlier, really, when she started, especially, and had to deal with all sorts of persecution as a result. So can you talk a little bit about some of the resistance that women tend to get, whether it's just sort of the unspoken kind of resistance, or really, sometimes it's extremely explicit, as you had one anecdote in your piece about someone who was just rejected because the ownership of a team wasn't comfortable having a female voice, and they just sort of said that up front. But between that and the kind of feedback that you get on Twitter or just from fans and the nasty things that they say? I mean, what are some of the most common critiques or kind of exclusionary language that gets applied? So a lot of it is focused on

the women's voice. And I'd really delve into that in the piece because I wanted to get beyond just people have a problem with women's voice and look at why do people have a problem with women's voices? And how is that specifically holding women back in play-by-play roles where the woman or the broadcaster has to be an authority and be uh trusted and received as an authority by the listener and so it's a very intangible criticism to make right like she's good at her job i just don't like her voice. Yeah. And that's what you'll hear a lot. You hear that a lot with Jessica Mendoza, who is the color analyst. But it's this when a woman has risen to a role that a level that high,

it's because she's good at her job and she's earned it. Right. Especially considering that she's already up against a lot just being a woman. The fact that she's being given those opportunities usually means she's really good at what she does. And so a lot of the criticism can't come from she doesn't know what she's talking about, or she's a bad broadcaster. So it comes down to her voice is annoying. It's grating. It's shrill. It sounds like my mom. I feel like I'm listening to my mom yell at me. There are things that people have actually said about women on a broadcast. And that's the nice stuff that we hear. I mean, the death threats she was getting in the late 80s were so severe, she had her own police force at Yankee Stadium for a year. That's horrific.

But that's what women are up against. And it's not just from listeners at home. And I think it's amplified now because we have social media. And so everybody can tweet directly at the person about how much they don't like their voice. like their voice. But it's also unconscious bias that's held by perhaps people in the production room who may not feel like a woman sounds right doing it, even if they don't think that that's the bias. And a lot of people also talked to me about how important it was to make sure that your producer and your color analysts were supportive because you can be set up to fail. You can be made to look really, really bad if, you know, your broadcast team isn't behind you and invested in you a hundred percent. Yeah. I thought that was one of the most interesting aspects of the piece

about the language, because you do tend to hear these coded terms that come up again and again when there's a woman in the booth. And I thought it was really kind of thought-provoking how you cite this research that's been done about how women's voices, at least in that context, do tend to be perceived differently. But it seems like it's really hard to uncouple that from kind of the cultural norm or the societal expectation of hearing one type of voice and then hearing another type of voice. It's not necessarily that there's some objective greatness about one type of voice over another voice. It's just that if you haven't heard the second type of voice, then maybe you respond to it more negatively, even if it's kind of

an unconscious thing. And so you talked about how some female broadcasters have actually tried to modulate their voices in certain ways to maybe sound a little bit more like people are used to, which is kind of a fraught thing to do, I guess, if you have to change the way you sound to kind of conform to people's expectations. if you have to change the way you sound to kind of conform to people's expectations. Yeah, that some women use voice coaches to try to learn how to stay in the lower register. Both Pam Ward, who she works for ESPN and does a lot of WNBA and used to do college football, and Kate Scott, who's on the Pac-12 network, they both talked about the fact that they have naturally deeper voices and they think that that served them really well in these roles. But even still, Kate Scott was really,

really candid with me about how much she thinks about what her voice sounds like on a broadcast. And I can't help but wonder how many men have spent time in the broadcast booth when they could and should be exclusively focusing on the game, worrying about whether their voice sounds, I mean, everyone, they're working on their voice, but does their voice sound masculine enough for the listener? You know, like, that's just not something that a male broadcaster is going to have to focus on or even stress about. Right. It makes me think of there's the sort of an ongoing political conversation about whether female politicians should be wearing like pantsuits or whether they should just embrace women's fashion and dress however they want instead of trying to mimic men.

Because at the end of the day, if you are a woman and you're a female broadcaster, if you try to lower your voice, people are still going to recognize that you are a woman. And then maybe many people will either like that or not. So I understand the piece that you wrote was based on a series of interviews, you didn't do a whole of a whole lot of your own editorializing. But I was curious, and I know you just spoke to this, but I was curious what you how you feel about that idea. I know that you you mentioned there are some some male broadcasters who also go to voice coaches and try to modify their voices, because I think everyone could recognize what is considered a classically good, deep, smooth broadcasting voice. But how do you, Brittany, feel about the notion that even among the women who are able to broadcast right now, that so many of them are working to

modify their voices and sound different from how they naturally do? I think that women, all of us in whatever field we're in, are trying to succeed in a patriarchal world. And so sometimes that means working within the oppressive system. It's a bunch of feministy language. But, you know, sometimes in order to succeed, that's what you have to do. And that makes total sense to me. I do think we're getting away a little bit from, you know, when I talked to Dan Duva, who does play-by-play for the Las Vegas Golden Knights, and he teaches play-by-play classes, he talked a little bit to me about how we're getting away from the more traditional, like, broadcaster voice, and more often people are encouraged to be themselves more. And I was really, really curious about that

when I spoke to both Tiffany Green and Angel Gray, who are Black women, and I wanted to know if their, you know, natural inflections and dialects were things that they were asked to erase from their work or to try to hide. And both said no. And in fact, Tiffany Green felt like getting to be herself on the broadcast had helped her succeed and stand out a little bit from what other people were doing. So I think there is a little bit of a shift just in terms of what we are okay with hearing on a broadcast. There's more diversity in the voices that we are hearing, not just from women. But it makes complete sense to me that women would be trying to change or modify or control their voices in a way to get ahead and succeed in a field that really was not built for them at all.

So we've talked about this traditional conception of the broadcasting voice. There's also the traditional conception of the broadcasting background. And I guess this applies more to the color or the analyst role than the play-by-play role. But there have traditionally been a lot of former players in the booth, of course, in baseball, in every sport, really. And that has always been viewed as an asset that you played the game at the highest level. So now you can come in and talk about it. And of course, Major League Baseball has been an all-male activity to this point. So how much of an obstacle does that continue to be?

Of course, Jessica Mendoza was a player herself. So it's almost as if you still need that background, or at least it's still viewed as a positive attribute, which I suppose is an additional obstacle on top of everything else we've been talking about. Yeah, I think that's a really good point. And it's something that I was really interested in when I started to report this story, because on the surface, it would seem like play-by-play would be more accessible to women because that's the role in which you don't necessarily have to have the lived playing experience. It's the color role that is usually talking about all of the context and the why and the things that they learned from playing the game. A lot of the men that are play-by-play broadcasters did not play the game at very high levels.

Maybe they played in high school, maybe they played in college, but so did a lot of women. And I think that's a really good point. And it's one that, you know, didn't fully make it into the piece, but it is a criticism that these women often get of they didn't play the game, especially at a high level. So they must not know, but neither did most of the men doing play-by-play. They just went to broadcasting school or maybe didn't even do that. And Pam Ward talked about that in the piece that men come in and they are often given opportunities, even with very little experience, that women with much more experience are never given. And so I think it's really, really interesting to me because if there was a role in the booth

that should be accessible to someone who has not had that lived playing experience, it should be the play-by-play role because it really doesn't require it. So on the local level, of course, everybody has their beloved broadcasters and no one can really measure up to a Vin Scully. But if you were thinking of, I guess, national broadcasts in particular, and I can only really speak to baseball, so we'll just keep sticking to baseball.

But this is anecdotal, I guess. I haven't polled the entire national audience, but so much of the conversation about the headlining national broadcasters seems to be negative. You can think of Joe Morgan, Tim McCarver, Joe Buck. Just think about all the different announcing teams who are handling just this year's division series, and you can think about how even John Smoltz is just being negative and complaining about the way baseball is right now. And so you have all these announcers who seem to be lightning rods for criticism from fans.

So you have all these announcers who seem to be lightning rods for criticism from fans. And so how do you reconcile that on the one hand, so many people who listen to these current male announcers seem to not like them. And yet, on the other hand, these same people still, at least by some measurements, or maybe again anecdotally, seem resistant to the idea of having one or a few of them replaced by a woman doing the same thing. I mean, the men are just, they're familiar. And a lot of these national male broadcasters that have been criticized so much have been on the air a long time. And, you know, I think there's something to that. People just love to hate them because they're familiar and they're used to them. But, you know, it was interesting to me on the TBS broadcast during the

ALDS between the Yankees and Red Sox, Ron Darling, not play by play, but color actually gave a shout out to the radio broadcasters for both the Yankees and Red Sox. And he mentioned all three men by name and never mentioned Susan Waldman's name. And I was reporting the story while watching that. And it stuck out to me so much to see her erased from the broadcast booth like that. And in light of so much of, you know, what I was writing about and what I was hearing at the time, and I had just recently spoken to her like a few days before that as well. And it, you know, it really stuck out to me. And so I think, you know, there's a segment of baseball broadcasters who respect the hell out of her, but I still, you know, I don't think that she and other women get, get the respect that they deserve and should get from the rest of the broadcasting world. But yeah, I actually

alluded to, I didn't name John Sm But yeah, I actually alluded to, I didn't name John Smoltz, but I alluded to in my piece when I was talking about Tiffany Green, who does historically black college and university football games for ESPN. She's the first black woman to do college football. And her broadcasts are so much fun.

I listened to her call games for this story. And all I could think was what a contrast it was to because I watch mostly baseball to the games that I've been stuck listening to and all the people that have been complaining about how these older white men seem to hate the sport that they're calling and how freaking refreshing it was to hear somebody sound like she was having a blast calling her sport. it's kind of how I felt like listening to Jenny Kavnar you know in her first uh Rockies game she was new she was a little you know hesitant at times and you can hear where she's gonna tighten it up with practice but she was having fun and her analysts beside her were having so

much fun watching her call the game and all I can think is just like more of that, please. Like it's sports. It's fun. I want to feel like the people that are calling the game are having fun. And if the people in the booth right now aren't and they happen to be men, like why not try something different? For people listening who are not Rockies fans or maybe weren't aware of Jenny Kavnar's debut, can you just recount that story? Because that's one of the coolest. I mean, it's a broadcasting highlight of the 2018 season. Yeah. And it's really cool because I feel like it's the first one that I've

been old enough to be able to say, like, I'm going to remember that forever. You know, in April of this year, Jenny Kavnar, who has been a local pre-post game Rockies host for almost a decade, I want to say, got to call play-by-play for a game against the Padres. She was the first woman to call play-by-play for a Major League Baseball game in 25 years. And what was really cool about it, I thought, was there's social media now. And, like, I don't watch the Rockies. I'm a Red Sox and Marlins girl. I'm, like, you know, one of the seven Marlins fans that exist. But I watched that broadcast because how could I not?

You know, it was history. And so much of my corner of baseball Twitter was watching it, too. And everyone wanted to know what her home run call was going to be. And in the bottom of the first inning, Nolan Arenado hit a what her home run call was going to be and in the bottom of the first inning Nolan Arenado hit a line drive home run over the left field wall and Jenny Kavnar said fire up the fountain she's gone and the fountains behind center field spouted water on command and it was really really cool. And that ball is shot in the left field.

Fire up the fountains. She's gone. I love it. I love it. Fire up the fountains. There they come. Fire them up. Now it was a two-run home run.

It only works in course. That's okay. It was also very cool because she had, you know, two guys in the booth with her. I don't know their names off the top of my head, but they both are former players. And they had not heard her call beforehand. And they were so excited about it. Like, listening to them be so stoked about Jenny's call was, I just thought it was such a fun moment, a fun baseball moment that I know I'm going to remember for a really long time. Yeah, that was great. And it's always a dangerous thing like to debut a catchphrase to just sort of decide what your

catchphrase is going to be and then trot it out there because it might sound manufactured. It might sound like it's not organic enough, like you just kind of workshopped it or, you know, focus grouped what your catchphrase was going to be. And then you bring it out on the broadcast. But it did sound totally natural and great and became kind of a viral sort of sensation because it was a really great call as well as a distinctive one. So I hope that we get to hear more of her not just pre and post game but during games too yeah me too and i think it was really cool that the rockies did a t-shirt giveaway at a game this summer that had a picture of arenado's home run swing and it said fire up the fountain yeah because it just felt like the team and the franchise was getting behind her

in that like you know to make that such a big part of the season and a moment that the team and the franchise as an organization is proud of. I felt like that was a really big deal. So Jeff's last question made me think a little bit about my old Grantland colleague, Wesley Morris's recent article in the Times about the morality wars, which I know was sort of a divisive piece, but sparked a lot of conversation. And it was kind of about how he was arguing, at least, that critics are maybe hesitant to criticize art that's made by people who traditionally haven't had the opportunity to make art, you know, people of color or people from underrepresented segments of society. And I think of that kind of when we're talking about women who are broadcasters,

because it seems like every Sunday night in our Facebook group, for instance, there's a thread about the ESPN broadcast. And inevitably, there is a backlash to Jessica Mendoza. And then there's a backlash to the backlash. And there are people saying she's great and there are people saying they don't like her. And I'm always kind of reading those comments and almost pre-cringing or worried about what I'm going to read and what I'm going to have to moderate and delete there. negative comment, you think, well, does this person have some sort of implicit bias that is manifesting itself here? Or is there actually some sexist comment being made? Or is it just a critique of a professional broadcaster, which is fair game and something that every professional broadcaster encounters? So I guess almost the goal is to get to the point where you could have this sort of criticism of a

woman broadcaster and it wouldn't be coded or you wouldn't have to worry about ulterior motives for that commentary other than just purely the performance. But whenever I see that reaction, I always kind of read it more carefully than I would, I suppose, with a similar kind of complaint about a male broadcaster. Yeah, I think that we can tell when it's a legitimate criticism versus, you know, if someone is criticizing Alex Rodriguez in the booth with her, are their criticisms rooted in the fact that he's a guy, right? Like, probably not. So if she's being criticized for things that don't have to do with her baseball knowledge, because that's a ridiculous thing to criticize. Plus, I actually

have I profiled her and I spent the day with her on site at Sunway Park before a broadcast, Sunday Night Baseball broadcast. I watched her prep day of and I learned all about her prep. And I you know, you can't argue with what she knows because she does her homework, you know? So there are legitimate criticisms. One of the women I talked to for this piece, Marissa Ngemi, who was the one who was told that she was a good broadcaster, but they didn't want a woman to be the voice of their team.

We talked a little bit about how to criticize or be critical of a woman without being sexist. And she's like, sometimes people criticize my pacing. And that was a fair criticism. Sometimes I didn't let the game breathe. That's real. Saying, you know, who is this chick calling the game or I don't like your voice is not a fair criticism. And I can almost guarantee you that nobody is criticizing the performances as hard as as much as the women themselves who all you know, if you're going to be a broadcaster, whether you're a woman or a man or what, you have to be able to listen to yourself back and recognize where you have to improve. And every one of those women is doing that, you know, after almost every game they call. So I think that we we can criticize performances as long as, you know, we're not delving into sexist stereotypes and

coded language about you know what's wrong right criticizing pacing is a legitimate criticism and it's very different than saying your voice is just bothering me or you don't know what you're talking about yeah there's any number of male broadcasters whose voices i can't stand so the the last thing i wanted to ask if you look look at, for example, women in STEM fields, then what you inevitably see is that at the college level, you have, depending on the field, but I guess combining them all, you have a nearly even split between men and women. And then at every step above that, then proportion of men becomes more and more overwhelming until you get to, I don't know, the CEO level, and then it's just absurd. So in your piece, you talk to Dan Duva, as you mentioned, who's the broadcaster for the Vegas Golden Knights, and Dan Duva also happens to be a professor at the

Newhouse School, broadcasting at Syracuse University, and he teaches a class, he has a TV play-by-play class at the Newhouse School, and you cite one statistic in here where he says that the demographic breakdown in his class is more equitable, to use your words. Not even, but he says he estimates it at about 65% men and 35% women. Now, that is one data point from presumably the most recent year that he taught the class. I don't know how long he's been doing it. I don't know if you ever asked him or have access to his historical numbers. But do you think that at this point, understanding that it is a little of both columns, that as far as women in broadcasting go, is this a bigger problem of initial interest or a bigger problem of retention? I think it's both. And, you know, Dan told me, which didn't make the piece, that

his class is an elective. And so not everyone that's taking it is necessarily taking it because they want to be a play by play broadcaster. Some people are and some people are. This could be interesting. But almost everyone I talked to ended up in play by play, not because they started out wanting to do that. There were a few women who said, I always knew I wanted to do that. Beth Mullins was one of them, you know, Pam Ward was another, but a lot of them said, I stumbled into this, I was given an opportunity, but I didn't know that it was an option for me, because I'd never seen a woman doing it, you know, and so they're coming in through, you know, sideline roles, they're coming in through maybe they're writing or reporting. A lot of them started out as writers or reporters. So they're coming into the industry in different ways because they don't think that play-by-play would even be an option. And so I think that the biggest piece right up front is that if you don't think that there's a job for you there, why would you go after it? That's something I saw when I reported on female umpires as well. When I went

to the minor league baseball umpire academy in Florida, there was only one female student in the class. And she told me she was there because she'd read an article about Jen Powell, who's in her second, she just finished her second season of minor league umpiring. And she literally was there because she'd read that article and didn't know that women could be umpires before she saw that article. So I think there's a similarity there. And then, yes, the retention is also an issue because you're fighting against all of these biases. I know at least one woman that, you know, didn't make the article, but who said, I wanted to go into broadcasting. I wanted to be a broadcaster. And what I had to experience

in order to try to do it just wasn't worth it to me. So I think the women that are able to stay in are really remarkable people who are willing to tune out a lot and, you know, to work their asses off to get there. But I also think that the more women we see at these levels, the more we're going to see. And that was a huge piece of doing this reporting is everyone I talked to wanted to tell me about the other women that had helped them or the other women that were supportive of them, even if they worked in totally different sports, even if they'd never met, that women who are doing this, when they find out there's another woman entering the field, they're reaching out to that woman and they're mentoring them and they're helping create opportunities for them because they also want to see more women doing this.

Right. And there are all these little slights that you document in your piece that maybe women have to encounter and they're not always intentional necessarily, but they're unfortunate. Nonetheless, you mentioned the recent Thursday night football broadcast on Amazon that has Hannah Storm and Andrea Kramer doing the commentary. And to access that feed on Amazon, you have to go into the languages setting where you have English, Spanish, UK English, or Storm Kramer, as if it's some entirely different language, which was probably not an intentional kind of insult or commentary, but it's just like someone has to realize the way that

that looks at some point in the process, and hopefully that gets changed. But the last thing that I wanted to ask you was that historically, women on broadcasts have often been shoehorned into these sideline reporter roles, which are just really difficult jobs to do. I mean, there's a whole counterpart to the voice conversation we've been having that is an appearance conversation with women on broadcast too. But there's also just the fact that it's just such a difficult and thankless kind of role. I mean, I've been thinking it watching Lauren Shahadi on the TBS broadcast this postseason where, you know, she'll get like 30 seconds to stick a microphone in the face of a manager between innings or something. And it's, you know, there's no way to ask an interesting question or get an interesting answer.

It's just like, hey, here's a microphone, say a few words, you know, so-and-so is doing well, so-and-so is not doing well. And, you know, say some generic cliched comment in response to that. So is there any way to advance from that type of role? I mean, assuming that some of the women doing that job would prefer to be doing another kind of broadcasting job, or is it like you just kind of get locked into that? I mean, I know that Lauren does MLB Network studio work too and other things, but can you pivot from that to being in the booth?

I think you can if there's people at your network that are going to champion you doing that. I think Jenny Kavnar is on some sideline as well. Most of the women I talked to had done a little bit of sideline at some point. But you're right. It's a really hard job. Like what you don't see is them basically running across stadiums in like between shots and getting set up and then having to smile and ask a question. It's really hard. And one of the women I talked to actually said that she was sent to cover an event and she'd never done sideline before she'd done mostly play by play and a little bit of color. And she was the only woman on the broadcast team. And they got there and they

were like, Oh, we need someone to do sideline. You know, why don't you go do it? And she's like, I don't think that they would have asked one of the men. Why didn't they ask one of the men to go do sideline? Why was it assumed that I could do it, even though I had no experience doing it? Probably because I'm a woman. And I think if women want to be, you know, sideline reporters, that's great. And I'm so glad that we get to see so many of them. And sometimes it's the only place

in a sports broadcast that we ever see a female face but at the same time I do think it's a really thankless job I think about Darren Austin on nothing because I'm in Boston and how much she gets doused with Gatorade she got hit in the face with a champagne cork by Mookie Betts in the Yankees clubhouse the other day on air it's's a tough gig. And I do think that a lot of them don't get the chance to show us how much they actually know about the game, which is a lot because yes, they're stuck asking questions like, you know, tell me about what's going on with your pitcher right now when we're all watching the game and we can see what's going on with the pitcher right now. Yeah. Right. So if there is something interesting, they're not going to tell a national broadcast audience about it.

Right. You know, I want to see I'd like to see more men doing sideline. There's not very many. Why is that? Because it's a job that a lot of people want to do. It's because it's not given the credit it should be given, maybe. But I hope to see more women, you know, pivoting and hopefully if they know that there might be opportunities for them in other parts of the broadcast, the hope is that the people behind the scenes and working with them will support that transition or even like Jenny Kavnar, who tried it out for a couple games and, you know, hopefully she'll be back. But that was something that came about because the rest of the broadcast team said, what are we going to do in a couple days that our normal play-by-play guy is off?

Hey, let's put Jenny in the booth. That would be great. All right. Well, you can find Brittany's bylines all over the internet, hopefully more often in the future at The Ringer. This was a great article. I'm glad that you wrote it and came on to talk with us about it. And she is on Twitter at BrittanyDLC and also at BrittanyDLC.com.

That is with an I at the end of Brittany. And thank you very much for coming on. Thank you so much. So as I record this outro, I see that Kim Eng is back in the news as a potential GM candidate. She's going to be interviewing with the Giants and maybe the Mets, or at least has been connected to the Mets. General managers, obviously a profession where women are even more underrepresented than they are in the play-by-play role. If you're interested in that conversation, we have had it already. Episode 1218, back in May, we talked to Christina Carl about the prospects of the first female GM in Major League Baseball. So I'll link to that. You can go check that out too. And also as I speak, I see that the Cubs have just dismissed Chili Davis as their hitting coach.

That's a topic that Jeff and I talked about a few weeks ago, how much Davis could be blamed for the Cubs' offensive outage. And we pointed out that if you look at the full season numbers for Cubs non-pitchers compared in 2017 and 2018 are almost identical, at least in terms of overall production. 108 WRC plus in 2017, 107 this year. But of course, if you look at the trajectory, Cubs offense disappeared in September, it disappeared in game 163, it disappeared in the wildcard game, and that is never good for a hitting coach's job security. So I don't know whether he is more of a scapegoat in this case, or whether the Cubs brain trust felt that he was actually at fault for the way things played out there, but I'm sure there are quite a few frustrated

Cubs fans who are not sorry to see him go. You can support this podcast and potentially get in on our simulcasts during the postseason by signing up for Patreon at patreon.com slash effectivelywild. As the following five listeners have already done, Matt O'Donnell, Nicholas Shaw, Nathaniel Kapp, Spencer, and Melissa Goodwin. Thanks to all of you. You can also follow along with all the remaining October games in our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectivelywild. You can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Also, some of you have asked that the podcast could be added to Spotify. I have just submitted it, and evidently it should be there in a few hours.

So by the time you're hearing this, it may already have appeared. And you can contact me and Jeff via email at podcast.pancrafts.com or via the Patreon messaging system. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. Have a wonderful weekend, and we will be back to talk to you early next week. You'd be my champion When the world was burning down

We could not be from so low When everything was broken Going over out of bound No, I won't forget Although it may be unspoken But it's not enough To make up for wasted time

The shelves collecting dust The stairs are hard to climb