Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1284: The Ghosts of Game Seven

Episode Date: October 17, 2018

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Game 3 of the NLCS, the apparent breakouts of Orlando Arcia and Brock Holt, Josh Hader as Poochie, why Yasmani Grandal and other playoff catchers can’t catch, whether a “cruising” pitcher is actually likely to keep cruising, and the 15th anniversary of Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS. […]

Do I want to do right? Of course. But do I really want to feel unforced? To answer you, hell no. I'm quite, quite a taste for a well-made mistake. I want to make a mistake, but I can't make a mistake to hit at least three home runs in the playoffs after having hit no more than three home runs during the regular season. He joins Roberto Perez from a couple years ago when I believe it was Willie Randolph from 1981. Arcia hit three home runs during the season, three in the playoffs. I was reminded doing this cursory go nowhere research that maybe nothing is more amazing than 2005 Scott Posednik because you might remember that posednik hit two home runs during the playoffs that year for the white socks during the regular season he hit zero so that's more incredible than orlando arcia but here we

are this podcast is going up presumably after two more playoff games have been played it's kind of annoying so i maybe yasmani grandal is a hero by the time that you're listening to this even though he's not starting game four but anyway game three brewers dodgers the brewers beat the dodgers for nothing orlando arcia has been good christian yelich and ryan braun have been bad the brewers shut out the dodgers with euless chassin against walk Buehler. So who literally even knows anymore? Yeah, so what is going on here? Because it's not just the three homers. He was four for four in game 163 too in the tiebreaker.

So he was kind of the offensive hero of that game. I think that was his first four-hit game because he's not good at hitting or hasn't been in the past. I mean, he wasn't terrible last year. He was, like, fine for a shortstop who can field. But I know he went back to AAA at some point this season in, what, July he was in AAA, and then he came back and I read about some nebulous things he worked on when he was down there, but it wasn't like your classic swing change story or it didn't sound like it. But these homers he's hitting have not really been cheapies either. Like he kind of looks like a

good hitter too. So I have spent too much time. I have published nothing about Orlando Garcia today. I don't anticipate that I'm going to unless he forces my hand by continuing to be good, which I just can't believe is going to be the case. But he did a little postgame interview with Ken Rosenthal after the fact where he was talking about how it's just been a matter of him recognizing the pitches being thrown to him, which is, I guess, hitting 101. So I don't know what he was doing before. But I was comparing first half Arcea against second half Arcea. Second half Arcea has been a lot better still not great but better and you know

his his like his regular weighted on base has gone up his expected weighted on base has gone up still not to the point where he's good but it's like when I've looked at some videos nothing exhaustive but I don't see anything that looks too different they i think they said during the game three broadcast something about kristen yelich helping arcia get his foot down on time so that his timing is better it's hard to argue with the results and one thing i did observe just looking at spray charts is it seems like second half arcia has been able to pull some balls in the air whereas first half arcia couldn't do that at all. But on the other hand, he just hit an opposite field home run in game three. So in conclusion, no freaking idea what's going on with Orlando Arcia. Like you said, he's nebulously worked on some things, and now he is one of the hottest hitters in the playoffs. So okay.

Yeah. And like second only maybe to Brock Holt, who's been like one of the very best hitters in So, okay. up catcher so kind of discount that but then you actually dug into it and seems like brock holt is now a new man and it's two months and who knows but there have been real changes there and he hasn't been playing every day which would lead you to believe that the red sox don't actually think he's one of like the five best hitters in baseball but uh i mean he has had the results of one for a while now yeah i mean in fairness i guess brock holt outside of hitting for the cycle in the playoffs is 0 for 6 in the playoffs so whatever who knows what it means he's 0 for 4 against the astros with three strikeouts at the end of the day he's still brock holt but yeah i it makes me this is so anecdotal and i can't

imagine this is actually true but i do, especially now you have these series and take the Dodgers. The Dodgers are going to be analyzing everything. How do we get Christian Yelich out? How do we get Lorenzo Cain out? How do we get Jesus Aguilar out? How do we get through the Brewers order? They've probably put so little thought into, well,

how do we get Orlando Arcia out? Because usually Orlando Arcia does that on his own. So it makes you wonder, because you can look at this and be like, well, doing well for the Brewers like Garcia obviously has been good and Eric Kratz has been on base a lot for some reason and that's you know Heron on well I don't know I don't have anything to say about Heron Perez but from the Dodgers perspective you're probably not thinking about RCN Kratz very much and now the Dodgers still have good pitchers pitchers who presumably are better than Kratz and

Arcia but here we are it's just been a weird and fun thing to observe even though I realize that every time Orlando Arcia hits a home run in the playoffs it drives traffic away from baseball analysts because there's nothing we can do about this yeah and you mentioned Yasmani Grandal who his struggles are really even more perplexing because he has been one of the very best catchers in baseball for several years now and one of the very best defensive catchers in baseball. Always is elite and continues to be, but he's not bad at other things like looking at his blocking stats and everything else. He's fine in that area. And now he's had a bunch of past balls. He's had a bunch of wild pitches. He just has a terrible postseason slash line career and this year, which is a separate issue, but it's strange to see a hitter who has had so much to do with the Dodgers' success during this run of six consecutive division titles getting booed and benched and replaced by Austin Barnes.

It's just a strange sort of thing. I mean, I don't know that there's that much analysis to do. It's just like good players having a really lousy playoffs. Yeah, right. It feels like there have been a lot of wild pitches and pass balls in the playoffs. I don't know if that's actually true. I will say that there's been a gradual trend league-wide toward more wild pitches, which shouldn't be a surprise as there's been a trend away from fastballs because fastballs don't get thrown for wild pitches. With Grandal, I guess one thing you could point to is this season in high leverage situations he had a WRC plus of 63 and in low leverage situations it was 139 so you could say well Grandal clearly just doesn't have the clutch

gene and he's is coming completely apart but then you look at his career splits and no that's not really true so I don't know what to do about Yosemite Grandola. It seems like he's been afflicted by the same thing the Dodgers were afflicted by all season long, which is just not performing so well in the clutch, which is historically, again, not in any way, not in any way predictable. But here we are. And you look at the hitters this year who have been unclutch, the most unclutch hitters almost in baseball, have been Max Muncy, Cody Bellinger, and Yosemite Grandolin. We're kind of waiting on them to do much in the playoffs. So it's presumably a coincidence, but it is becoming a glaring coincidence, if that makes any sense.

Yeah. Craig Edwards actually has a new post up on Fangraphs about all the wild pitches and pass balls. And it is not just anecdotal. There actually have been more wild pitches and pass balls and it is not just anecdotal there actually have been more wild pitches and pass balls this postseason and last postseason actually too so it's not just a one-year trend although this year there are even more and as you were saying Craig speculates that it might just be a blip but it probably is related to the fact that there are just more wild pitches and pass balls in general now and you'd expect there to be even more than that in the playoffs because you have even more breaking balls being thrown in the playoffs. You have even faster fastballs on average being thrown in the playoffs because you have teams that are

employing the best pitchers and the best pitching approaches. You're at max effort all the time. You're bringing in your very best pitchers. You're not throwing your fifth starter in there. So these pitches are just harder to handle. And so as we speak, probably not as you listen, the Brewers have a 60% chance to win the series, according to Dan Zimborski, which is not a product of the projections thinking they're better. It's a product of the fact that they're up 2-1 now. And they shut out the Dodgers in game three. And I don't know, a lot of the post-game conversation was about Dave Roberts not being as aggressive as the Brewers traditionally are by sticking with Walker Buehler and not pinch hitting for him in the fifth inning when the

Dodgers were really struggling for offense. But, you know, that's one small decision in a game where the Dodgers got shut out and Julius Jessene pitched really well. And then the bullpen came in and did the Brewers bullpen thing. So you can kind of quibble with that decision. It maybe wasn't the best decision from a win expectancy standpoint, but also the Dodgers got shut out. So there's more going on there. If you look at the, I mean, look, the resultsgers got shut out, so there's more going on there. I mean, look, the results-based analysis never gets anyone anywhere. But if you look at the box score of what happened with the Dodgers, not only did they not score a run, which it doesn't matter what Roberts would have done with Buehler perhaps, but they pinch it three times. And if you look at the box score, they are designated A, B, and C.

That's David Fries, Matt Kemp, and Brian Dozier. So underneath the box score, it says A, struck out for Peters in the 8th, B, struck out for Muncie in the 8th, C, struck out for Floro in the 9th. Pinch hitting maybe wouldn't have saved the Dodgers anyway. Yeah. So much of this series is just about Josh Hader. It's just like, when is Josh Hader going to pitch? Is Josh Hader

pitching? When can they use Hader? How much can they use Hader? He's poochy. Yeah, he basically is. Like like when he's not on the screen we're still talking about when he will be on the screen and that's kind of the case now because he was used in game three for two outs and i think people were curious about why that was because he hasn't really been used on back-to-back days much and that's partially because when he comes in he tends to pitch two or three innings, and then he's not available. But according to Council, he will be available

in the next game because he only got two outs. So you can use him in one of these two games, game four or game five, and so it's just all about when is the right time to use him, because it feels like you can just activate Josh Hader and then guarantee like two or three scoreless innings, which is not actually the case. Josh Hader does allow runs from time to time and the Dodgers score lots of runs, but it just kind of feels like these automatic zeros

that you just have to decide where you want them. Yeah, it was a little strange to see Hader come into the game, I guess in game three, because it was 4-0 to see Hayter come into the game, I guess, in game three, because it was 4-0 in the eighth inning, and that's a pretty comfortable lead. But if I had to guess here, the Brewers presumably told Hayter, okay, we're going to use you today. So they just wanted to stick with the plan. And as Jeremy Jeffress demonstrated, a four-run lead is not always that safe, especially against a lineup as potent as the Dodgers. And then when Hayter was removed,

you figure Josh Hayter, there are two more games. There's a game Tuesday and there's a game Wednesday. And then there's going to be a day off in series. And Josh Hayter, one way or another, is going to pitch in one of those two games. He's not going to pitch in both. So at that point, if you figure, well, Hayter is going to go in one of the next two anyway, we might as well just use him now while we have him and let him get two outs two apparently very easy strikeouts for him to record you look at where what hater has done so far in the playoffs he is at six shutout innings with two hits no walks and 10 strikeouts he struck at 50 of his opponents and honestly he couldn't have made the dodgers look worse in game three but yeah the fact

that he was used gingerly i I guess he only threw eight pitches. So the Brewers got him up, probably didn't want to waste that energy. So they let him come in. He did what Josh Hader does. And then he went away, yielded to Jefferson the ninth. So it is interesting to have so much of the conversation be about one reliever in a bullpen that is supposed to have a bunch of good relievers. Like Corey Knable, I don't know if you noticed you noticed but in game three he got five of five batters out and he with four of them cory

knable is also really good and unhittable but josh hater is the one who dominates the conversation he is the best one but like this is the brewers have a very deep bullpen that is about more than one guy even if that is maybe the most compelling guy who's out there. Don't sleep on Corey Knable just because he has a gentle looking face. So I want to answer a listener email because it's relevant to this conversation and to Robert's decision making with Bueller or the Brewers with Wade Miley. It'll keep coming up. This is a question from Carter about in-game pitcher performance. And he says, it seems like managers are quicker than ever to pull a pitcher at the first sign of trouble, especially in October. While there is obviously something to guys just not having it on a given day, do you think managers pull pitchers too quickly based on small, very recent samples? For example, if a pitcher who is usually very good gives up three straight hits, do you think managers tend to overreact when really it could just be a statistically random

bunch of big hits that do not increase the immediate likelihood of more big hits? Even if the hits were caused by the pitcher piping bad pitches, is it correct to assume the pitcher will continue to do that to the next batters? Does the same logic apply to walks? So he basically wants to know whether recent performance is a guide to what you're going to do to the next batter or in the next inning. And Russell Carlton wrote about that at Baseball Perspectives today. He looked at cruising pitchers like Miley to see whether they are more or less susceptible to the times through the order effect. And he found that

basically they're not. There's really not much there to suggest that someone who's just been cruising through the game actually is less susceptible to that penalty than the typical pitcher is. And Mitchell Lichtman, former guest of the podcast, has written a lot about this, about how a cruising pitcher just really isn't more likely to succeed, not significantly, than a pitcher who's not cruising. And that historically speaking, managers haven't seemed to do a great job of distinguishing between a pitcher who is going to do well for the rest of the game and who is not. And so I don't know whether there's more information out there that teams have or

in theory the expertise that a pitching coach and a manager have are supposed to be able to tell you something that the numbers don't and to pick out the players who actually are going to struggle or the pitchers who are going to keep cruising but just doesn't seem like that's a reliable ability from the research i've seen yep nope it's one of the like the first lessons of second guessing is that you i guess you should sell them second guess or at least you shouldn't be reactionary the people that you'll see in in the stands or on twitter i don't know newspaper comment sections who are just ripping a manager because something didn't work out like you'll see after the fact, if a bullpen gives it away, then fans will always complain the

starter was pulled too early. There was no reason to take him out and vice versa. We've seen all these things before, but there's really just not been any demonstrated predictive power in whether a pitcher is cruising or if he's not cruising. I mean, we've seen enough bad first innings where pitchers then come back in the second and then they're in a groove from that point on things fall apart quickly now you do see i guess we'll talk about the great little game an awful lot in in this podcast back in 2003 and you saw great a little allowed page martinez to face jorge pesada with uh with two on in the eighth inning

and then jorge pesada hit a very good pitch and he hit a bloop double to center field, which does not reflect poorly on Pedro Martinez at all. But then Grady Little came out and removed Pedro Martinez, even though, in a sense, he had done a good job against Posada. If he was able to pitch to Posada, and he threw the pitches that he did, then he should be able to pitch to the next guy. But I guess there is, in instances like that,

like sometimes you'll see a pitcher get pulled after a fielding error behind him, which of course doesn't reflect on the pitcher at all. But I guess there is a psychological component. Maybe you feel like the pitcher isn't going to be able to bounce back. Maybe he's going to be too frustrated, or maybe now the situation is just getting hotter and you want to go to the bullpen. So you do see some of those decisions are maybe more proactive than they seem, but certainly not all the time. So yeah, the rest of this episode, we are going to be doing a little retrospective on the Grady Little game, the Pedro Martinez game in 2003, ALCS game seven, because it is the 15th anniversary today, Tuesday, as we speak. And I'm still pretty fascinated by that game, both because it is my favorite rooting experience of my life. Frankly, it is the happiest I have ever been in my life, I think, which is not a commentary on the rest of my life.

The rest of my life is great. I'm happy usually, but I have never been, I think, as deliriously happy in a moment as I was at 2003 ALCS Game 7. I was in the upper deck in right field in Yankee Stadium. I was still very much a fan at that point. I was a teenager. I was in high school, and that game was incredible. And so I wanted to revisit it, not just because I wanted to go back and get the nostalgia hit from watching the highlights,

although that was nice, but I also was struck by just how different an era that seems to stem from in that we've been talking so much about bullpenning and how managers work these days and how pitcher usage works. And basically it does not work like it did in that game, in Game 7, when Pedro threw 123 pitches and the bullpen was ready really for a full inning before Grady Little finally went to get him after the Yankees tied up the game at five in the eighth inning and you just don't see that anymore now granted it was Pedro and Pedro was the best and his peak was unparalleled but But you just don't see a starter left out there. I mean, literally, we have seen one starter this postseason pitch into the eighth inning, Clayton Kershaw, one time. We have not seen any starter this postseason get to even 105 pitches.

five pitches there were in 2003 again not that long ago there were 231 starts that year of 120 pitches or more this year there were 12 and there hasn't been one since mid-september that was the only one since the trade deadline it's like even within this season it seems to have become less common so you just don't see that anymore and you don't see a whole lot of managers like Grady Little was then who was by his own admission just kind of playing hunches and trying to stare deep into a pitcher's soul and see whether he had anything left so I wrote about this for the ringer and went into a lot of detail about the stats and the sequence of events but we are going to be bringing on Tom Tippett, who was the Red Sox senior baseball analyst for 13 years or so

and had started that consulting relationship just before the Pedro game. So he's going to tell us about his experience watching it and how he has reevaluated it in the years since and also a little bit about how teams prepare for postseason series. There's something I had forgotten about because there was no reason for me to remember this, but on July 25th of 2003, the Red Sox played the Yankees. Pedro Martinez got the start opposite, I don't know, some Yankee guy, David Wells.

And Pedro Martinez wound up throwing 128 pitches in the game before he was removed in the top of the seventh. In the top of the seventh, with Pedro Martinez pitching, they went single, wild pitch, strikeout, stolen base, walk, strikeout swinging, and then RBI single to put the Yankees ahead 3-2, at which point Pedro Martinez was replaced by Scott Sauerbeck to face Hideki Matsui. So Pedro Martinez was ridden all the way to 128 pitches. In fact, he was at that magic number 123 when he began the plate appearance against Bernie Williams, where there were two outs of men on the corners and Grady Little was punished for his stubbornness, leaving Pedro Martinez in there. I don't know how good the pitch was. I don't know how good

the contact was. But in any case, in the back of Grady Little's mind, he might have thought, oh, I've seen this before. Yeah. Didn't matter. Yeah. Well, the Red Sox bullpen that year was pretty porous. It had gotten better as the season went on. And Tim Lin and Embry and Scott Williamson, those guys had all been excellent in the playoffs up to that point.

But Pedro had had six leads blown after he left the game by the Sox bullpen that year, including his first start in the playoffs in the ALDS. And that was the year with the whole bullpen by committee, which wasn't really their plan. They just kind of didn't go out and get a closer until eventually they traded for Byung-hyun Kim, and he ended up being the closer. But it was just disordered, and the Red Sox had the third highest bullpen ERA in baseball that year, although by September it was largely fixed and effective. But I think that's part of it. And obviously part of it was that Pedro was unbelievable, even in 2003, when he was not quite at his peak, but still one of the very best pitchers in baseball. And I went through all

the stats because we didn't really have a way to look at like times through the order in 2003 no one was thinking about that as you'll hear tom say and so the stat that everyone cited then and now is that pedro was less effective after 105 pitches which is a weird kind of milestone it's just stats inc the data provider used to split the pitcher's effectiveness into 15 pitch increments and so it was like from pitch 106 to pitch 120 that year pedro had allowed a 370 batting average which fine but he'd only had like 10 starts where he even pitched into that range and it's batting average and it's like a little more than a hundred pitches. So who even knows if that's predictive of anything, but now we have pitch count splits. We have third and fourth time

through the order splits. Thank you, baseball reference. So I looked back at that stuff and I was somewhat surprised to see that, well, maybe not that surprised because Pedro is a Hall of Famer. You figure he's going to be good at everything. But his times through the order splits were very small for the third time through the order. So he was really effective the third time he was facing hitters in a game, which is not the case for most even great pitchers. Like I went back and, you know, Randy Johnson and Roger Clemens and Kurt Schilling and all these great pitchers from the era, Greg Maddox, they had bigger splits than Pedro. But once you get to the fourth time through the order, which is where Pedro was in that eighth inning in game seven, he really did poorly in those situations and didn't really pitch into that many of those situations. So basically the data we have now does support the idea that Pedro was kind of vulnerable after the fourth time through the order after 100 pitches, but only relative to himself. Like he was still good relative to the typical pitcher because he was just so incredible. pitcher because he was just so incredible. Yep. I'm looking at the same splits as we speak, and all they do is confirm what I already read in your article. So I have now spoken long enough to make this seem like it was a response, even though I said nothing of material

value at all. Great. All right. Well, I'll link to that article if you want to relive it and dive into some of the numbers, but we will bring Tom on. You know, we just got an email as we were recording from Matt in Seattle, who says it's been almost a week without Jeff starting out the podcast with a Williams-Estadillo update. What is he doing in the offseason? Has he struck out? It is weird to go from knowing what Williams-Estadillo is doing like at all times to not having any Williams Estadio updates. Like what has he been up to in the last week? I don't know, but I'm sure something interesting, but we just don't get those kinds of updates. I'm looking forward to like, what is he working on this off season? Where will he end up next year? What will his role be? But nothing, just a total blackout as far as Estadio is concerned. I know he doesn't seem to have a Twitter page either maybe he's on instagram but i'm not so i don't know how to search that so i don't know maybe we just don't get to know maybe he's uh maybe he's all about his personal privacy

maybe williams has to do is a libertarian i'm not really sure but it's one of the things we could find out when he has his several profiles written when he wins the mvp next season yes right all right so we will take a quick break, and we'll be right back with Tom Tippett. Because it's my unhappy anniversary But I love saying it's just another day This is my unhappy anniversary All right, so we are joined now by Tom Tippett, who is the original developer of the Diamond Mind baseball computer simulation game, which I'm sure has stolen many hours from many of

our listeners. And until two years ago, he was also the Boston Red Sox senior baseball analyst. Hey, Tom, how are you? I'm good, thanks. How are you? We're doing well. And we wanted to reminisce about a game that was played 15 years ago today. I guess before you had an official full-time relationship with the Red Sox, but just after you had started some sort of relationship. So take us back to how you initially made that connection with the team and where you were and what you were thinking during the Pedro Grady Little game.

Well, in 2003, I was still running Diamond Mind from our offices in Lexington, Massachusetts. still running Diamond Mind from our offices in Lexington, Massachusetts. And we got to the last week of the season that year. And the Red Sox clinched the wild card on Tuesday night, if I remember correctly. And on Wednesday, Wednesday afternoon, Theo Epstein, the GM of the Red Sox, who was in his first year in that role, called his team together, which were mostly young people who had never been through a postseason before. And they were brainstorming about how to best prepare for their opening series against Oakland. And apparently, I obviously wasn't in the room at the time, but apparently Bill James, who was in town for that meeting, because he had been hired about a year earlier by the Red Sox, he was in the meeting and somebody in the room, I don't know who, said, you know, it'd be cool if we could

simulate this series before it starts and just see what we could learn from that. And Bill said, hey, I know a guy who has a simulator and he lives about 10 miles from here. And so this is Wednesday afternoon. And if we were going to do anything at all, it had to be done by four o'clock on Friday. And they had no idea whether that was feasible or afternoon. And if we were going to do anything at all, it had to be done by four o'clock on Friday. And they had no idea whether that was feasible or not. And so Bill emailed me that Wednesday afternoon and asked me if it could be done. And I thought it could. So I said yes.

And so along with one of my fellow employees at Diamond Mind, a guy named Zach Scott, who's now the Red Sox VP of research and development. We put our heads together, figured out how to get it done, and spent a couple of very long evenings crunching some numbers and getting everything ready so that we could go over to Fenway that Friday afternoon at four o'clock and deliver a few copies of the software that we could install on their machines and the database with the player stats and ratings that were necessary to drive the simulation. So how deep, I mean, this is going back a long time. I remember the original Diamond Mine, but when you were doing these simulations,

how deep would you go? Because, of course, there are starting lineups and there are starting pitchers, but how would you try to factor in managerial tendencies or which matchups someone might prefer, which lefty-on-lefty action or something else? How do you account for all of that nuance in a series like that? Well, that's actually a great question, maybe the most important question for a project of this nature. So the game software, the simulation software, did have a computer manager component. It's a series of decision rules that it used in choosing starting lineups and choosing when to go to the bullpen and for

whom and when to bunt and hit and run and bring the infield in and that sort of thing. So it had the ability built in to manage either one team against a human manager or both teams by computer. But the big question was whether we should use that capability or not for this particular simulation. And for a project like this, one of the most fundamental choices is whether you want to be hands-on, play a few games with whatever amount of time you have available, using human managers making decisions that seem most appropriate for what you're trying to learn, or whether you want to set it up and have the machine play itself a thousand times so that you get a much larger sample size and maybe more scientific conclusions can come

out of that. And for this particular exercise, we felt it was more helpful to be more hands-on, to have human managers who could make the kind of decisions we thought that the Oakland manager would make and make the kind of decisions that we thought Grady Little would make in handling the Red Sox, rather than just trust it to a generic, a pretty smart, but it's still a generic computer manager that would kind of play both teams by the book, play the percentages the way, you know, the best, you know, best we could do given our understanding of sabermetrics and our ability to to program a computer manager to to behave properly in all possible game situations

so this particular exercise was done with human managers so there were i think eight people at the the red sox offices who ended up sitting down and going head to head so on four different machines we had games going with somebody playing the Red Sox and somebody else playing Oakland. And we just kind of got as deep as we could in the few hours that we had available to see what kinds of questions came up in our minds and what kinds of strategies seemed to work a little better than others. A lot of the motivation for doing the project was to help figure out which player or players would be most useful at the tail end of the 25-man playoff roster. I mean, most of the roster was pretty set, as you would expect. But there were questions about whether or not a particular player might be the best choice for

that 25th spot on the roster. So it was less about figuring out game strategies and a little more about figuring out which set of personnel would be most useful given the kinds of situations that might come up in a series against that particular team. So it was really interesting to watch the guys go through the exercise. And most of them were new to Diamond Mine Baseball. They obviously knew real baseball really well. And they knew these two teams really well. They knew Red Sox personnel in particular very well.

So we had to spend a few minutes up front just teaching them how the game worked. But after that, they were on their own and they really got into it. It was a pretty raucous environment with people like, you know, sweating over a lot of the decisions they had to make. And I do think, and not just that day, but in general, when you put people in a position where they have to make decisions, it makes them a little less inclined to second guess and criticize real life managers because they realize that, you know, you may not have 10 minutes to think through whether you want to do X or Y in a particular situation.

You've got 10 seconds to make that choice, and there's a lot going on. And, you know, some people say baseball is a slow game, but when you're in the middle of making decisions on every pitch and every play, it speeds up in a hurry. Although I guess in the eighth inning of ALCS game seven, for instance, you have a little more time potentially to make a decision, but we'll get there. So I feel like it's a good thing that Dan Shaughnessy did not know about this or that other baseball media, I feel like 2003 Boston baseball media would have had a field day with stat nerds simulating the series before it was played.

Probably like, oh, they don't even need to play the games or they think the computer can tell them how to win at baseball or whatever. But I guess they won the series. They beat Billy Bean. Good job, Diamond Mind. So did you do this again for the ALCS? We did not. You know, this had never been done before to our knowledge. And so we went into this not really knowing, and I'm sure the Red Sox people went into this not really knowing what we might be able to accomplish and how much we could

learn from doing an exercise like this. So we did it for the Oakland series because we had a few days to prepare. And then everybody got so busy just being part of the Oakland series that we didn't stop to kind of set up two simulation environments for each of the possible ALCS opponents and kind of go through that exercise again. And by the time it was clear that the Red Sox were going through, which, as you may recall, went down to like the last pitch of game five in Oakland, you know, there was no time to pull together a simulation for the Yankees series. Now, I remember thinking at the time that the Oakland roster and the Yankees roster had a lot of similarities. They had lineups that were, you know, very patient, good mix of left and right-handed batters. And so I felt like a lot of the lessons from simulating the Oakland series would also apply in simulating the Yankees series. But the reality is we just didn't have time to go through that exercise

a second time before the Yankees series was underway. Do you recall this far down the line, it's been 15 years, what in particular you might have learned from simulating the Oakland series? Like what questions or solutions you came up with after having run all the math? There were, you know, there were only a couple of small things that came out of it. And that didn't surprise me too much, given the amount of time we had to work on this. But one thing we did realize in preparing for the Oakland series is that the Red Sox bullpen only had two candidates for lefty relievers. One was Allen Embry, which everybody knew was a good option. The other was Scott Sauerbeck.

And in the course of simulating those games that Friday night, it seemed like one of the lessons was that Embry is your only real left-handed weapon out of the bullpen. And against a lineup like Oakland, and actually I'd say the same about New York, you need to pick your spot. You need to figure out when you want to play the Embry card. And because you've only got that one opportunity and you've got lineups that have a good mix of left and right-handed batters who are dangerous, once you've played that card, you can't go back to it. So you're going to have to trust your righties to get the good left-handed hitters out on the other team in the late innings. So that was one of the things that I think became clear in the course of simulating these games that night. And I have no idea to what extent that might have been incorporated into the

advanced scouting report for the Oakland series. But, you know, when we all got together at like 1030 that night to have dinner and kind of rehash the evening and talk about what we learned, that was one of the things that came out of it was Embry's a really important piece. We need to pick the best spot to use him in each game that presents an opportunity.

But in general, we're going to have to rely on the right-handed relievers to get the job done, even against the good lefties on the other team. Sounds like Grady Little was not involved in this simulation process. But tell me then where you were and what you were thinking as you were watching that game, because you had been a Red Sox fan, obviously, you're from the area, even before this connection with the team arose. So you were watching that more or less like everyone else is watching it, except someone who had simulated the Red Sox roster in the playoffs. So what were you thinking? Yeah, what you just said is 99% true. The one thing that's different is I actually grew up in the Toronto area and moved to Boston when I was 25, but I grew up as a Red Sox fan. I got really interested in

baseball in the mid-60s, and the Toronto Blue Jays didn't exist until 1977. So I had 10 years of being a diehard Red Sox fan before my hometown even had a team. So it kind of worked out well that I ended up moving to Boston and, and, uh, you know, in time after having been in Boston long enough, I kind of drifted back to being a Red Sox fan first and Blue Jays fan second, but yeah, I grew up with the, the 67 Red Sox and the 75 Red Sox and the 86 Red Sox, you know, all those, all those moments were fresh in my mind in the Bucky Dent game, of course. So I was in my living room at home watching the game on TV

like so many other Red Sox fans. I was alone in the room because my wife is not a sports fan. And when it got to that bottom of the eighth situation, the Red Sox had a 5-2 lead, I was as surprised as anybody to see Pedro come out for the eighth inning because I saw how tough the seventh inning was. And it looked like he was getting handshakes in the dugout after that inning and that his night was over. And so I was like, wow, Pedro's coming back out for the eighth inning. This is really interesting. And I did not,

as a fan, I did not expect this to end well. I was too nervous to sit. I was pacing back and forth in front of the TV, kind of muttering out loud that this is not going to end well. And I was dreading what was about to happen, even though as an analyst, I know what the win probabilities are for a three-run lead in the eighth inning, even against a really good team. I still was pretty convinced that this was going to be an unhappy ending, just I think based on having suffered so much as a Red Sox fan over the previous 30 years or so. Yeah, right. You were hardly an objective observer.

I was in Connecticut at the time, and I think every Red Sox fan I ever talked to was of the mind that, yeah, everything is always going to to go poorly and it's going to go poorly at the worst possible time so when yes you know this this playoffs maybe we haven't seen so much in the way of managerial decisions and headlines but there are some aaron boone stuff which is i guess ironic given this conversation but when you have managers or coaches who make decisions that fans don't like one of the very common expressions that you will hear is that that's a that's a fireable offense and certainly uh grady little arguably committed what was a fireable offense in in the uh in game seven of the lcs and he was relieved of his duties not too long after that. Are you a believer in the idea that any one decision,

short of, I don't know, kidnapping and hog-tying one of your own players, can actually be cause for dismissal? Or should it always be about some sequence of events, some series of just basically a process decision as opposed to one decision? You know, I guess I would have to say that I would hope that most people would get judged on the full body of work and not just one particular decision that did not go well. But I wouldn't go so far as to say that every individual decision can be safely ignored or safely put into the pile with everything else. I do think that, you know, there are key moments where a decision might rise to the level of determining whether somebody is really worthy of having that job or not. And by the way, just I'm getting ahead of myself a little bit, but, you know,

I'm not saying that this particular decision was one of those. But I think it's really important with any decision that you understand the information that's available at the time the decision is made. And you want to know that the thought process behind the decision was as sound as it could possibly be. And not just second guess after the fact, because, you know, in baseball decision making, you're always playing the probabilities. You know, something, you know, doing X rather than Y might raise your win probability from 54% to 58%. And over the course of a season or a series of seasons, those little extra percentages that you can gain by making consistently good decisions in those situations, they'll add up to

a measurable number of wins. But in any one game or any one moment in a game, you know, even if you are increasing your chances to win from 54 to 58 percent, there's a chance you're not going to get the outcome you're looking for. And a particular play, you know, you might decide to sacrifice bunt rather than swing away. And that might give you a small incremental gain in the probability of producing a better game situation after that play than before that play. But there's still a certain percentage chance that you'll ask the player to get the bunt down and it won't happen the way you want it to. down and it won't happen the way you want it to. So I think it's totally not fair to judge somebody just because the decision didn't give you the outcome you're looking for. But I think it is fair to judge someone on the thought process that went into the decision. And there are times in a game

to be aggressive and there are times in the game to be conservative. And I would want a major league manager to have a very good feel for when to be aggressive and when, you know, a certain amount of aggressiveness just goes into the territory of being reckless. And so, yeah, I do think it's fair to judge people on these decisions. I do hope that most of the time they'll be judged on their overall body of work and not just on one decision that didn't work out. But I'm absolutely opposed to just assuming that whatever outcome happened on that play was inevitable and therefore the decision was clearly a mistake. It's generally not the case. So you started working more, consulting more for the Red Sox the following year, 2004, which went a little bit better.

And I'm sure that took some of the sting out of what had happened in 2003. But you still hadn't revisited that game. And those memories were still probably pretty painful. But a few years later, 2006, Nesson comes along and says that they're working on this special, this what-if program where they want to go back and see what would have happened if Grady Little had made a different decision and had pulled Pedro and put Embry in or made some move to the bullpen, and they came to you and you were still working with Diamond Mind at the time,

and you, I guess, reluctantly at first decided to help with this project and revisited that game and kind of came to a different conclusion, slightly at least, than you had the first time around. So tell us about that story. Yeah, so totally out of the blue, I got an email or a call, I forget what it was, from somebody at the Red Sox who had been approached by NASesson with the idea of doing this simulation. So naturally, they thought of me since I was a local guy with a simulator. And as you said, at first, I was reluctant to do it. I really didn't see the point in rehashing this situation. And my two biggest concerns were that Grady Little had lost his job over this and was still looking for a new job two years later, if I recall correctly.

And so I thought, you know, he had suffered a pretty high price for the way that game played out. And I also thought if we simulate that game again, and in the simulated version, we go to the bullpen instead of leaving Pedro in, either at the beginning of the eighth inning or, you know, when he got in trouble, two or three batters in. And if the bullpen ends up blowing that game too, somebody on the current Red Sox team might have been that simulated reliever who blew that game. And why would we want to create a chance that we'd be throwing somebody under the bus for something they didn't actually do in real life? So, and you know, and as you said, the Red Sox had won the World Series in 2004, the curse was broken. They did so in incredibly dramatic

fashion coming back from three games down against the Yankees. And it just seemed like it was all, you know, water under the bridge at that point point and it wasn't much to be gained by going back. But it was clear that they were determined to do the project and I wanted to make sure that if they were going to do a simulation, they did it with a good simulation engine and with a good process around the whole project so that the results would be valid. And more important than that, I wanted to make sure that the results were communicated in a way that captured the real uncertainty in situations like this. I don't like the idea that because Pedro stayed in and the team lost the game, that's clearly a wrong decision. And the presumption being that if they

had gone to the bullpen, it's inevitable they would have won the game and that would have been the right decision. Neither one of those outcomes is a certainty and I wanted to make sure that if we're going to do this, that kind of communicated the uncertainty around the outcomes for both of those scenarios. So we ended up putting those two rosters together and researching how fatigued the various pitchers were who might be brought into that game in relief and set it up as realistically as possibly could. And then we simulated that game 100 times with Pedro having been removed when it was 5-3 and two men on base. When Grady came out to the mound and checked with Pedro and then turned around and walked back and left Pedro in the game.

That's the decision point we went with. And we simulated that a hundred times and we saw that the most common outcome was a 5-3 Red Sox win. And so we chose one of the, I forget what it was, 38 or 41 instances where that was the final score. And we picked a representative example of that outcome and sent that list of individual game situations and plays that came about in the last couple of innings of that simulated game. And then Nesson built the broadcast around those outcomes and actually played a version of that entire game on television with the first seven and a half plus innings being the actual broadcast

and the last inning and a half based on these simulated results. So they cut together images from other Red Sox-Yankees games to find video that would express the outcomes that came out of that simulated game. It was extremely well done. I was very impressed with the capabilities that their technical staff showed in putting that broadcast together. Yeah, that was going to be my next question. Whenever you are the analyst in a situation like this, there's always the question of how what you're doing is going to be handled by the people who are producing the project who are not the analysts. So I guess you already gave the answer, but how did you feel like your information was handled by what is a cable company looking to draw as high ratings as possible?

I thought they handled it really well. I mean, as I said, I had some doubts in the beginning as to whether this should be done at all. But in the end, I was very happy with how open they were to my input on certain things, especially when I suggested to them that they actually, you know, once I heard that they were going to broadcast the entire game, I suggested, why not do a postgame show so we can have some people in the studio that kind of put it in proper context and not make it seem like showing a game where the Red Sox end up winning 5-3 is definitive proof that taking Pedro out would have been the right decision. You know, I did not want it to come across as a sure thing. I wanted somebody in the studio to be able to say, you know, if they leave Pedro in,

the chances of winning are X percent. If they take him out, the chances of winning are Y percent, and neither outcome is guaranteed. And they went along with the idea of doing a postgame show, and they actually asked me to be a guest on that show so that I could explain this myself. And I don't think I was a particularly good guest, but I got through it and I got those points across. And I don't know how well those points landed because I was mocked the next morning on WEI, the morning hosts. I forget the exact phrasing, but their description of me was not very flattering. I think that's a badge of honor to be mocked on WEI probably. But they actually did a whole, I think it was a half hour long postgame show. And they had me on for the first segment to just explain how the simulation was set up and the results that came out of it. And I did get a chance to make those basic points. And then they got to commercial and came back with a couple of prominent local sports writers to just reminisce about that game.

And I thought it came off really well. And as you rewatched it, which I did just this week as I was working on my article about it, I, of course, enjoyed that game in the moment more than you did. And I was on the opposite side, rooting interest-wise. But I think your opinion was changed somewhat about how bad the decision was. Not that you ended up saying that Little did the right thing and he should have left Pedro in that long. But there's a little more gray area, you think, based on how Pedro performed and some of the matchups. So I guess make the case that the decision to leave him in was not quite as abhorrent as it seemed at the time or as it's remembered today.

Well, I have to say that in real time, you know, as a diehard Red Sox fan who's been through a lot of disappointments to that point in my life, I was definitely looking at his decision through the lens of, you know, this is not going to end well. I don't like this decision. You know, this is a big mistake. You know, in real time, that's what I was thinking. And when I went back, I didn't watch that game again until this project came along a couple of years later. And I felt like it was necessary to watch it again as part of my preparation. And when I did, I was surprised at how well Pedro pitched to those batters that a lot of people felt he shouldn't have been facing. You know, I saw a lot of velocity.

I saw great movement on his breaking ball. I saw some really good pitches against those hitters. And he threw a couple of bad pitches. So I think there was some evidence of fatigue there for sure. But, you know, those were of bad pitches, so I think there was some evidence of fatigue there for sure, but those were harmless bad pitches. They were like a curveball that didn't really bite and ended up a foot and a half in the opposite batter's box. These are not hittable pitches. The one that Matsui hit down the line that stayed fair by about a foot was a 93 or 94 mile an hour fastball that started a couple inches off the inside of the

plate and then tailed over the inside edge you know i was i found myself as i watched it again two years later thinking you know i bet if that pitch is thrown a hundred times to that hitter you know it doesn't end up in a double down the corner all that often there's you know he's gonna he's gonna sometimes he's gonna take that pitch because it started out inside and then tailed in over the strike zone sometimes he's gonna swing and miss at that pitch he's gonna foul it off a lot you know it's not inevitable that that ball gets hit down into the corner for it was for a big hit and then of course there by a couple feet as it was yeah yeah it's you know my as it was. Yeah. Yeah. It's, you know, my memory, it was about a foot fair and, you know, and, um, and then of course the Posada hit was a bloop that just found no man's land and shell left center field. And, uh, you know, that was a good pitch too. So, you know,

if, if we're judging Grady on whether he made the right decision about whether Pedro had enough gas in the tank to go get another few hitters out it's hard to make the case in hindsight that Pedro did not have the ability to get through those two or three hitters and and I thought he pitched really well he may have been like running on fumes at that point but whatever you know whatever he had left he was able to give and he was still throwing hard and throwing to spots and and getting movement on his pitches. And it just didn't work out that night. Now, I would also say one other thing, you know, just kind of going forward to the 2004 ALCS, there were several moments in games four and five of that series when the Red Sox were clawing back from a three game deficit,

you know, in and I forget which of these incidents happened in game four and game five. I think it was game four, but there was a situation I think in the seventh inning of game four and it's a really close game and the Yankees load the bases and have a chance to blow it wide open. And Matsui hits a rocket to right field, but it's right at Trot Nixon and he makes the catch. If that ball is like six feet either side, it's a basis. Suddenly, it's a 7-2 game for the Yankees instead of a close game that the Red Sox are able to come back and win in dramatic fashion. And so, you know, in 2003, that line drive off Matsui's bat finds a spot and it ends up turning the game around, or at least starting the turnaround. And the next year, he

hits a ball just as hard, but right at somebody and the Red Sox are able to get out of that inning and go on and and win that series and go on to win the World Series and break the curse so you know in hindsight you know there are nights where things go your way and there are nights where they don't go your way and and I have a hard time looking back and saying that Grady obviously made the wrong choice. I just really don't think you can say that. I do think that if it was me in the Red Sox dugout making the decisions, I probably trust the bullpen and I don't even bring Pedro out for the eighth inning. But I can't guarantee that that would have been the right decision either. And I also don't know if I, even today, have all the information that Grady

had at that moment about what his, you know, what his relievers were able to give him that night. I don't know if anybody was a little sore. I don't know if anybody was fatigued. You know, I don't know what he felt he knew about what his other options were. And I hate second guessing somebody when you don't have the same information that they have. So one of the complicated things that now we're facing fewer and fewer circumstances where managers are going out there and asking if their pitcher still has any gas in the tank, because of course, starters come out now in the third and fourth inning. When you're going back to review, you're absolutely right. I was watching the video today.

You were re-watching, Ben was re-watching, looking at those pitches that Pedro threw in the eighth inning. And they were, for the most part, really good pitches. But that was also Pedro's fourth time through the order. So to what extent, and we know this a lot better now than we did back then, but even when you're looking at those pitches how if it's even possible how do you sort of distinguish whether maybe a batter is just getting better swings or making contact because well he's already seen Pedro three times in the same game is that like when the manager would go out to ask if a pitcher still had any gas in the tank does it seem like that's only

even addressing half of the problem with working so deep in a start in the first place? That's a great question. And, you know, as you point out, we certainly weren't thinking about the third time through the order, fourth time through the order kinds of research, you know, in 2003. And I don't think that anybody involved in that kind of a situation in that time period would have been thinking beyond, you know, who's my best pitcher and who do I trust in this situation and who do I not trust in this situation? And, you know, you're not even in that game unless Pedro is Pedro all season long. And actually for several years before that. So, you know, I completely get the idea of wanting to ride the

horse that got you there. And as long as you have no reason to believe that he's, you know, he's totally out of gas and cannot continue to be that guy. So I do remember in the moment when I was watching the game on television that I've never liked the idea of going out and asking the pitcher how he feels. I really feel like the manager needs to have made up his mind before he walks on the field. And because if you ask any high performance athlete if they can get the next guy out, he's always going to say yes. And, you know, I just don't think that's particularly reliable information. I think you need to have made the judgment before you do that. And I remember thinking in the moment that I thought Brady made a mistake in that respect.

But again, you know, as I said before, in hindsight, you know, he went out there, he asked Pedro what he had left and he got the answer he wanted. He turned around and he walked back and left Pedro in the game. And Pedro made some damn good pitches to the next couple of hitters and just didn't get the outcome that they were looking for. So as time goes on and you get more and more involved with the Red Sox and you're involved in preparing for playoff series, not just kind of as a consultant, but as a full-time guy, at least in 2013. By then you'd been a full-time employee for several years. So what can you tell us about how teams prepare for series today, or did then? Has it gotten any more advanced than bringing in Tom Tippett to simulate with Diamondmind, or what are the limits to what you can do? Because Jeff and I, at this time of year, we feel limited, I think, in trying

to figure out things to say about a single series because there's so much that's unpredictable. But teams don't have the luxury of just saying, well, we'll see what happens. You have to try to find every edge that you possibly can. Yeah, I agree. And by the time 2013 rolled around, I had been there as a full-time employee for five years. We were nine years into the development of our baseball information system, and a significant part of that effort was generating data that would go into the advanced scouting reports for all regular season series as well as postseason series. So we had a process that was pretty well established for generating information and combining the analytical side with the video scouting and with

the observations of our advanced scout who's on the road. And because that process was functioning quite well, we didn't feel the need to do anything drastically different for the playoffs. We just kind of doubled down on the effort. So we had more than one advanced scout on the road because we had more than one potential opponent that we needed to be ready for. We got some other people in the office involved in running and reviewing some of the analytical work because, again, we had multiple teams to prepare for. And we had a little more time than you typically do in the regular season. So we were able to dig a little deeper in some things, study more aggressively if the other team has some predictable tendencies

for when they make pickoff throws and when they attempt steals and these kind of narrow game situations that you don't have as much time to really focus in on during the regular season because you're doing two or three of these reports a week. But in the postseason, you know, we kind of knew by the last week of September what the range of possible opponents were, and we could really go to town on some of this stuff. Now, by this point, we were not running simulations of upcoming opponents. That was a one-time thing back in 2003. So it was mostly just digging deeper into the information we had available to us.

And of course, by 2013, we had five years worth of PitchFX data to study. We had a lot more to work with than we did in 2003, 2004. So there were elements to the analytical work that we just didn't have the opportunity to do back in 03, 04 when we were getting started with this. So it wasn't dramatically different, but it was just a kind of a relentless search for any tendencies in the other manager or the other players that we could potentially exploit in a key game situation. I think you weren't running simulations 10 years after the fact because you did such a great job the first time that they thought we could never do better. That was the pinnacle of all serious

simulations. I guess as a similar kind of question, again, building off of how much time you've now spent in the game and just being in communication with so many people in the game, never mind your own responsibilities that you've had. Compared to where you were when you started, what can you tell us now about your impressions about the significance of a manager? Because of course, from the perspective of someone like myself or like Ben, it's almost a black box and we're relying on a lot of anecdotes and we're always saying, well, you know, it's a lot more than just tactics and strategy. It's about being a leader. But have you observed anything in particular that maybe you'd like to share with us?

You know, big picture, I don't think my feelings about the role of a manager has really changed a lot over the years. Before I started working with the Red Sox, and I'd always believed that the in-game tactics were a relatively small portion of their job, that working with the front office to pick the right people to be on the roster in the first place, communicating effectively with those people, being a leader, being a leader of the coaching staff, making good choices about who you want to have on your staff, dealing with the media, dealing with ownership when necessary. I felt like all of those things add up to a much higher percentage of the value that a manager brings to the table and the success that they might have than the in-game tactics. Now, I will say that if in-game tactics is a serious liability and you start to lose the confidence of your fellow coaches and the players on the team in particular, that could really

undermine your ability to do all of those other things. So you do need to be a very competent in-game strategist. But I don't know that managers can necessarily win a lot more games per season than their talent would normally support just by being brilliant at in-game strategy. It certainly helps, and I think the really good managers can win a few games that way. But I'd still believe, even with all the new data that's available and all that I learned from being inside an organization and seeing how things were done on a day-to-day basis, I didn't fundamentally change my opinion about that. Well, I also wanted to ask you, we've talked a bit about this off the air, but you left the Red Sox a couple of years ago and you have done some baseball consulting work since then, but you sort of felt a need to look beyond baseball and see where you would fit. And that's something that

I think probably Jeff and I have felt and other people in baseball have felt, and maybe even people who spend a lot of time watching baseball and are wondering if that's really the best use of their time. And it sounds, you know, it's a dream for a lot of people, obviously, to work in baseball. And there are many people in baseball who never want to do anything else and are totally content. But I guess there is that sense maybe that this is just a game and it's a zero-sum game. And if we win, someone else loses. And are we really making the world a better place? And, you know And if it's just entertaining us all and giving us a livelihood, that's a good thing too. But what made you feel like you wanted to explore and see where else your skills could be useful?

Well, I have to agree. It was a dream job. And I never imagined being somebody that would be welcome in a baseball front office. You know, when I started Diamond Mind, it was not with the idea that I'm going to prove myself as a legitimate, you know, employee in a real baseball team. That was a complete surprise to me. So I loved running Diamond Mind. I had a great run with the Red Sox for, total of 13 years as a consultant and an employee. And it was an amazing experience. But going into this whole thing, it was never my plan back in my 20s and 30s to spend my entire life in baseball. It was always great fun. And I love puzzles. And baseball has an almost infinite supply of interesting puzzles to try to solve and wonderful

data sets to work with. So it was right up my alley. But I've always been interested in a lot of things. And in running your own company and then working for a major league team, those are all consuming jobs. And it just squeezed out everything else. So when I got to the stage in 2015,2016, I started thinking about whether this was maybe the last chance that I would have to step out of baseball and find something else in the world that I could be really passionate about for the next 10 or 15 years and throw myself into that. I decided it was time to step away and give myself the time to explore that. I knew that as long as I stayed working for the Red Sox or any team for that matter, that I just wouldn't the time to explore that. I knew that as long as I stayed working for the Red Sox

or any team for that matter, that I just wouldn't have time to properly explore any other options. And, you know, it would be very easy for inertia to just carry me into retirement without me stopping to think about whether this is really the most important thing or the most satisfying thing I could do for the next 10 or 15 years. So I decided to step out and begin exploring that. So for the last year and a half or so, as you said, I've done some baseball work and I'm actually doing a little bit of baseball work right now for my old company. But mostly I've been exploring, learning as much as I can about healthcare and renewable energy and a number of other challenges in the world that maybe I could find a role in

trying to move things forward and things that matter a little bit more than who wins a baseball game on Tuesday night. Or maybe you could at least slow the rollback. Anyway, that's getting too political. So the last thing I wanted to ask, and this goes back to how we started, talking about Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS. Now, we had talked about you going on Nesson's What If program in 2006. And, of course, that What If program aired two years after the Red Sox won the World Series. So, as a different sort of What If, now the Red Sox have won three World Series since then. It's amazing. No Boston sports fan has any right to complain for a long time.

But have you considered, or if you were to start considering now, what do you think the conversation about Game 7 in 2003 would be like had the Red Sox not won any World Series since then? Do you think it would still be an open, festering wound? Yeah, I guess I'd have to say yes to that. You know, honestly, I've never really thought about that question until you asked it just now. But yeah, I mean, I can put myself back into my head in 2003, where I could remember quite vividly that the Red Sox lost Game 7 in 1967, and they lost on the final weekend of the season in 72.

That was a strike-shortened year that year, or maybe a lockout-shortened year. I want to be fair about that. They lost in Game 7 in 75. They lost the Bucky Dent game in 78. They lost the game against the Mets in 86. And in 2003, people were still talking about the decision to leave Bill Buckner in the game in 1986, 17 years later. So I have no doubt that if the Red Sox hadn't won a World Series still, and the streak was now 100 years old, that people would be dissecting that decision in Game 7 in 2003 today, just like they still talk about the Buckner game. In fact, I was listening to sports radio the other day and the Buckner game came up.

And I don't think it's fair to Bill Buckner because it was really John McNamara's decision to not go to a defensive sub in that situation. And there were a lot of other things that happened in that inning besides that one play. So I really think that Bill Buckner's gotten an unfair rap about that whole game. But yeah, I'm almost certain that almost on a daily basis, people would still be talking about that game with the Red Sox in the postseason right now. Well, we're glad that you could come on and reminisce a little and that the memories are a little less painful

than they might have been otherwise. And if anyone listening to this is trying to improve the world in some way and needs someone who helped end the Red Sox title drought and knows a lot about math and stats and machine learning, just send me an email and I'll connect you with Tom. But thank you very much. And thanks for making Diamond Mind on behalf of everyone who has spent years of their lives playing it and still do. Well, thank you very much for that. It was great fun to work on the game, and it was a pleasure to be with you two today.

All right, that will do it for today. Since we spoke, Nathan Ivaldi has justified our faith that he would be a good matchup for Boston against the Astros. He pitched very well. The Red Sox scored a bunch of runs off Roberto Asuna. They won 8-2 and took a 2-1 lead in the series. As I post this episode, Dick Mountain is dealing against Milwaukee. Jeff and I are tentatively planning to do our second live stream for Patreon supporters at the $10 level and above during Thursday night's game.

That's an ALCS game that is subject to change because the playoffs are always unpredictable for our schedules. But that is the plan, and we will definitely be doing it soon. So sign up at patreon.com slash effectivelywild. Support the podcast. Get in on that live stream. And five listeners who have already signed up include Scott Mizuno, Mike Secor, JM, Jason Allen, and Ryan Corcoran. Thanks to all of you. keep your questions and comments for me and Jeff coming via email at podcast at bankrats.com or via

the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter we will be back to talk to you soon Instead Left all Pressing cares All along The road Fifteen Keys Where do they Go

Slings and arrows Complete the score Always leaving Wanting more And I tried and arrows complete to score our ways leaving wanting more and I try to throw it away