Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1285: October Gets in Gear

Episode Date: October 19, 2018

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about a wild week of playoff baseball, including all the action from Games 3 and 4 of the ALCS and Games 4 and 5 of the NLCS, Joe West’s infamous fan-interference call against the Astros, Andrew Benintendi‘s game-saving catch, Craig Counsell‘s Curly Ogden gambit with Wade Miley, Clayton Kershaw‘s […]

Hello and welcome to episode 1285 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by the birthday boy, Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs. Hello, happy birthday. Thank you. The birthday boy, not a fast boy, not a fast boy like Chris Taylor or Yasiel Puig or Chris Taylor. That was a deep cut. I don't know if that made any sense. Anyway, one of the reasons that we planned to do this podcast on Thursday is because that way, having last plotted on Tuesday, there would be four new games for us to talk about. What happened two games ago? I only remember the games now from Wednesday because Tuesday feels like a distant, distant memory. I'm not convinced that there actually was baseball back then.

I'm not convinced there was a Tuesday. Wednesday was everything. There was a lot of interesting baseball on Wednesday. A lot has happened. We have a lot of material. We've had to stretch a little bit in some of these episodes, and somehow we still get to the same length no matter what, but we've had to dig deep, and right now I feel like we just have too much to talk about. So I know that you were up very late writing, and we will talk about what you were writing about, but man, we have a

lot to get to. We have managerial decisions and non-decisions. We have Joe West. We have incredible catches. Baseball's gotten good, finally. We talked about how the division series was pretty dull, historically dull, and now we're into a championship series that has been competitive and exciting in different ways. As Andy McCullough tweeted, it seems like these are two different sports at times, the ALCS and the NLCS. But man, I don't know where to start. Should we just start with the most recent stuff since it's on our minds and then we'll work back a bit to some of the things we've missed? Yeah, and I can't promise that I'm even going to be alert for more than 25 minutes of this,

so we should do the most important stuff first. All right. So let's start, I i guess with the first game on wednesday dodgers brewers which well we can really start with the start of that game because craig counsel did something that has been discussed on this podcast many times that was mentioned in the only rule that sam and i wanted to do with the Stompers, he pulled the 1924 Bucky Harris, George Mogridge, and Curly Ogden maneuver. He brought out Wade Miley for a single batter. The left-handed Miley walked the leadoff man, and then he was done. And this was the only time that Miley has started in his life,

according to him, on short rest. The only time that Miley has started in his life, according to him, on short rest. And so this was just a gambit to try to get the Dodgers to commit to a bunch of right-handed hitters to face a lefty and then pull the switcheroo and some slate of hand and bring in Brandon Woodruff. And it kind of worked. I give him lots of points for creativity. The problem is that the Dodgers sort of saw it coming. You could kind of see it coming because this is how the Brewers have operated. They sort of did this. We talked about it with Dan Jennings, right, in September.

They used him for one out at the beginning of a game. And because Miley had never started on short rest and because we always thought they would kind of go bullpen game in one of these games in the the middle three on back-to-back-to-back days the Dodgers didn't fully buy in so they did start Bellinger they did start Muncie but those guys I don't know they probably had a slightly different order than they would have had anyway I guess they burned David Freeze not that that matters all that much but Council went for it he tried the thing that we've talked about why don't people try that thing yeah now i i i have seen the argument uh presented in a lot of places that the dodgers kind of had a hunch that something was coming and again they did have bellinger and muncie in the lineup but i think that the clue that the dodgers weren't all the way there is that why would they bet cody bellinger

lead off if they thought that that wade miley was just going to be in there temporarily it was it right and Bellinger let off I think I had seen that Bellinger hadn't let off before anyway so it seems like there's evidence that the Dodgers thought okay Miley's probably not long for this game I don't think they thought that he was going to Dan Jennings it but it is what I think similar to to the bullpen game or the opener, maybe especially the opener. This is one of those maneuvers that it's like really playing around the margins. It's a dramatic looking maneuver when you're at the game, when you look in the box score. But when you think of what it does to the win probability, it's so small, which is funny because it just it seemed based on, you know,otal Twitter feeds, seemed like he was extremely polarizing,

and some people were greatly upset by the idea that Craig Cantle would pull a chicken bleat maneuver or whatever to get a starting pitcher out of the game before he's even a starting pitcher. But I don't know. I think my biggest takeaway is when you are the Brewers, when you're any team there are people within the organization who are open-minded and creative they could you know maybe they're maybe they're big curly ogden fans or maybe they're big effectively wild fans and there there are going to

be brainstorm sessions within any front office there's downtime there is downtime in baseball i don't know if you've ever watched baseball And so you'll just kind of shoot the shit between people. And it's one thing for people in a front office or with a coaching staff to think about doing a maneuver like this. And it's quite another to do it in the playoffs when you're in game five of the NLCS. And I think it is a credit to the Brewers. It's a testament to the Brewers and the clubhouse community culture, I guess, they've fostered that this was a maneuver that everyone got behind. I mean, Wade Miley found out, I think he said a few days before

what the plan was going to be, and he was okay with it. Brandon Woodruff, I guess, only found out Wednesday morning that, oh, by the way, you're going to do most of the work. And he was fine with that, of course. And if you're a Brewers player, like if you're a position player, it doesn't change that much for you because you're still out there and doing the same job.

But in order to convince the team that this is what we're going to do, I think that that's it speaks to the team. It speaks to Craig Cancel and the support staff. Yeah, I am. I am delighted by the fact that it happened, even though the fact that it happened is of almost statistical negligence. Yeah, right. Well, we talk so much about managers when they lower the win probability by like 2% in reality. So we might as well talk about it when they raise the win probability by 2%. I don't know what the actual percentage is here, probably even less than that.

But if we're going to focus on those things, and we always do because we focus on things that you can control that require some forethought that are unforced errors if you do them. It's hard to really fault a guy for swinging and missing at a major league pitch or even for missing a spot if you're a pitcher because it seems really hard to hit your spot. So it's harder to criticize that. I mean, you can hope that players will always do everything perfectly, but they won't. And when they don't, unless there was a lack of effort, there's just not much you can say about it. But with a manager, you have days to plan all this out in advance. And so manager has no other job really other than talking to the media and setting your lineup and deciding who's going to start. I mean, that's the whole thing. So I think when someone screws that up, then we really fixate on it. So I think that's why we

get excited about this kind of thing too. It's the inverse of that. So I appreciate it and applaud it, and there are really only so many situations where you would do something like this, I think, because this was contingent on the Brewers really not having a starter that they wanted to use or they want to bring Miley back when he's not on short rest. And Miley, despite his previous excellent start, is not really that great a pitcher.

I know he's a different pitcher and better pitcher in some ways. Anyway, I don't think this is something we'll see happening all over the place, even as much as the opener has spread. But it was kind of cool that it happened once on a really, really big stage. And the Brewers lost anyway. Just like Sam wrote about the other week, all these teams have tried the opener or bullpenning before, and then generally when they've tried it, they've lost, which is why it hasn't been picked up. The big difference about the Rays this year is that they went to the opener and they were good,

which is not something that we've seen from teams who try these maneuvers. So I wanted to ask you, I guess this maneuver is a little bit different from a bullpen game of the past or an opener game of the past in that Wade Miley was not announced as the opener. Like Dan Jennings was announced as the initial out-getter or something. And so was Brandon Woodruff not too long ago, but Wade Miley was a deke. Now, maybe it was a somewhat predictable deke, but it was a little bit of subterfuge. I think I nailed that. So are you at all concerned about the precedent that this could set? Because in theory, teams could just keep doing this over and over to one another. It's just like checking for pine

tar, right? That the reason you don't do it is because you don't want it done to you. So is there any risk of that or do you think this is just a one-off? Yeah. We talked about this recently because the Dodgers had already complained to the league about the Brewers not announcing their starters far enough in advance. There's no rule that you have to announce them early, but there's a convention. And my colleague Zach Kram, he started his article at The Ringer about this by envisioning this future scenario, this dystopian version of baseball where no one announces their starters and everyone is waiting for lineups to be set once they know who the starter is. So it's like a Pat Vendetti sort of situation, like where he has to choose what side he wants to throw from. And then the hitter or the other way around, the hitter has to choose where he wants to hit from and then so you could almost have just like two

lineups ready to go at the last second and then do a switch of your starter and then the other manager switches his lineup so it could get kind of complex and bad and i you know you'd have to just set a rule i guess if this does become something that spreads then MLB can just say hey you have to announce your starter and stick to your starter by this period of time and then you know you can still do what council did but it would be obvious if you're going to do that most of the time I think because'd know if the guy who's starting is generally a reliever, if he's not able to go long in the game. That's what made this kind of work to the extent that it did, because Miley is a starter. And so in theory, he really could have been making a start.

Whereas if they had started a reliever or something like Jennings, then it wouldn't work because he would know that he's not going to go deep in the game regardless. So I don't know that in the regular season this would be an issue, but it could continue to be an issue in the postseason. And if it is, I don't know that it hurts the fan spectator experience. Like it's a pain for teams and managers and staffs to have to have all these contingency plans. But for us, I mean, the the game's gonna start when it's scheduled to start right so i kind of don't care who's pitching yeah what uh one of the things that uh helps convince so i generally am just open to these things that's not a surprise we co-host this

podcast i like weird maneuvers in baseball yeah now i know whenever you talk about the decline of the starter or just you know you go to the ballpark because you want to see the starting pitchers, right? Or at least many people have made that argument. Like, oh, I want to go see Verlander's sale. Like, that's going to be a great game. Or in the case of this recent series, it's not going to be a great game. Anyway, I don't think anyone goes to the ballpark because they're like, I want to see Kershaw-Miley. Like, it doesn't really cross your mind that Miley is going to be that much of a draw.

I don't think it affects attendance or enthusiasm one way or another. I think that if the Brewers had a Clayton Kershaw, then they wouldn't have to do something like this. But I am glad that they did. And now I have lost my train of thought. Oh, no. That's understandable. Now I only have my train of thought. Oh, no. That's understandable. Now I only have half of one point. Running out of time.

Running out of time. Well, if it comes back to me, then I'm going to let you know. Okay. Well, I think that the thing is, I mean, you can't say it didn't work because Woodruff pitched really well. He went five and a third, and it didn't work to the extent that it won the game for the Brewers, but there's no real reason to expect that to happen. The real problem for the Brewers in this series lately has been that they're not scoring runs, and you're just not going to win no matter what kind of strange gambits you try if you don't score runs.

And the reason they didn't score runs in their most recent game is that Clayton Kershaw was really good. Oh, wait. Yeah. I got it. Oh, go ahead. Okay. Before we move on to Kershaw, it's back.

One thing, one minor point. Sorry, I hate interrupting you. But one thing to throw out is just that what I also liked about this maneuver is so Wade Miley was always supposed to start game six for the Brewers. And so that means for game five, he was basically untouchable. Like you could see in an emergency situation, maybe he'd be available out of the bullpen. But Wade Miley was basically not part of the active roster for game five. But by using this little deke maneuver, the Brewers did find a way to make use of Wade Miley on the roster.

So that part I like. way to make use of Wade Miley on the roster. So that part I like. It's a little innovative because it effectively expanded the roster from 24 to 25, which the other teams wouldn't have the same ability. But again, he did walk the one guy he faced. So there's the whole conversation about process versus the actual results. And by the actual results, Wade Miley didn't really matter. Brandon Woodruff was good. Clayton Kershaw was better. Now we move on to the Kershaw point. wasn't him at his best because he only struck out three guys and seemed like he was taking advantage of the Braves' aggressiveness, which was a credit to him, but he wasn't overpowering in the way that he has been. And then, of course, in his second start of these playoffs, he had his, I believe, second worst start of the playoffs by game score ever and got knocked around in game one of this series. And then now this time we saw him turn in one of his best playoff starts, but in a more

convincing fashion, I guess you could say, than the first game in that he struck out nine guys and just looked pretty dominant and seemed to have his command and all his stuff was working. And so this is kind of the third way that we have seen him pitch this offseason. And there's going to be more variability in what you get from Kershaw at this point in his career because he's not going out there and throwing as hard as he used to. So it's going to be contingent on whether he has his command that day and how his stuff is moving but when it's working he's still really effective against a pretty good hitting team yeah what what struck me about Kershaw is in the the start previous to this one he only it was the first game

as mentioned I think all season where he didn't miss a single bat with his slider it was his first start where he didn't miss two bats at least with his slider in a previous game in the series and in this game he missed 10 bats with his slider. He went from zero slider whiffs to 10. The slider is Clayton Kershaw's most important pitch. I think that if you just look at the plots of what he was doing with the slider, then he was just a lot more successful at keeping it to either side of the plate and, in a lot of cases, burying it sort of low into the glove side.

So he just had a better feel for the slider. I think that was evident when you were watching. It was evident from the swings the Brewers were taking. And when you have Clayton Kershaw who has his slider working, then he is a full three-pitch pitcher as opposed to being a two-pitch pitcher. And we know that he doesn't use his curveballs in a lot of the different counts. And so it would make him a little bit easier to hit. So when he has his slider going, he's still great.

When he doesn't, he's less great. I think when you talk about the game against the Braves, it's easy to look at a game like that and say Kershaw's always in control, but I think you and I always feel a little weird praising a pitcher who doesn't get that many strikeouts just because we know that it's generally not that sustainable of a thing. So even in the one game where maybe the Braves take a bunch of off-balance swings or make bad contact, you can look at it and think, well, we'd really feel better if Clayton Kershaw got

strikeouts though. And he got strikeouts. So this was a, you know, we talked before about how in Clayton Kershaw's first game of this series, it just seemed like everything went wrong and everything went against him. And, you know, it's always Clayton Kershaw's fault was a headline I saw at the ringer. And in game five, Clayton Kershaw one run in seven innings. He was nearly not even allowed to go that deep into the game, but went seven innings, one run, nine strikeouts, great start, got the win because the Dodgers rallied. And Clayton Kershaw

drew not one walk but two two walks he has now drawn six walks all time in the playoffs as a hitter which ranks him second all time among pitchers one behind the illustrious Whitey Ford Brandon Woodruff drew a walk too not quite that's right Homer but it's something yeah and then the Dodgers just uh kind of nailed it down from there. They scored a couple of runs off of Woodruff and that was really all they needed. Ultimately, they tacked on against Soria and that put it away. And Kenley Jansen has looked really good this October, which is a stark contrast to other closers we could mention in this postseason. And that's good because he was obviously a little more mortal in more ways than one, I guess, this season when he had actual health scares.

And his performance was variable, too. And he has really looked good. His velocity has been consistently mid-90s. And he's just come in and shut people down. So no concerns there for the Dodgers, and that was kind of a concern coming into October. Yeah, Jansen has done sort of the opposite of whatever it is that Craig Kimbrell is doing. And Jeffress, yeah. And Jeffress, for sure, but at least Jeffress isn't quite on that level. One other fact,

just because I ran a query while we were saying this. I was curious. So as you mentioned, Brandon Woodruff also drew a walk. Lots of pitcher walks. Six pitcher walks so far in the playoffs. So there were three of them in Game 5 of Brewers-Dodgers. It is just the second time in playoff history that a game has included three pitcher walks. history that a game has included three pitcher walks and the only other time it happened was in 1906 when ed oh no ed rulbach walked ed walsh and jack feaster walked ed walsh and ed walsh walked

orville overall this is great and uh so on october 13th 1906 in a game between the cubs and the white socks there were also three pitcher walks. Only time it's happened since then. So I don't know if that's a fun. I don't know. Where is that on the 1 to 10 fun fact scale? Is that like a 6? Yeah.

I think it's a 6. It's closer to a 10 than a 0. I'll also point out two days before that, Jack Feaster also walked Ed Walsh. So interesting. Jack Feaster and Ed Walsh, just a real, I don't know, respect, I guess, for Ed Walsh's potent stick. our mind back that far, but we can go with the most recent game in the ALCS before we time travel back. So I guess that closes the book on game five in that series. The Dodgers are now just a win away from being back in the World Series. So in the ALCS, this was, I think, the most exciting, entertaining game of the playoffs so far. It was also one of the longest games ever, at least among nine inning games. You tweeted this one. It was the second longest nine inning playoff game ever and the fourth longest nine inning game ever, period, including all regular season games.

And as usual, I mean, it felt long, but it didn't feel long in a bad way for the most part because there was exciting stuff going on and real talented players on display and shaky bullpens, and you never really felt like any lead was secure, and most of the leads were not secure for very long. So this is going to be dominated, I guess, by discussion of how it ended, the very last play, and also how it, well, almost started with Joe West inserting himself into the series for the second time in a much more significant way than earlier in the series when he body blocked an errant throw from Christian Vasquez. I don't know what Joe West's win probability added for the Red Sox in this series is, but he's probably Red Sox series MVP at this point.

I don't know. Jackie Bradley, probably up there. But Joe West can't be far behind. So the fan interference call. More like Joe East. Joe East, coast bias. Good one. Good one.

Good one. Yeah. Leave it in. Leave it in. Okay. So you wrote about the Fed interference call. You stayed up late and toiled to have a take on this and I have not read it yet. So your opinion is going to be new to me. Again, this Jose Altuve hit what looked like it was going to be a two-run homer. Mookie Betts leaped and looked like he might make the catch, but then his glove ran into fans in the stands, and the question was, did his glove hit those fans in the stands or leaning over the fence, which would be fan interference. If it was just in the stands, then that's just an occupational hazard of being a fielder. The fans can do what they want out there.

And Joe West said it was fan interference and not a home run. And then there was a replay review, which confirmed that call or upheld that call. So what is your stance on this call and the review? Here's, okay, so here's the most annoying thing for a little backstory color. You know, there were two games back to back on Wednesday. And after the first game finally ended, I thought, all right, I need to get out of this, this apartment office, I'm going to go for a little walk. We live just a few minutes away from like a walk in the woods by a creek. There's a bunch of squirrels harvesting nuts, and it's therapeutic.

I love to watch squirrels harvesting nuts. Anyway, so after the first game ended, I went for just like a 30-minute walk in the woods, and I thought, that's fine. I'll get back, and I'll still have like four hours of freaking baseball game to watch. So I'll just kind of stretch my legs, breathe some air, and then I'll get back, and nothing too exciting should have happened. And then I got back after my very therapeutic, relaxing walk, and I opened Twitter and I thought, oh, no, I missed the play of the playoffs.

I missed my opportunity to have a take because everyone was saying, I don't know what we're going to do. It looks like the Astros were cost two runs in the American League Championship Series. So I had to scramble to rewind. And then the rest of the game was so gripping I couldn't even really digest until the game was over. Anyway, that's all backstory. And the, I don't know, front story is that I have come around,

I think, the problem with, at the core of this, is that by the letter of the law, there can be no fan interference call if a fielder goes beyond the wall or any sort of boundary. But there can be an interference call if a fielder is still on his side of the boundary. That's basically what we're looking at, where contact took place between Mookie Betts and the fans. Now, I think one of the issues with the rulebook is that even as long as it is and as many

explanatory comments as there are, it still has some gray area. Like, for example, the fence is not two-dimensional. even as long as it is and as many explanatory comments as there are that still has some gray area. Like for example, the fence is not two-dimensional. The fence has a top and the top is sometimes just a few inches wide. Sometimes it can be like a foot or two feet wide. I think in Houston it looks like, I don't know, eight inches, six inches, something like that. Some sort of flat top and in the rule book it doesn't say whether the top of the wall

is technically in play or out of play. That is the area above the top of the wall is technically in play or out of play. That is the area above the top of the wall. I think because if a ball hits the top of the wall and then somehow comes back into play, then it's still in play. I think that the top of the wall and the area above it is to be considered an in-play area. I don't know if that holds up to reason, but I'm going to go with it. So looking at the evidence the problem the they the the call in the field was interference it was upheld not confirmed because they didn't

have conclusive evidence to go really in either direction and the reason for that is because even though there was a camera that was along the fence for anyone watching or for anyone who has watched now maybe the funniest part of this whole sequence is that a security guard leaned directly in front of the camera and obscured the view we could not get any sort of visual on where Mookie Betts was when his glove contacted the fans but looking at even the weird deceptive sort of two-, three-dimensional screenshots and videos that we do have, because there were still three angles of the play that were made available. I think that when you start to link points together, there's a guy in like a white shirt,

or a gray shirt, I don't know, a light shirt, who's in the front row, and he's reaching out with his right hand and his right arm, and he's right there in the mix of things. He's not the guy who closed Mookie Betts' glove, but his hand is basically in the same place. And if you look at that guy's left hand, his left hand is gripping the wall, his upper body seems to be leading at least above the top of the wall, and his right arm is seemingly based on some angles, and you can just read about it in the post, this is impossible to explain on a podcast if you just look at his right arm it does seem to be protruding a little bit forward from his right

shoulder which appears to be uh just about above the top of the wall so if his right shoulder is basically above the top of the wall and if his right arm is more forward than it is back it stands to reason that his right hand is therefore above the field of play which is around where Mookie Betts made contact with the fans so there's no question Mookie Betts was his glove was going to end up beyond the field of play if no fans were there because it was he was robbing a home run right but I think at the instant at the place where contact was made, it is my belief, not 100%, I think I'm like 80-20. It's my belief that Mookie Betts was indeed in the field of play.

I think that if you also just kind of break it down and think of the spirit of the rule, I don't think that baseball wants to encourage fans to interfere with batted balls, even if they're close. I think that if you look at this and you pretend that the fans weren't there, if there's some sort of boundary or buffer between the wall and the fans, Mookie Betts presumably makes the catch. It would have been a tremendous catch,

but keep in mind, he'd already done the hardest part of the play. He got there and he timed his jump perfectly. So I think I have come to terms with it. I hate, I always hate when an important game ends or even an unimportant game ends and you think, well, the umpire or the ref just messed it up and there's no satisfaction there. And I always want to find some sort of sense to know for sure whether the umpire was more right or more wrong. And in this case, I think that the call was more right than wrong. the call was more right than wrong. Not 100% again, but I am most of the way there, and I'm content with believing at the heart of hearts that Joe West and the review people wound up, whether it's by accident or by design, I think they wound up in what's more likely to be the

right place. Okay. Well, I'm pretty convinced just by hearing you say that. I have not watched it in the Zapruder-like depth that you have. I thought just watching it along with everyone else, it seemed to me, it was so hard to say. I mean, I think that the replay not changing the call was correct because there just wasn't anything definitive about the replay. You couldn't really overturn what Joe West had said based on what we were able to see, thanks security guard. So I think that it was okay to leave the call as it stood after the call was made. Whether that initial call was correct, there's just no way to say with complete certainty. I mean, I guess to me it kind of looked like because he was going into the stands inevitably in order to catch the ball, I felt that probably he would have been touched by a fan in the stands at some point before being able to catch the ball anyway, if that makes any sense. Like, he may have been touched in the field of play, and so in that

sense, it should be fan interference, and it should be not a home run. But I don't know, I kind of felt like even if the play had been allowed to continue by the time he had gotten to the point of getting it in his glove he would have been in the stands and all those people were there reaching out and so I don't know that he could have caught it anyway even if the fan had not interfered over the fence like if if the fan really had only touched him, you know, an inch behind the fence instead of over the fence, then I'm not sure he could have caught it anyway, just because there would have been that contact and maybe his glove would have been closed anyway. But I could be reading that wrong.

I don't have any special insight into what happened here, but I'm okay going with your conclusion. But I agree it is unsatisfying because the margin of the game was two runs at the end and doesn't mean that everything else would have played out exactly the same way obviously if that had been a home run and not a fan interference call but if you're an Astros fan you're probably saying we lost by two runs and we've hit a home run that would have been worth two runs. And so that is probably pretty frustrating. And it's kind of a shame that a really exciting game is maybe decided

or at least influenced by that. On the other hand, we will remember this forever, which we probably won't remember just the generic good game. This is like the fan interference, the Joe West game. It will be part of baseball playoff legend. There's a part of the rule. So in the rule book, there are rules and then there are

frequently comments. And I think that the clarifying, seemingly clarifying part of this rule is within the three or four paragraph comment. You always need a four paragraph comment for a one line rule because it turns out a lot of weird things can happen to baseball. So in the comment, it basically says no interference can

happen beyond the fence, but interference can be called when it is over the field of play. Now the actual rule is, it says when there is spectator interference with any thrown or batted ball, the ball shall be dead at the moment of interference and the umpire shall impose such penalties as in his opinion will nullify the act of interference. So looking at that, I wonder, that leaves it up to a judgment call. Now most of these things are judgment calls, but it does give umpires the option of awarding something besides, in this case just a home run or an out. It seems like in theory theory maybe based on that reading joe west or the review replay review crew could have been like well let's put the medal let's

double or something but i wonder i wonder if that is over ruled by the comment because in the comment it suggests that when fans reach into the field of play to interfere, then the batsman is out. So I kind of don't know what the rulebook is trying to say. So I don't know. It's just another lack of clarity in a whole situation that lacks clarity. But I don't care. I'm still going. I'm going to say I said it was 80-20 before.

I'm going to go 70-30. I'm going to go 70-30 that the right decision was made. Yeah, always great when we're trying to understand these inscrutable phrases in an ancient rulebook that sometimes seems to contradict itself. It just kind of goes to show that no matter how many cameras you have and no matter how many comments on the rule you have, you then end up with this sort of situation that is just impossible to resolve. It's like there's just, I mean, I guess you could get even more cameras, cameras everywhere, cameras covering every square inch. But at some point. Well, the Astros would have them, right? Yeah, well, probably. Probably Kyle was watching this from somewhere, and he might have a better

answer than we do. But yeah, I don't know. It's a weird one. And ultimately, I think we'll remember that, and we'll remember how this ended, which was with sort of a similar incredible catch to the one that Bellinger made in Game 4 of the NLCS to extend that game. It was a similar sort of slide and another kind of catch that if the fielder had been right-handed instead of left-handed, things might have gone completely differently. gone completely differently. But as it was, Andrew Benintendi managed to snag what looked off the bat like a fairly likely single from Alex Bregman with the bases loaded against an extremely shaky Kimbrel. I guess the fact that it's so shallow in left field in Houston, I'm sure Benintendi was playing shallow as a result. And so he was able to to get to that but it was still a really nice catch and kimbrel now i think has if i have this right he's faced 28 batters in this postseason

and 17 of them have reached oh my god and still he is not below to save and uh i don't know how he's doing it's like either he's just incredibly adept at pitching to the scoreboard or he's really getting lucky combined with just having buffers when he's coming into this games because he is using every last base that he can not to blow these games. And I don't know. games and I don't know someone asked him like if he could sense what he was missing after the game and he said the plate which is uh accurate his command just is not there seemingly and he is not getting swings and misses on his breaking ball the way he usually does and at this point it's just a heart attack waiting to happen every time he comes in. And this was the first save of more than four outs that he has ever recorded as a closer in regular season or postseason. He's just been a one inning guy. And it really looked like we might get David Price

coming in in a dramatic situation. We didn't get that. But man, that was, I have no rooting interest in this series. and i was just like on the edge of my seat during that whole half inning yeah craig kimbrell has allowed an ops of 1.014 so far in the playoffs as you said no blown saves he allowed a home run to aaron judge in his first game which was also the best game that he's had in uh in his second game which was alds game four he almost allowed that grand slam to Gary Sanchez. At the end of game two in the ALCS, he almost allowed that home run to Alex Bregman. And near the end of ALCS game four, it gets lost because of the Benintendi catch.

But remember that two batters earlier, Brian McCann almost hit a home run that would have ended the game. He hit a fly ball deep to right field. I know that it was a fly ball that was just in front of the track. So he was still probably, like, 10 or 15 feet away. But, like, coming close, guys. Like, Craig Kimball is trying really hard to give up a walk-off home run or something. But it is – when you look at Kimball, he's definitely not getting the swings and misses on his breaking ball. He's not getting the swings at the breaking ball. Therefore, there aren't going to be those swings and misses.

I think Giancarlo Stanton is like the only guy that Kimbrell has made to look like Craig Kimbrell usually makes people look in the playoffs. And you think about how when the playoffs began, there was all this conversation about how the Red Sox bullpen was its one vulnerability and all they have back there is Craig Kimbrell. And they don't even have Craig Kimbrell right now, and it still doesn't matter because they're one game away from going to the World Series. The Benintendi catch, you're right, because that's a play that's only made in Fenway Park or Minute Maid because of how shallow left field is.

I haven't had a chance to read. I think it was Jen McCaffrey who put up immediately some sort of oral history of the catch. I don't know how these writers, I mean, I was, for me, the game ended at 10.14 p.m., which is not that bad. For people anywhere else, it's much worse. So I don't know when someone like Jen McCaffrey

is waking up today on Thursday, but she had an oral history of the catch, and I think Jeff Passan also, I mean, look, a lot of people are going to write about the game ending catch, and Andrew Benintendi got into position according to the card that was in his back pocket and then he says that he actually moved up about a step and a half or a foot and a half before the the first pitch was thrown i believe it was the first pitch that bregman hit into play and had benintendi not just had the idea to move up a foot and a half that's that ball i mean that's at least down for a tying

hit but if he still dives that was a sinking line drive you die for a sinking line drive you miss it the game's over and the astros have have won the game so you will you'll be hard pressed to find a catch with a bigger swing in championship probability added or really just to win probability added i guess yeah really exciting yeah and kimbrel has now allowed a run in four straight games this postseason and he has never done that in the regular season so this is like unprecedented shakiness from kimbrel and it hasn't cost the red socks one bit so that's pretty amazing and remember his eighth inning also began with a single or basically almost a double where he got the out because Mookie Betts made an unbelievable play to throw out Tony

Kemp at second base. Now, the Red Sox outfield is very, very good. We'll add everything, Mookie Betts being a big part of that. But bottom of the eighth, first pitch of the inning, Craig Kimball comes in. Tony Kemp rips a line drive to right field. And Tony Kemp is fast. And it required a perfect throw by Mookie Betts to get him out at second base. He was out. I calculated the break-even rate of Tony Kemp trying to advance on that play from first to second,

because at that point, the Astros were down by three runs. You think being on base is more important than moving up a base. The break-even rate I found, and this is a lot like had Tony Kemp just tried to steal second base if he stayed on first, the break-even rate wound up being 82%. So if Tony Kemp was about 82% sure that he could make it safely from first to second, it was worth the attempt. Now, Mookie Betts did everything perfectly.

He fielded the ball perfectly. He spun perfectly. He threw the ball perfectly. It arrived perfectly. Tony Kemp was thrown out by like a fraction of an inch at second base so it's i don't think it was bad base running necessarily i think it was a brilliant play by bets but craig kimbrell allowed a single then he hit a batter then he allowed a double and that's how his outing began in the eighth inning and he'd never even gotten six outs before so uh i i i just i don't know what it must

feel like to watch this with a rooting interest but when you don't have faith in your closer i don't know if there's a more uncomfortable feeling in playoff baseball i again i wouldn't know because i don't remember what playoff baseball is like with a rooting interest but yeah it seems like it's the worst yeah i was sort of surprised that they didn't just in to see if he could get through at least part of the eighth because he only got one out the last out of the seventh and he got a strike out and looked fine and because kimbrough has never done this before i i kind of thought that maybe they wouldn't push him quite this hard but it's it's hard to criticize a manager for going to his closer. I mean, that's one of the things that we've talked about for previous Octobers

is just that you want to put your best pitchers on the mound and push them a little harder than you do during the regular season. It's just that Kimbrell has no history at all of doing that. It's not like he's Mariano Rivera or Andrew Miller or someone who gets the one-inning save sometimes in the regular season but can go two or three innings and has a history of doing that. Kimbrell just did not at all and also has looked as bad as he possibly could without blowing a save this October. But hey, it worked. So congratulations, Alex Cora. Yeah, it was weird

to me. It was weird to me that Barnes lasted so little. He only got Tyler White out with, by the way, two spectacular curveballs. But I guess maybe they were thinking that because Barnes had also thrown 16 pitches in Game 3, they didn't want to push him further, and Kimbrell hadn't pitched in a few days. Now, if you look at the season numbers, there was very little difference between Matt Barnes and Craig Kimbrell. They both got similar strikeouts, similar walks. They're similar kinds of pitchers in a way, high heat and a breaking ball. They just have different breaking balls. So I don't know why pushing Kimbrell longer than he's ever gone was better than trying to send Barnes back out there to maybe get a second or third batter.

But I guess if you are Alex Cora, you probably don't, maybe you don't want to push Barnes for a full inning in the eighth. And then you also don't want to bring in Craig Kimbrell in the middle of an inning or something. Relievers don't like that very much. But Kimbrell has a history of four out saves. So I don't know. It seems like it's an easy point to argue in hindsight. And had Kimbrel blown the game, I think that would be one of the first things that we'd be talking about is why did he remove

Matt Barnes so quickly? But whatever, here we are. The hero is Andrew Benintendi and I guess Joe West. Yeah. And by the way, Josh James, I know he took the loss in this game, but man, he looked really good before things went wrong. He i mean he is gonna be just a star it looks like he was what hitting 102 and just nasty and had five strikeouts a full season of josh james is just gonna make the astros even better next year but that's looking forward so anyway it was a great game there was controversy and a call that will be debated forever. There was great defense. There were some of the very best players in baseball and the best teams in baseball doing the things that they do.

And Jose Altuve hobbling around and still almost hitting two homers. I mean, I don't know. It was a great game, even though it lasted forever. homers i mean i don't know it was a great game even though it lasted forever so i want to back up just a bit if you are still awake and uh just cover briefly a couple things that we had missed earlier in the week so first we had the latest spy gate controversy which this one was just funny, frankly, because it's a guy named Kyle in an ill-fitting suit who's like an off-the-books employee of the Astros or Jim Crane who's just standing on the field aiming a camera at the Red Sox supposedly to make sure that they are not stealing signs, which is like the classic Chris Correa defense.

I was only doing it to make sure that the other team wasn't doing it. So this guy was doing the same thing in the Indian series, and the Red Sox and the league were tipped off about it. Anyway, MLB released a statement that was just like, nothing to see here, everyone move along. This was nothing. We've talked to everyone, and Kyle's not coming back anymore, so don't worry about it. So I have no idea what was happening here. I don't know whether Kyle really was just monitoring the other team or whether taking now to try to counteract the suspected sign stealing.

And the signs that they're using in games now are just, it's getting extreme. I mean, a single pitch call, it used to be you put one finger down or two fingers down or whatever. And now it's this full like third base coach style sequence just to call a pitch, which I guess is another thing making the games even longer but and you as you noted it's not everyone doing it like some teams just have no password protection on their phones at all essentially and other people have like fingerprint scanners and codes that they have to type in and and facial scanners and everything it's like some teams are it seems like the teams that are

facing the Astros and maybe the teams that are facing the Dodgers are the ones who are really taking extra security steps here. I guess that those are the teams that are kind of the most suspected of doing something nefarious. Yeah, it's interesting that just based on like the way that catchers are calling pitches, we see the Astros who are doing elaborate signals all the time, even with nobody on base. We see the Astros opponents doing the same thing. The Rockies catchers seem to be using more elaborate signs in all of their important games that they played, including the game 163 tiebreaker.

The Dodgers, to my observation, have not. They've just been going with the basic signals, which is interesting. It is at least interesting that not everybody is participating in this. So now this is, there's a hidden pace of play component here, because when you have these complicated signals, not only does it take a fraction of a second longer to pick up what the pitch is, but you are more likely to have the pitcher not get it. He'll stop and then they'll have to do the signs over again. When the pitcher is standing out there looking at the signs, if he holds the ball too long,

the batter will back out because you can only focus for so much time in a row before you just kind of need to take a breath and step back in. So you'll have more mound meetings as a consequence of this. You'll have more cross-ups as a consequence of this. So it does seem like there is real momentum more momentum than ever toward outfitting catchers and pitchers and maybe the dugout with some sort of earpiece or electronic wristband or something to just convey the signal to the pitcher it feels like if i had to guess right now it feels like we're maybe two years away from the catcher being able to communicate directly with a pitcher via

electronics and then we're not going to have these signs anymore. There are two things that confuse me. One, even if you take this Kyle McLaughlin story, Kyle McLaughlin, McLaughlin, I don't know how it's pronounced. Kyle, come out of hiding on social media and tell us. Even if you buy the story, which is ridiculous, that he's just making sure that the other people aren't cheating, why is he holding a camera up instead of just using his goddamn eyes and secondly even in the this occasion of sign stealing i know that the red socks were like caught with the whole apple watch

sign stealing thing here's what i don't understand and i will never i will never understand this you can put me on a freaking baseball team and I'll never understand this. The signs are given seconds before the batter sees the pitch. How do you interpret the sign and relay that signal to someone who can tell the batter within like a second and a half and also have it not distract the batter? I just don't. If it's the runner on second, if there's a runner on second who's sending a signal to the batter, first of all, it's the runner on second, if there's a runner on second who's sending a signal to the batter, first of all, there is a runner on second a small minority of the time. If it's the third base coach or like a first base coach who's sending the signal to the batter, then the batter is looking down the line at the base coach instead of at the pitcher,

who by the time the word is coming out is already like almost throwing the baseball. So it just strains credulity to me that you could even steal a sign and get it happens so fast yeah there's no time between when the sign is given and when the pitch is coming unless you have a pitcher who like really holds the ball a really long time but it just seemed you know how there's been research that when someone's batting with a runner base and the runner tries to steal, it makes it harder to hit because it's presumably distracting? This seems like it would be distracting. It seems like there is so much possible effort, and there's definitely so much paranoia here over something that I just can't imagine. I could be completely wrong here.

I'm not with the team. I'm not in the game. But I can't imagine it is actually as big a deal as this all seems like. No, I mean, the only reason that I think it could be is that players seem so convinced that it is right. And historically, I mean, going back decades, centuries, this has been part of the game that players are always either trying to do this or on the alert for the other team doing it or both. I mean, it seems like if there weren't some utility to it, they wouldn't all be so obsessed with this. I don't know whether it's like a macho thing where it's like, oh, you're trying to hide your signs. Well, I can figure out your signs or you're not allowed to know our signs. This is a

secret club or what. I don't know if it's that or what, but you would think that if there weren't some real benefit to doing this, people would not be spending so much time and effort to try to do this and to try to prevent the other team from doing it. It seems very silly, but I know what you mean. I was reading, what was it, in Jeff Passan's report about this, like banging on garbage cans or like things in the dugout to try to signal what pitch is coming. I mean, it sounds so elaborate and less valuable than people actually think it is. But what do we know? We should have someone on to talk about sign stealing at some point, except that it's this like secret Omerta thing where

no one will actually talk about how you do it. So anyway, it's fascinating. Chase Huntley is almost retired. Yeah, maybe, maybe he'll come on. So that was one little controversy that flared up and then died down, but has probably played into people's sense of the Astros kind of exploiting every edge and having no scruples about how they win at baseball games. So another thing in that vein was the Manny Machado heel turn, which not really a heel turn because this is someone who has thrown a bat at another player in the past. This is not totally new behavior for him, and he's been involved in all sorts of fights and benches, clearing brawls and milling abouts before, but he was fined by Major League Baseball for seemingly, I don't think he really even made any attempts to hide what he was trying

to do here. He ran to first base, and Jesus Aguilar was just kind of, you know, he had more of his foot on the base than usual, and Machado just ran right through it and seemed to try to trip him or worse. And this just seemed excessive, and I think it was appropriate that he was fined for that. And this came right after Machado just very matter-of-factly told Ken Rosenthal about how he doesn't hustle and he's not Johnny Hustle and

he's not the guy who runs hard all the time, which came up because there was a play in this series, right in what, game two or something. It's hard to keep them all straight at this point where he didn't beat out a ball that was deep in the shortstop hole. So I don't know. I think the whole hustling thing is generally kind of overblown. I think we're talking about a range of a few hits gained or lost in a full season from always running hard or sometimes not running hard. And if you preserve your health because you're lowering your risk of pulling a muscle or stepping on the bag the wrong way, like Adam Eaton or something,

maybe it's the discretion is the better part of valor sort of situation. But obviously in the playoffs, when these things really do matter, you want to be hustling. And he was hustling when he then scored that winning run. So anyway, Machado has not had a great postseason PR-wise, aside from the fact that he's played pretty well, if he doesn't hustle now, does that mean he won't hustle in the sixth year of a long-term contract when he's starting to age and his finances are already secured? Will he not work as hard?

So it's probably something that are giving people pause, but obviously he's going to make hundreds of millions of dollars regardless. There is, not to take this back three minutes, there is one last thing I did want to point out just about sign-stealing paranoia, because there's something that happens before our eyes all the time. And remember that every time there's a mound meeting, the pitcher will cover his face. All these people will cover their faces with their gloves when they're having a conversation. And I don't think that there's a soul that's trying to lip read at this point. Like if you just went out there and had a conversation without your gloves and you just like looked at people face to face and talked without covering your mouth, you'd be fine. But I think there's so little cost to acting paranoid.

And especially now, there's so much reason to believe that everybody is trying to cheat all the time, especially a team like the Astros that, quote, uses cameras or something. Anyway, we can just move on from there. I think everyone in baseball is paranoid because there are no controls. There has to be a solution. There has to be discipline for teams to electronically surveil people, kick them all out, send them to prison. I don't care. I'm not one of them. So with Manny Machado, it was a heel turn was a good expression

because he literally turned Jesus Ocular's heel as he was running the first. Craig Edwards wrote about this at Fangraphs. He got to it before I did. I had gone back and I found like five other plays from just this series and like August where Manny Machado was trying to beat out a ground ball to first base where Jesus Aguilar was standing. And I found like five plays where he didn't step on his foot or like collide with his leg. Aguilar basically did the same thing almost every time. He kind of left his foot there.

A lot of first basemen will get the out and then pull their foot off the bag. That just kind of comes naturally to a lot of first basemen. When you see Travis Shaw play first base for the Brewers, you'll see him do that. But Aguilar just has this thing where he seems to leave his foot there longer than usual. And Machado definitely didn't collide with him. It hasn't come up before so it's it's one of those things where it was I think it was a heat of the moment activity I think Machado was frustrated he probably maybe he thought he should have hit the ball harder he was the 10th

inning at this point maybe he was trying to hit a walk-off home run or maybe he just thought he missed an opportunity and I think it was just sort of a heat of the moment thing where maybe if you're just in a mood and you happen to be walking by something that could make a loud noise you maybe just want to like slap it or punch it just be like ah i'm mad but uh and you know it's not like he didn't spike haste's aguilar's leg he didn't like try to tear his achilles or anything he dragged his foot to make contact and then he was like what what i didn't do anything and aguilaruilar is like, you obviously did something. What is funny to me, it's like, look, it's a bonehead maneuver. Machado deserves to be funny. He deserves, like, it's immature.

It's almost like Alex Rodriguez slapping the ball out of a glove. But within a few innings, apparently, Jesus Aguilar and Manny Machado have known each other for a while. And within, like, a few innings, the next time Machado was on base, him and Aguilar just talked it out and they like did a little partial hug. And so everything was fine, water under the bridge. But then the – I mean Christian Yelich's quote was, F that mother effer, except he didn't just use the letters. Like the Brewers – Dirty play by a dirty player.

Yeah. Yeah. Or what was it? Craig Cancel saying, oh, I don't think he's playing that hard or something like that. Just like a lot of shade coming from the Brewer side, even though Jesus Aguilar stopped caring almost immediately after it happened. So it does. It feels a little funny that the Brewers became so enraged on Aguilar's behalf. And Aguilar was like, that's fine. He made a mistake. We're over it. But I mean, I guess this is just one of those things. It's not about, as soon as it happens, it's not about the individual player anymore.

It's about the whole team being offended. And the Brewers aren't wrong. Machado has made an impression. But, you know, it's one of those situations where you think, all right, Machado is a tool. But Aguilar forgave him. Machado apparently apologized to him. Forgive and forget. Move on.

There's a series to play. And speaking of just long games that were exciting and had exciting endings, I mean, that one went five hours and 15 minutes in 13 innings. And we got a question from listener Mike who said, with a 3-2 count, Grandal on deck, and Urias after that with no pinch hitters or indeed any other pitchers in the bullpen, why didn't Craig Council walk Bellinger or at the very least make sure he didn't have a good pitch to hit there this is in

the bottom of the 13th when Bellinger hit the walk-off single Mike continues his run didn't matter you can debate the propriety of walking Grundahl after that I'm on team pitch to Urias but how is it defensible in any way to throw Bellinger a strike there? So again, this was with Bellinger up and a runner on second who had advanced what after the first pitch of the plate appearance was a wild pitch or a pass ball. So you had, I think, a one-out count and runner on second and Grendel up next with Urias after him. And Mike is saying, and many people were saying, why not put Bellinger on first base? His run doesn't matter. This way you set up the force and maybe you face a worse batter, although not dramatically worse.

But then, I mean, as mentioned at that point, even if your decision is between Bellinger and Grandal, I mean, Grandal is a pretty good hitter to playoffs aside. He's better than this. And, you know, Cody Bellinger has been terrible in the playoffs. But even at that point, then why not just also walk Grandal and just face the pitcher? Why not just have an escape? Like, now I know we're talking about the playoffs where three pitchers were just walked in game five, Woodruff and Clayton Kershaw. But, you know, Junior Guerra is a strike thrower.

He threw 33 of his 51 pitches for a strike. He didn't walk a batter in his three and two-thirds innings against the Dodgers. Do you, I mean, what's Urias' history of hitting? I don't know why I said that. As if I don't know the answer, I'll come up with the answer. Well, his history is that he's four for 29. Early last year, right? So, I mean, I don't know. He just hasn't had a whole lot of playing time at all lately. I mean, statistically, there's an argument for doing that. I have a hard time faulting the manager for not opting to load the bases in a situation like that,

especially with all the wild pitches and pass balls we've seen this postseason. You get one in that situation, and if the bases are loaded, the game is over. You have a pitcher who's been in there for a while. You're putting a lot of pressure on him to throw strikes. I mean, I don't know. It's debatable. I think that, obviously, Urias is not a good hitter and you'd rather face him in that situation. But once you weld the bases, there's just so little margin for error. And I think probably the reason he didn't do it, you don't often see an intentional walk issued that does not give you the platoon advantage, and it wouldn't have

in that case because Yasmani Grandal is a switch hitter, and he would have been batting from the left side too. And the difference between Grandal and Bellinger as hitters is not dramatic. I guess Bellinger is probably a better contact hitter than Grandal or a better average hitter. And that is all that matters really in that specific situation. So there's an argument for walking one or both of them. And probably I guess I would have walked Bellinger, but it's a tough call just given how hard it can be to throw strikes even with a pitcher at the plate. Yeah, I get it. And I don't like walking the bases loaded either no matter who's up.

But I just think like what are the probabilities here? There was a wild pitch thrown to Bellinger that moved Manny Machado from first to second. And at that point, there's an open base. And so what has the greater odds of happening? your what has the greater odds of happening bellendor or grandal getting a hit that drives matrata home or urius either getting a hit or gareth throwing a wild pitch or a pass ball and i think the the wild pitch pass ball odds are still so low the difference between bellendor and grandal is and and urius at the plate is enormous because urius is bad and bellendor and grandal are good yeah so i hadn't actually considered it much of the time because the game took 10 and a half hours and so by that point i was just like

whatever happens happens i'm not thinking strategically anymore and for all i know maybe neither is this great cancel at that point he's thinking what are we going to do in game five but i do in hindsight i it's now i'm biased by the way that the game worked out i i own that but it does seem like in hindsight that situation called for the double intentional walk. And maybe it seems like it's the coward's way out to face the pitcher, but it's National League Baseball. That's what you do. You have to deal with it. Yeah, yeah.

I don't disagree. So is there anything else that—man, we've covered a lot of ground here. And I guess we pretty much totally skipped over one Red Sox-Astros game, but that's okay. It wasn't that exciting. Nathan Ivaldi was really good, as we thought he might be, and that was kind of that. But Osuna gave up some runs.

No one was sorry to see that happen. So anything else from these games that we haven't talked about, or not even the games themselves, but just all the stuff surrounding the games. There has been a lot to think about and mull over this week. I have come to the conclusion that when you're a team and you make the playoffs, I don't think that it feels like you made the playoffs until you're in the League Championship Series. Now, I think about this from like, you know, do you remember that the A's were in this year's playoffs? They were. They existed. You saw them. They played in your hometown.

The A's were there, and that was the reward for having such a successful season. But like, did they really make the playoffs? And then you look at the Indians. It's like the Indians made it past the wildcard game. They got to play three games against the astros but so what yeah no one that was that was barely in appearance and now maybe it's just because these particular league championships years have been so much fun but now it feels like it's playoffs now it feels like the season won't be over in a day or two although i guess at this point the season could be over in a day or two for both for two of these teams but it feels like the real goal once you make the lcs i think then you're like all right no matter what happens here we had a good season we played a lot and we we put it all

in the line and then whatever happens happens i think if you lose the wildcard game or you lose in in the lds then you're just like that there's no satisfying way to be done in like a game or four games or three games or whatever it just ends so quickly and there's attention to split in so many directions because there are four lds series like you you know you remember when the braves and dodgers played a really fun game three it was maybe the best game of of the lds round or it's certainly one of the top two or three it feels like forever ago doesn't matter anymore who cares that the braves made the playoffs? I'm sorry, Braves fans, but it's just so long ago, and it was just so irrelevant now. This is the good stuff. Yeah. And I'll say this, the last thing, because I'm writing about this, but playoff baseball

is great because of the stakes and the excitement and the intensity. But without that, playoff baseball would be horrendous. Playoff baseball would be unwatchable if it were in the regular season. If this were somehow ported to May or something, we would just forswear this sport forever. This is, I mean, it's the length of the games. It's the pace of the games. It's the style of the games, like low style of the games like low offense high strikeout three true outcomes it's so much about every trend basically that makes fans fear for the future of

baseball is just amplified in the playoffs like every thing that we talk about man mlb has to step in and do something here because this is just getting out of control. In the playoffs, it's like dialed up a few notches. I mean, the average fastball velocity so far is 94.8 in these playoffs. And that is amazing. And everyone's throwing more breaking balls. There are a lot of reasons for that. It's like, A, you have better pitchers in the playoffs and better pitchers tend to throw harder. B, you have everyone bullpenning. And so relievers come in and relievers throw harder than starters. And when starters know they don't need to go deep into games, then they can throw harder. And everyone just throws harder relative to their

own regular season performance because it's the playoffs and it matters and you're not going to take any pitches off. So all of that contributes to more strikeouts, less scoring. That's something fans generally don't like. And yet the games take forever because there are so many more pitching changes. There are many more replay reviews than there are in the regular season.

Like every little thing that people generally dislike about baseball just gets magnified at this time of year, which is probably not great because like for those of us who are already invested and hooked, I mean, we're going to watch whether the game is three hours or five hours. Like we're in pretty much. And because every moment matters so much, we might not even notice all the time that a game is four hours long. But this is the time of year when baseball probably reaches its largest national audience. I mean, it's a regional

sport for most of the year, and it does really well ratings wise in local markets. But this is the time of year when at least some people tune in to watch baseball for like the only time of the year and they think that the sport is like an average game that is like creeping up toward four hours and no one makes contact and there's a new pitcher every inning and it's just for that like if you don't know the storylines it's a testament to the fact that the storylines are really what matter in the sport more so than just the x's and o's stuff but if you don't already know the storylines like we do then you must think how does anyone watch this sport yeah i i agree with you a hundred percent i it always feels i always feel a little i don't know jaded to talk about how long games last and like even even tweeting about yesterday's uhros-Red Sox game taking so long,

I was just kind of bracing myself with the people saying like, oh, I didn't think it was long enough. It's like, look, the game was fun. It was an exciting game. I get it. The longest playoff game of all time, the longest nine-inning playoff game of all time, was game five of the Cubs Nationals Division Series last year, which was completely and utterly insane.

It was a fun, engaging baseball baseball game but the fact of the matter is that the nine innings in the playoffs now we're averaging about three hours and 45 minutes which is like 45 minutes longer than already regular season games that drag now a big part of that is that the commercial breaks are longer by almost a minute every single time there's not a whole lot that you can do about that short of just charge more for the regular commercials and have fewer commercials. Just charge more money. It's fine.

But it does. This is... It's also the between pitches pace, which I think I was just looking at the numbers, I think is the longest we've ever seen in the playoffs. And playoffs are always longer than the regular season. There are more mound visits, even aside from the pitching changes i mean it makes sense you you're gonna take as much time as as you can because every moment matters but for people watching at home it's it's not ideal

it the games are too long it's fun but there And, you know, I'm not even conditioned to it because when I sit down and watch a playoff game now, I look at the clock and I think, alright, about three hours from now I'll be able to go do something else. No, it's not true. It just doesn't work like that. You're lucky if you get away in three and a half hours, and when you are a casual fan who's not invested in the game, it is asking

a lot for you to dedicate your attention to the game for the duration, and maybe this is where rob manfred's bigger problem is and now this is where i think that just having electronic signals could be a real game changer i mean literally it would be a game changer but it's something that you know they figure they test in the afl and the low minors first and then maybe a year later they put it in the majors just like with the pitch clock but if you remove the whole sign giving aspect and all the paranoia and you remove so many of of the mound meetings then pace could improve dramatically like you could cut in whole seconds off of the

time between pitches we know that pitchers can work faster we know that hitters can work faster now of course in the playoffs they're going to be wanting to take longer breaks take more deep breaths everything's more important you just everything is a stressful moment in the playoffs so you expect that people need breathers a little more but i think that it could make a huge difference and it could make an even bigger difference than baseball might expect and so if they could just implement it next year just start next year but not in the majors i'm sure they will have to test it first but if you implement it you can see game lengths cut by an awful lot especially in the playoffs when everyone is just concerned about everybody else and maybe

by by having catchers and pitchers worry less about the signs then they can just focus more about execution and the strategy and and knowing what the batters like to hit or what the batters don't like to hit. And you can just the whole I know that signs are just a traditional part of baseball, but I don't think that they add anything to the viewer experience relative to what could be added if we just got rid of them entirely. It seems like it is not even controversial at this point. It's the technology is coming. And then at some point, the Astros are going to hack into that technology. We're going to have a whole other problem, but we're not there yet. Right. Yeah. And people get frustrated when Rob Manfred comes out and

says something publicly about how the game is too long. They think it's like bad PR for the league, which I get. If the commissioner just keeps saying that baseball has problems, that's maybe not the best message to present, but I don't want him to be thinking everything's perfect and wonderful because one of the purposes that he serves ostensibly is to monitor the game and make sure that it's in good shape and that it's doing everything it can to increase its audience. And, you know, maybe his main purpose is making sure that the owners in good shape and that it's doing everything it can to increase its audience. And,

you know, maybe his main purpose is making sure that the owners keep making money. He kind of works for them, but ultimately it should help the owners make more money. Not that we care about that. If the game is a more compelling product and more people want to pay attention to it. So Rob Manfred should be looking at this. I mean, he doesn't have to say it out loud, I guess, unless he wants to put pressure on the players to agree to change things. But he very much should be monitoring all of these trends and figuring out what can be done to counteract them, because clearly they are not just going to fix themselves. I mean, these are going back decades here. These things are not just going to magically reverse themselves. Baseball will actually have to step in and do something, which it has not done in like 30 years at this point, even though other sports leagues are constantly tinkering with rules from season to season. always this huge production. Maybe that's partly because the players' union in baseball is so strong, which is a good thing,

but makes it harder for the league to just unilaterally decide to implement changes. But something's got to give at some point. It's been fun, but it's really getting out of hand. Game four of the NLCS between the Brewers and the Dodgers was tied at one after nine innings, and it had taken by that point almost four hours. Tied at one, and there had been a lot of pitching changes, but all but two of them to that point had been between innings, so that doesn't take any extra time. The Dodgers only made two pitching substitutions in the seventh inning, and there's a little bit of a delay there, but that's it. There's a little bit of a delay there, but that's it.

I don't know how that game got so long. The Brewers and Dodgers games haven't been quite so long otherwise, but you can't expect that people are going to want a 1-1 game to last almost four hours. That's just too much. I don't think it makes me a bad baseball fan, if that makes any sense. I don't think it makes me a bad baseball fan to point it out. It is a problem, and if you don't see it as a problem, probably you're a Brewers or Dodgers fan, which is totally fine. Those games couldn't, you want to be watching those games forever, because as long as the playoff game is on featuring your team, your team hasn't been

eliminated yet. Your team is still alive in the playoffs, which is kind of the whole point. But I can't speak to basketball, I guess, and I can only speak a little bit to football, but baseball is the sport that changes the most when it gets to the playoffs. I mean, you look at football, every regular season game is so important anyway because there's only like four of them. So every regular season game is managed in a similar way as in the playoffs, and everybody always talks about how there's no better viewing experience than playoff hockey, and the game doesn't change,

except that overtime is different in the playoffs. But everything moves at the same pace. You see basically the same players. Strategy is more or less the same, just the talent is higher. Baseball does become a different sport. Now, I don't feel, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing

that the strategies are different in playoff baseball. I think that it is fun and interesting to see teams selectively using their best players, but the fact that it does slow down so much is a problem. It is a problem for baseball, and I think Rob Manfred is correct if he were to point it out, because baseball does have a pacing problem, especially when the stakes are at their highest, which happens to be when the most people are watching. So I would feel weird if baseball had a commissioner that didn't recognize this

because if the commissioner is just like, everything is great, love our sport. I mean, that's great. Then you have a cheerleader, but that's not a commissioner who's going to get anything done. All right. Yeah, we're up to 8.9 pitching changes per game on average now, so that's not counting the two starters. So in

terms of pitchers used, we're basically at like 11 pitchers per game for both teams combined. And in past postseasons, in recent postseasons, it's been right around seven pitching changes per game. So we've leaped like two pitching changes per game on average in one postseason because of all the bullpenning, which, you know, I just I don't know how much further things can go in that direction. But it's a pretty dramatic change even just from last year. So I think that we have talked enough because we have to talk again soon for our Patreon stream. So only for four and a half hours. We will end there. Yeah. to talk again soon for our Patreon stream. Only for four and a half hours. We will end there. Yeah, and I guess by the time we podcast again,

it will be time to talk about the World Series. So that's exciting. All right, I'm recording this shortly after Jeff and I wrapped up our Patreon supporter live stream during ALCS Game 5. I considered seeing if Jeff would want to talk for a few more minutes just to add an addendum to this episode, but I figured five hours of talking to me about baseball on his birthday was probably enough to ask. It was a good game. It was gratifying to see David Price pitch well, and he really did pitch well. He got enough run support to win, but he held the Astros scoreless despite their propensity to punish left-handed pitchers, missed a lot of bats, threw a lot of change-ups, which worked really well for him. Maybe the Astros just missed having Kyle around to tell them that change-ups were coming.

I don't know what it was, but he was great. There are really just no quibbles you can have with his performance. I have no rooting interest in this series, but it's still just nice to see a guy do well who has been labeled with this choker reputation, which I just find it hard to believe that any major league player, particularly one as accomplished as David Price, actually deserves, especially when you can point to so many instances when he has been clutch and he has pitched well at important moments, and this is prime among them. So I hope this helps change his reputation, although really it would just take one bad World Series

start to screw it all up again. Then again, another good World Series start or two, that might really change things. We were talking about Craig Kimbrell coming on for the ninth. I was not surprised to see him in that situation. It was a save situation, and even though he had pitched two innings the day before and had thrown 35 pitches, it just felt like the thing you do. The closer's the closer because he's the closer. So of course you bring in your closer to clinch the pennant, but Kimbrel actually looked good too. So a lot to feel good about if you are a Red Sox fan. We'll see what shape Chris Sale is in when the World Series rolls around, but because they wrap this up in five,

they have some time to get their affairs in order. And I think both Jeff and I were surprised that the series not only went five, but that it played out the way it did. It's funny because you're never really shocked by anything that happens in a playoff series, whether it's best of five or best of seven. We're just so aware that in any given series, the better team can lose. And in this case, the separation between the Red Sox and the Astros wasn't so great that this was at all inconceivable.

But they looked so good during the LDS and so good in Game 1, and were so good all season long and just really didn't have any obvious weaknesses, that I'm sort of surprised in spite of myself. At least that this series didn't go longer than it did. And that Joe West call goes the other way, or Benintendi's playing back a foot and a half instead of up a foot and a half, and that Bregman line drive falls. Who knows how the rest of the series plays out. For our sake, I'm sort of

sorry that it didn't go seven one way or another, just so we could see the two best teams in baseball keep squaring off a little longer. But we still have Dodgers-Brewers and another exciting series to come. One other thing I wanted to mention, we had wondered what Williams-Estatio was up to on the show the other day. Well, we should have known he's up to what he's usually up to. He's playing baseball in the Venezuelan Winter League. Thanks to Octavio Hernandez for filling us in. Looks like Astadillo is catching for the Cree base, and through 19 at bats, he has yet to strike out. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. And the following five listeners have recently signed up. John Leary, Ryan Brown, Charles Hart, Robin Berenson, and Rob Borkowski. Thanks to all of you. You can also join our Facebook group at facebook.com

slash group slash effectivelywild. And you can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and elsewhere, including Spotify these days. Please keep your questions and comments for me and Jeff coming via email at podcastfangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system. We've got some good questions stockpiled. We're just too busy with playoffs to get to them this week, but we will get to them soon. Dylan Higgins was off today, so thanks to myself for editing assistance. Have a wonderful weekend, and we will be back early next week to preview the World Series. Persian gold Don't get a fight And man just can't light it on There's a high High

Some gold There's a high High Some gold