Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1430: To Win or Not to Win

Episode Date: September 13, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Kyle Lewis’s debut, Rich Hill’s brief return, Daniel Palka’s second hit of the season, the Braves and Dallas Keuchel, and the Diamondbacks’ Brewers-style rebuild, then (18:13) talk to Will Leitch about what (if anything) Dave Dombrowski’s firing says about MLB teams’ competitive priorities, how the Cardinals (and Jack […]

You never saw that bridge burning. You never saw that tide turning. Now you've become the biggest cliche. Your hopes go up, your guard comes down. You think you're number one in town. Will anyone remember you at all? Attention here, deception there, You're only sticking up the air,

Till nobody behind you takes your call. Hello and welcome to episode 1430 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast brought to you by Fangraphs and our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs, and I am joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? Doing all right. How are you? I'm doing all right. You told me you were going to a Mariners-Reds game on Thursday, and you didn't sound super

psyched about that matchup, but I said, maybe Kyle Lewis will hit a homer, and Kyle Lewis hit a homer. Yeah. That must have been fun. Yeah, that part was fun. It was Justin Dunn's Major League debut, which was less fun. But Major League debuts are always at least a little fun because it's an exciting thing. Perhaps too exciting in this case. Yeah, he did seem a bit nervous um he had some trouble

locating but yeah it was you know uh don donnie walton got his first major league hit so you know the mariners are not good but they should be better in a couple years and some of the guys who might help with that we're doing some stuff stuff, so that's always exciting. That can be fun at the tail end of a terrible team's terrible season. Maybe things can sort of look up and you get a glimpse of some guys who might be

around when the team is good again. If you get to be at a big league debut, you always get to say, I saw that guy's big league debut, so that's always fun. So yeah, there's a silver lining there. Yeah, well, and you say, I saw that guy's big league debut, so that's always fun. So, yeah, there's a silver lining there. Yeah, well, and, you know, I think Kyle Lewis has a lot to do to demonstrate that he's going to stick in the majors. He's probably at best a fourth outfielder, but considering that his knee is probably filled with hamburger meat, and it seems like it was being held together by paste him being

there at all is really cool and to see him uh hit home runs and and get a couple other hits besides is uh it's neat so yeah done lasted two outs which was also how long rich hill lasted in his very brief comeback what's up with that now he has MCL strain, so I'm guessing he's probably going to be done for the year. It seems bad. I want more Rich Hill. Yeah. He comes back just long enough to remind us that we missed him, and then he disappears again. Yeah.

So it's advanced age and fragility, and I don't know whether we'll ever see an extended run of Rich Hill again. But I hope we do, because I love Rich Hill. And as long as he wants to keep trying to extend this thing, I want him to keep doing that and want him to be around baseball. So I hope one of these comeback attempts takes. Yeah. Yeah. That would be nice to see. Also, Daniel Palka got a hit.

Yes. I heard about that. I don't think that this. Yes, I heard about that. I don't think that this, well, I'll just ask you, does this qualify as sufficiently hitterish for you to feel better? I don't think it does. Was it a single? Yes. Was it a ground ball? Yes. Was it a ball that was fielded by the second baseman? Yes.

Was it a ball that he barely beat the throw on? Yes. But it was a single, and his average is up to healthy 35 right now. Almost double what it was the last time we talked, so things are looking up. Well, I guess the good news for Daniel Polka is that he gets to face Mariners pitching for a series, so maybe things will be on the up and up for him who's to say yeah 35 he got like a standing ovation from his teammates when he got that single which probably like i'm sure he's happy to get the support but also like if you're getting your

teammates on the top step applauding because you got an infield single essentially. I guess it technically got to the outfield, but it's not a huge accomplishment. You kind of want that to be a routine thing that you don't necessarily need to get applause for. But on the other hand, maybe we should applaud every hit. Every hit is an achievement in the major leagues. Pretty tough to get hits. So maybe we're just not celebrating all of the singles enough yeah i mean uh i've said before i it feels impossible that anyone ever gets a hit it also feels impossible that any pitcher ever gets a strikeout so i don't quite know how i

score those things in my head but um baseball feels impossible and then it isn't so that's kind of cool uh but yeah you you do want in moments like that i would rather if it were me to not have people saying hey it's kind of like uh it's kind of like how when i write a thing people like you wrote a thing i'm like yeah look i know okay i know thank you and it's not it's nice it's a nice thing and i should i should be like hey thanks but my inside reaction is like, can you not freaking just... Yeah, right. So we are going to talk for most of this episode to the very valuable Will Leach, who joins us to talk about Dave Dombrowski and about what Dave Dombrowski's firing says about how teams are operating these days. Talked about that a bit earlier this week,

but really get into it a bit more here. He wrote about that for New York Magazine this week. And we also talk about the Cardinals because Will's a Cardinals guy. And I realized that we just have sort of snubbed the Cardinals this year for reasons that we will get into in the interview, but they are deserving of some conversation.

And so we give them what they deserve. And I realized it had been quite a while since we had had a guest on the podcast, close to a month, I think, which is unusual, not bad. I think it reflects the fact that we like talking to each other. We're self-sufficient here at Effectively Wild, but also it's nice to bring in other people to talk about other things at times. So fun conversation with Will, as always. Just a couple quick things while we're on the subject of teams trying to win and investing in their rosters. And also while we're trying to check the boxes of teams that we have probably given short shrift to this season. I wanted to talk about the Braves and Dallas Keuchel for a minute because he's been excellent for them.

That was the subject of a post by Tony Wolfe on Fangraphs on Friday, which you should all check out. But the Braves have to be very satisfied with their signing of Dallas Keuchel. There are probably a bunch of teams out there that are sort of wishing that they had signed Dallas Keuchel. Granted, the Craig Kimbrell signing has gone about as poorly as that could possibly go but one out of two on free agents signed way later than they should have been signed and really he's kind of big for the Braves we haven't talked about the Braves I guess that much because they haven't been in that tight a race they have some standout players, but not like an MVP contender probably. And they just sort of everything's kind of gone smoothly for them. I don't know. There hasn't been controversy.

They haven't blown a big lead or anything. And so we've just sort of not talked a whole lot about the Braves, but they've been on a really great run lately. And Keichel's been about as good as he's been for years and years now and ronald acuna is one home run and four stolen bases away from 40 40 right now which is pretty exciting so braves baseball pretty good these days catch the fever i imagine well we could like we could even just go through these here playoff teams. I bet the Yankees wouldn't mind the services of Dallas Keuchel right now. The Astros are like, we're fine. We're very invested in pitcher wins apparently, but we're fine.

You know, the Dodgers are doing all right. The Braves have him, so they're pretty content there. The Twins are probably sitting there going, that Dallas Keuchel, he sure would be useful. Oh, yes, very much so. The Phillies could use Dallas Keigel. So it's just a tricky thing to, when we're evaluating what individual signings mean

and say about macro trends, that can be a tricky business. You can over and under react to things. As you noted, there are sort of pros and cons for specific signings, but I think it does go to show that, you know, when you identify weaknesses and then try to bolster them, it can be to your benefit as a baseball team. So that's the thing that people should think about,

maybe consider doing sometimes. Yeah, and I get why there wasn't tremendous interest for Keichel. And maybe he had somewhat unrealistic expectations for the kind of contract he could command. He was coming off a durable year and a pretty decent year, but not like a star level year. And the way that he pitches is sort of not in vogue in baseball right now. And I like that he is succeeding despite that. I like that he is sticking with the sinker because, yeah, lots of guys are abandoning the sinker and it makes sense. But if you've got a really great sinker, then you should probably still throw that sinker.

And Dallas Keuchel's got a good one. And he is getting tons and tons of ground balls. His ground ball rate is back up where it was in his heyday, really, back over 60%, and it's been even higher than that lately. So good for him, good for the Braves for investing in him. And I guess that goes to show the benefit of signing free agents when you need them. Once the price dropped down to where it was when he eventually signed, there were probably a few other teams that should have been more involved in that conversation. And I think there were reports that the Phillies were, right?

And then Keichel came out this week and essentially said that was not the case. Yeah. So. Yeah. Well, and, you know, with the, as you would expect, with the rebounding of his ground ball rate, the homer rate has come down. It's sort of useful to have a guy who doesn't give up a lot of those at this particular moment in baseball.

So yeah, it's always tricky because we get some teams that sort of exaggerate or dissemble entirely about how active they're trying to be in the market. And we, of course, never really know exactly what goes into these. We very rarely get a complete TikTok of the teams that don't end up signing a free agent. But yes, I think there are a number of teams out there that kind of a whole lot this year, perhaps because we didn't expect them to be contenders, is the Diamondbacks, who were also the subject of a Fangraphs posting Friday. Your staff is really on top of things these days. Finger on the pulse. They do a good job. wrote about the Diamondbacks and about how they have completely turned over their roster in the last couple of years and how they went from a team that seemed to be on the verge of selling and

tearing it down and rebuilding. And they did a little bit of that. And obviously they let big free agents walk and they traded Zach Greinke. And yet they are still very much in it. They're three and a half games back in the wildcard race as we speak, but their run differential is better than the Mets, better than the Phillies, better than the Brewers by quite a bit in some of those cases. the hazen regime has done a good job at development and at finding people in places that you don't typically expect to find people and they've made a lot of trades that have worked out pretty well on the whole for them so far that's fun and and i guess they are now it felt like a few years ago like they were heading for some kind of cliff potentially and now it really doesn't feel like that they've kind of done the brewers rebuild on the fly type thing which i don't know that that produces as solid a core as the total rebuild does if you do that right like the brewers right now they don't have

a ton of quality homegrown players they've done a good job at adding them and signing them and trading for them. But that team is not unassailable. But the fact that they went from bad to good without ever really getting terrible or bottoming out, I think there's something to be said for that. Even if you don't come out on the other side with an Astros style, just juggernaut, having skipped the three or four really terrible years that the Astros and the Cubs have, that counts for something too. Well, and I think, you know, when it comes to diagnosing how close to one or the other of those models Arizona is, they're a little bit different than Milwaukee in that they just went through what could end up being sort of a

franchise altering draft, right? Where they had a tremendous amount of both picks and draft capital to spend. We have them, Eric and Kylie have them ranked as the fifth best farm system in baseball at the moment. So they're in a position to contend for a wild card now. And I think that there are things like you said that they did at the deadline that, despite losing Granke, arguably kept their major league roster sort of at least where it was if it didn't make it better. And they are going to have reinforcements coming from the farm in the next couple of years.

Some of their prospects are sort of close to major league ready now, and they have exciting young guys too. So I think that they are i mean it's a it's a pretty interesting approach and one that i like a lot because it seems to be a good melding if it works i mean obviously these prospects have to pan out but if it should work it seems like a really compelling mix of the two where you can give your fans baseball that they're not going to feel bad about watching. Yeah.

While also, you know, sort of building that young core that we've seen other teams do. Not every team is going to be in a position to have a single draft year that can change the course of their franchise quite like Arizona did. That set of circumstances was pretty unique. But they're cool. They make me feel good about all the Diamondbacks hats I own. I own, it own a lot. It's a lot of hats. Several of them are very brightly colored, and I feel good about it because look at that D-backs team go. Yeah, and that trade that they made, the Zach Gallen-Jazz Chisholm trade, which was really fascinating at the time.

It's obviously way too soon to say who will end up getting the best of that deal. But Gallin, having been in the big leagues already and being ready to step onto that roster immediately, he has been great for them just since the trade deadline. And Chisholm's been very good for the Marlins too, but in AA, whereas Gallin is doing that in the big leagues now and is probably like their best or second best starting pitcher yeah immediately which is cool because that was like a challenge trade and so far i guess both teams are probably pretty happy with how it's working out just in the past couple months but it's nice when you can make a move like that and reap some rewards from it right away yeah it seems like one of the rare times where both sides might end up by virtue of where they are in their respective competitive cycles come away thinking, hey, we did really well here.

And the Goldschmidt deal, too, was one where it was like, okay, I get why they're doing this. It's tough to give up a guy like that. But maybe this is the time when you do it. And they got a good package of players back but they've won that deal in 2019 at least for sure goldschmidt could rebound and be better and obviously he's recovered somewhat from his very slow start but yeah getting kelly and weaver and the contributions that they've had and goldschmidt not looking like his old self. That has worked out really well right away when that was more of a long-term oriented move.

And, of course, what they've done with Quetel Marte and picking up Christian Walker and some of these guys who have really blossomed or kind of come out of nowhere. It is a pretty fun team. Yeah, they're a lot of fun. All right. You got anything else? No. I will have uh i will have prospect thoughts hot from the arizona fall league uh next week i'm headed down to phoenix for that next friday but learn that no i do not how is that as a spectator experience i guess i don't know

i've never been before okay yeah i i briefly went when i was at scout school but i wasn't really there for the Arizona Fall League. I think we went to a game or two maybe when it overlapped, but I don't really recall how that was because I was so full of anxiety about trying to pretend that I could evaluate baseball players with my eyes and nothing else. Well, thankfully, I will not be forced to do that. And if I get confused, I can always, uh, uh, bother Eric about it.

Cause he will obviously be taking in fall league ball too, but I don't know. I'm excited to, to get to see my, my first fall league. I haven't been yet. Um, I've heard that it's much more mellow than spring training, so that makes it immediately appealing to me. All right. So we will take a quick break and we'll be right back with will leach Okay, so we are joined now by our pal and man of many bylines, most of which appear these days at New York Magazine and MLB.com, Will Leach.

Hey, Will. Sir, an honor. As I was saying before we came on, this is not just an honor. Being on this podcast, I consider a substantial honor. Like it is not just a mere honor. It is a substantial honor. I'm having all sorts of insubstantial honors all day. This is in fact a substantial honor.

Well, we're always happy to bestow it upon you. So we're here to talk to you about a couple things, one of which is the Cardinals, but I figure we probably shouldn't start with the Cardinals because if I get you going on the Cardinals, we may run out of time to talk about anything else. So let's start with what you wrote about for New York Mag this week, which was about Dave Dombrowski, and your column was called Winning Ain't What It Used To Be. So do you want to lay out the thesis and then we will interrogate it as the kids say? Yes, I should point out that this column, in fact, starts with something about the Cardinals.

So keep that in mind. And ends also. Yes, exactly. It comes back around. But yeah, so basically, obviously, there's been lots of discussion after Dave Novoski was fired, of course, less than a year after he won the World Series. And I thought it was fascinating. I kept going back to a quote that was in tom verducci's uh write-up in this in sports illustrated and i mentioned this in the piece and the the exact quote is and this is something we all understand he said the team was looking for quote a process-oriented architect who can steer the franchise efficiently through a difficult transition toward its next championship team which i i get it i get it like we all i watch baseball we all know how this works i've read

your book like i know how this goes uh and've read your book. Like I know how this goes. And I know your book is not exclusively about this, but you know what I mean? We all understand how this goes, but it still felt very, it felt cognitively dissonant to me. The idea that like this guy literally not only just won a world series less than a year ago,

but was brought in specifically to go ahead and do what he did, which was to clear out some of the farm system and win a World Series. And while I understand that this is a process, to me, we've kind of noticed in the last couple of years as front offices have become more and more similar and like-minded, I think sometimes people take this like a massive criticism, which is, I don't understand that because when Dave Stewart was a general manager, he was different than everyone else, but different in a very bad way.

Like just being different is not necessarily a bad thing. I think a lot of the front offices that do things are doing things in smart ways. But there has been – I'm not the first person to mention the idea that actually trying to spend and pay and do whatever you can to get the best possible team on your 40-man or 25-man roster right now feels like it's become kind of the new market inefficiency because everyone is kind of still planning down the line. And as another point in the piece is, as teams are all making money, the incentive not only to win now, but to even do something as basic as selling tickets is just not that big of a deal because you're making money otherwise. So it felt in a way that, as I kind of wrote in the piece, it just felt very odd to see not just that they had just won the World Series, but the idea of someone dedicated to winning now feels out of step with the times.

And so I started with an idea of famously Whitey Herzog when he took over the Cardinals in 1981, had Whitey's riverboat, where he had Raleigh Fingers on his team for like 45 minutes, and then shipped him off, and brought in Ozzie Smith that offseason, and basically he just completely reshuffled, traded Ted Simmons, made this crazy reshuffling of the roster, specifically just he just wanted to win right now. And I'm hesitant of

doing nostalgia on these sort of things. In fact, I tried to cut back at the end of the piece and remind everyone that things weren't always so great back then either. But certainly the notion of, it's one thing when you have a, maybe say a columnist for like a national daily newspaper playing up the idea that like,

baseball's too much like this. I think it's very easy to mock people like that. But it does feel very strange that the idea of having someone to come in and say, I'm going to win this team a championship as quickly as possible feels almost old-fashioned. And I understand why it's old-fashioned, but it's still – as a longtime baseball fan and someone that understands process but also emotion, it can feel strange. So that was the idea of the piece and also, of course, a way to once again talk about the Cardinals in the first paragraph of the piece. Who actually have nothing to do with the story. What do you think of the argument that Dave Dombrowski has one primary skill at this point in his career, which is maybe a little reductive because he's built great teams from scratch before.

And presumably he still has that in his tool bag but he hasn't been called upon to do that for a while his last couple stints and a decade or more now he's been the guy who just keeps the team winning every year and trades all the prospects and signs the free agents and so forth and so that's what he was

hired to do and he did it and mission accomplished but then maybe he's not the guy you want for the next phase it's like with managers where you go from the guy who's good with the young players and is a good mentor and then the team gets good and maybe you jettison that guy and you bring in the guy who then can inspire them all and and use a finished roster and take it to the World Series, or that's the idea, and you sort of ping pong between those two poles. And so I guess you could make the analogy to say the free agent market where teams now are not paying for past performance anymore. They're

looking at what can you do for me now? And if Dombrowski really is a guy who at this point in his career can just come in and kind of finish off a team and fill whatever remaining holes you have and trade the prospects that the previous person put in place then maybe that's the guy that you bring in to do that one job and then you go get someone else to do the next job yeah two things to this one it is kind of funny to think that general managers are now going remember larry boa was always the one on this He was always getting hired and he would get the play. He always coming after a manager who was friendly with his team. Right.

And he'd come in and fire them all up. And then, and then, and then three years later, like we were all the players would have these anonymous quotes. We really hate Larry Boa. And then they would bring in like someone really nice and they would come in. And then, and that was always, it's weird to see general managers kind of having that idea, which is, I guess, i guess i don't know if that's progress or not uh but the second idea of this that i find strange is a i'm not sure it exists

david obrowski was brought in to do that job and for the record he did it like i would understand it's also worth knowing he did not actually win that world series in detroit which is which like whitey herzog in the piece it's always a good reminder your job changes when your boss is nearing death if the timeline just becomes really quickly and what the way you do your job changes a lot which i think whitey herzog in the same thing with gussie bush but i would say that like on one hand i yeah right we have dombrowski has shown he can in fact do that it was also weird to say like well dombrowski you know he's getting so older like he's like 64 like i know that like like that you know there are there are like dozens of people running for president that are like a decade older than that so it it struck me as very strange that the idea that like somehow that would

be seen like oh in the twilight of his career why would he want to be a part of a rebuilding project particularly with the red socks because basically i think what we're looking at with the red socks i think is i touched on this in the piece it feels like kind of like they did with charrington right like they'll bring in someone and they'll bring in someone to rebuild the farm system and maybe I think what we're looking at with the Red Sox, I think I touched on this in the piece, it feels like kind of what they did with Charrington, right? Like they'll bring in someone to rebuild the farm system and maybe they will or maybe they won't. But if they do three or four years down the line, because Boston is a lunatic media market, they'll all be like, why are we wasting our time with these young players? Just like they did with Dombrowski.

And they'll bring in Dombrowski or a Dombrowski-lite type guy. Now, if we're saying that's what baseball general manager, if that's what baseball is now, is doing that kind of flip-flop back and thing, maybe you'd have a point. I don't think any other team other than the Red Sox is doing this, right? Like, I don't think there's a lot of teams saying, okay, we've brought in this general manager for the next three or four years. He'll build it up, and then we'll get'll get the closer or Winston Wolf will come in and clean up the, clean up the whole project. Like, it feels to me that the Red Sox are, this may have been the strategy now,

but like, it doesn't feel like the Red Sox are like building up to, if the Red Sox are building up to do this in three or four years where they switch again and find another guy, I don't think any other other teams in baseball are doing that. I don't see a lot of other teams in baseball planning for that. It feels like, as I kind of said in the piece this feels like the red sox being they were the one team that was kind of fairly desperate in for winning right now that's not to say that the astros are not trying to win now or the dodgers are not trying to win now but

like they felt like the red sox were trying are now getting with the program would be the best way to put it and becoming more and more like every front office in baseball. And while I understand that, there does feel, it still feels like a strange thing to say, okay, well, we're going to get this more efficient. And that led into the larger point of these piece, which as we all know, it does feel like baseball efficiency has become, as I think my second line of the piece was, baseball is not, winning is not just the only thing. Winning is not the everything. It's also not the only thing and maybe even not the top thing anymore.

And it doesn't matter, as I think I made the joke that, listen, it's important for your team to win. After all, how else were you convinced your fans to pay for your tax breaks on your new stadium reservations? But the idea that it's the most important thing feels to me,

the Red Sox are an anomaly in this in that they may flip up back and forth when other teams won't, but it feels more that most teams are not doing that. Most teams are just more working about long-term efficiency necessarily than winning right now. I do wonder though, if we might come to understand this as occupying a mold that's a little bit different than what you're suggesting. I mean, I think that the Astros are the team that everyone thinks of when we think about teams that do a hard reset. And I think we all agree that Boston and its media market does not have the appetite. There's just not the intestinal fortitude anywhere on the planet, let alone there to sort of endure a hard reset in Boston. But I think I wonder if internally

they think of themselves less in that mold and more in the mold of the Dodgers, where you do have a team that is a perennial contender. They're a powerhouse in their division. They have a very strong farm system and player development organization that supplements that. we think of the last Red Sox regime, you know, the regime that he replaced, there was this sense that Charrington was taking too long, right? That there was a, an overemphasis on player development that we were waiting too long for these young guys. And we can, we can all talk about how reasonable a reaction that was to what was going on there, especially for a team that managed to sort of, um, look their way into a world series in the interim. But I wonder if we're maybe, and I'd be curious on your thoughts on this, if we are perhaps a little too early in this process

to really understand exactly what it is that Boston is envisioning themselves as going forward, because isn't a possibility here that there is a renewed emphasis on player development, a renewed emphasis on sort of rebuilding the farm, coupling that with still one of the largest payrolls in baseball, maybe they think of themselves being in a slightly different group than the one that we would worry about the most in terms of deprioritizing winning. Yeah, I certainly do think they're modeling themselves after the Dodgers, and they should. I'm assuming everyone is trying to model themselves after the Dodgers. The Dodgers are doing everything right. But I think there are two major differences there and

then i'll get into the next idea this one is boston is a different market than los angeles and two they don't have andrew friedman and i think that and all the people that friedman has come in let's not forget in like the first couple years of friedman pivots in the dodgers wasn't there a lot of this by the way wasn't there a lot of like hey why aren't they going out and getting guys why why are they bringing in all of these mid-tier players instead of going and getting the big names? Friedman's doing just what he – This past winter or the trade deadline. Yeah, exactly.

Like Friedman got a lot of that like, oh, well, maybe that works in Tampa Bay, but you got a big payroll now. And now we've seen what he was doing all along. If Boston surprises me and shows to have the patience to do that again, I'm sure that's what they want to be. But I also feel like, again, as I do with a lot of my pieces, the Dombrowski thing is both the point I'm making and also a launch into a larger discussion, which is, as I talk about in the piece, the Cubs and the Astros are the reason, in a lot of ways, this is all happening, right? Like obviously these things are all progression, but basically the Cubs and the Astros were able to take this competitive reset and come back and build these monsters. The Cubs monster did not quite turn out the way they wanted to, but the Astros monster seems to be going very, very well.

So I think what you've seen, I use the Pirates as the best example of this, but I think there's a lot of teams that have a little bit of the, I think every front office has a little bit of this, is this idea of like they can point to their fans and they can say, look what the Cubs and Astros did. So don't worry. We don't need to go out and spend a lot of money right now or we don't need to like try to – we can kick the ball down the – kick the can down the road, kick the ball down the can, whatever you're kicking in whatever hill or piece of territory

or geographical land that is going around is what I'm trying to say. They are – push it down the road a little bit. And then don't worry because, look, it works. Look at what the Astros did. Look at what the Cubs did. And I think what that can happen, I think what can happen there is I think kind of what's happening with Pittsburgh, right? Like you're promised this great future. And then when it comes, you don't follow up on it.

To me, one of the great things the Astros have done is not just take those years where you reset, but then when it became time to spend, because remember when the Astros were not spending money, they said the entire time, we're banking this money, but we will spend when it's time. And they kind of have, right? They've kind of done that. We can all argue maybe they should have spent more, maybe they could have gone after this guy. But generally speaking, I feel like the Astros have invested a lot of that money that they saved back in the team. I'm not sure. I think that people want to model the Astros' plan in the reset and build up young prospects type of way. I'm not sure they always want to do in the, yes, but when it comes time, let's spend when it comes time to do that.

And I think that to me is less an indictment of the Red Sox and more an indictment of what the Red Sox are trying to do that and i think that is that to me is uh it's less than diamond of the red socks and more than diamond of what the red socks are trying to do in a macro sense which has become like the rest of baseball and right now i would argue the rest of baseball feels less dombrowski or or herzog than uh then let's uh make sure this comes out the general lack of urgency right like at a certain, teams are making money. Their teams are making a lot of money. And in the past, if you needed to make more money, you would try to get a better team. So more people would come to your games and buy more things and spend more money and you get post-season games. That sort of money is like, it's not irrelevant. No money is irrelevant, but certainly they're doing, they're making a lot of

money in other ways that the actual number, I wrote up this for New York Magazine a couple months ago and Neil deMuce wrote about it for Deadspin a few weeks ago. The idea of the fact that people are not coming to games, are coming to games fewer. And this is not just in baseball but I think in all sports. But I think baseball cares less about it because they don't need – their money is not coming from those guys. And so therefore they don't need to spend as much because they're making money now. And thus, there's not as much urgency to win the way that would have been in the past. Yeah. I think there's only so much you can read into any one firing or hiring because you never know in any individual case whether they're off the field issues or frayed relationships or front office dysfunction.

I mean there have been a couple articles. office dysfunction. I mean, there have been a couple articles, Evan Drellick and Peter Gammons wrote about the Red Sox front office and how there was a perception that maybe Dombrowski had a couple favorites like Tony La Russa and Frank Wren and other people didn't feel included and a lot of other executives left to go to other teams since he was hired and so on. But I think if you read Alex Spear's Homegrown, which is about how this Red Sox team came together, largely under Ben Charrington, I think Dombrowski is sort of portrayed as the guy whose skill is finishing it off. As we were saying, he's the guy who can make that big move. And as you read about it, it just seems like he's kind of the one who will put that extra prospect in the trade that the other team won't.

So he'll say, yeah, I'll give you Yohan Mankata and then I'll get Chris Sale. And that worked out well. And Mankata is a really very good player now. But if that's the primary skill, if the primary skill is I'm the guy who will give the biggest package of prospects. I'm the guy who will offer the biggest contract. We need a starting pitcher. I'll go get David Price. I'll get Chris Sale and Extension, et cetera. I don't know if that's the best skill or most valuable skill that a GM can have.

I guess there's a skill in persuading ownership to spend that money or okay that move. But as far as just being the guy who can be the high bidder and offer the most money or the most prospects, that seems like a more replaceable skill, I guess, than building it up, than being the Charrington who finds the prospects that Dombrowski then comes in and gives away. And maybe that's oversimplifying it. I don't know. I said that you can't read that much into anyifying it. I don't know. I said that you can't read that much into any one move. I do think that this sort of reflects some trends that we're seeing in the game as a whole, and it's not just this one firing.

And I do wonder how other GMs and executives will look at this and look at their own jobs and think, well, gee, if Dave Dombrowski can build one of the most successful teams of all time and win a World Series and then get fired, then I better not do that because it doesn't give you any job security. What gives you job security is stockpiling prospects and being efficient. So I do see that. But on the other hand, I just, I don't know, maybe Dombrowski was able to build teams with the Expos or with the Marlins, but can he still do that in today's game when

player development has changed so dramatically and he hasn't really been called upon to do that for decades at this point? I don't know. Well, I would say, again, I agree that you keep your job longer by kicking again whatever I said you would kick and whatever thing it would roll down. I think that's true, but I have to say one thing I would argue that is rather marketable about Dombrowski's skill is that he won a World Series by going and actually making all of these things, and I think that they'll still...

Don't call me old-fashioned with my play and my record players to make the kids go to sleep, but like, I think that does kind of matter a little bit, and I would argue this. Dombrowski is... I agree. I agree that the best way to – it might not be best practices to have a – to just constantly have a Dombrowski. We saw what happened – that's still going on in Detroit. Like clearly they went way too long there and we saw what happened.

I think we could argue the Phillies had that maybe when they went a year too long earlier as well. The Tigers are definitely the worst example of that. But I have to say, again, you do eventually have to do it, right? Like what I'd like to see, what I would have liked to have seen, for example, is let's say Dombrowski is the closer, right? Like I think teams, you think we can argue whether or not the Red Sox would have won a World Series if they just stayed with Charrington. They would certainly still have Moncada. I don't think there's any question about that, but like, would they have won a World Series? Now, obviously these are hypotheticals. We never know really the answer to them, but it's hard to argue the Red Sox were not in a better position to win a world series in

2018 because Dombrowski was there. And I do kind of think that matters a little bit. So, you know, I, I, I do, uh, maybe Dombrowski is just this floating around guy that comes around and, and he's, he's the, uh, he's the Kawhi Leonard of general managers. He just flows from city to city and takes teams that couldn't get their act together, gets it and then rides out of town. Unlike past Red Sox employees, not in a gorilla costume, but still like sneaks out the back. I wonder if there's value in that, right? Because there's got to be some sort of value in someone that is actually doing something a little bit different, because that's how this started, right? That's. I think this is something that's actually – I'm sure we'll get into a Cardinals conversation. I think this is something that's hurt the Cardinals a little bit last year because that's always been their plan, right?

Perpetual contention. That's why they got rid of Walt Jockety back in the day because he was kind of Dombrowski. He would make big trades and that would get the team going. And ultimately they realized that was not sustainable. and ultimately they realized that was not sustainable i and i agree but like right now eventually some of these teams that are building and focusing on prospects they're not going to win they're not going to win there's like if everyone's going this way someone's not going to do it and i do think there's value in someone of a fresh set of eyes that comes in and says you know what you are too close to this guy you are too close like. Like, I like going on Mankata.

I think he's a terrific player. I don't think a single Red Sox fan would not do that trade immediately. And maybe in five years, maybe in five years from now, and maybe you're right. Maybe it's a series of Charringtons to Dombrowskis, and that's the new plan, but I doubt it. I bet it's more just Charringtons now. And listen, I don't mean to be a – Charrington obviously did a great job. But I do think that if it's just people that are

constantly building to the future and no one that comes in and says, okay, let's try to do it now to have that specialist to do that, maybe that's what it is. But I have a feeling that's not really what's going to happen. I just think it's going to be a bunch of people kicking whatever thing down whatever hill. Yeah, I wonder. I kind of was thinking about it as almost like a sacrifice bunting analogy. There are certain situations where it makes sense to lay down a sacrifice bunt because you're playing for one run and all you need is one run. And there are cases where a sacrifice bunt can increase your chances of scoring one run but it also decreases your chances of scoring multiple runs and maybe decreases your run expectancy and

that doesn't always matter sometimes you just need that one run and you'll win or you need to tie to keep the game going and that's fine but there are a lot of times then when it's counterproductive because usually you want to score as many runs as possible. And so you write, and you're not the only one making this argument. I probably made it myself maybe, but you say in many ways, spending now and not building for the future to win now has become the new market inefficiency. And I think there's some truth to that. It's like, if you're a contending team, you can go and get guys from the rebuilding team and if you're a rebuilding team you can go and get guys from the contending team and it's different guys and you're willing to make different moves and so you can benefit both sides and i think if you decide that we want to win

right now we care about this one year then that is an advantage because you will be willing to give up that prospect that the other team's not going to give up but then does that come back to bite you and can you count on actually turning that into a world series now the red sox did and so i'm sure they would do everything that they did all over again because it worked out but can you count on it working out especially in a game where you've got 30 teams you've've got three full playoff rounds, you've got the wildcard game now? So even if you decide we're going to go all out and pull out all the stops and build the best team we can to win right now, you can't really count on that translating into a World Series. If it does, then you're brilliant. And if it doesn't, then maybe you're left with a depleted roster the rest of the decade.

The Tigers or the Bluegers decade because they won zero World Series and the Red Sox have won two. But if you could redo the decade, if you could simulate the decade a thousand times, would the Red Sox win more World Series in the typical timeline than the Yankees and the Dodgers do? I don't know. Or are we just looking at it and saying, well, it worked out, but the Red Sox were the most successful team last year. I don't know that they were necessarily the best team. And it very easily could have turned into a situation where they had some regular season success and then they got knocked out in the playoffs. And then suddenly you're left with the highest payroll and some of these contracts that haven't worked out thus far. And you don't have that ring and that flag flying forever. Yeah, but I know as a, for the record, this is a bad example to use when we're talking about the Red Sox. But fans generally like it and are happier when you are trying, when they can see that you're trying to win.

And I do think that matters. I think it comes back, again, Red Sox fans are never happy at all. So that's a really bad example. But generally speaking, I will say, I think this is something that does get a little lost when we talk about this is the idea that you're trying to win a little bit. And I think right now, this goes back to my idea of urgency and incentive. Right now, I don't think that baseball ownership is incentivized to worry about the right now because things are fine right now. Things are going really well right now and there's tons of money throughout baseball right now. And they've just got this big BAM tech check and there's all this money coming in. And so because of that, when there's that much money coming in, the idea of – like I'll put it this way.

Bill Veck is never a general manager who's like throwing out every stop he can to attract every fan base he can – every fan that he can if they're making a ton of money otherwise and they don't have to worry about competing. Like I think there's not a major incentive for owners to worry about getting more fans in the ballpark and making more money. And so because of that, there is a... Sure, you can promise me that you're going to try to build something for me to win someday.

But I don't... I mean, sure, it might not have worked for the Red Sox. It also might not work for the Dodgers, right? They have not won a World Series. It might not work. This is the Phillies' fear, right? They had that stretch where they took a step back and they still haven't made the playoffs. Now, I think there are reasons for that. You certainly can't argue the Phillies haven't spent in some ways. But I think that when you're continuously saying we're building something efficient and it will pay off later, that strikes me not as not that different of a bet or that different of a asking your fans to trust you than it is saying we're going to go right now and maybe it's going to be bad later. Maybe it's going to be bad. I don't know.

But we know we're trying to win right now. Certainly the former is a better long-term plan. But again, that doesn't guarantee success any more than trying to go right now does. I would argue. I do wonder a year from now where we're going, how we're going to look at this Red Sox team, because I mean, they obviously have some difficult choices. They are making them difficult for themselves, right?

If this team wanted to sign bets to an extension, they could just decide to not care about the luxury tax. So we should say that up front, but this team will in all likelihood look pretty similar to what it does this time next year. And I do look at them as sort of a interesting Rorschach test for where we think baseball is headed because there's a not small likelihood that this team, which is not playing terribly, right? They're 10 games over 500 or whatever, is going to find themselves in playoff contention next year with a new general manager. And I wonder what our impression of this moment in their franchise history will be if a year

from now we're getting ready for October baseball and the Red Sox are going to be maybe not the AL East champions because it seems like the Yankees aren't going to move from that spot without a good fight, but back in a wildcard race and then finding themselves playing deep into October. And I wonder where we will think they're headed and what we will think of this move if that's where they end up a year from now, because they're still going to have one of the largest payrolls in baseball. They're still going to have most of this team. And hopefully, if they can figure out something to do with that starting rotation, perhaps they're in a totally different spot next year than they are now.

Yeah, the time where we see the Red Sox go through a Royals-esque desert in between is hard to imagine that happening, right? And even if it's the most efficient thing for them to do. And I do wonder if we are allowing the Red Sox, who are, let's face it, a pretty tumultuous organization. Like there's all sorts of madness over there. I wonder whether or not we are letting the Red Sox stand in for something larger in sports when it's actually just a weird Red Sox thing.

Right. And I've wondered that throughout this process also, because they are almost certainly not, as you said, about to go embark on either a hard rebuild or a long prolonged period of non contention, given what they still have on the roster now. So it's going to be I wonder, I wonder how we'll feel a year from now. I don't know. Let's see. Ask me how the election's going. I don't know. Let's see. Ask me how the election's going. Sure, yeah. We might not be worried about baseball at all. It is funny as a fan of a franchise that hasn't been to the postseason in so long that their postseason drought can drive without other people in the car for fans of this team to be complaining about the possibility of missing the postseason for one year. Theoretically. Theoretically, theoretically, of course. Yeah, I guess it comes back to that question of how do you define success in baseball and what's your goal? I mean, everyone's goal is to win the World Series, but how do you do that? Is winning

seven consecutive division titles winning? Is that success? That seems pretty successful. You put a compelling product on the field that hasn't translated to a World Series win yet, but there's just so much randomness and chance involved in converting a great regular season team into a World Series winner that if you tell me that I can build you a division winner every year, I'm going to sign up for that

because you do that enough times and it should translate into a World Series or at least you put yourself in that position. Are you going to win the division every year? You can promise me that. That sounds great. I'm not sure that's – everyone's making that promise, right? Yeah, right. I do think this is – it's obviously about efficiency,

which is code for spending less and winning as many games or more games. I'm sure that if John Henry thinks that he can find someone who can build just as good a team for $150 million in payroll as Dave Nabrowski can for $250 million, then he will happily sign up for that. But I think that it is also partly about when you do build a homegrown core. Yes, that is absolutely about saving money because young players are not paid anything close to what they're worth these days. But also, I think it's that you can count on those guys to be good for several years. So if you bring up Mookie Betts and Raphael Devers and Jackie Bradley and Andrew Benintendi and Xander Bogarts all at once.

Those guys, you know they're going to be good for several years. And yes, they're also going to be affordable. But there's really something to be said for knowing that we've got this team that just starting with these homegrown guys, we can sort of fill in around the edges and we can make trades and we can sign guys. But you can do that because you have these guys who come up when they're 21 and they're largely good right away. And you can just plan for the future because you know that five, six years down the road, these guys are still going to be there and still going to be good, which you just can't really do with free agents, even if you are willing to spend on them, especially now that everyone's signing extensions and you can't even count on free agents being there. So it's absolutely about money, but I think there is

also an element where it's about that dependability and predictability of knowing that you have, say, half of a winning team that you can count on for the next half decade before you do anything else. I guess, but I feel like the Pirates were kind of this like four or five years ago, right? Like we all felt like I remember in 13, that Pirates team felt like, wow, they are not going away. And then they went away. And a lot of that was because they didn't get any support, right? They built and I got to me, I think me i think the pirates the pirates are my way of cheating a little bit because i feel like they are the example of like of the they are the actual worst case of the scenario of the problem that i'm potentially subscribing this but prescribed that may not actually happen to everyone but the pirates

feel like the example of that happening they have all the and this is the fear like this is what you liked about san diego signing machado right like Like, that's what you want is to be able to make that step forward. The question is how many teams are actually going to do that when we've seen the free agent market. I don't know if they're actually going to do that. I was going to say the Pirates fans would love a $150 million payroll problem. Right. Yeah. Don't model yourselves as Pirates or Pirates ownership.

No. Yeah, don't model yourselves on pirates or pirates' ownership. So we should transition to St. Louis now. And I do sort of have a segue because Rob Arthur wrote something about Dombrowski for Baseball Prospectus on Friday. And he looked back the past few decades of GM history, and he found that Dombrowski's firing is essentially unprecedented in that time. found that Dombrowski's firing is essentially unprecedented in that time. Someone who had had so much regular season success, who had so recently won a World Series, for him to be fired, that just hasn't happened. But he pointed out that probably the best recent comp for that is Walt Jockety, former Cardinals GM, who was fired less than a year after the Cardinals won the 2006 World Series. And granted, that 2006 team was not nearly as good as the 2018 Red Sox, and the 2007 Cardinals were not as good as the 2019 Red Sox. But do you see any parallels there?

And does that tell us anything about what might happen in Boston or these trends? Because as you were saying, maybe this has been a problem for the Cardinals just trying to contend every year, but not going all out in any one year. I think that, I think the parallel, it's not, it's not one-to-one, but it certainly makes some sense. I also feel like it's worth remembering that for all this talk of Tony LaRussa being this like old time, crusty baseball guy that never listens to anything. He, him and Jockety were like best, but they came in together and like,

and he survived. He's the one that was okay with them making that transition to John that never listens to anything. Him and Jockety were like best, but they came in together and he survived. He's the one that was okay with them making that transition to John Moseley and Jeff Luna, who I think obviously is brought in to change that whole system. I think the analogy is a little bit there, but I think certainly the Cardinals ownership team,

Bill DeWitt and all the other various Cardinals, St. Louis area investors who are now are making so much money off Ballpark Village, which will be coming that again, they will ultimately forget they have a baseball team altogether. But I do think that they – having – the deal with Jockety, it wasn't just that he didn't seem to be down with like player development. The whole strategy for Jockety was these trades and they were incredible trades to get Jim Edmonds for Kent Bottenfield, to get Scott Rowland for Placido Polanco, who, by the way, I love some Placido Polanco. We were born on the same day in 1975, so I'm sure he's going to come back left in him. And the Mark McGuire trade would be another good example. Clearly, the Cardinals had gotten so much success from those trades that that seemed to be only the strategy at that point. And really what happened, sure, he got fired after they won a World Series, but he really got fired after the Mark Mulder trade.

The Cardinals made a trade for Mark Mulder where they traded away Dan Heron. And before there was Twitter, Dan Heron was actually a really good pitcher too, and a really exciting young pitcher. And that clearly cost the Cardinals that trade. And Mulder was hurt, and he was a veteran. Exactly the risk that – it was one of those trades that didn't pan out. And I think that started to kind of turn the tide a little bit on Jockey. But there had been disagreements already happening.

And it's worth knowing that DeWitt, for whatever issues I think he may have now, and I think they're minor, but I think that he did see something ahead of time, which was, listen, we need to – the great example I always say is after the Cardinals won the World Series in 2006, they had the worst farm system in baseball. And after they won it in 2011, they had the best farm system in baseball. Like that's a cool five-year stretch of being a fan right there. Like that's nice when that happens. And a lot of that is because Lunau and them coming in.

But that was DeWitt recognizing – as I wrote this in the Baseball Perspectives Annual a couple of years ago, a lot of that move was actually based around Albert Pujols because Pujols actually was coming up, they knew his free agency was coming in five years and they wanted to make him stand usual and they realized that they needed to keep costs down, not necessarily just because he wanted to keep costs down though that's always a nice bonus, it's that they knew

this huge check was coming for Albert Pujols and if they kept paying all of this money for these other guys, it wasn't going to work. So they were going to have to get these cost-effective guys like a Matt Carpenter, like an Alan Craig at the time. Those guys were going to have to be the complimentary pieces around Albert Pujols so they could afford to pay Albert Pujols. Ultimately, that worked out perfectly for the Cardinals on both sides because they did not have to pay that money to Albert Pujols. But that was the driving influence of them changing that because they wanted, they knew that Albert Pujols, had they gotten him so cheap for the first half of

his career, they knew they were going to have to pay big for him. This is why there's this myth that the Cardinals were like, oh, we're being so smart about not signing Albert Pujols. Like they desperately wanted to keep Albert Pujols and just kind of lucked out that the Angels went so insanely high. But so I think that was a driving influence too, was the way Jockety was running the Cardinals was in a way that was going to make it incredibly difficult, in DeWitt's mind anyway,

to be able to afford Albert Pujols. And so they had to change their entire system with 2011 in mind. Now, again, this is another example of what we're talking about earlier. Whatever your long-term plans are, weird things keep happening to make them all turn and go off course. And so it ultimately worked out in a very strange, positive way for the Cardinals, but not in a way they could have anticipated. Right. Yeah. Well, we're seeing some of that weirdness with this Cardinals team on July. Let's see if I can navigate this quickly enough. On July 2nd, which was the sort of nadir of their playoff odds for us at Fangraphs, we had

them having a 17.7% chance of making the postseason. And that has, of course, since rocketed all the way up to 91.1 today, September 12th, or the 13th, excuse me. And so I'm wondering, how do you account for this Cardinals team, Will? Because they don't seem to do anything especially well, or at least they haven't for long stretches of this season. They are playing, obviously, much better defense in the second half, which has certainly helped. They are getting some standout second half performances, especially on the pitching side. But how do you account for this 2019 Cardinals team? If I can piggyback on that, I think Craig Edwards wrote about them this week,

and he noted that they were a 500 team at the All-Star break. At that point, they had an 11% shot at the division. And one of the reasons we wanted to have you on to talk about them is that we really haven't talked about them at all, which maybe you've noticed as an Effectively Wild listener. But I think it's been easy to overlook them, A, because they just seem pretty mediocre for much of the season. And even if you look now at, say, the full season stats, it's like they have a roughly average offense and a roughly average pitching staff. And at least according to Fangraph's war, they don't have a single four-war player. And so there's no really attention-getting superstar, at least on a full season basis, that you have to talk about. And yet only the Yankees have more wins in the second half

of the season, and they've got a four-game lead in the division with not many games to go. So yeah, what happened here? Well, there was a's a couple things and frankly a lot of these things have to do with the cubs and a lot of these things do with the brewers to be entirely honest i think that uh certainly the cardinals were not a a great team in the first half that was when it got really dark i feel like at the all-star break not only the cardinals i do a podcast every week with bernie mickless a long-time columnist for the same list post dispatch called seeing red we just yammer about this and about this and it is completely unobjective. Mostly I'm either crying or cheering into the microphone once a week.

So we're doing a lot these days. But the thing that's interesting that we kind of noticed is at the All-Star break, there were two teams that didn't have an All-Star picked by either the players or the fans. It was the Cardinals and the Marlins, which is always a wonderful place to be. And so Paul DeYoung was the only one chose. And part of that was because Goldschmidt had a slow first half. Ozuna had a slow first half. But really, the thing that's really helped the Cardinals in the second half have been

two things. One, the schedule, to be honest. It's completely like the Cardinals, I think, went to a stretch in August where they played. At the beginning of August, they played the Dodgers and the A's on the road and got swept. And it really felt like as dark as it was going to go. They lost five in a row. And then they got the Pirates and the Reds and the Marlins and the Pirates again. And they really just went through this stretch where they were able to just really beat up on bad teams and like actively beat up on them.

If you look at the Cardinals August, the only team they played that was halfway decent was the brewers and that was when the brewers were actually going through their their major their dip so uh they've they've benefited from the schedule which is good because right now theoretically that's what the cubs are about to do the cubs basically only have one winning team the rest of the way and it's the cardinals so they have seven games with and the cardinals have yet to win at wrigley field this year. So that's something, the idea that this race is over, I think is pretty foolish. But I would say that the Cardinals have really done better is the thing that, and when we refer to the Cardinals former manager on Seeing Red,

we mentioned he had that, that shall not be named, but I'm going to go ahead and say, because I'm not on that podcast. What kind of happened with Mike Matheny, I think, during his run with the Cardinals? There were all sorts of things going on. But one of the major things, there was just general sloppiness in both base running and in defense. And I think there's a great piece by Derek Gould this week in the Post-Dispatch talking about how the Cardinals, if one thing the Cardinals have done is they are actively shifting so much more than they have at any other time in the last 10 years. And that's, I know shifting is, we can all discuss the efficient ways to shift and so on. But like the idea that Mike Schilt has basically come in and all the stuff that Matheny was hesitant about and was frankly often at the front odds with the front office about, he's kind of brought into practice.

It's this wonderful little detail of Stby clap yes stubby clap stubby clap and willie mcgee physically cutting out with uh sharing a pair of scissors to cut out the cards in hand to the players for the defensive shift that they basically have a color code system that i imagined an intern would do but apparently they got cardinals legend willie mcgee and nomenclature uh legend stubby clap to physically do for them uh and i i there's just been a clear cleaning up in in the in the defense of the base running and it's led to just a pretty terrific run prevention uh certainly uh you've seen up the middle i think the indicative of the player of what the cardinals are is probably colton wong colton wong a player, particularly under Matheny, was kind of yanked out of the lineup back and forth.

Dexter Fowler always talked about this as well. He's another guy that's had this great year. But Wong has always been this terrific defensive player. But now he's been moved up to second in the lineup. Like he was betting he would have been put 10th for a long part of the last couple of years or yanked out of the lineup at all. He has like become this steadying influence. I think Paul Goldschmidt for, he hasn't had the offensive season he'd like, but every

single Cardinal, particularly on the infield, talks about how just on the whole, the defense has been cleaned up having him there. And, and, and, you know, they were playing Jose Martinez and Matt Carpenter the last couple of years. That's made a huge difference. But I really think why they're so hot in August and September, they're beating really bad teams in all series. And that's about to stop. They've got the Brewers this weekend. Everyone they play the rest of the year has a winning record. So they've built this four-game lead by being cleaner. But listen, the Cardinals

are projected to have a worse record than both the Brewers and the Cubs when they finished first and second in the division last year. The Cardinals are winning the division, but a lot of that is because the Cubs have taken a pretty big step back and so have the Brewers. And so the Cardinals have benefited from that. They're roughly around where they were last year, a little bit better. But in the division, the Brewers and Cubs have stepped back enough. And the Pirates and Reds have not been a factor at all. The Reds are kind of their own story of how disappointing this year's been for them. But they haven't been enough of a threat.

The Cardinals have just been able to take advantage. One guy I do want to ask about in particular who has seemingly followed this trend of a second-half resurgence has been Jack Flaherty. His first-half FIP was 4-7 473, which is not something you really write home about. And that number has come down substantially. He's writing a 218 FIP in the second half. His Ks per nine are up. Strikeout rate, walk rate is down. What have you seen change for him? Or is it just sort of adjusting and finding sort of a new way forward? Yeah, a lot of it. There's a Derek Gould, another good piece on this. Everyone in the follow Derek Gould,

he's great. Next time I'm talking about the Cardinals, you should probably just have him on because he's great and he talks a lot slower. But we get so much more in with you. Yeah, that's true. Fast, fast, fast.

Yeah, definitely. This is the, I think every time I'm on, I think I've actually seen this on the Facebook group before. Like, yep, Leach is on. Time to go to the half speed. Time to go to the half speed on that one so we can understand what in the hell he is saying.

But I would say that Alava has been fastball placement. It basically is – he's always had – and listen, he's always had flashes, right? And I think he was actually – even when he – there were games this year in the beginning of the year where he would pitch pretty well and didn't give up a couple homers. To me, the big number is the home run rate that's been down the second half that's been way down uh uh really that's actually kind of a key for the whole cardinal staff in a home run happy year the cardinals are actually one of the best teams at preventing homers i think that even adam wainwright is giving up one home run per nine innings like that is that is uh that's not something you expect when they're 94 years old and uh and can't throw faster than 85 miles an hour anymore.

And I say that out of love for Adam Wainwright, but I think for me, what Flaherty has done, one former Cardinal pitcher that he reminds people of and he's actually worked a lot with is Chris Carpenter. Chris Carpenter, who there's a lot of similarities between the two of them. He's throwing a lot of strikes and he's throwing a lot of strikes with fastballs. And I think that has kind of been the key for him. He's always been able to do that, but there is a certain aggression that he's had. I think clearly in the second half, it's built on itself, right? I mean, he is legitimately one of those pitchers right now. I think he's taken no hitters into the fifth

inning, like four times in the second half. And again, whatever and again whatever no hitters but it's still cool what is happening and it feels it definitely has no hit stuff when it goes on and so uh it's been exciting to see uh bernie and i on the podcast just like a month and a half ago we're saying if there was some theoretical plan and where the cardinals made the wild card game who would start game one and we decided that if it was on the road it would be miles michaelis and if it was on the at home it would be Adam Wainwright, which is to say this has come on us very quickly. Flaherty now, obviously, is the first guy you would have.

And he stepped up and been able to do that. And they've wanted him to do that for a while, but he's clearly showing. Now, another pitcher, frankly, that's been terrific for the Cardinals in the second half, too, is Dakota Hudson. Dakota Hudson has been excellent for the Cardinals. He has stepped up in a way. You know, at the deadline, Cardinal fans were really upset

that they didn't make a trade for a starter for all the offensive problems they had this year. It really felt, and they still need a fifth starter. Michael Waka is throwing like two to three innings a game, even when he's pitching well. They clearly don't try, which is probably not the best thing for his free agent case, by the way. He's a free agent at the end of the year.

He's like, I don't need wins, but let me throw three innings before you take me out. But on the whole, I still feel like there's an innings gap. They were just trying to make it September and have some of their calls. The bullpen has been terrific too. I feel like even guys like Carlos Martinez in the last couple of weeks has really stepped up. They've got a lot of success from those guys but really having Flaherty give you seven or eight innings of dominant pitching uh every five every four or five days has changed kind of the whole complexion of the bullpen and the rotation in a way that has kind of kept it rolling yeah and defense is easy to overlook but

boy up the middle defense doesn't get better than Molina, DeYoung, Wong, and Harrison Bader I mean that is about as good as you can get at catching the ball, both in the upfield and as a catcher, and then converting double plays, which they've done really well. So that's one of those things that kind of goes under the radar. And that's been percent chance to win the division does that feel right to you because as you were saying it is a pretty scary rest of the schedule normally you'd feel pretty good about a four game lead with 16 games to go but you've got the brewers this weekend then the nationals then four against the cubs then the diamondbacks then three more against the Cubs to end the season. So not only exclusively good teams, but also mostly the teams that you are facing in the division race right now. So what's your level of anxiety? Oh, my level of anxiety.

It's always very high. Listen, it has been four years since the Cardinals made the playoffs. You know what a drought – Meg, you know what it's like. Meg, you know what it's like. You know what it's like. It's hard. So like clearly – Call me's like. You know what it's like. It's hard. So, like, clearly. Call me when your drought's about to go to college.

Well, you know, in dog years. Oh, shit. But, yeah, so I feel like, I think, clearly, they've struggled a lot in September over the last couple of years. I think that there have been times that they were really, they were terrific in August after they fired Matheny and brought in Schilt, and then they kind of ran out of gas. I think the team is better constructed than they were last year. They're in a better position. They're certainly more stable in the rotation than they were. They had Austin Gomber and Daniel Ponce

de Leon taking huge starts for them down the stretch last year. They're in a much better position this year. I think it helps that on one hand, yes, wow, they're playing all these winning teams. To me, I mean, the Cubs are without Javier Baez and the Brewers are without Christian Yelich. That is a nice place to be at, even when you're playing all those teams. And obviously the National, the Dimebacks, those are tough games and we'll see what happens in the Brewers series. But I'll put it this way. Yes, four games, I have some anxiety. But if you can't hang on to a four game lead over the Brewers who have lost Christian Yelich and the Cubs who have lost Javier Baez, I do think that maybe the team was not that well constructed in the first place.

They've been able to count on the Cubs and Brewers taking a step back all year. I know the Brewers are hot right now and they clearly coming in with it, with it, with a great spot in that series. I don't think anyone's actually going to argue that the Brewers are a better team without Christian Yelich even in a small sample size the rest of the season. So I feel cautiously terrified. Let's go with that. Let's go with cautiously

terrified. Okay. Well, you can find Will almost everywhere, but particularly at MLB.com and New York Magazine and on Twitter at William F. Leach he will grudgingly tweet from time to time and you can write him a letter if you don't like something

he said just send him a letter and he will actually send you a letter back that is a thing that he does and you can get the address to mail him at by subscribing to his newsletter which you should be doing anyway that is at tinyletter.com slash William F. Leach. So thank you as always, and good luck surviving the next couple of weeks. Of course. And reminder, the newsletter is free. I would never,

ever ask someone to pay for my ramblings about Y.D. Herzog. Thank you. Thanks, Will. Thank you. Thank you, Mike. Okay, that will do it for this week. Thanks to you all for listening. And thanks to those of you who are supporting the podcast on Patreon. You can be one of those people too. Just go to patreon.com slash effectivelywild and sign up to pledge some small monthly amount

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players your ratings and reviews of the book are appreciated too we hope you have a wonderful weekend and we will be back to talk to you early next week Bye.