Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1434: The Cubs’ Lost Weekend

Episode Date: September 23, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about Cody Bellinger‘s and Keston Hiura’s home runs, the Cardinals’ climactic four-game sweep of the Cubs, the Brewers’ surge sans Christian Yelich, the rapid reversal in the NL Central playoff picture, Craig Kimbrel, Dallas Keuchel, and the narrative about players signed at midseason, what went wrong for Chicago and […]

What you do is all I see And I feel like it's surrounding me The crowd intrudes all day Till I'm finally swept away I'm finally swept away. I'm finally swept away. Good morning and welcome to episode 1434 of Effectively Wild, the baseball podcast from Fangraphs.com, brought to you by our Patreon supporters.

I'm Sam Miller of ESPN, along with Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Hi, Ben. Hi. This one's partly on me, but Keston Hira, I would say, having 37 homers across two levels is kind of shocking to me. Yeah. Not to you?

Well, across two levels, I knew he had done well in AAA. I didn't know he had that many homers. He had 19 in 57 games. Yeah.'t know he had that many homers. He had 19 in 57 games. Yeah. Huh. Well, that is a lot. And he has 18 in 77 games in the majors.

He's 22. He's a 22-year-old second baseman. The prospect write-up for him at Baseball Perspectives this year said that he has more power than it looks like. He has, I think it said maybe he has, he could have above average power and he's so good at hitting that he'll probably get there but there was no I don't think there was any impending sense that or sense of it being impending in this way he had 13 homers last year he had four in 42 games in his professional debut in 2017 so you know he to go from 13 to 37 is something else, in my opinion. That's a lot. Yeah, it takes a lot to shock me with the AAA numbers this year,

although I guess they're not more extreme than the major league numbers. They're so much more extreme than they were last year by, what, 70 or 80% the home runs. But I guess they are similar to what they've been in the big leagues. But the league average numbers, especially in the PCL, which has always been an offense-first league, but this year is just out of control. Yeah, it is. I don't know. I'd read a good piece on that. I'm sure they've been written, but I haven't read them. I just keep hearing about them. I keep hearing AAA fun facts. I haven't necessarily read a great AAA piece. All right, what's going on?

Well, for anyone who is interested, more interested than you were, maybe in that Cody Bellinger fun fact about how he had hit 44 home runs and they had all been against different pitchers, which would have been an all-time record for the most homers hit in the season without repeating.

Yeah, before you... I'm guessing that you're going to tell me that he homered off of somebody for the second time and it's now moved. He did. Okay, so I have a way of rephrasing that previous fun fact, which is this. In Major League history, 37 batters have homered off at least 44 pitchers in a season, and Cody Bellinger's year is the worst yeah that changes it I need a minute to wrap my head around that one but that is a different different takeaway yeah so he hit his 46th on Sunday it was a grand slam I believe and it was off Jake McGee whom he had already homered off once earlier this season so that fun fact is now over okay all right probably helps him in the uh the fun fact of uh in 2019 cody bellinger won the mvp award which is which is not that fun a

fact but he'll probably prefer it yeah probably okay anything else specifically well i don't know what our topic is today let's talk about the cubs yeah i figured we'd be talking about the cubs so that was a great that was i mean the result would be um very disappointing for a lot of people but uh just from from a baseball standpoint that was one of the most enjoyable uh series i've ever you know i've seen in you know in a while yeah so game one the cubs have a three run comeback in the ninth down by three in the ninth comeback tie the game lose in extra innings game two cubs blow a one run lead lose two to one they i don't that's that's it is two to one game it was a good game though uh game three there are seven lead changes, including Craig Kimbrell blowing it in the ninth on two homers on two pitches.

The Cubs lose by one. Javi Baez comes off the bench, seemingly wasn't available, but shows up to pinch hit with two outs in the bottom of the ninth and takes the biggest swing I've ever seen in all of baseball history, but does not connect. And the Cubs lose again by one run. And then game four, Hugh Darvish is left in to try to protect a one run lead in the ninth inning and complete the game. He cannot do it. The Cubs again, blow the one run lead, lose another one run game.

And that was their sixth consecutive loss by a grand total of seven runs and in those six games their playoff odds dropped from 77 to two yeah six games ago they were 35 to win the division i know i have the playoff odds graph right on my screen now and it's shocking how quickly it declined. I mean, just before this four-game set against the Cardinals started, it was flipped so that the Cubs had a 58.2% chance to make the playoffs. That was just last Wednesday after last Wednesday's games. And the Brewers at that time were less than 50% shots to make it. And now, of course, the Cubs seem just about done and the Brewers are just about assured. They're actually tied for the first wildcard now with the Nationals, which is really pretty incredible reversal of fortunes.

Yeah, 17 days ago, the Brewers were at 5.6% playoff odds and they're now at 97. And then they lost Christian Jelic after that. So they've still been outscored on the season, but with Jelic gone. So they haven't had an off day in like almost three weeks, more than two weeks. I think they've gone 15-3 since their last off day. They've gone 10-2 since they lost Christian Jelic for the season. And during that span that they've been without Jelic, his primary replacement, Trent Grisham, has about a 140 WRC plus and has been worth about half a win above replacement,

which is not too different from what you would have forecasted Christian Jelic to be worth over that period. And yeah, it's not often that you see this felt like a playoff series. There's still another series with the Cardinals and the Cubs next weekend that seemed like it might actually matter. And perhaps it still will. But at this point, it seems like that was pretty much a death blow to lose six in a row at that time. Four of them coming against the Cardinals while the Brewers just keep winning and winning. And as you said, to do it just barely every time. They've lost five games in a row that were all one-run losses. And then the one before that was a two-run loss, which normally you might say, well, luck went against them. There's a lot

of chance at play there, and I'm sure there still was. But also there was Craig Kimbrell continuing to do his utmost to negatively impact the Cubs season. And I guess part of the reason that Hugh Darvish was in the top of the first inning. There was nobody on. And so the Brewers' chances of winning that game were at 46% going into that plate appearance. And they won that game. I just feel like we should say they're 11-2 since they lost. They played pretty much that whole game without him. Right, exactly. They played pretty much the whole game. It had barely started, and they did not already have an advantage.

So 11-2. I'm going with that. So yeah, there's a lot of things to talk about in this series, different ways that you can converse about it. But yeah, one of them is Craig Kimbrell. I'm sure you saw this, but this is also, I would say, in contention for defining fun fact of 2019, which is that Craig Kimbrell has set a career high for home runs allowed in a season. Yeah.

Here's another way of putting it. He allowed nine home runs in his first 240 innings as a brave, and he has allowed nine home runs in his first 20 innings as a cub. It's not even that he's set a career high for home runs. He is actually two ahead of his previous career high in home runs. And so with Kimbrell, this is off topic for the Cubs generally, but it seems like a big question. It almost feels like the other 29 owners are just like giddy seeing what has happened with Craig Kimbrell. Because think of the pressure this puts on players now. If you can establish a narrative, whether with evidence or without, but if you can establish a

good, strong public narrative that players who sign late aren't very good, then teams aren't going to want to sign players who hold out. And then it becomes even harder for them to get paid when they're trying to use their leverage in the offseason and it really feels like this kimbrough thing is just something we're going to be hearing about for years now like that craig kimbrough is going to because you already had the alex cobb and the lance lynn conversation coming out of the previous offseason where not only did they both start really slow, but I think they talked about how bad or how to at least one of them talked about how tough it was to get going, which is probably not a great thing to be talking about. But you

know, you can understand why you'd want to say it when you have an era of seven. But now it just feels like next year, there's going to be some player who is not able to get a contract. He thinks he merits and he's going to think, well, I'll just I could always wait until, you know, pass the draft pick compensation date and and then sign a prorated contract. But the Craig Kimbrell thing is just going to make it seemingly so hard to think that a team is going to want to get in. So I don't know. I think that it's, I don't know how much that we should assume that Craig Kimbrell's season has to do with that. I mean, it is obviously, it's a horrifying season so far.

There's some of it that falls into the Edwin Diaz thing where it's mostly, you know, just a, it's nine home runs. It's basically nine swings of the bat. He's still striking a lot of batters out i think there's another big part of it which is that he looked pretty bad last postseason he didn't just look shaky like he looked not good um and so a lot of the control stuff that's going on here really it looks like a continuation of what was going on in october but i just really wonder how much how many times i'm going to hear craig kimbrough's name this offseason basically and i'm getting it out of the way we're we're saying it now and uh i'm going to try not to keep talking

about it um but i'm curious to see how much he is held up as precedent when the offseason comes along versus how much you Keuchel could be. Which, I mean, Keuchel is a player who also signed late, also had missed the first three months, joined a contending team, and has been not only very good, but basically exactly how he always is. There's nothing about Dallas Keuchel that would make you think, ah, this was an anomalous offseason for him, and it sure shows. And that could have been A really big thing like that

If you think It's very easy to imagine that next year there's that Guy waiting around and someone goes Well remember what Dallas Keuchel did for the Atlanta rotation I mean so important And then it would be like Totally opposite precedent But I just think that Kimbrell is going to be the one

That everybody remembers I think so too unless I mean we'll see if Dallas Keuchel has some huge postseason start, then maybe we'll remember Dallas Keuchel's season as a success more than we remember Kimbrel's as a failure. But I think the more spectacular nature of Kimbrel's failure and the way that it has tied into the Cubs collapse here over the past week. We'll probably make it stick in our minds more than Keichel's just sort of steady, low level of success, moderate level of success will. The Braves probably would have made the playoffs without Dallas Keichel.

There are a number of teams out there that probably wish that they had signed Dallas Keichel or would have been very happy to have his production for them over the past few months, but it didn't necessarily turn out to be make or break the way that Kimbrell seems to have turned out to be break. And yeah, I have no idea whether it was the layoff that caused this or contributed to this. Obviously, part of the reason why he had that long layoff, I think, is that there were already some doubts and concerns about him based on his struggles in October last year, based on his control issues last year and also in 2016. And just the perception that closers don't last a long time and who knows what kind of contract he was demanding. Certainly the numbers that were rumored and bandied about were very large. So that is probably part of it. So you have a guy who teams are already wary of signing for

whatever reason, and then he asks her a lot, and then he sits out half the season, and maybe it's hard for guys to come back for that. We've got two data points, and one of them was good and one of them was bad. So there's not a whole lot you can conclude from that. But yes got two data points and one of them was good and one of them was bad. So there's not a whole lot you can conclude from that. But yes, I could certainly see a narrative arising around that. I used to talk about this a lot when we were writing transaction analyses, but it always blew my mind how we would discuss whether a deal was a good deal based on whether we thought he was going to be like a three win player or a 3.5 win player. And then they always like, you know, they sign and some of them that that person that you were trying to figure out three or 3.5 ends up being a seven win player like Adrian Beltre, or he ends

up becoming like not just replacement level, but the reason you missed the playoffs or the reason that, you know, like he's Josh Hamilton or whatever. And the range of outcomes is just so much wider than our vocabulary for analyzing transactions could possibly possibly forecast. I mean, the Cubs, it is crazy to think this, but they made the move that was just seemed so obvious. It had seemed obvious for months. It seemed obvious for teams that had not signed him. so obvious. It had seemed obvious for months. It seemed obvious for teams that had not signed him. They went out and they got the good player and the good player is the, you know, the reason that they lost a bunch of these games. Now you mentioned that it is probably likely that Darvish was left in to the ninth inning because Kimbrell had been shaky and shaky, so much worse than shaky. But I actually wondered about that i wondered uh how odd it was

to it felt so obviously we don't see many complete games and darvish had only thrown i think 98 pitches or something like that going into the ninth so he had the arm still in him but it felt so unusual to see a pitcher pitching in the ninth inning not just in the ninth inning but in the ninth inning of a close game and so i wondered whether complete games in one run games have gone down more or less than complete games overall. And so to answer the question, they have gone down a lot more. So complete games this year are about 35% of what they were in 2010 through 2012. about 35% of what they were in 2010 through 2012.

Complete games in one run games, which have always been rare, but they are now extremely rare. They are at 6% of what they were in the first three years of this decade. Now, I will tell you, if Darvish had completed it, they would have been at 13% because there's only been one and Darvish would have been the second so there's one this year it was by jimmy nelson brewers of the most likely playoff bound brewers there were three last year there was one the year before before that there were about 13 to 13 or so a year with some fluctuation so yeah yeah it felt really weird to see a pitcher not just i it wasn't so much that darvish was allowed to throw the pitches he had he had the pitches it was just that yeah

you very rarely see a pitcher left that late when one swing can change the outcome right and madden said that kimbrough was unavailable i i don't know exactly whether he was physically incapable of pitching or whether well they had just decided that he wasn't going to pitch. He had the elbow inflammation earlier this month, and so I'm sure they wouldn't want to work him too hard if they could avoid it. He pitched on Thursday. He took the loss on Thursday. He took the loss on Saturday. He did not pitch on Friday.

He did not pitch on Friday. So if he were like lights out bullpen monster Craig Kimbrell of a few years ago, then this is the sort of situation where maybe you do push a guy and you want your dominant bullpen monster out there. Whereas when Craig Kimbrell is pitching as he is now, then you can say that he was just unavailable because, you know he you don't really want him there anyway yeah there was i saw some people saying that it looked as though he'd been rushed back just from his results it's hard it's always hard to know about that his velocity is normal but i mean if you just look at what the cubs did with not just javi baez pinch hitting

uh when he he's not able to play but he was used as a pinch hitter. But but also Rizzo. I mean, Rizzo was really extraordinary to watch this weekend. So he went seven for 14. It was like the sort of performance that if the Cubs had won four games by one run, Rizzo might have like gotten a statue the very next day. I mean, it was really incredible to watch because he could not run at all and such that it was at times a real liability. There was a play that he fielded a bunt and like, just like they just let Jack Flaherty get a bunt hit because Rizzo couldn't couldn't really run after it.

And so he just sort of like jogged after it. You don't very often see a pitcher get a punt hit in a sacrifice situation he was very station to station and uh you just get the feeling that like it's not just that if this weren't the playoff that you know the final push he wouldn't be playing you get the feeling that if this weren't the final push he would have been maybe two or three weeks away from playing like he was he was running like you know eight man softball and you're the eighth i mean not a 10 10 players off but this is a bad i botched it never mind forget it just i said some words you get it okay all right so kimbrough rizzo darvish There's the, okay, so the, oh, we didn't even,

I didn't even mention this in the game three recap, but that was the game where Tony Kemp was struck out with a runner on and a balk was called on the pitch and then he homered. He homered after a balk was called on strike three. That is crazy i was trying to think of i was trying to think of even a theoretical turnaround that could be that unexpected in baseball like most things that happen in baseball you know they're unlikely but they could happen like you know that they're in the realm of like you know a player hitting a grand slam down by three in the ninth inning is unexpected it's dramatic it's it's fantastic but like you you dream about that you're thinking like what

is possible here in this age situation what is possible and there are a certain number of times in baseball where you're watching a game and uh the team that you really want to win loses and it's the final out or, or something. And, and there's just this brief, tiny little brief microsecond where your brain's like, is there anything, could there be anything, could anything possibly like, could they challenge, could, could somebody have run out on the field? Like what? And it just, it, it's, it's not there, you know, when the game's over, the game's over when the out is made the out is made and in this case you're not even thinking for a second that like well maybe there was a bot call like what could there be there's catcher's interference sometimes works that way and so that's probably the closest thing that you can be but the thing about the catcher's

interference is that you can actually say that plausibly that the catcher's interference affected the play that like if a player strikes out and then the umpire's catcher's interference that's very dramatic for you because you didn't hear or see the catcher's interference you weren't thinking about it but he might not have struck out if he had not had his bat interfered with by the catcher. But in this case, almost certainly the balk had no effect on Tony Kemp. He just completely struck out and then got another life. He just got another life. And I could not really think of anything other than a truly egregious umpire missed call that would compare to such a thing.

Yeah, there was also a strange homer which game was it but the the marcel azuna to run homer i didn't see that one okay that one was i mean you if you look up the the highlight i have it here it's he looks like he's completely off balance the pitch is way below the strike, and it looks like he's just kind of popping up to the opposite field almost, and it got out. And I don't know whether this was a case of juiced ball or whether it was juiced ball plus wind blowing out. Not sure what the wind was doing. Yeah, it was crazy wind day. Yeah, okay. So it was the seventh inning, though, and the Cardinals were down. Oh, my God. Yeah.

It was the seventh inning, and the Cardinals were down by a run. This was the Saturday game. So, I mean, that was obviously a very big pivotal blow, and it didn't look at all like a homer. So maybe it's just— Wow! Have you freeze-framed this? Well, no. I've seen the pitch plot and looking at how far the dot is below the strike zone, very far below. But yeah, when he made contact, you would never guess unless you've been so conditioned by what a home run looks like in Wrigley with a juice ball and the wind blowing out.

Otherwise, you'd just never guess. He looks like a man digging a grave in the freeze frame. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. So that's an example maybe of you look at one-run losses, and that's a huge two-run homer that swings one of those games. And under most circumstances, a ball thrown there and hit in that way is not going to

go out, but it did that day marcelo zuna i don't know there haven't been as many two years ago there there was a there was that spate of players that i wrote about and other people talked about who were really terrible and had a lot of home runs and there hasn't been that this year but there are a lot of people who have a lot of home runs and then you look at their numbers and they're very, they're very blah. Yeah. And I was, I had come into this series. I mean, a lot of things changed in this series.

The Cubs went from a playoff contender to, you know, basically out of it. And I went from thinking Marcelo Zuna was having a really good year to not thinking that. Anyway, that's a crazy swing. All right all right well let's talk about the cubs they win the world series in 2016 and i think that clearly like everything that i'm gonna now talk about with like the you know is it worth it to tank and all that in the cubs calculus no doubt about it right yeah like nobody has like maybe literally nobody has ever gotten more out of a World Series than the Cubs did and needed that more. And so, however, I want to look at the Cubs trajectory since then, because at the time,

I think what it was like, basically, it was a seven year window is what they were talking about. The idea was that they were building a team that had all this great young talent, and they knew that eventually the young talent would get expensive, would depart, would get old. There'd be some entropy, and the whole plan would start to fall apart. But there was talk about it being a seven-year window of competition. And so, yes, they were terrible for three years, but not only were they going to win the World Series, but they were going to have seven years of being really good and um so they they

were really good one year and then they won the world series the next year and they were elite they were fantastic 103 win team can't you know they were the best team in baseball by far and then the next year they uh lost in the nlcs and then the next year they lost in the wild card game now i'm cheating a little bit they won more games in that second year but they lost in the wildcard game now i'm cheating a little bit they won more games in that second year but they lost in the wildcard game and then this year they're going to miss the playoffs and so the caveat here that being totally honest about all this is that the cubs have been good this year like if you look at their run differential they've been as good this year as they were the previous two years if you look at their third order winning percentage which is essentially what a projection system projects projection

systems are projecting the stats which they then turn into a third order winning percentage which they then turn into wins and so a projection system is really projecting a third order winning percentage and the cubs third order winning percentage is pretty good it's the it's the winning percentage of like a well it's a 90 win team and they're going to end up winning like 85 and so the third order winning percentage isn't quite as good but still it's a good team it's a good enough team to make the playoffs a lot of times so i don't know that um i don't know whether the conversation to have is about how successful these Cubs have been and how, in fact, their window has stayed open a whole long time, or if it should be to talk about how disappointing they are right now, specifically right now, how disappointing this year is,

and how one wonders whether the window is actually closing and what we can learn from that. Again, for the Cubs specifically, in the specific instance that we're talking about. No doubt about it. It was a good result that they got out of this project. They're happy with it, and they don't need me to tell them whether it was worthwhile or not. But I've been thinking about this with regards to the Phillies too, who coming out of 2017 when the Astros were so good and the Cubs had been so good, it felt like turning three years of tanking into a dominant team was inevitable, especially if you had the resources to be a big market team afterward. And the Phillies, unlike the Cubs, have not been good this year.

They have not even been sneaky good. The Phillies actually have a pretty mediocre team. They don't really have any strength anywhere and this is supposed I think if you like kind of do the calendar and you say well we're really bad now and then we'll do the bridge year and then we'll be good and this is that year this is the year they're supposed to be good they've they've went out and they got a bunch of stars who were supposed to be the final pieces. And they just don't have them. They just don't have the base coming out of that rebuild to be very good. And obviously very different than the Cubs who won the World Series and have had a five-year window. But do you think that from the Cubs experience, one, and from the Phillies experience two does it have you rethinking the level of of risk involved

in embarking on this plan you could also maybe throw the White Sox in there you definitely could yeah oh man yeah you know there are players on that team who are considered essential to the rebuild who have had big years and have had big breakthroughs obviously giolito and and others but i think on the whole you would have to say that the progress there is disappointing and that they are not clearly say a year away at this point the way that you would have expected them to be at this point as good as giolito has been as good as moncada has been well menez has been somewhat better in the second half but still they seem to be a long way away and yeah i think you could say that the concept of tanking has taken a bit of a hit you could also i guess throw

the braves in there though as a counterpoint because they kind of tanked. They tanked perhaps prematurely, even more so than in the Cubs in the Astros case, where they were pretty ripe for a teardown. They didn't have a whole lot left. There wasn't a lot of hope and outstanding talent there, whereas in the Braves case, they kind of pulled the plug arguably before they had to, but they also got back to being a good team and a division winner pretty quickly without too much suffering in between. So I think, yeah, it's certainly not too soon to say that tanking isn't a guarantee of anything. I think the fact that the Astros and the Cubs were kind of the first to do it, the Cubs, I guess, started before the Astros, but the Astros took it to an

even greater extreme, perhaps an unprecedented one. I think the fact that those two teams did that and embarked on that in such an intentional way that we could see what they were doing and trying to do, and we could grade how well it worked, and then it worked as well as it possibly could have in the short term, and that they both both won world series and yet it has turned out that the astros were maybe the team that was built to last more than the cubs although really the cubs have lasted pretty well yeah so i just want to be clear that so the phillies and the cubs i bring up as as two totally different examples with the phillies it is was I underestimating the risk that the thing just doesn't work, that you end up going through it and then you sign your guys,

you trade for your guys, and then you're still actually not that good. And you are, you know, still going to, you know, bounce between 80 and 90 for a couple of years and not reach that point with the Cubs.

It's different. Like the Cubs, 103 games. They were awesome. With them, it's more is the length that you can keep it together shorter than we were anticipating. Because the Cubs at the time were not only

were they really good when they won 103 games, but they were really young. They had a really good farm system. And it just felt like they had so many stars that were like young 23 year old position players. It felt like they were building some sort of unstoppable dynasty at the time. And just a year later, it no longer seemed that way. And so with the Phillies, it's clear, like, oh, wow, this is kind of like worrisome. With the Cubs, I'm not even sure if I accept the premise

that they have not done exactly what they said. I mean, I can't decide whether this is a good team or not right now, whether this is a team that is disappointing because of how the year went, but not disappointing because of the way they've played, you know? Like, are they the favorite next year, do you think? If I had to guess today, probably. Yeah, I think so too, maybe. And so I don't even, I think that like with the Cubs,

I'm sort of just trying to puzzle through whether they are proof of concept or a small warning about how hard it's going to be, just how much harder it's going to be than you think it is. Yeah. Well, I think they're seen as disappointing just because everything went so well for them in 2016, and it seemed like they were set up for so long. And to get only two division titles out of this, if this is all they get, if it doesn't continue beyond that, I think that would be seen as somewhat disappointing. Again, stipulating that

none of this is really disappointing because once they win that World Series, it was almost mission accomplished. And you may get greedy and want more, but that was a huge win for them as an organization that everything else is not really excused judging by what I've heard from Cubs fans, but at least, you know, it puts it in perspective, I think. So if it were just losing in the playoffs, that would be one thing, because I think we all understand that that can be random. But not winning divisions, especially at a time when the division isn't really full of powerhouse teams, that's probably more of a letdown. Even so, I don't think that they are really an argument against tanking. It's something that we started saying once it became clear that tanking was going to be a trend or at least a kind of Astros-Cubs-style rebuild was going to be something other teams would try to do.

We all said at that point, well, it can't go as well as it went for the Cubs and the Astros every time. as it went for the Cubs and the Astros every time. Not everyone is going to come out the other side of this thing and win a World Series because that's just impossible if a third of the league is trying to do this. They can't all win, and they can't all win right away. So I think it is a reminder of that, certainly. And you look at the whole way that they put this team together, and they built it around position players,

and they drafted hitters and those draft picks worked out and I don't think that they were wrong to construct their team that way it's something that we all said like well if you're going to bet on position players or pitchers you want to bet on the position players so this is smart this is how they're constructing their team

and then it turned out that they developed no pitchers at all and you do still need some pitchers. Granted, they developed Hendrix and Arrieta. They turned those guys into Cy Young winners or Cy Young contenders's just yielded almost nothing. And so they have had to supplement. They've had to go outside and sign a lot of more high-priced pitchers and go get Hamels and Darvish and Kimbrell and Lester and on and on. And some of those guys have been disasters and some of them have been just okay and some of them have been pretty good. But on the whole, they have really suffered from not having that pitching. And they've traded a lot of guys, obviously, to get that pitching. I mean, they've made trades for Aroldis Chapman and Jose Quintana, and they've given up very good players and good prospects

who have gone on to success elsewhere. And on the other hand, you have the Braves who kind of built around pitching, or at least they intended to build around pitching, and yet then they ended up with Asiabes and Acuna and like a really good position player core, even though they sort of really set out to make that a pitching-centric team. So I don't know. I think probably the lesson, as it often is,

is that it's really hard to predict these things. But I wouldn't say based on the Cubs that, oh, they made a mistake, they shouldn't have built around position players or they shouldn't have rebuilt the way that they rebuilt or other teams should be wary of doing things the way the Cubs did them. Maybe once you start looking at the Phillies and you start looking at the White Sox, and who knows, we'll see these other teams that are rebuilding. I mean, you know, are the Padres in trouble because they made no progress this year,

at least record wise. And now they have fired Andy Green and, you know, maybe it means nothing. Maybe they all gel next year and they turn out to be as great as we all expected when we saw that incredible farm system, but maybe they hit a wall and start to stagnate too, and maybe other teams do. And then on the other hand, you have all these contenders and winning teams right now who never did the tank, never did the really drastic rebuild, right? You have the A's, you have the Brewers, you have these teams that never really bottomed out and are still pretty good. And then you have other teams that, I don't know, they don't even fit into either of those categories, really. I guess you could put

the Diamondbacks, even though they're not a playoff team, you could lump them in with teams that are pretty good and seem to have turned over their roster without getting terrible. But then you have the Cardinals who are just pretty good every year, and you have the Dodgers who are great every year, and you have the Yankees who never bottomed out, but they're the Yankees, so different rules apply to them. And I don't know, you look around this whole playoff field and there isn't really one type of way to win it seems like there are a whole bunch of them which maybe is what we should have expected maybe we got caught up too much in the whole you have to tank to win thing because clearly you don't i just while you were speaking i was

listening too i really was that time um and i i'm going to prove it by responding to the last thing you said, but while you were doing that, I, uh, I just looked at the ERAs this year for the 11 relievers that the Cubs have most used and their ERAs last year. And if you were, well, the correlation from one year to the next for those 11 is negative 0.6. for those 11 is negative.6 so if you were to have predicted these pitchers if you were to have ranked these

11 relievers before the season you probably would have gotten it almost exactly wrong you would have gotten Steve Ciszek in the right place and that's it that's it every single other good one was bad and every other bad one was good.

And, you know, probably the, well, oh, man. Did you, have you ever looked at Pedro Stroop's ERAs? They have bounced around. No, no, the opposite. So you're right. He had, so in 2013, he had a 7.25 ERA with the Orioles. Okay. And then they got rid of him then he uh then he went to the

cubs in the arietta trade right yes okay so i'm going just to cheat a little i'm going to remove those 22 innings from baltimore and i'm only going to call i'm only going to count the 35 inning seat through with chicago that year okay okay Okay. These are his ERAs since his first, you know, semi-full year. 2.05, 2.44, 2.83, 2.21, 2.91, 2.85, 2.83, 2.26, 5.08. Okay. And that's the cup season and so the cardinals you mentioned the cardinals is one of the teams that's really good and did not follow the team and the cardinals in their last what in their last three years they averaged like 86 wins a year right and they they just because of the way those 86 wins fell they didn't make the playoffs any of those three years and it would have been perfectly plausible that with the exact same quality of team the same number of total wins that they made the

playoffs one or two of those years very easy to say well you move two here to this year or you move three from this year to this year and they make the playoffs at least once and then that's a different story about the cardinals coming into this year where we're probably not. I don't know. I don't even know if they need to get Goldschmidt, for instance, if they had made the playoffs one of those years. But because they didn't make the playoffs, instead of seeing them as a good team that was that, you know, just because of the fluke of how the winds even out or just because they came up a little short in a year where they couldn't come up that little bit short, they had a pretty frustrating three-year run.

And it might just be worth remembering that with the Cubs, both this year and to some degree last year. I mean, I, in my mind, still think of the Cubs last year as being more of a failure than it was by overall quality. I mean, if you ask me how many games did the Cubs win last year, I don't I wouldn't have thought it was 95. You know, I wouldn't have thought that they were in position to get home field advantage throughout the postseason if they had just won the wildcard game or not the wildcard game the 100 and game 163 and so we put a lot of emphasis on these final two weeks of a season and who can go from six percent playoff odds to 70 to 97 in 17 days and who goes from 77 to 2 in six games because that's

really important that's what we're playing for. And as far as determining whether the season was a success, that's, that's right. That's, that's how we do this. But in terms of determining how, how good the team is, we probably over-remember some of those things. And I'm definitely guilty of over-remembering the Cubs losing one game, I guess, technically maybe two two because they lost the wildcard game too, and getting bounced really quickly. And I'm really in danger of over-remembering this year as being the year that the Cubs were bad when they are not bad. They have not been bad. They've been actually very good as a team, just not winning. Yeah. Well, there are teams that are hard to characterize. Like what are the Nationals? The Nationals haven't had a losing season since 2011. And in 2011, they were 80 and 81. This is a long, sustained stretch of success, except with the Nationals, you remember the early playoff exits and the times they didn't make the playoffs and I don't know did they have a plan what was the Nationals like signature way to build a team it was like have number one picks the years that Bryce Harper and

Steven Strasburg were available in the draft and then I don't know get other good players but they didn't like tank in the way that these other teams tanked or or what are the twins the twins just got good again are they a team that tanked i don't know they won 59 games in 2016 and then they won they were like a surprise team they made a wild card game in 2017 and then they went backward last season and then they got good again this year and we're sort of like the big surprise team of this year what's their one thing if you had to boil it down to a few words it's hard to reduce some of these teams to that or the rays the rays never got terrible right there was a period where we thought that maybe they'd lost their mojo a little bit they'd lost andrew friedman and madden and

they'd had changes and it seemed like maybe the league had caught up to them in terms of finding inefficiencies and that sort of thing. But then the Rays got good again, and they continued to do innovative things with their pitching staff, and they continued to make smart moves. And they've been really about as good as the Yankees this year. If you look at the underlying numbers, they've perhaps been even better. So it's kind of hard when you look at this playoff field, which is maybe a good

thing that we've all been wringing our hands about the tanking and do you have to tank to compete? And really more teams than not that are going to make the playoffs this year didn't really do it that way. So there's still diversity when it comes to team building. And then you have teams like the Dodgers that just seem to have mastered everything. And not only do they have advantages when it comes to their market and their payroll, but they are also smart and seem to do a great job at player development. And we were maybe more forward thinking in that respect than the Cubs were. And the Cubs are kind of catching up. So it's kind of hard to reduce these things to a very simple narrative if you had to say this is the way to win in baseball

right now. Do you think that a team would be more reluctant to tank if it meant losing 115 games as opposed to 100 like like rob arthur just wrote a piece of baseball perspectives about how there's a competitive balance problem at major league baseball right now or at least a growing competitive balance gap because the gap between the best teams and the worst teams is is higher than it's ever been and we all know this we all know that there's both more super teams this year than there have ever been more like 100 and 405 win teams than there have ever been in a year and there could end up being more hundred win teams than there have ever been in a year and that there could end up being more hundred lost teams and more hundred and 405 lost teams than there have ever

been and the tigers for instance they go into their rebuild, they go into their we're going to be bad period. And if this were four or five years ago, that might look like, well, we're going to lose 96 to 102 games every year. Like other than the Astros, nobody else was really losing that many games at that point. Like even the Cubs only lost 100 one time, they lost 101. There's going to be four teams that lose 101 this year. And three of them are going to lose like high, like maybe 105, 106, 107, 112. So to get back to my question, is it less appealing when you think, oh, we're going to go into this three year rebuild, we're going to lose 98 a year, it's going to be ugly and no fun. And then we're going to come out of it oh, we're going to go into this three-year rebuild. We're going to lose 98 a year. It's going to be ugly and no fun.

And then we're going to come out of it good versus we're going to go into this three-year rebuild. We're going to go 45 and 117. And I mean, seriously, the Tigers could go 45 and 117. And I don't think they were expecting to. The Orioles have already lost 105. So they're going to lose 110 this year, probably. The Tigers have lost 109. so they're going to lose 110 this year, probably. The Tigers have lost 109, so they're going to lose 110. 110 losses is not a small thing.

The Royals have managed to get off easy this year. They've only lost 99, so they're going to end up at about 103, 104. But didn't last year, didn't they lose like 108? What did they lose last year? but didn't last year didn't they lose like 108 what did they lose last year they lost 104 last year uh while the orioles lost 115 which is like what like the third or fourth worst season of all time and the marlins this year have already lost 101 and so they're going to end up losing 104 105 does that does does that have an incentive at all attached to it? Or do you think that once you say last place, last place is last place, and they're just able to compartmentalize these losses?

I think it's still something that would dissuade you. I don't know whether it would stop you. The teams that you're talking about, I guess with the exception of the Marlins, but like the Royals and the Orioles and the Tigers, those are not teams really that set out to say, OK, we're rebuilding now. We're going to do this very purposeful rebuild and we're going to be bad for a while and then we'll get good. I guess at a certain point they did, but like the Royals never say that. And the Orioles and the Tigers just kind of tried to stretch their run out as long as they could. And if they had maybe earlier said, we're going to get a jump on this thing and get a head start and try to turn this around, then maybe they wouldn't have bottomed out to quite this extent. Or maybe they would have, but it would have been over by now or they would have been further through this process.

have been further through this process. So yes, I think if you told a team that you'd lose 110 games if you go through with this as opposed to 110, I think people still don't like losing. It's still less fun to be around the ballpark. It's less fun to have random encounters with fans of that team around the city, probably less enjoyable conversations with ownership and with the media. It's embarrassing, I think, and you sort of suck it up because you think it's smart in the long term or it will benefit you, but it's still sort of a stain on that team and on your reputation, I guess, unless you turn it around and build an absolute juggernaut on the other side of it, in which case no one really holds it against you at that point.

All right. So the NL Central, is it done? Are you done watching these games? Is it now only the AL wildcard? It seems that way. And if we had had to have this decisive blow with one team kind of claiming victory, I wish they had waited until the last weekend because it would have been fun

if this Cardinals-Cubs confrontation had meant something, had meant what it might have meant in that final weekend of the season, which now it doesn't look like it will. And so, yeah, I think you'd probably have to say that the wildcard race, which is pretty good right now,

I mean, unless you care about who's going to have home field throughout the playoffs, best record in the league, that's still out there, or who's going to win wildcard one as opposed to wildcard two in the NL, that's still in play. But when it comes to, is a team going to make the playoffs or is it going to go home? That seems like it's pretty much down to Tampa Bay and Cleveland right now. And I guess Oakland still sort of in play there too. I was going to ask you, do you feel like 97% for Oakland is about right? Or do you think it's a little more perilous than that?

Yeah, 97 sounds a little high. They have a series against the Mariners and the Angels left. Well, that helps. Exactly. Exactly. And the Angels are not and the Angels left. Well, that helps. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And the Angels are not even the Angels anymore. So they, I mean, that's a huge, huge thing for them. They have two games on two teams.

So they would need to, if they win even with six games to go, if they win even two games of those six, then both teams would have to go four and two or better and one of the teams if one of them goes four and two then that team would also have to beat them in a in a one game head-to-head and so that's a lot of there's a lot of scenarios and the Rays next series is against the Yankees which is the opposite of the Angels. Now they've clinched so they're only playing for home field

and not really anything else at this point but they are playing for home field and honestly if I'm the Yankees I will say this because I'm not the Yankees so this is not me. I'm saying if I was the Yankees, then I would be different than me.

I would have different opinions than I have. But if I were the Yankees, I would actually really want to knock the Rays out and face the A's in the postseason instead of the Rays. I would not, being a Yankee, want to face a Rays team that has Snell and Glassnow and Morton and the great bullpen and that I've seen 19 times and probably just annoys me. So I would be really like very desperate, not desperate, I'd be very eager to beat the Rays a couple of times and just send them away. Also, you don't want your division rival to get playoff revenue. I guess that's true. Yeah. So, so I think the Yankees are going to be very motivated. And so now that I've told you, I've described this dynamic at play,

would you still say that 97% seems too high? Yeah, but not much. All right. And not only are all the playoff spots, otherwise, you know, pretty darn close to settle, but the closest division is now three games. So nobody's even really playing for division unless the Brewers and it's sort of a very desperate push, which don't put it past them, but we're able to overtake the Cardinals.

And so, yeah, what did they have? Actually, they have a 5% chance that these, these give the Brewers about twice as good a chance of... They give the Cardinals twice as good a chance of blowing the division as the A's do of missing the playoffs. All right. All right. super teams and truly terrible teams. Is it just as simple as there were some teams that tanked,

like the Astros tanked and it worked out for them, and then we're in this era where it's less imperative to be respectable because your revenue is pretty much assured. It's not as closely tied to wins and losses, and so teams are okay with being 50-win teams instead of 55 or 60-win teams? Is that the answer? Or is it just a random spooky thing? Or is it like the Dodgers and the Yan, hey, I noticed there are more teams winning 100X games than ever before and more teams losing 100X games than ever before. What's going on? Yeah, well, you know, two years ago, Cleveland had one of the all-time greatest third-order records Yeah. One of the greatest pitching staffs ever. And they don't fit any of these trends. And yet they were, I mean, at the time we talked about four super teams. And, you know, the Cubs, of course, came out of that 103 win season.

And they looked like they could be. I mean, they had super team kind of projections for a couple of years. So I guess I would say that more than anything, I think that it's on the low end. Yes, it's the social acceptability of losing that losing no longer counts as losing that teams have have reconciled themselves to losing doesn't count only winning counts. And so if you take 110 losses, it bears no stigma and it is somehow not a trial that you have to go through. It's just a stage you have to go through. And so I would say on the low end, it's that it's this that that sort of social or I don't know,

competitive aspect of not caring about losses anymore. On the higher end, I think that's a lot more complicated. And I think a lot of these teams, like you say, have different stories. And it's hard to know whether we're just seeing a somewhat flukish collection of three or four of them happening to exist at one time. But I think that it's a combination of money and adopting all of the, I think it's the rich teams are doing all the things that the poor teams were doing to keep up with the rich teams now. And that there just isn't, were doing to keep up with the rich teams now. And that there just isn't, there isn't really a great way to counter that.

There had, that nobody has found the way that you counter program, be smart and rich. Now, I don't think that can possibly be everything because Cleveland and Tampa and Oakland are all going to be within a couple of games of a bunch of really rich and smart teams. And ahead of some other rich and smart teams and ahead of some other rich and smart teams and Minnesota as well. I mean, Minnesota is like a mid-market team, but still. So I don't feel like I've caught the whole story by any means with that, but that's sort of what I think best explains the Dodgers and the Yankees into a little bit of a degree, the Astros. Okay. Yeah. And we should also mention that even though the Cubs have been successful in a lot of ways, it sounds like there's going to be a lot of change

there. It doesn't feel as if Theo Epstein feels like, yeah, we're doing a great job and things are going against us a little bit. I mean, there was the quote earlier this year where Epstein promised a reckoning, right? If things didn't turn around, there would be serious changes. And of course, Joe Maddon is in the last year of his contract. I know that Jason McLeod's responsibilities were recently reconfigured so that he's overseeing more day-to-day big league team things instead of draft and development things. And it sounds like there are other impending changes in that organization. So they are clearly not content to say, yeah, things are running smoothly and as they should. So things are going to change there. And we've

got a couple minutes until this recording runs out. Do you have any thoughts on the Andy Green firing or is that just kind of run of the mill? This is what happens with managers who are on teams with lousy records for a few years in a row. I always really liked Andy Green. I think he'll make a really good manager on another team. And I always tend to, anytime a team is losing and they fire somebody, I tend to not get too upset about it just because even if, you know, that person is good at his job and couldn't have done anything better with it, I think there's some value to simply like kind of announcing that you are a culture of

accountability and that when people fail, they, even if, you know, they tried their darndest, they, they don't necessarily keep their job. I, I, like I said, I like Andy Green. My guess is that there are about 75 managers that are available that I would like. So I don't think that there's a huge scarcity of quality managers right now. I think he'll get another job and I think he'll be really good. Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised at all. I know the second half of their season has been pretty lousy. It's been disappointing. This was a season where they

were supposed to take a step forward and they did at first and then it all kind of came tumbling down. And of course, Tatis got hurt and there were some other guys who were there early on that were not there later on. And a lot of the failures you could attribute to Eric Hosmer or Manny Machado having a disappointing season seems pretty tough to pin some of those things on green. disappointing season. Seems pretty tough to pin some of those things on green. But there were, I guess, questions about how the team was competing or the fundamentals or effort level and all of that. And so when you've been in that position that he was in, where he took over a terrible team that really had nothing good on the horizon, and then he stuck around it, it seems like just to the verge of them potentially getting good again and i guess they haven't really developed any breakout hitters so they've had successes on the pitching side but not so much on the offensive side i don't know it's it's the kind of thing where this happens often when someone is in that position takes over a rebuilding team a team that really doesn't have a lot going for it, and then loses a bunch of seasons in a row and then gets jettisoned for someone else who comes in and kind of reaps the rewards of that.

And it feels sort of unfair. I don't know whether they will go out and hire a name manager now, whether they'll go get Madden if he's available or joe gerardi or someone like that i guess bruce bocce is not interested but there is that perception that like you need a development manager to kind of be friendly to the kids and get everyone acclimated to the majors and then the team gets good and you bring in the win now manager who's been there before and can kind of whip everyone into shape and do the final things like the the Dombrowski equivalent who will come in and put on the finishing touches and take the team to the promised land and I tend to think that that idea is probably somewhat overrated like

there have to be some people who are good at both of those jobs but maybe yeah maybe you do need to just signal okay the time is here this is development's over and now we have to win and so we're bringing in the winning person maybe there's some benefit to that but i would assume that andy green will one day get a chance to manage a winning team and that he'll do just fine at that but maybe it can't be the team that you were with when it was at its low point. Maybe you just need someone who's sort of not associated with the dark days. Yeah. When I was at the Orange County Register, there was sort of a bit of conventional wisdom that if you wanted to get a promotion, you had to go somewhere else because anytime you got hired

as basically as an entry-level reporter, no matter how good you got at it they would never see you as anything other than the kid that that yeah that they remembered being you know bad and so you like had to go somewhere else and then like you could go somewhere else for like two months and they'd be like oh and see he's got this other job now and so i probably not it's probably not like that but yeah there i don't know maybe there is something about you know you don't there's something to be said for people not having seen you fail in their presence yeah and maybe that you haven't seen those players fail also and so someone comes in and sees like the finished product of that player instead of the guy who went through a bunch of growing pains. I don't know.

It's probably useful to have seen someone come up and to know that he has this potential to work hard and apply himself and get better. But also maybe you remember certain games where he did something that he would never do now. But you still think of him as that guy who made rookie mistakes, even though he's not the rookie anymore. So maybe it's see that happening at times where you just kind of remember the initial impression that a player made on you instead of what he is now. All right. So we will end there. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up, pled some small monthly amount

to help keep the podcast going and gotten themselves access to some perks, including a couple of live streams we will be doing for Patreon supporters during the playoffs next month. Sean Dundar, Andrew Maxim, Andy Oklak, Patrick Finley, and Sam Isaacs. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments for me and Sam and Meg coming via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. You can buy my book, The MVP Machine, How Baseball's New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players.

Your ratings and reviews for the book are appreciated too. We will be back with two more episodes later this week, so we will talk to you soon. Well, you set my life a-whirlin', darlin' when you're twirlin' on the floor

And who cares about tomorrow? What more is tomorrow than another day When you swept me away Yeah, you swept me away Yeah, you swept me away