Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1436: Reviewing the Regular Season

Episode Date: September 27, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Meg’s mental preparations for Félix Hernández’s probable last start as a Mariner, the dubious appeal of playing spoiler, the biggest hits of the season according to Championship Win Probability Added, Rowdy Tellez delivering on a promised home run, what Meg loves about baseball, both hosts’ experiences in the […]

I change key, but city to me, it's just a minor thing, yo. It owns everything. To be a just, you gotta trust that all the fuss is just a minor thing, yo. It owns everything. It's just a minor thing, and I'm a minor king. It's just a minor thing, and I'm a minor king reporting live from the desert and i am joined as always by ben lindbergh of the ringer ben how are you i am doing well how are you i'm preparing to feel some feelings we're recording this on thursday and felix is making his final start as a mariner and

i'm prepared to cry you never know you never know but i'm prepared to have some feelings about it yeah so you're at the arizona League, which I will ask you about. But what does that mean for your Felix viewing situation? How are you going to take in this game? Well, oddly enough, right before we started recording, it started raining here. You're sure you're in Arizona? Yeah, no kidding. Yeah, there's been some very dramatic weather.

I would feel bad about bringing rain to the desert, but everyone down here seems very appreciative to get the moisture, which I suppose is unsurprising. So I think that I will likely watch this game on my laptop in my Airbnb and resume Fall League action tomorrow evening so that I can finish writing a piece about it for Fangraphs tomorrow. So that's the plan. Maybe with a glass of wine, some sort of sedative just in case things get, I don't know what

things will get like. True to Seattle form, I, at the local natural food market here in Scatsdale, purchased a kind of high ABV IPA. Okay. So I will be having one of those i imagine yeah i guess you have to write so you probably have to keep it to one of those otherwise you could drown your sorrows yeah i think uh you know it's one of those things where they do say that sometimes writing tipsy is fine if you edit sober but since i end up doing the editing that's true i'm going

to need to safety net yeah no safety net. Yeah. Dylan Higgins can edit sober, but he'll be editing this podcast. Exactly. So I'll have to keep my wits about me and just ride the emotional wave. Well, I expected to talk to you after that start, and now we're talking before it instead. So I can't ask you how it went, but we will all be able to read about it after the fact. And I'm sure that you will describe your mental and emotional state there.

So I won't have you spoil it now and reflect on the whole career because that's probably what your post is going to be about. Yeah. All right. What are you hoping for? I mean, obviously, you're hoping for like some throwback, uplifting, prime Felix sort of start. But are you at least realistically hoping for just like a quality start does it even matter what the last start is really i just uh i just would prefer that it not be bad yeah i just would rather it not be bad it doesn't need to be you

know i'm pretty clear-eyed about where felix is I think when you start doing this professionally, it has a funny effect on your fandom, which is not a novel thought. But people have asked if you can maintain some kind of fandom and still be an objective baseball writer. And I think when you're a Mariners fan, it's really easy to do that because they're just bad. They're often just bad. And so you look at them and you're like, hey, this is a bad baseball team. I like them anyway. I like a lot of things that are suboptimal and this is one of them. But when it comes to Felix, you just hope that he, I don't know, you just want him to be able to walk out and like he's going to get a standing ovation no matter what, but you want it to feel like you should yeah right like uh

i would be happy with like a five inning you know two three run couple of strikeouts sort of deal i think that that's probably what the best case scenario looks like but who knows maybe we'll get something uh a little bit more special than that yeah as long as they get to put up a couple k's on the king's court at least, just you don't want to get shut out in that last start, which I guess that hasn't happened to him this year. As lousy as his season has been, he has not had a start with zero strikeouts. That's true.

It is funny that, and I meant to look this up before we started recording and then forgot to, but it is sort of funny that he is going against the A's. He's had such good luck against them as a franchise over the course of his career, and so there is something sort of poignant, I guess, about the final start, especially at home, coming against them. I was going to say, it's a game with playoff implications, not for Felix, but for the A's and Sean Mania, who's starting for them. And the next time he pitches will probably be in a wildcard game

if all goes well for the A's. So I guess this is the matchup the A's probably want at this point. The Mariners and Felix, not a bad way to end your season when you're trying to win every game, a four-game set against the Mariners. But yeah, there's something more at stake here than just the emotional stuff, although there's a lot of that too. So that will be sort of fascinating, and I hope for the best. By the time people are hearing this, they probably already know how it turned out. I do kind of think people talk about playing spoiler for teams in this situation, and I don't know whether that's something that would motivate Felix in this position at all.

I personally can't imagine myself really getting much happiness out of spoiling someone else's playoff run if I am already eliminated from the playoffs, which maybe is because I'm just not wired the way that baseball players are and I'm not competitive in quite the same way that they are. But to me, it feels like almost mean-spirited it's like well we we don't get to go so we're gonna stop you from going anyway and it's like unless you have some specific grudge against that team by hurting this one team you're only helping out another team it's not like you can prevent everyone from making the playoffs because if you don't get to be happy no one else does so it's sort of a zero seven game so that the whole idea of spoiler like unless there's maybe a natural rivalry involved like this weekend for instance that the Cubs of course are playing the Cardinals and maybe there's something at stake there even though the Cardinals just cleaned the club's clock and are now eliminated themselves. But that kind of thing, just even when I was a fan, I mean, when I was a fan, the Yankees won the World Series every year, so I never really had to think about

spoiler. But I think even in that situation, I just wouldn't really be motivated by the idea of ruining some other fan base's day. Yeah, it doesn't strike me as a particularly resonant experience either. I mean, I have been, you know, sort of deeply enthralled in like, you know, a rivalry and defeating that rival on your way to something. Like the Mariners offered not a ton of great examples of this.

Like, you know, it meant something to me even as a child to like have the Mariners defeat the Yankees in 95. Like that felt like an accomplishment, but it was an accomplishment, right? It was them advancing through the playoffs and doing what they needed to. It, you know, it just reads a little differently, but I don't know. Perhaps I'm in, you know, sitting here in what is now rainy arizona um removed from the moment i'm perhaps giving myself more credit for not indulging in pettiness than i deserve but

yeah i agree it's not quite it's not it's certainly not the same as uh as getting to defeat a rival for your own purposes in order to sort of you know further your own playoff aspirations for example yeah so we'll leave it at that, I guess. Well, the Mariners did have mercy on Zach Greinke, at least. It did not put him through the hassle of pitching a no-hitter against them. So that was nice. I enjoyed very much. I was sort of bouncing around between games last night

because obviously there were a number of them that had sort of important playoff implications. And so I came into that, like the inning that he gave up, you know, in the ninth when he gave up the no hitter. And there was on the Astros broadcast a replay that focused just on his face when the hit fell in. And it didn't change. His face didn't change. His face was completely the same from start to finish. It's like you don't know where in the highlight the hit actually fell.

And so he's just a delightful weirdo, and we should appreciate Cranky more. Yep. On record as not really wanting to throw a no-hitter. Just not worth the trouble. Not worth the hassle. What a guy. Yeah. Speaking of playoff implications, I was going to say that at this time of year,

I enjoy looking at Friend of the Show, Dan Hirsch's site, The Baseball Gauge, because he has a stat on there called championship win probability, which expresses in percentage points just how much a certain play or a certain player's contribution swung his team's chances of winning the World Series. Swung his team's chances of winning the World Series And at this time of year when you look late in the regular season When there are some pennant races You start seeing the highest championship win probability added figures Of the whole regular season appearing on those leaderboards And so for instance since we were speaking about the A's Their big home run that they got from Matt Chapman on Wednesday When they were down by a run against the Angels in the ninth inning and Chapman hit a two-run shot to give them the lead and ultimately the win.

That is the second biggest hit of the season or second biggest play of the season, according to Championship Win Probability Added. The only higher rated play thus far is Ryan Braun's Grand Slam on September 15th. Not to be confused with Ryan Braun's Grand Slam this week, which came in the game that the Brewers clinched their playoff spot. But the one on September 15th, which was in a similar situation to the Chapman-Homer, where I think it was like two outs in the ninth against the Cardinals. And it was the go-ahead shot, and the Brewers won a game that it looked like they were going to lose. The actual figures are not that high because this is, again, championship win probability added. It's your odds of winning a World Series, and obviously your odds go up quite a bit if you make the playoffs as opposed to not making the playoffs, but the odds

are still against you because there's a big playoff field. So these two plays that I just mentioned only added about one percentage point to their respective teams' odds of winning the World Series. But that's still a lot when you think of how inconsequential most plays in the regular season are. And this is obviously, you could look at it and say, well, every game counts the same and every win matters as much and that is true in a sense this is just looking at how much these plays swung the team's playoff odds at that moment so there may have been a big hit in the A's first week of the season or something that ultimately affected their place in the standings as much as Chapman's homer but in April you're not going to get a big swing in playoff probability from a single

game. Whereas now that we know what the odds are and we can look and just see with a few games left that this team has to win X number of games, et cetera, you can quantify that. And so I think that is obviously like analytically questionable, but it very much matches up with what a fan feels as you watch these games and these plays and what A's fans felt when Chapman hit that homer and what Brewers fans felt when Braun hit that homer. So I enjoy that. One of my favorite parts of the end of the regular season. The biggest championship win probability added hit of all time, I believe, is Hal Smith's three-run home run in Game 7 of the 1960 World Series. Everyone talks about the Bill Mazeroski home run in that same game.

That was the 10th biggest hit of all time. But the Hal Smith one had a championship win probability added of 63 percentage points that kind of put that game away. So that's about as big as it's ever going to get, obviously, in game seven of the World Series. So we're talking about small numbers right now, but still big relative to what's happened over the past six months or so. It's a nice time of year because, you know, once we get into October, everyone's watching the same games and that's always a a a nice feeling right because at any given time during the course of the regular season you have you know fans of well i don't know how many marlins fans are but like you have fans of all 30 teams and they're engaged in their own small you know local interests and then when we get to october everyone's watching the same stuff and this time

of year occupies this really nice in between where we all are kind of watching the same things but there are still more things than we can comfortably watch at any given time and so you still have the delight of you know getting an at-bat notification that something exciting has happened in the game that you happen to not be watching in that particular moment because you're paying attention to this other thing that matters a great deal and so i just i don't know i really like this time of year it just is it's thrilling in a way that is sort of a very nice in-between emotional register from the craziness of uh the postseason and sort of the ho-hum oh that guy did that thing four days ago i totally missed that of the regular season yeah Yeah. I wish Felix had gotten to be on the other side of that at some point in his career or

his time with the Mariners. And I don't think it tarnishes anyone's opinion of how great a pitcher he was in the way that, say, a team failing to make the playoffs, a team might win 90 games and miss the playoffs. And we won't even really remember that that team had a semi-successful season. With a player, certainly postseason success can elevate his reputation, but I don't know if never making the playoffs can really count as a strike against you. The only thing that's hurt Felix's a lot in the last couple of weeks, especially as teams have sort of solidified their playoff positions. Like when the Brewers secured their playoff spot, I'm like, oh, Ben Gamble's going to play in the postseason.

He's going to make that postseason roster. Ben Gamble. Ben Gamble will have playoff innings in the field. Felix has none on the mound. It's been a weird couple of weeks, man. It's been a couple of weeks of feelings. I can imagine. I look forward to reading all about it. So following up on our conversation from last week about the audacity of requesting home runs from players and players promising those home runs, much to my surprise, I went to MLB.com and happened to see this headline, Tellez honors young fans wish with two homer game rowdy tolez so i've i've read this story a couple times and it seems like there are some conflicting accounts in here from different sources and i can't quite figure out whether this was a request from a five-year-old boy here who had had some heart problems and he's

developed some sort of relationship with tolez and it's very nice and heartwarming that they have made that connection and i can't quite clarify whether the kid actually asked Tellez to hit a home run or two home runs or whether Tellez just promised him that he would just volunteered that information Tellez said I promised him three and I failed I assume he was kidding I'm not sure But what kind of nerve does it take either to request home runs from Rowdy Tellez or to be Rowdy Tellez and guarantee home runs? And then to deliver not just one but two? This story describes Tellez as a slugger, which I guess you can call him a slugger because he's hit 21 home runs in a partial season this year. Granted, everyone has. But you could call him a slugger

because he is kind of an all-or-nothing guy. Like, he's a below-league average hitter this season, despite all those dingers, but it seems like something that we've probably defined at some point in the show's history. But the point is, this is not Aaron Judge promising a home run. This is not Babe Ruth promising a home run. This is Rowdy Tellez.

I don't know how often Rowdy Tellez guarantees home runs, but this time at least he delivered and may have delivered double. So I don't get it, but it keeps happening. I am mostly shocked as I look at his player page at Fangraphs that he is not yet 25. Yeah, that too too that's shocking he is not yet 25 years old if you told me he was 40 i'd believe it and i don't mean that as a knock on rowdy like you know you're a professional baseball player you're doing better than i am but if someone said actually we've learned that he lied the whole time and he's 40, I'd be like, yeah, all right. That makes a certain amount of sense.

It suggests to me that the level of confidence required to be even a rowdy to less level baseball player is just so much greater than anything I will ever be able to achieve in my entire life. Because, yeah, that's an audacious promise i wonder if he felt a little bad about it after and then was very relieved or if he was just confident yeah i can't decide which is better confidence no never in my life never in my whole life anyway did not expect to see that that would be the guy who would be the next home run guarantor who would actually deliver. So that's something. Yeah, good for him. He actually says in the story, I guess

he was asked about reaching the milestone of hitting 20 home runs. And he says, hitting 20 is special. And I was thinking, is it? Is it really, Rowdy? Is it special anymore when you hit 20? Because as we speak, 128 guys have hit 20 this year. And by the time people listen to this, it may be more.

So it's a lot less special than it used to be. But on the other hand, it is pretty special to be in the big leagues at all and to hit even a single homer and to hit 20 in a single season. It is pretty special in the grand scheme of things less special in a relative sense than it once was but it's still up there yeah it's still a an accomplishment right it's a thing that you can like that's the thing you you tell people when you go to your high school reunion like you're like i not only was i a big leaguer like that one year i had 21 dingers yeah two of them of them. I promised a kid. Yeah.

People are going to look at you and be like, wow, Rowdy. He really made something of himself. That Rowdy worked out for him. Yep. What a great name. What a, what a, just, it's just an 80 name. Yeah. Maybe not his given name.

I don't know. I don't want to investigate it. I just would prefer that his, he was born and his mother looked upon him and said,dy seems right i just looked it up and i really regret it no okay not nearly as much character ryan john oh no yeah it's terrible no well i'm glad he went with rowdy good job so am i yeah so last time sam and i spoke about what we love about baseball and i regretted that you were not there to give your own two cents about that so i know you listened to it i don't know if you want to echo or add to anything we said you have your own reasons which may overlap with ours but perhaps not i liked very much what you had to say about, well, I liked

parts. I liked all of your, both of your answers, but there were, there were parts of both of your answers that really struck a chord with me. I agree with Sam that the, the ability of baseball to sort of elevate otherwise sort of pedestrian moments just by virtue of its presence and sort of routine is really lovely. You know, I also listen to like games on the radio and I'm, you know, taking care of the garden or whatever. And the sort of accessible inquiry that we have into baseball where we are able to ask kind of tricky questions, but generally arrive at answers or parts of answers i think is a big part of it i mean for me i think that baseball is one of the

rare sort of pursuits where you get to marry rigor and whimsy in the same thing right it lends itself well to both and I think benefits from having both things sort of in equal measure, right? Because if it's all whimsy, it can get a little saccharine. And if it's all rigor, it can get a bit dull. And if it's both things, it's really quite special because you get to experience such a range of not only emotions, but sort of intellectual pursuits while you're engaged with this thing. And I think because of that, it helps us to, I don't know, like you said, understand other things about ourselves in the world beyond baseball, right? It gives a very

easy and accessible way to grapple with serious questions, but also to step back from them when you need to and enjoy yourself. And I think that this is, you know, this isn't something that's unique to baseball writers. The intensity of it is perhaps a little bit different than it is just for fans, but I think it's true with fans also, which is that, you know, you get to, you just get to meet cool folks as a result of engaging with this sport. You know, I have, this will,

this will be a thread in my Felix piece tomorrow also, but like there are just people in my life who I really genuinely love and can't imagine sort of getting through the hellscape without. And I know them because of baseball. And, you know, I'm sure that there would be other people who I would feel similarly about if there were a different thing that sort of got me excited to reach the end of the day and get to unwind in front of it. But it's a very, I think because of how much time we spend with it over the course of the fun months of the year where we're sort of most inclined to engage with other people because it isn't dark and dreary and we want to be out and about experiencing the world it just it grabs you in a very particular kind of way and i think that the other people who are similarly moved you know you can find a real sense of

fellowship with those folks so i just i don't know that combination of things is really is really quite special so i don't i think that's why I like it. Even though I have elected to be a fan of a franchise that often makes me quite sad or frustrated, I guess it's a testament to the power of the other things that I not only wanted to keep engaging with it as a hobby, but felt compelled to think about it full time. So it's a cool thing. It's a good question. I got very nervous. I knew that you would make me answer it. And so I had to listen to your guys' answers. I'm a couple rounds of things behind because of travel and whatnot. But I was driving around looking for

coffee today. I was listening to you guys talk about it. I was like, oh, I got a good answer. Give some thought to this. How has your AFL experience been? And I guess we should explain for people who are not as plugged into the prospect world what the Arizona Fall League actually is. Right. So Fall League, which is now officially aptly named, there were a couple of days there at the beginning of Fall League because the schedule got moved up where it was fall league but not in the fall which i felt bad about but it's a it's an opportunity for some of the better prospects mostly prospects around baseball to play more baseball and is for you know for them it's an opportunity to play against good competition and extend their seasons. For

scouts, it's an opportunity to see other organizations' players all in one place. And for me, I obviously am not doing any of the heavy lifting with drafting or prospect lists that task falls to Eric and Kylie, but it seemed like I would be able to offer more reasonable and substantive feedback if I saw more of the guys who they're going to end up ranking. Obviously, not everyone who ends up on a fan graphs prospect list plays in the fall league, but a lot of the headliners do. So rather than just moving commas around, I thought I'd come down and see what it's all about. And I have enjoyed it a great deal it is you know it's lightly attended it is a very interesting mix of folks there are a lot of uh scouts and other industry people

floating around but there are fans who come to fall league and engage with fall league some of whom i would imagine many of whom are local but some some of them travel. And it's just kind of relaxed. I think of the games that I've gone to so far, the highest attendance that was announced was around 800 people. So these are not hugely well-attended events. You can hear individual fans responding to things in a way that is sometimes very delightful. Responding to things in a way that is sometimes very delightful. On Friday, last Friday when I arrived, there was one, he sounded like a Phillies fan, who was just having an ongoing dialogue with the home plate umpire at Salt River, which Salt River Field is testing the robo-umps. So I got to see the robo ump experience live which i will have to write

about at some point the the latency i imagine is not noticeable to a casual fan but was noticeable to me in a way that i found kind of distracting uh at least initially uh but this poor this poor ump was getting just railed on by a phies fan, and he wasn't calling balls and strikes. It was my worst nightmare realized. Yeah, I wonder how long it will take for everyone to be clued in that umpires are not actually making the calls anymore. I truly don't think it will matter. I do not think it will matter.

Yeah, will it be like years? Because if you're just like a casual fan, and yelling at umpires is something that you think everyone does and you've always done and you're not paying attention to the new technology and you don't know that they're robot umpires, like how many years will it take until everyone in the ballpark understands that, oh, right, the umpire is not actually influencing this call? And will even that change them or will they just yell because you can't really yell at a computer and that guy's just standing there i wonder if the the sort of more humane balance that will end up striking is that fans will become very invested in check swing calls and so the home plate umpire will no longer bear the brunt of of the umbrage but man those those first and third based umpires they better be on their game i wonder if that'll be the direction it goes yeah

my stars i meant to say by the way that one of the pleasures of scouting i guess you could call it that's sort of what i was doing when i went to the afl because i was at scout school primarily to write about it but also to go through the exercise seriously, not with an eye towards being a scout like most of the people there, but just to experience that side of things. And I enjoyed going. It was sort of low stakes for me because I wasn't actually angling for a career in that field, but it was kind of nice to see these guys at that level and be able to maybe form some sort of fondness for them, like seeing them in this place before they get big. And there are oh, I saw that guy when he of because, of course, when you're seeing someone in a small sample, then maybe you see them play particularly well and you can get

unreasonably excited about them. And in my case, I have no illusions that I am actually great at evaluating players, seeing them in person. But I remember forming a prospect crush On this Cubs infielder Named Yaskar Amaya Who at the time Was a 20 year old Second baseman coming off A season where he had a 698 OPS in A ball And currently he is a

26 year old second baseman Who is coming off a season in which he had A 642 OPS in Double A ball. So things have not really worked out as I envisioned them for Gioskar Amaya. But at the time, for whatever reason, I thought he looked pretty good. And I went back to my hotel room. And as I wrote about at Grantland at the time, I talked to a couple of people in the game and asked them if I was seeing something that wasn't there. And they said, no, yeah, he's good. You're right to like him. And ultimately, I guess I wasn't really. And I hadn't seen the stats either.

So I had no idea what his history was, where he came from, what kind of season he had had. And so when I went back to the room and looked up the stats, and it was like, oh, uh-oh, OK, maybe not a top prospect then. But I still had that sort of experience of like divorcing myself from what I know and being able to enjoy seeing something in the moment and letting myself kind of get attached to someone because there were no stakes or consequences to my doing so. Yeah, I think that in terms of putting Fall League in sort of its proper context, I think the way that like Eric has described thinking about it is useful, which is that, you know, it's probably helpful to focus mostly on the positives that you see, right?

Because if a player demonstrates a skill, they show that they're able to do something like you know something about them now, right? You know that they can do this thing. But, you know, something about them now, right. You know, that they can do this thing, but you know, you also are seeing guys at the end of a long minor league season, depending on, you know, where they are both in their careers and how deep into say the minor league playoffs, their teams played, they might be dealing with fatigue. So you want to put relative under performance perhaps in, in a context where you're not going to, you know, overly debit their prospect profile as a result of that sort of thing. You know, I enjoy, I just, like, I am not an evaluator by any means, so I don't mean to affect an expertise I don't have, but I just think that it's a very cool kind of imagination that scouts demonstrate,

like the ability to project in a way that is meaningful, I think is, it's just a very, it's just a very cool skill. It's a skill that I think is fun to observe. And so it's nice to get to talk to those guys and to see kind of what they're seeing and what matters to them and to get to, you know, ask doofy questions in a context where people aren't going to look at me too hard. But yeah, it is see a guy who looks really good for a couple of weeks and it's easy to get too high on guys or you might see someone who's clearly demonstrating fatigue and perhaps isn't throwing their fastball as hard as they usually do

and to get overly pessimistic. So I think putting things in their proper context is important. But yeah, it's just a cool thing. And it's just nice to be in a ballpark that's quiet like that. It's a, I didn't realize that I, you know, I, it's not like I've experienced a ton of burnout lately, but it's just, it was a nice reset from the, the typical sort of baseball experience that I have either watching games on TV or being in a major league ballpark to just have the, that I have either watching games on TV or being in a major league ballpark to just have the quiet. It feels very, everything feels very close in a way that is pretty cool. So I like it. Yeah. And I remember that was something them drilling into us at scout school was that

because we were seeing amateur players some days and then pro players some days that they drew the distinction that if you're an amateur scout, then usually you're looking for reasons why someone will succeed because most of the time, almost everyone you're seeing will fail. Yeah. If you're going to high school games, college games, the vast majority of players there do not have a future in pro ball. And so it's just like the default assumption is that guy's not going to make it. You don't even write up reports on most of the players you see because you don't want to waste your time just writing, nope, nope, nope, not good. Whereas in ProBall, everyone you're seeing, someone believed in them enough to sign them or draft them, and so there's something there that

someone who's qualified to evaluate talent liked. And so you're kind of looking for things that they don't do well. You're looking for reasons not to like them because you're filing reports on every player in pro ball. And so you're trying to weed out the ones that you don't think will make it. I liked that way of looking at things, even though even in the minors, even in pro ball, most guys are still not going to get there. But there's a little more to see. Yeah, no, for sure. You need to be properly calibrated. And I think the amateur pro

distinction is useful. And then it is also useful if you have been accustomed to recently watching major league ball to appropriately calibrate your expectations downward, which is not to say that those players won't be major league contributors or potential all-stars, but that they are at a very different phase of their careers. And so it's the same as anyone who bounces back and forth between minor league and major league ball. You need to remember who you're watching

so that you're not judging in a way that is unreasonable relative to the competition level. Yeah. Did you see this controversy about the Mike Miner dropped pop-up and ensuing 200th strikeout of the season? What a goofy thing. Oh, this is so silly. So I'll just set it up. The Rangers were playing the Red Sox, and obviously both teams totally out of it. Mike Miner was pitching and having a great start. He's had a very good season. Obviously, he's been through a lot physically.

He's missed seasons. He's had injuries, and he's come back, and he's put it all together now in his 30s, had his first all-star season ever, and he was on the precipice of 200 strikeouts. So he started this game with 191, and got eight and he had one more to go. And it was the eighth inning and he was up to 124 pitches. So this was his last inning and probably his last batter. And a hitter on the Red Sox popped up and it fell just foul, just a little bit between home plate and first base.

And Rangers first baseman Ronald Guzman let the ball fall foul. Could have easily caught it, but let it fall foul. Clearly so that Mike Miner would have another shot to record his 200th strikeout of the season. And he did. He got it. He got the big 200 so congrats to mike minor on that and some people have been mad online about this and maybe mad offline i don't know i haven't read the quotes but this seems like it requires a grant brisby unwritten rules breakdown or something because this is so silly and the situation it was what i think it was the rangers were up 7-5 in the ninth inning actually i said the eighth this was the ninth inning with

one out so game almost over but it made it slightly less likely that the rangers would close out and win this game. And to be fair, it looked like Guzman was going to catch the ball if it had fallen in fair territory. He ran down and he looked like he was about to catch it, but then it became clear that it was going to fall foul. And so he opted to give his teammate another shot at this personal milestone. at this personal milestone. Are the people, so I saw the tweet from Jeff Wilson about this, but are the people who are mad online Red Sox fans?

Who is mad online? It's not entirely clear to me which side is more mad about this because like Pete Abraham, who covers the Red Sox, tweeted, Mike Miner's 200th strikeout should have a big asterisk. That was Bush. Chasing a milestone that way is unprofessional. What? I don't know. So I don't mean to call this particular tweet into question.

We will question the sentiment rather than this particular tweet. But here's the thing about that. First of all, I doubt very strongly that Mike Miner had anything to do with this decision, right? It wasn't as if he said, hey, let it drop. If he said, hey, let it drop, that would be one thing. Although still, I don't know that it would be that big of a thing because is it Bush League to elect to not get a shirt out?

Is that Bush League? That seems like charity. We applaud charity. We think that charity is kind. This seems like mutually beneficial charity. The only reason I could think of why Red Sox fans or Red Sox players would be upset about this

is that I'm really having to twist my mind into a pretzel to come up with why this would bother them. But I guess it's because like hey don't show us up like we're trying our hardest here you should try your hardest too even if it hurts us like don't make the game into a sideshow like or don't go easy on us like don't have pity on us even though that's not the real motivation for this. It has nothing to do with the Red Sox really. That's the only thing I can think of.

Now if you're a Rangers player or a Rangers fan or something then you still want the team to win. Whatever Rangers fans were watching this game even with obviously the season amounting to nothing really and no playoff stakes here. You still get some small amount of happiness perhaps from your team winning. And so you're essentially saying that Mike Miner's feelings matter more than the many Rangers fans out there who want to win this game. I guess you could make that argument or like, why should we put Mike Miner's personal accomplishment ahead of his teammates wanting to win? Like, Chris Woodward, the manager of the Rangers, said, I didn't love the idea that we dropped a pop-up at the end.

So I guess he wasn't totally on board either. And then he said, but on the other side of that, they, meaning the Red Sox, swung at three pitches in a row in the eighth inning down by two. meaning the Red Sox, swung at three pitches in a row in the eighth inning down by two. If they have any beef with that, as in the pop-up, they chose to not try to win the game as well. Wow. Well, if anyone should be mad about anything, I think it might be him being kind of sassy, I suppose.

I have a tough time following that. They swung at three pitches in a row, so that means're not trying to win what if what if they were good pitches well yeah what what is what is that what is that bit of business when you're losing you're not supposed to swing is that the idea i mean i don't understand you you want to get guys on base but like swinging is also one way to do that so i don't understand the logic of that at all, especially from a guy who manages Joey Gallo, who struck out almost 38.4% of the time this year. Yeah, wasn't trying to win. is not the normal course of business to engage in behavior like this on the other hand who gives even one good damn about what happened in this rangers red sox game who cares even one little bit i think that it's fine all you're setting him up to do is to have to try hard again that's all

you're setting mike minor up to do it's like, you have to try hard again. And you, guy, whoever was next up in the Red Sox lineup, you get an opportunity to try hard. And it's just a little easier because there are fewer outs. But it's not that much easier. I think this is very silly. I hope that we elect to not make this a controversy because it does not matter. Even one tiny little bit bit it doesn't matter

doesn't matter at all what i want to know is like was this discussed and when and by whom like was ronald guzman standing out there at first base thinking all right if this comes to me and it falls three feet into foul territory i'm just gonna let it drop because the big 200 is at stake for my teammate mike here How did he even know that Mike Miner was at 199 strikeouts? Usually players are not hyper aware of milestones like that. That's not a big milestone. And I wouldn't expect everyone on the team to be aware, oh boy, this is it. He's on 199. We just need one more here. So was Ronald Guzman just studying the stats? Was this like disgust on the bench between innings somehow?

And the whole team said, hey, guys, let's do a nice thing for Mike here if this comes up. Did they even know that Mike Miner would have wanted them to do this? Like what if Mike Miner wanted the out in that situation? That helps his stats too what if the hitter had hit a home run or something right so i don't know it's uh i think it's it's nice that guzman was being thoughtful and doing something for his teammate and friend i suppose so it's sort of touching in a way but also deeply confusing I wonder I wonder if what we all really would have preferred is just for Guzman to be a better actor right like to to trip

yes he should have he should have fallen down he should have been like I fell right yeah that's that's an even bigger sacrifice because then it makes him look uncoordinated. Yeah. I didn't mean to set my friend up to have to try hard again. I just, I fell. I, one time working from home, my foot fell asleep because I was sitting on it and I got up to get another cup of coffee and I just fell over. I just fell over in my house and there was no one there because I was working from home by myself. And thankfully I didn't spill any coffee because there was none left in my cup. But I just fell over. And that was embarrassing.

And no one would have known except for the fact that I just told that story. But he should have just fallen over. He should have just been like, ah, I had a moment. I had a moment where I fell down. I just got deja vu. Did Jeff also have a story about falling down at home while blogging? Did he really? Or have I told this story multiple times, perhaps?

Yeah. That's a possibility. We've all done it. We've probably all fallen in our homes while blogging about baseball. It's very relatable. It's just one of those things where, you know, and like it's a slow motion fall, right? Because you're practically still seated. And so you have time to think about the falling. And it makes you realize that you hope you don't die by falling off a building because uh you'd have even more time to think about it and the whole time i'm like well i'm

gonna fall and here i am falling and i thought about it the whole time and it was unpleasant i did get a bruise on my knee but i didn't break the mug so it worked out okay yeah anyway this all calls to mind a conversation that Sam and I have had in the past about, like, who does the game belong to? Like, is the game for the players or is it for the fans? And I think Sam kind of comes down on the for the players side, and I maybe come down more on the for the fans side but this is a case where the players were sort of hijacking the game and saying that what matters most now is mike minor's 200th strikeout more so than sealing this meaningless september win against the red sox and i suppose there might be someone out there who could object to this it's like the thing that i've said before about twitter which is that you can always find someone who is upset about something so So the fact that one person tweeted about this, or maybe a few people tweeted about this,

does not mean that there was a general outcry about this dropped pop-up. But I have many questions about this. And on the other hand, I have no questions about this because it's so utterly insignificant. I think that it is fine for us to be confused by the decision, not because we are incensed by it, but because it is confusing, especially as it has been expressed by the folks affiliated with the Rangers who have talked about this. But I also think that in general, showing kindness to one's coworkers is a laudable thing. Sometimes it doesn't work out quite the way you want it to, or you do it in a way that is silly,

but the general sentiment behind it is fine. Since, well, this is perhaps a very loaded way of saying this, but since the Rangers have already let their fans down for most of the season, as it turned out, it's fine for them to do this one. I mean, this time they did it because they wanted Mike Miner to have a nice day at work, and that's a pretty good reason of all the reasons there are.

I don't really mean that they let them down. They were surprisingly competitive. It was sort of this whole weird thing. But, you know, they couldn't get Lance Lynn a Cy Young, which is fine, so they could get Mike Miner this. It's good. It's good. It's fine. I would like to hear a lot more about it,

but not in a prickly way, in a explain yourself sort of way. Yes, just what discussions went into this. What's going on? Who knew what? Right. I need the TikTok. Who is the ringleader?

Yeah, that's what I want to know. All right. Well, this is still a developing situation, trying to put it together on the fly here. So after we finish recording, I'm going to dive deep into the literature on this, and I will report my findings at the end of the episode. I have a feeling that there may be more to say. now closer to the end than the beginning, is to do a little regular season in review because this is probably our last episode of the regular season pending tiebreakers. And next week we will be talking about the playoffs. And so before that starts, and we can keep this pretty concise, I guess, just wanted to review whether this was a good regular season or not.

Just wanted to review whether this was a good regular season or not. And it could become appreciably better depending on how the rest of this weekend goes. But based on what we've seen, was this a good year? And I've had this conversation before, and it's always a tough one because I never know exactly how to decide whether a baseball season was good. And obviously the playoffs can influence that. And I'm sure after the playoffs, we'll talk to Sam because he does his annual exercise in determining what was the most memorable thing from that season and what will we remember in the future from that year. But just regular season only, it's hard to say because it's so long and it's always there for months and

months and months. And they always play the same number of games and the same number of teams always make the playoffs and someone always wins the same awards. So in that sense, it's the same every season. And there's probably less of a difference between regular seasons than there is between playoffs because you can have noticeably more exciting or boring playoffs whereas most of the regular seasons just sort of a grind but all of that said what's your impression of 2019 has it been a good year i i hesitate to say it's been a bad year because like you said, like, you know,

there's a lot going on. We're just grind. It's many things. I enjoyed a lot of individual performances this year. I would say that I enjoyed, uh, the twins being good and winning the central, but I did not enjoy how perhaps the least predictable division,

because I think that we would probably say that the NL Central ended up having the most sort of variation in terms of who we thought was going to win, was really the results of those teams not being very good. So I didn't like that. I don't love the fact that oh man let's see how many are we at now we currently have i can do this quickly here we go so we we have we have four teams that have lost at least 100 games all of them have lost more than 100 games the tigers lost 111 baseball games

they have a negative 320 run differential so like tigers fans are like hey baseball is the worst right and in and even in a year where everyone hit a bunch of home runs they didn't even hit a bunch of home runs so they didn't even get to like be excited about dingers so i think that those things stack up to say not super great but there are things that were that were great and exciting you know there were some very fun and impressive rookie performances some of which were expected right you know we expected before he he got laid up with injury that fernando tatis would be great and he was she was very good um but some of which took us by surprise you know we did not expect that peter lonzo would have the year he did or that jordan alvarez would have the year that he

did so those things are very exciting it lance lynn delighted me just because i that's weird i like that kind of chaos. But I think that some of the league-wide trends were concerning, you know, the split between the haves and the have-nots I think is probably not a thing that is especially great for baseball. I think the situation with the ball, not the best. Not the best. Yeah, right. There are only like a handful of criteria I think that you could really use to separate regular seasons. So there's like offensive environment.

Was it a weird year in some way? Were there perhaps a record number of home runs and also a record number of strikeouts, et cetera, et cetera? So when you think back to certain seasons, it's like, oh, 1987, that was like the rabbit ball year or 1930, that was a rabbit ball year or certain years have a ton of stolen bases or whatever. So that can differentiate a season. And then you could have great record chases, by which I mean individual player record chases. So it could be home run title. It could be a consecutive game hitting streak. It could be maybe a player hitting 400, you know, some sort of really special milestone that one or more players is going after and perhaps accomplishing.

You could have great pennant races really coming down to the wire all over the season. Everyone thinks of like the last day of the 2011 season as the greatest day of regular season baseball. Something like that alone can really elevate a season. And then I guess related to that also is just the general overall parity and competitive balance in the game at that point. And there are probably other things that aren't coming to mind, but I think those are really the big factors. Obviously in some years there are a lot of really great rookies debuting or just a lot of really spectacular seasons. Mike Trout declared this his best season, or at least he said that he felt the best in the batter's box this year that he has ever felt. And so there are things like that. Obviously, there are tragedies in certain years, including this year. And there are other things of historical significance that happen. But just sticking with the few things I named, so it certainly was a weird offensive environment year, for better or worse. It's kind

of hard to say because it's subjective and it's a matter of taste, but it got to the point, I think, where it dominated the discussion about baseball so much that it became tiresome to me. I was sort of sick of hearing records broken every day and always the same sort of record. And it sapped all of the specialness from that kind of record. And at the same time, there weren't really interesting individual player record chases. Sam and I talked about that before. This hasn't been a great era for record chases and interesting records being broken. And I think this year was probably the same. records being broken and I think this year was probably the same and other than that I think as you said probably the thing that is most notable about this year even though it didn't

totally preclude some pennant races and intrigue late in the year is the lopsidedness of the game and it's really gotten to a greater extent than ever before, at least when you look at the extremes. So I saw the stat earlier today because Joshian mentioned it an accomplishment, on only six previous seasons, I believe, or maybe even five. And that included the last couple of years, so 2017 and 2018. We're kind of in this era of super teams and terrible teams. But it's really been raised a notch and also lowered a notch this season where we have now broken that record i believe it's now seven teams have either a hundred wins or losses and two teams still have a shot at getting to that mark the twins and the braves could still get to a hundred wins so we may very well blow by that previous record of six such teams and get to eight or even nine, which, you know,

on a percentage basis is a huge increase over the previous record. That's almost a third of the league will either have a hundred wins or a hundred losses. And I think maybe that's, it's not necessarily disastrous. I mean, I like watching really good teams too, except that it's not so fun that a lot of those wins are coming at the expense of the same few teams and poor Tigers rob arthur has shown i think there is a lower percentage of games that actually have like real playoff implications in this season compared to some earlier seasons and i don't know how noticeable that is but attendance is down a bit and rob also made the case that that has something to do with the lack of games that actually matter compared to past seasons. So, I mean, that's probably the thing.

Like if you had to look back in the future, I guess 2019 will be the record-juiced ball year, depending on what happens next. But it will also probably be the year of extreme teams. And I don't know that either of those things is actually a good thing. So baseball is still good, but compared to every other season, I don't know if that actually helps 2019's case. I think that baseball is at its very best when what we are seeing on the field is primarily a product of, and granted, how a team

is coached always matters, how a roster is constructed always matters, what ownership is willing to spend in terms of payroll always matters. So I don't mean to overstate the degree to which this is a binary where there are years that the actions of players dictate what happens on the field and there are years where they don't. But I think that baseball is at its very best when what we are seeing feels at least as if it is the byproduct of baseball players engaged in fierce competition with one another. And I think that when you have a year where you simultaneously have an influence on the offensive environment that is not the result of individual players.

Sorry, there's controversy in the condo parking lot, so I apologize if there's some honking. Someone's in the wrong spot. You're going to get honked at. So I think that- Drop the pop-up out there. Oh my gosh. We'll never get a satisfactory explanation for it. That's the part that's the funniest. We're never gonna we will never be satisfied with the explanation that we are given for that. dramatically impacts the offensive environment that is not the result of, you know, players figuring out a new way to swing or pitchers being suddenly more effective in a way that is compelling. It can all feel a little artificial. And I think when you marry that with having a number of teams

that are taking a step back in a variety of different ways from being competitive, back in a variety of different ways from being competitive, which also feels like an artificial sort of relinquishing of competition, those things in concert with one another sort of pull our focus in a way that is disappointing, right? It will be, I think that you are right that when we look back on this particular year, we probably aren't going to remember, like, we're not going to remember Pete Alonso. We're just probably not. I mean, Mets fans will, and close observers will, but in 15 years, we will probably think of this year being the year of the ball being different and this particular sort of competitive environment. And so I think that that is to the game's detriment, which doesn't

mean that there weren't a ton of things to enjoy about baseball this year, but it just pulls focus from the place that we want it. And by doing that, I think tends to put us in an area of baseball discourse that is naturally very prickly and sometimes quite unpleasant. And it is necessarily unpleasant. I don't mean to say that like we can't have hard conversations about the state of the game. I think that's very important for us to do, but it does sort of mute our ability to sort of appreciate the individual performances and even the team performances that we're seeing in a way that I think is sort of a bummer because there still were great things that happened this year.

There were still incredible individual performances and there were teams that were great and would have been perhaps would have accrued fewer wins, but still would have been very good baseball teams, even if the competitive environment had been sort of more evenly balanced. So I think that's the place where i wish that it had gone a little differently this year because uh we're missing out on some pretty cool stuff and we won't remember it in the same way that we would if things were sort of more organically driven by the players themselves

rather than these external factors that seem to be dictating the direction that the game goes this season yeah and rob manfred did make a comment about the ball this week, which was somewhat stronger than his previous statements. He was talking to Maury Brown of Forbes, and he said that they've reconvened the panel of scientists that had previously studied the ball, and their conclusion was essentially that the ball was responsible for the increased home run rate, but that they weren't really sure why or what was causing the reduced drag.

So he wants them to take another look at it. a more predictable, consistent performance from the baseball, which, if you read it carefully, does not mean that they are necessarily going to deaden the ball or increase the drag. He didn't say that we're going to make it less lively. He said we're going to make it more predictable and consistent, which could mean that it is predictably and consistently at this current rate. I don't know know but probably not if they were to make a change in one direction or another it would probably be to make it less lively so he seems to not be totally pleased with how things have gone because in the past he has made the case that fans

like dingers so more dingers is good and now he seems to be changing his tune a little bit whether it is about the current rate of homers or just the wild swings in the rate of homers one of those two things or both of those things seem to have gotten his goat a bit yeah i mean i can't imagine that he is and again we will we will just for the purposes of this conversation, except that, I don't know, the ball has a mind of its own. Some mythical forces dictating the degree to which it is lively or deadened. We'll just say that. I'm sure that he has to be aware of the fact

that the continued conversation being about the ball is not great for the sport. And so I would imagine that he is both keen to try to address it at a time where he can be on the record and then we will all shift our attention to the postseason and maybe be a little less engaged with that conversation. And also that it should look probably less extreme as a run scoring environment and a home run environment so that, you know, for instance, you and me and Sam don't spend part of every other episode of this podcast going, who is it?

How many home runs now? Yeah. Rowdy who? Huh? Rowdy? Let's get rowdy indeed. Right. So I'm sure that he is conscious of the fact that that is both the thing that people are very aware of and a thing that people are sort of throwing around as a way to diminish the achievements of players who he has to know that, you know, it is better for the sport if we're not mentally putting an asterisk next to people's names when we're looking at leaderboards from this year.

Well, unless it's Mike Miner's 200th strikeout, then you've got to get the asterisk next to people's names when we're looking at leaderboards from this year. Well, unless it's Mike Miner's 200th strikeout, then you've got to get the asterisk in there. I want a deep dive so badly. This seems like something that our pal at The Athletic will be looking into, right?

Levi's got to be on this beat. Come on, Levi. We're counting on you. Get to the bottom of this. The hopes and dreams of a nation turn their eyes to Texas, to Levi. Yep. Do it. Yep. All right.

Well, we covered the whole regular season in 15 to 20 minutes there. You did an okay job. I think so. I will say, Ben, I have enjoyed podcasting with you throughout the regular season greatly. So in that sense, I think that it's been a very nice year. Yeah, I think it's been an above average regular season for Effectively Wild from my perspective. We've got a whole extra co-host, more co-hosts than we've ever had before. It's like more 100 win teams, also more co-hosts of Effectively Wild, more good things.

Should win teams, also more co-hosts of Effectively Wild. More good things. And we're able to look at the standings and should the Rays be able to hold on to their spot, we will have both a fan graphs and Effectively Wild. I don't know if we're obligated to root for the Rays in homage to Jeff. We could decide to be very mad at him for abandoning us and say, go A's. But really, it's just, you know, it's nice to have some representation. It's very exciting. That part's good.

Yeah, I'll be happy for Jeff. Hard to hold a grudge against the guy for going and taking that job, especially because we would not be podcasting right now, probably, if Jeff had not taken that job. It's true. So good things come out of somewhat sad things. Yeah. It's nice when people follow their dreams even if they take them to Tampa.

Even if he didn't even think it was his dream until shortly before it became. We all change as we age. Yeah. My foot fell asleep again as we were sitting here. I think that's about age too. Careful when you get up. Well, it's very precarious because these are high chairs so if i were to fall it might actually do some damage so i think i'll wait until it it comes back alive human bodies what a what a weird thing people play baseball with them it's incredible it's a great regular season because a bunch of people did this impossibly hard thing,

and only some of them got horribly hurt while they did it. It's kind of amazing. Yeah. Those people are probably less likely to just fall in their homes for no reason, but that does happen. We hear about injuries where people just fell or sneezed or who knows what. They hurt themselves in all kinds of ways just like us regular folk. Yes. So baseball players too. Yeah. 30s are so perilous. All right. Well, enjoy Felix's last stand if you can. And the rest of your AFL experience, we will reconvene once the playoffs have begun. Sounds good. All right, so I do have some updates on the Mike Miner pop-up situation. The plot thickens. First, I will note that Felix had a, what did we call it when he came back off the injured list?

A credible start. I guess he had a credible start. Five and a third innings, three runs, more walks than strikeouts. But hey, focus on the positives. Matt Chapman homered again. Sean Mania was great again. The A's won. But Felix got a really wonderful send-off.

It's strange to see him get that sort of sendoff because he's only 33 years old and it feels like it's too soon for that sort of sendoff, but obviously he's earned it. And he has also earned the forthcoming Meg article, which I'm sure will be a great sendoff too. I kind of think Felix will be back in the big leagues next year though, but probably not for Seattle. Also want to mention Daniel Palka. Meg and I discussed his horrendous start to the season, but since we discussed it, he has actually been pretty good. He is finishing strong. He hit two home runs on Thursday. Two. Entered the game with zero, so that's got to feel good. His WRC plus on the season is up to seven. Yes, seven. That's not great, but it was way in the

negatives when we talked about it for the first time, so he will have some positive September memories to take into the long cold winter. Now, Mike Miner. We mentioned the Pete Abraham tweet bashing the Rangers for behaving in such a manner. Didn't mention that Mike Miner replied to that tweet, quote, Then Abraham replied, congrats to you and CB on number 200, a reference to home plate umpire CB Buckner, who called strike three on the pitch after the pop-up. And it kind of looked like Buckner was in on this whole thing because it was not really in the strike zone, but hey, close enough. Now, Alex Cora criticized this too, not explicitly, but when he was asked about it, he said, I don't know, I'm just happy our guys are playing the game the right way. We're playing hard until the end. I'm

adding the emphasis there, but it may have been there. Clearly he was implying that the Rangers were not playing the game the right way. Now we were wondering about that swinging at first pitches thing. Chris Woodward said the Red Sox weren't trying to win the game because they were swinging at first pitches, even though they hit a couple first pitch homers earlier in the game. So in the eighth inning, Miner had actually pitched a three pitch inning, or as some say, a minimum inning. So that's what that was a reference to. Now, Woodward then said that the Red Sox were trying to keep Miner from striking anyone out by swinging at the first pitch. And Miner said the same thing. Miner said the Red Sox were trying to rob him of the 200th strikeout. He says, I knew what they were doing. They were laughing about it.

That's just inconceivable to me. We were surprised that the Rangers even knew or cared about this achievement. And now we're learning that the Red Sox were aware that Mike Miner was going for his 200th strikeout and they were trying to prevent him from getting it. Man, we talked about playing spoiler earlier in the episode. If you're playing spoiler by spoiling Mike Miner's 200th strikeout, that's sort of sad. They were trying to mess with me because they knew what I was trying to do, Miner said. I was kind of mad. Not mad, but I knew what they were doing. So Miner said he was aware of this because Lance Lynn had gotten to 200, I don't know, a little while ago, and he and Lynn

are the second set of Rangers pitchers with 200 or more strikeouts in a single season after Nolan Ryan and Bobby Witt did it in 1990 so there was some awareness of this and he says guys were talking about it so it was known by the team I guess they were doing the addition the last thing is that we were wondering who coordinated this did Guzman do it on his own and Miner owned up to this after the game he He said, I knew it was going to be a two-strike count if he dropped it, so I yelled at Guzzi to drop it. So Miner actually requested that Guzman drop the ball and Guzman was credited with an error on the play. Granted, it's not like teams pay attention to errors or pay players based on errors anymore. I don't know, maybe

in arbitration, but still no one likes to be told that they made an error. So Guzman made a sacrifice there. It's a little less uplifting because he did it at Miner's request instead of deciding to do it himself. But still a nice gesture. So that's that. Just a strange saga all around. What I still don't really get is that he did get the strikeout. It wasn't like Chris Owings singled or something and then he had to go back to the plate and hit again and then he struck out he hit a foul pop-up which is essentially an automatic out under most circumstances and then

he struck out so minor still had to record the strikeout i mean strikeouts are always going to be somewhat sensitive to the context some teams play with more or less foul territory or better or worse fielders so i don't know he still had to earn it. Sports are very strange. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks,

including the two Patreon-only live streams that we will be doing during the playoffs next month. You've got to sign up for Patreon at the $10 level or higher to join us for those. Steve Wolkend, Mark Montgomery, Matthew Gardner, Jesse Coomer, and Jonathan Fabry. 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 Meg and Sam coming via email at podcast.fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you're 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 hope you have a wonderful weekend, the last weekend of regular season baseball. We will be back early next week to discuss wild card games down, let it all fall down. I keep hollering timber, timber.

I hope it don't fall on me. I'm hollering timber, timber. Let it all fall down, go on. Let it fall down, let it fall down, let it all fall down.