Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1443: Managing, Fast and Slow

Episode Date: October 14, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller break down the latest ALCS and NLCS action, touching on the Cardinals’ offensive outage, Mike Shildt’s old-school managing, the Nationals’ pitching, the Astros’ purported pitch-tipping and sign-stealing, Aaron Boone’s quick hooks, and the de-juiced ball, plus a Stat Blast about this October’s anomalous bullpen usage. Audio intro: Neil Young, "Wolf Moon" […]

Wolf moon, keep on shining Your day's rolling by And timeless grace Your heart just keeps on beating Just keeps on beating Inside the beauty Of this place Good morning and welcome to episode 1443 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs.com brought to you by our Patreon supporters.

I am Sam Miller of ESPN along with Ben Lindberg, the ringer. Ben, I went to a funeral this weekend and guess who I met there? I couldn't possibly. The guy who coached Barry Bonds in Little League when Bonds was nine. Oh, wow. Yeah, that was not my first guess. No. So how much did you talk to this person? I talked to him a lot, but yeah, but I don't did you talk to this person i talked to him a lot but uh yeah but i don't know if i would say that i talked to him on the record so uh not that not that i like got a bunch of dirt or anything like that but uh it was interesting i i would say that my my general view of bonds was uh was more strengthened than than complicated by this

huh general view in that he's a good hitter. Well, he was very Bonds-like at nine. I see. Personality-wise. Personality-wise. Temperamentally-wise, I would say. He demanded his own corner of the clubhouse. No, not that.

He played shortstop and he was left-handed and the coach had to deal with parents who were mad that he was playing Bonds, quote, out of position. And he was like, well, he's actually really good was like uh well he's he's actually really good at baseball so he's gonna be the shortstop uh-huh so he was very much a hitting prodigy oh total yeah a total super total superstar uh-huh okay already yeah all right we'll

take that he wasn't juicing when he was nine probably probably not yeah all right so we're gonna talk about championship series games I guess do. So we're going to talk about Championship Series games, I guess. Do you have anything you want to talk about that's not about Championship Series? No. I mean, I have various things to talk about about the Championship Series. But no, I think I'm bantered out. Yeah. Well, I learned today that the name Randy, the meaning of the name Randy, the first name Randy is Wolf, which means Randy Wolf was Wolf Wolf.

All right. I wasn't sure whether to bring that up during this postseason. I guess that could have waited for the offseason. Should have saved it. Could have done an episode on it in January. You learn something like that. It's hard to sit on it. Although I guess is December the new January for podcasting?

Yeah, I guess given the way that the free agent market works now. I have listened to your episodes from last December, and almost every episode has some like, well, I mean, you know, Harper will probably sign any day, but Machado will sign any time. What language is Randy Wolfe in? Do you know the etymology? Yeah, I believe it's British, and Randall, it's actually Randall was House Wolf. Oh, all right. Yeah, okay. So, playoffs. Should we start with the undercard or the series that more people seem to care about? more people seem to care about. That's a pretty derogatory way to refer to the NLCS, but it just, it feels like the ALCS is kind of, like I've heard some people describe it as like the real world series or something, which sounds too dismissive to me. There is going to be a real world series

and it will produce a real world champion, but it's the super team matchup it's the 2017 rematch it's the one with pitch tipping and with weird pitcher usage and walk-offs and that kind of makes it a little more intriguing than the one where one team just can't get a hit so a little although the the nationals i mean i think that the way that it is playing out is the most uh I don't know, if you want to think of it as not an undercard series, then you would want the Nationals to win. Because I think clearly the Nationals look more intimidating to a World Series opponent. And in fact, the Nationals, you know, the Nationals are 30%, 31% likely to win the World Series on Fangraph's playoff odds right now. And, you know, the projections, I think one of the stories of this season, I don't know if this was a story exactly, but even when the Nationals were way behind in the division, like in May,

their playoff odds were still kind of high. And it was like, it sort of felt like, wow, those playoff odds are sure having a hard time catching up to what's happening in the national season. But they just really liked the projections, really liked this team, both the offense and the pitching. And they kept on saying, no, not yet, don't give up on them yet. And then the Nationals were like basically three to one favorites or well, not exactly that they were three times more likely than the Cardinals to win the World Series, which means that they were more likely to win the series that they were in, and also probably more likely to knock off one of the AL teams. And now that they've taken the lead there, you know, 31%, which I guess, I mean, I guess if you assume that this series is kind of almost close to already done uh not not really but i mean the playoff odds must think that the nationals are prohibitive

favorites yeah it's about 90 percent now yeah all right so there you go then that means that there's still only like 35 or something percent to win the world series if they get there depending on who they face but still i mean that's a that's a credible opponent. And so to see the team that probably is more likely to win the World Series come out of this series, as well as to see their strength really manifest to see their pitchers just dominating. I mean, Anibal Sanchez is not considered one of the big three or anything. And so maybe that dilutes it a little bit. But the story of the Nationals dominant starting pitching, kind of doing a 2005 White Sox through the postseason is pretty good. I don't feel like this is, I don't feel like the AL, it's not like in some sports leagues where one league is just

so much more dominant that I think you can get away with saying, oh, well, the AFC championship is the true Super Bowl or anything like that. It seems like it's going to be a good World Series. Yeah. Well, the league differential is not what it was. In fact, it's the opposite. Yeah, the National League won interleague again this year. Yeah, and by a lot this year.

I don't know. I checked in like August, and it wasn't even that close. There wasn't suspense this time like there was last year. I don't know. I checked in like August and it wasn't even that close. There wasn't suspense this time like there was last year. I don't know how much of that once you get this polarized league where there's five really great teams and five, you know, disastrously bad teams at the bottom in one league. I don't know how much that tilts the interleague. we should say that the AL's postseason teams were weaker just because their interleague record, the league's interleague record was much worse, as we used to say about the National,

because it almost feels like the league-wide stats don't really capture the tiers in any significant way. And so, I don't know, probably even knowing that, I would have taken the five AL postseason teams over the five NL postseason teams. But there might still be a little bit of lingering anti-NL bias in my head. I might just not take the NL seriously enough. Yeah. Well, I think the Nationals were favored heading into this series, but the way that it's gone so far is pretty devastating to the Cardinals.

You would have a hard time drawing up a worse way to start the series because these games were in St. Louis. And game one in particular was the one where the Nationals seemed the most vulnerable. They had their worst starting pitcher on the mound. Daniel Hudson was unavailable for that day. And that was the day that if you're the cardinals you you really want to win that one because you know that you're facing scherzer and strasburg and corbin next and so that's kind of not a must win but you know it's it's pretty important to win so they lost that one and then scherzer was scherzer and that was that so the cardinals have produced four hits in these two games half of them by jose martinez half of them arguably because of outfield misplays.

And Martinez's double was the only extra base hit. I mean, it's just, you know, the lack of offense has become a story, not just in this series. I think the most scoring in this round was in game one of the ALCS, 7-0, seven combined runs, and the Astros were shut out on that day. So I mean, this plays into a larger discussion about the ball, but in this series in particular, you've got the ball, you've got good pitching, you've got cold weather, you've got shadows, which may or may not have a real effect. You've got the Cardinals offense, which is just not great to begin with. It's the worst offense of any team in the playoffs, kind of a middle of the pack offense in the majors. And so I think the Cardinals have kind of looked bad, but also it's just like

good pitching performances. You can't really fault them for not hitting Scherzer, who seems to be back pretty much all the way. Like he's throwing harder than he did during the regular season by a significant amount. And we're talking two days here. We wouldn't be making that much of two games if this were some other point in the season. Sanchez, obviously, you don't expect him to go deep into games like that. And Martinez had relievers warming for Sanchez every inning, even before he had put anyone on or anything. It was just like that had to be the most relievers warming up during a pretty routine no-hitter attempt. It wasn't like one of those no-hitter runs where a guy's walking everyone and you keep expecting him to blow up. It was just like, well, it's Sandoval Sanchez, so how long can this keep going?

But it did keep going but it did keep going and the guy who I think had been the worst starter in baseball Craig Edwards pointed out the third time through the order during the regular season really had no trouble and was just cruising through this game so pretty hard to win if you can't get hits and credit to Scherzer and credit to Sanchez who I think adjusted his approach somewhat and he was throwing a lot of sinkers and off-speed stuff and the Cardinals have been more of a four-seam fastball hitting team so he seemed to have everything working he was like putting pitches where he wanted to put them so I think he did a good job more than the Cardinals did a bad job but maybe it's a bit of both yeah the only way it could be worse is for the cardinals to have

used jack flaherty yes they haven't maybe mike schultz knew what he was doing he kept it from being worse right i by the way earlier this year i this is totally off topic but i a team reached eight of the first nine in a game reached so they had made one out and they'd scored like six runs through the the first time through the order and thecaster goes, it's hard to imagine a worse way for this game to start. I thought, I can actually imagine the way it would be if nine players. It wasn't that hard to imagine. Anyway. Yeah.

Well, Schilt, I think, speaking of his managing, he's been, I think, the oldest school manager in these playoffs and certainly among the remaining teams. The way that he is sticking with starters, the way that he's handing out intentional walks left and right And I don't want to downplay that because I think it's one of the best stories of the eighth and the first time in the nlds he got out of it without allowing a run this time that was not the case and wainwright allowed two runs and it was a game that the nationals won by two runs so i guess you could say that that was costly although it was i don't had the had the cardinals scored by that point when did their one run come it was pretty late in the game uh in game two, it was against Doolittle. Yeah, right. So, you know, maybe that was costly. It's certainly not great decision making. It doesn't seem like. And we've talked about how

the Nationals really want to avoid using their bullpen. And they have because their starters have pitched so well that they've only had to get three innings from their relievers, plus a single out from Patrick Corbin in relief. But Mike Schilt really does not seem to want to go to the bullpen any more than Martinez does. And he's also handing out tons of free passes. a stark contrast to like the astros yankees series where you have the astros who have not intentionally walked a batter all year and then aaron boone lifting guys left and right so it's it's a very stark contrast between modern managing and like 90s managing yeah he also had uh in the final game of the lds he had colton long sacrifice bunt in the first inning with a runner on first. Right. And I, uh, that's the only time he's done that all year. That's, I mean, they've had like 40 times or something where the leadoff man got on first and he had never sacrificed there before, including a bunch of times with Colton Wong.

So yeah. Yeah. I mean, how often do you see a sacrifice bunt in the first inning, uh, ever in the majors these days, but, uh, especially a runner on, with a runner on first, not even on second. Yeah. That is a dead bunt. When I looked a few years ago at which sacrifice bunts were disappearing

over the years, I mean, that one was one that was like common in the 70s and even by the 90s, it wasn't common and it's completely gone now. Yeah, right. And then of course the Cardinals exploded and they didn't make it out until colton one came up again but yeah that was a weird one yeah in fact i'm going

to now look up just while you're while we're talking i'm going to look up and see how many sacrifice bunts of just that sort there were this year so yeah i mean i mean when i kept thinking during the dave roberts discussion about crazy pitching moves and how what you said that Schilt seemed to be getting away with a lot right now. And there's not much that you could say about this series. If you get four hits, you're probably going to lose both games. And he might escape much, I don't know, second guessing anyway. Yeah, it takes a lot of heat off the managers when the players just don't play well or at least don't succeed yeah you need close heartbreaking losses you need

games where one team was ahead and lost because of a managerial move you need you need like the manager to be the weak link and that has not really been the case especially if it's the hitting that's failing i think that there's just not really any decisions that you can make. I guess at a certain point in a series, you could shake up your lineup. Start Jose Martinez. But yeah, nobody even blames a manager. Like the hitting coach gets blamed for bad hitting fairly commonly. But you never really hear a manager blame for hitting.

I assume if you're a manager, your ultimate goal would be to win, but the second best outcome for you is that your hitters all collapse. Yeah. I mean, far, far, far below. It's like a long gap between the first choice and the second choice. Yeah. But that is the way to lose in the playoffs is your hitters all just go blank. Right.

Yes. Because you can't do anything. No. Well, you could start Jose Martinez because he's the one Cardinal who's been hitting, and that's the obvious reactive move to placate people. Give an inspirational pregame speech. You can motivate them. But yeah, that's about it.

Yeah. What even would that speech be? I don't know. Shorten up, folks. It's time to shorten up. Yeah. But even then, I assume that it's your hitting coach's job to tell them to shorten up. All right.

I'm almost to the sacrifice puns. Okay. Oh, well, you can sacrifice bunt more. That is what you could do. Manufacture runs. Right. That is what you would be criticized for is not manufacturing runs, not putting pressure on the defense. Yeah.

Yeah, not exactly. So maybe he's doing that yeah well these are two teams that do do that by modern standards like these are teams that run as joe sheehan pointed out they had exactly the same stolen base and caught stealing totals during the regular season so they will put pressure on you and mix things up but like you have to get a runner on base to do a lot of that stuff and that just hasn't been happening oh more of these bunts than i uh i was expecting actually yeah there's been like uh of the i don't know am i doing this right it feels like it's too many this year of the 2002 plate appearances in which the leadoff man was on first base in the first inning with nobody out, there were, oh no, here we go, 27.

27 sacrifice punts out of 2000. So about one in 80-ish. Okay. Is there anything else to say about this series? give it too short shrift but it's like you know the cardinals lost these two games in st louis and now they're going back to dc and having to face strasburg and corbin and then i guess sanchez again and scherzer looming it's just it there's a reason why the playoff odds say that they're like a one in ten shot to survive the series because that's a really tough assignment if you were davy martine Martinez and you were in this

pretty commanding position in the series, would you back off using your ace starters in throw day relief appearances now? Would you play it a little safer? Would you, as they say, put your boot on their neck or whatever it is? Or would you say, hey, you know, I've got, I'm probably have seven more games after this one and these pitchers are pushed right now to the brink. Presumably it might be time to, to, you know, give,

give the Tanner Rainey and Wander Suero part of the team a little bit more responsibility, knowing that if you lose one, it you're still in a commanding position. I think I'd stick with what's worked so far. Probably not like pushing them even harder, but in any other throw day yeah i'd probably keep doing that and you figure that if you can end the series sooner

then you get a little bit of a break well i guess that you know the world series starts the same time regardless but you get a little bit of a break if you don't have to play those games which another form of rest that's a good point if you can save strasburg from having to throw a game seven right then strasburg is has saves six innings is ready for game one yeah and the same for scherzer in game six yeah so yeah probably more than any team they would really benefit from a short series yeah and i mean for that matter do little in hudson if you can avoid having to use do little in hudson if you can avoid having to use do little in hudson in the sixth and seventh games it probably helps too right yeah and this series

whether it's because of the de-juiced ball or because of the weather or because it's the postseason or whatever there just hasn't been a lot of scoring and so there hasn't been much pressure to pull your starters and so we have ended up with this surprising split between starters and relievers, where starters are pitching much more than relievers still, and the percentage is pretty similar to what it was in the regular season. And we were coming into this.

I just tweeted this. Yeah, I'll give you the facts. Yeah. You want to play the song? Is this a stat blast? I don't know I mean I did stats I got a spreadsheet okay sure they'll take a data set

sorted by something like ERA- or OBS- and then they'll tease out some interesting tidbit discuss it and then analyze it for us in amazing ways So, yeah, this obviously the amount of innings and batters face that go to relievers in the regular season has been going up steadily for years and years. And so over the last five years, that in the regular season has gone from 35% to 37% to 38% to 40% to 42%. So this year, 42% from 2015 at 35%. But then it also not only does the relief usage correspondingly go up in the postseason, but the rate that relief usage has gone up in the postseason on top of the increase in the

regular season usage has also been accelerating. So in 2015, relievers pitched 11% more often than they did in the regular season. And then in 2016, it was 17%. So it went from 11 to 17% of a bump to then 22% in 2017 to then 24% in 2018. And this year, the reliever bump in the postseason is only 5%. Yeah. Huh. So to what do we attribute that? is going to go and and maybe that'll accelerate but i think having not really thought this all the way through but it feels like it's pretty easy to just say that well we've had great starting pitching which doesn't seem like that doesn't seem like it's probably a trend so much as it's just some pitchers have pitched really well in the postseason so we're still as we talked about a couple of episodes we still have pitcher starters

way better than than relievers in the postseason i think now it's something like 2.8 era for the starters and like 4.4 4.5 for the relievers so you know even if you could maybe take from that that managers will also trust their relievers less as the series goes on and they see their relievers fail. But just a starting pitcher who's pitching well is likely to go deeper into the game. And we've seen that a lot. We've seen pitchers who I would guess entering the game had, you know, fairly short postseason leashes. I mean, we know. Annabelle Sanchez.

Annabelle Sanchez is a great one. And we know that Tanaka, for instance, they specifically said that only Paxton would probably be used as a traditional starter in this series. And then, you know, you look up and he's through six because he pitched so well. Yeah. And there's a bunch of pitchers, in fact, who've done that. There've been some really great starts. Managers are much more proactive about pulling a guy before they get in a ton of trouble than they used to be.

But even now, if you're throwing a shutout or certainly a no-hitter and your pitch count is not out of control, then you're going to keep getting a longer leash. And that's what we've seen, except perhaps with Aaron Boone, but we'll talk about that. Yeah. And then you've got the fact that the Nationals, if the Nationals hadn't won the wildcard game, for instance, if they had not come back against Josh Hader, then these numbers would be... I mean, the trend would still have been disrupted, but it would not be to the same degree.

The fact that the Nationals keep winning and that their whole strategy was to go deep with their starters because they don't have a good bullpen. They've used... So remember, starters or relievers threw 42% in the regular season this year and 44% in the postseason. Nationals relievers have thrown like 30, low 30s percent.

And so that has skewed things somewhat. You've got the Cardinals who have throughout the year had a kind of a workhorse mentality for their pitching staff. They had all four of their starters qualified for the ERA title, which is unusual in this day and age. And they've all gone even deeper. Schilt's had very slow hooks for pitchers who were struggling,

which has been anomalous. I don't know if Schilt represents the vanguard of the next trend of postseason managing or if he's just an outlier, but either way, he's human. And then you have the Astros just have a dominant rotation rotation and it just makes sense that cole and verlander are going to go deep as they have been that is yeah cole cole's and verlanders have always gone deep in the post season yeah so i don't know whether this playoff field this collection of playoff teams is abnormally skewed toward strong starting pitching or weak relief because

usually the teams in baseball with the best starting rotations make the playoffs that tends to be the case i don't know whether this year whether it's unusual to have the nationals and the dodgers and the astros with these really great starting rotations and fewer of the type of team that is less dependent on its rotation. Like you have the Yankees and you have the Rays, who during the regular season probably had more innings pitched by their relievers, if you count openers. The Rays did by 200 innings. I don't think the Yankees were number two, but the Rays were certainly number one.

But yeah, the Angels may have been first even. The Rays were certainly number one. But yeah, the Angels may have been first even. But yeah, so it's not hard to imagine, I guess, a different distribution of playoff teams. Like if the Brewers had made it past the wildcard game, as you said, or I don't know, were there any other? Like if Cleveland had made it, I guess that wouldn't have really changed things. They were more of a starting pitching oriented team probably so i don't know it could be partly because of what we talked about during the regular season which is that there was no gap almost no gap between starters and relievers when it came to effectiveness so maybe there are just more teams that are trusting their bullpens less

than would have been the case a few years ago and that was a trend that we puzzled over during the regular season. I know that Craig Edwards wrote that maybe it had something to do with the fact that you had more lopsided games during the regular season, more low leverage innings as a percentage of all innings, partly because you had these lopsided teams and great teams playing terrible teams and also high scoring and the ball being juiced and all of that, more blowouts. So that may have been part of it. Craig argued that it was just like teams not giving as high a percentage of their innings to their really high leverage guys just because they had more low leverage opportunities. So I don't know if it was that or the other theories that we discussed during the regular season. But because of that, because you maybe had fewer teams with just shut down dominant bullpens, other than I guess the Yankees and the Rays, really, there weren't a lot of teams that came into the playoffs

thinking, this is our strength. This is the way that we get all the way is by sticking with these relievers who've been our our foundation all year yeah i want to clarify i exaggerated a little bit unintentionally so the rays did throw the most relief innings this year they were a hundred ahead of the yankees who were the number two team in relief innings among the division teams and they were 200 innings ahead of the Yankees, who were the number two team in relief innings among the division teams, and they were 200 innings ahead of the number three team. That's where the 200 came from, got mangled. Yeah, it's always really hard to look at relief stats as a group because they always include both the high leverage and the low leverage relievers.

I should beg Sean Foreman to add a split that's like high leverage relief or some sort of relief split that is, limits it to games that are, I don't know, relief within three runs or something like that. Because you never really know. Like the Cardinals, for instance, well, I don't know. They're all good examples. The Yankees, for instance, did not have a top bullpen ERA at all this year. They were like eighth or something like that. I just keep making things up. And then a minute later, I have to go back and clarify. I'll just tell you that one too. But the of course, we know that the Yankees bullpen is a huge strength. And there's like a bunch of innings that went to players who are not going to get in postseason games unless it's the 10th inning. They were ninth in ERA this year, the Yankees, the Yankees bullpen. And so

reliever splits are always a little bit hard to decode at the end of the year. I feel like my sense kind of is that the teams going back to the bullpens aren't as good, generally speaking, theory, my feeling while reviewing all these bullpens before the LDS was that for the most part, the teams that made the division series round did have the best bullpens in the game, most of the best bullpens in the game, like Tampa was the number one ERA, and Houston was the number two, and the Dodgers were the number five, and the Cardinals were the number six, and the Yankees were the number nine, and the Dodgers were the number five and the Cardinals were the number six and the Yankees were the number nine and the twins were the number 10. So those are all that's did I name seven teams or six and then the Braves were number 11. So seven of the teams were in the top 11 bullpens for ERA, but that no bullpens were all that across the board dominant

this year that that you don't have that if you were to compare these bullpen these bullpens to their peers in 2019 they all look really good but if you were to compare them to their peers in 2018 and 2017 and 2016 they maybe would not stand out as much that is that is my my uh guess going into that sentence okay still at the end of the sentence? I think so, yeah. able to come in and throw really hard and not worry about going through the order multiple times like it still seems to make sense that teams would want to go with a more bullpen centric model in the postseason so maybe it is a one-year blip like even before the recent you know Andrew Miller inspired trend toward heavy relief usage in the postseason, there were occasional years where there was very heavy bullpen usage in the playoffs. And there was the year that Tony La Russa, 2006, he rode his

bullpen really, really hard all October long and won the World Series. So there were years where there were spikes. It wasn't like flat every year, the percentage of relief pitchers used. And so this may just be a one-year deviation from the trend that will resume next year. I don't know. If you look at TOPS+, which is a team's OPS in one split allowed in one split compared to their overall bullpen OPS, TO-OPS plus this year. There was one team with a T-OPS plus lower than 95, which is kind of like to say that the bullpen pitched more than 5% better than the starters. And again, in the aggregate, sucks up all sorts of players who aren't there anymore

or who aren't in big roles in the postseason, and that can be misleading. But all the same, one team that had a T- TOPS plus for their relievers of less than 95, which is to say very good compared to their starters. And if you look at last year, there were three of those teams. The year before, there were six of those teams. The year before that, there were five of those teams. And the year before that, there were five of those teams. So that does seem to suggest that even for the postseason teams, this year's postseason teams, there is not the clear separation between their starters and relievers that we have seen in recent years.

Yes, right. And so the question is, does that mean that bullpens are just not going to be great anymore, which would be weird? Is it that teams have asked so much of their bullpen pitchers now? They're asking them to throw so many innings that just by necessity, the talent level, the performance is diluted there. Could that be it? Is it that they are moving more of the good pitchers to starting roles because starters are not being asked to go as deep into games to begin with, and these jobs are just sort of

blending together, so maybe we won't see such a big gap between them anymore. So I don't know, it's really hard because none of this is really something that we would have predicted coming into the year, so it's always tempting to say that this is now the new new trend, but it's also very possible that it's not, and it's just sort of a misleading avenue that we've gone down this year but we'll be back to where we thought we were going next year poor wander suero my go-to example of a nationals reliever over these past two weeks has been uh removed from the postseason roster with daniel hudson coming back from paternity leave he was on for game one and he

is now, I believe, off the postseason roster, which breaks my heart because Wander Suero was my pick to click. So Wander Suero had a bad ERA this year and that seems to be mainly because of a bad strand rate, which is, if that is a true part of your profile as a reliever, it's just about the worst. But if it's just small sample shenanigans, then it's a way that pretty good seasons can end up looking really bad. Because Wander Suero, despite having a 4.5 ERA, had a 3.07 FIP, which would have been the second best FIP on the Yankees bullpen.

And I thought maybe this would be the moment. Maybe he's been pitching well all along, and maybe he'll put together six good games in a row, and we'll realize how great he was. But nope, alas, he's out. Yeah. Well, at a certain point, if you go away from certain pitchers for so long, then you may not really trust them in a big that, even if you do think he's decent? And you probably don't think he's great or he would have pitched in some of those games. But even if you think he's serviceable, it's like, well, now he hasn't pitched for two weeks, really. So can we even trust him in this spot?

Yeah, yeah. And he did not have good outings when he did pitch in this postseason the one time. The one time he pitched, he had a bad outing. Yeah, right. In fact, he allowed as many home runs in a third of an inning of postseason work as he allowed in the second half, which is one.

The answer is it's one. One home run through 13 postseason pitches. All right. So ALCS, should we switch over here? I guess one of the storylines in this series is something that one of our Patreon supporters, Russell Goldstein, he of the True Win, wrote in to ask us about during Game 2. I guess I'll just read his email here. He says, and this was prescient, this was predictive, this was before we knew the outcome of game two. He said, watching the Yankees Astros series and feel like Aaron Boone is over-managing with his pitchers. For example, tonight, game two, Chad Green pitched two perfect innings, finishing with a strikeout. He was taken out for Adam Adovino, and the first pitch Adovino threw was hit for a home run. I understand that Adovino is a great reliever, but why go with the unknown in terms of how his stuff and command is today over a currently dominating pitcher?

The same thing happened yesterday. Tanaka had about 70 pitches through six innings, giving up one hit and one walk, and he was pulled. I get the third time through the order data, but Tanaka had the Astros befuddled. It worked out yesterday, but not tonight. There has to be a threshold of dominance where it makes sense to keep the current pitcher in the game, regardless of matchup or league-wide data. What are your thoughts? And then then Jay Happ came in essentially to be the Nathan Evaldi and pitch for as long as he had to pitch for because no one else was left and so the Yankees lost while the Astros were still throwing some of their high leverage relievers and still had some of those guys left and I think Boone has been very open about how he has course corrected. He has adjusted to the criticism that was levied against him last offseason by many, including us, I think, by me and Jeff at the time.

And it sure seemed like the Yankees had built this Super Bowl pen and Boone had waited a little too long to deploy it in certain cases in the series against Boston. And he has been open about hearing that criticism and trying to adjust to it and manage more aggressively. And he was asked after game two about this. So just looking at the press conference transcript here, someone said, do you consider it all? Even though it went well, once you remove a starter that early, it could start a chain of events where if you go to extra innings, you're not using your traditional leverage, guys. And Boone said, you're playing it to win the game. You're not playing it to what if we go 13, you know? You're playing it to what gives us the best chance to win here.

And the bottom line is that we end up giving up a third run in the 11th inning. I'd say from a run prevention standpoint, it went pretty well. Yeah, I don't think, I was thinking throughout this game what I thought about his pitching changes. And ultimately, I didn't think that it was, there was anything egregious that I could really hang on to as far as pulling pitchers. But I did think that there was something, there is something the way that that managers manage and that they manage yesterday that still isn't quite managing to win the game all the time so they get almost there but they don't take the last step to what they should do if they're really truly going to follow the philosophy philosophy of we're going to win the game so so here's what i mean

it's the ninth inning for instance and you you could use mean. It's the ninth inning, for instance, and you could use Zach Britton in the ninth inning, but Chapman is your guy. You figure Chapman is your best reliever. That's why he pitches the ninth inning. And you don't want to lose the game with what you consider your second best reliever in. And so you take Britton out and you bring in Chapman. And that notion takes hold starting around the seventh inning, I think, for the most part. Sometimes it takes hold if there's like bases loaded in two outs in the second inning of a one run game. And you might do something there where you play really aggressively, as they did. And as I think that Aaron Boone really appropriately did in bringing Chad Green in.

But for the most part, when you've got a clean inning and it's the fifth inning, you're not going to your closer or anything like that. you're not going to your closer or anything like that. But in a game like this, where you know you have the day off the next day, and you know you're going to be using all of your best relievers, and you know that you're not really going to, you would like to max out each of those players as much as you can to keep them effective and have your best pitchers in for as long as you can. And when you start getting late in the game, you almost force yourself to remove pitchers who are still useful so that you can bring in the better pitcher.

And it seems like in a game like that, you should just start with your best pitcher. Obviously, this would take communication and probably some practice and preparation, but you should probably bring in Chapman first. And so that you know that you're going to get the most out of Chapman so that you know, you're not going to get, you know, you're only going to get, I mean, in this case, Chapman probably only had one inning because it took a lot of pitches to get through it. But you know that you're not going to only get one inning of Chapman. You, maybe you, maybe he, he's really efficient and you get two and a third. And then you go to your second

best pitcher and then you let him go as far as you think he's still your second best pitcher. And then you go to your third best pitcher and you let him go as far as you think he's still your third best pitcher. Now, I think that the way that it worked out last night, as we're recording this, it was last night, that only really ended up affecting Britton. Britton probably, he pitched in game one, so I don't know how many pitches he had, but he only threw 12. And in a perfect world, you would have, like if you could have brought Britton back for the 10th instead of Sabathia, you would have. I think it's clear that Britton had at least a couple more outs in him. And so if you just start

with that descending order of pitcher, then you're probably likely to extend your bullpen a little bit because you're not pulling pitchers before they're ready because there's a better option available, if that makes sense. And it felt like to me, the Rays actually did it. That was one of the nice benefits of the Rays bullpen usage throughout the years. I think it prepared them to do it, but also they did some things that were unusual even for the Rays. So I think if I remember this right, I think that when Glasnow was getting hit early in game five, that in the second inning, that they had Emilio Pagan warming up as the first pitcher out of the bullpen, which he's their closer. And that would sort of fit what I'm suggesting the mindset should be.

And they had Nick Anderson, who is in a traditional usage is your eighth inning guy. And in the postseason, he's maybe your seventh and eighth inning guy, and maybe even your sixth and eighth inning guy. And with the Rays, that's what he pretty much was an eighth and seventh inning guy during the regular season. They had him come in to the eighth and also sometimes to the fourth and to the fifth. So it feels like the idea of pitcher scarcity of trying to manipulate things so that your best pitcher is on the mound in the most important moments so that you don't end up wasting him in less important moments makes a lot of sense over the course of a season. But in a game like last night, you know that that that you're going

to want to use them that all the outs are equally important in that moment that the second and third and fourth and fifth innings are just as important as the ninth inning that any any like leverage index things become kind of an illusion if there's no real scarcity that you're planning for tomorrow to to save people for so i like again I was thinking throughout the game, like they're going to run out of relievers. And so it seemed like a bad idea to pull Britain after one inning, for instance. But then otherwise, you know, I was thinking that, but also it kind of didn't. They did almost get, I think, what they could get out of everybody.

I don't know maybe I'm underestimating how many innings for instance Chad Green could have gone I think he threw 27 pitches I think one through 27 and one through 25 of of Green and and Canely and I don't know do they have 35 in them without it becoming a problem maybe they do I know Grant Green definitely Green had three inning stints during the season and So if you had it to do over, could they have stretched those five pitchers through 11, through 12? I think it's debatable, but it's also arguable that they could have. Yeah, I didn't think it was egregious. I didn't either.

It doesn't look great, I guess, when you're trusting Sabathia coming off inactivity and injury in that spot. And then Loizaga, I think he had not pitched in back-to-back days, I believe, and was asked to do so this time. And, you know, it looked like he couldn't really find the strike zone. And then Jay Happ is on the mound. Like, it doesn't look great when you lose that way with pitchers who are kind of like mop-up guys or lower leverage inning guys. And meanwhile, A.J. Hinch is still running out Joe Smith and Josh James and Ryan Presley and really good relievers. So it looks like Hinch handled things better, but of course he also got the better start. But of course, he also got the better start. And so it was a lot easier for him to have guys left when he had Verlander pitching well, as opposed to Paxton not pitching well and getting a very quick hook. don't know if there's a happy medium somewhere in between where he could just be a little more cognizant of the fact that games might go to extras but i'm kind of with him when he says that we're not really planning for that and we're just trying to trying to win trying to win each inning so i i kind of get it and i don't think it's nearly as bad as what he did last year so i think he's been right to adjust in the way that

he has yeah there was also a point where he was making a lot of pitching changes late and i was thinking like they're not just out of good pitchers they're going to run out of all pitchers pretty soon and i but it i wonder just how much of of that thinking is like i've managed this team all year they score like this is not a game that's going to go 19 like our team is almost certainly not going to go scoreless for the next seven or eight innings it might happen and you know as it was it did happen that it went 11 which in the fifth inning you would not have bet that it was going to go to 11 without them scoring again so there's always the risk that you run out or that you get stretched or you end up with a pitcher that you don't really love on the mound. But the odds were that there was going to be some more scoring

than that. And so you aggressively managed to try to make sure that the other team's belief that they're going to score sometime in the next seven innings does not come true. So I didn't have any problem with it. I think you can play with a lot of what ifs in that game there's definitely room to think of ways that the yankees may have won it but yeah nothing that i was like screaming about or anything like that yeah there is also a little part of me that that thinks j-hap was really good in september and i wonder if they could have been more aggressive about using him in the not that competitive series against the twins he threw one inning but he's thrown one

inning in the last 20 days or so and you just don't you don't know how a pitcher is going to be able to to respond when you call on him in an unfamiliar role for the first time yeah for the second time and he got out of a jam in that first inning which was yeah and i don't know if j-hap is good yankees fans know if j-hap is good much better than i do and aaron boone knows much better than they do but i remember thinking at the beginning of this postseason that j-hap could end up being like a pretty positive wild card in all of this and instead he was basically packed away until just now i don't know if there was an opportunity to get him you know three innings instead of one in in that series or or what and i guess maybe there's if you want to keep that i tend to roll my eyes a little bit

at the oh no they swept now will they be able to handle four days off or whatever but if they're if you are trying to keep players fresh, there is that tiny little, tiny little penalty to having a, a sweep is that more players in all these off days and all the time in between series, if you add on top of that, that you're not able to, to get players playing time when you do have scheduled games, then you end up with possibly some rust. And that's, that's what the Yankees had in the 10th and 11th inning. They had a lot of rust. So pitch tipping has continued to be a storyline here.

We talked about it with Glasnell last week. Now it was an issue with Paxton. The Astros, either they're really great at this or they're just so in everyone's heads that everyone thinks they are really great at this or they are just so in everyone's heads that everyone thinks they are really great at this and that alone may actually end up helping them like there are times where i think there was a time where paxton kind of there was a cross up in the first inning and that could be because teams are just being so secretive they're like switching up their signs all the time they're not giving nobody they're doing second base signs with nobody on base all the time right yeah and i and i remember like this

is something that started happening last october because i remember talking about it with jeff and there was the whole like there's a secret astros guy with a camera and the man in the suit or whatever and lots of conspiracies about that and teams accusing them of stealing pitches picking up signs whatever and doing it in sort of a nefarious way and i don't think any of that was ever documented but it is still very much a part of the story here and it sure seems like they are seeing something like you you see clips of you know, Alex Bregman gesturing or whatever. And unless it's like an elaborate misdirection where they're trying to convince everyone that they're seeing something, they might actually be seeing something. At the same time, it's not like they have, you know, Paxton gave up one run.

Granted, he was out of the game and two and a third and he walked a couple guys but it's not like he was getting destroyed so again it goes back to our last conversation about pitch tipping and what is the actual benefit and is it still hard to hit james paxton and tyler glass now even if you do know what's coming those guys are kind of tough to hit and they throw pitches that are not very hittable even if you can kind of predict them and i don't know if the esters are doing something super secret and special here like maybe just credit to them depending on what that thing is like there is a tweet that went around jake signer who is a reporter for ap i believe and he had spoken to former catcher Eric Kratz for a story this spring that was supposed to be about sign stealing and tech, and that story was never published. But given what's going on right now, Jake posted this little excerpt from that interview

or from that story, and I'm quoting now. One of his former clubs placed cameras behind home plate to detect when opponents were tipping pitches. After games, the team would use video editing software to overlay each delivery from the pitcher. If he was doing something differently on his breaking pitches, maybe moving an elbow in a funny fashion, the whole team would know to watch out for that the next time they matched up. And this is very plausible to me isn't like someone in the dugout during the game with some banned electronic device that's using this to to pick up these things mid-game if it's just after the game i mean that's scouting that's that's advanced scouting

everyone should be doing that if they're not doing that i think yeah besides whether it's illegal i don't know that there's anything even unethical about it. I mean, that's just what everyone already does, but more effectively, basically. And Kratz, as many people pointed out, is a former Astro. He's also a former Yankee. So he's been on nine teams. So I don't know which team it was. But of course, you suspect it might be the Astros. But if it is, then everyone should be doing that if they're not already.

So I don't really have a problem with it. No, that seems completely, completely like fine. I have zero qualms about it whatsoever. It is very different from stealing signs, which that's more debatable. And I'm not taking a position on that right now. But I think there is a little bit of an agreement with the stealing signs that like, you know, come on, guys, we need to get this done. Like, we need to be able to communicate.

If you steal signs too aggressively, now we're going to have to slow everything down. And if it becomes constant, then we're just going to come up with some like league wide fix. Like, we'll all have like, you know, buzzers on our wrists or something. And so you're just taking advantage of the the social agreement here and it's you know kind of kind of jerk right but this is different but it's always been part of baseball not technology or well not technology this sophisticated but stealing signs yeah i i think that with i think that there is a line to which it is always part of baseball. You have to make it you basically have to make it possible, I think, for the other team to deliver signs. And if they're too lackluster, too lazy to do it right, then that's on them.

But you you could crack any sign if you had enough kind of resources at your disposal. I mean, we're not going to be, this is not going to be like World War II and like the code breakers and the whatever machine. You have to be able to just like communicate. And so, yeah, stealing signs is fine. Stealing signs too sophisticatedly is probably not fine. But this year-

It is annoying from a spectator perspective just because it slows down everything and you get mountain conferences and guys going over the signs and yeah yeah it's bad and yeah but if you're standing out on the mound for everybody to see how you present yourself is totally up to you and you need to take take control of that uh i have uh absolutely no matter how much technology they have well Well, I don't know. Could you imagine that with technology, it would be impossible to hide, to perfectly hide your pitches to keep them from tipping them? I don't think I could imagine.

I think that you always it is it is fairly simple and easy to keep the other team from finding out what you see, even if they have satellites and radar and microphones on your lapel and everything. You can fairly easily keep that information from the batter if you're aware of your mannerisms. Yeah, I think so. Paxton had a start against the Astros in April, which was one of his worst starts of the season. He gave up five runs in four innings. And he said after that game that he thought he was tipping pitches. He said he thought he was tipping his knuckle curve while runners were on second. And he was going to try to correct that. He said they knew what was coming. So they were fouling off some pretty good pitches, taking some pretty good pitches. They were stealing some signs. So that didn't help me. We were working on that in the bullpen yesterday. I think we found something

to remedy that, so I'm not going to give away pitches, so that'll help. So again, it's an Astros thing now where whether it's happening or not, everyone thinks it's happening. And look, they're the best offense in baseball, whether or not they're tipping pitches. I don't think that has all that much to do with the fact that they have been so great at hitting this year, but it helps. It probably helps if the other team is so psyched out by this that they're thinking about every movement they're making to make sure that they're not giving away something. I can certainly imagine that taking a pitcher out of the headspace that he wants to be in during a game.

I think that it is 100% effective to know what the pitcher is throwing. I do not believe people who sometimes say, ex-players who sometimes say, I didn't even want to know. That seems bananas to me. I never believe it. Andrew Parker, our catcher on the Stompers, never faced major leaguers. And so he is not a 100% foolproof authority on this. But he said that they would occasionally, I think, steal signs or just pick up on something

that the pitcher was throwing. And he said it was just like a merry-go-round. You would just completely crush the guy until he was gone and that there was no doubt like it was like the difference between a 230 hitter and a 450 hitter in his mind i could imagine that being a bigger difference though at that level right because this stuff isn't pitchers don't have the stuff and hitters aren't as good as adjusting yeah but you said that paxton was not getting crushed these are the the balls that he allowed in play by expected batting average 160 870 900 260 500 960 900 and gone so that's pretty that's it's pretty much it yeah okay all right so yeah if this is a thing that the Astros do, then presumably they'll keep doing it. And that can only help them.

The overlay is, I had not thought about the overlay. Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. So I think ultimately there are just 2016 article by Neil Weinberg at Fangraphs where he pointed out that managers had sort of been fooled by the home run spike and the juice ball that like managers were taking starters out of the game earlier because they were allowing more runs even though they weren't allowing more runs relative to the

league. The whole league was allowing more runs. Scoring was up across the board. But because starters were giving up more runs, he argued, managers were pulling them and not reacting to the new reality of baseball, which is that you should just expect all of your pitchers to give up a certain number of runs. So if that's the case, then we may be seeing the opposite here, where if the ball has been deadened for the playoffs, then managers are used to managing the way the regular season ball worked. And now they're seeing guys get through innings without giving up runs. And maybe during the regular season, they would have allowed an extra run or two at times. And so you would be more willing to to hook them than you do now so that could be part of it like maybe it's just

managers not adapting to this new reality and oh so it's the reverse and who you're right yeah so now that the ball is is deadened it's like we've gone back to managers saying well i'll leave this guy in because he hasn't given up many runs, even though he's not actually pitching that great. It's just scoring is down. So that could be part of it, too. And that's part of the reason I think that everyone is kind of up in arms about this latest ball change, because it's like, why are we tampering with fundamental conditions of the sport in October when players and managers have been conditioned to play a certain way all season and now you have the highest stakes games of the season and suddenly the rug has been pulled out from under them or there's been this sort of switcheroo and that's really it's kind of reaching a critical mass at this point where every day there's like a new column lambasting MLB for changing the ball or for not being aware that the ball was going to be changed. So Rob, of course, wrote about it last week.

I wrote about it last week and Hannah Kaiser wrote about it and Evan Drellick wrote about it on Monday. It's just like these increasingly strident columns where it's like, hey, this is not OK. Regardless of why this happened, this is really not okay. And I'm seeing it more and more on Twitter, which again is not the real world, but you've seen it in this Yankees series where there have been, I think Mark Carrigg tweeted that the warning track is like the breakout star of this series because there've been so many balls that kind of looked like they could be dingers off the bat, and then they died before they went over the fence. And now baseball Twitter is just like after every one of these batted balls, it's like,

oh, MLB Manfred de-juiced ball, maybe even more than we should. Maybe we're overreacting to it at this point, but it's become such a part of the story of this postseason, at least online, that it's become such a part of the story of this postseason, at least online, that it's not good. It's really not good. I don't think that's what you want your fans to be talking about at this point in the season when you want the focus to be on the games and on the players and no one questioning whether this is like on the level or unfair that the conditions have changed seemingly somewhat drastically all

of a sudden should we get rob on next uh on the next episode to talk about it because i have some questions i have some questions and i have any prescriptions that i might have require me to ask those questions first okay all right okay so why don't we do that why don't we uh we'll meet again in two days talk about the uh the two games, I guess, that will happen in that time for a half hour and then talk to Rob. Okay, we can do that. And also just mention that the Carlos Correa walk-off, he took the advice that Meg and I had offered or what we had said we would do in a promising a kid a home run situation. We said that we would not promise that we would hit a home run in a given game, but we would just say, well, our next home run, that one's for you.

And evidently, that is what Carlos Correa did. He said, next home run I hit will be for you. When you see me pointing, I'll be pointing at you. And of course, he did hit a home run and he pointed and he made other gestures too but that i think is how i would handle it you know it's no less special i don't think if it doesn't come in that given game if it's just the next time it happens and especially if it happens to be a walk-off that is that's pretty special too but kudos to to Carlos Correa for handling the walk-off guarantee in a very prudent way. Mm-hmm.

Perfect. All right. We will end there. I should add, you know, we wrote in the MVP machine about how teams are using computer vision and machine learning, just ingesting large quantities of video and using computer models to recognize certain attributes of pictures that might lead to future success, let's say, or might identify some kind of mechanical flaw, things that you might not be able to recognize with the naked eye or wouldn't be able to without a lot of labor and time invested in that process, and completely makes sense that the Astros would be doing the same thing for pitch tipping and for looking for patterns in pitchers. If you're talking about individual pitchers, it's easier to just sit down a scout and say,

watch all of this guy's pitches, watch this guy's outings, see if he does anything to give away what he's about to throw. But you could also just put that high-definition, high-speed footage into a computer and train it to recognize certain patterns, pick up on things that that pitcher may be telegraphing that may be so subtle that you might not even recognize them just watching. But once you know about them, maybe they stand out. So given the way that the Astros and other teams have used those techniques for other applications, I'd be surprised if they hadn't at least tried that for picking up pitches too. And again, don't really see anything wrong with that.

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