Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1447: The Astros Stay Losing

Episode Date: October 24, 2019

After an update from Ben Lindbergh on the Astros’ firing of Brandon Taubman and inadequate apology, Ben and Sam Miller follow up on a discussion of postseason chase rate, talk more about Taubman, and break down the first two games of the World Series, focusing on what went right for the Nationals, what went wrong […]

Hey everyone, quick pre-episode update here. Sam and I recorded the episode that you're about to hear on Thursday morning, when there had still been no major updates on the situation with the Astros and their assistant GM, Brandon Taubman. Later on Thursday, the team put out another statement in which they announced that they had fired Taubman following an investigation over the past two days in conjunction with Major League Baseball. They interviewed Astros employees and reporters and evidently concluded that Taubman was lying all along about his comments in the clubhouse after ALCS Game 6 being intended to support Roberto Osuna and not target any specific reporters in the vicinity. The Astros say, our initial investigation led us to believe that Brandon Taubman's inappropriate comments were not directed toward any reporter. We were wrong. We sincerely apologize to Stephanie Apstein,

Sports Illustrated, and to all individuals who witnessed this incident or were offended by the Now, it's obviously a good thing that Taubman was held accountable here, even though the Astros' description of what they did as proactively assisting Major League Baseball strains credibility given their actions leading up to this point. It's good that they apologized to Stephanie Epstein and the other reporters who witnessed this. I would not say it's a sufficient response in that they do not apologize in this statement for releasing their own first statement in which they supported Taubman and accused Epstein and Sports Illustrated of fabricating their report, which has been proved completely accurate and was very soon corroborated by other reporters. They made what could have been a career-ending accusation by suggesting that that report was fabricated, so there really should be some sort of reckoning for that. And Luno admitted on Thursday that before the team issued that original statement, only Taubman and another Astros employee were spoken to, so they didn't even talk to the reporters about what they said they saw happen.

And yet Luno also said this is not endemic, this is not a cultural issue, which is very hard to believe given how unseriously they appeared to take this. Luno claimed that, quote, the belief was that it was one colleague talking to another colleague and having been overheard and it was not intended to be overheard, which again, pretty hard to believe, clearly contradicted by the reports that were out there. This also doesn't explain why they allowed Tobin to make a false statement in a press release on Tuesday, nor does it explain why Luno went on the radio and did an interview on Wednesday in which he said, we may never know Taubman's intent. I would think that by that time there had been enough eyewitness reports to suggest that we had a pretty good idea about what his intent was. So whoever was responsible for releasing that first statement, it seems, should also be held accountable for that. And any other members of the Astros organization who may have backed up Taubman's account should be held accountable for that too.

Jeff Luno did not say who wrote the statement, but that a group of people were involved and that he did see it before it went out. He acknowledged that it should not have gone out. He also said that he has not actually reached out to any of the women who were subjected to Taubman's tirade. He said, I have been traveling up here. I had to have a pretty tough conversation this morning with someone that's worked with me for a long time, but I will as soon as I can. Yeah, no one really feels bad about the tough conversation you had to have with Taubman. Luno said it was devastating to learn what really happened. Quote, I wouldn't wish it on anyone in this room, just like I wouldn't wish it on anyone in this room to sit up here and answer these questions either. Really not scoring any sympathy points here. So this is a positive development in the

sense that it would not have been inconceivable for nothing at all to happen and no punishment to be applied, but it doesn't seem quite sufficient. Obviously dismissing one person or multiple people probably wouldn't root out whatever systemic issues led to this incident, but even the direct response to this single isolated incident still leaves a lot to be desired. So we will see whether there are any further consequences, whether MLB issues any discipline of its own. The Astros have really bungled this every step of the way.

It's obviously unfortunate that this happened at all, but they should have immediately said that we're investigating, we're looking into it, provided that comment for the initial report that Epstein wrote for Sports Illustrated, not issued defenses of Taubman in the intervening days while they were evidently still uncertain about what had actually happened. Really kind of a clinic in responding as poorly as possible from start to finish, but perhaps this will not be the finish. Maybe they'll really nail it in the fourth statement. The first three were warm-ups. All right, now you're up to speed. You'll still hear my conversation with Sam because most of it still applies, but now you know the latest. So on with the episode. There's coming in from above And you promise that you got a new tune

Though you never even know what to do No, you never even know what to do No, you never even know what to do No, you never even know what to do No, you never even know what to do No, you never even know what to do No, you never even know what to do Yeah, we're lost right now Hello and welcome to episode 1447 of Effectively Wild,

a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Sam Miller of ESPN. Hello, Sam. Hey, Ben. I meant to mention last time, or at least after we recorded last time, you fact-checked John Smoltz's contention that hitters chase pitches more often in the postseason, which I was thinking of because he mentioned it again in game two of the World Series. And you found that whereas he had said that guys swing about, what, 10% more often, chase 10% more often in the playoffs, you found that it was about 5% accounting for their regular season swing rates. So as you

said, that was a pretty good observation by him, except that he keeps ascribing a different motivation to it. He keeps saying it's because guys are anxious and because they're pressing, right? Which I would think that if it's only a 5% bump, the most likely explanation is just that you're facing better pitching, right? I mean, you're facing pitchers who probably have higher chase rates in general. So you would expect guys to chase a little more often in the playoffs than they do during the regular season. Yeah, that's true. I also kind of wonder whether when he says 10% or when people hear 10%, whether they are thinking 10 percentage points as opposed to 10%, in which case we're only talking about one percentage point. But yeah, a better look at this would be,

I mean, what Russell Carlton used to do when he would search for, you know, clutchness when he was going through his phase of trying to find clutchness or the opposite of clutchness. I guess he was more interested in the chokingness aspect of it as he would look at the likelihood of a swing by a batter given the batter and the pitcher involved and he seemed to find that in certain circumstances certain higher levered circumstances some players really did swing more often and so it would still be perfectly in keeping

with a reasonable hypothesis about what we know about you know performance and humanness to find that batters do swing a little bit more in big situations, maybe because they're nervous and their ability to suppress action is somewhat weakened by the blood flowing to their head, or maybe because they are more anxiously trying to be a hero to take action in a situation that they feel calls for it or maybe neither of those things is true at all and that this very small effect is like you say just that pitchers are throwing more difficult pitches it's also worth noting that the well like we've talked about the percentage of pitches that are over 95 miles per hour doubles in the postseason and those pitches tend to get more chases than than regular

fastballs than slower fastballs but i also wonder whether the sense that i have that there are more breaking balls thrown in the postseason than in the regular season is true that's true breaking balls are definitely more chase chase pitches than than zone pitches that too too. Yeah, I would guess that that explains the whole thing. But if someone wants to do a follow-up, if John Smoltz wants to go on Baseball Savant and do some number crunching, he can. All right. Anything else you want to bring up?

No. Okay. So we've got World Series to talk about, two games in the books, and the Astros are no longer the favorites. I guess we could just do a quick follow-up on what we talked about last time, the Brendan Topman situation. Not a whole lot has happened since the last time when we talked about it. I thought more might happen. Well, yeah, it's a pretty big deal that not more has happened,

because what it essentially does is draws the whole organization into it. It is the organization saying this situation that was exposed is perfectly fine with us. And that makes it a much broader scandal. Yeah. It means that the defenses of the Astros that you can't take it out on a whole organization just because of the rogue actions of one bad actor. That argument loses all of its strength when the organization has said, we're fine with this.

We're standing by him and it. We aren't going to make a really truly robust apology for what happened. We certainly aren't going to make a truly shame-faced robust apology for slandering the reporter who exposed it. We're just going to keep doing business the way we do it, which is a way of absorbing that sin into the whole organization, in my opinion. Yeah, and by the whole organization, I don't mean like, you know, the assistant director of giveaways on game days or something. Like, I'm sure there are a lot of people inside the Astros organization

who are quite upset about this, because I think that was the case with the Osuna trade. But by whole organization, we mean ownership, we mean Jeff Luno, anyone who has the power to actually do something about this and has not, and in fact has done the opposite. So the Astros did release statements from some people, from Taubman, from Jim Crane, the owner, and Jeff Luno did a radio interview, and they said sorry, sort of. Taubman said sorry, sort of. Luno said sorry, but it was not a sincere sounding or full-throated or

accounting for and reckoning with exactly what happened type of apology. Taubman did just kind of a classic sorry if I offended anyone, which obviously you did. I think we're talking about this because clearly you did. There's no uncertainty about that. And he sort of said, you know, I'm a nice guy and I'm a father and I'm a husband and I'm progressive and I'm charitable. And, you know, this doesn't represent who I am and all this stuff. stuff and essentially said that the initial report misinterpreted, didn't deny that he said those things and that he yelled those things at this group of female reporters, but suggested that they misinterpreted it. It's, again, hard to come up with a reasonable other interpretation than the one they had.

And of course, they were there, but that's what he went with and crane kind of went with the just uh hey we're we're trying to raise awareness of domestic violence and we've also given money to charity although really like bragging about giving three hundred thousand dollars when you are a person worth billions and your organization is worth billions. It's kind of a drop in the bucket. And they also only did that after there was a backlash to the trade. And they didn't need to make the trade in order to do that if they wanted to give money to domestic violence organizations. So it just seemed like they're trying to hide behind charity and not even particularly impressive charity at that. about her tweets about domestic violence and the Astros before that she would say tweet about

domestic violence hotlines when Osuna would come into the game and that he had complained about this wasn't clear from the report to whom he had complained but I assume to her or to her editor or something so he was sort of on the record as objecting to this before, evidently, which really kind of exposes his statement that this didn't reflect who he was. And meanwhile, Luno did a radio interview where he said essentially, well, we can't know what he was thinking. We weren't in his head at that time. So I just don't know what to do. We just can't tell. Just who knows?

Just kind of threw his arms up. So it seems clear that the Astros are not going to do anything themselves. They're just going to hope that this blows over and that they win games and that's all that matters. Fans will be happy as long as they keep winning, which frankly, unfortunately, is probably true for the most part. So now we're just sort of waiting to see if anyone forces them to do anything, if this MLB investigation, which is going on, which consists of interviewing all of the parties and I don't know what else, if that leads to any kind of discipline and suspension or recommendation to do something. So we will see. All right. Anything else to add about that? By the way, when I say that they said sorry or apologized to some extent, they did not address or acknowledge or apologize for the initial statement that the Astros put out at night that hour after Stephanie's report at Sports Illustrated statement that just smeared

her reporting, essentially. They have not apologized for that. Granted, I suppose they are still saying that the reporting was misleading, not in so many words, but Taubman said that his actions were misinterpreted pretty much. So he is, I guess, still questioning the reporting, despite the fact that there were all these eyewitnesses who corroborated it. So the Astros have not addressed that frankly dismissive and offensive statement that they first put out. This just really seems like a situation where they're not going to do anything to Taubman unless they don't have to, because if anything, it might just open up a can of worms for them. Because if you're suspending the assistant GM who was defending the Osuna trade, in a sense, then you're kind of opening yourself up to further criticism of the Osuna trade itself,

which would be merited, of course, but they want that to go away. Todman was really only apologizing for, I guess, using bad words for using unprofessional language. That's pretty much all that he really copped to here. So I wrote more about this at The Rer if anyone wants to check that out. And not only did they win the first two games, they beat the Astros with Garrett Cole and Justin Verlander starting. Both of those guys took the loss in these games, and they did it in Houston, which is kind of an incredible accomplishment because the Astros had only lost back-to-back games started by these two twice all year and not since June. And both of those instances came on the road, and Cole and Verlander had never taken the loss in back-to-back games, so they went in and they slew the Giants in the Giants' own home park.

And not to say that the Nationals starters were slouches or something, like if you're going to try to beat Cole and Verlander, then doing that with Scherzer and Strasburg, that's a pretty good way to go about it. But still, they did the thing. Like I said in my recap, like they pulled the sword from the stone. Like this is what you have to do to show that you're the champion, that you can beat the Astros. You have to beat their best guys that no one beats. And the Nationals have done it.

that no one beats and the Nationals have done it. Yeah, and I think that one of the, I mean, I don't know if anything is more encouraging than anything else when you win two games in a seven-game series, but it's not like they won just because Max Scherzer and Steven Strasburg were too dominant for the Astros to hit. This really was the Nationals as a team beating the best that the Astros had to throw at them. They won primarily because they broke through against those two pitchers. They scored five runs against Garrett Cole, and they scored early and then scored late against Justin Verlander and then basically dismantled the relievers that they brought in. brought in after that if you i mean i i had the feeling watching scherzer that this was the worst maybe the worst i'd seen him all year until the very end when he he kind of settled down as he

reached the end of his pitch limit but the nationals won despite max scherzer not really being able to dominate and and really max scherzer also won despite not felt like every fifth or sixth pitch Max Scherzer threw he threw with his eyes closed like he was missing in a way that that in those misses showed like almost like complete discoordination like he was missing by a lot it wasn't like he was having trouble finding that that spot it was that he was having trouble finding forward when he was throwing I mean he was missing by a lot and despite that he was having trouble finding forward when he was throwing. I mean, he was missing by a lot. And despite that, he managed to make a lot of really good pitches in between those. And then the Nationals scored. And then Steven Strasburg, I don't know,

Steven Strasburg maybe is a slightly different case, because it felt like a lot of his problem was that the umpire was really squeezing him. I i don't know you always wonder whether what you're seeing is is that your is that the tv strike zone box like to some degree i think tv strike zone boxes change from like network to network yeah we've been watching the fox tv strike zone box for a while so i'm i don't know if there's a risk that my mental calibration is off or whatever, but this was like the most consistent that an umpire has been rebuking the TV strike zone box. And just almost always on by not giving pitches that appeared to be on the zone. Some of those that were not caught smoothly because, um, you know, maybe Suzuki was,

was moving his glove to, to get there or because the type of pitch it was. But sometimes it just seemed like it was a really tight strike zone. But anyway, the upshot of all that is that Strasburg had, you know, had to really labor a lot more than he usually does. He has thrown, he had thrown 70% of his pitches this postseason for strikes. Last night it was 62%. He had gotten swinging strikes on 14% of his pitches in this postseason. Last night, it was 10%. And before the Kurt Suzuki homer, I think that Strasburg had allowed the six hardest

hit balls of the night, according to StatCast. Suzuki homer kind of edged into that. So I think he ended up with only the four hardest hit balls between him and Verlander. Again, you could imagine that one way that the Nationals could win games is that when they're on, Scherzer and Strasburger are just basically unhittable. Either one of them could throw a shutout, and you're very likely to win a shutout, but they didn't need to do that. They beat the Astros. They beat the strongest part of the Astros roster, and that's got to be somewhat encouraging.

Not somewhat encouraging. That's got to be really encouraging, besides the fact that the math just tilts so strongly towards you when you're going back home and you've got a two-game lead, and when you think about what the Astros have to do now, it becomes a very daunting task for any team to do against any other team. And so they're just in a really strong position. And they didn't have to use Sean Doolittle or Daniel Hudson,

which I don't know how much that matters when you have a day off and everybody is basically in a full-on sprint for the finish line. But it seems like it would help. And they didn't have to use Patrick Corbin either, which also seems like maybe even more significant because one of the great central mysteries of postseason baseball as you're watching it is that you never really know how much these throw days are affecting the starters next start and you're also never really sure how much the starters previous start is affecting their bolt you know the the days that they're throwing in relief it could be that there's hardly any effect and that the ace starting pitcher who

comes in two days after throwing 112 pitches is the ace starting pitcher pitching in relief and he's going to dominate but maybe you just don't know you just don't know if it's going to be that little thing that takes it out of him and so the fact that they didn't have to use, I presume Corbin was available last night, given that they changed their... Yeah, Martinez was asked about it after the game. He said they were trying to stay away from him, but he didn't say he wasn't available. So basically he was available and they didn't want to use him.

And ta-da, they didn't have to use him. That seems like a pretty big win. Although I'm surprised, given that they didn't use him, I'm actually surprised that he's not starting game three, that he wasn't going to use him. That seems like a pretty big win. Although I'm surprised, given that they didn't use him, I'm actually surprised that he's not starting game three, that he wasn't going to start game three. And I wonder if there's some little extra bit of logic that I'm not seeing there. Well, right. It must have been a great relief to be able to use the soft part of the pen, the Rainies

and Rodneys and Javi Guerra even without having to worry at all because they had a 10-run lead at that point. So that was really big just to be able to go away from their core six or so pitchers that they've been kind of running into the ground and not have to worry because it was a low leverage situation, which you just don't really expect to get against the Astros unless they're beating you. So yeah, I think it was impressive. You mentioned the umpire and it certainly was partly the umpire and it was partly maybe the Nation guys work and they foul pitches off. So that part of their offense seems to be working more or less. They did make those guys work. They made Strasburg throw 114 pitches in six innings and they knocked Scherzer out after five innings. So even if those guys weren't at their best, they didn't help them out.

They were pretty disciplined, I thought, for the most part. And you expect them to be because they're a great offense, except that they haven't done the scoring, but they've done the other stuff. So it's not like they've looked completely wild and out of control and chasing everything. It's just that the results have not been there so far. The other thing is a lot of times one of the ironies of baseball is that your winning takes more out of your bullpen than losing. Now, there are certain situations where that's not true if your starter gets hit early and you have to go to the bullpen and use a lot more innings and all that. But usually if you're winning by a little bit, then you have to use your good relievers. And if you're losing by a little bit, you often use your second tier relievers. And so then the next day, the team that won is at a slight disadvantage.

Oftentimes, that's true. But in this game, it definitely did not turn out that way because despite it being a blowout, ultimately, despite it being a game where, like you say, Javi Guerra got to pitch, although not Wander Suero. Wander Suero. I assume that Rainey was in because they're just trying to get him to, they're trying to figure out what they have with Rainey. Rainey is either potentially very valuable or potentially very destructive,

depending on whether he's going to come in and throw, you know, 63% or more strikes, and that they're still just not quite sure whether they can go to him or not and so they thought well let's have another inning to get him an inning of work to get him out there and we can just see one more time before the next sixth or seventh inning comes whether whether we can trust him but i would have liked to see wander suero for personal reasons i'm the only person who has personal reasons about wander su Suero. I don't know how that happened. I didn't set out to fall in love with Wander Suero. But anyway, the Nationals managed to, like we just said, get to completely escape using the parts of their bullpen they want

to preserve. Meanwhile, the Astros actually did arguably two pretty big things happen to the Astros bullpen that will affect them the rest of the series. One is that Josh James came in, and because the Nationals managed to get a couple hits, draw a walk, put some long at-bats on him, he threw 27 pitches, which they have a day off today. I assume he'll be available for Game 3, but 27 is sort of right up pushing up against a long outing that affects you for maybe more than 24 hours. And that I think he's like I said, I think he's definitely available for game three. But I don't think after throwing 27 pitches, you're probably available for games three and four. And so that that could happen.

That could happen that the Astros will be essentially without Josh James one of the next two games if they needed him in both of those games but the more significant one is that Ryan Presley came out and I mean you know that rally was notable for some of the soft contact I mean Ryan Presley got the slow grounder to third base that would have gotten the Astros out of that inning and then it's a totally different scenario. But what actually happened is that Ryan Presley gave up that hit, that hit, quote, a hit. And then he gave up another hit. And then he gave up another chopper hit.

And he walked two batters. And generally speaking, he, A, didn't look like he was in command of his pitches. And B, ended up with a really grotesque pitching line. And, I mean, I don't know if Ryan Presley is any longer a high-leverage option in this postseason. Now, maybe the Astros are, you know, like, less likely to react to things than I am and that the rest of the world is,

but Ryan Presley entered this postseason as a slight question mark because he had missed most of September. But then he pitched extremely well in the four, I believe, four outings that he had between his return and the postseason. And so you thought, well, I mean, one of the advantages the Astros have is that they have this pretty great bullpen, including Ryan Presley, who might be the best setup man in the game if he's right. And we just couldn't say with 100% certainty whether he was right, but it seemed like he probably was. And over the course of this postseason, that has been a little bit called into question. He has often looked quite good, but he then Astros have not been leaning on him the way that you would have maybe expected them

to lean on maybe the best setup man in baseball, which suggests that there was something a little worrisome to them. He had not thrown a full inning yet. He still hasn't thrown a full inning yet, which is very much not the bullpen poochie mode of using a top setup man. And he had been falling into sort of weirder and lower leverage, not low leverage by any means, but slightly lower leverage situation. So it seemed like maybe he had fallen to third or fourth in the line, in the bullpen line. And I think after that game, after World Series game two, in which he went two-thirds of an inning, allowed five base runners, allowed four runs, and this coming off of the potential, was it knee injury that he had in the final play that he was involved in in game six of the LCS. It just, you kind of feel like they sometimes talk about where a pitcher is struggling to find his slider early in a game, and they'll talk about how, well, now the hitter can cross that pitch off.

Until he finds it again, you can just cross that slider off off and you can just sit on the fastball and the change. I feel like maybe at this point you can, if you're the Nationals, you can just cross Presley off. You can assume that they're one down, that they're not going to probably go to Presley in the seventh inning of a tie game because I don't know that he'll be trusted anymore. And that seems like a pretty big win too in a series where the bullpen mismatch was one of the big seeming mismatches yeah coming into this series and certainly coming into this month you would absolutely expect the astros to be the team that owns the seventh inning on if

they're going up against the nationals like you would have had to like the Astros' chances last night at home after six innings with Strasburg at 114 pitches. And I mean, that's kind of the time when you think, well, now the Astros have the advantage from now on. I mean, technically they had the advantage from the beginning because they're the better team and had the better pitcher probably. But I think that's kind of when you expect that advantage to be even bigger, and instead it went completely in the other direction, and things fell apart, and that seventh inning was wild. I mean, you can't really say that the Nationals, obviously they broke it open, they scored six runs, they put the game away, but it wasn't the most impressive way to do that, or at least the most expected way to do that, If you thought that they had scored six runs, or I don't know, maybe because it's the Astros, you'd think that scoring six runs against them would have to involve some strangeness. to have the game-winning home run, which he did. So Verlander came back out with 98 pitches,

which I guess is not unusual for him. Like, if this were last postseason, maybe we'd be talking about that. Like, why did Verlander come out facing the third or I guess about to be fourth time through the order at 98 pitches? But like, now no one thinks anything of it because every starter is going that deep

into games. In fact, it looked like Strasburg might come back out for the seventh at 114. It would have been close. Yeah, he was sitting in the dugout. He looked like he was still very much in the game, which would have been inconceivable a year ago for a pitch. No one even got to 114 pitches, let alone ending an inning there and coming back out. So we've just seen pitcher usage change dramatically. And I get that these are two starting pitcher-centric teams, but still, we've just completely gone away from where we thought we were going with starting pitcher usage in the postseason. So Verlander comes back out. And as Jake Kaplan pointed out, this was the first time all season that he had faced a batter with anyone other than Robinson Chirinos catching because Chirinos had been pinch hit for in the sixth. And Maldonado came in and I don't know how much of a difference that makes. Like Maldonado did catch him in 2018, so this wasn't unprecedented. And it's funny, we were just talking on the last episode about the baseball belief that you can't change catchers when the pitcher's throwing a good game. JP Hornstra, the reporter, sent us some tweets, people saying that after they switched on Verlander.

But, you know, you're just throwing the pitches. the pitches. And so, you know, sort of Zach Kreiser in his recap for BP, he made the point that the Nationals have put the Astros in the position or the Astros have put themselves in the position where they are doing things that they haven't done ever or much all year. And one example of that is the intentional walk, which we can talk about. Another is Jose Altuve getting thrown out in the first inning, stealing third base, which as Zach pointed out, Astros have only attempted 10 steals of third base all year and were only caught twice stealing third base. So that was unusual. And then here you had Verlander throwing to a different catcher, but it made sense to pinch hit with Kyle Tucker for Chirinos when they did in the

sixth. So Verlander comes back out and he gives up this home run to Kurt Suzuki, which of course he would not have expected because Suzuki came into the game, I think with one hit in his 28 postseason plate appearances. And he had two hits in this game, including the game winner. And he also threw out Altuve in the first inning which I mean one of the knocks against Suzuki is that he does not throw out base runners he throws out like 10% of base runners and yet he threw out Altuve a lot of people were saying they should start Jan Gomes because Suzuki's not hitting and that's the only thing he does better than Jan Gomes but they stuck with Suzuki and it really paid off in this game. So

yeah, then you had that and you had Verlander issue the walk, I think on a pretty close call that he wanted to get. And then Presley came in and after that, it was just, it was singles. Although really one of the singles was a ball that Bregman should have fielded, would field most of the time, really probably should have been scored an error, but it was a single. And then there was an even weaker single that Ryan Zimmerman hit that Bregman then threw away. Just like getting two weak ground balls with low expected batting averages to your slick fielding third baseman who you think of as the guy who made that incredible play in the 2017 World Series and threw the guy out at home. And here he screwed up twice in an inning and the Nationals really won this inning despite Rendon making an out, Soto having the bat taken out of his hands, and Kendrick hitting a weak ground ball. It was not the people that you would expect to break open a game, but it happened nonetheless. The intentional walk, it was somewhat surprising to see it happen, although my colleague Zach Cram had called it coming into the series that this would happen because the Astros don't have a left-handed pitcher. So it's hard to know what to do with Soto in a high leverage spot. Other teams in this

postseason have gone after him with Kolarik or, you know, someone who was sort of assigned to that role and the Astros don't really have that guy. And this was like a perfectly fine intentional walk. I mean, it was not a bad one. It didn't put the winning or tying run on base. It gave them the platoon advantage. It brought up a worse hitter. It was totally defensible. It just totally didn't work out at all. got the weak ground ball and that should have gotten him out of the inning in theory but it did not so that was strange to see but also it wasn't like the Astros went against their principles or something like in an interview in late September Hinch had said it's not like I'm never going to issue an intentional walk again I haven't and clearly the bar is higher for him but he said like I will do it again. And he even joked in that article that, like, he'll probably do it in the postseason and everyone

will write about it. And that's what happened. So it was weird, but not terrible. And it came very close to working out just fine. But again, like, even if the rest of that inning hadn't gone as it did, you wouldn't have had Javi Guerra in the game obviously giving up that solo shot to Martin Maldonado in the ninth but at this point you don't know whether the Astros would have scored anyway they just can't seem to score and that's their whole thing they score they score more than anyone but not so much right now yeah I thought it was very very expected that they'd walk Juan Soto there. I think that if you could somehow give every manager in the history of the game that chance, I think that you would have like verging on 100% intentional walk right there. But I will just note this.

While Soto is, yes, left-handed and the Astros do not have a left-hander in their bullpen. I thought you were going to bring up that Will Harris is good against both. Oh, well, actually, I was going to bring up that the whole Astros bullpen is extremely good against both. They were the best bullpen in baseball against lefties this year. If I remember this right, Josh James, I think, is very good against lefties. Will Harris is very good against lefties. But Ryan Presley, who was in the game, is the best against lefties. In fact, Ryan Presley this year was the best pitcher in baseball against lefties.

He was better against lefties than every left-handed pitcher. He has a reverse split in his career, but he especially had a reverse split this year. Lefties hit 124, 165, 196 against him. That is a 361 OPS. Again, it comes down partly to the question of whether you believe Ryan Presley is Ryan Presley. If you don't, you're essentially taking one of the, I don't know, dozen most important players on the Astros for a postseason push and putting them on the shelf.

And I think that might be what has happened. And that is perhaps suggested by, I think suggested. I think probably even if you had Adam Clark, even if you had like peak Javi Lopez or peak – I don't even – maybe – I think if you had Aroldis Chapman, you probably would still walk Juan Soto there to face Howie Kendrick, right? Juan Soto, he's a stud. He's really good. And you're probably going to walk him anyway Yeah Draws a lot of walks You should be careful with him

So as Joe Sheehan pointed out in his newsletter The Nationals have scored more than half Of the base runners they've had in this series 17 of 30 The Astros have scored a quarter of their base runners 7 of 28 And obviously have not had as many base runners to begin with. And the Astros' offense now for the entire postseason is hitting 216-292-370,

which even when you account for better pitching and defense and lower temperatures and de-juiced ball and all the rest, it is sort of shocking that they have hit this poorly. And that's bad, like, compared to other playoff teams. Like, only the A's, who played one game, and the Cardinals, who, of course, got swept away in the NLCS, only they have worse offensive lines in October. And the Cardinals were the worst hitting team coming into the playoffs. And the Astros were the worst hitting team coming into the playoffs and the Astros were the best historically great so I don't know what to make of it I guess just even a month is a pretty

small sample but in the ALDS at least like they cashed in the opportunities that they had but in the ALCS they batted 109 with runners in scoring position. And in this series so far, they're at 176. And they got past the Rays and the Yankees, not because they out hit them. The Rays and the Yankees both had higher OPSs in those losing series than the Astros did. So they've been out hit this whole October, really. And they've made it this far. They're almost lucky to have made it this far, hitting as poorly as they have. So it's weird. You wouldn't expect that to continue.

They're a great offensive team, but they just have not been a great one this October. And they're just being outplayed right now. They're the better team in this series, but they are not having the better series, that's for sure. They're just really doing a lot of things right like Rendon busting it down the line in game one and beating it out Bregman didn't get the double play and then that set up Soto's double or Strasburg getting out of the jam in the sixth inning on Wednesday the pitches that he made to Tucker he got out of that jam Presley didn't't. There was certainly some luck there, maybe. Like the ball that Correa hit against Strasburg, like that little blooper that was caught. Maybe that could have fallen in just as easily, but it didn't. So things are going their way, but they're also sort of making them go their way to some

extent. And the Astros are not. That's been pretty glaring on defense, but really on offense all October long. Yeah. And just looking at it, I mean, partly it's that they're, that they're overall not performing as well as they typically have. They, as you know, as was often cited, they led the league in, in walk rate while also having the league's best strikeout rate. And they are still better than most of the postseason teams in each of those.

They're not striking out much. They're just very slightly behind the nationals and the braves but they're much better than most of the teams and they are they still are you know among the better walk rates in this postseason although not not at the top but their power has just disappeared their power is worse than every team except the cardinals their isolated power is their bats for home run there and their babbitt is also the lowest and so that you never know what to make of babbitt but it seems like all of these things are saying that they're they're just not hitting the ball hard which is interesting because i will say maybe this is maybe the league's paranoia has infected me too but I get the feeling personally watching the Astros that they are like, I feel like they're that, that they have got a lot of pitchers that they have figured out some tip

just by watching them lay off breaking balls just out of the zone. It feels like I have had many moments against many pitchers in this postseason where I thought, where I saw a bunch of Astros take, say, a pitcher's good change-ups just below the zone over the course of multiple innings, or lay off a bunch of sliders just off the zone without swinging at them, where the feeling I have had is, oh, like they've got something there that they think that the pitcher is tipping. They have felt to me like they have been kind of in control of the strike zone and in control of their swings.

But that's just the view from the batter's box. When they actually hit the ball, it has not been doing much. It hasn't been going far. Yeah, and they have not run into teams that are making mistakes like the Astros made on defense last night. Yeah, I was thinking the same actually watching Jordan Alvarez in game two, who has been one of the primary culprits here. He's having a pretty terrible postseason on the whole. I just wrote about that this week, and he looked completely out of his element in the ALCS and to some extent late in the season. And even during the ALDS, he was striking out a ton. And you wonder about fatigue with him because he's like basically doubled his career high playing time in a single season. Like he's had injuries the past couple of years. So he played about 90 games or fewer, and now he's at, know 156 or something he's just like way past whatever he's done before

so it would be understandable if you were somewhat tired i am old enough that it is never understandable for a 22 year old to be somewhat tired well it's probably helped that he dh's all the time but anyway he's he's way past anything he's done before but he he did look more like himself in the series and in game two he had some takes that were impressive and I was thinking wow he he didn't look like he was even tempted by that pitch I know he then struck out in his last plate appearance but yeah there were some there that I was thinking gosh he he just didn't even look like he considered swinging at that pitch. And that was a pretty good and close pitch.

Speaking of Alvarez, I'm actually I'm curious to see what the Astros do with him in the NL Park, which I mean, at this point, you would think that he probably won't play, right? Or he probably won't play much, which I think he only played 10 games in left field for them during the regular season. Mostly he was DHing. And if he were himself, if he were like best hitter in baseball, basically, which is what he was for the most part, he was like the fourth best hitter in baseball from the day he came up to the end of the season. He just sprung forth fully formed as this Mike Trout level hitter. He actually out hit Trout from the day he debuted. And that's most of his value, but he was so valuable as a hitter that he was like 11th in war from the first day he played on, even though he was DHing almost all the time. That's really hard to do. So if he were that guy, you'd have a hard time sitting that bat, even in an L park, even though he is defensively limited. But given the way the

Astros have treated him this postseason, and they did bump him back up to the sixth spot in the order in game two, but before that they had demoted him to seventh, which he had never hit seventh all season long. He actually only hit sixth once in the regular season, and that was in July. And they pinch hit for him in ALCS game six. They said, no, we would rather have a Ledmus Diaz up right now than Jordan Alvarez, which was inconceivable coming into that series. So clearly it doesn't seem as if they think that he is what he was during the regular season. They're just not handling him in that way. So even aside from the results, the fact that the Astros seem to have lost a little confidence in him makes me

think there's something going on there or there was something going on there that they could detect even in small samples. So now you're going to the NL park and it would be an advantage for the Astros that they had this like all-time great DH like coming off one of the best rookie offensive seasons but you probably don't play him right because in game four it'll be a lefty it'll be Corbin So you would think that he would probably sit for that game. And again, like Alvarez was the best hitter in baseball left on left this year by a lot. So it's not like that's been a big liability for him. But still, I would think with the platoon disadvantage, maybe you don't play him there.

And maybe you even don't play him in the other games with righties pitching because you have Kyle Tucker on the roster. So he has a platoon advantage and he can play defense. And I just don't know if Alvarez is in that space now where it's like he plays no matter what. Yeah, I don't. I mean, obviously they know better than we do a lot of these details about what Alvarez is capable of, especially defensive because, um, you know, you and I did not watch the games that he played during the regular season in the outfield with the expectation of having to say two months later, whether he can handle it. Yeah.

So, uh, we're speaking from a position of, of some ignorance here for sure. But if you, if you believe he's your best hitter, I, I think that in this case,

if you believe, if you still believe he's your best hitter, I would play him this case if you believe if you still believe he's your best hitter i would play him i don't consider him a from again from my limited knowledge of his skills i don't consider him to be a defensive liability the way that sometimes a team has a dh who you know hasn't played the field in four years or has only played like a couple like david ortiz or something right he played he he the main thing that you want is someone who has played the position recently. What you don't want is to put someone out there

who is both bad and also it's very unfamiliar to them because then you just have the makings of a disaster. You have the makings of an injury. You have, I mean, probably then you have someone who truly can't handle the position. Alvarez played some outfield in the majors this year. He played a lot of outfield in AAA. So, and he played a lot of outfield in AAA the year before.

I mean, he has been playing outfield recently. And so it suggests that he's not good at it, but that he's not incapable of it, that he's not going to go out there. And like, he doesn't have to borrow somebody's glove. He doesn't have to like have the outfield coach take him out before the game and teach him how to play the wall, which would be a much bigger liability. So then the question is, is he one of your best hit ninth and I mean he's I mean he's you have to think he's better he's better than Josh Reddick right I mean I would think so the defense matters and so maybe he's not better enough than Josh Reddick and and then you're gonna have to presumably put Michael Brantley in right and so you take hits in two outfield positions. And I could see

the case where maybe you think that it's not worth it, but I think it's worth it. I mean, you have to really believe that either the three months that we saw him in the regular season was way out of character for him and that that is skewing our impression of him and that he's not actually an MVP level hitter or you have to believe that the slump that he was in was incredibly real and yet and yet the you know the the very different look that we've seen from him in the last two days is not real I don't know I'd trust him I think I think I would that's a tough decision I would yeah I wouldn't want to make this decision but I would just say I would not actually if I were AJ Hinch I don't think I would labor that much about this decision I think I would that's a tough decision I would yeah I wouldn't want to make this decision but I would just say I would not actually if I were AJ Hinch I don't think I would labor that much about this decision I think I would play Alvarez well I yeah I mean when when he was in the ALCS and Diaz was pinch hitting for him and he had never been pinch hit for all season unsurprisingly

at that moment I would have said he would sit in these games now that he's looked a little more like himself. I don't know. It's hard to imagine the Astros making these decisions based on two games either way. But he has looked really dramatically different. And clearly they saw something or thought they saw something because they dropped him down in the lineup twice and pinch hit for him,

but now they moved him back up the lineup. So I don't know. They're making some sort of decisions based on pretty small samples here. So that's a pretty interesting strategic play here. I don't know which way it will go. My answer now will probably be different than it was two days ago. But they seem to trust Kyle Tucker. He's having pretty good plate appearances. They're using him to pinch hit. So it's not a bad option to have him there either. And then you do have

Alvarez available, I guess, in a late inning situation to pinch hit. Yeah, it's tricky because if you don't play him because you don't think that he's actually capable of hitting good pitching right now, that he's just too lost, then you can't say, ah, but he'll come up big in a pinch hitting appearance. Whereas if it almost in a way makes it easier for me to make him a pinch hitter, if I think he's right, if I think that he is the dominant batter that he was, because then you could make the argument like, oh, the defensive hit is too big. He's just too bad out there.

You can't weaken two outfield positions, too important. You got to play defense in the National League and he can't do it. And the benefit of having him on the bench league and he can't do it and the benefit of having him on the bench is that you can leverage his one plate appearance now it's a little harder to do that if you're the if you're the astros because who's he going to pinch it for he'll pinch it for whoever's in right field maybe and maybe the catcher and is that the only spot in the lineup you can pinch it for it is right those are the only two and so you're not really even gonna hardly get to leverage that play like there's a 50 50 chance that that would have been

his spot anyway if you started him and you don't really want to pull your catcher so in fact you almost yeah his has a pinch hitter his value is yeah pretty much nothing yeah that's true yeah well anyway i'll be i'll be interested to see what decision they make there. And they might make different decisions depending on the game. But another thing I wanted to mention is that all you said the same thing and Rendon said the same thing. You know, we put the ball in play. Good things happen. Except the Astros are putting the ball in play. Good things are not happening. team that is good usually but slumps in October and so everyone says oh it's because they're an all-or-nothing team like granted the Astros did score a higher percentage of their runs during the regular season on home runs but they're not a team that's like we're only going to hit homers and if we don't hit homers we won't score or at least it's not a team that is always trying to hit home runs this is a team that had the lowest whiff rate in baseball. They are a better contact team than the Nationals.

And in fact, in game two, they struck out less often than the Nationals did. They struck out eight times. Nationals struck out 10 times. And everyone seemed to be saying, oh, it's because the Nationals are putting the bat on the ball. It's like, no, it's not that. The Astros are making contact. They may even be making better contact.

As you were saying, they hit some balls hard, but good things are not happening. Like, yeah, you remember when good things happen, but very often they don't happen, which is the whole point. That's why it's beneficial to have guys who walk in and hit home runs and don't put the ball in play all that often

because putting the ball in play is sometimes quite bad it's sometimes a weak grounder to the second baseman it's sometimes a double play it's sometimes exactly the balls that howie kendrick and ryan zimmerman hit last night it's not like that's the sustainable way to win yeah just put the bat on the ball and just weakly it to Alex Bregman like that's not going to be a winning strategy in the long term it just it happened to be last night but it's not because of some advantage in approach that the Nationals had like they are less good at the thing people were crediting them for than the Astros have it It's just, if anything, it shows why putting the ball in play is not so advantageous because sometimes the ball does not find holes or sloppy fielders

and bloopers don't fall in, and that's what's happening to the Astros right now. Yeah, we just got through saying that the Astros' offensive problem is that when they put the ball in play, bad things are happening. Their BABIP is low. Right. BABIP is extremely low. Yes. So anyway, I hope that's not like the takeaway from this series.

I'm always wary of what the, like, oh, this team won because it did X. Like now you're starting to get the, oh, well, these teams are winning because they have great starting rotations, which is like the opposite of what we've been saying for the past few postseasons, where it's like, oh, this team won because it had a great bullpen. And look at the 2014-2015 Royals, and they have this unbelievable 7th, 8th, 9th combination, and this is the way you win. And then Cleveland did that too, and Andrew Miller, and oh, this is the new thing.

You build a Super Bowl pen now we have one postseason where it's been starting pitcher centric and it's like oh maybe starters are back in vogue and teams are gonna go get great rotations and I just I mean it doesn't change depending on a single postseason a single postseason can be influential I think if you see a team do something dramatically different and it works out very well for them. That can have some carryover copycat effects. But I mean, I'm happy that this postseason has been so starting pitcher-centric. It's just, it's so much more enjoyable and watchable when you have Justin Verlander and Steven Strasburg just kind of matching zeros from the second inning to the sixth inning, like that was just fun to watch. And it moves quickly and you've got, you know, pitch counts to count and you've got like characters, protagonists of the game that you're following. following like I enjoy that much more than I do the four hour or four hour plus bullpen game where

it's just new guys coming in every inning so if baseball were to swing back in this direction I'd be happy about it I just don't know that any of the things that we were saying about why it makes sense to be more bullpen centric for the past few post seasons I don't know that any of them don't apply anymore, even though this was a different kind of year where bullpens were not that effective relative to starting rotations. And maybe that means something, or we've talked about what that means. And I just, I don't know. It happens to be the case that you've got the Nationals and the Astros with these great rotations in the playoffs, but we very easily could have ended up with totally different teams.

I mean, the Brewers could have been the team that beat the Nationals so easily, and then we would not be talking about this. Oh, and the Rays and the Astros, right? Sure. The Rays very nearly beat the Astros, and those are the two teams that, well, and I guess in the Yankees who made it to the LCS, who put the least emphasis on starting pitchers, except for the Angels, I guess, who did not come anywhere close. So Ben, then, since you kind of bring it up, this is something that I like to think about

every World Series, which is that quote that Theo Epstein had, I think Theo Epstein had a few years ago, where he said that whoever wins the World Series, you can kind of expect that there's going to be a little mini trend of teams trying to copy something about them. And oftentimes it's very easy to identify what that thing is, especially in the postseason, because it really becomes quite amplified by postseason play. And it does seem like something that is maybe anomalous about the team and that maybe you can even, you can replicate it. And then sometimes it's just, it's just impossible to figure out what, what, what it would even be. So do you have a sense if the Nationals win this World Series, what that could be, what teams would identify as something that they could invest in or that they could attempt in any way to copy? Well, by far the most salient thing about the Nationals is their starting rotation.

I don't know if that's a copyable thing. Right. It's probably not. Go get the number one overall draft pick and one of the top pitching prospects of all time and then one of the best pitchers of his era and then also signed the the top free agent starter and uh especially because like the scherzer component of this is is especially is especially confounding because it's not just that they signed a top free agent starter it's that they signed into a long-term deal and he got progressively better through the long-term deal i mean scherzer is basically the best starting pitching signing ever uh as a free

agent or one of the two or three best and this is pretty deep into his contract and so you you it's hard to imagine that after 20 years of like learning the lesson of like long pitching deals that any team is going to see sign find and sign the greatest free agent starter of all time as something that they're that is either accessible to them or that they're gonna probably even feel like a lot of excitement about building a team around right i guess corbin is someone who I think there was some wariness about signing because he had gone with that heavily slider-reliant approach in his breakout or re-breakout in Arizona. And I think there's still a lingering concern about that. Not sure if it's

justified, but that guys who throw sliders that much or rely on breaking balls that much put some stress on their arms and maybe this would be a bad bet. And there's a long way to go in his contract. But in the first year, he was not quite as good as he had been, but one of the top starting pitchers. They signed someone who had been one of the top starting pitchers and he continued to be one of the top starting pitchers. And that was a great signing for them. Like if it was an either or with Bryce Harper and Corbin, and I don't know that it needed to be, but if they treated it as one, they probably picked the right guy there, especially because they had a very good outfield already. So in terms of marginal difference, Corbin was a bigger upgrade for them.

Can I, I just want to interrupt too. The other thing about this is that the thing that defines these nationals that we most easily define about these nationals is the top starting pitching with Scherzer and Strasburg and a third ace behind them. That has also been what defined them for all the years when they were getting knocked out in the LDS. They had a long run of Strasburg, Scherzer, and another ace. They had Jordan Zimmerman when Jordan Zimmerman was also considered a top ace.

They had Gio Gonzalez when Gio Gonzalez was getting Cy Young votes. They went and got Doug Pfister when Doug Pfister was considered one of the top number three starters in the game. They had Tanner Roark with sub three ERAs. Like they, and all along Scherzer and Strasburg. And the other thing is that it's not just that Strasburg was number one overall pick. It's not just that he was the most desired number one overall pick of all time. But that was 10 years ago.

As a GM, are you going to be like, my strategy is to draft a starting pitcher. And then in 10 years, I'm going to be really cool? to spend some money that that'd be nice but also like you can't really extrapolate from signing scherzer to saying yeah this is the way to do it because that's worked out better than anything could have so i don't know i don't know that there's a thing i don't think there really is a thing it's uh they've been really good they've been good for a long time now they have uh one of the highest win totals in this decade, I believe. They keep making runs, and their runs have always been very abbreviated before, and now this one isn't. They've just gotten really hot at the right time, and I know they've been hot for months now, but

they've reached a new level of hotness, and everyone was sharing that quote that Steven Strasberg said, right after they won the pennant. You have a great year and you can run into a buzzsaw. Maybe this year we're the buzzsaw. That's a good quote. It's a good quote. And that has been the case. They've won. That's a great quote.

Yeah. They've won 18 of their last 20 games, I think. They've won 10 of their 12 playoff games. They've won their past eight games straight against the Dodgers and the Cardinals and the Astros. And this was a team that easily could have lost the wildcard game, that easily could have lost game five against the Dodgers. But they're just on a great roll right now. They've outscored those three teams 50 to 17, I think, over those past eight games.

And that's a high level of competition. So just everything's coming up nationals right now you know i have written in the past about how josh hater is and this came up when we were talking about strategy too josh hater is insanely difficult to hit when he's ahead in the count that's what makes him the you know one of the most dominant relievers in baseball when he gets ahead in the count you just have have zero chance, but he's actually quite bad. The deeper into the count it gets with him behind in the count that he really, he does. Once you get him to a three ball count, for instance, he's worse than I, I don't, I haven't looked at numbers this year, but he's been worse

than, than an average pitcher in those counts. And it's not just that he maybe walks the batter but he becomes more hittable he gives up harder contact on those balls and so on so josh hater if you can get ahead in the count he stops being josh hater i can't believe i've got a wild card take here uh i just noticed the other day though that in the 30 pitches that josh hater threw in that wild card game he threw two when he was ahead in the count. Huh. Wow. Which is pretty good. That's pretty good hitting.

Yeah. I mean, it's pretty bad Hadering and also pretty good hitting. What about, I don't know if this is, I'm just throwing this out there, but one of the things that stands out to me about this Nationals roster is how many veterans that you would have just considered generic veterans over the last few years are on it are, I mean, you've got your, like, so you take,

you take, I'm just going to name some names, Adam Eaton, Yon Gomes, Matt Adams, Brian Dozier, Howie Kendrick, Kurt Suzuki,

Ryan Zimmerman, Estrubo Cabrera. That's basically the team that like four years ago would have been really good. Two years ago would have seemed like an outright disaster. They're all in their 30s or older. And they went and got a bunch of these players who, like, eh, you could imagine that if, like, if the wrong teams spend an offseason signing those players, we would just be dunking all over every one of those moves. It would feel like a 1997 Pirates kind of offseason. They got all these players, and a number of them are having career—I mean, some of them are having career seasons, like Howie Kendrick, who has just finally become the batting champ that was prophesied 15 years ago. Some of them are quite bad.

Matt Adams is quite bad, for instance, has been quite bad. Some of them have found new roles and are still productive. the last just in the last couple months of the season became very different hitters or had very different types of types of developments in their game like brian dozier did and as drubal cabrera did and so these are all players that you don't think of as having a lot of unpredictability left in them you don't want to sign them because you go well well, I know what he is. I know that there's not like some extra level that Howie Kendrick of all people is going to reach at this stage in his career. If I'm going to gamble on a mediocre player, I'm going to gamble on one who at least I can envision having a breakout when he turns 28 or something. But they went and got a bunch of these players and a bunch of them have had kind of breakouts. Kurt Suzuki, 35-year-old catcher, is kind of having a breakout. Like, I mean, in some way. Definitely. His late career offensive surge. He was on a postseason team, and he didn't start for that postseason team.

Now this year, there should be many articles written about Howie Kendrick's 2019 season. And so is there something about that that matters? And even Ryan Zimmerman, Zimmerman looked completely like Toast as recently as three months ago, two months ago. And even he is a productive hitter again. So Estrubo Cabrera had a huge second half with the Nationals. I don't think anybody was excited. In fact, nobody was excited about Estrubo Cabrera at the trade deadline because he got released three days after the trade deadline. Yeah.

So is there anything there or is that rather than saying, ah, that's the plan, that's the thing that we should try to follow, is that simply describing how the Nationals got here? in this era where guys can turn themselves around but i i don't know if this is repeatable just pick up generic veterans and and hope that they turned around it wasn't even like they had turned around and the nationals believed it or something like and and i don't know that any of these guys is a story of like dramatic high tech you know went to driveline and suddenly they're different or something. It's, I don't know what their stories are, but yeah, it seems hard to predict, hard to repeat. I guess one lesson would be, and this is not a new lesson, but manage to your strengths in the postseason and try to minimize your weaknesses. And if you do have a great top of the rotation, like the Nationals do, then, you know, ride those guys really hard and use them in relief. And if bullpen is your weakness, then try to get through the whole month using two bullpen guys in high leverage spots. that was their path through this postseason. But again, there aren't that many teams that have

exactly that roster that have this really great starting rotation, especially the top three, and then like two reliable bullpen arms. It's just, there aren't that many teams that fit that mold. But for those who come along that do, they might look at the Nationals as an example of, okay, this is how we get through this and by the way even the bullpen part of it where you ride your two best relievers as much as you can if you were a gm and you were thinking well how do we replicate that you would not say well let's go acquire the 25th and 45th best relievers in baseball like doolittle is is quite, but he has not. I mean, he is not the person. He is not, you know, a Raldus Chapman, right?

Like Sean Doolittle is a very good reliever who, you know, wasn't even like this wasn't his best year. He's not. It's not like he is mowing down opponents in a way that just like you just shake your head and think, how does anybody hit him? He's just good. He's your head and think how does anybody hit him he's just good he's just reliable and he's good and teams should have Sean Doolittle's players like Sean Doolittle around they should get a lot of Sean Doolittle's though they shouldn't just get him and Dan Hudson who was a kind of a low-key trade acquisition at the deadline and say well now we can just ride those two guys for 70 innings in the postseason.

Like that's another thing where it, it is how this has worked for the nationals. It's not so much that they set out with a plan of we have Doolittle and Hudson, no one's ever going to hit them. It's that Doolittle and Hudson have come into games and no one has hit them. Like they've just performed, they've done it. And it's, I, I, I sort of always kind of like those stories where it is not really a story about how the GM had a plan that nobody could defend against. being better than the other team and by being better than maybe you would have even expected from them that it really was decided on the field and not in um you know in a series of transactions over the offseason because yeah i mean dan hudson like that that's that's not a replicable plan yeah well if you do want to replicate the the nationals rotation you can do it basically with two guys who are in this series potentially you can go sign garrett cole and possibly you can do it basically with two guys who are in this series potentially. You can go sign Garrett Cole and possibly you can sign Steven Strasburg if he becomes available.

I'd have to think, and we were talking about free agents in this series, but as I said, maybe if there's anything that sways where those guys will go, it would be the Nationals winning this series and then ownership saying, well, we've got to keep this group together because they took us all the way. So there's a pretty good chance that Strasburg will not be available, that he will just use his opt-out as leverage to work out some sort of extension with the Nationals. He's already chosen to stay with them once when he could have tested the open market, so he may do that again but if both those guys are available you can sign two-thirds of a nationals level starting rotation this offseason if you just want to outbid every other team in baseball do you think someone will sign both of

them do you think someone will try not not just try individually to sign each of them but do you think that we will hear about an ownership group slash front office that is aggressively pursuing both simultaneously in tandem? Like, I mean, if you're talking about basically, I think we're talking about three teams here, maybe four, but probably Angels, Padres, Yankees. Will one of those three teams Actually go into this offseason saying We're getting them both? Probably not

These days, I doubt it The Yankees seem to talk more about Staying under the competitive Balance tax threshold or whatever we're calling It these days than they do Assembling a super rotation And the other teams They're in a position to benefit from that

Certainly And maybe, I mean, the Padres were aggressive. They went out and got Machado. I just don't know with Machado and with Eric Cosmer whether they would consider themselves to have the ability to do that. But that'd be a huge boost to either of those teams. That's exactly what they need is to just go get two of the best starting pitchers in baseball so that'd be pretty cool but i doubt it they might pursue both because they might not land one but i'd be pretty surprised if they got one and then yeah still went after the other one so all right so the series is it's not over it's far from over obviously the odds have swung in the nationals' favor, and if you look at the recent history of series that have started out like this, certainly looks like the Nationals are in the driver's seat here. Of the 55 teams that have ever taken a 2-0 World Series lead, 44 have won, including 17 of the last 18 and I think the last 11. I think only the 96 Yankees have come back from that in fairly recent years.

So obviously none of really the teams that went down 0-2 in those series were as good as these Astros are. But also the Astros just lost two games at home, so the Nationals have home field advantage and they're no such as themselves. So there could be a comeback here. Would not be surprised if this turns out to be a long series still but obviously the the nets are favored here and in this game three game three would be one where the astros could potentially get on the board at least because they do have the better starting pitcher in this game maybe they've had the better

starting pitcher in every game but the advantages have been pretty slim. But Greinke, Anibal Sanchez, that's a pretty big advantage. And I think it was one sort of unsung benefit of the Astros finishing off the Yankees in game six. Part of that was that they didn't have to use Garrett Cole in game seven, and so they were able to start the series with him. But also it lined up Zach Greinke for the game three start, the NL Park start, and that's a big advantage that you get with Zach Greinke, that he is a good hitter. He is a much better hitter than any of the other pitchers in this series, and he will get to hit. Now, it's been a while since he has hit, so knowing him, he's probably been taking BP every day in preparation for this, but he could be rusty, but that's a nice thing. We will get to see one of the best hitting pitchers in decades

and decades, if not all time, get to use that skill in this game. And so it would not be at all surprising to see the Nationals drop one here. Also an ever, ever, ever so small advantage to having Granke in the NL too, is that you're a lot so small advantage to having grinky in the nl2 is that you're a lot more likely to have sacrifice bunts in the nl because the pitchers are doing it and grinky's probably the best fielding pitcher of of this generation as well so yeah that's right it's just curious uh no i'm not just curious i always go past that Curiosity is not that great. Okay. All right. So we will all be talking during game three. You and I and Meg, we will talk

during game three for our Patreon supporters. We'll be doing a live stream. You'd still have time to sign up if you want to join us for that. Of course, Meg and I will be back with another episode this week, so that'll do it. By the way, didn't even mention this in the episode proper because it just seems so insignificant. Kind of strange, unexpected, but still insignificant. Justin Verlander the way that we talk about Clayton Kershaw,

given Verlander's struggles in the World Series? But Verlander has been a very successful postseason pitcher on the whole. He's been excellent in the division series and the championship series in like 150 combined innings. So Justin Verlander's career regular season ERA is 3.33. His career postseason ERA is 3.35. So he's basically been himself in the postseason. It just so happens that he has not been very good in the World Series so far. You'd have to have a very specific and demanding definition of clutchness to say that Justin Verlander is unclutch because of his World Series struggles? Because then are you saying that the World Series is so dramatically different from the earlier playoff rounds that you have to win to get to the World Series, that he just can't succeed in that series, even though he succeeds in those other series? This is a small sample, doesn't mean anything.

He's proven himself as a postseason performer, so didn't even really think it was worth bringing it up when we were discussing it earlier, but figured I'd mention it here. There was some manager news that we did not have time to talk about. Maybe we will talk about it in the next episode. Kind of an interesting series of hirings, I think, in that they reveal just how different the desired major league manager is right now. You have the Phillies hiring Joe Girardi. You have the Cubs opting not to hire Joe Girardi and instead hiring David Ross. And then you have the Padres hiring Jace Tingler, who is both the best name but also the least known name in this trio.

So you have 55-year-old veteran manager Girardi. You have 42-year-old first-time manager, was a big leaguer and just retired a few years ago, David Ross. And you have 38-year-old first-time manager, Jace Tingler, who was never a big leaguer. He was a minor league player. He's kind of had an almost A.J. Hinch-esque past few years in that he's been a front office guy with the Rangers. He was actually one of their assistant general managers, and then he was an interim bench coach. He was most recently the player development field coordinator. So he fits in very well with the idea that the Padres

are trying to improve their young players and teams are trying to develop players in the majors these days. They want managers who are up to speed on those latest trends. Then again, these other hirings were not like Jay Stingler. This was, you know, get respected clubhouse guy who is well-liked in that city and organization, and then just go get pretty respected former longtime manager. So there's no real clear pattern here, which I think is kind of interesting. Maybe Meg and I will explore that next time. You can support the podcast on Patreon. As I said, if you sign up at the $10 level or up, you can get access to our second playoff live stream on Friday during game three. Go to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. Sign up to pledge some monthly amount to help keep us

going. Get yourself access to some perks. The following five listeners have already done so. Matt Lindner, Andy Karl, David Calvert, Brad Behearns, and Kyle Jones. 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 at fangrass.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance, and we will be back with another episode and another live stream a little later this week. Talk to you then. Ladies, for Houston ladies. With all those truck huggers, gun luggers, now you got to have their babies. No.

This town, it's so impressive from a distance. Listen, boy, I'm talking to you.