Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1596: The Unpredictable Playoff Round

Episode Date: September 29, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about a misconception about FIP and how to weigh FIP and ERA in evaluating pitcher performance after the fact, the Phillies’ failure to make the playoffs and how the outcome of their season affects (and should affect) the future of their front office, Jacob deGrom’s ever-increasing velocity and how […]

Welcome to the workin' week Oh, I know it don't thrill you I hope it don't kill you Welcome to the workin' week You gotta do it till you do it So you better get into it All of your family has a kill to survive And it's the waitin' for their big day to arrive

But if it do, I feel it, it better be alive Welcome to the workin' week Oh, I know it don't thrill you I hope it don't kill you Welcome to the working week You gotta do it to be good So you better get to it Hello and welcome to episode 1596 of Effectively Wild,

a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I'm Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by ESPN's Sam Miller. Hello, Sam. Hello. Can I express a pet peeve to you? Yeah. I was listening to another podcast, and the hosts were—that's not it.

I like other podcasts. They are not my pet peeve, even though they are competitors of ours. But the hosts of this other podcast, whom I admire, were talking about Cy Young Award voting. And they were saying that for them, FIP, Fielding Independent Pitching, should play no role in Cy Young voting. Or at best, it could be a tiebreaker that really what they're interested in is ERA or maybe some other stats. But they want to know about results, not what could have happened, what might have happened, what should have happened. And there are a lot of people who hold that opinion.

I think it's a reasonable opinion to hold. And they didn't discount the value of FIP. They acknowledged that it's more predictive of a pitcher's future ERA than his actual ERA is. They were just saying that for retrospective award voting, they don't care about what he deserved. They care about what happened. And to me, this is just sort of a misconception about what FIP measures. I mean, I get it. But on the other hand, you're awarding awards to players based on what they do, right? They're individual awards. And the reason why FIP is more

predictive of future ERA is that it isolates what the pitcher actually did, right? What the pitcher was responsible for, his strikeouts, his walks, his home runs allowed. Of course, there's a little luck allowed and other players and people factoring into those things too, but they are kind of the true outcomes, the truer outcomes. And so FIP filters out luck and defense and things that the pitcher didn't really have anything directly to do with. And so to me, it seems like if you care about an individual award, then it's just as legitimate to say, I care more about FIP or I care just as much about FIP. And of course, Fangraph's war is based on FIP, whereas Baseball Reference War is based on runs allowed. But doesn't that sort of make sense to you? I mean, that's the way I think of it. Like,

FIP is what the pitcher did. ERA is partly or largely what the pitcher did, but it's also luck-based and it's defense-based. It's a team award, really. And I'm not saying you shouldn't give awards based on that to players, but FIP, I think, has just as strong a case for this is what that player actually did, and we're rewarding or debiting that pitcher for what he did, not necessarily what else happened while he was on the mound. Why are you being so coy about what this other podcast is? I could say what it is. I don't want to call anyone out.

I mean, it's a good podcast. It's beyond the scrum with our pal, Annie McCullough, who's often on here, and Mark Craig. They're both great. I think some of the best baseball writers out there, but I differ philosophically with them on this. Yeah, I think FIP got a little bit of a, I don't know, a little bit of a bad name because it's what's known as a predictive stat. It's an ERA predictor. It does not reflect anything about how many runs were scored, but predicts, you know, roughly what a a pitcher's era should have been if everything else

kind of had evened out for him and because of that word predictor it sort of gets lumped i think psychologically in people's heads with uh speculative or even even projecting it's it'd be like saying like i mean if if someone were like well i think the saiyan should go to whoever pitched best this year not who had the best projection entering the season we would all be like well yeah that yeah of course uh sure and in i think in people's heads when they draw their little circles of where everything goes phip sort of kind of nudges up against the projection side because it's like it's a hypothetical it's an imaginary in people's psychology but of course you're right it's it's not that it's just a

measurement of it's it's three measurements of a pitcher's performance of his actual performance three measurements three very sturdy measurements that one looks at in in isolation all the time and and tries to put them in a balance and and once you put it in a balance, and then once you have, I mean, you know, I'll be honest, like I've never figured out how Kelvin works, you know, the Kelvin, the temperature, the idea of a constant when you're talking about a ratio, like you're talking about a ratio, but there's a constant in the ratio I've never, ever understood. And so you have, you know, you have some math that isn't entirely intuitive. And so for all those reasons, you get fit lumped in with a, well, this is like,

you're trying to trick me. This is a trick. This is a trick stat. And so I, um, I understand why that we should push against that notion of, of FIP being that FIP is a very simple, very basic stat that measures three parts of a pitcher's performance, probably the three biggest parts of a pitcher's direct performance, and then tries to put them into one number so they can be compared against each other. And I think particularly when you're looking at smaller samples, which might be as small as a couple of weeks, or it might be a couple of years because players fluctuate a lot. It does tell you more, I think, than ERA does for how good the pitcher is. So that's all good.

I, on the other hand, don't necessarily have a problem with Andy's or Mark's. I don't know which one of them, but it sounds like the sort of take Andy would have, position that FIP shouldn't necessarily overwhelm an Asai Young argument, because I do think that pitching is a collaborative effort between the pitcher and the catcher and the defense. I've come to appreciate that, I think, more in the years since. I don't have to spend much of my time predicting who's going to be a good pitcher as much as I used to. I used to have to spend, it used to be that a lot of my writing was telling people who was going to be good this year,

or who was going to be good next start. And since I don't have to get into that quite as much anymore, I've moved away from precisely caring to what degree every player was responsible for a team success. And I've just embraced that they're all wearing the same pajamas because they're all on the same team trying to do the same thing. And if a pitcher's job is to prevent runs by collaborating with his defense, then it is fine to say that his ERA

reflects something about him, even if it was, you know, other people around him as part of that effort who might have failed him. Anyway, to get to the answer, I'm fine with either one. I actually don't have a total preference, and I would say that I probably lean toward FIP a little bit more than ERA. But if I have a Cy Young vote, I definitely would look at both of them.

I would not pick the ERA champion if his FIP were a run and a half higher, and I would not pick the FIP champion if his ERA were a run and a half higher. Yeah, I wouldn't say that you should only look at one. I'm just saying it's more than a tiebreaker to me. They're more on equal footing, if anything. And I think that if you want to make the case that FIP is missing on someone for some reason, that FIP is missing on someone for some reason, that FIP is misrepresenting how a pitcher performed in that season, I'm willing to listen to that case too. If you say, well, he got really soft contact and so he was allowing easy defensive opportunities and that's why, or he gets a lot of grounders and he allowed soft fly balls or

something and that's why they didn't go over the fence or whatever it is, then you can make that case. I'll be a little skeptical just because it doesn't seem like many pitchers have that ability over the long term, but they might have that ability or at least that result over a single season. So if you want to say that's the case, that so-and-so's expected weighted on base or exit velocity allowed or whatever was really low he just did a great job of inducing soft contact and he should get credit for that that's a good argument to make too so i'm not saying either is the the be all end all it's just more than a tiebreaker to me given that this year was so short this would be

the year probably to lean fib yeah i Yeah, I think that makes sense. Although I guess in one sense, though, also because this year is so short, you end up with crazy numbers, crazy being like you have ERAs that are lower than we ever really see. And so you just probably have a lot of choices. And so I would say that particularly in the National League, well, in the American League, it's so obvious. And then in the National League, you have a bunch of really good choices. And so you can afford to pick somebody who meets both marks, I think. You don't have to go with FIP or ERA in this case because you have a handful of pitchers who are extremely good by either measure. Yeah. All right. One other thing that stood out to me this weekend, I read an article or I got an email, like an athletic email with some of

the recent stories in there. And one of them was by Jim Bowden and it was GMs and managers on the wobbly chair. Of course, it was not called wobbly chair. It was called hot seat, but that's how I read it. And one of the GMs and managers on there, or multiple of them, I guess, have already had their chairs topple over, right? Ron Renneke, manager of the Red Sox, is no longer the manager of the Red Sox. Billy Epler, GM of the Angels, is no longer GM of the Angels. But it mentioned Matt Klintak, Phillies GM, who of course has been rumored to be on the Wobbly chair for some time now. And Jim Bowden wrote, if the Phillies don't make the playoffs, Klintak is expected to be let go early next week. If they do earn a postseason berth, the Phillies will probably need to get past the wildcard series to save his job. Now, I don't know what this is based on. I know Bowden's always talking to people in the industry, so maybe he's hearing this. Maybe it's total speculation. Maybe it's totally wrong. But I wonder if we're still doing decisions like that. Do you think decisions are still being they both lost their games and the Phillies won,

Phillies would have been in the playoffs. And the Brewers and the Giants did lose their games, but the Phillies also lost. And so they were eliminated. So the Phillies came within one win, could have been any win, not just Sundays, of making the playoffs. And so if they had made the playoffs, again, a difference of one game, maybe that saves Klintak's job, or if they make it past the wildcard round, that saves Klintak's job, and that's just winning two games out of three, which means essentially nothing. I'm not saying that they shouldn't get rid of Klintak or he's had a chance to build this into a team, I think, that would not have to come down to the final day of the season to make the playoffs in a 16-game playoff format. So if you want to say that the Phillies are just not what they should be at this point after their rebuild, that is totally legitimate. But the idea that it might come down to the outcome of a single game or even, say, three or four games, do you think that's still really how decisions are being made?

Like I understand the PR aspect of it, that if you have a playoff team, how do you let someone go and say bad job if you achieve the goal? But really the goal is not to squeak into a 16 team playoff field for the Phillies right now. I think their job is to be more than that. Like I picked them as a flop team when we had to make preseason picks, not because I thought they would be so completely terrible, but just because I thought their future, their fate was so up in the air that at this point, it should not be that. They should be in a more solid position. They should be where Atlanta is or where other teams that have come out of their rebuild in a more solid state,

I think, than the Phillies have. So there's a great case for having sort of a rebuild in the front office there, but that it could come down to the outcome of one game or three games or four games strikes me as strange today, but it's possible. Yeah. Hmm. So do i think that those decisions are still being made on the basis of one game yeah i i think probably i i mean it has to be this i mean there are various ways that a narrative is dramatically changed by one game all the time i think and you know i think that like for instance we we consider this era of the Dodgers to be like, we're going to talk a lot about like whether the Dodgers can win the World Series this postseason. And when it's like really significant that they do because they haven't won a World Series since 1988.

And, you know, it's been a long drought. And there wouldn't be the drought if they had won one more game in 2017. And so we're still essentially talking about this team's narrative based on one win. So it has to be the right win, obviously. Yeah. It doesn't seem the Dodgers are doing that, though. I mean, they've had people call for Dave Roberts firing

based on his postseason managing. Even I was kind of in the camp last year of, okay, maybe that was so bad that they actually need to make some sort of change, but they haven't done that. Okay, so let's pause there. Let's pause there. You say even you got to that. Because they hadn't won a World Series. If Dave Roberts had won the World Series in 2017, you would not have been in that camp. Yeah, I guess that's true.

I guess that's true. So you ask, are we still doing this? And Ben, you have answered the question. We, you, are still doing this. And I mean, I really feel like the Phillies, for instance, it's not just the one game that they needed to win to make the playoffs this year but like the fact that they won 81 games last year if they had won 82 i think that would have been significant i think the 80 games they won the year before if they had won 81 yeah i think that would have been

significant i think if you added one win to all three of the last three seasons, then that's three wins right there, right? And then instead of a losing season, you had a 500 season in their bridge year. Instead of a 500 season, you have a winning season last year. And then instead of missing the playoffs, you make the playoffs this year. I don't think Matt Klintak's winning executive of the year this year in that case, but I definitely do think that it changes the narrative of the team a great deal now as to whether it should i think that we've talked about this many you know several times over the course of several hundred episodes but i think that the a lot of firing and hiring well a lot of firing in particular is is trying to just establish that there is accountability

and that we understand that it's really hard to win and that there are things outside your control, but we need you to be doing everything you can to win without being able to make excuses. If a GM is worried about all the reasons that like the job was hard and that they lost for things he didn't do, then does that give him a little bit of freedom to not take care of everything that he wants to? You want to have you want to have accountability.

You want to send us a message. I guess what you really want is to send a message of accountability that says, honestly, we don't even care if the reason that we lost is a hundred things that were outside of your control. You're, you're going to get fired if we keep losing. Um, and then that sends a message that you can't slide on any of the things that you can control. And it's true that the Phillies probably are not a significantly different team.

I mean, they are not a significantly different team if they're in the playoffs right now with 29 wins than missing it with 28. But like the message that you send to the rest of the organization is perhaps a valuable one that says like, just get the job done. Like we can't do everything around here for you.

You need to get the job done or else people get fired. It's a shocking thing when you see someone get fired but but yeah i mean you're basically you're right that like the the question you should be asking is is this person going to be the best person to do the job going forward um and that's not really being answered by what happened on sunday the phillies blew a couple of leads in losses after my stat blast last week about the the highest percentage of losses with blown leads ever so they went into Sunday's game with a chance to have the all-time highest percentage but they blew that too by not blowing a lead at all they never had a lead in

that last game so as it turned out they had leads in 21 of their 32 losses. That is 65.6%. And that is only fourth all-time, according to updated and more complete numbers from our listener Adam Ott. So 1932 Tigers and Yankees were up at 67, 66%, and the 2017 Brewers at 65.8. So Phillies, fourth all-time. Still bad. Just think how mad you'd be if you were, you know, if you owned the Phillies business and you went through three years of rebuild and then you can't get a 500 team out of it.

You'd just be so mad on Sunday. You'd be so mad watching them lose again. Yeah, no, as other people have pointed out, it's kind of like the glaring example, maybe the only example of a team that has really gone through this modern rebuild and has come out just not really a winner. I mean, kind of a contender, but far from a really well-constructed, safe playoff team at the end of it.

So we knew that some team, once everyone started doing that, it wasn't going to work for everyone. And the Phillies are the one that it hasn't worked for. So I did have one more observation. I don't know what you want to talk about, but before we talk about the playoff teams and playoff players for a month, I just wanted to mention Jacob deGrom and what he did this weekend, what he did this season with his ever-increasing velocity. It's like it's entered effectively wild listener email territory with him where it's like, what if there were a pitcher who just added two miles per hour of velocity every single season? What would happen? What would you pay for him or whatever? Like, DeGrom is in that zone now where both his average fastball speed and his maximum fastball speed just keep going up and up like a tick or two every single year.

So, like, 2016, his four-seamer averaged 94.2. Then it went to 96.0 in 2017. Then 96.7, 97.2, 99.0 this year. And this year he topped out, according to Brooks Baseball, which Park corrects and all of this stuff, he hit 102.7 with a fastball, which is just unbelievable. His average this year was 99.0? Yeah. Wow. Yeah. And so the last couple of seasons, he hit 100. And this season, he kind of went viral this weekend for hitting 102 on the gun.

But at least according to Brooks Baseball, he actually, if you round, hit 103. And it's unique. It really is unique. There have been articles by, I think, Rob Arthur and Travis Sochik about this, about how unusual it is for any pitcher to keep gaining velocity over this period of time, because the typical progression is you lose a little bit of fastball speed every year, and maybe every now and then a little bit of it comes back, but there just has not been a pitcher in the relatively few years for which we have this velocity data who has had this kind of progression just faster and faster

as he gets older and older. I mean, it's like he throws harder than Noah Sindergaard now. I mean, Sindergaard doesn't throw at all in 2020, but I used to think of Sindergaard as the hard thrower on that staff. And DeGrom threw hard, of course, but not triple digits hard. And now he's up at 102, 103, and I don't know what to make of it. He's 32. It should not be happening. I don't know whether it's that he was converted into a pitcher late. He was was a shortstop until I think his junior year. So maybe his arm is fresher than the average 32-year-old pitchers.

But still, you just don't expect to see this. And I haven't seen anything reported about like, oh, he went to driveline or something. Like I think he's pretty cagey about what he does or he hasn't come out and said, yeah, I have a new training routine or I changed my mechanics or something. Like I haven't seen a great explanation for why or how this is happening. And it is just utterly unique. And I don't know what to make of it. He's on pace to throw about 110 by a couple of years from now. What was he two years ago, did you say? Well, two years ago, he topped out at 100 on the dot,

and his average release speed was 96.7. So he's up more than two miles per hour. No, more than, yeah, right, 96. Yeah, so, okay, so he's up more than two miles an hour, two and a half miles an hour almost. Does it strike you as at all interesting in addition to the, I mean, the most interesting thing is obviously the adding the velocity, but does it strike you as at all interesting that he isn't any better as a pitcher? Yeah. Well, what I was just going to ask you was whether you think this is better for his

long-term outlook, given that, as you said, he hasn't really gotten better. I mean, I guess if you look at like XFIP, this was his best XFIP ever, even better than his 2018 Cy Young year. I don't know if you looked at deserved run average or something. Like maybe there are some stats in which he was better. Clearly his strikeout rate was higher this year than ever before. So in some ways he's better. But in terms of FIP or ERA, we just had that discussion. He is not better than he was two years ago. And so would you rather have the guy who is this good and is throwing 102 at max, or would you rather have the guy who's topping out at 100 and averaging 96.7? Because it's sort of scary. Like if you're throwing 102, 103, you start to think he's going to break down. Like you just, an arm cannot sustain that. And you look at Sindergaard and other guys who have thrown that hard and the injury record is not great. So in a way,

I might almost rather have someone who throws hard, but not hardest, just because I feel like, well, maybe the health outlook is a little bit better. On the other hand, you always project some loss of velocity eventually. Although in deGrom's case, he's Benjamin Buttoning here with his fastball speed, but you'd expect him to lose velocity at some point, right? And so the faster he throws now, the harder he will throw after losing velocity. So I don't know which is actually better for his long-term outlook, throwing this hard or throwing as hard as he did a couple years ago and the season in some ways benefited him or i guess how do i put this it was a much shorter season yes and

so he didn't have to worry about pacing himself through through a long season right and partly because it was a shorter season partly because of double headers and things like that uh he also threw fewer innings per game so he didn't have to pace himself as much in each game. Like, you know, in 2018, he averaged almost seven innings a start. This year, he averaged five and a half innings per start. I guess 5.67 innings per start. And so do you suppose that, and of course, you know, for what it's worth, the Mets aren't in the playoffs.

And so he didn't have to worry too much about being fresh in October although they didn't know that they weren't going to be in the playoffs until you know relatively late do you suppose that this is this could be partly a 2020 thing and that he might not have actually changed much this year so much as he was like almost you know kind of a like i don't know he got some of the boost that a reliever would get by only having to throw 68 innings this year instead of having to throw 210 right yeah that's possible there was no great league-wide uptick in velocity at the average for seamers feed went from 93.6 the past two years to 93.7 this year. And that's even with all other

starters making shorter outings and more relievers pitching innings. So it doesn't seem like across the board that was the case. And of course, there was the shorter ramp up to the season, which maybe you build up arm strength less than you typically would. So that could go either way. But maybe in his case, because he had this extreme result, it is logical to think that it had something to do with that. But it's really just extraordinary. I mean, he's been so great, but the fact that his stuff just keeps getting better is unprecedented as far as we know. 99. Yeah. Has a starter done that? Has a starter averaged 99? Let's see. That doesn't feel right to me. It does not done that? Has a starter averaged 99?

Let's see. That doesn't feel right to me. It does not feel to me like a start. If you ask me to guess, I would guess that the hardest starter had averaged would be in the maybe high 97s. That is the hardest anyone has averaged. The next closest guy is Cindercard, who averaged 98.9 in 2016. So, yeah, this is the tops. Big difference. 99 and then Noah Cindercard, just 98.

That's 98. Yep. Starts with an 8. Well, that's all I got. Well, I didn't bring anything. Okay. I guess we could. Did you watch the final day?

No. Of the season yesterday? I just wanted to note that like the basically the way the season ended, you know, like baseball in 2012, 2012 was 2012 or 2011. The year where they had the final day of the season was so incredible and outrageous and 2011 2011 okay and i always sort of think that like this plan of having all the teams play at the same time uh on sunday partly that's for fairness you don't want to give uh team intelligence about like whether they need to win or lose and whether they can you know rest their starters and so that's that's part of it but i feel like part of it, is trying to recapture the magic of 2011, where you have like the games going on simultaneously. So the the playoff implications are changing constantly between cities. And you can have like an extraordinary result followed by another extraordinary result.

And like we're all really wrapped up in this synchronized playoff push, right? And so Sunday was sort of the worst possible, I think, way for that to end. Just because the way that the playoffs were finally settled was that the Brewers lost and then the Giants lost. and so what happened is that you had the final playoff team winning basically getting their spot right after they lost to lock in a sub 500 record right and then they won but they got the playoff spot anyway because another team lost to tie them but because of the tiebreaker system this year, the Brewers got the playoff spot, even though the tiebreaker says, I don't know if you guys talked about this on the show, but the tiebreaker system makes no sense whatsoever. We already have a unbalanced schedule. There's no overlap between anybody's schedule. So we already have an unprecedentedly unbalanced

schedule because you only play play teams in your region. And so now the tiebreaker is how well you did against teams in your region, like a subset of teams in your region. But the tiebreaker was how you did against your division. But almost all they played was teams against their division this year. The Brewers already had this advantage, presumably that they had a weaker schedule than teams in the East or the West. And now the tiebreaker is how you do against your division. Very odd, very odd decision to make the tiebreaker that. And so you have, okay, so the final showdown of the season is one team loses and then the other team loses and they both have the same record. But because of a tiebreaker, one team is now celebrating in their losing locker room,

which I don't even think they're allowed to hang out in their locker room. So they probably have already gone home by then. The Brewers have probably already gone home by then, by the time they get their ticket punched for the 16-team playoff. I think they were still there because I think they took a triumphant photo on the field, which just... We did it. Yeah.

We lost. We snuck in with our sub-500 record. Put that 2020 tiebreaker banner up. Yeah. I'm getting my 2020 tiebreaker t-shirt. Right. And on top of all that, you had it and you had the giants game end on a really bad

strike call by rob drake and i don't know if you followed the game at all i don't know if you followed the rob drake thing at all i didn't see that no okay so robbed as rob drake have you heard rob drake's name in the last 24 hours yes i have okay so this game was like okay you know how there's this idea that like a lot of these games on the last day of the season don't really matter and so the umpires give this really wide strike zone it's almost like a caricature of like the umpire who wants to go home for the offseason everybody wants to go home for the offseason so it's a big strike zone you better be swinging we're all going home right and you got the sense that rob drake didn't realize

that there were playoff implications in this game because this strike zone started out really large and then just kept growing and growing and it was like i have not seen anything like this in the pitch fx era where the strike zone made no sense and nobody could do anything about it. And he, Rob Drake was just sort of like very like calmly and unemotionally just punching everybody out on crazy, you know, pitches that were way inside, way outside, sometimes way high, sometimes way low. And so I'm going to just go, I'm going to go down the list of some of these strike lookings and they're called strike percentage, according to ESPN stats and infos calculations for percentage of pitches that are in that location that are called a strike all right so

first pitch of the game to the Giants called strike 58 percent okay no big deal all right and then we have 77 percent in the first inning no big deal and then Mike Yastrzemski again 78 percent all very normal okay you know these are of, these are borderline calls, kind of, but they're justified calls. Okay. And then we have another 74, another 74, here's a 98, everything good. Okay. Bottom of the second, Evan Longoria, strike looking, 35% strike. Okay. And then we have bottom of the third austin slater strike out looking 0.6 strike so he's punched out on a 0.6 strike so now you start thinking this is a big zone 62 and 61%, and 71%. So all the borderline calls, a lot of the borderline calls are going.

And so then in the seventh inning, all right, so the seventh inning, it's a one-run game, and Mauricio Dubon takes a pitch inside with two strikes. He gets punched out. That one's 27%. And then shortly after that,in slater gets punched out also bottom of the seventh inning one run game 37 percent and then you have in the eighth inning the inning starts with wilmer flores up first pitch to him is called a strike. That's 1%. And then Brandon Belt comes up.

First pitch to him, 46%. That's a strike. And then you have Evan Longoria. He's punched out in the bottom of the eighth inning. That's 28%. And then you get the final pitch of the game, which was to Austin Slater. And it's a one run game, right?

Two strikes, one run game playing for the postseason, 19%. And the pitch is, you know, pretty clearly both low and outside. And so I don't know, I don't know if the way that I read those out made it just seem like a whole bunch of like, maybe it was hard to follow what I was doing there. But the process of seeing this strike zone expand just felt so odd and unnatural. And so like this was a game that didn't really matter kind of a strike zone. And so to have the season end that way was really an odd thing to watch. It felt like something from the 1990s before we had the strike zone box. And you would just see like

batters constantly aggrieved and there'd be like that close-up shot of the batter's face like what and uh so anyway so that's how sunday ended were there a lot of calls going against the padres too or was it one-sided not that it's good if they're terrible calls on both teams but it's maybe a little bit better than only against one team. Oh, yeah. I mean, it was a big strike zone for both sides. So if you're looking at just the Padres side, there's a number of pitches in the 60s and 50s and 40s that were also called strikes looking.

And then they had, let's see, here's a strike three looking that was 55%. Here is a strike three looking to jake cronenworth that was 32 here's a strike three looking to manny machado that was 22 and here's a strike three looking to greg garcia that was six percent on the final strike so it was it wasn't so much that like there was a like a bias toward one side it was more that it was just so odd to see of this game where it felt like the umpire was um was operating on like a kind of a different goal than the players were like they were playing as though this was a regular game and the umpire's zone was like a zone that seemed to be signaling like not a regular game, like just a get out of town game.

And so it was a very odd thing to see with the stakes as they were and with the sort of intent of trying to create this last day of the season drama to see that kind of punctured by the weird strike zone. Yeah, I didn't find it to be a very exciting or riveting end to the season in general, even though there were playoff spots at stake and obviously seedings at stake until the final day of the season, it just felt like the teams that were fighting for survival were just not good teams. So obviously the fans of those teams really cared and wanted them to make it, but it was just sort of hard for me to get all that worked up about whether this 29 and 31 team was going to make it or this 500 team was going to make it or this 28-32 team was going to make it. And I felt like the structure of this playoff format sort of focused all the attention on those teams in the last couple of weeks as opposed to the really good teams, the best teams in baseball.

Because it just didn't really seem to matter what happened with them, like who won the division as opposed to winning the second place spot or a wildcard spot as opposed to a second place spot. The seeding just doesn't matter all that much because every team has to play in the wildcard round, so there's no buy at stake. And then after the wildcard round, there isn't even any home field advantage at stake, or at least theoretically there isn't because you're playing all those games at neutral parks. So it just felt kind of inconsequential. And so all of our attention

was focused on these very mediocre teams and there was something at stake for them, but it just wasn't great baseball. I mean, just watching like the Phillies in that last week, it wasn't like they were making some great run and just fell short. I mean, they won like one game in the last week and all the other teams were just sort of backing in. It was like, who's going to lose less and make it? So I didn't find it to be all that exciting.

And I think that's sort of a downside of the the 16 team playoff format it was also just kind of a headache to figure out who was actually in playoff position at any given time what with all the tiebreakers it was sort of tough to just look at the standings and figure out who was in and who was out so i'm a little relieved that that's over yeah there was uh enough enough teams had really massive home road splits that this year that I was able to sort of talk myself into thinking, well, maybe it matters if the Yankees are at home for the first round, kind of a thing.

But yeah, the seedings, I mean, trying to care about the seedings is really, really hard. And I just basically scrolled past those aspects of it. I pride myself on being able to find a reason to have a rooting interest in every game, no matter what, like, my psychology allows me to create a reason to care about almost anything that's happening in the world at almost any given time, so I can create some emotional interest in it. And so like I was, for instance, you know, I thought it would be fun for me for the Phillies bullpen to be in the postseason. I thought that

would be fun. Like that would be like the Nationals bullpen last year. So I could sort of root for the Phillies to make it in the final spot. And then, you know, there was the Giants Dodgers as a first round matchup. That would have been really fun to see. Another reason probably that the payoff of the final weekend was a little disappointing because the Giants-Dodgers, the Giants have been in the number eight spot for a fair amount of time. And so I had kind of just in my head banked on that matchup being part of my future. And so then that ends up not happening. And I kind of was hoping that the Cardinals would have to play today. So there was a part of me that was always rooting for this to be close enough that the Cardinals would need to play so that we would have a baseball game on Monday. But yeah, for the most part, there just wasn't all that much to root for on the final weekend. the final weekend yeah to be honest this is a not really on the same exact topic but if they're if they're only going to do 60 games they should have really done 54 not for the playoff implications

but so that the players could just triple their stats i feel bad for players who are like did i have a good year i don't really like like you know someone scores 37 runs is that a good year you gotta multiply by 2.7 right if you multiply by three then yeah 37 runs that's a lot but if you multiply by two then it's not a very good year and i don't think that like 37 is not a very intuitive number for math purposes so i feel like there's a lot of players who are at home right now asking their kids like did how was my year did i have a good year yeah trying to figure that out so they should have probably just done 54 triple triple it all up and then uh they'd have a couple uh extra days that they could sprinkle into the playoffs so that there'd be well if they had maybe the phillies would have made the playoffs and maybe matt quentin's job would be safer. I mean, truly, that's the thing. It's not just that the one game shouldn't dictate

whether you keep your job or not, one win. It's that the length of the season is always a little bit arbitrary, but at least it's traditional. That's the rules we play by. This year, the length of the season, it could have been anything. It could have been 50. It could have been 70. And if it's 65, Matt Klintak gets Klintak gets his job.

If it's 55, does he get his job? Like the, it is really an odd way that these things work. If the giants had won five more games against the NL West, but five fewer against the AL West, what does that have to do with the brewers? How could that have anything to do with the brewers? And yet in one case, they make the playoffs, and in the other case, they don't make the playoffs. I'm going to just see. If we had a 54-game season, who would have made the playoffs? I imagine the Phillies would have because of how poorly they ended things. And that's what I wrote,

I think, at the beginning of the season was that after 60 games, it's basically like in a typical season, 30% roughly, I think it's a little more, of the teams that have a playoff spot after 60 games don't have one by the end of the 162-game season. That's with a 10-team playoff format, of course. But yeah, you would expect a good number of teams not to make it if they had just played more games. All right. So if they had ended this after 54 games, teams first 54 games. I'm here on the play index using another one of my favorite tools. All right. 54 games.

The wow. Oh, it would have been. In fact, it would have been uh in fact it would have been a tie the giants the brewers and the phillies and the reds all would have tied and then we would have totally different tie breakers scenarios because i don't know how well everybody did on their division play so we would have actually had a four-way tie for the let let's see, for the one, for the seventh and eighth spots, there would have been a four-way tie at the end of it. And let's see, Houston, yeah, still would have made it with there. Houston would have finished at 500 instead of under 500, which is a slightly different story than they would have told. Well, four-way tie would have been much more fun

if they were actually playing tiebreaker games than if they were just settling it for tiebreakers. Yeah, I got all excited when I saw the four-way tie, and then I got really unexcited when I remembered. All right. Well, we have not done a playoff preview here. If you want a series-by-series sort of thing, we'll be doing that on the Ring of Rome B-Show,

and you can go to Fangraphs.com. They are doing previews of every wildcard series, so that's out there wait if you one last thing i want to say one last thing from the final weekend during the final one of the broadcasters in one of the final games described a playoff type atmosphere during the weekend's games and i thought like there's that that phrase is retired Like, we can't have a playoff type atmosphere when it's fake white noise. It'll be a 2020 playoff type atmosphere, I guess. Because there just won't be one, really. All right.

Well, do you have any, I don't know, any predictions? No, no, no, no, no. Nothing? No, no, no. Certainly not. Okay. Yeah, me neither, really. I mean, I had to do them.

I was asked to do predictions for the playoffs, but, you know, I did predictions the way I usually do them, which is just like the favorite. Yeah, it's boring. I just feel like, you know, if you want the wacky, the wild, the most entertaining outcome, you can determine what that would be yourself. Like, we can all root for certain things. You don't need me to tell you that that's actually going to happen because the reason why it's fun is that it's not likely to happen, right? So I just went with my Dodgers win the World Series pick that I made two months ago and sticking with it now because the Dodgers are still great.

So it's going to be a really busy, wild week, and we will be doing episodes about all of those games when we can catch our breaths. But we don't have a lot to offer in terms of predictive value, I don't think. In fact, just to hammer home how unpredictable it all is, according to the Fangraph's playoff odds, the Dodgers have a less than 2-3 chance to make it past the Brewers, and that's the biggest mismatch in the wildcard round. The Dodgers also have a less than 1-3 chance to make it to the LCS, and a less than 1-5 chance to win the World Series. And they're the best team in this field. So no one knows anything, really. We'll enjoy this week, but we can't really predict

this week. Maybe we'll enjoy it in part because we can't predict it. So we will do longer, more in-depth previews when we get to longer series that are a bit more previewable. Just know that even the Dodgers, the favorite, have a very hard road ahead of them because of the extra round, because of the lack of home field advantage after the wildcard round. And home field advantage really does matter this year. Home teams finish with a 5.57 winning percentage, even without fans in the stands. So if the Dodgers do win, if they snap their championship drought, yes, it will have come in a 60-game season, but it's a season in which their October road is a lot harder than it would have been under normal circumstances.

So in that sense, it will be an even bigger accomplishment. So we will soon see what happens, and we will reconvene after some of these early games to discuss what went down. Okay, that will do it for today. Thanks for listening. I can tell you based on the work of Andrew Mearns at Baseball Prospectus that we will see some new matchups in this postseason.

Andrew wrote that of the 120 possible playoff matchups among 16 teams, 62 have never happened before. Of the 56 possible interleague playoff matchups among 16 teams 62 have never happened before of the 56 possible interleague playoff matchups 26 are unprecedented three of the eight wild card series feature opponents who have never played each other in the playoffs ace versus white socks twins versus astros rays versus blue jays and there are many possible division series matchups that have never happened before including dodgers padres dodgers marlins and more. So we will see some new blood, fresh playoff matchups. That's another thing to look forward to.

You can also look forward to more episodes of this podcast thanks to our listeners who have supported us on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks. Patrick Green, Mark Rohan, Joe Mielenhausen, Arthur, and Sam Cunningham. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild. There are usually open threads in the Facebook group for a lot of the games that are going on.

It's a fun month to be in there. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments for me and Sam and Meg coming via email at podcast.fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. Enjoy the games, and we will be back to discuss them soon. Talk to you then. Independence wasn't won With a single-ballad gun

I just wanna have some fun tonight And not get in a fight A rollercoaster ride Beside the line in a fight, a roller coaster ride. The sight of life that's getting in my eyes, a roller coaster ride.