Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1602: Dig Deep

Episode Date: October 12, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about the Honda Fit being discontinued, then discuss Game 5 of the Yankees-Rays ALDS, why this postseason’s strikeout-centric, home-run-reliant brand of baseball may be entertaining to hardcore fans but a turnoff to non-fans, the ALCS and NLCS matchups, the incredible depth of the Rays and Dodgers, whether (and why) […]

🎵 Music 🎵 Hello and welcome to episode 1602 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I'm Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Sam Miller of ESPN. Hello, Sam. Hello. Heard the Honda Fit was discontinued in the United States. Sad moment for this podcast. Many of our early episodes were recorded there. How many episodes would you estimate were recorded inside the Fit? I'm not prepared to answer that. You need to give me a minute. Wow, I definitely expected to buy another Honda Fit. I guess not.

Do you still have one? Yeah, sure. Yeah, it's still our primary car. It's a beauty. It's your last one. Got to make it last, I guess. Wow. I would guess.

It's hard to remember. I spent a lot of time. I think that I ran into Wi-Fi connectivity issues in the fit. And so then I would start recording right outside the garage door instead. So if I had to guess, well, let's see. I remember doing the episode with the accounts and descriptions of this game episode with Jason. What was that, like 300, 250? I know I did that one in the backyard sitting on a chair. And so the fit couldn't have been that far.

So I'd guess 100. Okay. Yeah. Well, it was a good place for you to record. Sound dampened recording studio that would not wake up your family. And I guess there will be a new fit in Europe and Japan. So you could move or maybe you could import. I don't know if you're desperate for a fit when this one runs out. Also marketed as Honda Jazz. I don't like a Honda Jazz. No, I don't like that.

I'm a fit fan. I'm not a Honda Jazz fan. The great thing about a Honda Fit is that it truly does not a Honda Jazz fan. The great thing about a Honda Fit is that it truly does fit a lot in it, inside of it. You can constantly make things fit. I have yet to run into something that we couldn't fit in it. And it also does itself fit. And so it's because it's a fairly small car. So it's a cute little pun, really, when you think about it. It's quite elegant. It fits things. Fits a funny word. Go ahead. So I was up in Syracuse last week for a wedding. My brother-in-law got married and it was just a small mid-pandemic type wedding with just very-laws and most of my in-laws are not baseball people. And my father-in-law was a big Yankees fan when he was younger, but he just kind of went cold turkey because he hated George Steinbrenner. And at a certain point he just said, nope, I'm out. And he really- What was that certain point?

I think, I don't know. He mentioned something about like letting Ron Guidry go. So maybe that was the breaking point when they didn't keep Guidry when he reached free agency at 37 or whatever he was. I don't really remember the circumstances of the end of Guidry's career, but that would have been the late 80s. But somewhere in that range, he just swore off baseball because he was sick of the way Steinbrenner ran the team. Understandably, I suppose. And he just hasn't watched baseball since then, really, and no one else in the family was really ever a baseball fan. And so we were watching Game 5 for a few innings

because I knew that I had to write if the Yankees lost, and so I did end up writing, and I got all my thoughts and my frustrations about the response to their Game 2 pitching plan and people blaming that for them losing the series into writing. But stakes were high, both because I knew I was going to be up most of the night writing if the Yankees lost, but also because it was an elimination game and it was really exciting. So we were watching it together and then we went back to the hotel and I finished watching it there and wrote about it there. But the next day we went back to the hotel and I finished watching it there and wrote about it there. But the next day, we went back to the house and my mother-in-law came over and she was like, can I ask you something

about baseball? And she doesn't regularly ask me things about baseball, but she said, I remember when I was watching baseball decades ago, it was all about base running and fielding and people doing things. And this game didn't really seem like that. It seemed like it was all about strikeouts and just the batter-pitcher matchup. And this was like the first time I had kind of encountered that reaction in the wild. Like, you know, usually you hear it just expressed by sports writers or longtime fans who are bemoaning the way baseball looks now. And, oh, it's no

contact and it's all strikeouts. This was like an organic reaction by someone who has not watched baseball for a few decades, really. Like we usually we hear from people who've been watching this whole time and say, oh, back in the 80s when I was a baseball fan, I was growing up and baseball was different or better. And in this case, it was someone who just sort of skipped from that era of baseball to this one and was just watching it almost for the first time. And she noticed the same thing. It stood out to her that this was a different style of baseball. to me that it really is not subtle, I guess, that even someone who has not been paying attention to baseball, who doesn't follow baseball closely, would notice that baseball looks different now than it used to. And this game was really a perfect illustration of that because it was all strikeouts. It was all guys coming in pumping 95 or higher. The slowest pitch in the game was 95. Wait, the slowest fastball?

Yes, slowest four-seam fastball. I think Zach Britton threw a 92-mile-per-hour sinker. That was the slowest fastball. But Nick Anderson threw a 94-point-something fastball four-seamer that was the slowest one. So according to Mike Petriello, the average stat cast average was like 97.2, which was the second highest in a game on record. The pitch info average was like half a mile per hour slower. So I guess maybe the readings in Petco are hot according to pitch info, but whatever, whether it was low 97s or high 96s, it was just a parade of guys who throw really hard and were getting strikeout after strikeout. And so to my mother-in-law, that was pretty boring, I think, compared to the baseball she remembered. This game was riveting to me despite that, despite the fact that it felt like no one would ever make contact, that inevitably it would be decided by a solo home run, which it was. But, you know, that's how I was feeling as the game was going on.

It's just going to be whoever hits the next solo home run will win this game because no one could ever possibly make enough contact against these pitchers to actually drive someone in from a base like there was not a single hit in the game with a runner on base I think it just felt like all right it's going to be bullpen monster after bullpen monster and eventually someone will get lucky or swing hard and happen to hit it and it'll go out and that's what happened and all of the solo homers in the game which were responsible for all of the runs barely left like they were all just a few feet over the fence brett gardner robbed one from randia rosarena that would have been a home run and then finally of course it was mike brousseau off of aroldis chapman for the very satisfying narrative climax to the

game the payback for being buzzed early in the year. And it was really exciting to me. I mean, I was on the edge of my seat, not just because I had an article at stake, but also because so much was at stake for these teams. And yet for someone who maybe didn't know the backstory or just wasn't as invested in those two teams or this season, it was pretty boring and it was pretty uneventful. And so I guess that sort of illustrated to me that maybe we don't mind as much when that sort of thing happens. I mean, when like almost 40% of the outs in that series are strikeouts and more than three quarters of the runs are scored on homers, we're in anyway because it's the Rays and the Yankees

and we have this incredible display of talent and it's fun to watch those guys just hit a hundred after a hundred and have these unhittable breaking balls but if you're just coming to it cold and you're a casual viewer then you're going to think nothing is happening here no one can make contact no one can hit the ball and why am I this? So that did sort of illustrate to me maybe the problems that baseball has as a spectator experience if you're not already on board with baseball in the way that we are. I feel like you're concluding that because it was an enjoyable, a great game that we don't mind as much. But I mean, just think about what this game had going for it in its fundamentals

it was a win or go home game between two division rivals probably the two best teams in the american league representing complete opposite ends of baseball's big big versus little david versus Lyeth spectrum. And it was a close game that came down to the final at bat and turned on a heroic achievement by an undrafted free agent who was going up against the greatest physical force who's ever pitched on a major league mound and who a month earlier had thrown one of the most terrifying and seemingly blatant pitches at his head in in recent years and of course you would enjoy that of course you would i mean what under what circumstances were you not going to enjoy that i mean there were also no fans in the stands which made the game much less enjoyable. But I wouldn't say we don't mind as much just because I enjoyed the game. I do mind as much. Like it was a great game that was made

worse because there were no fans. And I would say it was also a great game that was made worse because the three solo homers, here's my, this is what I, I was communicating with a friend throughout the game. And at the end I said, great game. And then a minute later, I said, great game other than three runs scoring on three solo homers, I guess. And he said, yep, because it is a worse way to have a great game develop. Now, I think that the homers, I think the homers have been scapegoated a lot. The homers, I think, are fairly exciting, and they show you an athleticism

that is what the baseball players are going for. It's that there's nothing else. You don't want to have a game where you feel like the only way to score is to hit a homer. And so it's really... It just felt impossible. It really did, that anyone would score any other way in that game to me.

I mean, of course, it could have happened some other way, but in that moment, it just felt like, yeah, it can't happen. Yeah, and you don't want that feeling. You want to feel like, you know, that rallies are going to be happening too. And the problem is that it's all like one ecosystem of offense and defense. all like one ecosystem of offense and defense. And so if you have a situation where homers are everywhere, then pitchers have to respond to that by, you know, developing certain skills and strategies to avoid home runs, which then leads to more strikeouts, which also then leads to more walks, which then incentivizes more home run hitting for the batter. And so the, you know, the fact that there are more home runs is probably also a cause of there being more strikeouts. And the fact that there are more strikeouts is probably also a cause of there being more home runs. And so you can't totally separate them. But

I think the fact that a casual fan picked up on it right away, and the fact that I also was in the middle of one of the great games of the past decade, thinking about it, even if I didn't, I don't care. Like I enjoy it all. Like I enjoy everything. And I don't notice myself not enjoying something quite as much, except when I consciously like remind myself, oh, you're a writer, you need to have thoughts about this. Then I realized that I'm not enjoying it as much but I do I mean in in this game you would ideally not like to be thinking about the repetitive weaknesses of the game I feel like I don't know I might be misremembering this but like the there was a complaint in I think there still is but there was a complaint in the NBA that too much offense, it depends on three point shooting and three point shooters.

And the great game of my short time following basketball during like the peak, I have, I was in Northern California at the peak of the Warriors. And so I got kind of into basketball for, you know, a couple of years. I would listen to games and the great game of that era was the game where the Warriors beat Oklahoma City in regular season game in overtime. And Steph Curry came down the court and just pulled up from like 40 feet away. Didn't need to just did like that's how he was going to get space. He just pulled up from 40 feet away and and and drained this three. And it was the most incredible thing in the world. And I that in a sense would be comparable. It lines up where the dramatic moment was the thing strategically that people were complaining about. And yet I don't recall thinking, oh,

like there's more evidence that we have too many three pointers. It was like, okay, that is like the perfect execution of this strategy. And it made you appreciate the three-pointer. It made you appreciate that we had come to a place in the world where Steph Curry exists and he could do that and a game could turn on that shot. Whereas with these, it didn't really make you appreciate the homer. It made you in a sense aware of the fact that the homer couldn't quite deliver what you were looking for in a game. Yeah.

And all the things that you mentioned as reasons why we would enjoy this, they do rely on some knowledge of the game and the sport. I mean, knowing that it's David and Goliath when the Yankees go against the Rays payroll-wise, or knowing that there's history between Chapman and Brousseau, or knowing who Chapman is and his whole history. I don't know that my mother-in-law was aware of any of that other than, I guess, knowing that the Yankees are the big spenders. But beyond that, all those other things are things that we know because we've been paying attention. We've been watching the sport.

So if you just watch it without any history, either you need someone to explain that to you, you need the broadcasters to convey that, which they probably will, but it won't just be something that is inherent. So if you're just flipping channels or something, or you're saying, oh, I'll give this baseball thing a shot for the first time, then it has to be an entertaining product on the field to hook you, I think, because those storylines, you're just not going to know. They're going to go right over your head. So for my mother-in-law, I don't think she knew those things. And I think she thought nothing is happening here.

So that's just sort of the dichotomy, I guess. If you are talking about appealing to hardcore fans as opposed to appealing to non-fans, then you need the game to be entertaining, too, because they're not going to know that history. Yeah. It's a good game, though. I really enjoyed that game. It was. then you need the game to be entertaining too because they're not going to know that history yeah it's a good game though i really enjoyed that game it was no it was incredible and and it really like that series easily could have gone either way the yankees outscored the rays in that series i think just as they outscored the astros or out hit the astros in their elimination last postseason and there were close games. I

mean, when it comes down to, you know, game five and it's 1-1 in the eighth, obviously, that series could swing either way. And so people acting like, oh, the Yankees handed it to the Rays in game two with their opener plan is, I think, pretty ridiculous. But that did, I think, the end of that game really did expose the strengths of the Rays in that the Yankees were down to their last reliable bullpen option. They were trying to stretch Chapman for two and a third innings a day after he had gotten four outs, and he hasn't gone that long in an outing since 2016. So even if he had held the Rays scoreless through the eighth and through the ninth, I don't know what they would have done after that. They could have maybe gone to Chad Green for an inning, even though he had thrown three combined innings in the two previous days. After that, it's just the underbelly of the bullpen, or maybe you go back to Davey Garcia or someone.

There was no one you'd really feel confident about putting on the mound at that point. Whereas the Rays, they could have gone another nine innings and they would have had good pitchers. They had Morton and Snell warming up in the bullpen. They had guys like John Curtis and Aaron Sligars, who do not have big names, obviously, but have good stats like almost everyone on that race team like they're just so many of them like they they have a top tier like the the nick anderson's and the diego castillos and everything but after that they go like six deep with like pretty good guys you know like guys that a lot of other teams would be happy to hand high leverage innings to and the Rays just don't have to so they just seem pretty perfectly equipped for this postseason this format of no

off days and you sort of saw it in game one of the ALCS between the Astros and the Rays which was another 2-1 game in which only two solo homers were hit there was an actual run scored via another type of hit, but it was the same thing where the Rays could just go with reliever after reliever who are all really good. And the fact that they tried to push Blake Snell, who was sort of shaky to five innings is maybe their concession to, Oh,

we might have to play seven games in seven days here. So let's take it easy. But they just have so many pitchers and so many players who are unsung and low profile. And in many cases, like anyone could have had. I mean, there are so many guys on that roster who passed through other organizations and were like rule five guys or undrafted or trade pickups that no one paid any attention to at the time. And here they are pitching important innings. And it's just like, how did the Rays do that?

I don't know. But not only do they have this great team with the best record in the AL, and they also have baseball's best farm system, which is hard to do both of those things at the same time. And Dan Samborski mentioned that this spring, according to his Zips projection system, the Rays had 38 pitchers in their organizations who projected to be better than replacement level in the major leagues which

is just incredible like that's you know what three rosters worth of pitchers who all would have been okay and that was more than any other team had so i don't know how they do it, but they keep finding value somehow, whether it's in trades or just picking up players off the scrap heap. And then they either recognize something in them that was good all along or they make them good. It's just kind of like a magic trick, but they keep doing it over and over. Yeah. I mean, it works the other way too, where like they, their closer last year was Emilio Pagan and yeah it's that to me almost more than any other thing it is like remember how long ago 2019 was his Emilio Pagan was the Rays like bullpen I mean they they had gotten they had eight or nine really great

relievers so Pagan was the closer kind of in name only but he was incredible he you know he struck out 12 batters per nine and struck out seven batters per walk and had a 2.3 ERA and I mean he was really incredible and then they traded him for a fourth outfielder and just because they have so many relievers and I mean they not only did they trade him for a fourth outfielder by the way but he was i think he was pre-arb they traded him for a fourth outfielder yeah i mean let's talk about the astros bullpen though for a minute so i've told this to two people i've expressed this idea to two people in the last uh week and one of them gave some pushback and the other said yeah that sounds about right but if you just go like picture by picture and compare this Astros bullpen to last year's

Nationals bullpen, which was like the dominant storyline in the postseason was how could the Nationals possibly win? They have the worst bullpen that's ever been in the postseason. If you just compare person to person, I think that the Nationals bullpen last year was actually better than the Astros bullpen this year. It's incredible, like really when you just look at who they have. They have a really good closer in Ryan Presley, although he had a lesser year. And then they have like three players who they got in tiny little trades over the last, in the last year, Andre scrub,

who had a good ERA and then, and, and, and walked a batter and inning Blake Taylor, who had a good ERA, but a terrible FIP. And then Brooks Raley, who didn't have a great ERA,

but did have a, you know, a more, more convincing peripherals but did have a, you know, more convincing peripherals, but was like, you know, a losing pitcher in Korea up until a year ago. And so those are three of their core relievers. And then they have Sy Snead, who they don't go to. They have Josh James, who walks a batter an inning now and who they don't go to. They have Chase DeYoung, who was just added to the roster, who was signed from Sugarland, the Sugarland Skeeters, this summer, and who has a career ERA of 7.12, and who amazingly in his bio at Baseball Reference

gets relatives cousin of Jordan DeYoung. Who is Jordan DeYoung, and why does a cousin of his get recognition for that? I don't really think that that's worth a line of text, even on the internet, where space is infinite. And then they have Anoli Paredes, who has been treated as their number two reliever in this postseason, but is himself like, you know, nothing, nothing like particularly distinguished. And then they would have Christian Javier, but because he's their fifth starter and they haven't known when they were going to need him, he hasn't been able to be used.

And so you compare that to the Nationals last year where you could say, well, all right, they don't have anything as good as Presley, but they had Doolittle and Madsen as a 1-2. And then they had Wander Suero as a good FIP guy. And they had Tanner Rainey as the underachieving high strikeout guy. And it seems to me that the Astros' bullpen is just such an enormous potential liability in theory, and it hasn't worked out that way yet. And this causes me to wonder does the seven game in seven day format do you feel like that is a significant disadvantage for the worst bullpen or is it wrong to think of it that way because in fact they're gonna have to use a lot more of their starters anyway that like the whole the having seven games in seven days in a sense deprives you of a lot more of their starters anyway. Like the whole, having seven games in seven days,

in a sense, deprives you of a lot of the bullpen strategizing because you can't count on days off. You can't overwork certain guys or really lean on two pitchers regardless. And so for the most part, they're going to be trying, and you've already seen it, you saw it with Snell, but you've seen it in various points in this postseason where teams have actually been trying to stretch their starters a little deeper into games. And the Astros do have at the moment a pretty good rotation and maybe even a deeper rotation

than the Rays do. So does the seven games in seven days format seem like it's going to completely doom them because of the bullpen I just named? Or is it actually a preferable pace for them to run it? I think it's probably still worse to have the worst bullpen in this scenario. I think so. And just like the thinner staff overall, which you're saying maybe they have a better rotation i don't know maybe i don't know what zach rinky is right now really yeah deeper i said deeper not better yeah deep right yeah deeper that's uh deep when i say deep i guess i imply like uh you know good players depth and good players not just like a lot of okay players like that is one type of depth It's like during the regular season Or I guess now it's good to have the kind of depth Where you don't have to use like sub-replacement players Because you have you know

Okay players But I guess in the postseason When I think of depth I think of depth of like Above average players Like players you would want to be pitching Postseason innings And I think the Rays really have that to a much greater extent than the Astros do, certainly. And I think it still hurts you when you have to, because if you're a thinner team, if you like, if you're top heavy, if you only have a few guys, you can squeak by in a regular postseason with those guys only almost and now you just can't do it it forces you to use the the underbelly of the bullpen as i said before and so if your underbelly is a lot

worse than the other teams then you have to roll over you have to show it at some point so i i think it's still worse okay yeah you never know though i mean like the the a's had the great bullpen coming into the postseason and their bullpen during their ALDS loss to the Astros gave up 17 runs in 18 and two thirds innings. So you just, you don't know if it's actually going to pitch up the A's and the Rays, who both, you know, the A's, like you said, had the best bullpen ERA. And going into the final weekend, they had, I think, the second best bullpen ERA in history. And part of what, and then they, I think they had one bad outing collectively, and it raised their ERA from like 2.42 to 2.7. But it was still very good. 2.7 but it was still very good and and i think also going they had a very seemingly a very deep bullpen going into the postseason as well where they had something like nine or ten different pitchers who had eras you know under three or something like that it was it was outrageous

how many pitchers they had with eras of like 2.25 or below again going into the final weekend and then i think they got they got they had one one bad weekend. And yet, what we saw was that Bob Melvin didn't trust any of them except for Liam Hendricks. When it got to the postseason, he trusted one pitcher, and he was going to get as many innings as possible out of that one pitcher. And you could see him kind of gripping the dugout rail any time he had to think about going to anybody else. And with the Rays, it's the opposite. You look at game one of the ALCS. And I mean, the obvious thing to do in the sort of risk averse, super scrutiny era that managers are managing in right now is to go to your best reliever in a big moment and to be, if anything, to go to your best reliever too early, too often, if it's October, that you can justify your best pitcher maybe being failing because he was asked to do too much more than you can justify going to your second or third best reliever instead of bringing your best reliever in and you know bob melvin definitely

would have brought liam hendricks in for probably the eighth but definitely the ninth of a one run game in the first game of an alcs and and kevin cash was he just let castillo ride and it's partly because castillo's awesome but like as noted the a's also had a lot of good relie And it's partly because Castillo's awesome, but like, as noted, the A's also had a lot of good relievers. It's just that there's a more trust in the different pitchers they have. There's a lot of different pitchers that they're willing to put in a, in a extremely, extremely, extremely high stakes situation. And because they have that trust, they're able to, it feels like pace themselves over seven games a lot better than a lot of these other teams could do and, you know, didn't have to pitch in game one, which is a nice

thing to do when you're playing seven games in seven days. I think most teams would have gone to their super number one relief ace for, you know, for maybe even four or five outs in game one whereas Nick Anderson didn't have to throw not even a single pitch they they basically got him through that one run game with without any effort whatsoever and all of these raised pitchers have pitched in almost every conceivable situation they had what 12 different guys get saves this year which was partly a product of injuries like they lost a lot of good pitch saves this year, which was partly a product of injuries. Like, they lost a lot of good pitchers this year to injury. Like, this is a diminished staff that we're seeing now, and yet it's this deep and this good.

So because of that, they've all pitched in high leverage late inning moments, and now they're pitching in early inning moments. So Anderson comes in in the third inning in game five, and that went just fine. And I think just watching that game just made me think even more like they've got to move the mound back. Like I've kind of been on the move the mound back train for a few years now. But watching that, like we just talked about all the reasons why that game was exciting. But if that game happens in May as opposed to October and it's not a double elimination game, it's not as fun. And granted, in a May game, you're not going to have Nick Anderson coming in in the third inning and it's not going to be just a bullpen

game. But even so, pitchers are too good. They throw too hard. There's just no reason to expect hitters to hit this stuff stuff They can't really improve To the same degree that I think pitchers have improved To me it's just like It comes down to the fact that pitchers are just Bigger like they're just so big Tyler Glasnow is so big All these guys are huge

They're releasing the ball much closer to the plate Than they used to And so you have to move them back a bit In order to make it fair again. Like forget about how much harder they're throwing. Just they're bigger. They're just closer to the plate. So I think you need to move it back.

I think really that would be a solution to a lot of problems that really would not be all that disruptive. So I hope they explore that possibility in the future. So speaking of this lack of contact, I wanted to ask you about this. Joe Sheehan has been looking at contact rate or strikeout rate as a predictor of postseason success for years now. He's been tracking this going back to I think 2009 was when he started because he had noticed that the strikeout rate in baseball had spiked so much. And so he just updated this in his latest newsletter.

And the Yankees, actually, I think people think of them maybe as more of a strikeout team than the Rays just because they hit for so much power. But they're actually a better contact team. They don't strike out nearly as much as the Rays did this year. So that was an upset if you go by contact rate that the Yankees lost. an upset if you go by contact rate that the Yankees lost. But since 2009, the team with the lower strikeout rate is 50-27 in postseason series. And that's relevant now because in these championship series matchups, you have two big mismatches in contact rate. So the Astros, who despite not cheating anymore, had the lowest strikeout rate In Major League Baseball against the Rays who had the second highest

Strikeout rate in baseball and then The Dodgers had the third lowest Versus the Braves who had the tenth highest So you would think if contact rate really Matters this much this would be a mismatch And we saw the Rays take game One over the Astros but They did sort of play to expectations

Contact wise like the Rays struck out Thirteen times in game one The Astros, but they did sort of play to expectations contact-wise. Like the Rays struck out 13 times in game one. The Astros struck out five times. Houston had more hits in the game, and they had, I think, 13 base runners over nine innings, and they were just not able to score them. The only run they scored was on a solo home run, but they did put guys on the bases. And so if you think this is a real thing, then this would be a significant factor in the series. And I've been sort of skeptical about this going back to when Joe first started writing about it. And part of the reason is that I can't really come up with an intuitive connection here that would say this is why this is so important in October, if it is.

Like Joe always writes about ball go far, team go far, which is the idea we've been talking about, that hitting home runs is important in the postseason. So how do you square that with the idea that just making contact is important in the postseason? And Joe wrote, how do we square those things? Perhaps it's just that making contact gives you a better chance to hit homers, maybe because it gives you more tickets in the BABIP lottery, allowing you a path to scoring that isn't just dingers. The why escapes us for the moment. The what, though, is increasingly clear.

Being a good contact hitting team seems to be a small cheat code in October. Being a great one, as the teams in that list that he shared mostly were is a large cheat code. So he really believes in this. And I've kind of thought all along, well, maybe we're just seizing on something that seems to be significant, but it isn't really. It's just a mirage, like how Baseball Prospectus had their secret sauce that they stopped using at a certain point because it stopped being predictive. It was like, have a great closer and a good defense and a good pitcher strikeout

rate, and that'll be the way to win in October. And I think we talk a lot less about the way to win in October than we did at the beginning of this podcast, because at a certain point, we just gave up and we said, there is no way to win. Like, it's better to be a better team, but it's all just so random that it's hard to pinpoint any specific factor. But this contact rate thing has held up so far, and it could just be randomness. It could be chance.

It could be like the team with more facial hair is 50 and 27 over those series. I don't know. Or maybe it's that those teams with better contact rates were just better offenses. I think there is some small correlation between having a lower strikeout rate and being better overall as an offense, or maybe there was something else about those teams that they did better. Maybe they happened to be the better pitching teams or the better defensive

teams. I don't know. So I still don't totally buy this, even though I did do a little study back in the Grantland days when the Royals were winning in the postseason, and I found that there is some advantage against high velocity, against power pitchers. It's better to be a contact hitter. Like everyone is worse against power pitchers, but contact hitters are a little bit less worse relative to their usual line than power hitters are. But that advantage is small. It's like, you you know smaller than home field advantage it wouldn't make you 50 and 27 in those series so i still don't know what to think about this but joe keeps writing about it i keep not knowing what to think about it and it's really relevant this week

because there are mismatches between these four teams but can you think of a reason why this would be the case or do you buy it i'm not going to say whether i buy it or not because i would be like what do i know yeah uh you just told me about it i could see a reason that it could be the case though which is just that if you're if your strikeout i mean we sometimes talk about certain for instance, that move up the minors better. And so if you have a bad strikeout rate in the minors, even during the period when baseball analysts were, in fact, kind of lauding the strikeout hitters because they had been undervalued for so long and we now realize that it wasn't that big of a deal to strike out, there was

still, I think, an awareness that you didn't want to have a minor league prospect who had a strikeout rate that was too outrageous, because that's not a skill set that travels up the minors very well. And as you face better pitchers, that particular weakness becomes even more pronounced, and it becomes kind of like disqualifying. You just can't survive as that strikeout rate gets higher. And as you're facing more and more of that thing that you are weak against. And the postseason is not the regular season. It's partly a better class of pitcher. You're generally facing more strikeout pitchers and better strikeout pitchers. And also they, because of the way that pitchers are used, and maybe because of

things like adrenaline and stakes, I'm not sure about that, you face a lot more high velocity. And so I think we talked about this maybe a year ago, because I was writing about something along these lines, but the percentage of pitches that are over, like, I think like 95 double in october it went from like 12 in the regular season to about 25 in the postseason and so just it could be this postseason baseball we shouldn't think of postseason baseball as the end of the major league season and we should instead think of it as almost like a separate league the highest highest league, the true highest league. It's like Major League Baseball Plus. And that in the same way that a high strikeout rate in AAA might be a bad sign for a certain type of quad A hitter who can't quite hack it in the majors, maybe a super high strikeout

rate in the majors is a bad sign for a regular season type hitter who can't hack it in Major League Plus in October. Yeah. Okay. I can kind of buy that. It seems counterintuitive because we keep saying, well, hitting home runs is good, and we tend to think of contact hitters and home run hitters as being opposed to some extent. So you would think that those two things would go against each other in the postseason. We always, it's hard to sequence scoring runs because it's hard to put guys on base and then drive them in because these pitchers are so good that you can't really string together hits and put a lot of players on base. So

you just need to hit a home run, like we were saying about game five. And yet you can also point to this contact rate success and say well maybe you're better against heat if you can make contact so maybe those things are not opposed maybe it's just that if you can hit for power and make contact like joe was saying maybe if you make more contact you have more chance to hit home runs in some cases so maybe it's that i don't know it's such a a strong predictor, seemingly, that I'm sort of suspicious of that. I think that even if you are a better contact hitting, that can't be so important that you would go 50 and 27 because you have a better contact rate.

It just seems to me like that's too big an observed difference for it to be that you know it can't be that important right and so if it if it can if a small difference if a small benefit can look so massively big then it's not then it could also a small disadvantage could look massively big as a benefit too right like basically you're saying you could buy that it's maybe five series. Five of those 77 series would have been tilted by this. But the fact that it's 23 of those series already tells you that we're in statistical no man's land, that we're way outside any effect that could be directly tied to that small thing. Yeah. And yet if it were only five series, then I'd say that's nothing. That's noise.

Yeah, exactly. Let's see another 5, too. You have James Click, former right-hand man of Friedman with the Rays, who is now the GM of the Astros. And even the Braves, run by Alex Anthopoulos. Anthopoulos was, of course, a GM before he came under Friedman's umbrella. But he did work for the Dodgers for a couple seasons as a high-ranking executive under Friedman. So it's really just Friedman everywhere you look, part of the Friedman executive tree. And we kind of think of like Billy Bean or Theo Epstein, I guess, being the defining baseball executives of this century, or certainly the most famous or biggest name in Bean's case because of Moneyball and because he was an early

adopter, maybe not the earliest adopter, but the most prominent adopter of Sabermetrics. And then in Epstein's case, you think of him because he broke two curses. He won World Series with the Red Sox and the Cubs. Friedman has not done that. He has not broken through. He has not won a World Series. He's taken a bunch of teams to the World Series, but has not won one yet and hasn't had – well, I guess there have been some books sort of written about what he's done, but not as closely associated with him as Moneyball was with Bean. And so he's a little lower profile and maybe just as a personality or as someone who speaks to the public, he's not quite as attention getting, I guess, as Bean or Epstein. But boy, the impact that he has had on baseball and the way that he has really sort of dominated baseball wherever he's gone over the last 15 years is pretty unparalleled. I think if you had to identify one baseball executive that you would want to build a team around at this point, it would have to be Friedman. If you look at just the consistent track record of success of his

teams, it would be Friedman. If you look at the disparity in the places, he has been the baseball operations leader and has won, whether it's with the tiny payroll raise or the huge payroll Dodgers. He's done it in both places, no sweat. And all these people who have worked under him have gone on to run teams. And so his influence has spread. I mean, baseball is a reflection of Andrew Friedman now, I think, more than just about any other executive. And I don't know what you would say is like the defining's what Andrew Friedman does. Here's why he's good. Other than his teams are just really great at identifying talent and I guess not overcommitting to talent that will not pan out. Like he is with the Dodgers, like he's certainly spent a lot more money than he did with the Rays and has signed some players, but usually not like at the top of the market still. some players, but usually not like at the top of the market still. Like he'll splurge to keep the Dodgers own players and free agents, but generally hasn't gone out and signed like the Garrett Cole, although he certainly tried to. But I don't know what the consistent thing that he does is other than he really sticks to his script of amassing talent and keeping it and not trading it. Like, I guess that's the thing that he's brought with him from Tampa Bay to Los Angeles is that when he got there,

he could have said, okay, I can spend now. I have these resources. I can trade these top prospects to get players, veterans who are good right now. And he mostly hasn't done that. Like, you know, other than holding on to Verdugo for a while and then trading him for Mookie Betts. Like, yeah, he'll trade top prospects for Mookie Betts,

but he's not going to trade his really good prospects for lesser players. He'll just keep them, and he'll have this perpetual machine that the Dodgers have. So he sort of kept the good aspects of what he was able to do in Tampa Bay and melded them with what he's able to do with the Dodgers and sort of stayed within himself, but just extended his capabilities because of this new franchise that he's running. So it's just impressive, I think, that his tentacles really reach to all of these teams in this round. Yeah, he left after 2014 and the Rays had a losing record. I mean, I totally agree. Andrew Friedman, if he wins the World Series,

he's going to be one of the three GMs from this era that goes to the Hall of Fame. If he doesn't, then he won't, but he will still. He'll deserve to just as much probably. Probably. Isn't he the highest paid GM still? I think so. Yeah, I think if you did a GM draft or if you did an executive draft, I think he not only would be the first pick, I think he would have been the first pick for,

I don't know, for like eight of the last 10 years. I think he would have been the first pick. So it is a fine tribute to him that you just said. So now I'm going to just ask you a question. The Rays had a losing record when he left. The Rays had a losing record in the next three years after he left. The Rays are now very good. It's been six years since he left. Are we still giving him credit? I mean, how much? Because wouldn't it be the, if they were bad and they had turned out to be bad, wouldn't we be giving him credit because when he left, they collapsed and that it turned out that it was his presence there the whole time that that was so valuable i mean it seems like either way he goes he was gonna get credit for the raise but he hasn't been there for six years like yeah i'm just saying like maybe maybe it's

more about what his work with the dodgers at this point than what the Rays are doing. I think that the Dodgers the past four years have been the strongest, you know, it's the strongest team over a multi-year period, probably since the late 90s Yankees and one of the half dozen strongest teams ever by talent. And that's very impressive. I think that what the R rays did this year is also incredibly valuable uh or important impressive and i think they should get credit for that instead of giving credit to their gm who left six years ago does joe madden get credit for the rays well yeah he left at that same time right so you could say that part of their success under friedman was madden but but i'm saying does he get credit for this year's raise of course not he's not a manager anymore no that said it's still the Delman Young trade yeah managers don't construct the roster in this era the way that

GMs do or presidents of baseball operations do so you do have more of a lasting impact like like when Ben Sherrington left the Red Sox and then the Red Sox won the World Series under Dombrowski, it was like you could clearly point to a lot of that team that was Charrington. And in this case, it's been a while since Friedman left, you're right. So yeah, like Kevin Kiermaier is still around. Like they're still remnants of the Friedman era team. But I guess when people give Friedman credit, it's more about the influence that he maybe had on the people who are running the team now or ran the team recently. So, you know, like, Haim Bloom came up under Friedman, and Eric Neander, who is running the team now, came up give Friedman some credit for finding those guys, you know, like identifying and grooming front office talent, that's something that reflects well on him. And you would probably assume that they learned from Friedman, right? Like some part of what they do now was probably coached by Friedman to an extent that got to see him operate when they were coming up in their formative years as executives. So for all I know, they've thrown out everything they did during that time and

they've completely pivoted and they operate differently. But I would assume that they learned some lessons from Friedman that they are probably still applying at this point. And obviously Friedman is too. How do you even preview the NLCS? The Dodgers and the Braves are both 5-0 in the postseason, but this series is sort of simplistic to preview because everything the Braves are bad at, the Dodgers are good at, and everything the Braves are good at, the Dodgers are better at. So the Braves have a great offense, the Dodgers' offense is probably better, and we've talked about the depth of the Rays and the Dodgers. The Braves have used three starters

so far, and they've thrown four shutouts in five games, getting through the Cubs and the Dodgers. The Braves have used three starters so far, and they've thrown four shutouts in five games getting through the Cubs and the Marlins. Well, the Dodgers are not the Cubs or the Marlins, and a best-of-seven series is going to make it tough for the Braves to get through without using much more of their staff, and that's going to be an issue because of the vulnerability of their rotation, which has been great so far, but was seen as a weakness coming into the postseason. Meanwhile, the Dodgers have gotten through the Brewers and the shorthanded Padres without LeMet or Clevenger, so they've both had fairly easy roads to get to this point, and they've both looked good, but it seems like the Rays, the Dodgers, are built for this sort of format, so I don't know how you could bet against them. That depth that's gotten the Dodgers through the postseason in recent years hasn't helped them

as much once they got there, which could be one reason why they have not actually won a World Series. But this year, that depth is still helpful in October. So maybe this is the year they break through. Last thing, as we were recording, it was reported that Joe Morgan died at 77. That follows on the heels of Whitey Ford dying at 91 last Thursday. And it feels like we have been talking about Hall of Famers who died a whole lot in the last month, and we've been doing these little remembrances of these just absolute legends. So Al Kaline back in April, and more recently Tom Seaver and Lou Brock

and Bob Gibson, and now Ford and Morgan. It's really just an incredible run of inner circle type players who we've lost all at once here. And I think what makes it hit harder than it might otherwise is that all these players remained so visible and were such integral parts of their franchise and of baseball long after they played. Like some great baseball players, they retire and they just go away. You know, like they ride off into the sunset.

You don't hear from them that much anymore. They're not still working in baseball. A lot of them do. But sometimes they really do just leave and they do something else with their life and so a younger generation doesn't really come to know them and to appreciate them in the same way and so when they die it's the people who saw them play that generation tells you oh man those those guys were incredible and this is such a loss and i remember them at their peak but with these players they were all around those teams.

They were forging relationships with younger players on those teams. They were broadcasters. Like Whitey Ford was just one of the most visible former players growing up as a Yankees fan in New York. Whitey Ford was everywhere. Even before I was born, he was a coach for years with the team. He was a broadcaster for a while. And then he was just a staple at old-timers games, at all-star games.

Like he was always around and he was a link to that era. After Mickey Mantle was gone and Yogi Berra was gone and Phil Rizzuto was gone, Whitey Ford was still standing and was still very visible. And Joe Morgan, of course, has been as visible as any former player, both with his broadcasting work and his work with the Hall of Fame and his sort of prominence as a former player who would say things. And granted, in his case, those things, I think, produced a different impression of him among the younger generation than those who had seen him play. But still, like maybe the best second baseman of all time, best second baseman certainly of the last century.

And if you're era adjusting and saying players have gotten better over time, then he was just the best ever. And of course, the contrast between who he was as a player and who he was and what he lauded and derided as a broadcaster was pretty stark. But I think if you set that aside, he was just an unbelievable player, celebrated teammate. And I think in a way, like he probably had an influence on like a generation of people who look at the game in a different way, a way that he wouldn't have liked. But, you know, I think probably the fact that Joe Morgan was there as a foil sort of to the Sabermetrics upstarts, you know, 10, 15 years ago, probably had a pretty big impact on people embracing Sabermetrics. Like I think I've heard Mike Schur say that he regrets the name of Fire Joe Morgan, that he wishes they hadn't singled out one person as the name of that blog. But that blog

had a huge impact on my really getting into this stuff and pursuing this as a career. And so he was influential in that way, even if he didn't really mean to. And ultimately, when you look back at a life and a great career in baseball with two World Series wins and two MVP awards in his 30s and a 392 career on base percentage, whether he actually approved of on base percentage in his later years is pretty small beans in the grand scheme of things. And I liked a lot of aspects of his Sunday night baseball broadcasts. I meant to mention with Ford, like he was incredible in his own right, not as close to the top of the war leaderboards because he had sort of a shorter career, missed a couple of years for military service, but best career ERA of any pitcher in the live ball era with at least 3,000 innings, 2.74, and basically had the same ERA in the World Series, which it's impressive if you can be as good in the World Series as you are during the regular season. And he pitched in 11 World Series in 16 years because the Yankees were always there. So he

had the opportunity to be one of the great World Series pitchers of all time. And later in his career, when he started losing some of his stuff, he started cheating. He threw a mud ball. He would load up the ball with mud and he would scuff the ball. And Alston Howard would cut the ball on like a section of his shin guards for Ford. And Ford even had like a phony wedding ring he wore that had like a raspy surface on the palm side and he would scuff the ball and another thing I think that helped him that was mentioned in Craig Wright's newsletter pages from Baseball's past is that he pitched

In the old Yankee Stadium Which was good for left-handed pitchers Because it was so hard to hit for power there To left field and left Center and his career era Yankee Stadium was 2.58 Because his home run rate was reduced like 30 at yankee stadium and the yankees took advantage of that so casey stengel saw that he had that

ability that he was a good fit for that park and i'm reading here in 1954 stengel correctly deduced that it was worth altering the rotation from time to time to get ford more starts at yankee stadium and on the road to keep ford from pitching Fenway Park, where lefties were vulnerable to homers while increasing his starts at Comiskey Park, which was the toughest homerun park in the league. For the rest of Stengel's career managing the Yankees from 1954 to 1960, Whitey had 14.3% more starts at Yankee Stadium than on the road. In those seven seasons, Stengel allowed Ford to start at Fenway Park just four times compared to 21 starts at Comiskey Park. Ford's career ERA at Fenway was 6.16 and 2.48 at Comiskey Park, which was sort of interesting. You don't see teams really rearranging their rotations in the same way these days. Anyway, two more legends lost, and I'm sorry that we keep having to devote parts of podcasts to talking about all-time great players who are no longer with us.

Yeah, Joe Morgan was a local broadcaster for the Giants during a lot of my childhood. And was just, I mean, I remember him being a great local broadcaster. And I remember just being aware, even as a very young person, that he was such an educational broadcaster. He would, I mean, it's a very different job doing local games where you've got, you know, you've got to go, you've got 150 games with the same audience and you can, you really can drill down into things in a different way. And you've got, got you know a lot of

a lot of the time it's sort of slow and boring and there's there's no real production to help you and and in my family we all knew that like joe morgan was like someone that we were learning a lot about the sort of the physics and the motion of baseball and um and particularly with things like the interplay of base running and defense what the defenders were doing with regards to base runners and what the base runners were doing with regards to defenders there were a lot of lessons there was it a fake what was it really his wedding ring though i mean apparently it was fake was the was the wedding fake did he actually go through a fake wedding in order to justify the ring did Was this the ring that he actually had at a real wedding?

I mean, I know it was customized, so there was a rasp on it. But, I mean, you know, was it like... He was actually married, and they had three kids. So I assume that was real. Were they fake kids? Did he... It was a very elaborate backstory. Yeah.

Yeah. He got married in 1951, which I think was years before he started using the fake ring. So he laid the groundwork for this ring years before he knew he would need it at some point when he started losing his stuff. No, I think it was he was married. He had a real wedding ring, and I guess he had a fake one that he would swap in for games that would tailor to scuff the ball. So you think it was a swap-in situation?

I think so. So you think that he didn't wear that wedding ring after his pitching career, that he had his go-to real one? Let's see. So now I'm reading on Wikipedia. So Craig said it was like a phony wedding ring that he would use he had his go-to real one let's see so so now i'm reading on on wikipedia so so craig said it was like a phony wedding ring that he would use to scuff it wikipedia says that he sometimes used the diamond in his wedding ring to gouge the ball and was eventually caught and warned to stop doing that and so howard would then scuff the ball himself. So unclear, I guess, competing sources here.

Not sure if it was two rings or if he was just using the diamond on his real ring to do it. But one way or another. Yeah, his Saber bio says that he was aided in that hot streak by a customized, quote, wedding ring with the rasp. And umpires came out to check, and it looks like he first convinced them it was fine but then at some point he knew the jig was up at the end of the inning he took

the rasp ring off and gave it to trainer joe sores with instructions to get rid of it get rid of it get rid of it i wonder and file for divorce while you're at it. We can just call this whole backstory off while we're at it. Yeah. I wonder if the fake ring, like, was it like cubic zirconia? Like, did he get a real diamond on the fake ring? Because you'd think you probably wouldn't throw that away, right, if it was a real diamond on there. I have more questions about this.

Anyway. All right. We can end there. Okay. That'll more questions about this. Anyway. All right. We can end there. Okay, that'll do it for today. Thanks as always for listening. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to

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Keep your questions and comments for me and Sam and Meg 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 a little later this week. Talk to you then. I'm so deep, you're so deep, everybody is deep. I'm so deep, you're so deep, everybody is deep.