Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1605: Welcome to the World Series

Episode Date: October 20, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley discuss the exciting seventh games that decided the ALCS and NLCS, the exits of the Astros and Braves, the Braves’ future, how the Dodgers defeated Atlanta, the joy of home run robberies, the Mookie trade revisited, and more, then preview the World Series, focusing on the return of off days, […]

And despite all the truth that's been thrown in my face, I just can't get you out of my mind. But I've got to begin again, though I don't know how to start. Don't know how to start Yes, I got to begin again And it's hard Hello and welcome to episode 1605 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Rowley of FanCrafts. Hello, Meg.

Hello. We've got ourselves a World Series. We sure do. How exciting. It's all been leading up to this, almost three months of this baseball season. I guess it's, yeah, almost three months. Almost three months. What a weird time we live in, Ben.

Yeah, sure is. So we got two game sevens in the championship series that really turned out to be a more exciting and drawn out round than it looked like it was going to. When the Rays were up 3-0 and the Braves were up 3-1, looked like that might all be over with quickly. And then we got two exciting Game 7s, and you and I spoke for the entirety of ALCS Game 7 because we were doing one of our Patreon live streams, which we will be doing again this Saturday for World Series Game 4. But we have not yet spoken after NLCS Game 7, and we have not really talked about this World Series matchup so that's what we're gonna do today and we actually have an off day to do it we have a little bit of a

breather and off days are back in this series we actually don't have baseball every single day which is really a boon to podcast hosts specifically yeah because we can actually talk without everything we say immediately being outdated but also kind of nice for teams that get to rest their relievers and their starters and nice I think for fans and media members who get to sort of

savor the series before it's over it was all so rapid fire and happening so quickly there wasn't a lot of time for storylines to build up. And now we get that. We get those little breaks. So I kind of miss that. Yeah, I think that for media members in particular, you know, there's always the postseason is always exciting. These are the memories we make as a collective, right? In a way that you just really can't in quite the same way

during a normal regular season because there are so many games and so many teams and you're not watching everything that everyone else is watching. But I think that when you have to do baseball or get to do baseball for your job, this time of year is always very hectic and busy. And while you still appreciate it,

you always have a time or two where you think, I'm just ready to be. I'm just ready to be done now because I'm tired and in my 30s. But I have found myself really, despite the rapid pace of the early rounds, appreciating it more than I have in past years and certainly expected to this year just because the season was so short before it. I kind of don't feel bad about not getting super worked up about the the postseason because really i took in 162 games i i've i've had my fill of baseball and i don't feel that way ben we've been deprived and so i'm

glad that we will have even more time to sort of appreciate the the baseball before us before we launch into the offseason so yeah so we we've got Dodgers-Rays. It's an exciting matchup. It's a fascinating matchup. We'll break it down a bit. But before we get to that, I guess we should talk about how we got there, specifically with NLCS Game 7, which was really exciting on Sunday. That was a great Game 7.

It was close right up until the end. There was a great game seven. It was close right up until the end. There was a lot of action. There were only 11 strikeouts total combined, both teams in that contact really did allow for a lot of fun in the field and on the base paths that you don't get when it's just flamethrower after flamethrower and whiff after whiff. I think the average four-seam fastball this postseason is up to 95 or a little bit above 95, as Rob Arthur wrote on Monday. And in this game, there was contact. And because there was contact, we got exciting double plays. We got exciting base running.

We got base running blunders. We got really great defensive highlights. We got home run robberies. There was just a little bit of everything in this game. This was like a really good advertisement for what makes baseball baseball in all of its many respects well and i think the the part of it that i found interesting is that you had that coupled with the reality that you were going to have pitching changes right this is there's no higher stakes than there are in a game seven and guys are going to have a short

leash and dustin may was told that afternoon he was going to be an opener in this game and so there was still you know your usual postseason bullpen management and machinations but it never felt like it dragged yeah you know there was one point where I looked up and I was like wow we're only in the fifth inning but I didn't feel you know I didn't feel like it lagged or was oppressively boring in any spots. And while I'm sure that the Braves fans listening wish that some of the base running had been a bit less adventurous than it proved to be, like you said, there was silliness that was fun to watch, provided you weren't rooting for Atlanta. And so, yeah, it was quite a game seven. And we were all reminded of the importance of accent marks.

So it was educational too. Yeah. So the Dodgers came back in this game and in this series. They weren't up in the series until, what, the seventh inning of the seventh game. Right. So this was as close as it could be. And I think the Dodgers lineup just showed its strength in this game, not just hitting a couple homers, but also being patient, being disciplined, taking tons of pitches, and really working into that Braves bullpen that was already tired. Dodgers batters saw 175 pitches. Braves batters saw only 131 pitches, and that was with no bottom of the ninth, so the Dodgers had one less time at bat and this

is game seven you know seven games in seven days it's uh already the third playoff round and the Braves were not really built with this in mind the way that the Dodgers were not necessarily built with this in mind but it worked out to their advantage I think that they are so deep as the Rays are and I think Atlanta was sort of stretched. I mean, both teams were to an extent, but clearly the Dodgers were making them work. And it seemed to get to guys like Minter and Martin who had been working a lot. And whether it was because of that patience and taking pitches, I guess we'll never know, but it sure looked that way. It's just, they're not going to make a lot of easy outs most of the time, and eventually they will wear you out, or at least they will wear Atlanta out. I don't know if they'll wear Tampa Bay out because it's pretty tough to wear Tampa Bay out, but against just about any other team, eventually you're going to get to either the underbelly of the bullpen or the elite late inning arms that are

just maybe a little bit gassed. So, you know, I think John Smoltz, we take issue with some of the things he says on broadcast, but I thought he was pretty perceptive when he was talking about Minter and sharing his own experience going from closing to starting and then working in extended outings again and just not really being built up to do that and how exhausting it was. And after Minter's really brilliant outing as an opener the other day when he pitched three scoreless and had seven strikeouts, it looked like he might just not have the same stuff on Sunday. So eventually the Dodgers broke through,

but it really could have very easily gone another way, whether in one of the earlier games in the series or in this game, because both teams squandered a lot of chances. And the Braves, most notably with their toot plans in the fourth when, you know, they were already up, I guess, 3-2 at that point, and they had runners on second and third and no outs, and they did not score in that inning or for the rest of the game. And that was because of smart fielding, heads up, throwing, and defending by the Dodgers, but also bad base running, not necessarily by Swanson, who was kind of going on contact, but definitely by Riley and maybe also by Mark Akis who could have made it to second while all of that running down was happening and didn't. So that was an ugly way for that inning to end. I don't want to make Atlanta fans feel worse than they probably already do, but the sequence,

the emotional high of pulling ahead and pulling ahead on the bat of one of your young guys who you're excited about. And then to have both of your runners advance on a wild pitch, you just sit there and you're, you're salivating, right? You got, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, this is going to go great. And then to go from that to that, not only a double play, but that double play is, uh, you know, if we had an emotion tracking graph the way we do a win expectancy chart i imagine that the the the peak to valley would have been quite a dramatic fall yeah the old five two five two five six double play or something yeah that the someone posted in the facebook group a screenshot from the mlB app that had like the summary of the play and for some reason wrote out every throw.

So it says Nick Markekis hit into a fielder's choice double play. Third baseman Justin Turner to catcher Will Smith to third baseman Justin Turner to catcher Will Smith to third baseman Justin Turner to shortstop Corey Seager. Densby Swanson out at home. Austin Riley out at third. Nick Markekis the first. Soensby Swanson out at home. Austin Riley out at third. Nick Marquick is the first. So yeah, that was a wild play. But the Dodgers had a lot of opportunities too that they didn't convert.

I think they stranded 10 runners in this game. They went one for 10 with runners in scoring position. They had Chris Taylor thrown out at home on an infield-in grounder where Ozzie Alpes made a great throw so there were really potentially game-saving plays on both sides and it just happened that the Dodgers were on top when it all ended yeah they let's see they left one on in the bottom of the first they left two on in the bottom of the second they left another two on in the bottom of the third they left one on oh no excuse me

that's the Braves guys you should have figured that out they left three on in the bottom of the fourth it felt like both sides were trading missed opportunities and like you said it could have gone very differently if Austin Riley is more decisive if Mookie Betts doesn't make one of the more impressive you know home run robberies that we've seen this game could go very differently but here we are yeah Mookie with his third really spectacular play in as many games and I think I saw Mark Simon of SIS post somewhere that there have been five home run robberies in these playoffs, which is as many as there were in the 2013 to 2019 playoffs combined. So that has been a highlight here.

And I wrote something, I don't know, maybe a year or so ago about home run robberies being sort of the saving grace of this all or nothing high home run era. That one of the really redeeming qualities, like a lot of people think, oh, it's just, it's too many home runs and home runs aren't exciting anymore. But because we have so many home runs, we also have so many near home runs and we get more home run robberies these days than we used to. And I think a home run robbery is probably the most exciting play in baseball. So that's been a lot of fun to see. And Globe Life Field, it seems like, is a good pitcher's park. It keeps those fly balls from going out. And because it has those pretty short fences, at least in some portions of the outfield, you just get that perfect placement. It's like in Camden Yards where they have the short fences. And so you see the most home run robberies there.

They're just at the perfect height. And I think it was Joe Davis maybe on the broadcast said that he'd be in favor of having like eight foot fences in every park. And I can't really argue with that. Unless you have like a green monster type of historic reason for having a high fence. I like variety, but I also really like home run robberies. It just makes it exciting up until the last second when you find out if the ball went out or if it landed in someone's glove. I also wouldn't mind a height restriction on, say, right fielders.

Because look, when you watch Aaron Judge rob a home run, it's impressive because of the judgeness of it, right? You're looking at it and you're like, that mountain of a human being is 20,000 feet tall and he is impressive because of his height. Whereas Mookie Betts is impressive because of the vertical he's able to reach as like a normal sized human man. Yeah. And so I don't say that as if it is not

impressive uh when aaron judge does it because you know like i said he's you appreciate his physical person in a way that you don't necessarily when he's just walking around although as long as he's standing next to something that you have a good sense of the height of you're just still in awe every time there's at least one time good sense of the height of, you're just still in awe every time. There's at least one time a game where you're going, God, you're just very tall. How do you date anyone? So there's that part of it,

but when you really are able to appreciate the timing of the leap and the distance that a human can put between himself and the ground, it is just, I think think nothing more fun than when someone that height is able to do what bets does and uh yeah i i have a i have a i don't know if this is a controversial mookie bets take ben but can i share it with you sure i don't think that it is good sort of franchise building or treatment of one's fans to behave as the Red Sox did. So I want to put that out there, that I think it would be better for baseball if teams like the Red Sox were disinclined

to trade players like Mookie Betts. Having established that, I'm so glad that Mookie Betts is not on the Red Sox. Not forever, this year. I'm glad he wasn't a member of the 2020 Red Sox because they struck me as a pretty miserable baseball team to watch most of the time. And the Dodgers are not miserable to watch most of the time. And so I am very happy that we get to watch Mookie Betts not only play for a good

baseball team, but play in the World Series and not have to worry about where he's going the next year. We just know, you know, if the Dodgers aren't able to pull it out against the rays they're gonna get another chance probably and it'll be in part because of that guy and so that part of it is a satisfying silver lining to me as a person who does not root for boston and as people who do who might listen to this podcast i am sorry yeah i've seen a lot of people bringing up the red sox trade again, and we talked about that plenty when it happened and after it happened. But just, I think, the fact that we're all watching Mookie be so incredible in every facet of the game and keep making these game-saving plays and people marveling at the fact that the Red Sox decided that they wanted to trade that guy and we went over the reasons for that and look alex verdugo had a pretty good year too and you know if you think that mookie wasn't gonna resign and you just add up the war that you would have gotten from mookie this season and the war that they'll get from verdugo and the other guys in that trade like i understand the rationale but i think we criticized it both on that level but

also in the level that you were bringing up that it's just like if you get one of these guys and you're one of these franchises that should be able to afford to keep those guys when you get them then you probably should just do that and treat your fans to seeing that player for a decade or more and now the Dodgers treated their fans to that and it is a lot of fun for us just to see him in the same outfield as Bellinger and to see him making these deep playoff runs. And, yeah, the Red Sox will probably be good again at some point during Mookie's career, I would hope, for their sake. But still, for now, we would not be seeing him right now. And instead, we are seeing him star on the stage.

So I'm with you on that. seeing him right now and instead we are seeing him star on the stage so i'm with you on that and it is meant i think we we talk a lot and we will talk more in the course of this episode i am sure about the depth of the lineup that the dodgers are able to feel ben cody bellinger hit sixth in this game i know i know and he was batting i think like 160 something right before he hit that game-winning homer with some patience and power. But they hadn't really gotten great Bellinger there. I guess they didn't really get great Bellinger all year. This season, really. Yeah. And they're still so good. And I guess you could play that game with the Rays, too, right? You could point to Brandon Lau having not hit and

some of the other players in their lineup who've underperformed, even as the Rosarinas of the world have overperformed. But yeah, it is pretty striking that some of the Dodgers have not been as good as you'd expect. And yet the MVP of this series, Corey Seager, who I think set records with five homers and 11 RBI or something, think set records with five homers and 11 rbi or something he was 0 for 5 in game 7 and jp hornstra who covers the dodgers and mlb emailed us to point out that his championship win probability added for this series according to baseball reference was negative 9.4 percentage points so according to championship win probability added he he actually hurt the Dodgers' chances of advancing. And in fact, his WPA on the series, not even the championship WPA,

but just his basic win probability added was negative for the series. So I guess between having a bad game seven and then maybe doing some of his damage offensively at lower leverage moments, on the whole, his numbers are great for the series, but in the moments that mattered the most, he didn't do that much. And so if you compare him to previous postseason MVPs, we did a stat blast on this in episode 1544, but it was on World Series MVPs specifically. on World Series MVPs specifically. And compared to those, this would be the worst WPA or CWPA performance by a series MVP, at least.

Maybe there's been another earlier round MVP who was this bad in that way. But that's interesting. And, you know, you don't give Mookie Betts, I guess, championship win probability added for his catches, just because of the way the stat works all of that gets credited to pitchers which is why it's a sort of a flawed stat in some ways but

we all know I think that Mookie contributed to winning this series much more than that number alone would tell you I agree I think that I don't know how you feel about this, Ben, but I tend to not get overly fussed about the, you know, each individual rounds awards. Because I don't think like at the end of it, the thing that really matters is that you've won the series and get to advance. I never even remember really who wins those things for more than five minutes. And I think that this is a place where it's probably best, even though we might be able to look at a stat like when probability added and even appreciating its limitations, say that, well, this guy actually did a bit more to help his team advance.

This feels like a place where it is probably in the best interest of stat heads to just not get too cute. It's probably best to not get too cute because I think that it's comprehensible to fans, regardless of their proclivities around advanced stats to look at a 298 358 766 line with six home runs and say yeah I should probably be the MVP of the series and and and so I I and I'm not suggesting that you

are advocating for an abundance of cuteness Ben that's That's not what I'm saying, but I do think this is an area where it's okay for it to look and feel a bit more like a traditional baseball fan's view of things because it's an inconsequential award. And there is an exception to this, which is I think that if you hit a walk-off in a decisive game, that you should probably be the MVP of the series regardless of your prior performance

because you have literally allowed the advancement of the team even there i guess you're not doing it all by your lonesome but in that moment you you had the bat in your hand right yes that's important but otherwise i think it's you know i think it's fine for cory to get a convertible maserati does he get a camper does he get an rv because it was camping world ben i have never heard a broadcast be so keen on home runs being hit into a specific area of the ballpark so that they could talk about the camping world rv giveaway synergy yeah are there americans crying out for rvs that we do not know ben i think I've mentioned that I've always sort of wanted an RV despite not being able to drive or ever leaving the city, but still.

I like very much the idea of you arriving at your apartment and parking on the sidewalk and turning to Jesse and being like, guess what, you get to drive. Yeah, I can't imagine alternate side parking in Manhattan with an RV. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Speaking of cuteness, there was an accusation of excessive cuteness that has been leveled against the Dodgers. Not physical cuteness, although they have some of that certainly, too, but getting too cute with their opener scheme with Dustin May.

And I've got to say, I'm a bit perplexed by this too. And I defended the Yankees in the ALDS when people accused them of getting too cute in game two with their opener strategy with Davey Garcia and Jay Happ. And I thought that made some sense because neither of those guys was really that great. You couldn't count on them for a lot of innings. And with the Rays' sometimes lopsided lineup,

I figured it might be a good idea to get the platoon advantage and get those guys through the game together. In the Dodgers' case, they have more arms to choose from and better arms to choose from than the Yankees did. And so the fact that they keep going with Dustin May to open games, and May, I think, is a very promising pitcher. He's been a pretty good pitcher. He looks like he's got great stuff in a lot of ways, and maybe will have a bright future. But he's not lights out now. He doesn't have great control now, doesn't maybe miss as many bats as you'd think he would based on how hard he throws and Dodgers seem to have confidence in him and that's fine but when you have Tony Gonsolin who seems like a better pitcher at this point in his career I just I'm not sure I see the advantage of going with May for an inning and then bringing in someone else as they've done a couple times now like in this game they were bringing back may who started game five and they're bringing back in game seven whereas you had a much more rested

gonsolin ready to go and you know may looked shaky in that first inning of work and gonsolin was shaky in his two innings of work so if you had started gonsolin maybe he would have been bad too like there are no guarantees here. And I'm sure even the Dodgers, who must have some reason for doing this, would say that they think whatever advantage it is conferring is small. So these things work out or don't work out. It doesn't mean they were a brilliant idea or a terrible idea. But I'm not sure that I see the advantage if you have someone like Gonsolin who appears to be more lined up to start. Why go with Mei and then go to Gonsolin? I don't know.

Yeah, and I might feel differently about it if it seemed to be a more carefully architected strategy on their part. So we got the late scratch of Kershaw, and when that scratch was reported, they talked about how he had been experiencing discomfort in his back since Saturday, but then May had pitched the day before. So you wondered why he wasn't held out to then be on fuller rest when he was going to go, and it was reported that he didn't even know he was going to be the opener until the day of the game before game seven. And so I think that there is probably a more defensible version of this. And I would probably feel better about his usage if, you know, he weren't quite so young and inexperienced because, well, I can't prove this. I would imagine routine is probably somewhat more important in that situation. And it just seemed to be sort of willy-nilly based on, you know, what Roberts kind of felt and thought in any given moment rather than it being, you know, when you say juxtapose it with the Rays where it's clear that they have a very firm

pitching plan. And we could perhaps say that there are times when it feels a little too firm to some people, right? That they are too strict in their usage. But the usage of May never quite seemed to have been figured out or optimized in a way that I actually found kind of surprising given the way that the Dodgers normally operate. You're right to say that, you know, Gonsolin had his own issues.

Plus we had to contemplate the weird cat stuff again. Yeah. So that was, you know, changed by that. I like his look though, which you tweeted about. It's distinctive. Oh, yeah. And the gator enhances it to my mind. I mean, when he first debuted, because I have seen like 50 movies and only have so many references i think i also alluded to him looking like an extra in tombstone and now it's just even more pronounced whereas you know i don't quite know what to comp dustin may to i i have an aesthetic comp in terms of the way his body moves courtesy of craig goldstein who just will never be able to get wario out of my mind when looking at may but i don't know who Dustin May looks like because you're gonna say Sideshow Bob but that's all wrong in the face yeah yeah I think

I've seen him compared to like a Cabbage Patch Kid maybe or like a like a Raggedy Ann doll or something but uh yeah definitely distinctive appearances for both of them but yes may is uh more about uh i guess nature and gonsolin's is more about nurture or whatever has led him to adopt his personal style yeah man the cat thing is really intense i like cats but that's that that bit of catness is a lot it's's a lot of cat stuff. Yeah. Well, ultimately, May and Gonsolin only ended up pitching a third of this game, and the Dodgers got through the final six innings with scoreless and actually hitless relief from three relievers, Blake Trinan, Brustar Gradoval, and Julio Urias.

And, man, they were great. And not only did they get the Dodgers to the World Series, but I think they sort of bailed out Dave Roberts or maybe prevented him from having to make some hard decisions that I think we all perhaps anticipated that he might have made in a perplexing way. We didn't have to see Joe Kelly. We didn't have to have Dodgers fans' blood pressures rise when Joe Kelly came in. And we didn't get Clayton Kershaw in relief, which, I mean, I think we all sort of sensed that it was almost inevitable that Kershaw would be coming

into this game. Like, even on short rest, even with the back issue, even with the fact that he is not Pete Kershaw anymore it just seemed like a roberts thing to do because he's done it before and it seemed like if there was a lead late with kenley jansen having looked good in games five and six but also pitched in both of those games right didn't know if he'd be available or maybe you'd need multiple arms and it just sort Right. World Series game one on Tuesday. So I think Roberts managed it pretty well, but also didn't have to do as much managing as we feared because Urias specifically was just brilliant and really has been all postseason long now in three outings and really almost his whole postseason career. I mean, he now has a 2.84 ERA in 16 career playoff games, and the worst of those was way back in 2016 when he was a 19-year-old rookie and kind of blew up

in a game against the Cubs. So really, he's compiled a pretty impressive postseason track record for someone who just turned 24 in August. Yeah, for sure. Shall we talk about the World Series? Yeah. One more thing I meant to mention, I think, about this game is that two of the runs were scored on Hernandez's pitch hit homer and then Bellinger's homer,

but the first two Dodgers runs were scored on a ground ball by Will Smith that was hit through the shift, so right-handed hitter, and it was hit through a vacated hole between first and second base because the Braves, who normally don't shift very much at all, were shifting on Smith, and they had three infielders on the left side of second. And so Smith just snuck a ball through. And this is something that I think we could keep an eye on

in the World Series because we've talked earlier in the season about shifting on right-handed hitters and how the latest research by Russell Carlton and Tom Tango and the folks at Sports Info Solutions seems to suggest that shifting on right-handed hitters is usually ill-advised or that it's done much too often by teams currently. And two of the main offenders for that are the Dodgers and the Rays. The Dodgers shifted, I think maybe overall more than any other team, but they shifted on right-handed hitters more than any other team. And the Rays were up there too too so we've seen a lot of examples this postseason of hitters especially left-handed hitters having hits robbed from them hits up the middle that probably would have been hits in earlier eras but it goes the other way too and if you look at the

numbers and do all the adjustments it seems to suggest that it is normally not a good idea to shift on right-handed hitters. And so the fact that the Dodgers are even in the World Series may be because the Braves gave them a gift there. And I think Smith is one of the more defensible hitters to shift on because he does pull a high percentage of his grounders. But still, we're going to be seeing this a lot in the World Series, and there might be more pivotal moments there. But to this point in the postseason, right-handed hitters with the shift on have produced a.343 weighted on base average, which is quite good. And without the shift on, they have produced a measly.305 weighted on base average.

So there's a pretty big difference there. There was a big difference during the regular season, and that's something I'm going to be tracking in this World Series too. I can't believe that we don't get any more Will Smith versus Will Smith matchups. I know. Well, we only got that one probably because of the three batter minimum rule. I think there probably would have been a change made there, but Snickers' hands were tied. So yeah, let's move on to the World Series. And I guess we can just say parting words for

Atlanta. I mean, everyone was not sorry to see the Astros go, but I think people were sorry to see the Braves go. Not because they were rooting against the Dodgers, but just because the Braves were so much fun to watch. And they pushed the Dodgers to the brink, and they're going to be back. Like, I don't think there's any doubt that the Braves are here for the long haul, too. And I think I wrote something last year around this time about how the Braves' rebuild hadn't really gone as planned, that they'd gotten where they wanted to get, but they did it with offense, and they did it with Acuna and Albies and Josh Donaldson at that point,

and some of the pitchers had not panned out to that point, and they had really tried a pitching-centric rebuild. Well, now you still have Albies, and you still have Acuna, and you still have Freeman, at least for another year. But you also have Anderson and Soroka and Freed. And maybe that's not Maddox, Glavin, and Smoltz, but it's a heck of a top of a rotation of 20-something starters. So I would say there is definitely a championship caliber core here. I just found it so wildly impressive how not only against the Dodgers, although given the depth, as we discussed, of the Dodgers lineup, that it was particularly impressive there. But coming into this postseason, I mean, I didn't expect Atlanta to make it past Cincinnati given the state of their pitching and how injured they were and how young those guys are. For them to not only have advanced as far as they did, but as you said, to have really stuck it to Los Angeles was presumably if they are able to get some of their young pitching back either in the form that it showed at the end of the season or to better health they are gonna be a problem for folks for a long time those plucky astros they

survive so much adversity so many injuries and so many covid cases and then they snuck into the postseason with a losing record and they went down 3-0 and they came all the way back. Just an inspiring story really of resilience and heart, I would say. Are there no PR professionals working in the greater Houston area? Are they all busy? Yeah, definitely not for the Astros organization. Yeah, I don't think there's any way that they could have spun this into a feel-good story, but they might have avoided making it quite as much of a feel-bad story as they did it every turn really over the past several months. Yeah, I just think that people, you know,

there are always going to be people who hold grudges and given the scale of the injury to the sport that the astros of 2017 affected i think that having a little bit of a grudge is just fine but i think that people are inclined to forgive after a while at least those who seem genuinely remorseful it's too late now like you can't can't work it back then no definitely not no but we can look forward we can look forward to an astralis world series yes indeed so let's do that so we've got raisin dodgers and as many people have pointed out these were the two top seeds in the postseason they were the teams with the most wins in their respective leagues, the only teams to win 40 or more of the 60 games this season. And so in that sense, this is chalk. This is what would have been predicted, I suppose. these two teams together had three winner-take-all elimination games that they played in which they were trailing or tied in the late innings. So both of these teams came within a breadth of

being eliminated. So very easily could have turned out to be a less predictable matchup, and I don't think we should draw any conclusions from this outcome that a 16-team playoff format is not actually as upset-oriented or subject to randomness as we thought it was. It is. It just didn't happen to work out that way this time. here than they would have in a normal year, especially maybe the Dodgers, because they had to face an additional round and also were deprived of home field advantage for one round or two rounds in the Dodgers case here. On the other hand, the format played into their hands a little bit in that they were able to make use of their depth, which would not have been perhaps quite as beneficial in a normal postseason with off days built in. So they both, I think, sort of outlasted their opponents to an extent, and they still had arms ready to deploy when their opposition was pretty much down to their

last reliable relievers when things were said and done. So in this series, they both go up against each other. So it's hard to say that one has a depth advantage, although I suppose the Rays still have the better and more imposing bullpen, even though Jensen seems to have righted himself somewhat at the end of that series. Even though the Dodgers got good work out of their pen in game seven, I think you still have to have more confidence in the Rays' array of relievers. I think that that is correct. When you think about sort of which advantages you are going to prioritize, I just am quite concerned about the Rays' lineup relative to the Dodgers in a way that I think neutralizes some of the benefit I see

in what is a very good and deep and variable bullpen in terms of the looks that it presents to opposition there's very few places to hide from that Dodgers lineup and I think there might be quite a few places to hide from the Rays even though I you know I don't think that we should look at a couple of bad weeks from Brandon Lau and think that he's irreparably broken or that this team is bad. You know, when you look at our, our team rankings, they, the Rays had like the ninth best WRC plus team WRC plus in baseball, and they weren't slouches by any means. So it's not as if they can't hit. And if anyone can make some bad business for his opponent out of fastballs, it's Randy Rosarana. So that doesn't pretend well for them, I suppose. But I just keep thinking about how Cody Bellinger was hitting sixth.

Yeah. I'll be curious to see how they pitch Rosarena in this series I think R.J. Anderson tweeted that Rosarena is hitting 342, 419, 921 Against two strike fastballs Including cutters and sinkers in this postseason Seven of his 14 home runs in this year Were on two strike fastballs And R.J. concluded the Dodgers should probably not throw him a two-strike fastball. And I think that seems like a pretty fair conclusion.

You know, I don't know that he's helpless against breaking balls either, but I think when you have that much success against heaters, then yeah, maybe try something else. Yeah, it's pretty, I think we had a number of places in the live stream we did for our Patreon supporters where we were just like, well, why do they keep throwing him a fastball? Yeah. Yeah, Jay Jaffe looked at this for, looked at Randy again,

within the context of other great post-seasons by hitters generally, but young ones in particular. And his conclusions were not very different from RJ's. 5'12", ex-Woba on four-seamers, a 5'80 mark on four-seamers, 95 miles an hour or higher, and a 5'43 on sinkers. But he has managed just a 3.07 ex-Woba against cutters. has managed just a 307 x wobo against cutters so you would imagine that that has kenley jansen and dustin may and bueller and trinen pretty pretty excited he didn't do as as well against uh curves or sliders or change-ups either but um yeah yeah and fastballs have been cited as a factor here in the attempt to suppress tampa bay's because the Rays, at least by some metrics,

have not been good fastball hitters. So I think Dan Simborski mentioned in his World Series previews one of the things he considered was can the Rays hit Dodgers fastballs. And I never know what to make of team-level pitch-type metrics, really. It's something that is often trotted out in series previews because there's only so much we can say, frankly, when we're previewing a baseball series,

you know, there aren't that many X's and O's and matchups that are really compelling. And so if one team has a bunch of great fastball pitchers or something, and the other team does not have a great track record that season against fastballs, then it's something worth mentioning. And it's been mentioned in earlier series in this postseason. I'm always sort of suspicious about it, and I'm especially suspicious of it this season because we're relying on 60 games of data and then when you're slicing and dicing that into individual pitch types and these pitch type metrics are often concerning what happens on the decisive pitch of a plate appearance and so they're not really all-inclusive and also if you

look at it different ways you can come to different conclusions. So Dan rightly pointed out that the Rays rank low when it comes to overall value produced against fastballs this year. But Eno Saris in one of his recent pieces about the Rays pointed out that the Rays are very good against the fastest fastballs. So Eno noted that against fastballs over 95 miles per hour, So, you know, noted that against fastballs over 95 miles per hour, the Rays have been fourth best in the postseason. I don't know whether he means among postseason teams or just in the postseason specifically. So sometimes you'll get like, you know, teams are not that great against fastballs overall, but then they're good against the very fastest fastballs and it's like okay well are we saying they can hit pretty fast pitches but not the fastest pitches that doesn't really seem consistent or you know maybe it's just that they've done okay this postseason and at this point the sample size of the postseason is like a significant percentage of the sample size of the regular season this year so i don't know how much to make about that you know if i were writing a series preview i I would cite it too. But I'm just

saying I don't know that it's definitely a decisive factor. But I think what you mentioned, which is just that the lineup, while decent, is not a Dodgers level or a Braves level lineup, I think that's maybe more salient. Yeah. And I just have this vision in my mind of the dodgers lineup facing blake snell and him accumulating an absurd number of walks and only pitching four innings and then them having to backfill because he relies in part on on fooling people with pitches out of the zone and he has done it very well and very successfully over the course of his career. And I am just quite skeptical given the plate discipline generally and particularly of some of their better hitters that he will last very long at all,

which means he's going to throw like a complete game shutout because that's how things work. But, you know, then he'd be happy and I don't really care. So that would be fine. I'd be willing to be wrong for him to have that happen. Yeah. So both of these teams had to go to game sevens to get here. So it's not as if one is way better rested than the other.

So no clear edge there, really. It is sort of striking the similarities in the way these two teams were developed and constructed and also the differences. Like I was on Hang Up and Listen earlier and Josh Levine was asking me like how far down you would have to go on the Dodgers roster on the list of like the most famous or best known Dodgers before you get to one who is not as famous as a Ray. Like, you know, how low would the best known Ray rank on the Q ratings of, you know, all the players in this series? And other than America's sweetheart, Randy Rosarena, who has achieved some celebrity in October, but was nationally anonymous as of a few weeks ago. I guess the best known Ray would probably be Blake Snell just because he won a Cy Young award. And I've got to think there are at least five Dodgers who are better known than Blake

Snell, maybe more. And then probably the fall off from Snell to, I don't know, Kevin Kiermaier or the next best known Ray. There are probably some more Dodgers who are better known than he is. And I think that's a reflection of the way these teams were built to an extent. And there's going to be a lot of talk this week about this being the Friedman Bowl, right? And it's Andrew Friedman's current team against Andrew Friedman's former team. And there are some similarities in the way these teams were put together.

Like clearly they are both teams that appreciate stockpiling prospects and have some good developmental acumen. But the big difference is that the Dodgers do everything the Rays do, but then also spend. And so they have superstars. spend and so they have superstars and the Rays have really good players but they don't have the top level elite talent I guess that the Dodgers do they certainly don't have the players with the name recognition that the Dodgers do and that's because the Dodgers can go out and trade for Mookie Betts but then also extend him forever and when they develop good homegrown players or they find a player who has underperformed with other organizations and then blossoms with the Dodgers they can keep them when they approach free agency so they can you know

re-sign Justin Turner or extend him or Clayton Kershaw or Kenley Jansen, whereas the Rays, because of the ownership-imposed constraints on spending, don't do that. And so they're perpetually churning their roster and replacing their players with the next wave of young, cost-controlled guys. And so there are similarities, but they're pretty clear differences. And I think maybe we have to figure out what the best way to talk about that is because the Rays do get celebrated, I think, rightly in some ways for managing this high wire act without falling. And yet we also don't want to lionize their organization for not spending. It's like we got an email earlier today from a listener who I think probably said something that a lot of listeners are saying or thinking. And he wrote, are we talking enough about what the Rays have been able to accomplish with a $28 million payroll, 28th in the league this season? If they beat the Dodgers in the

World Series, they will have toppled three of the top four payrolls this season. Yankees first, Dodgers second, and Astros fourth. That seems somewhat historic to me, or at least a decent fun fact. Kershaw and Betts both make more than the entire Rays payroll. I don't know why I find this so interesting. So the question was, are we talking enough about it? I think, yes, we are talking enough and maybe we're talking too much about it, but it is sort of hard to figure out, okay, how do you praise the Rays for doing this year after year, for building a competitive team with these low payrolls, but then not imply that we want all payrolls to be low or that it's a good thing generally for teams not to spend on their players i think that there are a couple of things to keep

in mind the first of which is and we saw this almost immediately upon the conclusion of of that raise game seven and and then i think again yesterday as the this dynamic of the world series became clear i don't have a ton of patience for fans who use the less savory aspects of their opponent's organization against them i think it's sort of a fool's errand anyway because ain't no team in baseball clean right like they all have skeletons yeah right i mean the dodgers were under an active doj investigation so they had a spreadsheet called crimes they had a crime sheet you know how you have a spreadsheet with all your crimes noted yep plus the the game capler stuff and right yeah exactly so i i which isn't i don't say to minimize

any of those indiscretions or to say that they shouldn't be things that we care about and criticize and endeavor to make better. But I always find something sort of gross and slippery when they are used against other fans as if to invalidate their fandom or to try to make them feel bad for rooting for the team they do, because it suggests that you don't really care about the underlying issue so much as you do just giving another fan base a hard time and that's an icky way to use like you know bonus skimming or someone's sexual assaults like don't do that you don't want to deputize that stuff into your argument against another fan while you're rooting for laundry that's gross so we'll say that first of all. I think the last year has made very clear to a lot of people and has further underscored to me that we in the media, I think, need to do a better job of distinguishing between what is an ownership mandate and what is the folks in an organization's preferred way of constructing a team.

And those things are not completely divorced from one another, right? Ownership tends to find people who will run the team the way they want them to run it, right? So you develop a particular skill in building good teams on the cheap, and you're going to be the person who does that. And maybe you get hired again a second time to do it somewhere else. So they're not unrelated to one another. But I think that we've seen, you know, whether it's the way minor leaguers have been treated or the way that baseball operations personnel was treated during the pandemic, that quite often baseball people are also at odds with ownership.

And so that isn't to say that we should not criticize or implore owners to treat their players well and pay them a fair market value for their services. But I do think that it gives us a little bit of daylight to acknowledge, hey, the Rays scouts do a phenomenal job, right? Rays player development does an amazing job. The analysts working in the front office do a really great job working with less from a financial resource perspective than most other clubs in baseball. And that isn't to say that it wouldn't be good for ownership to say, no, we want a Mookie Betts, so we're going to let ourselves have a $23 million a year guy.

Or we think it's really important to lock in the top of the rotation. So instead of signing Blake Snell to a below market deal, we're going to invest in the free agent market and spend, you know, $150 million on a pitcher, whatever it is. Right. I think that we can want that and still acknowledge the good baseball work that's being done and these players who who put together the best team in the American League. I think we can do all those things. Now, it does require that we be careful with how we talk about it and are quite nuanced in the way we talk about it, which means that we probably shouldn't talk about it on Twitter because it's not a place that lends itself to that. But I think that we owe it to each other and baseball people and baseball players to have that conversation in a slightly different way because I think it's really easy to look at a general manager who has a budget that they have to operate within and ascribe all of the nonsense of an organization to that person. And that isn't always, that often is not the whole story,

even if part of why that person was selected probably had something to do with their ability to field a good team within those constraints so let's we should just have a more informed conversation because i i refuse in 2020 to give up finding randy rosarania fun i refuse no absolutely not i refuse to not look at nick anderson and be like this is so cool that this guy pitches this well given his his background and the route he took to get here i don't have to be excited about watching pete fairbanks pitch he's very good but he looks always so nervous and then that makes me so nervous and so that's not a fun like aesthetic experience but i i get to enjoy that part and be happy for you know the people i know who work in that organization and i think that we can do that and hope that they spend more money and and

absolutely say that that should not be the industry standard for payroll because it artificially constricts the salaries that players are paid in an industry that generates a ton of money so that's what i think about it yeah do you think that pete fairbanks could like eat an edible before he pitched or something yeah he shouldn't do that don't don't do drugs before you pitch that's a bad idea but you know he just looks so nervous, Ben. Yeah. Maybe like, I don't know, some Botox or something that would just like smooth out the anxiety lines. His eyes are so wide. Yeah. His eyes are so wide.

Yeah. Maybe it lets in more light and he can like see better. I don't know, man. I'm going. Very deer in the headlights look. Yeah. It's very stressful. I don't mostly find the Rays to be an unpleasant aesthetic team, though.

There's been a lot of talk about that. And I think some of the strategies they pioneered are maybe fan unfriendly. Like, you know, I like starters going deep into games, even though I know it's not analytically correct. And so when I see them go out and replace Charlie Morton after five and two thirds in game seven, when Morton's only thrown 60-something pitches and he's pretty much cruising. But Nick Anderson comes in, I nod my head and say, yep, that's, you know, not only predictable because it's what they've been doing all year, but it makes sense analytically. So I understand why people were up in arms about that, some people, but I also think it was the right move. On the whole, though, you know, they've

kind of gone away from the opener as other teams have embraced it. They've sort of backed off it a bit as they have had more starters available. You know, they started using the opener in part because they were so shorthanded and it was like an emergency compensation tactic. Now they don't do that as much, although they do still have quick hooks and i think they're just pretty fun like they're a good defensive team so it's fun to watch that it's fun to watch their relievers even though there are a lot of them i think because they all have these different arm angles and approaches and because they throw so hard i think they're pretty entertaining and stylistically differentiated

enough. So I see why some of the things that they have popularized and, you know, because they've been so successful, they've also been influential and maybe that has backfired in some ways for fans. But this team in this season, I find them pretty fun, Maybe not Braves-level fun, but pretty fun. Well, and you have G-Man stretching. They all look so happy for each other in the dugout, which, look, when stuff's going well, it's really easy to be happy for other people. The degree of difficulty is quite low there.

I'll acknowledge that, but they just seem to genuinely be invested in one another. You know, Brandon Lau has had just the worst hard time throughout the postseason. It did not get better in the ALCS. And he had that little bunt in field single. And the dugout was so happy for him. Yeah, Brandon, you did it, man. You're going to be OK, buddy.

And so, yeah, I can understand how the pitching stuff in particular can lend itself to an unpleasant experience for some i think that saying that you don't like watching the rays the way the rays play baseball is a perfectly defensible position but i'm with you i i quite enjoy the like sum total of their pitching i think that as we talked about i don't know if it was on a i can't remember if it was a past episode or the live stream but they they didn't want to open her as much as they did right they opened as much as they did open dirt oh they used an opener as much as they did because their rotation was really horribly injured so even that has calmed down some and so i just uh i like them i like watching the dodgers too you know it's really

fun to watch a lineup that dominating i'm gonna keep focusing on this because i just can't i can't quite believe it's true when when dan was preparing his world series preview you know he he was thinking about the lack of offensive production from some of the better bats on the Rays. He told Zips to assume that Brandon Lau, Yandy Diaz, and Willie Adamas would have an OPS of 600 throughout the World Series. By doing that, the Rays' odds of winning dropped from 47% to 40%. Then he did the same thing with the three best bats on the Dodgers from this year. So Will Smith, Corey Seager, and Mookie Betts. And it dropped their odds from 53% to 50%. Yeah. Just because they have so many great hitters. They have so many

great hitters. And because those guys are, yeah, it's just, they are part of a crazy multi-headed dog. Hydra, they're part of a Hydra. Was the Hydra the? Cerberus. Cerberus was the dog, but the lizard-y thing was a Hydra? Yeah, the Hydra's got the snake heads, and then the Medusa has the snakes for hair. Well, yeah, Medusa had snakes on her head. But anyway, they're a really good offense.

And Tampa is an okay offense with two dudes hitting out of their minds and a bunch of guys who have been much more productive in the past but are simultaneously slumping. But they're all still great fun to watch. Yeah, it was interesting. Something else Dan pointed out that Globe Life Field, which we think is a pitcher's park, has performed as a pitcher's park thus far and seemed likely to be a pitcher's park based on its configuration, has sort of a leveling effect where the more of a hitter's

park you assume it to be, the better the odds for the Dodgers get, according to Dan's projections, I guess, because, you know, the higher scoring the environment is, I guess the more damage the Dodgers could do, they're more likely to hit those home runs than the Rays are. So the fact that this is sort of a pitcher's park helps the Rays to a certain extent. And so maybe that's a factor here. And of course, the Dodgers don't get the home field advantage. You know, it's a neutral site. So they don't get to enjoy the home field advantage that they would in a normal year.

So because of that and other factors, Dan has this being pretty close to a coin flip, really, with the Dodgers having a slight edge. So one last thing I wanted to say about that Rays discourse, I think there's been a lot of self-examination in the sabermetric community about the role that sabermetric writers played in espousing this, you know, what ultimately maybe turned out to be an ownership-centric viewpoint just by celebrating efficiency, essentially. And I think that may have been the effect, and maybe the effect is all that matters. And maybe it was naive to think that pointing out that certain players, you know, should not get certain long-term deals in their 30s or whatever,

you know, maybe everyone should have known what the effect of that would have been, not just redistributing the spending, but suppressing the spending. But I don't think that was the aim of the sabermetric writers, at least. I don't think it was that they were anti-player or pro-owner and that they were trying to pick the players' pockets. I think a lot of people are upset when players make a lot of money, but not so much the sabermetric people. I think more of the mainstream media members or even just fans will say, these guys make too much money. You know, they make so much more than I make. They're just playing a game. They're all rich and spoiled and overpaid. And I don't think you hear that sentiment that much among sabermetric writers.

So when sabermetric people would say, you know, Ryan Howard is not going to be worth this extension, I don't think they were begrudging Howard making that money. I think it was more about saying, well, if you're going to spend this money, there are better ways you could spend it. And maybe the effect of that was that they stopped spending money that way and didn't start spending it in other ways. So it worked out that way. where it really did seem like payroll was more tightly connected to success. And there weren't maybe as many non-baseball revenue sources. And so it wasn't that, you know, how much a team could spend was like completely divorced from attendance and team success because everyone was making so much money from TV money or internet money or real estate money.

Yeah. All these other things that make teams print money for owners, whether or not the teams win in some cases. That wasn't as much the case decades ago. And so I think there was more of a sense that, well, if you want to contend and compete year after year, you really do have to avoid spending a ton of money on a post-prime Ryan Howard because there is only a limited amount of money that you theoretically can spend or reasonably can spend. And so if you're devoting a disproportionate amount of it to someone who is

not performing on the field, then you're really hamstringing yourself. Whereas now we've gotten to the point where it's harder to say that. It's harder to say that if you spend X dollars on this guy, you can't spend Y dollars on that guy. No, you probably still could spend Y dollars on that guy if you wanted to. It's just that a lot of owners are not willing to do that. I think it was partly that the game has changed, like the financial calculus has changed, and also that maybe we or they didn't realize what the effect of all of that would be. But I think certainly the Rays have been celebrated plenty in the past for balling on a budget or whatever. And there is, you know, something I think worthy of respect if

you look at it from a front office standpoint and not from an ownership standpoint and say, boy, they sure are clever to keep doing this within these budget constraints. But, you know, I don't think it was ever really motivated by we want Stu Sternberg to make more money so much as, you know, maybe that was what happened, but it was kind of an unintended consequence to some extent. I think that that is a fair thing to say. I think that there, I never quite know what to do with this argument because on the one hand I am sympathetic to the idea that you know like players didn't and more specifically the players association didn't

properly anticipate how all of the divergent revenue streams that teams were going to have access to and how quickly revenue sort of winning and revenue would decouple from one another. And so I want to be kind of fair in assessing blame for that lack of imagination. I think that part of it is, as you said, like it was a different era. Some of this is less about sabermetrics per se and more about the online environment that early sabermetric writing grew up in, which I think was, you know, while it was incisive and often funny, it was also sarcastic and confrontational and sometimes very defensive. And so I think that with that general sort of tone and tenor being the focus there was you know there

perhaps wasn't as much room for someone to come along and say well hey now you know maybe we want to think about some of the labor implications of the argument we're making which is as an aside part of why it is so wild to watch football analytics twitter come into its own yeah because it's some of the flashback to yeah and some of the same mistakes are being made again and i i like all the the smart nerds who were like go for it on fourth down but i also i'm like you should think more about what saying running backs are interchangeable means it'll be a problem later and worse in your sport because the contracts aren't guaranteed. So anyway, so I think that there was not room for either the kind of imagination that was required for that or I don't know that it adapted quite as quickly as it ought to have. And so on the one hand, I think that if, you know, I wasn't part of Saber 1.0, like I was reading Saber 1.0,

but I was not a writer at that time. And I would imagine that if you ask those folks, there would definitely be things that they would change in terms of how they articulated value as a concept and what they chose to focus on and how much snark there was. Because I think that it is easy when you're operating in that kind of an environment to have a reader make a jump from, well, this contract is a bad idea for this player to contracts like this are a bad idea for all players. Right. I think that part the sabermetric community has to own. But I do think that you're right to say that for, well, for many of the sabermetric writers, because there is sort of this funny little libertarian streak

through the whole thing that can have a different vibe. But I think that for most of the sabermetric writers, they weren't out there trying to keep player salaries low. They were trying to understand where value was coming from and who was good and why. And I think that that is a very worthy pursuit. But I also think that if the environment had been less antagonistic, it wouldn't have taken that much more imagination to say, well, we're noticing that this market inefficiency thing sure helps teams out a lot. Well, that's just another way of saying that you're not paying a

player what he's worth. Yeah. So that part probably should have needed to be examined in a great deal more effort. And I don't want to erase all of the people who along the way sort of sounded warning bells because those voices and works did exist but i think we all got we all got a little caught up and then it was hard to walk it back with the appropriate level of sort of concern but yeah i don't know i'm sort of of the mind at this point that the delay might have been longer but as soon as baseball teams became such an obviously valuable investment and were thought of that way as an investment vehicle rather than like the cool thing you get to own because you're fabulously wealthy, I think that this pressure was inevitable. But I do think that it was helped along and legitimized in a way that is unfortunate by some of the early work.

unfortunate by some of the early work. Yeah. And I guess there wasn't really anywhere for that money to be reallocated. Like if you were saying it's generally not the greatest idea to give a long-term deal to a player who's in his 30s and is already declining because of what we know about aging patterns, that's all well and good. But under the current collectively Barkin system, it's not as if you can say, so instead of signing, you know, X veteran to this long-term deal, sign, you know, give that money to the 22-year-old in his first year of service time or something. Like the current system is not structured that way. that spending from one end, you're not just shifting it to the other end. You're just kind of taking it out entirely, at least in the current system, which, you know, maybe can be rectified. It certainly should be a goal for the Players Association. But as things stand right now, you can give more money to the older players and at least teams don't have much incentive to bestow

all of that money on the younger players who only have, you know, one or two or three years of service time. So that's a quick detour that I didn't entirely mean to take. I think the Dodgers are on one of the more impressive runs really in history when you adjust for the era and the context and how hyper-competitive everything is, how many playoff rounds there are now. They have not won a World Series, and until they do, everyone will hold that against them. But winning eight straight division titles is incredibly impressive. Getting to three World Series in four years is incredibly impressive. Getting to three World Series in four years is incredibly impressive. Whether they win this one in Game 7 as opposed to losing one in Game 7 as they had before, ultimately, of course it matters, and of course it's part of the legacy of the team. But they've done a lot just by getting to this point. I was going to say you can't ask for any more than continuing to get to the World Series.

But, of course, you can. You can ask for more. And maybe you should ask for more. But just, I think, be conscious of the fact that they've been on a really impressive run just to get to this point and to have no end in sight. You know, because for the foreseeable future, one would imagine they will keep getting back here. for the foreseeable future one would imagine they will keep getting back here and i think yeah you can critique clayton kershaw fairly and you can critique dave roberts fairly but when it starts getting into like motivation stuff or character stuff or they don't want it enough or they're unclutch or whatever i just i can't go along with that and people were saying really in the nlcs at times when the Dodgers were a few innings away from elimination, you know, people were saying, oh, the Dodgers look flat. You know, they don't look like they're trying or they don't look like they are making the effort. And it's like, yeah, you know, when any team is losing, usually they just don't look that great. And you can project anything that you're feeling on that team.

You can say they don't want it enough or whatever, but probably that's not the case. And people were sharing some comments from Dodgers pitcher Alex Wood, who was saying that, you know, when you're in the playoffs year in and year out, like the Dodgers have been, it can be a little harder maybe to get up for games and to feel that same surge of adrenaline that you do the first time. And Dave Roberts, I think, acknowledged that. He said, yeah, maybe it's a little harder, but you have to do it anyway. And I expect my players to do that anyway. And, you know, when it looked like the Dodgers were going to get knocked out, people were circulating those comments and saying, well, if they can't get excited for a playoff game,

then I don't know what to tell you. And Roberts has to go. And, you know, maybe if they had lost, Roberts would have gone, maybe just change for the sake of change. I don't know, you know, light a fire under them, or maybe for legitimate reasons, because you take exception to some of his pitching moves. But they came back, you know. They answered that criticism. They fought their way off the mat, and now they're back here on an even footing with the Rays. And so whatever happens, I think they have passed whatever test of character that you want to apply to baseball teams based on postseason results. And I think the fact that we have two of the best teams in baseball facing off here and that they have had difficult roads to get to this point, we don't really have to have the a. And if anything, the road has been harder and longer for them than it would have been. So if they win, you should celebrate it as much as you would in any other year, if not more. And if they lose, well,

be disappointed. But I don't think you need to take it as a reflection on the organization's character. No, I have said this to you before, Ben, but everything about this year has just been an awful hard time. They're pro athletes, and they make good money, and they get tested a lot. These two teams have been fortunate in their exposure to the pandemic, and a lot of things went right for them, and they're very talented, but this was just, for every person alive a terrible hard year and i don't think that anything was done easily

and nothing came easy and they're very good teams and i feel no i feel no instinct to discount a 2020 World Series. I don't even know that I will think of it differently in the years to come. I just really don't think I will. I don't know how right or fair that is, but I think it was a terrible hard time, and here they are. On that note, let's enjoy the World Series, which will hopefully not be a terrible hard time for the next week or so. And we will be back to discuss it as it proceeds. going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. As I noted at the top of the episode, we will be doing a second Patreon-exclusive livestream for members at the $10 level and up on Saturday for Game 4. It's not too late to get in on that. 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, such as that livestream. Austinin peteric kevin hayden jackson evans nathaniel cane and nick will work thanks to all of you you can join our facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild you can rate review and subscribe to effectively wild on itunes and spotify and other podcast platforms keep your questions and comments for me and meg and sam coming via email at podcastoffangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. We will be back with another episode a little later this week. Talk to you then. Now is the right time To swing the bass and sing the praises of

Love so fine it won't be long before I have to leave Knowing that I could use more time alone With you, that just might carry on