Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1606: Call it Even

Episode Date: October 23, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller discuss the first two games of the World Series, touching on Clayton Kershaw’s Game 1 excellence, the Dodgers’ discipline, Dave Roberts’ pitcher usage, the status of Rays reliever Nick Anderson, the Game 2 breakout of Brandon Lowe, and the outlook for the rest of the series. Then they banter about […]

Hello Hey man, hey man like me Sam Miller of ESPN. Hello, Sam. Hello. World Series is tied at one as we speak, so I figured we could talk a little bit about the first couple games and then maybe do some emails. So you just did a roundtable at ESPN about some observations from the first couple games, and I just took a look at it and it matched up with some of the things that I wanted to bring up too. So Clayton Kershaw was sort of the story of game one. He's sort of the story of almost every postseason game he appears in, one way or another. Sometimes it's a happy story, sometimes it's a sad story. This was one of the times when it was a happy story, and he pitched really well. And I was a little bit surprised,

I guess, to see that this game didn't rank higher on his list of postseason starts. If you sort all those postseason starts by game score, this game, in which he was great and effective and got lots of strikeouts, was only his eighth best postseason start. It was not his best World Series start. That would be World Series Game 1 in 2017. It was not his best 2020 postseason start. That would be his start against the Brewers in the wildcard round. So it was very good, but even when he has a very good start now, it's generally not his best one, or it might not be his best one because he's made so many postseason starts. And even though, on the whole, his postseason starts have not been nearly as good as his average regular season start He's still been really fantastic a lot of times Which I think is the part that confounds people about the Kershaw playoff narrative No one denies that he has been worse or at least most people don't deny that he has been worse

But I think when people chalk it up to choking or something That's when everyone bridles because he's been so good so many times that it's hard to argue that he can't be that good or that he's incapable of it. So that just really reinforced to me that despite the lackluster track record, he has a lot of great games even in the postseason. And this was another one. Yeah, my feeling about the Kershaw you know curse or whatever

has always been that it's it's not that he chokes in any way it's that the nature of the postseason has i guess the nature of the postseason and also the nature of his ace status has combined to put him in a bunch of situations where he was asked to do more or stretched to go further than maybe a typical pitcher would have been asked. And things then kind of got out of hand. You know, like a lot of his, you know, his failures, I guess, in the postseason. If you applied the same rules to him that are applied to, say, Blake Snell in the year 2020, Kershaw would have been out of the game an inning or two or three before that.

You mentioned that this game was only his eighth best. It's because he only went six innings. He only went six innings because it was a blowout. But also, he only went six innings and that's the 14th longest start that he's made. And among the ones that are longer are games where he went six and two thirds and allowed five runs, six and two thirds and allowed eight runs. I mean, just imagine a starter.

That was only six years ago. But imagine a starter in 2020 or maybe a starter in 2020 who wasn't the best pitcher in baseball. Maybe you could imagine a Shane Bieber or a Jake DeGrom going that deep and being allowed to work into a seventh inning jam. But for the most part, it's almost impossible to imagine. Like Tyler Glasnow is a very good starter. It's almost impossible to imagine Tyler Glasnow being allowed to face, you know, seven batters in a disastrous seventh inning,

but Clayton Kershaw was allowed to do it and so so many of his runs have come tacked on at the end of starts where he actually looked quite good and so it's a when when he was doing the hugs at the at the end of uh six innings I mean presumably that was to keep him fresh to keep him from you know any any any throws that he doesn't have to make in game one are potentially gonna keep him stronger in game five and in game seven but also you just sort of feel like partly it's a matter of uh giving him the the grace to get out of the game before he has to yeah potentially get get hit right is not a grace that has been traditionally extended to him because he's

Clayton Kershaw. Yeah. And so it was 8-1 after six, and they took him out after 78 pitches, and he didn't have the opportunity to get into trouble. Although I will say, comparing him to Snell or Glasnell, obviously the Rays have short leashes with their starters, unusually short leashes. And I think also because Kershaw started pitching in the postseason 12 years ago, the expectations for postseason pitchers were different than across the board.

Because he's the best pitcher of his generation and was the best pitcher in baseball at his peak, it would not have been unreasonable at that point to expect him to get through the sixth or seventh inning fairly unscathed. So I think both things are true that he's been left in too long at times, but also that given how great he was then, you would have expected him to get through those innings more times than he did. Yeah. So, yeah. All right. And I think the other takeaway from that first game was that the Dodgers offense is really good. That should not be a new takeaway if you've been paying any attention to the Dodgers this year. But I think everyone was also reminded

how great an all-around talent Mookie Betts is. Again, not news, but nice to be reminded as he hits home runs and makes great catches and runs wild on the base paths. He's been such an important part of that team and that offense. So to see all of that on display in game one, it was just pretty stark, I think, in that the Dodgers hitters saw 174 pitches. In game one, Rays hitters saw 128 pitches, and that was with a bottom of the ninth. So they had an extra time at bat, and the Dodgers still saw so many more pitches. And that was partly because they hit better and they had more guys on base and there were more plate appearances. But it was also true on a per plate appearance basis that they saw a lot more pitches than the Rays batters did. It's just a better offense. Like the pitching, both teams have great pitching, deep pitching. The Rays pitching is arguably better, at least in relief. But offense is, I I think really where the disparity between the two teams shows up and so you sort of expected that to be a big factor in game two because the Rays had Blake Snell going and Blake Snell is a pitcher who does not throw a lot of pitches in the strike

zone and so one would think that the Dodgers would not be a great matchup for him because they're a team that chases less than any other team but the Yankees did this year. And Snell is someone who relies on getting chases. And you could have envisioned the scenario where the Dodgers just spit on a lot of those pitches and he would not have been effective. But that's not really what happened. Eventually, they got to him. He did walk four batters and he didn't quite make it through the fifth, but he was cruising right up until two outs in the fifth when finally, I guess, some of the beat them in any given game and that was the game that I guess if you're the Rays you would be thinking we really have to win this one because we've got Blake Snell and they have bullpen day basically so I don't know if the Rays really have a starting pitcher advantage on paper in any game except two and I guess six if they repeat that pattern so that was sort of

the one that you need to win if you're the Rays that you're maybe more okay with losing if you're the Dodgers and they made it close too so it wasn't like they got blown out the way the Rays sort of did in game one yeah was that a close game yesterday by the way because I I deleted a sentence where I said that the, in drawing a distinction between, yeah, I mean, they split the first two games, but they did not look like equal teams. And if you look statistically, the Dodgers have, you know, like have been vastly more, you know, more offense in these two games.

If you look past the runs. And I had a sentence that said something like, you know, the Dodgers cruised to a comfortable win while the Rays squeaked out a close one. And I couldn't decide whether that was the subjective experience everybody else had had. To me, it felt close the whole game. It felt like the Rays needed to be nervous. And then sure enough, you get to the eighth inning and the Dodgers have the tying run up. And you think, oh think oh wow this thing but then when you actually like kind of look at it maybe slightly more objectively the Rays were you know fairly

comfortable like the closeness of it the closeness built up but yeah but ultimately the Dodgers only had that really one moment where they got close did it feel like a close game to you or did it feel like a not close game to you I thought thought it felt pretty close. I never felt like the Dodgers are out of it. I mean, you're bringing in Anderson and Fairbanks in the middle innings. Yeah. That sort of by definition is going to be a close game. Yeah. And I think the Rays relievers, so many of those great Rays relievers are right-handed. And I think the matchups are not as good as they were in the first three rounds of the playoffs because the Dodgers have all these great lefty bats. Not that these righties can't get lefties out too. They can, but I think they're a little less scary against this lineup than they were against the earlier lineups they faced in the postseason. ESPN and a lot of people have mentioned is that Nick Anderson has not been his normally dominant

self lately and he has almost a 5 ERA on the postseason as a whole he's allowed runs in his last five outings I believe and as RJ Anderson pointed out until game two he had gone 23 batters without striking out anyone and I think up until game two, you know, Saris mentioned he had only gotten two whiffs on his fastball. So it seems like his stuff has just not really been there quite as much that maybe he hasn't had his feel for the curve or maybe his feel was even a little bit down by his standards and whatever it is, he has just not been as lights out as he was. I i mean he allowed one earned run in the regular season in only i think 16 something innings but still i don't think he had i think i think i have this right i don't think he allowed two base runners in a game during the regular

season in in any game and he's done that one two three four four times plus two games where he allowed a plus yeah two games where he allowed a home run in the postseason. And the thing about Nick Anderson, I think, it's not like he's had two blowups. It's that he's arguably had one good outing, like one clearly good dominant outing. It's been five times in a row that he's looked off. Certainly four times in a row, four times in a row where he hasn't looked anything close to his normal self. So

this isn't like, oh, well, an inning got away from him and it messed up his numbers for the month or anything like that. It's like on a pitch by pitch basis, you can see it. And it's been consistent that you could see it for, you know, going on two weeks now. You mentioned the Dodgers, by the way, seeing a lot more pitches, and that has become sort of a shorthand for talking about how dominant their offense is, I think, in this past week, which is actually kind of an odd thing because the Dodgers actually saw fewer pitches than almost any offense in baseball this year. And so it is true that they have been working opposing pitchers in a very kind of like Yankees, Red Sox, like dominant war of attrition sort of way in the past couple weeks. I agree that that is the appropriate description of how they've been hitting in the last couple weeks. And they have that ability. It's interesting that that was not how they were as a team during the regular season and i wonder if you think that this is uh by design that they've intentionally had a regular season approach and a postseason approach or if you i don't know i don't is is

what i've just described to you the sort of thing that would be worth digging into for an article or do you think that like like there's just nothing there well i had not really been aware that it hadn't been the case before so that's sort of surprising to me because i know that they don't chase a lot they've been selective all season yeah but now that you mentioned it they didn't really walk that much either so i mean they were kind of middle of the pack in walk rate. So I guess that would just mean that they were maybe more aggressive on pitches in the zone. I guess I'd have to see because they had a very low swing rate against pitches that were outside the zone, but I guess they were probably pretty aggressive in the zone and ended up not walking so much because they're good hitters and hit for good power. And I don't know, maybe in the postseason, I don't know whether it's that

they have faced pitchers who have been going outside the zone more. And so those pitchers have just played into their strengths and the Dodgers have just let those pitchers beat themselves or whether they have adjusted, which would make sense. I guess it would make sense to adjust your approach if you could do that because they haven't had off days during postseason games up until this point. So if you were to say we should do something different as an offense, maybe it would be let's make them work hard because by the time we get late in this series, we'll really have taken a toll on their bullpens and they won't have been able to refresh themselves yeah i'm looking at it

now and and as you noted they had the second lowest chase rate in the regular season but they had one of the highest swing rates in the zone in the regular season not not the highest but they're like 10th in baseball so top third and in the postseason they have the lowest swing rate on pitches in the zone so their chase rate actually has not changed they haven't gotten more patient on chases they've actually chased a little more which you would probably expect because you're facing a tougher average pitcher so you're going to chase more but the swing rate on pitches in the zone has gone uh has gone way down okay well yeah maybe it is a conscious thing i don't know all right and i think much of the discussion

about dave roberts pitching decisions here has centered on may and gonsolin and how he has used them in game two gonsolin started was pulled after only four outs. May came in later. They faced 14 batters combined, and four of them scored. And to some extent, this situation was set up by what happened in Game 7 and in earlier appearances in the playoffs. Because of the way they got through Game 7, none of their options to start this game was rested enough to throw more than 50 pitches, so you had to try to piggyback them somehow. did have more of a choice in game seven when gonsolin was rested and they started may as the opener anyway he keeps switching may around sometimes he started sometimes he's been more of a bulk guy sometimes he's coming in relief he's been an opener gonsolin has kind of gone back and forth too and there's been criticism

about that because they've been moved around, but I think also mostly because they just haven't pitched well lately in whatever role they've been deployed in. And so if you want to say they've pitched poorly because they have been jerked around a little bit, you could make that case. It's also entirely possible that they just haven't pitched all that well and that they wouldn't have pitched any better in a different role. So I don't know. If you look at the regular season stats, you would say that Gonsolin is the better, more effective pitcher, and that May, despite his great stuff and his great velocity, is not a great bat-misser at

this point in his career. And he's looked sort of shaky, I guess, since the NLDS. So they'll have to make this decision again. They'll have to decide whether they want to use those guys in relief over the next few games because they have the Thursday off day, or whether they'll want to hold them back for game six, and then which one do you use first, or when do you use them? You have to use both of them at some point again. And so I don't know whether we're all making too much of, oh, you have to have set roles and you have to have them do this or that. People, I think, were taken aback that May didn't know he was starting NLCS Game 7 until like seven hours before the game or something. And I was listening to Andy McCullough on his podcast and he was saying, you know, it's not like May didn't know there was a game or that

he was going to be pitching in that game. Like he wasn't going to make plans for that night or something. So the fact that he wasn't notified that he would be starting until several hours before the game, well, I don't know. We all just sort of reflexively say, well, you've got to tell them. They've got to know far in advance. And Andy was saying it sort of infantilizes the athletes if it's like you have to map out exactly how they'll be used way in advance. And yet there are times when athletes complain

when they are not used in a clearly telegraphed way. So it sort of varies by pitcher, and I don't really know whether their ineffectiveness has had anything to do with the fact that they haven't had a set role or whether you just can't really count on them in any role right now. But you have to find a way to work them into games,

even though the Dodgers are carrying 15 pitchers in this series. Those are still two pretty important ones. Yeah, the postseason, it's always very difficult for a manager because nobody is on their regular routine. Even if you're talking about your ace and he's pitching exactly on schedule, you still have uncertainty about whether he's going to end up

being bumped up to short rest or, you know, I mean, you have a certain, a different level of adrenaline going on through the process. You have a different travel schedule. Everything is different, but I mean, I didn't just give a great example, but you're constantly dealing with pitchers who are on somewhat different rest or who are pacing themselves for a different sort of race and who are more tired than they've been and then at the end of the the sequence if they've done poorly we act like well of course the manager should have known that that wasn't going to work out and you never know whether it's because the pitcher threw 34 pitches the day before or whether

it's just because that was his day to be bad. I mean, you have to, like the courage to use the Dodgers. The Dodgers had a very, if you're the manager of the Dodgers, you had a very safe way of managing this postseason. You had five good starters. This was a postseason that was going to require, for the most part, you know, like five, if you had five good starters, there were no off days. You were going to you could use them that way. And you would look really good for having five good starters, it would look safe, it would look normal, you would look like you had the huge advantage, everything could have been done along those lines. And so then when you start doing creative things, you just know that you're going to get second guessed. And we'll never know why May and Gonsolin haven't done well. But I mean, when you're talking about two pitchers who were among the 15 or so best pitchers in baseball

by ERA Plus this year, and Gonsolin, I think, was like fourth in FIP. When they don't pitch well, it's very easy to say that, of course, they could have pitched better if you'd used them in a normal way. So anyway, the tricky thing though is, I don't want to say it's fair to second guess because our guesses aren't any better,

but where it's just simply fair to wonder about whether a pitcher's routine was disrupted is that you hear pitchers a lot, you hear professional athletes a lot, but I think you especially hear with pitchers, they talk about their state of arousal almost as a, like a beast that they have to control and that is hard to control. And so they have to, they want to be really amped up at a certain time.

And that takes kind of work and attention to be appropriately amped up when they need it. But then they also need to pace that ampedness for just the right amount of time. And then once that ampedness wanes, then they, they sort of feel like they lose effectiveness or they can't get it back. And so you're just always hearing about pitchers who have to really carefully manage just how excited they are, just how much adrenaline is coursing through them. It's something that I think they learn to do through routine. That's one of the reasons that routine is something that they value so much and that is in some ways mysterious and hard to control. And so it probably would be easy to say that telling

Dustin May, a starter, to do the easier task, which is to only throw one or two innings, shouldn't be too hard. He knows that he's going to be called on that day. He certainly knows he's going to be called on that week. He knows what the stakes are. He knows what his job is. And he knows how to hold a baseball, put his fingers on the seams and throw it really hard. So it should be something that he can handle. But getting just the right amount of that beast in him is something that baseball players really take seriously in their own psychologies. And then I think they feel at a disadvantage when that's a little bit out of their control. Yep. And I think the other obvious thing from game two, I think Meg and I talked last time about how the Rays had gotten to this point without really any offensive contributions

from some of their biggest hitters. And that if that changed, that would bode well for them in the series. And that finally changed in Game 2, most notably with Brandon Lau, who hit two home runs after being almost silent except for one solo homer for the rest of the postseason. So they stuck with him, they trusted him, they kept hitting him at the top of the lineup and trusted in the projections, the sample size, and eventually were rewarded for that. the projections, the sample size, and eventually were rewarded for that. And they got some good stuff out of Joey Wendell and Austin Meadows and others who had been basically absent for a while. So if those guys hit, then the differential in the lineups is not quite as massive as it would look. Otherwise, you can't probably win a World Series entirely with Randy Rosarena being like your only good hitter and, you know, occasional contributions from Mike Zanino and Manuel Margot, who is apparently just a good hitter now, I guess. I love Manuel Margot. I think that every postseason there is a player who gets hot for three weeks and then that's what you remember from their season.

And the next year you just expect the most massive things from them and uh at this point it is a near certainty that that player is going to be margot for me i mean the man hit one home run this year yeah and yet in my head he is like the fourth best player in this series right now. Yeah. Yeah. So I think the Dodgers are still in fairly good position here. I think they're the better team. And now they have Buehler and Ries and Kershaw lined up for the next three games. And who knows what will happen. But even though it's even, I think the Dodgers still have some edge here.

And I don't know if I have any other brilliant takeaways from these first couple games. Do you? No, I've been thinking a lot about this story I heard from the 1902 Giants season. So I could talk about that if you want. Sure. What is it? sure what is it i've been reading the saber 50 for 50 50 at 50 50 450 compilation which is this great collection of 50 saber articles that university of nebraska press put together for sabers 50th anniversary it's been very enjoyable and wonderful and whenever you're reading about

baseball from 100 years ago you're just constantly struck by how different the game was. And so there's an article on John McGraw's first year with the Giants. And Clifford Blau wrote this article. And there were three details that really jumped out to me as like, can you believe baseball used to be like this? And one of them is that christy matthewson christy matthewson right you know one of the half dozen greatest pitchers of all time coming off of a sensational rookie year in 1901 when he well for what this is worth he was worth nine war as a 20 year old i mean it's 1901 pitching who even knows what that means but then he got

a sore arm and so they decided or at least they discussed because he got a sore arm they discussed converting him to shortstop christy matthewson the winner of 9 000 games in his career uh nearly converted to a shortstop because he was a pretty good hitter and seemed like a pretty good fielder. So they sent him to first base for a weekend. He played three games at first base. He made four errors. And so they, then, well, now he can't be a shortstop. So he didn't become a shortstop. He went back to the mound when his arm healed. And if he hadn't made those four errors, you could imagine that Christy Matthewson could have just been made a hitter like on the fly like that and they say he was a pretty good hitter and that was why they decided but he wasn't really he he at that point in his career uh was hitting 207 238 255 which is an ops plus of 48 for you know even relative to his peers for his career he had an ops

plus of 60 maybe he would have gotten better with peers for his career he had no ps plus of 60 maybe he would have gotten better with with reps and maybe he would have been a league average hitter and a league average shortstop but they were just willing to do that and i guess that tells you something about how willing they were to to do that but also about how like little hope that there was no plan for his arm they they could rest it and he could get better or they could convert him to shortstop. There was no, there was no third option,

like try medicine like that. They didn't have medicine yet. They hadn't invented it. So that was one thing that was really crazy about that era. Another thing is that the giants lost two games earlier in the season that they then had to replay because it was discovered the games were overturned because it was discovered that the Cubs pitching mound was two feet too close to the plate. Two feet. Imagine a team with a mound two feet too close.

Imagine that baseball. Yeah, I imagine mountains being moved in the other direction all the time. And probably six inches would change the game dramatically. So these games add the mound two feet too close. So these are both things that I think, wow, baseball is practically unrecognizable. But on the other hand, you know, I guess pitchers get hurt. And also 20 and 21- and 21 year olds futures are still up in the air. And so maybe Christie Mathewson wasn't that, that wasn't that weird of a thing.

And then, you know, teams, I guess the Cubs were cheating. And so teams do cheat obviously today. And so maybe that wasn't that crazy, but here's the third thing, which I think is really the example that shows how different baseball was. Some of Christy Mathewson's teammates, a teammate gave an interview after he had been traded or maybe released, where he talked about how the fielders didn't really try very hard behind the pitchers they didn't like. And they basically sabotaged the teammates they didn't like.

And Christy might have been one of these, according to this teammate, that they didn't like and christy might have been one of these according to this teammate that they didn't like him they thought he was stuck up they thought he complained too much and so they according to this teammate they maybe gave him very poor defensive support and there was one game where a catcher allowed a whole bunch of passed balls arguably intentionally wasn't quite clear whether it was intentional or not. Christie got so upset by this that he just started lobbing baseballs in, lobbing pitches in, and quickly gave up like five runs because he was lobbing the ball in.

And this notion that the defense would sabotage its own fielders shows up actually a bunch of times in this book. So you have the Christie Matthews an example. And then you have in an article that Jerry Malloy wrote about the International League in 1887. So the International League in 1887, this was like a really crucial year for the development of the color line. Because the International League began with with eight black players, it was actually like was a league that seemed to be moving in the direction of having, there was some promise that it might be, you know, an integrated league.

And then there were problems throughout that year with various protests or white players complaining about things. And it was through that season that the color line really got established and codified in that league. And so he talks about a 19 year old pitcher named Robert Higgins, whose teammates also used this approach that there was a clique of teammates who has a way of basically protesting this pitcher. They allowed a bunch of errors and one game in a blatant attempt to make Robert Higgins look bad. The Stars lost 28 to 8.

Marr, Bittman, and Beard seemed to want the Toronto team to knock Higgins out of the box, and time and again, they fielded so badly that the home team were unable to secure many hits after the side should have been retired.

In several instances, these players carried out their plans in the most glaring manner. Fumbles and muffs of easy fly balls were frequent occurrences, but Higgins retained control of his temper. Of Toronto's 28 runs, 21 were unearned. He allowed 21 unearned runs because of his teammates. His catcher had three pass balls and three wild throws, quote, incurring his manager's wrath to the degree that he was fined and suspended.

And so that's a second example of this. And then there's a third one in a Gene Carney piece about the 1919 Chicago White Sox, who of course threw the World Series. And he wrote a piece about some court transcripts or maybe deposition transcripts. I can't remember. Court transcripts from 1924 in which some of the members of the scheme were explaining how it worked.

And the long story short, the White Sox, you know, threw the first two games and then they were having trouble getting paid from the gamblers. And so then there was this this like sort of tension about, well, are they still doing this? Are they going to get, are they still going to get paid? And the gamblers were complaining that so many other gamblers knew about it, that they couldn't get good odds. And so quote, they asked Burns to ask the players, this is before game three, they asked Burns to ask the players if they would try to win the next game so they could get better odds for their money. Burns said he would ask them.

Burns left again, then came back. The players said, no, they would not win for, quote, a busher. And that's because there was a rookie named Dickie Kerr who apparently they didn't have very high regard for. So they actually threw the first two games for the money. And then the gamblers were like, can you win the next one and they're like no we hate this pitcher now that kerr ended up winning the point of this article is that uh it seems like the gambling fix ended after game two perhaps but they apparently again were unwilling or like just didn't like their teammate and so they thought well why win for him?

So anyway, like I said, I think injured pitchers and what to do with them is still a connection to the modern game. I think cheating teams or maybe inexact or inconsistent ballpark conditions, either of those you can say there's a through line from there to the modern game. But I don't think there is any connection whatsoever between this apparent willingness in the first 50 years of organized baseball to simply look, do bad, to play poorly because you don't like your pitcher. That there was no sense that like the team win was worth it and also it's like they they didn't even seem to mind that they were known to be doing this or to be seen doing this like it's one thing to look bad by making errors which they were willing to do and then a whole nother level to be to look bad by intentionally making errors and apparently players felt fine about being seen doing that as

well. And that I think is just completely disconnected from what we think of as modern baseball. So when I say sometimes that baseball early on, I have a hard time thinking of it as real baseball, that would be an example. Yeah. There's just too much at stake now, I guess, to do that. Or there's too much incentive to play well at all times, maybe. Or, I don't know, it's so hyper competitive, or the salaries are so high, or there's so much scrutiny on everything that I guess you just wouldn't be inclined to dislike each other as they ever were, I guess, right? I don't know whether there are fewer divisions in clubhouses in some ways, but probably more divisions in clubhouses now in some ways because the game is more international and salary disparities are higher than ever and everything. So you'd think that you would still have teammates who don't like each other. But I guess, yeah, there are a lot of other factors that make players want to be

at their best at all times well this is uh one connection i guess to today's game and an earlier version of the game that was tweeted at me yesterday by aiden jackson evans who is a writer and has done a lot of saber bios and he sent me a quote from a 1949 column in the Sporting News by J.G. Taylor Spink, and Spink, of course, was the publisher of the Sporting News for almost 50 years and was very influential, and his name is still on an award that the BBWAA gives out, sort of the Hall of Fame equivalent for writers, although it probably will not continue to be the name of that award for a long time because people have recently brought attention to the fact that he was often a voice and the Sporting News was a voice that kind of confirmed what the owners

wanted out there at the time. And so he upheld the color barrier and some of the labor issues of that time. But he did write something here that is not terrible, I think, and that reminds me of things that I've written recently, which is why Aidan sent this to me. So 1949, he wrote, does strategy on the field make a good or bad manager? Strategy as represented by calling the hit and run, the bunt, the squeeze, giving the hit and take at the proper time, that part of the game which is in front of the hit and run, the bunt, the squeeze, giving the hit and take at the proper time, that part of the game which is in front of the public and is the favorite dish of the grandstand managers and second-guessers, plays only a minor part in the success of a pilot. No doubt this may come as a shock to a lot of fans throughout the country who think they are all managers

and who took exception to some of Bert Schotten's moves with the Dodgers during the 1949 World Series, Casey Stengel merely happened to guess right and Shotton wrong on those occasions. One pitch by a twirler who had confidence rather than fear would have changed the whole series. There are certain percentages in baseball, as there are in other games, percentages that cannot be disregarded over a period of years. But the margin of difference between managers in playing that percentage is so small that it carries little practical weight. So I've been sort of banging that drum lately

just because I feel like we hyper-focus on managers in the postseason, and so much of it comes down to just whether the players perform or not, and the manager's decisions really only increase or decrease your win expectancy by a percentage point or two here or there so jg taylor spink was uh saying the same thing in 1949 along with probably some terrible things that i would not agree with yeah it's you know i mean it's it it's a weird way to put it because, of course, the manager's decision to bring in the wrong pitcher is not a small decision.

That changes the game. If the pitcher gives up a run and another pitcher would not give up a run and the game is one by one run, then you can say it was not a small thing. It was the entire game. And who made that decision? It was the manager who made the decision. And who made that decision? It was the manager made the decision. It's more, I think, about humility of acknowledging that the manager can't be expected to be any more omniscient than we are. The manager knows a little bit more than we do, should know actually quite a bit more, but like quite a bit more is like, I don't know, going from 8% of the relevant information to like 30% of the relevant information, it's still mostly fog. And recognizing that like so much of what they do is incredibly consequential, but also half chance given the limitations of human knowledge is I think mostly what we're talking

about here. And I guess also maybe comparing what we're really doing is saying, like we want to say, well, that manager messed up by bringing in the wrong pitcher. And that might be true, but there is no alternate manager to compare him to where the alternate manager would have gotten it right. You can't, it's not like you can fire your manager who did the bad thing and then hire a manager who never does the bad thing. It is the state of all managers to be constantly doing wrong things. There isn't an ideal out there that you can get. And so if there's no perfect model that you can long for and lust for, then why bother? Just do make the best of what you've got.

Yeah, right. All right. I've got a few emails here, playoff related emails that a couple of them will touch on things that we just talked about. So Eric says, I've heard a lot about this Kershaw postseason narrative. I wonder what the average pitcher's postseason ERA, say minimum 25 postseason innings pitch, is compared with that same player's career regular season ERA. same player's career regular season ERA. Wouldn't it necessarily be higher because the competition is better in the postseason and the batters are more focused and you're often pitching on less rest, etc.? So the difference for Kershaw is 2.43 career versus 4.31 postseason, but how much higher is that postseason ERA for the average pitcher? Maybe, for instance, it's a run higher for all

pitchers, and so that seems like it would take away some of the bite from the supposed Kershaw postseason narrative. Now, sure, you still want a better set of postseason numbers from an all-time great, but at least it would provide some better context. So this is a valiant attempt to undo the Kershaw postseason narrative by saying that all pitchers are worse in the postseason. And Eric's right. It's helpful to have context, and there is some truth to what he is saying here. So I happen to have a spreadsheet from Dan Hirsch that I got a couple of weeks ago when I was writing something about Kershaw about all players' postseason ERAs and those same players' career regular season ERAs. So I had the data handy. I did the minimum 25 postseason innings pitched as Eric specified. And it turns out that the average pitcher has an ERA that is 0.28 runs higher in the postseason. So a pitcher with an ERA of three in the regular season would have a 3.28 in the postseason.

Yes. Which is probably, that probably undersells it though, because you're a lot more likely to pitch in the postseason during your your peak years then yeah so so if you actually just looked at the rate of change in the years that you pitch in the postseason weighted by how much you pitch in the postseason it would probably be more than that i i would probably guess that maybe it would be double that, but still, even if I'm right about that, then you're talking about maybe three-quarters of a run or somewhere between a half a run and three-quarters of a run as a bump, which seems like conveniently exactly what I would have guessed. Yeah, and I'm doing minimum 25 postseason innings here, so it's going to be pitchers who had some amount of postseason success probably, or at least were just good pitchers or were on good teams and kept getting chances. So I think, yeah, it's important to point this out, I think. But it doesn't really help that much with the Kershaw thing because then you're talking almost two full runs for a pitcher with the postseason sample size that he has,

two full runs and for a pitcher with the postseason sample size that he has, which is like, I think, the seventh most postseasonings pitched of all time. I think when I checked a couple of weeks ago, it's still pretty striking. And I guess this could be kind of confusing because people might say, well, doesn't scoring go down in the postseason? Why do the ERAs go up when scoring goes down? And both of those things are true. Scoring does go down, but it's a better collection of pitchers and a better collection of defenders and teams and I guess also colder temperatures and all these things that depress scoring on sort of a league-wide level. It's just a better group of pitchers. But if you take the same pitcher and compare how he does in the regular season and postseason, typically, he'll do worse because he'll be facing better competition. So both of those things can be true.

I really think, I mean, I think Craig Goldstein did this maybe five years ago, so it's probably out of date. But my sense really too is that clayton kershaw's postseason performance is not as bad as clayton kershaw's postseason runs allowed which would suggest there's a lot of there's a lot of well there's some clustering going on but there's also a lot of bullpen letting inherited runners come in and if you if you gave him a typical number of inherited runner scoring i think that the runs allowed drops to a uh to a potentially narrative shifting number and if you just look at what postseason hitters have done to him if you look past the runs allowed i mean there's a there's a bump he has allowed a 655 ops in the postseason compared to 581 in the regular season

which is a bump but of course he's facing better hitters like we just talked about and i don't think that that bump is significant enough to explain the runs i mean a 655 ops allowed would still be a very good pitcher with a very good ERA in normal times. Though, on the other hand, it is a very sizable 60-some-plus bump in slugging percentage. So he has been prone to that. All right. Alex, Patreon supporter, says, The TBS broadcast just mentioned that Kevin Cash doesn't like to chase wins by using his

best relievers in games he's losing, and I would love to hear you discuss the logic of that strategy. I've always reasoned that two-run deficits are just as high leverage as two-run leads, and that managers fail to treat them that way only due to loss aversion bias, but hearing that one of the game's smartest organizations thinks otherwise has me second-guessing that. I guess my question is, is there any reason a manager should be less aggressive with his best relievers facing a two-run deficit as opposed to a two-run lead? Or is Kevin Cash falling for the same fallacy that all managers seem to? And I guess you could probably ask this question about Dave Roberts too, you know, using Joe Kelly in the sixth in game two when the Dodgers

were down five to two. That was questioned also. Okay. You want to answer it? Sure. So I think Kevin Cash is right. I think maybe Alex was falling for a fallacy here, but it's a common one, I think. And Russell Carlton has written about this from an analytical perspective, but really it's sort of a thing that you can consider logically. an analytical perspective, but really it's sort of a thing that you can consider logically.

And I guess I will quote from a Russell article on this subject from 2013, because I think he lays it out pretty clearly here. He says, the problem is that we might have a skewed view of how often these efforts are rewarded rather than simply in vain, the effort of putting in a good reliever to try to keep the game close when you're losing, that is, a team that enters the ninth inning down a run wins the game less than 20% of the time. It's seductive to believe that this team is never really out of a ball game, but in fact, the rewards that a team is chasing in that situation are small enough that it's not worth using your best reliever to chase them. A manager wouldn't use a good reliever when down by 15 unless he needed to get some work

in, because in that case the game is essentially over, and tiring out an effective arm would be throwing good money after bad. And the ugly truth is that down by 1 is actually a lot like down by 15, in that it's not a good place to spend a scarce resource, even worse than the much-derided 3-run save. If it works, it might make for a great storyline, it just doesn't work often enough for it to be worth it. The full reason is one that you might not expect. The difference in win probability between being tied and being down a run in the last inning of play is actually greater than being down by one run and being down by 87.

That means that the marginal decrease in win expectancy for each individual run actually gets smaller with each run allowed. So while our closer is better than our third best reliever at not giving up extra runs, that difference doesn't matter as much. In the three run scenario, it's true that most relievers would convert the save and that closers are somewhat more efficient at doing it. A lesser reliever might be more likely to give up a run or two, but since the lead is three, it doesn't matter. What drives this finding is that lesser relievers are more likely to give up three or more runs than closers, and those particular runs are valuable in that they tie the game or give up the lead. We're not really valuing the closer's ability to put up a goose

egg, which even bad relievers do the majority of the time. We're valuing the fact that he's not as likely to implode, and as infrequent as that event is. It's a killer when it does happen. So that's what Kevin Cash is saying and doing in this series, basically, and in all the series this postseason. It's not the same to be up by two runs and down by two runs. No, it's not. And I'm just looking at a win expectancy calculator. And if you're up by three runs and you give up three runs, then your win expectancy has changed by 40%.

And so it's really important to not allow those three runs when you're up by three. If you're down by three runs and you give up three runs, your win expectancy only changes 9%. It's much less. And I mentioned this in a piece that I wrote a couple of days ago about the kind of six win expectancy tables that exist in baseball. And the most common one I speculated is simply that a team somewhere in the earlier mid innings takes a lead of a few runs. And then that lead holds because most leads in baseball holds scoring is, you know, is relatively rare

enough. And that if you have a three run lead, you're probably going to win. You're probably going to, I mean, obviously we know that, but you're going to, for the most part, protect your lead. And I wrote inertia is the default expectation in baseball. The trailing team doesn't use its release ace because it knows it probably won't come back. Allowing more runs probably won't change the outcome yeah i mentioned this to alex but when i was covering the angels i went through a period where i also believed as he did like i fell for the same fallacy that alex was and i would think it's a two-run game either way so why is mike social using his mop-up guy when he's down but using his ace when he's up and um i spent i don't know i don't know how long i

spent with that fallacy but it wasn't that long because you do start to get a sense that the game is where you're down too they're usually pretty much over yeah all right another patreon supporter adam terciak morgan says in memoriam of the Astros, if you were down 0-3 in a series, what would be the most satisfying conclusion to that series that did not include winning it? Is the most satisfying outcome different for the fans of the team than for the players? I opened this like six times, and I could not think of anything to write to him. I had a hard time with this. right to him. I had a hard time with this. I think the simple answer is that if you're a fan, from a fan's perspective, you just want more games and more time spent hoping. So you just want it to go seven. And the details of how it gets there are secondary to the fact that you

would like it to go seven so that you have more baseball. Like we do watch this primarily because it passes time and it's entertaining. And we get to fill in the time between games with hope and anticipation and so more games that matter they're just good they improve your quality of life and then for players the simplest answer is you want to have a bunch of great stats so that you go into the season offseason thinking well it wasn't my fault like i had good stats uh you just want to get hits when you're a player that's the i think the primary motivation for athletes is they want to get hits and the team aspect of it i think the team aspect is a little bit of a social construct i think they really like to get hits on their own i don't and so i think there's some it's it's less

fun being on a losing team. And there's definitely a lost opportunity to achieve your goal, your own personal goal of winning a World Series and the team goal of winning a World Series. But for the most part, you're going to go into the offseason with roughly the same sense of disappointment, whether you lose in four or seven. And certainly after about a day, you will have quit thinking about the seven or four aspect of it. I don't think that there's anybody who's extra mad 12 years later that they got swept. I just don't think that matters that much, whereas they do hold on to the hits that they got.

So I think that if Don Larson hadn't ruined it by throwing a perfect game, I think the answer would have been to throw the only perfect game in postseason history. I think if you lost a series, but you or your team threw the only perfect game in postseason history, you might still consider that a fair trade. But since Don Larson already did it, it's not all that special. Yeah, well, it's true that you get more enjoyment in the short term. If you just get more games, you get to postpone your team's offseason longer. And for Astros fans and for the Astros themselves, it was really fun that they came back from, you know, being counted out of that series to force a game seven.

It was, you know, you've got the walk-offs and the exciting clutch hits and all of that, great postseason memories. But I think there is a difference after the fact in that if you came close and lost, you really rue that loss in a different way than you do a sweep, I think. Maybe a sweep is just embarrassing, like you lost face in a way if you do a sweep, I think. Maybe a sweep is just embarrassing, like you lost face

in a way if you were swept. But if you get to the top of the ninth inning of game seven like the Astros did and you have the tying run at the plate, then you go into the offseason thinking, we were so close. We were so close to winning that pennant. And if you lose in a close game and you lose in some agonizing fashion, then I think you do think about it and regret it a lot more over the next months and years than you do if you just, you know, got swept or lost in five or something and never really felt like you were in the series, we would have won the pennant. We could have won a World Series. So I think, I don't know, like if you told me that I could lose in, you know, sort of demoralizing fashion in a sweep, or I could lose in really agonizing fashion in a game seven, I would have enjoyed the series more as it happened if it goes to seven. But I think in the aftermath of the series, it would cause me more anguish if my team came close. Yeah, yeah. I'm somewhat convinced, but I'm not totally convinced. I don't know if that's actually how we would respond to it. That does seem plausible.

That seems like a plausible way that our brains would would process the experience but i am not sure especially if you're not the one who did the boner if you could if you could push the blame to somebody else who failed to to get it done maybe that would actually be freeing or i yeah i don't know it's a good question i mean we obviously had you know the experience with the stompers of coming extremely close of literally of actually seeing the what time run score in in that game and then having it be wiped away so that was very painful yeah of course would it have been better to have lost that game nine nothing i don't know not for the book but uh but maybe for our emotions i don't know yeah would it be worse to have regrets to not feel like you just simply couldn't do it because if you get swept the message you take away is we couldn't do it.

I was not capable of achieving a great thing. Whereas if you narrowly lose, then you say I was capable of it and I didn't get it done. I think that I was capable and failed is a better self-image than I was not capable. I couldn't do it. I think that it's better that way, but I'm not sure. I mean, there's all sorts of things that I'm incapable of that I never even try and I'm perfectly fine. Like I am incapable of dunking a basketball, for instance, and I never try and it's fine. Whereas if I could almost, but not like, and I spent every day trying to get there and continually getting stuffed by the barest margin, maybe that would be frustrating. These players though, don't have the option of saying, well, I'm incapable of it. So I'll never

try. They have to try there. They tried anyway. They tried. And if they got swept, they tried and failed all the same. It's kind of like the conversation about like, well, would you rather be a fan of a team that never makes the playoffs like, you know, the Mariners or a team that makes it all the time but loses again and again? Like, I don't know, the A's or the Twins or something. Yeah. In that case, I think it's still better to be the team that makes the postseason because most of the year is spent with the regular season team. And if the regular season team is good, then you're getting a lot more enjoyment over those several months in a normal year and you get to anticipate the postseason. And yeah, it's crushing when you lose, but I think it's still better to have crushing postseason losses than never to be

good and always to be watching a bad baseball team that's out of it. But this is a less extreme version. In this scenario, you're still getting most of the enjoyment either way. We're just talking about a difference of three games and then the difference between how you feel about that series afterward. So I was thinking about Sisyphus and would you rather, if you were Sisyphus, if you were doomed to be Sisyphus, would you rather have a boulder that you would get almost to the top or that was so heavy you couldn't even get it, you know, 5% of the way? And I think in that sense, you might rather have, it might just be more tormenting to continually get close to raise your hopes and to feel like you were getting close, but

to never actually get there. But of course, this is not, we're not talking about Sisyphus. We're talking about players who are going to play next year as well. And so in the sense that they could take a close loss and say, we were so close next year, we can do it. I feel like that would be really encouraging. Whereas if you get swept, you don't necessarily feel close. And so then you have the

burden of going to next year, feeling like you have to make up more ground. And so given that most of these players are going to come back, and in fact, most of them are going to be on the same team. And in fact, most of the teams are going to still be competitive. I think that it is better to be close. Okay. Yeah, that's a good question. And there's one here. You just answered this and you said, it's such an interesting question. And I think it's an interesting question too.

And I looked something up. So I'm going to just answer this one. This is from Spencer who says, growing up watching games with my dad, one of his pet peeves was the descriptor of when the count was even. Typically announcers will call the count even when it is one, one or two, uh, answer as to which is right would help me square things in my mind when I watch games and can still hear my dad complaining about what makes a count even. And it is a tough one. I just looked up the

OPS after every count. I looked for 2019 just because 2020 was weird. And after 00, so, you know, altogether, league average OPS was 758. And if you just sort the OPSs that hitters have after passing through each count, each of the 12 ball strike counts, you have six that are higher than that 758 and five that are lower than that 758 and it bounces around a lot so that most of the counts are not all that close to the average one which makes it tough to to answer so again the the average was 758 a full count was 815 ops but yeah But that's misleading because the OBP is so high. That's true. Yes, that is true. But that would be the closest number. And then it goes like after two one counts, you have an 828 OPS. After one O, it's 858. Those are really the only ones that are close but above the average. And then below the average, you have 1-1 is 7-0-3, and then it goes down to 0-1, 6-31. So it's tough. Like even count, if you want to say a count is even just because the numbers match, you could

do that, but the results do not really match. So after a 1-1 count, it's 7-0-3. Okay, that's pretty close to the average. But after 2-2, it's 6-11. Well, suddenly that's not so close. That sort of favors the pitcher. So is that really an even count? You know, not really for the reason I suppose that Spencer's dad said. I mean, there's truth to that.

So I don't know. How do you treat it? Yeah. Well, I mean, the sort of weirdness here is that the two most even counts, other than 0-0, which is obviously even. I mean, that's perfectly even. The two most even counts are 1-1 and 2-1, which you can just see the problem here. And neither one is even, but they are the closest to even. And something really happens after 2-1 where 2-2 is extremely lopsided.

You can't say 2-2 is even anymore. It's not even close. But then 3-2, which would be the alternative, his dad would say 3-2 is even. That's also extremely lopsided. Not by OPS plus, but just the on-base percentage is darn near 500 on that count. And so you can't say that one is either. And so the concept of evenness is just, it's way too simplistic for what's actually happening in a count it just doesn't fit it's like saying what's it i mean really it it why would we say the count is even at all if none of these counts actually represent a balance between offense and defense right i mean

i guess they like because it's just numbers yeah i guess you could say we do it because it's just numbers and two and two are the same and so then it's like a question of like which which meaningless concept are you going to choose to honor with this word but otherwise it's it's really challenging yeah i came down on the side of of his dad to me-3-2 is much closer to balanced than 1-1 and 2-2. And so because of that, I'm going to say, and we're throwing 0-0 out because nobody says 0-0 is even. That's just the first pitch. So I'm picking, if you establish that it has to happen sometime in the middle of a count that evenness is reattained. I'm saying that 2, 1, 3, 2 is better. Yeah, I think I agree. I don't think we're going to change this probably because it's just so ingrained and because the numbers aren't the same, so it doesn't look even on the

surface. But I agree that based on results and based on what we're essentially trying to say when we say the count is even. I mean, the implication there is that no one really has the upper hand. It's balanced. And so if you want to get close to that, I agree. Spencer's dad is right. So take note, broadcasters. All right, we can end there. Okay, you can check out an article I wrote at The Ringer this week. Last time, Meg and I talked about the role of shifting against right-handed hitters and how it's played a pivotal part this postseason the dodgers do it a lot more than any other team the rays do it too and it's kind of confounding because the stats seem to suggest

that shifting against right-handed hitters on the whole is not helpful for defensive teams so it's something of a mystery why the dodgers do it this much. So I summed up that research and dug up a bunch of clips to show how and when it does and doesn't work. Something to keep an eye on in the rest of this series. There was a Manuel Margot bouncer to the right side with a shift on in game two that helped create a Rays rally, so it's something that could affect the outcome of the series. As a reminder, Sam and Meg and I will be doing our second Patreon livestream during Game 4 of the World Series on Saturday. Hope you'll join us. You can still get access by signing up at the $10 level or above

at patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners have already signed up to pledge some small monthly amount and help keep the podcast going while getting themselves access to some perks james david specht sean million justin leck and evan haldane 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 spotify and itunes and other podcast platforms please keep your questions and comments for me and Sam and Meg 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.

Meg and I will be back with one more episode before later. Call it even. Call it even later. Can I get it from you? Call it even later. Call it even. Call it even later. Can I get it from you? Can I get it from you? Can I get it from you?