Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1747: Embrace the Race

Episode Date: September 16, 2021

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Jake Arrieta’s sub-replacement pitching and the sorry state of the Padres’ starting staff, Bryce Harper, Juan Soto, and the NL MVP race, Shohei Ohtani, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., and the competing, persuasive narratives of the AL MVP race, and the ascendance of micro sports betting. Then (31:49) they talk […]

Hello and welcome to episode 1747 of Effectively Wild, Here's the prize, you pay for one mistake. So get off the streets, it's Shaggy Jack. Hello and welcome to episode 1747 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs, and I am joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? Not too shabby. How are you? I'm doing pretty well. Yeah. We're both doing better than a player I wanted to mention briefly in our banter here.

You know how the concept of replacement level and our stats that try to measure the win value of a player are kind of predicated on the idea that a team can just reach down to AAA at any time and pluck up a player who could perform at replacement level? That's the basic assumption, right? That's what it's all based on. The continued employment by the Padres of Jake Arrieta seems to belie that idea. He looks cooked, and he's looked cooked for a while. And perhaps he could change something so that he would not look so cooked, but that doesn't seem to be happening here. And you would think that a team in the thick of a playoff race would be able to find someone, anyone to take the ball who is not Jake Arrieta. It's like he's breaking war in a way. It's like my assumption is that you're supposed to be able to find someone better than Jake Arrieta. And look, we're talking about someone who is one of the best pitchers in baseball just several years ago.

So life comes at you fast, and it has come very fast at Jake Arrieta. So according to Fangraph's war, he is now negative 0.8, which is just a pittance compared to baseball reference war, which has him at negative 2.4. Holy Moses. Yeah. So that has him at negative 2.4. Holy Moses. Yeah. So that's based on runs allowed. Right. He has had a lot of runs allowed.

And his most recent outing this week was against the Giants. And the Giants won, as they always do. And in this case, they won because Jake Arrieta lasted three and two thirds. That was part of the reason, at least. And he has not gone more than five innings in a game since May 14th. And his last several outings, three and two thirds, five innings, three and a third, four, four, four, one and two thirds, one and two thirds. He's not giving you length. He's not giving you effectiveness during the inning or three that he pitches. I know the Padres are in a tough spot, but they have a matchup with the Cardinals coming up. That's pretty important for the Padres right now. And if Jake Arrieta makes that start, do we have to question war? Does war work if Jake Arrieta keeps getting starts? I mean, I know that it's much more complicated than this,

but I think we have to wonder if Mackenzie Gore has been kidnapped. Yeah. I mean, that's part of this that we talked to Eric about that. I understand that there's a lot going on there, but it is shocking. We talked in the beginning of the season about the vaunted depth of the Padres. And I think that when we did our minor league free agent draft, I made the point that you agreed with it. Like there's, there is depth, but there was also a good deal of injury risk. And that injury risk has manifested itself into injuries with that, with that rotation.

And so they have had to rely on a number of guys who I think probably assumed far greater roles than they were anticipating on opening day. But yeah, maybe nothing underscores that point quite so strongly as Jake Arrieta's continued presence on this roster, which is given the stakes and the sort of nature of the NL wild card, like kind of unfathomable in a lot of ways. I struggle to, I don't think it breaks war i do think that it challenges some of the premises that war is based on at least how front offices engage with engage with the concept of guys they're gonna run out there to

eat some innings is jay carrieta's employment on the padres perhaps an indication that we need a another waiver death yeah right just to spare people from this the spectacle of pitching at this point in his career yeah you're pretty far down the depth chart if you're still running him out there it would be one thing if he were eating innings but he's not i mean he were eating innings, but he's not. He's just really super not. Yeah, he's nibbling innings, I guess, but that's about all you can say. No one has a war quite as low as Jake Arrieta this year. No one else is below two, according to baseball reference, among pitchers, that is. Hunter Dozier and Jared Kelnick are down there, too.

It's not great. That is Hunter Dozier and Jared Kelnick are down there too. So it's not great. It's a sign of the Padres desperation at this point. And obviously they are shorthanded. And yeah, it's rough. Like you'd have to think, I mean, you'd prefer a bullpen game at this point. Of course, you can't do a bullpen game every day necessarily.

So that's where they are. But yeah, not being able to complete a trade. That is something that's probably contributing to this. I mean, i assume that's why they picked him up in the first place and why they've stuck with him this long right i mean you sit there and you you think wouldn't you rather just like have chrysmont start and then see how deep he can go and supplement from there but then you get deeper into that bullpen and you're like i can't we can't keep running austin adams out there he's starting a national controversy so yeah gosh they could you know they could sure use like mike clevenger right now or or adrian

morihan it's like there are guys that are in the the padres orbit who would be quite helpful here, but the injury bug has just been so bad for them. Yeah. Yeah. It's like so many Tommy Johns. It's just like, so it's a lot of Tommy Johns, Ben, you know,

you look at their roster resource page and it's like Tommy John, Tommy John. Yeah. And you have Paddock with elbow inflammation. And then, and then you go Tommy John, Tommy John, and not all the guys who need Tommy John or have gotten Tommy John or starters, but some of them are. And, uh, you know, it's Tommy John, Tommy John, Tommy John. And not all the guys who need Tommy John or have gotten Tommy John are starters,

but some of them are. And it's Tommy John, Tommy John. Yeah, so good luck against the Giants, the Cardinals, the Giants again, the Braves, the Dodgers, and the Giants again. Just a little light end to the Padres' schedule. Clearly, they're in great shape for this stretch run. It's rough out there for the Padres' schedule. Clearly, they're in great shape for this stretch run. It's rough out there for the Padres right now. Snell is hurt too. One Padre who was pitching well. They'll take anyone. They just signed Ross Detweiler, who was just released by the Marlins.

They signed Vince Velasquez, who was released by the Phillies. It's like the saddest swap meet. Other teams put pitchers out on the curb. The Padres say, what a find, and they bring them in. At this point, they would gladly sign up for replacement level pitching. Anyway, don't want to pick on the Padres too much. They're spinning plenty of plates. It's just that most of them are dropping and breaking. We should probably talk a little bit about better players. Just don't depress everyone and remind everyone of their mortality. We will be devoting most of this episode to talking about teams like the Padres who are in playoff races right now.

Jay Jaffe will be joining us to talk about team entropy and the prospects of tiebreakers and multiple teams battling to a draw and how that would work and some of the interesting tiebreaker scenarios that we might see in division races and the wildcard races especially. We'll also touch on Ryan Braun's retirement with Jay and on some of the players who have helped their Hall of Fame cases this season. And one of those players that Jay will briefly mention is a player that you wanted to bring up briefly here. I think we need to take a moment to re-appreciate Bryce Harper. Yeah.

I mean, we've talked about Harper at various points throughout the year, and we've talked about how little other people have talked about him, which is just like, you know, that's podcast gold right there. That's always a defensible position that doesn't collapse under scrutiny at all. But I think now we have to talk about harper in a different context which is that i think bryce harper might be the nlmvp ben yeah make the case i think now i i want to immediately follow that up immediately follow that up by saying that he is separated in this the war leaderboard that this is the fangrafts

war leaderboard you might be uns Fangraphs war leaderboard. You might be unsurprised to learn. But like, you know, fractions of a win from Trey Turner and Fernando Tatis Jr. So I do not think that this is a runaway case. I think that these guys are literally effectively the same guy. I mean, they're very different guys because they're three people. And also, if you're a pitcher should win MVP sometimes person, then you could also opt

for corbin burns or zach wheeler you could do that head of bryce harper in fancraft's war yes you could you could also do that but if we focus for a moment on the position players and just the position players because i tend to think that you know you have to really be lacking a good candidate for the writers to be swayed by pitchers for MVP. I don't think it happens very often. I mean, it doesn't happen very often. That's objectively true, but I think the instinct toward it is to not. But he's leading the pack

from a position player war perspective. Again, not by very much. He's got a 170 WRC plus he has he has 32 home runs 32 home runs ben i mean yeah he is uh he is not the the nl leader in home runs he is surpassed for instance by uh fernando tatis jr who is not very far behind him from a war perspective. But I think that Bryce is making a compelling case here. He's hitting 307, 421, 612. His Woba and his X-Woba are exactly the same. I love it when a Woba and an X-Woba are exactly the same.

It's nice when a guy's like, this is the guy. Yes, that is nice. When the expected stats are like no like that that's him bryce is being himself like we we support him and his uh personality as it exists right now or at least his play on the field so and as i recall the first time he won the mbp award that was the first season of stat cast and i think that season he exceeded his expected woba by quite a bit quite a a bit. He produced those hits and everything, but all of his fly balls turned out to be very valuable.

And after the fact, it was pointed out that maybe he exceeded expectations a little bit. But yeah, I mean, his raw stats aren't quite what they were that year, but he is maybe earning them more than he did that year. Yes, your memory is correct. He had a 461 woba in his mvp season and a 412 x woba in that in that mvp season um 197 wrc plus that year what a what a weird year 2015 was for nationals yeah what a strange what a strange campaign they launched uh and completed

that season but i i do not think that the case is settled by any means. And I think that one of the many things about the insistence that some folks have on continuing to litigate the AL MVP race, which I think of all the major races is like the most settled, is that they have this great race. They have this fantastic competition that they could be litigating if they so choose, where you have three guys who are legitimately quite close to one another in terms of their war totals.

They're all having fantastic seasons. They all have things to recommend them. You know, we could sit and talk about whether guys who get traded should really be MVPs. Like, we got all kinds of fun stuff that we could be talking about there. So I think that I would encourage the tweeters of the world to like get hyped about the NL MVP and start preparing your arguments because you have big personalities. You have compelling arguments to be made and none of them require us to like bend over backwards to say that Shoya Otani isn't the AL MVP. So let's just choose sanity amongst ourselves.

Let's do it. I've been sort of dreading the AL MVP conversation, so I'm happy to have the NL MVP one. It's funny. On the Ringer MLB show at some point a while back, I was trying to maintain that the AL MVP race wasn't over. It wasn't done. And Michael Bauman kind of accused me of trying to like reverse jinx Vlad or something by saying that. But it was far enough away from the end of the season and you never know. And could Otani keep it up and Vlad is great and all of that.

And so there was some amount of uncertainty in my mind. And obviously this has flared up again because the gap has closed. There's still a substantial gap, whatever win value metric you use, but it has narrowed because Otani has slumped and Vlad has very much not slumped. And also like you have an interesting narrative value battle between them. Yes. Because, of course, Otani has the greatest two-way player in a century thing going for him. But then Vlad has propelling the Blue Jays to the playoffs, potentially.

And also possible triple crown. He has, as we speak, I think six RBI behind Salvador Perez. And that is the only triple crown component he doesn't currently own. He also holds the sabermetric triple crown, if you want to say the slash line triple crown. So I don't know which of those wins out in the end. Like if the gap continues to close, like if Otani doesn't turn it on here and get his bat back soon, and Vlad keeps raking for the next few weeks, and you end up with a difference, a gap of, say, sub one war or something between those two guys, that's within the margin of error, really, as we can measure players, basically. And so at that point, much as this has been the most exciting season and enjoyable season for me really ever to watch Otani, I entertain arguments for fun. I have to be objective about

this. And I'm not someone who would be inclined to give extra value to someone because his teammates are good but if it's more of a tiebreaker sort of situation then i get it you know there's something to that i suppose in those edge cases it's just really like do you give it to the one-of-a-kind player who is doing something we haven't seen in forever or do you give it to the guy who is doing something that we rarely see that also has a lot of narrative weight behind it and has the potential playoff team and obviously could himself have made the difference between playoffs and non-playoffs, which you can't say for Otani. So it's a debate. It's a discussion. It's more of a valid discussion than it was a while back and i don't know whether

it will be more or less valid by the end of the season but i get why it's coming up yeah i get why it's coming up i get it and i think that if we use it as a as an opportunity to appreciate both of the seasons that they're having well that's that's fine I'm, I'm not opposed to us using it as an opportunity to like marvel at what both of these guys have done. I think that we, uh, you know, we want to be mindful of, of using stats as a way to open conversations rather than close them. Right. Like it's so, it's just mostly, it's very boring to be like, well, look at war and then move on. Like, that's not a, you know, that that's not interesting to really anyone. And it doesn't, I don't think that it makes anyone who doesn't look to war as sort of a starting framework to understand the sport and who is generating the

most value for his team versus not. Like, it's not going to sway anyone to look at that and be like, well, you know, you tried to beat me about the head with that scaffolding so i shall surely use it going forward right like that's not going to persuade anyone and it's probably going to make them like think about the time that a stat nerd was rude to them and that's gonna like not be very meaningful to sort of advance an understanding of the game that we think is the best one all of that said i do think that the case is more compelling for otani so maybe what we should be doing is welcoming the debate because we think our arguments are strong. Maybe that's the approach that we should be taking. But I think that there's a lot of fun to be had in dissecting the other awards races because they are quite a bit closer, at least from a war perspective. at least from a war perspective. So I wanted to say that I think that Bryce is putting on quite a show.

And I am not inclined to really think about the playoff part of it for guys either, because I don't think that that's what the award is meant to designate. And I think that it leads to some really strange logical inconsistencies in voting, right? Where it's like the, you know, I think Dave wrote about this a couple of years ago where people were saying, well, Mike Trout shouldn't be the MVP because he's not on a playoff team. But then all of those folks had him like second on the ballot.

And I was like, well, that doesn't make any sense. If the team part matters, then he should just not be on there at all, right? Like you're twisting yourself into a weird knot so i don't i am not a flexible person so i try not to twist myself into weird knots because i'm not persuaded that i could get out of them but what was i trying to even say ben i don't know i think bryce harper's pretty i'm in a i've i've led myself down a strange argumentative cul-de-sac and gosh i'm trapped there but i think that uh I think that Bryce Harper is pretty good at baseball.

Oh, this is what I was going to say. What I was going to say was that if one is inclined to take the postseason part and take consideration, I would just note that like Harper's performance has really sure helped that Phillies team stay remarkably playoff relevant, even though every time i look at philly's twitter i assume that like a meteor has struck their ballpark and everyone has perished because everyone seems very upset all the time but like harper was was quite good in the first half and he has been uh at least offensively even better in the second half he's a 209 second half wrc plus 209 that's the number above 200 famously it's a stat that's indexed to 100 so 200 seems very good yeah i guess when it comes down to

these narrative arguments i mean maybe if i'm sort of lagging off the playoff position argument maybe it's also not really fair to bring in the degree of difficulty of what Otani is doing. Like if we're sticking strictly to value, like how many wins above replacement did this player produce? Is that sort of how we're framing it? And not everyone frames it that way. And isn't that wonderful that we can all argue about what valuable means to us?

But I think if you are looking at it that way, then you could say, yeah, I mean, what Otani is doing is impossible for anyone else. But does that fact produce more wins for the Angels? Not necessarily. I mean, you could argue that maybe there is some slight hidden value that War can't capture with Otani because you're combining basically two players in a single roster spot or whatever. But that's not an enormous thing. So it makes it much more impressive that he has done it. It's a singular season, but is it more valuable? I don't know. Not necessarily. So maybe if we're ruling the playoff argument inadmissible, then maybe that should be inadmissible also. I don't know. It's

certainly part of the story of his season and it's what makes it so fun, but I don't know. It's certainly part of the story of his season, and it's what makes it so fun. But I don't know how much that should be weighted, if at all. It's kind of an interesting conversation. And maybe depending on where they end up, you won't have to parse the slight differences that way. But the way things are trending, we may be heading for that kind of ending. We might be. i think that it's just another opportunity for us to advocate for it being called the most outstanding player award yeah i agree and i made this point on twitter and there were people who were like but then the acronym would be mop and i was like well you tell i didn't say this because you know i had to work and so i couldn't

spend time replying to everyone on twitter because I had to do my job. But I would put it to all of you, which is sillier, MOP as an acronym or us having this dumb old debate? I would submit that one is obviously worse than the other. Yeah, and I will also mention, I don't think he's going to win, but one of the leading rivals to Bryce Harper in that NL MVP race is the player who is playing his old position for the Nationals, Juan Soto. Yeah. Bryce Harper, 209, WRC+, as you said in the second half. Juan Soto, 205.

I mean, neck and neck and OPP wise, he has actually gone a measly two for five as we speak on Wednesday afternoon. The Nationals have already played. So that brings down Juan Soto's on-base percentage. But entering Wednesday, he had a 527 OPP in the second half, which is kind of incredible. And, you know, with a high average and power and walking in more than a quarter of his plate appearances, I mean, his full season walk rate is like 21%. That is the highest since Barry Bonds. He is basically Barry Bonds-ing at this point.

And he is the only hitter with 150 plate appearances or more this season who has walked more often than he struck out. And it's not even close in his case. He's walked much more often than he struck out. Adjusted, especially for the league OBP. He's having one of the best on-base seasons in recent memory. And that's despite a slow start and maybe some lousy luck early in the season. So lately he has been incredible.

And I would encourage everyone to watch Juan Soto. I know the Nationals are not exactly a must-see team these days. He's kind of the main attraction and the only attraction sometimes. But having just watched every pitch that he took this year for a recent article on the Soto shuffle, he is someone who, you know, we talk about how there aren't a lot of plate discipline highlight reels and maybe walks despite being valuable are not all that exciting but watching Juan Soto walk and take pitches actually is really exciting because it's a very active process and he is just kind of having a conversation with the pitcher and he is gesticulating and he is gyrating and he is contorting himself and it's so much fun to watch his expression and his body movements and just how incredible a command of the strike zone he has and still how young he is you know that he is younger than all four of the prospects that the nationals acquired in the max scherzer trey turner trade i did know that and it's great we should say that fact every day it's the best and he's younger than

adley rutschman consensus top prospect in baseball i mean we can't do the younger than fun facts forever we did those with bryce harper for a long time we don't do those anymore but one soto not turning 23 until next month and it's just this precocious preternatural control of the strike zone which maybe we overvalue relative to like his power because he also just creams the ball constantly and i feel like i don't mention that as much just because he's so good at taking pitches that i almost forget how good he is at hitting them which is partly i suppose because he's swinging at good pitches to hit. If I recall, when we were talking about the home run derby bracket, I tried to make this exact point. Let us not disrespect Juan Soto's power.

Let us not, because it is quite impressive. Well, whoever winds up winning these MVP awards, Shohei Otani is the only baseball player on Time's 100 list. So he's got that going for him. He is evidently one of the hundred most influential people of 2021 which you know i hope that's the case he is uh listed in the icons section it's like prince harry and megan markle and and shohei otani so uh yeah he didn't do any sit down interviews with Oprah where he shared gossip about

his family or anything, but I love the idea. I'm sure that there have not been a whole lot of baseball players lately on this list, this annual list of influential people. And I don't actually know how influential he is. Is he influential in the sense that he is making more people watch baseball or play baseball or that he will make people more willing to pursue two-way careers or entertain two-way careers? I don't know. I hope so. I don't know. Maybe it'll take some time to figure out how influential he is or was, but that's an honor, I suppose, that no other baseball player can claim this year. Yeah, but now I really want him to start referring to the Angels and Artie Moreno as the firm, because then he'd have even more in common with Harry and Megan.

Yes. Okay. Last thing I wanted to mention here, not to dismay you, but you live in Arizona. I do. And so you are a football watcher at times. And if you had pulled up the DraftKings app this past weekend while you were watching football, which I'm sure you just do on the regular, if you had done that, you would have noticed

that you could suddenly do micro-betting on football games, in-game wagering on just all sorts of events happening in that game. That is legal now in Arizona and several other states and

now is available via various apps. And apparently there is an article on Sportico about this this week, which I will link to if you're interested. But this is supposedly the next big thing, micro sports betting. And obviously, baseball is quite tailored to that. It hasn't caught on in some other sports as much like in Europe and the betting market there because soccer is so big and soccer is not really well tailored to micro betting because it's all just sort of fluid and the action is constantly going on. Whereas in football and baseball, you have these stops in the action and you have discrete plays. And it is almost exhausting for me to contemplate the number of things that one could potentially bet on in baseball if you're

doing in-game wagering. I mean, every single pitch and every event is fodder for betting. pitch and every event is fodder for betting. And I guess there are some ways in which this could be beneficial for baseball. There are some ways in which this could be bad for baseball and for people who get hooked on this sort of thing and have difficulty enjoying it in a responsible way. But it just seems like it would drain me, like the number of potential options, things to bet on in baseball. Like it would just be nonstop. I mean, this is why Rob Manfred alluded to the idea that maybe the slow pace and the long length of games could actually be beneficial to baseball, if not necessarily to baseball fans, but just in terms of accruing revenue, just because there are so many opportunities to bet. But it seems like you could just be glued to your screen for hours on end, and that would probably not be great for you. But if you were, there's precedent in other sports of scandals, betting scandals and athletes throwing games and everything.

And you don't even have to throw games. That's the scary thing with this in-game wagering and micro betting. It's like, you could throw a pitch, whatever that means. And no one would ever know, right? I mean, it's possible to detect these things on a macro level. And that has happened in tennis and other sports. But the sheer number of potential events that one could wager on in baseball, it seems like would make it almost impossible to detect reliably. So that's a little scary. And maybe there wouldn't be big enough sums riding on individual events in individual games to make that worthwhile for a major leaguer who's making good money.

And at lower levels, who knows? I don't know how much action there would be for minor league games, but there is enough action on low-profile tennis matches for low-profile tennis players to do things. So keeping minor league pay as low as it is, as we discussed on our last episode, seems like potentially a recipe for trouble. Yeah, it's funny. And I know this is really just the algorithm mooshing up against the of of it being newly legal in Arizona. But Ben, I can't say I'm not interested in ads on Twitter around sports betting fast enough. Like I just and I, I, I know, some of you are thinking, well, may I just block them? And and I will. The time will come where I will just have to block them because the volume is such that it makes me miserable. But I am

kind of curious how long it takes for the algo to adapt and how much it matters. But I say I'm not interested. I'm not interested in that one either. I am not interested in that one either. The one that Ben Affleck is hoping to advertise for reasons that make no sense. You're dating Jennifer Lopez. You no longer

need to have divorced dad energy. What are we doing? Sorry, that was loud. Anyway, don't want to know about that one either. I'm mostly confused by his commercials for win bets. I don't know what I'm supposed to think of him. I don't know if I'm supposed to want to be him. He doesn't seem happy in the commercial. he doesn't seem to be having a good friendship with the guy in the car he seems to be haranguing the driver anyway it's just constant there are so many and we don't need to relitigate our entire sports betting conversation and i know that i am at risk of being hoisted on my own petard if and when this becomes like a thing that we just from a business model perspective as an industry can't escape in some form but the sheer volume both in terms of how shouty the commercials tend to be and also

their frequency I just I find that part overwhelming and so yes i agree with you the the idea of of sitting there while you are trying to enjoy with all of the it just seems like a lot yeah it seems like a lot especially as someone who finds it you know like a pretty boring personally and if you don't that's's fine. We can like different stuff, but it's not my stuff and it's everywhere. It's everywhere. That's my point, basically. Brace yourself because we're about to be buried

in this even more than we are. Yep. So on that note, we will take a quick break and we'll be back with Jay Jaffe of Fangraphs to talk about the most exciting playoff races and tiebreaker scenarios and Ryan Braun and the Hall of Fame. I read the news, it wasn't news, it wasn't really much at all. Entropy has got me thinking

I can't bear to think at all All right, we are joined now by our friend Jay Jaffe from Fangraphs who has often joined us to talk about the Hall of Fame, and perhaps we'll touch on that briefly before the end of the segment, but we're really here today to talk about team entropy and some fun and far-fetched tiebreaker scenarios. Jay, hello, how are you? Hey, Ben, I'm good. Good to be here. So we may have discussed the concept of team entropy on the podcast before, and you've certainly written enough explanations of it over the years,

but for anyone who's not familiar, hasn't read your pieces yet, which we will link to on the show page, can you lay out the concept of team entropy and the origin story of team entropy as well? Sure. Yes. So this started a decade ago, actually, which means I've been doing this for 10 years, about half my career. During the 2011 wildcard races, when I guess we were colleagues at Baseball Perspectives at the time. I think we were. I don't know. I can't remember. Yeah, I think so. But during those crazy division races that resulted in the Tampa Bay Rays and the St. Louis Cardinals snatching away spots from the collapsing Red Sox

and Braves on the season's final day, I coined the phrase team entropy, which kind of took a page from the second law of thermodynamics in my college education as a biology major, which states that all systems tend toward disorder. It was describing the various phenomenon of rooting for scenarios that produce tiebreakers and other end-of-season mayhem. We just wanted to see what the hell would happen, how this would all sort itself out. And it's a concept I've returned to annually because it seemed to resonate with fans. Most of us, if you're rooting for a team that takes precedence, but you

know, if your team is out of the hunt, you just want to see things get messy, maybe get some extra baseball out of it. And, you know, since then I have done my best to try to track how Major League Baseball would handle these tiebreaker scenarios, how to untangle, especially once the second wildcard team was added and the distinction between a wildcard team and a division winner became a meaningful one. Just what happens if two teams end up with the same record, whether or not there are wildcard implications and how a three-team scrum or a four-team scrum would be sorted out. Most of this is theoretical, but a couple of years ago, we got two game 163 tiebreakers,

which I think kind of vindicated the project at a point when it had sort of been flagging. Yeah, it's funny because you mentioned the 10-year anniversary of that last day of the 2011 regular season. I'm guessing we're about to get a bunch of retrospectives of that as memorable as it was. So I wonder if you feel like you've sort of been chasing that high all this time and have had trouble kind of recapturing it because that was so special. And it's fun to game out these scenarios and think about three-way ties or four-way ties or five-way ties, but it usually ends in disappointment. Hopefully it won't this year. you know this year's introductory piece i track you know heading into the final day of the season every year except 2017 and here i'm

leaving out last year because it was a very different story but but it does it was true to some extent you know there are play there have been playoff at least one playoff uh spot at stake every year except for 2017 during this uh period of two wildcard teams. And we've only gotten three tiebreakers out of that, two of them in 2018. But, you know, it's the thrill of the chase. I think that's what it comes down to because, you know, you don't have anything to lose by watching to see if somebody, if some team can make it interesting in hopes that you get that play in game.

But, you know, even if you don't, it's something that carries you until the playoffs. And for some of us, that's enough. And that chase has been thrilling this year. And things have even shifted around since you published your introduction to the 2021 Team Entropy installment last week. So maybe the place we can start is to get an update on where we are on our potentials for tiebreaking scenarios. And you broke this up between division races and the wildcard. So we'll do the same here and start, I guess, with the NL division races. What is the latest and greatest potential for chaos, Jay? I'll just butt in to note that we are speaking here on mid-Wednesday afternoon. So by the time people hear this a little later, things may have shifted slightly. But if we're citing any specific numbers, this is a snapshot

of the standings as we speak. Yeah, there's only really two divisions that are in play at this point. And even since publishing on last Friday, we've seen these races, at the very least, time has run off the clock and the odds have tilted in favor of the favorites. The Braves still lead the Phillies by four and a half games they're up to 91 percent in terms of in terms of making the playoffs and 90 percent in terms of winning the division I'm just going to keep the decimals out of it here neither the Phillies nor the Mets has been able to make any inroads the Mets are actually

now two games below 500 so as a three-team race this is is sort of a dud. The Phillies can't seem to get very far above 500. Right now they're at 500 at 72 and 72. The Dodgers, you know, they keep winning, but they can't seem to catch the Giants, who keep winning as well. It has been a remarkable two-team race. The two best records in all of baseball are right there. The Dodgers, who was defending world champions, were anticipated to be the powerhouses. And the Giants, who looked like they were going to be, I think, maybe heading out of rebuilding at best, but not necessarily the single best team in baseball by record. But they have just

proven to be the rabbit that the Dodgers can't catch. The margin is still two and a half games. The odds, I think at the time I wrote, it was about 55 to 45 in favor of the Giants. It's now about 62 to 38 percent chances in favor of the Giants. They're just, you know, every time the Dodgers win, the Giants hold serve and they haven't really left Los Angeles much of an opening. And there's still, you know, two plus weeks remaining here. So there's a lot that can happen. All it takes is one slip up. I mean, that's how the Dodgers caught the Giants a couple weeks ago. But I think the Giants, we've seen the odds change really in the last week from favoring the Dodgers to favoring the Giants, at least in terms of the way that we calculate those odds at fan graphs. So that's where things shake out from a division perspective. But if you are a fan of Team Chaos, the wildcards give you a lot more options here.

So yeah, now before we move on here, I want to point out that, you know, the Giants did win the season series 10 to 9, but we still have a chance at bonus baseball here. If the two teams finish with the same record, they would have to go through a game 163 just to determine which team has to then go to a wildcard game uh to play the other team uh in the end which is which is kind of silly but also kind of awesome yeah you know you're putting let's just say that the serve holds here but the the dodgers do catch the giants but don't overtake them they would have to play a play-in game just to determine who the wildcard team is on

I guess the Monday after the regular season ends, which I think is October 4th here. And then the loser of that game becomes the host for the wildcard game, has to win that one. And then if they do, they go back and face the NLS champions. And that having gone all out to win those two games just to avoid that scenario and give themselves the cushion of a longer series. And I think before you get into the specifics of the races, I'm going to ask you to do a slightly challenging and perhaps annoying thing, which is to help our listeners understand what the tie-breaking scenarios actually are here, because they get fairly complicated very quickly. So in the event of ties in the wild card, can you help us understand how those ties would be broken and what games that would require?

Yeah. So first of all, I should note that this scenario is so confusing that even having written about this stuff for years and years and years, including every year I've been at Fangraphs, which means we're now in the fourth time around doing this stuff. It turns out I was doing it a little bit wrong. I was skipping a step for some of this stuff. So if I can miss it, then anybody can. You should definitely blame that on your Fangraphs editor because it is almost certainly her fault. No, I'll take full responsibility for it myself here. Got to read the fine print sometimes. So if it's a two-team tiebreaker, and we're just talking about a single wildcard spot at stake, it comes down to head-to-head record to see who would host.

And if the head-to-head records are even, if two teams, say, have split the season series three to three, which is often the case when you've got two teams from separate divisions because they wind up playing an even number of games. You have to go on to intra-division record first, you know, who did better within their respective divisions. And then you go to intra-league record, intra, not inter. We don't care about how you fared against the American League if you're a National League team in this process. And then if the tie is still there, you go to the last half of intra-league games, and then the last half plus one, the last half plus two, add, you know, 80 until you get to the very end if that tie hasn't been broken. Now, we've never seen anything go that far, but MLB has laid out the process for how that would be broken. Where things get confusing and where I tripped up before here is the three-team tiebreakers. First of all, there's a determination as to if a single team beat the others in their season series and who beat whom in their season series. And I actually provided a hypothetical example here, and I'm just going to have to scroll up until I find this and read it in this process here,

just so people can understand how hard it is to parse. So here we've got a situation here where you've got three teams, and I've supposed that the Padres and Cardinals wind up with a season series split of 3-3. Meanwhile, the Reds have actually won the season series over the Cardinals 10-9. If Club 1 has a better record against Club 2, in this case Reds 10-9 over Cardinals, Clubs 2 and 3 have identical records against one another, Padres 3 and 3 against Cardinals, and Club 3 has a better record against Club 1, Padres 6 and 1 over the Reds. a record against club one padres six and one over the reds what having done that okay then we get to a point where the teams are ranked by their combined winning percentage and that was i was i was ranking them by their combined winning percentage all along but there are certain cases

where you don't actually do that and you know it's hard to produce an example when when when you can't find one so i'm just going to stick with that that's why i stuck with that hypothetical but then you but in this case what you've got here is the padres have would have gone nine and four against the other two for a 692 winning percentage the cardinals second at 480 12 and 13 and the reds third at 423 11 and 15 what happens then is they draft into a scenario where club a would host club b with the winner hosting Club C. And it turns out that the least desirable spot of that isn't Club C, the third choice alphabetically, but Club B, the team in the middle, because they would have to win two road games in a best case scenario to get to the wildcard spot, whereas Club A would have to win two home games, and Club C would only have

to win one home game. So the choice for the team that's picking first is whether you want to try to win two games at home or one on the road. And I think a lot of that would come down not just to the dauntingness of doing it twice, but also to the particular matchups and and where your pitching staff is at that juncture because i could see you know a team that felt that really had the advantage going the you know one one road game just because they didn't want to expend two pitchers and felt reasonably good about beating the other team sounds so simple when you lay it all out there yeah maybe maybe it's for the best that we don't actually have to figure this out very often. Although I guess if we got more tiebreakers, we would actually have to learn

how this works, but still I'm sort of happy to be spared. Right. It gets a little, you know, by the time you get to four teams involved, it is just, you do just go straight to that ranking them by their combined winning percentage, which is at least, you know, I think a little bit easier to understand. What's really interesting is there's no published five-team process for how to untangle it. And when I was at Sports Illustrated, my editor, Ted Keith, tried to figure it out. And independently, Russell Carlton of Baseball Perspectives, who's, you know, one of the top minds in this entire industry, tried to figure it out. Everybody kind of runs into the same, like, well, how do you do this fairly?

And the reality is that unless you're going to take the time to play a round robin, there is no fair way to do it. I think probably the most expeditious way is to pare it down to two teams that are the best and have them do one game. And then the three bottom teams in that do that kind of three-team tiebreaker scenario. Somebody's going to have hurt feelings there. But, you know, even within these tiebreakers, we do try to prioritize which teams fare better in there. And so somebody's going to end up with a short end of the stick. I still, when we've got, as it turns out,

since we have five teams vying for two spots in the AL and five teams vying for one spot in the NL, you know, we do at least have the folks in the commissioner's office, maybe sweating bullets and dusting off that five team plan and, you know, maybe having some sleepless nights over it. So I hope that's the case because they deserve a little less sleep over in the commissioner's office. Yeah. So I guess in the NL then, I mean, I guess you've sort of laid out the best case scenario. Well, that applies to either wildcard race, but what's your hope team entropy wise on the NL side? agnostic as to these teams. I mean, I think it would be pretty funny if you wind up with these teams all close to 500. At best right now, what the team, the best teams in the race are,

or sorry, the Cardinals are six games over 500. So that would take, that would actually take the Mets deciding to be a good ball club again, which I'm not sure they have it within them. I should note that within this five-team NL scrum, three of them have negative run differentials right now. The Cardinals, despite being six over 500, are 12 runs below water. The Phillies are 22 runs below water. The Mets are 11 runs below. And that's kind of an indictment. In general, are you someone who kind of prioritizes a division race? I know there's a certain school of thought that maybe leads to people getting a little less excited about wildcard races, even if there's more of a multi-team pileup there. It's just generally not as good teams, and it's often about who will lose the least as opposed to who will win the

most. Well, I think the one thing I think the MLB has done well, and I've criticized their various playoff structures in the long time that I've been writing about this, and I really wasn't a fan of last year's 16-team structure, but I do think that the distinction between winning a division and coming in second is worth something, and that the appropriate penalty of maybe having to expend your ace just to win that win that do or die game and hobble you going into the division series is is an appropriate penalty

to pay for not winning the division even though sometimes it works out where you've got the two best teams in baseball in this situation and sometimes you've got a very big difference there i understand the critics when they say yes the wildcard race suddenly has us focusing on who the fourth, you know, watching teams play out the string. And, you know, the fact that these are imperfect teams, you know, it comes down to who's going to rise to the occasion and whose flaws proved too glaring to help them survive. Well, the AL is pretty lacking in terms of division intrigue, but it does have, as you noted, a number of teams, five in fact, that are sort of in that wildcard scrub. So what is, as of Wednesday morning at 11.22 a.m. Pacific, what is the state of affairs in the AL wildcard race? spot. The Blue Jays and Yankees are both 81-64 and in an absolute tie. And then the Red Sox have one more win and one more loss and a winning percentage one point lower. But they're technically tied for the spot as well as determined by games behind in the standings. So, I mean, three of them from the same division even being there, I think, is an impressive moment in time.

And these are reasonably strong ball clubs. The Blue Jays have, I think, is an impressive moment in time. And these are reasonably strong ball clubs. The Blue Jays have, you know, I think one of the best run differentials in the entire league because they have just been scoring runs by the dozen almost lately. 11 runs in each game of a doubleheader last week, including 11 runs in one inning. Just insane stuff like that. So you've got them, and then out on the West Coast, you've got the Mariners and A's, who a couple days ago had the same record. And now they're separated only by a half a game. But they're three and three and a half games back, the Mariners and A's respectively. So they're a little bit fading from the picture. The Mariners do have a negative 60 run differential.

And I think Baseball Perspectives had something on their historic deviation between Pythagorean winning percentage and actual winning percentage. So that's kind of fun, especially as they're trying to break their 20-year postseason drought. But it does feel like the odds of us getting that five-way tie are long, but the odds of a three-way tie for two spots are actually on the table. Yeah. Apologies to fans of the NL wildcard contenders, but it sort of seems like if we were trying to construct the most exciting playoff field, we would like steal a wildcard from the National League and move one over to the AL. So we could have three AL wildcard teams because they're good ones and at least one of them is

going to miss out. There's an idea. We reseed the wildcard teams across leagues. So you go, an idea we reseed the wildcard teams across leagues so you go okay this is this is this is a new wrinkle we could uh i can i can get behind that you know make the yankees go through the nl bracket or something like that i don't know is that just a way to uh to spice things up in in wildcard land well it does sort of inspire a question i mean you talked about you know wanting to incentivize people to win their divisions i think that we want teams to do that because it helps them to sort of want to put a winning product on the field. But I always wonder when you put this series out, like, what are the things that you personally would like the playoff structure to best incentivize. We like the chaos. The chaos is fun and having the potential for tiebreaker games and what have you is, I think, a fun thing to root for, especially when you're in our position and aren't really strongly pulling for any individual team to emerge victorious. But I imagine that for fans of these teams, it is just emotionally exhausting

to face that prospect. And we do have a situation where a couple of very good teams happen to be clustered in divisions that are highly competitive. And they're going to, you know, one of those teams is going to get bounced potentially after one game. And so we, you know, probably will see the Dodgers and the Giants persist deep into the playoffs, but we might not if someone has a bad night. So I'm curious sort of what your personal philosophy around the postseason is and what you'd like to see the structure sort of allow for and incentivize. Yeah. I like the idea that the Dodgers and the Giants could meet in the playoffs. They haven't done it before. We've seen the Red Sox and Yankees do it. And those are some of the most memorable

series that the system has produced. Even here, we're stepping back into the one wild card era, 2003 and 2004, especially. But, you know, I think people on both sides of that rivalry still talk about those series. And there's each side has one very painful, one very painful one and one very glorious one. You know what, this just occurred to me when you were asking the questions here, but I think about, you know, the idea of a team having to run this gauntlet of expending their best pitchers just to get into another do or die situation. It's changed a little bit because, you know, we imagine that, you know, teams are going to have to use all their best starters. But what we've seen increasingly in recent years,

I think starting with the Rays and spreading throughout the rest of the game is the increasing usage of, not just of openers, but of bullpen games entirely. You know, we've seen the Dodgers limp, you know, not even limp, you know, go through the two months of the season here,

you know, without Clayton Kershaw and without Trevor Bauer using not just one, but two bullpen games every time, their rotation and having to stretch out David Price or whatever. We've seen the Rays do this a lot too. It's worked out less well for the Padres, which is one reason why they have fallen off the map almost. the map almost. But, you know, the idea that a team running through this is going to have to, you know, keep coming up, you know, it's just going to be a matter of whether their starter fares best on that day is maybe kind of antiquated. You're probably, if you put a team in this

situation, there's a very good chance you're going to see, you know, them going with like seven pitchers to cover nine innings or something like that. And it won't be just on whether Max Scherzer or whomever has a good or bad day. It's going to be on whether all these guys are able to manage the lanes that their managers set out for them in that context. And so I don't know. I mean, I love the idea of the rivalries. I will also concede that bullpen games are maybe not the most exciting games to watch because the endless pitching changes and we all know what a drag that can be. So I don't know.

I mean, as with all this stuff, it's be careful what you wish for because, you know, I like to follow this stuff. I also like to not have to do updates on Saturdays and Sundays of the final weekend. Especially now that I have a small child to attend to and whatever. So I think it's just a time to appreciate, you know, it's really, it all comes down to, this is the last time this year we're going to have so many teams playing at once. Seeing them all fight for spots in this sort of desperate attempt to ward off the inevitable coming of the end of the regular season, I think is always worth something, you know, even if, you know, just because there's a finality to it.

You know, you run out of games, you run out of innings, you can't get there. And there's something about that, about about those desperate grades especially when you get to um that last day of the season when everybody's playing at the same time and and you know some teams have controls of their destiny some teams don't it's there's there's a certain excitement there and that i just think is is unique to the sport yeah well we'll know in a few weeks whether any of these scenarios you've laid out come to fruition. And for fans' sakes, I hope that they do. And just for your sake, too, because I'm imagining, you know, when one of these nightmare or dream scenarios, depending on your perspective, actually happens,

the media members will be sweating and panicking, and everyone will be desperately running around trying to figure out how this all works. And you'll be sitting there, cool, calm, and collected, having prepared for this for a decade and just saying, I trained for this. I'm ready. The contrast of 2017 and 2018 was really kind of the highs and lows of this thing. I got a pretty good razzing in 2017 when it looked like we had a pretty good chance of all this happening.

And then team entropy spit the bit going to the last couple days of the season. We had nothing to play for. And then the next year when we had two play-in games and a good chunk of my Twitter feed just completely celebrated that and it made for a really great extra day of baseball watching. I remember also that one vividly because my daughter, who at the time was two years old, watched the Brewers beat the Cubs in the celebration. And she said, they're doing the ring around the Rosie as they were celebrating, which is one of the most

adorable things she's ever said in a baseball context or otherwise. And so I think I have a special affection for that year. So while we have you, you just wrote about Ryan Braun, who made it official this week that he is retired. Of course, he has not played since last season. And as your post on his career said, it's a complicated legacy that he leaves behind. So you want to sum up Ryan Braun's career? Obviously, not a Hall of Fame one, probably not on the merits, but also not for other reasons. But what do we think of Braun? What kind of story will he leave behind, I guess, in Milwaukee and elsewhere? Because it's probably

two very different legacies. Right. Yeah, it's interesting. I have a certain affinity for the Brewers arc. Based on my childhood fandom, the Brewers arc based on my childhood fandom. The Brewers were not my favorite team, but I really loved that 1982 squad. And my previous marriage, I was actually married to a Milwaukee native. And so I got to do things like run in the sausage race one time and got to go to the infamous 2002 All-Star game that ended in a tie, things like that. So I kind of was very tapped into the Brewers' return to relevance, which Braun, I think, was a catalyst of. His rookie season was their first above 515 years. And the next year, he helped them to the playoffs for the first of five times.

And it was a very good player. I think six-time All-Star, 2011 NL MVP, you know, put up some big home run seasons and all that, and even a couple 30-30 seasons. So, you know, I think on the merits of the numbers, he was certainly among the game's top players, particularly in 2011 and 2012. However, you know, Braun was, you know, first suspended for 50 games based on a positive test that happened during the 2011 playoffs, which he fought successfully on the grounds that the sample handling protocol was not followed. He got off on, you know, quote unquote, a technicality. And then he was later suspended as part of the biogenesis probe. And, you know, as somebody who I think defended Braun, not because I thought he was innocent, but because I thought that the way that the grounds that he was protesting on, you know, the due process of the testing system and the confidentiality of it, which are basically the foundations of a fair and functioning testing system that MLB has, for the most part, maintained, seemed to be violated in both of those cases.

But as it turns out, Braun was, you know, he was doping. He embarrassed himself. He embarrassed others by the way he so vehemently protested, you know, his innocence. You know, there's a line where he said, you know, I would bet my life that I didn't, you know, that the substance didn't enter my body, which Jesus, you know, that's a little much. But what really, you know, so what really stuck in my craw was that he went after the sample handler personally. His public statements were sort of vague, like we've learned some things about this guy. But according to reports by Jeff Passan and Buster Olney, he was alleging that this sample handler named Dino Lorenzi Jr. was anti-Semitic and also a Chicago Cubs fan,

and ascribing motives for him getting caught that didn't exist. And I thought that that was particularly tasteless. And that one, even after Braun apologized in 2013, finally admitting that he really screwed up, that one really sticks in my craw. As a Jewish fan and writer, anytime somebody plays the anti-Semitism card where anti-Semitism doesn't exist, it's, it just, it really, really, really is hard to get past. And, you know, I feel, you know, kind of personally stung by that, especially because I, you know, I defended the procedural grounds on which she was, you know, initially, you know, the suspension was overturned.

And so I just, I chafe. And it's here, it's with him that I can certainly, you know, have a greater understanding of how a previous generation of reporters feel when it comes to Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, guys who they feel lied to their faces about PED usage. And, you know, they can't get past it when it comes to considering them for the Hall of Fame. Braun isn't somebody who's going to have a real Hall of Fame case. He fell short by the numbers. He was never really the same player after the suspension, which I think, you know, has less to do with what drugs he was taking or not taking, and more to do with a pretty standard aging curve, you know, with some injuries thrown in. But yeah, you know, the way he's being treated reverentially by Brewers fans,

and, you know, he did do his best, I think, to rehabilitate his image and demonstrate solid citizenship after his suspension, to the point that he was even nominated by the team twice as their Roberto Clemente Award representative, which is funny because we're talking about this their Roberto Clemente Award representative, which is funny because we're talking about this on Roberto Clemente Day here. And the first time was in 2014 when he hadn't even completed a full season returning from a suspension. So I always thought that that was maybe just a little too carefully manicured. I didn't put that in the article,

but it does strike me. I mean, he was involved legitimately in a lot of different charitable organizations. And I think the Brewers owner praised him for, you know, for contributing more than a million dollars to community causes. And so, okay, I understand why Brewers fans revere him, especially when you connect that to their, you know, competitive renaissance. But, you know, I think the rest of us are allowed to be less reverential. And so, you know, bye-bye, Ryan Braun. I'm not going to miss you or celebrate you. And I tried to grapple with that. It was something that I hadn't really anticipated writing about Ryan Braun.

And then I was trying to figure out just why this particular seed felt like it was stuck between my teeth. I think I kind of picked at it until I got to 2,000 words and then felt satisfied. I can't believe you did the sausage race and I didn't know that. Jay, you've been holding out on us. You know, I wrote about it, but I wrote about it when you might have been still a wee lass. Well, I feel better then. It was that long ago. I ran the race, I think it was 2005, when I was still only covering Futility Infielder,

my Futility Infielder blog with occasional Hall of Fame coverage at Baseball Prospectus. I actually wrote about the experience for Rich Letterer's Baseball Analyst site, just because it was a fun piece and I wanted greater visibility. And it's something I'm still proud of. You can actually find YouTube footage of it if you look hard enough. And again, I imagine we'll just throw the link here into the long, effectively wild list here

that accompanies this article. Yeah, I guess I won't spoil the outcome of the race for anyone who hasn't seen it, but I'll link to all of that. So maybe we can close then by asking about one of your other recent pieces, which was on players, hitters, and pitchers. You did separate pieces who have maybe helped their Hall of Fame cases this year because you had to write, unfortunately, about players whose Hall of Fame cases were potentially hurt by the loss of a lot of last season or sitting out a season or whatever it was in some cases. And so now that everyone's back in action, you were able to take a look at some players who have actually improved their odds. And, you know, we've probably touched on a good number of them at some point this season on the show, whether it's Votto or Posey, etc. But who sort of stood out to you as players who have maybe

pushed themselves across the line this year or at least gotten themselves a little bit closer? You know, Votto, I think, put himself over the line with the 2,000 hits and passing the Jaws standard at first base. I think that's, you know, when you look at the players who have done that, the only ones outside the hall who aren't PED guys, specifically referring to Bonds, Manny Ramirez, and Rafael Palmeiro, are Bill Dolan, who's a strong early baseball candidate for the era committee, and Scott Rowland, who is making strong inroads towards election via the writers. And so seems like pretty good odds that Joey Votto gets there just on that basis.

Passing 2,000 hits is really key for most candidates because nobody from the post-expansion era, post-1960 expansion era, with fewer than 2,000 has gotten in. And all the players that we've been known as being the overlooked ones, you know, guys like Dick Allen, Bobby Grich, Manny Minoso, although Minoso's status has changed because of the reconsideration of the Negro Leagues. Tony Oliva are short of 2,000 hits, or they're otherwise short on the Jaws standard a little bit, like Lou Whitaker. So Votto's pushed himself over the line. Buster Posey has gotten his career back on track after two injury-marred seasons and then opting out. Although he still has a ways to go to get to 2,000 hits, he's checked just about every other box. Not quite there on Jaws, but definitely there on peak,

seven-year peak. Max Scherzer, I think, has really put himself over the line this year, not by Jaws, but the 3,000 strikeout is the first big milestone of his. He's still got, I think it's 11 or 12 wins to go to get to 200. I think once he gets that, he's a full-on lock. You know, younger guys, I think Carlos Correa has gained the most. I didn't delve too much into the mid-career guys because some of them haven't really filled out the seven-year peak yet. But Correa advanced the most thanks to some changes in how DRS is calculated with the team responsibilities

versus individual responsibilities. Mookie Betts is gaining a lot of traction. is calculated with the team responsibilities versus individual responsibilities. Mookie Betts is gaining a lot of traction. He's already, even in a season that has been, I think, maybe short of his standard, he's already got the highest seven-year peak of any active player this side of Mike Trout, Albert Pujols, and Robinson Cano. And he's into that. He's increasing that peak even as this season continues. Bryce Harper's done something, especially if he can add a second MVP award, which I know is not necessarily

the favorite to do, but he's put himself in play for that. Those are the big ones on the hitting side. I think besides Scherzer, we've seen Clayton Kershaw and Zach Greinke make, you know, kind of wobbly progress towards their, you know, their milestones wins. You know, Kershaw still in surgery to 200th win and 3,000th strikeout. But he looks to be a couple seasons away. And even Zach Greinke's a couple seasons away from 3,000 strikeouts because he stopped missing bats. So we're going to need both of those guys to come back and keep plugging away. But the other guy who I think has helped his cause is Craig Kimbrell, who looked like he could be facing the end of his career or at least the end of his career getting guaranteed money based on how he was doing circa 2019. And he had kind of a late season recovery last year that he carried over into this year and had been really dominant. I don't know that he's somebody who I think has a

strong chance of getting to the point where we consider him a Hall of Fame reliever. He's not nearly the pitcher he was a few years ago with the Braves, but he's helped himself. And there are some other guys that people ask about that I kind of at least checked in on, even if they haven't totally helped themselves, people want to know where they stand. And so it was fun to round up those guys. Yeah. I guess it depends on whether you're talking about north side of Chicago Kimbrell or south side of Chicago Kimbrell, because those have kind of been two different guys so far. Yes. It hasn't really gone so well since the trade. And I know that he's not getting the save chances and saves are one of his big tickets

because he's at 372. I think he's in the top 10 now, but he's got a ways to go. The other guy who was really making some interesting progress, obviously he got hurt, Jacob de Grom. Even he was with 5.1 war baseball reference version, including 0.6 on the offensive side. That was his fourth highest total. So he bumped his peak score up. He's going to have a very interesting case if he ever returns to the mound

and can avoid the possibility of Tommy John surgery, which I don't know if he can. He certainly can't throw in 100 on every pitch. But back in the spring, I looked at some projections that Dan Zimborski provided and really came to the conclusion that if he pitches up to those projections, we're going to be talking about a guy who's got a singular case, kind of a Koufax-like exception of just high-peak short-career dominance that is so good that we're moving beyond just the Johan Santana to Cy Young guy

who didn't stick around long enough. You're looking at a guy with possibly the three or more Cy Youngs that would be hard to deny him a spot in the Hall of Fame, especially given his late start and all that. Yeah. Well, I imagine we may be talking to you about this again in a few months, so we'll have to save something for next time. But in the meantime, I will just shout out your piece from August about the Negro Leagues, just because this is a big year for that, just given some of the advocacy that has gone on and the availability of the stats and everything. And there's been a long drought in the induction of Negro Leagues players, and it seems like there are some deserving candidates out there, and you ran through some of them and some of that history last month. So I will link to that and encourage everyone to check it out. And we could probably spend some more time on that when we get a little closer to that happening. I hope so.

Yeah. And I guess I'll have to figure out what to do with my first ballot or if I even won a first ballot. Mazel tov. Yeah, this is the year that I – Big year for young Ben here. Yes, I have to figure out what to do about that. But I guess I'll have my consternation off the air a little later. So you can find Jay writing regularly at Fangraphs.

You can find him on Twitter at Jay underscore Jaffe. Of course, read the Cooperstown Casebook if you haven't yet. And follow him for all of your team entropy needs in the next few weeks as we come down to the wire. So Jay, thanks as always. Sure thing. Good to talk to you guys. All right, that will do it for today. Thanks as always for listening.

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or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. We will be back with one more episode before the end of the week. Talk to you then. Oh man, give me endless time Never let these ties sever with one more episode before the end of the week. Talk to you then. Gold ties and companions Just sitting on a fence