Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1754: Never Tell Me the Odds

Episode Date: October 1, 2021

With the postseason around the corner, Meg Rowley and guest co-host Ben Clemens discuss the playoff picture, how the Seattle Mariners got where they are, which team Ben would prefer to see his Cardinals match up against in the NL Wild Card, and the biggest surprises of the season. Then they discuss Ben’s recent work […]

🎵 Hello and welcome to episode 1754 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs, and I am joined to ease you into the Ben Lindbergh bliss month ahead by another Ben, Ben Clements. Hi, Ben. How are you? I'm doing pretty well. How are you? I'm doing well. I'm feeling some stirring of fan feeling, and it's unusual. It's been a little while since I've had that experience. We are going to talk about some of the work that you've done for the site over the last week in a little bit here, but I thought before we talked about how good our playoff odds are, we could talk about the current state of the playoff race because despite the divisions all being pretty well decided except for the NLS, we have something

of a barn burner here, a late season barn burner. This is very exciting. Well, I don't think you're supposed to burn stuff in the Pacific Northwest anymore. No, we frown on that now, but as we are recording this on Friday, we currently have a three-way tie for the— well, we have a two-way tie. We have three teams in wildcard position in the American League. The Yankees are holding on to their first wildcard spot. And the Mariners, having not had to play yesterday, had a great Thursday.

And the Mariners, having not had to play yesterday, had a great Thursday. And by virtue of Boston losing to the Orioles, have snuck in to tie the Red Sox for the second wildcard spot. Yeah, and the Blue Jays losing is a big deal too. Yeah, the Blue Jays are now officially a game out. They were not able to pick up any ground against the Yankees. to pick up any ground against the Yankees. So, well, and then I guess before we get to the AL, we should also just note that the Dodgers, the poor Dodgers, you know,

we have to feel so sorry for them, just keep winning. They've lost a few years for them. Yeah, and it keeps not mattering because the Giants keep winning too despite the best efforts of some not good teams. So let's start with the American League. I guess like the first thing i'd ask you ben is like what are what are your expectations for how this weekend is going

to play out well probably the red sox will lose a game they shouldn't yeah that seems to be the thing that they do yeah um their just inability to move anywhere in these standings like they've just dropped a lot of very winnable games at times and it looked like they could just pull away the oriole series is a great example but i feel like they've done that a bunch yeah so i think that they'll probably lose a game that they shouldn't i'm sure that's not the right way to say it but it just feels that way i think the angels are pretty checked out but you know they're they're gonna put a whole team out there and show hitani's pretty good hit, even though he won't pitch.

Right. I don't think I'm smarter than a coin flip, but I'm going to say I want the Mariners to win. So I have no idea if that's right, but it'd be a lot more fun. Yeah, I guess. Well, where do you stand on the sort of attractiveness of chaos? Are you rooting for tiebreaker games? Is that something that is exciting to you? Are you a tiebreaker guy?

Yes, 100%. Well, unless my team's in it, and then no, not at all. Well, and you don't have to deal with that. Ben, the last time you were on this podcast when you filled in for me in co-hosting duties while I was on vacation, I think that other Ben,

oh, now see, he is other Ben while he is on leave. Now you are the prime Ben. He's been replaced i think that he asked you if you guys needed to talk about the cardinals and your impression was that no you did not need to do that that that is accurate i may have been hasty yeah because then they ripped off a 17 game win streak and secured the second wild card before we go back to the undecided races like how are you feeling, Ben?

It's pretty great. I'd feel better if the Dodgers weren't just looming as a tough wildcard game, but it's one game, which is the ideal way that you want to face the Dodgers. Right. I'm glad that it's going to be Adam Wainwright pitching. Yeah.

And it's going to be really fun. They're obviously not favored in that game, but it's going to be great to watch. There's been a lot of Cardinals dodgers postseason clashes through the years that i have fond memories of i hope i get another yeah but i don't expect i'll get another but i'm still very happy to hope for it if you had your druthers which of the giants or the dodgers would you hope to face in that wild card because i guess technically the dodgers really yeah you don't want to put the dodgers in that wildcard? Because I guess technically the Dodgers. Really? Yeah, you don't want to put the Dodgers in a five-game series.

Yeah, I guess that's true. Okay, so we will have the Yankees up against Tampa Bay. We will have Boston up against the Nationals. And then as you noted, Seattle goes up against the Angels where they will face just the overwhelming rotation of Jose Suarez, Jonathan Diaz, and Reid Detmers. Oh, that Angels team. I mean, it's not the worst thing for the Mariners that they don't have to face Otani,

but man, the Angels are not very good. I'll tell you this, it's better than it looked yesterday when they were facing Suarez, Diaz, and TBD. Yeah, yeah. Now they just get reed. So you expect that it will be Yankees-Mariners for our ultimate wildcard clash? Expect is an interesting word, but yes. Yeah. Yeah, I very much hope it is.

If you could pick any of the four, and by four, I mean, we'll leave Toronto in here for a minute. What is your ideal American League wildcard matchup? Mariners-Blue Jays. Yeah, I've converted people to this cause i feel i think if you're a yankees or red socks fan then i see why you don't like the second best matchup is probably yankees red socks but i'm pretty tired of the yankees and red socks and i'm not tired of the mariners or blue jays so yeah it would be hard to be tired of the mariners they would have had to they would have had to really be annoying in order for us to be tired of them.

This team only has a 0.4% chance of winning the World Series. They're sneaking into the second wild card. I just, we're sub-tweeting via podcast, which is, you know, a very of the moment thing to do, I suppose. which is a very of-the-moment thing to do, I suppose. But it is really interesting when people decide to go onto the twitter.com and say, like, hey, you guys, this thing that you're really enjoying and that hasn't happened in a long time, aren't you embarrassed that they haven't been a better team? Yeah.

I understand taking a long view and saying, man, this team has not been great at building a good roster for a long time. And that seems bad. I would maybe not say that during an exciting playoff run that might break a long playoff drought. I don't know. Just spitballing. Yeah. I think that we are in an interesting era of like the let people enjoy things discourse sort of evolving because I think that it's like there's no need to harsh somebody's vibe

if they're having a good time in a way that isn't like hurting them or someone else. I think that sometimes that sort of transmogrifies into people saying like, no, you have to like this thing and enjoy it even if you naturally don't, even if your instinct is not to find it compelling. And like that can be grating too, but it's a 20-year playoff draft man like we can't be choosy and i think that the folks who look at a team like seattle and recognize its holes and recognize all of the many ways in which is improbable for them to have gotten to this point and that they're doing it anyway like you really get to enjoy it then you're appreciating how strange it is like we talked about this with kevin on chin music it's like if you if you know what the what the average team in this situation

does if you know what a team with a negative 48 run differential typically does which is not play meaningful baseball the last weekend of the season then then in some ways you just are having an even better time because you're like wow you're free rolling yeah this is great it's like i'm i have nothing to lose here i am dealing with house money okay so that is the state of the american league i guess we should talk briefly about seattle and sort of how they've gotten here jay outlined this in great detail today for fan graphs but what is your sort of grand unified theory of of the mariners and how they have arrived at this place i get to ask you this question after being asked this question on a different podcast okay my grand unified theory of the mariners is that they have i don't know two-thirds of a good team is that fair some somewhere between half and three

quarters of a good team they're they've got few holes, but teams that have a few holes are definitely capable of playing like good teams when the people who are kind of the weaker links in the chain are hot and the rest of the team is playing as expected. Or if someone gets just, you know, insanely hot and is one of the good players, they can make up for some of the holes. Right. Kind of like what Abraham Toro did when he first came to the Mariners. Sure. Kelnick's maybe doing that now. Yeah. right kind of like what abraham toro did when he first came to the mariners sure kelmick's maybe doing that now yeah but i don't think that this mariners team is a you know

a true talent 89 win team and i don't really care they're not going to be the same team next year they'll probably be better next year they've got interesting players coming up hopefully i don't know yeah a lot of pitching in the pipeline yeah and julio as well so i don't think there's any reason to really be super worried about the future of the mariners and the present is that they're tied for a playoff spot right so great yeah i think that that's fair we might end up with like a uh you know really exciting paul seawald postseason moment and what a time that would be i think the ideal sorry fans yeah gosh yeah really kind of a rough go when you think about some of the key pieces of this mariners team both now and in the future and ones that have been helpful with a hot streak in the last little bit it is sort of

not the best for you know the mets uncovered these two hidden gems in Paul Seawald and Jacob deGrom, and now one of them will be in the playoffs. Exactly. Yeah. It's like, you guys thought that the worst part of this season was going to be watching Jared Kelnick, but surprise, it's actually Paul Seawald. Well, I think that kind of takes us to some of the stuff that you've been writing this week, which is we've noticed at Fangraphs and other places that people are really feisty about the playoff odds this time of year. Yeah, people don't like probability. That's an unfair way of saying it. Probability is very hard to grasp.

Yeah, that's a better way of putting it. If you're not careful, myself included, you look at something and then an outcome that was not the you know the center of the probability mass happens and you're like well what no come on you said that couldn't happen right now we don't have it as bad as i don't know like all politics but right it's kind of a microcosm of the same thing yeah you've anticipated a question i have which is if we can think of the sort of psychological explanation for how people interpret and react to this stuff, because it seems like every year we put out odds. And most of the time, our odds do not have to butt

up against like extended runs that dramatically alter them to quite the degree they seemingly have this year, right? Like, I can't remember a recent run where we had what happened with the Blue Jays, what happened with the Cardinals, and then what has happened with Seattle all sort of coalesce in the same month. I'm sure that I'm forgetting something very obvious, but like those three teams underwent really dramatic shifts in their playoff odds and have continued to, right? Like Toronto went from 5% to 50% and now they're down significantly with their loss to New York yesterday. So, you know, they get bandied about and sort of buttressed by real life and people react to that by assuming that they have been wrong this whole time

and that the model is sort of missing something. I don't want like people to encounter it and be made to feel bad for being skeptical of that stuff. It's good to be skeptical. We're not just making these numbers up, but you do want to pay attention to the man behind the curtain. Oh, yeah.

Because sometimes you have an improbable 17-game winning streak where you have the Blue Jays basically not losing for a month while their direct rivals were losing pretty badly. But sometimes there is something actually wrong with the model.

We are not above admitting that like stuff can can occasionally require tweaking you know you want the reason that the model is wrong to be a strange and unexpected event rather than it not being rigorous or sort of well thought through and designed in some way yeah i would argue that there's a difference between the model being wrong which is where you have like some biased inputs or incorrect inputs that are making it noisier than it needs to be. And, you know,

an outcome that was not the mean probability of the model predicted. Obviously the model had some runs where the Mariners made the playoffs because they weren't 0%. Right. But we said, Oh, most of them didn't. Right.

Because, you know, again, this team is being, is behaving rather strangely. It's unusual to win as many one run games in a season. We're also blown out all the time. It's just a strange set of circumstances for them.

To me, this is why probability is just hard to grapple with because we only get to see one. Right. And it's very easy to do some, you know, post hoc reasoning here where it's like, well, this happened. So clearly it happened for a reason. Right. And I think that's often the case that you can ex post point out things that made this happen. I just think that those things aren't always predictive beforehand. And that's why it's good to have the model to kind of sanity check you where you say, you know, we should have seen this 17 game winning streak coming. Well, I mean, probably not. Right. But that doesn't mean it can't happen. It happens sometimes. Right, exactly. I think that, you know, we can be forgiven for not thinking that

a team that had been sort of, I don't know what, they were like basically a 500 team. Yeah, I think they were like 69 and 68 at some point or something like that. Right. And even in the case of the Cardinals, I mean, them winning 17 in a row certainly buoyed their odds pretty significantly. But even that didn't happen. Even though that shift in odds wasn't occurring in isolation, right? They also had their main competitors either be bad and lose or really tread water. And that combination of things coalesced to them having the second wildcard spot. Yeah, the Reds being 82 and 77 is not something I expected.

Forget where the Cardinals ended up. You know, they obviously ran away with the wildcard race. I didn't think the Reds would win less than 86 or 87 games. And they just can't now. Well, so before we get into what you wrote this week to sort of back check in and verify our playoff odds and sort of examine where they have done well and where they have been sort of less good relative to other models. I did not prepare you for this question. but what teams have surprised you most this season?

So I'm trying to think about the season as a whole because in the last month, it's been, you know, the teams that have gotten really hot. On the season, I'd say the Twins probably surprised me most. Oh, sure. That's fair. Boy, they're really bad. Yeah, 71 and 88 as we are recording. They did, you know, junk all their good players or a lot of their good players at the trade deadline and then played better.

So that, I guess, means that they're kind of not maybe as bad as they started the season. Right. And just getting unlucky because they were just really down and out early in the season and they just never came back. But they got a lot worse intra-season. Aside from that, the Mariners. Not to say that I thought the Mariners would have a 89-win season. Obviously, I didn't think that. I did kind of think they'd be a round-zero run differential team.

But, hey, the wins count. Who cares about run differential? Right. If you're winning, run differential is not even an incredibly good way to predict future results. You kind of want to look at underlying talent. And, you know, okay, they don't have the best underlying talent either. Right. But I guess my point is those two teams have surprised me the most.

And as much for their quality of play as their record, I think that the Mariners have been better than I thought they'd be. Yeah. And I also definitely think the Twins have been a lot worse than I thought they'd be. Yeah. Gosh, they sure have. And they were bad. I think the part of the Twins season going the way that it did that surprised me the most was the speed with which it went sideways, right?

There was never really a stretch with Minnesota where you were like, oh, this is a good team. This is the division winner. Not everyone, but a lot of us predicted this is the team that is going to come out of the central. Like they just never really got going in a way that made you think that they were going to be able to steer out of the skid. And it really did surprise me. Like if I look at am I able to pull this up quickly? Yeah, I sure am. i know that everyone really enjoys me clicking around on leaderboards that's their favorite activity i do on the podcast like they were 9 and 15 in april they were 13 and 16 in may they were 11 and 14 in june they were 11 and 16 in july their only

winning month was august and they went 14 and 13 yeah they're 27 and 27 since the trade deadline so after they jettisoned two of their best players right they've played 500 they've been fine and so i think that lends some credence to the fact that they just were in a just an ungodly funk at the beginning of the year yeah they were outscored by a lot of runs they didn't they didn't just lose a bunch of one run games they were really bad and then since then they've been better not good but better but that's why you might not think of them for the the surprise of the season because they did all their surprising early right i think taking the whole season arc as a whole they they'll stand out as the like whoa what happened here the giants

actually i guess i should put the giants ahead of the mariners that was uh that was overlooked because i'd been thinking al the giants are my second most surprising team maybe even first like pretty much tied with the twins those have been the two really wow look at these standout teams this year yeah seattle seattle is is up there i think that the the chart that jay included in his piece that I found to be the most illuminating and strange was he did largest gaps between actual and Pythag Pat win percentage. And Seattle really is just at the top of that list. Like the 2021 Mariners are there. And then the next team is like the 1905 Tigers.

And, you know, there are modern teams there, too, like the Rangers in 2016 and the Padres in 2017. and you know there are modern teams there too like the rangers in 2016 and the padres in 2017 but it is a it is a pretty it is a pretty dramatic over performance relative to expectation so i guess we have to put them there but yeah the giants yeah they kind of came out of nowhere they're they're playing 660 baseball yeah they've scored 200 more runs than they've allowed that all sounds not like what i expected the giants to do this year yeah it's pretty it's pretty incredible i wonder if buster posey just is making the case for all of us to be able to take sabbaticals in our professions to come back refreshed and better than we have been in years. Is he just proposing a new labor policy? Come back fresh.

Yeah. I mean, when your knees don't feel like they're filled with lava as a catcher, I bet it's easier to be spry. Okay, let's talk about your research here, because this was illuminating. I know that you were a little bit nervous when you embarked on it, that you would find a bad result, but thankfully for all of our listeners, you found a good one. So because we have been met with this skepticism around the playoff odds. And people are sort of working through what we just talked about the the human instinct to sort of not believe that the process is sound when we see an extreme event that alters our probabilistic thinking, you thought, I'll go back and check

and make sure that the playoff odds are performing as they should. So how did you go about this process? And what did you find? Yeah, so we keep every day's playoff odds in a giant database somewhere. And I got that from Sean Dolinar and just checked every day. Yeah. You know, it was a data lift for him, I suppose, but not a huge one. And a lot of the work was just saying, all right, which teams made the playoffs? All right, let's look at all the times we forecast them throughout the year. Let's now kind of collate it and look at it in different ways. Because one problem with this is that it's not an intuitive thing to graph or, hey, is this model good? Well, it predicts things right on average, but how important is that? And like how well on average? That stuff is hard. But the general

findings are it does a pretty good job. It does better than using season to date stats. It does much better than treating every game as 50-50, obviously. And it is especially good at beating those models early in the season when very few games have been played. Because after 161 games, it's a lot easier to project the rest of the season. Sure. And after 150 even, it's a lot easier to project the rest of the season. But after one or two games, the season to date stats, which are mainly using last year's stats at that point, and the coin flip stats, which are flipping coins, just don't really know who's going to be good or bad. Whereas our model has done a really good job in the last seven years. If it thinks a team is unlikely to make the playoffs early in the season, it's mostly right. Right. And if it thinks a team is very likely to make the playoffs, it's mostly right right and if it thinks the team is very likely to make the playoffs it's mostly right and it's willing to do that more than any kind of more naive assumption and that has

paid off for it so what i would say is that our odds look really good relative to basically the sanity check test of like well this team's up and it's early and they were good last year so they should be good and it looks really good relative to like well any team who's up five in their division usually wins those kinds of things it just it does a good job of what it sets out to do which is use zips and steamer to figure out how good it thinks players are and use how good the players on a team are to figure out how good a team is and then forecast the season it has basically done what we think it's done. I'd say better than I expected. Yeah.

Well, where are the places though where it has done less well than you had expected it to? Sure. So the two things that I think are the places where we can improve it in a reasonable way without completely overhauling the way it's done is, so firstly, we use point forecasts for how good a team is.

So we take Zips' individual forecast for a player and Steamer's individual forecast for a player, their 50th percentile ones, or maybe their mean, I don't remember. We take their single one line output and say, that's how good this player is. And we take Jason's one line plate appearances output and say, here's how much he'll play. And then we build a team's strength he'll play. And then we build a team's strength based on that. And then we simulate the season 20,000 times. A different way that you could imagine doing that was every player has a range of outcomes, somewhere on a scale from zero to 100%. And every player has some chance of injury. And for each simulation, we roll some

dice and say, oh, this player had a better than expected season. This one had a worse one. This guy's hurt. Rebuild their death charts and now run it. So that would allow for some more team variation. I'll give you an example. Like there was definitely a chance that the Giants were going to be a lot better than we thought. Right. You know, our projections were a mean projection for Buster Posey and for Brandon Crawford.

And they were wrong. They were just not right. Right. Those projections were bad. But the projections were unbiased but they came out above their 50th percentile outcomes right and so if we continued using their 50th percentile outcomes which we did we didn't predict the season and so it wouldn't change as much as you think because a lot of times that you have your you know 70th percentile

outcome so do the dodgers right and they just pass you anyway and a lot of time that you have your 50th percentile outcome if you're the dod lot of time that you have your 50th percentile outcome, if you're the Dodgers, the teams behind you have their 50th percentile outcome and you win anyway. But I think that would make for basically less certainty. And while I said that it's really good that our model gets certain quickly, I think regressing it back very slightly by doing this would help. Yeah. That's pretty small potatoes though, honestly. yeah that's that's pretty small potatoes though honestly it does a really good job relative constraints it has and with the amount of uh inputs it has it has very few inputs which is really cool right of getting there the other thing that i don't really think the model's built for but that it can struggle with is projecting the odds of playoff rounds and the reason for that

is just because we build our team strength based off of, you know, who we think will play all year and playoff rosters don't really look like that. Right. It matters a lot more which of your four starting pitchers you can get to go. Right. Yeah. I think this is why having Dan's zips postseason sort of game by game odds, which dig into and understand like who is on the roster, who's the actual starter going to be that night, right? And that construct it in a way that I think is closer to how teams actually deploy their rosters in the postseason is a nice compliment. And when you view those next to one another, it can be kind of illuminating for the places

where I don't know that our odds necessarily fall down. I don't want to be as dramatic as that, but where there is difference in the interpretation and what those differences can yield in terms of the odds that you get in any given like real series between two teams, right? Yeah, I think I'm comfortable saying that our odds think good teams are too good in the playoffs. Yeah.

That's what it comes down to basically. Every team gets to cull their worst players. A lot of the bad teams have more worse players to get out of there. The good teams are good because they're good. And so I think that we basically overestimate the chance of teams that we projected really good going into the season. But it's a pretty small thing. And I think the much more important thing that our odds do is playoff projections. I care a lot more about our playoff odds than our World Series odds. Sure. Yeah. Personally. And that's definitely what the model is built for.

And it does a pretty good job of that. I agree with you that it's nice to have Dan's odds there because his is purpose built for this. Right. We are literally just taking the way that we do regular season and saying, oh, it's in the playoffs. Yeah. But it's not designed for that. It's designed for regular season.

Yeah. Were there particular kinds of teams that you found that we either over or underestimated in our approach? Yeah. We're pretty bad about underestimating teams that are the Rays. Yeah. And I think that basically comes down to the point estimates I was talking about. Yeah.

Good luck writing a depth chart for the Rays before the season. And one thing that the Rays are just continually better than we think they are at is having a bunch of depth and rotating it where other teams lose games to injury. I mean, the Rays lose games to injury too. They just do a lot better job of having solid replacements who are credits to the team rather than below replacement level Jake Arrieta's taking the innings essentially. And the way that we do this without adjusting for injuries and depth, it's going to always underestimate those types of teams. In a similar fashion,

teams like the Red Sox and Mets tend to be overrated by our model where they're very top heavy, but don't have a lot of depth yeah that's probably the main takeaway in terms of what kinds of teams we've over and underestimated i do have one funny thing for you though tell me one of the types of teams that we've most overestimated before this year because i you know don't have the data for this year yet right are teams that are not very likely to make the playoffs going into september so the exact opposite scenario of what you would expect given how people react to the playoff odds this time of year yeah basically if you look at 2014 to 2019 so all the seasons before 2020 where the playoffs were weird and so i don't really want to take too much into it we projected

teams with less than a 20 chance to make the playoffs about 12 so you know like there were a bunch of teams they made the we thought they'd make the playoffs 12 12%. So, you know, like there were a bunch of teams. They made the, we thought they'd make the playoffs 12% of the time. They made the playoffs 2% of the time. We were way too optimistic on teams that were on the periphery of the race hanging on. And I'm guessing that after this year, people will think the opposite. Right. Now that does mean it's a noisy model. It's going to correct, but it's going to correct via more errors,

which is not really what you like. Right. But I don't think that's a systematic problem. I think that's just the way that the outcomes broke. And you can't build a model that on September 1st just has hundreds and zeros and gets them all right. Right. So there's some question of minimum average error.

Right. And I think we've done a pretty good job of that. But to the extent that we've missed, it ironically has been that we're a little too credulous of teams that are trailing going into september so when people get mad at us on twitter they should just remember that we're actually overestimating they won't no and i'm not even sure that they should i don't know that they should either i think that they could just not get mad that is an option that is available to us. I also think not that many people get mad. Yeah, I think that that's probably fair. People like to perform as a mad person on the internet,

but I'm not sure their heart's in it. Well, and I also think that the folks who are genuinely sort of flummoxed by it, I think most of them come into conversations about it in an effort and sort of wanting to understand how a particular number is derived rather than just assuming that the model is wrong like i do think that there are plenty of people who to your point like probabilities are complicated and being able to think probabilistically sort of runs counter to how we maybe are naturally predisposed to think about things as humans and so it does take some work to be able to sit there with it and suss through and suss out why we arrive at what we do. And so I

think most people are just trying to understand more than they are getting grumpy. But there is always sort of this funny thing where, you know, it tends to be the folks who are reacting to what is for them good news that sounds the most sort of worked up about it. And it's like, but this is good news for you. Like you've done something cool and improbable. Like, you know, that's exciting. Why are we angry? We should be happy about stuff.

Yeah. I think that one thing that is, I would say maybe the most misunderstood thing about odds is I don't think our odds are perfect. Yeah. But I don't think that the existence of a team like the Cardinals or like the Blue Jays or Mariners means that our odds don't work. Right.

It means that they did the really impressive thing. And if you had a perfect odds system. Right. It would still have said that the Cardinals weren't very likely to go on this run, that the Mariners weren't very likely to go on this run. And they did. And that's really cool. I think focusing on, like, well, these odds were low means that they were wrong.

That's not the case. They could certainly be wrong. I'm not saying that the odds were right. But just because we ex-ante thought it was unlikely, I mean, it was unlikely. It was unlikely. Yeah, and so I think that the trap that you can fall into in evaluating these, and I definitely do from time to time, is basically that. Is saying, well, they said it was unlikely and it happened. Well, unlikely things happen sometimes. You kind of have to take

a broader picture. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't change things about it in the future to smooth things out more, but it does mean that you shouldn't get too worked up about one observation. Yeah, I think that that's fair. Are there particular squads that you are most excited to watch in the postseason? I'm trying to think of teams I'm not super excited to watch. That's maybe a better way to put it. Yeah. Are there any where you're like, ah, old news or you're bad, you're going to get you're going to get stomped and then it'll be boring baseball. Yeah, I'm not incredibly thrilled by the Braves. Yeah.

That's no knock on them. My two favorite Braves to watch are both out, Acuna and Soroka. They're fun to me, and they're not there. They're not unfun. The Brewers have been a lot of fun this year. I'm a Cardinals fan, and the very likely Dodgers-Giants heavyweight fight is going to be really fun. And so the only NL team where I'm like, oh, yeah, like, cool. They're there is the Braves. And then the AL, like, I guess the White Sox and the Yankees, I'm not that excited about.

Yeah, it's interesting. I, you know, we did like a whole draft about this, we don't have to rehash it. but I have just not really felt like overly compelled to watch Houston which is strange because several of the components of that team that underperformed last year are are sort of back on track this year and so it isn't as if they lack for exciting players but it just hasn't been I don't know for whatever reason I have not been grabbed by them I appreciate aspects of what Atlanta has been able to do in the face of the injuries that you just mentioned. We probably will spend a good deal of time if they go on a deep run here talking about how impressive it is that they were just able to completely remake their outfield, given the injuries that they sustained and how successful that has been, even if one of the pieces of that in Jack Peterson has been sort of meh.

But yeah. They also did a great job of having the rest of the division be really bad. Yeah, like no one wanted to win the East. It's really wild. The fact that it came down to yesterday is pretty spectacular. It's weird to me that they're going to have the worst record of any playoff team. I would not have guessed that. Yeah.

It's weird to me that they're going to have the worst record of any playoff team. I would not have guessed that. I put this question to other Ben at various points, but I will put it to you. I didn't prepare you for this question either, which is not nice of me. You have to take a second to think about it. That's fine.

What would your ideal playoff structure be? Do you want to hew to the division thing? Would you like reseeding what are your thoughts on how we could maybe spice up uh the the playoff field here because it is striking that like that team is going to be the worst one by record even though they're definitely not the worst team that will have made the playoffs right well well it'll be close atlanta's better than seattle if seattle makes it yeah we don't know if they will they're probably they might be better than the red sox too yeah i think they're definitely better than than boston well i think they're better than boston i don't know if

definitely definitely might be too strong i picked the red sox to make the playoffs before the year and i don't think anyone else did so i would be happy if that happened but i'd be sad about the mariners if i could pick my own playoff structure, I like 10 teams making the playoffs. I think lots of people don't like it. I think the incentive of the one game play-in is really nice. It really says you need to go out and win your division beating whoever's there. Right. I don't even have a huge problem with the fact that the Dodgers are going to the wildcard game.

Well, they didn't beat the Giants. Right. They played very similar schedules and the Giants won more games. You could do some kind of reseeding, but I really like the way it's set up to where if you're in a close race, you're incentivized to just get after it. And that just isn't as likely, I think, if you're doing reseeding. The Dodgers and Giants race wouldn't be fun right now.

Yeah. Like at all. Right. If there were reseeding, I guess the question would be in the Cardinals-Braves wildcard game, who would have home field? I don't know. It wouldn't be very thrilling, is I guess my point. So I think reseeding, I'm not a huge fan of.

I really love the one game. I know baseball here purists don't, because it's one game and you can go home. And I was talking to Kevin about it yesterday. He doesn't even think they're playoffs. Oh, no. I mean, he's wrong. He is wrong. They're playoffs.

I think they're pretty clearly playoffs. But I really like the fact that the wildcard team has a real penalty. Yeah. I think that's nice. And it's better by far than the old eight-team system. I thought that was kind of just a drag. Yeah. Like if there was the eight-team system

and the Dodgers penalty was that they'd play an extra road game, well, then all they also wouldn't care about the race between the Dodgers and the Giants. Right. But instead, it's great and it's really good theater. And jockeying for home field throughout the playoffs versus literally needing to play a win and end game against a team that barely lost in september like that's really high stakes and i like the way it makes for extra stakes i think 10 is a reasonable number so yeah i think i'd keep it pretty close

to the way it is now maybe a seven game series in the first round oh cut a few regular season games out yeah i'd be i would be okay with that i i like that idea we had a we had a listener email a little while ago that we answered about sort of how to incentivize teams to continue to win in the face of what seems likely to be expanded playoffs at some point right like at some point we will almost certainly actually have a broader playoff field even if it doesn't swell to the size that say last year's playoff field did. And they proposed using a cutoff, a record cutoff that potentially left you with an odd number of playoff teams that you would expand the field and you'd have sort of a maximum size, but you also

would have to be at least a 500 team in order to make the playoffs. How would that work if you have an odd number of teams, some kind of round robin? Yeah, we decided that it probably would not work was what we decided. But I liked the spirit behind the question, which was in the face of what we imagine will be a broader field that might end up being diluted and then resembling something like what the NBA does where like half the league makes the playoffs, but we kind of know going in that the less good teams are likely to get bounced fairly quickly to try to still incentivize teams to win in order to secure a spot. And I like that idea. Although I think I said at the time 500 seems like too low a bar to make them clear. Yeah, one good thing about the current cutoff is that it seems to mostly get pretty

decent teams. The team that's going to get in this season where you're like, that record should not be a playoff record is not a wildcard team. Right. And yeah, you can't really solve the fact that sometimes divisions are bad. But even in the two wildcard era, you know, you want to be in the 88 to 90 win range to get the second wildcard. And that's a good team. Yeah. You know, if you go, if you're 18 games over 500, I don't think anyone's like, that team's trash. Right. Yeah. I don't think that, I don't think so either.

Yeah. Because like this year we will have, we won't even really have any teams that are remotely close to just 500. Like we're going to be well off of that pace for this year's field. We don't need to worry about it. So Ben, the next time I record Effectively Wild, we will be into October. We will be into the postseason. And we do this thing where we tend to forget the regular season as soon as that happens. No one is interested in

reassessing it until we get deep into the offseason and have to come up with something to write every day. So I will ask you, is there anything about the 2021 season among teams that maybe aren't going to make the playoffs or that you anticipate will not persist into the postseason that you will be sad to see go as we get into playoff baseball? Well, I think I'm okay with this disappearing as we get into playoff baseball. But one thing that I liked this year was, or at least found interesting, was the development of a six-man rotation by a lot of teams in the league. And you guys had Rob Mains on to kind of talk about that. I think it's a pretty fascinating idea.

I think it, in theory, can lead to pitchers just not being as gassed as the season goes on. And pitching injuries are just really the worst. They're a lot less fun to me than pitchers leaving games early or pitching slightly less often, but in a rotation in a way I can see. So that obviously won't persist into the playoffs. They're off days. You only use four starters instead of six. Things are kind of completely changed, but baseball's going that way, whether you want it to or not. And I actually think it's less catastrophic for the game than we think it is. It's not as bad as the decreasing amount of innings starters pitch.

That's not fun. And you and Ben have gone over the reasons for that many times. But I think guys going every six days and maybe being more healthy because of that was perhaps a reaction to 2020, but one that makes sense and I think will continue into the future. Yeah, gosh. What are we all going to write this offseason when we don't have any? How will the strange shortened season impact next year? Yeah, there's no uncertainty this offseason, so it's just going to be tough. We have to turn the attention of the playoff odds to the probability

that we will end up with a CBA by the deadline. Yeah, we're going to simulate Rob Manfred's negotiation strength. Oh, no. This is like grad school all over again. Well, Ben, I imagine that we will force you to come back on here. And by that, I mean, I will ask you nicely and you'll say, yeah, that sounds great before other Ben returns from his paternity leave. But do you have anything on Fangraphs.com that you would like to plug before we go? Yeah, go look at a bunch of pictures of our playoff odds.

And next week, surely, though I haven't written it yet, read my defense of voting for Corbin Burns for Cy Young and why you should. Oh, do you want to preview your defense now? We have a little bit of time. I don't. Does this is this a controversial take? It is. I don't think he's the Cy Young favorite.

And I think that's ridiculous. I think he's he's having one of the best seasons in baseball history. I think that caring overly much about innings pitched when someone is this dominant and just consistently so is really kind of misreading the situation. That's basically what I'd say. I just don't think that he's certainly not considered a runaway favorite. I don't even believe he's the favorite. And that just seems wrong to me.

I think that we will look back on this season in 20 years and say, wow, like this is the best season that a pitcher had in the 2020s. And so, yeah, I just think that people need to be a little bit more solid on that. I do think Burns is probably the favorite, but I don't think it should be close. I think that he should be more of a lock than Robbie Ray, and he's just not. I find that I only end up hearing bad like award voting discourse secondhand, which makes me feel like the folks I'm following on Twitter are doing a really solid job

because I would have just, I mean, I know that from like a war perspective, the gap between him and Wheeler isn't that significant. Although, you know, when you notice the difference in innings pitched, I think you look at that gap a little bit differently, but he's just been so incredible that I just assumed that people thought he was the obvious favorite,

which isn't a knock on Zach Wheeler. He's put up an incredible season two at a time when Philly, just beyond their top guys, did not have reliable pitching. But Burns has just been so sparkling, sparkling. I think that this would be a much less likely win for Burns if Scherzer hadn't kind of fallen apart in the last few weeks. But I thought he was the Cy Young before that. So I guess this article is a little less urgent now

that it feels like he's in the lead. But this doesn't need to be complicated. He's striking out more than anybody else. He's walking fewer than anybody else. He's giving up fewer home runs than anybody else. That's good. Yeah. I said that we were going to go, and then I thought of other things to ask you. What do you make of the Scherzer thing? Do you think he's just tired? I mean, one of those starts was in Colorado, so it's also a Colorado thing.

Yeah. Tough place to pitch. Could be a little bit tired. Scherzer, I don't know how predictive this is, but he feels very streaky to me. And I have a lot of Nats fan friends. And when the Nats won the World Series, they were all convinced that Scherzer would be bad every game. And then he was good every game. Yeah. And he just like sometimes looks a little off or his back is hurt and he pitches through it anyway because he's a crazy person. It wouldn't shock me if he was hiding a nagging injury right now and just playing through it anyway because they need him to. Max Scherzer pitching at 90% is a lot better than, I mean, bullpen game featuring Phil Bickford, I guess.

Phil Bickford. I mean, it is. He was good. You are correct about that, but we should probably take a moment to like marvel once again at Phil Bickford. Phil Bickford, he's pretty good. Yeah. Surprisingly. I didn't expect it he has not great hair but pretty good pitching oh where are you on where what about his hair

displeases you i am just not a big um long unkempt locks kind of person sure fair enough it reminds me of um the three musketeers It reminds me a little too much of the Noah Syndergaard, Jacob deGrom, not great long hair combination that the Mets had for a while. See, I didn't like Syndergaard's long hair because it was stringy, but I thought deGrom's hair was luscious. It was very shiny.

He had some good curl. Felt like it was well-conditioned. Sometimes when men have long hair i'm like conditioner exists and you should use it because then that will look better why don't you if they someday do an oral history of jacob degrom getting rid of his hair oh yeah i don't think they will i think that the the turning point will be a geico commercial that he did for a local market in new york where people keep mistaking him for the geico caveman oh really like they just recorded that with Jacob deGrom with his long hair and he was good with that I guess so but then the next year he didn't have the hair anymore wow that's wild oh yeah I guess

you have to distance yourself from the caveman if you've like willingly filmed a commercial like that anyway Phil Bickford is an inspiring story even if ben doesn't like his hair which we will tell phil bickford the next time yes sorry phil that's okay i think that um he'll get over it when he looks at his season line okay well now we actually shall go you can check out all of ben's good playoff coverage in the weeks to come at fangraphs you can follow him at ben clemens and that is underscore Ben underscore Clemens, the dreaded double underscore. You can hear him often on Fangraphs Audio,

so you should check that out if you want more podcasting with Ben. And Ben, I think we're going to do some postseason streams too, yeah? That's the plan? Yeah. I don't know if we've narrowed down specific games yet. I don't think we have.

It matters what the actual schedule that's released is. But yeah, we are going to. Yeah, so you will also at some point in the next couple of weeks, see Ben's face. Yeah, if you're so inclined, there'll be a lot of me talking either on camera or on microphone

in the next few weeks. But there'll be a lot of everyone at FanGraphs talking. Yes, we're getting into the thick of it here. Ben, thank you for easing the audience in to their brief ben respite i appreciate it you're welcome are you gonna bring on someone with the last name lindbergh next so we can kind of have various halfways i should i i'm gonna have to do some thinking about the appropriate lindbergh yeah it's not an easy find i guess no many more ben's so many more ben's just uh we're lousy with Ben's.

Alright, Ben. Thank you very much. That'll do it for today. A couple of quick updates. First, for those of you who aren't on Twitter and didn't see Ben's announcement, Ben and his wife Jessie got to meet a major infant yesterday. Sloane Lindbergh was born on International Podcast Day of all days and is already decked out in Otani gear as you might

expect. Both Sloane and Jessie are doing well. Congrats, you guys. We have a quick stat blast update courtesy of Lucas Apostolaris. In episode 1733, Ben did a stat blast on the players with the most options and recalls in a single season. At the time, Eduardo Paredes held the record. This is only since 2000 Mind Mind You, but the last few years are really the options era anyhow, with 22 combined options and recalls for the 2018 Angels. But since then, the Rays' Lewis Head tied him this year, and yesterday, Alberto Breu broke the record by getting called up when Luke Voigt went on the injured list.

He's now been called up or sent down 23 times this season. He hasn't pitched very well in the majors. A 5-2-5 ERA and a 5-4-9 FIP in 36 innings pitched. That's pretty understandable considering how many times he's made the trip to or from Scranton. Thank you to Lucas for that update. And thank you to you all for listening. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some small monthly amount to keep the podcast going and get access to a few special perks. Stephen Sulkin, Ross Dowker,

Eduardo Zadbert, Sue W., and Sean. Just Sean. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectivelywild, and you can rate, review, and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions coming via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you're a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for

editing assistance. I'll be back next week with new guest co-hosts and new episodes, but until then, enjoy the last weekend of regular season of baseball and go teams. You had a charming hair, all cheap and debonair, my widowed mother found so sweet. And so she took you in, her sheets still warm with him, now filled with filth and foul disease.