Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1765: Of Cinnabon and Shifts

Episode Date: October 29, 2021

Before Game 3 of the World Series, Meg Rowley and guest co-host Emma Baccellieri of Sports Illustrated discuss postseason travel for sportswriters, the forgotten virtues of suburban malls, Emma’s piece on how Atlanta shifted its stance on the shift midseason, and how the front office, Ron Washington, and the players came together to adopt the […]

And we'll end our whole world We fuse like a family But I will not mourn for you So take off your makeup and pocket your pills away. We're kings among runaways on the bus mall. We're down on the bus mall Hello and welcome to episode 1765 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Raleigh of Fangraphs and I'm joined today by Emma Batchelori of Sports Illustrated.

Emma, how are you? I am great. Happy to be here. Thank you for joining me. We are going to talk about Bob Melvin. We're going to talk about the World Series matchups that are to come. But first, I thought that we would start with your road travels. You are one of several itinerant reporters going from place to place as part of the post season. And I think this is interesting to people. It is interesting to me as someone who prefers to be home more than anywhere else, really.

What is the month of October like for you from a travel perspective? Yeah, as you said, it is a lot. And it's the sort of thing where, of course, I'm extraordinarily lucky to get to do this. And the actual baseball itself is wonderful. And you, of course, don't want to sound ungrateful for that because I do try hard to be as grateful for that as I should be. But I would also really like to sleep in my own bed. And I am very much looking forward to being able to do that within a week at the latest. Although, gosh, another week right now sounds like quite a long time.

But yes, it is kind of a grind. So where have your travels taken you so far this postseason? I was actually, I consider myself lucky in that I did not have a CS assignment. So I got a break in the middle. But yes, I started with the ALDS in Boston and St. Pete. So that was about a week back and forth between those cities, which are not very easy to pack for in October, very opposite weather. Then I was home for about a week, which was nice. And then I was off to Houston for the Star of the World series and am now in Atlanta. You were recording this from your Atlanta hotel. You know, last year was just so deeply strange for any number of reasons, but one of them was that all of the media access that anyone had was conducted over Zoom. What has it been like to be able to be not only back in the press box,

but on the field, in the dugout, talking to people face to face? It really is lovely. Just because, I mean, I think no matter what you do, any job done over Zoom long enough starts to get very grueling. There's just a sameness to it and just a lack of connection. Even when you're talking to someone who you might know decently well and have good banter with, doing that over Zoom enough just I have found presses the joy out of it. But like in any situation, even with like Zoom happy hours with friends after a certain point, it's just like, oh, like this platform does not really makes it hard for you to actually have a good time with whatever you're doing.

And so, yeah, just to, you know, we're not in clubhouses yet. That's something that will take longer, I think, to get back in terms of access. But yes, just being on the field and even just being on the field and even when you're not talking to anyone, just the experience of being down there and watching BP or in-field drills or whatever it is, it is very nice to have the physical connection and the sense of place that comes with being able to actually experience things outside the computer. Yeah, I would imagine that rapport is dramatically improved when you're in person and can kind of react to like all of the small indicators that we always get in the course of a conversation about like how a particular question

is being received and, you know, how long it like kind of takes for them to think about it. And you have the video component with Zoom, but there is something about it being mediated that I think blunts our ability to sort of interpret that stuff with any kind of accuracy. Yeah, absolutely. And I think also when you're talking about the difference between Zoom's use as an official setting for a press conference versus just even if it's a scrum of several reporters and it's very much a media appearance, standing and talking with eight people around you versus an official setting of Zoom and what that looks to it is a quite different. So it's quite nice. Yeah. So when you're on the road, are you able to make time for yourself to like

go explore places? Have you seen bits of Houston or Atlanta or St. Pete, I suppose, that you otherwise would not have been able to engage with if you weren't there? Not as much as I would like. I find it's easier during the regular season when you do road trips just because with the playoff media schedule is a little different. You have to be at the ballpark earlier. And so it is a little bit more difficult to make time. Even when you have the best intentions, there was this art exhibit I wanted to see in Houston. And I was like, you'll wake up one day early enough to make sure you can go. And that did not happen. Although maybe if we go back for a game six and seven. Here in Atlanta, I have been very lucky to got here yesterday, realized I had lost my AirPods

on the plane. And that meant I got to go to the Cumberland Mall. Oh, boy. Yes. Experience a brand new Apple store. Brand new to me. But it was actually quite nice. I love the mall. I live in DC where I don't have a good suburban mall. I mean, there are good suburban malls, but I don't have a car. I live in DC, not out in Tayson's where the good mall is. And so it's been a while since I had just walked around a nice giant suburban mall. And I had a really lovely time. I appreciate all of the things that make the mall kind of soul sucking to a lot of people. So we are not necessarily trying to bring back the mall or the suburban sprawl that

often accompanies it. But especially after the last year, there's something real nice about being able to walk into a store and walk around and like touch the thing that you might buy rather than having it delivered to you. It is like the tactile experience of it is is really nice. You can get a pretzel, you know, like get that Cinnabon smell. That's really great. The smell of Cinnabon, they should bottle that and make it available everywhere it yeah just walking in smelling the Cinnabon just taking a nice stroll seeing all the people shopping I genuinely did enjoy it uh which is not something I expected to for a you know annoying errand to run getting off the plane so thank you to the mall yeah I think that um malls

and ballparks especially when they're in places where you don't live and aren't familiar, are just such wonderful people-watching opportunities. You get a sense of the place. What are these folks like? Granted, the sense of place that Atlanta has given where they have chosen to locate their ballpark is not quite what it once would have been, but it is probably illuminating in its own right. Yes.

Well, we hope that you are able to get some sleep and enjoy an art exhibit in Houston because that would mean that we get more games here. But I think one of the great things that has emerged from your travels is some just lovely reporting, which is unsurprising from the woman that brought us the mud guy.

We learned about the mud guy. We learned about the mud man. And I wanted to take a chance to talk about one piece in particular that you did, because I think it'll be especially interesting to our listeners who have grappled with the efficacy of the shift for a long stretch. I know that this is both a well-utilized strategy or at least an often-utilized strategy, and its efficacy is sometimes in doubt. We've spent a number of episodes devoted to that. And Atlanta went through quite the shift in its shift usage over the course of this season. One of many things that sort of ended up moving the needle for them as they went from being a team that was under 500

to one that's in the World Series. And you had a chance to talk to a number of people involved in the organization around this particular question. So for our readers who haven't had a chance to take a peek at your piece, what did you discover about Atlanta's adoption of the shift? Yeah, so this is a pretty drastic change. As you said, you know, they had been dead last in shift usage last year in baseball, less than 10% of pitches they shifted on. They'd been toward the bottom of MLB in 2018, 2019. It was a longstanding thing that they didn't really shift. This year, they completely changed that, although they didn't start off the year changing it, which is interesting because when you're

talking about as big of a strategic change as that is from going from someone who basically doesn't shift at all to shifts more than almost any other team in baseball, save the Dodgers, they're number two now. Something that big, that seems like something you might roll out in spring training, have a bunch of one-on-one conversations or a presentation. It doesn't seem like something you do in literally one day was the case for them. But as it turned out, you know, it was something that Alex Anthopoulos and the front office had been considering maybe ramping up for a while and finally kind of hit a breaking point in May. Towards the end of May, they had a homestand with a series against the Mets and then a series against the Pirates. And after that series against the Mets, you know, they just had a few clear instances of balls that could have been

caught with a different defensive alignment. So the next day, Anthopolis went down to talk to Ron Washington, who's their third base coach and also, you know, infield defense coach, and had this idea of like, okay, I'm going to bring this up, you know, maybe we're going to see is this something we institute gradually if he's okay with it? Like maybe we'll, we'll do some drills, we'll work on it more pregame and over the next couple of weeks we'll institute it. And Ron Washington was like, no, if you, if you want to do it, like we're going to start doing it tonight. And they did. And they like never looked back. And that's basically just what happened. And you know, that's an infield that has a lot of talent in general, just in terms of, you know, general ability between Albies and Swanson and Freeman and Austin Riley. But they got considerably better as a group once they started changing their alignments a bit.

one of the things that I really enjoyed both about this piece and sort of the insight that it gave me was that, you know, not only did they have buy-in from Washington, but they, they sat that infield down and they had a couple of front office personnel there and, and Brian Snicker was in the room and they sort of talked through not only the logistics of the shift, but what it feels like to actually be participating in that. And some of the moments where, you know, the infielders had insight about what it would be like to actually be going through the motions of doing that. And it seemed like such a smart way to approach this.

Cause I think that part of what we hear from players, especially pitchers around the shift is that they really hate it when a ball kind of makes its way to the outfields that were they in a traditional alignment would have been you know caught or you know thrown for an out and this it seemed like they despite their haste in in implementing it really did manage to get ahead of any of those questions by how they approached implementing this for their infield yeah like you said they had a meeting after they made the change that night. And then a few days later, they all sat down together. And it does make a lot of

sense. Like, as you said, no one wants to ever make a mistake or feel like they're in a position to do something wrong. You don't want to be the pitcher, certainly, that is watching these balls go by behind you. You want to have understanding across the group of like, how is this going to work? And like, you can, you know, point to the statistics of how often it works and what that means. But I think it is different to like sit down and be like, okay, how does everyone feel? And like, what can we work out together to make sure everyone's comfortable? Which I think just generally is a good way to run a workplace, which this kind of is, it literally is. And it just, you know, it makes sense. You want people to feel good, no one to feel like they're in a position that they're not comfortable with, or they don't really know what they're doing. And

so that was a big part of it for them. And another component of that was that they give the pitchers the final say that if, you know, because they've had this general work of getting buy-in across the board, the pitchers are generally pretty comfortable with having a shifted defense behind them, but that they do have a system where if the pitcher says, like, I'm not cool, like, please go back to a traditional alignment right now, they're given the right to do that basically just to call them off. and the right to do that basically just to call them off. It does seem like an approach that would be a good one to replicate when you're trying to integrate cybermetric concepts into gameplay because it doesn't treat anyone in the process

as having a more inherently informed voice on a question, right? Like the infielders were bringing their expertise, the front office folks were bringing theirs, and everyone gets to kind of chat through the parts that are either exciting or confounding to them, but they're doing it on kind of a level playing field in a way that I imagine if you're a player and you're used to having all of this, you know, like stats and stuff thrown at you is probably a really welcome shift in approach. And I don't say that about like the, you know, Braves front office in particular, but just front offices generally, where being granted sort of your own expertise

in a moment has to really change the way that you enter those conversations. Yeah, it's interesting. This didn't end up in the piece, but in talking to Anthopolis, who's been there since 2017, and obviously has been around front offices long before that, he said something he tried to do that season, his first season with the Braves, was he was focused more on outfield positioning. And he had Nick Markakis, who was the most veteran outfielder they had, a little more traditional in some ways. And Anthopoulos asked him, can you think about, you know, think about doing some different positioning? I'll give you this card that, you know, that now is ubiquitous that you'll put in your pocket. And Markeikis was like, I'll put the card in my pocket. Not like,

I'll look at it or I'll, you know, I'm willing to like really entertain this. And that eventually that changed over the course of the season. But Anthopolis said that kind of made him realize, like, it can't just be, here's your card, this is what you're doing. It needs to be a process more like what we saw them do here. And I think in general, over the last four seasons, you've seen what was already happening in terms of those traditional barriers between front office and on-field stuff being broken down even more. And I think this is kind of just another example of that, that it's not really, you know, these are two separate entities. It's everyone working together. Yeah. And I do love the primacy that Ron Washington has in this story because I liked the way you framed this, that we shouldn't think of him as strictly old

school. Like he clearly has insight that's really valuable here and a willingness to to implement stuff that he thinks will work and who like truly who better to get an infield prepped for this kind of thing it's like i'm sure every team in baseball is like oh how should we get washington to like run our shift to the shift that sounds great yeah and it's you know of course i i this came out i think the morning of game one and then in game two there were several just not the best infield play for them and a couple of moments of balls getting through you know being hit the other way to escape the shift and I was like I thought this would be the one thing that could be like evergreen throughout this series

and of course it is not but yes as we as we saw in story, they clearly are committed to it and one game will not throw them off. Yeah, I think that once you've gotten over the initial shock of that being just a reality of any strategy, right, you're never going to field every single ball cleanly. And especially if you've had a couple of games in a row where balls have gotten through that would have been gobbled up if they had been shifted. I imagine that that's a starting point where you're able to sustain your confidence in a strategy for much longer than if there hadn't been the buy-in that they had and they hadn't had that prior experience.

They're like, well, we remember what it's like when it doesn't work the other direction. So this is probably pretty sound, at least for a while. Right, exactly. I want to leverage your in-person experience a bit more and ask you what it is like to be at one of these very, very long postseason games in person, because there has been a tremendous amount of discourse on the length of playoff games. you know when your average runtime is approaching four hours we're not there yet obviously but it seems to creep up every year that perhaps things are not as efficient or as easy to watch as they ought to be so what it is what is it like to be in ballpark during one of these games because you know when a fan gets bored they can just leave but you have to stay until the game is done yeah it is true i i cannot just leave. I actually thought game one provided a really interesting look at the difference between pace of play and length of

play. And that's the first couple of innings were extremely long, but also pretty exciting. Like there was a good amount of traffic on the base paths, stuff was happening there. It was good baseball to watch, even though I think I mean, the first two innings were I think it was like almost an hour it was very long innings. And then after that the game just kind of slowed to a crawl and it like was taking about the same amount of time but was proceeding much more slowly and less interestingly. In that you know, through those first couple of innings, I had seen some of the Twitter discourse of like, this is taking forever. And I was like, but this is great baseball, like, I'm having a great time. And then like, two hours later, I was like, well, not so much anymore. And so I don't know,

that to me is still the big dividing line of like, there are some long baseball games that are genuinely great baseball games. And then there are others that are very much not and um yeah I mean I know there are like big picture concerns with television and fan interest and all of that stuff that game one I think ended up being it was over four hours I believe like four hours and six minutes or something I know nobody wants that but in terms of the experience of it like as long as it's you know a pleasure to watch I don't mind the other part so much which is also helped by the fact that I'm not someone with a print newspaper deadline to meet I know some of the writers very much have reasons for different motivations on

that count but yeah I haven't been like a god at any point yet although the later innings of game one did test me somewhat do you have a preferred approach to sort of solving those issues and helping to not even, like you said, not even to necessarily shorten every game, but to pick up the pace? I like the idea of a pitch clock. I have seen a few minor league games with it, don't find it intrusive. You know, I would be shocked if we don't get that more substantively integrated to the major league level soon. Other than that, I'm kind of torn. You know, I know there are, I think one big thing for the playoffs is that the commercial length times are increased, although I know that's never going back.

But that would certainly help. You know, I know there are various suggestions on ways to stop batters from stepping out of the box so much. I'm not sure how, if there's a good way to curb that without being unnecessarily strict about it. But yeah, I think for now, like the pitch clock is the one that just stands out to me and it makes a lot of sense and should just happen already. Yeah, that seems to be the emerging consensus. At least, you know, that is certainly the way to do it while being potentially the least intrusive to the game as it's played now. And like you said, so many of these guys have, have used it before. That's not like it would be completely new territory for them. So I think I,

I think I tend to agree. There's a, there's an emerging effectively wild stance on this question that our guests are providing. It is always weird to record podcasts surrounding the World Series because unless you're doing it like I did yesterday on an off day, you know that you're going to post something that is pretty quickly out of date. But we have the lovely benefit of three games. We know we are not facing elimination tonight, and I thought that we would perhaps use a listener email as a way to talk about the the series as it will be played in atlanta so this is from listener josh uh part of a longer email he sent that says happy world series just now after learning that charlie

morton will be out for the rest of the series a braves fan friend texted our group chat should we be allowed to adopt a replacement from a team we vanquished? Get Max Scherzer in there. Needless to say, I love this idea. I bet you do. Dead arm and all. If we adjusted the rules of the playoffs so that each time a team won a series, they could draft a player from the team they vanquished, it would be very awesome, and we would learn a lot about what teams feel their weaknesses are headed into the next round of play. Here's my question. For both the World Series teams, who would you have drafted from their championship series opponents if you're the braves do you draft scherzer like my friend suggested or do you go with a pitcher with more bullpen experience like julio urias might you

instead take will smith and upgrade one of the holes in your lineup similarly it would just be wildly confusing to have multiple will smiths on the same team similarly if you're the astros and as an aside the astros are in need of a catching Will Smith, but that's neither here nor there. Do you just take a Red Sox smasher, Schwarber, Martinez, Hernandez, Devers, whomever, or do you take Evaldi to shore up your rotation, or do you strengthen your bullpen with Nick Pavetta? So Emma, we're going to do a little mini draft. And by mini, I mean, we'll probably just pick one person. But let's start with Atlanta. If you were Atlanta and you could take anyone on the Dodgers to address areas of team need, who would you take? As much as I love the idea of a double Will Smith roster tandem, I just think you have

to go with pitching here. Even if this draft presumably would have taken place before game one, sure, before you knew about Charlie Morden, I think even in that case, you know, especially without, you know, having been hurt, knowing that your pitching depth was not as considerable as it had entered the playoffs, I think I really like the Scherzer pick, I think I would go with that, just because that gives you the flexibility of either as a additional starter, which I would imagine would be just because that gives you the flexibility of either as a additional starter, which I would imagine would be the most straightforward way to use him, or as a bullpen super weapon. I think also just the sheer brainpower and insight you get from adding him,

who not only just faced you, but also faced you for a very long time in the NL East with Washington. I think it's hard not to go with him. So I would pick Scherzer. I think Scherzer is the right pick. I think Scherzer or Buehler is probably the way to go just to shore up that rotation. Like you said, even absent and absent Morton, you can always use more starters there. I do wonder, do you worry about the dead arm stuff? Do you just count on rest right-handed reliever to that bullpen because they're so lefty heavy and so it would give you another option there i mean their their lefties have been very good i don't mean to say that they aren't but you might end up being like you know blake trinan come on down bruce stark lateral come try to punch god on our behalf doesn't it

look like he's trying to punch god as he exits the mound he really does and it's interesting because he like to watch him throw it's such a relaxed low-key delivery which is just a wild thing to say about someone who throws that hard and then you watch him like step off the mountain it's like oh like there's all the intensity i would have expected to see you throwing like 102 with right it. It's funny though, if we allow for substitution sort of after game one, I think you definitely go with pitching. And I think you probably go with pitching even if you have to make these selections before the World Series rosters are otherwise set. But you know, when you think about Atlanta's offense in contrast with Houston's, I do wonder if perhaps you look to some of the Dodgers boppers and just say, you know, it wouldn't be the worst thing to like add one of these bats to the mix.

Although I guess like, what do you do? You displace a part of your fantastic rebuilt outfield with Mookie Betts. I mean, yeah, you would do that. You would just be like, sorry, right. Ride the bench a little bit here. But so that's that's Atlanta what what would you do if you were the Astros and could take someone from the Red Sox yeah when I was originally reading the top half of this question I was just like I feel like in like nine out of ten scenarios no matter

the team or the opposing team like you're going to want to add pitching depth because that's such a problem in October. But the bottom of the Astros lineup, it really is such a weird experience. You go pretty much straight from Jordan Alvarez, very tough out, to just a wasteland. But I know that they really respect Maldonado as a catcher and don't want to move him out of the lineup despite his bat. And then you have Jose Siri, if the speed on the base pass counts for something there. But yeah, despite my general thinking that it's probably smartest to add a pitcher, I am a lot more open to adding a hitter for Houston. Yeah, I don't know. I think I'm almost interested in taking Will Smith here

to replace Maldonado. And give some cross-league substitutions. Yeah. Oh, geez. Sorry. I was not thinking there. It's a hypothetical. We can bend it however we want to, Emma. That's the great thing about these emails is that we get to say you get to do whatever you want then you could also have the added benefit of trying to take who you think your opponent is going to take right yes oh i like that if it's and and the thing about the thing that would make this well in some ways it would make it more fun although it probably makes the answers more obvious because imagine you go to both of these teams and you just allow them to draft any player from any roster that has been eliminated from the playoffs that had that

was a playoff team and has since been eliminated and then i think both of these teams just take brewer starters probably they're like great we would like a corbin burns please can we have one corbin burns and if he is unavailable can we just go down the rest of that rotation and pluck guys? But yeah, it would be very interesting if they got to draft from a common pool, because do you prioritize the needs that are most pressing on your own roster? Probably, but the temptation to scoop a guy so that your opponent can't have him, I imagine that, especially for a team like Houston, that might just be too dastardly to resist, right? That would be great. Game three of Corbin Burns versus Brandon Woodruff. Right, exactly. But okay, I'm glad my like temporary

brain confusion there added a little bit of intrigue there. But I guess I would probably take, I think you have to take a hitter for Houston, even if you're going by the bounds of the original question. I think Martinez maybe. Kike Hernandez, I think perhaps, because then you have the defensive flexibility too. I think that probably might be my answer is take Kike. Yeah. I think that if you're going to take a hitter, he's the one that makes the most sense for Houston because you know it's not as if the Red Sox catching core is like that much of an offensive upgrade I mean they definitely are an offensive upgrade but I think that it's the gap is narrow enough that you're probably not

looking to their catchers poor Kevin Ploiecki no no more postseason games for you and if you take Kike like you said you get the positional versatility they already have to deal with what to do with alvarez when they are in an nl ballpark so you probably don't want to add martinez because then you're just compounding that fielding problem and really compounding it because like alvarez is serviceable in the outfield and martinez is just patently not anymore so like that would be bad. I would, I would be tempted though, if I were Houston, especially after losing McCullers to just take Evaldi and like say that we have enough of a conveyor belt in the lineup that

we can kind of keep rolling with what we have. But I wish, see, this is where I wish that we would lean into the fun of strategy more because we talk about the NL and like pitching changes and all of that is true, but you just end up with these long games. This is where you can introduce like fun strategy to baseball and not like monkey with time of game or have endless pitching substitutions, right? Like we should do more of this stuff. Does it make it kind of gimmicky? I mean, yeah, but like in a fun way, right? Like this is fun gimmick. I would very much enjoy this gimmick. I also feel like a lot of players would enjoy this gimmick.

Like that's got to be a fun experience. I say this is a great suggestion to enter into the record as, you know, next CBA. If we take out pitcher's hitting, we add the universal DH. This can be our fun playoff strategy boost to make up for it yeah i think that that would be great i i also remain in favor of playoff teams being able to borrow players from other rosters for the postseason once those teams have been eliminated from contention and this is not just because i want us to figure out a way to get mike trout into the playoffs every year and otani too right like you just want your best guys there the teams would never agree

to it because you don't want to lend your player out for use for another squad that doesn't care about what happens to him after October at least not in the same way you do but I've been in favor of that I mean I've been in favor of that really since Felix just didn't get to go to the post season in the course of his Seattle career but I think that this strikes been in favor of that really since Felix just didn't get to go to the postseason in the course of his Seattle career. But I think that this strikes the right balance of being a fun gimmick while not being like a weird talk radio suggestion. So good job, Effectively Wild listeners. You remain the best. Are there any other World Series related thoughts that you would like to get on the Effectively Wild record before we shift a little bit to Bob Melvin

and the Padres? Not particularly. I will say it currently looks very much like rain in Atlanta before game three, which I realize will be out of date shortly after this drops. But I will just state for the record and put out into the universe that I would really appreciate it that it not rain, even if that does make Atlanta's pitching management easier and that I would really appreciate it that it not rain, even if that does make Atlanta's pitching management easier and that it would give them max read on full rest for game five. Yeah. I am curious to see how they treat this because it's either going to be, even if it doesn't

rain as much as it says it will, it'll be like a steady drizzle and kind of miserable generally, which is not the vibe I think anyone wanted. But yeah, it's another fun strategy wrinkle what if it rains everyone's favorite can i ask you a question that i have not been to minute made so i don't know if this is a function of how the ballpark appears on the broadcast and i i don't candidly don't know how it compares to like sort of league average. But was your impression of the minute made infield that it was particularly wet compared to other infields? That ballpark always looks like it has gone through a sopping rain like two hours before first pitch. And I don't know if it's just like the particular infielder that they're using.

Or if they really are just having the grounds crew, you know, water it down. Did it strike you that way or is this like a weird figment of the broadcast imagination? So it did look wetter than average in real life, but it didn't look, I did see some on TV. It looked extremely wet on TV. Okay. It looks like, okay. What a question. It's clearly a little damp in real life, but it didn't look, yes.

I saw on TV and it looked like it had been drenched and it did not look quite that bad in real life. So you are not wrong. It was not as extreme. Yeah. The degree was not as intense. I mean, like, you know, that seems like perfectly reasonable, like brinksmanship for teams if they, like if they have you know

ground ball guys and they want to like get it a little muddy i'm fine with that but i just couldn't tell if my perception of it was was accurate or not so i it is it is some amount of what but not an absurd amount of what is what we have arrived at okay well i i will ask you to, before we shift to Melvin, to just sort of give me your expectations for how many games we get left, how many more games we are likely to play in the World Series, and then who you have emerging victorious. And you should keep in mind that I don't know who you predicted for SI. So if you have had a change of heart since then, you could say it and I wouldn't know and I won't tell anyone so my my si pick was Atlanta in seven okay I'm now post-mortem loss I that sounds I hadn't said that out loud it sounds remarkably like post-mortem I think I'm gonna go Houston in six I mean I think a big chunk of it is just I I don't think back-to-back bullpen games for Atlanta, if that ends up being what it is, is quite as dire as it sounds.

I agree. Yeah, I thought the way Ben laid it out for Fangraphs.com was very good and showed the pathway they can get there. But I do think that it's a lot in general. That is just like, it's a lot in general. And then even though you would then have a travel day, if you pick up one of these games, it just, I'm not sure I see a reliable path for them going all the way here. Although I wouldn't be shocked if it does happen.

So I'll go Houston and six. Okay, Houston and six. You heard it here first after a daring pivot from your initial prediction. Okay, let's talk about Bob Melvin. The news broke yesterday that the Padres have hired Melvin to manage their ball club. He signed a three-year deal with them,

ending a very long and successful tenure with the Oakland Athletics. I find this move fascinating not only for what it means for the Padres, which we should definitely talk about, but also what it might signal for Oakland and how they perceive their sort of competitive picture going forward and what other moves it might portend for them. So I guess let's start with what this means for San Diego. What is your sense of both what San Diego needed in their next managerial hire and how well Melvin sort of answers that call? Yeah, as you said, it's very interesting just because it's such an about face from not just what they had in Tingler, but I mean, their last three managers were all first time managers,

which very much creates at least an impression of a power dynamic between the front office and the manager that is, I think, somewhat different than what you expect when you have someone who is not just not a first time manager, but someone who has the experience of Melvin or some of the other candidates they were reportedly interviewing. So yeah, it's very interesting to me. I like it for them. I'm curious to see how it plays out. But yeah, I was not expecting that. Yeah, I think that it is. I mean, he is so well respected in the game that it would probably be considered sort of a statement higher regardless.

But I think especially in contrast to what they have had over the last couple of years, it really signals that they think that there is like a change in direction that is necessary for this club to kind of get over the hurdle and move forward. I mean, I think it's hard when you have a year like San Diego had where you have just so many injuries and you have a pitching staff that is so hurt for so much of the season to really get a great sense of a clubhouse's reaction to a manager because it's hard to say what is this sucks for us generally like we thought we were going to be playing in October and now we're looking up at both the Dodgers and the Giants and what of it is this particular guy isn't really gelling with our

players and I don't know what the what the balance of that is but it will be I think kind of a pleasant departure for them to have someone like Melvin come in and be able to, you know, give, give guidance to some of the younger guys. But he's also, I think, done a good job over, over his tenure of not being like overbearing from a clubhouse culture perspective. Like, I don't think that that's his reputation within the sport. So it doesn't seem like last year when LaRusso was hired, we were like, Oh God, what is this clubhouse going to do in response to this guy? And Melvin clearly doesn't have that kind of a reputation. So I'm curious to see kind of how all those guys gel together with him, but I would be optimistic. Plus like, you know, you're, you're staying in California. You get to continue to enjoy

great weather, good food. Like if you're Bob Melvin, you're doing great. Yeah. Seems like a great move for him. And on the subject of his clubhouse demeanor, I will say I did a piece on the athletics in 2018 for, I think, for SI. And I described him just in passing as avuncular. And the PR staff wrote me a note afterward and were like, we've never seen Bob described that way, but I think it fits very well. And I was like, okay, win for the SAT adjectives. But I would stand by that. I do think he is rather avuncular. And as you said, like, by all accounts, not overbearing. Yeah. And so yes, avuncular. Yeah. I imagine it's a, you know, it's a hard thing to strike a balance there because you want to, you want to be able to sort of apply a direction and be a leader,

but you also want to give guys room to sort of flourish and be themselves and, and play in a, in a fun and loose way. And finding the balance on that, especially in a year where the club struggles overall, I imagine is a real challenge. So I guess if anyone's going to be up to that, it's going to be him. What do you think this signals for the A's in terms of their direction, both sort of immediately for 2022 and then over the next couple of years? Generally not great. I guess I mean, part of it is I'm not sure

quite how much stock to put in this one move, because as you said, there's a lot of things that are very appealing about this for Melvin, just in terms of what he's going to not what he's walking away from so i mean who knows maybe like he was just in the ready for a change like this and who doesn't want to live in san diego and yeah you know i'm sure there is some of that at play instead of just you know wanting to get out of oakland but uh yeah i would I would imagine it doesn't bode particularly well that there was nothing that he thought would be there going forward, making him want to stay around for it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It'll be interesting to see if they, you know, really move into full sort of teardown mode. Obviously, their stadium situation is still kind of up in

the air, although I know there's been some positive movement from the Oakland City Council. It's so weird to describe it as positive because it's like, I don't really want the city of Oakland to have to front money for a new ballpark. But in terms of them staying in the Bay Area, it seems like there's been some positive movement there. But I wonder if this sort of signals that they think relative to, you know, a Houston team that will be presumably less good next year without Carlos Correa, it seems like it can't be quite as good. And maybe a good Mariners team, Emma, maybe a good Mariners team. And then, you know, at some point, the Angels will probably get their act together and put a playoff team on the field?

Question mark. Could happen. Don't know. I think just like the law of averages dictates that it should eventually, like if you run out this roster with Trout and Otani long enough. But that also doesn't account for Angels energy, like whatever surrounds their pitching staff. Yeah. No matter who was on it. And that is

a very powerful force yeah yeah i think that it is one of the um underrated bad vibes in baseball like if we're ranking the bad vibes i i think that that one's on there and people um people discount it but we really shouldn't because it's keeping two of the game's like brightest stars from playing in October on a regular basis and that seems bad it seems bad that we we are in yet another year where we didn't have Trout or Otani in the postseason although I guess Trout's availability would have been in question wouldn't that have sucked if they had managed to like go on some kind of a tear and they finally make the playoffs and then Trout isn't there it's sort of like how I feel like this uh Atlanta team is the guys they have on the field and then Trout isn't there. It's sort of like how I feel like this Atlanta team is.

The guys they have on the field are great fun, but it is very strange that they might win a World Series without Acuna. That seems bad. Well, Emma, I want to allow you to return to the mall if you want to do that and get to the ballpark on time. Thank you for joining me. What would you like to plug for our listeners? We'll link to the shift piece,

but do you have anything else that folks should check out? I do not. I am on Twitter with my name. And yeah, thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure. I hope that you get to encounter the Cinnabon smell soon. Likewise. That'll do it for today.

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If you're a supporter, thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. I'll be back next week with new guest co-hosts and new episodes until then enjoy the world series. new episodes. Until then, enjoy the World Series. never lies or picks up his phone.