Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1768: The Braves Blueprint

Episode Date: November 5, 2021

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Ben’s return from podcast paternity leave, the quality of the 2021 postseason, whether the Braves were underrated or simply overperformed, what teams might learn from and emulate about Atlanta’s success, postseason pitcher usage and game length, the career and retirement of Buster Posey, their upcoming discussion of TV […]

Everywhere eyes, nowhere to die, no place to shove your sharp end heel. Looking, looking for a tight face in case you want it to go. I know I'm leaning in to the end. Hello and welcome to episode 1768 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs, and I am joined once again by Ben Lindbergh of The Ringer. Ben, welcome back. Meg, as the father of a daughter, I'm happy to be here with you today. I'll just preface all my sentences with that from now on. Yeah, it's apparently a very relevant character trait. You know, I think, Ben, I had a great deal of respect and also affection for you as a person and a colleague, a friend. But nothing makes you truly appreciate just how much work someone else does to make your life easy like them going on paternity leave for a month.

So thank you for being back. And thank you for doing all that you do for the pod that I probably did not express sufficient gratitude for before. Well, you made my life easier and my daughter Sloan's life easier for the past five weeks or so as well. So thank you very much for all that you did. It was wonderful to have the podcast to listen to just as a member of the public. And you did a great job. And I'm grateful that you kept it going during, I know, your busiest and toughest month of the year.

So thank you and apologies again for my family planning or lack thereof. It was my great pleasure. I only regret that I used the Welcome Back, Cotter theme already this week to start the episode with Jeff because we could have really used it this one but um you'll have to come up with your own musical interludes from now on so um good luck with that yeah well thanks to you and thanks to dylan for his production assistance absolutely i am back parenting complete mission accomplished sloan is self-sufficient so i'm sure she can take it from here actually i'm i'm being told apparently i have to be a father for the rest of my life. Yeah.

So I have to keep doing that, but we'll also do the podcast now. Still on leave at my day job at The Ringer, but wanted to be back here and not have to force you to get an endless string of guest co-hosts. So it's been an interesting five weeks for both of us, I think. And we're all still alive over here and functioning fairly well, I guess. Just based solely on the first five weeks, I wouldn't give Parenthood the greatest reviews. I understand that it gets a bit better from here. reviews i i understand that it gets a bit better from here uh but it's been fun everyone's uh alive and and fairly happy and healthy so things are going okay that's good i'm glad to hear that yeah i mean like we've talked at various points it's really remarkable that we survive as a

species yeah we're so vulnerable in the early going, just like really, just really vulnerable in that early run. Babies are bad at everything. Yeah. I mean, not one thing do they do well, really. Maybe one or two, but just really the most basic tasks they are incapable of completing. So I really had to be there. And of course, Jessie, my wife, had to be there.

And yeah, it really is a wonder i guess we all depended on someone at that stage of our lives or we wouldn't be here because no one is self-sufficient from birth so i am happy to be back and i guess the sad news is that the mlp season is over and we're staring at a month of talking about whether there will be a lockout or not but on the plus side i'm back so yeah that's something yeah i think babies are really a testament to how powerful being cute can be yeah right because like they like they can't even really focus their eyes all the way they definitely don't have object permanence their necks are all floppy and some of their are awesome, but a lot of them are bad,

or at least are a preview of bad, squishy things to come. But when I talk to friends and family of mine who are parents, they're pretty in on the endeavor, even though really all that's carrying it, like the carrying tool in the early going, they are pretty stinking cute to look at yeah so it's amazing cute all the time like they're definitely parts of the time where they're not cute or endearing at all yeah but they do their best to make up with for it the other times so yeah it's uh i i had as many post-season played appearances as Terrence Gore, but no rings. I was busier than he was.

Former Effectively Wild guest Terrence Gore. Now up to three world championships in his career. What an incredible career he has had. Yeah, really remarkable. Yeah, so I've missed out on all the postseason storylines, so I figured we could talk a little bit about some postseason stuff that I was not present for. And of course, the World Series as well, and some takeaways from that, which I know you have discussed a bit with Eric this week. And it was a pleasure to just follow

along like everyone else. Didn't know when an episode was dropping. It was a nice surprise when it appeared in my feed, and then I got to listen to it. And as I told you on one of our Patreon live streams, it was an unusual experience for me as a listener, just because listening to the podcast was very similar to recording the podcast in some ways in that we don't do video generally when we're recording the podcast. You're just a voice in my ears. I'm a voice in your ears. And that is very much what listening to a podcast is like as well. And so for me as a listener, it was like the same sort of experience, except that when you stop talking, I was not expected to start talking, but I was like prepared to start talking

in case you needed me to, which I guess, again, kind of mirrors the parasocial relationships that people have with podcasts in general. In this case, it's a little less weird because we do have an actual relationship, but just the many hours of like, okay, listen to Meg. What am I going to say next? Got to have something prepared to say next, except now I was not expected to say anything. And if I did, I was just talking to myself, but I think your guest co-host did a great job and mostly said the things that I would have said anyway. So it was wonderful. And here I am. Here you are. Yeah, they were the, I think that if we were going to name a hero of this last month, from my perspective, it was certainly Dylan. But very close behind him were all of the folks who

were nice enough to come on and hang out with me for an hour at a time and you know fill the fill the benless void some of those people were even named ben so that's right that made it easier yeah but yeah i think i missed more episodes in the past five weeks than i had in the previous nine years combined so i'm fresh i guess not really because i was helping keep a newborn alive during that time but maybe this will be like the gap year we've talked about that Salvador Perez and Buster Posey took and I'll come back refreshed and I'll be a more productive podcaster than ever that's my hope yeah although I hope that you end up taking a slightly different route than Posey took at the end of his year back because then I'm gonna have to fill a lot of episodes.

Yeah, we will discuss that a little later on today. But I love off-season effectively, while it is maybe my favorite time to do the podcast, even though in theory there's a little less to talk about. And who knows how long this off-season will last. We might get an extra long off-season. And we survived a pandemic-imposed work stoppage. So presumably we can survive whatever comes next here. And we can talk a little bit about that next week and for the next

month or however long that all takes to resolve. But today I figured we could just recap a little because I felt like this was a great regular season. I had a lot of fun this regular season. There were a lot of interesting storylines. The post-season was a little bit of a letdown for me, I guess, maybe. And I don't know if that was partly because I was following it in a different way than I would have if I had been blogging and podcasting regularly. But I feel like objectively, if there were a way to quantify this, it was not that great a postseason it certainly had its moments yeah and atlanta fans are very happy with how it turned out but if you were to try to assess the quality of a postseason i guess you could say well there were no game sevens at any point right and there

were a lot of teams making repeat appearances so there was sort of a shortage at least in the later rounds of like fresh faces and yeah teams that we hadn't seen and there were a lot of signature players of the regular season who were absent from the playoffs just because of all the injuries or because their teams didn't make it and other than dodgers giants which delivered. And if I had to pick a best series or a highlight, it would be that. And I'm sorry that that came in that round instead of a later round when there might have been more games. But other than that, probably you would say that the very best teams of the year were not in it at the end, which I guess is not a prerequisite for it being entertaining. But it is something that I generally look for and when you

do have all those injuries and in October just turns into a war of attrition and when the World Series champion is relying on Dylan Lee and Tucker Davidson and Kyle Wright to win and that's not to take anything away from the Braves who had an incredible pitching and defense performance and got past the Brewers it got past the Dodgers and shut down the Astros, the best offense in baseball in that final series, despite the cameos from pitchers that many people had never heard of. Like that took a little bit away from it for me. Like I would have rather have seen McCullers and Morton and Soroka and Acuna for that matter, or all the other missing faces from the postseason. So that was my general takeaway.

Like, if I had to sit out a postseason, I guess I'm not sorry that it was this one. And it's a tough time to cover baseball in general, especially as a podcaster, because as you discovered, there is no great time to record and post episodes without everything immediately being out of date but also because it's just hard to analyze individual games and even individual series in a way that really yields fresh insights for one thing because everyone's talking about the same baseball which is great in some ways because we're all paying attention to the same stuff but also we're all talking about the same stuff and so it's hard to say something that other people aren't saying, but also it's just hard to analyze baseball on a weekly or daily basis. So for all those reasons, I guess if I had to go on leave,

maybe I picked a decent time from my perspective, but not from yours. Yeah. I think that the point about it being hard to analyze is a good one because we have a version of this early in the season right where it's it's so early in the campaign that you're just like this could mean a lot or it could mean nothing who's to say like we don't know check back in two months and then we'll have a better sense of it but you you don't even have the promise of eventually being able to circle back and answer that question of like yeah this, this guy's really breaking out or no, that was like a weird little bit of flukiness. You just have to say, Eddie Rosario, good forever. I don't know, man. Maybe, maybe not. Could be true. Could end up being silly. You don't really

have that part of it. And I think I agree that this was sort of a, you know, at best an average, potentially a little bit below average World Series. Because I think about when the Nationals won, they were not the best team in baseball, right? In some ways, they're a really good parallel. But they were the opposite of Atlanta in that when you had their innings concentrated, it was like in their really good starters because their bullpen was not good and unreliable.

And some of those guys were hurt. And so I think that you don't necessarily need the best team to win, but it helps when the team that's there is able to showcase players who are legitimately stars, even if they aren't on the best team. It would have been one thing. I don't mean to say that Atlanta's run wasn't fun. It was really cool that Eddie Rosario was like the guy that's weird yeah but great but i think it might have felt a little bit different if you know they had gotten to atlanta had gotten to the world series and like

ronald lacuna jr had led them to a win right and they they got good performances from some of their players to be sure um and i thought that they were managed very smartly especially given the the injuries but no it was not quite a banner world series offering i think you're right that like dodgers giants really was the most exciting series of the bunch and it probably helps that we saw we saw more starters than of. Like we got to enjoy Logan Webb. We got to talk about, you know, openers. That was fun. So that was a good series.

But some of the ones that I expected to find the most dynamic kind of disappointed. Like I didn't think that, you know, Milwaukee versus Atlanta didn't live up to the billing that I was kind of expecting. And that's not just because I expected Milwaukee to advance. I offered badly, Ben. I did not do well at all in my predictions. I think I maybe got a little too cute. Yeah, I actually ran the table.

I picked every series perfectly correctly. I didn't publish my picks anywhere just because I was on leave. So it's not really on record, but you can just take my word for it that I nailed it all I was actually going to ask you about that whether the Braves obviously they surprised right I think most people and if you're an Atlanta fan I'm sure that you're thrilled to win no matter how you won or who you won oh yeah so like if anything the fact that you're reduced to like the dregs of the roster, and you're calling up people you haven't seen in months, and you still win, maybe that makes it

sweeter in a way. I don't know, just because it wasn't all the usual suspects. And you were really just pulling out all the stops to get there. And that fact that you said that, yeah, sometimes it just comes down to which team has an incredible month from its bullpen or any rosario just goes wild for a couple weeks like that makes the postseason much harder to analyze or predict but not necessarily less enjoyable it can be a lot of fun that one of those players or an entire team or a unit of a team has an out of character performance for a while but do you feel like you or everyone underrated the Braves entering October or was it just one of those months and and it wasn't like they fluked their way to the title like they probably did have the the best month of any postseason team like they

outplayed probably better teams in those playoffs they earned it but do you think that people were low on them or appropriately because you know i guess the fangraph staff projected who would win or predicted who would win the world series and all of the various series entering october and of the 28 people who made predictions no one picked the braves to win the World Series, right? Which is maybe less strange than it sounds, because if you better chance, then it's not actually that unusual that everyone would have sort of similar picks. I'm kind of thinking back to when I was the editor at BP and we would produce our predictions and we'd get accused of groupthink if we had too many similar predictions which can be a thing certainly but like also sometimes the underdog just wins and it's not really that surprising that no one projected them to win because they were the underdog and you don't you don't project the underdog to win but do you think that they were more of an underdog than they should have been no i i i struggle to

think i think that they were sort of appropriately pegged as the weakest team in the field. Other than the Cardinals, maybe? Yeah, other than St. Louis. I think that St. Louis and Atlanta were at the bottom of that if you were going to recede purely based on how they had performed over the course of the season or even the second half. Like, if we're being generous and we're only looking at Atlanta following their trade deadline activity, which is commendable that they decided, like, hey, we're not going to just sit this out. We're going to go for it, right?

They were, let's see, by our version of war, they, oh, I should take pictures out of this soon, Ben. We're not going to have to... We're just not going to have to do it. So they were, among their position players, they were the 11th best team in baseball. If we look at their pitching, they were... See, the fact that I'm having to scroll seems like a bad thing they were 12th

their sort of staff in total if you look at their starters they were 12th if you look at their relievers they were 13th and granted like there are some ties in there and some of these differences are minute and and so like i don't mean to – Oh, I went into a full season split again. Okay, hold on. Sorry, Dylan. Oh, this helps my case. So in the second half, their relievers were 14th in baseball and their starters were –

Their starters were ninth. Okay, so, you know, like, they were a fine team. They were not the worst team. It wasn't like they snuck in, like in the bottom third, but like they were, I think obviously weaker than the teams that were ahead of them with the possible exception of St. Louis. And so I think that they were sort of properly gauged. I think that it is useful for all of us as we go into predicting October baseball to just at the beginning of every prediction, everyone should remember that every writer is saying a lot can happen in a short series. That said, here's who I think will win. Right.

Like we are always trying to caveat performance in October with the understanding that we are going to just not be able to make as reliable predictions as we would over a larger sample because it's you know it's like not very many games it's just not very many games at all so i think that it was an appropriate amount of skepticism of their ability to advance relative to the other teams that they faced in the national league and then against the astros and to their credit atlanta just like flat out outplayed a lot of those teams. Like you said, they did not fluke their way in. They had a couple guys get hot at the right time. They had tremendous performances out of that bullpen.

And like I said, I think they were managed very smartly in terms of how their pitchers were deployed. And the pitchers that were sent out sort of rose to the occasion. You can have smart strategy that just kind of goes right because guys have to execute. And they had both things. They were put in a position to succeed and then they did that. So I think they were worthy World Series winners based on their play in October. And I think thinking that they were likely to lose in an earlier round

and certainly against Houston is defensible too. So, you know, that just gets to be cool for Atlanta. Like I continue to think that we are missing an opportunity to marvel at stuff when our focus on the playoff odds becomes these predictions are bad, like these projections are wrong. And it's like well clearly they You know accounted for a certain Set of factors at one time and then those

Factors changed and the changing of it Was really spectacular and that's really cool Yeah yeah and Atlanta Had not won a World Series since 1995 And they've had many opportunities To do so and they had not even Made a World Series since 1999 So again their fans should be thrilled

at their success and the team should be thrilled at its success and also i i saw a tweet from mark armor of saber who pointed out that this is now 15 different champions in this century and starting with 2001 i guess is when he started with so half the teams in that span, like a 20-year span, have won the World Series. And 21 have been in a World Series. And I think all but three at least made it to a championship series. Only, I think, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and San Diego have not made it. Pittsburgh and San Diego have not made it. So this is, I think, a strong argument in favor of parity know who can predict anything because I want to be open to learning from

mistakes which is a good way to learn and if you're wrong about something or you know something happens differently from how you expected it to happen then you could perhaps glean some insight from that but also you weren't necessarily wrong about it it's just that it's an impossible task to try to predict the playoffs and i think you can run into mistakes sometimes if you look at a team's full season numbers and that doesn't reflect the composition of that team's roster when the playoffs finally roll around which is the case with atlanta obviously they were without some key players and they added some key players and i guess you could say well their run differential was a little

bit better than that of an 88 win team over the course of a season and if you look at the last couple months so starting on august 1st when that roster was remade they were obviously much more successful from that time 36 and 19 before the playoff started but even 36 and 19 from august 1st until the beginning of the playoffs that is fewer wins than the dodgers the giants the blue jays who didn't even make the playoffs the cardinals the yankees the rays so even if you take a selective sample and say, here's when Atlanta was really Atlanta and this was that team, like there were still a handful of teams that were a good deal more successful than the Braves were. So that's kind of my takeaway is that it's tough to have any takeaway from October. And so you just sort of sit back and enjoy it. And I think it can be dangerous to use any outcome of any individual series to make a point.

Like, even if your point is good independently, like, the outcome of that series doesn't really reinforce that point. It's like, you know, when people do the tired, like, oh, the old school team beat the analytics team or whatever, which is, you know, so passe at this point because every team is the analytics team. They're all analytics teams. Even Atlanta, like a couple of the most prominent members of that R&D department are my former colleagues with Baseball Perspectives, Mike Fast and Colin Wires, who won a World Series with the Astros and now are helping put the Braves together. So, really, they're all the same, more or less in that respect. But even if it's like, you know, when the Rays won, and I think some people tried to say, oh, well, the Rays can't win in October, whether it's because of analytics or because of the payroll.

And like, there's a valid point to be made that like, hey, maybe if the Rays did everything they do and also spent some more money, they'd be even better than they are. And, you know, if you had the same team and you also like re-sign Charlie Morton or something and he doesn't break his leg, then you'd be even better. And who knows, maybe they would have advanced. Like you could certainly say that. But also like the Rays were probably the best team in the league. They have the most wins in the league over the past two seasons and three seasons trailing only the dodgers in the nl so like it'd be hard for the race to be much

better and certainly they easily could have won a postseason series so like you can dunk on them for being miserly but not because they lost really or at least they didn't necessarily lose because they were miserly. And I've actually, I kind of wondered when people were talking about that, like if the Rays spent a little more, would they be better or would it all kind of even out? Because like, it's not a coincidence

that some of the teams that have been on the cutting edge when it comes to like Moneyball and Sabermetrics and all that stuff are the low payroll teams, right? At least initially, it was like Oakland and Cleveland and Tampa Bay. And that is probably at least in part because those teams were not going to spend. And so they had to look for other ways to make their money go further, basically. And that's still sort of the case with the raise which is not to say that they couldn't afford to spend more but if they did how much better could they be realistically given that they've already been probably the best team in the league over a few years but

also like i wonder if there is some element of like if you know that you can just go out and get the best free agent then maybe you don't work as hard to like get the you know that you can just go out and get the best free agent, then maybe you don't work as hard to get the extra 2%, whatever it is, kind of edge there. Ideally, you do both and you're like the Dodgers and you're smart and you also spend a lot. But I wonder if your whole team and your whole front office and your whole way of operating is built around the idea that we're not going to spend very much because our ownership won't let us or whatever then can you just say well if you gave them 20 million more and they could just sign charlie morton like they'd be every bit as good in every other facet of the game except then they would have charlie morton or would it be that they would like take their foot off the pedal in some other way i don't know and would it all just even out and you'd have Charlie Morton,

but maybe you wouldn't have made some other brilliant move along the way. So I kind of wonder in the like alternate history timeline of the race where they spend more money, would they actually be better over that same span? I don't know. Yeah, I think it's, you know, it's always hard. We'll never know the answer to that question. I think that maybe for me, the more interesting counterfactual to consider is that is what happens if they make the decision now with the infrastructure and personnel they have in place to do the work that they've been doing so well on the scouting and development and analytics side, if you take that existing infrastructure and say, okay, we're tired of being such an incredible regular season team and then not being able to kind of close things out when it comes to October. And we

appreciate all the randomness that goes into that month, but we'd like to be in a position where we feel like we're just a little bit ahead of where we've been when we've entered that postseason gauntlet in the last couple of months. So we're going to spend now. I think that that's the sort of fact pattern that I would be interested in seeing them pursue, not because I don't think they do an excellent job. And I think that we've talked about this before, like the view of them as not wanting to win because of their cheapness, I think misses something. I think the Rays really want to win. I think they work very, very hard to like put a competitive team on the field every year.

But I do think that you have to be so good at that other stuff if you're just foreclosing entirely an entire avenue of player acquisition. And they've been able to meet that challenge so far, which I think is incredible and like a testament to how talented their coaching staff is and their front office personnel and certainly their players. But I wonder, like, what do you do? I'm going to really badly mess up a video game analogy. Are you ready? Welcome back to the podcast, Ben.

So like imagine you're playing a video game, easier you ready welcome back to the podcast ben so like imagine you're playing a video game easier for you than for me and and you've gone through a couple of levels and you've accumulated things in the video game that you that you are happy about right you got a bunch of like um medicine for if you fight a big bad and and get a little injured and you have a bunch of different kinds of weapons and the ammo for those weapons, and you realize, huh, I've been playing on hard mode this whole time. Then you keep all your inventory,

but you just play on regular mode after that. That switch is being able to sign free agents. Then all of a sudden you're like well i've got all this banked medicine and also weapons that are cool i don't know how video games work but i'm playing just on regular mode instead of hard mode and then maybe then you uh make it past a couple more levels yeah that kind of works i think i'm so proud of myself i feel like i've done really well plays video games yeah i yeah i actually was playing a video game yesterday called kena bridge of spirits for ps5 which was a lot of fun and and kind of challenging and i beat it with a baby on my chest slumbering peacefully

while i fought a pretty tough boss and i was thinking that kind of works too because uh that game has a few different difficulty levels and the the higher the difficulty level, I find at least like the less margin for error I know that I have. And so the more focused that I am, you know, if I know that there's like a one-shot kill scenario, then I'm trying really hard not to get hit with that one shot. Whereas I know that if I have a huge health bar and I can afford to take a few hits and it won't cost me anything maybe I'll be a little less careful or maybe at least I'll pursue a different strategy and maybe I'll be more aggressive and less cautious and I'll just go for the full frontal assault instead of trying to flake someone or something because I know I have more HP to play with right and maybe that is sort of what I'm saying with the Rays.

I think what you're saying is true also. But I guess if the option to just sign Garrett Cole is not available to you or you are making it unavailable to you, then you try harder to pursue some different route of obtaining innings than, say, the Yankees do if they know that they can just go get Gary Cole I guess that's basically what I'm saying all I'm saying is that like if a team is winning a hundred games or on pace to win a hundred games as the race have been lately like they're probably really good and it would be challenging to extrapolate from postseason performance one way or another.

But yeah, if you had more money and you spent more money and you had better players, then that could only help you. But I think we can agree on that much. So with Atlanta, we've done an exercise on the pod for a few years now, just kind of looking back at a comment that Theo Epstein made in November of 2015. This was the year before the Cubs broke through and won their World Series. But Epstein said at the time when the Cubs were, I think, down in the NLCS when he said this, but he said, the only thing I know for sure is that whatever team wins the World Series, their particular style of play will be completely in vogue and trumpeted from the rooftops by the media all offseason and in front offices as the way to win. So if we win

the World Series, it's going to be a necessity for every team to develop their own core of young, homegrown position players. If the Mets win, it will be required that you have four ridiculous young starting pitchers on the same staff. Remember those days? If the Royals win, you need to have speed and athleticism in contact up and down your lineup. If the Blue Jays win, you need to fill your lineup full of right-handed epic mashers and make a huge trade at the deadline. I think that's the only thing I can say. With certainty, this game is too nuanced and too complicated for there to be any one way. So he was saying, like, there is a narrative narrative that like, you know, recency bias,

confirmation bias, whatever it is, the team that just won like, oh, there's some inefficiency, some strategy that they have developed that other teams will now copy and it's a copycat industry. And I don't know whether that actually happens because teams are probably too smart and have long-term plans to just pivot on a dime and say, oh, we have to copy that team that just won that way because another entirely different team won the year before and will win the next year. So he was kind of undercutting the idea, even as he said it, by saying that, you know, based on whichever team win, you could come up with your own narrative for that. But if we were to try to do that for Atlantalanta and we were to try to say okay what's the atlanta

model of winning world series or what is it about atlanta's 2021 season that other teams could learn from or should emulate do you think there is anything or was it just uh you know make the playoffs and then have a really good month well i have a couple i'll offer you a couple and one of them is i think hard to do it's certainly not something you can do like on a dime but one of the things that has struck me about atlanta not just in this year but over the course of their rebuild if we want to call it that is that they hung on to freddie freeman yeah right when they were when they were sort of up against it and realized we're not going to compete in the east we need to restock and sort

of wait for some of our younger talent to make it to the majors they could have dealt freeman and i think that they would have gotten a pretty substantial prospect return for him if they had but they decided not to do that they held on to him and and had him kind of there as an anchor piece with a lot of experience and sort of production that you could feel pretty confident in just given his track record as their younger pieces were younger players, I should say, were reaching the majors and starting to contribute. So I think that if you're a front office type and you're looking at a roster that you think isn't going to necessarily be competitive over the next couple of seasons. Atlanta's approach does suggest that

there can be value, even if it takes a while to realize in looking at a player of Freeman's caliber and saying, you know, we're not going to win with you for the next two, three years, but then we're really going to win with you after that. So I think that that's one thing that you can say. And there are arguments against that. Certainly, you know, there have been times where really talented players have been dealt and teams have been able to restock their system, sometimes pretty substantially on the players that they have gotten back. But I think that Freeman at least shows that there is another path available to teams if they want to take it. So I think that's one thing that I take away from Atlanta. I think if you look at their season this year, there are two things that really strike me.

So there's the behavior that they exhibited at the trade deadline. I don't think it would have been at all surprising to see a roster in the state that Atlanta's was, given where they were in the division and sort of what they had to overcome and what I imagine at that time they thought to be the wild card picture and have their front office say, you know, it's not in the cards for us this year. We're going to have to restock and hope that next year we have a healthy Acuna, we have a healthy Soroka. Let's see what we can get for some of the pieces that aren't going to be in Atlanta pass this year and sort of look ahead to 2022. And they decided not to do that, right?

They rebuilt that outfield on the fly, and they tried to put themselves in a position to win, I think, seeing the East as winnable, which it proved to be even with sort of Philly and New York, where they were dysfunctional but still talented, right? And they chose not to do that. And that's not going to work every time. And your roster has to be in a particular spot in order to make those deals. And then those deals have to work out and that's not guaranteed. But I think that if you're a franchise with sort of a

middling record and you have confidence that your division is winnable or that you can sneak into a wild card, Atlantic gives you a blueprint to do that. So I think that part is very easy to operationalize if you're a front office, regardless of the approach that other teams that have won it all have taken before or after, right? Like being aggressive at the deadline is just, you know, it's just like a strategy that's available to you. And then I think the other thing, and Emma Batchelary and I talked about this when she came on, I think that there was this weird narrative that emerged that I think because of Brian Snicker's age that Atlanta was perceived as old school,

and you just talked about the ways in which that's kind of silly, but I think that they did a really impressive job of getting their players and coaching staff on board with a different defensive strategy, one that was informed by analytics. And I think that, you know, that's a strategy that teams can deploy, not shifting per se, but like how you talk to coaches and players about strategy implementation and the use of analytics. Like that's just useful to be able to think about in a more productive way, regardless of where you are in the competitive cycle.

And I think that I really appreciated having that sort of insight into how they approached getting their guys to shift. And, you know, it probably doesn't hurt to have Ron Washington there, you know, not every team is able to like put wash to work in terms of getting their, their infielders ready. And, you know, I know that they had had a couple of experiences as a roster where they had had balls sneak through that if they had been shifted, wouldn't have. And so I think that they were probably, from the player's side, better primed to be receptive to that than you might otherwise see. I think we've heard a lot

of stories of pitchers in particular who just hate the shift, even though it works a lot of the time. So I think that, you know, there are things that are idiosyncratic to Atlanta and that worked, that probably exceeded the expectations of the front office even when they happened. But I think there's stuff here that teams could point to and sort of use in one form or another on their own roster it's i think it's less like it's stuff that's a little less sexy than you know some great analytics you know innovation or a new way of preventing injuries i'm sure atlanta would have

loved a new way to prevent injuries this year yeah but i think that there's stuff there that you can take away that how you communicate within the org is important, and being decisive at moments when you can restock your roster is important, and sometimes holding on to your guys because you think you're going to be ready in a couple of years and that those players are still going to be good players. I think there's stuff there for other teams to take into account if they want to. Yeah, if you're disappointed that Dusty Baker didn't get his ring, well, at least Ron Washington got his ring.

So there's someone to be happy for either way. And yeah, reading Emma's piece and listening to your conversation with her, it struck me that the way that they implemented that so suddenly, like if they had tried to do it that way 10 years ago or something, it probably would have been a disaster. I think maybe the fact that they had Ron Washington and also the fact that it's 2021 and players know about the shift and pitchers and defenders are exposed to it and maybe they've played with it elsewhere. And it's just so standard now that if you're not doing it, probably some players are like, why are we not shifting? Right. So then why are we suddenly shifting? So I would imagine that it's easier to get people on board now than it might have been in the past, but still credit to them for doing something on the fly mid-season, which

is difficult. So yeah, I think there's a lot there in what you said. Good point about keeping Freeman, which I guess they now have the opportunity to do again. So we'll see if they make the same choice this time. That was actually one of the things I was curious about. Who wins the World Series matters to those fan bases. Of course, it also matters in terms of those teams' offseason plans. And I've written in the past about how there does seem to be a pronounced tendency for teams that win the World Series to bring back a higher percentage of their roster than teams that lose the World Series from one team to another affects whether those teams bring those guys back. And I don't know exactly what drives that effect, whether it's just the, hey, we're all in a good mood.

We all just won a World Series together. Let's keep the band together, bring the gang back. And we also can expect to be more flush because we'll sell more tickets and we'll be able to market ourselves as a World Series winner. And so we'll have more money to spend. I don't know why either of those teams would not want to bring those guys back. I mean, given what they've meant to those franchises and given where those franchises are in their competitive cycles and how good those players still are like i know there's a perception that freeman was and is much more likely to return to atlanta than carlos correa is to houston but i don't really see why the astros should not want to bring back carlos correa of course it's not always in the team's control when any team can make an offer but still it seems like those parties should have some incentive to stay together but as you and eric talked about it it doesn't seem like there's a reason to think that this is the last gasp for either of these teams i know that there's some turnover and with the

astros maybe you have korea departing you have brent strom leaving which is a pretty big thing when it comes to like a coaching change in that I think he's been about as responsible as anyone for their success with pitcher development over the past several years. So it might be tougher. And as you said, you have the ascendant Seattle Mariners who can maybe make it tougher for Houston. But these teams could be back, should be back, depending on how they proceed. And maybe the path is a little easier in the NL East than in the AL West. But still, I think the opportunity is there for both of them. Yeah, I think that that's right. And of course, Eric and I did not talk very much about the Los Angeles Angels, but that was only because I anticipated that you would bolster the case for

the Otani-led and Mike Trout-returning Angels to make their mark in the West, if they so choose. So don't stress, Angels fans. It's not a diss. I just didn't want to repeat material. Yeah, I'm sure Angels fans are pretty fatalistic at this point anyway. So I think, yeah, what you said about the shift is true. Who knows? Maybe there were other behind-the- scenes enhancements that were going on and

i know densby swanson thanked i think god and also the analytics department yes in his postgame speech so it was nice yeah i don't know specifically what he was referencing but it's always possible that there's some secret sauce there but yeah the competitive angle the try to win, the just go for it. I think that is true to an extent. I think it's, again, tough to generalize from any one team. I know that's the whole point of this exercise here, but I think Atlanta was in an unusual position in that they were expected to contend and, you know, they were defending division title winners and it was not a strong division. And so the path was there. And yes, they started out slow, and they didn't make it to 500 until August.

And by the time the trade deadline rolled around, they were shorthanded, but they had begun to play better. And I think they had halved the Mets' lead by that point. So I don't know how many executives or front offices, when faced with that exact scenario, would make the other call and say, no, we're four and a half games back or whatever, let's throw in the towel and plan for next year. It seems like probably a lot of them would have made the choice that the Braves made, but maybe would not have executed the strategy as successfully as they did I remember talking at the time about like will the Braves be sellers like it was a possibility it was on the table and they did not go in that direction and in some ways like

since I mentioned that no Fangraphs writers predicted that Atlanta would win the World Series when the postseason started I should also mention that i think the fan graphs preseason playoff odds pegged the braves perfectly 88 wins on the dot maybe they didn't get there exactly the way that the projections foresaw but they did end up right on the money there but you had an unusual situation that the braves were like expected to be in contention and were still technically in contention and yet also had a whole lot of holes to fill. Which is weird, right? Like you wouldn't expect that a team that needs an entire new outfield in late July is like going to end up winning the division. But that was where they were because they lost ozuna because they

lost acuna etc etc they had all these vacancies and anthopolis did a great job of filling them although like at the time it was almost an afterthought because none of the players they picked up was a big name right it's not like they traded for scherzer and trey turner or something like they traded for a bunch of guys you know who were like average-ish which I guess if you want to say you could learn something from them maybe it's that average players have a lot of value I'm sure that's not something that is lost on teams but maybe it is lost on fans but like when they acquired Rosario and duval and solaire and peterson like all those guys had average or below numbers right their teams to that point in the season so maybe they bought low a little on them

or maybe they just kind of lucked out and got really good three months or so from rosario and solaire that they're unlikely to duplicate like you have to hand it to them when ultimately your midseason pickups are your NLCS and World Series MVPs. That worked out perfectly. It wouldn't work out as perfectly if you were to do the exact same thing over and over again. Like if you were going to go by the Fangraphs playoff odds at that point, I think in late July, like on July 31st,

I don't know if this is taking into account the trades or not, but it doesn't make much difference. Like, you know, they were 11.9% chance to make the playoffs on July 30th, 16.7% to make the playoffs on July 31st, 15.2% chance to make the playoffs on August 1st. to make the playoffs on August 1st. And there were some wins and losses in there. But based on the playoff odds and the projections that go into them, it doesn't seem as if the moves that they made made the projections think, oh, suddenly they're going to turn it around and be the favorite now. So it wasn't like they acquired players who you would have expected to be big difference makers.

And they turned out to be. I don't know how predictable or repeatable that is and i guess they also got richard rodriguez who just you know seemed to suffer post sticky stuff perhaps coincidentally or perhaps not and wasn't even on the postseason roster so they got all those guys they didn't like give up big prospects or anything you know so it wasn't like they were like let's go for broke and get the biggest names right on the market they just got a bunch of like decent guys who filled holes so that they didn't have to play sub replacement or replacement level players and they hit on all of them he's like collectively and it turned out great but we know from Ben Clements's recent validation work with the playoff odds that generally a team that has playoff odds in that range is not going to make the playoffs, historically speaking. Or maybe they would have made it anyway. It's hard to know because they were kind of an unusual roster. But like, yeah, credit to them for not throwing in the towel and seeing that, yeah, we're in a tough spot here. But we'll just go for it.

And if you had asked Anthopolis or the front office or most people affiliated with Atlanta on that day, like, I doubt they would have said that we're the World Series favorites or maybe they would have thought that they could come back and win the division and that the Mets would implode. Perhaps that was semi-predictable, but I'm sure that even according to their expectations, the Braves probably outperformed or had a high percentile outcome when it came to how things actually worked out yeah i think that's the part of this that ends up being sort of the weird idiosyncratic behavior of the guys that they that they traded for and like there are plenty of times where teams are like we're gonna trade for guys at the deadline and we're not giving up and then it doesn't work

and they don't make the playoffs at all like that definitely happens so i don't think that i think that's what makes this kind of retrospective sort of assessment difficult is because we know the outcome and so of course those decisions look really smart yes and they could have gone badly they could have traded for guys who ended up not being good they could have traded for guys who were good but not this good they could have traded for guys who got them to the postseason, but then, like you said, didn't end up being literally the MVP of several rounds of it.

There are a lot of options in the multiverse for Atlanta, but I do think that they offer sort of directional indications to teams that it can work, right? We're not foreclosing these as possibilities if you find yourself as a GM confronted with the trade deadline troll at a fork in the road and that's how the deadline works right it's like a bunch of

little goblins being like a or b that's how goblins talk so it does at least provide a a fact pattern that can lead to good things and it's it's not guaranteed to but it's possible for it to end up being sort of the stuff that matters and and you know it also helps when like the teams that you're playing against in the division some of them don't do as well or tread water you know like the Mets collapse just remains one of the one of the things man that's one of the things of the season is that Mets collapse so so you know it's not it not a guarantee, but it can be a way forward, and sometimes it works out. Then Eddie Rosario has a wildly good postseason,

and the pitching is good enough, and your opponent's pitching is hurt, and then you get to have a parade. Yes, and if they had been in a different spot, like if they had been one of the teams in the jumble of wild card contenders yeah they have made all those moves i don't know i don't know but the fact that they had a chance at the division that that's what they were going for that probably helped and again like you know they acquired a collection of players who were like

in their walk years and you know some of them had been like tfa'd by prior teams and no one was expecting huge things from most of them and they got good things so i guess it's just an argument for hey stay in the running and you know if you can make it to the playoffs then you can win a world series because everything can click at the right time and it all worked out yeah so i've been a bit out of touch has anyone talked about the state of the starting pitcher or the length of games that did that come up at all no we had other stuff to talk about and i think that it really factored you know it's surprising that it would have not i know come up but i have all these pent-up takes from the past several weeks, so it's a relief that no one got to that before I did.

Yeah, I'm kidding, of course. I know that was discussed ad nauseum and also discussed on this podcast, so I don't have too much to add to what everyone said. It's something that we've talked about before, of course, but just wanted to read one email here from listener cory on the topic of pitcher usage because i don't want to assume that everyone feels about this the way that we do or has the same stance or feels as strongly about it so cory wrote in i have a question about baseball aesthetics it seems like there's a consensus on effectively wild

and more generally in sabermetric corners of the internet and i would add in old school corners probably even more so that aesthetically speaking it's better when starters pitch deeper into games part of me gets this preference following a starter through a game provides a narrative and there's a drama in asking how far the starter can go but another part of me doesn't get it. After all, in movies and books, we also appreciate narratives in which a group of people each brings something to the table to accomplish a shared goal. And there's drama in asking whether one pitcher can continue work that a previous pitcher started. So while I get why a traditional starter provides a narrative for a game, I don't get why that's necessarily a better narrative than one where we think of a group of

pitchers as the protagonists. I guess ultimately this is a subjective judgment, and I don't get why that's necessarily a better narrative than one where we think of a group of pitchers as the protagonists. I guess ultimately this is a subjective judgment, and I wouldn't want to tell anyone not to like the kind of baseball they like, but because there's such a consensus around the starter narrative being important, I feel like I must be missing something about why the starter narrative is more aesthetically appealing than a narrative built around a group of pitchers can you help me see what i'm missing and i don't necessarily want to change his mind about that if he's happy with the way that things are there's no one way to like baseball and if you like the team effort and it's like a heist and everyone gives their own set of skills i was just about to use the analogy sure i mean if you like that then more power to you and you're getting more of what you like. But I guess we are generally on the other side of the debate, maybe with the majority. So what are your thoughts? Well, maybe heist isn't the right analogy.

Maybe the analogy. I mean, I get why a heist movie is an appealing analogy here. But perhaps the analogy i would offer to you cory is that of the lord of the rings fellowship of the ring which is a movie that i quite enjoy i own it i've seen the theatrical release which is quite long i have watched the uh the extended uh release which is even longer but yes here's here's the here's the word that's important in those long it's long takes long. It takes a while. You got to give room to everyone's story. And there's all these guys in the fellowship, and some of them

have swords, and others have axes, and others really like lunch. And you want to make sure that everybody gets their time with what's important to them. And so if that's what you're in the mood for, that's awesome. And I agree with you, Ben. I think that like the place where these conversations tend to kind of go off the rails is when we assert like the aesthetic primacy of one way of watching the game. And I think there are a lot of ways to watch compelling baseball and a lot of ways that baseball can be compelling. And so if, if the heist or a trek to Mordor is what gets you going, then that's, that's great. Like that I think is fine. And I don't think you need

to fit yourself to a different story. I think that when you have a starter who is able to go seven or eight innings, and we should say that, as I think I mentioned when I was talking to Eric about this, like it isn't just the duration of the start that's compelling right it's that a guy going that long suggests that he is dominating and that he is striking a bunch of guys out and that he is showing an impressive arsenal and that there are a lot of opportunities for like a slow-mo of him coming off the mound while he's yelling at the sky and everyone's like yeah that, that guy was great. And you remember that. And I think that those performances can be really fun to watch and they tend to stick in our memories, you know, in a way that other stuff doesn't as well, because, you know, like when I

was talking to Jeff, I didn't remember that Randy Rosarino had stolen homes, just straight steal home. And that was so exciting. And in the moment I thought it was incredible. And I totally forgot that it had happened because there's so much stuff that goes on in the postseason. And it's just, we're all busy. And some of us are very tired. And so I think that there's something a little more lasting and indelible about the starter who dominates for seven or eight. And so that's part of the appeal of it too, because it like anchors me in my experience

of the postseason. And there are exceptions to this right like we we really enjoyed all of us i think watching tyler matzik and getting to hear his story and sort of appreciate what a guy who had just been out of baseball was able to do once he could get his arm slot right and throw enough strikes. That was really compelling. But I think that when you have the endless parade of relievers over the course of an entire postseason, it can get kind of taxing. It messes with both pace and length of game. That can be trying. So I think that there is a time and a place for the fellowship

but sometimes you want like a i don't know you want you want like the highlander like i don't think that movie is short either but you know what i'm trying to say like yeah we want to be able to really have a strong narrative anchor in any given game and i think that the starter is just like a really compelling option for that because for, you know, every half frame, like he's the guy who the camera is on at the start of every at-bat. I don't know. Yeah, and there's just more maybe nuance and strategy that goes into how you are going to approach facing a lineup multiple times

as opposed to just facing it once when you know you just have an endless parade of relievers who are coming in throwing fastballs and sliders max effort and it's effective but it's kind of monotonous and it is more fun i think to see a pitcher who has more pitches at his command and can use any number of them and maybe save something you know saves a pitch in reserve for the second or third time he faces a lineup and so you can see him start to work in different pitch types as he goes and maybe he loses a little velocity or in some cases maybe even gains a little because he's been holding something in reserve you know and so you can see him kind of back off a bit and ramp up a bit based on who the hitter is and what the situation is and it's just kind of an up and down and an adjustment as you go and you get to see the

guy get sweaty and try to make it work with reduced stuff or after he's already shown all of his weapons to his opponents and and that's hard to do and that's why pitchers are often not allowed to do that anymore because it's more effective to just bring in the fresh guy who's just going to throw blazing fast fastballs and nasty breaking balls for an inning. And then he'll be done and he'll hand the baton to the next guy. It works. It's effective. But I think it is a little more entertaining as a viewer to have someone in there for the long haul. as a viewer, to have someone in there for the long haul. I think you have the tension of the pitch count rising, as Corey mentioned. Nowadays, I don't want to say pitch count is meaningless, and certainly there's a cumulative effect across outings, but in any given outing, for a starter,

generally they're getting pulled before they're actually getting to their max pitch count, particularly in the postseason. I know this postseason was maybe a little unusual just because of 2020 and 2021 and the lighter workloads in the previous year and all of the injuries and all of that. But it's generally like a preview of how the regular season is going to look a few years into the future when it comes to all of these trends that are generally seen as spectator unfriendly. And so I think that is part of it, too, that, yeah, guys are going to get yanked early because it's October. But even in the regular season, it just doesn't mean quite as much to, like, have a hitter foul a bunch of pitches off and make the starter work harder.

Because really the constraint is not when is his arm going to fall off it's just you know when are you going to bring someone in because third time through the order or whatever and i think a couple other maybe more minor things but it is part of the stagnation in salaries that we've seen as rob means documented recently and maybe that's not something that is uh all that important to every fan whether players are making this many millions or that many millions as a group but even if you just care about the state of labor and you know tensions between ownership and players and the likelihood of a work stoppage like the fact that salaries have stagnated, have actually gone down a bit in recent years, that does seem to be connected to the fact that the innings are getting spread out among a bunch of just anonymous guys who are getting called up from AAA and sent down over and over and over again.

So that is contributing to that trend. And then I think maybe the last thing is that you're just getting so many players who most fans haven't heard of. Yeah. Like there are just more major leaguers out there. And I guess in a sense, that's nice because more people on the planet get to say, hey, I was a major leaguer once. That's cool. But from a spectator standpoint, like even as a diehard follower of baseball, there's just no way that you can keep track of everyone. That is why we started our Meet a Major Leaker segment,

which I guess we can continue over the offseason because we have not met nearly all of the major leakers. And if you have Tyler Matzik, who has a great story and that story is well publicized, then yeah, okay, we know who that is is but when it's Dylan Lee or Tucker Davidson or someone right I'm not trying to single those guys out in particular but it's like the Kiki Palmer on Dick Cheney line like I don't know who this man is sorry to this man like I just I have not heard of most of many of the people who are pitching in major league games these days and i'm ostensibly someone who is paying close attention to baseball so i think that is a little bit of a challenge too so those are all of the reasons i think and if we have not convinced you to feel that way then

you're probably better off yeah and if And if you need further convincing, you should listen to like the technical commentary on the extended Lord of the Rings. And then you'll be like, maybe this is too long. Maybe I didn't need to hear this much about like, you know, an island. I don't know, man. Yeah, the extended editions are better, I think, than the theatrical cuts.

But it is an investment. I think that that, anyway, that's not the conversation we're having. I will say that sometimes, you know, you have a weekend where you have a bad flu in high school and you just end up watching them with all the different commentaries and then you do voices and then you're like,

huh, maybe this is why I don't date a lot. So, you know, it's just like a thing to think about. And I probably have nothing original to say about playoff start times or playoff end times. I think you covered it. But basically, games are going to end late. I don't know that there is a way around them ending late. They could end slightly less late. This is not a new problem. It maybe is still a problem, and maybe it's a problem that has been exacerbated by recent developments. But really, for our entire lives, certainly our lives as conscious thinking people who know what baseball is, games have been ending really late. I saw that Paul Hemekides of ESPN had the stats the other day of the average time that World Series games ended by decade. And in the 2020s, at least when he tweeted this, it was 11.46 p.m. Eastern. In the 2010s, it was 11.43. In the 2000s, it was 11.54. In the 1990s, it was 11.29. So, you know, there's a

difference maybe between 11 and 12 or even 1130 and 12, but it's going to be late. It's going to be after 11. Like Joshian just ran down the history of playoff broadcasting recently in his newsletter. And he pointed out that basically as soon as they switched from day games to night games, it was this way. So there was never a time when games were not being played during the day, but they also ended early enough that if you're a little kid on the East Coast, it's not going to be way past your bedtime. I mean, that's just the way it is. Game four of the 1971 series was the first World Series night game, and it started at 8.15 in Pittsburgh, and it ended at 11.03. Now, today, maybe it would end at 11.33 or 12.03, just because the games go longer. So

that is a problem, and that's a problem that, in theory, could be corrected by a pitch clock or other measures. But the start time is not really a solvable issue, I don't think. I mean, yeah, you could compensate and say, well, the games are four hours now, so we're going to start at seven instead of eight. But as many people have pointed out, it's a big country and there are multiple time zones in that country. And so if you start at seven Eastern, you're starting at four where you are. And so if you start at 7 Eastern, you're starting at 4 where you are.

And a lot of people are working or in school or otherwise occupied. So I think if you were to go back to in the 1960s, the average World Series game ending time was 4.18. Now, that's not good either, I don't think, 4.18 Eastern. I would miss most of those games if I'm a kid and I'm in school. And maybe like you know, in the 70s it was 757 Eastern because you had some day games and some night games. In the 80s it was 1026, which is

you know, maybe more manageable. And there were still some day games there and weekday day games and the games just weren't quite as long. But really, like, I think networks know what they're doing when it comes to getting the most eyeballs there and weekday day games and the games just weren't quite as long but really like i think networks know what they're doing when it comes to getting the most eyeballs on the game as possible yeah yeah maybe they're prioritizing adult eyeballs over young eyeballs but still i feel like there's no way to please everyone and they're kind of splitting the differences as well as they could so it's

really the onus is on mlb to speed things up i think a little bit more than saying that the networks should schedule their games at a different time i think that that is very smart especially you know because you are the father of a daughter so you have new authority to comment on these things i don't want to be indifferent to the time of game concern because I share it. I think that focusing on that, to your point, is far more important than focusing on start time because we are sort of splitting the difference in, I think, a way that is the best possible method given the size of the country and how many time zones we have. I don't know, man.

I don't want to be indifferent to parents who want to watch the End of the World series with their kids. But when I was a kid, there were things that I couldn't stay up late to do. And then I got older and then I could. And it was fine. And I still liked a lot of those things. And I liked them more once I could enjoy them all the way through. But I didn't stop liking them because I had a bedtime.

I don't know like i i don't want to tell be just like hey parents figure it out because i don't have kids and so it's really easy for me to say that but i think that even if games like you're still gonna have kids missing part of late games because most kids who are little have to go to bed by 10 anyway so yeah i don't i don't know, man. I think that just like have a pitch clock and let's see what day it is. Yeah. And you can make exceptions like if you're a kid and your team is in the World Series or something.

I mean, yeah, I know sleep is important, especially at those ages. Do as I say, not as I do. But I think, yeah, like if it's a special circumstance, sure, let them stay up and make a lifelong memory and maybe get them hooked on baseball and maybe they're a little tired the next day and it won't be the end of the world. That said, like that's assuming that your kid already cares about baseball and you care about baseball and it's like an important event as opposed to, well, what if you just want to get casual fans or non-fans into this thing, you know, and you're not going to just give them an exemption to stay up way past their bedtime for something that they don't really care about. And that's just, you know, they might have to come to it a little older or come to it because they're playing baseball as opposed to watching baseball.

Like there are a number of ways you can do that. Or it's never been easier to catch up and keep up with baseball. Like there are a number of ways you can do that, or it's never been easier to catch up and keep up with baseball. Like watch the condensed game the next morning or like watch the highlights. You know, it's not the days of newspapers and not being able to see these games. If you miss them the first time, they're very easily accessible. So I don't think it's the end of the world if you can't stay up and if you have the experience of sneaking past your bedtime to watch or listen to a game which i did at times in my youth and i'm sure many people did and that can be very memorable too so i don't want to make it off limits to people definitely not but also like you know it just inevitably is going to be and there are a lot of people who

would not be able to watch if you were to schedule it earlier to try to you know cater it just inevitably is going to be. And there are a lot of people who would not be able to watch if you were to schedule it earlier to try to, you know, cater to the five-year-olds or whatever. And I don't know how I will handle this now that I'm an expert parent and qualified to talk about parenting things after my many weeks of experience now. I would think that given my attitude about bedtime just in general, and I don't know whether Sloan will watch baseball or care about baseball at all, but if she did, then yeah, I know that this can be a kind of an East Coast biased discussion, but there are reasons for it to be just because there are a lot of us East Coasters out here, I can say as one of them. And as the famous network executive Spock said, logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. And it's what half the people in the country are on the East Coast here. So like, of course, you are going to take the likelihood of their watching ahead of like the mountain timers, you know, sorry to the mountain timers, but you're outnumbered.

So this is a numbers game, but you do have to take into account the rest of the country to some extent too. you do have to take into account the rest of the country to some extent too yeah i think that the way that i would maybe frame that is that if it's half then it's not few elsewhere but just to like make an argument for west coasters it's not our fault that you guys decided to stay where you did no i that's silly to say i think that you're right we have have to strike a balance, right? You wouldn't want these games to start at 10 p.m. on the East Coast, although there are plenty of playoff games that start pretty late on the East Coast. In other sports, I think that if you address the time of game thing, you can make things more palatable for kind of everyone involved. And I think that that is probably where we ought to be focusing our energy

because the idea that you're going to have games start at least during the week in the mid-afternoon on the west coast seems pretty silly like you said I think the networks do a pretty good job of programming where they're going to get eyeballs in the most places and as our friend Craig Goldstein pointed out to a number of people on Twitter if being able to watch the end of the game was really all that mattered in terms of making lifelong fans, you'd expect there to be a sharper geographic distribution

of baseball fans than there seems to be. So I don't know that I find the argument that this is what makes or breaks fandom for young kids who live in the Eastern time zone to be a particularly compelling argument although i am sympathetic to parents who have to negotiate bedtime because i'm sure that that's no fun but you know like they're kids in the west too yeah yeah it's tough for me to have this conversation because i have no day night cycle in my life I sleep, but I don't sleep in very predictable patterns.

And now neither does the rest of my family. So that's been fun for a little while. All right. So I guess that's a wrap on the postseason. I said there were no Game 7s. There were also no sweeps, right? Were there any sweeps this postseason? I don't think so.

I don't think there were, which I like because one of my very pedantic hobby horses every postseason is that statistically speaking, you should never predict a sweep, and you should also never predict a game seven because just probabilistically speaking, those are never the most likely outcomes. And I've written a whole article about that, and no one cares. And when people predict postseason series, they're doing it often to get attention and make a statement yeah so then to be rigorous and statistically correct but uh nice to see that actually turn out to be the case for one postseason so before we go any parting words about buster posey who called it a career somewhat shockingly yeah very surprised to see

this news on the day of what would have been game seven it came to light that Posey would be announcing his retirement and this was right up there with wait Bob Melvin is the manager of the Padres now in like yeah news that made me do a double take would not have shocked me if you had told me a year ago that Buster Posey would be retiring after this season. But given the season that he just had, when he was the most valuable catcher in baseball, according to FanCraftsWare, and helped his team to another playoff appearance and seemed rejuvenated on his load management schedule. And after the break year, I sort of assumed that he would hang around for a little while, but he has decided to walk away after an incredible career. I guess all I would say about Buster is that, you know,

I've talked a lot on this podcast about what Felix Hernandez's career meant to my development as a baseball fan and a baseball thinker and eventually a writer. And I think that Posey is easily, he's not as sort of emotionally impactful to me given that I grew up a Mariners fan, but I think that engaging with pitch framing as a concept and really starting to watch for it when I was watching games played a really important role in my evolution as a baseball thinker. There were very few framers who I enjoyed watching as much as Posey. I'm really sad to see him go because I feel like I kind of sharpened my analytical blade on that particular whetstone. So I will really miss watching him play. It is very strange that he won't be there.

We have the possibility next season that we will certainly be without Buster Posey and might have Kershaw in a different uniform potentially. And so it does sort of feel like there's this really weird changing of the guard going on the landscape is shifting and in ways that I imagine being feeling kind of destabilizing come opening day but yeah he was just I can't I I don't know that you can say enough good things about him I think people should check out Jay Jaffe's um look at him and sort of the the odds of him making it to the Hall of Fame, which you'll be unsurprised to learn Ben Jay is strongly in favor of. But it's so rare in today's landscape to see a complete catcher, right? A guy who is not only a defensive force, but like a great hitter.

And I imagine that what catchers look like and the profile of catcher that's going to be the most valuable in the next five or 10 years is going to look really different than what we have come to expect in this most recent era of baseball. And so it does sort of feel, there's something about him choosing this moment

to be done before, like before the advent of a robo zone that feels kind of right. We get to just enjoy him coming off this incredible season where he had this really wonderful resurgence. We get to kind of put that experience in Amber, and he gets to walk away at sort of the height of his powers. We've talked before about how rare it is for a player to be able to do that to exit on

their own terms while they're still so good is not how it typically goes we have these long you know slow slogs to them being not the players they were so i think it's pretty cool that we get to to leave buster in this spot in our minds but i will i will miss watching him play very much so um and i also wouldn't have minded if he like waited a week to make his announcement but that's neither here nor there so you know i i wish him well and i hope that whatever the next thing is for him in his life whether it's being home with his family or you know something else that it's as fulfilling to him as getting to watch him was to everyone who appreciated him because i think he was a really important force for a lot of for a lot of baseball fans in the

bay area um and he was for me too so yeah it is rare to see someone decide to go out this way and i guess i'm glad it's rare because i wouldn't want it to be a common occurrence yeah superstars to be walking away you know i'd like to watch muster Posey a little longer if he wanted to keep playing. But it is nice that, you know, we don't have to watch like broken down Buster just scuffling through seasons because we've seen that when he was hurt and it was not so much fun. And as we record this on Thursday, he has not yet publicly addressed why he made this decision. But one would assume it

probably has something to do with the wear and tear that he has accumulated over the years with, of course, the famous ankle injury that led to the rule change and then the hip injury and surgery and the multiple concussions. And that's something that doesn't just affect your career, but maybe also your quality of life for the rest of your life so it's understandable that someone would want to walk away and of course he has the young twins at home right who played a part in his decision to opt out of the 2020 season so lots of reasons and he has accomplished just about everything that you can accomplish in major league baseball and yeah i guess he's not known primarily for his defense i I suppose, just because his offense is so good.

He's been the best hitting catcher over the course of his career. And he won one gold glove and I guess like, what, four silver sluggers or something like that. And, you know, seven-time All-Star and Rookie of the Year and MVP winner and three-time World Series champion. He has as many rings as Terrence Gore. That's just kind of an incredible accomplishment. And he has been, at least if you go by fan graphs, which includes framing

in WUR, he's been the second best player, or at least the second best position player in baseball since he came up. It's Mike Trout and Buster Posey. And as Jay documented documented even if you don't count the framing fully which is tough because we don't have detailed framing data on everyone throughout all of baseball history he still seems to stack up as a top 10 catcher and

you just have to keep in mind when you're looking at catcher career totals that they're going to be a little lower than players at other positions because they get banked up and they don't play as many games so even though he is calling it a career with 1500 hits on the dot like you know for other players at other positions you would not think hall of fame but for buster posey i don't know how you can not think that i mean statistically speaking and just everything else awards and world series and character and all of that i mean he checks all the boxes and yeah even though you don't think of him for the defense like it's the the nickel's law of catcher defense kind of thing right like the the catcher's defensive reputation is inversely proportional to their offensive

abilities and so because posy is such a good hitter maybe his glove was a little underrated but he's a great framer so we talk about the the jose molinas of the world where it's like oh you think he's bad but actually he's good because the framing no one thinks buster posey is bad but maybe you don't know quite how great he was if you're not looking at that too. So, yeah, I mean, I think pretty clearly the best catcher in Giants franchise history. And that's a franchise that dates back to the 1880s. So if you can say that, that is pretty good. Apologies to, I don't know, Bucky Ewing and Roger Bresnahan or whoever, but Buster Posey is great. And I know it's been a joy to watch him, especially for Giants fans, but really for everyone.

So sorry to see him go, but happy for him that he gets to go out on his own terms. Yep, agreed. All right. So that will do it for today. I have taken my name out of consideration for the Mets baseball ops job. So I am going to continue in my capacity as podcast co-host. And for anyone who has not been with us over an off season before, sort of the same routine. We are here on roughly the same schedule.

And sometimes we get a little weird, more so than usual even, just because there's not as much news. But we talk about all the transactions and we also get off the beaten path. And I'm sure inevitably we will be discussing some labor issues as well in the coming months. And just one programming note, because I think we're going to try something that we have not done before, but that we are excited about doing. We are all pining for baseball now. And I know there is L lead home and and other international action out there but if you are facing some baseball withdrawal we can help we are going to

do a watch along of the korean drama stove league which i have plugged several times on this podcast and many listeners or some at least it seems have taken me up on that and none has been disappointed thus far or at least i haven't heard from anyone who was disappointed maybe people who didn't like it held their peace but everyone who got back to me said it was great and i think it's great and i think it's the the best baseball tv show i've ever seen and i guess there's not a ton of competition we love pitch RIP pitch but I think this is even better it's like I don't know Ted

Lasso meets pitch meets like Friday Night Lights or something I'm just naming a bunch of really good shows but it's like that and this is a show that aired in Korea in late 2019 early 2020.

And it's just one season. As far as I know, they're not making another, but it ends in a very satisfactory way. It is a complete story. And essentially, it follows a fictional KBO team, a major league team in South Korea called Dreams. And this team is a perennial cellar dweller, and they've finished last, I think, four consecutive seasons. And then they bring on a new GM who has no experience in

baseball, but he has been successful in other sports. So it sort of centers on him and also on sort of a high-ranking executive within the front office, a woman who has kind of moved up in that front office and is climbing the ladder and is sort of assisting this GM who is unconventional. And really, it is heartwarming and it focuses on the relationships between these people and members of the team. And it also just like very inside baseball as well. And it focuses on like analytics and scouting and like every aspect of the organization gets its due in a way that for me felt fairly true to life by TV standards and was pretty enlightening. And I just love it really.

And I'm now forcing you to watch it along with me. I have put pressure on you before. Now I am leaving you no choice. But what we are planning to do is maybe beginning the week after next, we're just going to do some recap pods. It's a 16-episode season. It's an hour-long drama. So maybe we'll do like four episodes at a time. I don't know if we'll do them all in one go or whether we'll space them out a bit, but just wanted to tell everyone now so they have a little time to get into this and maybe get started on the series so that they can watch and react along with us.

So I think that'll be a nice off-season activity and we're capitalizing on the korean tv drama hype post squid game so this has never been more timely i still haven't watched squid game either well it'll have to wait until you watch stove league but it's it's really a well-produced show and it's a celebrated show it won a lot of awards in south korea and now a lot of people are probably wondering, how do I watch this excellent show called Stove League? There are a few different options. So if you are one of our international listeners outside of North America, you should be able to find it on Netflix. Lucky you. If you are not, if you are in North America, then you will have to find it elsewhere. But there are a number of ways that you can do that. It is on two Korean streaming services.

One is called Viki, V-I-K-I, and the other is called Cocoa. And there are free trials at each of these sites. So there's a seven-day free trial at Viki, a 14-day free trial at Cocoa, and that's how I watched it. There are also some illicit means, perhaps, of finding it on the internet. If you were schooled in the dark arts of torrents, it is findable. I'll just say that, and I'll leave you to your own devices. But I will link

to where you can find it. And these two streaming services, they are maybe not mainstream in the States, but you can find them on your Roku and you can Chromecast or whatever. You can probably find the apps on your devices. It's not hard to find them. They are affordable for a month if you want to sign up for a month, but you can also just binge in a week or two, and that would work too. So there are a number of ways to watch this for free, and I hope that you all will because I can't imagine that someone who likes this podcast would not also enjoy this show it's uh in Korean and subtitled of course but really that did not interfere with my enjoyment of it at all yeah I I'm very happy that I will have time for the show which I have not been resisting because I thought it would be bad. I've just been busy. So I am grateful for a podcast-related avenue to watch it.

And I look forward to chatting with you about it so that I feel like we're finally caught up. Because every time we talk, Ben, I worry that you're going to ask me, have you watched Stove League? And I'm going to have to say, no, I haven't. But now I'll be able to say, yeah, let's talk about it. Yep. Okay. So we will get into that soon. All right. One last thing I should have to know I haven't. But now I'll be able to say, yeah, let's talk about it. Yep. Okay. So we will get into that soon. All right.

One last thing I should have said about Stove League, by the way, if you're worried that your partner or your roommate or whomever you watch TV with might not be as into a baseball show as you are, don't worry. Hardcore baseball fandom, not required. My wife watched it and loved it just as much as I did. It's got good stories, good characters. All the baseball nitty gritty is a bonus for people like us, but there's plenty to love for everyone else as well. What better time to watch Stove League than during the Hot Stove League? I also should have mentioned earlier I gave credit to the Braves pitching and defense.

Don't want to give a short shift to their offense either, which was also very good. I believe they scored 58% of their postseason runs on homers and 72% of their World Series runs on homers. So no, it's not just pitching and defense that wins in October, nor is it small ball. Hitting homers helps too, and teams were 24-2 when they out-homered their opponents in these playoffs after going 35-5 in the previous year's playoffs. And although Atlanta sil going 35-5 in the previous year's playoffs. And although Atlanta silenced the Astros in the World Series, the Astros' offense was great too. These Astros teams will forever be associated with sign-stealing, and understandably so. But if there was ever any doubt that that 2017 team or this entire Astros run wasn't the result of a lot

of talent too, that these teams weren't good, and that this offense wasn't great, independent of the banging scheme. I would think that that's been put to rest. That'll do it for today and for this week. Thanks, as always, 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 help keep the podcast going and help keep the podcast ad-free and get access to some perks. Evan Brewer, Jacob Pridnau, Brittany Bollet, Xander Stroud, and Michael. Thanks to all of you. And we're actually going to be offering some exciting new Patreon perks soon.

Stay tuned for some announcements on that front early next week. But there's never been a better time to sign up, and we appreciate your support as always. Keep your questions and comments for me and Meg coming via email at podcastoffangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance, but not only his editing assistance, also his production assistance, as he is still assisting in that capacity as well, as I gradually return to work. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash Effectively

Wild, and you can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. We'll be back early next week to preview Free Agency and the CPA negotiations and more. Have a wonderful weekend, and we will talk to you soon. Look, the sky is crying. See the tears rolling down on the ground, down on the ground. But that don't mean, little brother, that your life will turn around.