Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1908: A Movie Script Ending (to the Season)?

Episode Date: September 27, 2022

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the latest hitting heroics by 30-year-old rookie Joey Meneses, then discuss the Guardians clinching the AL Central title, underdogs that defy the projections and playoff odds, and Albert Pujols’s 700th homer. After that (47:00), they talk to Death Cab for Cutie singer/songwriter/guitarist Ben Gibbard about the Mariners’ stretch […]

Put your hands on my shoulders A meaningless movement, a movie scripted And the patrons are leaving, leaving Passing through unconscious states When I woke, I was on the highway Hello and welcome to episode 1908 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Rowley of Fangraphs, who sounds

healthier today. Hello, Meg. Hello. You're recovered, it sounds like. I am mostly recovered, yeah. I still have, you know, you have like lingering gunk. For sure. Just to give everyone like a really cool visual. I hope you were all

eating while I said that. But yes, I feel much better. Thank you. It is nice. It's not audible gunk. Yeah. At least to my ears. Yeah. It has receded into the background where if I have to interact with people in public, I don't think they're going to worry like, oh no, what is she about to give me? So that's good because you don't want to make people worry about that stuff. Excellent. Get your illnesses out of the way for the playoffs. Exactly. Yeah.

So today's Joey Manessis Minute. I have an update for you here, my Nationals fave. So on Saturday, the Nationals scored one run against the Marlins and likely NL Cy Young Award winner Sandy Alcantara, who went eight innings, gave up three hits in just that one run. Wow. And that one run was on a Joey Manessis solo homer, of course. And then he homered the following day as well. And now he has cleared the 200 plate appearance threshold, which I'm going to pretend is something significant.

And he has a 158 WRC plus in his 204 plate appearances. So that ties him with Jose Altuve for fifth in the majors. Minimum 200 plate appearances. It's Aaron Judge, Jordan Alvarez, Paul Goldschmidt, Mike Trout, and then Altuve and Joey Manessis tied for fifth. This is a bunch of name brand baseball players right there. for fifth. This is a bunch of name brand baseball players right there. So again, I keep saying people should be happy to be in the club with Joey Manessis because exclusive company here. Yeah. I think that sometimes we all anticipate where baseball talent will come from and other times it asserts itself. And Joey Manessis is here to say, you should pay attention to me because

I'm a baseball player, you know? 326, 363, 579. I keep waiting for this to end. But even since I published my piece about him on September 2nd, he has out hit Juan Soto even since that piece was published. I was like, I got to get this out there because how long can this continue? And even since then, even since my little Sports Illustrated cover jinx that I put out into the world, he is a 133 WRC plus to Soto's 127. So I kind of can't believe that this is still happening, but it's no longer just a bit. He is just pretty good at baseball. It seems like maybe not quite this good, maybe not quite like better than anyone except Aaron Judge, Jordan Alvarez, Paul Goldschmidt, and Mike Trout, but surprisingly good for a 30-year-old rookie who was called up just to be the Soto slash Josh

Bell replacement. Yeah, it's, you know, I'm just so happy for Nationals fans yeah they get to have a thing to yes in the here and now to enjoy right because whenever you do these big trades that are about future potential production i know that like abrams has been up and everything but like it's you're you're asking to hold on to a reserve of goodwill that can't help but dwindle for the time that passes but they don't have to worry about that because they can just put goodwill in the joey maness's goodwill bank and enjoy it you know it's it's not like it's not a lot on a relative basis because there are you know a bunch of other guys on a baseball team at any given time but it's it's certainly not nothing so there you go pretty great all right so we are going to spend much of this episode talking to friend of the show, Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie fame, who has a new album out and also has a team that is possibly about to be in the playoffs.

Possibly. The number of times that we yelled at you for being confident, Ben. It was more than once. Yes. So Ben is a big fan of the Seattle Mariners, has been for quite some time. And like all Seattle Mariners fans, he's been waiting all of that time for a playoff appearance and might be about to get one. It's not official yet. It's looking good. So we're going to talk to Ben shortly about the Mariners and also a little bit about music and the album, but mostly about the Mariners.

We've been promising Mariners content for some time. So here it is. And I figured before we bring Ben on, we could maybe talk about the Mariners' most likely playoff opponent as we record on Tuesday, which is the Cleveland Guardians. And unlike the Mariners, the Guardians have clinched their playoff berth. In fact, they have clinched a division title. The Guardians are the winners of the AL Central. And that upset win, I guess we could call it, has occasioned some conversation about playoff odds and about underdogs and about people not believing in the Guardians, etc. So I guess we could talk a little bit just about the

Guardians in general, and then we could talk a little bit about the fact that nobody believed in the Guardians, quote unquote. There's some truth to that, but the Guardians, they're a good team. Everything that I will say about them will probably be AL Central adjusted. I don't want to diminish their accomplishments. They've been the best team in that division. It's not a great division, but they've been good enough to win it and they have finished strong. I think they're 18 and three in their last 21 as we speak. And meanwhile, the twins have gone into a tailspin. The twins were in first place in that division for much of the season. And then they just collapsed and they had a ton of injuries and they fell out of it.

And the Guardians have been on fire and everyone's into the Guardians. It's a fun team. It's a young team. Looking forward to them playing on the postseason stage. So I think that there are certain qualities of this Guardians team that maybe have been highlighted too much, or I don't want to say highlighted too much, but just the value of them has maybe been a bit overblown they are scrappy and they play small ball and they're old school. And all of that can be quite entertaining. It's almost become kind of a middle of last decade Kansas City Royals kind of conversation where they have that throwback style of play. And that maybe gets conflated with the best way to play. I guess my point is basically that the Guardians are a pretty good team, but I don't know that the qualities of that team that get played up are why they're good so much. For instance, the contact, it is true.

They strike out less than any other team. In fact, quite a lot less than any other team. And there's some research that shows that that may be advantageous in the playoffs, that when you're facing good velocity in October, it can be beneficial. All else being equal, maybe there's a little extra edge to making a lot of contact. So if so, that should serve them well. But they don't have a good offense, I don't think. I don't think that is the strength of this team. It's more like, well, that's how they do it.

That's what they do. That's how they get by. But the offense is not great, I would say, if anything. That's the weakness of this club. Like, they do a lot of things well. They're a good pitching team. They're a good defensive team. Yes.

It is true that they don't strike out. It's true that they're a good base running and base stealingoff team yeah they have had some good timing or clutchness or whatever you want to call it yes even so they're still 16th in runs scored their wrc plus is worse than the white socks or the twins for instance basically i'm just saying like yes we can get caught up in the fact that it's fun to watch them play the way that it was fun for those royals to play but i think there becomes a tendency to use them as the avatar of maybe this is the way that everyone should be playing or they're like bringing back this style play like we all kind of want that style play to come back to some extent i think right like we're on board with this is fun

it's fun to steal bases and make contact. And that's what MLB seems to want to bring back. And we're all for that for the most part. I guess it's just that I don't necessarily see that as a strength of this team. It is a characteristic of that team. But the fact that they pitch pretty well and they play good defense, I feel like that helps them kind of overcome the offense more so than they're winning because they're putting the ball in play and they're scrappy and small bolly. Well, and I think that part of it might be that the guys, they have a couple of guys who are very strong offensive performers. And two of those guys are guys who were not thought to be lined

up to be huge contributors to this team going into the season, right? So it helps that Andres Jimenez has a 145 WRC plus, you know? Like he is having this incredible season. Michael Bauman wrote about, you know, the top two spots on the AL MVP ballot are pretty much sewn up regardless of the order that you have Judge and Otani in. But he wrote today about

who the third place finishers might be because there's gonna be a third place finisher and you know he wrote about jimenez and i think that one of the things he said in there is like we've talked about before and remains true like he his performance this year allows you to have like a non-trolley non-takey did cleveland win the francisco lindor trade you know like he you know he's having this incredible year and jose ramirez is like his usual steady eddie self he's having a great season rosario no slaps either right and then we have you know the steven kwan of it all you know he has a 124 wrc plus he's been worth four wins this year. He is both very good and sort of perhaps the idealized version of the kind of offense that people say they are excited about when they're talking about Cleveland.

So there's the Kwan of it all. Oscar Gonzalez hasn't played as much, but Oscar Gonzalez has a 121 WRC plus. Josh Naylor has a 117. So there are individual elements of this offense that are really good and having good years. And like that allows you to forget like, you know, Fran Milreis like washed out of this team.

And the only, the only big league free agent contract that they signed this off season was Luke Mailey. Like their biggest move of the offseason was not trading Jose Ramirez. So I think it's fine for us to both be surprised and delighted in what Cleveland has been able to put together, both in terms of their breakout offensive contributors and then also the quality of the pitching.

They have guys on that side of the ball who are easy to root for. Like seeing Shane Bieber figure out how to still be as good as he is despite the velocity not coming all the way back and the fastball not playing as well has been really cool. And Tristan McKenzie is having a great year. I love Tristan McKenzie. Right. Who doesn't want to root for that guy? His story is incredible.

He's having a great season. So there are definitely elements of this team. And then that's before we even get to the bullpen right like the bullpen is fantastic james karen jack is almost surely gobbling the ball with something but like even when you take him out of it like that bullpen is great and so there are pieces of this team that have really outperformed our expectations there are guys who have taken steps forward and as you said they've been the beneficiary of playing in a division that has, as I described it yesterday, like been some combination of hurt mismanaged or the tigers, right?

Like there's just been, there have has been a collapse at the top of that division compared to who we thought would be good. A lot of that is attributable to injury, although some of it is attributable to underperformance, right? good a lot of that is attributable to injury although some of it is attributable to under performance right and then you know the the tigers despite spending couldn't take a step forward the royals we've just spent time talking about are the royals and so the guardians are a good baseball team like when you look at their underlying metrics this isn't a mirage of a team it's not like last year's mariners like this is a good baseball team. They're like three wins ahead of where base runs or Pythagin Pat says they should be, maybe because of the clutchness I mentioned.

But yeah, they've earned this title for sure. Yeah, they've earned this title. And it's very exciting to see such a young team able to do that. They have been the beneficiaries of pretty good health throughout the season, which I won't say for certain, but I would imagine is in some ways connected to how young the roster is on average right

but like absent anthony ghost needing tj and a couple of stints on the aisle from some of their other guys and like i guess please act not being able to resist smacking the mound with his hand which you shouldn't do zach because they need you to throw with that hand like they've been very healthy especially relative to the rest of the division and those those things can like sit comfortably together and and acknowledging the reality of the division circumstance isn't meant to diminish like what they have been able to achieve because they still had to go out and win those games against their division opponents. Right.

When they had those series against the twins and the white socks earlier this month, and they really like said, no, we're going to, we're going to win the AL central. They still had to do it and take advantage of the diminished state of their opponents.

We just watched a Mariners team, like go three and seven on a road trip against the angels, A's and Royals so right you know winning against diminished teams isn't a given you still have to do it so i think like we can acknowledge the circumstance of their division and still applaud the performance within it i don't think that those things are are contradictory or mutually exclusive yeah the youth makes them fun for sure and And they set some records. I saw that they had 16 MLP debuts this year, which is the most ever for a division winner. And I think they're

the eighth team to be the youngest in the majors and make the playoffs in a season. I did a stat blast inspired by the youth of the Guardians back in episode 1888, because young teams tend to not be so good yet. And the Guardians are already, which bodes well for their future. And yes, it is true. They've had good health. Just looking at the baseball prospectus injury list ledger, they have had the fewest games missed of any team, which could be luck, could be their youth, could be good health management and injury prevention. Who knows? So I'm not saying it's purely a fluke, but that's been a big part of their success. And yeah, the division, Rob Means wrote about this at Baseball Perspectives recently.

And the AL Central this season, as measured by performance outside the division, is one of the worst divisions of all time. And just behind the 2022 nl central which is even worse we gotta do something about the centrals yeah what's going on like the people of the midwest deserve good baseball like what are we doing here abandoned the heartland i think the thing with the guardians you could say maybe that their youth led to their being underrated to some extent, just because players who haven't even been in the big leagues, there might be bigger error bars on their projections. So you might not be able to anticipate exactly what they'll do before they

even get there. So that could be part of why they weren't a preseason favorite. It's certainly true that they were not, right? They had 7.5% chance to win the division according to the opening day fan graphs playoff odds. And I think no one on the fan graphs staff picked them to make the playoffs. No one in the ringer staff picked them to make the playoffs either. So I didn't. And yeah, I mean, people were definitely picking the White Sox and the Twins. There might have even been some dark horse Detroit Tigers picks out there. Cleveland was kind of an afterthought, not because they've ever really been bad lately, but just because ownership hasn't really invested in the roster.

that perhaps that led to the talent that was already on the roster being underrated or just the skill of that front office and player development department in bringing players along just because the fact that they did next to nothing over the offseason and then also did next to nothing at the trade deadline. I think ownership at least merited some condemnation for that just because there clearly was a competitive base there that you could build on and that was the frustration like if they had been a hopeless team as currently constituted then it might have been like well what's one or two moves here there it's a drop in the bucket but because they did have some talent because they kept ramirez around

it was like okay don't waste this put some talent around this kept Ramirez around, it was like, okay, don't waste this. Put some talent around this team. Ultimately, they did that just by promoting from within and developing players. And that front office has a pretty long track record of working within the constraints set by ownership and not being able to spend a lot, but still being able to make smart trades and acquire good players and produce their own good players, particularly pitchers. So that has paid off again. If anything, you would want them still to just spend because, again, like if the front

office is so adept at putting this good team together that is not making a ton of money, then you want them to go into the playoffs not just as the best team in the AL Central, but as good as any other team in the playoff field, which might be a bit of a stretch. So which is not to say that they could not beat any other team or could not make a run because, of course, they can. Any team can. But you would just not want them to squander what they have here and hope that they continue to build on it, keeping Ramirez instead of trading him like Lindor. That was great. But then you want other players to come along and they have come along just from within

or from other teams, organizations acquired via trade, which should not let ownership off the hook for trying to supplement where it can. Yeah. I mean, I think that when you think about the teams where if you're asked, like, who's particularly adept at player development, whose front office group is among the best, like Cleveland's definitely near the top of that list, right? Like the way that they develop pitching, you know, they have a good homegrown outfielder. The curse is over, right?

It's done. So like that's done. The way that they can help to sort of maximize guys on the pitching side is really incredible i mean it's funny to watch the guardians social media account doing this like you know no one believed in us pre-season and i'm like i they're not gonna say anything publicly but i'm like if you won't go ask your your folks in the front office i doubt that their internal projections were wildly different than ours right yeah but you're right like especially when you have young guys who you know like zips really liked steven kwan i think zips fan graphs was higher on we were stat wise and scouting wise yeah we were very yeah we were

we were uh we were here for the the the quantisance i don't know if we need to do names and and words and nouns again if you haven't been there before. Yeah, there you go. But like, you know, Zips was really high on Kwan, but even still, there's going to be a ceiling on the projections that you give a guy who doesn't have big league experience. And it can be a compounding projection issue, right? Because your sort of absolute projection of him is going to be, as it turned out, lower than what his performance this year has merited. And when you have guys whose performances are better than you expect, you are probably also taking the low end on their

projected playing time, right? Because if they're really good, they force the issue and then they're like really good all the time and they're going to play more than we maybe had them projected to on the playing time side. So you have this like compounding projection issue. But I just think, you know, we have talked about this within the context of other teams seemingly every year and definitely lately. Right. We talked about it last year when it came to the Giants. We talked about it when it came to the Cardinals, right? Another team that made a ridiculous late season run.

Right, or the Braves for that matter, right? Where we had projections that I think are sort of philosophically sound. Like the methodology behind them is sound and then things change, right? Guys take a big step forward. The rest of your division gets hurt. You go on a 17 game

win streak and it alters the way that the projections are going to interact with your team. And that, you know, sometimes when preseason projections are low relative to how a team ends up performing, it means that we do need to evaluate the model and see, you know, did we miss anything here? Are we not thinking about something the right way? And so I think it's always a valuable exercise because we should ask that question every year. We want to have the models be as good as they can be understanding that there are going to be things that we just can't, you know, we're never going to be able to quite get the injury stuff, right. You know, because guys, sometimes we know that they might be more likely to get hurt because they've been hurt before, but then sometimes they get hurt for the first time, right?

Or we can't think about how many of, you know, we're not as good at figuring out how they're all going to be hurt at the same time, like the White Sox. And it's hard for us to factor a player dev organization like Cleveland. How do you put that into the projection, right? How do you say, well, we know that they're good at this. So how do you translate that into altering an individual player's projection? That seems like, you know, really tricky business. So there are always going to be kind of blind spots in it. But just as often, it's because something unexpected happened. And sometimes for your favorite team, that unexpected thing sucks, right? Like sometimes all of your guys get hurt at once and that's a real bummer. But sometimes it's because

you have Steven Kwan and Andres Jimenez and Tristan McKenzie, and you have a bunch of guys kind of take a leap forward and really raise the ceiling on your team. And I understand, I said this on Twitter yesterday like i totally get individual players certainly and maybe teams generally embracing a like nobody believed in us narrative right and wanting bulletin board material although i wish that they would like do it in a way that helped their fans think about probabilistic thinking better because i still think that's a worthwhile battle for us as a society. But for the rest of us,

no one at Fangraphs disrespects Cleveland. We have issues with their ownership group, but we all think Jose Ramirez is cool. We just looked at that roster going into the season and we're like, well, I don't think Luke Maley on his own is enough. So relative to the rest of the division, they're not as good.

That isn't meant to like denigrate them. It's mostly about thinking like the White Sox are really good. And maybe the twins have sufficiently addressed their pitching. And they have Carlos Correa. And maybe Byron Buxton will stay healthy the whole year, right? I wish that we framed the surprise team, quote unquote, in terms of the sort of individual players and circumstances that got them to that surprise because it tells you so much more about that team to frame it that way than to sort of embrace like a facile. We can't get no respect. It's like, no, like you're not Harvey Dangerfield.

Like, it's fine. Your ownership group just doesn't spend money like those aren't get no respect. It's like, no, like you're not Harvey Dangerfield. Like it's fine. Your ownership group just doesn't spend money. Like those aren't the same thing. So, you know, I think it's super cool that the rest of the country who maybe doesn't watch AL central baseball is going to like get to know Steven Kwan. That's awesome.

Like as previously stated, this is a pro Steven Kwan podcast, you know, but that doesn't mean that the projection didn't make sense at the time it was made. And that's why it's good to see how these things trend over time.

You know, it's not like they had 7.5% postseason odds last week. You know, the projections adapt to changing information. And, you know, by the time they had cleared those series against the Twins and the White Sox, we thought they were going to win the division and the playoff odds reflected that.

Right. Yeah. And I've seen various ways that that sentiment has been expressed, like the MLB Twitter account tweeted the preseason playoff odds and then said, that's why they play the games, which true. I, I think that's fine. We all want that to be the case. We all want them to play the games. And we also want some surprises and some upsets sometimes. Totally. Baseball would be quite boring if the playoff odds were always perfectly correct. And you're always going to get some team that beats the projections, defies the projections in some way that's just inevitable.

There's a certain amount of luck that just can't be projected. And then there are other things that can't be projected or might be missed in a single season. And that's fine. That's okay. I don't personally have any reason to be defensive about this. I didn't produce the fan cast projections. And I guess I did predict that some other team would win this division, but I never pretend that my projections or predictions mean anything particularly. So I think I understand the sentiment and the desire to say, well, we showed them. I mean, if I were a fan of that team, I'd be thinking that too, probably. So the Guardians social media people, you know, putting together a montage of everyone who projected someone else to win the division. I don't know. I mean, maybe it's not the most gracious act like you've been there before way to celebrate or quote.

Which is wild because they've been there before very recently. They haven't been there before. Yeah. But I get it. I'm sure it plays very well to the fan base who probably were not pleased that the Guardians were not projected to win the division. And then when the Guardians turned out to win the division, they probably said, yeah, see that? We win. You were wrong. Yes, there is a probability and doesn't mean if a 7.5% thing happens, well, it should happen

7.5% of the time, right? And generally the playoff odds have checked out and have been validated and there is some substance and a decent track record to them. But sometimes they're going to miss and it's good that they miss. And I'm sure that, you know, if you're the social media people for a team, well, you want to get your fan base excited and worked up and you want to do the us versus them mentality. And I totally get why you would sort of stoke that and remind people, hey, we beat the odds. That's fun. You know, you're not going to be the team social media account saying we won even though we didn't spend any money. Our payroll ranks really low and we won nonetheless. So, yeah, you might remind people that you beat expectations. I don't see any problem with that. And Austin Hedges, who is one of the older members of this young Guardians team, he's a positively ancient 30, he said, we don't look at ourselves as underdogs, but I know everybody else thought we were, and I don't blame them. We're young, who would have thought? But we believed in ourselves

and we're going to continue to shock the world yeah which that seems like a great attitude yeah totally totally reasonable sentiment to have you know i just want i just want us to all be better about thinking about probabilistic stuff like i just want i think it's important like for society for us to be better collectively at probabilistic thinking and so that that is the one place where it can be a little grating. And I do have skin in the game, right? Because those are our odds. And it's like, I'm not doing them, everyone. Relax.

That's good. I shouldn't be the one that does them. That would be a mistake. It would kind of mix. I don't know. If I could set the Marin mariners playoff odds manually what would i put them at hmm what are the vibes right now yeah they might be lower than the actual ones oh yeah oh yeah but you know so i i will acknowledge obviously that like i have skin in

the game because i want people to understand how our odds are produced and i want them to think they're worth looking at because they're right more often than they're wrong. And that is true. And also sometimes, you know, sometimes you get a Stephen Kwan. I just, I mostly think that, you know, setting the fan part of it aside, which I realize is hard to do. It just feels like a more fun conversation not to mention a more like informative one to be like but andres jimenez though you know then to be like they don't respect us and i was like well i do respect what andres jimenez has done this year so let's talk about him because that's really great and cool you know and i think it would be worthwhile to

not in a like overly saccharine way and not in a, you know, everything has to be wonderful and positive all the time. But when we have stories like that, when we have performances we can point to that are unexpected and unexpectedly good, it would just be nice if that could be the sort of lens through which we analyze how did this Cleveland Guardians team win the Central? Because I think it tells you a lot more, and it's a lot more fun than me getting yelled at on Twitter. Right.

Yeah. I'm sure it didn't hurt that Terry Francona was healthy enough to be back in the dugout this season. Sure, absolutely. That's another thing. How can you account for that or project that? Did not issue a single intentional walk in a 1-2 count as far as I know. Not that I recall.

Not even one. Right. So it's a good team, a fun team. I wish them success in the playoffs. I look forward to watching them and people who may not be as aware of them getting to know them in the playoffs. we could sort of celebrate what makes them different without saying, well, this is why they're good or this is the new competitive advantage or the underrated quality or market inefficiency or whatever. Like, I don't think it's a competitive advantage not to score that much.

I mean, like maybe all else being equal, it's better to be a high contact middling offense than a low contact middling offense, but it's still a middling offense. So I just wonder if they do make a run here, which would be fun. I wonder whether we'll start to see. I think we've already started to see some, oh, this is what makes them so good and so pesky and so tough for other teams is that they make contact and everything. And I don't know, I think we can celebrate that it's fun to watch them make contact and that they are an outlier in that respect without necessarily attributing the success that they've had. Like even in the second half, they have a 97 WRC plus. So it's not like early in the year they were bad and then they figured it out. And that has nothing to do with the current team. Even in the second half, it hasn't really been better. And even in September, which I guess they started slow but have been red hot lately, they have a 102 WRC+.

It's just, you know, it's not a great offensive team. Not every team can be the Dodgers and be great at scoring and also preventing teams from scoring. They did enough to win this division, and they're a credible playoff contender. And I look forward to watching them i guess without having to like make them the faces of bringing contact back and this is why all teams should be doing this it'd be nice if it would be beneficial for all teams to do this but like hitting some homers is also typically pretty productive for teams i would say yeah and it's

not like really good player development and a strong front office is not a new, it's not a new inefficiency, right? If Cleveland started spending a lot of money, then it would be like, oh my gosh, they're trying something new. But it's like, no, the reason that they are able to do what they're able to do is, and this is where they share, you know, some connective tissue with the Rays is that they are able to really get a lot out of the guys that they have and they you know they are good at talent identification both on the amateur side and the pro side and they really help those guys to find their way and i don't say that to diminish sort of the raw talent that their players have to begin with but you know they are

they are really good at that stuff and i think that they get good buy-in from their coaching staff and they clearly get good buy-in from their players so that part of it isn't new in cleveland's that's why they're here at all is because they are good at that stuff so yeah and i don't want to give people more ammunition to ding the fangraphs playoff odds but if you want to do that, the Guardians are not the biggest miss of the season. They're not even close to the biggest miss of the season. The playoff odds had them with a projected winning percentage that is 85 points lower than where they are right now. There are six teams that the odds were off by more than so the orioles the big one yeah of course 135 points

the dodgers 108 points because even when you project the dodgers to be great not great enough and which like that makes sense though sure and then the astros 96 points of winning percentage above their projection. And then on the low end, the Marlins and the Nationals missed by 93 points and 89 points. They underplayed their projections. And then the Mets are 86 points ahead of where they are. And the Guardians, again, 85. So the fact that the Guardians' projection is sort of in the spotlight, I guess, has to do partly with the fact that they were in a division that was winnable by a team that might end up with 90-ish wins, and also that they were the Tigers, at least a couple of those teams are among the bigger disappointments of the season for various reasons. So that contributes to it also. If those teams had played up to expectations or above expectations, it might be a different conversation.

And granted, the Guardians have played some role in the demise of those division rivals i think they're combined 25 and 13 against the twins and the white socks so they have taken care of business against their prospective rivals in that division absolutely but the collapse of the tigers the recent collapse of the twins the just general season-long flop of the white socks that kind of opened the door, at least, and the Guardians have opened it wider and walked right through it. Yep. So, fun team.

Fun team. Congrats to them on clinching, and I look forward to seeing what they do next month. I look forward to them shifting into the part of their emotional spectrum that is jubilant and not aggrieved. They looked pretty jubilant when they were celebrating the clinching. Yeah, they sure did. Yeah. As well they should have.

I love that we're in like, you know, we have officially kicked off basement murder room season in baseball where they put up all the like the visqueen so that the locker room doesn't get destroyed. And it's like, are you celebrating a division championship win or are you preparing to like be the subject of a Netflix documentary? Who could say dexter kill room yeah definitely and i guess we should also extend some congratulations to albert pooholes yeah hit number 69 and number 700 he did it in style on friday back-to-back plate appearances against a lefty first and then they brought in a righty, and he said, it doesn't matter. I will still hit bombs. So that's been a bit of an upset and an underdog story. You wouldn't necessarily think of Albert Pujols as an underdog, but he was at this stage of his career, and he has just continued to be fantastic. What we thought might just be a nostalgia act and some warm

feelings and getting to see him in that uniform and take the last lap around the league. It has been that, but it has also been him basically being the second best hitter in baseball since like early July on a per play appearance basis, which I didn't see coming. one saw that coming and he has made himself not just a heartwarming figure but also someone who is now a core contributor to another team that's probably about to clinch a central title so that's been unexpected and surprising and really fun yeah i i think it's so cool that we got to see him do that in a cardinals uniform and another another moment where like it is very neat when players do that in the in a visiting ballpark and everyone there knows that the moment is bigger than the outcome of an individual game you know to see Dodger Stadium like all kind of rise in unison and and cheer for him and to see the the look on the faces of the Dodgers players even as like the

Cardinals were really kind of giving it to him like Like, yeah, it was very cool. It was, you know, we've talked about the amount of time we might have to wait before we see chases, although then we got to watch Aaron Dutch. But, you know, the in general, like the record and milestone chases might be fewer and farther between. And so it was really cool to to get to see one and to get to see him do it. And now, if he feels tired at the end of the year, you can just be done, Albert. You don't have to come back if you don't want to. I mean, you don't have to anyway, but I bet having that voice quieted is fulfilling too. Yeah. I think it's another argument, not that we needed another, but I think it's an argument in favor of the universal DH that it enables us to

have seasons like this. And the purists might say, well, if you can't play the field, then you shouldn't be a big leaguer anymore. But would anyone really wish that we had not gotten this last bow from Albert Pujols? This is one of the perks. I think it's not the primary reason to have a DH, but if you have a DH, then you have room on the roster for some players whose bats might still be big league caliber, but just might not be able to hack it in other respects. And we get to enjoy them a little longer and they bring joy to everyone. So that seems like a nice little thing. So I'm pro DH for many reasons, but that's another one to add to the pile. And if we hadn't had the universal DH, we would not have Albert Pujols on the Cardinals this year, even as it was. They didn't sign him till March 28th, right? And it was not at all clear that he would find another taker this season. And I remember talking about that signing. I think it was maybe on our NL Central preview episode, which happened to work out at the right time. And I was happy to see this

homecoming, of course, but there was some part of me where I expressed some apprehension at some point about like, well, do we know how this is going to go? You know, like what if he doesn't hit? What if the Cardinals are in a tight race in the Central or in the wildcard and they can't afford to carry someone who's not contributing on that roster? Like, is this going to get kind of awkward the way that it did at the end of Pujols' Angels tenure, where they just sort of unceremoniously eventually cut him loose. Like, is it going to be a Mike Schmidt, Ken Griffey Jr. sort of situation where maybe he just walks away in the middle of the season? And like, he started stronger than that. But as of July 4th, he had a 76 WRC plus. And it's like, oh, I don't know if this is trending in the right direction. And at the time, they didn't really have a great alternative because Corey Dickerson hadn't hit and Lars Neupahr hadn't hit yet the way that he has since. And since that time, Pujols has like a 189 WRC+.

Like he's been incredible, unbelievable. But this could have gone some other way. And I'm glad it didn't go that way. Like it would have been nice to see him in this uniform one more time regardless. nice to see him in this uniform one more time regardless but the fact that he has done a decent albert pujols impression at the plate like peak pujols that's just that's been gravy and that has enabled him to get to 700 which even as of like the middle of this season seemed extremely unlikely until suddenly he just found his mojo again yeah Yeah. And like we get to say to people, this is what it was. This is what we all were so amped about.

It's just really, really great. All the people who had seen the diminished Pujols for the past decade. Yeah, all you youngs out there, all you youths. Yeah. Now you get a taste of the genuine article.

And I really like, I don't know how to account for it exactly. Like this is one of the great old guy seasons of all time at this point. Like even over the full season, Barry Bonds is the only player who has hit more home runs in a season for anyone 42 or older, which not that many players have actually played and gotten significant playing time at that age. But this is really, really impressive that he has done this. And really, the main thrust of my piece was that for much of his career, Albert Pujols has been unsurprising. In his prime, he was basically the same superstar every year. Just incredible consistency in terms of value and MVP voting finishes. He just put up the same amazing season over and over and over again. And then in the second half of his career, he was consistent in not such a good way. He missed time with injuries and his bat was diminished and the rest of his game was too. And so he was typically a below average bat or at least below average player during that phase of his career. You always kind of felt like you knew what Pujols was, either peak Pujols or decline phase Pujols. There was

some surprise when he went from the first phase to the second phase. I still don't understand how just suddenly, seemingly in the middle of the 2011 season, he lost a lot of his plate discipline and started swinging at more pitches outside the strike zone and walking a lot less, and he never got that back. It's weird. But really, the two big surprises of his career have bookended the rest of the 22-year corpus of Pujols' work. When he showed up and kind of came out of nowhere as a 400-second overall pick who had no high-level minors experience and then just walked on to the Cardinals and became one of the best players in baseball from day one, and now the end when he turned back into one of the best hitters

in baseball at least for a few months here i wrote in the piece consistency was his superpower or i guess kind of his kryptonite later in his career but he blew our minds at the beginning and now again at the end again like i'm shocked that he has turned himself into this incredible lefty masher because he just he never was that like yeah through the end of his time with the angels he had a 139 career wrc plus against righties and a 147 career wrc plus against lefties which is not a particularly large platoon split i have all these numbers because i wrote about pujos this week and from 2017 through his release last year, when he wasn't hitting well overall, he wasn't hitting well against lefties either. Like he had an 81 WRC plus against righties and an 87 against lefties, which didn't say, hey, someone's got to pick this guy up as like a lefty mashing bench bat.

But since he signed with the Dodgers, he has hit 329, 377, 680 against lefties. That's a 183 WRC+, which is second in the majors to his teammate Paul Goldschmidt. And 77 WRC+, against righties. So he's had like two of the most lopsided split seasons ever back to back. And I don't know how to account for that. I don't know if he just like decided, OK, I'm in this phase of my career where I'm just a part-time platoon guy and he changed something somehow so that he would do better against lefties at the cost of doing well against righties. I don't know. Or is it small sample or is it the way he's been used this season? Or

I don't really know. It's like kind of a minor baseball miracle that this has happened but it's been really really fun yeah it has been very fun and it has obscured for me this is not something we had decided we were going to talk about but that uh nl mvp race has sure gotten tighter hasn't it true you know like goldsmith's just been kind of okay lately. And so as we have been so fixated on Pujols, I was like, oh, I don't know that he's a shoe-in to win anymore. There were a couple of guys on there, including Nolan Arenado, making a problem. Yeah, well, Arenado was always close, I guess, but some other players have sort of snuck into that conversation. Yeah, for sure. I mean, Manny Machado is now leading the league in fan graphs war i believe

i think you're right a tad just just a scooch ahead but a scooch a smidgen a pinch right yes a dollop a dollop of war what does that look like who could say it's not even as big as as a dollop i don't think no it's an iota of war i don't know a A pinch of Susan. A pinch. Yeah, exactly. Okay. Anyway, maybe it says that when you can see the finish line, you know that you just, you can empty out the tank. Yeah. It's just whatever he's got left now. And we've got a few more regular season games with him and then one more playoff run. And I think this is sort of a storybook ending, regardless of how the Cardinals playoff run

goes. But obviously a few more big October moments would be pretty special too. Very special. All right. So let's take a quick break and we will be back with one Ben Gibbard to talk about the Mariners and music. I'll never give up on you I'll never give up on you I'll never give up on you I'll never give up on you

Well, we are joined now by Effectively Wild outro theme composer Ben Gibbard. That is his main claim to fame, though you may also know him from throwing out the first pitch at multiple Mariners games, and from being the singer-slash-songwriter-slash-guitarist for Death Cab for Cutie, who released their 10th studio album, Asphalt

Meadows, this month. Ben, welcome back. Hi, thanks for having me back. So we want to talk some music, but first we have to talk some Mariners, which I imagine is how you hope most of your album promo will go. So maybe this time Rolling Stone or Paste or Stereogum or someone will just ask me about the Mariners and I'll get to talk about baseball the whole time. That probably doesn't happen all that often, but it is finally happening here. So as we talked to you on Tuesday morning, September 27th, Fangraphs gives the Mariners a 99.8% chance to make the playoffs.

However, the Mariners are not inspiring a great deal of confidence these days. So what are your emotional playoff odds right now? How confident are you feeling that the Mariners will not blow a three and a half game lead plus a tiebreaker with 10 to play? I am feeling fairly confident that they will blow it. So, you know, for weeks, for weeks, I have been coming up against Mariner fan friends of mine who have been expounding this, you know, fictitious, these fictitious playoff odds with like a month left to go. And it's like, dude, they, they had 99.9% chance to make the playoffs. It's like, fella, there are 20 games left. There's a lot of baseball to play. And from the jump when people started throwing out these playoff odds,

I did not believe them. And certainly with, you know, 10-ish games left to go without Julio and maybe without Cal, I'm not sure what his status is, at least for the next couple of games. Gino comes back today, I suppose, but who knows what we're going to get out of him. today, I suppose, but who knows what we're going to get out of him. I'm just watching a very insistent Orioles team. And I'm not believing that this diminished version of the Mariners, where the offense just seemingly doesn't exist without Gino and Julio, can limp across the finish line, especially when we're looking at the team that the Orioles are putting out there right now. So I'm not feeling great, honestly. What a world where we're talking about the Seattle Mariners fending off the Baltimore

Orioles for a playoff spot. It's not funny, Ben. It's not funny. It's really not. And it forces me to watch a Red Sox-Orioles game in late September and root for the Red Sox, which is something I don't particularly like to do. I wonder if there was any point during this season. It's going to feel so nice when we finally have this particular monkey off our backs, isn't it? But was there any point during this season where you felt like, huh, we really got something going here?

There was, and it was about two weeks ago. Yeah. I was texting with a mutual friend of ours who may or may not have maybe been on this podcast a lot of times. And I said to him, I couldn't believe it as I was typing it, but I said something like, you know, this team could win the World Series. And the next sentence I wrote him was emphasis on the word could. But, you know, looking at a Mariners team firing on this particular team, firing on all cylinders with the pitching staff and the bullpen defense and just enough offense. on all cylinders with the pitching staff and the bullpen, the defense and just enough offense, you know, I was starting to not so much believe that they were going to make that kind of run,

but it was starting to at least seem possible to me. You know, when you look at some of those like Giants teams, the 12 or 14 Giants, you know, a run that the Braves went on last year, you start to see, okay, well, this is possible. But then I, for a moment, I forgot that this was the Seattle Mariners. And, and that, and that, you know, you're catching me at a very fatalist kind of point in, in, in the season, especially after the game two days ago, you know, when I was in Chicago, I was in Chicago on a day off and I was kind of, I went to the Museum of Contemporary Art and I was looking at, I was trying to not watch the game on my phone, but checking the score. And it was 11 to 2. And I thought, well, this one's in the bag. I can put my phone away now.

And it turned out that I, that it was probably good that I did put my phone away and that I was only made aware of the score an hour later. Because it allowed me an hour of peace and it allowed me to enjoy the Nick Cave exhibit, which was incredible. I don't know which mutual friend you're referring to who was on this podcast many times. Could be anyone. But if it is one person I'm thinking of who is a mutual friend who was on this podcast many times, that person works for the Tampa Bay Rays. And the Tampa Bay Rays are half a game ahead of the Mariners right now. And is that at least what you would want to happen given the potential playoff matchups here? I mean, I know that when you're a Mariners fan, it's hard to think of wanting to get the third wildcard spot instead of the second wildcard spot. And you're playing with fire with Baltimore back there.

back there. But would you rather, I guess the question is, face the Guardians and the Yankees than the Blue Jays and the Astros, assuming that you are actually going to make the playoffs? Well, you are correct that that is the person that I was talking to. I wasn't sure if I was allowed to blow up his spot or not, being that he does work for a rival team. I don't think he could get fired for texting Ben Gibbard. I think that's okay. Yeah, I don't think so either, but I'm not sure how this stuff works quite. Honestly, at this point, or even before this point, where we seem to be teetering on the edge of blowing it, I shouldn't say we, but I'm not on the team, when the Mariners are on the verge of maybe blowing it. From the jump, when it was looking

like the Mariners had a healthy lead, and it was really just a matter of playoff slotting at that point, I have not allowed myself to go to the place of picking apart our potential opponents, the Mariners' potential opponents in a playoff run, as I feel a lot of Mariners fans or Mariners fans should feel at this point. Let's just get this monkey off of our back. Let's just make the playoffs. And then whatever comes, you know, let things come what may, you know, I don't I think that kind of acknowledging the playoff odds was a mistake. And then also discussing, discussing our potential opponents as if this was where we were at this point, I think was the second point

of hubris. So at this point, I think we the second point of hubris. So at this point, I think we're white knuckle in this thing to such a degree that as a fan, I just want to see them play a meaningful game in a playoff series. And I don't care who the opponent is. So you mentioned the absence of Julio if the Mariners are able to make the postseason and he is able to come back in some version of himself as we have seen, that is likely to dictate a good deal of their playoff fortunes. But before we get there, I wonder if you could just talk about the experience of watching Julio Rodriguez,

because as we know, there have been a lot of princes who were promised on the prospect side in Mariner fandom, and some of them have turned out okay, but a lot of the ones who were highly touted and highly ranked have ended up kind of disappointing. We all lived through the Dustin Ackley era. So what has it been like for you to not only see a Mariner's prospect sort of arrive on the big league stage and be so good,

but be sort of as transcendently good as Julio has been. And, you know, someone who has attracted the attention, not only of Mariners fans, but a national baseball audience. Well, I mean, the short answer is it's been wonderful to watch him. I mean, I had gone to see him play in Everett a number of times, and it was just very clear as a layman baseball fan that he was very special and just leaps and bounds above the competition at that level. But as a Mariners fan, I don't mean Meg, jump in and correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think we've seen as Mariners fans. I don't believe we've seen a above replacement level touted position player since Kyle Seager, maybe? Is he the last homegrown position player that has been above league average? It seems like he might be the last one.

Yeah. And he wasn't even super highly touted when he was a prospect. Yeah. He almost was like a mistake that he was as good as he was. Or they didn't see it coming, or he made some adjustments personally that turned out to benefit the Mariners. But yeah, the Mariners seem to have a very good track record of developing pitching and very little track record of developing position players. So it seems to me in this case that Julio is just so preternaturally talented and such a sure fire star that not even the Mariners could find a way to ruin him. And yeah, I do not remember a time in my life in the last 20 years that a position, a Mariners position player has kind of won the hearts and minds of the greater baseball community.

Have you considered re-recording Itro's theme as Julio's theme? Because, you know, Julio rhymes with go, as does Itro. So you would not have to even change up that many lyrics. I could do that, but I fear I would kind of fall into Elton John territory

whenever, you know, it's like, you know, there was this song about, that was originally about Marilyn Monroe and then it became about Princess Diana. I don't know if he's re-recording it for the Queen now, but I imagine he might be. So I feel to not sully the Ichiro song, not that changing the lyrics would be about Julio, but I think that Julio deserves his own very special song. And I'm not sure if I'll be the one to write it.

I'm sure maybe Macklemore is probably in the studio right now recording it and I'm sure it'll be great. So, you know, I'm on tour right now. I don't have the time to really accomplish that and I fear I might be beaten to the punch, honestly. Right. Well, how do you feel about the Mariners as a playoff team stipulating that you're not taking anything for granted

and you don't want to incur any curses or anything like that. But if they do make it, if the playoff odds prove right, what do you feel good about and bad about when it comes to the Mariners in October? Well, I still feel even through this very dark period, this, you know, 10 game road trip where they somehow lost series to the Angels, A's and Royals, it's almost impossible. It seems like it boggles the mind that that's impossible. But, you know, as I said, this is the Seattle Mariners we're talking about here. But I do believe even through this past 10 day road trip that this team firing on all cylinders, which I guess, you know, is kind of a little bit of a cop out to say that.

But, you know, if the pitching staff is putting up, you know, the numbers they've been putting up all season, the bullpen is able to hold leads. And, you know, we have a fully, fully healthy Julio and Gino and Cal, which, of course, are big ifs. I really see the only the only the only team I'm really afraid of in the playoffs is the Astros. But at the same time, the only team I'm really afraid of in the playoffs is the Astros but at the same time the playoffs are a crapshoot we all know this and anything can happen anybody can get hot at the right time and make a run so I'm not saying that with confidence I'm not saying that the Mariners can whip anybody except the Astros but as far as teams that have certainly this season given the Mariners a lot of grief there's, there seems to be something in the water in Houston that makes the Mariners play not so great down there.

It could be also just the Houston Astros. It might just be that. They are a very, very good team. It might not just be the water. It might be the actual Houston Astros. I wonder, kind of taking a step back even further than that, sort of how you feel about the direction of the franchise generally, right? Because we have heard a lot about this being the opening of a competitive window. We saw them sign Robbie Ray last offseason. We've seen them commit to Julio and also Luis Castillo in recent weeks. recent weeks. So there are, despite this recent sort of dip in their performance on the big league club, there are, you know, sort of positive signs of future contention. How do you, how do you feel about the future of the Seattle Mariners? Yeah, I have to, I feel more optimistic than I felt in

some time. I mean, obviously last year was kind of this fluky thing that was very fun to watch, but I didn't feel coming out of that season that it would be just as simple as adding Robbie Ray and now we're at 95 wins or whatever and definitely in the playoffs. But I do feel that the Mariners are, I guess this could be said about any team, but the Mariners are really a signing or two away from being really formidable. And I think it goes without saying that the offseason priority should be picking up a bat or two, I guess, along with every other team in baseball. But for the first time, it feels like there is a true core taking form. taking form and and looking at the rotation now especially with castillo wrapped up for the next five maybe six years it's hard to not look at this ray castillo gilbert and kirby and i guess to a

certain extent marco but slightly less so and just see this well that's that's that's four days in a row that's going to be very difficult for any opposing team yeah and to know that that is locked up for the next four or five years, you know, makes me as optimistic as I could feel. Yeah, I think I asked Meg this maybe before the season started, and she just shut down this line of discussion, probably appropriately. But is there any part of you that feels like you wanted to break the playoff drought in a different way than winning, let's say, the last wildcard spot? Does it feel like they had to create a new playoff spot and format in order for the Mariners to make the playoffs? Or is it just like, you know what, let's just get this over with and we can worry

about winning the division next year? Oh, I really don't care how I don't I mean, if I mean, I was kind of anti the NBA style playoffs that Manfred was trying to get through earlier this year, where it was like, basically half the league makes the playoffs felt very kind of participation trophy ish to me as far as the playoffs. And I do believe there should be a little bit of a, I do not care. Let me just say that I do not care. I just I can only imagine, you know, it's, it's that, it's kind of that old Seinfeld, you know, that old Seinfeld joke about rooting for the laundry when it comes to any sports team. And, you know, this, this particular group of gentlemen is not the same group of players that were on this team even five years ago, for the most part, almost across the board. You know, it, it has been often said that, you know, well, this is a different group of players. They don't feel that they're not carrying the last 20 years of pressure for not making the playoffs. It's a different group of guys, blah, blah, blah, blah. But these are human beings and they're hearing this every day from the press. And probably when they go out in

public, people are asking that they're going to break the curse. And I have to think that the pressure to kind of end this drought for the city is weighing on their shoulders because they're human beings and they hear this stuff all the time. So I think that I'm not expecting the Mariners to make a deep run if they do get in. It's certainly possible, but I'm not expecting it. But I do think that there'll be something, there'll be like kind of just a weight that's lifted off all the players' shoulders once they can just kind of get over this hump of missing the playoffs for, you know, 20 plus years at this point. Well, and I think it's good to get some new highlights in circulation.

You know, I remember the 95 team, like I have, despite how played out the 95 highlights are, still have affection for them when I see them but it'd be nice to have something new in the ballpark you know when they when they get to opening day in 2023 to not play anything from the 90s would just be I think a liberating experience for all of us yeah it's it's it's really becoming tiresome to me as well that, look, I love that footage of Griffey rounding third and scoring as much as any Mariners fan, but it's not in HD. It would be nice to get some highlights in HD, bare minimum, to play on the big, nice new Jumbotron. Deathcab turned 25 this year, which means that your band predates the

Mariners' playoff drought. And I did a little research here. If I did this right, the last time that Death Cab played on the same day that the Mariners played a playoff game was October 21st, 2001, which was the night of ALCS Game 4. You played the Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto on the photo album tour. And you're maybe going to have to reckon with overlap between a show of yours and a Mariners playoff game sometime soon. For instance, next Friday, October 7th, you're playing Rabbit Rabbit in Asheville, North Carolina. There are four wildcard games that day. Maybe you get lucky and if the Mariners are playing one, it will be a day game and you could do both. But you have shows on the 8th, the 10th, and most days during the rest of October. So if this eventuality comes to pass,

how do you plan to monitor the Mariners during shows? Is that possible? I don't think I would have the balls to do this, but I have heard stories about Johnny Ramone having a TV placed at an angle next to his monitor so that he could watch the Yankees in the World Series. This might be an urban legend, but I've heard this is from good sources. This is true. I do not, I think I would have to, well, I would. The focus is the show. People are paying money for these tickets. I'm not going to have an iPad behind my amp with the game on, as tempting as that may be. Knowing my luck, I would imagine the Mariners will be playing while we are on stage. That's just kind of how these things go. It's a similar kind of luck that the band tends to have with festivals where, you know, we don't end, we always end up playing on the opposite day from the band that we want to see. Kind of,

that's just kind of our luck. But a lot of my friends earlier in the season when the Mariners were on that tear were like, oh, buddy, you're going to have to reschedule some dates. You're going to have to be able to miss this. I'm like, if I'm going to have to miss this, I'm going to have to miss this. I don't think we have TiVo or DVR technology on the tour bus. And the way information moves quickly at some point, somebody would probably yell out the score from the audience at me.

Anyway, so I will watch where I can, when I can. But as I said, you know, I'm not necessarily making those plans yet. I will believe the Mariners are in the playoffs when I'm watching the first game on TV. That's when I will believe the Mariners are in the playoffs when I'm watching the first game on TV. That's when I will believe it. So, yeah, we'll have to cross that bridge first. Yeah, because October 26th, you're playing Seattle. That's the day of ALCS Game 7. I guess if the Mariners were in it, it probably wouldn't be a home game.

But still, I was wondering about the precedent because I don't know if you are aware, be a home game. But still, I was wondering about the precedent because I don't know if you are aware, but earlier this year, the country music star Eric Church infamously canceled a sold out concert in San Francisco because or San Antonio, I think, because he's a huge Tar Heels fan and the Tar Heels were in the final four and he wanted to go to the game and people were mad at him. But he ended up playing a free concert in Texas for the people who had tickets for the first show. I'm sure it's all blown over by now. So Eric Church has established a blueprint for you to get out of this if you want to. Plus, the Tar Heels had won the tournament only five years earlier. So you have a much better excuse than Eric Church did. And I was looking, one guy on Twitter at the time said if eric church really believed

in the tar heels he would never have scheduled a show during the final four to begin with oh yeah so yeah what do you say to the fans and i'm sure many people are saying this who've said if ben gibbard really believed in the mariners he would never have scheduled a tour during october to begin with well you know to be perfectly honest i i didn't believe in the mariners at the end of the season you know i i felt that last season although very enjoyable was kind of a fluke and i you know the most as you guys obviously know and have discussed them many times on the show you know you look at the mariners run differential last season and and their freakish record in one run games and it becomes very apparent apparent that this was not necessarily going

to be a repeatable thing, lest they make, you know, some personnel adjustments. So going into the season, I don't know what I have, I have like a bet that I have every year with some friends about what the Mariners win total is going to be. And I think I was around 85, 86, just like on the outside looking in. And I feel more so that I take these positions because I'd rather expect less and be surprised than to get rah, rah, rah in my fandom and then be disappointed at the end of the day. But I would also like to add in relation to Eric Church, Eric Church is one man who can make decisions unilaterally for his whole tour. And I am in a band with four other human beings who enjoy paying down their mortgages. And I don't

think I could get away with that, even if I wanted to. And certainly not in Seattle, the city that I live in and I have to walk around in all the time. That would not play well and certainly probably not with a fan base that I'm sure some of them are into sports, but it's not really a rock and jock crowd out there. So I don't think that decision would be met with understanding and forgiveness. You could spin it as I'm canceling the concert so that you can all go watch The Mariners. And secretly, it will be because you want to watch The Mariners, but you can make it sort of a selfless thing. But I'll give you this. Your last show on this leg of the tour, I believe, is October 27th. So you will be free for the World Series if

The Mariners were playing in it. But you mentioned Macklemore, and I believe he is about to tour too, but not until November. So he has his priorities straight, it seems like. And again, a one-man show, I guess, may be easier for him. But there aren't that many celebrity Mariners fans, really, compared to other teams. So someone has to represent. If the Mariners are in the Fox playoff game, and they're showing all of the usual celebrities who are in the crowd and there's no Ben Gibbard to get a close up there, who will stand up for the Mariners on that stage? Well, I think you I think you are wildly over exaggerating my celebrity by by stating that any major network would want to cut away to me in the crowd. I think I think it would be met with confusion by most people watching. No, but you are right.

I mean, the Mariners are not a cause de celeb. They don't. I think it's like me and Macklemore and I think maybe like Sir Mix-a-Lot. I think that's maybe about it. I think, you know, even, you know, I'm sure. Well, no, I'm the Pearl Jam guys are Mariners fans. Ed annoys me a bit with his like going back and forth between the Cubs and the Mariners kind of, you know, stuff. It's like, you know, his whole like, you know, he writes a song for the Cubs and like, is he going to try to, is he going to try to elbow in on the Mariners thing? You know, if the Mariners end up in the World Series, I mean,

obviously he's welcome. Of course, he's been a Seattle resident for longer than I have. So he's certainly entitled to do that. But we'll just have to see. We'll have to see who comes out of the woodwork, if and when the Mariners ever, ever make it to the World Series. Who will all of a sudden come out of the woodwork and be like, yeah, I've been a Mariners fan my whole life. A bunch of bandwagon jumpers.

Yeah. Yeah. But I would love to have the problem of being annoyed at bandwagon fans. That would be a wonderful development to sit back and have that be the thing that I'm annoyed with and not, you know, not the offense. I guess like Chris Pratt, maybe. Rainn Wilson. I'm trying to think of TV. Dale Chihuly. Yeah.

Oh, yeah, Dale Chihuly. Yeah. I bet the Fox broadcast is like, where's Dale? Where is he? We have failed because we haven't gotten Dale. Dale. Cut to Dale. They just walked it off.

Cut to Dale. Well, you've maybe kind of answered this question already. But for you, is a successful Mariners 2022 season them just making the playoffs? Do they have to advance or is simply clearing that line and letting us move forward with our lives sufficient for you to feel satisfied? I think it's certainly the latter. Making the playoffs at this point would feel like winning the World Series after 20 plus years of not playing.

I guess we technically played in October, but not in the October Series after 20 plus years of not playing. I guess we technically played in October, but not in the October, October. So yeah, I mean, just talk to me in 10 days when the Mariners are knock on wood playing a playoff game. Of course, at that point, I'm gonna wanna win. It feels, I mean, it might be a little bit like my feelings about the Grammys,

where it's like I didn't particularly, it wasn't something I, being nominated was a thrill the first time we were nominated. And then once we were there, I really wanted to win one. I was overcome with being competitive and a desire to win. So I'm sure the same, I'm sure the same thing will take hold of me if we get to that point. But as I said earlier, I will believe it when it's, when I'm watching it. And until that point, there's just too much baseball to play. And, and the Orioles are on fire and, you. And the Mariners are down some really important players. So we'll just have

to see if they can move across the finish line. I don't know if the Mariners will be able to line up their playoff rotation the way that they would want it. But I guess if they could, then you'd probably have Ray and Castillo out there. Although, arguably, they've not been the most effective Mariners starter, which leads me to the question, who would you want in a game three if it came to choosing between these two, Logan Gilbert or George Kirby? Because there are almost too many pretty decent starters who are better than that for a three-game series. I think I would go with Kirby. I think his stuff is, as much as I can evaluate it as a layperson,

his stuff seems really nasty and he just throws a lot of strikes and he works really quickly. It seems to me that Gilbert can get a little bit sloppy with the fastball and kind of accidentally serve, you know, a meatball every once in a while. And I think that Kirby's kind of control, you know, kind of puts him slightly ahead of gilbert for me i don't know meg meg what do you think i'm curious what your take would be what a good question i am moved as you are by the control with kirby i never know how much to really value to really ascribe to sort of big game experience and obviously neither of these guys have pitched in the big league playoffs,

but Gilbert is a more seasoned veteran when it comes to just playing in the majors generally. So maybe he can handle the moment better. But I imagine everyone's just going to be a ball of nerves no matter what. So I don't really think you can go wrong. I have affection for what Marco Gonzalez has sort of contributed to the franchise. But I think as long as Marco isn't the guy you have to turn to in that moment, I think you're probably doing okay. I would agree 100%.

It's interesting how Marco went from being the de facto ace, even though no one would ever have given him that mantle on any other pitching staff. I see people on Mariners Reddit complaining about Marco now, and it seems a little unfair. I mean, he's still a workhorse. If he doesn't have the control, it can be an ugly day or night. But he's still Marco. He's still a really effective big league pitcher. And I feel like we have an embarrassment of riches

in the starting pitching department now, which has kind of pushed Marco to the outskirts, which is good for the Mariners, but maybe a little unfair as it pertains to Marco Gonzalez as a pitcher and a human being. So we want to ask you a few music questions, album questions before we let you go and enjoy DC before your concert there tonight.

I'm curious as someone who's been touring for many years and has played hundreds and hundreds of shows, whether you retain any memory of individual shows. For instance, when I told you that you played the Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto on October 21st, 2001, were you like, oh yeah, I remember that one? Or were you like, I'll take your word for it, because it just blends into the zillion shows that I've played? Can you summon any memories from individual concerts among the sea of concerts that you've played? I usually can. When you said the horseshoe, I had a specific memory of pulling through the alleyway behind the horseshoe, which not necessarily in a bad area of Toronto,

although it's a city, so alleys and cities are never like great places. You know, they're never like a pleasant place to be. And unloading the gear and right onto the stage to play a show, I remember just kind of, I don't remember faces, but I can kind of remember this hazy view of, you know, a couple hundred people

or whatever it was at that show. So it's not so much that I have specific memories of shows or venues that we've played. Sometimes I'll see a venue on the itinerary and be like, I don't think we've ever played there before. And Nick or somebody else will be like, no, we've played there twice. I'm like, no, I don't think we have. And then it was like, no, I don't believe you. It's like, dude, we've played there twice. And then we get to the venue and I walk in and I go, oh yeah, I remember this place. Yeah, yeah, totally. So, you know, places start to blend together a bit. But it's it's not so much that I have to be told what city I'm in or, you know, that I've never said the wrong like, hey, Cincinnati, how you doing?

And we're in Cleveland or whatever. You know, I try to it's it's important to me and to the rest of the band that we recognize that as a good friend of mine, Travis Morrison from the Dismemberment Plan once said, every night is somebody's Friday night. You know, somebody bought these tickets and it was analog. They posted them on their little tack board or they kept them in their phone or whatever it might be. And, you know, they're looking forward to the show and they're going to go out to eat beforehand or they're going to meet their friends for a drink. And I would like to say that I've been able to be virtuous in that position my entire career. It hasn't been always the case. You know, we've had bad shows. We've had, you know, things go poorly or nights that just felt off. But I think it's just for any performer in any kind of discipline, anybody who gets in front of an audience, it's important to

remember that that point that every night is somebody's Friday night, you know, even if it's a Sunday and, you know, Tuscaloosa or whatever, you know? Yeah. Yeah. I kind of wanted to ask a related question to that because, I mean, I hope this will not feel strange, but it's like your music has like highlighted important stretches of my like emotional life as a person. And I don't say that to like put a burden on your new album or anything like that. But I wonder like what that feels like, because sports kind of mimics that for a lot of people, right? Like you, we remember aspects of the 95 playoff run, and they have deep emotional resonance for us. And music can sort of play a similar role, but it's more lasting because you, you know, you can listen to it every day. So what is what is it like to carry the emotional like burden of a generation, Ben?

Well, let me tell you, Meg, it's not. No, I mean, I guess I can only really speak to that as a fan of music myself, because if I speak of it as an artist or a songwriter or whatever, it can get a little self-important. And so as a fan, you know, there are records by bands and artists that mark time in my life the way no other medium marks time. I've said this a few times, but I do really believe it that, you know, music is a time machine. You know, you, you know, it's like if you if I put on the Cure's Disintegration, I'm immediately taken back to being 13, 14 years old in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., you know, about to move to Seattle and how sad I was about, you know, leaving my friends and leaving high school. and formative. But I think one of the beautiful things about the music that kind of marks time in your life and kind of and marks emotional moments is that you can carry that with you through the rest of your life. You know, when I listen to Disintegration, I'm reminded what it's

like to be 14 years old, but I'm also 46 years old now. And, you know, this music has had resonance with me throughout different periods of my life, even after the first time that I heard it. But I think also as a fan, that makes it very difficult for an artist to kind of hit that same note for you later in life, because you have this period with their music that was so informative and important to you, especially when you're young, right? that was so informative and important to you, especially when you're young, right? So this is, as an artist, this is a really good problem to have. I don't necessarily think, when I go into writing a record or making a record,

I don't necessarily think that, I never allow myself to think, I should say, that a record 25 years in is going to have the same resonance for a fan who picked up transatlanticism when they were 18 years old. That just seems like it's very difficult to get that same hit. But there's always the possibility that somebody's going to stumble across this record, and it's going to maybe be the first thing that they've ever heard from you. And it might hit them the same way the 18-year-old who heard transatlanticism in 2003 felt. Or that that person who fell in love with an earlier one of our records will hear this new record and it will rekindle their love of the band and they will

find things to love in this new record that remind them why they love the band in the first place and I think for me that's the goal is always to make the best record ever the goal is always to make Sergeant Pepper like every time you go out right so it's not for a matter of not trying, but I think it's better to be, you know, to think about your own records the way I like to think of our own records the way I would. I think about my favorite band's records and why late era records don't resonate with me or do resonate with me. And, you know, recognize that we are not dissimilar. recognize that we are not dissimilar. A person on the streets relation to Death Cab who likes our band is not dissimilar to my relationship with The Cure or Superchunk or Lowe or any bands that I grew up really loving. Yeah, there was a Washington Post piece this week called, Why Do You Like the Music You Like? Science Weighs In. And the subheading was,

Preferences May Change Over Time, But Research Shows That People Tend To Be Especially Fond of Music From Their Adolescent Years, which seems like something that we don't necessarily need to commission research about. Yeah, do we need science for that one? You could have just asked anyone who listens to music about that, probably. But that's a good segue into Asphalt Meadows, I think, because it does seem to be resonating with people, maybe with new fans, but also with longtime Death Cab fans. And I think the title makes me think of a couple of things that are probably specific to me. One is a sports field in Manhattan called Asphalt Green, where I grew up as a kid playing sports. And also it reminds me

of like the outfield in the kingdom or something just like artificial turf that is basically green concrete. I'm sure neither of those was the inspiration. But I don't know if you pay attention to reviews at this stage of your career, but you're getting good ones. So according to Metacritic and various other review aggregators, Asphalt Meadows has the best critic score of any Death Cab album since Transatlanticism. And anecdotally, I've heard from a few people who've told me how much they've enjoyed it, and I'm really liking it too. So I guess it's hard to assess why music connects or doesn't connect with people. But do you feel similarly positive about this one? And do you have any theories about why this one does seem to be hitting with a lot of people?

Well, yeah. First off, thank you for saying that we felt while we were making it we had a hunch that we were we were making a good one and you know i would talk to friends and you know people close to me and you know somewhat guardedly say like yeah i think i think this one's gonna be good i think we're making a really good one and then we finish it we're listening to it ourselves and the mix process and mastering everything we're like i think this record's really good and then you know i'm starting're listening to it ourselves and the mix process and mastering everything. And we're like, I think this record is really good. And then, you know, I'm starting to talk to the press leading up to the record's release. And I'm talking about how I think this is, you know, it's very difficult to say you think you've made your best record in 10 years without having that be the pull quote.

And then having the next article be like, he said he thought he was making their best record in 10 years. But this record is garbage. So the closer we got to release date, the more I was hoping that we weren't wrong. You know, hoping that our... Because if we thought we made a really great record this time, and it turns out we didn't, I really wouldn't know where to go from there. But it's been... I don't search...

I don't seek out reviews. I never really have, at least not for out reviews. I really, I never really have, at least not for a very, very, very long time, but it's been really heartening to see the response from the press, but also friends, industry people who have always been supportive. And when we put a new record out, they'd be like, oh yeah, it's really good. I like that song, that song, to be effusively into it, you know, and you can, and you can, so it's, it's, you can really tell when somebody is being supportive and when they actually really like something. And I feel that the pandemic worked to our advantage to a certain extent in that we, we really had to slow down and

be a lot more methodical about, you know, writing and, and, and working on arrangements. And the fact that we really couldn't be in the same room together meant that. You had sort of a postal service-y composing process, right? Yeah, we were experimenting with new ways of writing music that I don't think we ever would have done if the world had not come to a grinding halt. And I think most importantly, it got us out of the cycle of, okay, it's been a year and a half since the last record,

so we need to start really thinking about what the next one's going to be and making these decisions that seem like they're more almost market-based or more so touring-based than I had something to say and we felt we had a really strong batch of songs. Yeah. And there's a lot of, I would say, experimentation on it, maybe thematically, tonally, but also sonically. It seems like there are a lot of interesting time signatures on this record as I've been listening to it with my wife who has a master's in music. And every time I put it on, I'll catch her counting like one, two, three, four, one, two, three, one, two, three, four. A lot of switches like in the middle of songs are kind of irregular

meters, which I imagine is difficult in concert, possibly. But was there anything in particular that inspired that? Or was that just your muse? I think at this point, 25 years in, I am not particularly interested in continuing to make records unless we have something, I have something I feel I want to say, and that we feel we're making music that is at least new and challenging for us. That's not taking away from the catalog, so to speak. I feel like there is this particular trend amongst career artists that at some point, certain artists or bands decide that what their fans really want is to be drowned in material. And, you know, I'm not going to name any names, of course, but it's, oh, so-and-so is releasing their second double album in six months.

I can think of one band that makes that description this year. Or, yeah, or, oh, wow, this is their third full length in the last two years. I mean, it's just, I feel like at this point in our career, I want to be very careful with the catalog and, you know, by extension, although it's kind of an odd word, the legacy of the band, that I would rather put out one record every four or five years that is highly curated and carefully kind of put together than to get into that position that I can only imagine the mentality is like, hey, we're great. We can whatever we do is going to be great. So let's just put it out. At a certain point, I don't think people need a Death Cab record every year, even the fans. I think that would be too much. I think at this point, it's better to go away for a while and ruminate on life and everything else and come back with something you feel is vital to say than to just continue releasing music because that's just what you've

always done. Well, you don't have to name any bands that might be a bit on the conveyor belt when it comes to new albums, but I am curious, what are you listening to lately that isn't your own band? As far as new records that I'm really enjoying, I've been a huge fan of this guy Alex G for some time. He has a new record out called God Save the Animals, which I really like. I love the new Built to Spill record, When the Wind Forgets Your Name.

It might not come as a shocker to anybody who has heard our music, but Built to Spill is a huge influence on us. I'm a big fan of this guy Micaiah McRaven. He's kind of like a jazz drummer. He's put out a new record called In These Times. As a band, we are currently

obsessed. I've always been somewhat obsessed, but now we are collectively obsessed with Creedence Clearwater Revival after watching the new Netflix live at Royal Albert Hall on the bus a couple days ago. And just, I don't, I can't pay credit for this observation. My friend, Tom Sharpling, once called Creedence Clearwater Revival America's Beatles. And I would completely sign on with that. I never do not want to listen to Creedence. One more question about the music on here. There's a lot of vocal filters and vocal effects, not on every song, but on some. And I wonder how you decide when you want to use something like that, because there are a lot of songs, solo songs, death cab songs, where it's very stripped down and it's just you and an acoustic guitar at times.

And here, I wouldn't say that the vocals are ever buried in the mix. And you're a band that I think has great lyrics and is known for great lyrics. And you want those to actually be intelligible, unlike a lot of bands that make it hard to hear the words. But how do you decide, I don't want this just to be pure, unvarnished gibbered. I want to add a little bit of fuzz or a little bit of something or other. Well, a lot of those calls were made by producer John Congleton when he was mixing the record. But I had specifically told him at some point that he could be as liberal as he wanted to be with vocal effects, so long as we were not leaning into kind of trendy, gimmicky effects. I mean, a perfect example is kind of doing a stylized auto-tuning of all the backing vocals or whatever

that is kind of seemingly a thing that I think Bon Iver kind of popularized, but it's become kind of a trope. I mean, it was a very amazing innovation, but I think it's been used a little bit too much as kind of a, you know, we are serious artists and make weird music kind of stand in thing. So, you know, as long as we weren't, as long as John wasn't dipping into kind of played out production tricks, I was totally fine with it. So I think in a lot of cases, it really served the songs and kind of the tone of the songs, you know. Well, I wanted to mention this to you, because how often do you get the chance to tell the person who wrote a song that is constantly stuck in your head that that is the case, but you have a song on your solo album, which I like a lot called Duncan, Where Have You Gone? And I don't know if this is high in the Ben Gibbard

canon, but I have a dachshund named Grumpkin, which is a George R. R. Martin mythical creature. And because Grumpkin sounds like Duncan, I'm constantly just singing Duncan, Where Have You Gone with Grumpkin substituted in for Duncan so that whenever I can't find her, I will start singing that song with her name in there. So I guess that just goes to show that you put these things out into the world and you never know how they're going to be received or if people will just change the name to their dog's name and sing it to their dog instead. Well, there's a really great William Gibson quote that I'm kind of paraphrasing here, but it's something along the lines, he was talking about his books. And people were asking about, you know, years after his, you know, the big trilogy,

the Necromancer trilogy came out, you know, if he recognized, you know, what it was like to have this kind of body of work that was out in the world, and, you know, influencing the culture, however it did. And he said something along the lines of, well, you know, my books are kind of like, I feel like they're my adult children who go off into the world and have great adventures. And I feel very similar about our records and my songs. It's like they, you put them out, very rarely do you expect anything grandiose coming back from them, or I should say hardly ever, if ever. But it does feel as if once you release music, it no longer belongs to you, at least in the kind of pop culture sense.

Right. It belongs to my dachshund specifically. It belongs to your dachshund now, yes. Your dachshund now owns, Duncan, where have you gone? I believe he can register with BMI ASCAP and collect some of whatever performance royalties might be coming from it. Yes. Great. All right. Well, we will let you go. You're a busy man. You're on the road. I've heard that it's difficult to get tour buses these days, that with so many people touring and supply chain and who knows what, that tour bus prices have skyrocketed. But I hope that you have managed to secure one and that you're traveling in style and that at least you have a TV in the bus if you finish your show while the Mariners are still on.

We do. In fact, we have been in good standing with the bus companies for some years. So the buses, we're all very nice guys and the buses tend to show up in the same state that they were leased to us. But yeah, I mean, to your point, it is everybody is on tour right now, mostly because people are understandably wanting to go and promote their albums they put out in 2020 or 2021. Right. So a lot of there's a lot of traffic, a lot of competition for consumer dollars when it comes to going to show. So, I mean, we just feel we just feel very fortunate that, you know, people are coming to the shows and they seem to be having a good time

and we're able to get from city to city in one piece. Yeah, at some point during the pandemic, I was talking with Nick, our bass player, and he said something along the lines of, I'm never going to take for granted a Sunday show in fill in the blank quaternary american market ever again i'm just going to be very very glad to be there and that's certainly been the case on this on this tour so far it just feels it feels just really wonderful to get back to doing this thing

that we love so much and that you know we weren't ever we weren't sure it was not so much ever going to come back but that you know touring indie rock was kind indie rock wasn't necessarily an essential service, at least not for the general public. So we kind of felt this would be one of the last industries to come back, and it was. But you can just really see it in the faces of people coming to shows now. People just are really enjoying congregating in mass and listening to live music again. And hopefully we can continue to do it. Hopefully we don't end up with variant Zed that this one eats your face after you breathe it in. Hopefully the worst of it is over. But even as we say that, you're never quite sure. Yeah. Well, speaking of which, there's a verse

on one of the new songs, Here to Forever, that goes, oh, these days it's so hard to relax. You got to hold a gun to my back to make me smile. And the only way I seem to cope is by trying to hold on to hope if just for a while. I'm sure that's not about watching the Mariners, but it sounds like it probably applies to watching the Mariners over the next week or two, however long they last. So good luck to you holding on to hope and getting to experience some of a probable Mariners playoff run. I appreciate you saying probable. I would like to hope that you guys are experts in this field and that you know much more about all of this than I do and that your confidence that I can take even just like a smidgen of your confidence that I will be

watching an actual playoff game with my seattle mariners within the next 10 days you know we'll see well if fancraft's playoff odds can underestimate the guardians i guess they can overestimate the mariners too but 99.8 i'd be feeling pretty good about that i'm tempted i don't feel yeah what are you doing ben you've already asked me this question. Do you feel nervous? And I said, yes. And now you're out here acting like very nervous.

All right. It doesn't count. I'm the non-Mariner's vet on this call. So it's not you just bringing down the fate of the heavens. It's me. It doesn't count. Yeah, it's kind of like when I hear pundits on radio or TV talking about the odds. And like, you know, I saw I watched something that was on the MLB app.

And a writer was on MLB Network saying like, oh, you know, the Mariners, they're getting in the playoffs. It's a it's a done deal. It's fine. Because but his reaction, if they don't make it, will be like, huh, didn't see that coming. Anyway, so our guardians are playing the Orioles. It's going to be a good series. It's very easy to kind of feel confident in these numbers when you have no rooting interest, you know? Right.

Well, you don't have to make a whole album just for an excuse to come on the podcast. You're welcome anytime. Always a pleasure. And if the Mariners win the World Series, we may demand that you return sometime soon. It's always great because it's not like when you have someone who is maybe known for their work in another field and maybe it's

cool to have them on a baseball podcast, but you never know what you're going to get in terms of baseball knowledge or expertise. You have Ben Gibbard on the show. It's basically like having any other expert Mariners source on the show. He's going to drop a replacement level and be familiar with everything that anyone else would be. This has been fun, and we encourage everyone to go check out Asphalt Meadows. Go to deathcabforcutie.com if you're in the US

or Europe. There's a good chance that they're playing somewhere near you, either in the next month or early next year. So go see Ben. And Ben, thank you for coming on today. Thank you for having me. This was a lot of fun. All right.

Thanks again to Ben for being generous with his time. In fact, he was even more generous than he had to be after we quote unquote finished the interview. He wanted to keep talking baseball and Mariners for a few more minutes. So stick around to the end of the episode and you'll hear a stinger, which is just a bit more of Ben Gibbard on the Mariners.

Before we get there, I got to give you the past blast. I neglected to do this during the intro, so here you have it. This is from Jacob Pomrenke, who is the director of editorial content for Sabre, as well as a Black Sox expert. This is episode 1908, so we are up to 1908 now, and here's the headline from Jacob, can't tell the players without a bulletin board. Today, he writes, Major League managers must send in their starting lineups before each game to the commissioner's office in New York before they're released to the public or to the media. Most teams announced their lineup several hours before the first pitch. But in 1908, fans in some ballparks might not know who was in the starting lineup until the players took the field. Uniform numbers

hadn't been invented yet, and there were no public address announcers or jumbotron scoreboards to help identify the players. So the American League decided to get creative, ordering every team to install a large bulletin board somewhere in each ballpark. The big board would let fans know the starting lineups and also any substitutions during a game. As the Detroit Times reported, this was an innovation that was long overdue. Here's the quote. Presumably each manager will be supposed to hand the scorecard man his batting order enough time before the game to permit the printer to run off the day's supply. If the managers do this and then stick to something like an approximation of the order,

the millennium will have arrived. Still fresh in the minds of every occupant of the Detroit press box must remain the vision of poor Puggy, chief of the scorecard sellers, who would hectically invade the confines of the enclosure and compare his card with the batting order on one of the scorer's books, only to hurry forth again, madly tearing his hair and shrieking maledictions on the scrappy little boss of the Yankees who had a different batting order every day. Jacob concludes, The bulletin boards were often too small or too far away for most fans to see, so the AL's rule didn't last very long,

but it did start to get managers in the habit of announcing their starting lineups in advance, a trend that continues to this day. What will they think of next, announcing the lineups in advance? Pass blasts like this make me reflect on the fact that everything had to be an innovation at some point. Everything was invented that happens on a baseball field or in a ballpark. Someone had to decide to do that and come up with the idea of, hey, how do we let the fans know who's actually playing in this game? So you got announced lineups and you got uniform numbers. Solutions to these problems were found, but at one point they were in fact problems, even though we think of them as givens today. And speaking of the Black Sox, I asked Jacob whether announcing the lineups exacerbated the problem of fixing or gambling on games,

which had happened before that point, but I was wondering whether putting it out there made it easier to exploit. And Jacob responded, there wasn't a direct link, since this decision by AL President Ben Johnson was much more about appeasing fan complaints, but advanced knowledge of who was playing, or especially who was pitching that day, was definitely a factor in all of the gambling scandals of that era. And of course, all of this is relevant again, or still relevant, as are so many of these pass-blasts, because a few years ago, MLB signed a deal with MGM and subsequently mandated that managers had to transmit their daily lineups to the league office. pass-blast because a few years ago, MLB signed a deal with MGM and subsequently mandated that

managers had to transmit their daily lineups to the league office and from there to the gambling partners before they were released to the press or the public. So the league gets to get those lineups at least 15 minutes before everyone else and then relay them to MGM and others. And MLB said that this was done to reduce integrity risks associated with the expansion of sports betting, specifically to reduce the risk of confidential information being tipped. Make of that what you will, but as I often say, all of this has happened before and it will all happen again, including me quoting that line.

All right, one recommendation I will make to you relevant to our Pujols discussion, the MLB Vault Twitter account at MLB, published a video that's called 700 Swings for 700 Albert Pujols Homers. And it is exactly what it sounds like. It's just a still image of Albert Pujols set up at the plate or in mid-swing on every home run he's ever hit, in the regular season at least. And it's just a ticker counting up with hundreds and hundreds of still images and some breaks for actual videos for the milestone dingers. I just wanted to shout this out and link to it in the show notes because if whatever editor or editors had to compile all of these still photos of Albert Pujols standing in the batter's box as he hit his home runs, I can't imagine how

long this took to put together. I'm almost envious because a lot of these games are not accessible to the public. I mean, games that were played in 2001 or 2002, it might as well have been the Pass Blast from 1908. A lot of those things are not accessible, at least not in full, but somewhere in the MLB vault, they exist. However, unless they are tagged in some way,

unless there's a way to identify every time that Albert Pujols was swinging and hitting a home run at the plate in a programmatic method, this might have taken forever. It would take a pretty long time even if you could cut right to the home run swing with 700 homers. So I imagine that one way or another, a lot of work went into that montage, and I applaud it. It's pretty cool. Also happy 97th birthday this week to Effectively Wild legend and former guest Bobby Shantz. Hope he's doing well. And two very brief follow-ups from our email show last time. We talked about the pitch clock versus pitch timer terminology. Someone suggested that maybe MLB is trying to push pitch timer on us because focus groups or fans in general recoiled at the idea of a clock

in baseball. And so they're trying to distance the pitch clock from the concept of a clock by calling it a pitch timer. Could be. Again, I don't hate pitch timer. Arguably, it's more accurate than pitch clock in that it's counting down, not counting up. But I'm used to calling it a pitch clock. We all know what a pitch clock is. I'm satisfied with that one term. But maybe, maybe that is MLB's ulterior motive for trying to rebrand the pitch clock as the pitch timer. Second point is that we answered a question about what would happen if hitters had their own personal strike zones, if they could decide what would be a strike and what their strike zone would be shaped like. We talked through a lot of the ramifications about that that would probably make things interesting but unworkable. One thing I wanted to mention is that I imagine that many hitters actually would just stick with the off-the-rack strike zone. Because if you think about it, the strike zone as currently constituted is designed

to make strikes be fairly hittable pitches, right? Most hitters are going to be hot, middle-middle, and on pitches that are in the zone. So I'm not sure it would actually vary that much from hitter to hitter. I mean, yeah, you have high ball hitters, and you have low ball hitters, and you have hitters who like a ball inside or outside, but I think most of the personal strike zones would map on fairly well to the regulation zone. There would be some interesting deviations, and I guess everyone or many players would have at least some small shift, but you'd have a lot of overlap between the personal preferred strike zone and the one-size-fits fits all. Meant to mention that last time, so I figured I'd follow up. For now, you can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com

slash effectivelywild. Ben Gibbard has been an Effectively Wild Patreon supporter. Don't you want to be like Ben? You can sign up at patreon.com slash effectivelywild and pledge some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going, help us stay ad-free, and get yourself access to some perks. The following five listeners already have Andrew Morgan, NC10NC10, LS, A Quint, and Vicky Ho. Thanks to all of you. Patreon perks include access to the Effectively Wild Discord group for patrons now approaching 800 members, as well as monthly bonus episodes, one of which we will be recording soon, plus discounts on merch and access to playoff live streams coming up next month and more.

You can contact me and Meg via email at podcast at fangraphs.com. You can also message us through the Patreon site if you are a supporter. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild and you can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. You can follow Effectively Wild on Twitter at EWpod and you can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash effectively wild. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing and production assistance. We will be back with another episode soon talk to you then So Meg, I have to ask you, how many times in your life have you been mocked for being a Mariners fan? Because I have been mocked a lot. Let's see.

The weirdest Mariners fan experience I had was when I was just out of college and was working in finance in new york which was terrible for other reasons and like i worked with a guy who was a big yankees fan and he was still sore about 95 like he was like giving me grief about 95 and how you know see how you know then you got swept out by cleveland and i like, you are a fan of a team that has won multiple World Series since that happened. I think you can let it go, man. Like you can just, there was a while in New York where people were like, oh, so you're a fan of the Yankees farm team, is that right?

Because, you know, like the Ichiro stuff happened then. And then they signed Felix to an extension and I came into work the next day and it was like, he's ours and you can't have him. So that was gratifying for a while. Yeah, as a fan of a team that, you know, obviously we have this playoff drought and I believe we are the only team to have not even made an appearance in the World Series. Yeah, right. Yeah, I'm the most annoyed with, I mean, usually it's Red Sox fans, but it's teams who have won a World Series, who have broken some kind of curse or long drought,

and then are still talking about the drought. Yeah. Like it's still a thing. Well, you know, Red Sox, 86 years, 86 years. Like, yeah, you weren't alive during that. Like that doesn't count. If you were not alive, then it doesn't count. Like you didn't have to live through it, you know?

Yep.