Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2075: Right-Hands Man

Episode Date: October 21, 2023

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about ALCS and NLCS action, the definition of an “unanswered run,” and a forthcoming documentary about Shohei Ohtani, then (51:16) answer listener emails about a playoff hot-hand theory, how bad an underdog would have to be for a postseason upset to shock them, and a pitcher with two right […]

Sous-titres par Jérémy Diaz Effective Moral Sauvage Effective Moral Sauvage Hello and welcome to episode 2075 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. Hello, Meg. Hello. We've got ourselves some series here. We do. We have some series.

I mean, we technically had series before Ben. We had them. We did. They were in our grasp. But now they are more competitive. They are, in one case, evenly matched. They featured a route. They also featured a controversial pitching change, which I am so happy was not decisive because I find myself exhausted of this particular discourse. But here I am furthering it.

So, you know, who's the sucker? It's probably me. Yeah. Well, last time we talked, it looked like there might be sweeps everywhere we looked. It looked like these CSs might be over early. And now, not so much. We're recording on Friday morning. So, of course, there will be more games on Friday. And so we will stick to what has happened in our part of the timeline here. But we have an even ELCS as we speak, and we have the Diamondbacks winning a game against the Phillies in the NLCS. So you were at that game. I was. And it was one of the better games of these playoffs, certainly of this round. Of these playoffs, certainly of this round.

So bring us the experience from Chase Field where the Diamondbacks beat the Phillies 2-1 on a walk-off, the first walk-off of these playoffs. Yeah, isn't that wild? That's the first walk-off of the whole thing. That's surprising. I feel like we've normally had at least one before now in most years. Well, let me share some thoughts from the scene. And then I think we do have to talk about the decision to pull fought. So here's some things that I witnessed at Chase on Thursday.

I know what day of the week it is. Yep, I'm all awake. I watched Philly's owner, John Middleton, almost, this is a technical term that involves a swear, eat s*** in the Philly's dugout trying to share baseballs with Philly fans. I saw that too, via video. Yeah, I think that we are, he did not fall, to be clear. And the idea behind what he was doing was so nice. And he was dexterous and deft up there, but he thankfully did not meet his maker or the dugout floor. I think we need a scientific study on the perfecting of pandering in that market now. And I mean that as a profound compliment.

Like it feels sincere. It feels informed. I know pandering, it suggests a lack of sincerity. But if you can earnestly pander, I think that they figured it out, both Middleton and Harper more famously. So there was that. That was the thing I watched.

And I sat there and I thought, you have better balance and a lot more money than me. How is that fair? You know, make that make sense. I don't have like a strong rooting interest in this game as I in this series, as I have said, you know, the D-backs are the team that I see the most often in terms of in-person big league baseball. This Phillies team is so fun. I feel like I'm going to be sad when this series is over because I like both of these teams quite a bit. But, you know, you never

want to, sweeps don't feel good. They don't feel good to a fan base. They don't feel good to an organization. And when I got to the park, I think in part because a lot, you know, some percentage of the Philly fans who were at the game had traveled and thus were there early. I felt very nervous for the D-backs faithful because most of the fans I saw were Phillies fans. They were being hyped up by their beloved owner, a weird turn of phrase in modern baseball. And they were sending out Ranger Suarez and he was being matched by Brandon Fott. And like Fott is a promising young pitcher, but we have detailed some of the struggles that he has had in this postseason. He hasn't been able to go like super deep even in that Dodgers game where he pitched well. You know, you could tell that they didn't

want him to go too, too far. And he's got a very youthful face. He's a rosy-cheeked young man. And I think that makes him look both younger and more stressed than he probably is in any given moment. And, you know, he's going up against Suarez, who just like, you know, you talk about like a slow heartbeat. And sometimes you watch Ranger Suarez pitch and you're like, is he alive at all? And I don't mean that as a knock on his performance. He's just so steady. His demeanor on the mound is so even. And he's quite good, and he's pitched very well this postseason.

And so I just was like, I don't want these young people to feel embarrassed. I don't want Corbin Carroll to walk away from this postseason run feeling like it ended on a flat note. That's a bad feeling for a young guy. And so I was nervous for them. And then I will say, despite the very early start time, ballpark was full, it was loud, the crowd was into it, much like in the clinching game against the Dodgers.

You could just feel them ready to erupt. They were ready to have something to cheer for. And they were given to have something to cheer for and they were they were given something early with thought like i've at this point now seen a good bit of thought as the best start i've ever seen um him throw yeah it was it was quite good he really kept them down he sequenced well he mixed in his pitch as. You could tell the slider was working really well for him. And, you know, he's able to get ahead. He was able to get strikeouts. He just, he threw like the game of his young professional life. you know, there were strikeouts to be had and a good number of them. You know, he gave the crowd there something to get really excited about. And against a, you know, a Phillies lineup that has been so fearsome

and that had really jumped on Gallin and Kelly, who are, you know, have had a good deal more professional success than Fott has. Like, to have, it felt like a victory for him that they got through the first inning without having allowed a run, which means they hadn't allowed a home run. And you're like, oh, wow, okay, that's new. That's a new thing for this D-backs team against the Phillies. And then he kept going. And then Troy Lovello pulled him sort of in keeping with his plan.

And kind of we'll talk about some of the factors that went into this. And boy, did he really get booed. Yes, I heard that. He got quite booed. And after the game, in his post-game availability, he said that his conversations, he was asked sort of what the conversations in the dugout were with his bench coach and with Brent Strom, his pitching coach in particular. And he said, the conversations are very typical. Am I an idiot to take him out of the game with night and strikeouts at five and two thirds? And he knew what the stakes of that decision were.

And he was able to be lighthearted about it after the fact because they won. But you could tell that he knew he knew that that was going to be a topic of discussion uh if things didn't go their way and so like we should talk we should talk about maybe let's pause and talk about the fought decision then we can talk about the the rest of the game what were your impressions sitting at home, Ben? Just, oh no, here we go again. You know, just buckle up. Probably I was feeling a lot like Tori Lovello was because didn't have a problem with the move itself,

as was documented well by Jay Jaffe in his write-up of the game. Fott has just gotten creamed when he has stayed in for the third time through the order, right? And like, you know, most pitchers, all pitchers are worse if you have a big enough sample, but he has been particularly bad, whether that's meaningful or not, I don't know. But even after he came back later in the season and was pretty effective, he was still not great. Third time through the order. So you just felt like, oh, here comes Schwarber and it's just going to unravel potentially. But a lot of other people were probably feeling like he's cruising.

He's looked legs out. So stick with the hot hands, the hot arm. lights out. So stick with the hot hands or the hot arm. And it just felt like it was shaping up to be the same conversation that we've had so many times, right? So I have no rooting interest in this series whatsoever. And yet in the aftermath of that move, I was really rooting for it not to backfire, you know, not necessarily for the Diamondbacks to win, but for whatever happened, not to be just a referendum on that move, right? Because I just didn't want another round of, did he pull the starter too early? Which we've just, we've hashed out over and over and over again in the past several postseasons, and there's just not that Right. Demonstrate convincingly that it was the right move in that particular instance, but you're just playing the numbers and the odds and the percentages.

And that's just never going to be satisfying to some people if it doesn't work out right away. It's the only rule is it has to work or else you're going to get second guessed and probably first guessed in this case, too. And so when Sol Frank walked Schwerber, then it was like, oh, here we go. Right. But but then he got the inning ending force out. Right. And then in the seventh, he walked Harper and then Ryan Thompson came in and. I'm laughing because of how badly that throw from Thompson missed.

It missed very badly. Yeah. And it's, you know, you can laugh about it because it ended up not mattering, but it at the time was not good. So there's that. Yeah. And so Harper there's that. Yeah. And so, Harper scored on that wild pitch. And you could already see it sort of shaping up to, you know, like Jeff Passan was tweeting about how, like, the Phillies get a run in the first inning where Brendan Fott didn't throw, right? Right. Brendan Fott didn't throw, right? And so, you know, which was a little, I mean, they got out of the inning where he was in

and they removed him. And then it was a subsequent inning. Like, how long was he going to go realistically? This is Brendan Fott, you know? Like, this is not the ace of your staff. This is not some dominant pitcher. So you really got to kind of count yourself lucky that you got such a great outing from him and then say thanks and uh we will now pass it to the next guy right so

but there was a run scored and so again like i guess any scenario where the diamondbacks had lost that game potentially you might have seen some backlash to that decision because people could have said, well, you leave them in and maybe the Phillies just never score. Like, you know, there are other relievers come in at a later time and they hold the line, whatever it is. Anyway, I was just so relieved that it worked out once. And, you know, partly, I guess, because you can cite it as, hey, here's a time when they did that and it worked. And so it's not always the

Snell decision where it instantly backfires. But also just because we were spared the conversations that would have come out of that. I think a lot of things can be kind of true simultaneously. Like when he was pulled, I felt like it was, I thought this is a perfectly good and logical place to pull him. He had been told, we were told prior to the game that he was looking at about 18 hitters plus or minus four, depending on how the lineup turned over and sort of where he was. He is averaged in like the mid 80s in terms of his pitches over his season. There have been times when he has gone longer than that, but he's averaged, I think like 84, 85 pitches. And it just seemed like a really logical spot to pull him because he gets through five and two thirds.

The top of the Phillies lineup is coming up. As you said, like his, I mean, granted, he has only had, you know, he has had like 15 and a third innings where he is facing the order a third time through as a starter so you know that's a small sample and also point out that like five and two thirds of the sample you know and his wobo allowed the third time through is 483 like he's allowed a 779 slug you know that i don't know if you know this, but isn't good. You know, meanwhile, Schwarber has like a 9-9-6 OPS the third time he's facing a pitcher. So it just

seemed like, okay, this young man had a terrible showing in Milwaukee. He had a solid start against the Dodgers. He did allow some hard contact in that start. If I recall correctly, the last time he had Faye Schwarber in this game, the contact was loud. And so you get through five and two-thirds. You have the opportunity to bring a reliever in with the bases empty to deal with the top of the lineup i feel like you you know you give the the young man a pat on the back for having an an incredible start and hand things over to your bullpen it just felt like a very smart place to do that and i think that all of those things can be true. This can be a decision informed by, you know, what the Diamondbacks have seen from Fott over the course of a season, what they saw from him that night, what they know about his times through the order penalty, where in the lineup it's turning over. And you can still have an aesthetic preference that starters go deeper than that. Oh, yeah, sure.

that. Like, I think that, you know, I think that's a perfectly reasonable preference, but I think we should just be careful to not conflate that with like automatically good decision-making, which isn't to say that every time a starter gets pulled, that's a good decision. Sometimes it's not. I didn't like when Jose Barrios got pulled in the wildcard game, for instance. Right. So, you know, got pulled in the wildcard game for instance right so you know i don't want to like overstate things but i do think that we should just do the work of separating out like the decision making process from our aesthetic preference and then we can have a conversation about like how much of good process we are willing to compromise in the name of potentially more pleasing, you know, pitching. That's fine. Like, and that's a compromise that fans might be willing to make. I understand the Diamondbacks not being willing to make that compromise because they want to go to the World Series. So, like, that's their

project. But I think that those things can all kind of be true at once. And then you can, you know, you can sit there and be like, wow, maybe don't. I'm sorry. I'm still thinking about that wild pitch because it was wild. It was true. It was quite wild. Yeah. Not every wild pitch lives up to the billing. Sometimes it's, you know, not a controlled pitch, but it's not wild exactly.

That one was wild. That one was wild. It was quite wild. But yeah, so I think that it's important to kind of keep those things in balance. Yeah, like you're just, we know you're not guaranteed to continue to be excellent. Even starters with a much longer professional track record aren't guaranteed to like have the hot hands, you know, in the next inning. to like have the hot hands, you know, in the next inning. So I think that it's just a useful thing to keep in mind. And I asked Fod after the game, you know, does the fact that you know you have 18 plus or minus four, like does that change the way that you kind of dole out and manage your effort as opposed to a start where you are just going to go until the manager pulls you and you don't quite know how long that is. And he said, no. And I understand him saying

that, you know, I know that Russell Carlton has looked at this question and there is something to the idea that like it does when there is a set sort of understanding of how many you're going to get, but it can kind of change the way that you approach your start. It should. Yeah. Fotz, you know, like his fastball velo wasn't up relative to his seasonal averages. I think in the first inning it was actually down. So like, you know, maybe for this particular pitcher that doesn't matter as much. But I also think that that's something to keep in mind too, where when you have a guy and he knows kind of how long he has,

it might, and to your point, probably should alter the way that he thinks about, you know, how he's, how much, you know, how often he'll go max effort, that sort of thing. So, you know, all of that kind of goes into the decision making. And these are the decisions that like can be defining for for managers and i don't envy them having to make them because you know lovello talks post-game about you you sort of set up your decision making in prior to the game in a dispassionate environment where you don't have emotion involved because like if you are tori lovello and you're watching that start and you're not thinking about that stuff you're probably like my God, let this kid keep going. But you have to balance that with the stuff that you know and try to parse for yourself which of these things matters more in this particular moment.

And I think going with a much larger sort of body of evidence and body of work is probably going to work to your benefit more often than not. And then you just have to hope that the guys after him can execute. You know, I think going to the relievers they did in the sequence they did makes a lot of sense, even if, you know, Thompson sent a ball to Max Duff and further, you know, it made a good bit of sense i i think so that's that's sort of my take on the the thought stuff i am curious to see like you know my view of this diamondbacks team coming into the postseason was that base running was going to be a huge asset for them because they are a good base running team you You know, obviously Corbin Carroll kind of leads the way in terms of steals.

And with McCarthy sidelined, they have a big drop off to their next stolen base leader. But like, you know, even a slower guy like Christian Walker is a good base runner, even if he's not stealing very often. And it feels like the base running for them has been kind of shaky this go around. And, you know, Lovello acknowledged as much after the fact. So I wonder if they will be able to clean that up in a way that proves beneficial to them because it didn't end up mattering in this game,

but it's like they're not going on contact when they should and they are going on contact when they arguably maybe shouldn't. And, you know, again, it didn't matter, but you're sitting there in the press box and you're like how is paven smith not on third base right now like what is happening and then you know perdomo walks and bails him out so it doesn't matter but it was um i was like you you guys are really good at this though and then and then this has been probably less good. So, you know. Yeah.

Well, most of the moves Lavella made worked out well, right? The FAT decision ultimately paid off or didn't hurt him. And then he kind of switched up the lineup a little bit with the lefty Ranger Suarez starting. And that paid off. Quetel Marte leading off ended up getting the biggest hit and a couple other hits too, and Gabriel Moreno doubled, and then he puts in Pavin Smith, the pinch hits with him, and he got a couple hits.

So he was kind of leading a charmed life in that game. And so the Phillies scored in the seventh, and then the Diamondbacks answered right away with the Gurriel double off of Kirkering. And then scoreless eighths for each team, although Alvarado got in a bit of a jam for the Phillies and then got out of it. And then we get to the ninth, and Seawald also gets in a little bit of trouble, but gets out of it. And Seawald also gets in a little bit of trouble, but gets out of it. And then Craig Kimbrell comes in. And we talked last time about the fact that we did not really trust Craig Kimbrell, that he'd had some scoreless appearances, but that he never looked like they were going to be scoreless until he finally got the last out. Like he was just, you know, high whip, low ERA guy, just putting a lot of people on base and somehow wriggling out of it. And that ended here. So this was just kind of a classic Kimbrel adventure, walk, steal of second base. It's pretty easy to steal off of Kimbrel. Then a single, then defensive indifference, and Pimmonsmith takes second,

then a fielder's choice, then a walk, then a single. So you're wondering, is he going to somehow get out of this? Will he get a double play or something? No. So Quetel Marte gets the liner to center and two runs score, or one run scores, one run scores, and that's the ball game. So two to one. So we, you know, we kind of had an inkling and I'm sure many Phillies fans had the inkling that you keep running Kimbrel out there in those high leverage spots and eventually it's going to blow up on you. And this time it did. Yeah. I think we should take a moment to make note of three very impressive performances in this. So first, like, man, is Cattell Marte having a hell of a postseason.

He's having quite a good little run and hitting it when the rest of that D-backs lineup has gone pretty cold. So good job, Cattell Marte. 180 WRC plus in the postseason. Good on you. Rangers Suarez was excellent in this game. Rangers Suarez was very good. Rangers Suarez has excellent in this game. Rangers Suarez was very good. Rangers Suarez has been very good

this entire postseason. The way that he is able to mix in the breaking and off-speed stuff he has is fantastic. It really gave the D-backs fits. He is very good. We should take a moment to be like, hey, good job. And then maybe it was just those two.

Maybe those were the only two. Oh, and Trey Turner had that really nice play. What a, what a, wow. What a play, what a play Ben. And you know, he's had moments where he has, he kind of has games sometimes where he's like a little deer in the headlights and you're like, what's going on with you? Cause like you're capable of that. And like, then sometimes you're just like booting a booting one you're booting one but you know sometimes when you have a big pitching decision and you have a walk-off now cattell was instrumental in that walk-off obviously but like you should take a moment to like acknowledge the the smaller stuff here that gets kind of lost because yeah it's been really good can i tell you

something weird it's weird to be on the field and have Bryce Harper at first base. I'm not used to that yet. That's weird. Yeah. You know, they didn't take BP, the Phillies. I don't think they've taken BP since they've gotten to Arizona. I wonder if they will today, Ben. Do you think they will?

I wonder if they're like, oh, we got to take BP. We didn't hit well yesterday. I always wonder how much that stuff kind of resonates. But they were taking infield, and there he is. He's Bryce Harper, first baseman. It's weird. I don't know if I like it. I mean, I'm happy that he's playing and playing a reasonable first base, but it's weird.

Yeah. So, there you go. Yeah. All right. Well, we'll see what happens in the rest of that series, and we will reconvene next week to talk about that. And then over in the AL, things have changed quite a bit since we last spoke. Last time we talked, it was 2-0 Texas, and they were coming home. And so we were saying, and they have these reinforcements in the rotation.

So unlike the Diamondbacks, who now have to go to Brandon Fott, the Rangers can go to Max Scherzer. And it turns out, much better to have Brandon Fott in this series than Max Scherzer. So Scherzer wasn't great. Like, you just, you never knew what you were going to get out of Scherzer and Gray. It was a nice, I guess, morale boost to get them back. But after their long layoffs, injury-related layoffs, no less, you just really didn't know if they were going to be rusty or if they were just going to be compromised in some way. And they both were. They were both fairly

ineffective. So that was one problem for the Rangers. And also the Astros offense woke up because they can mash too. And they had demonstrated that they could really rake earlier in the postseason and during the regular season, especially late in the regular season. And then the bats awoke. And even though Jordan was robbed of one home run they have still managed to just pile some runs on and uh 10 runs in fact in game four and now it's even and the astros who've been a very successful road team all season for whatever that's worth, that has continued to be the case in this series. And now, you know, it's not far from a toss-up, really. So that's where we are. Anyone who was counting the Astros out, nope, they're not dead yet. They're not dead yet. They're not dead yet.

And I don't feel any particular way other than I'm ready for some new representation in the World Series from the American League. That home run referee was pretty incredible. That was really nice. That was really nice. But yeah, I mean, the Astros are relentless. They score and score and score. It's weird.

It's so, you know, I don't think it means anything, but like the split between their road and home performance is so weird, Ben. It's just such a, it's such a strange thing, but yeah, they're, they're relentless. And we talked about how we were confident that at some point the Kimberl of it all would prove an issue for the Phillies and you know, the, the, the Rangers pitching situation, granted, a lot of this has to do with their starters, but the bullpen continues to not be like on anything. So it's just, you know, I don't know. On the one hand, the Rangers feel very vulnerable to me,

but also they get to throw Montgomery and Nathan Evaldi their next two games, and that's going pretty well for them. So I find myself kind of not knowing what to make of it I mean I guess that on balance like our depth charts for instance view Houston is the superior team a lot of that is the bullpen but they they're thought to be the better team you don't know what you would be getting with Scherzer in a potential game seven so like it's a and you, John Gray isn't a much better option. So you're just kind of in a weird, you're in a weird spot.

And I don't know if it's going to be, maybe it's Creed's fault. You know, maybe, maybe the Rangers will go back to Houston and there won't be Creed. And then they'll win. And then they'll have to do some soul searching. Yeah. They'll have to like, cause it's like, it's one thing to be playing. They were there, Ben. They were, they were in the building. I remember a lot of people in the building that night that I'm not a huge fan of, but like Creed was one of them. Creed as a group. I don't know them as people. Maybe they're nice. They might be perfectly nice, but their music is not to my taste. So, what can I do with this?

Creed. I wonder if they will mix it up. Maybe they will go with something else. But do you mess with the mojo? You know, they're such a superstitious bunch of baseball players. Right. But the Astros have messed with the mojo the last couple games. Yeah, I love that. Yeah, but you got to feel good. You're going back to big game Montgomery and then Evaldi,

who's looked like his good self lately. So, so yeah, like I'm sure the Astros feel okay about Justin Verlander starting game five, but then you've got Fromberber, who has been shaky, as we've mentioned. And then, I don't know what you... Flappable. Quite flappable. Quite flappable. I don't know what you do in Game 7 for either team, for that matter. I mean, we didn't talk about the fact that in the Diamondbacks-Phillies series, you've got the Diamondbacks going with a bullpen game, right, in Game 5. Yeah, Joe Mantance applied to open

and then they'll kind of play matchups from there. Yes, former all-star, of course. Just obligated to say that about him every time. But yeah, and then the Phillies are going with Christopher Sanchez, who is a starter, though certainly a lot less well-known than the other Phillies starters. So that's solid.

And then, you know, the Diamondbacks will have to face Zach Wheeler, of course, but they'll be back to their guys too. So I just, I don't know what you do in game seven if the ALCS gets to that. Right. Then, yeah, with the Rangers, I mean, I guess you've got to run Scherzer out there again, right? Like he's Max Scherzer. It's game seven. Maybe you hope that he shook the rust off in this game and he'll be back to something closer to form in game seven. It's just like, what are your better options? Because Gray didn't look great. And Heaney and Dunning were both extremely ineffective too in the last game.

So I don't know that you feel great about running those guys out there. So I don't know if you do like a just group effort, Johnny Holstaff sort of thing. Again, it's not like they have some great bullpen that they can count on and go bullpen game because there's just not a whole lot there that you would want in a game seven. But I guess you could just mix and match with Heedy and Dunning and Scherzer and Gray and just try to get it through it somehow. Urquidy was not good either for the Astros in that game. for the Astros in that game.

So yeah, we're not really set up for like a game seven pitchers duel of the ages here, at least in terms of the probable starters. It will be an all hands on deck sort of situation. And you're right, it won't be the most compelling matchup. It is a bummer when like the game sevens have the potential to be sloggy. You dons have the potential to be sloggy. You don't want Game 7 to be sloggy. You want it to be dynamic.

I guess the Astros could go back to Javier. So they're in better shape than the Rangers where it's just kind of a shrug question mark. I didn't watch a single pitch of that Astros-Rangers game. Can I confess to that? I didn't watch even one pitch because that Astros-Rangers game. Can I confess to that? I didn't watch even one pitch because it started while I was still at the ballpark. And then by the time I was done being at the ballpark, it did not seem like a game that one needed to rush to see. By that time, it was pretty well out of hand. Yes, and the Ast well out of hand. Yes. Yeah.

And the Astros tacked on. It was eventually 10-3. Yeah. And it was, yeah, not super exciting or suspenseful by the end because the Astros, they jumped out to a 3-0 lead in the top of the first. Right. And then the Rangers got three runs back over the next couple innings. And it seemed like, okay, we've got a got an interesting game here. And then the Astros kind of broke it open with four in the fourth. And then they tacked on three more in the later innings. So, yeah, not a lot of late intrigue in that one, as there was in the Philliamondbacks game. So I'm just glad that we got at least one close competitive game with tied late and a lead change and a walk-off. And then in the ALCS, if the actual games have not been the most compelling, at least the series has evened up and that makes it more compelling. Yeah, the Phillies have been involved in the two games

that I would deem the best of, just from a neutral observer perspective. I'm sure if you're a fan of any of these clubs and they've had big blowouts, that that's been very exciting. But they had that game against the Braves where Harper got doubled off. That was very exciting.

And then they had yesterday's game. So they are, whatever ends up happening against Arizona, I think the stars of the postseason to my mind, because they have been very fun and compelling in their own right. And they've happened to be in both those good games. So what are you going to do? You got to hand it to them, Ben. You got to hand it to them. Yeah. We got a question that was prompted by that last ALCS game that was sent with the subject line, emergency pedantic alert. Might be an oxymoron. I don't know if any of our pedantic alerts are emergencies. But James wanted to know. emergencies, but James wanted to know. He said, during the Fox telecast of game four of Astros versus Rangers, a recap graphic told us that the Rangers scored, quote, three unanswered runs to

tie the game, which was immediately followed or answered by a graphic stating that Houston scored four runs in the fourth inning to take a 7-3 lead. I can't see how the third run by Texas was not answered. If it is truly unanswered, every run a team scores is unanswered. What am I missing here? Thought you would know. Now I will finish watching the game. Before the game was even over, he just had to know immediately. So I don't know if we, it seems like we would have talked about this at some point, but

I searched the wiki and didn't see anything immediately. So I don't know if we, it seems like we would have talked about this at some point, but I searched the wiki and didn't see anything immediately. So what is an unanswered run? So what happened in this game, as I said, so the Astros scored three in the top of the first. Rangers didn't score in the bottom of the first. Astros didn't score in the top of the second. Then the Rangers scored two in the bottom of the second and one in the bottom of the third. So at that point, it's 3-3. And then top of the fourth, the Astros score four. So what is an unanswered run in your mind? Sounds like the sort of thing you take for granted and then suddenly you start thinking about it and it's like, huh. See, I think James has a point here. Yeah.

Because generally an unanswered run, I think, is you score uninterrupted and there's no responding run, right? Because you could say, I mean, if you say the Rangers scored three unanswered runs, you could take that to mean that they scored three runs before the Astros scored any after that, right? Like it was uninterrupted, you know, they scored three, all the run scoring was consecutive, like the Rangers scored three consecutive runs before the Astros scored another. But they were ultimately answered. They were ultimately answered. Yeah.

Or certainly the last of the three was answered by the four that the Astros then subsequently scored, right? So in order to have an unanswered run, does that mean that the other team cannot score again in the game? It has to be the last word on scoring in that game? I think, yeah. But yes, I think that that would be my preferred usage. So here's a question. Can you score unanswered runs and still lose?

I think so, yeah. I think you can too. So like imagine— You probably wouldn't see it said that way. Yeah, you wouldn't say that way. But like would we take issue—let's change up the scenario here. Let's imagine that the Astros had scored four runs in their first inning instead of three. And then the Rangers score three unanswered runs,

but they still lose. Does that scan as a, I mean, you're right that it wouldn't be the way that anyone would write it because we'd be writing about them losing. We'd be saying that they lost. But it wouldn't, I think it would still be technically correct.

Yes, I think so. So you hit the best kind of correct. So I'd say the Astros scored seven unanswered runs at the end of that game, right? Because their last seven runs were scored after the Rangers' final run. So the Astros scored seven unanswered runs there. But yeah, I think you could say, what, uninterrupted runs or something like that, maybe. But unanswered,ed yeah I think that implies that there were no further

runs scored and uninterrupted is a little dicey too because it implies I think that for it to be uninterrupted and then why would you say that it's like uninterrupted yeah

and then yeah you can't interrupt one team's half inning It's like uninterrupted. Has to do one inning? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, Ben. And then, yeah, you can't interrupt one team's half inning of scoring. Right. No, definitely not. Yeah. Famously against the rules. Yeah. I was wondering if it might have something to do with the inning in which you score.

Like, occasionally you might hear someone say, like, they won the inning or something. Like, if the team outscored another team in the inning. So like maybe if you score, like the Astros scored three in the top of the first and then the Rangers did not score in the bottom of the first. They scored in the bottom of the second. So maybe someone could argue that the Rangers didn't answer those Astros runs because they didn't score in the bottom half of the inning when the Astros scored their runs. But they still answered the next inning. In the next two innings, they scored more runs. And it's not like the Astros could have answered in the same inning that the Rangers scored their third run because that was the bottom of the inning. So it

was then the top half when the Astros got a chance to answer. So I think James is onto something here. I don't know if it's an emergency, but I am sympathetic to your ears perking up and going, well, hey, wait a minute. Because, yeah, I think it's an improper use of unanswered. I really do. They were very strongly answered, you know, as it turned out. They ended up being emphatically. Yeah, emphatically. Lost in brain, crazy.

All right. Well, we got that straight. That was important to straighten out. It's true. It's really important. You know, I need, Ben, some more stuff to happen in any of these games. Because I think you said it last time, like, what's there to say? Maybe in some ways that was the little gift that Tori Lavello gave us.

He was like, I know you don't like this discourse, but it is discourse. So here it is, as opposed to, you know, it's weird for us to be so opposed to discourse considering that we host a three-time-a-week podcast. We depend on discourse. Yes. We do discourse. We do discourse. But sometimes the discourse makes us feel tired. And we are resentful of that because we're already tired.

You know, we're busy people. We're tired. Here's a mystery I want solved. Why does Chase Field smell like crayons? Are there parts of Chase Field that just smell like crayons, Ben? Why do they smell like crayons? No idea. So I said the word crayons to people who are not from the West Coast and they're like, you mean crayons? And I was like, say Oregon correctly. Say it correctly even one time. No, I'm kidding.

Yeah. I say Oregon now because I know that's how you're supposed to say it. That's how you're supposed to say it. Now, do you say Oregonian or Oregon? Oregonian, yeah. So, you still say Oregonian or Oregonian? Oregonian, yeah. So you still say that. Okay. The paper is the Oregonian. Like, that's one of the papers.

But you don't say Oregonian. No, because that would sound stupid. Yeah, well, I would have thought that Oregon sounded stupid. Oregon. Because I grew up saying it Oregon, and I guess Oregonians thought that sounded stupid. So I've since learned to say Oregon. What you have in your body. I do say crayon though.

Yeah. Yeah. I know people. Mince was giving me grief about crayon. He was like, what the, what the, is a crayon? You know, and I was like, it's a, you know, like you draw with like you, the colors in a box. You know, you get a box of crants. Yeah, we know what they are.

Just, yeah, not what you were referring to. Yeah, crants. Well, I'll return to the playoffs briefly in a stat blast at the end of this. Do you have any other postseason thoughts? Any other postseason thoughts? I would encourage everyone to exercise caution when standing on benches in the dugout, particularly if you're in dress shoes, which are often slippy. They're just like slippy little shoes. What was the attendance in the atmosphere like?

Because you had mentioned that being a day game and all. They announced it as a sellout it looked very full i was in the third i'm in the third row for for these ones which i don't say in like a woe is me but just the third row of the press box at chase you can't visualize the upper deck and so i don't know if it was all you know if people were going all the way to the last row like they were for the dodgers game like every seat in that park was full but if it looked very full it felt very full it was loud again some of that was owing to the roof being closed but they were they were into it it was a good it was a good atmosphere it's hard with philly and ari Arizona because there's a lot of red to be had in everybody's uniforms. And so until the sound started, I couldn't really tell what the distribution was.

But I would say that the majority of the folks there were Diamondbacks fans, and they made their presence heard. The Philly fans did too, but they were shouted down a good bit. Now, I want to be clear because I don't want to stir anything. I'm not saying it was as loud as Citizen Spring Park. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying it was loud. It's not a comparison. I'm not lobbing any bombs. Well, I'm looking forward already to what lies beyond the postseason.

I know we're very playoff-centric right now, but there's one event in particular that I'm excited about coming in November. It's not the beginning of free agency. It's not lead-home action, though that has begun already. That has begun, yeah, yesterday the Dominican Republic Professional Baseball League has started play, you can watch that on MLB TV if playoffs aren't on offer

or if you prefer to watch that but one thing I'm really looking forward to is there's a Shohei Otani documentary coming out is there really? yeah, I meant to mention this last time why did you get that PR email? yeah, this was in the Hollywood Reporter

earlier this week. Shohei Otani documentary, Beyond the Dream, set for release on ESPN Plus in the US and Disney Plus internationally. The subhead says, the doc is said to provide an unprecedentedly intimate and

in-depth look at the baseball superstar's unique life and career. So that's exciting. November 17th, Shohei Otani, Beyond the Dream, the first official documentary about Otani. It's directed and edited by Toru Tokikawa. It's said to include Otani's first in-depth interviews about his background and how he nurtured and pushed his unique talent.

And it includes interviews and appearances by coaches, players, managers, mentors, baseball heroes that have influenced him. I'm thankful for the opportunity to share my journey in this documentary, Otani said. Hearing the stories shared by my childhood heroes has been truly inspiring. I hope this documentary stands as a testament to the importance of resilience, passion, and self-belief in the pursuit of excellence.

So it's going to trace his whole career from his childhood to Hokkaido to the big leagues. Hokkaido to the big leagues. And I guess this is sort of the official rollout of his free agency, right? This is like his debutante ball. This is his coming out party as a free agent. It's like, let's get familiar with Shohei Otani, this guy that everyone can bid on and potentially employ. So he is quite reticent typically. He doesn't do a whole lot of interviews and he's been besieged by interview requests and reporters his whole professional career and most of his adult life. But he doesn't grant a whole lot of audiences

and they're typically pretty brief. And so I guess he has chosen that this is the way that he will speak. You know, if you're a big enough star, then you could say, I'm not going to talk day to day to the beat writers so much. Every now and then I'll throw them a bone, but I'm going to wait for the real rollout when I get my big documentary on ESPN Plus and Disney Plus, and then I will pull back the curtain slightly in probably a curated way that I'm sure he decided exactly what he wanted to do and how much he was willing to open up. So, you know, I don't think this is going to be like a tell-all or anything, you know, probably not hard-hitting journalism going on here,

but at least a longer, you know, English-language documentary look at Otani than we've typically gotten. Yeah, that's exciting. I didn't know, Ben. I just didn't know. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, I'm someone who watches and writes about and podcasts about every Star Wars show on Disney Plus.

Right. I watch all the MCU stuff, and I have a daughter who is obsessed with Moana and Elemental and wants to watch Disney stuff every day. And yet this is probably my most anticipated Disney Plus release ever, the Shohei Otani documentary, or even if I'm watching it on ESPN Plus ultimately. So that's something to look forward to. Moana is great. Moana's good, yeah. I haven't seen Elemental.

Is it good? Yeah, I liked Elemental. I saw Elemental in theaters and Moana I was unfamiliar with until recently, and now I'm extremely familiar with it. But it has held up fairly well to the ultimate test of a two-year-old wanting to watch it every single day. How quickly will that drive you mad? And, you know, fairly slowly, all things considered. Yeah. Moana, I like the shiny song, you know.

The whole thing, all the music in Moana is good, but like the shiny one is like particularly fun. Yeah. Being a parent, that seems hard. Yeah. Watching Moana more than you might want to is not the hardest part, but it's not the easiest part either. When are you going to start putting Frozen into the mix? That's the question. Yeah.

I feel like it has ruined some lives, you know, once or twice. Great. Fine. The degree to which people, children love that. And I guess Encanto is the same way. Like every parent I know is like, we don't talk about Bruno. And I was like, I don't know what that means. Like, I'm sorry. I'm confused. Don't tell me. It's fine. I'm sure I'll watch it at some point. We have not talked about Bruno in my household as of yet, because I'm apprehensive. I've heard from other parents, like, once you break the seal on Frozen, like, that's it, you know? So we're trying to delay that a little while. You know, every now and then we go to Disney Plus and on the menu, the landing page,

you see Frozen there. And I'm waiting, dreading for the moment when she requests that one, but hasn't happened yet. So I'm sure we'll be in our Frozen phase soon enough. Yeah. So maybe we can answer a couple emails here that are not about pedantic emergencies. So here's one from Michael, who says, listening to your conversation on playoff rest and had some thoughts and one half-baked theory. So, here's one to gravitate toward that explanation. And I would have preferred they kept the momentum from their great seasons. But Will Smith had a very good playoffs, likely because of the rest and feeling the best he'd probably felt since April. I'm not a fan of the expanded playoffs, but we have them.

And that means fans and media need to adjust expectations, narratives and levels of disappointment. So my half-baked theory on wildcard teams having an advantage, baseball is a game of hot streaks. The A's won seven games in a row this year. Whoever emerges from that first round is more likely to be a team on a hot streak. I'm worried I'm just saying momentum is real, but part of my brain can't shake this. The team that wins a playoff series is not the best team,

but the team playing the best baseball right now. Does this increase the chances a team with a bye is stuck facing a team currently playing above its true talent level? You're weeding out the teams playing at or below their talent levels and left with the teams firing on all cylinders. It feels like actively selecting for teams currently playing winning baseball would have a bigger impact than a few days of rest. So what do you make of the hot hand? If you have a bye, you are sort of selectively facing teams that played well enough to make it through the wildcard round. And so you're going to be facing the hot team and you'll be at a disadvantage.

you'll be at a disadvantage i mean i i think that i think that baseball as a as an endeavor is prone to like a lot of streakiness i think that part is true i don't know if i would say that i necessarily put much store in like the hot hand i know know that like, I just think that sometimes you have a bad run. Like I, I, I feel like we're trying to overcomplicate a thing. That's like, sometimes guys are good and sometimes they have a bad week and sometimes their bad week lines up with other guys' bad week. And then it lines up with the other team's good week. And what do you do with that? Like, I, I also also think that it's what is like our comprehensive theory of this because it's a big problem that mookie and freddie freeman couldn't couldn't really hit that series but also all the pitching was bad but also i i don't know like is is it does

everything need to be good at once for you to win a baseball game can something just be good enough like what do you do with what do you do with a baseball game can something just be good enough like what do you do with what do you do with a team like you know doesn't the the early struggles of the diamondbacks disprove this or is this like it there's two hot teams and so you got two hot teams and then only one hot team can emerge i mean a hot like hat i mean it like you know playing well i'm not commenting on their hotness that seems i don't know like maybe maybe maybe i don't know i i think that sometimes guys just don't hit well and sometimes they face good pitching you know um it's hard to disentangle like how much of a struggle is this guy is in a slump

and things are going bad and how much is uh you got to hand it to them. You know, it's not hard to disentangle it in retrospect. I think it's easy to kind of get a sense of it, but sometimes you just get beat, right? Sometimes the other team is just good and you get beat and it's not about you slumping. It's about them playing well. So I don't know. Yeah. I think first of all, you don't have to be firing on all cylinders to make it through the wildcard round. You really don't. You have to win two out of three. Yeah, you have to have some lucky bounces. Yeah.

So it's not a guarantee that if you're the team that had a bye that you'll be facing some team that just is tuned up and really just raring to go and is going great. That was kind of the case this year, arguably, but doesn't have to be the case. And then not sure that being hot or playing well in one round is predictive of doing that in the next round. It's certainly possible you could look through history and find examples of teams that walked all over an opponent in one round and then didn't do so well in the next round. In fact, people have studied that and looked at how teams finish the season and whether that was predictive

of how they would play in the postseason. And nope, not really. You can finish the season hot. You can finish the season cold. Doesn't seem to have much predictive power either way. And also, if you do run into a hot team, I mean, if the theory of the case is that you don't have to be the best team,

you just have to be the team that's playing the best in October. And sometimes you don't even have to play the best necessarily to win. I mean, you could get outscored and still win, not in a game, but over the course of a series, let's say, or out hit or whatever. But if the theory is, well, the hot team, the team that gets hot, the team that plays well in October is going to go all the way. You're going to have to face that team

at some point, right? I mean, if you want to advance yourself. Right. So... Two hot teams, you know? It doesn't, yeah, it doesn't really matter when it happens. I mean, you'd still rather have the bye, right?

You'd still, if you don't get the bye, you might just face the hot team in the first round instead. Or you will later on if you stay alive long enough. Like at some point you have to have a good series yourself or at least a better series than your opponent has. So yeah, I don't think this really holds water for me. So, I don't know if being hot means that you stay hot. And also, I just, I think at some point you have to beat the teams, right? Like either you have to beat the team that's hot or you have to beat a team that was even hotter than the hot team and beat the hot team. Right. And then sometimes the hot team, it gets too hot and it combusts. You know, like it collapses under the weight of its own hotness.

And the only way you can combat it is to unbutton more of your jersey. And then like you have to still wear your jersey. It's in the rules. And then like, what do you do? Because you're like exposed. And then you have to slide and your jersey is unbuttoned and you get burn on your chest from sliding. And then you are, you're literally too hot. You know, you got burnt.

So like, then what? I don't know. Yeah. It sounds like you're describing the plot of Elementals, actually. Is it really? Did I work my way into that? That's so nice. I think you kind of did.

Yeah. You get too hot. Too hot to handle. Too too hot to handle and then what do you do you got to have water and then like you cool down but then are you too cold because then like what wow this really is elemental it's like you've seen it wow and then somebody sings shiny and doesn't talk about bruno and we've come full circle yeah okay yeah it. Yeah. It's even, even if you come into it with the premise of, I know this is probably just random and small sample, our brains still just really, really,

really want to find something that, that makes it mean something that, that adds some deeper significance or predictiveness to it. And yeah, I just, I don't know if it's there. We just, you know, we let some, some mediocre teams into the playoffs now. And, uh, once you get there, probability says like Rob means wrote this week for baseball prospectus. It's not that there have been more upsets than expected. Really. If, if you look over the past several years or the past 10 years or however

long he looked, there have been like exactly as many upsets as you would think, just going purely by probability. It's just that there's more potential for upsets, or at least for noteworthy upsets, because there are greater differentials between teams now, because you're letting in more teams, and some of them are still going to be really good teams, and some of them are not going to be so good. And so you're going to have mismatches. And so it will be more obvious, more glaring, more disturbing, perhaps when one of those not so good teams beats one of the better teams, but that's just a function of the playoff format. So yeah, I mean, we've probably gone over this enough, but even the people who are sympathetic to the idea that it probably doesn't mean that

much. It's just the way that the cookie crumpled still just really want it to mean something more than a cookie crumbling. You know what cookies don't crumble? Really hot ones. They don't tend to crumble. They tend to, they like goo apart, you know? Yeah, you can bend them. Yeah, like goo, you know, and then they, if they come out of the oven and they're still hot and you don't like the way that they're shaved, you just use a little spatula. You can squish them back into a circle. That's a baking tip from me to you. Yeah.

All right. You're like, I don't do that. I didn't know, but I've seen it done. All right. Question from Chris in a similar vein. He said, listening to episode 2071, I was struck by Ben's musings on the randomness of short series, specifically how he wouldn't be surprised with an underdog beating a favorite due to the variability inherent in a small sample.

This got me thinking, if we say that the best regular season team was the Braves, how bad would their opponent have to be for such a result to outweigh the randomness of the playoffs? For me, I think the tipping point would be this year's Colorado Rockies. To be honest, my analysis was far from quantitative. It was pretty heavily vibes-based. However, I think you can clearly rule out the other playoff teams after all the Braves did lose to one, as well as the other near-playoff teams. A serious win for the Cubs or the Padres or the Mariners were certainly within reason. Even when considering below 500 teams, I couldn't say for sure that I personally would be shocked beyond belief.

Could Kodai Senga blank the Braves for a game and Lindor launch a few? Certainly. Could Otani single-handedly propel the Angels past the Braves? Certainly unlikely, but feasible in such a brief set. However, I can't in good conscience imagine a scenario where this year's Rockies credibly get it done. For anyone who is a fan of the team, I apologize as I'm sure this feels like me picking on them, but I think the combination of one, being a bad team, and two, not really having a few players who seem like they could get hot enough to take over in a short series, kind of like the hot goalie theory for hockey, takes them past the brink for me. Curiously enough, my personal thought experiment was not

necessarily restricted purely to team quality. Even though their records and or run differentials were worse, in my snap judgment, I even thought there'd be a possibility of this year's White Sox, Royals, or Athletics making it out of a short series victorious. As ludicrous as this sounds, I think it's anchored to either theory number two above, that those teams have players who are good enough to eject sufficient variants, or the narrative around those teams being, frankly, better than the Rockies. Even with Oakland, the on-field narrative for them this year surrounded how absolutely awful their start was, but that they were not quite abysmal for the latter portion of the season. The Rockies, on the other hand, didn't really have the narrative ups and downs during the season,

which is making it harder for me to visualize a scenario where they take out a top team. All this is to say, what would your line be? If it includes the Rockies, would we need to delve deeper into historical teams, the 1899 Cleveland Spiders? You mentioned on the episode that the MLB playoffs are a bit akin to March Madness. After this exercise, I'm inclined to agree. Specifically, I think I wouldn't be surprised much by the results of one specific series, but I would be fairly surprised if a clear underdog actually went all the way. After all, while there have been plenty of 14 and 15 seed upsets, the lowest seed to actually win the tournament is an eight seed. So yeah, I guess it matters whether we're talking about just could they beat the Braves in a single series or could they go all the way and win the World Series?

Like it is – it's hard to imagine. You know, you could calculate the probabilities and it would be a non-zero chance that even the Rockies or the A's or whoever could win. You know, it doesn't take that many wins, right? You just say 11 wins or whatever it is to win the World Series. You could do that no matter how bad a team you are, even though you'd be facing exclusively pretty good to great teams. But yeah, that's as close as you can come to the limit in baseball. Would you be surprised if the A's or, cause these things happen during the regular season. I, I actually don't think the Rockies won a series against an

eventual playoff team this year. I could be wrong about that, but I was, I was checking to see if that was true. What a lovely, what a thing to ask because, uh, let's see. So the Rockies had a winning series record against, are you ready? Yeah. The Boston Red Sox, the Chicago White Sox, the Cleveland Guardians, the Kansas City Royals, the Los Angeles Angels, the Miami Marlins. They went five and two against the Marlins. So the Milwaukee Brewers, they were 4-2. They won against both New York teams. That's funny.

And they were, let's see, they were 500 against St. Louis, who famously did not make the postseason. So Miami and Milwaukee, they managed. Now, one of their wins against Miami was a walk-off, which is funny given Miami's record in one-run games. So, rah! And they did not win the season series against Minnesota, but they did walk them off also.

Man, they really won so few games, Ben. Yeah. They were 0-7 against the Braves, which is very funny. I thought I had looked. I guess they actually, they swept the Brewers in May at home, it looks like.

So these things can happen. And like, to be clear, they played, you know, it's not a lot of games. They played seven games against Miami. They played six games against Milwaukee. You know, it's like they're not, these are, they went 0-7 against the Braves.

So maybe that puts the lie to it. Yeah. Boy, what a bad baseball team. My goodness. Yeah. So if you had the 1899 Cleveland Spiders, whether they were the actual Cleveland Spiders from 1899 who were terrible against other players from 1899, right? They went 20 and 134 against their contemporaries. So I would imagine that the 1899 Cleveland Spiders might

be winless against 2023 teams. So yes, if you took a truly historically terrible worst of all time team, then I would be very surprised if they, well, won the World Series, certainly. But even beat a team like the Braves in one series, that would cross my threshold for, yeah, that's surprising. It wouldn't be the weirdest thing that ever happened, probably, to win a best of five, but it would surprise me. Would it shock me? Maybe.

Maybe it would come close to shocking me. But really, any current team, no matter how bad, if it's a big team, I still don't think that quite does it. But the Rockies would be fairly close. And I think I would probably still prefer the Rockies to the A's. I think we can dump on the Rockies plenty, and we do. But the Rockies were a better team. They were a 59-win team to the A's 50 wins. They were a 60-win Pythag team to the A's 49 wins. I don't know what the records were in the second half after the A's terrible start. But, yeah, probably prefer the Rockies to the A's at least.

But yeah, probably prefer the Rockies to the A's at least. Not necessarily to the Royals because the Royals really underplayed their run differential and base runs record and everything. But yeah, it would surprise me. But it wouldn't completely bowl me over if they won a single series against a good team because it happened. Not against the Braves, but at least against some decent teams. Yeah. I mean, like, things can be possible and still wildly surprising, you know? Like, that's the thing about baseball. It's like, is it possible?

Yeah, sure, of course. But is it likely? No. Would it make you go, what is going on? Yeah. Like, oh, my God. Can you imagine? Can you imagine, Ben?

I have one more, and this is sort of a weird one. Excellent. All right. This one comes from Matt, Matt Trueblood, in fact, who says, Will Harris, not the former relief pitcher, recently tweeted a typically disturbing AI rendering of a Dodgers team suited up to play football. AI rendering of a Dodgers team suited up to play football. In gazing at it in horror, the thing that jumped out to me most was the second man from the right in the front row. He has two right hands.

Yeah. I mean, I'll send you the link and I will link to it, of course, on the show page. But AI, sort of famously, infamously, not so great with the fingers. Yeah, they're bad with hands. Yeah, getting better, but not so great with the fingers. Yeah, they're bad with hands. Yeah, getting better, but not so great with the digits and the appendages. Oh, I'm so afraid to open this. Wait, hold on. Let me look at it.

Two right hands. You sometimes hear like, you know, so-and-so has two left feet, right? Would be a way to say that someone is kind of clumsy. But two right hands. I don't like that. I don't like that. I don't like that. That's the question. It's the obvious one, he says.

How would a pitcher who had a right hand on their left arm do? Obviously, the possibilities for a mind-bending array of pitch movement characteristics are tantalizing, but I feel like this would interfere pretty severely with the muscular wiring, if you will, of the arm. To permit a person to pitch this way, would they also need to have a freak UCL across the elbow from its usual place? Oh my god. Would the forearm be able to reverse itself to support the physiological nightmare? Oh no. And even if so, is the shoulder adaptable enough to accommodate having a backward arm attached to it? What's the fastest you could expect a pitcher like this to throw? Set aside the medical questions, though.

Let's assume it all basically works. Sure, why not? You know, R.A. Dickey didn't have a UCL. It worked for him. What arsenal of pitches would you build for this hurler, and how quickly would hitters adjust? Would this person's cutter be different enough from a normal lefty's sinker to cause lasting confusion, or would they just play like a righty? screwballs let's just ponder their four seamer does it freak hitters out is the angle weird enough to flummox them can the arm work in a totally different way or will their stuff loosely take the same basic shape as that of a normal lefty with only subtle differences based on backward grips I've typed all this

and now I suddenly feel sure this is a past pod topic the last sending anyway I don't think it was. So we've talked about where you would put the third arm if there was a third arm. Right. And whether that would benefit a pitcher. We thought about the hair if it was one, some sort of vivisection scenario, some like Island of Dr. Moreau, where it was like, if you could alter a pitcher's hand in some way, how would you do it? But this is different. I think this is a little bit different. This is natural. This is not altered or enhanced. This is just, hey, you're born with two right hands. This is just, hey, you're born with two right hands.

So I wonder, I mean, look, physiologically, I guess we would have to consult an anatomist. Yeah. Someone. Far beyond, far beyond my expertise, just wildly outside of my expertise. I mean, I think the boring answer to this question is that you would just have the guy throw right-handed on the right side of his body hand, right? Like, wouldn't you just have him be a righty? Like a traditional righty? I'm not going to say a normal righty

because this is how this guy's born. I'm not going to judge. That's just how he came out that's fine yeah but like i think you would be like that would be weird and hard to do because like yeah how does the elbow piece work like what is that what would you do presumably he would find some way to compensate physiologically. Like if he was born this way, people transcend all sorts of what one might think could be limitations and turn out not to be. People are very resourceful and ingenious and brain plasticity being what it is, we've talked about all the players who go against their natural handedness and learn to throw or swing or pitch or whatever with the other hands because someone tried to turn them into a switch hitter or a lefty or they were hurt their dominant hand. And so they learned how to use the other one for a while.

So I don't doubt that they could. I guess it depends on exactly how the anatomy works. Like there could be some constraints on the force that they could generate or the angle at which they could throw. It's hard to say without, you know, having the x-rays and the MRIs and getting in there and seeing how all the tendons and ligaments and bones and muscles connect to each other. Not that we would be qualified to assess that. Oh, gosh, yeah, no. Someone who could. But yeah, if we just assume that they are more or less unimpeded by this, that they could throw with regular stuff, I guess the question is though. Yeah. So you'd be.

Basically you'd be like Pat Venditti. Right. Weird. You'd have the same. Weirder. Weirder. Yeah. He was already weird.

Weird was the baseline. Yeah. But the advantage I guess to throwing with both. Instead of just using one arm would be possibly that you can work more. Maybe it's a little lighter workload. You're still going to have to work your lower body and everything. But, you know, your arm is going to get sore and then you can use the other arm instead. It's maybe a little fresher.

So maybe you can get a few more innings out of this guy. And then the question is, will it be a help or a hindrance in terms of the actual stuff? So if it came out of the arm, like you were just a righty, except you were facing the batter like lefty, like a lot of the platoon advantage is just the angle.

It's partly the movement, but it's also the angle and just not getting as good a look at the pitches. And so that might still apply with this guy. But then the stuff might be weirdly... I think this would be very beneficial one way or – like assuming you can actually pitch. Pitch, yeah. I think it would be good because all you want to do is stay out of the middle range of everything as a pitcher. Like you don't want your stuff to move like everyone else's moves.

like everyone else's moves. And so there are pitchers who have some weird release point or whatever, like the Josh Hader fastball, where you think it's going to move one way and then it doesn't, like your movement profile doesn't match your release point. Hader is such an interesting one to bring up though,

because so much of how Hader is getting the action that he is on his pitches has to do with like wrist pronation and wrist position and like where he is releasing and so then i'm trying to i'm like trying to do it sitting here and i'm almost knocking things over but it's like how would you i'm trying to okay so this is my right hand so my thumb goes okay so i have to turn it around and then try to okay so can i just say you're just sitting here so here's how I'm trying oh this is terrible radio okay so like Ben you put your hands out

in front of you okay put them out in front of you and then so like turn your left hand over so that your thumbs are facing the same direction. Okay. Okay. Okay. And then try to move. Up? Are my thumbs going, like I'm giving a thumbs up? Okay.

Well, yeah, like, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Like, you know, and so then, and then try to like move it. It's very, and like get any kind of like, it's very uncomfortable. I think you'd blow out your elbow right away. I think you would, but, but it's also my dumb body and it's not actually built that way because my arms are oriented the way that people's typically are so maybe this is a bad example but a hater is interesting because

it's like it could be cool i imagine a smart team could figure out ways to take advantage of like how you are like cocking your wrist basically and then like you get weird like you could do weird stuff with pronation or supination like i think it would if if your arm worked like a could work through a pitching motion yeah built this way if it were structurally sound sound, despite your hand being backward, basically, I think it could be really cool because those small things can make such a big difference. I'm like doing hater. You can't see me.

And so you're like, Meg, what are you even doing? You're telling Ben to put your hands out? Anyway, I think it could be cool, but I also think that maybe your arm would explode. So, you know, land of contrast. Right. But if it doesn't, then I assume— But if it didn't—

Yeah, you're going to get some of the advantage of just an unusual release point with movement profile. And I don't know what he would throw. Like, would he throw a typical man so many questions yeah like what do you call his breaking stuff like what do you like imagine throwing that stuff like with the same grips but from a funky it could be really cool right like you could have a you know you could have a curveball grip you could have a you know you could have a curveball grip you could have your change up you could have your slider grip but then you're throwing it from like a i'm like doing so much weird stuff with my hands right now i'm just like moving them around

i'm conscious of the fact that my lower back hurts i'm gonna have to sit at a desk all day i'm just like moving my hands and looking at them i feel stoned and i'm not. It's weird. You know, this podcast is really taking me to a place. Anyway. Yeah. Okay. Well, the safest move is to just go, okay. We'll never know. Yeah. I'd be curious to see if like the, the normal pitch type platoon splits apply to this guy or not? Probably not. I think if he could somehow make it work, I think he would be highly effective. And then I'd be curious about whether he pitched like a righty typically would to a lefty or like a lefty would. Do you throw the typical pitches that you would to an opposite or same-handed pitcher?

Or do you just not need to really because it's as if you have the platoon advantage? But you don't really. But you don't. In a sense, maybe you never have the platoon advantage. And maybe you always have it. It depends on your point of view. It's Schrodinger's platoon advantage. All right.

Well, if any people who are more knowledgeable about the way the human body works or doesn't work wants to weigh in, please let us know. I feel like sending this question to some of the player dev folks we know and being like, what would you – like imagine this guy walked into your facility. Would you look at that and go, what a cool, weird opportunity we have? Or would you go, ah, AI is going to kill all of us. Yeah. I think you'd be excited. Yeah. It's so weird that the hands are what really seems to reliably jam, jam them up. I mean, I know that's not the only, it's not like, uh, a has got it all figured out except for the hands and you know they just have to check that off and then domination awaits but it is weird that that is like there's like a whole john oliver segment about that about how

they couldn't do the worst thing about john oliver being back is that every time they do a segment on something they're like here are the states where terrible things happen and arizona is always lit up like a freaking christ Christmas tree on those maps. My goodness. It's so reliable. Get it together, fellow Arizonians. Oregonians. All right.

I'll end with a quick stat blast here. They'll take a data set sorted by something like ERA- or OBS+. The The StatBlast, as always, or as of late, brought to you by our sponsor, Topps Now. Topps Now. Topps Now still doing its thing in the postseason. Its thing being making baseball cards available very shortly after events happen in baseball games. And now the only events happening in Major League Baseball games are postseason events. So if you go to Topps.com and look at the latest offerings for Topps now, and we will link to that on the show page as always, then you're going to see a lot of Astros and Rangers and Diamondbacks and Phillies. Those are your only options for now, but you can commemorate your teams or a teams if it's not

your team, but you want to commemorate it anyway. You still can. You want to collect all the memorable postseason moments. You can. So you can anticipate that those big moments in the game. I don't think like Tori Lavello pulling Brandon Fott is a tops now necessarily. As we record, the latest cards are not quite up yet. So I can't confirm that as we speak, but you know, maybe Brandon Fott would be a tops now. And probably Quetel Marte will be a tops now. I don't want to put cards in Topps' assembly line here, but that's what I would do if I were. I wonder how often our intuition would match the Topps Now selections if we sort of predicted the Topps Now cards every day how close we would come. We need some Topps Now analytics.

Yeah. So, look, these postseason moments, they're memorable. And this is one way that you can remember them by having them memorialized on cardboard. And you can go to Topps.com, different suite of cards every day, collect them all or collect a select few of them. It's up to you. But there's a fresh batch every day, at least if there were games the previous day. All right. So we've been talking a lot about how this postseason has, on the whole, not been super exciting. And I come bearing stats that make that case. So it is true that this postseason, on the whole, on average, has not been that tense, that

suspenseful. And I guess there are multiple ways one could quantify that. One could look at, say, the percentage of games that have been played. So if you've played close to the maximum number of possible games, if the series all went deep, then that might be one way to assess how exciting a postseason was. Obviously, we won't know yet until these series and the World Series are over what the final figures will be for this year. But that's one way you could look at it.

You could look at it in terms of lead changes and late lead changes, which there just have not been a lot of. And you could look at it in terms of changes in win expectancy, which is one way I enjoy looking at these things. So I'll start there. So you can look at win probability added and championship win probability added. And Fangraphs and Baseball Reference both have postseason WPA. Baseball Reference has postseason championship WPA.

And I take it Fangraphs is going to have that very shortly. Yeah, soon. feels when you're following it in the moment and what's the win expectancy at any given moment how does that swing throughout the game as one team gets the upper hand and perhaps then has the lower hand so you can quantify all of the the changes and look at the cumulative changes in win expectancy in a game and that's one way to say how exciting was that game. And it's not always like analytically proper to sort of divvy up the credit because like, you know, defense doesn't really get WPA. It's just all attributed to the pitcher. And obviously this, you know, it just depends on when you come up. This is not like a talent measurement, but it's late innings. They're guys on base. It's a high leverage moment. You can have bigger win expectancy swings, even if, you know, hitting a grand slam in that situation is the same as hitting a grand slam in the first inning in some senses. But in other senses, it feels like it means much more. Yeah. And it feels more decisive in the moment. And WPA is one way to quantify that.

So you can add up all the win expectancy changes in a given game. So you look at the win expectancy graphs and sometimes they are just jagged, right? Lots of peaks and valleys and one team goes up and the other team goes down and then they reverse. And if there are a lot of changes like that in a game, then your cumulative change in win expectancy,

I guess the absolute value of the changes in win expectancy, are going to be great. And you can look at that just on an average per-game basis and see what the total win expectancy swing per game is. And if we do that, so far, through the most recent CS games, as we speak here on Friday morning, the average cumulative win expectancy swing per game in these playoffs is 2.2, which probably doesn't mean much without context. But take it from me, it's low.

For me, it's low. And in fact, it is the lowest in any postseason of the divisional era. So 69 on when they added the championship series when it was more than just a World Series. This is the lowest. So it looks like actually the lowest since 68, in fact. So any postseason with more than eight games, this is the lowest. And, of course, we're up to 29 games thus far. So to find a lower one, you have to go to 1982, which had 15 games and was also 2.2, but a slightly higher 2.2. And then 74, like to find a postseason

with this many games that had an average win expectancy swing this low, you have to go to 2019 when there were 37 games and the average swing was 2.4. And we could go back and see what we were saying about the 2019 postseason at the time. But, you know, you can kind of feel it, really. And we can feel it now, I think. And if you look at championship win probability added per game, so this is the same thing, except it is measuring not just your chances of winning that game, but your chances of winning the World Series. Well, we're at by far the lowest so far at 0.22, but that's not really fair because we haven't had the World Series yet, and you're going to get the biggest swings in championship win probability added during the World Series, of course. But if we even just look for no World Series, we just exclude the World

Series from every postseason, it's still the lowest at 0.22. Last year was the previous lowest at 0.28. Of course, you know, we haven't gotten to the decisive games of the championship series yet either. So this may come up. But purely on a win expectancy basis, yeah, it's been a bit boring. You know, as you said, like there have been only really two games, the two Phillies involved games that we talked about

that I think I will remember. Like, you know, if you're a fan of the teams, then you'll remember. But me, I don't know. Like, I guess, if you're a fan of the teams, then you'll remember. But me? I don't know. Like, I guess I'm undercutting the mission of Tops Now here by saying that a lot of these postseason games have been a bit dull by postseason standards. But, you know, it's true. We go where the stat blast takes us without fear or favor.

that blast takes us without fear or favor. But some of the big individual moments in those games, I think lend themselves very well to memorialization, even if the games themselves end up being a snooze. Yes, that is true. It's hard not to watch Jordan Alvarez or Bryce Harper hit a big home run and not get your heart rate up, even if the rest of the game is sort of ho-hum, which I think is one of the really lovely things about baseball. It can have these really exciting moments even when, you know, the game is long and full of terrors. Right. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's one way to quantify it. And it backs up our intuition here.

The most exciting playoffs, by the way, and I will include World Series this time, by average win expectancy swing per game, 1980 was big. 1924, which was just the World Series, but a classic seven-game World Series. 1995, 1912, that eight-game, seven-game series. 25, 41, lots of seven-game World Series in there. But if we have a lower games minimum, 2004 was big, 34 games, 2003, 1991, of course, 2009. And by championship win probability added per game, 1924 at the top, 1975, very high in the not just world series era, 1980 again shows up. The average championship win probability added swing is lower the more games there are. But 1992 and 1993 were pretty high. 1997, 2011. I'd

encourage people to peruse the spreadsheets that I will link to. And, you know, you can also look at the percentage of total possible games played. And Michael Mountain, listener, Patreon supporter, he actually did this and put this together the other day that that data that I just used WPA and CWPA that came from Kenny Jacklin of Baseball reference a semi-frequent StatBlast consultant. And I'll probably keep tabs on that as we get to the end of this round in the world series and see how it all shakes out but you can also look at yeah percentage of of total games played and if we do that as michael did and he made a spreadsheet that he posted in the stat blast channel of our patreon discord group which i will also post you can see that there's quite a wide range.

So the highest percentage of possible games played in any postseason is actually 114.3%, because that was 1912 when a best of seven World Series went eight games. So they got more than the maximum because there was one game that was a tie on a count of darkness. This was before lights at baseball games. And so they have to play an additional game. They've come a long way, you know? Yeah. So this one goes to 11. This one goes to eight. That one did at least. And then there have been a bunch of other postseasons when it was just the World Series and when they went seven. So that's obviously the max that you can get. But beyond that, beyond just the World Series going seven, I guess the maximum that we've gotten is it looks like 1972 and 1973 when 17 out of 17 possible games were played.

And then like 85 and 86, we had 20 out of 21 possible games being played. Now, 2003, we had, and in fact, 2011 also. 2011, remember, had that extremely memorable end of the regular season. But then the playoffs, too, lots of long series. So 2003 and 2011, 38 of 41 possible games were played. So that is 92.7%. And that's about the max that you can get in recent years when you had lots of rounds and lots of series. As for the minimum, of course, you had a lot of years where there was just a

World Series and it was a sweep. So four out of seven, that's 57.1 percent of possible games. But for games in the divisional era or postseason in the divisional era, you had 69 and 70, in the divisional era or postseason in the divisional era, you had 69 and 70, only 11 of 17 possible games were played. That's 64.7%. And then 1990, you had 14 out of 21 and 89 also 14 out of 21. So that's 66.7. That's two thirds of possible games. And then I guess if you're going to go with more recent, 2007 was sort of a dud in terms of long series. So 28 out of 41 possible games were played. That's 68.3%. So we'll see where 2023 comes out. Right now, we're at 29 games played. But yeah, it's tough to do the math now. Do you do it out of all the possible NLCS games

that could be played? Or do you give us 100% because all the CS games that have been played have been played, which is kind of tautological. But yeah, we could end up with one of the lower ones. Like if the remaining teams take care of business quickly, if we don't get game sevens in these CSs, and if you get a short World Series, then it could end up being on the low side because of the possible series lengths for the first couple rounds.

We're not really tested. We still have not gotten a winner-take-all elimination game. And I hope that we do, whether it's in one of these rounds or in the World Series. That's my hope. I hope that whoever wins, that we just get some good games and close series and exciting lead changes and lots of win expectancy swings. Yeah. Cause it can be, you know, you want to, you want to make a good game of it because then for a while there are no major league games, you know, you don't want your final impression

of major league baseball in 2023. I forgot what year it was for a second there. I was like, league baseball in 2023 i forgot what year it was for a second there i was like what year is it what what am i what am i saying you don't want it to be boring you want it to be thrilling um but you know there's always lead them so yep yeah michael says the 10 team wild card error record is 2014 when we got 32 of 43 games so that's 74.4 percent That was, I guess, for the lowest percentage last year, it was 75.5% of games for the 12-team era. And as I said, one other way you can look at it is by just looking at the number of lead changes and late lead changes. So Ryan Nelson, frequent StatBlast consultant, looked it up that way. By my count, we have had eight total lead changes in the 29 playoff games so far and only two late lead changes defined as seventh inning or later, those two Phillies games. So that's like

28% of games have had a lead change and about 7% have had a late lead change, that is very, very low. We're defining lead change fairly liberally here. Like if a team goes up one nothing in the top of the first and then the other team scores two in the bottom of the first, that's a lead change. Although it's not a lead change if one team is leading and then there's a tie and then the team that was leading takes the lead again. So it looks like if we compare just to pre-World Series games, this is the lowest percentage to this point of games with a lead change. And there have been only a handful of years with a lower percentage of late lead changes pre-World Series. The average in the divisional era pre-World Series is 0.6 lead changes per game. I guess it's not technically percentage

because you could have multiple lead changes in a game, but that's the average 0.6 lead changes per game. And this year we're at 0.28, so less than half the typical rate. And usually you have about 0.21 late lead changes per game. So this year so far, we're at about one third of the typical rate. So yeah, just not great. The post seasons with the highest number of lead changes per game, including World Series, 1980 shows up again, 1.07 total lead changes per game. Then 87, 99, 90, 75. This is with at least 12 total playoff games. 2009 was a good one. And the best years for late lead changes per game, 72, 99, 80, 2009. Some of the usual suspects showing up there too.

So we'll see where it shakes out this year. And we'll probably, when it's all said and done, when the dust settles, then we will give you the final figures. Well, listeners, this is the outro now. I'm back. It's Ben, a slightly older, slightly more knowledgeable Ben, because I now know what transpired in the two baseball games that took place on Friday. If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you're probably pretty familiar with the concept of regression to the

mean. You see some extreme results. It's likely that they won't stay so extreme, that they'll come back to earth a bit, sometimes in a disappointing way, sometimes in a very welcome way. And this is one of those times, because right after I finished a stat blast about how few lead changes we'd seen and how few late lead changes we'd seen, especially, we got a couple of classic baseball games, which each had two lead changes. That's a total of four lead changes, including one late lead change apiece. I believe these were the first playoff games this year with more than one lead change. So I wanted drama. I wanted competitiveness. I wanted excitement. And boy, did these games deliver. The Astros came back to beat the Rangers 5-4. The Diamondbacks came back to beat the Phillies 6-5. So the NLCS is even now. The Astros are one win away

from another World Series appearance. Both games had a crucial late home run in the 8th or 9th. Altuve hit yet another postseason home run. And Alec Thomas, pinch hitter, hit one off of who else? Craig Kimbrell. Lots of great pinch hitting action

in both of these games. There were a couple pinch hitters who preceded the Altuve home run for the Astros. But yes, our warnings about Craig Kimbrell went unheeded and the Phillies were punished again. So that is more like it. They can't all be like that, but some of them have to be like that. A couple of super exciting games, raising those rates of lead changes and late lead changes per game.

So playoffs not over. Still time for them to end on an up note. Good stuff. Not for Phillies fans, not for Rangers fans, but for any fans who want to see some back and forth battles decided late in the game. More like that, please. Keep them coming. And you can keep your support for this podcast coming by going to patreon.com slash effectively

wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going, help us stay almost ad-free, and get themselves access to some perks. Andrew Blythe, Chris Wicke, Brendan Bonner, Karina Longworth, and Joe Camerata, thanks to all of you. Patreon perks include access to the Effectively Wild Discord group for patrons only. There's a great channel in there just for post-season game chatting, and we will be chatting and live streaming during an upcoming playoff game. That's another Patreon perk. We've already done one this month. We also do monthly bonus episodes, and you can also get discounts on merch and ad-free Fangrafts memberships and so much more

patreon.com slash effectively wild. If you are a Patreon supporter, you can message us through the Patreon site, but anyone and everyone can contact us via email at podcast at Fangrafts.com. Send us your questions, your comments, your intro and outro themes. If you want to join our rotation, you can rate, review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild. You can follow Effectively Wild on Twitter at EW pod and you can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash Effectively Wild. Thanks to Shane McKeon for his editing and production assistance. We hope you have a wonderful weekend. We'll be back to talk to you probably after the end of the championship series, so enjoy the last steps on the path to the pennant. Talk to you soon. it be and if this thought haunts your dreams well stick around and see what Ben and Meg have to say

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