Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2227: A Triple Short of the Scalpel

Episode Date: October 5, 2024

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Pete Alonso’s huge homer off of Devin Williams, the chaos and colorful characters surrounding the Mets, the difficulty of counting the qualifiers in an Alonso fun fact, Alonso’s free agency, the compelling nature of the Division Series matchups, previews of each series, the front-office shake-ups of the Cardinals […]

Megan Benwaxin' bout a playoff race A blues bat's hard It's effectively wild So stick around, you'll be well-beguiled It's effectively wild Hello and welcome to episode 2227 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from FanGraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Raleigh of Van Graaff's. Hello, Meg.

Hello. So you know how my mom thinks Mariana Rivera was a choker. Yes. Some mom in Milwaukee probably thinks Devin Williams stinks today. Mariana Rivera, maybe best post-season pitcher ever, and my mom, not convinced.

Now, Devin Williams, arguably on a per inning, per batter basis to this point in his career, the best pitcher ever, now gave up this backbreaking home run. I feel bad saying backbreaking in his case, because didn't he have a stress fracture in his back that kept him out for much of the season? Multiple, I think.

Multiple. Right. Clearly not back breaking because since he has returned, he's basically been his usual unhittable dominant self. And so when I was looking at the ESPN win probability graphic that I ranted about a bit or complained about, last time I'm watching Mets and Brewers, ninth inning, wild card game three, and Devin Williams comes in. I'm thinking, well, these win expectancy numbers are not accounting for the fact

that Devin Williams is on and he made quick work of the Mets earlier in the series and you can count the number of times that he is blown a multi run lead on one hand, I think certainly in recent years, he just does not cough up a lot of runs. And then boom, what a moment that was. That was so exciting. That even compared to the Lindor Homer, not that we have to say one is better. They were both wonderful and season saving. By championship win probability added, Pete Alonso's homer was about four times more valuable than Lindor's. And that's largely a function of the fact that Lindor's was still

during the regular season and the Mets could have won that second game and still made it into the playoffs. This is facing elimination in the wild card round and you're getting closer to the World Series with each step along the postseason path. So the CWPA numbers are going to go up accordingly, but it felt every bit of that eight percentage points of World Series odds. That was wild and wonderful, not for Brewers fans. I don't know what's going on inside the mind of Pete Alonso. I don't know the man. I don't know his heart, you know? But I might have remarked a couple of innings prior, there was like a, he had the potential to catch a pop-up and foul territory, he failed to secure it. And he had this look

on his face in that moment and in moments after sort of contemplating things in the dugout, I think in the next half inning where it was like, it looked like the reality that this might be his final game as a Met was sort of washing over him, right? Like he had a look of a feeling. And I can't say with any certainty exactly what that feeling was, but it looked like a feeling full of face, Ben. You know, it was a face full of feeling. He had some feeling in his face. And so I was just sitting there thinking like, you know, is this the way that your sitting there thinking like, you know, is this the way that your tenure as a Met is going to end? Now, the Mets could very well resign Petolanzo. I'm fascinated by what Petolanzo's market is going to be this off season because if I were for an office executive, I don't

know that I would want to like be in the Petolanzo business in a long-term kind of way, but he could be a Met, he might be a forever Met. We don't know, we don't know about his Met-siness going forward. But in that particular moment, it felt like this chapter of his Met-sness at the very least was coming to an end. And then he gets that home run and they go on to face the Phillies and you know, it might tear a hole in the space-time continuum over I-95, but, you know, in the meantime, he gets to be a Met for at least a little bit longer. And so there was the important role that it played in finishing that game off in extending their season. But I have to imagine that for a man whose psyche might have depended

on the presence of a small pumpkin, that it was one of the more memorable homeruns he's probably ever hit in his entire life. You hear about the small pumpkin, Vance, you hear about that little pumpkin. Look, I'm trying to be on my guard about the Mets because the Mets are an improbable continuing story in this postseason. I worry about any number of teams in this playoff field and what their winning a World Series might portend sort of cosmically. I still partially blame the 2016 Cubs for the Trump administration.

Is that fair? Absolutely not. Do I do it? Yeah, in like an active way, right? So I'm nervous about these Mets, you know, in much the same way that I was candidly a little nervous about the Brewers because they hadn't won one. Does it open a new portal to the hell dimension if they would? I don't know, Ben.

We're never going to find out in that specific instance. Well, imagine if the Mariners won what kind of portal would open up, but you're probably willing to entertain that possibility. Probably. Yeah, I imagine one full of granola and questionable housing policy if I were going to put a specific tinge on it. But look, I was nervous, and I find Pete Alonso to be kind of a tryhard. We've talked about this before. I don't think that it's a facade. I think that he is sincere in his earnestness, but it's a lot. He's got a lot going on. But-

His home run derby dedication. Oh my God. I'm endlessly amused by that, but- His home run derby dedication. Oh my God. But- I'm endlessly amused by that, but especially when he loses. Yeah, I'm amused, but I don't know that I want to get a beer with the guy. You know what I'm saying? But then I come to find out through the intrepid reporting of our friend Chelsea Janes that he's got this little pumpkin, Ben.

He's got a little pumpkin. And I'm a sucker, you know? Now I'm like, chew chew, aboard the Pete Alonso train. Don't worry, Phillies fans, I am still respectfully terrified of you. And if I had my druthers, you'd probably advance in this series. But he's got this little pumpkin. Do any of you have a little pumpkin? Get, get Brandon Marsh a little pumpkin is what I'm saying. Get that man some decorative gourds. Yeah, it's still early in October. A lot of us will acquire pumpkins at some point between now and Halloween.

But I was delighted by just how he instantly knew that he got it and was just instantly euphoric to the point that the broadcast was very clearly muting all mics in the vicinity of the field. It was very funny as he hit it, as he waltzed out of the batter's box, as he rounded third base, as there was a celebration at home plate, there was just a lot of very conspicuous muting and selective muting on the delay. So I would love to hear the unedited, unmuted feed of that moment, but you could read his lips and you could pretty much figure it out. And I also loved the scenes of celebration from city field, from various sports bars

in New York. And this is not me being a New Yorker celebrating this in particular. This is just scenes of celebration and utter euphoria among fans of teams who may not know each other, maybe complete strangers, may not even like each other if they got to know each other, but they're just bonded by this baseball team. And it doesn't have to be a baseball team, any sports team.

That's sports, that's why we watch. That's why sports are such a wonderful thing a lot of the time, at least. And of course there's always the flip side and the dejected team and the utter silence in Milwaukee when that home run was hit, other than Pete Alonso, who was by far the loudest person in that park at that moment.

And probably even though the broadcast was muted, you could hear Pete Alonso was by far the loudest person in that park at that moment. And probably even though the broadcast was muted, you could hear Pete Alonso from quite far away from the field. I imagine if you were physically present, but I almost get choked up. Sure. We've talked maybe on bonus pods about how when you have the space movie, the NASA mission control scene where everyone's like threadting, you know, it's you lose contact during reentry or going around the other side of the moon or whatever it is. And then suddenly the radio crackles to life and we realize that everyone is safe and we did it, you know,

the Apollo 13 kind of classic scene, but it's repeated in many space movies. I always just get choked up by those scenes. And I'm not someone who is prone to very strong emotions or tears or anything, but those always get me. And it's the same sort of thing with sports when I see people just losing it like that, just forgetting their cares for a moment and jumping up and down an absolute bedlam

in a sports bar somewhere. That is why we watch. That's why we care about these things. I love it. I mean, look, it only takes a slightly strong wind for me to burst into tears. I'm prone to crying at any little thing, but it is a special kind of coming together that you see when folks who, like you said, might not know each other, may never see each other ever again, right?

Like that might be the only time that they cross paths in their entire lives. And to come together in a moment of joy, and I think even, I have limited experience with this sort of thing admittedly, but I think that it's still a source of comfort when, you know, it doesn't go the way you want it to, but you're able to kind of lean on people, feel that sort of sense of mourning collectively. Like it has you depart into the mid-western night. It's- The wake for the A's recently, right? It was the same sort of, yeah, that was not

celebratory really. It was more of a eulogy. It was elegiac. It was awake kind of, but it was also sort of special and beautiful in its own way. And especially perhaps in these polarized times where we're all siloed off and we're less connected maybe to the physical fabric of society, the whole bowling alone idea, we don't do group collective community activities. And I would certainly put myself in that bucket of someone who's just sitting by themselves on the internet all day. But it's especially nice, I think not that those divisions go away or anything because of some sports game, but at least you can forget your cares and all kind of come together in this one magic moment.

So that was really nice. And it was not the first time that the Mets have experienced a moment like that this week. So I guess new strategy against the Mets do not take a lead into the top of the ninth, maybe just try to win in a walk do not take a lead into the top of the ninth. Maybe just try to win in a walk off or something, go into the top of the ninth tight and score in the bottom of the ninth. You do not want to be ahead going into the top of the ninth because they will beat you.

Look, here's what I'll say to the Mets. Because the other thing that sports sort of expose and elucidate is your baseline level of annoyance with a particular fan base when they have something nice to have into them. So like, Mets fans, let's be real with each other. Don't be cocky. You know, I know that there is going to be divisional, excuse my swear, s*** talking between you and Philly fans. And anything can happen

in a five game series and it's not as if you don't have good players on your team. But I would suggest if you have the opportunity to score runs early and get ahead, you should probably do that, you know? Like if the if the decision tree is put before you, opt for the runs every time. Grimace shoots. If you wanna trust the ESPN win expectancy graphics, I guess you would say that.

Can I ask a very, very important question? One that might determine the outcome of this series. How do you think Mr. Met feels about Grimace? What is the vibe between the mascots? Because Met's fans have leaned into Grimace, right? I think that they saw Grimace at a game, they looked across at their division rivals, they said, we have a fanatic at home, which is crazy. Because like Grimace, guys, Grimace belongs to everyone. Grimace

is, the fact that Grimace has become Met's canon, I think is something that we should still dispute harder than we do. It makes no sense. Yeah, you don't get to claim Grimace. Grimace is not yours. Grimace is international. Grimace is everyone's, you know? Grimace belongs to us all. All of us wonder, what's in those those grimace shakes, you know? What's up with those? Why are they, they should save them for Halloween time. They should save them for October.

I know that his birthday quote unquote for this creature is like earlier in the year, but like purple is a Halloween color. What are we doing? Anyway, do you think that Mr. and Mrs. Met are like, hey, we've been over here doing our best to be, you know, the horny mascot you want to see at the park. And now you're all horny for this purple thing that is shaped like, I mean, not something I feel comfortable saying on this podcast. What is

the deal with Grimace, Ben? And also how does Mr. Met feel about him? I'll wait for my answer. Yeah, it is pretty rude that they have been kind of cast aside and not only in favor of Grimace, it's like the Mets have multiple characters and mascots, some of whom are real people and not actual characters, but they've just got this orbit of kind of colorful personalities surrounding them. And I would not have thought that any team could surpass the incredible chaos energy that the Phillies have embodied over the past couple of years and yet the Mets are making a bid to do just that. And it's like Grimace is not sufficient. Also, Haktua Girl is in the mix somehow. No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Pitbull is part of this, Pitbull is involved because he's on the Oh My God remix and that's a part of the whole celebration, the Jose Iglesias song and there's just all these ingredients in this Met's stew that is going into whatever is happening with this team. I have a controversial take about the New York Mets. Look, you guys are about sadness, really, and dysfunction. You're not about quirk. You're not about whimsy. That's not the vibe. And look- Or rebranding. Not, no, no. You're trying to do too much. What does your restaurant do well? What is your best

food? You know? I'm like, what is the hawk to a girl do? What, first of all, in general, what are we doing? But more specifically, what are we doing? But more specifically, what are we doing? You know what I mean? And here's another question. Is the grimace that appears at the Mets games, is that grimace now an employee of the New York Mets? Or is he like on loan from McDonald's?

What are we doing, Ben? What are we? I don't, again, I'm not trying to take sides in the series. It's sounding increasingly like I am, but I'm not trying to take sides in that series, but I'm just saying that if the fanatic and gritty don't combine to kill Grimace, you know, to deliver onto the, like to leave his head in the dugout, like the Rapscallions they are. Is that how you say that word? Rapscallion. I don't know if I like that word, but I'm using it again. Like the horse head in the bed in the Godfather, if Grimace's head is

not mounted onto a pike on top of the visiting dugout at Citizens Bank Park by tomorrow, then I have no confidence in the city of Philadelphia anymore. None. It will be gone. Because like go do what you or two chaos agents... Yeah, there's just really powerful mascot energy emanating from this NLDS. But it's not their mascot. Look, I know that teams do this all the time, right?

They end up with a squirrel or a dog or a monkey or- Yeah, you lean into whatever fortuitous occurrence. A tiny pumpkin, right? The symbolism abounds. There was the sausage, right? Remember when the twins had the magical summer sausage? The summer sausage, yes. That was the twins had the magical summer sausage? Yes.

That was a lifetime ago. Was that this season? Was that this year? Yes. That feels like a century has passed or at least one major league championship season. But anyway, all of this to say, I know the teams do this, I know. And sometimes it feels sincere and organic and you're like, oh my God, that really is a Tausman. The sort of a no. Oh no. No, too many things. It's just so many bits. It's hard to keep them together. It's too many bits. It's too many things. Again, what does your restaurant do well? Pick. But it's working, so you gotta keep rolling

as long as they keep pulling out victories like this. Yes, it's like, they're all like minor deities. It's like when you used to have the major Greek and Roman gods, so you'd ask for blessings. And then you'd have kind of like your local ones who were like the god of some small thing. Well, sure, because they all had to sleep with people and eventually they got tired of sleeping

with their siblings. So they were like, we must have met minor gods so that we can diversify the potential gene pool here. Yes. And so all of these different characters are bestowing their blessings upon the Mets right now. And so you just kind of invoke whichever one is helping you at that moment. And as long as things are going this way for them, then I imagine it will continue. And I cited how effective Devin Williams is. I searched the all time lowest adjusted ERA and FIP leaders at FanCrafts

minimum 200 innings. The best adjusted park adjusted era adjusted ERA of all time, belongs to Emmanuel Classe at 40, where 100 is average and below 100 is better. Devin Williams is second at 43. And then that other closer I name checked earlier, Mariano Rivera is at 49, not as good, although of course he pitched into his 40s and never really declined that much. If you go by adjusted FIP, then Devin Williams is tied for the lowest ever, even better than Clausé at 56, tied with Dellen Betancis, which maybe takes a

little bit of the wind out of the sails of that fun fact. Although he was nasty. Yeah. Yeah. But to hit that Homer off of Williams at that point where you just kind of consider it automatic, he is not one of these closers who makes you sweat and makes you nervous for the most part. He is just dominant and then Lindor works the walk and you can kind of tell and then Nimmo got that hit on 02 where the pitch was left over the middle and you got the sense, okay, maybe the command isn't quite there here.

Change-up wasn't finishing the way that it needs to. Yeah. Yeah. And then starring Marte had that nice, just like slap it to the opposite field. That was, I guess, to get the insurance run later. And then there was Winker who Milwaukee fans, not a fan. Okay. Okay. Here's another, here's man. Okay, you finish your thought, but then we have to talk about Jesse Winker. Yeah, I was just gonna say that I think the long hair, just incredible flow on him, I think it has distracted from the length of his neck,

the length of his hair now, because that used to be kind of a talking point with Jesse Winker, which is maybe mean, but it was a notable neck. And now it's not as notable because his hair is so long and he's like flipping it all over the place. And that is so long that I think it makes his neck look less long by comparison. So, but, but he's just got this like gritty grimy dirt bag look going on now, which is like different from how I remember Jesse Wicker looking with shorter hair. It's just a whole different vibe with him these days. And then the way that he was hit a couple times in

that game and he seemed not to be pleased about it and then he spiked his helmet so hard that I think he snapped it when he scored like directly in front of him. Flew off multiple pieces. Yeah, he was, he was doing a lot. He was really emoting in that editing. So Jesse Winker, let's talk about this. First of all, how dare you suggest I was mean for fixating on the length of his neck? You say that it was hard to avoid. It was inescapable. It was, it was an unavoidable amount of neck. Like to. To not remark upon it would have been like not remarking on the giant zit that marred the face of Dan Campbell during the NFL playoffs last year. Sometimes you just have to say it's that way so that you can move on from it.

Because if you don't say, look at the neck on that guy, you are inviting a question of whether you have a very specific kind of face blindness. Okay? So I had to say something about the neck. It was absurd. It affected the aspect ratio of his roster photos. Okay? It was the world's longest neck. And so that's-

CB I was going to cup into a different mole, the mole character from Austin Powers played by Fred Savage where there's that scene where Austin is trying not to notice the mole and say the mole and then all he can say is that there's a giant mole there. Yeah. It's that sort of, yeah. Exactly, Ben. Exactly. So I had to offer that defensive myself because I like to think of myself as generally a nice

person and I'm not trying to like give Jesse Winker the big business. He can't help how long his neck is, but like it was again an inescapable amount of neck. So there's that. Second of all, props to Jesse Winker for figuring out a hairstyle that to your point, I think balanced his neck importantly, right? It is a less notable neck now than it once was. And he has a great head of hair. You know, Michael Bauman remarked upon this to me in Slack. He's like, you know, who's got great hair? Jesse Winker. Third point though, is

Jesse Winker okay? Because like when Jesse Winker was briefly a mariner, my primary takeaway from the Jesse Winker experience was that he was a man who was willing to both start and end some shit. What shit? It didn't matter. He was just, he was there for the shit, right? He was a shit stirrer, a long necked shit stirrer. That was, that was what he did, right?

And then it seemed like some of the shit stirring kind of mellowed a little bit because I know that there was some reporting in the offseason that the trade was hard for him, he was distant from his family and that didn't sit right with him. So it sounds like it's been kind of a tumultuous couple of years for Jesse Winker and I thought, oh, you know, kind of get all that sorted. No! The man still, he's out here yapping at Willie Adamus. He's, you know, and like really, Ben, really yapping at Willie Adamus.

Do you think that Willie Adamus was like, hey, your neck's really long? Do you think that that's what he said? Was he like, I remember what it looks like, dude, the hair doesn't fool me, you got that long neck, you know? It's like that Mulaney bit where he's like, teens are mean because they'll make fun of you in a specific way. And do you think, so all of that to say, I get it's a big emotional moment.

He'd been hit twice in the game. He's trying to do his part to extend the Mets season. You know, he's all worked up, but like, chill, my guy, you know, like it was a lot. It just felt, it felt like a lot to me. It felt like an un... It was pretty aggressive. Yeah. It was really quite aggressive. Pieces of the helmet are flying everywhere. I'm just like, your team's already ahead at this point is the other thing, right? Like I know that he was the insurance run, which didn't end up mattering as it turned out,

but at the time felt like it was gonna be consequential. Oh, you've made this much, this project is now a much harder group effort, right? We gotta build a volcano that's due tomorrow overnight. What will we do? It felt like it could be this big momentous thing. So I appreciate their being feeling, but it's like, what did the helmet ever do to you

except to protect your noggin, but not your long neck. So maybe that's the problem, you know? I've mentioned this fun fact on the last outro, but I wanted to highlight it here too, the Optistats stats about this Alonzo home run, which I thought was quite fun despite the fact that there were many qualifiers and I was trying to count the qualifiers. Sometimes it's actually hard to tell how many there are and what should count as a qualifier, but the stat was Pete Alonso of the Mets is the first player in MLB history to hit a go ahead homer while trailing in the ninth inning or later of a winner take all postseason game. And people were saying, well, wait, what about Bill Mazurowski?

Well, it was tied. So they weren't trailing or what about Joe Carter? It, it wasn't a winner take all game. Right. So at first you think this, there's no way this could be true. And then you realize, oh, okay, maybe it is true. And it's actually kind of cool. I think that is kind of cool, but how many qualifiers is that?

Okay. So Pete Alonso of the Mets is the first player in MLB history to hit a go ahead homer. So go ahead. One. Right, that's one. Ding, we should have like a little counter here. Here, I can do it, ding.

While trailing. Ding. Okay, yeah, two. In the ninth inning or later. Ding. Three. Of a winner take all. Ding. Postseason game. Now, this is where I...

I think that's a compound qualifier. Winner take all postseason game. I don't know, because I think postseason game is itself a qualifier in a sense. I suppose, but like the part of it that... I mean, it could be any game and then winner take all, that's definitely a qualifier, right? But what are the... Talk to me about the other then winner take all that's definitely a qualifier. Right. I mean, winner take all is a qualifier. What are the, talk to me about the other meaningful winner take all circumstances. Well, no, I just, I think winner take all is a qualifier because if you didn't have that, it would just be any postseason game. Right. So it, this limits it to only postseason games.

Yes. Now you couldn't have a winner takeall game that is not a postseason game. This is my point. Unless it was a tiebreaker or something, right? In the regular season. I mean, that's going to be a small group of games. But that's a tiebreaker game. I would describe that differently. I wouldn't describe a tiebreaker game as a winner-take-all game. I guess it is technically part of the subcategory, but the part of it that is a meaningful descriptor to people would be tiebreaker, not winner take all. I think you and I probably think about hyphens

differently as part of what I'm learning from this. You're maybe a triple hyphener. I think this is a four qualifier fun fact because it's go ahead, ninth inning or later, trailing, and then winner take all. Winner take all postseason game. Yeah, that's all. Well, yeah, the winner take all is the qualifier. Well, yes, I guess if you put a hyphen after the all between the winner take all, comma, postseason game, there's no comment in the fun facts.

It would do winner take all. So it would be winner take all. There would be a dash between winner and there all. And then winner take all, there would be a dash between winner and all, and then winner take all, post-season game, one thing. That is a compound descriptor. You don't need more hyphens, but you just have faith in your reader, you know? Yeah, I think I'm with you here. People are like, hey, you know what's really fun?

Diagramming sentences on the podcast. Do more of that. On a podcast, yeah. Regardless though, you don't often see at least minimum four fun fact qualifier that you think, oh, that's actually a good one. But no, this was, so that's how special that home run was. And then David Peterson comes in to close out the Brewers

and Edwin Diaz, by the way, did ask to come back out, but this time, Carlos Mendoza denied him and said, no, not again. Like you did great here. You got us to that point. You kept it close, but we're not going to keep pushing it. We need you to be good for the rest of this postseason too. Yeah. He basically threw a starter's worth of pitches in like four days. Yeah. So super special game, super fun condolences to the Brewers who I think the better team had the better season, still waiting for their first world series

when probably we're all but tasting that champagne as Devin Williams was going out there because that's how justvin Williams was going out there, because that's how just automatic he is. But yeah, that was a pretty incredible moment. And I was thinking about Alonzo too, and whether this is just kind of the crowning achievement, the capper to his Mets career, or whether this buys him more time with the Mets. And maybe it depends how the rest of this postseason goes.

If the Mets make it to the Worlds, if they win a World Series this year, I have shown before, Sam has shown, that the World Series winner is more likely to just kind of keep the gang around, bring the band back. Just, you know, you're riding the vibes from winning. You want to just run it back.

You've got a boost in revenue. And so maybe you're a little more free spending and you're just more likely for that roster to stay together. Right. Compared to a typical team or even compared to the World Series loser. That is probably just as good because it also won a pennant. So I could see if the Mets win a world series and Alonzo continues to propel them to that, then Steve Cohen might just be like, yeah, here's your massive contract

that you wanted, maybe, who knows. But it will be really a fascinating free agency. And if there is a free agent case that could contribute to the does Boris still have it kind of conversation. It might be Alonzo because I could imagine this not going the way that Alonzo wants it to go. Sure. Just as you were implying because he's going to be 30 in December. He's kind of a classic old player skills guy. He's not that good. He was good when he was hitting 53 homers as a rookie, but the last couple of years he's more of like a slightly above average player maybe and like a 20% better than league average hitter and he's not giving you anything on the bases or the

field. And so if he's hitting 30 something homers, it's just, it's not like that valuable and overall profile really, though he has been durable and you wouldn't really expect it to improve as time goes on. So that does seem like a case of a free agent who in some earlier era would have stood to make much more money than he will make now. Not that I'm rooting against him or anything. Go get your money if you can. But I wonder whether his expectations are properly calibrated because there's been some reporting about that, that he was looking to top Freddie Freeman and Matt Olson.

Oh, yeah. Oh, relax. That was last November that he was looking to build on the frameworks of those deals. And then this May it was reported that last June he was offered a seven-year, $158 million extension and turned it down. And yeah, it makes me wonder if he's kind of thinking of himself in like a 1990s free agent way where like you're just a big hulking first base slugger type you could make bank back then even if you were 30 year older and now not so much probably.

So yeah, we'll see how that plays out, but we don't have to think about that yet. And a few more homers like that. Maybe he'll buy himself some extra dollars if the Mets are grateful for that. So I'm really excited for this series, this NLDS matchup. Honestly, all of these NLDS matchups, well, all these DS matchups, I should say, are fantastic. These are, these are great. Like I was very psyched for Padres Dodgers and the

2022 rematch. And of course these teams have had a rivalry of sorts and they're fighting down to the wire in the NL West. And now we get to see them go head to head again. I'm more excited, I think, for Mets Phillies now. Now I wouldn't say that is as evenly matched a series, which again, doesn't really mean that it won't be an evenly matched series in practice, but the teams are more mismatched, I would say. But the intrigue here, the Mets and the Phillies have never faced each other in the postseason. It's like, how cool is that? These teams have been playing each other for decades. They have all kinds of history and a rivalry and great moments.

And now they're finally going toe to toe in the playoffs. Like this is going to be just great. The atmosphere in New York, in Philly. And then on the AL side, you've got another intro division rivalry with the Tigers and the Guardians who are basically mirror images of each other. I mean, this is, this is a closely matched series, I would say, and also just very similar

rosters and strengths and weaknesses. It's like, you know, defense and bullpen and some offensive issues and starter depth issues, although the Tigers have scubal, the Guardians do not have a scubal, and the Guardians are maybe better on the bases, more likely to steal. So there are small differences, but really like pretty even, especially if you look post all-star break at who the Tigers have been and how they've played, it's quite close between these two teams. And then you've got Yankees Royals, which on paper seems somewhat lopsided, but then again you also have history here and you know it's 70s, 80s history so it's not personal to everyone watching, but of course there is a great playoff history and rivalry between

the Yankees and the Royals back in the day. So it's kind of calling back to that. And you've got Aaron Judge versus Bobby Witt, the two most valuable players of this season going head to head. You got the Yankees' Leakey bullpen versus the Royals' rebuilt bullpen, but a big difference in the lineups beyond Judge and Witt. There are storylines and narratives and aspects

and matchups about all of these series I'm excited for. Yeah, I do worry that there will be at least four human souls that do not exit Citizens Bank Park this weekend. And I'd like to offer my condolences to their families preemptively. And I'm not counting Grimace amongst them. Not human. Not human. Also, just to close out the Alonzo thought, I mean, I think his own injury, Stefan H, kind of complicates this a little, but it's like, wouldn't you just rather have Christian Walker, you know? Like, if you don't have the sentimental attachment to Alonzo of him being a Met and potentially driving this like postseason run, like, I think you just would

rather have Christian Walker. At least I would. That's my take on that. But yeah, like I think having, we said this last time, having divisional clashes in the division round is super, super fun. I think that it adds like an electricity to those matchups that can otherwise be lacking because sometimes I think I don't want anyone to get hurt. I don't want anyone to get thrown at, but like I think it can be nice to have those get a little nasty, you know? Like, it's good for the teams looking across the dugout and being like, I don't like those guys, you know?

Let's make their lives hard for a couple of days. I think that it can add an excitement to it that is palpable and meaningful and really enhances the thing. Yes, relevant to our Arcia Machado discussion last time, I suppose to some extent. But yeah, you want a little just low stakes bad blood. I mean, not low stakes, but sports stakes, sports high stakes, right? Not life or death. You want sporting bad blood, you know? Like you don't want any, again, you don't want anyone to get hurt.

You don't want anyone to, you know, slide hard unnecessarily. Yeah. And when the series is over, you kiss and make up, maybe literally, only if they want to. Yeah, only if they want to. But yeah, I'm not asking for literal blood, but I think having sort of the hint of psychological blood is, you know, that's useful. Yeah.

So Dan Szymborski has run his odds for this series, which may be changing because we're getting new details. The Mets are starting Kodaisanga in game one, which is exciting. Looks like the probabilities have already updated for that. Dan's on top of things. And who knows how deep he'll be able to go into games, but then again, it's October. How deep does anyone ever go, right? So that's exciting to get him back.

Meanwhile, the Padres will not have Joe Musgrove in the NLDS because of his elbow issues. But looking at the probabilities that Dan has run here, I guess they're somewhat surprising. What is not surprising is that Philly's Mets is the most lopsided according to Zips. It's about 66-34 in favor of the Phillies in this series. And then all the others are in a closer range. So you've got Dodger's Padres at 56-44, Guardian's Tigers at 57 and a half 42 and a half, and then Yankees Royals at about 56 44.

So some of those are, are, you know, almost kind of coin flippy, but this is just, there's so much intrigue here. So I don't know if there are any factors you've been editing the fan graphs previews for these series or different speakers or any angles that we should consider here that you want to highlight, I'm just into the story of it all. I think, you know, to your earlier point, one of the things that I was really struck by when I was editing Jake's Guardians Tigers preview is just how similar in a lot of really important ways these two teams are.

I think runs will be, you know, scratching across runs and getting something of a lead will be at a premium because, you know, the Guardians have Jose Ramirez, the Tigers have Riley Green, I guess, but like in terms of these lineups, not the highest scoring offenses that we've seen in the American League by any means. So I do think that whenever you're able to bring Scoobel to bear, you're going to have an advantage. I think that how well Mab Boyd ends up pitching is going to be important. I'm hoping by the end of the series, I will remember which of these teams he pitches for because Ben, I've gotten

that wrong every single time. I've been like, why is he over? Oh, right, right, right, right, right. Confuses, confuses old Meg, struggling with it. Seeing sort of how they fit those pieces together, how their respective managers deploy their respective bullpens is going to be really interesting because, you know, the Guardians have like this traditionally dominant bullpen, right? They have Klaasay who's had this incredible season, they have all of these really impressive setup guys. And then you look to the Tigers and like, they don't have the same name brand

dudes, although that might be changing depending on how deep this postseason run ends up being. But they have been wildly effective in the second half and they've been able to cover bowl beginnings, which they've really needed them to do. I'd like to see Jackson Job get like a do-over because it was, you know, among the Jacksons, not the best postseason outing we saw. Really dramatic reduction in effective Jacksons now, Ben. Yeah. You just said wildly effective. Maybe we should rebrand that way, but I don't know that that would be as accurate. But yeah, the Jackson count has been cut in half, but I am looking forward to what

Merrill does over the rest of this postseason. He's our best remaining Jackson hope, really. No offense to Jobe, but that's true. In terms of Royals, Yankees, you know, the most obvious exciting showdown is probably between the Royals starters and the judge and Soto of it all, but I think that how effective Chisholm, Austin Wells, you know, Taurus to a certain extent. Like the supporting cast for New York will have a lot to say, Stanton, a lot to say about how well that series ends up going for them because if they can't get anything going, I think

that those royal starters are going to just be able to be really careful with Judgen Soto and you know, that might be that. I am very curious what version of Garrett Cole and Carlos Rodin they end up getting. You know, they were both not looking super great at times, but have really rounded into form over the last month in particular. So what version of those guys they get I think is going to be interesting. And then like, is Luke Weaver going to be an important part of the Yankees' postseason story?

He was a really important part of their September when Holmes was pretty ineffective and basically got demoted out of the closer role. So I think that all of these rosters are like really different than I thought they would be in some important ways at the beginning part of the season. And I, you know, we've talked about sort of what do you emphasize? Do you look at the season long line? Do you look at how they've done in the second half in the last month? This is probably an obvious point to make.

But I think for a lot of these teams, like the, is it the full season version or the more recent version? Which version of those guys ends up showing up is going to be like pretty important for all of these. Tanner Iskra Yes. And I am interested in how the Dodgers navigate their starting pitching deficiencies. Did see Brandon Gomes, GM did kind of throw cold water on the Otani coming out of the bullpen scenario. It sounds like that is not happening. Although you just never know what Dave Roberts will get up to, but could be gamesmanship. They just misdirection. Yeah. What if it's a trick? Padres to expect Otani to come out of the pen. No, but I don't know that that will save them. They got to get

something out of Nack, Bueller. It's just, there's a weakness there. And that's, I guess, easier to get away with in a best of five than a best of seven. But yeah, the Padre's being able to go in with just a stronger rotation, even without Musgrove, I think it's, you know, like cease Yamamoto. I mean, can Yamamoto go deeper into a game? Is he like a hundred percent? Is he built up? And then, okay, Darvish Flaherty, then King Bueller.

I mean, that's a mismatch given how those two guys have pitched, right? And then I guess the odds still have Musgrove going against Nack here, so it won't be him. But yeah, that's the obvious deficiency, the obvious weakness, but really intrigued by that matchup. And of course, if you're listening to this before that series starts, I'll just do one more plug-in reminder that we're doing our first Patreon livestream during the Padres Dodgers and LDS Game One on Saturday evening, 538-838 Pacific Eastern. And you can sign up at our Ned Garver tier or above to get access to that and join us in our Discord group with lots of other listeners and supporters as we chat during that game. That should be a fun one. Yeah.

Okay, so we've got some non-playoff related news to catch up on here as we teased last time. We got front office news, we've got some other hirings and broadcast news and attendance updates, et cetera. I guess we can start with the front office overhauls. So there have been a few bits of news here. There was Thad Levine resigning as Twins GM, but Derek Falvey is staying as Pobo there. And I wonder whether Levine will be in consideration for other

openings potentially or what the story exactly was there. But the Cardinals shake up is moderately interesting. I think not quite as interesting as what's going on with the giants, but the Cardinals are phasing out John Mazalak. This is not unexpected. It was clear Mazalak's been there so long and what with the loyalty from ownership and everything, they weren't gonna kick him to the curb,

but he has one more year as Popo and then Heim Blum is taken over and he's been there for about the past 10 months or so helping out on the front office side. And so this is like a changing of the guard. Blum signed a five-year contract and Ali Marmol is staying. There's going to be a different emphasis spending wise. It sounds like major league payroll is going to go down. It sounds like the Cardinals may actually enter a season knowing that they're not going to contend or at least resigning themselves to that possibility.

And it sounds like there's a lot of attention that needs to be directed to the player development side. And Katie Wu did a deep dive on this at the Athletic late last month. The St. Louis Cardinals have lost their way. Now they must fix their failure. And it documents various deficiencies in spending, in resources, that it sounds like they got kind of complacent, that all of the player development and drafting success that they had, all the Cardinals devil magic, that has sort of ceased.

And they have had a bunch of prospects fail to launch or fewer coming along. And it sounds like whatever advantage they have early on in draft analytics and then in player development has fallen by the wayside because they have invested less in the infrastructure, in having coaches at every level and having other technological resources and they just have not been spending so much there and now they've kind of got to catch up.

So it's really striking how quickly you can fall behind, even if you're known as your strength is player development and the Cardinals way and all that. And now it seems that they have fallen behind the cutting edge a bit. I do think that sometimes players pan out for one reason or another that is not necessarily reflective of your skills as a player development organization. Sometimes guys just don't work out and sometimes they do and they would have worked out anywhere.

And so maybe we read too much into that and say, oh, this is a good player development organization because this guy worked out or this is a bad one because this guy didn't work out. But there's clearly a trend here and a difference in results. And so now you bring in Bloom, who obviously has more of a player development kind of farm system focus and you know, I'm sure sustainability will be invoked because it always is. And Bloom obviously left Craig Breslow with some players to build around in Boston, even though they ended up with just kind of a perfectly average, mediocre season.

It's very much like Ben Chericton left Dave Dabrowski with a lot of excellent building blocks in Boston. And sometimes that's what happens. You don't get to shepherd that team all the way, and then after you get dismissed, people realize, oh, he did some good things there, and look at all of these players we have that came from that previous administration. But it was, I think, pretty clear that Blum was going to get

another shot somewhere at some point, given his reputation coming into Boston and the fact that he's not advanced in years. And so he's going to get another crack at it, but not immediately. I guess it's fairly rare that we get this sort of like phase, like front office changes in phases, you know, where it's like not next year, but the year after that, then you will be the Popo, but not yet. And so how does that handoff? How does the transition team work,

one wonders. I just would work a lot less, you know? And I say that as a person inclined to work too much, you know, to care too deeply, to sacrifice too many things. No, but I wonder, like, from a psychological perspective, like like how does that wash over you? Presumably you care a great deal about the team that you've helped to build and to your point, like I'm sure this isn't surprising on some important level, but I wonder how I would feel about it and how motivated I would be. And I don't want to like, I don't mean that in a derogatory way, you know, I don't mean that to call into question like how much effort there will be expended here, but it is sort of an awkward thing,

right, to know that you're on the way out. Although, you know, maybe you're like, great, I get to shepherd this through, I get to make sure that the handoff is clean. And again, I'm sure that Mozilla cares a lot about the club and sort of how it does, but it is a weird situation. But you probably knew this was coming when Heim got hired, right? Yeah. And yeah, there had been previous reporting and buzzing about, well, maybe Moselleck's ready to walk away or maybe they will find a graceful exit for him. But yes, it does seem like there

needs to be some change there and a reprioritization on development and building up their infrastructure because all this stuff, it's always changing so fast and the cutting edge, it's just advancing year by year. And so you could be a leader a decade ago and a bit behind now. There have been a number of notable examples of the Cardinals even either hanging on to someone a little too long where maybe they could have traded them earlier or just like given them a set role sooner or guys like Jordan Walker who just haven't panned out yet. And there are details in Katie's story about like he just hasn't had like outfield coaches who've worked with him in a dedicated way that they just haven't really devoted the resources to development that they

should have. And I don't know, there are always these like post-hoc, post-mortems of when things go wrong for a team. And sometimes it seems like there's this sweeping organizational dysfunction. Like we got those last year with the Mets and the Padres, right? And now they're both in LTS. So it wasn't like the rot went that deep, presumably, but you could always learn some lessons and make some kind of correction. No one's doing everything right all the time. So we'll see how quick that turnaround goes, but there will be a new man in

charge as there is in San Francisco. So this is another one where obviously the writing was on the wall and people have been reading the tea leaves and this came up on the pod when the Matt Chapman extension was signed and Andrew Baggerley of the Athletic had reported that this seems perhaps indicative of the fact that Buster Posey has really taken the reins here and this might not bode well for Farhan Zayde's job security. And that did turn out to be the case. And now Buster Posey, as I said last time, is Buster Popo. And it's not unusual at this point that you would have a former player ascend to this

role because as I've noted, the ex-player GM slash Pobo is coming back, but to do it this way, this is highly unorthodox in multiple ways. I mean, A, the fact that he's an odor, he's on the board of directors, he has an ownership stake, which he's not relinquishing or renouncing or anything. And he also has no front office experience whatsoever, like I guess, other

than negotiating this Chapman extension. So I'm not saying that means he will be bad, but all the other ex players who have gotten gigs like this lately, Craig Breslow and Chris Young and Chris Getz and Jerry DePoto even, they all, and other guys who were GMs like Brandon Gomes and Sam Fold and others, they worked their way up to some extent. They put in some time and learned the front office ropes before just going into the deep end, not even GM, but Pobo. He actually is reassigning GM, Pete Patilla, and is, I guess, hiring

a new GM. And Pete Patilla, when I was working on the MVP machine, like everyone I talked to, sung his praises with the Astros and said, oh, he'll be a GM someday, which of course he was not long after that. But I don't know him personally, but people do speak pretty highly of him. And now he's out or being reassigned and I wonder how he will take to that if that's a demotion. So yeah, this is bold, I suppose we could say. It's certainly different. We've seen guys go from player to manager without much of a transition in between or not much

managerial experience or coaching experience. There's usually at least like a little bit of an apprenticeship, at least like a Steven vote kind of, we'll have a year here to get our sort of sea legs in this new role, but not in Buster's case. Look, maybe it'll be fine, but I think that even more than some of the other recent sort of less experienced hires that we've seen, you know, like pick, like you said, pick your role, right? The stakes of this one feel very high because he's not going anywhere. You know, I suppose there's a scenario where the team does really badly. He remains part of the ownership group, but gets shunted into

some sort of role that doesn't involve him running the team. But like, if that happens, I'm going to do a big swear, definitely bleep this one, Shane. That's awkward as f***. Like, that is such a strange scenario to navigate. You're right to say that his experience is a big fat zero when it comes to that. And I'm sure that they're going to say like, you know, he's been around the team, he's been in this ownership group, he obviously has the experience of being a catcher, but like, do we know this is going to go great? Like it seems to me like if what they want is for Posey to eventually occupy this role, it would have been very easy for them to bring him in in a smaller role and sort of get his feet under him and hire someone else to be the pobo to sort of shepherd them through this transition

point because like, what are your expectations for the Giants next year? Yeah, it's hard to say now. It depends on like what they do this. It is a pretty kind of pivotal, you know, I think the term inflection point is overused because technically almost everything is one, I guess, but this does feel like one for them. Yeah. When people who are more discerning about deploying that word think of what an inflection point is, I feel like this is the kind of scenario that they're trying to describe, right? Where this is a big winter for San Francisco. They have some very obvious holes. They have some amount of, I think, reputational rebuilding to do when it comes to how they

interface with the free agent market, agents, players, which isn't to say that they can't do it. Obviously, Matt Chapman was like, sign me up for more time here, right? But I think that there is this perception, and I don't think it's purely on the public side that free agents don't want to go there, that there has been a communication issue between that front office and the market. Now Buster Posey is an affable guy, and he seems to have helped bring Matt Chapman back into the fold for this extension that

We thought was fair to Matt Chapman that we thought was you know a good deal on the giant side So maybe this will all be fine, but this is a really important Offseason for San Francisco. They have a lot to do They are in a division that you know has a team that is just willing to keep spending money in the Dodgers and is wildly attractive as a free agent destination. They have a Padres team that I don't think that you can dismiss because they're a better club now than they were entering this season, and a lot of those guys are going to be around next year.

Now, maybe Ken Kendrick has planted his flag that he doesn't want any more free agents in the desert. I don't know, but like this isn't an easy pushover division. So they are going to have to improve that. I don't think that they can make a case for a postseason run with their existing roster. They have guys leaving. And now you've essentially promoted to the most important position in the front office, a guy you can't fire, both because he is a member of the ownership group and the face of the franchise for the last 15 years. So it better work, you know? Now,

I imagine that the way that they are thinking about it internally is we'll bring in additional folks to support Buster and get him up to speed, but they could have done that with, I think, a lower stakes entry point than the one that they've given him. So I don't know, man. Again, it better work because it's going to be that way for a while, I would imagine. My goodness. Yeah. Reading from Baggerley's piece, Posey hasn't sat across from an agent to negotiate a free agent contract. He hasn't sized up rival executives in trade discussions. He hasn't commanded a suite full of department heads and special assistants at the winter meetings. He hasn't taken heat for a transaction that backfired. He hasn't presided over a war room on draft day. He hasn't crossed rhetorical swords with Scott Boris, but he has won three World Series titles and he led those three

championship drives from the middle of the lineup and behind the plate. A baseball team is not an orchestra, but if it were, the catcher would be its conductor. And it talks about his leadership skills and his interpersonal skills and he inspires confidence and he's meant a lot to the franchise and that's all good and that can be beneficial. And if he's persuasive when it comes to landing free agents, you remember the comments he made last December about the misgivings seemingly that some free agents had. So maybe some of this is just sort of like signaling, we'll put a very wealthy ex-player who had a lot of success here at the top of this is just sort of like signaling, you know, we'll put a very wealthy ex player who had a lot of success here at the top of this organization and he'll be

able to speak to that from personal experience and say it's a great place to play and hey, you know, we're part of the fraternity and I'm vouching for this place, right, in this organization. And maybe he will prove to just learn really rapidly and that he will be a good manager and he will delegate and he will listen and he will learn quickly. That could absolutely happen. It's also risky when you have a franchise icon like that elevated to this role where if things don't go great, fans will turn on you and then you risk sort of staining that legacy at least temporarily.

And there are plenty of examples of people who were great as players and not so great as front office types. It's a very different skill set. There can be overlap, but there isn't always. So yeah, it's just posies unproven. So it's a big swing. It's a big risk. And I'm not saying that they shouldn't have made a change, but yeah, there might be more, I guess, cautious ways, more prudent ways. It seems like they just looked into his eyes and they felt the strength of his handshake and they just

utterly trusted him. So who knows, sometimes that can be misleading. And it seemed like he was a guy, I guess I wouldn't have bet that he would have wanted to be involved on this level. Remember he set out the COVID season to be with his family and the twins and everything. And I kind of got the sense like, maybe he'll just kind of have a laid back post-career playing career existence and not so much. Now he's signing up to have, which in some ways, even higher pressure and higher stress job. So it sounds like he wants to bring in sort of a, a scouting type GM. Like he, he paid lip service to Saber Metrics Analytics as you have to do these days. I don't know if that's exactly his strength or, or something he feels very strongly about. And if he wants to kind of bring in a, a scouting type, I mean, that's fine, but yeah, you

kind of wonder like, okay, he'll be at a different place maybe on the stats, scouts spectrum than Zide was, although all of this is very much the same spectrum and it's all blended together these days. Yeah. But I just don't know what the emphasis for him will be. So it's a little bit of a roll of the dice and at a pretty pivotal time. I have two things to say. One is a minor note that I realized will only be a problem the one time, but like, so Buster's

going to just be running a deadline and or draft room from his hall of fame induction question mark. So there's that. I realized again, that's only going to be a problem the one year, but here's sort of a larger point that I just kind of been contemplating with all of these front office transitions, you know, big and small. I get that sometimes you want to take a big swing. Sometimes you have conviction that you have a path charted, right, a course forward. But I do worry in these moments where it's like, you know, a lot of people's lives and livelihoods

depend on these decisions. It's not just whoever is being replaced as POBO, as GM, as a scouting director, whatever, you know. And so I hope that some care and consideration is given to that. And I think a lot of times it isn't, and it isn't even in circumstances where you're not doing what Miami is doing, where it sounds like they're just down to like clubhouse attendance, you know, moving on from people. CB 0 Yeah, if they got rid of them too. LS Yeah. Right. And so it's, I'm just saying like a lot of people's very real lives and careers

are bound up in these decisions. I fret for those folks because they don't have the salary of a Hall of Fame catcher's career to fall back on when things go sideways. Hopefully it doesn't sound like there's going to be a mass cleaning of house in San Francisco. That doesn't appear to be the direction they're going. So maybe it'll all be fine. But you know, when, when fans like cheer to move on and what have you, it's like, there's, there's a lot of, there's a lot at stake for a lot of people when these decisions get made. So. I have also been thinking more about our sea lake rule conversation recently with Dan Wilson being permanently hired by the Mariners to the extent that any managerial hire is permanent without an interview process or

anything. And I went to the league and I shared that language and they're thinking about how you can kind of get out of that obligation to interview minority candidates in certain situations. And if you ask permission and if you do other things in the organization. And the giants elevating posy here that kind of comes up again, team chairman, Greg Johnson said, we are also fully committed to following the sea league rule and ensuring diversity in our hiring for any of our open positions. I guess this position just, it was never open in the first place. And look, this is an owner and a part owner and an icon with this franchise. It's an unusual situation, but how many unusual situations are you going to have where it's like, well, this time doesn't count. Like, you know, this is special and you can just make some other moves and maybe they will. Maybe

there's a GM vacancy now. Who knows who they'll hire or elevate. But I was thinking about that with that appointment. And then also Terry Francona coming back out of retirement to manage the Reds, which I thought he was done. I thought he had retired. Maybe he thought so too. I guess he was evaluating his health because he just had so many health issues when he was with the Guardians and he had to have a lot of surgeries and he had to take time off. Obviously, retirement treated him well and he had some successful surgeries and he was feeling a lot better. One would hope that subjecting himself to the grueling travel and pressure and everything

else that comes with being a big league manager, again, that those problems don't recur. It wasn't just that the leisure time of being out of that gig helped him recover, but obviously he's feeling fine and feels like he's up to the task. And so he's now making an intro Ohio move to the Reds at age 65. And I enjoy Tito. I've always liked him and his quotes and his disgusting mouth chewing concoctions. Absolutely lorched. But this makes sense in the sense that it's okay, the Reds, they want to make the leap. They've got a lot of good young talent and you have

your rebuilding manager and then you bring in your winning manager, the guy with the track record of success, who's maybe not going to sign up for the long-term rebuild. This is going to be like a lure Bruce Bochy out of retirement to take the Rangers to the promised land kind of hiring. But also it doesn't seem like they interviewed anyone else. There was no reporting at least. There was some reporting that they had set their sights on Skip Schumacher, who of course, after leaving the Marlins, a lot of people seemed to be interested in him. And there was just no buzz about this that I saw. And as far as I heard, no interview process, maybe more details will emerge. But

how many times can teams keep doing this and say, well, that doesn't apply to this situation? Or how many times are you going to grant permission to go around that rule? It feels like there has been a shift to how loudly teams are feeling like they need to say they care about this. Yeah. You know, I don't want to like overstate the case. It's not like there are so, so many of these, but I do find that troubling, you know? I don't want to say that like the lip service is enough because it's not. And again, as we discussed when we were talking about the Dan Wilson hire, like my expectation is not that every time there is a vacancy that that position will be filled by a person of color, you know, what we want is for there to be a

real process and for there to be a strong and supported pipeline of talent because if that is true, you're gonna get a lot of different kinds of folks hired and some of those folks are gonna be white people and that's fine, you know, like that's not the... Sure. Like, to be white people and that's fine, you know? Like that's not the- Sure. To be clear, that's fine. Yes. To write some emails that we've gotten asking me if I think that. But I think that like it's a little alarming when it doesn't feel like they feel like they

need to even head fake at that, right? Because it suggests that there's been a, maybe sometimes, again, I don't want to like accuse anyone of anything because I get each of these circumstances different and I don't have insight into what if any search actually happened, you know, but like it does sort of suggest a shift in potentially in underlying values, right? Like the closest parallel that I can draw to it is I don't think that corporate pride suggests a deep well of real resolve around ensuring equality for LGBTQ plus people. But when you seed ground on that stuff, it also feels bad because it's like you don't

want this to be controversial. I want teams to feel like they have to justify themselves when they bring in a guy who, you know, has a deep managerial resume, but also was out of the game a year ago because of health concerns and it doesn't seem like they had a public search. Like I want there to be an accounting of the process there so that there can be confidence that the process is fair and open and considers these things and that advancing the idea of the game looking like the people who play it and the people who watch it is a core value. So I'm not necessarily saying anything right now, but I'm paying attention because it does feel like there's been a shift around this in a way that is noticeable this hiring cycle.

Yeah. You don't want it to be just for show, but also you don't want there not even to be a show at all. Right. And I think that what I would say to that notion is like, I reject the idea that it ... I know that it can be just for show and that there have been very high profile instances of that in the past, but there are a lot of very qualified people who work in baseball who look a lot of different ways. And so if

you put a real search together, I don't think it has to be for show. If your goal is to go in and assess a pool and really hire the person you come away thinking is the best person for the job. And again, that doesn't mean that every single time there's going to be a turnover and that the person hired is going to be a woman or a person of color, you know, insert underrepresented demographic here. But it feels like it should happen more than it does because there are a lot of really smart baseball people out there who look a lot of different ways. So, got my eye on you

all out there. I want you to know I'm alarmed. I'm paying attention. It feels like there might be school douggery at foot, chicanery. What was the other word I used earlier that I didn't like? Repsgalian. Yeah. I don't know if I like that word. It doesn't roll off the tongue in a satisfying way. Well, we've got new po-bos and new managers, new old managers, and soon new GMs. We've also got a new Tommy John surgery or a new variant of Tommy John surgery. I saw this this week. It was announced by Dr. Christopher Ahmad, who is the Yankees team physician, by Dr. Christopher Ahmad, who is the Yankees team physician. And he announced a new type of Tommy John surgery, which is triple Tommy John surgery.

What does that mean? TJ3. TJ3? TJ3 sounds like the moniker of like an athlete who wants you to buy like weird water. Yes. Yeah. My cop, when I saw this, I remembered the old, like 20 year old onion piece by a fake Gillette razor executive, f*** everything we're doing five blades.

Yes, we're doing five blades. Yes. Yes. And then they did do five blades in real life. Not long after that. So f*** everything we're doing triple Tommy John surgery. We're doing three TJs. So I'm quoting here from a medium post. So he wrote this up on medium and also was tweeting about it a lot with just some hashtags that definitely would not drive engagement because

I can't imagine anyone has ever used those specific hashtags before or would ever be searching them. but it says a groundbreaking new procedure set to change Tommy John surgery forever. So not really setting your sights low here, certainly pumping this up as a game changer. That's what the headline says. Revolutionary TJ3 procedure, also known as the triple Tommy John, Also known as the Triple Tommy John, a groundbreaking advancement in Tommy John surgery, TJ3 represents a new era in UCL reconstruction, offering baseball players at all levels faster, smoother recoveries with fewer setbacks

and extended career longevity. This innovative approach aims to increase success rates and accelerate rehabilitation, meeting the heightened demands of today's amateur and professional baseball players. Sounds almost infomercial-y. I keep imagining the limited time only. Get a triple Tommy.

We'll throw in a third Tommy John surgery with free shipping if you call now. Supplies are limited. So it says, triple Tommy John is a significant advancement in elbow reconstruction. This innovative technique combines native ligament repair with an internal brace and ligament reconstruction paired with remarkable bioengineering technology.

Just a lot of buzzwords and sciencey techno babble here. TJ3 offers a comprehensive solution for athletes with UCL injuries. The initial results are impressive with several hundred patients benefiting from this cutting edge procedure. So I'm kind of confused if several hundred patients have undergone the triple Tommy John. Why are we just hearing about this during the early phases of rehabilitation? The TJ three elbows demonstrate tighter flexion, especially in positions where the ligament endures the most stress and encouraging sign of added resilience. Players also report significantly less soreness throughout their rehab and throwing progression, contributing to faster recoveries.

Most importantly, many athletes are returning to play sooner than expected, showing that the triple TJ is not really, it sounds like some sort of a maneuver that one would execute in the Olympics potentially, right? This is like a figure skating. It's like a triple salchow or whatever. It's a triple TJ. It's not just a surgery. It's a game changer that could redefine the future of elbow

reconstruction in sports. The very like hype marketing language here almost makes me feel like this is just less trustworthy somehow, but it's a reputable person and doctor. I haven't read a lot of reporting about this and I don't see, there are a lot of very graphic photos of open elbow surgery. No, thank you. Don't send them to me. No, thank you. So if you want that- No, I do not want that. I don't want them. Yeah. There is a full surgical video, which is age-restricted content, which is probably for the best. So this involves the internal brace, which we've talked about, but it's different in some way from the internal brace.

I don't think it's just the same thing that we've been talking about all this time, but it incorporates that. It's like, let's just do all the different types of what's just combine them into one Triple TJ. I don't see here any sort of like hard data or like it's this peer reviewed. Like what is it? So I'm- This is my question. I have a lot of questions, but also I'm highly amused

and entertained by Triple TJ, TJ3. Yeah. So. Yeah. So here's the thing, Ben, can I ask a question and look, I'll put in the work if it's required of me. Do I have to know about this? Like I need to know that the procedure exists, but is the expectation of the effectively wild listening public that I'm going to be able to articulate in specific detail the differences between these procedures because like, look, I'm not a doctor, Ben, you know? Do I need to? I can't remember. I went to grad school for political

theory. I can't tell you what Cicero said anymore. I've forgotten. Do I need to know this? So there's a medium post that aims to explain how it's different from traditional TJ. So there's the repairing the native ligament step, utilizing strong sutures. And there's the internal brace that comes into it. So I guess they're repairing the original ligament and tightening it and suturing it and then there's the internal brace and then there's ligament construction with a graft. When all three of these components are performed together, it's like a captain planet with

our powers combined, the result is a more comprehensive and robust reconstruction. TJ3, one that offers greater strength, durability, and the potential for accelerated hearing. So I don't know. I assume that the Yankees team physician is not selling surgical snake oil here, but there is a lot of hype and not a whole lot of specifics here

and a lot of just hashtag use that makes me feel like this is an interesting rollout. And what are the incentives here? Is it like you want to establish your variant of this surgery as the best so that you become the go-to guy? So that's, you know, you're coming for Dr. Eletrash here. Is this like a surgeon-un-surgeon kind of battle for the supreme surgery? So I need to see more information and further reporting on the TJ3, but I'm tickled by the triple TJ. Let's keep adding TJs. Let's just keep stacking another type of TJ onto this thing. Three TJs got to be better than two TJs, right?

That's an extra TJ. You get a TJ thrown in for free, probably not for free. I'm sure it costs a lot. Yeah, okay. So I have a couple of thoughts. The first of which is I could never have been a doctor because even just the description that you've given me makes me feel queasy. It's like my stepmom had shoulder surgery at one point because she tore something and she sprung the video on us

and I've still not recovered from that. It's one of my foundational traumas as a child. I know that I need to understand the general contours but this feels like it's not my business. Shirley Hippa keeps this away from me in some meaningful way. Thinking about him like trying to one up the other surgeons though makes me think of like the dueling dentists and dermatologists who would advertise in the Subway. I bet those guys have a robust practice because how do you find a dermatologist? Subway seems as good a place as any. It takes forever to get into one if you're waiting on a referral from your primary care. So sure, get the Subway

guy. I bet he's fine. I imagine him getting the second opinion or maybe the third opinion, triple opinion, but just like, well, yeah, sure, you could get your standard TJ. You could get your internal brace repair, but can I offer you a triple TJ? And then like some lights flash and there's a smoke machine and there's like a presentation, confetti falls. Nicole Soule-Yeah, or like, it kind of feels like, you know, like triple bypass, you know? That's a more intense bypass. That's bad. Like, I wonder, you know, watch out. Jared Ranere You're bypassing more things, right? Like,

you're putting in more stents, like there's more blocked arteries. Nicole Soule-Yeah, quadruple bypass, yeah. Nicole Soule-Sure. Nicole Soule-So there's that piece of it. I wonder about the branding. I also am sceptical Yeah, quadruple. There was like a quadruple bypass, you know, and that was four. So there's that piece of it. I wonder about the branding. I also am skeptical of like, where are these claims coming from? Because have there been secret TJs the whole time?

Or different kind? Like a lab league for TJs that was just kind of going on. They're talking about career longevity. Like sir, how could you possibly know that? But yeah, I don't want to hear about medical stuff. There was a moment during the wild card round when Colton Kouser got hit on the hand, you know, he got hit on the hand, looked really bad. It was bad, ended up, you know, effectively ending his season, you know, wasn't going

to go all that much longer, it turns out. Sorry. The Orioles effectively or ineffectively ended their own season. Yeah. But there was a moment where they're showing the replay of him getting hit and then they're showing him going into the dugout and he took his batting helmet off. But there was a quick cut and I had looked down and then I looked back up and I briefly thought that Colton Cowder had thrown up in the dugout, that he had come down the dugout steps and then was like throwing up and I felt briefly vindicated because you

know what I've said is that like it's amazing to me these guys don't throw up more when they get hit. Like I would throw up, I would just like the pain of it would make me go bleh. And I thought like, ah, vindication. And then he was just taking off his helmet. Anyway, that doesn't really relate to the Triple TJ, but it made me think of it because you're describing it. And I'm like, I don't want to see the video.

I don't need to, I don't need to, you know, what's happening inside of you? That's not my business. That's none of my business, Ben. Like it's all mushy in there. There's stuff that's broken. I couldn't tell you the part that's broken from the part that's working exactly the way that it's supposed to. You know, I had a brief moment where I was like, maybe I would want to be a doctor.

Like the idea of healing people is like really compelling and like the science part is cool. And then I realized two things simultaneously. One, probably not good enough at any of the base sciences that I would be a good doctor. And two, gross, you know? Those were things I realized at the same time in high school. I was like, mm-hmm. No, thank you. There's not usually an announcement of a new surgery. It was like, tomorrow I'm going to unveil a revolutionary investment to Tommy John surgery. It was like teasing the new Tommy John drop. It was just highly unorthodox. So I need to know more.

You need a sneaker app to get the new Tommy John. Tommy John, the trilogy. So we'll let you know if we hear more about Triple TJ. Triple TJ, I'm going to offer that I think it's bad branding. Having listened to you, having rambled about throwing up and not becoming a doctor, I think that what I've concluded is that it's bad branding because it makes it sound like you've had three. And we know- That's true, yeah.

You know, the guys who go in for, you become on average less effective with each revision, right? Like the story is not a good one once you're getting into multiple TJs generally. So I think that that, you know, but you're getting into multiple TJs generally. But you're a doctor, you're not a miracle worker and you're not a marketer, so you got to get together with some of those folks. CB Yeah, no, it's definitely a marketing kind of rollout and it's sort of thirsty for attention in a way that I just don't associate it with doctors. Now some of these like celebrity surgeons, you know, there are these glowing profiles

of Dr. Eletrash and he's quite Hollywood and he obviously has lots of famous friends and clients and patients. But yeah, to kind of like be out there on Twitter, like tagging bunch of media outlets about your announcement of a new Tommy John surgery. It is. It is. And it's affiliated with the Yankees, right? Yeah. Right. Yeah, very strange. It's like someone whose name I know and have heard many times. So I'm just kind of confused

about the whole thing. But look, I hope it's in advance. I mean, sure, I'm rooting for it to be an improvement on Tommy John surgery. If this is better and actually helps people, then great. So we'll see. All right. So one little bit of potentially concerning news and then maybe a little bit of nice news to end on. So the RSN developments that we teased last time that Evandrelik has been on this beat at the Athletic and is reporting about the Diamond Sports Group and Bally Sports and the ongoing bankruptcy proceeding and the dissolution of this entity that has overseen all of these many local sports broadcasts. So Diamond dropped two more teams. So there's been this slow kind of paring away of their catalog.

And the next two teams to go are the Tigers and the Rays. Diamond rejected their contract and then also dangled the idea that they might drop a bunch more because four other teams had their deals expire after the season. The Guardians, the Twins, the Rangers, and the Brewers, they might have new deals with Diamond. There are eight teams under contract still for 2025, and Diamond said it wants to keep the contract of the Braves and drop the Tigers and Rays who could negotiate new deals. All of this is uncertain, but the other five teams that Diamond has deals with,

the Angels, the Reds, the Cardinals, the Royals, the Marlins can't yet be assumed or rejected because they're not a formal part of the bankruptcy proceeding. This is all kind of complicated and businessy, but essentially Diamond is kind of dangling the idea that they might not have an ongoing relationship with anyone except the Braves potentially. That the broadcast futures of nine other teams in addition to the Tigers and Rays could be in jeopardy here. And it just adds to

the ongoing uncertainty about the cable bubble bursting and the bundle dissolving and being broken up and MLB maybe wanting to try to figure out a way to assume those rights itself and sell some sort of national package, which we had Evanon to talk about. And then the stumbling block is that you do have some teams that have very favorable broadcast arrangements and they have their own RSNs and how are you going to get the Mets and the Yankees and the Red Sox and the Dodgers on board if it's something that's for the good of the league, but not for those particular teams. So there is a scenario here where this all falls apart faster than it was even expected to,

and that MLB might even welcome that on some level if it hastens the consolidation of some sort of unified MLB streaming situation. But I do wonder whether having this hanging over this off season and free agency, whether that will either give owners an out not to spend if they were inclined to not, if they were inclined not to, and just kind of give them an excuse or like legitimate financial uncertainty about how you budget for a world where you don't know what your broadcast

revenue is going to be. I worry about it a good deal, particularly given the fact that beyond the very top of the market, I just feel like there are a lot of potential excuses on the ground for owners to not spend very much this winter, whether it's the shape of the free agent class or this situation. It seems not good. CB It is kind of concerning and that's why I wanted to follow that up with a bit of good news because we don't want to be do-bers here about baseball and sometimes there's a lot of great stuff going on in the playoffs we talked about, but also business-wise, attention-wise. So MLB sent us a press release and put out this story about an attendance update

and also ratings, broadcast ratings. And it appears to be pretty rosy and good news across the board. Now, obviously this is MLB releasing this data. And so they're probably going to spin it in the most positive way possible or selectively omit things that aren't so encouraging. But this is, I think good news on the whole that attendance is up. It's the highest attendance in seven years. And also it's the first back to back attendance gain in 12 years.

And it's just a small, I mean, it's like 0.9% attendance boost compared to last year, but that is I think still encouraging given that last year was a significant boost, maybe because of the new rules in large part. And so you might've thought that there would be some regression, like maybe a bunch of people just came to the park to check out what the pitch clock looks like, and then they might've said, okay, well, we saw that. And that was that curiosity satisfied. And now we don't need to come back. But it appears that they have come back and that they've kept coming

back even in bigger numbers. So, you know, like a 1% ish gain in in-person attendance, even after the bigger gain last year. And then also the television viewership, double digit percentage audience growth in the 18 to 34 demographic, which we are no longer in. So we don't count, no one cares about whether we're watching anymore.

We're not the important advertising target market anymore. Yeah. But big record viewership for MLB TV, but then also ESPN, FS1, MLB Network, Fox, big upticks and further encouraging news about age after so many years of hearing the constant refrain about how old the average baseball fan was and baseball fans are dying out. Now the audience does seem to be getting younger. Percentage of ticket buyers aged 18 to 35 has jumped 8.5% in the last five years. Median age of ticket purchasers has decreased five years since 2019. So that's good because it has decreased five years since 2019. So that's good because it's been five years since then, and yet there's been a five year decrease in the average age of ticket purchasers from 51 to 46.

Average age of newly created accounts in MLB's fan database has decreased more than seven years. I don't know how meaningful all of this is, but baseball participation, youth sports, the highest officially recorded level since the survey started in 2008. And there's just like a lot of good news in here. And again, like, I don't know if this is just sort of selectively presenting that news. There's also, you know, all the growth

in the social platforms of MLB, et cetera, global viewership up. You read this report, this press release, that news, there's also all the growth in the social platforms of MLB, et cetera, global viewership up. You read this report, this press release, and it's like, wow, baseball's booming, business is great, interest is up. So I don't know if they are presenting the best possible version or interpretation of the news, but the parts of it that are known and verifiable and seemingly meaningful all seem to be steps in the right direction.

Well, and I think that it's useful to remember and it's such a complex business story, as you said, but part of the issue with Diamond and where they were and all the Bally stuff, the original sin was not them overestimating the appeal of baseball or the viewership of baseball or, you know, how even for teams that aren't very good, how much baseball plays in the summer with folks in those cities, their original sin was over-leveraging themselves with debt to the point of not being able to service it when they did this consolidation and bought all of these RSNs. Which isn't to say that this won't be disruptive, and I do have these concerns about how this is going to be used to justify reducing payroll, not spending on free agents, whatever.

But I do think it's important to talk about these stories in concert with one another because the appetite to watch baseball exists. It's present. It's not just that, you know, RSNs were able to accrue and harvest carriage fees from folks who, you know, didn't know that they were subsidizing root sports while they were paying for their cable package. That obviously exists and that dynamic needs to be figured out and how you induce a fan to pony up to spend on, you know, a dedicated streaming package for, for

instance, the athletics. I couldn't tell you, right? And that puzzle is still an important one to sort, but there's appetite for baseball. People are excited about baseball. People like baseball. And to your point, I think that we are seeing in some of the changes that the league has made, there's stickiness in those new fans. They want to stick around and keep engaging with the sport. I think also just broadly, and obviously there are limits to this and does it yield as lucrative

a landscape as we've had over the past 20 years? I mean, probably not, but I think people really like watching sports just generally. I don't think it's ever a dumb idea to put sports on TV. People will watch them. They are fun. People like fun. And everything is so horrible, so many other places, but sports remain awesome. Even when they have moments of horror, they're still fun.

Yeah, whenever you see the local ratings and this press release includes that too. They're bonkers. They are, right? Like ratings for MLB games in prime time rank first locally on cable in 20 of the 25 US markets that host MLB clubs ratings for MLB games in primetime rank first locally on all networks in 14 of the 25 US markets that host MLB clubs baseball regionally is extremely

popular and locally is very, it's like the most popular show on TV, you know, and that doesn't get reported enough, I think, just because it's not as nationally prominent as it used to be, and as I'd like it to be. I think it would be nice if there was more of a national profile. And I think there's probably a risk even to not maintaining that national profile,

because can you maintain that fractured interest where it's like extremely popular in all of these little pockets of the country but then not really popular on a national level? Is that sustainable or will that ebb eventually? Because like if people aren't talking about it in the kind of daily cultural discourse then will people locally continue to care? To this point, they have, but I would like to see an effort to boost the national profile.

And I think MLB has tried to do that and has said that it wants to do that too. But yes, I think it is worth a reminder because we're constantly confronted with the comparisons to ratings in other sports and football and it's apples to always, it's apples to oranges. It's football to baseball. It's different, vastly different numbers of games

in a season, just completely different patterns of consumption and broadcast methods. And it's meaningful. I mean, football is mega incredibly popular. It's the biggest thing in the country. I was going to say, it's not just football to baseball. It's football to literally everything else. Everything. Yes, exactly.

It is the only real manifestation of monoculture we still have. It's wild. The gap between the worst Thursday night game you've ever seen, which is not last night's, last night's game was fantastic folks, but the worst Thursday night game you have ever seen in your life is gonna blow everything else out of the water. It's wild. But compared to just about anything else, you know, baseball's doing pretty well. It's fairly healthy. So I think we should just like not always be on the vigil like baseball is on its deathbed. I know that that has gone on for 150 years or so and it's not going to stop anytime soon, but we don't have to hasten it along.

Baseball is doing just fine. It's not in hospice. Lots of people are paying lots of attention to baseball. It's very popular. So I do appreciate, we're the farthest thing from like shills for the league here, I would say. But when there is legitimately good news, well, that makes me happy because I like baseball and I care about baseball and I want it to be popular. Not just because it means more people will read us or listen to us, but because it's

a thing we love and want to continue and survive and flourish. All right. I have one last thing, just like a brief little, I guess it's a rant kind of, but it's a semi complaint. Have you noticed that like suddenly we're hearing about the pitching Triple Crown way more? Yeah, what's up with that? What is up with that? I mean, I guess I know what's up with that,

which is that Tarek Schuepel and Chris Sale both won the pitching Triple Crown this year, which I think is the first time that there have been two pitching Triple Crown winners in a season since 2011. I guess it's actually the first time in a full season that anyone in either league has won a pitching Triple Crown because Shane Bieber won one in 2020, but not since Verlander and Kershaw did it in 2011, as it happened in both leagues or even one in a full season. But when I started to see all this buzz about pitching triple crown, I honestly

don't think I could have told you what it was. I don't, I don't think I knew what the three stats are. I mean, triple TJ, sure. Triple crown. Yes. Pitching triple crown. No, I think I could have maybe puzzled it out, but I really would have had to think and say,

hmm, is it more likely to be this or that? So is it- It's, do you even know? ER, I'm assuming ERA. Yes. Strikeout rate? Yeah, what? Strikeouts?

Strikeouts. Strikeouts. Just plain strikeouts. What am I doing here? Thinking about rates. I'm not even thinking about rates. K minus BB percentage. Yes, no. It's just plain old strikeouts.

It's strikeouts. And then wins? Wins. That's right. Wins, strikeouts, and ERA. You did it. Imagine I was confident for all of those. I was just like so confident.

Wow. Wow. The confidence. So you knew, but you topped your upper percentile. You did it. Imagine I was confident for all of those. I was just like so confident. Wow, wow, the confidence. So you knew, but you, a top tier, upper percentile baseball knower, doubted that you knew what it was. And as did I.

So let's not pretend that this is really a meaningful accomplishment. And also let's not pretend that suddenly we care about wins again, because it's in a pitching triple crown. I tolerate the triple crown because it has a history, it's established, we all know what it was. It was at one point very important.

Is it sort of silly to elevate batting average in RBI to that level of veneration when we have kind of torn down those false idols, you know, they have their place. Just like they're not the number one or even two or three things really, except in this context of the Triple Crown, but fine, there's a historical legacy there, right? And there's kind of, you know, a special sense attached to this and players maybe care about it because they've heard about this passed down through the generations. Fine. But also we had some quibbles with, it's not just that like batting average and RBI have receded in importance, but also that as we argued, like there's a lot of overlap among

these three things where if you have a high batting average and a lot of home runs, well, you're going to drive in a lot of runs almost by necessity. Yes, it depends on your team quality and who's on base ahead of you, which is why we have kind of de-emphasized the stat in the first place. But all of these things are like correlated and they overlap. And so, you know, we've talked about, is there a better third thing? Or should you add another thing, which would be like a little more discreet so that they don't just kind of move in tandem where you win two, you're going to be almost

inevitably highly competitive, at least in the third thing. And you can say the same thing. I think about the pitching triple crown where, you know, ERA and strikeouts and wins, if you got two of them, you're probably going to do pretty well in the third. Like, I think I would be more compelled by it if it were just like three different things that were like distinct and not as highly correlated or like they were independent in some way doing well in one was impressive, but didn't almost imply that you would also do well in the other. The other thing though is that, okay,

so the hitting triple crown is rarer than the pitching triple crown. Not that you would know that because again, who remembers who won the pitching triple crown, but it's happened more often either because of the overlap among stats or because there are just fewer contenders for it in a given season. There may be more hitters than there are starting

pitchers, let's say. But the Triple Crown, I think, has happened 17 times in a major league season. That's excluding Negro Leagues cases. The pitching triple crown has happened 39 times. So it's like almost three times as common. Okay. It's still fairly rare and it hasn't happened in a while. The other thing though is that this just does not have as long a lineage. People have been talking about the triple crown for a really long time and it's mattered culturally and inside the sport for a very long time. According to the Dixon baseball dictionary, the first official use of it in baseball was 1936, which is actually a little later than I would have guessed. It's a horse racing term that was supported over to baseball,

but RBI was not an official stat until 1920, although there was some unofficial tabulation of it before then. So, you know, at least since the mid thirties, the triple crown has been a pretty big thing in baseball, but the pitching triple crown, I did some research to try to see like, when did this catch on? Cause I just don't even remember it being a big thing when I was younger based on my not exhaustive, but semi thorough more than cursory somewhere between cursory and comprehensive research on newspapers.com, I found that the first prominent reference I could find to the pitching triple crown was from August of 1952. So it came along, I think, at least 15 years after

the hitting triple crown and was kind of like, well, we have a hitting one, why not do a pitching one too? And actually appropriately, the first mention that I found of the pitching Triple Crown was it concerned podcast legend, Bobby Shantz, who was just, yeah, just recently turned 99, happy 99th to Bobby. But he was in contention for the pitching Triple Crown in 1952, his MVP year. And just reading from this story here, statistics computed by the Associated Press reveal that Shantz boasts the most impressive earn run average in the American league.

Shantz, the 5,640 pound mighty might of the A's has allowed only 33 earned runs in 194 innings. He already has recorded 19 victories, most in the league, and with only three losses, also owns the highest one loss percentage of 846. If the curve balling southpaw can maintain his supremacy in these three pitching departments, he can become the first hurler

to capture pitching's triple crown since Carl Hubble of the Giants turned the trick in 1936. And I don't know that anyone, I don't think anyone described it as the pitching triple crown when Carl Hubble did it in the year when the hitting triple crown was first mentioned prominently. You'll notice though, that those were different stats than the ones that we talked about being the pitching triple crown now. And this is what I also discovered is that the pitching triple crown, it's just whatever you want it to be. It's just, it's malleable. It's like, oh, well, we've got this guy who's leading in these three stats. I guess we'll call that the triple

crown. It evolved, it morphed for decades before it settled into what it is now. So in 1952, no mention of strikeouts whatsoever. It's ERA wins and winning percentage, which again, you talk about like redundancy and overlap to have wins and winning percentage. I mean, pick one. Like they're not the same obviously, but you know, and the same in 1954, there was a lot of buzz about the Giants, Johnny Antonelli, he eyes pitching's triple

crown and it was described as lowest earn run average, most victories and highest winning percentage. That's what it was. 1958, I found a reference to Whitey Ford who is eyeing or on his way to pitching's Triple Crown. And in this case, it was different stats. This time shutouts were one of the, yeah, shutouts. Shutouts, ERA and wins or winning percentage. So suddenly it was decided, well, he can be triple crown if he leads in shutouts too. So that like that we can't just change what it is each year and have it be meaningful. No. And then July, 1963, pitching's triple crown in store for Kofax wins 15th. And so here it said he was en route to becoming the first hurler in a quarter of a century to

wear pitching's triple crown. The feat, leading the league in victories, one lost percentage and earn run average. So again, even here in the 60s, it was still said to be wins, winning percentage and ERA. And then 1966, January, this is about Kofax again. In his 11th season, the Brooklyn native captured the pitching triple crown in the national league on one lost percentage, earned run average and strikeouts. So this is the first, yeah, this is the first mention

I can find of almost the modern pitching triple crown, but not quite because it was win-loss percentage, not wins. So it was ERA, strikeouts and win-loss percentage, not wins. So it was ERA, strikeouts, and win-loss percentage. So this was when it's strikeouts entered the picture, which I think maybe because Kofax, he just had so many strikeouts that maybe he made the conversation about pitching more strikeout centric,

and he set a record. And also the strikeout rate had really risen quickly on a percentage basis league league wide at that point, like in 1951, let's say the, the league wide strikeout rate was, it was fewer than four strikeouts per nine. Whereas in 1967, it got up to six strikeouts per nine. And you know, they expanded the strike zone and everything. You had that offensive outage. And so strikeouts really ticked up rapidly right around that time.

And that coupled with COFAX, I think maybe put the emphasis on the strikeout totals. So that was, but still it was not the final form. And then 1967, I saw another mention earned run average strikeouts and win loss percentage. So when are we finally gonna get the modern incarnation of the pitching triple crown? 1971, Vita Blue, he's going for the

pitching triple crown, it's ERA, it's strikeouts, and it's one loss percentage. 1972, Daily News, the rare pitching triple crown leading the league in victories, one loss percentage and earn run average. Even 1978, I find a story, the great Walter Johnson of the Washington Centers won the American League Triple Crown in pitching three times, leading in one loss record strikeouts and earn rather average. Okay. As far as I can determine the modern pitching triple crown was first prominently mentioned in the daily news in 1981, July of 1981. That is when I find the first formulation is the one achievement that has again eluded

baseball's elite is the one achievement that has again eluded baseball's elite is the Triple Crown of pitching. And it says, you are of course familiar with the hitting Triple Crown leading the league in average homers and RBI achieved by only nine players in baseball history. But did you know that only 10 pitchers in history have ever led their respective leagues in wins, strikeouts and ERA in the same season? That's the pitching Triple Crown. Is it? Who says?

That was Bill Madden writing in July, 1981, very matter of factly stating that that was the pitching triple crown, even though seemingly no one had described that as the pitching triple crown to that point. All of these articles very confidently lay out, this is what the pitching triple crown is, and each of them has a slightly different definition.

So it's been only since the 80s, as far as I can tell, that people have even agreed on what the three prongs of the crown are. So this is just not a real thing. I'm sorry. Scooble, great season. Sail, great season. Give them the Cy Young Award. The fact that they won the pitching triple crown under this modern definition, which I could not have told you what it was a few weeks ago, that does not enhance the luster of these seasons in my mind at all. I'm unmoved by the stat in any of the iterations that you described, the achievement. I mean, like, sure.

Yeah. Like, I guess you'd rather do it than not. Right? But like, also, I don't know that I would tell my mom about it. I told my mom about other stuff if I were one of those pitchers, because they've both had great years, but I don't know that this would be the thing I'd lead the call with. No. If I won a pitching triple crown, I would tell my mom because that would mean I'd undergone

a significant life change, I think. But if I were already a Cy Young caliber pitcher, I don't think I would guilt that Lily by saying, oh, and I won the pitching triple crown. No, that doesn't do it for me. Can I share a bit of sad, late breaking news before we go? Okay. Joe Musgrove needs TJ. Single, double, triple. I wasn't even going to do a joke. I was.

Sorry. Yeah, that's too bad. Yeah, that's too bad. Yeah, that's too bad. I knew he wasn't going to- Yeah, that's too bad. I knew he wasn't going to- That's too bad.

That's too bad. That's too bad. That's too bad. That's too bad. That's too bad. That's too bad. That's too bad. That's too bad.

That's too bad. That's too bad. Yeah, it did, really. He's out for this series to- Right. Oh, he's out for all of next season. So ouch. Yeah.

All right. Well, that's a bummer, but we have completed our triple podcast week. Okay. That'll do it for today. And for this week, thanks as always for listening and thanks especially to those of you who help support the podcast on Patreon, which you can do by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild and signing up to pledge some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going, help us stay ad free, and get yourself access to some perks,

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And you can check the show page at fangraphs or the episode description in your podcast app for links to the stories and stats we cited today. Thanks to Shane McKeon for his editing and production assistance. We hope you have a wonderful weekend. We hope to talk to some of you during NLDS Game 1, and we will be back to talk to all of you next week. It's the Zombie Runner Bobby Shands, Bobby Shands, Bobby Shands, effectively wild. It's the Zombie Runner Bobby Shands, Bobby Shands, Bobby Shands, effectively wild.