Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2232: Get Out the Vogt

Episode Date: October 18, 2024

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about a report that Jerry Reinsdorf might be willing to sell the White Sox, then (13:22) discuss the tactics and storylines of ALCS and NLCS Game 2, including controversial Vogt decisions, how Yankees fans would perceive a pennant or championship, the importance of Max Muncy, visualizing success, Shohei Ohtani’s […]

Sometimes I still feel like that little girl Hearing grandma's handheld readies Collecting baseball cards before I could read Hello and welcome to episode 2232 of Effectively Wild, a FanGraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Raulia Fangraft and I am joined by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? Ben Lindberg Well, first things first, if anyone is hearing this before Friday night, it is not too late for you to sign up for our second Patreon exclusive playoff livestream, which will be during ALCS Game 4.

Look at us actually following through on our intention to tease something at the very top of the episode. It never quite happens until this time. But time is short, so you still have a chance. Sign up for the Ned Garvert tier and you can join us in our Discord group and follow along as we discuss that game. Second things second, more relevant maybe if you are not listening to this before Friday, we are recording it kind of an awkward time as often happens in October because there have been two games since we last podded and there will be two more games before we next pod and probably before people hear this.

So we're kind of caught in between, but we can talk a little bit about some other news and some evergreen, still interesting takeaways from the games that have happened thus far, I hope. And then maybe we'll even squeeze in some emails. It's been so long. It's been an age, an eon, an epic, since we did an email episode. This won't be a full email episode, but maybe we'll dabble in a few. Maybe in the fine tradition that we established at the start of this month of talking about the White Sox instead of exciting playoff action. Maybe we could start there because- Hostie It's a great question. Wait a minute. I can't let you skate on fine tradition. I must register my objection to that characterization,

but continue. A massive mistake, but possibly we did it. We did it. We did do it. People will remember that we did that for better or worse. So there has been a report about the White Sox, which will be just as relevant, presumably by the time people hear this, which is that Jerry Rynsdorf, perhaps according to sources cited by the athletic, is open to selling the White Sox. How about that?

I don't know for sure that I buy it. I don't know that White Sox fans will believe that this happens until it actually happens. Obviously we've seen some false alarms with the angels, with the nationals. And then this is hot on the heels of the news about the twins, the Polads exploring a sale. So these are long tenured family owned groups.

Only the Steinbrenner's have owned their franchise longer than Rynsdorf has owned the White Sox. So this would be big if true, as they say. But is it some sort of ruse? Is it some sort of smokescreen? Are there ulterior motives? Supposedly, I'm quoting the Athletic here, he's in active discussions with a group led by former big leaguer Dave Stewart, who previously attempted to keep the A's in Oakland. That didn't work, obviously. And then has also been interested in establishing a new team in Nashville,

both an MLB team and an NWSL team. So if you wanted to play conspiracy corner here, I guess you could say that Reinsdorf, who publicly has never, to my knowledge, expressed interest in selling the team during his lifetime, is just floating this possibility to further his goal of getting public funding for a ballpark. Like, hey, give me what I want or I'll sell to someone who might be motivated to move the team out of Chicago. Could it be a gambit or could it be sincere? Well, I think that I would just invite the municipal leaders of the city of Chicago to

look Jerry Rynestorff in the eye and say, don't threaten me with a good time. There's no downside to these folks sort of testing the waters, right? Because it's not binding to explore potential sale. Do I imagine that Rynestorff thinks he can extract some sort of leverage? Sure, I bet he believes that. Will he be able to? I'm a little more skeptical about it because I don't think that his leverage is all that great to begin with, but I could see him trying that, kind of goofing around. But my general posture to these sorts of things is to, until like there is not only a named and identified potential buyer, but like moves made in a public and obvious and potentially binding way toward a sale, to just look at every owner as if they are Lucy and their team is the football.

And I, you know, I am a rube, but I don't need to be fooled again. Charlie Brown could chart a different path, you know? He could choose a different course. He could not kick the football. So it is interesting to see all of these things happen, maybe not simultaneously but in close succession to one another because I know that there is appetite for expansion. I know that there is appetite for, at least on Dave Stewart's part, seemingly owning a team. Would he pry the White Sox away from Chicago if he were to buy them and a new ballpark were not secured? I don't know that I believe that of him, but I don't know the man, so maybe. I guess there's always the danger, but it doesn't seem like there's been a tremendous amount of appetite

on the municipal level for all of these teams. I know that Vegas is like, yeah, put sports here, please, we beg. But in general, it doesn't seem like there's been a lot of appetite for entertaining relocation, at least. I do think there are municipalities that might be more amenable to the notion of expansion, but I don't know. Well, I guess we'll just have to see, Ben. Yeah, you'd like to think that Dave Stewart,

having witnessed the A's being wrenched away from Oakland, would not want to subject another city to that. Right. This is why I am skeptical of it because it didn't seem to sit well with him what happened with the A's. So I suppose that if the goal is to sort of be able to direct the fortunes of being owner of a franchise, maybe there comes a time where that objective and priority supersedes everything else. But at least in the way that he conducts himself around the A's, there did seem to be some civic mindedness there. So it would surprise me, but who knows? We'll have to see, I suppose. And it is interesting, the timing to me. So you could say, well, maybe Ryan Storff

has had a change of heart. He's 88 years old. Maybe having been confronted with how terrible his team is, he's thinking, gosh, it's gonna take some time to fix this thing. And who knows if I have that much time or if I wanna spend my remaining time watching this terrible baseball team

and being blamed for its failures, which he has been probably more than ever of late, fairly, I would say, but he has gotten a lot of scrutiny and perhaps he hasn't enjoyed that. And he is someone who genuinely seems to like baseball and perhaps it has been less fun for him to watch his team be terrible and extremely disappointing. So maybe that has soured him on the experience somewhat. And I also wonder just given the broader headwinds at play and the trends in the sport, whether the fact that the poll ads that Reinsdorf are potentially exploring a sale here.

And as you said, this could just be kind of like when front offices say, well, no one's off limits. We're not declaring anyone untouchable. If you call, we will answer and we will listen to your offer. It doesn't mean we're actively pursuing it or highly motivated to make a deal here. But could this have something to do with the fact that there's more uncertainty surrounding the sports financial future, at least as it pertains to the broadcast deals right now than there has been for a while. That's certainly been the case with the twins and the uncertainty about who will be broadcasting the twins and what their revenue will be. Does that account

at all for what we've seen with the sale of the Orioles and then also the explored sales of the Nationals and the Angels and the about faces there are the offers, not what was hoped for. The Orioles sold for what, 1.8 billion or something like that. 1.725, I think it was the third most that a team had ever sold for. So it's not as if sports franchises are a bubble, even if the cable bubble was one. So I do wonder though, whether that just sort of stratosphere, that rocket ship to the moon, you can never go wrong with franchise values.

They will always outperform the market. Whether we will see that that growth slows at all, given the uncertainty about just continuing to print money the way that teams have been able to with broadcast contracts or not. So it would actually be kind of enlightening if these discussions did proceed to sales and we got a gauge of like, are there fewer extremely rich people willing to shell out inordinate amounts of money for MLB teams or any sports franchises these days, or will they be pumping the brakes a bit given

some of those concerns? Kaitlin Luna I think that it would be silly to not have the broadcast piece of it factor into the conversation and inform our understanding of what these folks think the long-term trajectory is. But I do think that the Orioles are an important recent data point, particularly given who their new owner is. I know that there's some amount of sentimental attachment and he has a bit of civic mindedness himself perhaps, but when finance types spend that kind of money, I don't think they're doing it because they think it's a losing proposition long term.

There's a gap between where I imagine TV revenue is going to sit in the future compared to where it is now. But there's also a meaningful gap between where I think it's going to sit in the future and lack of profitability. You can make a little less and still make a lot and look at owning a team as something that is obviously a good investment. So I don't know, maybe that's a Pollyanna-ish view and I don't want to downplay the challenge that is the broadcast picture going forward. But I think we know that baseball is lucrative. Owning the team, bringing in the gate, doing advertising is lucrative. The broadcasts are popular. You have to think that business types who seem quite motivated to make money are going to figure

out a way to continue to make them profitable given that they are so popular, even for teams that way to continue to make them profitable given that they are so popular, even for teams that aren't particularly good. I think there's just a real stability to that inventory. I don't want to say that the concerns are overblown. I think that there might be a good bit of at least short-term disruption to the revenue model, but I think the long-term outlook still looks pretty positive. And as I said, when we talked about the twins, I think the grass is always greener or often greener or seems like it will be when it comes to ownership

changes and you can kind of talk yourself into, oh, the next owner will be better and beneficent and we'll invest in the team. And you never know whether that will be the case and things could get worse. But when you're talking about John Angelos in the Orioles case or Jerry Rynestorf in the White Sox case, probably not, right? Probably couldn't get worse realistically. And you'd have to be John Fisher for it to be worse probably. And John Fisher, I think is fortunately one of a kind, even among the ranks of MLB owners at this point,

when it comes to Avarice combined with incompetence. Plus, I guess the only way it could be worse maybe is if the team moves, but then again, the Angelos' and Rynestor, if they had already issued threats or made kind of tacit ones about moving the team. So if that's already happening, then it probably can't really get worse in that respect either. So yeah, I guess I wish you well, White Sox fans for some form of deliverance from your current predicament. So we'll see. We will return to this as it develops.

And yet again, we have led with the White Sox and now we can proceed to some good baseball teams, some teams that are still playing. maybe we can start with the ALCS. So last time we talked about the game ones and we have since seen the game twos. So Yanks Guardians game two, it was kind of a continuation of what we had been talking about where the Yankees games throughout this postseason have not been among the more entertaining. They have been sort of sloppy, less on the Yankees part than their opponents part,

but also sometimes on the Yankees part too. Yeah, this one was sloppy every which way. There was multi-directional slop as it were. Yeah, running into multiple outs on the bases in the same inning in the Yankees case, but it was the same story. It was a lot of walks. It was the Guardians, a sound defensive team, making errors, making miscues. The Yankees doing just enough to take advantage of them. They have sort of steamrolled through their opposition this October and yet never by wide margins.

There haven't been any blowouts. They've just kind of done enough to win, right? It's just, you know, one run wins to three run wins. They haven't really put that much daylight between themselves and their opponents and yet they've only lost one game. So things are just kind of cruising along, but most of the really exciting games in these playoffs have not involved the Yankees, which I think Yankees fans are fine with as long as they keep winning and advancing.

If they get the more boring or lower caliber kind of play games, then I think as long as you win, if you win ugly, that's still beautiful in a fan's mind. So this was just sort of more of the same, I guess, except that we did finally get Aaron Judge going deep and we also got Jose Ramirez going deep at the end there. So the stars did show up more so than they had in this series or this postseason so far, because that was something we had talked about last time too, where it's not necessarily the guys you'd expect who've been kind of carrying the teams thus far aside from maybe you Francisco Indore and Fernando Patis before the Padres got eliminated.

It had mostly been some lesser lights being brighter than the big stars, but a judge hitting a home run. That seems like a positive sign. I can't believe that you would disrespect laborators like that. It just feels so incredibly rude. Judge hit a home run. Everyone can relax a little bit, perhaps. Otani hit another home run. Everyone can relax a bit, perhaps. I'll say this. I think in general, this postseason has been delightful, effervescent, like a seltzer right after you've opened it, you know? Not like when you've forgotten it in the other room for four hours

and then wonder, like, do I really have to finish this? Like, it's warm, you know, the bubbles feel mean now. It's flat. Flat, but also like they have a message they want to send to you and it isn't a kind one. But in general, I think it has been great fun and I have enjoyed it immensely. I cannot say that about the Yankees Guardians series so far. It has been kind of boring as we've noted, sloppy, uninspired, you know? And I think you're right that if you're a Yankees fan,

you know, you don't maybe especially care how you win as long as you advance to the World Series. But I think that on a team that has some very bright stars, I'm ready to watch them play inspired baseball, you know, I'm ready for them to light it up and to come away feeling odd. And I haven't had that experience of them just yet. I mean, like the most exciting part of that series so far has been, is it in fact a good idea to intentionally walk Juan Soto to load the bases for and judge, which was a bit of fun, you know? It was me thinking that they are, you know, that moment from The Simpsons when Ralph's on the bus going, I'm in danger. And then it ended up being like less bad than it could have been. But it's been kind of a bleh series so far. And

I'll just say this, look, postseason field, I need one of you to push your series to six. It doesn't have to be both of you, and I don't really honestly care which one it is, but I need one of these series to go to six because if they both wrap in five games or fewer than Ben, they move the World Series schedule all around. They change it up, they push it up, they make it sooner. I don't much care for that. I have a plan. I have a careful plan.

The folks I work with have constructed careful plans based on my careful plan. And if we have to change it, then we need to do a plan. And I like our plan, you know, I'm content with the plan. So one of you needs to push this, which I guess means that tonight I'm rooting for the Mets, which is, cause it's the cleanest way to get it done, you know? And I feel, I don't know how I feel about that. I'm not really picking sides in any of these, but you know, I don't know about that. When it was announced that there was some flex in the postseason schedule where, yeah,

if both of these series wrap up early, then the series will start on Tuesday instead of Friday, I think I thought that was a pretty decent idea just because- Yeah, I was inspired, yeah. Yeah, instead of having a long layoff, not because I'm worried about rust or anything for the competitors, but more just because it would be boring to go a long time without baseball. Now, then again, if the series starts earlier, then it also ends earlier and that means that the off season is longer.

So either way, you're getting the same amount of no baseball and you could even say it's preferable for the off season to be delayed so that the long dark winter that stretches ahead of us does not loom quite as large at this stage. But yes, I suppose from a writing and editing and podcasting schedule, not that anyone cares about that. That's a very inside baseball problem. But yes, from a planning perspective, it does sort of screw things up. I will say, I am a bit surprised and then we can move off of this because I realized that the sort of navel gazing is only limited and has only limited sort of appeal to other people but you know the conclusion of the World Series is

the start of the offseason in in a obvious way for fans but like Once the World Series concludes it does cause other Events in the offseason to be good in a more formal way, right? There are roster considerations, there's the start of free agency. It does have an impact on teams in a much more concrete and meaningful way than me being mildly inconvenienced and you and I having a terrible travel next week for different reasons. I was a little surprised that that piece of it was sort of allowed to stand because once you get five days out from the last World Series game, you know,

stuff starts, we're going, we're in it at that point. So that there would be even more variability in that than there already has the potential to be, I am a little surprised by, but anyhow, we can stop talking about that because who cares other than us and everyone who works for our team. Well, for fans who don't follow other teams, which is a large percentage of fans, I mean, there are plenty of baseball fans who when their team season ends, baseball ends for them more or less. And they're not necessarily tuning in to see the World Series if their team isn't involved.

Maybe they would wish for an earlier start to the off season because, hey, let's kick off the hot stove. Let's light it. Let's start being able to talk about trades and signings, even though inevitably there's a slack period when it comes to those two. Again, there are only so many moves that can be made and there are so many days before next season starts. too. Again, there are only so many moves that can be made and there are so many days before next season starts. So we can move things up, we can move things back, but ultimately the average

intrigue over the course of the entire off season is sort of going to be the same. It's just going to be clustered a little bit differently. And it's, do we want to wait for the delayed gratification or do we want it in the lump sum sort of, but an entire week layoff if we had one before the World Series, that could maybe lead to the series getting forgotten a little bit. What with October being a very busy sports month and you've got the NBA season starting and the NHL is back and there are playoffs in multiple sports going on and college basketball is about to begin and football is happening.

So it would be easy for baseball to be lost in the shuffle if there were a lot of days without games. Then again, if you're really into the series and you have an exciting matchup, then there's more time to anticipate it and to speculate and to preview. I will say that either way, whether we start the series early or it proceeds as scheduled, the great news is that Halloween is an off day. Either the World Series will be done or it's a scheduled off day as the schedule is currently constituted.

And to whoever is responsible for that in the MLB schedule maker room. I simply say, uh, thanks very much. It's so nice to have Halloween off. I don't have kids, but I like Halloween, man. I like to give out the candy, be in my neighborhood, betwixt and between my neighbors, have this sense of lovely community and having an off day facilitates that. And I appreciate it very much. Pete There's also, I guess, the competitive implication that there are so many walking wounded at this time of year, that there are some teams that would probably prefer a delay if you're the Dodgers and you're like, it'd be nice to give Freddie Freeman a few days off that ankle, or maybe we could get

Alex Vesia back for the series. Sure. Maybe three more days actually makes a difference there. So the refee teams, if you're the Dodgers, if you're a team that might be facing the Dodgers, you might want to move things up or move things back. So it actually could affect things. It probably wouldn't swing a series, who knows?

But Yanks Guardians game two did have some interesting strategic tactical decisions as you were just alluding to. So there was Steven Vogt's decision to intentionally walk Juan Soto. And in tandem with that to pull Tanner Bybee, the team's number one starter, extremely early and aggressively bottom of the second down to nothing already. Yankees had second and third one out and Soto coming up. And so Bybee intentionally walked Soto and then vote took out Bybee,

brought in Cade Smith to face Aaron Judge. And Judge flight out to center. It was a sack fly. And then Smith got out of the inning, just behind three nothing. And ultimately that was too much for the guardians to come back from. We didn't know that then, but could have been a bigger inning.

And you would think that that would be a horrendous idea to put someone on to get to Aaron Judge, who even if he had been slumping is still Aaron Judge, even if it's Juan Soto you're putting on. But the math is a bit ambiguous actually. It's much closer than you would imagine it would be given the just is saying the statement out loud, um, much closer. In fact, Ben Clemens ran the numbers as you know, for your website, fan grass.com and my. And you are fan graph. And he found that the numbers suggest that maybe it was not the optimal move, but barely suboptimal by maybe a point of win expectancy, a percentage

point, which is so small that it could kind of come out in the wash depending on your assumptions. kind of come out in the wash depending on your assumptions. So yeah, maybe it wasn't the best, but then again, you know, you do, you're bypassing an excellent hitter to get to perhaps an even better hitter, but one who wasn't hitting so much at the time, not that that is necessarily predictive and you're setting up the double play and you know, there are platoon considerations there, of course, and it's a, it's yeah And it's a little more defensible than you would think. And he did get some kudos for being aggressive in that spot and pulling by me and recognizing, hey, this is a big moment in the game. Let me bring in my maybe most effective reliever or at least most effective reliever who I

could conceivably bring in at this stage because you're probably not going to go to class A that early, but Smith has been phenomenal, arguably more effective than class A, which sounds heresy, but kind of by certain stats. So I do applaud the aggressiveness or the willingness to do that and to do something sort of unconventional, though there are trade-offs here because on the one hand, yeah, the guardians, you want them to be bullpen centric. Their strength is their bullpen. Their weakness is their rotation.

But Bybee is the strongest part of that weakness, you think. Even though he had given up a couple runs already. If you're going to get length out of anyone in that rotation, it's going to be by B and no guardian starter has gone even five innings in this postseason. But to pull your nominal number one after four outs, even with an off day coming up the next day, we've talked about the reliever familiarity effects considerations, which really does come into play over a best of seven series with a extremely bullpen centric approach like

the Guardians. So are there costs to making that move and having that quick a hook? Yeah, potentially too. It's sort of hard to assess those ever really, but especially in the moment, it's almost easier to look back and say, oh, well, because he made that move, then this guy had to face this guy, and then later he faced him again, and maybe he was a little worn down. It's hard to know how things will play out, which is one thing I kind of appreciate about

the reliever familiarity effect, because it's like we have multiple layers of analysis that we have to do here. It's not just times to the order or this reliever is better than the starter. It's also what are the long-term implications of this yank? Yeah. Although I suppose, and this was part of the argument that Ben made in saying that it was closer than you'd think, if you have decided that you have to pull Bybee because you don't want it to get away, right? Because at the time they were trailing, but they were only trailing by two runs. Like if you're making the decision to pull him, does pulling him and then issuing an intentional

walk mean that you're in some ways sort of blunting the potential familiarity effect, right? Because then Soto's not getting a look at Smith, right? Only judges. Only judges. I want to acknowledge how ridiculous that sounds just like on its face, but you know, it's a tricky thing. And I expected the numbers to say, well, this is obviously wrong, but it wasn't. It wasn't obviously wrong. It is complicated. I feel like Vought's done a pretty good job. I think all the managers have actually done a pretty good job, Ben. I don't think there have been a lot of obvious, like, what are you doings out there? Even if they felt strange in the moment, like, like walking Soto to get to judge did

even guys who maybe at times have had a bit of a managerial monkey on their back, uh, like Robertson Boone, like have done it. I think I'm pretty good. Yeah. So there was one other move that vote made in that game, which I would say was not received as well. And this was the fourth inning bases loaded one out and vote pinch hit for Petra Boehneiler with David Fry. And maybe the problem is a lack of good options here.

Yes, I was just about to say. Yeah. The guardians just are not a good offensive team as they have shown. That has not been their strength throughout the season, particularly late in the season. And that issue has shown up here. And so Naylor hadn't hit at all in October. He didn't really hit in September either. Then again, Fry has been so-so since his early hot streak. So they put in Fry and he immediately, he swung at the first pitch and nothing happened there. And as a result of that move later on, there was no other- Get a lot of Austin hedges.

Yeah. There was no other button to push, no lever to pull. And then you get hedges up in really the last threat that the guardians mustered in that game and hedges for all his defensive acumen, which we have applauded here. He's one of the worst hitters ever. I mean, I don't want to be mean, but he is just one of the worst hitters ever who has had any sort of extended career. And so you have to have him hit with the bases loaded and two outs in what was a one run game at that point, right? In the fifth. And he struck out and that was the last threat that the guardians managed. And yeah, who knows if anything would have been different if you had not had hedges up in that situation, if you had had Naylor, if you had had Fry to

use in that spot instead, but it's just, it's never a great feeling when it's a big moment and you have to have hedges hit. Lack of good options is the way to think about it and talk about it because I will, I guess, offer this as a nit to pick because I think that perhaps the best move, and I know that you're not going to have the same guy catch the entire series, but I do wonder if the best move is to simply start hedges and then retain the option to deploy a better hitter later. If you're going to eat bad hedges, plate appearances on one end or the other, don't you want greater control about when you intervene on those plate appearances taking place?

Right? Like if you start him and, cause it just seems like he's going to get a couple of plate appearances every game, you know, because they, they rightly view him to be the best defensive option that they have. And maybe say, well, you want him as a defensive sub later, but don't you start him and then just say, ah, this is a big spot, so let's bring in Frye, or you know, I guess maybe you'd bring in Naylor sometimes, but I don't know. I think you're right that there's just not a really great option there in any direction, but it does seem like Austin Hedges is coming up

to the plate in crucial moments like a lot. It seems like it's happening a lot. And that seems bad because, well, when it comes to that aspect of his game, so is he. Yeah. Well, as we talked about last time, Naylor's defense hasn't been superb in this series and yet possibly is underrated or was underrated by us when we initially brought it up. If he does great out well, if you believe that he grades out well, if you believe the grades. I don't know, Ben.

I don't know, Ben. I don't know. Continue. If you do believe that he's not a defensive liability at least. Now, the thing is that he was a very bad hitter himself this year. And he was pretty good last year, but he projects to be below average. Now, not nearly as below average as hedges, but if you think that Yeah. Not nearly as below average as Hedges, but if you think that Nailor is on the whole, a plus defensive catcher, then you might say, well, you shouldn't really use Hedges at all, unless there's an emergency. But if you think that the gap is not that great, because you think that actually Nailor's not very good at defense and he doesn't hit that well either, and also Hedges is a

defensive savant, then I guess I could see the case for what you're saying where at least you could kind of pick your spots to pinch hit for him rather than be stuck with him because you've already pinch hit. Yeah. My plan making any sense at all is predicated on the notion that he is their best defensive option and is likely to get some amount of play. And I will say that like the way they've deployed him suggests that

they might agree with me. I'm just saying that, you know, but you're right. As I acknowledged as the paragon of intellectual honesty that I am last time. He did grade out better this year than I anticipated he would because I don't think he's all that great back there from a true talent perspective. But the numbers, Ben, they say something else. They offer a different story. It depends how big you think the upgrade from Nailor to Fry is. There's the platoon advantage, but then again, Yankee Stadium, you rather have to lefty and Nailor, if he can do anything, he can just kind of pull a fly ball and pop it out of there over the short porch.

So maybe it just wasn't a big enough upgrade in that spot to Merit making the switch. Who knows? But the game ended up close enough that you could at least have an interesting kind of conversation about the implications of these moves. Oh yeah. I'm not saying he's like unplayable back there, that he's like bad back there. I just think I don't think he's great back there. I don't think he's great back there. And because the Yankees are in kind of a commanding position as we speak, which may be more or less commanding by the time this podcast is posted.

I have been thinking about what it would mean if they advanced to the World Series, if they win a pennant, if they even win a World Series, Yankees fans will be at least temporarily placated because the Yankees will not have failed for one year. I guess if they come in second in the season, still a failure, right? Anything short of a ring in the trophy has been well established by Derek Jeter and Aaron Judge and Steinbrenner's, et cetera.

Just utter failure, waste of the season, et cetera. But if they were to make it, then that would be something of a vindication for Cashman and Boone and the Yankees process in general after many fans demanded that heads roll and that things change in a significant way. And look, I thought the calls for their heads were somewhat overblown, not that they're entitled to being the general manager and manager for life. And they've certainly had those positions long enough and you have to have high expectations for a team like the Yankees and at some point there should be consequences for a lack of success by Yankee standards.

I also felt like, well, you could do a lot worse than those guys, which granted Yankees fans feel like, well, that shouldn't be the standard you could do worse, we should do better. We should do the best. We're the Yankees. We can afford to bring in everyone, which is somewhat reasonable. In fact, if anything, the Yankees should act more like that than they have of late, right?

But if they were to make it, and if they were to keep those calls at bay for another year, I wonder whether fans would think, you know what, we had it all wrong, do some soul searching, do some self-reflection. Actually, these are the people that we want running this team. The brain trust is strong. Or will they think, well, this is a one-off. It's not necessarily an endorsement of the Yankees process. Because I think one of the complaints that Yankees fans have had throughout this run

of never being bad, but also never being great is, well, we should have a perennial powerhouse, not just a team that avoids a losing season and usually makes the playoffs and typically gets knocked out in the early rounds. Yankees fans have looked at the Astros and the Dodgers, and have looked at them always winning their division and always being in it and often making deep runs

and said, well, that should be us. And so if the Yankees make it this year with a flawed team, it's not a great team. I don't think it's good enough to get here, but if they make it having gone through an all AL central opponent path to the world series, which they can only pose the teams that line up against them, but it's an easier path to the playoffs than it potentially could have been. And it's a year when there just aren't really any teams that outshine the Yankees by that much.

There just aren't any true powerhouses this year, whether because of roster construction or because of absences and injuries, will still be seen as, well, this was still a pretty good but not great team that happened to go all the way because there weren't any really formidable opponents. STACEY On the one hand, I agree with you that as much as I can find the particular delivery of the criticism irritating, because come the hell on, I do think that a fan base having high and exacting standards for their favorite team is good. I think it's to the benefit of the sport for you to not be satisfied if you aren't not

only competitive, but in the postseason, making deep postseason runs. And I don't say that as someone who thinks that like the only way to understand a season as being successful is to win the World Series. And if you don't, nothing else matters. Like I think that that is an overly constricted view and it fails to appreciate a lot of things about the regular season that make it a worthwhile enterprise in and of itself.

But I think it's good for fans to say more. If you give a mouse a cookie kind of approach to fandom, right? If you give them an air and judge, they're going to expect a championship, right? And I think that's good. Now, I think that it needs to be responsive to and accepting of information like players being injured and that impacting the potential trajectory of the team or they're being dramatic under performance out of a guy you're maybe not expecting, but the process to bring him in was sound. I want it to be exacting, but also responsive and sort of intelligent,

right? You want it to make sense. The criticism should make sense because if the ultimate goal is to get to watch your teams have a parade, you want to be precise and correct about what needs to be done. So I've said all of those things to butter them up and now I'm gonna offer this. We don't need to slice and dice how hard was it to get there? Is this the hardest path they could possibly have taken? We don't need to do that. And if Yankees fans do that, if they get to the World Series, if they watch their favorite team win a World Series, and then they come back and qualify

it with, and I don't know that they're going to do this, right? Because I think winning a World Series is a lot of fun. And I think that most fans, having done that, are happy to unplug their brain for a little bit and just like revel in the parade, right? But like, no, it's hard. It's hard. It's hard to win a World Series. It's hard to get to a point where you get a buy in the playoffs. It's hard. It's hard to win a World Series. It's hard to get to a point where you get a bye in the playoffs.

It's hard. Yeah, in the AL East. In the AL East. That's so hard. You know, and you're right that this is a year that doesn't have like a super team, but it still has good teams. There are still good players. It's not that I don't want fans to have standards.

It's not that I don't want them to like say, hey, I'm rewarding you with my time and my treasure and what I want in exchange for that is a great time and a really good shot at a trophy. That's a good exchange. That's I think the right way to think about it from the perspective of fandom. But free yourself from these burdens, friends. Let those burdens go. It's certainly a less extreme situation, but it's like when people wanted to knock the Dodgers for winning in 2020 because it was a shortened season. And it's like, well, yeah, it was a shortened season. And so, the grind of 162 games was removed, but in its place was the most

terrifying, unstable, bizarre year of a lot of our lives. And so, it was still hard, right? of a lot of our lives. And so it was still hard, right? It, to my mind, is not diminished in any way. The idea that that championship counts less than others is just like, well, I guess an understandable bit of amnesia from that year because who wants to dwell on it, but like, no, come on now. Yeah, that Dodgers team was great to the point where

it's not like one of the other teams that sort of snuck into the extra large playoffs. That team, we were deprived of seeing whether it was going to rival some of the best teams of all time, but I don't think anyone thinks, well, if they had played 162, who knows whether the Dodgers would have been there? No, they would have been. Now, of course, you have a more normal season, things change, butterfly effect, maybe they don't win, but assuming they would have gotten in anyway, which seems like quite a safe assumption, you had an extra large playoff field and you didn't get home field all the time.

You didn't get fans. It was weird and if anything harder to make it through once you got into the tournament. So yeah, that doesn't really detract from that for me. Though I guess if you say, well, the issue with the Dodgers every year is that they wear down and by the time you get to October, they have not enough healthy pitchers because there's just been attrition. I guess you could say, oh, well, no wonder they won in the year when that wasn't quite as big an issue maybe or the season wasn't quite as long.

But yeah, I don't really think of that as being less than. I do understand why people do, but it's still quite an accomplishment. KS And look, I imagine that there will be people who continue to call for Cashman's head. There will continue to be people who are dissatisfied with Boone. And it's not as if, like you said, you're immune from criticism just because you've put together the kind of run that those guys have, right? They haven't won one since 2009. It's been a minute.

Benji They haven't been in one. Lauren Yeah, they haven't been in one. They haven't been in one, Ben. I imagine that there will be some amount of grousing, certainly if they advance to the World Series but don't win, and there might even be some grousing if they win the whole damn thing. Because as much as I was kind and buttered them up in the beginning, there are some of you who are truly unhinged in that fan base, and I of you to relax like for your blood pressure, Shirley, it can't be good for you. I will find some of that to be at least a little bit silly, a little

bit. Inarguably, Cashman Boon, they've made mistakes. Certainly they've made some unwise signings and transactions and there is really something to be said for just never being bad, even if you're the Yankees and you have all the advantages of being the Yankees, which are considerable. Still, just to never have a year where things go so wrong that you have a losing record,

there's still, there's something to that. And really like just being in there, just getting your lotto ticket almost every year, even if it doesn't pay off, that's still something that not every team manages. And that's something to sort of salute. But if you have that attitude where it's just it's all or nothing, it's just you win or it wasn't worth it essentially, then yeah, you're not really going to get plaudits for, well, we were good enough to get there.

You don't want to rest on your laurels. You want to continue to have drive. But I just like, I think part of why I can be a little, I don't know if I'd go so far as to say unfair, but why I engage in a fair amount of gentle ribbing of Yankees fans is that like, you guys, you don't know what I have had to justify to myself in my life as a fan. You don't know the teams that I have had to convince myself might have a shot. The players I have had to say, oh, that guy's pretty good. I just think that having perspective in life generally and as a fan specifically is really useful because again, you want to have standards, but you do need to keep the things sort of

in balance because it can always get worse. You know, it really can in sports and in life. And we must, we must maintain some amount of perspective on these things. Because I'm going to do this where the shitty little middle infielders I've had to pretend to be excited about, Ben, the corner bats, oh God, just years of nothing. Really just nothing. And some years where it was like it was actually fine, but the league was competitive. The wild card race was tight. There was, you know, it was a smaller field, whatever.

But some years, man. Yeah. And one year where you had the best team and the Yankees beat you anyway. Okay. Wow. Like, you know, you've moved on from being a fan, but sometimes I feel like you feel a sense of obligation to clap back a little bit when you feel like I've been giving him too much of the business. This feels like one of those moments to me. Yeah, okay. We want to play this game. We need

to replay 1995. I used to work with a guy when I was in finance who like would get angry when you would bring up that 95 series. And I was like, you have got to relax. This was in 2010. I was like, you just won the world series. You can let that one go friend. You can let it go. Yeah. Anyway. So Dodgers met. Walker Bueller was better, which is a low bar, but he had good stuff and made it through four innings. There were a lot of base runners. He was in trouble, but he made big pitches to get out of some jams, the beautiful curve he threw to get Francisco indoor.

And that was a better Bueller than we've seen in some time. And you can't bullpen day your way to success every day probably. And so it was yet another fine performance by the Dodgers bullpen. Another shutout after the blip of game two, where they actually allowed some runs and Bueller was part of it, which was heartening for him, I'm sure. And then there was a lot of offense and there were more Kike Hernandez heroics. I'm sure he was visualizing his success and it was coming to pass yet again. We actually got an interesting email about that from Brendan Patreonsaber who said, I

found the discussion on Kike Hernandez's claim that his postseason success comes from visualizing the night before. Fascinating, because there'sseason success comes from visualizing the night before, fascinating, because there's so much evidence that visualizing success leads to a very material improvement for athletes to the point that I think it's basically a dereliction of duty if players aren't doing it as part of their pregame routine. The most obvious examples on TV are usually race car drivers, because you can see them in the car with their eyes closed quote unquote driving the track in their mind, down to turning an imaginary steering wheel with their hands. They're athletes Meg, that was in parentheses.

But there are enough studies on this that I think it's basically accepted as proven fact and I think a majority of professional athletes are doing something akin to visualizing success. Though again, if they're all doing it, or if they all should be doing it, then can you stand out by doing it? Are you visualizing more vividly than someone else? And Brendan went on to say, this is not to say that Kike Hernandez

isn't doing this during the regular season. And even if he isn't, I doubt it could account for the full difference between his performance in the regular season and post season. But if he really is visualizing success in a much more intentional way during the playoffs, I think it would definitely lead to a material performance difference. Now, the race car driving, I was going to say that if you're racing, if you're running, if you're driving, even if you're a golfer, let's say, and the conditions are pretty predictable, you know the course, you know the

track, you don't know all the conditions necessarily, you don't know if it's going to be windy or rainy, you don't know what the other racers or drivers are going to do, but you could visualize yourself taking those turns and it would be a pretty good analog for the real life situation. I don't know that that would map quite as well onto the reality in baseball because what would you visualize? You'd have to either get sort of generic in your visualization and just visualize yourself swinging at just a generic pitch coming in, or you'd have to get hyper specific and potentially

be wrong because you don't know what pitch you're going to get and where it's going to be and even which picture you're going to be facing necessarily in a big spot. I guess you could run through a number of scenarios and visualize yourself succeeding in all of them. I don't know how elaborate the visualizations are, but you can't control exactly the conditions in which you're going to be coming to the plate or what you're going to be given at the plate. So I don't know if it's more about just the morale boost of seeing yourself running around the bases after another huge hit, or if it is about a dry run, a mental rehearsal for specific circumstances that you're going to encounter. But whatever he's doing, it's obviously working for him right now. So keep it up, Kike.

Yeah, I always struggle with how to talk about this because I think that there is some squishiness and conflation and definitions because visualizing, I think it's right to say, has an impact. If being able to work through what it looks like to get a particular pitch wasn't valuable. We wouldn't have the Traject Arc machines, right? That is just a very advanced form of visualization where you're actually mimicking the ABAP. But part of what you're trying to do is know, oh, that's what it looks like coming in so that when I'm in the box, I can do something with it or I can know to lay off that pitch or whatever, right? So I don't can notely off that pitch or whatever.

So I don't want to say that that doesn't matter. And I think, as we talked about last time, there's a psychological element to it that I think is useful, both in terms of the positive attitude, and maybe we didn't talk about this last time, but a sense of preparedness, in a pressure packed moment, I think can be really helpful to people in terms of calming down and being able to focus and not overthinking things or spiraling or whatever, right? Like, it allows you, I think, to be present, that sense of preparation, and actually reactive to what you're seeing rather than going through all of the potential scenarios in a way that is

maybe distracting and doesn't let you stand in and see your pitch and try to hit it, right? I think all of that is fine. I was making a joke about a propensity for woo that might exist in a certain set in LA, and I don't know if that's Kike Set to be clear, but there's like, you know, there can be sort of a shift that occurs from I'm prepared or I've seen this before and know what to look for and can react to like, I am engaged in some sort of mystical thing. And that I have a amount of skepticism about, which might surprise people because as we've established, I am a very powerful witch. As are you. Congratulations, Ben. But I think that there has to be some

amount of benefit to it because there's all this tech and money in that project now. And I think that we've heard from a lot of guys that it is incredibly useful to them in being able to prepare. So I don't want to discount the notion entirely. I just want us to be definitionally clear on it and not get over our skis in terms of what we think players are able to do from a manifestation perspective. Because I do have a fair amount of skepticism about that. I will say, I'm saying it in a quiet voice though, so that you don't yell at me in emails, everyone. CB And as great as he's been and as much credit that he's gotten for that and as much as we've

heard, oh yeah, this is why the Dodgers went and got him to be a playoff specialist. He wouldn't be playing this much or at all if not for injuries ahead of him probably, right? So it has worked out fortuitously for the Dodgers. But did they believe in that to the extent that they acquired him to be a postseason specialist so that he would get a ton of October playing time or has it just happened to work out that way and they just needed depth and they knew him and he seems like a fun guy to have around. And so, sure, let's have him as depth, but not as our postseason hero necessarily, or he would have been starting and it wouldn't matter

who was ahead of him on the depth chart. So I don't know how much teams believe in that, but regardless, he's been huge for them. And they hope that that will continue. And we shouldn't neglect the impact of Max Muncie, I think. He sometimes gets lost a little, right? I'm so glad you said that. Yeah. He homered in this game too. And he's a really important part of that lineup.

We talk so much about Otani and Betts, and we talk a lot about Freeman, even if it's mostly because he seems kind of compromised these days. Oh my god. Seems kind of? My god. The poor guy. He's getting me a new foot. They're going to have to do a foot transplant. They're going to have to grab a skeleton from Halloween and say, here's your new foot. But Muncie, especially with Freeman not up to his usual level, is just a key cog in that lineup. I mean, 195 WRC plus this postseason, he has had one of the best lines of anyone on any

team. And he was pretty much peak Muncie when he played this year. Obviously, he only played 73 games, but after a couple of down years by his standards and then injuries, like he came back from that hitting essentially the same as he did, okay, not in 2018, but in 2019 and 2021, like still a really valuable bet. It's incredibly valuable.

Makes their lineup longer and picks up the slack for some of the entries. He's been really important and you know you can always count on him to take pitches and not chase and work walks. So he really does give that lineup a different look. He's been pretty important to that team, even if he's not the star that some other members of that order are. Yeah.

I think because of the volume of time he has spent on the injured list in the last couple of years, he's easy to kind of forget about. And obviously the injuries have to color how we interpret the years where he has been less effective. Cause I think there have been times when he has, talk about playing compromised has sort of not been fully back to where he is.

I mean, like, I think the most obvious place that you can see the health manifesting for him is that he does seem much more comfortable in the field than, I mean, I have at times given him and the Dodgers the business a little bit about where he has been asked to play, but it's largely been fine this year. He's been able to fill in for Freeman when needed at first base. So like, I think you're right. Like he's not, you know, hitting 300 or anything like that, but he has been very impactful for them and particularly in the postseason.

So yeah, it's a good fun to see. And of course, Otani hit a moonshot, just a ball that, I mean, Muncie's was an upper decker too, but Otani's was so high. I saw two or three replays and I still honestly like couldn't tell whether it was fair or foul. If you told me it was foul, I would have believed it because it was just like, it was over the foul pole. Yeah, it went right over it.

It went right over it. Yeah. And there was like a parallax effect with the camera angle. And so I couldn't quite tell, I'll take their word for it, that it was in fact fair, but it was an absolute bomb that he somehow managed to presumably keep fair. And of course this continued the kind of quirky differential between his performance with bases empty and runners in scoring position, which has been with bases empty and runners in scoring position, which has been weird. I wouldn't make much more of it than that.

I know that Bauman blogged about the Otani, Nobody on Base Blues, and he found that maybe there are some indications that Otani's approach has been different in the two situations and that he's been pitched differently. Yeah, which makes sense. So you would expect that to be the case. You know, you're going to maybe get more fastballs

with runners on base or runners in scoring position. And maybe you can take advantage of that. And maybe he is coming out of his shoes and trying to do too much with the bases empty. But, you know, he's been one of the worst hitters, if not the worst hitter with the bases empty and one of the best hitters, if not the best hitter with runners in scoring position. And on the whole, you would certainly

prefer the split to be this way than the other way. It's a weird inversion because usually if you're getting criticism for some sort of split, like, yeah, it's the other direction. It's like, oh, sure. He's doing all that with the bases empty, it's just stat patter. And then in the clutch, he's coming up short and Otani, it's just the opposite now. So on the whole, he has been one of the more productive hitters this postseason just because the hits that he's had have come in these big important spots. So he's like 11th in win probability added as we speak now. So yeah, you might prefer a better balanced distribution of your production, but on the whole, this way is better than the alternative.

LS- Well, it is funny though that some of the bigger home runs, and this isn't unique to Otani, this has been sort of true across the Dodgers have been like when they're already up by a bunch. They didn't necessarily need his homerun yesterday But yeah, it's it's a funny. It's a really funny little quirk I don't know that the announcers really quite know how to talk about it I am so relieved that both judge and Otani have hit some home runs now So that everyone can kind of mellow out about it, but it is a really funny quirk.

Yeah, I don't know, man. I don't know what, I think that Bauman appropriately caveated it by saying that like, yeah, there is some amount of difference here, but also like these are the tiniest of small samples. And to say that it means anything would be going too far, but it is a funny little aspect of this postseason. So there you go. Yeah. He has historically this season and over the course of his career hit better with runners

in scoring position than with the bases empty. I guess most people do, but there's been a sizable differential there where he's obviously still been a great hitter with nobody on. So it's not as if this historically it's been this sort of stark difference. I guess you could dig into the career splits and see if there's something there and if this is actually the optimal approach that he's taking. But he's been merely like a 900 OPS guy this year with runners in scoring position.

Actually this year, just looking at his splits from this season, it was the reverse. This season, he had 1,036 OPS with nobody on and a 905 OPS with runners in scoring position. Over the course of his career, 1,029 OPS with runners in scoring position over the course of his career, 1029 OPS with runners in scoring position and 912 with the bases empty.

Those splits are just out of control, man. He's great either way. So this will almost certainly not continue. And you can't call him unclutched. He's timed the hits that he's gotten extremely well. So I think the Dodgers will take it. What a remarkable talent. And you know what, Ben?

You know, it's crazy. He didn't even pitch this year. He didn't even pitch. No, he didn't. We got an email about that I'll bring up in just a second. Now that power display was impressive because power on the whole has been down in the postseason this year. And maybe we can talk about that at greater length next time.

I'll bring some updated stats at that point, but it doesn't seem like the ball is carrying that well, which is something that was discussed as a possibility. And there was some speculation, oh, did the ball change late in the season and will that continue into October? And it is true that slugging percentage is low and batters are not getting rewarded for their hard hit balls quite as much, but the Dodgers hit some of these balls. They have not gotten cheated or robbed on some of these balls that they've just completely crushed.

One of my minor peeves is that people are still often referring to this as Otani's first postseason and not just Otani, but also some other accomplished NPB veterans. And I just, I think we should stipulate first MLB postseason. I think it's a pretty important distinction. It is an important distinction. I've heard this and read this many times. Most recently, I was listening to the Mets radio broadcast because I was putting to the Mets radio broadcast because I was putting my daughter to bed and lying down with her for a while.

And so I sneakily had a headphone in one ear as I was trying to tell her a story and also listen to the broadcast at the same time which was surprisingly difficult, but I did catch impressive multitasking. I'm amazed you're able to do it at all. Yeah, but I caught a reference on the Mets radio broadcast to this being Otani's first postseason.

Again for Otani, even though he has been around, he has been a giant of the game for the last few years, this is his first playoffs ever. I don't think that he feels that way, I would venture to say. I know that when he was asked whether he felt nervous about his MLB postseason debut, he basically shot it down and said no. And we all know it'll be Shohei Ohtani's first playoff series is so crazy to say. Now the question everyone is dying to know is.

Are you nervous at all for just playing in the postseason for the first time? playing in the postseason for the first time? Nope. Nope. Yeah, he didn't need Will to answer that question. He's like, nope, I got this. And maybe that's just cause he's Shoya Ohtani. Why would he be nervous about anything? But also because he's played in the WBC.

He won a WBC. That means so much in Japan. Way more people were watching that. The stakes in his home country were way higher for that than this. He had a 1345 OPS at a 1.86 ERA in the WBC. And if that wasn't a playoff atmosphere, he's been in NPP playoffs three times. And I mentioned either on a previous pod or on a Patreon live stream that I was trying to figure out what his NPB postseason stats were.

It's very difficult to look that up because the stats, you don't read Japanese and I was trying to piece it together on the NPB stats, the official site, and it was difficult to do. I subsequently got a data dump from Jim Allen, who has covered NPB for decades. And he sent me Otani's collected postseason stats. And from those, I determined that in his NPB post seasons, he has not been particularly clutch. He has underperformed. So, yeah, he appeared in three NPB post seasons, only very briefly in 2015, but at greater length in 2014 and 2016. And we should note he was 19 to 21 years old in the series, but if you were to weight his expected postseason performance by the distribution of playing time and what his regular season OPSs were in those seasons. You would have expected him to have a 936 OPS cumulatively and he had a 692 OPS.

Oh boy. Yeah, only 46 plate appearances, but he hit 262, 311, 381. He did not hit a postseason homer. And on the pitching side, you would have expected a 2.1 ERA and instead he had just an unsightly 4.37 ERA in 22 and two-thirds innings. So again, small sample. He was very young, but he did not perform as well as you would have expected based on how he hit and pitched in those regular seasons. So I don't know whether he looks on that as something that he wants to do better than, but obviously he's been exposed to that atmosphere and that

stakes at a young age. So I think we should stop saying that this is his first postseason or he's a postseason rookie or it's his postseason debut in any sort of meaningful way to him, I would imagine. This is not that, so we can just say it's his MLB postseason debut and that will be accurate. Yes. Okay. Well, we did get a question relevant to that and I hope that by the time this podcast is

posted and that we reconvene for our next episode, there will have been better baseball because the CS's so far have been a bit of a dud, I would say, you know, no lead changes, not super competitive games, just not really signature exciting moments after having so many in the wildcard round in the division series round. So hopefully that'll change and we'll get some memorable moments in the CS. But we got a question here from Wilson, Patreon supporter who said, I have a question that can't possibly have an accurate answer. I was thinking about Shohei Otani recently as one does, and I was struck by the question of what number of people who are currently aware of Shohei Otani are simultaneously unaware that he also pitches.

I know that obviously his several two-way seasons were hugely covered, but baseball still occupies a somewhat second-class status in the American sports scene and he has yet to pitch in the playoffs or while on a relevant team. The MLB playoffs, of course. Are there people who are just now diving into the Ohtani experience and think that by two-way we all just mean the power-speed combo? Or do they assume that when people talk about his previous two-way seasons, it means he has been an elite center fielder or something in those seasons? I'm always interested in figuring out what is and is not common knowledge. Right? You could be the, the ex-KCD person who is just among the people who just learned that thing that is well known on that day. And you would think that Otani is supernova bright in the sports world. But on the other hand, I was once at a bar trivia in 2021, at which there was a question

asked about the DH and outfielder who had just won MVP for the angels. So who knows? So there must be some people who've just, you know, they're the Johnny come lately's to the Otani saga and they were just introduced to him as a Dodger and somehow they've avoided the full backstory. I don't know if I were to put a percentage on it, I think it would be pretty low. Kaitlin Luna I think it would be low because even though he hasn't pitched in this postseason, the fact that he does pitch has been discussed, right? Like that has been brought up on the broadcast several times at this point. So if you're someone who just tunes into the playoffs and doesn't

really watch baseball other than your team in the regular season and your team isn't the Dodgers and you're not an Angels fan, then I suppose you could be like, eh, maybe not. But I also think that you know when he is Doing like ads and stuff. Well now I'm thinking to his New Balance ad Does he does he hit and throw the ball in the New Balance ad? I can't remember him He does laugh weird in that ad. He has like a really weird little laugh in that ad I think it would be pretty hard to even after just just one postseason game, not know that, oh, he pitches two.

And I think that it's been, if there's ever been a recent ballplayer who is sort of broken, contained from the sport, it's definitely Ohtani. And I think that his doing both gets emphasized quite a bit. So I would be surprised. But there's But the number is non-zero, you know, just by necessity is non-zero. So I don't know, it would be interesting. It sure would be interesting to know. Yeah, I can say that I would think that my three-year-old daughter, my just-turned three-year-old

daughter who loves Otani, I'm not sure she remembers that he pitches because when he was pitching she was two or not yet two even. So she's only seen him this season as a hitter. So I'm not sure that she recalls that he also pitches, but I have a little recording of her talking about Otani that perhaps I will treat people to at the end of this episode. So at least one. I think Sloan Lindbergh is probably one such person, but not a lot of older than three-year-olds. LS. And see, now I'm looking to see, does he throw it? Oh, he's got batting gloves. He's in the box. I'm watching his New Balance ad, which, sorry. Yeah, why do you laugh like that in that one spot though, Shoei? It is a little odd. It's a little odd. It's like such a deep... You're such a deep... Wow.

You're such a deep... Wow. You're such a deep... Wow. ...someone who was just unaware of baseball entirely really until this year and you just kind of jumped on the bandwagon and, hey, the Dodgers are in it. I hear this Otani guy is good. Just, you know, maybe you're not listening to the broadcast. You're just watching. Yeah. If you're such a person, if you know such a person, please let us know. Yeah. In 2023, I think he throws two himself in the commercial, right? Yeah. See?

There definitely been some of those. Yeah. If you saw his New Balance ad in 2023, as an aside, it's just so funny that this shot at Tempe Diablo, he throws two himself. He pitches two himself in the New Balance ad. Oh, he did a 10 things he can't live without for GQ Sports. Man, what a cool. And like if you saw the WBC at all, I don't know. I'm skeptical. I'm skeptical. But-

If we just blew anyone's mind, if you're listening to this right now, you're like, what? You're telling me he pitches on top of everything else? Please let us know. Don't be embarrassed. LS FLEMING If this is anyone's, first of all, very first episode of Effectively Wild, I don't talk about the Yankees this much normally. I do talk this much about the Mariners. I don't know what to tell you. But that would be a very funny point to dive in. But hey, welcome, friend. Glad to have you. CB I have a few pedantic corner questions here.

It's been a while since we did a, how can you not be pedantic about baseball? So, so here's one that is somewhat playoff themed. Jose, Patreon supporter said, pedantic question. Can you square up a ball yet also pull it foul? Seems to me these two things should be mutually exclusive. And this was in response to a tweet on October 1st from MLB.com, Astro's beat writer, Brian McTaggart, who said, Bregman squared up a fastball

and hit it 109.2 miles per hour and pulled it just foul. So Jose's wondering, is that possible? Can you square up a foul ball? And I actually, I referred this question initially to Mike Petriello of MLB.com because I figured squared up percentage is an actual stat now that Statcast tracks. And so I wondered what he thought and Mike said, well, there's no squared up number generated for fouls just because that's how it's coded. I don't think they've show this publicly, but technically that was a barrel.

That foul ball was a barrel, but it's just not shown. It's not displayed because foul balls are kind of thrown out. But Mike said, that's a choice though. I think you could argue either way. You could hit a ball so flush, so perfectly, just have the bat head too far in front. And so I clarified, so the Bregman ball was a barrel in terms of exit, velo and launch angle,

but just disqualified because it was foul. And then I said, I'm guessing all fair barrels have a high squared up contact percentage. And Mike said, yes, if you search for foul barrels on search, you get nothing, barrels have a high squared up contact percentage? Yeah. And Mike said, yes, if you search for foul barrels on search, you get nothing, but it looks like 90% of barrels are squared up, i.e. at least 80% squared up.

I would guess the remainder are guys who swing so hard that even poor contact by their standard still makes for loud contact. And so I said, in closing, I pronounced it okay to say that this foul ball was squared up and Mike said I 84% agree. So how do you feel? I think it's fine to say that you squared up a foul. You were just a little too early or late, but you hit it flush. You kind of got all of it, but you were just a little too hasty perhaps. I think that it's fine.

I don't know that it would be the way that I would refer to this exact scenario because I do, when I think about a ball getting squared up, I think about you really driving it. And that sort of, for me, precludes, I mean, you can drive it, you can like hit a ball foul really hard. You can do that. But in terms of like how I've, where in on the field I visualize a squared up ball going, I don't know that I automatically think about kind of hooking it foul, but I don't think that it's inherently wrong, you know?

I don't think it's necessarily wrong. But I don't, I don't think that if you were looking up the, as your conversation with Mike sort of bears out, if you were looking up like the dictionary definition, it wouldn't be the primary definition, you know? It would be on there, but it would be listed further down. Yeah. I think I'm okay with it, but I can understand the other position. We also got a question from Brian in Towson, Maryland, who notes that MLB posted a clip of Riley Green robbing a home run and captioned it as taking a souvenir away. However, he notes, if it was going out, it was definitely not going to reach a fan unless

they're hiding just beyond the fence, right? So it was a case. It was not going to go into the stands. It was going to go into either the bullpen area or just a no man's land, just on the other side of the fence. It could not have been caught by a fan until Brian Wonders has taking a souvenir away become semantically inert and now it can refer to any home run robbery, at least in announcer language, or do you have to have literally robbed not just a player of a home run,

but also a fan who could have caught that ball or retrieved it of a potential souvenir? I think that this is pedantically incorrect because you can't say that you took back a souvenir when it is beyond the reach of a fan. But I'm going to allow it because as we have discussed, you need a lot of different ways to say the same thing so that you don't exhaust people. And I don't think that saying that he took a souvenir back gets in anyone's way

in terms of understanding. Do you know what I mean? I think it's fine. I think it's fine. I think it's fine too. I guess someone could have retrieved the ball. I don't know. A fan could have hopped down there, some stadium personnel. I don't know whether they would bother to keep it, but it could have been a souvenir for someone potentially. And even so, it's a lot to ask a broadcaster to process that in real time too. It's all happening fast. You only have several seconds of hang time

and you're watching the ball and you're watching the fielder and it's an exciting moment. And maybe you're not kind of clocking that, okay, they robbed a homer, but technically if you want to be the best kind of correct, it was not going to go into the stand. So I certainly wouldn't take a commentator to task for that and just in the interest of variety. If I were writing about it and had time to review the highlight, I probably wouldn't describe it that way. But I'm not at all writing about it and had time to review the highlight, I probably wouldn't describe it that way. Yes.

Agreed. But I'm not at all upset about it. I wouldn't say that you're doing anything wrong. I think it would be fine. You could, it would be okay. Along similar lines, David, Patreon supporter says, I would like to argue that one cannot quote, fly out sharply unquote, as MLB's game day said, Addison barger did in the bottom of the eighth on a late September, Saturday, you can fly out to a deep part of the park or line

out sharply, but you cannot fly out sharply. We have a lot of like fly ball related questions here. So talking about squaring up and, out sharp. Can you fly out sharply or can you only fly out or line out sharply? You can definitely line out sharply. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. No one's disputing that. Yet. Have you met our listeners? Give them a moment, Ben. I don't know why you'd throw a gauntlet down like that. I would probably, I don't know if it's technically wrong. I don't think I'd say it though. I don't think I'd say you could fly out sharply. I think I'd say you

can line out sharply. I think that's what I think. See, a liner though, I don't know that it demands that this be true, but I think it implies a certain trajectory, does it not? Trajectory, yeah. It implies not an extremely high launch angle. I didn't look to see what the launch angle on this one was, but if it's a high arching. And I guess if it is a high arching, if it's not really a laser, then maybe you wouldn't say it was sharp.

I guess the way that I would feel compelled, I don't know that I would feel compelled to modify a fly out with sharply. I think that I would modify fly outs with lazy if they were particularly lazy. So I think that maybe that's where I'm getting hung up because I can envision the kind of batted ball that is being described here, but I don't think I would feel compelled to say sharply. I would just say he flew out. But should there not be some kind of counterpart to lazy?

Because batted balls are a spectrum, right? Like so many things. It's all on a continuum. And so if you have a lazy fly ball, which is less sharp. Right, yeah. It implies the existence of, yeah, no, you're right. Then the default fly ball, then there should also be something to convey that this was a hard fly ball, right?

Because this was more than the standard sort of fly ball. Would you maybe then do we start talking about lasers? Laser implies line drive to me, I think. A laser to the outfield. Well, would, yeah. Or what if you just said deep fly ball? Because that implies that it's hit hard, but it could also be arcing. Arcing.

Yeah. I don't mind having... Can't lasers also arc? Do they have to go in a straight line? You have only straight lasers. How limiting for them. Yeah, you could deflect it. I don't know, but I guess-

How does science work, Ben? Magnets, lasers, how do they work? But I think- I don't know. Lasers are amazing though. That was a fun week in physics. I like having some adjective to modify flyball. Yeah.

I don't think that once you go past the standard flyball, it should just automatically be a line drive. I think you can have a harder than usual fly, it should just automatically be a line drive. I think you can have a harder than usual fly ball and that there should be a way to convey that. And I don't strenuously object to Sharp, but Sharp does feel liner-like to me. It's how do you draw the line? Like obviously baseball savant does and people who classify these things, stringers, you have to say that this was a fly and this was a liner, but there's no, it's all sort of arbitrary and subjective, of course.

So I wouldn't use sharply as the way to just, I don't know, like it's, it's tricky. It's hard to imagine something that's not hit on a line as sharply. Cause it's like, it has to, if it's curving, you know, if there's an arch, like there at a certain point that the momentum gets arrested, but like you can hit on, you can hit it hard. I don't know, Ben. I feel like- Firm fly ball. No, that's worse.

No, I don't mean it. I'm not trying to work blue. I'm just saying that it's less descriptive. I think deep is good. Deep. I think you're right. And this is the problem maybe that the opposing ends of the spectrum, lazy versus deep. Maybe the opposite of a lazy flyball should be an industrious flyball. It was Maybe the opposite of a lazy fly ball should be an industrious fly ball. It was industrious fly ball. I guess it's not a hard working fly ball in particular. You know, by definition, sort of just along for the ride.

It's not- It doesn't really have agency. It's propelled. Well, but then it's rude to call it lazy, really, if you get right down to it. True. It's no fault of the fly ball. Right. And really, don't we all want to be a little- Lazy hitter. Oh, right.

Don't we all want to be a little lazy sometimes? Only sometimes, probably, but sometimes. Okay. We are in favor of something to distinguish between a harder hit than usual fly ball and your regular fly ball, but sharp would not be our preferred term. It would not be our preferred term. It would not be sharp. But clearly we need something because sometimes I think that part of the problem is that we have concentrated all of our descriptive efforts for very hard hit fly balls around home runs. We talk about them being titanic.

We talk about them being screamers. We've concentrated all of our descriptive efforts into the actual home runs and not the hard hit fly balls that don't leave the field. And you have like a wall scraper. Well, that's even usually a homer, right? And a warning track fly ball, but they're not all warning track necessarily. So yeah, why don't we just say deep fly ball? I don't think anyone would be upset about that. Deep fly ball. Last pedantic question comes from an other other Ben Patreon supporter who says,

the top baseball management official on many baseball teams has called the president of baseball operations. Sometimes it's also the chief baseball officer or something wonky, but usually the Pobo, that's our preferred term. Should Mark Shapiro's title really be something like prime minister of baseball operations for the Blue Jays or king of baseball operations for the Blue Jays in recognition of the fact that the Blue Jays are the sole major league franchise in Canada. Should that reflect the Canadian-ness of the Blue Jays are the sole major league franchise in Canada, should that reflect the Canadian-ness of the Blue Jays? Should it not be a president of baseball operations,

but a prime minister of baseball operations? Well, look, I'm not going to wade into the monarchy question as it pertains to Canada, because I'm given to understand there's, you know, people feel strongly about that one way or the other. No, I think probably not because it sounds a bit affected, you know, like to draw these distinctions because I don't think that we're really envisioning the president, vice president, chief, operated, like we're not trying to draw a parallel political structure. And so- CB There are presidents of companies in Canada, I think.

So it's not that they don't have any position called president. LS Right. It would be funny if they were like, okay, here are our national mandates. You have to do announcements in both English and French and also no presidents. We reject them as a political unit. We find them distasteful. CB Yeah. LS Yeah. CB Yeah.

LS And also, Mark Shapiro is not himself Canadian. He is from Massachusetts. Although I don't think the prime minister of Canada has to be born in Canada, but as a dual citizen, as a Canadian citizen myself- LS I was about to say, you're the one who has to speculate about the political units up there because those are your people. I'd go with governor general. I like that.

That sounds especially Canadian to me. That's kind of, you're representing the monarch. You're kind of the intermediate person who's carrying out those duties. And so you're kind of the governor general for the monarchical owner or corporate entity in the Boudre's case. So yeah, governor general of the Boudre's, that's Mark Shapiro's new unofficial title. LS FRAAD We should just call him the Tim Horton of the Boudre's.

CBH Yeah, sure. LS FRAAD Because it represents the entire country, right? Like Tim Hortons does. Sure. You've got to go get some back treatment. I know you and Alex Cobb. If I can squeeze in one non-pedantic one here. OK, yes, please. This is playoff related.

And Thomas says, I was listening to the recent episode where you discussed Manny Machado and his intent when deflecting a ball. You had mentioned that it was an unreviewable play. This got me thinking, why are some plays not reviewable? Why wouldn't a manager be able to request a review on any single event that happens in a game? I assume it's not a matter of slowing the game down, because managers have a finite number of challenges, and unless you increase the number of challenges, theoretically no more time will be lost. I suppose that some events, if overturned,

would have unknowable outcomes since play may have been stopped or otherwise disrupted. Yes, I think that's a big part of it. But it seems like we frequently hear the refrain, that's not a reviewable call in situations where review may have been illuminating. I think that part of the problem or part of the sort of decision making process around this stuff is yes, the would we actually be able to know the conclusion of the play, the outcome of the play had it continued, blah, blah, blah. I also think that there is some amount of how frequently does this scenario unfold and yes, you wouldn't necessarily increase the number of challenges that a manager gets,

but if they are able to challenge a very common thing and provided their challenges successful, retain the challenge, does the cumulative effect of challenging those things with a great amount of frequency bog down the game and how it unfolds, right? Isn't that part of it? Yeah. And so there's an element of subjectivity. I guess there's always some sort of subjectivity. We've gradually expanded what is reviewable, of course, because initially it was just boundary

calls. It was just homers, right? And then bit by bit, we have made more things reviewable, something like the neighborhood play, right? There was a rule change that that became reviewable before the 2016 season, I think it was, and slides, questionable slides, some of which didn't used to be reviewable and then were made reviewable. So there's potential for other things that are not currently reviewable to be made reviewable. And I do think there are probably some things that are not reviewable that could be, and that wouldn't be a bad thing. I do think that, yeah, some of it is just if you have

some hypothetical, well, play was stopped and you'd have to try to figure out where would this go if you overturn this and it would be a big mess. And so I think that's probably a big part of it, but yeah, I think I'm, I like replay. And so I'm in favor of more replay, the more the better generally. So yeah, I would say open it up. Cause there have been certain cases where it's felt like, well, why shouldn't this be, there might be somewhere you just, you also can't tell, I guess. Like if it's a, what, like a foul tip sort of situation and you might not really be able to tell that well anyway. And so if the evidence isn't going to be conclusive, then why waste the time? So there

are probably a few of those cases. You could have like in cricket where maybe they do it by sound or you do it by like, they used to have those cameras that would show like the heat signature of the contact, the friction being made. So there are things you could do or even check swings, right? Like I am all in favor of some sort of technological solution to check swings. That seems like it would be feasible now with the technology that we have and the bat tracking and all the rest. And so that, yeah, I would say not necessarily make it reviewable, but just like make it subject to technology, or at least like define it more strictly than we have to this point,

because that's extremely subjective, right? So yeah, there are some refinements that could be made, but I think those are probably the big reasons why not everything is reviewable. Yeah, I think that that's right. I'm open to expanding the universe of reviewable plays. I don't think we have it dialed in quite right. And I think that there's some room for improvement there. Here's have it dialed in quite right. And I think that there's some room for improvement there. CB Here's one that is also playoff themed and it pertains to the game that we did our first Patreon playoff live stream about because that was an extremely long one because there

were so many pitching changes, which we noted on the podcast. So Michael, Patreon supporter says wanted to follow up on the mid inning pitching change issue. I was at a couple of regular season games this year where pitching changes got off cycle. That is the starting pitcher was pulled with say two outs in the fifth. They brought in a new pitcher who pitched to three batters, third out of the fifth, first two of the sixth.

And then because these relievers can apparently only pitch to three batters in a game, they then brought in a new pitcher for the final out of the sixth, rinse and repeat in the seventh, eighth, et cetera. It was unpleasant then. It was really unpleasant in that Dodgers-Padres NLDS game. I was thinking about some kind of tweak to the minimum batter rule, something like if you start the inning, you have to pitch to three batters in that inning, regardless of how many batters you have previously faced. Maybe there's a tweak to that where a starter can be pulled after one batter in the fifth or something like that. Any thoughts?

I think in this age of the three batter minimum, we have had so few mid inning pitching changes that when they come fast and furious, it is almost worse now than when the one batter minimum rule was in place. And I think there's some truth to that just because they've gotten more scarce when we do get one of these games where there are a ton of mid inning pitching. As we were saying on that playoff live stream, it felt very much like a pre pitch clock, pre three batter minimum slog where just we were, please, someone change pitchers between innings instead of subjecting us to this delay. And maybe there are even longer breaks in the postseason and it's even more painful and disruptive of the flow of the game. So I hadn't

considered that, but I guess now that you do have so many relievers who are conditioned to go one inning at a time, if things do get off kilter, if someone doesn't finish an inning, then you can kind of get in this cycle where everyone's doing that. And then unless you want to pull someone after one out, because if you've finished the inning, it's okay to make a change. But if you don't want to use up all your pitchers super fast, then you bring them back and maybe you don't think they can then get three outs and then you're stuck and then you're continually making those moves when you're say one out away from the end of the inning. BT. Yeah, I think that there's probably a tweak that might be workable there. I mostly think that people were just really tired of hearing my Jimmy Stewart impression. If it had been better,

they wouldn't have minded the pitching changes as much. It's probably good that you kept that to the Patreon stream. That was an opt-in situation. You were like, I know you're about to do it again. Please don't. I'm just trying to head that off at the pass here. Look, it's not a bad impression. It just takes a couple of tries to dial in, and then once you get there, it's not my fault that Freddie Freeman wears his pants up there. It's a natural comparison to draw. We did talk about that at great length and I remain flummoxed by where his waist is and whether this is a stylistic choice or whether it's the proportions of his upper body relative

to his lower body. Does he have a belly button or is it like that show that was on ABC Family when we were kids where it's like, oh my God, the entire show is built around this kid not having a belly button. What does it mean? BF Yeah, or it's like a Hays Code era. We can't show that on screen, so we have to have you hitch up your pants like the family guy, high pants, fast talkers parody. So yeah, I remain confused by the proportions of Freddie, but I don't mean to body shame if he does have a high belly button or a proportionally small upper body, there's nothing wrong with that. It just stands out and I wonder whether it's a choice or just something that has been imposed upon him.

Yeah, we do wonder about that. But anyhow, I don't know quite how to get around that issue. I will say I don't want to overreact because it isn't an issue all that often anymore, I think is what we have generally noted about this stuff. It felt very strange to suddenly be faced with this circumstance. And I think that's because we largely don't see it. Even this postseason where we have a lot of teams that are in the bullpenning business, that game stood out for its length. And so I think it's important to not overreact to these things because then you can get into

too tinkerous a mode with your rule structure and then ultimately like, are you solving a real problem or are you just annoyed that Meg did a Jimmy Stewart impression? We have to ask ourselves that every postseason. And I've seen some sentiments that has advanced the idea of, well, maybe we should roll back the three batter minimum. We don't really need this anymore. That was a tiny measure that barely produced any change and wasn't really even expected to produce that much of a change.

And now that we took the big swing with the pitch clock, why even bother with the small potatoes of something like that, right? Or the zombie runner. Let's do away with that because the games are shorter, but I don't mind the three batter minimum, uh, you know, at the time was the juice worth the squeeze? Uh, I don't know, but, uh, I don't mind it particularly. And fewer mid-ending pitching changes is a good thing just in general, as we're saying here. So do we need to expand the purview of it?

I mean, I think if you did that, you might get yourself in trouble. Because as we're saying, so many pitchers do just go one inning at a time. That if you brought someone in mid inning and they got an out or two, how often are you going to want to bring them back the next inning? And then you're going to get even more pitching changes, even if they happen mid inning, you're still going to just get so many pitchers and then teams are trying not to use relievers in too many consecutive games. And so it's just going to increase the crunch and maybe you end up with more position player

pitchers, which we don't want things now that the pendulum has started to swing back in the other direction. We don't want to bring those back full force. So yeah, I would want to see some numbers and I know we're the ones who are usually providing the numbers, but how often does this actually happen? Is this a problem that we need to really legislate out of existence that we get several mid-inning pitching changes in the same game? That felt so unusual and such an affront to the sensibilities because it seemed like we hadn't seen that in so long. And so I think it's kind of

confined to few enough games and postseason, right? Which the stakes are high and maybe you're more likely to make those changes, plus you've got the stakes are high and maybe you're more likely to make those changes. Plus you've got more off days. So you can make more changes like that. And you don't want your product to be boring at the time when it matters most either. But I don't find that it's something that bothers me on the regular in the regular season. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's normally fine, Ben, you know, it's normally fine. We should end there. All right.

Just Ben here, some hours later and upon further reflection, I think governor general is the app title. Cause the governor general appoints the prime minister just as the POBO appoints the GM. So the owner is the Monarch. The governor general is the POBO and the GM is the PM or not. We could stick with the typical terms. No need to other the Blue Jays because they're Canadian or not even Canadian in Mark Shapiro

and Ross Atkins's case. But enough about that. There's been more baseball and some great baseball in the case of the ALCS. We said that the Yankees hadn't really been involved in the most thrilling games this postseason. Well, that changed. Though, as I said, Yankees fans would have preferred to win and have it be boring than to lose in roller coaster fashion.

We also said, Hey, these CS games haven't been so special yet. I hope we get a great game. Well, we did. It was phenomenal. Judge and Stanton, huge homers off of Clausay. John Kenzie-Noel, huge homer off of Weaver. Two outs, bottom of the ninth. And David Fry, huge homer to walk it off. In extra innings, no less. How long have we waited for zombie runner-less extra innings baseball? See, the key was starting Austin Hedges. Not only did he double and walk, but both Will Brennan, who pinch hit for him, and Bo Naylor, who replaced Brennan, got hits themselves.

Naylor was on base when Fry hit the walk off. Meg was onto something there. So the Guardians trimmed the Yankees lead to 2-1, and we will be live streaming for Patreon supporters during game 4. Also the Otani splits regression has already begun, the Dodgers beat the Mets to go up 3-1 in the NLCS, they won big, I was just thinking to myself that win big and big win have different meanings. You can win big, that is buy a lot of runs, without it being a big win. You could win big in some meaningless regular season game. But in this case the Dodgers won big in a big win

and Shohei Otani got their scoring started with a lead off home run. Which means that yes he got a hit with the bases empty. And in fact he made two outs later in the game with runners in scoring position. After having gone 17 for his last 20 with runners in scoring position which was a live ball era record. So some order is restored. Now my daughter didn't see Otani's homer. We had already begun the bedtime process by that point, but when I show her the highlights she'll be happy. She was disappointed when I told her that Otani wasn't playing in the Yankees Guardians game.

And as promised, I have a little clip for you here that I recorded. A brief interview with my just turned 3 year old daughter. I know it can get tiresome when people talk about their kids. Yes, I'm sure they're the cutest and the smartest. Please show me many pictures. I try not to talk too much about my kid. You want to hear us talk about baseball, but maybe you'll make an exception for me talking to my kid about baseball. Forgive a father who wants to provide his daughter's inaugural podcast appearance. So here's Sloan's effectively wild debut, not counting crying in the background, which I'm sure has happened at some point over the past few years.

All right. I'm here with a very special guest. What's your name? What? And who's your favorite baseball player? Oh yeah. Why do you like Shohei Otani? You just do?

I like Shohei Otani. Oh yeah? Why do you like Shohei Otani? I just do. You just do? I like Shohei Otani too. I like Shohei Otani. And why is he your favorite? Because he's the best player. Oh yeah? Why is he so good?

Because he plays baseball. Now is he the pitcher or the hitter or the midder? The hitter. Yeah, but you know he might be the pitcher and the hitter next year because he can do both of those things. Do you like to watch him? Yeah. Yeah. Are you rooting for the Dodgers or the Mets? Uh, the Mets.

Oh, yeah? But Shohei's on the Dodgers. The Dodgers. Oh, you switched. OK. You just want Shohei to win, I guess. What do you want to do now? Uh, I want to listen to myself.

Oh, yeah. That's why a lot of podcasters do podcasts. Now can you put those little singies in my ears? Oh, okay. Now it's your turn. Oh, it's my turn? Well, it was great to have you on. I hope you'll come back on the show again sometime, but now it's time for bed. And now I'm going to put this down for you.

Oh, okay. Are you ready for bedtime? No. Me neither. And now put that in your ear and listen to yourself. Are you ready for bedtime? No. Now listen to yourself.

Like father, like daughter. All right, a few more years, she'll be ready to fill in for me, at least when we talk about Otani, which is a lot of the time. She really did not wanna go to bed, by the way. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild,

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you can message us through the Patreon site. If not, you can contact us via email. Send your questions, comments, intro, and outro themes to podcast at fangraphs.com. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectivelywild. You can find the Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild.

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before the end of the week, which means we will talk to you soon. I wanna know about baseball. I wanna know about every single team. episode before the end of the week which means we will talk to you soon. I think it's good actually, Ben. It's a good impression. People are so flummoxed. If I answer the phone that way they're like, I thought Jimmy Stewart died years ago. This is gonna be, I need to make it a little louder. Oh. Make it a little louder. Why did I do it? I'm a little tiny. See? When I do this, it makes it a little louder.