Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2233: Cleveland Classics

Episode Date: October 19, 2024

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Game 3 of the ALCS and Game 4 of the NLCS, follow up (39:05) on replay review, fly-ball classifications, and executive titles, answer listener emails (53:22) about retiring numbers for both home and road teams and correctly labeling bat “flips,” and Stat Blast (1:03:46) about postseason despair, ball […]

Does baseball look the same to you as it does to me? When we look at baseball, how much do we see? Well, the curveball's bent and the home runs fly The more to the game, the beats the eye To get the stats compiled and the stories filed Fans on the internet might get riled, but we can break it down on Effectively Wild. Hello and welcome to episode 2233 of Effectively Wild,

a FanGraphs baseball podcast presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Rowley of Fangrass. Hello, Meg. Hello. Well, we are powerful witches indeed. I think that's the only conclusion we can draw from what went down immediately after we finished recording our last episode. We knew that we were in an awkward spot timing-wise, the same awkward spot we find ourselves in now. Well, it'd be nice when

baseball's over and we can just not have baseball interfere with our podcast recording schedule anymore. That's when you know you have your priorities not so straight. It's good to have baseball, but it does sometimes make timing difficult in the postseason.

So we talked about how comparatively dull the ALCS had been, and frankly frankly all Yankees games this postseason compared to the excitement of games that the Mets were involved in or the Dodgers. We talked about what to do with Austin Hedges and how should Steven Vogt handle that and will he make the right calls. Then we also talked about Shohei Otani and his very recent, very tiny sample inability to hit with nobody on base. And pretty much as soon as we got done talking about that, all of those things changed. So I can only conclude that we can wish great games into existence by talking about how there have not been enough of them in a certain

series. And so I will repeat that talking point and say, yeah, the games just haven't been good enough. We should continue to have some good baseball. I hope that they can play some exciting games now for a change. least in one of the series, at least six times, that would be additionally useful to me. Yeah. Well, now that you've put that out there in the world, I'm sure it will happen. Didn't inspire the Mets to play better yesterday though, did it? No, it did not. No, I guess that's true. That was one thing that you sent out into the universe that the universe did not reciprocate with. But we find ourselves with two more games to talk about and two more games starting soon enough that this podcast will not be posted by the time those games happen.

And so we are somewhat constrained, but we will do our best given these limitations. And fortunately we do have some exciting stuff to discuss because boy, that Guardians, Yankees game three, that was an all-timer. That was up there with the best games that we've seen this postseason, certainly. I don't know whether you think that was the best that we've seen thus far, but the contrast between that

and the previous games in this series or the ways that the Yankees had won in sort of a sloppy way. In fact, you messaged me early in that game. Sloppy. Yeah, sloppy series, right? And then after that, it just became riveting. So we should probably talk a little bit

about what went down there because that's one of those evergreen games. That's a classic. We will return to that one. Even though it was not a decisive game, it was not winner take all or winner go home, if you draw a distinction between those. And of course, it was only the CS, but that's one that will be remembered for a while. Hostie I want to clarify to our listeners that I messaged you and said sloppy ass

series. And I did not put an appropriate hyphen between sloppy and ass, so you're left to draw your own conclusions about what I meant. Yes, XKCD comic about that too. It's really pretty important where you put the hyphen. Yes, in that case it is. It was a fabulous game. And I appreciated, one of the things I appreciated the most about it, I think, is that it had so many different iterations in itself, right? And you know, I know that that proved frustrating to the writers who might be listening. I think David Laurela mentioned to me that he was on his third lead by the time the whole

thing ended up said and done, but- Yeah, well, maybe the guardians were on their third lead. I don't know how many leads they had had at that point too. But yeah. Yeah, but it's like, you know, here you have this team that we were, I don't want to say that we were totally counting them out, but we had maybe kind of counted them out and assumed that the Yankees would dispatch of them fairly quickly. And there was the version of it that's them fighting back.

That's them fighting back on the back of a strong starter performance, right? Matthew Boyd became, I think, their first starter this postseason to go five innings and dispatched the Yankees, a formidable lineup, with relative ease, only allowing the one run. And then you had guys coming back to push them ahead where they had briefly fallen behind. We got to see postseason fireworks from Kyle Manzardo. And then you think, okay, they got this in the back. They got a 3-one lead. We're not gonna worry about the couple of times that they've left guys on base in the prior innings

to maybe extend that lead, give themselves more comfortable insurance. They got it, they got a manual class A. How many times is a manual class A gonna give up an important home run in the postseason? He barely gives up home runs in the regular season over so many more games. Yes. And then, Ben.

Yeah. And then, yes, I guess Cleveland teams have a fraught history with 3-1 leads, but sometimes that works out for them. And it looked like this would not. When Emmanuel Cassé comes in, you figure, you know, even though there was the blip with Classe earlier in this postseason, you still figure, okay, he's good to protect a multi-run lead here. How many times does he blow those?

He's, he's had his allotment of earned runs allowed this postseason, but no, Aaron Judge had something to say about that. And then John Carlos Stanton had something very similar to say about that. And the two beef boys, which we haven't said that in some time. We haven't had occasion. Yeah, it's so nice.

I don't know if they're the archetypical beef boys. They're just the giants. They're just the titans. I just, I get a kick out of how Stanton is just so jacked. Like he slimmed down this spring. And I wondered like, have we seen the end of Giancarlo Stanton just having muscles on top of muscles? And no, not really. No, he's still like that. And yet he's this very fragile He's this very fragile Superman where he has like super strength and super physique and yet he is incredibly vulnerable. It's not that he's surrounded by kryptonite at all times and his kryptonite is if he gets

above a jog, essentially, he will probably tear some sort of muscle in his lower body. And so he rarely runs very fast. And you look at him and you think, oh my gosh, what a well-conditioned athlete at the peak of his performance. And then you watch him run and he's just kind of tentatively just like, don't want to go too fast here because if I, if it's something will sprung, if I get up to speed. Yeah. So he's kind of this hero with the feet of clay. He's this mountain of a man who can be felled quite easily, just a very literal Goliath, I guess.

And here he was just hitting a massive dinger after Judge had hit almost a Stantonian laser that was just high enough and very hard. And next thing you know, Klasay has coughed up the lead again and suddenly the Yankees are in commanding position and can put their closer in to finish things off. And that didn't go so well for them either. So what twists, what turns? I think that if I were Stanton, I would simply say that being made of candy glass in the lower half, you know, just hit home runs. Then you only need to get up to a home run trot, you know?

CB. Yes, exactly. LS. That seems like a safe speed to travel at if you have had the lower half issues that he's had. I just, it didn't feel, you know, sometimes you feel like, oh, this is going to go badly, but I really thought Clausé would pull it out and they would win and it would be fine. And then I thought, wow, this is it for them. They're done now. You know, the guardians. Right. Then that's the death blow. Yeah. Yeah. Like how do you rally back from that? Not only are you, you know, faced with having

to go ahead, then they were down, Ben. Then they were down because runs were scored in the top of the ninth by New York. And you're just sitting there, you're devastated, you're even further down. And then- CB. The Yankees had the momentum, which as we know, just once you have the momentum, you never relinquish it as evidenced by the guardians having the momentum and then immediately relinquishing it. So again, I just, I don't really understand how anyone can think momentum is meaningful

is more than vibes, which you attempted to rebrand it because in that same game, we saw multiple momentum shifts and swings. So if that can happen earlier in the game, surely it could happen later in the game. But yeah, I don't know what's going on with Class A, by the way. I mean, he set such a high standard for himself that it's just strange to see him now having allowed

more earned runs in the postseason than he did in the regular season, which famously a lot longer. It isn't as if he has been worked that hard because the guardians haven't had a lot of leads in this series. It'd be one thing if he did that in the ninth after they brought him in, in the eighth, he doesn't have a lot of history of going multiple innings, but that was his first inning of work. He hasn't been worked especially hard. It's not like, I mean, he has pitched at times, I guess you might say, he almost hasn't worked enough, but I don't think it's that anomalous given his usual usage pattern.

So, you know, it's just a couple or a few major mistakes and he makes so few of them usually that that is very glaring really, but it's hard if you're the guardians and you only have so many leads, your offense and your starting rotation only puts you in position to seal those wins so many times. You can't really afford to blow those, especially when you have this automatic closer you're counting on. So, I mean, they have just a dominant rest of the bullpen, but I assume they will just keep giving Klasay those chances as they arise. And you would think that he will deliver at some point, but it's kind of concerning. Yeah, I don't know that I would necessarily change my bullpen plan just based on what

we've seen so far. It's obviously these home runs have been quite impactful, but it's also, this is the kind of moment where votes gonna just have a lot more information about what's going on than we necessarily do. So if they were to kind of adjust things and reshuffle the back of that pen, I wouldn't be totally surprised, but I don't think that they're in a spot where they necessarily have to do that. And you know, there's uncharacteristic play going around, right? Like this was a very solid defensive team during the regular season. You talk about the vibes or momentum shifting.

It's like part of how the ninth inning unfolded, which put New York in a position to add that additional insurance run and be up 5-3 was them not being able to execute a rundown, right? Like them not being able to get the better of Volpe in a pickle. They couldn't pickle him, Ben. They couldn't do it, you know? And Jose Ramirez of all people, right? So, and I know that some Guardians fans wanted that to be called interference, that play, but he barely had it in his glove at all. He just really didn't even have it. So it's been interesting to see them continue to be able to advance here. We'll see what they're able to make of New York tonight. But if I were to tell you going into this series, we're going to get a blown save opportunity from

Klaus A and you're going to get some defensive weirdness, you'd probably say, well, you're done then because they just don't produce enough runs to survive uncharacteristically poor play on either side of the ball there. But last night they did, Ben, because they had Christmas on their side. Ben you think it bothers him to be referred to as Big Christmas? Is he into this nickname? Do we know? I would hope so. It's a great nickname. It's one of the best, right? It's one of the best. It was pretty devastating that he did not, I mean, I'm sure Guardians fans were perfectly

happy with the way that things went, but the headlines that we could have gotten if Big Christmas had been the one to deliver the walk off, Ben, just imagine, we would have been drunk with power, you know, it would have been kind of like Santa Claus. We would have been, the editors of America would have been like Santa Claus themselves just parceling out delightful headline gifts to their readers. But instead, David Fry got to be the hero of the moment, which, you know, couldn't, couldn't have done it without big Christmas. But yeah. Oh, there were a few heroes there. Lane Thomas had another big hit to set up Noel. This wasn't Thomas driving the bigger blow,

but he had to get his hit to bring Noel up to the plate and then vote pulling the right strings and pinch hitting with Noel to go for the big blow and then getting it. And then getting it. Two outs, ninth inning. I mean, that's what you want. That's as good as it gets.

And then, at that point I mean, that's what you want. That's as good as it gets. And then, you know, at that point, well, the momentum shifted. Shifting. And so, and the vibes were with the Guardians. And so I think there was a dread on some Yankees fans part. And look, finally we got an extra inning game, which I was glad to see.

I would have been happy to have multiple extra innings because we've just had so little of that. There was no extra inning postseason game last year, as I recall, and we hadn't seen it this year. And it was kind of cruel just to have the prospect of zombie runnerless extra innings baseball dangled in front of us and then not actually have extra inning games. So in front of us and then not actually have extra innings games. So we got one inning here at least without a zombie runner. So that was nice. And we got some good glove work showing up again in the 10th with Andres Jimenez and that incredible play he made on the jazz grounder. LSW Yeah, I got my digs in at their fielding. Obviously, this play was incredible. We should remember the second part of that incredible

play, which was Josh Naylor's stretch because he really went to get that ball and managed to keep his foot on the bag. And I think that Jimenez's move was so flashy and so well executed, but it doesn't mean as much if he's not able to do that. So really an amazing moment on both ends of that play. CB Yeah. And then Frye, who, as we mentioned, we were talking last time about players who have known injuries and are playing through them and playing through the pain, whether it's Rizzo or Nimmo or Freeman or Arise who has already had his post-elimination surgery, which is just a tradition in October.

And Fry is limited to batting now because of his elbow. So I don't know if it's hurting him at the plate, but he can't play in the field. So everyone's nursing something at this time of year. And he gets to have another huge hit of this run. Like we've, we've seen some guardians have had multiple huge hits. I mean, it's much like the Mets getting huge hits out of Lindor and Alonso and Vientos and the guardians have gotten that too out of Fry, out of Thomas, et cetera. So yeah, and it was particularly demoralizing for the Yankees, I guess, because their unexpectedly effective bullpen had gotten them this far and people were singing the praises of Weaver

and we've talked about Weaver too. I mean, you know, almost hyperbolic things were being said about Weaver and he's just like the most important player in baseball and the key to everything. And you know, he's totally changed the Yankee season. I mean, it was a bit much, but it was pretty important to have someone like that to solidify the end of games when you have this kind of closer uncertainty and just a late inning uncertainty. And we thought, okay, we found our shut down nails guy.

And also it looked like Holmes was back to being his best self and they both got taken deep. So it's not like the guardians picked on the underbelly of the bullpen here. They, they took on the two headed beast and they slew it. Yes. They took on the two headed beast and look, you know, different, I had a, a good season things, you, things kind of tapered for him after the All-Star break, obviously.

And so I'm not trying to knock David Fry, but I imagine it feels like a particular kind of bad when, look, if Jose Ramirez beats you, what are you going to do? That guy's incredible. But to have it come down to David Fry, to have it come down to a rookie, to tie it up, like I feel like that would kind of wrinkle if it were me. And again, I think Weaver has been great this postseason. He's been great, you know, for the last two, three months. And I don't think it's a stretch to say that he has stabilized that bullpen, but even good relievers get got sometimes and boy, they got got. Those were emphatic home runs. They went quite far and they were quite loud. David Fry knew, I think the second that ball left his bat,

he had done it, that he had walked them off. It was really something to see. And the call on the Spanish language radio broadcast of Noel's home run. Fantastic. The launch comes to the plate, Batalha! Yes! The gold! Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas!

What a shock, Noel! We've had multiple memorable radio calls this postseason. Of course, there was the great call of Alonso's Homer too, and that made the rounds and people were celebrating that one. And now this one, of course, you're getting a little bit of different energy, I guess, on this call than you get from Howie Rose, both great in their own way. Sure, yeah. But this call by Rafa Hernandez-Brito and accompanied by in the booth, Carlos Bayerga, this brought an energy that we're accustomed to hearing perhaps on soccer broadcasts, but not so much on your English language baseball broadcasts.

And I don't know that I would want that level of excitement in all of my baseball broadcasts, but if you're ever going to break that out, I think it would be for this moment. This is the moment where you hold nothing back and you provide a distinctive call. And I would love to have this energy more often. You know, we talk a lot about the sort of players expressing themselves and, you know, not doing the old

buttoned up, buttoned down kind of go about your business, don't show emotion. No, we get bat flips and we get fun and we get players celebrating. You don't get this so much though on your English language baseball broadcasts and I'm very much here for that vibe at this time of year. However, the predictions have gone too far. So I hate to come at Rafa Hernandez-Brito at his moment of triumph and maximum virality here, but not only did he make this incredible call,

but he predicted the home run. So of course the home run was predicted. Now he didn't do it on the broadcast. This was reported in Chad Jennings' piece at the Athletic about how this call happened. And I'll just read here. There might not have been much preparation, but Hernandez-Brito did do a bit of pregame prognosticating.

Before the game, Hernandez-Brito said, he happened to see, okay, now here's the thing. It's not just that he predicted Noelle's home run. He predicted all of the home runs in this game. So, yes. So before the game, Hernandez-Brito said, he happened to see Noelle, yes, so before the game, Hernandez-Brito said, he happened to see Noel, Frye, and guardians designated hitter Kyle Manzardo in the dugout.

And Hernandez-Brito told each of them they would hit a home run in game three. His predictions went three for three with Manzardo going deep in the third inning before Noel's and Frye's heroics at the end. We knew this team was in first place for most of the year because they have always fought to the last out. Hernandez-Brito said they have never put their hands down

so we knew it was going to happen. So how about that? Not only have they, this broadcasting tandem gone viral multiple times really because the Lane Thomas Grand Slam got a pretty incredible call as well. But claiming to have predicted all of the home runs that were hit in this game just so happened to see everyone who

was going to Homer in this game and told them all that they were going to Homer. I mean, look, if you're going to do it, go back. Here's the thing. There's no risk to this, because they won the game is the thing, right? The guardians won the game. You're never going to get any of those guys being like, he didn't say that we were going to offer a bid homer. They're not going to say that they won the game. They're excited.

They're pleased. They did it. I think this has, excuse my swear, we're doing five blades energy. Why not? Why not just say, why not? That's the thing. Did he just happen to see those three in the dugout or did he say that to everyone before the game? Was he just going around the entire team saying, you're going to hit it. It's just the Oprah approach to home run prediction. You get a homer today. It's like a shotgun blast

as opposed to kind of a more targeted approach. Just tell everyone that they're going to hit a home run in the game and then someone will probably. Right. And you can't help be right. So again, this is a situation where not to take anything away from the call or the magnitude of the moment, but I just want to follow up here. I just want some more questioning. Like it was only those three guys that you happened to. Did you only predict that in this game or do you tell them in every game?

Like how many predictions have you gotten wrong? Did you just go three for three and that's it? You have a hundred percent success rate and hit rate and home run rates? Or are we only hearing about this because these three, is this a selective telling of this story? So I need to know more because that would enhance the story for me if anything, if it turned out that Hernandez-Brito was a selective predictor, if it just so happened, like if he's not doing

this every day and he's not doing it to the entire team, but he just happened to go, he hit on all three predictions in this incredible momentous game, that'd be something. But if it then comes out that, oh, actually I predicted they were going to hit a home run in game one and game two too, and that didn't happen. And also I predicted that everyone else on the team was, it's just, you know, it's gotten out of hand a little bit. I think the rate of home run prediction and home run prediction reporting, and this is really maybe a new innovation. This is not a player. This is a broadcaster, but still just the like wide band approach,

just the mass prediction, you know, just not picking your spot at all. Just picking three spots at minimum. We had the triple TJ. Now we have the triple prediction. That's something that you don't typically hear because it does almost detract from the significance of it if you're just kind of willy nilly, just telling everyone unless it just so happens that those were the only three and you just got really lucky or got really smart.

So I need to know more is what I'm saying in order to evaluate the significance of this anecdote. I just really don't think that we as similarly powerful witches should be casting aspersions on other witches. We should have predictive witch solidarity. So I don't really know what the problem is here. I think people like to predict stuff. I think that people enjoy saying that they called it, and you can't say you called it if you don't tell anyone you're calling it. So you got to call it. I think people just want to call it. Yeah. Well, it's not necessarily a problem, but it's certainly a frequent talking point on this podcast. So just the latest frontier when it comes to home run prediction.

So we got a great game. Whatever else happens in this series and whoever wins, we got one that will live up to all of our expectations and go down through the ages as a great postseason game. Thanks, Guardians. Thanks, Yankees for entertaining us. Great job everyone involved. And now you just need to have one more win in you, Guardians. I mean, I know you want to have more than one win left in you, but I need you to have one more in you, okay? Just one, just like one, just do one, you know? Either them or the Mets, yeah. You're not picky, you'll take either.

I'm not picky. I will say that if Mets fans are looking for hope, because I saw many Mets fans and perhaps this can serve as our transition to that contest, which is less exciting to talk about because frankly it got pretty boring pretty fast. So yesterday before the Guardians beat the Yankees and we got an instant classic, I thought that their vibes, again using vibes and not momentum, was, the vibes were pretty dejected. The vibes were pretty poor. We assumed that they would lose. Not really based on vibes, but you know, the vibes did inform part of the picture. And we were wrong, because you can't predict baseball.

I will say the vibes coming off the Mets fan base this morning, and certainly last night, were fairly rancid. But who knows, maybe you turn it around. Maybe you win tonight, and then you get to keep playing, and then you'll feel silly for having been so dejected. So take some comfort in that. The other thing I'll say is that while I remain convinced that the Mets are doing too many bits, that they need to call some bits and just focus on a select number of bits rather than do so many.

And while I've called into question the presence of grimace, I will say this Ben, the decision to go to the ballpark in a fun and funky outfit, that's a high stakes choice for most fans, right? Because the broadcast camera loves to find people in fun, funny outfits, and the broadcast camera loves to find sad fans. There is very little that the broadcast camera and the broadcast crew like more than finding sad fans in the midst of a blowout. And when you can combine those two things, uh, catnip to producers, uh, at all of the networks that broadcast postseason baseball.

And we saw some of this, like we saw this in Houston because there are folks who go to Astros games dressed up in space suits and then they were losing and the camera found them and I'm sure that their friends and family sent them screenshots of it, right? They had to account for themselves. They might've, you know, been exposed as going to a baseball game instead of going to work when they called in sick. High stakes, right? Yeah. Here's the thing though. You can't tell who's in those grimace costumes. Could be anybody,

you know? It could be any person on the planet. It could be literally anyone. And so I think that for the purposes of being able to sit in one's sadness with some amount of privacy despite being in a public place, that maybe the Grimace thing is kind of brilliant actually, because I don't know who any of you are. I still think it's weird how many of you have managed to find Grimace costumes, but you could come into work the next day and say that you were a fan of an entirely different franchise and I would have no photo array to point to and say, aha, I saw you there, you and Scarlett Johansson, you were at that game. She didn't look very sad, but I think she's a Yankees fan.

Isn't she? Isn't she like canonically a Yankees fan? She was, it's why she was, I assume that's why she was wearing the Met hat, which I thought was quite clever. People were giving her guff about that. I thought it was funny. I thought it was fine. I don't know why anyone would be mad.

I don't think she was confused. No. I think part of the making of fun was that people were like, oh, does she know what we're, she knew she was at a baseball game. Yes, I think she was well aware. We can give her credit for that. I thought it was intentional.

I thought it was clever. I don't know what the discourse was. This was not a Mayor Adams situation, as far as I know, with the level of vitriol, greeting the hat wear. But yeah, I think either if you aren't a fan of that team or even that sport, but if you're going to the game with your partner who's a fan of that team

and you're not a fan of that team, it seemed like a good natured, self-deprecating way of acknowledging your own lack of affinity for that team without denigrating anyone else's, you know, just a lighthearted touch. I thought it was quite clever. Now, I will say that there is a version of the Met hat that says the Met's and is in Met's colors. And it's very cute. And I've seen it on a number of fashionable Mets fans, but again, it scrubs your hands

and is on a Mets fan. So it makes sense to me. And I'm sure she went in and she was like, look, they're doing all these bits. So surely I can do a bit. I mean, she's married to Colin Jost. Her entire life is bits at this point, right? It's just a bit, bit, bit, bit, bit, all the bits. What do you think they talk about?

Don't answer that question. I think about that every time I see them together though. I'm like, how did that happen? I don't understand. Colin Jost, by the way, went to Regis High School, just like me and Declan Cronin. So I- You don't need to brag about that one as much as Declan Cronin.

I guess I don't claim Colin Jost to the extent that I claim Declan, I guess. He's special. He's the only Regis Raider to have made the major leagues. So I do agree with you though that you really do have to commit to the bit if you are going to wear, if you're going to get all decked out and you are opening yourself up to being the butt of the broadcast camera and to being the sad fan who got all dressed up and then has to just wallow and marinate in that costume when your enthusiasm is sapped by the proceedings.

And I assume that there's a thriving market in grimace gear going on here, whether it is entirely sanctioned by McDonald's or not. But wait, it has to be sanctioned because they don't have a costume. I thought I read that. I thought that they have to like lend them a grimace. Oh yeah, to have the official grimace. Yes, but if you're just showing up as an unofficial grimace, I imagine there's some like a Times Square quality mascot costume going on there.

So just opportunists taking advantage of the Mets memes as long as they last. But yes, I could not blame any Mets fan for feeling deflated when the Dodgers are taking you to the cleaners and are shutting you down. The superstars showed up and did superstar stuff for the Dodgers and it's tough to combat that if that's going to happen. If Otani is going to come out of the gate hitting home run and then Mookie Betts is going to have himself a great game and Max Muncie just decides to stop making outs entirely and you continue to get good bullpen work and good enough Yamamoto work and that's that. So this Mets rotation, which has been such a big part of their success and to some extent an unlikely part of it, given just the names and the track records and the

injury histories and that rotation really has propelled them to this point in the regular season, in the postseason. And I guess has run out of steam to some extent in the NLCS here, though, whether that is on the pitchers or is just on the Dodgers, extremely selective approach at the plate, probably a bit of both, but the Dodgers will make you work. They will make you throw a lot of pitches. They will make you nibble. They will not chase when they're going well and they're going well right now.

So they have totally changed the perception of what a powerhouse this team is in the postseason from the middle of the NLDS to the middle of the NLCS where they just look really formidable right now, whether or not they're getting good work from their starters or not. I will admit that this is sort of a taxed metaphor, but do you remember in Independence Day? Did we already talk about this? Did I already make this comp on the pod, Ben? Sometimes it's hard to remember whether it's a Patriot livestream or the pods, but you definitely did bring up Bill Pullman and Bill Paxton and your confusion surrounding their roles and-

Okay. So remember though in Independence Day when Bill Pullman, Pullman, right? Yeah, that's correct. Okay, good. They don't know about the shields yet, Ben. They don't know about the shields. And so they send in the fighter jets, Will Smith, Harry Connick Jr., so talented. And then it becomes clear that it's going to go very badly for them because the alien craft-

Yeah, very demoralizing moment. Yeah. Yeah, has shields and so do their little guys. It's not just the big ship, it's all the little guys too. And then the fighter jets are getting blown up and here Connick Jr. is preparing to do something really stupid and then Will Smith is going to yell at him and tell him to put his mask on, that's an order of Marine, and he doesn't do it. But anyway, before that happens, Bill Pullman, Bill Pullman, as President Whitmore yells,

get him out of there. And that is how I feel about the Dodgers rotation a lot of the time in this postseason, where it's just like, they're in there too long, get them out of there. I know it's too short, but it's also too long. But the Dodgers lineup is the ship before Randy Quaid gets involved, right? Where it's just like, they're gonna wreck ya. They're just gonna wreck ya, Ben. And that's what the lineup's like when it, you know, here's how good that Dodgers lineup

is. Will Smith has been, well, he was pretty bad for long stretches of the season. And he has been, as Jay Jaffe wrote for us long stretches of the season. And he has been, as Jay Jaffe wrote for us today at FanGraphs, like the most productive of the remaining catchers. But that's like really damning with faint praise because the other remaining catchers have been so bad and Will Smith has not been good. He's just been marginally more productive. He's like the only one of them with a positive WRC plus, which is, that's a rough go. But even with him in there and playing every day, right? They haven't started Austin Barnes this postseason. No, although things have sunk to the point that I saw

Austin Barnes trending on Twitter. No, everyone relax. That's ridiculous. I know the things are not going well for Will Smith right now. Man, we're bringing it back to Will Smith. You, I know, I know that things are not going well for Will Smith right now. Man, we're bringing it back to Will Smith. See, this is actually perfect, right? This is a- Oh, wow. Tied it all together. Yeah, wow.

I didn't even think of it, man. But all of that to say that you're frustrated by Will Smith's relative lack of production, and that's understandable because he hasn't been hitting well. But here's the thing, it would be so much worse with Austin Barnes. And I'm sorry, Austin, like, you know, they clearly like you because you're just sticking around. But it's not, that's not a good, that's not an answer to this problem. That's not a solution to the problem at hand. No. But this lineup is so formidable. And, Freddie Freeman has one foot and didn't even play yesterday, you know? Like one foot, Ben. Yeah, it didn't hold them back at all. So

I would assume that if things go like they did yesterday, the Dodgers will be shut out in the next game and you'll get your wish of the World Series not starting until Friday. I don't know what will happen in the Yankees Guardians game, but we have tempted fate for someone, I suppose. We'll see. We'll talk about that next time and we've got a live stream to do, which will have happened by the time people hear this. We're mentally time shifting constantly as we record these things to put ourselves in the time and space in which people will be listening to these podcasts. It's tough to keep these things straight sometimes. Won't anyone think of the postseason podcasters?

So I have an email or two left over from last time that we didn't get to. I have a stat blast. I have a couple follow-ups. So we talked about reviewing plays and whether there should be more replay review last time. We answered an email about that. And one thing I meant to mention, which Patreon supporter Raymond brought up in our Discord group, is that there is a category of play that would be tough to review, which is those that require intent, would be tough to review, which is those that require intent, such as did the runner intentionally interfere with the throw, because maybe everything looks a little intentional in slow motion or after you watch it many times. And that might be something where it could actually be counterproductive for you to review it via replay. So we talked about the subjectivity

of certain calls and we talked about some may just be tough to actually determine what happened on replay, but that's another one too, just that sometimes you're gauging the intent of a runner or someone on the field. Replay might not be illuminating in that case. I'm usually open to, yeah, if you can slow things down and you can watch it just an infinite number of times, you will probably be better than in real time. But

that's kind of a complicated case, I think. Yeah, I agree. It's tricky. Mm-hmm. Yes. And Raymond also mentioned, which I kind of alluded to, but I don't know if I specified when we were talking about whether there needs to be a new title for Canadian baseball team executives. Should they be prime ministers instead of presidents of baseball operations? I propose governor general. And I like that because again, the governor general is kind of the intermediary almost is, you know, between the monarch, the king or the queen and the prime minister and the governor general in Canada actually appoints the Prime Minister. And so it makes sense in that respect that the owner would be equivalent to the

monarch and then the POBO would be the Governor General and then the GM would be the PM. But as Raymond notes, the Governor General is a largely ceremonial position. So they have these powers, but they're kind of just going through the motions and the powers are sort of exercised on the advice of the prime minister, which is sort of a rubber stamp situation. The governor general technically appoints the prime minister, but really does the prime minister's bidding for the most part. And if you're a Pobo, you want to have the power. You don't want to invert the power relationship there and actually be taking orders from the GM.

So that is yet another reason why we should probably just stick with POBO in addition to that, just being a charming term, just in general, and us not needing to make an exception for one team of the 30. Also, we talked about whether one can have a sharp fly ball, whether that is allowable terminology, and we were talking about potential alternatives. James, Patreon supporter, proposed booming fly ball. How do you feel about that?

Because we talked about- I like booming. Yeah, we talked about deep fly ball maybe as being preferable to sharp, but booming, I kind of like booming. And Patreon supporter, Broccoli, probably not a real name, but just a Discord username, said that the opposite of a lazy fly ball

should be a towering fly ball, since Sharp and lazy refer more to trajectory slash exit velocity, while deep refers to distance. A fly ball can be both deep and lazy. I guess that that could prompt a whole other line of debate, but I don't think it can be both lazy and towering. I think that's, that's probably true. Can it be lazy, but towering? No, I think that towering suggests like a force, you know, there's like a

there's a majesty to it, yeah. Right. Towering. But it does suggest a great height, but it doesn't, but Ben, does it say anything about the trajectory, right? Does it say anything about the launch angle? Cause like you can have a towering pop-up and that's not doing you any good at all. It's just straight up, come straight down. That's true. I guess you can have a towering pop-up and that's not doing you any good at all. It's just straight up, come straight down. Jared Sienaar That's true. I guess you can have a towering pop-up. Danielle Pletka You can. Tower over you.

Jared Sienaar All right. Well, maybe we should stick with booming then. I have no objection to booming. Booming fly ball. Danielle Pletka May I return briefly to the Canadian silliness that we entertained earlier? I think to my mind, the primary argument for keeping it the same is that it's impossible now to know what anyone's job is actually in baseball. And so I think that, you know, in the instances where we can identify this group of individuals are peers in terms of like the broad contours of their responsibilities, their relative place in the front office hierarchy, proximity to ownership, ability to make decisions. Like if those, if we identify those folks as all having roughly the same set of things

they're responsible for, then I'm of the opinion we should call them the same thing so that we know who the hell any of them are. Cause like, who are, what do they do? What are their jobs? It's impossible. It's like when I went to my 10 or 20 year, excuse me, reunion and I was like, I don't know what your job is. Like, what do you do all day?

You get in your car, you drive to the office and then you, and no one could tell me. I mean, they could, but I didn't understand it half the time. So if it's all the same, like, let's call them the same thing to combat the title creep. You know? Yes. Life is complicated enough as it is with chief baseball officers and such. So we might as well just try to keep it to the terms where we feel like we're on safe ground. We also subsequently received another pedantic question from Ari, Patreon supporter, who says,

How can you not be pedantic about baseball? Bat flips. The phrase bat flips has become far too overarching these days. A bat flip should be just that, a bat tossed end over end, preferably with a follow through. Bat tosses, bat spikes, bat drops are all cool and could be celebrated, but they are not bat flips. So do you think that since you just advocated for actually restricting the possibility space somewhat when it comes to describing things that we should only have one job title to

talk about the same job, do you think that bat flips as just a one size fits all? They did something with the bat in a celebratory fashion, right? They hit a big hit and then they propelled the bat somewhere away from them. Can we just call that a blanket bat flip or should we be more specific about the actual trajectory and launch angle of the bat? I think that there needs to be a bit more specificity because I do think that there's a material difference, you know, between like a flip and part of this is that like we all just have the Batista, like that's the, the er example, right? That's the peak of the

pinnacle of the form. I think that there are flips that are not quite as demonstrative as that, but still would be considered flips. Whereas, which is funny because it's not like it goes end over end really. Like, you know, that's not actually the, the motion we're trying to, you're like flipping it away from you. It's really, I mean, they're really all tosses more than they are flips, aren't they? Yeah. In fact, Batista, it's almost unfortunate that Batista became labeled a bat flip because that just doesn't convey the emphatic nature of what he did. It's almost like our booming towering sharp discussion, right? Like there's a spectrum, a continuum here and some bat flips. I mean,

flip sounds, you know, kind of, it can be casual, it can be dismissive, it could be like you're basically letting go of the bat. Whereas Battista's was really a bat fling. I mean, he was really kind of violently throwing that thing. It was a bat whip really, like a flip I just, I think of as being kind of a casual motion. And sometimes it is, sometimes it's just a jaunty, I'm just going to kind of toss the bat up in the air and let it go. But you know, just like the momentum of my follow through. But what Battista did was kind of, you know, there is a broad But what Battista did was kind of, you know, there is a broad range of things that are described as bat flips. It's not technically incorrect to call that a bat flip, but I don't know that that conveys

just like the distance that bat went and the way it was propelled and the gesticulation, the motion of his arm as he did that. That was a much more emphatic flip than some things that I've seen called flip. So I do think we should specify, I do think we should have a taxonomy of sorts. You want to allow for a range, you know? I think that this is an area where you don't have a need for, like you don't want to be too loosey goosey.

You want these things to have descriptive power, right? But I don't think it's like Pobo. I don't think it's like titles where we have like bat flip, descriptive creep. I think you want to be able to describe the full range of feeling, the way that the bat moves through the air, the position of the body relative to it. It's like this beautiful artistic thing, you know? You don't just say, hey, that person's doing ballet, you know? Well, maybe you do. I don't know. I might lack the lingo. Let me try again. You wouldn't look at, I don't know, name a ballerina. You wouldn't look at, I don't know, name a ballerina. You wouldn't look at a famous ballerina.

I don't know any of the ballerinas now. I don't know them. But you wouldn't look at a famous ballerina and Marshall Graham is- You just call any ballerina a ballerina because you don't know the name. So I guess that- Wait, but no, no, but that's not the, that's not, this isn't working as well as I thought it would. You wouldn't just look at dance and say, all the dances are the same, all the kinds of

dance are the same. That would be ridiculous because they're so different. You know, they're too numerous for me to even name. And we're going to get emails about ballerinas. I'm sure there are many very talented ballerinas. Do they still call them ballerinas? Ballerinas, ballerinas. I'm sure there are many very talented ballerinas. Do they still call them ballerinas? Ballerinas? Ballerinas? Ballet dancer? Do they? I don't know. I think that they are.

I don't know. I don't know what the vibe is like in that part of the dance world. Couldn't say. But anyway, like you wouldn't reduce the incredible human expression that is dance to just dance. You wouldn't just say that all the dances are the same. They're all very different dances, Ben. You know, and Batflips are like dance. Even if I'm clearly not knowledgeable enough to make this comparison work. But I think I'm right in the broad strokes there. Broad strokes, is that kind of dance?

That's kind of swimming. No, that's wrong too. So we should classify the choreography of whatever you're doing with that bat, however you're releasing it, however you're propelling it, we should give you credit for your creativity and your individuality there. I agree. And we've seen just so many more bat flips

that the standard bat flip that's become kind of de rigore and perhaps it doesn't generate the same excitement and the same social media sort of sensation. So I think you've seen maybe a broadening of what players will do, which I welcome. I think it's good that we can have bat flips and we can have bat tosses and we can have bat drops. And you can even reject that and say, no, I'm going to do a, I'm going to do a Kyle Schwab or thumbs up. I'm going to do a Francisco indoor, not even show that I recognize that I have just hit a huge Homer. I'm just going to run around the bases. And it's almost like

reclaiming impassivity or something. It's just when celebration becomes the norm, you can almost take it back in the other direction and then it becomes novel and fun. So yeah, I welcome just a broader spectrum of celebration and that applies to both the bat trajectory, the bat physics on display and the language that we apply to them. So I'm with you on this one, Ari. We should watch our words when we watch the bats. All right. Misty Copeland, she's a famous ballerina. Yes, sure.

There you go. Yeah, heard of her. I remember I couldn't, I don't, I was having a hard time remembering which ballerinas are real ballerinas and which ballerinas are characters in center stage. And I didn't want to name a fake person. That doesn't do anyone any good. But Misty Copeland is very real and quite talented. So there you go.

Yeah. I mean, people will still cite Baryshnikov, right? When you're reaching for a dancer, which is not really a current reference if you're plugged into that world. Maybe that's because of his star turn on Sex and the City, very memorable to me. But I guess when you- What a terrible character. When you define the- One of the worst of the Carrie boyfriends and there were a lot of stinkers.

That's saying something. Yeah, there were some that, but he might, I don't know if he's not at the top of the list, Big's at the top of the list, but I'm right about that. Even worse than Burger, Burger. The post-sit note was rough though, man. Anyway, Pop Culture Friday is unaffectively wild. Yeah, we'll save our Carrie Bradshaw boyfriend ranking for a Patreon bonus episode maybe sometime. Spoiler, they were almost all bad. Yes. But when you define the form, when you become so associated with something that your name is synonymous with that thing, then I guess that can last even after you are long gone from that field,

your impact lingers on. And so Jose Batista, he's the Brishnikov of the bat flip, right? We will always think of Jose Batista when we think of bat flips, because that was just such a defining flip, whether or not flip was actually the most apt term for it. The Margaux Fontaine of bat flips. Yeah, there you go. Here's a question that I meant to answer last time and then I figured, well, this is not pressing. This can wait until the next episode or really any episode, but here we are. So this is a question from Shane who said,

I was watching a Mariners game recently. Couldn't have been that recently really at this point. I don't know why I'm so mean about the Mariners these days. Why are you saying? Is it because I tell Yankee fans to chill out sometimes? I don't think it's that unless- Is it latent? Like a reflexive instinctual, yeah, some sort of like, and many born of 95, the fire that forged

us as fans and we're just forever on opposite sides of that divide. I don't know if it's that or what, but apologies for picking on you and your Mariners. But- I mean, to be clear, they don't do a lot to like inspire a different tone, but it does feel targeted sometimes, I tell you. This email was sent in September when the Mariners season was still ongoing. And Shane said, I was watching Mariners game recently with my dad and he noticed the Yankees, Alex Verdugo wearing number 24 when playing against Seattle

at T-Mobile Park. Of course, 24, famously the number one by Ken Griffey Jr. as a Mariner. My dad said something like, he shouldn't be allowed to wear that number in this ballpark, it's retired. That got me thinking, what kind of chaos, couldn't help but wonder, I guess as Kerry would thinking, what kind of chaos, couldn't help but wonder, I guess as Kerry would say, what kind of chaos would it cause teams if they couldn't wear

the retired numbers of opposing teams anytime they played in that team's ballpark? So basically, what if numbers were retired for any player who entered that park rather than just for that team that retired the number? What kind of unforeseen chaos would this cause for players, teams, and clubhouse managers if teams that played the Yankees at Yankee Stadium weren't allowed to wear any of the numbers in Monument Park or teams that played in Seattle couldn't wear 11 or 24?

I wonder how teams would approach these problems, just lots of spare uniforms for everyone and basically wearing a different jersey number for every series. I can think of a few problems it would bring up, And I'm curious for your take on how this would change baseball either for the worse or for the better. I think that the way that they would go about it would simply be to, to forego numbers altogether, right? That you would find some other mechanism if including full names because you can't

have them changing when you go. Like that's wild. It would be so wild to be like, oh, I'm whatever at home. But then when I go to, I mean, Yankee Stadium is really where this becomes a problem because they just have so many retired numbers. It's wild. It would be a problem for the Yankees as visiting players too, because they only have so many numbers that are allowable. And then you go to other places where those numbers are retired. But you could have alts, right? I mean, you know, like we have so many different alternate jerseys and uniforms as it is.

So you could just have your backup numbers and you could say, okay, what's your uniform number? And then every player would have to submit their backups. Like you'd have to rank all of your preferred numbers. It would get pretty complicated. It would get so complicated. And for what? Like complicated in service of what exactly? Right. That's the question. That's why I think that what would really end up happening would be that you would simply get rid of them.

You'd simply get rid of numbers altogether and just put guys' names back there, I guess. You know, there's some precedent for it. Like JD Martinez has just his full name on his jersey. Yeah, sure. I mean, we have names with numbers and so like you don't always need the number. And, and we have an inability to remember most numbers if they're not retired, maybe sometimes even if they are. So it's not something I pay that close attention to frankly, because I've never

really, unless we're in a spring training game situation or amateur ball or whatever, like where you actually need, you have a program or something, or you need to know who is that person. You know, you don't usually have that problem in the majors or if you do, you can resolve it more easily. So, you know, these are recognizable names and faces, if not numbers, there are other recourses, but if you just had a number, if a team insisted that that number was just so sacred in that space, who are you to come into T-Mobile and wear the vaunted, the revered 24, you dishonor the memory of the kid.

You, you must cease and desist from wearing that in our ballpark. And then you extended that courtesy to other teams when you visit their place of business. Then I just, I wonder, this could probably be stat blasted, I imagine, just how huge a headache this would be league wide. Like how many contingency numbers would you have to have on file? Would you maybe have some sort of like hot swap iron on situation with the numbers? Maybe you'd develop something like that, which could be cheap. Another way in which the uniforms could look worse and be less durable, but maybe if you had a more easily swappable system, right?

So that you could just bring a bunch of numbers and then sew them on or just, you know, Velcro them or something. It's like something like that. So that, okay, we're on a road trip. We know that we have this home stand here and then we're going to go to a few different parks and we'll plan ahead. And, you know, maybe your traveling secretary gets involved and your clubbies and they are proactive about it and they know we have the database, the

spreadsheet we keep of all the retired numbers everywhere we go. And so we have planned for this and we've brought all of these backup numbers, which we can then affix to the generic Jersey and then you could sort of swap it as you go. So probably there'd be some innovation when it came to actually having to switch your uni number, which you don't usually have to do that frequently throughout the season. I just feel like it would fundamentally sort of misunderstand the purpose because the number is just a placeholder for the person. What you're really valorizing is this individual player's contribution to our franchise, right? You're sort of saying, we're making a space in the history books of the Mariners, the Yankees, whoever, right?

And saying this person occupies a special place there, that to understand the story of this team, you necessarily have to include this person, otherwise it is an incomplete telling of the franchise. And that doesn't have anything to do with other people really. It's not about saying, and therefore we must conquer the number whatever when it comes to our ballpark. I don't think that that's really the purpose.

It sits up there and is meant to be honored and sort of understood to be important by the people whose history it is, right? And you're going to have, obviously you're going to have interludes in that history from other players and other teams just necessarily, but I don't think that it's about saying that your story has to be everyone's story, right? That's why we have individual team Hall of Fame's and number of retirements, and then we have the Hall of Fame, right? That's where you set sort of baseball's story.

And that's part of why, here's another argument that I've just found my way into. I also think that you want to have the ability to have an elevated, special designation that everyone has to observe, right? Like there's a reason that Jackie's number is retired across baseball. And if we had to then go into every ballpark and be like, well, that number, which means something very specific and so important to the history of not only the game, but like the country more generally is now being put next to all of our stuff where you can't wear those. I don't know, it just clouds the picture, right? I think we want to keep, you want to keep the ability to have your own special franchise

level things, but then there needs to be something that sits at a macro level that is about the game more generally. And I think that having all of this crossing of numbers and having to take a different, it clouds it and that's silly. Don't do that. That would be so confusing and weird. You're not dishonoring the memory of that player playing for that franchise because he didn't play for your franchise.

So there is no memory of that, right? There's no history of him playing for you. And so it's not as if you are casting aside his accomplishments by handing out his number to someone else. You never had that number for your team. So yes, if you have a Jackie, some people campaign for Roberto Clemente's number to be retired league wide. If you have someone of that sort of stature, then yes. But otherwise, I don't know why it would be looked down as an affront to wear that number on a different team. And that's not the spirit in which that number being assigned by other teams is meant at all.

It's not supposed to be a jab. Yes, but it would be a fun logistical question. That's why it intrigues me just to know how many problems would this cause? What would the mechanics of adapting to this system be? So yeah, maybe that's a stat blast challenge for someone out there. All right, I will wrap up with some stat blasting here. We are in mind as our OBS blasts And then they'll tease at some interest Who did but discuss it at length And analyze it for us in amazing ways Here's to day's STAT blast

One portion of this stat blast has to do with your mariners, but it's not specifically targeting your mariners in fact. They're not being singled out here. So Michael Mountain, listener, Patreon supporter, sometime guest on the program where he has developed fun stats, almost like Bill James toy type stats and has shared them with us and with the Effectively Wild community. And his latest creation is called the Playoff Despair Index. And so he has tried to quantify the level of despair that each franchise is currently feeling and has felt at various points in

the past, just based on their proximity to or lack of proximity to recent success in the playoffs. And so he has decided he's awarded points based on your accumulated despair. So I want to get your thoughts on the system and also the current ranking of the system. So when you win the World Series, you start at zero and then you accumulate despair from there. One point for each season since your last playoff appearance. So the way this works is you basically accumulate despair points as you get further removed from your successes as a franchise.

So one point for each season since your last playoff appearance, one point for each season since your last division series appearance that counts only from 2013 onward, as otherwise this would just be a duplicate of post-season appearance. One point for each season

since your last championship series appearance. So this is 95 onward, where this would also be duplicating postseason appearance. One point for each season since your last world series appearance. And this counts 69 onward, as this would be a duplicate for postseason appearance. So it becomes easier to accumulate despair points

as time goes on and as the playoffs keep expanding and as we get more and more playoff rounds, just because you get more points. But also, I guess that kind of makes sense because you could say that there is more despair, I guess, if you are unable to make the playoffs or make it to these rounds because it's easier to be in that field.

Like the playoff field is expanded. So I think it elicits more despair for you not to make it than it did when only two teams made it, even if there were fewer teams then, right? Okay. And then one point for each season since your last championship. Okay. So if you add up all of these points, the current calculation, the Seattle Mariners are actually not number one in the playoff despair index. But isn't that a function of how relatively recent their franchise is? Well, yeah, I guess that or the fact that they've

made the playoffs one time fairly recently. So there was that. Oh right, but they haven't won a championship ever. No, they have, right, exactly. So the top despair team, according to the stat is the Pittsburgh Pirates who have 140 points to the Mariners, the second place Mariners, 123 points. Would you say that that tracks? Would you say that the level of despair experienced by Pirates fans?

And of course this is not taking into account ownership situations or like payroll or nutting or, you know, 54% quotes or any of these other things that go into fandom. It's purely when was your last playoff appearance and your last trip to each of these rounds and your last title, et cetera. So does that sound plausible? Does that pass the sniff test to you that the Pirates would be number one in the Playoff Despair Index? LS. Yeah, I guess. Like, because you're not doing Franchise Despair Index, right? They're not, I wouldn't have them first if we were ranking like Franchise Despair, because then you're taking things like ownership and whatnot into account, and then you can't

do better or worse, I suppose, than Oakland. But from a playoff perspective, yeah, I guess I could see that. I'm trying to think of who else. I do wonder if it is perhaps not taking, because it's a simple binary, right? You either made the playoffs or you don't and that's how it accounts for things. Yes, and then whether you advanced. Yeah, so I mean, it's the Pirates,

it's been a while since they won a series, of course, 1979, and then, you know, it's now been, well, it will have been a decade by the time next season rolls around since their last playoff appearance. And each of their last two playoff appearances was just a wild card's loss. Right. And then 2013 they lost in the division series.

It's, you know, been a while. It's been since 92 that they advanced to a championship series. Right. So it's, it's been a while since they got deep into the postseason in addition to being a while since they've made the playoffs at all and since they won a championship, so. I mean, I don't know if I sat down

and thought about it for 20 minutes if they'd be precisely who I'd have at the very top, but I do think that it's conceivable to me that they'd be in the top tier, you know, of teams. Yeah. And if all playoff rounds were distributed fairly, Michael says, so you make the postseason once every, you know, three years, like 30 teams and 12 playoff teams each year, then the ALCS or the NLCS once every eight years, if it were all just distributed evenly, then a hypothetical average team

would see their playoff despair index fluctuate between zero and 60. So 15 teams are currently above that number and could claim to be due for some postseason success. I think the median score is 55 right now. So the Pirates, the Mariners, they're more than doubling the average despair, which if anything, it seems like probably more than that.

Again, it's hard not to factor in like all of the other things that color the fan experience here. This is a simplistic, but precisely targeted kind of stat. It's just your playoff record, your recent playoff records, not everything else that goes into making a team fun or unfun to follow. So the rest of the top of the leaderboard,

you have Pirates 140 points, Mariners 123 points, Reds 113 points, Brewers 107 points, A's 95 points, Baltimore 93 points, Twins 90 points, A's 95 points, Baltimore 93 points, Twins 90 points, Padres 84 points, Guardians 84 points, though that is subject to change. It would go down to 76 if they make the World Series or zero if they win. And then you've got the Blue Jays and the Angels tied at 79, the Rockies at 78, the Marlins at 68. And then you have the Tigers and the White Sox tied at 63. I guess they would be the closest to the median.

And again, this is because the White Sox, it hasn't been that long since they made the playoffs, but it feels like it has been a very long time. So the other, I don't know whether you'd call it a flaw or a limitation or it's just outside the purview of this stat is that it doesn't take into account how abysmal you are in the regular season. It's only, did you make the playoffs or not? So it doesn't really distinguish between a competitive team that just ended up on the playoff bubble and didn't

make it and the White Sox who were like the worst team by some measures ever or in the modern era. Right. So there's a different level of despair associated with those things. Although there is always the conversation of is it better to have contended and lost than never to have contended at all. Right. better to have contended and lost than never to have contended at all, right? Well, and I was just about to say, you know, there's, we have this like, we have this understanding of like making the postseason as good. And I think that that is like an

objectively true thing because you can't win a World Series if you're not in the postseason. But then you like talk to fans of teams in the postseason as they are progressing through the postseason. And they are the most nervous, miserable group of folks, not all equally and not all the time, but it takes a real emotional toll. And I'm not saying you should adjust the misery index or whatever, because at least you get to root for your team, right? And sometimes your team goes far, or they win it all, or even if they don't, they win some exciting games, right? Whatever ends up happening with Cleveland, you'll always have that game from Thursday,

so that's something at least. It's not everything, but it's definitely not nothing. But also, it can be agonizing. It can be the worst. I mean, one of the few things, I generally prefer baseball's playoff format, I think really to any of the major sport leagues because it's like, it's a lot, but it's the right amount of time, right? Like hockey, basketball, it goes on forever. Like it feels like they're in the playoffs for like six months. And football is in some ways too short because you just have to, by virtue of how violent the sport is, you end up having to play single elimination. But the one thing that is, I think,

good about single elimination is that you don't have to sit in that feeling for more than one game at a time. You don't have an entire series worth of, oh my God, are they really going to do this again? How do we account for that? How do we do it? Yeah. And if you look at the other end of the leaderboard, so of course you have the Rangers just with a minimum there at five points, they won the World Series last year and it just sort of

resets. Now, I guess you could say that maybe there should be some sort of, uh, accounting for accumulated despair or like a crude despair over time, where maybe you win that world series and you get the monkey off your back and you feel that euphoria, but also there's sort of a psychic load that you don't entirely shed, right? If you like grew up with this team that wasn't winning. Now, like if you're a Red Sox fan, if you had the experience of coming of age

as a Red Sox fan, since they've won fairly frequently versus when you've watched them when they were the cursed Red Sox and they had heartbreaking losses. Sure. Now at some point you have to let go of that grief and pain and suffering and hopefully it's wiped away to some extent by all the successes, but you still will feel a twinge. You'll still smart from 86 and 67, et cetera, right?

Like all of the close calls and the losses that would stay with you if you were formed, if those were your formative experiences as a fan. So I guess you could say that there should be some recognition of that. Like if the Mariners were to win the World Series next year or something, let's entertain that hypothetical. And I do not mean to torture you here with that thought. But if that happened, then would it all just be wiped away and it would no longer cause you pain that there was this extremely long playoff drought and you went so long without even making a World Series Lettle and winning one? Would it just feel the same as if you're a team that had recently won one and then won another? probably not quite, right? But I guess when you're bathed

in the warmth of that championship glow, while you're in that post-championship grace period, maybe it does feel similar. Maybe it even feels better because you got through all that and you made it through the gauntlet and you finally won one. Maybe you feel even better than the fan of a team that wins one on the regular, more or less, right? And then it takes some time for the pain and the despair to build back up again. I don't want to say that people have to get over it. If you've had a near lifetime of disappointment, moving on from that takes some amount of time. I do think you need to like let in new information and

if your team wins a championship, you have to say I've had it rough, right? Not that I have it rough, I guess is the distinction that I would draw. I mean, it's like I said about my old coworker who was like still sore about losing in 95 as a Yankees fan and a very nice guy to be clear. But like on the one hand, I think that happened at an earlier moment in his life and was maybe formative to his sports experience. But it's like, and then what happened, you know, like at a certain point you do, I think, benefit from getting over things if you're able to access a new feeling. HOFFMAN So Michael showed who was the leader in this despair index at all times in the modern

era, 1901, and for the first couple decades of the century, it changed hands. The belt, the playoff despair belt changed hands several times. I mean, the, the world series was new then the modern world series from 1926 through 1943, the St. Louis Browns held the playoff despair belt continuously. And then it was the Phillies from 44 to 49, the White Sox from 50 to 58. It was Baltimore from 59 to 65. And then the Phillies again, 66 to 75.

From 1976 to 2002, the Cubs reigned throughout that entire period, more than a quarter century as the most despairing team. Then the White Sox reclaimed control from 2003 to 2004, which is interesting because that's before the Cubs, of course, so one won, but they had gotten to the NLCS again, right? And this was before the White Sox ended their drought in 05. So really it was possessed by Chicago for just large swaths of history, whether it was one team or another, they were wrestling for control. And then after the White Sox won in 2005, it went back to the Cubs, of course, from 2005 to 2015 until they finally won one.

And then the Nationals held it from 2016 to 2018. The Mariners held it from 2019 to 2021. And the Pirates have held it from 2022 to present. He also provides each franchise's peak despair or misery season. I will link to the spreadsheet if you want to check out your franchise's peak or nadir, I suppose. But the all time high is the Cubs in 2014. Before they broke through, before they experienced some playoff success prior to their World Series,

when they reached a playoff despair index of 172 points. That was as high as it's gotten, and I hope for the sake of all fans that it never reaches that peak again. So there are five teams currently suffering through franchise high levels of misery. And that's the Pirates, the Reds, the Brewers, the A's for any number of reasons, and the Rockies. The Rockies are another one where like until very recently they were not good most of the time, but they hadn't been that bad in the regular season, which again, this does not take into account.

This does not take into account that the Angels have never lost a hundred games in a season. For instance, there are factors here that are beyond the scope, but the league leading pirates have been tied for fifth or higher each year, dating back to 2005, except for 2013 when they were sixth. The Brewers have been tied for 10th or higher each year dating back to 1991. The Cardinals, the Dodgers, and the Braves are the only teams whose high water marks in the pre-playoffs era, 1901 to 68, when the regular season winner went straight on to the World Series. Those are the only teams whose high water marks came then. And, uh, as I said, you accumulate misery slower when there are fewer rounds of the playoffs.

So you could look at this as saying those teams were bad for a long time back in the early 20th century, or that they've been impressively consistent in making deep postseason appearances since the seventies. And I guess the Dodgers case is interesting because in 1940, they were 20 years removed from their last pennant and had never won a World Series trophy, giving them 60 points. Then it took them another 15 years to get a ring, but several more World Series appearances ensured that the Misery Index never reached that height again, unless you were then miserable that you kept getting so close and just weren't quite there.

But because it took them so long to get back to another series after 88, they almost managed to exceed that misery index in modern times despite repeat visits to the NLCS and double-digit playoff appearances while the misery index was rising. So they got their number up to 56 after the 2016 season when they had a 4-2 NLCS loss to the Cubs before finally breaking through, making it to the World Series in 2017 and 2018. If both of those seasons had ended in the CS instead, they would have gotten to 60. And if 2018 had ended in the NLTS, they would have gotten to 61.

And of course, they're hoping that they will get back to zero shortly. Finally, 16 franchises currently have a higher playoff despair index than the highest mark the Yankees have ever had as a franchise. So that puts things into perspective for Yankees fans, or maybe it doesn't, but perhaps it should. So the high water mark for the Yankees was 42 after the 1994 season when they had been bad for a while and certainly bad by Yankee standards for a while.

So 16 franchises now have a higher playoff despair index than the Yankees have ever had when they had fallen on the hardest times for that franchise. So even when it's been bad, it's just never been that bad for the Yankees, but that's not news to us. It may be news to some Yankees fans. Yeah, it might be, you know, it might be, but also maybe not. Maybe they all have wonderful perspective and I've been unfair this whole time. Could be true. Well, start spreading the news if it is news. So I wanted to end here with, I wrote something for

The Ringer on this subject with the help of frequent stop-loss correspondent, Ryan Nelson, but I had a couple thoughts prompted by recent observations that Joshian has made at his excellent baseball newsletter at Joshian.com. I alluded to this briefly on our last episode, that there were some indications that maybe the ball is not traveling so well in the playoffs this year. And you know, there'd been some indications that maybe offense was down. I mean, it was down late in the regular season. And so there was a question of like, oh, you know, the usual suspicion about the ball that they do a switcheroo on us here. Do we have to pay attention to whether the ball is carrying this year? And so Joe wrote about this too, and he noted that this season,

2024 and the postseason, the difference between actual slugging percentage and expected slugging percentage has been 63 points. So the expected slug is 63 points higher than the actual slug, which would suggest that maybe the ball isn't carrying so well, that players are hitting the ball hard and the ball is not rewarding them by going as far and producing as favorable results. And if you look at previous post-se seasons, there's pretty much always some underperformance

there because you know, the X stats, the expected stats are calibrated to that full season. And in October, like you've got colder weather, right? The ball is not carrying as well. And so you would expect there to be some underperformance, but 63 points is a lot. The previous high was 37 points in 2019. So like, you know, you're getting close to doubling the previous high underperformance there. And you see the same thing with the gap between Woba and ex-Woba. And so if you're looking at the expected stats right now, you might think, what the heck is going on here? There's something happening with the ball.

But I think what is happening here, I mean, there might be more to the story, but this is an aspect of the story, is that the X stats that you see at Baseball savant, the stat cast based quality of contact metrics have not been recentered this season. So they, they recenter those stats for each year's run environment. And sometimes they do it at the end of the season, and sometimes they do it at the All-Star break. So that if you have a different run environment, then you're not comparing,

you're not kind of modeling the expected stats based on the previous year's run environment, right? Like we see this with projections too, if you're Zips or Steamer or whoever, like you have to decide, what do we think the scoring environment's gonna be this year? And sometimes you might kind of like over project everyone

across the board, like the league as a whole, cause offense is down or it's up or whatever, right? And so the X stats re-center themselves so that you're kind of calibrating to that season's conditions, asating to that season's conditions as opposed to previous season's conditions. So I asked Tom Tango if the X stats have been re-centered this season, because sometimes it happens mid-season and he said that it has not happened yet this year and so we have to wait until after the World Series to make an apples to apples, X stats to X stats comparison.

So it could be that there's some signal there, but we just can't really say based on the X stats, which is, I guess, unfortunate because it makes them maybe less useful, at least for this application, if you're just comparing individuals against each other, I guess it can still be useful. But if you're looking league wide, this is not necessarily the smoking gun that it might seem to be if you're looking at baseball savant. So be careful everyone out there, be aware of the lack of re-centering and use your baseball savant, your stat-cast stats responsibly. And if you look at just the postseason slugging percentage, which we can do with the handy dandy FanGraphs playoff leaderboards, we have right now the seventh lowest slugging percentage in a postseason since 1993, which was, you know,

when we started getting a livelier ball and a higher BABIP and higher home run rate and everything. So it's the seventh lowest postseason slugging percentage over that span, even after last night, which given the Dodgers and everyone homering in Yanks guardians that kind of boosted it a bit. But then 2024 regular season had the fifth lowest regular season slugging percentage over that same span. So it actually is fairly in line with the regular season, which itself was kind of down, not just power-wise, but also slugging percentages is driven by batting average as well. And that was down too. So I'm not seeing any very strong indication that something weird is happening here. Anecdotally, eye test-wise, I haven't been fooled frequently either. There have been some post-seasons,

was it? I think it was 2019 when it sure seemed like something suspicious was happening and there were all these big fly balls that everyone thought was gone. In fact, wasn't there a Will Smith one? But that whole year was weird. Yeah. I mean, yeah, 2017, 2019 was peak home run rate, but then it seemed to change a little bit. 19 was like peak home run rate, but then it seemed to change a little bit. But I haven't had that happen so much this postseason where I've seen a ball off the bat and thought, oh, that's gone. And then it wasn't. I don't know. Has that happened to you? I haven't felt like things are off particularly. I think the only home potential home run that didn't become one that I thought was gone

off the bat and ended up not going out was Winker. I thought he had hit a grand slam. I really did. It sounded like a grand slam off the bat. And then it was just a fly out, a booming one, who could say? A fly out to write that Betts settled under without having to move all that much as it turned out. So there were a couple last night, but also it was cold. I don't think that any of them have, there've been ones that I thought were going to go out and didn't, but none of them struck me as like suspicious. It doesn't feel like there's been a deliberate, there's nothing, no conspiracies here kind of a feeling. Yeah. My spidey sense about the ball has not been triggered. We're all on the watch always, but no, this has not stood out to me particularly.

The one I was thinking of, the infamous one, it was NLDS game five in 2019. It was Will Smith, right? That's right. That was a Clayton Kershaw game and the lead had been blown, a 3-1 lead in fact, and he comes up two outs and one on. Then he got Dodger's fans very excited. This was not the Will Smith who punched an alien, not the Will Smith who was with the Royals this year. And by the way, his championship streak snapped. So I guess that Will Smith, he's not a witch, at least in that way. And in fact, Smith bat flipped.

And as I recall it, it was, it was a flip in the air to right field and well hit Eaton goes back to the track and makes the catch Hernandez back to first. Two down. Wow. I thought Will Smith just ended it right there. He thought it was gone and everyone seemed to think it was gone. And then it was not, it was warning track power. So yeah, that was weird. That has not happened so much.

So that was one little mini investigation that Joe prompted me to do. And another one, which I can corroborate, I can confirm, I can wholeheartedly endorse his observation here. So he wrote something, which, you know, I was aware of this happening, but this kind of crystallized the thought for me. He was talking about the Guardian's decisions with their playoff roster. And the fact that for instance, Ben Lively didn't make their ALDS roster and then subsequently didn't make their ALCS roster initially until

he became an injury replacement for Alex Cobb and his bad back. But Ben Lively had the second most starts of any Guardians pitcher in the regular season. And so on the surface, it's sort of surprising. Oh, you ride that guy the whole way through the regular season, then you get there and you decide you don't want to bring him along. And you know, he'd been less effective later in the season. It wasn't like a huge shock or anything, but based on the track record, you might've thought,

yeah, you know, you danced with the guy who brung you basically. And instead, the Guardians have gone with Matthew Boyd, who made eight starts for them this year, and Alex Cobb, who made three starts for them this year, none after September 1st. Not anymore, no, right. And this is largely a reflection of the fact

that the Guardians' rotation was a weakness for them. And some of the stalwarts of that rotation, Carlos Carrasco, Logan Allen, Tristan McKenzie, they were demoted to the minors before the end of the season. And then Gavin Williams, who's starting game four, he's been in the bullpen and Joey Cantillo too, right? So they've reshuffled and rearranged, but they also did that in the bullpen to some extent where they elevated some relievers who were like Eric Zabrowski, Andrew Walters, these were September call-ups and they had them on the ALDS rosters instead

of Nick Sandlin or Pedro Avila, right? So they've made changes not based on the regular season usage, but just based on like who is the best guy for us right now. And so Joe observed, it's just fascinating to me to see how a team that goes to war in the playoffs now can be so different from the team that played for six months. We used to get some of this with waiver trade pickups in August, but those were at least players who were in the majors all year. Now, front offices treat the playoffs as an entirely different season and assemble a roster based solely on which 26 players provide the best chance to win.

For much of baseball history, a pitcher like Lively would have been on the playoff roster, maybe even in the rotation, out of inertia. Now he's just watching." And that rang true to me. There have always been examples of this, I suppose, but it does seem like teams are less tied to what happened during the regular season when the playoffs roll around. Okay, we're just going to put our best unit together here. And we saw this like last postseason, right? Where Chris Paddock pitched as many times in the ALDS for the twins as he did during the regular season because he was coming back from. Or Orion Kirkering for the Phillies. He was an important

postseason setup man after three regular season innings. Or the Diamondbacks who rebuilt their bullpen on the fly in multiple ways, some through trades, but also late season promotions and acquisitions. Andrew Salfranc and Ryan Thompson. And then the Rangers had Evan Carter's hot hitting to thank in part for their success in the postseason. He was a September call-up who was just huge for them in October. Then on the other end of the spectrum,

you had Tyone Walker who led the Phillies in pitcher wins and ranked second or third in baseball reference in fan graphs were on their staff and didn't appear in the playoffs for them. And he was not pleased about that. And he had kind of a cryptic tweet about disrespect, which seemed to refer to that. So it's not as dramatic this season. I think we haven't seen anyone make their major league debuts in the postseason, which has happened more often lately or certainly in 2020. But the Dodgers have been carrying a

couple of late season call-ups, Ben Kasparius and Edgardo Enriquez. The Mets went with Luis Angel Acuña over Adam Atavino. And of course, the Yankees, as we discussed, gave John Bertie his first professional start at first base in the playoffs. And then you saw some guys like Justin Verlander being left off the wildcard roster, Marcus Stroman being left off the ALDS roster. The Dodgers were even considering activating Tony Gonsolin for the NLCS. I guess he could still be in the mix for the world series. He hasn't pitched in the majors this season. So I wanted to try to assess whether this is true, whether this is just anecdotal

that teams are really willing to turn over their rosters more and there's just less consistency between regular season rosters and post-season rosters, or whether that's deceptive and I'm just getting anchored to recent events. And so I went to frequent staff last correspondent, Ryan Nelson, and at first I asked him to help me adapt a method that I had used to evaluate the turnover rates of world series winning teams versus world series

losing teams. Cause I have found in Sam Miller has shown as well that, uh, teams that win the world series, they're more likely to just get the band back together and just keep their roster together than even pennant winners who lost, even though those teams have equivalent quality. It's just like, well, we went all the way, let's bring everyone back. We feel good. Our revenue is going to be higher and players will be more willing to stay and why mess with success, et cetera.

So we adapted that method for this and we looked up and by we, I mean, he using Retro Sheet data, we looked at the percentage of regular season playing time as measured by combined plate appearances and batters faced produced by players on playoff bound teams who went on to appear in the post season. So basically you look at all the players who played for you in the post season and you add up their regular season batters faced and played appearances and you say how much of your total regular season playing time was produced or accounted for by your postseason players who were your October elect. And so the lower the percentage, the less consistency between your regular season and

postseason rosters. The more you decided, let's start fresh with a new group of guys, not necessarily the ones who got us here. And we broke it down by decades because, you know, it makes the samples larger and you can observe these trends. And based on that, yes, it does seem to be the case that there is less carryover. There's less consistency between regular season rosters and playing time and postseason rosters and playing time.

For instance, the high watermark for consistency, if you look at say teams that made the World Series, 91% of regular season playing time by World Series teams in the 1970s came from players who played in the postseason for those teams. So only nine percent of their regular season reps came from players who did not play in the postseason for them. Whereas in the 2020s, so far, obviously not including this year, it's down to 82% versus 91. So now it's 18% of the regular season playing time coming from players who do not appear in the postseason for you. So double the amount of playing time that it was in the seventies. And there's a progression where it's like the seventies, it was 91% and then the eighties,

it was 88%, the nineties, it was 87%, the two thousands, it was 87%, the 90s it was 87%, the 2000s it was 87%, 2010s it was 83%, and so far in the 2020s it's been 82%. And the same progression is observable in the CS teams that made it to the championship series where it was 89% in the 60s, and then it's been 79% so far this year. There's been a decline in division series teams too since the eighties by about five percentage points.

So yes, that does back up Joe's contention and my gut feeling that this is true. However, what this method cannot quite account for is differences in the roles of players who were on both the regular season and the post-season roster. Cause you know, you can make the postseason roster, but you can play a, a less prominent part in it than you did during the regular season.

Like for instance, Ben Lively during the regular season, he faced 10.7% of the batters who stepped in against guardians pitchers. Whereas in the playoffs so far, he has faced only six of the 300 hitters who have stepped in against the guardians. That's 2% because he's gotten into one game as we speak. So his usage rate in the postseason has been less than a fifth of what it was in the regular season. However, that method we just used would classify him the same as say, Cade Smith, who has more than doubled his usage rate in the postseason so far.

So he was 4.9% of the playing time for the pitchers in the regular season. He's been 10% in the postseason so far. So we want a more sensitive method that would take into account that as well. And so Ryan ended up using something called a two proportion Z test. So, you know, I, yeah, I have links and explanations in my article if you want more here, but I will spare people the details. But basically this is a statistical assessment of the difference between the proportions of two groups, in this case regular season players and postseason players. And statistically speaking, it's not the most sound method because usually you're using it with independent non-overlapping

populations, unlike our groups of players where we've got lots of overlap, but it's sufficient for the purpose of measuring the magnitude and significance of the disparities in playing time. So we ended up with this weighted average Z score that kind of quantified the degree of change essentially, right? So like, you know, weighted by playing time. So how much did your role change from regular season to postseason. And we were able to use this then to look at the biggest gainers in postseason playing share. So I have a leaderboard in my article, the number one guy, great name Virgil Trucks for the 1945 Tigers who kept on trucking into the postseason, but was not part really of the regular

season because he was in the Navy during World War II. And so he did not play at all in the 1944 season. And in the 1945 season, he was discharged from the Navy just in time to make it back to start the final regular season game for the Tigers. And then he went straight from that to starting two games in the world series in which the Tigers were victorious over the Cubs. So unusual circumstances. Let's hope with a World War and a player returning from that service,

he was not as rusty as you might think because he was playing baseball in the Navy, but still that was unusual. So he accounted for 0.2% of the Tigers regular season playing time that year, but 11.3% of their postseason playing time. So that's a big jump. And then the next guy is Matt Moore with the 2011 Rays, who again was a late season call-up and then became an important part of their postseason bullpen.

2017 Justin Verlander, who was of course a last second buzzer beating deadline acquisition for the Astros that year. So he didn't account for that much of the Astros playing time, but then did during the postseason. And then maybe the most famous example, Francisco Rodriguez in 2002, who faced 21 batters in September of 2002, and then faced 70 batters in the postseason of 2002 as the Angels went on their championship run. And he threw more innings than any postseason reliever that year. And that became kind of a boundary breaking trailblazing thing where it was like, wait,

you can do that? You can just bring up a guy who debuts in late September and then he's like, you know, your big weapon in October. Yeah, and then the next guys on the list are like Tyra Glass now in 2022 with the raise, Marcus Stroman in 2015 with the Bouges. They were hurt, they were coming back from surgery, they barely made it back at the end of the regular season and then they were regulars in the postseason.

So there are a number of ways that you can gain like this, but you know, the consistent part is you play much more in the postseason. So there are a number of ways that you can gain like this, but you know, the consistent part is you play much more in the postseason than the regular season. So on the other end, you have say Jason Marquis, who's the top playoff playing time share loser, because he in 2006, he led all Cardinals pitchers with 33 games started, but he wasn't very good. He also led NL pitchers in losses and homers and major league pitchers and earned runs. And so he didn't appear in the postseason at all, despite starting the most games of anyone for them that year. And that worked out for St. Louis. They won the World Series, right? So we ran through

that for players. We ran through that for teams. There are spreadsheets online where you can look at all the players and all the teams if you're curious. But the big finish was that we looked at this on a league-wide level and we looked at the wild card era, just going back to 95 and assess this for teams of varying lengths of playoff run, four to seven games, eight to 12 games, 13 or more games, and the numbers go up is the main takeaway. The trend lines are up. So over this span, this degree of change has changed itself. There is more change now than there used to be even a few decades ago. So it backs up what you would think, which is that, yes, postseason rosters and usage patterns look less like their regular season counterparts than they used to. And there could be a lot of

reasons for that. It's not just like teams getting more aggressive. It's, you know, maybe there are more injuries, maybe there are more mid-season transactions, maybe there's more roster reshuffling, maybe there's more pre-playoffs load management, but I think it is also teams taking a more aggressive approach to October. As teams do with player evaluation at any point in free agency, you're going less based on what have these players done before and more what are they going to do next. The game's getting younger and players are getting closer to their peaks earlier. I think teams are prioritizing playoff experience less.

So you have the, the Francisco Rodriguez esque scenarios more than you used to. And in fact, there was a 2014 change in the rule that made that easier to do because now you can substitute for someone who's on the injured list and put them on your playoff roster, as long as they were in your organization prior to September. They don't even have to have been on the 40 man at that point. So it's, it's more lenient. Yeah. So do you think this is, is good or bad or neutral that, you know, we have a very different environment in the playoffs and the rosters and the player usage reflects that.

I think it's neutral. I mostly think that the proportion of sort of the guys you see in the regular season versus the guys you see in the postseason, it's an acceptable proportion, right? It's not like you got a whole new roster out there. I think that when you look at the playoff teams that we have now, just because some of the players might be more anonymous by virtue of the team they play on, doesn't mean that they weren't like the guys who the fans of that team would know. There's always going to be some moving around, but it doesn't strike me as a problem in large part because I think, you

know, the potential for like shenanigans is pretty low because the league has to approve roster substitutions and you can't just do whatever you want and you want your best guys out there. Like the motivations that teams have at this stage are so clear that they just want their best guys out there. And I think that even if they are more likely to make changes than they might've been in prior eras, I think that in general, they're also reluctant to be too cute. So I think it's mostly fine, Ben. I'm not worked up about this one.

Yeah. You have some hard decisions. You have some hurt feelings, certainly. Although I think when Jason Marquis was left off the postseason roster, he still got a full World Series share. So I guess that helps a little bit, but you know, still, you don't want to be on the outside looking in if you've been a staple of that team the entire time. And suddenly you go to the dance and no one asks you to, you're a wallflower.

That's probably sort of sad, right? And after the 2016 World Series, Dave Cameron had a post for FanGraphs entitled, Is the postseason becoming too different? And Dave had advocated in the past for, let's throw out the script, let's do bullpen games, don't be too tied to your regular season usage patterns. And then team started doing that and taking that advice.

And then he was like, huh, is this actually good? Do we want this? And, you know, he wrote how far away from regular season baseball, are we comfortable letting postseason baseball get, is there a point at which we'll wonder if October baseball is just too different from the one teams have to play in order to get there? If there is that point, I guess we're closer to it now than we were even in 2016 when he was writing that. But it can be nice to have new bloods, like a recent arrival

who's helping propel you there. Yeah, you don't want so much turnover that it's like, who are these guys? It's like, you brought in a bunch of ringers. It's like, I don't have any relationship as a fan with these players. There was a previous stat blast we did about that, about like the Braves when they won in 2021 after making all those mid-season changes, right? And, you know, players who hadn't played for them in the first half of the season and kind of quantifying how historic that was.

Like you want to, you know, it'd be jarring if at the end of the marathon, you have this several month marathon and then the one month sprint, and it's just an entirely different group of people running that race. That would be weird, right? And so you can say, let's have fewer off days so that you can't take advantage of the schedule quite as much, or the soft underbelly of your bullpen or your rotation has to be exposed. Depth is still important, even

if the cost then is, well, now we have to watch Jason Marquis pitch in the first season, which I don't know if anyone really wants as an entertainment product. So yeah, there are pluses and minuses here. Atlanta is a good example. Yes, the reality of their injuries and their roster was such that it looked really different the year they won versus how it looked on opening day. But like, I'm sure they would have rather had Ronald LeCunha Jr. out there, you know what I mean? Like sometimes the injury piece of it is just what it is and you have to do the best you

can to field a competitive team in the face of really challenging injury, you know, situations. So I think that's again, part of what I mean when I say like they want the best team they can out there. If another player is being subbed in, it's very often because of injury or because maybe they have seen something that they feel they have enough information to view as being relatively predictive that they just have a guy who's a better fit for whatever, the pitching matchups that are coming up, the hitters, whatever it is. I don't think that those choices are made lightly and you're right, like they can be very, they're high stakes, not only for the results that you get on the field, but you're

right to say that it's very personal for these guys. And I think that it's a delicate thing you have to manage in the clubhouse if you're going to leave a guy off who's been an important part of a roster either recently or in the relatively recent past. So I think that they tend to be pretty careful about that stuff, even just series to series. You know? All right. Well, my kicker was today's playoff heroes may not just be players no one expected to excel in the postseason. They may be players no one expected to see there.

So with that, let us see some baseball. And by the way, I won't be here next week because I'll be traveling. That's what we have to figure out. Pods. Wow. Thanks for reminding me of that, Ben. Yep. Yep.

Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yes, so I'm handing you the keys to the podcast. I look forward to being a listener for a week, and then look forward to talking to you and everyone else the following week. Well, we got two more high-scoring games after we recorded. The Mets and Dodgers are just trading blowouts or near blowouts in this NLCS. Not the most exciting games. The Mets won 12-6. The Dodgers now hold a 3-2 lead heading into game 6. Meg gets her wish the World Series won't start until Friday, and before we could even post our podcast about a Cleveland Classic, we got another Cleveland Classic, though this one went against the Guardians, the Yankees won 8-6 in ALCS Game 4, as Meg and I were live streaming. Great game, back and forth, Emmanuel Classe,

mortal again, gives up two runs, takes the loss, after a great Guardians comeback, have to hand it to the Yankees, they got to Cade Smith and Classe, mortal again, gives up two runs, takes the loss, after a great Guardians comeback, have to hand it to the Yankees, they got to Cade Smith and Classe, and if the Guardians can't shut you down with their bullpen, then things aren't going to go well for them. That's the way they're supposed to win. It's funny, after we talked about how there hadn't really been any flyballs that looked like home runs but weren't, we got one of those with John Kenzie Noel, who appeared to have gone yard again to hit a huge game tying homer.

We were fooled. I think it was partly the camera work. Maybe the camera person was fooled as well. But that was quite an adrenaline rush. When we were talking earlier about John Kenzie Noel's excellent nickname Big Christmas, I meant to mention the other excellent nickname that we've gotten lately, which is the nickname of Red Sox Prospect. Well, let me spell his first name.

J-H-O-S-T-Y-N-X-O-N Garcia. Some sources say it's pronounced Yostinxin Garcia, some say Yostinxin, but he makes it easier for everyone by going by The Password. That's his nickname, The Password, which is wonderful. He has it in his Twitter bio, so we know he approves. He got to double A this year and I'm pulling for him, just so we can get a great nickname in MLB.

He has a brother who is also in the Red Sox system, younger in A-Ball, named Johanfran Garcia. J-O-H-A-N-F-R-A-N. Love it. One other thing about that Yanks-Guardians game, Tommy Canely closed it out for the Yankees, and he threw 18 consecutive change-ups in that appearance, which was pretty extraordinary, or would have been if not for the fact that in his game 3 appearance he threw 26 consecutive changeups, and if you add the 4 consecutive changeups he threw at the very end of his game 2 appearance, he's now thrown 48 consecutive changeups. Just oops all changeups, or whoops all changeups as Meg would say. This does not seem like it should work, just throw an 86ish mile per hour changeups over

and over and over again? I'm not completely positive, but I think this is likely a record, because back on episode 1586 we did a stat blast about the longest streaks of consecutive pitches of each type. The record at the time was 13 consecutive change-ups. It was the shortest, longest streak of any pitch type, if you know what I mean. Which makes sense, because a change-up is supposed to be a change-up from something else, a change of pace. If you're exclusively throwing change-ups, it seems like those pitches should be getting tattooed at some point. But Kainlee has now thrown nothing but change-ups for three consecutive scoreless innings. It's a really incredible run. Assuming all those pitches are classified correctly. I love it. Long may this streak continue. Never change. Always change up. Late-breaking hard fly ball suggestion from Patreon supporter Thomas Burton who likes loud fly ball.

Another Patreon supporter Andrew M says we're making too much of this. You can hit a fly ball sharply. He notes that according to MLB's classifications, 20% of fly balls are hit 100 mph or harder compared to 36% of line drives. I would point out that a lot of those hard hit flies are homers, only 10.6% of caught fly balls are hit 100 mph or harder compared to 27.6% of line drives. So he says line drives are much more likely to be sharp, but that doesn't mean it's the only type of sharply struck ball. I suppose not, unless we decide to define them that way. Who is MLB to tell us what is or isn't a flyball or a line drive?

We can each make these decisions for ourselves. Two percent of pop-ups with a launch angle of 50 degrees or higher have an exit speed of more than 100 mph, he notes. So he argues that you could probably call it pop-up sharp. The high launch angle does mean that it's less sharp, but that's not because it's definitionally impossible for it to be sharp, just that it's harder to hit a ball that way. Sharp pop-up?

No thank you. This week's sign of the sports betting apocalypse, article from Sportico headline A New Target for Sportsbetters' Doctors with Injury Info. Yes, the problem gamblers are now going after nurses, doctors, surgeons, in hopes of having them violate HIPAA and share private medical info so these gamblers can get an edge. Don't do that. Don't do that. Don't message athletes. Don't message their families. Don't message their doctors because you want to make a buck. I'll link to the piece, it's dismaying. Finally, you may have seen a clip going around of

some joshing and japing on the Fox postgame set involving Kevin Burkhart, Alex Rodriguez, David Ortiz, and Mr. and Mrs. Mett. David Ortiz was pretending to pick up Mrs. Mett, much to Mr. Mett's chagrin, Poppy pretending to be a mascot homewrecker. And while this is going on, Burkhard's laughing, A-Rod's laughing, Derek Jeter smiling a little, then stops smiling, then gets up from the desk, while they're still on air, just walks off set as if he is above these shenanigans. I don't get it, man. Derek Jeter on air, in public, with the press, just kind of a don't get it, man. Derek Jeter, on air, in public, with the press, just kind of a charisma black hole. I grew up watching Jeter, I grew up

rooting for Jeter, I never really warmed to him as a sentimental favorite. Bernie Williams was my guy, there were other players I loved on those dynasty teams, but I had a hard time loving Jeter because he kept everyone at a remove. As good as he was, it was endless cliches, occasionally cracking a joke, but mostly just being the captain, embodying professionalism. And he had a hard time with the tabloids, I get it. Maybe he learned not to show his personality, don't give anyone any ammunition. But if you're gonna go on TV, on a personality-driven show like this Fox, pregame and postgame, you gotta chop it up a little. You gotta drop the diplomatic polished

veneer. It's like the TBS set with Pedro Martinez and co. Show a little life. Yes and Poppy's improv. I get why Fox wants to put him on the air, just like Fox wants to put Tom Brady on the air. You sign up some legend who's either loved or hated. Maybe it brings some star power to your broadcast. In theory, people tune in to see and hear that person. But in practice, if they don't have the juice, if they're not willing to play along to tear down the mystique and aura, it's just not fun for anyone. It's not good TV. Why does he want to do this? Does he just miss the spotlight? I had hoped that we might see a different Jeter, a more personable Jeter on the air. It just hasn't happened. He's been as bland

as one would have thought he'd be. Not saying he has to be a clown, but he can't be the captain to be entertaining on TV. He has to have a human side, be a little less robotic. Yeah, Jeets, you gotta loosen up a little. We're glad that some of you find us entertaining, and that some subset of those folks find us so entertaining that they want to help us continue to entertain by supporting the podcast on Patreon. If you want to be one of them, you can go to Patreon.com slash Effectively Wild and sign up to pledge some monthier yearly amount to help keep the podcast going, help us stay ad free, and get yourself access to some perks, as have the following five listeners, Sean Ferrante, David Walters, Peanut Cheesebar, Tanner, and Jay.

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If not, you can contact us via email. Send your questions, comments, intro and outro themes to podcast at fangraphs.com. If you are not a Patreon supporter, you can still 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 Effectively Wild. You can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash effectively wild. And you can check the show page of fan graphs or the episode description in your podcast app for links to the stories and stats we cited today. That'll do it for today and for this week. Thanks as always for listening.

Thanks to Shane McKeon for his editing and production assistance. We hope you have a wonderful weekend. Meg will be back to talk to you next week. I will be back the week after that. Well, it's moments like these that make you ask, How can you not be pedantic about baseball? If baseball were different, how different would it be? On the case with light ripping, all analytically

Cross-check and compile, find a new understanding Not effectively, why though, While I can unite the pedantic. Yes, when it comes to baseball, how can you not be pedantic?