Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2378: MLB’s Big Finish

Episode Date: September 24, 2025

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the standings and stakes of an unexpectedly wild last week of the regular season, whether there’s such as a thing as a playoff team that can’t make a deep run, why Cal Raleigh is the player of the year regardless of whether he wins MVP, whether it still […]

If baseball were different, how different would it be? And if this thought haunts your dreams, well, stick around and see what Ben and Meg have to say philosophically and pedantically, it's effectively wild. Effectively Wild Hello and welcome to episode 2378 of Effectively Wild A Fangraphs baseball podcast brought you by our Patreon supporters I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs and I am joined by Ben Lindberg of the Ringer. Ben, how are you? I'm feeling grateful for this wondrous week we've been given,

this exciting grand finale, not Downton Abbey, the grand finale, though that was great too. But the finale to the regular season, this is super exciting. I'm hyped. We've talked multiple times probably this season about whether the end of the regular season would be boring, whether it was all set in stone. We knew who was going to be on the playoffs. What was there even to root for until the playoffs started? And here we are.

We're recording on Tuesday afternoon. So by the time people are hearing this, there will have been games that change the playoff picture. But just big picture, this is a super exciting conclusion to this regular season. I did not expect so much to be in doubt, so much potential for incredible comebacks, complete collapses. We've got it all. We got it all. And it's interesting, right, because I felt like we were saying the same thing over and over again. And I was a little concerned about that.

It was fretting. Like, oh, God, we don't have anything new to say. And then it was like, no, we're going to, we're going to make. this final wild card spot in both leagues highly, I don't know if competitive is quite the right word because it's mostly being driven by collapses, but not entirely, right? You got to keep winning on the bottom end for the poor performance at the top end to mean anything. I'm trying to not take anything for granted because that way lies madness and disappointment. And as we've covered several times, I'm quite familiar with that feeling.

But it is, are the Astros going to miss the postseason, but are the Mets going to, are the... These things are within the realm of possibility. There's so many permutations and potential outcomes. It's just, it's really exciting. And I'm sure that Astros fans and Mets fans and Tiger's fans would prefer that it be a little less exciting and more predictable. So we are profiting from their anxiety. Yeah. And I'm sure that the majority of MLB fans, they're just paying attention to their own team and maybe they don't care what's going on in the rest of the playoff picture if it doesn't directly concern their team. Their team is in or their team is out and that's that. But for anyone who's just into the sport and the league and is a neutral observer or just likes an interesting story in addition to following their team, just so many storylines here.

Just so much to pay attention to. We talked last week, I guess it was, about how. we wish that somehow there could be more head-to-head finalies, that somehow you could engineer it such that the teams that are in direct competition would actually be in direct competition instead of having to do a lot of scoreboard watching. Well, you can't ask for better than the Guardians and the Tigers going head-to-heads for three games this week. That's about as good as it gets.

And, of course, we just had Mariners v. Astros, and the Mariners just took care of business. They just, they swept. So everything coming up, Meg, right now in that series, at least. So we've gotten those highlights that we wanted. I, listeners might remember that I've been, I've been on vacation. It's been a little, mostly a staycation, a breather to reset, to feel less stressed going into the very busy season that is October. But I did take a little jaunt up Seattle way over the weekends to see the family,

go to a Seahawks game with my sister, the vibe is so good and so nervous simultaneously. And my stepmom is a big camper. She's a camping enthusiast. And I think as a result

of that, has an expression to try not to jinx things. This is the worst campfire I've ever seen. You know, when you get a campfire going just at the beginning. And it's like, you know, it can go either way, right? You don't. You don't know for sure that it's going to flourish. that you're going to get that roaring.

The number of times that we said that over in the course of the weekend, it was high. It wasn't always directly in correlation to the score, to be clear, again, just a nervous disposition in Mariners fan land. But I think the underrated storyline, at least as the American League is concerned, and then we can spend a bit of time on the NL2, it's not just that the Mariners went down to Houston and swept and took care of that business. And so now they have a three-game division lead with six to play. It's not just the tigers staring down the guardians for their own division,

but the collapse of the tigers, they have lost six in a row as we are recording on Tuesday. As you noted, they start a series in Cleveland. But because of their skid, not only are the Mariners leading, the West. They are in line for a first round Bobby, maybe. Yeah, yeah. What? Yeah, how about that? Yeah, you've

gone from looking like they might fall out of it entirely. Entirely. To actually being set up pretty well. In fact, they do have the highest world series odds, according to fancrafts.com, I noticed. And I was asked by a member of the Mariners' front office who will remain nameless. Like, what precedent is there for that?

I'm happy to report that that question inspiring me to bother David Appelman about it because I have a good amount of work, life separation while on vacation, totally good boundaries for myself. And this is in the history of our playoff odds, which, you know, caveat, right? This is, I'm sure that their World Series odds in 01 were probably pretty high if that had existed, right? But we didn't, that wasn't a thing yet. So prior to this year, their high was 10% on April 16th of 2015. And then it was right around nine and a half when they won the wildcard in 2022. But otherwise, the highest it's ever been. So that also just fills me with profound dread.

I don't want anyone to be mistaken. I don't want any potential Mariners, Etsy witches. is, I wonder if it's a booming business, right? Is there a competition in that marketplace now? Don't know. I don't want anyone to misinterpret this. Still profoundly nervous. The disposition is inherently anxious, but they're in a good spot.

Now, if you feel nervous and you want to do your own, this is the worst campfire I've ever seen, sure, they have this series starting against the Rockies. And sure, the Rockies are famously not a very good baseball team, but don't get trapped to Mariners. Don't you get trapped, okay? You just take care of yourself and your business and let other people fret about their own business. You drive your car and then we'll kind of see where things land. But yeah, man, it's something.

There's a lot at stake. There's the Mariners who have never won a pennant very much in the running. There's the Astros who have not missed the playoffs since 2016 running, running some run. risk of doing so. There is the Mets adding to their pile of collapses for their fans to brew, of course, summoning memories of 2007, 2008, etc. Going back even further, we could come up with other examples. And then there's the tigers who are now under threat of blowing the biggest lead ever, the biggest leads in a division, the biggest lead in a league prior to the existence of divisions, they had a 15 and a half game lead over the guardians. And now, as we speak,

they have a one game lead. They might not have any lead by the time people are hearing this. So it's really incredible. That's the kind of thing that people will talk about for ages if that were to happen. At least if they miss the playoffs as well, if you're one of the AL Central teams, you have multiple paths to the playoffs, whereas the Astros right now would really have to have a lot of things go right to win the AL West after being swept by the Mariners. But if you are one of the AL Central teams, then you have the potential to win the division. You also have the wild card path. So there are a couple potential routes that you could take, and that helps your playoff odds.

And if the tigers end up blowing the division lead but still winning a wild card, maybe that would ease some of the sting of the collapse. But you have to hand it to the Guardians too, who've just been playing incredible base. with an unlikely cast, just, you know, they've lost people to injury, they've lost people to pitch-fixing investigations, you look at their rotation, and you say, this doesn't necessarily seem like it would be the best rotation in baseball on paper, and yet it has been this month, just been absolutely lights out. And yeah, they don't hit very much, but they have timely hitting. They've been incredibly clutch. They've been the clutches team on both sides of the ball. combine the fan graphs batting and pitching clutch scores, then they are the clutches team.

And not only have they timed their hits well, but they've kind of clustered them of late. And that's the change, I think, because we talked about how, well, is it really an exciting race if everyone is just mediocre and no one's really catching up. And yeah, it's close, but there's no real change in the positioning. I wrote about this at the ringer on Monday and talked about it a bit on Hangup and Listen. But from the end of the All-Star break through September 1st, all of the contenders, the wildcard contenders, at least, their records were all clustered between 17 and 24 and 24 and 17. Like no one was going on just a great run and no one was completely incompetent. But lately, that has changed.

Right. The Mariners just win almost every game. The Guardians win almost every game. The Tigers and the Mets lose almost every game. So we've had some extremes here. we've had more of an impression of teams seizing their moments or fumbling at the worst possible moment. And so that has really made it more exciting. I mean, I get to profit from other people's pain.

But look, it has made it more exciting. If you don't have a horse in the race and you just want to see good races and things kind of coming down to the wire, then that's what we're getting here. And some teams are actually trying to take it from others. And it's fun. There have been enough swings back and forth. You know, we talked about how the mariners were in danger just falling out of the race entirely. And then they found their way into this position where they, like, really, really control their own destiny. But it has gone back and forth enough that I wonder if we look back, are we going to feel like we underrated the day-to-day excitement of the race?

Because there have been swaps, right? There have been, there's been coming and going. There have been changes at the top. Like there's these tight wild card races. So I don't know. You got to hand it to them. They kind of pulled it out at the end to the races to be more fun. To be more, these wild card races and playoff races generally are more dynamic than they seemed like they were going to be.

Yes, much more so. I tracked the odds in my article. I made a graph of just the day-by-day graph. the sum of the odds of the pre-September playoff field. So the playoff field as it stood on August 31st, what were the odds by day that there would be some change that some team that was not in playoff position would end up in the playoffs. And at the start of the month, it was like 40% combined chance.

So the odds were that there wouldn't be any change whatsoever. But now in the past couple days, it's been more than double that. And it's been almost tripled that. It's been the odds are that there will be a change now. So if it turns out that there is no change, that all of this was a late season excitement, and then it ends up the Tigers do win the division. And the Astros win a wild card. And the Mets cling to that wild card and the Reds don't take it from them. Well, then it will seem like nothing really changed, I guess, and nothing will have changed.

But what has changed is that there's real suspense. There's a real risk of change or real potential for change depending on your perspective. It's just gotten much more likely that there will be some sort of turnover. And that, I think, is what has catapulted it to a new level. And it was really this weekend, just the outcome of things this past weekend with the Mariners sweep and everything. And just the guardians and the Tigers continuing to close that gap and the Reds pulling even with the Mets and actually technically taking the lead because of. of the tiebreaker and all of that. That's right.

Yeah. My one complaint about this is having to constantly look up head-to-head records and then intra-division records. I can never remember who holds the tiebreaker over which other team. And then I have to continually remind myself of that. And then it's not super satisfying, too, because I just tantalized myself with, oh, how much more exciting would this be if we had the potential for a tiebreaker game instead of just deciding it based on these

head-to-head results, which I guess, you know, it's not like a head-to-head record, I guess, in some respects is more telling than just playing a single game. Because that's, you know, we're determining based on a head-to-head record, you may have

played several games, you may have played many games against another team. Not that that's super predictive, but it's more telling maybe than a single game 163, and yet the single game 163, is just so much more exciting and satisfying than just looking up what happened to this point.

That's just not nearly as exciting, really. It's just like either way, I guess you're deciding it with sort of small sample results. That's how the playoffs work. But it's not satisfying to my saber metric heart to settle it with head-to-head records, and it's so much less exciting. Now I get why they do it because there's one break,

Monday, teams are off next Monday, and then the Wild Card Series start. So they just, there are so many rounds, there's so many teams that they just want to get it going and they don't want to build in time for a potential tiebreaker that could screw things up, but what are you sacrificing there? There would be a real chance of seeing that sort of game to conclude this race, and that would be wonderful. Yeah, it would be nice. And you're right, it is a pain.

I have like the, you know, the little MLB.com explainer up. It's like, okay, the Mariners are three up. Oh, it's sort of like being four up because they have the tiebreaker against Houston. And, you're like, geez, Louise, Houston gets really, they had the chips fall in an unfortunate sequence as it pertains to tiebreakers. Because I think they don't have, they lose out in tiebreaker scenarios against all four of the teams closest to them. And the standing is like really rough. So. Well, I guess they shouldn't have lost so many games to those teams.

But also, they do finish this last week. with the Angels and A's, so that's something they've got going for. I mean, you know, not that the sequencing, I mean, of course, there's still some degree of imbalance in the full season schedule strength, but it's all just sequencing in terms of, well, other teams have already had their games against those teams in many cases. So we're just hyper-fixated on what's happening here in late September, and we weren't paying as close attention when other teams were playing those same opponents back in May or whenever it was. But still, it's a point in their favor because these other teams, they're playing each other. They're playing some tougher teams. And look, the Red Sox are in the mix. The Diamondbacks are in the – that's, I think, what is good here is that there's not just, like, one team chasing one other team.

Right. But you do have all these scenarios where a number of teams could still make it or lose it. You could get the Diamondbacks who, as we speak, are just a game out of the Wild Card. And then there's the Reds and there's the Mets and there's the Reds. And there's the Red Sox still in the mix and the AL up, but not comfortably up, and the Mariners and the Astros and the Tigers and the Guardian. And so it's, it ends up being a pretty significant percentage of the teams that are in this, not just for seating and clinching. And there's some of that still going on too, but just in or out. And that has vastly exceeded my expectations for what the stakes would still be at this point.

Oh, yeah. I was like, I'm going to have all of our postseason aside. It's done and up. No. Not quite considerate for an editor-in-chief of a baseball website. And that's fine. That's not the- It's a low priority for other people.

Yeah, but I am noting simply that it's like, well, I got something we're going to end up. You're going to have to do some scrambling last minute there. But for a good reason. It's fine to scramble. You know, we like to scramble. It is so funny to look at like the, you know, you look at the NL field. And you do have, you do have the. the spot, that final wild card spot.

But it's like, you know, when you look at the MLB.com standings, there's a lot more clinched division and clinched playoff berth there than there is on the AL side where I think the only team that has technically clinched at this point is the Blue Jays. Yeah, and at this point, the team strength, it almost doesn't matter that much. Yes, you can look at the numbers and you can say, oh, the guardians have been incredibly clutch. The Mets have been the opposite. They're the third least clutch team. And that's why they find themselves in these situations.

Right. And then the base runs standings page will say, oh, the Guardians are 10 games better than they should be. And the Mets are nine games worse. Well, it doesn't matter anymore. Not really. It doesn't have a material impact on the projections for those teams when you're talking about just six games. A couple of games, yeah. Yeah.

So, yeah, the Guardians have been outscored on the season. And suddenly they're doing this with Jose Ramirez and Kyle Monsardo and not a whole lot else. I mean, I guess Stephen Kwan's been back, but yeah, it's a weak offense. It's a good bullpen, not as otherworldly great as last year's was, and obviously without Class A and everything. But still, like, they've gotten the job done. So I'm glad that they have at this point because it's just made this way more exciting. I don't know which would be worse. Like, if the Tigers blow this, is that more painful than the Ments?

blowing this because the tigers were just sitting so pretty. It felt so comfortable. Yeah. Yeah. And the Mets, they had near virtual lock playoff odds at various points, too. It's been a while since they were that close in the NL East, but they appeared to have that wild card spot unlock, and that is just not happening. So the tigers, I mean, they've just, it's been a complete offensive outage for them.

for quite some time now. And I've been ragging on the Guardian's offense, but it's not like the tigers have been hitting these days. Maybe the names are slightly more impressive, but the results have not been. And with both the Tigers and the Mets, it's like they both got off to great starts. They seem to have sewn up playoff spots,

if not divisions. And then it's just been coasting. It's just been coasting into a collapse and basically like will the buffer that we built up early in the year when everything was clicking, will that last? And they've both had injuries. Obviously, the Mets have tried to rebuild their rotation on the fly and patch it together

with a bunch of prospects they promoted. And, you know, like the Tigers, all the early season guys who were super successful, like, oh, Javi Baez is back. He's the starting center fielder for the American League All-Star team. He has barely gotten on base since that game. So some of that were, okay, this is unexpected and it has not come. continued to happen. So some of that is just they were playing over their heads. But it's been bad. And this is coming on the heels of last year, which was the polar opposite, of course, where they sell at the deadline. Everyone writes them off. They write themselves off. And then they have this surge and they make it into the playoffs and probably. And this is just the polar opposite from a vibes perspective. Yeah. They've had like a freaky Friday with the Diamondbacks in a cross-league freaky Friday.

Like, you know, here's the deadline seller that might, you know, work their way into the postseason. I don't know the answer, like, which is worse? I'm inclined to say the Tigers, at least on a single season basis. I know that any time we experience some form of Mets collapse, there's, like, agita about it because of the Mets of it all over the long term. But, like, it was incomprehensible. We thought they were going to be the number one seed in the AAL for most of the season. So if they fall out of it, or even if they don't fall out of the field entirely, but they just end up a wild card, I mean, that's bad business. And then, you know, we've had this reporting around sort of the state of the organization.

And the combination of those things, if I were a Tigers fan, it would make me feel very uneasy, which isn't to say that they can't pull it out. And as we say, every year at this time, you get in and who knows what's going to happen. Yeah. I went to say that the other day that the idea that there are some teams that you don't feel like they'll make a real run if they get in. I don't know that I feel that about any team, really. I mean, I know what people mean. You have not watched enough Diamondbacks baseball for you to be saying that. Because that bullpen is terrifyingly poor. It is quite quite bad. Well, and how about the Tiger's bullpen? Another way in which they're the inverse of last year's team pitching chaos. This team. Where's your pitching chaos now? It's like actual chaos. Yeah, got to get John Brebria back in. I don't know that that would help.

But no, they just, they can't miss bats. No one in that bullpen can get strikeouts, really. Finnegan they picked up. And I guess he's been their best guy when he's been healthy. But it's just you don't have those dominant late-inning arms that you like to see, especially in October when you're getting a disproportionate percentage of your innings from those guys. They just don't have them anymore. But we've seen that happen before.

where teams that seem to have weak pens coming into the postseason, they just rip off a great month. It's not that many innings. It's totally possible. So when people say, like, yeah, I don't foresee this team actually making a run. If they get in, I feel like it's going to be quick. I mean, sure, some teams have better chances than others, but not by so much that I would really write off anyone.

If you get in, you really can just go all the way. We've seen it too many times to count anyone out. Right. Like speaking of those diamondbacks, right? Exactly. Think about their World Series, Ron. Ginkle? The gink. The gink, yeah.

The gink is here. Yeah. So it's been super exciting. I don't know. I think the other thing, if the Mets were to blow it, obviously they had higher expectations from a payroll perspective. Sure. The tigers, even though they ended last season in such exciting fashion, they were not nearly seen as a lock coming into this year.

A lot of people thought they would take a step back. And so their early season success was somewhat surprising. And we were weighing, like, is this actually a good team? Yeah, I think this is actually a good team. And then it turned into not so great a team for the rest of the season, but the whole season counts. So on the whole, pretty good, exceeded expectations. But the Mets, because of their payroll, because they signed Juan Soto, literally Juan Soto, who now has a career high in homers and steals.

I mean, their payroll is higher than the payrolls of the two teams that are chasing them combined. The Reds and the Diamondbacks plus $35 million gets you the Mets payroll. So that has an impact, I think, on how fans feel and how much of a embarrassment it's seen as if you blow that lead probably. But yeah, blowing the biggest lead ever would certainly set the Tigers collapse apart if that is completely. It's funny because it's like, what do you, you know, what do you want to see if you're, you set aside the, the fandom piece of it, like in general, what do we want to see rewarded when it comes to the playoff field? And it's like, okay, I would like, you know, I want to see the teams that spend money and invest in their rosters, the Mets, the Diamondbacks, right? I want those teams to

succeed because I think it's good for the sport when clubs that do that succeed. That doesn't need to be the only sort of flavor of playoff team, but it is one that I want to see in there. So in that respect, maybe I wouldn't be happy about a Mets collapse. You want to see teams that add at the deadline succeed, which isn't to say that every team that doesn't add at the deadline is doing something wrong. There might be very sound reasons for that. I didn't blame the Diamondbacks for selling at the deadline.

I feel like I'm talking about these Diamondbacks a lot surprising, given the fact that they are one game out. But I didn't blame them for it. I didn't think that they were like, you know, throwing in the towel on a winning club. I understood why they were willing to part with guys who are going to hit free agency anyway. Makes good sense, right? But it sure is nice and not just because I would prefer them to win regardless of circumstance to see the Mariners doing well when they addressed real needs on their roster at the deadline, right? They were willing to trade prospects who they liked so that they could go and get a couple of bats to reinforce the lineup. Isn't that going great? You know, even though A. O'Hanyo wasn't hitting for most of the

time, he's in a little bit more now. So that's good. But it's like, you know, there's sort of different archetypes of clubs that you want to see rewarded for their effort in the hopes that it inspires other teams in similar positions in the future to be like, no, we should we should go for it. This is this is a right thing to do. Yeah. Yeah. And you could look back, I guess, with hindsight and say, oh, maybe the tigers should have been a bit more aggressive at the deadline or maybe the guardians should have. It's just they've surprised themselves in multiple ways. They've certainly surprised us. So this has just been a ton of fun. I'm glad that we're here. However, it shakes out whether there's actual upheaval here or not or the teams that we thought were going to make it end up making it. The fact that there's so much up in the air here with just a handful of days left in the regular season, that's awesome. That's an unexpected gift. So thank you baseball for entertaining me so well.

Yeah. Yeah. Good stuff. Yeah. Not the point of like breaking down pitcher matchups and, oh, the tigers have two Terek Scoopal games if they want with him on regular rest. And then other teams don't. And, oh, the Red Sox only get one crochet start, and the Astros, they got Paredes back, but they lost Yordon and all these other guys. And I'm just like looking and breaking it down on a day-by-day, game-by-game basis in a way that I'm unaccustomed to in the regular season.

It's really, it's only a late September phenomenon or an October one where suddenly you look at hyper-scrutinizing individual games and series, which would just seem sort of silly. do for most of the season. And here, it just gets granular. And every game absolutely matters. And this Detroit Cleveland series, maybe that swings at all. Maybe it decides it. So just the epicenter of the sport is Ohio these days. Just the two Ohio teams just absolutely. We're always saying that. Yeah. Delivering great intrigue here at the end. And of course, awards races coming down to the wire as well, and Cal with another home run outburst to get up to 58 as we're speaking. So, I mean, he's already made all the history, but there's more he could make. And if you're invested in that AL MVP race, then that's something to watch.

If you're invested in the AL-Sai Young Award race, which I guess is basically just Scoobel versus Crochet, if Scoople hasn't sewn it up already. Yeah. There's just, there's still some stuff at stake here. It's just, it's fun. And I want to see how high Cal can go. I would also like to know the answer to that. It was so, it's so nice on Saturday.

I went and just watched my nieces play soccer. Man, youth soccer culture is intense. It's like, it's like a lot of folks and they're coming and going in different fields. And it was great fun. And, you know, it's a Saturday. There's a Seahawks game the next day. That day was the day of the Apple game. Cup, which for people from not in the state of Washington is the University of Washington and

Washington State playing one another, to all of my Washington State, not as in the school, but just the locality football fans, yes, it remains ridiculous that they play this game in September. Now, what are we doing? What have we lost in realignment? We've lost an Apple Cup that makes sense. That's one of the things we've lost. That's one of the things.

That's one of the things. September. September for the Apple. Apple Cup? What the f*** are we doing with that? Anyway, furious. Big day. Big day of sports, right? Big day of sports that day, big day, big day of sports the next day. And I'm looking around, you know, a lot of the people there are wearing garb for their kids' team. You know, I am so-and-so's mom's on the back. I'm, you know, I'm a whatever team, the C-sprites. That wasn't one of the teams, but I'm a C-sprite dad.

you know like they're there to support their kids playing soccer but but then there's so much mariners care there was just so much people are and it's just you know uh this they oh people want it so bad oh they want it so bad oh i'm so nervous and so and you're sitting there and you're trying you're trying to honor the anxiety both because it is a real emotional experience and also because you still don't understand how the etsy which works you don't understand that magic you don't want to disrespect it in case it's real um you just you know so you're trying to figure it out but you can't help but think things like well you know uh we don't really know what's going on with brian woo and his peck but like if they have a buy he could yeah he can

just rest he can just be arrested woo you know yes he can be a a fully hopefully knocking on wood Get at me, Etsy Witch, a fully rested woo, you know? Yes, the Etsy Witch is woo-woo, I guess. Yeah, woo-woo. They just need woo back as well. There's the potential here. If we get mariners and guardians and brewers in the playoff mix, I mean, just teams that have never won one or haven't won one since 1948. And there's just a lot of good rooting interests potentially in this playoff field.

I already used up my, a team that hasn't won a World Series. I did that the year the Rangers won, right? That was one of my pre-season predictions that year. Is that right? I think so. And then maybe I, did I predict that once too? I forget. Oh, I don't remember.

Yeah, you can run that back. You can always repeat that, although there are fewer and fewer who have not won one. Well, and hopefully after this year. Yes. Right. That number will dwindle further. You know, and by that I mean, hopefully, The Milwaukee Brewers will win a World Series.

I just filled water on myself, Ben, like some kind of distracted rube. I guess it's still in play for the Mariners to finish with a 540 winning percentage and make all of Jerry's dreams come true. That's still possible. But it looks like they might exceed that. I want to know. I don't want that to happen because what I would like, basically here, and here I'll put my cards on the table as it pertains to the Seattle Mariners. I would really like it if the Dodgers series that they have doesn't matter, right?

That like, because I think, you tell me if I'm wrong, this part I always get kind of goofy. And I thought they used to have a column on the standings page for this. And maybe they got rid of it or maybe it's just too early yet. But am I right to think that they need a combination of either three wins of their own or three losses for Houston to win the division? Is that right? That sounds right. Yeah. So here's the thing.

I just, I don't want, because the Dodgers are playing for something, you know, like they haven't won their division yet, right? They haven't clinched that division. No. No. So they might soon, but no. Yeah. But not yet. And so they're still playing for something.

There's still playing for something. And I don't want a motivated Dodgers team to be the thing that a motivated but, you know, still deeply anxious, foundationally. In the disposition, Mariners team. No, just you take care of your business against the Rockies and hopefully, hopefully that, then you can just be done. You know, you win the division. Yeah. And there's also stuff about like, do you want the buy or what do you want the buy? You always want the buy.

Do we have to do this every year? Not you and I. We're civilized. We've answered this question. I don't even mean the layoff conversation, though that always rears its head. but just which matchup do you want because the NL West winner will almost certainly not get a buy anyway. So what's at stake is, well, bragging rights, but also just do you play the Cubs on the road? Or do you play the Mets slash Reds slash Diamondbacks at home?

And you'd probably want the latter. So sometimes they're these kind of perverse incentives. And then also there's stuff like fans rooting for teams. that they normally would not root for, that normally they would be opposed to? Because, like, the Blue Jays are playing the Red Sox this week. And that means that Yankees fans sort of have incentive to root for the Red Sox because the Yankees are still within striking distance

of the Blue Jays in the ALE East. Right. They want to win that division. And so you've got Yankees fans rooting for the Red Sox, and then you have Red Sox fans wanting to win so that they make the playoffs, but knowing that by winning, they are potentially helping their mortal sports enemies the Yankees by beating the Blue Jays

and perhaps handing the division to the Yankees. So you end up with all these just unlikely bedfellows and just weird rooting interests. Yeah. Lions, lying down with the lambs, whatever that saying is. Cats and dogs living together. Yeah, I love it. I just love these things that happen with the end of the season.

And it's just, it's not a marathon at this point. It's a sprint. It's a sprint. And I liked that on Monday, there was a bit of a breather. It was just the calm before the storm. Yeah, so few games on Monday. There were three games, six teams in action, and few playoff implications. I guess technically the Giants and the Cardinals not eliminated.

And the Padreys clinched a spot. That's true, yeah. But, yeah, their win clinched them a spot in the postseason. Yeah, most of the teams that are in the thick of this were off. And I kind of liked that. It was just like, oh, we get a day to appreciate and anticipate, much as we will next Monday when this is all said and done after the weekend. And there's a one-day break there for travel and everything. But I kind of liked this Monday, almost universal off day.

It reminded me of in the Phantom Menace before the dual states. You could have given me 1,000 guesses. And I would never have anticipated this. the phantom menace was about to make an appearance in this conversation. It could have been, wow. All right. So in the phantom menace. Guessing that I might reference Star Wars is a pretty high probability bet, I guess.

Yes, but also. But you know that one moment at the end before, you know, the duel of the fates kicks in and Darth Maul and Quigon are going head to head. And then Obi-1 comes in and they're the energy barriers on the boo. And so the fight is interrupted. They're pirouetting everywhere, and they're jumping, and they're leaping. And then they're separated. There's like a little break in the fight because the red energy barrier comes across,

and Darth Mall is just stalking and scowling, just ready to resume the fight. And Quigon meditates and kneels and gathers his strength and tries to center himself, for all the good that it did him. Spoilers for Phantom Menace. But, but, you know. He's going to get one angry email. How dare? I was just going to get around to watching that.

I was just going to watch that. You know, that's probably some fans were probably stocking restlessly, like Darth Maul, and others were just, oh, okay, let's breathe deeply here. Whatever happens, you know, I'll be one with the force, right? I can reappear in Obi-1, Canobi, the Disney Plus streaming series decades down the road. So what do I really have to lose here? Quigon. Quigon is or Darth's Mal is?

Well, yeah, Quigon appears in that briefly. Darth Mal has appeared in, you know, their Disney Star Wars properties. But he's not, yeah, that's right. But he's not not dead, right? This is like a back in time kind of appearance. Quigon was dead, but he, you know, became one with the living force and everything. Oh, so he's like a force ghost? Yeah, eventually.

And then Darth Mal is not dead, though he does appear to be when you're watching. Well, yeah, because he gets sliced in half further spoiler alerts. Yes, but not fatal. He comes back. Right in half. Yeah, that might surprise. some people, but not if they've seen various animated shows and or solo a Star Wars story. Anyway, it's dangerous when I set off on this track.

That's what that moment reminded me of. It's like, okay, how are we going to handle this brief break before all hell breaks here? And I was stocking more like Darth Maul than I think I was meditating like Quigon. That actor, oh, well, I guess it would probably be more accurate to describe him as a martial artist who was in he was also toad in X-Men Oh yeah, Ray Park

Yeah He was towed in X-Men Yeah Okay What? You're the only one who can make obscure references Give a grief Anyway, we have a lot to enjoy here and we will talk about it all

As it happens and break down The way that this ended So I'm excited By the way, when it comes to Cal, I'll probably be writing about this. I don't know if I'll be the only one with this take, but I don't really care who wins ALMVP because in my mind, well, for a few reasons. One, I just care less about awards outcomes now than I used to, just in general. I've just kind of what it's not even the entire BBWA. It's such a small subset of the BBWA.

It's 30 people. Right. It's a small, you never had an award. No, and I never had one. And so it's just luck of the draw and just sort of randomly assigned, sort of. And it's not even the entire body of baseball writers. It's just a small minority of the baseball writers. A little sliver. And we've had a number of recent races that yielded unanimous results. And so maybe that was representative of what the larger body would have voted for. But in this case, where it seems like it should be close, in theory, you may well end up with the outcome just being determined by who happens to get a vote this year. And if you put it up to the full body of the BBWA, you'd get a different outcome.

So it's not really representative, even of the baseball writers. Right. And as a baseball writer myself, you don't have to outsource your conclusion about the most valuable player to the baseball writers that will obviously get a lot of attention and will help. to determine those players' legacies and tell the story of the season and everything. But the results don't change. You know, the vote happens at the end of the season. We find out about it, November,

and the season's set. The numbers happened. So who wins ultimately doesn't really change who was actually most valuable. And it doesn't have to change what you conclude offered the most value. So for all those reasons. And plus, these days you don't so much get awards voting being a referendum on kind of the culture war of baseball stats and how we evaluate players.

We're not, it's, there's more of a consensus now and everyone's just kind of paying attention to war or whatever. And the results map what we think of as value more closely than they used to. And it rarely turns into this larger conversation about, oh, if you vote for this guy, it means that you think this about baseball. And if you vote for that guy, it means you think that. There's just, there's less at stake. Obviously, for the players, there's plenty at stake and for fans who care about this. But I just, I care less for all of these reasons. But I think regardless of the outcome, the other reason I don't feel that strongly about it is that I think they're very equivalent in value.

I don't think there's really a wrong answer. There's no great separating factor, especially if you're taking into account Cal's defense and framing, which I do. and they're barely separated by FanGraph's War. You can't even really separate them based on other factors. It's not like one has been so much more clutch as we've covered. In terms of their value to their teams, both pretty darn important, you know, still in close races that these guys are swinging, whether they're in the playoffs or not. Like, you take Cal away from the Mariners, the Mariners missed the playoffs. You take Judge away from the Yankees, the Yankees missed the playoffs.

Yeah, 100%. Yeah. And, you know, I guess you could give extra credit to Cal just because they're the Mariners and they've won a whole lot less than the Yankees and maybe they just have more writing on this kind of in a carmic sense. But really, like they've both been essential to their teams. And I just, you know, if you told me you're voting for Cal, I'd say, yeah, that makes sense. And if you told me you're voting for judge, I'd say, yeah, that also makes sense. It depends on your rationale, but you can't really go wrong with either. And so my take is basically that regardless of of who wins. I think the judge has a very legitimate case as the most valuable player in the league. But Cal is the player of the year. Like, that's the distinction in my mind. Like, this season has been more defined by Cal.

Yes. And that's not the actual award, or at least it doesn't have to be. I tend to approach it as value on field value. And I'm not really going to give the narrative. I mean, you know, if you want to, say, well, Cal was just, like, one of the biggest stories of the season. Sure.

And he's doing this thing that's unprecedented, whereas Judge is kind of a victim of his own prior success. Like, he's not doing anything unprecedented because he has done it before. So that's just made Cal more noteworthy and just more fun to follow and more fun to talk about. I haven't really, like, you know, we haven't talked that much about Aaron Judge lately. We talked about him early in the year when he just seemed to have reached an entirely new level and was like, Is he as good as Bonds? Is he better than Bonds? And then he cooled down a little and he got hurt.

And then we talked about the injury and like, can he play the field and can he throw and all those things? But it's kind of like ho-hum. He has a 200 WRC plus, you know? Whereas Cal, he's just doing something we've never really seen before. And that doesn't make it more valuable than what Judge is doing. But he's having like the best catcher season ever. He's got the home run record for catchers in multiple ways. He's got the home run record for Mariners.

He's got the home run record for switch hitters. Like, you know, it's just a more fun, extraordinary season. And he's doing it by kind of being the model of the modern hitter, just like pulling everything in the air, like that kind of approach that teams help hitters take now. He just gets it up in the air. He just yanks it. Like, T-Mobile can't contain him

because he's just getting everything in the air down the lines. So I think Cal is the player of the year. And if he doesn't win, personally, I won't care all that much. And I don't think him being the player of the year, quote, unquote, should necessarily have a bearing on whether he wins MVP or not. But it's just

that's ultimately more important to me. Cal season is more memorable in my mind whether 30 people decide that he was the most valuable player. Yeah. And I want to be clear, I have A awards vote this year, but it is not an ALMVP

vote. So because people are like, the bias will see. No, I don't have that about, I would have talked about the whole thing very differently if I had had the vote. Here's the thing that I'm appreciating about Cal season, just even setting aside the mariners of it all, obviously. I thought that when Judge hit 62, it was very exciting, even with us spending so much time with the Maris's, which got a little old after a while. But it felt false. It felt a little false to me, right? Because we know who's hit the most home runs in a season.

It wasn't Aaron Judge, you know. And I understand the discount that people want to apply to Bonds. And that's, you know. And McGuire and Sosa. Right. But it felt false. It felt it felt simultaneously very exciting. And like a real accomplishment, it wasn't like they made up a record.

But they certainly emphasized a record that I think most people were not aware of prior to judge approaching it. And there's something about Cal's various records that feels more organic to me because it doesn't, it's already qualified going in, right? No one is saying that the most home runs by a catcher, and here we should remind people both, he has achieved the record both as a primary catcher and then I think in the strict split too, right? Like he's at that point where he has hit the most home runs by a catcher, playing catcher on the day he hit the home run. No one thinks that that is equivalent as a record to the most home runs hit in a season, right? I don't think anyone's confused about how we might compare the most home runs by a switch hitter, the most home runs by a mariner in a single season. There's already qualification on those. And so you can just be enthusiastic about them

because I don't feel like the league is like trying to pull a bait and switch. And it did feel like some of the league's enthusiasm around Judge, sure, it was about it being genuinely a tremendous accomplishment. It was about him being a Yankee doing that, right? That certainly amped up the volume on his home run chase. And, you know, like no shade a judge for that,

but like we paid more attention to it, just like we'd pay more attention to anything that pertains to a Yankee, because he's a Yankee. And so I'm not trying to discount judges' season that year or how hard it is to hit that many home runs, right? It is an AL record that still stands, and despite, you know, Cal having a couple of little cluster games here is likely to stand when the season concludes on Sunday.

But it also felt like the league was doing a little side of hand to center a player who does not come with the taint of, PEDs and do a little rewriting of history there. So, and that it wrinkles because that it feels dishonest, right? Like, I watched baseball as a child. Guess who played well? Barry Bonds, you know? Mark McGuire, Sammy Sosa.

They famously did a lot of hit in the home runs. So it felt dishonest, and I didn't care for that aspect of it. But I enjoyed watching him pursue and then surpassed Maris's record, but I was like, eh, we We can be honest about part of what we're doing here, right? Yeah. Yeah. I'm minded for people to kind of caveat, as long as they weren't pretending, like, yeah, Judge is the home run record holder.

If they wanted to say that he has the most home runs of anyone who is not tainted by having done it on steroids, as far as we can tell during the steroid era, well, yeah, you know, that's a meaningful distinction to make, I think. But, yeah, as long as you're not pretending that we have actually rewritten the record books because those records still stand. We just, there's context to them. But I think in most seasons, this player of the year would probably be an MVP. There are some awards that are more specifically for this.

Like there is, there's a sporting news award called Major League Player of the Year. They've been handing it out since 1936 continuously. So, like, Carl Hubble won it in 1936 and Shohei Otani won it last year. Yeah. Cal should be the MLB player of. of the year. Sure, yeah. And that's not as well-known and prestigious an award, of course.

Cal should win the Commissioner's Historic Achievement Award. That's the awards that the commissioner, it's not an annual award. It's like when someone does something really extraordinary, then they get it. The most recent guy to get it was Shohei Watani. It's not even just four players. It's mostly players, but like Vince Gully won it and Rachel Robinson won it. And, you know, it's like players who do something really special. They're not just good at baseball, but somehow they kind of transcend everything.

Mark McGuire, I believe, was the first winner. Actually, McGuire and Sosa won it in 1998. So, you know, the origins are tainted in that way. But you can see why because, like, yeah, that was the story of sports that year. So that was above and beyond. So I think Cal should win a commissioner's Historic Achievement Award for just all the history that he has made this season. So it's that kind of year for me and of course

I'm sure he would like to win MVP and Mariners fans would like him to win MVP and there is probably some fatigue when it comes to judge because he's just, he's won it before, he's been great before and Cal has reached a new level for him and for any catcher but

whether he wins it or not, I just I don't care of that much because it's not that meaningful to me but one way or another he is he's the player of the year. So he could take some solace in this maybe if he doesn't win MVP, which he very well might, but maybe it comes down to whether he hits a barrage of homers this week. You know, if he gets to 60 or above, that would probably help. So we'll see. To be clear, it would help a number of different things.

So just do it. You know, will it feel as satisfying to hit home runs against Rocky's pitchers if you do it not in cores? I think let's find out, you know. Let's do a little natural. experiment. Here's something I was wondering. Bowman in the Fangraph's Weekly mailbag this past weekend. He had an aside there where he said, I imagine any twin who plays a key part, not a twin as in a simpling, but a Minnesota twin, who plays a key part in winning a World Series will never have to pay for a meal

in the state of Minnesota again. 1,000%. Might also be true for Cal in the state of Washington. To be clear, I don't think Cal's paying for another beer or meal. in the state of Washington already. Okay. I think it might be done. Yeah, this is an age-old saying, but taking it hyper-literally, do you think this is

actually, do you think it's true that if you are a sports in this era, maybe it used to be true, but like now, because players, they make a lot of money, you know, and so like, they can afford to buy themselves a drink or something. In fact, if I were a player and I were making. many millions of dollars over the course of my career and a server or someone who owned a restaurant or a bar or whatever tried to just comp my meal every time I ate there. I'd probably say thank you, but I will pay because like, you know, do you think this happens anymore? Like, do people still offer to pay multi-million, you know, just mega rich athletes? Just, hey, I'll

pick this up for you. I got your drink. Do you think that still happens? Do you think athletes want it to happen. I think that it is likely offered and almost universally politely refused. Yeah. I think a thing I would find really fun and satisfying to do if I, like, won the lottery would be to buy around for the whole bar. Like, I've always wanted to do that. Like, this rounds on me. That would be fun. I think it would be fun to be like, I got you guys. Yeah. I think that would be fun if you were an athlete. And we hear about that happening, right? We're like a guy, I'll come in and he's like, yeah, I got this round or what have you. I'm sure it gets offered, you know, if only because I'm not going to say that everyone who's

offering that is doing so in some sort of like weird obsequious way. I'm sure that there are plenty of people who are like, they tell the bartender, his drinks on me and then they don't like make a thing of it, right? But I also think that there are a lot of people who are like, I'm going to pay for his round and then he'll probably come over here, you know? Yeah, currying favor or like trying to. Trying to be a big shot or something. Yeah.

Will you come sign this? So I bet it happens. Yeah, I'm not saying we need to retire the saying because I think it still speaks to something real, which is that there's just a great affection for a player and a sentiment that will last throughout their career. And that's still true of sports. If you're a sports hero, especially in some benighted sports city where you just haven't had a lot of success. And then this player delivers you to the promised land. then, yeah, they're going to be a folk hero forever.

But, yeah, the specific implementation of it, I'm sure that this used to happen more often when athletes made decent money, like, you know, better than average money, but still, like, normal person pay scales. And now I'd feel pretty sheepish offering to, like, pick up the tab for a big leaguer, a longtime big leaguer who signed a big extension, like Cal's.

Like, I'd feel sort of silly even offering. really and I feel kind of awkward if I were in the players position too because like because I want to you know I don't want to like flash my money too and be like oh you like little peon of a fan I vastly out earn you I don't need your your goodwill like I wouldn't want to you know the the thought is what counts and I would want to recognize oh I I am grateful that you offered because my career meant something to you and now you're trying to pay it forward or give back in a way but also it just, I would not actually feel comfortable, like just taking charity regularly in that way, probably if I made that kind of money.

So, yeah, I don't know, different dynamic than it used to be. I also think that an important thing to remember, and I don't know whether this is true of Cal or not, but I also wonder if a thing that's maybe diminishing it to the extent that it is diminished is that they're not always living in that place during the off season. And so the people most inclined to be like, oh, my God, you took us to the, you know, the World Series for the first time are going to be people, like, if that happens, you know, let's just say that happens a year. Some year. This year, who could say a year. That happens this year with the Mariners, a year, a year. Some year in the future. The people who are the most likely to, one, recognize a Mariners player as a mariner in, like, street clothes are going to be people in the state of Washington, probably in the, Greater Seattle area, and they're going to have them the greatest likelihood of running into one of those folks during the off season. Because during the season, it's not like they don't go out for dinner or whatever during the year, but like they're busy being pro athletes, you know.

And so the amount of like organic, accidental bumping into somebody might just be diminished by the fact that they're busy during the, during the season, and then often during the off-season, they might be living somewhere else. So, you know, that's probably a drag on the occurrence of it, too. True. Yeah. Speaking of players flashing fat wads, are you familiar with Pirates pitcher Dowery Moreta? No, but now I'm very afraid.

It's nothing unsafe for work. The wads in question are just. stacks of cash. But this is a pirate's picture. He's been pretty good for the pirates. He's back this year after having Tommy John surgery. He pitched for them in 2023. I really was not that aware of his work either, but I have become aware of it because

he's kind of like gone mini viral a couple times because he brings cash with him onto the field. And his celebration after he gets out of an inning or completes his outing is that, he will bring out bills. Recently, he tipped Joey Bart, his catcher. He basically, like, brought out some money to hand to Bart for, I guess, calling a good game. On the field? On the field, like, walking off the mound towards his catcher.

And he's done this for years. I think this has been less visible, A, because he was hurt for a while, but also because pirates. But he's called Big Bank. His nickname is Big Bank, or The Big Bank. this all sounds fake but it's true he goes by big bank or el bonko or denaro dowry or money maretta like there's just some money maretta is excellent too that's a great nickname yeah and so sometimes he has actual cash on him and sometimes he just does the the money signal you know rubbing rubbing the fingers

together and so i i big bank it's great so here's the order so here's the or origin story, which was told by a Pirates reporter back in 2023, because this is just, this is so good. So, all right, I'm reading. So where did Big Bank and El Banco come from? As the story goes, during a flight, someone, Maretta can't remember who, asked Moretta for change. Meretta obliged by pulling out $2,000 worth of $20 bills. Oh, my God. They asked me for change, and I said, yeah, yeah, I got it here. Murretta laughed. Then they started calling me Big Bank. recalled Will Crow. We were playing a little game on the plane, and he just dropped it on the table and said,

I'm Big Bank. I got the money. Anybody need the buddy? We were like, what? He was like, I got the money, and he just left it there. We were like, all right, he got the money. That's Big Bank. Big Bank or the bank, it's awesome.

Colin Holderman is then quoted saying, it was a lot of 20s. That's all I got to say. I snapped my head real quick on the plane when I heard how much money he was pulling out. so he does this show me the money gesture he was with the reds but he's been with the pirates for the past few years it's just it's awesome i love this and and no one seems to be mad about it or talking about unwritten rules or whatever just money moretta just the big bank i love the idea of tipping your catcher when he calls a good game i i i yeah i don't know if you want to advertise you're walking around with like two

grand in small bills um but other than that i mean i just find it so i find it i find it the video of him i find it odd because like what do you do okay so like what are the um like the internal politics of of it because okay so the the idea is oh you you've done a good job calling this game i'm going to tip you but don't you kind of have to tip them every game then Like, aren't yet, you know what I mean? Like, do you, are there ever games where he's like, I don't know, only worth 20 tonight? Like, what? Yeah, I guess if it doesn't go well for you, probably he does this if he doesn't get rocked or something.

Right, right. Yeah, okay. If the outing goes well, as scoreless outing, yeah, it's just got cash in his back pocket, just brings it out. I love this. I don't know why I wasn't aware of this. It's just seems like this should have been a bigger national story. That we're hearing. Well, maybe the reporters involved were nervous about advertising.

He's walking around with that much cash because he just don't want to. It's also extra funny because it's the pirates. I've seen many Bob Nutting jokes about this. I mean, it's not an organization that is known for lavishing funds. It's like, oh, Moretta has to step up because Bob Nutting is not providing bonuses for anyone. He's got to be a generous tipper. I love it. Oh, Bob.

Big bank. Big bank, Marita, my new favorite pitcher. Big bank. Yeah. This actually, this relates to something that I wanted to complain about. I had a get off my lawn kind of closed to this episode, I guess. Okay. Okay, so this is not why, but we got the news shortly before we started recording that the challenge system is in, efficiently, the joint competition committee, which is mostly owners and some places.

players and an umpire. They have made it official. We're getting the challenge system in MLB next year, spring training, regular season, postseason, all of it. So we've talked a lot about the challenge system, I'm sure we'll continue to. We're pretty pro. So this is predictable. I mean, this is not unexpected. They've been working their way up to it. I kind of had forgotten that it wasn't official yet, but now it's official. So, yeah, you can take it to the big bank, I guess. And it's going to be two challenges to start the game and you retain your successful challenges. And we probably all know how this works by now. So I guess they're sticking with the two-dimensional rectangle.

It's the middle of home plate. And then the edges are the width of home plate. So it's 17 inches. But then it's adjusted at the top and bottom based on the player's height, which would be actually measured accurately. So 53.5% of the batter's height at the top, 27% at the bottom. We know the drill, right? Okay, so this is happening. Here's a somewhat related story that I saw that dismayed me,

and I'm trying to figure out whether it's consistent of me to be dismayed by this. So the Marlins are now calling pitches from the dugout in the majors. This is like a college baseball kind of thing where coaches will call pitches. They'll signal the pitches to the catchers, the catcher the pitchers. the catcher the pitcher won't call their own pitches at that level often because you're still learning down there and it's like maybe part of player development and maybe this has happened, you know, lower levels of the minors and instructs or whatever else. Sure.

I don't mind it at that level. But the Marlins are now just calling pitches from the dugout in major league games. Yeah. And this feels like a line that I'm not happy. is being crossed, and I'm interrogating my own discomfort with this. But they just started doing this just a couple days ago. So it was Friday, and the Marlins ended up winning in 12 innings over the Rangers. Jansen Junk was pitching for them.

Liam Hicks was catching. But the Marlins' multiple pitching coaches, their pitching coach and assistant pitching coach, were calling the pitches. So the assistant pitching coach called pitches, I'm quoting here for. Membley.com from inside the dugout by delivering science to Hicks, who would then check his wristband and use pitchcom to relay the offering to his pitcher. And the Marlins have actually been doing this throughout their organization in the minors all season, and now they have brought it to the big leagues, and this first trial seemed to go okay, and so they're planning to do this

for the rest of this regular season, and presumably going forward. And Clayton McCullough, Marlins' manager, He talked about why they wanted to do this. He said, we keep coming back to, we think our pitchers over time will perform better if that's the delivery system we use coming from the dugout. And we kept saying the answer was yes. And I felt like this was the right time to do it. We have some season left. We feel like this is the time that I'm comfortable for us to do it. Yeah.

He says that it's not because they have young catchers and sort of an inexperienced staff, though maybe that. makes it more beneficial or tempting for them to do, but they just think that their pitchers are going to be better with the pitches called from the dugout. And I don't know exactly how the calls are relayed from the dugout to the catcher because it says that the pitching coach is delivering the signs to the catcher who would then check his wristband and use pitchcom. So I'm not sure if the pitching coach has pitchcom, I guess not.

But then are you opening yourself up to sign stealing again when it seemed like we got rid of that? So I'm not sure how that's relayed. So that would be another reason if we're making teams susceptible to sign stealing again, then that would be bad. But I mean, I guess if you gave the pitching coach a pitchcom, then you could just kind of cut out the middleman. You wouldn't even need the catcher to do anything. You could just have the pitching coach just call the pitches right for the pitcher. I don't like this. I just, I don't like it and I feel reactionary and I feel, you know, kind of get off my lawn, as I said.

But I don't want this to be the case. I don't want this to happen. It seems very strange to me as an organizational decision because it, we can't measure yet the value of game calling. But I think everyone agrees that it is an area of unexplored value. you in terms of our understanding of what catchers bring. So why are you removing that? That's one thing. Why can't you just teach your guys to call a game?

You know what I mean? Like, what happens when you have change in your catcher population across the organization, either because you drafts new guys, you trade guys, you sign free agents? Like, if you're a catcher, do you want to go, I mean, you might not want to go play for the Marlins anyway, but like, do you want to go play for the Marlins if you're not going to be able to call games? I guess it depends if you want that responsibility off your plate. I guess if you're bad at it, maybe you're like, oh, thank God.

But it just seems like a weird inversion of our understood progression of catcher skill because it's quite common for catchers in college not to call their own games, right? For their games to be called from the dugout. But the step after that, once they get into affiliated ball is that they have to be a game caller, Oh, Sam, you're totally goofing the dynamic between the catcher and the pitcher because, like, now you're like, I mean, this is maybe an overreaction, but I'm going to school on your shot a little bit here. Like, now the catcher is like a caddy to the pitcher instead of a partner in the battery. I don't care for it at all either. I think it's, I think it's disrespectful.

Maybe that's, yeah, and maybe one reason why they're implementing this now is with these young catchers who don't have this. standing to argue with it. Like if you tried to do this with Cal Raleigh or something, is he going to want to just abdicate that responsibility or some other experienced catcher who's been doing it? So maybe you kind of, you know, sneak it in with younger rookie catchers who maybe it's not a strength for them or they want this taken out of their hands. I don't care for it.

There was another article from early in the year about them doing this at the minor League level. And, you know, they've been doing it all the way up to AAA even. But they justified it as this is a way to learn. This is a teaching tool. And if that's the case, then that's okay, I guess. Like if it's, you know, then you take the training wheel. So like the Marwan's catching coach, he's quoted in one of these pieces saying it was an organizational decision. I think the premise behind it is to try to develop as much as we can, the instruction of pitch calling. Well, okay. But at this point, it's not about instruction, really. It's about just taking that responsibility away from the players. So at AAA, I guess it was like at the time, at least, sometimes the coaching staff was calling it. And then other times the catcher would call it. And then he could kind of compare, this is what they want me to do. This is what I'm doing. And you could talk about it after. And you could, it says, an opportunity to help develop those skills. But if the end game here is not to need to develop those skills. because you're just taking it out of the player's hands entirely.

And I don't like that. So there is the potential for it to backfire, of course. And there are some quotes to that effect in this article where Hicks is saying there's certain situations, obviously they can see. They've got heat maps. They've got certain things on the bench that you might not see, that you might not have access to in real time in the game. And then there's also times where I see things that maybe they don't see. and he talks about the communication mattering. So obviously, if you just have some algorithm

that's telling you here are the optimal pitches to throw, but that pitcher doesn't feel comfortable throwing that pitch that day, doesn't have a good feel for it, whatever, like doesn't have the conviction and all of that. Pitchers often will say that just being on the same page with their catcher, that's important. Feeling like they're throwing the pitch that they want to throw, that they have confidence in on that day, that's important.

So that's going to change your particular. results for that pitch in ways that are probably difficult to quantify beforehand. But okay, maybe there's some sort of communication here. I can buy that this would be beneficial. I can buy that if you had a dedicated coach doing this, that they might be better at doing it than the catcher. Because, you know, you were just saying that game calling, it matters, even if it's tough to quantify. And maybe this is actually reinforcing that. Maybe it's saying, yeah, it matters so much that we don't want to take any chances here.

What if this catcher doesn't know what he's doing? What if he's not studying the scouting reports? We've talked about this recently with our pitchers even studying the scouting reports, or are they just throwing the ball down the middle, which is another thing that the raise under Peter Bendix, who's now running the Marlins, and the Marlins have also done, which is just, you know, don't worry about throwing to a specific spot, just aim for the middle and let your natural stuff play up,

and maybe that's good and maybe that's bad. But this, I kind of get it because it's like, hey, why would you leave this pretty important thing up to someone who maybe is not applying themselves? Maybe they're not studying the data. Maybe they're not looking at the matchups. Maybe we can remove some of the uncertainty here by quantifying it really rigorously. And okay, maybe that would actually help a team. Or maybe there's another quote from McCullough here, our catchers need to. to be able to spend their bandwidth and their time and other aspects of things than the preparation

part of it on that side. So he's essentially saying, I guess, like, if we take this off their plate, they can do other stuff. They could practice physical skills. They could practice hitting. They could do whatever, right? And I guess another thing, you were talking about what happens if you change catchers? Yeah.

Well, you could argue that this would be good in that situation because if you're a pitcher who's been working with one catcher, and then that catcher gets traded or gets heard or something, okay, suddenly you're working with some other caddy here who might have a completely different approach to pitch calling. Maybe it's better to have a consistent organizational approach to that, where regardless of who the catcher is, it's being called from the bench, and then there's continuity there. But I just don't like it because, and I think I've been pretty consistent on this point over the years, even though there's maybe some tension, because I like information and I like

preparation and I'm not saying deprive yourself of an edge but I I like the players to have to be the ones who are playing the game ultimately I this is I don't know if this is like an old school position of mine but I've I've said this in the past about do you remember this almost a decade ago but when there was like a minor controversy because the Dodgers were using like laser range finders to yeah yeah to determine outfield positioning and The league was like, hey, you can't do that. Yeah, the Mets complained about it, and then there were some league guidance about it. And they weren't.

It wasn't even just in real time. It was like they would put markers out on the field where they wanted the guys to stand. So I didn't like that. And I also don't like the cards, the cheat cards. I've kind of come around on wanting to get rid of those. I thought they were kind of cool at first when they were new and novel. And I was like, oh, okay, this is good. The players will study this information.

But I don't really like when they just whip out the cheat sheet that tells them where to go. And, I mean, I've, this may be extreme, but I've even come out in favor of just banning mound visits. Yeah, you have a strong view about these things. Yeah, I guess I do. I just, like, once the game is going on and once you're between the lines, I want coaches to stay out of it, basically. Yeah. You know, like, you can do whatever you want. There's a lot of downtime.

You can have your preparation meetings. You can study whatever you want to study between innings. There's plenty of time, you know? Like if you want to memorize, okay, where am I supposed to stand in the next half inning, or how do I want to approach this hitter? What should we throw this guy? You can talk about that. You can plan it.

You can study the iPads and the cheat sheets in the dugout. But when you're out there, I don't like it. I've compared it to just, like, being off book. on Broadway or something like you can have the scripts when you're practicing but when you're out there it kind of it breaks my immersion if you're like reading from a script because I want to think like you're the you're the actor you're embodying this character I want to forget that you're an actor who's playing a part here and so I want you to have these lines down cold so well that you don't need to consult anything and you're delivering it naturally as if this is something

that's happening in your own head and I guess that's what I want when players are on the field too if there's a timeout or a break in the action okay but when you're out there i just i kind i want a less meddlesome way of communicating that information so i don't know if this is an entirely coherent philosophy but i want i want the players to play you know like i want if a catcher's good at game calling i want that to be a skill that benefits the team or hurts the team if if they're not good at game calling i don't want like all those edges sanded down by just the team and coaches providing that information even in the game. I don't know.

Is this, does this make some sense? I've gotten some pushback on this before, but I still, I feel it. I'm with you about, I want the catchers to do the game calling. That feels essential to their function. I do, I think mound visits are fine. I'm not bothered by the position cards in quite the same way, but this does feel so central to the function of the catcher that to have it removed at the pro level seems seems wrong and part of that is like my context for it is often college catchers where it's like

no you do need to worry about just receiving the ball that is not a given at the college level right and you know for really highly regarded draft prospects you know they're going to be good at that but there is i think much more of a developmental argument there where it's like you you're trying to get, you're still trying to lock in some of the fundamental aspects of catcher defense that we, we just take for granted in the majors. But, hey, we take them for granted. And I don't, my sense is not that there is like a great variation in skill as it pertains to catcher's ability to do that stuff.

So I don't, I don't know, man. I don't care for it. I don't. I think it's wrong. Yeah. If it's successful, and it would be tough to quantify. but if they get an edge here, then other teams will probably follow suit.

The race have not done this, I believe, at the Major League level. No. But this, I don't know. I mean, I'm sure in isolated instances, perhaps it has happened. You know, I thought about this when Pitchcom came in, and I'm pro Pitchcom, but there are some pitchers who will want to call their own games. That's okay. You know, catchers historically have done it, but not in all cases.

And as long as a player is doing it, I just, the front office puts the players on the field, and that's very important. But when the game is going on, I just, I want the players to be the separators and the differentiators. And if you didn't study the scouting reports and you don't know where to stand, then you're out of luck. Like, you should have done your homework, basically. And, you know, maybe the physical skills, the athleticism, that's why we watch sports more so than like someone studying the game film or the playbook. or whatever, but I think that's part of it. I think that's part of being a great athlete

is also the mental psychological side too, not just can you run fastest and have the best hand-eye coordination and be the strongest, but also, like, can you be smart? Can you study? Can you apply yourself? And if you just take that out of the player's hands

and it's just all kind of coming from an algorithm or something, I'm not like anti-you know, using numbers, bring the numbers into the pre-game meeting absolutely say, hey, here's what we think would be beneficial. But then ultimately the execution of that, I want that to be in the player's hands, not just some coach who's sitting in the dugout signaling. Now, I said this to my pals, Zach Cram, formerly of the ringer now of ESPN, and he brought up a reasonable objection, which is what's the difference between this

and relaying signs from the dugout to runners or to batters, right? So you have, you know, third base coaches or who are flashing signs or you have a manager or coach in the dugout flashing signs to a coach who's flashing signs to a player or something. And I guess that's sort of the same, but it's less heavy-handed than just calling every single pitch. Correct. And also it's kind of always, it's always worked that way. It's always worked that way. And you do have like a different, some of it is like you're benefiting from different perspective than the. player necessarily has.

Yeah. I don't know. I just, some of this is just like we've done it one way a long time. And so we view base running as an activity that is primarily born of the runner's own skill, but is seasoned by the base coach's instincts, right? And a base coach has responsibility on base running plays that are fundamental. to their, why they're out there. I know you wouldn't, none's they really want them out there.

I have also defended the idea of getting rid of base coaches too, so I'm consistent at least. It feels in universe to and consistent with a broader set of responsibilities that the base coach has. This feels, and you're right, that is born of it having always been that way. But this is actively taking away a responsibility that is fundamental to what the catcher, like the notion of like the, the field marshal captain you know and i don't want to say that it's necessarily anti-labor but it does feel a little like that because while we can't quantify the value of game calling players reputations in that do help to inform some of their free agent market and so to strip that skill away it's like well now that's one less thing they can be paid for and i'm not saying that's

necessarily the intent of the project on the part of the marlins but that might be an unintended consequence of it. And that feels bad, so. Yeah, yeah. And managers have always borne some responsibility for things that happened in games, obviously. You know, they'll signal an intentional walk or a pitch out or hit and run or, you know, sacrifice whatever it is over the years.

And so, yeah, that is a manager just dictating what the players do. And that's kind of the manager's job to some extent. But, yeah, I guess it feels different to me from relaying signs. because it's, well, it's just, it's more impactful. Maybe philosophically it's similar, but it is more pervasive. It's more impactful. And, yeah, like, as long as there have been signs, they've often been relayed from the bench or from a manager who was standing around

third base or whatever it is. And so, and, you know, historically you've had catchers often had some responsibility for positioning, too. They'd kind of, as you said, be that field general, and they'd walk out and point, oh, go over here, go over there. there because it is it's unusual baseball the degree of you know you have coaches managers in uniform which is kind of quaint and you know charming in a way it's silly but i kind of like it i guess for tradition's sake but it's symbolic of the fact that like managers can go out there you know

like they can trespass on the field it's not trespassing they could just walk out there i mean they're limited in the number of visits they can make and mound visits but they can they can go across the borders where you don't typically see that in most other sports where the coaches are wearing suits or something and they can call a time out and then you can come to the sidelines and they'll tell you what they want to do but then you go back out there and it's your job now you know in football of course they have headsets and everything and so that's another thing that could happen I guess in baseball does at some levels has been tested at least but yeah I'm just all for for minimizing this direct

role and maybe it seems like an arbitrary distinction to draw and just say yeah you can tell your players anything they want between innings before the game and then they go out there why shouldn't you still you know like they're often there's like an outfield positioning coach who will yell out there from the dugout and gesture and say hey shade over this way shade over that way now you see that less because it's just on the cards that you pull out of your pocket but something about that even offends me less than something you're actually bringing out onto the field. Because if you took it to some sort of logical extreme where it's like players don't have to think about anything and positioning is out of their hands and game

calling is out of their hands, you know, and I'm fine with the challenge system, but I do suspect that at some point we will get full ABS and there will be some merits to that, but I do appreciate catchers and I really like the catching position and you're going to be taking just most of the value away from what makes that a premium defensive positioning. What makes it so special is that these guys are calling pitches and they're receiving pitches and how they receive them matters and they're doing all these things. And I guess you could say, oh, it's too much to ask of any one player. Let's just let's make it easier on them and the computers will call the pitches and then

the coaches will call the pitches too and catchers will just have to worry about base stealing and blocking, and that's about it, and even base stealing, it's harder to catch guys now. So, I don't know. I kind of, I don't want the catching position to be diminished because it's a great joy of baseball to me. Yeah. Yeah, I just, I don't want this to be so transparently like coaches pulling the strings, because I'm there to watch the players and the athletes ultimately.

I also, can I be a little rude about the Marlins? Sure. I do have some skepticism that the team. starting to pioneer this is them versus. And it's not like there aren't smart people who work for that club, there are. And Peter Beneg's a smart guy. But yeah.

Is Big Bank Moretta just going to tip his assistant pitching coach after he calls a good game? Come on. Yeah, I just don't think that it I don't know. It feels like it's fundamentally misunderstanding one of the most important relationships on the field.

And I don't care for that. Yeah. I'm worried that it will work too well because I have thought that this is potentially an area where there are gains to be made when it comes to quantifying and improving pitch calling. And if those gains come from the fact that you have a dedicated person whose job that is who can look at the numbers and everything, then maybe that will actually be an improvement. But I just, I don't care for it. So, yeah, it's tough because we wrestle with this with like defensive stats now. where, you know, the stat-cast stats don't really take into account positioning. Or, you know, positioning, it's sort of like they take into account the starting position of the fielder. And then we measure how well the fielder does based on where he's standing and where the ball is and everything. But then there is that positioning component. And how do you know whom to credit that to?

Right. Historically speaking, there were players who excelled at positioning. And they were just, they read the scouting reports. They read the ball off the bat. They could think ahead and know, okay. here's the count and here's the pitcher and here's the batter and he's probably going to hit it this way and I'll shade a little that way. And there was a real edge there for some guys. And now maybe there is that edge, but it's all just down to the team because the team is telling you where to stand. I don't know. If it just becomes super prescribed like that where you're just kind of going through the motions, it's never going to be old. I mean, you know, you're still going to have to have the pitcher throw the pitch and have the hitter hit the pitch. It's not like it's all going to be just, you know, paint by numbers. But. There's just a degree of that that I'm just not comfortable with for whatever reason. So I'm with you.

All right. Yeah. Right in. If people have suggested before that this is like an inconsistent position or, you know, I'm open to that too. But there's just something that rubs me the wrong way about it. Sometimes we contain within us contradictions, you know? That's a thing about being alive. Yep.

I can only be myself and be sincere about my feelings here. So anyway. Okay. Did you see that Mike Trout, he hit his 400th Homer finally? And part of the reward that the fan asked for to give the ball back, he hit an absolute bomb. I think it was in course. It was like 485 or something. And the fan asked for autographed bats and balls or whatever.

He got his swag. But he also asked to play catch with Trout. And they did. They briefly played catch just like in foul territory between home and first or home and third. And, you know, I thought that was kind of nice, like the experiential reward because ultimately that would be more memorable or a better story, I think, than, oh, yeah, I got this autographed bat. Okay, maybe if the player hands that to you personally, it's kind of cool. But much cooler, I think, to have a video of you playing catch with Mike Trout. Yeah.

As long as it's not, like, you're imposing on, you know, you're being some super fan and, you know, you're like, dance for me to get this ball back. Like, you know, you treat me to. an experience, you know, like don't ask for too much. Have dinner with me, you know, let me come over to your house or something. Like, don't go over the line. But I thought it was funny that Trout did not wear a glove. Yeah. He was just catching barehand with this fan, which, you know, kind of a flex, I guess, just like there's no way that you can throw this hard enough to hurt me. And it's going to be a problem. Yeah. Now, because it's Mike Trout, I might say, wear the glove. Just be on the safe.

Yeah, go on now. Don't take any risks here, Mike. But, you know, I guess he mostly hasn't hurt his hands and fingies and bird bones. But sometimes he has, it's a hamate bone or whatever else, the slide that went wrong. I don't want to miss with those bird bones. Yeah. Plus, like, that fan in that situation is going to have every incentive to throw it at their max speed. Oh, yeah.

To impress the player. Right. You want to look cool in front of Mike Trout. Yeah. And so you're going to throw it as hard as you possibly can. And that still probably won't be that hard if you're a typical fan. Maybe he sized this fan up and was like, yeah, I don't think you have the velo that I have to worry about here. But it would be, you know, if the player was like, yeah, I think I'm good without a glove and you were wearing a glove, that'd be a little.

I don't know if that would like spoil the experience for me because it's, you know, maybe a little emasculating. It's like you don't think I could throw this hard enough to hurt your bare hand if I fired it in there. But maybe that would actually make the story better because it's like, yeah, you know, you play with this athletic god. You don't want them to use a glove. Maybe it's, you know, it's like, yeah, they wanted to maintain their separation and draw the line here and show that they're still different from me, even though we're both on the field playing catch casually. Apparently, yeah. Well, I'm recording this after Monday's results came in. The Astros lost and the Mariners won and clinched a playoff spot.

The Mets and Diamondbacks won and the Reds lost. New York reclaims a wild card spot for now. Meanwhile, the Tigers lost to the Guardians. So that 15 and a half game lead has fully a. evaporated. In fact, the Guardians even hold the tiebreaker, so technically they are in playoff position. Plenty of time for that to change, of course. But we have a tie atop the standings. Tough to believe. Quite a story. Red Sox also won in case you were wondering. So the plot thickens or stays thick. Guardians beat the best. Tigers threw scuba at him. And he

wasn't enough. Not yet, at least. Lots of talk about teams controlling their own destiny, which I've pedantically complained about before. I think it's a useful phrase. We know what it means. But of course, you can't control whether you win or lose even the games that you are directly involved in. If you could, then you would just win it will. But your opponent, and general randomness, often have something to say about that. One more note, we talked recently about Blake Trinan's zombie runner-induced loss, where he suffered sort of a hard luck loss after being pulled mid-extra inning. He didn't put anyone on base. He didn't do anything wrong. He'd actually gotten out of a jam in the previous inning. But he was charged with the zombie run when it scored. And

thus was the loser. Well, Trinanin's been terrible lately. He may have been blameless in that particular game, but he's been blamful in plenty of other games. And in fact, Mike Petriello and Jason Bernard of MLB.com, determined that Trinan, who has been charged with the loss in five Dodgers losses in a row, is the first pitcher on record ever to have made that history, ever to have been the losing pitcher in five consecutive team losses. There were 13 previous instances where a pitcher was charged with four team losses in a row. But the zombie runner loss pushed him over the top

to an unprecedented five consecutive losses. My heart does not weep for Blake Trinen, even though there's a zombie runner caveat to this unfun fact for him. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash Effectively Wild.

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