Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2395: Momentum is the Next Day’s Starting Podcast

Episode Date: October 31, 2025

Ben and Meg banter about Trey Yesavage’s performance in World Series Game 5, whether he’s already provided a career’s worth of value to Toronto, his current prospect ranking, and his future, plus Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s steady postseason production vs. Shohei Ohtani’s clustered postseason production, covering the regular season like we cover the postseason, why the […]

Effectively wild, where we can talk about a tonic all day long. Effectively wild, we've been in there make an honor like you know it's going to be a good time. I want to look about my statistics. I want to hear about none of them obvious, yeah. Tell me about some prospect I should know about. Effect, Effectively wild. Hello, Effectively Wilde, Effectively Wilde. Affectively Wilde, Baseball, Effectively Wild.

Hello and welcome to episode 2395 of Effectively Wild Baseball Podcasts from FanGraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. Who else? I am Ben Lindberg of the Ringer, joined by Meg Rally of Fever. Fangraphs. Hello, Meg. Oh, hello. Well, I was thinking about Trey is Savage, who isn't these days. Yeah. But I had some interesting thoughts, interesting to me, at least. Yeah. Because famously, he's eight starts into his big league career. Yeah. Five of them have been postseason starts, and most of them have been pretty spectacular. But he is still so new to the league, so young, so

inexperienced, he is still extremely rookie eligible postseason innings don't count toward that eligibility, right? So he will go into next season as probably one of the leading American League rookie of the year candidates. And yet, he has already reached the mountaintop more or less. I mean, this is the pinnacle pretty much of pitching and of playing in the major leagues. It's nowhere to go from here, but down. I hate to break it to Trey Savage.

I mean, I'm sure he's well aware, given the incredible trajectory of his season, which we have discussed, going from A ball and all the different minor league levels, and then coming up as late in the season as he did, and then becoming an integral part of the postseason rotation. And depending on how these last two games go, if the Blue Jays can win one of them, he's a potential World Series MVP. I mean, maybe it's Vlad, but it could be, you savage. He's in the running. Yeah. So you could call it a career at this point and feel pretty good about yourself. Not that he will or that the Blue Jays would want him to, but if he did, if he just said, all right, well, that's it for me. I don't know what else I could achieve in this game.

I'm just going to go off and enjoy the rest of my life and do something else and leave on a high note here. Yeah. The Boot Jays would probably be pretty happy with that draft pick, I think. Yeah. They'd be disappointed that he decided to stop playing baseball, but I think if you had given them that choice, hey, you want to use your 20th overall pick on a guy who's going to come up quickly next season, arrive right when you need him to step into a postseason rotation and help carry your team to a title, I think that's better than the median outcome for a 20th overall pick right there if he achieved nothing else in his baseball career. that right there would be a win. They would feel like they got their money's worth or their draft capital's worth. Yeah, I mean, it's such a funny thing because it's hard to know how to balance it.

You wouldn't be satisfied with it really. I mean, you'd certainly be grateful. I think you would probably be dissatisfied because, like, there aren't many non-tragic circumstances under which this is, like, the only thing he does, right? So there is that part of it. I also think that part of what you're doing when you're drafting a guy like you Savage who was like a polished college starter is you're hoping for this kind of outcome, right? Quick to the majors, very effective. Now, he has been tremendously effective for the most part in his time up. He's interesting because it's like, you know, we're recording this on the off day.

How nice to not have to worry about something aging, you know? I know for once we can post a pod and I don't have to update the outro to account for a game that has happened since we did their discussion. Yeah. And so, but, you know, so you're in this, you're in this interesting spot with him because the game that we just saw him throw, he struck out 12 Dodgers. He really held them in check. The only blemish really was that Kiki Hernandez's home run, which he sure got all of. But, you know, he was able to limit the damage. His splitter was super effective.

You know, he had good feel for it. He clearly felt confident deploying it, which was a contrast to his game one start, where he barely threw the splitter at all trying to, you know, I think some of which was planned given the way that that pitch plays from a platoon perspective. And some of it was he obviously, he didn't seem like he had a great feel for it. So I think he wasn't going to try to challenge them with the splitter when he didn't feel like he had it in the same way that he often does. But in this game, tremendous, right? Gave them lengths.

One of the best World Series starts. Amazing. By some metrics ever, you don't even need any qualifiers. But if you apply qualifiers for age or inexperience or rookie status or anything, of course, he had the most strikeouts by a rookie in a World Series game. And, you know, seven innings, one run, 12 strikeouts, no walks. Most strikeouts any pitcher has had in a World Series game without issuing a walk, which maybe there's.

There's not that much of a difference between no walks and one walk. But there is a difference, just aesthetically speaking, when you look at the line score, it's so much more impressive when you had all the strikeouts and none of the walks whatsoever. It just seems to make a big difference in signaling how in command you were. And you said he struck out 12 Dodgers. I guess technically he struck out probably nine of them 12 times in total, which is what you mean when you say that. But it was notable that he struck out every player in the Dodgers lineup, which was, I think, the fourth time in World Series history that a player had done that. And I know there are more strikeouts now than there used to be.

I can just kind of apply that caveat to all of these strikeout starts. But, yeah, I mean, incredible. It was the first time in his pro career, which sounds impressive, but is not actually that long, that he pitched this deep into a game and threw 100 pitches in a game. So, yeah, and the splitter is not only effective in its own right, but when he has that working, then that enhances the slider's effectiveness. So that was a big weapon for him, too. And in total, he got 23 whiffs, I believe, second most of any pitcher in this postseason. So everything was working. He just looked completely in command and dominant.

Yeah, completely in command and dominant. You know, he goes back out for the seventh. Like you noted, deep, both in terms of innings and pitch count. for him, gets Freeman to strike out swinging, which was the theme for him. And then, you know, Tay Oscar Hernandez is singles and you're like, well, are they going to have to go to the bullpen now? But then he just gets Tommy Inman to ground into a double play. So it's like you are doing all of the things that you could possibly want. Now, that stands in sharp contrast with his game one start, right? Where he had to feel his way through and his splitter wasn't working the way that it was

last night. And, you know, like we talked about, like some of this is his plan. But You know, he's not able to lean on it in the same way. He, you know, he wasn't nearly as commanding. And so I think it's, when you have a guy like this where he is so young, he's so new in his pro career, obviously with like high pedigree and, you know, a polished starters pedigree, but, you know, he's, he'd made three regular season starts in the big leagues before this postseason run. And so you're like, you're grappling with what he is right now.

And then you are doing this strange projection calculus. Like how, what does this tell us about who Tray Savage will be going forward? And how much does it alter our existing opinion of him? Because people are talking about how he, like, he went through four levels and all this stuff. And it's like, well, yeah, some of that is like he was a polished starter. He didn't really pitch much after the draft. He had like a weird. collapsed lung issue, pre-draft.

We weren't sure if he was going to be at the draft combine because he wasn't cleared to fly. And so some of this is like, yeah, you're going to start that guy like on the complex to, to or adjacent to the complex so that you can kind of really tailor his advancement. But yeah, he does this incredible thing. Was a well-regarded prospect? Like what, what if any difference is there in our understanding of his potential and trajectory than there was, you know, two months ago? And it can be hard to know how to react to something like this because you've seen what the fully actualized, like, ideal version of Trey Savage is. And you've also seen him, like, when he's doing fine, but not nearly as dominant as he was in game five. So it's a, right.

His ALCS start stunk. And his game one start when the splitter wasn't working was not great. He gutted through four innings. Yeah. On the whole, it's gone spectacularly. And the overall numbers are extremely solid. and the highs have been very high this start and the start against the Yankees. And the Js have won four of his five starts, which is ultimately the important thing when it comes to the playoffs.

But yeah, because that's the interesting thing. He was a first rounder last year. So, yeah, obviously he was a prospect, but he wasn't the most elite prospect. He was not even necessarily a consensus preseason top 100 guy. He wasn't on the fan grafts preseason top 100. He was 88th in the MLB. pipeline preseason rankings. I don't think he was on the Baseball America or Baseball Perspectus list either.

And obviously he's had quite a come-up, but yeah, how quickly do you adjust your expectations for what is ultimately a small sample? Because the fascinating thing is that he's still technically a prospect, even though he has made good. Like, he's reached the highest level of achievement that a player possibly can in a small sample, but he's still on prospect list, and he's still ranked below a lot of other prospects. Like MLB Pipeline, which updates its top 100, I assume fairly frequently or kind of continuously, has him at number 26.

Yeah. Fan graphs, the board, which was updated just prior to the playoffs. Like two days before his first start of the postseason against the Yankees, those updated rankings came out, and he was 35. Yeah. So now what do you do? And I asked Eric Longanagan what he would do. Where would he rank right now, given all we've seen and what he has accomplished here?

And he said that he would be, let's see, number 13 for him right now. So he has Nolan McLean of the Mets at 12 and Andrew Painter of the Phillies at 13. And Eric said that right now he would have you. somewhere in the gap between McLean and Painter. He said, I'll take McLean's command and extra fastball utility. He might just have otherwise been the guy doing this if the Mets were here. Right. Yeah, he was nails down the stretch for them, too.

Whereas Painter would not be, Eric says, he would be Eric Lauer. So, yeah, that's just so fascinating because, of course, you can't really evaluate a prospect and you're doing a prospect ranking. you're not going to rank a guy based on, yeah, he happened to come up when his team was in a penit race and won the division barely and then might just win a World Series. Like, he's contributed to that, of course, but how much are you going to give him a bump for those context dependent factors? When you're doing a prospect ranking, I guess you're really projecting essentially rest of season war maybe or rest of season or rest of career war, I mean, or career war during your years of team control. or whatever it is, right? Something long term. And you have to look beyond this postseason. And yet, if I had to guess, like, the median outcome for, let's say, a top 10, top 15-ish prospect who's a pitcher for a career can't be that much more valuable than what Yesavich

has already accomplished, which sounds preposterous. I haven't done the research if someone wants to and we'll send it to me, I'd be happy to relay it. But he has compiled 18% championship win probability added, according to baseball reference, in his eight starts. And just to pick a teammate, Chris Bassett, for instance, who is on the Blue Tays also and has pitched in this postseason and is 36 years old and has been in the big leagues for 11 years. Trey Savage has already exceeded Chris Bassett's career regular season plus postseason championship win powerability at it.

And it's not like Chris Bassett is some sort of spectacular pitcher, but he's a good pitcher, right? I mean, you know, on his baseball reference page, he's got 18 career war plus whatever postseason value. That's probably what you would expect from a whole career for even like a top pitching prospect in this day. age because those guys could get hurt or they could flame out or whatever, right? So like, if you got the career value of Chris Bassett, who was a 16th rounder himself, that would probably be pretty good. You'd hope for more, of course, but that would probably turn out to be the average or the median value that you got from that guy, and you Savage has already exceeded it. So in a sense, you'd have to say he has already more than made good. Like,

the career value that you hope cumulatively to extract from a player who was drafted where Yesavage was and ranked where you Savage was or is, probably he has already delivered that. So it's just it's all gravy from here on out, essentially is what I'm saying. But I wonder what he thinks about that because that's a weird way to think of things when you're 22 and you just broke into the big leagues. I bet he's probably not thinking about it like. that at all, you know? I bet he's, he's more focused on the task sort of immediately at hand.

I'm sure that Trey I'm savage to the, well, I'm not sure. I would imagine to the extent that Trey Yusavich is thinking about what does this portend for my future place in baseball, he's probably thinking, well, I guess I don't have to worry about competing for a spot out of camp. Yeah. I think Trey Y Savage can kind of pencil himself into the opening day rotation for the Blue Jays next year. It's so odd. you're right he'll always have this like even if the dodgers come back to to win the next two and win the world series um he will always have this will always be a tremendous accomplishment right i'm sure he wants his career to last much longer and then again things get murkier like we can all remember in 2023 evan carter lit the world on fire in the postseason right he batted 300

throughout the postseason he had a 158 wrc plus some huge moments for them really helped the Rangers to win that that World Series. And since then, you know, he's been much less effective. Now, part of that is that Evan Carter has dealt pretty consistently with injury over that stretch, right? He played a full, he hasn't played a full season since then, 45 games in 2024, just 63 last, this last year in 2025. So you don't want to over sort of correct and say, well, he was, he was terrible, actually. Like, it was wrong to have him be considered a top prospect. But it's just a good reminder that, like, guys get hurt.

Development isn't linear. Trey Savage is a pitcher. They famously don't stay healthy, right? And so, you know, like, I just, I wonder what we will see. And it'll be fascinating to watch going forward. Yeah. And I doubt he's thinking, or the Bougays are thinking, okay, mission accomplished. We got what we wanted out of that pick.

You're probably thinking sky's the limit. Now he has raised. his expected career value. He has raised his perceived ceiling. I don't know if, you know, maybe the Blue Jays expected exactly this out of him. They certainly promoted him aggressively and trusted him with a rotation spot. So maybe once they brought him up, they thought, yeah, this is exactly what he's going to give us. But everyone else who hadn't heard of Tray Savage a few months ago is now thinking maybe even has an inflated expectation for how good he's going to be after this because he has just been so good.

on this stage. Though, as I was saying to Eric, I knew nothing about Tray Savage's makeup prior to watching him closely this month, but just everything I've seen and all of the quotes and how he seems just completely unbothered by everything, not even unbothered. He's embraced it. He has thrived on this pressure. And that alone would make me think I'd give him a high grade for that. Right. And Eric said he seemed like that kind of guy even at the combine when he and Bauman talked to him. But yeah, like I've read a couple of his prior quotes about how he handles the pressure. And there was one in Passon's story about him too, where he was warming up prior to the game five start. And he's in the bullpen in right field. And they're Dodgers fans everywhere. And they're taunting him and insulting him and all the rest. And Passon Wright's at one point, Yassavage took a breath. stepped off the mound and turned to pitch and coach Pete Walker

this is fun you savage said I love this I mean that's a big game pitcher right there you know who knows if he'll

ever be in a big game like that again he could pitch for 15 more years and not end up in that big a game again but he certainly seems to have

the mindset if you know I mean you talk about like the value of experience in the postseason and all the research seems to show that there's nothing really predictable there, and inexperience doesn't seem to hamper players.

And, of course, sometimes just being, you know, new to it all, maybe you could be overwhelmed by it, or maybe you're not even really aware of the enormity of it. And you don't fully internalize that, and you just kind of play like a kid because you are still a kid, and you're not putting as much pressure on yourself. It's just team-by-team and case-by-case basis. But these Blue Jays do not seem to be bothered by anything. They seem quite resilient psychologically. And easy to say that when they're generally raking and playing as well as they have this month.

And there's always a chicken or the egg thing with that, the mindset, the mentality. Are they seemingly so loose and able to bounce back because they've been good? Or are they good because they are so loose and able to bounce back? Who knows? It's probably a bit of both. But, yeah, Yassavage just seems to be wired for this kind of competition. Yeah, I don't want to assume that anyone's personality is, like, fixed, particularly at 22, right? So if there's a guy out there who, you know, like, let's imagine, I don't, McLean is a bad example because I think that dispositionally he's probably not that far off from Yosavage.

But, like, let's imagine the Mets had advanced, right? And, you know, you saw him come in and, whoops, like, he folded under the pressure, quote, unquote, or it seemed like it was getting to him or he, you know, he got heckled in a bullpen and he jeered back at the fans there rather than, rather than taking it in stride and saying this is fun, right? I wouldn't look at him and say, well, this is his fixed state when it comes to these sorts of moments forever, right? like he's 24 you know people change a lot in their 20s their brains are still working on stuff you know but to be that young and to seem just sort of dispositionally suited for moments like this like it it certainly adds something to your ability to do what you need to in those moments can can i precisely tell you what the value of that is can we quantify it can we say what you know what it can make up for if you lack you know is it worth one tick of velocity and now

I can't tell you any of that, but I can tell you if you can go out there and be calm before you're facing Otani, like, it seems like it can't hurt, right? It has to, it probably helps a little at least. And not all guys are kind of in that headspace sort of natively to their personality. And so it's, it's very impressive. I'd be a complete mess. I would just be a disaster. I mean, part of that is that I'm pretty bad at baseball. And so if I were thrust into a World Series situation, I would be like, I am not meant for this. moment, there's been a terrible mistake, you know. I'd be walking around being like, this is not my beautiful house. Anyway, it's been fun to watch him and hopefully we'll be watching him for many more years, whether he makes it back to this sort of stage again or not. And yeah, when you're evaluating a prospect or a career, obviously you can't really consider the context like that. Or that's not how prospect rankings typically work. You know, we don't consider what team you're on or how many playoff appearances. you can be expected to make or whatever.

But if you do factor that in, just the context, you know, it's not as if Savage got the Blue Jays here. He helped, but he showed up fairly late in the game. So he just came in at the right time, at the right place, and then it was also very much the right time and right place for the Blue Jays that he happened to arrive and bolster their rotation when, you know, they had holes and Berrios wasn't available. And otherwise, I guess they would be starting Chris Bassett or Eric Lauer or someone.

And, you know, those guys have had their moments too. But yeah, it's pretty special, especially the trajectory. So that is what has been consuming me because he just arrived and already you could kind of say, well, call it a career. I had a pretty decent one. That's how good he has been. I suspect he'll want to keep going. You know, it's just to, because like, what do you do with your whole life after that, you know? A lot of baseball ahead of him, fortunately, for the Blue Jays and for fans like us.

Yeah. You can enjoy watching him pitch. So, as you said, we are in an off day, a rare, blessed, blissful off day, which we have needed, even though these last couple games have not been especially exciting. I mean, exciting for Blue Jays fans, exciting for Trey is Savage, but not particularly close are competitive or suspenseful. But I think we're all feeling some hangover from game three. Perhaps the Dodgers are.

I don't know. But it is nice to get a bit of a break in a breather here and actually not be out of date by the time we post this podcast. And I suppose this will be our last episode of the 2025 season because next time we pod, it will be over. And we'll be recapping what happened in game six and Game 7, if necessary, back in Toronto. So advantage Blue Jays, as we speak.

And since you mentioned Otani, you Savage facing him a second ago, obviously after the game where it looked like he had ascended to a higher plane where he could no longer be pitched to and would not see a single hitable pitch or pitch period for the rest of this series, he is 0 for 7 since then with a walk.

So you just never know, really. And meanwhile, Vlad has just continued to rake. Vlad basically just, he has his daily home run at this point. Like, you never know when exactly in the game it's going to come. But you know, he's going to get one at some point. And I was comparing their batting lines over this postseason. And it's such a contrast. They've both been great overall.

But Vlad has really spread out. his production. And Otani has completely clustered his production. Yes. So Otani has played in one fewer game than Vlad and has correspondingly, I think, five fewer played appearances. And Vlad has the better overall numbers, but they have the same number of home runs. So they have each hit eight home runs. But Otanis have come in four games. Yeah. And, you know, three, of those have been multi-homer games. Right. And Vlad has eight homers in eight different games.

He has not had a multi-homer game yet. And so it kind of lands differently because Otani has had these just otherworldly signature, the Otani game, you know, maybe multiple games that could qualify as the Otani game. Of course, he has pitched, as everyone is aware, also, which Vlad has not done. But Vlad has also played some solid defense, which Antony has. not done except for when he's pitching and the base running and all the all-around contributions that we've talked about. So if you look at the numbers, like Otani has a lower OPS and win probability added, but he has a higher championship win probability added. All that's just kind of a context dependent and when the production happens to come.

So Vlad's sort of having a signature postseason. This has been like the October of Vlad as much as anyone else. but Otani has had the more memorable single game performances. Yes. And I don't know which you would rather have either as the player or as the team. Because I could kind of see an argument that when Otani has had these signature games, he has basically single-handedly delivered Dodgers wins. Like, obviously in the two-way game with the 10 strikeouts over six innings

and the three homers and everything, he more or less one. that one by himself. But then he also had the wildcard game where he hit two homers in a 10-5 win. And then, of course, he had the nine reached on base, nine time on base two-homer game in game three, which the Dodgers won six to five. And he didn't win that one single-handedly, but they would not have won it without him. Having that kind of game seems safe to say. Whereas with flat, I guess, I don't know. if you just like clustered the same roughly amount of production or dingers at least in a few games where you just completely went off, I wonder whether that is better mathematically speaking.

You know, it kind of depends. Like maybe sometimes it's just piling on and the rest of your lineup would have delivered the win themselves and you didn't even need to hit the third homer or get on base for the ninth time or something. Whereas Vlad's just kind of steadily given you his homer in half. of the games that he has played thus far. I think so much of the eventual answer to this is going to depend, is going to depend on who wins the World Series.

So the fact that Vlad's production has been more evenly distributed and in just one more game, I think I would rather Vlad's production, in part because of the, it's not like you look at Otani and don't see a potential looming threat, like you're anxious when he gets, when he's in the on-deck circle regardless. But, you know, the home runs have been hyper-concentrated. The multi-home run games, to your point, have all been wins. But, like, he had, like, that garbage time home run, Otani did in a Toronto loss when they got, when L.A. got blown out in game one. It's so funny.

You're like, oh, Trey Savage, he wasn't that sterling. And then you look at the final score of Game 1 of the World Series. And you're like, ended up being kind of okay, though, you know? End up not really mattering when it was all sudden. done but um but also otani had two in that epic game i mean i don't know man they're pretty it feels like you're choosing between your children you know like how are you how are you to do such a thing but i think that the the constancy of vlad's performance has been just so impressive to me i mean i've i've said this a couple of times both on the pot and on our live

stream i don't want to lend the impression that i feel like vlad has been a loafer but The gear, his performance makes you feel like, oh, this guy has reached a new level, right? He has achieved a different gear than he has shown even during an effective regular season. And Otani has had, I think, more impressive individual games. But if you were asking me, like, who has had the better post-season? I still think I think I would say Vlad. Now, part of that is that I'm like, right now, I'm looking at, I'm looking at Otani's batting game logs only.

I'm not even looking at the pitching ones. I was too. And so there is that part of it, but, and it's not like there haven't been, you know, his first two playoff starts. Great. And as we talked about last time, it wasn't like his, his third one was the worst, but it wasn't, you know, it was pretty me. All things considered would have been better if you don't.

only thrown the five innings, you know? Part of it was that he went back out there. Or no, he threw six and went back out for the seventh. That's right. But he didn't record any outs in that seventh inning. I don't know that the two really good pitching performances are enough to offset like the men is the third. And then I don't know, this is that he's really been.

But part of this, part of this too is that we are always comparing Otani to himself, right? This, I think, is a more impressive postseason for him than last year, in part because he got injured so early in that World Series, and so wasn't, you know, was kind of a non-ish factor for them starting in the rest of the games he had. But I, Ben, I think, so, you know, you have to allow for that, that, like, part of why Vlad's performance stands out the way that it does is that he has not, he hasn't been an MVP multiple times, right? This feels like him achieving and sort of actualizing, like, the version of Vlad we all thought we would see. And so part of this is, it's funny, you know, since he's signed a $500 million contract already. But yes, I know what you mean. nervous we were when he signed that deal?

We were like, Vlad's a great player. They have to bring him back. Part of this is like franchise context, right? But like they got to bring this guy back. This does feel like it's going to be an overpay, but like you kind of have to do it anyway. But yeah, like Otani has just Ben Otani. And so some of this is like, like when you look at a guy's clutch on fan graphs and

you have to remember, he's being compared to himself, right, in all his other context. That's a rambling way of saying. They've both been so wonderful. Why would we have to choose betwixt in between them? But if I had to, I would give the slight edge, I think, to Vlad. I think I would give him the slight edge. Yes. Well, as always is the case when we do Vlad versus Otani or Cowell versus Judge or whatever.

Otati versus Judge, I'm always just like, they're both great. We don't have to choose. But obviously, it makes a difference when they're going head to head in this series. but I'm glad that they have both had the spotlight on them. I'm just kind of curious, statistically speaking, because I could see an argument for you cluster all your production and you almost guarantee wins in those games. Right.

But you also run the risk of wasting some of that production, you know, because it could be overkill. Maybe you don't have to hit that third homer in the game where you also pitched and, you know, hit two other homers and all the rest you were going to win anyway. So maybe the steadier production. just parceling it out, distributing it more evenly. Maybe there's an argument to be made there.

But they've both been huge and helpful, obviously. So these games and Game 5 specifically, we did, of course, get another Blake Trinen appearance. It wouldn't be a Dodgers postseason game without a Blake Trinan appearance, although he did pitch a scoreless inning this time, which is good, I guess, except maybe it's bad. Like maybe at this point, you know, if you're going to lose the game anyway.

Exactly, right. If you're going to lose, which you probably were by the time he entered, you might almost root for him to be as bad as possible to dissuade Dave Roberts from bringing him back out there in game six or seven. If we're being optimistic, we might credit Dave Roberts with finally, like, properly identifying Trin's level and deploying him appropriately. because, sure, Trinon faced Vlad, Bichette, and Kirk. So it wasn't like the, he got the, you know, soft underbelly of the Blue Jays lineup. But I think Roberts was like, so hey, we're down five. Let's have this be the time that he's used, particularly with the off day the next day.

It's like, then your other guys are like really rusted. He did bring in Bonda at Gardo. Ruffer, at Gardo. Yeah. That was rough at Gardo outing. But yeah, like, I don't know. I think you're right. they should just maybe not use him at all.

But if they're going to use him, I'd rather they do it when they're down five runs, you know? Yeah, we have seen the downside of the Dodgers bullpen post game three when both the Dodgers and the Blue Jay's bullpen's delivered in the last couple of games, they have allowed inherited runners to score pretty routinely, and that's not great. And you do feel the absence of Vesia, and I'm sure everyone's heart is going out to. him and you know you certainly are not like putting the onus on him to to be there but it does hurt when your your number one lefty is unavailable and you have to use bonda who's like perfectly fine and serviceable and generally good against lefties but it's not had a good

couple games here for whatever that's worth but that doesn't even matter that much because those runs that scored i mean this game we know now in retrospect was essentially over to two batters in, three pitches in. Bucci slid off the game with two solo homers, and that turned out to be all they needed because Yassavage was so good, slash the Dodgers' bats were so bad. And I don't know exactly how to apportion the credit and the blame there, but it's become a big problem.

It's not the only problem. There's sloppiness on defense. I wouldn't even call what Tayasker is doing. out there's sloppiness, that's just who he is. I just think he's not a good, he's just not good out there, yeah. Yeah, playing a single into a triple. He's, he's borderline unplayable out there. Like, it's, it's bad. It's really, you know, he's a good hitter, usually, but he should not be playing right field. He should not be playing anywhere in the field preferably, but definitely not there. Right. And it's like, they, what are you going to do? If you want his bat in the

lineup, what are you going to do? You're not, like, you're not going to Benjo Tani play. You're going to play Otani and Wrightfield. Yes. Smoltz, a man after my own heart, was crowing about how he wants to see. I've done a complete 180 on John Smoltz because he's so pro-shoe-O-Tonnie. But no, he was saying how much he would want to see Shohei Otani in right field, which I do feel like is the one box that hasn't been checked. I obviously hope he can continue to be a two-way player forever and excel at pitching. but if there does come a point where he can't pitch, I mean, I'm torn because I, and he probably would be torn also in his elbow if that were the case.

But I would not want that to happen soon, but I guess I would want it to happen if it had to happen at a point where he was still sort of young enough to maybe go out there in the field and give us a glimpse of what that would look like because I do expect that he would be great out there. Anyway, yeah, they've had issues in the outfit. field all seasons, so they don't have a whole lot of choices. Yeah, I, this is where, like, most of the time, their roster feels sufficiently flexible in some of these, you know, like, how do we get the bats we want in with some of the deficiencies

that we face defensively? But this is a place where it's, like, it's really proving to be a problem. Like, do you play them in left, you know? Yeah, maybe. Like, maybe it would be better. But yeah, it's, it's a problem. It's a real problem out there. And, you know, Barso's fast and he can really move on the bases, but that becoming a triple,

and it was scored a triple, you know, it was scored a triple. It was. That becoming a triple, it was just like to ask your buddy, come on, man. And it's like we said last time, this is your home ballpark, you know, for you to be having issues like this out there in your home park is really a problem. And, you know, I think he's a, there, he's been an adventure on offense, right? Because he's a good hitter. He's made some really bizarre base running choices this postseason.

But I think a net positive for them on offense. But, you know, the defense is a real problem right now. So, I don't know. But the biggest problem for this team is that it's not hitting. So it's not hitting. Yeah. And I have no idea what to make of that, if anything. And I've read some breakdowns of this, and Josian dipped into the swing data, the swing speed data in his newsletter.

And he was essentially, to show you how hard it is to analyze this information, he was looking at how hard hitters have been swinging as a proxy for whether some of these guys are gassed, essentially, based on the hypothesis that, well, the Dodgers are pretty old. And they have a lot of old hitters, and it's maybe the oldest lineup. and it's like two full years older than the Blue Jays lineup. Yeah. Perhaps that 18 inning game took a toll. Who knows, right? But he looked to see, is there any difference? And if you squint, you can kind of see it with certain guys at least, maybe.

But as he acknowledged, it's such a small sample. And who really even knows how to interpret that data? Right. Which was hammered home to me because Sam did something similar in pebble hunting, his substack. and he kind of treated swinging harder as a bad thing because he interpreted it as perhaps the Dodgers are pressing or at least maybe there's some data that would be consistent with the hypothesis that the Dodgers are pressing

and they both caveat appropriately but basically Sam was saying that some of these guys specifically the ones who are not hitting well have had different swings in the postseason or in the World Series specifically in a way that would be consistent with trying too hard, with swinging for the fences. Yeah.

You know, their swings have gotten harder, faster, but longer also. He was looking at versus fastball specifically and also lots of upper cutting, lots of, you know, very vertical attack angles and resulting high launch angles and lots of hitting balls to the opposite field and everything.

Yeah. But I really don't know. Yeah. It's just, it's so hard to analyze that data because there isn't really like an objective metric to say, yeah, all else being equal, swinging harder is generally better. We were just talking about that with the Bougays, how they've managed to do that the season and over the course of the season and in the postseason while maintaining the other aspects of their offensive approach. And so all else being equal, it's probably good to swing harder. and when you make contact hit harder but all else isn't equal

and when you're comparing players not to themselves but to other players it's just it's all different right and you have your Louisa rises and your O'Neill cruises and they're just completely different physically and mechanically and so it's hard to have a one size

fits all this is good you kind of have to analyze it individually which is complicated and we're just looking at a handful of games here and not that many swings and so I don't know. I think it's worth looking at and perhaps there's some signal there. And I guess if I were the Dodgers and I were trying to diagnose my ills, I would be digging into this to see if I could discover something. But also this could very well be an example of we just have these extraordinarily granular tools now that we never could have conceived of. And it could just be five bad games or not even all of them have been bad. And if you did this for any stretch of five games in a season, then you'd come up with something similar. So it's the postseason. It's the World Series. Oh, we might say it's pressure. Not everyone is water off a duck's back like Trey's Savage. Perhaps they are trying too hard. And we're the Dodgers and we're supposed to repeat. And everyone thinks we're just going to dominate. And I have to try to make that happen instead of letting it come to me. But I assume that if you looked at samples of equivalent size and dug into the.

the tiny small sample stats, you would find similar things over other stretches. So I just have no idea what to make of it whatsoever, not that I fault anyone for trying to. Yeah, I love the idea so much of like, but they're in their 30s. They're tired. Hey, if I had to, if I had to be, I mean, I was feeling fatigued after the 18 and in game. And all I had to do was sit my dumb butt on the couch. I didn't even have to edit that night. I didn't even have to edit.

I had done, as I said last time, but we'd done our deal. Me and Matt, we done our little switcheruny. And so all I had to do was watch it, you know. I even drank a beer during, just one, but I drank a beer during that game. And then I felt, I felt exhausted. And so I can't imagine you're in your, you're a man in your mid to late 30s. You're running around out there for 18 innings. Get out of here.

I'd be like on my back for two days. So I like the idea that there's a sleepy voice, you know. And especially the older ones, they're just like, oh, fuck, I'm so tired all the time. You know, looking at the hitters who have had different swing characteristics over this small span, it's like you wouldn't look at them and think, oh, they're the guys who are going to be pressing. It's like Freddie Freeman or Will Smith, like veteran guys who've done it all and have been great players and have been here so many times before and have had huge moments. on this sort of stage. It's not as if, if anything, you would maybe think,

who even knows? Because you could just kind of, it's all so subjective. But you might have said that the Blue Jays would be pressing more. If you had to expect one of these two teams to be pressing, wouldn't it be the Blue Jays

who haven't been here, this group of guys, and they're going up against the big bad Dodgers who just swept the Brewers and held them to one run in each game of the NLCS? And everyone thinks they're, dominant and they're the favorites. And you could say, oh, this is sort of scary and we actually

have to like try extra hard because we're the underdogs. But you could also look at it completely the other way and say, oh, the pressure's all on the favorites because no one expects anything of us, the humble Blue Jays who finished in last place in the division last year and weren't expected to have gotten this far, even though the eyes of our nation are upon us here, you know, it's impressive that we've even made it this far. Although, again, given the lack of postseason success, this group has had over the past several years, there's perhaps some extra pressure there to make good. It just all depends on the particular group of guys, really. And we can't even tell, you know, who can tell if someone's pressing without knowing

what is in their heart and in their mind? And do they even, are they even aware if they're pressing, if they're pressing, maybe, but maybe it just looks like a slump and feels like a slump. And Sam said you could interpret it differently, too, because the expected weighted-on-base average on-contact in the series is higher for the Dodgers than the Blue Jays. So you could say, actually, the Dodgers have just been unlucky, though you could also say maybe their lack of luck has manifested in the fact that every hard fly ball goes to Dalton Varsho. So that's bad luck for the Dodgers, but it's not luck for the Bouges. It's just that they're good defenders. So I don't know. I think you're right.

I think that that is like the responsible way to interpret all of this. And as you said, you know, Joe and Sam both put like the appropriate caveats on it. But also, Ben, Freddie Freeman is 36. And sometimes you're tired, you know? Sure. Could be. I am a very delicate microchip these days, you know. We have a night where the cats are misbehaving. That might put me on my back foot for a whole week.

It might put me on my back foot for a whole week, you know. And Freddie Freeman is 36, and he is cats and kids, you know. And Max Muncie, he's 35, you know. Kiki's 34. We're getting into you're tired when you get goofed by one. night, you know. That's that territory. Yeah. And of course, they did have the longer layoff before this series. And then there's the whole rest versus rest conversation, which is just inconclusive based on all the research. Basically, there's no really strong takeaways as far as all

the research that I've seen. And you'd think that would have helped them if that was disproportionately an issue for an older team, then I'd say take the extra rest, perhaps. Oh, sure. But maybe after an 18 inning game, having a couple extra days of rest prior to the series, you're not feeling that so much anymore. So who knows? It could just be terrible timing. And I'm pretty sure I said this explicitly either on this podcast or on Hang Up and Listen, that as dominant as the Dodgers looked, it can completely change on a dime. Oh, sure. We see that happen all the time.

It's not even surprising or it shouldn't be. And we've seen the Dodgers bats in previous post seasons go cold. And that's led to early exits even when they've had very good hitters. So is it because Mookie is pressing? I mean, maybe. I don't know. You know, maybe he's thinking, no, they keep putting show hay on. I better deliver here.

And the Dodgers kind of rejiggered their lineup a little bit. But it's so hard for me to say. And the whole momentum conversation keeps coming up, too. And I would quibble, I think, because I've seen a lot of people say essentially, oh, this series seemed over after game three, because the Dodgers were the favorites coming into the series, and then they're up two to one. And not only are they up two to one, but they have the backbreaking or could have been bat-breaking spirit, bad or back-breaking spirit-sapping win in 18 innings. And there's been reporting about the Blue Jays, they seemed unfazed by that. I mean, they weren't happy to have lost that game, of course, but they weren't visibly down in the dumps, right? Right.

And they still seem to be holding their heads high and everything. But there are a lot of people out there who have said, especially, I would say, after Game 4 and Game 5, have kind of, in retrospect, been like, yeah, this was over. and now suddenly it's not as an example of momentum not being a thing not being predictable being the next day's starting pitcher etc which which i subscribe to and and believe in absolutely but i i wasn't even really thinking about momentum so much after game three maybe i'm just generally not thinking about momentum i guess a moment a momentum man i'm not a big momentum man momentum momentum no don't ascribe much or attribute much importance to the big Moe on the West Wing.

I guess this series is useful because if you want to counter the momentum argument, if there are still people making it, then I'm sure there are. Yeah. There are. Even in the salad days of the late innings of the 18 inning game where Smoltz and Davis were like just a punchy, goofy, you know, Smoltz still managed to get like a WPA argument in. I don't like one.

I don't like the win expectancy graphs. John Smoltz believes in momentum 100%. Yeah, he definitely does, actually. He will squeeze that into every game, every other inning. It seems like, oh, big momentum to get out of this jam. Big momentum to get the scoreless inning after you score a run. Big momentum changer to score a run after the other team scores a run. It's just like every situation is some sort of vibe shift.

And I'm sure that is what it feels like to some extent when you're on the field. So he is kind of faithfully reporting what it feels like to be a player playing in postseason games. It's just that if you extrapolate from how you feel to whether that is actually predictive of anything, that's where you typically lose me. Yeah, a little trouble. You get into a little bit of trouble. Yeah. So I think to the extent that people were counting Toronto out before the series started, And or even after game three, that was somewhat silly because it's just, it's just a handful of games and it's a good team.

And it's not, you know, if this were the regular season, that's the constant refrain because it's so strange how we cover postseason baseball on this podcast and in our writing and everything else. And in our hearts. The hyperfixation, yeah, on single games, how much have we talked about, Vlad and Trey is Savage and. Davis Schneider and Kiki Hernandez. And, you know, it's just nonstop. It feels like we've been talking about the Dodgers and the Blue Jays for a month because we have. And I always, I always have some perverse desire to do a bit where during the regular season, we would just, without announcing anything, without saying we were doing a bit, just cover that month of the regular season as if it were the postseason.

just like hyper localized, just like we're sitting on individual series. We're breaking down individual games as if they were similarly meaningful. You know, we're just talking about the same team every day, which I'm sure some people feel we probably do at times. But really like talking about regular season baseball, like we talk about postseason baseball, just as a piece of podcast performance art, essentially. to show how preposterous it is that we analyze the postseason in this way. And how can we not? Because it's what everyone's watching or what the most people are watching. And it's what we're watching.

And it's the highest stakes games of the season. So, of course, we're going to break it down in this way. But that doesn't mean that that analysis actually applies any better to these games. And it also means that we run out of things to say about the same teams and the same players by the time where we're mercifully but bittersweetly released from talking about them at the end of the month. Yeah, this is why like previews get so hard to write. You know, once you get into the World Series, it's like, I don't know, are you unfamiliar with who's on the Dodgers? That is true for some people.

I do think there are casuals out there who like really don't lock in to the, to postseason baseball until the World Series. But those people probably aren't reading fan graphs, you know. So there's that part of it also. But yeah, it's a tricky, it's a tricky thing. I don't think momentum is like, I think that there is an impact to the feeling you have that you have this one in hand versus not. And it can have strategic implications, right? If you think you're comfortably ahead, you make decisions around, say, which relievers you bring in and leverage that are different if it's close and late and you think you can press the advantage and try to try to win one, you know, that you can, that you can snag one. And then sometimes it gets into the 17th inning and you're like, which arms are still attached to bodies? Because those are the ones going into this game right now. You make decisions based on the game state in front of you, but it's not like fated, you know.

It's not, it's not an intelligent force that's like putting its thumb on the scale actually and holding at bay the other team. You know, until George Springer hit a home run in game seven, I thought the Mariners were maybe going to go to the World Series. And then guess what? Then guess what? They didn't. They didn't.

They didn't. I have, this might be cope. You tell me if this is cope. As I have been watching this World Series, I have been having the thought. I said this to friend of the show and friend to us in real life, Jordan Schusterman yesterday. I was like, I think Seattle,

would have been out of this already I think I've gotten boat raced a little bit in this one I think boat race is that the right yeah I love it when I'm one word like

hey you know this professional editor who just reads all the time does she know what expressions are not always doesn't always know don't always know anyhow

momentum is it's sort of like the concept of ball don't lie you know it's not actually alive and if it is it's certainly

very changing you know sometimes the ball doesn't lie but it like takes a while to decide to do anything about it sometimes the ball does lie because it's feeling a little frisky you know it has to live its own life it needs to have can't always be a constant arbiter of justice sometimes it wants to misbehave a little bit be puckish as it were really important to pronounce that word correctly yeah so i think it's it's useful i guess for the unconverted to that way of thinking that momentum is not super predictive to point to how dominant the Dodgers looked against the Brewers and how just hopeless at the plate they've looked lately in this series and say not a lot of time passed in between. It's the same guys. It's the same hitters. It's just a

different day, different week, different opponent. And that's the other thing that I have discussed and probably lamented in the past when you're talking about previewing series and the same teams over and over. The matchups are different, but it's baseball. So that only affects things so much. Yeah, it's different from football. It's different from basketball. It's not that there are no team-specific factors and matchups. Oh, sure, sure. You got into that with other Ben prior to the World Series. And, you know, absolutely you can look at which way the lineup leans and who you have in the bullpen and forecast some matchups. And this team puts the ball and play a lot and this team gets a lot of strikeouts or has a bad defense.

They're there are factors, but I think they're more on the margins and usually not as decisive, or at least it's hard to predict that they will be decisive. There's just like a little less depth that you can really go into because it's baseball. It's a plug and play. I think that that's right. Speaking of guys you aren't hitting very well lately, what is your current? assessment of mookie bets. Yeah, man, I

don't know. I think he's a great player. I think he is one of the defining inner circle elite talents of his generation and will go to the Hall of Fame someday and still amazes me that he plays as good a shortstop as he does, but he has looked quite bad. He doesn't have a barrel in this series, I believe.

He's not hitting anything hard. He's one of these guys who's just like popping everything up the other way. essentially. And that said, would I count out Mookie Betts to have a big game six or seven? Absolutely not. But is this, perhaps, I guess, if we're entertaining the fatigue theory of guys are old and gassed and they had a long game and it's a long season, I guess given all the physical trials that he has been through this season, maybe that could be mounting and piling up and taking a whole, you know, like, the thing is that he did really rebound and he looked like the old Buki for an extended stretch there. And so I don't know whether after that the fatigue then because of all the weight he lost just at the start of the season and had to work back from that.

And I don't know whether there's then sort of a subsequent hangover effect just because of what his body has been through. But yeah, I guess watching him, I would. if I had to project, I'd probably lower my true talent projection for Mookie Betz at this stage below what the numbers would say, I suppose. But it's always dangerous when you start putting your thumb on the scale and say, oh, the I test is telling me that I know something that steamer doesn't or whatever. And maybe you're just fooling yourself. So you could absolutely have a big game or two. I'm contemplating the question.

I don't think that this. so him sort of having a return to form positively impacted my expectation of him in a going forward basis like beyond this season because there was there was a minute there where I was like oh dear we're maybe getting into as a Klein phase much earlier than I anticipated like this there is this weird shock

to his whole system quite literally right this whole stomach thing that he dealt with but maybe it has sort of sped up up a decline and he's not going to be able to overcome that. And then he did. And he rebounded and he looked very much like his old self. And he's still playing good defense in the field. So, you know, it's not like he's completely compromised or anything. But he just looks so, you're so dead at the plate, you know. And like you, I don't want to say, oh, well, he can't ever, you know, in these next two games, he'll just be, you know, he'll roll over a ground ball and, and that'll be that.

But I do think that this, I'm going to just be very curious to see what he looks like, not at the plate necessary, but like physically, what does he look like when he reports to camp in the spring? I think it might be a quite noticeable difference because he looks, he's just doesn't seem like he's got anything. And like we said, Ben, just to remind people 33, you know, they get. It's long for you, buddy, if you'd had a protracted stomach thing, you'd lose muscle mass and you're 33, forget it, forget it. Yeah, no, it's incredibly impressive that he has had the season that he has had, given all of that, given the position change, given the injuries, given that illness and weight loss and all the rest, and he still managed to be a very valuable player.

I would guess that he will rebound next year. At the plate, I would guess that maybe not to peak Mookie, but I would expect some bets bounce back and that he'll come in at his normal weight and strength level and he'll have a whole off-season to prepare. And as long as he doesn't catch some super bug at the wrong time again, then I do wonder how long he will play shortstop. Yeah. Because he's gone through all this trouble. I know. You can't move him quickly. First of all, he's good there.

but you're not looking at him as like your shortstop of the future, right? I mean, there's a few enough shortstops who play shortstop at 33, 34 to begin with, let alone guys who hadn't played it regularly until they were well into their 30s. But yeah, I guess there's not an obvious replacement candidate. But like if there were, you know, if the big free agent this offseason, and I mean, I guess there's Boba Chet, right, but, you know, he's not a great shortstop. but if you had, if the Kyle Tucker equivalent, like your number one position player,

if this were a rich... If Trey Turner was on the market right now. Yeah. And not this age Trey Turner, but Trey Turner, when he hit the market, I mean, he's not a big shortstop either, though. So that's a thing about him. I mean, suddenly he is, though, this year.

Sure. Getting better with age, seemingly. But, yeah, if that guy were available or multiple guys like that, would the Dodgers make them their top target and say, thanks for your service, Smooky. That was wild. That was effectively wild.

But we are now going to look long term, and you can go back to one of your other position options. Or would you almost feel bad about that? Because it's like he's put so much effort into it. And he stepped up when the team needed him to. And then he dedicated himself to it. And he remade himself and became an actual really good, like award-winning shortstop. And to say, well, you had one full season of that. And now that's how we need.

I'd feel if we feel a little bit about that. Maybe he died, you know, I don't know how he would feel. I guess it depends partly on whether he wants to stay there for a while now that he's sort of more or less mastered the position. Yeah. I mean, I think, so I think a couple of things are, we'd need answers on a couple of questions before we could answer the question that you're putting forth. One of the most obvious and immediate is what do the Dodgers think of Alex Freeland, who is the prospect they have that, you know, He got some big league run. It didn't go amazingly.

He played 29 games this year. He didn't hit particularly well. He's a decent defender. So part of it is what do they think of Alex Freeland, just thinking through what they're near big league ready or big league ready internal options are. So there's that. Because I think the bets is easily the best shortstop they have on the roster right now, right?

Like there's a reason he's playing there. Yeah. One other question they would have to answer is, are they actually in the Kyle Tucker market? because they need to upgrade right field. Yeah. We just got done talking about that. I think they are.

I don't see why they wouldn't be. All the reporting seems to suggest that they are. Well, maybe they are trying to avoid work stoppage. Apparently, what the Dodgers do is the only thing that matters in our potential labor dystopia. No, so I think that part of it will depend on are they in the Kyle Tucker market? Because if they go out and sign Kyle Tucker, well, they'll just play him and write. Mookie will stay at short, and they'll figure out the rest of the roster however they need to. And some of this probably depends on, like, what do I think of Mookie in right field?

By the way, I guess you could say Miguel Rojas might still be the best defensive shortstop on the roster. Could you? Maybe. It's not even clear cut, which is a testament to Mookie, but. Yeah, I don't want to give Miguel Rojas a hard time. But, Miguel, have you, did you pay attention to Miguel Rojas at the plate the other night? Well, I'm not saying overall better. No, no, no. I'm not even bringing it. I'm not even saying that. Let's just say that

Miguel Rojas's body looks like it is backed up on him. And it can, in a, in a, I was like, oh, buddy. And I haven't seen Miguel Rojas play shortstop in a minute. So maybe it doesn't matter. He hasn't had too much this year. So maybe, maybe that's why it's just more Miguel to love. Skeps cool. But, you know, the last time he did great in the games that he has played, yeah, he only played 22 it short though yeah it was less even than i thought he did yeah it's mostly been it's mostly been second base for him when he has been and and then you know and then you know do they try to revisit kim there probably not you know so they do have some options but he's not i mean i don't think that they look at hustling as a as an everyday guy they could sign

Hassan Kim and just confuse the shit out of everybody. Yes. You know? But maybe that would be good because, you know, then it would be incumbent upon everyone to be more precise in their pronunciations. So maybe it would be, it would be good for them as an org and it would also be good for the rest of us because we would be forced to get better at a skill we should have, you know? Maybe it would be like a service. I think that Hassan might just end up being a brave. we are ranking him, I think, on the top 50

because it's like, what do we do with this guy? What do we do with him? What do we do with him? I don't know why that was the voice that I was using there. But anyway, I think that they have some questions that they need to answer internally, but my guess is that bats will just be there starting shortstop next year, maybe irrespective of what they end up doing with Kyle Tucker.

Maybe Kyle Tucker would be like, I don't want to play there. I want to be the biggest guy on the roster. That doesn't seem consistent with what we know of Kyle Tucker's personality. But, you know, we don't know. him, Ben, you know? We don't know him. We don't exchange Christmas cards. Nope. Can anyone truly know anyone else, including Kyle Tucker? We could know Kyle Tucker better than we do because we barely know, we don't know him at all. Yeah, it's true. Yeah. A lot of people know him better than we do personally. But yeah, since you just invoked the, the Dodgers' work stoppage breaking baseball

idea, it is sort of silly that how these next two games go will dictate whether that is the story. Like it shouldn't because we're talking about two games. Because it's a goofy story to begin with, you mean? I don't even mean that. I just mean because the next two games, the outcomes of them will determine whether everyone is talking about the Dodgers broke baseball or not talking about that. To be intellectually consistent, you really should complain about that just as much or as little as you were going to anyway. whether they happen to win the next two games or not. Because these two teams have played almost 180 games to get here post-spring training.

What happens in these next two games matters a ton, obviously, but doesn't really matter at all in sort of assessing the true talent of the team's sense. And so whether the Dodgers make it six games or seven games into the World Series before losing or they end up winning doesn't really give us that much more information about whether the Dodgers are bad for baseball or whether they will affect a work stoppage or any of that. But it will absolutely affect the volume of that take. right? Like if they win, maybe it'll be moderated slightly because the Blue Jays have given them a series here. Like if the Dodgers do win, then they will have won in seven and they will have been pushed to the brink. And so that will probably lower the volume a little on the just like Dodgers are a unbeatable juggernaut because they absolutely have not looked like one for the past couple games here. And that'll still be fairly fresh in people's minds. But I think it will make a meaningful difference, obviously, whether they win or lose, even though these next couple games won't really, like, give us much more information about the competitive landscape of baseball.

So it's all sort of silly. It won't change anything, but we might do well to remember that it is sort of silly. It's hard for me to engage with it in any kind of, like, serious way because it's just such an obviously bad faith argument regardless. And so I don't think that it will, I think you're right that like, you know, certainly the temperature of that argument will be, will be dialed down somewhat based on the, based on them having been given a series. It will be dialed down considerably if the Blue Jays prevail. Yes. The Dodgers of it all, I think, will persist regardless of the outcome of this series, though.

And I don't know that it will be as responsive to new information as it ought to be. And part of that is that like it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's goofy. They, it's, guess what, it's goofy, you know, like the, we should specify what, what, what exactly we're, are, we're talking about the idea that the Dodgers winning would affect whether there's a work stoppage or a lost season or something. Yeah, that, that, that specifically, I think, is, is, is quite goofy. because the owners will want what they want and what they have always wanted, regardless of the outcome of the series. Right. It's not like if the Blue Jays win the World Series, the owners that have been, you know, yearning for a salary cap are going to be like, I guess we can't make that argument. Darn it, they got us. Like, that's not how this is going to work. They want a salary cap. They will find an argument to fit that desire and try to advance what I believe to be, like, a bad faith argument to achieve that desire, regardless of the outcome of this series,

because that's what they want. They've wanted that every CBA negotiation ever, you know. Their greatest regret isn't anything related to what they've done in their lives. It's the fact that they don't have a salary yet to begin with. So they're going to try for one. They're going to try for one this time. How ardently they try, how stubborn they are about it, how much they are willing to sacrifice of a season to try to break the union to get it, that I don't know, you know.

And yet, it will be a thing that they try for because that's what they want. They want to pay the players less. Yeah, what it will affect is the public opinion and how vociferously fans are upset about this and perhaps how sympathetic they are to the salary cap argument. However, from everything I understand and talking to people in the process, I haven't been at the table, obviously. the public isn't at the table. The public doesn't have a seat.

It doesn't matter. And so it doesn't matter. It really, the stakeholders here have their positions, unless it rose to the point where even the players started to get fed up with the Dodgers winning so much. And thus their resolve and resistance to the salary cap was weakened. Sure. And, you know, it's been so long since the heyday of the union maybe from sort of a solidarity perspective. and when the salary cap was a more acute concern and all of that.

And perhaps, you know, it's like there are not now many who remember whatever the line is from the voiceover at the start of Fellowship of the Ring, right? It's like, you know, unless it starts to weaken the players' resistance and resolve, I just don't think it matters much whether the public is on one side or another. because the public historically has always been on the owner's side. And that's probably less true now. And certainly it's less true of the media in general, which tends to be much more pro-labor than it used to be. But yeah, from everything I understand, it just doesn't matter that much because the players,

maybe they feel some heat, some pressure. Their mentions, I mean, you know, their mentions are so toxic and nuclear already with people being mad about prop bets. but, you know, maybe it weighs on them more if more people they are encountering or are calling them selfish or something. But ultimately, at least if the union does its job and the union leadership, that should not actually affect the outcome. Yeah. I don't know what the answer is in terms of the baseline level of solidarity right now. I felt like they held together really well in the last negotiation.

And I am mindful of the fact that you are starting to see guys who will have just been unionized the whole time they've been in professional baseball. Yeah. You know, that's a very small percentage for this CBA negotiation. But eventually, you will have just been a union member. I guess Trey Savage is part of that cohort. Right. And, you know, it's a really. strange group because they you know there is a very strong labor tradition within baseball and yet

you have like a really divided workforce in terms of the the earning potential you have a super stratified workforce now that the minor leaguers are unionized and and you know they are governed by their own cba but in terms of just like an exposure to being a unionized worker for the for your entire pro career like i do think there is something to the union have a the opportunity because they are you know they're administering both sides of this right being able to get in early with these guys and like talk to them about the value that organized labor has and why it's important to them and why it should matter and why they need to have like a coming together around this stuff i can see that having a positive impact over the the course of the

union's sort of long-term life you also have a workforce that you know is is certainly protected by their union is personally quite conservative on average, right? And so it's like, how do they understand union membership within the context of their own personal politics? Like, that's certainly at play for some of these guys, I would imagine. So it's a weird, it's a weird group. It's a weird group to have to have hold together. I think the fact that they had success in doing that the last time and that many of the gains that were felt in the CBA were felt by guys earlier on in their career is positive. The fact that the entire union board, the PA board, voted against ratification of the CBA and the membership voted for it, well, that's just, you know, that's

potentially a problem. The union is in a weird potentially compromised spot in terms of some of their leadership, right? So it's, there's not a clean answer, I guess, is the point that I'm trying to make. I think there are things that point to them being able to really have a good sense of solidarity and there are obvious potential pain points and sort of fissures that could arise there. So I don't know. But I suspect that all of those things are going to have a much bigger impact on the way that the negotiations proceed than the winner of the World Series, you know, two off seasons before they get to the table again. You know, it's not like, we're ending this World Series and then we're immediately launching into the CBA. We're going to have a whole other season in between. Maybe the Dodgers won't sign Kyle Tucker. Who knows what I'll have. Maybe they'll lose and have a quiet off season for them. And then what are we going to say about them?

I don't know. You know, so it's a whole conundrum. It's a it's a conundrum, Ben. The last thing I wanted to note here because I've been charmed by it over the past couple games, especially in game five when it became part of the broadcast, is Davis Schneider's practice of plagiarizing players' batting stances. So this was something that Ken Rosenthal was talking about and they were trying to puzzle out who was being imitated by Davis Schneider. And then it turned out the answer was actually that was just like his natural stance. I guess people

maybe forgot what it looked like because he's always putting on some other. kind of costume, not even for Halloween. He just, he just does this. And I guess he had gone back to some minor league stance of his that he had used. But it's so interesting because you do have your tinkerers. You have your guys who are constantly trying something new and they added a leg kick and they subtracted a leg kick and they move closer to the plate or farther away from the plate or they're more open or they're more closed or they're farther back in the box or whatever it is, right? They're doing something different. And then you have guys who look exactly the same, just they're always

unchanging, immutable metronomic batting stances in the box. But Schneider, I don't know whether there's a whole lot of precedent for this or whether there are a lot of other players who do this in the way that he does.

But he is just sort of a serial plagiarist of other players' batting stances. And he will just sort of try them on for size. And I guess it's, You know, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. He's a serial flatterer.

I guess it's a compliment if someone wants to hit like you. But he has done this all season. This is just something he does. Ben Nicholson Smith wrote about this for Sportsnet recently. I'll just quote from him here. Davis Schneider likes to imitate other hitters. Bobby Witt Jr., Aaron Judge. Okay, yeah, he seemed like the right guys, I guess, to try to emulate.

John Carlos Stanton, he's tried every one of their stances. Even left-handed hitters, like Bryce Harper, get the Schneider treatment if he's feeling inspired, which is, that's interesting, too. Yeah. Because I was, I had a hard time when I was a kid. My favorite batting stance to emulate was Paul O'Neill's, but he was a lefty, and I am not. And so I had to, like, inverted, I had to try to do the lefty stance from the right side, and I felt like I never. really nailed it. But he's doing everything here. Like what a wide range of hitters and bodies here who have nothing in common with Davis Schneider. And Nicholson Smith continues, it's fun for him and

it works. Part of the process for a player who estimates he uses somewhere between 20 and 25 different stances in the course of a season. His thinking, if a setup works for one of the games elite hitters, maybe it'll help him too. I guess sounds reasonable enough. I mean, he might not have the same body and skills as some of the aforementioned hitters, but sure, why not try it and see if it clicks? As it so happens, one of the stances Schneider likes to mimic belongs to Dodgers catcher Will Smith, one of his adversaries in the World Series.

During the summer, when the Blue Jays visited the Dodgers in Los Angeles, Schneider wasn't quite ready to break out the stance in games. Yet as the World Series approached, Schneider resolved to use the stance even if he didn't know Smith personally beyond a brief hello he were there, I wonder if he'll notice, Schneider thought. And Smith did, I guess, and someone had already remarked to Smith that Schneider kind of looked like him. And then he was informed that that's because Schneider is kind of copying you, which I guess you could almost feel creeped out by potentially, or you could feel like, you know, your stance has been infringed upon. It's like I have, this is a

is my trademark and and you have stolen it sort of maybe you could even take a fence or you could if you didn't know the backstory you might think someone was mocking you like he's doing a batting stance guy routine out here or something it's like some kind of marks brothers you know like making the same movements in the mirror sort of like a mime almost but that's that's not what's happening here but yeah it could you could you could have an unwritten rule violation i don't know if there is an unwritten rule about this because I'm not sure it comes up often enough. I don't know how many mimics there are in the majors, but I could see someone, like Tommy Fam would definitely be pissed about this, right? I mean, it doesn't take much. But if David Schneider

made the mistake of copying Tommy Fam and Tommy Fam saw, he might take a swing at him. I mean, it is flattery, especially if some of the other guys he's playing around. with from a stance perspective include like judge and Bobby Wood Jr. If I'm Tommy Fan, I'd be like, great, that sounds. I don't know that they would think about. Pleasurerism is such an interesting word to apply to that because it doesn't seem like

you can't like patent, you can't copyright a batting stance. Ben, I have completely unrelated news to baseball. Do you want to hear a very funny sentence and then we can get right back to David Schneider? Sure.

The mugshot for one of the Louvre thieves dropped. Bad news. He's super hot. Oh, no. He's so hot, Ben. It's like, really. Oh, it's going to be. Oh, no, it's not the Louvre Thief.

Oh, few. Okay. It was going to be hot felon plus Luigi. I need him to look like Kermit. I want it to be Kermit the frog. Who's the hot guy who isn't the Leaves Thief? Just some other hot guy. It's just some other hot criminal.

Okay. Yeah. I don't want to say he's hot because he might have done something very, knotty. Okay, never mind. I'm relieved that we were spared spared that thirst. I think that

there are things in the game that players don't want to share with each other or maybe it's better to put this in terms of like players on opposing teams don't want to generally share

with each other, right? Like we saw Louis Varland maybe intentionally back a runner to third because you just didn't want to have to deal with you know, it's not signs,

but like you don't want to see where the catcher setting up or like the glove or whatever. So, you know, that kind of, there is like a desire for subterfuge. But pitchers share grips with each other all the time. That sounds dirty. That sounds like a dirty sentence, but it's not. They share pitch grips with each other. They demonstrate pitch grips for each other. Or even like Charlie Morton, remember when he remodeled himself on Roy Halliday or, yeah, I've heard people talk about emulating Yamamoto and his mechanics, David

Laurela just covered that in a recent Sunday notes. So, yeah, you do pick up, but it's usually not full-on imitation like that. I guess it would be trademark, not copyright. I always have a hard time keeping those straight. Sure. I think that's the one. But it's like to fully appropriate it, I could see. But I don't, to be clear, as far as I know, no one has taken offense to this.

But it's almost like an effectively wild hypothetical sort of. scenario here. And I mostly think that I think that people would mostly be flattered by it, particularly if you tell them like the other batters who have gotten the same treatment and inspired this same

kind of imitation from him. I think I think people would be flattered. I don't want to just assume that Tommy Fam is always angry. I think he would find that flattering. I think he'd be like, oh yeah, cool, that's me. That's me up there. Yeah. And I bet I bet Aaron Judge might be like

okay buddy you know did do whatever yeah yeah yeah you might you might get a dismissive like okay okay little guy you know that's the only difference between us the stance right okay now you've nailed it and uh you hit like erin judge no i'm i'm sure that that is not what davis schneider thinks will happen here but he's just he's sampling and he's thinking maybe i could pick up something maybe something will feel comfortable here you would think that this would be disruptive, and for some hitters, I'm sure it would. They like their routine, and clearly he's not a creature of habit in the way that some hitters are. And the other thing is that I think typically stances, or at least your setup, it's overrated, really. Because if you freeze frame it

at the moment of contact or when you're swinging, everyone looks sort of similar, you know. I mean, there are differences, but you have to get into a certain hitting position to be able to hit major league pitches. And so there's only so much variety once you actually are sort of set up and facing the pitcher and the pitches on the way. Yeah, there's some variety. But even if you're someone who's like, my hands are held high, my hands are held low, like by the time you're ready to start your swing, it's probably within a fairly narrow range because it almost has to be in order to get the bat there on time. But it would be really interesting, though, if this were sort of treading into effectively wild hypothetical magic territory because yeah if he were like

Kirby you know like Kirby's copy ability where he swallows you and and then suddenly he can use your powers or or a Pokemon right he's like you know a Pokemon using mimic or copycat which are sort of similar but not exactly the same and suddenly you can you can use your opposing Pokemon's last move or whatever it is. That's not quite the way that it works for Davis Schneider, though he did hit a first pitch home run. So maybe it's paying off. But that would be, if it worked like that,

then I think probably players would be pissed because then they would feel like their competitive advantage was being infringed on. Yeah, that could be true. If he could just assume the powers of Aaron Judge by mimicking Aaron Judge's batting stance, then I think Aaron Judge would probably resent that. He would feel like I did this first.

You can't just do what I'm doing and be as good as I am, but that's not how it works with Davis Schneider. Yeah, I think you're right. Although, again, I don't, it doesn't strike me as an area where guys are like particularly precious about stuff. You know, I think that they know that there's like, there are only so many ways to stand in the box. And there's going to be some amount of similar,

DNA between every hitter to your point, right? Like, there are just certain things that you have to be able to do to hit major league pitching and to be in position to do that. But, yeah, maybe you'd be like, yeah, we have 70% DNA in common with bananas, but I'm not one, you know? Maybe you're like, I'm Aaron Judge and you're David Schneider. I wonder if it would feel worse with a division rival. Yeah, maybe so.

Or maybe Aaron Judge wouldn't even recognize it as his stance, of the mustache you know maybe he has a built-in disguise that makes it impossible for these guys to discern hey that's me up there they're like no i don't have a mustache though must be different guy yeah yeah could be and i guess as we've said there's a little less variation mechanically i think among players than there used to be just because a lot of them are going to the same coaches yeah same coaches or like best practices or they're just seeing everyone else all the time and so you're a little less likely to be an outlier because you're like a, you know, a finch on a island in the Galapagos or something and you evolved in isolation. You're constantly seeing all the other

players and so you're probably more conscious of doing something weird. It's, you know, like, why am I doing this? No one else is doing this. You almost have to be like cordoned off kind of or not get that elite instruction maybe to like kind of do it quote unquote wrong. It's not actually wrong if it works for you but it's it's non-standard you know it's the old like no one would teach you to do that but it works for him and i guess there's the old good artist copy great artists steal which is not exactly true but there's truth to it and it's true in in every field every creative field every field of human endeavor everyone's standing on the shoulders of giants and picking up things from i guess literally if he's copying from erin judge and john carlo stanton but such extremes there too like

John Crowston has such an extreme, like, it's not like he's even working with a fairly limited pallet here, though I guess what would be even the point of modeling yourself on a bunch of similar of looking hitters than you'd just be doing the same thing. But, yeah, it does make you wonder, though, like, at what point are you hint? I mean, like, obviously, I don't, I'm not trying to give him a hard time. He's had stretches where he's been incredibly successful, but, like, he's not Aaron Judge. So maybe I'm just answering my own question, but at what point are you like, is this diminishing returns? Like, should I just settle on something so that I can have a consistency to my approach?

Yeah. But also, Davis Snyder had a 127 WRC plus this year. Yeah, he did. What do I know? What do I know? Nothing. Maybe. Yeah.

And I also wonder whether this is something that he will do his whole career. Right. Like a Cal Ripkin kind of tinkerer who was always doing something different there, even if it wasn't explicitly modeled on some other player. But Davis Schneider is in his third season and really his second, you know, full season or fuller season. And he's not yet 27. And maybe it's kind of like what people say about artists and writers. You kind of try on other influences for size for a while. And then eventually you develop your own voice, but everyone goes through a phase where you sound like your favorite writer.

and you're kind of doing, you know, you're a cover band, you're a tribute act, essentially, and then you realize what your strengths are and what you're good at and what suits your skill set. So maybe an older Davis Schneider will just figure out what his inherent true best batting stance is for him. And then he will shed these other guises. Yeah, and I would be fascinated to know what the Blue Jays have to say about it.

It's like, hey, buddy, can you like lock in on something? Yeah. That's funny. Yeah, it must be complicated for their front office folks for their data analysis people. What do you even do with that? It's not like you have a sufficient sample with any stance he's trying to say, yeah, that one. Keep doing that one. Yeah, keep doing that.

Keep doing that. Clearly. Yeah. All right. Well, we will keep doing this, but next time we do it, it will be the off season. Oh, boy. Best mode. I know.

We're celebrating the off day today, but be careful what you wish for because we're at most three days away from I'm having nothing but off days from Major League Baseball for several months. So enjoy the last burst of baseball, and we will be back to discuss the way it went. Okay, a couple more Addison Barger face card comps for you. Becca suggests I keep seeing a young James Marsden in Addison Barger. Looking at zoomed-in headshots, the resemblance feels less potent, but figured I'd throw that in the soup. And Elijah says, my suggestion, Josh Hartnett, not quite the same. facial structure, but there's something in the eyes.

Boy, Addison Barger, the hero with a thousand faces, evidently. Listener and Patreon supporter Jeremy hips us to a clue in the New York Times crossword on Thursday. 22 across, what every baseball inning starts with. Answer, no one on. And as Jeremy says, if only. Of course, this would have been true pre-zombie runner, but it's not anymore. I sent this to listener, Patreon supporter Ben Zimmer, who says this has been much discussed

today. Like him, I'm surprised this got through their fact-checking process. Now, I guess every baseball inning starts with, what, warm-up pitches, probably? That won't fit in 22 across, but that's not my problem. My wife's a big crossword doer. Me, not so much. But I'm going to assume that this is just a strong anti-zombie runner stance, or that this was finalized after World Series game three, because it did sort of seem like every

baseball inning was crammed into that game. And each one began with no one on. Finally, Flavia writes in, in response to an aside I had in maybe the last episode where I referred to the expression the catbird seat. I know what it means, but I did not offhand know or recall the etymology, which, it turns out, is baseball related. She writes, The Catbird Seat is a phrase popularized by Red Barber, a name you surely know. I do.

It was taken up by James Thurber, who wrote a short story with the same title, one of his best, highly recommend. Yeah, the etymology is slightly complicated. Here's what the site Grammophobia says. The Oxford English Dictionary describes the Catbird seat as American slang for a superior advantageous position. The OED's earliest published example of the usage is from the catbird seat, a 1942 story by James Thurber and the New Yorker. Sitting in the catbird seat meant sitting pretty, like a batter with three balls and no strikes on him. One of the characters in the story is said to have

picked up sitting in the catbird seat and other colorful expressions while listening to Red Barber do play-by-play for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Red Barber announces the Dodger games over the radio, and he uses those expressions, picked him up down south, the story explains. The facts on file dictionary of American regionalisms describes the uses as a Southern Americanism dating back to the 19th century, but popularized by Barber and Thurber. The earliest example we could find in a search of digitized books and newspapers does indeed come from the South, but it dates from the early 20th century, not the 19th. One of the speakers at the 1916 annual meeting of the Georgia Bar Association says the frustrations of the legal profession make it hard for a lawyer to act like

a card player in the catbird seat as he squeezes an ace high flush. The use of the term catbird for the gray catbird dates from the early 1700s, according to the Dictionary of American Regional English. Their first citation is from John Lawson's New Voyage to Carolina's 1709. The catbird makes a noise exactly like young cats. Well, that tracks. The regional dictionary says the phrase catbird seat probably refers to the gray catbird's habit of delivering its song from a high exposed position. Where did Red Barber get the expression in rhubarb in the catbird seat? His 1968 biography, the old redhead says he first heard it while playing poker with friends in Cincinnati. I found a letter online written by Red Barber years later where he says the first

time I encountered the expression was in Cincinnati around 1936. A fellow beat me out of a pot in a penny anti-stud poker game. When he turned up his whole card, he had a second ace. They were back to back. He said, thanks for the raises. From the start, I was in the catbird seat. Inso much as I had paid for it, I began using it. I understand it as a folk saying, I'm glad I had something to do with popularizing it. So there, maybe more than you wanted to know about the baseball-related origins of the expression, the catbird seed. Much more to discuss managerial hiring, stat blasts, email answers, but that will wait for next time, and the time after that, and the time after that. We're almost ready to switch into off-season mode. We've got to squirrel that content away

for the long, cold winter. When, of course, we will keep podcasting, and on the same schedule, too, thanks to those of you who support the podcast on Patreon, which you can do by go going to patreon.com slash effectively wild and signing up to pled some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going. Help us stay ad free and get yourself access to some perks, as have the following five listeners. Hannah, Nick Pierce, Mark Williams, Roslyn Thumbs, and Niels. Thanks to all of you. Patreon perks include access to the Effectively Wild Discord group for patrons only, monthly bonus episodes, playoff live streams, prioritized email answers, personalized messages, potential podcast appearances, discounts on merch,

and ad-free Fangraphs memberships, and so much more. Check out all the offerings at patreon.com slash EffectivelyWild. If you are a Patreon supporter, you can message us to the Patreon site. If not, you can contact us via email. Send your questions, comments, intro, and outro themes to podcast at Fangraphs.com. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube music, and other podcast platforms. You can join our Facebook group at Facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild.

You can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at our site. Effectively Wild, and you can check the show notes at fan graphs for the episode description in your podcast app for links to the stories and stats we cited today. Thanks to Shane McKeon for his editing and production assistance. Happy Halloween, and we will be back to talk to you next week. Baseball is a simulation. It's all just one big math equation.

You're all about these stats we've compiled because you listen to Effectively Wild. With Ben Lindberg and McRolle Come for the ball The banters free Baseball is a simulation It's all Just one big conversation

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