Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 316: The Wild Weekend in World Series

Episode Date: October 28, 2013

Ben and Sam discuss the eventful Games Three and Four of the World Series.

Sad song Sad song To Sad song Sad song Says mom Living on borrowed Good morning and welcome to episode 316 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectus. I am Ben Lindberg, joined by Sam Miller.

Weird baseball this weekend. Yeah, good baseball. Fun baseball. That's what I was going to ask you, actually, I guess. Yeah, like the Wong getting picked off isn't that weird. It has literally never happened, apparently, to end a playoff game. But, you know, I mean, it's not like we all, you know, had to consult the village elders to find out what had happened. It's just a thing, right?

The night before was weird. The fact that Napoli was holding him on for what seemed like no particular reason, really. To pick him off off i guess so well i could actually i i couldn't figure out why i mean i guess i could figure it out but it seemed like a very strange place to have long pinch run uh-huh um his run not actually meaning anything and i mean you could certainly imagine a scenario where speed would matter in, like, breaking up a double play or... Well, that's basically it. That's, like, basically the only way it could possibly matter. And that feels like a pretty low-stakes way to use your, like, basically only fast guy.

And, you know, if you tie it up, if Beltran ties it up with one swing, you might have a long game ahead of you. And, you know, Wong as a hitter might have more value. Wong as a runner, I mean, certainly could have more value if, you know, Matt Adams were on base later in the game or something. That'd be a huge upgrade. So it felt sort of odd that you'd put him in and uh i guess putting him in instead of having like uh you know uh like joe kelly run which actually joe kelly probably should have run now that i think about joe kelly should have run but um in a strange way putting in the better runner probably makes it more likely he gets picked off not that you're thinking that's going to happen but probably in that situation

joe kelly has no problem staying anchored to the base we have heard many times that he's the best athlete on the team we have although I googled Colton Wong like a second ago because instead of going to baseball reference and then typing in a player's name

I just google his name and it's always his first result and so then I get to see his google image results as well and uh colton long has some uh some pretty pictures with him with with shirtless shirtless colton long oh quite a few of them it's like uh four of the first eight our shirtless colton long some nice tattoos too well we haven't seen shirtless Colton Wong. Some nice tattoos too. Well, we haven't seen shirtless Joe Kelly, so we can't really compare. We can try.

Shirtless Joe Kelly Cardinals. There are results, but they are all of him wearing a shirt. Oh, this looks like it's art. Is this art of Joe Kelly? Shirtless Joe Kelly. This might be shirtless joe kelly art i just got a lot of shirtless people who aren't joe kelly uh-huh yeah so i don't even know which move to start with really shirtless justin bieber is on this page actually quite a bit of shirtless justin bieber on this page that's not surprising all right it's probably on every page um yeah so people on our facebook group requested that we convene an emergency saturday podcast to discuss the

obstruction call uh i don't know yeah i don't know your opinion of it. I didn't see you state anywhere. I didn't have a problem with it, really. I thought it was called according to the rule. The rule is, as you wrote, a little ambiguous. There's a little room for interpretation and uncertainty. Um, but it, it seemed to me to be going by the letter of the law, even though the law is not totally clear. Um, it, it seemed like an okay call to me and, and the whole idea of it, like not, you not, not wanting the game to end on a call like that. I, I understand. But at the same time, if you believe that the call was correct, then you're really just saying that the game ended on the Saltalamakia throw and that Craig would have scored if not for the obstruction, and then that just would have been a regular baseball play.

And you could say that you don't want the game to end on an error or a mistake someone makes, but I don't know. The obstruction call is saying he would have scored if not for this obstruction. And I agree with that, I think. He was fairly close to scoring, even so. Right. I mean, had the game not been tied,

had the Cardinals been down by a run, then if they had not made the obstruction call, the game would have ended on, you know, the same, I mean, basically, you could just easily say, oh, well, you hate to see the game end like that. The game ending aspect of it does not seem compelling to me in any way. In fact, I don't really have any objection to the call. I mean, I think that the basic fact, I mean, the reason that I think it rubs a lot of people the wrong way is it feels like you're punishing

Will Middlebrooks for something that he couldn't have possibly avoided. But you're not really punishing him. I mean, Craig would have scored. It's not like Craig was going to be out. Like, if Middlebrooks could have somehow transported away uh if that's like the ideal situation is will middlebrooks transports himself out of the way then craig would have been safe so you're saying that like middlebrooks

couldn't have gotten out of the way but if he had gotten out of the way then then craig would have been safe right and so you're really just you're just setting things right it's like when we talk about the hypothetical uh outage mid-play, what do you do? And the umpire basically just tries to guess what would have happened, what the most realistic outcome is. That's basically it, right? If they hadn't gotten tangled up, Craig would have scored.

I'm more fascinated by the way that the rule is very specifically ambiguous. It's interesting to me that that kind of clauses in there at the end. But I don't know. I think that what captivates me about the situation is just sort of the realization that almost none of these rules existed at the beginning of the sport. They've been added as time goes on. They get more specific and they deal with more uncertainties. There's nothing kind of inherent in the sport. There are no rules, other than a very few,

there are no rules that are inherent in the sport. They get added as we play the game and learn more. And so it was interesting just to think of this as a situation that, um, uh, might require the rules to be more specific because I feel like there are, uh, this, this, this play raised hypotheticals that maybe need to be addressed in the rule book at some point. So, uh, what, what change to the language would you make? Did you think of that at all? Because neither of us is particularly comfortable, I guess, with the idea of umpires interpreting intent, right?

That sort of makes me uneasy. Well, if the umpire interpreting intent, I mean, if the umpire – interpreting intent. I mean if the intent is clear, I don't think you would necessarily have a problem with – I mean if Craig had deliberately tripped over Middlebrooks. If he had known that he was going to be thrown out at home, he couldn't get there. But seeing Middlebrooks on the ground had deliberately tripped over him. Right, or if he'd run out of his way. The A.J. Pruszynski play, right? We hate the A.J. Pruszynski play. That's intent.

And we wish the umpires could rule intent on that, don't we? Sure. So you don't mind there being don't mind, you don't mind there being exceptions for intent in the rules. It's just, I don't know that, I don't, I don't have, I don't know exactly how I would word it, but I don't necessarily have any opposition to intent being part of the rule. I couldn't tell whether there was any intent on Middlebrooks' part. there was any intent on middlebrooks's part if if he had i mean it it does seem like like it's a if if a base runner is intentionally held by a fielder that's worse and i wouldn't mind if there was a separate rule for intentional obstruction yeah okay i mean what if middlebrooks had grabbed

him by the foot is that like it – like maybe there's no difference there and maybe we don't need any difference there. But I mean that would be clearly wrong and clearly jerky and I would have no problem penalizing the defense for such a thing. I mean in basketball, there's contact all the time between players, right? And there's – like it's specifically um split up into different types of contact there's incidental contact which is legal there's unintentional contact which is a foul and then there's intentional contact which is a separate uh class of foul with a higher penalty

so uh intent is is you know constantly considered there, right? Yeah. So Sunday's game, there are managerial moves to talk about. There are things about Buchholz to talk about. Are you focusing on Buchholz in your writing, or are you talking about how he kind of got by despite not throwing hard? I have no idea. Okay.

So that was kind of scary to watch, but also sort of fun to watch in that it looked like he was always on the verge of just getting shelled, at least for the first couple innings there. His velocity was down, and it just looked ugly. It looked like a blow-up waiting to happen, and it never did. And he made some pretty good pitches, location-wise at least. So that was kind of impressive, I guess. It could have been much worse. I thought it would be much worse after I saw what he looked like in the first inning.

Yeah, I did too. I mean, if he weren't Clay Buchholz and he were just some lousy number five starter who were forced to pitch and had an 88 to 90 mile an hour fastball with good uh two seam movement and you know a decent three pitch mix i mean it really a four picks pitch mix because his cutter's you know basically a slider um and uh you know that was a good pitch today um then you wouldn't think that much of him going four innings allowing one run walking three and getting pulled before things could get wrong i mean he basically did what you hope to get out of your fifth starter probably they just it was just kind of unfortunate

for the red sox that they had to rely on a fifth starter and fortunate for them that he got through it you you just hold your breath i mean you you get the feeling that sean farrell knew it i mean they would have known in the bullpen that he had nothing i mean he was throwing 88 he was you couldn't tell his first pitch of the game was i think 85 and uh i marked it down as a changeup. And then the second pitch was 87. And I had to cross it out because I realized, oh, this is what we're doing now. Are you surprised that DeBruyne didn't get a start in the series, having seen Buchholz and having seen DeBruyne

and with the Cardinals' weakness against lefties and everything? Dubron and with the Cardinals' weakness against lefties and everything? I wouldn't have been surprised four hours ago by that. I guess, I mean, only because I've seen, you know, I saw Dubron look good and I saw Buchholz look terrible. I mean, maybe I'm surprised that there wasn't a late scratch of Buchholz for Dubron maybe a little bit, but I don't know. Not really. I mean, it's Clay Buchholz. He had like a 1.70 RA.

I mean, I know he's not the same, but he was a lot closer to the same before this start, right? He wasn't sitting 87 in his previous October starts, was he? I don't think so. I don't think he was. I only glanced, and I didn't see that to be the case. And then the other stuff is just bullpen moves, I guess. And the thing about Matheny is I don't think he's a bad manager. It seems to me like he's gotten better as a manager,

but the leaving starters in too long seems like kind of a chronic problem with him. And I don't know. I can't really explain what he's done in some of these moves when he's either had the opportunity to go for Chode or someone to face a lefty or go with the situational guy in a really obvious situational guy situation. And he,

he gets the guy warmed up too. He gets him ready. And then for whatever reason, between having him warmed up for that situation and that situation arrives, he decides not to, to use the person. We saw that the other day when we talked about when he left Carlos Martinez in, and then we sort of saw the same thing today when Lance Lynn started the sixth

with Ellsbury coming up and Nava and then Pedroia and then Ortiz, and he kind of got burned there. I didn't think that going to Maness was such a terrible move, but at that point, the good move was already behind him, I feel like. That particular move didn't work out well, but that matchup wasn't awful, but it was the inaction earlier in that inning that I didn't

understand. First, we're going to have to decide how we're pronouncing his name. Manis, right? Is it Manis? It would just be very uncomfortable if we were doing two different things side by side. Okay, sure, Menis. Yeah, I don't know.

I have not understood anything Matheny has done this whole series. It feels like he, I forget what it was, but it feels like in game, what game did he win? He won game one? Or he won game two? They won game two? This has been a long series. I might be thinking of a previous game. I might actually be thinking of a game in a different series the cardinals won game two and i don't remember there was one game where he did a whole bunch of unorthodox things

like he batted this guy like he had his lefties batting against lefties or something he had like all the i you know i i have i have no idea what i'm remembering anymore but he had a whole bunch of things that were unorthodox all go well and you start you start thinking like oh okay he's got a method and then he just keeps doing it and that that that's not the case it does not keep going so yeah i don't know i mean every every bullpen decision it's almost you know the problem is that it's almost like all of his options are just good enough to seem um to seem like good options to him like manis manis is you know like we look at manis and go oh or whatever his name is uh you know oh why you know you shouldn't go to him here. Why would you bring him in and turn Nava around?

And why would you – anytime you bring him in, you're thinking really is he your best thing? But, you know, like Matheny looks at him and he sees a really – like a great ground ball pitcher with an ERA of two this year who doesn't walk anybody and, you know, like was super reliable all year. And it's almost like the whole bullpen are is filled with guys who are good enough that they seem better to Matheny than they are and so like he's probably pretty confident with all these decisions um whereas with like Farrell you get the sense that even though like Tozawa is kind of awesome

Farrell's just like get Koji in like what no matter, Farrell's just like, get Koji in. Like no matter when it is, we just need to get Koji in like right now for the most part. Unless you want to get John Lackey in. Yeah, unless you want to, which was also kind of, I mean, that's sort of along the same lines. I mean, going to Lackey is in that situation.

In game four, I mean, it's not game six, it's not game seven. Going to your, you know, second best starter in that situation is basically a way of saying none of my options are good enough. So I'm going with my, you know, like really, really good guy, right? It's like Farrell doesn't trust anybody and Matheny trusts everybody. Farrell should trust Tozawa though. And he'd thrown two pitches. That's what I'm saying. Farrell doesn't trust anybody. Farrell trusts Koji and, and he would probably like, he would probably trust, like if Pedro were available in relief, he probably would trust

Pedro, but like he doesn't trust any of the options he really has. Yeah. Um, well we were talking the other day about whether teams would ever start using starters on their throw days to pitch an inning uh so that just happened i i don't hate the idea of that i i like the idea of that generally more of a more of a regular season thing than something you break out for the first time in in world series game four but um yeah i don't know it seems like to me bullpen management in the playoffs seems easier than the regular season right because you don't have to worry so much about how it's going to impact your pen going forward there are a lot of days off i know there are three games in three days right now but for the most part you you have a lot more opportunities

to rest people if you push them a little hard and almost everything is high leverage so you you're kind of restricting the potential pool of relievers to like i don't know three or four guys there there are only so many people you're ever going to go to so i feel like it's unless you're Mike Matheny well I feel like it's often very easy or it's like there there's one guy who makes the most sense clearly or possibly two guys who would who would make perfect sense and then in this series it's consistently been a third or fourth guy who doesn't make as much sense who actually gets to go in um I don't get it. It's confusing. And I don't know whether, do you enjoy this series any less because it hasn't been a particularly well-played series?

I mean, these aren't great defensive teams as we've talked about, and they're showing why. There's been some weird base running stuff there have been a ton of questionable managerial moves but it's been a very close competitive series because both teams are are making strange mistakes um does that does that affect your appreciation of it or enjoyment of it at all oh goodness no no not at all i think i think yesterday was the most probably the most enjoyable single game from like start to finish that i can remember since um i think it was game four of the 2010 nlcs between the phillies and the giants which is like a totally forgettable game to most people but um it was also extremely exciting from start to finish. And it ended on a 10th-inning sack fly.

And it was just every play from the first inning on felt high leverage. And that's sort of how I felt yesterday. It wasn't just the weird ending. It just felt really close the entire time. And so, yeah, no, I enjoyed that game immensely there's i i 10 errors would be perfectly fine as long as it was five and five i wouldn't enjoy it if it were one team making 10 errors and the other making i don't yeah errors are very exciting errors are way more exciting than most things they're they go crazy i mean especially like i don't know i feel like once they

do you ever okay so uh sometimes when i'm walking like to to the grocery store um and i'm like all alone on this quiet street in the middle of an afternoon and i'll just close my eyes and start walking with my eyes closed to see how many steps I can take with my eyes closed before I I've done that it's it's dangerous in Manhattan I found but I've done it yeah so the first like seven or eight steps are are really easy and then nine it's like almost always at nine or ten something in your brain just clicks when you realize like your brain is kind of doing the math and realizes that uh your range of possibilities of where you actually are has gotten too broad and you might be about to walk into an alligator and so if you keep pushing then like past nine it's like every step you know it's exponential the possibilities of danger are exponential. I feel like errors are like that. The first throw that a major leaguer makes, the play's pretty predictable. But once they start having to make multiple throws, once they get out of the regular routine

and you start having the first baseman is picking the ball out from the tarp and there's a runner going to third and the pitcher doesn't remember where to back up that's when things get um you know like gifable so uh so i'm all i'm all for errors yeah i like i like the mistakes as long as they're evenly distributed so that it keeps things close and competitive and and weird although i i like a crisply crisply played series as well. But yeah, this has been fun. I don't even know what else to talk about. It's just so many strange decisions that I can't really make much sense of. sense of um i can't even really offer a rationale for the fact that that brandon workman batted on saturday against trevor trevor rosenthal so this is really this is this feels like it's the

series of pitchers batting unnecessarily it's it feels like every time a pitcher gets pulled from a game he batted 40 seconds earlier yeah right uh like the workman thing was weird dubront felt weird joe kelly i think had a weird one yeah uh they all you know they all feel you could have made well no i don't think you could, but Keith Law was making the case for Lance Lynn being pinch hit for in the fourth, which makes strategic sense, but of course is probably too far. I think Lynn had a one hitter at the time. And as we've established with Matheny, he does not trust any of his relievers and is going to let every pitcher go way too long, every starter. Yeah, like Joe Kelly hit for himself in the fourth

inning on saturday with the bases loaded and one out um and kelly kelly's a very specific type of pitcher where you would absolutely probably smartly go into the game thinking fourth inning on i'm looking for a reason to get him out if it makes sense and yet he had been pitching pretty well up to that point and they're just there aren't a lot of managers out there who would make that move with a guy who's pitching well through four innings or whatever. There's just not a lot of people who would do that. I guess Farrell did it sort of with Peavy, and I mean, he took Buchholz out after four but that was like such an obvious one kind of where he was kind of limping along

but yeah I mean it's the same thing we were talking about letting the pitcher bat too many times is the same issue as letting the pitcher go through the third inning or go through the lineup for the third time too many

times. It's just sort of underestimating the impact of that. It's often made sense, I think, to take the starter out, even aside from the fact that you don't want that guy hitting if you can avoid it. But when you combine those two things, I mean, that seems like the number one thing that we are complaining about now with managers, more so than in past playoffs. Like, it's not so much that there haven't been a lot of questionable bunts, really. Like, there was Beltran bunting on 3-1, I guess, but that was probably something he decided to do, I would think, bunting for a hit. There haven't been that many, that many terrible sacrifices or intentional walks. I mean, Farrell did issue a couple intentional walks on Saturday after having only done that 10 times for the whole regular season.

But it feels like just being on Twitter and following along with people complaining about everything, it's not as common for people to complain about bunts or intentional walks or whatever it is to complain about leaving starters in too long. It just seems like the thinking has evolved on this, at least on the Internet, if not in the games. Yep. I was actually going to steal that observation from you in my recap knowing that you would also include it in your recap so now triple threat okay um is there anything else we need to to get to i mean it seems like there's a lot to talk about but i kind of when you get right down it's just like what just happened is that yeah

it's all it's all old news by the time anyone listens to this anyway probably because game tomorrow game on monday we're 50% likely to have a game seven so that's good well that was my call going into the series is that something that kind of bothered me and i don't know whether i'm not doing the math right on this but you know people predicting the series would all be like oh I think it's a toss up both of these teams are even and who knows

and then they pick one team in six which to me like if you think it's even and it's just a coin flip shouldn't you pick someone in seven yeah or not pick or not pick not picking but shouldn't you pick someone in seven? Yeah, or not pick. Or not pick.

Not picking is always the best option if you can get away with it. Yeah, well, yeah, the picking, the games are supposed to be, how many games it takes actually doesn't have any relevance. It's just supposed to be a way of signaling how certain you are. So, yes, I mean, mean basically the games how many games is like how many stars a movie critic gives the movie right they they talk they say a bunch of words about like what the mise en scene means and everything like that and then they just put a number on it and so everybody who doesn't want to you know doesn't want to read your your dumb explanation can just see the number so yeah that's what games are supposed to signal. So it's supposed to just be like, you can give whatever reason you have for it,

but then you put a team's name and then how many games. And if you put four, then you're saying, I feel very strongly, and if you say seven, you say it's a coin flip. So if you're saying coin flip and six, yes, that's absurd. Okay, because I've heard that a lot and it's been bothering me because I decided to pick seven before I decided which team to pick. So I said someone in seven, and then when pressed, I said Red Sox in seven. But I've heard so much, I don't know, too close to call, someone in six.

I don't get it. Well, I don't know. Maybe they did an analysis of all the seven-game series in history and found that six is the most common number, and they're just actually very concerned about accuracy. That could be. All right. Anything else?

No, we'll just do it again tomorrow. Okay. We will see what's in store for them. All right. So send us some emails at podcast at baseballprospectus.com. Thanks to those of you who rated and reviewed us over the weekend. There were some of you, and we always welcome more. And we'll be back for tomorrow's Crazy Game 5 discussion.