Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 45: What the Wild Card Games Could Look Like/Miguel Cabrera and the Triple Crown

Episode Date: September 19, 2012

Ben and Sam discuss whether teams will get creative with their Wild Card rosters, then talk about Miguel Cabrera’s Triple Crown chances and why we should care if he wins.

No dough, no show. Good morning, good evening, welcome to episode, I'm going to say 45? That's right. Of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives. I am Sam Miller, and with the vibrant voice that you just heard, it's Ben Lindberg in New York, New York. Ben, how are you doing? I just watched the season three, or sorry, series three premiere of Downton Abbey. So I am, my mind is 90 years ago and across the pond, but I am in fine spirits.

Did they go to America yet? You want me to spoil things? I suppose we shouldn't. Yeah. Off the air. You can spoil Downton for me off the air. Okay. Out of respect to our Downton listeners. Do you have a topic about baseball? Yeah. I want to talk about the wild card play-in game or playoff game or whatever we're calling it. And I'll talk about Miguel Cabrera and the Triple Crown, so why don't you start? Okay, so in a development that I wasn't really aware of or actively aware of when I was reading about the new playoff format this year and has been pointed out by a few writers in the last day or two, the wildcard playoff game will have its own sort of strange roster setting.

Teams that are playing in that wildcard game will be able to set their 25-man roster for that game and that game only. And it won't have to have anything to do with the Division Series roster should that team win the play-in game. And it won't have anything to do with the September roster. It will be its own entity. So teams can choose to do something crazy if they want to, or they can choose to go with whatever playoff roster they would go with

for a five or seven game series. So I'm curious about what those teams will do. Do you think that they will get adventurous and do something that we would never see in a longer series or during the regular season? Or do you think it will look a lot like we normally see? I think it would be a while before teams started to get adventurous. It seems to me that sports take a little while for strategies to really develop, and this is a new creation. I don't think anybody's going to really experiment too much quite yet. I would expect everybody is going to use their best starting pitcher. They might carry extra bullpen arms, but the odds that

you're going to get to a seventh or eighth or ninth reliever in that game are extremely long. It probably makes more sense to carry extra bullpen arms than a third, fourth, or fifth starter, but I doubt that anybody's going to try anything particularly weird or cool. I wouldn't expect anything cool. I will root for something cool, but I'm not really optimistic. Yeah, there was a lot of speculation that teams would really stack their bullpen with a ton of guys because they'll only need one starter for certain. But yeah, when you're getting beyond your top three or four relievers, even if you're playing matchups,

and presumably there will be a lot of matchups played in those games if you're getting beyond those top guys the game is probably out of hand anyway after a certain point it doesn't really help to play matchups anymore because the guys you're putting in for matchups just

aren't as good regardless of the platoon advantage so I guess I would expect to see maybe some extra bench guys, like maybe a third-string catcher or something, if you want to pinch run for a catcher, and probably a couple extra bullpen guys, but I guess nothing crazy. I wonder, I mean, everyone sort of expects that there will only be

one or two starters on the roster. I guess you'd want to keep a second just in case there's some sort of expects that there will only be one or two starters on the roster. I guess you'd want to keep a second just in case there's some sort of injury early on. But I guess in a lot of cases, the starters might be the best relievers on the team, which is something that we've touched on briefly in previous episodes. And presumably, if a starter were to pitch an inning in relief in that game it wouldn't uh rule out their starting in the division series um so you could get creative and and go with a bunch of starters pitching in relief but i guess if that's something that those starters have no experience with, maybe it's not worth the risk.

Yeah, I mean it's probably not worth the risk in the are all going to be way too risk-averse, and they're going to take the safe way out because they don't want to answer questions after the game. I don't think that's really true, but there certainly is more downside to doing something weird in that game than there is to simply playing it straight and trying to win, especially because you don't really know that it is going to work any better. I don't know. Do you think that relievers, sorry, starters that aren't used to relieving are at a disadvantage? Do you think losing that kind of routine takes a pitcher out of his game all that much?

I think so. takes a pitcher out of his game all that much? I think so. Even if it's not mental, I would think there would be some psychological or some physical aspect where starters are used to warming up for a very long time. That's something I think Shelby Miller talked about when he came up and started pitching in relief for St. Louis.

He said that he had to warm up a long time to get ready because that's what he's used to. And that wasn't a problem in his first outing relief for St. Louis, he said that he had to warm up a long time to get ready because that's what he's used to. And that wasn't a problem in his first outing because he knew when he was going to pitch and he could prepare for that. If you don't know when you're going to pitch, that could be a problem. Dave Cameron, of course, made the case that for, I believe, ESPN Insider, that the Braves and perhaps some other teams should just start their closer and go all bullpen and not even get into the starting side of their staff,

which is an interesting idea for all baseball games, but one that I don't think there's probably a great deal of appetite for from the manager's perspective. I don't think there's probably a great deal of appetite for from the manager's perspective. There is a sense that even if starters are less effective over seven innings than a reliever, that you put your best arm out there. And I would be very surprised if anybody tries that, although it's an interesting idea. I wonder how long this roster rule will be with us because it is sort of strange. I don't mind it. I don't mind it i don't mind it but it's sort of

i don't know it it may have seemed like a better idea back in march to some people than it does now that it's uh almost upon us i i mean buster only wrote yesterday that uh maybe we could see in future years that this would be tinkered with a bit and possibly the wildcard teams would have their roster locked in for that play-in game and also the first round of the playoffs which would be kind of a another slight disadvantage to being a wildcard team I could see that happening um just I guess just in the sense that it's not baseball as we see it for most of the season. Um, if you have your own roster for this particular game, although you really could say the same about a five game series and that some of your

backend starters won't have to pitch and you can go heavy on your, on your top starters. And so in that sense, it's already not really regular season baseball. Yeah. You can say it about a seven game series too. I mean, you have off days, so many off days, and you're not ever getting to your fifth starter, and you're unlikely to ever get into the back end of your bullpen. I mean, it's already quite a bit different in October, which is something that Mike Socha has complained about a lot, but that's how it is.

It's a tournament. I don't mind it being a little bit odd. It's not nearly as funky as September and having 39 guys crowded onto a bench. Which is another thing that will change, I suppose. And another thing that I don't mind now that you mention it. We never talked about that. No, we didn't. I guess we're not going to.

Baseball can only be made more fun, I think. I think anything you change makes it more fun. be made more fun, I think. I think anything you change makes it more fun. I think that I sit around some days and just think about almost anything that you put into the game makes it more fun.

Just for the novelty, at least. Yeah, except for the extreme baseball that Dustin Parks was sending around the other day, in which two pitchers throw two pitches to two batters on each side, and some of them run the other way. That did not look fun.

But if you were to add a pit on the field, that would be good. Yeah, clearly a pit. I don't think there's any doubt about the pit. So moving on, if we can. Miguel Cabrera today in the eighth inning hit a meaningless grand slam against Oakland in the eighth inning of a game that the Tigers were already winning in a route. But that grand slam could be significant by historical standards because it now puts Miguel Cabrera in a position where the Triple Crown is very, very nearly in reach. He is, I believe, two home runs behind the leader.

He is now six RBIs ahead of the leader. He is now five points ahead of the leader in the batting race. And the Triple Crown is a weird thing because it combines two things that we don't care about with one thing that we sort of care about. And yet I love the Triple Crown. two things that we don't care about with one thing that we sort of care about and um yet i love the triple crown i can't get enough of triple crown races and i'm super excited about this one and i'm totally rooting for it and i'm wondering whether i am the weird one or if you also

like the triple crown i'm not quite as enthusiastic about it and And I don't know, I don't want to sound like the stereotypical stat geek who dismisses traditional stats, but that kind of takes a little bit of the luster away from it. So it's more of a historic tradition thing than an actual accomplishment. Not that you don't have to be extraordinary to win the Triple Crown with the three traditional stats you do. But it's still, it doesn't mean that much to me except in the sense that it hasn't been done for so long and the players who did it were so famous.

And so in that sense, I like to see the present kind of connected to the past. But I will not be on the edge of my seat or anything. It's really the stupidest collection of stats. I don't know how they came to those because they're not even the same types of stats. Like batting average and home runs uh are the process by which rbis are created and so it's actually this weird multi-tiered uh collection of stats where um like you should if you lead the league in batting average and home runs that's far more impressive than anything having to do with runs batted in you know what i mean

it's it's like it and and also there's so much overlap between the three that you're, like, it purports to be an achievement of variety, and yet there's just so much overlap that it's really just an achievement of sheer force. I mean, it's, I'm totally making the case for why it's meaningless. And yet I was supposed to be the guy who was defending it. I can't defend it. I don't know why I like it. Um, but, um, obviously a, um, uh, the earlier this year, Mike Trout was leading, um, all of baseball in true average. He was leading all of baseball in base running runs above average and he was uh in the top 10 in defensive runs by our metrics i believe at the time and he was i think

perhaps leading by dewan's metric and that is a triple crown yeah because those are three totally different skills that um are not really related to each other, that don't build on each other. And if you could pull that off, that would be something. Yeah, people talk about the sabermetric triple crown, which is the 300, 400, 500. And of course, slugging is as highly dependent on batting average as RBI is dependent on home runs and average if not more um

so yeah that doesn't really solve that problem it would be more fun if it were kind of a multi-tool achievement like i don't know even if it were just average and home runs and stolen bases or something that would be kind of fun um but yeah i would i would like to see somebody lead the league in um ops plus uh pitching wins and saves so then why are you excited about the traditional triple crown because you know why it's because it happens um it gets close a lot and uh it would be like okay i also i hate no hitters i'm not a no hitter fan i like perfect games i don't like no hitters um and it would be it like as if there was a no hitter that went into the eighth every two weeks but never one that was completed you would just get so wound up by these close

calls that um eventually you would really be into it and the problem with no hitters is that when they get to the eighth they just usually you know they happen and that's not that exciting but triple crown it seems like the last few years we've had somebody who's made a a decent run at it uh each, and yet it's brutal. It's so hard to make it happen. I mean, batting average in particular seems to just be like you're just at the whims. And so I guess that's why. I guess it's the unfulfilled anticipation over all these years.

Josh Hamilton and Matt Kemp were the early favorites this season. Hamilton especially. Yeah, they were. Hamilton especially. And I think Pujols a couple years ago looked very realistic at about this point in the season. And, of course, we could probably find one almost every two or three years going back at least to Gary Sheffield when he was with the Padres and nearly won it that year and didn't.

And I like that chase a lot more than I like hitting streaks and no hitters and those sorts of things. I understand. But it probably won't happen. I think it will probably be another year two home runs is uh is probably harder to make up than we think it is and he'll probably fall just short um but anyway that's probably a conversation that we can have after the season ben let's wrap this up it's wrapped goodbye goodbye