Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 549: ALDS Postmortems and the Rest of Baseball’s Big Weekend

Episode Date: October 6, 2014

Ben and Sam marvel at a wild baseball weekend and dissect the ALDS sweeps.

I need a big weekend, kick off the dust, yeah, a big weekend, if you don't run, you're rushed. Good morning and welcome to episode 549 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives, presented by The Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I'm Sam Miller, along with Ben Lindberg of Grantland.com. Hi, Ben. Hello. How are you? Great.

So I guess we're probably just going to jump right into the playoffs. I would imagine that any banter that you even had would be playoff related. Is that correct? Yeah, that's correct. Do you have any banter that's not really, I guess I have banter that's tied to specific games or series, but nothing introductory. Uh, I, uh, let's see. I want to note that, uh, the MLB.com headline for the Orioles series today was how sweep it is. And immediately upon the Royals getting the final out of the game, there were about 4 billion how sweep it is tweets, which is going to make it hard to to see whether uh anybody respectfully used the headline i'm sure someone did it's too early to say the game just ended not long ago i do see it on uh let's see uh hot country b 104.7

uh-huh well it's a classic it's the old standby people bring brooms and headline writers bring that headline. Yeah, it is very sweet. All right. So let's see. Four series happened. All of them good. As you noted, an incredible... Wait, did you know this? You sort of implied.

You alluded to the fact that it has been incredible action uh throughout the four series all of them uh exciting even though technically not close yeah uh like we have two sweeps a possible sweep uh looming and yet incredible games in all three of those series i mean, the Royals-Angels, two extra inning games, and two real sort of classic games, too. The Giants and Nationals had, what, a one-run game and a 18-inning game. And then the Tigers-Orioles had big, big, sudden lead swaps late in the game. And then the Dodgers, of course, the Dodgers and the Cardinals had the amazing Kershaw game. So it's been a good weekend. Yeah, I'm writing something for Grantland for today.

Just an appreciation of October so far because it really has been great. And you mentioned the one run games. There have been a ton of one run games. It's I think, what have have there been 11 playoff games something like that so far if you count the wild card games and something like eight of them have been decided by one run and there have been five extra inning games it's it's crazy it's like the playoffs are a crapshoot and one run games are largely dependent on luck so this is like a luck on top of a crapshoot on top of the playoffs and it's just

really exciting every series even though as you as you mentioned the series themselves are not so close or or at least three of them two of them are over there have been two sweeps one of them is up to nothing and and yet it doesn't feel like that at all it feels like every game has been closely contested contested because almost every game has and there have been tons of lead changes and the preseason or the pre-series consensus favorites according to uh vegas according to most of the the prognosticators myself included not you included because you refuse to prognosticate wisely, but all of the preseason favorites are either losing or defeated already. So it's been a good postseason for just rooters or for underdogs,

people who aren't supporting any one team but are just interested in interesting games, and they've gotten tons of them. Yeah, it's pronounced Reuters, but sure. So I don't know why I picked 2012. There's no reason to pick 2012, but I noted, this is updated now since you've given me updated numbers, but yeah, eight games have been decided by one run, plus a game that went, think 12 innings so let's

count that so nine games out of I believe 12 9 out of 12 75% have either been decided by one run or gone into extra innings 75% in 2012 there were 11 in the whole postseason which is 29% of those games. Uh-huh. Yeah, and there was that one game that was maybe decided by the widest margin, game one between the Orioles and Tigers, which the Orioles won 12-3 was a one-run game with one out in the eighth until the Tigers' bullpen did its thing but it was close for

most of the game really there there hasn't been one where the outcome was decided except possibly the nl wildcard game uh otherwise it's been pretty tight until the end all right so you had a tweet and uh jeff sullivan had a different tweet that made something of the same point, I think. Which you said, I'm going to see if I can find it. But, okay. In 2014, you said, the GOAT isn't the player who gave up the game-winning hit. It's the manager who left him in or the GM who didn't sign someone better. Which sounds like a somewhat snide comment on your part.

I might be reading too much into it. It wasn't totally. It was just kind of responding to the tweets that I was seeing at that moment. All right. Just the general attitude or atmosphere on Twitter, which I don't necessarily disagree with it, but maybe we will talk about that. And then Jeff Sullivan. He retweeted me i think did he yes jeff sullivan tweeted when did so many people start in what by the way ben yeah it's it's it's not classy to brag about a retweet you brought him up so okay and okay. And Jeff Sullivan tweeted today,

when did so many people start interpreting the playoffs as nothing but a board game between respective team managers? And I'm going to add, an hour later he tweeted, here's the thing about manager decisions. There are good ones and bad ones, but ones that get made don't change odds much at all regardless uh which is probably true as far as the odds and uh so i uh so i guess this is a backlash movement to uh to the postseason managerial uh over analyzing which you started

last year i think in this space but uh doesn't the closeness of these games justify it if these are basically nine out of twelve games ten out of twelve games that turned on any one pitch and so surely uh the manager's role in those games is exceptionally high so why shouldn't we be discussing uh the the minut minutia of baseball? I don't know if the minutia is the right word there. The microscopic parts of the game if the games are decided by microscopic margins. Yeah, I was considering writing a whole post about this idea and then I'm going to incorporate it into my article today because I'm not convinced that it is really anything new. I mean, obviously, fans and writers have been criticizing managerial decisions for as long as there has been baseball. I don't want to make

the mistake that everyone makes in baseball of proclaiming that something is new when every generation proclaims that the same thing is new. So, I mean, there have always been player goats and there have always been manager goats, right? When people talk about 1986 Red Sox, they talk about Bill Buckner and they talk about Calvin Chiraldi, but they also talk about John McNamara. People remember who put in the pitcher who threw the game losing pitch also. So I don't know that it is necessarily new or whether it just seems like it because it's Twitter and Twitter is kind of in your face if you're on there. And I think you're right.

I mean, it just, I think what prompted that tweet was I was watching the second Tigers bullpen implosion, and no one was tweeting, you know, Jabba Chamberlain is terrible. Why is Soria so bad that I saw? Every tweet seemed to be about why Brad Ausmus didn't leave Anibal Sanchez in longer or why Dave Dombrowski didn't acquire a bullpen, which is something that we had talked about after the first bullpen implosion. And so that seems sort of different, but I mean, it makes sense, I guess,

because there's only so much that you can say about a player being a goat, right? It's kind of boring to talk about a player not executing, because all the players are trying unless there is a case where a player does something so boneheaded. You know, he lets the ball go through his legs, literally, which is like a fundamental mistake, or he throws to the wrong base or something, or he's not hustling. If it's just a guy throws a pitch, the pitch gets too much to the plate, there's not all that much to talk about really. The player was trying to throw a good pitch and he probably feels bad about not throwing a good pitch. And so maybe you can take your anger out

on him a little bit, but it's not all that satisfying. Whereas the manager who put him in had a choice to make. He had some time to think about it. He had many different options that he could have gone with. And the GM who put that player on the roster had all season to acquire a better player to put on the roster. And so it does sort of make sense if you figure that we all you know i thought maybe it's a result of like everyone owning players in fantasy leagues and everyone reading projections and being aware of advanced stats and knowing what players have done in the past more so than than they did uh before we could look up everything on baseball reference and so maybe it's it's sort of a a byproduct of

that but but it does. It makes sense. I think you're right. I mean, we can talk about players who didn't execute, but it's in a sense more interesting to talk about whether Matt Williams should have left Jordan Zimmerman in than it is to talk about whether Drew Storen should or shouldn't have allowed the hits that resulted in an 18-inning game. Yeah, I think there's two different things here that it's easy to get sort of confused about which one we're talking about. And I think that you are exactly right about that. On Hang Up and Listen, it seems like a running joke, the he's got to do that commentary, you know?

He's got to hit that pitch, he's gotta catch that ball. Well, yeah. I mean, he's gotta if he wants to do the play, but that's the challenge is that the other guys, the sport, the conflict in the sport is the challenge of doing the thing one's gotta do. Otherwise, it would not be a sport. It would be laying on a couch or something. otherwise it would not be a sport it would be laying on a couch or something um so it's much easier though to say the manager's gotta make that move like the the just the rhetoric of that the the language of it doesn't sound quite so absurd well you gotta leave zimmerman in there like that's just an opinion and that's what managers do is they have opinions and you have your opinion and you're going,

mine's better. Mine would have worked and his didn't work. And so it just sort of makes sense as an argumentative device in a way that you've got to not give up a home run doesn't make any sense. However, I think that what the backlash is, I think my hypothesis is that what you and Jeff were both responding to, and not necessarily in ways that are critical of the discussion, but what you were both responding to was not entirely the focus on the manager and or GM. It's the knee-jerk criticism of everything that doesn't turn out right.

Every move that doesn't work, every run that is scored, there is a blame put on some move that led up to that. And that's the problem. Just because a move doesn't work out doesn't mean it wasn't the right move. Just because it wasn't the right move doesn't mean it was an easy move. Doesn't mean that your move, your suggested move, would have been any better. I mean, these are impossible questions. This is a very, very, very difficult future to predict. And it seems like this postseason

to me has been much more aggravating than previous ones, just from the sense of this immediate loud consensus that every move was dumb. When i think a lot of them were not dumb i think most of them were not dumb i think there have been there there have probably been 75 controversial moves and like in this postseason and i i find like maybe five of them clearly clearly wrong and probably and probably 55 of them clearly right and like 20 20 that you could debate. So that's sort of where I would agree with what your tweet might not have been trying to say, but did say to me. And it's kind of a good thing. I mean, I think a lot of the criticism has come from more awareness of these factors that people have been talking about for a while that maybe the

larger audience wasn't aware of the the times through the order effect that we seem to be harping on over and over last postseason when we were criticizing managers for not taking starters out or for leaving them in and that seems to have really spread this year so that every time a starting pitcher stays in longer than six innings or so, that leads to criticism. And then that leads to a backlash where, I mean, and it's dependent on the personnel partially, right? If you're the Tigers or the Dodgers and you don't have as airtightable pen as some other

teams, then maybe you do want to leave the starter in. And so people have been bringing numbers to the discussion, at least. It's not totally a knee-jerk thing. And there's been a lot of first guessing, too. It's not all results-based. It's not all this guy gave up a hit and so putting him in was the wrong move. It's first guessing of seemingly every move. And this is something that if you're not on Twitter

while you're watching baseball games, which might be more enjoyable, it's certainly a viable way to watch a baseball game and enjoy it, then you might not have this experience at all. You might not be aware of all of this criticism that's going on. I don't know whether it has been reflected in the papers and the mainstream media as much as it has on Twitter or with, you know, advanced stat sites. But in some ways, it's not the worst thing. In some ways, I think we are looking at things that we weren't looking at before that we should be looking at and yet it is a lot to take in when you just kind of want to enjoy the drama of a close postseason game to have a million people criticizing every decision or or non-move yeah oh it's been fun as heck i just like yeah i've i've been surprised at how many people are wrong is all and uh uh i'm

sure many people are often have have been surprised at how wrong i am as well um in particular the defense of the ventura shields thing on i feel like i i feel like i uh made some enemies just just from the response i got to my tweet i feel like i made some enemies. Just from the response I got to my tweet, I feel like I made some enemies there. Anyway, let's talk about a few things that happened. First of all, well, I don't know. What do you want to talk about? What was interesting to you? What was interesting to you about the Angels and the Royals? Gosh, I mean, I don't know how much, I mean, I can marvel at that series and how much fun the Royals are to watch. They're a really, really fun team. And I know that they're probably going to get a Team of Destiny label now. And if they do keep winning, which, I mean, this has been fun, I'd be happy if it continued. But, you know, I don't think we should overrate how good a team they are they're they're not suddenly an amazing team we saw how good they were all year and they're hitting really

well right now and everything is going well and of course they look amazing but if we kept playing for another couple months in this this postseason there would be lots of games where they didn't score but it's still been really exciting I I mean, Lorenzo Cain catching everything. And it's been sort of nice to see Moustakis and Hosmer hitting. I mean, it'd be great if the Royals were winning and Josh Willingham were hitting lots of home runs or something. I'm sure Royals fans would still be happy if that were the case. But the fact that it's been Moustakis and Hosmer

and that they've been hitting for power and they've been walking is kind of cool because they've been a big part of the the resurgence and also the disappointment and and the great farm system and not not quite panning out the way everyone expected them to and continually waiting for them to and maybe they won't actually be any better next year, but for right now they're hitting fantastically well. And, uh, and I don't know, it's been, it's been fun to watch. They put the ball in play and they catch the ball and that's great when it's working. It's really entertaining baseball. Yeah. You sort of can appreciate why, um, this, this, there's a certain breed of old school writer that fetishizes this style of play. It's just delightful.

It's just so much fun when you catch the baseball and you steal bases and you do all the little things and it works. Billy Butler stealing bases and scoring from first on a double. Yeah, yeah. So I guess a postmortem for the angels um this i don't know they uh there was a weird assuming that i'm remembering the reports correctly and assuming the reports were correct uh jerry depoto had was was had his contract extended for a year which we talked about is an unusual thing to do it's's, uh, suggests something less than full

faith and confidence in him, even though he, uh, got, you know, his team had the best record in baseball because a year contract extension is basically setting him up to be the lame duck. And, um, you wonder whether the, um, whether that says something about kind of the Angels brass and how they feel about what was accomplished this year. If they consider this to be a huge flop of a season, they made the playoffs for the first time in five years, they did not win a playoff game, so they haven't won a playoff game in five years. And in a way, even though the team was really great and you could get swept up in how dominant they were during the postseason, there were still a lot of parts of the roster that you would look at and go,

well, that looks like a big disappointment. You look at Josh Hamilton and it's still a disappointment. You look at the pitching staff and the fact that they not only had to use C.J. Wilson in a start, which I don't know if there's... There probably is. I'm thinking maybe the Dodgers were in Alaska last year, but

I'm not sure that there's a team in the last five years that would have allowed C.J. Wilson to start a game in their postseason rotation, and the Angels did it in a three-man rotation. Like, that's how bad the rotation was. And obviously Richards was hurt. But only Richards was hurt.

Skaggs was hurt, but Skaggs wasn't exactly good this year. So it's not as though you're like, oh, well, geez, our number two went down too. I mean, Skaggs was scuffling. So basically they lost richards which hurts but you know the giants lost kane and everybody loses somebody um and so you you wrote about that in your preview that wilson has just had a high percentage of disaster starts where he just doesn't go deep in the game at all and that's that's what happened so but the thing that i i know again that we're going back to the manager and the GM sort of situation here,

but the thing that really strikes me more than anything about this series is that the Angels seem to lose in large part because they didn't have a tactical bench. And we probably, I don't know, maybe we focused too much on benches this time of year too we probably focused too much on everything but this was really a series where in game one they didn't have a pinch runner when

they really needed one and you looked at their bench and you went, oh, that's because everybody on their bench is slow, they only have four guys and none of them are very fast and then in game two, they needed Chris Iannetta to lay down a bunt, and Chris Iannetta is not a guy who lays down bunts, and they didn't pinch hit for him there. I don't know if maybe Gordon Beckham is a good pinch hitter, a good bunter,

maybe Colin Calgale is a good bunter. I'm not sure. But for whatever reason, they carried a very light bench. They carried a very, very, very deep bullpen. And they had a bunch of guys on their bench who weren't really good enough to pinch hit for anybody that was in the lineup. So you weren't going to see any of them being used as pinch hitters. Who didn't provide any particular speed and who didn't really have any single skill that you thought, oh, well, this is going to get him in the game. So like Gordon Beckham would go in as a pinch runner for David Freeze late in the game, which is probably worth a run every 5,000 games.

And I think Calgill went into pinch run at some point and he was thrown out trying to tag up but it's not like Cowgill is a blazing fast guy. I mean, he's not obviously Gerard Dyson or Terrence Gore. So it's, I don't know, I mean, in a series like this with games that are this close, you can pick out anything. You can pick out the mere existence of josh hamilton or you could pick out mike trout you know struggling in two games when he usually doesn't struggle or you could pick out timing of base hits or you could pick out you know anything but uh it does feel like there's a there's an indictment of their

bench which uh is an unusual thing to blame a series on. Yeah, I mean, they scored six runs in three games. And obviously that has something to do with the Royals pitching and defense, but it's also just having three games where they didn't score and Hamilton going hitless for the series and the other big hitters, Trout and Pujols and Kendrick, not doing a whole lot. They each had an extra base hit in the last game, but did nothing before that. So that's kind of what we're talking about. It's not really interesting to talk about that. It's more interesting to talk about the bench construction,

even if the bench construction might have cost them a run maybe or something. And the fact that all of their good hitters had have cost them a run maybe or something. And, and the fact that all of their good hitters had offers cost them a lot more. That's if you had to point to one thing, it would probably be the fact that they had CJ Wilson. They didn't have a better pitching staff and, and their guys just didn't hit. They had maybe the best offense in baseball and they didn't hit. And so maybe the best offense in baseball, and they didn't hit. And so it would have been nice if, I mean,

maybe they should have put Tony Campana on the roster. Maybe they should have acquired better bench players. Maybe that would have helped a little bit. But, you know, the fact that Iannetta couldn't get a bunt down, I mean, Iannetta, he's a good hitter. You want Iannetta on the whole, right? For the most part, you want Ioneta. Hit a home run, so that was good.

He did that in a one-run game. So on the whole, they lost because they didn't do the things they're good at, I would say. Yeah, that's true. That is all very true. So how much more seriously are we taking the royals because i i the when we do our pakoda odds for the alcs pakoda is going to continue to to say that the royals are you know not not a great playoff team that they had a bad third order winning percentage that their offense isn't very good, that they're using guys like Vargas and Guthrie who don't really do that well by any projection system,

and they're going to say that the Royals are basically a 500 team, true talent team. And so at this point, do we take them more seriously than that? Do we look at them and say, say well they're simply better in it postseason i mean they have a they have the bullpen they have the tactical weapons they have this incredible defense they have i mean that you would say that they have the secret sauce if you still believed in the secret sauce uh-huh yeah i'm i mean i'm willing to believe that they are some percentage better as a postseason team than a regular season team. I don't think it would be as high a percentage as they've shown, as it seems like, if you look at how well they've played so far and scoring as many runs as they've scored,

which is just not something that they've managed to do all year. I don't know. I'm willing to believe that they are a little bit better because they have the bullpen. And even if Yost is not really going to use it much differently in game three, he got his perfect ideal setup where Shields six, and then he goes Serrera and Davis and Holland, and that worked out exactly as designed. I'm willing to believe that that and the fact that they have Dyson and they have Gore makes them a little bit more dangerous now than they were. But I don't know. I will have to make a pick at some point this week, and I do not really know which way I'm leaning yet. Obviously, the Orioles look pretty good too.

Let me ask you this, Ben. Let's assume that they really are a 500 team. And so if you didn't know anything else about their opponent, say their opponent is a 500 team too, just a random 500 team. And so in the first inning, you're basically saying, well, the Royals have a 50% chance of winning, right? And in the third, you probably say,

well, they probably have a 50% chance of winning if it's tied. So now let's fast forward. It's the seventh inning. It's still tied. What odds are you giving the Royals? Against an average playoff opponent, I would say... Against an average team i mean it's it was 50 50 before so yeah um probably uh i don't know i'd bump them up to to 60 maybe

just based on the the the holland and and herrera and davis and dan Finnegan and Frazier. I mean, they go pretty deep there with good guys. So I would say once you get to that point, their bullpen is a significant advantage. All right. I did not see any of the Tigers-Orioles series. I didn't follow it at all. There's too many games.

It was not one of my series, so I didn't follow it. So tell me about it. Well, the Orioles hit well. They hit lots of home runs, which is what they do. And I mean, it really kind of came down to, a lot of these series sort of came down to what we thought the strengths and weaknesses were going in. We thought the Angels' weakness was their rotation. We didn't think it was their lineup, and that turned out to be a weakness in the series. But we thought that the Royals' bullpen and defense and base running would help them, and it did. And it was sort of the same thing in the Tigers and Orioles series

where the Orioles hit a lot. They hit really well. Nelson Cruz hit a couple of home runs. Delman Young got his annual huge postseason hit. They were great in the bullpen too. Gossman out of the bullpen looked great for several innings in relief of Chen. And they hit a lot. And the Tigers had bullpen blowups.

And probably too much was made of the bullpen blowups. I mean, I think it's, you tweeted something, right, about how criticizing a GM for his bullpen is like something. I forget what analogy you made, but it was good. That was supposed to be private. That was a message. That was a tweet aimed at Jeff Sullivan. i didn't know you could see that i did i said that i think i said that blaming a general manager for his bullpen is like blaming a parent for his kid getting asthma

right yeah jeff retweeted that i will give you credit for being retweeted by jeff also um yes i mean the orioles scored 12 runs in the first game and seven runs in the second game. And then in the last game, it was a 2-1 game. But they pitched well. I mean, it's kind of what they've done all year. They have Andrew Miller, who is just dominant and unhittable, and Zach Britton, who is pretty dominant and unhittable.

And Gossman was great. And Nelson Cruz hits homers. And Buckshaw Welter seems to be almost immune from what we were talking about at the beginning of the show. I don't know that his moves are so brilliant that you could point to one thing and say it was the smartest thing ever. so brilliant that you could point to one thing and say it was the smartest thing ever. But he doesn't seem to make the dumb move or the move that Twitter thinks is dumb. He doesn't really seem to leave guys in too long or put the wrong bullpen guy in. He doesn't seem to have the hang-ups about inning assignments for relievers,

and that seems to help also and and the tiger's weakness was what we thought the tiger's weakness was except even even more so um and it's i mean the the tiger's bullpen had like a 12 something era in the series obviously they are not that bad it's an exaggerated version of how bad their bullpen is. If you look at those guys, full season stats, Soria and Chamberlain, I mean, they've been shaky,

but they haven't been that bad. Most of the time you would expect them to pitch a scoreless inning and they did not, they could barely get any out. So it was an exaggerated version of what we thought their weakness was, but that was that. So Gossman pitched in relief. You can make the case that he's certainly one of the Orioles' four best starters if you really wanted to. Pitched very well over an extended stretch.

over an extended stretch. The Giants, of course, leaned on Yusmero Petit, who I would argue is their second, maybe could be argued as one of their, is certainly one of their, okay, let me rephrase this. You could argue he's one of their four best. You could argue he's as good as their second best at this point, if you really wanted to. And he, of course, pitched a long time in relief.

Tanner Roark pitched in relief for the Nationals. He is probably not one of their four best, but is very, very good. Danny Duffy pitched in relief for the Royals, although not for an extended stretch. You could make a case he's one of their four best, although we don't really know what it is about him that the Royals saw that they pulled him from the rotation. It might be something having to do with his shoulder. It might have something to do with fatigue. Anyway, the question that I'm getting to is... Anibal Sanchez pitched two scores in the next just about the only Tigers reliever who didn't blow up. There you go. So is this, does this mean anything? Are teams, is this just that

teams that have deep rotations get to the playoffs? and so that's why we're seeing this? Or do you think that we might see either teams looking at having that fifth starter as being a crucial part of their postseason? You know, when a team is in, say, August, and they're putting together the final pieces for their postseason roster, and maybe they're adding a reliever, and maybe they're adding a tactical speed weapon are we going to see teams really looking at this as a postseason position and or is it conceivable that we'll see teams actually pulling one of their four best starters out of the rotation and using him as a roving tactical long slash high leverage relief option maybe yeah i mean

it's i tweeted something about that when anibal cinches was i mean it's just it's easy to forget when relievers are posting one something eras going one inning at a time that that if you put them in the rotation, they would get demolished. They would be Wade Davis going from being one of the worst starters in baseball to one of the best relievers in baseball. And that's maybe not a typical transition. Maybe there's some luck there and maybe there's Wade Davis being better suited to the bullpen

than most starters are. But yeah, I mean, you put, and it's kind of a luxury. I mean, not every team would put their fifth starter in the bullpen and have him be immediately one of their best relievers. Fifth starters for a lot of teams are scrubs. You wouldn't really want them in there in any role, I don't think.

And so, yeah, when you look at the Tigers having three Cy Young winners in their rotation and they also have Annabelle Sanchez who wasn't stretched out, and it's a great luxury that they can put Sanchez in the bullpen or the Nationals having a ridiculous rotation and also Tanner Roark, and they can put him in the bullpen. That's great if you have that. Not many teams have that.

And so, yeah, Duffy and Gossman seem like maybe the stronger cases for that where it wasn't necessarily depth that made their teams put them in the bullpen, but either some other factor. Gossman didn't have a hard innings limit, but he was something like 30 innings over his previous high, so maybe they just didn't want to push him, didn't want to test him. And so he seemed like he would have been one of the better starting pitchers for the Orioles. And they put him in the bullpen.

And maybe it was because of factors specific to Gossman and him being tired. But maybe not. Maybe it was the sense that you could get higher leverage innings out of a guy and that he would be your best reliever. And you could push him past an inning unlike these other guys. And so I don't know. It's definitely a nice luxury to have. I don't know whether you can plan on it or whether you can cultivate that or whether that's just hard to do because no one has enough good starting pitchers as it is i'm looking at the tweet that you referenced ben gosman and sanchez out of the pen reminder that elite starting pitchers are to many late inning relievers what mike trout is do

use platoon player six retweets but none by jeff sullivan that's right yeah didn't catch his eye uh all right uh i feel like we're going to talk about the National League tomorrow as well. So I don't know the way to go. We've got all week without AL action here. So I guess quickly, like two minutes max, pulling Zimmerman and leaving Kershaw in. Thoughts on either? I mean, I think the Zimmerman move, you have to stay consistent.

And if we're going to advocate the pulling the starters and putting the fresh arm in because of the times through the order effect and what the numbers say, I think you have to stick with that regardless of the results. And so in this case, he had gone eight and two-thirds, and I know he hadn't thrown a ton of pitches, but the data seems to show that it doesn't matter

whether you've thrown a lot of pitches, whether you've gotten through the first two or three times through the order quickly doesn't seem to matter because it's more about the batter's familiarity with the pitcher than it is about the pitcher's fatigue. And Drew Storen is a good pitcher and they weren't losing the platoon advantage or anything. So I really have no problem with that. I know there's this sense of when a guy is going well, you just leave him in there and you succeed or fail with your starter, your number one guy. But based on what history seems to show, how well you're pitching up to a certain point doesn't necessarily show you that much

about how well you will pitch past that point. And I don't really have a problem with that decision. I know that Williams said he was kicking himself all night after that, and of course he would, regardless of whether you thought it was a good move or not. Of course you would regret making it or wonder what would regardless of whether you thought it was a good move or not of course you would regret making it or wonder what would have happened if you hadn't but but i have no no issue with that yeah it goes both ways i mean if if he left zimmerman in and zimmerman would have given up the home run and taken the loss right he would have been kicking himself

if that had happened too i mean uh it's it's easy, well, so imagine that Zimmerman had given up, say, two runs in that game. He had been otherwise pitching extremely well, but simply based on, you know, the cluster of some of the, you know, a blooper had fallen in in the seventh or, you know, two of his hits had been bunched together in the second inning and then one had scored on a sack fly. I'm saying Zimmerman has a good outing, but not an elite one. Even though those two are basically the same in performance, he might have been throwing just as well in the one I described.

He might have been throwing just as hard. He might have had just as little fatigue and all that. And yet, in that scenario, if you don't go to the reliever with a 1.12 era then everyone would probably just kill you for it and there's just not that much difference between that's the problem with this game where you try to say oh well this pitcher right now is the exception uh to all the rules because he's pitching so well right i mean it's kind of true except that you can't it's really kind of hard to to to say that he's the exception when the difference between the two scenarios I described is so small. I mean, he had gotten some hard hit outs the previous inning. He had just walked Joe Panik.

Joe Panik had just hit a ball 9,000 feet on a pitch right down the middle, just foul. They could just hit a ball 9,000 feet on a pitch right down the middle, just foul. And so, you know, it's not as though, like, Jordan Zimmerman. That's the thing about this. It's the same with Shields. It's like people have forgotten that James Shields had put on two runners to start the inning. He was not, like, he was also scary. Both options are scary.

Playoff baseball and one-run games are terrifying. All of your options can suck. They can all lose. And the fact that one loses is it. So anyway, I'm concerned. The Giants seem to be so gleeful that he was out of the game. I sort of am. I'm kind of okay with criticizing Matt Williams in that one. Just because it just seems like they are telling you something. Okay okay so then Kershaw no-brainer I I didn't see that move I I

was walking from one restaurant to another and in those in those eight minutes yeah me too actually I was watching almost that entire game and I had to go do an errand quickly. And in that time, everything happened. The Carpenter homer happened. The Holiday homer happened. So I wasn't watching at that moment either. I mean, it's different when it's Clayton Kershaw than any other starting pitcher because he is the best starting pitcher.

And the Dodgers bullpen is not a strength. So I don't really... I mean, when Pedro Baez is the next guy coming in, it doesn't really bother me to stick with him there. So in reply to Hot Country B104.7, Mary Tucker replied on Facebook, It's pretty SWEEP That's spelled

S-A-W-W-W-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-P-P-P-P-P Three exclamation points SWEEP And that was part of the Excitement of it too Not that I wish any ill on Clayton Kershaw Not that I want to see him fail I love seeing him dominate That's fun too of it too not that i wish any ill on clayton kershaw not that i want to see him fail i love

seeing him dominate that's that's fun too and and he had one of the stranger lines you'll ever see right i mean you're the pitching lines expert but eight runner eight earned runs eight hits no walks 10 strikeouts that's got to be a pretty strange one it can't be common to give up eight runs when you have walked no one and struck out 10 and and that was great tell me tell me again give it to me again hang on hang on hang on hang on okay do it play indexing here six two thirds eight hits eight runs eight eight earned runs and no walks in 10ks uh all right. And so we will soon find out. I'm going to guess that that is the 10 to nothing. It's almost any 10k and no walk.

Yeah. Stat line is going to be, you know, no more than three. Yeah. I'm sure it's not unique, but it's got to be uncommon. I bet it's unique. I'm going to say right here, unique. The six and two-thirds, half innings, especially late innings like that, are odd. And runs equaling base runners is very odd, too.

So I'm going to say unique. All right, you're the master. Unique. Yeah, so that's a weird one. So that was, I mean, before that game, So that's, that's a weird one. So that was, I mean, before that game, people were seriously discussing whether the Cardinals should save Adam Wainwright. And this is a top five pitcher in baseball.

And, and people were basically saying with Adam Wainwright, one of the best pitchers in baseball, the Cardinals should just concede. That's how good Clayton Kershaw is. They shouldn't waste one of the best starting pitchers in baseball against him. And then of course, when the Cardinals hit him, people had to come up with all sorts of reasons why they hit him. There was pitch tipping going on. He was, he was tipping his pitches and he denied it and everyone denied it. And I didn't see any clear evidence that it was the case, but it was just so hard to believe that Clayton Kershaw could get hit that we had to invent reasons why. Well, yeah, it seems likely that he'll start game four against the Cardinals, and it seems

unlikely to me, at least. And Russell Carlton wrote a piece for BP that'll run Monday about the Cardinals' ownership of Kershaw. So I imagine we'll talk about that tomorrow night. So you can read that. It could be an effectively wild book club if you'd like. But yeah, we'll probably talk about it tomorrow night. Okay.

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