Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 552: Your Playoff-Related Emails, Answered

Episode Date: October 9, 2014

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about the postseason.

This is the story of a champion. Run us in the mark and we pop the gun. Stand up, stand up. Here he comes. Tell me what it takes to be number one. Tell me what it takes to be number one. This is the story of a champion. Run us in the mark and we pop the gun. Stand up, stand up. Here he comes. Tell me what it takes to be number one. Good morning and welcome to episode 552 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus presented by The Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I am Ben Lindberg of Grantland.com joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Prospectus. Hello. Hello. So we had a day without baseball. We have another day without baseball coming up. So we are, as we've promised for a while, going to get to some listener emails on a day when we don't have new baseball to talk about.

And we will preview the championship series tomorrow with a guest. Should be good. But for today, we will catch up on some of the listener email backlog. We will do mostly playoff-th playoff team themed emails some of you have been sending non-playoff themed emails that will probably help us once the playoffs were will are over and we will revisit them but for now playoffs playoffs all the time um also you can ask the kershaw one by the way because you wanted to know whether you should ask the kershaw one go ahead ask the kershaw one but also i just wanted because you wanted to know whether you should ask the Kershaw one. Go ahead. Ask the Kershaw one. But also, I just wanted to say, it's a fun play index.

Oh, good. I'm looking forward to it. I don't know. Maybe it won't be a fun play index, but it is a heck of a play index. Right. Okay. Well, let me start with this observation then before we get into the playoffs from Scott, who noticed something that once Scott brought it to our attention, it's interesting. It's hard to stop thinking about it. So he says, why do most pitchers lean in to get the sign from the catcher when they're in the stretch? Surely they're capable of seeing the signs from a standing position. In fact, most pitchers take signs standing up when out of the windup, only to hunch over awkwardly once a runner reaches base. If it is to help them pick to first,

wouldn't they have the ball in their throwing hand? If they're actually stretching to relieve back tension or something, why not do it when in the windup? Other than the odd intimidation derived by Craig Kimbrell putting his arm around the shoulder of his diminutive imaginary friend. I simply do not see any practical reason for leaning in. So what am I missing? Yeah, we're not going to answer this. We don't know. But it's super duper weird when you think about it, right? Yeah. That it is, I don't know how this is, but I assume the answer has to do with holding the runner. That it's, and like he says, it's not clear how that helps.

But it has something to do with the process of getting into the set in a way that I guess keeps the runner close maybe. Or it's simply an energy saver. It's simply easier to kind of half lay down. Have you ever climbed on a rock wall? And there's this particular way that you can sort of squat or something that is much less stressful on your haunches. And so when you're just sort of chilling there waiting for somebody to catch up to you

or save you because you're terrified, there's this particular kind of way that makes it much easier. You could sit up there for hours if you needed to. And I won't. If it's just sort of like an I'm tired kind of a thing. Could be. Just the stress of pitching with a runner on base.

It's tension. You've got your muscles stiffen up. I don't know. We should tweet at some pitchers who are active on Twitter and ask them. Yeah, I asked. I just sent an email to Gabe to see, but I sent it like two seconds ago. So that's not soon enough. And I don't know. He's not even a pitcher. What does he know about pitching? He isn't, but I sent it like two seconds ago. So that's not soon enough. And I don't know.

He's not even a pitcher. What does he know about pitching? He isn't, but I bet he knows. He probably does. I don't know if he knows, but he has a much better idea than we do. That's true about a lot of things. Someone listening probably knows, so let us know. Post it in the Facebook group or email us at podcastatbaseballperspectives.com.

Okay, so you did give me permission to ask this question about home runs and Clayton Kershaw's curve ball, which was asked by Michael. He says, I remember reading something a few years ago about how nobody had ever managed to hit a regular season Homer on Clayton Kershaw's curve ball. I holstered this to be drawn later as a Clayton Kershaw fun fact and have drawn it a few times.

You can see Jeff Sullivan make reference to this fact in his article from May 2013. I'm a Cards fan, and I've seen the Cards face Kershaw a pretty fair amount in the playoffs recently. And the thing I keep noticing is that the Cards just won't stop homering when he throws a curveball. And he sends us some links to examples. Matt Holliday in the 2009 NLCcs randall gritchuk in game one of this year's nlds matt adams of course so i'm not sure of the validity of this whole thing not nor am i sure how to look into it maybe you can make something of it but this seems to have the makings of a fun fact that's get getting even funner. All right. So it's surprising that he said that at the end.

That's where it took a twist because to me this is a fact that was fun and is getting less fun because now he gives up home runs on his curveball. It's still a really good pitch. But fun facts really have to sort of shock you. They have to be a jolt. More than anything, they have to have some sort of, like they have to have no rough edges. There has to be a round number. There has to be something clean about it.

Like for instance, the Angels recently had 38 players on their active roster and the Braves had used 39 players all year. And that's interesting. And it was so interesting that I tweeted it, even though it isn't really good enough. If it had been 39 and 39, or if the Angels had 40, that would have made it a really good one. But getting close to a fun fact is not that fun and if i just waited like a day and a half they called up their 39th guy on their active roster like a couple days later i could have had 39 and 39 i blew it you're such a fun fact purist but the kershaw fun fact was only interested well not only interesting but it was only fun what to me when he had zero when we

thought he had zero and as i've noted fun facts almost always have a lie in them uh and this lie was that kershaw had a home run allowed to matt holiday in the 2009 postseason that the fun fact um uh tweeters were overlooking or or they had to couch it and say regular season curve yeah exactly and uh so there was which is fine there's you're allowed a lie in a fun fact you're allowed one one uh convenient crop out of in any fun fact uh but then then it emerged that he had actually allowed uh what is almost certainly a home run on a curveball a couple years ago in the regular season. But PitchFX had called it a slider. Now, it looks like a curveball.

It's 77 or 78 miles an hour. It's a curveball. And so then that invalidates even the regular season thing. And so I was already kind of not that cool with it and then now we have two in this nlds plus uh what michael doesn't note is that brandon hicks i think of brandon hicks of all people hit one off of kershaw earlier this year uh which is what got a lot of people thinking about this fun fact in the first place um i think it was brandon h. Yeah, it was Brandon Hicks, who's not even that good. And I think it was on an 0-2 pitch, if I remember correctly.

So there's a lot. Now, I would say that, by the way, the pitch FX slider slash curveball was also hit by a cardinal. So Michael would consider this to just be getting better and better. So I guess my question to you is, let's assume the Brandon Hicks home run never existed. I think Brandon Hicks invalidates this, and it is no longer worth ever pointing out when a guy homers off Clayton Kershaw's curveball.

It's just a thing that happens sometimes. Not that often, but sometimes. However, assume for a second that Brandon Hicks had never hit this home run, and Kershaw had given up four home runs on his curveball over the last five years, and they were all to the Cardinals. Would this be more or less interesting, as a fun fact to you, than if he had allowed a legitimate zero on his curveball? The fact that it's concentrated in one team? Yeah, that it's all cardinals yeah i think still slightly less interesting than no no curveball homers to

anyone i agree it is mildly interesting that it maybe you start thinking that the cardinals have not not pitch tipping not cardinals devil devil magic, but it's possible. And this was something that we didn't really mention the other day when we were talking about whether we bought the idea that the Cardinals own Clayton Kershaw. You would think that, I mean, if advanced scouts do anything, right, if they contribute anything, if there are advanced scouts who are better than other teams advanced scouts and give those teams an advantage then you would expect some splits some player versus team splits to be real or sort of real and yet we could never tell which ones they are because the samples never get very big but if you wanted to make that case it, it's at least conceivable that some teams spotted something, some team does a better job of informing its hitters that someone throws a particular pitch on a certain count and they're ready for it. So it's possible,

it's possible that teams can pick something up against a particular opponent. It's just hard for us ever to say that that's true, and usually it probably won't be true, so the safer assumption is that it's not true. But it could be in any individual case. The thing about the home run on one pitch type stat is that, I mean, there was a span of three years or so where Kershaw didn't really throw the curveball very much.

I'm looking at Brooks baseball and looking at the percentages of curveball usage. And so he came up and in 2008, he was throwing a decent number of curves. 2009, he was throwing a decent number of curves. And then 2010, he threw 6.75% of his pitches were curves. And then 2011, 5% of his pitches. So, I mean, he didn't throw all that many curveballs.

Yeah, not all that many. You're right. But when Hicks hit his earlier in the season, I wrote about this fun fact and about Hicks. And since the start of 2012 at that point, he had thrown it 900 times. So he threw a curveball 900 times without really hanging one and having somebody crush it.

And the Alan Craig one had come in 2011. So he did have a 1,000 curveball run, basically, without allowing one, which is not nothing. It's pretty something. I think that one of my least favorite Kershaw facts that I see from time to time, and I once edited out of an otherwise well-written document about Kershaw, was the one about his strikeout-to- walk ratio on the curveball. Are you familiar with this one at all? I see it a bit. And like I saw last year, so last year he struck out 78

and walked nobody with his curve, which is amazing, right? Isn't that a great fun fact? Sort of. He didn't throw it once on three balls. He literally never threw it on three balls, not one time. It would be impossible to walk a batter if you don't throw the curveball on three balls, which is not to say that 78 isn't a lot of strikeouts, and it's not to say that it's not one of the best pitches in the game.

It's just that this is a lie too far. He could not. And as I mentioned this in the thing I wrote about Kershaw fun facts, if anything, if anything, that fun fact when, you know, acknowledging the caveat, that fun fact is a knock on his curveball because he can't throw it, according to this, he can't throw it with three balls. That he is physically incapable of throwing a three-ball curve

if he goes an entire season without doing it uh and so it's not even a it's a pitch he has to pocket when he's behind in the count i don't think that's true but if you were going to draw anything from that fun fact that's what you would draw otherwise he's awesome right okay this question comes from our guest yesterday zach Zachary Levine, who says, If you worked for a non-playoff team and could be detached from the emotions of rivalries, would you be rooting for or against your division rivals in the playoffs? I could see rooting against that team because maybe a title would mean more money, they'd be harder to compete against in the future.

But I could also see the argument that most teams have money and money doesn't buy much anymore, so I'd rather they win and maybe get complacent or they keep advancing and their pitchers have to throw more, sometimes on short rest, and maybe that helps us next year or in the long run. Any thoughts? I think he's definitely undervaluing the benefit of money. Yes, every team has

money these days, but still $50 million or whatever is not nothing. I wouldn't want the opposing team to have that money. However, it's probably closer. I believe the hypothesis is sound, that pitchers do worse after they've gone through a long October, or at least some pitchers do.

But more than that, I would think that the real threat to a team, which we saw, I think, as we talked about, I think we've seen with the Rangers, even though they never did win the World Series, is a brain drain in your front office. If you have a reputation as the team that's got the solutions, then your assistant GMs start getting hired to be GMs. Your scouting and player development directors become getting hired as other teams' assistant GMs, and your scouts and your coaches go with them a lot of times. They get poached by the guys they used to work for, who used to head their departments.

And I think that's a real threat to a team's sort of system and continuity, especially if you're talking about losing your draft and develop guys. especially if you're talking about losing your draft and develop guys. And I don't think that it is necessarily likely to come back and cost you, ruin your dynasty or whatever. But it's certainly one way that dynasties fail, I would think, one possibility for how they fail. And so if I were the, you know, in retrospect, if I were the A's and the Mariners, I would probably be pretty happy that the Rangers had as successful a run and the perception of as successful a run as they had for those few years. And maybe you've written in the past about how teams that win the World Series

tend to keep their roster together and resign everyone, bring everyone back. Yeah, the stand pat philosophy, the stand pat theory. The theory of pat and standing it. I don't know whether that applies to regular playoff teams or whether it's only World Series winners. It's only World Series winners. That's the thing. The World Series loser, as I recall when I looked at this over the course of a half century or something, as I recall, World Series losers tend to stand pat tend to re-sign players uh and uh

don't make what would what another team would consider necessary upgrades in the uh in the following offseason yeah or they they arrange their roster by sentiment and they want to bring back the guys who got them there and the fan favorites or something, and maybe that could cost them in the long run. But I probably still wouldn't wish a World Series title on my rival, hoping that they would make bad decisions because of it. I would think that the benefit of getting there probably outweighs that. I mean, it can be a pretty big boost. Like, I would expect the Royals, for instance, who drew under 2 million this year, and they got some criticism for that. But you can understand why a team that had been losing for close to three decades would not bring its fans back immediately at the first sign of success. But after this postseason run,

even if it doesn't go further than it has to this point, I would expect that they will draw better next year than 11th out of 15 in the American League. And that will be some sort of boost for them. Maybe they'll sell some season tickets. Maybe they'll sell some merchandise. And maybe they'll be able to afford someone that they wouldn't have been otherwise.

So I think the money is probably still the it's still worth something. I agree. Okay. I'm with you. All right. This one comes from one of the many mats who listened to this podcast and it has to do with a tweet of mine and a response to that tweet so he asks about our response to what mgl or mitchell lichman the sabermetrician who we mentioned on the show many times and alluded to once yes recently yes yes about one of his other tweets

to me what he said in response to my tweet, and my tweet was something about how it was right after the Matt Adams home run and how I did not envy MLB managers because of the decisions that they have to make about bullpens and fatigue starters. And Mitchell responded to me and said, I actually don't think they are difficult decisions at all. That's the beauty of managing them optimally. And so Matt wants to know, I understand you might be bored of talking about manager decisions, but MGL seemed to bring it up in a slightly different way.

And I'd be interested in hearing what kind of response you might have to that on the podcast. So Mitchell's position is that it's easy to manage. At least the in-game stuff is easy. Maybe talking to the media is not easy. Maybe managing players in the clubhouse is not easy. But making pitching changes and deciding whether to bunt or any kind of in-game tactic that you can name should be easy because statistically there is a right answer. Usually. Usually there is an answer. It might be very close. Maybe a couple options come out just about the same.

But Mitchell has his projection system and he tries to factor everything that he can into that and platoon splits and home road and pitch types and velocity, and it spits out an answer, and that is the optimal decision according to the stats in the projection system. So is managing easy? Is it tactically easy? If there is a correct answer, statistically speaking, to every in-game move, does that mean it's easy? And I would still stick with my position, which is no, it's not easy. I think maybe there are certain decisions that don't get made that seem like they should be easy sometimes, and maybe managers make them harder than they should be. But I think it's also possible that the other factors that the stats don't consider things like a certain guy feels like

he doesn't have his best stuff today, or he feels like he has even better stuff than usual today, or he is suffering from some kind of nagging injury or something that is not in the stats and that a manager might know. Those things might make this decision harder because you then have to weigh these sort of subjective factors as well as whatever the stats would say. Or they might make it harder in that you might put too much stock in those things. You might look into a guy's eyes and he says, I can get this guy, and maybe he doesn't know whether he can get this guy. Maybe he is exactly what the stats say he is, no matter how determined he is when you go out to the mound

and talk to him and try to take the ball away, and he won't give it to you. So I think it's probably more difficult. It's certainly difficult in the sense that millions of people are watching what you do and criticizing what you do and first guessing and second guessing you. But of course, you could say that managers shouldn't pay attention to that, that they should be confident in their answers and that that shouldn't even be a factor. Even so, I think there are enough sort of soft factors that go into these things, managing players' egos over the course of the season, that it is still a difficult job. probably are easy, but they're not all easy. And even if you consider them easy,

even if you just focus on the ones that are easy, maintaining a club, maintaining a team over the course of a season is itself challenging and sometimes requires that you make moves other than the easy one. So I think I disagree. I think it's incredibly difficult. Okay. Some of them are.

Some are easier than probably we give credit to. Yes, some are. And the ones that we talked about last night, the Matt Williams decision, we were wondering whether something would come out, whether Tyler Clipper, it would turn out, would actually be hiding an injury or suffering from some injury we didn't know about. As it turned out, that was not the case, that it was the seventh inning,

and Matt Williams was going to stick with the seventh inning, guys, and that's exactly what he said. Okay, so do you want to do your play index segment that you've built up our expectations for? Yeah, sure, and i don't have a great narrative storyline or anything i just have a pretty awesome thing so the a's as you know did what i don't you maybe you don't know do you know i don't know yet the a's did not use a lot of rookies this year we've talked about that's right we've talked about how the A's have their latest zig seems to be trading prospects for players who might be considered sort of role players in a lot of ways. And it's fascinating to think that this small market team that made one of its

kind of biggest, most seminal philosophies was the idea of trading your pre-free agent players for bucket loads of prospects has done the exact opposite now. And that's very fascinating. And so you might know that they didn't have a lot of rookies this year. And it's true, they didn't have a lot of rookies. So I wondered, I wanted to put this lack of rookies in perspective. So what I did, Ben, is I went to the play index. I went to the batting season finder for individual players. I searched for all non-pitchers who got at least one plate appearance for a team in a season that Baseball Reference has coded

their rookie year or a rookie eligible year. And I'm just going to pause real quick. This is where there would be a footnote normally. Maybe we can cut this and put it at the end of the show and people won't know what the footnote is until the very end.

And it'll be italicized. But this is an inning. Rookie status is a tricky thing to do. I just actually had to go through about 60 players' rookie statuses for the Internet Baseball Awards balloting. And it's actually really hard to figure out who has rookie status in a lot of cases because you need to have, it's the 45 days of service time thing. Or is it 45? I think it's, now I don't even remember how many days of service time it is.

It's X number of days of service time, but September is not included and disabled list time is not included. And there's this weird way that if you get sent down but then called up within a certain amount of days then those days in between are included and it's very difficult rookie service time oh gosh so so so i think that um so play index would uh baseball reference would it would acknowledge that this is a very good proxy for rookie status, but you will find examples of guys who had burned their rookie service time

for some service time not played appearances reasons, and they might still be listed. So, inexact, pretty close, darn close. So I looked, and then I looked to see how many players each team had had each year going back to 1998, which is when we started our current 30-team era. So in those 30 years, there have been 510 teams. 30 years. In those 17 years, there have been 510 teams. 30 teams times 17.

And every one of them has had rookies that got a played appearance. and every one of them has had rookies that got a plate appearance. However, the A's are one of only one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight that had only one player, one rookie player, get a plate appearance, and their rookie is Billy Burns, who I think batted five times. I didn't check, but just eyeballing these names, Miguel Cabrera, Ryan Howard, Grady Sizemore, Adam Everett, and a couple that I don't know. But I remember those guys' rookie years pretty well. I guess I don'tett, and a couple that I don't know. But I remember those guys' rookie years pretty well.

I guess I don't remember Adam Everett's. I don't know. Who would claim such a lie? But my guess is that Billy Burns has the fewest played appearances of any of these eight. I can check later. And if I turn out to be wrong, then I'll issue a correction on the next episode. We'll recall that this episode. All right.

So then next pitchers did the same thing 510 players and uh 510 teams and in this case only 509 teams have ever had a rookie starter or a rookie pitcher pitch even one out and the one exception the 2014 oakland days so they are the only team in these 17 years that have never had a rookie pitcher. They are one of only eight that have only had one rookie hitter. And if you put those together and just look for teams that employed a rookie and had a rookie get in a game

and get a plate appearance or pitch an out, the A's, according to this, the A's with one are the lowest. No other team in any other season has had fewer than five. I think I have one minor quibble. I hate your quibble. I'm sorry to quibble, but I don't want to spread any false information. I believe that they had one other plate appearance from a rookie.

According to an article I read, a Joe Lemire article. Tell me, what's his name? Brian Anderson. Brian with a Y? Yes, Brian Anderson. Pinch hit for one plate appearance this year, and I believe... Dude, Brian Anderson's not a rookie. Hang on, I'm looking.

He doesn't meet the plate appearances, but he's got service time. I think he's going to have service time. He's appeared in three different seasons before this on the Major League rosters. Usually those are the guys who have capped their service time. I can't say for sure, but in this one he's got 12, so he's got 18, 19 days in the first year that's assuming no dl i mean okay this one's a close 120 okay yeah he's probably he might be a rookie it depends whether he was on the dl in 2010

counting days of the service time it was a great great podcast activity yeah so that was a stat i saw in in joel le Lemire's Wall Street Journal article where he interviewed Bean at the end of September, but he did not say anything about other teams or where that put the A's historically. He just mentioned that they only had those rookies. Hang on, hang on. I got more.

I did go a little further back because I wanted to see. And so then I went back to 93, which was the 28-team era, and every team had a rookie, and no team, I think, had fewer than four. Then I went back to 1977, which is the 26-team era. Every team had a rookie. I found one team with two. The 79 Brewers had two. But every other team had more than that, including in the strike-shortened seasons, which in the one strike-shortened season, there was no September.

So you can imagine the accomplishment of beating that season. And then I went back to 1970, which is the start of the 24-team era, and every team had at least four or five rookies. So they are well historical. Yes, definitely. It's more extreme than I had realized. And there were some quotes from Billy Bean in that article where he said, I think you're undervaluing the value of the present, particularly in sports. Part of it is because of our situation. We've always tried to recognize that the present probably needs to be rated at a higher level here in Oakland than maybe the future. And they have really taken that to an extreme this year. And it'll be interesting to see how

long that lasts because it did seem that other teams were kind of copying that at the trade deadline and throughout the year. So who knows how long it'll be before the pendulum swings back in the other direction and the A's go after rookies again. But it really is pretty impressive that they managed to do that with no rookies, more or less. Certainly no rookies who contributed anything to their season. No rookies who contributed anything to their season. So please use the coupon code BP when you subscribe to the Play Index,

as we know that you will, to get the discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription. Okay, this question comes from Steve, who says, In some of your past conversations, it has been clear that neither of you know a whole lot about European soccer. True. So I'm going to consider it possible that you don't realize that in the highest level of soccer in England and most other European countries, there are no playoffs. The regular season winner is the winner. There are also no subdivisions within the league. Everyone just plays everyone twice and whoever is at the top at the end wins. plays everyone twice and whoever is at the top at the end wins. They keep some knockout excitement by having a parallel tournament, including all teams from the lowest tiers on up, that leads to

a national cup champion in addition to the regular season champion. This can be the same team possibly in this achievement as known as the double. However, most fans of English soccer that I've talked to don't value the cup nearly as highly as they value the regular season crown. How would you feel about dual and equally valued regular season and postseason champions being recognized? And then he says that he's been thinking about this difference as well as cultural differences between the two regions. And he can't help but feel like the idea that you can be mediocre for most of the season, but redeem yourself in the playoffs through some combination of luck and legitimate improvement

is extremely American. It seems to me that the abolition of playoffs in American sports would lead to people feeling that teams were deprived of their chance to show what they were made of when it mattered most and that it was somehow unfair when in reality playoffs are probably the less just way of determining the season's winner. I feel like I've heard that. I feel like I've heard the this is the American spirit theory before. I don't know if I've heard that. But

yes, I had heard about the way that it works in soccer, I think from other listener emails in the past, probably. And I would be fine with that. I think I'd be okay with that, with recognizing a regular season champion. It would be hard to do at this point, I think, because the World Series is so ingrained. It's been around for well over a century now, and we are so used to the idea of the World Series being the goal that I'm not sure many people are really clamoring for a regular season title. I don't know whether

people would consider it any sort of legitimate improvement. I'd be happy to see it, sure. I would expect that the team that won that and did not win in the playoffs would be sort of sheepish about having won that just because of the tradition and the way it's always worked or almost always worked, but I'd be okay with it. Is this thing that he's describing, in the second paragraph, is he describing the Champions League? I think so. Sorry, the Champions League. Is that what he's describing?

I believe so. Okay. Because that is, when I've mentioned this to people, they say, oh, that is the play. I mean, that's the postseason. You play to get to the Champions League Oh, that is the play. I mean, that's the post season is that you, you play to get to the champions league and that is your post season. And so I don't know if that's true. I don't, I don't know if that's what he's describing.

I don't know. As it turns out, he was, he was right. Very intuitive about our European soccer knowledge. He was, but in principle, the idea of crowning a regular season champion

and then having the having a month of something else entirely and and crowning another champion or possibly the same champion but oh no but the i mean they you know that all that would be like they could do that now they could just give them a trophy right nobody cares i don't think anybody i mean i guess if you market it if you if you give teams banners and you market it and you get a little bit lucky and people embrace it then it could happen i guess probably nobody's maybe nobody's just ever tried uh but it doesn't seem like the average fan or even the uh the the hardcore fan i mean we don't particularly care who has the best record do we do you know i guess you do know who has the best record uh because we've said it but yes i mean who had the best record last year ben i don't know and maybe the the problem then is i

mean if you start talking about who had the best record, then are we going to start talking about who had the best third-order record? Well, that's what I was going to get at. Who had the best Pythagorean record? Who had the best run differential? Because there's obviously some luck that goes into having the best record in the regular season, too. So that would be a potential complication. Yeah.

All right. Who did? Who did, then? Who did? What's your guess? The Tigers. I'm going to say that it was the Cardinals. Oh,

it was. Oh, right. That was the, the year that the Red Sox and the Cardinals were the best teams in baseball and they played in the world series. Oh yeah. That year. Yeah.

Last year. All right. I didn't. Yeah. best teams in baseball and they played in the world series oh yeah that year yeah last year all right i didn't uh yeah all right so we right because that was that was one of the stories of that postseason that that this was a case where the best teams actually did make the world series and one of them won it okay well and then there was a related question from Jason who has basically the polar opposite idea of Steve or philosophy of Steve. And Jason says there is a perennial sort of talk among baseball commentators that seems to take it for granted that it's easy to say that this or that team is the best team in baseball or the best team in the league. This happens even quite early in the season, like when the Giants were leading the majors at 42-21. And then there's

complaining when the best teams get eliminated because they play like crap or get shut down in a five-game series when it really counts. But perhaps we should simply admit that there's more to a team's greatness than simply having the best record over 162 games. The Nationals had the best record in the NL, but in the NLDS, the Giants out-hit them substantially, and the Giants' pitchers shut down the Nats' well-balanced deep lineup. The third and fourth hitters for the Nats, Wirth and LaRoche, had.071 averages in the series. Their fifth hitter, Desmond, batted 143.

True, the Giants, in a much more powerful division, finished eight games behind the Nats. But over 162 games, does this easily translate into the Nats are the better team? What if the Nats can't deliver when it counts? What if their manager, a critical part of the team, can't make good, flexible decisions in pressure situations? Best team, really. I think a lot of the talk about how the current playoff setup doesn't crown a legitimate champion is silly. The goal is to get to have the sort of team that can A, get to the postseason and B, succeed when it gets there.

There's no reason to assume that the best team that will be the best at succeeding in the postseason is necessarily the team that will be best at securing a winning record in the regular season. So teams should be built and balanced for both purposes. That's what it means to be the best team to be able to do both do you buy that you tell me if you buy it i mean it it it's related to the talk that we've been having for a while now about whether there is a way to win in the postseason or something that makes you better at being a postseason team than a regular season team. If there is, then I sort of buy it because when teams are planning at the beginning of the year,

they are planning in part for the postseason. They're planning to get there, of course, but if they think that there is something that will help them, especially once they do get there, then that's something that they would incorporate into their roster building, I would think. And so if there were a way to build a really good playoff team that was distinct from building a team that was only good in the regular season, then I would agree with Jason. I am not convinced that that's the case or that it's enough the case to matter,

that it would be enough to affect the team's planning, or that the true talent of any team in the postseason would be so much higher than it was in the regular season, given that the strongest correlations with winning in the postseason seem to be whether you won in the regular season. So I buy it in theory, but in practice, I don't think so. It seems to me that the paragraph that sort of shows not necessarily how weak this idea is generally but how weak any evidence for it currently is or how useful it would be to accept the idea at this point is the one that says the nationals have the best record in the nl but in the nlds the giants out hit them substantially well that seemed i mean nobody's saying that you're built i mean that seems like kind of the point, right? What are you going to do to build a playoff team?

Build the team with the worst hitters? And he goes on. The third and fourth hitters for the Nats had 071 averages in the series. That's the point. You're not going to get... The strategy for the postseason is not going to be don't get Jason Wirth or hitters of his quality. They'll only hit 071. The fifth hitter, Ian Desmond, batted 143.

The Giants would have traded Brandon Crawford for Ian Desmond at any point in this season. And so then his question is, what if the Nats can't deliver well? Yeah, right. I mean, that's really hard to plan around. What if their manager can't make good, flexible decisions in pressure situations? If they thought that was the case, they wouldn't have hired him. They thought he could. Their goal in hiring a manager was to hire a manager who could make good, flexible decisions in pressure situations. or maybe Matt Williams had a bad week, or maybe Matt Williams just got unlucky.

But it's not like anybody is saying that you shouldn't hire a manager. It's not like the Nationals built their team around hiring a manager who couldn't make good flexible decisions in pressure situations. So there's really nothing out of all of this that is actionable intelligence, is what I'm saying. Yes, I think I agree with that. Okay, lots of other good questions. We'll probably get to some of them maybe next week, maybe in the offseason. There are some questions about free agents and salaries, and I will respect Rob Nyer's wishes.

He wrote something recently about how the talk about money and free agency can wait until November. We've got plenty of playoffs to talk about before then, so we've got some good questions about that, but I will save it for now. It will work later. Keep sending us stuff at podcast at baseballperspectives.com. Please join the Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild. And please rate and review and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. We will be back with another show tomorrow.