Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 553: Rob Neyer on Sabermetric Broadcasts and October Baseball

Episode Date: October 10, 2014

Ben and Sam talk to Rob Neyer about bringing stats to Fox Sports 1’s NLCS Game 1 broadcast, plus the Royals, postseason managerial moves, and more.

Good morning and welcome to episode 553 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. Today we are going to continue talking about the playoffs. We will get into some of the ALCS stuff later on in the show. But first, we will talk about broadcasting. And one of the constants in October is complaints about broadcasters. Really, regardless of the network, the transition from local crews during the regular season to national crews during the playoffs seems

to get on the nerves of a lot of people, or at least a lot of people that I follow on Twitter. And one of the major complaints tends to be that broadcasts are not very statistically literate. You're going to get a lot of talk about shutdown innings and stats versus the top 10 pitchers and wins, and a lot of guys saying, small sample sample but this guy is two for four against that guy and at 8 p.m on saturday you can get the regular broadcaster used to you can turn on fox and joe buck and harold reynolds will be there calling the nlcs game one with the rest of the regular crew but if you are so inclined there there is another option. There is an alternative

that may be of interest to some of the statistically inclined listeners in our audience. If you turn on Fox Sports 1, you will get the NLCS on Fox Sports 1 powered by Just a Bit Outside, the microsite that was launched a few months ago, run by Rob Neier. And we are joined today by Rob Neier, FoxSports.com Senior Baseball Editor. Good morning, Rob. Good morning. So tell the people what to expect if they turn on Fox Sports 1 on Saturday. Well, you already did a fine job, but it really is going to be unlike, I think, unlike anything that anyone's ever done, at least for baseball.

You know, it's funny you mentioned how people complain about the broadcast. And you're right, they do. I'm reminded of a column that my colleague Ken Rosenthal wrote, I think just at the end of last week where he said, okay, you guys, all you people who have been complaining about the Yankees and the Red Sox and maybe the Dodgers being in this thing every year, well, this is your year because all those teams are gone. Now put up or shut up. If you really want to see these teams play in the postseason, prove it and watch.

Well, it's sort of the same deal with what we're doing. For people who don't like the regular broadcast, for whatever reasons, we offer an alternative that really is unique. And I certainly can't predict that we'll nail it every second of three hours. But when people tune in, they will be able to see the game. One way or another, they'll be able to follow the game on the field. We'll have the Fox broadcast. The picture will be available. Now, it's going to be available in different ways.

One minute, it might be a split screen with us, and I'll get to us in a second, us on one side and the game on the other side. A lot of people have pushed back about the split screen, I guess, which I understand. It means you're seeing a tiny version of the game and maybe not seeing it all that well. But we'll also be doing things like um we'll have the the game might take up the whole screen and while we're talking about it or um you might see the back our our backs and heads backs of our heads like on uh mystery science theater 3000 and with a giant screen in front of just like we're watching a movie. So all of these things could happen. And also we'll be doing some demos, especially not me.

I'm not a baseball player, but C.J. Nikowski and Gabe Kapler will be there, and they can get out of the chair any time and stand up and demonstrate something, which, of course, we've never seen in the midst of a game while there's stuff happening on the field. So there's going to be a lot of different looks game while there's stuff happening on the field. So, so there's gonna be a lot of different looks and there'll be all sorts of graphics too. And we're going to be, we're going to have graphics explaining various sabermetric principles.

I think we've worked up 25 or 30 different sabermetric terms and those will be flashing somewhere on the screen all the time. So yeah, it's going to be a lot different. And we're also, by the way, going to have Bud Black on the screen all the time. So, yeah, it's going to be a lot different. And we're also, by the way, going to have Bud Black on the set with us, so that opens up a whole other round of questions, managing against both Mike Matheny and Bruce Bochy, and then tying it all together, Kevin Burkhardt, who's just tremendous.

He's just amazing. I just can't say enough about him. He'll sort of be, he'll be the facilitator and the real host. So I remember up to maybe a decade ago, even seeing this idea that baseball perspectives authors who at the time, along with, with you, Rob, were basically the only people who were talking about this stuff, should have kind of their own parallel broadcast of the games. And of course, it was probably illegal to do such a thing because of copyright law, and you've gotten around that by getting hired by the copyright holder or whatever law is applicable here. But is this an idea that has been percolating in your head for some time? I

imagine that somebody suggested that you should do this when you were a very young man and had a much smaller audience. What is the genesis of the idea as it is to be executed? Well, it's certainly nothing that originated with me. I mean, it's certainly people over the course of many years I've been doing this, I've had people say to me, you should do the games, you know, and, you know, I've done a lot of baseball broadcasting, almost all of it. games i used to do a lot of um a triple a games in in portland and i really enjoyed it but it's really hard i'm sure you guys are self-aware enough to know this broadcasting a baseball game is much much harder than it seems when you're just listening at home uh you have to fill the space you have to not stumble over your words um you've got to come up with something interesting or at least moderately interesting to say for three plus hours over and over again um it's it's it's tough work and it having done it in triple a um just as an analyst i never did any play-by-play i never was brave enough my my my the play-by-play guy who's a friend of mine was was kind enough to offer me the opportunity and I kept

telling him that I was going to practice at home and and then I'd finally do it and I and I never did so I never even tried the hard part I just sat there and doing a little pithy comment every when one came to mind but it's it's not easy um so I've always known that you couldn't just throw me into a broadcast booth and I would be even decent. I have done a lot of TV over the last 10 years, thanks largely to Brian Kenney. So I'm a little less uncomfortable with it than I would otherwise be. But I'm still a rank amateur. CJ and Gabe are both really good. They're very polished.

Kevin's a tremendous pro um so they'll do the heavy lifting i will be there as uh comic relief however unintentionally i'm sure um as far as the genesis of the thing again not not my idea in fact my boss who's been who's now producing the show, that's his background, his TV production, it came straight from above to him. He was on vacation, got home, and they said, oh, we want to do this show in three weeks or four weeks. So somewhere above us, I don't know if it's the vice presidential or whatever level it

is, somebody decided that we should try to do something radically different. And then it's all come together very quickly. Are you slightly terrified about this? Sure, of course. The first rehearsal we did Tuesday night. I think it was Tuesday night, yes. We did a few innings. And I was awful. We did another rehearsal a couple hours later. I was

less awful. Um, but I mean, it's, it's, it's overwhelming. It's not just going to, uh, you know, it took me years to get used to going to a studio in Portland and doing a remote where there was one camera and one person, a friend of mine, by the way, now, standing next to the camera. It took me years to get used to doing that. You walk into a studio, and Ben, I know you've been in the MLB Network studio, so you can probably relate to this, but you walk into the Fox studio, and you're surrounded by lights and many cameras and these huge screens and graphics and all these people running around. And all of a sudden you realize how high the stakes are, how much money is being poured into this operation.

And, you know, I try not to think about it, but sure, I'm going to be up there for three hours. And all it would take is, you know, one lame joke. I'm going to feel like I failed that evening. So am I nervous? Am I terrified? A little bit. I think I'll get over it. But it absolutely pops into my head every once in a while.

How do you rehearse for a game that is not going on? Is this like pitching a simulated game? Well, we actually, when we did our rehearsal, we rehearsed during the game that was happening actually during both games we did the two or three innings of both games um both nlds games tuesday we're going to rehearse again uh uh tonight thursday night and uh we're going to use some the previous games so we will already know what's happened that's going to use some of the previous games. So we'll already know what's happened.

That's going to be a little odd, knowing what, you know, having already seen the events. But we've got a lot of subjects we want to talk about. We have things we want to say about Adam Wainwright and Clayton Kershaw. We have things we want to say about Babbitt and Wins Above Replacement. So we're just going to sort of run through those things.

And, you know, you don't want to rehearse too much because we want it to be spontaneous. It won't be fun for the viewers if we've already said everything. And without giving away too much of what people will see, what stats or what concepts do you think lend themselves to a broadcast? And what is it, do you think that, that bothers you most, or maybe that bothers most people about the traditional broadcast, at least as far as the lack of statistical sense, is it that they don't mention certain things that they don't bring up certain things, or is it the things that they do mention that maybe they shouldn't? I think there are obviously a few things that are mentioned that we would

rather were not. One that comes to mind is momentum, right? Whoever wins game one, especially if it's a blowout, there'll be a lot of talk about momentum. Well, we're going to have the stats at hand. We might bring it up and then we'll say, you know what? It doesn't matter. The winner of game one of the LCSs historically have lost more than 50% of game two. So we can bring up the things that people say that we don't agree with, and we can say, here's why, and dispatch that pretty quickly. I think that it's funny. I, I, I, I just yesterday, I was thinking back to somebody asking about what we're going to be doing and talking about. And I, I, I, uh, was reminded of something that Bill James wrote years ago. Um,

probably in his last abstract, um, when he, when he said that he wasn't writing about anything that people weren't already writing or talking about. He was just doing it in a different way. So people talk about pitchframing all the time. Tim McCarver was on pitchframing 25 years ago on a national broadcast. What we didn't have then were the numbers. So we'll talk about pitchframing. That's one of the things we all would love to talk about especially because we got Buster Posey and Yadier Molina who are two of the better pitch framers statistically so we'll talk about that but we'll bring some data and explain what that means and

some of the vagaries of trying to measure it we'll talk about trying to think of you know we'll talk about base running and fielding and but we'll go we won't just trying to think of, you know, we'll talk about base running and fielding and, but we'll go, we won't just say that somebody is a good fielder. We'll say what makes them a good fielder, how we measure that. So it's really the same conversations that people are already having. We're just going to inject a level of objectivity into it that really you're not going to find on most broadcasts. Okay. Well, to switch to the actual games going on, one of the things that we've been

talking about that other people have been writing about is whether baseball is too unpredictable or whether the playoffs are too unpredictable. The fact that all of the favorites have lost in the division series, the teams that that the sports books picked and the projection systems picked have been eliminated and some people are bothered by this by the fact that you can play 162 games to determine which team is is the best during the regular season and then that can all be undone in a single game or in three games does this bother you has it reached a point where you feel that this has gone too far away from the ideal of the best team winning at all? Or does that not matter?

Is it just exciting baseball and you're happy? Well, I tend, you could, most questions you would ask me about any subject, I would wind up in the middle somewhere. And it's that way with this question, too. There was a time 15 years ago, and I recently wrote about this, actually, when it did bother me when the best team didn't win. I wanted to see teams rewarded for doing things the right way. But I got over it. I think that as a fan, I can take pleasure in the Nationals winning 96 games and being outstanding. I can acknowledge that. And I can also appreciate the capriciousness of sport, and particularly this sport. And, you know, I think as unjust as it might seem when all the best teams get knocked out early,

it would also be boring if we knew who was going to win every year. So, you know, probably if I had to choose, and I'm glad I don't, I would probably try to find a happy medium in there somewhere too. I think I would probably didn't want to see the Nationals and the Dodgers necessarily every year, which by which I mean as proxies for the best teams. But I kind of would like to see one of the best teams, at least in the LCS, if not the World Series. So I would say I miss, I miss, I do regret a little bit that all those teams got knocked out. But look, the unpredictability is why we watch, most of us anyway. And if you allow some unpredictability, there will be years when you have a ton of unpredictability.

I don't see any way around that, and we're certainly not going back to four playoff teams. That's not going to happen. I think one of the keys to happiness is not pining for things that just aren't going to happen. Do you think that the gap between the best teams and the teams that have advanced this year between, you know, the Royals and the Orioles, for instance, and the teams that they dispatched is big enough that we will notice it? Is it going to be in any way a less attractive sort of style of play because these kind of second tier great teams have made it? Or do the Royals and the Orioles clear any minimum bar that would create compelling baseball?

Oh, I think so. I mean, I think the only true loss that we've suffered in terms of the eye test was Clayton Kershaw. suffered in terms of the eye test was Clayton Kershaw. Clayton Kershaw obviously is just so far above everyone else, not just in terms of his performance, but his physical tools that will miss him. But look, there's only one of him.

And eye test wise, there's not that much difference between the Royals and the Nationals. I mean, I know the Royals don't have a Bryce Harper who hits the ball 800 feet. I get that. But Harper could easily go through a whole series and not hit the ball that far. He happened to hit two against the Nationals. I mean, against the Giants. But that wouldn't necessarily happen in even a best of seven series. So I think they do pass the eye test.

Statistically speaking, that's a little trickier. I think, you know, if the Royals had been matched up against the nationals, um, we wouldn't have been terribly surprised by a sweep. It would have been, it would have been surprising. It would have been unlikely, but we wouldn't have been, we wouldn't have been blown away by that. But with the Dodgers and the nationals both out, um, see why every series going forward shouldn't be shouldn't be competitive i want to talk about the royals a team that you know a thing or two about they have been the underdogs thus far in their matchups and one could say that they still are that they will be in in any series

at least going by regular season numbers and run differential and the things that we usually use to assess the strength of teams. Sam and I both gave the Orioles slight edges in our ALCS previews. Is there something about the Royals that invalidates that way of looking at a team? Is the fact that they have played this well thus far or something about the way that they're built, does that make them a good playoff team? Or are they just a team that has won in an impressive and compelling way for four games

but are still what we thought they were? You know, I haven't done my projections yet for the series. I'm pretty sure that I'll wind up with roughly the same thing that you came up with. I think that if you want to make a case for the Royals, and again, I haven't made this case. I'm not making it now. I might later. But if you're going to make a case for the Royals, it's this. Their hitters were not as good this season as we expected um particularly billy butler and

eric hosmer and they had some other players who have performed better than we expected but i think the general the general consensus and i don't mean opinion wise i mean statistically was that royals would have decent hitting this season, maybe better than average, with their younger hitters developing a little bit, or at least playing better than the year before. And starting pitching being a weakness, because we didn't know what Danny Duffy would do, or what Nordano Ventura would do.

And of course it didn't work out that way. Starting pitching was a strength. The starting pitching was a strength. The bullpen was incredibly good. Wade Davis being this, you know, maybe the, I think he might've been the best reliever in the American League. And we didn't see that coming. So, you know, it's, I wrote something about this

a few weeks ago too. The Royals, their record wound up being better than we expected, but their fundamentals, and by that I mean their underlying performance in terms of wins and losses, was almost exactly what we expected, around 500. They're basically a 500 team that outperformed that a little bit. that a little bit. But I don't know how much credit we can take for this wonderful prediction when they did it so differently than we expected. And if we were that wrong about them then, maybe we weren't that wrong. Maybe their hitters are better than their numbers. And maybe Eric Hosmer is the guy we've seen over the last week. And I know, I don't mean to suggest that we should assume Eric Hosmer will hit exactly as well in the LCS as he did in the division series,

but it may be that he is a better hitter than his full season numbers. Um, and it may be the Billy Butler is, he certainly has always been before. So I think if you're going to make a case for the Royals, you, you make the case that they underperformed this season, but their true abilities will start showing up any day now.

In fact, maybe they did last week. And their pitchers really are this good. So that's the case for them. And I think that you can maybe get them a little closer to the Orioles if you do that. And you also assume the Orioles were a little over their heads this year, which they probably were, Steve Pierce, et cetera, Nelson Cruz. So I think that basically I would agree with you.

The Orioles are better than the Royals, but probably not a lot better. The Royals have earned, I think, a lot of goodwill by being super fun to watch and being kind of exciting in sort of certain postseason-friendly ways. But the style of play that they have is not one that, on paper, a stat head would generally like, and there has been a bit of ambivalence about them finally making it to the postseason with a team that seems to go against traditional stat head values.

And it reminds me, though, and I have been thinking about this over the last few weeks of Joe Posnanski's writing about the Royals five years ago, when the point he would make, and I remember one column in particular that he just made it so beautifully, was that the Royals, that the only thing that they should be doing is whatever nobody else is doing, that there's just no point in them playing like everybody else, and any dumb idea they have, if no other team is doing it, is the right idea. That's sort of what they have to do. And so they have this style of play right now that feels 30 years old,

play right now that feels 30 years old, 30 years behind the times, but is also their own unique niche, I guess, in a way. Does that sort of convince you that Dayton Moore actually does have a sort of rigorous and sound strategy that stat heads should all love and appreciate? I would love to say that it does. I've just never seen a single quote from Dayton Moore suggesting that's the case. He has talked about wanting players with some power and wanting players who draw walks. And maybe he's sincere. I wonder how sincere.

He said things about the Royals um you know when they struggle to score runs which is basically all season but i remember back right around the all-star break roughly somebody asked them about the royals inability to score runs or their failure to score runs and and he mentioned something about them uh not doing well with runners in scoring position which wasn't the problem at all they were doing fine uh they were getting plenty of big hits it's just that there wasn't anybody on base for the big hits it just he just has said so many things over the years that fly in the face of the actual facts but i've just sort of come to assume he doesn't know what the facts are i could be wrong maybe he's maybe it's maybe he's sandbagging maybe it's all a smoke screen um you could argue certainly that the

royals are hearkening back to branch ricky who famously said among the many other things he famously said that speed is the only thing that helps you on both offense and defense because of course you can run the bases quickly you can bunch your way on and then in the field you can catch more fly balls and the royals do those things um they are as we all know now um they are excellent base dealers they have a high success rate um which is what we like sabermetrically of course and they also have this incredible outfield defense essentially they've got um three center fielders playing at least some of the time when dyson's in there and aoki in

right field didn't have a good year this year statistically, but historically has been a very good outfielder. So we like that too, sabermetrically. We like outfielders who can catch fly balls and steal home runs and all that neat stuff. So it's not that they do everything wrong sabermetrically. It's that the biggest things, the most obvious things they do so wrong. They're last in home runs, last in walks. I believe I read somewhere that they're the first team that's ever finished last in both of those things and made the playoffs.

So it's an odd team. that I've seen of the Royals is that instead of focusing on the outfield defense, which is really the number one benefit of the speed, the roster speed, people are talking now about the stolen bases and the pinch running and Terrence Gore. And I went and looked. Terrence Gore got called up on August 31st. From that game through the end of the of, or that was his debut, from then through the end of the season, he scored five runs. Only one of those runs was meaningful,

one run in a month. So the notion that the Royals' postseason fortunes are going to hinge on Terrence Gore and Gerard Dyson pinch running, it's just highly unlikely. Now, granted, those guys played a big role in the wild card game against the A's, so it can happen. But I argue that if they're going to beat the Orioles, it's not going to be because Gerard Dyson and or Terrence Gore stole a bunch of bases. It's going to be because they pitched better and they hit better than the Orioles, which is what happened against the Angels. Those guys didn't score.

I believe neither of those guys scored a single run against the Angels. That's not how they won. About a week ago, I was reading columns about how the A's don't have a team that is built for the postseason, and there didn't seem to be any compelling, consistent story of why that would be. And right now I'm reading stories about why the Nationals haven't been built for the postseason. And again, I haven't seen any compelling story for why that would be.

And in a week or so, if the Royals have won three games and jumped ahead in this series, I'm sure I will be reading columns about how they are built for the postseason. And somewhat contrary. Like you say, the largest factor is going to be do their pitchers keep the other team from scoring runs and do their hitters hit better than expected or at least as well as expected. But, you know, there is, Ben and I have kind of batted around this idea of whether the

Royals are suited for a, you know, 2-2 game in October or any other month. And I think that we estimated that if the Royals were a 50-50 proposition going into a game against a similarly matched team, that we would give them, what, 60% odds if it were tied in the seventh or something like that? Is that what we said? Yeah. Based on, you know, based on, yes, the stolen bases of Terrence Gore and Gerard Dyson, based on the defensive switches they get to make, based on their bullpen, just based on their general ability to be tactical at the end of the game.

So if those columns start getting written in a week, what are the odds that you think that you will retweet one of them, find it to be credible in any way, or alternately, how much vomit will be in the back of your throat? Well, I think that your analysis is spot on. I think that the Royals are well-equipped to win a close game. The trick is keeping it close. I mean, it's basically been the same team all season. People act like it became a different team when Terrence Gore joined them in late August.

But like I said, that's just not true. He won one game for the Royals, basically. There was one really incredible ending where I think he scored from second on an infield hit or something. And that's it. It's been the same team all year. The same core of players. And the fact is that their run differential was not that good. They didn't win, as I recall. I can't look it up right now,

I believe their record in one-run games was not impressive at all, even though they had the great bullpen. So, sure, they are well-equipped to win a close game, to do some one-run strategies, to keep the other team off the board, especially if Kelvin Herrera is healthy, and he seems to be. And adding Brandon Finnegan to the bullpen, it's a tiny sample size, but he's obviously got a live arm, seems to be completely fine with pitching out of the bullpen,

even though he's always been a starter um so you know if they have four lights out relievers um should they win their more than their fair share of of two of games that are tied in the in the seventh sure they should the trick is getting to that point and it still helps to have guys who hit a lot of home runs and draw a lot of walks just to get there. And you'd rather be ahead 8-2 in the sixth or seventh than tied 2-2. So I don't think that, and not that anybody listening needs me to say this, but Ben wrote this incredible piece just a couple weeks ago about all the tropes associated with postseason play,

and he found that none of them are true. I did do that. So this is the time of year when, if people are not complaining about broadcasters, they are complaining about managers, and we've seen many moves that drew the ire of the internet thus far. I want to ask you, first of all, when will we get to a point, or do all, when will we get to a point or do you think that we will

get to a point where these same mistakes that are being decried over and over again will no longer be made or will be made so rarely that we are shocked when they happen? At what point will a manager not justify a decision by saying that so-and-so is his seventh inning guy. And these series seem to be a mismatch, managerially speaking. Buck Showalter and Bruce Bochy are generally regarded as two of the best managers. They are maybe the only managers who have largely escaped criticism so far this October. They are matched up against Mike Matheny and Ned Yost, who have taken their fair share of shots over the years. How big an advantage is that? Is that

equivalent to one team having home field advantage? Is it something that's not even likely to make a difference over a best of seven series? Tell us your thoughts about managers and mistakes. You know, I love that analogy. Home field advantage in baseball is what? It's like 53-47 or something like that. I think that kind of nails it. That's probably the biggest spread that you're going to find between managers. And Buck Showalter, Ned Yost might be 53-47. I think that's tremendous. might be 53-47. I think that's tremendous. In a more general way of discussing this, I always feel guilty when I write about managers. And I do it all the time, in October especially.

You know, I ripped, I don't know who I ripped. Earlier in the postseason, I ripped somebody. I can't remember which one it was because all the losing managers did something it's it's bizarre to me i i've i've been wondering for a while now if i follow if i followed a team day in day out which i used to do but don't anymore if i followed a single team would i find something to criticize in almost every loss because that's what i do and many of us do in the postseason and it's usually the bullpen stuff not always sometimes the which pinch hit. And it's usually the bullpen stuff. Not always. Sometimes it's the which pinch hitter, but it's usually the bullpen stuff. And Don Madden came in for his fair share of criticism. Dave Cameron just destroyed Matt Williams after game four. And I was right on board.

I do wonder if it's fair. I do wonder how many things that we just don't know. And if we did know, would change our mind. If we'd been in the dugout talking to the pitching coach at the same time, looking these guys in the eyes, whatever. So it's a strange pursuit, second-guessing the eyes, whatever. So it's a strange pursuit, second guessing the managers or even first guessing them, because there's just so many things that we don't know. And the other problem, of course, is that we keep asking, pleading for these managers and then criticizing them after the fact for not using their best pitchers in the highest leveraged

situations. But how fruitful is that? None of them do it. You could argue, I think, that Joe Maddon, for example, I think this year he used his closure in the eighth a few times. Not many. I haven't looked in a while, but maybe it was three or four. So you've got one manager out of 30 who used his closer three times out of 60 or whatever in a higher leverage situation. That's a pretty high standard, a pretty high bar for these guys to clear, for any one manager to clear, to completely go off the reservation and do something that nobody else is doing. There have been so few managers in the history of baseball who have been willing to stray from convention.

I mean, Billy Martin arguably didn't really care what anybody thought. Madden, just to a limited degree. Tony La Russa, who ironically i guess because he's the one who codified a lot of these bullpen rules but but you know he he's the one who started batting his his pitcher eighth um which was pretty crazy and he took a lot of a lot of criticism for it um but there's just been so few managers who would do something like that. Most of those guys were already well-established and didn't have to worry about losing their jobs. So a guy like Don Mattingly, if he uses Kenley Jansen in the seventh inning

and it doesn't work, he's going to get destroyed. Not by us. We'll be cheering him on. But we're not the ones who sell the most newspapers and who sign his paychecks. So I think it's perfectly human for these managers to do exactly what's conventional. And it's not surprising that they don't care what we think. And lastly, we saw a couple of teams come into the playoffs with, I think, bullpens that seemed

weaker than their competition, the Dodgers and the Tigers. And then both of those teams lost in ways where we could blame the bullpen for their loss, either relievers coming in and being terrible or starters having to stay in longer than maybe they should have because of a lack of reliable relievers. And a lot of people drew a direct line between the bullpens and the losses and blamed either the manager for using a suboptimal reliever in certain situations or a general manager for not building a better bullpen.

And I look at it and I think back to spring training when we all thought the Dodgers bullpen was going to be great and it was filled with former closers in seemingly every inning and both they and the Tigers had some Tommy John issues in the bullpen and the Tigers traded for a closer who then got hurt and was ineffective do you blame those teams for not building a better bullpen? Is it something that we can say that so-and-so should have built one better? Or is it a case that sometimes things go wrong, and in a very small postseason sample, guys who were pretty good during the regular season will be pretty bad?

And is that an Achilles heel in the postseason? Or did it just happen to be this year? Because if those teams had say scored a bunch of runs then it might not have mattered that they had had weak bullpens well we've certainly seen weak bullpens teams with weak bullpens do well in the postseason no question um what one thing i don't know and would like to know is how many how many more games in the postseason are close um i think you've looked at the numbers before and there's no clear connection between bullpen quality and postseason success right

yeah the i mean the scoring is slightly there's a slightly higher percentage of one run games nowhere near the percentage that we've seen this this postseason which has been an anomaly but slightly higher percentage of one run games, slightly higher percentage of extra inning games. But, uh, bullpen quality was one of the things that Nate Silver had in the secret sauce or closer quality. And that didn't seem to be predictive after it was published. Yeah, that's right. And, and I think too, that, that you, too, that you should be able to actually cover some of your bullpen problems in October, if you have them, by using your starters. Having Anabel Sanchez was a luxury, and he actually pitched quite well when he was used out of the bullpen. You'd think that a pitcher like him, assuming that he does pitch well, could make up for a lot of other issues because he can go two innings or three innings if necessary. So, yes, this was an anomaly, no question.

I do think that people were criticizing the Tigers for not having built a good boat. They knew they had this problem. Well, yeah. And they went out and got Soria, who had been tremendous for the Rangers. And then he got hurt and was terrible for the Tigers. So it's not like they didn't try. I do think that in the Dodgers case, they did what they do with everything. They threw a ton of money at the problem. Not a ton. They threw a fair amount of money at the problem in the forms of Brandon

League and Brian Wilson, both of whom make pretty good salaries. And I think that teams do have a tendency when they're spending that much money on any any player um in this case relief pitchers um i think that it it might lead to a certain inflexibility um and maybe if they hadn't been spending that much money on those guys they would have given uh more chances been a little more or less reluctant to give some high leverage innings to, I might be getting the names wrong, I apologize, Baez and Frias, who both pitched quite well in low leverage situations during the regular season. Maybe those guys would have thrived in October,

but they didn't really get the chance. They were the last guys out of the bullpen, basically. On the other hand, I know I'm falling in the middle again, but one of the things that I've been questioning for a while now is the tendency teams have to be impatient with relief pitchers. I think in 1984, the Royals used 12 pitchers. All season, 12. Not 12 relievers, 12 pitchers. I think in 1984, the Royals used 12 pitchers all season, 12, not 12 relievers, 12 pitchers. And there were a lot of reasons why that's changed so much, why teams now use 20 relievers in a season or more instead of six or seven or eight. And I think some of them are

good reasons, but I think one of the reasons is that teams just aren't as patient with pitchers anymore. A pitcher goes out and has four or five terrible outings over the course of a couple of weeks, and he gets sent back to AAA. I'm not sure that makes sense. I'm not sure that pitchers' real abilities were manifest in those four or five or six innings. So, you know, at the same time, I'm preaching that maybe they should have been less patient with league and, and, and Wilson. I'm also will preach that team should be more patient with their relief pitchers. So I don't know where I fall on that.

I certainly think the Dodgers could have done a better job. And I think really Mattingly did not seem to have any real plan. No, there's, there's an old military adage. I seem to have any real plan no there's there's an old military adage um i don't know what the adage is it's an adage about plans and it's better to have one than not to have one even if it's a bad plan and it didn't sound maddeningly had a plan at all i think that i can see why that one caught on yeah well that wasn't the adage there isn't the thing is there are multiple adages and i I always get them mixed up. There's an adage about best laid plans not working out so well also. There's that contact with the enemy.

There's that one. That's the famous one. That's a good one. Yeah, it's exactly a good plan. See, I can't do that one either. No, I think you got it. I think that's exactly what it is. I know what it is.

Here's another one. I know what it is. I know what it is. Here's another one. A bad plan today is better than a good plan tomorrow. That's another one. Oh, yeah. See, that actually does sound like an adage.

All right. Well, you have a plan for a baseball broadcast that Twitter will actually like. We wish you well in that mission and we remind people that if you have been clamoring for a more stat friendly sabermetric broadcast for years now, you have a choice for your NLCS

viewing on Saturday night and you should vote with your cable box and find Fox Sports 1 and watch Rob and Gabe and crew as they cover the game in a new kind of way. So good luck with that, Rob, and thanks for coming on. Well, thanks, and I want to mention just very quickly one more thing. We will be taking questions also. I should have mentioned that before during the game,

and we need good questions. That's going to help really make the broadcast every inning i have a really great question and so we'll be tweeting out and doing all the things that tell people where to come on the web and uh i would love for everybody to show up and and not only watch but participate all right so please do that and please also support our sponsor the play index at baseballreference.com by going to BaseballReference.com, subscribing to the Play Index using the coupon code BP to get the discounted price of $30

on a one-year subscription. Enjoy your weekend and the baseball, and we will be back on Monday.