Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 567: Game 7, from Start to Finish

Episode Date: October 30, 2014

Ben and Sam recap and respond to Game 7’s twists and turns, from Guthrie to Bumgarner and Gordon.

Took my family away from my Carolina home Had dreams about the West and started to roam Six long months on a dust-covered trail They say heaven's at the end but so far it's been hell And there's fire on the mountain, lightning in the air Holding them heels and it's waiting for me there Good morning and welcome to episode 567 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus presented by the Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I am Ben Lindberg of Grantland joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Prospectus.

Hello. Hello! I'm excited. We have things to talk about. I'm sort of sleepy. Turns out that it takes a long time to get a cab back to your hotel from Kauffman Stadium at 3 in the morning. How far was your hotel from Kauffman Stadium? Probably about a 15, 20 minute drive. I think it's, yeah.

Too long, too far to walk. It's like eight miles or something. Did you see the orange fountain? I saw blue fountains. There was an orange fountain? Apparently, after the game, apparently what i heard on the radio is that kaufman stadium changed the color of the fountains so that it was orange in honor of the giants which is just about the sweetest thing i've ever heard classy super classy i the the royals really i mean

this was the year of the royals like for, for obvious reasons, they got, you know, super far and changed the whole story of their franchise and everything like that. But how much do you love Ned Yost, like, personally, right now? I mean, you love the guy, yeah? I love the whole team. Right, there's no villain. There's no villain. Now, so, like, if Dyson were good at baseball at all, we would probably be annoyed by him.

If he were like a pretty good ball player who was talking big, then we'd be sick of him by now. But the fact that he's literally a pinch runner and defensive replacement and that's his job, that's what will be on his baseball reference page. That's what will be on the sheet they send to hall of fame voters like in in this incredible um uh act of uh you know humble brag uh that makes it okay as far as i'm concerned for him to be dancing and bragging. Yeah. Defensive replacement with a star's swagger. It's an endearing combination. It is an endearing combination.

And then, yeah, otherwise, I mean, you could see too much Hosmer being too much. He's a little intense. And I forget what, John Boyce had one of the great lines of the postseason which rather than ruin it I'm going to to look it up but so I'll circle back to Hosmer

but they don't have an obnoxious closer which is like that makes them a minority in this game boring closer kind of a boring closer yeah uh and uh yeah there's just there's just nothing not to like about the south paris and they have paris's instagram tormenting of lorenzo cane which is great and oh i would say that uh yeah great you're gonna say that's overrated? No.

Yeah. Interesting. Perez. Good pronunciation. I can't even bring myself to say it. I guess I could say Sal Perez, but it's hard for me to say Perez without Sal in front of it. It's just really hard for me not to say Perez. Anyway, I thought that the water bottle thing sort of revealed a crack in that.

That is a very common player thing. They do that a lot. Or at least I've had that experience several times when I've been talking to someone in a clubhouse and another player walks over and pretends to be a reporter.

I was looking at basically all the highlights from the postseason for my end of postseason wrap-up, and there are way too many instances of player or manager pretending to be a reporter that get highlight videos. It doesn't need to be. It's the same way that Steve Perry is a highlight video for every single game. Every single game, he gets a highlight video. And so at a certain point, you can just say, refer back to it. It's like Ibid or whatever, Ibid.

But I also thought that in particular the Sal Perez, Lorenzo Cain one, showed a – there was a deep resentment in the eyes of Lorenzo Cain. About midway through, you realize that, in fact, he hates the man. It seemed a little testy. So this is John Boyce's description of Eric Hosmer. Eric Hosmer is the 50-50 compromise of Zach Morris and Chris Pratt, which is just right. I think that's just about exactly right. And so too much of him would probably be annoying unless he was, I guess, if he were a superstar, we would maybe like him. But, yeah, I don't know.

I mean, Vargas is completely lovable. You got to love Jason Vargas. Just his reaction faces. His reaction faces. His reaction faces. Yeah, so it's a good team. Aoki? Aoki's the best. Yeah, not to racial profile,

but Aoki is Munanori Kawasaki with game. He's Kawasaki with game. He's Kawasaki without the sort of shameful feeling that we're letting our little brother tag along for the express purpose of picking on him. So, yeah, he's great. I mean, Kane is amazing. And Gordon. Gordon is just about the most fun player to watch in baseball. Gordon is like a top six right now baseball

player to watch. I don't know who the rest of that six would be like you know I love Starling Marte and Yadier Molina would be up there and maybe Sal Perez would be up there but Alex Gordon is definitely a elite watchability player right now. I'm sure that we'll talk about watching Alex Gordon in a little bit.

Yeah, and you could even say that Shields is a—I mean, even though Shields' leadership qualities have been, I don't know if anything, overrated or certainly mentioned constantly. He's, you know, he's an admirable player, I suppose. And since I stopped rooting for a team personally, I don't think I've ever gotten as attached to a team. Or at least I've never watched a team as much. to a team or at least I've never watched a team as much. I don't think that I wasn't, you know, rooting for by birth as much as I've watched the Royals this month because I don't,

I was previewing every round of the post season and they were in the American league and they were there every step of the way. And then I was going to the world series games at home. So I've just watched more Royals baseball now than usually I watch any one team. And I kind of feel like I have a good handle on their team and how they work and how they win more so than I normally would. And yeah, even watching them that much, I was not tired of it at all. Watching them that much, I was not tired of it at all. You know, you hear all the time sports writers talk about how after a couple years on the job, you quit rooting for teams.

You root for stories. And I've never particularly had that feeling. I root for, as we've talked about, I root for my predictions to come true. And I sometimes will root for, if I'm on the cusp of a fun fact, I will root for that fun fact to come true. Like, for instance, the Royals run differential. I was sort of hoping they would fall behind 5-0 at some point in the game, so that I could say that. But I've never generally felt that way. However, recapping the ALCS, I have to admit it was so obvious before the games began how much fun it would be to write about the Royals.

And how not that fun it would have been to write about the Orioles in the same game. I root for happiness for all Orioles fans. They deserve it as much as anybody. So happiness for all Orioles fans. They deserve it as much as anybody. However, the Royals were like the most fun team to write about that you could conjure up. And it did start to, you're right, it did start to sort of, you watch them every game for a month and it does start to affect what you hope for in their futures. And I know this is true all the time, but it was particularly true this year because the other two LDS series didn't go very long

and because both these teams were in the wild card. There were 32 games this year in the postseason and like 25 of them had a Royal or a Giant in them. And so it really felt like this was a one month world series between these two teams. Yeah. Because in a sense, it wasn't this way for everyone, but giants were the team in the NL that I was paying more attention to because of where I live and because of

everybody I know roots for them. And the royals were the team I was paying attention to in the AL from the very beginning, partly because I recapped that series, partly because I have more interest in the Angels than most teams, and partly because they were just so fun. They were the story. And so it was like this was not a seven-game World Series. This was a one-month, 25-game World Series with these two teams just playing constantly in the foreground for me. So it was fun. I agree.

And, yeah, you talked about rooting for predictions and for much of the postseason their their victories went against my predictions not that i ever felt strongly about a prediction really but until the world series when i predicted that they would win in seven their their winning contradicted my pre-season or pre-series thoughts. And yet I still wanted them to win sort of, or just so that I could keep writing about them, if not so that they would win themselves. Although that story certainly would have been as good as anyone else winning, if not better. So thank you. Thank you, you royals for treating us to that so we should we should talk about the game in which they were eliminated i don't know where to start

there are so many so many things where do we start where do you want to start uh i at the very beginning a very good place to start. All right. I don't know. Start at the end. Start with Alex Gordon. No. Anything.

Okay. All right. Well, so the nice thing about the game, I guess, or any game seven, is that the normal thing about baseball is that you can't really manipulate who is up at the crucial time, who is pitching at the crucial time. There's a batting order and there's a starting rotation. And once those things are set, you can't deviate from them all that much. You can't pass the ball to the best shooter at the buzzer or go long with your best receiver or whatever. You might just have your worst hitter up at the most important time and there's only so much that you can do about that. And game seven is sort of different

in that you can kind of choose at least who has the ball, and you're choosing from almost everyone on your team, anyone on your team, whom you might want to have the ball. And that was kind of what this game came down to, ultimately, which I like. I enjoy Game 7s for that reason. But before we even get to Madison Baumgartner, I mean, there are a few moves that we could discuss if we want to do the manager critiquing thing. And not even just managers, but in this game you can kind of critique players in the same way that we have been critiquing managers all month. So if we want to start with managers, just to get it out of the way, I guess the most notable mistake you could point out is sticking with Jeremy Guthrie a little too long, perhaps. The number of arms that both teams had, it was clear from the beginning that the starters were the weakest links, and they just needed to get far enough that you could get them out of the game without your better options getting gassed before the end. So that was not a long time, and as it turned out, Tim Hudson didn't go very far at all. The Giants were just fine

Guthrie looked I guess pretty good for Guthrie but good for Guthrie isn't really all that good and so in the third inning when Guthrie went one two three maybe that slowed Ned Yost's trigger a little bit in the fourth he came back out for the fourth, which itself was sort of debatable. There was no one warming, I believe, when he went out there for the fourth. And he let the first two guys on. And that culminated in after Kelvin Herrera came in and Mike Morse had a good at-bat against Herrera where he fought off a 99 mile per hour four-seamer inside and just sort of lined it softly into right inside out at it. And that was in the end the winning run. And so you can kind of say that, you know, how teams will

go into a series and they'll say, we don't want this guy to beat us, some star on the other team. We don't want him to be the one who beats us, which is silly, kind of, because often those guys will be the ones that beat you, or more often than any other player on the team, because they're the best player. But maybe the Royals could have thought the same thing about Guthrie. We don't want our worst player or our worst pitcher to beat us and he you know he technically took the loss he he gave up the the winning run all the runs all the runs in the game were charged to starters which was i guess not all that surprising the surprising thing was probably that there weren't more relievers used,

which is, which is probably because of Bumgarner, which we'll get to, but, you know, there was, it was pushing it to stick with Guthrie for the fourth inning, to not have someone ready when the fourth inning started. So if you want to point to one managerial decision, maybe that would be it. If you want to point to one managerial decision, maybe that would be it. Yeah. I sort of tried to talk about this yesterday and didn't have my thoughts clear yet. And then I wrote about it and they cleared up some and I probably won't be able to say them out loud clearly, so bear with me.

But this is why I think that it's such an important thing to figure out a way to get away from your starter in a game like this, where you know that your starter is limited. It's just too scary for managers to take their starter out. They just don't know what they need out of him yet. They don't know what the contours of the game are going to be. They don't know if they're going to need a guy who can go six if he goes extra innings. If he goes extra innings and you've pulled your starter after one and two-thirds, then you might be at a real disadvantage and you just don't know if that's going to come up. For instance, if Bochy had gone to Bumgarner and instead of seeing the Bumgarner that we

did, if that first inning he pitched, which there were some scary moments, right? He gave up a hit to the first batter. Yeah, Infante had a single. batter yeah infante and then he fell behind he fell behind escobar got it got basically a gift with escobar bailing him out right bunting on a 2-0 count and then aoki hits the ball that very easily could have been you know a double in the corner the the giants played it perfectly so they earned that but you wouldn't say that bum garner made a great pitch or anything like that. And then he got Kane, which was a big out and super significant, but there was at least one and maybe even two very questionable calls in that. You could certainly imagine a scenario where Kane loops a double down the line, and all

of a sudden, that inning has gone completely differently bum garner's given up two and bocce starts panicking and bum garner's got to come out the next you know the next inning or something like that and now bocce doesn't and now he's really got to lean on his relievers and so uh it was very aggressive for bocce to take hudson out although although you know arguably there were people who were going, wow, this is a slow hook when it was happening. This is the sequence that led to Hudson coming out. First off, a not very impressive first inning

with a walk and a ball hit hard and really a lot of pitches that seemed to be missing location. So then the second inning, single, double, hit by pitch. And at that point, I'm thinking, where's this quick hook? That doesn't, like, a quick hook means single, double, hit by pitch. You're out, right? And then there was two fly outs and a single, and that's what finally got Hudson out of there.

I mean, Hudson arguably was worse, I think actually without question, was worse in the second inning and got to last longer than Guthrie was in the fourth inning, who was pulled much more quickly. So in a way, Bochy's hook was actually slower. And that's because there's something about, there's a finality. That's one of baseball's, I mentioned in my thing about why Bumgarner should have started is I talked about the screw you mechanism of basically baseball being a game of attrition and you don't have enough innings or you don't have enough pitchers for all your... You don't have enough good pitchers for all your innings. And so you have to figure out precisely how to parcel them out. And that's

basically the number one strategy of managing a team is making sure that as many of your innings go to your good pitchers as possible. And so you have all sorts of ways to do that. One is by having starters, for instance, instead of all relievers. And one is by having leverage and paying attention to leverage. But another kind of screw you facet of baseball is this idea that you don't get to go back in the game once you're out. If you pull a guy in the second inning, that's it. And that's not like that in most sports. In most sports, you can manage to the situation

without worrying too much about what it's going to do to you three quarters later. But in baseball, once he's out, he's out, obviously. Those are the rules, guys. I hope everybody is aware of those rules. Should we go back and talk about more of the rules about baseball? Yeah, we'll get to them. And it's like it seems practically impossible to find the sweet spot where you get him out at just the right time, not a batter too early or not a batter too late. And so you can sort of, I feel like with Yost, it seemed like he maybe deviated from his plan a little bit.

Yeah, because before the game he mentioned that he would go. Right, he'd bring in Herrera in the second inning if he had to. If he had to. Right, and he said if he had any doubt, he said, if we've got to think, hey, do you think we can push him to another inning, that won't happen. Like if there is any doubt in his mind that the guy could get through the next inning, that he wouldn't even try it. And there had to be or there should have been some

doubts so i don't know that i agree with this i the question is uh once you get to the third are you certain that herrera davis and holland can get the last six innings. If you're certain, then it doesn't matter. You just take Guthrie out automatically, clean inning or not. You just take him out of there because he's not as good as those guys. However, Ned Yost doesn't know that those three guys can pitch six innings. One might have a bad day. One might get bogged down by a 14-pitched bat. One might load the bases and have 31 pitches in

the first inning he throws, and then you're like, well, is he still my best option for the second inning? And what you don't want is to then start having to fill. Now, maybe you have Shields, and you have Finnegan, and you have Duffy, and maybe you still feel confident, but it's not nearly as clean a decision if you don't know for a fact that those three guys are going to get your last six innings. And so, you know, if I'm Yost, probably I, I don't know. I think about pulling Guthrie in the second. After the third, though, it's hard to say that it was a no-brainer. He struck out Panic and Posey to end the inning. And then the fourth starts and he gives up an infield hit. Alright, so do you pull him after the infield hit?

Probably not. And then Pence gets the hit. Do you pull him there? Probably after Pence gets a hit. But that's all the damage that Guthrie allowed. He got the next guy to fly out. And it was Sandoval going to third on a pretty

brilliant tag. but that's not guthrie's fault exactly did you did you feel that gordon was too nonchalant on that on that catch some some people thought you know he kind of he did sort of drift back on it he didn't really get in a good throwing position it wasn't clear whether he could have, whether it was too deep for him to really camp under it and set up and get all of his momentum behind it, or maybe he wasn't expecting Sandoval to try to tag. Didn't see it. Uh-huh. Okay.

I saw Perez. I saw Perez let Gordon go to third on a tag, and I thought that he was too nonchalant. Uh-huh. He was too nonchalant. So if you can assess the... So I will say that let's say that Perez is on the nonchalant plus scale is 100. So just compare what Gordon did to Perez and that's what I believe. Okay. Was it more or less nonchalant than Perez? I thought it looked at the time more.

Okay. So I would give it like a 114 on the nonchalant so it was too nonchalant because because perez was definitely anything anything more nonchalant than perez is too nonchalant uh anyway uh and then and then herrera comes in he's the one who gives up you know the next hit so it's not like if you bring it which just which obviously herrera is good and better than than guthrie but it's just not to say that if you bring it, which obviously Herrera is good and better than Guthrie, but it's just not to say that if you bring in Herrera, he's definitely going to get whatever outs that Guthrie would have gotten. So anyway, I'm just saying that from a process standpoint, yeah, I think you and I would have done it differently than Yost did.

From a results standpoint, I don't know that I pin this on that decision exactly. Because I don't know that it was that obvious to take him out other than after Pence is single. And after Pence is single, Guthrie got the next hit. Anyway, I would say that on the Yost meter, of all the moves that Yost made this postseason, there were probably, I don't know, a dozen that I would object to more strenuously than that, and maybe two dozen.

It's been a funny postseason. Yeah, it was not one of the most egregious, but it wasified by the the margin by which the Giants won and obviously the stakes of the game and and yeah there were lots of player mistakes or successes that probably had more to do with who won the game um you you could talk about uh Joe Panik's double play, which was fantastic. And yet on the same double play, and by the way, there was a note from Stats and Info that Panik was like the best double play turner in baseball this year. 48 of 61 that's 78.7 percent of double play opportunities as either the the fielder or the pivot man which was the highest rate of any second baseman i don't know whether that's more crawford or more panic but but it's both to some extent so he made that great play and yet on that same great play you could say that the Royals sort of screwed up a little bit in that not only did Hosmer dive into first on a play that I would say he probably would have been safe had he not.

There's a lot of debate and discussion about the sliding into first thing. I know that Alan Nathan, who knows more about the physics of baseball than anyone, if I recall a tweet from earlier in the postseason correctly, is either agnostic on this subject or thinks that at times the dive actually does make sense. But maybe Hosmer caught himself there, or maybe, as Drew Fairservice pointed out, the worst dive on that play was Lorenzo Cain diving headfirst into second rather than attempting any sort of takeout slide on Crawford, which could have slowed Crawford the tiny fraction of a second that it would have taken for Hosmer to be safe.

Or even conceivably more than a tiny second. I mean, Crawford was in the most prone position that a middle infielder could be. That is, and you almost, I've seen Crawford make that throw a lot. I mean, he's, that, he has got a complete cannon of an arm from that position. Like one of the strongest arms I've seen in that sort of reverse spin move that you have to do in that position. However, you are really exposed. And there was a brief moment where I'm completely imagining this. Don't take me seriously on this.

But there was a moment where, to my eyes, it was almost like he turned without expecting necessarily to throw. And because of the way the runner was coming in uh he went through with it but if Kane's really barreling in I'm not sure that Crawford turns I'm not sure that Crawford was definitely going to throw like if if Kane comes in and destroys him he might just get out of the way yeah maybe so that's another little thing where it could have turned on that. And yeah, you mentioned Juan Perez's catch. Now I'm switching from Perez to Perez. That was partially positioning. The fact that he was that close to the line, I don't know whether it was his own positioning or Giants coaches positioning.

Either way, it seemed like a ball that Travis Ishikawa probably would not have caught. Maybe if he had been standing in exactly the same spot, he would have had a shot. But it was certainly it would have been a lot less likely. So you could credit Bochy for for putting him in to start although there were a couple rallies that he kind of helped kill earlier in the game like when guthrie got out of not really got out of but but sort of got out of the the bases loaded jam early on with the the two sack flies and then the strikeout he struck out because he was up and it was almost like having a pitcher up where you can kind of get out of a jam because the

the worst hitter on either team who's in the game is up so i don't know whether he was a net positive or a net negative on the day but but that catch certainly helped a lot. Well, I'm trying to remember if that catch came before or after I thought the obvious move to pinch hit for him. Probably after. Yeah, he'd already been up a couple times. Yeah, let's see. I don't even remember when I wanted him to be pinch hit for,

but there was some point in the game where I... And this seems to be a trend in the postseason, is that I always want Ishikawa to be replaced for defense, and then later he hits the game-winning home run. Or I always want Perez to be pinch hit for on offense, and then that's when the catch comes. Or, similarly, at one point, on the Royal side, I will get this decision wrong regardless of team. There is no bias. I will always get the decision

wrong. There was the time where I thought that it was so obvious that Aoki should have pinch hit for Dyson. And then the next inning, Kane in right field makes this great catch that otherwise would have been a game-changing hit for the Giants. Yeah, so then that takes us up to Bumgarner. Not to shortchange Jeremy Affelt, who came in to relieve Hudson, got out of that jam, pitched two more innings. It was his longest outing, I think, since July of 2012. innings it was his longest outing i think since july of 2012 and he's now pitched 22 straight scoreless appearances in the postseason which is one short of mariano rivera for the longest ever yeah jeff long wrote about that for prospectus today if if i mean you can argue that affeld

while bum garner's been doing this thing aff Affelt has been doing just as impressive of a thing. But he's Affelt. It's not as impressive because he's just doing reliever things. But still, it's been incredible. What Lopez and Affelt have done for this three-year, three-champions uh is probably worth a a long magazine article are people actually calling them the core four on the broadcast someone said that i don't even know who the core four wait so that oh romo romo cassia yeah and and Lopez. Oh, that's kind of cute. I don't remember Kaseya being leverage in 2010 at all. But I might be wrong about that.

And AFL wasn't that great in 2010. But sure. I mean, the core of this group would be like eight guys, right? There's been a lot of guys who have been roughly equal in value over the course of three championships. Yeah. I was sort of surprised that Eiffel wasn't used even more earlier in the series. So he got his shot, and he took it, and it was good.

And then? Kasia actually actually even in 2012 Kasia was mostly mop up He had 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 11 appearances And only 3 were above average Leverage

And all but 4 Were.4 or lower Which basically means no And he's still not quite In the Sam Miller circle of trust All but four were.4 or lower, which basically means no significance whatsoever. And he's still not quite in the Sam Miller circle of trust, I sense. He's still not. That's correct. And I know people will say, how can you still be looking at fifth? It's been five years in a row, but it's like 260 total innings.

Yeah. So that happens. Yeah. So in the top of the fifth bum garner starts warming and we knew that if bum garner was warming he would be coming in so he had the the 0.29 era in the world series to that point lifetime and so he would come in and either he would lower that era even further or he would surrender the one run lead and the question was which was which and we've we've talked about how he looked a little shaky was maybe a little fortunate to get didn't throw any harder or softer than he normally would. There wasn't any bullpen velocity boost, perhaps because he was pacing himself. He said after the game that he was not even thinking about finishing the game,

or he wasn't thinking about how many pitches he had left or how many outs he was going to get. He was just kind of going to continue pitching until he couldn't anymore. And he said he felt fine. He said he finally admitted that he was a little tired in the postgame interviews, but said he felt fine during the game. And so he sort of pitched a little tired in the post-game interviews but said he felt fine during the game and so he sort of pitched a little differently there was a stats and info note about how he threw 50 54 percent of his pitches in the upper third of the zone or above which was his highest rate of high pitches in any appearance in his whole career and he got three quarters of his swings and misses nine of twelve on those high pitches and he never went to a three ball

count on anyone which also was the first time that he had had an outing this year without going to a three ball count and he actually fell behind guys. He threw first pitch strikes to less than half, to 47% of the hitters he faced, and yet then he came back and threw strikes like 81% of the time or something once he was behind in the count. And it seemed like after the initial inning when his command looked sort of spotty after that the pitches that he threw outside of the strike zone seemed and i didn't have a great angle on it really from where i was but seemed sort of intentional and seemed enticing he was kind of taking advantage of the royals' aggressiveness to some extent, and particularly in the last at-bat of the game, which we'll talk about maybe, or maybe I'll just say it now, that with the tying run but he, you know, normally with Perez up, you would throw that

slider in the dirt or something, a breaking ball in the dirt that we often see him chase, and maybe that was something he didn't want to risk with Gordon on third, so instead he just went up, up, up, like the pitches barely fit on the Brooksoks baseball strike zone plot they're so high and salvi kept swinging at them and there was almost no way that those swings would produce anything but a strikeout or a pop-up you just can't really hit a pitch that high unless you get lucky and and bloop one in and and that didn't happen and bum garner said i knew perez was going to want to do something big we tried to use that aggressiveness and throw our pitches up in the zone so he was smart about how he was pitching and he was also executing his game plan really well and i mean it was just a pretty

incredible fun fact producing performance yeah uh grant Grant Brisby's post on this game and on Bumgarner particularly because I imagine that Grant Brisby will have 75 or 80 posts on this game. But the one on Bumgarner is absolutely essential reading. It's really great. It's wonderful. And he shows every plot, every batter versus pitcher plot

of Bumgarner's in that start and there just are no pitches that aren't on the black and I don't know maybe without watching the tape and who knows maybe Bumgarner was missing location and just happened to be missing

on the right on the other edge or something like that you can't say for sure that it was brilliant command. But there's like nothing in the middle of the play. It's like he is a toddler who is learning how to trace. And he's just tracing this black line with his pitches. It's beautiful. It's really presented the way that Grant did it. It really gives you a sense of how unhittable and how

dominant Bumgarner was. And the high fastball in particular, that pitch has been such a big part of Bumgarner's story this year and really exaggerated in the postseason. He has his high fastball, which I never thought of him as a high fastball guy necessarily until this year. I thought of him much more as being fastball, sort of kept away from hitters, and then really leaning on his slider cutter that gets that big, sweeping, hard-to-hit movement. And this year, he became much more of a high fastball guy. And it was dominant. this year he became much more of a high fastball guy uh... and uh... it was dominant i'm i wrote about it

before the series started other people have written about it uh... but it's probably you know a one of the twelve best pitches in baseball right now his high fastball and he uh... as we saw throughout this world series runs for season you could throw it uh... high in the zone you could throw it high in the zone.

He could throw it ludicrously high out of the zone. It's this combination of angle, deception, and velocity and command that is practically impossible. I mean, you put those four things behind a pitch. How many guys have all four of those things in any single pitch? So, I don't know. It's weird sort of to talk about Bumgarner at the end of this World Series because while it was indisputably one of the great performances ever, and while we know that Bumgarner is a great pitcher,

he is not the best pitcher in baseball. What I think he had before this year, I think he had a ninth place Cy Young finish. This year he'll probably finish fourth or fifth in the National League, which is mostly wins driven because his ERA and his adjusted ERA aren't spectacular. So we're talking about this super legend which he deserves to be but he's also not a super legend yet

for his entire body of work and so we're kind of getting swept up in October I don't know there's a part of that that feels balanced and there's a part that feels like we're kind of high on helium right now.

And so I don't know. Let me ask you two things. One, it takes about 70-ish war to get to the Hall of Fame as a pitcher these days. What does Bumgarner need? You mean in that he has the postseason success on his resume? Exactly. How many wars does that lower his required level? Judging by Curt Schilling, not a whole lot.

Yeah, I agree. That's exactly what I was thinking. It seemed like at first I was going to be all like 12. It's 12 wars. He could be a 58 war pitcher. He could be Jack Morris and make it. But yeah, Schilling, not only has it not seemed to help Schilling, but Schilling did it much, much later in his career where it would be a lot fresher in voters' minds. I mean, we're talking about 18 years from now maybe. Schiller's only 25. So we We're talking about 18 years from now maybe. There's only 25.

We're probably talking about 23 years from now that it'll come up. I don't know if it will loom larger in people's memories because it will be even more legendary and because the people who are voting... The problem with Schilling is that by the time he did that, the guys who were voting on him were already in their 40s and 50s and had lost the capacity to love. But with Bumgarner, the people who are going to be voting on Bumgarner are right now in their teens and 20s. And so this is one of the defining pictures of their youth. And I feel like those guys get the boost so in fact shilling's recency the fact that the sock had only happened eight years earlier i think hurt him and so maybe it

will help bum garner um in a way that it didn't help shilling although jack morris is the exact right yeah i was gonna say that yeah uh yeah i don't i don't know about that. I mean, the fun facts are, I think, the most fun facts are, some of them are just the percentage of innings that he pitched this postseason. Or, I mean, he threw more innings this postseason than the rest of the Giants starters combined, which is crazy. He threw like, and that's counting his relief appearance obviously but but still and then in the world series alone i think other giant starters combined for one out more than he recorded on his own and and other giant starters had about a 10 ERA. And so he really, I mean, he threw, I think more than a third of the team's innings period. So he just kind of carried the pitching staff in a way that is difficult to do, especially nowadays when pitchers aren't conditioned to just pitch complete games every time. I mean, it's, it's kind of incredible that he did that. And yeah, I don't know how much it tells us about how great he actually is or how great he'll be once next

season starts or whatever, but it was amazing. And there are only so many postseason performances you can compare it to, really, because it's just, I mean, he easily broke the record for most postseason innings pitched or by four and a third innings or so over Schilling. But obviously he's pitching at a time when you have a ton of postseason rounds. So it's hard to compare that to any pitcher in a previous era who wouldn't have had a chance to make that much of an impact over a long period of time. But if you compare his stats to Schilling, they look very similar. Bumgarner had a few more innings. He allowed the same number of runs. Schilling had more strikeouts. And you

could say that if you era-adjust it and park-adjust it, maybe Schilling's performance is more impressive. Schilling himself tweeted after Baumgartner's appearance last night that that was the best postseason performance ever. So we know where he stands. I'm very much looking forward to your post at Grantland showing how Baumgartner sucks compared to 1999 Pedro. Yeah. Well, you could make that same sort of argument if you wanted to but no one wants to it was really amazing to watch what were your other questions oh the other question is just uh where how many and I'll I don't want to hear you actually list

them so I'll just take an estimate but how many pitchers would you take over Bumgarner, say, for the next three years? Sort of just your rough guess. And does that number change if I told you that there was no postseason anymore? No, it probably doesn't change. And off the top of my head, I don't know, maybe six? Yeah. It wouldn't change at all. There's nothing at least to the idea that he is a guy who can throw 270 innings

and not show any effect as the year wears down. I mean, he was throwing harder in these starts than he had thrown in any starts all season. There is a – I don't know, I don't know if there's anything to this or not, but, you know, there does seem to be a kind of rubberness to his body type and his, the way he pitches and the, you know, the effort level at which he pitches. There is a, there is a, there is a Randy Johnson-ness to the way he throws and looks.

And Randy Johnson was just, that was one of the, that was the second most crazy thing about Randy Johnson is that he seemed like he could throw forever. And, you know, coming back on no days left. I'm still sort of mad that he retired when he did because he could have kept going, I think. So it doesn't change. It wouldn't even bump him up to five just knowing that, you know, there's 50 postseason innings in that arm.

Maybe. That's a legitimate argument. I was thinking of it in terms of is he actually clutch or not. But, yeah, just the rubber armness maybe that's that's legitimate i think okay um all right is there anything more to say about bum garner specifically much has been said much more will be said he was he was amazing and i mean no one expected him to go five in that game i don't think i mean that he throws 40 to 50 pitches on his typical throw day bocce said but of course a typical throw day is no pressure pitches no one

watching no stakes this was 68 pitches under the most intense scrutiny imaginable after you know 265 innings pitched on the season uh this relief appearance pushed him past james shields on the list of most pitches thrown this season so he took over the top spot so it was it was more than i think anyone realistically could have expected and and there was uh there was some twitter discussion about whether you start the ninth with him or whether you do kind of the the matt williams thing in the jordan zimmerman game and go with your closer over your ace who is pitching fantastically but must be tiring and i think bocce did exactly the right thing he had cassia warming from the second that bum garner went out to the mound which was just good i think i mean i think it was wise to leave

bum garner out i also think it was wise to have cassia ready just in case you know that that final inning break had taken something from bum garner in case the adrenaline had stopped flowing and he had suddenly lost his command or something i thought it was smart to have the closer ready to come in because that was my my advice to both managers early before the game was just to have someone warming always and he did and as it turned out Casilla wasn't needed but thought they had to handle that well um so I guess that's enough to say about Baumgartner so the the only remaining bit of intrigue is the Gordon play and it looked like the Royals would just succumb quietly without even challenging Bumgarner after that initial fifth inning rally. And then with two outs, Gordon hits this ball that Gregor Blanco thought about trying to dive to catch.

Wisely decided not to dive for, but kind of wavered between diving and not diving long enough that he got caught in between a little bit, and the ball got by him, and not only did it get by him, but it rolled to the wall, and Perez had trouble retrieving it, and kind of, you know, the first time he picked it up, he pushed it further away, and all the while, Gordon was running around the bases. The whole stadium was sort of willing him to score. It would have been a pretty incredible, improbable event if it had happened. And he was held at third. And so there was a lot of what-ifs, a lot of second-guessing going on.

So we could talk about the decision to not send him. We can also talk about the fact that he wasn't running at full speed out of the box. And I understand that that is, I mean, it's a difficult thing to always run full speed because this, I mean, a ball hit in that spot at that velocity and trajectory with two excellent fielders in the vicinity would not result in a scoring opportunity very often i don't know how many hundreds or thousands of balls you would have to hit under those exact circumstances for that result to happen even once and And so you're kind of conditioned to run a certain way out of the box if you're a player. You're not expecting to have a chance to score

on this soft liner to left center. And so Gordon kind of ran out of the box like you would on a typical single. And then he, you know, maybe sort of slowed a little bit around second also and then slowed into third because he was being held if if the stakes had somehow been able to overcome his muscle memory and he had been totally busting it out of the box all the way i imagine that he would have attempted to score and would have had a decent decent chance of success assuming that the rest of the play had transpired exactly the same way it did and that you know the fact that he had been running really hard out of the box hadn't affected what the fielders had done so so we could we could i don't know that i agree with that no i don't know i i think we

almost always overestimate the uh the effect of not busting it out of the box like i would guess that if he had run as hard as he possibly could have from step one it would have gained him like uh maybe a foot maybe a foot and a half huh Huh. Yeah, I'd guess a little more than that. These guys, and I know I always also think, oh, what are you doing? Run hard. You would have scored or whatever. But I think that these guys run really fast

when it looks like they're not running really fast. And the amount of arm pumping that you do is not as big an indication of speed as we think it is. I think that Gordon was making good time. I don't think that he would have. Here's the thing is that he was going to get thrown out by a lot if he had gone for it, right? Yes. Like by a lot, by like 30 feet. Well, yeah. gone for it, right? Yes. Like by a lot, by like 30 feet. So he's way, way, way out unless the throw is offline, unless the throw is a bad throw. If it's anything like a competent throw, he is long

gone. And so really those extra four feet or whatever wouldn't actually matter because he would still be thrown out unless the throw was wild and basically it was either Going to come down to wild throw or not wild Throw and You know he probably could have taken more time And the same Principle would have applied I don't know I'm

Maybe A bit more optimistic that he could Have scored had he been somehow Running at his top speed from the start. But as it was, I think you're right. He very likely would have been thrown out easily. And you can, I mean, Crawford has a strong arm. Crawford has an accurate arm. I don't know how many short stops would have been better relay men in that situation. He did have to pick up a short hop throw and turn a bit before he had thrown.

And who knows? I mean, Tom Tango did the math and Nate Silver did the math and concluded that he would have had to have about a 25% chance to score in order to make it worth it. You know, maybe a little less, depending on whether you think Perez was diminished by his fatigue. By the way, he did set that record for catcher innings caught two innings after being plunked, after which I received about 50 tweets telling me that I had jinxed him. And so maybe he had been diminished by the workload, maybe by the hit by pitch, maybe Bumgarner was just so locked in that the real expectancy of a hit there was lower than

it normally would be for Perez versus a left-handed pitcher. Who knows? But was there a 25% chance that Gordon would have scored in that spot? No. Probably not. I would say no. I mean, selfishly, I kind of wish he had tried it just because it could have led to an amazing play. The pop-up that actually ended the game was not all that exciting, even though it was sort of an example of Bumgarner's intelligence and execution and mastery of the Giants. It was not in itself all that exciting. So sure, selfishly, I wish that Gordon would have gone, which would have either ended the game in a play at the plate with Buster Posey

or an incredible inside- park single and three base error to tie the game, which would have been kind of amazing either way, as long as the series had not ended on a replay review of a tag play at the plate, which could have happened also. Yeah, I was going to say, I think that it... I'm just totally making this number up completely, I would guess maybe 8% to 14% chance that he's safe on that play. What you're really betting on is that Posey won't leave him a lane.

That's the most likely situation is that Posey doesn't give him a lane and they overturn the call. So I don't know if third base coaches are quite equipped to include that in their math yet. Yeah, I mean, it's a lot for him to weigh as Gordon comes around unexpectedly, not expecting to have to make a decision about whether to wave a guy home or stop him when no one is even on base and someone hits what looks like a single at best.

no one is even on base and someone hits what looks like a single at best so a lot of factors to weigh in the you know 13 seconds or whatever that it took gordon to get there so uh probably i mean knowing how it ended maybe you can wish that he would have gone but realistically probably wouldn't have changed anything i know jeff sullivan is working on a full video breakdown of this play, so maybe that will enlighten things further. But from what I saw, that's what I would conclude. Kratz should have replaced Perez, though, right? Absolutely. He should have, I think, probably.

Perez looked compromised. Yeah, who knows? I think it's believable that he maybe was compromised. And in that situation, if you have Willingham up Yeah, who knows? hitters and Yost never went to his bench for Willingham which I mean that was consistent with the way that he managed this series and this postseason and the regular season he's not a guy who pinch hits but you could say that there were spots there where maybe Willingham would have made sense if if he's even still in a condition to play at this point after not having played forever so maybe maybe that's something i wonder if willingham will announce his retirement

retroactively i'm retiring retroactive to yeah it's september 30th or whatever right that would that would inoculate yost against any criticism of him not using him. Yeah. Okay. So we've talked for a long time already. I feel like maybe we're not totally done talking about the implications of this postseason. I think I might want to talk about the Royals and the Giants a little more tomorrow and the significance of how they were built and what they did and are the giants a dynasty and all of these questions so i have a another flight to catch back to new york but

we will talk again tonight and probably talk about that and maybe we'll answer a couple questions i don't know so send us some at podcast at baseball prospectospectus.com. Join the Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild. There was like a 400 comment game thread last night during the game. So if you have any lingering thoughts about that game or the postseason, go there. Talk about them with other listeners. And please support our sponsor, Baseball Reference, 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. And since the season is officially over now, I guess we can thank people for listening to us and sticking with us the whole way. And we will continue. So we'll be back tomorrow with another show.